BOOKS @ VOLUME #38 (26.8.17)
This week's newsletter includes our reviews, news, events, courses, competitions, recommendations, new releases and other things.
Saturday, 26 August 2017
When something is at rest it is only conceptually differentiated from the physical continuum of its location, but when moving its differentiation is confirmed by the changes in its relations with the actual. Likewise, humans have in them a restlessness, a will to change, a fluidity of identity and belonging that Olga Tokarczuk in her fine and interesting book Flights would see as our essential vitality, an indicator of civilisation so far as it is acknowledged and encouraged, otherwise a casualty of repression or of fear. “Barbarians stay put, or go to destinations to raid them. They do not travel.” Flights is an encyclopedic sort-of-novel, a great compendium of stories, fragments, historical anecdotes, description and essays on every possible aspect of travel, in its literal and metaphorical senses, and on the stagnation, mummification and bodily degradation of stasis. The book bristles with ideas, memorable images and playful treatments, for instance when Tokarczuk reframes the world as an array of airports, to which cities and countries are but service satellites and through which the world’s population is constantly streaming, democratised by movement, no preparation either right or wrong in this zone of civilised indeterminacy. To create a border, to restrict a movement is to suppress life, to preserve a corpse. Tokarczuk’s fragments are of various registers and head in different directions, but several strands reappear through the book, such as the story of a father and young son searching for a mother who disappears on holiday on a small Croatian island. Historical imaginings include an account of the journey of Chopin’s heart from Paris to Poland following his death, the ‘biography’ of the ‘discoverer’ of the achilles tendon, and an account of the peripatetic sect constantly on the move to elude the Devil. For Tokarczuk, we find ourselves, if we find ourselves at all, somewhere in the interplay between impulse and constraint. {Review by THOMAS}
>> Read an excerpt.
>> Read another excerpt. (The Fitzcarraldo Editions edition is also available).
>> "Flights has echoes of WG Sebald, Milan Kundera, Danilo Kiš and Dubravka Ugrešić, but Tokarczuk inhabits a rebellious, playful register very much her own." - Guardian
>> Visit Olga Tokarczuk's library (and learn Polish incidentally).
 |
Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell {Reviewed by STELLA}
When the Queen Mary, a Victorian liner, sinks, a baby with hair the colour of lightning is found inside a cello case floating on the English Channel. She is discovered by eccentric scholar Charles Maxim, who names her Sophie and takes her into his home, much against the advice of the authorities. While Sophie sometimes eats off an atlas or writes her sums on the wallpaper, she is surrounded by music, words, and love. When the inspectors come, despite the best efforts of Charles and Sophie to tidy and clean the house and make themselves presentable, the authorities conclude that now that she is thirteen Maxim is not a suitable guardian, and Sophie is to be moved to an orphanage where she will be taught to be a proper young lady. In a fit of fury, Sophie destroys the cello case that saved her life, only to find a clue, and away they head over the channel to Paris. On the run from the authorities, Charles and Sophie are mother-hunting. Sophie is convinced her mother survived the sinking of the ship and she’s determined to take risks to find her. Risks that involve a strange boy, Matteo, and a band of wayward children who live above the streets of Paris on rooftops or in treetops, eking out a precarious existence - one that is preferable to the orphanage or workhouse. Can Sophie trust these unusual, secretive children? Will she be courageous enough to face physical danger and determined enough to believe in herself? Katherine Rundell creates magic with her cast of characters and description of place. Sophie is a wild child and determined young woman you warm to immediately: stubborn, intelligent, brave and vulnerable. Matteo is a perfect companion: resourceful, secretive and daring. Charles is an adult who brings the rules, lives by the heart and is loyal to the core. Rundell is an exquisite writer, her pace is spot on, the plot inventive and her language witty. You will find it hard to leave Sophie behind when you close the final page of this adventurous and warm-hearted novel. Fortunately,Rundell has several other titles to her name, the latest has just arrived -The Explorer. |
