Michael Frayn, A Very Private Life, 1968

Though it depicts a future dystopia, A Very Private Life is actually less a science fiction novel and more a futurist fairy tale. The young female protagonist Uncumber lives in a sterile underground world in which personal privacy is paramount, being a cultural reaction against the invasions of privacy that began in the 20th century. Emotions must be drug-induced to be acceptable, babies are made at the factory when you provide the ingredients, and dark glasses are the only item of clothing because they help keep your feelings to yourself. But, being a bit of a rebel, Uncumber looks for something more tactile and goes on her way to the outside world in search of Noli, a surface-living man she accidentally encountered on her holovision TV. He turns out to be a selfish low class polygamist among other things, and her situation get worse from there. As an allegory for the dangers of withdrawal from the world A Very Private Life works well but the story never really comes alive as anything other than a mild comedy of manners. Yes, life is always far more complex than we can perceive from a naïve standpoint, but that observation seems self-evident from the beginning and the development of this theme never really moves beyond second gear.  PY

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Sebastian Faulks, Pistache, 2006

A while before Faulks had written a new James Bond novel he’d already done a ‘pistache‘ (pastiche, piss-take, whatever) of Ian Fleming, one among many other short pieces for BBC Radio 4’s The Write Stuff that are collected here as flash fictions and poetry written in the styles of others. I can appreciate perfectly about half of them (and they are all indeed rather clever), but that half also reveals my own tastes and prejudices: Martin Amis has his first day at Hogwarts (probably my favourite), James Bond goes shopping, Dan Brown visits the ATM, Enid Blyton’s Famous Five are drafted by the Anti-Terrorist Squad, George Orwell confronts the real 1984, Harold Pinter writes a TV sitcom, Shakespeare composes a speech for Basil Fawlty... and on and on. The mind does boggle a bit at how diverse Faulks has shown he can be, and stay funny and mostly original too.  PY

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Friday short fiction #38: Nigeria

Irene Becker   Posing Children   2010
Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it’s far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do – it can make us identify with situations and people far away. If it does that, it’s a miracle.
— Chinua Achebe, The Altantic Online, 2 August 2000

The worst realities of our age are manufactured realities. It is therefore our task, as creative participants in the universe, to re-dream our world. The fact of possessing imagination means that everything can be re-dreamed. Each reality can have it.
— Ben Okri

For no readily apparent reason, this week I picked another country that, like Pakistan, a) I’d like to know better than I do, b) has a hard time shaking off negative stereotypes, and c) is clearly a significant creative force in world literature. Of the dozen or so Nigerian short stories I read this week, these six go from the traditional to the mainstream to the fantastic and science fictional.

Chinua Achebe, ‘Dead Men’s Path’    –  1953
A new and ambitious headmaster of a Nigerian village school comes up against local folklore concerning the spirits of the dead. This is the kind of story which may be emblematic of what Nigerian fiction used to focus on relentlessly: the clash of local beliefs with the civilising influence of ‘progress’ and colonialism. The story reads with a rather dusty air of antiquity when compared with the liveliness of what’s coming from Nigerian writers today.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, ‘A Private Experience’    –  THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK, 2009
Two Nigerian women, one a rich Christian and one a poor Muslim, take shelter in an abandoned shop to escape rioting in Kano. This is a mature and understated story, one that also encapsulates the huge gulf between cultures that precariously co-exist within Nigeria’s borders.

Helon Habila, ‘The Second Death of Martin Lango’    –  THE GUARDIAN, 7 SEPTEMBER 2011
The latest in The Guardian’s series of short fiction connected with the tenth anniversary of 9/11. A Nigerian immigrant in Washington DC relates how he met up with a man he believes he once met in Lagos, someone who may not have been who he claimed to be. This story feels authentic and gives a good sense of the long passage of years between that day and today. I have a fair amount of respect for Habila’s debut novel Waiting for an Angel, and last week I added his third novel Oil on Water to my TBR pile.

Nnedi Okorafor, ‘Spider the Artist’    –  JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS, ed., SEEDS OF CHANGE, 2008
In the near future, killer spider robots protect the oil pipelines in the Niger Delta, but one woman finds an unexpected connection with a spider that shows some creative intelligence. Nigerian American Okorafor is already a winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature, and this is an uncomplicated tale that makes me want to see what she wrought with last year’s novel Who Fears Death.

