We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo
Dips and rises, stronger in some places, weaker in others
Darling is an imaginative, intelligent and constantly hungry child living in Zimbabwe, in a tin house where the bed is made out of a mattress stuffed with old cloth and chicken’s feathers. Her commentary on life is matter-of-fact and astute, yet funny in a precocious child kind of way. Darling’s dream is to live in America, ‘My America’, she calls it, and imagines plentiful food, clothes, big beautiful houses and a Lamborghini that she will surely drive once she gets there. Her friends with Chekhovian names like Bastard and Godknows dream too – like Darling, they want to leave their ghetto called Paradise and become ‘real’ people – but for now they spend their days stealing guavas from the gardens in the wealthy Budapest, playing Find Bin Laden and Country-Game, and watching the adults try to cope with the demise of their country.Eventually Darling gets a chance to realise her dream when her aunt Fostalina, brings the girl to Michigan, or DestroyedMichygen, as Darling and her friends call it. But America is not what she expected. Homesick and frustrated at not being able to visit her friends and family in Zimbabwe – Darling’s visa has by now expired and she is an illegal, just like her aunt and uncle – the teenager watches her dream dissipate into the reality of low paid jobs, community college and now also pressure from those she left behind. Pressure to write, pressure to telephone, pressure that Aunt Fostalina is under to send money home. Life is not easier here at all, Darling starts to realise. Not everyone is rich, and most immigrants work very hard, and not as doctors and lawyers but as cleaners, packers and nursing homes staff.Writer Helon Habila has made an interesting point in his review of We Need New Names about the seeming anxiety of the author to cover every topic considered ‘African’, be it genocide, Aids, political violence or child abuse, all in the first hundred or so pages before Darling’s arrival to America. Even Darling’s poetic, original voice does not change the fact that the long list of ‘African issues’ distracts from the real story, even if just for the mere reason that one would need a much longer, and a very different kind of novel to cover them all. Still, it is the second part of the novel – the American part – that jars the most. As Darling finds America bland and disappointing, her voice changes to that of a critical, sharp teenager whose sense of wonder slowly turns into sarcasm, and the ending is somehow more bleak than all the horrors of Darling’s previous life. Her impressions of America are far from favourable, and at times far-fetched. It is, after all, hard to believe that a girl who sang Lady Gaga’s songs with her friends in Paradise, has never heard of aerobics and is shocked by her aunt’s at-home workouts.I too had a list of things I found strange or different when I first came to Britain from Russia at the age of eighteen but even a teenager must realise that no country is just one thing, and no people are just bad or just good. In Darling’s eyes, America is fat, cold, obsessed with looks and inaccessible to the poor. An African man must be marrying a fat white girl purely for the papers, and a pretty rich girl Kate has no right to be depressed and bulimic just because her boyfriend has dumped her – for how can she really suffer if she has not lived through real hunger? This one-sided view lets both Darling and the novel down.We Need New Names dips and rises, stronger in some places, weaker in others. Darling’s adventures in Zimbabwe are fascinating because of her great storytelling but seem a little Hollywood-like , as if intended to please an audience. Her American life is as disappointing to read about as it must be for her to live through. The overall theme is not that new or original but there are still many parts that are beautifully written, and the chapter called How They Lived is a standalone cry of pain that sums up a lot of Darling’s new experiences. The author’s love for her country is evident in Darling’s nostalgia for her childhood, no matter how difficult it had been. It is just a shame that the love for her culture prevents her from falling in love with her new surroundings – it is hard if not impossible to survive just on nostalgia.We Need New Names is a nostalgic story of shattered dreams that at times loses itself in too many socio-political issues.
First published on Bookmunch on 18 Sept 2013
All The Beggars Riding by Lucy Caldwell
accessible and light
Lucy Caldwell’s latest novel, All The Beggars Riding, has all the ingredients of a bestseller – it is fast-paced, well-written and with a mystery to unveil.Lara is in her late thirties and has just lost her mother. She is now an orphan – her father, a prominent plastic surgeon from Belfast, died in a helicopter crash when Lucy was just twelve. Her life as she knew it crashed at that moment too, with her father’s double life, and Lara’s family, suddenly becoming the favourite topic of national tabloids. Not only did it turn out that he had a wife and two other children in Belfast, but Lara’s mother had known all about it. She wouldn’t talk about it though, despite Lara’s attempts to get to the truth. When her mother dies, Lara starts writing about her childhood, first from her own perspective, then as a story of her mother, Jane Moorhouse.From imagining her mother’s life to deciding to meet her half-brother Michael in Belfast, Lara’s quest will take her on a journey of confronting, and finally accepting, her past.Caldwell’s writing is accessible and light and it is no wonder that the novel ended up on BBC Radio 4’s Book At Bedtime. Her strong plot keeps the reader hooked right to the satisfying ending.This is hardly my favourite book of the year but it is a very enjoyable read from start to finish. A great one to take on a journey or a holiday.
