Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone

All Our Names is a powerful novel set in the 1970s in Uganda and Midwest America. Narrated by a male African voice whose first given name is never revealed, and a white American social worker, Helen, the novel explores one man’s experience as he moves through different continents finding friendship and love in people with whom he has no genetic kinship.

The male voice speaks of Isaac, his revolutionary friend of the hungry classes who embroils him in war and then helps him escape. The female voice speaks of another Isaac, a man with a borrowed name who has been given his friend’s escape route in the form of a student’s visa to America.

What I like most about All Our Names is the eloquence of the unspoken. The narrative and the style both opt for sparsity creating a novel whose message navigates difficult boundaries through fear’s common ground. Blending in is what keeps you alive but everyone should have the right to stand out, to own the names of their life’s journey. My paltry attempt at summarising these themes shows why it is a good thing for the novel to avoid these crass generalisations.

Just before the middle of the book, our unnamed narrator recounts a story that his father told him as a child about a city that was kept alive by the dreams of its citizens. At first it was an honour to dream of their house, their street, all the municipal buildings, the roads and railways, but as time passed more and more citizens grew tired of always dreaming of the same things. Finally, one man stands up and says he will take away the citizens suffering by doing all their city dreaming for them. Thinking they are now free, they dream all manner of wonders only slowly to discover their streets and shops, the people themselves are shifting and disappearing under this one man’s control. ‘Those who tried to dream of the city again could see only their house or their street as it looked years ago, but that wasn’t dreaming, it was only remembering, and in a world where seeing was power, nostalgia meant nothing.’ (p131)

Something about this dream speaks to one of the problems at the heart of the novel: dreaming is central to change and plodding behind a chosen course without question, without truly seeing the path you are on, will lead you nowhere you want to go. In other words, thinking you are free is one of life’s greatest shackles. Something that often comes to mind when I’m encouraged, yet again, to get a credit card because you need to be in debt before you can be free to borrow. In the name of freedom other countries and peoples have been ravaged and it is the cruelty of power, set against friendship and love, set against personal safety, that this novel seeks to discuss. When you read a novel and feel as if a sharply nailed grasp is constricting the beats of your heart, you know you are reading something challenging, something that speaks directly to you and questions your integrity. I wish I could write something even a little like it.

It doesn’t escape my notice that the American lover and narrator Helen has the name that launched a thousand ships. Will she go back home or will she stay with the newly named Isaac? It’s an ending we aren’t told but need to imagine in our own minds.

Next week I’m reading The Last Lover by Can Xue.

White Hunger is about the famine in 1867 in Finland and looks at the lives of two very different families – one poor and one rich – whose paths cross and enmesh. The Senator, based on the finance minister of the time whose stringent policies did nothing but provoke the crisis, also has a voice.

I was expecting to love this novel. It has won many literary prizes and has a theme I am usually drawn to. However, I was somehow, like many of the characters within its pages, left in the cold. For the first time in an age of reading translated works, I wondered if it was the translation I was struggling with. Austere prose is one thing, but the novel seemed full of general platitudes about the baseness of man reduced by hunger that did nothing to set my literary desires aflame. I was disappointed. It is nothing new to read of rich people making unfair decisions about poor people. It is nothing new to see poor people turn thief in the face of death. Elevating this into a narrative that forces new neural pathways, that challenges the reader to think differently about poverty and hunger, is what books like this should be doing and whether it was the translation (from the Finnish by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah) or the novel itself, I was disappointingly taken nowhere new.

I say disappointingly because as well as the praise I read for the novel, I also love the publisher’s, Peirene’s, aims and the causes they support. Everything about this book makes me want to love it. And still, I remain unconvinced, unmoved by the image of a boy watching his mother’s dead body slowly shrouded by a blanket of snow. This lack of emotional response comes in a week when I was lucky enough to see the birth of my friend’s beautiful baby son.

I won’t say that you will not enjoy this novel. It is compelling enough. I only wish I could read it in Finnish. Then I would know for sure where my frustrations lie, with the novel or the translation.

