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Reviews of Inglorious
This section contains full extracts from a selection of reviews:
- Inglorious — Tara Ison in the LA Times
- Inglorious — Olivia Laing in the Guardian
- Inglorious — Kate Saunders in the Times
Tara Ison in the LA Times
EXPECTING a reader to ride shotgun on the journey of a character's existential crisis is a lot for a writer to ask. Potholes loom: Ah, the paralyzing anomie of postmodern life, the self-absorption of the downward spiral, the privileged self-indulgence of middle-class despair! Woe to the reader — and writer — who risks that invitation: Do we really need to hear that story again? Do we really want to go there?
Joanna Kavenna's first novel, "Inglorious" (following her widely acclaimed nonfiction debut, "The Ice Museum"), is a trip worth taking. Rosa Lane, a 35-year-old reasonably stable and successful London journalist, suddenly finds herself "in a labyrinth, lacking a ball of twine," abruptly "aware of an invisible stopwatch tolling her down…. Sitting at her desk that day, sweating into her shirt, she thought, If they told me I would never do anything more than this, would I want to live or die on the spot?"
Instead, she quits her job on the spot — you might think this the healthy and proactive (if impractical) choice, but wait — and staggers out into a morass of emotional conflicts and circumstances she has sensed churning but until now has resolutely ignored. Rosa's mother died six months ago, and she has yet to adjust to the loss; Liam, her longtime boyfriend, exits their perfunctory relationship and takes up with Grace, Rosa's best friend; Rosa's father has a starting-a-new-life relationship of his own; Rosa's once manageable financial debt is ballooning to blimp proportions. A possible new boyfriend is 10 years younger than she, and his cavalier optimism serves as rebuke to her own waste of time and potential. London is hellish in its hyper-stimulation, its relentless insistence on tangible success. Rosa wanders from flat to flat, friend to friend, borrowing clothing and food, wearing out welcomes, juggling funds, increasingly humiliated and exhausted.
But, as with any honest depiction of emotional unraveling, it isn't the circumstances that matter most. Rosa is gifted with options and talents, after all — she isn't anywhere near as logistically desperate as she might be. It's the caught-in-the-maze panic, the mental self-flagellation, the psychological hamster wheel. (Or the chemical imbalance: One glitch here is the absence of the idea of seeking professional psychological help. Odd that no one in her world advises her to see a shrink.) Should she really be spending all her time seeking a place to crash, the tide-over loan of a few quid,the security of a living-wage job? Or is the truer quest — the should-should-should drumbeat she feels morally obliged to march to — the escape from such quotidian banalities in favor of a search for Life's Meaning?
What to do? Who can tell her? She attempts a metaphysical retreat: A bus ride to a job interview becomes a rumination on how to take comfort in Socrates, "who said that it was foolish to fear death, because there was no knowing if death was a better state than life," while "[i]n the here and now, death — the deaths of others — robbed you of love." And why obsess over Liam and Grace instead of "trying to understand the sun"? She becomes a compulsive "To Do" list-maker, a running motif of oppressive and evolving directories that combine high-mindedness with the most humdrum of errands: "Buy some tuna and spaghetti…. Read 'The Golden Bough,' the Nag Hammadi Gospels, the Upanishads, the Koran, the Bible, the Tao…. Read Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Bacon, Locke…. Hoover the living room. Clean the toilet." She is bombarded by signs: Graffiti, billboards, trash on the street all proffer scattered words of wisdom or advice or warning; such "clues," Rosa believes, are a potentially illuminating language she must puzzle out.
It's the intellectual wit and Kavenna's Woolfian eye for the universe-in-a-single-detail that save the novel from the hair-tearing emotional excess and sentimentality so many nervous-breakdown stories suffer from. "A dishcloth had dropped on the linoleum, and no one had stooped to collect it," Rosa observes of her former life with Liam. "There were these small signs of ferment and then a few remnants of order, everything incommensurate." All things portend peril, every moment is fraught: "She ran the tap, and watched the water whirl into the drain. She touched the plastic of the shower curtain and saw light sliding down it. The universe was riddled with impossible elements, she thought, absurd symmetries."
