Metamorphoses and Transformations: a reading list by Ben Tufnell
By Little, Brown Book Group
Metamorphoses and Transformations: a reading list by Ben Tufnell
By Little, Brown Book Group
The North Shore begins with a storm which leaves something very strange behind in its wake. At the heart of the book is a metamorphosis, an irrational, incredible, impossible transformation which leaves the narrator questioning the very nature of reality, the unknowable power of nature, and the unreliability of memory.
So here are ten books that spotlight ideas of transformation. Of course, change powers all narrative. It is the promise of change that keeps us reading. But these are stories that speak of physical transformation, woman into plant, man into beast. Sadly, that means there’s no room for the emotional or mental metamorphoses of a book such as Lisa Robertson’s extraordinary The Baudelaire Fractal (in which a young poet awakes one day to the certain knowledge that she has written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire). Do check that one out too.
Ben Tufnell, author of The North Shore
The Metamorphoses
Ovid
£16.99 £16.14Of course, we have to begin with Ovid who writes, in the opening lines of his poem, ‘I want to speak of bodies changed into new forms’. Metamorphosis is a ‘history’ of the world from the creation to the time of Julius Caesar, but this epic and episodic poem is also a mind-boggling compendium of mad myths and tall tales. One reads with a growing sense of recognition for Western culture is filled with the echoes of Ovid’s tales. We’ve been telling and retelling versions of these stories for thousands of years but this is the motherlode.
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror
Robert Louis Stevenson
£6.99 £6.64Stevenson’s account of a scientist who discovers a way to separate the duality of human nature is one of the great modern Gothic stories: modern in that science, not magic or divine intervention, is the engine of metamorphosis; Gothic in that Dr Jekyll’s experiment embodies an ageless fear, that we all contain the possibility for both good and evil. The shifting, twitching physicality of Jekyll/Hyde remains genuinely disturbing.
Metamorphosis and Other Stories
Franz Kafka
£8.99 £8.54What has always struck me as so extraordinary about Kafka’s claustrophobic story, is not the horrific indifference of Gregor Samsa’s family to his awful predicament, but the fact that we never learn why the metamorphosis has occurred. Why does he wake up one day as a monstrous insect? It is a metaphor, of course, but traditionally the transformation occurs as either punishment or reward. Here there is no motive, no reason, only tragedy.
The Heart Of A Dog
Mikhail Bulgakov
£8.99 £8.54Bulgakov’s brilliant satire, in which a scientist in the Soviet Union transplants a human pituitary gland and testicles into a stray dog, with increasingly bizarre metamorphic consequences, is both hilarious and terrifying. This was my first Bulgakov and it is a perfect appetiser to the immense feast that is his surreal masterpiece, The Master and Margerita.
Orlando (Vintage Classics Woolf Series)
Virginia Woolf
£8.99 £8.54The weirdest of Woolf’s novels is a playful ‘biography’ of an Elizabethan nobleman who lives for 300 years and at one point goes to sleep for a week and wakes up a woman. As with poor Gregor Samsa, we never know why. Unlike Gregor’s, Orlando’s transformation is a kind of blessing.
Bestiary: The Selected Stories of Julio Cortazar
Julio Cortazar
£10.99 £10.44Short stories seem ideally suited to tales of transformation (think of Horacio Qiuroga’s ‘Juan Darien’, the strange stories gathered in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, or Sarah Hall’s extraordinary ‘Mrs Fox’). Julio Cortazar was one of the great short story writers of the twentieth century and ‘Axolotl’, a tale of man obsessed by the axolotls in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, is one of his strangest stories. What happens is perhaps not a transformation per se, perhaps more of a transference, and it continues to haunt me.
The Owl Service
Alan Garner
£7.99 £7.59Garner was my favourite writer as a teenager and The Owl Service was my favourite of his books. I reread it recently and it still has a freaky power. Garner writes of time loops and the power of place. He evokes the Welsh myth of Blodeuwedd – a woman made from flowers and transformed into an owl - using three teenagers thrown together one summer in a remote Welsh valley. The ending is deeply ambiguous and it’s not actually clear whether the heralded metamorphosis has occurred or not. Indeed, I’m still not sure what happened. And I feel that’s a good thing.
The Vegetarian: Winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature
Han (Y) Kang
£9.99 £9.49This powerful story seems at first to be about the ways in which a woman’s decision to become vegetarian upsets the equilibrium of her family, but by the end we are in more abstract territory. Yeong-hye’s endeavour, her attempted metamorphosis, is to relinquich the inherent violence of human existence and become more like a plant.
Annihilation
Jeff VanderMeer
£9.99 £9.49If you’ve seen the film but not read the book, then you really need to read the book. It’s an astonishing achievement and one of the strangest things I’ve ever read. Visiting Area X - a landscape of metamorphosis - for the first time is like experiencing the world gently shifting on its axis, becoming weirder and even more unknowable. Wonderful.
Mischief Acts: 'Joyous' THE TIMES, Best summer reads 2022
Zoe Gilbert
£9.99 £9.49A polyphonic account of the mythical English figure of Herne the Hunter, tracking him at various points in time through the Great North Wood and its remaining traces in and around Sydenham and Dulwich in South London. Herne is a shapeshifter. We never witness his transformations but we see him reappearing through history in different guises. Herne’s witchy power diminishes as industrialisation and technology grow more dominant, but Gilbert ends with the heady suggestion that the old myths are rising again, regaining their power, and that Herne will return. At a time of growing ecological crisis, it’s a powerful idea. We need our myths, our Green Men, our old gods and forest spirits, more than ever.
The North Shore by Ben Tufnell is out now in hardback. A story of transformation and a coming-of-age tale. It speaks of the mysteries that lie between the land and the water and the ways in which we use myths and folklore to understand the strangeness of the world.