Six Degrees of Separation: from The Anniversary to Romantic Comedy

On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Kate W: Books are my Favourite and Best

Yet again I  haven’t read the starter book: Stephanie Bishop’s The Anniversary. I gather though that it’s a forensic examination of marriages and relationships.

That gives us plenty to choose from then.  I’ll start with Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, a compelling story of a doomed love affair, set against the background of the crumbling of the GDR in the 1980s. A young student meets by chance a very much older married man and they fall into a tumultuous, torrid affair, fuelled by their love of music and art. He’s had several affairs during his marriage, but when she strays for a single night, he submits her to cruel and demeaning punishments, picking over her confession for weeks and long months. This is not a tidily wrapped up book, though we learn from the prologue and epilogue that the affair does in fact end. As did the GDR. Though that wasn’t tidy either. One quibble – in a society where spying on one’s neighbours was expected, how did this couple keep secret their affair, conducted in full public view?

My next choice might have had a married man having an affair as its subject.  Not quite.  How to Make a Bomb by Rupert Thomson was a surprise to read. Instead of full stops, there are line breaks. Sentences are often short – staccato even, giving the book something of a feel of a prose poem: this choppy presentation suits the book and its main unable-to-stick -with-an-idea protagonist well. Philip Notman is an acclaimed historian who’s been to a conference in Bergen. He’s happily married to Anya. From nowhere, apparently, he start to question life itself – it’s ‘artificial’, ‘unbearable’. His solution is to go away for a while – to Cádiz, where a woman – Inés – whom he met at the conference lives, and for whom he has formed an attraction. No adultery takes place, and soon he is off to Crete, because some chance acquaintances have lent him their holiday home there. He dabbles with integrating himself into local male society, with religion, before moving back to London, but not to his wife. He still loves her, still needs time. His rather self-indulgent and self-aggrandising quest to solve the ills of society via his Notmanifesto (see what he did there?) is rather a mish-mash of received ideas. His grandiose ideas amount to very little and we leave him on the last page no further forward than he was when he embarked on his unlikely quest. Unconventionally written, with its absence of punctuation, this is an immensely readable book whose subject is a Privileged White Male living out a cliche.

Next, Holly Williams’ The Start of Something concerns a group of people also exploring relationships.  It’s a cleverly constructed novel – or is it a set of short stories? in which ten characters in turn have their inner stories revealed. Each character has slept with the one before. Several are exploring or questioning their sexuality: some are lonely, because or in spite of their relationship; some are heartbroken: all are seeking – something. One chapter is coming to an end for each of them, another is beginning. And at the end, there is hope for the two people with whom the book closes.

More exploration of sexuality in The Sleep Watcher by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan.  A young woman, Kit, uses this book to address her lover to explain how her teenage self has made her who she is. She lived with her parents and younger brother in an unnamed seaside town in southern England and became prone to out-of-body nighttime wanderings as she slept. This device should have had me slamming the book shut, never to open it again, but it worked. Able to travel round the town at will, she witnesses her parents in private moments and realises their relationship is increasingly fragile, her father not the happy-go-lucky man she thought she knew. She’s also exploring her own sexuality with her closest school friend, Andrew. The satisfaction of reading this book lies in the evocation in just a few phrases of her home town, her teenage companions, her family, and the things they did. Her conflicting feelings about her parents – especially her father – whom she thought she knew are well portrayed. Kit is a convincing, if enigmatic character. An intriguing read.

Here’s another book written in the voice of the main protagonist reviewing her past. Absolutely and Forever by Rose Tremain, of whose writing I’m usually a fan. But while this book was, as expected, a page-turner, I didn’t warm to it much. It’s written in the voice of Marianne, whom we meet as a 15 year old boarding-school girl, with self-obsessed parents whom I found to be caricatures. She’s helplessly in love with 18 year old Simon. She knows they’ll soon marry and she willingly loses her virginity to him. Life gets in the way, and he’s despatched to Paris when he disappoints himself and his parents. She never forgets him, despite a decent marriage, which is detailed in all is downs and ups. The denouement, when it comes, isn’t a surprise, to me at least. I found most of the characters to be ciphers, and the characters slightly unbelievable. An easily-read and well-written, but slightly unsatisfactory read.

