Tag: fantasy

Stories from Taiwan: ká-sióng, Part 1

25th November 2024 / / 0 Comments

Strangers Press is a publishing project based at the University of East Anglia, specialising in sets of strikingly designed chapbooks, with stories in translation. Their latest project is ká-sióng, a collection of five tales from Taiwan. They kindly sent me a set for review, and in this post I’m looking at the first three.

‘Not Your Child’ by Lâu Tsí-û
Translated by Jenna Wang

Parliamentary assistant Yu-Jie is on the train, going to visit her niece, when her leave is interrupted. A speech given by her MP following an assault on a young girl – a speech that Yu-Jie wrote – has been taken out of context and gone viral, the MP now seeming callous and out of touch. People ask what right she has to comment when she’s not a mother herself. 

I have a soft spot for strong thematic parallels in stories, and there’s one here. Yu-Jie is taking that journey because she’s concerned about the welfare of her niece. She feels that she may even be more concerned than the girl’s own mother, and questions whether that’s right when this is not her child.

So, you have that personal quandary playing out with and against the professional scandal unfolding in wider society. Yu-Jie can’t really do anything about either situation while she’s on the train, so the ultimate sense for me is of the protagonist in her own bubble of reality, heading into an unknown future. 

‘Cage’ by Qiu Miaojin
Translated by Shengchi Hsu

This tale begins with a character in a room with an open exit. What, it asks, is keeping this person from leaving? We then cut to the voice of Li Wen, who meets Ping when they are both about to jump off the same building. They talk each other out of it, and Li Wen goes on to become a successful journalist. Ping reappears in his life intermittently, happy to be alive while he’s alive also. She is an almost idealised hanger-on, someone Li Wen cares for deeply without allowing it to become love. 

At the same time, Wen is haunted by “him”, a bedraggled and boorish figure who takes up space and brings out the worst in him: “Our co-dependence was toxic: we were each other’s plaything, like live targets in a dart match, the darts poisoned with repulsion.”

The question arises for the reader of whether this other figure is real: probably not, is my guess – I imagine him to be an embodiment of Li Wen’s worst attributes. This also raises the question of whether Ping is real: probably, although Li Web may be projecting his desires on to her. 

One of the most powerful scenes in ‘Cage’ for me comes when all three characters – Li Wen, Ping and “him” – apparently occupy the same space, and one has to interpret what’s actually happening. The uncertainty over how much we’ve really seen of Li Wen electrifies the reading. 

‘Mountain Rat’ by Lulyang Nomin
Translated by Yu Teng-Wei

Our protagonist is chopping at a tree knot when a mountain rat bites his ankle. He retreats to a bamboo hut reserved for members of his tribe to quarantine in times of plague. Instead of healing, though, he finds himself transmogrified into a hybrid rat-human creature. He also finds his consciousness being pushed out by a malevolent spirit. 

This is a splendidly disturbing story. The sense of horror escalates as the protagonist tries to shake off the spirit’s hold, but it’s coupled with a nagging sense of allure. The protagonist recalls a tale his grandfather told him, about a young man who turned into a monkey and decided he preferred to live that way. Perhaps, for this protagonist, there is something to be said for life as a rat. That tension underpins ‘Mountain Rat’ right up to the final page. 

The Black Orb by Ewhan Kim (tr. Sean Lin Halbert): Strange Horizons review

28th October 2024 / / 0 Comments

I am back at Strange Horizons with a review of The Black Orb by Ewhan Kim, translated from Korean by Sean Lin Halbert. This is the tale of an unusual apocalypse, as mysterious dark orbs proliferate across the world, absorbing everyone who gets in their way. Our protagonist is Jeong-su, who may not seem to be cut out for surviving an apocalypse, but does so anyway. It turns out that the real danger in this novel lies on the inside.

To find out more of what I thought, read my review in full here.

The Black Orb is published by Serpent’s Tail.

The Liquid Land by Raphaela Edelbauer (tr. Jen Calleja): Strange Horizons review

1st September 2023 / / 0 Comments

I’m back at Strange Horizons with a new review. The Liquid Land by Raphaela Edelbauer (translated from German by Jen Calleja) concerns a woman who goes in search of her parents’ birthplace and finds a quaint little town in its own bubble of reality – with a giant hole in the middle, where the secrets of the past can be conveniently lost. Eddelbauer’s novel is a striking metaphorical exploration of how people may seek to ignore the past, and how it may catch up with them. Published by Scribe UK.

