March 2023 – David's Book World
David Hebblethwaite
David's Book World
Well, this turned out to be quite a page-turner. From one angle, that’s not so surprising, as there’s plenty of suspense in the set-up. In rural France, artist Christine has been receiving threatening letters. Her neighbour Patrice is getting ready to celebrate his wife Marion’s fortieth birthday. But some mysterious figures are watching, waiting to intrude on the party.

In other ways, The Birthday Party might seem the opposite of a page-turner, because it’s slowly paced and densely written. For example, here is Patrice trying not to contemplate that Marion may be unhappy in their relationship:

…he doesn’t think to himself that his wife goes out of her way to come home late, as though trying to avoid the moment where it’s the three of them together, no, he pushes away this thought that sometimes tries to force its way past the barrier he’s built up against it, a fraction of a second every night, sometimes more than a second, a few seconds, then, when the thought gets loose and spreads across his mind, but each time he rejects this bad, this acid idea that would have Marion go out of her way to come home as late as possible, no, that’s not true…

translation from french by daniel levin becker

I love the rhythm of this writing, a fine translation. Mauvignier’s prose combines this constant flow of interiority with sudden interruptions of action, and this technique is what makes the novel so propulsive for me. There are secrets and turns throughout, right up to the end – and we’re kept so close to the characters, too.

Book published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Click here to read my other posts on the 2023 International Booker Prize.

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Now I’m moving on to the first novel translated from Tamil to receive an International Booker nod. The last book of Perumal Murugan’s that I read was the fable-like The Story of a Goat. Pyre takes more of a realist tone, yet still has heightened aspects of its own.

The novel begins with a couple, Saroja and Kumaresan, getting off the bus:

Beyond the tamarind trees that lined the road, all they could see were vast expanses of arid land. There were no houses anywhere in sight. With each searing gust of wind, the white summer heat spread over everything as if white saris had been flung across the sky. There was not a soul on the road. Even the birds were silent. Just an action dryness, singed by the heat, hung in the air. Saroja hesitated to venture into that inhospitable space.

translation from tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan

Straight away, we have a vivid sense of place, and the feeling that all is not going to be well. Saroja and Kumaresan met and fell in love in her home town, where Kumaresan had gone for work. Now married, they have come to live in his village. The problem is, they are of different castes.

Whenever anyone asks about Saroja’s caste, Kumaresan tries to deflect attention by saying she’s of the same caste as him and everyone else in the village. But this is not enough: questions and gossip persist, and haunt the narrative. Murugan never actually specifies whether Saroja is of a higher or lower caste, which is one of the little touches that, for me, contributes to a heightened atmosphere. Murugan builds up the tension over where this will go, to a striking ending.

Book published by Pushkin Press.

Click here to read my other posts on the 2023 International Booker Prize.

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My next stop on this year’s International Booker journey is Norway, where we meet Johanna. She’s estranged from her family, having left behind them and their plans for her legal career, to make a life as an artist in the US. They didn’t invite her to her father’s funeral, and she didn’t think of going. Now on the verge of sixty, Johanna has returned to Oslo after almost thirty years, for a retrospective of her work.

Johanna’s thoughts frequently turn to her remaining family: her mother and her sister Ruth. She’s tried calling them, with no answer. Johanna doesn’t even know if her mother is alive, and speculates intensely over what life might be like for her now, what she might be thinking:

Perhaps Mum gets upset merely on hearing my name and so everyone around her avoids saying it. Perhaps Mum feels uneasy every time she hears the name even if it’s just some random Johanna, a skier or a newsreader, the name is mentioned and Mum shudders, Mum is lucky that not many people are called Johanna. Perhaps Mum has succeeded in suppressing unpleasant thoughts about me in her everyday life – she has years of practice – that but then it pops up in a random interviewee on the television whose name is Johanna…

translation from norwegian by Charlotte barslund

That repetition, the rhythm of the translation, all underline Johanna’s level of preoccupation. She has found out her mother’s address, and towards the start of the novel I wanted to say to her: just go there and make contact – whatever has happened, it’s surely better to face it than stay in this cycle of speculation.

Well, that was before Johanna started lurking in her car outside her mother’s home. She finds out that her mother is indeed alive, but doesn’t stop wondering about her. Then, without ever changing the essential tone of the narration, Hjorth transforms our perception of Johanna from a somewhat sympathetic character to one who really isn’t. We start to see why Johanna’s family might want nothing to do with her.

As a character study, I found Is Mother Dead powerful stuff. It’s also an examination of familial relations at a high pitch. Hjorth’s novel has set the standard for the rest of the International Booker longlist, as far as I’m concerned.

Book published by Verso Books.

Click here to read my other posts on the 2023 International Booker Prize.

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At 86, Guadeloupe-born Maryse Condé is the oldest author ever to be longlisted for the International Booker Prize. She says The Gospel According to the New World will be her last book, though it’s my first time reading her. I did wonder whether I was missing out somewhat in terms of not knowing about the themes and concerns across her work that led to this point, but I enjoyed my time with this book nonetheless.

