The poem may not have loved her back, but in its own way it was steadfast. Even when the woman’s life seemed to be spinning from her control, there was one thing she knew she could depend on, one thing that always remained stable. The poem never left her, despite being reduced to a tattered photocopy, handbag-crumpled, grocery-squashed and splattered with dishwater and breastmilk. It stayed by her side when the woman drove herself, wailing, to the maternity hospital. It held her hand through weeks in neonatal ICU. It whispered under her pillow as she dreamt.
“There’s a heron in the book, too,” Patrik Svensson calls over after we notice the bird perched in the willow tree under whose arches the writer is being photographed.
In The Gospel of the Eels, the 48-year-old journalist’s extraordinary, prizewinning book on “the world’s most enigmatic fish”, such coincidences happen a lot.
Born in an Indian village with cerebral palsy, Kuli Kohli was lucky to survive. Neighbours told her parents they should throw her in the river, instead they brought her to the UK. As she grew up here, writing became her means of escape - and transformed her life in ways she never expected.
What does it say about capitalism, John asks, that we have money and want to spend it but can’t find anything worth buying? We’re on our way home from a furniture store, again. We almost bought something called a credenza, but then John opened the drawers and discovered that it wasn’t made to last.
I think there are limits, I say, to what mass production can produce.
We just bought a house but we don’t have furniture yet. We’ve been eating on our back stoop for three months. Last week a Mexican woman with four children rang our doorbell and asked if our front room was for rent. I’m sorry, I said awkwardly, we live here. She was confused. But, she said, it’s empty.
As the culinary experiments suggest, experimental archaeologists are on a quest to fill in the blanks of the archaeological record, to bring the lessons of the past into the present, and to experience what it felt like, smelled like, and tasted like to live in the distant past.
This is not your typical novel. There’s little in the way of plot; there aren’t even chapters. But that’s the point: It’s a mishmash. As Nayeri writes, “A patchwork story is the shame of a refugee.” Stick with Khosrou, though, and you’ll be rewarded.
The reward is empathy. Early on, Khosrou tells the reader, “The quick version of this story is useless. Let’s agree to have a complicated conversation.” “Everything Sad” invites us not just to see another perspective but to live in it. It’s openhearted storytelling when we need it most, an antidote to our divided times.
Contemporary English fiction is, with a few exceptions, a bourgeois affair: middle-class authors writing for middle-class readers about high-class problems. So Who They Was, the Booker-longlisted autofictional debut by Gabriel Krauze, arrives on the literary scene like the sound of gunfire over a south Kilburn housing estate.
Start with the square heavy loaf
steamed a whole day in a hot spring