Tag: Reviews

Anthology review: Zero Hours on the Boulevard

6th June 2019 / / 2 Comments

There have been a few anthologies published recently in response to the current political climate. I reviewed one, Tempest, last month – and today I have another. Zero Hours on the Boulevard (ed. Alexandra Büchler and Alison Evans) comes from the Welsh publisher Parthian and is subtitled ‘Tales of Independence and Belonging’. It includes a mixture of English-language originals and translated pieces, often revolving around how individuals may relate to their surroundings (whether old or new). An opening poem in three languages sets the tone: in ‘Lands of Mine’, Hanan Issa writes about being one person from multiple places.

One story that I found particularly affecting is ‘A Birthday Card From the Queen’ by the Maltese writer Clare Azzopardi (tr. Albert Gatt). Old Kelinu spends most of his time making tea, even though he doesn’t like drinking it. He struggles to come to terms with the contemporary world, thinks things were better in days of Empire, and waits patiently for his hundredth birthday when he’ll receive a card from the Queen. The sense is clear that Kelinu is a figure out of time, and his grip on life may be fragile; but there are some piercing moments, such as this, where Kelinu remembers his late wife Maria:

When the tea has cooled he pours it into the sink. He puts a lot of washing-up liquid into the glass and lets the foam rise and rise, then he rinses the glass and rinses away Maria’s face, the white dress gliding across the carpet of a humble church and the hard years that followed. Maria lying in the throes of her illness, heavy as the rain clouds dimming in the light of the room. Nothing remained of Maria’s pear-shaped body, nothing but foam.

Some of the pieces in Zero Hours on the Boulevard concern characters who move (or have moved) to a new place. In ‘When Elephants Fight’, Cameroon-born and Wales-based Eric Ngalle Charles describes his daughter being deeply concerned about what Brexit means for her and asking him where he’s really from. He tells the harrowing tale of what caused him to leave Cameroon, which gives her a new dimension of understanding. ‘The Book of New Words’ by Eluned Gramich sees a German girl start school in England, where she finds the nuances of language rather different from what she’s learned so far. By the time she returns to Germany, her sense of self has shifted. Durre Shahwar‘s ‘Split’ is the short but powerful tale of a woman turned away from the Life in the UK test on a technicality, and Faiza, the invigilator whose mother took that same test in the past. Faiza worries for the woman she glimpses through the Test Centre doors, but is grimly reminded of how little she can do to help.

Other stories in the book revolve around dealing with changes to a familiar place. ‘Mercy’ by Lloyd Markham (an extract from his novel Bad Ideas\Chemicals) takes us to a near-future (or alternative-present) Wales. 19-year-old Louie Jones is trying to jump through the hoops of ‘Careers, Lifestyle & Attitudes’ when he is assigned a work placement at the Mercy Clinic, which leads him to reconsider his relationship with his alcoholic father. This piece is a rush of developments that straddle the borderline between absurd and chillingly plausible. In ‘The Garden’ by Slovak writer Uršul’a Kovalyk (tr. Peter and Julia Sherwood), Ela moves to a new flat in the capital, her modestly-paid job leaving her in a precarious position. She finds the apartment building’s beautiful terraced garden a source of peace, and gets to know Boženska, the old woman who has lived in the building for decades and looks after the garden. The history of the garden comes to stand in for the changing world outside – and, as so many of the stories in this anthology underline, change comes to everywhere and everyone.

Book details

Zero Hours on the Boulevard (2019) ed. Alexandra Büchler and Alison Evans, Parthian Books, 248 pages, paperback.

Animalia Paradoxa – Henrietta Rose-Innes

31st May 2019 / / 0 Comments

Animalia Paradoxa is one of the first fiction titles from Boiler House Press, a small imprint based at the University of East Anglia. It’s a story collection by Henrietta Rose-Innes, a South African writer whom I first read when her story ‘Sanctuary’ came second in the 2012 BBC International Short Story Award.

