fictionstream

Michael Frayn, A Very Private Life, 1968

2011-07-29T13:43:00.003+01:00

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

MORE ON MICHAEL FRAYN : CONTEMPORARY WRITERS PROFILE | WIKIPEDIA

Sebastian Faulks, Pistache, 2006

2011-07-28T06:32:00.007+01:00

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

MORE ON SEBASTIAN FAULKS : AUTHOR'S WEBSITE | WIKIPEDIA

Friday short fiction #38: Nigeria

2011-07-26T08:03:00.015+01:00

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

2011-07-21T18:48:00.009+01:00

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

MORE ON HARUKI MURAKAMI : AUTHOR'S WEBSITE | WIKIPEDIA

Collin Piprell, Bangkok Knights, 1989

2011-07-19T11:38:00.008+01:00

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

MORE ON COLLIN PIPRELL : AUTHOR'S WEBSITE

Blake Butler, Scorch Atlas, 2009

2011-06-14T21:23:00.003+01:00

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

2011-05-16T06:26:00.011+01:00

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

MORE ON GAÉTAN SOUCY : THE CANADIAN ENCYCLOPEDIA | WIKIPEDIA

Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, A Life on Paper, 2010

2011-05-14T13:31:00.015+01:00

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.

MORE ON GEORGES-OLIVIER CHÂTEAUREYNAUD : FRENCH WIKIPÉDIA

Guillaume Lecasble, Lobster, 2003

2011-05-12T12:59:00.004+01:00

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

2011-05-05T08:11:00.007+01:00

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

MORE ON LATIFA AL-ZAYYAT : ARAB WOMEN WRITERS

Donald Antrim, The Hundred Brothers, 1997

2011-04-01T14:27:00.020+01:00

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

MORE ON DONALD ANTRIM : WIKIPEDIA

Paul Auster, Man in the Dark, 2008

2011-03-16T10:24:00.002Z

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

2011-03-15T10:14:00.002Z

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

2011-03-15T07:52:00.007Z

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

MORE ON BINJAMIN WILKOMIRSKI : INSTITUTE FOR HISTORICAL REVIEW | WIKIPEDIA

Joanna Russ, The Female Man, 1975

2011-03-10T14:12:00.004Z

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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Elise Blackwell, Hunger, 2003

2011-02-25T08:22:00.016Z

The Soviet Union’s premier botanical institute is the setting for this rather peculiar novel about Leningrad under blockade from German forces in 1941, though the focus is more on the experience and memories of an unnamed protagonist as he, his wife and his colleagues struggle to deal with the ideological extremes of Stalin’s totalitarianism and Trofim Lysenko’s disastrous collectivisation of Soviet agriculture as their nation starves. In spite of the hardships in the worst times of the ‘hunger winter’, the scientists have made a pact: no matter how bad conditions become they will protect their precious cache of seeds that will be their gift to the country’s future. The unnamed narrator is a scientist who has already made various travels to remote places around the world, and the book’s triangular balance is between these memories, his experience of the Seige of Leningrad and assorted sexual reminiscences. He comes across as a particularly unlikeable person with both a bottomless pit of personal vanity and a considerable amount of emotional detachment from the suffering, prefering to recall his appetite for sexual infidelity or at least try to make sense of it in the context of the hunger he witnesses around him.

Despite this being her first novel Elise Blackwell has something of a literary pedigree, but quite why she chose this setting to make some existential points about hunger, appetite and remorse in this particular way was, while reading, largely beyond me, though when seen instead as a long parable about temptation and forbidden fruit it tends to make much more sense. Hunger may have been selected by the L.A. Times as a Notable Book of 2003, but this wasn’t quite the notable book I was expecting: disturbing and curious, I would have preferred a novel lighter on the existentialism and heavier on the real-world subject matter itself. PY

MORE ON ELISE BLACKWELL : AUTHOR'S WEBSITE | WIKIPEDIA

Chart Korbjitti, No Way Out, 1980

2011-02-23T00:57:00.003Z

A short novel that describes the almost systematic dismantling of a Bangkok family, as a result of the poverty trap they find themselves in when the father tries to take them out of rented accommodation and into a corrugated metal-and-wood shack of their own. Korbjitti is spare with the details, though through the multiple viewpoints of the family he provides more than enough information to give a clear picture of their circumstances while at the same time leaving it to the reader to decide where the blame may lie. A sad but very true book for many, Korbjitti has won two SEA Write Awards for his explorations of Thai social issues that few Westerners get to see, let alone experience. PY

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Fa Poonvoralak, The Most Silent School in the World, 2009

2011-02-20T06:54:00.008Z

While experimental fiction gets as fair a shout in Thailand as anywhere else in the world, as far as I can see (and, given that I don't read Thai, maybe I can’t see far enough) the country isn’t really on the map for wildly imaginative speculative fiction, let alone science fiction, fantasy or slipstream. So when something comes along that is unusual and category-defying it’s rather unexpected, particularly considering that The Most Silent School in the World was also shortlisted for the 2009 SEA Write Award. It’s the story of eight schoolchildren of mixed ages at a riverside school in rural Thailand; they turn up when they want, night or day, there are no teachers, they play games with each other, not a great deal happens that’s different from one day to the next and they’re not being groomed for a life in society. That’s because in our plane of existence they’re not really children at all: they’re the eight Trigrams of Taoist cosmology, given English/Thai names like Water Nam, Mountain Pukao and Sky Fa. Then they are visited by eight more ‘echo children’ from the Moon who are all subtly different, then more children arrive from the rings of Saturn, the Oort Cloud, the Sun and various other places around the solar system. They speculate if their school may in fact be some kind of spaceship. They’ve finally multiplied to sixty-four – the same number of pairings that make up the Hexagrams of the I Ching – and the physical dimensions of their school keep on growing, instantly adding more rooms as new children arrive. How they all interact may be meant to reflect the inherent subtleties of the I Ching’s Hexagrams; although this seems to be the intent it was often difficult to figure out beyond the characters of the children/Trigrams themselves.

All the above is not actually a spoiler as it would have helped to know something of the structure of the book before beginning it. It’s also rather inconclusive, but then this story was written more along ancient Eastern lines than that of a linear, modern Western text, with the analogy of the ‘Silent School’ probably meaning the life situations contained in the I Ching itself, and the physical school representing an expansion of an octagonal ba gua arrangement of Trigrams. This book is both perplexing and entertaining, and for someone who’s long been interested in both creative fiction and the inner working of the I Ching it’s also a rare and valuable find, regrettably one that I doubt will be showing up at many bookstores outside of Thailand. PY

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Philippe Grimbert, Secret, 2004

2011-02-01T04:10:00.010Z

An unhealthy and introverted boy in post-war Paris imagines he has a rival elder brother, as strong and statuesque as his health-obsessed parents, but he soon learns about a real brother, no longer alive, that his parents have kept secret from him. This feels like a very private memoir, firstly because it’s filled with such personal and lifelong tragedy for all the characters, and secondly because the protagonist shares not only the surname of the author but also, as an adult, the same profession in psychoanalysis. These are just a couple of the crossover points that give away Secret as an ‘autofiction’, that identifiably French genre, and Grimbert also seems to be asking the reader if the relationship between fact and fiction is more like that of rivals, or long-lost brothers? He seems to be trying to reunite the two, and is deft at manipulating the reader to see the novel this way at the same time as telling a wrenching story, with its autobiographical tone making it insightful, compassionate and also very saddening. Secret was also made into a film in 2007. PY

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Mahmoud Saeed, Saddam City, 2004

2011-01-25T12:13:00.013Z

One morning in 1979 Mustafa Ali Noman, a Basra schoolteacher, is arrested, imprisoned and tortured by Saddam’s secret police, yet no reason is given other than the shrugged-off possibility of mistaken identity, and even that’s not enough to stop the juggernaut of institutionalised cruelty that defined Saddam Hussein’s era of paranoid and terrifying power from bearing down on him, similarly inflicted upon maybe hundreds of thousands of others who refused (or neglected) to join the Ba’ath Party. What Mahmoud Saeed does in this brief novel is to tell the story relatively straight without expending unnecessary effort to draw the reader further into the experience, instead offering a simple window on events. In this way the reader doesn’t then feel manipulated in any way into revulsion for the baseless cruelties the narrator is describing – they’re self-evident, while Mustafa alternately descends into further despair or rises to occasional hopes and with such an emotional rollercoaster ride being his alone, the Western reader may feel a little detached from it, somehow separated from the horrors and injustice by the matter-of-fact tone of the narrator. This is not so much an experiential novel as, moreover, a descriptive one, with emphatic shades of both Kafka and Solzhenitsyn informing the true-to-life events, which could well be based on Saeed’s own experiences as an occasional prisoner of Saddam himself. As a document of the abuse of power on a frighteningly extensive and systematic scale that was possibly only surpassed by Stalin or the Khmer Rouge, this realistic fiction is a useful and necessary one. PY

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Gloria Lisé, Departing at Dawn, 2005

2011-01-18T11:43:00.029Z

There are, fortunately, novels other than Nathan Englander’s excellent The Ministry of Special Cases that deal with Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ and that are available in English. Published by the Feminist Press in 2009, Departing at Dawn is clearly seen as a definitive novel of 1976-1983 Argentina, because by decree it’s now permanently available to read at every library throughout the country. It tells the story of Berta, who has seen her partner, a trade union organiser, thrown from a window to his death by the government’s goon squads, and she flees Tucumán to stay with remote relatives in the Argentine interior, escaping the junta’s relentless pursuit and disappearance of anyone even vaguely associated with Leftist politics. Curiously, given the subject matter, this is a novel written in delicate literary watercolours as opposed to oils, and I was expecting a much more immediate and punchier read. It does also have some strongly written passages such as the long and engaging description of the bleak backwater town of Olpa where Berta ends up, but the tone was set at the beginning with the first half of the novel mostly given over to delicate character studies using Berta’s family history as source. I did wonder if or when the novel was ever going to pick up the pace a little, which it thankfully did towards the last quarter of the book, but even that kept the political strife off-screen and instead used it as the background context for Berta’s eventual exile. Quietly powerful, and indeed a very worthwhile read. PY

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Woody Allen, Mere Anarchy, 2007

2010-11-29T11:08:00.006Z

Picked up on a whim, I was rather impressed with this collection of shorts, mostly because it was a discovery that the Woody Allen you read in print bears little if any resemblance to the Woody Allen you see on the big screen, or even the Woody Allen who used to do stand-up. It’s still absurd neurotic comedy, intellectually engaging and (often very) linguistically dense, and throughout he adopts the style of his feuilletoniste literary hero S.J. Perelman who preceded him as a humourous writer for The New Yorker, where most of these pieces first appeared. He has his moments: some stories are well thought out if too briefly explored to do them justice and might even benefit from being longer; some are even science fictional, the cleverest by far being ‘Strung Out’, if you can overcome Allen’s tendencies towards female objectification. As this is his first collection of short fiction for more than a quarter of a century it would be interesting to see how it compares with one of his previous collections, but as Allen seems so immersed in the feuilleton style I suspect this must be something of a continuation. PY

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Chart Korbjitti, Carrion Floating By, 1987

2010-11-18T03:11:00.004Z

You’re driving at night and fall asleep at the wheel, triggering a car crash: in Thailand, this makes you fair game for everyone else involved who will claim compensation for injuries, damage and loss of income, and the cost to you now has to be negotiated and bargained. You’re now carrion for the vultures who all want a piece of you, but when you happen to work in advertising, doesn’t this then become tit-for-tat? This is a dryly amusing book and mildly satirical even though it’s deliberately light on laughs. Told throughout in the second person, Korbjitti intended the narrator’s gender to be undetermined but this somehow became lost in translation from Thai to English, with the reader, at key points, necessarily being provided with a male narrator; otherwise, barring a few minor errors in English this is a translation that reads very fluently. I’m getting to understand Korbjitti’s point of view: he’s uncompromisingly socialist, and his books that I’ve read so far have been well-observed and unremittingly mundane in subject matter, yet with an emotional impact reserved for the closing scenes that has so far never failed to hit the mark. PY

