Category: The Blog

This is a collection of short stories that made me want to reread even as I was reading. There is a pleasing mixture of the surreal and the contemporary real that bares the hallmark of great short story writing; think Borges, Kafka, George Saunders, Raymond Carver, Dambudzo Marenchera.

Blasim moves with ease from the fantastic tales of childhood and superstition, to bizarre snippets of human interest that highlight the grotesque and pointless moments of soul- or solace- searching in the daily lives of ordinary people. Men and women fall into time-warping holes (‘The Hole’) or try to remember what happened the day their brother fell into the septic tank (‘The Song of the Goats’). A woman dies from ingesting rat urine when out pleasuring her dog (‘Why Don’t You Write a Novel, Instead of Talking About All These Characters’, great title). A man living far from his country, from his family, obsesses over the life of a dung beetle, dreaming he is the larva growing inside a world of excrement and being lovingly cared for by his mother, pain (‘The Dung Beetle’). Concentrated crying can make knives disappear (‘A Thousand and One Knives’). An animal observes and is saddened by human behaviour (‘Dear Beto’). A drunkard goes home and becomes prisoner to his own imagination when he sees a wolf in his flat (‘The Wolf’). This same drunkard wonders if art is only ever the manifestation of another’s dream while another character questions if villagers stories about drought-bringing trees springing from a woman’s thoughts can be anything more than the babblings of the ignorant (‘Sarsara’s Tree’).

I’m not sure which story is my favourite. Sometimes it is weeks later that such favouritism rises into conscious musing and Blasim’s stories are definitely ones that will set my mind turning even when I consider myself to be thinking of something else. Ultimately, these stories are inspiring. They ask you to look closer, to think more deeply and in less well-travelled ways. They ask readers to pay attention not just to their stories but the world around them. This is the kind of writing that reminds you how powerful short stories can be. I definitely recommend The Iraqi Christ and will probably read his other collection very soon.

Next week I’ll be reading The Undertaking by Audrey Magee.

Rudi has always wanted to be a chef and it has taken him far from home, across many of Europe’s now multiple borders. Sometime in our future separatism has spread through the world like a rash. Even buildings fight to become nation states and passing between these countries presents a challenge Central, a group of Couriers, have become expert at meeting. Documents, people, anything you need delivering incognito requires a courier. When Central recruit Rudi his life becomes a series of seemingly unconnected drops and meets until he is given a key to a whole different set of borders.

There is much to like about this novel: the effortless crossing of genre borders; the way the story creeps up on the protagonist in ever tightening circles, new sections often beginning with different characters whose lives turn around the arrival of Rudi; the mesmerising story line that keeps you hooked on unravelling the mystery of this world just beyond our reach. However, despite greedily returning to the book I’m still not sure about where it ends. The book takes an unexpected turn that intrigues and bemuses me. I’m not sure how well it was foreshadowed or where the novel can go from here if it doesn’t get developed in a sequel and I want a novel, even if it is going to be part of a series, to feel whole in itself. I don’t think Europe in Autumn quite does that, but it does stay in the mind and it does capture what a continually fractured Europe might look and feel like. The espionage is cleverly rendered, driving the plot with a kind of old-fashioned noir appeal all the more enticing because of the future setting. If you like a mixture of crime, espionage, sci-fi, alternate realities, you can’t go wrong with Europe in Autumn. Even if you only like one of those things, you should give it a go. Whatever else you might feel about the novel, you can’t deny that Europe in Autumn is an expertly crafted tale.

Next week I’m reading The Iraqi Christ by Hassan Blasim, winner of the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the only prize dedicated to fiction in translation.

Tenth of December is a kind of monstrous collection – monstrous in that it acts as a portent, a warning of what life has in store, of how soon life is over, of how easy it is to exploit others and take a misstep along the road of social cohesion. The way that Saunders happily throws genres into the blending pot and creates stories with surreal, dream-like edges that can send a reader into labyrinths of possible actions and paths is reminiscent of Borges. What he adds to all of this is humour. This is a writer you want to meet, someone who you feel has truly written themselves onto the page, someone prepared to tell the truth about what they see in this world of ours.

