Now shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize.
It is translated by the prolific Megan McDowell (I have previously read her translations of CaNow shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize.
It is translated by the prolific Megan McDowell (I have previously read her translations of Carlos Fonseca, Samantha Schweblin and Daniel Mella).
The collection is unashamedly written in a fairly conventional horror genre style, and with one exception are shortish stories with a fairly simple story arc (oddly perhaps at least for me the least memorable story of all is the titular one) and a single “horror” twist or concept (often supernatural based) and with characters (but not setting) rather secondary to added transgressive detail.
But much of this is filtered through a specific Argentinian lens – although in way which I think is accessible to an English reader without any need for excessive research.
Location matters – whether it’s the different districts of Buenos Aires, the city centre versus the suburbs, or the Norh of the country versus the City, or the boundaries between them. Particularly the Riachuelo River which features in both “Angelita Unearthed” – a ghost story about a girl yoked to the ghost of her Great Aunt- and “The Cart” – where bad treatment of a distressed visitor from the slums causes a run of bad luck for a working class district - and I believe often takes on a symbolic importance in her work as the barrier between the natural and the supernatural);
The supernatural elements are often coated in local superstitions of figures (for example Pomba Gira in “Our Lady of the Quarry” – a story of inter-girl rivalry, envy and revenge which turns on a figure said to be of Our Lady instead being of the Afro-Brazilian spirit, San La Muerte in “The Well” – a story of the witchcraft induced transfer of a curse)
Class and generational differences are important ;
What I would call (from those I know) the Argentinian obsession – meat – features: one story has a character about who the first thing we find is that she is a vegetarian (the Argentinian’s I know would pretty well use that term for someone who ate a vegetable with their plate sized steak); and more importantly another story is even titled (and at heart about) “Meat” – perhaps one of the most distinctive stories in the collection – of some obsessive pop fans who take consumption of the works of their dead idol to an extreme. And “Where are you Dear Heart” is a rather creepy tale of someone obsessed with sickness and then with irregular heartbeats – but whose obsession with hearts, as the story ends, turns more carnal.
And most importantly, and I think what gives the story collection its real edge from what I fear would otherwise by a fairly non-literary set of transgressive ghost stories, the stories (several in particular) are permeated with recent Argentinian history – particularly the years of military dictatorship and “the disappeared”, but also more recent violence particularly by men on women. The author captured this really well in an interview about her next collection “Things We Lost In The Fire” (which was the first to be translated to English)
I think political violence leaves scars, like a national PTSD. The military here launched the stuff of nightmares: they disappeared people, common graves, bones unidentified. The concentration camps were sometimes military spots or police stations, but others could be schools shut down for the purpose of holding prisoners. People were thrown from planes. Children were kidnapped from their parents and given to other families …. There’s something about the scale of the cruelty in political violence from the estate that always seems like the blackest magic to me. Like they have to satisfy some ravenous and ancient god that demands not only bodies but needs to be fed their suffering as well ….. of course this happened a long time ago, but there’s still a shadow. And the shadow has many forms.
These ideas of course explain precisely why a ghost story genre fits the author’s broader political themes and the ideas of the horrors of the past impacting on the present feature in many stories – “The Well” (see above), “The Lookout Tower” (where a ghost waits in an Ostend hotel for someone to take on her role and free her from the need to haunt the present), the final story “Back When We Talked to the Dead” – where a group of Ouija board experimenting youngsters suddenly find that the disappeared are desperate to communicate with them. Even “No Birthdays or Baptisms” – which I did not enjoy and found too deliberately provocative with its tale of a film maker who offers his services for filming “weird projects” ends as a study of hauntings and scars.
But the most clear links are in two stories:
The longest story – and perhaps the only one with a complex narrative arc - “Kids Who Come Back” tells of a woman working in an archive of missing children, who is then caught up in a surreal set of happenings when missing children return in droves, but all frozen in time at the point they disappeared and with a lethargy about them what infects the whole capital.
And there are many similarities with “Rambla Trieste” featuring Argentinians in Barcelona (as you may expect from the title) but a district haunted by the ghosts of the child victims of crimes.
Overall not my favourite on the shortlist but redeemed by the country specific links....more
Winner of the 2021 International Booker Prize, one of two shortlisted books by Pushkin Press – who publish “the world’s best stories, to be read and rWinner of the 2021 International Booker Prize, one of two shortlisted books by Pushkin Press – who publish “the world’s best stories, to be read and read again.”.
