LRN No.29: fantasy fried bananas
Plus: ex-X
This one is going to be brief, and possibly full of typos, because I’ve been away on holiday. I had planned to draft this on the plane home, but I finished my book instead, which was Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
I never used to read much fiction. I was always too distracted by the artifice of it - by obvious exposition, plot points and deliberately engineered narrative arcs - to really enjoy it. You will learn something from non-fiction, even when it’s written badly, I figured. So I stuck with non-fiction.
But then I realised the problem: I had been reading bad fiction. Good fiction compels you to stay with it. You might never finish a non-fiction book but still consider it a good read; if you give up on a work of fiction - if you check out before knowing how the story ends - then it’s failed.
So this year I decided to read the big novels of the summer that everyone has been raving about, to see what I can learn from them about writing - and reading - as a non-fiction writer.
First, I read You Are Here, by David Nicholls, which is as slick and engineered as a Formula One car, but it was so well done that I didn’t mind. It’s an accomplished and absorbing book, but it’s also knowing and charming in the same way as a Richard Curtis film is, which some will find grating. And that’s probably by design-too: it reads like it’s been written to be adapted into a Netflix series. But I couldn’t begrudge it that. I read it in just over a day. It was fun.
The Bee Sting was not fun. I walked off the plane feeling traumatised after turning the last page. But it’s a kind of masterwork - extraordinarily ambitious, tense and moving. I was gripped for 650 pages - and a few hundred of those pages had no punctuation at all, which was fairly bonkers. (There were no speech marks in the entire book. Can someone explain what that is all about? I know a lot of writers do it now. What’s wrong with speech marks? I like them.)
Anyway, I had a great time in Italy, and I can now add a watermelon granita that I had in Florence to my list of unforgettable things I have tasted abroad and will spend the rest of my life dreaming of tasting again. Others on the list include a particular cup of coffee in Zanzibar, some deep-fried slices of banana in Sarawak, and a passion fruit smoothie on the island of Roatan in Honduras. Of all of those, the granita is the easiest to find again. Hell, it’s even on Instagram.
While I was away, and reading books instead of Twitter, I began to feel much happier without it. I will still be there sometimes, but not as much. Do come and join me on BlueSky here, where I’m @jennykleeman, and on Threads and Instagram, where I’m @thejennykleeman.
The holiday read I'm just finishing is the English Patient also with speech marks from way back. Actually I now think I've read it before but can't be sure maybe the film did its job well. I did that last year too with the Incredible Lightness of Being. Got to the last chapter and the a sequence with a dog reminded me that I'd read it before. Sort of annoying. But also kinda nice. My other way of chosing holiday reads is picking up a random book that I can leave with locals when finished. And the kind of thing I wouldn't bother with at home and am forced to finsh. That was 2061 A Space Odyssey. Slightly annoying in its quaint doing all this space stuff is unremarkable way. But some gems dropped in like the discussion about the Napoleon film that had delighted the French and infuriated the British (opposite of the film last year) and something about a violinist throwing up during a Mahler.... Long post cos on the bus to airport home...