Category: French

Reading round-up: early September

Time for another round-up of some of the books I’ve read lately.

Nikesh Shukla, Meatspace (2014)

Nikesh Shukla’s follow-up to Coconut Unlimited is another exploration of how personal identities are shaped, this time revolving around the online world. Kitab Balasubramanyam is a writer who performs better on social media than he does in real life. Having lost his job and girlfriend, he’s drifting along – until a namesake who’s found him on the internet pays a visit, and his brother goes off to the US to find someone with the same tattoo. Shukla gradually reveals just how much Kitab is struggling to find stability for himself, and the lengths to which he’s prepared to go for it. Published by The Friday Project.

MalvaldiMarco Malvaldi, The Art of Killing Well (2011)

Translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis, 2014

In 1895, Italy’s first cookery writer, Pellegrino Artusi, takes a break from his travels at the castle of Barine di Roccapendente – only for his rest to be disrupted when a body is found in the cellar. This is a rather jolly and enjoyable murder mystery, whose waspish third-person narrator takes swipes at the aristocratic characters, and makes arch comments about writing a novel set in the nineteenth century. The tongue-in-cheek quality of Marco Malvadi’s prose keeps it on the right side of charming, and I definitely want to more by him. Published by MacLehose Press.

Annie Ernaux, A Woman’s Story (1988)

Translated from the French by Tanya Leslie, 1990

This is a short book about the life of the Annie Ernaux’s mother, but it’s not a straightforward memoir. It engages with the author’s deep-seated feeling that she needed to write about her mother, and the inevitable limits to what she could achieve by doing so. There’s a real power in the underlying themes of change and loss. Published by Quartet Books.

Royle

Nicholas Royle (ed.), The Best British Short Stories 2014

The fourth entry in Salt Publishing’s annual anthology series. It’s a varied mix: there are writers whose work I’m familiar with and admire, such as M. John Harrison, Christopher Priest, and Stuart Evers. Then there others who were unknown to me: there’s David Grubb, whose ‘Roof Space’ tells poignantly of the relationship of a father and son by way of their model railway. In ‘Ladies’ Day’, Vicki Jarrett examines how a group of young mothers are searching for a new sense of direction in life, focused through a day at the races. ‘Guests’ is Joanne Rush’s first published story, and I hope there will be many more, as this one is superb: the tale of a woman whose house becomes filled with the ghosts of war dead while her husband is working in Bosnia. Whatever your taste in short fiction, there should be something to intrigue in here.

José Carlos Llop, The Stein Report (1995)

Translated from the Spanish by Howard Curtis, 2014

1960s Majorca: Guillermo Stein is a newcomer at school, mysteriously different from the other boys. A group of his schoolmates tries to find out more about him; what they discover goes far beyond the life of one individual. What makes The Stein Report work for me is the sense of friction between the worlds of adults and children. The schoolboys’ world is complete to them; they know its contours. But when investigating Stein gives them a partial window on the adult world, we see just how much they still have to learn. Published by Hispabooks.

MaineSarah Maine, Bhalla Strand (2014)

In 2010, Hetty Deveraux visits her inheritance – an old house gone to seed in the Outer Hebrides – and uncovers human remains while repairing the place. A hundred years earlier, Hetty’s ancestor Beatrice marries the owner of Bhalla House, painter Theodore Blake. An intriguing mystery unfolds between the two timelines, but perhaps strongest of all is Sarah Maine’s evocation of the raw Hebridean landscape and the lives of its inhabitants. Published by Frieght Books.

Andrew Crofts, Confessions of a Ghostwriter (2014)

I really liked the idea of this latest title in The Friday Project’s Confessions series; it promised to open a part of the book world that we don’t usually get to see. And so it does – though only to an extent, naturally. Andrew Crofts mixes tales of his encounters with celebrities, politicians, and others with a story to tell; and entries on the day-to-day of the writing life. It’s an interesting combination that reveals a varied professional life; Crofts’ enthusiasm for what he does is palpable.

Neil Williamson, The Moon King (2014)

I reviewed Neil Williamson’s debut story collection way back in 2006; now he’s followed it up with a first novel. The Moon King looks rather different from much of Williamson’s short fiction, but it has the same dextrous approach to the fantastic. In a city whose inhabitants’ temperaments change with the phases of the moon, Anton Dunn wakes one day to find himself closer to the centre of power than he ever thought he’d be. There’s a vein of strangeness running through this novel that adds an extra dimension to an already intriguing story. Published by Newcon Press.

