Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin Modern Classics; 112 pages; 2017. Translated from the Italian by Jamie McKendrick.
Behind the Door is the fourth book (out of six – see ** below) in Giorgio Bassani’s Romanzo di Ferrara (The Novel of Ferrara) cycle, which I appear to be reading completely out of order. Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to matter.
Like both The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (my review) and The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles (my review), this works perfectly well as a standalone novel, though I love how Bassani keeps returning to the same city, revisiting its people and history from different angles and writing about it with such love and affection.
Bassani was born into a prosperous Jewish family in Ferrara in 1916, and all six novels are set there.
This one takes place between October 1929 and June 1930 and follows an unnamed Jewish schoolboy through his first year at upper secondary school, a period he later recalls as one of the darkest of his life. Looking back as an adult, he remarks that although he had “been unhappy many times” (page 1), few periods had been “blacker” than those months.
American chef Anthony Bourdain (1956-2018) became a household name when his non-fiction book Kitchen Confidential was first published in 2000.
Many of you reading this review will already be familiar with it, along with the TV shows that followed — A Cook’s Tour, Parts Unknown and others — which helped propel Bourdain to a worldwide cult following.
I was not one of those followers.
There’s no reason for this oversight. In fact, I can’t quite explain why I knew so little about him or had any interest in his career. I love food, I love cooking, I love travel, the very things Bourdain specialised in. It would seem I’d be a good fit.
Despite not knowing much about his life, I was acutely aware of his death. It was 2018 and I was working in a hospitality start-up. A young colleague who idealised Bourdain (and loads of other celebrity chefs) turned up to work in tears, devastated by news of his suicide.
But even that did not make me want to explore his work.
Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams is a perfect little nugget of a book.
In just 120 pages, it tells the story of a man living on the American frontier from the late nineteenth century through to the 1960s.
First published in 2011, it is essentially a Bildungsroman compressed into novella form, where years can pass in the space of a few pages.
The story follows Robert Grainier from childhood into old age. His origins are mysterious, even to himself. He does not know who his parents were or what became of them. He may have been French Canadian; he may have come from Utah.
His eldest cousin, a girl, said he’d come from northeast Canada and had spoken only French when they’d first seen him, and they’d had to whip the French out of him to get room for the English tongue. The other two cousins, both boys, said he was a Mormon from Utah (page 26).
All Grainier knows is that he arrived in Idaho on a train when he was six or seven years old and was raised by his Uncle Robert Grainier, the First, alongside his three cousins. His rootlessness marks him as a loner from the outset.
I had ambitious plans to read all the books on the Miles Franklin longlist, but with the shortlist announcement only a week or so away, that’s all it’s going to be — a plan.
Anyway, first cab off the rank is this novella about dementia with the apt title You Must Remember This.
Sean Wilson says the story was inspired by his grandmother, who showed similar symptoms to his protagonist, Grace.
In the book, Grace is an elderly widow, who lives alone and is having trouble with her memory. She often thinks that events that happened years ago happened only yesterday. She often forgets that her husband, Howard, is dead, and sometimes forgets her daughter, Liz, who is constantly checking in with her.
The things she remembers seem to find her more than she finds them. They come to her in pieces, out of order, like pages cut from a book and scattered in the wind (page 21).
And then there’s her wandering, out into the road, at night, in her bathrobe… and her subsequent placement in a care facility.
“Oh, take their picture,” said the woman to her bemused husband, “I think they’re artists.” “Oh, go on,” he shrugged. “They’re just kids.” (page 47)
American singer-songwriter and poet Patti Smith won the National Book Award in 2010 for her memoir, Just Kids.
The book charts her life through the lens of her intimate relationship with the artist and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989), with whom she lived in the late 1960s and early 70s.
Most people will know Smith from her influential 1975 album Horses (Spotify link) or from the hit single Because the Night (YouTube clip), which she penned with Bruce Springsteen in 1978.
In 1967, a chance meeting between two young people led to a romance and a lifelong friendship that would carry each to international success never dreamed of. The backdrop is Brooklyn, Chelsea Hotel, Max’s Kansas City, Scribner’s Bookstore, Coney Island, Warhol’s Factory and the whole city resplendent. Among their friends, literary lights, musicians and artists such as Harry Smith, Bobby Neuwirth, Allen Ginsberg, Sandy Daley, Sam Shepherd, William Burroughs, etc. It was a heightened time politically and culturally; the art and music worlds exploding and colliding. In the midst of all this two kids made a pact to always care for one another. Scrappy, romantic, committed to making art, they prodded and provided each other with faith and confidence during the hungry years–the days of cous-cous and lettuce soup.
Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. Beautifully written, this is a profound portrait of two young artists, often hungry, sated only by art and experience. And an unforgettable portrait of New York, her rich and poor, hustlers and hellions, those who made it and those whose memory lingers near.
In the Afterword to Iris Murdoch’s fourth novel, The Bell, her peer A.S. Byatt describes it as a story about “religion and sex, and the relations of those two” (page 332), which is probably the simplest way to sum it up.
While in the Forward, Sarah Perry offers a more complex description. She claims it’s a Gothic novel because it features elements of the Gothic, including isolation, repression, forbidden desire, secrets, psychological disturbance and an atmosphere of spiritual unease. That’s also an apt description, although I didn’t read it through that lens.
First published in 1958, The Bell is one of those rare literary novels that gives almost equal weight to plot and character. And the more Murdoch I read (as part of A Year with Iris Murdoch), the more I’m noticing how deeply interested she is in big ideas about human relationships — sex, marriage, friendship — as well as faith, morality, repression and religion.
Today marks the first day of winter in the Southern Hemisphere, which means it’s 20 Books of Winter time! (If you live in the Northern Hemisphere — which I did for two decades — it’s known as 20 Books of Summer.)
I’ve participated in this reading “challenge” every year since 2017. I use the word “challenge” loosely as there are really no rules — you just need to read books that are in your TBR (to be read) pile between 1 June and 31 August.
It was initially run by Cathy at 746 Books, but Annabel at AnnaBookBel has taken it over (find out more here).
I’ve dusted off my physical TBR and chosen 20 books I’d like to read between now and the end of August. I’m a mood reader, so I can’t promise I’m going to read all of these, as I’ll likely swap books out from the 700+ other tomes lying about the house or from the 500+ digital ones lurking unseen on my Kindle.
Whatever the case, I like being able to read books that I already own — if only to create more space for future purchases!
Fiction – paperback; Giramondo; 160 pages; 2026. Translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken.
They, by famed Danish writer Helle Helle, is the first in a planned trilogy.
It’s the portrait of a mother and daughter — the “they” of the title — living in a small community on a Danish island in the 1980s whose lives are shaped by illness and solitude.
It’s a simple story and told in a simple way, but there’s something about its emotional restraint and its focus on the minutiae of everyday life that lends it an understated power.
Written in stripped-back prose and with little plot, They is a beautiful mood piece, melancholy and wistful, bringing to mind the best of Per Petterson’s quietly affecting work. I read it with a giant ache in my heart.
Congratulations to Gráinne O’Hare, whose novel Thirst Trap, was named winner at the opening night of the 55th anniversary of Listowel Writers’ Week.
It’s a wonderful novel deserving of the prize.
In my review, I described it as “fabulously immersive”, a book that is “full of wit and warmth, the kind of story that deftly balances humour with pathos”.
Kerry Group’s Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, Catherine Keogh, said: “It is especially encouraging to see such a distinctive new voice emerge, continuing the remarkable tradition of Irish authors celebrated through Listowel Writers’ Week. All this year’s nominees were outstanding, and as Kerry marks 30 years of sponsoring this award, we are proud to support original Irish voices and the enduring impact of Irish storytelling.”
Fiction – paperback; Faber and Faber; 272 pages; 2020.
A Thousand Moons is the follow-up to Sebastian Barry’s previous novel, Days Without End, which won the 2016 Costa Book of the Year, was longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize and was named by the Irish Times as one of the 100 best Irish books of the 21st Century.
I’m a longtime Barry fan (he’s listed on my favourite authors page) and I have read most of his output (see here), but, unlike the rest of the world, I didn’t entirely warm to Days Without End — it was simply too bloody, too violent, too unrelenting for my tastes.
I wasn’t in a rush to read the sequel.
Indeed, I tried, and failed, to read A Thousand Moons what seems like a thousand times — well, at least three !! — but couldn’t get into the voice.
But when I picked it up again last week, in a bid to read it before the third instalment, The Newer World, is released in September, it finally clicked. (I swear, reading — for me, at least — is such a mood-driven thing; what works one day just doesn’t work on another. I don’t know why; there seems to be no rhyme nor reason to it.)
Reading Matters 
