Author: David Hebblethwaite

Just Call Me Superhero: into the unknown

18th August 2015 / / 0 Comments

If To Mervas is a novel of moving from inside to outside and back again, Alina Bronsky’s Just Call Me Superhero (translated from the German by Tim Mohr) is one of crossing into unfamiliar worlds. It begins with our narrator, Marek, arriving at what he thinks will be a tutorial to help him pass his high school diploma – only to find that his mother has actually sent him to a support group for disabled people. Marek was disfigured after being attacked by a Rottweiler, but he wants nothing to do with any sort of disability group – until, that is, he spots the beautiful Janne sitting there in her wheelchair.

One of the first things I began to notice about Just Call Me Superhero was how tightly controlled was the flow of information about Marek– for instance, we never learn the full story of his disfigurement. We are firmly in the ‘here and now’ of Marek’s life; there is a clear sense of going only as far into his world as he will allow. That’s what it’s like for Marek with the disability group (particularly the frosty reception he gets from Janne), though there’s also reluctance on his part to enter the group and open himself to them.

Bronsky’s novel is effectively structured into two halves, with Marek taking reluctant steps into two of these unfamiliar spheres. In the first half, it’s the disability group; in the second, it is the family of his father, who eloped with the au pair and had a son whom Marek barely knows. Bronsky draws intriguing parallels between the two groups, and one question hangs above all: is there a family for Marek, among all these people?

Book details (Foyles affiliate link)

Just Call Me Superhero (2013) by Alina Bronsky, tr. Tim Mohr (2014), Europa Editions paperback

Read more of my posts for Women in Translation Month.

To Mervas: inside/outside

17th August 2015 / / 0 Comments

This August, Meytal from Biblibio is once again hosting Women in Translation Month; and now – albeit later than I hoped – I can join in. The first book I’ve read for this is To Mervas by Elisabeth Rynell (translated from the Swedish by Victoria Häggblom). What I want to talk about here is how R moves between, and reflects, ideas of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.

Rynell’s protagonist is Marta, whose diary-within-the-novel begins as she has received a letter from Kosti, her lover of years ago, who says he’s in the remote northern town of Mervas (which, as far as I can tell, is fictional). The whole of the novel’s first part is written as Marta’s diary, and it reveals just how much she has withdrawn into herself, having grown up in a violent household and faced the death of her son.

Marta decides to travel to Mervas and find Kosti; her journey begins in the novel’s second part, and is written in the third person. Suddenly we’re thrown into the outside, both in terms of the backdrop to the action, and the vantage point from which we view Marta. The effect of this is the dazzle of stepping out into daylight.

The third part returns to Marta’s diary, and by now she’s reached Mervas. In this section, inside and outside bleed into each other: Marta’a first-person voice symbolically gains the confidence/authority to narrate her journey through the world; and her time in Mervas becomes a kinetic means for her to address what’s holding her back. Marta has been brought out of herself, and now she can return.

Book details (publisher link)

To Mervas (2002) by Elizabeth Rynell, tr. Victoria Häggblom (2010), Archipelago paperback

Morvern Callar: the strangeness of ordinary lives

16th August 2015 / / 0 Comments

A nonchalant reaction to her partner’s dead body wasn’t the half of it. Morvern Callar gets ever more unsettling: the protagonist takes full advantage of the sudden windfall she receives from her partner’s bequest, eschewing her supermarket job for a holiday in Spain, and submitting his draft novel to publishers under her own name. Some of the things that Morvern does are more understandable than others; but they all need rationalising after the fact, because she’s in no hurry to explain herself to us.

What I find particularly striking about Warner’s novel is the way that it highlights how strange an ordinary life may appear to those observing it from outside. Morvern refers to her friends and acquaintances by an array of nicknames: entirely natural to her, of course – as it would be to us in her position – but bewildering when you don’t have the key. The whole sense of Morvern Callar is that a secret world of connections and history likes just over there, if only we could reach it.

Book details (Foyles affiliate link)

Morvern Callar (1995) by Alan Warner, Vintage Classics paperback

Too soon to be a classic?

15th August 2015 / / 8 Comments

One thought that occurs to me reading the Vintage Classics edition of Morvern Callar: is twenty years too soon to call a book a classic? (Granted, in this case ‘classic’ is more a marketing term than a critical evaluation, but the question remains.)

I don’t have a straightforward answer. On the one hand, my instinct is to say that the term ‘classic’ implies a book old enough to have survived being tested by the years, and twenty years is not old in literary terms. On the other hand, I very much liked Morvern Callar, and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it. If a ‘classics’ imprint can look at a certain period in time and say, ‘these books are worth reading now’, I find it hard to begrudge that.

Morvern Callar: first impressions

14th August 2015 / / 0 Comments

Vintage have reissued five Scottish novels as Vintage Classics, to mark the twentieth anniversary of Alan Warner’s debut, Morvern Callar. The publishers were kind enough to send me a set, and I thought I’d start with the anniversary book itself.

