Plans for Jean Rhys Reading Week & Book Giveaway

Last month I posted an announcement about the Jean Rhys Reading Week that will be taking place from Monday 12th to Sunday 18th September. In essence, it’s a week centred on reading and discussing the work of this remarkable writer.

During her lifetime, Rhys published five novels: Quartet (1929); After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1931); Voyage in the Dark (1934); Good Morning, Midnight (1939); and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). She also wrote several short stories – a number of collections have been issued and are still available to buy secondhand if you’re willing to hunt around. There is a series of letters too, plus Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography.

The wonderful Jacqui who blogs so insightfully about books at JacquiWine’s Journal kindly invited me to co-host the reading week with her. Poppy Peacock (who writes about books at poppy peacock pens) and Margaret Reardon (another long-standing Rhys fan) will also be helping us with a couple of activities during the week. Between the four of us, we’re planning to cover pretty much all of Rhys’ work to give a broad view of her oeuvre. We’d love as many readers as possible to get involved by reading one of more of Rhys’ books (or even a relevant biography).

With a few weeks to go before the start of the week, here is an overview of what will be happening during the week and how you can get involved. Ideally we’d love you to read something by Rhys (or a book connected to her work) and then to share your thoughts about it via one or more of the following routes:

•    If you have a blog, you could write a review or article about the book and post it there.
•    Alternatively, share your thoughts on GoodReads. We’ve set up a ‘Jean Rhys Reading Week’ Group on GoodReads with a discussion topic for each book, plus one on Rhys’ life
•    Tweet about it on Twitter using the hashtag #ReadingRhys
•    Add your comments to other readers’/bloggers’ reviews/posts which will be going up throughout the week

You can post your reviews and comments at any time from 12th-18th September, it’s entirely up to you.

To give you an idea of what each of us will be focusing on, here’s a schedule for the reviews/posts we are planning to issue during the week.

#ReadingRhys Schedule:

Monday 12th September
•    Welcome to #ReadingRhys, plans for the week + After Leaving Mr Mackenzie – Jacqui (at JacquiWine’s Journal)
•    Welcome to #ReadingRhys, plans for the week + Good Morning, Midnight – Eric (at Lonesome Reader)
Tuesday 13th
•    Voyage in the Dark - Eric (at Lonesome Reader)
Wednesday 14th
•    Tigers are Better-Looking (short stories) - Jacqui (at JacquiWine's Journal)
Thursday 15th
•    Wide Sargasso Sea - Eric (at Lonesome Reader)
•    Quartet – Poppy (at poppy peacock pens)
Friday 16th
•   An interview with a special guest – Jacqui (at JacquiWine’s Journal)
Saturday 17th
•    Good Morning, Midnight – Margaret (at newedition.ca)
•    Smile Please – Eric (at Lonesome Reader)
Sunday 18th
•    Rhys’ Letters: 1931-66 – Poppy (at poppy peacock pens)
•    The Left Bank (short stories) – Jacqui (at JacquiWine’s Journal)

Between the four of us, we’ll be taking responsibility for visiting your blogs, the relevant GoodReads threads and reading comments on Twitter etc. At the end of the week, we’ll pull together some brief summaries of everyone’s responses to the books with a view to posting these on our blogs and the GoodReads group area during w/c 19th September.

So that’s the plan for the week. You can post your reviews and comments at any time, and we’ll visit when we can. Do add the banner (near the top of this piece) to your own posts as and when they go up and feel free to add it your blog if you’re planning to participate. Please use the #ReadingRhys hashtag in any Twitter comms about the event.

Good Morning, Midnight Giveaway!

As a little incentive, we have 5 copies of the brand new Pocket Penguins edition of Good Morning, Midnight to giveaway. For a chance to win one of these prizes, please tell us what you’re planning to read for #ReadingRhys week by commenting below.

The giveaway will run until midnight on Thursday 25th August (UK time) after which time we will select five winners at random. It’s open to everyone worldwide, so please feel free to enter wherever you live. Do include a note of your contact details in your comments, either an email address or Twitter/GoodReads handle. Good luck!

We’re really looking forward to discussing Rhys’ work and we hope you will join us during the week.

In the meantime, if you have any comments, queries or suggestions for the Jean Rhys Reading Week (#ReadingRhys), please leave a comment here or get in touch with one of us via Twitter. We tweet at @JacquiWine, @lonesomereader, @poppypeacock and @2daffylou.

Happy #ReadingRhys!

The North Water by Ian McGuire

I’ve had a copy of “The North Water” for ages and part of me wishes I’d read it in the midst of winter to add atmosphere to the reading experience. It’s an immersive story so full of vivid descriptions it made me shiver as if I were trapped in a snowstorm and wrinkle my nose as if I could smell the pungency of sailors long at sea. This dramatic account of a treacherous ocean voyage follows a Yorkshire whaling ship, the Volunteer, as it journeys up the coast of Greenland into the arctic during the mid-1800s. An Irish surgeon named Patrick Sumner, who has a murky past working in the army in Delhi, joins the vessel’s crew as they set out to hunt whales and skin polar bears. But others on the crew have alternative motives for the voyage including Captain Brownlee, first mate Cavendish and a terrifyingly violent harpooner Henry Drax. As they journey into the treacherous iceberg-laden seas Patrick and the crew face perils both within and outside of their ship. This novel is a gripping adventure story of the highest order which gives a penetrating look into the darkest acts that men are capable of.

There are plenty of thrills, but it is not simply about heart-racing scenes. I think McGuire is doing something more sophisticated in this account of the strife his characters encounter when they venture out into the raw and untamed elements. Here a person’s identity is indelibly tied into their daily actions which involve life or death decision making. Patrick reasons that “Only actions count, he thinks for the ten thousandth time, only events.” It’s these events at sea which define these sailors’ identities. Rather than meditating on purpose or how to go forward in the future there is only meaning in how these men conduct themselves under highly pressured circumstances. Later Patrick reasons “It is a grave mistake to think too much, he reminds himself, a grave mistake. Life will not be puzzled out, or blathered into submission, it must be lived through, survived, in whatever fashion a man can manage.” The test of will these sailors pit themselves against determines whether they survive and only then does life shape into meaning.

