Author: David Hebblethwaite

“You can’t get thoughts out of your mind just by trying”

1st July 2013 / / 5 Comments

Jon McGregor, This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You (2012)

Perhaps above all else, what emerges clearly from this collection for me is that Jon McGregor is a superb writer of the mundane. I suspect this is an undervalued quality in a writer (certainly I have undervalued it in the past); but This Isn’t the Sort of Thing demonstrates its value quite clearly.

The book’s opening piece, a two-page vignette entitled ‘That Colour’ is a fine example of what McGregor can achieve on a small canvas: while her partner (the narrator) washes the dishes, a woman looks out of the window and tries to describe the colour into which the trees are turning (“When you close your eyes on a sunny day, it’s a bit like that colour”). Sensing her apparent surprise, the narrator describes the process of chlorophyll breaking down in leaves; but the woman already knows that: “It’s just lovely, they’re lovely, that’s all, you don’t have to”. There we have two characters sketched briefly yet precisely – one thinking in practical terms, the other more intuitively – and the sense of an awkward emotional space between them. We can only guess what may have happened to create that space; but the simple gesture at the end, of the pair holding hands and the narrator saying, “But tell me again,” is enough to show that the gap between the couple is starting to be bridged. It’s a small but telling moment, depicted economically yet with a true sense of the way people talk around each other.

This Isn’t the Sort of Thing has a good number of these very short pieces (some just a few sentences long) which capture little ironies and significant details. ‘Airshow’ sees a family returning from a funeral, and deciding to take the grandfather to see his old station during the war – but there’s nothing much to see at the airfield, and nothing much that he wants to say. The family also goes past a current RAF base, where there’s a display of vintage aircraft; at home, the grandfather asks “just what it was those people with the binoculars had thought they might be waiting to see”. That one remark encompasses thoughts on the passing of time, and the transformation of the horrors that the grandfather would have seen into a nostalgic tourist attraction. ‘The Remains’ evokes the despair of losing a loved one through the use of dispassionate sentence-fragments which could all begin with the two words of its title (“Are believed to still be intact,” and so on). The piece ends with the phrase “Have yet to be found” repeated over and over – a truth inescapable on the page, as it would be in life.

[EDIT: Max’s comment below prompts me to add, in case I’ve given the wrong impression, that there are also some longer pieces in the book – though a majority are ten pages or fewer.]

One of McGregor’s hallmarks in these stories is how, through language, he shows characters trapped in particular thought and behaviour patterns. ‘If It Keeps On Raining’ (which I wrote about previously here) focuses on a man building a shelter for the flood he’s sure is coming; we discover that he was a police officer at Hillsborough, who cannot let go of what he experienced there – the surging river reminds him of the surging crowd, and images of that day go around and around in his head. The narrator of ‘What Happened to Mr Davison’ is giving evidence at an inquest; they hide behind the rhetoric of officialdom to deflect attention from whatever it was that affected the titular farmer – but occasionally we catch glimpses of the real person underneath, who would like to be more forthright, though the circumstances (and perhaps also professional obligations) do not allow it.

McGregor’s stories are populated by often anonymous characters, at what may often seem at first to be unexceptional moments in their lives. But, time and again, the author takes us beneath the surface to show how pivotal those moments can be.

This book has been shortlisted for the 2013 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Click here to read my other posts on the shortlist.

See also:
My other posts about Jon McGregor’s work.
Some other reviews of this book: Sam Ruddock for Vulpes Libris; dovegreyreader; Valerie O’Riordan for Bookmunch.

Read This: Cooking with Bones by Jess Richards

26th June 2013 / / 2 Comments

I have a new review up at Bookmunch, and wanted to flag this one up especially, because the book is so good. In fact, it’s my favourite read of the year so far. Without further ado, I present to you Cooking with Bones by Jess Richards…

***

Amber looks at her sleeping sister Maya and sees a thousand phantom faces. Maya is a formwanderer, a “mirror of want” – a human specially engineered so that anyone who looks at her sees her as whatever they want to see, even if they’re not aware of what that is. Formwanderers have a difficult existence – there are reports of them killing people because their observers unwittingly desire it – but perhaps Maya’s greatest problem is that she doesn’t know what to be for her self.

