Category: Granta

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2020), Author, Book review, Cynan Jones, dystopian, Fiction, Granta, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, UK

‘Stillicide’ by Cynan Jones

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Fiction – hardcover; Granta; 180 pages; 2019.

Stillicide, n
1. A continual dropping of water.
2. Law — A right or duty relating to the collection of water from or onto adjacent land.
From Latin ‘stillicidium’, from ‘stilla’ drop + ‘-cidium’, from ‘cadere’ to fall.

Cynan Jones’ latest work, Stillicide, was originally conceived as 12 stories to be read aloud in 15-minute slots on BBC Radio 4. The stories were interconnected to form a collective whole, but each had to work as a standalone piece.

As Jones explains in his Author’s Note, “Being for radio, with listeners not having the chance to turn back a page, the world and its characters had to have an immediacy and be clear on first listening”.

The work has now been published in book form by Granta.

A future without water

The stories are all set in the not-too-distant future, where water has become so scarce it has to be “imported” via huge icebergs, towed from the Arctic Circle. A specially built Ice Dock is under construction but the project is now threatening to displace many residents, and people are protesting the plan.

Two years since the project started. An anniversary today. Of the beginning of construction, that started with a ribbon of buildings being demolished, before we could begin. A gash cut through the city to steer the iceberg through.

Meanwhile, a Water Train transports this now-rare commodity, but it, too, is under threat of heists and hold-ups. (A previous pipeline, taking water into the heart of the city, has been closed down because it had been bombed one too many times.)

There is only early morning light. Then the Water Train passes. Different. A weight of sound. The sound of a great waterfall crashing into a pool. It has the power church bells must used to have.

We, the reader, experience this dystopian world through the eyes of a diverse range of characters whose lives and livelihoods are impacted one way or the other by stillicide, but it’s mostly centred on Branner, a marksman, who defends the Water Train from the people who wish to derail it.

An ambitious project

Did I like this book? I’m not sure. It’s an ambitious project and I admired the premise and the execution — Jones is a superb writer, his prose is pared back and reads like poetry — but I struggled to “get” some of the individual stories and often couldn’t figure out what was going on.

I don’t think it helped that I read this in short snatches here and there; it’s definitely the type of book that would benefit from reading in one sitting.

I don’t “do” audiobooks, per se, but I do wonder if I might have got more out of Stillicide had I heard the radio series first. I’m happy to report all 12 episodes are available to listen to online — but only for a few more days!

This is my 8th book for #20BooksofSummer / #20BooksOfSouthernHemisphereWinter. I purchased it in Dymocks last January because I had read a couple of Cynan Jones‘ previous novels and loved them.

Author, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, Granta, Italy, Leonardo Sciascia, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction

‘The Day of the Owl’ by Leonardo Sciascia

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Day of the Owl by Leonardo Sciascia

Fiction – paperback; Granta; 122 pages; 2014. Translated from the Italian by Archibald Colquhoun and Arthur Oliver.

Short. Sharp. Powerful. That’s the best way to describe Leonardo Sciascia’s The Day of the Owl.

First published in 1961 and set in the early 1940s, this novella looks at the difficulty one policeman faces when he tries to investigate a crime. The setting is Sicily, where the mafia has infiltrated almost every aspect of society. Even the average citizen on the street closes ranks when the Carabinieri start asking questions.

Dramatic opening

The book opens in rather dramatic fashion. A man in a dark suit is running for a bus when he is gunned down in broad daylight. He is only metres away from a fritter-seller and there are dozens of passengers on the bus, yet no one sees a thing.

What follows is a complicated narrative tracing the investigation into the man’s murder led by Captain Bellodi, an outsider and “mainlander” who heads up the Carabinieri. His quiet pursuit of the truth is intertwined with the voices of those who want to obfuscate his work, and yet he never gives up or takes short cuts to reach his desired outcome.

Captain Bellodi […] was by family tradition and personal conviction a republican, a soldier who followed what used to be called ‘the career of arms’ in a police force, with the dedication of a man who has played his part in a revolution and seen law created by it. This law, the law of the Republic, which safeguarded liberty and justice, he served and enforced.

But while this book might have the look and feel of a crime novel, it doesn’t follow the conventions of the genre. There’s no neat ending, no redemption. What it offers is an honest and authentic look at a society that has been subjugated by a small band of powerful and immoral men, who have rewritten the rules of engagement and live by their own code of honour. It is particularly good at showing what happens  when bystanders turn a blind eye to crime, violence and corruption.