First published on Bookmunch on 20 April 2013
You Have 24 Hours To Love Us by Guy Ware
A clever, playfully uncanny debut collection that has left me looking forward to more of Guy Ware’s writing
Guy Ware’s debut short story collection is called You Have 24 Hours To Love Us. It took me roughly that amount of time to read through it for the first time and immediately fall in love with the author’s style.Ware’s take on life is original and thought-provoking but not without a hint of humour. In ‘In Plain Sight’, a chicken farmer Stan in a far away country is suddenly put under blockade by a government led by a President and a General Weedon from the other side of the world. ‘You have twenty-four hours to love us,’ they tell him. They build a concrete wall around his friend Jeannie’s goat farm, and then they play ‘Imagine’ over and over again on one end of the wall, and ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ on the other, until all their goats die. Then they bomb the farm with chicken carcasses. The satirical resemblance with the Western approach of dealing with those who, as they put it, ‘don’t want to join the twenty-first century’, is clear, as is the allusion to all ‘chicken farmers’ who are ‘a threat’ to Weedon’s security.In ‘Hostage’, a woman takes a wrong turn on her way home and walks into a different life, a life that could be hers, with the identical IKEA wardrobe in a similar semi-detached house and with its own grief and sorrow. When she cannot bear her own life, she will make a choice. Another favourite of mine, ‘All Downhill From Here’, is a story of Noah’s Ark told from the perspective of one of the creatures the captain took with him, a hoofed mammal similar to a wolf. As she stays on top of the hill with the old captain, watching with him the appearance of the new world, she thinks about the other wolf, Yvan, who was too late to board the boat. That is what she believes anyway.Guy Ware is not an author that makes reading too easy for us. He leaves enough gaps to require a few rereads, some thinking, a couple of days’ of the story sinking in. His stories are diverse, his topics fascinating: the identities we choose, the turns we take, the illusions we prefer to believe in.
First published on Bookmunch on 10 Jan 2013
The Taste Of Apple Seeds by Katharina Hagena
I struggle to see why this book became a bestseller in France and Spain as the blurb informs us. I’d rather re-read Visitation an extra time to take away the unsatisfying taste of the apple seeds.
When Katharina Hagena’s latest novel The Taste of Apple Seeds (translated from German by Jamie Bulloch) landed in my lap, I was hoping for a similar exquisite pleasure as I experienced when I read Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation. There is a house here too, also in Germany. There are several generations, their stories tangled up around a family secret. There is even a lake. But here the similarities end.It starts with Iris Berger, a young woman brought up in Baden, who comes to the village of Bootshaven for her grandmother Bertha’s funeral. Bertha has left her house to Iris, and as we wait for Iris to decide whether to accept her inheritance, we find out about a secret that is still affecting the surviving members of the family.The memories from Iris’s childhood, mixed in with her ideas and half-forgotten facts and tales about her extended family, are beautifully written, and I only wish that the rest of the novel was as good. Alas, as soon as we are back in our times, the whimsical haze of the years past disappears and is replaced with ordinary, often repetitive writing that would be better placed in an uncomplicated chick-lit novel with the plot of a single slightly odd woman finally finding petite bourgeoisie- style happiness with a childhood friend she used to ignore.Riding around the village on her grandfather Hinnerk’s bike, dressed in her dead aunt’s clothes that seem to be constantly getting soaked with sweat, and periodically dunking herself into the nearby lake, managing to bump into her solicitor and childhood friend-cum-the-man-she-fancies Max whenever she swims naked, Iris seems to have no personality unless she is talking about her mysterious family. Iris’s cousin Rosmarie and her best friend Mira’s relationship is intense and dangerous, and Bertha’s magical garden with its apple trees and redcurrants that turn white is another character in the novel. Maybe the past always seems more romantic than the present, but the difference here is too striking to be enjoyed.