There is something wonderfully indulgent in McGuire’s powerful descriptions of the hyper-masculine environment of seafaring living. It’s full of gritty honesty about bodily smells and functions not to mention the hyper violence which is inextricably a part of hunting the ocean and arctic plains. Although it may turn a reader’s stomach at times it unquestionably makes the story come vibrantly alive. However, there are also lines of tremendous grace and beauty, especially when McGuire describes the landscape: “The black sky is dense with stars and upon its speckled blank, the borealis unfurls, bends back, reopens again like a vast and multi-coloured murmuration.”

The sailors also encounter communities of Inuit people in Greenland.

Since the majority of the novel takes place on the ship there are very few female characters. There is nothing polite or politically correct about these hard men whose language is full of racial invectives and disdain for women. It’s a pleasure when these men come under critique themselves such as the wonderful line: “Pigs grunt, ducks quack and men tell lies: that is how it generally goes.” Yet, the author skilfully draws distinctions between men who are ruled by selfish instinct and those who have more of a sensitivity and moral conscience. There’s also a refreshing representation of a homosexual sailor who is neither a “pansy” nor someone who suppresses/denies his sexuality, but finds himself in an extremely difficult situation when events take a dark turn.

Periodically throughout their journey Sumner reads from The Illiad. It’s interesting that he mediates upon this book rather than the Odyssey which is the journey he more inhabits. Yet, it’s appropriate as the character is plagued by memories of what happened during his time at war in Delhi. The victims in this story (whether they be people in war or animals slaughtered during hunts) take residence in the minds of the men who manage to survive these battlefields. It creates a haunting message about the transformation of personality when men are involved in the most harrowing conditions imaginable. This novel is a true experience: brutal and completely gripping.

Harmless Like You by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

One of the reasons why this book blog is called LonesomeReader is I want it to be an ongoing exploration of what loneliness means. People who can be termed as introverted or shy have a tendency to feel greater degrees of loneliness as they aren’t able to easily connect to others or socialize as naturally as more extroverted groups. Many who feel this way think of themselves as indistinct and unnoticed, standing on the sidelines or a wallflower. “Harmless Like You” begins with Yuki, an adolescent girl living in New York City in the late 1960s. She’s someone who often holds her feelings inside, but they seep out in creative ways through different artistic mediums with how she experiences colour and sees the world in a distinct way. The novel flips between the decades of Yuki’s development as a person and artist and a time in 2016 when a young man named Jay travels to Germany to inform his estranged mother Yuki about his father’s death and the house that was left to her. Their stories combine to form a powerfully emotional tale about family connections, self esteem and personal expression.

As a girl, Yuki thinks of herself as so invisible that not even the perverted man who flashes women on the street notices her. Because she sees herself as so separate from others she feels she has no impact on them. But a quiet presence can have just as powerful or a greater effect than someone who makes themselves loudly known. Since she’s not able to express her feelings to people her silence sometimes acts as a destructive force towards others and herself. It leads to the dissolution of her relationships with her parents who move to Japan, her only childhood friend Odile who pursues a modelling career and a man who later tries to earnestly love her. There’s a moving scene after her first sexual experience when she recalls her father hitting her knuckles when she was forced to memorize poetry, but she’s not able to speak about this with her partner. Opportunities for nurturing emotional connections are lost because Yuki is unable to express how she feels.

Her silence also leads her to not tell anyone about the abuse she receives within a difficult destructive relationship. There are strong descriptions of how “she’d been knocked out of herself. A screaming ghost girl, with teeth of orange glass, hovered above the body.” Yuki develops a fractured sense of self which makes her emotionally withdraw even more from other people. Yet she pursues further techniques for trying to artistically render her complex feelings in painting and photographs. Looking at a photograph of civilian girl victims in Vietnam, Yuki’s partner remarks how they are harmless like her. This makes a deep impact on Yuki in how she is seen externally by some white Americans to be a completely benign presence. The novel shows a complex understanding of how passive people subtly enact their own influence.

Jay has a cat named Celeste. "The one thing a hairless cat shouldn't do is hairball."

Yuki’s son Jay is a new father who has inherited some of his mother’s traits. Emotional connections are difficult for him as well – especially with his newborn son of whom he remarks “I’d never dreamed of leaving my wife until this creature came into our lives.” He only achieves a sense of emotional stability in his connection with his elderly cat Celeste. Having never known his mother, he’s kept inside many feelings about her and their broken family until he travels to Germany to finally meet with her. This encounter allows for the possibility of more open emotional connections in both of their lives.

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s debut novel contains a lot of moving descriptions of how colour relates to emotion. At times Yuki experiences a synaesthesia so when she’s taken to a movie cinema the buttered popcorn connects with her partner: “The sweet yellow smell was Lou.” Many chapter headings begin with a description of a particular colour and its complex meaning. In a similar fashion the way Yuki experiences colour tempers how she relates to and feels the world around her. This creates a sophisticated portrait of an artistic sensibility and the story cleverly shows the influence introverted personalities have upon the world. “Harmless Like You” is an extremely moving and imaginative novel.

The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984 by Riad Sattouf

I read graphic books so rarely, but every time I do pick one up I wonder why I don’t read more. Maybe it’s because usually only the most acclaimed and, presumably, high quality ones reach me. Whatever the case, this first volume of Riad Sattouf’s graphic memoir about his childhood growing up in Libya, Syria and France is absolutely mesmerising. It depicts his experiences under the parentage of his academic Syrian father Abdul-Razak and his French mother Clementine. His father’s ideals and pride about his heritage are complicated by the real world challenges he and his family encounter living under the rule of Gaddafi in early 80s Libya and Hafez al-Assad’s Syria a few years later. Gradually his principles change and he aspires to fashion his young blonde-haired son Riad into the Arab of the future.

