Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer > Books: 2021-booker-longlist (13)
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1784743925
| 9781784743925
| 1784743925
| 4.02
| 25,734
| 2021
| Feb 18, 2021
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it was ok
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Longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfpRm... This book set in the ficitional town of Solace in Northern Ontario in 19 Longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfpRm... This book set in the ficitional town of Solace in Northern Ontario in 1972. It is a book with a strong sense of place – in a small, remote and very much enclosed community – one very different from anything I have experienced or will experience Better stop dreaming of the quiet life, 'cause it's the one we'll never know The book opens in the third person voice of a introverted seven year old girl Clare, with what seems to be increasingly autistic tendencies exacerbated by the tension she is facing making her something of an outsider at school Playground kids and creaking swings Her popular but volatile sixteen year old sister has run-way from home after one of a series of rows with their mother – and has not been heard from for several weeks And quit running for the runaway bus The sister is called Rose – and her mother regrets the harsh words she exchanged with her in a life together which now seems too brief 'cause those Rose-y days are few Her father was very much a peacemaker which only served to antagonise his wife And stop apologizing for the things you've never done Clara is looking after the neighbour’s cat – an elderly 72 years old lady (born at the turn of the century) – Elizabeth – who has gone to hospital for what she told Clare would be a short stay, but is already stretching out longer than either expected. She is our second narrator (on an almost but not quite contemporaneous timeline with the other two). In hospital she talks in her head to her beloved now-dead husband and in her head reminisces about events in their life. They were childless (she having suffered many miscarriages) which leaves her with a profound sense of isolation and emptiness And a hundred lonely housewives clutch empty milk bottles to their hearts And starts to suck the joy out of her marriage Lost laughter in the breeze But for a brief period in her life she found profound joy in the shape of a young boy – one of three (and then five) children of her neighbour – seen by his mother (whose other children were girls) as unmanageable – and for whom she became a de facto carer (the young boy even living with her for parents). For reasons darkly hinted at the two lost contact for years but then resumed it after she reached out to him after he husband’s death and the correspondence the two then had is now, together with memories of her husband, sustaining her as she approaches the end of her life. Hanging out their old love letters on the line to dry The book opens with Clara both confused and horrified when a man comes to Elizabeth’s house and makes himself at home. That man is Liam and he is our third narrator – and we quickly realise was the boy that Elizabeth was fond of and that she made him her heir and, while she is still alive, gifted her house. Liam’s own marriage – which started promisingly – has disintegrated over time Struggle after struggle, year after year His wife accusing him of being unable to truly love and attach – something he knows has been true his entire life – stemming from rejection from his mother in his childhood which has lead to him lacking an ability for emotional engagement in his heart I'm almost stone cold dead Quitting his job also he is unsure of his aim in life It's at the moment bound for nowhere Just going round and round And so has decided to move to Solace – with an aim to gather his thoughts, sell the property and move out before the harsh winter The atmosphere's a fine blend of ice Over time Clara begins to realise that the situation with Elizabeth is much worse than her parents have told her – and by extension becomes increasingly emotional as she realises that the same may be true of their reassurances about Rose and so starts to lose faith in them It's enough to make you stop believing when tears come fast and furious It’s a long book I could go on for hours and I probably will But ultimately it is a book which has at its heart many difficult but all too common life-stories (childlessness, end of life incapacity and terror, bereavement, broken relationships, divorce, missing children) 'Cause time is short and life is cruel But which, particularly perhaps in the character of Liam sets out the possibility of repentance and redemption but it's up to us to change and so ends on a very uplifting and hopeful note But I'd sooner put some joy back In this Town Called Solace Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba With thanks to Paul Weller ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 29, 2021
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Jul 29, 2021
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Jul 26, 2021
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Hardcover
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0241466946
| 9780241466940
| 0241466946
| 3.80
| 5,200
| May 27, 2021
| Mar 01, 2022
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really liked it
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Now shortlisted for the 2021 Costa Novel Prize. It’s not that Mahmood believes himself important, the past few months have put away that illusion, bNow shortlisted for the 2021 Costa Novel Prize. It’s not that Mahmood believes himself important, the past few months have put away that illusion, but he is extraordinary, his life has been extraordinary. The things he has got away with, the things that he has been punished for, the things he has seen ……. Re-read after its shortlisting for the 2021 Booker Prize - a book which can be seen as historical fiction but as this article shows (https://www.thenational.wales/news/19...) still has contemporary resonance. The author is a British-Somali and together with Sunjeev Sahita’s “China Room” - their merited inclusion is a welcome change after a year where one of the judges Sameer Rahim defended a disappointingly (and disappointing) American-heavy longlist by saying “Only a handful of novels by British ethnic minorities were entered.” As an aside both authors were on Granta’s last (2013) once-a-decade list of Best Young British Novelists (which also included three Women’s Prize Winners - Naomi Alderman, Kamilia Shamsie and Zadie Smith). Overall I found this an enjoyable and engrossing tale - one which is though perhaps stands out more for the true-life story it tells than for its literary style. That terrible and sobering story, of the wrongful conviction and judicial murder of a Cardiff based Somali seaman - Mahmood Mattan - in 1952 (for the brutal murder of a Jewish shopkeeper and unofficial money lender in Bute Town in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay area; a miscarriage of justice underpinned (as is so often the case) with racial prejudice and the fear of the outsider is covered excellently in this article https://www.africansinyorkshireprojec... And perhaps most impactfully in this short video at the end of the article where we hear, many years later, from Mahmood’s white, Welsh wife (and mother of his three children) - Laura https://vimeo.com/194263366 The article refers to (given it’s Yorkshire focus) on a short period that the couple spent in Hull - and this was of particular resonance to the author as her now deceased father knew Mattan in Hull - describing him as a rather ordinary, well dressed man - but in her further research and writing - she uncovered a much more complex character. I do not often comment on book covers but in this case I felt the cover captured the author’s intent perfectly. A back cover of a street scene but with a white silhouette of a man - but then a front cover showing the man himself - a well dressed Somalian - showing how the book is not just about telling the story but in capturing the essence of the man at the centre of the injustice. The title “Fortune Men” is what Somalis called those who became sailors as they were comparatively incredibly wealthy when they returned. I assumed its use here was ironic as this book shows the other side - misfortune . It’s a link also to the author’s first novel as the term is used there. The opening of the novel is somewhat chaotic - a range of characters and viewpoints - capturing I think deliberately the both vibrant and notorious multi-ethnic melting pot that was the Tiger Bay docks area of the 1950s where Cardiff attracted workers from around the world to its export of South Wales coal and steel (an area of whose other famous resident Shirley Bassey makes a slightly gratuitous cameo appearance). Eventually though the book homes in on the viewpoints of the two victims (one of injustice, one or murder) Mattan and the Jewish shopkeeper (here sensitively changed to Violet Volacki at the request of a family member) as well as the latter's sister Diana and niece Grace (the real life equivalent of the latter was I believe interviewed by the author as part of her researches - and I am assuming was the person who requested the change of names). And this gives a welcome focus to the novel. One of the most impressive pieces of the novel - and really I think when the power of a fictional retelling comes to bear - is a lengthy chapter when the author imagines Mattan’s back story in Somaliland and what drew him to become a stoker in the merchant navy, his life there covered in a separate briefer but equally impressive section. Although the power of the sections is slightly hampered by the excessive use of untranslated terms. Similarly we read about Diana’s history - her determination with her husband to sign up after Kristallnacht for what they saw as an inevitable conflict with Nazi evil. Although I did feel that the victim’s family’s part of the story ended slightly abandoned part way through the novel. But really the book is about the picture she paints of Mattan in 1952. And it is a complex picture - a proud man, one who broke free of the constraints of his family life, who now has seen much of the world and speaks five languages but also something of a chancer, one who struggles with a gambling addiction which leads him to petty crime. But ultimately one whose downfall is his belief that, for all the prejudices of its society, the British legal system is nevertheless one committed to truth. A belief that (together with his views on how best to conduct himself with the police and then in court) proves terribly ill founded in light of the desperation of the police for a quick conviction, the repercussions for him of the Somalia communities wariness of the police, the unfortunate but inevitable distortions to justice caused by a reward offered by the victim’s family and a lazy if not racist solicitor who shockingly ends up basing his case on the defendant being a half-educated savage. Overall 3.5 rounded up. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Sep 19, 2021
Jul 28, 2021
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Sep 24, 2021
Jul 28, 2021
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Jul 26, 2021
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Hardcover
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0857526804
| 9780857526809
| 0857526804
| 4.11
| 72,006
| May 04, 2021
| May 04, 2021
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did not like it
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Now incomprehensibly shortlisted for the 2022 Women's Prize after being mysteriously shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. Its longlisting was not jus Now incomprehensibly shortlisted for the 2022 Women's Prize after being mysteriously shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. Its longlisting was not just the reason why I read the book but more pertinently the reason I persisted with it to the end as it was the last of that I read (having completed the previous 12) and I was determined to complete my circumnavigation of the longlist. Reading this one: I was tempted to call off the whole adventure as misguided on frequent occasions as a number of times on my journey through it I faced numerous and unexpected challenges despite those who had gone ahead of me to chart the ways with their reviews. Sometimes it was the ridiculous set of melodramas – even in the first 100 or so pages of the historical section we have – inter alia - parental child abuse, sexual obsession, a shipping magnate and his mistresses, severe PTSD, a dramatic ship capsizing, a disappearing mother, a jailed father, a predatory Bootlegging baron meeting a young girl delivering alcohol to a brothel; Other times the forced coincidences between the lives of Marian Graves and Hadley Baxter – note to author coincidences between two entirely fabricated lives lack impact and even when clever (one person caught out by incriminating letters, the other by a hotel spycam) can seem forced. And this overreliance on forced coincidences goes wider - another example being a character obsessed with animal welfare purely it seems so the author can have the love of his life turning out to be the daughter of a meat-magnate; Which leads into another issue: pretty well everyone that Marian and her family meet seems to be well connected and/or wealthy (that goes without saying for Hadley but some contrast or normal people might be welcome)– the repeated patronage Marian and her family gain becoming patronising to the reader; In another place the dawning set of revelations as we are forced (in what I think is the book’s point) to think about what we know about people after their death compared to the truth of their existence (note to author having an omniscient narrator rather spoils this otherwise interesting idea); In many others it was the author’s insistence on not just including much of her research verbatim but in some cases building odd storylines around it (see Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly - surely this should have been in a different book); And on the subject of odd subplots a bizarre incident of mistaken identity involving a Japanese family and their gangster enforcers has even one of the characters laughing at its implausibility; I also struggled with the behaviour of both Marian and Hadley with sleeping with anything that moves (and some that didn’t move - all described in lascivious detail); But most inhospitable of all the parts of the book I visited was the unedifying Hollywood sections built around a Twilight-inspired film franchise and featuring every sterotype going (the Los Angeles shroom-section was a particular lowlight) as well as ostentatious wealth. ...... Then even with much of the book completed but the last daunting stretch ahead of me it was tempting to abandon the attempt – for fear of drowning in the sea of overelaborated prose. And finally even with the last part ahead of me I felt what limited enthusiasm I had leaking away and was tempted to bail out – leave the longlist, abandon Gumble’s Yard and live anonymously under another avatar. It turns out all of those instincts were book appropriate as well as well advised. But I did not and I have completed my great circle around the longlist leaving behind a list of my reviews to chart my voyage of which I can confirm this was the lowlight. I must say it is a lot different to what I was expecting - I was thinking of an aviatrix pioneer hagiography lacking depth and with some dreadful prose - entertaining but shallow. And the novel of course features that exact book - the one that inspired the movie. This one is actually a lot more complex in terms of plot lines and themes and serious in its literary ambitions than I expected. But that just made it worse somehow. I feel like there are probably at least 5 good novels here - the amazing story of the WWII female delivery pilots, the round the world voyage and a story of pioneering fliers, a book about a film of a book which examines what we can really know of dead people especially those who disappear (and the difference between disappearing and dying and their different impacts on those left behind), the story of war artists, something on gender fluidity in history. But adding them all together lead to a book that for me was simultaneously too long but unsatisfying in every respect. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 07, 2021
