Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors

I picked this book in my library because I had been seeing it everywhere for a while – a bit like it happened with Normal People back in the day – I wanted to know what all the fuzz was about.

After reading the blurb, I was mainly interested in two things. First, New York as the setting. I’m a city person (I was born in Madrid, after all) and New York is one of the most interesting cities I’ve ever been in. Second, this book focuses on the relationship between a woman and a man twenty years his senior. I am interested in relationships with a big age gap. I was born to one of those and I’ve been in one for almost a decade.

The first chapter was interesting – very sharp writing, good dialogue. It’s narrated from the perspectives of both Cleo and Frank (actually it took me a bit to get used to the switch of perspectives in the same chapter, but this happens all along the novel, so it wasn’t a problem in the end). Their encounter, on New Year’s Eve is quirky but sweet, and these two different characters are introduced by the way they dress and speak to each other.

Almost immediately we jump into a wedding scene. Cleo is twenty-four and Frank is forty-four. She’s a British painter who has moved to New York and is struggling to make a living on her art after finishing her university studies (I mean, yeah, as a fellow artist I sympathise, it’s a hard world out there). Frank is a successful marketing executive with his own company who’s starting to make big money. Ah, also, he’s an alcoholic.

The book focuses mainly on the disintegration of their marriage – they did marry a few months after meeting each other, which, if you ask me, it’s not the best idea, but it’s also said in the novel that Cleo needs to marry an American to get a green card and stay in the States, so that’s implied as a possible reason, even if she denies it at several points in the novel (also, no shame on that, I don’t really believe in marriage but I’d totally marriage to give someone citizenship or to obtain it).

Many of the chapters are told from the perspective of Cleo’s and Frank’s friends. Some perspectives I found more interesting than others and I wish Mellors had expanded more a few characters. For example, Cleo’s best friend is American-Polish Quentin, a gay man, inexplicable rich (apparently he comes from a wealthy family) struggling with his gender identity (it’s implied that he might be gender fluid and trans). There’s only one character who gets to narrate in the first person, and that is Eleanor, Frank’s employee. I wonder why the author chose to give her that ‘privilege’. She’s more similar to Cleo than it may seem – she’s quirky, creative, funny. She’s not as young or as beautiful, though. But she (spoiler ahead) ends up becoming Frank’s partner when Cleo and Frank end up divorcing. Which left me a bit disillusioned because I felt that she deserved much better. I also wanted to say an age gap relationship succeed for a change!

There was something about Cleo and Frank that I didn’t quite get. Cleo spends a lot of time regretting having married Frank and struggling with the fact that he’s an alcoholic but, couldn’t she realised that from the very beginning? I mean, how long does it take you to see that someone’s drinking patterns are a bit… excessive? And if you knew that, why would you marry them? Is it all the honey moon’s phase fault? Also, Frank, as miserable as he is, is also very rich, so he has the resources to treat his addiction (he just has to want to do it, which I understand is the tricky part).

This brings me to my main (highly personal) issue with this novel. Minor spoiler ahead, so beware. I can’t stand animal violence. Human violence? Sure, bring it on, I read a lot of horror. But animal violence? That’s a different issue. At a point in the story Frank has the brilliant idea of getting Cleo a pet because sure, if your relationship is starting to disintegrate a pet will fix it. Yeah. Because they live in a small apartment he gets her something called a sugar glider. I didn’t even know this animals existed but they are a sort flying-squirrel-gerbil. Super cute (which is why Frank picks it, everyone knows women like cute animals, right?) They are also illegal to breed, but of course that doesn’t stop him. I think that by know you know the sugar glider won’t meet a happy ending at Cleo and Frank’s house, but basically what happens is that Frank, being extremely drunk, does something that gets her (yes, she’s a female sugar glider) killed. At that point I started losing sympathy for both of them. Like, lot of sympathy.

