Shortlisted for the 2024 Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman, Winner of the 2023 Prix Littéraire Gisèle Halimi for Women’s Writing, this is a pretty ropey novel with a cast of characters that fail to convince on every second page, fractured relationships that don’t convince us, and desperation that’s unconvincing. When all’s ‘laid bare’ in this ‘very contemporary take’ on a Parisian ‘closed door’ story – we’re stuck in this room all evening with the guests and hosts of a dinner party – there’s nothing there, because none of it’s convincing when the writing isn’t convincing.

What’s called “a novel of ideas”, “an intellectual page-turner, and “a ferociously clever book” is just a damn good novel: it changes the way you see yourself and the world around you. As you read this novel you revaluate your relationship to others, to your children or parents. To yourself. It’s not comforting, but rather it’s disturbing. It’s not easy. It challenges preconceived ideas in the subtlest of ways.

This is set up as a ‘metafictional quest in search of an unjustly forgotten African author’, but it’s not very metafictional in that it has very little to say about fiction, though it does have a lot to say about nothing, if a few other things too. But first and foremost, it has nothing interesting at all to say about fiction, if it does, in a roundabout way, explore the impact of colonialism on literature, writing and the identity of the writer.

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The Deepity: Faux-profundity in literature.  Reviews of this book are predictable enough: that Murnane is a ‘difficult’ writer, but at the same time a ‘compulsively readable writer’. That he is like Kafka, Calvino, and Borges, ‘but with his own distinctive (and essentially Australian) quality’. This book is a little like Calvino’s most popular, if because most cryptic, ‘Invisible Cities’; however, where it falls down is in having a lot of meaningless crap paraded, un-ironically, as profound truth.

This short story cycle is made up of twenty-two short stories each "...conceived as complementary parts of a whole, centred in the background of a single community”, each of which is based upon one character's past / present struggle to overcome the loneliness / isolation / feeling of entrapment that affects people in a small town, how everyone cannot adequately express themselves to others (or to themselves), find meaning, etc.

This, apparently, is ‘the story of a raindrop’. It is also an ‘ambitious, multi-perspective novel about the politics and preciousness of water’, whilst it ‘ranges from ancient Mesopotamia to contemporary London’. The book’s ambition is apparently to be marvelled at, and the books is covered with quotations of praise, and yet, this novel’s flaws are rather glaring, as per the following review from the Guardian:

This was the last of Chekhov’s stories, though not the last he started. His final few stories run in this order (of publication / completion) The Lady with the Dog (1899) At Christmas Time (1900) In the Ravine (1900) The Bishop (1902) Betrothed (1903) – Unfinished  Disturbing the Balance (1905) – Unfinished Like ‘Gusev’ (1890), ‘The Bishop’ is a story about death, with the protagonist dying for the duration of the story.

Anton Chekhov’s “Little Trilogy” is made up of “Man in a Case,” “Gooseberries,” and “Concerning Love”, three stories linked by both character and theme, the stories being told by the same group of friends, all dealing with ‘love’ in a variety of manifestations: romantic love, and the lack of romantic love, the mystery of romantic love, the kind of alienation born of the notion of love, or the suspicion of love, then the fear of love, or what might be emotional timidity, then a kind of abstract love – an ‘excessive devotion to a life-draining abstraction’ – as well as the delusion informed by love – all of which is based on such a wide definition of love, that these stories may well not be about love at all – as they all claim to be.

Interesting in that Chekhov deals with themes he doesn’t usually address: the nature of artistic genius, of creativity, its closeness to madness, the price we pay for artistic achievement, and ultimately, its value. What is the point of doing something for posterity, if one has to throw one’s life away. But again, we have the arrogant man, Kovrin, Chekhov’s favourite type of protagonist; yet, how he is undone, this time, is very different.

This is one of the great early stories, if only because how utterly different it is. And how odd it is. Nealy as odd as Gogol. But it’s not surreal. Nothing magical – like in Gogol’s “The Nose”. Nothing fantastically disturbing, like you get in Gogol's "The Overcoat", in which the grotesque and the absurd battle agsint minutely observed detail and everyday reality is defamiliarized.

This is peak Chekhov – whose stories peter out – as does he – at the beginning of the last century – with only 4 stories completed after ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ – which is rightly considered to be his masterpiece. The great stories ‘Ionych’ and ‘A Visit to Friends’ were both completed in the previous year, as were ‘In the Cart’ as well as the famous ‘Little Trilogy: ‘The Man in the Case / A Hard Case / The Encased Man / The Man in the Shell’, About Love / Concerning Love’ & ‘Gooseberries’.

This took Chekhov three weeks to write – apparently the first story he took sufficiently seriously – even suffering ‘creative agony’ and four false starts. Is this, perhaps, the first great story of Chekhov’s? Had claimed that, before this, he never spent more than a single day on a story. He was writing under his own name now, getting a deal of critical attention, and publishing his stories in the more prestigious ‘New Times’ – this being the first story published here.

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A story in which the boredom and pettiness of a small town, the life of a mediocre family, the Turkins, a silly old man, his wife who writes tedious novels ‘about things that never happened in real life’, and their daughter ‘pussycat’ who of course ‘reads a great deal’, is revealed as the answer to the eternal question, however it might be phrased.

A story which shows the importance of how the story ends: “Ten minutes later he was at his desk working – and he didn’t give Kuzminki another thought.” Far better perhaps to feel sorry for the narrator/protagonist, and his lack of understanding, than to poke fun at the narrator’s sentimentalism. Here we have the usual ‘ethereal women’ (Chekhov liked his women to not physically exist too much), the flowering fields of rye, the narrator with a lack of understanding, the tragedy of lost / failed / frustrated love – which is just a metaphor for the tragedy of lost / failed / frustrated life: how we fail to appreciate what’s important until it’s too late.

Is this the first appearance of ‘the green light’ in literature? Is this the same green light that appears in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby (1925) – when narrator, Nick Carraway, observes Jay Gatsby stretching his arm out toward the distant green light of his impossible love for Daisy Buchanan? Or is this Jules Verne’s made-up Scottish legend of the Green Ray (1882): a flash of green light that can appear in a clear sky as the sun is passing the horizon at sea, allowing you to see into your own heart and read the hearts of others?

One of the better Chekhov stories for being less neat and tidy and having more of the bits that don’t quite fit into the pattern. If writing the ‘perfect short story’ is what motivated Chekhov – making it perfectly balanced, neatly but subtly patterned, having everything working, all lined up, nothing loose – it’s only towards the end of his short story writing career where he has the confidence / genius to throw things up in the air and leave things loose, not quite add up, not fit, and really get under the reader’s skin.

Another fictionalised biography by Tóibín, this time exploring the life and times of the greatest German writer of the 20th Century – Thomas Mann. In his 2004’s ‘The Master’, Tóibín gave Henry James the same treatment – but with more success. Indeed, Tóibín’s book on James is stunning – but if the reader is more engrossed in the subject, so is Tóibín.