Tag: books

My favourite books read in 2015

21st December 2015 / / 9 Comments

It’s been a year of ups and downs, really: I relaunched the blog with a new focus and name, and later with its own domain; and I feel I’ve got closer to what I wanted to achieve. However, especially in the latter part of this year, I haven’t had as much time as I expected for reading and blogging, so some of my plans are being put back into 2016 instead. I would like to dig more deeply into why I respond to certain books in the way I do (I also have plans for a series of posts going back to books I read in my pre-blogging days, to trace where the reader I am now came from). I’d still like to focus in more on the kinds of books that speak to me most, and explore older works… Well, more on that later.

For now, here are my twelve favourites from all the books I read in 2015. I’m especially struck that I have my most globally diverse list to date: authors from ten different countries; books originally written in six different languages; and, for the first time, translations predominate. More than that, though, I look over this list and think: yes, these books – in all their different ways – are what I like to read. That’s what this is all about.

Enough preamble: on to the books. The countdown is a bit of fun, but the books are all well worth your time.

MJuly12. Miranda July, The First Bad Man (2015)

I started off thinking I knew what sort of novel this was going to be: offbeat tone, middle-aged, middle-class American protagonist… I have the measure of this, I thought. Well, I was wrong. There is a good deal of eccentricity and artifice in July’s tale of a fortysomething woman whose careful household routine is disrupted by the arrival of her employers’ twenty-year-old daughter. But it is shown to be a front and a defence mechanism – and when July breaks through her characters’ façades, her novel cuts sharply.

[My review] – [Foyles affiliate link]

11. Ivan Vladislavić, The Folly (1993)

A story of how easy, and dangerous, it can be to fall for someone else’s dream. The husband of a suburban couple is captivated by a stranger who moves on to the neighbouring plot and announces that he’s going to build a new house. Soon the husband is doing all the hard work for the newcomer while the ‘house’ remains little more than an idea – but what a powerful idea. Vladislavić’s first novel is equally delicious and disturbing, reminding one of the darker shadows that lie behind its playful tone.

[My review] – [Foyles affiliate link]

10. Sunny Singh, Hotel Arcadia (2015)

A novel about the distance between image and reality, set in the heightened environment of a hotel under attack from terrorists. Singh maintains a tight focus on two characters – a war photographer who roams the corridors, and the hotel employee who uses CCTV to help her evade capture – and never leaves the building, except in flashback. But that very stylised approach helps give Hotel Arcadia its power, as reality becomes concentrated, and a few days can hold a lifetime.

[My review] – [Foyles affiliate link]

9. Dan Rhodes, When the Professor Got Stuck in the Snow (2014)

Hands down, the funniest book I have read in a very long time. You can sum it up in a single line – Richard Dawkins forced to stay in a village at the vicar’s house – but you can’t capture its essence without reading. The mixture of broad, cartoonish humour and sharp satire (aimed in several directions) lulls you into a false sense of security… Then comes the moment – as in all of Rhodes’ fiction that I’ve read – where you see behind the curtain, and that is really why I love this novel so much.

[My review] – [Foyles affiliate link]

Repila

8. Iván Repila, The Boy Who Stole Attila’s Horse (2013)
Translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes (2015)

A small, hallucinatory jewel of a book in which two boys are trapped at the bottom of a well and trying to get out. This novel plays out in my mind’s eye as a scratchy animated film, each chapter-scene limned in a slightly different colour. Repila constantly changes the imaginative space of the well through his style and imagery; and, as with The Folly above, there’s a grim reality apparent beneath the surface of metaphor.

[My review] – [Foyles affiliate link]

7. Hiromi Kawakami, Manazuru (2006)
Translated from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich (2010)

If you’d told me last year that I would have a Kawakami novel on my favourites list this year, I may well not have believed you. I had read The Briefcase/Strange Weather in Tokyo twice and scarcely felt close to unlocking it. But Manazuru is a different kind of book, one I took to straight away: a combination of hazily blurred realities and pin-sharp emotional detail, as a woman retreats to a seaside town in search of something – possibly her missing husband, possibly herself. A third read of The Briefcase/Strange Weather is clearly in order…

[My review] – [Publisher link]

6. Jenny Erpenbeck, The End of Days (2012)
Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky (2014)

A worthy winner of what turned out to be the final Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. The first page may be the single most potent scene that I’ve read all year. In each of the five main sections, Erpenbeck’s protagonist dies at a different point in time, which changes the meaning of her life and death, and the way she interacts with history. The End of Days sets an individual life against the sweep of the twentieth century, to quite marvellous effect.