‘Sanctuary’ opens this collection, and it was a pleasure to read again. The narrator describes travelling to a campsite through a series of wire fence gates, and encountering a family staying at a nearby lion sanctuary. In the morning, there has been an accident: it seems the father has been attacked by a lion. But it soon becomes clear to the narrator (and us) that something else has gone on; the story is all the more powerful for what it leaves unsaid. When the narrator leaves with the family, the group passes through those gates again:

I drove through and waited while [the family’s mother] did up the complex metal knot, and then we moved on again, making good our slow, methodical escape. Over and over we did this again, locking ourselves out for good, locking it all away behind us…

At this point, the gates represent much more than a means of traversing a fence: this is leaving behind an old life, never to return.

Several of Rose-Innes’ stories work like this, with something in the environment serving as a metaphor for what’s happening to the protagonist. One of my favourites is ‘The Boulder’, which sees teenage Dan staying with his girlfriend at her parents’ holiday home. Dan feels he doesn’t belong, like the boulder which has fallen down the mountainside and now intrudes upon the lawn. The tension of that feeling builds to a wry conclusion. In ‘The Leopard Trap’, Daniela takes a breather from her marriage by driving out to stay in an unfamiliar farmhouse. She comes across a little enclosure once used by hunters for capturing leopards; her ambivalence about the place comes to reflect how she views her relationship.

Some of the stories in Animalia Paradoxa venture into more fantastical territory. ‘Limerence’ concerns a woman with a condition that induces involuntary feelings of – well, desire, if not quite love. There’s some wonderful imagery in this piece, to match the intense rush of the protagonist’s emotional state. In ‘The Bronze Age’, a man has travelled from Johannesburg to the UK, to spend a week with his son Robbie. They visit a historical site, and the man then finds that Robbie has brought home a flint knife that he feels he needs for protection. In this story, the Bronze Age represents the distance that exists between father and son, adulthood and childhood – Robbie taking part in historical activities when it’s not how his father imagined the day would go; their differing attitudes towards the knife. A closing vision of the Bronze Age itself makes the father realise just how far apart he is from his son.

I found Animalia Paradoxa an evocative and affecting collection of stories. It leaves me keen to read more of Rose-Innes’ work, and to see what else Boiling House Press has in store.

Book details

Animalia Paradoxa (2019) by Henrietta Rose-Innes, Boiler House Press, 228 pages, paperback.

An avant-garde seaside farce: Berg by Ann Quin

10th May 2019 / / 2 Comments

The first sentence sits there on its own page, drawing you in, enticing you to read on:

A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father…

I first read this sentence at the top of Max Cairnduff’s review in 2010, and the book caught my imagination. But I didn’t read it: I guess I wasn’t in the right place as a reader back then to appreciate it. Still, I never forgot Max’s enthusiasm for Berg, and when And Other Stories published a new edition in March, that was my cue to give it a try.

Berg (1964) was the first of Ann Quin’s four novels. It is the tale of one Alistair Berg, a hair-tonic salesman who lives with his mother Edith (her imagined voice is a constant presence in his mind). His father Nathaniel left them some years ago; this seems to Berg’s principal reason for wanting to do away with the man, though he’s constantly trying to justify it to himself:

Of course it’s ridiculous to think the whole thing is simply a vehicle for revenge, or even resentment – hardly can it be called personal, not now, indeed I have never felt so objective. If inherent in the age, well and good, though historically speaking the idea perhaps is a little decadent.

