Published in 1992. This edition: Picador, 2012.
I feel compelled to share with you that my hands are shaking, a little, as I write this down. Reading books like these pry at the elusive answer to the unspoken question of how deeply an experience, literary or otherwise, can mark us, until we begin to chafe gracelessly against the semaphore of its instruction.
Never Mind is the first of British author Edward St. Aubyn’s novels centred on his alter ego protagonist, Patrick Melrose. I came to these books because I was curious about Patrick, about what fictional forces have led to the concretization of his status as one of contemporary English literature’s most formidably-hewn characters, and his author as one of the best living English writers producing work in that language.
I stayed out of horror and awe, both infused with the kind of reverence you don’t even realize you’re giving up willingly while you read. Whether you levy your slackjawed, glassy-eyed admiration freely or with begrudging restraint, it takes no more than a very few pages to realize that prose, in St. Aubyn’s hands, is effortlessly sovereign. He writes with the sort of sleight of hand beauty that might make poets weep, and he has the good grace to wipe his plate clean of indulgent treatments in diction, in the assignation of flasks to purses, of wineglasses to fiercely shaking digits, of bespoke canes to corridor umbrella stands, immutable and indifferent, receptacles cast in porcelain, green glass and untraceable decay.
Though the origins of decrepitude evade certain timelines, the origin points of disease in the novel’s chief players are subject to a much more rigorous scrutiny. St. Aubyn uses fiction like a paring knife, cunningly training the blade on a single day in the lives of five year old Patrick and his parents, David and Eleanor. The Melroses are expecting a small contingent — two other couples — of dinner guests, a pleasant, intellectually undemanding evening at Eleanor’s family house in the South of France.
Cognizant of the frequently baffling starts and stops of adult humours, the self-sufficient Patrick easily ventures into his private world of childhood play, roaming the grounds of a vast garden that extend into the Melrose holdings. In the imaginatively fertile clutches of this verdant terrain, Patrick is the undisputed king. There is an unashamed curiosity, fringing on tenderness, that the young boy conducts with members of the animal family — behaviours notably missing from his interactions with his parents, or the vaguely warm yet mostly distant maid, Yvette.
“…Patrick had only seen the tree frog twice, but he had stood still for ages staring at its sharp skeleton and bulging eyes, like the beads on his mother’s yellow necklace, and at the suckers on its front feet that held it motionless against the trunk and, above all, at the swelling sides which enlivened a body as delicate as jewelry, but greedier for breath. The second time he saw the frog, Patrick stretched out his hand and carefully touched its head with the tip of his index finger, and it did not move and he felt that it trusted him.”
On this day, Patrick doesn’t espy his favourite lucky tree frog. A different sort of visitation awaits him, one that will alter the pattern of his internal weather, not simply for the remainder of the evening’s social pleasantries, but for a time we cannot, with the limitations of our gaze, yet glimpse.
It would be difficult enough to bear if Patrick’s parents were uniformly, homogeneously wicked, but the inverse is true. Eleanor mires herself near-constantly in drink, to escape the cruelty meted out by David, who administers amoral punishments in line with what he considers his judicious purview. During the course of the miserable spectacle of a dinner party, Eleanor’s miseries are relentlessly pursued across the page. The stifling tedium of her emotional subservience to David is measured out as if in stiff fingers of drink, each furtive gulp of liquor entering her gullet an ineffective balm against days and nights laced with peaceable terror.
Reading David is a master class in pain – in the gnarled roots of its provenance, and in the steady, wincing gait of its unsteady yet triumphant time on earth. We learn more, reading David, than is easy or comfortable to hold, and the more we know about him, the less we wish we knew. In the crucible of his motivations, he reads like an aged Briton of a Patrick Bateman, with his bloodlust diverted into a series of grotesque amusements best served over a course of game and unpalatable, expensive wine. During dinner, having perceived himself vaguely slighted by the antics of his subordinate colleague’s comely-but-gormless girlfriend, David plots.
