Contemporary Authors

• OK, Mr. Field ( (novel)) Faber & Faber (London, England), 2018

1. Ok, Mr. Field : a novel LCCN 2018003397 Type of material Book Personal name Kilalea, Katharine, author. Main title Ok, Mr. Field : a novel / Katharine Kilalea. Edition First U.S. edition. Published/Produced New York : Tim Duggan Books, [2018] Description 218 pages ; 20 cm ISBN 9780525573630 (hardcover) 9780525573647 (softcover) CALL NUMBER PR9369.3.K46 O39 2018 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• United Agents - https://www.unitedagents.co.uk/katharine-kilalea

  Katharine Kilalea grew up in South Africa and moved to the UK to study for an M.A. in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her debut poetry collection, One Eye’d Leigh (2009), was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize for writers under 30. She worked for many years in an architecture practice and is completing a PhD at the University of Sheffield on the experience of space in poetry. She lives in London.

  Katharine's debut novel, OK, MR. FIELD, was published in early June 2018 by Faber & Faber, and in the US in early July 2018 by Tim Duggan Books.

• Granta - https://granta.com/katharine-kilalea-and-emily-berry-in-conversation/

  QUOTE:
  It does feel different to write a novel. Less pressurised, because it’s not quite so intense, and less exposing, because it’s a story about someone else and also because the narrative form – beginning, middle, end – is so at odds with the form of lived experience that a novel never really feels real.

  KATHARINE KILALEA AND EMILY BERRY IN CONVERSATION
  Katharine Kilalea & Emily Berry
  Katharine Kilalea and Emily Berry discuss architecture, psychoanalysis and the different types of exposure that come with writing prose and poetry.
  the milestone element for me, personally, was a shift from writing ‘from the heart’ – or the nerves, or gut, or wherever poetry comes from – to a more mediated kind of writing, one which I have more control over, maybe, because it’s got more ideas, or maybe more structure, in it. I guess what I wanted to find out with the book was something about intimacy, how to achieve it maybe, if it exists, what it feels like.

  Katharine Kilalea:

  We’ve spoken quite a lot over the years – in person, and over email – so I’d thought this ‘conversation’ would be easy, but as soon as I sat down in front of the computer, rather than just asking the questions I’d like to ask (like you stopped writing for a while, why did you start writing again?) I felt the ‘writerly’ need to subject everything I think to endless revisions. It’s tiresome, this feeling of not being able to just speak/write freely. Then I remembered a conversation we had about a decade ago after one of Roddy Lumsden’s poetry workshops. We’d discovered that we’d both written for the London Review of Breakfasts. I’d spent a week or so writing a single review – hardly more than a few sentences – and was complaining that I wouldn’t write another because writing prose was too torturous for me. You said, I think, that actually you found it quite easy (or more relaxing anyway than writing poetry). So . . . Are you as cagey about this as I am!?

  Emily Berry:

  That’s so weird I said I found it more relaxing to write prose. I don’t think I find writing either poetry or prose relaxing, if I even know what the difference is . . . Do you mean am I cagey about this conversation or about questions about writing? I think it’s only right and proper to be a bit cagey about one’s writing process and also about ‘public’ conversations . . . Quite often people ask me, ‘Are you writing at the moment?’, which I guess is a perfectly normal question for writers to ask each other, and even though on the one hand I don’t mind answering the question I feel a bit icky about it, like they’ve just asked if I’ve had sex recently. I think I mentioned to you I have been tentatively writing some stuff but I’m having to almost keep it a secret from myself, I don’t know why. Because I actively didn’t want to write for quite a long time – it felt somehow intrusive. So now I am doing that thing that Thelma does at the beginning of Thelma and Louise where she takes a bite of a chocolate bar and then puts it back in the fridge and then takes it out again a bit later and so on, to pretend I’m not really committed to the whole business . . . So, are you writing at the moment? (haha)

  Katharine:

  Nope. This is the only thing I’m writing right now. You know, I was lying awake last night agitating some problem when my mind returned to what you said about writing not being relaxing and a strange thing happened. As soon as I started thinking about how to write back to you a calm feeling came over me. I don’t much like this way of speaking, but it was a feeling of ‘presentness’ – as if I were in myself – a bit like getting a massage. I tried to work out why writing might or might not be relaxing in the abstract, which resulted in meaningless philosophising, so I stopped. But I did enjoy the feeling. It helped me sleep and reminded me that I do, on the whole, find writing relaxing. It made me want to work on something again. I liked the idea of writing in order to relax, and maybe even prefer it to the nobler reasons like writing for consolation, for truth, for revenge, etc. etc.

  Emily:

  That’s interesting because I feel like I remember you saying somewhere – maybe on radio or a podcast? – something about how the impulse to write was somehow connected to a desire to get into ‘something difficult’? Or to work with difficulty, unpick something. Maybe you were talking about ‘Hennecker’s Ditch’? Which made a lot of sense to me. It feels like work. But it sounds like what you are talking about is the fabled state of flow, when you’re totally absorbed in a given activity? I hear that’s something writers and artists get but I don’t know if that happens to me so often when writing. Though I should say that this type of writing (corresponding, emailing), is a totally different experience for me than writing a poem or anything more . . . formal (?) – I LOVE corresponding! But I still don’t know if I would say it’s relaxing, it’s more . . . exciting . . . But why I didn’t want to write poems was maybe to do with feeling that I’d over-exerted and over-exposed myself on some very deep level writing my last book and I needed to just stop all that and shut the door and not let anybody else in (even me). Do you ever get a feeling where you’ve been socialising a lot and there’s been a lot of talking, and when you go home your mouth feels sort of exhausted and full of the ghosts of all the conversations you’ve had? And you think, I can’t say another word. Like that, only with my writing ‘mouth’, wherever that is (what a horrible concept).

  Katharine:

  Over-exposure, yes, I know the feeling. It feels perverse sometimes, to constantly be ‘giving oneself away’. But there must be a pleasure in it, too, I mean, here we are exposing ourselves again! I suppose most people prefer to keep their thoughts and feelings in their own minds, but among writers – and there are a lot of us! – people are exposing themselves all the time, infecting everyone else with our issues. Did you enjoy ‘not writing’? Did you think you might give it all up and be, I don’t know, an interior designer or something?

  Emily:

  Not writing felt neither good nor bad, it felt sort of determined. I did think of doing something else – every now and then I think, oh dear this is a rather unhealthy pursuit isn’t it? What shall I do instead . . . shall I become a florist, or a Pilates teacher or something? But I sort of realise it’s maybe a kind of acting out against myself, and that there’s an inevitability about what I’m doing, and I just have to go along with it. I saw this Jean Rhys quote on Twitter yesterday that resonated with me: ‘It seems I was fated to write, which is horrible. But I can only do one thing.’

  Katharine:

  On the subject of resonant quotes. We had a conversation recently in which I said that I’m more tolerant of novels than of poetry, that I don’t mind reading a mediocre novel but that when I read a poem I don’t love it makes me quite angry. You said, ‘It’s because you expect something from a poem. You expect it to make you feel something, and if it doesn’t make you feel anything you think it’s wasted your time.’ I was very struck by this idea you had about wanting poems to make you feel something. I actually lent it to a character in OK, Mr Field (I wonder if you noticed!) only the idea is applied to the sea . . .

  Emily:

  I did pay extra attention to the brilliant passage in which he is wondering why people are so interested in the sea because it made me think about my own (maybe former) compulsion to write about the sea . . . And it reminded me of the bit in ‘Hennecker’s Ditch’ where it says ‘the sea – of course it was – was marbled / and contorting’, there’s something about the exasperation there which for me prefigures Mr Field’s slightly contemptuous view of sea enthusiasts while simultaneously being in a kind of way quite affected by the sea . . . But this is perfect because I feel the same way about the sea as about a poem, if I look at the sea I do want it to make me feel something . . .