I will read Aki Ollikainen’s next novel. There is the seed of something promising here, but more in hope that anticipation.

Next week I’m reading All Our Names by Dinaw Mengestu and mulling over the joys of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Longlist and the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction Longlist.

I’m about to sit down and post about the book I read this week but I can’t blog without mentioning Terry Pratchett who died yesterday, Thursday 12th March 2015. I’ve been heartened to see how many writers have wanted to make known their sorrow over his death and their love of his work. Even if the literary establishment doesn’t recognise him other writers (and of course the public) do because this was a man who knew how to bend your reading ear and tell you a story. This was a man who was never pretentious but who understood and knew how to communicate the strange predicament of being human. Like all brilliant writers his fantasies come closer to the truth than any recordings of fact because he knew how to turn philosophical thought into narrative in such a way that most readers weren’t even aware he was doing it. To my mind that is the work of an artist. I’m going to miss having new works of his to look forward to.

Neverhome is a quick and engrossing read set in the American Civil War about a woman who goes to fight in place of her husband. Written in precisely chosen, but simple and colloquial language, Constance’s account is remarkably open and painfully honest; such clear, concise and characterful writing is an unusual treat. There is no sense of an unreliable narrator. This story is raw and well balanced, perhaps almost too well balanced.

I could write a lot more about how the story develops but I would spoil it. I will mention one of my favourite images though and that is of a greenhouse made of portrait glass. Each pane of glass has the image of a soldier or sweetheart printed upon it, slowing fading in the bright sunlight, casting ghostly shadows upon the people and plants within.

I’m not sure I would rank this as a book that will stand among my favourites of all time, but Neverhome is a real story lover’s story, a tale that one could imagine being told by a fireside, pipe and brandy in hand, an intimate account of the ravages of war, the strength of women and the endurable nature of the human race. It would be hard to read this book and not enjoy it.

Next week I’m reading White Hunger by Aki Ollikainen.

Reading The Last Novel is like taking small, deliciously savoured, sips from the most potent cocktail you can think of. The narrator or Novelist, as he calls himself, calls it ‘Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage’ (p8) but that doesn’t feel entirely true. Made up of remembered facts, anecdotes, quotations and the occasional fragment of the Novelist’s experience, the novel is indeed collage-like but like many collages, it is one in which wider pictures emerge from precisely placed and chosen samples: the history of human tolerance, or the lack of it; the story of the generally impoverished or misunderstood artist; a feeling of isolation in the midst of voices long dead, be they friends or works of art.

There were plenty of times when the knowledge revealed by the text reminded me of my own ignorance, but I didn’t feel preached to or looked down upon, it was more like I was being offered an avenue for future exploration. To give you a flavour, here are a few of my favourite sips:

‘It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.                                                                                                 Said Gertrude Stein.’ (p7)

‘The imagination will not perform until it has been flooded by a vast torrent of reading. Announced Petronius.’ (p26)

‘I can’t understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems; it’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.   Quoth Philip Larkin.’ (p49)

‘Thinking with someone else’s brain.                                                        Schopenhauer called reading.’ (p67)

‘Reality is under no obligation to be interesting.                                                      Said Borges.’ (p139)

‘The greatest kindness we can show some of the authors of our youth is not to reread them.                                                                                                                      Said François Mauriac.’ (p160)

‘I never saw an ugly thing in my life.                                                                        Said Constable.’ (p165)

I’ll find new favourites in another reading and I’m sure you would find your own. The Last Novel is a book you want to keep on dipping back into. If you feel the need to read something that refreshes the mental palette, then this is the novel for you.

Next week I’ll be reading Neverhome by Laird Hunt.

Sherilyn and Brendan are an immaculate, newly married couple living in a well-to-do street. Always perfectly turned out, their house and garden styled in exquisite, if monochrome, taste, they are a couple on the rise. Always polite, their social responses appropriate if distant, they are aloof but accepted, admired even. Until…

Until Sherilyn, despite Brendan’s vasectomy, falls pregnant.

