Is there a trail you follow when you read? Does a book’s closing paragraph leave a question that you hope another’s work might answer? Or do the books stack up, haphazard, their place earned by a pretty cover or the author’s work gone before?
I began the year with a woman whose company I was surprised to enjoy, neurotically dissecting marriage and the fear and default longing it provokes. In the white beach heat of the New Year I pursued Frankenstein’s monster for the first time across the ice, tiring of the endless gnashings of teeth, the pleas for pity, the cries of ‘poor wretch’. I opened—with the guilt of an unforgiveable delay—a novel so much closer to home, that I had been warned I would love and hate. I loved and hated it. In the end its author lured me to his next work, in a collection that made me cry for the complex sadness and wonder of siblings. Then I followed the most haunting and violent of those stories to its young author’s endlessly lauded debut, where I sat and heard all the things he knew, and admired and fell into the spaces of all he’d left out.
I finished homesick for my own city again and visited parts of it I’ve only seen from the outside, watched it slowly turned inside out, familiar and far away. A chance appointment put a grim and fascinating tale of underbelly Tokyo in my hands and I devoured the pages of it in a day—guilty all the while for the entertainment wrought by its horror—and was left looking for a woman’s voice in the debris, her experience of a profession that confuses and shocks. The voice I found when I went looking for it was a beautiful one, full of poetry; sad, sweet and gentle with itself, unafraid. It told of skin and self and a wearying of addiction and emerged at the other end, but how many others could it speak for? Perhaps none. An escape, then, to the efforts of so-called ordinary people to create meaning and beauty from the hard, mismatched pieces of life. And then home again, to a true story of meaning built from the accumulated love of a lifetime.
Next comes a road of bleak beauty through a charred world. Who knows where it will lead.
