*Ahem* You’ll have to forgive me for that one, I just couldn’t resist. All abysmal jokes aside, I decided that the only way to catch up with my reviewing was to pop a couple of books into each post until I’m caught up, and the two books that immediately jumped out at me were The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold, and Her Fearful Symmetry, by Audrey Niffenegger; not only do both books feature dead people as central characters, but, to me, they also had a similar kind of feeling about them, too. So, onto The Lovely Bones first.

So, I’ve always been wary of the pod-people-like effect that seems to go hand in hand with bestselling books like The Lovely Bones, where seemingly everyone on the planet is reading the same book, and praising it to the sky. I rarely find that those books live up to my expectations, and, if I do want to read a bestseller, I usually wait at least a couple of years; which brings me to Alice Sebold’s novel. In case I’m not the last person on the planet to read the book, The Lovely Bones is narrated by Susie Salmon, a girl who was raped and murdered at the age of fourteen, and tells the story of her afterlife in heaven, where she watches over her family as they slowly fall apart. It’s not a whodunnit, as you know who killed Susie almost straight away. Instead, it charts the effect of Susie’s death on those she left behind.

There probably isn’t a lot more that I can say about this book that hasn’t been said hundreds of times before, but, personally, I enjoyed the book. I will admit that, on occasion, I found Susie a little annoying, and the ending, for me, wasn’t exactly brilliant, but the writing was lovely, the characterisation was brilliant, and the book was certainly emotionally charged. I’m glad, nevertheless, that I left it a few years before I read the book, as I think I would have found the book slightly disappointing if I had read it while all of the hype was still going on. While The Lovely Bones probably won’t make it onto my ‘best reads of the year’ list, and I can’t really see myself rereading it, it was an easy summer read, despite the subject matter, which was great when I was going through a patch of literary laziness and didn’t feel like reading anything that would tax my brain.

Her Fearful Symmetry, compared with The Lovely Bones, is a much more complex book, and, I have to say, I enjoyed it more because of that. I have to confess, I haven’t read The Time Traveller’s Wife, although I have a copy knocking about somewhere, but I loved Niffenegger’s “novel in pictures”, The Three Incestuous Sisters (which isn’t about incest, just so you know), and I thought that Her Fearful Symmetry sounded like it was in a similar vein, which it is.

The novel is actually composed of interweaving narrative threads, but the central story concerns Julia and Valentina, a pair of American “mirror-twins”, who inherit a flat overlooking Highgate Cemetery from an aunt, Elspeth, whom they never knew they had, and from that point on their lives interweave with those of Robert, Elspeth’s lover, and Martin, the crossword setter who lives in the flat upstairs, confined by his severe OCD, and whose wife has left him, unable to bear living with his illness anymore. The twins see their move to London as a chance to gain their independence, and start living separate lives, but they face several problems, not least of which is that Elspeth hasn’t quite moved on, and is, in fact, spending her afterlife in the flat with the girls. Things get ever more complicated, until the novel comes to a surprising, beautiful and poignant end.

There are quite a few twists in this one, and while everyone would probably pick up on a few, I think it is fair to say that there will always be a few surprises; it is a testament to Niffenegger’s skill in handling her characters that none of these plot twists, when they come, seem out of place, no matter how surprising. Her Fearful Symmetry, then, is a deftly plotted, intricately woven piece of fiction, which is not only a highly interesting read, but is also beautifully written, perfectly paced, and incredibly moving. I loved it as soon as I finished the book, but over the next few days snippets of the book kept coming back to me, and I love it even more now, if that’s possible, than I did when I first finished the book. I can’t say for definite that I will read any more of Alice Sebold’s work, and I don’t know if I will read The Time Traveller’s Wife any time soon, but I am really looking forward to Niffenegger’s third book, which looks incredibly interesting too, and I would be happy to recommend both books to anyone who thinks they sound even remotely interesting.

