Winner of the 2018 US National Book Award for Translated Fiction, under its American title, The Emissary.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
A curious blend of dystopia and utopia, with themes extrapolating from recent events and trends. It is set in a contaminated future Japan where the elderly are super-fit and support everyone, and children are plagued by severe health problems. In this world, most countries are isolationist. For its subject, it has an unusually peaceful and quirky tone and atmosphere, one which may be familiar from light Japanese literary fiction.
Many details of its world-building do not fit together logically, and are far from hard SF - but it makes a refreshing change from the standard projections of future technology and society in scenarios of environmental degeneration, which become hackneyed once you have read enough of them, and which are often American, or American-influenced. I was especially alert to the material and world-building aspects of Tawada's novel because recently, I attempted to plan a story starting in 2095; I had wanted to push past the sometimes lazy received wisdom of the usual American collapsitarian guys, and I ideally wanted to be able to have a logical story behind every object around my characters and everything they knew and thought. Where and when was this made, with materials from where and how did it reach them, or how has it survived? Where did they learn what they know? What influences their words and accents? What communications or media reach them and by what logistical and material means? How would social relations develop with and without various items, taking into account that this is also development from the present, not just a reversion to the past? It was overwhelming to try and work out such stuff along with questioning a lot of material I'd previously read, and I felt a surprising sense of relief at some of the cop-outs involved in Tawada's strangely cosy dystopia, in which it's not terribly clear how the economy works, and in where a Japan that apparently does not import anything from abroad nevertheless has solar powered items (although not in vast numbers), and advanced medical care. There's also what seems to be an entirely new type of trade, in which some countries (including South Africa and India - two of the BRICS group, you may notice) export language, but it's never explained what this entails.
The novel's world attains a combination of technology usages which would be particularly desirable to left-leaning environmentalists, via a sleight of hand combining the isolationist policy and a fantastical shift in public opinion and science in which "Electrical appliances had met with disapproval ever since electric current was discovered to cause nervous disorders, numbness in the extremities, and insomnia — a condition generally known as bzzt-bzzt syndrome." (The author evidently recognises how central public demand is for consumer electricals, and that trying to get rid of them with legislation would be incredibly unpopular.) It would have seemed more plausible if this condition only affected the children, who are all very delicate and afflicted with multiple novel medical problems. Or perhaps it's connected to nuclear radiation, which is hinted as the cause of the major disaster in the recent past. But the revolt against electrical machinery seems to be universal, and as a result, the only household appliances are now solar-powered refrigerators (I wonder if Tawada also loves those moments when every machine in the home is switched off apart from the fridge freezer). Almost everything else - other than high-tech disability aids and the remaining, shambolic, public transport - has seen a return to pre-industrial manual technology such as cloth, wood and horse-drawn carts, and it's very common to employ cleaners. (There are many parallels to the appropriate technology movement of the 1970s, which has been having a small revival in recent years.) Manual labour is highly respected, and people such as academics also take turns doing work like cleaning school toilets. Resources such as paper have to be treated carefully and there is no unnecessary consumerist tat, the product of the old "global rat race in which huge corporations turned underground resources into anything they could sell at inhuman speeds while ruthlessly competing to keep the lowest production costs".
It is not only different forms of work that are equally respected: the society has abolished the "distinction between useful and useless people" and children are discouraged from using expressions that might even tangentially support it, such as "putting people to a lot of trouble". All the children seem to be treasured by society at large, and by the grandparents and great-grandparents who look after them, and unlike in the real world for all but the very rich with complex medical issues and disabilities, they never have to contend with anyone misunderstanding or disbelieving their problems, or with delays or blocks to accessing any treatments available in their country. The children tend to be calm and good-natured, but rather than this being some sort of stereotype of disabled people as patient martyrs, I see this as relating to the huge difference in stress levels I've seen between disabled people who have to manage on UK and US benefits and other insecure resources, versus those who have comfortable private income or come from countries with the best welfare states, such as an old online friend from Norway.
This level of respect and provision on an apparently national scale is a relatively recent phenomenon in recorded human history, but as far as other aspects of the book's society are concerned - the isolationism, the pre-industrial technology and the frugal use of resources - it was no surprise when references to the Edo Period (1603-1868) began to appear more and more frequently. From the first few pages onwards, it had already looked as if the novel was alluding to the Edo, and probably to modern usages of the period, where the Edo is held up as a real-life model of a sustainable society: see for example here, here, here, or here, and more informally in the environmental blogosphere. This page mentions in addition that "Today, the Japanese have an insatiable appetite for all things Edo. This goes deeper than the daily long lines outside the Edo-Tokyo Museum or the very popular historical dramas on TV every Sunday evening." Tawada refers to historically inaccurate usages of the Edo for political ends, when the wise great-grandfather protagonist tries to contradict them: " When Yoshiro submitted an essay entitled “Japan Was Not Isolated” to the newspaper, they refused to publish it. He wrote it to show how strong Japan’s connections to the outside world had been during the Edo period, through the channels of Holland and China, but the newspaper’s official scholar refused to give it his stamp of approval. He decided to hang onto the manuscript until the next time a magazine asked him for a contribution, yet strangely enough, all those requests from magazines dried up completely after that."
The allusions to the Edo may be clear, and the contaminated land and health effects strongly suggest radiation (not to mention the blurb's mention of Fukushima) but exactly how and why things became this way is never really explained, and the government is shadowy and faceless - no one is quite sure where it is based any more, and no politicians are ever named, although there are allusions to capricious changes, and policies restricting freedom of speech on certain topics, or the ability to settle outside your home region. This vagueness often reminded me of another odd and not altogether logical literary dystopia, J by Howard Jacobson. However the repressions and changes rarely seem as frightening as in J. Other than people being anxious not to mention a few topics, chiefly to do with abroad, society remains mysteriously ordered, peaceful and in a way friendly, for a country which has gone through major upheaval and has next to no visible police - there isn't the suspicion that anyone may denounce you, which stalks fully totalitarian dystopias. (The police are privatised and now mostly concern themselves with their brass bands.) Foreign words are strictly to be avoided (though writing should be in Chinese characters), likewise mannerisms (waving is now up and down, like a maneki neko, not side-to-side), and travel abroad is forbidden. However, a mixed-race school teacher, Mr Yonatani, does not appear to face discrimination. "Though his mother was so attached to the name Yonatan that she wanted to keep it as her own, at a time when having non-Japanese relatives was enough to bring you under suspicion, such a foreign-sounding surname was sure to be a strike against her. She did, in fact, often feel she was being watched. She would come home to find signs of a break-in; even when nothing had been taken, the police would come round to investigate."
It's hard to tell what is intentional and what is accidental in the generally cosy and sometimes whimsical style of this book. Sometimes we are told that aspects of Yoshiro's life are unpleasant or sad - and it might sound boring to a reader in their twenties - but his life of enduring good physical healthy, jogging with dogs (rented), trying to get decent fruit from the market, having someone to look after for whom state services provide well, and apparently not having to worry about money sounds pretty pleasant compared with a lot of people's lives now, even if there are a few things he needs to be careful not to say. His great-grandson Mumei has a lot of medical problems, but until late in the book, physical pain and discomfort is only rarely mentioned. Before that they seem like logistical matters, described in such a way that the reader doesn't feel them (nor the physical aspects of helping) - and because most kids have similar problems, and schools always have doctors on hand, he doesn't feel unusual or left out. The way the characters are narrated is strangely unembodied. (After mention of Mumei's digestive problems, I thought another oblique Edo reference might appear - the He-gassen or fart scrolls [N.B. link includes thumbnails of pics which in close up are NSFW], but there was nothing like that whatsoever. Ribaldry isn't a big part of this book) As I found the beginning of Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear *too* embodied, uncomfortably so, it was surprising to find the opposite here.
I wasn't sure what the reader was supposed to make of the Emissary scheme. I found myself worrying that the children might not be treated well at the other end - but I'm not sure where that came from. Perhaps because the attitudes and services for them seemed so positive in Japan, and it was easy to imagine things being worse elsewhere, because almost anywhere in the real world, they are.
