Adventures in reading
A new month is around the corner, which means a new instalment of Sunday Story Society. The story I’ve chosen comes from the October issue of Bookanista (an excellent site, always worth visiting): taken from her collection Pelt and Other Stories, ‘Nathalie‘ by Catherine McNamara tells of a day that changes a mother and daughter forever. Join me from Sunday 3 November for a review and discussion.
(EDIT: As I’ve been short of time lately, it’s now going to be Sunday 10 November)
I like to link to other blogs when I review a book, especially so when it’s a book I love. It wasn’t easy to do that with The Luminaries, because the novel was so recent at the time I reviewed it that blog posts weren’t so widespread (no doubt its length also played a part!). Now that has started to change, I want to highlight some other people’s thoughts:
Anna of A Case for Books was another early admirer of The Luminaries; we were both invited to Granta’s party celebrating Eleanor Catton’s Booker shortlisting (which in due course became a much greater celebration; Anna recorded the reaction as Catton’s win was announced, which was quite something to experience). She’s now posted her review of The Luminaries; I especially love her insights on the part gold plays in the novel, and the way that Catton turned the golden ratio into the book’s central relationship.
Claire of Word by Word talks about how the novel folds back in on itself rather than ‘beginning’ and ‘ending’ as such. That takes me straight back to the experience of reading The Luminaries.
Naomi of The Writes of Woman had a similar experience to me, of the novel speeding up in its second half. (I think of it as a catapult, which needs to be stretched out into the long opening section, before it is released with greater force.)
Dan Hartland would have put Colm Tóibín’s book ahead of Catton’s for the Booker (I was the other way around), but he liked The Luminaries nevertheless. He has some interesting things to say about agency and causality in the book.
What all these reviews now make me want to do is go back and re-read The Luminaries to see what else I can find in it. I’m sure I will do that at some point, but not quite yet; it’s something to save for a special occasion, because this is a book that needs – and deserves, and repays – time.
In my latest pair of reviews for We Love This Book, I’m looking at a darkly comic thriller that launches the new ONE imprint from Pushkin Press; and a history of social media that finds its subject’s roots to stretch further back than you might suppose.
Jamie Mason, Three Graves Full (2012)
“There is very little peace for a man with a body buried in his backyard.”
In Jamie Mason‘s Three Graves Full, the man with the corpse in his garden is Jason Getty, who killed a conman named Gary Harris in the heat of the moment and hastily buried the evidence. We meet Jason as he is hoping the gardeners won’t come across Harris’s body. They don’t – but they do uncover two more bodies that Getty knew nothing about. These are the remains of Katielynn Montgomery and her lover Reid Tamblin, who were killed by Katielynn’s husband Boyd when he found them in bed together when the Montgomerys occupied Getty’s home. Now the police investigation will bring old and new players back to the house.
Three Graves Full can be divided into two parts: the first manoeuvres the main characters into place and reveals the broad extent of what has happened – even when the book is at its most amusing, Mason never allows us to forget the underlying gravity of the situation. The novel then turns into a breakneck chase which is as thrilling as one could wish; overlapping views of the same scene underline that there are partial perspectives all the way down. Mason explores what may happen when people seek to keep the deepest secrets, in a novel that deftly balances humour, action and contemplation.
(Read the original review here.)
Tom Standage, Writing on the Wall (2013)
According to Tom Standage, digital editor at the Economist, ‘social media’ has been around for a lot longer than you might think.
For most of human history, Standage argues in Writing on the Wall, information has mainly been shared between individuals, through personal networks. From this viewpoint, the 20th century’s centralised broadcast media, transmitting information to large numbers of people at once, are a historical anomaly.
I’ll admit I was sceptical about this book at first, concerned that Standage’s approach might be too anachronistic. In the event, I found it quite persuasive. The author goes chronologically through a number of examples, mostly from Western Europe, highlighting the similarities with contemporary social media. The Romans exchanged information through letters which could be intended for wider circulation; comments may literally be written on walls, and sometimes attracted replies.
