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One of the best books I have read during lockdown is Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo, a funny and punchy novel detailing the interconnected life experiences of twelve (mostly) black British women. Deftly exploring poignant themes of feminism and race, the novel gives a voice to those who have been underrepresented within British fiction. Alongside its refreshing narrative, one of the most striking features of this novel is the lack of conventional punctuation. Full stops, capital letters and speech marks are all scrapped in favour of emphatic line breaks and commas, both of which are used to tightly control the speed and rhythm of the prose: “while dancing/ for herself/ out of it/ out of her head/ out of her body/ feeling it/ freeing it/ nobody watching/ nobody judging”. Printed almost as verse, the narrative favours a close interiority of the characters: it is almost a stream of consciousness which mixes narration, dialogue, and internal monologue. ....
World literature In 2021, we will hopefully see theatres back open again. One of last year’s anticipated happenings that didn’t happen was the premiere of Zadie Smith’s first play, The Wife of Willesden, an adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath. If it doesn’t get to the stage anytime soon, never fear, Hamish Hamilton are publishing the manuscript in June. It will be interesting to see what Smith does with the bawdy poetry of Chaucer. Jonathan Franzen isn’t known for breaking the fourth wall, but his new novel sounds faintly metafictional. Crossroads (4th Estate, October) is the first in a trilogy called The Key to All Mythologies. That name, of course, is taken from a book the insufferable Casaubon never finishes in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Crossroads spans three generations of the Hildebrandt family during the second half of the 20th century. Franzen is often called America’s greatest living novelist, which he’s not, because there isn� ....
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