Author: David Hebblethwaite

My holiday reading

8th August 2013 / / 5 Comments

I’ve been on holiday recently, and managed to get through most of the books I took with me. I thought I’d do a brief round-up of what I read.

Rodrigo de Souza Leão, All Dogs are Blue (2008/10)
Translated from the Portugese by Zoë Perry and Stefan Tobler, 2013

If there’s one thing I have come to expect from And Other Stories’ books, it’s that they will be intensely engaged with language. And so it is with this short novel, narrated by an inmate of a Rio asylum. The narrator is lucid about the tenuousness of his grasp n reality; he loops back and forth between his present, his past travels, his childhood, and his eventual release – but the question of what precisely is and is not ‘real’ remains open. I read All Dogs are Blue on the train down to my holiday; it was short enough to fit in the time, and is probably best experienced in a single sitting, when it can really pull you into its world.

Maria Semple, Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2012)

Bernadette Fox was once a hot-shot architect; now she mostly hides away in her family’s Seattle home, outsourcing most of her interaction with the word to a virtual PA in India. Gathering together myriad documents, Bernadette’s daughter Bee chronicles her mother’s turbulent relationship with her family and the other school moms, and her attempts to find Bernadette after she disappears.

I’ve heard so much about Semple’s book, and it mostly lives up to the praise. It’s wickedly funny, with few characters escaping some sort of satire; and very well constructed, as the differences between viewpoints gradually reveal hidden truths – truths which give the novel its dark undercurrent. I have a sense that Semple lets her characters off the hook for some of their flaws a little too easily, but otherwise this book is highly enjoyable.

Robin Sloan, Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (2012)

When Clay Jameson takes a job doing the night-shift for a mysterious bookstore, he doesn’t realise that he is about to enter the world of a secret society who are scouring certain volumes for clues that will unlock… well, who knows? But Kat Potente, the pretty Googler who walks into the store one day, might just have the means to find out.

The principle flaw in Sloan’s debut is its treatment of gender –for example, Kat is the most prominent female character, and she falls into the stereotype of ‘hot geek girl who’s super-competent, but still needs a male character to ultimately save the day’. Aside from that, it’s all rather jolly, but also reflects seriously on the relationship of books and new technology. Sloan steers a middle course which I found thought-provoking.

Matt Delito, Confessions of a Police Constable (2013)

This is one in a series of (generally pseudonymous) books from the Friday Project (including Confessions of a GP and Confessions of a New York Taxi Driver). The author is a serving officer in the Metropolitan Police, and the book is based on his blog of stories from his career. I’ve read a few of the books in this series now, and always find them interesting, and good to read when I feel like a change or a rest from my more usual fare. So I finished it off on the train home.

Granta Best Young British Novelists 2013: Joanna Kavenna

31st July 2013 / / 2 Comments

With most of the novel extracts in the Granta anthology, I’ve been able to gain some sense of what the full novel may be like (which is not say my impressions are correct, but I have been able to form them). Not so Joanna Kavenna’s short piece ‘Tomorrow’, which has the potential to head off in a number of odd directions. We see its narrator collect the stuff she (along with several others) has been storing at a friend’s house; do her job at home, sending out customer service emails; talk to a friend about the subjective passage of time.

Now I read that back, it maybe doesn’t sound all that strange in summary. But it’s the tone of Kavenna’s writing that makes it feel so whilst one is reading it. I have a copy of the author’s most recent novel, Come to the Edge, on my shelves; and I’m thinking I ought to read it soon – because one thing I do sense clearly from ‘Tomorrow’ is that Kavenna may be my kind of writer.

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: Benjamin Markovits

30th July 2013 / / 1 Comment

Benjamin Markovits’s biographical note in the Granta anthology says that ‘You Don’t Have to Live Like This’ is excerpted from “his new novel about, about a group of university friends who get involved in a scheme to regenerate Detroit”. This particular excerpt focuses on their time at university, so we don’t seem to get much of a sense form it of where the novel will ultimately go.

