"Touchy Subjects" by Emma Donoghue

An audio book of stories.

• Touchy Subjects - Sarah, 38, flies from Seattle to a Dublin hotel to meet her friend's husband Paudrig. He's donating semen as a favour. He struggles to produce the goods, succeeding eventually. She's interrupted by room service when she tried to insemenate, ending up squirting semen on the carpet instead. She calls him back. This time he has to phone his wife to get excited.
• Expecting - When she starts chatting to an old man who's getting something for his pregnant daughter, she says she's pregnant too. Unable to admit she lied to him, she continues the story for months when they cross paths weekly. His daughter loses her baby. She avoids him. 5 years later she still has a prepared story in case she meets him, about having some children.
• The man who wrote on beaches - He wrote rude words in the sand as a kid. At 43 he suddenly becomes religious. He gets his partner of 10 years to marry him, then says he wants a child. She gets pregnant for him, miscarriaging 3 times.
• Oops - gay James thought that his tampering with his friends' birth control device caused the woman to have a daughter. James helps with the daughter's upbringing. When she's 18 he admits to the mother that it was his fault. She says that actually they'd been trying to have a child.
• Through the night - Ontario. Una is sleep-deprived, with a 2 month old baby Moira. Her mother looks after the baby for a night, so that Una can have a good night's sleep. It works well. The mother doesn't say that she laced the baby's feed with cognac.
• Do they know it's Christmas - Trevor and partner, both academics, treat their 3 dogs (Gide, Mallarmé, Proust) like kids. Trevor's sister has 3 kids - her family is welcomed by their parents whereas they discourage dog visits. Trevor thinks this is unfair.
• Domesticity - Lavender's Blue - LeRoy and Sheryl before marriage said they wanted a house painted Lavender blue. They have a child. They struggle to agree on the precise colour they meant - "Distant Haze"?
• The cost of things - Liz and Sophie started their relationship when they found Cleo, a cat. They argue about the vet bills and who cares most about the cat. They split a few months after a big argument that sorted itself out.
• Pluck - After 7 years together Rosheen and Joseph have a child. He stays at home to care for it. Joseph becomes obsessed by a hair on his wife's chin. He tries in vain to pluck it out with tweezers while she's asleep. He mentions it to her casually, hoping she won't be offended, and she plucks it out without any fuss.
• Strangers - good deed - Sam in Toronto passes a street-person who's bleeding. He wraps the street-person in his expensive coat and calls an ambulance, thinking he'd better go in the ambulance. Later the street-person self-releases. Sam doesn't expect the coat back but the hospital delivers it.
• The sanctuary of hands - She escapes to the Pyrenees, joins a cave tour. A group of handicapped people are there - she thinks of them as "specials". The tour-guide talks about apes, evolution and cave-men. She has to help a scared "special", holding his hand. The tour-guide points out ancient handprints, some with missing/incomplete fingers. The "special" tries to touch the prints (signs of old individualism)
• WritOr - A published writer gets a university job, hoping to use his time to write a novel. The budding writers who he has 1-to-1s with make standard beginners' errors. One of these presents an unbelievable child-abuse piece that turns out to be autobiographical. A girl presents a poem he'd have loved to have written. She's not impressed by it and isn't interested in being published, so she gifts him the poem. He wonders whether he's deluding himself the way the students do.
• Desire - Team men - Saul (who fluffed an important save when he was a goalie years before in a big match) coaches his son Jon's soccer team. A new boy, Davey, moves in, and plays centre-forward instead of Jon. Jon and Davey (both about 16) start having sex. When Davey says he's going to come out to his parents, Jon panics. But Davey doesn't mention his name when he come out. They'll be separated when they go to university anyway.
• Speaking in tongues - 2 alternating, overlapping PoVs. Lee, 17, a student at Cork has a reputation in her home town in Ireland - openly gay. Sylvia, 34, a poet living in Dublin, comes from the same town and keeps her lesbianism a secret. At a Galway conference they meet for the first time. Sylvia reads a poem written in Gaelic. They sleep together in the back of Sylvia's van, parking in a field. Both think they're too good for the other. Both think it could be love. When they kiss their tongues are slippery.
• The welcome - A woman's co-op in Manchester (9 woman living together) advertise for a new resident. Lucy criticises the ad's grammar. She moved in after she came out at 15. She's 18 and still a virgin - she's picky about partners as well as punctuation. JJ is chosen from the candidates. Lucy fancies her. JJ doesn't say if she's gay. She's evicted. Years later Lucy has a wife. She's kept a letter JJ sent her after she moved out that said she was born a man. Lucy re-reads the letter whenever she feels she understands life.
• Death - The dormition of the virgin - Student George is in Firenze for 4 days, looking at art. When he leaves the tiny hotel he realises that the landlady's been dead 3 days. He realises he can leave without paying.
• Enchantment - Peetr runs boat-trips in american swamps. He has competition. To attract custom he hires a portaloo, trains a Caiman, tells scarier stories. He's thinking of giving in when his competitor suggests a partnership.
• Baggage - Ninnyann flies from Shannon to LA - her brother Arthur was there and is still paying for storage area. Her luggage is lost. He's disappeared. She realised rather late that he's "not the marrying type". She tours the sites then flies home, her luggage waiting for her at the airport.
• Necessary Noise - May (20) and Marti (17) collect their brother Maz (15) from a party. Their mother left about 12 years before. Maz has taken something. They rush him to hospital. He's ok, but it was close.

