Eleven books finished this month, six by women/POC, and an unexpectedly successful five in German. That makes a respectable 58 for the first half of the year.
- Der andere Name (Heptalogie I – II) — Jon Fosse tr. Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — James Joyce
- Sinopticon — ed. Xueting Christine Ni
- An der Baumgrenze — Thomas Bernhard
- The Best of All Possible Worlds — Karen Lord
- Eure Heimat ist Unser Albtraum — Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah et al.
- Katherine Carlyle — Rupert Thomson
- Deadlock — Dorothy M. Richardson
- Marzahn, Mon Amour — Katja Oskamp
- All About Love — bell hooks
- Der Trost Runder Dinge — Clemens J. Setz
Der andere Name (Heptalogie I – II) is, like Claudia Durastanti’s Die Fremde, and the in-progress Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, published by Fitzcarraldo in the UK, and falls into the “devastatingly brilliant” genre they seem to specialise in (emphasis on the devastating). In this volume (the first two of seven parts) not a great deal happens, but we inhabit the head of an ageing Norwegian painter living near not-quite Bergen, who interacts with a few obscurely-defined characters who seem to be different versions of one another. So far so off-putting, but it’s told in such a perfectly-judged voice (compared to Beckett by Brits, but for me the German version recalled Thomas Bernhard) that its repetitions keep the reader (or listener — the German audiobook is wonderfully-read) hooked throughout.
Some actual Bernhard for the first of the short story volumes this month — An der Baumgrenze contains three intriguing, but relatively slight earlier works. More substantial Austrian weirdness is to be found in Der Trost Runder Dinge, which contains stories of Schweblinian uncanniness written in an irresistable prose style. At their best, the stories combine this stylistic brilliance with understated pathos, as in the story of a woman travelling around Norway with a … a something not quite specified, or the ultra-brief final picture of a mentally-ill father who thinks he has regained his youth.
The third collection of stories, Sinopticon — an anthology of Chinese science-fiction — was unfortunately a dud. As with my earlier attempts with Chinese sci-fi, my main obstacle is the writers’ frequent tin ear for dialogue: “This year it’s on an unprecedented scale, the university’s arranged all kinds of banquets and social gatherings. As chief rep of student relations at He’lin First University, how could I not pay any attention?” Trying to be open-minded, I can imagine that Chinese people could just have a different way of talking, which might sound odd to someone from a different cultural background, but I just don’t think that’s true (based on personal experiences, and on reading other genres of Chinese literature). It reads to me more like bad sci-fi info-dumping.
Much more successful POC-SF was from Karen Lord — The Best of All Possible Worlds is told in a comic voice reminiscent of Connie Willis, but presents an interestingly-nuanced world with recognisable, but not hammered-home elements of African cultures. The episodes are rather loosely connected, but taken as a road movie rather than a highly-structured arc, it’s very enjoyable.
Three(ish) works of non-fiction this month: All About Love, by bell hooks, was thought-provoking and maddening in equal measure. The Americanism was often hard to take for this uptight European, especially the religion and the very straight-faced discussion of self-help books, but there are plenty of interesting ideas:
While I do not want to suggest that extended families are not as likely to be dysfunctional, simply by virtue of their size and their inclusion of nonblood kin (i.e., individuals who marry into the family and their blood relations), they are diverse and so are likely to include the presence of some individuals who are both sane and loving.
Estrangement from the realm of the senses is a direct product of overindulgence, of acquiring too much.
hooks’ personality comes through in some real zingers:
As one man bragged about the aggressive beatings he had received from his mother, sharing that “they had been good for him”, I interrupted and suggested that he might not be the misogynist woman-hater he is today if he had not been brutally beaten by a woman as a child.
but one suspects that she wasn’t the easiest person to get along with:
If a friend gives me a gift and asks me to tell him or her whether or not I like it, I will respond honestly and judiciously; that is to say, I will speak the truth in a positive, caring manner. Yet even in this situation, the person who asks for honesty will often express annoyance when given a truthful response.
Eure Heimat ist Unser Albtraum is a collection of essays by, broadly, “people of migrant backgrounds”, to use the favoured German term. Some of the contributors I already knew — Mithu Sanyal, Sharon Dodua Otoo — while others were new discoveries. They paint a depressing picture of the treatment of outsiders in contemporary Germany, which like Scotland prides itself overmuch on being now a non-racist country, but this is combined with a humour that frequently made me laugh out loud, and a determined focus on how people can respond.
