‘I don’t read books that literally,” says Abra, 49, from Arizona. “I don’t read literature as self-help.” But we’re talking about All Fours, the second novel by the American artist and author Miranda July, which came out this year, and the way it changed her life. The New York Times called it “the first great perimenopause novel” and “the talk of every group text”, having started “a whisper network of women fantasising about desire and freedom”. This is a novel that made women blow up their lives; every book group had a friend of a friend whose life had been shaken to its foundations.
Herein lies one of the junctures of where my conflicting feelings about Murakami arise. As a reader, I can appreciate the magical realism and surrealism present in his stories and the psychological interiority of his characters. The simplicity of his writing pairs well with the depth of the human condition he seemingly explores. But that impulse seems to end with his female characters.
The challenge to approaching a translation of Dante's original Italian this way is that it means you can't concentrate on three lines at a time – you have to take larger chunks into consideration. Many other English translations opt for free verse, or a looser rhyme scheme. "And many of them are quite fine," said Palma. "But I think without reproducing the rhymes, you're certainly losing a lot of the sound value. You're losing the music of the poem."
Thus, the order of grapes we know today fell into place: Grocery stores became the domain of the more robust green and red table grapes, European grapes came to dominate the vineyards, and Concords became the stuff of juices and jams.
Who can deny that the letter—pen, paper, envelope, stamp—is dead, incontrovertibly, relentlessly, unforgivably, unmistakably dead? Dead as a doornail. Dead as the dodo. Dead as the hundreds of generations who had no other way to convey ideas and emotions over distances of land and longing. The fountain pen, like the ink bottle it drank from, is now equivalent to an heirloom or an art object. The typewriter is as extinct as longhand. In the absence of the old-fashioned letter, speech is abbreviated, time itself is truncated, manners altered once and for all. Dear Mr. Smith is reduced to a speedy Hi. Can romance survive texting?
As the boundaries between reality and illusion blur, And He Shall Appear suggests that we are all unreliable narrators of our own lives, apt to see significance in all the wrong places, and vastly to overstate our importance in the minds of others. It’s an insight that strikes a greater chill than any amount of gloomy staircases and creaking floorboards.
In his latest book, James Rebanks, the Lakeland shepherd turned bestselling author, sets off for the Arctic Circle in search of an elusive creature and an almost forgotten way of life. We find him in a rain-lashed house on a lonely island reading Moby-Dick. Is this a clever literary device? Are we in for a magnificent obsession and a baggy monster of a book that shouldn’t really work but somehow does? The perhaps surprising answer is: we are.