Usually, I steer clear of books with any kind of “celebrity” associations, but I just couldn’t resist Shappi Khorsandi’s first literary offering. Not only did it seem like the kind of light read I was look for, considering that I think Khorsandi is a fantastic stand-up comedian, but A Beginner’s Guide to Acting English also sounded like a fascinating book in its own right. And, overall, it is. The book tells the story of the Khorsandi family’s move to London, and their eventual exile from Iran, the problems Shappi and her brother face growing up in a foreign country, whilst also interweaving snippets of stories about the childhood’s of other members of the Khorsandi family, still at home in Iran.

Khorsandi’s father was a renowned poet and satirist, and the book begins in Iran, where Shappi’s parents are preparing to leave for London, in the hopes that a stint in a foreign country will help Hadi Khorsandi’s career. Once the family arrive in London, however, Shappi recounts the trouble she had in settling into her new life, unable to speak English and yet forced to go to an English nursery, then on to school, while the revolution begins in Iran. Once the revolution in Iran is over, however, Hadi Khorsandi is exiled from his own country, and the Khorsandi family is forced to face up to the fact that they might never be able to return home.

Having read Persepolis recently, Marjane Satrapi’s memoir about growing up in revolutionary Iran, and a similar, though solitary, exile from her country, I was somewhat familiar with the politics behind Khorsandi’s memoir, but the book is more about family life than politics, and that is the real strength of the book; at heart, A Beginner’s Guide to English is simply the portrait of a close, creative, quite eccentric family, and their attempts to adjust to a new country, and a new way of life. Of course, things inevitably get more complicated than that, but I have no intention of spoiling the book for anyone.

What I actually found very satisfying when reading the book, though, was the fact that Shappi doesn’t try and write a “funny” book. Certainly, there is a lot of humour in the book, but this comes mainly from the actions of the family, such as when Shappi and her brother ‘play firemen’, and accidentally set fire to a brand-new sofa, but there are a lot of sad moments in the book, as well, and it is the balance between the two that is so satisfying. I won’t say that Shappi Khorsandi is breaking new literary ground with A Beginner’s Guide to Acting English, but the book is a moving, funny, and, above all, very satisfying read, the perfect choice for a couple of sunny days in the garden.

At the moment, I’m trying to plug some gaps in my reading. There are so many books that I’ve really wanted to read, but not got round to, or genres I’ve barely begun to explore. More particularly, I’m increasingly aware that I used to read loads of ‘classics’ when I was young, since I hit my late teens, I’ve barely touched an old-school ‘classic’. I think the last one I read was Tess of the d’Urbevilles and, let’s face it, it’s great but hardly a barrel of laughs. I think I just overdid it and went into a spell of not reading any.

So I picked up my forlorn and neglected copy of The Odyssey. What better way to get back into some classics reading than with a super-exciting adventure story, right?

Right! It was a lot of fun to read. It did, though, surprise me and that’s what prompted this post. The thing which surprised me is also something I loved about this book: everybody cries, all the time. Quite rightly! They all keep losing friends and relatives, being in awful situations, and on it goes. There’s something quite pleasant about it being explicitly okay for ‘heroic’ men to sit around weeping; it’s not something that often gets represented, I suppose. So it was a bit of a cultural shocker, but incredibly refreshing.

Not that I think representations of masculinity in The Odyssey were nothing but good, but this was a really positive aspect of the story, and I think I connected a lot more sympathetically with the characters as a result.

Have you been reading any books that surprised you lately?

You know what I think it’s time for? Another Wednesday Waffle! As the more astute of you may have noticed, I subtly dropped the ‘Weekly’ part of the initial ‘Weekly Wednesday Waffle’ as I felt it was too limiting. I’ve subsequently posted Wednesday Waffles on really whatever day I felt like it. Happily for me, I feel like it today: and you could have knocked me down with a feather when I noticed that today is, in fact, Wednesday.

