Tag: books

A reader’s beliefs

10th April 2016 / / 4 Comments

I believe that a work of fiction is not…

…a machine. It cannot be understood simply by breaking it down into its component parts. It lives in the reading.

…a business transaction. Once the book is in my hands, there is no customer relationship. The book owes me nothing.

…an exam. There is no such thing as ‘difficult’ fiction. There may be fiction that requires concentration, or setting aside preconceived ideas of how a work ‘should’ be – but it’s all there to be read. There won’t be a test at the end, and it doesn’t matter if I don’t see everything. What matters is opening myself to the experience.

…functional. There are times when I’d like a book to fit a particular bill, and sometimes I’ll find the right one and the right time. But many of favourite books do things that I may not have anticipated, which is why I try to let the book have its way when I read.

…mandatory. There is no  single book that I have to read, be it old or new. There are books which are essential to me, but these can only reveal themselves with hindsight. Reading is an ongoing process.

…an unfiltered view. Reading a book is like looking through a window, but even the plainest window frames and shapes what you see.  The fiction I value most builds that sense into itself: form is the window, and it is made to be part of the view.

…written for my benefit. The author wasn’t thinking of me when writing this book (any book); I ought to bear that in mind.

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What, after all that, do I believe a work of fiction is? Just that: a work unto itself.  No matter how old, no matter how much has been said or written about it, the work remains, ready to speak anew. I just have to listen.

Tram 83 by Fiston Mwanza Mujila: #MBI2016

29th March 2016 / / 7 Comments

Tram 83Tram 83 is the debut novel by Congolese writer Fiston Mwanza Mujila (published by Jacaranda in the UK and Deep Vellum in the US). It’s set in ‘the City-State’, which has seceded from its parent country and is now a mélange of locals and incomers, many drawn by the lure of wealth from the local mines. Lucien is an incomer, but his main intention is simply to write; he comes to the City-State with the help of his friend Reqiuem, whose preoccupations are rather more… worldly.

The environment of the City-State is multifarious, and can be bewildering to those unused to it. This is reflected in the jagged swirl of the prose and its arrays of details:

The Northern Station was going to the dogs. It was essentially an unfinished metal structure, gutted by artillery, train tracks, and locomotives that called to mind the railroad built by Stanley, cassava fields, cut-rate hotels, greasy spoons, bordellos, Pentecostal churches, bakeries, and noise engineered by men of all generations and nationalities combined. It was the only place on earth you could hang yourself, defecate, blaspheme, fall into infatuation, and thieve without regard to prying eyes. Indeed, an air of connivance hung ever about the place. Jackals don’t eat jackals. They pounce on the turkeys and partridges, and devour them.

Language surrounds Lucien as he tries to make his way through this place: dialogue cuts into description; repetitions abound, such as “Do you have the time?”, the constant, coded solicitation of the women who gravitate towards Tram 83.

Tram 83 is the City-State’s night club, where all the deals are done. In my mental map of the novel, the Tram is its pulsing heart, with lines and circles of language radiating out from there (Roland Glasser’s translation is superb at creating that sense). When reading this book, I was reminded of my experience of reading Mrs Dalloway, and the way that Woolf transformed a geographical space into a linguistic and mental one. It was as though events were taking place not just in London-the-city but also at the level of consciousness and thought.

There’s a similar sense of multiple levels in Tram 83. When Lucien tries to give a reading at the club, he doesn’t last long, and it’s as though he is beaten down by the language of the Tram itself. As the novel puts it:

There’s cities which don’t need literature: they are literature.  They file past, chest thrust out, head on their shoulders.  They are proud and full of confidence despite the garbage bags they cart around.  The City-State, an example among so many others—she pulsated with literature.

Lucien tries to bring his own literature to the City-State, and succeeds to a certain extent. But he can’t tame the literature spreading out from Tram 83, and ultimately he becomes just another part of its web.

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Is this a shortlist contender?

Yes, I think so. It’s such a powerful reading experience, I can’t imagine Tram 83 not making my final six. I’d like to see it on the real Man Booker International shortlist, too.

Other reviews

From the shadow panel, Tony Malone, Stu and Grant have reviewed Tram 83 to date. You can also find reviews by Lisa at ANZ Lit Lovers (who is also maintaining a list of all the shadow panel’s reviews), and Adrian Nathan West at Words Without Borders.

Book details (Foyles affiliate links)

Tram 83 (2014) by Fiston Mwanza Mujila, tr. Roland Glasser (2015), Jacaranda paperback

Read my other posts on the 2016 Man Booker International Prize here.