Berg is even hesitant to actually do the deed, often passing up the chance when it arises. He seems at least as interested in getting together with Judith, the woman his father now loves. Berg takes an adjacent room in their lodgings; he can often hear them through the thin partition. Intense feelings abound in such circumstances, and Quin’s prose is an apposite medley of description, internal monologue, authorial commentary, and Berg’s own imaginings. Here, for example, is Berg remembering Sunday school and childhood summers:

Only perhaps now recalling the shaft of light, the summer’s half-hearted breezes through the swinging chapel door; the mumbled hymn-singing no one ever really knew; peering through a crack in a grave, in awe at the stick-like bones, or staring at unpronounceable names inscribed on marble, counteracted by own writing on pavements and garden walls: Josie loves Aly; Barney Broadbent stinks. The tree with the swing, the hollyhock bowers; untouchable ladybirds, catching a Manx by its stubby tail; trespassers be warned. But you king of the jungle, a warrior supreme. I see an eye through a slit in the wall, my own unique eye, insouciant at everything, beyond what it can now see.

As Max says, Quin’s writing requires concentration; but, with passages like this, I think there’s ample reward. I also agree with Max that Berg is very funny, surprisingly so: I wasn’t expecting it to turn into an outright farce, but it does. Berg gets into scrapes with a pet budgie, a ventriloquist’s dummy… I won’t say more, as I think these are best discovered for yourself.

Berg is also enriched by its sense of place. The unnamed seaside town is recognisably Quin’s hometown of Brighton, and it’s depicted in a way that reflects the rawness of Alistair Berg’s situation. For example, the boarding house is memorably seedy: “Door upon door, separated merely by strips of plaster and pink wallpaper damp-stained: the carpet as though just unrolled leading perhaps to a saw-dust ring. Everywhere the smell of disinfectant.”

If there’s one thing I’ve come to appreciate in ten years of book blogging, it’s that so-called ‘experimental’, ‘challenging’ fiction is not sealed off in some rarefied bubble, but belongs equally to an ordinary reader like me. Berg is a prime example: for a novel with this kind of humour and setting to be written in this kind of language still feels unexpected to me, although it shouldn’t (any other suggestions will be gratefully received!). I’ll be reading Quin again, probably The Unmapped Country, the short fiction collection published by And Other Stories in 2018.

Elsewhere

Lee Rourke has written several interesting articles on Quin’s work. Max links to two, from 2007 and 2010; and there’s this one from 2018.

Book details

Berg (1964) by Ann Quin, And Other Stories, 160 pages, paperback.

Tempest: an Anthology

2nd May 2019 / / 0 Comments

Tempest (ed. Anna Vaught and Anna Johnson) is a new anthology from Patrician Press themed around the current ‘tempestuous’ political climate. It brings together fiction, non-fiction and poetry; as I’m more of a fiction reader, I’m going to highlight a few of my favourite stories.

‘The wall’ by Emma Bamford is a good example of how voice can shape a story. It’s narrated by a builder talking to his mates down the pub (“Lord, can’t a man get a bit of peace with his pint of an evening after a hard day’s labour? If I tell you, will you leave me be?”). The story his friends are so keen to hear concerns the time he was invited to America to work on a new border wall, and it didn’t work out quite as anticipated. The homely narrative voice does just enough to push the tale to one side of reality (it’s a voice that doesn’t belong in the situation it’s describing), without losing sight of the seriousness beneath.

Some of the stories in Tempest work as evocative snapshots of a strange new world, and allow the reader’s imagination to fill in the details. ‘The carp whisperer’ by Petra McQueen and Katy Wimhurst takes us to a highly stratified world of water shortages. The protagonist is mistaken for someone who can talk to – and maybe even shapeshift into – carp. All this comes together into a striking final image of rebellion.

Justine Sless’ ‘Tempest on Tyneside’ is another of these strange snapshots. In a country beset by storms and prone to flooding, everyone is still heading to the North East for the football. But first a visitor, Miranda, has to work out the underlying geology and make sure its safe. I think that’s what she is doing, anyway; I must admit, I didn’t grasp everything that’s going on in this story. Still, it doesn’t matter to me, not when there’s such spectacle to fill the mind as the image of hundreds of football supporters on bikes descending on a brightly lit stadium while a storm rages at sea.