Ben Okri, ‘Worlds That Flourish’    –  STARS OF THE NEW CURFEW, 1988
My only previous encounter with the writing of the Booker-winning Ben Okri did not end well, in fact I reacted rather emphatically against Astonishing the Gods and have long felt I needed to give the guy another chance. His 1988 collection Stars of the New Curfew is a good place to start, and opens with an evocative epigraph from poet Christopher Okigbo (“We carry in our worlds that flourish our worlds that have failed”) that gives shape to this story. It describes the increasingly hallucinatory journey of a man who leaves his apartment in an abandoned African city to find a strange group of people living in the jungle in a different kind of reality. It’s dark and a little dangerous with some strong imagery in which nothing is as it first appears, and ends with a clever looping back to an earlier point in the story. This was a marker on the road for Okri’s use of more imaginative imagery, and his increasing rejection of more conventional forms of fiction. I’m now becoming far more inclined to pick up The Famished Road.

&  Favourite short story of the week — E.C. Osondu, ‘Waiting’    –  GUERNICA MAGAZINE, OCTOBER 2008
In a Red Cross camp for war orphans, teenagers await the day they will be picked by American families and transported to a new life abroad. This has a truly great opening paragraph that somehow sets the scene without actually doing any scene-setting, and the story is then fleshed out admirably with great dialogue and incident right up to the end, which leaves the reader hanging a little but wanting more. This is vivid writing.

Haruki Murakami, after the quake, 2000

For some enigmatic reason Murakami wanted this collection’s English title to be devoid of capital letters and all in lower case. The six stories are all set in February 1995, a month after the devastation of the Kobe earthquake (and a month before the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway that Murakami explored in Underground), and while the characters he writes about were not directly affected by the earthquake it nevertheless created some other far-reaching and more personal seismic shifts. This is Murakami’s focus here, and only the story ‘Super-Frog Saves Tokyo’ has his trademark use of surreal imagery, the rest are very down-to-earth stories and all are told in the third person – again, a departure from previous style. Murakami has a deft way with characterisation and these stories all get their point across with an easy-going precision. ‘Landscape with Flatiron’ cleverly parallels a famous Jack London short story, but for me the best of all is the story ‘Thailand’, about a bitter Japanese woman on holiday there who, with her ex-husband in Kobe, is shown an unusual way to let go of her heart of stone. There are undercurrents of violence present in this collection, much like the seismic dangers that are always present but held at bay in the ground beneath our feet.  PY

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Collin Piprell, Bangkok Knights, 1989

Thailand has a boisterous and sometimes shady breed of expat fiction, something with which you take your chances and inevitably court disappointment. Canadian author and journalist Collin Piprell started out writing guide books for Thailand’s diving community then worked his way into getting his short fiction published in the Bangkok Post. These are bar stories, yet their quality may be a cut above the rest in this often seedy sub-genre of world literature because Bangkok Knights has already received three different editions from three different publishers. If so, this collection probably sets a good ‘bar story’ standard: all of them are gently humorous or bittersweet in tone, neither outlandishly sexist nor patronising, and they share a cast of fairly well characterised (if sometimes rather clichéd) expat Western males combined with an assortment of colourful (if also rather clichéd) Thai females. What I expected to find, and certainly did, is that uneasy distrust that often sees them eyeing each other warily over the cultural barricades while still needing each other for various pre-determined selfish reasons, in fact it’s often this cultural frisson that informs each story’s plot.

The first-person narrator of all the stories remains largely invisible throughout except for a couple of episodes, one which describes a journalistic trip up the Maekok river that goes disastrously wrong (in fact the only non-bar story in the collection and probably the best), and the final outing which is an interesting mixture of relationship and identity crises running in parallel, something that probably comes upon any emotionally unattached, long-time expat resident of Thailand. Piprell has also written three novels – I expect I’ll be reading them all.  PY

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Blake Butler, Scorch Atlas, 2009

Fourteen linked prose stories about the end of the world as we know it, but this is not a polite apocalypse after which there remains some kind of structure to life after the event. No, Butler’s vision is to turn everything completely inside out with nothing left to grasp onto: weather, society, bodies, the mind, and especially families which most of the stories are structured around. However life does go on somehow, and Butler pushes the reader through one impossible event after another with a variety of narrative voices that never question what is happening to them – try ‘The Many Forms of Rain’ for a sample. It’s an extraordinary and often jarring experiment, and as apocalypse fictions go this has to be a benchmark, something that for a long time will be hard to top.  PY

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Gaétan Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 1998