[My review] – [Foyles affiliate link]

5, Paulette Jonguitud, Mildew (2010)
Translated from the Spanish by the author (2015)

The protagonist of this short novel finds mildew growing over her body, and Jonguitud’s writing creeps through the reader in the same way. The narrator merges together fallible memory, physical space, and possibly faulty perception, to the point that there’s no meaningful boundary between the real and the imaginary to begin.  We are invited into this seamless imaginative space, and can only hold on as the narrator tries to keep control of her own story.

[My review] – [Foyles affiliate link]

Enquist4. Per Olov Enquist, The Wandering Pine (2008)
Translated from the Swedish by Deborah Bragan-Turner (2015)

Of all the books on this list, Enquist’s was the one that caught me most unawares, in that I wasn’t prepared for how deeply it would affect me. The Wandering Pine is based on its author’s life, combining closeness to its subject with a distance and mystery that comes from the oblique fictional framing. It’s a novel that explores what explores what it is to engage with the world through writing, not to mention one of the most powerful depictions of childhood that I have read.

[My review] – [Foyles affiliate link]

3. Lucy Wood, Weathering (2015)

Three years after the wonderful Diving Belles, Wood goes from strength to strength. In someone else’s hands, this could have been a run-of-the-mill tale of a woman returning to her rural childhood home. In Wood’s work, all lines between metaphor, place and action are erased; here, she situates her characters in a raw, unknowable landscape that haunts them as they haunt it. This author is carving out a path all her own, and I am excited to see where she will go.

[My review] – [Foyles affiliate link]

2. Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World (2009)
Translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman (2015)

A woman travels from Mexico to the US with a message for her brother, in this tale where borders of all kinds are crossed or dissolved: borders of geography, language, culture. There’s a fuzzy, mutable quality to both the language and the space of this novel, where a journey to another country reads like a metaphorical (or literal!) descent into the underworld. I’m still astonished at how much ground Herrera covers in so small a space.

[My review] – [Foyles affiliate link]

Vegetarianpb

 

1. Han Kang, The Vegetarian (2007)
Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith (2015)

This was the very first book I read in 2015, and nothing since has ever quite supplanted it. Three novellas, linked by the character of a woman who decides to give up eating meat, eventually refusing all food, for reasons we are never fully allowed to comprehend. We only view the main character through the eyes of those around her, as Han explores the ramifications of someone stepping outside social norms, and asks who really makes the self. The Vegetarian is an extraordinary experience.

[My review] – [Foyles affiliate link]

And if you want more favourites, here are my previous lists: 2014; 2013; 2012; 2011; 2010; and 2009.

 

 

Dear Infidel by Tamim Sadikali

20th December 2015 / / 2 Comments

Tamim Sadikali’s first novel is set around Eid ul-Fitr in 2004, and focuses on five British Muslim protagonists each dealing with their own personal, familial or cultural struggles. Four of them are cousins: City worker Aadam has his doubts about whether Britain is the best place for him to raise a family. His strictly observant brother Salman, however, is quite certain that his children should be protected from non-Islamic influences. Meanwhile, their cousin Pasha has largely turned his back on Islam, though he still doesn’t feel settled, as he leaves his white girlfriend shortly before travelling down to London for the family gathering. And Pasha’s brother Imtiaz is just drifting listlessly through life, with no berth in sight. Alongside these four there is Nazneen, Aadam’s wife, who perhaps feels most keenly being caught between two cultures, as she still looks back on life with her old boyfriend Martin.

Dear Infidel follows the characters separately to begin with, before bringing them together for the Eid celebrations, where tensions rise to the surface and lives are changed by their confrontations with each other. Sadikali uses a range of styles and approaches throughout the book, which works well in individual sequences (one of my favourites alternates a feverish Imtiaz’s dream of playing cricket for Pakistan with a radio debate on Islam that’s being broadcast as he sleeps), and across the novel as a whole. Dear Infidel never settles: its characters’ lives are still in motion, and so is the experience of reading, even after the last page is turned.