Quite a few duds. I liked "The sanctuary of hands", and "The welcome" had enough jokes to keep me interested.

Other reviews

• Stevie Davies (Her touch is so light and exuberantly inventive, her insight at once so forensic and intimate, her people so ordinary even in their oddities, that she is able to exhibit the small shames, shortcomings, prevarications and betrayals that we hope to keep in the dark. ... a major theme in the collection, concerning privileged folk (of whom the reader is likely to be one) who think they're in a bad way, but find themselves bereft of human decency when they come into squirming contact with the truly afflicted.)
• Anna Scott

"The Penguin book of modern British short stories" by Malcolm Bradbury (ed) (Penguin, 1988)

From Bradbury's introduction -

• "The modern short story has therefore been distinguished by its break away from anecdote, tale-telling, and simple narrative" (p.11)
• "only a few British writers have made the short story their first or only form, [] a good many of our finest short story writers also happen to be our finest novelists" (p.12)
• "It seemed right to start this anthology at the close of the War" (p.13)

Now the stories -

• Strange Comfort Afforded by the Profession (Malcolm Lowry) - He visits Keats' house in Rome, transcribes letters, etc - "the lower is the real power". He recalls how 2 years before he'd visited Poe's house.
• Ping (Samuel Beckett) - [No]
• Mysterious Kôr (Elizabeth Bowen) - WW2 London. Arthur, on his first leave, meets girlfriend Pepita. She fantasises about a poem - London under full moon reminds her of Kôr. He points out that the poem says Kôr doesn't exist. They go back to the flat she shares with Corrie - no chance of them sleeping together. In the night Callie and Arthur talk while Pepita dreams that Arthur "was the password, but not the answer: it was to Kôr's finality that she turned".
• A Family Man (V.S. Pritchett) - Berenice is waiting for her married lover William. His wife, fat and ugly, knocks at her door with a letter that she thinks William's lover wrote. Berenice deduces that Rosie (a colleague of Berenice and William) wrote it, saying that she's making a necklace for Rosie's marriage and that William has organised a collection. The wife leaves, satisfied. Berenice isn't so happy.
• The Burning Baby (Dylan Thomas) - Rhys Rhys, a widowered vicar, made his daughter pregnant. She died in childbirth. He burns the baby, his son watching. [It's how the story's told that matters.]
• The Invisible Japanese Gentleman (Graham Greene) - The first-person PoV, an author in a restaurant, sees a 20 year-old woman talk to her fiance about the deal for her first novel. She suggests that they could now get married and that he could reject the offer of a safe family job to go to San Tropez with her. The persona assesses the weak-seeming man and isn't impressed by the writing profession. At the end her powers of observation are questioned.
• More Friend than Lodger (Angus Wilson) - The first-person PoV character is June, 26, wife of Henry, an editor who's just taken on a snobby, attractive writer, Galt, whose first book was about cuckolds. "But what Henry is like ought to emerge from my story if I'm able to write it at all. And I must in fairness add that my comments about him probably tell quite a lot about me ... Reading over what I have written, I see that it must appear as though Henry and I live on very whimsical terms ... Now we come to the most important point in this story". After Galt becomes June and Henry's lodger, they hear that Galt has a bad reputation for financial trustworthiness. Galt and June had a wonderful time in his MG. He asked to sleep with him. All June's friends - even Henry's mother - like him. When he started sleeping with a maid, June sacked the maid. While Henry was away, Galt took June to Paris and asked her to leave Henry. She's rather attracted to cads but he's too pushy and doesn't sleep with him yet. She discovers he'd borrowed money from Henry's mother and stole from elsewhere. He's arrested in Italy. June gave a gossip writer some info hinted that Henry had been cuckolded. [The best so far]
• The Lotus (Jean Rhys) - Christine and Ronnie are visited by wacky, stout Mrs Lotus Heath, who lives in the basement flat. She's writing a novel and wants to recite the best poem she's ever written. Ronnie finds her funny. She and Christine bicker. After a drink, she leaves. Later, Ronnie see her running naked in the street, collected by 2 policeman who ring his bell. He says he knows little about her. She's taken away by ambulance.
• Miss Pulkinhorn (William Golding) - the Cathedral organist, knighted, notices Miss Pulkinhorn, a regular who is "crazy with opinions and hate". Every congregation has one. Another regular is a simple man who poses like Abraham does in the stained glass when he worships alone. After an episode in the Cathedral he's taken away and dies a month later. Miss Pulkinhorn tells the organist that her conscience is clear, then dies a week later [I think I missed something. What did she do and why?]
