I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
It is published by a Scotland Street Press - a Scottish and InterI read this book due to its longlisting for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
It is published by a Scotland Street Press - a Scottish and International independent publisher of fiction, history, poetry and translation.
It is a book which can only really be discussed in two parts – the underlying novel and this translation.
The underlying novel, as written by Alhierd Bacharevič is set in his native Belarus and is a dystopian fantasy on a battle for nationalist identity against imperial colonialism carried out with the weapons of language (or of dialect – the very distinction between the two being a key part of the battle), but told through a magic realism like lens drawing both on Hansel and Gretel and on the Jewish folklore of a Golem - all against terrible echoes of the Holocaust.
The story, in brief outline, features a man whose own Belarusian language (in which he takes his sense of identity) is simultaneously suppressed by the Russian-speaking authorities – who regard it as simply an idiots version of classical Russian, while promoted by nationalists who drove his singer wife to suicide as her songs did not conform to their aims for the language.
As a form of secret and long-term resistance he decides to bring up his daughter to speak only Belarus at home, and to simply refuse to speak or even acknowledge the Russian taught at school. As this increasingly antagonises the authorities, his daughter is taken away – together with a son who was moulded for him at about the same time. They end up interned in a language camp (on the site of an old concentration camp) deep in a forest where a Doctor has been given permission to carry out experiments to “cure” extreme cases of Belarus speakers by use of both pills and surgery on a growth he is convinced is responsible for their inability or unwillingness to speak properly.
The book starts with their father (and effectively a stepmother) arranging an escape from the camp – but they then got lost looking for berries and in the forest stumble across a 21st century version of the Gingerbread House made from sweet boxes. Later they encounter faceless border guards (with eyes drawn on in pen) and an author.
Different chapters move between the children, the father and the doctor.
So far so unusual, intriguing and enthralling.
But what really takes things to the next level is the translation process – a process which rather than some form of literal translation really effectively uses the novel as a starting point to produce a new piece of literature.
The first translator Jim Dingley had to approach the issue that the language was written in a mixture of Belarusian and Russian (actually both in a mix of literary and colloquial usage) as well as fifth even more colloquial language that was an amalgam of the two (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trasianka).
Reflecting on some similarities between Scots and Belarusian: both UNESCO Endangered languages (albeit part of 2500+ such tongues); both dominated by another language; and both seen by native speakers of that language with condescension as a dialect – and a rather uncouth and hard to comprehend one at that (although “In the case of English I think that we could add sentimentality to condescension – the Scots are odd folk that use words like ‘wee’, ‘bonnie’ and ‘the noo’ and we like singing their funny little song at New Year”) – he decided to replace Russian (called in the book “the lingo”) and Belarus (in the book “the leid” with English and Scots respectively. Further he translated the whole book into standard “RP” English and then worked with a Scottish poet Petra Reid to translate the Belarus parts into Scots.
There are actually two aspects to this part.
Firstly – the language itself. Reid had admitted to drawing on her granny, Rab C Nesbit and Irvine Welsh among other inspirations – and I would probably explain the book as like Shuggie Bain on steroids. Copious footnotes help (a glossary at the back I found I used much less) as does reading out the Scots passages phonetically in one’s head. Deliberately playing up to my own coloniser stereotype in keeping with the novel I would also condescendingly say that any educated English speaker who has sat through a Burns night dinner will find much that they can follow in the text – and thankfully without a man with a skirt waving a sword at a plate of offal.
And that was actually a relevant comment as what takes the novel to further heights of originality and impact is the translators decision to duplicate the copious Belarus poetic and literary references in the novel (particularly Frańcišak Bahuševič and his poem “Things Will Be Bad” which both is repeated frequently in the novel and gives it its title) by bringing in lots of Scottish poetry, with the National Bard Rabbie forming the centre piece. And so the book is scattered through with much of Burns most baudy verse, but also other songs and poems including “The Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond”, music hall (It's a braw bricht moonlit nicht) and pop novelty “Donald Where's Your Troosers”.
The effect of this is to effectively translate the sense and thrust (rather than the literal reading) of the novel - and to put an English speaking reader (and I think more particularly an English speaking reader from either England or Scotland) very much into the world and mentality of the original novel as it would have been read by a Russian or Belarus speaker. If there is a downside it is that one can come away from the book with very little knowledge of Belarus itself - but for a book which is effectively an allegorical fable drawing on international dystopia, German fairy tale and Hebrew folklore I think this approach works. Further what I think is the really key Belarus text in the novel ("Things Will be Bad") is retained in this version.
It is rare to come across such imagination and power in a novel and such audacious invention in its translation
Leaving behind the city of disgrace, I was [searching] for an unknown language through which we could consider grace.
I read this due to its longli
Leaving behind the city of disgrace, I was [searching] for an unknown language through which we could consider grace.
