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The Woman in the Purple Skirt by Natsuko Imamura

This book is without a doubt the strangest thriller I have ever known. And also, despite this—or perhaps because of it—one of the best. It is subtle and psychological, pulling the reader into the complex inner world of someone who calls herself “the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan”. At first, the narrator seems sane, reliable even—she is one of many people obsessed with a person known as “the Woman in the Purple Skirt”. The Woman in the Yellow Cardigan follows this “local celebrity’s” movements with scientific precision; perhaps her scrutiny is a little more thorough than the norm, but harmless, surely. And then the soft woollen threads of their lives become increasingly intertwined, with disastrous consequences. Before long everything has come unspooled.

Darkly witty, intricate, and expertly observed, this is a sympathetic, compulsively readable portrait of loneliness and mental difference.

As translated into English by Lucy North, The Woman in the Purple Skirt by Natsuko Imamura was first published by Faber in 2020.

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RAGNAROK by A.S. Byatt

A.S. Byatt’s latest offering is a feast for any bookworm; but while it can serve as a lucid introduction to the world of Norse mythology, I believe the real thrill is reserved for those of us already familiar with the stories of Loki and Odin and the giants, with the territories of Asgard and Midgard and Niflheim, with the tales of the Fenris Wolf and Jörmungandr and Sleipnir. Admittedly I expected something completely different – a novel in the usual sense of the word, with lashings of dialogue and a conventional arrow of narrative. But what Byatt has given us is something more real. Ragnarok is an intertwining of the reader – a thin child in WWII, an echo of Byatt herself – with the myths, the real with the fictive; and when the two worlds melt into each other the result is breathtaking. This book is a set of linguistically virtuosic descriptions, annotated by the understanding of the thin child, deepened by the mirroring of myth and real life. It is an account of the raw and the primeval and the survival of the fittest. Ultimately, it is a warning, a beautiful, petrifying warning. The end will come, the book seems to say; it’s out there. “A real End. The end.” The wolves are already on the prowl.

Ragnarok by A.S. Byatt is part of the Canongate Myths series. This review was originally published on 26.1.2012.