Click here to read my review in full.

Appius and Virginia by Gertrude Trevelyan

10th January 2023 / / 1 Comment

A Happy New Year to you! I’m starting 2023 on the blog with an obscure classic that took me by surprise…

Gertrude Trevelyan published eight novels before she died tragically young in 1941, from injuries incurred when her home was bombed in the Blitz. She fell into obscurity, but a few years ago her work was rediscovered by Brad Bigelow of the Neglected Books Page. This led eventually to her debut novel, 1932’s Appius and Virginia, being reissued. It’s the story of a woman who raises an orang-utan as a human child, and from that description, I was expecting to be rather whimsical. It really isn’t. 

Virginia Hutton is on her own aged 40 and frustrated with life. She decides to conduct an experiment to see if an ape can be nurtured into humanity. This is her chance to leave a mark:

All her will power, all her suggestive force, her whole reserve of nervous and mental energy, was not too much to expend on this experiment. For If it succeeded she would indeed have achieved something. She would have created a human being out of purely animal material, have forced evolution to cover in a few years stages which unaided it would have taken aeons to pass…

Virginia buys a young orang-utan, names him Appius, and retreats from London to the countryside to set about her task. It isn’t easy, because Appius experiences the world on a much more abstract level than Virginia, and often he doesn’t understand what she’s trying to tell him, or why she does what she does. But eventually, Appius gains skills such as rudimentary speech and the ability to read, and Virginia feels she’s making progress. Oh, what a future she imagines for Appius – and herself:

She saw him, in Eton suit and shining collar, bowing over an armful of gilt and crimson tomes while the oak-panelled hall resounded with discrete, kid-gloved applause. She saw herself in the front row, surrounded by secretly envious parents and gratified masters, clapping shyly, blushing a little at this honour paid to her big boy, doing him credit by her clothes, her sleight figure, her youthful but not too girlish appearance.

Key to Virginia’s approach, though, is keeping Appius unaware of his true animal nature. There are times when this breaks through despite her best efforts, and the whole reading experience becomes something much rawer, elemental. The unbridgeable gap between Appius and Virginia becomes more apparent as the novel reaches a higher pitch – until the ending, which gives me chills just thinking back on it.

Women in Translation Month: Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada (tr. Margaret Mitsutani)

30th August 2022 / / 0 Comments

In Denmark, a linguist named Knut is watching a TV show about people from in countries that no longer exist. One woman catches his attention in particular, with her unusual name (Hiruko), appearance (she looks a bit like Björk on that album cover), and language (she speaks a pan-Scandinavian tongue of her own devising).

Knut sets out to meet Hiruko and find out more about her. Hiruko’s country has vanished beneath the sea, and with it any knowledge of the word ‘Japan’ – as just one example, Knut thinks that sushi is Finnish. What Hiruko wants most of all is to find someone else who speaks her native tongue. Knut resolves to help her, and they set off on a journey across Europe.

Along the way, Hiruko and Knut gain several fellow-travellers, including Akash, a trans Marathi-speaking student, and Tenzo, who turns out to be a Greenlander rather than Japanese. Everyone is between worlds in some way. Different characters narrate across Tawada’s novel, so that no one is truly at the centre. What we then have is an exuberant exploration of how language can help to make and remake identity, and how we might find different ways to belong.

Published by Granta Books.

Women in Translation Month: Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata (tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori)

11th August 2022 / / 0 Comments

After Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings, Sayaka Murata has become one of my must-read authors, so I was looking forward to this story collection. I’m used to her work starting off innocuously, before something strange stops me in my tracks. So it proved with the opening story here, ‘A First-Rate Material’. It begins with an apparently ordinary scene of afternoon tea, before one character says to the narrator: “Hey, Nana, that sweater…Is it human hair?”

Yes, that’s a Sayaka Murata story, and no mistake.

In this story, human remains are commonly reused: hair for clothes, bone for rings, fingernails to decorate a chandelier. Nana is fine with this, but her fiancé Naoki sees it as sacreligious. To Nana, reusing people’s remains is a way of honouring our humanity, but she resolves to respect Naoki’s beliefs. That’s until she goes to visit his family, and the couple both find their preconceptions tested.