  Katharine:

  As it happens, I’m on holiday in Cornwall at the moment, and I’ve noticed that when I look out the window at the sea all I get is a pleasant blankness or absence of feeling. (Though if, as you say in ‘Picnic’, ‘the mood of the sea is catching’, then this may just be because the weather is good and the sea is flat.) I love the sea but am very disinclined to write about it. But the sea seems (or seemed) to be a kind of portal for you – I have the sense that your sea poems just kind of poured out. They have a kind of speed in them, like they were written at the speed of thought. Actually I feel that sort of ease in your work more generally, so I was surprised to hear that you don’t get the ‘fabled state of flow’!

  Emily:

  Well I’m happy if that’s the impression . . . actually a lot of the poems in Stranger, Baby were collaged together out of short groups of lines written at separate times . . . so if there was flow it probably only lasted about three minutes each time or something . . . (P.S. Some of the lines in ‘Picnic’ were written looking out of the window in a house in Cornwall by the sea!) I’ve been thinking about how amazingly detailed and close-up OK, Mr Field is, and I kept wanting to hold onto these details but they accrue so quickly that as you read on they kind of merge into more of a feeling, the feeling of being inside your narrator’s mind . . . or the feeling of looking at the sea (trying to observe its parts but getting distracted by the whole . . .). I’ve been trying to compare it to your poetry and think about how it differs. I was going to say it feels poemistic, the way you might say something is novelistic, but that’s probably too easy since I knew you as a poet first, and I’m not sure it’s true. But the writing seems to me very different to what you find in most novels . . . And I notice things from your poems in there. Whole lines have snuck in, like ‘The air was blood temperature’, which is a favourite line from ‘Hennecker’s Ditch’ . . . How does a poem-y feeling differ from a novel-y feeling? Why do you think the transition occurred for you (from poems to a novel)?

  Katharine:

  It does feel different to write a novel. Less pressurised, because it’s not quite so intense, and less exposing, because it’s a story about someone else and also because the narrative form – beginning, middle, end – is so at odds with the form of lived experience that a novel never really feels real. (Actually that’s why I prefer traditional novels to the kind of auto-fiction that’s being written at the moment, because it does have that inbuilt distance.) The transition from poems to novels happened because I’d reached a dead end in poetry. ‘Hennecker’s Ditch’ used me up and when I tried to write poems afterwards I felt like a jobbing writer (and there’s no worse crime, in my opinion, than writing something which doesn’t need to be written). So I gave up on the poems and then, suddenly, I was writing a novel. I’ve always wanted to write a novel. There’s something about certain novels which I sort of ‘live by’, if you know what I mean? Also, I’ve been in an analysis for some time and a big part of that is about being able to say things in a way which makes sense. (Whereas I think that what suited me about writing poems was that they didn’t need to make sense.) I always swore to myself that when I finished a novel I’d end the analysis. The two things felt connected, as if by writing a novel I was good enough at making sense to have ‘passed’ the analysis.

  Emily:

  What you say about feeling ‘used up’ after ‘Hennecker’s Ditch’ is basically a much shorter way of saying what I said above! I totally agree about the crime of writing things that don’t need to be written (although I suppose it depends who’s making the decision, haha. There are plenty of things I absolutely think had no need to be written – well, published – whose writers would certainly not agree . . .) But it’s interesting that novel writing gave you a way out of that feeling of ‘used-upness’. Actually the small amount of writing I’ve started doing is possibly closer to prose than poetry. Though not remotely a novel. I’ve actually never wanted to write a novel, in fact I would go so far as to say I actively do not ever want to write one.

  Katharine:

  Curious . . . I suppose you mean you’re writing in paragraphs? Or are there ‘stories’ in them? I think poets are suspicious of storytelling – I suppose there’s a falseness about it.

  Emily:

  I don’t know what I mean . . . There are paragraphs and stories, yes, but I’ve previously written poems with paragraphs and stories where I didn’t have the same questions about what form I was writing in. It just feels different. I was trying to explain to someone recently how one type of anxiety I was experiencing felt different from another kind I had regularly, but it was impossible to clarify the distinction . . . maybe it’s like that. Why have you always wanted to write a novel? What is it about a novel? What do you mean by you ‘live by’ certain novels exactly? I think novels, the reading of them, is so important to me and has been ever since I was quite young – like a sort of security blanket – that I just don’t ever want to enter that territory as a writer in case it spoils it. I want it to be a safe place I can be in as a visitor.

  Katharine:

  At its most basic level, being able to write a novel felt appealing because I’m a terrible storyteller, the kind of person who starts a story at a dinner party and makes everyone immediately feel anxious. I partly agree with the idea of a novel as a security blanket – I find it reassuring to come back to a novel night after night because I know what I’m getting into. What do I mean about ‘living by’ novels? I suppose novels seem to be full of ideas about life, or anyway, I’m always looking to them for clues about life’s problems. I remember, for instance, thinking that K’s hopeless pursuit of the castle had some kind of meaningful bearing on my own struggle, at the time, to fall pregnant (the novel’s advice, it seemed, was not dissimilar to the common sense wisdom that the only way to fall pregnant is to stop trying to fall pregnant, as if the only way to get what you want is by not wanting it. But how are you supposed to fool yourself at that very deep level?).

  Emily:

  But I also look to poems for clues about life’s problems, don’t you? And then I think oh god why do these distinctions even matter!! What kind of person spends time trying to distinguish one anxiety feeling from another? Mr Field, I expect! It makes me think of his internal critic saying ‘You’re too sensitive’, or him remembering his mother telling him – I loved this! – ‘Nobody cares about one’s personal trials and griefs. One’s trials and griefs are boring.’ Which brings us back to psychoanalysis. I was struck by the role of Hannah Kallenbach in the book – this real person who becomes a projection and sort of disembodied voice in the mind of your narrator, a person he seems to experience as witnessing his life. When I read the book first, knowing that you are in analysis, I thought of that voice as something similar to the voice of an analyst, which is disembodied, since it mostly occurs behind one’s head. Did it function that way for you? I’m interested that writing a novel seemed to mark a kind of milestone for you. I would think of ‘passing’ analysis as being about having finally been ‘cured’ of life (although wouldn’t that be death?), or being certified an official competent grown-up or something (!) – do you think the novel is a more ‘grown-up’ form than poetry? I sort of think it might be . . .

  Katharine:

  Is a novel more ‘grown up’ than poetry? Trick question! It’s more conventional, perhaps, more accepting of compromise (I think that an analysis might see those as being two good outcomes). I suppose the milestone element for me, personally, was a shift from writing ‘from the heart’ – or the nerves, or gut, or wherever poetry comes from – to a more mediated kind of writing, one which I have more control over, maybe, because it’s got more ideas, or maybe more structure, in it. I guess what I wanted to find out with the book was something about intimacy, how to achieve it maybe, if it exists, what it feels like. Psychoanalysis thinks that you can get closer to somebody – or at least speak more freely with them, which surely amounts to the same thing – if you can’t see their face (which must be an aspect of writing also, since if you’re writing to somebody you can’t see their face). I noticed that when I’m feeling something really deeply, I’m often, at the same time, imagining myself articulating that feeling, as if to somebody else. Writing is a bit like that – articulating oneself to someone (everyone) else. I worry about the idea of feeling on my own – I don’t mean feeling isolated, I mean the idea of having nobody to tell my feelings to. (If a tree falls in a forest and there’s nobody to hear it etc.)