“Never mind, thought David, I can get her later. In the pursuit of knowledge, there was no point in killing the rabbit before one found out whether its eyes were allergic to shampoo, or its skin inflamed by mascara. It was ridiculous to ‘break a butterfly upon a wheel.’ The proper instrument for a butterfly was a pin.”
Immediately following a calculated act of brutality upon which the novel’s scope and shape hinges, I shared this feverish message with a St. Aubyn devotee: “Reading the first of the Patrick Melrose novels is destroying me in the most delicate of increments. I feel like I’m being precisely gutted, every nick and scrape of my emotional defenses perfectly tallied in this… god, this assiduous, bare-but-gleaming prose. It’s beautiful and terrible, and in the full vein and spirit of so many things I want to do with my own writing that I could weep. It’s a treasure. It’s like reading horror stories in the bright sunshine and feeling ghosts slide up and down your spine like inky regrets. I can’t wait to see how Patrick survives, what he survives. What he becomes. I dread it and I long for more.”
It’s true. It’s all still true. What St. Aubyn proves, in Never Mind, is that there be monsters everywhere, verily, in the safest of places, in the most simperingly polite of cloistered alcove repartee. The writer, you feel, is pinning down an entire poisoned institution to the mat, forcing it to rap its perfumed knuckles to bitumen, snarling at it to give.
First published in 1977. This edition: 2012, 
It’s December 1st, 1955. After a day of work at her seamstress’ job in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks boards a city bus from its hateful Coloureds entrance, and takes a seat in the vehicle’s neutral section, where both blacks and whites can sit. Looking forward to returning home and cooking her husband something special, Parks’ positive daydreaming is interrupted by the bus driver’s belligerent demands that she surrender her seat to a white passenger. As anyone with a smidgeon of knowledge on the African-American Civil Rights Movement will tell you, Rosa Parks refused – not with equal hostility, but with a calm, undaunted resolve that has etched her name into history books, monuments and national holidays. Giovanni’s faithful, poetic retelling of Parks’ story takes the reader onto that very bus, and beyond it, to the Montgomery Bus Boycott that her actions springboarded into life. It includes the nomination of Martin Luther King, Jr. as the official spokesperson for anti-segregation laws, sparking a nonviolent movement towards equality in the Constitution of the United States.
This collection begins with a nocturnally winsome invocation, “Welcome to the Night”, in which these dark hours are described with as much liveliness and imaginative engagement as any merry daylight revel:
Antes Que Anochezca, the Spanish language Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas (incidentally, I bought my best friend the English translation last Christmas, and wrote about it briefly in 
Any novel titled And Let the Earth Tremble at Its Centers becomes an “I must have you in lieu of bread” acquisition. This is the first novel of Gonzalo Celorio’s to have been translated into English, an undertaking of the Texas Pan American Literature in Translation series. (Marginalia: in its original 1999 Spanish publication, it was released by the same Tusquets Editores who released Antes Que Anochezca on their Fábula line.) It’s translated by Dick Gerdes, and foreworded by Ruben Gallo, author of 
Since it was published in 2010, I’ve thought about Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night more than occasionally. Peer, a Kashmiri journalist and political commentator, writes about the 
A literary treatment I’ve admired on my colleague’s blogs for some time is a multi-tiered reading project: handling an impressive beast of a tome in segments, and offering a reader’s diary alongside the gradual covering of sections. Currently, Iris on Books is doing it with the daunting War and Peace (
Published in 2012 by 
The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin (2012, Harper) is, at first glance, an almost outrageously handsome book. It seems to tell you, by the very look of it, that it will be both durable to hold and magnificent to read. Coplin’s story is described by Holloway McCandless (what a gorgeous name, right) of Shelf Awareness as “an extraordinarily ambitious and authoritative debut”, which, when one thinks of debuts, is what one wants to hear. Set in the rural reaches of the Pacific Northwest at the end of the twentieth century, The Orchardist has one of those plots that gives you faint goosebumps under your arms and across your nape, just considering it. It involves a kind, reclusive man interfacing with two young pregnant girls who trespass on the fringes of his land and the cockles of his heart. There’s trauma, and acts of redemption, and the bedrock of an America that scarcely resembles the one of 2013. My mother has already read it, and loved it. She deemed it “serious, important writing”, a moving, beautiful story, movingly and beautifully told.
