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Most stories are never as straightforward as they might seem, and we seem to be living in a heyday of readapted and reimagined stories from antiquity, with a focus on revealing new perspectives and unleashing unheard voices. In I, Antigone, Carlo Gébler reimagines the story of Oedipus, as told by his daughter Antigone. In framing the novel this way, the question immediately arises of how a person’s identity is often wrapped up in the stories that are, or perhaps even worse the stories that aren’t, told about them. 💫 Today’s library haul 💫 The Inugami Curse by Seishi Yokomizo, a classic Japanese murder mystery, is a tale about a family fortune, a family feud and family secrets, revolving around the explosive, divisive and extremely complex will left by Sahei Inugami, patriarch of the Inugami Clan. When Detective Kindaichi gets a tip-off that the old man has died, and things are about to get hairy, he rushes to the picturesque lakeside village the family calls home. Before long, the murders begin, and they are grisly, dramatic and laden with symbolism. South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami is a story of childhood soulmates, who drift apart in adolescence before meeting again years later. Hajime, our narrator, and Shimamoto meet as children and, as two rare only children in their neighbourhood, they naturally develop a bond; but, as time progresses, this bond deepens to something fuller. They listen to music and talk for hours about everything and anything, with searching intensity and without self-consciousness; but, when his family moves away, they eventually lose touch. After years without direction, Hajime has finally settled down with a family; this is when Shimamoto reappears in his life under strange circumstances, beautiful and enveloped in mystery, throwing the real value of everything he has built up into question. What follows is a quietly intense and deeply moving story as Hajime tries to understand what has happened, in both her life and his, in these missing years. A fine pile of books containing stories from a fine selection of Irish women writers, written from the turn of the 19th Century through to 2017. It’s goodbye to the #20booksofsummer22 reading challenge and what an enjoyable summer of reading it’s been. I didn’t manage my original 20 but still read more than ever before. Thank you @cathy_746books for kicking things off and looking forward to next year! It’s back to school time, which got me browsing my bookshelves for the books from school that I still have here - most of them the original copies complete with scrawled teenage notes! I’ve just finished this e-book and I loved it. A novel that moves between a pre and post pandemic world, with an other-worldly graphic novel at the heart of the story. Mandel creates her worlds, where her characters’ stories weave in and out of each other, shifting between timelines and revealing new connections and intersections, in such an enthralling way. How to Gut a Fish by Sheila Armstrong is a strange and sharp collection of short stories, that packs so much into a small book. The stories are so different, the main unifying element being a foray into the unsettling and the jarring. There are stories where things may or may not have happened; or things that certainly happened but remain unsaid. Lifetimes pass before us in a flash, or short periods of time are explored in great detail. There are stories that explore cause and effect; how one small moment can have dire consequences. Then there is the story which is progressing somewhat normally before taking a delightfully surreal turn at the end. At the core of this reading experience for me is the fact that it’s the feelings and sensations evoked by each story, the moments captured, that prevail over the storylines themselves. Armstrong’s writing is so rich and dense that she packs so much into each sentence, even in the passages where nothing of particular consequence is happening; the corner of a room, food, a part of the landscape, each are described in detail as their own microcosm, with beautiful turns of phrase at every corner.
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