Looking for the best books you should read just now? Look no further!
With Brian Toal
‘On Friendship’ by Andrew O’Hagan
‘The greatest friendships can never really end. They embolden one’s basic faith in togetherness: you are just another body suspended in air until someone puts out a hand to you.’
So says the blurb on the back of the book, and it’s a pretty concise summary. You’ll be familiar with O’Hagan from ‘Mayflies’, ‘The Illuminations’ and ‘Our Fathers’, and where fiction and fact are at times interchangeable, or at least the fiction is derived very much from lived experience, as with some of the best novels. In this latest offering – beautifully presented and ideal as a gift for a friend, by pure coincidence – O’Hagan presents eight essays on friendship which encompass childhood friends, workmates, animal friends, soulmates and lifelong allegiances.
Every essay made me think. Every essay had a different central figure around whom O’Hagan ruminated and philosophised. We are given an insight into the friends and relationships which inspired ‘Mayflies’. We learn more about O’Hagan’s childhood through the prism of his friends, illuminating his relationship with his father in an oblique way, but interesting if you’ve already read ‘Our Fathers’. The namedropping is a bit tiresome at times: famous Seamus Heaney, Edna O’Brien and Julian Assange, to name but a few. Nevertheless, it’s not his fault that he moves in those circles, and those grand circles have inspired a lot of interesting anecdotes and bon mots concerning friendship. Not a book to be consumed in one gulp. It’s too rich and dense for that.
‘Eurotrash’ by Christian Kracht
Merging fact and fiction, Christian Kracht (the character) takes his eighty-year-old mother on a road trip to spend the money they have accumulated from a lifetime of investing in munitions, desperate to offload this ‘dirty money’ onto deserving causes to expiate the guilt which (mostly) he and (to a lesser extent) his mother feel. Switzerland is a complicated place. We all have that stereotypical view of pristine meadows, glaciers, mountain peaks and blue skies.
The people are conservative, polite, immaculately dressed and sticklers for etiquette. However, according to Kracht, this is all just a front for a much more complex psyche and a dubious past. Where did all that Nazi money go at the end of the war? Where did all those SS officers disappear to? Kracht would know as his father was instrumental in helping Axel Springer set up his media empire following the war. Many right-wing Germans found themselves able to carry on almost seamlessly in post-war Switzerland, with plenty of money and contacts to get them started. Perhaps this is oversimplifying things, but that’s what Kracht does in order to make his point. He knows, though. He’s lived and breathed it.
‘What had it really been like being married to my father? What had it really been like living with her father? Had the SS identification card and the Golden Party Badge and the various torture chambers and the grandiose, decades-long, centuries-long silence, that corrosive, incisive, intransigent, irascible silence, been merely a dream, a seemingly never-ending pedestrian, ghastly dream?’
The son is a terrible person.
The mother is a terrible person. And yet, these two awful individuals somehow foster our compassion as they grate against each other, stumbling from crisis to reconciliation to tenderness to crisis again. ‘You think I don’t know what to expect from this journey? You said it yourself last night, in your sleep. Catharsis is what you said; there’d be an expurgation between us, you said, if only you remained on the move with me. Your mother. Takes her along to some saccharine melodrama, tragedy, comedy, whatever, starring yours truly. Promises her who knows what, seeing that she’s got to drink herself to oblivion constantly and choke down pills for her unendurable pain. And then he blames everything on Switzerland, the Nazis, and the Second World War.’
It’s one of the funniest books I’ve read in a while. Changing a colostomy bag in a gondola as it hangs in the air is at once a moment of real tenderness and bathos. Trying to give money to a vegan, hippy commune only to find out they have fascistic tendencies made me laugh out loud. Bloody vegans! Enjoy all 190 pages.
‘Strange Pictures’ by Uketsu
This is the creepy bestseller that took Japan by storm and is now all over the bestseller tables in our bookshops. Uketsu is a Youtuber who specialises in horror and mystery. It looks like I’m obsessed with all things Japanese – ‘The Bookshop Woman’, ‘Butter’ – and that’s partly true, but the quality titles coming out of Japan recently has been phenomenal. The premise is that there is a series of seemingly innocent pictures with no apparent connection. However, as the novel unfolds, connections are slowly made, and it becomes an intricate murder mystery. It’s no surprise that the creator of ‘Murdle’ raves about this book.
First, we are shown sketches made by a pregnant woman which seem sweet and innocent at first, but when placed in a different configuration reveal something much darker and more sinister. Then we are shown a child’s picture of their home with a strange smudge where their apartment is. Are they angry? Are they trying to hide something? A sketch made by a child who has just murdered her mother is a horrifying mixture of sweet and macabre, whereas the last sketch – made by a murder victim in his dying moments – helps to reveal the identity of his murderer. Each drawing holds a clue and Uketsu encourages the reader to figure out the connections, as well as the metanarrative which connects each of the four stories.
We know they connect. But how? Well, you’ll just to read the book to find out.
All of the books reviewed can be found in Waterstones Byres Road and all good bookshops.
For further books you should read just now, visit our Cover to Cover section in our Culture and Arts Articles
