I’m unapologetic about the fact that my favourite book is Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, a book that has fascinated me since I was a small child. Magical stories, or at least narratives in which the tyranny of reality is overthrown or subverted, have fascinated me since. At different stages in my childhood and adolescence I read such fiction to the exclusion of almost everything else. In my teens and twenties, intoxicated by the rhetoric of the bygone European avant-garde, I dismissed realism as an innately reactionary way of presenting the world, and although now (in my forties) I can see that my anti-realism was ill-informed and quaint, my predilection for the bizarre, the mythical and the surreal remains. Kneel Downe’s books satisfy that craving, and An Owl’s Tale does so in a particularly idiosyncratic way. 

The book is a collection of mythopoeic tales, told by Owl to a little girl called Amelia, who makes significant appearances elsewhere in Kneel’s work. The framing device of Owl’s narration allows the reader to sit at the author’s knee and accept each magical story in the same way that a young child accepts Little Red Riding Hood or Hansel and Gretel. This is a children’s book for adults, and it makes an enchanting alternative to the conventions of story-telling we accept as the norm when we are beset by mortgages, career ambitions, money worries, responsibilities. The language of An Owl’s Tale is artfully archaic, full of syntactic inversions and olde worlde vocabulary, but at the same time it is terse and punchy. Take this example, from “The River That Fell in Love with the Sea”:

Slipped the seasons and cold came unto the world… 

And her back turned harsh and white.

Solid.

But beneath she endured.

Grain by grain…

This style looks at first like an acquired taste, but the fluidity and confidence of Kneel’s writing carries the reader along, and the stories quickly become accessible and engaging. The book taps into ancient story-telling traditions that we greet with a smile of recognition when they manifest as “The Wolf Who Lost His Reflection” or “The Prince Without a Throne.” 

The best children’s books are objects of beauty, with windows to other worlds in the form of illustrations. An Owl’s Tale offers its adult readers the same aesthetic joy, thanks to Susan Omand’s elegant ink drawings, which introduce each tale. The combination of Susan’s pictures and Kneel’s words is powerful and exciting. 

If you love traditional tales and myths or are fascinated by the act of story-telling, you should buy this book.  

The Afflictions by Vikram Paralkar is described in its blurb as “a magical compendium of pseudo-diseases, an encyclopaedia of archaic medicine,” a claim that is slightly at odds with the brevity and fragmentariness of the book. The reader is treated not to an encyclopaedic experience, but to a series of excerpts from the 327 volumes of a fictional Encyclopaedia medicinae, linked by a framing narrative. Anyone familiar with my writing will know that I have nothing against brevity and fragmentariness per se (quite the opposite), but in The Afflictions there is a tension between those qualities and the way the book has been put together and presented to the public that I find unsatisfying. More of that later.

Paralkar’s prose is balanced, genial and articulate. It has an olde worlde quality that is difficult to pin down to a particular setting. Syntax and diction feel predominantly early Twentieth Century, while the story seems to be set in an unspecified feudal Catholic country (possibly Spain), in which writers use quills and the schism between science and superstition has yet to occur. Learning and enquiry are at the heart of the book, and the notion of empire is subtly present throughout; perhaps Paralkar has located his fictional world in the Sixteenth Century. But the intention is clearly not to provide the reader with an obvious milieu. I felt as if I had entered the archetypal world of a Calvino or a Borges, removed from mundane reality yet connected with history.

The escapism provided by The Afflictions is one of the chief attractions of the book. Another is the ingenuity of the author in defining and exemplifying his invented ailments. Paralkar is a writer of Twitterature, and in this book he shows his formidable talent for the creation of concise, witty, crystalline prose. Each affliction is neatly contained in a couple of pages, offering the reader a delightful promenade from one to the next, like a saunter through an art gallery. The tone is light and easy. Distinctions between the physical and the metaphysical don’t apply to the symptomatology of the diseases listed here: “the sufferer of Cursed Healer Syndrome… finds himself taking on the disfigurements of those around him”; victims of Oraculum terribile see the future damnation of everyone they look at; the Curse of Sisyphus keeps those afflicted in a cycle of development and regression, perhaps to keep them free from sin. Paralkar’s inventiveness in devising maladies is stunning.

