Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin





I spotted this book as a thumbnail when I was reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Ever since I read the title, I wanted to read this book. Qiu Miaojin is the first Taiwanese writer who confirmed her sexuality as a lesbian and wrote this book in a tumultuous time in Taiwan. One can easily spot the emotional turmoil caused by the political one in her writings, especially in the Crocodile entries.





Reading this book is a whole journey itself. You go through a multitude of emotions. We follow Lazi in her quest of finding love. Enter Shui Ling. A beautiful flower in the eyes of Lazi. Their relationship is a feverish dream. They can't get enough of each other. But... but... Lazi's useless pondering of sexuality leads to self-sabotaging her relationship with Shui Ling.





Ah! Self-sabotage. Hello, my old friend. Due to her unavailability, Shui Ling turns her back on Lazi which starts a series of other relationships, both romantic and platonic, which didn't last long. Lazi yearns for Shui Ling and goes on a depressive spell. Though they are in touch, Lazi is a spectator of Shui Ling's now new life.





What surprised me about this book is that the writing is surprisingly millennial! Miaojin, if she's alive will be my mother's age. Paired with the fact that she committed suicide after 2 years of releasing this book, it gives out a whole different meaning. Every page is a kaleidoscope of emotions and it was too much for me to take it. Bonnie Huie, the translator of this book, has said in an interview that this is supposed to be a guide for teens. For the right person, this will be the right book at the right time.





The use of Crocodiles is synonymous with lesbians (IMO) throughout this book. The thoughts of the crocodile are given in the form of journal entries which serves as an interlude between the emotionally heavy chapters. The struggle between being a butch/femme stereotype that leads to another identity crisis also forms the crux of the work. The way Miaojin wrote them applies even now. Miaojin passed away 25 years ago. But her writing still speaks to many unknown faces who needs validation.





With all that said, I can never do enough justice writing a review of this book. This book is tender yet crisp. Vulnerable yet impenetrable. And it made me ask a lot of questions but a few prevalent ones on my mind are, why is it hard to find a little love?



Why can't people practise acceptance? How many lives do we need to lose before realizing being gay is not the end of this world? And why did only queer people had to ask for approval?

A Passage North by Anik Arudpragasam



Memory is a trickster. Just when you think that it's gone, a smell, a smile or a song will induce that deepest part of it you think you forgot. When you are grieving, this memory is taunting. It taunts you with what-ifs and what not scenarios. You go through the motion as if you are an outsider to your feelings. When it comes to a breakpoint, the feelings that are at bay will engulf you as a whole. This is where you go numb. Where you don't feel pain and don't care whatever happens to you.



A Passage North shows this exploration of grief through the memory with highly philosophical prose. Right from the first line, I was hooked. I read, reread and read some more to just understand the gravity of the words. We follow Krishan on his journey to the war-torn North of Sri Lanka. And as the author points out, it is not just a physical journey but a journey from the deepest south to the north of his own mind.



We see all the characters through the eyes of Krishan. Even then, we are not shown all of them. We have to work with the vignettes of the characters in Krishan's memories. One thing I found fascinating is that how the author can connect mundane things to a trauma exploration. Like in one part, we see how Poosal built a temple in his mind and its connection with how Krishan creates the war scene in his mind using all the data he consumes. And how well PTSD is explored! I remembered all the psychology and rehabilitation lectures. It was surreal.



Another thing I liked about this book is how well trauma is investigated. We dissect layer by layer of Appamma's trauma caused by her ageing. How it makes her feel weak and cranky, almost like a toddler, showing that at the end of our life, we will be returned to the state of birth. Except now we will be waiting to die not to live. Then we see Anjum, who is not accepted by her mother for loving a woman. She may look indifferent to that, but it makes her vulnerable. This creates a restlessness that is only satisfied by her activist work with her comrades.



The heart of this book is Rani. It is her trauma that triggers something deep inside me. Rani lost her 2 sons in the Civil War. Deeply affected by PTSD, she even takes shock treatment and dozens of medications. She yearns for her boys and feels a detachment that affects her everyday life. The time Rani works as a caretaker of Appamma brings her a brief relief but not a cure. And we are left to figure out what happens to her.

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The author brutally discusses the violence that happened around that time. There's this carnivalesque nature to the way he writes trauma. I don't know how else to put it. Krishan, ridden with survivor guilt, tries to appropriate the trauma by bringing violence to life in his mind. He is detached from the violence in person but there is an obsessive attachment to the trauma caused by it, that makes this whole thing complex.

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I also love how atmospheric this novel is. The way the character's mood is reflected in the sunset or a passing train is beautiful. The small stories of Poosal and Pillayar, the uncertainty of new love and the realization that the love is not going to last. The tangle of bodies and mind and then yearning to detangle. The detachment and attachment to the self. It all adds flavour to the story. And how can I not mention the part where he talks about Kuttimani and LTTE cadets. The way he wrote it sounds cool and indifferent? Also, what's with the sentences as long as paragraphs, conversations without punctuations? I loved it but I constantly had to change the highlight colours which made my ebook look like a rainbow.

