Friday Five: Books Read in June

1. The Morningside by Téa Obreht (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) - The Morningside is an apartment building in a future dystopian world in an unnamed country where rising sea levels have flooded much of the land. Silvia is an eleven-year-old child whose mother manages the apartment. They are refugees who have arrived as part of a humanitarian scheme which sends children to school but offers little else in the way of welfare. She encounters another girl, Mila, who seems to have much more privilege, and they have adventures which are hauntingly unpleasant. The world created is sketchy as seen through a veil of imagination and terrifying fairy tales (Silvia's aunt Ena tells her magical folktales) and the young person narration shifts the reader’s focus. This is true magical realism in which the reader should go with the flow rather than swim against the (rising) tide. 
2. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown (Vintage) - Written as social anthropoly, this book studies each Native American tribe's relation to and treatment by the American government. The litany of lies, deceptions, broken promises and massacres are overwhelming as the settlers keep pushing West, plundering resources and dispossessing the Indigenous population of their land and livelihood. We know the names of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Red Cloud and Geronimo, and this fills in their stories with ever-depressing detail. It has an elegiac tone as it focuses on defeat and victimisation. "Their musical names remained forever fixedon the American land, but their bones were forgotten in a thousand burned villages or lost in forests fast disappearing before the axes of twenty million invaders." While this book, first published in 1970, undoubtedly changed the way Native Americans were viewed (savages and brutal warriors), the narrative maintains a tragic death of their culture rather than propounding the vibrancy of their survival. 
3. Psykhe by Kate Forsythe (Vintage) - This begins as an interesting history then rapidly descends to teen-fantasy quest using the myth as a narrative structure. Natalie Haynes, Kamila Shamsie and Madeline Miller are all doing interesting things with myth – Kate Forsythe is not. She tells the story of Eros and Psyche as a template for the Beauty and the Beast fairytale, set in the fifth century BC. Her focus on Estruscan life draws unfavourable parallels with Ursula Le Guin's Lavinia, as she offers up recognisable history without contemporary interest, and the fantastic decriptions of lavish settings are strangely underwhelming, like those of biblical tales. She then attempts to retrofit feminism with passages about the lack of self-determination for women, but succumbs to a conventional narrative in which the supposed passion and desire present more like coercive control. "He had never let me see his face; he had come and left in darkness, he would not let me know his name. I had been kept locked in, forbidden to see or speak to anyone else.” It is rather perfunctory and lifeless and adds little to the ever-increasing canon of mythical revisionism.
4. The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (Penguin) - Living in a colonised country, one notes strong parallels with the themes in this novel of contested ownership and possession. Isabel lives in the family house in the Netherlands with no real understanding of its origin or how they came by it. She and her younger brother, Hendrik, mockingly discuss their older sibling, Louis, knowing that he will inherit the home when he marries, and that Isabel merely inhabits it on suffrance until that time comes. When Louis, dumps his graceless girlfriend, Eva, on her doorstep, Isabel is initially repulsed by and later drawn into a relationship with her, which is almost Chekovian in its repressed passion and unspoken trauma. There is aching loneliness and explosive sexuality in this stifling millieu of 1960s middle Europe with a focus on atmosphere and undercurrents rather than superficial storytelling.