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Aug 09, 2021
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Jul 26, 2021
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Hardcover
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9781778378694
| 3.71
| 8,144
| Jul 13, 2021
| Jul 15, 2021
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really liked it
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I had the pleasure to put some questions to the author as part of the BBC Radio 4 Front Row Booker Book Group (the third year of three I have appeared
I had the pleasure to put some questions to the author as part of the BBC Radio 4 Front Row Booker Book Group (the third year of three I have appeared - previously with Salman Rushdie and Tsitsi Dangarembga) https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0b... -------------------------------------------------------------------- Re-read after its shortlisting for the 2021 Booker Prize - for which it is in my view the most literary book on the list. This is a philosophical novel yet one which is very readable if approached at an appropriately thoughtful manner and slow speed. It is one which places us deep in the mind of a third party character and which largely (and deliberately) eschews each of: a) Action - this is a novel of the interior not the exterior. The first section largely takes place on a coastal road walk, the second on a long and solitary train journey, the third on walk towards a cremation - but all really are located in the narrator's head; b) Classical Character Development - replaced instead by introspective reflection; c) Spoken Dialogue. The book is more interested in reflecting on conversations – in you might say their legacy – than in the immediate experience of them – which actually matches the book’s treatment of its core subject. The author has also effectively said that reported speech has greater fidelity anyway given he is often writing Tamil dialogue in English. It is one that could not be described as autobiographical - but one where it is clear that the author has projected many of his own ambiguities and obsessions onto his third party character as well as one as well as one where sometimes as a reader one feels that the author has (not entirely satisfactorily) rather bypassed his character to include his own research for the book directly. The author is a Sri Lankan Tamil who grew up in the capital Colombo, rather distant from the direct fighting in the Civil War. He wrote the book in the US while studying for a PhD in Philosophy at Colombia University. Interestingly given my comment about this being a philosophical novel he has argued that the Western study of Philosophy is rather abstracted and formal and divorced from an “introspective or essayistic” approach and instead he was more inspired by Robert Musil and “A Man Without Qualities” and the idea of using fiction to “place philosophical questioning and response in a kind of living, bodily situation.” He has said that he is “obsessed” with the Sri Lankan Civil War and particularly its legacy as the Tamil diaspora came to terms with the allegations of the government atrocities which led up to the defeat of the Tamil Tigers – and all his novels have addressed this in some way. This book, compared to his other writing, is both a more oblique treatment of the war itself which remains in the background, but also a more direct treatment of the war’s legacy both for those involved and for those, like the author and his narrator, whose involvement was after the event. He wondered brought him to this place so far removed from the world he knew, what forces had led him to leave the life he'd created for himself in India, to come to this place he'd never actually lived, this place that had hardly figured in his life growing up. He wondered what movements of fate had led to his seemingly accidental encounter with Rani in the hospital ward, to her arrival in their home just a few months later, to her unexpected death two days before and his attendance now at her cremation, unable to shake off the sense that his presence in this scene of desolation had been decided somewhere long before, that something inside him had been driving him toward it long be-fore the end of the war, something more than just guilt, some-thing like freedom, even if he could not say what exactly freedom was. The book’s third party character Krishnan is also a Sri Lankan Tamil – again with a family base in Colombo (where he lost his father to a bomb attack but is otherwise relatively unaware of the details of the conflict in the North): who also went abroad to study – in this case Political Science in Delhi. There the shock end to the war and the subsequent Channel 4 “Killing Fields in Sri Lanka” documentary (https://www.channel4.com/programmes/s...) opens his eyes and he becomes obsessed with researching and mentally recording the war. In Delhi he later met and fell in love with an Indian activist Anjum and is challenged by her devotion to women and labour cause activism – and when she makes it clear that she is focused on her causes more than him and signal the end of their relationship, he decides to quit his studies and return to Sri Lanka – working with a small NGO working in the North East with those affected by the war. Later he returns to Colombo with a better-funded, more desk-based overseas NGO, living with his mother and ageing Appamma (Grandmother). After the latter has a number of falls Krishnan arranges for someone he met in his work – Rani, a Northern based Tamil lady who traumatised by the loss of her two sons (one in combat, one killed by shrapnel), is undergoing electric-shock therapy – to be his grandmother’s carer. The book itself takes place over a couple of days: after a number of years of silence Krishnan receives an email from Anjum; on the same day he gets a call to say that Rani (who some time since returned to her family in the North) has died after an apparently accidental fall into a well. After a reflective walk, he decides to travel to the funeral to represent his family; and on the lengthy train journey and then at the funeral reflects on the events of his life. He couldn’t help thinking, as the train hurtled closer toward his destination, that he’d traversed not any physical distance that day but rather some vast psychic distance inside him, that he’d been advancing not from the island’s south to its north but from the south of his mind to its own distant northern reaches. The author has talked about the different ways of remembering the war – and his contribution being via his novels and this idea comes up also in the book People would remain who insisted on remembering, some of them activists, artists and archivists who’d consciously chosen to do so but most of them ordinary people who had not other choice … who, in the most basic sense, simply couldn’t accept a world without what’d they’d lost, people who’d lost the ability to participate in the present and were this compelled to live out the rest of their lives in their memories and imaginations, to build in their minds, like the temple constructed by Poosal, the monuments and memorials they could not build in the world outside. In this quote I would say that: Anjum is the activist (as are those, in a Tamil context, who take part in protests around the world); the author is the artist; Krishnan a mental archivist who tries to move towards activism; Rani the lost person without choice. And this quote also includes one of the most interesting and allegorical aspects of the novel – the Sri Tamil legend of Poosal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pusalar) and the idea of building a “castle in the mind” – something that Krishnan realises he was doing himself with his post-documentary, pre-Anjum reaction to the end of the war and which much more poignantly he realises Rani is doing. This is a book of very deliberate juxtapositions of two concepts and then an examination of them together. These include: 1) The inexorable passage of time and the intensity of the present moment – this is key to the novel’s opening; 2) Desire and yearning – this is key to the novel as shown in its ending; 3) The past and the present ; 4) Absence and longing; 5) Activism and academia; 6) Action and introspection; 7) Agency and obsession; 8) Gaze and touch; 9) Sleep and Waking; 10) Travel and Exile. A repeating (and all the more notable for being slightly unusual even at time discordant) image is of not just vision and sight – the author has even said that “Visions” was a working title for the book – but also the physical elements of eyes themselves. It was only when looking at a horizon that one’s eyes could move past all the obstacles that limited one’s vision to the present situation, that one’s eyes could range without limit to other times and other places, and perhaps this was all that freedom was, nothing more than the ability of the ciliary muscles in each eye—the finely calibrated muscles that contracted when focusing on objects close by and relaxed when focusing on objects far away—nothing more than the ability of these muscles to loosen and relax at will, allowing the things that existed in the distance, far beyond the place one actually was, to seem somehow within reach. And this is most striking and shocking in the true story of the arrest, death sentence and then prison riot murder of the Tamil militant Kuttimani (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selvara...) – his wish for his eyes and their eventual fate. We also have the glances shared between two Black Tigers in the documentary from which this excerpt is taken https://www.pbs.org/video/frontlinewo... - a documentary which forms a key juncture in the development of Anjum and Krishnan’s relationship There were I felt some false notes with the book. The book was I felt very much at its strongest and most original when looking at the Sri Lankan conflict, or discussing how Anjum’s activism challenges Krishan: when on more conventional matters – in particular the period when Krishan and Anjum have sex for the first time and then the early stages of their relationship, I felt the philosophising style felt rather cliched – like a Alain de Botton derivative. Some of the areas recounted are reproduced in detail which is simply unnatural such as Krishan’s tale of Kuttimani – supposedly remembered by Krishan while he smokes a cigarette on a train but runs to 12 or so pages, with exact dates and so on (although even then it misses a completely crucial detail that explains why the prison officials allegedly permitted and possibly even facilitated the riots – that his death sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment). The second section in particular is weakened by being dominated by these two elements - however the first and third sections were both I felt exceptional and overall this was a very welcome addition to the longlist which thoroughly deserved its shortlisting and would not be an undeserving winner. My thanks to Granta for an ARC via NetGalley ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Sep 24, 2021
Aug 2021
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Sep 26, 2021
Aug 02, 2021
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Jul 26, 2021
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Hardcover
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031646127X
| 9780316461276
| 031646127X
| 4.15
| 54,518
| Jun 15, 2021
| Jun 15, 2021
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liked it
