26 October/27 October 2019 ★ FTWeekend 11Proceeding through a series of appar-
ently unlinked episodes,Flightstakes us
from the back seat of a Skoda, from
which the narrator watches the scenery
during childhood holidays to haunted
Russiancityscapes,Croatianislandsand
the seething streets of Istanbul, blend-
ing history and psychogeography with
wildlyimaginativefiction.It’sadizzying
listen, and a great introduction to
Tokarczuk’swork.
In contrast, Ann Patchett’s novelThe
Dutch House Bloomsbury) is all(
about the danger of stasis, and of
attempting to root a fractured family in
a single, claustrophobic space. The titu-
lar building isn’t itself cramped — in
fact, it’s a hilltop mansion that’s the
envy of the neighbourhood — but it
emblematises the repressed emotions
and unhappiness of the Conroy family,
and in particular its two children,
DannyandMaeve.
It’s Danny who tells their story,
and who is here given exceptionalBooks
N
ear the end ofOlive, Again,
Olive Kitteridge — the
retired schoolteacher who
is the novel’s spiky, fasci-
nating centre of gravity —
bumpsintoanex-studentofhersnamed
Andrea L’Rieux in a local diner. Andrea
is now a famous poet. They talk: about
children, about ageing, about loneliness
and suicide. Olive, Andrea says, is “the
kindofpersonpeoplewanttotalkto”.
A few months later she writes a
poem about the encounter. Olive is at
first dismayed by the intrusion, then
grudgingly impressed. “It seemed to her
she had never before completely under-
stood how far apart human experience
was,” Strout writes, “Andrea had gotten
it better than she had, the experience of
beinganother.”
Elizabeth Strout’s novels are built of
these quiet moments of realisation:
epiphanies in which characters come to
understand something about them-
selves, or their relationships with other
people, despite not quite having the lan-
guage to articulate it. They are written
in cool, transparent prose, in a subtle
free indirect style in which the third-
person narration is coloured by the sen-
sibilities of the people it describes (that
“gotten it better” feels like Olive’s
phrase rather than the narrator’s). Her
characters (like her writing) aresustained by what Olive called (in
2008’sOlive Kitteridge, the first novel in
which she appeared) the “little bursts”
of daily life: the pleasures of eating a
doughnut, or the satisfaction that stems
from discovering that your neighbours
are less happy than you are. But the
overall effect ofOlive, Again s one ofi
deep melancholy: what one character
calls“astarkfeelingofdismalness”.
Olive Kitteridge old more than a mil-s
lion copies, won the Pulitzer Prize, and
was made into an underwhelming tele-
vision mini-series by HBO. It was set in
the fictional town of Crosby, Maine,
where Olive grew up and lived for years
in the house she had built with her first
husband, Henry. It was written as a
series of linked short stories, some of
which concentrated on Olive, others of
which she merely passed through, as
stately and silent as a royal barge. As in
Virginia Woolf’sTo the Lighthouse
(1927), large chunks of time passed off
the page, in between chapters. By
sweepingoverapparentlyimportantlife
events — births, marriages, and deaths
— Strout could concentrate instead on
the effects they had on those who expe-
riencedthem.
Olive, Again overs a period of eightc
years or so, picking up whereOlive Kit-
teridge eft off. Olive is the same as ever:l
still physically large and slightly awk-
ward, still saying “phooey” and “hell’s
bells” and calling people “snot-wots”,
still uncanny in her ability to penetrate
the façades of small-town social life. But
she’snowanoldwoman,andherbodyis
beginning to fail. Her acquaintances are
dying.Thereareundignifiedencounters
withtheauthorities.
Henry died three years beforeOliveKitteridge nded, and since then Olivee
has started a relationship with a retired
academic named Jack, whom she
doesn’t always seem to like (she is
angered to find out that he had voted
for Trump). Soon they get married. Her
onlyson,Christopher,livesinNewYork
with his second wife Ann and their four
children, only two of which are his.
Olive is baffled by his choices, dislikes
Ann, and is wounded by the rudeness of
hergrandchildren.
One of the remarkable things about
Olive Kitteridge as the way in which itsw
tone and mood seemed to bleed into
your consciousness, so that while read-
ing it every social interaction you had in
the real world seemed charged with
potential significance. Though there
weredramaticmomentsinthenovel(at
one point Olive and Henry were caught
up in an armed robbery in a hospital) its
uncanniness stemmed from the way it
articulated those private moments of
hidden devastation that mark most
lives (the lasting trauma of the robbery
was caused by the fact that Olive and
Henry said some unforgivable things to
eachotherduringit).InOlive, Again his effect is more une-t
venandheavy-handed.Oneofthechap-
ters is about a woman who revisits her
childhoodhomeafterithasburntdown,
killing her father. Back in Crosby, she
feels an outpouring of love for her fam-
ily lawyer, whose parents were killed by
theNazis,andrenewedrevulsionforher
father,whomadeunethicalinvestments
in Apartheid-era South Africa. In
another, a civil war re-enactor is unset-
tled when his daughter comes out to
him as a dominatrix. Here the equiva-
lences (both are play acting; both feel
alienated by the roles they have chosen
toadopt)feelslightlyforced.Itisnotice-
able that Olive is absent from both of
thesestories.