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Chart Korbjitti, Time, 1993

2010-11-10T03:27:00.001Z

A Thai film director goes to the theatre to see what has been billed as Bangkok’s most boring play of the year, in which half a dozen elderly women live their usual uneventful day in a care home for the aged. That may sound like a very dull premise for a novel, and perhaps it is, but deliberately so. Time earned Korbjitti his second SEA Write Award, and to find out why means ploughing through two hundred pages of rather mundane dialogue mixed with some minor personal crises. There are some winning passages in which Korbjitti gets people to look at their own lives in relation to what’s being acted out on the stage; these are the novel’s most interesting aspects as the sheer dullness of these ladies’ existence – as people essentially discarded from Thai society – makes for tough reading because there is so little in what they do that will engage a reader. We often don’t expect to encounter such uninteresting everyday activity in a novel let alone on a stage, so it’s only the varieties of circumstantial self-reflection and analysis that Korbjitti puts a few of his characters through that will give Time any value. Does he succeed? Within such a deliberately uneventful book it’s the journey’s end here that matters, and I doubt I will read a book this year that has a better ending. Its conclusion was so unexpectedly moving, as well as being downright clever, that it left me speechless, making me pause for five minutes before I could do anything else. Time may have an empty vacuum at its heart, but it’s a worthwhile and rewarding experience and – after some further introspection – only a superficially hard journey getting there. PY

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Romesh Gunesekera, Reef, 1994

2010-10-30T07:05:00.000+01:00

In Reef Gunesekera treads the familiar territory of his short stories with the way he depicts the tensions of Sri Lanka impacting on daily lives, even though his stories are mostly gentle and everyday. Here he goes a little further, Reef being a story about reconciling the past and the need to make memories tangible in the present. It's the story of Triton who, at the age of eleven, goes to work as a houseboy and later becomes a very good chef in the house of Mr Salgado, an amateur marine biologist and dilletante. Centred around these two people there is some wonderful character development, and Triton's recollection of the experiences that have shaped them both inside and out is particularly well communicated. Drenched in nostalgia Reef touches on all the senses. A memorable book. PY

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Graham Greene, A Sense of Reality, 1963

2010-09-27T15:54:00.002+01:00

This slim volume of four short stories predates the twenty-five year period in which Greene kept a comprehensive dream diary, although dreams are clearly one of this collection’s thematic strands. His usual realism takes a back seat in favour of a more imaginative approach to his writing although, on this evidence, it doesn’t actually feel like something he was particularly comfortable with or even adept at: I puzzled at the glowing cover quotes and wonder if they were actually describing the same book I was reading. The most imaginative story, ‘A Discovery in the Woods’, a post-nuclear war piece, feels uncomfortably stilted throughout yet the idea is a decent enough one (it was also reprinted in the pages of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1967 and later anthologised in a science fictional context three times); I didn’t much care for the rather forced nature of the dream-inspired ‘Under the Garden’ and ‘A Dream of a Strange Land’, but the most successful story, ‘A Visit to Morin’, is a much more familiar kind of Greene, a sharp tale dealing with Catholicism and the loss of religious belief – now that’s a story to remember. PY

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John Wyndham, Chocky, 1968

2010-08-31T19:17:00.004+01:00

There’s still some uncertainty over Chocky’s original publication date: Penguin claims it was first a novel in 1968 but John Clute points to an earlier appearance in Good Housekeeping in 1963 – it certainly exhibits a domesticated gentility suitable for such a magazine. This Penguin Modern Classics edition comes with an introduction by Brian Aldiss that maybe goes into a bit too much detail, as if readers of this particular edition will almost certainly have read it before. It’s an undemanding and straightforward read that ultimately reveals the identity of that extra voice in young Matthew’s head, with perhaps only a fleeting mention of the troubling matter of schizophrenia and no mention at all of Multiple Personality Disorder which, given Matthew’s Harley Street treatment, would at least have been considered more than the outdated diagnosis of ‘possession’. This seems to indicate that the science has been excised as much as possible, making it one for the list of recommendations of science fiction for people who don’t read science fiction. PY

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Roberto Bolaño, Amulet, 1999

2010-06-28T11:45:00.015+01:00

Picador picked up a total of eleven Bolaño titles in 2009, and this was the first to be released in English after publication of his posthumous magnum opus 2666. There is a link between the two books: the year 2666 gets a mention here, included among the many other ramblings of Bolaño’s wonderful creation Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan immigrant and the self-declared ‘mother of Mexican poetry’. She’s holed up in a Mexico City university washroom, hiding from the military as they try to quell student demonstrations in 1968; her rather prolonged stay there results in an increasingly hallucinatory excursion backwards and forwards in time as she recalls meeting people she could never have met, plus some far-flung predictions of which authors will be popular in, say, 2059 or 2017 – there’s a surprise in store here for fans of science fiction as Bolaño indulges a penchant for name-dropping outside his own genre. He also gives himself plenty of space to let his words breathe with his familiar long rambling sentences, and it’s often difficult to see where fact separates from fiction or where he is taking the story until the very last page, although the thrill, as with By Night in Chile, is in Auxilio’s mad journey itself. Simply, a lovely book. PY

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John Christopher, The Death of Grass, 1956

2010-06-01T10:51:00.002+01:00

The lesser-known of the two great ‘floral apocalypses’ of the period, the other being John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids to which this bears little resemblance. The Death of Grass is actually a far better read, and there’s certainly a greater similarity to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies in the way it shows civilisation as little more than a fragile set of agreements, easily ignored when the chips are down as the world’s diseased food chain collapses and Britain descends into anarchy. This is deliberately a very adult book that gives little consideration to half-formed attitudes – the perspectives of the coterie of children who also head north with John Custance are more or less ignored as a deadly adult type of playground power-play is put centre stage instead. There are a couple of well-drawn characters in the cynical Roger Buckley and particularly the enigmatic Henry Pirrie, whose individual influence throughout the novel is consistent and believable. The Death of Grass had been out of print so long that a 2007 Bookfinder survey named it as one of the top ten out-of-print British books; another out-of-print book it recalls – in believable environmental themes at least – is John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up, although John Christopher/Sam Youd’s conception of a highly contagious and adaptable form of stem rust seems to be coming ever-closer to reality. A timely and overdue reprint, and a scary read indeed. PY

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Thomas M. Disch, The Prisoner, 1969

2010-05-11T11:27:00.004+01:00

This new Penguin edition of Disch’s novelisation – the one that, in his lifetime, he resented every reprint of – is timed to coincide with the recent miniseries remake. Disch contracted to write this for a small fee while particularly short of cash, even before he caught a few episodes of it on US television, and he felt no particular affinity to the series but went on to create his own kind of embellishment on what he had seen with little regard as to how his novel might match the series’ end result. It certainly diverges from it in any number of ways, but that’s possibly explained by the (very likely grafted on) notion that this was meant as a sequel: Number 6 has been recaptured, and he goes through the motions once more with similar tenacity but with a very different set of results. I didn’t see this as a sequel at all, but I like the notion that The Prisoner’s deliberately inexplicable nature can give rise to different interpretations and outcomes from its themes. Given the circumstances of its conception this isn’t considered a great Disch novel – understandably so, although I still found it to be elegant throughout, particularly the eloquent cat-and-mouse dialogue between Number 6 and Number 2 which felt exactly as it should, and which gives an indication of why Disch was probably right to be offered this gig: he made a more mentally stimulating job of it than, say, Philip K. Dick possibly would have, despite some multiple-identity and dystopian overtones that would now be considered Dickian. Certainly one for the completists of either Disch or The Prisoner, but in many ways actually better than might be expected. PY

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Jan Blensdorf, My Name is Sei Shonagon, 2004

2010-05-03T01:20:00.011+01:00

The rights to this novel were reportedly sold to eight countries before publication, an enviable record for a debut novelist. Aiming at being a modern rendering of Sei Shonagon’s 11th century Pillow Book, it’s the story of a Japanese-American woman who inherits a Tokyo incense shop and finds herself acting as counsel to the insecure inner lives of her customers. It’s a ‘spiegel im spiegel’ of interiors, constantly looking further into the life of ‘Sei’ and how she engages with the lives of other people, lives far more interesting than her own which seems to have had most of the joy written out of it. This book is also good for providing a discreet look inside the private behaviours of present-day Japanese who come across as a nation mostly fearful of offending each other, largely reflecting what generations of Japanese would still see as the truth despite the excesses of post-war Western influence. As a whole it has the feel of a book that’s been assembled from disparate parts and rewritten maybe too much, all pieced together with the joins and spikes of interest smoothed over. It is observant and artfully prismatic, though not quite as engaging as I’d hoped for. PY

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Bjorn Turmann, The Last Tobacco Shop in the World, 2010

2010-04-07T12:59:00.004+01:00

Just occasionally the novels you discover at airports are not your typical airport novels. They tease you with nondescript jacket designs and instead draw you in with a well-written cover blurb. They’re wrapped in cellophane or produced by a very small publishing house, or they come in very limited print runs. In the case of The Last Tobacco Shop in the World, all the above apply.

Just a few chapters into The Last Tobacco Shop in the World it becomes apparent this is an unexpected and original take on the future – one in which natural disasters are created as aphrodisiacs, in which smokers are hunted down and murdered by the state, in which interior lighting has the ability to sense human needs. My interest was sustained for over 300 pages mostly because of the tight and interesting way Turmann has with dialogue, particularly between strangers getting to know each other: they talk obliquely to produce conversations that zig-zag their way to their point. There are also some very neat future ideas in this story, set in the year 2040 on a new island called Jarangwa, a tiny slice of post-tsunami geological apocalyptica thrown up by the Andaman Sea off Thailand in 2004. Anton Brick is a freelance ‘syrup monkey’, chasing down ever-diminishing fringe supplies of oil in Iraq, then while staying in Cambodia he’s offered, and takes, a PR job at the only hotel on Jarangwa, one of the few places on Earth where it’s still entirely legal to smoke tobacco. The rest of the planet is a mess of plagues and worldwide Orwellian governmental forces that have banned love, premarital sex, small firearms (big firearms being harder to conceal) and, of course, smoking. But Anton discovers that the guests at this hotel are an unusually strange crowd including a repentant ex-spammer and a Mongolian ex-prostitute (by far the most interesting and well-drawn character), some with frightening personal ambitions and dangerously complex personalities.

Plot and setting aside, Turmann’s obvious strength is his dialogue. It’s the aspect of this novel that will probably draw the reader completely into it, with a side-effect of making one feel a little trapped inside, Prisoner-like, as one tries to figure out where this small cast of ill-matched characters is heading: occasionally as the reader I felt like the protagonist Anton, a blank slate always being kept a little in the dark and always well out of his depth. This is an enigmatic and slightly twisted novel, more slipstream than science fiction, and it’s also one of the most off-beat books I’ve read for a long time. It kept me reading less for its distinct strangeness, which is actually understated, and more for its promise, which is considerable. It has one obvious geographical error (and a rather unforgivable one as it’s relevant to the plot) which is that a boat cannot get from Cambodia’s Rabbit Island to Phuket unless it circumnavigates the entire Malay Peninsula, a journey that could not be done in a day – for convenience Turmann seems to have somehow relocated Phuket and the Andaman Sea on the other side of Thailand. That problem notwithstanding, as I write there are only 600 copies of Tobacco Shop in the world, but there ought to be plenty more as in my humble opinion this novel deserves the interest of a bigger publisher.

