Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?

I realise that over the next few months, the most widely read Canadian writer will be our treasure, Margaret Atwood. However, I am reading another writer from Canada - one who writes almost exclusively about the Newfoundland & Labrador coast, with stories of almost mythical intensity. Michael Crummey’s latest is The Innocents. The prose in the first two chapters is lyrical. It has become a bit grittier since then but I am always willing to ride whatever waves roll in, when Mr Crummey is the writer. I loved Sweetland and am thrilled to be reading these maritime lilts again.

It’s a polyphonic oral history of people’s personal experiences of the Soviet Union, its collapse and the aftermath, based on interviews that Alexievich had conducted over 20 years. I’d been wanting to read something by Alexievich for a while, and now I want to read everything that she’s done. This book was fascinating, moving and often deeply shocking - even though you know at an intellectual level how brutal some of the history is, the individual, personal experiences create a much greater emotional impact. I came out of it feeling that I understood a lot more about what life in the Soviet Union - and in the countries that succeeded it - was actually like. Extremely highly recommended.

Written with the verve and pace of a Cold War thriller, the terrifying tale of a closed world gone wrong. A misguided test that literally went nuclear, the Soviet rush to denial and cover-up, and the reckless attention to future prevention.

The incredible clean-up operation is morbidly detailed, and the huge risks to hundred of thousands of mobilised personnel. The deaths, illness and environmental devastation that followed the disaster are haunting and unforgettable.

It feels very current in one sense where the geopolitical causes of war are concerned and, to an extent, ‘fake news,’ but horribly dated when it comes to its depiction of race and women’s place in society.

It’s also a bit of an outlier of the genre, or what it’s become, in that it’s oddly optimistic.

First published in 1954, it is a charming novel about a wealthy Mississippi family; the story of Uncle Daniel Ponder, told by his niece, Edna Earle, who runs the Beulah Hotel in the small town of Clay. Uncle Daniel may have the ‘sweetest disposition’ in the world, a Southern gentleman of the old school, but he is ‘simpleminded’ and childish in his actions, so much so that Grandpa Ponder has him put away in an asylum, but Uncle Daniel soon manages to get out. He then ups and marries Miss Teacake Magee, but it doesn’t last long and Grandpa Ponder carries Daniel off to the asylum again, but he is soon out, and marries again. This time it is a seventeen year old girl named Bonnie Dee Peacock from the country…. When Bonnie Dee dies in mysterious circumstances there follows one of the most informal and entertaining trials in fiction, bringing this delightful tale to its fitting climax.

I think this is a much better novel than The Underground Railroad (which I thought was good, not great). Whitehead is in total command of the story in The Nickel Boys, keeping things taut and tight (am I mixing metaphors or creating redundancy here?). A more intimate canvas allows for richer characterisation. Across about 200 easily-read pages it delivers some real heft and punch.

A spare and stark short novel reviewing the life of a haunted figure - that Roth alter ego that features so prominently in his work. It has some of his most remarkable writing, getting right to the heart of the human plight. The Everyman of the title references not only the famous morality play but also the jewellery store belonging to the central character’s father which is called Everyman’s. We review this lonely commercial artist in his declining years, travel back to his childhood, and see the loss of wives and friends to illness or betrayal or both. It’s a summation of his life - looking at what it meant to him and those closest to him - another Ivan Ilyich with something of Tolstoy’s unflinching gaze. Whatever our sympathies, however his flaws strike us, he and his brother and his colleagues who he contacts as final illnesses strike are most defiantly present and ready for us to experience. You could say we share the humanity of these characters and the book offers as unconditional a solidarity as the character of Knowledge in the original play. “I will go with thee, and be thy guide, In thy most need to go by thy side”.