 | My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent {Reviewed by STELLA} Many debuts come with much fanfare - some of which creates deflation.My Absolute Darling is not one of those. Author Gabriel Tallent can write in the most lyrical way about the most horrific violence and abuse. Unsurprisingly, My Absolute Darling has been compared with A Little Life and The Sport of Kings. Set against the backdrop of the California coast, in Mendocino (where the author grew up), we meet fourteen-year-old Turtle (Julia) - tough, resourceful, able to handle a gun at six, able to survive in the wilderness with little or no equipment, watchful, lonely. Turtle lives with her father, Martin - her mother disappeared when she was very little. She struggles at school yet in her internal world she is intelligent - knowledgeable and philosophical. Her home life is controlled and confined by a set of predetermined rules and expectations laid down by her disturbed father: a father who believes that the apocalypse is upon them, a paranoid survivalist who insists he is training his daughter to exist against all odds, who loves his daughter more than anything. Tallent does not shy from the abuse which Turtle encounters, and his skill lies in the care with which he portrays the relationship between father and daughter and the beauty of his words. Martin and Turtle both have an understanding of nature, of the physical world around them, and this seems to hold them in some kind of warped isolation together. Julia has no friends at school, knows no other life. Her only other true relationship is with her grandfather, an war vet alcoholic who lives in a trailer on the family property. When Julia is with her grandfather you sense her relax. At all other times, Turtle is overly aware and on edge, expecting a poor outcome, ready to be at fault, ‘a useless slit’. This tension overlays the whole book, so even when things are going well in Turtle’s world you sense that this is the calm before the storm and that the storm will be mighty. The tension is so finely wrought that you find yourself torn between turning away and being compelled to stay with Turtle despite your unease. At the half point of the book, Turtle takes off on a trek cross-country (something she does from time to time to save herself from the constant trauma), to be alone. This time she comes across two boys just a little older than herself who are out adventuring, unwittingly unprepared for the elements and completely lost. Turtle follows them into the night and decides to rescue them, and so makes a departure in her life - real contact with others. This encounter becomes a pivotal point in the story: something changes in Turtle, something that Martin senses and feels threatened by. From this point, you understand that merely surviving will not be enough. Turtle will have to use her sharp and finely tuned instincts to decipher her truth and be tougher than she has ever been. And this is a tough, but an incredible, novel that reveals the internal world of damage and explores the psyche of Turtle humanely and honestly. With a remarkable character, a plot that keeps you wired, lyrical writing about relationships and nature, My Absolute Darling is compelling and unsettling. >>This book will be released this week. Let us put a copy aside for you. |
 | These Possible Lives by Fleur Jaeggy {Reviewed by THOMAS} The desire to understand must not be confused with the desire to know, especially in biography. Too often and too soon an accretion of facts obscures a subject, plastering detail over detail, obscuring the essential lineaments in the mistaken notion that we are approaching a definitive life, whereas such a life, even if it were possible, could not be understood. Instead a labour of whittling is required, a paring from the mass of fact all but those details that cannot be separated from the subject, the details that make the subject themself and not another, the details therefore that are the key to the inner life, so to call it, of the subject and the cause of all the extraneous details of which we are relieved the necessity of acquiring (unless we find we enjoy this as sport). Jaeggy, whose brief fictions, such as those in I am the Brother of XX, remain as pleasant burrs in the mind long after the short time spent reading them, has here written three brief biographies, of Thomas De Quincey, John Keats and Marcel Schwob, each as brief and effective as a lightning strike and as memorable. Jaeggy is interested in discovering what it was about these figures that made them them and not someone else. By assembling details, quotes, sketches of situations, pin-sharp portraits of contemporaries (some of which, in a few words, will change the way you remember them), Jaeggy takes us close to the membrane, so to call it, that surrounds the known, the membrane that these writers were intent on stretching, or constitutionally unable not to stretch, beyond which lay and lies