Skip to main content

Review 36: Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell

Vampires in the Lemon Grove
Across the course of this challenge, I’ve tended to pick authors whom I know are well-respected, or books that have sat on my ‘to read’ list endlessly, gathering dust and weeping like abandoned children. So when I saw Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove winking at me, a book I’ve never heard of by an author I’ve never heard of, but with a frankly excellent title, I thought Are you Abba? Because I’m gonna take a chance on you.

I’m delighted that I did. VITLG is a book of short stories, each of which follows a similar form: there’s a weird idea that forms the crux of the plot, and then Russell sets about making it feel fleshed out with believable characters. It would be wrong to call this surrealism, because there’s generally only a single oddity in each story. But it’s also not quite magic realism. It’s somewhere in-between. Or if it is magic realism, it’s 90% realism and 10% magic. It’s on the Murakami road.

Let’s be exemplokleptomaniacs and take an example: in one story, a number of former presidents of the USA awake to find themselves reincarnated as horses in a barn. A wacky premise? Yes indeed. But the actual writing feels like straight literary fiction. She uses the story to explore the types of personality that would be drawn to the presidential role, and the way they’d cope in an unfamiliar situation. She uses the fence around the barn as a metaphor for the limits of their comfort zone, and the security that they garner from being top dog (or top horse, or top horsedog) of their zone, and their inability to risk that. Once you’re past the premise, it’s all thoughtful character development. The situation feels normalised.

Another pilfered instance: a story whereby pigeons are – it’s implied – semi-malaevolently stealing small items from people in a town to significantly change the courses of their lives. Whatever your feelings on pigeons (and we all have them, be honest), the concept that they are the architects of fate is somewhat beyond credulity. But the characters in the story, how they react to the way their lives are manipulated and the idea that the loss of something small can have big life impacts are all explored realistically.

The writing has the same sense of weight as other literary fiction, with a pleasing balance between plot movement and description. It’s modern and sharp, like a fidget spinner made of knives, or a vinegar drone

I personally really enjoy any combination of plausibility and oddity, so for me this was a cracking read. If you’re less willing to suspend your disbelief, you might find this too big a bite to swallow.

--

This is my thirty-sixth book review of 100 to raise money for Refuge, the domestic abuse charity. If you liked this review, or just want to help out, please donate on the link below!

JustGiving - Sponsor me now!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review 34: The Long Song by Andrea Levy

I’ve read a few books dealing with black slavery as part of this challenge. It’s interesting how each one looks at it through a slightly different lens, adding slightly different perspectives to the whole picture. In The Long Song , the thing that rings as much through the book as the horror and inhumanity of slavery is the sense of humour between the slaves themselves. It felt odd to laugh out loud while reading this, but there are plenty of times I did. I guess that this in itself is important – humour is an essential and universal human trait, so if we deny the slaves’ humour in recounting their stories, maybe it’s another way of denying their humanity all over again. I tried rewriting this about five times to make me sound less like a pseudo-intellectual jerksack, but this is the best I could do, I’m afraid. Anyway, TLS is set in a Jamaican sugar plantation in the early 19th century, and spans the periods just before and after slavery was abolished in the British Empir...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 7: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

The first thing you see when you open Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing is six pages of quotes from reviews saying how good it is. If you’re like me (and with any luck you’re not), you’ll think: talk about putting yourself under pressure . Happily, Gyasi more than rises to the implicit challenge set by her voluminous praise. The scope of her book - following two branches of an African family tree as they become separated by time and distance – is beautifully realised, with each chapter representing another generational step down. Homegoing is, in its clearest sense, about the reverberating impact of slavery on black people, both in the lands they were ripped from and the lands they were taken to. But the core theme that ties the book together is connection between those two strands of people. The title could be considered a reference to ‘returning’ to Africa, but I think it’s more powerful when considered as more abstract – the re-binding of the strands of people who have been separa...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 9: The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie

The Portable Veblen is an odd read, and possibly not in the ways you’d expect. Picking it up, I assumed it was some sort of sci-fi or magic realist novel. Was a Veblen some sort of futuristic gun? A translation device? A highly treatable but somewhat embarrassing rash? In fact, as with so much in this world, it really only serves to highlight my troglodyte-level ignorance. Apparently Veblen is a reference to Thorstein Veblen, a Norwegian socialist and sociologist living in America in the late 1800s. He essentially decried capitalism and proposed an alternative system to Marxism, and it is after this prominent thinker that TPV ’s main character, Veblen, is named. For me, the novel is really about contradictions between people and between families as they try to adjust from being purely individual to being part of a wider group. How do you decide what to compromise on and what to retain? What is an unhealthy hangover from your upbringing and what is a genuinely core part of ...
Post a Comment
Read more