"The continental affair" by Christine Mangan

An audio book.

A woman sees a man in a train. They act as if they're strangers. They met 2 weeks before. There had been problems in Belgrade. They're on their way to Istanbul. It's the 1960s.

Henri was born in Algeria to a French father (Marseilles) and Spanish mother (Granada). He went to university and became a policeman to make them happy. When they died in a car accident and the political situation in Oran was difficult, he went to Spain, doing undercover deliveries/pickups for his family. On a job to collect money at the Alhambra he sees a woman drop money and another pick it up. He follows her towards Paris.

When Louise Barnard's invalid father died, he left £40. She decided to spend it on a holiday to Alhambra rather than on his funeral. She's 28, a factory worker - tall, strong, thin. Her mother had left for Paris years before, sending just one letter back. When she'd found the £5,000 she'd been almost penniless. She decided to head for Paris by bus. She can speak French.

She finds out that her mother died. She catches a train to Istanbul. He follows. She tells him about her father and the money. She wants to change her life. At Istanbul they realise that they're being followed by a man - one of Henri's Spanish associates. They can't lose him in the Grand Bazaar. She ends up with a gun and the follower is wounded. She escapes, claiming she's lost the money.

In the epilogue she's at Oran years later hoping Henri will pass by.

Other reviews

• Janice Ottersberg (The structure of the novel is complex and requires close reading. Pivoting on a mysterious event in Belgrade, the narrative switches between two legs of the journey – before Belgrade and after.)
• Kirkus reviews (The book is front-loaded with too much backstory, but a patient reader will quickly be rewarded by an unconventional heist narrative that is equal parts moving and thrilling. ... The novel is a smart riff on a familiar genre, with complex protagonists and a cliché-defying love story.)
• RoughJustice (The Continental Affair has an unusual structure, which at first is a little confusing, but ultimately serves the story well. Each chapter begins with the pair sharing a train carriage not far from their final destination. These scenes are followed by a flashback, told from their alternate points of view, bringing the story forward to the present.)

"A User's Guide to Make-Believe" by Jane Alexander

An audio book.

Cassie visits some kind of addiction meeting. She hasn't been for a few months. She sees a man there, Lewis, who she senses has the same problem as her. They talk. They'd both been addicted (and banned from) a VR product create by Imagen. She wants to sleep with him. He's half-hearted, saying he's just left a relationship (later he says that his partner had a VR-related death). They sleep sexlessly together.

By the time Cassie was 16 her mother had died and her father was planning to start a new life in Australia. She began living with classmate Alan and his mother Vanessa, who has just died. She attends the funeral. When she was sacked by Imagen she became poor. She started a company offering support to students (essay-writing, help with deadlines, etc). Nikol, one of his employees, is a tech-wizard. Imagen finds that their clients' VR logs give helpful info for targetted advertising.

She visits Alan in a lock-up ward. Who's paying for his treatment now? Who's his next of kin? He doesn't remember her. She has a sister Meg who has children Ella and Finn. When they overnighted with her once she neglected them, losing all track of time on Make-Believe.

Imagen, based in a grey tower on campus, was spun off from the university. Its genius is Prof Morgan. Because it received government funding - a flagship project - there's pressure on it to succeed. There was hope that Make-Believe would one day be a shared world, useful for education, mental therapy, and sex entertainment. Cassie talks to Morgan, who tells her that some users can connect longer than the allowed 2 hours/day, and that shared worlds can't happen. There's a section from Morgan's PoV suggesting that she's worried about Cassie's questions. Cassie goes to an exhibition about Make-Believe (a way to deliver an info-dump - there are also FAQ section). Bioware is inhaled and an earpiece used to connect to secure 6G network. She connects to Make-Believe though she's been banned. She meets Alan there - or is it her imagination? Imagen bring her in - she's broken her agreement. They explain that they want to stop users interacting with each other - it's a bug. Their plan is to update her bioware so that it will spread among other users and fix the bug. If she agrees, they'll give her back her job. She agrees because if she passes the upgrade onto Alan he'll suffer less (she thinks he's a victim of the bug). She's been suspicious of Lewis. Now she finds evidence that he's working for Imagen.