Tautly written

This tautly written story, which has been pared back to its most basic elements, is an incredibly nuanced piece of work (the dialogue is exceptionally good) and is a wonderful portrait of Sicilian society at a particular moment in time. But it’s also difficult to follow. We are introduced to an endless cast of characters — informers, criminals, politicians, shopkeepers et al — and there’s a disturbing lack of place names (everything is referred to by initial), which makes for a sometimes confusing and frustrating read.

Furthermore, for anyone new to Italian history, it’s almost impossible to understand what’s going on politically without doing some research first. (It was thanks to this Wikipedia entry on the Sicilian Mafia that I discovered that the mafia was suppressed under Fascism, which helps put the whole of The Day of the Owl into context.)

Yet for all the difficulties I had with this book, I’d like to return to it at a later date. It’s short, yes, but it’s so dense with ideas and ethical issues that it would take multiple readings to come to grips with them all.

Finally, the author’s afterword — or “tailpiece” as it is called here — adds a fascinating insight into his fear of being charged with libel and slander for skating too close to the truth. He shortened the story — he calls it “pruning” — to protect himself from the reactions of “any who might consider themselves more or less directly attacked in it”, adding: “I was unable to write it with that complete freedom to which every writer is entitled.”

I can only imagine how explosive the book might have been had it included everything he really wanted to write!

2016 Giller Prize, Author, Book review, Canada, China, Fiction, Granta, literary fiction, Madeleine Thien, Publisher, Setting

‘Do Not Say We Have Nothing’ by Madeleine Thien

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Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeliene Thien
UK edition

Fiction – paperback; Granta; 480 pages; 2016. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

It’s not often I struggle to say something about a book, but trying to review Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing has proved a challenge.

So much has been written about this novel in the past six months, mainly because of its shortlisting on both the 2016 Man Booker Prize and the 2016 Giller Prize, that I didn’t feel I could add anything new. Then, when I sat down to commit my thoughts to this blog last week, it was named winner of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and the internet was awash, once again, with praise and reviews.

On that basis I’m going to keep this short.

Life under Communism

Do Not Say We Have Nothing is a careful blur of fiction and history that follows the interlinked lives of two Chinese families and their struggle to survive under China’s Communist rule. It spans the time of Chairman Mao and his Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s right through until the student protests in 1989.

The narrative comprises two threads. The first, written in the first person in 1991, is told from the perspective of Marie, a 10-year-old girl living in Canada with her Chinese mother. Their lives are interrupted with the arrival of a young Chinese woman, Ai-Ming, who is fleeing the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre. It is Ai-Ming’s story, told in the third person, of her family’s life in revolutionary China, which forms the second narrative thread.

And it is this thread that makes Do Not Say We Have Nothing such a powerful read, because it follows the topsy-turvy lives of three young classically trained musicians and their struggle to create music at a time when creative expression was forbidden except in the strictest of terms. The simple act of playing a violin, or just the “wrong” kind of music, for instance, could result in internment at best or death at worst.

An ambitious and epic novel

This book is best described as an “epic”. It’s not only ambitious in scope, its complex, interleaved narrative, which jumps backwards and forwards in time, is meticulous in its detail. Yet the story never gets bogged down, perhaps because of its wonderfully drawn trio of musicians — composer Sparrow, violinist Zhuli and the pianist Kai  — whose joys, sorrows and struggles we get to follow so intimately.

The novel’s strength is the way it so eloquently reveals how the hand of history leaves a long-lasting legacy, stretching across generations. Like several other books I’ve read recently (Magda Szubanksi’s Reckoning and Cal Flyn’s Thicker Than Water immediately come to mind) it explores intergenerational guilt, survivor’s guilt and moral ambiguity. It shines a light on how political regimes can mark the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary, often devastating, ways.

Funnily enough, for all of that, I must admit that this book did not pack the emotional punch one might expect. It’s not that I did not care about these characters — I did — but somehow I felt as if I was always kept at a distance from them (this is also how I felt when I read Thien’s novel Dogs at the Perimeter several years ago). It wasn’t until I came to Ai-Ming’s involvement in the student protests in the late 1980s that I began to feel the true weight of this story, of how history somehow has an uncanny knack of repeating itself and that it is often the young, with so much to lose, who get trammelled by it.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Canadian edition

I could point to many dozens of reviews more eloquent and detailed than mine, but let me just point to Naomi’s, who blogs at Consumed by Ink, for the two of us have read this book for the Shadow Giller.