Quite often the dialogue which accompanies illustrations of Riad’s experiences combine with very short snippets about political developments of the time. This intelligently puts these scenes in context and gives a welcome insight into the state the family lives under. Also, considering the father’s attitudes alongside our own historical knowledge about the outcome of some of the leaders and regimes he mentions makes this a bracing read. Sections of the book are shaded various colours to differentiate the nations that they are living in: blue for France, yellow for Libya, pink for Syria and (briefly) green for Jersey. I admired how these colours sync with Riad’s descriptions of the different environments of these various locations. The expressive design of the illustrations also beautifully reflect the emotional mood of the story – particularly during some vividly rendered dream sequences and a scene where Riad’s grandmother licks his eyes!

Wonderful touches of humour abound throughout this book including Clementine’s description of Georges Brassens as a French God leading Riad to visualise the singer every time someone mentions God to him. There are also sympathetic portraits of family relations and Riad’s impressions of a series of misfit or bullying other children. Some scenes depict chilling flashes of violence which springs up against animals and people. At other points a fascinating tension appears when the family comes under the sway of competing ideologies – particularly in the virulent anti-Israeli attitudes impressed upon children. For instance, toys Riad and two friends play with in Syria show the Syrian toy soldiers in heroic poses and the Israeli toy soldiers in treacherous poses. These attitudes demonstrate the growing conflict within Abdul-Razak of whom it’s noted “He said he wasn’t religious, but he constantly defended the Sunnis. According to him, the Sunnis were always right.” His cultural and national pride mingles with the dogmatic principles of religious doctrine so he comes to teach Riad things such as “Satan likes to hide inside women.” Reading about the father’s gradually transforming ideas makes me really tense to read how he will develop in the second volume of this graphic memoir.

“The Arab of the Future” is a tremendously engaging story of family life. It’s also a fascinating personal insight into differing cultural attitudes, the physical reality of living under two distinct Arab leaders and how national/social/religious ideologies filter through the consciousness of a wide-eyed adolescent. It’s a heartfelt, refreshing take on growing up in unique circumstances. I highly recommend reading it before the next volume of this trilogy is published in the UK in September by Two Roads.

Infinite Ground by Martin MacInnes

It begins like a caper story. A young man named Carlos went missing from a family dinner when he stepped out to use the bathroom and never returned. An investigator is given the case to track him down. But his search almost immediately folds in upon itself when he starts searching the restaurant/Carlos’ office and interviewing people connected to him. The woman he speaks to who he believes is Carlos’ mother is not really his mother and many people at his office are only actors hired to look like productive employees. A scientist named Isabella analyzes traces of Carlos’ biological makeup and expounds upon an increasingly improbably multitude of chemical factors which could have led to him departing. The borders of reality collapse as the investigator struggles to analyse, research and report. Nothing is what it seems. The closer you look at things the more the world becomes an absurdist fantasy. Martin MacInnes’ compelling debut novel is a story of existential crisis and irreconcilable loss.

There’s a wonderful fluidity to MacInnes’ writing so that, although his narrative makes surprising tonal shifts from the comic to the horrific to exhaustively detailed analysis, I felt entranced by his skewed perspective of the world. It all resonates with how the investigator is not just searching for a missing person but for a way to wholly capture experience. By the time all the details are accounted for, time has moved on and the moment has passed and we must mull over it all again trying to faithfully recreate/understand it. If you think of these things as obsessively as the investigator then “it was a marvel, he thought, that any of them managed to do it all, to get from one day to another, to keep everything going just like that.” The novel artfully expresses the fallibility of memory and the clunky mechanics of consciousness. It’s interesting reading this so soon after César Aira (a quote on the cover compares this novel to his work) because Aira equally uses dream-like logic as a way of highlighting the futility of accurately representing reality.

The investigator frequently looks for a more primal understandings of human motivation and behaviour as a way of explaining our actions. Many chapters of this novel are prefaced with quotes from a fictional book about tribal behaviour. The second half of “Infinite Ground” entails the investigator’s travel to “the interior” of a forest where he believes Carlos has slipped away to. Here he embarks on tours to find others who have become lost in this wilderness as well as searching for more authentic modes of life. Hilariously reality here turns out to be as simulated as that in urban life. This is also where the investigator becomes more psychologically revealing as his civility is stripped slowly away. Some time ago he lost his wife and instead of dealing with her loss he seems inspired by Isabella’s proposition that “If it were up to me I would spend my whole life digging up the lost civilization of a single vanished person. There would be no end to the project, Inspector. No end to what may be discovered.” Instead of narrowing down possibilities, the investigator opens his mind to an infinite amount of them. It becomes apparent that “He was out of his depth in a case he couldn’t understand and would never resolve.” This was never about finding out what really happened to Carlos, but accounting for the totality of life when we’re caught in the unstoppable flow of time.

This is an experimental novel whose imagery and ideas challenge our modern sensibilities. In an age when our understanding of other people’s lives are mediated through how they are represented on social media it seems more pertinent than ever to question how we can really understand or know about another’s experience. At the same time there is something pleasingly retro about the novel’s style and earnest manner (perhaps because its action isn’t located in any specific time or place). It harkens back to post-modern literature like Joyce Carol Oates’ phenomenal novel “Mysteries of Winterthurn” which is more about the process of investigation than the crime itself. No matter how objective we try to be in understanding the world it is always refracted through a personal perspective leading the investigator of MacInnes’ novel to see he was “so naïve as to believe in the authenticity of the investigation and the autonomy of his own role.” The totality of the investigator’s being is caught up in searching for answers (which might be why he has no name), but he can only start to see what’s true when he looks hard at himself.

Interviewing Zadie Smith

These photos make it look like I was hilarious although I don't remember cracking that many jokes.

The publishers Hamish Hamilton who publish so many authors I love such as Ali Smith, Adam Haslett and Deborah Levy kindly invited me to interview Zadie Smith on Thursday evening at a special preview event for her forthcoming novel “Swing Time”. How could I say no?! Smith’s meteoric rise to literary fame occurred in the same year I first moved to London in 2000. Ever since reading the wonder that is “White Teeth” I’ve avidly followed her writing – not only her novels but her eloquent journalism such as her review of Christian Marclay’s artwork ‘The Clock’ (one of the most brilliant pieces of art from the last decade) and her recent powerful essay about our post-Brexit world ‘Fences.’ She’s an admirably thoughtful writer who portrays a wide variety of characters with depth and insight.