Maxence Fermine, The Black Violin, 1999

2010-04-07T01:31:00.005+01:00

The second in Fermine’s ‘Colours’ trilogy, each of which stand alone as stories of people whose lives are defined by colour. Unlike the first in this trio, Snow (about a young Japanese poet who writes haikus about snow), The Black Violin is a darker tale set in the 18th century Napoleonic wars: a young soldier who is also a genius with the violin is posted to Venice where he encounters Erasmus, understudy to the Stradivari family and creator of a violin imbued with a dark soul of its own that somehow captures the essence of those whose lives it touches. The book tries to connect both creation and destruction with the unseen world of the spirit and succeeds, though it seems to be a stripped down version of what could have been a far more detailed and nuanced story if Fermine were, politely put, a more detailed and nuanced writer. It's unchallenging for the most part and a hundred pages shorter than it ought to be, nevertheless it does resonate with a hauntingly uncomfortable question or two about fundamental motives when it comes to matters of the heart. PY

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Jacques Chessex, A Jew Must Die, 2009

2010-04-05T10:02:00.020+01:00

Chessex continued to look into the dark corners of Switzerland’s past right up to this, his last-but-one novel. It looks at the 1942 murder of Arthur Bloch, a well-to-do Jewish cattle dealer in Payerne by some Swiss Nazi sympathisers, meant as an offering to the Führer just a few days before Hitler’s birthday. It wasn’t just a random murder – how the teenage killers also disposed of the body was particularly gruesome. This short novel was not well received in Switzerland, possibly because the Nazi chant of ‘death to the Jews’ is frequently put across in the first person alongside some possibly gratuitous S&M imagery, plus Chessex has a cynical take on Swiss indifference. Payerne is also where Chessex grew up and the last chapter neatly but remotely connects him to the event as he explores the culpability of a particularly notorious pro-Nazi religious leader. I found this was just as good, and sad, and well-told a story as his other recent biographical novel The Vampire of Ropraz, and in short doses like this Chessex makes a memorable impression. PY

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Mikhail Bulgakov, The Heart of a Dog, 1925

2010-04-02T12:02:00.008+01:00

The Heart of a Dog has ingredients that make it a satirical classic, yet it would surely have been funnier still to its intended Russian audience. Bulgakov had constant problems with censors and he never saw publication of The Heart of a Dog in the Soviet Union in his lifetime: he died in 1940 and it was suppressed there until as late as 1987, appearing only a few years before the fall of Soviet Communism. Philip Philipovich, a rich and respected Moscow doctor who specialises in rejuvenation, decides to experiment with some transplant surgery on a stray mongrel known as Sharik with a few body parts from a recently deceased prole, and unwittingly transforms the dog into a poor resemblance of a cultured man. What gives this book its spark is the downtrodden dog’s character, which kicks off and then punctuates the rest of the story very nicely indeed. Bulgakov displayed a splendid sense of fun in this satire on the Russian Revolution, in which the uneducated and common proletariat expected to simply be handed a share of the wealth, and when encapsulated in the character of Sharik they’re also satirised as aspiring – and of course failing – to take on the airs and graces of the bourgeois elite. The doctor’s frequent counter-revolutionary rants are what help this novel endure as a modern and edgy one: right or wrong, Bulgakov gave the reader room to still wish the world was a fairer and more evenly divided place, despite the entrenched imbalance between rich and poor that became the source of his best jokes. A book that can’t be missed by those with a taste for sharp satire. PY

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Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!, 1966

2010-03-31T13:10:00.022+01:00

A word about Ondrea Barbe’s great photograph that appears on the cover of this recent Penguin Modern Classics edition: it’s the perfect accompaniment to the alliterative nature of both Harrison’s name and the book’s title, and at the same time reflects the oppressive heat and claustrophobia contained in the book itself. Make Room! Make Room! occupies the other end of Harrison’s spectrum in relation to his satire and humour: a murder in an overcrowded and riot-prone New York in 1999 forms the backdrop to some good characterisation and a serious overpopulation message. What you get are characters to care about, a decent police-procedural plot and a strong dose of feminism; what you don’t get is the grafted-on horror aspect of the movie adaptation Soylent Green. This sits comfortably alongside some eco-conscious literature of the 1960s, published just a few years after the environmental preachiness of Silent Spring and at a time when overpopulation was not the major global concern it is today. Also, interestingly, it appeared seven years before Roe vs. Wade, and puts up a strong defence of the need for access to birth control which some at the time specifically wished to remove. Still a very good book indeed that always deserves to remain in print. PY

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Julia Leigh, The Hunter, 1999

2010-03-02T02:38:00.006Z

This debut was a very different animal to her later Disquiet. An unnamed man has been sent by a biotech firm to retrieve the DNA of the last Tasmanian tiger, a carnivorous marsupial now believed extinct in the twentieth century. This man is only one link in a chain and we don’t see any distance beyond the job he’s doing, so what’s noticeable are the areas that Leigh doesn’t explore such as the purpose to which this DNA might be put, or the immorality of hunting down the last of a species. Instead we get a straight-ahead story of survival as the man lays traps in the forest by day and sleeping rough at night, while also suffering the awkward negotiations of the bereaved family with whom he stays at weekends. Leigh was picked by the Observer as one of the twenty-one writers to watch in the new millennium and this was certainly a confident debut, though not as directly allegorical as I was expecting, or hoping for. However it does resonate with unanswered questions that invite further thought on her technique, ie. of what she chose to leave out and why. This was not an “extremely disturbing” read as one blurb quote puts it – far from it, unless I’m missing something glaringly obvious – but it was at least rather unsettling. PY

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Dambudzo Marechera, Black Sunlight, 1980

2010-02-24T10:55:00.009Z

Marechera was the kind of off-beat Zimbabwean writer that did himself no favours, one who ended his life sleeping on Harare’s park benches refusing to talk to his family. He was either mad or blessed with, as some believed, a taint of genius, and his small output of work continues to attract attention with the reissue of his second novel in Penguin’s newly launched African Writers Series. A photojournalist whose name may or may not be Christian becomes connected to a violent rebel organisation that may or may not be called Black Sunlight, in a country that may or may not be Zimbabwe. What Marechera is doing in this odd and, yes, awkward book is explore anarchism as an intellectual position. Written when he was in his mid-twenties, the story bounces between Christian’s marriage to his blind wife Marie, to liaisons with several women (all of whom are necessarily spectacular in bed), to his work covering student riots and the shadowy world of Black Sunlight. There’s an interesting passage in which he meets a doppelgänger of himself and discusses violence, plus there are several sections in the latter parts of the book that indulge in philosophy-fuelled rants of the sixth-form variety (Marechera also studied at Oxford, before being kicked out). One surprise was that he name-checked John Wyndham and Clark Ashton Smith, although not in a particularly complimentary way. I didn’t particularly like this book at all; it’s vain, inconsistent and weakly plotted (if there is much of a plot at all), and gives the strong impression of a talented young writer who didn’t yet know how to say with clarity what he needed to say. PY

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Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One, 1948

2010-02-24T09:55:00.005Z

This was described by Anna Haycraft (better known as Alice Thomas Ellis) as ”One of the funniest and most significant books of the century”. The friction that drives it is the awkwardness of British cultural attitudes in post-war Los Angeles, set mostly in the Whispering Glades Memorial Park – a kind of Disneyland for the dead – and involving a young British poet who falls for a young American corpse beautician while he himself works secretly as a mortician at a pet cemetery. Waugh is funniest when he lets his characters’ veneer of civility slip to reveal something far more feral underneath, and I can almost sense how he filled in some laugh-free zones with just that kind of unexpected viciousness to keep the humour levels up. Some mocking characterisation and a few very memorable turns of phrase make this a wickedly funny book. PY

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Soazig Aaron, Refusal, 2002

2010-02-24T09:20:00.005Z

Sometimes it seems that any new fiction centred on Auschwitz is required to offer up new horrors previously untouched upon and Soazig Aaron has certainly attempted to go down that route too, somewhat in the tracks of William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice. In this case I’m not sure it was necessary, but as the point of Refusal is to focus on some of the after-effects of the horror, perhaps you can’t really do that without the inclusion of a few graphic scenes as flashbacks. In Refusal much of the evil of Auschwitz happened to Klara Schwarz-Roth, a German-born Parisian Jew, separated from her daughter and sent there where she was forced to learn many of the darker aspects of survival, which also prevent her from properly rejoining the world upon her release. Klara is a fascinating and eloquent character, if also deeply scarred and deeply scary. Even though the story is told through the eyes of her pre-war friend Angélika, Klara takes centre stage throughout. This is one of those books that won’t let go and is, even with Klara’s self-imposed and self-limiting options for her future, defiantly difficult to argue with. PY

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Italo Calvino, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, 1947

2010-02-24T08:55:00.010Z

Throughout his career Calvino had a very ambivalent relationship with this, his first novel, and even when not quite disowning it he was more than happy to point out its various faults and explain just how and why they came about. Written when he was twenty-four after Calvino had lived through some of the kinds of events he describes, and despite clearly trying not to be this is still a very naïve coming-of-age novel. Set in a town on the Ligurian coast at the tail end of the Second World War that is overrun with both the Germans and the Blackshirt fascist paramilitary, a young cobbler’s apprentice hangs out with adults in the local bar, playing their dangerous adult games and, after stealing a German soldier’s pistol, later plays at being a partisan revolutionary. It really doesn’t go any further than this (apart from the awkwardly polemical ninth chapter that really does stick out like a sore thumb) having been specifically plotted and themed to tick all the boxes of the recently formed Italian ‘neo-realist’ school, its aim seemed to be more to preach to the converted (it sold very well on first publication) and nail Calvino’s communist-leaning politics to the mast, rather than tell a good story. Disappointing, but clearly the best place to start when understanding the transformations of Calvino’s later career. PY

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Julia Leigh, Disquiet, 2008

2010-02-24T08:32:00.009Z

Fleeing a violent marriage in Australia, Olivia returns to her mother and childhood château in France with her two young children and a broken arm. By coincidence her brother arrives with his wife and newborn child, along with a tragic secret that will turn them into a family in extremis. Just two books into her career and Simon Schama is already calling Julia Leigh “one of the greatest living writers”. Before beginning Disquiet I was sceptical about this accolade, but I had to admit just fifty pages in that I admired enormously her distilled method that cuts out an enormous amount of in-between and focuses on tight prose that makes the family tension palpable, bleeding out in a long string of tense and, yes, exquisitely described interpersonal moments. There is much left unspoken in this rather gothic, present-day novella and Leigh doesn’t waste words, so as an example of how less is more this comes highly recommended. PY

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Michel Faber, The Fire Gospel, 2008

2010-01-26T13:22:00.002Z

The tenth in Canongate’s series on myths, this one being modelled loosely on the story of Prometheus stealing fire from Zeus and giving it to mortals, but there any proper connection to mythology ends and the satire begins. A cynical Canadian researcher in a ransacked museum in war-torn Iraq stumbles upon a hidden manuscript written by a man who knew Jesus, and a sudden lust for fame and money drives him to publish it as The Fifth Gospel, go on an American book tour and risk the wrath of Christians, Arabs, homocidal maniacs and Amazon reviewers alike. Wickedly funny for the most part, with Faber sharing exactly the kind of vicious, ascerbic humour of fellow Dutch author Cees Nooteboom. Faber must have had a very good time writing this. PY

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Bohumil Hrabal, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, 1964

2010-01-08T16:02:00.007Z

An unnamed narrator holds forth to a group of ladies he obviously wants to impress on matters such as marital strife, dream symbolism, personal hygeine, crooks, barmaids, balalaikas, unlikely personal dalliances and anything else that comes to mind, all in one rambling, tumbling, obscenely long and unfinished sentence that’s clearly meant to be taken with a massive pinch of salt. As with other books by Hrabal (for instance the bizarrely worthwhile Too Loud a Solitude and Closely Observed Trains), Hrabal’s linear momentum becomes rather effortless once you get into his awkward rhythm: the oddness of what he’s describing is somehow shaken off and the reader can indulge this vainglorious character all the way. As book-length, comic self-portraits go this is excellent, and Hrabal’s self-imposed task of writing an entire book in a single sentence was clearly a constraint he could also turn into something of a liberation. PY

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Sadeq Hedayat, The Blind Owl, 1937

2010-01-02T22:02:00.008Z

Hedayat’s writing has been banned in Iran since November 2006 so The Blind Owl, his most famous book, is the obvious first port of call. It begins with a mysterious woman’s murder by a rather deranged man in the ancient Persian city of Rey, then follows his own dreamlike self-portrait as a man who has lost his grip on life. The book is either a veiled, opium-drenched, mysogynist rant with similarly high levels of angst and self-loathing or, as is widely believed, a Kafkaesque masterpiece. I expect the truth falls somewhere in between but I won’t default towards the latter opinion, as it’s still a very hard book to figure out without learning a little more about Hedayat, who commited suicide not long after writing The Blind Owl. A deliberately uncomfortable read that also defies proper categorisation, it’s out there on the margins of European-influenced literature but only of any real value to existentialism: if you also read Kafka you'll get much more out of it. PY

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Cory Doctorow, Little Brother, 2008