In the meantime, if you loved this novel, I do highly recommend Chinese Whispers: A Journey into Betrayal by Jan Wong, a non-fiction book about the long-lasting impact of the Cultural Revolution on two students, and Beijing Coma by Ma Jian, an epic novel about the 1989 student pro-democracy movement. I have reviewed other books set in China or by Chinese writers here.

This is my 6th and final book for the #ShadowGiller2016

UPDATE — TUESDAY 8 NOVEMBER 2016:  Do Not Say We Have Nothing has been awarded this year’s Giller Prize. You can find out more via the official announcement on the Giller Prize website.

Author, Book review, Fiction, Granta, Katherine Faw Morris, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, USA

‘Young God’ by Katherine Faw Morris

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Young-god

Fiction – paperback; Granta; 208 pages; 2015.

Some books leave a strange but memorable aftertaste on your reading palette, and Katherine Faw Morris’s debut novel, Young God, certainly does that. This may be a thin volume, but it brims with menace and sparkles with shameless in-your-face shocks, which arrive one after the other. It’s a story that gets under the skin and leaves an indelible mark. And they’re the kinds of stories I like best.

Life on the margins

The story goes something like this… When her mother dies, Nikki, a sassy, street-smart 13-year-old, moves in with her father to avoid social security putting her in care. Her father, Coy Hawkins, lives in a trailer in the woods with his 15-year-old girlfriend, Angel, whom he pimps out.

Coy was once the biggest coke dealer in the county, but he now seems to use drugs rather than sell them, a fact that shocks Nikki when she presents him with a bag of 500 “Roxies” — the opiate Roxicodone — which she stole from her mother’s boyfriend, Wesley.

She expected him to sell them first. Call somebody. However that works. Nikki didn’t snort any. Angel’s nodding on the couch. Coy Hawkins is slumped in a reclining chair. Nikki stands at its foot, completely alert.

Somewhere along the line Nikki understands that if she’s to avoid being pimped out, she must make a living elsewhere, and so she turns to the local drug trade, where she begins selling “black tar” heroin for one dollar a milligram. It is, needless to say, a rather sordid and dangerous business, but Nikki seems unaware of the consequences.

Living in this messy world, where life is cheap and teenage girls are merely sexual objects for older men to play with,  Nikki holds her own, but it’s not a life that offers any kind of hope or fulfilment.

By turns shocking and stomach-churning, Young God lifts the lid on an impoverished underclass living on the margins of society. It’s a dark, brutal, cut-throat existence, no place for anyone let alone an uneducated 13-year-old girl, who’s just lost her mother. But Nikki is not the kind of character that invokes pity: she’s headstrong, determined, full of life and willing to rush headlong into new experiences.

Short, sharp, snappy prose

I read this book, mostly with my heart in my mouth, wondering what wretched, violent thing was going to happen next. It’s a gritty story full of sleaze and sex, where characters perform base acts to numb the pain of existence. On every page there’s something to shock or to stun the reader, but it doesn’t feel manipulative or gratuitous — everything is there to inform the story, to lend it an air of authenticity, to show you how cheap life is for those who live their lives like this. It makes for a deeply unsettling reading experience.

The prose style — short, sharp, snappy — mirrors the starkness of the subject matter, but reads like the rawest of poetry.  This is also reinforced by the creative use of white space in which a single sentence or a short paragraph occasionally stands alone on a whole page:

Young-god-text-excerpt

When I came to the end of this novel, which I read in one frenzied sitting unable to tear my eyes from the disturbing story unfolding before me, I felt wrung out. Young God is a thrilling, eye-opening read, and not one that is easy to forget…

Author, Catherine Lacey, Fiction, Granta, literary fiction, New York, New Zealand, Publisher, Setting

‘Nobody is Ever Missing’ by Catherine Lacey

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Nobody-is-ever-missing

Fiction – paperback; Granta; 256 pages; 2015. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

I must admit to getting a bit tired of reading contemporary novels about marriages gone wrong which are told entirely from the wife’s angst-ridden perspective — think Hausfrau and Dept. Of Speculation — but Catherine Lacey’s Nobody is Ever Missing is cut from (slightly) different cloth.