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About the things that didn't work for me, we are shown the snippets of various happenings in the Civil War in the inner monologues. But, most of the time the transition from memory to reality is not smooth. That bumpy passage doesn't reduce the reading experience in any way. And we see vignettes of all the characters except Krishan and his mother. I understand why Krishan is detached but I would've loved to see his mother who lost a husband to the bombing, kept her sons under locks to save them and later have to put up with a whiny mother-in-law.

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A Passage North is not an easy book to read. You will spend equal time reading and indulging in philosophical ramblings. But it is a book that must be read with tenderness and love and desire. I will not be surprised if this book makes it into the shortlist.

Art is subjective. We see what we want to see. Second Place is one such book. While it's great for some, it just didn't hit the mark with me. I didn't see what the author wants to say. While reading, I was sitting there thinking, what is the point?





The tidbits on parenting and the complex emotions one feel when they conflict with their mind are written like a dream. I enjoyed reading M's point as a mother. I have read many books on the daughter's view but this is refreshing. One can also spot a lot of paradoxes in here. For example, M wants to be seen and the moment she's spotted, she couldn't stand the agony. She is content being invisible. She wants a husband who complements her but instead she's with Tony who gives her a comfortable space.





Her obsession with L is kind of startling to read. I can see why she is obsessed. But the whole thing seems unnecessary. L being an entitled brat, march into the Second Place both literally and metaphorically. I also like how the author used him as a device to showcase male privilege. An artist with no penny in his pockets living off of his wealthy friends and mostly expected nothing in return. Imagine that with a female artist!





I do find these occasional places where I see the male privilege, especially the part where the author talks about being born with a male body in itself as freedom. But female fate? I am confused here as to what she wants to convey as female fate. Is it the continuous effort a woman takes to keep the brewing storm at bay? Is it the body of a woman that is always subjected to scrutiny, young or old? Is it the inability to accept oneself as her own or is it the compassion a woman continuously denies herself? I am confused. Because I see a bit of all in here and I see all of it in me.



Some chapters are better than the others and the same goes for the chapters. I have to read, reread and read some more to get the hang of it. But in the end, it all felt like an elaborate drama. The writing did in a few places (okay, in many places) sounded pretentious. Like it's written for the intellectuals who can explain the line of the theme by line. 



But oh well! I am no intellectual and that's a me problem. With that all said, I do feel this is the right book at the wrong time for me. Maybe I should've read her other works before reading this one to understand Cusk better. I don't know if it'll make the shortlist but it's too early for me to say that. 

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I didn't delve into much of the plot as it's all over bookstagram and some of them has written excellent reviews. So I am writing only the impressions I made after reading it. Last, of all, I have chosen this particular cover as I feel this represents the book much better than that yellow modern art thing. Have you read Second Place or any of Cusk's works? What do you think of it?

Charming, brilliant and thoroughly entertaining.

Racy.

I just raced from the first to the last page in a span of hours. Traps upon traps, riddles upon riddles, it is the perfect book to get you out of the slump.

The Promise is my first South African Literary work and my only thought while reading this is how did I miss this? To say this is one of the best narratives I have read this year will definitely not be an exaggeration. The Promise is essentially a book about fulfilling a promise, made by the Swart family matriarch before her death. But it's more than that.


Let's talk about the brilliance that is narration. We have a narrator who knows anything and everything about the characters, even ghosts, in this book. This narrator is sneaky, sassy and strikes when no ones expects them to. It was like watching a telenovela with all the characters and the narrator. And when we see the character deceiving us, the narrator is there, hinting to us that they mean it differently.


This narrator seems to have an eerie sense of humour. They quip about how it is convenient for people to forget the dead at the sight of food. In another instance, they moan about how inconvenient it is to die on the finals of WorldCup. The sarcasm of losing oneself in vanity and gluttony, the irony of serving the others while you can't serve yourself, the narrator knows and shows anything and everything.


We have 4 decades, 4 funerals, 4 seasons (as @but_i_thought_ said, it's a South African seasonal quartet) and 4 landmark events form the basic frame of the plot. But you will be lost if you read this book superficially. The beauty of the narration is finding the clues in between the lines. It is not about what is said, it is about what is not said. 


I interpret that the author intends to represent the Swart family house as the nation and the promise made by the Swarts as the politics of the nation. And again by not giving a proper voice to Salome and showing Lukas as the stereotypical black man and the murderer of Astrid as a man of colour, Galgut shows how the voice of the natives and how people are colour are invalidated again and again, even though they are in their own country.