A Cup of Rage by Raduan Nassar: #MBI2016

20th March 2016 / / 1 Comment

NassarTime for the oldest and shortest book on the Man Booker International Prize list. Raduan Nassar is a Brazilian writer who published two main works: a novel, Ancient Tillage (1975), and this novella from 1978. A Cup of Rage concerns a farmer and his younger lover who spend the night together, then argue their relationship to splinters. The couple’s argument takes up 30 pages out of 45, so we are looking at a detailed game of power.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that each chapter of A Cup of Rage consists of one long sentence. Stefan Tobler’s translation really shines here, creating unstoppable torrents of words that carry the reader along in their wake:

For a few moments in the room we seemed to be two strangers observed by somebody, and that somebody was always her and me, the two had to watch what I was doing and not what she was doing, so I sat on the edge of the bed and calmly started taking off my shoes and socks, holding my bare feet in my hands and feeling how lovely and moist they were, as if pulled out of the earth that very minute…

I found that last image quite unsettling: it’s in keeping with an individual who’s so self-regarding, with such a high opinion of himself; and it shows just how uncomfortably close the book can bring us to this character. The thing is, when we get to the couple’s confrontation, the emphasis shifts from sensations to thoughts and actions. It’s still engaging, with rising tension and the upper hand shifting back and forth; I just found that it didn’t get under my skin in the same way as the earlier chapters. This makes it a little difficult for me to get a perspective on the book as a whole; it may be that I just have to put it down to personal taste.

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Is it a shortlist contender?

For me, no. If I had found the main section as vivid as the earlier ones, it might well be in contention; and I wouldn’t rule it out from making the real shortlist. But I’ll be looking to other titles for my MBIP choice.

Elsewhere

From the shadow panel, Stu has reviewed A Cup of Rage. I’d also point out Nicholas Lezard’s review in the Guardian; and there’s an article about Nassar by translator Stefan Tobler in the Independent.

Book details (Foyles affiliate link)

A Cup of Rage (1978) by Raduan Nassar, tr. Stefan Tobler (2015), Penguin Modern Classics paperback

Read my other posts on the 2016 Man Booker International Prize here.

A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler: MBIP 2016

16th March 2016 / / 6 Comments

 

SeethalerMy first stop on this Man Booker International Prize journey is Austria, and a book that passed me by completely prior to its longlisting. The fulcrum of Robert Seethaler’s short (150 pages) novel is Andreas Egger, who is brought to his uncle’s farm as a boy in 1902. Egger remains in the same mountain village all his life, apart from two months serving on the front in Russia and the subsequent eight years as a prisoner in the gulag. A broken leg in childhood leaves Egger with a permanent limp, but he is otherwise strong and agile. The mountains are in his bones:

Sometimes, on mild summer nights, he would spread a blanket somewhere on a freshly mown meadow, lie on his back and look up at the starry sky. Then he would think about his future, which extended infinitely before him, precisely because he expected nothing of it. And sometimes, if he lay there long enough, he had the impression that beneath his back the earth was softly rising and falling, and in moments like these he knew that the mountains breathed.

Everything in A Whole Life returns to the landscape: the encroachment of modernity is symbolised by the cable car being built in the valley, which will bring electricity and more besides. The Second World War happens largely at a distance: for Egger it’s mostly a matter of boring holes in rock, cutting wood, marking time in the camp. Towards the end of his life, thinking to broaden his horizons, Egger takes the bus to its last stop; when he gets there, he has no idea where to go – he may have spent his life in the same place, but that place is his life to a great extent.

In the latest edition of the Peirene Press newspaper, the writer Cynan Jones has an article in praise of short novels:

There’s no room for digression. No room for passenger writing. Every word is doing a job. So pay attention. A short novel is an event, not a trip.

I was reminded of this very much when reading A Whole Life: since the book’s canvas is so large in comparison to the page-count, the account of Egger’s life seems distilled to its essence. The quiet precision of Charlotte Collins’ translation underlines how deeply Egger is connected to his specific surroundings.

I was also put in mind of Angharad Price’s superb The Life of Rebecca Jones (2002; translated by Lloyd Jones, 2010), another short novel about a character who lives for much of the 20th century in the same place. The experiences of their protagonists are rather different, but both novels show lives lived fully despite being bounded geographically. The title of Seethaler’s book is apposite in more ways than one: yes, it chronicles Andreas Egger’s ‘whole’ life from beginning to end; but that life is also whole because it’s lived in the round, for good and ill.

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Is this book a shortlist contender?

I’m not sure yet. To my mind, A Whole Life is a solid nominee; but it feels more like a book that may round out my personal shortlist, rather than a shoo-in. Time will tell…

Elsewhere

Nobody else on the shadow panel has reviewed A Whole Life as yet, but you can find more reviews at Lizzy’s Literary Life, Vishy’s Blog, and A Life in Books.