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Longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize as well as an Oprah Book club pick – an impressive double for a debut novelist under 30. The book opens, in my vie Longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize as well as an Oprah Book club pick – an impressive double for a debut novelist under 30. The book opens, in my view, very impressively for the first 150 pages or so with a restrained and distinctive look at what initially seems like it is going to be a combination of say “Days Without End” and “Underground Railroad/Washington Black” and is marketed like that by its UK publishers. For this is US civil war/slave era historical fiction – a period which unfortunately seems a rather unimaginative go to staple for UK literary prize juries (the 2017 Booker for example – one of the best longlists ever in terms of the literary reception and success of the books – had no fewer than three, including the outstanding winner “Lincoln in the Bardo”). Many of those books added an additional element to a familiar tale - be it spirituality, steampunk ("Washington Black"), science fiction ("Underground Railroad") or additional intersectionality ("Days Without End" and "The Prophets" which was heavily tipped for this year's list) with varied success. This one I feel is aiming to be distinctive more on the strength of the writing, and on the quiet message at its core, and that is a hard task to pull off. The novel is set immediately after the end of the war in a small Georgian Town – Old Ox – coming to terms not just with its defeat but with the implications of the emancipation proclamation. The book opens with a landowner – George Walker – walking his fields at night and stumbling across two black men – the garrulous Prentiss and his silent slack-jawed brother Landry. For a fleeting moment he thinks they are a legendary beast his farmer father (from whom he inherited the 200 acre land) told him about and which he saw as a youngster. But rather than any immediate confrontation or violence all of them seem rather lost in themselves - and their meeting only pushes each of them further into their own thoughts (which is what I found refreshingly different about the beginning). The brothers are freemen who have chosen to leave the neighbouring plantation – but have still to resolve on their future plans - Landry in particular reluctant to rush into moving away from a familiar area. And George’s midnight walk is haunted both by news he has heard today from his son’s best friend (a well connected August Webler) that Caleb was killed in the war – news he still does not know how to break to his wife Isabelle. George, who has never been a farmer, but largely survived by selling of properties and parcels of land, decides to channel his grief into starting a peanut farm, paying Prentiss and Landry fair wages to assist him. When Caleb suddenly returns harbouring two secrets, of his own desertion and of his love for August, as well as the scars of some beatings at the hands of those who captured him – he finds that August is about to be married off by his rich father and is unwilling to acknowledge their relationship, and that rumours of his war actions are widespread. George and Isabel always had something of a distanced albeit loving marriage – both largely keeping themselves to themselves, both believing that the other is holding their true selves back. Caleb’s return and George’s scheme to involve the two freemen only seems to exacerbate this sense of distancing. He often had this same feeling in his own home, facing Isabelle: that the space, although shared, had been cordoned off, with invisible lines demarcating who belonged where. They spoke more than they had before, since the night she'd joined him at the table with Caleb and the brothers, but the cold front holding them apart was taking its time in dissipating, and meanwhile he walked around her like a child tiptoeing at night so as not to wake his mother. George’s only real consolation is a whore Clementine that he pays to listen to the feelings that would he thinks make him appear weak if he shared with his wife. Isabel gains strong consolation in a close but non-sexual female relationship with a widow. Further both are considered something of outsiders – even Northerners – in the town and George’s decision to employ two blacks as fair-paid labourers when the town is full of out of work soldiers and other plantations (including his neighbours) are having to adjust to a sudden loss of their entire economic basis – only adds to this. Caleb is haunted both by his own cowardice and by August’s apparent rejection. We also learn more about Landry and Prentiss – their mother having been sold by the plantation slave owner, before that Landry inadvertently became for many years the literal whipping boy for all the others slaves misdemeanors, in a collective punishment devised after two of their number escape. Over time with the monthly beatings he retreated into silence – focused more on the natural world on the sound and sight of running water. For this period the novel becomes very much one of interiors – with the character’s thoughts, their pasts and their inability to communicate, much more central to the novel than their actions, the present day developments around them and their dialogue. And the book is all the better for it – and different both from what I had expected and more standard civil war/slavery novels but without relying on the need for a gimmick or an added intersectionality. But then the outside world intrudes violently and disturbingly on their world – and I had something of an analogous feeling as a reader that the publisher and/or author’s need for a plot intruded on my own contemplation of the novel with a series of violent (but disappointingly cliched) acts and ideas: a brutal beating, a crooked sheriff, a bent judge, a horse theft, a jailbreak, a runaway black man and a pursuing posse, a sacrificial action, an arson attack and a friendship forged on the run. While I would not go anywhere near as far as the back-page quote from Richard Russo that “The result is better than any debut novel has a right to be” – I did think there was a lot of writing promise shown here and I will be interested to follow the writer’s career. I did also feel that this was a more measured and unusual debut than say “Real Life” by Brandon Taylor on last year’s Booker shortlist. That made the classic debut novel mistake of packing in too much of the author’s autobiographical essays and other writing ideas/exercises: this by contrast reads very much like a fully formed novel although one I wish had stuck to its initial understated intent rather than feeling the need to spiral into action. The Booker Judges citation to me implies that it was more the first part of the novel that engaged them as they said how they were incredibly impressed by the way it probes themes of trans-historical importance—about race, sexuality, violence, and grief—through meticulously-drawn characters and a patient examination of their relationships And on the characters I would say that those of George, Landry, Prentice, Caleb and particularly Isabelle are definitely meticulously drawn. The portrayal of Isabelle and George’s lengthy marriage and of Isabelle’s platonic female friendship with Mildred are (returning to Russo - much better than a 29 year old has the right to write). But those of many others - mainly the bad characters (Austen’s father, the “Sheriff”, the nearby landowner) but some others (a somnolent hat wearing man who suddenly springs to life to save the town, a “tart with a heart”) are more like caricatures borrowed from Westerns or (like Austen himself) rough outline sketches. The legendary beast storyline slightly strained my credulity but I did appreciate the way it was ultimately used with a jovial conversation revealing the truth but causing George to question what he has perhaps seen as the one true friendship of his life and had been looking possibly to reproduce in his relationship with Clementine (interestingly Prentiss too projects a fantasy relationship on to her). I would agree on the trans-historical importance – because ultimately this is a book about how differences need to be set aside and replaced by empathy if a nation is to be healed of racial divides – something as true for America now. I think this is an author to watch in a literary sense, particularly if he can dial down the need to add borrowed plot and characters (which may well have come from editor and publisher) and use the huge success this book will bring him (Oprah and Booker) to be able to forge his own path and write to his obvious great strengths. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 30, 2021
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Jul 31, 2021
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Jul 26, 2021
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Hardcover
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B09B5KTDY3
| 3.56
| 3,734
| Nov 12, 2020
| Jul 23, 2021
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really liked it
| What had he done, what could he have done … He felt the answer rise up in his chest. These memories, these memories, hunting him down, taking posse What had he done, what could he have done … He felt the answer rise up in his chest. These memories, these memories, hunting him down, taking possession of him. These memories, and a word now, just a word remembered, that moved inside him, sat on his tongue, waiting there, until he spoke it out loud. He turned his face towards the woman, bent down to her, said, “Violence.” Longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize and very much the welcome surprise on a longlist which favoured established authors. Further in a list dominated more than ever by the powerhouse conglomerate Penguin Random House (6 entries) and Booker specialists Faber and Faber (3 entries) it was refreshing to see a book from a small UK press – Holland House Books. The author of the book lives now in Brazil – having moved with her husband’s work – and that is very relevant to the novel as the author has described how I am an introvert at the best of times, but never more so than I have been in this country. Compelled to go where my husband found work, we ended up in the centre of Brazil in a city that is predominantly conservative, full of staunch supporters of the nation’s right-wing, racist, homophobic, misogynistic, dictatorship-adoring president, Jair Bolsonaro. I have very little in common with such people. .... With no friends or family to ameliorate the situation, it was lonely and challenging. While my husband went to work every day, I was left in the apartment with the general advice not to go outside as it was unsafe …….. I was alone for 10 hours a day in an apartment on the 17th floor of a tall apartment block. I hardly went anywhere. I saw no one but our building’s security guards. When I did meet people, I was unable to have any sort of conversation with them as I knew very little Portuguese and had no opportunity to practise …. I became obsessed with the order of things – everything had its place and time – and I became unsettled when my husband disrupted that order. In my mind, he began to feel like an interloper. The book is set over a four day period in an unnamed African country (more later on this). The third person protagonist (and this importantly us a book with a very focused third party viewpoint) Samuel is now an old man. For twenty three years (a period which will recur in his story) he has lived as a lighthouse keeper on a remote Island – his only source of living human contact two men who visit him on a supply boat once a fortnight from the mainland - a mainland he has never revisited. Over the years though thirty two bodies have washed up on the land (initially from the chaos and violence under dictatorial rule, but in later years the bodies of unsuccessful refugees) – Samuel burying them in the walls around the Island as a further act of both distancing himself from the outside and warning people away. His existence now is a routine in personal survival, in maintaining the Island’s walls against the ingress of the sea and in fighting the growth of an invasive plant he has named smother-weed. Samuel’s focus could be almost said to be in disproving the first part of John Donne’s famous assertion - No man is an island entire of itself - something backed up by the brilliant cover image - and avoiding being involved in mankind although as a reader we cannot help but wonder how every man’s death diminishes him further. When therefore at the book’s start a drum washes up on shore with a body attached, Samuel’s immediate focus is on how he can use the drum. Even when the body shows signs of life, Samuel is very reluctant to get involved, preferring to hope the man dies and initially showing much more concern for a red-hen (something of an outsider and subject to attacks by the other chickens he keeps – the hen of course both for the reader and for Samuel himself standing in as a substitute for Samuel’s own predicament). But when the man shows resilience but also fear of the supply ship Samuel is suddenly forced to face the fact that he may need to share his Island with this foreign refugee. And of course we then have the link that the author draws with her own predicament – Samuel in almost complete isolation, obsessed with order and routine, now facing disruption from an interloper – one with whom he cannot communicate (neither speaks each other’s language and Samuel is unable to read so they resort to a mutually wary sign language, one on which Samuel at least tends to place a distrustful / worst case kind of interpretation). As the two grow to an uneasy accommodation over the next few days – Samuel sometimes by directly induced flashback, sometimes just through natural memory looks back on his life and the way it is tied up with the history of his nation. Samuel grew up in the country but his family was forcibly removed (and some neighbours to slow to leave massacred) by the colonisers. He and his family move to the city – resorting to piecework and begging to survive - where his father is actively involved with the successful Independence Movement. However his father’s belief that the new president will remember those in the slums that fought for him persists long past the point when it has any hope of fulfillment. Samuel drifts into a life of petty crime and hustling but the country is seduced by a populist General who with a gospel of betrayal murders the president and takes over the country himself before turning into the Dictator and introducing a police state. Samuel comes into the orbit of a marxist style revolutionary group - the People’s Faction – only really committing to the movement when his occasional girlfriend challenges him to show he is worth to be father to the child she is carrying. His subsequent involvement in an ill-fated march leads to his arrest and detention in a notorious new prison (the Palace) and a prior twenty three year period – one also spent largely in psychological isolation as he sells out the movement, the mother of his son and his fellow prisoners in the face of torture. When he is finally released (in a now relatively free and prosperous society whose biggest issue now is refugees) his only surviving family – a Sister and her children – force him to start begging and then set up his Lighthouse Keeper job to get him away from them. And of course cleverly here the second half of Donne’s statement comes in - every man is a piece of the continent because this is a novel with a deliberately set in a unnamed African country which is simultaneously every African country and with a kind of everyman protagonist both designed to represent the travails of an entire continent. But what is more powerful is the effect all of this both societal and individual history has on Samuel and his relationship with his fellow Island dweller - I will say nothing more as this is the main narrative in the book (Samuel's and the nations life history is something which we learn more over time with many of the key areas revealed up front). The cycle of violence and humiliation combined with the distrust engendered by isolation mean that this is not a redemptive book – as the author has said “where Samuel represents the effects of the general political history of an entire continent, a continent which has been exploited for generations, then it becomes impossible for me to write a happy ending. My job as a writer is to hold a mirror up to these realities, but it is not within my abilities to suggest solutions". Overall this is a bleak and powerful, fable-like exploration of the long-lasting impact of colonialism in Africa and its disturbing legacy of violence-begetting-violence. It is also an exploration of the effects and damage of isolation and the distrust and fear and almost entire lack of empathy it breeds – and so therefore I think also a potential parable about the potential legacies of COVID – not the health impacts but the potential longlasting behavioural impacts of lockdown. Recommended and an impressive addition to the longlist. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Sep 05, 2021
