Author: David Hebblethwaite

Héloïse Press: The Memory of the Air by Caroline Lamarche (tr. Katherine Gregor)

9th December 2022 / / 0 Comments

The Memory of the Air is a slim volume that confronts an assault, at first obliquely and later directly. Caroline Lamarche’s narrator begins dreaming of a dead woman in a ravine, and resolves to visit her regularly. It seems pretty clear that this is an internal journey for the narrator:

Every morning, I think that everything is going to be all right. Or, on the contrary, that everything is going to go wrong. Either way, I have to go for it: put one foot in front of the other. Depending on the day, the descent into the ravine can be more or less easy.

As the monologue flows back and forth between the narrator’s life and that ravine, we get a sense of her reality growing unstable. She tells us about her relationship with a man she refers to only as” the man before” or “Manfore”. Over time, we see how toxic – indeed, abusive – that relationship was. A remark from Manfore then takes the narrator back further, to finally face what happened to her in the past. 

Katherine Gregor’s translation takes you right into the narrator’s perspective. Reading The Memory of the Air is an intense, harrowing experience. 

Published by Héloïse Press.

Salt Publishing: The Peckham Experiment by Guy Ware

27th November 2022 / / 1 Comment

The Peckham Experiment was a project begun in 1926, aimed at encouraging working-class families to better themselves through access to leisure and cultural activities. Guy Ware imagines twins born into this project: Charlie and JJ. As the novel begins, we meet Charlie aged 85, looking back on his life to write a eulogy for JJ.

The brothers’ parents were communist, and JJ and Charlie carried into adulthood ideals of improving life for everyone. JJ was a council architect, looking to design better housing for working-class people. Charlie was a surveyor, building those homes. As time went on, they would find their ideals compromised, and placed in the shadow of structural failure and disaster.

Charlie’s narrative voice is dense and discursive, his recollections haphazard at times, but still sharp. It’s a voice that can weave together the personal, political and historical. As a result, the twins’ experiences reflect undercurrents that play out across broader society in the novel. It’s fascinating to read.

Published by Salt.

Peirene Press: Body Kintsugi by Senka Marić (tr. Celia Hawkesworth)

10th November 2022 / / 0 Comments

The latest Peirene title is translated from Bosnian, but its title nods to Japan. Kintsugi refers to the art of mending pottery with lacquer mixed with gold, so that the broken edges are highlighted rather than hidden. Senka Marić’s protagonist discovers a lump at the start of this novel, which leads to a diagnosis of breast cancer. The rest of the book chronicles her changing relationship to her body as she undergoes treatment. 

Be warned, the protagonist’s experience is vividly – at times brutally – described; but that’s also what gives the book is power. Marić depicts the protagonist struggling to come to terms with what’s happening to her, but also a gradual sense that these changes are becoming part of her, like the cracks in a work of kintsugi. 

The novel is also structured in a way that reflects the idea of kintsugi: short chapters, not just from the present but also the protagonist’s childhood. In other words: pieces of her life, the joins visible, that are put together into this striking work. 

Corylus Books: Deceit by Jónína Leósdóttir (tr. Quentin Bates)

5th November 2022 / / 0 Comments

Today I’m welcoming Corylus Books back to the blog, with a stop on their blog tour for Deceit, the first novel by Icelandic author Jónína Leósdóttir to appear in English translation. 

Expat English psychologist Adam receives a call from his ex, police detective Soffia, asking to speak to him urgently. Adam is not happy about this, as he’s worried about catching Covid, but there’s no one else available for Soffia to turn to. She explains that the fresh fruit in a café has been found to be contaminated with needles. Other incidents of contamination emerge, and it turns out there’s a web of family ties connecting the targets. 

Deceit is one of those books that grabs you from the beginning and just keeps on going. I was especially intrigued by the setup, which grows only more complex as the pages turn. Adam and Soffia are a pair of contrasting and engaging characters that really help to give this mystery a distinctive feel. It was a pleasure to spend time in their world. 

3TimesRebel Press: Mothers Don’t by Katixa Agirre (tr. Kristin Addis)

25th October 2022 / / 0 Comments

This is one of the first titles from 3TimesRebel, a small press based in Dundee, who specialise in books by female authors, translated from minority languages (Mothers Don’t is translated from Basque). It’s a compelling book, and quite a statement of intent for the publisher. 

The book begins with one Alice Espanet being found at home with her twins, whom she has apparently killed. Two weeks later, Agirre’s narrator is in the middle of giving birth when she realises that she knew Alice for a time at university, though in those days Alice was named Jade. The narrator comes to find that motherhood is taking over her sense of self. Having found some success as a writer of true crime, she decides the way to get back to herself is to write about Alice Espanet. 

Agirre’s protagonist tries to understand what drove Alice to kill her children. She visits the Espanet house, goes back to an old friend who also knew Jade, attends Alice’s trial… but the answers remain elusive and ambiguous. At the same time, the narrator is questioning her own feelings about motherhood: sometimes it feels beautiful and fulfilling to her; sometimes it pushes aside everything else. 

It seems to me that Mothers Don’t is an example of what Javier Cercas terms a ‘blind-spot novel‘ – a novel searching to answer a question that ultimately can’t be answered, so that the search itself becomes an answer. The narrator’s feelings about being a mother, the competing stories trying to explain Alice Espanet’s actions… These things are not reconciled, but the contradictions in them animate the novel and help give it its power. 

