Best Reads of 2021

We have successfully passed through a strange and stressful year. But now we seem to be embarked on an even stranger one that promises even greater stress. Around the world, tensions are high. Covid is not done with us, not by a long shot. Supply lines are fractured. The price of everything is out of control.

Not much is certain. But one thing that is certain: books provide solace and distraction. So let’s keep reading!

My own reading in 2021 included the usual mix of titles new and old, prize winners and writers from the literary fringe, authors in translation, short story collections and novels ... an eclectic assortment, selected without plan, rhyme or reason. In other words, books that reflect my individual and admittedly peculiar tastes.

As always, I’m looking for interesting, memorable characters, fluency of expression, an original approach to storytelling. The books that affect us most deeply, that remain fondly and vividly in the memory, are ones that engage us on an intellectual and visceral level. The titles on this year’s list do that and more.

The task of choosing the best is never easy. Inevitably, worthy titles are left off the list. We can’t worry about that. If the left-offs are truly worthy—and we think they are—they’ll show up on somebody else’s list and receive the attention they deserve.

Jack Wang’s first collection of short fiction, We Two Alone, is a superior example of the form, beautifully crafted, emotionally resonant, and dramatically satisfying. Wang’s characters are primarily Chinese nationals and the sons and daughters of Chinese immigrants, people who are struggling to acclimatize to shifting geopolitical environments and/or deal with crises that threaten their way of life and sometimes their very survival. Racism is present in many of these stories, either hovering menacingly in the background or playing a dominant role in the lives of Wang’s characters. For instance, “The Valkyries” takes place in Vancouver and Banff shortly after the end of the First World War. Teenage orphan Nelson, who lives in Vancouver’s Chinatown and works in a laundry, loves hockey and is highly skilled, but being Chinese he’s denied the opportunity to play in an organized men’s league. Instead, when he discovers a women’s league, he assumes a disguise, passes himself off as “Nelly,” and becomes one of the stars for his team, the Valkyries. But when his deception is uncovered, the price he pays goes far beyond a mere settling of scores. A remarkable feature of Wang's fiction is his ability to convincingly evoke an assortment of cultural and historical contexts. In “The Nature of Things,” it is 1937. Young Chinese couple Frank and Alice must flee Shanghai because of the escalating hostilities with Japan. Frank, an American-educated physician, puts his pregnant wife on a train to safety but refuses to leave the city himself because of his work. From this point the story chronicles Alice’s desperate yearning and fears for her husband after the Japanese invasion, and her eventual realization that she will never see him again. The narrator of “The Night of Broken Glass” is recalling the time just prior to World War II when he, his father and stepmother lived in Vienna. The narrator’s father is a Chinese diplomat, versed in the ways of the world, wily and pragmatic, and the story tells of the father’s careful navigation of shifting political winds when the Nazis move into Austria and begin victimizing Jews, minorities and foreign nationals. “Everything in Between,” set in South Africa at the beginning of the Apartheid era, describes a Chinese family’s efforts to live a normal life under exceedingly challenging circumstances. “Bellsize Park” takes place in contemporary England and poignantly depicts the doomed relationship of two students: Peter, who is Chinese, and Fiona, who is English. And in “All Hallows” divorced Ernie’s irresponsible nature is thrown into sharp relief when he takes his children, Ben and Toby, trick-or-treating the day after Halloween because he’d failed to show up the night before as he’d promised. As good as these stories are, the outstanding piece in this collection is the masterful novella from which the volume takes its title. Leonard and Emily, both actors, are divorced. Leonard, in his late forties and still hunting for the Big Break, is entering a premature cognitive decline, which he recognizes because it is the same disorder that left his mother debilitated before her death. As he struggles with worsening symptoms, he recalls his years married to Emily, who finally gave up on the dream, retired from acting and left Leonard when he refused to do the same. Wang chronicles their life together from beginning to end: the shared aspirations, thwarted idealism, the minor triumphs countered by heartrending setbacks that marked their marriage and their careers. In the end, a crisis brings Leonard and Emily together one more time to enact a final scene before Leonard slips into the darkness and is unable to remember what they meant to each other. There is an effortless and seamless quality to Jack Wang’s writing that is particularly impressive. The nuts and bolts of craft, the scaffolding of plot, never intrude on the reader’s experience. In each of these tales Wang generates considerable narrative momentum by introducing his characters in place, slowly revealing their hopes and fears as he ramps up the stakes and the tension, and then letting the drama unfold in a manner that is patient and never forced. There is nothing cheap or maudlin going on here. Wang frequently elicits an emotional response from the reader, but without exception this reaction arises naturally out of the drama we’re witnessing. We Two Alone is a thoroughly engaging volume of short fiction by an exceptionally talented author. These are near flawless tales of personal struggle and modern angst: deeply empathetic, humane stories by a writer whose command of form and technique is unfailing.