In ‘The Semplica Girl Diaries’ his narrator is writing about his life for future generations. Not long after winning money on a scratch card, he writes:

“Have been sleepingwalking through life, future reader. Can see that now. Scratch-Off win was like wake-up call. In rush to graduate college, win Pam, get job, make babies, move ahead in job, forget former feeling of special destiny I used to have when tiny, sitting in cedar-smelling bedroom closet, looking up at blowing trees through high windows, feeling I would someday do something great.” (location 1786)

Saunders writing is a like a “wake-up call”. It is innovative, anarchic even. He isn’t afraid to play with language or grammar if it better tells his story and this playful fearlessness is wonderfully refreshing.

I’ve read one other George Saunders book and was struck then in the same way. Here is a unique, embracing voice. A voice that would flounder in England without the kind of accolades Saunders work comes with from America. I can think of several English short-story writers who have a similar mix of the bureaucratic-bizarre – Guy Ware, Adam Marek, Paul Blaney – but we don’t seem to grasp and reward these writers. I wish we did.

I don’t want to summarise the stories. I don’t want to say, oh, in this one… I just want you to read this collection.

Next week I’ll be reading Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson.

I said I would read The Notebook this week but I bought the version published with The Proof and The Third Lie and liked The Notebook so much that I read all three novels that comprise a trilogy of stories about the twins Lucas and Claus. Of all three I think The Notebook is my favourite, but all three novels speak of fractured lives and identities whose loves transgress social conventions, conventions often challenged and changed by war and its ever shifting allegiances. Who are we? Are we bound to the country of our birth? Are we tied to those whose blood we share?

The two brothers are divided during the war, whichever novel you read and whichever plotline you believe. This division, this separation is unbearable and makes life a constant battle fought solely for envisaged reconciliation. This makes The Third Lie particularly hard to read.

It is not hard to miss the historical and political narratives beneath the tales, but nor is it easy to decipher any form of truth not turned by the storyteller’s wheel. The literary oral history of forest and fairy-tale, of epic journeys and miraculous recovery, of transformation and shape-shifting flow fluidly through the lives of the twins making their struggles ache with metaphorical and mythical parallels despite the carefully simple prose. This is stark and potent writing so good it feels as if I’ve read it already and I now know that what may have impressed me in other writing is partly Kristof’s influential echo.

The twins’ description of what work gets written into the notebook they are writing is wonderfully telling. What gets into the notebook must be considered ‘Good’:

‘To decide whether it’s “Good” or “Not good,” we have a very simple rule: the composition must be true. We must describe what is, what we see, what we hear, what we do.

‘For example, it is forbidden to write, “Grandmother is like a witch”; but we are allowed to write, “People call Grandmother the Witch.” …

‘Words that define feelings are very vague. It is better to avoid using them and stick to the description of objects, human beings, and oneself, that is to say, to the faithful description of the facts.’ (p29)

The twins observe life with a fearless, fanatical fervour that sees life and human behaviour without sentiment giving us a picture of the world that doesn’t edit out the unseemly, unpleasant or unconventional. This is truly inspiring, galling work.

Having said that, it’s true that these novels are not for everyone. They don’t make for easy reading, in the sense that they cover difficult topics of war, betrayal and a kind of survivalist cruelty, but they are honest and they are important for anyone hoping to grasp a sense of contemporary European fiction.

Next week I’m reading Tenth of December by George Saunders.

Despite many attempts by my Grandmother, my school, my various universities, to encourage me to read French Literature, my ability to read in the original is pitiful and my knowledge of French Literature consequently unimpressive. Though I have my favourites, Marguerite Duras, Marie Darrieussecq, George Perec, Flaubert and Montaigne, and though I have read Proust, Maupassant and Baudelaire, I am embarrassed by how unfamiliar I am with French Literature and how reliant I am upon publishers to find and translate great works in French (I long for them to do this more). It was no surprise then that I hadn’t read this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Patrick Modiano. What did surprise me was how familiar the work felt.

