This book has now been shortlisted for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize. Even its longlisting was while in line with the letter of the aims ofThis book has now been shortlisted for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize. Even its longlisting was while in line with the letter of the aims of the prize, was not I think in line with their spirit of rewarding UK and Irish small presses taking risks on publishing innovative literature.
The book was published in the UK in 2021 by Daunt Books Press – who as far as I know are part of Daunt Books (a successful, profitable and cash rich chain of independent bookstores owned by the current manager of Waterstones in the UK and Barnes and Noble in the US). It was published under their Daunt Originals imprint (which seems to be a classic case of misbranding) as it was previously published in the same English translation by the not-for-profit Archipelago Books in the US as far back as 2014 (and for some time available on their website for free in electronic copy including as far as I can tell to UK readers), having been shortlisted in 2016 for one of the world’s richest literary prizes – the Dublin Literary Award (and as a result being available - and still available - in the UK library system in its original publication).
But (non) eligibility aside this is an excellent book
It is one that has been reviewed very widely – in the press and on Goodreads - in the original French, in its English translation and then a third time on its re-publication in the UK.
The book is in essence a harrowing account of the insidious effects of (particularly Belgian) colonialism in Rwanda, including the way in which the Western powers first established the opposing Hutu and Tsutsi ethic groups (as well as the underpinnings of the theory of Hamites) written in the form of a satire of an all girls school (think “Mallory Towers”) which mirrors developments in Rwandan society in the late 1960s and early 1970s up to and including the 1973 coup, as well as satirising Western views encapsulated in “Gorillas in the Mist”.
For me the best story in the collection has now been shortlisted for the BBC short story award.
The full collection was Shortlisted for the 2022 RepubFor me the best story in the collection has now been shortlisted for the BBC short story award.
The full collection was Shortlisted for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize
This is a debut collection of short stories although the author (a poet and writer) has already won the prestigious White Review Short Story Prize and a number of the stories have already been published there or in Granta (links presented below).
The book reminded me of two books which were shortlisted for the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize – a year I was one of the judges and both collections whose inclusion on the shortlist I strongly championed; David Hayden’s “Darker with the Lights On” for what the author of that collection described as his technique of “defamiliarisation” to create a text which gains its resonance precisely by losing obvious reference points and Eley Williams “Attrib.” for her innovative use of typography, spacing and language.
And interestingly the book is blurbed by Williams (who the author has specifically referenced as an inspiration) and was reviewed very strongly in The Guardian by Hayden (who is far more eloquent about the book than I can be here - https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...).
Of Hayden’s own collection my 2017-18 review says “Many of the stories can at first read seem disorienting lacking an obvious and familiar anchor around which to base one's comprehension and on a first read I preferred the stories where I felt that I understood Hayden’s theme or concept for the story, although often even these stories veer off into a surreal ending.”. And so I was intrigued both to experience something of the same phenomenon here and to see in Hayden’s review of this book this comment: “The disruptive style works to convey the textures and deep resonances of harsh experience: to explore the necessity and difficulty of memory, and the challenges of knowing ourselves and others in the midst of life. At its best, this is prose that courses with energy, confident in its inventiveness. The risk in not relying on borrowed formulas and striking out into a world of new phrases is that the reader might lose their hold on sense and coherence, but Onwuemezi’s meanings are rooted firmly in her gifts of attention, rhythm, colour and shape.”
One thing I particularly appreciated in this book was how the stories play with this very sense of moving away from conventional communication and phrases in order to get a real handle on what is happening. For example when in the striking titular opening story (see below) a character reverts, unusually, to a boring cliché of “Long time no see”, the other character immediately comments “Ah some words are in the right order”. In the strongest story “Green Afternoon” (again see below) the narrator trying to make sense of life (and in particular a death) ends up shuffling letters around “changing one letter at a time moved towards the wanted word. And talked out loud to help me through”
I have added some other relevant quotes under each story.