There are a few dramatic incidents in the book but in the end the deus ex machina of sorts bothered me a bit too. Cleo ends up divorcing Frank which also means she loses her source of income because since they married he was supporting her completely so she could focus on her art. Which, in this day and age, really Cleo? Really? Of course she doesn’t do any art and instead gets depressed because her relationship is not all that great. I’ve always valued my own financial independence highly and personally, as tempting as it sounds, I’d never quit my job(s) unless writing was supporting me first. I also suspect that having a part-time job (at least) to get me out of the house is very beneficial for my own creative process. (I actually work full-time, as it’s very stressful, but if I could afford to I’d go back to part-time to have more writing time.) This extra income also allows you to be as risky as you want with your art because you don’t need to be pressured to make a certain amount of money every month.  

But guess what. Right after she divorces Frank Cleo happens to meet an old friend from her university days at New York. He’s a very famous artist (not like her) and uses his influence to get her a residency in Italy. So there she goes, and in the last chapter, when she and Frank meet again, she’s chilling in beautiful Italy, exhibiting her art in what must be one of the most beautiful countries in the world (I haven’t been in Italy, but I’d love to) while they have a bittersweet chat about their relationship.

That rang untrue to me. A bit too perfect, a bit too rosy. As an artist myself, yes, there are lucky moments, but that perfect timing, nah. In my experience, there’s a lot of juggling different jobs, of waking up ridiculously early or staying up ridiculously late to work on what we love the most. There are also lots of heart-crunching rejections and moments of desperation. We don’t normally get highly influential friends placing us in artist residencies in Italy right after a break-up. If only.

So. This is where I stand with this book. The writing was very good, sharp and witty; sometimes I didn’t connect with the intense moments as much as I should have but Mellors is a talented writer. The idea of focusing the story on the disintegration of a marriage (and the ripple effect it has in both Cleo and Frank’s social circles) is also a good one. Ans even if I found many of the characters frustrating I overall enjoyed this book.

Friendaholic by Elizabeth Day

I really enjoyed Day’s How To Fail which I read back when it came out. This was the time in my life when I was trying to get a permanent job in academia – as a Creative Writing lecturer – and failing at it – academia is almost as hard as the writing industry. I’d just finished a PhD and I didn’t know what to do with my life – well, yes, I knew I wanted a) a stable pay check or b) go to live off-grid in some distant island. The fact that this book focused on failing was refreshing – I also really enjoy her podcast, where she interviews famous people on their failures, rather than their successes. 

The topic of her second non-fiction book is friendship. I’m big on friendship, to me is more important than romantic relationship, and I wish there were more books and media focused on friendship and how complicated and beautiful friendships can be.

In this book Elizabeth Day confesses herself a ‘friendaholic’ – basically caring more about quantity than quality when it comes to friends – and decides to learn and reflect on friendship to try and cure this bad habit. The book starts during Covid-19’s lockdowns, when she realises she has less real friends than she thought. From then on, every chapter focuses on a different aspect of the topic of friendship, blending theory with her own personal experiences.

I loved many of the chapters of this book and I learned many valuable things. It also made me reflect on my own friendships – and I even found myself wondering, am I a good friend?

One of the most beautiful moments in the book recalls a conversation between Elizabeth and her friend Joan, who she met in LA. Both women have just met but have connected immediately (is it not great when that happens in friendship?) and they are talking about the fact that none of them have children. In Elizabeth’s case, this is not by choice, as she struggles with infertility and has had many miscarriages. Joan tells her that, if she wants to be a mother, she’ll be a mother, and it doesn’t really matter if she has children of her own or not. This scene in the book is an example of those powerful realisations we can have thanks to our friends, who challenge sometimes how we see things or show us new ways of understanding them. One can be a mother to friends, to children, to so many people in so many ways.

