While the book’s structure bears echoes of classic children’s novels, thematically it does something very different. The death of at least one parent is as common a trope in children’s literature as fairy godmothers. “It makes sense, because you have to give the kids agency, and it’s part of the fantasy,” Mangan says. But in Escape the Rooms, the death of Jack’s mother doesn’t free him: it traps him in emotional stasis, and the rooms, it quickly becomes clear, represent moving through the grieving process.
Coincidences are ceaseless in César Aira's The Divorce, a 2008 novel with a new English translation by Chris Andrews. The coincidences and the rambunctious absurdism are nothing new to Aira's readers, but rarely before has the author seemed so purposeful. "Let us take advantage of this frozen moment to sketch in the spatial and temporal background," our narrator says towards the end of the novel. The frozen moment is the moment the water falls on Enrique as he holds his bicycle, "from whose spinning stories are born."
Mason pulls off something extraordinary in this huge-hearted novel, alchemising an unbearable anguish into something tender and hilarious and redemptive and wise, without ever undermining its gravity or diminishing its pain.
"Diary of a Young Naturalist" is a remarkable book, the most moving memoir I have read in years. Now 17, Dara wrote it when he was 14, and his knowledge at such a young age amazed me — not just his understanding of the natural world, which is immense, but of literature (feeling the "peaty cold" of a bog pond reminds him of a Seamus Heaney poem), of Irish history and legends, of music and politics. His writing is clear and honest, laced with analogies from nature. (A goshawk chick "looks like an autumn forest rolled in the first snows of winter.")
Gravity seems to pull less,
and feet drift above asphalt.