“Dark Neighbourhood” is set in a form of waiting room for a better life – the narrator, who runs a form of swap shop and sees her closest friend die (death and mourning are recurring themes) only realises at the end that her waiting for was only ever really self-sanctioned
‘Some kind of ridiculous,’ Stevi says, and looks around like casting judgement on all but unseen fragments of dust. Those statements, piped out at regular intervals, make nonsense for our ears, fatherly condescension. A kind of love, perhaps, perhaps that’s it, Stevi is here, grazed, looking rough and in love after all. ‘By the time those words reach my patch, they’ll be mixed up, and some words swapped out for other words. The statement will make another sense, or another nonsense by then,’ he says.
“Cuba” (https://granta.com/cuba-vanessa-onwue...) and “Heartbreak at the Super 8” I found the weaker stories – I think due to their setting. I know the author’s interest in Afro-Cuban religions was key to her researches for the novel which may justify the first (a tale of hotel maids, unionisation and a lost baby) but the second seemed to American road-trip for my tastes.
“The Growing State” had particular resonances for me – a successful businesman “The Winner” is seemingly dying in his office, contacted in turn by his third wife and her two predecessors, and his children – all critical of his concentration on business ahead of his family, with his interlocutor an office cleaner who is possibly there to clean up his body and soul.
One paragraph in particular reminded me of my own conversations with my EA albeit I hope I achieve a slightly better work-life balance
Ottessa runs through the week: ‘You don’t want to be disturbed, I know, but a reminder.’ She’s standing up, voice full and assertive. ‘Morning meeting tomorrow, 9 a.m., over at Tullow’s offices, good luck, I’ve emailed you the briefing notes, car booked for 8.40 car back to the office, let me know, car home car booked afternoon lunch pre-ordered then we have them coming in, I know, there was no other day table across the road booked for dinner, breakfast, I thought that you would be hungry, let me know, safe trip, your flight for Wednesday booked for 9 p.m. as you asked need your sign-off on those expenses at some point and those and those, lunch meeting with the lawyers when you’re back please let me know … good luck, safe trip, next time.’
I try to say something true. I don’t have the vocabulary to say it. ‘I am the way, the truth,’ we would say sitting in rows can you hear it? A clash of memories, the only truth I can get at. And to love each memory without falling apart, to love is the hardest thing. My voice rebounds. Memory slips and is split, I disappear inside and everything else is lost because my brother, the good man is dead.
“Green Afternoon” was I thought the best book of the entire collection – a man witnesses finds a young man dying of a stab wound in his garden and enters a darker side of London in his quest to find out more about the man and what lead to his death (with some troubling implications for himself at the end)
I photographed the site, on film, objects and edges blurry. But it wasn’t precision I was after, not the faint details of the ground, but the mood.
They spoke in sentences broken between three mouths, like a ball being batted between them and kept from touching the ground.
“At the Heart of Things” (https://www.thewhitereview.org/fictio...) – the closing story and her White Review winner is ostensibly about a woman who trips on an escalator on her commute and recuperating at home enters an underwater land where she encounters her family including her estranged sister and late father.
There was nothing to my fingers, no weight, no force on the pads of my feet, no cold draught wafting past the hairs of my skin, no sound, no sight. I couldn’t set my watch to nothing. I waited, couldn’t scream, unaware of mouth or lungs to do so not breathing, not dead, not alive. No fear. Not yet. Eyes wide open into dark and no sense. Unsayable.
Overall an innovative and very promising collection – one which, like many of the best experimental literature causes the reader to re-examine our assumptions about language and life....more
Shortlisted for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize
The book is published by the UK Fum d’Estampa Press, founded in 2019 with the aim to bring “awShortlisted for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize
The book is published by the UK Fum d’Estampa Press, founded in 2019 with the aim to bring “award-winning Catalan language poetry, fiction and essays to English translation”
The author is the late Montserrat Roig – 1946 to 1991 -(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montser...) was an award winning writer (of novels and short stories) and journalist, feminist, Catalanist and left-wing activist (particularly in the Franco era). This collection of short stories dates from the very end of her career - published in Catalan in 1989 when she had (from what I can find in her researches) moved to a more literary, reflective and lyrical style in her fiction without losing (but perhaps no longer dominated by) her activist themes.