Book details (Foyles affiliate link)

A Whole Life (2014) by Robert Seethaler, tr. Charlotte Collins (2015), Picador paperback.

Read my other posts on the 2016 Man Booker International Prize here.

Man Booker International Prize 2016: the shadow panel’s response

13th March 2016 / / 2 Comments

This is the group response of the shadow panel to the Man Booker International longlist.

The Shadow Panel for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize congratulates the official judges on curating a longlist of thirteen fascinating titles, a selection containing many familiar names, but with enough surprise inclusions to keep us on our toes. We are particularly pleased about the geographical spread of the list; with seven of the thirteen books originating from outside Europe, the longlist has a truly global feel, which was certainly not the case with the final Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist.

Of course, as with any subjective selection, there are some areas for discussion. Firstly, we note that female authors are underrepresented, with just four of the thirteen titles written by women. We share the concerns Katy Derbyshire expressed in her piece for The Guardian and would certainly like to see more books by women translated into English. However, we also acknowledge that the figure of 30% is close to the current percentage of translated fiction written by women published in English – and that the percentage among the submitted titles may have been even lower. Unfortunately, with the list of submissions a secret, we are unable to test that suspicion.

Despite the pleasing geographical spread, some areas of the world have missed out. There is nothing from the Arabic-speaking world, and Russian, once again, seems to have fallen out of favour. The largest oversight, however (and one also referred to by Eileen Battersby in her commentary in The Irish Times), is the total omission of books in the Spanish language. In a very strong year for Spanish- language literature in English, we find it surprising (to say the least) that not one of these books made it onto the final list. We would like to mention just a few of these books at this stage to support our point: The Illogic of Kassel by Enrique Vila-Matas; In the Night of Time by Antonio Muñoz Molina; The Boy Who Stole Attila’s Horse by Iván Repila; Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera; My Documents by Alejandro Zambra; Thus Bad Begins by Javier Marías. Of course, some of these titles may not have been submitted (again, we are unable to clarify this), but we do find this oversight puzzling.

Still, despite these issues (and the omission of László Krasznahorkai’s Seiobo There Below, winner of the American-based 2014 Best Translated Book Award, when one of the MBIP judges was on the panel), the Shadow Panel is happy to accept the official judges’ decision and will not be calling any titles in this year. However, as always, we reserve the right to create our own shortlist, one which may diverge from the official decision. We look forward to reading, reviewing and discussing the thirteen longlisted titles – and we hope the official judges will enjoy seeing our take on their decisions.

This post is one of a series on the 2016 Man Booker International Prize.

 

Man Booker International Prize 2016: the longlist

12th March 2016 / / 5 Comments

Here we go! The first longlist for the new-style Man Booker International Prize was announced on Thursday. The 13 titles in contention are:

  • A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa, translated from the Portugese by Daniel Hahn (Harvill Secker)
  • The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions)
  • The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith (Portobello Books)
  • Mend the Living by Maylis de Kerangal, translated from the French by Jessica Moore (MacLehose Press)
  • Man Tiger by Eka Kurniawan, translated from the Indonesian by Labodalih Sembiring (Verso Books)
  • The Four Books by Yan Lianke, translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas (Chatto & Windus)
  • Tram 83 by Fiston Mwanza Mujila, translated from the French by Roland Glasser (Jacaranda)
  • A Cup of Rage by Raduan Nassar, translated from the Portugese by Stefan Tobler (Penguin Modern Classics)
  • Ladivine by Marie NDiaye, translated from the French by Jordan Stump (MacLehose Press)
  • Death by Water by Kenzaburō Ōe, translated from the Japanese by Deborah Boliner Boem (Atlantic Books)
  • White Hunger by Aki Ollikainen, translated from the Finnish by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah (Peirene Press)
  • A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk, translated from the Turkish by Ekin Oklap (Faber & Faber)
  • A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler, translated from the German by Charlotte Collins (Picador)

(The tiles above will, as ever, become links as I post about the books.)

My first impressions? I’m excited to read these books: I’m pleased that there’s such a strong showing for non-European fiction, and the three titles I’ve already read – The Vegetarian, White Hunger, and Mend the Living – are all strong contenders in my view. It would be over-optimistic of me to expect to love everything on the list (though I can hope…), but I am anticipating a strong competition this year.