Jul 25, 2021
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Sep 06, 2021
Jul 26, 2021
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Jul 26, 2021
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Kindle Edition
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1039000703
| 9781039000704
| 1039000703
| 3.91
| 62,707
| Sep 21, 2021
| Sep 21, 2021
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it was amazing
| He rehearsed memories endlessly, and every repetition of the details made him happier. When he finished a book he liked, he’d start it again immed He rehearsed memories endlessly, and every repetition of the details made him happier. When he finished a book he liked, he’d start it again immediately, from page one. So having read and loved (let alone liked) an ARC of this book ahead of the Booker longlist announcement (on which I was rightly sure it would feature) it seems appropriate to start it again on its print publication a week after its shortlisting for the 2021 Booker Prize My views on the book on a second read (and also having read a number of other reviews both here and in the press - at the time I originally reviewed I think there were at best a handful of reviews anywhere) are to further strengthen (and confirm) my views on both the book's tremendous strengths and its clear weakenesses. But my overall view is to echo the view of Aly on mankind No novel is perfect - but this one falls short so beautifully ORIGINAL REVIEW They share a lot, astronomy and childhood. Both are voyages across huge distances. Both search for facts beyond their grasp. Both theorize wildly and let possibilities multiply without limits. Both are humbled every few weeks. Both operate out of ignorance. Both are mystified by time. Both are forever starting out. The latest novel from the author of Booker shortlisted “The Overstory” and one which I feel will appeal strongly to the many fans of that book. Whereas the etymology of Bewilder implies being lured into the wild and left astray and confused as a result, the sense of this book is of an encounter with the wild (both wilderness on earth and the wilderness of outer space) as a way to make sense of our own world and to think of the implications for how we should change the current trajectory of our society. The novel is also partially a rewrite of a classic science fiction short story - in 2018 after the success of "The Overstory” Powers said he was looking at the genre of science fiction for continuing his writing ”But when you’re asking what would it take to effect the transformation in consciousness that humans need, the only people who ask these questions are the sci-fi writers.” The book is set in what is best perhaps described as a very near future dystopian extrapolation of 2021 USA – a world in which an (unnamed) Trump remains in power and turning his rhetoric into hard action and where various interrelated climate, species-extinction and human-pollution crises are heading inexorably to a tipping point. The book is narrated in first person by Theo Byrne (his surname he notes derived from Bran – the Irish for raven). After a slightly wild youth, Theo found his métier in astrobiology and the love of his life in Aly(ssa), a fiercely effective and committed environmental (particularly animal right) lobbyist and activist, with a love of birdwatching as a hobby. He thinks of her as “compact and planetary” (after a Neruda Sonnet). As an aside the Sonnet is Number XVI which opens (this is not quoted in the novel) I love the handful of the earth you are. And this I think is very important to the plot (and hence I am sure Power’s inclusion of it) as Theo works in the search for exoplanetary life. His specialty is around the analysis of spectroscopic signals from planets which reveal the gases in its atmosphere. In particular he models theoretical life bearing planets and the gases they may admit (so that planetary searchers can know likely signals to search for ). In a clear nod to Aly’s birdwatching his work is referred to as the Byrne Alien Field Guide – “A taxonomic catalog of all kinds of stereoscopic signatures collated to the stages and types of possible extraterrestrial life that might make them”. For Theo the real driver is to understand if life is almost nowhere (with Earth a genuinely unique case) or almost everywhere – and to understand why some people for religious or other reasons would actually much prefer the former to be the case. At the time of the novel, Aly has died in a car crash (seemingly avoiding an opossum, but killing herself and her unborn child) and the bereft and hapless although well-intentioned Theo is left alone to bring up their son Robin (named after his parent’s “national” bird – which they used to signify the beauty in the everyday in their marriage). Robin is an unusual child – best I think described by Theo in a passage which I think gives a good sense of Theo and his life views as well as Robin, and is also important to the plot of the book). I never believed in the diagnoses the doctors settled on my son. When a condition gets three different names over as many decades, when it requires two subcategories to account for completely contradictory symptoms, when it goes from nonexistent to the country’s most commonly diagnosed childhood disorder in the course of one generation, when two different physicians want to prescribe three different medications, there’s something wrong.. The link between this spectrum and Theo's own work with spectroscopic signals is another neat one linking Theo's work to a member of his family (here Robin). The book starts around Robin’s 9th birthday – with him struggling at school, Theo takes him on a camping trip in the wild – there the two stargaze, remember Aly and say and discuss her “secular prayer” (May All Sentient Beings Be Free From Suffering), play Wildlife bingo and discuss Fermi’s Paradox I lay in our tent that night, thinking how Robbie had spent two days worrying over the silence of a galaxy that ought to be crawling with civilizations. How could anyone protect a boy like that from his own imagination, let alone from a few carnivorous third-graders flinging shit at him? Alyssa would’ve propelled the three of us forward on her own bottomless forgiveness and bulldozer will. Without her, I was flailing. They play a game Theo has invented as a distraction for Robin – whereby he describes an imaginary but plausible life-bearing planet, hugely different from Earth and our own definition of life, and the two travel there together in their imaginations and read a classic science fiction short story “Flowers of Algernon” (which story effectively gives the novel its plot). When they return home, Robin, who struggles to understand others and to control his temper, is suspended after an incident with a classmate the authorities put pressure on Theo to allow some form of chemical treatment for Robin. Desperate to avoid this, Theo approaches an old friend of Aly’s, a scientific researcher who is experimenting with the (real-life) technique of Decoded Neurorfeedback – in simple terms training subjects to control their emotions and thinking patterns by learning how to reproduce neural activity with visual aids; and particularly by learning to reproduce the activity of other subjects with desired traits. Theo and Aly were guinea pigs at an early stage and once Robin shows an aptitude and enthusiasm for reproducing the neural patterns, the researcher uses Aly’s thought patterns to train him to deal with his condition. Initially these inspire Robin to turn his frustration and anger at the human race’s terrible treatment the other sentient beings with which it shares a home, into effective campaigning – inspired partly by his father (who is lobbying against government plans to cut off the funding for exoplanet researches), partly by a Greta Thunberg type character who Robin adores but mainly by his mother (who increasingly he believes is behind him in his head). The trajectory of what happens to Robin though is tragically predictable from the seed-story. The book has the same strengths which made “The Overstory” much loved. It has the same motivations and world-view (here perhaps more of a worlds-view) as “The Overstory”, the same rather folksy setting and writing, the same embrace of the wonder of nature, the same rather cynical view of mankind, the same huge range of ideas, and the same passionate and didactic presentation of them. If there is a difference it is in the length – whereas Overstory was rather sprawling, this can feel sometimes like some ideas are picked up and discarded. I do also feel the book has many of the weaknesses of “Overstory” also. None of Robin, Aly or Theo are particularly convincing or rounded characters – feeling perhaps a little more caricatures functioning as plot-vehicles. Some of this of course is due to Theo as a filter, idolising the memory of Aly (despite a number of clear counter-indications) and supporting his motherless and troubled son even in his excesses (Theo's reaction when Robin smashes a boy in the face with a flask is particularly troubling). For a book which is fascinated with the life of other terrestrial life forms and the possibility of extra-terrestrial life and particularly how both differ fundamentally from mankind – the book is spectacularly uninterested in (or seemingly aware of) any Earth countries or human cultures other than the USA. For a book which explores spectroscopy and tell tale colour signatures - everything is seen very much in black and white. Those who disagree with Theo's world view, disagree (at least as seen by Theo) from either ignorance, evil, greed or prejudice. The concentration is on emphasising difference rather than using empathy to seek to break down divisions. Perhaps wittingly one of the imaginary planets that Theo invents is Geminus where the capture of the planet's rotation by its star has lead to a planet divided into halves of light and dark and "the minds of the day failed to find the night intelligible, while night's minds couldn't comprehend the day. They shares only one bit of common knowledge: life could never exist "over the edge" - and there is little attempt her to travel "over the edge" of US politics. Theo I think knows that this is a weakness of his - an early on reflects how Aly was able to deal with conflict much better with her mantra "Nobody's perfect ... But, man, we all fall short so beautifully" I also did not like at all the anti-Christian barbs. In addition to have a book which castigates those in America anti-science on areas like climate change and astronomy but then with a main character who effectively lines up as anti the medical profession is a little troubling given current anti-vaxxer debates. Theo's views on how to treat Robin's condition - demonising the education, care and medical professions in favour of taking his own rather reckless decision on an experimental treatment - seems to be remarkably similar to how Trump dealt with his own COVID - except that Trump's gut feel turned out to have better long run results. But the strong points of the novel still made up for these weaknesses in my view. I was reminded too of some other novels. Like Salman Rushdie’s “Quichotte” the protagonists read a very famous (and IRL) science fiction short story (actually its two short stories in Quichotte) and the plot of the book then explicitly follows that short story. And both books are in part a homage to science fiction and how this much-maligned genre tells us something about our world today and particularly our future. (The author in an interview on the Booker website says it "pays homage to both contemporary and classic speculative fiction writers including Daniel Keyes, Ursula LeGuin, Olaf Stapledon, Alan Lightman, Italo Calvino, and Kim Stanley Robinson I had strong overtones of Max Porter’s “Lanny” (maybe even Jesse Ball’s “Census”) in the special child revealing the truths about the absurdities and cruelties of the adult world - the author himself in the Booker site interview talked of the book as partly "a novel about the anxiety of family life on a damaged planet" and name checks Margaret Atwood, Barbara Kingsolver, Evan Dara, Don Delillo, and Lauren Groff. And the focus on absence/disappearance (here a mother, a pet dog, and of course the Fermi lack of alien contact) as a metaphor for species extinction is a strong echo of Richard Flanagan’s “Living Sea of Waking Dreams”. The author's overall take on the book For me, the astrobiology and neuroscience in Bewilderment—two fields undergoing rapid and dramatic revolutions—are really ways into much older and more intimate human passions. Beneath the immense technologies and intellectual achievements of those pursuits are some primal questions built into human beings: Is life a one-off fluke, or is it inevitable and ubiquitous in the universe? What is consciousness? Can we know what it is like to be someone or something else? How do we land back on Earth and make a home here among the neighbours? Can we find contentment despite our bottomless hunger? How do we surrender the increasingly isolated self to the terrifying diversity of “endless forms most beautiful?” All these questions form the time-honoured heart of fiction. Bewilderment is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. I’ve just updated the fable for the age of pandemics, exoplanets, and mass extinction. Overall I found this a very impressive book - it stimulated my mind, challenged my conscience and moved my heart. One final comment – just as with “Overstory” Powers seems allergic in the text to any form of afterword/references/acknowledgement so a few links which may prove useful https://www.sdfo.org/gj/stories/flowe... https://www.pnas.org/content/111/35/1... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete... https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/ My thanks to Penguin Random House, William Heinmann for an ARC via NetGalley ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Sep 16, 2021
Jun 29, 2021