Reading round-up: mid May

Time for another look at some of the books I’ve been reading recently…

Andy MillerAndy Miller, The Year of Reading Dangerously (2014)

With all the business of work and family, Andy Miller had read only one book for pleasure (The Da Vinci Code) in three years; then he found a second-hand copy of The Master and Margarita, and started reading:

…borne aloft on Bulgakov’s impassioned words, I felt the dizzying force of books again, lifting me off the 6.44, out of myself, away from Mrs Atrixo [a fellow-commuter of Miller’s who would manicure herself on the train] and her hands. How had I lived without this? (pp. 30-1)

Spurred on by that feeling, Miller made a list of fifty books he’d always meant to read (and that he’d told people he had read, when he hadn’t), and challenged himself to read them; The Year of Reading Dangerously is his account of that time. Some of the books he likes, some he doesn’t; but Miller is always entertaining when he writes about them, and there’s always a keen sense of how personal this reading is to him.

Reading this book reminded me of Eleanor Catton’s idea of literature as encounter, because that’s very much what Miller is describing here (indeed, he and Catton make some of the same points). This volume isn’t a list of ‘fifty books you must read’; it’s the story of one person rediscovering what he loves about books, and finding a place for them in his life. It’s an inspiring piece of work.

The Year of Reading Dangerously is published in the UK by Fourth Estate, and will be published in the US by Harper Perennial on 9 December.

Oscar Coop-Phane, Zenith Hotel (2012)
Translated from the French by Ros Schwartz (2014)

Now this is an example of how important social media can be for translated books and small publishers: Zenith Hotel (published by Arcadia Books) comes covered in quotes from bloggers, bookshops and other people on Twitter (it even bears the #translationthurs hashtag created by Stu from Winstonsdad’s Blog). And if all that praise wasn’t enough to raise a sense of expectation, there’s also the fact that Oscar Coop-Phane was only 24 when he won the French Prix de Flore for this, his first novel.

What we have in Zenith Hotel is a short (not even 100 pages) portrait of a day in the life of a prostitute named Nanou, and her clients. With great economy, Coop-Phane depicts a succession of men, each with their own individual situations and concerns; but makes clear that, when they go to their appointment at the Zenith Hotel, each man is no more (or less) significant than the rest. Tying the book together is the world-weary voice of Nanou, who refuses to tell us much about herself: the most important thing is what’s happening now, and what she needs to do to keep going. Ros Schwartz’s translation creates fine distinctions between these characters whom we glimpse briefly but clearly, underlining the subtlety of Coop-Phane’s work.

Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King (2012)

This was a choice for my reading group, one I was looking forward to as my first experience of reading Dave Eggers. I don’t know quite what I was expecting – probably the kind borderline fabulism that (rightly or wrongly) I tend to associate with McSweeney’s – but it wasn’t what I got. A Hologram for the King is the story of Alan Clay, a middle-aged consultant who has travelled to Saudi Arabia in the hope of making the business deal that will turn his work and life around – if only the King would turn up so Alan can make his presentation.

I gather that this book is written in a plainer style than is usual for Eggers (the literary equivalent of an acoustic set, perhaps); I think the sparseness does have its moments, but not as many as I’d hope for. I appreciate the parallel Eggers creates between the difficulties of Alan’s personal life and the USA’s economic situation, but… A Hologram for the King just never really came to life for me. Still, I would like to try reading Eggers again one day; hopefully this title was just a blip.

A Hologram for the King is published in the UK by Penguin.

Lois Lowry, The Giver (1993)

My reading group also recently started a science fiction offshoot, for which this was the first choice. I hadn’t come across book or author previously, though it’s a YA title that I would have been roughly the right age for at the time of publication, and it’s the sort of book I would have read. I think the teenage me would have liked The Giver very much; but the adult me still enjoyed it.

Lois Lowry starts by briskly outlining some of the contours of her fictional world. This is an enclosed community where everything is highly structured, even growing up: every year, there’s a ceremony at which children are given the appurtenances of the next phase of their lives; until they reach Twelve, when age no longer matters and they begin the ‘assignment’ which will occupy them for the rest of their lives. Relations between children and adults in the same family unit may seem oddly distant, and there are clear hints that some catastrophe happened in the past; but this society appears to work well enough. Our protagonist is Jonas, who at Twelve is sent to The Giver, an old man who will pass on the community’s memories – suffice to say, there’s a reason most people don’t remember them.

I liked The Giver for its crispness of telling, and its thoughtfulness on issues of individuality and conformity. There’s also a wonderful shift of perception halfway through which I was nowhere near predicting. I think the book is let down slightly by its ending, which is a little too abrupt – not so bad in the context of the four-book series which The Giver begins, but it leaves this volume feeling unbalanced on its own terms. My teenage self would have wanted to read on.

The Giver is published in the UK by HarperCollins Children’s Books.

