Ruins, Child - Giada Scodelaro
There are some books that you read and love and want to press into people's hands, and then you get to the end and realise you have absolutely no idea how to talk about them. Ruins, Child by Giada Scodelaro is one of those books. It's been a few days since I finished this and I'm still not really sure what I actually read, but I know that I loved it. If you've read Helen of Nowhere from this year's Booker longlist and got on with it, I think you'll get on with this too. If you hated it, give this one a wide berth.
The first time I saw Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain was at a midnight 35mm screening, the fourth or fifth film of an all-nighter. I was exhausted, half-awake, in that liminal dream-logic state you fall into after too many hours in a cinema seat. The film started and I had no idea what I was looking at. Just this onslaught of images and feeling that my brain wasn't ready to process. I sat there thinking, I don't know what this is, I don't know what I'm watching, but I know I love it and I want more of it. The opening pages of Ruins, Child did a similar thing to me. I was swept up in the language and the imagery and at no point did I ever figure out what it meant.
I've been reading more poetry this year, and one of the things it's taught me is how to stop trying to extract meaning from text that doesn't want to give it up, and just sit with what it makes you feel instead. That's the only way in with this book. It's very much a prose poem: opaque, shifting, nebulous, impossible to pin down. It's a mosaic of images that put me in mind of Han Smith's Portraits At The Palace Of Creativity and Wreckong or Jenny Offill's Weather, and it would sit very comfortably on a Goldsmiths Prize shortlist. It's taking the shape of the novel and asking whether it has to keep working the way it's always worked.
If I had to say what it's actually about, I'd say maybe community? Perhaps femininity, in all the different forms it takes. Race, and specifically Blackness. Voyeurism, too, particularly in the first section, where we watch a group of people watching another group of people, as though they're being directed in a film, which reminded me a lot of Quentin Dupiex's Rubber but without the humour. It felt like commentary on how inherently voyeuristic the act of reading is, but also on how voyeuristic community itself can be. We watch our neighbours and think we know them, but there are huge stretches of their lives we're never given access to. It felt like the book was in conversation with the idea of community, maybe even the myth of it, but all of it happens behind a curtain. You have to reach for meaning here, and it doesn't come easily.
Parts of it drift from prose poem into outright verse, which I loved. It slips between forms constantly, surreal and fragmented, refusing to be pinned down at any point. I still don't really know how to review it, or talk about it in any coherent way. I just know I loved it. If you're someone who enjoys experimental prose, novels that push at what the form is even for, I think you'll get a lot out of this one.