Running away to the other side of the world

For a start, there’s no sex in this novel, there’s no affair, indeed there doesn’t appear to be any good reason as to why the narrator, Elyria, would want to leave her stable life in Manhattan to do something totally unpredictable, irresponsible and dangerous. But that’s what she does. She buys a one-way ticket to New Zealand, presumably to get as far away from her husband as possible, and tells no one of her plans. She doesn’t even leave a note.

On the other side of the world, with little more than a scrap of paper with an address scrawled on it to guide her, she hitchhikes from the north island to the south, having mini adventures and escapades along the way, until she lands at the farm she intended to find. Here, she moves in with Werner, a writer she once met in Manhattan, who casually invited her to stay in his extra room if she ever wanted to visit New Zealand.

Their relationship is purely platonic — she tends his garden in exchange for room and board — until she overstays her visit and is asked, quite forcefully, to move on. From there, Elly’s  adventure descends into a kind of madness as she grapples with her past, her current and her future.

A hyperactive voice

What I liked most about this book was Elly’s voice — it’s hyperactive, energised and full of mordant humour — reflected in breathless prose characterised by long, convoluted sentences that loop back on themselves or unfurl into unexpected directions. The following is a good example:

What I meant was I knew I had to do something that I didn’t know how to do, which was leaving the adult way, the grown-up way, stating the problem, filling out the paperwork, doing all those adult things, but I knew that wasn’t the whole problem, that I didn’t just want a divorce from my husband, but a divorce from everything, to divorce my own history; I was being pushed by currents, by unseen things, memories and imaginations and fears swirled together — this was one of those things you figure out years later but it’s not the kind of thing you can explain to an almost stranger in a broom closet while you’re mostly drunk and you barely know where you are or why you are there or why some people can smell secrets.

For much of the novel Elly is trying to figure stuff out, so what you get is a kind of mental diarrhea on the page, full of her thoughts and insights spilled out without any kind of filter. What she thinks and what she does often reveals her alarmingly naivety, but there are occasional flashes of brilliance that show she’s mature beyond her years.

Nobody-is-ever-missing-US-version

And while you could bill  Nobody is Ever Missing as a road adventure, it’s more akin to a psychological journey  in which the narrator tries to find herself without going completely mad. It’s occasionally frustrating to see her repeat mistakes over and over, or to think about the same things continually, and I admit that by the time I’d got half way through this book I was finding Elly’s company more of a chore than a joy. Indeed, once she’d reached Werner’s farm I was bored with the whole damn adventure and wish she’d just get back on that plane and save her marriage.

But it’s worth hanging in there. That’s because the author cleverly holds back key bits of information, so we’re never quite sure of Elly’s motivations until little revelations get dropped in and you begin to understand some of what is going on. The narrative jumps backwards and forwards in time too, inline with Elly’s memories, so that a disjointed picture begins to build up of her past life in New York where she made a living as a writer on a soap opera and married a mathematics professor much older than herself.

Key to all this — her current state of mind, her crumbling marriage, her desire to find herself — is the suicide of her adopted sibling, which runs like a refrain throughout the entire story, which is as much about loss (and grief) as it is about the search for meaning.

All up, I enjoyed (and admired) Nobody is Ever Missing. It’s very much about what it is to be human, to love and to be loved, and how important it is to find a place for ourselves in a complex world where nothing stays the same for very long.

Author, Book review, Fiction, Granta, Jenny Offill, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, USA

‘Dept. of Speculation’ by Jenny Offill

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Dept-of-speculation

Fiction – paperback; Granta; 180 pages; 2015.

Expectations are funny things, aren’t they? When you pick up a book and start reading, your expectations can do so much to your enjoyment of the reading experience: too low and you can be pleasantly surprised; too high and you’re disappointed. Sometimes you can have no expectations at all and be completely wowed.

With Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation, a book I’d heard so many great things about (mainly via Twitter), it was a case of super high expectations not being met. It’s not that I didn’t like the book, because I liked it a great deal, but I couldn’t help thinking, is that it? Why is everyone raving about this?

First up, the good points.

Thumbs up for the fragmentary structure

The novel has an interesting and unusual structure. It comprises fragments, written mainly in the first person and occasionally in the third, which chart one woman’s experience moving from romance to marriage to parenthood to possible divorce.  In isolation, these individual snippets don’t mean much, but taken as a whole they add up to a rather effective, if slightly predictable, story spanning about seven years.

