Tag: literature

Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary (2012)

15th September 2013 / / 1 Comment

I’ve decided that I want to read the whole Man Booker shortlist in advance of the winner being announced on 15 October. The list has seemed interesting to me all along, and the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’m inclined to engage with it. After all, it contains my favourite book of the year so far; I’m curious to find out more about what else the judges selected.

Anna of A Case for Books has set up a Booker shadowing group on Twitter, with which I’m planning to join in. We’ll be tackling the books in increasing order of length, which means starting with Colm Tóibín’s 101-page volume The Testament of Mary. Of all the titles shortlisted for this year’s Booker, the Tóibín is the one that interested me the least, one that I would never have chosen to read in the normal course of things. I have to say, though, that I was pleasantly surprised by it.

As its title suggests, The Testament of Mary is an account of Jesus’ adult life and death, narrated by his mother. As the book opens, Mary is living in exile, guarded by two of her son ‘s disciples, who want to record her story – or some version of it, at any rate:

I know that [one of the disciples] has written of things that neither he saw nor I saw. I know that he has also given shape to what I lived through and he witnessed, and that he has made sure that these words will matter, that they will be listened to. (p. 5)

The last part of that quotation is particularly telling: Mary’s story, as told by her, does not matter to her guardians or the growing movement they represent – partly because it is a woman’s account, partly because it does not fit the grander narrative they wish to create. While her son (Mary no longer feels able to use his name) is becoming a charismatic leader, she remains distanced from the fervour. Even when she witnesses the resurrection of Lazarus, Mary’s account evokes no sense of the miraculous; all of that is happening for other people, not her. Mary is the outside observer who can see that, beneath the spectacle, Lazarus is still sick and the revellers have moved on to new distractions; she is the mother who feels impossibly distanced from her son.

Tóibín presents this situation in a way that makes it transcend its immediate context. With social change, the world suddenly opens up (‘People, both men and women who had nothing, began to talk about Jerusalem as though it were across the valley instead of two or three days’ journey,’ p. 14), and Jesus decides to leave home after a series of earnest discussions with some acquaintances. This could be any son (or daughter, for that matter) heading out into the world having found a new ideology, and Mary’s concerns those of any mother watching her child leave and change.

The disciples minding and interviewing Mary are seeking to tell the story of Jesus as redeemer, Son of God. They’ll do that regardless of what Mary tells them.; her story is deemed unfit for the ages. But Tóibín’s novel suggests the importance of a more personal view, in a quietly powerful character study.

Elsewhere
Some other blogs on The Testament of Mary: A Case for Books; Dan Hartland; Booker Marks;
Colm Tóibín’s website

Event report: Juan Pablo Villalobos at the London Review Bookshop

12th September 2013 / / 1 Comment

One of the reasons I’ve enjoyed going to the World Literature Series of events at the London Review Bookshop is the serendipity of learning about something I don’t know that well, which then turns out to be fascinating (so far, I’ve heard talks on Japanese book design and the Thousand and One Nights). Still, it is also nice to have the reference points of a more familiar subject, which is what I had for the latest event.

The evening was hosted by the excellent And Other Stories press, as publisher Stefan Tobler interviewed Juan Pablo Villalobos, the Mexican author of Down the Rabbit Hole (which I reviewed here) and Quesadillas (which I reviewed here). We began with Villalobos reading from the opening of Quesadillas, first in Spanish (cue laughter from the Spanish-speakers in the audience and those of us who’d already read the book in English and know what the beginning is like), then English (cue laughter from everyone else). Tobler then read from another And Other Stories title, Rodrigo de Souza Leão’s All Dogs are Blue (which I reviewed here), which Villalobos has translated into Spanish from the original Portugese. Both readings underlined how much these books are spoken texts.

The interview section started with Villalobos’s experience of translating All Dogs are Blue. The author said that he viewed translation as responding to an instinct to share a book you love with other readers (he’d been introduced to the book by Tobler, and immediately wanted to translate it for a Spanish-speaking audience). Thinking about it, I suspect that I’m responding to a similar instinct when I write about books.

I’m always interested to hear about the different kinds of choices that translators have to make. For Villalobos, there was the issue of slang; he ended up producing two versions, one Spanish, one Mexican. He also made  appoint of leaving in a lot of the Brazilian words, as he wanted the reader to remember that this was a Brazilian book. Villalobos suggested that the power of All Dogs are Blue lay in its imperfections, and I think that’s very true; the rhythm, flow and idiosyncracies of its language draw you into the narrator’s world.

