Author: David Hebblethwaite

Katie Kitamura, The Longshot (2009)

27th July 2012 / / 5 Comments

Katie Kitamura’s debut is one of those novels whose form neatly mirrors its subject. The Longshot is about mixed martial arts (MMA), and it’s as sharp and focused as a fighter on top form. Our protagonists are Riley, an MMA trainer; and Cal, his protégé of ten years. We join them as they arrive in Tijuana, where Cal is due for a rematch against the legendary Rivera, who beat him four years previously. Both Cal and Riley appreciate how significant this fight is going to be.

The Longshot is a short book, and its prose terse to match – but that doesn’t mean it’s undescriptive. Kitamura captures superbly the physicality of the fighting about which she writes, its combination of violence and extreme control. However, what stands out even more for me – and there’s a nice  tension between this and the novel’s brevity – is the emphasis on observation. Riley and Cal pore obsessively over videos of Rivera’s old bouts, in search of the key that will enable Cal to gain the upper hand: a little weakness or habit or pattern that could be exploited in Cal’s game plan. That relentless need to notice spills over into other areas of life, as when the two men can’t help observing how each other eats breakfast. But it’s presented most vividly when Cal is finally in the ring against Rivera:

His head was light. His body was light. It was the detail that was doing it. Everywhere there was detail. He placed his hands on the ropes. The grain of the rope, each individual piece of ribbing – just the touch was enough to burn him. His toe brushed against the canvas, and he felt the give of the floor against the tug of the nail (pp. 171-2).

So, Kitamura presents MMA as an all-consuming sport, one that demands the full focus of its practitioners’ bodies and minds. That’s something else brought home by The Longshot’s tight focus; we learn hardly anything about Cal’s and Riley’s backgrounds (save that Cal was a kid going nowhere in life when Riley spotted his talent). If these men have lives and relationships outside of MMA, we don’t see them – and the sport is so important to them that it hardly makes any difference.

There’s a clear sense that Cal and Riley depend on each other, and wouldn’t really know how to function if anything undermine their relationship. That’s why they’re ambivalent about the impending fight with Rivera; it could destroy Cal’s career as easily as revitalise it. Both protagonists have their moments of doubt: Riley visits Rivera’s training gym in San Diego; seeing the talented new kids there makes him feel hopelessly behind the curve. For Cal, a similar moment comes when he sees posters for the match in the streets of Tijuana; his instinct is just to run, to escape. He’s had to become so self-absorbed for his training that being reminded of the reality of the fight in the outside world is almost too much to bear. But both Riley and Cal must go on, because of all there is to gain – and, perhaps, because they’re simply unable to do otherwise.

The Longshot is a portrait of two men pushed to extremes, whether extremes of physical exertion, concentration, or desperation. It’s very well achieved indeed, and puts Katie Kitamura’s imminent second novel, Gone to the Forest, straight on my to-read list.

Elsewhere
Katie Kitamura’s website
Some other reviews of The Longshot: Dovegreyreader Scribbles; Books, Time, and Silence; Methvenite; Pursewarden.

The Booker’s dozen 2012

25th July 2012 / / 8 Comments

I promised myself that I’d pay more attention to the Man Booker Prize this year than I have previously. Here are my initial thoughts on the twelve books in the 2012 longlist:

Nicola Barker, The Yips

Barker is a previous Booker shortlistee (for Darkmans in 2007), though I’ve never read her myself. The Yips is a comedy set in 2006, revolving around a golfer who’s losing his touch. I’ve heard praise for this book, but the extract I read did not encourage me to investigate further.

Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident

When I heard about Beauman’s debut novel, Boxer, Beetle, I was intrigued; when I read it, I was disappointed. The blurb for The Teleportation Accident (‘a historical novel that doesn’t know what year it is; a noir novel that turns all the lights on…’) makes it sound right up my street; but I read the extract, see the familiar prose style, and remember last time…

André Brink, Philida

Brink’s name was new to me, but he was shortlisted twice for the Booker in the 1970s. Philida is the story of a slave’s journey across 1830s South Africa in order to escape the fate which has been laid out for her. That could be interesting – I can’t find an extract of Philida online, but I’d be inclined to try the book out.

Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

It’s always a pleasure to see books from small presses on award lists; Newcastle’s Myrmidon publishes the first of three here. The novel itself concerns a female Malay judge and an exiled Japanese gardener in post-war Malaya. It seems to have been well received, and could be worth a look.

Michael Frayn, Skios

Frayn was previously shortlisted for the Booker in 1999; his current novel concerns a scientific conference on its titular Greek island. I read an extract and was charmed by the prose style – definitely a book I’d be interested to read.

Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

A candidate for breakout debut of the year, Joyce’s book is one of two on the longlist that I’ve already read. I’ve also reviewed it here: I thought the novel good, particularly in the way it balances eccentricity and seriousness – but I didn’t have it down as a Booker contender.

Deborah Levy, Swimming Home

And here’s the second longlistee that I’ve read. It’s particularly gratifying to see a title from And Other Stories being recognised by the Booker – they started only last year, and have an exciting community-based publishing model that deserves to succeed. It seems almost churlish to note that Swimming Home left me cold, but other people with good taste have thought very highly of it.

Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

It seemed almost a foregone conclusion that this would be shortlisted, given Mantel’s Booker win in 2009. I wouldn’t contemplate reading Bring Up the Bodies without reading Wolf Hall first; but the extract I looked at suggests a very good book. I still find it hard to conceive of this winning, though.

Alison Moore, The Lighthouse

The second of four debuts on the longlist, and the third and final small press title (this time from Salt). I was both surprised and pleased to see The Lighthouse listed, partly because I didn’t know about it, and partly because I so enjoyed Moore’s Nightjar chapbook a couple of years ago. This is going straight on my to-read list.

Will Self, Umbrella

I’ve never read a Will Self book before (only his piece in the Granta Horror issue) and, from what I’ve heard of Umbrella’s layout (400 pages of unbroken paragraphs), I doubt this is a suitable place to start. I can’t really say more than that.

Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

The third debut novel, this one centring on a Bombay opium den. Based on the extract I’ve read, I’m undecided about Narcopolis.

Sam Thompson, Communion Town

Any novel which comes with comparisons to David Mitchell and Italo Calvino, and a cover quote from China Miéville, is one I want to investigate. CommunionTown looks as though it could have shades of Jeff Vandermeer’s Ambergris as well, which is no bad thing. The fourth longlisted debuts also joins my to-read list.

***

What to make of that list overall, then? It’s a good balance between new and established names; decent enough in terms of gender diversity; less so in its diversity of ethnicity and nationality.

At this point, I certainly want to read The Lighthouse and Communion Town, and am very much inclined to read Skios. I don’t so much want to read The Teleportation Accident as to have read it. The rest, I could take or leave.

How about you, reader – what are your thoughts on the longlist?

Book giveaway: Various Authors from The Fiction Desk

23rd July 2012 /

To celebrate the launch of the Sunday Story Society, those good folks at The Fiction Desk have let me have six copies of Various Authors, their first anthology, to give away. It has twelve stories by authors including Charles Lambert and Danny Rhodes, and can be yours in exchange for a comment…

How to enter

If you’d like the chance to win a copy of Various Authors, leave a comment on this post, naming a favourite short story and saying why you like it so much. The explanation doesn’t have to be long, but I won’t accept your entry without one. You have until 11.59pm UK time on Sunday 29 July to enter, after which I’ll select six winners at random. The giveaway is open to anyone worldwide, but only one entry is allowed per person, and only on this comment thread.

And while you’re here, why not join with our current Sunday Story Society discussion, on Jennifer Egan’s Twitter story “Black Box”?

Sunday Story Society: “Black Box”

22nd July 2012 / / 27 Comments

To keep up to date with the Sunday Story Society: view our schedule; follow @SundayStorySoc on Twitter; or like us on Facebook.

So, it’s time for our first discussion. The story – Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box” – is available to read here at the New Yorker website, if you haven’t yet seen it. For the rest of this post, I’m going to round up some of the comment there’s already been on the story. There has been rather a lot, so I won’t pretend to have captured it all here.

