Category: Authors

Tramp Press: Seven Steeples by Sara Baume

2nd May 2022 / / 0 Comments

Sara Baume’s third novel begins with a disconcerting description of a mountain in south-west Ireland. First, Baume emphasises that this apparently passive landscape is full of the eyes of animals:

And each eye was focused solely on its surrounding patch of ground or gorse or rock or air. Each perceived the pattern, shade and proportion of its patch differently. Each shifted and assimilated at the pace of one patch at a time.

Then, the mountain itself becomes an eye:

It’s kept watch on the sky, sea and land, and every ornament and obstruction – the moon and clouds; the trawlers, yachts and gannetries; the rooftops, roads and chimney pots; the turbines, telegraph poles and steeples.

The image of an eye recurs throughout Seven Steeples, along with the sense of the landscape as an antagonistic (or at least indifferent) presence. 

Into this landscape come Bell and Sigh, a couple who believe that “the only appropriate trajectory for a life was to leave as little trace as possible and incrementally disappear.” They have moved here determined to cut all ties with their old lives (for reasons which are at most only hinted at). They resolve to climb that mountain, but for the seven years of this book, it remains unclimbed. 

Seven Steeples is one of those novels that takes you into the minds of its protagonists through the way it’s written. This is not a novel concerned with ‘what happens’ so much as with the ebb and flow of the life Bell and Sigh want to lead. The rhythms of Baume’s prose reflect that the couple want to live as part of the landscape, and it’s absorbing to read. 

Published by Tramp Press.

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

New Island Books: Lenny by Laura McVeigh

19th April 2022 / / 0 Comments

Today’s book is from the small Irish publisher New Island Books (the last title of theirs I read was Sue Rainsford’s excellent Follow Me to Ground). It’s the second novel by Laura Mcveigh, who grew up in Northern Ireland and now lives in London and Mallorca.

In 2011, a boy named Izil watches a pilot fall from the sky to Libya’s Ubari Sand Sea. The man has lost his memory, but takes the name Goose and is reliant on Izil’s people to help him survive.

In 2012, we meet ten-year-old Lenny, who lives in Louisiana. His mother has left and his father is scarred from PTSD. He spends much of his time with old Miss Julie, who longs for her husband to return from the war in Korea; and Lucy, the town librarian. The town itself has suffered deprivation and is also threatened by a sinkhole. Lenny searches for something he can do to help.

It gradually becomes clear how these two timeframes are connected. What unfolds is then a poignant tale of loss, family and belonging. McVeigh creates a distinctive atmosphere in her novel, one where time itself might potentially be held back or twisted. I enjoyed spending time with Lenny – both the book and the characterisation.

Henningham Family Press: Pupa by J.O. Morgan

7th April 2022 / / 0 Comments

Another handsome volume from Henningham Family Press (not that there’s any other kind), this time the first novel by Scottish poet J.O. Morgan. I don’t know Morgan’s poetry, but after reading Pupa I am certainly intrigued. 

In the world of this novel, people hatch from eggs and may choose to spend their entire lives as a larval (apparently of insectoid appearance), or go through a pupal stage and become an adult (who seem to bear a closer resemblance to humans as we know them). We meet Sal and Megan, two young larvals in low-level admin jobs. The question of whether to pupate is on their minds, and Sal for one is sceptical. As he says to Megan:

“And when you end up looking so different, how can you be sure it’s really you? You can’t know if you’ll like how you’ll turn out. And you can’t switch back again. That’s it forever. You’re stuck. At least this way you already know. You can be content. Just as you are.”

Megan is more inclined to keep her thoughts to herself, and Sal eventually discovers why: she has chosen to pupate. The two then find themselves in different social worlds, and having to reconfigure their friendship as a result. 

There’s potentially a whole history behind the world of Pupa, but by focusing in on these two characters, Morgan highlights the metaphor. The larval/adult divide could stand for age, class – any social division where you could move from one side to the other. There’s an openness to Pupa which allows the reader to imagine with it in different ways. It’s a sandbox of a novel, and a pleasure to spend time with. 

#2022InternationalBooker: Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung (tr. Anton Hur)

24th March 2022 / / 0 Comments

Oh, how I loved this. It’s not often that a story collection will grab my attention from the beginning and keep it throughout. But, for me, there isn’t a weak link among the ten stories in Cursed Bunny. 