2009-12-31T19:17:00.005Z

In the latter days of the Bush presidency Little Brother possessed that aura of a book that needed to be written, and is also Doctorow’s self-confessed “Orwell fan fiction”, involving a small group of tech-savvy teenagers who, after a terrorist attack on San Francisco, fall foul of the Department of Homeland Security in a very bad way. Beyond the pervasive surveillance and counter-hacking it deliberately veers towards a believable extreme – at its most uncomfortable points it involves Americans torturing American children. A country’s government using torture on its own youth in the name of state security isn’t new, and in the light of the US’s recent cultural nadir it’s certainly fair play to line it up alongside countries like Burma, Iran and South Africa, at least in fiction. You also don’t find many new genre books published these days with an Afterword, let alone the two that Little Brother contains, including one from Bruce Schneier. This is pitched perfectly as counterculture teenage fiction, it somehow feels right from cover to cover even though the protagonist Marcus is often talking with the know-it-all hindsight of maturity. Interestingly there is now a project under way with Burmese Americans to get Little Brother translated into four Burmese languages, but there is certainly knowledge here that could be applied by politically active citizens confronting any suppressive government around the world, democratically elected or otherwise. Unreservedly, this is a book to recommend widely.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper, 1892

2009-12-20T15:07:00.009Z

A psychological horror story that owes much in style to Edgar Allan Poe. The narrator, whose name may or may not be Jane, keeps a journal while she herself is kept in a room with disturbing yellow wallpaper, all as a way of curing her post-natal depression. During her descent into madness her husband only sees the situation without seeing the struggle of the woman inside; this aspect of the story I still find unnatural as, being a doctor himself, he would surely notice something unsettling going on with his wife. Gilman’s own experiences and the disastrous ‘resting cure’ she was proscribed by the renowned doctor S. Weir Mitchell for her own depression are the origins of the book; Mitchell, named in person in the story, took Gilman’s criticism seriously and to his credit abandoned this form of treatment for depression. The medical and Victorian family traditions that inform the story are the real mental confinements of the tale with the wallpaper a clever if slightly vague metaphor. Not a story I’ve ever actually enjoyed, but there are elements here that can apply as much to men as women when it comes to medical treatment that somehow ignores the needs of the patient. PY

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Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile, 2000

2009-12-18T10:29:00.012Z

My first encounter with Bolaño was a few years ago with his heroic cameo appearance in Javier Cercas’s marvellous Soldiers of Salamis, something which brought him fame in his adopted Spain, and since his passing there’s been a bit of a worldwide Bolaño-fest culminating in the posthumously released magnum opus 2666. A year ago Jonathan Lethem said “Reading Roberto Bolaño is like hearing the secret story”, and that’s exactly right. By Night in Chile is basically a dying rant from a mad Chilean priest and poetry critic, endlessly digressive and enormous intellectual fun, and as a first encounter with Bolaño’s actual books it matched the word-of-mouth and was a good place to start. I was taken not only with what Bolaño amusingly alludes to, that an obsession with poetry probably indicates a wasted life, but also with Bolaño’s style: I grew to like his long, rambling sentences that allow him to fill the page with all kinds of loosely connected thoughts into what is essentially one book-length paragraph. This must have been hard stuff to translate and yet also keep Bolaño’s nervous energy going throughout, but it’s an admirable accomplishment. Bolaño has been a very satisfying discovery, and at his best is someone who has can open one’s eyes to what literature can be in a way that few authors can do. PY

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Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, 1963

2009-12-17T04:00:00.006Z

Thirteen year-old Noboru spies on his widowed mother Fusako with her new lover Ryuji, a rugged sailor on shore leave in Yokohama. Without a father he’s become dispassionate and dysfunctional, part of a sinister group of schoolboys who can’t find meaning in anything and who eventually draw up their own plans for Ryuji, based on the sadistic treatment they’d previously dished out to a harmless kitten. It’s Noboru’s misanthropic world view in one so young that makes this a definitively perverse book, one that exhibits an almost tangible disrespect for those who show no strength, as when Ryuji finally exchanges his rigorous life at sea for a soft life on land and therefore must suffer the consequences. This broadly echoes Mishima’s own tough and exacting expectations of other people, and his ambivalent sexuality finds a quiet voice here too though it doesn’t detract from what is otherwise a well-plotted, lightly atmospheric and economically told story. PY

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Andrew McGahan, Wonders of a Godless World, 2009

2009-12-16T14:11:00.001Z

This mainstream novel received a big push from its Australian publishers, with an animated promotional video that ties in with the book’s stunning first edition wraparound cover. This story – of a nameless orphan who encounters a mysterious and nameless new patient in a nameless asylum beneath a nameless volcano on a nameless tropical island – holds a lot of promise, not all of it fulfilled. McGahan wrote it to indulge his fascination with extreme weather and extreme natural disasters, and he uses science fictional and fantasy elements as the stitching that binds them together. The story builds quite nicely for the first half, mostly using the too-easy devices of out-of-body experiences, telepathy and immortality to form the link between the orphan and ‘the foreigner’, who is the increasingly likely suspect for some bizarre behaviour among the inmates, and soon some murders, despite literally never lifting a finger. By the fourth chapter one feels one is onto something rather original, and how it avoids becoming a straightforward paranormal tale is the way McGahan has embedded everything in the Earth sciences, and these provide the best descriptive passages by far.

The flip side to this seems to be, given McGahan’s self-imposed limits on names and characterisation, an inadequacy of conviction in the relationships between the novel’s small cast, particularly when it comes to sex, all culminating in a strangely bizarre S&M scene between two catatonic patients that frankly doesn’t work at all well. In fact as the novel progresses, sex becomes more and more the vector for certain plot elements to resolve themselves, and McGahan’s approach is, given the patients’ general lack of experience in these matters, rather predictably mechanical. I felt McGahan was coasting as he passed beyond the half-way mark; the OoBEs and telepathic conversations become a little repetitive, the foreigner’s story of his vendetta against the planet increasingly unbelievable. The best aspect is the way the Earth is the real star of the story with the locations and human characters all nameless and as minor as ants; plus the way the orphan’s status in society, an unreliable narrator forever on the outside and condemned to trying to figure out what’s going on inside, echoes humanity’s position literally as ‘outsiders’ on the skin of the Earth itself: this planet beneath our feet that we do not yet completely understand really does not care about us at all. As a whole package Wonders of a Godless World is impressive, but at the center of it all the story itself lacked the kind of substance that a more rigorous science fictional approach might well have given it: a story like this, with its informative backdrop of geology, vulcanology and meteorology all threaded with a fantastical sensibility, almost deserves to be science fiction. PY

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Christopher Priest, The Dream Archipelago, 2009

2009-12-08T11:19:00.017Z

Seven stories (two of which are novellas) set on a chain of equatorial islands that are the focus of a long continental war, on a world that permanently sits beneath a strange vortex in time. These are very English stories in their manner as well as the romance of the setting, the archipelago representing an ideal locale for the perfect escape except that it is far less perfect in reality, and is also where these stories’ protagonists get to face themselves in unexpected and uncomfortable ways. Best of all is ‘The Miraculous Cairn’, which turns around at least one of the reader’s suppositions brilliantly, and ‘The Watched’ which combines a smattering of quantum theory with a rather Jungian fixation. Also present is the new Dream Archipelago story ‘The Trace of Him’, written especially for this new edition. Loaded with metaphor and dream symbolism, Priest is something of a master at depicting unresolved sexual tensions. Highly recommended. PY

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Carlos María Domínguez, The Paper House, 2004

2009-11-07T16:00:00.007Z

Anyone who lives their life at least partially under the spell of books will almost certainly find the premise of The Paper House captivating: a copy of Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow Line is sent by a Cambridge lady professor to a Uruguayan academic. Not long after, the professor is dead and the book suddenly arrives back in England, caked in the dust of concrete. The small mystery to be solved is not the reason for her death – that is explained away in a very brief literary indulgence – but the nature of what has been done to her book while in Uruguay, and the answer somehow lies in the power of books themselves. There is a distinctly Latin American quality to this novella’s fanaticism for literature, but most of us who possess a substantial number of books will identify at least a little with such veneration and also be uncomfortably reminded of the sometimes unreasonable degrees of power our books have over us. It’s a self-conscious read and possibly too self-indulgent as well, but I can’t deny it is also unerringly engaging with many passages I want to go through again, so it’s probably up for a re-read soon. PY

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Kressmann Taylor, Address Unknown, 1938

2009-11-02T07:27:00.011Z

A very brief and neat exposure of the realities of Nazism, written by an acutely aware observer in the distant US before the Second World War had even begun. Two German-American friends and art dealers, one a Jew, conduct some friendly correspondence after the other returns to Munich in 1933, where he then falls under the enchanting spell of Adolf Hitler. A small but tragic event follows in Munich which, suffice to say, ensures a brilliant response. There's not much else that can be said about Address Unknown without giving the game away. America was largely uninterested in what was going on in Germany at this time but over in Europe word spread about this short serialised work, ensuring it was copied and translated (Steinbeck’s excellent The Moon Is Down, written as anti-Nazi propaganda four years later, underwent a similar propagation), inevitably ending up on Germany’s list of banned books. The simplicity and potency of Taylor’s idea ensured her a large and immediate readership, then after the war was over it was largely forgotten until its reissue in 1995 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps. Another interesting aspect is the vehement rejection of liberalism which broadly echoes some of the same criticism you hear from the American far right today. Certainly one of the better 30-minute reads I have had this year. PY

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Yuri Buida, The Zero Train, 1993

2009-10-30T20:05:00.005Z

The bête noire of post-Soviet writing from Russia would seem to be the question of what Stalinism did to individual lives, and The Zero Train is at heart a straightforward allegory on this theme with a straightforward answer: it sidelined them. Therefore we have a community of disparate people living in the sidings of Station Number 9, ensuring the Zero Train runs without a hitch as it passes through every day, a fast juggernaut with both an unknown cargo and an unknown destination. How the mysterious Zero Train defines the lives of these people is Buida’s meat and gravy and he spreads the allegory pretty thick, also with different meanings attached to individual lives: character X is a metaphor for this, character Y is a metaphor for that. It’s a lively and lyrical read though I made the mistake of expecting proper characterisation, which is clearly not Buida’s point at all. A second reading would probably explain more, but thankfully the translator’s afterword answered many of the questions I was inevitably left asking. Complex and slightly mad, and certainly entertaining. PY

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Jane Vejjajiva, The Happiness of Kati, 2003

2009-10-21T23:15:00.009+01:00

Kati is a nine year-old Thai girl from Ayutthaya whose hospital-bound mother is dying of Motor Neurone Disease, and the story charts her upbringing by her grandparents and how she connects to the world immediately around her and beyond, including how she chooses to deal with the possibility of reconnecting with her estranged father. The setting is unashamedly, comfortably middle class and presents an idealistic, almost perfect environment for Kati that cushions her separation from both her parents, and this blunts the story somewhat although it’s still undoubtedly realistic. The author Vejjajiva is clearly sticking to the strata with which she’s most familiar: herself cerebral palsied and wheelchair-bound, and apart from running a Thai publishing agency and translation bureau her writing also won her Thailand’s 2006 SEAWrite Award (two years before her brother became the country’s current Prime Minister). The Happiness of Kati has also been translated into six languages with a Thai film adaptation released early in 2009. This gentle story also illustrates how Thai extended families can function in more close-knit ways than they do in the West. Recommended. PY

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Jacques Chessex, The Vampire of Ropraz, 2007

2009-10-18T05:52:00.013+01:00

Chessex was the only non-French author to have received the Prix Goncourt by 1973 (he won another, for poetry, in 2004), and despite a large body of work there’s still little by him that’s available in English. This is a fictionalised account of a ghoulish but unsolved true mystery regarding necrophilia and the desecration of young women’s graves in Switzerland’s Jura mountains at the turn of the twentieth century. It starts out lucidly and almost frighteningly atmospheric, with the mountainous landscape harbouring isolated villages rife with superstition and Calvinist doctrine, and when a possible suspect is found the rule of law comes a poor second to the prejudices of the local people and the courts. Chessex’s writing grabs the reader from page one: it’s unflinchingly spare and direct and gets straight to the point, but although much of this story is based on real events he perhaps added a little too much gratuitous detail, even though this just adds to the sense of how much remains unknown. The twist at the end seems almost too extraordinary to be true and would be incredible if it were, but even so it’s still a very good allegory for buried secrets. A brief but memorable novella. PY