  I’m thinking back to the two times I read Stranger, Baby. The first time was just after my daughter was born – days after – and it quite unmanned me (a gendered term, but a good one). I thought it might be something to do with me – my hormones maybe, or that, as a new mother, I was peculiarly sensitive to the idea of how important a mother is to somebody. I avoided the book for a year or so after that because I didn’t want to ‘go there’ again, and when I read it a second time it was equally affecting. I wondered whether part of what’s so moving is the feeling that, in the poems, a child is speaking. Of course it’s an adult writing, but the expression is of a child’s experience too, and because children can’t really express their experiences with clarity (because they don’t have the language) it’s like accessing previously mute territory. And maybe this is too neat, but it also occurred to me that there’s something about a book, as a format, which is appropriate for Stranger, Baby. Because if reading a book is entering into a sort of relationship with the book’s author – who is, of course, not there – then reading a book is fundamentally the experience of being with someone who is not there.

  Emily:

  I remember you texting me after you read it and I was very moved that you had read it at such a time . . . though it’s very strange to have written something where the sort of ‘positive’ outcome is that it makes the reader sad. Yeah, it did feel like a childish or childlike place those poems came from. Neither of those words has quite the right connotations, but I was partly trying to channel my childhood experience of my mother’s death, which I largely have no memory of, so it was a weird process. I was seeing a CBT therapist for some of the time while writing the book, and one exercise he gave me (which I’m not sure is typical of CBT) was to ‘revisit’ my child self in my head at a traumatic moment, and talk to my child self with my adult self’s ‘wisdom’. As with a lot of therapy I’ve had, I remain unsure what impact it’s had on my day-to-day wellbeing, but I found it very generative for my work! There’s a bit in Jeanette Winterson’s memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? when she is recounting a breakdown and she ‘spends time’ with a very furious, volatile child self with whom she has to argue and negotiate through various things – it was a little like that, I suppose, only more . . . prearranged. I haven’t hung out with my child self for a while, I should check in with her and see how she’s doing.

  Katharine:

  I’m struck by this idea of the adult self comforting the child self. It might clarify something of my own response to the poems. I wonder if what was conjured up so uncomfortably wasn’t a loss feeling so much as a sort of caring feeling, the urge to comfort – which is such a strong urge! – and failure of being able to. It reminds me of a passage in Imre Kertész’s Fateless. It’s hard to explain exactly, but there’s a point in the book (which is about a boy’s experiences at a concentration camp) where one of the camp doctors discovers that the boy was brought there without his parents’ knowledge, and feels sorry for him. The story is repeated to other camp officials who all seem saddened by it. The boy notices, though, that his sympathisers seem to enjoy their feeling of compassion, even to seek it out, as if, he says, to reassure themselves that they’re still capable of it. The boy says he feels ‘embarrassed’ by the doctors’ feelings about his situation. Do you feel embarrassed for us?

  Emily:

  I haven’t read the book, but isn’t his embarrassment more about being the object of their compassion? That’s where the embarrassment lies for me, I think. To be in a position that incites compassion is necessarily to be in a very disempowering position.

  Katharine:

  Actually, the boy wanted to say to them your compassion is misplaced, but he stopped himself because he could tell they liked the feeling . . .

  Emily:

  Wow. I think this boy is more generous than me . . . I think I also find it a bit troubling thinking about readers of books entering into a relationship with the author, which you mention above. I mean, OK, they enter into a relationship with the ‘author’, the writer of the words, but I try hard to distinguish that from the person of the author . . . but I suppose that’s what you mean about the author fundamentally not being there. I think you have to not be there, as a writer, or you wouldn’t be able to cope – it’s too intimate. Maybe one of the best things about writing (for me) is if you manage to transform a feeling that happened in your body/mind into something that can ultimately be taken into someone else’s body/mind as their feeling, but sometimes those feelings are sent back to you, and mistaken for yours . . . that’s maybe what I find embarrassing.

  But it’s much easier to not be there when the book is more obviously a fiction, as with OK, Mr Field. (Which I keep wanting to call ‘OK, Mr Cross’ – I have absolutely no idea why! I don’t think Mr Field is particularly cross.)

  Katharine:

  Ha! Mr Perverse, Mr Repressed . . . like Mr Men books for adults.

  Emily:

  I’m always wondering where the line is between ‘true’ fiction and ‘autofiction’ – does it exist? When I read a novel by someone I know, I can’t help trying to look for them in there – I tell myself off about it but I can’t help it! Richard Scott has a great line about this in one of his poems: ‘are you looking for me in these lines / like a urologist examines piss for blood’, and the answer to that is, yes, I am, I’m sorry!!! And I feel very uncomfortable when someone does that to my work. Do you feel Mr Field is 100 per cent made up (is that even a thing?), or are you in there a bit? For example the bits in there from your poems . . . and the voice, the style of meditating on things, feels very you (you the writer or you the Kate . . . I don’t know??) How did you create/come up with Mr Field? Did you do a lot of research or do you already know all that stuff about architecture, classical music etc? And what drew you to writing a male character? Was that a deliberate choice?

  Katharine:

  I can’t be far from Mr Field because I feel very defensive when people describe him as going mad! (Which, I’m beginning to understand, is how the book’s plot is generally understood, though I personally think of it as a kind of odd ‘coming of age’ story . . .) In one way, it’s true that his life gets more isolated and confused, etc., as the book progresses, but in another way, he started off as a mediocre pianist with a distant wife and ends up with a passionate attachment to both a dog and a stranger . . . Well, at least he’s passionate about something! I also identify with Mr Field’s frustration at, as you put it so well, not being able to transform the feeling inside himself into feelings that other people can take in. In fact, his jealousy of the fellow pianist whose playing always makes him terribly sad is not a million miles off the envy I’ve felt towards you! He did grow out of a sequence of poems I was writing about a House for the Study of Water, though at the beginning he was just a ‘state of mind’ so (as a friend helpfully put it) the book sounded like a Paulo Coelho . . . Deciding to set the book in the House for the Study of Water made it easier because the building – or how he moved around the building – became a kind of ‘plot’, or a way to write about a state of mind without anything having to actually happen. The music bits were quite easy as I played the piano as a child. As to his sex, I actually intended to write him as male then switch gender at the end, but OK, Mrs Field is an awful-sounding title.

  Emily:

  Since you mention the dog I’m now remembering how brilliant you are at writing about dogs. Their sort of heartbreaking personhood. ‘Sometimes, when I looked down and saw the dog lying on the floor with his legs tucked under him like a grasshopper, I felt an immense affection for him followed by a terrible sadness . . .’ In another exchange I would like to have a whole conversation about writing about dogs, please.

  Katharine:

  Or the sea, or both.

  Emily:

  Coming back to embarrassment, since you mention feeling ‘defensive’ of Mr Field, is that to do with embarrassment? I don’t think I would have described him as going mad, but it does seem as though some sort of breakdown is occurring . . . on the other hand maybe any close analysis of an individual’s thoughts would make it seem like that person was having a breakdown . . . do you think you would have felt more ‘exposed’ if you’d written the character as a woman in the first person?

