Van has finished reading… Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal

No need to bother with the bad sex awards this year. In Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows, Balli Kaur Jaswal has the winner! Okay, maybe that’s not the praise this review should begin with but it should give you a clue to how achingly funny this book is. Intentionally achingly funny. The biggest laughs are definitely to be found in the telling of the aforementioned erotic stories, in both situation and in the language of euphemism. There are certain phrases that will, I think, live with me for a long time (I’d love to list some here but to do that would be to take away the pleasure of finding them for yourself). I read this book to Mrs Van and there were times we had to simply wait for the crying to stop before we could carry on.

Of course the laughs are just one side of the story. There was sadness too, moments of anxiety and empathy, and not a small dose of out-and-out anger (it’s always a good sign when Mrs Van starts wishing bodily harm on someone). All the things you’d expect from a well-crafted, well-layered novel.

The characters are fantastic. Albeit the world of Asians living in England may be unknown to you, the level of detail Balli Kaur Jaswal provides is excellently pitched so the experience is immersive, rather than feeling like you’re looking in from the outside – even when characters are indeed looking in from the outside. The author picks apart the various relationships with subtlety to reveal what it is to be a part of this community, what it is to be excluded as well as included, and she is never shy of showing the negatives along with the positives.

One of the things I really enjoyed about this book is the way your attention focuses, the way it makes you look and then look again at the characters. Consider the title: Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows, and alongside the frisson of excitement the humour is apparent because, you know, old women. Dour old women, obviously, seeing as they’re widows. Except they’re not – neither all old nor all dour – and you realise that you’re starting to key into the essence of their invisibility. There is something inherently funny about the idea of old women misbehaving or doing things they shouldn’t be doing (see John Niven’s The Sunshine Cruise Company), but hang on. Who says they shouldn’t be doing these things? And why not? Let’s face it, they must have done these things – or at least something similar – for their children to be around to censure them. And if it was good why on earth wouldn’t you want to remember it fondly? And if it wasn’t, well, who could possibly begrudge you for dreaming of or imagining something better?

 

Top, middle or bottom, it really doesn’t matter where in your To Be Read pile you put Balli Kaur Jaswal’s Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows as long as it’s on there somewhere. Holiday reading would definitely be a good bet, though there’s no reason why you should wait that long. It’s funny, it’s racy, it’s emotional and uplifting and thought-provoking, and did I mention it’s funny? And racy? It deserves to be a huge hit. I mean HUGE. Big as an aubergine.

 

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows is published by HarperCollins on the 9^th March 2017 ISBN: 9780008209889

 

You can find Balli on Twitter @balli_jaswal, or at her website ballijaswal.com.

 

With thanks to the HarperCollins PR team, who allowed me to review this book.

Van has finished reading…An Account Of The Decline Of The Great Auk, According To One W by Jessie Greengrass

While it’s catchy, the story that gives Jessie Greengrass’s debut collection its title, An Account Of The Decline Of The Great Auk, According To One Who Saw It isn’t really about great auks and their decline. Neither is the title fad-following or trying to be quirky when it’s not. Actually it captures a lot of what follows: a voice unfamiliar with addressing an audience; inadvertent comedy; bleakness. It’s a tale that leaks sadness the more it goes on and yet all the while, as the number of birds steadily falls it remains difficult to feel sorry for them. As difficult as it is to maintain a sense of eye contact with our narrator because deep down we both know… And then there it is in the close.

That sense of bleakness, of isolation and anaesthesia infects the whole collection so that the idea of a happy ending seems more illogical than unachievable. And yet, in The Comfort Of The Dead and Scropton, Sudbury, Marchington, Uttoxeter, there is a sense of something approaching that – at least a sense of a circle squared.

If all this gives you the jitters fear not. As with all good short stories, Jessie’s collection is apt to make you think and feel. What ultimately comes through is that we are seeing, perhaps even confronting aspects of ourselves that may well be latent but are most assuredly inherent.

