At 86, Guadeloupe-born Maryse Condé is the oldest author ever to be longlisted for the International Booker Prize. She says The Gospel According to the New World will be her last book, though it’s my first time reading her. I did wonder whether I was missing out somewhat in terms of not knowing about the themes and concerns across her work that led to this point, but I enjoyed my time with this book nonetheless.
Condé’s protagonist is Pascal, who is born in Martinique to a woman named Maya. Burdened by dreams that say her son will change the world, Maya abandons him at Easter, leaving him at the home of a couple who own a nursery (for plants) called the Garden of Eden.
Pascal’s life is then a parody of the gospels. He heads off in search of his origins , with rumours following him that he might be a new son of God. There are disciples, not-so-miraculous miracles, even a strange figure who might be an angel.
With everything he sees going on, Pascal begins to wonder: if he is to be a messiah, what is he “expected to do with this world streaked with bomb attacks and scarred with violence?” Then again, maybe the mantle of saviour doesn’t suit him anyway. Pascal’s story is told in a storyteller’s voice, the translation capturing that sense of truth in imagination.
For ten years now I’ve been part of the Shadow Panel reading along with the International Booker Prize (and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize before it). Over that time, my reading horizons have broadened considerably, and the Shadow Panel played a key part in that. I always look forward to this time of year.
The 2023 longlist was announced on Tuesday, and here it is:
Ninth Building by Zou Jingzhi, translated from Chinese by Jeremy Tiang (Honford Star)
Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan, translated from Korean by Chi-Young Kim (Europa Editions)
Boulder by Eva Baltasar, translated from Catalan by Julia Sanches (And Other Stories)
So far, I’ve only read two of them (both striking pieces of work, in very different ways), so there is a lot to get through in the weeks ahead. I will try my best to read and review as much as I can, because I am intrigued by this list.
Today I’m joining the blog tour for this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize, which is awarded to writers in English who are aged under forty. This post looks at one of the longlisted titles, Losing the Plot, the second novel by Derek Owusu.
Losing the Plot is inspired by the journey of Owusu’s mother from Ghana to the UK. We get a sense of the impetus for this book from its epilogue, in which the narrator Kwesi conducts a “factless interview” with his mother – factless because she’s reluctant to answer his questions about her life in any sort of detail.
This means that Kwesi has to stretch his imagination in writing about his mother, leading to an account that’s fragmented and impressionistic, shifting between prose and poetry. Through this, there is a keen sense of the displacement felt by Kwesi’s mother. For instance:
She lifts her head, towel for tresses, watches as snakes of steam dance and fight to rise and fall,
condensing, dripping, drops dying and spreading,
reminding her tears cling to the face to live a little longer.
She brushes her teeth out of time with her reflection,
watches suds touch the porcelain prefering the scrub and ease of a chewing stick.
One striking aspect of Losing the Plot is its use of marginal notes. The mother’s account includes words and phrases in Twi, which come with their own sidenotes. Rather than provide a direct translation, Kwesi uses these notes to give his own observations. For example, one note begins like this:
Honestly, certain insults can’t even be translated and put into context that makes sense, you just have to feel the vim of the insult and know it’s devastating and it’s all gonna end with a scrap. Bro, I know this because I’ve seen it with my own eyes. She’s bare small so I didn’t even clock she can fight.
So, it seems the sidenotes are there not so much to open a door for the reader, as to help Kwesi bring himself closer to the story he’s trying to tell. In reading Losing the Plot, we are confronted by the limits of what we can and can’t know about another person’s life. It also becomes clear that there is an urgent reason for this story to be told, and together these help give Owusu’s novel its power.
Book published by Canongate. The shortlist for this year’s Dylan Thomas Prize will be announced on 23 March, with the winner to follow on 11 May.
The (unnamed) narrator of Eva Aldea’s debut novel admires her greyhounds while they’re chasing after squirrels:
…it is the flutter of a furry tail above the grass that sets them off, from still to leaping in no time at all, paws thundering like hooves on the ground – she loves that sound, feels it in her chest through her own feet. She loves the sight of their bodies in flight, the double suspension rotary gallop, only sighthounds and cheetahs hunt by this fastest and most explosive of gaits, where the body is in touch with the ground only a quarter of the time. The rest is spent flying.
In this opening scene, one of the dogs has got lucky, and the woman has to put the squirrel out of its misery. This is a gruesome little episode that doesn’t fit neatly into the woman’s life as a university lecturer. It sets the tone for a novel that explores what darkness might lurk beneath the everyday.