First published on Bookmunch on 9 Jan 2013
Where Have You Been? by Joseph O'Connor
a multi-layered, thought-provoking collection that might bring with it a bout of sweet nostalgia
Joseph O’Connor’s first short story collection (plus a novella) in over twenty years,Where Have You Been? reads in one go. For November it is perfect – broodingly melancholic even in its most comedic moments.O’Connor’s characters are as diverse as his topics – a woman diagnosed with terminal cancer, a suicidal civil servant, a young Irish couple desperate to make it in the 1860s America. One minute we are in London of 1988, arguing with some Irish Republicans at a wedding and worrying about a sister who says she has lost her legs in Paris. Another story – and we are in Dublin, another yet – in the village of Glasthule, near Dun Laoghaire.And through all this diversity – one theme, of family and fatherhood, whether in a personal sense or maybe in a wider meaning of our relationship to our roots, to our countries, wherever they are. Of course, for O’Connor it is Ireland, but the torturous love to one’s native land mixed with sometimes pride, sometimes, pain and embarrassment, and often unresolved feelings that a child might feel for their parent – this love is something anyone can understand without ever setting foot in Ireland.‘The Wexford Girl’ and ‘The Death of The Civil Servant’ are my favourite short stories in this collection. In ‘The Wexford Girl’, a son recalls some poignant memories of his childhood, and of his father. In ‘The Death of the Civil Servant’, there is a son and father relationship too, and an ending that will keep you guessing, and possibly hoping. The novella, which gave its name to the collection, is almost a long short story too. Cian, having experienced a nervous breakdown, meets an English girl, a production designer who is in Ireland to shoot a television remake of Wuthering Heights. An affair starts, but the result of it will be surprising to all involved, including the reader.
First published on Bookmunch on 21 Nov 2012
Dare Me by Megan Abbott
a crime novel with a twist – or a tuck – that you will want to read in one go
Welcome to the world of cheerleaders! Not the silly pink pom-pom shaking ones but the hard-core athletes who train every day and survive on potassium broth, the ones who do hundreds of tucks at a time and crave KitKats only to vomit them back out in order to stay thin. Doesn’t sound too exciting? Or at least not if you are over twenty and don’t want to remember your teenage angst, or if you are not at all curious to find out what everyone else did while you practised your piano and learnt French. Or was that just me? But come on, brace yourself and you will be greatly rewarded, for Megan Abbott’s new novel is one of the best I have ever read when it comes to small-town teenage girls. Or cheerleaders.
Besides, there will be a crime, and an extremely well-plotted one. But first things first.There are two girls – Addy and Beth. They are best friends, and as it often happens, the harmony in their touching friendship is achieved by one of them – Beth – being the boss, and the other – obviously Addy – being Beth’s sidekick. They are both in a cheerleading crew, and Beth is the captain and the top girl (if you are not familiar with the cheerleading terminology, you have to read the book). But then comes new coach Colette French, a young beautiful woman with a husband, a daughter and some secrets.As you would expect, Coach French seems very cool to the girls, or at least to everyone apart from Beth who becomes jealous, a situation exacerbated by the fact that Coach announces that there will be no more captain. Add to that the fact that the girls are bored, Coach is bored and Coach’s husband is just boring. Or so it seems. Or maybe he is. But anyway, there you have the perfect plot. Well, that and some other important facts that I cannot disclose for the fear of spoiling it for you.All in all, Dare Me is a great portrait of young girls in their last year of making it through boredom, with tons of free time and an urge to finally start living their lives. The twists of the plot and some shocking antics of the characters will keep you reading and the tension will stay high right until the end. I doubt it will change your life forever, but then imagine what it would be like if every book you read changed your life! We are not teens anymore, after all.
First published on Bookmunch on 24 Aug 2012
The Village by Nikita Lalwani
subtle and multi-dimentional
Ray is in an idealistic, somewhat
confused BBC journalist about to make her first commissioned
programme. Nandini is serving a sentence in an open prison in India
for the stabbing of her mother-in-law. The programme needs to be
sharp, punchy, capable of pulling the viewers in, and so Ray is given
a crew consisting of the producer Serena and an ex-con turned TV
presenter Nathan.
Had a crew shown up in some village in
the West, it would probably be a different story. Our hunger for fame
and obsession with television would draw the crowds in, only too
happy to get their sob story on TV. But this Indian village doesn’t
take too well to the visitors. The villagers have to be polite –
they don’t have a choice, under the prison governor’s orders. But
they are suspicious, and the fact that Ray is of Indian descent does
not make them trust or like her any more. In fact, the only person
that Ray seems to have gotten on her side is Nandini, an inmate too
but also a counsellor in the prison, someone who seems to want to
make a difference.
Ray may be naïve but it doesn’t stop
her from quickly realising that Nandini’s story could become the
highlight of the whole programme. But as she is half-grooming Nandini
for an on-camera interview, her colleagues aren’t sitting on their
hands. They have a plan, and as it unfolds, so will the depth of
Ray’s discomfort at her task, and her identity.