It’s a rather wonderful portrait of a marriage, though we only ever hear one side of the story. Interestingly, for much of the novel the narrator describes herself as “the wife”, and it becomes clear as her married life progresses that her identity is so caught up in the idea of marital harmony that when it begins to go wrong, when it starts to unravel, she’s at a loss as to what to do. Yet the signs had been there all along.

When we met, he wore glasses he’d had for fifteen years. I had the same bangs I did in college. I used to plot to break those glasses secretly, but I never told him how much I hated them until the day he came home with new ones.

 

I think it was a year later that I grew out my bangs. When they were finally gone, he said, “I’ve always hated bangs actually.”

 

My sister shakes her head at this story. “You have a kid-glove marriage,” she says.

Dept of Speculation is also a fascinating look at parenthood, especially the changes that arise with the arrival of the first child.  Offill depicts those early months as a parent with great insight and honesty: here is a new mother, her life forever changed, grappling with sleep deprivation and a baby that won’t stop crying while her husband goes off to work and leaves her to cope alone each day.

What did you do today, you’d say when you got home from work, and I’d try my best to craft an anecdote for you out of nothing.

The book is also very good at mood. There’s a lot of anger in it (and a little bit of wry humour), though the overriding emotions are sadness and despair: the narrator never seems happy or content with her lot and even when her marriage is on a sure footing she doesn’t quite believe it’s ever going to last.

And now you’re wondering about the bad points, right?

Thumbs down for the fragmentary structure

For me it was the narrative composed entirely of fragments. Yes, I know I’ve already suggested the structure was one of the positives, but overall the fragments felt too elusive, too fleeting, too brief, too much like Tweets (I’m sure most of them were no longer than 140 characters) or Facebook posts, so that I raced through the book in two hours without properly taking in the detail. Perhaps it’s unfair to blame the author for this; I should have simply slowed down and savoured each snippet, yet the structure didn’t particularly lend itself to a careful reading. In some ways it felt like a book for the internet age, for people with short attention spans.

And the story, while told in an original way, felt self-indulgent and too focused on the navel; and the tone was simply too petulant and whiney for me. I know that you don’t have to like a character to like a book, but I think you do need to like the voice and I really didn’t like this one.

All up, I’m glad I read Dept of Speculation, if only to see what the fuss was all about, but I came away feeling disappointed. Don’t let that put you off, however — the great and the good seem to adore this book. The quotes on the blurb of the British paperback edition are littered with words like “brilliant” and “beautiful” and “glorious”; it was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Pen/Faulkner Award and the L.A. Times Fiction Award; and was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review. Keep your expectations in check and you’ll probably love it…

Author, Book review, Cynan Jones, Fiction, Granta, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, UK, Wales

‘The Long Dry’ by Cynan Jones

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The-Long-Dry

Fiction – paperback; Granta; 104 pages; 2014.

Earlier this year I read Cynan Jones’ extraordinarily powerful novel The Dig and was so impressed I quickly sought out his first book, The Long Dry, which was published in 2006 and won a Betty Trask Award the following year. Cut from similar cloth as The Dig, it depicts a world that is earthy, rough and rugged but it is written in such lyrical pared-back language it practically sings with the beauty of the rural landscape in which it is set.

A lost cow

Set over the course of a single day, it tells the tale of a farmer looking for a missing cow. But this is much more than a simple search-and-rescue mission, for as Gareth searches the parched fields we learn about his hopes, his dreams and the love he has for his wife and children.

Central to this is Gareth’s connection to the land — he is a second generation farmer, having inherited the farm from his father who bought it after the war because he no longer wanted to work in a bank — and his community, including Bill, the simple-minded neighbour who was given a few acres of the farm by Gareth’s father, for whom he feels responsible.

We also hear from the wife — in brief, first-person snippets — who is worried that she’s no longer sexually desirable, suffers headaches and depression, and has a dark secret of which she is very much ashamed.

Then there’s the teenage son, who’s more interested in having fun than carrying out his tasks in any kind of responsible way, and the young daughter, Emmy, wise beyond her years and very much-loved and doted on by her father.

And finally, the lost cow’s wanderings — she is heavily pregnant, which is why it is so important for Gareth to find her — are threaded into the narrative, which is punctuated by little fragmentary set pieces, mini-stories within the story, that showcase life and death on the farm.

Nature writing

The Long Dry is very much a paean to nature, which is beautifully evoked in simple yet vivid descriptions, occasionally using unexpected words that not so much as confront the reader but check that you’re paying attention:

Damselflies and strong white butterflies, delicate as hell, are everywhere around the pond, and machine-like dragonflies hit smaller insects in the air as they fly. The reeds are flowering with their strange crests and on the island in the middle of the pond the willow herb is starting to come to seed, and the thistles.