Individuals at the Tudor court compiled interesting texts into their own commonplace books, rather like someone today adding content to a social media profile. The coffeehouses of 17th century London served as hubs for debate and the exchange of ideas. Even when the facts are familiar, Standage’s interpretation encourages us to look at the past in a new light.
Perhaps inevitably, Writing on the Wall loses a little of its interest when it reaches the development of the internet, because here Standage is narrating history more conventionally, rather than making those unexpected connections between past and present. But the book ends with a salutary reminder that information-sharing does not stand still, and we don’t know where its fascinating story will turn next.
(Read the original review here.)
I started this blog in 2009, and began to explore some of the new fiction that was being published. The highlight of my reading year was an obscure debut novel by a young New Zealand writer, which had just been released in the UK. I read it on a whim and thought it was terrific, one of those rare instances of a book embodying the very essence of what speaks to you as an individual reader. I wished everyone could discover what I had found in this book, and was frustrated when, though it got some attention, it seemed a novel destined to remain in relative obscurity.
Four years on, that same writer published her second novel, and I loved it as much as her first. But the circumstances are very different: there’s no obscurity for Eleanor Catton now, because she has won the Man Booker Prize with The Luminaries. I’ve already written about why I love The Luminaries so much, so I won’t go over that again here. Instead, I’ll say a few words on why I’m so pleased with the Booker result.
For the past few years, it has felt to me that the Booker was stuck in something of a rut; whatever the merits of the individual winning titles, it was starting to seem like a lifetime achievement award for English novelists. Not this time. This year, the Booker has recognised a writer at the start of her career – and what a career it could be.
The Luminaries is a joyous, stubbornly idiosyncratic novel (‘a publisher’s nightmare’, as Catton put it in her acceptance speech) that celebrates and interrogates its own project in equal measure, and it deserves as wide an audience as possible. I want writers to have visions as compelling and individual as Catton’s, and to be able to make a success of them. I can only see the Booker result as a clear signal that this can be done.
On a personal level, of course it’s very pleasing to see my own tastes align so squarely with the Booker jury’s. But Catton’s win also makes me feel that my generation is really starting to make its mark on the literary world (at 28, Catton is the youngest-ever winner of the Booker Prize) – and that’s a good feeling. As long as there are writers like (and yet completely unlike) Catton around, the future of literature looks bright; and I’m confident that she will continue to be a vital voice in it.
Sunday Story Society is a monthly review feature where I write about a recent story that’s been published online, and invite you to join in via the comments. This month’s instalment is a week later than planned, but here we go…
***
Perhaps a good place to start with Mona Awad’s story ‘No Translation’ (Carve Magazine, Fall 2013), is with the author’s comment which appears at the end:
I didn’t want to talk about identity per se as much as I wanted to talk about translating identity, making it honestly comprehensible to a curious outsider who’s going to be excluded almost accidentally, almost by nature. The idea that translation, the inherent conspiracy of it, is an act of storytelling itself…
(This is an extract from a longer interview with Awad which appears in the print version of Carve, but I am limiting myself here to material that is freely available online.)
The particular individual whose experience is mediated for us in ‘No Translation’ is Ahmed, a Cairo fruit-seller. List the bald events of the story and they seem ostensibly quite straightforward: Ahmed gets into an altercation with a young policeman who wants to see his permit, and finds that the money which usually helps to grease the wheel doesn’t work with this guy. But Awad’s narrator (as the author’s comment above suggests) seeks to make clear that behind even this apparently simple exchange lies a more complex reality, which requires interpretation that will necessarily be partial.
Right from the start, we are reminded that a third party is bringing this text to us:
I am letting you listen to Ahmed’s thoughts. It’s important that you know this, because he only speaks Arabic, he only thinks in Arabic, and that’s not a language you understand…He doesn’t have any special interest in talking to you. I’m the one who thinks you should know.