• My Enemy's Enemy (Kingsley Amis) - British soldiers during a war, a 100 miles from Brussels. Signal corps. A mix of classes, ranks, and pre-war occupations. Tom Thurston (Oxford degree) wants Dally promoted (good at tech, though cheeky and ill-disciplined) but he's part Italian. Bill wants Cleaver promoted, but he's too chummy with underlings. Bill, wanting to find an excuse to get rid of Dally, plans a surprise inspection. If Tom forewarns Dally, Bill will cancel Tom's leave. Bentham, a regular, warns Dally instead, telling Tom that he's disappointed in him.
• The Rain Horse (Ted Hughes) - A suited man visits a rural viewpoint he's not been to for 12 years. He waits in vain for feelings to overwhelm him. It rains. He shelters in a wood. A horse shelters too, then charges at him. He escapes. Was the horse just being playful? No, it charges again. He hurls stones at it and escapes again, his suit muddy and torn.
• The Fishing-boat Picture (Alan Sillitoe) - It starts with "I've been a postman for twenty-eight years. Take that first sentence: because it's written in a simple way may make the fact of my having been a postman for so long seem important". He'd married Kath when he got the job. They argued - he read too much. They threw things. She left after 6 years to live with a house painter. When he died 10 years later she visited, asking for a painting of a fishing boat. It had sentimental value to him. He found it a few days later in a pawn shop and bought it back. She visited weekly after that, not asking about the returned painting. He gave her money. 6 more years later she asked for the painting again. She was run over by a lorry while carrying it. She'd been living with another man.
• To Room Nineteen (Doris Lessing) - It starts with "This is a story, I suppose, about a failure of intelligence: the Rawlings' marriage was grounded in intelligence.". Susan and Matthew got married, lived in Richmond and had 4 children. They talked to each other about their lives. Matthew slept with a girl at a party and was forgiven. When all the children were old enough to go to school the plan had been that she'd go back to work (commercial drawing) but she preferred to stay in the spare room. She once imagined she saw the devil - a young man - at the end of their garden. When the spare room wasn't enough she rented a shabby hotel room in Victoria, staying there 3 or 4 days a week. She went on a walking holiday alone. She thoought so was going mad. If was her fault. She asked for an au-pair and got one - Sophie - who was her replacement 8am-6pm. She found a grubbier, more anonymous hotel room. When Matthew employs a detective to track her down, the room becomes pointless for her. She stays at home. Matthew says he has a lover. She tells him she has one. He's relieved. She goes to the hotel and kills herself.
• The House of the Famous Poet (Muriel Spark) - A woman on a train to wartime London starts talking to a soldier and a posh-speaking servant girl Elise. Elise takes her to the house where she works. The owner's away. She realises that the owner's a famous poet whose books she's read. Bombs are falling. The soldier re-appears, selling her an abstract funeral. The author admits to the reader that it's a strange concept. Next day the girl and soldier are on a train. The girl asks the soldier what an abstract funeral is. He says he sold the poet and Elise one too. He gets off the train but he''s still there with her. The poet returned home and died in a bombing. The ending is "When I reflect how Elise and the poet were taken in - how they calmly allowed a well-meaning soldier to sell them the notion of a funeral, I remind myself that one day I will accept, and so will you, an abstract funeral, and make no complaints"
• The Enigma (John Fowles) - John Fielding, MP and family man, disappears. He was last seen at the British Museum, leaving his case there. The slow (unnecessary?) earlier pages deal with standard investigations. Sergeant Jennings is left as the only person on the job (though Mrs Fielding is led to believe it's still an active case). Jennings is young, clever, public-schooled. When he interviews Isobel, the girlfriend of Fielding's son, his questions refer to the case, but also to his liking of her. She (a budding novelist) suggests that Fielding was a standard character. Perhaps he tried to meet her at the Museum to tell her that he wanted to become memorable by being a mystery. Perhaps he drowned himself in his own lake. He tries in vain to get the lake dredged. He goes out with Isobel, sleeping with her on their first date.
