The shortlist for the award consisted of four novels and four short stories. My own preference is very much for novels over short stories, but this prize has given me the opportunity to engage with an unfamiliar genre.
The book starts strongly, in only 5 pages “It Begins” effortlessly sketches out a few years of the post graduate life of a young girl (moving back home, unable to get a paid job in arts and settling on an office job, falling in love, breakdown of marriage, post-divorce dating). The rest of the book however reads too often like a series of variations around the same theme, but without any real sense of whole such as seen in “Pond” (when the stories are it seems all by the same narrator) or of progression such as seen in “All That Man Is” (when the different characters represent different ages of man). As a result the book becomes a little too repetitive – a continual reworking of themes of love, mismatched relationships, breaking up, disappointment. Too many of the stories fail to really spark. There are some highlights though which like the opening story showcase Williams ability to sketch out 21st Century Life dilemmas:
“One of those Life Things” a girl left unexpectedly by her boyfriend
You thought you might have exited your twenties, before announcing in whisky hushed tones … that you had been left for some kid in their twenties … some blond piece. You feel like some version of yourself sent from a future, dark timeline …. He hadn’t even the decency to have done it at a point when you could have properly committed to the role. Your options scatter like playing cards in front of you, offering only wishy-washed monologue, half-assed character pieces. Where does one go from here? Aerobics and amdram? Pilates and Prozac? … What is the narrative here?
finds that she is pregnant by him (“It is .. positive which seems a .. presumptuous lexicography”) and contemplates an abortion (“You are reading lines form Just Seventeen. You are a freeze frame from Jackie”).
In “This Small Written Thing”, a Manchester based girl whose husband is working away in London, reflects that the foundation story of their relationship, that he helped her home from a party after her drug was spiked, is actually untrue (she had actually taken ecstasy for the first time and reacted badly to it), but nevertheless has “taken flight” with her husband often referring to it.
How was she supposed to know that this thin sliver of untruth, this morsel of fiction, was being dispensed to her future husband … to grow fat, to develop wings …. she hadn’t realised lies take effort, they take commitment. She hadn’t realised that if you’re not in for the long haul, well best not, to bother at all. She hadn’t yet realised that in a relationship, honesty was just one of the many options, a sort of moral high ground, yes, but no more than vegetarianism or recycling. And she was both a vegetarian and a recycler.
Later, despite behavioural evidence that her husband is having some form of affair in London, she chooses to ignore it “No it couldn’t be another woman. She was the liar, the deceiver, the fraud”. Over time, her realisation that truth is not necessarily positive for a relationship causes her to take a deliberate choice to ignore hard evidence of emails from the other woman.
She gripped him tighter, because what is it really, this small written thing, gone with the click of a button, the collapse of a screen, vanished, gone.
Under the circumstances, are there any benefits to dedication, devotion, honor, responsibility? What. in this context, is the responsible action? Is
Under the circumstances, are there any benefits to dedication, devotion, honor, responsibility? What. in this context, is the responsible action? Is it even possible to invoke a rhetoric of ethics? Only repetition produces tangible benefits, which include the stability of a routine (however precarious) and the forestalling of longer term considerations that might provoke the following emotions: fear, indecision, paralyzing despair. In the absence of a stable context, the question of ethics intrudes. What kinds of responsibility? The maintenance of the established order, that is: labor? What is the non-material or spiritual component? In the private sphere: to the ancestors, their memory, to the elusive community of the self and its desires - constancy or consistency. What is these are in conflict
Other than the above quote I really cannot add anything to the review below
Except to make the observation that the underlying subject matter of this book (showing a counternarrative to the white dominated view of history and culture) is at heart the same as the Booker Prize winning The Sellout. The execution could not be more different....more
The shortlist for the award consisted of four novels and four short stories. My own preference is very much for novels over short stories, but this prize has given me the opportunity to engage with an unfamiliar genre.
The short stories in this book typically take place at a transitional time in the main character’s life or relationships: a recent widowers takes a plane trip; a retired plastic surgeon starts building a tenuous relationship with a waitress who thinks he is a surgeon; a couple try to rebuild their relationship after the man returns from a space trip; a man who has known since childhood he would go blind realises the moment is upon him. Probably my favourite story was “The Ice Cream Song is Strange” – a now retired businessman takes a trip to Tokyo and (doing something he has not done in his business career) uses the hotel facilities.
