Tag: Womens Prize

Women’s Prize shortlist book review – “The Persians” by Sanam Mahloudji

I think I’m in what they call a real reading and writing funk at the moment – definitely no flow going on here. I’ve been writing this blog for nine years and I am finding it hard at the moment to motivate myself to put fingers to keyboard and write reviews. I have had a handful of unkind comments on my blog posts – really only a very small number, but sadly my skin is thin. I don’t mind people disagreeing with me (I like debate about books), but unkindness sucks. But I’m not sure that’s the sole reason. Real life has been super-busy and some parts of it quite challenging of late and I just don’t think I have been in the right headspace. 

Reading has always been my sanctuary, but it hasn’t entirely been that for me recently. It was with great joy that I picked up Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (Vol 1) a few weeks ago. A long-neglected volume that has sat unloved on my bookshelves for many years (a gift from my husband back in the days before we had children!). And whilst I am enjoying the experience of reading it, it is, I’m afraid, very very slow, and only really rewards long spells of reading (like a train or plane journey). Precious few periods like that recently so it feels like hard going. And a couple of books I have read recently, I am afraid I did not particularly enjoy. So, a reading funk it is. Let’s hope I get out of it soon. 

One book I did enjoy though, was on the Women’s Prize shortlist, Sanam Mahloudji’s The Persians. I think I am right in saying it is one of three debut novels that made the shortlist and it is an impressive achievement with a cast of strong and distinctive characters and covering the lives of several generations of the same family. It is particularly appropriate for the Women’s Prize shortlist because it is primarily a book about women, about mothers, daughters and sisters and family dynamics.

The novel opens in Aspen, Colorado where Shirin, the high-flying, flamboyant, sophisticated, Iranian immigrant who left her home country and made a life, a business and a name for herself in her adopted United States, finds herself in trouble with the law after allegedly assaulting a police officer, a charge she does not take very seriously. In these opening, energy-filled scenes we get a strong sense of who Shirin is and what she represents in the family – resentment at being treated merely as an immigrant, harking back to the wealth and status her family enjoyed in Iran (they brought much of the wealth with them, it has to be said) and an arrogance which we will later learn hides some vulnerabilities. Her husband, like most of the men in the family, is rather insipid, seems merely to want a quiet life. Shirin’s niece Bita, daughter of her late sister Seema, who also fled to the US with her but who subsequently died, loathes her aunt, but is forced to engage with the embarrassment of the case because she is a law student and has connections that may help Shirin. 

The parallel story is that of Shirin’s (and Seema’s) mother, Elizabeth, the matriarch of the family, who did not leave Iran after the revolution, but stayed behind in Tehran with Shirin’s daughter Niaz, who was a child at the time. Through flashbacks we will learn the history of these women and how they have developed their world view, and we also learn about the Valiat family history, in particular the source of its wealth and status and its mythology. The author skilfully peels away the layers to reveal the lies and deceits that have been perpetrated on them all, whilst also exposing the hypocrisy in attitudes towards class, race and gender. Both in Iran and in the US. All the women in the book are on a journey of self-discovery. 

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and recommend it highly. I listened to it on audio and the narration, by four different actors, was mostly excellent.

Book review – “Thunderclap” by Laura Cumming

The longlist for this year’s Women’s Prize for Non-fiction was announced last week. Only a couple of the books on the longlist have crossed my radar – Neneh Cherry’s autobiography (I have heard her talking about it on the radio quite a lot recently) and Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, which feels like it might be required reading at the moment, sadly. Anne Applebaum is someone I admire hugely and she is speaking at the Hay Festival this year, the opposite weekend to Colin Greenwood so I am trying to choose between her and Radiohead! Depression and joy perhaps!

So, I thought it might be a good week to post a review of Thunderclap by Laura Cumming, which was shortlisted for last year’s Women’s Prize for Non-fiction and has been widely praised since its publication in 2023. Laura Cumming is a journalist, art critic for the Observer, and Thunderclap is her third book. The subject is Carel Fabritius, the Dutch Golden Age painter, pupil of Rembrandt, who was killed in 1654 at the age of 32 in Delft when a building in the town where gunpowder was being stored exploded, killing more than a hundred people and injuring thousands of others. Fabritius was killed and his studio destroyed along with an unknown number of his paintings. Only about a dozen of his paintings remain in art galleries around the world. 

Laura Cumming follows in the footsteps of many other scholars and art experts in trying to find out more about the artist who showed so much promise (he has been described as the only one of Rembrandt’s many pupils who began to develop his own style after learning from the great Master, and at such a young age) but has left tantalisingly little. Experts have long felt that there simply must be more of his work, but that it just has not been found yet. He is a somewhat enigmatic figure and very little is known about his life; it is known that his first wife died young as did their infant daughter, and that he married again, but there are significant gaps and despite his rare talent he seems to have died quite indebted so he obviously did not live well from his work. For one so gifted he has left remarkably little behind, either in terms of paintings or a paper trail. 

Cumming writes of her deep love of Dutch art and how this was fostered from an early age. Her father was also an artist and nurtured her interest, and married with the deep dive into the life and work of Carel Fabritius (and his contemporaries) is biographical detail about her father and his creative life. She draws many parallels between her modest, gentle and talented father (who died prematurely) and the kind of person she imagines Fabritius might have been. Examining the facts of his life, his humble background, his marriage to a local girl, then widowhood and the loss of a child, she concludes that he carried a heavy burden and that this helps to explain his absence from the main Delft and Amsterdam artistic scenes. Cumming looks deep into a number of his paintings and finds in ‘Young Man in a Fur Cap’ (thought to be a self-portrait) traces of tragedy and grief. 

This book is both expansive (as well as Fabritius, Cumming writes at length about other Dutch painters of the time and the genre generally, her father and her own journey embracing art) as well as focussed on the tiny details of her subject, his life, his appearance, his paintings. I learned so much but I did not feel at any point that I was being given a history lesson – Cumming takes you on the journey with her.

One of my favourite books of recent years is Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, which, of course, concerns one of Fabritius’s most famous paintings of the same name. It now hangs in the Mauritshuis gallery in The Hague. I was drawn to find out more about the painting and its artist creator after reading that book, and Thunderclap came out shortly after I read it, so I have been keen to read this book. I was not disappointed, it really is excellent. Since completing it I have also been to the National Gallery in London to see the Van Gogh exhibition there. The National Gallery has two of the paintings Cumming explores in detail – ‘Young Man in a Fur Cap’ and ‘View of Delft, with a Musical Instrument Seller’s Stall’ – and it was a joy to see them and have a greater understanding of the work.

I recommend this book highly. 

By coincidence, I am currently reading Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, which won the Women’s Prize for Non-fiction last year. I am enjoying it enormously and it shows what high quality this particular Prize promotes. The 2025 shortlist is out on 26 March.