Author: David Hebblethwaite

My BSFA short fiction nominations

10th January 2013 / / 2 Comments

Midnight tomorrow is the deadline to submit nominations for this year’s BSFA Awards. I sent mine in yesterday, with a view to suggesting things that might otherwise be overlooked. I won’t go over the novels I nominated, because they’re mostly covered elsewhere. But coming up with  short fiction ideas made me dig further into my reading from last year, and it might be a little more interesting.

I’m aware that most of these will be long shots (though you never know…); I’ll probably be the only person in the BSFA who’s read some of them. But I can highlight stuff all the same; so here, in no particular order, is what I nominated:

‘Countless Stones’ – Lucy Wood

I couldn’t neglect my favourite book of short fiction from 2012, so here’s a story from Diving Belles. ‘Countless Stones’ is probably the strongest fantasy story in the collection (some of the tales have a lighter fantastic touch than others), and it really illustrates Wood’s approach to combining the supernatural and mundane, as her protagonist treats turning to stone yet again as just another inconvenience, no worse than having to deal with an ex-partner.

‘Black Box’ – Jennifer Egan

This is the story from the New Yorker‘s science fiction issue that was also serialised on Twitter. We had a good discussion about it on the blog last summer. It’s a flawed story, but also an interesting one, and I thought it should have a chance to be considered.

‘The Lonely Hunter’ – John Grant

John Grant is a friend, but I nominated this novella (published as a stand-alone volume by PS) because of how much I enjoyed its blurring of reality and fiction.

‘How We Ran the Night’ – Keith Ridgway

A story/chapter from Hawthorn & Child. I couldn’t call the book as a whole speculative fiction, for all that it shares some of the same sensibilities. But this particular piece toys with the idea of a fantastical society of wolves living in London, and is worth attention in its own right.

‘Ghost in the Machine’ – Christopher Parvin

There are a number of sf stories in the latest Bristol Prize anthology, but I decided to limit my nominations to one story per book, and this is it. I found Parvin’s take on the idea of robots living alongside humans amusing – and its collage structure works well, too.

‘Switchgirls’ – Tania Hershman

This piece from Still is particularly short, but carries emotional heft and is nicely ambiguous.

‘The Kendal Iconoclasm’ – Paul Rooney

One of a handful of fantastic stories from Rooney’s collection Dust, this weaves horror out of characters’ awareness that they’re in a story and can’t escape.

Before I finish, a note on one of my non-fiction nominations. John Mullan’s dismissive attitude towards science fiction is well documented, but I nominated him for his Guardian Book Club series on Iain M. Banks’s Use of Weapons. This nomination wasn’t entirely frivolous: when he’s focused on analysing the book, Mullan’s critique is engaged and engaging. Yet there’s still the odd swipe at the genre; the shifts in tone are quite bizarre. But, for all that, I thought the articles were worth acknowledging.

The BSFA Award shortlists will be published next week – I look forward to seeing what’s on there.

Man Asian Literary Prize 2012

9th January 2013 / / 0 Comments

Another award shortlist today, this one for the Man Asian Literary Prize:

  • Between Clay and Dust by Musharraf Ali Farooqi (Pakistan)
  • The Briefcase by Hiromi Kawakami (Japan)
  • Silent House by Orhan Pamuk (Turkey)
  • The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng (Malaysia)
  • Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil (India)

The two books that immediately jump out at me there are the Tan and the Thayil, because of course they were also shortlisted for last year’s Booker. I’ve read The Garden of Evening Mists, but haven’t felt inclined to try Narcopolis. There’s a readalong taking place of Kawakami’s The Briefcase as part of January in Japan, so you can expect a review of that on here by the end of the month.

Of the other two nominees, Orhan Pamuk falls into the category of well-known authors I’ve never got around to reading. I don’t know the historical background of Silent House, so it could be an interesting read. Farooqi, I knew nothing about at all – but Between Clay and Dust sounds like something that would chime with my sensibilities, so count me intrigued by that one.

The winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize will be announced in Hong Kong on 14 March.

