Books like Iris Green, Unseen

This book is a quiet, understated masterpiece about quiet, understated lives and a critical counterpoint to Soseki’s earlier I Am a Cat. That novel was a cruelly comic parody of Nietzscheanism, its arrogant feline narrator portraying his owner, a small-town schoolteacher, as embodying everything wrong with miserable, mediocre, insignificant humanity. 

This book is more ambiguous and sympathetic, portraying a similarly humble, childless couple. Initially, we feel contempt for their uneventful, indecisive, dispassionate lives. But their troubled past reveals, beneath their failings, a deep undercurrent of authentic courage and love.

They may even achieve something like Nietzsche’s “love of fate,” hinted in the title’s reference to the gate between past and future, where Zarathustra wills the “eternal recurrence” of every detail of his existence, whether joyful or painful, exciting or dreary, beautiful or ugly.  

“What is this?” I asked myself on first reading. “Fiction?”

Each short piece contained a moving story that was like a jewel to view and think about, but something was strange, in a wondrous way. It seemed like fiction posing as journalism, like the great classical Chinese tale “A Record of the Peach Blossom Land” by Tao Yuanming (6th century) that inspired my most popular play.

It upended my concept of short story, and of art, opening doors to ways of writing. “Fiction in disguise.” Astonishingly creative, yet peaceful and profound. Wildly creative themes and twists narrated by a quiet objective voice. Maestro Borges taught me that you can shock an audience through very calm narrative, and how profound creativity starts with format.

A master class in creativity that ends with compassion.

To say I had high expectations of this book would be an understatement and it certainly delivered!

Although quite niche, this book gives us a detailed look into professional women and women scientists, among other roles, in 1950s Science Fiction B movies. 

Although we often believe that more recent films are more progressive, Noonan shows how even gender limitations in the 1950s still provided room for qualified women to shine in different scientific fields, both in traditional and pioneering roles. She also studies how women could have important roles at the periphery of science like computer operators or darkroom technicians.

I loved the uniqueness of this storyline and the combination of magic being an accepted everyday thing in a historical world. Think old-world 1940s newspaper era meets World War 2 and manipulative Gods, with threads of magic woven throughout.

I absolutely adored the idea of rare typewriters linked by magic that can send missives to each other and the beautiful and rich enemies-to-lovers trope that develops around the typewriters. Its cute You’ve Got Mail vibe was beautifully executed in a story and world that I loved to step into.

Unlike so many heroines of historical mysteries who had dangerous jobs in the Great War—usually a spy, courier, or battlefield nurse—I found Iris Cooper refreshingly average, but not boring. She’s sailing from England to America after a round-the-world tour with her aunt. When a man dies in a deck chair, Iris searches for answers about his identity. I especially liked the fact that Iris used her shorthand and typing skills to become part of the ship-board inquiry into the death and holds her own with the panel, which is basically an old boy’s club. The parade of suspects is catnip for a mystery reader like me and includes a voluptuous film star, a mysterious professor studying criminology, a handsome musician, and an enthusiastic newspaper reporter. I enjoyed watching Iris come into her own as a sleuth and find a little romance along the way.

The twists at the end took me by surprise, though I sensed something wasn’t quite right throughout. I just couldn’t put my finger on what exactly. Iris and Gabriel return from a holiday and are surprised to find their friend Laure staying in their home.

What begins as an annoyance escalates to a threat as long-buried secrets start to surface. The tension kept me swiping the pages on my E-reader. It’s my favorite B. A. Paris thriller so far.

Edna O’Brien’s work makes me laugh and cry at the same time!

The Country Girls is a rollicking tale of two girls from rural Ireland in the 1950s, convent-educated, who leave home after their secondary school graduation to seek freedom and fun in the big city of Dublin.

Not quite Sex in the City, but a reader will laugh with the girls and sympathize with their troubles with men and work. 

I first encountered this book as a series of lectures in Oxford in 1978 and was riveted.

Lyons faced head-on the themes of cultural and sectarian antagonism in Ireland from the death of the constitutionalist nationalist leader Parnell in 1891 to independent Ireland’s decision to remain neutral in World War II, using sources that were as much literary as political, and at the end projecting the divisions in Irish society forward to the then-current violence in the North. The tone was notably acerbic, even verging towards despair, but also employing bitter humour.

A great historian, he died prematurely a few years later when just embarking on his projected but unwritten biography of Yeats. He had written many books, but this is the one that left the loudest echoes–notably in nailing the psychological gulf of understanding between Ireland and Britain that became so apparent in the early twentieth century.

Let’s be clear: the title is ironic. This is a love story, told mostly in retrospect. Well, it’s not love exactly. It’s sex. Or a kind of twisted idea of romance. It’s attraction anyway, not quite obsessive, but close. And it’s mysterious. Who are these people? How do they connect to each other? How do they know each other? Do they even like each other? Why/why not?

The answers, if readers can identify them, are not reassuring. And yet... I loved this book, read it twice, straight off. It’s partly the descriptions of the physical world – natural and constructed – always partial, never conclusive, that are so attractive to read. 

And it’s a very young book. Exhilarating. 

I see the phrase "roadtrip across Ireland," and it's an immediate "yes" for me.

There was so much that I loved about this story—the adventurous main characters and the shenanigans they get themselves into, an animal sidekick, and of course the setting. There were some parts near the end that made me a little teary-eyed, but in a beautiful and cathartic kind of way. I think it's time for a reread!