This is Lalwani’s second novel. Her
first one, Gifted, was met with praise and longlisted for the
Man Booker prize in 2007. The Village was published by Viking
on 7 June 2012 and it is subtle and multi-dimensional. There are the
obvious themes of inequality and corruption that are rife in India
and the sensationalist culture of British television, but there is
also the theme of an outsider, someone who doesn’t quite belong to
either of the cultures, and is not fully accepted by either. ‘I
resemble everyone but myself…’ starts the novel with an extract
from a poem Self-Portrait by A.K. Ramanujan. Ray looks like
the villagers, she dresses like her English co-workers. She portrays
herself as a ‘veg’ – a choice for the upper classes in India -
until we find out about her secret rendezvous with chicken at a local
curry house. She is horrified when Serena and Nathan tell her about
their ploy and yet she persuades Nandini to meet with her ex-husband
on camera, telling her that it would be beneficial for other women in
a similar situation. Maybe it would, only Ray herself knows that this
programme will never be seen by the women that might need the help.
Lalwani’s prose
is subtle, lulling, calm. Even the most dramatic moments are written
quite gently, and the impact of the events doesn’t sink in straight
away, maybe in a similar way as it sometimes happens in real life.
But gentle can still be strong, and The Village is definitely
a novel worth reading, and thinking about.
A thought-provoking novel about
identity and the choices that we all make.
First published on Bookmunch on June 28, 2012
Once You Break A Knuckle by D.W. Wilson
a powerful, intricate collection that is both charged with testosterone and tinted with romantic nostalgia
D. W Wilson’s first collection of
short stories Once You Break A Knuckle is refreshingly original,
which may be partly due to the fact that they are set in the Kootenay
Valley, Canada. Half way through his MA in Creative Writing programme
at the University of East Anglia, Wilson decided to follow the old
adage of write what you know, and the characters of Mitch and Will
Crease were born, along with a whole cast of supporting characters
who appear here and there throughout the collection.
The title Once You Break A Knuckle
comes from one of the stories in the book and it seems to attract
males in particular, as demonstrated by all of the male population of
my family, starting from a seven-year-old, excitedly enquiring about
the book as soon as it appeared. But the testosterone of breaking
knuckles, grinding teeth and clenching jaws is just one side of the
coin. On the other – sentimental, romantic, nice guys falling in
love, admiring their dads, playing with their kids… Simple but
complex humans with simple and yet complicated lives.
There’s Dunc in The Dead Roads, in
love with Vic, ‘lacking the balls’ to give her the engagement
ring he’s bought her ages ago but prepared to let his rival Animal
get hit by a passing truck. There is Will Crease in The Elasticity of
Bone, taking on his dad in a Judo fight and hoping that if he hurts
him – ‘just a little’ – then his old man would miss his
flight and wouldn’t have to go to Kosovo. Then there is Mitch
Cooper in Don’t Touch The Ground, a thirteen-year-old boy who gets
beaten up by a bunch of teenagers and saws off to within half an inch
the branch of a tree where he knows they would be playing on the rope
swing. We will meet Mitch again in The Millworker, this time a
dissatisfied man who works eighty-two hour weeks to punish himself
for disappointing his wife and his teenage son Luke.
D.W. Wilson has said in an interview
that he can’t write about places while he’s there. The distance
he is talking about can be felt through the stories, sometimes with a
touch of nostalgia, at other times with the wisdom of an émigré,
even though Wilson is planning to go back home at some point.
The Dead Roads
won the 2011 BBC Short Story Award, and Wilson debut novel will be
published next year.
First published on Bookmunch on May 30, 2012
The Mara Crossing by Ruth Padel
death is the end but it is also the beginning
Ruth Padel’s latest collection of
poems The Mara Crossing is thoughtful and fascinating. It is also an
explanation – provided by Padel herself in the accompanying prose –
of how she came to write these poems, and of the amazing journey the
poet has taken, both physically and in her imagination.
The collection focuses on migration –
a concept so ancient and yet so current in our lives. Each chapter
consists of a selection of poems and an essay written in crisp,
beautiful prose that circles around the main theme and creates an
intricate pattern of repeated and revisited concepts, turns of phrase
and imagery. Padel’s vast knowledge in history and science is
impressive, although not surprising – she is the
great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin.
Migration is more than a quest for a
better life. Both animals and humans have spread from a few cells to
a fully populated planet over the millennia but that physical
migration has always been accompanied, and often preceded, by the
migration of the soul.