(Note that I refuse to drop the ‘Wednesday’ part: just calling a post ‘Waffle’ makes it sound like something that should be topped with cinnamon, and makes me hungry.)

The magic number today is… 619!

It’s time to rock it up with Freedom, Law and Justice by Lord Justice Sedley. This is part of the Hamlyn Lecture Series: a series of annual lectures given by important people from the legal world.

I’ve actually had these on my shelves for a while. I got them (for free!) when I finished my Law degree and waited until I had a bit of distance to start reading them. And I actually did, recently! I was going to wait until I’d finished them all before talking about it. I won’t review the series (well, I’ll never do that, as there’s more than 50 of them, and I only have 5) right now, but let’s just say that so far I’ve read one: From the Test Tube to the Coffin. It was about the law surrounding family life – birth, marriage, death – written by Brenda Hale, and quite frankly, I was slightly disappointed by the analysis. I felt as though it relied too heavily on the concept of ‘choice’ in forming an argument, and just didn’t go far enough: for instance, in one place, it was commented that marriage as an institution continued to be useful without going into any further depth.

Personally, I’d have liked to see something a bit more challenging. If we’re going to go there, why not really interrogate the social structure of marriage, what it’s ‘uses’ are and how it could potentially be developed and changed (or done away with altogether) in search of more egalitarian social institutions.

And there, I tentatively think, may be the issue. It’s a series of lectures by people who’ve made their name in legal circles, who are accepted by the big bad – generally fairly conservative – legal world. How challenging is it really going to be, and to what degree is it going to attempt to legitimate rather than rigorously analyse the status quo? I can’t answer that for you yet, but I certainly have my doubts.

Nonetheless, what I have read has been interesting, and sometimes it’s fun to stretch those brain muscles by arguing with a book in my head. We can’t only read things we agree with, after all! Thinking more specifically about what I’ll find in this particular book, by Lord Justice Sedley, I feel inclined to think that it will actually be extremely interesting. Sedley is notorious for having argued that all UK citizens, and all visitors to the UK should be included on a DNA database. Where that seemed to come from, though, is from his belief that the current system was biased against, for instance, ethnic minorities: a situation he called “indefensible”. He’s done a lot of work and speaking about civil liberties, an area close to my own heart, and whether I agree with it or not, I think that Lord Sedley is an interesting character and comes at things from unexpected angles. So this is definitely one that I look forward to digging into soon (although I am going to be strict with myself and read in chronological order).

How about you; do you tend to gravitate towards books which fit in with your own views, or do you sometimes or always take on something which at least attempts to challenge those views?

Okay, I know I already kind of posted about Aztecs and pirates, but that was in the mini-golf sense. Now I thought it might be time for a brief review of my very exciting reading of late.

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
There’s been a lot of chat about this from all over the blogsophere and beyond, so I don’t really want to go too in-depth with a big old plot analysis. I do want to say, though, that I really enjoyed this. It helps, I think, that I’m really interested in the period that was covered, and the characters. It speaks volumes for the author’s skill at drawing you in that despite knowing some of the things that were going to happen (Trotsky’s going to die), I’d still get quite emotionally involved (“Oh no, Trotsky!”).

My one gripe about this, and it’s a general fault with the ‘diary’ format in fiction I think, is that it did go beyond the bounds of believability a fair few times. I don’t demand realism in my fiction. And don’t get me wrong, I can usually suspend disbelief with the best of them, but it does jerk me out of a book from time to time when the structure within which the story is told is at odds with the way the story is written. Which is a really long and fluffy way of saying that I just can’t stand pages and pages and pages of dialogue in what is supposed to be a diary. It’s a fairly minor gripe, though, and it’s hardly like Barbara Kingsolver is the only one guilty of this, so it didn’t overly hamper my enjoyment.