  Katharine:

  I do think I’d have felt more exposed while writing if Mr Field had been female. And perhaps making him male did ‘protect’ me by forcing him not to be me. The word breakdown is less pejorative than going mad, I like it. Breaking things down can even be positive sometimes . . . like a book I read by Christopher Bollas which described a breakdown as coming into contact with the fundamentals of existence. It’s a fascinating idea that a close analysis of a person’s thoughts resembles a breakdown – I wonder if the experience of a breakdown is the same as the experience of undergoing a close analysis of one’s thoughts? Psychoanalysis was a big part of your PhD research too, I know. But do you buy it? I ask because of course psychoanalysis believes that expressing oneself will make whatever bothers you bother you less. But in Stranger, Baby you say that writing the poems has brought no consolation. (Which reminds me of what J.M. Coetzee said in an interview: ‘Writing, in itself, as an activity, is neither beautiful nor consoling. It’s industry.’) I appreciate much of what psychoanalysis has to say, but I’m not sure it has all the answers . . . I wondered whether there’s an attempt, especially in poetry, to offer another way to understand the minutiae of subjective experience, as if to collate data (albeit in a less organised and less overtly therapeutic way than psychoanalysis) for some kind of alternative understanding of how the mind works?

  Emily:

  I am very into psychoanalysis as a kind of reading tool (reading books and people) but I don’t know yet what I feel about it beyond that. I’m very suspicious of it. I just finished the Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St Aubyn (have you read them?) which I thought were absolutely incredible. I felt like underlining practically every sentence. They follow one character through a traumatic childhood into haunted adulthood (basically his own life, I gather), and the framework through which the character’s life is viewed is very psychoanalytic . . . in one bit someone is describing to a child what psychoanalysis is and they say ‘it’s a way of getting access to hidden truths about your feelings’. I liked that, but sometimes I worry that there are no hidden truths, just different stories that make sense at different times. Hence poems. (Incidentally you saying above that when feeling something you are always simultaneously imagining articulating it reminded me of something St Aubyn says in an interview in the New Yorker I just read: ‘Even if I’m walking down the street on my own, I’m narrating the experience. It has to be described before it convinces me that it has happened.’ Maybe all writers do this?) I was reading Grazia magazine when I was having my hair cut recently and the columnist Polly Vernon said something about how in life you just keep having one epiphany after another and each time you think Yes! That’s it! and then shortly afterwards you realise, no . . . that’s not it at all. That is not it, at all . . .

  Katharine:

  I did read the Patrick Melrose novels, and must have loved the books because I read them almost in one sitting, but I wasn’t sure about the way Edward St Aubyn seemed to understand everything about Patrick Melrose’s life, as if he’d found (in psychoanalysis) a system which explained everything, and within which it all made sense. It reminds me of Le Corbusier. He developed a completely new measuring system for architecture, based on the human body, and resized the elements of his buildings to an apparently more human scale. It all makes sense, but when you go into his buildings everything seems a little small, the proportion just doesn’t feel right.

  Emily:

  I love that comparison. I’ve always been interested in (what seems like) the significance of architecture for you as a writer (the starting point of your book being that Mr Field has moved into a replica Le Corbusier house). My partner is an architect, as you know, so I’m generally intrigued by intersections between architecture and literature, which seem to happen less than one might think . . . is this something you have any thoughts about?

  Katharine:

  I worked in architecture for many years, which is how I learned about it. I’m not sure if architecture in itself especially interests me. I’ve found the theory around it fascinating – Peter Sloterdijk especially (I’m sure I’ve mentioned him to you before, I mention him to everybody). I am peculiarly sensitive to my environment, though. I remember visiting a part of the Cornish countryside I didn’t know very well, where something about how the bushes overshadowed the roads, and the farm houses looked down over the fields, made me feel like I was in a Daphne du Maurier novel, and I had to leave and go home. A ‘thinking space’ especially, has to be ‘just so’, nothing uncomfortable, nothing ugly, nothing messy. Half of my work day is spent preparing the environment to exactly the right degree of tidiness. I’m writing this from my new shed – more like garden room (which is what I spent my entire advance on!) ­– and it’s blissful. I know that you are sensitive to how spaces make you feel because I’ve had some wonderful descriptions from you in the past of interiors which you didn’t like . . . the mix of metal and plastic and hard blue carpet in uninspiring teaching rooms is my favourite . . . but you’ve also questioned rooms with dated interiors or chairs too far apart, etc. I hope you don’t mind my bringing these up – I totally get it! And you’ll remember the house which both you and I happened to stay in which inspired, at least partly, ‘Hennecker’s Ditch’ and your Arlene poems! I expect you’re better at saying what was so evocative about it . . .?

  Emily:

  I’m sort of the opposite, I mean, I’m interested in architecture in the sense that I love looking at it, but I don’t know much about the theory. My partner was telling me that architects are often very reluctant to acknowledge the influences or references in their design, preferring to arrogantly present everything as their own original vision, which seemed . . . significant somehow. That’s not like Jan Kallenbach in your book who feels that Le Corbusier has already done everything that’s worth doing . . . I feel like poets are very eager to talk about their influences? ‘Hennecker’s Ditch’ had a massive influence on me. I remember finding out that you had stayed in that house too and that it led to probably the darkest poem each of us have written?! I found that hilarious and comforting. I hope the person who lives there is OK! My poem ‘Sweet Arlene’, which was begun there, talks about a ‘mutilated floor’ and that’s how it was when I was there – one of the rooms was huge and completely bare with these scratched up old floorboards and nothing in it except a creepy vintage sofa bed. I think it was dark red velvet or something. You pressed it flat and it became this tiny uncomfortable single bed. I had a terrible panic attack in that room that went on all night and beyond. It’s very true I care a lot about how interiors ‘feel’ and I hate to stay anywhere that doesn’t feel ‘right’. Consequently I don’t stay places very often . . . Probably the truth is it’s my own interior that is not quite right. But oh my god, you have a garden study! What a dream . . .

  Katharine:

  Yes, it’s a secretive little room at the bottom of the garden with tall narrow windows so that nobody from the outside world can really get a view inside. I feel safely tucked inside, like a snail in my shell. Which is conducive to writing. As if, paradoxically, by enclosing myself in a room, I’m more inclined to ‘expose’ myself.

  Katherine Kilalea’s novel OK, Mr. Field, is available now from Faber & Faber, and from Penguin Random House in the US.

  Emily Berry’s collection Stranger, Baby is available from Faber & Faber.

• From Publisher -

  QUOTE:
  frustrated narrative arc

  Originally from South Africa, Katharine Kilalea moved to London in 2005 to study for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her first book, One Eye’d Leigh was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize for writers under 30. She has received an Arts Council Award for poetry and her poems have appeared in publications including the 2010 Forward Prize Anthology, PN Review and Magma and performed on BBC Radio 3, as well as at festivals including the Wordsworth Trust Poetry Festival, Bridlington Poetry Festival and Worlds Literature Festival. A poem on chairs was commissioned for Martino Gamper's design book, 100 Chairs in 100 days and its 100 Ways. She works as a publicist for an architecture practice.

  Katharine Kilalea grew up in South Africa and moved to London for an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She has published a poetry collection, One Eye’d Leigh, which was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. She lives in London.

QUOTE:
QUOTE:
auspicious debut that challenges the reader to follow the progress of mental distress and bravely offers little relief from the painful sight.
gloomy, evocative novel.

Kilalea, Katharine: OK, MR. FIELD
Kirkus Reviews. (June 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Kilalea, Katharine OK, MR. FIELD Tim Duggan Books/Crown (Adult Fiction) $25.00 7, 17 ISBN: 978-0-525-57363-0

A concert pianist finds his life and mind drifting after an accident damages his hand in this gloomy, evocative novel.