Included in Suspended Sentences are three novellas written over a five-year period and not originally intended to be published together, but all of which obsess over a Paris seen through the misted glass of memory and loss. It seemed more than fitting for the last novella of the collection to be called Flowers of Ruin, so reminiscent of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal which for me is a collection remembered from adolescence as a flaneur’s musings on the darker side of city life. Though Modiano’s narrators aren’t wandering the streets of a relatively modern Paris (1990s) with tortoises in lieu of dogs, they do meander across the city and through memory with a strange mixture of measure and suggestion that adds to the mystery at the heart of all three novellas. Each narrator is seeking answers to people who feel central to their earlier lives, be it childhood, adolescence or early adulthood, and each of these people remain unanswerable, characters lost to history. In Flowers of Ruin one of these characters disappears before his very eyes:

“At that moment a phenomenon occurred for which I’m still trying to find an explanation: had the street lamp at the top of the steps suddenly gone out? Little by little, that man melted into the wall. Or else the rain, from falling on him so heavily, had dissolved him, the way water dilutes a fresco that hasn’t had time to dry properly. As hard as I pressed my forehead against the glass and peered at the dark gray wall, no trace of him remained. He had vanished in that sudden way that I’d later notice in other people, like my father, which leaves you so puzzled that you have no choice but to look for proofs and clues to convince yourself these people had really existed.” (p211)

Though each novella tells a different story, they feel deeply connected – the bumper cars of one story reappearing in another – and at the heart is this puzzle over identity; the people and events that make up our past become lost in ways that question our own solidity.

“I was going to disappear in this garden, amid the Easter Monday crowds. I was losing my memory and couldn’t understand French anymore, as the words of the women next to me had now become no more than onomatopoeias in my ear. The efforts I’d made for thirty years to have a trade, give my life some coherence, try to speak and write a language as best I could so as to be certain of my nationality – all that tension suddenly released. It was over. I was nothing now. Soon I would slip out of this park toward a metro stop, then a train station and a port. When the gates closed, all that would remain of me would be the raincoat I’d been wearing, rolling into a ball on a bench.” (Afterimage, p57)

You can hear Modiano’s own struggles written into the narratives of these novellas and yet, despite the fraught difficulty of autobiographical fiction, even the fruitless investigations of his narrators, the writing itself is quiet and elegant, creating careful snap shots that are perfectly clear until they are forced to cohere when the intrusion of light over-exposes them into the beautiful fog of time passed that remains my lasting impression of the book as a whole. In the first novella, the narrator recalls a remark made by his photographer friend, of whom he is now trying to write, saying that you need to “approach things gently and quietly or they pull away” (p47).  What he wants is to “blend into the surroundings and become invisible, the better to work and capture – as he said – natural light” (p55). This is the impossible search Modiano and his characters have entered into, making Suspended Sentences an intriguing and elusive book whose mastery is in the simple reflection of the maze of memory.

Next week I’m reading Tinkers by Paul Harding, followed by The Notebook by Agota Kristof.

Ruth Swain lies in her sick bed and writes the history of her family, which is also the history of her town in Clare, Ireland. She writes of how Irish people grew up from the seaweed, people of story and myth trying their best to take that impossible leap against the tide that will eventually send them back into the cycle of cloud, rain, river and sea. Somewhere in History of the Rain there is a quote (I blame kindle for being unable to find it – how much easier it is to locate things, regardless of search buttons, in physical books with pages where your fingers and eyes find remembered words) about how people remember not what you do or write, but what you made them feel. This is very true of History of the Rain.

The novel is endlessly quotable and there is something both pleasing and irritating about this. It is undeniably a well-written story, full of those writerly conversations readers and writers are addicted to – “All writers are waiting for replies. That’s what I’ve learned. Maybe all human beings are.” Locations 5097 – where the history of what you read becomes part of your identity, the story of yourself. Without giving it away, the story is also full of enough family trouble to tug on the heart-strings, especially my heart strings primed with some similar family troubles, but I leave the book both moved and unconvinced. It’s as if I’ve been tricked into feeling, as if the whole novel were some kind of essay in life and in the end I wonder if the novel suffers from its own self-consciousness where the literary canon weighs the words down and forces them to stand in little neat phrases rather than in one long distinct whole. It is true that no story stands alone, but I think I read to find something different, not to find more of what I have already read.

This is an extremely harsh reaction to the book, which many will undoubtedly love with a passion, and this idea that Ruth has of being half part, her father’s Swain half, of a family labouring under the Impossible Standard against which no endeavour will ever quite succeed, makes it impossible not to contend with the literary canon and with God making what I dislike also pivotal to the novel. So, I recommend this book to those who love remarks about the sentimental, romantic nature of men and the carrying-on nature of women (which I don’t), and those whose life is part conversation with authors they have only ever met in the pages of books. I suppose I leave the novel in a state of contradiction. Time will tell which side of me wins over: the side in which the novel leaves a cloying, unpleasant aftertaste or the side that ended the book crying over a story that inspired self pity for my own.

