Author: David Hebblethwaite

German Literature Month: Alina Bronsky

20th November 2013 / / 8 Comments

Alina Bronsky, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (2010)
Translated from the German by Tim Mohr, 2011

abI would call this book delightful, but that doesn’t seem quite the right word for a novel with such a splendidly awful protagonist, and which actually carries quite a bitter sting. I was taken with The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine from the first two paragraphs, so perhaps I’ll quote those:

As my daughter Sulfia was explaining that she was pregnant but that she didn’t know by whom, I paid extra attention to my posture. I sat with my back perfectly straight and folded my hands elegantly in my lap.

Sulfia was sitting on a kitchen stool. Her shoulders were scrunched up and her eyes were red; instead of simply letting her tears flow she insisted on rubbing them into her face with the backs of her hands. This despite the fact that when she was still a child I had taught her how to cry without making herself look ugly, and how to smilr without promising too much.

This voice belongs to one Rosa Achmetowna; already we get a sense of the kind of person she is: concerned about how she appears (which must be proper), and possessed of a very low opinion of her daughter.

What we see shortly after is that Rosa will go to extraordinary lengths to achieve her goals, and that she’ll change her attitude in a heartbeat if it suits her. Her first reaction to Sulfia’s pregnancy is to try to stop it; her folk remedies don’t work, but a knitting needle does the trick – except it turns out that Sulfia had twins, and one of them comes to term. Rosa is horrified at the thought of Sulfia having a child – until little Aminat is born, and proves (unlike Sulfia) to share her grandmother’s Tartar features. Aminat promptly becomes the apple of Rosa’s eye, so much so that Rosa thinks the girl would be better off with her than Sulfia.

Much of the humour in Alina Bronksy’s book comes from seeing just how far Rosa is prepared to go. For example, when Rosa is casting about trying to find Sulfia a good husband, she learns of a German man in a coma who’s been brought into the hospital where Sulfia works (Dieter Rossmann; “What a nice name!” says Rosa), she sees her chance, even entertaining the thought that Sulfia could tell him when he wakes up that the two of them are in a relationship, in case he’s lost his memory. Rosa is even more delighted to discover that Dieter is a journalist researching Tartar cuisine – until she finds out that he cooks himself, at which point she wants nothing more to do with him. That changes again when the prospect arises of the family being invited to move to Germany, where Rosa thinks they’ll have a much better life.

Rosa has a very clear image of herself and her worth: she always thinks that she’s the best looking, the best dressed – better than those around her. How much of what she does is for the good of her family, and how much for her own self-worth, is open to question; the two are so bound up with each other that perhaps there is no difference in Rosa’s mind. The real sting of the novel comes from seeing how Rosa’s view of herself doesn’t always correspond with reality. When her family makes it to Germany, Rosa gets a job as a cleaner; she’s very pleased at this, and suddenly we experience the jolt of recognition that Rosa’s high opinion of herself may not be as high as we thought.

This feeling of dissonance returns – though developing more slowly, and with a more melancholic undertone – as Rosa grows older, and starts to lose her grip on the world around her. If she was out to improve her family’s lot in life – well, that’s happened in some ways, but not in others. If she was out to improve her own, I suppose that has also happened, if not quite in a way Rosa would have anticipated. In other words, the outcome is a typically bittersweet jumble of life – but the book that chronicles it is a joy. Bronsky has one other novel in English, Broken Glass Park; you can be sure that it’s on my to-read list.

Elsewhere
Some other reviews of this book: Janet Potter for The Millions; Boston Bibliophile; Lizzy’s Literary Life; Leafing Through Life.

Granta Best Young British Novelists 2013: Ross Raisin

17th November 2013 / / 1 Comment

My Ross Raisin anecdote goes like this: I heard him read from his second novel, Waterline (during which he gamely affected a Glaswegian accent to match the narrator), at the first Penguin General Bloggers’ Night. We got talking afterwards, and I mentioned that we were from the same county – though, as an ardent supporter of Bradford City FC, he wasn’t best pleased to learn that I was from Huddersfield (all in good humour, though, I should add!).

Anyway, Raisin is one of the Granta novelists whom I’ve meant to read, but not yet got around to (I’ve heard such good things about God’s Own Country, I really must read it). ‘Submersion’ is a new and complete story to end the Granta anthology; it sees a pair of siblings heading back to their flooded home town when they see news footage of their father being carried away by the water, still sleeping in his armchair. It’s a strange story that floats on reality like debris caught in the flood. It underlines that I should read more of Raisin’s work – as is the case with a good number of the authors on Granta‘s list.

This is part of a series of posts on Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4. Click here to read the rest.

