As with Joyce and Faulkner, Schofield is primarily concerned with weaving her tapestry via innovative approaches to narration and structure. If Martin John fractured its narrative by breaking down scenes and incidents into discrete chunks of elliptical prose, Bina pushes this technique even farther, with successive short passages that read like point-form notes or jottings ... Schofield’s anger is precisely calibrated and she strikes her targets mercilessly ... The humour in Bina is acerbic, though it drops off in the final third, as anger gives way to melancholy and mourning at the loss of a friend. There is irony here, too, in the complicated moral calculus involved in Bina’s calling and the fact that she has been brought up on charges for the one incident in which she insists she did not have a direct hand. This is typical of the author, whose subtlety is surpassing ... Schofield locates herself in the vanguard of a group of strong women writers – Rachel Cusk, Eimear McBride, Valeria Luiselli, Anna Burns – who are radically revising the novel’s potential and pushing it forward as a form. She calls this book 'a novel in warnings,' as if putting the reader on notice as to its singularity and calibrated strangeness. Her work is challenging and perturbing, sure. It is also, pace Marie Kondo, a source of much joy.
Readers who might be expecting the geriatric whimsy of The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, or the slick gerontological procedurals of Elizabeth Is Missing or The Thursday Murder Club, will be in for a rude awakening. This is a novel of tangles and absences, aggressively resistant to sentimentality. To follow its wrenched syntax is to experience the frustrating dogleg lanes of consciousness, the distortions and failures of memory and self-narration ... this is not to be an encounter with an elderly character whose life is designed to help us extract lessons from it — that inverted child protagonist here to defamiliarize the everyday stuff and remind us all what really matters ... Whether you view the work you are asked to do here as a reader as a pleasure or a chore comes down to the sort of reader you are. I started off feeling as if I were going through a second round of lockdown, before the novel clicked and I found myself in tune with Bina, reading around and back and through her, coming to know her through that process and valuing her all the more because of it. Bina is a bitterly funny novel but one that carries moral weight. Ultimately much of its energy comes from the simple subversive act: making a woman’s life matter, making her voice be heard.
The slow disclosure of plot, at first frustrating, becomes one of the greatest pleasures of this excellent book. Painted with colour and wit, there emerges a whole host of absurdist characters clamouring for Bina’s attention ... The emotional core of the novel, however, is Bina’s relationship with her dear friend Phil, who, we are reminded in the footnotes, is the protagonist of Schofield’s first book, Malarkey (2012). Their friendship is beautifully realized on the page, providing a life-raft both for Bina and the reader in the face of so much cruelty ... These moments of vivid, metaphorical description are all the more striking in contrast to the brusque, contracted language otherwise deployed in Bina’s tale ... In writing her life as it happened, Bina is invested with the kind of power she has not been granted beyond the page. Such power does not extend to delivering herself the ending she has hoped for. Instead, we are given a beautiful, devastating tale about the tragedy of old age.
Here is a book you must read but you can’t. You can’t because the new novel by Anakana Schofield – whose first novel won two prizes and whose second novel was shortlisted for three – hasn’t been published in Ireland, the UK or even the US. It’s available only in Canada, so if you want to read it you need to have it shipped internationally for an arm and a leg. If I were you, I probably would ... This style is entirely unique: Schofield’s wit makes it slip down easily, yet her refusal to spell things out gives the reader plenty of work to determine what is going on. By not telling us explicitly what happened, we are embedded more deeply in Bina’s character. The reader has a greater investment in her story and her life, and the book makes a dialogue out of a monologue ... Here’s another warning: watch out for this book, if you do manage to get hold of it. It will undo you.