madness and death, the constant themes of all Jaeggy’s attentions, and, for her, the backdrop to, if not the object of, all creative striving. How memorably Jaeggy gives us sweet De Quincey’s bifurcation, by a mixture of inclination, reading and opium, from the world inhabited by others, his house a place of “paper storage, fragments of delirium eaten away by dust”, and poor Keats, whose “moods, vague and tentative, didn’t settle over him so much as hurry past like old breezes,” and Schwob, with his appetite for grief tracing and retracing the arcs of his friends’ deaths towards his own. These essays are so clean and sharp that light will refract within them long after you have ceased to read, drawing you back to read again. Is the understanding you have gained of these writers something that belongs to them? Too bad, you will henceforth be unable to shake the belief that you have gained some access to their inner lives that has been otherwise denied. |
 | Letters from a Lost Uncle by Mervyn Peake {Reviewed by THOMAS} “You will understand, unless you are very stupid, how exciting it is after so many years spent in searching for the White Lion, to feel so close to him.” The characters of Peake’s fictions, finding conventional society too narrow to contain them, turn their backs upon all that is familiar, traditional and expected of them and choose the path of loneliness that is the only alternative, monopraxis establishing no maps to variance, to learn that the path of loneliness is one to be beaten for oneself. Where there is no route forward a route must be made forward, and to carry on is to carry on with no companion but perhaps an oddity not of the same order of being as oneself. This is a melancholy path but it would be gritless to despair for to despair is the intended fate of all who turn their backs on lit windows and dining tables. One such wanderer, a “lost uncle”, though to whom he is lost is unclear, finds himself, one-legged but with a useful spike to complete his complement of limbs, more suited to the hazards and loneliness of arctic wastes than he is to human company, and travels north in search of the White Lion, whose image he has seen on a stamp. The longing of the Peakesean wayfarer draws him to the cold far edges of the mind, where snow may be swept by wind into a vast column, clearing the underlying ice so that the monsters that swim beneath may grin up as he passes. He has only a mutant turtle-dog named Jackson for company and to carry his gear. And the lion? Single-mindedness such as the uncle’s cannot fail, but the prize is bound to disappoint, the White Lion to be vast but old and on the point of death, the animals of the North all gathered for its farewell. And out of such loneliness, from this nowhere to which such uncles belong, from these experiences from beyond the usual ambit of experience, why these letters posted back to an undifferentiated nephew, these, in this case, distinctive pencil drawings with typewritten scraps of text pasted on? Does the letter, the book, the artefact, the text perform an inward urgency, tethering the sojourner to a sanity from which they might otherwise be distant? Or is there a magnanimity in production when to not produce would be less draining: does a writer imagine that the world might somehow be better (or worse) for their imposing their words upon others or upon at least the possibility of others? The task of an explorer is to explore. Is there any quest that does not leave a trace? |
Friday, 25 August 2017
Contestants were required to choose a piece of spam, junk mail or advertising and to write a poem using only the vocabulary of their chosen junk. We were overwhelmed with the number of entries - many thanks to everyone.
Winner: Janine Martig
Flawless Audrey
Seamless
Perfect
Confident
I can be you
As perfect as you
I correct my errors
to be as flawless as you
I can be you
I + work = you
It's the way
All that work
to be you
Perfect
Seamless
Flawless
To be Audrey
Can I be as confident
as you?
Audrey?
Can I?
Audrey?
All that work...
Judges' comment: This poem uses the limited vocabulary of the advertisement to wring a huge amount of pathos out of the fact that grammatical insecurity is merely a manifestation of personal insecurity.
Commended: Joe Papps
An unsolicited open-access map,
the map with no connections between national places,
separate locations,
there is no limit.
A sheet, a copy,
originating from various wandering locations,
mobile encounters,
there is no limit.
Following the day,
you associate streets with volumes of phantom space,
virtual tours,
there is no limit.
Contribute to this new piece,
ensure your billstickers amount to your name,
send or deliver,
there is no limit.
A junk arrangement,
you will no doubt amount to the spam you receive,
estimate twenty years,
there is no limit.