Unfortunately, the novel's ending relies a bit too heavily on a handy plot device to trigger an epiphany, briefly threatening to tip the complex balance of Rosa's struggles toward a more conventional, scorned-woman/failed-romance climax — but Kavenna darts away from it just in time. If the actual conclusion feels "unsatisfying" — well, thank goodness for that. "And then she thought how damn ironic that was, that you should seek obscurity and positively embrace ignorance. That you should fashion your philosophy from the acceptance of unknowability" — that's about as much "resolution" as we get.
Good for Kavenna. The obvious tidiness of, say, a leap from London Bridge, a new Prince Charming, a fabulous job offer would give the lie to her respectful and nuanced rendering. Because it is the journey itself, not the destination, that makes this lovely and wrenching novel worth the ride.
Olivia Laing in the Guardian
In her travel book The Ice Museum, which was longlisted for the Guardian first book award, Joanna Kavenna embarked on a quest to find the mythic land of Thule, a journey that led her deep into frozen wastes, both literal and imaginary. Rosa Lane, the troubled heroine of Kavenna's exuberant debut novel, has also launched herself on a journey. Her aims are lofty: to discover the meaning of existence, escape penury and gorge herself on key works of philosophy and literature - but her peregrinations don't take her much further than an ill-fated trip to the Lake District. Mostly, she wanders the corridors of her own mind instead, never far from complete collapse.
At 35, Rosa has reached "Dante's mid-point, the centre of life, when she was supposed to garner knowledge and become wise". But a faint dissatisfaction with the "pocket utopia" of her life has given way, following the death of her mother, to a sense of dislocation and disintegration. The buttresses that have so far supported her seem comically unstable, and so she sets about dismantling them. Within a matter of months she has resigned from her job as a journalist, been dumped by her handsome but vacuous boyfriend, moved out of her flat and whittled her possessions down to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the complete works of Shakespeare - all necessary preparations for a descent into the realms of depression, grief and madness.
Kavenna is astute enough to realise that there is an addictive thrill to this kind of freefall, and so Rosa keeps on tumbling, severing herself from friendships and dispensing with social norms. "Acedia, plain and simple" is her typically grandiose self-diagnosis, and the prescription is equally weighty. "Read Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the rest," she scrawls. "Hoover the living room. Clean the toilet. Distinguish the various philosophies of the way."
If Rosa has lost the plot, Kavenna has dispensed with it almost entirely, and yet this journey into a nervous breakdown is described with such relish and mordant humour that it remains as gripping as many more epic voyages. From her newly dispossessed vantage point, Rosa regards the rat race her friends are engaged in with baffled horror. Take the property ladder, "a grand illusion - everything dangling out of reach, and the ladder reaching up higher and higher to a grand crash, a Götterdämmerung of wage slaves, in which the liveried masses will fight a final battle for a small house to call their own and be slain in droves and burn to a crisp".
Such fevered musings form the bulk of the book; and a more accurate self-diagnosis would have been logorrhoea. Rosa is subject to flights of ideas and associative thinking; while her life stalls, her mind soars. The wordplay is her defence against the threat of extinction, the looming terror of "the snuffing out of me!" In exchanging the usual niceties of story and character development for this barrage of language, full of obscure allusions and quotations, Kavenna faces the charge of pomposity - worse, she risks alienating her readers with a display of linguistic dexterity that dazzles rather than engages. That she succeeds instead in captivating is testament to her sly, self-deprecating wit. It is this love of larking amid despair that saves Rosa and the novel that contains her from drowning.
Kate Saunders in the Times
Rosa is a fairly successful journalist in her early thirties. One day, soon after the death of her mother, she walks away from her well-paid job. From that moment, it all falls apart. Her handsome, vacuous partner runs off with her best friend. Rosa is homeless, camping on the sofas of friends, until they throw her out. Aimless, helpless and unemployable, she drifts and sinks until she is bumping along the bottom. This is a superb piece of writing, and a disturbing, witty commentary on modern life. “To live free from illusions, but content. Impossible!”