Tag: Reviews

Galley Beggar Press: Insignificance by James Clammer

18th June 2021 / / 0 Comments

It’s time for another journey into the singular world of Galley Beggar Press. This time we meet Joseph Forbes, a plumber returning to work after a nervous breakdown:

For hours hereon there would be no softness but only the sharp edges of the tools and of the job itself. Almost always it became a battle of one sort or another. He did not yet dare to touch the airing cupboard door and confront the cylinder within, instead he opened the hard plastic case of the toolbox, he would put the gloves on then spend a moment familiarising himself with the things inside, what was this fear, this reluctance, you would think he’d never handled these tools before or learned what each one did.

There’s a wonderful sense in this book that James Clammer knows the precise weight of his prose and what it’s doing. The writing has a mechanistic tone, long paragraphs that break down into their component parts – fitting for a protagonist who works with his hands. 

It seems to me that Insignificance creates a space where Joseph can become (or be seen to be) a doer who’s also a thinker – action blurs into thought in this style of writing. Joseph is also faced with two characters who think in ways he doesn’t understand: his son Edward, who tried to poison his mother Alison; and Alison herself, who has found religion. 

Clammer’s novel takes place over the course of a single day, and the tension ramps up as you start to wonder where this day is going to go. Add in that prose, and it’s a compelling piece of work. 

Fitzcarraldo Editions: The Things We’ve Seen by Agustín Fernández Mallo

15th June 2021 / / 2 Comments

The original Spanish title of this novel is ‘Trilogía de la Guerro’ or ‘War Trilogy’ – because (according to an interview with the author) each of its three sections deals with the echoes of war playing out in the characters’ lives. The title of the English translation comes from a line of poetry repeated throughout the book: “It’s a mistake to take the things we’ve seen as a given.”

These themes – the shadow of war and the idea that reality doesn’t stand still – are apparent from the novel’s beginning. A writer (possibly a version of Fernández Mallo) travels to an island to take part in a conference on digital networks. The island was a prison camp during the Spanish Civil War, and the writer spends time finding the places in a book of photographs he has from back then, and taking pictures of those same locations now. Some of the results are reproduced in the novel, past starkly juxtaposed with present. 

In the second part of The Things We’ve Seen, we meet Kurt Montana, purportedly the fourth, unseen astronaut from Apollo 11. Now, Kurt lives in a retirement home, and recounts his life to us. He’s clearly haunted by his time serving in Vietnam, perhaps to the point where he can’t trust his senses or memory. The third part of Fernández Mallo’s book sees a woman take a walking tour of Normandy, where the remnants of war are never far away. 

Nocilla Dream was an earlier novel by Fernández Mallo which used fragments of prose on recurring themes to present the world as as a network without centre. The Things We’ve Seen also uses techniques of recurrence and remixed facts, but its paragraphs are lengthy and discursive. The effect (in another fine translation by Thomas Bunstead) is to suggest that there’s no way out of the writing here, just as there’s no escape from war for Fernández Mallo’s characters. The Things We’ve Seen is a hazy, striking experience. 

Prototype Publishing: Lorem Ipsum by Oli Hazzard

11th June 2021 / / 2 Comments

I have a few posts coming up about books from small publishers that are new to the blog (and mostly new to me!). When the time comes, I’ll take the opportunity to introduce the publisher as well as the book, starting now…

Prototype is a London publisher that aims to “increase audiences for experimental writing”. They had a title longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize last year (Fatherhood by Caleb Klaces), though this is the first time I’ve read one of their books. I love a good series design, and I was already taken with the small format and striking black-and-white covers of Prototype’s prose fiction list.

Oli Hazzard’s novel is written as a single sentence, addressed to someone known only as A (all characters and real-world figures in the book are referred to by letters, which adds to a feeling of disorientation) . The title of Lorem Ipsum refers to dummy placeholder text used in book and website design, and there’s a sense that the narrator is using his lengthy email as a kind of displacement, throwing everything in as it occurs to him because he’s not quite sure what he wants to say. 

One of the novel’s main themes concerns different kinds of experience. For example, here’s the narrator talking about returning to the analogue world having been immersed in playing a video game:

…I feel like I am emerging from something distinct from sleep or distraction, a state of having been away from language for a while, and returning from the place where I had been–a place in which I ‘thought’ in football, in the sense that the movements of the players I was controlling were expressive of ‘thoughts’ (or maybe ‘ideas’) which I would otherwise only ever become aware of if they were articulated in words–is frightening, partly because it makes me realise how smoothly and soundlessly language can fall away… 

This theme extends to different areas of the narrator’s life, including parenthood. For example, he describes his sense of “our children’s resistance to our efforts to naturalise the process of everyday experience” – imagination rules, and the real world is only allowed in reluctantly. 

The way Lorem Ipsum is written gives the reader a similar kind of dual experience: being immersed in a swirling sea of language at the level of reading, against the everyday reality of what’s being described. The best thing is just to start reading and let it carry you away. 