There are, inevitably, omissions. Particularly striking to me is that there’s nothing translated from Spanish, because most of the titles I was hoping to see would fall into that bracket (Signs Preceding the End of the World, Mildew, and The Boy Who Stole Attila’s Horse, in case you were wondering). But I don’t want to dwell on that – at least not until I’ve read what actually has been longlisted…

What I can say for now is that, at first glance, the Man Booker International longlist puts the lists of many Anglophone literary prizes rather in the shade. So please join us on the shadow panel – Stu, Tony Malone, Tony Messenger, Bellezza, Clare, Grant, Lori, and me – as we read along. It will be quite a ride.

Coming up tomorrow: read the shadow panel’s official group response to the longlist.

Mend the Living by Maylis de Kerangal: a European Literature Network review

18th February 2016 / / 3 Comments

maylisThis week, I made my debut as a reviewer for the European Literature Network website. The book I’m reviewing is Maylis de Kerangal’s second novel to appear in English, Mend the Living (translated from the French by Jessica Moore; the US market has a different translation, Sam Taylor’s The Heart).

I could tell you that Mend the Living is the story of a heart transplant, and that would be true; but it wouldn’t prepare you for the extraordinary, kaleidoscopic sentences:

What it is, Simon Limbeau’s heart, this human heart, from the moment of birth when its cadence accelerated while other hearts outside were accelerating too, hailing the event, no one really knows; what it is, this heart, what has made it leap, swell, sicken, waltz light as a feather or weigh heavy as a stone, what has stunned it, what has made it melt – love; what it is, Simon Limbeau’s heart, what it has filtered, recorded, archived, black box of a twenty-year-old body – only a moving image created by ultrasound could echo it, could show the joy that dilates and the sorrow that constricts…

Already in this opening fragment, the line between the medical and emotional meanings of the human heart is being blurred, and so Mend the Living continues. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find this novel in contention for the Man Booker International Prize; read my review to find out why.

Now read on…

Stu has a good review of Mend the Living at Winstonsdad’s Blog; and there’s an interesting conversation between de Kerangal and Moore over at BOMB Magazine.

Book details (Foyles affiliate link)

Mend the Living (2014) by Maylis de Kerangal, tr. Jessica Moore (2016), MacLehose Press paperback

Introducing the 2016 Man Booker International Prize shadow panel

14th February 2016 / / 8 Comments

For the past couple of years, I’ve been part of a panel of bloggers (and other readers) shadowing the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize  (IFFP). We would read that year’s longlist, score the books, create our own shortlist, choose our own shadow winner. It was always a highlight of my reading and blogging year.

Well, now the IFFP as we knew it is no more, having been merged into a reformatted Man Booker International Prize. But the shadow panel lives on: we’ll be reading along with the new MBIP, just as before. We have each prepared a short bio to introduce ourselves; so, please meet my fellow shadow panellists:

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Stu Allen is returning to chair the first Man Booker International Prize shadow jury after hosting four shadow IFFP juries.  He blogs out of Winstonsdad’s Blog, home to 500-plus translated books in review.  He can be found on twitter (@stujallen), where he also started the successful translated fiction hashtag #TranslationThurs over five years ago.

Tony Malone is an Anglo-Australian reviewer with a particular focus on German, Japanese and Korean fiction.  He blogs at Tony’s Reading List, and his reviews have also appeared at Words Without Borders, Necessary Fiction and Shiny New Books.  Based in Melbourne, he teaches ESL to prospective university students when he’s not reading and reviewing.  He can also be found on Twitter @tony_malone

Clare started blogging at A Little Blog of Books four years ago. When she’s not doing her day job in London, she blogs mostly about contemporary literary fiction and particularly enjoys reading books by French and Japanese authors. Twitter: @littleblogbooks

Tony Messenger is addicted to lists, and books – put the two together (especially translated works) and the bookshelves sigh under the weight of new purchases as the “to be read” piles grow and the voracious all-night reading continues. Another Tony from Melbourne Australia, @messy_tony (his Twitter handle) may sometimes be mistaken for the more famous Malone Tony but rest assured they’re two different people. Messy Tony can be found at Messengers Booker (and more) and at Messenger’s Booker on Facebook – with a blog containing the word “booker” why wouldn’t he read this list?

Lori Feathers lives in Dallas, Texas, and is a freelance book critic and member of the National Book Critics Circle.  Her recent reviews can be found at Words Without Borders, Full Stop, World Literature Today, Three Percent, Rain Taxi and on Twitter @LoriFeathers

Bellezza is a blogger from Chicago, Illinois, who has been writing Dolce Bellezza for ten years. She has run the Japanese Literature Challenge for 9 years, and her reviews can be found on publisher sites such as Penguin Random House, Simon and Schuster, Peirene Press, and SoHo Press. It is her great joy to participate in the shadow jury for the Man Booker International Prize with fellow participants who are experts in translated literature.

