LITERARY FICTION
A FOOL, FREE
by Beate Grimsrud
(Head of Zeus £16.99)
ELI is almost never alone. She’s plagued by the voices of boys named Espen, Erik, Emil and Prince Eugen, urging her to behaviour ranging from anti-social to selfharming. She’s in and out of mental hospitals and frequently sectioned after outbursts of violence in which she smashes things and abuses people.
And yet, she’s wonderfully creative and loveable, too.
She overcomes dyslexia to become a successful writer of books and films, and in spite of her bouts of mania, she inspires affection and loyalty in others who show endless patience trying to help her.
Eli’s first-person narration of her troubled life, from childhood to middle-age, tugs you into the mind of a schizophrenic — a kaleidoscope of mayhem and misery in which self-destruction is always only an internal whisper away.
But it’s far from depressing, for what shines through is a courageous and imaginative personality, a triumph of optimism over often bitter experience, turning this episodic story of what is — to use the cliche aptly for once — a rollercoaster of a life into a page-turner.
A bestselling prize-winner in author Beate Grimsrud’s native Norway, it’s waited five years for publication here. You wonder why it took so long.
FATES AND FURIES
by Lauren Groff
(Heinemann £14.99)
LOTTO (Lancelot) and Mathilde fall in madly love at first sight, just as they are graduating from university aged 22. Lotto is stunningly charismatic and so clever everyone assumes he’s destined for great things. Consequently, Mathilde takes on the role of supporter and enabler of his undoubted talent, a loyal wife working the boring nine-to-five while he reaches for the success as an actor that will surely come.
A decade later, it hasn’t happened, and Lotto is drifting into despair when, in a drunken midnight frenzy, he hammers out a play and finds his true vocation as a dramatist — soon becoming the toast of New York’s theatre critics.
Through it all, his and Mathilde’s mutual devotion is the envy of everyone who knows them; they seem to lead an almost mythical golden life, until fate takes another twist.
Groff’s study of a marriage — examined first from Lotto’s point of view and then, in the book’s second half, from Mathilde’s — shows that from the inside, relationships are rarely as hunky-dory as they seem.
It’s a book of two halves, the first sometimes awkwardly overwritten, the second a much more fluid and engrossing read.
THE GAP OF TIME
by Jeanette Winterson
(Hogarth £16.99)
A NEW series of novels in which well- known authors are commissioned to write their own versions of Shakespeare plays kicks off with Jeanette Winterson revisiting The Winter’s Tale.
It is, she points out, an appropriate pairing — the story of a foundling told by one. Adopted herself, it’s a play that has apparently always fascinated Winterson.
One hopes for something special, but unfortunately the result is disappointing, as these projects so often turn out to be.
It’s not disastrous like Alexander McCall Smith’s reworking of Jane Austen’s Emma (another match seemingly made in heaven), but the updating of the situation to post-financial crash London and the fictional American city New Bohemia, in which Leontes becomes a financial tycoon and Autolycus a car dealer (Auto — geddit?), leads to cardboard characterisations and a feeling of flippancy.
That said, there’s always something likeable and sincere about anything Winterson does and there are individual lines here that are pithy and memorable.
One just wishes that, having got this out of her system, she’d pressed delete and done the whole thing again — only further from the original and nearer to herself.