It's cold and grey, the world is in turmoil, and slowly, the idea of floating out to sea on an ice floe becomes more and more appealing. Luckily, there are books. And a trending genre called "healing fiction" might just get you through. Better still: It's about cats, coffee and bookstores.
Mabanckou immerses us in Liwa’s tale, creating the uncanny sense of a corpse communing with his sentient self. The three parts never fully coalesce, but Mabanckou interweaves horror and gallows humour to great effect, the shifts in tone are beautifully controlled, and his prose is rendered into exquisite English by Stevenson.
Have you ever woken up on Thanksgiving morning to a house full of company and just wanted to flee? In Mischa Berlinski’s extravagantly brilliant and darkly funny new novel, “Mona Acts Out,” the eponymous heroine does just that.
“The Secret Painter” here is Joe Tucker’s uncle Eric, apparently the most unaesthetic of men, inhabiting the most unaesthetic of places, the industrial town of Warrington, Lancashire. He kept his trousers up with a rope; his habitual bomber jacket was patched with sticky tape, as was the cracked rear window of his car. He worked as a labourer and his regular haunts were Warrington pubs, the rougher the better, and the local Betfred.
But when Eric Tucker died, aged 86, in 2018, more than 500 paintings were found in the small council house he had long shared with his mother. The works, of the highest quality, depicted mid-20th-century working-class northern life. Many showed blurry, smoke-filled pub interiors, beautifully composed and full of slightly grotesque figures, typically side-on to show their strange profiles. They often look pale (except for red noses) and pensive, but they all have one another, and here is the first of many paradoxes about Eric Tucker.
This Beautiful, Ridiculous City is in part a tribute to the place she feels saved her, and it works best when it’s on this territory, recounting Sohani’s endless walks across Manhattan. New York fortifies her, and watches over her, and slowly she uncovers its secrets, nurturing her own rituals (taking the aerial tram from Roosevelt Island to Trader Joe’s at Bridgemarket) and selecting her favourite sights (the huge, cursive signs that appear on Macy’s department stores at Christmas; the F-train notices that have Bengali translations; the Strand bookstore). Her illustrations of New York are so effective; I love the way she messes with scale, and mixes her media, deploying maps, Polaroid photographs and textbook diagrams when she needs to slow down the book’s sometimes exhausting pace.