Turning to Villalobos’s own work, he has been widely translated himself: Down the Rabbit Hole has been translated into fifteen languages, Quesadillas into eight. Villalobos commented that he saw similarities between All Dogs are Blue and Down the Rabbit Hole in terms of their tone and humour; I think there’s something in that, and I might add to that list the importance of the protagonists’ limited perspectives.

Villalobos said that the style of Quesadillas was meant to parody the rhetoric of politicians. He also talked about it being an ‘open’ book, all loose ends and a feeling of escape, in contrast with the more ‘closed’ Down the Rabbit Hole. I can see where he’s coming from with both of those points, but now I want to re-read the books to see what else I can find. And I’d say that an author event that leaves me wanting to revisit books that I’ve previously enjoyed is a very good event indeed. (Even better if it involves a chance to meet the author and get a book signed…)

quesadillas

“You want to find one of us who chooses to be out here without a past, I’d bloody pay to see that”

11th August 2013 / / 12 Comments

Evie Wyld, All the Birds, Singing (2013)

As a way of setting out a novel’s stall, this opening sentence works rather well:

Another sheep, mangled and bled out, her innards not yet crusting and the vapours rising from her like a steamed pudding.

The novel this introduces will be unsentimental about the harsh realities of its protagonist’s life; and full of smells and other sensations, often unpleasant ones. But then there’s that image of the steamed pudding, a seemingly incongruous reference to home comforts; a suggestion, perhaps, that even this life of blood and death has its positive points for the individual who’s living it.

That individual is Jake Whyte, a woman whom we first meet living on an island somewhere off the British coast, with no company but her dog and flock of sheep. We then step into Jake’s past in Australia, where we find her working on a sheep station having clearly left somewhere in a hurry; when one of Jake’s colleagues threatens to reveal her secret unless she sleeps with him, she punches him hard enough to break his jaw – and that is the latest event we’ll see of Jake’s Australian life, because the rest of that narrative strand goes backwards chronologically.

As in her debut, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, Evie Wyld works with two parallel narratives which remain separate but nevertheless reflect and illuminate each other – and not simply because (as in this case) they chronicle stages in the same character’s life. Wyld highlights the contrasts and similarities between the environments in which Jake finds herself: she’s looking after sheep in both, and doing so is (to an extent) a means for her to escape the past. But the sheep station is a very different place from the island: life in the former, with its workers arriving from all over, is transitory; the latter feels much more like Jake’s attempt to build a permanent life for herself. That impression is underlined by the use of different tenses: Jake’s narration on the island is in the past tense, while her flashbacks are in the present tense – so the chronological present feels more stable than what (for Jake) has already happened.

Mysteries power both narratives in All the Birds, Singing. The mystery of the flashbacks is, of course, how Jake got to where she ended, and the nature of the secrets in her past. Wyld constructs this very well indeed, revealing just enough information to maintain the tension (there’s more than one revelation to be had about Jake’s history), and allowing the past to bleed into the present in ways that enrich both.

On the island, the mystery is a matter of concern for Jake: something is killing her sheep – maybe a wild animal, maybe something more human. I think there’s a clear metaphor at play here: Jake’s flock is her protection, the stability of her life; anything that threatens the sheep is then threatening the equilibrium of her life. The story of this plot strand is, for me, the story of how Jake finds a place among the community of people on the island, rather than just living by herself. Jake befriends a man named Lloyd, which allows her to build a relationship from first principles, as it were; after we’ve seen Jake verbally outmanoeuvred in a few conversations with islanders early on, there’s a strong note of optimism to her thought about Lloyd: “He doesn’t know me.”

The ending of All the Birds, Singing (perhaps I should say ‘endings’ because of the two strands,  but I still think of the ending as a complete ‘unit’) takes a turn into an unexpected place, and for me it works perfectly – it shows how far Jake has come, balanced with a bitter note of irony. It puts the cap on another fine piece of work by Evie Wyld.

Elsewhere
Some other reviews of All the Birds, Singing: Savidge Reads; Fran Slater for Bookmunch; …but books are better.

My holiday reading

8th August 2013 / / 5 Comments

I’ve been on holiday recently, and managed to get through most of the books I took with me. I thought I’d do a brief round-up of what I read.

Rodrigo de Souza Leão, All Dogs are Blue (2008/10)
Translated from the Portugese by Zoë Perry and Stefan Tobler, 2013

If there’s one thing I have come to expect from And Other Stories’ books, it’s that they will be intensely engaged with language. And so it is with this short novel, narrated by an inmate of a Rio asylum. The narrator is lucid about the tenuousness of his grasp n reality; he loops back and forth between his present, his past travels, his childhood, and his eventual release – but the question of what precisely is and is not ‘real’ remains open. I read All Dogs are Blue on the train down to my holiday; it was short enough to fit in the time, and is probably best experienced in a single sitting, when it can really pull you into its world.