Essentially, I think it’s a great book, and I felt quite attuned to it because of my personal interest. Having said that, I don’t necessarily think that it’s the best quality novel out of the Orange shortlist. I’ve only read two – this and Wolf Hall – so I suppose what I’m really saying is that I think Wolf Hall is some high-quality fiction. The Lacuna is a great read, though: it might be big, but I whipped on through it, because I got so invested. Which is always a nice reading experience!

Bold in Her Breeches: Women Pirates Across the Ages by Jo Stanley
I’ll stand right up and say that I love a bit of gender history. And maritime history and pirates is an area quite in need of a more objective, reasoned analysis. Women in this context have either been written out completely, or painfully sensationalised. So I found this a fascinating book: it covers women involved in piracy from Artemisia in ancient Greece, to the modern day (well, ish, it was published in 1995, but that’s not the book’s fault). What I found particularly interesting was the attention given not just to women as pirates, but to the role of women in supporting piracy in a wider context: for instance women on land providing information and sexual services. It’s a great introduction to this area, and I’d love to do more reading around this.

Another aspect of the history which is incredibly interesting from a more political angle is the relationship between piracy and the state, and between piracy itself and privateering or working in the navy. There was a point in time when states were more inclined to tolerate such activities, and could indeed profit from it. That’s obviously a long, long way from the state of play (couldn’t resist the pun) today, when piracy can be a hindrance to international trade and ‘legitimate’ profits. Again, this book discusses these issues and has sparked my interest in further reading – I’ve already sourced a couple of books about piracy and international politics and history!

Finally, what I really appreciated was a realistic approach to women pirates. They are neither glamourised nor demonised: that kind of approach is something I think is inherently limiting. Without taking into account social factors and constraints, there’s a real shallowness to how women pirates (and pirates generally, too) have been treated. That includes the crossdressing involved when women have taken to the seas within a patriarchal culture. Crossdressing can be a practical consideration, rather than a particular desire to seem sexy or depraved to audiences of the 21st century. As for the pirates themselves, I’ve got to say that I have to agree with the author when she says:

I have the impression that I would not like most of these women pirates; they might steal my best bath oil and laugh at my poems. I also believe that women should be free to travel without fear of molestation [...]. As I think human beings should not have to risk death in the course of their work, how could I hold a brief for people – whatever their sex – who attack employees?

This study of women pirates, though, is really interesting, and a great introduction to women involved in piracy. As much as anything else, it’s given me a lot of enthusiasm for taking it further and looking at some other books focusing on particular issues, such as crossdressing or international trade. Again, that’s made this a really satisfying reading experience for me. I like getting excited about my reading, and I really did here.

It’s been an exciting reading period. I’m now going to settle down with a nice quiet-living book: The Odyssey. (Ahem.)

The Lacuna counts towards both the Chunkster Challenge and the Global Reading challenge as my book from the Americas. Bold in Her Breeches counts towards the Women Unbound Challenge.

Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch.
I have been umming and ahhing over whether to post a review of Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman now, or to leave it until much closer to the publication date, as Peirene Press aren’t officially releasing this short novel until later in the year. Having bought the book directly from the publisher, however, I couldn’t wait to read it, and, well, I couldn’t wait any longer to review it, either. You may have guessed by now that I am a bit over-excited about this book, and I am fully prepared to admit to that I loved this short, original, beautiful novel.

Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman is set in Rome, in the middle of the second world war, as a young, heavily pregnant German woman makes her way from the hostel in which she is staying to a Bach concert in a church. While she is walking, she thinks about her life, her husband away fighting in Africa, her parents, her childhood, and her short time in Italy. However, the novel isn’t really “about” the second World War, so much as it is about the ability of human beings to close their eyes to the horrors going on around them, simply because they are too difficult to deal with. The young woman of the title does not support Nazism because she believes in it, but because she cannot face the reality of what is happening in the world. In fact, she barely seems to know what the war is actually about.