The writing style is strong, but the stories left me largely unmoved. ...more
The shortlist for the award consisted of four novels and four short stories. My own preference is very much for novels over short stories, but this prize has given me the opportunity to engage with an unfamiliar genre.
Williams unique style is described on the book's front cover as "very short stories": many are only a page in length, and even within that span typically consist of a series of apparent non-sequiturs.
A bedside table book to be dipped into and reflected upon, but really not a book for me....more
The book opens with Dantala (born on a Tuesday) a Quaranic student having fallen in with a gang of street boys and getting caught up in political riotThe book opens with Dantala (born on a Tuesday) a Quaranic student having fallen in with a gang of street boys and getting caught up in political riots in 2003 when he attacks an opposition political party’s headquarters, sees his close friend shot and himself participates in a killing.
Fleeing to another North Nigerian town (Sokoto) he meets a religious leader and organiser Sheikh Jamal and joins his movement, where he befriends Jibril, the brother of Jamal’s more radical advisor Malam Abdul-Nur. As Dantala slowly grows in influence (the Sheikh impressed by his language abilities), he is exposed to the complexities of political compromise (the Sheikh is closely associated with an up and coming politician) and increasing religious tension: firstly between the Sheik’s followers and the Shi-ite’s – the Sheik going out of his way to try and defuse tensions; later within the Sheik’s followers as Malam Abdul-Nur leads a more radical break-away group of Mujahedeen (Jibril forced to go with him). When the violence gets out of control (including the murder of the Sheik) the (Christian) army intervene and Dantala is arrested, then adbucted and tortured when his apparent links to the Mujahedeen (via Jibril) are discovered.
At one point he writes
When I read old magazines from outside Nigeria, I see how foreigners are always concerned with explaining things that have already happened. Everyone wants to tell you what someone was thinking, why someone did a thing, why someone said something. There is no way a person can know such things about another person.”
Dantala is a first person narrator – and the author seems to have made a deliberate choice to keep his voice true (rather than adding some form of omniscient narrator) – so that no attempt is made to provide extraneous explanation of geography or tribal and religious groupings and this combined with the use of Hausa terms can make the full details of the narrative difficult to follow.
Further Dantala is a relatively naïve character, himself largely honest, straightforward and with a trusting religious faith, struggling to understand the motives, dishonesty and malevolence of others. He is more of an observer of rather than commentator on what goes on around him (as the quote above suggests).
The writing itself (again perhaps true to Dantala’s voice) is relatively undescriptive. A review from the Guardian quotes the following example of “humour and wisdom” and “beauty” in the text, which to me at least illustrate the opposite - that is the almost childlike simplicity of the descriptive writing.
[the chemist] is short and his eyeballs look like they are about to fall out … I can’t stop looking at his huge nose, which seems to be divided into three parts. He must be breathing in a lot of air
the rice farms of Fadama farmers stretch out like a shiny green cloth
[the girl’s eyes] are bright and look like a deep gully, the type that pulls you and makes you dizzy when you look down into it
Dantala is learning English and the weakest part of the books are intermittent sections where he copies out definitions of words in English and then, in broken English, comments on how they relate to his experience.
What really makes the book is the finishing section when Dantala is detained – this is visceral, difficult to read but very impactful. Overall a fascinating book and an insight into a different world....more
Don Waswill (like his Spanish namesake and predecessor) is a well-spoken eccentric, who has spent 21 years living in a Water Tower, writing an Encyclopedia and developing his thesis that the Hyperfine transition of hydrogen provides the basis for what he calls “the restitution of all being”, a task that he now wishes to undertake at the end of 21 years.
He assigns the number 21 (the length in centimeters of the spectral line of the transition - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroge...) special significance, treats Chance as his mistress (like Dulcinea in “Don Quixote”) and in particular rejects all concepts such as: the past and future (of course of significance given his surname); cause and effect; progression; order; presence and absence; fixed character attributes – and hence by extension all writing (both historical and fictional).
Please don’t say the word “cause” in my presence said Don. In fact don’t use it at all, because owing to the fallacy of space, presence and absence are neither different from one another nor do they have reality at all. Cause and effect are the great story telling delusions of human culture, and they are about to take a hiding to none. If I believed it was possible that the past existed, I might suggest to you that I have in fact reminded you of this on several occasions previously.