I gave more than one Christmas book last year, however. To my best friend, I gifted Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas (1994 reprint, Penguin). It is her favourite memoir in film, and we both predict/hopefully anticipate that it will be her favourite memoir in print, too. (An outrageously goodlooking image of Javier Bardem from the 2000 movie is plastered across its front cover, which, one imagines, would spike impulse sales considerably.) The New York Times Review of Books describes Arenas’ prose reminiscences as “a book above all about being free”, charting in often painfully honest chapters the episodes of sexual persecution that have defined his queer autonomy, and political suppression that has stifled his creative work. Nor, one notes grimly, are the two methods of censorship mutually exclusive. This is the world on which so much of the Cuban writer’s fiction is founded, and Before Night Falls grants the reader the freedom of access to anti-regime, anti-persecutory reading: freedoms that Arenas himself often worked and lived without.
My brothers gave me three books, two of which suit each others’ company as impeccably as cucumber sandwiches and Darjeeling tea: North Parade Publishing collector’s edition copies of Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility and Northanger Abbey. Perhaps alarmingly, or predictably, I’ve read no Austen in her totality other than that which I studied, because, well… I don’t know. 
One needs to be in the precisely perfect alignment of mind and disposition to delve into Austen for pleasure. These volumes might well lend themselves to that faster than the others in my possession. Incredibly portable, endearingly tiny, and interspersed with charming black and white illustrations, these are true keepsakes. I will endeavour to fill out my collection with the remaining titles, and actually strive to read them all.
The third of the books from my brothers is the hauntingly-covered Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger (2009, Alfred A. Knopf), whose super popular The Time Traveller’s Wife endeared me in no way towards it. (Please remember that I am a book snob, and that book seemed to have “Oprah’s Book Club” smeared all over it. For all I know, it could be a good read.) Her Fearful Symmetry seems more promising, telling the tale of two intensely bonded sisters, Julia and Valentina, and their acquisition of a London apartment that looks over the impressive Highgate Cemetery, home to the bodies of several departed luminaries. As ghost stories go, it seems a juicy, engrossing tale, with, I hope, a shiver or two tucked inside.
Ivan Turgenev’s First Love (2005 reprint, Barnes & Noble Books) is widely celebrated as one of that prolific Russian author’s most favoured pieces of short fiction. “Anyone who has ever been in love,” the blurb of this edition proclaims, “will be touched by this tale of passion and disillusionment.” Given that my previous year was characterized by mostly contemporary reads in both fiction and non-, First Love feels both mirthful and apropos: a reminder that a look, a glance, a well-considered waltz backwards into the archives of classical literature can elicit rejuvenating effects. Coming in at just under seventy pages, I don’t think I’d be remiss in casting this slim volume as a potential 
Run by Ann Patchett (2008 reprint, Harper) is touted by Jonathan Yardley of Washington Post Book World as “a thoroughly intelligent book, an intimate domestic drama,” one that deals, above all else, with concerns of family. Patchett’s fourth novel, Bel Canto, thrust her into the spotlight: the three books that preceded it received acclaim, certainly, but not quite in the way that the PEN/Faulkner award-winning Bel Canto did. Run‘s biggest worry, out the gate, must have been on how it would stack up –even if Patchett didn’t trouble herself on this issue, the critics would. The author is talked up by The New York Times Book Review as being “more hammer and nails than glue and lace”, which is enough to make me wheel back and take serious note, on its own. I haven’t even read Bel Canto, though, so here’s what I’ll do: read Ann Patchett backwards, like my fingers are tamped down on a VCR’s rewind button. We’ll see what insights and revelations emerge.
