Six Degrees of Separation is a meme hosted by Kate over at Books Are My Favourite and Best. It works like this: each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six others to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the titles on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.
This month we’re starting with Hernan Diaz’s 2022 Booker Prize longlisted Trust, a very clever book which portrays several versions of a marriage. I loved it.
It’s a small leap to Domenico Starnone’s Trust which also offers different versions of a relationship
Starnone’s novel was translated by Jhumpa Lahiri who translated her own novel, Whereabouts, originally written in Italian, into English.
Like Lahiri, Danish author Jens Christian Grøndahl translated his novel, Often I am Happy, into English. It’s about enduring female friendship.
One of my favourite novels about friendship, Linda Olsson’s Astrid and Veronika is about two women living in the Swedish countryside.
Neither is another book I loved, Howard Norman’s The Bird Artist, set in Newfoundland
Leading me to Eva Meijer’s Bird Cottage, based on the life of Len Howard, an eccentric birdwatcher whose books were wildly popular in the twentieth century.
This month’s Six Degrees has taken me from a clever, many layered novel about truth and morality to one based on the life of a women who devoted herself to observing birds. Part of the fun of this meme is comparing the very different routes other bloggers take from each month’s starting point. If you’re interested, you can follow it on Twitter with the hashtag #6Degrees, check out the links over at Kate’s blog or perhaps even join in.
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