I’m tempted to say very little else about the novel because in a sense discussing what happens ruins a reader’s pleasure, but I am going to say more, so if you are hooked already don’t carry on reading this until you’ve finished the book.

The baby, born of this perfectly turned-out couple who planned never to have children, is viewed by Sherilyn and Brendan as an intruder. Samantha (the child) has entered their lives deliberately intending to destroy Sherilyn and Brendan’s happiness. Even though they plot to climb social ladders and earn good money, they really want nothing but each other. The answer is simply to shut the child out of their lives by turning her bedroom into a homemade cage (she is two when they first lock her away), until even the most menial care – putting a commode and a TV in the box with her with a sink just outside, delivering food, cleaning her up, visiting a meagre three times a day, hitting or burning her with cigarettes when she doesn’t comply with their wishes – gets too much for them and they realise the outside world will soon intervene with questions over her schooling, not to mention the pesky visit from a social worker, and decide to simply go away leaving Samantha behind. The girl, now four years’ old, is found dead some weeks later after an attempted burglary.

This is where the story takes an interesting turn. You expect a novel of this kind to unpick Sherilyn and Brendan seeking answers to their behaviour. In some ways the novel does do this. They find solace in each other, a home no one else has ever been able to provide. Sherilyn was overshadowed by her perfect baby sister and abused by her father. Brendan’s mother died when he was very little and he was then passed between step-mothers and hit by all parent figures, growing into a tall, muscular man who wet his bed and made strange collections of feathers, insect wings and scarab beetles. But there is more to them and their relationship than this. Instead of delving further into their past, we look more closely into their present, into their connection which – certainly for them at least – transcends physical boundaries and makes prison a meaningless punishment: they remain in control because they remain separate in their togetherness; their love transcends. This isn’t what you expect from a novel like this. You aren’t made to feel pity, or even to question your place in a human race that contains their disregard for a child, not even a morbid fascination. Instead, you are presented with something entirely singular and this stops the book from being a cliché and forces you to rethink easy presumptions about the perpetrators of such a terrible crime.

This side-stepping of the expected exploration of the sick mind is enhanced by the way in which the story is told through the multiple voices of the couple’s neighbours, police officers, social worker, co-workers, prison staff, judge, jury member, and family. These voices are far more troubled by Samantha’s death than her parents and the interlacing of these different interpretations of the story weave an intriguing picture of the wider impact of Brendan and Sherilyn’s actions. The multiplicity suggests the unending social ripple of story made painfully visible by the terrible, normally construed unnatural, nature of this particular story.

I’m not sure, in the end, if I wanted the novel to go in this direction. I wanted more of a picture of what Brendan and Sherilyn actually did to Samantha, more of how, why and what they felt as they behaved and acted as they did. The title, Monster Love, suggests an author eager to explore their love, their acts, as a portent (monster comes from monere, to warn), a warning to others and yet, in order to warn you need to understand that a monster is not something different but instead something possible, something whose potential exists in all of us. I think the collective portrait is one way in which Carol Topolski attempts to show this, and I admire this novel immensely, but I wanted a more intensely personal exploration even if you may well not. Certainly, this is a gripping and provocative novel that makes me want to read more of Carol Topolski’s work. I thoroughly recommend it.

Next week I’m reading The Last Novel by David Markson.

I’m not always entirely sure of when events take place or of how much time is passing in Handke’s novel, Across, but this hiatus of uncertainty is central to Handke’s theme and the novel’s main character, Andreas Loser: he needs to be helped to have time because he stands at the threshold, a threshold in which daddy longlegs are his only company, their live, dying and dead legs ticking out time like living clocks or ‘patron[s] of the threshold seekers’ (p21).