When their parents announce that they have found jobs for the sisters that will split them up, Amber and Maya flee their home city of Paradon to a coastal village. They take up refuge in an abandoned cottage, where Amber finds a strange recipe book, cooking utensils made of bone, and cupboards full of ingredients. Discovering that more food is regularly left outside the front door, Amber sets about trying out some recipes, unaware of the effects they have on the outside world. Meanwhile, the villagers leave their tithe of goods out for the witch Old Kelp; but one child, Kip, is about to stumble across a secret.

Cooking with Bones is, quite simply, one of the best books I have read this year. Its vision is so confident and complete, its language a joy. One has the sense that Paradon houses endless stories waiting to be told – Amber’s new job at the Tear Lab, “where sadness is measured”, is just one tantalising detail – but they are not to be told here, as the city is swiftly left behind. This is the depth of texture with which Jess Richards imbues her novel’s world, and it is exhilarating to read. The recipes dotted throughout the text also evoke a real sense of magic:

“Sieve together the cornflour and sand, thinking of sand clocks, of life cycles, of beginnings and endings, of cliffs crumbling to rocks to stones to sand, and footprints leading along an inevitable path.”

As for the story, it strikes me most of all as a tale of growing up. The three young protagonists are all, in their own ways, being held back: Maya is so used to (literally) existing for other people that she can’t work out what she wants; Amber doesn’t really know what she wants either, but feels that primal want all the same; Kip just wishes to be Kip, though others place obstacles in the way. All will find some sort of resolution, though a happy ending is not guaranteed.

Cooking With Bones is a novel that draws you so completely into its world that it is hard to step out again. Whilst you’re there, it is a delight. Now I need to go back and read Richards’ debut, Snake Ropes; and you should definitely read this book.

Any Cop? Without doubt. As far as I’m concerned, with this book, Jess Richards has established herself as an important new voice in British fantastic literature.

(Elsewhere: read other reviews of Cooking with Bones at Workshy Fop and Learn This Phrase. They also think it’s great.)

“The more you saw of a person the less you knew them”

21st June 2013 / / 2 Comments

Jane Rogers, Hitting Trees with Sticks (2012)

It’s no surprise to see “Winner of the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award” on the front cover of Jane Rogers’ first story collection – The Testament of Jessie Lamb is probably her best-known novel right now, and no doubt for many (including myself) it was an introduction to her work. So it seems worth asking as a way in, where do the stories of Hitting Trees with Sticks stand in relation to Jessie Lamb? Well, think of that novel as a tale about understanding – about a girl trying to explain herself to the parents who can’t understand the choice she wants to make. Understanding (or failure to understand) is a theme that also runs through this collection, and Rogers approaches it from many angles.

There are some adolescent protagonists in Hitting Trees with Sticks, but they don’t necessarily get Jessie Lamb’s chance to set their thoughts out. In ‘Sports Leader’, a boy who’s missed out on a place at college takes a job as a window cleaner – partly because it lets him nosy into other people’s houses. One senses that he means well at heart, but isn’t too worldly-wise; as a result, others may take advantage of him. The Sports Leadership course for which he still holds out becomes a symbol of the boy’s thwarted hopes and potential.

At least he still has a life ahead of him, though, unlike the title character of ‘Where Are You, Stevie?’ The story begins with a narrator, Amanda, expressing her current frustrations: Christmas is getting earlier, and why have they sent that young lout to work at the theatre, it’s not as if he’ll do anything… But she is brought up short when she learns that Stevie is dead. We then hear from Stevie’s grandmother, his girlfriend, and his neighbour, who each reveal more about him; we come to see how Stevie got into the situation he did, and that there was more to him than Amanda supposed. The presence of Stevie looms large even though he is fundamentally absent; he is understood by the reader as he could not have been by those in his life.

Elsewhere in the collection, Rogers’ characters are finding that they didn’t know as much as they thought, or try to hide knowledge from others. The narrator of ‘Kiss and Tell’ was on a writing retreat with a famous politician whom she at first thought obnoxious, though she eventually had cause to change her mind. ‘The Tale of a Naked Man’ sees a Ugandan man arrive home nude at 4am in a bush taxi and attempt to convince his wife that his story of being waylaid by bandits is true – but there’s no real way of knowing, as story piles upon story. In ‘Conception’, a mother is reluctant to tell her daughter what she and her partner were thinking when the girl was conception. ‘Morphogenesis’ presents Alan Turing as a man who apprehended the workings of the universe as had none before him, but was ultimately destroyed by a human world that refused to understand him.