It’s actually quite touching to see that every chapter of this book features (and to an extent, is a dedication to) Day’s real friends. One of the final chapters is a love letter to her best friend Emma, which is quite touching. When talking about friendship, Day uses the words ‘platonic love’ a lot, and I resonate with her in that regard, yes, we all love our good friends platonically, that’s one of the most accurate way of describing it. The topic of best friends also made me reflect on how society often wants us to focus so much on our romantic partners but the figure of the ‘best friend’ seems childish, or even anti-anarchic and judgemental. Yet there can also be a person (or persons, if we are lucky, I suppose) who are out there for us no matter what, even though they may not be a romantic partner or be connected to use genetically.

Other chapters focused on darker topics, like being ghosted by a friend, breaking up a friendship and toxic friends. On the issue of ghosting I thought it was interesting – sad but enlightening – to hear Day’s perspective as a friend who has been ghosted with no explanation. 

In the end this book was a perfect blend of personal writing and theory behind friendship and the importance of having friends – placing an emphasis on quality before quantity. At the beginning of the book Day discusses her experience being bullied in secondary school – and she suspects that the consequence of that is a craving for acceptance and love from friendships – which has always pushed her to make as many friends as possible, even if that’s not sustainable. 

Another part of this book that I found interesting was the idea of having a friendship contract, which Day has taken from the reality show The Real Housewives (which I’ve never watched, but apparently Day is a fan). Putting terms in a friendship seems awkward, too artificial, yet it made me wish I could have conversations around boundaries and expectations with my closest friends. Not because I think our friendship isn’t working but the contrary: I want our friendship to be strong and to last as long as possible, and sometimes things that are left unsaid can fester with time in any kind of relationship. 

All in all, a book I enjoyed thoroughly, and I’m happy to see that there are more books being written about friendship.

Juliette or the Ghosts Return in the Spring by Camille Jourdy

I borrowed this graphic novel from my Mum, who picked it up at Forbidden Planet in London when we were there together earlier in August. The layout is quite interesting – each panel is a square, almost as if these were scenes in a film roll. It’s also beautifully coloured – I read in a review that the tone and the colours remind of Matisse, and I agree.

One of the reasons why Mum picked this graphic novel in particular was because the characters had real body types (her words, not mine) and she was glad to see that. This story is humane in many ways, not only in the depiction of its characters, but also in the themes that it discusses. 

This is, basically, the tale of a (flawed) family and how they are forced to deal with different ghosts (literally and figuratively) one spring. The character I found most interesting wasn’t Juliette (who gives title to the story) but Marylou, her older sister. Marylou is a married woman with two children who works as a caregiver and somehow needs to keep the family together (which includes her grandmother, who is suffering from dementia, plus her divorced parents who can’t stand each other and her sister Juliette who suffers from depression and anxiety) while she’s trying to conceal her love affair with a man who works at a party store that sells all kinds of costumes.

The relationship between Marylou and Juliette resonated with me – these are two sisters who love each other whilst being unhappy in their own lives (which couldn’t be more different) for several reasons. There’s bickering between them and jealousy that goes both ways, but there’s also undeniable support, which is quite moving.

The family scenes are also relatable, sad but equally funny. Every character has their own motivations, their own flaws and contradictions.

The character I had most trouble connecting with was Georges, a romantic alcoholic who seems to just chill in his apartment during the day and then go to the pub to drink every evening (it’s not clear what he does for a living or where he gets his money from). Juliette and him start a relationship of sorts and there’s a cute duckling involved (they find him in the park) which of course (minor spoiler) dies in an accident because apparently every time we have cute animals in a story they have to die.

All in all, I enjoyed this book, and I thought that the illustrations with their unique details and beautiful colours added to the spring-like atmosphere. Beautiful work, and also, more complex in terms of storytelling than it may seem at a first glance. I’ll definitely be reading more from this author.

The House in the Cerulean Sea by T J Klunt

This was my queer book club read of the month. I’ve been hearing about this book for years so I was curious about it. I read it in three days and, overall, I enjoyed it. One of the things I liked the most was the atmosphere even though for a fantasy book (I’d actually consider it magic realism) the world-building is not really fully developed and kept quite vague. Yet the author manages to create a certain atmosphere, a pinch of nostalgia and Studio Ghibli vibes that worked quite well.

