Varieties of Exile
Novels by Charlotte Wood, Jenny Erpenbeck, and Kazuo Ishiguro, with a nod to Mavis Gallant
Before I dive into this month’s book recommendations, I first hope to introduce you to my new favorite literary genre: The New Yorker: Fiction podcast episodes featuring discussions between Margaret Atwood and TNY fiction editor Deborah Treisman. I have listened to three of these—sadly, perhaps the only three in existence—and have found them enthralling. They include: a 2013 episode in which Atwood reads “Voices Lost in Snow” by Mavis Gallant, a 2019 episode in which Atwood reads “Corrie” by Alice Munro, and most recently and spectacularly, a 2023 episode in which Atwood reads “Varieties of Exile,” also by Gallant, in front of a live audience. Atwood and Treisman are absolutely brilliant and incisive literary minds, and the friendly post-reading sparring sessions about the stories are a real delight.
By the by, if you haven’t heard of Mavis Gallant (as I hadn’t until I encountered her work in these and other TNY: Fiction podcasts), she’s a Canadian-born writer whose work seems to be undergoing a renaissance and rediscovery; a volume of her previously uncollected stories was released in January. It’s surprising that her work is not more widely read and taught considering that she published 116 stories in The New Yorker during her lifetime. Alice Munro, by contrast, published just over sixty, yet far more American readers are familiar with her work.
“Varieties of Exile” is quite funny at times and is a story with an unusual shape—e.g., there’s a two thousand word digression in the middle about the British phenomenon of remittance men. Its presence in the story will make more sense when you read it (and even more after listening to Atwood and Treisman’s discussion), but it got me thinking about the malleability of story shapes and about how great work can take many different forms. The title also feels like a good theme for this month’s selections: The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood, The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Susan Bernofsky), and A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro. These novels are written in very different styles, and each includes some thematic element of exile, though this doesn’t always involve crossing geopolitical borders.
The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood
“Was it the softness, perhaps, that made them want it so much? And hate it so much? The body was separate from her, it was a thing she wore. The things that were done to it had nothing to with her, Yolanda, at all.”
I read this book—Charlotte Wood’s sixth novel—in preparation for reviewing her seventh for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: the Booker Prize-shortlisted Stone Yard Devotional, which was released in the U.S. on Feb. 11, 2025. (I strongly recommend Stone Yard as well; my full review appears here. If you enjoyed Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Stone Yard will likely be very much your speed.)
Both books are set in rural south-central Australia, where Wood is from, but The Natural Way of Things is much starker than Stone Yard, more overtly lyrical and more dystopian, aptly drawing comparisons to Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale. According to this interview on the Garret podcast (be warned, however: there are quite a few spoilers in this), Wood was moved to write it after learning about an incident in which ten girls from a “girls home” in Sydney were deemed the “worst girls in the state” and were drugged and shipped off to be imprisoned in a facility in remote New South Wales. Wood’s version, all the more disturbing because of its real-life inspirations, imagines a similar premise but set in the near future, focusing on two girls, Verla and Yolanda, and how they process and react differently to their situation.
The first half of the book is more focused on the girls’ quest to try to piece together and make sense of the reasons for their imprisonment; while nothing is ever fully explained, the pieces do cohere into a loose, if deeply disturbing, larger narrative. As supplies dwindle, the book shifts more deeply into a drama of survival and quest for escape. It is somewhat bleak and often visceral in its descriptions and will be a difficult read for some, though I found it quite gripping and intense and not gratuitous at all. The ending is especially moving and memorable
One quirk of the book that I don’t fully understand (and would welcome insight in the comments, if anyone has it!) is that it moves between past and present tense for the same time frame, coinciding with shifts in the third person narrator from Yolanda to Verla. However, the story so absorbing on the whole and the prose felt so highly controlled that this was only a minor distraction for me. I’ll close with a passage from one of Verla’s sections, to give a sense of Wood’s lyrical style: “The river is a wide rope of bronze silk twirling, and Verla hammocked inside it. She is a creature of the animals, of kangaroo and horse; she is a little brown trout very still in the water, then a twitch and it’s away, somewhere in that channel, scooped along by the river’s strong brown hand.”
The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Susan Bernofsky
“The weave of life in its entirety—containing all knowledge of snow, all glances out the window, all listening to sounds made by the cold or damp wood—would have severed one truth from the other for all time. Only the blue tinge of the girl’s skin—above all around her mouth and chin—would have stayed with the parents, an uncomfortable memory. A memory that would have returned to them uninvited now and then, and neither would have mentioned it to the other, for fear of tempting fate. And so fate would have kept quiet, and this first moment when the child might have died would have passed without further ado.”
This novel, first published as Aller Tage Abend in 2012, has drawn comparisons in the U.S. to Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life (though the latter was published afterward, in 2014), which I have yet to read, but I mention it in case it is a useful point of reference. It’s written in five “books” or long sections, interspersed with short, transitional “intermezzos” (no relation to the Sally Rooney book, as far as I can tell). In the first book, the main character dies as an infant in 1908 in a small Galician town, and we learn how her death affects the lives of her parents.
The subsequent intermezzo posits an alternative course of events in which the girl survives, and the second book picks up the story from that alternate version. The novel repeats this cycle five times, with the protagonist dying five times, in entirely different contexts and life stages, spanning the bulk of the twentieth century and involving several—you guessed it—varieties of exile. It’s a book about memory and what survives, and the objects in the story gather particular meaning for the reader, much of which is lost to the surviving characters. One of the key constants in the book, however, is dislocation due to antisemitism and political violence, as the characters are impacted by pogroms, the Holocaust, and Stalin’s Soviet regime.
It’s a beautifully executed thought experiment that expanded my sense of what’s possible even in what is otherwise an entirely realistic, chronologically-narrated historical novel.
A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro
“It is possible that my memory of these events will have grown hazy with time, that things did not happen in quite the way they come back to me today. But I remember with some distinctness that eerie spell which seemed to bind the two of us as we stood there in the coming darkness looking towards that shape further down the bank. Then the spell broke and we both began to run.”
This last novel is the oldest of the three, the debut novel of 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, first published in 1982. A friend recommended it to me, and I was surprised that I couldn’t find it in my local library. It’s worth hunting down, though, especially if you have enjoyed any of Ishiguro’s other work, like Klara and the Sun or Never Let Me Go. Much like that one, A Pale View of Hills is a book for which you will probably want to carefully avoid spoilers on the first read, though I don’t doubt that a second read would be just as richly rewarding as the first once you know where the book is going.
Just briefly, I’ll say that it’s the story of an older Japanese woman living in England whose older daughter has committed suicide; the woman’s younger daughter comes to visit, prompting the mother to recall stories about a mother and daughter she once knew when she lived in Nagasaki. The book is rather slippery and ethereal at times, and it’s a good one to read slowly and with a careful eye to the details.
As always, thanks for reading, and hope something in this mix calls out to you!
Jules