Though Awad’s narrator expresses a desire to make things as smooth as possible for us, it can’t be done: there are differences of understanding that the unsuspecting reader might never twig, which are here brought out and examined. What might seem just a fanciful way for Ahmed to think of Cairo (‘She cries his name in car horns, and she’s always screaming like she’s giving birth feet first’) turns out to be a pun on the Egyptian name for the city (‘Umm al-Dunya, or the “Mother of the World”’). The narrator’s barbed question ‘Does saying it help with the joke?’ underlines the distance which has been revealed between reader and subject, a distance which exists in any translated work.
As a means of getting us readers to examine and dismantle our starting assumptions, this is sharply effective. So too is the way in which the city is described, in direct opposition to any stereotypical notions of ‘exotic’ glamour. Take the example of the pomegranates on Ahmed’s stall: ‘No sinful jewel-red here. Just the grit of exhaust that’s on them like the grit of exhaust that’s on everything in Cairo, and there are flies because there are always flies.’
When the policeman arrives on the scene, Ahmed thinks he knows the score. The policeman asks for Ahmed’s permit (‘These were the words Ahmed knew this guy was going to say, and they get said, on time’); Ahmed doesn’t have one, ‘but he lies because that’s what’s done.’ The fruit-seller then goes through the performance that he expects will see the official satisfied and on his way… but none of it works. Ahmed wonders, ‘Is [the policeman] a part of the New Egypt?’ This is Ahmed’s own moment to experience a difference of understanding, where the behavioural ‘language’ he’s always used in these situations is not understood, and he can’t see where the other party is coming from.
As the story concludes, Awad returns to where she began, though things have now changed:
…[Ahmed] cradles his brow, not thinking.
It’s the not thinking that’s the important part.
Do you understand?
As with the opening paragraph, this is referring to Ahmed’s thoughts and the reader’s understanding; but I think the emphasis is subtly different. It seems to me that the beginning is more general, more about establishing the distance between Ahmed and the reader on the basis that the implied reader does not speak Ahmed’s language. The ending feels more deeply personal, a way of underlining that you, the reader, cannot truly comprehend what the events of the story mean to Ahmed – that it’s beyond words, beyond the reach of any translation.
The latest issue of the BSFA critical journal Vector has landed, and it contains my review of The Soddit by Adam Roberts. The Soddit was the first of the parodies that Roberts has produced alongside his ‘canonical’ novels; originally published in 2003, it was reissued last year. I started out imagining that the review would be just a bit of fun; as I went along, though, I found myself thinking more about the playful side of Roberts’s work, and what it is that draws me to his writing. Interestingly, Dan Hartland writes about similar qualities in his review of the story collection Adam Robots in the same issue. It seems we’re on the same page as regards Roberts’s “wilfulness and idiosyncrasy”.
Anyway, on to The Soddit…
***
Anyone who follows Adam Roberts on Twitter will know of his penchant for puns, which are always excellent, and never induce groans at all – honest, guv. (Thought I’d indulge in some irony, there.) And anyone who’s followed Roberts’s bibliography over the years will know that his sense of humour has found a home in his fiction, most obviously in the series of parodies he has written alongside his more serious SF novels. The first of these parodies, The Soddit, has recently been reissued (there was even a film to mark the occasion, or something), and I agreed to review it. What did I let myself in for?
You’ll have some idea of how The Soddit goes purely from knowing how The Hobbit goes, so I won’t rehearse the plot too much: a Soddit named Bingo Grabbings is cajoled by a group of dwarfs and the wizard Gandef to join them on an expedition to the Only Mountain, home of the dragon Smug; they are at pains to emphasise to Bingo that this quest is all about taking the dragon’s gold – honest, guv. An episodic narrative of various encounters then follows, until the group reaches its destination.