Granta Best Young British Novelists 2013: Sunjeev Sahota

17th November 2013 / / 2 Comments

It is just about a year since I read (and liked) Sunjeev Sahota’s first novel, Ours are the Streets; he’s another on my list of authors to keep reading. Sahota’s Granta piece, ‘Arrivals’, is taking from his forthcoming follow-up, The Year of the Runaways – and I think it works quite well as a stand-alone story.

We begin with one Randeep Sanghera showing a woman into her new flat in Sheffield; is he an estate agent, or perhaps her landlord? After seeing his living arrangements and work as a builder, we find that the truth is somewhat different – Randeep is one of several immigrants living in the same house, and the woman is who he married as a means of obtaining a visa. ‘Arrivals’ is an interesting set-up for the novel, but that’s what it feels like – a beginning. Still, Ours are the Streets worked best as a whole, and I suspect that The Year of the Runaways will be the same. I’m looking forward to finding out.

This is part of a series of posts on Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4. Click here to read the rest.

Granta Best Young British Novelists 2013: Jenni Fagan

16th November 2013 / / 3 Comments

Jenni Fagan‘s debut, The Panopticon has been staring at me from the shelf (what else would it do?) ever since I bought it last year, having heard so many good things about it. So ‘Zephyrs’, Fagan’s novel excerpt from the Granta anthology, is the first thing I’ve read of hers – and it really is superb. A short portrait of a man leaving London as the river levels rise, the piece is written in a dense, fractured prose that makes even quite ordinary things seem hallucinatory (in this I was reminded of Jon McGregor’s work, which is always a pleasure). It ends with a strange image: a woman doing housework, outside, in her sleep. I’m left wanting to know more, and to read more by this writer – perhaps it’s time to stop staring at The Panopticon, and open it instead.

This is part of a series of posts on Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4. Click here to read the rest.

German Literature Month: Bernhard Schlink

14th November 2013 / / 3 Comments

Bernhard Schlink, Summer Lies (2010)
Translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway, 2012

9781780220918I should say first of all that the only thing I knew about Bernhard Schlink prior to reading this story collection was that he wrote The Reader – and I haven’t read that novel, nor seen the film. So I came to Summer Lies pretty much cold.

I’d sum this book up as a collection of stories about loss. The protagonists tend to be middle-aged (usually men), generally successful, but often with the nagging sense that things are starting to slip (or have slipped) away. I like the title, Summer Lies, as a reflection of this: it could mean lies that last a golden season; or (and I don’t know if this pun works in the original German) that summer itself is lying – that the good things are not just transient, but in a sense were never really there at all.

I’m going to pick out two contrasting stories to illustrate Schlink’s approach. The writer protagonist of ‘The Night in Baden-Baden’ is either lying to himself or simply doesn’t care. As the story starts, he has taken Therese to Baden-Baden, to see the opening night of his first play. All well and good, except that Therese isn’t his girlfriend. His actual girlfriend, Anne, doesn’t like him seeing other women; he can’t understand why, and wonders why she doesn’t see that he’s bothered with all the travelling Anne does for her job as an academic. They’ve both chosen their paths in life, he reasons, so these are the consequences.

Our man is adept at justifying his actions to himself, and that includes withholding the truth from Anne (‘He wasn’t presenting anyone with a false picture.He was presenting sketches rather than pictures, and sketches aren’t false, because that’s all they are—sketches,’ p. 55). He’s not so good at comprehending why the two of them drift apart when Anne eventually finds out about Baden-Baden. Whatever he has lost by that happening… well, he’ll probably find something else to replace it. As a study of a quite obnoxious character, ‘The Night in Baden-Baden’ works well.

‘After the Season’ is the story of a holiday romance, a typical young lovers’ whirlwind – except these two are just either side of forty. Richard, a German flautist living in New York, meets Susan, a Los Angeles-based American who works for a theatre foundation. The pair bond over a shared love of music, and end up planning their future together, even though they know it can’t last.

Theirs is a romance born from the freedom of being away from their normal lives – so, when the time comes for them to return, the relationship can’t be sustained. Richard in particular doesn’t realise until that moment how much he is invested in his partnership with Susan; like the protagonist of ‘The Night in Baden-Baden’, he has either been fooling himself or willingly ignoring the truth – but, as he’s more open emotionally, Richard’s reaction is rather different. He is facing the sudden loss of summer, and is not prepared for the autumn.

Elsewhere
Read a story from the collection: ‘Johann Sebastian Bach on Ruegen’
Some other blogs on Summer Lies: Winstonsdad; Lizzy’s Literary Life; Julie Fisher for Bookmunch.