The title story of Hitting Trees with Sticks is also its closing piece, and for me its most powerful. It is a first-person portrait of Celia Benson, an old woman with dementia. Rogers takes us inside a psyche which continually makes and remakes the world. Celia’s viewpoint makes sense to her, and the details that don’t fit are mistakes or absent-mindedness – the Meals on Wheels must be for some poor old dear, not her; and Celia has obviously just mislaid the shopping. But then the moment passes, and a new present is formed: Celia has lost the sense of continuity that would enable her to engage with the world – though of course, as far as she’s concerned, nothing is wrong. ‘Hitting Trees with Sticks’ is a harrowing piece of fiction, made all the more so by our knowledge that its protagonist cannot step out of the perspective we experience through her narration. As readers, we understand Celia all too well.

This book has been shortlisted for the 2013 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Click here to read my other posts on the shortlist.

(Read some other reviews of Hitting Trees with Sticks: Shortly Speaking; Carys Bray for The Short Review; Carlotta Eden for Thresholds; Elizabeth Simner for For Books’ Sake.)

Event report: the Peirene Experience and Japanese books

15th June 2013 / / 6 Comments

I’ve been on the road (well, on the train, really) this week to a couple of bookish events that I’d like to share with you. One was the Peirene Experience, an evening to celebrate the publication of Mr Darwin’s Gardener by Kristina Carlson, the latest title from Peirene Press. Though I’ve read all their books, I have never managed to make it along to a Peirene event until now, and I had always wanted to go to one. I went to the second event more on spec, as part of my plan to get more into world literature. It was part of the London Review Bookshop’s World Literature Series, this time focusing on Japan. As you’ll see, I’m very glad to have been to both evenings.

***

So, to Belgravia Books on Wednesday, where Peirene Press’s founder and publisher, Meike Ziervogel, hosted as three guests each offered their own take on the book. First up was actor Adam Venus, who gave two readings over the course of the evening. His first was the book’s opening, and it was fascinating to realise just how different this felt from when I had read it silently to myself. Carlson’s text switches back and forth between a third-person narrator and the inner thoughts of various villagers; I’d read this quite steadily, but Venus brought home the dynamism of Carlson’s style. His second reading, from near the end of the novel, focused more on Thomas Davies, the titular gardener who wonders what, if anything, he should believe in. Unlike the other first-person voices, Venus read Thomas’s thoughts in the same measured voice that he used for the narrator, which again placed an interesting contrast on the text that hadn’t struck me so strongly on first reading.

The second performer was violinist Javier Garcia Aranda, who performed his own compositions (a series of sketches, and later a more extended piece) interpreting various extracts from the text. This was almost a musical remix of Carlson’s novel, as Aranda brought the focus in on a few sentences at a time, without necessarily needing reference to their wider context. I’m not particularly musical, so I don’t think there’s a lot I can say about this; but I was impressed at Aranda’s range, and really appreciated being able to see the close connections between text and music.

After the first reading and recital, Emily Jeremiah, one of the translators of Mr Darwin’s Gardener, spoke about some of the challenges of creating an English version from the Finnish original – which must be even greater given how idiosyncratic is this particular book. Jeremiah gave one example of a four-sentence extract In English that had been a single sentence in Finnish, the two languages’ grammars being so different. The other day, I was reading a piece that Stu Allen wrote for the Booktrust website, where he talks about a literary translator being like a musician who ‘plays’ the author’s composition. I think Jeremiah’s talk here showed just how true that is – and, of course, Venus and Aranda showed how something similar can be true for different kinds of performance.

I can’t speak for anyone who hadn’t read Mr Darwin’s Gardener in advance of the event, but I thought this was a superb introduction to Carlson’s novel. The reading and music gave a way in to the novel on an instinctual and emotional level, before Jeremiah turned to more practical matters. But the emphasis was still on personal responses, and this is what I found especially valuable as someone who had already read the book – the opportunity to experience how others saw it. I look forward to more Peirene Press events in the future, and I’d love to see more literary events this creative.

***

WLS_GY_LFrom Belgravia Books to the London Review Bookshop, and the latest in their monthly World Literature Series, which took place yesterday. The bookshop’s guest was author and editor Masashi Matsuie, who began the evening with an illustrated talk on Japanese book design. He explained that modern Japanese hardcover books would often come in their own separate box (though this is less common nowadays – the high point for the practice was in the 1960s and ‘70s). They would also have an illustrated page in a different paper stock before the title page. Matsuie showed pictures of some beautiful books – volumes with illustrated endpapers, titles embossed on their spines, illustrations impress into front covers. It was clear to me just how much care and attention had gone into these designs. I think sometimes book design can be undervalued or taken for granted, so it was great to see it being celebrated here.

