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hanswan's review against another edition
4.0
belinda carrots is a really really good name but it's not about her
hooked_on_books's review against another edition
3.0
I frankly don't know how to feel about this book. At it's base, the story is about a British concert pianist who is injured in an accident and goes to South Africa to convalesce thereafter. From there, however, the story is not truly a linear story with a plot but a dreamlike sequence of imaginings, obsession, and sadness. I felt like at times I became a bit lost in what was happening because of the structure of the book. And I don't feel it truly had a conclusion. I did, however, love the prose, which is beautiful to read. I suspect this is a book that would deepen with re-reading. I received an early copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
arirang's review against another edition
4.0
It seemed likely that, as in a story whose sequence of events is always forward-moving, my visits would either progress to some climax or conclusion, or that I, losing interest, would give up or move on. And yet the story of my time with Hannah Kallenbach - because it was a story, and it was about time - was impervious to the passing of time. Nothing happened.
I came to this 2018 novel by Katharine Kilalea (a first novel, from a South African poet) via the brilliant book of essays on writing Between the Word and the World by Anna MacDonald published by Splice: my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3040674849
McDonald’s take can also be found at: https://www.thisissplice.co.uk/2018/06/04/a-room-for-fantasy-katharine-kilaleas-ok-mr-field/.
The first person narrator of the novel (presumably the eponymous Mr Field), a pianist, is travelling back from an unsuccessful concert in London, where he performed Chopin’s Raindrop Prelude, when he is involved in a train accident, shattering his wrist and (it is implied) halting his career. He uses his compensation payment to buy (or rent?) a house in South Africa, a reproduction of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye.
The house was one of three Villa Savoye doppelgängers: there was the “shadow” version in Canberra, which was an exact copy but painted black; the “mini” Villa Savoye in Boston, in which every aspect of the original house had been shrunk by 10 percent to fit the client’s budget; and my house, the House for the Study of Water, which replicated Le Corbusier’s house in all aspects apart from its location, since whereas the original Villa Savoye overlooked the rural French landscape, the one in Cape Town overlooked the sea.
Everything I knew about Le Corbusier came from a South African academic who, like a number of so-called architourists, had turned up at the house one day as though it were a museum rather than a private residence. She wore a kaftan and jangly bracelets and was writing a book, she told me, on Le Corbusier and the third world.
The architect who’d designed the House for the Study of Water, Jan Kallenbach, had met Le Corbusier during a tour which he and several other architecture students had made of European ¬architecture. They’d turned up at Le Corbusier’s apartment one day, she said, and the old architect had invited them in and said, Okay, she mimicked his French accent, so now I will teach you the sisteme. The sisteme entailed a number of rules which Le Corbusier applied to all buildings, regardless of their size or use, like that all buildings should have moveable walls, a roof terrace, horizontal windows, and be raised off the ground on stilts. The architecture students—later known as the Johannesburg Group—published articles on Le Corbusier’s sisteme in the local journal South Africa Architectural Record and applied it to the design of a number of new houses, built mostly for German Jewish immigrants who’d developed a taste for modernism before the war. With their glass walls and external staircases, these houses typified what became known as the Johannesburg style. The point about the houses, she said—this must have been important because she repeated it several times—is that they were “à la Corbu” but not just meaningless copies. They took his system and synthesized it in a new way. Whereas Kallenbach, apparently, had been so seduced by the Master, as he’d called him, that he believed the practice of architecture post–Le Corbusier could offer nothing more than to replicate his buildings verbatim. We were standing at the strip of windows in the living room, looking at the sea. That’s why he was ostracized from the inner circle, she said. Then her voice trailed off and she turned away from the window. I feel queasy, she said, the way these windows cut off the ground makes me feel seasick. And for a moment she did look pale, but then, laughing, went on, Maybe that’s the reason Kallenbach’s wife left him. Because living here was like living on a raft.
It’s true, the windows did give one an odd perspective of the world. I’d often thought it perverse that a house overlooking the sea should have windows so narrow that they hid all but a sliver of it. It was a restrictive view, almost punitively so, so frustratingly partial that it seemed a kind of tease. Though the sense of something withheld—the sea was there, of course, you just couldn’t see it—was not entirely unpleasant.
Although the narrator’s wife, Mim, moves to the country with him, soon after the novel opens she disappears from the scene, presumably having left him although Mr Field seems remarkably incurious as to what has happened, other than feeling her absence. When attempting to play the Chopin piece once more, his injured left hand now no longer as responsive as his right he observes:
A relationship unfolding between two hands which were the two characters, one expressive, the other inexcitable, who’d once been together but were now detached.