It was good to see that after their rather odd shortlist and longlist choices the judges remembered what the words "long-form fiction" actually mean.
In 2014 I spent much of the Summer reading non-fiction books around World War I / The Great War – mainly concentrating on the factors that lead to its outbreak, but some covering something of the War as well. One thing that becomes clear if you study the War (but is perhaps a lot less clear from more standard accounts and most fiction on the topic) is the extent of non-white involvement particularly in the British and French armies.
One of the most interesting books I read was “Attrition” by William Phlipott, one of its key themes (from my 2014 review) is that “from very early on it was inevitable that given the current state of technology and the existential nature of the war, the land war would largely be an attritional battle of numbers – destroying or capturing the enemies key war resource (i.e. soldiers) to the extent that they could no longer sustain the battle”. One aspect of this was the advantage held by England and France in being able to raise troops from their Empires (for example the Sepoys in the British Army), the book stating that “The availability of imperial manpower resources allowed the Entente states to keep expanding their war efforts after Germany’s had reached its peak”. The book points out that a French General Charles Magnin had argued even pre-war, in an influential treatise, that a French imperial manpower reserve “The Force Noire” should be developed as a counterweight to Germany’s larger population and that as the war progressed the West African battalions became more and more crucial to the French war effort.
And this is a novel about those forces – the “Chocolat” soldiers – and two soldiers in particular: Alfa Ndiaye and his “closer than a brother” friend Mademba Diop. The novel begins with one of its many difficult to read scenes, with Mademba dying slowly in agony in no man’s land, his guts literally in his hands, with Alfa refusing, on what he later realises is mistaken principle, his friends pleas to end his agony by cutting his throat.
Another history book I read was the popular military historian Max Hastings “Catastrophe: Europe Goes To War 1914”. That book gave much less coverage to the West Africans that fought for the French other than in a rather gratuitous section on war brutality which mention a story of a column of escorted German PoW’s being “beset by Senegalese troops determined to cut off the German’s ears”, before following up with a reference to a French army Chaplin in a field hospital complaining about the lack of civilisation of the West Africans being treated (“while applauding the terror the colonial infantry inspired among the Germans”).
However gratuitous, this story acts as a very close analogy to the subsequent story of Alfa. On the way back to the trenches, carrying Mademba’s body something switches in his mind (what we might now categorise as PTSD) – the first sign he recognises himself is that he suddenly views the trenches in a highly sexualised way; but the more serious consequence is that he takes to hanging back after the retreat is sounded with the aim of hamstringing a German soldier with his machete, dragging him to no-mans land , slicing his belly and then cutting his throat after only a short period as soon as the soldier pleads for release – effectively recreating Mademba’s death with a different ending. Even more gruesomely he cuts the hand from his victim and takes it back with him to the trenches.
At first his savagery and the fear it must strike in the enemy makes him something of a hero, even among the white soldiers, but soon the stench of death he carries makes him a pariah even among his fellow Africans – at which point he is sent to a field hospital for recovery.
There – in what is the real beating heart (I am tempted to say bloody guts) of the novel - we learn more of his life in Africa, his mother and father, his relationship to Mademba and his first sexual experience just before his travel to Africa, and a tour de force ending - that I think will stay with me for a long time - reunites him with Mademba.
Overall this is a harrowing but compelling novel of brotherhood in war (something I think better captured by the French title), very naturally translated by Anna Moschovakis....more
This book is about what happens when we reach the edges of science; when we come face to face with what we cannot understand. It is about what occurs to the human mind when it pushes past the outer limits of thought, and what lies beyond those limits.
This book has now been shortlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Fiction having previously been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize (where it was one of two books by Pushkin Press – who publish “the world’s best stories, to be read and read again” - the other the eventual winner).
I was already well aware of this book and very keen to read it - as one of my closest Goodreads friends Neil had picked it as one of the best books of 2020 (for a Mookse and Gripes discussion/ranking – where it ended up ranked first for 2020) and my twin brother Paul had suggested it as the clear deserving winner of the 2021 Booker (well before the longlist).