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Sep 18, 2021
Jun 30, 2021
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Jun 29, 2021
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Hardcover
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191121585X
| 9781911215851
| 191121585X
| 3.78
| 9,695
| Jul 13, 2021
| May 06, 2021
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really liked it
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I re-read this book after its longlisting for the 2021 Booker Prize and had similar views to my first read. There was one photo that I’d focus on,I re-read this book after its longlisting for the 2021 Booker Prize and had similar views to my first read. There was one photo that I’d focus on, a small picture in a dark-wood frame. It was of my great grandmother, an old white haired woman who’d travelled all the way to England just so they she might hold me ………… The photo hung there quietly as I sat at the table, opened up my laptop and started to write ………… I’d been clearing the ground the better to see what was in front of me, which was the past. All sorts of pasts in fact, including the one that found me rehabilitating on a farm in India, in 1999, the summer after I turned eighteen. This is the third novel by the author, who like me has a mathematics degree and like me started his career, post-graduation, working for a life insurance company (our paths rather diverged after that). The author’s second novel “The Runaways” was shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize and was also winner of that year’s Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award for literary second novels. My own views on that book (one of what I have to say was, in my view, a poor Booker shortlist with a winner that was not to my taste at all) was that it was a triumph of theme and ideas (a topical and engaging treatment of the hidden lives of economic immigrants to the UK and the contrasts and interactions between their lives in India and England) over execution (a lack of plausible and distinguishable characters, the over-heavy use of untranslated objects, expressions and distinctions and a very weak epilogue). The author was discussing his ideas for a third novel in interviews around 2015 but in time the form of the novel changed – originally it had been intended as a magic realism novel roaming across time and with a rather broad sense of place, but it has ended as a much quieter novel, while still drawing on the same genesis - a family legend about his great-grandmother, who with three other women was married to four brothers – but “None of them knew which man she was married to ….because they had to remain veiled the whole time. There was no electricity. It was in the middle of nowhere on a rural farmstead and they didn’t know who was the husband, so the story goes.” Now that strand – but much more firmly rooted in time, place and harsh reality, forms one of the two point of view tales which are interleaved in the novel – and perhaps draws more on a Shakespearean tradition of mistaken identity than magic realism. Set in 1929 rural Punjab, we follow the third-party story of Mehar living in a small standalone building on a farm (known as the “China Room” due to its decoration) with two other women – Harbans and Gurleen. The three were married on the same day to the brothers: the oldest of which is Jeet and the youngest the rather rebellious Suraj. The family Matriach Mai gives the brothers permission to sleep with their wives on different nights – but the veiled women are not allowed to view their husbands. The narrative development in the book occurs when Mehar starts meeting Suraj (who she works out from observation must be her husband) outside of Mai’s supervision. The second first-party strand is set 70 years later – as Mehar’s great grandson, shortly before taking up an unconditional offer to study Maths. at Imperial, travels to visit his Aunt and Uncle in India, ostensibly for a family visit but really in an attempt to go cold turkey from heroin addiction. His initial technique seems to be largely to use whisky as a substitute, and in the face of his Aunt’s hostility and his Uncle’s embarrassment he is shipped off to a deserted family farm and ends up staying in the same China Room. There as he reflects on his upbringing – and the overt as well as persistent racism that his family faced after Thatcher-era redundancy lead them to give up their life in Derby (surrounded by family and kin) to set up a shop in an otherwise uniformly-white ex-mining town and which acted as a trigger for his addiction. He also starts a tentative involvement with a visiting Doctor and an initially awkward friendship with a local teacher (both around 20 years older than him) and the two start to draw him out of his addiction, while he also reflects on the locally well-known story of his great grandmother and discovers insights into his Aunt’s past. This section is introduced in 2019 as the narrator returns to the family shop to nurse his father post a knee operation (see opening quote) – a real life incident which crystallised the writing of the novel. Overall this is a novel I think for which the word “understated” will frequently appear in reviews. The 1929 section is quietly powerful but the modern day section for me did not work as well as it could have done. Some of the sections set in the narrator’s childhood were very powerful – for example a remembered ill-fated visit to a birthday party, glimpses of the struggles in the lives of his parents – but I felt these could have been longer. And I felt that the narrator’s initial struggles with addiction were rather disregarded over time and replaced with more of a relationship story. The real strength is the links though of ideas and themes between the two stories - a desire for belonging, identity, connection and of grasping for some form of self-determination in the face of societal prejudice and expectations. Mehar has her freedom constrained by a very prescribed role set out for her, the narrator and his parents by contrast when they move are constrained by the fact that they are seen as not having any welcome role at all to play in the life of the town. The book is also underpinned by a sense of loss and of having to settle for a substitute or reduced status. This extends beyond the narrator and Mehar, to his parents, to Mai, to both Jeet and Suraj (for different reasons), to his Aunt and Uncle (again mourning different things), and empathetically even to those who in the mining town (the “villain” in the birthday party scene is himself struggling with the loss of his miner-identity and the shame of his new job as a shelf stacker – deliberately taking night shifts so as not to be seen). 3.5 rounded up. My thanks to Random House UK, Vintage for an ARC via NetGalley ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 16, 2021
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May 17, 2021
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May 11, 2021
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Hardcover
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1784744069
| 9781784744069
| 1784744069
| 3.86
| 44,929
| Apr 06, 2021
| Jun 17, 2021
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it was ok
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Less “Four Wedding and A Funeral” than “Four Funerals and A Partheid” A book that simply did not work for me despite two readings and whose choice as Less “Four Wedding and A Funeral” than “Four Funerals and A Partheid” A book that simply did not work for me despite two readings and whose choice as winner of the 2021 Booker Prize (together with the decision to represent Africa on the longlist by two white South Africans) was the literary lowlight of 2021. For there is nothing unusual or remarkable about the Swart family, oh no, they resemble the family from the next farm and the one beyond that, just an ordinary bunch of white South Africans, and if you don’t believe it then listen to us speak. We sound no different from other voices, we sounds the same and we tell the same stories, in an accent squashed underfoot, all the consonants decapitated and the vowels stove in. This book is the latest written by an author twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize (in 2003 and 2010). It is effectively a family tale – the Swarts, a white and relatively privileged South African nuclear family of five who live on a farm near Pretoria. Their story and the story of those around them. The family is Manie - owner of the farm and later the main family business – a reptile park, over time he grows close to an ex Reformed Church Afrikaans minister His wife Rachel - who re-converts back to Judaism while she is dying of cancer And their three children: Anton - whose unplanned birth out of wedlock lead to a marriage Amor’s family considered a mistake – Anton kills a woman when conscripted to the South African Army and deserts before later marrying his childhood sweetheart Desiree who becomes increasingly involved with New Age and Yoga Practices and the leader of a nearby Ashram Astrid - who converts to Catholicism, has twins and two unhappy marriages Amor – something of the irreligious conscience of the family, spending her time nursing AIDS patients, refusing to take the family money or to stay in contact, and the only one who holds to the eponymous promise the dying Rachel extracted from Amor – to give the family’s black maid Salome the deeds to her home in the farmlands There are two very distinctive parts of the book’s execution: The first is its cyclical structure. The story (which ranges over several decades) is told at discrete intervals in four sections all based around the funeral of a family member (the sections named after the family member that dies in turn as the nuclear group diminishes - less “Ten Green Bottles” than “Four White Racists”). Each section starts with the circumstances of the death (cancer, snake bite, murder and suicide). Each funeral coincides with an important point of South African history (the rugby world cup victory, Mbeki’s inauguration, Zuma’s resignation). Each is set in a different season. Each has details on the dead body and the viewpoint of the person preparing it for burial. Each features in detail the thoughts of the person carrying out the funeral (and the way their views clash largely with the beliefs of the remaining family members) and each has Amor’s latest attempt to realise the promise. The second is the narrative voice – a very deliberate and intrusive omniscient narrator which swoops from character to character (including some side characters such as a down and out and a criminal and even at one stage some jackals), switches out of its default third person into first person even second person for the point of view character, sometimes addressing the reader directly and sometimes into a brief first person plural chorus. I think the book will appeal to a lot of people and I would definitely recommend others to read it But I have to say it did not quite work for me – and simply felt too gimmicky. The family is clearly meant as to represent South Africa and the book to serve as an analogy for the nation’s history but this felt overdone to me. One clear example of this being the coincidental linking of the funerals to important events - at one stage a character comments that Manie has “died at a very inconvenient time” and as a reader we can only think that the opposite – that the fictional timing of the fictional death is very convenient for the move. And when combined with the symbolic deaths (and their symbolic natures), the need for understanding and reckoning (and dare I say truth and reconciliation) which arises from them, the examination of the decaying states of the bodies (standing for the nation) and so on – it all seems rather forced. And no experienced novelist, even in possible irony, should have characters remarking on how things are like (or not like) a novel, or have a character member trying but failing to write an autobiographically inspired novel or have characters named ridiculously like a soldier named Private Payne or two detectives named Olyphant, Hunter. And while I can see people admiring the sheer bravura and dexterity of the narrative voice – I was struggling really to see what admirable it really achieved. One of the effects for example was to have the voice call De Verwoerd “a great man” and the Pienarr/Mandela encounter that of a “beefy Boer and the old terrorist” and I have to say this got my back up a little. And my negative reaction was further exacerbated by the lack of voice really given to Salome, the way her son Lukas is portrayed as angry and ungrateful and the way in which the first non-white character given a significant voice is a murderous car-jacker (followed by a corrupt politician, a corrupt policeman and so on). Those comments may not be fear but while I went to University in a different era to today’s world of trigger warnings and no-platforming and was not very politically active or aware – but the one area that did affect me politically was the boycott of firms connected to the reprehensible South African Apartheid regime and I am still (to use the phrase) triggered by white South Africans complaining about how their country is now racked with crime and in my personal reading consider no-platforming books written about white South Africans who prospered pre-Apartheid. I say that to put my views into context. But I am not sure my views are entirely unfounded when I read an interview like this with the author (https://www.newstatesman.com/world/af... - apologies may be paywalled) - where he says that "some are leaving the country, and taking their money with them. I’m not among them – yet – but for the first time the idea is in my mind, and it’s not going away" and I put it in the context of someone who was 30 before South Africa had a democratic election and who I believe did National Service in the apartheid army. And then on The Radio 4 Front Row Booker Book club the author said with no apparent irony that "“To be a white man in South Africa today is to be disadvantaged as the odds are stacked against you. " Finally I did not respond at all well to the “plague on all your houses” views of different religious belief. Overall as I said I can see people liking this book but my suggestion would instead be to move a little North and instead read Tsitsi Dangarembga’s trilogy “Nervous Conditions”, “The Book of Not” and “This Mournable Body”. My thanks to Vintage Chatto and Windus, Random House UK, for an ARC via NetGalley ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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May 25, 2021
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May 27, 2021
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Apr 27, 2021