We like to feel that we belong
somewhere. But we are also constantly pulled towards the unknown, the
‘far far away’, the adventure. ‘Behind a lot of this is a
bird’s response to earth’s magnetic field,’ says Padel. We,
humans, might not be quite as magnetically programmed as birds, but
there is still something that pushes us on, urges us to take the risk
and to succeed as a species. There is another aspect to migration
too, not quite as romantic and beautiful. The wars, the
discrimination, death, hatred – Padel explores these with an
objectivity of an artist and a philosopher.
Mara comes from Latin and means
‘bitter’. Mara, or ‘mer’, appear in many languages and
often mean something horrifying, like Buddhist’s Mara, the demon of
illusion and death, or even the root of the Russian word smjertj,
meaning ‘death’. Padel came to associate this dark meaning with
the crossing she witnessed at the river Mara in Kenya where thousands
of wildebeests crossed the river as they do every year. Hundreds of
them were eaten on the spot by crocodiles but the rest survived and
got to the other side, only to take the journey back in a few months.
Hundreds of wildebeests die but the species survive. Death is the end
but it is also a beginning. Our migration is personal and often
difficult and yet it is at the root of our civilisation and brings
amazing transformation both to the migrants and to those whose land
the migrants make their new home.
The Mara Crossing
is a brilliant exploration of our essence, a philosophical book that
skilfully brings together science and history, prose and poetry.
Those who consider themselves migrants would love Padel’s
reflections of what motivates us to take a journey. But those who
have never left their home would enjoy it just as much, for we are
all migrants in one way or another.
First published on Bookmunch on 13 March 2012
The Whores' Asylum by Katy Darby
a stylish gothic story
The darkest
nights of the year are traditionally best spent with a good dark
book, and Katy Darby’s debit novel The Whores’ Asylum is a
perfect choice for those who like a stylish gothic story. But it’s
more than just a bedtime read. The topic of sex trade and abuse of
women is very current, what with the remake of The Girl With The
Dragon Tattoo hitting the big screen in January. The Whores’ Asylum
is set in Victorian times, but deals with the same issues.
Told mostly in the voice of Edward
Fraser, a former student at Oxford, the novel is structured as a
memoir addressed to Fraser’s son. It starts with Edward’s first
years as a graduate, when we meet the man who will become his best
friend, a brilliant medical student Stephen Chapman. Reminiscent of
the friendship of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, this relationship
will eventually become intense to the point of unbearable. As Chapman
falls in love with the irresistible Diana, Fraser will do his best to
protect his friend and their friendship, with the most shocking
consequences.
While Fraser is obsessed with getting
Diana as far away from his friend as possible, she is busy setting up
an asylum for prostitutes where they can recover and get some
support. But it is Diana herself who will need rescuing as her life
becomes entangled with lies, abuse, secrets and misunderstandings. A
villain duly appears, and in the end it will be up to Fraser to undo
the harm he has caused.
Darby’s impeccable style is at the
same time Victorian and current, which creates a strange but
enjoyable impression of being transported back in time as if it were
the most natural thing in the world. She is one of those authors that
the reader would be curious to meet, even if it is just to see
whether she does speak like that in real life.
A classic gothic story with some very
modern themes, it will keep its grip on you long after you finish
reading it.
First published on Bookmunch on 21 February 2012
Landfall by Helen Gordon
Landfall starts as a typical chick
flick – there’s Alice, an art magazine journalist who is a bit
fed up with her life. There’s Peter who is in love with Alice while
she keeps him as a friend just in case she doesn’t find anyone
better. Then the magazine closes down and Alice decides to move back
to her parents’ empty house in the suburbs for a little while.
And that’s when things start getting
interesting. A missing sister, an American cousin who seems like a
brat but is actually quite a nice kid, a weird boy from next door and
even the missing sister’s ex boyfriend all appear. Well, the
missing sister doesn’t appear as such, just her voice in Alice’s
head, or maybe it isn’t a voice but a ghost – this isn’t quite
clear.
For a while, we are subjected to an
agonising wait while Helen Gordon decides where she is heading. Will
it be a chick flick after all or a literary novel? While she is
deciding, we get to know the American cousin and discover that all
her bad attitude is the result of having been brought up by an
irresponsible mother. We also get closer to the weird boy next door
who fancies the American cousin and who is a nice person deep inside.
The first one to get tired of waiting is Peter who hooks up with a
Polish student.
That spurs our Alice (and Helen Gordon)
on and the decision is made. It will be a literary novel! So Alice
packs up and drags her poor American cousin to the south-east, to the
coast, where she plans to interview a famous artist with a reputation
for the bizarre. The tempo really picks up then. Things happen
quickly and unexpectedly, and suddenly we are left wondering what the
hell happened.
It’s a pity
that the last part of the book is so short as this is where we
finally get to see some great writing and a fascinating plot. A good
first novel, especially towards the end, but you’ll need to be
patient to get to the best part.