I read this due to its longlisting for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize for small presses.
It is published by Ignota Press – an “experiment in the techniques of awakening [which] publishes at the intersection of technology, myth-making and magic” and which seeks to “develop a language that makes possible the reimagining and reenchantment of the world around us”.
The presses name is from the Latin “Lingua Ignota” (Unknown Language) as used by the 12th Century German mystic, polymath (writer, composer, theologian, liturgist, dramatist, correspondent of Popes and Emperors, botanist, natural medic) Hildegard of Bingen.
And this book both perfectly fits their brief and is fundamentally inspired by it, as it is effectively a reimagining and reshaping of the eschatological writings and visions of Hildegard aimed at reenchantment and renewal of our world today (year C19) – a world of immediate plague and of impending climate doom.
The main part of the book (which is book-ended by an introductory story and an afterword) and is co-authored by the Barcelona based, British novelist, writer, podcaster and critic (on topics of sex, politics, history, landscapes and love) Huw Lemmey.
I say co-authored as the book itself credits Hildegard as a co-author, reflecting the sense in which Lemmey is acting as an interpreter of Hildegard’s writings and visions, but recast into a novel which is simultaneously set in an early medieval world, a 21st Century dystopia and the Revelation 20 one thousand years. It also mirrors the way in which Hildegard’s own writings were effectively divinely coordinated.
The narrator of the story is a public health official (whose strict initiation into the lifelong and all-encompassing service of the health authority closely mirrors Hildegard’s own training as a Benedictine oblate – together with an early mentor called Jutta) in an atemporal city surrounded by five mountains, mountains which she sees as occupied by five beasts on the end of long ropes tethered to the City – a very deliberate echo of Hildegard’s complex visions in her Scivas (see for example (http://www.mille.org/publications/win...) and how they point to the end of the Sixth Age.
And the City is then swept by a transformative, cataclysmic and apocalyptical storm, swiftly followed by an eschatological Holy Occupation by a host of heavenly angels – lifted, I would say, straight from the first part of Ezekiel, who instigate a terrifyingly repressive regime at the heart of the City, whose exemplary justice regime and ruthless cleansing of the ills of society is a many times multiplied and purified extension of the works of the health authority which employed the narrator.
From there the narrator, aware of her likely imminent arrest and summary trial, flees the City for the unknown hinterlands on a pilgrimage which I think mirrors Hildegard’s own move (one perhaps surprisingly and fortuitously given both contemporary and retrospective ecclesiastical blessing) to escape the narrow and judgmental confines of existing religious authority (mirrored in the book by the narrator’s work for the public health authority) for a journey towards an all-sense understanding of real grace.
In this humbling landscape, something was growing within me: the realisation that there exist for each of us a place of grace. I had no tongue to talk of this blessed state before, only morality and cleanliness
It is a journey which includes:
An intense queer relationship with a young girl, who was a prostitute in the City (and there would have seen the narrator and her employer as officious persecutors – with shades I think of Mary Magdalene);
Meditations on St Jerome and St Ursula (a particular inspiration for Hildegard),
Gemstone (particularly the smaragdus/Emerald) healing and power;
An encounter with a Leviathan (a mechanical one, but one which cannot help but remind the reader of both its biblical mythological origins in Job, Psalms as well as in its Hobbesian allusions to an oppressive state) and with its occupants on an Exodus through the wilderness inspired by Moses;
An intense healing of a wound which draws explicitly both on imagery of Christ’s stigmata and Genesis 2:7 and I think more implicitly on the redemptive role of sacrificial blood in both the Old and New Covenants;
Capture by a diabolically inspired group of Tafurs – inspired I think by the allegedly cannibalistic group of zealots by the same name in the First Crusade;
And which culminates in a series of intense visions in her imprisonment and a full realisation of a divinity which was not just incarnate in the person of Jesus but permeates nature – her idea of Viriditas, and the book culminating in her “lay[ing] down to live again in the lights and greenness of God”.
Even deeper this beautifully produced book (with a beautiful illustrated endpaper glimpsed as if in an incomplete vision through a gap in the cover) has both an introductory story and an afterword which further add to the sense of co-authorship, engagement with Hildegard’s work and its relevance for today’s world.
The afterword is by Alice Sprawls and is a transcript of a lecture delivered in C-19 /2020/Covid year zero – which draws out key themes in Hildegard’s lifestory and work.
The introductory story is more tangentially inspired – a brief, poetical tale of Pinky Agarwalia who, 100 years or so in the future, with Earth now known as planet Avaaz, finds fragments of Hildegard’s story and takes from it a new inspiration for the salvation of the species and planet. It is written by a fellow Churchillian – Bhanu Kapil – who subsequent to this novel’s publication became the first Covid age winner of the UK’s most prestigious literary prize – the TS Eliot Prize for her poetry collection “How to Wash A Heart”.
