Who could resist that cover? Even before I had an idea of what it was about I knew I’d pick this one up in a bookshop. One look at it tells you that the myth of Leda and the Swan has to be in there somewhere even if you don’t – and I didn’t – recognise the title as a quote from W. B. Yeats’ poem which prefaces Eli Goldstone’s debut. The novel’s as arresting as its jacket, exploring grief, love and the secrets kept in the closest of relationships through the recently widowed Seb who takes himself off to Latvia, the birthplace of his beautiful wife Leda.
Leda has drowned in the lake at her local park, her boat capsized by a startled swan. Seb, an academic already struggling with his work, is devastated. Antisocial at the best of times, he withdraws further into himself, wondering what he should do with this huge, gaping ache for his beloved wife, then discovers a cache of unopened letters, postmarked Latvia, hidden in a drawer. Leda had told him that she had no family but it appears that she had a cousin, Olaf, the sender of the letters one of which contains a lock of Leda’s hair. Seb decides to find Olaf, hoping for comfort but is faced with several puzzling revelations: it seems he hardly knew the woman who had been the centre of his world. Interspersed with Seb’s adventures in Latvia are extracts from Leda’s diary, revealing an intense, lonely and precociously bright child who grew into a troubled woman, obsessed with death.
Narrated by Seb, Goldstone’s novel has a rich vein of dark humour running through it nicely offsetting its sombre subject. Seb is cerebral, erudite and a little superior – hopelessly out-of-place in the forests of Latvia with Olaf and his friends – yet manages to engage our sympathy. He finds himself trying to throttle a swan in the park, drunkenly playing cards with Latvian hunters and fending off the attentions of his lonely landlady, all delivered in a faintly sardonic tone. He’s a man who’s asked few questions of his wife while she was alive, perhaps preferring to think that she sprang fully formed into life the day he met her. Goldstone’s writing is often striking – Seb’s fear of death ‘springs like a cat from a high shelf, to scare the living shit out of me’; Leda’s mother ‘acts as if there is a live TV audience present at all times’; a dead swan ‘smells like a pillow that has been slept on by somebody I love’. There’s a thread of myth and fairy tale running through the novel as you’d expect from that cover and title but essentially it’s about grief and how well we know those we choose to share our lives with, explored in a witty and original piece of fiction.
That really is an interesting cover. Am I dreaming or have there been at least 2 other swan-related covers over the past year or so? I wonder what that says about the collective psyche?
Isn’t it! The only other one I know is Paraic O’Donnell’s The Maker of Swans. I don’t think it’s a theme which will become so ubiquitous as ‘the woman in a red dress/coat walking away’ motif which seemed obligatory a little while back.
Yes, that’s definitely one I’m thinking of, and ‘Black Swan Green’ by David Mitchell.
Good memory! I’d forgotten that one.
I had to search for it – haven’t read it, but vaguely remembered the cover.
I loved the cover too. I read a few pages of the book and I hope to read more of it this month
Isn’t it beautiful? I hope you enjoy it, Resh.
I hope so too. 🙂
I reviewed this alongside How to Be Human. You liked this one more than I did, and I liked How to Be Human better than you did, so we swapped 🙂
Ah, we’re quits, then!
I saw this in Waterstones and was drawn immediately by the very arresting cover. It is incredibly well done. Sounds like the book is interesting too, the way you describe it reminds me of Angela Carter, perhaps a little more muted or perhaps that’s just the Leda and the Swan reference as Carter used it too in The Magic Toyshop.
I think it is the reference, Belinda. I wouldn’t want to disappoint you! But it is a very well turned out debut, and whoever designed that cover should win an award.
This seems to be everywhere I look at the moment! So glad to hear it lives up to the hype, I hope to read it soon.
Perhaps it’s that attention-grabbing jacket! Hype usually sends me screaming in the opposite direction but I was lucky enough to read this one before all that took off.