Book Recommendations: December

Fiction

Octavia Butler, Kindred

Through compelling first-person narration, Octavia Butler crafts a tale of history and humanity, weaving sci-fi and social justice with talent. Her protagonist, Dana, is mysteriously and repeatedly transported to antebellum Maryland. As a black woman with a white husband, Dana encounters many layers of difficulty with this new, forced dynamic created by her sudden awareness of her own history. With thoughtful consideration and through an exciting narrative, Butler represents the scar of slavery on the collective American psyche.

The time, the year, was right, but the house just wasn’t familiar enough. I felt as though I was losing my place here in my own time.

Through this narrative of unavoidably intertwined narratives, and shared memory and trauma, Butler explores how history is often much closer to the present than we would like to think, and how a violent past can so easily rear its ugly head. The past bursts in on Dana and she is spontaneously ripped from her world and into another. As readers, we can draw parallels between this and the repetitions of racist history that still continue in the present: no-knock warrants and police brutality (police who originate in escaped slave patrols) still invade the home and transport it abruptly into a violent past. As Dana spends more time in the past, the lines blur between plantation house and contemporary home, and the fragile border between security and entrapment is distorted.

After Kevin is once accidentally transported alongside Dana, and subsequently trapped in 18th-century America for 5 years without her, Dana sees shadows of the slave master within him. Through this, Butler successfully symbolises the complexities of interracial relationships, even in contemporary times. Dana is forced to recognise the tensions at work in her own relationships, and the reader comes to think around these power dynamics too, thanks to Butler's nuanced and thoughtful portrayal.

He pulled away from me and walked out of the room. The expression on his face was like something I’d seen, something I was used to seeing on Tom Weylin. Something closed and ugly.

The unpredictability of the narrative and the realism of its characters kept me hooked and the ending left me simultaneously satisfied and frustrated. Octavia Butler is an imaginative, talented storyteller and this book was an incredible exploration of the fraught and unavoidable connection between past and present.

David Nicholls, Us

In Us, Nicholls crafts a tale of relationship breakdown: beautiful, humorous and heartbreaking all in one go. The beauty of this book is its positivity and sense of warmth despite the somewhat-tragic events and characters it centres around.

With a sense of a tightly-knit pair of strings gradually unravelling, Nicholls perfectly captures the sadness, but also the catharsis and warm nostalgia, of the breakdown of a marriage through flashbacks and reflections throughout. What stuck with me most were the words of the protagonist's soon-to-be ex-wife:

"It was not a mistake! That’s the whole point. It was not! I have never thought that it was a mistake, never ever, and I have never regretted it since and I never will. Meeting you and marrying you, that was by far the best thing I ever did [...] You are a wonderful man, Douglas, you are, and you have no idea how much I love you and loved being married to you. You made me laugh and taught me things and you made me happy, and now you’ll be my wonderful, brilliant ex-husband. [...] And the fact that you and I didn’t last forever, well, you have to stop thinking of that as failure or defeat. It feels awful now, I know, but this is not the end of your world, Douglas. It is not. It is not."

I love this because it so perfectly captures the mixed emotions of the end of a relationship; we can beat ourselves up, we can be frustrated and heartbroken, but eventually we come to appreciate, albeit with a sense of melancholy nostalgia, the profound effect that a relationship can have on our personal journey, on our ability to connect and grow and become.

The juxtaposition of past and present tense in the line 'how much I love you and loved being married to you' perfectly captures how feelings of love jar with, and cannot be constrained by, the rigid and clear-cut timeframes of marriage and divorce, of past and present, of opening and close. The end of a relationship is not an end, but a transformation and a repositioning. Where so many romantic narratives end when the couple get together, Nicholls explores all the stuff after: the real-life sadness and the laughter and the anger that all go hand in hand, and does so with grace, sensitivity and good humour.

Non-Fiction: Documentary

Netflix, Disclosure

I spoke about this in my previous post, but I just wanted to reiterate here how important, interesting and illuminating this documentary is. As it states near the beginning, 80% of Americans don't personally know a trans person. The result of this is that the majority of Americans (and I imagine Brits too) get their perceptions of the trans community from mainstream media representations. These representations, as this documentary shows, are biased and ill-informed.

What this documentary does then, is clearly collate, analyse and provide insight on the representation of trans people in film and TV, from as early as the first pieces of cinema in the early 20th century. When we see this history, we can begin to understand society's general hostility towards trans people. From Hitchcock's Psycho, to The Silence of the Lambs, transness has been repeatedly portrayed alongside tendencies for psychosis and murder.

The transgender interviewees also intelligently analyse contemporary representations, such as the critically-acclaimed The Danish Girl. They argue that while Eddie Redmayne was very successful in his portrayal of transness, having cis men play trans women contributes to the idea that transness is a performance, something to be put on and taken off. By having trans people play trans characters in films more often, they say, the occasional clumsy representation doesn't matter so much, because it doesn't form a whole nation's idea of what it means to be transgender.

If you don't know any trans people (or even if you do), I would highly recommend this documentary as an accessible way to broaden your understanding of this highly marginalised part of society, and allow for the presence of trans voices in mainstream media and cinema analysis.