Kick the Latch
Kathryn Scanlan
Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch vividly captures the arc of one woman’s life at the racetrack—the flat land and ramshackle backstretch; the bad feelings and friction; the winner’s circle and the racetrack bar; the fancy suits and fancy boots; and the “particular language” of “grooms, jockeys, trainers, racing secretaries, stewards, pony people, hotwalkers, everybody”—with economy and integrity. Based on transcribed interviews with Sonia, a horse trainer, the novel investigates form and authenticity in a feat of synthesis reminiscent of Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony. As Scanlan puts it, “I wanted to preserve—amplify, exaggerate—Sonia’s idiosyncratic speech, her bluntness, her flair as a storyteller. more
144 pages, Paperback
First published
4.14
Rating
2001
Ratings
330
Reviews
Kathryn Scanlan
10 books 97 followers
Kathryn Scanlan's work has appeared in NOON, Fence, Granta, and Egress. Her debut collection of stories, The Dominant Animal, is forthcoming from FSG Originals in 2020. She lives in Los Angeles.Community reviews
Kathryn Scanlan interviewed a horse-racing trainer and then used those interviews to craft this extraordinary hybrid of fiction and non-fiction. Providing a gripping insight into the often brutal world of jockeys, trainers, and racing, this is totally captivating. It's a pithy series of events and observations -- a supercut of a life rather than a plot-driven novel -- but still a total page turner with a narrative voice that oozes personality. A quick read because I simply couldn't put it down. more
help me find more books like this. i don't have any opinions or insights about the author or the subject. this is like the cure for autofiction. blank perfect empathy, but also with some filigrees of made up shit to make it double-perfect. seriously if you know about other books that are this short this good give them to me immediately. more
I am really behind with my reviews, so I will try to get a few short ones out of the way. Though it is almost always when I think that it is going to be the short one, I end up writing a memoir:-) Anyway. I've first met Kathryn Scanlan's work when I've picked up Aug 9 - Fog. I did not know anything about the book. But Aug 9 is my birthday. more
A quietly amazing novel that takes one small, niche story and makes it appear to be about everything there is. This is the life of Sonia, a young girl from Iowa, who grows up to become a racehorse trainer. From this one person and her quiet, normal but dramatic existence, all life seems to bloom. As Sonia works her way up from apprentice to fully fledged trainer, her story overflows with the comradeship of the track community and love for her horses, and is often blighted by violent men. Through it all she maintains a stoic dignity, an admirable matter-of-factness about what life throws her way. more
Daunt books has the following accolades listed for this slim book - SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2023/2024SHORTLISTED FOR THE WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK AWARD 2023A DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEARA TIMES BOOK OF THE YEARA NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEARA NEW YORKER BOOK OF THE YEARAnd then I saw it popping up on some trusty readers recent reads - so off I popped to collect it from the library. I am not going to lie, initially I was - what’s all the fuss . It’s very “horsey” and this put me off for a time but hang in there and you realise the author has captured an entire life in 144 pages. I have yet to puzzle out the fact vs fiction distinctions, I believe it’s based of a conversation with a real horse trainer . But it’s fiction . more
This is a novel based on interviews the author did with Sonia, a midwestern woman in her 60s who worked with horses most of her life, primarily at race tracks as a trainer. Short vignettes, in Sonia's very direct, almost entirely unsentimental voice (except maybe about Rowdy, her first horse, about whom the sentiment is entirely justified), that read as if they were oral history but which clearly involve authorial license since Scanlan describes it as a work of fiction. Some of it is funny and some of it is terrible, but it's all set out with just the right balance of economy and detail. I'll note that the terrible fates of some of the horses was hard to take, but I was still so happy to have read it. It's written so effectively and engagingly, conveying big life experiences, both the shared and the lonely. more
short, sharp, vivid. unsentimental, yet filled with compassion. this is a special book. i should have done my research before diving in, because my opinion of the book shifted when i learned that it's a fictionalized oral history. it's based on transcriptions of interviews scanlan conducted with a real horse trainer named sonia. more
Kick the Latch feels like trading stories over beers at a dive bar with the tough old bitch I’ve always wanted to be. Despite my mother’s best efforts I never was a horse girl, but this book made me catch a little fomo for life on the backstretch. more
One hundred and twenty brief pages of vignettes from the life of a female horse trainer in the late twentieth century. And many of these pages are half-pages. There’s a lot of white space, it’s extremely pared down. She grows up poor-ish in the country, but she loves horses. Her parents work hard to get her riding lessons, then eventually a horse, and from there, when she graduates, she goes to work at a racetrack. more
Kathryn Scanlan is a master of distilling found truths into compelling fictions. In her first novel, Aug 9 – Fog, she artfully conjures a singular portrait of life-sized ordinariness by rearranging fragments from a diary, once belonging to an eighty-six-year-old woman, that she found in an estate sale in rural Illinois. In The Dominant Animal, a collection of forty haunting pieces of flash fiction, she strips our experience of being human down to its essential eeriness and basest cruelties. Now, with Kick the Latch—her second novel and likely most propulsive work to date—Scanlan once again brings to light the touching strangeness of everyday mundanity, offering herself up as the medium for a midwestern woman named Sonia whose real-life experiences as a horse trainer are here presented as a fictionalized account of brutality, camaraderie, toil, and trouble on the racetracks. Written in short, vignette-length chapters, Kick the Latch follows Sonia from the setback of her birth in 1962, when she came into the world with a dislocated hip and a doctor’s prescription for a lifelong impairment—”turned out I could walk”—into the contentment of a middle age that follows only a fulfilled, well-loved youth. more
