Summer Catch-up #2

The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds

The Golden Notebook remains perhaps my all time favourite book for many reasons, and I've spoken to many people over the past year about mental health issues and how these are finally coming to the fore in news, politics and medical treatment. During one of these discussions, and having mentioned how much I love literature that explores these issues, a friend recommended The Quickening Maze. 

I devoured this in about 4 days on holiday. It's an easy and quick read, but no less hard hitting than it should be. Based in a  19th century asylum, the book explores the relationship between control, power, and treatment that dictated attitudes and responses to mental health. Greed and monetary ambition drives the owners of the asylum, resulting in horrific abuse and disrespect of the patients. The variation of voices and seamless flowing between people's experiences and the natural surroundings of the forest allow the decline of the patients' mental health to come through effectively and movingly. It's hard to know, by the end of the book, what's truth and what's in the characters' imagination, and the reader is left feeling the importance of understanding mental health in order to help people.

Essentially a historical book, Foulds still manages to enlighten opinions of mental health in today's society, conveying the ahistorical personality and behaviour behind the stereotypes of the Victorian asylum

My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante

Two things have become obvious to me about my reading tastes since starting this blog: 1) I can't resist a good bildungsroman (coming of age novel) or biography, and 2) I love any kind of story set in a culture other than my own. My Brilliant Friend promised to be both these things, and was raved about here and across the pond - we've all seen the New Yorker review. Obviously, I eagerly put it on my birthday list. Just before I started it, I read a somewhat scathing review on The Guardian, but if the New York Review had called Ferrante 'one of the great novelists of our time' it must be worth reading, right?

I was firstly disappointed by the descriptive element, or lack thereof. Ferrante heavily emphasises the setting of Naples wherever she can, with its violence and poverty, but it comes across as rather...superficial. I didn't come away with a sense, or even an image, of the place in which the book is set - one of the main promises that drew me in. The central relationship between Lila and Elena is at times affecting and moving - we can all empathise and relate to complex friendships at any age, and their growth through adolescence, together and singly, was the highlight of the book. 

Being a trilogy, I was expecting to want to pick up the next instalment almost immediately. And I did...for about five minutes. Since finishing the book, I can barely remember the characters' names, and look back on it as rather 1 dimensional - a shame as with some more in-depth development I could have really loved this book.

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Other summer reading highlights include: What Maisie Knew by Henry James (intriguingly narrated and very challenging), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (subtle and full of inferences, populated with characters we can all relate to, as I've come to expect from Spark) and Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham (hilarious).