Author & editor
Gabriella Bennett







Friday 23rd April 2021



Q1) The book most influential for you as a young person

Anything spooky. I had every Goosebumps book going and loved Anthony Horowitz’s young adult novels, especially The Switch. I also loved Darren Shan’s Cirque Du Freak series. My brother and I were massive nerds and used to enter competitions to try and meet him. We made up Darren Shan-themed quizzes to keep ourselves entertained when other kids were out doing normal things like riding their bikes and setting things alight. Our nerdery paid off when I won a trip to Shan’s book signing in the Edinburgh Dungeons. He was just as nice as I’d dreamed.

Q2) The book that gets you through hard times

I try to read Modern Nature by the filmmaker Derek Jarman at least once a year. It’s the most extraordinary book I’ve ever come across, heartbreaking but also deeply relaxing because its form - a gardener’s diary - is so simple and disarming. On the surface it’s a record of observations made by a man just going about his day. When Jarman writes about the mundane stuff (trying to get things to grow in the shingle of Dungeness or his relationship with HB) the reading experience is like stepping into a warm bath.

But when he writes about art or the establishment he’s full of rage. For the tabloids, too, because of their treatment of the gay community in the 1980s and beyond. There’s this undercurrent running beneath the pages, which is that it is a book written by someone who loves to potter in junk shops and tend to Icelandic poppies, but who is dying of AIDS, someone trying to navigate the erosion of their body while processing what is happening to him and also finding peace. It’s that contrast between mediation and anger that makes the book so extraordinary to me. Another of Modern Nature’s appeals is that it feels stripped of artifice. I don’t enjoy books that feel writerly. The actual writing process in Jarman’s diaries feels so inconspicuous it’s practically invisible. It's all about the Dungeness nuclear power station and the black and yellow cottage and the flinty sea.

Q3) The book that most disappointed you

Convenience Store Person by Sayaka Murata. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. It had been hyped so much and yet I spent the entirety of the novel cringing over the self-conscious characters and their totally unbelievable relationships. It was like Cat Person but worse, which is really saying something. I finished it only as an act of masochism.

Q4) Name a book with either a brilliant opening or a brilliant ending

I hated every word of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station until I got to the last page. The whole book felt like a vanity exercise, a tiresome thing to wade through. But then the ending comes out of nowhere and turns everything upside down. In some ways it feels like Lerner’s run out of ideas on how to finish so he just lets his character get high, which shouldn’t work, but the writing is so impossibly beautiful that it does. I like how the ending rejects the urge to tie things up neatly or provide an analysis, which is a cliche a lot of endings fall foul of. It’s a slapdash thing to do, which fits the personality of the protagonist. But all that is periphery, really, because the reason the ending is so good is the words themselves. They’re like a fever dream. Pure poetry. The last seven sentences are among the most glorious I’ve ever read: “Night-blooming flowers refused to open near the stadium lights. Freedom was on the march. Aircraft noise was having strange effects on finches. Some species synchronized their flashes, sometimes across thousands of insects, exacerbating contradictions. Why was I born between mirrors? Teresa would read the originals and I would read the translations and the translations would become the originals as we read. Then I planned to live forever in a skylit room surrounded by my friends.”

Q5) Your favourite character from a novel

I read Nell Zink’s The Wallcreeper recently and thought the narrator, Tiffany, was a strange fish. I love that she’s the antidote to all the incredibly earnest living with nature memoirs that have been coming out. Tiffany and her husband adopt a wallcreeper called Rudolph but he dies and it tips the husband over the edge, although their marriage is a big old bin fire anyway. So yeah, Tiffany is weird and her relationship with the nebulous concept of nature is quite surreal and always funny. She has all these trash men in her life and it’s as much about trying to deal with them as it is about going birdwatching. It’s hard to make a character truly funny, but she’s one of my favourites.

Q6) Next on your 'to read' pile is...

I bought Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat a few months ago and haven’t yet got round to reading it. It feels like the kind of book you want to clear space in your life for, so I’m trying to do that first. For work, I am about to get wired into two non fiction titles on ethical travel: Emma Gregg’s The Flightless Traveller and Nina Karnikowski’s Go Lightly: How to Travel Without Hurting the Planet. I am dying to read Louise Gray’s The Ethical Carnivore, because I love her writing, and Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment. And finally In the Kitchen, an essay collection on “food and life”.

Q7) Your favourite poem

I’ve never been a big poetry person. I’ll read a poem and think that I love it but then I’ll forget it by the next day. So maybe I didn’t love it after all. Saying that, I’ve always liked the work of the French essayist and poet Franic Ponge. His poems aren’t laid out traditionally, more prose than poem. They’re not formal or stylised and perhaps that’s why I like them. Poems that aren’t poems. The ones about mundane objects really get me going: pebbles, raindrops, sponges. They don’t take themselves too seriously, and neither does he.

Q8) The greatest book you've ever read

Hotel World by Ali Smith is kind of the perfect novel. But then there’s the Elena Ferrante trilogy (which surely counts as one book), which is just so rich and astonishing. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is so baroque and cinematic that it really got under my skin. This isn’t answering the question, I realise, because I’m listing so many, but I guess I don’t have a greatest book. Like poems, I enjoy declaring a book the greatest thing I’ve ever read and then forgetting about it by the following week. ●











Gabriella Bennett is an author, columnist and editor of Alba, the Times Scotland’s lifestyle section. / t:@palebackwriter






CLICK HERE TO RETURN TO FICTION FRIDAY PAGE