‘Fenner’ by Suzy Norman is a poignant tale of trying to move on after loss. It is ten years since the narrator’s musician husband, Ray, died, and now Dewi, a film-maker, wants to make a tribute to him. The narrator accepts Dewi’s request for an interview, but this stirs up old memories and brings change to the old house she shared with Ray. Norman’s writing carefully illuminates the very beginning of a new future for the protagonist.

Book details

Tempest: an Anthology (2019), ed. Anna Vaught and Anna Johnson, Patrician Press, 178 pages, paperback.

The Storyteller – Pierre Jarawan

16th April 2019 / / 0 Comments

My post today is the last stop on a blog tour for The Storyteller, the debut novel by Lebanese-German author Pierre Jarawan (translated from the German by Sinéad Crowe and Rachel McNicholl, published earlier this month by World Editions). This is a big yarn of a novel, exploring family secrets.

In 1992, young Samir lives with his family in Germany. He’s never been to Lebanon, but is fascinated by his father’s accounts of the place:

As a boy, I felt an insatiable longing to see Lebanon. It was like the enormous curiosity inspired by a legendary beauty no one has ever seen. The passion and fervour in the way Father spoke about his native land spread to me like a fever. The Lebanon I grew up with was an idea. The idea of the most beautiful country in the world, its rocky coastline dotted with ancient and mysterious cities whose colourful harbours opened out to the sea.

One day, Samir’s father disappears, and family life falls apart. Years later, Samir decides that the time is right to travel to Lebanon and try to find out what happened to his father. He discovers a life and history that were unknown to him – and that the fantastical tales his father would tell him as a child had an unexpected basis in reality.

The Storyteller examines Lebanese history on the smaller canvas of a family’s story, and considers how stories themselves may distort reality. It’s expansive and engaging stuff.

Book details

The Storyteller (2016) by Pierre Jarawan, tr. Sinéad Crowe and Rachel McNicholl (2019), World Editions, 468 pages, paperback.

The Faculty of Dreams – Sara Stridsberg: #MBI2019

14th April 2019 / / 0 Comments

Sara Stridsberg, The Faculty of Dreams (2006)
Translated from the Swedish by Deborah Bragan-Turner (2019)

Well, this turned out to be my favourite book from the Man Booker International Prize longlist. It’s inspired by the life of Valerie Solanas (1936-88), who wrote the SCUM Manifesto and, in 1968, shot Andy Warhol. This is not, however, a fictionalised biography: Stridsberg describes it as a “literary fantasy”, playing fast and loose with even the known facts of Solanas’ life. For example, in real life, Solanas was born in the New Jersey city of Ventnor; in The Faculty of Dreams, she’s born in the desert town of ‘Ventor’ in Georgia – even the desert is fictional.

The narrative focus switches back and forth between different periods of Solanas’ life, up to the point where she lies dying in a San Francisco hotel room; here, the narrator will often speak directly with Valerie, in the form of a transcript. Stridsberg’s writing, in Bragan-Turner’s translation, is often invigorating to read. Here, for example, is a passage from near the beginning, looking back on Solanas’ life from her death bed:

And if you did not have to die, you would be Valerie again in your silver coat and Valerie again with your handbag full of manuscripts and your building blocks of theory. And if you did not have to die now, your doctorate would shimmer on the horizon. And it would be that time again, the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, Ventor, Maryland, New York and that belief in yourself: the writer, the scientist, me. The great hunger and swirling vortex in your heart, the conviction.

The effect of building a bespoke version of Solanas’ life in the novel is to keep the central questions of that life unresolved. It helps maintain a heightened sense of reality that runs throughout The Faculty of Dreams and makes the book all the more compelling.

Book details

The Faculty of Dreams (2006) by Sara Stridsberg, tr. Deborah Bragan-Turner (2019), MacLehose Press, 340 pages, paperback.

Read my other posts on the 2019 Man Booker International Prize here.