The humour of The Soddit typically starts with a pun on the name of a character from Tolkien’s work, and extends outwards from there. Some of Roberts’s ideas work better than others: for example, the shape-shifter Biorn is an inconsistent mishmash of Scandinavian stereotypes – he speaks in Abba lyrics occasionally, and likes his flat-pack furniture – that I found too broad-brush to be truly amusing. But I loved the translation of Gollum’s riddles in the dark into a philosophical contest with ‘Sollum’.
Beyond the humour, what comes through time and again in the book is a trait that Roberts shares with Tolkien (though it manifests in very different ways in the authors’ respective work): a love of language. In The Soddit, it’s not just about puns: there are passages where Roberts is clearly revelling in the possibilities of prose, the pure rhythm and flow of writing. If you like that in a work of fiction (and I do), it is a joy to read.
But The Soddit is not all about play; there are elements of a straightforward, serious novel here, and they work rather well. Instead of a Ring that makes him invisible, Bingo finds a Thing (complete with registered trademark) which makes true the opposite of whatever someone speaks through it. Cue the classic fantasy trope of ‘be careful what you wish for’, which Roberts uses very neatly. And I must admit to being surprised by the twist in the nature of the group’s quest, a twist that succeeds on its own terms even as one senses that Roberts is deliberately making the gears of narrative grind noisily. The Soddit is a showcase for Roberts’s sense of humour, yes; but his skill as a storyteller is also firmly on display.
Last night, the 2013 BBC National Short Story Award was won by Sarah Hall for her story ‘Mrs Fox.; Lucy Wood was runner-up, for ‘Notes from the House Spirits’. It’s a good result, I think: Hall’s story, about a man whose relationship starts to break down when his wife undergoes a profound transformation (which may or may not be literal, for all the difference it makes), has a brilliant sense of wildness and mystery. I’ve already written about Wood’s tale in my review of Diving Belles; it was one of my favourite stories in her collection.
Actually, Hall’s and Wood’s were two of my three favourite stories on the Award shortlist (the third was ‘Barmouth’, Lisa Blower’s depiction of a woman’s life depicted through her caravan holidays, which creates a wonderful sense of time and place, and captures the melancholy of change). Interestingly, both the first- and second-place stories make use of the fantastic to explore personal concerns and notions of change. You can still pick up a copy of the Award anthology, which I’d suggest is well worth doing.
Today is the third birthday of that fine publisher And Other Stories. I enjoy their books (see what I thought of Down the Rabbit Hole, Lightning Rods, All Dogs are Blue, and Quesadillas), and I love what they stand for as a publisher: they have a strong and distinctive editorial vision; they champion fiction in translation; they care about the design of their books. So when they asked if I’d like to host a giveaway to mark the anniversary, I was only too happy to say yes.
I wanted to choose a book from each of And Other Stories’ years, so the following titles are up for grabs:
Swimming Home by Deborah Levy
Shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize
As he arrives with his family at the villa in the hills above Nice, Joe sees a body in the swimming pool. But the girl is very much alive. She is Kitty Finch: a self-proclaimed botanist with green-painted fingernails, walking naked out of the water and into the heart of their holiday. Why is she there? What does she want from them all? And why does Joe’s enigmatic wife allow her to remain?
Profound and thrilling, Swimming Home reveals how the most devastating secrets are the ones we keep from ourselves.
Zbinden’s Progress by Christoph Simon
Translated by Donal McLaughlin
Lukas Zbinden leans on the arm of Kâzim, as they walk slowly down the stairway towards the door of his old people’s home. Step by step, the irrepressible Lukas recounts the life he shared with his wife Emilie and his son. Different in so many ways, what was the secret of their life-long love? And why is it so hard for him to talk to his son?
Gradually we get to know a man with a twinkle in his eye and learn his captivating story. Zbinden’s Progress is heart-rending, heart-warming and hilarious.
Quesadillas by Juan Pablo Villalobos
Translated by Rosalind Harvey
Anarchy in Mexico – a comic novel about screwed-up politics and families from the author of Down the Rabbit Hole.