Granta Best Young British Novelists 2013: Helen Oyeyemi

13th November 2013 / / 2 Comments

The first taste I had of Helen Oyeyemi’s last novel, Mr Fox, was reading the embedded story ‘My Daughter the Racist’ on its own. So I’m prepared to accept that any given extract from an Oyeyemi novel is not necessarily going to represent the whole thing. A little digging around into her forthcoming Boy, Snow, Bird suggests that it’s based on the tale of Snow White – but this is only obliquely hinted in Oyeyemi’s Granta piece.

We are introduced to Boy Novak, a young bookstore-worker in mid-20th century America, who takes two teenage girls under her wing when they really ought to be at school. She lives with the Whitman family, which includes a six-year-old girl named Snow. I love the glimpses of Boy’s character that we get from her voice, and definitely look forward to a whole book narrated by her. There is the briefest hint of the supernatural at the end of Oyeyemi’s piece, with mention of a comics artist who appears to have an unusual view of time. The stage is set for another typically idiosyncratic novel Helen Oyeyemi, who’s become a writer I always want to read.

This is part of a series of posts on Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4. Click here to read the rest.

Sara Maitland, Moss Witch and Other Stories (2013)

12th November 2013 / / 0 Comments

mwaosOver the past few years, Comma Press has published a series of anthologies of stories written in consultation with scientists, including When It Changed (2009), Litmus (2011), and Bio-Punk (2012). Sara Maitland appeared in all three of those, and now we have Moss Witch, which collects fourteen of her stories, each inspired by a conversation with a scientist.

Although each tale in Moss Witch has grown from the seed of a particular scientific concept or piece of research, Maitland uses the science in a variety of ways across the collection. Sometimes she imagines an episode in a scientist’s biography, or somehow otherwise dramatises a significant development. An example of the latter is ‘How the Humans Learned to Speak’, which draws on Robin Dunbar’s work correlating brain size in primates to the size of social groups, and imagines the pressures that might have led to the first human speech. What makes the story so amusing is its playful tone (“Unlike hunting and gathering and learning your four times table, evolving takes a very long time”), and the way that Maitland gives her group of early humans a rather contemporary outlook.

‘The Metamorphosis of Mnemosyne’ has a more metaphorical take on its scientific material, as the Greek goddess of memory is dismissed from her post, and goes before the assembled pantheon to plead her case. Mnemosyne is concerned about changing views on the nature of memory (once thought to be akin to a recording, and now starting be seen as something we continually reconstruct), and what that means for her. Although the situation is comic, the story’s concerns are thought-provoking, and the ending wonderfully evocative.

Maitland goes further down the metaphorical route in ‘A Geological History of Feminism’, which elegantly dovetails plate tectonics and the development of the Women’s Movement. We meet young Tish, talking to her aunt Ann about the latter’s earlier life. Ann describes taking boat trips with her geologist uncle, who told her about the then-new idea that the ocean floor was not static, but instead made up of several slowly-moving plates. As Ann puts it: “nothing is quite stable, nothing is fixed” – which is the same kind of thinking that led to her pinching her brother’s boat when he wouldn’t give her the money to do her own research (because he thought “geology wasn’t ladylike”). We feel Ann’s sense of exhilaration as new possibilities open up in her life; but that turns into a certain sense of resignation as time passes further (“We didn’t give up, Tish, we were ground down, pushed under, subducted”).

All of the stories in Moss Witch come with afterwords written by the scientists whom Maitland consulted. Some of these are just explaining the science behind the story; but the more interesting afterwords for me are those in which the scientist engages with Maitland’s work, and reflects on the interaction of their science and her art. My favourite one of all belongs to the last story in the book, ‘Dark Humour’. This is the tale of a scientist couple rekindling their relationship in a country cottage after she has returned from a stint working in Geneva. The banter between the two is splendidly sharp, and shows how far science has permeated their experience of living. At one point, he wonders out loud whether scientific phenomena could do with better, more poetic names; in the afterword, physicist Rob Appleby talks further about scientific nomenclature, and observes that science tells a story through its names:

“There is an elemental story at the bottom of it all, with a finite table of particles, or a finite cast of characters, if you will. We tell the story of our universe through these characters. Their names may change over time, but they are all part of the same story. So the names matter.”

In Moss Witch, the stories matter, and the science matters. That combination is a delight to explore.

Any Cop? Yes, especially if you’re interested in seeing science refracted in myriad ways through the prism of fiction.

(This review first appeared at Bookmunch.)

Granta Best Young British Novelists 2013: Xiaolu Guo

11th November 2013 / / 1 Comment

It is National Short Story Week, so this week’s posts are all about short fiction. This includes finishing off my story-by-story blog of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 4 anthology, which I’ve let fall by the wayside these last few months. I have fives entries left, so let’s get back to it…

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‘Interim Zone’ is an extract from Xiaolu Guo‘s forthcoming novel I Am China; on the basis of this, the new book is set to be rather different from Guo’s previous novel, UFO in Her Eyes. We meet Kublai Jian, a Chinese refugee in France, and see the contrast between his boyhood in Beijing, and his current life learning French. This piece is the shortest in the Granta anthology, perhaps a little too short for what it’s doing. Still, there’s an effective sense that Jian is in an ‘interim zone’ emotionally as well as physically; and the juxtaposition of past and present sets up an interesting theme that I imagine is explored further in the novel.