Mr. Field is sleeping when the book starts. He is sleeping when a train crash shatters his left wrist. He is sleeping when his wife leaves him. The scant story he narrates alternates between stark reality and a dreamlike limbo, specifics and vagueness. With the compensation money he receives, he buys a white house, a box on stilts, that overlooks the sea on the Capetown coast of South Africa and was designed by an admirer of Le Corbusier. Mr. Field--no definite first name is given--meets the admirer's widow, who lives nearby, and she soon haunts his waking life. He spends time peeping through her garden window. He often encounters a stray dog in a graveyard when he's out walking. In the widow's sitting room, a Chagall-like print shows a woman, a dog, and a rudimentary box of a house. Near Mr. Field's house, a circular residential tower is being built. He wanders around his house, which is in a state of decay, as is Mr. Field. He is sad about his lost career and lost wife. His sadness wearies him: "I was so tired of being sad." Maybe his wife found his sadness tiresome. Before she left, she played computer solitaire and studied the sea, writing observations in a notebook he later finds. Kilalea, who grew up in South Africa and whose previous book, One Eye'd Leigh, was a poetry collection that hasn't been published in the U.S., conjures from precise prose and elements as basic and fraught as Tarot card images--sea, widow, wife, round tower, box house, sad man--a kind of tone poem that seems at times forced but ultimately resonates well beyond one man's depression.

An auspicious debut that challenges the reader to follow the progress of mental distress and bravely offers little relief from the painful sight.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Kilalea, Katharine: OK, MR. FIELD." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A543009013/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d0cc10e6. Accessed 18 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A543009013

QUOTE:
Kilalea's striking, singular debut constructs an eerie world of replicas, repetitions, and doubles that contrasts the Utopian ideals of a modernist house with the irreversibly damaged soul who inhabits it.
disorienting and enthralling

OK, Mr. Field
Publishers Weekly. 265.21 (May 21, 2018): p40.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* OK, Mr. Field

Katharine Kilalea. Crown/Duggan, $25 (192p) ISBN 978-0-525-57363-0

Kilalea's striking, singular debut constructs an eerie world of replicas, repetitions, and doubles that contrasts the Utopian ideals of a modernist house with the irreversibly damaged soul who inhabits it. Narrator Mr. Field is close to inhuman, a lethargic obsessive recovering from a traumatic injury that ends his career as a concert pianist. He retires to one of three replicas of a modernist masterpiece, Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, in Cape Town, South Africa. Perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean, the house is a "grand white box ... rising from the rocks on its thin white stilts as if signifying, albeit tenuously, the victory of architecture over nature." Meanwhile, a developer begins construction on a fanciful housing project next door, a "tower of cowsheds" rising up into the clouds, as Mr. Field's life and home fall into disrepair. Mr. Field's wife, Mim, vanishes, leaving behind cryptic notes about the sea; the house's windows fall out and weeds encroach; and Mr. Field hears the voice of the villa's former occupant in his head, then tirelessly stalks her in real life. The novel is as opaque as its central character, but Kilalela maintains a balance between formal control and the irrational mystery of a man who is a "stranger to [him]self." The result is a disorienting and enthralling descent into one man's peculiar malaise. Agent: Anna Webber, United Agents. (July)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"OK, Mr. Field." Publishers Weekly, 21 May 2018, p. 40. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541012568/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=839a581e. Accessed 18 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A541012568

QUOTE:
startlingly good first novel.
the shocking accuracy of Kilalea's prose,
which, ultimately, is what makes this novel so riveting. The absolute correctness of the vocabulary she uses
makes one realise how pretentious and unnecessary the language in much contemporary fiction is.

First Novels
Alex Peake-Tomkinson
Spectator. 337.9907 (July 14, 2018): p32.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
Katharine Kilalea is a South African poet who has written a startlingly good first novel. OK, Mr Field (Faber, 12.99 [pounds sterling]) is the haunting story of a concert pianist whose wrist is fractured in a train crash. On a whim, he uses his compensation money to buy a house that he has only seen in pictures. If that sounds dull, this might be because it is hard to convey the shocking accuracy of Kilalea's prose, which, ultimately, is what makes this novel so riveting. The absolute correctness of the vocabulary she uses makes one realise how pretentious and unnecessary the language in much contemporary fiction is.

This would be nothing, of course, if Kilalea didn't have anything to say, but she has so much to convey about loneliness, madness and mortality. The literary critic Harold Bloom has said that what makes Kafka's Metamorphosis so disorientating is its strange familiarity, and OK, Mr Field has this by the bucketload. This curious, short (it is just 200 pages long) book feels as uncanny as Kafka or Beckett.

Max Field, Kilalea's protagonist (if you can call him such, given his passivity) is clearly disturbed: his thought processes are dissociated and his mind can't make sense of what he sees and experiences. This detachment is often funny. Looking at his naked wife, Field reflects, 'I liked looking at her. It wasn't the nudity that attracted me, there was just something about her body which my eye liked, or had at least taken an interest in. And so it was, scanning her figure with a lazy and purposeless kind of attention, that my eyes came across her slightly goofy-looking large brown nipples.' Alarmingly, he is discomfited by the nipples that belong to his wife because of their 'indifference, which seemed to see things in the way that children seem to see things when they stare at you on buses'.

Kilalea used to work in an architecture practice and she writes beautifully about the property Field buys, a replica of Le Corbusier's Le Villa Savoye, plonked on a stretch of coast outside Cape Town. Even those of us who think we have little interest in the impact of a constructed environment will understand Field's reflection on a window whose glass has been shattered: 'The empty window made me feel vulnerable in a way that was not entirely unpleasant.'

This feels like a peculiarly South African novel, with its emphasis on trauma and surreal humour. The South African quality which informs the fractured narrative will be detectable to those who know the country and its contradictions well, but for those who don't, I suspect, OK, Mr Field will seem rather European in its odd self-possession and exactness.

Only slightly less odd is the bombastic Problems (Tramp Press, 12.99 [pounds sterling]) by Jade Sharma, another first novel but this time about a young, anorexic heroin addict. The New York Times has said of its narrator that she is 'as horrible, and as fully human, as men in literature have always been allowed to be', which doesn't seem quite right to me. Maya is certainly problematic, not least in her appetite for self-laceration, but I found her grubby, angry young woman narrative rather appealing and not really horrible at all. Certain lines, not least when she says of a man: 'I wanted to be his personal come dumpster', will make most readers wince, but her overall outlook doesn't seem very different to me from that of many adult woman in the western world. I can't think of any woman I know over the age of 30 who couldn't relate to Maya's reflection, 'Behind every crazy woman is a man sitting very quietly, saying "What? I'm not doing anything."'

This is also a rather tender novel in places, without being sentimental, and Sharma has managed to achieve a consistency of voice that has ultimately eluded writers covering similar terrain such as Sheila Heti or Melissa Broder, the latter the author of The Pisces, a novel in which a disaffected and self-destructive woman has a relationship with a merman. Crucially, Sharma also somehow made me care about what happened to her heroine, which is not the only way to ensure a reader keeps reading but it is certainly a very effective one.

Laurie Canciani has written about another young woman in a perilous position in her first novel, The Insomnia Museum. Anna is 17 and lives in a flat with her father, who is a hoarder. Anna cannot remember having ever left the flat. Canciani has written rather movingly about her own experience of agoraphobia before, and the claustrophobia of Anna's situation, isolated inside the flat with her father, is powerfully evoked. There is also a great deal of humour in Anna's distorted view of the outside world. Observing neighbours behaving prosaically, shooing away pets or getting into cars with coffee cups, she anticipates great drama: 'She watched them and waited for some kind of murder.' Canciani nonetheless has a slightly irritating tic of interrupting a sentence with a full stop, as here: 'The dust came down like that painful snow from the.' If used sparingly, this could be quite powerful but it becomes mannered and, in the end, it only acts to obfuscate the writer's meaning. Dissociating language from meaning is a risky business and requires a clarity of purpose that I didn't feel The Insomnia Museum possessed.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Peake-Tomkinson, Alex. "First Novels." Spectator, 14 July 2018, p. 32. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A549485559/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7167b552. Accessed 18 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A549485559

QUOTE:
Kilalea sketches this sad, slightly surreal situation without mawkishness or morbidity. "OK, Mr Field" introduces a striking new voice in fiction.