In the main part of the novel, the woman’s banker husband has moved them from London to Singapore. At first, it seems as though life there will be idyllic, but the shortcomings soon become apparent. It’s too hot even for the dogs to enjoy their walks, and the narrator is disconcerted by the distorting effects of globalisation (such as coffee grown nearby, sent halfway across the world to be packaged, then back to Singapore).
The woman essentially ends up as an affluent expat housewife, which is tedious and puts her high up in a hierarchy where she doesn’t want to be. These frustrations lead her to give free rein to her darkest thoughts, and it’s written in a way that blurs the line between reality and imagination. This is what makes Singapore such a striking debut.
Who is Fatima Daas? Both a pseudonym and the main character of this novel. Fatima-of-the-novel is the ‘last one’ in her family, the only one born in France rather than Algeria, the third daughter her parents may not even have wanted.
I started with that question because the whole book represents Fatima’s reckoning with her self, the different parts of her identity. All of the chapters bar one begin with a declaration of her name and go on to depict an aspect of her experience, in writing that often echoes the rhythms of a prayer:
My name is Fatima.
I seek stability.
Because it’s hard to always be on the outside looking in, looking at people, never with them, your life passing you by, everything passing you by.
Translation from french by lara vergnaud
Within the pages of this book, we see Fatima as a daughter who feels she doesn’t belong in her mother’s kitchen; as a people-watcher on the train from the suburbs into Paris; as someone who lives with asthma. She’s a lesbian and a Muslim, and is searching for a way to reconcile the two. She enjoys the experience of visiting her family in Algeria, but still ultimately feels like a tourist.
All these different aspects of Fatima’s life jostle together in The Last One. By the end, there’s a sense that she is on the way to working things through and finding a place for herself.
The thought that kept returning to me as I read this book was: I don’t really know what I’m reading here, but I know I like it. Reading a few other reviews of Whale online has helped me to see it as a dance through recent Korean history, examining military dictatorship and the rise of capitalism through the stories of a few individuals.
I say ‘stories’ deliberately, because there’s a certain fairytale atmosphere to Cheon Myeong-kwan’s novel, with its hazy passage of time and the just-so tone of its narration (really well evoked in Chi-Young Kim’s translation).
The principal character is Geumbok, a woman from the mountains whose fortunes rise, fall, and rise again, until eventually she builds her own movie theatre in the shape of a whale. Geumbok’s story is intertwined with that of her daughter Chunhui, large and immensely strong, a brilliant brickmaker, unable to speak – except with an elephant whom she befriends.
There is great trauma and violence in Whale, but also moments of humour and touches of magic. This book is a kaleidoscope of interlocking stories, all painted larger than life.
The publisher links above go to the publishers’ specific pages on each book.
I’ve taken a look at the time I realistically have, and decided that I’m not going to read along with the Prize this year – all ten is just too much for me. But I will see what piques my interest, and hopefully manage to read a few in the weeks ahead. Congratulations to all the nominees!
Is it really so long since I read Brodeck’s Report? I haven’t read Philippe Claudel nearly enough. His latest book in English translation is a cycle of five stories set in 20th century German, exploring themes of history, memory and complicity.
The opening ‘Ein Mann’ sets the tone. It sees a German soldier abandoning his post. We don’t know his name, and the landscape through which he travels is also largely anonymous. He’s been an unthinking cog in the machinery of the Nazi regime: “Was he guilty? Guilty of having obeyed? Or guilty of not having disobeyed? All he had done was follow. Did that make him less responsible than the others?”
Now that he sees what he has participated in, he wants to get away – he’s not really thinking about where, as long as it’s somewhere else. The ending of the story suggests, however, that he can’t outrun the past.
Recurring throughout the book is the name of Viktor, who may or may not be the same character each time, but always seems to have been an active participant in atrocity. In ‘Ein Mann,’ he’s in charge of the soldier’s concentration camp. In ‘Irma Grese’, though, he’s an old man in a care home in the 1990s, albeit with a past in the regime.
Irma herself is a girl who’s been given a job in the care home, part of which is specifically to look after Viktor, who happens to be the mayor’s father. Irma resents the job, and resents the pitiful Viktor. She takes out her frustrations on him by eating his food and mistreating him other ways. In an inversion of ‘Ein Mann’, the Viktor of ‘Irma Grese’ is victim rather than oppressor now. But, as Irma will find, there are no real winners in these stories, not in the face of the cruelty that flows through the book.