This is part of a series of posts on Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4. Click here to read the rest.

Sunday Story Society: ‘Nathalie’ by Catherine McNamara

10th November 2013 / / 0 Comments

sundaystorysmall

Sunday Story Society is a monthly review/book club feature where I write about a recent story that’s been published online, and  invite you to join in the discussion in the comments.

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Catherine McNamara’s story may be called ‘Nathalie’ (Bookanista, Oct 2013), but it as much (if not more) about Nathalie’s mother, Mona. We meet Mona at home in Ghana, waiting for Nathalie to arrive for one of her periodic visits:

She went out to smoke on the terrace, the city air a giant belch of open sewers and fried food, a gassy decomposition. Mona had seen travellers gag at the channels of waste snaking through the city. Where old women straddled and pissed, where a fallen coin might well have plopped into magma. But for her it was the most acute of honesties, the travails of the city were naked.

I like that description, both as a depiction of place, and for what it says about Mona: she is a person who sees what is in front of her, perhaps even one who takes some pride in being so. That quality will come to haunt her by story’s end.

What Mona sees in her daughter as she arrives is a bright and  welcome interruption to the doldrums of her daily life (Mona’s lover has long since left her, and she has only her difficult young son Miguel for company), but also someone who has what she never had: love that came easily and frequently. When Mona meets Nathalie’s new boyfriend Seth, she feels jealous of him because “she had wanted Nathalie to herself”, but it seems clear enough that she’s also jealous of Nathalie for having Seth in her life.

For me, the crux of McNamara’s piece is the unspoken (and, to pretty much everyone but Mona, unperceived) difference in power between mother and daughter. This changes drastically later in the story, when Nathalie is attacked: her confidence is shaken, perhaps permanently; and then Mona is there to provide a mother’s comfort, just as she’s also finding her first success as an artist. Mona wanted her life to have more of the dynamism of Nathalie’s, but not like this, not at this cost. Nathalie has changed:

The lines Mona had never noticed on her face had become grave and hard. Her eyelids were fallen, discoloured furrows below them, and the cheeks were those of a gaunt woman whose good health had been stolen.

Now Mona can’t help but see what has happened to her daughter, and there is no comfort for her in being able to do that. I like the subtlety of the characterisation in McNamara’s story, but it’s the reversal of status the really makes ‘Nathalie’ such a powerful piece of fiction for me.

German Literature Month: Alissa Walser

6th November 2013 / / 5 Comments

Alissa Walser, Mesmerized (2010)
Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch, 2012

This November, I am taking part in German Literature Month which is co-hosted by the blogs Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Lizzy’s Literary Life. As part of my efforts to read more works in translation, this seemed a good thing to get involved in; so I scoured my shelves for books originally written in German, and have three more lined up for the rest of the month. This first one, though, is a book I bought especially for German Lit Month, because it intrigued me when I saw it in the bookshop.

Mesmerized is a fictionalised account of Franz Mesmer’s attempts to restore the eyesight of Maria Theresia Paradis, the court secretary’s daughter, a musical prodigy in Mozart’s Vienna. Mesmer’s methods are controversial, but they do seem to have some effect on Maria’s blindness  – possibly, though, at the cost of her musical ability.

mesmerizedI’d describe Mesmerized as a novel of fragments. Alissa Walser’s prose (as translated by Jamie Bulloch) is full of sentence-fragments, which clump together like iron filings attracted to one of Mesmer’s magnets. Here, for instance, is Maria experiencing music:

Those notes. Which flew away before they had properly settled. Blended into each other. As if each note were too large for a single pitch. As if several chords were flowing out of the note and in all directions. A fading polyphony. Almost sad. Sadly excited. [p. 58]

This style mirrors the coming together of disparate elements to form an individual’s perception, the different senses which make up Maria’s experience of living. It also creates a constant feeling of unease and instability, that all these fragments could just scatter if whatever keeps them in place disappears. This is what Maria feels when she starts to struggle with her music; and there’s also a sense that treating her is the only thing holding together Mesmer’s life in Vienna. So one might say the two of them are pulling in different directions – and Walser leaves us wondering to the very end who will win out.

Elsewhere
Some other reviews of Mesmerized: Iris on Books; Erykah Brackenbury at For Books’ Sake; 50 Year Project.
A sample from the book.

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