I was also aware that it is a book which draws heavily in its initial chapter on WG Sebald’s “Rings of Saturn” which I re-read recently and for much of the rest of its content on quantum physics and mathematics (which I studied and loved at University - quantum physics in fact being the only part of applied mathematics/mathematical physics that I really loved as its more theoretical and probabalistic nature much more matched my love of pure mathematics and statistics).
And this is not a book that disappoints.
As both Paul and Neil have pointed out the author (a Netherlands born, Spanish language writer now living in Chile) himself gives the best introduction to the book in a detailed English language interview with his German publisher – and I would recommend reading it in full (before and after reading the actual novel).
The book starts with a almost entirely non-fictional chapter “Prussian Blue”, which has heavy overlap with Sebald (for example starting with silkworms) and takes in (largely via the German scientist, Noble Prize winner but also alleged war criminal) Fritz Haber such ideas as German end WW2 mass suicides, artifical pigmentation, WW1 gas attacks (including Hitler as a victim), the amphetamine dependency of the Nazi war machine, Zyklon-B, nitrogen-based fertilisers both natural/historic and artificial (via the synthesis of ammonia), poisons and so on. The author has the section contains only one fictional paragraph which I think could be the last one – where Haber’s true lack of remorse for his War actions (which in WW1 even lead to the suicide of his wife) was said to instead have regretted his role in allowing the risk of fertiliser enhanced nature to take over the world.
The second chapter concentrates on Karl Schwarzschild and his remarkable work on solving Einstein’s General Relativity Equations while posted on the Russian front (my pun – he could have been said to have solved the Field Equations while in the field), and despite suffering from a completely debilitating genetic auto-immune disease which may have been triggered by a gas attack (linking of course to the first chapter). Symbolically though the many different ideas in the chapter are inexorably drawn to one central idea Schwarzschild first originated – the Black Hole. A physical singularity which is a necessary consequence of the mathematical equations of space-time but which is difficult if not impossible for us to really conceive of in any conventional terms; and something which at first – and particularly to Einstein - seemed a paradox, an anomaly, a consequence of either over-simplification or of applying a formula beyond the limits and bounds where it can be correctly parameterised – but which in science has gradually accepted as being real and fundamental to our understanding of physics. The even greater power in this chapter though is the corollary drawn (I am not clear if really by Schwarzschild or by Schwarzschild interpreted by Labatut that human psyche (if sufficiently warped and concentrated on a single purpose) could perhaps produce an equally terrible singularity “a black sun dawning over the horizon, capable of engulfing the entire world”, something even more terrible than WW1 – which is of course a prophecy of the rise of Nazi-ism.
The third chapter in my view was the weakest – about the Japanese mathematician Mochizuki and his predecessor the master of abstraction Alexander Grothendieck. Thematically the chapter fits well – with the idea of mathematical concepts which while seemingly true seem impossible for most people to understand, and the idea that at the centre (for the few who do comprehend them) is something terrible and dangerous; but I just did not feel it came to life as well as the other chapters or had particularly strong mathematical descriptions (a quick Wiki look up helped me grasp A+B = C much better than the chapter). Here I think a largely factual basis has a number of fictional elements (particularly I think around Grothendieck’s last days).
The fourth section is the longest – by now the gradual blending of fiction and fact has come to something of a balance.
The factual scaffolding of this section is the two rival schools of interpretation of Quantum mechanics – Erwin Schrödinger and his Uncertainty Principle, and Werner Heisenberg and his Copenhagen interpretation as developed with his mentor Niels Bohr - rival schools which were not just about different mathematical formulations but about different mathematical/physical worldviews as explained in a preface “while Schrödinger had needed only a single equation to describe virtually the whole of modern chemistry and physics, Heisenberg’s ideas and formulae were exceptionally abstract, philosophically revolutionary, and so dreadfully complex” – further Heisenberg we are told (in a return to one of the author’s key themes) had “glimpsed a dark nucleus at the heart of things”.
Much of the rest of this section is then a fictional imagining of (quoting the author’s interview) “the conditions under which each one of them had their particular epiphany”. Schrödinger’s sensuous time on a ski resort, his “lover’s …..pearls inside his ears to concentrate”, Heisenberg’s solitary time with horrendous hayfever on Heglioland – scene of course post-war of one of the largest ever man-made explosions, a non-nuclear and peace time explosion by the victorious British of surplus armaments. Now of course (partly my link partly the author’s) had Heisenberg not failed in his development of the German WW2 Atomic Weapons programme (in contrast to Haber’s success in the German WW1 Chemical Weapons programme) a very different explosion (nuclear, war-time, by the Germans) may have taken place instead and the history of the World been very different.