Another thing I loved in this book is the description of human bodies. The inner working of the mind, the need for sexual pleasure even at the darkest times, the fragility of human bodies as they age, is all well captured. One can feel the heat flashes seeping through the pages and wipe their brows. This satirical, omnipresent narration didn't fail to deliver what I expected in a 'Booker Longlisted' title. I am going to real salty if I didn't see it in the shortlist. 


Notes:
While the whole setup of South Africa is exciting to read, I know little to nothing about the political scenario of SA. So I obviously refrained from commenting on it. Also, I didn't talk about the sibling relationships as it feels too personal to talk about. I chose this cover because of the significance lightning plays in the story.

Giving birth to a child and raising them are two different olympian sports. You don't know what to expect most of the time. Sometimes all it takes is an educated guess and hope with lots and lots of prayer that we don't fuck up this kid in the process. But through all that measures, hopelessness creeps in, inch by inch, and one day you will have a glaring realization that you don't want to be a parent. But it creates a roller coaster of panic emotions and you do the one thing you didn't want to. You somehow fuck up your kid. The unknown narrator in Die, My Love is stuck in this dilemma. But the irony is, she's not trying to be a good mother. She just doesn't want to be a bad one.


Two things stood strikingly out in this novel. Violence and animalistic instincts. Violence, the need to inflict violence, the imagination of it, is something that made my stomach churn. When you look at the root of it, you can see the dilemma between feminity and the idea of feminity. She uses violence as a way to express her emotions. She is alone, isolated in the French countryside with no support system. The things are always done or decided for her, always criticized for her inability to learn french or speaking it in the wrong way. the toxic femininity and the expectation put on women to be a good little wife tending to the baby and looking after her husband creates a dilemma between her already traumatized mind and reality.


This sort of brings out her animalistic nature. violent, animalistic nature to inflict violence and also brings out intense emotions. Whenever these intense emotions come out in play, she loses control of her instincts, thus more animalistic thoughts. The lines between the humans and animalistic nature of humans are blurred and she's in a state of metaplasticity where both her instincts refuse to cooperate and she (and the narration) becomes fluid with her environment. This also increases her sexual anxiety and the carnal need for pleasure, also fantasizing about them. 


We can see a lot of paradoxes going on in this book. For example, she wants to get better for her baby, but she couldn't love the baby. She wants to be left alone but she is clingy. These undertones almost create a horror scenario where even her raunchy affair with another man feels like a sort of possession. And his obsession with her is alarming and at one point we don't know who is possessed any more. The relationship with her boyfriend, then her husband, doesn't help either. The rigid way in which he practices patriarchy and expects his wife to take care of the baby when he knew she is not well is nothing but a show of privilege. The entitlement people have over a woman's body, time, health is ridiculous and they even dare to behave offended when she resists makes me furious.


It is impossible to note the similarities between Septimus Smith of Mrs Dalloway and Harwicz's unnamed narrator. Both are outsiders. Both don't have the agency to express their feelings. They both either overemote or shut down at the tiniest things. Both are ignored and misunderstood by the medical professionals who are supposed to treat them. Though I feel that it is not intentional, these are too similar to not look at. Harwicz said in an interview that she wrote this book to escape the motherhood that serves as a form of prison and one can see that desperation leaking through the pages.


In her own words, this is the story of a woman faced with two possible fates: being a mother/wife/lover or walking the riskier, marshy path of simply Being. And this will not be such a spectacle has it not for the two translators Sarah Moses and Carolina Orloff.

"It's different for women, isn't it? They have no choice in where they go. They grow up in a prison and then get married into one."



This quote pretty much sums up what China Room is about. Sahota uses two timelines to explore oppression and sufferings caused by the oppression. On one hand, we have Mehar, a 15-year-old child bride, married off to one of the brothers of an affluent family, and on the other, we have her great-grandson, held in the clutches of addiction, sense of claustrophobia caused by racism and a sense of unbelongingness. These two are 70 years apart, but they go through the similar emotion of being shackled.



Now, this book has so much potential. It could've been a masterpiece. But somehow it falls flat. The story is concise. We are shown what we have to see. Considering that this is loosely based on Sahota's great grandmother and later himself, one can understand the need for conciseness. But what didn't work for me is how underwhelming the characters are developed. It's like only a few of them are focalized while the others are left behind. There is no philosophical undertone, no atmospheric writing like the last 3 books I read. It felt like lazy writing.



What worked for me is the way the author made me angry. There are only a few books that made me furious over the injustice and sheer unfairness. And China Room is one of them. I read the first few chapters swearing at the obscene way. A girl is being shopped as if she is a commodity. Her identity is erased as if she is a person only if she has a husband. We don't even know what Mehar is called before she is Mehar. And the demands made by the boy's family as if they are doing a favour by marrying their girl, when in fact, it is the girl who is going to toil makes me want to punch something. And the men in here are treated as properties. Like their sole purpose is to toil for the family welfare. Ugh!