This is far from a conventional plot driven novel. As Mr Field notes of himself:
I'd never liked crosswords or any kind of word games. It was a musician's sensibility, perhaps, which made me pay more attention to the sounds of words than to their meanings. I couldn't even read a novel since before long I'd always find myself in the middle of a sentence or a paragraph with no idea of where I was or what had come before. Tracing a plot or following a cast of characters required a mental gymnastics my mind seemed incapable of.
The Irish Times take on his style of narration expresses it well, although Mr Field lacks the misanthropy of some Bernhard narrators (https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/katharine-kilalea-ok-mr-field-review-brilliantly-funny-debut-novel-1.3550957):
Meanwhile in the plot next door another modernist architect is embarking on a rather abstract and ambitious project, one that reminded me of The Folly by Ivan Vladislavic. Although this is perhaps a lazy comparison, as Kilalea has argued she has little affinity with South African literature, citing instead The Magic Mountain as perhaps her key inspiration (see https://www.thisissplice.co.uk/2018/06/06/some-revelation-and-a-renewed-sense-of-vagueness-katharine-kilalea-on-writing-ok-mr-field/)
This imaginary obsession then develops into a real one as he starts to stalk Hannah Kallenbach, spending his days hiding in her garden, although the narrator himself seems unaware of how creepy his behaviour has become.
Later on he strikes up a kinship with a stray dog, one that seems to have little need of companionship, human or otherwise, but spends its days playing incessantly with an old tennis ball: He seemed to want it to go on forever
And this lack of progress seems key to his world view. In another imagined dialogue:
It’s better than the alternative, said Hannah Kallenbach. What the alternative? I said.Erosion.
inspired by his disgust at coastal erosion and indeed entropy in general – strikingly the Villa, designed more for aesthetics than practicality, leaks when it rains and is, in general, is a state of decay. Whereas, as the opening quote suggests, Mr Field seems more trapped in statis, a sense of absence:
which was disconcerting, breaking as it did, the promise inherent in reading, that line by line, as one thing leads to another, one is all the time going somewhere, that if one keeps going one will eventually get somewhere, to some end or conclusion.
A truly striking and highly original novel – one I am surprised didn’t receive more prize attention. 4.5 stars.
I came to this 2018 novel by Katharine Kilalea (a first novel, from a South African poet) via the brilliant book of essays on writing Between the Word and the World by Anna MacDonald published by Splice: my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3040674849
McDonald’s take can also be found at: https://www.thisissplice.co.uk/2018/06/04/a-room-for-fantasy-katharine-kilaleas-ok-mr-field/.
The first person narrator of the novel (presumably the eponymous Mr Field), a pianist, is travelling back from an unsuccessful concert in London, where he performed Chopin’s Raindrop Prelude, when he is involved in a train accident, shattering his wrist and (it is implied) halting his career. He uses his compensation payment to buy (or rent?) a house in South Africa, a reproduction of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye.
The house was one of three Villa Savoye doppelgängers: there was the “shadow” version in Canberra, which was an exact copy but painted black; the “mini” Villa Savoye in Boston, in which every aspect of the original house had been shrunk by 10 percent to fit the client’s budget; and my house, the House for the Study of Water, which replicated Le Corbusier’s house in all aspects apart from its location, since whereas the original Villa Savoye overlooked the rural French landscape, the one in Cape Town overlooked the sea.
Everything I knew about Le Corbusier came from a South African academic who, like a number of so-called architourists, had turned up at the house one day as though it were a museum rather than a private residence. She wore a kaftan and jangly bracelets and was writing a book, she told me, on Le Corbusier and the third world.