A deliberately difficult book to form any kind of mental dialogue with, its talkative narrator being a nameless teenage girl whose weird father dies in the first paragraph. With her and her brother never having been beyond the boundaries of their home, her perspective is particularly unique and discomfiting when she becomes forced to deal with the outside world. She also has a gender identity problem, and this is totally embedded into her narrative to the extent that the reader also becomes unsure, and from there the nightmare gets progressively worse. An impressive, disturbing and cunningly told story, with very menacing undercurrents.  PY

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Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, A Life on Paper, 2010

This first collection of twenty-two of Châteaureynaud’s short stories to appear in English is a very welcome addition to genre bookshelves. His stories may be bizarre and frequently disconcerting, but I’d still struggle to describe Châteaureynaud specifically as a genre writer, at least in the Anglo-Saxon sense of how we define that word: he specifically avoids invoking horror and fear in the reader, instead choosing a far more understated approach to getting across the essence of his surreal mysteries. He occasionally also employs science fictional tropes, although he never lapses into an over-reliance on them to purvey his sense of elusive, dreamy strangeness – he is far more subtle than that. I didn’t actually find the book’s description of Châteaureynaud as “France’s own Kurt Vonnegut” that helpful (apart from the obvious physical resemblance) as Châteaureynaud’s writing possesses an elegance that Vonnegut rarely achieved, but perhaps that’s partly down to the translations by Edward Gauvin, who frequently displays a knack for precision in finding that English mot juste wherever it’s needed – Châteaureynaud is actually more Kafkaesque in his leanings, perhaps with a dash of Calvino. Several stories stand out: ‘The Only Mortal’ is probably the liveliest (and funniest) story here, ‘Delaunay the Broker’ is masterful in the way it compounds its central mystery, but for sheer unique strangeness it’s hard to better the eponymous ‘A Life on Paper’ in this collection. If this ever gets a paperback edition – which it really deserves, and further collections would be very welcome too – then I expect it will sell very well, and Châteaureynaud deserves to become a much more familiar name to English language readers.  PY

•  Edward Gauvin’s translation of A Life on Paper won the Long Form Category of the first Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Award in 2011.

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Guillaume Lecasble, Lobster, 2003

In the dining rooms of the Titanic, Lobster sees his parents getting eaten, then is about to get boiled alive himself at precisely the moment the ship hits the iceberg. Instead he experiences an erotic encounter with a refined but sexually frustrated woman just as the ship sinks, giving him a taste for life as a human without a hard shell to contain his desires, and a desperate need to find his belle Angelina again after they become separated in the lifeboats. I’m no stranger to bizarro fiction and the vaguely repellent feeling one gets from its use of extreme or uncomfortable allegory, but Lobster actually left me behind a quarter of the way through, just to let me catch up again only in the last ten pages. Lecasble’s first novel (he’s an artist and film-maker also) has a theme of unrestrained desire but Lecasble seems undecided about precisely what to do with it: if it’s a paean to the idea (as in the first half) it might just as well be a warning against it (as in the second). Not a winner then in terms of an elegantly communicated concept – and I doubt it’s the translation that’s at fault – but certainly a great success in giving you imagery you’d simply rather not have floating around inside your head.  PY

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Latifa Zayyat, The Owner of the House, 1994

Samia’s husband Mohamed is a fugitive political prisoner on the run from the Egyptian police, and as she joins him in hiding, with all the necessary games to conceal identities, her struggle becomes an internal as well as an external one, leaving her with the possibility of being doubly enslaved. This is a novel of metaphor, mostly concerning the parallels of her situation with an individual’s relationship to the state. The narrative occasionally becomes a little disconnected whenever Samia looks inward, giving us, in effect, two stories that have blurred boundaries. It’s a successful novel in getting across its message of escape from both mental and physical oppressions – relevant still to what happened to Egypt in 2011 – but perhaps less successful in terms of narrative, indeed I found myself having to re-read previous paragraphs to recap what appeared to be minor points that were in fact major ones. The Owner of the House requires some close reading to be best understood, and the long introduction is also necessary to ground the story in context, which is partly that of Zayyat’s own life.  PY

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Donald Antrim, The Hundred Brothers, 1997