There’s quite a bit of serious stuff here.  Let’s finish in a lighter vein.  Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy.  An engaging and highly readable … romantic comedy. Sally is in a team of writers and other creatives who collectively and separately write a popular Saturday night TV sketch show. It feels as if Sittenfeld has accurately brought to life this high-octane, stressful environment where very close friendships sustain the team, and the lively portrayal of a-week-in-the-life-of was eye opening as well as entertaining. But this story is that which develops between Sally, and one of the guest hosts, wildly popular singer Noah. We follow their tentative first mis-steps towards romance, through an e-mail relationship that develops in lockdown through further mis-steps to … well read it and find out. The story is sustained by cameos of the relationship Sally has with her two closest women friends, and with her now-widowed step father. A rewarding romantic novel with the added edge of giving an insight into aspects of the world of show business.

That’s it for this month. My last book doesn’t link back to my first, but all of them this month deal with the search for, or life with A Significant Other. Next month’s starter is Butter by Asako Yuzuki. Apparently it’s a crime novel with a difference.

The first, second and fourth images in the text of this post are my own. The third is by Valentin Antonucci of Pexels. The sixth is by Penin Thibault of Unsplash, and the seventh is by This is Engineering of Unsplash.

Author: margaret21

I'm retired and live in North Yorkshire, where I walk , write, volunteer and travel as often as I can.

45 thoughts on “Six Degrees of Separation: from The Anniversary to Romantic Comedy”

  1. Always interesting choices, Margaret. I’m currently reading Americanah by Chimanda Ngozi Adichie, another love story, with a Nigerian background. I’m only midway and not sure of a happy ending but it tussles with race and sexuality. Not sure if you would enjoy. Have a happy weekend! 

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  3. What an interesting chain. Unusually for me I can happily pass on by which surprises me since relationships and inner lives are generally a big draw for me. Perhaps I have had too much of a good thing!

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  4. I haven’t read any of those but will probably be reading Absolutely and Forever as it’s just been shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize and reading the shortlists for that prize is a personal project of mine. I’ve enjoyed some of Tremain’s books but not others, so I’ll be interested to see what I think of it.

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    1. Isn’t it funny how our minds all work so differently? It was my first thought. Probably based on the first review I read of a book I haven’t read.

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  6. Okay, now THAT is coincidence. I originally wanted to use Kairos for my first link, but I hadn’t finished reading it yet. Mind you, I’m no longer sure that it fits as well as I thought it would, now that I’ve finished reading it. My review comes out next week.

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  7. That’s a really interesting list. I was thinking I wanted to read each as I read, but then I fell asleep writing this reply and realized I’ll be lucky if I read even a couple!

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  11. Interesting links to both books I know and don’t though I haven’t read any of them yet. How to Make a Bomb sounds really intriguing in its structure and I think Romantic Comedy should be a fun read!

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  13. I like Rose Tremain but haven’t yet reed this one. Perhaps I won’t now. Best were Restoration and its follow up, Merivel, set – guess what! in the Restoration. A bit of a favourite period of mine. I also have her memoir on kindle to read.

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      2. Agreed. But I am a library devotee. They are still buying all sorts of appetising titles. And I need to keep them encouraged!

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      3. A definite gold strap from me! I do borrow library books, though mainly from the women’s library which is not part of the public library system. I almost always buy book group titles from kindle because it’s rarely possible to get them on time from the library, especially when several of us all living in the same area are chasing the same book!

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  14. You always come up with an interesting set of books. I want to read something by Rose Tremain, but maybe Absolutely and Forever isn’t the one to start with? Despite your positive words about How to make a bomb, I feel it’s a book, I wouldn’t enjoy much.

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    1. I looked at it in dismay, How to Make a Bomb, once I’d opened it. But I was sucked in immediately. But as to Rise Tremain – please try her, but maybe not that one!

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  15. Quite the romantic chain this month – spring is definitely in the air! And I love the fact we both thought of Kairos instantly as the first in the chain. But I’ll tell you how people managed to keep affairs secret in surveillance-heavy societies: from my own experience (and I was just a teenager myself, would probably have been even better at it if I’d been a bit older), they got very good at keeping secrets. There was also an element of ‘you keep my secret and I’ll keep yours’ around, especially when everyone got disenchanted with the political system towards the end.

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      1. You just learnt to navigate things. We were sure the only boy in our tutor group, for instance, was an informer, so we just avoided saying things in front of him, or else saying provocative things just to confuse him. But of course, there may have been an additional informer amongst us girls too (we were only a group of 7 though, so unlikely).

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