She breaks into Prof Morgan's house. Morgan says she had a partner who she lost because of Make-Believe. She's privately been working on a real remedy. Imagen are planning to do product placement in the VR world. Cassie tries the remedy. She wakes in Meg's house. She reads that Imagen's share values are sinking - Prof Morgan has been whistle-blowing? She visits Alan (in VR?), who remembers her now (his expenses have been paid by Imagen). The "campaign for real life" has gained pace. She realises that her VR meeting with Alan are in her imagination.

Other reviews

• thewallflowerdigest (I did find the first half of the book stronger than the latter. Some things were easy to see coming, and I wasn’t entirely satisfied with where the plot went but I did I like how the unreliability of Cassie’s point of view was played with.)
• The Only Gaijin in the Village

"Hedonism" by Chris McCabe (Nine arches press, 2025)

Poems from London Magazine, Poetry Review, etc.

My favourite is "A poet & two translators". "Lockedowne Aventure" is the one I least like. Most of the others are beyond me.

Other reviews

• Carol Rumens (It confirms a prodigious talent for the assimilation of ideas, and for letting them loose in forms that are variously experimental, and use the full muscle and gristle of lived language)

"The cult of the avant-garde artist" by Donald Kuspit (CUP, 1993)

It concerns the artist's role in society - how the maladies of each affects the other - and the artist's use of past art. Duchamp, Mondrian, Warhol, Beuys, Schnabel, etc. 113 pages followed by 57 pages of notes.

Compressing the main points below - the avant-garde artist makes his art to restore himself to health, influencing his public's perception of that art. The postmoderns are backward-looking social reactionaries, mocking innovation by turning the new into a cliché. Fame is narcissistic compensation for therapeutic failure.