Anna Jaquiery, The Lying-Down Room (2014)

This is the first in a new series of crime novels set in Paris, written by French-born and Australia-resident Anna Jaquiery. Commandant Serge Morel investigates the grisly murder of an elderly woman, a case which will lead him into the past of Soviet Russia – all while his father is slowly succumbing to dementia, and there’s turbulence in his personal life. Jaquiery balances the different elements of her novel well, and the historical thread adds an interesting dimension. All in all, the Morel series is off to a good start with The Lying-Down Room.

The Lying-Down Room is published in the UK by Mantle.

#IFFP2014: Ogawa, Knausgaard, Mingarelli

Yoko Ogawa, Revenge (1998)
Translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder (2013)

RevengeI’ve read two of Yoko Ogawa’s books previously (see my thoughts on Hotel Iris and The Diving Pool); each time, I have been struck by how she anatomises the dark psyches of her characters. Revenge is a little different: a collection of eleven linked stories, it unsettles more through the overall effect of the tales as a composite.

Revenge begins with ‘Afternoon at the Bakery’, whose narrator goes to buy two strawberry shortcakes; a conversation with someone from the neighbouring shop reveals that the narrator is doing this in memory of her six-year-old son, whom she found dead in a refrigerator. This is how Ogawa’s stories work: mundane details are shown to have dark, sometimes even absurd, underpinnings.

‘Afternoon at the Bakery’ ends with its narrator discovering a young woman crying in the bakery’s kitchen.  This young woman reappears in the second tale’s, ‘Fruit Juice’, when she invites that story’s narrator, a boy from her school, to go with her as moral support to a meal with the father she is about to meet for the first time. Strawberry cake is served is served at this meal; by story’s end, we not only know why the young woman is crying as she sits in her kitchen, we also anticipate with dismay what her reaction to the current customer’s order is likely to be.

As Ogawa’s collection continues, more links emerge between the stories: at first, isolated details reappear; then characters seem to recur (the identities of some remain sketchy, so you can’t be entirely sure whether or not character X mentioned in one story is also character Y from another); one story in Revenge may appear to be fictional in the reality of another; images and events are repeated or echoed in strange new contexts. The relative straightforwardness of Ogawa’s prose (and Stephen Snyder’s effectively matter-of-fact translation) only heightens the sense of being caught up in a world where it’s uncertain which is worse: the thought that all the details of reality won’t cohere, or the thought that they might. Revenge is one of those story collections that works, and is best appreciated, as a complete whole; it’s also one that stays in the mind long after reading.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Man in Love: My Struggle, Book 2 (2009)
Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett (2013)

Knausgaard 2Where Volume 1 of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle focused on its author’s adolescence and reaction to his father’s death, Volume 2 chronicles the period when Knausgaard left his first wife and moved to Sweden, where he fell in love with Linda, and examines his life as a husband and father. Reading A Man in Love has been a strange experience because, while the general palette of the first book remains – the dense treatment of everyday minutiae, punctuated by reflections on life and art – some quality that made A Death in the Family feel transcendent to me is missing.

Knausgaard takes up his key concerns from the first volume: that he feels preoccupied by the business of everyday life when what he really wants (needs) to do is write; and that he is more deeply moved by contemplating art and the natural world than by those closest to him. In this volume, he also talks more about how fatherhood affects his sense of masculinity; feeling constrained by Swedish society; and how the heady rush of falling in love with Linda didn’t last.

Don Barlett’s translation is as fine as ever, but A Man in Love doesn’t touch me as deeply as its predecessor did. When I read A Death in the Family, I could feel the clash of Knausgaard’s emotions rising off the page; with this book, that clash is still on the page, but it stays there. To me, A Death in the Family felt like something that Knausgaard needed to write in order to work through that part of his life; A Man in Love is good enough as far as it goes, but doesn’t have that same sense of urgency.

Hubert Mingarelli, A Meal in Winter (2012)
Translated from the French by Sam Taylor (2013)

Meal in WinterHubert Mingarelli is a prolific author in his native France, but A Meal in Winter is the first of his books to appear in English. It’s a novella narrated by one of three German guards who are sent out to retrieve an escaped Jewish prisoner. On their way back to the prison camp, the guards and their captive stop off in an abandoned house, and start to prepare a meal of soup. When a Pole walking past the house also seeks shelter, his raw anti-Semitism leads the guards to question what they’re about to do.

With A Meal in Winter being so short, the stage is set for a tight, intense piece of fiction. In some ways, this is exactly what we get: Mingarelli strips out most of the historical detail, thereby closing the distance between reader and book. The characters’ world is not ‘World War Two’ understood as a period of history; their world is this journey, this landscape, this house, and we are there with them.