First published on Bookmunch on 13 November 2011
Next To Love by Ellen Feldman
a little like a daytime soap
Three young women wait for their
husbands in war-time America. Babe is independent, Grace is
traditional and Millie is optimistic despite her traumatic past. Two
of them will lose their husbands on the same day; and Babe, who works
at a local Western Union office, will be the first to find out the
horrifying news. Ellen Feldman’s novel spans over a few decades,
and we witness the girls trying to rebuild their lives after war.
In her interviews, Feldman says that
she wanted ‘to look at the consequences of their widowhood’.
Whatever these consequences are, what we see here are three ordinary
women with typical lives of the after-war period. Maybe that was
intentional, and the author wanted to focus on those ordinary people,
but as we all know, complete ordinariness is boring. Out of all
Feldman’s novels, this is the first one to have completely
fictional characters. A historian by education, Feldman has based her
work on real-life characters in the past. Maybe that’s where the
problem lies. Next To Love’s characters are realistic
enough, but they lack the twist that would make them unforgettable.
There is nothing original about them, and nothing original about
their lives.
The novel touches
on several other big themes, including sexism, anti-Semitism and
racism but instead of feeling personal, it reads more like a history
manual with real-life illustrations. Babe is forward-thinking, so
Feldman gets her involved in a couple of rallies against racism.
Grace is traditional so she marries a doctor who refuses to have sex
with her. There is another doctor who does want to have sex with her
but Grace is too traditional so at the last minute she breaks off the
budding affair and hurrah! – the first doctor finally takes her to
bed out of fear of losing her. Taking on a big theme might work well
for creative nonfiction, but here the characters seem to serve one
purpose – to fit in with the chosen topic. The panoramic view
created by Feldman only shows what we already know.
Next To Love is a little like a
daytime soap – you enjoy it with a cup of tea, you sympathise with
the characters, you get bored at some parts and when it’s over, you
forget all about it and go back to your life.
First published on Bookmunch on 29 September, 2012
The Forty Rules Of Love by Elif Shafak
philosophical
A cliché American woman Ella has a
beautiful home, three teenage kids and a cheating husband. She works
part-time as a reader for a literary agency and one day she reads a
book and falls in love with its author. That’s the premise of the
modern-day part of The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak.
Simple and not that original, it is in
direct contrast to the real story of a Sufi dervish Shams of Tabriz
and his inspirational friendship with Rumi, a famous poet, a few
hundred years before. Called The Sweet Blasphemy and written by a
Scottish photographer turned Sufi, it is a book within a book, and
the impetus that Ella needs to change her life and follow her heart.
Shams is a wandering dervish, a Persian
Sufi who is looking for the higher truth and a companion to share it
with. Rumi is a renowned scholar, an interpreter of the Qur’an, a
popular speaker whose words are respected by thousands. He has a
family, wealth, fame, but there is still an emptiness inside him that
will only be filled by his friendship with Shams of Tabriz. Their
story is told from several perspectives, including their own. As we
piece it together, we even hear from the man who will be tasked with
killing Shams.
The Sweet Blasphemy is based on the
real-life encounter between Shams-I-Tabrizi and Rumi in Konya, in 13
century. It is filled with philosophical musings, poetic,
Sheherasade-like stories and mysticism that is the centre of Sufism.
Shafak skilfully condensed the Sufi teachings into forty rules that
Shams has formulated during his travels. They are accessible and easy
to understand, and make a great introduction to Sufism. The rich,
aromatic imagery reminiscent of a noisy, bright bazaar somewhere on
the coast of the Black Sea, is contrasted to the stilted,
black-and-white experience of Ella’s life. This is a case of an
amazing painting in a plain, bland frame. Whether this was a
deliberate approach by Shafik or not, it does create a juxtaposition
of the Western life today and the Eastern journey almost a thousand
year ago.
Shafak, through Shams, talks about the
danger of words. They can create misunderstandings that provoke war
and conflict, Shams points out, and gives two interesting
interpretations of the Nisa verse of the Qur’an. The first
translation, by M.N.Shakir, seems to authorise men’s attitude of
superiority over women, whilst the second one, by Ahmed Ali,
encourages to treat women with respect. The second approach, that of
respect and love for everyone, as we are all one, forms the basis of
Sufism.
The Forty Rules of Love is a
philosophical book wrapped in an accessible, some might say populist
approach. It has a simple but poetic style, and a message to match.
We seem to have gone the full circle, and religions are slowly
starting to come together in a fundamental shift of attitude to God:
less focus of the details that separate us, more attention to the
essence of what unites us.