I read “Swing Time” last week and it is such an engaging and fascinating book. I’ll post a full review about it in November when it’s published. But just to give you an idea of what this new novel is about here’s a brief summary. The narrator recounts her adolescence growing up in North London in the 1980s with a fiercely intelligent feminist mother and a friendship she forms with a provocative and high-spirited girl named Tracey. They bond over a shared love of dancing and are “magnetically” drawn together because they are both mixed race and have matching skin colours. She recounts her development into the 90s and then the narrative takes an interesting turn where it zigzags through time showing scenes from the narrator’s adult life working as an assistant for a famous pop star who wants to establish a school for girls in West Africa and also shows how the narrator’s friendship with Tracey broke apart in their teenage years. “Swing Time” is also the title of a 1930s musical starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and a scene from this film features in the prologue. The narrator becomes somewhat entranced with watching scenes from old Hollywood musicals particularly in the offensive way they depict race. The novel gives a fascinating perspective on time, racial identity and growing economic/social/political divisions over a few decades.

The event was held in the Prince Albert pub in Camden – a locale in the neighbourhood of the novel’s narrator. Zadie read from the opening chapter and then we talked about how this novel is quite a different book for her in its structure and focus on only one character’s perspective. We also discussed the vulnerability of writing in the first person, the fractured sense of identity created by the diaspora, the draw of nostalgia and her lifelong love of musicals. She was so engaging and interesting in her answers I wish I could have spoken to her for ages. It was also a strange coincidence that Mark Lawson sat right behind me and Zadie because the room was so packed chairs for the audience were placed behind us as well. When I first came to the UK I loved watching Newsnight Review on the BBC because (coming from the US) it felt so amazing to me that there was a serious show devoted to reviewing the arts and culture. Lawson was the show’s long time host and I’ve always respected his opinions.

This is the first time I’ve interviewed an author so it was slightly nerve-wracking that it would be with someone of Zadie’s stature. But our talk went down well with the audience who all seemed engaged and excited about the novel. It was also wonderful speaking to Zadie one on one about what else we’ve been reading recently and life in the US vs the UK. She’s very friendly and sweet so even though I felt anxious about the interview she put me at ease. It felt like a nice cosy event even though there were around 100 people there with lots of drinks and bookish chat after our talk. It was such a pleasure doing this event. I hope you’re now looking forward to reading “Swing Time” when it comes out in November because it’s such an excellent novel.

Are you a Zadie fan and which of her novels do you like most?

The Lauras by Sara Taylor

When I read the Baileys Women’s Prize longlist last year, one of my favourite books was Sara Taylor’s novel “The Shore” a sprawling family epic centred on an island. It read like a fantastic jigsaw puzzle where you could piece together how a family was related by following their separate stories at different points over two centuries.

I was thrilled to receive her follow up novel “The Lauras” which is a very different kind of book but maintains her distinctly engrossing and insightful style of writing. It’s somewhat challenging to write about it because the novel’s narrator Alex, who is thirteen years old at the book’s beginning, doesn’t live as one gender or another. So it just presents a technical challenge where I have to use the joint pronouns she/he when referring to Alex. (This isn’t the novel’s fault but shows how gender divisions are so ingrained in our culture and language.) The novel begins when Alex is abruptly woken in the night by her/his parents’ fighting - unfortunately this isn’t unusual in Alex’s experience. But this time Alex’s mother comes into her/his room and abruptly takes Alex with her to run away. They embark on a journey across country which takes a number of years as Alex’s mother concludes unsettled business from her chequered past and forges new relationships. Meanwhile, Alex grows into an independent individual by making connections with a broad spectrum of people and experiencing adventures for her/himself. So this novel is a thrilling road trip story about a mother and her child on the run. It also says something deeply compelling about how we form fictitious and factual tales about our lives, challenges conventional notions about identity and how we define the concept of home.

The Lauras of the novel’s title are five different girls/women Alex’s mother knew over the course of her adolescence and teenage years – all of whom were named Laura. They all played an important role in her life as she tried to make her way in a difficult situation. Her parents were unstable and her home frequently shifted as she and her brother spent time in different care facilities. These Lauras are both distinct individuals and represent the crucial connections we make with people which help us find the right path in life. Alex remarks at one point: “you look back when you’re forty years old and realize that you have a long string of Lauras behind you who were all important, and it isn’t just coincidence but the eight-year-old you trying to fill in the hole that the first Laura made.” This is a meaningful statement that encapsulates how we seek out or are found by people with whom we form alliances in life that both inspire and challenge us in making crucial decisions about the future. Alex’s mother tells her/him stories about her life as they drive up, down and across America. So the mother’s recollection of the past is layered on top of the experiences they have revisiting significant places and individuals in a beautifully poignant way. Meanwhile, Alex pines for the father that she/he left behind and holds to the belief that they’ll be reunited - even as the years pass by while the mother and child occasionally move from state to state.

Recently I read Marilynne Robinson’s exquisitely beautiful novel “Housekeeping” but haven’t felt equipped to write about it on this blog yet. There are parallels between Robinson’s novel and this story in the way they challenge the idea of what a home is when the narrative of family is fractured. At an early point in Taylor’s novel Alex wants to know from his mother ““When are we going home?” I asked. “What is home?” she asked back... “That's a time, not a place. And time only goes one way.”” Although the mother was obviously in a difficult situation with Alex’s father, I couldn’t help feeling upset that Alex was so rashly pulled of the life that she/he knew for a constantly shifting/unstable life on the road. But gradually it becomes apparent that the connection that Alex and her/his mother share is the most important nurturing aspect of her/his life rather than the place they happen to be living in. The home we make or are born into can be a place where we can grow and thrive, but it can also be a kind of trap we must escape. It leads Alex to discover that “home for me was a place I was going to, rather than a place I could occupy.”