Books in brief: early January

7th January 2013 / / 3 Comments

It’s a blogging anniversary – four years ago today, I published the first post here on Follow the Thread (a review of the movie Once). A further 728 posts have followed it, and there are more to come. Here’s one now – let me round-up some of the books I’ve been reading in the last few weeks…

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Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists (2012). A judge retires to her old house in the central highlands of Malaysia, recalling the old Japanese gardener she knew there in her adolescence – the Japanese Emperor’s one-time gardener, no less. This is a very still, quiet book: its language can be overly ornate, but does create that atmosphere also well. Eng also paints a complex picture of morality and history.

Ali Smith, Artful (2012). Four lectures on aspects of art, delivered by Smith at the University of Oxford in early 2012. Essayistic reflections on art are folded into the ongoing story of a woman haunted by her dead lover (who may or may not have returned). This is thought-provoking stuff, and I suspect it would be excellent read aloud by the author. Perhaps not the ideal book for me to choose as my introduction to Smith’s work, though.

James Renner, The Man from Primrose Lane (2012). David Neff, a successful writer still sorely missing his dead wife, investigates the mysterious murder of a recluse – and finds his reality growing more and more unstable. There’s considerable charm in the raggedness of Renner’s debut novel; and, especially in the middle, the slippage between perceptions and realities is quite exhilarating. On the flipside, the book sidelines its female characters, and it collides two genres in such a way that they tend to undermine rather than reinforce each other.


Pierre Szalowski, Fish Change Direction in Cold Weather (2007; tr. Alison Anderson 2012). Montreal, January 1998: a boy’s parents split up, he calls to the sky for help – and a severe ice storm descends. New relationships are forged as the community is brought closer together. Szalowski’s prose is light and breezy, perhaps a little too much so –the novel aims for a deep emotional connection which I never quite felt.

Kobo Abe, The Face of Another (1964; tr. E, Dale Saunders 1966). A scientist disfigured in an accident determines to create the perfect mask; when he succeeds, he finds himself thinking of the mask as a separate entity. I found this an interesting book – in terms of both its philosophical reflections on what faces mean to us, and its characterisation of the protagonist, with his increasing lack of self-awareness – but it was also dry, and my enthusiasm for writing about it further waned as the pages turned.

Patrick Neate (ed.), Too Much Too Young (2012). The second annual anthology from Neate’s “literary club night”, Book Slam. Twelve stories from writers including David Nicholls, Marina Lewycka, and Nikesh Shukla, each taking its title from a song. It’s a diverse set of stories, with the passing of time as the most common theme. My pick of the volume is Chris Cleave’s ‘We’ll Meet Again’, in which a man shows his grandmother (who has dementia) how to use the internet, leading to poignant contrasts of past and future.

January in Japan: Ryu Murakami and Natsuo Kirino

4th January 2013 / / 17 Comments

Ryu Murakami, Piercing (1994/2007)
Natsuo Kirino, Out (1997/2004)

Kawashima Masayuki, the protagonist of Ryu Murakami’s Piercing (translated by Ralph McCarthy), stands over his baby daughter’s crib with an ice pick, testing his resolve not to use it. The full darkness beneath Kawashima’s outwardly happy family life is soon revealed, as we learn that he once stabbed a woman with an ice pick, and he’s afraid he’ll do so again to the baby. He convinces himself that the only way to deal with these feelings is to stab a stranger instead. So he checks into a hotel, calls for a prostitute, and waits.

The young woman who arrives is Sanada Chiaki, who has had her own demons to face in life, and is perhaps more than anything just looking to feel once again. What follows, in a chapter taking up fully half of this short novel, is a tense and fascinating game of power-plays. Our perspective shifts back and forth between Kawashima and Chiaki, as does the upper hand in a battle they don’t (at first) even know they are fighting. Both characters have their strengths and weaknesses, their resources and defences, and one can never be sure how this game will end. Piercing is deeply uncomfortable reading, certainly; but, as a portrait of two deeply damaged individuals, it’s also compelling.