Overall this is an outstanding, visionary, beautiful and deeply intelligent novel.
This body is supported in every way through the earth This the earth glorifies the power of God
I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
My five start review of this would be as follows.
This short novelI read this book due to its longlisting for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
My five start review of this would be as follows.
This short novella (only 85 pages) nevertheless packs in a whole host of themes: German post-war liberal identity; love – not as something that is given but as something that is egotistically imposed by its giver on its object; transgenderism – in particular looking at the way in which the world seeks to impose a clear and fundamental binary divide on something which for some people is fluid; sexbots and what they say about the fundamentals behind sex; the body and how attitudes to it change between age and sex; art and religion and their interaction with identity and the body; the role and downsides of therapy.
And all of it written in a style that is a very deliberate rewriting of two giants of literature (one American and one European), with it being both:
A deliberate rewrite of Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint” – some items being simply tributes (Roth’s controversial liver is replaced by - – at least from reviews I have seen – an equally divisive banana), in some cases a literary sleight-of-hand (the reader takes time to realise that Dr Seligman in this novel is not a psychoanalyst) and some simply reversals (of sex, religion etc).
And a book explicitly inspired by the writing of Thomas Bernhard but which in this case makes far more sense than the rather dismal trail of authors who have simply taken from Bernhard that they just have to write a mix of misanthropy and scatology and pretend it’s literature. Here I think the author is very much in Bernhard’s “Nestbeschmutzer” tradition , albeit here rather cleverly attacking a German society that considers itself to have fully acknowledged its Nazi past and to be both liberal and hyper-tolerant rather than (as Bernhard) a traditional/conservative Austrian one in denial about its Nazi past.
It is also one that is genuinely funny – even from the first page “It was never feasible for us to hold down an empire for a thousand years with our deplorable cuisine”
My one star review of this would be as follows.
A book which is subtitled “The Story of A Cock”, whose contribution to the controversial issue of transgender rights and toilets is too banal to even list here, with a protagonist who pretends to interact with Hitler and with a mix of crude and scatalogical humour, and culminating in the alleged eating of popular and furry members of the rodent family – the book is basically a rewrite of Freddie Starr. Mercifully it is short (as I think was Freddie Starr).
2022 update - yet another prize listing with the shortlist for the US National Book Critics Circle Autobiography award
--------------------------------2022 update - yet another prize listing with the shortlist for the US National Book Critics Circle Autobiography award
--------------------------------------------- Since my review now winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography, and longlisted for the 2021 Desmond Elliott Prize for debut fiction. These nominations again showing how this book is part biographical, part fiction - something recognised I think explicitly by its nomination for the Gordon Burn Prize which specifically looks for books which blend the two forms.
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“I think of [starling’s] song, how deftly they regurgitate strands of true remembered sound, weaving it into their own melodic bridges: a fusion of truth and invention; past and present”
I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize and shortlisting for the 2021 Folio Prize – although I was already familiar with it from its winning of the An Post Irish Book of the Year in 2020 – remarkably the third time in five years by its publisher Tramp Press who have (among others) published Mike McCormack’s “Solar Bones” (Goldsmith and Dublin Literary Award Winner) and a series of books by Sara Baume.
Tramp Press publish fiction, essays/non-fiction and a Forgotten Voices list which is “committed to rescuing and recovering forgotten literature, and to re-engaging with those writers”.
And interestingly this beautiful and heartfelt work stands at the intersection of all three of these areas – having already won prize nominations for both fiction and non-fiction due to its heavily auto-biographical/memoir/autofictional nature and being based around re-engaging with an older writer.
The author Doireann Ní Ghríofa is better known as a poet and her award winning collection “Clasp” examined the concept of palimpsest, of grief, of the joy and pain of motherhood – and featured in particular the poem “The Horse Under The Hearth” which is effectively a continuation of a famous 18th Century Irish keen (a lament) “Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire” by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill – an elegy to Eibhlin’s soldier husband, murdered by an English Protestant Sheriff/magistrate over a dispute about a horse.
That poem was sparked from a love by the author not just of the poem itself but firstly a fascination with the writer as someone largely written out of history and known for her dead husband and her famous politician nephew (Daniel O’Connell) and secondly a strong sense of connection between her life and that of the poet.
This book – with its familiar refrain “THIS IS A FEMALE TEXT” is an exploration of a 21st Century auto-fictional narrator who reads and re-reads the poem, decides to translate it herself (the author’s translation with the original Gaelic is in the Appendix, and parts of the poem both accompany each chapter heading, give the book much of its narrative drive and appears frequently in the text.