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Sabai Muang, The Call of the Midnight Hour, 1993

2009-10-15T02:30:00.010+01:00

Sabai Muang is one of the many pseudonyms of the Thai author Sukanya Cholasueks, and The Call of the Midnight Hour is one of five novels she wrote on each of the Five Precepts of Buddhism. The Third Precept here is that of abstaining from sexual misconduct and is the story of Phatta, who abducts another man’s wife and suffers the consequences but also obtains a rather unusual redemption. Set in India at the time of the birth of Buddhism, Muang’s story has supernatural elements which muddy the waters of what is otherwise a very clear storyline, and towards the end it splits into two threads that separate what is going on with Phatta’s soul in the spiritual world and what is happening with his body in the real world, but these are blurred in such a way that it may become difficult to tell what was happening where, and with whom. If the other four short novels are also published in English they will probably be worth reading as well as this was well written, even if I felt at times that it was either too straightforward in places or a little too abstract. PY

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Nathan Englander, The Ministry of Special Cases, 2007

2009-10-03T21:58:00.008+01:00

It must have been heartbreaking all over again for the Argentine mothers of the Disappeared to end their protests back in 2006. There are inevitably several non-fiction works available on this dark period of Argentina’s history but little in the form of fiction other than The Ministry of Special Cases. It must be among the best there is, in English at least, as the focus is on one family as it is torn apart by the casual cruelties of a paranoid government. Kaddish Poznan is a family man in 1976 Buenos Aires, an aimless outsider by day but, with the political climate as uncertain as it is, by night he has created for himself the unusual job of erasing the family names of his hijo de puta clients from their headstones in the city’s forgotten Jewish cemetery. There’s a military coup on the horizon and worse in the shape of the Dirty War, and when Poznan’s teenage son enters that catalogue of the Disappeared he can only appeal to the strange labyrinthine bureaucracy that is the Ministry of Special Cases for any semblance of justice.

This debut novel has a masterfully burlesque yet confident beginning, necessary to establish Poznan’s colourful family history and the range of experiences that brought Buenos Aires its arm of the Jewish diaspora, but this quickly settles down as Poznan’s small family is revealed to be a typically ordinary one. Unexpectedly, and despite the seriousness of the subject, Englander finds plenty of opportunity for black humour (mostly revolving around plastic surgery), but he also explores many serious themes via a cast of shadowy characters, the impenetrable web of government lies and the absolute need for hope in a hopeless situation. This is obviously a broader subject than just being purely a Jewish experience therefore in some way it’s fortunate that Englander doesn’t consider himself to be a ‘Jewish’ writer, but it’s all too easy to see how this novel was his labour of love, eight years in the writing, and it deserves to be considered a triumph. He pulls you around by the heartstrings with a drama that reads easily but is always engaging, and his main problem must have been how to end the story of an unending nightmare. He handles it rather well if perhaps, inevitably, a little inconclusively, but this still comes highly recommended. PY

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Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men, 2005

2009-10-02T19:32:00.011+01:00

Out-of-his-depth Llewelyn Moss stumbles across a drugs deal gone horribly wrong, makes off with a case containing $2.4 million and engages the relentless pursuit of the toweringly bad Anton Chigurh. This is not a book that’s especially complex with its plot, and McCarthy makes it a relentless ride because it feels so completely testosterone-driven. It might be trite to say that his idiosyncratic grammar and punctuation is what carried this story for me: commas only when absolutely necessary, no quote marks, in fact nothing that detracts from the punch of his storytelling. McCarthy has his own way with written English; and why not, for him it’s a toolkit, he uses it as he wants but with precision. The story itself is direct enough not to be bogged down with (or even need) much in the way of descriptive passages, although the rambling observations of Sheriff Bell on the decline of common decency gradually gain the upper hand in the reader’s mind over the the amoral violence of Chigurh, and you end up sympathising, if not completely then at least with a degree of respect for his outdated point of view. Bell may also be something of a Jubal Harshaw: McCarthy’s point seems to be that violence such as this needs to be considered minus its modern, fake, grafted-on glamour (à la Natural Born Killers) and seen once more in a properly moral context. In No Country For Old Men he embeds the men – and only the men – all at different levels in a culture of violence from the top to the bottom – the women, all but invisible in background supporting roles, can never upset the balance of machismo by getting in the way of the guys figuring it out for themselves, the hard way. A mostly excellent and memorable read despite its overtly masculine trajectory. PY

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William S. Burroughs, Junky, 1953

2009-10-02T19:23:00.004+01:00

For the proper experience this is one of those books that ought to be read as a first edition, with its cheap cover illustration that was meant to inspire a degree of horror towards heroin use in those who picked it up. Starting life as one half of an Ace Original double paperback, with fifty years hindsight it’s easy to see how Junky took the road from cheap pulp fiction to cult novel, and while Burroughs didn’t intentionally romanticise heroin use, today, like heroin itself, this kind of book or film is now mainstream. Under the thin disguise of ‘William Lee’ Burroughs is unapologetically confessional, yet Junky probably wouldn’t have made publication at all if he didn’t also display the redemptive element of repeatedly trying to kick his heroin habit (and instead fall back on the lesser social evils of morphine, coke, alcohol and petty crime), first in New York, later in New Orleans then Mexico City. Junky isn’t an alienating experience because Burroughs does not take you on that journey; instead his alienation arrived here fully formed with the everyday world already rendered meaningless – including his wife (who he killed between drafts of this book) and, for the most part, the law – and in replacement his junk habit was promoted to the almost everyday activity of a natural bodily function like sex, a mere extension of himself stripped of its negative and antisocial connotations. Burroughs’s writing is for the most part deadpan and functional yet he occasionally indulges in wonderfully descriptive and concise analyses of what’s going on beneath the skin – not his own skin or his own experiences while under, but the skins of those exterior horrors, other people, and these passages were an early root from which were later to come the excesses of Naked Lunch. This is a relatively safe book now, but it’s lost none of its immediacy. PY

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Khammaan Khonkhai, The Teachers of Mad Dog Swamp, 1978

2009-09-12T05:25:00.021+01:00

There are pitifully few fiction books available in English that function as Thai examinations of Thai identity, but this is one of the more famous. Sompong Palasoon (under his pen name Khammaan Khonkhai) began it as a film script, filmed as Khru Ban-Nork (‘Rural Teachers’), and the book came later with its more colourful title being used for the English translation. Set in a jungle village in Thailand’s far north-east, it has to be said this isn’t a gripping read so much as an ethnographically interesting one: little happens in 300 pages apart from a minor teacher/pupil scandal, some celebrations about the building of a new classroom and the discovery and consequences of an illegal timber trade, but, as the translator Gehan Wijeyewarnede says, “the author sets out to describe the way of life of a poor village folk of a remote area of the northeastern region ... He details their speech, their economy, their technology, their festivals and their food ... He glories in the environment in which they live, the cycle of seasons, their knowledge and adaptation to it.” The characterisation is mostly well done if a little on the shallow side, and this kind of story is often more familar to Western readers when played out in an African context, and indeed the kinds of dramas described seemed rather continentally interchangeable as well. This was first published by an academic press, and is still a great book for reference if you want the minutiae of daily life in Thailand’s remote north-east. PY

AT AMAZON.CO.UK : UK PAPERBACK → ALL EDITIONS → ALL BOOKS BY KHAMMAAN KHONKHAI

Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip, 2006

2009-09-10T11:24:00.013+01:00

This 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize winner was also favourite for the 2007 Man Booker, but was ultimately beaten by Anne Enright’s The Gathering. Set in Papua New Guinea during the civil war of the early 1990s, Mr. Watts, the only white man on the small island Bougainville, becomes the only schoolteacher for a group of island children and his only realia is a copy of Dickens’s Great Expectations. The pathos starts from page one and there is some admirably sensitive handling of any number of issues that carries that pathos through to the last page, with all the accompanying horrors viewed with an impressive detachment when they arise. The viewpoint of the teenage pupil Matilda is as close to authentic as Jones could reasonably be expected to get, and the three-way tension between her, her distrusting mother and Mr. Watts is to a great extent the dynamo that drives the plot. What Matilda learns from Great Expectations, and from her own life situation, is the important stuff about survival and finding the key that gives you permission to be someone else by the transformative power of fiction. Jones’s writing is clear and uncluttered; the story, including where it unexpectedly ends up, is mostly uplifting and the result is something bittersweet, something that you warm to as well as admire. PY

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Luis Sepúlveda, The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, 1989

2009-09-07T14:43:00.008+01:00

— When a gringo’s body is fished out of the water deep in the Amazon jungle, the local villagers realise the killer was an ocelot, enraged by the slaughter of her cubs. Only septuagenarian Antonio José Bolivar, who takes refuge from the world’s barbarities in reading love stories, has the skill needed to hunt her down. Native lore tells him it is sacrilege to slay her, but as one of the encroaching white race he knows she must die. In this haunting tale, exiled Chilean writer Luis Sepúlveda powerfully dramatises the ravages of Western civilization and the threatened natural world’s retaliation.

A solitary, elderly man who lives alone at the edge of the Ecuadorian jungle becomes the one person who can track down and kill a dangerous ocelot, but he’d rather be left alone to read the tacky romance novels that he uses to teach himself to read. This has a tangible sense of time and place at the farthest edges of what’s left today of Spanish colonialism, and Sepúlveda’s lively, good humoured storytelling also comes with a subtle environmental message. He knows who he’s writing for, which is something that probably helped this debut novel win a total of eight European literary awards. A memorably good read. PY

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Yasunari Kawabata, Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, 1988

2009-09-07T13:54:00.012+01:00

— In these brief and intense tales, all aimed at some heightened perception or ineffable truth and many based on dreams expressed or implied, we find loneliness, love, the passage of time, and death. Palm-of-the-Hand Stories captures the astonishing variety and complexity of form, setting, character, voice, and tone of one of the twentieth century’s greatest literary talents.

Seventy miniature short stories that Kawabata wrote between 1923 and 1972. It’s said the essence of Kawabata’s writing can be found in these brief episodes in Japanese lives more so than in his novels, but in truth they often feel like fragments of larger stories that Kawabata may have discarded then stripped down to their absolute minimum. Many end with a character staring into the distance, perhaps wondering something, or with an unresolved issue still hanging uncomfortably in the reader’s mind, but there’s also a sense of give-and-take here because while Kawabata often goes for the minimalist effect he’s also careful not to remove the points and markers that can give his characters an often luminous form. It’s interesting to read short stories composed differently from the way we are used to experiencing them, though the reader may still be left with a small sense of dissatisfaction with many, although those written nearer the end of Kawabata’s career are rounded off with more depth: best of all is the brief, impressive ghost story ‘Immortality’, the imaginative flourish of ‘Snow’, and ‘Gleanings from Snow Country’, loosely connected to his famous novel Snow Country. Altogether gentle and enjoyable, but frequently too slight. PY

MORE ON YASUNARI KAWABATA : NOBEL PRIZE BIOGRAPHY | WIKIPEDIA

Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, 1969

2009-09-07T13:10:00.015+01:00

— When a young man returns to his village in the Sudan after many years studying in Europe, he finds that among the familiar faces there is now a stranger – the enigmatic Mustafa Sa’eed. As the two become friends, Mustafa tells the younger man the diturbing story of his own life in London after the First World War. Lionized by society and desired by women as an exotic novelty, Mustafa was driven to take brutal revenge on the decadent West and was, in turn, destroyed by it. Now the terrible legacy of his actions has come to haunt the small village at the bend of the Nile.