Maria Semple, Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2012)

Bernadette Fox was once a hot-shot architect; now she mostly hides away in her family’s Seattle home, outsourcing most of her interaction with the word to a virtual PA in India. Gathering together myriad documents, Bernadette’s daughter Bee chronicles her mother’s turbulent relationship with her family and the other school moms, and her attempts to find Bernadette after she disappears.

I’ve heard so much about Semple’s book, and it mostly lives up to the praise. It’s wickedly funny, with few characters escaping some sort of satire; and very well constructed, as the differences between viewpoints gradually reveal hidden truths – truths which give the novel its dark undercurrent. I have a sense that Semple lets her characters off the hook for some of their flaws a little too easily, but otherwise this book is highly enjoyable.

Robin Sloan, Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (2012)

When Clay Jameson takes a job doing the night-shift for a mysterious bookstore, he doesn’t realise that he is about to enter the world of a secret society who are scouring certain volumes for clues that will unlock… well, who knows? But Kat Potente, the pretty Googler who walks into the store one day, might just have the means to find out.

The principle flaw in Sloan’s debut is its treatment of gender –for example, Kat is the most prominent female character, and she falls into the stereotype of ‘hot geek girl who’s super-competent, but still needs a male character to ultimately save the day’. Aside from that, it’s all rather jolly, but also reflects seriously on the relationship of books and new technology. Sloan steers a middle course which I found thought-provoking.

Matt Delito, Confessions of a Police Constable (2013)

This is one in a series of (generally pseudonymous) books from the Friday Project (including Confessions of a GP and Confessions of a New York Taxi Driver). The author is a serving officer in the Metropolitan Police, and the book is based on his blog of stories from his career. I’ve read a few of the books in this series now, and always find them interesting, and good to read when I feel like a change or a rest from my more usual fare. So I finished it off on the train home.

Granta Best Young British Novelists 2013: Joanna Kavenna

31st July 2013 / / 2 Comments

With most of the novel extracts in the Granta anthology, I’ve been able to gain some sense of what the full novel may be like (which is not say my impressions are correct, but I have been able to form them). Not so Joanna Kavenna’s short piece ‘Tomorrow’, which has the potential to head off in a number of odd directions. We see its narrator collect the stuff she (along with several others) has been storing at a friend’s house; do her job at home, sending out customer service emails; talk to a friend about the subjective passage of time.

Now I read that back, it maybe doesn’t sound all that strange in summary. But it’s the tone of Kavenna’s writing that makes it feel so whilst one is reading it. I have a copy of the author’s most recent novel, Come to the Edge, on my shelves; and I’m thinking I ought to read it soon – because one thing I do sense clearly from ‘Tomorrow’ is that Kavenna may be my kind of writer.

This is part of a series of posts on Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4. Click here to read the rest.

Granta Best Young British Novelists 2013: Adam Foulds

29th July 2013 / / 2 Comments

In Adam Foulds’s ‘A World Intact’, Will returns from military training in London to his family home in the rural heart of England, for a short stay before he embarks on his posting in Field Security Services. It’s not quite the commission he wanted, especially as he hoped to follow in the footsteps his late father, who was awarded the Victoria Cross during the Great War.

This extract from a forthcoming novel sets up themes of romantic heroism versus the horror of war (there’s the suggestion that Will’s father may not have been as pleased as his son thinks to know that his Will is off to fight), and personal fulfilment (Will’s rural home is the ‘world intact’, yet it is still not quite enough for him). The piece is perhaps too short to satisfy by itself; but it’s a promising foundation for Foulds’s novel.

This is part of a series of posts on Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4. Click here to read the rest.

Granta Best Young British Novelists 2013: Steven Hall

28th July 2013 / / 1 Comment

I didn’t plan it this way, but it has been a few months since my last blog on Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 4 anthology. Now I’m back to it, and up to Steven Hall, whose The Raw Shark Texts I reviewed back in the pre-blog days of 2006 for Laurs Hird’s New Review website.

Hall’s upcoming second novel is titled The End of Endings, and the Granta volume has a couple of excerpts. One of these, Autumn’ is set in the UK of 2014: its narrator, Philip Quinn, tells of speaking to his wife on the phone while he (and the rest of the world) watches a webcam feed of her sleeping; talks a bit about entropy and how it applies to his kitchen; and describes receiving a photograph of a mysterious black sphere from a friend (whom he’s already told us died soon after) .