Bora Chung’s stories in this book are often strange, often creepy, always compelling. The title story concerns a family who make cursed objects. The grandfather tells his grandson how he broke the rules and cursed an object for personal use: a bunny-shaped lamp designed to wreak revenge on the company that destroyed his friend’s family business. Rabbits chew their way through the company’s paperwork, but they don’t stop there – and the tale takes some unexpected and horrific turns. 

Some of Chung’s stories are built around powerful metaphors. In ‘The Embodiment’, a woman finds that her period won’t stop. She takes birth control pills for several months, to no avail – in fact, they make her pregnant. The doctors tell her that she must find someone to be the child’s father, or things will go badly for her. Societal pressures around motherhood and relationships are transformed into vivid narrative strokes that raise the protagonist’s predicament to a higher pitch of intensity. 

There are entries in Cursed Bunny that read like fairy tales, though with Chung’s distinctive stamp. ‘Snare’ begins with a man coming across a trapped fox that bleeds liquid gold. He becomes rich from this, but eventually bleeds the fox to death. The man has the fox’s fur made into a scarf for his wife, who then falls pregnant. The man finds a way to obtain gold from his children, but at a terrible cost. This is a sharp parable of greed. 

What really makes Cursed Bunny hang together for me is the voice. Anton Hur’s translation from Korean is beguiling, as it persuades the reader that all of this could happen. Bora Chung goes on to my list of must-read authors. 

Published by Honford Star, a small press specialising in books from East Asia.

Read my other posts on the 2022 International Booker Prize here.

Naked Eye Publishing: The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing by Darina Al Joundi

22nd March 2022 / / 0 Comments

Time for something a little different today: a dramatic monologue. Darina Al Joundi is a Lebanese writer and actor now living in France. She first performed this one-woman play in 2007. She co-wrote a novel based on the play which has previously been translated into English, but this is the first English translation of the play itself. The translator is Helen Vassallo, who runs the excellent blog Translating Women (she’s written a post here on how she came to translate the play. 

Al Joundi’s protagonist is Noun, whose father was a secular freedom fighter in a strict Muslim family. She interrupts his funeral, locking herself in the room with his body. She is there to carry out his wish to have Nina Simone’s ‘Sinnerman’ played at his funeral, rather than recitations from the Qu’ran. The monologue is Noun’s reflection on her life in Beirut, and on her father’s influence. 

Noun’s father encouraged her to live as she wanted, and didn’t judge her. In turn, she looked up to him. For example, as a girl Noun tells her father that she wants to wear a bra. He warns her that she’ll find it painful and constricting, but she insists and he goes along with her wishes. Noun soon discovers that he was right.

There is humour running through Noun’s story, but she also experiences great violence – both personally and as part of the war escalating around her. In time, she has cause to question whether her father appreciated how free his daughter might really be in a society that didn’t share his values. Noun comes across as a vivid, complex character in this thought-provoking piece of work. 

Published by Naked Eye Publishing.

Composite Creatures by Caroline Hardaker: a Strange Horizons review

16th March 2022 / / 0 Comments

I have a new review up at Strange Horizons. This time I’m looking at Composite Creatures, the debut novel by Caroline Hardaker (published by Angry Robot).

Composite Creatures is set in a future where nature has mostly been replaced by artificial substitutes. Norah and Art are learning to live together with Nut, their “perfect little bundle of fur”, and Norah feels she’s presenting different versions of herself to the world.

I found that reading Composite Creatures felt like peeling back successive layers of the novel, so that’s how I structured my review.

You can read the review in full here.

A bite-sized chat about The Tomb Guardians

4th March 2022 / / 0 Comments

Something a little different today, as I make my debut on YouTube. Shawn the Book Maniac is a Canadian BookTuber based in Tokyo. He has an ongoing series called Bite-sized Book Chats, where he invites different people to talk about a book they’ve enjoyed. Shawn kindly invited me to take part earlier this year, and I chose my favourite book of 2021, Paul Griffiths’ The Tomb Guardians. You can see my chat with Shawn as part of the latest episode below.

