The Literary Fiction you should be reading: Waiting For A Party by Vesna Salt, The Proof
WAITING FOR A PARTY by Vesna Main (Salt £10.99, 208pp)
There’s a slight Mrs Dalloway-esque air to this slim novel, which spans the hours that pianist Claire spends waiting to attend the birthday party of her novelist friend, Martin.
He’s about to turn 102, which makes nonagenarian Claire a mere spring chicken, not least (she reflects) because her life truly began in her 60s, when she first found sexual satisfaction.
As her mind circles around her numerous lovers – and her ‘found family’ – she meditates on what makes for a life well-lived and re-evaluates her marriage: was it as happy as she is determined to believe? And was her husband’s death a stroke, or perhaps an accident that she had a hand in?
A welcome window into old age that isn’t about its miseries.
THE PROOF OF MY INNOCENCE by Jonathan Coe (Viking £20, 352pp)
The Proof of My Innocence is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Since his Cambridge University days, Chris Swann has been on a personal crusade to chart the course of conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic. But when, in the early days of the Truss government, he stumbles on a secretive think-tank’s plan to
push for NHS privatisation, his days are numbered.
Here, however, things take a turn for the meta, as Phyl, the disillusioned Gen-Z graduate daughter of Chris’s old uni chum Jo, seeks both catharsis and cash by spinning his demise into a potentially lucrative cosy crime yarn.
The result takes us off – slightly regrettably – in a different direction: a tangentially-related literary mystery surrounding a neglected novelist whose Right-wing sympathies saw him denied the fame of his Leftie peers.
Alongside all the ingeniously twisty satirical entertainment we get a defence of the art of fiction – which, based on this display, seems safe enough in Coe’s hands.
THE CITY AND ITS UNCERTAIN WALLS by Haruki Murakami (Harvill Secker £25, 464pp)
The City and Its Uncertain Walls is available now from the Mail Bookshop
In an afterword, the beloved Japanese author explains that this novel grew from a 1980 novella that he came to regard as unfinished. By the time he set himself to the problem it was 2020 and the pandemic was raging – which, he reflects, may or may not be significant.
Readers will strongly suspect the former. The wintrily atmospheric titular city seems to have been ruined by a catastrophe of which its few inhabitants have no memory. Time has no meaning, while forlorn unicorns suffer as obscure scapegoats.
Moreover, the city is itself a shared hallucination, a joint construct of the unnamed central character and his girlfriend, who insists her ‘real’ self dwells there. Murakami’s favourite motifs proliferate as the boundaries between the real and unreal, conscious and unconscious, blur.
With the narrator’s lovelorn malaise hanging heavy throughout, this opaquely allegorical doorstopper ultimately feels like a November mist – both dense and insubstantial.