At the start of the novel, Morvern Callar discovers that her boyfriend (to whom she refers as ‘Him’) has killed himself. Straight away, I was reminded of how the simplest sentences can do the strangest things:

I came back towards the scullery then took a running jump over the dead body. The sink was full of dishes so I had to give them all a good rinse. The face was by my bare foot. I fitted the kettle spout under the tap. Then I put my underwear over the spout  and tugged the elastic round the sides. When the kettle boiled I put the warm knickies on. I jumped back over Him ready to throw the kettle away, after all you don’t want to scald your legs.

The whole opening sequence is like this: a sequence of (mostly) straightforward actions, described quite plainly. But, of course, it raises questions – most of all, why is Morvern so calm in the face of this apparently sudden tragedy? Already, Warner has drawn me in.

Book details (Foyles affiliate link)

Morvern Callar (1995) by Alan Warner, Vintage Classics paperback

Re-reading Lucy Wood

13th August 2015 / / 5 Comments

My book group chose Lucy Wood’s collection Diving Belles for this month, which gave me a welcome excuse to re-read it. I enjoyed it even more the second time around, and – having read Weathering quite recently – gained a greater appreciation of Wood’s approach in general.

By coincidence, Max Cairnduff reviewed Diving Belles the other week; like me, he loved it (I wasn’t surprised, as we tend to have quite similar taste in books). One of his comments that I found particularly interesting was that, even though the metaphors in Wood’s stories aren’t the subtlest, he was more forgiving of this than he’d usually be.

Thinking about this in the broader context of Wood’s work, I am struck that her fiction inhabits a space where metaphor becomes interchangeable with action and landscape. She can get away with using broad metaphors, because they are the foundation of her work, rather than its end-point. To borrow an expression from Ethan Robinson,  magic is a ‘living presence’ in Wood’s stories; this is a key quality that draws me to her work, and why it continues to haunt me.

Book details (Foyles affiliate links)

Diving Belles (2012) by Lucy Wood, Bloomsbury paperback

Weathering (2015) by Lucy Wood, Bloomsbury hardback

Welcome to David’s Book World 2.0

9th August 2015 / / 4 Comments

Hello, and welcome to the new version of my blog – now with its very own domain.

All the old content is here, but my intention from now on is to blog in more of a ‘notebook’ style – blogging more from the ‘front end’ of reading, rather than looking back over my shoulder at what I’ve read.

I am still experimenting with the different plugins and features available on this new platform, but for now, please update your bookmarks and blogrolls.

Finally – and as always – thank you for reading.

Moving on…

31st July 2015 / / 1 Comment

For Life-related reasons, there’s now going to be a (hopefully) short hiatus in blogging. A time like this naturally leads me to reflect on what I’m doing with this blog and why (as it happens, I’m not the only person to be thinking about these sorts of issues lately – see these posts by Jonathan McCalmont, Abigail Nussbaum, and Maureen Kincaid Speller). It’s not all that long since I decided to change my approach to reading, but it never occurred to me to change my approach to blogging. This time is different.

We all know that the world of book blogging has changed. The personal text-based blog is falling out of favour as a medium, not helped by technological changes such as the decline in RSS. Social media has become the key way for people to discover new book-related content; but its random nature means that the process often feels like starting from scratch with each new post. In these circumstances, certain types of content stand a better chance of being heard: focus on the latest buzz titles or something that’s already popular – or say something controversial – and you have a head start.

Now, sometimes the latest buzz title and I get along; but mostly I find myself as a reader moving in a different direction. I say this not to grumble, but rather to acknowledge the context I’m in. If the book blogging world is not the same as it was when I started, it’s worth asking: is what I’m doing the best thing I could be doing to achieve what I want?

Well, what I really want is to explore how and why I respond to particular books, and (as far as it’s possible) to have conversations about it. Despite everything, a written blog still feels like the best medium for the job. Tweets are too short; Facebook is too general; Tumblr always seems better for contextualising images; a YouTube channel feels to me more appropriate for ‘finished’ thoughts. There might be fewer conversations on blogs these days, but it’s still the right medium for me.

However… my responses to books on the blog have tended to be review-shaped, because that’s what I’ve always done. But perhaps they don’t need to be. Taking inspiration in particular from Time’s Flow Stemmed. I’m thinking of switching to more of a ‘reader’s notebook’ format, to reflect the nature of reading as an ongoing process. For example, instead of writing 950 words on The Wandering Pine, I might have done three or four blog posts, each focused on a single idea – one on the book’s depiction of childhood, one on the significance of the English and Swedish titles, and so on. A blog as a continuous series of thoughts, if you like.

I’ll still write longer reviews on the blog, where it feels appropriate; but I want to try something different and see how it goes (I have some other ideas for types of blog post, but am still thinking them through). There’s also a good chance that I’ll take the opportunity to move the blog elsewhere. Either way, I’d like to thank you for reading, and I’ll see you again in a week or so.

Miranda July, The First Bad Man (2015)

28th July 2015 / / 1 Comment

MJulyOne of the words that I’ve seen bandied around in newspaper reviews of Miranda July’s novel is ‘quirky’. I can see where this view is coming from, but there are two main problems with it: one is that it’s inherently dismissive (as July herself puts it, it makes her sound like a little girl); the other is that it overlooks the specifics of what the novel actually does.

