Author: David Hebblethwaite

Naked Eye Publishing: The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing by Darina Al Joundi

22nd March 2022 / / 0 Comments

Time for something a little different today: a dramatic monologue. Darina Al Joundi is a Lebanese writer and actor now living in France. She first performed this one-woman play in 2007. She co-wrote a novel based on the play which has previously been translated into English, but this is the first English translation of the play itself. The translator is Helen Vassallo, who runs the excellent blog Translating Women (she’s written a post here on how she came to translate the play. 

Al Joundi’s protagonist is Noun, whose father was a secular freedom fighter in a strict Muslim family. She interrupts his funeral, locking herself in the room with his body. She is there to carry out his wish to have Nina Simone’s ‘Sinnerman’ played at his funeral, rather than recitations from the Qu’ran. The monologue is Noun’s reflection on her life in Beirut, and on her father’s influence. 

Noun’s father encouraged her to live as she wanted, and didn’t judge her. In turn, she looked up to him. For example, as a girl Noun tells her father that she wants to wear a bra. He warns her that she’ll find it painful and constricting, but she insists and he goes along with her wishes. Noun soon discovers that he was right.

There is humour running through Noun’s story, but she also experiences great violence – both personally and as part of the war escalating around her. In time, she has cause to question whether her father appreciated how free his daughter might really be in a society that didn’t share his values. Noun comes across as a vivid, complex character in this thought-provoking piece of work. 

Published by Naked Eye Publishing.

Composite Creatures by Caroline Hardaker: a Strange Horizons review

16th March 2022 / / 0 Comments

I have a new review up at Strange Horizons. This time I’m looking at Composite Creatures, the debut novel by Caroline Hardaker (published by Angry Robot).

Composite Creatures is set in a future where nature has mostly been replaced by artificial substitutes. Norah and Art are learning to live together with Nut, their “perfect little bundle of fur”, and Norah feels she’s presenting different versions of herself to the world.

I found that reading Composite Creatures felt like peeling back successive layers of the novel, so that’s how I structured my review.

You can read the review in full here.

#2022InternationalBooker: the longlist

11th March 2022 / / 0 Comments

We now have our longlist for this year’s International Booker Prize, and it’s a striking selection:

  • Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, translated from Korean by Anton Hur (Honford Star)
  • After the Sun by Jonas Eika, translated from Danish by Sherilyn Hellberg (Lolli Editions)
  • A New Name: Septology VI-VII by Jon Fosse, translated from Norwegian by Damion Searls (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
  • More Than I Love My Life by David Grossman, translated from Hebrew by Jessica Cohen (Jonathan Cape)
  • The Book of Mother by Violaine Huisman, translated from French by Leslie Camhi (Virago)
  • Heaven by Mieko Kawakami, translated from Japanese by Samuel Bett and David Boyd (Picador)
  • Paradais by Fernanda Melchor, translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
  • Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park, translated from Korean by Anton Hur (Tilted Axis Press)
  • Happy Stories, Mostly by Norman Erikson Pasaribu, translated from Indonesian by Tiffany Tsao (Tilted Axis Press)
  • Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro, translated from Spanish by Frances Riddle (Charco Press)
  • Phenotypes by Paulo Scott, translated from Portuguese by Daniel Hahn (And Other Stories)
  • Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell (Tilted Axis Press)
  • The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft (Fitzcarraldo Editions)

Tony has posted the Shadow Panel’s response on his blog, so I won’t say too much more myself. But, if you think back to the last time David Grossman was longlisted for this prize, five years ago, that was a very different longlist: mostly European, five titles from Penguin Random House imprints. This year, most of the authors are from outside of Europe, and two small publishers (Fitzcarraldo and Tilted Axis) make up almost half of the nominated books. I’m really pleased by that change.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be reading and reviewing what I can from the longlist, along with the rest of the Shadow Panel. To date, I have read four from the longlist but reviewed only one – and it will take a very special book to dislodge Elena Knows as my favourite. Still, this is all about discovering good books, so let’s go for it.

International Booker Prize 2022: introducing the Shadow Panel

7th March 2022 / / 0 Comments

The longlist for this year’s International Booker Prize will be announced on Thursday, so it’s time to convene the Shadow Panel once again. As always, we will be reading and reviewing the books, coming to our own conclusions, then choosing a shadow shortlist and winner – which may, or may not, reflect the ‘official’ ones.