Translator Michael Emmerich then took to the stage to interview Matsuie, after a reading from Matsuie’s 2012 debut novel, At the Foot of the Volcano (delivered alternately in Japanese by Matsuie and English by Emmerich). The novel (not yet published in English, but I hope it will be) concerns the relationship between an architecture student and the older architect whose work he admires and whose practice he joins. Matsuie said that drew on his own career in publishing to write about his protagonist’s architecture career, and that he  himself had thought of being an architect until he realised he didn’t have the right skills. Emmerich commented that it seemed to him almost as though the spaces were more important than the characters in the novel; and I could certainly imagine that from the extract we heard, which vividly described a church designed by the protagonist’s hero (I especially loved the image of the church looking “like a grey cat curled up in a ball waiting to nap”). Emmerich asked Matsuie if there was a parallel for him between designing books and designing architectural spaces; the author replied that he hadn’t thought of it that way before, but there probably was something to that. This is just one example of what an interesting and illuminating evening this was.

I must mention one more thing. During the Q&A session afterwards, an audience member asked if it were possible to see any of the boxed books, but Matsuie said that unfortunately he hadn’t brought any samples with him. The bookseller holding the roving mic then immediately turned around, pulled a copy of B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates from the shelf and handed it to Matsuie, who had never come across the book before and was keen to take a closer look at it. I noticed in passing that The Unfortunates is still on sale with the same design as it had when I first saw a copy in 1999. That’s a testament to good book design, just as the whole incident is a testament to good bookshops. I’d like to thank everyone involved in putting on last night’s event (and, of course, Peirene’s on Wednesday). I thoroughly enjoyed it, learned a lot… and I already have next month’s World Lit Series event in my diary.

“This is how hard you should have fought for my son when you brought him into the world”

12th June 2013 / / 4 Comments

Adam Marek, The Stone Thrower (2012)

Who is the Stone Thrower? In the title story of this, Adam Marek’s second collection, he is a boy killing the chickens  of the lakeside house that Hal’s family is renting. Hal pulls out all the stops to save his birds, demonstrating an action hero’s dexterity – but he is unprepared for just how determined the boy is to achieve his goal. In the collection as a whole, the figure of the Stone Thrower may the extraordinary forces at work in Marek’s stories, forces that may inspire extraordinary (to us, at least) responses in the adult characters seeking to protect their charges (chickens in Hal’s case, but more often children).

Marek’s tales typically begin with what appears to be a fairly unremarkable situation, but as they develop we may discover that not all is as it seems. In ‘The Stormchasers’, a father heads out with his son Jakey to go looking for a tornado. At story’s end, however, we find that the true purpose of that journey was to protect Jakey from a different kind of storm which has been going on at home. ‘Remember the Bride Who Got Stung?’ sees Victor out on a picnic with his family, when his allergic son Nate is stung by a bee; having left behind Nate’s shots , Victor determines to get the child’s adrenaline flowing – by any means necessary.

That latter story in particular illustrates one of Marek’s common techniques: to show how particular circumstances have shaped a character’s psychology in ways that appear reasonable to them, but may not to an outside observer like the reader. But – like many of The Stone Thrower’s tale’s – ‘Remember the Bride’ is understatedly and elegantly fantasticated. The appearance of a bee is a rare occurrence in the world of this story; and that’s the only hint we receive that we may be reading about a near future.

When Marek writes about the future (or an alternative present), there’s usually a greater degree of difference than that; but he’s always primarily concerned with the characters and their relationships. ‘Tamagotchi’ sees a new, more sophisticated, generation of those virtual pets on the market. Young Luke has a Tamagotchi which is sick, and spreading that sickness to other children’s pets; one parent asks that he keep away from the other children at a birthday party. But Luke is also epileptic, and his parents talk about him having a “design fault”: the stigma of having a sick Tamagotchi shades into how Luke is treated because of his condition, and affects the way his parents think about him. Sometimes this kind of mirroring extends further outwards: in ‘A Thousand Seams’, a mother clutches her ill son in the midst of a protest and tells him, ‘”WI’m going to make everything okay”. It’s an open question whether the boy or society is more threatened by having too much pressure placed on their respective weak points.

