For National Literacy Month: Literary Fiction That Will Disturb and Intrigue You
This month, to honor National Literacy Month’s adherence to reading and writing skills, I’m pulling some books off my shelf for recommendations and writing about my experiences reading those books. I started with poetry.
Now, let’s explore fiction. The kind that will disturb and unsettle you.
This list is for readers who are unafraid to try the unfamiliar, the bizarre, the uncomfortable. This list includes poignant literary fiction that underscores meaningful things about people and place.
After all, literature doesn’t always have to entertain, does it? Sometimes literary fiction moves us out of the familiar into the strange. Sometimes, the books that trouble us stay with us long after we turn the last page. These books taught me things about the histories and attitudes of different parts of the world, and they did so with refined characters and emotional depth.
True to form for my Reading Around the World blog, I bring you six books from 6 countries and 3 continents around the world.
1. The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy
Written by the award-winning Indian novelist, Arundhati Roy, this novel won the 1997 Booker Prize.
Let’s start with language. The language in this book will intrigue and astound you. The changes in narrative voice will have you so spellbound that once you get to the core of the narrative, you’ll get chills. Roy’s writing in this novel has been compared to Faulkner’s.
“Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse things kept happening.”
This is the story of an affluent Indian family whose lives, particularly the lives of their seven-year-old twins, are upended when their beautiful cousin, Sophie Mol arrives. It is a beautiful and heartbreaking family saga with the backdrop of political upheaval.
“Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house—the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture—must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for.”
The story veers between two timeframes—the 1960s and the 1990s. Ambitious in frame, the novel explores race, religion and class. It includes a sprawl of characters from a family line that begins with the grandmother, Mammachi—which means this is a book where marginal annotations will be helpful as you try to keep up. As you uncover the underlying stories, they will affect you in ways that you may not have considered.
2. The Days of Abandonment, by Elena Ferrante
Considered one of Italy’s most acclaimed contemporary writers, there has been much conversation regarding the mystery surrounding the true identity of Elena Ferrante. Most known for her My Brilliant Friend series, she shocked Europe when this book was unveiled. Shocking this novel is, indeed. In a good and disturbing way.
“Hold the commas, hold the periods. It’s not easy to go from the happy serenity of a romantic stroll to the chaos, to the incoherence of the world.”
Olga, a writer who has been abandoned by her husband and left to face single motherhood, descends into mental darkness. The narrative explores her inner psyche and it is explosive.
“Time seemed to be boiling over, flowing in sticky waves out of a pot onto the flame.”
The mood and language of this novel will entrap you. The narrative has a visceral intensity for which you’ll have to prepare yourself, but it convincingly depicts the inner struggle with loss of control when a love and life is altered.
3. Salvage the Bones, by Jesmyn Ward
From an American novelist and two-time National Book Award Winner, this novel will wound and terrify you.
Hurricane Katrina is 12 days away and threatens the town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. Teenaged Esch and her brothers are alone in The Pit, a clearing of trailer homes. Their single father, a drunk, cannot be counted upon. One brother takes care of a prized pit bull while the other cares for a younger brother. They are surrounded by chaos. And Esch, a motherless girl growing up with men, has just realized she is pregnant.
I wrote about my reading experience with this book on Goodreads in 2017. I wrote that the words in this novel seem to be tears that have not been shed, so they build up on the inside and fill up buckets of anguish:
“I learned how to cry so that almost no tears leaked out of my eyes, so that I swallowed the hot salty water of them and felt them running down my throat.”
This is fiction about how children without nurture, find love in dizzying and skewed ways. The words in this novel are wounds with fragile scabs. This narrative is the beat of a wounded girl’s heart; it bleeds on the page and hurts to read.
4. The Door, by Magda Szabó
This is fiction from a writer the New York Times calls “one of Hungary’s most important twentieth-century writers.” From the first sentence of this book—”I seldom dream”—you will be captivated. It is beguiling.
Emerence, a housekeeper who can barely read, goes to work for a young Hungarian writer who has just returned to writing after her writings had been politically frozen. They develop an unusual friendship. However, no one truly knows Emerence. She is seen as “fearless, enchantingly and wickedly clever, brazenly impudent.” Later, you understand why Emerence’s door remains closed to people. The conclusion and betrayal will stun you.
“The decades of her life in Hungary had exposed her only to the rhetoric she so hated, and which had drained away any interest she might have had in poetry.”
The moment you start to read, you realize you’re in the hands of a fiction writer who is stylistically different. Atmospherically, this novel is luring and by the time the tension is revealed, you’re hooked.
5. Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier
British writer Daphne du Maurier wrote 37 books but none of them surpassed Rebecca in sales. This is considered her masterpiece.
A young bride, Mrs. de Winter, recently married to the wealthy Maxim de Winter, walks into the eerie home and shadows of her predecessor, Maxim’s deceased first wife, Rebecca de Winter.
This is an enthralling and dreamlike narrative that lures you with the first sentence:
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
Manderley, an isolated stone mansion on the Cornish coast, is itself a character in this book. When I remember this book, I hardly think of Rebecca, the deceased wife, nor will I recall the nameless narrator and gullible young bride of the rich Max de Winter. And I certainly won’t remember Max de Winter or his brazen housekeeper. Instead, I will remember the mysterious and strange Manderley and everything that happened there that becomes so palpable within this first-person narrative.
6. The Woman in the Dunes, by Kōbō Abe
This is ficion from Kōbō Abe, who is considered one of Japan’s foremost novelists. According to his publisher’s note, all of Abe’s books have been bestsellers in Japan. If you enjoy mythical reads, you’ll enjoy this. Bear this in mind, it will leave you bewildered.
A slow-paced narrative, this novel is rife with musings on entomology. An entomologist on a day trip misses his bus, so he’s offered lodging at the bottom of a sand pit. Yes, you read correctly, a sand pit. (Caution: readers around the world, do not miss the last bus on your day trips)!
After losing his ladder, Jumpei is trapped in the sand dunes with a mysterious woman. Their interaction is intoxicating and unnerving.
“Certainly he must be the strangest of all…he who was musing on the strangeness of things here.”
But how much of what he experiences is real, how much of it is an illusion? How much is mysterious, like the “tongue-burning soup containing bits of seaweed?” How much is psychological? You will close this novel by Kōbō Abe and wonder what it is you’ve just read.
To challenge yourself to read new books and visit literary cities, please join me on my reading around the world trail.