Two characters in particular strand out to me from the extract: the narrator, Greg Marnier, an ordinary kid from Baton Rouge who doesn’t seem to have been too lucky in love; and his college friend Robert James, a more privileged type who seems set to go places. These characters could be the foundation for an interesting novel, but Markovits’s piece does feel very much like a beginning, and I am undecided as to whether I’d want to read the novel on the basis of this extract alone.

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: Adam Foulds

29th July 2013 / / 2 Comments

In Adam Foulds’s ‘A World Intact’, Will returns from military training in London to his family home in the rural heart of England, for a short stay before he embarks on his posting in Field Security Services. It’s not quite the commission he wanted, especially as he hoped to follow in the footsteps his late father, who was awarded the Victoria Cross during the Great War.

This extract from a forthcoming novel sets up themes of romantic heroism versus the horror of war (there’s the suggestion that Will’s father may not have been as pleased as his son thinks to know that his Will is off to fight), and personal fulfilment (Will’s rural home is the ‘world intact’, yet it is still not quite enough for him). The piece is perhaps too short to satisfy by itself; but it’s a promising foundation for Foulds’s novel.

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: Steven Hall

28th July 2013 / / 1 Comment

I didn’t plan it this way, but it has been a few months since my last blog on Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 4 anthology. Now I’m back to it, and up to Steven Hall, whose The Raw Shark Texts I reviewed back in the pre-blog days of 2006 for Laurs Hird’s New Review website.

Hall’s upcoming second novel is titled The End of Endings, and the Granta volume has a couple of excerpts. One of these, Autumn’ is set in the UK of 2014: its narrator, Philip Quinn, tells of speaking to his wife on the phone while he (and the rest of the world) watches a webcam feed of her sleeping; talks a bit about entropy and how it applies to his kitchen; and describes receiving a photograph of a mysterious black sphere from a friend (whom he’s already told us died soon after) .

Turn the volume upside-down, and there is ‘Spring’, printed on alternate pages (white text on a black background) and set in the US of 1854. A writer is commissioned by the New York Tribune to write a story on a spiritualist who claims to have invented an engine powered by prayer; just as he decided to accept the assignment, Hall’s piece ends.

Perhaps inevitably, ‘Spring’ and ‘Autumn’ serve more to whet one’s appetite for the novel than as complete pieces in their own right. But what intriguing tasters they are: evidently these two rather different storylines are going to connect somehow; and it sounds as though there’s going to be an interesting subtext too. I look forward to reading the novel to see how everything plays out.

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

The Booker’s (baker’s) dozen 2013

23rd July 2013 / / 3 Comments

This year’s Man Booker Prize longlist is out, so let’s take a gander:

  • Tash Aw – Five Star Billionaire (Fourth Estate)
  • NoViolet Bulawayo – We Need New Names (Chatto & Windus)
  • Eleanor Catton – The Luminaries (Granta)
  • Jim Crace – Harvest (Picador)
  • Eve Harris – The Marrying of Chani Kaufman (Sandstone Press)
  • Richard House – The Kills (Picador)
  • Jhumpa Lahiri – The Lowland (Bloomsbury)
  • Alison MacLeod – Unexploded (Hamish Hamilton)
  • Colum McCann – TransAtlantic (Bloomsbury)
  • Charlotte Mendelson – Almost English (Mantle)
  • Ruth Ozeki – A Tale for the Time Being (Canongate)
  • Donal Ryan – The Spinning Heart (Doubleday Ireland)
  • Colm Tóibín – The Testament of Mary (Viking)

I have read precisely none of those – not that that’s about to stop me from opining about the list…

Given that The Rehearsal remains my favourite of all the books I’ve read during the lifetime of this blog, I’m naturally very pleased to see Eleanor Catton on the longlist. The Luminaries has not been published yet, but it promises to be a great big tome set in the New Zealand goldrush of the 1860s, taking in astronomy, murder mysteries, and more besides. I’m really looking forward to it.

The other writer I am particularly pleased to see longlisted is Alison MacLeod. I know her more as a fine writer of short stories, but I’m certainly intrigued to read one of her novels. Unexploded, set in wartime Brighton, isn’t out yet either, so there’s not much more I can say there.