The collection ends with ‘Earthquakes’, which tells of a boy named Toby who has a rare condition that induces seizures which have external effects. The effect is different in each case (Toby’s seizures cause earth tremors), but no children with the syndrome have yet lived into their teens. The format of this story gives it a slightly different tone from most of the others in The Stone Thrower: it’s written as a generic fundraising letter – the details of the case are specific, but there’s just a placeholder for the recipient. So we have a curious mix of the personal and impersonal: there’s enough of a story about the text that it carries emotional weight; but there is also a sense that it may all be fake, a marketing document generated to drum up sympathy and cash. Even if we accept ‘Earthquakes’ as genuine, it feels like a lonely cry in the dark, because the mother writing this letter doesn’t know if anyone will ever read it. But, as ever in Marek’s stories, the adult characters will go to any length for their children if the circumstances demand it.

This book has been shortlisted for the 2013 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Click here to read my other posts on the shortlist.

Reading round-up: early June

8th June 2013 / / 2 Comments

More snapshots of some of the books I’ve read lately:

Patrick Ness, The Crane Wife (2013). Fortysomething George Duncan removes an arrow from the wing of a crane which has mysteriously appeared in his garden… then falls in love with a woman named Kumiko who visits his print shop the next day. But what follows is not so simple as “Kumiko is the crane” – she becomes the missing piece in more than one character’s life, and highlights how others do the same. The Crane Wife is a neat exploration of love and communication; I especially like the subtle ways that Ness alters the style and tone of his dialogue, depending on which characters are in conversation.

Kristina Carlson, Mr Darwin’s Gardener (2009; translated from the Finnish by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah, 2013). The latest Peirene Press title centres on Thomas Davies, non-religious gardener to Charles Darwin, who wonders what is left to live for after his wife has died. Carlson’s prose swoops in and out of the minds of various inhabitants of Downe village, examining their faith and slowly revealing their own personal doubts. The lines between faith as a belief and a way of life blur, as do notions of living for this world or the next, in a complex portrait.

Meike Ziervogel, Magda (2013). And here is the first novel by the founder of Peirene Press. It’s a composite of story-chapters, in various voices and styles, about Magda Goebbels, her mother Auguste, and eldest daughter Helga. Ziervogel ddepicts Magda as a girl given the fear of God at convent school; a woman who sees in Hitler what she had been searching for; and a mother preparing to kill her children. She also traces the psychological changes in her characters over the generations, in an interesting piece of work.

Rupert Christiansen, I Know You’re Going to Be Happy (2013). The son of two journalists, Christiansen is himself a newspaper opera and dance critic. In this memoir, he attempts to unpick the story of his parents’ divorce (his father left when Christiansen was a young child; the last time that the author never saw him was at the age of five). Christiansen is frank that this is an act exploration for him as much as one of recollection; but he creates vivid vignettes, whatever he turns to (I particularly appreciated his depiction of the ambivalence of growing up in suburban London). Christiansen’s story is compelling, and his prose a joy to read.

“When you change countries, perhaps your old self stays fixed to your back, like a turtle’s shell”

4th June 2013 / / 3 Comments

Emma Donoghue, Astray (2012)

Emma Donoghue is best- known for her contemporary novel Room (2010), but most of her fiction to date has been historical, as is the story collection Astray. Some of these tales dramatise the lives of specific (though often largely forgotten) characters from history, others create fictional faces for real events; but all are based to some degree on incidents of travel to, from, or within North America.

Donoghue has a keen eye for an interesting or unusual story. The very first piece in the book, ‘Man and Boy’ is about Jumbo, an elephant who was sold to Barnum’s circus; as narrator, his keeper in London narrates his sorrow and frustration at having to let Jumbo go. In ‘The Widow’s Cruse’, a New York attorney named Huddlestone thinks he has the measure of Mrs Gomez, a young widow who comes seeking his services. The stage is set for Huddlestone to make a pretty penny – but all is not quite as it seems. Mrs Gomez and Huddlestone both create strong impressions in the reader; these two stories illustrate what we see time and again in Astray – history painted in bold colours or from unexpected angles.

Two of my favourite stories in the collection alternate between perspectives, to considerable effect. ‘The Gift’ tells of a girl given up for adoption in the late 19th century, and the battle fought over her by the girl’s birth mother and adoptive father. This story is told entirely in the form of letters written to the anonymous adoption agency – so the two narrators never communicate directly, and the girl’s voice is never even heard. The poignancy of ‘The Gift’ lies in the sense of a life being pushed around by forces beyond the individual’s control, and that any hope of a resolution lies impossibly far away.