The protagonist here is Linus, a forty-year old balding man with a bit of a belly who works as a case worker for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth (DICOMY). This is a world where orphaned children with magical powers are kept at special centres (basically orphanages) so they can’t create chaos in normal society. Linus lives an extremely grey and boring life, following rules without questioning them. Things change when he’s given a special assignment – he has to travel faraway to special orphanage where the most extreme cases are kept and hidden from the world (the orphanage is in fact so faraway that he manages to escape the blanket of rainy clouds that seem to cover the city he lives in permanently).

Once he arrives to this new place (the house on the cerulean sea) he’s ‘welcomed’ by a group of interesting children which include the Antichrist, a gnome called Talia, a sort of giant slug-ish thing called Chancey (my favourite character), an elemental spirit called Phee, a cat-sized dragon called Theodore and a nervous teenager, Sal, who transforms into a Pomeranian whenever he gets nervous. And of course, Arthur, their charismatic keeper.

I knew where this book was going the moment I started reading it. Of course Arthur and Linus fell in love and Linus understood that DICOMY as an organisation was inherently evil (in that it doesn’t really put the interest of the children first) so he quit his job to become another father figure to the children, who may have seemed a bit difficult at the beginning but are all super cute and sweet by the end.

Sure, this book was a bit too soppy for me but I can see value in the way it celebrates the idea of chosen family and the importance embracing those who are different. I also liked that the romance was between two men who were not traditionally beautiful or young (Arthur is forty-five years old and described as wispy, with bony knees and looking far too young for his age). Another thing I thought was quite good was the way both Arthur and Linus have roles which have traditionally been seen as female in our society – they are both nurturing figures to the children and they find fulfilment as caregivers, while also being very sensitive.

What didn’t quite ring true with me was how neat the plot was. How the first friend the children happened to make amongst the reluctant villagers (the orphanage is close to a tiny fishing village that is being paid by DICOMY to keep quiet about it) turned out to be the mayor. The fact that Arthur had some super magical powers of his own that allowed him to annihilate everyone if he so wished to (in reality, when you belong to a group that suffers discrimination you tend to be in quite a powerless, vulnerable position). And, of course, the ending. Linus manages to convince DICOMY to keep the orphanage open but it’s never clear how he does so (when he was sent there precisely to close it, and DICOMY has already shown they don’t really care about the children). Also, when Linus leaves DICOMY quite abruptly to go live with Arthur and the children there’s no repercussion for him, just a happily-ever-after that of course ends in marriage.

So, in a way, this book addresses the issues of inherent discrimination in a society (non-magical humans against magical humans) and shows how an organisation (DICOMY) has been set to perpetuate this. In the end, nothing changes. The children have to be kept apart, and DICOMY keeps controlling them and taking them away from their families (in the book there is barely no mention to the real families of these children).

That said, I can see the value in reading a cosy story with queer characters now and again. You could argue this story simplifies a lot, but it also offers positive representation and a hopeful tale of redemption in the idea of the chosen family.

Earthlings by Sakaya Murata

I had this novella since it came out in 2020 but was one of those books in my to read pile that I’d never got around to tackle. Finally I did this summer, right after I finished The House in the Cerulean Sea, and oh boy, could these books be any more different? (Also, the fact that Earthlings is my favourite of the two should also tell you things about my literary tastes).

This is a horror book, which combines moments of pure terror with scenes that are so bizarre that they are funny.

It follows the story of Natsuki, an eleven year old girl who’s always felt like an outsider. The only person in the whole world who she can be herself with is her cousin Yuu, who she meets once every year when the whole family meets in the grandparents’ house in the mountains of Akishina to celebrate Obon (a festivity dedicated to the ancestors).

When I say that Natsuki has always been an outsider I mean it. For example, her mum dotes on her older sister but is always being mean to Natsuki for reasons that are never specified. But she regularly calls her ‘thick’ and ‘stupid’, gets mad at her every mistake and even hits her, often in the head. So that’s not a brilliant start in life for such a young girl.