Despite the millions of translated copies in print over the last forty years (with barely a trickle of royalties for its author) and its frequent bannings around the world this has had very few widely available English editions, so in his introduction to this new Penguin paperback Salih tried to outline how it has become such an important book in the wider context of African literature (and, as it was written in Arabic, was also voted the most important Arabic novel of the twentieth century). In storytelling terms it is far more successful, and several degrees more complex, than either of those equally famous post-colonial novels Things Fall Apart or From a Crooked Rib: an unnamed narrator returns from England to his village in the Sudan, only to find a newcomer who has adopted the village as his own: Mustafa Sa’eed is a mystery from Khartoum, someone who gradually provides a very unflattering portrait of himself, centred around his own lurid experiences in England that are far more troubling, and necessarily secret, than anything anyone in the village may suspect. Tayeb Salih gives this story many interweaving layers as just about everyone submits to subconscious destructive forces that seem to spread forward and backwards, from person to person, throughout the novel. At the root of it all is the aftermath of British colonialism in Sudan, but that country doesn’t come out of this novel looking at all respectable either, which along with the explicit sexual content probably accounts for its periodic banning. Still a very engaging and challenging book while the echoes of Africa’s post-colonial experience are still being felt. PY

MORE ON TAYEB SALIH : WIKIPEDIA

Imre Kertész, Liquidation, 2003

2009-08-01T10:21:00.010+01:00

— Ten years have passed since the fall of Communism. B., a writer of great repute – whose birth and survival in Auschwitz defied all probability – has taken his own life. His friend Kingbitter discovers among his papers a play entitled Liquidation, in which he reads an eerie foretelling of the personal and political crises that he and B.’s other friends now face. Having survived the Holocaust and the years of Communist rule, having experienced the surge of hope that rose up from the rubble of the Wall, they are left with little other than a sense of chaos and an utter loss of identity.

Communism has fallen in 1990s Hungary, the publishing house of the literary editor Kingbitter is about to fold, and his friend, B., the only author he admired, has just comitted suicide. B. was an extraordinarily perceptive writer, having written a play, Liquidation, which predicted precisely how his coterie of friends and lovers would react after his death: Kingbitter reads about himself doing exactly what he has recently done. This clever beginning to the novel hints at layers of metaphysical introspection, a clever interweaving of meanings and motives, but this ‘Matryoshka doll’ technique of hiding stories within stories only goes so deep here. Further in, and always central to Kertész’s concerns, is the nature of evil and its coexistence with good, the impossibility of truly escaping the mental confines of Auschwitz even after that too has come and gone, and the question of how does one continue to live on after or whether there’s greater dignity in ending it all before the survival instinct disappears forever. A book that’s full of things coming to an end with no new beginnings, short novels don’t come much weightier than this. PY

MORE ON IMRE KERTÉSZ : NOBEL PRIZE BIOGRAPHY | WIKIPEDIA

Thomas M. Disch, 334, 1972

2009-07-21T11:18:00.003+01:00

This is the novel (or more correctly, set of linked stories) which for many showed how Disch was often too clever by half for the rest of us. The novella ‘Angouleme’ included here was the subject of a book-length critical essay by Samuel R. Delany, who argued that despite the absence of scientific themes its speculative setting made it inherently science fiction. A snapshot of the 21st century lives of the people who live in 334 East 11th St, New York, it ranges from being at turns darkly comic and farcical to sharply realistic and unfailingly sympathetic. The science fiction is there in places but played down to the everyday while the social realism is played up, to the point that 334 takes the reader into immersive layers of intricacy, and with a Dickensian eye for detail that shrugs off the fact that this is all meant to be about ‘the future’. Neither was it ever meant to be a fun read in the way that Camp Concentration could be, and if Disch’s last posts on his Live Journal Endzone were indicative of the direction his thoughts were heading in his last weeks, he’d been there already in fiction with 334’s closing sentences. Someone – and really I can only mean Terry Gilliam – could probably make a very decent film of this. PY

MORE ON THOMAS M. DISCH : ENDZONE | WIKIPEDIA

Imre Kertész, Detective Story, 1977

2009-07-20T11:40:00.035+01:00

— Antonio Martens was a torturer for the secret police of a recently defunct dictatorship. Now in prison, he requests and is given writing materials in his cell, and what he has to recount is his involvement in the surveillance, torture, and assassination of Federigo and Enrique Salinas, a prominent father and son whose principled but passive opposition to the regime left them vulnerable to the secret police. Preying upon young Enrique’s aimless life, the secret police began to position him as a subversive and then targeted his father. Once this plan was set into motion, any means were justified to reach the regime’s chosen end—the destruction of an entire liberal class. Inside Martens’s mind, we inhabit the rationalising world of evil and see first-hand the inherent danger of inertia during times of crisis.

As an Auschwitz survivor the study of evil has always been Kertész’s focus and yet this novella, in the form of a prison memoir written by one of the police officers after a civilian government has been restored, focuses more on its banality than its excesses though is no less gripping. The officer shows nothing in the way of remorse and instead tries to show how he was just doing his job, following orders, and the surveillance techniques he uses are straight out of East Germany’s Stasi. This works as an excellent and very accessible piece of writing that serves to illustrate how an untrammeled police force will often be inclined to pursue the wrong leads, and it that respect it helps to cast light on the kind of mindset that results in the death of innocents at the hands of the police. Recommended. PY

MORE ON IMRE KERTÉSZ : NOBEL PRIZE BIOGRAPHY | WIKIPEDIA

Carsten Jensen, Earth in the Mouth, 1991

2009-07-20T07:01:00.019+01:00

This is an interesting experiment in self-reflection: the Danish author Jensen revisits an unpublished fictional Indian travelogue he wrote twenty years earlier, and questions himself – and indeed his younger self – on why it remained unfinished. The travelogue itself is of the kind many thousands of backpackers-as-aspiring-writers would have turned out, with the self cast as a third person and where the protagonist’s culture shock is explored to the nth degree. In fact Jensen’s alter, Thomas, excels at this as he staggers from one crisis of the ego to another, utterly overwhelmed by the alienness of India. The bracketing prologue and epilogue frame it well, and understandably Jensen never really gets to the bottom of things as his journey isn’t yet finished. A mature book, with writing that has been compared to Bruce Chatwin and Milan Kundera. PY

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Thomas M. Disch, Camp Concentration, 1967

2009-07-18T10:47:00.011+01:00

Thomas Disch was never as fashionable within the science fiction community as he deserved, and at the time of first publication Camp Concentration was perhaps (to take a very long view of things) outplayed by Daniel Keyes’s slightly more reader-friendly novel Flowers for Algernon which had been published some months earlier, explores the same theme of artificially enhanced intelligence, is hard-hitting in its own way but then is also, undeniably, outstripped by Disch’s combination of erudition, creativity and political cynicism. Camp Concentration also contains ideas that might look unnervingly close to the present dystopia: America has declared war on the world and its government is experimenting on conscientious objectors. Maybe now that Disch has sadly left us this deserves to be considered a classic of 20th Century fiction: forgive the superlatives but it’s a masterpiece of understated black comedy and still a deliciously wicked book. PY

MORE ON THOMAS M. DISCH : ENDZONE | WIKIPEDIA

Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain, 2008

2009-07-16T14:05:00.041+01:00

Being one of those people who sees dogs as having distinct personalities if we only bother to look, this kind of imaginative take on a dog’s point of view is actually the type of book I like to find. Like all dogs, Enzo thinks and feels like a human and he considers this incarnation to be a trial run for being reborn as one. Now at the end of his life and looking back on his time with his Seattle motor racing master Danny, he considers his karmic track record particularly when Danny’s family falls apart after the death of his wife. This is a very likeable book indeed and Enzo’s first person story actually adds to its authentic feel, because Stein’s aim is to put him across as being essentially the same as us and deserving of a human rebirth. Sad in many places but also pretty uplifting, I’ll probably be thinking back to this haunting book for weeks to come. PY

MORE ON GARTH STEIN : AUTHOR'S WEBSITE | HARPER COLLINS WRITERS PROFILE | WIKIPEDIA

Jim Crace, Continent, 1986

2009-07-16T11:40:00.034+01:00

— A novel in seven stories, Continent is an exploration of the cultures, communities and natural life of an entirely imaginary realm. Built on rich seams of myth and metaphot, this new, seventh continent is strange, atmospheric and yet not wholly a mirage, for its inhabitants are disarmingly familiar, known to us through their loves, their hopes and their struggles to make sense of life.

Continent achieved quite a trio of honours for a debut British author. It’s seven short stories provide no geographical details yet it does still feel like more than just an imaginary realm, and in some respects is also reminiscent of Christopher Priest’s The Dream Archipelago. Some stories focus on how Europe and America relate culturally to its rather backward population, and there’s no doubt the best story among them is ‘Sins and Virtues’, by far the easiest to understand from a cultural perspective and also the best plotted. The rest of these stories are difficult to engage with for a variety of different reasons but are all self-evidently significant, and they demand close attention as there’s not a wasted word anywhere. Cautiously recommended, but without reservation if you go in for Italo Calvino. PY

• Continent won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, the Guardian Fiction Prize and the David Higham Prize for Fiction, all in 1986.

MORE ON JIM CRACE : AUTHOR'S WEBSITE | CONTEMPORARY WRITERS PROFILE | WIKIPEDIA

Jack Kerouac, Beat Generation, 1957

2009-07-16T08:26:00.020+01:00

A play that Kerouac wrote around the time of writing On the Road, but was only discovered in 2005 in a New York attic. The entire play is just a group of friends mostly “shooting the shit”, easy dialogue that rarely scratches below the surface, though Kerouac’s weighing up of his Catholicism against his interest in Buddhism finds a voice in the third act. A minor piece very much of its time and place, the most useful inclusions in this edition are the brief bibliography and biography of Kerouac that, when combined, succinctly sum up his life and not inconsiderable troubles in just fifteen pages. PY

MORE ON JACK KEROUAC : BEAT MUSEUM | PENGUIN 'JACK KEROUAC' MINISITE | WIKIPEDIA

Jack Kerouac, Tristessa, 1960

2009-07-16T08:12:00.022+01:00

Two trips into the junkie houses of Mexico City in pursuit of Tristessa, a beautiful Mexican morphine addict, make this one of Kerouac’s most uncomfortable and tragic short books. The “kickwriting” occasionally goes into overdrive and Kerouac often risks losing the reader if you don’t keep up with the pace. It’s a long meditation on a slow loss, and one (as usual) fuelled by plenty of drink and drugs. PY

MORE ON JACK KEROUAC : BEAT MUSEUM | PENGUIN 'JACK KEROUAC' MINISITE | WIKIPEDIA

Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1957

2009-07-16T07:50:00.057+01:00

— On the Road swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. Now recognized as a modern classic, its American Dream is nearer that of Walt Whitman than Scott Fitzgerald, and it goes racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and autobiographical passion.

The big deal about On the Road was mostly lost on me when I read it back in the 1970s, at a time when its prominent reputation meant it should have made much more of an impact. After a recent second reading and having since learned more about Kerouac I can understand what set him off on his road back and forth across the US but the excess of stimulants still leaves this reader non-plussed. Neal Cassady, incarnated here as Dean Moriarty and being both the heart and tao of the book and the whole Beat Generation, was the focus around whom the more observant Kerouac bracketed his own search in the character of Sal Paradise. There are some great passages and the last trip into Mexico feels like an encore to an already epic story, the whole of which is written in rather sentimental style compared to his later ‘stream of consciousness’ approach. I still think he was intellectually lazy in comparison to Burroughs or Ginsberg but On the Road – or more specifically Dean Moriarty himself – still takes you on a fast and thrill-seeking ride, the impetus of which is hard to shake off. PY

MORE ON JACK KEROUAC : BEAT MUSEUM | PENGUIN 'JACK KEROUAC' MINISITE | WIKIPEDIA

James Morrow, City of Truth, 1990

2009-07-16T05:48:00.019+01:00

The 1992 Nebula-winning novella that Morrow expanded from his short story ‘Veritas’. Morrow has never really caught on in the UK, and more’s the pity. City of Truth depicts the utopian city Veritas, where lying and anything less than complete honesty has been conditioned out of human communication, while it is under seige from the rebel ‘dissemblers’ of the hidden city of Satirev. Jack Sperry believes he must go from a ridiculous extreme to an absurd one as he learns to lie in an attempt to save his young son from a fatal disease. Morrow’s notable wit, very prominent in the first half, is gradually replaced by a sadness that shows how neither extreme of truth or untruth is ideal. A very good if rather implausible satire, and one that favourably compares with Vonnegut in Morrow’s exploration of the ridiculous. PY