First published on Bookmunch on 7 September 2011
Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck
like a family tree
Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck,
in a brilliant translation by Susan Bernofsky, reads like a
collection of folk tales – mysterious, wise and poetic. The
stories, at first seemingly unconnected, tangle up to produce a
stunning piece of work, one that takes a while to process and that
demands a re-read as soon as you finish the book for the first time.
These stories are all about ordinary
people – there is an architect, the architect’s wife, a Red Army
officer, a gardener, there is a Jewish girl hiding in an empty
apartment. A communist writer who escapes to Russia; a Jewish family
who don’t get a chance to escape. Some of these characters appear
again and again, like the gardener who looks after the grounds of a
house on a lake. This gardener, and this house, are what connects all
the characters. That and the country where the house stands.
I don’t know
about you but I don’t often think about what it was like to be
German in the last century. All the politics, all the ambitions, a
country at war and then a country defeated and divided into East and
West. Jenny Erpenbeck is brilliantly skilful in her portrait of her
country. She doesn’t take sides; instead she simply describes the
events through the ordinariness of objects. In her story of Doris she
painstakingly lists those objects, those pots, those bed sheets, ,
once belonging to the girl’s family, now auctioned off to ‘the
families Wittger, Schulz, Muller, Seiler, Langmann and Bruhl,
Klemker, Frohlich and Wulf’ while the girl waits for her death in a
room stinking of her own urine. In the re-appearing chapters about
the gardener Erpenbeck talks only about his garden chores. At first
the details of his work seem boring and insignificant. But as the
house and the garden change owners, get divided, deteriorate, the
gardener’s stubborn efforts take on a different meaning.
The poetic, folk-like style leaves many
gaps, and the readers would have to fill them in on their own. That’s
what makes this novel so personal. Each of us will have our own
interpretation within the poetic framework set by Erpenbeck. Borders
are imposed upon the characters by the events of the 20th
century, but there seems to be no borders for this magnificent
writer, and therefore, for the reader, when it comes to understanding
each and every character in the novel. We empathise with them all, we
feel as if we know them personally, we want each of them to get
through this, to survive.
Visitation is like a family
tree, with its real people hiding behind the old-fashioned names and
objects, with the stories passed down the generations. Remember that
gardener who? Remember the auntie who got? The story of several
generations, of the opposite sides, of different owners, all
reflected in the calm waters of a lake.
First published on Bookmunch on 10 August 2011
The Storm At The Door by Stefan Merrill Block
a compelling story
Stefan Merrill Block’s first novel, The Story of Forgetting, was based around his own family curse, the
Alzheimer’s, and won him ‘Best First Novel’ at the Rome International Festival of
Literature in 2008. His second novel, The
Storm at the Door, focuses on another family misfortune, one that the
author shares with his grandfather – bipolar disorder.
Frederick Merrill, a handsome naval officer, suffers from
dark moods and likes to shock his friends. He also regularly cheats on his wife
Katharine, the author’s grandmother, as a way of lifting those moods. The
tension in the couple’s life reaches its apogee when Frederick decides to
expose himself to passing cars one night, and is reported to the police.
Katharine makes a decision to send her husband to the Mayflower Home for the
Mentally Ill, maybe as a way to save him, more likely as a punishment for what
he had done to her.
As Frederick finds himself locked in a nightmare, he is
convinced that if only he uses his real talent, writing, to let his wife know
how he feels, Katharine would understand him and help him return to his life.
At Mayflower, he meets other patients who the society has declared mentally ill
but who – Frederick is certain – are simply misunderstood or traumatised. There
is the formidable professor Schultz, a Harvard linguist from a Jewish town of
Bolbirosok in Lithuania, destroyed by the Nazis. Having lost all his loved
ones, Schultz discovers instead a new language, what he thinks might be the
true language of God, and the professor now spends his days writing it down.
Everything has a sound – the wind, the steps down the corridor, the pen on
paper – and these sounds make a language that he, Schultz, must record.
There is Robert Lowell, a poet who is one of the few voluntary
patients at the hospital, and who Frederick looks up to. There is Marvin
Foulds, the Mayflower’s most famous patient, a man with fifteen personalities
whose case made the career of Dr Wallace, Mayflower’s head psychiatrist. There
will also be Rita, a nurse at the Mayflower, who will become Frederick’s ticket
to the outside.
The theme of families, and the effect they have on us,
dominates the book. Katharine’s decisions are influenced by her cousins’
opinions, her mother’s advice, her father’s money and interference. Frederick’s
darkness will be passed on to Merrill Block himself. The family members’ dreams
and failures interweave and create a net that is impossible to escape.