This is also a book about motherhood and the giving and sacrifice involved – a U2 song (which the author hates but cannot dislodge) and its lyric of “you given yourself away” captures this idea and the narrator’s wider interest in sacrifice (the book starts for example with her pumping breast milk for premature babies – something which later takes on a much greater meaning for her; she continues to breast feed her daughter until almost forced to give up; she riffs on the Rapunzel Foundation – where girls grow their hair long before donating their ponytails to make wigs for those with hair loss).
The book is simply resplendent in repeated imagery.
There is, for example, the recurring themes of rooms – including how the narrator links it (via the Italian stanza) to the construction of a poem; on the concepts of desire; of how women in Irish history are in the “masculine shadow … only of interest as a satellite to male lives”
Starlings reappear – their ability to incorporate sounds into their song (as per my opening quote) conveying something of how the keen was first passed down verbally, of the author’s poem and of this novel.
There is discussion of how while male texts and the songs of bards were copied down to preserve them, “literature composed by women was stored not in books but in female bodies, living repositories of poetry and song”
Weaving and knitting feature – her first outing with her baby daughter to visit the site of the poem’s events we are told she is wearing a cardigan knitted by her grandmother “a female text in which every stitch is a syllable” and of course we immediately think of this book – a female text in which syllable is a stitch, a stitch in the historical picture the narrator is weaving. And later we are reminded that the etymology of “text” lies in the latin for “to weave” and how the famous poem “belongs to a literary genre worked an woven by women, entwining strands of female voices that were carried in female bodies”- a genre to which of course this book is proud to belong.
I could continue but will give only one more example. For me what really makes the 18th Century poem outstanding is the verse when the wife gallops to her husband’s still hemorrhaging dying body and unable to stem the blood, wipe or clean it “my palms turned cups, and oh I gulped”. And this terrible image of drinking blood – occurs twice in the narrator’s story at critical junctures. In hospital with her very premature daughter – and after a heel prick to draw blood and also to see if the baby will cry, she sucks the blood away from the heel. And at college, having studied hard and against school and family advice, to attend a medical/vet course at her first dissection she immediately cuts herself on a scalpel and retreats to suck the blood from the wound – the cutting incident starting the collapse of her original ambitions and a crucial turning point in her life.
The book has only one weakness – a lengthy chapter when, having exhausted the direct and secondary sources on Eibhlín and the site visits to understand more of her life, she decides to resort to relatively conventional genealogical tracings of her descendants. The failure itself (and the lack of interest in the chapter) I think does serve a purpose – it’s the only time when the text stops being a female text, as her quarry are entirely male and at the culmination of her searching she finds only a blank where her Eibhlín should be.
Overall this is a powerful and memorable book....more
I would actually suggest instead of reading this review you read my much better written review of the outstanding, intellectually stimulating “Lucia” I would actually suggest instead of reading this review you read my much better written review of the outstanding, intellectually stimulating “Lucia” – joint winner (with the equally brilliant “Murmur”) of the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize
When I heard Alex Pheby author of “Lucia” was writing a fantasy novel – I had originally anticipated a cutting edge dystopian novel – perhaps a world where cancel culture is reversed and artists embed NFTs in their work that prevent those with political opinions they disapprove of from being able to consume their work.
Instead this is, at least to me, was rather disappointing – a rather standard young adult style fantasy novel – which I felt drew far too heavily on Harry Potter (I recognise that may simply be both books drawing on an older tradition – but it came across to me as very derivative)
And it has all of the drawbacks of that genre. A TLS review that Neil drew my attention to sums this up well “And Pheby is by no means immune to the clichés and pitfalls of the genre. These include (but are not limited to) a surfeit of exposition, a disorientating Sargasso Sea of characters, a general sense of second-handness or pastiche, a dalliance with kitsch, an over-reliance on Capital Letters as a slightly lazy way to ramp up the significance of a thing, and an enervating lack of jeopardy, given that everything’s ultimately just about who’s better at magic – given, moreover, that this whole world, as rough as it may be for some of the characters who people it, has been created with its author’s convenience a little too much in mind.”
I was also I have to say not convinced at the world building (or should that be World Building) – perhaps here I am judging against way too high a benchmark (and I also acknowledge that books which are filmed have an unfair advantage in world building), but the only fantasy novels I have ever enjoyed – Lord of The Rings (although I preferred the films), Harry Potter (ambivalent between film and book) and particularly A Song of Ice and Fire (where the TV series was great until it overtook the books and then was not so much) – had worlds which seemed, for all their fantastical nature, fully realised and existing outside of the immediate context of the book.
To use another analogy my children had a Nintendo Switch for Christmas and I shortly intend to buy WRC9 when released (as pre children I loved playing the early WRC games on my PS2 – between watching rallies in the flesh). Reviews of that are mixed – its clear the PS5 version is better – and the Switch one suffers from “texture pop in” – where countryside is being clearly drawn as your rally car passes it. Here despite the 100 page glossary (which was a fascinating concept) I felt the world was being written at the same pace at the book – in other words that there was too much texture pop in.