Read it and let me know what you think.

Next week I’m reading Suspending Sentences: Three Novellas by Patrick Modiano.

Francis Plug is a writer/gardener. The book follows his attempts to write a guide for aspiring writers, like himself, helping them to plan for the world of public appearances now expected of modern authors. As Billy Bragg says to him in a urinal at Hay, “These authors think they’re flaming rock stars, don’t they?” On his journey to the heady heights of authorial fame, Francis Plug drinks away his home and occupation. In order to fully research his future prize-winning book, he borrows the unread first editions of one of his gardening clients, a banker, takes them to readings and gets them signed to himself.

Each chapter starts with a copy of these signed books with genuine dedications to Francis Plug. The conversations and imagined conversations with the various different prize-winning authors are brilliantly envisaged. I think my favourite is his encounter with Ruth Rendell on the train to the Hay Festival. She actually tells him to Shoo.

I was lucky enough to be at a reading for this book. Paul Ewen read from the end, where Francis Plug has managed to sneak his way into the Booker prize ceremony of 2013. It was very funny. Though much of the book is funny, I know that I would enjoy listening to this novel and would recommend the BBC grab it for serialisation on Radio 4 because as with all good humour, there are serious messages running beneath the laughter with much of the sharp end pointing at the very crowds that sponsor and populate author appearances, awards and performances (and listen to BBC Radio 4). Francis Plug is brilliant at cutting through middle class pretension and pointing out the obvious. To give but two examples:

“As an author, V. S. Naipaul gives me hope. He says some really crazy things, and yet he’s still held up in esteem. Recently he pronounced his belief that no woman writer was his equal, not even Jane Austen. This, he thinks, is because of a woman’s ‘sentimentality’ and ‘narrow view of the world’. I sometimes say some mad things myself, in the pub. With any luck, I’ll be tolerated and laughed off too.” (p192-3)

“Despite the odd exception, the only way to live comfortably as a writer, it seems, is to be rich already.” (p229)

As I’ve already written, I’m not usually drawn to overtly comic books, but Paul Ewen is a master of the absurd. Even when writing alcohol-fuelled hallucinations of giant squids or ghostly fusions of the actual Ruth Rendell with the library scene in Ghostbusters, his prose has an understated elegance that never fails to amuse. If you like books and you like to laugh (even at yourself), you will enjoy How To Be A Public Author.

Next week I’m reading Mockstars by Christopher Russell.

Not far into the novel, Pereira, pitched as a real man telling his story to the narrator, quotes an ‘oft-repeated saying of an uncle of his, an unsuccessful writer’: ‘Philosophy appears to concern itself only with the truth, but perhaps expresses only fantasies, while literature appears to concern itself only with fantasies, but perhaps it expresses the truth.’

This gentle, subtle novel, tells the story of a middle-aged Portuguese widower waking up to the world of Europe in the 1930s and a right-wing Portuguese dictatorship. I say gentle, though the events are anything but. I say subtle, though the novel makes clear both the reader’s and writer’s responsibility to speak out against brutally enforced censorship (indeed there is an on-going assessment of authors whose literature is measured by their ability to concern themselves with fantasies that speak the truth). My reason for using those words, that suggest writing of quiet elegance, is how well Tabucchi evokes the normal, daily activities and worries at the heart of Pereira’s story. A life beset by worries over his health and his weight, a life weighed down by grief and loneliness – his closest confidant is the photograph of his dead wife – but lifted by such simple things as an omelette for lunch, sitting by a fan in the heat, or a chance to have a real discussion about ideas and opinions. His progression to revolutionary feeling and action is a slow movement of the mind that begins with a feeling of repentance.

Pereira is a journalist in charge of a new section of a middleweight evening paper, the culture pages. He reads an article that quotes from a thesis of a young man and Pereira is so touched by this article that he contacts the young man and arranges to meet him. They meet at a nationalist rally where Pereira offers him a job writing provisional obituaries for living authors. Pereira sees his own youth in the man, and wishes, not for the first time, that he and his wife had been able to have children. When this young man’s girlfriend appears his paternal feelings are heightened; he worries this young lady is no good and will prove nothing but trouble for the young man.