• Memories of the Space Age (J.G. Ballard) - Dr Malory (ex NASA) returns to Cape Kennedy with his wife. It's abandoned, time is slowing down. Hinton is there, flying ever older planes in the belief that unaided flight will cured the time problem. When he's ready he'll jump off a building. The time problem was his fault? When he was an astronaut he killed his fellow astronaut Shepley. His daughter helps Malory. She wants him to leave the infected area. But time stops for him. [Best so far]
• A Meeting in Middle Age (William Trevor) - Mr Mileson, 50-ish, has been employed by Mrs da Tanka (ex Mrs Spires) to be a co-respondent. He, a quiet virgin, has to put up with a torrent of insults about his pointless life. He tries to counter-attack, suggesting that she's hard to live with. They sleep in the same bed, uncomfortably.
• In the Hours of Darkness (Edna O'Brien) - A son starting at Cambridge University goes by car with his mother. She stays the night in an unsuitable hotel after having a welcoming college meal with her son and a few staff. Her son has a fun night.
• A Few Selected Sentences (B.S. Johnson) - 3 pages of fragments. [No]
• Composition (Malcolm Bradbury) - Englishman William starts teaching composition in a mid-West American university in the time of Nixon and Vietnam. He starts sleeping with a PhD student until he finds a knife under her pillow. She pesters him. When marking, he tries to favour the minorities, etc. He's photographed having sex with 2 students. He can't tell whether the letter he receives from one of them is blackmail or love. He analyses it like a story. At the end there are 3 endings. In one of them he grades the letter. [entertaining style]
• Weekend (Fay Weldon) - Martha has 3 kids and an exacting husband Martin. She does all the domestic work without complaint. At their weekend cottage they host Martin's old friend Colin and his new woman Katie. Martha liked his old wife Martha - she helped out. The others sometimes do little tasks, spoiling her plans. When her daughter has her first period, Martha can't stop crying.
• Hotel des Boobs (David Lodge) - Brenda and Harry are holidaying alone on the Côte d'Azur now that the children were old enough. Harry stares at the breasts around the pool. He wanted Brenda to go topless. We learn that the story so far is being written by an author by a pool. His papers are suddenly blown away. He wants to leave the hotel before the bathers read about themselves. In the rest of the story Brenda sleeps with the waiter and Harry hits her, because he feels inadequate about his genitals. She admits later that she made the story up. The author's wife says that the real waiter is gay.
• Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie (Beryl Bainbridge) - Charlie and his wife live in a high-rise. He misses the terrace house where they used to live. They take their grown kids Alec and Moira to Peter Pan, with Moira's little son Wayne - the father's gone. Alec explains that the pantomime's on multiple levels. When the audience is asked to clap to save Tinkerbell, Wayne unexpectedly cries and Charlie dies from a heart attack. [Does a lot in 6 pages]
• Psychopolis (Ian McEwan) - Soon after arriving in LA the english first- person protagonist is asked by feminist Mary to chain her to his bed for a weekend and to ignore her protests. He does, playing his flute badly as usual, joking about having a "captive audience". She thinks England's in total collapse. He befriends George whose shop has party gear and invalid devices for hire. He meets up with handsome Terence, an American who he met years before in the UK. Terence tells him how a girlfriend humiliated him in front of her parents. He goes to an open-mic where a guy with vomit down his front tells the audience how useless he is. He tells Mary about it - "'Everyone here,' she said, gesturing towards the setting sun, 'has got some kind of act going like that'". When he decides to leave LA, George hosts a farewell party with Mary and George. They argue about religion and guns, then settle down to genteel banter - "Terence said, 'The English tell each other nothing.' I said, 'Between telling nothing and telling everything there is very little to choose.'". By request he plays his flute. They formally applaud. He formally bows. [I like it]
• Flesh and the Mirror (Angela Carter) - she returns to Tokyo after 3 months back in England, hoping her lover will be there to welcome her. "I was walking through an ocean whose speechless and gesticulating inhabitants, like those with whom medieval philosophers peopled the countries of the deep, were methodical inversions or mirror images of the dwellers on dry land. And I moved through these expressionist perspectives in my black dress as though I was the creator of all and of myself, too, in a black dress, in love, crying, walking through the city in the third person singular, my own heroine". She has a one-night stand with a man in a mirror-ceilinged hotel room. "Women and mirrors are in complicity with one another to evade the action I/she performs that she/I cannot watch". Later she meets her old lover, but they soon split. It ends with "The most difficult performance in the world is, acting naturally, isn't it? Everything else is artful"
