Highbrow and Lowbrow

'Winter' by Ali Smith is one of a quartet of 'seasonal' novels. Art is going home for Christmas, but has broken up with his girlfriend Charlotte and does not want to admit this to his mother, so he meets a random girl and offers to pay her to pretend to be Charlotte. It made me think somewhat of 'The Accidental', where a young woman invades a family holiday, really gets under their skin and causes all sorts of bother. It is quite an interesting literary device to put an outsider into a family situation to disrupt it, they are free to say and observe things without the tensions that exists between people who have a long history. I enjoyed reading it but it didn't leave a strong impression on me as when I picked it up to review I could not recall anything much about it.

I'm not sure if this is how you get to be taken seriously as a writer but putting weird stuff in your novels certain seems to work for some people. Here is Sophia (Art's mother) interacting with the disembodied head that has been floating around with her for a few days (no explanation given) (and the notion of a 'handkerchief drawer' is so wonderful, I know my parents had one in their dressing table):

"Then it had given her a singular thank-you glance, after which it removed, as if by magic, all expression whatsoever from itself, dimmed into a colourless statue like the blank-eyes face of an ancient stone Roman.

More of its hair had come loose on the pillow in a semicircle around it. She'd gathered up the hair and put it in its substantial clumps on the bedside table. The newly visible top of the head's head, which the hair had covered till now, was very pale, fragile looking as a child's fontanelle. So she'd got up and found a large handkerchief at the back of the handkerchief drawer. She wrapped it round the top of the head in case the head was cold without its hair. She got back into bed and put the bedside light out. The near-bald head had smiled at her and glowed in the dark in its new turban as if lit by Rembrandt, as if Rembrandt had painted the child Simone de Beauvoir." (p.108)

'The Husbands' by Holly Gramazio (who naturally has her own website) was surreal in a totally different way. Lauren does not seem that interested in being married, but her attic has other ideas. She comes home from her friend's hen night to find a 'husband' in her flat. All the photographic evidence on her phone seems to indicate that she is indeed married to this person. But when he pops up into the attic a different husband comes back down. And so it goes... Men arrive, if she doesn't like the look of them, or they have an annoying habit, she sends them back up. Then she gets attached to one ... only for him to go hunting for wedding photographs and get swapped out. As opposed to the notion of there being one special person out there who will complete you, the book is trying to make the case for the idea that actually there are endless people who you could potentially fall in love with and spend your life with, but I ended up feeling that the magic attic dehumanised the potential husbands, and Lauren treated them as disposable. In some alternate universes other people's lives were different too and she was often more upset about that than the person who she was with. So, then she goes in search of the one who got away (the men all exist in real life and have their own lives apart from her), only to be rebuffed. Then ... one of them breaks his ankle climbing down the ladder and she is stuck with him. Not only that he is not keen on going back up. Lauren is forced to take drastic action. I read this book in about three sittings and enjoyed it immensely, it was so silly. 

"She wants Carter back.

She sends Pete away and gets a husband with weird-shaped elbows. The one after that has an accent that reminds her of Carter's and that seems like a bad idea. Then a man who is red-eyed and hung over and attempting to resolve the issue by having two different beers at once. Then a man who is maybe ten years older than her and the house is too clean, honestly, and the shelves are empty, where are her books? Where's the little cactus pot she made with Elena?

She is aware she's being unfair.

Okay. She tells the too clean husband that she's going out for a walk, and heads away from the railway station and up the hill to the park, where she dodges happy families and dog-walkers, heads to the lake, looks at ducks. She's vague on the details of duck mating but she knows it's unpleasant and involves a corkscrew-shapes penis, so arguably things could be worse.

Under a tree, out of the drizzle, she tries to talk herself out of feeling bad: she barely knew Carter, this isn't a divorce, this is like a third date with someone who never replies to your message. But even if she didn't know him well they were still married, the third date became a thirtieth and a three hundredth, became a life." (p.110)

Stay safe. Be kind. Read for fun sometimes.