I would actually suggest instead of reading this you read the outstanding, intellectually stimulating “Lucia”
Now winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (Britain’s oldest continuous literary prize) as well as the Republic of Consciousness Prize (one of Now winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (Britain’s oldest continuous literary prize) as well as the Republic of Consciousness Prize (one of its newest). Attrib. By Eley Williams did the same double - in a year when I helped judge the RoC. And to complete the link Eley Williams was a judge on this year’s RoC.
ORIGINAL REVIEW
I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2020 Republic of Consciousness Prize although I already had a copy lined up to read due to enthusiastic and excellent reviews (not least from my twin brother here - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... - parts of which I have adapted for my own).
The book is first party narrated by Mathilda (although she is someone who adopts various identities and names over time – spinning plates to stop her inconsistent stories and the worlds in which she maintains them intersection).
At the book’s start she volunteers to sort through the archives of the National Portrait Gallery, and photographic material relating to the "Bright Young Things", a (real life) Bohemian group of artists and socialites in 1920s London.
Mathilda is subject to Transfixions, visions or spiritual connections with various figures from this and other groups, which she captures on cards describing both the characters and the Sensations the transfixion induces (which appears to show influence of Synaesthesia).
Amongst the photographs she finds one of an unknown black artist, which she is able, via her research into the archives, to eventually identify as the, seemingly forgotten, Scottish modernist poet, Hermia Druitt.
She also finds a link to the European town of Dun, where Druitt seemingly spent her last year's and founded an esoteric society LOTE, a queer modernist cult who (over time she finds) believed the mythical lotus-eaters were a real proto-communist society (with some form of ritualistic overtones).
To get to Dun, Mathilda bluffs (via a very odd and seemingly years out of date internet link) her way on to a Residency at a foundation which (after she joins) she finds is for followers of a theorist John Garreaux, whose aesthetic and artistic principles are the antithesis of her own and Druitt's and whose followers seem to speak in length academic nonsense.
The foundation seems to practice Garreaux’s idea of celebrating the abgenation of art – with for example the culmination of each term the submission of a project which is then placed in an archive unread (any attempt to read or evaluate the project destroying its very point).
Over time the historical (and in some ways continuing) relationship between Garreaux and Druitt, and how this may account for her erasure of the latter from the record, gives the novel its narrative tension. It seems that given Garreaux's principles of abnegation of art, he may have picked the complete historical eradication of Druitt as his first project.
An additional complexity is a character Erskine-Lily who lives in Dun and who Mathilda eventually befriends: initially when seeing Erskine-Lily Mathilda thinks they might be Hermia, later Mathilda finds he has pictures which almost seem her transfixions and then she moved on to seeing him as more of a living transfixion, before at the book's end understanding his true identity (albeit that is not clear to this reader).
The novel integrates a number of different strands - the main narrative, Mathilda's Transfixions, extracts from a (fictional) academic treatise Black Modernisms, and direct (or possibly novelistic) accounts of Druitt's own story (the title of these sections are redacted as are the title of the Transifixion card for Erskine-Lily and the reveal – but a Thought Art member – of Erskine Lily’s true identity). Again I was not sure I fully understood all of this although I think the provenance of the Druitt sections is deliberately left vague - is it flashbacks in the novel we are reading, a contemporary account, an autobiographical novel or one written by Mathilda after our novel ends. To add complexity - and confusion - on a couple of occasions Mathilda’s own story briefly merges with this account (at least typographically and possibly on her or our imagination).
This is a book which is at once extremely distinctive but also, for me at least, resonant of many other books.
It has much of the underlying “liberating the canon” worldview but also the distinctive writing style of Isabel Waidner; the complex intertextuality and artistic conspiracy theory reminded me very much of Daniel James “Ezra Maas”; the attempt to identify the way in which Black contributions and presence in (particularly European) art and art society history have been erased (via a combination of ignorant misreading of evidence and racially motivated deliberate suppression both past and present) put me in mind of some of Bernadine Evaristo’s novels and of Washington Black (albeit that concentrated on the same process in the world of science); and the German residency and intersection with some theories of art and textuality of the setting (if perhaps not the wider themes) of Hari Kunzru’s “Red Pill”.
The issue for me was that I felt that the story drew perhaps too much on some of the weaknesses of each of those books/authors as much as their strengths – and too often I found this novel close to undreadable,
This is partly I think due to its length – I think the novel would have worked much better at half the length or less (this is one area where I feel the author could learn a lot from Isabal Waidner).