• Let me Count the Times (Martin Amis) - Vernon kept stats about sex with his wife - 3.5 times/week, etc. He was always the one who initiated. He suddenly started masturbating in addition, first fantasising about his wife, then celebs and anyone he knew, then literary characters - Ophelia, Madame Bovary. Gradually he became impotent. One night his wife initiated and they tried all sorts of things. Relieved, he decided not to count in future.
• My Wife is a White Russian (Rose Tremain) - The narrator, a financier, is wheelchair-bound and struggles to talk. He met his wife when she was a Parisian prostitute. She has a lover. They don't sleep together. He dreams of his earlier days.
• The Prophet's Hair (Salman Rushdie) - Hashim finds a strand of Muhammad's hair. He becomes strictly religious, forcing his family to join in. His son seeks a thief to steal the hair. He's mugged and taken home in a coma. Hashim's sister succeeds in hiring a thief. When he breaks in, the son dies, Hashim accidentally kills his daughter then himself, and the thief is shot dead. The mother has to go into a home. The hair is returned to where it was stolen in the first place.
• One of a Kind (Julian Barnes) - The persona speaks to an exiled Romanian about Petrescu - a friend of the Romanian when they lived in Bucharest. Petrescu had been writing a clever (deceptive) satire on Socialism. The persona had been to Bucharest and had seen books by Petrecu in shop windows. The satirical one wasn't there. Had he never published it? Had he published it and then wrote more acceptable novels after?
• Philomela (Emma Tennant) - Philomela, the sister of the first-people protagonist, encouraged her to flee from Athens to the mountains, but she married Tereus instead and went to Thrace. Years later he decided to find Philomela for his sad wife. He returned to say that Philomela was dead. She has another son, Itylus. After a year she's given a tapestry showing Philomela pleading with Tereus, having her tongue cut out, then being imprisoned in a tower. She sends trusted servants to find her. They bring her back. After a while the two sisters kill Itylus and make a pie of him. Tereus eats the pie and is exiled.
• Bedbugs (Clive Sinclair) - Joshua, a husband who lives at Bury St.Edmunds, is asked to run a Cambridge summer school on WW1 poetry - Isaac Rosenberg when 10 kissed his grandmother when she was 7. The students are mostly German girls. He suffers from bedbugs, so do the students. He has doubts about his marriage - his wife has miscarriaged. He fancies Inge, a student. She gets rid of the bedbugs and they sleep together. He sees and talks to Rosenberg while he first has sex with her. They rehearse a play for the final night where he is a wife and Inge his husband. On a daytrip to Bury, they drop into his wife, who's sunbathing nude in the back garden. She and Inge get on well. Next day, his wife kills herself. He tells nobody and performs in the play
• Seraglio (Graham Swift) - He and his wife of 8 years are on holiday in Istanbul. Months into their marriage he had an affair that she never found out about. She had a miscarriage and can't have children. They go on frequent holidays instead. They play mindgames - "I blamed my wife because I myself felt to blame for what had happened and if I blamed my wife, unjustly, she could then accuse me, and I would feel guilty, as you should when you are to blame". She says that the room service man touched her. He's not sure that she's telling the truth. She wants to go home so they do. There's symbolism about their bodies in bed being like 2 continents - so near yet so far.
• A Family Supper (Kazuo Ishiguro) - The Japanese narrator returns home from the States for the first in 2 years. His mother died because she ate ill-prepared Fugu fish. His reserved father's company has gone bust. His business partner, a man of principle, killed himself. The narrator's sister Kikubo is more bubbly. He tells her that there's nothing to keep him in the states now that he's split with Vicki. Kikubo's boyfriend's asked her to hitch-hike around the states with him. She tells him that their father's business partner killed his family, not just himself. They all eat fish soup which the father has prepared.
• Structural Anthropology (Adam Mars-Jones) - An anecdote about a wife's revenge on an unfaithful husband is analysed in terms "nature/culture", "limp/stiff", "private/public", etc. The ending is "just below the surface of story, like the succulent separate threads beneath the skin of a perfectly cooked vegetable-spaghetti, lies the tangled richness of myth"