This tiny step out of his world of grief and into the world of the young, a world they face bravely, leads Pereira down a path of self-discovery. Via a French trained Doctor at a health spa, who encourages him to listen to the part of himself that longs to slough off his torpor, this interaction with these two young people forces him to wake from his apathy of self-absorption.

Declares Pereira is a beautiful novel of lasting relevance. What begins as a man questioning the relevance of his life becomes a novel that asks us to pose the same question of ourselves.

Next week I’ll be reading, How To Be A Public Author by Francis Plug, followed by Mockstars by Christopher Russell. It is a relief to have moved beyond the confines of reading ahead of the Man Booker 2014 announcement – despite the excellent quality of the list this year, part of my pleasure in reading is dipping into books across genres, countries, and ages – and I am very happy that Richard Flanagan received the prize. Please do keep your suggestions and comments coming. It may seem that there aren’t many on the site, but I’m glad to say I’ve had lots of interesting conversations off the back of the blog. Feel free to start the conversations here.

Sewn around the life of Dorrigo Evans, a Tasmanian Corporeal and Doctor who led his men through the life of prisoners of war in service of the Japanese in Thailand, building a railway line for the Emperor with little more than a handful of rice as daily rations and rope and hammers to build with, The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a novel that weaves through time and characters all searching for what it means to be alive. The rhythm, beauty and coherent promise of poetry interlace the different sections that take different lives into the hell of war and the battlefield of marriage. The Haiku, death poems, beluga calls and Tennyson round out these lives in an illusive and circuitous search for meaning.

Profoundly moving and, like of the other novels on Man Booker shortlist, deeply concerned with what it means to be human and how life matters at all, The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a delicately constructed work of beauty that I wish I had read more slowly.

Now I have read all the 2014 Man Booker short list, I feel several things: inspired, humbled and less irritated than I often am when contemplating short lists of this kind. There are novels I wish were in the short list – such as The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth – and there are novels that I feel aren’t worthy of this year’s short list despite being good books in their own right – To Rise Again at a Decent Hour and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. I think the other four novels – how to be both, J, The Lives of Others and The Narrow Road to the Deep North – are all books that deserve to be read by many and read again and I would be saddened if they didn’t become classics of their kind. I suppose my favourites are how to be both and The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Which should win? I’m not sure. As Dorrigo Evans himself muses, ‘A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.’ Though how to be both is moving and provoking, my soul is perhaps more challenged by The Narrow Road to the Deep North. I’m not sure. I may change my mind when the haste of reading in a flurry passes and I’m left with those aftertastes that linger in the mind and form tiny fissures of thought that crack through the every day.

Next week I’m reading Declares Pereira by Antonion Tabucchi and pondering whether I should continue the blog. Let me know what you think.

The Lives of Others does exactly what it says on the tin: it gives a wide spectrum of different but connected lives and shows how difficult it is to lay a clear path of fairness in the mess of familial, social, cultural, religious, legal, moral and emotional relations and relationships. The novel does what I hope all great literature should aspire to do: it sets ideas against practice, it shows thought muddied in the water of experience, it asks the reader to question their own easy affiliations with the world around them, and it does this through the precise rendering of characters’ thoughts and actions. The characters we meet come to us through four generations of the Ghosh family, a Bengali middle-class family living in Calcutta. We see the shifts in their social and financial standing. We see the intimate quirks of their family life.

Whilst it is typical of an Indian novel to stretch over generations – we watch them live through Indian Independence, the Independence of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh and specifically the Naxalite student movement in Calcutta that fed into revolutionary action in West Bengal, all the way to 2012 – Neel Mukherjee’s ability to jump between very variant perspectives and present characters whose differing standpoints and views all induce empathy is inspiring. What path should we take through a world full of such conflicting injustice?

There were times that I felt I waded through the novel, as the weight of different experience slowed my progression, but the wading is worth it. The Lives of Others is an immensely powerful and moving novel that I hope lots of people will read. I’m not sure if I want it to win the Man Booker 2014, but I’m very pleased the judges chose to put it on the short list.

This week – you may have noticed I am a day late in reviewing last week’s novel! – I will be reading The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan. I hope to finish my review before the announcement of the Man Booker prize tomorrow night. I also would like to add that despite my mostly negative reaction to To Rise Again at a Decent Hour last week, it has motivated me to start flossing again.