Peirene Press: Marzahn, Mon Amour by Katja Oskamp (tr. Jo Heinrich)

25th February 2022 / / 0 Comments

We’re going to Germany for this year’s first title from Peirene. Katja Oskamp’s narrator is in her mid-forties, which she imagines as swimming in the middle of a huge lake, with the past having receded but the future still out of focus. She feels she’s treading water:

My life had grown stale: my offspring had flown the nest, my other half was ill and my writing, which had kept me busy until then, was more than a little iffy. I was carrying something bitter within me, completing the invisibility that befalls women over forty. I didn’t want to be seen, but nor did I want to see. I’d had it with people, the looks on their faces and their well-meant advice. I sank to the bottom.

The woman decides that, if she’s going to be invisible to the wider world, she may as well make a major change for herself. She leaves behind her writing career and retrains as a chiropodist. She works out of a salon in the Marzahn area of Berlin, which was formerly part of the GDR. It’s the kind of place that could itself be overlooked, as could the narrator’s (often elderly or disabled) customers. One of the key things she does as a chiropodist is then simply to give her clients recognition. 

The novel as a whole does the same. Each chapter focuses on a different customer – and they’re a vivid cast, from Frau Frenzel whose life revolves around her dachshund, to Herr Pietsch, who was a party official in the GDR, but has had to adjust to a rather different way of life since. Marzahn, Mon Amour becomes a composite portrait of this community, one that works to make its characters visible – narrator and customers alike. 

And Other Stories: Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs by Gerald Murnane

15th February 2022 / / 2 Comments

My introduction to Gerald Murnane was his debut novel Tamarisk Row, which I loved for the way it depicted childhood imagination and the sense of strangeness hidden within the everyday. Murnane’s 2005 essay collection Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs came as part of my And Other Stories subscription, and it has proven an ideal follow-up to Tamarisk Row. I’ve valued it for the chance to spend time in the author’s world. 

The essays in this collection gave me some insight into how Murnane perceives the world. For example, the young protagonist of Tamarisk Row would imagine whole worlds in the abstract patterns of light through glass. It came as no surprise to discover that, when Murnane played horse-racing games with marbles, he would focus on the patterns created out of each small movement. He also mentions a liking of charts and diagrams: some of his essays feel like diagrams put into words, as they circle back over images and memories. 

Murnane’s writing often seems to return to landscapes, but landscapes of the mind, imagined grasslands or plains. As he puts it in ‘Birds of the Puszta‘:

Plains looked simple but were not so. The grass leaning in the wind was all that could be seen of plains, but under the grass were insects and spiders and frogs and snakes – and ground-dwelling birds. I thought of plains whenever I wanted to think of something unremarkable at first sight but concealing much of meaning. And yet plains deserved, perhaps, not to be inspected closely. A pipit, crouched over its eggs in the shadow of a tussock, was the colour of dull grass. I was a boy who delighted in finding what was meant to remain hidden, but I was also a boy who liked to think of lost kingdoms.

Murnane’s work keeps evoking for me a sense of “lost kingdoms”, imaginative spaces hidden just out of sight. When I finished Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, I had been changed by it: when I looked around at the world, something felt different. 

Daunt Books: Inheritance by Dani Shapiro

8th February 2022 / / 0 Comments

This year Ninja Book Box are offering a subscription of indie-published memoirs. I don’t read that many memoirs, so I thought this would be a good chance to try something different. I didn’t know which books I was going to get, but I very much enjoyed this first one. It’s published by Daunt Books. 

American writer Dani Shapiro was born into a large Orthodox Jewish family, and this culture is in her bones, though people have often commented that she doesn’t look Jewish. Shapiro is in her fifties when her husband Michael suggests she join him in taking a DNA test through a genealogy website. She thinks nothing of it, but the results reveal that she cannot be biologically related to her father. 

Shapiro’s parents are no longer alive, but she recalls an offhand comment from her mother that she, Dani, was “conceived in Philadelphia”. Her mother said she had been travelling there for tests relating to artificial insemination. Further research reveals that, at the time, sperm from the prospective father would be mixed with those from other donors, often medical students. With some investigation, Shapiro is able to identify ‘her’ donor – and decides to make contact. 

Inheritance is then the story of how Shapiro is forced to reconfigure her long-held notions of family and identity. She tries to find out just what her family knew about the circumstances of her conception, and wonders if she can make a connection with her new-found biological relations. 

I appreciate that Shapiro doesn’t try to resolve any of these issues definitively – they’re too complex for that. Rather, this book is account of the author coming to terms with the issues for herself. I found Inheritance compelling as the story unfolded to begin with, and it kept my interest to the very end. 

More reviews from #ReadIndies 2022

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