The above quote captures well the spirit of the book - and a variation on it can probably be found by opening up the book to a random page.
Similarly I have deliberately included three Wikipedia links - as this is one of the books where I often felt the need to quickly consult Wikipedia and on almost all occasions, understood some of the text at a deeper level as a result.
Isaiah Olm plays the role of Sancho Panza, initially being rescued by Don after he is struck by lightning (which he finds enables him to remember all speech) and is recruited by Don for his quest – roaming Essex according to the dictates of chance with Is hauling a bizarre chest that Don has cobbled together containing the written records of his encyclopedia references.
The relationship of Is to Don is brillianly similar to that of Sancho Panza and Don Quixote – despite being a clearly simple character of limited education (Is cannot even read), Is’s incomprehension at much (if not all) of Don’s frequent philosophical discourses mirrors that of the readers, and further Is’s bafflement and Is’s earthy and basic interpretation of the various escapades in which he and Don find themselves is normally on the face of it much more accurate than Don’s bizarre and constant desire to “tilt at windmills” and interpret everything according to his over-arching theory.
Over time Is queries why Don is keeping a written record given his rejection of writing and when he reveals his memory, Don instead uses him as an "Is-Encyclopaedia", the chest and papers though keep returning despite being burned or otherwise disposed of several times as events (rather than just Don’s interpretation of them) increasingly depart from the conventional.
Like “Don Quixote” the second part of the book becomes more self-consciously meta-fiction, in this case the narrator, disgusted at Don’s increasingly hostile denunciations of fiction and writers, starts to actively intervene in the story, initially to simply skip forwards, but over time to directly influence the novel. Don and Is find to their bafflement that their wanderings in Essex and inadvertent involvement in a few plots against a local landowner, have been the cause of a movement designed to commemorate and then to re-enact the Peasant’s revolt.
On one level this departure is welcome, the gentle humour and the originality of the story starting to pale as Is and Don’s escapades and Don’s rantings become increasingly repetitive, however the Peasant’s Revolt part of the plot (where huge crowds descend on London from Essex and Kent and try to enact the written chronicles of the Revolt as literally as possible – with copious rioting and hangings) becomes implausible and when Don and Is realise they are in a book and need to escape it, the reader feels from sheer exhaustion rather than from any lack of enjoyment feels like joining them.
As I read the book I was unsure whether this was a case of literary genius or Emperor's new clothes and therefore how I should review it. And even as I have written this I am still not clear. However given the sheer audacity of the author in attempting such a book and the vision of the independent small publisher in backing it, I have ended as a 4* review and I would hope this book makes the Goldsmith shortlist for 2017 (assuming its publication date makes it eligible)....more
Originally written novel which takes the voice of the eponymous social-misfit, sex-offender and his Irish mother who has exiled him to London to get aOriginally written novel which takes the voice of the eponymous social-misfit, sex-offender and his Irish mother who has exiled him to London to get away from the risk of either prison or being beaten up. The book is mainly told in Martin John’s voice and includes lists, one sentence chapters, and lots of repetition of key phrases and ideas, designed to convey the obsessions and circularity of his thoughts.
The book perhaps drifts for too long, and although there is some narrative progression in the second half - the very narrative loses some of the stronger sense of the first half without actually giving any real narrative resolution.
Now deservedly the winner of the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award.
I first read this book when it was shortlisted for the 2016 Goldsmith PrizeNow deservedly the winner of the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award.
I first read this book when it was shortlisted for the 2016 Goldsmith Prize, an award it deservedly went on to win. My original review is at the end of this review.
At the time there were two side issues that caused some debate
A) Had it been overlooked for the Booker or was it in fact not eligible
B) Why was a major plot revelation included on the back cover blurb (see below) and not either included in the book or omitted entirely.
At a reading by all the Goldsmith author's it came up that the book was not eligible for the Booker as it had not actually been published in the U.K.
A brief chat with the author at the drinks afterwards confirmed that the statement that the book's narrator is unknowingly dead was deliberately placed in the blurb so as to place the reader in a greater state of awareness than the narrator, and that as the book is in the first person the author did not think it should be placed in the text.
The book has now been published in the UK and made the 2017 Booker longlist as a result, but with Marcus's death no longer mentioned on the back.