Orestes’ mother prepares hundreds of quesadillas for Orestes and the rest of their brood. After another fraudulent election and the disappearance of his younger brothers Castor and Pollux, he takes to the road. With Quesadillas, Juan Pablo Villalobos serves up a madcap satire of politics, big families, and what it means to be middle class.
Here is how the giveaway will work:
Sound good? Then leave a comment and try your luck!
Next Sunday, I’ll have a new Sunday Story Society post up on the blog, so here’s a quick notification if you want to join in. The story I’ve chosen is ‘No Translation‘ by Mona Awad, from the Fall 2013 issue of Carve Magazine. It’s a story about an Egyptian fruit-seller, which explores issues of identity and the extent to which that can be translated. I think there’s potential for some really interesting discussion of this piece, and I’d love it if you could join me, from Sunday 6 October.
Here are my two latest reviews from We Love This Book:
Andrew Lovett, Everlasting Lane (2013)
When his father dies, young Peter Lambert finds himself with a new life before he has had much chance to make sense of the old one.
Peter’s mother (now insisting that she’s going to be his Aunt Kat) whisks him away to an old cottage on Everlasting Lane in the village of Amberley. Kat tells him that this is his grandmother’s cottage, and that he has lived here before; Peter doesn’t remember that, but the house does seem strangely familiar. And Peter would very much like to know what’s in one particular room which is hidden away behind heavy drapes.
Andrew Lovett’s debut is partly a tale of growing up in the 1970s, and he populates Everlasting Lane with some memorable secondary characters who come into Peter’s life. These include his new teacher, Mr Gale, who comes up with his own insulting nicknames for his pupils (‘Lambchop’ in Peter’s case), and generally treats them shabbily – until a cricket match goes wrong. Most of all, there’s Anna-Marie Liddell, the pretty girl next door who is only a year older than Peter, but likes to act as though she’s far superior. She and Peter become something like friends; their relationship has a thread of uncertainty that’s very well realised.
The mystery of Peter’s new circumstances adds an extra dimension to the novel, a sombre undercurrent stemming from suggestions of tragedy in his family’s past. This turns Everlasting Lane into a dark riff on Famous Five-style tales of children solving mysteries. I’m not sure that the full force of the novel’s adult issues always emerges from Peter’s viewpoint as a child; but there is a clear and poignant sense that he is trapped in his own story. Everlasting Lane is an interesting coming-of-age tale which never quite settles into the shape you might expect.
Links
Original review
The publisher, Galley Beggar Press
David and Hilary Crystal, Wordsmiths & Warriors (2013)
In Wordsmiths and Warriors, linguist David Crystal and his partner Hilary take us on a historical tour of Britain to show us how – and, more importantly, where – the English language was shaped.
Each chapter of Wordsmiths and Warriors focuses on a particular place of significance in the development of the English language in Britain – from the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons at Pegwell Bay in Kent in the fifth century, through to Randolph Quirk’s Survey of English Usage, inaugurated at University College London in 1959. The book is a mixture of a historical accounts, anecdotes and illustrations from the Crystals’ own road trip. There are even directions to each site if you want to make your own visit.
There’s a lot of interesting material in here, whether you are unfamiliar with the history of English or, like me, studied it at one time then headed in a different direction (for those with greater knowledge, I’m less sure; this feels like a general-interest book). Amongst many other topics, the Crystals’ survey takes in the Paston letters; Robert Burns and the development of Scots; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; Dylan Thomas’s contribution to Welsh English; and Roget’s Thesaurus.
The book is arranged chronologically rather than geographically, which (perhaps inevitably) reduces the sense of a journey. But the history is the main thread, and it is fascinating to view that history through its places, gaining a vivid sense of how the story of English in Britain moves (broadly speaking) from battlefields, castles and ecclesiastical establishments to scholarly halls and writers’ rooms. It remains a dynamic story, wherever it takes place, and the Crystals capture that dynamism superbly in Wordsmiths and Warriors.
Links
Original review
The publisher, Oxford University Press
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