The fact of Alex’s gender neutrality is obviously something that is challenging to most people that she/he meets during their journey across the country. Alex’s physical features and clothing don’t immediately signal that Alex is a boy or girl. Alex’s doesn’t believe that she/he should have to choose a gender to live as so remains neutral allowing most people to look at her/him in a puzzled way and refer to Alex simply as “kid.” Alex reasons that “Knowing someone's sex doesn't tell you anything. About that person, anyway. I suppose the need to know, how knowing changes the way you behave towards them, the assumptions you make about who they are and how they live, tells an awful lot about you.” The issue of whether Alex is male or female becomes most crucial when she/he enters high school where gender lines are more firmly drawn and Alex’s peers take a brutal bullying attitude when wanting to know the truth about what’s between Alex’s legs. They refer to Alex as “it.” The way which they need to define Alex as a girl or boy does say something significant about both their attitudes and our culture’s attitudes towards gender. Taylor presents Alex’s gender neutrality in a compelling way, especially in how Alex’s sexuality develops at this crucial time of life despite not specifically identifying as either a girl or boy.

Based on the “The Shore” and “The Lauras”, it’s interesting how Taylor’s narratives are made up of individual vignettes held together by overarching themes. This led some people to feel “The Shore” was more a group of short stories than a novel. “The Lauras” is more tightly held together as it is controlled by Alex’s narrative voice, but still amidst Alex’s journey there are the fascinating stories of many other people they meet along the way. This method of segmenting her novels into different stories might be inspired by the author’s mistrust of there being only one story: “it's so rare that reality rustles up a satisfying narrative shape, the edges rounded off and the ends tied up. It's rare that you get finality to things, the way we like our books and movies to end. Life so often goes flabby and peters out at the finish point instead of clicking satisfyingly, like the sound of a box being shut.” Like Alex’s gender, this novel doesn’t want to be limited to being only one thing which makes Taylor both an ambitious and fascinating writer. She is particularly good at portraying the lives of disadvantaged individuals hemmed in by the expectations of society. Flashes of violence appear throughout her sub-stories showing dramatic clashes between people who seek to control others and those who will fight to escape and survive. There are also moments of great tenderness and warmth. Sara Taylor is a gifted storyteller who threads thoughtful contemplations about life into her intelligent and beautiful writing. 

The Many by Wyl Menmuir

A great pleasure of following the Man Booker Prize longlist is coming across books that I probably wouldn't encounter otherwise – including Menmuir’s debut novel “The Many”. It was a joy to plunge right into reading this without knowing anything about it and I was immediately struck by how atmospheric it is as the story is set in a strange fishing village. Life is hard in this murky, remote corner of the world and it’s becoming even harder. The bay seems to have been polluted because the fish caught in the sea appear disturbingly malformed and the only buyer of these hauls is a sinister woman dressed in grey who is accompanied by a couple of cronies. There is something deeply unsettling and strange going on in this village. The story goes somewhere completely unexpected which left me completely gripped and moved when reading the final quarter of the book.

“The Many” alternately follows two characters. For some time a dilapidated house has remained unoccupied – ever since the disappearance of its owner Perran who was a close familiar to many in the village. But a man named Timothy purchases this rundown dwelling intent on turning it into a home for him and his absent wife Lauren. He’s shunned and treated suspiciously by most of the guarded people in the village. Ethan, an unpopular fisherman and longtime inhabitant, struggles to find anyone to accompany him out into the water to help bring in his increasingly meagre catches. Although he refuses to answer Timothy’s insistent questions about Perran, the two become unlikely allies and fishing partners. But the mystery about Perran keeps swelling to the surface and the village is slowly flooding. Eventually everyone must confront the truth of what’s happening.

The accounts of Ethan and Timothy move freely between the present and past building tension and a deeper understanding of the action. As the novel progresses it also becomes increasingly hallucinatory as Timothy is plagued by insidious dreams and a ravaging illness. The line between what’s real and what’s not becomes blurred. It creates an effective sense of tension and psychological suspense along the lines of Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw” but passages where the men are out fishing in the gloom also invoke a feelings of intense meditation and a primal self-sufficiency similar to Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea”. I was slowly drawn into the novel’s bizarre climate of secrecy and impending doom. “The Many” is a brisk, impactful novel which poignantly portrays grief, solitude and an inhibited state of consciousness. 

Polari First Book Prize 2016 Shortlist

It’s good that the day after the Booker Prize longlist was revealed, the shotlist for the Polari First Book Prize was announced at Polari’s regular literary salon held at the Southbank Centre. Concerns are rightly raised about the diversity of authors listed for any prize when announcements are made because it highlights how the industry and our society in general might be prone to elevating people of a certain gender, race, class or sexuality above others. The more prizes we have like The Polari First Book Prize (which honours debut books that explore aspects of the LGBT community), the more voices from all corners of our country are heard.

I attended Polari last night to hear the announcement and it was a pleasure to hear imaginative poet John McCullough read from his latest collection “Spacecraft”. His poem ‘Cat Flap’ went down particularly well with the audience. It was fitting to hear him read as his beautiful book “The Frost Fairs” won the prize in 2012.

I’ve read three out of the six titles shortlisted for the prize and you can read my full reviews of them by clicking the titles below. Fantastic to see Andrew McMillan in the running for yet another award and his inclusion gives a nice continuity as he read at Polari when the 2015 shortlist was announced last year. Stevan Alcock also read from his gay coming of age novel “Blood Relatives” set against the backdrop of the Yorkshire Ripper murders. This makes a nice contrast to Paul McVeigh’s equally powerful coming of age novel “The Good Son” set in Belfast during the Troubles. Last night, Juliet Jacques also gave an excellent reading from her memoir “Trans” which gives a meaningful perspective on the everyday reality of a trans individual. I’m eager to read the other books on the list.

Have you read any of the below or are you interested in giving them a try?