‘Counting the Days’ moves between Jane and Henry Johnson: she is on the last day of a voyage from Belfast to Québec, where he already waits. But, while Jane looks forward to a joyful reunion and a new life together in Canada, Henry is unwell – and we know that Jane’s dreams are not to be. Donoghue presents  this piece without breaks between scenes, which not only emphasises the closeness, the mirroring of the two protagonists; it also denies the reader space to separate the two mentally. We’re not reading about two chains of events, but about a single one that spirals down to a bitterly ironic conclusion. The characters in Astray may travel, but not all of their journeys finish.

This book has been shortlisted for the 2013 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Click here to read my other posts on the shortlist.

(Read some other reviews of Astray: Jessica Freeman-Slade for The Millions; Fran Slater for Bookmunch; Josh Goller for Spectrum Culture.)

Your suggestions, please: world literature

1st June 2013 / / 10 Comments
by
Sat, Jun 01 2013 06:59:44

 

  1. I’ve made a mid-year resolution to read more works in translation and other world literature. I do read some currently, but it’s something I want to explore much further. I asked on Twitter for suggestions of what to read:
  2. David_Heb

    David Hebblethwaite@David_Heb
    I’m making a mid-year resolution to read more world lit. Can I have your suggestions of essential books, please?
     
     

    Mon, May 27 2013 05:59:55

     
  3. stujallen

    stu @stujallen
    @David_Heb Punti lost luggage Longo ten Różewicz mother departs Topol the devils workshop, Jean-Claude izzo
     
     

    Mon, May 27 2013 06:06:50

     
  4. lx69

    Alex M. Pruteanu@lx69
    @David_Heb @stujallen anything by Andrei Makine…outstanding literature.
     
     

    Mon, May 27 2013 06:07:36

     
  5. lx69

    Alex M. Pruteanu@lx69
    @David_Heb @stujallen Herta Muller’s “The Hunger Angel”
     
     

    Mon, May 27 2013 06:08:17

     
  6. stuck_inabook

    Simon Thomas@stuck_inabook
    @David_Heb I was very impressed by Nervous Conditions by Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangaremba – stuck-in-a-book.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/nervou…
     
     

    Mon, May 27 2013 06:11:03

     
  7. JacquiWine

    Jacqui Patience@JacquiWine
    @David_Heb Have you read ‘Traveller of the Century’ by Andres Neuman? Absolutely loved that one. @stujallen
     
     

    Mon, May 27 2013 06:11:18

     
  8. ummlilia

    june seghni@ummlilia
    @David_Heb @stujallen Antal Szerb, Journey By Moonlight , 20th century Hungarian modernist classic
     
     

    Mon, May 27 2013 06:12:05

     
  9. stujallen

    stu @stujallen
    @lx69 @David_Heb Zambra ways of going home and sidewalks Luiselli I’ve enjoyed as well this year
     
     

    Mon, May 27 2013 06:12:30

     
  10. Frizbot

    Naomi Frisby@Frizbot
    @David_Heb Faces in the Crowd – Valeria Luiselli
     
     

    Mon, May 27 2013 06:14:57

     
  11. tony_malone

    Tony@tony_malone
    @David_Heb Hmm. 140 characters ain’t going to cut it… Just try my blog instead 😉 tonysreadinglist.blogspot.com.au
     
     

    Mon, May 27 2013 06:23:10

     
  12. dadwhowrites

    Dad Who Writes@dadwhowrites
    @David_Heb The Tale of Genji. First long-form novel as we know it by a lady-in-waiting in 11th century Japan.
     
     

    Mon, May 27 2013 06:23:43

     
  13. Catamaroon

    E. J. Swift@Catamaroon
    @David_Heb Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, some Roberto Bolano and some Angelica Gorodischer.
     