For now, let me introduce you to the members of this year’s Shadow Panel…

Continue reading

Michel the Giant: An African in Greenland

6th March 2022 / / 1 Comment

Originally published in French in 1977, this is a travelogue by Togolese writer Tété-Michel Kpomassie (translated by James Kirkup). As a teenager in the 1950s, he is (reluctantly) about to be initiated into a snake cult when he reads a book about Greenland. This place is beyond anything he has experienced or can imagine, but there will be no snakes – and, he reads, “the child is king, free from all traditional and family restraint”. This is enough to make the young Kpomassie resolve to travel to Greenland, even though it means running away from home.

Kpomassie’s journey to Greenland is an epic tale in itself. It takes six years for him to earn enough money to leave Africa, followed by a spell working in Paris before he finally reaches his destination. He stands out, not just for his skin colour but also his height (hence he’s nicknamed Michel the Giant). This will be a two-way meeting of cultures: “I had started on a voyage of discovery, only to find that it was I who was being discovered.”

Kpomassie’s book is a fascinating account of his travels. There are telling details, such as the cinema that stops foreign films every ten minutes to explain the action to the Inuit audience, because only Danish subtitles are available. These episodes are mixed with Kpomassie’s broader reflections on the people he encounters. His openness and willingness to meet Greenland on its own terms are what make Michel the Giant so engaging for me.

Published by Penguin Modern Classics.

A bite-sized chat about The Tomb Guardians

4th March 2022 / / 0 Comments

Something a little different today, as I make my debut on YouTube. Shawn the Book Maniac is a Canadian BookTuber based in Tokyo. He has an ongoing series called Bite-sized Book Chats, where he invites different people to talk about a book they’ve enjoyed. Shawn kindly invited me to take part earlier this year, and I chose my favourite book of 2021, Paul Griffiths’ The Tomb Guardians. You can see my chat with Shawn as part of the latest episode below.

Peirene Press: Marzahn, Mon Amour by Katja Oskamp (tr. Jo Heinrich)

25th February 2022 / / 0 Comments

We’re going to Germany for this year’s first title from Peirene. Katja Oskamp’s narrator is in her mid-forties, which she imagines as swimming in the middle of a huge lake, with the past having receded but the future still out of focus. She feels she’s treading water:

My life had grown stale: my offspring had flown the nest, my other half was ill and my writing, which had kept me busy until then, was more than a little iffy. I was carrying something bitter within me, completing the invisibility that befalls women over forty. I didn’t want to be seen, but nor did I want to see. I’d had it with people, the looks on their faces and their well-meant advice. I sank to the bottom.

The woman decides that, if she’s going to be invisible to the wider world, she may as well make a major change for herself. She leaves behind her writing career and retrains as a chiropodist. She works out of a salon in the Marzahn area of Berlin, which was formerly part of the GDR. It’s the kind of place that could itself be overlooked, as could the narrator’s (often elderly or disabled) customers. One of the key things she does as a chiropodist is then simply to give her clients recognition. 

The novel as a whole does the same. Each chapter focuses on a different customer – and they’re a vivid cast, from Frau Frenzel whose life revolves around her dachshund, to Herr Pietsch, who was a party official in the GDR, but has had to adjust to a rather different way of life since. Marzahn, Mon Amour becomes a composite portrait of this community, one that works to make its characters visible – narrator and customers alike. 

Republic of Consciousness Prize 2022: the longlist

17th February 2022 / / 0 Comments

It’s time for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and this year’s longlist is especially intriguing:

  • Somebody Loves You by Mona Arshi (And Other Stories)
  • Five Days Untold by Badr Ahmad, tr. Christiann James (Dar Arab)
  • Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga, tr. Melanie Mauthner (Daunt Books)
  • The Beast They Turned Away by Ryan Denns (Epoque Press)
  • Dark Neighbourhood by Vanessa Onwuemezi (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
  • The Song of Youth by Montserrat Roig, tr. Tiago Miller (Fum D’Estampa Press)
  • After the Sun by Jonas Eika, tr. Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg (Lolli Editions)
  • Sterling Karat Gold by Isabel Waidner (Peninsula Press)
  • In the Dark by Anamaria Crowe Serrano (Turas Press)
  • Happy Stories, Mostly by Norman Erikson Pasaribu, tr. Tiffany Tsao (Tilted Axis Press)

This is a list that really shows the breadth of the Republic of Consciousness Prize: four of the ten titles are short story collections; half of the longlist is in translation. I’m also pleased to see that, even though I think I’m pretty clued up on small publishers, there are still two here which are completely new to me (Dar Arab and Turas). There is always something more to discover.

