Hyper Herons – 28/09/2024

Like Fanta Mentos, The Sopranos, Le Creuset, Florence (the city and the Machine), smoked paprika, the printing press, this contraption, Jodie Comer and the medjool dates they sell at Reg the Veg, the new Sally Rooney novel is worth the hype.

I was nervous before reading it and had shunned reviews. I need not have worried. Between its white and navy covers and checkerboard end papers, I found a clever, complex novel, brilliantly plotted, subtly told, varied in voice and perspective, witty and occasionally farcical, which I could not stop thinking about whenever I had the misfortune to be forced to put it down.

Intermezzo is about two brothers, Ivan, who is 22, a chess player, awkward and unable to keep his dog in his shared flat and Peter, ten years older, a charismatic human rights barrister suffering from insomnia which regularly leads him to search online for signs of his own insanity. Their father has recently died after years of being about to. This has not prepared them for the fact.

Throughout the book the conversations – and the silences in between – are stunning. The subject matter and the styles are brilliant: the half-conversations when people first meet and assess each other; the in-depth discussions about who we are, what we ought to be and losing parents; the internal speech; the barbed comments of siblings who can’t reach across the divide of age and temperament.

Arriving more quietly this week – no branded coffee cups, tote bags or checkerboard puppies – but with suitable buzz and in mountainous quantities here in The Heronry is Olga Tokarzcuk’s The Empusium, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

Mieczysław Wojnicz has come to stay at a health resort in Görbersdorf, Poland to recover from tuberculosis. He and several other guests are unable to secure rooms in the main resort and find themselves in a guesthouse passing the time by drinking and talking, often about women and increasingly about the folk horror of the surrounding landscape.

Like Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, there are elements of theatre. Like Flights, there is exploration of truth and distrust of reality. Like The Books of Jacob (which I haven’t read yet in all its glorious 928 pages…) another narrator enters to knock down any limitations of the novel form.

The Empusium draws on Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain in which a man goes to visit his cousin in a Swiss sanatorium for a few weeks and instead stays for seven years. With impeccable timing Lynne Tillman’s American Genius, A Comedy, has just been re-published, also with links to Mann, in which a woman checks herself into an institution of uncertain kind (Is it a sanatorium? Is it a writing retreat?) and draws you into a story in which nothing happens and everything is considered. Interior decoration, bathing routines, Kafka and human rights are examined in minute detail and somehow it really is a comedy.

Narrative games, board games and video games combine in Richard Powers’ Playground. Todd Keane and Rafi Young played chess together as children and Go as college students but have since fallen out over the development of a website called Playground.

Rafi and his wife Ina are living on Makatea, Polynesia when the now billionaire Todd begins planning to build floating cities off the island. Diving from Makatea regularly is oceanographer Evie Beaulieu taking the reader to a wondrous but depleted playground. The sheer scale of the book is astonishing. In imagination it is playful yet the message catastrophically serious.  

So, to games and risk in non-fiction:

• On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything by Nate Silver: I’m finding this fascinating. Nate Silver writes at the pace he thinks: fast and hard. I am no better at poker or predicting an election (that’s my failing; I can’t even predict the Booker) but I’m enthralled.
• Around the World in 80 Games: A Mathematician Unlocks the Secrets of the Greatest Games by Marcus du Sautoy: game theory, cultural history and psychology are all explored while answering the big question: how to win rock, paper, scissors.
• The Secret Lives of Numbers by Kate Kitagawa & Timothy Revell: a fascinating history of mathematical scholars of whom you will not have heard from the ninth century House of Wisdom to the modern day. These are fascinating trailblazers fighting for inclusivity of the mathematical and cultural kinds.   
• The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck by David Spiegelhalter: Spiegelhalter is incredibly good at explaining difficult things which we humans repeatedly get wrong. How unlikely is it that a statistician should become a national treasure? Well, he was excellent on Start the Week which is presumably one criterion for gaining the title.

And in poetry:

• If All the World and Love Were Young by Stephen Sexton: a beautiful poetry collection about the death of the poet’s mother, set in the world of Super Mario. I know how that sounds (like lots of little bleeping noises as a dungareed-man jumps over mushrooms?) but, whether you know anything about video games or not, it’s wonderful.

And in children’s books:

• One is Not a Pair by Britta Teckentrup: wonderful nature illustrator (see: Bee and Hedgehog) and writer, Teckentrup offers both game and rhyming stories in this picture book, with a missing pair to spot on each page.
• Escape Castle Dracula by Sam Fern: a huge, gorgeous and gothic puzzle book with mysteries to solve, labyrinths to break out from and monsters to flee, inspired by Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and more…

Puzzling over how we are almost in October, here is what we have coming up in that month:
7, 19.30: Susie Alegre on Human Rights, Robot Wrongs: being human in the age of AI
12, 18.00: Glyn Maxwell and Kaycee Hill at Poetry in Herons
15, 19.30: Brian Bilston and Henry Normal at St George’s
18, 19.00: Brad Evans on How Black Was My Valley at Clifton Library
And book groups!

Finally, nothing to do with Heron Books except that we are interested in Jay Griffiths’ writing, this lecture as part of the C.G. Jung Public Lectures looks well worth attending.

May your weekend be worthy of the hype,
Lizzie

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