Judges' comment: This poem cleverly appropriates the vocabulary of the competition instructions to explore the existential threats and opportunities of the concept of the limit (or the constraints of its absence). 'Phantom space' is a concept that deserves a whole book.
Commended: Jeannette Cook
Black chook
you are luscious,
velvet smooth, sumptuous, silky,
elegant as you run by the river
below our cellar door.
We are impressed by the red-gold
of your powerful head,
your beautifully structured form
as you scoop ripe fruit
onto your palate.
Big, weighty, generous,
a champion layer delivered to us laden.
Today we collected two -
smooth in the hand they lay
like white stars.
We lovers from across the world
built on this estate below the range
to share our passion
for simple things. Your delicious offer
has made us rich.
Judges' comment: This poems nicely turns the adjective-laden vocabulary of advertising inwards to construct a carefully patterned and very personal poem.
NEW RELEASES
These books have come in asking for you.
We have in us a restlessness, a will to change, a fluidity of identity and belonging that Olga Tokarczuk in her fine and interesting book Flights would see as our essential vitality, an indicator of civilisation. Flights is an encyclopedic sort-of-novel, a great compendium of stories, fragments, historical anecdotes, description and essays on every possible aspect of travel, in its literal and metaphorical senses, and on the stagnation, mummification and bodily degradation of stasis. The book bristles with ideas, memorable images and playful treatments.
>> Read Thomas's review.
The three-day siege of the Battle of Orakau in 1864, in which 1700 Imperial troops laid siege to a hastily constructed pa sheltering 300 Maori men, women and children, marked the end of the Waikato War. Ihimaera tells the history from the point of view of a Moetu, a boy on the side that refused to submit and fought to the end. With facing texts in English and Maori (by Hemi Kelly). First-hand accounts and documentary illustrations appended.
A dazzlingly intelligent dual-narrative novel concerning, on the one hand, a retired New York lawyer who 'disappears' to Tel Aviv, and, on the other, a novelist named Nicole Krauss who comes home to find herself already there, and so sets off towards the point the narratives meet. Elegant and replete with Kraussian themes of memory, solitude and Jewishness.
"Restores your faith in fiction." - Ali Smith
"Charming, tender, and wholly original." - J. M. Coetzee
>>"What is ‘real’ and what isn’t, and do such questions even apply, really, to something that is entirely a construction, from beginning to end?"
As well as being a deeply thoughtful writer, Coetzee has always been a deeply thoughtful reader, and his essays are helpful in unlocking the work of other writers, including, here, Beckett, Walser, Murnane, Goethe and Kleist.
"I want to show you our world as it is now: the door, the floor, the water tap and the sink, the garden chair close to the wall beneath the kitchen window, the sun, the water, the trees." Following the remarkable quasiautobiographical 'My Struggle' series, Knausgaard has begun to produce an impressionistic personal encyclopedia of the world to appear in four seasonal volumes. The first begins as a letter to his unborn daughter and proceeds to catalogue the wonders and banalities of elements of the natural and human worlds, and of their effect on each other. Illustrations by Vanessa Baird.
>> The sun: "utterly unapproachable and completely indifferent."
>> "I am back writing good sentences."
"Meet Bram Presser, aged five, smoking a cigarette with his grandmother in Prague. Meet Jakub Rand, one of the Jews chosen to assemble the Nazi’s Museum of the Extinct Race. Such details, like lightning flashes, illuminate this audacious work about the author’s search for the grandfather he loved but hardly knew. Working in the wake of writers like Modiano and Safran Foer, Presser brilliantly shows how fresh facts can derail old truths, how fiction can amplify memory. A smart and tender meditation on who we become when we attempt to survive survival." - Mireille Juchau
"We didn't want to be like twins-we wanted to be twins. We wanted to be absolutely identical. But because we hadn't been born twins, we had to make ourselves the same-and part of that, of course, was having to go through all our most important experiences together." Rowing partners Johann and Ludwig are best friends, but that's not enough. To defeat the region's current champions, identical twins from a nearby town, they must become twins too. Ludwig has a plan: they will eat, sleep, breathe and even think in perfect harmony. Only then will they have a chance of winning. But Johann has a secret he's been keeping from his friend-and when Ludwig begins acting strangely, Johann realises that his 'twin' wants to put their bond to the ultimate test.