It would be interesting to hear what Japanese readers think of this book, as it is easy to see it as the novel of a writer living abroad. There are passing references to international concerns such as climate change, or pollution leading to spontaneous sex changes in wildlife, and the book presages a shift away from globalisation and towards nationalism (it was first published in 2014). But in terms of Japanese issues, it appears to be referring to those that are well-known internationally, such as Fukushima, the ageing population, young people refusing to carry on traditions, and restrictions on inward immigration - even the early 2010s youth fashion for grey hair - and Yoshiro's descriptions of central Tokyo and come from the memory of a character who has not been there for years.
This is a strange little book, and its light approaches to (or outright elision of) a number of serious issues have put off some readers. However, if you are getting bored with the typical cli-fi and environmental decline dystopias, while remaining interested in the general idea - and you aren't too irritated by illogical worldbuilding - this may be an interesting change.
----
My response to this book is quite different from that of a lot of Goodreads posters and bloggers.
A lot of people find its scenario wholly negative.
- The kind and generous way disability and chronic illness is treated in the book's society won't be so noticeable to people who haven't had to deal with what the equivalent would be like IRL, service provision problems and so on. The heavy presence of disability and illness in the narrative may be more frightening to those who are not used to disability as a routine part of everyday life. They may focus more on the fact that there is so very much disability about in the book's society - i.e. an entire generation.
-It depends on readers' quality of life and/or what they have witnessed first hand. Aspects of some dystopias (ones that do not have totalitarianism or total societal breakdown) featuring middle-class characters from countries with very high quality of life in the present (Scandinavia is usually the case in point) can seem quite okay compared with difficult real lives. I didn't even get much sense of a class system in this book. It seems rather egalitarian.
- Quite a lot of people will think the return to earlier technologies in many spheres merely sounds frightening. But not only does it work here on a day to day basis and the people are apparently happy with it - it conveniently sidesteps the most common dispute when people advocate such stuff "what about healthcare?', by having advanced tech still around for that. (Even if some characters do think that there might be better advances abroad or possible to create by international collaborative working.)
- In the last few months I have been reading a lot about Stalinism and the Eastern Bloc: the political repression in this novel is not on that level, nor is it presented in as scary a tone.
- A lot of the other reviews focus strongly on the words / language / things characters can't say. If that is the aspect people care and think about most, or personally feel to be most different from now, the scenario in the book will feel worse.
(Read & reviewed Feb 2019. See the review and comment thread on Goodreads.)
Showing posts with label SFF. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SFF. Show all posts
12 February 2019
5 November 2018
The Iliac Crest by Cristina Rivera Garza, tr. Sarah Booker
This recently-translated Mexican novella from 2002 was first published in English in 2017 by Feminist Press in the USA, and then in Britain in 2018 by And Other Stories, as part of their Year of Publishing Women (a response to Kamila Shamsie's 2015 'provocation' about inequality in literary fiction). The US edition was longlisted for the 2018 Best Translated Book Award for Fiction.
-----
Slippery, literary psychological horror. It addresses current topics: the revival of neglected female authors, and gender boundaries, but was first published in Mexico in 2002.
Some readers will pick up a hint from the introductory Note from the Author, but I'd recommend reading the translator's note first: it explains some important points, and it makes the narrative and its symbolism somewhat less opaque. I read it just under halfway through. Up till that point, merely looking up the writer Amparo Dávila (thank you to other reviews for indicating the character was named after a real person), and assuming that references to 'disappearance' related to political arrests in Latin American countries had left me frustrated. The disappearance is actually that of women authors and Dávila in particular - and the possibility of expression readers are robbed of at the same time - layered with the widespread murders of women in Mexico which would also become the subject of Roberto Bolaño's 2666. The title is a reference to the bones which most easily distinguish a female skeleton from male. Another character, Juan Escutia, is also named after a real person.
Understanding this background meant that I could enjoy the book to an extent from an analytical viewpoint, although the genre and atmosphere isn't one I like much in book form. (I wouldn't have read this novella if I weren't working through a few books eligible for next year's Booker International.) I noticed echoes of Hitchcock films combined with the paranoia engendered by living in a dictatorship - as in some other Latin American, or Eastern Bloc literature and film - but many English-language readers have compared it with David Lynch. I didn't feel a Lynchian atmosphere, but the possibility that facets of the story are not amenable to clear and specific interpretations, and are instead simply eerie and dreamlike and things-in-themselves is very Lynchian. I still craved concrete interpretations of certain points (e.g. the symbolism of the character of the Seducer, and some of the last reactions of the False Amparo when the narrator says he is going to visit True Amparo) but I have not been able to find any so far in other reviews online. If it were a type of book I enjoyed in itself, and wanted to spend more time with, I would probably have spent longer trying to think of my own.
I was impressed by the skill of the translator in dealing with gender ambiguity in the narrative. The Spanish shows some other characters addressing the narrator - who often asserts his own maleness and masculinity - using feminine word forms, which English does not have, a significant linguistic drawback. Frequently, the narrator did not feel convincingly male: like a character an inexperienced woman writer had created by attaching a number of stereotypical chauvinist male behaviours and ideas to a stream of other inner thoughts that (in a way I couldn't quite pinpoint) sounded more likely to be from a woman. He sometimes described and analysed his own actions in ways that sounded a lot like women analysing a man; I thought a few times of the question "Is this a reverse?" (i.e. someone posting a dilemma in a forum as if they were one of the other people involved). Of course one cannot trust such impressions absolutely (and these days gender-based assumptions about narrative styles are discouraged), ergo ambiguity.
I thought that the three characters' talking to the narrator as if he were female could be seen as their assertion of equality: his with them and theirs with him. (He felt this habit to be an affront.) They were making the male female, as opposed to claiming male/masculine characteristics and words for themselves because of male as the default culturally and linguistically, and being more powerful (as they are perhaps implying he has been doing, and as women have done to get ahead in male-dominated spheres. This could be related to the late 20th-century shift from forms of feminism about women being or becoming more like men, to feminism about asserting femaleness in itself - although that may have been a very Global North current, of limited relevance to conditions in Mexico).
[A typo or error that stood out: a doctor, of all people, wouldn't be getting cellulite and cellulitis mixed up.]
As Dávila wrote psychological horror, The Iliac Crest presumably contains references to her stories (which I have not read), and to other Mexican literature I don't know. A couple of journal/blog reviews mention Julio Cortázar.
The ideal reader for this book probably enjoys psychological horror blended with highly literary writing, has a keen eye for feminist interpretations and theory, and a good knowledge of Latin American, in particular Mexican, literature. That isn't me.
The Iliac Crest reminds me, in its claustrophobic twisty-turny atmosphere, of some other books that were listed for the Booker International and its predecessor the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (and which I didn't always want to read in full); I wouldn't be surprised if it were on the longlist next March.
-----
Slippery, literary psychological horror. It addresses current topics: the revival of neglected female authors, and gender boundaries, but was first published in Mexico in 2002.
Some readers will pick up a hint from the introductory Note from the Author, but I'd recommend reading the translator's note first: it explains some important points, and it makes the narrative and its symbolism somewhat less opaque. I read it just under halfway through. Up till that point, merely looking up the writer Amparo Dávila (thank you to other reviews for indicating the character was named after a real person), and assuming that references to 'disappearance' related to political arrests in Latin American countries had left me frustrated. The disappearance is actually that of women authors and Dávila in particular - and the possibility of expression readers are robbed of at the same time - layered with the widespread murders of women in Mexico which would also become the subject of Roberto Bolaño's 2666. The title is a reference to the bones which most easily distinguish a female skeleton from male. Another character, Juan Escutia, is also named after a real person.
Understanding this background meant that I could enjoy the book to an extent from an analytical viewpoint, although the genre and atmosphere isn't one I like much in book form. (I wouldn't have read this novella if I weren't working through a few books eligible for next year's Booker International.) I noticed echoes of Hitchcock films combined with the paranoia engendered by living in a dictatorship - as in some other Latin American, or Eastern Bloc literature and film - but many English-language readers have compared it with David Lynch. I didn't feel a Lynchian atmosphere, but the possibility that facets of the story are not amenable to clear and specific interpretations, and are instead simply eerie and dreamlike and things-in-themselves is very Lynchian. I still craved concrete interpretations of certain points (e.g. the symbolism of the character of the Seducer, and some of the last reactions of the False Amparo when the narrator says he is going to visit True Amparo) but I have not been able to find any so far in other reviews online. If it were a type of book I enjoyed in itself, and wanted to spend more time with, I would probably have spent longer trying to think of my own.