Sparse superb prose and a great story. And that’s coming from someone who doesn’t even likes horses that much 😊. more
A PARTICULAR LANGUAGEWhen I tell Jerry stories about the racetrack he doesn't say much. It's hard for people who haven't been there to understand. There's a particular language you pick up on the track. I'd come home for the holidays and try to talk to my family, but nothing I said made sense to them. What. more
A brief, remarkable account of one woman’s life working with horses. It’s billed as fiction, but it’s based on a series of interviews conducted by the author with just such a woman, and nothing could seem more authentic. Made up of many brief chapters, most just a single page (or less) long, the effect is like a series of lightning flashes, each shedding vivid bursts of light that accumulate to build a picture of a life. And what a hard life, full of financial hardship, rootlessness, and high risk of injury. And yet it’s clear that Sonia, the horsewoman, loves it and finds it rewarding in the ways that matter to her. more
An easy 5 stars. Kathryn Scanlan is a genius. It seems odd to have to little to say about a book that was so good, but sometimes the work speaks for itself. . more
Straight to one of my favourites of all time, so so perfect. more
Scanlan's writing has that extraordinary skill to it that makes it such a pleasure to read, the ability to extract a beguiling strangeness from the banal. This is a fictionalised portrait of a woman's career in horse-racing in the American Midwest, based on a series of interviews the author did with an actual person. It is told in fleeting installments, from half a page to three or four pages, that trace its subject, known only as Sonia, chronologically throughout her lifetime. This is a fine example of the sort of novel that forms an ordinary life into great art, but the succinct style Scanlan uses I have never come across before, except perhaps in poetry. Sentences come across as being effective and competent. more
Kick The Latch is gebaseerd op de memoires van Sonia, een paardentrainer uit Iowa. In korte hoofdstukken van nooit meer dan 3 pagina’s en soms maar één zin, lees je hoe Sonia van race naar race reist, zich te pletter werkt en meer dan eens het slachtoffer wordt van geweld. Een belangrijk thema is de band die we hebben met dieren en onze eigen dierlijke aard die maar al te vaak naar boven komt. Ik ben een paardenmeisje, dus schrijf over paarden en ik ben verkocht. Maar Kick the Latch degouteerde me. more
Really enjoyed this brief portrait of a woman who spent her years training horses. Kathryn Scanlan based Sonia’s narrative off of a series of interviews she had with the trainer over several years. The prose is so stripped back and understated it almost feels transcribed in its bareness. Sonia has lived a whirlwind of a life cleaning shit out of the stables and dealing with drunk jockeys, terrible convicts and petty owners. Yet she isn’t hardened by this life, she describes the men with such empathy and poignancy that endears you to her and the decisions she made to be around horse racing. more
I feel like I want to start this review by saying I like Kathryn Scanlan a lot. I like her vibe, I like her style and I like her ideas and the things she chooses to write about. Yet somehow, I don’t always love her books as I’m reading them as much as all that. It’s a peculiar relationship to have with an author’s work. It’s as if sometimes I like the idea of her work more than the reality of the work itself. more
Unclassifiable. Eminently readable. Voice-oriented without being overbearing or pretentious. Clear attention to the sentence that still allows the narrative and humanity to shine through. Beautiful. more
This slim book is a great kick in the head to gender stereotypes of women. It's hard to remember while reading it that this is a novella and not Sonia just telling me about her life as she goes about it - mostly working with horses in one form or another. The reason becomes clear in the Afterward, when Scanlan thanks Sonia for interviews recorded over the last few years. Scanlon has such a light and empathetic touch that she fictionalizes Sonia without erasing an ounce of her realness. Almost like she understands Sonia so well that she's written autofiction on her behalf. more
Excellent character-driven narrative, excellent prose. An unsurprisingly fast-paced read, but a surprisingly engrossing story. The narrator was so charming. Much is held back but she’s so giving. I loved it. more
This book. It reminded me of why I read; to be awarded with experiences such as this one: At least as addictive as your favourite snack and I couldn’t care less about horses. . more
Not like anything else I’ve read. She has the ability to distill stories to their bones, but still retain the details that stick with you. . more
Based on the author’s own interviews with an American horse trainer called Sonia, this novel creates a picture of an almost entire life of one woman’s experiences living, working and breathing everything the racetrack has to throw at her. In this male-dominated world populated with all its jockeys, horse trainers, grooms and horse owners, Sonia has to work twice as hard to make something of herself. As someone who has always hated horse racing and everything it entails (and I still stand by this, probably even more so than before), I found this an utterly fascinating and compelling glimpse into a life I knew very little about. Told with a very straight-forward, blunt narrative style, there is very little emotion, which probably works in its favour. The author, or Sonia herself, doesn’t sugarcoat the bad stuff, but at the same time you can see how much Sonia’s life revolves around horses, and it’s something that will stay with her for the rest of her life. more
In this fragmented novella, Kathryn Scanlan ventriloquizes a horse trainer named Sonia. Scanlan interviewed Sonia over the course of a few years, recording her stories about her life raising horses and working at various horse racing tracks. This book, then, is the result of those interviews as what we get, through Scanlan, are Sonia’s own stripped-down, unadorned words. Like Marit Kapla in her “Osebol: Voices of a Swedish Village,” Scanlan is less of an author in how we think about authors and more of an ethnographer and editor. She’s careful to retain Sonia’s own words. more
Aquest és un d'aquells llibres que sents una satisfacció immensa d'haver llegit. No és un llibre que segueixi cap mena d'estructura típica ni tòpica vinculada a la novel·la tradicional. Capítols breus, concisos i ben sintetitzats: explica molt amb poques paraules. Històries que són reals i d'altres que són pura ficció: no saps quina és real ni quina surt de la ment de l'autora. Simplement, et trobes amb una història que van fent puntades i et deixa un brodat final preciós. more