I have just re read the book as part of my longlist read through. Overall I enjoyed the book as much if not more the second time around.
This time I particularly enjoyed looking for the clues scattered through the text about Marcus being dead, and his own occasional awareness that something is not quite right.
there is something strange about all this, some twitchy energy in the ether which has affected me from the moment those bells began to toll
why these thoughts [about death notices and burials] today, the whole world in shadow, everything undercut and in its own delirium, the light superimposed on itself so that all things are out of synch and kilter, things as themselves but slightly different from themselves also, every edge and outline blurred or warped and each passing moment belated, lagging a single beat behind its proper measure, the here and now beside itself, slightly off by a degree as in a kind of waking dream in which all things come adrift in their own anxiety so that sitting here now fills me with a crying sense of loneliness for my family ... their absence sweeping through me like ashes.
These grey days after Samhain when the souls of the dead are bailed from purgatory for a while by the prayer of the faithful so that they can return to their homes and the light is awash with ghosts and ghouls and the meaning between this world and the next is so blurred we might easily find ourselves under to shoulder with the dead, the world fuller than at any other time of the year,as if some form of spiritual sediment had been stirred up
this day has done nothing but drive me desperate into a grating dread which seems so determined to conceal its proper cause and which is all the more worrying since ther is no doubt whatsoever of its reality or that it is underwritten in some imminent catastrophe
nothing coming through at all but the certainty of being wholly displaced here in this house, my own house, and the uncanny feeling of dragging my own after-image with me like an intermittent being, strobing and flickering
I also enjoyed the hints as to the reason for his death
my line traceable to the gloomy prehistory in which a tenacious clan of farmers and fisherman kept their grip on a small patch of land .... men with bellies and short tempers, half of whom went to heir graves with pains in their chests before they were sixty
And picking out Marcus's own anger and short temper: against the interference of politicians, the opportunism unscrupulous contractors, the media coverage of the water poisoning, his sister and father, his daughter's exhibition. Although on the day of his death, he is remarkably happy and almost euphoric (despite catching a newspaper back page on the tragedy of Barcelona's reclamation of Fabregas).
Other themes and motives I enjoyed were:
- How Marcus relates the world to his engineering background and predilection, so that for example the Roman Catholic catechism has the whole world built up from first principle, towering and rigid as any structural engineer might wish, each line following necessarily from the previous one to link heaven and earth step by stepand how it is clear that for him engineering is subconsciously a way to make sense of the world and impose order on it, and to counter his natural tendencies to anxiety and apocalyptical dread, tendencies exacerbated by the financial crash and by the water contamination outbreak, but tendencies he also decries in his two children in their reaction to the latter.
- The perspective on being a father both of young children and of growing children starting to make their own way in life, as well as on being successfully married for many years.
Finally he clearly thinks actuaries are well dressed as seeing his artist daughter in a sensible coat he remarks that she looks so sharp that has she been someone else I would not have been surprised to hear that she worked in some sort of financial services job, insurance or something, some career where the value of the present moment is wagered against some unknowable future
Hugely recommended.
ORIGINAL REVIEW
The book is set on November 2nd 2009 (one day after All Souls Day and one year after the Irish financial crisis) and is narrated by a 49 year old civil engineer (Marcus) who works for a local council in County Mayo and lives in a small village with his teacher wife and two children – Agnes a conceptual artist (whose first exhibition is extracts from small court cases written in her own blood) and Darragh who is backpacking and fruit picking in Australia and whose unwillingness to engage in a career frustrates Marcus.
The subject matter of the book is largely conventional – its style anything but.
From the blurb we intentionally (on the author’s behalf) learn what Marcus only realises as the story ends – that he died of a heart attack around 8 months previously.
Further the book is written in a single, almost unpunctuated, sentence of Marcus thoughts roaming back and forth in time and with paragraph breaks commonly midsentence after “extension/joining” words. The book is though very easy to read and reproduces well the idea of someone’s thoughts flitting from subject to subject, picking up on and drawing out associations and memories. The book mainly explores the family’s past and recent history (including a severe food water contamination bug which strikes his wife) and Marcus’ job and interactions with the local pork barrel politics.
Generally a really excellent book – perhaps drifting a little in the middle, but uniquely capturing a normal life in an innovative way which is at the same time immediately natural and realistic....more
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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