MORE ON JAMES MORROW : AUTHOR'S WEBSITE | LIVE JOURNAL | WIKIPEDIA

Ayn Rand, Anthem, 1938

2009-07-15T22:36:00.012+01:00

Rand wrote this at the same time as she was working on The Fountainhead, so the two books share the theme of asserting individuality over collective living (the edition available today is her revised 1946 version). This is a very straightforward story but also a rather overworked parable, in which a future society populated by people who are numbered rather than named exists without the concept of ‘I’, instead only having ‘we’ with which to express themselves, and collectivism is enforced almost as a religion. The protagonist, Equality 7-2521, rather unbelievably gets to do everything all by his very resourceful self: stumble upon a lost source of ancient knowledge, make scientific discoveries singlehanded, suffer cruel punishment for his good fortune, escape from jail, win the most beautiful girl and discover the Unspeakable Word. And rather uniquely, because of Equality’s upbringing most of Anthem is told only using the first and third persons plural. Any atheist who has shaken off an earlier religion will, similarly, probably understand some of Rand’s antipathy to her roots, and her loathing for Russian collectivism informs the whole story. The influence of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We is also there in the background, despite being thematically rather different. This is not a natural or free-flowing tale at all, it’s (necessarily) linguistically clumsy and way too earnest, but as a vision of a mind breaking free from imposed constraints it displays its own kind of self-conscious dystopian perfection. PY

MORE ON AYN RAND : THE AYN RAND INSTITUTE | WIKIPEDIA

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, 1921

2009-07-15T19:51:00.022+01:00

Welcome to OneState, a soulless totalitarian regime based on mathematical principles, reason, logic and the efficiency models of the 19th century management theorist Frederick Winslow Taylor. The designer of the spacecraft known as the Integral, the mathematician known only as D-503, has love and pity for the life found elsewhere in the solar system, considering them as yet uncivilized by the missionary nature of the Integral’s forthcoming journey. D-503’s diary entries depict a cold and unemotional civilization: OneState is obsessed with its own mathematical perfection, a dictatorship run through with expansionist dogma and rhetoric that it will impose on whatever aliens are encountered out there in the universe. But then there are his misadventures with the rebel movement Mephi and his infatuation with the woman I-330, both of which take his eye off the ball and force OneState to intervene. We was the first work banned by the Soviet censorship bureau and wasn’t published in Russia until 1988, despite having already inspired Ayn Rand’s Anthem and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s easy to see why this short dystopian masterpiece is considered to be among the greatest of its kind; described by its most recent translator Clarence Brown as a “clunky old postmodern monster” it feels very much of its time yet retains a great deal of charm, not least because D-503 knows he is not writing for posterity or his contemporaries but for his wild and remote ancestors, us. PY

MORE ON YEVGENY ZAMYATIN : ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOVIET WRITERS | WIKIPEDIA

Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1981

2009-07-15T09:07:00.021+01:00

Based on an event he remembers from his youth, Márquez adopted a journalistic yet personal style for this novel as a speculation on what led a possibly innocent man to be murdered in a South American form of honour killing, after a Colombian bride’s doomed wedding night. It would be easy to fall into line and call this a masterpiece the way everyone else does, but that’s to overlook that the structure of this novel can at times be difficult, particularly in the early few chapters where Márquez’s rhythm is not at all easy to establish. The fact that he removes the mystery from the murder in the first few pages is what makes this book exceptional because he can still keep the reader interested in events with the way he ranges back and forth along the story’s non-linear timeline, well beyond the killing itself. It’s one of those books short enough (and OK, important enough) that it deserves to be read by everyone, if only to witness the non-intrusive hints of magical realism that he adds, the multiple viewpoints that illustrate how the whole town failed that day, and his complex composition which drives the point home that the story’s dénouement is actually as important as the story itself. An intimidatingly masterful read. PY

MORE ON GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : THE MODERN WORLD | NOBEL PRIZE BIOGRAPHY | WIKIPEDIA

China Miéville, The City & The City, 2009

2009-07-09T23:20:00.020+01:00

One of Miéville’s starting points for The City & The City was a line from Bruno Schulz’s short story ‘The Cinnamon Shops’ (from his collection The Street of Crocodiles), about an imagined city, hidden and unseen, that occupies the same space as Poland’s Drogobych. Miéville seems to have simply taken this idea and expanded on it with considerable detail and a complete change of genre, instead producing a curious hybrid of Chandleresque crime with a slight twist in the nature of reality. In the contemporary Eastern European double city of Beszel/Ul Qoma a murder is committed in one city but can only be solved in the other. This presents some very interesting complications, not all of which Miéville surmounts completely, mostly because people of one city are forbidden from seeing the other city at all, even its inhabitants, and even while in the same street. How citizens avoid breaching this solid rule is done by ‘unseeing’ them, a kind of tuning out of the senses, and it sometimes felt as if, for this notion to work, Miéville had to constantly reinforce and shore up this taught and learned ability by showing increasingly difficult situations where people are challenged to ‘unsee’ what is clearly right in front of them. To walk around with so many blind spots peppering your vision and hearing must surely be debilitating beyond any ability to function properly, but everyone is adept at it and they seem to get by just fine without invoking the wrath of the authority that preserves this intimidating status quo, known as Breach. And then there is the notion of a mysterious and sinister third city, hidden again somewhere between the two, which Miéville uses to great imaginative effect in pulling the story forward.

It’s admirable that Miéville hasn’t copped out with any magical or paraphysical explanations for the two cities occupying the same space, and it must have been far more challenging to have written it this way without resorting to his considerable facility for fantasy. A fair amount of characterisation also seems to have been sacrificed in order to keep the pace up, but instead Beszel/Ul Qoma becomes a good addition to that list of imagined cities where Weird Shit happens – it’s more Hav than Bellona, but still different from either. Having said all that I still found this an engrossing read and have no objection at all to the way Miéville makes you work a double shift, both at getting your head around the nature of the cities themselves as well as keeping up with the slightly less trivial pursuit of figuring out the whodunnit. One of my favourite and certainly less easily categorised books of 2009. PY

MORE ON CHINA MIÉVILLE : PANMACMILLAN WRITER'S PROFILE | REJECTAMENTALIST MANIFESTO | WIKIPEDIA

Marguerite Duras, Moderato Cantabile, 1958

2009-07-06T22:43:00.020+01:00

It would have helped to know a little more about the French nouveau roman movement before taking on Moderato Cantabile, however my rather back-to-front way of dealing with the book has still been an education, which ultimately is the whole point of my choosing to read diverse styles of fiction. This is one of the more famous pieces of nouveau roman, the manifesto for which Duras didn’t exactly align herself with even though a large middle segment of her work, beginning with this novel, is recognised as such. Unfortunately, I’ve always been a little wary of stories in which everyday characters are (for want of a better term) ‘overcome by symbolism’; such stories risk going way too far up their own postérieur beyond any legitimate experiment in style, resulting in the kind of artistic endeavour that years later usually ends up the subject of legitimate parody.

In a French coastal town, a woman whose unnamed and recalcitrant son is taking piano lessons overhears a murder in the street. The following day she meets a man in a café who also witnessed the murder, and their subsequent encounters are based purely on exploring ideas of how and why it happened. She finds herself drinking copious amounts of wine, and he has motives beyond mere conversation. Their speculations soon become the vector of emotion between them, something clearly more real and important to them than these two deliberately barely-sketched characters are to the reader. This set-up itself is interesting, however the execution and end result left things to be desired, at least for me; others will no doubt find it a satisfying read in its adherence to the nouveau roman credo: one of the movement’s aims was to subvert characterisation, bring other story elements to the fore and explore the tension in between. With that knowledge Moderato Cantabile becomes a far easier story to understand, because some of the elemental symbolism Duras employs is also of the kind more readily understood in the visual arts. I found its depersonalising aspects a little troublesome in terms of actually enjoying the book, but on reflection I can see how it holds up as an example of magnificent literary sleight of hand. PY

MORE ON MARGUERITE DURAS : WIKIPEDIA

Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, 1960

2009-07-06T07:11:00.013+01:00

This was Miller’s only published novel (if one discounts his incomplete Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman), and is the cornerstone of his reputation for looking at Christian themes while placing them in a science fictional context. Leibowitz was an ordinary electrician in the military prior to the world’s first nuclear war, after which, repentant, he went on to found a minor religious order. Then came the ‘Simplification’ of humanity, and six hundred years hence an indecipherable artifact is found which was undoubtedly his, and over the following thousand years man learns once again to develop nuclear weapons.

The generally bad temper to Miller’s Catholic humour is what gives A Canticle for Leibowitz its kick: he is at turns comic, often sad but always prodigiously grim and rich. Some superbly cantankerous abbots and monks (most of whom are killed off without a shred of dignity) seem to prove their human fallability on a daily basis while at the same time debate higher morality on a grand scale with perhaps too much eloquence. The final moral dilemma for Abbot Zerchi is direct, painful and graphically drawn, making Miller’s exploration – or was it a defence? – of a self-perpetuating Christianity all the more ambivalent. Part of Miller’s point seems to be that humanity’s beliefs – whether one considers them rational or irrational – will over centuries become exaggerated to the point of having a hold over us that’s often far out of proportion to their elementary simplicity; on the one hand he seems to poke fun at this state of affairs in the wider world though on the other hand he appears to stand by some of the more ornately embellished beliefs of the Catholic Church. And where this discord applies to the story’s last third it becomes an uncomfortably big question mark that hangs over everything – just how useful, or useless, is Christianity? – a question mark with a hook that one detects Miller can’t seem to wriggle off all that easily (at least on the page, and he sits the reader squarely on that fence too, allowing you to jump either way). An angry and ironic book, and there are even iconoclastic aspects that make it as relevant today as ever. PY

MORE ON WALTER M. MILLER JR. : WIKIPEDIA

Graham Greene, Brighton Rock, 1938

2009-07-06T06:58:00.022+01:00

Sometimes your most honest appraisal of a story can be found in the first words you say to yourself when you finish it: in this case mine were “That was, again, a fantastic book.” Greene doesn’t put a foot wrong in his story of the downfall of Pinkie, a teenage gangster on the streets of 1930s Brighton, after he commits one murder too many. Greene’s getting under the skin of Pinkie is a truly class act in characterisation, equally so his nemesis, the formidably convincing Ida Arnold, who gets to the root of things with the small help of a ouija board and plenty of female intuition. There’s something quintessentially British about it all, with everyone trapped in their own circumstantial worlds and their lives intersecting in ways that can’t help but point back to their own individual loneliness. How Greene does this I’m not so sure, and in fact to analyse that some more would take away much of the pleasure: Greene can dazzle you with his writing here, if you let him. Brighton Rock is also a very catholic novel about life, with Pinkie being a defiant exception to whatever rules life may have, his come-uppance conveyed in his refusal to countenance that ‘there’s always room between the stirrup and the ground’, even when time is at its most short. A benchmark of a novel in British literature, and one that can still make a particularly hard-hitting impression. PY

MORE ON GRAHAM GREENE : WIKIPEDIA

Gao Xingjian, One Man’s Bible, 1999

2009-07-05T19:40:00.031+01:00

A long and completely detached autobiographical but fictionalised retrospective on Gao’s time as a revolutionary Party cadré under China’s catastrophic Cultural Revolution, and a navel-gazing analysis of how women and sex have shaped him throughout his life. In this account of his life Gao has deliberately divorced himself from his past: he refers to his younger self in the third person and to his present 1990s self in the second person throughout, which at times makes it something of a challenge to follow the dual threads but is still a neat literary device. Often heavy going and ponderous (as one might expect from a Nobel Laureate), it nevertheless does offer a unique first-hand insight into the paranoid nightmare that was everyday life under Mao. PY

MORE ON GAO XINGJIAN : NOBEL PRIZE BIOBRAPHY | WIKIPEDIA

Franck Pavloff, brown, 2001

2009-07-05T14:58:00.018+01:00

Two easy-going friends are living under a regime that is gradually tightening its grip. New laws are introduced stating that brown pets are healthier, stronger and eat less than other animals. So as not to upset the authorities they trade in their differently coloured pets for brown ones. Other colours start to disappear, first the cats, then the dogs, then the people...

brown is nothing less than a very succinct short story that first appeared in France as 'Matin Brun', published by a small press more famed for its poetry, and is now available in English with a small commentary about its origin and subsequently very colourful life. It was written by Pavloff (a psychologist and son of a Bulgarian anarchist) as a response to French local elections in 1998 when it was discovered that mainstream political parties had made secret alliances with the extreme right wing Front National. Through word of mouth it has since been used to debate totalitarianism with the FN’s Jean-Marie Le Pen, and has since sold at least 600,000 copies. PY