Book details (Foyles affiliate link)

Dear Infidel (2014) by Tamim Sadikali, Hansib Publications paperback

A Kind of Compass: ‘The Unintended’ by Gina Apostol

16th December 2015 / / 0 Comments

This cracker of a story appears in A Kind of Compass, a new anthology of “stories on distance” edited by Belinda McKeon and published by Dublin-based Tramp Press. ‘The Unintended’ begins with Magsalin, a translator and mystery writer from the Philippines, pondering her task:

For the mystery writer, it is not enough to mourn the dead. One must also study the exit wounds, invite the coroner to tea, cloud the mind with ulterior motives, typically in triplicate. In addition, pay credit card bills for the grieving, if such bills are extant.

(I was sold on the story from that opening paragraph, to be honest.)

We then move outwards: in the past, Virginie falls for a filmmaker named Luca Brasi, and they have a dream romance, at least to begin with. In the present, the Brasis’ daughter Chiara has hired Magsalin to be her translator as she, like her father, makes a film about the Philippine-American war (though for Chiara this seems to be as much a quest to find out what made her marriage fall apart). Along the way, Magasalin has cause to observe the many strata of distance between photographs of war and its reality:

there is the eye of the victim, the captured,

who may in turn be belligerent, bystander, blameless, blamed – at the very least here, too, there are subtle shifts in pathetic balance;

there is the eye of the colonised viewing their captured history in the distance created by time;

there is the eye of the captor, the soldier, who has just wounded the captured;

And so it continues, layer on layer.

There are other types of distance in ‘The Unintended’: between Chiara and her parents; between the beginning and end of her parents’ relationship; between Magsalin and Chiara – and between reader and event, because all we have in the end is a broken-up narrative filtered through the viewpoint (perhaps even in part written by) Magsalin. Distance all the way down.

One thing I do know: I need to read more of Gina Apostol’s work.

Book details (Foyles affiliate link)

A Kind of Compass (2015), ed. Belinda McKeon, Tramp Press paperback

The hand and the pickaxe

2nd December 2015 / / 0 Comments

Everything is endless but nothing remains as it is. That’s a lesson your hand has learned, right down to the bones and the nerves; the hand that no longer shakes the air like a fist of bronze, but hovers uncertainly — with bulging veins — over the table, the hand that has to reassess dimensions and sizes, heaviness and lightness. Have you noticed how unsteady it is when you shake hands with people, give directions or touch things? Perhaps not, because against the background noise of flesh and blood, you cannot hear that mysterious and perfidious pickaxe chipping away, as the stones of the fortress start to work loose from the inside. But the rasping noise of that pickaxe comes straight from the lungs. It cannot always be muffled with the palm of a hand or a pocket handkerchief.

— Amjad Nasser, Land of No Rain (translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright)

Book details (Foyles affiliate link)

Land of No Rain (2011) by Amjad Nasser, tr. Jonathan Wright (2014), Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing paperback

The Emperor’s New House: The Folly by Ivan Vladislavić

23rd November 2015 / / 3 Comments

FollyThe South African writer Ivan Vladislavić now has the most titles of any author on And Other Stories‘ roster; and when they keep plucking gems like this from his bibliography, it’s not hard to see why. The Folly is Vladislavić’s first novel, originally published in 1993 towards the end of apartheid; it’s as delicious and disturbing a tale of one succumbing to another’s illusions as you might wish.

We are introduced to Mr and Mrs Malgas, who live a mundane suburban existence:

The frog-mug had been bought at a sale of factory rejects, and for that reason it was Mrs Malgas’s favourite, warts and all. Mr Malgas thought it was in bad taste. He stirred the coffee, scraping the frog on the murky bottom maliciously with the spoon. He fished the tea-bag out of his own mug, which was chocolate-brown and had I ♥ DIY printed on it in biscuit. He thought this one was gimmicky too, but it had been a Father’s Day present from his spouse and he used it out of a sense of duty.

The couple watch a shanty burning on the evening news, but the distance of the television (and the cosseting effect of that Vladislavić’s prose) ensures that this doesn’t intrude unduly into their lives. They are known to us only as ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’, which increases the sense of them as cartoonish figures, but also – subtly – denies them the dignity of their own names.