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Hardcover
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0593189582
| 9780593189580
| 0593189582
| 3.55
| 50,309
| Feb 16, 2021
| Feb 16, 2021
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it was amazing
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My favourite tweet from the Poet Laureate of Twitter - her first of September - https://twitter.com/TriciaLockwood/st... Now fully deserved winner of t My favourite tweet from the Poet Laureate of Twitter - her first of September - https://twitter.com/TriciaLockwood/st... Now fully deserved winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize. I re-read this book (is it a re-read if the first time was an audio book?) following its deserved shortlisting for 2021 Women's Prize - now joined by a rare double shortlisting for the 2021 Booker Prize. I have to say that on a second (or first) read I think the book was even better than the first time Original review “Stream-of-consciousness…. Stream-of-consciousness was long ago conquered by a man who wanted his wife to fart all over him. But what about the stream-of-a-¬consciousness that is not entirely your own? One that you participate in, but that also acts upon you?” From your experience you know Patricia Lockwood to be (tick all the correct answers) a) Author of the memoir “Priestdaddy” and an highly thoughtful contributor to the London Review of Books b) Author of the harrrowing viral poem “Rape Joke” c) Originator of the Twitter concept of ironical sexts (sample: “I am a living male turtleneck. You are an art teacher in winter You put your whole head through me”) and author of one of the all time great literary tweets: @parisreview. So is Paris any good or not All three are true but depending on if your answer was more a/b (or even none of the above) than b/c may depend on how you engage with the first half of this book - a novel in which the the author aims with some success to re-cast cutting edge literary fiction for the world of Twitter, but largely by adopting and reproducing the memes of Twitter. The first person narrator of the novel is unnamed, but the book is heavily autofictional. Lockwood has remarked with some profundity that the reason that so much fiction is now autofictional is that Google allows us to discover that it is (whereas previously we would know of author’s lives only what they chose to reveal) – a quote I found out when Googling to see how much of this novel was autofictional. The narrator has gained fame in the Portal (Lockwood’s term Twitter - not as many reviews seem to claim the entire internet - given that the word “internet” is used at least once in proximity to the Portal) for a single viral tweet: Can a dog be twins?. Now her life seems to consist of two main parts – sitting on her chair participating in the newly emerging consciousness of the Portal and travelling around the world talking about the newly emerging consciousness of the Portal – and the first part’s plot matches this The plot! That was a laugh. The plot was that she sat motionless in her chair. The book is a series of (to quote Lauren Oyler’s narattor in “Fake Account”) “Necessarily short sections, simple, aphoristic sentences, more of an essay than a novel.” - a style that is familiar now from Jenny Offill (and others) and was parodied (slightly unsuccessfully in my view) in Oyler’s novel but which Lockwood and her narrator defend (with reservations) Why were we all writing like this now? Because a new kind of connectoin had to be made, and blink, synapse, little space-between was the only way to make it. Or because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote. Many if not most of the sections are about viral tweets and memes, almost all I think taken from 2018, very little of which is actually explained - and I have seen some criticism of this. But then I can think of a book (a book of course referenced in my opening quote) which for full appreciation relies on an encyclopedic knowledge in one City on a single day in 1904 (or tens of pages explaining the references) and that is considered perhaps the greatest novel of all time. Returning to this novel - for those who haunted the internet that year to the extent of the narrator’s inhabitation of planet Portal (and who are likely the a/b of my introduction) much I think will be very familiar indeed and bring lots of knowing smiles that come when you get or are reminded of a shared in-joke (and so much of this section is about how the Portal is a form of shared consciousness and shared jokes and ideas – and of how difficult it is to convey that sense to future generations or to those not of the Portal). For those like me who did not – the choices I think are fourfold: (1) to ignore the memes altogether; (2) to cheat; (3) to google-while-you-read; or (4) (as a mid-case) to see which ones you can spot/recall. I read somewhere between the fourth (I was impressed with myself for example for spotting the reference to the “Cat People” short-story but it was a rare triumph) and more of the time the third approach – and would not recommend the first or second – as I think the memes and understanding them is important (see end of my review). Some – perhaps many - of the references themselves say something deeper I think about the themes that the author is exploring – sometimes in a way which is concisely explored (the book is full of eminently quotable aphorisms) and sometimes in an exercise left for the reader. One that intrigued me is a lengthy section describing watching a documentary of Thom Yorke singing “Creep” to a festival audience, a section which contains perhaps the second most insightful discussion of that song I have ever seen (the first of course to any member like me of the MTV rather than Twitter generation was by Beavis and Butthead). The narrator describes how Yorke’s almost palpable disgust at how a song which was originally and specifically around alienation/isolation is now hollered back to him by huge crowds of the very type of people that excluded him - suddenly allows him to recapture and re-own that very sense of detachment of what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here at the heart of the song. And of course one thinks of how Twitter has changed over time and how the narrator and Lockwood and continually trying to reclaim the original sense of freedom they felt there against their disgust at it being the very thing that permitted and enabled the rise of Trump (called in the book the Dictator). This first part of the novel is nothing if not bold in its claims to re-address the issue of what literary fiction should be in the 2120s. As per my opening quote the Joycean comparison is explicit – and reinforced by a visit to Dublin. And a trip to Scotland leads the narrator and her husband to sneer at tourists visiting a lighthouse only to realise later that the tourists are paying homage to Virginia Woolf. Another trip leads her to view an ancient cairn and reflect: “They said all you needed to be remembered was one small stone piled on another,” she thinks to herself. “Wasn’t that what we were doing in the portal, small stone on small stone on small stone?” The second part of the novel gives what seems a very abrupt and very deliberate change of gears. The narrator’s sister is pregnant and the LOL-ing at the baby’s head on its scans suddenly takes a dramatic turn after an urgent message from her mother asking her to fly back to the family home, as Doctors have discovered that the baby is suffering from Proteus syndrome (gigantism as suffered by the elephant man) and will likely not survive – the only real question being if her sister will also survive given Ohio laws which even make it illegal to induce a pregnant woman weeks before term. This leads to agony for her strongly, in fact militantly pro-life father – forced now to “live in the world he has created” (that itself an echo of course of the Twitterati’s dilemma in Trumps America) . And then unexpectedly the baby survives and the book takes an even more serious turn. Of course it is tempting to view the baby as a metaphor – a metaphor for the unexpected survival but also unusual and unprecedented development of Twitter as a medium, for the hyperbole and gigantism of the internet; or alternatively (as the narrator increasingly finds true feelings and depth of emotion in her love for her niece) as a metaphor for the difference between the Portal and IRL. And both of these metaphors are absolutely relevant. But also as the narrator remarks “It spoke of something deep in human beings how hard she had to pinch herself when she started thinking of it all as a metaphor.” – because this part of the book is given much greater emotional heft when you realise it is the least fictional part and that it is very much about Lockwood’s own experiences and her own niece. This section will I think be seen as emotionally moving by some and emotionally manipulative by others – I was much more in the former camp. It also of course causes the narrator to examine her use of the Portal: her popular and archly ironical persona there which has given her whatever measure of identity and recognition she has “If all she was was funny, and none of this was funny, where did that leave her?”; her realisation that the universal shared experiences of the internet do not match the individual or closely shared nature of personal tragedy “The previous unshakeable conviction that someone else was writing the inside of her head was gone”; the sudden realisation that the need to participate in a communal consciousness and affirm and even create a shared experience is replaced by the need to participate in her family's personal tragedy "She fell heavily out of the broad warm us, out of the story that had seemed , up until the last minute, to require her perpetual co-writing" but also a recognition that much of what she has learn through Twitter and the shared vocabulary and shortcuts she has established with her sister do enable them to find a way to navigate through and communicate during an impossible situation - “For whatever lives we lead they do prepare us for this moment.” But the strongest parts of this book are those which just examine the miracle of life, the smell of a baby’s head, that celebrate the small battles that her niece wins in a war that she was already destined to lose, even before her birth. And there are some hugely emotional moments - for example a diaper change, the second appearance of a poodle. There is so much else I could say about this book but I would urge people to engage with it. For anyone with an LRB subscription many ideas in the book were included in a British Museum lecture by the author shortly before lockdown (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n...) a lecture which the narrator also gives towards the end of the book in a nice meta twist. I first listened to this book in Audiobook form – where it is excellently narrated by Kristen Sieh who captures, I think, the tone of the book perfectly. If I had any criticism it would probably be to drop the accents – particularly the Australian one. One thing about listening to the Audiobook while say walking your dog (as I did) is that unlike reading a Kindle version, or a paper copy (but with a smartphone by your side) it is not so easy to Google the various references/memes etc and find yourself drawn into your own portal. Normally I would say that is a good thing – I aim (not always successfully) to use literature to escape from the omni-presence of the screen – but here I think this does not allow full identification with the underlying worldview at the centre of the book. And as for the cheating option – well this link (which I found after I finished helps) https://lithub.com/all-the-memes-in-p... but again I think turns entering the portal into staying on the outside looking in and so does not really work. My thanks to Bloomsbury UK Audio for an Audiobook ARC via NetGalley ...more |
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059331817X
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| 3.75
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really liked it
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The Nobel Laureate discussed his latest book on a Guardian Live event the evening of publication (with an audience of 3500+) – his first event of what
The Nobel Laureate discussed his latest book on a Guardian Live event the evening of publication (with an audience of 3500+) – his first event of what he calls a virtual world book tour. Alex Clarke hosted with questions asked by pre-recorded video by Daisy Johnson, Bernardine Evaristo, David Mitchell and Emma Thompson. Here are my notes on the evening. The genesis of the story is a children’s story – for children of 5-6 years old that Ishiguro had developed. He has always been fascinated by the link between the hopeful and sweet illustrations and the text – which, with a wish not to deceive our children too much, hint partly at the darker side of reality. He ran the short story past his daughter (Naomi – of course a novelist in her own right) in 2014-15 and was hold he could go nowhere near children with it as he would traumatise her. The story was about a stuffed toy bought by a girl in a shop – the girl was not well and the two of them watch the Sun pass from one side of the room to the other. The novel is more optimistic than the original children’s story. The Science/Artificial Intelligence idea is something he is also interested in – and he felt if the book was in an adult part-dystopian world – the teddy bear could be an AI Robot. Ishiguro enjoys writing with a distanced or alienated narrator which allow him to bring an external perspective on humanity and to focus on the oddness of the narrator. Klara fits this well – her entire role is to prevent loneliness in teenagers so her entire focus (initially) is on loneliness and what it means in humanity. This approach – a distanced narrator - allows him to focus on the themes he wants to explore in an economical way. He does not think of the setting of this novel as dystopian in the same way as “Never Let Me Go” – this is a confused world, in flux and trying to work out how to re-organise itself in response to rapid technological change. Historically – effectively his first three novels - he had very stable backgrounds (country houses for example) and tended to focus his novel on the darker sides of humanity. He then had a (his words) “rather odd” midpoint of his career when he focused on dream-scapes. In his last three novels including this one - he has (which he thinks is a process of maturity) to have a darker background but in his novels to celebrate the better parts of humanity. Klara believes in some form of innate goodness – and focuses on the Sun as a benign presence. His narrators often do not realise how lost they are until much