I was impressed by the skill of the translator in dealing with gender ambiguity in the narrative. The Spanish shows some other characters addressing the narrator - who often asserts his own maleness and masculinity - using feminine word forms, which English does not have, a significant linguistic drawback. Frequently, the narrator did not feel convincingly male: like a character an inexperienced woman writer had created by attaching a number of stereotypical chauvinist male behaviours and ideas to a stream of other inner thoughts that (in a way I couldn't quite pinpoint) sounded more likely to be from a woman. He sometimes described and analysed his own actions in ways that sounded a lot like women analysing a man; I thought a few times of the question "Is this a reverse?" (i.e. someone posting a dilemma in a forum as if they were one of the other people involved). Of course one cannot trust such impressions absolutely (and these days gender-based assumptions about narrative styles are discouraged), ergo ambiguity.
I thought that the three characters' talking to the narrator as if he were female could be seen as their assertion of equality: his with them and theirs with him. (He felt this habit to be an affront.) They were making the male female, as opposed to claiming male/masculine characteristics and words for themselves because of male as the default culturally and linguistically, and being more powerful (as they are perhaps implying he has been doing, and as women have done to get ahead in male-dominated spheres. This could be related to the late 20th-century shift from forms of feminism about women being or becoming more like men, to feminism about asserting femaleness in itself - although that may have been a very Global North current, of limited relevance to conditions in Mexico).
[A typo or error that stood out: a doctor, of all people, wouldn't be getting cellulite and cellulitis mixed up.]
As Dávila wrote psychological horror, The Iliac Crest presumably contains references to her stories (which I have not read), and to other Mexican literature I don't know. A couple of journal/blog reviews mention Julio Cortázar.
The ideal reader for this book probably enjoys psychological horror blended with highly literary writing, has a keen eye for feminist interpretations and theory, and a good knowledge of Latin American, in particular Mexican, literature. That isn't me.
The Iliac Crest reminds me, in its claustrophobic twisty-turny atmosphere, of some other books that were listed for the Booker International and its predecessor the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (and which I didn't always want to read in full); I wouldn't be surprised if it were on the longlist next March.
12 September 2018
The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington
A book I've been circling for years, even before I joined Goodreads: depending what I heard about it, sometimes it sounded enticing and light (a charming, funny, Alice-like fantasy with intellectual depth) sometimes depressing (about an old lady in an oppressive nursing home). I was finally induced to read it by this recent interview with Olga Tokarczuk, in which she says it influenced her newly-translated Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead.
Some editions of The Hearing Trumpet, including the Virago Modern Classic, include a 1991 introduction by Helen Byatt. This contains material about crones and witches in surrealism and feminism, madness, boarding schools, occultism including Gurdjieff, the Grail and Robert Graves' [book:The White Goddess|820465] (a book I'm glad I read when I was younger, before I knew people rarely bother with it these days, as it's referenced in a surprising number of things) and vaguely Margaret-Murrayish ideas of wild pre-Christian matriarchal religion, equating maleness with Christianity and authoritarian sky-gods generally. This did not make me look forward to The Hearing Trumpet itself - it made me glad the book was short - but it was interesting to have my attention drawn to the ideas about modernity and religion while in the middle of Sarah Moss' Ghost Wall, which includes the idea that modernity is better for women, and soon after reading a friend's review - of yet another book - which pointed out the contradictions between feminisms.) By the end of the book, I thought there were topics the introduction had unjustly neglected, but more of that later. If I have read the newer introduction in the Penguin edition, by Ali Smith, it would have been years ago in a bookshop and I can't remember anything about it - I'd like to read it (again?) now.
In the novel, I was surprised how good, and how instantly likeable, the narrative voice is. Marian, 92, absolutely sounds like an old lady. (And like the author, she is an English expat in Mexico.) In the early part of the novel, it reads like a really good children's book, with delightful lines like "people under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats" on nearly every page. Her existence seems idyllic, and so one inevitably feels it is unjust that her callous, image-obsessed son and daughter-in-law decide to put her in a home. (Even if one is an age at which peers consider homes for aged parents.) Although the home turns out to be architecturally adorable (and worthy of a surrealist art exhibition) and to have intriguing fellow-residents, the management are a new-age cult who continually invalidate and refuse to listen to the people in their care. Carrington portrays them with sufficient lightness of touch that they are ridiculous caricatures at least as much as monsters. Rather than making a big deal out of the 'reality' or otherwise of what Marian says - as many contemporary authors would, creating an unreliable narrator who may have dementia, or in children's fiction, in which a child hero needs to persuade at least one adult that something is real - she is a reliable narrator of her own reality, a reality which makes up pretty much all the book and which reads as a slipstream fantastical narrative. (She is always clear other than one passage near the beginning, in a stream of consciousness mode like disjointed thoughts from the edge of sleep). Even if a reader were to bring a cold and clinical attitude that most of what happens is in Marian's imagination, it would surely make one think about the amazing worlds that a person may contain.
The humour tapers off in the second half (or perhaps becomes darker and more subtle) as the narrative approaches the story-within-a-story, an account of a covertly occult 18th-century Spanish saint and abbess. It reads, minor historical inaccuracies and all, like an early-20th century horror tale. I think it was at the end of the story of Abbess Rosalinda, when Marian remarks "I had become affectionately attached to the intrepid and energetic Abbess. The fact that the snooping priest... had done his best to portray her in a pernicious light, hardly distorted the purity of her original image. She must have been a most remarkable woman" that I first thought 'what a twentieth-century book'. Perhaps it's because of a comment I read somewhere online recently that only from a century's 20s does the character of a century start to emerge (there are counter-arguments, but in English history, the late 30s of the 16th and 19th centuries fit) and sufficient distance is established to characterise the earlier century as a whole. Approbation of the Abbess disregards her own crimes and her disregard of those committed by others. I've seen it said elsewhere, with disgust, that sexual abuse, especially of boys, by male clergy was such an open secret that it had become a running joke in 20th century British literature, and one that should no longer be funny. Perhaps that's an especially 2010s sentiment - it's far too early to tell. But in the context of fantasy literature, it feels like this is another way in which this isn't just a very 1960s-1970s book, but encompasses ideas that ran through more decades either side: the lineage from the Golden Dawn through Gardnerian Wicca to the New Age; from Kellogg's sanatorium to dodgy hippie cults; elderly people talk of the First World War and have peculiar deference to aristocracy in a world of plastic wallpaper and electric fires with glowing fake logs, and on one level it's about social liberalisation and increased human rights, and the throwing off of a stuffy old order, the big Western narrative of the whole second half. (It still seems remarkable that Carrington apparently wrote this in the early 60s - if only she'd published it then, she'd have been so ahead of her time, and I suspect the book would have been better known. It's full of stuff which feels like end-60s burnout: indictment of cults and their leaders, jumping off tall buildings and dying under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs; apocalyptic tabloid scare of the time, a new ice age, also fictionalised with flair by Anna Kavan, as well as the playful, psychedelic exuberance of a couple of years earlier, and the principles of Szasz and Laing.)
There's quite a lot of upper-middle-class Englishness here (though Leonora, is rather remarkably, nothing at all to do with Dora Carrington of the Bloomsburies) but I'd love to hear more, well, anything, about The Hearing Trumpet in the context of Latin American art & lit. (Byatt describes Carmella's repeated mentions of firearms as masculine, but I thought them more likely to relate to the prevalence of revolutions, coups and armed rebels in the region.) I haven't read enough Latin American myself to say exactly what's relevant, but it does feel like there's something connectable in The Hearing Trumpet to the magic realism and tricksiness of the Boom.
The line-drawn illustrations in this edition, by the author's son, are in a style quite different from the cover painting (hers) and are not my sort of thing, but may appeal to fans of David Shrigley and Allie Brosh.