• "These, then, are the basic articles of faith in the avant-garde artist: he is more spontaneous - primordially expressive - than anyone else because he is more absolutely integrated than anyone else, and he can experience in a more primordial way than other people because his sense perception is not bound by symbolic functioning ... To put this in Whiteheadean language, it is because the artist does not accept society's symbol systems that he is able to sense with unusual directness what is fundamental" (p.7)
• "In its decadent appropriation of avant-garde art, the neo-avant-garde is narcissistic, however much the avant-garde art produced under the auspices of the idea of art for art's sake seems to be narcissistic as well. If art for art's sake implies narcissism, it is secondary or defensive narcissism, rather than the consummate, cynical, self-celebratory narricism of neo-avant-garde art" (p.8)
• "Fear of decadence and the wish for rejuvenation haunt - indeed, terrorize - modern thinking about art" (p.9)
• "The artist is able to revive the decadent audience's will to live" (p.11)
• "The artist's deliberate will to create art stops the drift to decadence, and the advance of art embodies the reversal of this drift" [Nietzsche] (p.11)
• "unless art is made for an audience in desperate need of transfiguration, of control over the chaos in itself, of form, then art is merely the expression of vanity" [Nietzsche] (p.12)
• "Until the present state of postmodernist disillusionment, belief in art's profound healing power ... was the cornerstone of belief in avant-garde art" (p.12)
• "[postmodernism] exploits its audience's susceptibility to art, its unconscious hope for transfiguration by art, but offers little in return" (p.12)
• "Art today has reached a new extreme of decadence, in which it dialectically incorporates all the past signs of artistic rejuvenation ... while denying their contemporary possibility" (p.13)
• "For the neo-avant-garde artist, the avant-garde past is not a land of milk and honey, but a desert with half-buried, broken, dubious treasures, to be excavated with ironic curiosity. He incorporates these fragments in his art the way medieval church builders subsumed the stones of ancient temples, and thus the gods these housed" (p.16)
• "Avant-garde art climaxes in the belief that every member of society can be an innovator, that is, can transform himself through the therapeutic practice of art, from a wounded decadent into a healthy Overman" (p.19)
• "[The neo-avant-garde artist] restablishes the traditional, easy reciprocity between society and artist denied by the avant-garde artist and destroyed through his self-imposed ostracization ... A major symptom of this new artistic worldliness is the explicit use of artistic innovation to win fame and fortune" (p.20)
• "modern art's manneristic "fondness for far-fetched connections," [] in fact acknowledges profound disconnection" (p.22)
• "The basic contention of this book is that the avant-garde artist makes his art to restore himself to health, an intention that not only informs his art but influences his public's perception of that art" (p.28)
• "Fame, we might say, is narcissistic compensation for therapeutic failure" (p.28)
• "Avant-garde art, as I have suggested, involves a wish to regress to the primordial beginning to escape the decadent end" (p.29)
• "avant-garde art's melting forms are simultaneously symptoms of disintegration anxiety and indications of a process of creative reintegration of the self. The notion of "breakthrough" conveys this double meaning" (p.29)
• "Fame is a provocative trap and distorting mirror - ironically, like the artists' objects" (p.35)
• "many modern artists turned to distortion as the promised land of primordial creativity ... These artists are less creative - less astoundingly original - than they think" (p.42)
• "Traditional society was protected from the sense of decadence by belief in the meaningfulness of transcendence, embodied in religion. Abstract art re-embodied it for modern society, which is one reason the first abstract artists felt imbued with a sense of religious mission" (p.56)
• "the geometricist is also schizoid: his geometry is an intellectual defense against the frustration of empty feeling (against which the expressivist has no defense at all) ... Like many intellectuals, the abstract artist is acutely sensitive to his own inner processes, but he is insensitive to - indeed, cut off from - those of others" (p.59)
• ""total spontaneity of expression," as Breton said, is the most direct avenue to the primordial unconscious ... Both the surrealists and expressionists want to make art spontaneously. The former seem to think one can learn to do so" (p.60)
• "Where the modernists were forward-looking psychic revolutionaries, the postmoderns are backward-looking social reactionaries, even if they have ironic insight into the status quo of art and the society" (p.66)
• "disbelief in art's therapeutic power defines post-avant-garde art, which mocks innovation by turning the new into a cliché" (p.66)
• "[Beuys'] shamanism was an attempt to bring the human and scientific together again, as in primordial art" (p.91)
• "Hitler was a failed artist, and Beuys, it should be recalled, was a successful politician, a founder of the Green Party" (p.91)
• "Beuys is the grand climax of a long line of self-contradictory avant-garde narcissists in conflict with a society they want as their audience" (p.98)
• "The real tragedy of the avant-garde artist is that he wants to heal a society that has a vested ironic interest in his pathology" (p.98)
• "Appropriation art is informed by the decadence syndrome: the sense of the decline and impending death of art" (p.106)
• "Art is indeed a confidence game in that it gives the audience confidence in itself. This is why the audience rewards the artist with fame and fortune, giving him, in turn, confidence in the significance of his creativity. Art fuses artist and audience in a mutual narcissism" (p.111)

"My Good Bright Wolf" by Sarah Moss

An audio book - memoir.

She writes that she's trying to be truthful except when she's hiding identities. A voice interrupts when it suspects that there's a deviation from the truth. She's the daughter of Owl (American) and Jumbley Girl. She's the sister of Angel Boy. She was a late reader and felt fat - the bullying was worst when she was 9. She thinks about how the books that she repeatedly read as a child ("Swallows and Amazons", "Little Women", "Little House of the Prairie", "Pilgrims Progress", etc) affected her, giving them a feminist interpretation - she mentioned some of them in her PhD. She's interested in the author/heroine's attitude to food, and the author's approach to truth. She recalls reading "The Bell Jar".