Andreas Loser is paused between many things: he has not left his family and yet he does not live with them; he has not quit his job but he has a leave of absence; he is a teacher but also a lay authority on the archaeology of the threshold; he lives in Salzburg but on the outskirts within sight of the German border; he lives close to a canal where the bridge preoccupies him. When he suddenly acts without seeming forethought and steps beyond the realm of commonly accepted morality, he stands at the threshold of lawlessness, homelessness and wilderness. The beauty of the mountainous landscape around him, infiltrated and pock-marked by habitation, thrust into relief by the human density of the Old City centre, makes the story more painful, more melancholic, more romantic in the oldest and most poetic of senses that stretches the naval gazing over the human condition back to the Greeks.

Loser, who has chosen to interpret the etymology of his name as a derivative of the dialect verb losen meaning ‘listen’ or ‘hark’, rather than someone who gets rid of things, is exceedingly good at heeding the world around him in a detail that is almost painful in its comprehensive inclusivity. He feels he lacks a sense of combined imaginative perception the Ancient Greeks call leukein, but the prose is full of the expression of illuminated experience. There is one passage in which he describes how a group of card players, brought together through a loose-knit connection of friendship, become bound through the aftermath of a period of storytelling:

‘One after another fell silent. But this was not the usual lull in the conversation before a group breaks up. The storytelling seemed, rather, to continue in the silence, and thus to become more eloquent than ever. Each of us delved deeper into himself and there met his neighbour, with whom he now, without trying, had everything in common. “Once upon a time there was we.” (How is it that I can say “we”? After all, we were not very many. And I trusted this “we.” Once upon a time there was a fact.)’ (p70)

This binding follows on from his criminal act making their closeness all the more eerie, all the more beautiful for its love and distrust of fellow feeling. The human ability to come together – and indeed this feeling of contented connectedness is something I think we all recognise and seek – isn’t necessarily entirely positive: it can blur moral sensibility. We need storytellers to hold us together, but we need them to be prepared for the consequences and sacrifices of standing between: “The storyteller is the threshold. [Loser quotes this himself.] He must therefore stop and collect himself” (p130).

I’m not saying I always like the main character, his motives or his actions, but Handke’s story is spellbinding, compelling, quiet in its outrage.

Next week I’m reading Carol Topolski’s Monster Love followed by The Last Novel David Markson.

The Hour of the Star is a novel you finish and then instantly want to pick up again. Because of this I will undoubtedly wish I had written something else about it by this time next week. Though short, I wanted to fold the corner of almost every page.

The novel follows the life of Macabea, a girl from North-east Brazil like thousands of others ‘to be found in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, living in bedsitters or toiling behind counters for all they are worth. They aren’t even aware of the fact that they are superfluous and that nobody cares a damn about their existence’ (p14). A badly paid and barely literate typist whose family are dead, Macabea exists with little luxury of thought or experience. We follow her as she struggles with work, almost gets a boyfriend and seeks professional advice about her health and her destiny.

Though ostensibly a male authorial narrator, Lispector’s voice remains present in the telling of Macabea’s story. The narrator says that someone else could write about Macabea ‘but it would have to be a man for a woman would weep her heart out’ (14). He continues to write about himself:

‘Prayer was a means of confronting myself in silence away from the gaze of others. As I prayed I emptied my soul – and this emptiness is everything that I can ever hope to possess. Apart from this, there is nothing. But emptiness, too, has its value and somehow resembles abundance. One way of obtaining is not to search, one way of possessing is not to ask; simply to believe that my inner silence is the solution to my – to my mystery.’ (p14)

This emptiness – echoed in a desire for simplicity in the writing – is something that the narrator shares with Macabea: ‘Most of the time, she possessed, without knowing it, the emptiness that replenishes the souls of saints. Was she a saint? It would seem so. The girl didn’t know that she was meditating, for the word meditation was unknown to her. I get the impression that her life was one long meditation about nothingness.’ (p37)

And so, though much has been written about Clarice Lispector being heir to Kafka, it is Flaubert I think of when reading The Hour of the Star. Of course Macabea is anything but a bourgeois Madame Bovary yet her story invokes similar themes in which human beings are forced to face the gratuity of life, are forced to squeeze meaning from the little afforded them.