What I particularly like is the way that the element of strangeness becomes a larger-than-life means to explore fundamental questions of what we value and how we relate to each other. The combination of otherworldliness and a focus on deep questions plays out across the collection in different ways. Some tales are snapshots of the strange, such as ‘Poochie’, in which a middle-aged man, without irony, takes the place of a pet dog (his standard bark is “Finishitbytwo!”). Then there’s ‘Lover on the Breeze’, which sees a bedroom curtain develop a crush on a visiting boy. There’s real emotional heft to these stories, because Murata (in Ginny Tapley Takemori’s ever-superb translations) keeps them grounded.

Other stories map out a process of change in more detail. In ‘Eating the City’, urban-dwelling Rina is reluctant to eat vegetables, because she feels they’re of poor quality in the city. But she thinks back to her rural childhood and her father’s love for wild foods, and that changes her mind. She starts to explore the wild plants available to eat in the city, and in turn this gives Rina a feeling of being closer to her environment. This story really got under my skin, as Rina talks about spreading her enthusiasm in terms of “marinating” another person and changing them from the inside out.

The title story ‘Life Ceremony’ is one that seems to bring the different aspects of Murata’s approach together. In this piece, a decline in population has changed certain attitudes: sex is now “insemination”, a social good done for reproduction rather than pleasure. When someone dies, it is customary to hold a life ceremony at which the deceased’s remains are eaten – and at which people then look for an insemination partner, to keep the cycle of life going.

Maho, the protagonist of this story, is old enough to remember when it was forbidden to eat human meat, and she’s never been able to accept the new custom. But when a close work colleague dies suddenly, the experience of his life ceremony challenges Maho to change her mind – and the reader’s preconceptions are challenged in turn.

Time and again, the stories in Life Ceremony – just like the ending of Convenience Store Woman – put the reader into the main character’s position. What seems strange from the outside gains emotional force from the inside as we come to understand the characters more deeply. To read Life Ceremony is to see things differently.

Published by Granta Books.

Lanny by Max Porter

14th June 2022 / / 1 Comment

In the countryside near London stirs Dead Papa Toothwort, a nature spirit who moves through the different layers of life in the village, and revels in the music of human voices. These curl and overlap strikingly on the page:

Lanny is a dreamy young boy from the village with a wild imagination. Many people can’t work him out, as we hear from his parents, a commuter and novelist who are recent arrivals from the city. We also hear from Pete, a local artist who spends time with Lanny, and seems more on his wavelength than most. 

Papa Toothwort understands Lanny, though: he sees that here is someone with an affinity for nature – someone who would respect the deep tales of old, rather than treating them as tourist fodder. As the novel’s first part ends, Toothwort decides the time has come to reassert himself – and Lanny goes missing. 

The second section is my favourite part of the book, as the prose turns into a collage of voices echoing Toothwort’s passages in the first part. Max Porter explores not just the relationship between his village community and the natural world, but also relations within the village – for example, the way suspicion soon falls (unwarranted) on Pete.

The theatrical third part turns to the question of what Lanny means to those closest to him – whether they’ll be honest about it or not. It’s the feelings in Lanny that remain strongest in my mind, the way emotions twist and unpeel as the novel goes on. 

Published by Faber & Faber.

Faber Editions: Mrs Caliban by Rachel Ingalls

1st September 2021 / / 0 Comments

Faber & Faber have recently launched a new series called Faber Editions, which reissues some of their backlist titles with new introductions, to “spotlight radical literary voices from history”. The first book in the series is this short novel by Rachel Ingalls (1940-2019), an American writer who lived in the UK from 1965. Mrs Caliban was her second novel, originally published in 1982. 

We meet Dorothy Caliban, a Californian housewife drifting through life: her young son has died, and her husband Fred is unfaithful. The setting underlines this sense of stasis: it feels as though this could be the 1950s as easily as the 1980s.

Dorothy hears a radio item about a large sea creature, dubbed ‘Aquarius the Monsterman’, which has escaped from a research institute having killed two employees. It’s a hint of strangeness amid a seemingly ordinary tale. Then the creature turns up on Dorothy’s doorstep:

She came back into the kitchen fast, to make sure that she caught the toasting cheese in time. And she was halfway across the checked linoleum floor of her nice safe kitchen when the screen door opened and a gigantic six-foot-seven-inch frog-like creature shouldered its way into the house and stood stock-still in front of her, crouching slightly, and staring straight at her face.

I have to credit Irenosen Okojie for the observation in her foreword that Ingalls makes this seem unremarkable, but the effect really is striking in context. Dorothy embarks on a relationship with the sea creature (who prefers to be called Larry). They can keep it a secret because there are certain rooms in the house where Fred doesn’t go – but they don’t want to stay indoors forever. 