There’s also some unexpected humour, too:

People are seduced by ducks: by their seeming placidity. They fall for the apparent imbecility of their smiles and their quietly lunatic quacking. But they are dangerous things which plot, like functioning addicts. In the local town — a beautiful Georgian harbour town which is not lazy and which is very colourful — the ducks got out of hand. […] If you tried to drink a quiet pint on the harbour the ducks were there and they sat squatly and looked up at you and seemed to chuckle superciliously, which was off-putting. If you put your washing out, somehow the ducks knew, and by some defiance of physics managed to crap on it. And duck crap isn’t nice. It’s green like baby-shit. If you fed a baby on broccoli for a week.

But mostly this is a tiny book packed with startling little moments and quietly devastating revelations — mainly about the farmer’s wife and the couple’s young daughter — that come out of the blue and turn the entire story on its head.

The Long Dry is beautiful and sad, poignant and often quirky, but full of human empathy. It constantly spins and shimmers and dances along the very fine line between sex and death — this book brims with both — and the way in which we are all essentially animalistic, in our basic needs, our desires and our behaviour. It explores the fragility of life, of holding on to happiness and how tragedy can strike at any moment. And it’s filled with vivid, sometimes unsettling, imagery that lives on in the mind long after the book has been put down.

It is, quite frankly, an extraordinary achievement to do so much in such a slim volume. I’ll be holding on to this one to read again…

Author, Book review, Cynan Jones, Fiction, Granta, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, UK, Wales

‘The Dig’ Cynan Jones

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The-Dig

Fiction – hardcover; Granta; 160 pages; 2013. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Visceral. Violent. Compelling. Those are the first three words that spring to mind when I think of Cynan Jones‘ The Dig, a muscular little novel that is so powerful as to be Herculean.

Set in a Welsh farming community, it could be described as a “rural novel”, but it’s not the bucolic countryside so often depicted in literature. This is nature red in tooth and claw. It feels earthy, rough, rugged — and realistic. Anyone who’s grown up on a farm or in a farming community will recognise the life and landscape depicted here, even if they might not recognise or be familiar with the illegal activities at the heart of the story.

Good vs evil?

The Dig pits two men against each other: Daniel is a sheep farmer; the other, who is referred to throughout as “the big man”, is a ratting man who keeps dogs for pest control.

The big man has a dubious, never-quite-explained criminal history (all we know is that he has firearms offences and a long-ago record for assault) and is currently involved in prohibited activities: he traps badgers, a protected species, for use in badger baiting. This is a cruel and illegal activity in which a badger is put in a pit with a dog and left to fight it out (usually resulting in the death of the badger) for the purposes of “entertainment” and gambling.

Jones’ descriptions of these activities are brutal and stomach-churning, leaving little to the imagination (the one that follows is relatively mild, but will give you an inkling):

The big man took the sack over and dumped it on the table which shook the badger into life so it scuffed on the table and rocked it. A can of beer went over to laughter as they held the table steady and then he punched the badger and it seemed to go still and there was a sense of immediate respect and dislike for him. It’s a big, heavy boar, he said. Then they tipped the badger into the pit.

But The Dig isn’t solely a bloodthirsty, vicious tale, however, because Jones carefully balances this aggressive narrative with a tender love story that shows us the farmer’s softer side. He’s a man who’s constantly holding his emotions in check, even though it’s clear he feels things deeply and his life has been marked by loss.

Beautiful prose

In my opinion, the real strength of the story is the prose style. It is immediate, stripped back, lyrical and, occasionally, hard-hitting, and often reminded me of the Irish writers I love so much. It’s something to do with the incisive way Jones has of getting to the heart of an emotion or a subject using a bare minimum of works in a rhythmic way — his sentences practically sing. And then, every so often, he crafts a sentence that also dances:

A singular moth flutters in through the wind baffles to the naked bulb above the kettle, cuspid, a drifting piece of loose ash on the white filament, paper burnt up, caught in the rising current from some fire unseen, unfelt.

The entire book is also brimful of beautiful descriptions of nature and the weather — in fact, if I underlined all the ones I admired, I’d end up defacing every second paragraph:

It was brewing to rain again, the sky bruising up and coming in from the sea.