It doesn’t seem quite right, though, to say that we come to empathise with the guards as the novella progresses. It’s more that we see the contours of their worldview, and how that is challenged by their experiences; empathy at a further remove, perhaps. But I can’t shake the feeling that the full intensity of this situation doesn’t quite come through the sparseness of Mingarelli’s prose (or Sam Taylor’s translation). For me, A Meal in Winter is almost there… but only almost.

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What of these books’ chances on the IFFP shortlist? Even though the Knausgaard disappointed me, I will be extremely surprised if it doesn’t make the shortlist (though I don’t expect it to be my preferred winner). I would be happy to see Ogawa’s book on the shortlist, and suspect it has a good chance. The Mingarelli, I don’t know: it didn’t really work well enough for me to want to see it shortlisted, but it has been better received in the reviews I’ve seen, so it may just be a book that didn’t click with me.

This post is part of a series on the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

#IFFP2014: Javier Marías and Andreï Makine

Javier Marías, The Infatuations (2012)
Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

Andreȉ Makine, Brief Loves that Live Forever (2011)
Translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan (2013)

My first IFFP titles are both by veteran authors whom I’m reading here for the first time.

InfatuationsJavier Marías’ The Infatuations is narrated by one María Dolz, who takes breakfast at the same café as an attractive couple who are clearly very much in love; though she doesn’t speak to them, María enjoys being in the same place as them, feels her life is brightened by the simple fact of their happiness. All this is disrupted when the couple stop appearing at the café, and María discovers that the man, a businessman named Miguel Desvern (or Deverne – his family changed their name for their film distribution business; nothing settles into stable certainty here) was murdered. When María later sees the woman of the couple return to the café alone, she introduces herself; she and the woman – Luisa – become fast friends, then María gets to know Javier Díaz-Varela, a museum???friend of Luisa’s. As María becomes more attracted to Díaz-Varela, she has to face not just that he has feelings for Luisa, but that she might not know him at all as well as thinks.

Perhaps Marías’ key concern in The Infatuations is the gap between what can be thought and what can be known. At the start, María watches Luisa and Miguel from afar; she wonders who they might be, though of course she can’t know. Then she tries to imagine what Miguel might have thought before he died, and realises she can’t know that either. The novel is full of its characters’ second-guessing others’ thought processes, or recalling their own thoughts to such a degree of detail that the very amount of information causes us to doubt its truth. The more you think, Marías seems to say, the less you can really know.

But this uncertainty is not confined to thoughts; when Marías’ characters engage in lengthy, discursive speeches, we see that the author’s techniques are distorting the reality of his novel as well, when his characters engage in lengthy, discursive speeches. This creates an interesting contrast between content and style: at the centre of the novel is an act of extreme violence, but the text that surrounds it – that mediates and tries to make sense of it – is still and reflective. In the end, perhaps reflection is all we have; as one character remarks, even the darkest of life’s events will eventually recede and become memories. It is the distinct texture Marías creates from layers of subjectivity (and Margaret Jull Costa has done a superb job of conveying this texture through her translation) that makes The Infatuations for me.

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Brief Loves‘The fatal mistake that we make is looking for a paradise that endures,’ says the unnamed narrator of Andreȉ Makine’s Brief Loves that Live Forever, pointing towards the central theme of this novel: that the things which last in life are actually the fleeting moments, the memories and experiences. Makine (a Russian author who writes in French) guides us through key moments in his protagonist’s life, when the narrator experienced a transitory instance of love, which has nonetheless stayed with him: seeing a girl run into the arms of the grandmother she’s never met, for example; or a summer affair by the Black Sea.

Alongside this are glimpses of Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, often represented by structures which are ignored or decaying (or both): the grandstand for a parade, which is soon emptied; an factory bearing a slogan that claims permanence but goes unnoticed; perhaps most striking of all, a giant orchard that was intended to make a statement, but not to be harvested. These structures may pass into ruin, but the emotions experienced in their shadow remain.

The interplay between these two aspects lies at the heart of Makine’s novel, and leaves its mark on our narrator: though he sees flaws in the Soviet project, he has not entirely discarded it by the time of perestroika; but it’s not that he clings to the old times so much as he recognises that they have provided the context for the life he has lived Makine’s prose and Geoffrey Strachan’s translation are elegant, and the novel’s reflections on love and history insightful; all adds up to a fine short novel.

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What about these books as contenders for the IFFP? They strike me as well-made mid- to late-career novels, but not as the kind of major work that I’d want to see winning an award like the IFFP. I admired, enjoyed, and would recommend both books; but, at the same time, I suspect they are not the best that their respective authors have written. So I could see either of these novels making the shortlist, but I’d hope for more from a potential winner.

