Category: The Blog

The Book of Harlan is exactly that and more. It tells the story of a man named Harlan from his very beginnings, including the history of his parents, until 1973. As we follow his story through the musical heights of Harlem in the 1920s and 30s, into the Second World War and beyond, we are exposed to a host of characters who fill Harlan’s life.

Harlan is not a lone character, but a man connected to family and friends, to his work, his country and the wider world. You cannot read about Harlan without reading about the history of the first half of the 20th Century. But instead of reading a history so many of us have read before, this is history from the perspective of a black American. Continue reading The Book of Harlan by Bernice L. McFadden

Closing His Eyes is a collection of short stories from the famous Iraqi writer, Luay Hamza Abbas. This was the only book I could find of his that was translated into English. Whilst I am very grateful to Yasmeen Hanoosh for translating these stories, as a flavour of the original prose seems to linger in the meanderings of the characters who half inhabit the new world emigrated to and yet remain in Bazra, their eyes unable to forget violence that has become everyday, I still found the language confusing and feel certain the work is not yet fully translated into English. Responding to the stories therefore, becomes difficult and frustrating. I can feel their particular style, their vision, hovering underneath the ambiguous English.

Perhaps this is not so terrible a thing. I felt as if I had been situated within the liminal space many of the characters seemed to inhabit. Life was going on around me, narrative was taking place, but I was standing apart from it, unable to move beyond the vividness of certain violent moments, or the aching of loss for a familiar face or city. Continue reading Closing His Eyes by Luay Hamza Abbas

Thanks to all those who sent comments via email, facebook etc. The winner of last week’s competition is  Continue reading Prize Winner Announced

Set during and after the Second World War, All The Light We Cannot See weaves its main narrative around two main characters who both live through the destruction of Saint-Malo, Brittany, in 1944: a blind French girl, Marie-Laure and a German boy Werner Pfennig who are connected by the mysteries of science over radio waves and through the preserved stories of the past crushed into coal or hard as the largest recorded diamond, the cursed Sea of Flames.

Of course the book is more complex than this. There are many other characters against whom these main two sharpen their sense of right and wrong – Werner’s sister, Jutta who sees the darkness at the heart of the Nazi movement from the beginning, his friend Frederick who refuses to add to the suffering of others; Marie-Laure’s locksmith father who makes models of the places she lives in to help her move about in the outside world, the housekeeper who shows her how to have courage in occupied France. There are also many themes about the wonder of science and the mysteries of the puzzle of life.

However, as all the handmade puzzles of the novel can be cracked, All the Light We Cannot See exasperates me because it too seems to believe the puzzle of life can be unlocked. And whilst I can’t deny that many will devour and adore the novel, crying as the characters live through hard times or when they connect in wonderful unforeseen ways – the skill displayed in weaving the disparate parts into a whole is undeniable and delightful – the certainty that the pieces will fall into place irks me. And it may indeed be at the root of what troubles me about a lot of modern novels. Beneath the flawlessly edited prose and the carefully timed plotlines with complex characters whose lives feel real and believable is a hole that sucks the meaning from all this clever work because what is missing is a belief in the reader and an uncertainty about life. Continue reading All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Ladivine is a wonderful, difficult novel that casts a heavy oppressive weight on the reader. Every character moves through a fog of disappointment brought on by shame.

The daughter of Ladivine, Malinka, cuts her mother out of her life in order to be free of her mother’s shameful heritage. A lowly, unassuming woman with no ambition but to live side by side with her daughter, Malinka thinks of Ladivine as ‘the servant’. Though she has her mother’s bone structure, Malinka is not dark skinned. She believes her life will be freer, more fulfilled, if she keeps her mother at arm’s length. She meets Richard Rivière, becomes Clarisse Rivière, and tells Richard her parents are dead. Continue reading Ladivine by Marie NDiaye

If you have read any Jeanette Winterson before then Written on the Body feels like familiar territory. There is a protagonist of uncertain gender who has male and female lovers. There is a true love with flame red hair. There is also a passion for the minutiae of falling in love, an obsession with the different ways of expressing desire.

What starts as a love affair in which the narrator claims not to want to possess the other but to be possessed – ‘Louise, your nakedness was too complete for me, who had not learned the extent of your fingers. How could I cover this land? Did Columbus feel like this on sighting the Americas? I had no dreams to possess you but I wanted you to possess me.’ (p52) – using, regardless, the language of colonisation and hunger, becomes a different contemplation of her lover’s body when Louise develops Leukaemia. Louise’s body starts to become foreign to itself and the narrator is forced to make a choice about how to help Louise fight her illness: should she stay with Louise or give her up to Louise’s husband, a cancer specialist who believes he can cure her. Continue reading Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson

Originally published in 1907, The Desert and the Sown tells the story of Gertrude Bell’s journey from Jerusalem to Alexandretta in Syria.

Gertrude Bell is an unusual Englishwoman. One of the first to graduate from Oxford she was a formidable historian, archeologist and linguist, speaking Persian and Arabic among other languages. For most of the journey she can talk to the people she meets without need of translation, moving between people of different origins and religion and between men and women with the ease of an outsider, something it must have been much harder to achieve in England. Because of her ease of movement and linguistic ability she learns a great deal about the politics of the lands she travels across and thinks hard about the Ottoman Empire and the rule of the Turk. She also spends much time on the ruins of previous eras, Greek, Roman, Syrian. Continue reading The Desert and the Sown by Gertrude Bell

The Angels Die tells the story of Turambo, an Algerian peasant named after the village of his birth that was swept away by a storm.

The novel opens with the threat of Turambo’s execution. What has he done? What has brought him to this point? Turambo tells us. Continue reading The Angels Die by Yasmina Khadra

Here I Am is a difficult, circumlocutory, beautiful novel filled with the story of an impossibly bright family trying to understand itself – fatherhood, motherhood, brotherhood – trying simply to be there. Or at least that is what Jacob, the father of three boys, the sometime husband to Julia, the owner of their dog, Argus, is trying to do.

By introducing the novel in this way, I am kind of cheating because Here I Am isn’t only a story of trying to learn how to be there. The words ‘Here I Am’ are what Abraham says both to God and Isaac as reported in the Torah just at the moment he is preparing to sacrifice his son at his God’s behest. And introducing this dichotomy, to be wholly there for both God and son, to be impossibly present for more than one thing or person, also introduces one of the other major themes of the novel: Judaism, being Jewish, what it means to be a Jew. Are American Jews as Jewish as Israeli Jews? Is it possible for Jews to have a homeland? How does a Jew not living in Israel reconcile their Jewishness with this physical distance? Continue reading Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer

Taduno is a musician from Nigeria living in exile. He sang songs against the military regime and had to flee. He was beaten so badly his voice was affected and he can no longer sing with the sweet voice that made him famous. Somehow he has been allowed to live in an unoccupied house, undisturbed, welcomed even, by the people of a foreign town.

Then he receives a letter from his girlfriend Lela, telling him that everything in Nigeria has changed. How could she know where to find him? The letter doesn’t even have an address.

Fearing what has happened, Taduno goes home to Lagos where no one recognises him, not even his neighbours who lived beside him for decades. And Lela has disappeared. Continue reading Taduno’s Song by Odafe Atogun