These fictional sections – Heisenberg’s in particular, mix dreams and visions with quantum physics – returning to another recurring theme of the book, that many great mathematical and mathematical physics discoveries (particularly those relating to the mysterious world of higher mathematics and quantum mechanics) begin with a literally imaginative and visionary leap beyond conventional thinking with then the harder work being to put the mathematical framework behind it (this very idea of a factual scaffolding holding up but also inspired by an imaginative piece also mirroring the very structure of this fourth section).
And one of the key visions that Heisenberg has ends in a nightmarishy way – when he later meets with Bohr he tells him everything that lead up to his developments of his quantum theory other than this part.
but for a strange reason he could explain neither to himself nor to Bohr, for it was one he would not understand until decades later, he was incapable of confessing his vision of the dead baby at his feet, or the thousands of figures who had surrounded him in the forest, as if wishing to warn him of something, before they were carbonized in an instant by that flash of blind light.
And we of course see know that this vision is linked to and maybe even acted as a warning to Heisenberg not to contemplate the German Atomic weapons programme. I was of course reminder of Michael Frayn’s brilliant play “Copenhagen” which tells and retells the story of Heisenberg and Bohr’s meeting in 1941 and what it meant for both the US and German programmes.
The last chapter rounds the book off neatly – a first party and entirely fictional account, where the narrator, in Chile, meets a night-time gardener, an ex-mathematican and the two discuss many of the ideas in earlier chapters and the book’s overall themes.
The book is translated (extremely naturally I have to say) by Adrian Nathan West
The only criticism I could aim here is the usual bugbear of title – the Spanish language title being effectively I think translatable as “A Terrible Nature” (although literally translated in this book as “ a terrible verdure”) which is taken from the very last words of the first and important chapter, in my view encompasses the key ideas the middle sections explore and then identifies directly with the last and very different chapter of the book; whereas the English title is taken straight from the longest section of the book and perhaps gives that undue primacy in an English reader’s mind.
But that is a small criticism of a brilliant book....more
Now inexplicably shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize a book for which it should not have even been considered eligible.
I read this booNow inexplicably shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize a book for which it should not have even been considered eligible.
I read this book due to its longlisting for that prize – a prize looking for newly UK published translated works of long-form fiction (or collection of short stories) - and which looks (like the main Booker) to find the "finest fiction" of the year.
The judges this year have rather stretched the definition of eligibility in a few cases.
But no more so than in this case, which is a lot closer to non-fiction than fiction, and at just over 60 small pages (with generous font size) is not something anyone would I think call “long-form”.
Unfortunately they have also stretched the definition of "finest fiction"
In practice this is much closer to an lengthy history essay, and not even a good one.
The essay has a biographical and thematical nature – the biography of the 15th/16th century German preacher, religious reformer turned peasant leader Thomas Müntzer, and the theme is of popular uprisings originating with a rediscovery of the Bible’s actual teaching and preaching of a radical Gospel following the widespread distribution of a vernacular translation – with the emphasis ultimately more on the social than religious aspects of that interaction.
Müntzer’s story is then rooted both in his family history (or at least a common but mainly discredited version of it) and in the story of Thomas Wycliffe/John Ball/Wat Tyler and then Jack Cade and Jan Hus.
It is certainly an interesting topic – but I do not think it is particularly well done (even putting aside the essay’s strange prize eligibility and rather poor value for money).
The part of the story I am familiar with is the English part – and even from my limited knowledge (which appears more than the author’s) I felt that the story missed some obvious resonances.
He conflates Wat and John Tyler using the simplified versions of later Centuries - which might be OK I suppose if this is meant to be a novelistic account rather than a "contemporary sources say" historical account; but he seems to miss the point of the "assault" on Tyler's daughter (rendering it simply as a rape): my understanding was that the poll tax collectors were empowered to investigate who was eligible to pay the tax which included checking young girls for whether they had reached puberty - with rather obvious parallels with things like police stop and search powers in the UK and US – where the very law encourages its own abuse by enforcements.
In the London riots he misses how attacks took place on Flemish immigrants (and how over the years – even to today – such riots have a distinct xenophobic element).