That said,Olive, Again s, in itsi
way, a perfect novel: as compelling and
unsettling as anything Strout has writ-
ten. But its perfection is of a brittle kind,
akindthatfeelsintheendwearyingand
even slightly manipulative. How little
we can know each other, it says. How
strange and temporary our feelings are.
How slight and overwhelming they can
be. How quickly they pass. How soon
theyend.Bursts of a life
Elizabeth Strout’s spiky and slightly awkward retired schoolteacher,
Olive Kitteridge, makes a welcome — if brittle — return. By on DayJ
Ollie HirstVoices to cheer weary ears
I
’ve been on a mammoth road trip
recently, criss-crossing the UK
interviewing authors on literary
festival stages. Tempting though it
was to spend my motorway time
with the radio tuned to the unfolding
parliamentary drama, it quickly gave
me a sinkingGroundhog Day eeling tof
whichaudiobooksweretheperfectanti-
dote. Publishers take note: you have an
ideal window in which to market your
wares to those all too weary of the inter-
estingtimesinwhichwelive.
One of my interviewees was the poet
Brian Bilston, who has been catapulted
to fame partly by his excellently amus-
ing Twitter persona. I had read his first
novelDiary of a Somebody(Macmil-
lan) on the page, but decided to give the
audio version, narrated by comedian
andactorBenMiller,arunforitsmoney
— correctly, as it turned out, because it’s
aninstantcheerer.Followinginthefoot-
steps of Charles Pooter and Adrian
Mole,Bilstoncataloguesayearinthelife
of his provincial poet, from his tangles
with his ex-wife over the care of their
son and her insufferable new boyfriend
to the tense hierarchies of the poetry
club. Will Brian ever triumph over his
rival-in-verse, Toby Salt, author of the
unparodiableThis Bridge No Hands Shall
Cleft? It takes a year to find out, but it’s
worththewait.
Somewhere around Newport Pagnell
services, I turned to more serious mat-
ter and the unclassifiable work of newly
crowned Nobel prizewinner Olga
Tokarczuk. Her 2017 novelFlights
(Penguin) is available in an audio ver-
sionnarratedbyClareCorbett.It’sapar-
ticularly good match if you’re on the
move, because travel — as the title sug-
gests—isitsorganisingprinciple.In its way, it is a perfect
novel: as compelling and
unsettling as anythingStrout has written
life by narrator Tom Hanks. The actor’s
ability to convey unhappiness, regret,
anger and love with the most delicate
of voice modulations stands him —
along with Patchett’s story of two sib-
lings surviving the departure of their
mother and the arrival of her replace-
ment—ingoodstead.
As with her previous novelCommon-
wealth also available as an audiobook,(
narrated by Laurence Bouvard), Patch-
ett is adept at exploring the changing
contours of American society through
the prism of domestic and family rela-
tions.Highlyattunedtoshiftingdynam-
ics and loyalties, she expertly conjures
the patterns of entrapment and escape,
and the subtleties of how a picture
changesovertime.
Previously in this round-up, I high-
lighted Laura Cumming’s moving fam-
ily memoirOn Chapel Sands, which, like
The Dutch House, uses visual art as a way
of exploring how dramatically percep-
tion can shape the course of lives. HerFreedom to write,
freedom to read
Nilanjana Roy
Reading the world
By Fiona BensonLike baby elephants, their ears and tails
are distinctive; witness their naked rumps
on the June lawn as they sport with water to cool down.
Their happiness too is elephantine — they sing
silly songs, snorkel and spout fountains,
then hurl themselves about on the trampoline
to get dry. We are nothing to them till they fight —
then there is barging and squeaking and they need us
to intervene. The cause, of course, is bewildering.
But finally they’re assimilated back,
a herd unto themselves, kicking up the grass,
their strange, endangered joy trumpeted
for miles as they streak across the garden,
our crazy girls, our glorious, stampeding calves.From ‘Vertigo & Ghost’ (Cape, £10), winner of the 2019 Forward Prize for Best CollectionThe Poem
Portrait of our DaughtersA
mong the pavement stalls
in Delhi’s Sunday book
bazaar, one bookseller was
a genius at sorting second-
hand books into little piles
guided by theaffinity betweennovels.
I was a student looking for a cheap
copy of Franz Kafka’sThe Castle, and he
offered it to me sandwiched between
a tattered copy of Brecht’s plays and
a book by an author I hadn’t come
across: Ismail Kadare.
Over the years, I’ve bought many
more of Kadare’s books in clean, crisp
editions, from his first novel,The
General of the Dead Army 1963, first(
translated into English in 1971), about
an Italian general and his chaplain
searching Albaniafor the remains of
their countrymen fallen in the world
wars, to other classics —Broken April
(1978), about a man caught inblood
feuds that stretch for generations,The
Siege 1970), which captures the clash(
between the Albanians and the
Ottoman Empire — and more.
