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Scotsman
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Ripeness, by Sarah Moss review: 'feels somehow fabricated'
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... This is a terribly accomplished novel, and I am unsure if that is a compliment or a criticism. It has an affecting core scenario, some extremely engaging writing, some very interesting observations; and yet I found it, at some gut level, manufactured, or as if it had palpable designs on eliciting a particular response. Moss has written eight other novels, and is much admired by novelists whose opinion I respect, and yet this felt somehow fabricated. It has the kind of realism that makes you mistake a Blaschka glass flower for the real thing. Ripeness has one central character but two distinct modes. In the present day and the third person, Edith is living in rural Ireland, divorced but in a happy and uncomplicated relationship with a German Marxist potter. A friend of Edith's is contacted by a possible step-sibling, and this triggers first-person recollections of her unusual gap year in the 1960s, away from her father's Derbyshire farm, when before going to Oxford she was in Italy, attending the final weeks of her glamorous, ballet dancer sister Lydia's unwanted pregnancy. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Sarah Moss The reader is, of course, supposed to see the visible seams stitching the stories together. There is an element of intrigue in that the first person reminiscence is addressed to an initially nebulous 'you': 'I should be clear that I'm not the one you want either. You shouldn't get your hopes up. We'll come to that'. The reader is, in effect, reading a private correspondence (and the identity of the addressee is not exactly difficult to discern). The rise of personal computers even means that the 'letter' is not at the credulity-stretching length of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. Likewise, the third person sections slip effortlessly into close focus, internal monologue; as if the whole novel is an intrusion of sorts. Moss's previous works have a feature (not quite a formula) of setting political events against the personal. The Fell had the lockdown, Summerwater had Brexit amongst other apocalypses, Ghost Wall had Iron Age re-enactment alongside un-pretend toxic masculinity and The Tidal Zone featured an NHS in crisis paralleled to the post-war rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral. This time, the ideas of home, belonging and inheritance are sufficiently baggy to have debates about 'good' (Ukrainian, white) refugees versus African ones alongside the intimate details of adoption, empty nests and disconnection. I am always uncertain if such neat matrices of meaning arise naturally from a narrative, or are trimmed and stapled to fit. Indeed, I am increasingly sceptical about the 'aboutness' of novels. The ballet, and to a lesser extent the pottery, offer a lexicon of terms and a stock of images that can be co-opted for symbolism. The idea, for example, of the 'kinesphere' – 'the space claimed by bodily movement' – is a readymade image to be translated onto various poses, postures, intimacies, indignities and distances. The title is again semantically fully loaded. It is literal in the figs, 'which I only knew dried and chopped in suet puddings' (a choice little piece of characterisation), to the metaphor for pregnancy as well as the cusp-y nature of the younger self, through to a sense of late life fulfilment. It appears within the text in a strange (and extremely clever) aside. Moss/Edith has noted the curious parallel of Hamlet's 'the readiness is all' and Edgar in King Lear's 'Ripeness is all' – prefaced by 'men must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither', appropriately enough. Much could be said about this, but isn't. Edith says she 'managed to get into my Oxford entrance exam, my idea that Lear is a darker play than Hamlet'. Ye-e-e-e-es: but it's hardly an original idea that Lear is darker than Hamlet. Samuels Johnson and Taylor Coleridge would agree. Are we supposed to read this ironically, as evidence of Edith's naivety and unearned superiority? But it is, with the limits of the novel, written by the elderly Edith: is she concurring? Unaware? Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad There are many memorable, shrewd notes: a marble bathroom is 'a room carved out of Stilton cheese', Edith chafes at A-level Italian including terms for 'nuclear deterrent' but not nappy, a child's 'sea-anemone mouth'. Young Edith brims with Eliot, Brontë, Milton and Hopkins in a convincing way, although the Older Edith talking about her friends 'Dearbhla from the Samaritans, and… Clare from a short-lived Dante reading group, Clare who was from the North via Modern Language at Cambridge' seems almost parodic. More seriously, there is a backstory about Edith's errant mother, who avoided the Holocaust and ends up on a kibbutz, which may have broad links to bohemianism, identity, duty versus free-spiritedness, but smacks of being the kind of thing that tends to occur in novels. Towards the end, Edith muses that 'Wouldn't it have saved the Third Reich some work, to be able to pull us all from a spreadsheet?' It's a throwaway line except IBM/Dehomag did precisely that. The patina of ballet references have a similar feel, and many of the ways in which they are deployed – weightlessness, elegance, pain – are handled more full-heartedly in a novel like Amélie Nothomb's The Book of Proper Names. Although there is much to appreciate here, it would be remiss not to warn the reader that it ends rather bathetically.
