‘Hold on to your hats…’ the best literary fiction this week: Female Life on Planet
Female Life on Planet Earth is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Female Life on Planet Earth by Laleh Khadivi (Oneworld £16.99, 224pp)
NOT long after her mother dies, Heti receives a package containing three images of her as a younger woman in Iran. In two photos her mother is in religious dress; in one she is pointing a machine-gun at a group of handcuffed western women; together all three point to a previous past life as a militant during the Iranian Revolution.
In an instance, everything Heti thought she knew about her mother – and everything she took for granted about her own comfortable life in Los Angeles – is overturned.
Across a series of eloquent vignettes, as Heti grapples with both her own life as a mother and the memory of one she no longer fully recognises, Khadivi conjures up the irreducible variety of female experience in ways that question our right to assume we know anything about anyone at all.
The Newer World by Sebastian Barry (Faber £20, 272pp)
IRISH writer Sebastian Barry returns once again to the American Civil War, this time picking up a minor character, the black slave Tennyson Bouguereau, and placing his story firmly in the foreground.
In theory the Civil War is over and Bouguereau, living with his sister on a farm in Tennessee, is a free man.
But history isn’t so easily forgotten in the American Deep South and Bouguereau is soon on the run, taking refuge in a college for black freedmen and women in Nashville, where he falls in love with Minnie and establishes a deep friendship with George, a former soldier.
Barry is excellent at showing how individual lives are at the mercy of external events and his writing is as frisky and brightly coloured as ever. Yet this novel is enriched by the many threads it shares with the two novels that precede it, so, if you haven’t read those, do so first.
PLY by Hernan Diaz (Picador £20, 464pp)
Hold on to your hats – Hernan Diaz’s latest is a wild, sometimes hard-to-navigate ride through a barely recognisable future New York. Democracy is over, and what remains of public utilities is in the hands of ruthless corporations.
Amid this intriguingly pre-modern world, a young orphaned girl scrapes a living from selling makeshift batteries, primarily to power underground concerts.
But then she is recruited by the mysterious Pola, who is planning a huge reality-shifting assault on the space time continuum with a view to building something better.
From this point on, many readers might find themselves horribly adrift in a wildly digressive plot which takes on political theory, selfhood, quantum physics and reality itself.
You can’t fault Diaz’s ambition in reckoning with the very fabric of our present and our future, but as a novel, this is best classed as an honourable fail.