Each week our wonderful staff share the books that they've been enjoying.
Joanna has been reading:
The Moustache
Emmanuel Carrère, translated by Lanie Goodman
May’s meeting of the Hidden Treasures Fiction Book Club at Readings Carlton will focus on Emmanuel Carrère’s 1986 novel, The Moustache. Recently republished by Vintage Editions, it has a distinctly minimal cover design that just demands to be picked up and read.
Beyond the cover, the premise is compelling too. After many years in which it has kept him company, a man decides on a whim to shave off his moustache. This simple act leads to a massive identity crisis. Carrère’s writing, across fiction and nonfiction, is concerned with ruptures in everyday reality and the internal conflicts that follow, and The Moustache has those aplenty. What does it mean if no one, including his wife, notices that the moustache is gone? And what if they say he never had a moustache to begin with? Who is telling the truth?
The Moustache is both surreal and Kafkaesque, intellectual and ironic, very French, and probably many other things in between. I’m really look forward to discovering what book club members make of it – I’m expecting some very lively discussion.
Fiona has been reading:
The Labyrinth
Amanda Lohrey
I've had this on my shelves at home for a long time – after years of people telling me to read it – waiting for some mysterious Right Moment to appear before me. Last weekend, curled up on a comfortable chair, the mysterious Right Moment appeared, and I started The Labyrinth.
Friends, it's wonderful. Like a particularly good coffee machine, Lohrey has mastered the slow drip; while it doesn't take long for readers to know the story – a mother moving to be near her recently incarcerated son – the why, and the history of this family, are within the labyrinth of this story, waiting to be encountered when the path leads you there. Lohrey is a divine writer, and once I've made it all the way into this spiral of a story and out again, I can't wait to read more of her work.
Baz has been reading:
Morning and Evening
Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls
Being my fourth Fosse, Morning and Evening was a nice deepening of my growing connection to his writing. It’s a fairly simple story that Fosse steeps in an atmosphere of lightness, quiet and intimacy. Told in two parts, the first part narrates the moment of the character Johannes’s birth, and the longer second part takes Johannes from his death into the after.
It was a pleasure to move to the calm music of Fosse’s prose. This is a beautiful book.