Perhaps inevitably, a good number of the responses focus on Egan’s story in its Twitter form. Dan Holmes found that the Twitter form influenced his reading: “Many of the sentences have an aphoristic power that can be appreciated when taken alone, independent of the larger text.” (Holmes goes on to explore how the tweeting of Egan’s story could be seen as performance art).

Bruce Stone’s essay at Numéro Cinq (well worth reading in full) reflects on literature in digital media, and finds “Black Box” pertinent to that subject:

Egan’s work speaks most powerfully and palpably to…the vexed core of the media wars: tensions between the old and new; the technological and the organic; the self and the other; the word, the body and the data processor…the tale’s cool, lyrical irony reveals a deep skepticism for the very technological apparatus that it presumes to embrace and exploit.

Joe Winkler reviewed “Black Box” in sentences of 140 characters or fewer:

Ultimately, the story itself embraces the idea of attention, of what to think about, what to view, what to choose, and how to perceive life.

In many ways, Egan’s story is less about a nebulous women spying on a nebulous man that it is about general musings on perception, projection, persona and controlling the images we make, create and intake.

Show, don’t tell.

Sara Walker’s response was more negative:

Women are not disposable, and I’m not enamoured with a world where they would be treated as such. I’m sure this was a choice to add social commentary to the science fiction, but it devalued the story for me. Likewise the theme that beauty and brains are mutually exclusive.

For Martin Ott, the story brought to mind instructional poetry. Trevor from The Mookse and the Gripes found “Black Box” stronger in print form. Further positive write-ups come from Paul Debraski; Rosabel Tan; Aaron Riccio; J Chance; and Catie Disabato.

A couple of this blog’s regular readers have also posted their thoughts. Alan Bowden liked the story very much:

The narrative drive Egan attains in each sentence, often by allusion alone, is wonderful and is combined with unexpectedly poetic moments, all of which are deployed in the instrumental manner of the training manual.

Maureen Kincaid Speller (in another extended response, again recommended in its entirety) was less complimentary:

The brevity of the format naturally eschews detailed explanation of setting and motivation, although Egan seems able to include it when she feels like it. However, this leaves the reader having to try to figure out what is going on while providing an escape clause for the author if things don’t quite make sense. There is a difference between the narrator not making sense and the story not making sense; my own feeling here is that the story in and of itself somehow lacks clarity, in part because Egan is too taken up with the format and transmission of the story to fully consider its implications.

I’ll also point out a New Yorker interview with Egan about the story (to which Maureen refers).

With that, it’s over to you. What did you make of “Black Box”?

Book notes: Toby Litt and Stuart Evers

21st July 2012 / / 1 Comment

Toby Litt, Ghost Story (2004)

Toby Litt is an author I’ve intended to read for ages; his work is so varied that it’s hard to know where to start, so I just went for something from the middle of his career to date. I may not know Litt’s work that well, but I know enough to be wary of a novel that so blatantly declares its (ostensible) genre. And, indeed, Ghost Story is not a ghost story as you might imagine; its ‘ghosts’ are not the supernatural kind.

When first we meet Agatha and Paddy, she’s expecting, and they’re about to leave London for a new home on the south coast. After they’ve moved in, Agatha has given birth to Max, but miscarried his twin, which has affected her deeply (as it has Paddy, but Agatha is the novel’s main focus), and she becomes withdrawn. Effectively, Agatha comes to haunt (and is haunted by) her own house. Litt tells this story in a way that highlights its fictionality: long descriptive passages which create a sense of lassitude, dialogue which feels theatrical rather than naturalistic – and there’s a tension between this and the book’s emotions, which ring so true.

It seems to me that key to understanding Ghost Story is its fifty-page preface, in which Litt describes how he and his partner were themselves affected by three miscarriages. This memoir also includes a couple of fantastical sections; the sense here is that fiction can tell certain kinds of truth which non-fiction cannot. The story of Agatha and Paddy strikes me as a portrait of loss which lies beneath the surface of what’s told, and is perhaps all the more powerful for it.