The collection has been translated by Tiago Miller – a London born and raised translator now living in Lleida.
The collection for me fits into two very distinctive parts – six really quite short stories and two lengthier stories and I must admit my strong preference (and for me the real literary merit of the collection) lies in the longer stories.
“The Song of Youth” (the first story, which gives the book its title ) is about an elderly woman in a hospital ward where many of the other patients are dying of old age, and reflecting on a love affair in her youth. “Love and Ashes” is a rather quirky story about a poor married couple who save up for a safari – the husband’s obsession with Giraffe’s being literally his downfall but liberating his wife (the story can be read here https://static1.squarespace.com/stati...). “Free From War and Wave” is a tale heavy in literary references about a son of a tavern-owner and man-entertainer who later is caught up in the Civil War. “Division” is about a married couple visited by a flirtatious senator (who can advance the husband’s interest) and his wife. “I Don’t Understand Salmon” is a story about Republicans reminiscing (returning metaphorically to their spawning grounds) many year after their Civil War defeat. “The Chosen Apple” is about a woman who marries to the disapprocal of her mother in law.
All of these are enjoyable and contain some interesting elements and also build a theme of female independence, particularly later in life – a theme I can also see could be allegorical for post-Franco Catalonia. None however are for me either particularly successful, memorable or innovative as short stories – I wonder also if a temporal as well as linguistic/cultural distance has impeded my full appreciation.
Since the publication of Anna Karenina, or perhaps even before, it has become customary for humanity to believe that happy people have no stories to tell, something I now know to be false, for if there are any stories really worth recounting, it’s those of people who have known happiness. And that is exactly what I was next to Mar: a happy person. Those moments, despite their stillness, are far from dead: they are silent when I want, voluble when I choose, rising up in me as seemingly profitless fragments of memory united by pain or converging in joy to challenge my belief that the youth I’d regained thanks to Mar, was lost forever.
“Mar” (at some 30 pages) is the highlight of the book, a much more involved and memorable tale by a female narrator looking back on an intense, almost obsessive, life defining and societal convention-defying relationship with another woman – Mar – who suffered a catastrophic (and possibly non-accidental) car accident in her jeep-style vehicle two years before the narration. The narrator’s fierce but one might say theoretical feminism is challenged by Mar’s determination for independence on her own, unconventional terms.
Subordinate clauses always sound good at night. But in narrative terms, the kaleidoscope and its harmonised images shattering just as they take shape is far more alluring. In the daytime, subordinate clauses shatter all by themselves. In the daytime, the world demands simple sentences, subject-verb-object, full stop, new paragraph, while adjectives are to be austere, precise and to efficiently complement the verb. As the terse prose of day takes over, nocturnal rhetoric begins to feel inhibited and awkward. At night, anyone who dreams can be a poet but during the day only a few are writers who write. Prose, then, admits no excuses: this is not about an old man not yet tired enough to die but a bad literature teacher spying on schoolgirls as they get undressed. The precise adjective is ‘ridiculous’.
“Before I Deserve Oblivion” is the other longer story (at some 40 pages) – it begins with a rather clumsy metafictional conceit of a narrator sent at third hand a largely “autobiographical” and “ponderous” text, by a near-retired Spanish literature high school teacher seeking to justify (albeit in a way he admits lacks coherency) his discovery as a voyeur on his female pupils, with the vast majority of the story the actual text. The Spanish teacher was for many years a censor and his censorship increasingly moved away from the political as desired by the authorities to a more personal obsession with removing sexual imagery. Roig is at pains to set up the story in advance (as my comments imply) as self-consciously ponderous, incoherent and rambling – but once that is accepted there are fascinating ruminations in the text on both what it means to write, what it means to read and what it means to censor as well as how all interact with life and ageing.
Overall a worthwhile if uneven read – perhaps best approached as an insight into a literature (Catalan) which is, I suspect, almost entirely unknown to English readers....more
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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