Douglas Stuart’s gut-wrenching, prize-winning first novel tells the story of young Hugh “Shuggie” Bain, whose disastrous family life provides the framework for a sordid, tragic tale of alcoholism and abuse. We first encounter teenage Shuggie in 1992. He is fending for himself, working for cash in a Glasgow supermarket. But how did he get there? The middle sections of the book answer that question by taking us back to the early 1980s. Shuggie is the youngest of the three children of Agnes Bain, a beautiful, proud woman in her thirties who habitually takes up with selfish, manipulative, abusive men. His father Hugh, known as “Big Shug,” drives a taxi and routinely carries on with women of every stripe and description. For solace, for fun, and to blot out the world, Agnes drinks, invariably to excess. It’s a hardscrabble life that lacks hope and promise, but things go from bad to worse after Shug moves his family out of the cramped council flat they’ve been sharing with Agnes’s parents to a house in a remote mining village. This is post-industrial Scotland. The mine has all but shut down and almost everyone is on the dole. The mining town is a ruined, scorched place where, as Stuart tells us, “the land had been turned inside out,” a place neglected by those in power and despised by the people who live there, a place that breeds cruelty, misery and addiction. When Agnes’s drinking and resentment over his philandering become more trouble than they’re worth, Big Shug abandons his family altogether. Left alone with three children, Agnes’s dependence on alcohol escalates: most days she is dysfunctional by noon and comatose by evening. Money is tight and most of it goes on lager and vodka. Under these wretched circumstances the children—Shuggie, Catherine and Alexander (known as “Leek”)—care for themselves as best they can, pinning threadbare hopes on their mother’s rare and sporadic periods of sobriety while steeling themselves for the inevitable relapse. Despite her dereliction, Shuggie grows up idolizing his mother, in thrall to her beauty, serving her needs before his own, unaware that she’s deliberately raised him to be her enabler. His siblings are more mature and pragmatic, Catherine especially. She is the first to leave, absconding for a new life in South Africa. Later, in a drunken rage, Agnes throws Leek out of the house. Left alone with his mother, Shuggie struggles to assume necessary responsibilities and keep the household afloat while continuing to attend school and learning how to navigate an alien and hostile adult world. With Agnes having relinquished the roles of guardian and provider, Shuggie often goes hungry, but rarely does his mother go without drink. Still, Shuggie clings to hope, managing her moods, battling her cravings and encouraging sobriety. But it’s a battle against a relentless adversary that he has no chance of winning. Shuggie’s torment is magnified by growing up a misfit, aware that he is different from other boys but helpless to do anything about it, subject to taunting and physical abuse because of his proper speech, effeminate mannerisms and indifference to typical masculine pursuits, like football, girls and automobiles. The novel is long and structured in the manner of a symphony, with themes and motifs repeating and intensifying as the story progresses, the whole thing building to a devastating crescendo. Douglas Stuart’s down and dirty novel is not for the faint of heart. A portrait of anguished love and addiction, Shuggie Bain offers only faint flickering glimmers of hope. But it gets to the heart of the matter as it portrays the human will to survive, as only the best fiction can.