     

    Mon, May 27 2013 08:01:01

     
  14. drownedbook

    Laura McGloughlin@drownedbook
    @David_Heb To the End of the Land by David Grossman (Israel),
    Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos (Mexico)…
     
     

    Mon, May 27 2013 10:53:02

     
  15. EmilyBooksBlog

    Emily Rhodes@EmilyBooksBlog
    @David_Heb Ryu Murakami from @PushkinPress, Jenny Erpenbeck from @PortobelloBooks and Giorgio Basssani from @PenguinUKBooks
     
     

    Wed, May 29 2013 01:22:36

     
  16. BradleyBooks

    S J Bradley@BradleyBooks
    @David_Heb @andothertweets Best European Fiction 2012 would be a good place to start. Or Drown by Junot Diaz
     
     

    Wed, May 29 2013 01:25:03

     
  17. londonkoreanist

    Deborah Smith@londonkoreanist
    @David_Heb you pretty much can’t go wrong with the Argentineans & the Hungarians. Knausgaard, Shishkin, Yoko Ogawa, Yoko Tawada, Mia Couto
     
     

    Wed, May 29 2013 02:44:05

     
  18. katobell

    Katherine Stephen@katobell
    @David_Heb Saramago, if you haven’t read any of his.
     
     

    Fri, May 31 2013 05:13:04

     
  19. evastalker

    Eva Stalker@evastalker
    @David_Heb Clicked on ur tweet to say Saramago & saw @katobell already had! ‘Blindness’ is remarkable. Came to him after Kelman’s prose.
     
     

    Fri, May 31 2013 12:21:56

     
  20. katobell

    Katherine Stephen@katobell
    @David_Heb @evastalke also Calvino, if you haven’t tried him. If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller is a thing of joy. Unusual technique again,
     
     

    Fri, May 31 2013 13:11:01

     
  21. Thanks to everyone who offered suggestions. I’m still on the lookout for ideas, so please feel free to chip in below.

Reading round-up: late May

30th May 2013 / / 0 Comments

Notes on some of the books I”ve read recently:

Caroline Smailes, The Drowning of Arthur Braxton (2013). A properly wonderful tale of water nymphs living in a northern English swimming baths, and the boy who falls for one of them. The clash between timeless magic and the modern, rather mundane, setting is amusing at times; but a deeper sense of something genuinely strange and dangerous also emerges. Smailes tells a coming-of-age story with an atmosphere all its own.

Richard C. Morais, Buddhaland Brooklyn (2012). Seido Oda is dispatched from his monastery in Japan to set up his sect’s first temple in America – Brooklyn, to be precise. Once there, Oda finds a ragbag of individuals who mean well, but who aren’t the kind of Buddhist he is used to. This is an engaging tale of different cultures meeting, as both Oda and the Brooklyn Buddhists find that they can learn from each other.

Gila Green, King of the Class (2013). A few years hence in Israel, Eve has a decision to make about her relationship when her fiancé Manny embraces religion. A decade later, she faces new pressures when her son goes missing. Green’s debut examines issues of identity, faith and love, as it moves between character-based drama and mystery-thriller.

Peggy Riley, Amity & Sorrow (2013). Amaranth,  one of the wives from a fundamentalist cult, flees the cult’s compound with her two daughters, Amity and Sorrow. One of the girls responds well to the outside world; the other longs to return. Riley goes back to examine how and why Amaranth joined the cult, and what led to her leaving; as well exploring the lives and feelings of her three protagonists in the present. All adds up to an insightful and multi-faceted character study.

Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders (2007). When I was a child, I read a lot of Gyles Brandreth’s books of obscure facts and puzzles (his Word Box was very nearly one of my choices for Simon’s My Life in Books feature). Now Brandreth has written a series of murder mysteries starring Oscar Wilde as the detective; this (my reading group’s latest choice) is the first, and sees Wilde’s journalist friend Robert Sherard as narrator, and Arthur Conan Doyle in a supporting role. Brandreth’s novel is quite the romp, with Wilde becoming a Sherlock Holmes figure; but it feels too much as though the cards of the mystery are being stacked up to be revealed at the ed, making the journey that bit less involving.

Granta Best Young British Novelists 2013: Adam Thirlwell

24th May 2013 / / 1 Comment

Adam Thirlwell, one of two writers from Granta’s 2003 list to appear again in the 2013 selection, contributes ‘Slow Motion’, whose protagonist, Edison Lo, who wakes up in a motel room next to a girl he’s picked up, and returns later that day to find her dead. I didn’t check the biographical note until after I’d finished reading Thirlwell’s piece, and so was not aware that ‘Slow Motion’ was a novel extract. It actually works quite well as a discrete piece, though I’m not sure how well Edison’s narrative voice – dense, but woven from banalities and pop-culture imagery – would fare at novel-length. It’s just fine for these twenty pages, though.

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

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