Arguably the sexiest thing beneath the Christmas tree addressed to me, Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 (2012 reprint, Vintage) is going to be the first book I read by this legend of an author. I am excited. I am so excited. This book seems strange and compelling and entirely unpredictable, and I want to know it, the way you would want to know the dark, Aragorn-esque stranger in the corner of the tavern. The Times calls it “a work of maddening brilliance”, and so wide is the net of global recognition flavoured with quirky, creatively fecund singularity that Murakami’s cast around him, one is inclined to agree vigorously even before reading the first page. Set in Tokyo’s 1984, the novel follows the intertwined stories of Tengo and Aomame as they venture deeper and further down rabbit holes of parallel worlds and suspicious ghostwriting assignments. I would like to repeat, just for the record, that I am so excited.
Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Dream of the Celt (2012 reprint, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is described in the last lines of its blurb as a novel that dares to push the envelope where historical fiction is concerned. It illuminates the life of Roger Casement, the Irish nationalist whose humanitarian work deeply discomfited those accused of its crimes, notably the British in Northern Ireland. Convicted and executed by the British, stripped of his rank and title, Casement’s pioneering work was so sullied by his disgraceful end that real interest in his legacy only peaked again in the 1960s. This novel feels formidable, masterful and deeply rewarding. I shall have to acquire a copy in its original Spanish, and read the two side by side.
Edited by R. V. Branham, Curse + Berate in 69+ Languages (2008, Soft Skull Press) is a reminder that my mum is possibly more of a badass than I will ever be. There is very little I can say explicitly about this irreverent, whimsical, yet clearly superbly researched book that won’t get Novel Niche slapped with an NC-17 rating, which really is the core of the compendium’s, er, charms. Disclaimer: Wanting to use several of these gorgeous, filthy expressions doesn’t make you a bad person, but inventing and engineering social encounters so that they escalate into verbal bloodbaths, just so you can shout out “trust fund hippie” in French, or “five-faced hypocrite” in Tagalog: well, that’ll probably get your Miss Manners card revoked.
I’m not joking. My Fantasies: An Erotica Journal by David Russell and Gary Silver (2006, Clarkson/Potter Publishers, Random House) is precisely the sort of book my mother would give me, with or without any expectations that I’d fill in the lined pages, which feature helpful prompts such as “Here are my instructions for the perfect massage…” This gift, I think, is most telling: of how few boundaries there are in the discussion of what governs good and bad in printed matter, in the creator & progeny relationship of which I am one half. What is even more endearing, and comforting, is that this is the way it has always been — not that my mum was giving me erotica to read when I was in pinafores, no, but that the conversation on reading has never felt stilted, blinkered or reined in by dictates of “You shouldn’t”, or “Good/chaste/charming girls don’t read those awful things.” Panelled with quotes by the usual suspects (Pablo Neruda; Gustave Flaubert; The Kama Sutra; Rumi), and tastefully (yet pulse-tinglingly?) peppered with illustrations in unobtrusive sepia, this pocket journal is precious, darling: a fitting accoutrement to the love you’re making or dreaming up.
From she who knows the mettle and measure of my reading life with as much intimacy as my mother, I received The Children’s Book, by A. S. Byatt (2009, Alfred A. Knopf). For a long time in my teenaged years, I would tell anyone who asked that my favourite book was Byatt’s Possession. It was. Never had I read something so perfectly, ornately itself, if that’s at all coherent — this unabashed love letter to epistolary ardour, to the secret lives of writers and the conventions of two ages colliding into each other. Everything Byatt writes feels forged in a master (a mistress!) class of writing well, and I cannot fathom that The Children’s Book, loosely based on the life of English children’s book author E. Nesbit, will feel any differently. I don’t have the full measure of The Children’s Book (and when does one have the full measure of a book, ever, really?) but I can tell that it will lend itself to cloistered, intense readings. I will read it so fixedly that the rest of the world will fall away, and people and places will seem strange, when I return to them again.
Novel Niche 