The other issue I had is that the book basically features some 2020 wasters (Mathilda and Erskine-Lily basically make a living by stealing and fraud to fuel a a lifestyle of poverty combined with consumption of luxury alcoholic drinks) who are besotted with a group of rich 1920 wasters (the Bright Young Things) – and I could not find any sympathy with either group.
I also could not understand some of the choices made and felt they undermined what I saw as the author’s aims – for example an interesting discussion on whether Druitt is an elaborate hoax (like Woolf and her friends Abyssinian Princess hoax and many other examples) cleverly points out that the opposite occurs – not the invention of historical black artists but the eradication of real life ones. Except of course Druitt is fictional.
And the intellectual-guff of the Thought Art group (which I think may be for comedy value) was unfortunately indistinguishable at times for me from that of what I think was more meant to be the theory underlying the book.
Overall a fascinating and worthwhile experiment which simply did not work for me – but which I would urge others to engage with....more
So, ethnography, first is an activity; second, it’s exploration and interpretation. Third, writing and writing narratives.
Now shortlisted for the
So, ethnography, first is an activity; second, it’s exploration and interpretation. Third, writing and writing narratives.
Now shortlisted for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize
I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize – which is perhaps unfortunate as I aim to read all the books longlisted for that prize (not least as I have been involved with it as a past judge and one year a sponsor of the prize fund) and, while this is a book which I am sure will appeal to many readers, it very much did not appeal to me.
If I had picked up the book in a bookstore and read pretty well any page I think I would have quickly put it back down – and unfortunately that is how I felt every time I picked it up when reading for the longlist.
Hopefully though this review will pull in the other more appreciative readers this book deserves as its clearly a work of great intelligence and deep cultural insight – just one whose outer packaging I could not break through.
It is published in the UK by Peninsula Press and small press formed by three booksellers in 2017 which published its first full length fiction in 2020 (including this book).
The set up of the book is that it is first party narrated by Ezekiel (“Zeke”) Hooper Stark – an academic ethnographer whose areas of study include: family photographs and the stories they tell of a family and our culture; the changing role of imagery; and new men and how they have adapted to a post-feminist world.
The book is set up as a series of short chapter essays which explore each of these topics but on which the other research topic is Zeke himself and his wider family (including: an alcoholic and distant corporate lawyer father; an androgynously born, surgically male, later cross-dressing Great Uncle Ezekiel; an effectively mute Little Sister; a passive spinster - but influential on him - Aunt Clarissa; and a yard-based praying mantis – or more likely a series of such insects - which he christens Mr Petey and adopts as a childhood pet and confidant). There is some plot development involving a suicide and a betrayal towards the end of the book.
Many of the essays are based around family photos – both those from his research and those from his own family. There are some interesting ideas here on the role and evolution of portrait photography and how it has both followed and lead societal changes.
The text itself came across to me as a mix of: very arty “theory”; rather colloquial type musings (there is way too many “Ha”s and “Kidding”s and far too much RANDOM CAPITALISATION); pop cultural references which were almost entirely lost on me (this was a classic type of book which I felt needed an English-English translation for me really to repeat it).
A couple of examples of the first two type which I think give a good sense for the book
[my thesis director] is partial to Stuart Hall’s theory of articulation, in which cultural formations are an articulated ensemble, linked, joined, not modeled on an organic living body with an “eternal shape”. This theory bypasses or eliminates the question of authenticity or in-authenticity.
And
I’m an oxymoron, moron ox, dumb pun. Who cares.
Theoretical border crossings, shifting fields of inquiry, morph into self-made mind wars. I renounced and claimed and accepted and denied what I once held dear.
Total hedonism, total boredom. OK, pathetic, not cool.
To be honest I struggled with one page of the text in these styles – so 300 was a trial.
The last 70 or so pages of the book is a piece of Zeke’s research – his field study into new men “MEN IN QUOTES” – frequently referred to in the main text. Cleverly this is actually a piece of research that the author has said she “did on her characters’s behalf” – based on actual interviews she carried out with her men friends – the study itself says that this is a self-selected, non-cross section and it is perhaps telling of why I struggled with the book (or that my earlier struggles had by then rather squashed my interest) that I could not identify at all with anything said in this section (or remember any of it as I write this review).
Not for me. For an example of how to write much more concise essay fiction I would suggest instead another RoC longlisted book “A Musical Offering”....more
Now longlisted for the 2021 Walter Scott Historical Fiction and Republic of Consciousness Prizes.
I read this book due to its shortlisting for the 2020Now longlisted for the 2021 Walter Scott Historical Fiction and Republic of Consciousness Prizes.
I read this book due to its shortlisting for the 2020 Goldsmith Prize and it is an excellent choice from the judges and my favourite on the shortlist – both innovative and fun but also of excellent literary quality.
The author is an internationally renowned writer on music, a librettist and an Oulipian author – and this book rather neatly manages to combine all three aspects.