I've rated it 4 stars rather than 5, unlike many GR friends, because I didn't find the joy in it that makes a 5-star read (due to the setting) but it is absolutely a wonderful little book that deserves to be more widely read.
(read and reviewed September 2018; the review on Goodreads.)
Some editions of The Hearing Trumpet, including the Virago Modern Classic, include a 1991 introduction by Helen Byatt. This contains material about crones and witches in surrealism and feminism, madness, boarding schools, occultism including Gurdjieff, the Grail and Robert Graves' [book:The White Goddess|820465] (a book I'm glad I read when I was younger, before I knew people rarely bother with it these days, as it's referenced in a surprising number of things) and vaguely Margaret-Murrayish ideas of wild pre-Christian matriarchal religion, equating maleness with Christianity and authoritarian sky-gods generally. This did not make me look forward to The Hearing Trumpet itself - it made me glad the book was short - but it was interesting to have my attention drawn to the ideas about modernity and religion while in the middle of Sarah Moss' Ghost Wall, which includes the idea that modernity is better for women, and soon after reading a friend's review - of yet another book - which pointed out the contradictions between feminisms.) By the end of the book, I thought there were topics the introduction had unjustly neglected, but more of that later. If I have read the newer introduction in the Penguin edition, by Ali Smith, it would have been years ago in a bookshop and I can't remember anything about it - I'd like to read it (again?) now.
In the novel, I was surprised how good, and how instantly likeable, the narrative voice is. Marian, 92, absolutely sounds like an old lady. (And like the author, she is an English expat in Mexico.) In the early part of the novel, it reads like a really good children's book, with delightful lines like "people under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats" on nearly every page. Her existence seems idyllic, and so one inevitably feels it is unjust that her callous, image-obsessed son and daughter-in-law decide to put her in a home. (Even if one is an age at which peers consider homes for aged parents.) Although the home turns out to be architecturally adorable (and worthy of a surrealist art exhibition) and to have intriguing fellow-residents, the management are a new-age cult who continually invalidate and refuse to listen to the people in their care. Carrington portrays them with sufficient lightness of touch that they are ridiculous caricatures at least as much as monsters. Rather than making a big deal out of the 'reality' or otherwise of what Marian says - as many contemporary authors would, creating an unreliable narrator who may have dementia, or in children's fiction, in which a child hero needs to persuade at least one adult that something is real - she is a reliable narrator of her own reality, a reality which makes up pretty much all the book and which reads as a slipstream fantastical narrative. (She is always clear other than one passage near the beginning, in a stream of consciousness mode like disjointed thoughts from the edge of sleep). Even if a reader were to bring a cold and clinical attitude that most of what happens is in Marian's imagination, it would surely make one think about the amazing worlds that a person may contain.
The humour tapers off in the second half (or perhaps becomes darker and more subtle) as the narrative approaches the story-within-a-story, an account of a covertly occult 18th-century Spanish saint and abbess. It reads, minor historical inaccuracies and all, like an early-20th century horror tale. I think it was at the end of the story of Abbess Rosalinda, when Marian remarks "I had become affectionately attached to the intrepid and energetic Abbess. The fact that the snooping priest... had done his best to portray her in a pernicious light, hardly distorted the purity of her original image. She must have been a most remarkable woman" that I first thought 'what a twentieth-century book'. Perhaps it's because of a comment I read somewhere online recently that only from a century's 20s does the character of a century start to emerge (there are counter-arguments, but in English history, the late 30s of the 16th and 19th centuries fit) and sufficient distance is established to characterise the earlier century as a whole. Approbation of the Abbess disregards her own crimes and her disregard of those committed by others. I've seen it said elsewhere, with disgust, that sexual abuse, especially of boys, by male clergy was such an open secret that it had become a running joke in 20th century British literature, and one that should no longer be funny. Perhaps that's an especially 2010s sentiment - it's far too early to tell. But in the context of fantasy literature, it feels like this is another way in which this isn't just a very 1960s-1970s book, but encompasses ideas that ran through more decades either side: the lineage from the Golden Dawn through Gardnerian Wicca to the New Age; from Kellogg's sanatorium to dodgy hippie cults; elderly people talk of the First World War and have peculiar deference to aristocracy in a world of plastic wallpaper and electric fires with glowing fake logs, and on one level it's about social liberalisation and increased human rights, and the throwing off of a stuffy old order, the big Western narrative of the whole second half. (It still seems remarkable that Carrington apparently wrote this in the early 60s - if only she'd published it then, she'd have been so ahead of her time, and I suspect the book would have been better known. It's full of stuff which feels like end-60s burnout: indictment of cults and their leaders, jumping off tall buildings and dying under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs; apocalyptic tabloid scare of the time, a new ice age, also fictionalised with flair by Anna Kavan, as well as the playful, psychedelic exuberance of a couple of years earlier, and the principles of Szasz and Laing.)
There's quite a lot of upper-middle-class Englishness here (though Leonora, is rather remarkably, nothing at all to do with Dora Carrington of the Bloomsburies) but I'd love to hear more, well, anything, about The Hearing Trumpet in the context of Latin American art & lit. (Byatt describes Carmella's repeated mentions of firearms as masculine, but I thought them more likely to relate to the prevalence of revolutions, coups and armed rebels in the region.) I haven't read enough Latin American myself to say exactly what's relevant, but it does feel like there's something connectable in The Hearing Trumpet to the magic realism and tricksiness of the Boom.
The line-drawn illustrations in this edition, by the author's son, are in a style quite different from the cover painting (hers) and are not my sort of thing, but may appeal to fans of David Shrigley and Allie Brosh.
I've rated it 4 stars rather than 5, unlike many GR friends, because I didn't find the joy in it that makes a 5-star read (due to the setting) but it is absolutely a wonderful little book that deserves to be more widely read.
(read and reviewed September 2018; the review on Goodreads.)
18 August 2018
Elefant by Martin Suter, tr. Jamie Bulloch
New in English in 2018, in translation from Swiss German, this light speculative fiction adventure - about a genetically engineered miniature pink elephant and the homeless man who stumbles on him - may appeal to fans of Jonas Jonasson and Frederik Backman. I received a free Advance Review Copy ebook from Netgalley and the publisher, Fourth Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins UK.
[3.5] A light read narrated in a tone similar to The Hundred Year Old Man and A Man Called Ove. The first protagonist on the scene, Schoch, a middle-aged alcoholic homeless on the streets of Zurich, is from the same curmudgeonly stable of characters, who, in their real life incarnations, might not be so likeable - but are made sympathetic, and sometimes endearingly comic, by that children's-book-for-adults authorial voice.
As is typical with novels like these, Elefant takes the reader on a caper through various locations, situations and occupations many people have hardly ever thought about - although here several of them have to do with elephants and/or genetic engineering. (I don't think I've read such detail about the collection of semen from domesticated animals for artificial insemination since James Herriot books - but here the tone isn't laugh-out-loud awkwardness; now, it's decades later and a different species. A matter-of-fact clinical tone subtly communicates a sense of it and other artificial reproduction procedures as demeaning and tragic for the animals.) Seriousness is generally offset soon enough, though, by likeable or picaresque characters, or the outright endearing. (I've had to watch videos of baby elephants to try and see some of the cutest behaviours described - I particularly like this one.) And there are bumbling chases and stakeouts that wouldn't be out of place in a 1970s British farce. Perhaps the cosiest, most escapist aspect of the novel is in the first two thirds, where several chapters evoke the joy of living alone in a big comfortable house with a sociable pet, and reading a lot. These are scenes to revel in and to curl up in. A nice detail was that we don't get lovely descriptions of snow scenes in winter - I wondered where they were in December chapters, as I'd been looking forward to them - but using that old friend of the Eng Lit student, pathetic fallacy, 'unnatural' out-of-season blizzards, and the longed-for Christmas-card scenery, arrive in late May.