Elsewhere, Claudel explores the fallibility of memory. In ‘Sex und Linden’, an 90-year-old man looks back on his adolescence, and a time when he was seduced by a beautiful woman who kept whispering another man’s name (‘Viktor’, as it happens). It all sounds a bit too good to be true, and along with the man’s happy memory is a sense that the golden past can’t be recaptured, if it was there in the first place.
‘Die Kleine’ is the story of a young Jewish girl who has been rescued from a concentration camp, and taken to start a new life in a new household. She pictures the elements of her old life wrapped up in a handkerchief, but this memory is precarious. First, she recalls the old elements in a different way each time. Later, they start to lose their vibrancy:
The handkerchief, folded and tidied away in her brain, held many things but they were things that no longer moved, the way that clothes that have lost the bodies that used to inhabit them still keep a trace of their shape and their smells, but not much. Everything the little girl kept in the handkerchief reminded her of what had happened before, and over there. But over there was gone. There was only here.
The story which I found to lay down the greatest challenge to the reader was ‘Gnadentod’ – not in the sense of ‘difficulty’ but in its degree of confrontation. In this story, Claudel imagines a version of history in which the German artist Franz Marc did not die in 1916 at Verdun, but was instead placed in an asylum and subjected to a ‘mercy killing’ (to translate the story’s title) by the Nazis in 1940 due to his mental health.
Then again, maybe that’s just the official line. In one startling sequence, Claudel has Marc’s real-life biographer defending his scholarship in the face of the story’s prevailing fiction. This is a stark experience because we’re seeing fake history being created before our eyes and paraded as the truth.
In various ways throughout German Fantasia, Claudel illustrates how history and memory can be distorted (deliberately or otherwise). He also suggests that his characters are caught in the shadow of German history, no matter where or when they are.
A Happy New Year to you! I’m starting 2023 on the blog with an obscure classic that took me by surprise…
Gertrude Trevelyan published eight novels before she died tragically young in 1941, from injuries incurred when her home was bombed in the Blitz. She fell into obscurity, but a few years ago her work was rediscovered by Brad Bigelow of the Neglected Books Page. This led eventually to her debut novel, 1932’s Appius and Virginia, being reissued. It’s the story of a woman who raises an orang-utan as a human child, and from that description, I was expecting to be rather whimsical. It really isn’t.
Virginia Hutton is on her own aged 40 and frustrated with life. She decides to conduct an experiment to see if an ape can be nurtured into humanity. This is her chance to leave a mark:
All her will power, all her suggestive force, her whole reserve of nervous and mental energy, was not too much to expend on this experiment. For If it succeeded she would indeed have achieved something. She would have created a human being out of purely animal material, have forced evolution to cover in a few years stages which unaided it would have taken aeons to pass…
Virginia buys a young orang-utan, names him Appius, and retreats from London to the countryside to set about her task. It isn’t easy, because Appius experiences the world on a much more abstract level than Virginia, and often he doesn’t understand what she’s trying to tell him, or why she does what she does. But eventually, Appius gains skills such as rudimentary speech and the ability to read, and Virginia feels she’s making progress. Oh, what a future she imagines for Appius – and herself:
She saw him, in Eton suit and shining collar, bowing over an armful of gilt and crimson tomes while the oak-panelled hall resounded with discrete, kid-gloved applause. She saw herself in the front row, surrounded by secretly envious parents and gratified masters, clapping shyly, blushing a little at this honour paid to her big boy, doing him credit by her clothes, her sleight figure, her youthful but not too girlish appearance.
Key to Virginia’s approach, though, is keeping Appius unaware of his true animal nature. There are times when this breaks through despite her best efforts, and the whole reading experience becomes something much rawer, elemental. The unbridgeable gap between Appius and Virginia becomes more apparent as the novel reaches a higher pitch – until the ending, which gives me chills just thinking back on it.
If 2022 has taught me anything with regard to reading, it’s that I shouldn’t bother with firm reading plans! Over the year, I was a little frustrated that I couldn’t seem to get into my usual reading routine. I also had a sense that some of my reading cornerstones (such as the Goldsmiths Prize) weren’t chiming with me as they usually did. Whether that’s just a blip or a broader change in my taste, I’ll gain a better idea next year.