Together, once; South African fiction
The Economist. 427.9096 (June 16, 2018): p73(US).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
http://store.eiu.com/
Full Text:
WHEN Max Field, a failing British concert pianist, breaks his wrist in a train accident, he tries out a new life. He buys a replica Le Corbusier house in Cape Town that was, according to the estranged wife of its architect, intended only as a modernist holiday home. After Max moves there with his wife Mim, his life seems to deteriorate further. Out of this simple premise emerges a dazzling debut novel.

Katharine Kilalea is a poet who grew up in South Africa and has worked in an architecture practice. All these experiences inform "OK, Mr Field", whether through her luminous use of language, her descriptions of Cape Town or her understanding of how space can be constricting and expansive, vertiginous and comforting, at the same time. Details are observed intimately, like pin-pricks. The muscles around the eyes of Hannah Kallenbach, the architect's wife, contract "very slightly as though focusing on something very small or squinting against the sun".

Max narrates the book. His voice is detached and wry, not unlike a character from a story by Samuel Beckett. Events seem to just happen to him; he frequently seems absurd. "I didn't miss her in the way you're meant to miss someone you love," he thinks after Mim leaves him, before realising how much her absence has affected him. Soon he finds himself talking more and more to an imaginary version of Hannah, and then driving to her house each night to spy on the real woman.

As with much of Beckett's writing, "OK, Mr Field" is often bleakly comic. But at moments it is also tender (without being sentimental), depicting the strange dream-like inner life of someone who is terribly lonely. Its descriptions of piano-playing--even with a damaged wrist--are superb:

That night, as I sat at the piano, the piece wasn't just a retelling of the story of Chopin and his situation (like mine, only more lonely), it was something that was happening, there on the piano, a relationship unfolding between two hands which were like two characters, one expressive, the other inexcitable, who'd been together once but were now detached.

This sense of something being separated from what made it whole runs through the novel. Ms Kilalea sketches this sad, slightly surreal situation without mawkishness or morbidity. "OK, Mr Field" introduces a striking new voice in fiction.

OK, Mr Field.

By Katharine Kilalea.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Together, once; South African fiction." The Economist, 16 June 2018, p. 73(US). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542667284/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fd2cfdf0. Accessed 18 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A542667284

QUOTE:
In
her first novel, distinguished poet Kilalea describes
Mr. Field’s emotions in a devastatingly
evocative fashion.

Driscoll, Brendan. Booklist. 6/1/2018, Vol. 114 Issue 19/20, p34-35. 2p.
OK, M r. Field.
By K a tharin e Kilalea.
July 2 0 1 8 . 192p. Crown/Tim Duggan, $25
(9 7 8 0 5 2 5 5 7 3 6 3 0 ).
Modernist architecture and the properties
of water inform this poetic tale about a
concert pianist who, following the abrupt
end of his career and his marriage, becomes
increasingly disoriented by his surroundings.
His wrist mangled in a train crash, Mr. Field
impulse-spends his settlement money on the
House for the Study of Water, a Le Corbusier-inspired
curiosity perched high above a
rugged coast near Cape Town. The house implies
“the victory of architecture over nature,”
but its views of the sea are constrained by
narrow horizontal windows, and its “stark geometry”
of glass and concrete seems intended
to confound those who, like our protagonist,
tend to linger in moments of reverie. Mr.
Field fixates on leaks in the ceiling, the everchanging
ocean, and the musical clamor of a
nearby construction site while indulging in
a pretend conversation with Hannah Kallenbach,
the estranged wife of the building’s
designer. Although his obsessions create a
gentle forward momentum, the focus is on
his fragile, impressionistic state of mind. In
her first novel, distinguished poet Kilalea describes
Mr. Field’s emotions in a devastatingly
evocative fashion. —Brendan Driscoll

Publishers Weekly

By: SEIDEL, MATT. Publishers Weekly. 7/2/2018, Vol. 265 Issue 27, p37-42. 6p. 16 Color Photographs, 4 Black and White Photographs.

KATHARINE KILALEA
Narrative architecture

Discussing the Villa Savoye, the 1929 house designed by Le Corbusier that features in her debut novel, OK, Mr. Field (Crown/Duggan, July), Katharine Kilalea says that the modernist architect "envisioned a specific circuit through the house that mirrors a traditional narrative arc, leading up to a point of clarity: a window that gave this fantastic view of the landscape." In front of the window, however, is a bench facing in the opposite direction.

"The idea that your climactic view is something you would turn away from felt truer to life than the idea that you would get to the top and everything would be just as you hoped," says Kilalea, who is 36.

In OK, Mr. Field, Kilalea drew on this idea of a frustrated narrative arc in telling the story of a London pianist who, after an injury forces him to put his career on hold, moves into a replica of the Villa Savoye in Cape Town, South Africa. Nothing much happens, fascinatingly. "His relationship to the house and the severing of all ties to his former life invite the reader into a vacuum that can be fully inhabited and fully experienced," says Anna Webber, her U.K. agent. Kilalea says she first experimented with an architecturethemed work in poetic form before discovering that "poetry had absolutely no use for the idea." She turned to prose, and the project slowly took shape. "I envy people who can dash brilliant things off," she notes. "The first chapter was a year in the making, something absolutely ridiculous."

Kilalea, who grew up in Cape Town before moving to the U.K. to study creative writing at the University of East Anglia, points to a bulky classic as inspiration for her crystalline novel: "A lot of what I was thinking about when writing this book was Hans Castorp and the lethargy of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain."

Will Wolfslau, Kilalea's editor, compares the novel to more recent works like Dept. of Speculation and The Vegetarian "in that the protagonist slips into a state that goes beyond depression or ennui and becomes an almost metaphysical disorder."

WRITERS TO WATCH. By: SEIDEL, MATT, Publishers Weekly, 00000019, 7/2/2018, Vol. 265, Issue 27
By: SEIDEL, MATT. Publishers Weekly. 7/2/2018, Vol. 265 Issue 27, p37-42. 6p. 16 Color Photographs, 4 Black and White Photographs.

"Kilalea, Katharine: OK, MR. FIELD." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A543009013/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d0cc10e6. Accessed 18 Sept. 2018. "OK, Mr. Field." Publishers Weekly, 21 May 2018, p. 40. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541012568/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=839a581e. Accessed 18 Sept. 2018. Peake-Tomkinson, Alex. "First Novels." Spectator, 14 July 2018, p. 32. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A549485559/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7167b552. Accessed 18 Sept. 2018. "Together, once; South African fiction." The Economist, 16 June 2018, p. 73(US). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542667284/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fd2cfdf0. Accessed 18 Sept. 2018. WRITERS TO WATCH. By: SEIDEL, MATT, Publishers Weekly, 00000019, 7/2/2018, Vol. 265, Issue 27 By: SEIDEL, MATT. Publishers Weekly. 7/2/2018, Vol. 265 Issue 27, p37-42. 6p. 16 Color Photographs, 4 Black and White Photographs. Driscoll, Brendan. Booklist. 6/1/2018, Vol. 114 Issue 19/20, p34-35. 2p. OK, M r. Field. By K a tharin e Kilalea.