In fact to take it further he misses the historical resonance of protests against Belgium by non-Londoners lead by a populist leader from Kent - 600+ years before Farage and Brussels.
He also misses John Ball’s most famous speech "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then a gentleman?" – one that was quoted again and again down the centuries even to the modern day and which precisely fits the theme of the essay.
And how seriously can one take an essay that tells us that Wycliffe translated the bible into “British” or has a line "At the time, three popes were laying claim to Peter's throne: the Pope of Rome, the Pope of Pisa, and the Pope of Avignon. Gregory XII, John XXIII, and Benedict XIII. That's a lot of names and numbers to keep straight; it was complicated".
So on the part I know something about it is clear to me that Vuillard has either through ignorance or incompetence not really understood how it fits his theme.
Which hardly encourages me on the parts with which I am less familiar - although even there as I said he seems to completely misrepresent the importance of religious beliefs.
The title at least fits - I cannot work out what is most poor - the clear ineligibility for the prize, the terrible value for money or the paucity of understanding in the writing.
Now on the Longlist for Translated Literature for the 2022 US National Book Awards having been shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize.
It Now on the Longlist for Translated Literature for the 2022 US National Book Awards having been shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize.
It is published by a UK small press – Lolli Editions, a London based European publisher which publishes “contemporary fiction that challenges existing ideas and breathes new life into the novel form. Our aim is to make available to English-speaking readers some of the most innovative writers that speak to our shared culture in new and compelling ways, from Europe and beyond.”
This novel I think fits Lolli’s aims well and also seems to fit with the particular slant I see on this year’s International Booker longlist, one even the prize describes as “heterogeneous even by the standards of recent International Booker Prize years” and which seems determined (something like the 2018 main Booker) to showcase a variety of books and perhaps test the definition of the prize – here the focus on “long form fiction”, with among others a novella-lite historical essay, a short piece of oral mythology and this which is part science fiction genre, part art-exhibition companion piece.
The set up of the story is of a spaceship or ships (the Six-Thousand Ships) on a lengthy mission from Earth with a mixed crew of humans and humanoids, who have visited a planet (New Discovery) and taken on board a number of strange living-sculpture like objects which seem to unsettle both humans (whose feeling of loss and bereavement from Earth seems to grow) and the humanoids (who feel a sense of desire for something they have never had).
The story is presented on 130 small pages – with plenty of white space – in the form of a series of witness statements given to a workplace commission, as things start to unravel with tension growing between humans, humanoids and their employer – to a perhaps rather inevitable conclusion.
But the strength of the book lies less in its story arc (which to be honest is rather predictable Sci Fi 101) than its repeating sensory ideas and in its allegorical implications.
Various sensory ideas recur – many of them heavily bound up with the lesser senses (with the author deliberately inverting the standard priority of sight and hearing) and even with these senses in a way which goes beyond the conventional idea of the sense:
- Smell (with the objects having a kind of Proustian impact on those who interact with them, but an impact that seems to vary with the recipient)
- Taste (and much more in the sense that a young baby first uses their mouth as a primary sense and a way of exploring objects – the idea of putting things in your mouth recurs in the book)
- Feel (and again in a wider way – in this case in the sense of skin-crawling negative and phobic type reactions)
And in terms of allegorical implications:
- There is much in the book about motherhood and by extension denied motherhood/infertility including recurring images of eggs and wombs;
- The book explicitly questions the idea of job-as-identity and fulfilment through work;
- The book examines belonging, lost, nostalgia, kinship
- In its examination of what it means to be absent from the familiar as well as what happens if your work-identity is questioned it inadvertently foreshadowed some of the experiences of lockdown and furlough.
- The reactions of the witnesses (particularly in the early testimonies) to the New Discovery objects – which are hung as though in a viewing gallery - reminded me very much of the way that people react to conceptual / installation art. Which is no accident given that the book was explicitly written as an accompaniment to (in fact more of a dialogue and mutual inspiration with) a modern art exhibition - Guldditte Hestelund’s “Consumed Future Spewed Up as Present” (shown at Overgaden).
And the way in which the objects cause people to question their purpose, the humanoids to look for a sense of connection, the humans to mourn the connections they have lost and seek to rediscover their own feelings – I think stands in a meta sense for the very thing that the author is trying to do with this fascinating novella.
Congratulations also to the prolific Martin Aitken for a very natural translation.
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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