Centred on a community of immigrants who have traded their endangered lives as artists in China and Taiwan for the constant struggle of life on the poverty line in 1990s New York City, the stories that make up Sour Heart examine the many ways that family and history can weigh us down, but also lift us up.
"As I read, I quickly realized this was something so new and powerful that it would come to shape the world, not just the literary world, but what we know about reality. Zhang's version of honesty goes way past the familiar, with passages that burst into a bold, startling brilliance. Get ready." - Miranda July
"Obscene, beautiful, moving." - The New Yorker
>> Jenny Zhang and Lena Dunham.
From his seat in the tiny aeroplane, Fred watches as the mysteries of the Amazon jungle pass by below him. He has always dreamed of becoming an explorer, of making history and of reading his name amongst the lists of great discoveries. If only he could land and look about him. As the plane crashes into the canopy, Fred is suddenly left without a choice. He and the three other children may be alive, but the jungle is a vast, untamed place. With no hope of rescue, the chance of getting home feels impossibly small. Rundell, author of The Wolf Wilder, writes beautifully as always.
Exhaustive and magisterial, this biography benefits from its author's first-hand knowledge and from his access to Hillary's personal papers. It reveals dimensions of Hillary's life not hitherto examined.
Why are the institutions of representative democracy seemingly unable to sustain themselves against forces they were designed to manage, and why does it matter?
When a beautifully made coffin turns up for Edvard's grandfather, whose death is nowhere in sight, Edvard begins to unravel the mystery of his lost uncle and dead parents, an unravelling that takes him from the remote Norwegian farmstead where he grew up to the Shetland Islands, to the historic battlefields of France. The novel is neatly dovetailed throughout, just like the woodwork that runs through it. From the author of the incomparable Norwegian Wood.
>> Mytting speaks with Kathryn Ryan.
The first concrete evidence for Desmond arrives when he stood for parliament in Hawkes Bay in 1884 (coming last of three candidates). He continued to campaign against landlords, bankers and monopolists, and for Maori against the settlers (and aligning himself with Te Kooti). By the time he left New Zealand in 1892, Desmond had already formulated the first version of Might is Right, his notorious manifesto of extreme social Darwinism, in which he proposed that the strong have an evolutionary duty to uproot and supplant the weak (including Christians).
Kells runs his finger along the shelves and wanders the aisles of libraries around the world and through time, both real and imagined, with books and without, and ponders the importance of the library as a representation of the human mind.
Everything from the fundamentals (types of flours and starters; stages of fermentation; basic doughs and fillings) through to recipes for breads (baguettes, sourdoughs, speciality breads, flavoured breads, oil breads and milk breads), Viennese pastries (croissants, pains au chocolat, apple tarts) gateaux (flan patissier, pistachio and apricot tart, spice bread), brioches (Parisian, praline, plaited, layered and cakes) and biscuits (sables, madeleines, almond tuiles).
Authentic and achievable recipes from the northeast of Italy, attractively presented.
In 2015 a tumour in the language centre of her brain robbed Blain of her ability to speak. After the rigours of treatment, she set about rebuilding her linguistic capacities through writing. At the same time, her mother was losing her faculties to Alzheimer's disease. An interesting meditation of the place of language in our conception of ourselves.
Being a teenager is hard enough without someone else using your body to commit murder. With the help of his 'ghost pimp,' Andy earns extra cash renting his body to spirits hungry for a taste of the corporeal world. But one day his body is returned battered and bruised, and he finds himself accused of a murder he doesn't remember committing. With the police on his trail and time running out, Andy must embark on a dangerous quest to catch the spectral killer, unaware he's a pawn in a larger conflict between supernatural forces. Exciting YA fiction from local author Mike Moreaux.