Turn the volume upside-down, and there is ‘Spring’, printed on alternate pages (white text on a black background) and set in the US of 1854. A writer is commissioned by the New York Tribune to write a story on a spiritualist who claims to have invented an engine powered by prayer; just as he decided to accept the assignment, Hall’s piece ends.

Perhaps inevitably, ‘Spring’ and ‘Autumn’ serve more to whet one’s appetite for the novel than as complete pieces in their own right. But what intriguing tasters they are: evidently these two rather different storylines are going to connect somehow; and it sounds as though there’s going to be an interesting subtext too. I look forward to reading the novel to see how everything plays out.

This is part of a series of posts on Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4. Click here to read the rest.

The Booker’s (baker’s) dozen 2013

23rd July 2013 / / 3 Comments

This year’s Man Booker Prize longlist is out, so let’s take a gander:

  • Tash Aw – Five Star Billionaire (Fourth Estate)
  • NoViolet Bulawayo – We Need New Names (Chatto & Windus)
  • Eleanor Catton – The Luminaries (Granta)
  • Jim Crace – Harvest (Picador)
  • Eve Harris – The Marrying of Chani Kaufman (Sandstone Press)
  • Richard House – The Kills (Picador)
  • Jhumpa Lahiri – The Lowland (Bloomsbury)
  • Alison MacLeod – Unexploded (Hamish Hamilton)
  • Colum McCann – TransAtlantic (Bloomsbury)
  • Charlotte Mendelson – Almost English (Mantle)
  • Ruth Ozeki – A Tale for the Time Being (Canongate)
  • Donal Ryan – The Spinning Heart (Doubleday Ireland)
  • Colm Tóibín – The Testament of Mary (Viking)

I have read precisely none of those – not that that’s about to stop me from opining about the list…

Given that The Rehearsal remains my favourite of all the books I’ve read during the lifetime of this blog, I’m naturally very pleased to see Eleanor Catton on the longlist. The Luminaries has not been published yet, but it promises to be a great big tome set in the New Zealand goldrush of the 1860s, taking in astronomy, murder mysteries, and more besides. I’m really looking forward to it.

The other writer I am particularly pleased to see longlisted is Alison MacLeod. I know her more as a fine writer of short stories, but I’m certainly intrigued to read one of her novels. Unexploded, set in wartime Brighton, isn’t out yet either, so there’s not much more I can say there.

Looking at the list more generally, I think the range of author nationalities is nice to see. The Booker has perhaps been starting to look a mite parochial in recent years, having gone to well-established English authors for four years in a row. With only Jim Crace really fitting that description here, we may well see a different outcome this year.

The longlist is lighter on small-press titles than I’d have liked. There’s only really Sandstone Press (and congratulations to them on a second longlisting, following The Testament of Jessie Lamb a couple of years ago). You could add in Canongate, Granta and Bloomsbury as independent publishers, I suppose – but they’re not small presses in quite the same way. After such a strong showing for small publishers last year (And Other Stories, Myrmidon and Salt – half the shortlist), I can’t help feeling a little disappointed about that.

Which of the books would I most like to read? Taking the Catton and MacLeod books as givens… The Kills has me especially intrigued – a vast political thriller cross-pollinated with a literary mystery, which was first published as a series of enhanced ebooks with added audio and video. Five Star Billionaire and We Need New Names sound interesting. I’ve heard so many good things about A Tale for the Time Being that I really ought to give it a go… That’s a full shortlist right there.

Reading round-up: late July

21st July 2013 / / 1 Comment

Catching up on some of the books I’ve read recently…

Rachel Joyce, Perfect (2013)

In 1972, two leap seconds are added to time, and Byron Hemmings wonders if this is what led his mother to cause a road accident that she didn’t even notice; Byron sets up ‘Operation Perfect’ with his school-friend James Long to find out. Meanwhile, in the present day, middle-aged Jim is trying to rebuild his life after years in a psychiatric hospital; we may guess that these two narrative strands are connected, so the question becomes: how? Perfect is quite different in subject and tone from Joyce’s Booker-longlisted debut novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry; but it shares the earlier novel’s underlying seriousness, which gives Perfect a firm emotional grounding.

Monique Roffey, Archipelago (2012)

A year after their home flooded, Gavin Weald and his daughter Océan still cannot settle back into life. So, along with their dog Suzy, they head out from Trinidad across the ocean on a voyage which is at least as much emotional as it is physical. With that in mind, the archipelago of the title could be all the many pieces of life that the Wealds encounter on the journey, as well as the islands they travel through. By novel’s end, there is a sort of peace, but it is not easily won.

