I finished a relatively modest nine books this month, including one standalone short story, but six of those were for my Black History Month reading topic, another two by women, and three in German, one in Portuguese (which I read twice!).
- O avesso da pele — Jeferson Tenório
- Secret Lives and Other Stories — Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
- Driftglass — Samuel R. Delany
- Iowa — Stefanie Sargnagel
- Mist, die versteht mich ja! — Florence Brokowski-Shekete
- Die schönste Version — Ruth-Maria Thomas
- Red Dust Road — Jackie Kay
- Slow Time Between the Stars — John Scalzi
- Under Our Skin — Joaquim Arena
Starting with that one: I finished O avesso da pele at the beginning of the month after a long pause, then listened to the audiobook to get a better idea of the whole. It’s an odd book, written in the second person addressing the narrator’s recently-murdered father. The narrator himself is strangely sketchy (clearly to put the focus on the father, but he’s not completely transparent), while the father’s tale is an effective balance of personal and political (though as it makes clear, everything is political). The core of the book is the chapter detailing the father’s experiences of being targeted by the police, which is Bolañoesque in its remorselessness.
The last book I read is also originally in Portuguese, and oddly has almost the same title: Under Our Skin (Debaixo da Nossa Pele). Even more focused on race, this is a non-fiction account of the family and wider history of the Cape Verdean writer on the one hand, coupled chapter by chapter with his search for traces of the former slave population in southern Portugal. The historical sections were often eye-opening (notably the former slave who went on to gain a doctorate in the Netherlands for a work defending slavery), while the travelogue sections are evocative of a dying society. The use of racist terms in the text, again clearly intentional, is something I want to find out more about in the Portuguese in Translation discussion next month!
Staying in Africa, Secret Lives and Other Stories is an early collection from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, with all that one might expect — the stories are powerful, but simplistic in comparison with his later work.
Red Dust Road and Mist, die versteht mich ja! are an intriguing pair of memoirs: Jackie Kay was born in Scotland to a Nigerian father and Highland mother, and immediately adopted, while Florence Brokowski-Shekete was born to Nigerian parents in Germany (and so was Nigerian), but was brought up by a foster mother and only adopted as an adult. Kay’s book focuses on her tracing of her birth parents and discovery of the Nigerian side of her family, whereas Brokowski-Shekete concentrates on her childhood in small town Germany and brief, unhappy stay in Nigeria.
Race is less explicitly a topic in Driftglass (a re-read, but from so long ago that much of it seemed new); these are again quite early stories, and variable in quality, but the 60s visions of the future are entertaining. Points also for use of “coolth”.
A mini-project this month was catching up with some of the Deutsche Buchpreis long- and shortlisted books: Iowa was great fun, in a somewhat terrifying way; Sargnagel’s ironic persona is possibly the only sane way to deal with the weirdness of a liberal arts college surrounded by darkest rural Iowa, and she plays the role perfectly:
Ich respektiere Religiosität. Allerdings respektiere ich sie auf dieselbe Art, auf die ich kleinkinder respektiere, wenn sie mir in der Sandkiste einen „Kuchen“ anbieten. Ich schaue anerkennend, agiere so, als würde ihre Fantasie auch in meine Realitaet Eingang finden, und lächle wohlwollend von oben herab.
The footnotes from her travelling companion Christiane Rösinger add another ironic layer to the whole thing.
I accidentally found a great Cottbus writer on the longlist: Die schönste Version takes place in an unnamed town which is suspiciously similar to these parts. Starting with an incident of domestic violence, Thomas leads the reader forwards and backwards to show the effects and the causes (spoiler: the causes are all of German society). At the centre is a sympathetic portrait of the realistically imperfect main character, whose personality comes through brilliantly in the narrative voice. Speaking of voice, the audiobook is excellently performed by Lili Zahavi.
Lastly, a tidger: Slow Time Between the Stars is one of a series of standalone short stories, which covers millions of years in a very modest number of pages. That’s pretty much the point of the story, and this is a great way to experience drifting at high speed in interstellar space.
Next stop is France, in the company of Barthes, Ernaux, probably Perec….