later in the novel – or how little they are in control of their emotions and decisions. A lot of his books feature narrators (Stevens, Kathy, and now Klara) who do not realise until later that what they consider their best efforts are part of something different and less benign. He likes this idea as it captures how difficult it is for all of us to get a real perspective on the present and metaphorically the reality of our own lives. His early novels were written by narrators looking back at their life – trying to make sense of their life and their decisions. As he himself has got older he has realised you don’t even really see a clear path even in retrospect where critical decisions and mistakes can be identified – he now realises luck and circumstance have much greater effect. So he know sees this as a convenient storytelling device but as something he no longer wants to rely on. As someone who explores themes (and sees settings as secondary) he feels he has the freedom to try genres. He described his like for genre as slightly childlike – and a little like someone who likes to try their hand at cooking different types of food, he enjoys trying his hands at different genres. He then finds that some of the constraints and forms of the genre give his ideas more strength. His early models for great artists are people who switch genres – he mentioned Dylan’s switch from folk to electric which he was “in awe“ of as a 14-15 year old (by which time Dylan’s greatness as someone who switched genres was already established) . He also mentioned Stanley Kubrick (horror, science fiction, cold war satire), Miles Davis, Picasso. From an early age he understood that great artistry meant moving on – after writing “Remains of The Day” he felt he needed to go on an electric tour and get boo-d by his previous fans – something that happened a little with “The Unconsoled”. He likes to mention Worcestershire in every novel. David Mitchell (at the time on tour for his debut novel “Ghostwritten” asked him why he always mentioned it) – at the time he did not recognise this (and still does not think he did it in his first novel) but as a result he chose to make this his signature (as standing for a traditional part of England). He always writes in a first person style, addressed to some form of audience, because he still thinks of himself as a folk singer/songwriter performing his songs to a small pub (which was his original impression) He tends to start his book with the ending as the after-effect of a book, the emotions and ideas a reader is left with after reading, is the crucial thing he is aiming it. He thinks too much critical writing advice concentrates on how you keep a reader engaged as they read the book – he is far more interested in how to stay in the mind of a reader long after they have finished the book. He is far more interested in longevity than engagement and as a result sacrifices something of the reading experience to achieve this. Last year has shown a clear divide between two different views: a rational, evidence based version of the truth and an emotional version of truth (where what you feel and believe to be true is true) – and this divide (shown between the science of COVID-19 and the reaction of Trump supporters to the election) has made him fundamentally question what he does. Does fiction even deserve a Nobel Prize – are artists and fiction writers on the wrong side of the fence of this divide over truth. Is it enough anymore to simply say fiction is important because it contains emotional truth (which is what he says in his Nobel acceptance speech). ...more |
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0571366295
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| 3.69
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| May 06, 2021
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really liked it
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Now re-read following its deserved longlisting for the 2021 Booker Prize. This remains in my view the most literary and involved but also the most dem Now re-read following its deserved longlisting for the 2021 Booker Prize. This remains in my view the most literary and involved but also the most demanding book on the longlist - one I thoroughly enjoyed but would hesitate to recommend to many others. ….when we were building the second place, and had come to start calling it that in a way I knew would never change if we carried on doing it much longer, I said to him that ‘second place’ pretty much summed up how I felt about myself and my life – that it had been a near miss, requiring just as much effort as victory but with that victory always and forever somehow denied me, by a force that I could only describe as the force of pre-eminence. I could never win, and the reason I couldn’t seemed to lie within certain infallible laws of destiny that I was powerless – as the woman I was – to overcome. I ought to have accepted it at the beginning, and spared myself the effort! Tony listened to me, and I could tell he was slightly surprised by what I was saying, and that he was thinking about why he was, and after a long time he said: Rachel Cusk’s latest novel is partly inspired by “Lorenzo in Taos” – the American art patron Mable Dodge Luhan’s account of a rather fraught (on both sides) visit to her New Mexican pueblo-based literary colony by DH Lawrence and his wife in 1922. Any true appreciation of this novel involves some engagement with that earlier book. Paul’s evolving review here is capturing - with my assistance - a very large number of links between the two books (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) which cover many (but by no means all -there are many other influences) of the otherwise apparent oddities or slightly out of place images and actions in this novel. This novel is narrated as a first person recollection by “M” to an unknown (to us) recipient – Jeffers. The book starts with M describing a rather series of events in Paris when she was in her first marriage – events which occur immediately prior to a train journey where she meets the Devil with unspecified but catastrophic consequences for her life. After an evening spent flirting unsuccessfully with a famous writer, she comes across a gallery exhibiting paintings by an artist L which, particularly the landscapes (as well as a portrait of an unknown woman), somehow speak to her at a profound level. This part seems to link strongly with an incident in Transit (https://www.vice.com/en/article/xdw3d...) featuring the painter Marsden Hartley. 15 years later M is living with her easy-going second husband Tony in a property on a coastal marsh where they have discovered and renovated a cottage (the eponymous second home) which they use as a place for visiting artists to work. The marsh has the same effect on M as L’s landscapes and she writes to the now extremely successful L (via a mutual acquaintance) inviting him to stay with them. Initially he demurs and stays with some of his wealthy patrons – but an unspecified catastrophe (which both leads to an asset price collapse – including L’s own property and his paintings – and travel restrictions) leads him to accept. Most of the book tells of L’s stay – which decidedly does not go to M’s plans. She seems convinced first of all that L will form a bond with her (and perhaps see her as a muse if not lover) and, more so, that the marsh landscape will inspire his work, and his painting somehow express what the marshland means to M. In practice this aim is frustrated both by: L’s aloof and unfeeling and rather exaggerated character - with an attitude to m which seems equal parts pity, contempt and dismissal); and by the presence of others – L comes with a young British companion in tow, the preposterously accomplished (for her age) Brett, and the circumstances lead to M’s adult daughter Justine and her boyfriend Kurt (a rather absurdly confident character who one day decides to knock up a fantasy novel unwittingly plagiarised from one he has read) to stay also. From then on the book examines the dynamics between the group – but always filtered through M’s obsession with her original intentions for L’s visit. The themes explored by Cusk through M are many and include but are far from limited to : Motherhood and marriage (and ideas in both of identity, sacrifice, obliteration, communication, evolution of roles and the loss that comes with it, freedom and obligation)l Privilege (in many forms – sex, age, wealth and status) Art (its relationship to reality, the workings of the art world, how we view art and how it can both reflect, magnify and alter our thoughts, the necessary character to be a successful artist and its implications for other aspects of the artists life and relationships Because this is partly a story of will, and of the consequences of exerting it, you will notice, Jeffers, that everything I determined to happen happened, but not as I wanted it! This is the difference, I suppose, between an artist and an ordinary person: the artist can create outside himself the perfect replica of his own intentions. The rest of us just create a mess, or something hopelessly wooden, no matter how brilliantly we imagined it. That’s not to say that we don’t all of us have some compartment in which we too are able to achieve ourselves instinctively, to leap without looking, but the bringing of things into permanent existence is an achievement of a different order. The closest most people come to it is in having a child. And nowhere are our mistakes and limitations more plainly written than there! As one would expect with Cusk – this is a deep and quotable book, one which teeters somewhere – like much of her writing - on just the right side of the boundary of genius and pretentiousness, but one which occasionally trespasses the boundary as well as making the occasional excursion to the territory of farce. One of my Goodreads friends has made the criticism of the author's work that some of her more profound and widely quoted sentences have equal weight if the nouns are reversed - so I was amused to see One afternoon I came upon him standing by the prow of the landlocked boat, just as he had been the day of our very first conversation, and this coincidence led me to exclaim, somewhat absurdly: ‘So much has changed, and yet nothing has!’ When of course, Jeffers, it would have been as true – and as meaningless – to say that nothing had changed and yet so much had. It also has (to quote an early Hilary Mantel view of Cusk’s work) her “bracing mix of scorn and compassion” – in fact M says something similar of L’s work part of L’s greatness lay in his ability to be right about the things that he saw, and what confounded me was how, at the plane of living, this rightness could be so discordant and cruel And this of course both of these elements (one I think accidental but one very deliberate) lead to another element of Cusk’s writing – its use of auto-fiction, its idea of telling a story ostensibly about others but at least partly (if not largely) about the story teller – something which is true of Cusk’s narrators (most famously in her annihilated perspective of the Outline/Transit/Kudos trilogy) but also of Cusk herself. Fans of Cusk’s autofictional approach will not be disappointed here - and there are lots of these references. One, I think, of the key themes of the book is how male artists get away with being self-absorbed, abrasive and arrogant in a way never possible for a woman (and of female complicity in this). One might say how does Ms Cusk get pilloried on MumsNet while Mr. Self appears on Shooting Stars The very marshland setting of the novel is of course a nod to Rachel Cusk and her second husband’s own recently sold stunning property in the North Norfolk saltmarsh village of Stiffkey and I was of course reminded of various snarky tweets by literary commentators (for example John Self) that I saw when that house was put on the market last year by this observation by L ‘Who pays for all this?’ he asked. ‘The house and the land belong to Tony. I have some money of my own.’ ‘I can’t imagine your little books make all that much.’ And the switch of landscape from teh Mexican pueblo in "Lorenzo in Taos" to Cusk's own marsh, an area I know very well with its tides and shifting currents and ever changing, ever flowing landscape is brilliantly justified by this quote from the first book "It is terribly difficult for me to explain these things to you. Jeffers, these tides and currents that compromise the relationships between people - the fluid come and do that constitute so different a reality from the solid, staring fixed appearance of faces" The character of L (and the idea of changing the real life Lawrence - one of Cusk's favourite authors due to the brutal honesty of his writing) to a painter still named "L" seems like a deliberate nod to Cusk's favourite painter Lovis Corinth and many of the ideas in the book are similar to those in this 2011 short story (https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...) and some are almost directly lifted from this lecture (https://vanderleeuwlezing.nl/sites/de...). Fans of Cusk will also know that all her books feature a dog – even though she herself has never owned one (and is allergic to them) and her rather deliciously there is a whole section around a non-dog used to summarise M’s troubled and complex relationship to her husband and daughter. Justine often asked me why Tony and I didn’t get a dog, since our life was ideally suited to having one and since she knew Tony had always had dogs before he met me. …. The truth was, Jeffers, I feared that if Tony got a dog, it would become the centre of his attention, and he would give it friendship and affection that should have come to me. I was in a sense in competition with this theoretical pet, many of whose characteristics – loyalty, devotion, obedience – I believed I already demonstrated ……….. I would say that this non-dog had come to stand for the concept of security, …. I mention this because it illustrates how in matters of being and becoming, an object can remain itself even at the mercy of conflicting perspectives. The non-dog represented the necessity for trusting and finding security in human beings: I preferred it that way, but Tony and Justine only had to get a sniff of that proposition to take fright. Yet the non-dog was a fact, at least for Tony and for me, and we were able to agree on it, even while it meant different things to each of us. The fact represented the boundary or separation between us, and between any two people, that it is forbidden to cross. …. all I could do was suspect, from my side of the boundary, that the two chief recipients of my love – Tony and Justine – both privately yearned for something mute and uncritical to love them instead. My thanks to Faber for an ARC via NetGalley. ...more |
Notes are private!