Physical - Andrew McMillan

Blood Relatives – Stevan Alcock

Sugar and Snails - Anne Goodwin

Trans – Juliet Jacques

Different for Girls – Jacquie Lawrence

The Good Son – Paul McVeigh

The Man Booker Prize 2016 Longlist

After the stunning novel “A Brief History of Seven Killings” won last year’s Man Booker Prize, I’m especially excited to see what takes this year's award. Again, we have a compelling longlist of 13 novels. I’m a big supporter of new authors so great to see 4 debut novels included. I suppose you could say the biggest name on the list is J.M. Coetzee who has won the prize twice before. More than anything, this list makes me want to lock myself inside for a week and get reading!

I only managed to correctly guess one book on the longlist and I’ve only read two of them: Deborah Levy’s wildly original novel on family/relationships “Hot Milk” and Elizabeth Strout’s short impactful “My Name is Lucy Barton”. However, I’m really happy about this because many of the books on the list I either have on my shelf or I’ve heard great things about such as Ian McGuire’s “The North Water”, David Szalay’s “All That Man Is”, Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Eileen”, Madeleine Thien’s “Do Not Say We Have Nothing”, David Means’ “Hystopia” and Paul Beatty’s “The Sellout”.

I’m a big fan of A.L. Kennedy and J.M. Coetzee so I’m also excited to read “Serious Sweet” and “The Schooldays of Jesus”. I don’t know anything about Graeme Magrae Burnet’s “His Bloody Project”, Wyl Menmuir’s “The Many” or Virginia Reeves’ “Work Like Any Other”. So I’m glad there are some real surprises there for me to discover.

A shortlist of six books will be announced on September 13th and the winner will be announced on October 25th.

What do you think of the list? Have you read any? What are you looking forward to reading first? I can’t quite decide what to start with.

Dirt Road by James Kelman

New novel “Dirt Road” is the first book I’ve read by Scottish writer James Kelman. It may not be representative of his usual work as I believe he has a reputation for writing novels that invoke Glaswegian patterns of speech which make it difficult for people unfamiliar with this dialect to understand. His Booker Prize winning novel “How Late It Was, How Late” was surrounded by controversy for its frequent use of bad language, but Kelman responded to these objections saying he was honouring and representing how working class people in Glasgow actually speak. “Dirt Road” features both Scottish and American Southern dialect because the story is about a US road trip, but it’s very readable and easy to understand. This emotionally affecting story closely follows the experiences of Scottish teenager Murdo as he and his father visit relatives in Alabama shortly after his mother died of cancer.  

I’ve find it can take a while to get into novels that are so embedded in the moment to moment thoughts and feelings of their protagonists. It can feel at times like a chaotic accumulation of superfluous detail and tedious observations. It’s a testament to the skill of Kelman’s writing that I was surprised to find after fifty pages or so how mesmerising this narrative became and how close I felt to Murdo as he navigates a country that is bewildering and foreign to him. What’s more, his position of naivety gives a fresh perspective on social, national, racial and economic divisions within society highlighting their ridiculousness. In the middle of the novel, Murdo and his father Tom travel with an aunt and uncle to an American Scottish festival. The dress and activities on display here are a strange simulacrum of outdated traditions and are out of sync with modern Scottish sensibilities. It makes for funny scenes but it also feels like this contrast between the idea of a unified national character and actual Scottish characters make a poignant and timely statement about how national identity is porous and changeable. Kelman isn’t mocking the sense of community that festivals like this give, but he shows how they are more about the idea of a nation rather than truly representing the evolving complex reality of a nation.

Murdo is a talented accordion player and his teenage passion for this musical art form is poignantly rendered. He tries to explain to his father how he’s not academically gifted in the traditional sense, but gets a sensory education from listening to music: “Just hearing it the way I’m hearing it, it’s like learning, although I’m just listening like I hear it and I learn it. It’s just the way I do it Dad so I mean that’s just how it is.” When Murdo encounters attractive girl Sarah and her grandmother Queen Monzee-ay who is locally famous for her Zydeco music, the impressionable boy is strongly drawn to playing alongside them and joining this charismatic group of performers. Naturally, his father is protective and wary of his son setting out with bands of musicians when he’s still only sixteen and not an American citizen.

At the heart of the novel is how Murdo and his father Tom’s relationship changes as they learn how to live without the mother and Murdo’s sister Eilidh who died many years ago. I can’t help but feel Kelman must have been inspired by Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” in some way because of the novel’s title and the emotionally fragile father-son relationship it portrays as they travel together without a mother. When I think of McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel I’m immediately reminded of the chilling horror it portrays, but my more lasting impression is the bond shown between a man and his son. It’s a tricky thing to do especially because many men conform to their gender roles and don’t often openly discuss emotion. The same is true in “Dirt Road” where Tom spends a lot of time reading on his own while Murdo likes to escape to his aunt’s basement to listen to music in solitude. Conversations between them are short and to the point. Details about the emotional discord created by the mother’s death are gradually revealed, especially how Murdo was placed in a caring position for his father. He thinks with resentment: “The son shouldn’t have to feel sorry for the father. Jesus didn’t feel sorry for God.” But their experiences together during their journey create a more harmonious bond and mutual respect for each other.

Kelman is attentive to small differences in customs and behaviour making America strange to this Scottish boy such as the way tax is only added at the point of sale, the way many Americans use fork and knives differently from Europeans and the social separation between racial groups that exists in parts of the American south. It makes for atmospheric reading as it is so finely filtered through the sharply observed perspective of a sensitive teenage boy. Equally strong is the way Murdo is bewildered by his own changing identity as he builds a sense of self out of his interactions with other people: “Ye look in the mirror and see other people. Because they are seeing you.” This is an impactful story about a damaged father and son building a connection and respect for each other amidst their lingering grief, but it is also about how artificial lines of division break down when real connections are formed.

Try a Story

A fun thing about joining the booktube/youtube community is that there are a lot of challenges that prompt you to talk about books in a different way from straightforward reviews. Recently I was “tagged” to make a video where I pick five short story collections I haven’t read before. I then read the first story of each and decided whether I wanted to continue reading them or not. Here’s the video I came up with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY4iaLp-c5Y

If you want to take this challenge yourself please do and let me know the results. I’m a big fan of short stories so let me know if you’ve read any good recent collections or anthologies.