Nevertheless, despite the young woman’s naivety, there are those around her that are more aware, and much more critical, of the Fascist forces in both Italy and Germany, but even remembering the questions that her roommate, Ilse, raised in her mind about why she had to hate the English and Americans

made her feel guilty, confused and horrified, because after all they were fighting against her husband, against the Germans and Italians in Africa, and causing so much suffering to innocent people with their bombs that fell on towns and cities

and so she doesn’t question what is really going on. It is not cruelty or wickedness that makes her support the war effort, then, but the effects of propoganda, her own innocence and ignorance, and the vain hope that, if Germany win the war quickly, her husband will be home sooner.

Even though this does seem a selfish reason to support a fascist army, I found myself feeling incredibly sorry for this woman, in a foreign city where she doesn’t speak the language, doesn’t really have any friends, and is left to worry constantly over a husband that, in the end, she seems to barely know, and the reason I felt so sorry for her, even empathised with her, was because the characterisation is just superb. The entire book is focalized through the young woman in question, in a kind of stream-of-consciousness narrative. In fact, Delius’s narrative strategy as a whole is very inventive as not only does the book take place in something close to real time, depending on your reading speed, but the whole book is composed of one single, 117 page sentence. The fact that the narrative never seems confused, but remains incredibly easy to read, is a testament to the author’s powerful skill as a writer.

In the end, though, the story is more than an interesting look at the ability of human beings to ignore what they don’t want to face up to. It is a gorgeously conceived, wonderfully executed, and deeply moving short novel, that brought me close to tears at least once (which is not something I would ever normally admit to). I am only hoping that some other publisher will pick up where Peirene Press have left off and have some more of Friedrich Christian Delius’s work translated into English soon. While I’m waiting for that to happen, Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman is scheduled for release on the first of September, for anyone who is interested, and I really cannot recommend it enough.

Translated from the French by Polly Mclean. I don’t think anyone could accuse me of having boring reading tastes; one of my favourite novels of all time features a statue of a weeping crash-test-dummy Jesus, and only last month I read a book with a depressive penguin as a major character. I’ve breezed through any number of books that other people have found just too odd to deal with. I’d begun to think that there wasn’t a book that had been written that was too odd for me to like. Alas, Lobster, by Guillame Lecasble has come forward to prove me wrong. Very wrong. Although, I must say, the fact that the book is incredibly weird is not the only thing I disliked about it.

Lobster is a short novella that begins just days before the sinking of the Titanic, and features as a main protagonist, unsurprisingly, a Lobster. The other central protagonist is Angelica, who is a rich passenger, eats Lobster’s parents, and plans to commit suicide because she can’t have an orgasm. I’m sure that’s really horrible for her, and everything, but, my gods, the woman is annoying. After they crash into the iceberg, Lobster is thrown from a pot of boiling water, now red, smelling like bay leaves, and sexually attracted to Angelica, of all people. Angelica, meanwhile, has had her dinner-companion die on her, almost literally, as his hand is firmly clasped around her ankle; something Lobster deftly deals with by a snip of his pincers. May I say; eurgh.

What follows in the scene immediately after this is basically sexual assault as a form of resuscitation, something which I am pretty sure is not going to catch on with the emergency services. In all seriousness, though, this was just one of many scenes that made me completely uncomfortable, not least because the fact that Angelica has her first orgasm whilst unconscious, and then promptly develops feelings for Lobster as well. What follows is just a catalogue of ridiculousness, from lobster orgies to crustacean suicides, and a late entry for a bit of magical realism, which adds a whole new level of stupidness to the narrative.

If that was all that I didn’t like about the book then, fair enough, but it also has quite a few needlessly grisly scenes in it that made me feel distinctly nauseous. I also thought that the characterisation was poor, and I didn’t really care what happened to any of the characters. I felt like there was something about the narrative that was distinctly Freudian, too, as if Lecasble had read a Freud textbook and just patchworked various bits of theory into a plot, where he thought it might fit. I will admit, however, that I don’t know a lot about Freud, only what I have studied as part of my literature degree, so I may be completely wrong about this, but, well, even I could pick up on the female-castration thing, and there were definite elements of the Electra complex in there somewhere. Not being a fan of Freud, this obviously didn’t endear the book to me much either.