[Schofield] dispenses plot details sparingly, so that you hardly know what has happened or why, and yet the book’s driving enigma turns out to be of the second variety ... Bina is not a conventionally unreliable narrator. She’s forthright ... But, little by little, the picture fills out. Bina is tormented by a man named Eddie, her 'sorta son,' whom she took in after he crashed his motorcycle in a ditch by her house ... Careful readers of Schofield’s work may recognize Bina from Malarky ... the author’s début, from 2012, in which Bina, in a cameo role, attacks a plane with a hammer ... while Schofield’s themes are transcendently bleak—so bleak that the bleakness must be the point—her style feels almost decadently addictive. Bina makes for great company; her obstinacy, like Bartleby’s, is flecked with heroic resistance, and her complaints elicit a pleasing mixture of satisfaction and dread ... The stubborn lack of charisma to these facts makes the novel almost as recalcitrant as its narrator—both demand, grouchily and wittily, to be taken on their own terms.
Schofield’s spiky new novel also keeps you guessing ... Most writers, it spoils nothing to suggest, would be tempted into sentimentality by the ticklish ethics behind the Group’s work. But like Martin John, Bina treats problems of social care slantwise, with a caustic charm liable to leave you blindsided by its most painful turns ... Still, you can’t help but have a few doubts about the peculiarly spotlit variety of circumspection we’re treated to en route, which involves a fair bit of throat-clearing in tandem with near-comical intolerance of readerly restlessness ... Powerful, funny and highly manipulative, the moment seeks to turn any sense of the book’s shortcomings into a failure of the reader – a risky alchemy that proves key to Bina’s chewy moral heart, as well as being a mark of its admirable, wholly non-emollient chutzpah.
These scattered lines of thought, which Ms. Schofield sometimes arranges like verses of prose poetry, compress a remarkable amount of humor, anger and sadness ... The novel holds out no consolation except the vigor of its telling. If she has nothing else, Bina has had her say.
Bina is delightfully, darkly funny and seems to have a distinctly Irish sensibility. The language is both conversational and deeply inventive. It succeeds completely at bringing us into Bina’s world ... The novel is a moving portrait of a friendship and the complicated calculations, ethical and interpersonal, that attend to witnessing another’s pain ... I began the book amused by Bina’s brusque manner, her cynicism and misanthropy, but I ended it feeling emotionally devastated. Bina may be a novel of warnings, but what it ultimately warns us of is the messiness, heartbreak, and, yes, humour that comes with existence. Bina is a comic and affecting cri de coeur from one of society’s ignored.
... witty and abrasive ... [a] scathing and offbeat examination of the demands of empathy faced by women of all ages, and the negative outcomes — both petty and sweeping — that women endure because of said demands ... Experimental and fragmentary, the novel includes profuse white space ... This formal audacity results in a propulsive energy, a quick and quirky reading experience that feels pleasantly unpleasant, equal parts entertaining and upsetting ... In the vein of Rachel Cusk or Clarice Lispector from whom she draws one of her epigraphs, Schofield uses her book's inventive structure to deliver a story that's biting, bitter and rife with dark humor. Relentless in her tone of alarm, like a warning bell or a warning shot, Bina's words will leave your head ringing.
There is undeniable energy in these scraps of straight-backed, emphatic prose, but the scavenged paper conceit feels unnecessary, a gimmick reverse-engineered to justify Schofield’s stylistic preference for staccato, pointillist storytelling ... Bina is adamant: she is a 'modern woman with modern thoughts on modern things', forthright and practical. Yet Bina is a novel of wilful obfuscation and piecemeal revelations. Whether this is a source of beguiling, cantankerous irony or annoying quirk will depend on the reader. In a novel that works so hard to make older women visible – and their stories feel urgent – it seems counterproductive to embrace a form so repetitive it borders on the doddery ... At its raw best, Bina captures the neural loops of a grief-snagged brain with crow-black humour.
... enthralling ... at the center of the novel are Bina’s memories of her friendship with Phil, who acts as Bina’s sounding board for her persistent, overactive consciousness and is 'great company even when [Bina] was moaning and deluded.' It’s this bond that makes Schofield’s novel shine. Intriguingly crafted and surprisingly funny, Schofield continues to produce work that challenges conventions and enthralls readers.