The Seamstress and the Wind by César Aira (Translated by Rosalie Knecht)

I had almost finished reading César Aira's short novel on my way home from a book launch last night when I stopped at a Chinese takeaway to get my dinner. After placing my order, I sat down to continue reading when an eight year old boy came up to me and asked if I knew I had entered a force field which transported me to another time. I replied I didn't know that and asked what time I was now in. He said we are now in 2008 which is the year he was born. He looked up thoughtfully and reasoned that this meant he wasn't really here yet. Such an unexpected plunge into the realm of fantasy is entirely in sync with this surreal and surprising novel.

The main story involves a car chase. Seamstress Delia Siffoni's son has gone missing. Believing he might be in the back of a neighbour's large truck that has embarked on a long haul drive, she pursues him. Her gambler husband Ramón pursues Delia and in pursuit of Ramón is a mysterious little blue car. Following all of them is a gust of wind named Ventarrón which carries a wedding dress. There's also a sinister monstrous baby let loose on the world after a horrific incident. This might all sound bizarre enough, but it gets a lot stranger. There's an Alice in Wonderland-type journey through the convoluted labyrinth of a truck. One character's skin colour changes. A meteorological phenomenon falls in love. At all times, you are aware that this novel is a construct as it is a story being composed by a writer sitting in a Parisian cafe. In doing so, Aira creates a bewitching tale at the same time as meditating on the meaning of invention, memory and art.

The writer is upfront at the novel's beginning that all he has for this book is a title. How he goes about constructing a story to fill that title is something he pauses to consider in depth. Most would consider that novels are formed out of a blend of a writer's experience and imagination. What else could it be? But Aira is intent on utilizing the state of forgetfulness for his creativity rather than inventing a story: “In loss everything comes together.” He's mistrustful of imagination because he feels it will always draw upon memory which is unreliable. Rather than tie his creation to the past he wants it to exist freely: “Forgetting is like a great alchemy free of secrets, limpid, transforming everything into the present. In the end it makes our lives into this visible and tangible thing we hold in our hands, with no folds left hidden in the past. I seek it, to oblivion, in the insanity of art.” So the novel is a sort of freeform exercise based in what he doesn't recall and the result is a bizarre episodic series of events and descriptions which follow a dream-like logic.

Since I was having trouble puzzling over what to make of Aira's novel I asked these cute kids what they thought it was about. They answered time travel and Vikings.

I'm not sure I believe it's possible for Aira or “the writer” to create a story untied to the past. You certainly can't fit the strange images and twists of the story into any neat interpretation, but that doesn't mean they aren't based in part on his lived experience or emotional experience. He tries to hold his characters such as Delia in the present as she is spontaneously created: “Delia is not the luminous miniature in the reels of any movie projector. I said she was a real woman, and I submit myself to my words, to some of them at least... to the words before they make sentences, when they are still purely present.” But details arise, such as how the local housewives who don't work look sneeringly down upon Delia for maintaining a profession as a seamstress even though her husband works. This economic imbalance and sexist social injustice feels like it was inspired by the writer's experience either directly or indirectly. Similarly, there is a touching way how the writer describes his boyhood when the trucker Chiquito created snowmen for him to enjoy. The sentiment of this friendly, playful gesture feels real as well. I'm not saying these things happened to Aira and I never try to interpret a writer’s life into my reading, but how can there be any emotional resonance if it didn’t come from a person with experience? It feels to me like there is an emotional truth, rather than historical truth, which comes through whether the writer is conscious of it or not.

César Aira is an incredibly prolific Argentinian novelist with around eighty novels and novellas to his name. That his output is so rapid isn’t surprising when you read this novel – not because it lacks craft or refinement, but there is a rapid fire quality to the prose where ideas and images are boiling over to form an outrageous plot. His writing has been compared to Borges and it came across like reading an Italo Calvino novel to me or watching a David Lynch film. It’s clearly not cosy fiction, but it’s sophisticated and energetic writing which will leave you scratching your head with curious wonder. I have a feeling certain powerful eerie scenes will stick with me more than his theories on narrative. Most of all, I admire the sheer uncompromising audacity and verve of this novel.

Dodge and Burn by Seraphina Madsen

Dodo Ink is an exciting new independent press that’s publishing daring fiction which doesn’t fit into the catalogues of more mainstream publishers. I was delighted to contribute to their Kickstarter campaign last year because I know the people behind it are committed and serious readers who want to bring out vibrant and challenging new literature. So I’m thrilled to read their first publication “Dodge and Burn” by Seraphina Madsen which is simultaneously a fable about two sisters Eugenie and Camille who live under the control of a sadistic stepfather doctor, a mystery about a lost heiress, a psychedelic road trip about two lovers on the run from gangsters/the law and a mystical meditation on space/time/being. It’s energetic, feverish writing takes you on a spectacularly wild journey.

The novel begins with Eugenie’s bizarre account about her mother’s death when a group of bees fiercely attack her. She and her sister are subsequently taken to her mother’s grand house in Maine where their sadistic guardian Dr Vargas subjects them to torturous experiments including fixing electric collars around their necks and making them kill and eat their pet rabbits. Tantalizingly the house contains a number of libraries whose books the sisters eagerly devour but there is one library which is forbidden to them. The sisters are made to stay in different rooms, but read to each other through a ventilation shaft. They engage each other with literature as varied as William S Burroughs, Henry James and Nabokov as well as a number of mystical and scientific writings. They formulate systems of drawing upon ritualistic behaviour to gather spiritual strength and plot to escape from their deranged guardian/captor.

When the sisters become unexpectedly separated, Eugenie spends her life trying to locate Camille and embarks on a path towards a kind of enlightenment or unveiling of the hidden deities which secretly control our reality. She’s an almost supernaturally strong individual who seems impervious to poisoning or overdosing from the phenomenal amount of drugs she consumes. She’s highly intelligent, well-read, an expert poker player and gymnast. Her partner in crime is Benoît, a man she marries and nicknames Venus Acid Boy (after he hilariously mishears the Bjork song Venus as a Boy). They gamble in Vegas and win so dramatically that casino thugs set upon them. Their adventure takes them across the country having encounters with candy ravers who subsist off from a diet of Pez and neighbours who grow a substantial amount of marijuana. Eugenie’s intense drug-fuelled and sexual experiences take her to other planes of consciousness which might or might not be real: “For all I knew I was my own hallucination.” All the while she’s intent on reuniting with her lost sister.