During covid, now a prof with teenage kids, she moves the family to Ireland. She over-exercises, under-eats. By the time she goes to A&E she's on the edge of organ failure. She's 46. Still she refuses sugar, following the advice of the "men of science". She has trouble distinguishing between "care" and "control". She finds she can't write fiction while fasting. She's told to prioritize recovery by giving up work, but she goes on book tours etc - they're not a problem. Her husband and kids do European hikes for holidays. Water is an issue more than food. That becomes a source of arguments too.

She reads about Dorothy Wordsworth, and how she balanced her creative work with domestic chores. She reads about Mary Wollstonecraft and how she coped with male attitudes to female thinkers. She assesses whether these female characters are like 1st or 2nd wave feminists.

She talks about her suicidal thoughts (Mary Wollstonecraft tried, Virginia Woolfe succeeded). On a walk she sees a wolf. Was it a female?

"The Other Side of Night" by Adam Hamdy

Preface - the narrator (Elliot's father) looks back on his life. What do we sacrifice for love? We can't choose. Harriet was 32, a policewoman, when she met Ben. She was lonely, mailing to herself daily. The narrator admits that he has access to the mail, that this book isn't a product of his imagination. Elliot was troubled, according to the social worker.

Harriet lived in a flat in Stoke. She had been dismissed 6 weeks before her story starts. Ben had harshly broken up with her a while before. She had loved him at first sight and thought the feeling was mutual. They had a love of poetry in common. Her work partner had been Sabi Khan.

She finds a withdrawn library book in a 2nd hand shop - a self-improvement book which mentions that we long for the familiar even if it's a bad pattern we've fallen into. It also mentions that sexual attraction weakens rationality because procreation is an instinct. A "he's going to kill me" message is written in it. She goes to the library and finds that it was last taken out by Beth Asher, who'd died of cancer a year before. Her husband David died later - an accident on a cliff, maybe suicide - the body never found. Harriet goes to their cottage and finds Ben there, looking after Elliot who's upstairs. Elliot resembles Ben. Had Ben been having an affair with Beth?

She discovers that Beth's body disappeared from the hospital the night she died. She, David and Ben all worked at the same physics lab from which some Cobalt 60 had been stolen. The lab boss asks Harriet to check Ben's cottage with a radiation detector. She finds a poem for her in the toilet. Elliot says that Ben often talks about her. His car sets the detector going. Harriet hopes that solving the case will help her get her job back. But Sabi makes the investigation official. When Sabi and she investigate they follow Ben and Elliot. Elliot gets away. During a fight, Ben pushes Sabi into a ravine.

Elliot tells Harriet he knows a secret. Ben reminds him not to tell anyone. Ben gives himself in, first passing Elliot to the housekeeper, Cynthia. In the courtroom Elliot shouts that Ben's innocent, that Harriet pushed Sabi over the edge.

Sabi tried to deal with a minor criminal, Monroe, who drew a knife and slashed at Sabi. Harriet hit Monroe. They fought. Monroe ran into the path of a train and died. An investigation suggested that she used unnecessary force and caused Monroe's death, hence her dismissal. Later she was sent a video showing her innocence.

Part 2. Elliot's a student at Lincoln college, Oxford. 2 profs talk to him, saying that he was wasting his time. He seemed very self-contained. Prof Hoight got a Nobel using formulae that Elliot had jotted while she was disciplining him. Next day Elliot disappeared. Dead?

Thanks to the video evidence, Harriet got her job back and her boss took early retirement. She replaced him. When Ben's released, Elliot goes to her, promising to tell her the secret if she came with him. She does so, but suddenly fears she's being led into a trap.