Looking at the list more generally, I think the range of author nationalities is nice to see. The Booker has perhaps been starting to look a mite parochial in recent years, having gone to well-established English authors for four years in a row. With only Jim Crace really fitting that description here, we may well see a different outcome this year.

The longlist is lighter on small-press titles than I’d have liked. There’s only really Sandstone Press (and congratulations to them on a second longlisting, following The Testament of Jessie Lamb a couple of years ago). You could add in Canongate, Granta and Bloomsbury as independent publishers, I suppose – but they’re not small presses in quite the same way. After such a strong showing for small publishers last year (And Other Stories, Myrmidon and Salt – half the shortlist), I can’t help feeling a little disappointed about that.

Which of the books would I most like to read? Taking the Catton and MacLeod books as givens… The Kills has me especially intrigued – a vast political thriller cross-pollinated with a literary mystery, which was first published as a series of enhanced ebooks with added audio and video. Five Star Billionaire and We Need New Names sound interesting. I’ve heard so many good things about A Tale for the Time Being that I really ought to give it a go… That’s a full shortlist right there.

Reading round-up: late July

21st July 2013 / / 1 Comment

Catching up on some of the books I’ve read recently…

Rachel Joyce, Perfect (2013)

In 1972, two leap seconds are added to time, and Byron Hemmings wonders if this is what led his mother to cause a road accident that she didn’t even notice; Byron sets up ‘Operation Perfect’ with his school-friend James Long to find out. Meanwhile, in the present day, middle-aged Jim is trying to rebuild his life after years in a psychiatric hospital; we may guess that these two narrative strands are connected, so the question becomes: how? Perfect is quite different in subject and tone from Joyce’s Booker-longlisted debut novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry; but it shares the earlier novel’s underlying seriousness, which gives Perfect a firm emotional grounding.

Monique Roffey, Archipelago (2012)

A year after their home flooded, Gavin Weald and his daughter Océan still cannot settle back into life. So, along with their dog Suzy, they head out from Trinidad across the ocean on a voyage which is at least as much emotional as it is physical. With that in mind, the archipelago of the title could be all the many pieces of life that the Wealds encounter on the journey, as well as the islands they travel through. By novel’s end, there is a sort of peace, but it is not easily won.

Antoine Laurain, The President’s Hat (2012)
Translated from the French by Louise Rogers Laulaurie, Emily Boyce and Jane Aitken, 2013

Daniel Mercier is eating out when none other than François Mitterand sits at the next table; when the President leaves, Daniel sees that he has left his hat behind. Deciding to keep the hat for himself, Daniel finds his life start to change – until he leaves the hat behind somewhere. We then follow a succession of characters who gain possession of Mitterand’s hat, each gaining that extra confidence to do something different. I found this book simply great fun to read; as a nice added touch, there are different translators for each viewpoint character.

Marlen Haushofer, The Wall (1968)
Translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside, 1991

On a visit to her cousin, a woman wakes one day to find no other people in sight, and an invisible wall cutting her off from much of the outside world. Some years later, still (for all intents and purposes) the only human about, she writes her report of what happened, which is the book we now hold. Told precisely and coolly, The Wall is a tale of survival not so much as heroic endurance but as keeping going because that’s all there is left.

Carmen Bugan, Burying the Typewriter (2012)

A memoir of the author’s childhood in Ceaucescu’s Romania, where her father was a dissident and her family surveilled by the secret police. There are some good scenes in this book – a sequence where the young Carmen tries to visit the American embassy is as tense as any fictional thriller; and there’s a real sense towards the end of how out-of-place the secret police are in Carmen’s village – but, as a whole, it didn’t quite engage me.

Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders (2001)

A novel set in the Derbyshire village of Eyam, which voluntarily cut itself off from the surrounding country when the plague struck in 1665, seen through the eyes of Anna Frith, a young housemaid who remains immune. There’s lots of interesting historical detail in here, but sometimes to the detriment of the book as a novel – and the ending especially feels rather too abrupt.

Two by Cees Noteboom

17th July 2013 / / 1 Comment

I have to thank MacLehose Press here for sending me copies of their latest Cees Noteboom reissues. Noteboom is (or was until recently) on the long list of “authors I have heard of, but don’t know much about and have never actually read” – I knew he was one of the Netherlands’ most celebrated writers, but that was about it. The writer I’ve now found in these books is one concerned with the thoughts and habits that hold us back, or keep us going.

