Adventures in reading
The longlist for this year’s International Booker Prize will be announced on Thursday, so it’s time to convene the Shadow Panel once again. As always, we will be reading and reviewing the books, coming to our own conclusions, then choosing a shadow shortlist and winner – which may, or may not, reflect the ‘official’ ones.
For now, let me introduce you to the members of this year’s Shadow Panel…
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Originally published in French in 1977, this is a travelogue by Togolese writer Tété-Michel Kpomassie (translated by James Kirkup). As a teenager in the 1950s, he is (reluctantly) about to be initiated into a snake cult when he reads a book about Greenland. This place is beyond anything he has experienced or can imagine, but there will be no snakes – and, he reads, “the child is king, free from all traditional and family restraint”. This is enough to make the young Kpomassie resolve to travel to Greenland, even though it means running away from home.
Kpomassie’s journey to Greenland is an epic tale in itself. It takes six years for him to earn enough money to leave Africa, followed by a spell working in Paris before he finally reaches his destination. He stands out, not just for his skin colour but also his height (hence he’s nicknamed Michel the Giant). This will be a two-way meeting of cultures: “I had started on a voyage of discovery, only to find that it was I who was being discovered.”
Kpomassie’s book is a fascinating account of his travels. There are telling details, such as the cinema that stops foreign films every ten minutes to explain the action to the Inuit audience, because only Danish subtitles are available. These episodes are mixed with Kpomassie’s broader reflections on the people he encounters. His openness and willingness to meet Greenland on its own terms are what make Michel the Giant so engaging for me.
Published by Penguin Modern Classics.
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.
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.
It’s time for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and this year’s longlist is especially intriguing:
This is a list that really shows the breadth of the Republic of Consciousness Prize: four of the ten titles are short story collections; half of the longlist is in translation. I’m also pleased to see that, even though I think I’m pretty clued up on small publishers, there are still two here which are completely new to me (Dar Arab and Turas). There is always something more to discover.
Sterling Karat Gold is the only nominee I’ve reviewed to date. I was expecting it to be longlisted, and it would be a worthy winner… But I’m excited to see what the rest of the list is like.
I’m planning to take a more relaxed approach to reading along with the Prize this year – in the past, I’ve tried getting through entire longlists before the shortlist announcement, and doing that hardly ever makes it more enjoyable. I am also trying this year to be more selective about the books I review on here, so I won’t necessarily review the whole longlist even if I manage to read all of it. That way, I hope I can get the most out of the experience (and give you some interesting posts to read!).
Congratulations to all the longlisted publishers, authors and translators! Now, let’s get reading…
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.
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.
This February sees the return of Reading Independent Publishers Month, hosted by Lizzy’s Literary Life and Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings. Independent publishers are a big part of what I read, so I should be able to join in with this fairly easily. We’ll see how it goes, anyway.
To start, I’m off to Scarborough’s Valley Press, and the first novel by Jaimie Batchan. He’s the co-host of Unsound Methods, a podcast I would recommend as it features many authors whose work is squarely in my area of interest. It came as no surprise to me discover that Siphonophore is in my area of interest, too.
Our narrator is MacGregor, marooned on the Darién isthmus (now Panama) in the 16th century following a failed attempt to establish a Scottish colony. The novel begins straightforwardly enough, with McGregor explaining how he ended up in his current predicament. He communes with his Creator – who isn’t quite the kind of being one might anticipate:
His procrastinating, for example, is noticeably absent from the scriptures. Once He becomes committed to the work he must undertake, this stalling finds a fresh set of robes in which to creep upon the earth. His time-wasting swiftly dons the attire of legitimate research. So much for omniscience. He diligently bookmarks web pages for future reference, scribbling notes in his spidery handwriting and hiding away in the ailing libraries dotted about the borough.
MacGregor is fully aware that his Creator is a 21st-century novelist. The Creator’s life and speech patterns bleed into McGregor’s narration, which ties the two timeframes together. We discover that the novelist has a rare terminal illness, and is desperate to complete his book. McGregor, in his turn, wants the writer to stay alive long enough to get him home.
This has the effect of giving a real sense of urgency to an approach that might otherwise seem just a gimmick. MacGregor and his Creator are mutually dependent on each other (like the marine organism after which Batchan’s novel is titled). Siphonophore examines their differing thoughts on living life when time is short.
Batchan’s novel creates a whirlwind of perspective that only grows more intense as language breaks down and the line between MacGregor and Creator blurs. It’s quite a ride.
I’m intrigued by the way that the brevity of a short novel can bring a distinctive feel to familiar subject matter. One of the Boys by Daniel Magariel springs to mind here, the way it puts a toxic family relationship into extreme close-up by removing all but the most essential detail.
Another example is The Sky Above the Roof, the latest novel to appear in English by Mauritian-French author Nathacha Appanah. It revolves around three characters who are all, in some way, ill at ease in the world. We begin with young Wolf in the back of a police van. He drove on the wrong side of the road, there was a crash, and now here we are. To an outside observer, Wolf may just seem a boy who doesn’t pay attention. In fact, though his mind mixes up times and memories of events, his mechanical instinct is something else. His mother thinks of him like this:
…a boy who does not have a licence and cannot catch a bus on his own, suffers from anxiety attacks and can go for days without speaking. One who has magic fingers and can repair little things when they break down (hairdryer, telephone, power drill), his gaze acting like a scanner and detecting where the fault lies. He who can run round and round the house for two hours without stopping, is afraid of the hollow in the garden and, now, does not want to see her.
At the time of the crash, Wolf was driving to visit his sister Paloma, who walked out years ago. Paloma is someone who hides on the sidelines of life. Then there’s the siblings’ mother, who was named Eliette as a girl, and hated the way her parents made her dress up and sing – which is to say nothing of where that led. She made a life for herself as an adult, changing her appearance and calling herself Phoenix. She also made sure that she wouldn’t constrict her children in the way her parents did with her – but, as we see, not everything turns out as intended.
The Sky Above the Roof has 130 pages and encompasses this family’s immediate history, as well as Wolf’s brief (though still harrowing) stay in the remand centre. It seems to me that the novel loses some nuance of cause and effect through its brevity: sometimes it feels as though upbringing is the be-all and end-all. But its shortness also brings Appanah’s book intensity, making it a string of set-pieces with that swirling prose in Geoffrey Strachan’s fine translation.
Published by MacLehose Press.
This is another title from Bernardine Evaristo’s Black Britain: Writing Back series. Jacqueline Roy has written a number of children’s books. The Fat Lady Sings (published in 2000) was her first novel for adults – her second will be published later this month.
The Fat Lady Sings revolves around two Caribbean women living in a psychiatric ward in 1990s London. Gloria is in her fifties, a naturally exuberant presence: her mental health was assessed when her neighbours complained about her singing. It’s as though life has conspired to prevent Gloria from living it on her own terms. She has been ostracised by the family of her partner, Josie. When talking to police at the scene of the train crash that killed Josie, Gloria only felt able to describe herself as Josie’s friend. It’s a similar story on the ward: Gloria is told to keep her voice down, and the food is bland English fare.
Gloria has been in the unit for some months. Roy’s other protagonist is a new arrival: twentysomething Merle, who’s quiet and afraid of the voices in her head. Where Gloria’s narrative viewpoint is continuous, Merle’s is fragmented and subject to interruptions. But over the course of the novel, we see both women’s pasts, and they try to find a future for themselves.
The Fat Lady Sings is written in a way that brings the reader close to both its protagonists. We have to piece together their lives, just as they are doing. But there are moments of humour and light along the way – ultimately this is a tale of survival.
Published by Penguin.
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