Voices of the Lost by Hoda Barakat

8th June 2021 / / 0 Comments

Lebanese writer Hoda Barakat won the 2019 International Prize for Arabic Fiction with this book; as its title suggests, its characters have been displaced – and its structure underlines this even more. 

Voices of the Lost (translated from Arabic by Marilyn Booth) begins with a series of anonymous letters, written to parents, siblings, lovers. These letters go into some of their writers’ deepest feelings and secrets, but they also float free of context to a certain extent. The letters never arrive with their recipients – each one is found, unsent, by the writer of the next. 

Following the initial cycle of letters is a set of chapters that appear to be written from the viewpoints of the characters who would have received those previous letters. These chapters cast new light on what we’ve read before, but the fact that they seem to respond to letters that weren’t sent makes their sense of reality uncertain. 

What I found in Voices of the Lost is a combination of powerful character portraits and a sense of dislocation that comes from the way the book is organised. It’s striking stuff to read. 

Published by Oneworld.

15 Years of Quick Reads, and The Motive by Khurrum Rahman

28th May 2021 / / 0 Comments

2021 is the 15th year of Quick Reads, an initiative run by the Reading Agency charity to help reach people who find reading difficult, or who don’t read regularly for pleasure. Every year, six new Quick Reads titles are published: short books that are distributed to libraries or available to buy at a low price (£1 in paperback). 

I was invited by Midas PR to review one of this year’s Quick Reads titles. The 2021 selection includes The Baby is Mine by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Atlantic), The Skylight by Louise Candlish (Simon & Schuster), Saving the Day by Katie Fforde (Arrow), Wish You Were Dead by Peter James (Macmillan), and How to Be a Woman abridged by Caitlin Moran (Ebury). But I went for The Motive by Khurrum Rahman (HQ), which is a prequel to his series of spy thrillers featuring Jay Qasim, a west London dope-dealer who reluctantly ends up working for MI5.

In The Motive, Jay takes a call from a stranger asking him to deal at a student house party. Jay would prefer to stick to customers he knows, but times are tough. He might wish he’d kept to his rules, though, when one of the students is stabbed. What’s more, Jay’s friend Idris – a police officer – is also called to the scene. 

I enjoyed reading this: it’s snappily told, with Jay and Idris both engaging narrators. You get a real sense of the tense atmosphere at the house party, and there are several twists when it comes to who’s responsible for the crime. I’m interested to see where Rahman takes Jay after this, so I think I’ll be reading more in the future. 

The Untameable by Guillermo Arriaga

25th May 2021 / / 2 Comments

In the mood for a long book? Here’s a 700-page Mexican tale of revenge (translated from Spanish by Frank Wynne and Jessie Mendez Sayer) that never flags. Our narrator is Juan Guillermo, who grew up in Mexico in the 1960s. His brother Carlos had his own drug business, and was killed by the Good Boys, a Catholic youth gang protected by the local police chief. Juan Guillermo’s parents died in a car accident a few years later, but he sees their grief over Carlos as the root cause. He would like vengeance, but that won’t come easily. 

The structure is what really makes The Untameable stand out to me. For a long way into the novel, the narrative moves back and forth between different periods of Juan Guillermo’s life, as though highlighting that none of this is really over for him. A parallel strand sees a young man hunting an infamous wolf in the Yukon, which mirrors Juan Guillermo’s search for revenge – and intersects directly with his story in the end. In between chapters, there are shorter passages on different beliefs and practices around death, which show how much this weighs on Juan Guillermo’s mind. 

I found The Untameable to be fascinating, poignant, and a good old page-turner.

Published by MacLehose Press.

Pew by Catherine Lacey: Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize

10th May 2021 / / 1 Comment

Today’s post is part of a blog tour covering the shortlist for this year’s Dylan Thomas Prize (the winner of which will be announced on Thursday). I’m reviewing Pew, the third novel by Catherine Lacey. I’ve previously written about her debut, Nobody Is Ever Missing; like that earlier book, Pew focuses on a protagonist who’s elusive even to themself. 

Lacey’s narrator is an individual with no memory or identifiable characteristics. They’re dubbed Pew because they are found in the church of a small American town. The townsfolk welcome Pew at first, but Pew’s reluctance to say anything unnerves them, and their attitudes change. There will be a Forgiveness Festival in town at the end of the week, and the reader has reason to suspect that this may not be as wholesome as it sounds… 

With Pew staying silent, conversations are one-sided. Pew becomes an empty presence, and the town’s inhabitants fill the void with their own stories. The novel explores questions of what makes a person, and how individuals and communities relate to each other. Underneath it all is the figure of Pew, who might be looking for a place to belong, or might not need one after all. Lacey’s book is enigmatic, thought-provoking, and a pleasure to read. 

Published by Granta Books.

#2021InternationalBooker: The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enríquez

4th May 2021 / / 0 Comments

This is Mariana Enríquez’ second story collection to appear in English translation by Megan McDowell (though it was her first to be published in the original Spanish). I would have loved Things We Lost in the Fire to be longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize (as it was then), so I was pleased to see that this collection had made it.