But the main topic of the novel is the language, the
writing, and what it represents. Frederick’s only hope and saviour is his diary
where he records not only the events of his stay at Mayflower, but also his
ideas, his innermost thoughts and observations. When the new head psychiatrist,
Canon, orders to remove all paper and notebooks from the patients, a rebellion
will slowly grow that will eventually end Canon’s career at the institution. The
words, the language, are what connects and grounds the characters, what keeps
them on this side of sanity.
The Storm At The Door
is a compelling story, even despite its occasional awkward and heavy feel, and
the humanness of the characters is a credit to the author. After two books
based around his own family’s psychological issues, it would be interesting to
see what Merrill Block will set his sights on next.
First published on Bookmunch on 19 July 2011
The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
unusually lucid as can only be possible in dreams
When The Unconsoled first came out in 1995, it was met with a mixed but
passionate reaction. Some called it a masterpiece while others - the worst book ever written. That confusion
among the critics is a characteristic of the novel as a whole, both in the
reader’s mind as the story develops, and in the protagonist’s life itself.
Those who love neatly tied ends and explanations would probably find this a
challenging read. But this neatness is not what happens in real life, to real
people, and the fact that the novel offers no Hollywood-style explanation is
what makes it all the more powerful.
Ryder is an accomplished pianist who, it seems at first, has just arrived
in a small town somewhere in Central Europe. He has a performance to give and
as the evening of the recital approaches, it becomes clear that a lot depends
on this performance. The townsfolk are obsessed with music in a comical,
exaggerated way. To them, the evening is about finding a new talent upon which
to place their hopes of becoming an extraordinary, art-focused town.
Unfortunately for them, the only person they can think of, now that their
previous idol has lost their confidence, is Mr Brodsky, an old miserable drunk
who used to be an orchestra conductor in his home country some years ago. In
their blindness, the town’s most proactive, led by the hotel manager Hoffman,
completely ignore the real talent, a young pianist Stefan, who happens to be
Hoffman’s son, and they focus instead on helping Brodsky to reconcile – but
only as far as they feel is appropriate – with his wife Miss Collins. This
reconciliation, they hope, would stop Brodsky from drinking and turn him into a
viable candidate.
At the same time, for Ryder this recital would be the apogee of his career,
and something that he hopes would so impress his parents - who until now have
never seen him perform - that they would finally get back together.
The dream-like quality of the novel is brilliantly created through the
various altered states that Ryder experiences as he prepares for the recital.
There’s his strange ability to hear and see what goes on inside other people’s
homes. There are the bizarre location switches when after a long drive out of
town Ryder suddenly finds himself in the back room of the café that he had left
an hour ago. There are the long ramblings of the people he meets that somehow
become their thoughts as if Ryder was inside their minds.
At first, the reader waits for an explanation. Is Ryder dreaming? Is he in
some kind of comatose state? Or maybe he is dying and looking back at his life?
Does he have dementia or is this a surrealist book like Kafka’s Trial? There
would be no answer to these questions so the reader has to pick the version
they like best.
The theme of families and their little ‘understandings’, as one of the
characters puts it, pierces through the novel. Sons and daughters devote their
lives to pleasing their parents. Fathers and mothers behave in a cold, distant
way, not realising what effect that has on their children. Husbands and wives
don’t talk, relying instead on subtle signals to work out what the other is
thinking. Some if it is bizarre and absurd and all of it is painfully real,
despite the unreal feel of the book. There are two relationships in particular
that evoke a sense of reality through the sheer stupidity of the characters’
behaviour. One is the understanding that Gustav, a hotel porter, has with his
daughter Sophie. They never talk. They love each other very much but they only
communicate through other people, mostly through Sophie’s son Boris. This
understanding, which started when Sophie was a young girl, and which troubles
them both immensely, only gets resolved as Gustav is dying. The other one is that of Hoffman and his
wife. Hoffman decided years ago that his wife was about to leave him. Now, over
twenty years later, they are still together, and he is still convinced that it
is about to happen, and that the only way to prevent it is to really impress
his wife. Frustratingly, the couple never discuss their issue.
Ryder is constantly on the go, trying to fulfil the numerous requests and
obligations that keep distracting him from his real goal, and this state of
constant availability is very similar to how we live now, with our mobile
phones, internet and social networking. As the book was written in
mid-nineties, it is amazing to see how accurately Ishiguro predicted what our
lives were to become. The Unconsoled is full of signs and metaphors. The
symbolic meanings of the novel will keep coming back long after the reader has
finished the book, and the realisations that stem from them will be as
unusually lucid as can only be possible in dreams.
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