“Mom, shall I make dinner tonight?”

“No,” she answered without even turning around. “Don’t go pocking your nose in where you are not wanted.”

“But you look so tired. We learned how to make curry at–”

“I said no. If you start meddling, you’ll just end up making more fork for me. Try to be a good girl now.”

She was right. I was being pushy. From my family’s perspective I was worthless, so it was presumptuous of me to try to do anything positive. It took all my effort just to remain at my zero level without becoming minus.

“You’re always the same, all talk, even though you can’t do anything.”

Mom always told me off when she was irritable. She wasn’t telling me off for my own good but because she needed a punching bag. By hitting me with her words not her hands, she regained her composure.

Sayuka Murata

To cope with things, Natsuki makes up a fantasy in which she comes from another planet, Popinpobopia and has been given magic powers by her stuffed toy, a hedgehog called Pyyut. Things start getting complicated after Natsuki starts being groomed and abused by her teacher and her mother refuses to believe her. When she’s caught sleeping with her cousin Yuu she’s punished harshly – she’s seen as dirty and deviant by her whole family and is only allowed to leave the house once she is an adult and marries Tomoya.

This book is somehow similar in its themes to Cleopatra and Frankenstein in that it focuses on relationships within a group of people. But in this book society is seeing as the main enemy – and dubbed as ‘the factory’ in Natsuki’s fantasies. People are expected to live in small cells (flats) like Natsuki’s family’s silk worms and reproduce, generation after generation.

“My town is a factory for the production of human babies. People live in nests packed closely together. It’s just like the silkworm room in Granny’s house. The nests are lined up in neatly rows, and each contains a breeding pair of male and female humans and their babies. The breeding pairs raise their young inside their nests. I live in one of these nests too.

The Baby Factory produces humans connected by flesh and blood. Eventually we children will also leave the factory and be shipped out.

Once shipped out, male and female humans are trained how to take food back to their own nests. They become society’s tools, receive money from other humans, and purchase food. Eventually these young humans also from breeding pairs, coop themselves up in new nests and manufacture more babies.”

Sayuka Murata

Natsuki has a hatred of physical contact (born from her experiences of abuse) and so does her husband Tomoya (it’s also implied he’s suffered from sexual abuse as a child). Both of them have a marriage of convenience to placate their respective families but in reality they are more like flatmates. After Natsuki and Tomoya meet with Yuu in the family home in the Akishina mountains, their families realise everything has been a charade, which forces the three main characters to take some extreme decisions.

I found the ending quite shocking to read, and I didn’t know what to make of it. But, on reflection, I think it’s a commentary on society, (Japanese society in the first instance, but I can find links with the society I live in too) . Natsuki’s family has always preferred to ignore the horror for the sake of maintaining appearances – for example, how Natsuki was being treated by her own mother and sister, how she was sexually abused as a child and not believed by those who should have protected her and so on. It’s only at the end, when all this trauma and violence has turned Natsuki, Tomoya and Yuu into monsters than the ‘adults’ properly acknowledge the horror and are finally affected by it.

This book is similar to Convenience Store Woman (by the same author) in that it criticises societal expectations – and shows how harmful it may be to try fit into them for some of us. It takes things further by using taboo and abjection to shock readers and make us look directly at things that many of us prefer to ignore.

West by Carys Davies

This is a reread of a novella I adored back in 2019. I was working at Waterstones then in Lancaster and I was invited to host a panel at Lancaster Litfest with both Carys Davies and Sarah Moss who had just published novellas-marketed-as-novels – Sarah Moss’ was Ghostwall, which is also great. Because it was pretty short notice I read both books on the same day. So this time I was happy to be able to spend a bit more time with West, and I realised that, for a book its size, it actually takes a bit long to read, because there is so much in it, so many details and reflections that I found myself pondering about as I went through .