The books set up is that Beethoven rather than dying in 1827, survived long enough to accept an 1823 commission to write a biblical oratia – and the book is a record (or perhaps better described as an imagining) of his time in Boston from his ship voyage through the first public performance of the piece – which is based around the story of Job.
And the first constrain that the author imposes on himself is that, as far as possible given the lack of truth of the book’s central premise, everything has to be based around actual historical people, locations, events and possibilities. But the way he does this is very enjoyable – by directly addressing the reader to explain both the research he has undertaken and the resulting editorial and narrative decisions he has taken, or in some cases retaken as further research means either altering elements of the story to date or a certain amount of explicit hand waving over inconsistencies that are not worth resolving. I also found it an excellent piece of commentary on the role and importance of fidelity in literary historical fiction: in this case going to (and detailing) lengths to maintain complete fidelity but surrounding a central core which fails fidelity in the most basic manner (the central subject visiting a continent on which he never set foot, not to mention the small manner of being long dead at the time the novel is set).
The second and more Oulipian is to only attribute words to Beethoven which are taken directly from his letter – mainly as complete sentences, sometimes as complete clauses. All sources explained in the notes at the back of the book.
First of all I found this a fascinating approach.
More conventional historical novels (ones which bide by the convention of actually telling a true story) for all their fidelity can often be accused still of putting words in their subjects mouth. In this case the words are the subject’s own. And as a result, even if the comments are taken out of context, we actually get a fascinating insight into Beethoven’s character which despite its not just fictional but falsifiably so central story, relies in one side of the dialogue entirely on primary factual sources.
And secondly it is, again, tremendous fun. One of the issues with Oulipian writing is that while it can be fascinating and clever for a short period of time, I find the reader’s interest normally pales fairly quickly and one can be left wishing you could have contacted the author and told them their efforts were understood, their point made and that there is no need to carry on. Here though the author, while respecting his self-imposed constraints plays with variations. We have: a chapter entirely of dialogue marked up with musical notation; dialogue to accompany a game of draughts; a letter; an interview with a youngster which is pretty well entirely drawn up to imply via one odd line that Beethoven perhaps inspired Moby Dick; a monologue address to the chorus; and best of all and early on a chapter where Beethoven’s identical words are used in two completely differently developing dialogues (a mishearing of a German word driving the two courses). Even if some of these don’t work for a particular reader it is of little consequence as each chapter is short and a new approach sure to follow shortly.
The third aspect of the novel is the oratorio itself – reproduced in the book in detail, together with descriptions of the music. The writer of the text is itself part of the plot of the book (a Unitarian minister with rather plodding prose being secretly superseded by a widow who Beethoven takes as a confidant) – and again the author plays with this: remarking that everyone who heard it felt that the composer has managed to find a poet who is his equal (that poet of course being the author).
And there is even more to the novel than this – lots of ideas many of which are only explored for a brief period, before taking their leave before any risk they become irksome to be replaced by something new.
We have for example a brief 21st Century editorial intervention (possibly a nod to the intervention by Elihu in Job’s story?) urging the author to move the story on. We also have a brief visit to the area of the kind of historical research that takes up the time of factual writers with a brief foray into a story about a distinctive green ink and what it might prove or unprove. We even have a theological dispute between Unitarian and and Trinitairan laced with tit for tat bible verse quoting and with theology sourced from a real character’s sermons.
Inevitably any reader may find a false note among all the perfect ones (and maybe even here the author signs that by first of all having a dispute over who was the source of some incorrect annotations in the first printing of the score, and secondly by having a number of musicians and singers whose limitations, particularly when faced with the complexity of the composer’s work, quite literally leads to false notes).
For me the one false note was a visit by some Indian Chiefs to a rehearsal – the behaviour and dialogue of the native Americans seemed a little sterotyped to me, and while based on a real occurrence I noted that the occurrence was from a contemporary white American account.
However overall this is an excellent novel – not just full of ideas but also a very well written story which seemed to have a new delight at each chapter....more
Now shortlisted (the fabulous) 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize as well as winner of the (rather better known) 2020 Costa Book of The Year prize aNow shortlisted (the fabulous) 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize as well as winner of the (rather better known) 2020 Costa Book of The Year prize and previously shortlisted for the 2020 Goldsmith Prize and 2021 Folio Prize.
“Every afternoon, around three o’clock, David dropped Aycayia to Miss Rain’s for lessons. There at the table in the grand room with wooden floors, sat an indigenous woman of the Caribbean; cursed to be a mermaid by her own sisterhood, whose people had all but died out, slaughtered by the Castiilian Admiral and his kind; a woman who, as a mermaid, was pulled out of the sea by Yankee men who wanted to auction her off and if not that, stuff her and keep her as a trophy; a woman who was rescued by a Black Conch fisherman [David]; a mermaid who had come back to live as a woman of the Caribbean again. She sat quietly as she learnt language again, from another woman she wasn’t sure she could trust. This woman was white, dappled with freckles, and no matter what she wasn’t, she was of the type who had wiped her people out. Arcadia [Rain] was self conscious, because she only spoke Black Conch English, a mixture of words from the oppressor and the oppressed.