Graeme Macrae Burnet’s Booker Prize-nominated novel, His Bloody Project, purports to reconstruct, using contemporaneous documents, the story of a brutal triple slaying that took place in the Scottish village of Culduie. On an otherwise unexceptional day in August 1869, seventeen-year-old Roderick Macrae strolled up the lane from his house to the house of a neighbour, Lachlan Mackenzie. On the way there he was seen by another neighbour and spoke with her. She later testified that Roddy’s manner was normal: he was calm, gave her no cause for fear and did not raise her suspicions. Once at the Mackenzie house he used farming implements he had brought with him to bludgeon to death Lachlan’s daughter Flora and son Donnie, then waited for Lachlan. When Lachlan arrived home, Roddy beat him to death as well. Burnet’s novel consists of an account of the incident written by Roddy after his arrest, several witness statements, medical reports, an excerpt from a study of criminal psychology, and the trial transcript. Posing as an historical document, Burnet’s novel is thoroughly convincing, not to mention suspenseful and addictively readable. His detailed but never heavy handed prose brilliantly reconstructs the period in which the story is set, capturing the doleful spirit of the times, the superstitions that people held, the laws under which they laboured, the technologies they used, their pastimes and the beliefs that swayed attitudes and behaviours. The book, and Roddy himself, are infused with a mood of tragic inevitability. At the trial, Roddy’s motives come under close scrutiny. Experts and witnesses weight in on possible reasons for his actions. But questions persist. How can anyone know the content of another man’s mind? Graeme Macrae Burnet has written an astonishing and gripping novel that gives the reader plenty to think about.

Human interaction can be joyful and enriching, but it can also be worrisome, disturbing and destructive, and it is from this murky shrouded world of suspicion, bitterness, chafing desire and petty grievance that the short stories of Norwegian author Kjell Askildsen (1929-2021) emerge and flourish. The stories collected in Everything Like Before represent a selection of Askildsen’s astonishing work over a long career and reveal his fascination with the ways in which our efforts to communicate with one another can go awry and slip unaccountably into conflict and estrangement. In minimalist prose stripped of all but the most essential details, Askildsen describes chance encounters that leave people hurt and confused and long-term relationships pushed to a breaking point. These conflicts arise for many reasons. They can result from trifling misunderstandings or absurd disagreements, seemingly inconsequential flashes of irritation, mistaken assumptions, or grudges of long standing. Askildsen frequently writes about family members who don’t get along and couples caught in passive-aggressive relationships whose resentments escalate into major disputes. But he is also adept at chronicling fraught encounters between strangers. In “A Lovely Spot,” a couple has driven out of the city to spend time at their summerhouse on the coast. Their bickering is constant but more-or-less benign—his driving, what to do during their holiday, etc.—but an accumulation of minor annoyances drives the husband to an inexplicable act of aggression. In the title story, Carl and Nina are on vacation in Greece. Carl is annoyed that Nina enjoys getting drunk and flirting with other men. Nina finds his judgmental attitude tiresome. They argue, he tells her it’s humiliating. After a night of unrestrained drinking Carl realizes their differences are irreconcilable and that they cannot continue. The next morning, while they are having sex at Nina’s instigation, Askildsen tells us, “He remembered, and wanted to resist, otherwise what had been done would be undone.” But it’s too late, the wrongs of the past are suddenly forgotten, and they end up back where they started. And in “A Sudden Liberating Thought,” an apparently random encounter between two old men on a park bench leads to repeated meetings and many companionable discussions, until it is revealed that the two are linked by an experience from the past, which makes it impossible for them to go on meeting. Askildsen’s outlook on human nature is bleak and much of his writing is dour, but we find humour in these stories as well, usually when a character attempts to decipher another’s motivations or anticipate someone’s next move. The stories are relentlessly engaging, filled with startling moments of illumination and stark realization, and Sean Kinsella’s translation is nothing short of masterful. Everything Like Before is a remarkable collection, and Archipelago Books deserves kudos for making the work of this exceptional European writer available to North American readers.

