Hear about the great books, new and old, that our staff have been enjoying.
Angela has been reading
Forbidden Notebook
Alba de Céspedes, translated by Ann Goldstein
I immediately loved the concept of this story when I heard about it. A woman buys a notebook on impulse and she starts writing a diary, keeping it hidden from her self-absorbed family. She chronicles the lives of her young adult children, and the fear her husband is having an affair, becoming more and more absorbed by her diary and her own secrets.
This novel, set in 1950s Italy and beloved by Elena Ferrante, is a compelling story of a middle-aged woman’s awakening. I could not help but identify with her life and her secrets, becoming more complicit with every page. Forbidden Notebook is a feminist classic that has only recently been translated into English by Ferrante’s translator, Ann Goldstei, with an introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri.
Justin has been reading
Rejection
Tony Tulathimutte
Rejection peels back the skin of modern alienation to poke at the raw, pulsing things underneath – shame, delusion, obsessions, ego. The stories are formally unhinged, structurally sly, and emotionally perverse. Narrators spiral, reality buckles and by the end you’re not sure if you’re reading a book or being read by it …
If you’ve ever humiliated yourself in the name of love, attention, or some kind of vague literary aspiration – this might be for you.
Joanna has been reading
My Phantoms
Gwendoline Riley
I’m revisiting a book I first read when it was released in 2021. Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms was the talk of the shopfloor back then, so I’m looking forward to being able to talk about it at length again, this time with the members of the Hidden Treasures Fiction Book Club at Readings Carlton, and to see if our conversations follow a similar or entirely different trail.
After seven books, Riley has developed what might be called a recognisable style, comprising razor-sharp prose with a wholly unsentimental view of human relationships. In My Phantoms that brutal scalpel is aimed mostly at relationships between parents and their children. The first-person narrator, Bridget, is a woman in middle-age dealing with a mother she describes as self-absorbed and perpetually disappointed. Helen, known to her friends as Hen, is also ageing, which brings with it other challenges.
Is Hen a dreadful mother? Is Bridget a long-suffering harassed daughter? Bridget has a rule when it comes to Hen – she doesn’t talk to her about anything that really matters, a clue that communication is disjointed between them in more ways than one. We only really know Hen through how Bridget thinks about and behaves towards her. Bridget is merciless, but she may not be an entirely reliable narrator. Part of what makes My Phantoms both unsettling and brilliant is how it doesn’t offer any real answers to these questions, despite Riley being such a gifted writer that she imbues every interaction with psychological meaning that speaks of a whole history.