Antoine Laurain, The President’s Hat (2012)
Translated from the French by Louise Rogers Laulaurie, Emily Boyce and Jane Aitken, 2013

Daniel Mercier is eating out when none other than François Mitterand sits at the next table; when the President leaves, Daniel sees that he has left his hat behind. Deciding to keep the hat for himself, Daniel finds his life start to change – until he leaves the hat behind somewhere. We then follow a succession of characters who gain possession of Mitterand’s hat, each gaining that extra confidence to do something different. I found this book simply great fun to read; as a nice added touch, there are different translators for each viewpoint character.

Marlen Haushofer, The Wall (1968)
Translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside, 1991

On a visit to her cousin, a woman wakes one day to find no other people in sight, and an invisible wall cutting her off from much of the outside world. Some years later, still (for all intents and purposes) the only human about, she writes her report of what happened, which is the book we now hold. Told precisely and coolly, The Wall is a tale of survival not so much as heroic endurance but as keeping going because that’s all there is left.

Carmen Bugan, Burying the Typewriter (2012)

A memoir of the author’s childhood in Ceaucescu’s Romania, where her father was a dissident and her family surveilled by the secret police. There are some good scenes in this book – a sequence where the young Carmen tries to visit the American embassy is as tense as any fictional thriller; and there’s a real sense towards the end of how out-of-place the secret police are in Carmen’s village – but, as a whole, it didn’t quite engage me.

Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders (2001)

A novel set in the Derbyshire village of Eyam, which voluntarily cut itself off from the surrounding country when the plague struck in 1665, seen through the eyes of Anna Frith, a young housemaid who remains immune. There’s lots of interesting historical detail in here, but sometimes to the detriment of the book as a novel – and the ending especially feels rather too abrupt.

Two by Cees Noteboom

17th July 2013 / / 1 Comment

I have to thank MacLehose Press here for sending me copies of their latest Cees Noteboom reissues. Noteboom is (or was until recently) on the long list of “authors I have heard of, but don’t know much about and have never actually read” – I knew he was one of the Netherlands’ most celebrated writers, but that was about it. The writer I’ve now found in these books is one concerned with the thoughts and habits that hold us back, or keep us going.

Rituals (1980; translated by Adrienne Dixon, 1983), which begins in 1963, when Inni Wintrop is coasting through life, picking up women and making money by trading art and shares. When his wife Zita leaves him, Inni tries and fails to commit suicide – then Noteboom takes us back and forward, to encounter other characters who are stuck in their own behaviour patterns.

In 1955, Inni meets Arnold Taads, a former ski champion who now lives his days according to a precise and regimented schedule of his own devising. Arnold describes how he ceased to believe in God when he saw a priest collapse dead in the midst of conducting Mass; and there’s a scene in which Taads forcefully argues with a priest about theology. So Arnold Taads is dismissive of Catholic rituals; but he has his own in the shape of his daily timetable.

In 1973, Inni Wintrop is in his forties, and feeling somewhat more at peace with life. Now he meets Philip Taads, a son of Arnold’s about whom he’d previously known nothing. Philip lives by the tea ceremony and other Japanese rituals, but Inni sees these to be as empty as anything Arnold Taads followed or derided. But each of Noteboom’s three main characters has his own rituals for coping with/shielding himself from life – and it seems that letting go of those rituals is the only thing that allows any of them to move on.

Perhaps more optimistic is In the Dutch Mountains (1984; translated by Adrienne Dixon, 1987), which sees an Aragonese road inspector named Alfonso Tiborón de Mendoza write his own interpretation of The Snow Queen. Throughout this book, there’s a sense of reality and story being pulled and stretched; quite literally so in the way that Tiborón sets his tale in a much larger – and mountainous! – version of the Netherlands; but also in the subtleties of how his adapts and references Andersen’s original (Kai and Lucia are circus performers, who are sent away by their impresario to find work in the south; when the world starts to look more dismal, Kai imagines that a sliver of glass or ice has entered his eye; and so on).

Going beyond this kind of surface playfulness, though, there’s a deeper consideration of how stories relate to – perhaps how they parody – life. Tiborón constantly interjects (though he keeps promising not to) to remind us that a fairy tale is very much a fixed version of reality. Sure enough, Kai & Lucia become limited by their story – they have a happy ending, but that’s because they are in a fairy tale, and needs must. Tiborón is the one who is ultimately freed by the telling of stories, his tale allowing him to look at life differently. Maybe he’s not so different from Inni Wintrop, then, as all either of them needed was a little jolt from life to allow themselves to change.

Read some other people’s reviews
Rituals: Tony’s Reading List; Book Around The Corner; Iris on Books.
In the Dutch Mountains: Damian Kelleher; liberreview.

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