Books

I’m reposting here some of the book reviews I originally posted on Facebook. I’m trying to pick out those books that I loved the most and this is certainly one. I said in the original interview that it’s not an easy read but, upon reflection, I don’t think that’s true. Once you get used to her style, the book moves right along. Here’s my original review…

I just finished reading “Milkman” by Anna Burns, winner of the 2018 Man-Booker Prize (awarded annually for the best original novel written in English and published in the UK.) It’s a wonderful book that I really liked but it’s not for everyone. It’s told in an digressive, ruminative manner with repetitions and explanations that jump around in time – a bit like stream of consciousness but easier to read.The narrator is an unnamed young woman in an unnamed city in Northern Ireland during ‘The Troubles’ in the 1970s when sectarian violence threatened to overwhelm everything. Not only is the narrator unnamed (she’s referred to as ‘Middle Sister’) but so is everyone else. the city in which she lives is unnamed, England is referred to as ‘the country-across-the-water’ and characters are referred to by their habits or their relationship to the narrator (First Sister, Maybe-Boyfriend, Tablets Girl). The people who run her ‘area’ are the ‘Renouncers of the State’ or just Renouncers who wear balaclavas or masks, identify and execute informers and battle the police and the soldiers of the country-across-the-water.The namelessness is superstitious and futile. The idea that if you don’t name something it won’t have power over you. But everything about you gives away your allegiance even to the tea you drink: “There is “[t]he right butter. The wrong butter. The tea of allegiance. The tea of betrayal.” Middle Sister tries to hide from all of this (or merely survive) by shutting it out – reading only 19th century books because she hates the 20th century. Her life changes when she is approached by The Milkman who is a high ranking person in the Renouncers and though she tries to ignore him, he keeps showing up and everyone thinks she is ‘with him’. Her paranoia grows as does the gossip around her but she keeps going and her sense of humor and wry observations of the people and customs and goings-on around her keep us going. The author’s use of words is wonderful – they are wonderful words, piled on top of one another in glorious heaps. Her dad’s depressions were “big, massive, scudding, whopping, black-cloud, infectious, crow, raven, jackdaw, coffin-upon-coffin, catacomb-upon-catacomb, skeletons-upon-skulls-upon-bones crawling along the ground to the grave type of depressions.”The whole plot is compressed into the novel’s first sentence, but it’s such an enigmatic declaration that we won’t understand it for more than 300 pages: “The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died.” I loved this book but it takes some time and a bit of effort. You should really read this book. It’s available on the Maryland Digital Library.