An intense read

The Dig is an intense and immersive reading experience — on so many different levels: in its use of language, its characterisation and its depiction of rural life and crime. It is genuinely shocking in places, but it’s also heart-rending. There were times when it made me feel sick, occasionally I wanted to cry, mostly I felt my heartbeat escalating in fear of what was about to happen next.

It is dark and thrilling, definitely not for those with a weak disposition, and left a marked impression on me.  I have no doubt that even though it was the first book I read this year, I already know it will be in my Top 10 for 2015. I’ve already gone out and bought Cynan Jones‘ entire back catalogue…

To see what other bloggers thought of this novel, please see the reviews at Savidge Reads, Farm Lane Books Blog and Asylum.

UPDATE: Thanks to Mary Mayfield for pointing me to this great interview with the author on her blog.

Alejandro Zambra, Author, Book review, Chile, Fiction, Granta, literary fiction, postmodern literature, Publisher, Setting, South America, translated fiction

‘Ways of Going Home’ by Alejandro Zambra

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Ways of Going Home

Fiction- paperback; Granta; 139 pages; 2013. Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell.

Alejandro Zambra has been described as the most important Chilean author since Roberto Bolaño. He was named on the Bogotá39 list (39 of the most promising Latin American writers under the age of 39) in 2007 and selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists in 2010.

I read his second novella, The Private Life of Trees, in 2011 and was intrigued enough to want to read his latest, Ways of Going Home, which won the 2013 English PEN Award for outstanding writing in translation.

But reviewing this short work of fiction is not a straightforward task. There’s an ephemeral quality to it, like waking from a pleasant dream knowing you will never be able to recapture the feeling of it. It’s difficult to try to figure out the shape of the narrative, but it’s written in such eloquent, stripped-back prose, the story slips down as easy as hot chocolate — though the themes are far from sweet.

Set in the author’s native Chile, it uses the devices of metafiction to explore memory, love, truth, deception, guilt, family life and political responsibility. It particularly focuses on the generation born after Pinochet came to power in 1973 and how, in young adulthood, they have had to come to terms with uncomfortable truths: that their parents were either victims or accomplices in the murderous dictatorship that lasted for 17 years.

Freedom under a dictatorship

The book opens with an unnamed nine-year-old boy, living in suburban Santiago in 1985, musing on the fact his parents haven’t always known best. Indeed, this turns out to be a metaphor for the entire book:

Once, I got lost. I was six or seven. I got distracted, and all of a sudden I couldn’t see my parents anymore. I was scared, but I immediately found the way home and got there before they did. They kept looking for me, desperate, but I thought that they were lost. That I knew how to get home and they didn’t. “You went a different way,” my mother said later, angry, her eyes still swollen. You were the ones that went a different way, I thought, but I didn’t say it.

We get a feel for the suspicious nature of life during the dictatorship when the boy’s parents refuse to have anything to do with their neighbour Raúl — a single man who lives alone — for fear he comes from a different political class. The boy cannot escape this sense that the man is dangerous, for he is enlisted by Raúl’s 12-year-old niece, Claudia, to spy on him — “to keep an eye on his activities and make notes about anything that seemed suspicious”.

But despite the political troubles, life for the boy, his parents and their friends is relatively contented and free.

We lived under a dictatorship; people talked about crimes and attacks, martial law and curfew, but even so, nothing kept me from spending all day wandering far from home. Weren’t the streets of Maipú dangerous then? At night they were, and during the day as well, but the adults played, arrogantly or innocently — or with a mixture of arrogance and innocence  — at ignoring the danger. They played at thinking that discontent was a thing of the poor and power the domain of the rich, and in those streets no one was poor or rich, at least not yet.

It’s not until the book switches tack in the second part that we can begin to understand the “disease” of the middle classes who preferred to keep their heads down rather than confront the wrongs (mainly unexplained “disappearances”) happening around them. Zambra does this by turning the narrative on its head: he makes the unhappy protagonist in the second part the writer of the novel begun in the first part. Through this we learn that he has suspicions that his own father sympathised with the Pinochet regime, all the while claiming he was apolitical.

While he continues working on his novel about an unnamed boy and his childhood friend Claudia, the protagonist tries to patch up the relationship with his estranged wife, Eme. Their vexed lives strangely mirror events that later appear in his novel when the “boy”, now in his 30s, starts a sexual relationship with Claudia. It blurs the lines between writer, narrator and character, so that the reader begins to question what is real and what is not.