There are underlying values in the book which to some, probably seem so normal as not to be noticeable, especially to Continental Western Europeans in late middle age and older. (The author is 70, and Elefant was first published last year.) Some of these will, and some won't, go down well with others... Refugees are basically good and should be helped, especially if they are nice people and share the values of your country (the just-post-Second World War generation taking this as more of a given than many younger centrists and conservatives); genetic engineering feels wrong and unnatural on a gut level and could have worrying repercussions; there's something satisfying about formerly well-off people who fell on hard times getting restored to their (rightful?) station; and China is supplanting America as a certain kind of antagonist: a big unethical corporate threat that's increasingly over here (also makes a work more saleable to Americans...). Very EU values, especially if considering the EU as neoliberal - although it's actually a Swiss-German novel. The prevalence of wealth in the culture - especially later in the book - is very Swiss, and especially very Zurich, as I understand from my Goodreads friend Warwick, who lives there. Homelessness is apparently not visible as it is in UK cities. With the range of centres and soup kitchens available to Schoch and his comrades through the day, it's perhaps evident why. It's a level of service that suggests Swiss cities may be among the easier places in the world to be street homeless, better at any rate than contemporary Britain, especially as this provision is combined with a basic benefit rate of 986 CHF per month for a homeless person, equivalent at current exchange rates to slightly more than 10 weeks' worth of UK Jobseeker's Allowance (although Suter doesn't give details of the criteria).
Homelessness, alongside genetic engineering and elephant behaviour, are subjects on which Suter has done his research, including with people who have first-hand knowledge, as the acknowledgements explain. It's a shame that a few clangers, mostly, but not all, on other topics, remain in this edition. It doesn't tally with a vet's scientific knowledge that his biggest fear about genetic engineering would be infectious diseases that targeted specific human racial groups. Did that really get past the geneticists who read the manuscript? Or was that included later or despite them? How are all these vets moving into exotics practice from other specialties with such ease? Is it less of a big deal in some countries than in the UK? Did no-one at all try to correct a character's saying that not eating meat helped save the ozone layer?? (Rather that reduce carbon emissions or climate change.) Someone with opinions on animals as strong as hers these days seems likely to be vegan, not only vegetarian - but that would have meant that Suter wouldn't have had the opportunity to write about so many traditional Swiss dishes containing cheese. Why does an intelligent Burmese man who's been living in Switzerland for about 20 years still have such poor English? (The answer does seem too likely to be stereotyping.) And why would he name an elephant in Hindi when he talks to the animals in Burmese?
For me, these points didn't impinge too much on the narrative as a whole - Elefant is decent light / comfort reading and frequently made me smile - and I don't, in any case, expect popular fiction to be flawless. (It's an unexpected surprise if it doesn't have any errors, stereotypes or plot-holes.) I keep wavering between rounding down to 3 stars (which wouldn't reflect how much I enjoyed stretches of the book, on a scale with my other ratings) and 4 stars (which I feel a bit guilty about, because of the stereotyping of Kaung, and the way the wheels of the plot are oiled by the 'goodies' turning out to have connections and lots of money. Although the latter, especially from a UK/US perspective, also just reflects hard facts of life in which private charity is becoming increasingly important as state provision declines - having the authorities sort everything out, as happens in plotlines of some Nordic works, seems ever more distant and utopian.)
The novel also left me impressed with the versatility of translator Jamie Bulloch - the other of his translations I've read was the tense German modern classic [book:The Mussel Feast|16138043], which has a markedly different style. It was great reading a translation into British English, as so many UK publishers commission or reprint American ones these days.
Elefant won't appeal to everyone: it hasn't got a lot to offer to readers who only go for the highly literary or experimental, and others may think its political underpinnings leave something to be desired. But, although whimsical, it thankfully isn't as cheesy as the current UK cover's tagline suggests ("true friends come in all shapes and sizes"); and if you like the Jonasson type of caper novel for an occasional break , or just because, it may be worth a look.
(read and reviewed August 2018; the review and comment thread on Goodreads.
[3.5] A light read narrated in a tone similar to The Hundred Year Old Man and A Man Called Ove. The first protagonist on the scene, Schoch, a middle-aged alcoholic homeless on the streets of Zurich, is from the same curmudgeonly stable of characters, who, in their real life incarnations, might not be so likeable - but are made sympathetic, and sometimes endearingly comic, by that children's-book-for-adults authorial voice.
As is typical with novels like these, Elefant takes the reader on a caper through various locations, situations and occupations many people have hardly ever thought about - although here several of them have to do with elephants and/or genetic engineering. (I don't think I've read such detail about the collection of semen from domesticated animals for artificial insemination since James Herriot books - but here the tone isn't laugh-out-loud awkwardness; now, it's decades later and a different species. A matter-of-fact clinical tone subtly communicates a sense of it and other artificial reproduction procedures as demeaning and tragic for the animals.) Seriousness is generally offset soon enough, though, by likeable or picaresque characters, or the outright endearing. (I've had to watch videos of baby elephants to try and see some of the cutest behaviours described - I particularly like this one.) And there are bumbling chases and stakeouts that wouldn't be out of place in a 1970s British farce. Perhaps the cosiest, most escapist aspect of the novel is in the first two thirds, where several chapters evoke the joy of living alone in a big comfortable house with a sociable pet, and reading a lot. These are scenes to revel in and to curl up in. A nice detail was that we don't get lovely descriptions of snow scenes in winter - I wondered where they were in December chapters, as I'd been looking forward to them - but using that old friend of the Eng Lit student, pathetic fallacy, 'unnatural' out-of-season blizzards, and the longed-for Christmas-card scenery, arrive in late May.
There are underlying values in the book which to some, probably seem so normal as not to be noticeable, especially to Continental Western Europeans in late middle age and older. (The author is 70, and Elefant was first published last year.) Some of these will, and some won't, go down well with others... Refugees are basically good and should be helped, especially if they are nice people and share the values of your country (the just-post-Second World War generation taking this as more of a given than many younger centrists and conservatives); genetic engineering feels wrong and unnatural on a gut level and could have worrying repercussions; there's something satisfying about formerly well-off people who fell on hard times getting restored to their (rightful?) station; and China is supplanting America as a certain kind of antagonist: a big unethical corporate threat that's increasingly over here (also makes a work more saleable to Americans...). Very EU values, especially if considering the EU as neoliberal - although it's actually a Swiss-German novel. The prevalence of wealth in the culture - especially later in the book - is very Swiss, and especially very Zurich, as I understand from my Goodreads friend Warwick, who lives there. Homelessness is apparently not visible as it is in UK cities. With the range of centres and soup kitchens available to Schoch and his comrades through the day, it's perhaps evident why. It's a level of service that suggests Swiss cities may be among the easier places in the world to be street homeless, better at any rate than contemporary Britain, especially as this provision is combined with a basic benefit rate of 986 CHF per month for a homeless person, equivalent at current exchange rates to slightly more than 10 weeks' worth of UK Jobseeker's Allowance (although Suter doesn't give details of the criteria).
Homelessness, alongside genetic engineering and elephant behaviour, are subjects on which Suter has done his research, including with people who have first-hand knowledge, as the acknowledgements explain. It's a shame that a few clangers, mostly, but not all, on other topics, remain in this edition. It doesn't tally with a vet's scientific knowledge that his biggest fear about genetic engineering would be infectious diseases that targeted specific human racial groups. Did that really get past the geneticists who read the manuscript? Or was that included later or despite them? How are all these vets moving into exotics practice from other specialties with such ease? Is it less of a big deal in some countries than in the UK? Did no-one at all try to correct a character's saying that not eating meat helped save the ozone layer?? (Rather that reduce carbon emissions or climate change.) Someone with opinions on animals as strong as hers these days seems likely to be vegan, not only vegetarian - but that would have meant that Suter wouldn't have had the opportunity to write about so many traditional Swiss dishes containing cheese. Why does an intelligent Burmese man who's been living in Switzerland for about 20 years still have such poor English? (The answer does seem too likely to be stereotyping.) And why would he name an elephant in Hindi when he talks to the animals in Burmese?
For me, these points didn't impinge too much on the narrative as a whole - Elefant is decent light / comfort reading and frequently made me smile - and I don't, in any case, expect popular fiction to be flawless. (It's an unexpected surprise if it doesn't have any errors, stereotypes or plot-holes.) I keep wavering between rounding down to 3 stars (which wouldn't reflect how much I enjoyed stretches of the book, on a scale with my other ratings) and 4 stars (which I feel a bit guilty about, because of the stereotyping of Kaung, and the way the wheels of the plot are oiled by the 'goodies' turning out to have connections and lots of money. Although the latter, especially from a UK/US perspective, also just reflects hard facts of life in which private charity is becoming increasingly important as state provision declines - having the authorities sort everything out, as happens in plotlines of some Nordic works, seems ever more distant and utopian.)