The Pine Islands – Marion Poschmann: #MBI2019

7th April 2019 / / 2 Comments

Marion Poschmann, The Pine Islands (2017)
Translated from the German by Jen Calleja (2019)

After dreaming that his wife has cheated on him, Gilbert Silvester leaves Germany for Japan, for no reason he can articulate. Inspired by the travelogues of Bashō, Gilbert decides to go to the pine-covered islands of Matsushima in the north. He takes under his wing a young man named Yosa Tamagotchi, whom he stops from throwing himself under a train. We’ll find you a better spot, Gilbert tells him.

At first – with Gilbert’s tenuous pretext for fleeing home, the hipsterish nature of his job (a lecturer on beards in film), and his unshakeable confidence in his own rightness – it seemed clear to me that The Pine Islands would be spoofing the stereotypical, self-absorbed white Western male who goes off to distant lands in order to ‘find himself’. There are some nicely amusing moments, such as when Gilbert tries composing a haiku:

Hi from Tokyo –
Cherry trees no longer bloom,
only bare concrete.

Gilbert read his poem through a few times and concluded that he had reached the heart of the matter. The rules of the haiku, which he had learnt from the appendix of the Bashō book, had been perfectly realised within these lines: five, then seven, then once more five syllables, an allusion to the season, a sensuous impression, universal and seemingly impersonal, in which a sensitive reader would have nevertheless been able to decipher profound emotion.

Well, if you say so, Gilbert.

As Poschmann’s novel progresses, Gilbert’s journey of self-discovery gains more weight. There are lovely passages of nature writing in the latter stages (it’s a carefully controlled translation by Jen Calleja). The thing is that, when the book takes Gilbert more seriously, it ends up undermining the tone of critique that came before, and Japan itself feels more like a backdrop than a place. The result is a frustratingly uneven novel.

Book details

The Pine Islands (2017) by Marion Poschmann, tr. Jen Calleja (2019), Serpent’s Tail, 184 pages, hardback.

Read my other posts on the 2019 Man Booker International Prize here.

International Dylan Thomas Prize blog tour: House of Stone by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma

31st March 2019 / / 2 Comments

My post today is part of a blog tour for the Swansea University International Dylan Thomas Prize, which is awarded to a novel written in English by a writer aged 39 or under (39 being the age at which Dylan Thomas died). The a blog tour is looking at the books on the longlist. The book I’ve chosen is House of Stone, the debut novel by Zimbabwean writer Novuyo Rosa Tshuma.

House of Stone is narrated by the orphaned 24-year-old Zamani, who lives with Abednego and Agnes Mlambo. He would like to be more than a lodger in this family and sees his chance when the Mlambos’ son Bukhosi goes missing. In an effort to ingratiate himself with the couple he refers to his “surrogate” father and mother, Zamani asks Abednego and Mama Agnes about their lives. He tries his best to oil the wheels:

We spent the whole of yesterday seated in the sitting room, in a battle of wills, me trying to get [Abednego] to take just one sip of the whisky, he pursing his lips, glaring at the wall, willing Bukhosi to reappear, declaring himself to be mute unless the boy popped up abracadabra before his eyes, and snapping at me to shurrup when he I pleaded with him to continue with his story.

Despite initial reluctance, Abednego does continue with his story, as does Agnes. Through their accounts, Tshuma explores the history of Rhodesia and Zimbabwe, while telling an intriguing family story. Zamani also has secrets of his own, adding up to a multi-layered and engaging book.

Book details

House of Stone (2018) by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, Atlantic Books, 374 pages, hardback. [Paperback published on Thursday 4 April.]

Take a look at the other stops on the blog tour in the graphic above. The shortlist of the Dylan Thomas Prize will be announced on Tuesday 2 April.

