Marshwood Vale based author, Sophy Roberts, gives us her slim pickings for October 2020.<\/p>\n
As a travel writer, I describe places through my lived experiences. When I write about Tajikistan or Chad for The Financial Times\u2014my main source of freelance work\u2014my writing is dictated by the facts: landscape, people, history and politics, which I try to conjure up as evocatively as possible, but in the end, the narrative has to be driven by journalism. Recently, as Covid-19 continues to wreak havoc on my profession, I\u2019ve found myself leaning in towards fiction for inspiration during this rare moment of pause. In liberating writing from inconvenient context, words can cut straight to the heart of a place. This month, my slim pickings are all short novels, describing a sense of place so vividly I can\u2019t summon any non-fiction that could do it better.<\/p>\n
A Whole Life<\/em> by Robert Seethaler covers the entire twentieth-century lifespan of an Austrian man of the mountains, Andreas Egger, in just 148 pages. In sparse and understated prose, Egger\u2019s life unfolds from his point of view: his childhood, marriage, work for Bitterman & Sons clearing swathes of land for cable cars, and his time as a prisoner of war. The alpine landscapes are a lodestar throughout, as modernity gradually makes its mark on the remote community where Egger lives. With piercing, almost brutal directness, Seethaler exposes Egger\u2019s life, the \u2018white silence\u2019 of mountain blizzards, and the sunlight falling in \u2018shimmering bundles\u2019 through tree canopies. A work of genius.<\/p>\n Nagasaki<\/em> by \u00c9ric Faye is one of those books that lingers long after you\u2019ve turned the last page. The protagonist is an unremarkable Japanese man, living an unexceptionable life as a middle-aged, unmarried meteorologist in Nagasaki, the Japanese city devastated by the 1945 atomic bomb. The protagonist\u2019s modest, ordered existence (he never eats dinner later than 6.30pm; avoids drinks with colleagues, and is surrounded by \u2018old-lady\u2019 neighbours) is thrown into chaos when he begins to notice food disappearing from his fridge. He becomes increasingly involved and concerned, the story unravelling with his obsession to identify the intruder. The writing transports me straight to Japan, from the neatly folded items in the oshiire and sun-warmed rush mats, to the \u2018straggly, crooked bamboo\u2019 and the food being taken: \u2018a single pickled plum\u2019.<\/p>\n The Passion<\/em> is a gutsy, almost hallucinogenic read by Jeanette Winterson. Loosely set in the Napoleonic era (although Winterson is careful to caution that this is a book unbound by natural laws of time or history), the sense of place is visceral. While I enjoyed following Napoleon\u2019s campaign from France to Russia, the real draw of this book is in the magic of Winterson\u2019s Venice descriptions (when she wrote the book, she\u2019d never visited). I was swept along with the protagonists to the dissolute glamour of Venice\u2019s gaming hells, to fireworks displays above St Mark\u2019s Cathedral, breaking the sky into \u2018a million coloured pieces\u2019, and along narrow streets, watching the \u2018sepulchral churches\u2019 rise above foggy thoroughfares. This is travel so evocative, you almost couldn\u2019t beat it with the real deal\u2014a good thing too, given we\u2019re all likely to be at home a while longer.<\/p>\n Sophy Roberts<\/strong> is a freelance journalist who writes about travel and culture. She writes regularly for FT Weekend, among others. Her first book, The Lost Pianos of Siberia<\/em>\u2014one of The Sunday Times top five non-fiction books for summer 2020\u2014was published in February by Doubleday.<\/p>\n Buy any of the books above at Archway Bookshop in Axminster in October and receive a 10% discount when you mention Marshwood Vale Magazine<\/em>. archwaybookshop.co.uk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Marshwood Vale based author, Sophy Roberts, gives us her slim pickings for October 2020. As a travel writer, I describe places through my lived experiences. When I write about Tajikistan or Chad for The Financial Times\u2014my main source of freelance work\u2014my writing is dictated by the facts: landscape, people, history and politics, which I try […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5728,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[33],"class_list":["post-5270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reviews","tag-sophy-roberts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5270\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}