littoral's reviews
507 reviews

I picked up Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth because it was included on the International Booker Longlist. I had my reservations, since it’s not the type of book I typically read - and after completing it, I think it’s unlikely I’d reread it. But there are things to celebrate in how the book is constructed and draw the reader in to recommend it for another reader.

The premise of the book is that the narrator has just moved back to the city in which she grew up, Oslo, and in which her mother still lives. The narrator has been estranged from her mother ever since she (the narrator) abruptly left home, a husband, and a career in law to pursue a man she has just met and a career in art in the United States. Although she ultimately makes a family with that second man, and gains some international notoriety for her art, her relationship with her mother never recovers, especially after she later exhibits two of her works, Mother and Child 1 and 2, in her hometown.

The writing is a near stream-of-consciousness exhibition of the unreliable narrator’s thoughts about her troubled relationship with her mother. Her deepening psychological obsession parallels increasingly compulsive behavior to physically shadow her mother, observing her apartment, her walks with her sister to their father’s grave, her time in church, even going through her trash. I struggled at first with this book that is so defined by the thoughts of one narcissistic, obsessive character (the first 25% in particular has some repetitive elements), but the author manages to propel the action forward with the gradual deepening of the physical and psychological elements in both the present state of events and the author’s reflection of the past in her thoughts. As these unfold, you reflect on the nature and responsibilities of parenthood; the nature of the ties that form between parents and children, children and parents; and how these are perpetuated across generations, until you are propelled to an explosive end. I would not call this pleasurable to read, but I can see how there can be pleasure in discussing this one.

Jennifer Croft is best known as a translator in Polish, Argentine Spanish, and Ukrainian, including of Olga Tokarczuk’s International Booker-winning Flights. In Homesick, she turns her words inwards to describe her coming-of-age in Oklahoma. Through fragmented vignettes interspersed with photographs and textual comments, the novel-memoir explores the author (“Amy”)’s relationship with her sister (“Zoe”). The narrative arc of the book has two major parts. In the first, she portrays her childhood and the tender bonds of family and sisterhood. Gradually, though, we see Amy and Zoe grow apart, as Zoe becomes ill from seizures, and Amy leaves home to attend college early. In the second part, we see Amy pursuing her dream of travel and language. But now that she has achieved independence, she is beset by the titular sense of homesickness and longing for the connection once so easily obtained.

Different versions of this book have been billed as a memoir (2019 Unnamed Press, interspersed with photographs; the one I read) or a novel (2022 Charco Press, with extratextual elements removed). I can see how readers would have differing views of the text based on which version they read. For me, the most poignant parts of the book were heightened by knowing that this was a memoir written by a translator, which lent additional credence to her reflections about language as a form of homecoming. It is a delight to see the author’s love for translation slowly develop from a childhood fascination with developing a code language with her sister, and with an intrinsic affinity for the structure that rules can bring to understanding the world - something that she initially affiliates with mathematics, but gradually with language as well. And there is a delight in unraveling the meaning of the choice of the photographs and textual comments that the author has chosen to include alongside the main body of the text (unfortunately not best done in the ebook format I read). A version without these elements - a straightforward coming-of-age narrative - would be less compelling by half.

I had been looking forward to Charlotte McConaghy’s Migrations for a long time because of the universal praise and raves I had seen for it and her next book, Once There Were Wolves (to be reviewed tomorrow). Migrations could be said to fall into the category of “climate fiction”, in that it presents a future in which Earth is undergoing mass extinctions. Migrations begins with the narrator Franny on a mission to follow the last Arctic terns in the world on what may be their final migration to Antarctica. Along the way, we see the tension between freedom and captivity, survival and extinguishment in the birds echoed in Franny’s own journey.

I have to say - this mini-review is a difficult one to write, since the overwhelming feeling I had while reading it was: am I reading the same book as everyone else? In terms of character development, Franny’s defining key characteristics of changeability and flightiness and how these are tied to her past and recent traumas are revealed by the author without significant development in the actual narrative of the book. This is a character to whom things happen; to whom people are incomprehensibly drawn and captivated without explanation. The actions she takes and spurs others to take feel unearned, and it was difficult to be invested in her journey. In terms of themes and setting, the author does little to make this world on the brink come alive, this world where the forests are dying and birdsong is about to be lost to time - aside from news headlines about extinctions that are mentioned in passing. The writing, which has such an opportunity to blossom with the premise, is too self-absorbed in Franny’s thoughts to truly engage with the beauty of this dying world.

All in all, I appreciate what this book is trying to do by linking themes of personal trauma and belonging to the natural world. But the execution is shallow and emotionally manipulative, and I can’t find myself recommending Migrations as the vehicle to explore these themes.