Vesna Main - Böcker

A novel in five parts, Only a Lodger . . . And Hardly That puts Vesna Main's power of beautiful observation on full display as she explores how writing stories about one's ancestors is key route to learning about and fashioning one's own identity. While the stories are self-contained, together they form a narrative whole that approaches this age-old idea from five unique perspectives.In 'The Eye/I', we meet someone called She, who obsessively tells the story of her childhood and adolescence to an unnamed narrator. 'The Acrobat' is a sequence of prose poems, written in the style of magic realism, which tell the story of Maria and her life-changing adolescent encounter with a flying circus performer. The female protagonist of the first section narrates 'The Dead', describing the secret life of a grandfather she never truly knew and his unusual habit of sending family members anonymous parcels of carefully chosen books. In 'The Poet', she examines four family photographs in order to piece together a story of her other grandfather, the husband of Maria. The final section, 'The Suitor', is a first-person narrative told by Mr Gustav Otto Wagner, an older man who hoped to marry Maria but was ultimately turned down. 'The Croatian-born novelist Vesna Main writes unusual and formally ambitious fiction. . . . Only a Lodger... And Hardly That is subtitled 'a fictional autobiography' and hovers somewhere between memoir and novel, also playing with perspective and style.'- New Statesman Recommends '[Vesna] Main is a writer who works subliminal for all it's worth.'- Elaine Aldred, Strange Alliances

Lush Library Recommends: Anna James’ Books for 2018Variations and fugue on the theme of obsessionVesna Main disturbs our self-image as educated, reasonable and ironic people who read modernist fiction. She disturbs us because we recognise ourselves in her obsessive and bloody-minded characters as they are pushed to the extreme. But they are only too human and seek love, just like us.This is a collection of twenty short stories of different lengths and written in a variety of styles. Main writes about characters whose passion borders on obsession and who are seeking love and companionship but are doomed to remain alone, with their sense of personal failure as the only company.

A Life in Books: Books of the Year 2019Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2019In a world where we present our diverse selves through social media, chatbots and messaging, this dark novel listens in on intimate secrets, desires and adultery.This novel-within-a-novel charts the writing of a story about Richard and Anna, a middle-aged professional couple, who face the biggest crisis of their twenty-five-year marriage when he admits seeing prostitutes. The text unfolds through a dialogue between Anna, the writer, and her husband, Richard, the reader.As the story of Richard and Anna progresses, the tension between them increases and, on several occasions, they stop speaking to each other. The writer’s novel compels them to examine their own marriage. Gradually the differences between the characters in the novel on the one hand and the reader and the writer on the other appear to diminish to the point where we begin to wonder whether the reader, like Richard, pays for sex, and whether the writer, like her female protagonist, is coping with the situation by having several lovers.