This post is part of a series on the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

Four tales of war

Monsieur le CommandantIn Romain Slocombe’s Monsieur le Commandant (2011; translated from the French by Jesse Browner, 2013), it is 1942 when Paul-Jean Husson – a respected writer and member of l’Académie française – writes to his local SS officer, unable to remain silent any longer. Husson begins his story ten years earlier, when his son introduced him to his new love: a beautiful blonde German girl named Ilse Wolffsohn, whom Husson later discovered to be Jewish. Husson was immediately attracted to Ilse, an attraction that only intensified as the years went by; all the while, he remained a Nazi sympathiser, regularly publishing anti-Semitic articles. But matters would eventually come to a head; and Husson’s letter to the Commandant is the only way forward he can see.

Monsieur le Commandant is an uncompromising book, which confronts the implacability and inherent contradictions of its protagonist’s worldview head-on: Husson is a character who has no qualms about describing graphic violence or venting his hatred, and the results of that are right there on the page. The novel becomes a grim, inexorable march towards a bitterly ironic ending; the weight of history bears down on our reading; but its starkness gives Slocombe’s book a power of its own.

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King of Hearts

Chasing the King of Hearts by Hanna Krall (2006; translated from the Polish by Philip Boehm, 2013) is a view of 1942 from Warsaw. There are perhaps two things that matter most to Izolda: the love of her husband Shayek, and finding a way out of the Warsaw Ghetto. When Shayek is imprisoned, Izolda’s love for him leads her to do whatever she can to free him; and what she’s prepared to do seems almost without limit – she hides her identity and religion, smuggles goods into the ghetto… Even though she’s captured more than once, she refuses to give up.

In contrast with Monsieur le Commandant’s harsh precision, the tone of Krall’s book is somewhat hazier; told in a series of vignettes, the choppiness of its structure gives the text a dream-like quality, which enhances the sense of the Holocaust as something larger than those caught up in it can truly comprehend. There are moments of horror (made all the more effective by the subdued tone in which they’re written), but a deep sense of love as well. We know from several chapters within the book that Izolda survives into old age, but even then she finds herself dwelling on the past and what might have been. Chasing the King of Hearts is the story of a hard-won personal victory, and the mixed consequences it brings.

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News from BerlinHusson and Izolda could be seen as being at two opposite ends of a continuum of experience of World War Two, a continuum that Oscar Verschuur – the protagonist of Otto de Kat’s News from Berlin (2012; translated from the Dutch by Ina Rilke, 2014) – might (at first glance, anyway) appear to be completely outside. Oscar is a Dutch diplomat in Switzerland, well away from the day-to-day realities of the war. That’s until his daughter Emma visits from Berlin, with information from her German husband Carl, a civil servant who covertly opposes the Nazi regime:  an invasion of Russia is planned, codenamed Barbarossa. Now Oscar must decide whether to disclose this information, knowing that to do so may place Emma and Carl in danger.

Relationships, it seems to me, are at the heart of News from Berlin: Oscar’s relationship with his wife Kate is pretty lukewarm and distant (literally so, as she’s currently a nurse in London). Both characters themselves drawn to someone else: he to Lara, a free-spirited Dutch woman he meets in a village hotel; she to Matteous, a wounded Congolese soldier whom she helps to treat. There’s a sense that both of Verschuurs are searching for something in these other people, not that they’re necessarily going to find it (Kate especially comes to realise how it hard it would be for Matteous to adapt to a life in London). Interestingly, Oscar’s new attraction draws him away from the reality of the war, whilst Kate’s draws her towards it; this mirrors their instinctive feelings about the Barbarossa dilemma. As a diplomat, Oscar’s work is fundamentally about relationships on a grand scale; the choice he now has to make brings that work down to the most intimate of levels. Like Slocombe and Krall in their books, de Kat explores the personal effects of war, how individual lives are shaped by conflict.

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Wake

War’s effect on individuals is also the focus of Anna Hope’s debut, Wake (2014), which is set in the aftermath of World War One – specifically in the five days leading up to the parading of the Unknown Warrior through London in 1920. Hope tells of three women: Hettie, a dance instructress who becomes intrigued by a charismatic man she meets at the Hammersmith Palais; Evelyn, who works at the Pensions Office and has a quite a tense relationship with her army-captain brother – but still wants to know why a man comes to her office asking after him; and Ada, a housewife grieving for her son lost in the war, who receives a visit from a boy who appears to know of him.