July’s narrator is fortysomething Cheryl Glickman, who works for a self-defence training company named Open Palm. She has eyes for Phillip, a colleague twenty years her senior; and imagines that certain young children she sees are Kubelko Bondy, a baby she was sent to play with once when she was nine. When Cheryl agrees to have her employers’ twenty-year-old daughter Clee move in, her careful household routine is disrupted – and things change even more when Clee becomes pregnant.

There’s a lot of artifice in the characters’ lives, but it seems to me that this is often a defence mechanism. Cheryl has worked out a system at home for streamlining day-to-day busywork, but the sense is that really it’s an excuse for disengaging. She goes to see a chromotherapist who rents an office for three days of the year, then makes an appointment with a psychologist who uses that office the rest of the time, and turns out to have been acting as the chromotherapist’s receptionist. When Cheryl overhears a conversation between the two, it reveals what a front they’ve been putting up.

The ‘first bad man’ of the title is not a character in the novel as such, but a figure in one of Open Plan’s DVD scenarios, a role taken on by Clee when she and Cheryl act the scenario out. This is an example of how relationships between the characters become performances. Another is Cheryl’s fantasies of Phillip mid-novel, where the lines between reality and imagination blur. Then there’s complicated dance of a relationship between Cheryl and Clee later on. In all, The First Bad Man is quite a powerful novel, whose characters’ eccentricities are central to creating that power.

See also

Reviews of The First Bad Man by Naomi Frisby at The Writes of Woman, and John Self at Asylum.

A round-up of recent reading

25th July 2015 / / 1 Comment

A few notes on some of the books I’ve read lately…

EclipticBenjamin Wood, The Ecliptic (2015)

Benjamin Wood’s first novel, The Bellwether Revivals, explored themes of creativity and obsession. He returns to those themes, and takes them further, in The Ecliptic. We first meet Elspeth Conroy in the 1970s at Portmantle, an invitation-only refuge for artists who have become creatively blocked. The arrival of a mysterious teenage musician leads Elspeth’s past to catch up with her – a past we delve into, learning of her development as a painter, and how she ended up going to Portmantle. There’s a running theme of creativity becoming an all-consuming force in artists’ lives, a theme which gains its most powerful expression late in the novel, in quite an unexpected way. I’ll let you find out the rest for yourself…

Irenosen Okojie, Butterfly Fish (2015)

Published by Jacaranda, Irenosen Okojie’s debut is a kaleidoscopic novel which focuses primarily on Joy, who is trying to cope with the death of her mother Queenie. The figure of a mysterious woman appears in Joy’s life and photographs, and Joy finds herself fascinated by a bronze warrior’s head that belonged to her mother. Okojie weaves in other narrative strands, including one set in 19th century Benin, Nigeria (from where the bronze bust originates), and one examining Queenie’s arrival in London from Nigeria in the 1960s. Parallels and connections emerge, forming Butterfly Fish into an intriguing whole.

Raymond Jean, Reader for Hire (1986)
Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter (2015)

The second in Periene’s Chance Encounter series, and rather different in tone from White Hunger. At a friend’s suggestion, Marie-Constance places an advert in the paper, offering to read aloud to others in their own home. Her first client is a disabled boy named Eric; after she reads him a rather macabre section of a Maupassant short story, Eric is disproportionately affected, scared out of his wits. Marie-Constance has this ability, to evoke the deep effect of what she reads in her listeners – as she and others increasingly discover. The prose of Reader for Hire reflects this: the viewpoint stays close to Marie-Constance, so the book begins and ends with her life as a reader; and it feels quite sharply episodic, each chapter its own little story. All in all, a charming celebration of reading.

Hawthorn

Melissa Harrison, At Hawthorn Time (2015)

At Hawthorn Time is, first and foremost, a novel of the modern English countryside: its chapters are headed with field notes, and images of the rural landscape run through its pages. Though the eye of narrative may be focused upon human characters, there is always the sense that they are defined by their interactions with the countryside. Melissa Harrison’s four main characters have different relationships with the country: Jack, a former radical protester, wanders across the land, both in close connection to it and yet somehow apart. Young Jamie is the rural native struggling with the realities of trying to make a living. Howard and Kitty are the urban incomers, whose marriage frays at the seams as they try to find their place. Their lives intertwine with each other and the landscape, heading towards the tragedy that, from the beginning, we know has been coming.

Jonathan Pinnock, Take It Cool (2014)

The last book I read by Jonathan Pinnock was a story collection, Dot Dash. This one is different – a non-fiction account of the author’s search for a reggae singer named Dennis Pinnock. The chapters rotate through three strands: Jonathan’s attempts to contact Dennis and the people who knew him; reviews of Dennis’s singles; and the author’s research into his own family history. Reading this book felt rather like eavesdropping, particularly as I don’t know much about reggae (I didn’t listen to any of the mentioned while I was reading, as I found it interesting to maintain that distance – I guess I can rectify that now). But Take It Cool tells an intriguing story, whatever your immediate interest in its subject matter. Published by Two Ravens Press.

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