list.co.uk/books Reviews | BOOKS
MUSIC MEMOIR CARRIE BROWNSTEIN Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir (Virago) ●●●●●
Exceptionally talented guitarist and co-creator of Portlandia, Carrie Brownstein takes the reader through her childhood, evolution as a musician through the 1990s in Olympia and behind the scenes on Sleater-Kinney tours and album recordings up until 2006 in a revelatory, poignant and genuinely funny memoir.
Brownstein’s candid account of her mother’s anorexia, her father’s eventual coming out and her own battle with anxiety is nicely balanced with witty stories of life on the road. She articulates her unconditional love for fellow band members, Corin Tucker and Janet Weiss, as if speaking to a close friend. Her prose flows like an intimate but animated conversation, driving home the formative role music has played in her life. Unguarded excitement rolls off the page when speaking
of her appreciation for the Riot grrrl music scene, including bands such as Bikini Kill, Bratmobile and Heavens to Betsy, whose lyrics and energy encouraged Brownstein to embrace her feminism. On her time with Sleater-Kinney and their hiatus, Brownstein is introspective, never wishing to speculate on anyone else’s feelings but her own. She navigates this world with a raw vulnerability, especially as she divulges information on her failing mental health towards the end of their 2006 tour.
Ultimately this memoir reads like a rich and rewarding
coming-of-age novel where the protagonist confronts her fears in a really cool setting while hanging out with the likes of Jack White and Eddie Vedder and playing dares with Beth Ditto. Disarmingly honest and self-deprecating, it’s inspirational reading for aspiring musicians, outsiders and anyone trying to make sense of their life. (Katherine McLaughlin) Out now.
FICTION DAVID MITCHELL Slade House (Sceptre) ●●●●● GRAPHIC NOVEL EDWARD ROSS Filmish (Self Made Hero) ●●●●●
TRUE CRIME GRAEME MACRAE BURNET His Bloody Project (Contraband) ●●●●● FICTION KEVIN BARRY Beatlebone (Canongate) ●●●●●
‘What do you do when you’re visiting someone’s house and their garden starts to vanish?’ says Nathan Bishop during his visit to Slade House. Fans of David Mitchell may recall the set up from a story he composed on Twitter to promote 2014’s The Bone Clocks. This short novel grew from those tweets, and is set in the same universe, where human souls and time are mere playthings. Set over five days spanning five decades, each with its own protagonist, Slade House is a metaphysical haunted house tale that sees guests summoned to the house every nine years. From Nathan to seedy CID officer Gordon Edmonds and the tragic student Sally Timms, Mitchell has that rare ability to fully establish a character in just a couple of pages, and to vividly describe a world not confined by the laws of physics. His la nguage and the tightly woven world he creates are equally enthralling. There aren’t many writers with his imagination or the ability to successfully pull off so peculiar a plot. He does it majestically. (Kevin Scott) Out now.
Anyone walking through Edinbugh’s Filmhouse cinema in the last few years will have stumbled across Filmish, the lovely comic book treatments of film theory from Edward Ross. Under the same title, the artist and essayist has now expanded into a full graphic novel form with this fun and engaging journey through film history.
It's a solid overview of film theory from Laura Mulvey to Gilles Deleuze. However, distilling 100 years of cinematic history (and over 300 film references) into 200 pages is no mean feat, and even those well-versed in the male gaze and technophobia will find rich reward on each page that lovingly celebrates classic images from the big screen. In the tradition of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, Ross himself inhabits Filmish, guiding readers through his personal reflections on the subject. As he notes early on, while the medium has continued to evolve, its power to open up the potential of human vision remains undiminished. And so it seems, does the manner in which we discuss it. (Scott Henderson) Out Sat 7 Nov.
When researching his family history in Inverness, author Graeme Macrae Burnet discovered the story of Roderick ‘Roddy’ Macrae, a 17-year- old boy from Culduie in Wester Ross who committed a brutal triple murder. While awaiting trial, Roddy wrote
a detailed account of his life and this novel is the first time his memoir has been printed in full (disturbing passages were previously distributed in small booklets known as chapbooks). Roddy recounts a seemingly honest and entirely unromanticised account of the life of a crofter in 19th-century Scotland. The known outcome lends his tale a weighty sense of foreboding.
His narrative is followed by an extract
from the memoir of a psychiatrist who examined Roddy, along with newspaper accounts of his dramatic trial. These expose inconsistencies and omissions in Roddy’s story, demonstrating not just the unreliability of the individual narrators but the complexity of the justice system’s task in determining whether he, or any criminal, was sound of mind. (Rowena McIntosh) Out Thu 5 Nov.
The first thing you should know about Beatlebone is that you can take the Beatle part literally. This novel imagines John Lennon at a time of creative strife, escaping for three days to an island he owns, in order to contemplate life, work and his impending 40s in solitude. John’s period of isolation on the island doesn’t last long. He finds himself at the mercy of a shapeshifting driver and suddenly the island is full of foreboding elements that make his creative woes seem a distant memory.
It’s been billed as a ‘mystery
box’ of a novel, but in practice the opposite is true. Kevin Barry’s clean yet imaginative prose seamlessly puts the reader into the mind of a complex figure in the midst of a creative dry patch, and thus allows us to imagine a whole new world for this man, who was so much in the public eye, but who had a private life plagued with worries and doubts, just like the rest of us. It’s a must for Beatles fans, and even more so for fans of inventive, meticulously crafted contemporary literature. (Rebecca Monks) Out now.
5 Nov 2015–4 Feb 2016 THE LIST 83