The Delivery Room
By Sylvia Brownrigg
The stream of patients who traipse in to see psychoanalyst Mira Braverman transform her London consulting room into a vivid theater for dramas about birth, death and war. As Brownrigg’s lucid novel opens in the mid-1990s, Mira’s patients use her as a blank canvas on which to explore their finely wrought inner worlds.
Speaking to her much-loved husband, Peter, a translator of Russian literature, Mira gives her patients nicknames to protect their confidentiality. Their preoccupation with birth gives the book its title–“the Mourning Madonna” suffered a miscarriage late in her pregnancy; “the Aristocrat” struggles with IVF and her philandering husband. While Mira devotes hours to pondering the intricacies of her patients’ lives, noises from the other side of the consulting-room wall–where Mira lives with Peter–begin to impinge on her thoughts. Peter falls ill with cancer, and the sound of his coughing disturbs her patients, who begin to wonder about Mira’s personal life. Disturbing reports of war from her native Serbia penetrate her mind.
Slowly, the cornerstones of Mira’s life begin to crumble. Brownrigg does not flinch–in passages both difficult and beautiful to read–from charting the unraveling of her life with Peter as his disease progresses. When he returns from the hospital, Mira relishes what intimacy is left, rather than shrink from it as a painful reminder of what she is losing: “Now that Peter was home Mira could feed him, and that was a small, good deed.”
As the war in Serbia intensifies, the boundary between her professional and private life breaks down entirely. Accounts of deaths and atrocities pour down the telephone from her family in Serbia, conjuring up a world in which tolerance for ancient differences has vanished. Mira is no longer able to reflect undisturbed on her patients, who become increasingly distracted by what they guess about their therapist’s life. War throws into sharp relief the precariousness and beauty of Mira’s relationships with her husband and patients. And at the end, it is neither death nor birth but Brownrigg’s rich insights into the tiny, profound re births that occur in life and love that linger in the mind.
Theft: A Love Story
By Peter Carey
When his marriage breaks up, artist Butcher Bones, seething with rage, often drunk and utterly convinced of his neglected genius, is forced to shack up with his mentally handicapped brother, Hugh, in the Aussie outback. The arrival of Manolo-clad art expert Marlene to authenticate a painting owned by a distant neighbor, and its subsequent theft, sets in motion a gripping, vivid exploration of the fragile boundary separating the fake from the authentic, and exposes in penetrating and witty detail the clash between jet-setting cosmopolitans and small-town homebodies with deep roots.
District and Circle
By Seamus Heaney
Poetry is not an obvious choice for a beach book–except that it’s highly portable–but Heaney’s 12th collection weaves together past and present in a provocative and witty way. His poignant elegies to renowned Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz and other friends suggest a preoccupation with mortality–perhaps not surprising as the Irish poet enters his 60s. For Heaney, the earth has always hoarded mysteries, and here it contains a horrifying Dante-esque underworld, as the book’s title poem reminds us of the two London Underground lines struck by terrorist bombs in July 2005. But in other poems, the earth harbors hope. These are filled with a sense of Heaney’s love, elegantly depicted, for the landscape of his native country.
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
By Maggie O’Farrell
When Iris Lockhart, a young woman in Edinburgh, receives a letter from a psychiatric hospital about a relative–and long-term patient–named Esme who she never knew existed, family secrets begin to emerge. Full of trepidation, Iris visits the old woman and begins to piece together the past. Feisty Esme never fit into stuffy colonial life in India as a child in the 1930s, nor could she bow to the stifling mores of Edinburgh society as a young lady when her parents returned home. A series of childhood tragedies (swept under the carpet) only exacerbate her oddness. O’Farrell’s taut, highly charged novel bristles with the harrowing consequences of a life written out of history and scrutinizes the notion that mental illness may be socially constructed.