Rituals (1980; translated by Adrienne Dixon, 1983), which begins in 1963, when Inni Wintrop is coasting through life, picking up women and making money by trading art and shares. When his wife Zita leaves him, Inni tries and fails to commit suicide – then Noteboom takes us back and forward, to encounter other characters who are stuck in their own behaviour patterns.

In 1955, Inni meets Arnold Taads, a former ski champion who now lives his days according to a precise and regimented schedule of his own devising. Arnold describes how he ceased to believe in God when he saw a priest collapse dead in the midst of conducting Mass; and there’s a scene in which Taads forcefully argues with a priest about theology. So Arnold Taads is dismissive of Catholic rituals; but he has his own in the shape of his daily timetable.

In 1973, Inni Wintrop is in his forties, and feeling somewhat more at peace with life. Now he meets Philip Taads, a son of Arnold’s about whom he’d previously known nothing. Philip lives by the tea ceremony and other Japanese rituals, but Inni sees these to be as empty as anything Arnold Taads followed or derided. But each of Noteboom’s three main characters has his own rituals for coping with/shielding himself from life – and it seems that letting go of those rituals is the only thing that allows any of them to move on.

Perhaps more optimistic is In the Dutch Mountains (1984; translated by Adrienne Dixon, 1987), which sees an Aragonese road inspector named Alfonso Tiborón de Mendoza write his own interpretation of The Snow Queen. Throughout this book, there’s a sense of reality and story being pulled and stretched; quite literally so in the way that Tiborón sets his tale in a much larger – and mountainous! – version of the Netherlands; but also in the subtleties of how his adapts and references Andersen’s original (Kai and Lucia are circus performers, who are sent away by their impresario to find work in the south; when the world starts to look more dismal, Kai imagines that a sliver of glass or ice has entered his eye; and so on).

Going beyond this kind of surface playfulness, though, there’s a deeper consideration of how stories relate to – perhaps how they parody – life. Tiborón constantly interjects (though he keeps promising not to) to remind us that a fairy tale is very much a fixed version of reality. Sure enough, Kai & Lucia become limited by their story – they have a happy ending, but that’s because they are in a fairy tale, and needs must. Tiborón is the one who is ultimately freed by the telling of stories, his tale allowing him to look at life differently. Maybe he’s not so different from Inni Wintrop, then, as all either of them needed was a little jolt from life to allow themselves to change.

Read some other people’s reviews
Rituals: Tony’s Reading List; Book Around The Corner; Iris on Books.
In the Dutch Mountains: Damian Kelleher; liberreview.

Event report: Abelfattah Kilito and the Thousand and One Nights

14th July 2013 / / 1 Comment

WLS_GN_L (1)I enjoyed the June event in the London Review Bookshop’s World Literature Series so much that I wanted to make sure I went along to this month’s, whatever the subject. It was another interesting event, though it may be that I lack some of the context to write it up properly. Here goes, anyway…

Abdelfattah Kilito is a Moroccan writer and critic; he was interviewed at the LRB shop by Marina Warner, mostly about his own fiction and one of his key scholarly interests, the Thousand and One Nights. Warner commented at one point that Kilito’s work often blurs the line between fiction, essay and memoir (which Kilito put down to his admiration of Borges); there was a similar blurring going on in this interview.

Kilito told of how, as a child, he could not afford to buy books; instead, at the age of 12, he joined an American library in his home city of Rabat. Most of the books were in English, but there was one stack of books in French – and so the young Kilito was set. The power of books and stories became a recurring theme of Kilito’s talk: he remarked that Scheherazade’s telling of stories saved a human community, because it stopped the King from killing women. In the end, the King demanded that Scheherazade’s stories be recorded by his scribes, even though he could have just taken the books from her library – there, Kilito suggested, was an early expression of the value of publishing.

Kilito said that he was fixated with the idea of people ‘carrying’ particular stories with them: anyone who tells a story discharges it to the listener – and they may go on to transmit it to someone else. He mentioned a story of souls in the underworld reading the books of their own lives; eventually the souls grew bored, and started swapping their books and reading each other’s – but then they forgot their own book, and were unable to find it again.