This book is set around 1818 and follows Cyrus Bellman as he embarks on a journey from Pennsylvania to the unchartered West. Like many people at the time (and even now) Bellman is obsessed with the image of the grandiose Wild West. He’s read in the newspaper that there had been large bones discovered there, and he’s convinced that he’ll find some mammoth living there. He wants to see what no human has seen before, and he wants to be the first at doing it, so when he goes back home everyone will known him as an intrepid explorer.

Bellman did not feel like a vain man. “I’m not seeking any kind of glory,” he said… Still, it would be quite a thing, he couldn’t help thinking, to write to the newspaper when he got home, and sit across from Julie, and Elmer Jackson, and Gardiner and Helen Lott, and maybe Philip Wallace, the schoolteacher, and the helpful librarian, whose name he couldn’t recall, and Bess, of course, and tell them all about the beasts he had found and seen with his own two eyes.

Carys Davies

He’s not obsessed with money or riches – he has a prosperous farm where he lives a comfortable life with his ten-year-old daughter Bess. What he wants is something intangible. Glory. Recognition.

The story is told from different points of view. Bellman first, and also his sister Julie, who doesn’t approve of his decision to leave his young daughter and embark in a journey he knows will take him at least two years, if not more. Julie is a severe woman who decides to take care of her niece – Bess’ mother, Elsie, died a few years before, and it’s also implied during the narrative that Bellman may be struggling with the loss still. Then we have Elmer Jackson, a man who lives nearby an helps Bellman with the farm. He’s asked to keep an eye on Julie and Bess but through the course of the book he develops a, shall we say, unhealthy interest in young Bess. Then there is Devereux, a French fur trader who sells Bellman some goods and convinces him to take a First Nations young man with him – called Old Woman From A Distance – to guide them as he goes into unchartered territory. We have the random point of view of a widow from Bellman’s town, Mary Higson, who was hoping to marry Bellman before he left but grows bored of waiting. There is also Bess, and her sections are sad and touching as she struggles to protect herself from several men who round her and the farm like vultures since her father went away. And finally – and arguably the most interesting point of view of all – Old Woman From A Distance’s. He recounts the story of the Shawnee trib how they were forced to leave their land and move to the west after a failed treaty in which the English paid them only half of what was stated. Bellman and Old Woman travel together for more than a year, and yet they are never able to communicate because neither of them speak each other’s language.

At several points in the book Bellman wonders about the young man and wishes they could understand each other. Yet he makes no effort to learn his language or teach him his. In a way, Bellman is inhabiting a land that is not his, superimposing his own fantasies of glory and recognition (the mammoths he hopes to find) without knowing really anything about the nature that surrounds him.

In the end (and this is a massive spoiler, so stay away if you wish to) Bellman won’t ever find the creatures, and he’ll have sacrificed everything he has in this useless pursuit: his comfortable life in the farm in Pennsylvania, his relationship with his daughter.

In the last pages, it’s revealed that Old Woman From A Distance knew all along what Bellman was looking for. 

For as long as he could remember he’d heard stories about the man-eating creatures: his people had seen their bones when they lived in the east, sunk in soft, briny clay of a wooden valley. The very same ones, perhaps, that the big red-haired explorer had read about. But what he’d been told was that the monsters were all gone – that they’d vanished forever when the Great Spirit, the Big God, had destroyed the huge bloodthirsty animals with thunder and lightning because the beasts had preyed upon his people, consumed then.

Which begged the question, why did the Great Spirit not destroy the white settlers from across the sea the way He’d destroyed the mammoth animals?

Carys Davies

The ending becomes quite experimental as suddenly the narrative switches to present tense as if to symbolise that everything that has been told before is what will trigger a series of unusual events that will pile up on each other to construct a cathartic ending for both Old Woman from A Distance and Bess, the unlikely heroes of this very particular western. 

This is still one of my favourite novellas, and I enjoyed how the small details helped suggest a wider historical context while the sensitivity of the different characters also painted a portrait of a strange, painful world.