A mysterious figure called Nieuwenhuizen moves on to the plot next to the Malgases’ house and sets up camp, using the rubbish around him for furniture. After a spell of observing him for a distance, Mr Malgas goes up to Nieuwenhuizen to find out what he’s doing. It turns out that the newcomer is building a house, though he hasn’t started yet. The owner of a hardware shop, Mr Malgas is inspired by this, and is soon helping Nieuwenhuizen out: clearing the ground to lay down a grid pattern, hammering in nails for cat’s-cradles of string that somehow correspond to the great plan… Actually, Mr Malgas does rather more than help out, and since Nieuwenhuizen insists on being called ‘Father’ (and Mr is quite happy to oblige), you can imagine what sort of relationship is established between them.

To recall another And Other Stories novel, Nieuwenhuizen is like Joe, the salesman from Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods, in his ability to manipulate others through language and rhetoric. Vladislavić’s approach is a little different: where DeWitt immerses her readers in Joe’s business-speak and does not allow them to gain purchase outside it, in The Folly we see Mr Malgas’s willing capitulation; Nieuwenhuizen’s contempt for him; and Mrs Malgas looking on aghast. As a result, we don’t quite get caught up in Mr’s enthusiasm, but we are swept along in the wake of its unstoppable tide, and we fear where it might end up.

As the novel progresses, the idea of Nieuwenhuizen’s house grows stronger – stronger than (or perhaps indistinguishable from) the reality. Here, The Folly put me in mind of The Boy Who Stole Attila’s Horse by Iván Repila, in the blurring of its imaginative and physical space. But the transformative power of The Folly is all its own. Let this novel whisper in your ear, and listen closely.

Book details (Foyles affiliate links)

The Folly (1993) by Ivan Vladislavić, And Other Stories paperback

Lightning Rods (2011) by Helen DeWitt, And Other Stories paperback

The Boy Who Stole Attila’s Horse (2013) by Iván Repila, tr. Sophie Hughes (2015), Pushkin Press paperback

A Ghost’s Story: The Bookseller review

14th November 2015 / / 2 Comments

The Bookseller website has my review of A Ghost’s Story, the first novel by Lorna Gibb. It’s the tale of the spirit Katie King, her manifestations and observations of the human world – but does she exist beyond the text of her spirit writings?

I see all things and yet have no eyes, understand thoughts yet have no physical mind with which to process languages, can hear music, the rustle of leaves, the sound of  the Adriatic, yet have no ears. It is as if I am dreaming, have dreamt, the world we live in, as if I interact with imaginings. I see some people and know their past, how they have come to this, can watch their earlier life unfold around me, feel them living, although I do not.

Read the full review here.

Book details (Foyles affiliate link)

A Ghost’s Story (2015) by Lorna Gibb, Granta hardback

Strange Horizons book club: Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights

29th October 2015 / / 0 Comments

Over the last few weeks, I have been moderating a discussion for the Strange Horizons book club  about a classic Japanese SF novel: Ryu Mitsuse’s Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights, sees Jesus of Nazareth, Siddhartha, and the demigod Asura travelling far into the future, to witness the end of all worlds. Taking part in the discussion were regular Strange Horizons reviewers Benjamin Gabriel and K. Kamo; and Kathryn Hemmann, who lectures and blogs on Japanese literature. Interesting book, fascinating discussion; do take a look.

Book details (publisher link)

Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights by (1967) by Ryu Mitsuse, tr. Alexander O. Smith and Elye J. Alexander (2011), Haikasoru paperback

When the Professor Got Stuck in the Snow

14th October 2015 / / 4 Comments

Have I mentioned how much I enjoy reading Dan Rhodes? Of course I have: see previous reviews of Gold, Little Hands Clapping, and Marry Me. But there’s enjoying a book, and then there’s this.

Rhodes’s latest novel (new in paperback from Aardvark Bureau), When the Professor Got Stuck in the Snow, sees Richard Dawkins and his put-upon assistant Smee, on the way to the village of Upper Bottom, where the Professor is due to address the All Bottoms Women’s Institute. But bad weather sees the pair stranded in Market Horton, where they end up staying with the local vicar and his wife…

First things first: this book is hilarious, the funniest I’ve read in ages. The Dawkins character is splendidly pompous, and Rhodes takes every opportunity to puncture him. To say much more about how he does so would risk taking away from the fun of reading the novel, which I don’t want to do. So here’s a quotation to give you an idea:

[…]’Do you think I am kind, Smee?’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Well, do you?’

Smee was desperate to make up lost ground. ‘You are very kind, Professor.’