All three of Hope’s protagonists have seen their lives changed by war: Hettie’s brother is affected by shell-shock, but the world of the dance instructress has opened a new avenue in her own life; Evelyn lost her partner in the war and now finds herself, as an unattached woman nearing 30, outside of social norms; for Ada, it’s not so much a case of needing to find a new path as of coming to terms with the one she has travelled. In Wake, the arrival of the Unknown Warrior is presented as a moment when the British people collectively took stock of the war and its consequences, a recognition of and reflection on the changing times; this is also what Hope does individually for her characters. But there is also the sense that change continues; and, indeed, the women’s stories go on beyond the final page of this vivid novel.

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Links

Monsieur le Commandant
Interview with Romain Slocombe by Gallic Books.
Other reviews: A Life in Books; These Little Words; The Friendly Shelf; Literary Relish.

Chasing the King of Hearts
Interview with Hanna Krall by PEN Atlas.
Other reviews: Andrew Blackman; Sabotage Reviews; A Discount Ticket to Everywhere; Tony’s Reading List.

News from Berlin
Other reviews: 1streading; Lucy Popescu for the Independent.

Wake
BBC interview with Anna Hope (and Judith Allnatt, author of The Moon Field)
Other reviews: For Winter Nights; Book Oxygen; The Unlikely Bookworm; Cleopatra Loves Books.

Books in brief: Mid-March

Manisha Jolie Amin, Dancing to the Flute (2012). Kalu is a poor boy whose life is changed when a healer overhears him make music with a rolled-up leaf, and offers the boy an apprenticeship with his musician brother. Kalu learns to play the flute, which will eventually take him from around the world. Amin’s novel is a celebration of music, which changes Kalu in more ways than one. But it also keeps an eye on the people left behind in Kalu’s village, and shows how even apparently ordinary lives may be transformed.

And, if you’d like to win a copy of Dancing to the Flute and three other books by women writers, the publisher is running a competition:

Easter-Women-Comp

Pascal Garnier, The A26 (1999/2013). Translated from the French by Melanie Florence. As the modern world encroaches in the form of a motorway, a brother and sister cling to 1945 in their cottage. Bernard is terminally ill, and develops a taste for killing in his final days. Yolande just stays at home in her own little world. This is a nicely creepy novella that leaves you unsure how everything will end, but almost certain that it’s going to be bad.

Elizabeth Fremantle, Queen’s Gambit (2013). A novel about the final years of Katherine Parr, beginning shortly before she enters Henry VIII’s court, and chronicling her marriage to the king and affections for Thomas Seymour. Fremantle examines the place of women at court, finding both opportunity and restriction: Katherine’s maid, Dot Fownten, can move up in the world, even find love. Katherine also gains status as queen, power as regent, and can pursue projects such as religious reform – but, as a woman, there are still limits on what society considers acceptable from her.

W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe (1982). This is an odd book, especially if you come to it cold, like I did (I knew it inspired Field of Dreams, but have never seen that film). The protagonist, farmer Ray Kinsella, hears a voice saying, “If you build it, he will come”; this inspires him to construct a baseball field – which brings the legendary baseball player Shoeless Joe Jackson back to life. Ray then persuades J.D. Salinger to join him on a road trip in search of other faces from the sport’s past. Possibly you need to be into baseball to fully appreciate the novel, but there is quite some charm in its willful and direct strangeness.

Susann Pásztor, A Fabulous Liar (2010/13). Translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside. Joschi Molnár: raconteur, Holocaust survivor, late patriarch of a rather extensive family. On what would have been his hundredth birthday, various branches of Joschi’s family gather to work out just what may have been true out of all the stories he told about himself. Pásztor paints a careful portrait of a family forced to question even the most basic ‘facts’ they thought they knew, and examines the pros and cons of doing so.

Sunday Salon: Ten Love Stories

I’ve been reading Marry Me, Dan Rhodes’s new collection of flash fiction on the theme of marriage. This being Rhodes, all is not exactly sweetness and light: in many of these stories, a male narrator is treated shabbily by his female partner – or occasionally he’s the one behaving shabbily himself – in absurd and darkly amusing ways.

‘Is there someone else?’ asks one man as his wife leaves him. ‘No,’ she replies, ‘there isn’t. But I would really, really like there to be’. Another woman informs her husband that he’ll have to leave, then produces a catalogue and sells him pots and pans for his new home (‘I would give you a discount because I know you, but it’s early days and I’m sure you’ll understand that I’ve got to keep a firm grip on my finances now I’m a single gal’). And so on, and so on, with these wonderfully barbed and pithy lines.

But, just occasionally. there are touches of real romance, as with the couple who put the lump of charcoal he gave her in lieu of a diamond under their mattress in the hope that pressure may transform it. The result: ‘it never looks any different. I think we would be a bit disappointed if it ever did.’ Moments like this bring light to the book, which ends up being quite sweet, in its own deliciously sour way.