Corylus Books: Harm by Sólveig Pálsdóttir (tr. Quentin Bates)

13th October 2022 / / 0 Comments

Today I’m joining a blog tour for Corylus Books, a small publisher of European crime fiction. We’re off to Iceland for Harm, the third of Sólveig Pálsdóttir’s novels to feature detective Guðgeir Fransson. It’s the first I have read, but it worked as a jumping-on point.

We meet Ríkharður, a fifty-something doctor on holiday with Diljá, his much younger girlfriend (ex, he has to remind himself), and four of her friends. Diljá finds Ríkharður dead one morning, and flees. Enter Guðgeir and his fellow detective Elsa Guðrún, who start to question Diljá’s friends while the police are searching for her.

Harm is a relatively short novel that moves along at a brisk pace, with a plot that shifts in several directions. The initial rounds of questioning uncover a darker side to Ríkharður, a fragile side to Diljá, and mysteries among Diljá’s friends – but Sólveig’s tale does not rest on its laurels.

I was pleased to find that I really couldn’t tell where Harm was going. I also appreciated the way Sólveig explored her characters’ backgrounds, illuminating complex moral issues. All in all, this novel was a highly intriguing read.

#GoldsmithsPrize2022: Somebody Loves You by Mona Arshi

10th October 2022 / / 0 Comments

The voice of Mona Arshi’s debut novel belongs to Ruby, a young British Indian woman. It’s an expressive voice in this written (or thought) form, but Ruby decided as a girl that she would stop speaking:

The first time I spoke out loud at school I said the word sister and tripped all over it. I tried a second time, and my tongue got caught on the middle-syllable hiss and hovered there. The third time? A teacher asked me a question, and I opened my mouth as a sort of formality but closed it softly, knowing with perfect certainty that nothing would ever come out again.

The scattered vignettes of Somebody Loves You are appropriate for a narrator who’s not used to telling a story to an audience. Still, Ruby’s tale covers a lot of ground in a relatively short length, including growing up, racism and mental health. The latter is explored through the character of Ruby’s mother, and I’m picking it out because I think it’s a good example of how Arshi’s book works.

This is how the subject is introduced:

The day my sister tried to drag the baby fox into our house was the same day my mother had her first mental breakdown.

It’s an arresting line, but one that’s at least as interested in the fox as in Ruby’s mother. Actually, in that whole short chapter, the mother’s mental breakdown is strikingly ‘off-page’. Quite a lot (though by no means all) of what happens in Somebody Loves You happens to characters other than Ruby, and of course she can’t see into their experiences – though she can observe.

Ruby notices that her mother finds respite in the garden – a defined space, so rare in this novel of hazy edges. Gardens become one of the book’s recurring motifs, an anchor point for characters and reader alike. The vignettes of Somebody Loves You build together into quite a powerful whole.

Published by And Other Stories.

Click here to read my other reviews of the 2022 Goldsmiths Prize shortlist.

Goldsmiths Prize shortlist 2022

7th October 2022 / / 0 Comments

We’re now in the tenth year of the Goldsmiths Prize, which causes me to reflect on how much my reading tastes have been shaped over that time, by the Prize specifically to an extent, but more broadly by what it represents in championing ‘mould-breaking’ fiction. It wouldn’t be the same without the Goldsmiths, let’s put it that way.

On to this year’s shortlist: let’s see what we’ve got…

  • Somebody Loves You by Mona Arshi (And Other Stories)
  • Seven Steeples by Sara Baume (Tramp Press)
  • Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer (Picador)
  • Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi (Faber & Faber)
  • there are more things by Yara Rodrigues Fowler (Fleet)
  • Diego Garcia by Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams (Fitzcarraldo Editions)

I’ve reviewed one of these books already, and Seven Steeples is a worthy contender, with the way it makes character fade into landscape (and vice versa). Helen Oyeyemi has long been a favourite author of mine, so I’m really pleased to see her make this shortlist. The rest is all to be discovered as I read along.

Santa Monica Press: The Revenge of Joe Wild by Andrew Komarnyckyj

4th October 2022 / / 0 Comments

Andrew Komarnyckyj wrote one of my favourite books from last year, Ezra Slef. That novel was a joyous romp about a pompous writer who makes a deal with the Devil. The Revenge of Joe Wild is something rather different: a coming-of-age yarn set in 19th century America. What unites the two books is that they’re anchored by strong narrative voices. Here’s Joe Wild:

The schoolhouse was the worst house in the world ‘cept our house. It had a bell on the roof that went right through you like a stone through a window when it rang. If you warn’t inside when that bell rang woe betide you, you was in for a leatherin’. I knows better’n most about leatherin’.

In 1861, Joe is a twelve-year-old boy from a poor Illinois family. When he’s wrongly accused of murdering a neighbour, Joe runs away from town and into an even wilder world than the one he knew. Eventually he will join the army and return home a man, to set the past right.

Joe Wild is as compelling in its own way as Ezra Slef, a tale of vivid set-pieces that just doesn’t let up. If you’re looking for a rip-roaring adventure, this is a book well worth your time.

Published by Santa Monica Press.

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