There are quite a few characters who are authors, or there are significant allusions to poems. Lots of infidelity too.

"Light year" by Jennifer Wong (Nine Arches Press, 2025)

Poems from Poetry London, Poetry Wales, Finished Creatures, etc.

In the poem "Light Year" I have trouble with -

• "Even if a star dies, its light echoes around the cosmos." - in what way "echoes"? What does the light bounce off of? Or alternatively, what does "star" mean other than star?
• "As the supernova shuttles through space\               at the speed of light, its echo         expands" - in what way "shuttles" (i.e. goes back and forth)? In what way does it have an echo? What do all the spaces mean?

and I have problems with the poems in section IV. "Diary" is my favourite piece, followed by "when you stopped speaking to me for a whole year".

Other reviews

• Jonathan Han (Light Year is a meditation on separation and exile, tracking the concerns of other authors of the Hong Kong diaspora. ... Over the course of four sections, the two sides of the equation, time and space, become interlinked, then inextricable. ... Written in a deceptively simple style, Light Year is an engaging body of work that opens up one end of the conversation without demanding a response. Although not entirely bridging the distance, Wong’s careful examination of family proves that, if one has read the poetry, her reflection is clear and sympathetic.)

"Identity Unknown" by Patricia Cornwell

An audio book.

Kay Scarpetta (her first-person PoV) is a coroner. Kay has an Irish secretary and a husband, Ben. Elvin, the person Kay replaced, wasn't trustworthy. Her colleague Merino is. A girl, mentally impaired, has died from a gunshot - self-inflicted say the parents, owners of a theme park. They try to get her daughter's body back. But there are suspicious bruises. The body of Sal Giordano (Nobel astrophysicist, SETI sympathiser, close friend of Kay) is found in the park on his 60th birthday, dropped from the sky by a non-identifiable type of craft. The FBI suspect he might be a traitor. Lucy, her neice, is in intelligence and she's a helicopter pilot. Carrie was a colleague - a psychopath. She went to Moscow as the result of a prisoner exchange. Giordano might have been alive when he fell, but why didn't a big cat (found loose in the area) eat him?