This bizarre novel has a superb opening sentence that takes up two pages, in which the highly unreliable and self-deceiving narrator Doug introduces his ninety-nine brothers (aged from 30 to 93) and explains what they plan to do over the course of a single night in the collapsing library of their late philandering father’s decrepit mansion. Of course, it doesn’t go exactly according to plan, instead it ends up the way these gatherings always do, in a squall of fights, exhibitions of puerile insecurities and generally asinine behaviour. It’s a black comedy of manners in which little gets resolved, a skillfully crafted and often surreal work that’s set in the present day, although at times it’s given a historical feel largely through the Rabelaisian extravagance of the brothers’ caricatures, done in a way that makes it feel as if one’s viewing an animated Hogarth sketch. But The Hundred Brothers is also as conceptual as it is comedic as the brothers’ childish antics are played out in sections of the library that allude to the loftiest aspirations of Western thought, and it will inevitably appeal to fans of Robertson Davies largely because of the comic intelligence with which it’s written. The cover notes go in for things like “the Marx Brothers - times twenty-five - performing a Harold Pinter play”, but the most succinct is the pull-quote “A mad wrestling match of a book”, because that feels exactly right. We could certainly do with reading a few more erudite comedies like this largely because they set a very high watermark indeed.  PY

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Paul Auster, Man in the Dark, 2008

August Brill, an insomniac and retired book critic, composes in his head a story of a parallel America to fill the early morning hours. It’s a world in which 9/11 never happened and the US never went into Iraq (instead being preoccupied by the bigger nightmare of a secessionist civil war), and it’s a world in which he himself plays a remote but defining role. The science fictional element can’t be ignored but for the book to work in the way Auster probably intended, it ought to be (and of course others have done this particular kind of parallel world thing so much better). It’s just August Brill’s particular distraction, while his real preoccupation is his fractured family, defined by divorces and the violent death of his granddaughter Katya’s boyfriend in Iraq. Another sizeable part of the book is taken up with August and Katya’s eloquent discussions of movies – another deliberate distraction. If not set in darkened rooms or out in the night, most of this book takes place at least with a dark aura of regret and atonement, with everyone wishing to be somewhere else, and the distractions are coping mechanisms that help them occasionally look away from painful truths. I wouldn’t say this a brilliant book by any stretch of the imagination – the parallel world thread isn’t rigorous enough, for one thing – but I like the fact it’s not burdened by too much structure, feeling loose and improvised instead even though Auster clearly knew where he was going with it. It’s also a book that offers up many of the wisdoms of hindsight, and is all the better for that.  PY

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Paul Auster, Timbuktu, 1999

Mr. Bones is the canine companion of homeless Willy G. Christmas, the rather unhinged son of some Polish immigrants to New York and someone whose dreams exist far beyond the reach of his abilities. Timbuktu is a small marvel of empathetic writing: Auster puts the reader right inside Mr. Bones head and, anthropomorphism notwithstanding, you see the world through his senses, filtered through his panicky and slightly desperate nature as well as his unswerving devotion to the humans who show him love when he needs it. John Berger later did a similar thing with King – viewing homelessness through the eyes of a dog – and although this may not be a typical Auster novel it’s still a very rewarding distraction.  PY

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Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments, 1995

Finding generally available Holocaust memoirs published outside of Yad Vashem is not always easy, and not made easier by questions about the authenticity of books such as Jerzy Kozinski’s The Painted Bird and Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments, which is now recognised as a rather unfortunate work of fiction. Wilkomirski’s now notorious 1995 ‘memoir’ had not been published for long in several other languages when, in 1998, questions were being asked by Swiss journalist Daniel Ganzfried about the authenticity of Wilkomirski himself. His investigations uncovered the likely perpetration of a deliberate literary fraud, and when the questions became accusations Wilkomirski’s literary agent commissioned Swiss historian Stefan Maechler to deconstruct Fragments and learn the truth about Wilkomirski. The ‘Wilkomirski affair’ is now well documented, but the potted history is that Wilkomirski was the son of a single Swiss mother who was given up for adoption at the age of two, is neither Polish nor Jewish nor had brothers (as he claims), had never set foot in a concentration camp, was brought up with the name Bruno Dössekker by a middle-class Zurich couple, and eventually worked as a classical musician. The best, ultimately, that can be said for Fragments is that it appears to be a misguided and unfortunate (perhaps even cynical) blurring of the line between metaphor and truth; at worst it may have undermined the reputations of several historians, educationalists and therapists who still believe it has proper contextual relevance and meaning, it provided fuel to Holocaust revisionists, and fooled a considerable number of people.