The novel also left me impressed with the versatility of translator Jamie Bulloch - the other of his translations I've read was the tense German modern classic [book:The Mussel Feast|16138043], which has a markedly different style. It was great reading a translation into British English, as so many UK publishers commission or reprint American ones these days.
Elefant won't appeal to everyone: it hasn't got a lot to offer to readers who only go for the highly literary or experimental, and others may think its political underpinnings leave something to be desired. But, although whimsical, it thankfully isn't as cheesy as the current UK cover's tagline suggests ("true friends come in all shapes and sizes"); and if you like the Jonasson type of caper novel for an occasional break , or just because, it may be worth a look.
(read and reviewed August 2018; the review and comment thread on Goodreads.
27 December 2015
The Mountain and the Wall by Alisa Ganieva, tr. Carol Apollonio
The Mountain and the Wall was the first Dagestani novel ever translated to English (albeit the original was in Russian), released by Dallas-based small publisher Deep Vellum in 2015. In 2018 Deep Vellum published another novel by Alisa Ganieva, Bride & Groom.
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The recently-translated Islamic-fundamentalist-takeover-dystopia novel that isn't Houellebecq. And whose characters are rather less jaundiced.
In a near-future Dagestan, there are rumours that Putin's Russia has had enough of dealing with trouble from the Caucasus country and has just put a wall up across the border - like the Berlin Wall, as a couple of characters say - and it proves to be true. Extremist Salafi / Wahhabi insurgents, already present in fairly significant numbers, see a power vacuum, and quickly try to seize authority. The novel follows an extended network of friends and family trying to make sense of the chaos, concentrating on Shamil, a twentysomething rookie journalist. The viewpoint characters, with a few exceptions, are middle class moderate Sufis or secular Muslims who have more sympathy for local folk traditions or for Westernised pop culture than for the fundamentalists. We get a sense of how life was before (I'm not sure if it's a portrait of things as they are now, or marginally worse in some ways) and later of capital city conditions deteriorating as a self-appointed morality police of angry young men with guns pays more attention to enforcing the destruction of museums and the veiling of women than to getting electricity, water and rubbish collection running again - whilst residents with transport leave to hole up with relatives in remote mountain villages, or try to get to the Georgian border.
The introduction mentions that most Russian writing about the Caucasus known in English is essentially colonial, by the likes of Lermontov and Tolstoy. A few more books by authors native to the region have been translated recently – e.g. the Dalkey Archive Georgian Literature series – but this is apparently the first ever from Dagestan – albeit written mostly in Russian - to appear in English.
Some background knowledge about contemporary Russia will help when reading The Mountain and the Wall, but you don't need to be a specialist to get something out of it. What I'd read a few months ago in [book:Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible|21413849] helped orientate me around the book: Russian racism towards Central Asians [this interview with the author mentions how she used to get stopped by the police, and how Russian media coverage of the region has changed recently], the growth of fundamentalism in the region, and typical attitudes between men and women, in Russia and in the Caucasus republics. The Mountain and the Wall is steeped in the culture and vocab of its home country almost as much as [book:The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao|297673] is in the Dominican Republic. Ganieva's main Russian narrative is translated to English, but the Dagestani and Islamic words - foreign to the average European Russian - remain in their own language. Unlike the Junot Diaz, this book has its own glossary, but it's at the end, and there'll be a lot to look up unless you've got family from the region or you've studied it. People who know Arabic Islamic terms will be familiar with a percentage of the vocab (language origins - as there are several - are given for the glossed words), albeit some of the Arabic words are apparently used with slightly different meanings in Dagestan. Footnotes would have been more user-friendly than endnotes, as in some chapters, especially near the start, there are multiple terms to look up per page: it's the sort of situation made easier by keeping an ebook open on two screens (not great if you fail to resist distractions lurking elsewhere on the computer), or photocopying the glossary from a paper book. So although the narrative itself is very readable, the need for notes means this isn't exactly the ideal commuting book. Best read at home over a day or two, so you'll hopefully remember a few of the more commonly-used local terms and not need to look them up every single time they appear. There are too many new words for all but the most superpowered language learners to absorb in the time it takes to read a 250 page novel. (The glossary lists 125 terms, only 12 of which were already familiar to me.) Then, that pet hate of glossary users - when a word isn't in it, and you couldn't have known until you'd looked! That wasn't too bad here, better than in most glossed novels: maybe 85-90% of the words I expected to be glossed, were.
Another form of information overload for readers less familiar with the region is the number of language and ethnic groups mentioned in political conversations, at least twice as many as named in the main Wikipedia article on Dagestan. If you're not overly bothered, most of these could be treated simply as "group of people who think X, or live in Y", as the mentions are fleeting. Unlike an Estonian novel I'm currently in the middle of ([book:Radio|20802262]), in which the narrator often talks like a tour-guide and historian, The Mountain and the Wall isn't quite a standalone introduction to the region; there's a general foreword, but if you're the sort of reader who prefers to have some systematic information on what it means to be an Avar or a Kulyk or a Lezghin, you'll need to read beyond the covers.
That's a lot about the information content - which wouldn't cause the bat of an eyelid to friends who read the likes of Pynchon or A. Theroux on a regular basis - but directly after finishing the book, I felt like I'd done more work than for other novels of this size: more importantly, unexpected work. (I've written about this in detail so the effort isn't unexpected for anyone who's looked at this post, and to show it's not just a philistine reaction - “ but of course I won't have to do that” - as a shorter account could imply to a stranger.) Oscar Wao is the best comparison I know of, because similarly, The Mountain in the Wall isn't highly complex in its English vocab, experimental or tricksy. It may still satisfy seekers of the meta, as it contains multiple viewpoints, and some fascinating books-within-books. I loved the long 'excerpts' from a didactic Soviet novel for Dagestani teenage girls, and the works of a mediocre modern epic poet writing about traditional mountain life, even more than the main story - I'd have happily read the whole lot of both if they were there.
The Mountain and the Wall indicates a three-, or even four-way divide in the larger culture of Dagestan: folk culture (allied to moderate Islam); new fundamentalist Islam; Western commercial culture and fashion - with some sympathy for the folk culture/moderate side; and a probably forgotten Soviet atheistic culture opposed to all of the previous three. Ganieva hints that women may have had the greatest respect under the Soviets, at least in theory, although there were otherwise many drawbacks in the way the USSR attempted to cut people off from their history. Most significant characters have respect for the folk culture, especially material culture - and, being self-sustaining unlike urban Westernised tackiness [which word I dare to use because the author herself has described the capital, Makhachkala, as “backward and provincial”], it ends up as a refuge from the fundamentalists. The implication seems to be that this culture would be a very good thing if only women were equal within it, and there was less violence and feuding.
The depressing interactions between boys & girls out clubbing I more or less recognise from pre-university days. (As a witness only, because I was a teenage snob devoid of any sense of obligation to talk to anyone I found 'unattractive' or 'thick'.) There was a divide between the behaviour of most university boys - who rarely had any presumptions - and those before, albeit in a different town. Among these Dagestanis twenty-odd years later, the graduates behave just the same as yr boy racer type did, and probably still does, here with girls his own age. These scenes show that two-way problem where girls are trained to be coy and indirect, and boys to be persistent, and only a whole lot of different values and behaviour on both sides will change things. And this was an environment where I had no doubt the description 'street harrassment' was merited; this was not the occasional random compliment that floats away on the breeze, which in most parts of Britain I know is a very small part of the urban ecosystem, one that I take exception to certain popular quarters of the internet taking exception to. These Makhachkala girls barely have time to think whilst walking along, what with the barrage of aggressive catcalls and accostings. (And unlike some Northern & other working class girls in the UK, the young Dagestani women definitely aren't acculturated to give as good as they get or to whistle and whoop at boys as much as the other way round – that would, sadly, be shameful in their society.) And thus this sort of stuff goes, even more clearly than it had before, into the category of things I wouldn't want abolished completely but which there can, emphatically, be too much of (as well as the wrong sort of).