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As it’s nearly Valentine’s Day, I decided to go back through my blog archives and see how many love stories I’ve reviewed over the years. My instinct was that it wouldn’t be that many, but (allowing for my subjective interpretation), I’ve come up with a list of nine more books to add to the one above, which is more than I expected. Here they are – but I’m not necessarily promising happy endings…

Viola di Grado, 70% Acrylic 30% Wool (reviewed Jan 2013)

A girl struggling to move on from her father’s death may have found a way forward when she meets a local boy who teaches her Chinese – if she can let herself move forward, that is. I really enjoyed this book, but it might as much an anti-love story as a love story.

Evan Mandery, Q: a Love Story (reviewed Sept 2012)

This must be a love story, because it says so in the title, right? Well, maybe not, as its protagonist receives repeated visits from his future self, trying to persuade him to call off his relationships. But the ending is actually rather affecting.

Alice Zeniter, Take This Man (reviewed May 2012)

A fine portrait of complex circumstances, as a young French-Algerian woman prepares to marry her Malian childhood friend in a bit to prevent his deportation. Not so much a tale of ‘will they?won’t they?’ as ‘should they? shouldn’t they?’.

Henry Green, Loving (reviewed Jan 2012)

A tale of love and contested space in a wartime country house. It begins and ends with the words of a fairytale, but that kind of happiness is a long way from being guaranteed.

Robert Shearman, Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical (reviewed Aug 2011)

An excellent set of stories examining love in its various manifestations.

Alison MacLeod, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction (reviewed July 2011)

Another fine set of stories about love.

Daniel Glattauer, Love Virtually (reviewed Feb 2011)

A novel told through two people’s emails; their correspondence becomes a form of courtship dance. Will they or won’t they? I don’t know without reading the sequel.

Priya Basil, The Obscure Logic of the Heart (reviewed June 2010)

A non-religious boy from a wealthy Kenyan Sikh family and a girl from a devout Birmingham Muslim family fall in love – and the complexities of their situation are very nicely delineated in the book.

Ronan O’Brien, Confessions of a Fallen Angel (reviewed Aug 2009)

The story of a young man who has apparently prophetic dreams of people’s deaths. I include it here for its wonderful portrait of falling in love twice, in two different ways – the dizzy rush of first love, and a slower flowering of affection later on in life.

Bookmunch reviews: HHhH and The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

Here’s my latest couple of reviews for Bookmunch.

Laurent Binet, HHhH (2009/12)

In 1942, Czech Jan Kubiš and Slovak Jozef Gabčík were sent from London and parachuted secretly into Prague. Their mission: to kill Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Gestapo, widely considered in the SS to be the brains behind his superior (‘Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich,’ they’d say – Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich, or HHhH). Laurent Binet heard this story as a child, and became more and more fascinated by it after going to Slovakia as a teacher, and finding the church crypt where Gabčík and Kubiš hid after their attempt on Heydrich’s life. In this novel, Binet tells the men’s story – but he also chronicles the process of research and writing, and the difficulties of making fiction out of real events.

This is a fascinating approach. Binet may present a scene that reads like historical fiction, then unpick it in the next chapter, asking how much he can really be sure about, what he may have left out or glossed for the shape of his story. It has the effect of creating tension even when you know broadly where the history is heading, because suddenly nothing is certain. Alongside this, as Binet tells of his time researching and writing HHhH, it too takes on something of the quality of fiction – and the lines between what’s real and what’s not are shown to be ever more blurred.

The prose in HHhH is often matter-of-fact rather than colourful. It’s not that Binet doesn’t do colour: there are some gripping passages of narrative as Gabčík’s and Kubiš’s mission reaches its climax (I must add here that Sam Taylor’s translation from the French is superb). Rather, I suspect that the more neutral tone represents Binet’s desire to remain true to the history (perhaps the change of tone towards the end is a recognition that he can’t do so completely). And I don’t find that tone dry, nor Binet’s interjections intrusive; HHhH works well as a whole, both as a tale of history and the pitfalls of telling it.

Any Cop?: If you’re in the mood for a novel which is as interested in examining what it’s doing as in portraying its historical subject, definitely give this a try.

Ayana Mathis, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (2012)

In the 1920s, young Hattie is one of the many American blacks who will travel from the Southern states to begin new lives in the North. A couple of years after settling in Philadelphia, Hattie has married August and given birth to twins, whom she names Philadelphia and Jubilee in optimism for the years to come – but the children die as babies. She will go on to have many more children who survive, but this is the first sign of the difficulties Hattie and her descendants will face making their way in life throughout the twentieth century.