The writing is complemented by some striking illustrations by Amanda Thomas, which provide an extra treat. The pictures are decorative and quietly fanciful, but they have the orderly stasis of textbook illustrations.

Despite all these excellent qualities, The Afflictions has one significant flaw, namely the framing device, in which an elderly librarian introduces a dwarf called Máximo to the Central Library, housing the Encyclopaedia medicinae. The device attempts to impose a narrative but proves insubstantial and disappointing; there are hints that Máximo is deformed and suffers from some sort of affliction (which might explain his interest in the encyclopaedia), but this plot strand is cursory and undeveloped. The book half promises (but doesn’t deliver) a labyrinthine narrative, in which Máximo’s life and story become intertwined with the grotesque vignettes of the encyclopaedia entries. This is just speculation on my part, but it looks to me as if Paralkar wrote his encyclopaedia entries first and then wondered how he could bring them together into a cohesive whole. Perhaps he should have resisted the urge to make his book resemble a novel; unlinked fragments from the encyclopaedia would have been enough, and might have made for a more satisfying read. He should have let the book be what it wanted to be, and not shoe-horn it into an established form.

But don’t let my little grumble about form put you off. The Afflictions is engaging, entertaining and enchanting, and Paralkar is a writer to watch.

You can buy the book here.

The Newer York is an online-and-print magazine that plants itself firmly in the tradition of the avant-garde, publishing left-field short stories accompanied by artwork and grandly declaring on its website, “We will end the triumvirate of novels, poems and short-stories.” It sells a range of merchandise, including paintings, mugs, t-shirts and books, one of which is a remarkable little volume written and illustrated by Bob Schofield called The Inevitable June.

In his book, Schofield strips the lexicon of narrative and illustration to their essentials. Each page is its own world. We start with a small square, which becomes a big square, then a box, then a frame around the book’s title. Over the page, the date “June 1” suggests the start of the story, and a first-person narrative begins:

This morning I am swollen in my mother’s belly. It creaks like a door in the lamp post. I imagine a coat rack built in an iceberg. There are clouds above it. A black octopus touching people’s hair.

The story is neither rational nor linear. Its mercurial instability recalls Benjamin Péret; Schofield, like the great surrealist, lets words and images wander down whatever pathways of association they like. It makes for a delightful read, in which the reader is constantly being surprised, yet is struck by the unaccountable rightness of the story’s shifts and changes. Every chapter is a day in June, beginning with the same two words: “This morning.” We experience a perpetual morning, in which everything is always new. Constant novelty could get boring very quickly, but Schofield presents us with threads, themes, motifs, running from chapter to chapter: the box, glass aeroplanes, baking, the sea, masks, identity, family.

Delight and surprise were not the only emotions I felt when reading The Inevitable June. The book is unsettling and thought-provoking. I am not sure why. One reason might be Schofield’s use of the first person; I felt as if I was reading an encrypted autobiography, a poetic transformation of lived experiences, similar in tone to Fernando Arrabal’s La Pierre de la Folie Take, for example, this passage from Arrabal’s livre panique:

Imprisoned in the glass bottle, all I could see were my mother’s huge hands, slamming the lid shut.

And now this, from The Inevitable June:

This morning I am thinking about my father, who jumped from a glass airplane at the precise moment I was born.

Like La Pierre de la Folie, the narrative of The Inevitable June is organised into brief episodes and proceeds by the accumulation of heterogeneous details, rather than by providing a logically coherent story. I would argue that, in this respect, both books resemble life as we actually experience it far more closely than most novels.

But I digress. The other source of The Inevitable June‘s power lies in its combination of stylish monochrome design and simple drawings. The pictures make their own story, one that runs parallel with Schofield’s word world, intersecting at times, diverging at others, reflecting, distorting, parodying. The book would be greatly diminished without them. Unfortunately, if you buy the Kindle version and read it on your iPad or iPhone, many of the pictures don’t display properly. In any case, there’s never a substitute for a physical book, and this one is a pleasure to handle.

There is a lot more I could write about Schofield’s book: the array of cultural allusions (such as Mary Poppins – check out June 24), the humour, the terrifying octopus. But I’ll wrap up this review by saying simply that I love The Inevitable June, and if you enjoyed silly stories as a toddler and haven’t entirely forgotten what it was like to be one, you will too.

You can buy the book here.