She's shown an underground lab. A screen there shows Ben. Ben had discovered a time travel device (cobalt 60 being an ingredient) and had taken his father back to the moment of Beth's death. Ben rushed them all 200 years into the future. Beth recovers and lives with David, having 3 kids, but Ben returns to look after Elliot so that Elliot (who is the younger Ben) can discover time travel. Ben/Elliot and Harriet go back to 1989 and live happily out of the way of paradoxes. Various loose ends are tidied up - it's easy to see now why Ben kept talking about fate and inevitability.

Other reviews

• Artis-Ann
• jenmed (somewhat of a departure from the usual high action stories ... made up of so many elements of so many genres – mystery, a touch of suspense, maybe a bit of sci-fi and a lot of speculative fiction)

" Tell Me Everything" by Elizabeth Strout

An audio book, set in Crosby, Maine. Post-covid.

It's a mesh of stories by old people with previous spouses and old friends (the characters and setting are used in other books by the author). They're still learning from past experiences. They share their fears, Couples still argue and make up.

Bob Burgess is 65, a retired lawyer. He's been married to Marge, a church minister, for 15 years. His father died when his brother Jim, a boy then, was playing with the car in the drive and it ran their father over. Bob took the blame.

Olive has 4 grandchildren. Her best friend was Isobel, who had to move to the other side of town.

Lucy, 66, has moved from New York with her ex-husband William (who had affairs). She's a writer, a friend of Bob. William is a parasitologist

Olive invites Lucy over to tell her stories - Olive's mother carried in her handbag a press cutting about the boy she wanted to marry; a woman whose husband was a closet gay took in her husband's young lover when her husband died, and left the house to him in her will. Lucy's interested in who knew what and how. She tells Olive that she sometimes feels she has a connection with someone she encounters at random, younger men mostly. Lucy wonders whether these unrecorded lives have meaning.

Pam visits Bob, her ex-husband. They've not been in contact for years. They talk for 4 hours. She says that she hates her life and friends, and was (is?) a secret alcoholic. One of her sons is a transvestite. She saw her husband having sex with a friend and didn't feel hurt.

Jim's wife has a month to live. Jim doesn't want people to know. Susan has told Pam who told Bob. Jim's wife dies. Jim apologises to son Larry for being a lousy father.

An old woman disappears. She'd been living with her unmarried son Matthew Beake. Bob offers to defend Beake, who stands to gain from his mother's death. He's a good amateur artist. One of his models was a pregnant woman whose credit card was stolen to hire a car that might have been involved with the disappearance.

Olive's upset because Isobel is moving away. She wonders about killing herself. Bob asks Matthew if he's thinking of killing himself - he keeps a gun in the house.

Pam, having gone to AA, falls off the wagon. Marge is worried about losing her job. Bob sees Matt Beake's sister at the airport and phones Matt, telling him to stay out of his house. His sister kills herself in the house. She was about to be arrested for the murder of her mother. Jim and Bob agrees that their memory of events around their father's death is unreliable.

As Lucy and Bob's friendship deepens, Marge and Bob become more distant. Bob feels guilty that he's falling in love. Lucy describes Bob as a "sin-eater" - someone who is drawn to people who have done wrong. After they have a little disagreement he hears from William has she's finally agreed to remarry him. Marge doesn't lose her job. Bob treats Matt a bit like a son.

The text reminds readers that there's a narrator - "Here is what happened -"; "As we have just mentioned", etc.

When I read her Olive again book, marketed as short stories, I didn't think much of it. I like this book more - perhaps because I'm older now and can empathize more with the (almost exclusively old) characters, or perhaps because I should have read her interconnected stories more as a novel.

Other reviews

• Mattis Gravingen (All of them feel lonely. But why? The novel seems to answer that their loneliness is interlinked with a withering United States that makes people struggle to connect. The characters feel a “terror”, not just about their decay as they grow older and more lonely, but also because their country is falling apart. ... But perhaps a better answer to why the characters are lonely is that none of them listen to others.)
• Elizabeth Lowry
• Judith McKinnon