Cave of Altamira

There is another layer to the story where Eugenie herself is missing and her estranged father who is an Antarctic explorer has offered a substantial reward for her recovery. Her notebooks are discovered in an ancient cavern in Spain. Here are Paleolithic cave paintings which inspired the surreal artist Miró. The quest to discover what happened to both her and her sister Camille are layered into this larger frame. It creates a fascinating array of stories which feed into each other and straddle different periods of time and various locations. This style reminded me somewhat of Lina Wolff’s wildly creative novel “Bret Easton Ellis and The Other Dogs” published earlier this year. Similarly, in “Dodge and Burn” episodic adventures are related with great fervour. An intensity of experience and thought dominates over traditional narrative flow. This left me dazzled and awe-struck, but at the same time I wished for the story to slow down at some points to linger and expand parts such as the bizarre perversity of Dr Vargas’ child-rearing methods and the sisters’ joint strategies for surviving them.

Seraphina Madsen is a highly intriguing new author whose writing encompasses both outrageously fantastic and movingly realistic modes of narrative. Eugenie’s intensity of experience is vividly rendered as is her emotional quest to reunite with her lost sister. It’s made all the more meaningful if you read Madsen’s process behind writing this book and her personal experiences here. This novel gives a highly amplified version of the painful injustices of childhood and our quest for deeper meaning in life. It’s a bold and imaginative debut from this new author and promising new press.

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack

It's easy to scoff at literary fiction which experiments with form given our existing canon of literature which is already packed full of wildly eccentric novels. Everyone from Virginia Woolf to Samuel Beckett to Gertrude Stein to William S Burroughs to Eimear McBride has twisted not only conventional grammar but the shape of the story on the page to say something new about the experience of life and art. So a novel that is one long continuous sentence which lasts more than two hundred pages may seem like it's being wilfully unconventional, but really the style of Mick McCormack's “Solar Bones” perfectly suits the flow of thought for its meditative and entertaining narrator Marcus Conway.

Marcus is an ordinary Irish man who worked as an engineer in County Mayo with his wife and raised two children. Moving through his house he hears the chiming of a bell and this sound resonates throughout the whole novel as it captures a moment and highlights the way our lives are paced out in marked time alongside the flow of life around us. The novel has a poetic brilliance which shines through the very readable prose as Marcus sifts through the experiences of his life. He recounts the trials of his family life, the recent financial crisis in Ireland, local politics and a virulent strain of flu which made his wife very ill.

The effect of reading this extended sentence which is uninterrupted by any full stops made me feel like if I stopped reading I'd miss out on some crucial bit of information which was about to come next. So I was mesmerized and intrigued, but also frustrated because I naturally long for a conclusion or break point. Marcus himself gets frustrated when he wishes at points to halt the stream of his musing: “stop mother of Jesus stop this is how the mind unravels in nonsense and rubbish if given its head”. Really that's partly the point; there are no neat conclusions in our experience - just a continuous flow of thought running through our heads melding the past with imagination, an internal conversation with oneself and those we’ve known in the past. It makes you aware of the way you are a constant subjective witness to both your life and the world around you. You are both the absolute authority of this experience and someone utterly bewildered by it all.

McCormack is extraordinary at capturing the personal reaction we feel witnessing societal shifts which we feel powerless to stop. It felt particularly poignant to me with the recent referendum and the vote for the UK to leave the EU. At one point Marcus and other citizens of his town witness a large ship passing and he thinks “something in me recognizing this as a clear instance of the world forfeiting one of its better ideas, as if something for which there was once justified hope had proved to be a failure and the world had given up on some precious dream of itself, one of its better destinies”. The consequences of these changes and lost ideals reverberate through our personal and collective history. It makes us question the solidity of a society we need to believe in to go about daily life, but which we know in reality is just a collective agreement and, ultimately, an illusion.

He records this feeling when Marcus considers how in 2008 the profitable boom in the Irish economy turned to a nationwide recession. He reflects how “the whole thing ridiculously improbable, so unlikely in scale and consequence it's as if something that never was has finally collapsed or revealed itself to be constructed of air before eventually falling to ruin in that specific way which proved it never existed”. The ways in which we can personally react to these shifts in society are represented in the lives of Marcus' children. His daughter Agnes is an artist whose confrontational work thrusts her into becoming a local icon for a discontented generation. His son Darragh emigrated to Australia. The focus of his interests shifts from subject to subject so he's not able to focus in any substantial way. He becomes consumed with playing the video game Civilization which is a game I've also spent countless hours playing. The player in it leads the development of a civilization while also interacting and trying to dominate the rival nations which are simultaneously growing around you. It works poignantly in this novel as a way of showing how we seek to control the changing society around us, but in reality we are in many ways powerless.

Mike McCormack reads from Solar Bones at Kennys Bookshop

It's impressive the way this novel reflects how daily life can be so caught up in particular moments as global news is filtered through our brains. Marcus comments on how “dawn to dark six or seven news bulletins needing my attention all spaced out at regular intervals, the day structured like the monastic rule of some vigilant order synched to the world's rhythms and all its upheavals” so that his mind is constantly bombarded with outside information that slightly shifts or confirms his own points of view. It makes him feel both at the centre of a nexus of global change and like a helpless pawn being moved by larger forces.

This is a novel which many might feel hesitant about approaching because of its unusual style, but I bet if you start reading you’ll be hypnotised by its engaging and fascinating voice. Marcus’ gripes and wry perspective are very relatable plus the flow of language is a thing of fine-crafted beauty. Mike McCormack captures the movements of everyday life whether we feel engaged with the world or deeply resigned about it: “rites, rhythms and rituals upholding the world like solar bones, that rarefied amalgam of time and light whose extension through every minute of the day is visible”. It's an electrifying experience being swept so fully into one man's uninterrupted meditation on life.