Whilst most of The Mountain and the Wall is set in the capital, there are also plenty of descriptions of traditional crafts (during Shamil's visit to the mountains to research an article) and customs (especially in the 'epic poem'). Hm, I might read some novels at least as much for ethnography as for stories... This is a fascinating book, and aside from the quibbles over the format of the notes, one I was delighted to have read. I feel as if I haven't actually finished it, because I still find myself looking up related articles.
(read and reviewed December 2015; the review on Goodreads.)
-----
The recently-translated Islamic-fundamentalist-takeover-dystopia novel that isn't Houellebecq. And whose characters are rather less jaundiced.
In a near-future Dagestan, there are rumours that Putin's Russia has had enough of dealing with trouble from the Caucasus country and has just put a wall up across the border - like the Berlin Wall, as a couple of characters say - and it proves to be true. Extremist Salafi / Wahhabi insurgents, already present in fairly significant numbers, see a power vacuum, and quickly try to seize authority. The novel follows an extended network of friends and family trying to make sense of the chaos, concentrating on Shamil, a twentysomething rookie journalist. The viewpoint characters, with a few exceptions, are middle class moderate Sufis or secular Muslims who have more sympathy for local folk traditions or for Westernised pop culture than for the fundamentalists. We get a sense of how life was before (I'm not sure if it's a portrait of things as they are now, or marginally worse in some ways) and later of capital city conditions deteriorating as a self-appointed morality police of angry young men with guns pays more attention to enforcing the destruction of museums and the veiling of women than to getting electricity, water and rubbish collection running again - whilst residents with transport leave to hole up with relatives in remote mountain villages, or try to get to the Georgian border.
The introduction mentions that most Russian writing about the Caucasus known in English is essentially colonial, by the likes of Lermontov and Tolstoy. A few more books by authors native to the region have been translated recently – e.g. the Dalkey Archive Georgian Literature series – but this is apparently the first ever from Dagestan – albeit written mostly in Russian - to appear in English.
Some background knowledge about contemporary Russia will help when reading The Mountain and the Wall, but you don't need to be a specialist to get something out of it. What I'd read a few months ago in [book:Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible|21413849] helped orientate me around the book: Russian racism towards Central Asians [this interview with the author mentions how she used to get stopped by the police, and how Russian media coverage of the region has changed recently], the growth of fundamentalism in the region, and typical attitudes between men and women, in Russia and in the Caucasus republics. The Mountain and the Wall is steeped in the culture and vocab of its home country almost as much as [book:The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao|297673] is in the Dominican Republic. Ganieva's main Russian narrative is translated to English, but the Dagestani and Islamic words - foreign to the average European Russian - remain in their own language. Unlike the Junot Diaz, this book has its own glossary, but it's at the end, and there'll be a lot to look up unless you've got family from the region or you've studied it. People who know Arabic Islamic terms will be familiar with a percentage of the vocab (language origins - as there are several - are given for the glossed words), albeit some of the Arabic words are apparently used with slightly different meanings in Dagestan. Footnotes would have been more user-friendly than endnotes, as in some chapters, especially near the start, there are multiple terms to look up per page: it's the sort of situation made easier by keeping an ebook open on two screens (not great if you fail to resist distractions lurking elsewhere on the computer), or photocopying the glossary from a paper book. So although the narrative itself is very readable, the need for notes means this isn't exactly the ideal commuting book. Best read at home over a day or two, so you'll hopefully remember a few of the more commonly-used local terms and not need to look them up every single time they appear. There are too many new words for all but the most superpowered language learners to absorb in the time it takes to read a 250 page novel. (The glossary lists 125 terms, only 12 of which were already familiar to me.) Then, that pet hate of glossary users - when a word isn't in it, and you couldn't have known until you'd looked! That wasn't too bad here, better than in most glossed novels: maybe 85-90% of the words I expected to be glossed, were.
Another form of information overload for readers less familiar with the region is the number of language and ethnic groups mentioned in political conversations, at least twice as many as named in the main Wikipedia article on Dagestan. If you're not overly bothered, most of these could be treated simply as "group of people who think X, or live in Y", as the mentions are fleeting. Unlike an Estonian novel I'm currently in the middle of ([book:Radio|20802262]), in which the narrator often talks like a tour-guide and historian, The Mountain and the Wall isn't quite a standalone introduction to the region; there's a general foreword, but if you're the sort of reader who prefers to have some systematic information on what it means to be an Avar or a Kulyk or a Lezghin, you'll need to read beyond the covers.
That's a lot about the information content - which wouldn't cause the bat of an eyelid to friends who read the likes of Pynchon or A. Theroux on a regular basis - but directly after finishing the book, I felt like I'd done more work than for other novels of this size: more importantly, unexpected work. (I've written about this in detail so the effort isn't unexpected for anyone who's looked at this post, and to show it's not just a philistine reaction - “ but of course I won't have to do that” - as a shorter account could imply to a stranger.) Oscar Wao is the best comparison I know of, because similarly, The Mountain in the Wall isn't highly complex in its English vocab, experimental or tricksy. It may still satisfy seekers of the meta, as it contains multiple viewpoints, and some fascinating books-within-books. I loved the long 'excerpts' from a didactic Soviet novel for Dagestani teenage girls, and the works of a mediocre modern epic poet writing about traditional mountain life, even more than the main story - I'd have happily read the whole lot of both if they were there.
The Mountain and the Wall indicates a three-, or even four-way divide in the larger culture of Dagestan: folk culture (allied to moderate Islam); new fundamentalist Islam; Western commercial culture and fashion - with some sympathy for the folk culture/moderate side; and a probably forgotten Soviet atheistic culture opposed to all of the previous three. Ganieva hints that women may have had the greatest respect under the Soviets, at least in theory, although there were otherwise many drawbacks in the way the USSR attempted to cut people off from their history. Most significant characters have respect for the folk culture, especially material culture - and, being self-sustaining unlike urban Westernised tackiness [which word I dare to use because the author herself has described the capital, Makhachkala, as “backward and provincial”], it ends up as a refuge from the fundamentalists. The implication seems to be that this culture would be a very good thing if only women were equal within it, and there was less violence and feuding.
The depressing interactions between boys & girls out clubbing I more or less recognise from pre-university days. (As a witness only, because I was a teenage snob devoid of any sense of obligation to talk to anyone I found 'unattractive' or 'thick'.) There was a divide between the behaviour of most university boys - who rarely had any presumptions - and those before, albeit in a different town. Among these Dagestanis twenty-odd years later, the graduates behave just the same as yr boy racer type did, and probably still does, here with girls his own age. These scenes show that two-way problem where girls are trained to be coy and indirect, and boys to be persistent, and only a whole lot of different values and behaviour on both sides will change things. And this was an environment where I had no doubt the description 'street harrassment' was merited; this was not the occasional random compliment that floats away on the breeze, which in most parts of Britain I know is a very small part of the urban ecosystem, one that I take exception to certain popular quarters of the internet taking exception to. These Makhachkala girls barely have time to think whilst walking along, what with the barrage of aggressive catcalls and accostings. (And unlike some Northern & other working class girls in the UK, the young Dagestani women definitely aren't acculturated to give as good as they get or to whistle and whoop at boys as much as the other way round – that would, sadly, be shameful in their society.) And thus this sort of stuff goes, even more clearly than it had before, into the category of things I wouldn't want abolished completely but which there can, emphatically, be too much of (as well as the wrong sort of).
Whilst most of The Mountain and the Wall is set in the capital, there are also plenty of descriptions of traditional crafts (during Shamil's visit to the mountains to research an article) and customs (especially in the 'epic poem'). Hm, I might read some novels at least as much for ethnography as for stories... This is a fascinating book, and aside from the quibbles over the format of the notes, one I was delighted to have read. I feel as if I haven't actually finished it, because I still find myself looking up related articles.
(read and reviewed December 2015; the review on Goodreads.)
6 September 2015
The Palm Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola
The tallest tall tale ever of what one champion boozer did to get a decent drink.