During the audience questions, Kilito suggested a difference between Arab intellectuals of the past and present: in the past, Arab intellectuals would translate works from other cultures a great deal, but were less concerned with having their own books translated. Now, Kilito said, Arab intellectuals may well want to be recognised in America and Europe – it can even be the case that they may not receive full attention in their home countries until they have that recognition elsewhere. But efforts to translate more go on, in all directions; stories continue to be carried and transmitted.

This was the last event in the 2012-13 World Literature Series; I’m only disappointed that I didn’t discover them sooner. I asked on Twitter if there’d be another Series, and received this reply:

Oh, I will.

Event report: Salon London’s Summer Essentials

12th July 2013 / / 0 Comments

Salon London is a monthly event that brings together science, art and psychology with three speakers looking at different aspects of the same subject – “massive ideas in intimate spaces”, as host Helen Bagnall put it. I went along to my first Salon last night, held in the Café at Foyles. The theme was “Summer Essentials” – and, appropriately enough for the location, began with books, as the Independent on Sunday’s literary editor, Katy Guest, recommended books for different situations on your summer holiday. As it turned out, I’ve only read one of them…

In the airport bookshop looking at the bestsellers? This year’s top surprise bestseller has been The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane’s tour of Britain’s ancient paths. [I can sort-of second this recommendation, as I remember enjoying Macfarlane’s reading from the book at last year’s Penguin bloggers’ night. I still haven’t read The Old Ways myself yet, though.]

Waiting for the plane and need something short? Try Ali Smith’s Shire [a mixture of essay and story that sounds to be in a similar vein to Artful], or Dan Rhodes’ Marry Me [that’s the one I’ve read; read my thoughts here – the short version is that I really liked it].

Need to get away from an annoying family? Become lost in Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life [definitely a book I am intrigued to read]. Kids not keen on the prospect of studying Shakespeare? Give them Ben Crystal’s Springboard Shakespeare guides. [Apparently Ben Crystal is an actor who’s also son of the linguist David Crystal; if he shares his father’s touch for writing about language, I bet these books will be great.] Interested in all things Tudor and want to learn more? Try Leanda de Lisle’s Tudor: the Family Story.

Then came questions from the audience. What books will Guest be taking on holiday? The newest ones, probably; but certainly Precious Thing by Colette McBeth. Being sent 200 books a week, how does Guest decide which to read? Covers can help, especially with new authors; Guest mentioned Polly Courtney, who left her publisher because she wasn’t happy with the chick-lit style covers they were using for her books, and pointed out that the cover for Courtney’s new novel, Feral Youth, is rather different.

Did Guest think John Williams’ Stoner was worth all the praise that’s been heaped on it? Bret Easton Ellis likes it; so, if you like him, then perhaps. Recommend a good big detective series? Not really something Guest reads much, but she suggested the work of Marian Keyes. What’s going to be the next big historical period in fiction? The eleventh century, tales of Vikings, Guest suggested.

***

Book recommendations in hand, we then heard from Robin Fegen, one of the directors of the Robin Collective, “purveyors of curious events and experimental food”. Fegen was here to speak on taste and flavour; he talked about how factors like colour and sound can affect how food tastes, and explained that there can be great individual variations in the sense of taste, with so-called “supertasters” being particularly sensitive (as the chemist Arthur L. Fox put it, people live in “different worlds of taste”.

Fegen had a few experiments for his audience to try, in order to see who might be the supertasters. My results were inconclusive: a tastebud-counting exercise suggested that I had a lower number than average, which tends to be characteristic of a nontaster – but I could very much sense the bitter taste of PTC, which would point towards the opposite case. Maybe I should just conclude that I have good taste…

***

The evening’s final speaker was John-Paul Flintoff, whose topic was “how to have meaningful conversations”. Time was a little tight at this point, so we didn’t have chance to try all the activities Flintoff had planned – a pity, really, because the session was good fun. I especially like the idea that a good conversation should be an adventure – sounds a good guiding principle to me.

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