Where Piercing is short and tight, Natsuo Kirino’s Out (translated by Stephen Snyder) is long and (relatively) roomy, but it shares a focus on individuals at extremes of behaviour. Four women work nights on the production lines of a boxed-lunch factory. In the heat of the moment, one kills her husband, driven to her wit’s end by his abuse. One of her colleagues, Masako Katori, takes charge of disposing of the body, gradually drawing the other women into the secret. Then the pressure is on to keep the killing hidden, from the police and other prying eyes.

For me, the character of Masako is the great strength of Kirino’s novel: psychologically, she’s quite ‘blank’ – even she doesn’t really understand what drives her to do what she does – which gives the book a similar sense of uncertainty to that Murakami achieves in Piercing by coming from the opposite direction (his protagonists are ‘known quantities’, but he creates uncertainty by bringing them together). As a thriller, Out has the same narrative momentum, and is perhaps even more dynamic as it shows greater change in its characters’ lives. But I find myself leaning towards Piercing as the more intense reading experience, with a study of character that bit sharper.

January in Japan is a blog event hosted by Tony’s Reading List.

Open thread: graphic novel recommendations

3rd January 2013 / / 8 Comments

With Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes just having won the Costa Biography Award, and Chris Ware’s extraordinary-sounding Building Stories popping up on year’s-best lists, it seems clear to me that I’m missing out by not reading graphic novels. It’s not that I don’t like the form, more that I don’t really know where to start. So…

Please give me your graphic novel recommendations for someone who, like me, comes from a prose fiction-reading (rather than a comics-reading) background. Not Watchmen or Sandman, though — but something I might not have heard of. (And proper recommendations only, please — no advertising.)

Martin Lewis stopped by to recommend Days of the Bagnold Summer in the comments of my Costa post. What else could we add to the list?

Costa Book Awards 2012

3rd January 2013 / / 3 Comments

The category winners of the Costa Book Awards have been announced:

Novel: Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

First Novel: The Innocents by Francesca Segal

Biography: Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes by Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot

Poetry: The Overhaul by Kathleen Jamie

Children’s Book: Maggot Moon by Sally Gardner

There are a couple of notable firsts for the Costas here: a graphic novel (Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes) taking one of the prizes, and an all-female roster of winning writers (Bryan Talbot being the illustrator of the biography).

Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes actually looks like the winner I’m most interested in investigating – graphic novels are a gap in my reading diet, and this could be a good title with which to start changing that.

 

 

Strange Horizons: 2012 in Review

2nd January 2013 / / 0 Comments

I have a little piece in today’s 2012 in Review feature on Strange Horizons, talking about my speculative fiction highlights of the past year. The books I chose to talk about won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who’s seen my favourite reads of 2012 list; but I have tried to tie everything together in a way that makes a larger point:

…the key opposition in the field right now is not between genre and mainstream, but between texts that play into genre conventions and those that go their own way.

I’ll be looking for more of those works that “go their own way” over the months ahead.

(Incidentally, I was especially surprised – and pleased! – to see three other mentions for Hawthorn & Child: not bad going for a novel that isn’t, technically, speculative fiction.)

January in Japan

2nd January 2013 / / 6 Comments

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So here is the first blogosphere event I’m taking part in this year. I’m not very familiar with Japanese literature, but I’ve wanted to read more for some time; so when I heard about this themed month being hosted by Tony’s Reading List, it seemed an ideal pretext. I’ve scoured the local library and my own shelves for some reading material, and I’ll be linking to all of my posts from here as and when they appear. (If you want a sneak preview, keep an eye on the new ‘Read in 2013’ page above.)

1. Piercing by Ryu Murakami & Out by Natsuo Kirino

2. Harmony by Project Itoh

3. Hotel Iris by Yoko Ogawa & The Goddess Chronicle by Natsuo Kirino

Into 2013

1st January 2013 / / 1 Comment

Happy New Year! For my first post of 2013, I just want to talk about a few changes in direction that I’m planning. My default way of blogging over the last couple of years has been to mix longer reviews with sets of 250-word “book notes” pieces, as a way of covering as many of the books I read as possible. This year, I expect to have less time for blogging; so I want to be more selective and focus on the books I most want to write about.