Whatever the case, I still read some grand books this year. Here is my usual informal countdown of the dozen that have flourished most in my mind:
12. Faces in the Crowd (2011) by Valeria Luiselli Translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (2014)
My chance to catch up on a book I’ve long wanted to read, and it was worth the wait. A young woman’s life in Mexico City contrasts with her old life in New York, and with the novel she’s writing, and the life of the poet she’s writing about… Different, blurred layers of reality make this such a rush to read.
11. Standing Heavy (2014) by GauZ’ Translated from French by Frank Wynne (2022)
A novel about the changing experiences of Ivorian security guards in Paris, Standing Heavy is intriguingly pared back in its form. Three story-chapters capture the movement of history around the characters, and more fragmented observations deepen one’s sense of the book’s world. This is a short novel with a lot to say.
10. The Sky Above the Roof (2019) by Nathacha Appanah Translated from French by Geoffrey Strachan (2022)
This was a fine example of how a novel’s brevity can bring a distinctive atmosphere to familiar subject matter. Appanah focuses on a young man who’s been apprehended after a road crash, as well as his sister and mother – all three of them ill at ease with the world. This novel has an intensity that might easily be diluted in a longer work.
9. The Proof (1988) and The Third Lie (1991) by Ágota Kristóf Translated from French by David Watson (1991) and Marc Romano (1996)
These two novels follow on from Kristóf’s The Notebook: I read them together, and they belong together here. Kristóf’s trilogy tells of two brothers displaced by war. There’s great trauma in the background, but emotions are kept distant. Geography and time are also flattened out, adding to the feeling of being trapped. The trilogy progressively undermines any sense of understanding the truth of what happened to the brothers, and therein lies its power for me.
8. Love (1997) by Hanne Ørstavik Translated from Norwegian by Martin Aitken (2018)
This novel is about a mother and son who live in the same space yet still in their own worlds. That theme is strikingly reflected in the writing, as the two characters’ stories merge into and out of each other repeatedly. Often, the pair seem closest emotionally when they’re separated physically. The ending is sharp and poignant.
7. The Sons of Red Lake (2008) by Zhou Daxin Translated from Chinese by Thomas Bray and Haiwang Yuan (2022)
Breaking the run of short, spare novels is a longer one that I enjoyed taking my time over. A woman returns to her childhood village, falls back in love with her childhood sweetheart, and finds her fortunes changing for better and worse. Zhou’s novel explores the effects of tourism and the temptations of power. I found it engrossing.
Some of the best writing I read all year was in this book. It’s a novel following the life of an African American woman from Chicago. She has aspirations for herself, but the reality turns out to be rather mixed. In the end, I found hope in Maud Martha, as its snapshot structure opened up possibilities beyond the final page.
5. Life Ceremony (2019) by Sayaka Murata Translated from Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori (2022)
I’m not sure that anyone combines the innocuous and strange quite like Sayaka Murata. This story collection is typically striking, using larger-than-life situations to explore basic questions of what we value and how we relate to each other. Perhaps most of all, Murata puts her readers in the position of her characters, so we see them differently as a result.
4. Mothers Don’t (2019) by Katixa Agirre Translated from Basque by Kristin Addis (2022)
Few books that I read this year made such an immediate impression as this one. Agirre’s narrator tries to understand why another woman killed her children, while trying to come to terms with her own feelings about motherhood. Contradictions abound and nothing is reconciled, and this is what drives the novel – not to mention its vivid prose.
Russell Hoban was my discovery of the year, someone I know I’ll read again. Turtle Diary is the story of two lonely characters linked only by a wish to set free the sea turtles at London Zoo. I really appreciated the ambivalence of Hoban’s novel, the way that saving the turtles in itself isn’t enough to fill the hole in the characters’ lives. I simply haven’t read anything quite like this book before.
I loved this novel exploring the ramifications of new technology. Morgan imagines the development of a matter transporter and, step by step, puts humanity’s relationship with it under scrutiny. What is perhaps most chilling is the way that everything just trundles on, away from the people actually experiencing this technology. Appliance provides a welcome space for reflection.
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1. Cursed Bunny (2021) by Bora Chung Translated from Korean by Anton Hur (2021)
At the top of the tree this year is a story collection that grabbed my attention from the first page and never let go. Some of the stories are strange and creepy, others more like fairy tales. Many are built around powerful metaphors that deepen the intensity of the fiction. It’s all held together by Chung’s distinctive voice, in that wonderful translation by Anton Hur. I look forward to reading more of Chung’s work in the future.
With that, I will leave you until 2023. In the meantime, you can also find me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Mastodon – and I’ll see you back here next year.
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