Kay does Giordano's post-mortem in a secret lab in case he has UFO-related infection. When she visited him on his last day she'd been preceded by a florist delivering a booby-trapped vase. The same type of van is being used by a firm working on her building. He'd left his house afterwards with a case and $35k in cash.

A helicopter crashes into the sea. A TV reporter who'd criticised the girl's parents, had been scheduled to be in it. Imitation moon dust is found on the girl's body and Giordano's.

Carrie (who used to be Lucy's lover) contacts Kay via video link. She admits to the florist job, helicopter sabotage, etc. She shows a video of the daughter's last moments. Her location's tracked (Warsaw) and she's arrested. The parents are arrested. Kay and Merino visit a research lab that Giordano had been visiting. They'd been manufacturing moon/mars dust for sale to NASA etc. Giordano was interested in using it to develop radio telescopes. He'd been bribing a worker there. Carrie had worked there as a pilot. Her vehicle had anti-radar treatment. The research lab's owned by the parents. Keri did extra work for them.

Other reviews

• seattlebookmama (two of Cornwell’s old standbys, ones that I’d be happy to see her retire, appear. First, she has to be driven to the scene in a helicopter, but oh no, there’s a storm coming. I was irritated. Can Kay not go anywhere without there being a storm? Just once? Please? And then something has to be retrieved by diving, which harks back to an earlier book)
• Elaine Donadio (The killers’ motives are not clearly defined. I don’t find the motivations plausible. Too extreme a reaction for such insignificant provocation. The pacing is good. Modern technology and concerns with extra-terrestrials dominate the book demonstrating the author’s attempt to keep up with current trends. All in all, a tightly knit plot with some ridiculous characters, but still a page turner.)

"Perfection" by Vincenzo Latronico (Fitzcarraldo, 2025)

About 100 pages long. Each section uses a particular tense (which probably worked better in Italian)

PRESENT - descriptions of an apartment's rooms. Tasteful: "lit by an accordian wall-light mounted between a botanic lithograph of an araucaria and a reproduction print of a British wartime poster". They're descriptions of photos advertising a Berlin rental. "The life promised by these images is clear and purposeful, uncomplicated."

IMPERFECT - Much the longest section. It starts with "Reality didn't always live up to the pictures". The professional couple, Anna and Tom, wake satisfied, but clutter and grime acculumate. They don't speak much German, they have ex-pat friends aged 23-30. They grew up before Social Media. They design web sites. They sometimes sub-let for a few weeks. When they do, they clean up first. Then "For a few glorious seconds they would see their apartment just as they wanted it, perfectly superimposable onto the pictures". They note that "an identical struggle for a different life motivated an entire sector of their generation". Their job "demanded creativity, mostly in the form of making tiny tweaks to existing frameworks". Their families were puzzled by their move. Little art galleries and indie art spaces have become "the pulse of their life". They want things to stay the same. "Their love grew deeper every day. They were lovers, partners, best friends." They worry that their sex isn't adventurous or frequent enough compared to their friends. They're aware that Social Media had become an everpresent part of their life, one they have trouble controlling. It's not a distraction, it's part of their work/life flow. They speak better German now. The area's becoming gentrified - partly their fault. "They spent all their time in plant-filled apartments and cafes with excellent wifi". They make donations, sign petitions. When Germany lets in a million immigrants, they help - moved by "images of the drowned boy" and the detachment of the man in the images. Gradually their departing friends aren't replaced by similar people. Clubs in abandoned warehouses close down. Little art galleries are replaced by upmarket exhibitions they don't understand.