• The Arts Desk
  https://theartsdesk.com/books/katharine-kilalea-ok-mr-field-review-architecture-and-alienation-cape-town-coast
  Word count: 1326

  Katharine Kilalea: OK, Mr Field review - architecture and alienation on the Cape Town coast
  An uncannily memorable South African debut turns abstract ideas into concrete art
  by Boyd TonkinSunday, 24 June 2018 ShareFacebookTwitterEmail
  The shape of thought: Katharine Kilalea
  Elena Heatherwick
  Modern novels with an architectural theme have, to say the least, a mixed pedigree. At their finest, as in Thomas Bernhard’s Correction, the fluidity and ambiguity of prose fiction mitigates, even undermines, the obsessive planner’s or designer’s quest for a perfect construction. On the other hand, Ayn Rand’s all-too-influential The Fountainhead – loopy Bible of the libertarian right – shows that novelists too can fall for the tattered myth of the heroic, iron-willed master-builder.

  The first novel by a South African poet, OK, Mr Field shapes its architectural components into a haunting and original design. Katharine Kilalea smartly avoids the usual paradigm of hubris-and-nemesis – perhaps as ancient as the Tower of Babel – that clings to stories of proud buildings and those who create or inhabit them. Max Field, her narrator, is not an architect but a lonely, disappointed concert pianist, his career ended by a Tube accident that broke his wrist. Even in his recital days, however, the chilly Field has kept his distance from the passions of his music. After a performance of Chopin’s “Raindrop” prelude, which becomes a leitmotif of the novel, a listener notices the “absence of feeling” in Field’s “splintered, wooden” rendition. How do we inhabit our own emotions, how do we inhabit our living space, and how do these inner and outer worlds connect – or fail to connect? Although lucidly, indeed beautifully, written, Kilalea’s novel poses question that belong to philosophy – and poetry – as much as architecture itself.

  On impulse, after he receives compensation for his injury, Field buys a house on the coast near Cape Town. It is an exact facsimile of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, the austere concrete house on stilts outside Paris that, soon after its construction in the late 1920s, became a global icon of the Modernist “international style”. Field falls for the “clean lines and pure geometry” of its Cape Town twin. He moves in with his wife Mim to pursue – as he hopes – a suitably clarified and simplified life in it.

  Inevitably, his plans for a purified existence, with mountain behind and ocean in front, “stretching in every direction”, swiftly go awry. The unfathomable Mim soon departs. What has become of her? A builder named Touw plans a grandiose, Utopian housing project on the hillside behind. So the disruptive din of construction work thuds through Field’s vacant days. Almost a hermit, his solitude punctuated by aimless drives around the Cape Peninsula, Field drifts into an obsession with the widow of his house’s architect, Hannah Kallenbach. He becomes a sort of stalker, peering through her windows from the garden of her suburban home. The seasons pass. The rain hammers relentlessly, destructively down on this transplanted box of abstract European idealism – and how strange to read these passages now, as Cape Town with its depleted dams thirstily craves every winter drop after its long drought. Mist – as it often does around that city – rolls in ominously from the ocean, “hanging over the world like a new law”. Field’s isolation in this uprooted Modernist “machine for living” pushes him towards some kind of crisis or collapse, as his “Days opened up with nothing inside them”.

  Climate and setting degrade this meticulously engineered space, which aims to give shape and order to existence. Touw’s intrusive grand design next door shatters the dream of tranquil self-sufficiency. The mood of erosion and fragmentation seeps into Field’s mind. His alienation, and dislocation, deepens. Increasingly, he feels that “Things are on the cusp of not being themselves”, and that “the very glue which held the objects of the world together” is “growing old and weak”. When he tries to play his battered old Bechstein (Chopin’s “Raindrop”, of course), his hands act like “two characters, one expressive, the other unexcitable, who’d been together once but were now detached”. His fixation with Hannah lends a purpose to his numbed routines, but also carries risk.

  A stranger to himself (and, needless to say, a far-from-reliable narrator), Field finds that signs, words, objects and – above all – spaces lose their borders, edges and identities. The homage to Le Corbusier in which he dwells now fosters not bracing clarity, but utter perplexity. Caught in its “rhythmic geometries”, he swoons into vertigo. “As in a cubist painting”, these disorienting perspectives “forced me to occupy several points of view at once”. We sense the nearness of some shattering event that will break Field’s frame, and smash his walls. Could the horrible sight of a horse maimed in a road accident, which dies “with the look of creature who is not alone but has something to think about”, trigger the catastrophe?

  As it surveys the porous, shifting boundaries between mind and world, the dialogue between our senses and our spaces, OK, Mr Field distils into vivid image and impression the sort of ideas that seldom find a place in mainstream fiction. Kilalea’s approach reminded me not only of the philosophy of Heidegger but Bachelard’s great exploration of the house as the frame for consciousness, The Poetics of Space. But her sensuous, sculpted prose keeps her narrative lean and spare, though always enigmatic.

  The novel also sets up a tantalising relationship to its own geographical location. On one level, it conforms closely to the topography of the False Bay seaside settlements around Kalk Bay and St James, from the ageing-hippy art shops and boisterous summer bars to Kalky’s fish-and-chip restaurant, even the pushy Cape Fur seals that cadge for fish along the dock. On another, Kilalea converts this stretch of coast between Muizenberg and Fish Hoek, and the mountains that rise behind it, into a pure landscape of imagination. The novel’s own routes and distances do not always match any map. The experience of place can be as subjective, as mutable, as the shifting sea itself. Moreover, the social context of Cape Town nearly – but not completely – vanishes. Ostensibly, differences of race and culture play no role here (the real Kalk Bay is a “Coloured” fishing community long colonised by white professionals).

  And yet… my sense is that, as in the more gnomic novels of JM Coetzee, South African realities do silently underpin this narrative. From the endless competition for land and the policing of private property to the fear of break-ins (or “home invasions”) and the sudden proximity of violence, the backdrop to Field’s angular castle on the coast does – however obliquely – belong to a historical as well as an imaginary terrain. I detected the magnetic pull of Coetzee, too, in the somewhat anticlimactic dénouement. Animals and their interaction with humans – that abiding Coetzee theme – come to the fore as Field befriends a stray dog; a “simple” creature, he thinks, that “wishes to be loved only”. This ending, with its echoes of Disgrace, feels abrupt. Still, it hardly detracts from the uncanny power of this memorable, even mesmerising, debut.

  OK, Mr Field by Katharine Kilalea (Faber & Faber, £12.99)
  Boyd Tonkin's 100 Best Novels in Translation is published by Galileo
  Read more book reviews at theartsdesk
  As in the more gnomic novels of JM Coetzee, South African realities silently underpin this narrative
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• Open Letters Review
  https://openlettersreview.com/
  Word count: 858

  QUOTE:

  This is a deeply meditative novel whose curious tone teases out tantalizing questions about how we position ourselves in the world and about the gap between our inner and outer realities. The story knowingly resists any form of logical plot or certain conclusions.
  OK, Mr. Field by Katharine Kilalea
  July 03, 2018 Eric Karl Anderson
  OK, Mr. Field
  by Katharine Kilalea
  Faber and Faber 2018 (UK)
  Tim Duggan Books 2018 (USA)
  OK, Mr. Field.jpg
  It’s risky when poets become novelists. When a writer transitions from focusing on language and metre crafted into carefully honed short pieces to a sustained storyline centred on characters and plot, there’s a danger that the author’s ideas won’t show as robustly. Of course, there are plenty of poets who successfully wrote in both forms (such as Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath or Ben Lerner) and many books utilize elements of each form to gloriously withstand categorization (like Virginia Woolf’s The Waves).