Ingalls maintains a delicate balance between the real and unreal throughout Mrs Caliban. The fact that Larry is non-human allows things to be different for Dorothy: she can take charge of her life, and he challenges the model of masculinity represented by Fred. There is something of a fable about this book, but really it has an atmosphere all its own.

Peninsula Press: Sterling Karat Gold by Isabel Waidner

20th July 2021 / / 0 Comments

Isabel Waidner has been shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize twice and the Goldsmiths Prize once, which puts their work squarely in my area of interest. I had tried Waidner’s previous novel, We Are Made of Diamond Stuff, but… well, it just didn’t click with me. But I wasn’t going to give up.

Sterling Karat Gold was a recent Republic of Consciousness Book of the Month, and I was determined to meet it halfway. “‘Different’ doesn’t need to be scary or boring or hard; it can be fun,” says Waidner in a recent interview. So I thought: just go with the flow. 

This time, the book clicked.

Any synopsis I give will be inadequate, because there’s so much going on, and because so much is in the actual experience of reading. But let’s see… This is how the narrator introduces themself:

I’m Sterling. Lost my father to AIDS, my mother to alcoholism. Lost my country to conservativism, my language to PTSD. Got this England, though. Got this body, this sterling heart. 

This paragraph merges the personal, the political, the geographical, the linguistic, and the bodily. And that’s how Waidner’s novel continues. 

When we first meet Sterling, they are set upon by a group of matadors, and saved by Rodney, a footballer who sends the bullfighters off. Sterling later goes to a Hendon FC match in search of Rodney, but is arrested by two representatives of the authorities for assaulting one of the matadors. Sterling is taken to a detention centre in Margate on further spurious charges. This results in a trial that takes place in Sterling’s bathroom, muscling in on Catastrophic Foibles, the performance art project that Sterling hosts at home with their best friend Chachki.

Did I mention the time travelling spaceships?

The world of Sterling Karat Gold is a nightmare for Sterling and their friends, because its workings are inexplicable and primed to act against them. The reader gets a sense of this by proxy through the strangeness of what happens, but there are also sharp moments of clarity. For example, there is a powerful chapter of long paragraphs (which you can read in full on the Granta website) in which Sterling reflects on the life of the footballer Justin Fashanu:

…in Chachki’s and my Cataclysmic Foibles lexicon, a ‘spaceship’ is a moment in which discreet neo-authoritarian governance and deliberate governmental deceit become apparent, just momentarily, before vanishing again. What’s that have to do with your life, you might ask, Justin Fashanu, a gay, black footballer, but how the concerted bullying of an individual belonging to more than one oppressed demographic relates to the workings of state control is a pertinent question, and one I ask myself every day.

Alongside this, Sterling Karat Gold is a lot of fun to read – and in that fun, there is hope. A word that came to my mind when reading this book is ‘carnival’, in the sense of entertainment, but also in the sense of the old feast when the structure of society could, in a fashion, be turned upside-down. Sterling and friends are able to take some control back at last. 

Published by Peninsula Press.

Click here to read my other reviews of the 2021 Goldsmiths Prize shortlist.

Tartarus Press: Ezra Slef, the Next Nobel Laureate in Literature by Andrew Komarnyckyj

25th June 2021 / / 0 Comments

Tartarus Press are a Yorkshire publisher specialising in supernatural and strange fiction (they were the original publisher of The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley). They publish some beautiful limited edition hardbacks – there are still some copies available of the book I’m reviewing today – but they also do ebooks, which is the version I read.

Ezra Slef is a contemporary Russian writer, “a titan of contemporary Postmodernism”, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Will Self. The text we’re reading is apparently a biography of Slef, written by one Humbert Botekin, an academic and self-styled literary genius. The problem is that Slef wants nothing to do with him, so Botekin ends up writing mostly about himself instead. 

Oh, but this book is such a joy to read! Botekin is a splendidly pompous narrator, and his life goes through so many ups and downs. He accepts the help of a certain individual calling himself Rensip De Narsckof (I could tell this was an anagram, but I have to thank a Washington Post article for the solution: ‘Prince of Darkness’) to deal with a Twitter troll, and things are never quite the same again… 

Komarnyckyj includes little riffs on writers such as Borges and B.S. Johnson, and plenty more that I didn’t spot (there’s a list at the back). It’s just great fun. If Ezra Slef sounds like your kind of book, I’d say go for it. 

Read an extract from Ezra Slef at minor literature[s].

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