Marzahn, Mon Amour is presumably somewhat disguised, but based on the author’s real experiences with her customers when working as a Fußpflegerin (pedicurist? chiropodist? German doesn’t seem to distinguish) in the Marzahn district of Berlin. Oskamp addresses several times the uncomfortable reactions of her writer acquaintances to her taking up the profession, forcing the readers to confront their own prejudices. The bulk of the book consists of relating the stories of some of her clients, mostly elderly residents of the decidedly unfashionable district. She tells these simply and engagingly, her respect for her customers providing her own response to those who look down on her and them.
Another road movie in Katherine Carlyle, the prologue of which starts with a 10/10 opening sentence:
I was made in a small square dish.
Chapter one gets going with a lovely simile:
Another beautiful September. The sun richer, more tender, the colour of old wedding rings.
And so it continues, with Thomson seemingly teasing the reader with his sensory evocations:
The air smells of spinach and wet fur. (Rome)
The air smells of parsnips and stainless steel. (Belarus)
and several more.
Similes are good too:
A dark van races past, its tinted windows closed. From inside comes the thud of hip-hop, as if the van is an animal. As if it has a heart.
No one stares down into his phone like a daredevil about to dive into a small pool from a great height.
And he sees the funny side of Russia:
When I wish him a good day he gives me a fatalistic look.
‘We will see,’ he says.
Amid the fun and games, there’s a story which darkens (appropriately) as we head to Svalbard. Thomson balances the thriller elements, the virtuoso writing and an engaging, if irritating, main character to make a fine book overall.
Two modernist classics to finish off: the Joyceathon continued with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which I can confirm is much better than Stephen Hero, and much worse than Ulysses. I’d blanked from my memory the great slabs of theology and aesthetics which make the later chapters a bit of a slog.
Finally the latest instalment of Pilgrimage, Deadlock, shows Miriam starting to grow into a writer and beginning — just — to develop her own ideas. Her intolerance of others’ perceived conformism (someone in the Pilgrimage Together discussion group aptly compared her to Holden Caulfield) is not yet matched by any real independence of her own, but there are some green shoots. And Richardson is irresistably quotable, as always:
Certainly she would not read the pamphlet. However clever the man might be, his assumptions about women made the carefully arranged and solemnly received display of research, irritatingly valueless.
The chill of Mr. Shatov’s indifferent response to her explanation was buried in her private acknowledgment that it was he who had forced her to discover something of the reason of her enchantment. He forced her to think. She reflected that solitude was too easy. It was necessary for certainties. Nothing could be known except in solitude. But the struggle to communicate certainties gave them new life; even if the explanation were only a small piece of the truth
Nearly always she must appear both imbecile and rude, staring, probably with her mouth half open, lost. Well-brought-up children were trained out of it. No one had dared to try and train her for long. They had been frightened, or offended, by her scorn of their brisk cheerful pose of polite interest in the surface of everything that was said. It was not worth doing. Polite society was not worth having. Every time one tried for awhile, holding oneself in, thinking of oneself sitting there as others were sitting, consciousness came to an end. It meant having opinions. Taking sides. It presently narrowed life down to a restive discomfort…
Wealth made life safe for him. People could be people to him; even strangers; not threats or problems. But even a wealthy Englishman would not calmly give ten pounds to a disreputable stranger
Harriett is perfect for that. We learnt it in church. But when she used to twist all the fingers of her gloves into points, under the seat, and then show them to me suddenly, in the Litany
her German, neglected so long, grew smaller and smaller, whilst, most inconveniently, her reputation for knowing German grew larger and larger.
It is not what people may be made to see for a few minutes in conversations that counts. It is the conclusions they come to, instinctively, by themselves.
Highlights
My top six so far this year:
- Der Trost Runder Dinge — Clemens J. Setz
- Der andere Name (Heptalogie I – II) — Jon Fosse tr. Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel
- Die Fremde — Claudia Durastanti tr. Annette Kopetzki
- A Manual for Cleaning Women — Lucia Berlin
- The Books of Jacob — Olga Tokarczuk
- Tenth of December — George Saunders
Next
Looking back at my plan from the end of last year, I’ve completely failed on non-Shakespearean plays (but I have some of Jon Fosse’s to make up for that next time), plus volume 2 of Parfit’s On What Matters, Max Porter, Eliot’s poetry, and Nino Haratischwili’s Das Achte Leben, so they’re still on the list. Add to that some graphic novels, and my growing backlog of Fitzcarraldo hard-copies. Pilgrimage will be finished in December, Ulysses the next December (planning ahead), and I’m planning a Black History Month in October. Three German books a month worked quite well, so I’ll try upping it to four!