I’ll still do longer reviews as before, but I don’t want the book notes pieces just to group together the last two or three titles that I’ve read. I want to try to forge stronger links within multi-book posts, even if that means not blogging about one book until several months after I’ve read it. To catch everything else, I’m planning round-up posts which will treat books more briefly; and I’ll keep a dynamic list of everything I read in the year on a separate page linked at the top of the blog.

I’m also going to look out for more things to join in with in the wider blogosphere, starting with January in Japan, an event hosted by Tony from Tony’s Reading List. More on that shortly.

My favourite reads of 2012

20th December 2012 / / 16 Comments

It’s that time of year again, for looking back over what I’ve read and picking out the highlights. In previous years, I’ve limited my list to books published in the year in question, or split it equally between old and new titles. For 2012, I’m just doing a straightforward list of my favourite twelve reads of the year, regardless of when they were first published.

So, in alphabetical order of author surname, here they are:

Adrian Barnes, Nod

Telling of a battle of words and perceptions in contemporary Vancouver, this is a dystopian novel with the nervous energy of a new world still being negotiated, and a keen sense of its own precariousness. It never feels as though it’s about to settle.

M. John Harrison, Viriconium

Possibly the ultimate anti-escapist fantasy (and almost certainly the only major work of fantastic literature to be set partly in my home town of Huddersfield). In this collection of novels and stories, it’s fantasy that does the escaping, leaving readers and characters alike scrabbling at mirrors.

Katie Kitamura, The Longshot

The tale of a mixed martial artist heading for one last shot at glory. This short novel is as taut and focused as a winning fighter; it’s a brilliant unity of form and subject.

Jonathan Lee, Joy

A fine character study of a successful young lawyer who attempts to take her own life in front of her work colleagues, and of other key figures in her life. Lee has superb control of voice and tone, and the whole novel is a great pleasure to read.

Simon Lelic, The Child Who

Here, by coincidence, is another incisive  character study focusing on a lawyer – this time the solicitor defending a twelve-year-old accused of murder  whom he (and everyone else) knows is guilty. This unusual angle enables Lelic to give certain key scenes an unexpected texture, and to give a complex picture of the issues he raises.

Karen Lord, Redemption in Indigo

A Senegalese folktale spliced with quantum physics. A morality tale whose only moral is that the reader should decide on one for herself. An examination of choice wrapped up in a glorious piece of storytelling that knows just when to turn on itself.

Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic

A chorus of narrators tells the story (and stories) of a group of Japanese ‘picture brides’ who go to the US at the start of the last century, and their descendants. Otsuka’s short novel is a beautiful composition whose focus shifts elegantly back and forth between a wider and more individual view.

Keith Ridgway, Hawthorn & Child

An anti-detective novel in which any semblance of narrative or coherence dissipates as soon as you look. Its pieces are brought together into a whole by superb writing and Ridgway’s distinctive aesthetic.

Adam Roberts, Jack Glass

Read during my ongoing semi-hiatus, this novel brings together Golden Age detective fiction and science fiction, and interrogates them. It is very much alive to the limitations and shortcomings of those types of fiction, but still plays fair with the reader. (See Jonathan McCalmont’s masterful review for more on the book.)

Zadie Smith, NW

A collage of a novel that examines the connections between several characters’ lives in north-west London. Smith goes through several different styles and approaches in NW, but all combine successfully in this insightful read.

Muriel Spark, The Driver’s Seat

A deeply unsettling piece of work that turns the concept of the murder mystery on its head and – perhaps even more effectively – puts a dark twist on the notion of a character study. This is the sort of novel that makes me want to explore the rest of its author’s œuvre.

Lucy Wood, Diving Belles

My favourite debut of the year, this collection brings Cornish folklore into the present day. These stories are  by turns amusing, mysterious and evocative; I can’t wait to see what Wood writes next.

***

This will be my last blog post of 2012. Wherever you are, I’d like to thank you for reading and wish you well for the coming year. See you again in 2013.

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