A psychedelic quest as mindbending as Yellow Submarine the film, but written fifteen years earlier and thousands of miles away.
A myth told (unusually) in the first-person by a trickster-god-slash-Herculean-hero, with a Taoist-fresh voice like a tarot Fool.
Whilst, thanks to one or two other people on Goodreads, I'd already figured that The Palm Wine Drinkard was a book to read because it's fun and interesting and strange - and not [just] in aid of wholemeal-sackcloth reasons like diversity quotas, with which much of the internet pushes/afflicts fiction from African countries - I didn't expect it to like it quite this much, or that I'd find it so funny.
Sense of humour is personal, yes, and no-one else has tagged this book as humour - but here it was one of those works during which one feel laughter bubbling under the surface most of the time [except during two or three brutal scenes], then every now and again an audible fit of the giggles erupts. Out of context, without the tone and build-up, it's probably not clear why that particular phrase did it.
- Some of the humour might run on the contradictions of conjunctions and other small words - like a child might write (many bizarre sequences of 'what happened' and less of how people thought and felt), or, yes, like a drunk person might say, or a transcript of conversation, where sense chenges slightly as you go along. e.g. because he was very clever and smart as he was only a Skull and he could jump a mile to the second
- Scenes that can be read as if they're satirising folktales because of the ridiculously convenient timing: for example someone changes into an animal and overhears a conversation at exactly the right point to hear what they needed. Not like they just missed it, or had to hang around for nine hours waiting. Dunno what the intention was, but it worked to read them as knowing: the naivety of the voice is perfect, yet it's all so well constructed.
- There is a lot of absurdity, but perhaps you have to be there, reading the whole book, to really laugh: These unknown creatures were doing everything incorrectly, because there we saw that if one of them wanted to climb a tree, he would climb the ladder first before leaning it against the tree.
Or, a man asks to borrow some money: after that I asked him where he was living, and he replied that he was inside a bush which nobody could trace.
- MJ's review lists some of the other great bizarre chapter titles, but my favourite was this (aided and abetted across decades by echoing Bridget Jones' famous pronoun-elisions): AFRAID OF TOUCHING TERRIBLE CREATURES IN BAG
This new edition has an excellent introduction by Wole Soykina that, to my mind, clears up points some earlier GR reviewers seem to have been scratching around for. Discussing the initial negative reception of the book, Soyinka mentions "dismissal and condescension" in Britain, and Nigerian concerns that it pandered to ideas of "uneducated colonials" - but in many ways, Dylan Thomas' enthusiasm for the book made other critics and writers take a second look (he considers it needed to be a Celt, not an Englishman, who'd get it, being more anti-establishment and with a closer connection to fantasy and myth).
What an imaginative rupture of spelling, to have turned a negative association into a thing of acceptance, if not exactly approval. Not ‘drunkard’ but – ‘drinkard’. Difficult to damn ‘drinkinness’ with the same moralistic fervour as drunkenness. The social opprobrium attached to the grammar-strict word is dissipated and the anti-hero is accepted as a first-rate raconteur. The title then sets the pattern for a narrative of weird encounters. Tutuola was not shut off from the ‘correct’ usage of the English language; he simply chose to invent his own tongue, festooned with uproarious images, turning it into a logical vehicle of the colonial neither-nor (or all-comer) environment. This was a polyglot proletariat... Tutuola intuitively realised that the more common ‘broken English’, or patois, would not suffice to capture the sounds of such a community – a world that was too realistic to be liminal, too paranormal to be realistic, each segment intersecting with others according to its own laws.
There are inevitably various bits and pieces in reviews characterising the book as quintessentially African, or primitivist or something. But [whilst knowing not much at all about Yoruba, or African cultures in general, and also seeing a universality in its folktaleness, reminiscent of myth-based stories from and about elsewhere] I'd say this is quintessentially African like Mark E. Smith's songs are quintessentially Northern English. That's definitely there, part of the spirit of the exercise, but the main thing is actually this surreal genius doing strange things with language and images and ideas, things that could look simple and crazy but are actually very clever indeed.
(read & reviewed Sept 2015; the review on Goodreads.)
A psychedelic quest as mindbending as Yellow Submarine the film, but written fifteen years earlier and thousands of miles away.
A myth told (unusually) in the first-person by a trickster-god-slash-Herculean-hero, with a Taoist-fresh voice like a tarot Fool.
Whilst, thanks to one or two other people on Goodreads, I'd already figured that The Palm Wine Drinkard was a book to read because it's fun and interesting and strange - and not [just] in aid of wholemeal-sackcloth reasons like diversity quotas, with which much of the internet pushes/afflicts fiction from African countries - I didn't expect it to like it quite this much, or that I'd find it so funny.
Sense of humour is personal, yes, and no-one else has tagged this book as humour - but here it was one of those works during which one feel laughter bubbling under the surface most of the time [except during two or three brutal scenes], then every now and again an audible fit of the giggles erupts. Out of context, without the tone and build-up, it's probably not clear why that particular phrase did it.
- Some of the humour might run on the contradictions of conjunctions and other small words - like a child might write (many bizarre sequences of 'what happened' and less of how people thought and felt), or, yes, like a drunk person might say, or a transcript of conversation, where sense chenges slightly as you go along. e.g. because he was very clever and smart as he was only a Skull and he could jump a mile to the second
- Scenes that can be read as if they're satirising folktales because of the ridiculously convenient timing: for example someone changes into an animal and overhears a conversation at exactly the right point to hear what they needed. Not like they just missed it, or had to hang around for nine hours waiting. Dunno what the intention was, but it worked to read them as knowing: the naivety of the voice is perfect, yet it's all so well constructed.
- There is a lot of absurdity, but perhaps you have to be there, reading the whole book, to really laugh: These unknown creatures were doing everything incorrectly, because there we saw that if one of them wanted to climb a tree, he would climb the ladder first before leaning it against the tree.
Or, a man asks to borrow some money: after that I asked him where he was living, and he replied that he was inside a bush which nobody could trace.
- MJ's review lists some of the other great bizarre chapter titles, but my favourite was this (aided and abetted across decades by echoing Bridget Jones' famous pronoun-elisions): AFRAID OF TOUCHING TERRIBLE CREATURES IN BAG
This new edition has an excellent introduction by Wole Soykina that, to my mind, clears up points some earlier GR reviewers seem to have been scratching around for. Discussing the initial negative reception of the book, Soyinka mentions "dismissal and condescension" in Britain, and Nigerian concerns that it pandered to ideas of "uneducated colonials" - but in many ways, Dylan Thomas' enthusiasm for the book made other critics and writers take a second look (he considers it needed to be a Celt, not an Englishman, who'd get it, being more anti-establishment and with a closer connection to fantasy and myth).
What an imaginative rupture of spelling, to have turned a negative association into a thing of acceptance, if not exactly approval. Not ‘drunkard’ but – ‘drinkard’. Difficult to damn ‘drinkinness’ with the same moralistic fervour as drunkenness. The social opprobrium attached to the grammar-strict word is dissipated and the anti-hero is accepted as a first-rate raconteur. The title then sets the pattern for a narrative of weird encounters. Tutuola was not shut off from the ‘correct’ usage of the English language; he simply chose to invent his own tongue, festooned with uproarious images, turning it into a logical vehicle of the colonial neither-nor (or all-comer) environment. This was a polyglot proletariat... Tutuola intuitively realised that the more common ‘broken English’, or patois, would not suffice to capture the sounds of such a community – a world that was too realistic to be liminal, too paranormal to be realistic, each segment intersecting with others according to its own laws.
There are inevitably various bits and pieces in reviews characterising the book as quintessentially African, or primitivist or something. But [whilst knowing not much at all about Yoruba, or African cultures in general, and also seeing a universality in its folktaleness, reminiscent of myth-based stories from and about elsewhere] I'd say this is quintessentially African like Mark E. Smith's songs are quintessentially Northern English. That's definitely there, part of the spirit of the exercise, but the main thing is actually this surreal genius doing strange things with language and images and ideas, things that could look simple and crazy but are actually very clever indeed.
(read & reviewed Sept 2015; the review on Goodreads.)
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