The Strangeness of Life

Mild Vertigo by Mito Kanai in Translation from the Japanese by Polly Barton. This is a story of a housewife called Natsumi who lives with her husband and two children in Tokyo. Each chapter there's a kind of moment of not quite recognition but a kind of putting things out of joint something in her ordinary life makes her stop for a minute. And I think that as a reader you'll be surprised by how fascinating and strangely moving a novel can be made with the most ordinary of materials. Next week at this time Mary Lawson will be talking to James Nocte on Book Club about her award winning 2002 novel Crow Lake.