If you haven’t guessed already, this is not a straightforward easy-to-follow narrative. But Ways of Going Home is one of those clever books that shines a light on the gaps between fiction and reality. By setting it in the context of Chile’s troubled past, it also explores the thin line between complicity and innocence. The way in which it weaves the personal with the political makes it a complex but sophisticated read. Even if you know nothing about Chilean history, it will make you think about childhood, the different ways we “go home”, understanding your parents’ decisions and beliefs, and the importance of finding your own truth to live by.

Author, Book review, Fiction, Granta, literary fiction, Publisher, Romesh Gunesekera, Setting, Sri Lanka

‘Reef’ by Romesh Gunesekera

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reef

Fiction – paperback; Granta Books; 190 pages; 1995.

Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 1994, is a rather beautiful and occasionally heartbreaking coming-of-age story set in Sri Lanka before the civil war.

It’s 1962 and 11-year-old Triton, the narrator, is sent away by his father after he accidentally burns the thatch of a schoolyard hut. He goes to live with Mister Salgado, a hunch-backed, quietly spoken marine biologist who is studying coral reefs, and here, under the care of the main help, Joseph, he is taught all manner of household chores.

When Joseph is dismissed from the household for being drunk, Triton is elevated to being the master’s main boy, something that fills him with immense pride. The story largely follows his efforts to fit in, the lessons he learns along the way and how he comes to love cooking and become exceptionally good at it.

Coming-of-age story

Reef is told from the perspective of Triton as an adult looking back on his somewhat unusual childhood. Though he was essentially a young slave, he isn’t bitter about the experience, probably because he is treated well and with respect. Indeed, he feels a great deal of warmth, love and gratitude towards Mister Salgado, who becomes a substitute father figure. It is through the retelling of his childhood experiences that we come to learn how this fondness — and mutual respect — developed.

The key to this is a love affair that Mister Salgado conducts with Nili, a young woman, in the late 1960s. Triton witnesses it at close quarters and does his utmost to ensure Nili is wooed successfully, because he wants his master to be happy.

Before Miss Nili first came to our house on the poya-holiday of April 1969, Mister Salgado only said to me, ‘A lady is coming to tea.’ As if a lady came to tea every week. It had never happened before in his life, or mine, and yet he acted as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Luckily he gave me some warning. He was concerned to make sure there was plenty of time to prepare, even though he acted so nonchalant. I made everything: little coconut cakes — kavum — patties, egg sandwiches, ham sandwiches, cucumber sandwiches, even love-cake… I made enough for a horse. It was just as well: she ate like a horse.

Nili eventually moves in with Mister Salgado — they do not marry, bucking society’s conventions at that time — but the relationship doesn’t run smoothly. One day Nili leaves in a fit of fury to go and take up with another man, an American, that Mister Salgado knows.

Mister Salgado is heartbroken and seems to lose interest in most things. But this is merely a metaphor for other forces at work — there’s trouble brewing, politically and socially, and even Mister Salgado’s beloved coral reefs are coming under threat from development and pollution. Eventually he leaves Sri Lanka, for London, taking Triton with him, where he accepts a university posting.

A tropical paradise

This is a prime example of a book that doesn’t have much of a plot but which excels at drawing you in to an unfamiliar world peopled by interesting characters.

There’s an aching kind of quality about it as it follows Triton chasing his dream to be a chef while another man — his boss — loses his dream to create a marine sanctuary.

It’s written from a relatively naive point of view — there’s no sex in it, but food is seen as “the ultimate seducer” (interestingly, Nili eats greedily; Mister Salgado barely eats at all) — which reflects the mindset of a young boy.

But it is the descriptions of a paradise (under threat) — and lots of lovely food — which really makes this book such a delicious read:

When I looked up again I would glimpse the seas between the trees bathed in a mulled gold light. The colour of it, the roar of it, was overwhelming. It was like living inside a conch: the endless pounding.

And it’s hard not to fall a little bit in love with Triton, who is diligent, self-motivated, hard working and shows initiative. You want him to succeed because he truly deserves it. And you want him to be happy, too.

I’m not going to spoil the outcome by revealing it here, but let’s just say that Reef is a rewarding read. It’s elegant but also hugely powerful, and I came away from it feeling as though I’d spent some time in (a troubled) paradise. Despite it’s brevity, this is a novel to read slowly, to savour every word and to revel in the beauty of Gunesekera’s languid storytelling.