LITERARYFICTION STEPHANIE CROSS
CLARA READS PROUST by Stephane Carlier (Gallic Books €14.49, 192pp)
HOW Proust Can Change Your Life was the title of a Noughties bestseller by Alain de Botton; it could also serve as the tag line of this French novel.
Twenty-something Clara is a hairdresser at Cindy Coiffure, the favoured salon of the local septuagenarian set. Her relationship with fireman JB might at least seem more promising, but the flame is flickering out. Is this as good as it gets? Happily not.
A fortuitously forgotten volume of In Search Of Lost Time starts Clara on a journey not just literary, but of selfdiscovery. Soon she’s missing her stop, reading and hiding from her parents to spend more time with Marcel. And then bus driver Claudie — recently transitioned from being Claude — has an idea, and Clara, too, is offered the opportunity to re-imagine her life.
A slender but gently diverting tale of inspiration, bold re-inventions and the richness that great literature is a gateway, too.
HEADSHOT by Rita Bullwinkel (Daunt Books €14, 256pp)
DAUNT BOOKS enjoyed success last year with Kick The Latch, an electrifying novel-comeoral-history of the hardscrabble life on the American horse-racing circuit.
Here, the arena is the boxing ring — Bob’s Boxing Palace in Nevada — which, over the course of the two June days that the novel spans, plays host to the Daughters of America Cup.
All the combatants are 18 or younger — there are a pair of cousins; the child of a legendary fighting family; a teen lifeguard haunted by a fatal accident; and the eccentric Rachel Doriko, who tries to psyche out her opponents by donning a mangy racoon-skin hat.
Unfolding as a series of short bulletins, the novel is a combination of the visceral (the sweat, the bruises, the washboard stomachs) and the transcendent.
Bullwinkel zeroes in on this brutal defining moment in her protagonists’ lives, before zooming out to show us how not just the years but personal mythologies unfold. Compelling.
ANNIE BOT by Sierra Greer (The Borough Press €20.30, 240pp)
ANNIE BOT is a Snuggle Bunny, a humanoid companion built to cater to the every whim of her narcissistic manchild owner, Doug. Her raison d’etre is to please him; his ire causes pain. But Annie is also highly intelligent, and when Doug’s pal seduces her, she finds the secret of their broom-cupboard encounter adds a human richness to the desert of her emotional life.
When Doug’s cruelty reaches a new low, she makes an exhilarating bid for freedom — but how long before a flat battery or her tell-tale tracking device gives her away?
AI is, of course, a mirror for its makers, for good or ill. So who, Annie wonders, would she be if she no longer existed to serve Doug?
Greer’s involving innocence-toexperience tale follows Annie’s slow, stumbling journey to selfhood while exploring what makes for humanity. Unexpectedly emotional.