Adventures in reading
There was never any chance that the International Booker Prize judges would choose the same winner as the shadow panel this year, because we went for Minor Detail, which didn’t make it to the official shortlist (though it should have, if you ask me).
However, I’m pleased because the jury chose my favourite book from the official shortlist, which is…
At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop (tr. Anna Moschovakis)
Congratulations to the winners!
The official winner of this year’s International Booker Prize will be announced later today. Before then, it’s time to announce the shadow panel’s winner. We choose a winner from our own shadow shortlist, so sometimes it matches the official result, and sometimes… Well, read on.
This was our tenth year of shadowing the International Booker (and its predecessor, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize), but it was also a year of some firsts. We were able to meet virtually via Zoom for the first time – no mean feat when we have members in the UK, Australia, India and USA. We also introduced a ‘Eurovision-style’ scoring system for the shadow shortlist, where each panel member ranked the titles and gave them 10 points, 7, 5, 3, 2 and 1. After adding up the scores, we can now reveal the results:
In 6th place, with 25 points… Wretchedness by Andrzej Tichý (tr. Nichola Smalley).
In 5th place, with 31 points… At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop (tr. Anna Moschovakis).
In 4th place, with 37 points… The Employees by Olga Ravn (tr. Martin Aitken).
In 3rd place, with 39 points… When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut (tr. Adrian Nathan West).
In 2nd place, with 52 points… In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova (tr. Sasha Dugdale).
Which means our shadow winner, with a grand total of 68 points, is…
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli (tr. Elisabeth Jaquette)
This is only the second time in shadow panel history that our winner hasn’t appeared on the official shortlist. It’s also another strong showing for Fitzcarraldo Editions, who have published four of our five shadow winners since 2017, and took the top two slots this year.
Congratulations to the shadow winners, and thanks to my fellow shadow panellists: Tony, Stu, Bellezza, Vivek, Frances, Areeb, Barbara and Oisin. It’s been another fun year – I wonder what the official jury will have chosen?
Read my other posts on the 2021 International Booker Prize here.
2021 is the 15th year of Quick Reads, an initiative run by the Reading Agency charity to help reach people who find reading difficult, or who don’t read regularly for pleasure. Every year, six new Quick Reads titles are published: short books that are distributed to libraries or available to buy at a low price (£1 in paperback).
I was invited by Midas PR to review one of this year’s Quick Reads titles. The 2021 selection includes The Baby is Mine by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Atlantic), The Skylight by Louise Candlish (Simon & Schuster), Saving the Day by Katie Fforde (Arrow), Wish You Were Dead by Peter James (Macmillan), and How to Be a Woman abridged by Caitlin Moran (Ebury). But I went for The Motive by Khurrum Rahman (HQ), which is a prequel to his series of spy thrillers featuring Jay Qasim, a west London dope-dealer who reluctantly ends up working for MI5.
In The Motive, Jay takes a call from a stranger asking him to deal at a student house party. Jay would prefer to stick to customers he knows, but times are tough. He might wish he’d kept to his rules, though, when one of the students is stabbed. What’s more, Jay’s friend Idris – a police officer – is also called to the scene.
I enjoyed reading this: it’s snappily told, with Jay and Idris both engaging narrators. You get a real sense of the tense atmosphere at the house party, and there are several twists when it comes to who’s responsible for the crime. I’m interested to see where Rahman takes Jay after this, so I think I’ll be reading more in the future.
In the mood for a long book? Here’s a 700-page Mexican tale of revenge (translated from Spanish by Frank Wynne and Jessie Mendez Sayer) that never flags. Our narrator is Juan Guillermo, who grew up in Mexico in the 1960s. His brother Carlos had his own drug business, and was killed by the Good Boys, a Catholic youth gang protected by the local police chief. Juan Guillermo’s parents died in a car accident a few years later, but he sees their grief over Carlos as the root cause. He would like vengeance, but that won’t come easily.
The structure is what really makes The Untameable stand out to me. For a long way into the novel, the narrative moves back and forth between different periods of Juan Guillermo’s life, as though highlighting that none of this is really over for him. A parallel strand sees a young man hunting an infamous wolf in the Yukon, which mirrors Juan Guillermo’s search for revenge – and intersects directly with his story in the end. In between chapters, there are shorter passages on different beliefs and practices around death, which show how much this weighs on Juan Guillermo’s mind.
I found The Untameable to be fascinating, poignant, and a good old page-turner.
Published by MacLehose Press.
I have some personal news today. Dr Jennifer Arnold is an academic at University College Cork, working on a project about translated literature called Reading Across Cultures. On Monday 17 and Tuesday 18 May, she is hosting a conference on Reading in Translation. It includes a round table discussion on book blogging, with Stu from Winston’s Dad, Marcia from Lizzy’s Literary Life – and me!
The conference is taking place online, and it’s free to register if you’re interested. My panel is on Tuesday at 3.15 pm.
Today’s post is part of a blog tour covering the shortlist for this year’s Dylan Thomas Prize (the winner of which will be announced on Thursday). I’m reviewing Pew, the third novel by Catherine Lacey. I’ve previously written about her debut, Nobody Is Ever Missing; like that earlier book, Pew focuses on a protagonist who’s elusive even to themself.
Lacey’s narrator is an individual with no memory or identifiable characteristics. They’re dubbed Pew because they are found in the church of a small American town. The townsfolk welcome Pew at first, but Pew’s reluctance to say anything unnerves them, and their attitudes change. There will be a Forgiveness Festival in town at the end of the week, and the reader has reason to suspect that this may not be as wholesome as it sounds…
With Pew staying silent, conversations are one-sided. Pew becomes an empty presence, and the town’s inhabitants fill the void with their own stories. The novel explores questions of what makes a person, and how individuals and communities relate to each other. Underneath it all is the figure of Pew, who might be looking for a place to belong, or might not need one after all. Lacey’s book is enigmatic, thought-provoking, and a pleasure to read.