The book itself is a series of disjointed ‘recovered memories’, a shaky enough foundation on which to base a Holocaust memoir. The premise of the book is that Wilkomirski’s true parents were murdered by Nazis in Riga, Poland, and he continued to survive alone as a child in Majdanek and Birkenau before being smuggled out to Switzerland at the end of the war. His adoptive parents claimed his concentration camp memories were just bad dreams that he must forget, but with help he was able to establish that these memories were ’real’. Fragments was therefore driven by the need to fill a large hole in his past, which his adoptive parents refused to share with him. Why would Dössekker perpetrate such a fraud, when there appears to be no motive other than the attention-seeking behaviour of someone claiming victimhood? It is this that shouts loudest in Fragments, written with the tone of a scared child throughout, a persona which Wilkomirski/Dössekker carried through convincingly in his public appearances as the awards rolled in. In retrospect, with some self-imposed editing and revision it could have made a legitimate (if rather strained and brutal) work of children’s fiction, and Dössekker could have kept his credibility intact instead of being forced into hiding.

So knowing it’s a fraud, why read a book such as this? Mostly to view the tone with which it is written, to see if one can smell the rat and maybe see where Wilkomirski trips himself up. These ’recovered memories’ are far too detailed to be authentic. The style is one in which almost every paragraph, filled with “shards of memory with...knife-sharp edges”, craves sympathy for yet another hardship, yet another injustice or indignity, calculated to bleed you dry of emotion. Comparisons are sometimes made with Elie Wiesel’s Night, recognised as a legitimate memoir but still with its own detractors, though Wilkomirski seems to want to go one better by delivering his points of impact with an overbearing intention to shock: adults are dangerous because they are best at fooling you, children stand in buckets of shit to keep their feet warm, babies die from gnawing their fingers to the bone for lack of food. At an early point in the book, presumably as a suppressed memory, Wilkomirski witnesses the murder of his father and from this point on women are mostly portrayed as stern nurturers and men as psychopathic murderers, a delineation that lacks balanced realism. This tells you it is not so much ‘us vs. them’ in the context of a Holocaust memoir, as ‘big vs. small’ or ‘me vs. everyone else’, with only a loose grounding in verifiable fact.

It was a technique that in terms of literary style alone perhaps should not have fooled as many as it did, yet in other places, relieved of its unfortunate accompanying baggage, it is easy to see why Fragments initially received the accolades “small masterpiece”, “stunning”, “unforgettable”, and “morally important”. But in truth it is nothing more than a catalogue of invented horrors, supposedly unquestionable because of their sacrosanct location, and as a piece of holocaust literature Fragments is now worthless even as a legitimate novel, only worth reading for the curiosity value and necessarily to be taken with massive pinch of salt.  PY

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Joanna Russ, The Female Man, 1975

Some may have been thinking this inclusion on the SF Masterworks list is well overdue, and they’re probably right. Russ plays a part in her own novel (her most famous) about alternates of herself that may exist out there in the multiverse, with the broad differences between them being defined along the lines of their degrees of emancipation. By including herself in her novel even though she largely takes a back seat, this seemed to be the most honest way Russ could explore the subject of women’s unequal role in society by comparing four possible universes, one of which is her own. The most prominent is of course the Joanna Russ that is Janet Evason, inhabitant of a far future Earth renamed Whileaway in which men died out in a selective plague 800 years previously; then there’s the Russ that is Jeannine Dadier from an alternate present in which WW2 never happened and American women are universally the stay-at-home types, and the fourth Russ is Jael Reasoner, combatant in a protracted and violent future war against men, who brought the four of them together for purposes she will eventually reveal. Russ does not fire off her flaming arrows at only the men, as her female characters often come in for an equally tough critique. She wrote the story scattergun-fashion with the four different points of view interchanging frequently and denying the reader any chance of experiencing a straightforward narrative, however the novel still hangs together nicely and the unusual composition is a major part of the book’s originality.

On publication The Female Man may have been a wake-up call for the men at the time who were prepared to take it on, as it is undeniably didactic. As a sequel to her Nebula Award-winning short story ‘When It Changed’, it’s probably fair to say Russ’s prickly and often very humourous rants are a little less reflective, directly, of the experience of Western women today. However much things have improved and however much the battleground may have shifted, the objective hasn’t: the glass ceiling is still there and the ongoing battles for equality of opportunity in the West are still no less important than those that went before. The Female Man can still put fire in the belly of feminists everywhere, including myself, and while it’s probably a layer or two beneath the current strata of feminist experience and thinking (that evolution could certainly be commented on better by others, not myself) it was certainly pivotal to some of the feminist literature that came after. However much this was a product of its day, its age is beginning to show a little and that’s actually something to celebrate, as its impassioned and very likeable ending itself makes clear. Certainly a masterwork, and still an invigorating book which I’m glad to have finally read.  PY

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