Then we have this business of not letting the girls know who their husbands are. This whole story wouldn't have happened if only they knew who their husbands were. But, clearly, it didn't and we have a situation that makes things complicated for everyone. I have read a few reviews that say this book makes them uncomfortable. Of course, it is going to be uncomfortable. We have our inner old lady/man out, judging Mehar and Suraj for their adulterous relationship, when in fact, they both are trying to break away from the shackles of Mai. It may sound blasphemous, but morals will be thrown out the window when you are trying to just exist.



It is yet another book that shows how women play as pallbearers of patriarchy. When a woman continuously repressed by patriarchy, constantly wounded and traumatized, stripped of her power, is given power, she will inflict the same violence on others. The orgasmic cruelty of inflicting pain on the other women, especially on the daughters-in-law, are hidden under the veil of maintaining the 'family honour'. This family honour is what imprisons women figuratively and in this book, literally. And while the woman suffers, everything around her goes as usual.



We can see this similar sense of claustrophobia and suffering in Mehar's great-grandson too. While Mehar is shackled by patriarchy, our unnamed boy is shackled by substance addiction, blatant racism and guilt. He stays in the same room as Mehar, when she is imprisoned but he finds his home in there. A complete circle of suffering coming to a sort of closure like a nice woven basket. 



I wanted more of Mehar and Suraj, both traumatized, seeking an outlet from an oppressive home, ending with a tragic outcome. Had it been told by Mehar, this book would've been a different one altogether. And the interruption makes the book a bit underwhelming. I feel that we have quite a lot of agency for the trauma caused by racism and substance addiction. But the trauma caused by the arranged marriage or the love where you have to fight for is not discussed on a bigger note. The suffering women face even in this 'New India' is glossed over as something normal. Overall, while I loved a few parts, I am underwhelmed by the writing. I don't know if it'll make the shortlist.

I appreciate the creepy vibes but this book didn't work for me. One can't ignore the allure of a creepy child protagonist, but it felt a bit pretentious.

The main thing I felt is that there is no element of surprise. Since we also had chapters from Hannah's POV, we already knew what's gonna happen. Also, the violent undertones felt too made up and intentional. We are not given any kind of background on why Hannah is the way she is and mostly it felt too Freudian. Also, Suzette is also kind of weird. Had it been only with the mother's POV, this book would've been on a different level. Just another book with potential that didn't hit the right spot.

This book is the kind you would pick on a calm winter evening. A perfect book to read when you're tucked in with cosy clothes, a mug of coffee or whatever you want to drink, while the fireplace crackles (in my case, ASMR videos). An adorable, cosy, one time read. This book kind of reminded me of Big Little Lies. The writing and setting are also somewhat similar in both novels. In many places I had Moriarty popping up in my mind that it's impossible to stop comparing both.





I am not going to dive into the plot, as many have written about it already. I enjoyed the writing. In no time I was sucked into the story. I kept on turning the pages with such a fervour that I couldn't believe it when the book ended. I loved Clara and Liam. The thing I loved most about this book is, that it's a simple story. No need to wring your brain to understand the metaphors or connect the imagery with whatever is happening. The story is clean and crisp.





Also, I love how Clara is written. An adult writer writing a child's voice may be a hit or a miss. But I feel Lawson trod with care and didn't overdo it. Everything about Clara was adorable. And how can I forget Moses! I loved reading them. Also, I love how Liam's vulnerabilities were played. In one place Liam feels as if he couldn't cross that river to make meaningful relationships. I felt that in my bones. It is bliss to read something that resonates with you, isn't it?





Now coming to things that didn't work for me. I don't understand why Lawson has included some anti-fat language that seems unnecessary. Once it's fine. But three times, that didn't seem like a coincidence. Then her portrayal of motherhood. I know what it feels like to yearn for a child. I do know how it feels to be overwhelmed with everything that's going on. But using that as a vantage to advance the plot is not what I had in mind. It felt like fetishizing one's pain to provide fodder for entertainment.





And what's with the fathers in this story. I had a mini discussion with @ yesterday. And I kind of realized the fathers were either uninvolved or too scared to protect their kids. The aloofness of Rose's father made her mother look bad in her eyes. While Rose is perceptive of her father's inability to intervene, it isn't until late he somewhat realizes his mistake. On the other hand, Liam's parents divorced and he kind of left him with his mother who he knows will continue to hate Liam? And we don't have enough insight on these two mothers on what they think. That sort of leaves an incomplete feeling.





Finally, this isn't a book that I expected to see on the Booker longlist. But I am glad that I found this. A simple book with a lot of food for thought, it's a book that we'll enjoy. And I forgot to mention how much I loved the ending. In the end, they found solace in whatever troubles they had. I kind of liked it but not enough to see it on a shortlist.