In the absence of being able to procure crisp blue skies and sunshine (does anyone else in the UK begin to feel the necessity of chartering an ark? As I type, I am listening to someone on the radio describing the weather as ‘dreich’ which I have always thought an entirely excellent and exceedingly apt word), I offer you instead five books to tempt your literary palate.
I make no apology for the accidental loose theme of infidelity (two are about affairs; one has an infidelity as a peripheral incidental): good books are good books. By the time I realised, I was set on this course. And we can enjoy the irony in the month of February, infamous for its saccharine, overblown declarations of love.
My first hot tip for February is anything but saccharine and overblown.
They - Helle Helle (Akoya)
Akoya is a new independent publishing house, which chooses its titles by literary instinct - and, I think, love. This slender Danish novel is extraordinary: be not fooled by its size; it packs a disproportionate emotional weight.
An unnamed mother and daughter live in a small flat above a hairdresser’s in a small town. They are both at inflection points: the daughter is starting high school; the mother is seriously ill. As they face something extraordinary (the end of their shared world), the narrative follows the ordinary: the bus journey to school, homework, knitted gloves, tomato soup, a duffle coat, tentative teenage encounters with boys, the weather, light shining on cake crumbs. But it reminds that there is beauty to be found in the everyday: “the delight of treetops swaying soundlessly on the other side of a windowpane”, “A man waves from his breakfast”, “lilacs grow at the bottom of the wilderness, she picks many bunches, there aren’t enough vases”, “Coconut loaf cake diminishes endlessly, sticky caramel bake.”
You can’t skip through this of an afternoon - nor would you wish to. Prose this exquisite rewards careful reading. It is set in the now, which sharpens your focus and immerses you in the specific moment and the minds of its characters. Despite its heavyweight subject, there is no agonised wringing of hands - this is the complete antithesis of the overblown emotion of a Hollywood epic, cunningly calculated to clutch at your heartstrings with the literary equivalent of soaring strings. It is stripped back to the minimalism of the unsaid - grief and love are inherent in every moment, the half-caught private joke, the deep currents of silent affection that flow between mother and daughter:
"Today then she's not going to the hospital, her mother doesn't see the need anyway for her to keep coming all that way, she ought rather to think of herself and for example buy a nice big pastry from the bakery.”
Reading this book will make you feel more alive.
The Ten Year Affair - Erin Somers (Canongate)
Cora and Eliot are hip, self-consciously earnest, rather smug New Yorkers who found themselves priced out of the city, even with an unexpected inheritance, and move upstate to a hipster town for space, clean air, and a house where a mushroom grows, inexplicably, between the bathroom tiles. Eliot works, gets high in the evenings and urges Cora to make a friend. Cora is lonely. She spends her days shuttling their daughter to nursery and taking their son to baby groups that smell like “breast milk and cruciferous vegetables” and are populated by people like 'Broccoli Mom’ who talk about episiotomies, orgasming during childbirth, and elimination communication. (You don’t want to know…)
And there Cora meets Sam, who shares her eye-rolling disdain for Broccoli Mom and her acolytes. Because he a “chief storytelling officer” for a mortgage start-up and his wife is “a real person" i.e. a lawyer, Sam on is on parental leave and playgroup duty. Given that Cora’s feelings for her husband have been reduced to something rather “blank, liking-adjacent” and she has fantasies about surviving in the wilderness and a lover who will worship her, it takes no great leap of imagination to fall for Sam, who is “square-jawed and symmetrical with heavy brows”. She longs for a heated sex in hotel rooms.
Except Sam refuses. For ten years, whilst Cora angsts and longs, and performs mental gymnastics of passionate infidelity. Reality is bound to be disappointing - and of course it is, because you can’t escape yourself - especially if you’re as painfully serious and self-conscious as Cora. Her post - and sometimes coital - thoughts wonder to spaghetti, Uno, and the children’s bath-times. Sam snores “the like 40-year-old husband he was” and sends her erotic photos, the description of which made me snort with laughter. (Move the crocs out the picture, Sam! Don’t grip your manhood like “a walkie-talkie”.)
Somers unpicks a midlife affair with withering brilliance. She is constantly alert to the comic potential of everyday married life - and, come to that, the humour inherent in a middle-aged, married mother engaged in an affair, but also has a constant ticker tape to-do list running through her mind.
“She and Sam showered together, which became sex, and Eliot wondered aloud if he should resubscribe to The New York Times or let it lapse because it had become a little expensive, hadn’t it?”
It’s a droll, clever, relentlessly, often wince-inducing, rapier sharp portrait of both marriage and affair.
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