David Hebblethwaite – well, you know me…

Grant Rintoul is a Scottish reviewer who lives on the coast not far from the 39 steps said to have inspired Buchan’s novel. Luckily the weather is generally ideal for reading. He blogs at 1streading, so-called as he rarely has time to look at anything twice. He can sometimes be found on Twitter @GrantRintoul

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The mechanics of the MBIP are not actually that much different from those of the IFFP: the main change is that the longlist will comprise 12 or 13 titles, rather than the 15 of old. This first new-style MBIP also has an extended eligibility period, so it will cover books published in the UK between 1 January 2015 and 30 April 2016 – which means that some writers, such as Han Kang and Karl Ove Knausgaard, will have two titles eligible (and others, like Patrick Modiano, will have more than that!). There is every chance of worthy books being left off the longlist (as we felt happened with Zone last year).

The key dates for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize are:

10 March: longlist announcement

14 April: shortlist announcement

16 May: winner announcement

The shadow panel will be there to read along every step of the way. I’ve read some excellent translated fiction over the last year, and I look forward to seeing what makes the cut.

Tip of the iceberg: The Weight of Things by Marianne Fritz

28th January 2016 / / 6 Comments

WeightofThingsThe Weight of Things is a little book (140 pages including afterword; small, square format), but it’s the tip of what sounds an extraordinary iceberg of writing. Translator Adrian Nathan West provides illuminating background on Marianne Fritz (in his afterword, at The Paris Review, and in conversation with Kate Zambreno at The Believer). During her lifetime (1948-2007), Fritz produced some 10,000 pages of an unfinished project that she called ‘The Fortress’ – in West’s words, “a vast fictional work analyzing what aspects of Austrian society had conduced it to the twin disasters of the First and Second World War.” Over time, Fritz’s work drifted further and further from convention, as though language itself had been complicit in the atrocities of the 20th century, and she needed a different mode of expression. She went from deliberate misspellings and unusual grammar, through to elaborate diagrams and arrangements of text on the page (just take a look).

This first novel of Fritz’s (originally published in German in 1978, now in English from Dorothy, a publishing project) is in fairly straightforward language, though the shadow of that iceberg is never far away. In the first few pages, we have established some basics: in 1945, Berta Faust’s husband Rudolf did not return from the War; his comrade Wilhelm Schrei came back in his stead, and married Berta. By 1960, Wilhelm has married Berta’s friend Wilhemine; and Berta is in an asylum (‘the fortress’). In 1963, Wilhelmine suggests paying Berta a visit for her fortieth birthday (which just happens to coincide with Wilhelmine’s and Wilhelm’s wedding anniversary); but we sense that Wilhelmine isn’t doing this just to be friendly…

The stage is set for a blackly comic farce, and there are indeed moments of wry humour. Here, for example, is Wilhelmine talking to Wilhelm when he first brings the news of Rudolf:

What’s your story, sir? Are you planning on staying in Donaublau, then? Nowadays all the cities look more or less the same. A heap of rubble is a heap of rubble no matter where you go. Nowadays everyone has to start from scratch.

But this lightness of tone is deceptive. Even the title isn’t as innocuous as it first seems in context at first, not when you start thinking through what it means: “In February of 1945, Berta experienced a moment of freedom from the weight of things, in particular from that weighty circumstance historians call the Second World War.” Berta carries an existential burden with which she struggles to cope, just as the four little words of the novel’s title can’t hold all their meaning in. Wilhelm is too equivocal and reticent to be of much help: “He believed all and nothing, doubted all and nothing, was a born dreamer who never dreamed. In a nutshell: he was a worthy representative of his nation.” In that last comment, Fritz seems to suggest that here is a seed of war in microcosm.

The Weight of Things moves restlessly backwards and forwards in time, which enables the narrative feints that I won’t go into here… More fundamentally, though, it disrupts the reader’s feeling of progression: a period of history flattens out into timelessness, a sense that these circumstances cannot be escaped. When I’d finished The Weight of Things, my immediate feeling was one of waking from a beautiful nightmare – but it’s a nightmare that demands to be revisited.

Now read on…

I read The Weight of Things as it’s the first choice for the new Reading the World Book Club organised by the University of Rochester’s Three Percent blog. The Book Club has its own tag onNew for ‘ Three Percent, and Lizzy Siddal from Lizzy’s Literary Life has also been taking part.

Book details (publisher link)

The Weight of Things (1978) by Marianne Fritz, tr. Adrian Nathan West (2015), Dorothy, a publishing project paperback

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