  Katharine Kilalea is a South African writer who moved to the UK where her poetry collection One Eye’d Leigh was nominated for multiple literary awards. OK, Mr. Field is her debut novel which follows the beleaguered existence of its eponymous hero after a train accident that leaves him incapable of carrying on his career as a concert pianist. In some ways, this feels exactly like the sort of novel a poet would write: it’s meandering, image-focused and its characters remain vague outlines. But in other ways it’s crafted more like a philosophical or surrealist novel that seeks to defy metaphor and psychologically describes the difficult feelings of the solitary protagonist.

  Mr. Field was a renowned European musician, but after his debilitating accident he decides to uproot himself and his wife Mim to Cape Town where they reside in a replica of Le Corbusier’s ‘Villa Savoye’, set on the coastline. The long horizontal windows and free floor plan allow views of the sea. But Mim disappears fairly quickly leaving behind notebooks filled with trite descriptions comparing the ocean to the rhythms of human existence. Rather than seek out what has become of his wife, Mr. Field sinks into a contemplative, directionless and lonely state, imagining the voices of birds or a dog or a widow named Hannah Kallenbach.

  He obsessively lingers outside Hannah’s window preferring a muted form of observation rather than actually interacting with her. The very logic and rhythms of his existence are modulated by the modernist structure he resides within and the construction of a tower near his own property. This is no doubt highly influenced by the many years the author has spent working in an architecture practice and her current pursuit of a PhD focused on the experience of space in poetry. It allows for many interpretations and meanings as Mr. Field is caught in an ambiguous state between fogginess and clarity, dreams and reality, life and death. Stripped of his passion he has become a stranger to himself and lacks a motivation in his life. He seems to want all the comforts of a home and a relationship but without engaging with real people. In this limbo-state he might be “a part of the unhappiness that’s come apart from the total mass of unhappiness” but outwardly he is essentially fine or at least “OK”.

  Some of the most effective parts of the novel are the descriptions of Mr. Field’s new relationship to music. His old piano - which had always inspired him in the past - becomes an object of resentment. He was never enthusiastic about playing Chopin’s famous Prelude or “Raindrop” piece which he feels verges on sentimentality. But now, with his injured hand, when he tries to practice this piece of music again it’s like his hands work as if they are unknown to each other:

  “the way my hands moved in relation to each other. They seemed to understand something about the piece that I had never understood myself. Before, they had been a pair, operating together, but now they were independent.”

  And the repeated A-flat note that is meant to simulate the steady sound of raindrops becomes a backdrop to Mr. Field’s story just like the waves outside his windows. They are a reminder of the dull persistence of time amidst personal loss and riotous emotions. Mr. Field, however, seems to feel curiously resistant to their being interpreted as such. It’s this tension: the desire to exist without residing within any larger symbolic meaning which makes the story of this novel so disarmingly innovative as well as frustrating in how it eludes meaning.

  This is a deeply meditative novel whose curious tone teases out tantalizing questions about how we position ourselves in the world and about the gap between our inner and outer realities. The story knowingly resists any form of logical plot or certain conclusions. It’s a book that readers will most probably find either richly engaging or frustratingly tedious.

• Guardian Online
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/19/ok-mr-field-katharine-kilalea-review
  Word count: 1063

  QUOTE:
  Both in its power to unsettle and its quest to establish a relationship to character that isn’t based on understanding, this is a strikingly original piece of writing.

  OK, Mr Field by Katharine Kilalea review – strikingly original debut
  There’s a void where his personality should be and he turns into a stalker – but somehow the narrator of this strange tale exerts a powerful grip on the reader

  Lara Feigel

  Thu 19 Jul 2018 04.00 EDT

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  Le Corbusier Villa Savoye France
  Austere structure … Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye in France. Photograph: Alamy
  Towards the end of OK, Mr Field, the narrator realises, “with a sudden vertiginous knowledge”, that at the centre of his being is not, as he’s always feared, “some solid alien presence – like a tumour deep inside”, but a hole. His is a body “with a space in it, a space in which things could be put”.

  This is the central image in Katharine Kilalea’s first novel. Originally from South Africa, Kilalea has made her name in the UK as a poet: her Costa-shortlisted first collection, One Eye’d Leigh, established her as a meticulous observer of people, places and things. The “I” of those poems was a version of Kilalea but had an anonymity unusual in the lyric poem, and was more interested in classification than introspection. In OK, Mr Field, the author writes in the voice of a middle-aged man, a concert pianist who moves, on a whim, from London to a replica of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye on Cape Town’s coast, after seeing a photograph of it in a newspaper.

  It’s unusual, right now, for a first novel narrated in the first person to be so resolutely unautobiographical, especially when it’s by a debut female novelist flouting the canons of identity that would normally define her. This emptying of self becomes itself the subject of scrutiny: what happens when the novel takes as its central character someone with a hole where selfhood is usually found – someone who doesn’t know himself and fears there may be no one to know?

  There are other recent novels that offer a narrator-protagonist characterised by absence or flatness. Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy springs to mind, though her heroine Faye is overtly autobiographical, and both the lives that she observes and the events that happen to her are more dramatic than those in Kilalea’s book. Kilalea’s structure is more austere, like the house where Mr Field chooses to live, in which he seeks the definite outlines lacking in his life.

  The house becomes an obvious but also complicated symbol for what is going on in the novel. Its small, narrow windows offer peculiar cut-off views of the sea. For Field’s wife Mim, who disappears inexplicably halfway through the book, this results in a seasick feeling, as though she’s living on a raft. Field is more ambivalent, finding that the “sense of something withheld” is “not entirely unpleasant”.

  The question of pleasure – should we expect it in our buildings and our books? – is one that we seem encouraged to interrogate here. Certainly there are pleasures offered by this teasing narrative, which come to us because of rather than in spite of their withholding. The most obvious lie in the small, precise moments of observation, reminiscent of Kilalea’s poems. Here is Field on Mim’s walk, for example: “There was something strange about the way she moved, chest first and legs trailing behind as if she wasn’t in control of herself but being sucked forward into a vacuum that had opened up in the air in front of her.” There is a pleasure too in the pace, which is perfectly timed despite the lack of action.

  In its power to unsettle, this is a strikingly original piece of writing
  The plot comes to focus on Field’s obsession with Hannah Kallenbach, the widow of the house’s architect, whom he encounters briefly when he first buys it. The obsession begins with his hearing her as a voice inside his head, alternately reprimanding him for his silliness and making the same kinds of observations he does (“when you kiss someone platonically, said Hannah Kallenbach, you use the outside of your lips, and when you love them sexually you use the inside”). The pace picks up when he starts stalking her, which is particularly alarming to the reader because it’s unclear whether Field knows why he’s doing it, or even that he’s doing it at all.

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  Just when I was tiring of the book’s slowness, it became almost thriller-like – a remarkable achievement, given that the action is still all occurring inside the head of so flattened a character. The South African setting helps. Field’s paranoid fantasies are frightening because this is Cape Town, where armed robbery is a frequent occurrence, and so when he hears “the sound of an intruder’s footsteps dragging their way along the corridor towards me” there’s a rational basis to his fears. We don’t know him well enough – he doesn’t know himself well enough – to know if he’s dangerous when he becomes an intruder himself.

  This is as odd as it sounds, and there’s a danger that Field becomes a kind of laboratory specimen. Sometimes I wondered if my whole experience of reading the novel was driven more by curiosity and aesthetic pleasure than because I really cared about the character or was inhabiting his world. But it’s a while since a book has produced such uncertainty in me. Both in its power to unsettle and its quest to establish a relationship to character that isn’t based on understanding, this is a strikingly original piece of writing.

  • Lara Feigel is the author of Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing (Bloomsbury). OK, Mr Field is published by Faber. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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