The Guardian
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss audiobook review – a life shaped by anorexia and literature
A haunting exploration of a life shaped by literature and anorexia, The Fell author Sarah Moss's memoir is told in the second person, as if the present-day Moss is directly addressing her past self. During her 1970s childhood, when every adult woman she knows is on a diet, Moss absorbs the message that she must be smart but quiet and amenable; she must be pretty and sylph-like but should never appear vain. Threaded through the narrative are the books of her formative years, by Arthur Ransome, Louisa May Alcott, Sylvia Plath and the Brontës, in which Moss is alert to depictions of women and femininity (her reading was done in secret, since her parents regarded it as a sign of indolence). Moss begins to see her body as a battleground, something over which she must exert control and power. This leads her to obsessively count calories, decline cake at birthday parties (for which she is often congratulated) and, eventually, stop eating altogether. The Scottish actor Morven Christie is the narrator: her reading is measured and reflective, drawing out the forlorn beauty of Moss's prose. She also inhabits the brutality of the author's inner voices, which berate her when they suspect her of disingenuousness or self-pity and hiss at her: 'Shut up, no one cares.' An eventual diagnosis of anorexia is followed by the prescribed treatment: an instruction to eat more and drink four glasses of milk a day. Little wonder Moss's illness follows her into adulthood, coming to a head during the pandemic where she becomes severely malnourished and a doctor warns her: 'If we do not feed you now, you will die.' Available via Picador, 8hr 28min A Death in the ParishThe Rev Richard Coles, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 8hr 25minThe kindly sleuth Canon Daniel Clement investigates another murder in the not-so-sleepy village of Champton. Read by the author. A Woman Like MeDiane Abbott, Penguin Audio, 13hr 27minWestminster's mother of the House reads her memoir charting her path to becoming Britain's first Black female MP, and the personal and political struggles that followed.
Yahoo
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Literature of the Pandemic
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. Not long after COVID lockdowns began in the U.S. five years ago this week, many readers and writers started to wonder, with a mix of trepidation and curiosity, what the literature about the time period would look like. Half a decade on, we now have at least a small body of work that takes on the pandemic. In some cases, the calamity serves merely as a scene-setting device; in others, it's a major plot point. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic's books section: The world can't keep up with its garbage. The man who owned 181 Renoirs An unabashedly intellectual murder mystery An all-female society, pushed to extremes As Lily Meyer writes this week, she has taken a special interest in reading these books as they've trickled out. But she's found a fairly common flaw: Many of them attempt to 'overcontrol the experience of the pandemic' by leaning on descriptions of what happened. These novels remind readers of widely promoted images of middle-class lockdown—fashioning masks out of old scraps of fabric, wiping down groceries, catching up with friends and family over Zoom—but fail to transcend these rote recitations, or to capture other experiences of the early days of the pandemic. When the world knew the danger the virus posed but didn't know how to prevent its spread, people lacked a sense of agency: All that many of us could do was wait for news about case counts and vaccines. A writer's impulse to transcribe details from that time is perhaps an attempt to make that feeling more manageable. But 'fiction that asserts too much control loses the possibility of transformation,' Meyer argues. Her point is that no matter what's happening in the world, life is always unpredictable—and good literature understands this. Meyer notes that she hasn't found a great pandemic novel yet. What form might this eventual writing take? One type of book she's hoping for is 'a great novel of the mind,' one that 'will either reject or undermine the self-controlling impulse' to describe the textures of the early pandemic and will instead examine, in surprising ways, how the catastrophe affected people's psyches. As I read Meyer's essay, I remembered Sarah Moss's The Fell, a 2021 novel that I think may actually meet those criteria—at least in part. In it, a woman named Kate is quarantined