A fascinating exploration of a mermaid myth – this one from the Neo-Taino people (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigen... for some details), and which places its subject into mid 1970s Black Conch (a fictionalised version of Tobago) at a time of change and convulsion in that nation.
The story (which is summarised in the opening quote) is told in three interleaved sections: a conventional third party omniscient narrator telling the story of 1976; a journal written by David Baptiste (the local fisherman who first finds, then rescues Aycayia – and then falls in love with her) some 30 years later as he reflects on his feelings, actions and mistakes; and free form verse from Aycayia mingling her life in the sea, her time on Black Conch and her burgeoning memories of the time centuries earlier before her banishment, told in a mixture of the native tongue she is remembering and the Black Conch English she is learning (together – just like Arcadia’s deaf son David - with America sign language and book English).
At one stage Aycayia reflects on her time as a mermaid – “The sea was deeper than she knew or could swim … Her time had been spent mostly in the upper sea”: and I found that a good metaphor for the reading experience in this book
It is possible to stay closer to the surface and enjoy this book (in line with its subtitle) as an enjoyable if unique love story.
But it is also possible to go deeper and to see it as something which explores many of the themes and ideas that inform both Roffey’s other writing (female sexuality, pre-Christian legends – particularly foundational myths about womanhood, Caribbean history on a multi-century scale, colonialism, creolisation, fatherhood, outsiders) and her wider activism (particularly her XR involvement).
Perhaps for me, the most striking and topical passage of the book is when a vexatious local woman and her occasional lover (a corrupt policeman) confront Arcadia with how, for her all her insistence that they are in the wrong, her very life is built on white privilege and that she is literally living in and on the proceeds of slavery (but all against a background of a state founded on the prior eradication of the native peoples).
Shortlisted for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize and for Fionn Petch winner of the US Society of Authors Premio Valle Inclán award for translaShortlisted for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize and for Fionn Petch winner of the US Society of Authors Premio Valle Inclán award for translation from Spanish.
Charco Press is an Edinburgh-based small UK press – they focus on “finding outstanding contemporary Latin American literature and bringing it to new readers in the English-speaking world”.
This is the third book of their fourth year of publication – and like the others so far this year, the second they have published by the same author: in this case the Argentinian author Luis Sagasti, author of their 2018 publication “Fireflies” - which remains one of my favourite of their books (all of which I have read).
The book is translated by Fionn Petch who also translated “Fireflies" and two other books for Charco.
“Fireflies” was a delightful, playful and learned exploration of 20th Century history (particularly the history of flight) and 20th Century art (in all its forms) – covering huge amounts of detail in its 85 or so pages and seamlessly mixing factual detail, urban myth and some of Sagasti’s own invention.
This book, at just under 120 pages, is very similar in its delightful, playful and learned exploration; and perhaps even more explicit in mixing fact and invention: both Sagasti’s own invention (a fable like chapter on the construction of a huge organ) and the invention of others.
The subject matter revolves largely around music, and ranges across such areas as: Bach/Glenn Gould/Goldberg Variations; the Beatles, Rolling Stones and The Who (in their more experimental phases); Joshua Bell’s undercover busker experiment; the artist Mark Rothko (and private acquirers of his work); unsurrendered Japanese soldiers: John Cage and other experimental composers; Shostakovich; Wagner; concerns held in cities under siege or performed in prison camps; the music carried on the Voyager probe; Oliver Messiaen; Mondrian and his love for Boogie Woogie; Navajo sand paintings - and much, much more.
I love the writing and style but on a personal level perhaps did not appreciate the subject matter as much as “Fireflies” as I am something of a musical philistine when it comes to classical music and I think just the wrong age to have really been a fan of the pop groups mentioned.
The other theme though is circularity – introduced up front via Goldberg Variations and Scheherazade’s tales (and Borges’s fabled 602nd night); later explored delightfully via the didgeridoo.
And the idea of variations on a theme (and an ultimate circular course) give the book its structure with thematic chapters (on areas such as lullabies, silence, conflict, space, flight) which both loop around ideas within themselves but which have recurring motifs across the chapters.
And the idea of repetition (in this case as a burden – to grandparents of small children and to pop/rock bands) also gave me my favourite quote of this delightful novella
“There’s not much difference between Sisyphus, a story before bed and a hit song. Musicians and grandparents alike know that the story doesn’t belong to them that they have to sing, and that’s that”
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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