Elsewhere
Toby Litt’s website
Some other reviews of Ghost Story: Reading Matters; Joanna Briscoe for The Guardian.

Stuart Evers, If This Is Home (2012)

The author of last year’s excellent Ten Stories About Smoking returns with his first novel, which continues to explore how life may fall short of one’s dreams. Evers’ protagonist is Mark Wilkinson, who escaped his life in Cheshire and made it in America as ‘Joe Novak’; when we meet him in the early 2000s, he’s in Las Vegas , selling apartments at the ultra-high-end Valhalla complex. Alternate chapters chronicle a day in 1990 when Mark’s teenage girlfriend Bethany Wilder became a reluctant beauty queen at a parade, shortly before she and Mark were planning to leave for New York. But Bethany is nowhere to be seen in Mark’s present life – what happened becomes clear about halfway through the novel, when an incident moves Mark to return to the UK and catch up with the people and places of his own life.

There are some striking and well-handled shifts of tone in If This Is Home. In the opening chapters, the Valhalla complex seems almost to belong in a more heightened reality, which contrasts sharply with the down-to-earth nature of the Cheshire-set sequences. Later on, the novel starts to turn on Mark’s character and, balances reality with a slight unreality in a different way – yet If This Is Home always feels a cohesive whole. Evers examines the difficulties of fitting in, leaving and returning; and shows how an individual can simultaneously have no options and all the choice in the world.

Elsewhere

Stuart Evers’ website
Evers interviewed on Nikesh Shukla’s Subaltern podcast.
Some other reviews of If This Is Home: Julie Fisher for Bookmunch; Dog Ear Discs; David Whelan for Litro.

Sunday Story Society Reminder: Black Box

19th July 2012 / / 0 Comments

The time for our first Sunday Story Society discussion is nearly here; our subject will be Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box”. Egan is author of the Pulitzer-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) and three other novels, as well as a short story collection, Emerald City (1993).

“Black Box” (2012) was published in The New Yorker‘s recent ‘science fiction issue’, and also via the medium of Twitter. It’s now available to read on the New Yorker website. Join us here on Sunday to talk about it.

Book notes: debuts by Kerry Hudson and Katy Darby

18th July 2012 / / 7 Comments

Kerry Hudson, Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma (2012)

Boasting one of the best (and longest) titles I’ve come across in ages, Kerry Hudson’s debut chronicles the childhood of one Janie Ryan. Born to a single mother in Aberdeen (her American father having long since disappeared from their lives), Janie is a battler from the start (‘fishwives to the marrow, [the Ryan Women] were always ready to fight and knew the places that would cut deepest,’ p. 1). Janie’s childhood is spent in a succession of B&Bs and run-down council properties; and her mother goes through a number of violent and destructive relationships – but Janie comes through it all.

Hudson has a great eye for detail, and this is what really makes the places and characters in her book live and breathe. She’s unflinching in depicting the harshness of Janie’s and her mother Iris’s lives; but there’s humour in there too – both in comic scenes such as that when the young Janie tries to warm up Iris’s coffee in the toaster; and in wryer undercurrents, as when Janie misunderstands what the ‘wee bags of flour’ are that her mother weighs out for other people.Hudsoncaptures the ups and downs of life through this skilful control of tone.

I had an exchange with Naomi Frisby on Twitter recently about whether Tony Hogan was a grim book; she found it ‘unrelentingly’ so, but I said that it didn’t feel that way to me. On reflection, with everything that Janie goes through, it seems somewhat naïve not to call the book grim. I think what I really meant was that I didn’t find it bleak; that’s not just down to the good humour, but also Janie’s determination to move beyond her circumstances – and the narrative voice which acts as a constant reminder that she will eventually succeed. The road for Janie is rocky, and there’s nothing that can suddenly stop it from being so; but the story of how she travels it is engaging and compelling.