I don’t want to sound like I am being needlessly horrible, and I will admit that the initial concept, what drew me to the book in the first place, was certainly imaginative, but I just didn’t feel like Lecasble really pulled it off. If anyone else has read Lobster, and completely disagrees with me, then I will just say now, I am completely prepared to admit that this is just my opinion. However, this is probably the book I have enjoyed the least out of all of the books I have read this year, but my attitude is, you have to read a complete duffer once in a while to appreciate the good stuff, and I am sticking to it.

Sometimes life reflects reading to an extent which is slightly bemusing. It’s fairly frequent that I find myself able to draw links between what I’m reading and something that’s happened to me during my day to day business of being (it’s only natural, and I probably wouldn’t have noticed anything exciting if I hadn’t been reading whatever it is that I was reading – y’know?), but just sometimes it’s particularly awesome.

At the weekend, I was in the enviable position of having just finished The Lacuna – which I loved – which features Aztecs, and having just started a new book, about women pirates, called Bold in Her Breeches. Yarr!

It was at this point that I was spirited away to partake of some crazy golf. Ah, how I do love crazy golf! Only, blow me down with a feather, the crazy golf course was split in two: half was Aztec-themed, and the other half was pirate-themed! It couldn’t have been more perfect.

Have any of you chanced upon any fun links between life and books recently?

Translated from the Japanes by Stephen Snyder. The Diving Pool by Yoko Ogawa is made up of three subtle, yet intensely creepy, short novellas; the title novella, ‘The Diving Pool’, about a disturbed teenage girl’s obsession with her foster brother, ‘Pregnancy Diary’, where a woman keeps a diary of her sister’s pregnancy, yet slowly reveals a more sinister side to herself, and ‘The Dormitory’, where a young woman, left alone while her husband is working abroad, starts to visit her old university dormitory after she gets her cousin a room there, before beginning to suspect that something odd is going on.

I enjoyed all three of the novellas to some extent, purely because Ogawa is such a wonderfully evocative writer, and writes such compelling psychological portraits of her narrators, so that it is impossible to entirely dislike Ogawa’s narrators, even while two of them act in truly reprehensible ways. Nevertheless, ‘The Dormitory’ was my favourite out of the three stories as I found it easier to identify with the narrator, whose growing unease and paranoia create a sense of building tension within the novella. Added to this, I actually think it has the most sinister atmosphere, with the backdrop of the nearly empty dormitory, and the sick, disabled dormitory caretaker, giving the story an air of modern gothic fiction.

The only gripe I had while I was reading the book was that I thought the stories all seemed to end on a note of anticlimax, yet I actually think that this is one of Yoko Ogawa’s cleverest moves, as the endings stayed with me for far longer than they would have if the stories had ended in the way I perhaps expected them to. With ‘The Dormitory’ in particular, what I initially thought of as a dull ending to the story stuck with me to the point that I was still thinking about it at odd moments days later, and the image on which the novella ends is so powerful that I actually now think that the everyday ending Ogawa came up with was more sinister, and much more chilling, than anything that I could come up with in my head.

The most chilling thing of all about Ogawa’s stories, though, especially ‘The Diving Pool’ and ‘Pregnancy Diary’, is the fact that the characters seem so real, and, outwardly, normal; in ‘The Diving Pool’, the narrator takes a horrible pleasure out of tormenting her young foster-sister, and the reader is privy to her thoughts as her eyes

wandered to the large urn abandoned at the edge of the woods in back. Once a decoration in a hall at the Light House, it was a Bizen pot, nearly as tall as a man’s chest. I carried Rie to it, rubbing her back to quiet her ragged breathing. Then I removed its lid of rotting boards and slowly lowered her inside.
I wanted to hear her cry louder. I wanted to hear every kind of howl or sob she could produce. Her legs contracted in terror, as if she were going into convulsions, and she clung to my arms.

