I picked up this book while I was reading Detransition, Baby as I felt I needed something to counter-balance it. In truth, I am not sure what I needed as I also started reading The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture... I felt hesitant of the Tractor book as I am always slightly suspicious of too many and too emphatic accolades but my doubts dispersed on page 2: ‘”Thirty-six. She’s thirty-six and I’m eighty-four. So what?” (He pronounces it ‘vat’.)’ The story of an aging father and a Visa-focused Ukrainian (or Russian, it remains unclear) divorced bombshell of a mother is humorous although I found it tragic at times as the father got physically attacked and abused. I had to distance myself from those events and remind myself that the story is a hyperbole in every sense and that is why his daughters stand on the sidelines watching...
Read more: Marina Lewycka: A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
I became aware of the book through the Women’s prize for fiction longlist as it was hailed as the first-ever nominated book by a transgender author. Then it came back on my radar after the Wild Women Writing Club accused the prize of allowing a ‘male person’ to infiltrate it... I thought, wait a minute, I need to buy that book. It took a few weeks to arrive as many people shared the same thought – it was nice to find myself a part of a wider community.
I could not get my head around the plot as summed up in the various articles I read prior to opening the book and so I was intrigued to see whether I’d be, after all, able to grasp it. I blame the summaries as it makes perfect sense, even though, it is an exceptional story for someone who has been mainly surrounded by cis-gender people. It definitely exposed limitations of my knowledge and my experience. The story delves deep into the humanity, intricacies, challenges, struggles and victories of transgender people. The detail is rich, minute and generous – I felt like a guest invited to observe an intimate ritual with no holds barred.
As a child, I was fascinated by the Greek mythology (the children’s version of it), I used to know all the stories by heart. After reading Irving Stone’s The Greek Treasure about Heinrich Schliemann’s discovery of the actual city of Troy I wanted to be an archaeologist. Visiting Hisarlik is still on my list and I remember the dizzying feeling looking at the golden mask of Agamemnon in Athens’ museum gave me when I was 12 (although that was also partly due to the stifling heat of the place).
It has been almost a month since I finished reading Shuggie Bain. I followed the last year’s Booker Prize Shortlist and attended a few online interviews and readings with the shortlisted authors. In the first wave I bought Brandon Taylor’s Real Life and enjoyed it, then followed Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body and Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (both, as yet, unread). I hesitated with Shuggie and only decided to buy it after it had won. I did find the premise interesting but, for some reason, not interesting enough. So, when I started reading it and struggled to engage with the story I was not too surprised.
Eighty pages in and I was telling everyone that I do not see the point. And then it hit... I am not sure what exactly was the turning point, I would not say either Shuggie or Agnes are easy characters to warm up to – Agnes’ alcoholism introduces a Jekyll & Hyde dichotomy while the emphasis on Shuggie’s ‘otherness’ creates an intrinsic separation. At the same time, they share an inescapable likeness - the importance of appearances, insistence on dressing well, their protective aloofness and their painful looking after each other. They are cut out of the same cloth, they even share a self-harming urge to cajole Shug back or at least prevent him from cutting the ties completely.
Two terrible realities of the western world recent histories yet each offering unexpected hope where one is unable to envisage one.
Came the Stranger is a study of human weakness and its distillation into hatred. It is set in Czechoslovakia a few years before the start of the World War II. Being born in Czechoslovakia and having the knowledge of the historical facts made me experience the novel as a heavy, dark and suffocating cloud hanging over the story and its protagonists. The impending dread is unavoidable and unstoppable and yet I wished for it to be dispelled, I wished for zur Mühlen to rewrite history.
Read more: Hermynia zur Mühlen: Came the Stranger and Benedict Kiely: Proxopera
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