The world of David Huebert’s second collection of short fiction, Chemical Valley, is a poisonous, inhospitable place. In some respects, as we turn these pages, it’s easy to imagine we’re visiting a future world: the one that awaits our elder selves and our descendants should humans continue to obliterate CO2-absorbing flora and allow toxic effluents and emissions to pour unchecked into the land, sea and air. One might assume that the author intends these tales of struggle and longing in a tarnished landscape to be cautionary: prognostications of environmental cataclysm, annihilation at our own hands. But as we read, what David Huebert is really telling us becomes clear: this is the world in which we currently reside, and the confusion and desperation his characters experience as contaminants seep unseen into the earth and the biological slowly succumbs to the chemical is everyone’s here and now. This is serious business. But though the messaging is palpable, there is nothing heavy-handed in his approach: no doomsday declaration, no portentous drumbeat. In Chemical Valley, as in his previous volume of stories, Peninsula Sinking, David Huebert’s knack for creating engaging characters and finding interesting things for them to say, do and think is on abundant, boisterous display. Huebert’s characters are Every-man and -woman, people whose daily rituals, quandaries and tribulations mirror our own. The narrator of the title story, set in Sarnia—hub of Canada’s petrochemical industry and nicknamed “Chemical Valley”—works at a processing plant. His partner, Eileen, is off work, suffering from a mysterious, debilitating malady. With the indifference of his employer as a backdrop, we witness him floundering under domestic and professional pressures while grappling with manifestations of community contamination, so widespread they have infiltrated his home. “Swamp Thing” tells the story of teenage Sapphire. Bouncing between her separated parents, embroiled in a clandestine affair with her female English teacher, Sapphire and her friends Dee Dee and Jenna are members of the ultra-climate-change-conscious generation meeting the disastrous consequences of the previous generation’s environmental profligacy head on. The story, set during a punishing heatwave, chronicles Sapphire’s emotional awakening through a series of catastrophic climate/environmental incidents, culminating in “a super-flare, a major melt-down, and a death at the plant.” Elsewhere in the book we encounter Deepa, a young mother barely coping with a recalcitrant newborn, a complacent husband and a rodent infestation (“Cruelty”), a reluctant hockey enforcer whose personal life is a mess (“Six Six Two Fifty”), Zane, whose partner Geoff is obsessively preparing for the coming environmental apocalypse (“SHTF”), and fifty-year-old socially-challenged Edward, bullied all his life, afflicted with a maddening fungal skin infection, whose man-made companion (the GenuFlesh XS-4000, “a fully customizable” “anthropomorphic robobride”), named Lily, is just about done for, worn out by his constant need (“The Pit”). Throughout the book, Huebert’s prose shines, frequently catching the reader off guard with startling but memorable turns of phrase and delirious imaginative leaps. And while the manic energy, eccentric humour and wry observations on life and love keep us entertained, the book’s rich emotional core draws us in, touching us at the most profound level.

David Huebert writes in a pulsating, kinetic contemporary voice. Still at an early point in his career, he has complete command of his craft. These quirky, artfully composed stories are a gift worth savouring.

