Book Reviews

The Modern
Anna Kate Blair (Simon & Schuster, available now)

The Modern is our Debut Spotlight for October! Read an interview with first-time author Anna Kate Blair here, plus watch an exclusive reading on our Instagram!

Anna Kate Blair’s debut novel, The Modern, follows Sophia, an Australian woman working at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She is confused, unmoored. Her work contract (and thus her visa) is almost up and she is newly engaged after her steady, if somewhat dull, boyfriend proposes.

The Premonition
Banana Yoshimoto (Allen & Unwin, available now)

The Premonition is the newest English release of fiction by Banana Yoshimoto, bestselling author of Asleep, Goodbye Tsugumi and the beloved cult classic, Kitchen. The delicacy of Yoshimoto’s prose shines in Asa Yoneda’s translation, bringing anglophone readers this masterpiece for the first time—thirty-five years after its initial Japanese publication in 1988, the year Yoshimoto made her startling debut with four works.

Yayoi lives a perfectly normal life with her mother, father and brother. They’re the ‘picture of a happy middle-class family, like in that Spielberg movie’. Still, Yayoi can’t seem to escape the feeling that she has forgotten something important from her past: ‘Something’s missing. There’s something else…’

The delicacy of Yoshimoto’s prose shines in Asa Yoneda’s translation.

Strange visions creep into Yayoi’s life with growing intensity—a cold chill in a hot bath, a ghostly rubber duck, an unfamiliar child. Yet visceral as these hauntings are, Yayoi is unable to hold them long enough to understand their meaning: ‘Because like everyone I was always moving into the future, at some point I’d stopped thinking about it.’ To escape, she makes a habit of running away to her aunt Yukino’s place, a cluttered and disorderly cabin in the Japanese mountains. Yet it is here that Yayoi’s memories truly begin to emerge, ‘like a mirage that I suddenly discovered was real.’ For the first time, at the age of nineteen, Yayoi is forced to face the truth of her past. A question arises: Is it better to forget?

Readers of Yoshimoto will be familiar with her eloquence of tone, quietly heart-wrenching prose and wonderfully honest depictions of human existence. The Premonition is no exception. It is a sleepy odyssey of self-discovery traversing the depths of forgotten memories. As visions of the protagonist’s past increasingly bleed into her present, Yoshimoto lends the narrative a deeply melancholic, dreamlike quality.

In Japan, there is an expression: 以心伝心 (ishin-denshin). It is to know the feelings of another without the use of words. And it is what Yayoi shares with her aunt. Yukino’s life is strange and chaotic. She spends all day in her pyjamas, religiously watches Friday the 13th and wakes Yayoi at 2 am so she has someone to drink with. In her backyard, Yukino throws old furniture, children’s toys, broken objects—a rotting trash pile of things from a past she wants to forget. Despite this strange nature, Yayoi has an unmatched sense of understanding of her aunt: ‘I could feel the depth of her sadness like it was my own.’

As in so much of Yoshimoto’s writing, The Premonition explores the depths of female relationships. At the centre are two women negotiating the truth of a shared past and their story is compelling and quietly devastating. In length this novel is short, yet the poetry of Yoshimoto’s words will leave you reflecting on the fleeting nature of each passing moment, as the leading women struggle to do the same.

—Annie Yoshida

Gunflower
Laura Jean McKay (Scribe, available now)

Laura Jean McKay’s fiction has an uncanny ability to disorientate. Her latest book, the short fiction collection Gunflower, makes ordinary humans seem like alien creatures and turns the strangest scenarios into the stuff of the everyday. Building upon the ideas in her award-winning 2020 novel, The Animals in That Country, which envisioned what would happen if a disease allowed people and animals to suddenly communicate, Gunflowerunveils how so much about the way we live—from the food we eat to the resources we abuse—relies upon there being a clear distinction between human and Other.

Some stories in Gunflower achieve this by once again conflating the human with the animal. The narrator of ‘Those Last Days of Summer’ speaks of an existence comprised of cages and ‘the giddy, heady urge to birth’, but gives us no clue as to her species. In ‘The Two O’Clock’, a child sees a vision of a dance hall filled with pigs in lipstick and people who move like chickens, but they are too young to grasp its meaning. Other stories probe our vulnerability in the face of other fathomless entities, things that are ‘unspeakable’ in the sense of being inexpressible as well as horrifying (the ocean, the virus, the gender known as men).

Laura Jean McKay’s fiction has an uncanny ability to disorientate.

Like any short story collection, some stories stand out more than others. A few have punchy premises that nonetheless lack narrative staying power. For example, ‘Cats at the Fire Front’ takes place on a farm where sheep are household pets and cats are bred for their milk and fur. The casual allusions to eating ‘foxhound feta’ are jarring (presumably, as they are intended to be) but risk becoming a gimmick. Several of the flash fictions, meanwhile, are perfectly crafted and startling in their brevity.  The story ‘Less’ offers this brief but poignant opening line: ‘She had completely forgotten to have children, and it was so embarrassing.’

But the titular story is a powerful, effective tale. ‘Gunflower’ begins with an American law academic undergoing an abortion in international waters, primarily as an activist gesture (she is partnered, middle-aged and white). What starts out as a realistic albeit atypical premise eventually and unexpectedly becomes much more: a harrowing journey that brings into sharp focus the fragility of such constructs as class, ethics, law and nation. The further out her ship travels, the greater her bewilderment grows, until she and the reader alike are left unsure of where humanity ends and the indifferent abyss begins.

—Georgia White