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is structured as a series of episodes, each focusing on one or more of Hattie’s children at points in history ranging from 1925 to 1980, which together create a composite portrait of the family. The emotional scope of the novel is vast, as Ayana Mathis’s characters face desire, betrayal, racism, insanity, and more besides. Perhaps most central to the book are issues of living up to (or failing to meet) the expectations of others, and what binds (or may separate) the members of a family.

Mathis moves between many different viewpoints (third- and first-person) with fluency and ease. Her characters are always vivid, such as Six, whose violent outburst as a child becomes channelled into an unstoppable religious fervour (“The Word collected in his mouth like a pile of pebbles and pushed itself out through his lips”); and Bell, who couldn’t have foreseen herself living in squalor and wasting away from tuberculosis (“She’d taken such pleasure in saying no to [two marriage] proposals…Women who married men like that did nothing but shop for groceries and nearly die of boredom. But here I am dying anyway”).

And through it all is Hattie herself, from age 17 to age 71, who wants the best life for her family, but doesn’t always get it. It would be wrong to say that her determination never flags, or that she sacrifices herself entirely – Mathis’s portrait is too complex to sum up in that kind of way. But Hattie’s personality, and those of her children, fill the book to its very end.

Any Cop?: Absolutely. This is a superb novel of character and situation – and it’s only Ayana Mathis’s debut.

Books in brief: early January

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.

What I’ve been reading lately

I don’t have proper internet access in my new flat yet, and won’t have until mid-January; so blogging here will still be intermittent for the time being. But I have still been reading: this post is a quick catch-up of the last few weeks.

Lavie Tidhar, Osama (2011). The latest novel to win the World Fantasy Award, this details a private detective’s search for the author of a series of pulp novels featuring “Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante”, in a version of history without global terrorism. Tidhar makes a comparison between ‘real-world’ terrorism and pulp fiction, which I found to be very powerful; but I suspect I’m not familiar enough with the other works with which Osama is in dialogue to fully appreciate the book.

M. John Harrison, Light (2002). I’m planning to read all of Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract trilogy before Empty Space makes its likely appearance on next year’s Clarke Award shortlist. I actually find myself unsure what to say about this first volume in isolation, and feeling that I’ll get more from it once I’ve read the whole series. I am struck, though, by Light‘s general movement towards possibilities being realised and mysteries starting to be solved, which stands in marked opposition to what I’ve come to expect from Harrison’s work. Of course, that movement may yet be subverted – we shall see.

Helen FitzGerald, The Donor (2011). A father faces the dilemma of being the only suitable organ match when both his daughters suffer kidney failure. I read this for Fiction Uncovered, so a longer review is forthcoming.

Samit Basu, Turbulence (2012). The passengers on a flight from London to Delhi wake from a dream to find that they each have a super-power based on what they most desire. A few of them try to make a difference to the world, but others have their own agendas. Turbulence starts out well, with a sharp wit and a welcome suggestion that powerful individuals may not find it as easy to change the world as they imagine. But then a sense of spectacle comes to dominate, and the novel as a whole ends up too frothy.

Stendhal, Roman Tales (2012). A new translation (by Susan Ashe), of three of Stendhal’s later works, all based on trials from the 16th and 17th centuries. I suspect that readers who already know Stendhal’s work and style will get more from this book than I did. Sometimes I found the detail engaging; at other times, it came across as a little dry.

Christopher Brookmyre, Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks (2007). Sceptical journalist Jack Parlabane may have met his match in the person of Gabriel Lafayette, a conduit for apparently incontrovertible paranormal phenomena. Certainly more is going on than meets the eye, as Parbalane is narrating while dead. This was my first Brookmyre novel, and I gather it’s less humorous than is his typical style. The book took a while to get going, but I did appreciate its twists and turns. I do want to sample Brookmyre’s more typical work, though.

Kate Atkinson, Human Croquet (1997). The tale of the present and past of the Fairfax family, seen mainly through the eyes of sixteen-year-old Isobel, who finds herself occasionally slipping through time. The timeslip aspect of the book  is what works best for me, with Atkinson giving it a wonderfully matter-of-fact quality. But I found the family drama side of Human Croquet less engaging, which left me unsatisfied with the novel as a whole.

K.T. Davies, The Red Knight (2012). This  first novel from small publisher Anachron Press is a fantasy set in a kingdom facing civil war, centring particularly on the character of Captain Alyda Stenna, who returns from a successful campaign to find that her battles are far from over. Though the plotting isn’t always as clear as it might be, there’s a real exuberance to Davies’s storytelling which keeps things interesting.

Laurent Binet, HHhH (2009/12). A novel about a real-life plot to assassinate Reinard Heydrich in 1942, interwoven with the author’s reflections on writing fiction from history. I read this for Bookmunch, so once again, there’s a longer review in the works.

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