“The quiet of the listener makes room for the speech of others, like the quiet of the reader taking in words on the page, like the white of the paper taking ink”

Rebecca Solnit

Rachel Cusk (2012) Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation. London, Faber & Faber. 978-0-571-35164-0

 

Aftermath is the story of exactly that – the aftermath of Rachel Cusk’s separation from her husband and the setting up of a new home for herself and her daughters and a new life for herself, despite the trauma.

When Rachel Cusk published the novel, it provoked a huge backlash over the honesty of her description of the emotions that accompanied the breakdown of the marriage and her feelings about her daughters.

For me, it provided interesting parallels and contrasts with the trauma experienced by women leaving marriages and relationships due to domestic abuse. Neither is pleasant or easy and the escape from an abusive marriage still contains all this trauma alongside the issues around domestic abuse.

Donna Leon (2012) Drawing Conclusions. London, Faber & Faber. 978-0-09-955976-4

 

This is a crime novel, set in Venice, part of a series of Commissario Guido Brunetti novels, where an elderly woman has died and the Commissario investigates whether the death is of natural causes, an accident, or murder

[Trigger Warning: Domestic Violence]

[Spoiler alert]

This novel is not directly about domestic abuse, but as Brunetti investigates the death of a very private woman, it emerges that there is a nationwide network of women who provide refuge to other women fleeing abuse, and was this connection a key to her death.

As it turns out, the death has a connection to other crimes, but is in essence a death of natural causes. There are some stereotypes used in the description of the women fleeing abuse, e.g. a consideration that the women coming and going might have been cleaners.

One diversion in the plot is a woman who has stayed in the women’s flat who was known to the police as someone who would “move to a city, start an affair with a man, either move in with him or have him come to her place. Then she’d start an argument with him, and she’d see that it got violent [my italics] and when the police came … he said that it was the most effective when the neighbours called the police… She’d be the victim, and the police would get in touch with one of the groups that helps battered women, and she’d be placed in a home, and she’d stay there until she had her own key and knew what was in the house. Then she’d disappear with as much as she could carry.”

Would a woman really consider subjecting herself to abuse; to pick a man who would abuse her and be violent; to go to all the time and trouble to be moved into a house where there may or may not be anything of value? Although it was an interesting path in the route of the story, it felt to me a little unrealistic.

The book itself was compelling and the outcome satisfying.