I've never read any Faulkner before (yes, I know, what an oversight!), and what a way to start — I loved this novel.

An astonishing multi-perspective novel of a family taking an ailing woman to be buried in her homeland, with her traveling in her own coffin.

Stunning. As you'd expect — it's William Faulkner.

To begin, Addie, the mother of the family, sits in the window of their home, listening and watching as her firstborn son, Cash, build her coffin outside. She dies, and the family attempt to transport their mother's body and the coffin back to her birthplace through numerous difficulties, challenges and horrors.

The story switches between the perspectives of each of the family members, 15 different points of view in all, developing the characters slowly as the narrative progresses and allowing the reader to get to know each of them with a growing degree of intimacy.

This is a great novel. A must-read.

(Reading it has also been a great insipiration for my own novel-in-progress, which is also a multi-perspective family story.)

Novelist as a Vocation is a collection of Haruki Murakami's essays on his experience of being a novelist. Of course, many of the essays, especially the earlier ones, are very autobiographical and tell his story of becoming and being a novelist. He turns also to his ruminations, his perspective and his observations on the work and life of being an author of fiction.

It's a riveting and detailed book, honest and self-effacing throughout. With its focus on the vocation of the author's life, it's fascinating, though I would like to have understood a bit more of his journey to becoming — I felt a bit of a gap between the 'before' and the 'now' of being a novelist that I would've liked to hear about a little more.

I have loved John Fowles's writing for years, though I haven't picked up one of his novels in a while. The French Lieutenant's Woman has been on my mind for a while and I've never quite got round to reading it before for some reason. I am so glad I've read it now — this a superb novel.

This is a post-modern novel par excellence, telling you a story and telling you that it's telling you a story and reflecting on how it's telling you the story all at the same time.

The story of The French Lieutenant's Woman is simultaneously historical and contemporary, it's two timelines exactly a hundred years apart — in the mid-Nineteenth Century and in the 1960s. But it's also a smart feminist novel — Sarah Woodruff, the main female character in the 1860s story, is independent and unpredictable whilst the men, by contrast, are more stereotypical. The story has multiple endings, all offered as different options for the reader to particpate in the novel and complete as they will.

The narration shifts, from a classic third-person perspective (with a degree of omniscience) to actually becoming a character in the narrative and examining the story-telling task at the same time. Brilliantly inventive.

This is an outstanding book … and it's only not 5 ⭐️ coz I'm really cautious about dishing out all 5 ⭐️s.