2 hours ago
10
Tice Cin’s philosophical and poetic new novel about a young Turkish-Cypriot songwriter and music producer extends the preoccupations of her prizewinning debut, 2021’s Keeping the House. This intimately told sophomore novel, again a story of friendship, precarity and community, is at once an elegy, a spoken-word poem and a journalistic meditation, repeatedly asking readers: “So, are you listening?”
For our unnamed narrator, “hurts come in different shapes each time”: from the childhood scars of her father’s abandonment, to sexism in the creative scene and the difficulties of navigating short-lived flatshares on universal credit (“If you don’t know about being money dry, if you don’t know loss – you don’t get it. If you know, you know”). Her journey of personal discovery is mapped on to the contemporary travails of London’s wider working-class inner-city diaspora communities as she calculates her life by doorways, “walking past each one” without a roadmap for her personal and professional goals.
At the centre of the novel is the loss of the narrator’s closest confidante, referred to as “My Favourite Person”. As his untimely death becomes fodder for gossip, she addresses those questioning how he died: “You’re asking for information but to me it’s the loop, the scaffolding, never comes down, this con of process, all dying to know how he died.” Meanwhile, she remembers their late-night phone calls, continues to leave him unheard voicemails: “Don’t want to do it all without you on my team.”
How to survive in a world darkened by an unshakeable loss? “Memories are a bit like a messy laundry cupboard. Whenever you brush past the door, all the items inside are falling out… Jamming the door doesn’t help because everything is still messy inside.” Through love affairs and short-term jobs, in DJ booths or on dancefloors of local raves, in therapy sessions and beauty parlours, the grieving narrator attempts to articulate herself creatively and emotionally. “Sometimes my head feels like the city, ambulances going past 24/7 but we still hear nothing. In a way it’s a type of growth, to feel the wrong things less.”
In Cin’s dexterous hands, form meets content to kaleidoscopic effect. Told in the first person and without character names, most vignettes are additionally prefaced with a clarification of who is being addressed, or doing the addressing: “The ‘you’ is reading me. The ‘me’ is still me.” “The ‘she’ is all of us, me.” “I am ‘her’ and ‘you’.” With a protagonist deep in the world of music, these shape-shifting perspectives give the impression of a DJ spinning tracks.
In the narrator’s own safe space, she is “a marshmallow gravity genie who sleeps facefront on a soft cloud”, floating away from earthly human concerns. This is a tender novel looking for a foothold in an alienating world.