Macabea confronts life with bravery and faith. In what does she place this faith? ‘It isn’t necessary to have faith in anyone or anything – it is enough to have faith. This often endowed her with a state of grace. For she had never lost faith.’ (p25)

These ideas of faith and saintliness point me even further in the direction of Flaubert, into an aesthetic that juxtaposes harsh experience against religion, myth and the power of story.

‘Remember that, no matter what I write, my basic material is the word. So this story will consist of words that form phrases from which there emanates a secret meaning that exceeds both words and phrases. Like every writer, I am clearly tempted to use succulent terms: I have at my command magnificent adjectives, robust nouns, and verbs so agile that they glide through the atmosphere as they move into action. For surely words are actions? Yes I have no intention of adorning the word, for were I to touch the girl’s bread, that bread would turn to gold – and the girl (she is nineteen years old) the girl would be unable to bite into it, and consequently die of hunger.” (p14-15)

The awareness of the creative act of using and shaping words, the desire to empty the self, the need to put faith in something, align Macabea and Lispector and highlight the writer as someone who is as one with the many millions ‘that nobody cares a damn about’. This is the kind of writing that inspires and humbles me. This is how literature best expresses philosophy and philosophy is best expressed.

The Hour of the Star is a beautiful gem whose many facets can be turned and turned again in an endless play of meaning. Even if you aren’t one for literary novels, you won’t regret reading The Hour of the Star.

Next week I’m reading Across by Peter Handke followed by Carol Topolski’s Monster Love.

When I was studying my A Levels I had a friend from Southern Japan. I was with her the first time she saw England in the snow. It was a small country town with plenty of trees and pretty cobbled streets and though everything was covered in glistening layers of whiteness the snow was still falling. My friend turned to me and said, “It is so beautiful. Like feathers being shaken from a dead swan.” The Vegetarian has much the same aesthetic.

Split into three sections, each from a different character’s perspective, the novel tells the story of Yeong-hye who has a terrible dream that turns her vegetarian. Up until this moment Yeong-hye has been the meekest most absent of people who fulfilled her family’s and husband’s expectations and lived quietly in the background. Her refusal to eat meat causes surprising upheaval and leads Yeong-hye into a world in which one unconventional behaviour breaks many barriers.

Her story is told by first her husband, then her sister’s husband, and then her sister. It is her sister who remarks of herself, “It’s your body, you can treat it however you please. The only area where you’re free to do just as you like. And even that doesn’t turn out how you wanted.” And the book is all about what we do to our bodies, why we do it and how these actions are interpreted. We are physically bound to the world around us and The Vegetarian explores how little we think of our intermingled physicality, employing dreams to break through the surface of our conventional real through the use of the surreal. I don’t want to spoil the plot but her brother-in-law’s narrative is all about bringing the surreal into reality in a cleverly lustless congress of floral blossoming.

We do hear snippets of Yeong-hye’s voice in her husband’s narrative. It seems a strange place for them to come free given his almost complete distance from her even when he chose to have her in his life. I think I would have taken them out of his narrative entirely, given them their own place outside of the three sections, but I could easily be misunderstanding something.

Ultimately, The Vegetarian is a pleasing, engaging read full of ideas and provocative images. It is probably at some disadvantage coming after László Krasznahorkai’s writing because it feels light in comparison but perhaps that lightness is a positive, invasive thing. You’ll know if the idea of the story appeals to you and whilst I can’t promise you’ll be blown away by The Vegetarian, you will enjoy it and it will leave you with questions to ponder.

Next week I’m reading The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector.

“… already I am ascending, I still see the troubling chaos of the villages and the cities, the lands and the seas, the valleys and the peaks, and the moment that enclosed so much into itself comes to an end, and as I ascend, everything ascends with me, a magnificence rises there, a magnificence – back to the purity of the Heavens, to the sphere inconceivable – which in its own form, resplendent, streaming forth, swelling, is nothing else than a return back to that place where nothing is, to the Radiant Empire of Light, the boundless plains of the Sky, for that is the place where I exist, although I am not, for this is where I may place my crown upon my head, and I can think to myself that Seiobo was there below.” (p214)

Thus the gods move through the Noh theatre of the story ‘The Life and Work of Master Inoue Kazuyuki’, one of the seventeen stories that form the formidable Seiobo There Below.