The sudden decision of a young woman to become vegetarian has dire consequences in Korean author Han Kang’s first work to be translated into English (brilliantly by Deborah Smith). The book is divided into three short sections. In the first we meet Yeong-hye, who is married to Mr. Cheong. Mr. Cheong doesn’t like disruption: one of the reasons he married Yeong-hye was because she is “unremarkable.” Their life together is placid and holds no surprises, until the day he returns home to find her throwing away all the meat in the freezer. She informs him she’s become vegetarian and when he presses her for a reason, she tells him that she’s been visited by a violent, bloody recurring dream. The change creates a deep rift in the marriage, and, later, a savage confrontation with her father leaves Yeong-hye injured and hospitalized. In part two, “Mongolian Mark,” Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law is an artist obsessed with the human body. He convinces Yeong-hye, now living on her own and, after her earlier trauma, in a fragile mental state, to take part in a project that requires her to be filmed naked. And in part three, “Flaming Trees,” Yeong-hye, institutionalized and refusing to eat, is visited by her older sister, In-hye, at the facility where she’s being treated. The Vegetarian is infused with a profound sense of loss and excruciating melancholy. Yeong-hye’s behaviour comes under a microscope: other characters are unable to accept her actions and obsessively try to decipher her motives and figure out why she is destroying herself. They claim to want to help her, but from the moment she makes her decision, almost every human interaction that Yeong-hye endures is a form of violation. This concise narrative is delightfully enigmatic, deeply disturbing and psychologically rich. It generates great suspense as well as a uniquely creepy urgency. The questions that swirl around Yeong-hye’s mysterious desires have to do with asserting control over one’s body. Who, other than oneself, has the right to make those decisions? Han Kang has written a haunting, mesmerizing, nightmarish work of fiction that readers will not easily forget.

∞

Finally, four exquisite retrospective titles, modern classics. These books, written by iconic 20th- and 21st-century authors of fiction, are recommended enthusiastically and without reservation.

Margaret Drabble’s second novel, published in the UK in 1964 when the author was twenty-five, is an account of a troubled period in the marriage of a young couple, David and Emma Evans, parents of toddler Flora and infant Joseph. The family lives in London. But David, a professional actor, must go to where the work is, and when he is invited by a famous producer named Wyndham Farrar to take part in a theatre festival in rural Hereford, he accepts. His insistence that Emma, the children, and their French au pair Pascal, accompany him into the countryside for several months causes some tension because to do this Emma must decline a prestigious newsreader opportunity with a television network, a position just offered to her and that, after three years of marriage and a long and exhausting period devoted to meeting the relentless demands of two young children, she had been eager to accept. But this is the 1960s, and Emma dutifully relents in order to support her husband’s ambitions, but not without some bitterness. Emma narrates the story of her Hereford adventures with ironic, clear-eyed and occasionally ruthless honesty—honesty that extends to herself. Emma—intelligent, observant, consummately self-aware—readily admits that she is something of a spoiled brat, accustomed to nice things and the abundant distractions that a cultural hub like London offers. She hates the house in Hereford where the family takes up residence. Easily bored, she finds provincial life tedious and avoids mingling with the town’s inhabitants. She has little patience for people she regards as foolish and, when it suits her, can be pointedly, unapologetically rude without any thought for consequences. But Emma is also beautiful (before marrying David she had spent time modeling) and despite her misanthropic tendencies people are attracted to her. In Hereford, with rehearsal and performance commitments, David is preoccupied and short-tempered. He has little time for her and no patience for the children. Emma’s social circle is limited to Pascal and David’s theatre colleagues, many of whom she finds tiresome. But a notable exception is producer Wyndham Farrar, a man twenty years her senior, with whom, almost without trying, she strikes up a friendship. Flattered by Wyndham’s chivalrous attentions, amused by his world-weary cynicism, and driven by a perverse and vengeful impulse to inflict pain on David, she lets the relationship flourish and evolve into a dalliance. The drama unfolds in a leisurely fashion and throughout the novel Drabble’s prose is poised, elegant and brimming with witty asides and sardonic observations on love and marriage. When the messy denouement arrives, it’s not exactly a surprise, but it still lands with a clatter and causes great damage and emotional fallout. As in her first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage, in her second Margaret Drabble devotes her attention to the two issues that would inform her fiction for years to come: the role of women in society and the tensions between the sexes. The novel addresses profound themes, but for all its seriousness and social consciousness, The Garrick Year is also a delightful entertainment and, without any doubt, the product of a mature and sophisticated talent.

