Six Degrees of Separation – from Murmur to Johannesburg

Six Degrees of Separation is a meme hosted by Kate over at Books Are My Favourite and Best. It works like this: each month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the others on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

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We’re starting this month with Will Eaves Murmur, a slice of experimental fiction which explores Alan Turing’s life and ideas through dreams, correspondence and journal entries. Eaves’ extraordinary book won both the Republic of Consciousness Prize and this year’s Wellcome Prize.

The Wellcome Prize often has an interesting selection of books on its shortlist one of which was Sarah Moss’ Bodies of Light in 2015. It follows Ally in her struggles to become a doctor in nineteenth-century Britain.

Moss also wrote Names for the Sea,  an appealing account of her year in Iceland, which brings me to Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir’s very funny Butterflies in November in which a dead sheep is wrestled into a car’s passenger seat.

That sheep (and the style of Ólafsdóttir’s somewhat wacky novel) puts me in mind of Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase which sees a Sherlock Holmes-obsessed, chain-smoking advertising executive pursuing a sheep with a very particular birthmark. Funny, gripping and wonderfully odd.

Hiromi Kawakami is another favorite Japanese author of mine who also knows how turn her hand to the surreal but not in The Nakano Thrift Shop. The eponymous shop is staffed by an endearing set of awkward and idiosyncratic characters who become so close they’re like family to each other.

As do the characters in Michael Cunningham’s lovely, heart-wrenching Home at the End of the World in which Bobby, traumatised by the childhood death of his brother, finds a family with Jonathan and Clare.

Cunningham is better known for his novel The Hours (although I prefer Home and the End of the World) which was made into an award-winning film. It was inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway as was Fiona Melrose’s Johannesburg which follows a set of disparate characters through a single day as one of them prepares for a party on December 6th, 2013, the day after the death of Nelson Mandela.

This month’s Six Degrees of Separation has taken me from 1950s Britain and the reimagining of Alan Turing’s life to a tribute to Virginia Woolf, set in Johannesburg in 2013. Part of the fun of this meme is comparing the very different routes other bloggers take from each month’s starting point. If you’re interested, you can follow it on Twitter with the hashtag #6Degrees, check out the links over at Kate’s blog or perhaps even join in.

24 thoughts on “Six Degrees of Separation – from Murmur to Johannesburg”

  1. I know I’m in the minority however I have never found Sarah Moss’s books to be as wonderful as others find them. That said, Names for the Sea is on my reading list – the sample chapter had a warmth to it that I find her novels lack.

    A dead sheep in a car? My first thought was the dead dog in the bath in Irving’s Hotel New Hampshire. 😀

    1. Oh dear! I hope dead animals isn’t becoming a theme for me as I included the Irving last time.

      Names for the Sea is brilliant on the discombolation of finding your way into a culture that appears very similar to your own but isn’t. There are some great moments in it.

  2. Some very interesting books. Haruki Murakami is sadly missing completely from my book shelves, but you completely sold A Wild Sheep Chase to me, it sounds great.

    I loved The Hours.

  3. Another great chain Susan! I am keen to read the Moss, and I loved The Hours so had better check out Johannesburg sometime. 🙂

      1. It’s on the list…! Having just started Flush for the Persephone Readathon, it is good to be back in VW territory in various ways.

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