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
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 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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