Like her first novel, Owls Do Cry, Janet Frame’s second novel draws on the author’s personal history. Istina Mavet, a 20-year-old schoolteacher suffering from a nervous disorder, is placed in Cliffhaven, a mental institution for women. Frame writes in Istina’s voice: in the various wards where she is confined, every observation, every experience, comes to us through the distorted lens of Istina’s troubled perspective. Istina’s story takes place in the days before anti-psychotic drugs (late 1940s, early 1950s), at a time when mental patients were regarded as subhuman and feeble-minded inhabitants of society’s fringe. Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) was in the ascendant as a preferred treatment. At Cliffhaven, Istina is a first-hand witness to ECT being used to alter the behaviour of oversensitive and “difficult” patients and endures the threat of ECT by overworked nurses and staff to encourage compliance. In Istina’s narrative, the suffering of patients is vividly portrayed: their futile struggles against forced treatments, their confusion, tears of despair and inarticulate raving when their greatest fears are realized and all seems lost. Wards are dominated by fear—patients live in terror of being sent “for treatment,” of being put in restraints, of punishment, of humiliation. Every morning Istina wakes fearful, not knowing if the dread command, “No breakfast for you, young lady. You’re for treatment!” will be directed her way. But Faces in the Water is not a horror show from start to finish: not all the hospital staff are ogres, not all the patients are helpless victims. The reader will find a balanced ebb and flow to Istina’s account of her 10-year journey to wellness, and her descriptions of the staff and other patients—their survival strategies, obsessions and tragic delusions—are fascinating and often very moving. The novel is episodic in structure: each short chapter has an individual focus, an event or entertainment that Istina attends, or the quirky behaviour of one of the other patients, or an encounter with a medical professional. Istina begins her therapy at Cliffhaven, leaves to be with her family “up north,” but her symptoms return and she is again institutionalized, this time at Treecroft. Ultimately, she returns to Cliffhaven. It is during her second confinement at Cliffhaven that a new progressive attitude begins to reshape the handling of the mentally ill, leading to more humane treatment, and Istina is permitted to exercise more freedoms and engage with the outside world. Frame’s polished and highly imaginative prose carries the reader through even the most gut-wrenching scenes, often reaching astonishing lyrical heights. The writing is rich in metaphor and crammed with startling and memorable visual details. Harrowing but beautiful, Faces in the Water is a landmark in the literature of mental illness and in 1961 confirmed Janet Frame’s growing stature on the international literary scene as a writer whose work was attracting critical praise in addition to a wide readership.

A masterful and seminal work of prose fiction, Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women explores the place of women in mid-20th-century society and pivots on the gradual awakening of narrator Del Jorden to the realization that there is more to being female than catering to the needs of men. Resembling a collection of linked stories more so than a standard novel, Munro’s deeply felt, minutely observed narrative describes Del’s pre-teen and teenage years growing up in Jubilee, a small town in rural Ontario, in the years before, during and immediately following World War II. On the surface, Del’s upbringing does not challenge the boundaries of convention. Her father is an unassertive man who supports his family by raising foxes for pelts. Her mother is a housewife who has known hardship. But there is nothing conventional about Del’s approach to life, which is skeptical and outward-looking. Del’s intrepid, tireless curiosity is driven primarily by her vivacious, opinionated mother, who harbours lofty ambitions for her brainy daughter. (Indeed, as presented to the reader, Del’s father is little more than a cipher and plays a minimal role in her childhood.) In the opening story, “The Flats Road,” Del is living with her mother, father and younger brother Owen outside Jubilee on a shabby property where her father keeps his foxes and a few other animals. It is a neighbourhood populated by misfits and eccentrics where everyone is poor. Later on, Del has moved into Jubilee with her mother where they live in a rented house on River Street. Her mother takes in boarders, and, in “Princess Ida,” has embarked on a career selling encyclopedias. For Del on the cusp of womanhood, her mother—who does not attend church and expresses an acute disdain bordering on hostility for organized religion—who loves opera and pushes her daughter to excel at school—is a source of pride, embarrassment and inspiration. The novel chronicles the growth of Del’s complex interior life along with her occasionally reckless forays in the external world, and depicts her sexual awakening, her evolving attitude toward boys and love and the mysterious world beyond Jubilee that, she comes to realize, will nurture her but also try to crush her. The novel shows us Del’s struggles with her maturing body and the triumphs and misadventures that shape her into a self-aware young woman with a loving heart who values knowledge and independence. Lives of Girls and Women is a truthful, candid, supremely intelligent novel. Sometimes shocking, it is elegantly written with humour and irony. This is a novel that confronts human desire and depravity head on. It is not Alice Munro’s style to cushion the blow, to spare her characters suffering. Del Jordan often fails, sometimes in spectacular fashion. Her struggles are universal and sear themselves on the reader’s memory. Del Jordan is one of the most authentically human fictional characters you will ever encounter. Once you’ve read her story you will not forget her.