Continues the project begun in What Lies Beneath into the sixties, sexual liberation, literature and Thatcherism.
Ten years old and irrepressibly curious, Ellie lives with her fisherman father, Peter, on the wild North Yorkshire coast. Her mother's breakdown is discussed only in whispers, with the promise 'better by Christmas' and no further explanation. Steering by the light of her dad's sea-myths, her mum's memories of home across the water, and a fierce spirit all her own, Ellie begins to learn how her world is put together (or pulled apart).
The elder daughter of working-class Korean immigrants, Casey inhabits a New York a world away from that of her parents. As Casey navigates an uneven course of small triumphs and spectacular failures, a clash of values, ideals and ambitions plays out against the colourful backdrop of New York society, its many layers, shades and divides.
"Ambitious, accomplished, engrossing. As easy to devour as a 19th-century romance." - New York Times
"This big, beguiling book has all the distinguishing marks of a Great American Novel. A remarkable writer." - The Times
Nature writing from a professional tree-climber whose work has taken him into the upper strata of forests around the world. Beautifully written.
Orhan Pamuk’s tenth novel, The Red-Haired Woman, is the story of a well-digger and his apprentice looking for water on barren land. It is also a novel of ideas in the tradition of the French conte philosophique. In mid-1980s Istanbul, Master Mahmut and his apprentice use ancient methods to dig new wells. This is the tale of their back-breaking struggle, but it is also an exploration—through stories and images—of ideas about fathers and sons, authoritarianism and individuality, state and freedom, reading and seeing.
Doudna's discovery of the genome editing capacities of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) has provided scientists with potentially the most powerful interventional tool yet in the field of genetics.
Bread, vinegar, kvass, yoghurt, butter, sauerkraut, kimchi, natural sodas, scrumpy, mead, pickles, kefir, creme fraiche, buttermilk, kombucha, cheese, miso, tempeh: you can make it all. Gentle and thorough.
"Like a fox running over snow there is a lightness, a poetic grace and a keen focus to these stories. Sharp, true and always hinting at a larger world, the work has a fable-like quality. Devour this delightful book in one sitting, then savour the stories all over again. " - Frankie McMillan
Illustrations by Rachel J. Fenton.
>> The back of a woman walking away. Radojkovich's flash fiction.
Engaging columns on literary travel.
"An insightful guide to the stages of writing fiction and memoir without falling into common traps, while wisely navigating the writing life, from an award-winning author and longtime teacher.
A book-length master class." - The Atlantic
What is at the top of the ladder? Who knows.
Exposes political economist James McGill Buchanan as the architect behind the right's relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatise public education, and curb democratic majority rule.
A grand history of China's deep and recent history told through its relationship and management of water.
The City of the Secret Rivers by Jacob Sager Weinstein $23
London is crisscrossed with sewers and underground rivers. Can Hyacinth, recently arrived from the US locate the magically charged drop of water that will prevent another Great Fire? Who can she trust?
Serious critical consideration of the 2017 Nobel Literature laureate from Simon Armitage, Christopher Butler, Bryan Cheyette, Patrick Crotty, Aidan Day, Mark Ford, Lavinia Greenlaw, Hugh Haughton, Daniel Karlin, Paul Muldoon, Nicholas Roe, Pam Thurschwell and Susan Wheeler. A new edition, with a perceptive introduction by Will Self.
>> You know something is happening.
The psychologist specialising in PTSD recounts her own experiences surviving Auschwitz (where she was forced to dance for Josef Mengele) and those of the people she has helped.
"The Choice is a gift to humanity. Dr. Eger's life reveals our capacity to transcend even the greatest of horrors and to use that suffering for the benefit of others." - Desmond Tutu
Spices, grilled food, health food, vegan food, caramel, hamburgers, chilli hot dogs, avocado cheeseburgers, granola, lobster rolls, hamburgers, French-style tacos, fro yo, hamburgers, kale pizza, acai bowls, shrimp pad thai and hamburgers. Excellent photographs; part of the 'Cult Recipes' series.
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