Worms Best Reads of July 2023
CAITLIN Mcloughlin
Corey Fah Does Social Mobility by Isabel Waidner
I found myself gripping tightly to this book as I was reading, tugged left and right, dragged down wormholes, through timelines and alternate realities. As with Waidner’s previous novels it's set in a familiar yet surreal urban landscape. Here a 1930s mystical forest creeps in at the edges, even more familiar yet distinctly more surreal creatures materialise: a hyperactive and sex crazed bunny rabbit called Fumper and Bambi Pavok, a distant relative of the original Bambi, but he’s half deer half spider, cute but blood thirsty. Narrator and hero Corey Fah is cynical and a bit grumpy and also the recent winner of literary prize The Award for the Fictionalisation of Social Evils, however, with the trophy missing the life changing £10,000 prize money cannot be released. Their sweeter and more optimistic partner Drew is starting to get sick of their shit, but still throws their all into trying to retrieve the missing trophy. In the process they let loose Fumper and Bambi Pavok and bring them back to their and Corey’s flat on Sociální Estate. When Corey takes Bambi Pavok on a chat show hosted by the allusive Sean St Orton all hell breaks loose and the stakes of their mission to find the trophy are raised. I feel like this all sounds like total chaos, and it kind of is, but as with all Waidner’s writing it’s totally immersive and somehow it all feels totally believable. Like when Bambi Pavok starts working at his father, False Widower of the Forest’s fast food chain it makes total sense – ah yes, of course. It’s definitely not without Waidner’s dry humour and I found myself laughing out loud throughout, but it also gets at the pressures and injustices faced by a working class writer and particularly one occupying a marginalised queer identity. £10,000 is a lot of money and with or without it, the immense pressure Corey feels to ‘make the prize count’ and ensure it kick-starts their career before the next year’s winner is announced, is overwhelming.
Arcadia Molinas
The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng
If I had a penny for everytime I said how good this book was out loud, I’d have enough pennies for an egg and cress, plain salty crisps and a small Revitalising Innocent juice from your local Tesco’s AT LEAST. I hope my choice in a meal deal doesn’t reflect poorly on my taste in books because The Garden of Evening Mists is truly one of a kind. Rarely do I read a book where every detail is so well tended for and that repeatedly surprises with its ambitious, multidimensional portrayal of such a wide range of subjects.
The conflict at the heart of the book is that between remembering and forgetting, love and hate, war and peace, and how those antithetical constructs blur into one another throughout the course of one’s life. The protagonist, Malayan of Chinese descent Yun Ling is plagued by the grey areas as she revists Yugiri, a Japanese garden designed by Aritomo, once the Japanese Emperor’s gardener, twenty years after her first visit. During the Japanese occupation of Malaya, Yun Ling was a prisoner at a concentration camp and forced to do unspeakable things in the name of survival. Her sister, who was imprisoned too, has a fascination with Japanese gardens that during their imprisonment, serves them as a fantasy world of escape for the brief moments they find to themselves. Her sister dies at the camp and Yun Ling vows to build her a garden in her memory and in order to do so, meets with Aritomo, the most knowledgeable gardener alive but of course, he is Japanese, and their meeting is fraught with tension from the outset. What ensues is a battle between trying to forget and struggling to remember and how life’s tides take you to one shore or the other as time wears down the rough edges and age takes the body and mind prisoner, permanently altering your relationship to reality.
I would describe this book as quiet. Seeds planted at the start of the book take their time in sprouting their flower, as they do in real life. After this book I read Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan, a fantastical telling of 20th century Indonesian history and I was shocked at the disparity between their representations of women and the ordeals women endure in wartime. Both the authors are men and in the case of Beauty is a Wound this fact is a detriment to the book. Tan Twan Eng on the other hand, writes a character who is profound, scarred by her traumas but not defined by them and determined above all to control her own narrative. Stylistically, in its tempo and careful consideration of timing poignant reveals, it reminded me of Kazuo Ishigruo, whose The Remains of the Day worked in a similar way of driving the stake slowly into your heart, so slowly that when you close the book you’re shocked to find only the hole of the wound, so deep is it buried within you.
His new book, The House of Doors has been longlisted for the Booker Prize and I’m sure it’s bound to be another headfirst dive into meaty subjects that will leave no reader indifferent.
PIERCE ELDRIDGE
Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary is profound, an ode to how we should preserve memory in our darkest moments. A conversation between Toshio Meronek and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, the transcriptions of their many conversations offer an insight into the roots of Stonewall and speak to how movements are unmade at the hands of those who wish to kill us. The gift of this book rests in the empathy and determination of Miss Major, to and for all of her ‘gurls’ as she shares her history with activism and her visions for the future; uninhibitedly, carelessly, yet sealed with pure love. This is one of those ones, an epic. Cried so much reading this.