The Aunt’s Story, Patrick White’s powerful, psychologically complex, stylistically challenging third novel, probes the life of a tragically unfulfilled woman in early 20th-century Australia. In part one, Meroë, we meet Theodora Goodman, born into privilege and raised in a household clinging to the stuffy remnants of Victorian England. Her father, a landowner, is a neutral presence in her childhood and for the most part emotionally absent, while her mother—domineering, eternally dissatisfied and unfeeling—does not bother to conceal her preference for Theodora’s prettier, vivacious sister Fanny. For her part Theodora, plain, dour and conditioned by her mother’s casual cruelties to think poorly of herself, is content to exist in Fanny’s shadow. Theodora’s youthful attraction to a neighbour, Frank Parrott, goes undeclared. Years later, convinced of her own lack of worth, she rejects the overtures of a wealthy suitor. With Fanny married to Frank and raising two children, when her father dies Theodora is left to care for her mother, which she does uncomplainingly for years until her mother’s death. In part two, Jardin Exotique, newly liberated Theodora, at the age of forty-five, has embarked on a world tour, which takes her to various destinations, eventually depositing her in 1930s Paris, in a hotel where she meets and interacts with a group of needy, narcissistic, neurotic individuals of various nationalities. And in part three, Holstius, her European adventures at an end after the hotel burns down, Theodora, while crossing the United States by train on her way home, contemplates with something like horror the drab, solitary future awaiting her. Suddenly and inexplicably, compelled by a strange restlessness and sense of foreboding, she disembarks somewhere in the mid-west, wanders into a small town, and attempts to make a home for herself in an abandoned house at the top of a hill. In outline, the novel sounds like a sad and pathetic life story: a lonely spinster who has endured a stifled existence and made a habit of suppressing her emotions finally loses her marbles. In fact, The Aunt’s Story is a mesmerizing and disturbing novel of great originality, wit and candour. The angular, tortured, surrealistic qualities of Patrick White’s prose are for the reader startling and frequently disorienting, but undeniably captivating. We experience everything through Theodora’s eyes in a kind of distorted interior monologue—something like a funhouse mirror. This distortion is most pronounced in the middle section, Jardin Exotique, where we see that Theodora’s self-loathing and cloistered, repressed existence have made her withholding and secretive, fearful of ridicule, and that she has become someone who lacks the emotional vocabulary to form meaningful bonds with other people. She shares little about herself with those she meets at the Hôtel du Midi, instead allowing herself to be drawn into their dramas and petty feuds and seeming to live vicariously through the stories they tell about themselves. By the time her journey takes her to America, her grip on reality has become tenuous and she is hallucinating. The novel is without doubt a work of uncompromising genius. Maybe not everything in these pages works, but in 1948 Patrick White is taking enormous risks as he strives to push prose fiction into a realm of deeper psychological richness.