This week, Kadare won the Neustadt
International Prize for Literature. Run
by the University of Oklahoma and
World Literature Today, the Neustadt
is less showy than the Nobel Prize for
literature and in its almost 50 years,
has had a far more global set of winners
than the heavily Eurocentric choices
made by the Swedish Academy.
Kadare was born in 1936 in
Gjirokaster, Albania, and studied first
in thecapital, Tirana, and then at
Moscow’s Gorky Literary Institute,
where he found the atmosphere rigid
and constricting. He came to writing
early, publishing his first collection of
poetry at 18 and his first novel at 27.
Back in Albania, Kadare played a cat-
and-mouse game with the regime. He
wrote poems in praise of Lenin because
under the dictator Enver Hoxha, who
kept Albania in his grip until 1985,
every student had to perform that task,
but he also wrote novels that enraged
the dictatorship.The Palace of Dreams
(1981) imagined a state that devoted
an entire branch to sifting through its
citizens’ dreams, bringing the best of
them like rare treats to the dictators’
attention. It was banned in 1981 for
being filled with “allusions against the
regime”, so thoroughly that it was
forbidden to even write or speak the
title of the book.
Kadare won the International Man
Booker prize in 2005, sparking
controversy. Romanian poet Renata
Dumitrascu wrote that he was “no
Solzhenitsyn” — Kadare had held
active party membership in Hoxha’s
regime, and enjoyed privileges that
other Albanian writers lacked. But in
a completely totalitarian state, it isimpossible to be an ideal dissident.
Those who raise their voices too loudly
or use their pens too freely disappear
into prisons, might be murdered, or if
they’re fortunate, exiled. Often, the
dissident’s job is simply to survive.
“I have never considered myself
either as a hero or as a dissident,”
Kadare wrote in a 1998 exchange of
letters published in the New York
Review of Books. “In Hoxha’s Albania,
as in Stalin’s Russia, a declared
dissident was sure to be suppressed.”
Many of his novels were banned, as
was his 1974 poem “The Red Pashas”,
thought to have been lost until it
surfaced in an archive in 2002.
Kadare finally left Albania for Paris
in 1990, claiming political asylum. In
France, he could speak and write more
freely, but he insists that his writing
stands on its own, as in this 2009
interview: “I think that my writing is
no more political than ancient Greek
theatre. I would have become the
writer I am in any political regime.”
The edition ofThe Palace of DreamsI bought on that crowded Delhi
pavement has long since disappeared.
It was not a beautiful copy — the front
cover was missing, the pages dog-eared
and marked with tea stains. ut I wishB
I had it now as a reminder of how we
build our reading histories. It is one
thing to discover an author from a
prize, reading their work in order of
publication, or to pick up a book from
the endless flow of bestsellers. For
many readers, though, our relationship
with an author comes about in an
accidental but natural fashion.
A bookseller adds a novel to a
bundle; it is not the book you wanted
but the price is cheap; it is set in a
country hat you know nothing of; itt
intrigues you and, over the years, you
find yourself seeking out everything
that once-unknown author has written.
Kadare offered me a measure of
peace, in his understanding of the
stains left behind by wars and empires
less widely explored. In his novels,
people find their freedoms and a touch
of grace in small moments, even when
bound by unjust laws or by a tyrant’s
power. “A writer can be free in an
enslaved world, or he can be enslaved
in a free country,” he said in a 2001
radio interview. He makes it clear that
the choice is always with us.Olive, Again
by Elizabeth Strout
Viking £14.99/Random House $27
304 pagesbook has just been shortlisted for the
Baillie Gifford Prize, alongside Hallie
Rubenhold’s pioneering bookThe Five:
The Untold Lives of the Women Killed
by Jack the Ripper olinda Publish-(B
ing). Rubenhold’s mission was simple:
to lay before us the realities of a group of
women, all unknown to one another,
whose lives have been erased by the cir-
cumstancesoftheirdeaths.
Unlike any previous account of Mary
Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Eliza-
beth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and
Mary Jane Kelly, this one doesn’t rerun
their brutal and gruesome ends.
Instead, it attempts to piece together —
using a wide range of documents and
histories of the period — what came
before, from birth onwards. It’s a stun-
ning achievement of both forensic
research and authorly compassion, well
complemented by actor Louise Brea-
ley’snarration.
After that, you’d be forgiven for han-
kering for something lighter, so a brief
mention for the funny — and
frankly, very silly —Ayoade
on Top Audible Studios), in(
which comedian Richard
Ayoade delivers an impas-
sioned plea for the cinematic
merits of the filmView from
the Top, a little-known mas-
terpiece about the highs and
lows of working on an aero-
plane starring Gwyneth Pal-
trow. Is it fit to stand along
withThe Godfather Part 2 ro
The Magnificent Ambersons?
Even Ayoade might not be
able to persuade you of that,
but you’ll certainly be richly
entertained as you edge for-
wardinthetraffic.In a totalitarian state, it is
impossible to be an ideal
dissident. Often, thedissident’s job is to survive
Richard Ayoade in ‘Ayoade on Top’ —ShutterstockBy Alex Clark
GENRE ROUND -UP
AU D I O B O O K S
OCTOBER 26 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 10/201924/ - 18:18 User:paul.gould Page Name:WKD11, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 11, 1