What is actually most horrifying about this sadism in the young narrator is that it seems to come from nowhere; there is no explanation for why the girl is disturbed. While this added to the horror of the story, though, it is also one of the things that put me off a little, too. I just couldn’t understand the character, or why she does what she does, and the same can be said for ‘Pregnancy Diary’, too. In fact, the narrator of ‘Pregnancy Diary’ almost seems like the same narrator from ‘The Diving Pool’, only ten years older.

It was this inability to really grasp any understanding of two of the narrator’s that, in the end, meant that I didn’t like The Diving Pool as much as I thought I would. Having said this, I have a great deal of admiration for Yoko Ogawa’s writing, and she does write beautifully nuanced and understated prose, and I would read more of her work in a heartbeat. I think I would just pick the book more carefully

I have to confess, despite having both A Passage to India and A Room with a View in my book collection, I hadn’t read any Forster before, and so I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect when I received a copy of the Hesperus edition of The Obelisk, a collection of Forster’s short stories that were never published. in his lifetime, from LibraryThing EarlyReviewers. Suffice it to say, what I wasn’t expecting were the quirky, subtle, and often funny stories that I got, many of them with a distinctly subversive flavour, from the beneficial effects of marital infidelity on a relationship, to an upper class man being made to face up to his own prejudices by the selfless actions of his working class male lover.

In fact, all of the stories deal with sexuality, and often homosexuality, in a very frank manner, which probably explains why Forster never had them published, and makes many of the stories seem very contemporary, especially considering Forster died in 1970. A couple of the stories seem a lot less modern, due to some of the language used to describe people of colour, and the antagonistic attitude many of the white characters have towards them, although, to be fair, this doesn’t appear to reflect the attitude of E M Forster himself, as the characters that express these attitudes are generally portrayed as uniformly unlikeable.

Nevertheless, this attitude towards people of colour, and the fact that, if a character from another culture was represented at all by the narrative voice it was in a slightly patronising manner, was one of the few things that made me uncomfortable about the book, although this occurred in only two out of the eight stories. These attitudes are very much of the time that Forster was writing, I think, but I was very aware, as I was reading, that I was accepting attitudes within The Obelisk that would entirely put me off a modern author.

Still, I have to say, apart from the two stories that dealt with “colonial” themes, ‘The Life to Come’ and ‘The Other Boat’, I really enjoyed the rest of the stories, and my two favourite stories were ‘The Torque’ and ‘The Classical Annex’, the two stories in the book that could fit comfortably within the magical realist genre, with statues coming to life at night in a museum, in ‘The Classical Annex’, and the hint of divine retribution, in a subversive manner, in ‘The Torque’, a story set in medieval Spain, as far as I could make out, although the historical and physical setting are never clearly established.

What really won me over about The Obelisk, though, was the ironic humour that Forster demonstrates. The days after a young girl, destined to be a saint, her brother comes to believe that he is responsible, due to his “impure thoughts”, but

There was so much work to do that he had not the time to repent. He duly recognised in his spare moments that his impiety and lechery were to blame and might damn him eternally, and he duly mourned his distinguished sister and collected what could be found of her into an urn. But what a relief not to have her about!

It’s this kind of irony that makes Forster’s stories so interesting, and so easy to read. Some of the stories, however, take the level of comedy to almost absurd levels, in particular the story ‘What Does It Matter? A Morality’, which reads like a kind of literary Carry On film, about a political scandal.

Overall, though, I really enjoyed the whole collection of stories in The Obelisk, although, as I said, there were some stories that made me a little uncomfortable, and I will definitely be adding some more Forster to my TBR pile in the very near future, as I would like to see how far the short stories in this collection reflect his writing style in general, and whether the subversive, ironic tone that I saw in his previously unpublished work is something that Forster has carried through into the work that Forster did choose to publish while he was alive.