Enríquez tells tales of urban horror, with vivid unsettling images such as the dead baby that returns as a ghost in ‘Angelita Unearthed’, though not necessarily as the kind of spirit that the protagonist anticipates. Then there’s ‘The Well’, in which a woman tries to excise the fears that have blighted her life by returning to a witch she visited as a child. There’s a real sense of nightmare about it. 

My favourite piece in the book is the novella ‘Kids Who Come Back’. This is the story of Mechi, who works at the archive for lost children in Buenos Aires. Mechi’s life (and other people’s) is turned upside down when missing children start to reappear – though all is not as it seems. After reading this, I’m really looking forward to Enríquez’ novel Our Share of Night, which is being published in McDowell’s translation next year. 

Published by Granta Books.

Read my other posts on the 2021 International Booker Prize here.

Lean Fall Stand by Jon McGregor

29th April 2021 / / 1 Comment

In the past, I’ve described Jon McGregor as a writer who brings out the strangeness in the everyday. Thinking about it, he also writes powerfully about trauma. Both of these aspects come together in his new novel – though at first glance, Lean Fall Stand may seem something of a departure for him, not least because part of it is set in the Antarctic.

In the first third, three men are on a research expedition: newcomers Thomas Myers and Luke Adebayo, and veteran field technician Robert ‘Doc’ Wright. When we meet them, they’re in trouble, separated and disoriented. Caught in a snowstorm, Thomas observes that what he’s heard from other people couldn’t prepare him for the reality:

He had heard this described as like being inside a jet engine. As though people knew what being inside a jet engine was like. People said these things, but the words didn’t always fit. 

This is the first example of a key theme in Lean Fall Stand: the difficulty of capturing experience in language. Nevertheless, McGregor’s prose often evokes a visceral reaction in me. Towards the end of the Antarctic section, Doc’s viewpoint breaks apart, and it’s harrowing stuff:

He was the assistant. General. The technical general assistant. He was required to assist. He was required to take action. He had the experience required. He moved towards the radio. He went over on his weak right foot and hit the floor hard. He floored the numb faceness of his raw. No. Rawed the rub. The rum. The nub. 

What’s happened here is that Doc has had a stroke. The second part of the novel is told mainly from the viewpoint of Doc’s wife Anna, who finds herself forced to adapt to a new way of living. This is reflected in the prose: at first, pieces of calm language from the hospital lodge themselves in the narration (“It’s Robert. It’s your husband. A bit of a stroke. We need you to.”) Later, the repetitive routines of care start to take over:

She had to get some food into him before his blood sugar dropped too low. She had to leave him in the armchair while she went down to the kitchen, and she had to make him promise not to move. She had to listen out for any crashes or noises whilst she sliced an apple, and spread toast, and made tea. She had to ignore the phone while she ran the breakfast tray upstairs. She had to cut the toast into small pieces so he could eat it.

We also see the laborious process of Doc’s recovery. The stroke has taken away both of the couple’s old lives: Anna, an academic, is ostensibly being “kept in the loop” of her old job, but it’s not hard to see that she’s being pushed outside of it. Doc is now Robert full-time, gone from being the person who tells others how to handle the Antarctic, to someone who’s no longer in control of even the basics. 

Robert’s attempts to regain speech are particularly significant, because he’s the only person who could explain what happened out there. Thomas didn’t make it back from the Antarctic, so there has to be an inquest, which needs Robert’s testimony. 

In the final part of Lean Fall Stand, Robert attends a speech therapy group (much of this is seen from the group leader’s viewpoint, to whom Robert can only be the person in front of her, not the person he was). At this group, Robert is able to rebuild his experiences into a story and an identity that he can assert for himself. 

Lean Fall Stand is an appropriately jagged novel, in terms of its language and its structure. Not every thread gets a full ending, but then this book is all about imperfect recollections and lives made patchwork. It’s another fine piece of work by one of my essential writers. 

Published by Fourth Estate.

Read more of my reviews of Jon McGregor’s work here.

#2021InternationalBooker: The Perfect Nine by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

27th April 2021 / / 0 Comments

I was looking forward to this, my first time reading Ngũgĩ, and it didn’t disappoint. It’s a version of the Gĩkũyũ people’s myth of origin: the story of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi and their ten daughters (the tenth, Warigia, makes them a Perfect Nine). 

In Ngũgĩ’s telling (translated from Gĩkũyũ by the author) , 99 suitors arrive seeking the hand of one of the Perfect Nine. Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi set them a quest: to go up the mountain in search of a hair from an ogre’s tongue, which will give Warigia the ability to walk. Not all of the men will return, but the Perfect Nine (minus Warigia) go with them, and are at least as capable, if not more so. 

The Perfect Nine is written in verse, with rhythms of oral storytelling, and plenty of wonder and adventure. I enjoyed reading it very much.

Published by Harvill Secker.

Read my other posts on the 2021 International Booker Prize here.

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