with her son in her home in England's Peak District after a COVID exposure. She quickly grows stir-crazy, and one night, violating government orders, she goes out for a hike—but at some point, she falls and can't get up. Moss leaves Kate's perspective to dip into the minds of her son, a kindly older neighbor whom Kate and her son provide with groceries, and a member of the rescue team searching for Kate in the dark and wet night. Though the novel is certainly descriptive, it might also qualify as what Meyer calls an 'interior' work. The prose is written as a stream of consciousness, evoking a sense of anxiety that sometimes tips over into the truly scary. For some, the experience of the early pandemic was not immediately life-threatening; often, it was an extended stretch of quotidian dullness spiked with moments of existential dread. But as one character thinks, 'people don't die of dread.' Moss doesn't exaggerate the stakes of the pandemic for her characters. Instead, she cleverly puts one of them in a genuinely frightening situation that has nothing to do with COVID, reminding the reader that the unfolding events of our lives are, by definition, beyond our control. The Novel I'm Searching For By Lily Meyer Five years after the pandemic, I'm holding out for a story that doesn't just describe our experience, but transforms it. Read the full article. , by Anne Carson Hardly any of Sappho's work survives, and the fragments scholars have salvaged from tattered papyrus and other ancient texts can be collected in thin volumes easily tossed into tote bags. Still, Carson's translation immediately makes clear why those scholars went to so much effort. Sappho famously describes the devastation of seeing one's beloved, when 'tongue breaks and thin / fire is racing under skin'; the god Eros, in another poem, is a 'sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in.' Other poems provide crisp images from the sixth century B.C.E.—one fragment reads, in its entirety: 'the feet / by spangled straps covered / beautiful Lydian work.' Taken together, the fragments are sensual and floral, reminiscent of springtime; they evoke soft pillows and sleepless nights, violets in women's laps, wedding celebrations—and desire, always desire. Because the poems are so brief, they're perfect for outdoor reading and its many distractions. Even the white space on the pages is thought-provoking. Carson includes brackets throughout to indicate destroyed papyrus or illegible letters in the original source, and the gaps they create allow space for rumination or moments of inattention while one lies on a blanket on a warm day. — Chelsea Leu From our list: Seven books to read in the sunshine 📚 Firstborn, by Lauren Christensen 📚 White Light, by Jack Lohmann 📚 Hunchback, by Saou Ichikawa Reality TV Just Leveled Up By Megan Garber The Traitors, in that way, might seem to be peak reality TV: all of these people who are famous for being famous making content for the sake of content. But the show has been an ongoing subject of passionate discussion because it is much smarter than that—it's derivative in a winking way. It doesn't merely borrow from its fellow reality shows; it adapts them into something that both celebrates reality TV and offers a sly, kaleidoscopic satire of the genre. It is a messy show that lives for drama. It brings a postmodern twist to an ever-more-influential form of entertainment. It's not just reality TV—it's hyperreality TV. Read the full article. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Explore all of our newsletters. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Literature of the Pandemic
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. Not long after COVID lockdowns began in the U.S. five years ago this week, many readers and writers started to wonder, with a mix of trepidation and curiosity, what the literature about the time period would look like. Half a decade on, we now have at least a small body of work that takes on the pandemic. In some cases, the calamity serves merely as a scene-setting device; in others, it's a major plot point. