Mikaela Nyman
A debut novelist’s lockdown reading list
After three years of writing in isolation, I was looking forward to living in the world again. Instead, the universe contracted. But there’s a wonderful world out there, with natural forces that don’t stop, even if we do.
Maybe it’s good to be reminded of that. Maybe it’s time to look to literature to reflect our humanity, allow imaginations to travel, and keep us sane.
I browse the Poetry Foundation website for hope and startling insight, pick familiar poets and discover new poems. Between new titles, I reread novels that have given me pleasure and filled me with wonder. I let the lushness of Annie Proulx’s and Arundhati Roy’s prose and the worlds they evoke pour over me. The love story in The God of Small Things is more heartbreaking than I remembered. Roy probes human behaviour among political upheaval in Kerala, and the consequences of India’s Green Revolution through a story of siblings, whose lives are ruined by the caste system’s ‘‘love laws’’.
In contrast, The Shipping News draws me into a shabby diner in Newfoundland during a snow blizzard. Proulx seats me among rugged locals with names like Tert Card and Jack Buggit, and serves up seal flipper curry with the bumbling hero Quoyle’s articles for the Gammy Bird newspaper.
Following the memory of a particular mood, I revisit Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.
The prose is pared back and precise. There’s pleasure at the sentence level and in the ambience evoked: in the transient Sylvie, the disintegration of a household, and the longing for a nomadic life.
What the novels have in common is the return to a place, a house and family, no matter how complicated those family links are.