‘You are quite right. I have devoted swathes of my life to kindly telling people how ignorant they are, and correcting them, and giving them the opportunity to think as I do. Look at me now, traipsing through the countryside, taking only modest fees, sometimes no fee at all, as I inform the clueless that there is no God, just as there is no goblin with a purple face, and that  there is no consolation, none whatsoever, to be found in religion. If anybody is kind around here, Smee, it is me – and I am unanimous in that.’

The humour isn’t all targeted in one direction, though: Dawkins has to put up with facile questions from the residents of Market Horton, as well as requests for favours such as delivering kittens (the thinking being, he knows about science, so he must be able to do that sort of stuff). The novel reads like a broad, delightful (and sharp) cartoon.

Ah, but wait. Something else that I like about Dan Rhodes’s work is that he’ll create these cartoonish scenarios, and then suddenly show you something real underneath that transforms what you’ve been reading. He does it here, and I’d better not say any more; but if you read the book (which you should), you’ll see what I mean…

Okay, so this has ended up being one of those blog posts where I basically end up saying, “This book is great; please read it,” without going into an awful lot of detail as to why. Well, so be it. I want you to enjoy this book as much as I did, and I think the fewer specifics you know, the better. Just know that it’s Dan Rhodes on superb form.

Book details (Foyles affiliate link)

When the Professor Got Stuck in the Snow (2014) by Dan Rhodes, Aardvark Bureau paperback

The Buried Giant: the ferryman

12th October 2015 / / 2 Comments

This is the second in a series of posts on Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant; the first post is here, and there’s a more general post about reading Ishiguro here.

The Buried Giant is the story of Axl and Beatrice, two elderly Britons in a post-Roman land suffused with a ‘mist’ that induces (or perhaps simply is) a kind of amnesia. The couple decide to visit their son’s village – though they have not seen him in so long, they’re sure he waits for them – and their journey forms the basis of Ishiguro’s novel.

The world through which the couple travel is both literal and metaphorical, and these aspects are deeply intertwined. I’ll show you what I mean by talking about the quality (the atmosphere) of one scene in particular. Towards the beginning of the novel, Axl and Beatrice come across a ruined villa where they meet an old woman and a tall man. He is a boatman who ferries people to a special island, one where they must usually go alone and will generally not see another person for as long as they remain. The old woman was planning to go to the island with her husband, but (she says) the ferryman tricked them and she has been alone for forty years. Now, whenever the boatman comes to rest at this villa, the woman appears to taunt him (as he sees it).

There’s a pretty clear reading here of the ferryman being one who takes souls to the land of the dead. Yet it seems to me that this can’t be reduced to a straightforwardly literal or straightforwardly metaphorical reading. The situation has a ritualistic absurdity that makes it seem like something out of a folktale; yet it still feels functional within the world of the book – the boatman takes people to an actual place, but what manner of place? I’m finding it difficult to articulate exactly what I mean, because to do so I have to separate out qualities that are bound together. Perhaps I could say that this villa and its occupants are in a landscape that slides between the geographical and symbolic as you look at it, which means the ferryman and his journey can be real and metaphorical at different times.

This is a treacherous land to navigate!

Book details (Foyles affiliate link)

The Buried Giant (2015) by Kazuo Ishiguro, Faber & Faber hardback

The Miner: Shiny New Books review

10th October 2015 / / 0 Comments

There’s a new issue of Shiny New Books in the world, and I’ve reviewed for it a new translation of a classic Japanese novel: The Miner by Natsume Sōseki, first serialised in 1909, and now published by Aardvark Bureau in a fresh translation from Jay Rubin.

The Miner is narrated by a young man who flees from Tokyo and his broken relationship, and finds work in a copper mine. The focus of the novel is very much on the narrator’s state of mind, the psychological landscape through which he travels:

The more I walk, the deeper I can feel myself tunneling into this out-of-focus world with no escape. Behind me, I can see Tokyo, where the sun shines, but it’s already part of a different life. As long as I’m in this world, I can never reach out and touch it. They’re two separate levels of existence. But Tokyo is still there, warm and bright, I can see it-so clearly that I want to call out to it from the shadows. Meanwhile where my feet are going is a formless, endless blur, and all I can do for the rest of my life is wander into this enormous nothing, lost.

Read the full review here.

Book details (Foyles affiliate link)

The Miner (1909) by Natsume Sōseki, tr. Jay Rubin (2015), Aardvark Bureau paperback

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