Sterling Karat Gold is the only nominee I’ve reviewed to date. I was expecting it to be longlisted, and it would be a worthy winner… But I’m excited to see what the rest of the list is like.

I’m planning to take a more relaxed approach to reading along with the Prize this year – in the past, I’ve tried getting through entire longlists before the shortlist announcement, and doing that hardly ever makes it more enjoyable. I am also trying this year to be more selective about the books I review on here, so I won’t necessarily review the whole longlist even if I manage to read all of it. That way, I hope I can get the most out of the experience (and give you some interesting posts to read!).

Congratulations to all the longlisted publishers, authors and translators! Now, let’s get reading…

And Other Stories: Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs by Gerald Murnane

15th February 2022 / / 2 Comments

My introduction to Gerald Murnane was his debut novel Tamarisk Row, which I loved for the way it depicted childhood imagination and the sense of strangeness hidden within the everyday. Murnane’s 2005 essay collection Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs came as part of my And Other Stories subscription, and it has proven an ideal follow-up to Tamarisk Row. I’ve valued it for the chance to spend time in the author’s world. 

The essays in this collection gave me some insight into how Murnane perceives the world. For example, the young protagonist of Tamarisk Row would imagine whole worlds in the abstract patterns of light through glass. It came as no surprise to discover that, when Murnane played horse-racing games with marbles, he would focus on the patterns created out of each small movement. He also mentions a liking of charts and diagrams: some of his essays feel like diagrams put into words, as they circle back over images and memories. 

Murnane’s writing often seems to return to landscapes, but landscapes of the mind, imagined grasslands or plains. As he puts it in ‘Birds of the Puszta‘:

Plains looked simple but were not so. The grass leaning in the wind was all that could be seen of plains, but under the grass were insects and spiders and frogs and snakes – and ground-dwelling birds. I thought of plains whenever I wanted to think of something unremarkable at first sight but concealing much of meaning. And yet plains deserved, perhaps, not to be inspected closely. A pipit, crouched over its eggs in the shadow of a tussock, was the colour of dull grass. I was a boy who delighted in finding what was meant to remain hidden, but I was also a boy who liked to think of lost kingdoms.

Murnane’s work keeps evoking for me a sense of “lost kingdoms”, imaginative spaces hidden just out of sight. When I finished Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, I had been changed by it: when I looked around at the world, something felt different. 

Daunt Books: Inheritance by Dani Shapiro

8th February 2022 / / 0 Comments

This year Ninja Book Box are offering a subscription of indie-published memoirs. I don’t read that many memoirs, so I thought this would be a good chance to try something different. I didn’t know which books I was going to get, but I very much enjoyed this first one. It’s published by Daunt Books. 

American writer Dani Shapiro was born into a large Orthodox Jewish family, and this culture is in her bones, though people have often commented that she doesn’t look Jewish. Shapiro is in her fifties when her husband Michael suggests she join him in taking a DNA test through a genealogy website. She thinks nothing of it, but the results reveal that she cannot be biologically related to her father. 

Shapiro’s parents are no longer alive, but she recalls an offhand comment from her mother that she, Dani, was “conceived in Philadelphia”. Her mother said she had been travelling there for tests relating to artificial insemination. Further research reveals that, at the time, sperm from the prospective father would be mixed with those from other donors, often medical students. With some investigation, Shapiro is able to identify ‘her’ donor – and decides to make contact. 

Inheritance is then the story of how Shapiro is forced to reconfigure her long-held notions of family and identity. She tries to find out just what her family knew about the circumstances of her conception, and wonders if she can make a connection with her new-found biological relations. 

I appreciate that Shapiro doesn’t try to resolve any of these issues definitively – they’re too complex for that. Rather, this book is account of the author coming to terms with the issues for herself. I found Inheritance compelling as the story unfolded to begin with, and it kept my interest to the very end. 

More reviews from #ReadIndies 2022

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