On the first reading my favourite story is Winter 2058. It’s the fifth story in the collection and at first feels like a step-change. The opening is more familiar in its approach, less internalised than the voices of the previous stories, and then the growing sense that this one might be something akin to science fiction. It utterly sucked me in. Of course good science fiction, like any other genre, is still about who we are and how we live. Winter 2058 is no different. What I enjoyed most about this story is the way the tension builds. What’s revealed about what’s going on and what isn’t, and the overriding sense of unease by the time I reached the last word. Read it on a train and then look around the carriage at all the other passengers…

An Account Of The Decline Of The Great Auk, According To One Who Saw It isn’t a light-hearted, feel-good read. Albeit it’s not a long collection (I read it in a few hours and I’m a sow reader) it will make you think, and it’ll leave you time to go back and look again. We should all make time for a short story collection and for my part, Jessie Greengrass’s debut is well worth making the time for.

 

An Account Of the Decline Of The Great Auk, According To One Who Saw It was published by JM Originals in 2015 and comes out in paperback on 23^rd March 2017 ISBN:9781473652040

You can find Jessie on Twitter @JessGreengrass

My thanks to Ruby Mitchell at Hodder for allowing me to review this book.

Van has finished reading… Hoffer by Tim Glencross

In William Hoffer Tim Glencross presents that trickiest of propositions: an unpleasant protagonist. Or is he? The fact of the matter is that, with Hoffer, it’s all about the appearance. He is studied in the ways of London Society as only a hunter can be, in but not of his surroundings. He’s accepted as an established figure although he’s not really one of them. Though you might not know it to see him, he is a working man and London Society is his office. His tastes are lavish, his manners impeccable and his past is not open to discussion – until it turns up, unexpectedly, in his living room.

Everything about Hoffer is contradiction, though he is always and unmistakeably Hoffer, even down to his thoroughly ‘English’ respect for the well-made umbrella. He takes great pride in his appearance and his reputation, and it’s nothing short of very hard work appearing to be so at ease with the world and in showing us all this Tim Glencross’s characterisation is perfect. What you first think of as an unpleasant protagonist is actually… likeable. And if that’s a bit of a stretch for you there’s no shortage of likely candidates to compare him to. Indeed, there are far more unpleasant entities to be found in the supporting cast and there is, I think, a detectable delight in the way the author draws them. As with Glencross’s debut, Barbarians, there’s a sense that it’s the ugliness in his characters that attracts him the most.

Whether you like William Hoffer or not, there’s plenty going on here to keep you wondering whether he’s going to sink or swim.

If I had to pick one thing as my abiding memory of the aforementioned Barbarians, it would be the very dry and quite pointed humour of it (still one of my favourite comic lines in a novel is the one from Barbarians directed at Tony Blair about how the Middle East isn’t his forte). With Hoffer I find myself far more aware of the teeth lurking in the grass. Not to say that Hoffer doesn’t have its lighter moments, it’s just that the points are that much sharper.

The prose itself chimes a note familiar to Barbarians too, making me think of Evelyn Waugh (with a little tweaking of the cultural references I could easily see this cast of characters feeling perfectly at home in the Twenties, though not necessarily with the unfortunate Mr Pennyfeather), though in this instance you can add a large dose of Patricia Highsmith to the mix. The everyday cut-and-thrust of Tim Glencross’s characters is very aptly couched in that phrase. It’s witty, razor-sharp and finely-observed and the story itself unfolds at a very pleasing pace. The impression is that there’s no particular rush, although of course that is just an impression because at the heart of things there’s that dark understanding that keeps you on edge, that keeps you wondering what’s next, and when is it going to happen, and who’s going to come out of it with something rather unsavoury beneath their fingernails.

 

With Barbarians, Tim Glencross arrived with much – and well-deserved in my opinion – fanfare. In letting Hoffer loose on us he’s set out his stall in a very enticing manner. Hoffer is a pleasure to read – a slightly grubby pleasure, but that is I think part of its charm. Already I’m wondering what the author is dreaming up to present to us next!

 

Hoffer is published by John Murray on the 23^rd March 2017 ISBN: 9781444797596

You can find Tim Glencross at his website timglencross.com