The architect who’d designed the House for the Study of Water, Jan Kallenbach, had met Le Corbusier during a tour which he and several other architecture students had made of European ¬architecture. They’d turned up at Le Corbusier’s apartment one day, she said, and the old architect had invited them in and said, Okay, she mimicked his French accent, so now I will teach you the sisteme. The sisteme entailed a number of rules which Le Corbusier applied to all buildings, regardless of their size or use, like that all buildings should have moveable walls, a roof terrace, horizontal windows, and be raised off the ground on stilts. The architecture students—later known as the Johannesburg Group—published articles on Le Corbusier’s sisteme in the local journal South Africa Architectural Record and applied it to the design of a number of new houses, built mostly for German Jewish immigrants who’d developed a taste for modernism before the war. With their glass walls and external staircases, these houses typified what became known as the Johannesburg style. The point about the houses, she said—this must have been important because she repeated it several times—is that they were “à la Corbu” but not just meaningless copies. They took his system and synthesized it in a new way. Whereas Kallenbach, apparently, had been so seduced by the Master, as he’d called him, that he believed the practice of architecture post–Le Corbusier could offer nothing more than to replicate his buildings verbatim. We were standing at the strip of windows in the living room, looking at the sea. That’s why he was ostracized from the inner circle, she said. Then her voice trailed off and she turned away from the window. I feel queasy, she said, the way these windows cut off the ground makes me feel seasick. And for a moment she did look pale, but then, laughing, went on, Maybe that’s the reason Kallenbach’s wife left him. Because living here was like living on a raft.
It’s true, the windows did give one an odd perspective of the world. I’d often thought it perverse that a house overlooking the sea should have windows so narrow that they hid all but a sliver of it. It was a restrictive view, almost punitively so, so frustratingly partial that it seemed a kind of tease. Though the sense of something withheld—the sea was there, of course, you just couldn’t see it—was not entirely unpleasant.
Although the narrator’s wife, Mim, moves to the country with him, soon after the novel opens she disappears from the scene, presumably having left him although Mr Field seems remarkably incurious as to what has happened, other than feeling her absence. When attempting to play the Chopin piece once more, his injured left hand now no longer as responsive as his right he observes:
A relationship unfolding between two hands which were the two characters, one expressive, the other inexcitable, who’d once been together but were now detached.
This is far from a conventional plot driven novel. As Mr Field notes of himself:
I'd never liked crosswords or any kind of word games. It was a musician's sensibility, perhaps, which made me pay more attention to the sounds of words than to their meanings. I couldn't even read a novel since before long I'd always find myself in the middle of a sentence or a paragraph with no idea of where I was or what had come before. Tracing a plot or following a cast of characters required a mental gymnastics my mind seemed incapable of.
The Irish Times take on his style of narration expresses it well, although Mr Field lacks the misanthropy of some Bernhard narrators (https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/katharine-kilalea-ok-mr-field-review-brilliantly-funny-debut-novel-1.3550957):
Mr Field himself has been compared by early reviewers to a Beckett character, but he might have more in common with the creations of Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. These tend to be deeply cultured perfectionists who keep circling back, in their minds and in the movement of their sentences, to a single obsession or plangent regret. In Ok, Mr Field, a Berhardian air of repetition works nicely: a dullness of narration which is also beautiful and perfectly intentional.Living on his own he develops an odd obsession with the architect’s estranged wife, Hannah Kallenbach, who he met only once when she handed over the keys to the house, carrying on an imaginary dialogue with her in his mind: said Hannah Kallenbach, whose voice had become the dark background of my days.
Meanwhile in the plot next door another modernist architect is embarking on a rather abstract and ambitious project, one that reminded me of The Folly by Ivan Vladislavic. Although this is perhaps a lazy comparison, as Kilalea has argued she has little affinity with South African literature, citing instead The Magic Mountain as perhaps her key inspiration (see https://www.thisissplice.co.uk/2018/06/06/some-revelation-and-a-renewed-sense-of-vagueness-katharine-kilalea-on-writing-ok-mr-field/)
This imaginary obsession then develops into a real one as he starts to stalk Hannah Kallenbach, spending his days hiding in her garden, although the narrator himself seems unaware of how creepy his behaviour has become.
Later on he strikes up a kinship with a stray dog, one that seems to have little need of companionship, human or otherwise, but spends its days playing incessantly with an old tennis ball: He seemed to want it to go on forever
And this lack of progress seems key to his world view. In another imagined dialogue:
It’s better than the alternative, said Hannah Kallenbach. What the alternative? I said.Erosion.
inspired by his disgust at coastal erosion and indeed entropy in general – strikingly the Villa, designed more for aesthetics than practicality, leaks when it rains and is, in general, is a state of decay. Whereas, as the opening quote suggests, Mr Field seems more trapped in statis, a sense of absence:
which was disconcerting, breaking as it did, the promise inherent in reading, that line by line, as one thing leads to another, one is all the time going somewhere, that if one keeps going one will eventually get somewhere, to some end or conclusion.
A truly striking and highly original novel – one I am surprised didn’t receive more prize attention. 4.5 stars.
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