Celestial Bodies – Jokha Alharthi: #MBI2019

27th March 2019 / / 2 Comments

Jokha Alharthi, Celestial Bodies (2010)
Translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth (2018)

Today’s book from the Man Booker International Prize longlist is the first I’ve read from Oman. It’s the second novel by Jokha Alharthi, a tale of two families and social change across several generations. At its centre are three sisters, each of whom takes a different approach to love and marriage. Mayya marries a merchant’s son at her parents’ instruction, though she has an unrequited love for another man (she names her first daughter London, after the city where the man of her dreams studied). Asma loves literature and feels sure that marriage and motherhood will be wonderful, though this is not necessarily reflected in what she reads:

Why wasn’t there even one book, among all of the volumes on her shelves, which singled out motherhood as the radiant experience it must be? Had her grandfather, Shaykh Masoud, whose library her mother had inherited, not been interested in motherhood? Or were books in general reticent on this subject? She didn’t know the answer to that one, since she had never seen another library in her life.

The third sister, Khawla, has waited since childhood to marry her cousin, and still waits for him, though he has now emigrated to Canada, and she waits for him to return. All three women have their individual ideals when it comes to love; Celestial Bodies explores the different ways in which reality measures up (or fails to measure up) to those ideals.

Alongside the three sisters’ tales are episodes from the lives of other characters, which reflect different experiences and common themes across the generations. Mostly the chapters are presented out of chronological order, which turns Alharthi’s novel into a forest of stories.

Book details

Celestial Bodies (2010) by Jokha Alharthi, tr. Marilyn Booth (2018), Sandstone Press, 244 pages, paperback.

Read my other posts on the 2019 Man Booker International Prize here.

The Years – Annie Ernaux: #MBI2019

21st March 2019 / / 5 Comments

Annie Ernaux, The Years (2008)
Translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer (2017)

Annie Ernaux’s The Years begins with a series of scattered memories, and reflections on the ephemeral nature of existence:

Everything will be erased in a second. The dictionary of words amassed between cradle and deathbed, eliminated. All there will be is silence and no words to say it. Nothing will come out of the open mouth, neither I nor me. Language will continue to put the world into words. In conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.

This paragraph stopped me in my tracks; it wouldn’t be the last time that happened during the book.

I can understand now I’ve read it why The Years has been accepted as a novel for the purposes of the Man Booker International Prize: it’s not so much the detail of history that lingers as the shape of the text. I’d describe The Years as an individual (auto)biography suspended in a broader account of history. It follows the life and times of a character (presumably a version of Ernaux herself) from 1941 to 2006. The wider historical canvas is mostly kept at ‘eye level’, stitched together from details that emphasise the experience of living through a particular moment in time. For example, the 1950s:

Beneath the surface of the things that never changed, last year’s circus posters with the photo of Roger Lanzac, First Communion photos handed out to schoolfriends, the Club des chansonniers on Radio Luxembourg, our days swelled with new desires. On Sunday afternoons, we crowded around the windows of the general electrics shop to watch television. Cafés invested in TV sets to lure clientele.

Ernaux also evokes the ways in which her protagonist’s mental landscapes change. The world of childhood, immediately after the Second World War, is a world of family voices telling stories, and traditions handed down:

Memory was transmitted not only through the stories but through the ways of walking, sitting, talking, laughing, eating, hailing someone, grabbing hold of objects. It passed body to body, over the years, from the remotest countrysides of France and other parts of Europe: a heritage unseen in the photos, lying beyond individual difference and the gaps between the goodness of some and the wickedness of others.

Over the period narrated in The Years, the old voices fade and machines become the main repository of knowledge (“Only facts presented on TV achieved the status of reality”). The old stories are ultimately replaced by the internet’s grab-bag of information. Memory itself fragments. This is what I like most about The Years: the way it evokes the changing texture of living and remembering through time.

Book details

The Years (2008) by Annie Ernaux, tr. Alison L. Strayer (2017), Fitzcarraldo Editions, 232 pages, paperback.

Read my other posts on the 2019 Man Booker International Prize here.

Archives

Browse posts by author, original language of book, or post category

© 2025 David's Book World

Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