Published by Granta Books.
After the official International Booker Prize shortlist last month, we on the shadow panel are ready to reveal our shortlist. We’ve scored our reading, crunched the numbers, and this is what rose to the top for us:
For the first time, our group shortlist matches my personal top six – so, as you can imagine, I’m especially happy with this selection. The International Booker winner will be announced on Wednesday 2 June, and we’ll have our shadow winner by then as well.
Read my other posts on the 2021 International Booker Prize here.
This is Mariana Enríquez’ second story collection to appear in English translation by Megan McDowell (though it was her first to be published in the original Spanish). I would have loved Things We Lost in the Fire to be longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize (as it was then), so I was pleased to see that this collection had made it.
Enríquez tells tales of urban horror, with vivid unsettling images such as the dead baby that returns as a ghost in ‘Angelita Unearthed’, though not necessarily as the kind of spirit that the protagonist anticipates. Then there’s ‘The Well’, in which a woman tries to excise the fears that have blighted her life by returning to a witch she visited as a child. There’s a real sense of nightmare about it.
My favourite piece in the book is the novella ‘Kids Who Come Back’. This is the story of Mechi, who works at the archive for lost children in Buenos Aires. Mechi’s life (and other people’s) is turned upside down when missing children start to reappear – though all is not as it seems. After reading this, I’m really looking forward to Enríquez’ novel Our Share of Night, which is being published in McDowell’s translation next year.
Published by Granta Books.
Read my other posts on the 2021 International Booker Prize here.
In the past, I’ve described Jon McGregor as a writer who brings out the strangeness in the everyday. Thinking about it, he also writes powerfully about trauma. Both of these aspects come together in his new novel – though at first glance, Lean Fall Stand may seem something of a departure for him, not least because part of it is set in the Antarctic.
In the first third, three men are on a research expedition: newcomers Thomas Myers and Luke Adebayo, and veteran field technician Robert ‘Doc’ Wright. When we meet them, they’re in trouble, separated and disoriented. Caught in a snowstorm, Thomas observes that what he’s heard from other people couldn’t prepare him for the reality:
He had heard this described as like being inside a jet engine. As though people knew what being inside a jet engine was like. People said these things, but the words didn’t always fit.
This is the first example of a key theme in Lean Fall Stand: the difficulty of capturing experience in language. Nevertheless, McGregor’s prose often evokes a visceral reaction in me. Towards the end of the Antarctic section, Doc’s viewpoint breaks apart, and it’s harrowing stuff:
He was the assistant. General. The technical general assistant. He was required to assist. He was required to take action. He had the experience required. He moved towards the radio. He went over on his weak right foot and hit the floor hard. He floored the numb faceness of his raw. No. Rawed the rub. The rum. The nub.
What’s happened here is that Doc has had a stroke. The second part of the novel is told mainly from the viewpoint of Doc’s wife Anna, who finds herself forced to adapt to a new way of living. This is reflected in the prose: at first, pieces of calm language from the hospital lodge themselves in the narration (“It’s Robert. It’s your husband. A bit of a stroke. We need you to.”) Later, the repetitive routines of care start to take over:
She had to get some food into him before his blood sugar dropped too low. She had to leave him in the armchair while she went down to the kitchen, and she had to make him promise not to move. She had to listen out for any crashes or noises whilst she sliced an apple, and spread toast, and made tea. She had to ignore the phone while she ran the breakfast tray upstairs. She had to cut the toast into small pieces so he could eat it.
We also see the laborious process of Doc’s recovery. The stroke has taken away both of the couple’s old lives: Anna, an academic, is ostensibly being “kept in the loop” of her old job, but it’s not hard to see that she’s being pushed outside of it. Doc is now Robert full-time, gone from being the person who tells others how to handle the Antarctic, to someone who’s no longer in control of even the basics.
Robert’s attempts to regain speech are particularly significant, because he’s the only person who could explain what happened out there. Thomas didn’t make it back from the Antarctic, so there has to be an inquest, which needs Robert’s testimony.
In the final part of Lean Fall Stand, Robert attends a speech therapy group (much of this is seen from the group leader’s viewpoint, to whom Robert can only be the person in front of her, not the person he was). At this group, Robert is able to rebuild his experiences into a story and an identity that he can assert for himself.
Lean Fall Stand is an appropriately jagged novel, in terms of its language and its structure. Not every thread gets a full ending, but then this book is all about imperfect recollections and lives made patchwork. It’s another fine piece of work by one of my essential writers.
Published by Fourth Estate.
Read more of my reviews of Jon McGregor’s work here.
I was looking forward to this, my first time reading Ngũgĩ, and it didn’t disappoint. It’s a version of the Gĩkũyũ people’s myth of origin: the story of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi and their ten daughters (the tenth, Warigia, makes them a Perfect Nine).
In Ngũgĩ’s telling (translated from Gĩkũyũ by the author) , 99 suitors arrive seeking the hand of one of the Perfect Nine. Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi set them a quest: to go up the mountain in search of a hair from an ogre’s tongue, which will give Warigia the ability to walk. Not all of the men will return, but the Perfect Nine (minus Warigia) go with them, and are at least as capable, if not more so.
The Perfect Nine is written in verse, with rhythms of oral storytelling, and plenty of wonder and adventure. I enjoyed reading it very much.
Published by Harvill Secker.
Read my other posts on the 2021 International Booker Prize here.
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