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic 's books section: As Lily Meyer writes this week, she has taken a special interest in reading these books as they've trickled out. But she's found a fairly common flaw: Many of them attempt to 'overcontrol the experience of the pandemic' by leaning on descriptions of what happened. These novels remind readers of widely promoted images of middle-class lockdown—fashioning masks out of old scraps of fabric, wiping down groceries, catching up with friends and family over Zoom—but fail to transcend these rote recitations, or to capture other experiences of the early days of the pandemic. When the world knew the danger the virus posed but didn't know how to prevent its spread, people lacked a sense of agency: All that many of us could do was wait for news about case counts and vaccines. A writer's impulse to transcribe details from that time is perhaps an attempt to make that feeling more manageable. But 'fiction that asserts too much control loses the possibility of transformation,' Meyer argues. Her point is that no matter what's happening in the world, life is always unpredictable—and good literature understands this. Meyer notes that she hasn't found a great pandemic novel yet. What form might this eventual writing take? One type of book she's hoping for is 'a great novel of the mind,' one that 'will either reject or undermine the self-controlling impulse' to describe the textures of the early pandemic and will instead examine, in surprising ways, how the catastrophe affected people's psyches. As I read Meyer's essay, I remembered Sarah Moss's The Fell, a 2021 novel that I think may actually meet those criteria—at least in part. In it, a woman named Kate is quarantined with her son in her home in England's Peak District after a COVID exposure. She quickly grows stir-crazy, and one night, violating government orders, she goes out for a hike—but at some point, she falls and can't get up. Moss leaves Kate's perspective to dip into the minds of her son, a kindly older neighbor whom Kate and her son provide with groceries, and a member of the rescue team searching for Kate in the dark and wet night. Though the novel is certainly descriptive, it might also qualify as what Meyer calls an 'interior' work. The prose is written as a stream of consciousness, evoking a sense of anxiety that sometimes tips over into the truly scary. For some, the experience of the early pandemic was not immediately life-threatening; often, it was an extended stretch of quotidian dullness spiked with moments of existential dread. But as one character thinks, 'people don't die of dread.' Moss doesn't exaggerate the stakes of the pandemic for her characters. Instead, she cleverly puts one of them in a genuinely frightening situation that has nothing to do with COVID, reminding the reader that the unfolding events of our lives are, by definition, beyond our control. The Novel I'm Searching For By Lily Meyer Five years after the pandemic, I'm holding out for a story that doesn't just describe our experience, but transforms it. What to Read If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, by Anne Carson Hardly any of Sappho's work survives, and the fragments scholars have salvaged from tattered papyrus and other ancient texts can be collected in thin volumes easily tossed into tote bags. Still, Carson's translation immediately makes clear why those scholars went to so much effort. Sappho famously describes the devastation of seeing one's beloved, when 'tongue breaks and thin / fire is racing under skin'; the god Eros, in another poem, is a 'sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in.' Other poems provide crisp images from the sixth century B.C.E.—one fragment reads, in its entirety: 'the feet / by spangled straps covered / beautiful Lydian work.' Taken together, the fragments are sensual and floral, reminiscent of springtime; they evoke soft pillows and sleepless nights, violets in women's laps, wedding celebrations—and desire, always desire. Because the poems are so brief, they're perfect for outdoor reading and its many distractions. Even the white space on the pages is thought-provoking. Carson includes brackets throughout to indicate destroyed papyrus or illegible letters in the original source, and the gaps they create allow space for rumination or moments of inattention while one lies on a blanket on a warm day. — Chelsea Leu Out Next Week 📚 Firstborn, by Lauren Christensen 📚 White Light, by Jack Lohmann 📚 Hunchback, by Saou Ichikawa Your Weekend Read Reality TV Just Leveled Up By Megan Garber The Traitors, in that way, might seem to be peak reality TV: all of these people who are famous for being famous making content for the sake of content. But the show has been an ongoing subject of passionate discussion because it is much smarter than that—it's derivative in a winking way. It doesn't merely borrow from its fellow reality shows; it adapts them into something that both celebrates reality TV and offers a sly, kaleidoscopic satire of the genre. It is a messy show that lives for drama. It brings a postmodern twist to an ever-more-influential form of entertainment. It's not just reality TV—it's hyperreality TV.