MORE ON FRANCK PAVLOFF : FRENCH WIKIPÉDIA

Derek Raymond, A State of Denmark, 1964

2009-07-05T12:03:00.014+01:00

A pull-quote on the back cover of the most recent edition describes this as “alternative science fiction on the scale of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four”, which is, frankly, rubbish: this doesn’t have the same imaginative scope, even remotely, though it is certainly a descendant of that more famous dystopia. A British socialist Prime Minister of the 1960s called Jobling reveals his true colours and quickly turns England into a relentless dictatorship, while Wales and Scotland secede from the United Kingdom and the Left just rolls over and dies. Set against Jobling is Richard Watt, a political journalist living under self-imposed exiled in Italy; this exotic and rather languorous setting for the first half of the book sets a pace that creaks along, but it’s there mostly to draw parallels with Mussolini. The second half is more descriptive of England under dictatorship and starts off far more boisterous, though endures to a downbeat finale of unceasing hopelessness. Serpent’s Tail reissued this pulp novel posthumously in 2007; it’s different from the usual English noir Robin Cook (as Derek Raymond) offered up but in places it’s plausible – a small warning that, actually, it could happen here if we let our guard down. Cautiously recommended, because in truth I suspect any aspiring British dictator would encounter far more resistance than is portrayed here. PY

MORE ON DEREK RAYMOND : WIKIPEDIA

J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World, 1962

2009-07-05T11:04:00.011+01:00

Ballard disowned his first novel The Wind From Nowhere, so most people’s Ballard collections now have to start here. It’s a typical Ballardian cataclysm: an overactive sun has produced a melting of the polar ice caps with a submerged Earth undergoing a new Triassic era, and London is now a steamy, coral-encrusted jungle populated by giant iguanas. Robert Kerans is an expedition biologist, enraptured by the disturbing dreams that people share at this latitude, and he chooses to stay when his expedition departs. He then encounters the manic character Strangman and his seductive African entourage, who are all similarly caught up by the end of the world but in a far more sinister and symbolic way. The Drowned World openly references the influence on Ballard of Paul Delvaux, who seems to provide a creative counterpart to Ballard’s own destructive imagery, and once you ‘get’ the character of Strangman, a man with a real heart of darkness and the only properly developed character, Ballard’s intention becomes clear and the rest falls into place. It’s a somewhat stilted read now but memorable for the visual ideas it leaves you with, and given the biblical nature of this apocalypse it’s also refreshingly free of much religious referencing at all. PY

MORE ON J.G. BALLARD : AUTHOR'S WEBSITE | BALLARDIAN | WIKIPEDIA

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, 1962

2009-07-05T09:53:00.020+01:00

The small but important differences between the original book and Stanley Kubrick's brutal film are not often commented on. This is still, thankfully, not yet a book to be noted for being a prediction, instead as a warning it seems to have functioned very well largely as a result of Kubrick’s truncated adaptation. But what was lost to Kubrick – he was unaware of the book’s final chapter because it was omitted from US editions – is a final sense of personal sympathy for the violent and unreliable teenage narrator, Alex. It’s actually what keeps the book alive and relevant because Burgess came down clearly on the side of his distinctly amoral anti-hero, despite having been driven to write A Clockwork Orange out of personal experience and loss from precisely the kind of violence he describes. It must have been difficult to write for that reason alone, though when set against the even greater amorality of a misguided government trying to deal effectively with youth crime it’s clear the book emerged out of Burgess asking himself some hard questions while still feeling a justifiable rage. Which makes the book a moral one, and far easier to experience than the film despite the complexities of Burgess’s invented language, Nadsat, which somehow also serves to veil the violence. Of which there’s plenty. PY

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Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street, 1991

2009-07-05T09:39:00.011+01:00

Esperanza Cordero is a young Mexican girl growing up in a 1960s Chicago tenement, not exactly on the wrong side of the tracks but poor nonetheless, and desolate Mango Street is the place she needs to escape from. This series of forty-six first-person vignettes captures defining moments and experiences often with pinpoint sharpness, and it’s also noticeable how the writing increases in sophistication as Esperanza becomes more mature, as her family and friends move on and her perception of her own young life becomes gradually more muted and melancholy under the gentle weight of added layers. A book that has sold three million copies worldwide, vibrantly written with prose that often captures the time and place with a near perfect clarity. PY

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Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt, Mr. Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran, 2001

2009-07-05T08:17:00.013+01:00

A teenage Jew, Momo, may be stealing from Monsieur Ibrahim’s Paris shop but over time they form the kind of cross-cultural father-son relationship that both seem to have been seeking out. Ibrahim’s Sufi beliefs come across as a light-hearted and positive way of dealing with the world, while Momo seems to find them more useful than Judaism and all but converts to Islam. It has echoes of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist but is far more engagingly written, and Schmitt’s tale (the first in his four ‘Cycle of the Unseen’ books) has also been turned into a film which would be worth seeking out. An easily-digestible story well-served by good, fluid writing. PY

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Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland, 1998

2009-07-05T07:52:00.014+01:00

By the end of his eight-year rule in 1979 Amin was established in the British media as both a perplexingly charismatic figure of ridicule, and an inept and dangerous dictator with the blood of half a million Ugandans on his hands. Out of necessity Foden first had to focus on what made Amin so personable and hypnotic a character, after which he gradually takes the reader across a very distinct line into Amin’s dark side as his personal physician Nicholas Garrigan learns the truth (the hard way) about Amin’s excesses and abuses. The truth of the real Amin’s relationship with those he employed was probably somewhat different as he was both intimidated and threatened when surrounded by people of greater intellect than himself, though at the same time he was scarcely able to exercise restraint when keeping a personal stranglehold on power. Foden has also threaded his story around real events by weaving in several fictional news cuttings amongst the facts and maybe has added too much sparkle to Amin’s character, but for the most part it’s convincing, often drawing as much on the Ugandan landscape as on Amin himself, and the result is an engagingly audacious read. I expect even Amin himself would have approved. PY

• The Last King of Scotland was the winner of the 1998 Whitbread First Novel Award.

MORE ON GILES FODEN : CONTEMPORARY WRITERS PROFILE | WIKIPEDIA

Barry Lopez, Resistance, 2004

2009-07-05T00:02:00.013+01:00

Nine loosely connected short stories about how individuals, at times of upheaval or personal challenge, have circumvented the self-defeating behaviours that often seem hardwired into us by our monolithic Western culture. Where a common response would be to live in fear of government, respond to violence with revenge or find salvation in consumerism, greed or misguided wars, Lopez takes his characters on alternative courses of action with each one side-stepping into different ways of thinking, the kind of thing that happens when the irresistable force of the spirit meets the immovable object of a dehumanising but personal circumstance. This all makes precisely the kind of uncommon sense that is rarely found. Resistance may be rooted in the counterculture of the ’60s but Lopez does not take easy refuge in either platitudes or cynicism; he preserves the restlessness of that era but reinvigorates it with maturity, a global awareness and a cautious optimism. A finely-balanced and necessary book, totally relevant to life in the West today. PY

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Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden, 1978

2009-07-04T23:51:00.014+01:00

Over a hot English summer, a family of four recently orphaned children avoid being taken into care by not telling anyone of their bereavement, instead choosing to fend for themselves. Narrated by the morose teenager Jack, The Cement Garden is soaked in an authentic atmosphere of a boring 1970s British adolescence, but their unguided excursions into premature adulthood would probably be treated as farcical and troubling comedy if they were from a less finely-tuned author. The setting seems as familiar and mundane as McEwan could possibly make it (notwithstanding the sibling sexual tension and the problem of how they dispose of certain incriminating evidence), and for a first novel it’s as dry as dust in its cold and disturbing perfection. PY

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Timothy O’Grady, Steve Pyke, I Could Read the Sky, 1997

2009-07-04T23:30:00.019+01:00

This book has been celebrated as something of a small Irish cultural event in and of itself, looking at the lives of Irish manual labourers in England. It takes the form of a old man looking back at his life, his family and the people he knew while going through decades of low-paid work in a country he feels alienated from. Noticeably absent are any adventures he may have had, instead focussing on the more mundane imagery of the unskilled jobs he’s done, his friends and the all-pervasive music they all play: those same hands that dig graves and tunnels and build roads also play flutes and accordions, something that is one of the defining points of the book. The photography of Steve Pyke is as important as the words, such is Pyke’s ability to perfectly capture Irishness when set in this context. The right music for this book is of course the album of the same name by Iarla Ó’Lionáird, which was also the soundtrack to the film. A superb and memorably haunting work. PY

• I Could Read the Sky won the 1998 Encore Award.

MORE ON TIMOTHY O’GRADY : CELTIC CAFÉ BIOGRAPHY

Keith Ridgway, Horses, 1997

2009-07-04T23:19:00.012+01:00

This novella first appeared in the anthology First Fictions 13, though following on from the acclaim for his first full length novel, The Long Falling, it then gained its own edition. Set in Ireland, it’s a story of arson, attempted murder, grief, revenge and death, all set on a dark and stormy night somewhere south of Dublin, and it has atmosphere in spades. Ridgway is also strong on writing about motive for his characters, though those motives are often hidden even to the characters themselves, such are the impulsive behaviours that combine to make an unpredictable story of small tragedies writ large: while some are letting their worst sides show, others are trying to hold it all together. The ending is all there, but left in pieces for the reader to assemble. A taut and well written story, one that draws you in and holds your attention completely. PY

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Manuel Rivas, Butterfly’s Tongue, 1995

2009-07-04T23:11:00.011+01:00

Three short stories that have the common theme of young Spanish men or boys viewing the adult world from the outside. Two of the stories, ‘Saxophone in the Mist’ and ‘Carmiña’ revolve around first encounters with music and sex, though particularly good is ‘Butterfly’s Tongue’, about a young schoolboy who admires his old teacher with whom he shares a love of nature, and yet for reasons of the Spanish Civil War is encouraged by his father to turn against him. This trio was also made into a film which is certainly worth seeking out. Rivas is a delicately observant writer. PY

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Joseph Roth, The Legend of the Holy Drinker, 1939

2009-07-04T22:59:00.009+01:00

A short tale about the last days of a Paris down-and-out whose life is suddenly filled with small miracles, and Roth drank himself to death in similar fashion at the age of 45, a month after he finished writing it. It’s concise but enjoyable with a mature economy with words being very evident, and through it you get the sense of the last throes of an aimless life, a knot unravelling. Sad but potent. PY

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Joseph Roth, The Spider’s Web, 1923

2009-07-04T22:47:00.015+01:00

Roth’s debut novel paints a disturbing picture of post-World War 1 Germany, and shows how the seeds of its unfinished war with itself fractured the country still further with the conspiracies of the radical right undermining the Weimar Republic. The writing is often urgent and relentlessly assertive, but with it you get the inside track on what drives Roth’s cunning, duplicitous and feral characters to survive in a dangerous time of national schism. Also worth remembering is that it was written long before the rise of Hitler and National Socialism, which makes the conclusion all the more prophetic and chilling. Excellent. PY

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Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, 1927

2009-07-04T22:36:00.010+01:00

In 1714 a bridge in Peru collapses killing five people, a priest who witnesses the accident is compelled to ask why those five were chosen by God to die, and after looking into each of the victim’s lives he draws his conclusions. It’s a necessary book about the danger of trying to divine religious meaning from random events and why bad things happen to undeserving people, written in a slightly arcane historical style that doesn’t make for fluid reading but does instead capture the time and place very well indeed. This also served as inspiration for John Hersey’s excellent journalistic Hiroshima. PY

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Banana Yoshimoto, Hardboiled / Hard Luck, 1999

2009-07-04T22:17:00.009+01:00

Two novellas that explore how two slightly unconventional Japanese women react to situations after people close to them have died, the first discovering how her awareness of the spiritual world has opened up, the second discovering how the circumstances of her late sister’s life has now given her own a new direction. Yoshimoto focuses on seemingly irrevelant details that at first make the stories feel too mundane until their importance to the development of the story is revealed. The first tale is quietly unsettling, the second an understated gem of quiet observation. PY

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