Elsewhere
Kerry Hudson’s website
Foyles interview with Hudson
Review of Tony Hogan at Read Between the Lines
Start of Tony Hogan blog tour at Valerie O’Riordan’s blog

Katy Darby, The Whores’ Asylum (2012)

NB. The Whores’ Asylum is published in paperback as The Unpierced Heart.

Katy Darby’s first novel is a proper page-turner. I don’t care how overused that description may be; it applies to this book. The Whores’ Asylum is presented as a series of manuscripts from the late 19th century, beginning with one Edward Fraser’s memoir of his years studying theology at Oxford, where he befriended a medical student named Stephen Chapman. With expertise in obstetrics and gynaecology, Chapman began to volunteer at a refuge for fallen women, managed by an acquaintance of his named Diana Pelham. On later meeting her, Fraser realised that he had encountered ‘Diana Pelham’ years before, under a different name – and tragedy resulted for another friend of his.

The subsequent parts of Darby’s novel delve back into that past, and give Chapman and Diana their own turns as narrator. This enables a wonderfully gradual unfurling of the truth, as we come to see all three protagonists in a different light. Darby’s prose evokes period style without coming across as pastiche; this and a gleeful streak of melodrama help keep the pages turning. But Darby also finds time to reflect on love, and explore attitudes towards prostitutes (and women more generally) in Victorian society.

To put it more succinctly: read this book.

Elsewhere
Katy Darby’s website
Foyles interview with Darby
Some other reviews of The Whores’ Asylum: What Sarah Reads; For Books’ Sake; Desperate Reader.

Teaser Tuesday: Ghost Story

17th July 2012 / / 1 Comment

Time for the weekly meme hosted by Should Be Reading, where we open the book we’re reading at a random page, and quote two sentences (without spoilers). My quote this week is from Ghost Story by Toby Litt:

The only drama came from the juddercrash of the pilot light catching, or the yawp of the central heating waking up and that was long past, now. Agatha enjoyed listening – doing nothing but listening; she took possession of the house first of all through her ears. (p. 31)

It’s difficult to give a true flavour of Ghost Story just by pulling out a couple of sentences – this is a book that works through long, immersive stretches of prose – but I think these lines give a sense of how the main character, Agatha, becomes preoccupied with the small details of her environment; and so starts to haunt (or be haunted by) her own house.

David Logan,Half-Sick of Shadows (2012): The Zone review

16th July 2012 / / 2 Comments

The Zone are now carrying my review of David Logan‘s first novel, Half-Sick of Shadows. The book was one of the joint winners of the inaugural Terry Pratchett Anywhere But Here, Anywhen But Now First Novel Award. The curious thing about it is that, for a work of the fantastic, Half-Sick of Shadows is at its best in realist mode: Logan’s portrait of childhood in a remote part of Ireland is excellent; but, when time travel elements kick in properly at about halfway through, the novel starts to falter.

Click here to read what I thought about Half-Sick of Shadows in full.

Announcing the Sunday Story Society

14th July 2012 / / 6 Comments

After the expressions of interest, we’re going ahead! Here’s how it works: each fortnight, we’ll discuss a particular short story (which will all be available to read for free online, either in HTML for as a PDF). I’ll post a reminder on the Thursday beforehand, and the main post on the Sunday will round up commentary on the story that I could find online (feel free to post your thoughts on your own blog in advance if you wish) – then the floor (or comment thread) will be open to you.

We’ll start off with six stories, and see how it goes. I’d love to make this a regular feature if there’s enough demand. Here are the first selections, with dates and links to the stories:

22 July: “Black Box” by Jennifer Egan [discussion]

5 Aug: “Bombay’s Republic” by Rotimi Babatunde [PDF]

19 Aug: “Atlantic City” by Kevin Barry [PDF]

02 Sept: “The Merchant of Shadows” by Angela Carter

16 Sept: “Two Ways of Leaving” by Alois Hotschnig

30 Sept: “Drifting House” by Krys Lee

Please note, although there’s usually a fortnight between discussions, I’ve scheduled the first one for next week (this is to avoid a clash of dates later on). The Society has its own index on the blog (above), as well as a dedicated Twitter account and Facebook page.

So there we go.What do you reckon to the first selections?

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