I say formidable because Krasznahorkai’s work is not something you can pick up lightly. The stories themselves are erudite, full of studied learning about history throughout the world, and, like the writing, there is a refusal to bend for the reader. If an explanation of an event or thought requires a sentence several pages long, or a ritual must be described in painstaking detail that refuses to break into the sort of fresh territory in need of a new paragraph, then so be it. These stories demand attention in such a way that even though you feel the reading is at times an ordeal, you end a story with a sense of having actually lived through it, of having moved through the heads of the characters and sensed what they experienced. To read these stories is to be these stories. And of course this way of experiencing a story mimics the way we experience life (it seems to me no surprise that Krasznahorkai returns again and again to the idea of the copy, the renewed icon, the new representation of a temple which is more authentic for its recreation – again no surprise that Japanese culture is therefore so prevalent, a land whose relationship to simulacra is entirely different to a typical western relationship where even the word reproduction has negative overtones). What you bring with you to the story allows you to see and experience only what you can comprehend. It is like being a fly on the wall with internal privileges. You see but you don’t necessarily understand.

In many ways the writing has the labyrinthine qualities of Borges and the grandiloquence of Sebald. The workings of literature are clearly in motion, making the miracles of the world manifest, asking readers, the characters even, to observe. Yet even that is not enough because the act of our observation and consequent action must in its turn be observed. Like the Ooshirosagi, the snow-white bird, hunting motionless in the Kamo river in Kyoto, from the opening story, if no one notices the way in which your stillness gives meaning to the human world of activity around it, you may as well creep into the weeded grass and die because “there will be no one at all to understand, no one to look, not even a single one among all your natural enemies that will be able to see who you really are … for there is no point in the sublimity that you bear” (p15).

My favourite story is ‘Something is burning outside’. It is a story of a creative retreat in the mountains. The routine of the retreat is disrupted by one of the artists who appears to have arrived on foot. For days he seems to do nothing but observe the other artists and in order to get to the bottom of what he is doing, the other artists decide to watch and follow him. They discover that he has been working. For all those days he has been rising at dawn, digging an enormous pit at the edge of the camp in the middle of which stands a “life-size earth-hewn horse … holding its head up; sideways, baring its teeth and foaming at the mouth; it was galloping with horrific strength, racing, escaping somewhere … as if he had dug it out, freed it, made this life-sized animal visible as it ran in dreadful terror, running from something beneath the earth” (p319).  When they show their admiration for his work, he stretches his arm out over the landscape. “There are still so many of them, he said in a faint voice” (p319). And the story ends with him walking away from the bus that delivers the artists back to civilisation, as if, we imagine, he has seen another creature for when they look after him, he has disappeared. “Only the land remained, the silent order of the mountains, the ground covered in fallen dead leaves in the enormous space, a boundless expanse – disguising, concealing, hiding, covering all that lies below the burning earth” (p320).

It seems to me that for these stories, art is all about concentration and the revelation of observation that almost always requires some form of repetition, some kind of physical repetitive craft be it endless careful movements with a chisel or the repeated words of a prayer; ritual is everything. So it doesn’t matter that he tells written history in many of the stories, or describes famous landmarks or works of art, because the power is in the going-over, in the endless turning this way and that of the meaning of all that is and has been. The action of art – the brush stroke, the chisel stroke, the hand moving the pen – that represents observation, as both physical and spiritual, holds the key to the story of conscious being. Because these acts of creation are impossible to do with the certainty of perfection, it must be practised, it must be done again and again.

Seiobo There Below is not an easy read but it is a rewarding one. If you want to feel you have an understanding of modern literature then I think you can’t afford to miss him from your reading list.

Next week I’m reading The Vegetarian by Han Kang.