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0571336485
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| 3.67
| 5,633
| Feb 04, 2021
| Feb 04, 2021
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really liked it
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Now winner of the 2022 RSL Encore Prize for second novels. I re-read this book after its longlisting for the 2021 Booker Prize. A book which starts wi Now winner of the 2022 RSL Encore Prize for second novels. I re-read this book after its longlisting for the 2021 Booker Prize. A book which starts with what I think is a flawed underlying concept (which makes me think it should not have been on the longlist), but one which has, again in my view, easily the best ending of any book on the longlist (one which even makes me hope it makes the shortlist). I was also very impressed by this interview (https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/article...) and what the author was aiming to achieve, even if he did not entirely succeed. I would contrast this with say "The Promise" where the author did succeed in his aims but ones I felt were largely worthless. ORIGINAL REVIEW Francis Spufford has explained the real-life incident which lead to this book – a V2 rocket attack on a branch of Woolworths in New Cross in 1944 while killed 168 including many young children – and the idea he had of imagining a similar attack (in a fictional South London borough – Bexford) but then imagining an alternate future where the attack did not happen – and then following the course of the lives of the five dead children at 15 year intervals from 1949 to 2009 (following each character for a day) – as a way also of plotting London history over that time. The publisher when it announced it had won the rights to the book said – in what serves as an excellent introduction to the book’s five key characters: November 1944. A German rocket incinerates a south London household-goods store, and five young lives are atomised in an instant. Jo and Valerie and Alec and Ben and Vernon are gone. But what if it were possible to resurrect them – to let them experience the extraordinary, unimaginable changes of the 20th century; to live out all the personal triumphs and disasters, the second chances and redemptions denied them? What kind of future would there be for clever, impulsive Alec? What would happen to Val in the world of men, beckoning beyond her all-female household? What would become of Vern’s greed – and his helplessness in the face of song? Would light or darkness fill Ben’s fragile mind? And where would Jo go, with the music playing in her head?" The biggest problem with the book – is that this concept rather than adding to the book by adding an intriguing element to it – seems to distract from what is in essence a well told novel. Conceptually this book starts after Atkinson but soon goes all Apted. The author I think could have gone several ways with the concept – and chose none of them. The first was to effectively run an alternate course of history – one or more of the children making a profound impact on history: I understand and respect why he did not do this - the aim of the book is to celebrate the ordinary as remarkable, to identify that any life cut short closes a world of possibilities for that person and their family. The second was I think to write a story but with a subtle “butterfly effect” so that overtime, without any obvious explanation, the world diverged from our own – I think here the author very much wanted to write about the real post war history of London so this would not have worked. A third, and perhaps what I had assumed, was more of a Kate Atkinson style playing with the idea of fate – either with repeated choices and forks of outcome, or with more of an unveiling revelation about what we are reading. I think this could have been done in a way which served the author's purpose and added a poignancy to the novel. Instead the concept – other than a very brief passage at the end where one character has a sudden moment when passing the building which used to house the local Woolworths- is largely forgotten and really becomes irrelevant to the story. As an example – the very basic characters of the five as set out in the publishers blurb are not revealed at all in the opening chapter but instead in the 1949 chapter as four of them are at school together and one at a Millwall match. It is very hard not to conclude that the book would have worked more genuinely if it had been represented as what it actually is: a story of five post-war schoolchildren and how their lives diverged (and occasionally intersected) in ways whose basic foundations were, in many cases, established in their childhood – something which is examined by revisiting them at regular intervals (a little like the 7-up, 14-up etc television series – the producer of who - Michael Apted - I found as I wrote my review died on the very day I started reading the book – 8 January 2021). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Now since I wrote my review I have seen several others that have referenced the same idea (I think I was the first to make the Apted link) and so I was interested that this has made its way to the author who has in an interview tried to explain what he was looking to achieve Q: Could you have written the book without the counterfactual element, that is, without showing the reader the ‘actual’ deaths at the beginning? And simply having the ‘possible lives’ as ‘lives'? --------------------------------------------------------------- Putting all that to one side – we do have a fascinating book and an fascinating history of London (and more broadly English) post-war society - including with a group of white characters (remember that the UK was something like 99%+ white post war, pre Windrush) dealing in different ways with an increasingly multi-cultural and politically evolving Britain. Vernon mixes a life long love of opera with a lifetime of rather shady property development (taking in council house sales, the London property boom, the Global Financial crisis and my favourite scene which covers both a catered dinner at Glyndebourne with the Lloyd’s crisis) - for a lover of opera though he realises at the book's end that his theme song has its origins more on the terraces of the Den. Jo – whose synesthesia seems to somewhat fade – initially escapes London and her life of domesticity for a West Coast US lifestyle (this for me was by far the most pointless and weakest of the storylines), only to be drawn back by the fate of Val who finds herself irresistibly drawn to a mod leader turned skinhead and racist agitator. Val's subsequent involvement with The Samaritans is one of the best scenes in the novel. Alec takes us through the print unions (this part is particularly excellent), the Thatcher counter-revolution and later to the world of school deregulation (and a reminder of mental illness in the 21st Century). And the most profound story is of Ben – with the most challenging and bravura scenes in the novel being two of mental illness (one in and one out of hospital) as well as a tremendously uplifting one of a brief period of family contentment and a peaceful ending. For my tastes there is too much music in the book but the author has said that was a deliberate choice it is trying to be true to the way that music is the popular art. It’s the big serious thing which gets everywhere, and other than firework displays making everyone go ‘ooh’ I can’t think of anything, except music, which reaches into almost all lives I can sympathize with that but I just felt that the author did not find a way to write about music in this kind of universal sense or in a way which built my empathy or understanding for the individual experience of each character to music. The author has talked of his Costa, RSL Ondaatje and Desmond Elliot Prize winning debut novel “Golden Hill” as a “brocade-embroidered waistcoat” – and this by contrast as a “Formica table” – and I think that is a little misleading: some of the novel is very down to earth – there is for example a lengthy examination of washing up – but some, particularly towards the end of the 2009 sections, is very descriptive, almost to the point of overwriting - particular I think as the author tries to link back to his motivating idea. An idea is in his head, the mercury consenting to be chased slowly to a standstill. Who knows if it’s true. But if the different bits and pieces of his life, rising, lofted as if by a bubble of force from below, are arranged in a messy spiral of hours and years, then mightn’t it be the case, mightn’t there be a place, mightn’t there be an angle, from which you could see the whole accidental mass composing, just from that angle, into some momentary order you could never have noticed at the time? Mightn’t there be a line of sight, not ours, from which the seeming cloud of debris of our days, no more in order than (say) the shredded particles riding the wavefront of an explosion, prove to align? And for me, perhaps no surprise given some of the author’s non-fiction writings (and his wife being in Church of England Ministry), the most refreshing part of the book was its positive attitude towards the consolation of religion – something in which both troubled souls in the book – Ben and Val find some sense of healing/peace and support respectively. This final passage alone both I think helped the book get on the Booker longlist - with Rowan Williams as a judge - and in my view more than justifies its place there. Praise him in all the postcodes, thinks Ben. Praise him on the commuter trains: praise him upon the drum and bass. Praise him at the Ritz: praise him in the piss-stained doorways. Praise him in nail bars: praise him with beard oil. Praise him in toddler groups: praise him at food banks. Praise him in the parks and playgrounds: praise him down in the Tube station at midnight. Praise him with doner kebabs: praise him with Michelin stars. Praise him on pirate radio: praise him on LBC and Capital: praise him at Broadcasting House. Praise him at Poundland: praise him at Harvey Nichols. Praise him among the trafficked and exploited: praise him in hipster coffee houses. Praise him in the industrial estates: praise him in leather bars. Praise him on the dancefloors: praise him on the sickbeds. Praise him in the high court of Parliament: praise him in the prisons and crack houses. Praise him at Pride: praise him at Carnival: praise him at Millwall and West Ham, Arsenal and Chelsea and Spurs. Praise him at Eid: praise him at High Mass: praise him on Shabbat: praise him in the gospel choirs. Praise him, all who hope: praise him, all who fear: praise him, all who dream: praise him, all who remember. Praise him in trouble. Praise him in joy. Let everything that has breath, give praise. My thanks to Faber and Faber for an ARC via NetGalley. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 09, 2021
Jan 08, 2021
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Sep 11, 2021
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Dec 07, 2020
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