REMOTE - "They tried travelling", their apartment easily hired out thanks to the photos they used to advertise it. They found a temp website-making job in Lisbon ("the new Berlin"). "It was all different, which was what they had wanted; and yet it was also somehow all the same." A Web summit for digital nomads was being held, for which they'd designed the promo material. They feel like outsiders - too old. So they tried Sicily - a house that looked ok online, but disappointed them when they moved there, near a motorway. They were unhappy for 4 months, then returned to Berlin.

FUTURE - an uncle of Anna leaves her a Mediterranean farmhouse. They revamp it ("simple, elegant decor - Mediterranean yet unmistakenly international") so that they can live in it and take paid guests. The first review in May 2019 says "It's all completely perfect. It's just like it is in the pictures".

Belonging. Same/different. Change. Character types rather than individuals. Real/Images

Other reviews

• Andrew Blackman (Latronico wrote Perfection as a tribute to Things: A Story of the Sixties by Georges Perec, and it closely mirrors the structure and approach of Perec’s 1965 novella: both stories begin with a long, extremely detailed description of the apartment, and both feature a youngish couple with generic names experiencing a similar plot arc. Perfection is a way of transposing Perec’s novel onto the early years of the 21st century.)
• Lizzy Siddal
• mostlyaboutstories (Anna and Tom are not living entirely authentically, which we are told but also notice ourselves, by the way they are living always in the shadow of images – others’ and their own. But neither, typically, are we.)
• Thomas McMullan (where the “things” in Perec’s book are distinctly and evocatively material – a silver fob watch, a jade ashtray – the objects that Latronico’s protagonists desire are just as often apparitions, mediated through images posted on Instagram.)

"Silverview" by John le Carré

An audio book.

Lily, who has a 2 year-old son, Sam, delivers an envelope from her dying mother to Proctor in London.

Julian was a London trader. Now he lives above his bookshop on the East Anglian coast. Edward Avon comes in, claiming to have known Julian's father at school. Julian's father went to Oxford, became a religious person, then renounced his faith, dying at 50. A cafe-worker tells Julian that Edward is Polish, and that his dying wife had chucked him out. Julian finds no evidence of Edward at the school.

Stuart and Ellen Proctor are celebrating the 21st birthday of their twins. He's a spy, she's ex-Service. He thinks she might be having an affair. Or is she on a secret mission? Has it happened before? He's troubled by a case involving a woman and a leak. Stuart visits 2 retired spies. They tell a long, info-dumpy story about Florian and Deborah in Eastern Europe. Stuart visits Tod at an airbase which has rooms a 100m down with a private network. Deborah, Edward's wife, had a connection into the network from her house, Silverview.

Celia helped Edward sell pottery. Edward asks Julian to deliver a letter in person to a woman in London. The woman tells Julian to report back to Edward that she's fine. Deborah invites Julian for a meal. He (and we) discover that Edward has a daughter, Lily. Julian's had 2 laptops stolen from work. He's caught up in the Lily/Deborah/Edward discourse. Art Festivals. Nietzsche. Sam is mixed race. Deborah soon dies. Lily tells Julian that her parents are spies. After the funeral, Stuart interviews Julian. He's been watched. He has to explain his behaviour at London, his dealing with Edward. Pottery was all part of a code. Stuart gives Julian a contract to give Edward (who is Florian, the cause of the leaks). If he tells them all he knows, they'll be lenient. Lily gives herself to Julian. Edward disappears - quite likely to the lady Julian delivered the letter to.

I like the dialogue - which both in love and espionage might be about one thing while seeming to be about another.

Other reviews

• Anthony Cummins
• Steven Lantier

"Zoo time" by Howard Jacobson

An audio book. I bailed out about a third of the way through. The monologuing was too slow. Easy targets. Easy jokes.

Other reviews

• Edmund Gordon (Zoo Time is a 400-page tantrum directed at reading groups, Amazon reviews, three-for-two offers, Kindle, Richard and Judy, graphic novels, vampire novels, Scandinavian crime novels, declining advances, declining standards of grammar, declining interest in language and psychology, and much else besides. ... Since Zoo Time deals with character, setting and plot in an entirely cursory way, you can only really engage with it as a piece of pure rhetoric – and yet its complaints are either unfocused or plain unconvincing)