Condé’s protagonist is Pascal, who is born in Martinique to a woman named Maya. Burdened by dreams that say her son will change the world, Maya abandons him at Easter, leaving him at the home of a couple who own a nursery (for plants) called the Garden of Eden.

Pascal’s life is then a parody of the gospels. He heads off in search of his origins , with rumours following him that he might be a new son of God. There are disciples, not-so-miraculous miracles, even a strange figure who might be an angel.

With everything he sees going on, Pascal begins to wonder: if he is to be a messiah, what is he “expected to do with this world streaked with bomb attacks and scarred with violence?” Then again, maybe the mantle of saviour doesn’t suit him anyway. Pascal’s story is told in a storyteller’s voice, the translation capturing that sense of truth in imagination.

Published by World Editions.

Click here to read my other posts on the 2023 International Booker Prize.

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For ten years now I’ve been part of the Shadow Panel reading along with the International Booker Prize (and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize before it). Over that time, my reading horizons have broadened considerably, and the Shadow Panel played a key part in that. I always look forward to this time of year.

The 2023 longlist was announced on Tuesday, and here it is:

Ninth Building by Zou Jingzhi, translated from Chinese by Jeremy Tiang (Honford Star)

A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding by Amanda Svensson, translated from Swedish by Nichola Smalley (Scribe UK)

Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel, translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey (Fitzcarraldo Editions)

Pyre by Perumal Murugan, translated from Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan (Pushkin Press)

While We Were Dreaming by Clemens Meyer, translated from German by Katy Derbyshire (Fitzcarraldo Editions)

The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier, translated from French by Daniel Levin Becker (Fitzcarraldo Editions)

Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv by Andrey Kurkov, translated from Russian by Reuben Woolley (MacLehose Press)

Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth, translated from Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund (Verso)

Standing Heavy by GauZ’, translated from French by Frank Wynne (MacLehose Press)

Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

The Gospel According to the New World by Maryse Condé, translated from French by Richard Philcox (World Editions)

Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan, translated from Korean by Chi-Young Kim (Europa Editions)

Boulder by Eva Baltasar, translated from Catalan by Julia Sanches (And Other Stories)

So far, I’ve only read two of them (both striking pieces of work, in very different ways), so there is a lot to get through in the weeks ahead. I will try my best to read and review as much as I can, because I am intrigued by this list.

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Today I’m joining the blog tour for this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize, which is awarded to writers in English who are aged under forty. This post looks at one of the longlisted titles, Losing the Plot, the second novel by Derek Owusu.

Losing the Plot is inspired by the journey of Owusu’s mother from Ghana to the UK. We get a sense of the impetus for this book from its epilogue, in which the narrator Kwesi conducts a “factless interview” with his mother – factless because she’s reluctant to answer his questions about her life in any sort of detail.

This means that Kwesi has to stretch his imagination in writing about his mother, leading to an account that’s fragmented and impressionistic, shifting between prose and poetry. Through this, there is a keen sense of the displacement felt by Kwesi’s mother. For instance:

She lifts her head, towel for tresses, watches as snakes of steam dance and fight to rise and fall,

condensing, dripping, drops dying and spreading,

reminding her tears cling to the face to live a little longer.

She brushes her teeth out of time with her reflection,

watches suds touch the porcelain prefering the scrub and ease of a chewing stick.

One striking aspect of Losing the Plot is its use of marginal notes. The mother’s account includes words and phrases in Twi, which come with their own sidenotes. Rather than provide a direct translation, Kwesi uses these notes to give his own observations. For example, one note begins like this:

Honestly, certain insults can’t even be translated and put into context that makes sense, you just have to feel the vim of the insult and know it’s devastating and it’s all gonna end with a scrap. Bro, I know this because I’ve seen it with my own eyes. She’s bare small so I didn’t even clock she can fight.

So, it seems the sidenotes are there not so much to open a door for the reader, as to help Kwesi bring himself closer to the story he’s trying to tell. In reading Losing the Plot, we are confronted by the limits of what we can and can’t know about another person’s life. It also becomes clear that there is an urgent reason for this story to be told, and together these help give Owusu’s novel its power.

Book published by Canongate. The shortlist for this year’s Dylan Thomas Prize will be announced on 23 March, with the winner to follow on 11 May.

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The (unnamed) narrator of Eva Aldea’s debut novel admires her greyhounds while they’re chasing after squirrels:

…it is the flutter of a furry tail above the grass that sets them off, from still to leaping in no time at all, paws thundering like hooves on the ground – she loves that sound, feels it in her chest through her own feet. She loves the sight of their bodies in flight, the double suspension rotary gallop, only sighthounds and cheetahs hunt by this fastest and most explosive of gaits, where the body is in touch with the ground only a quarter of the time. The rest is spent flying.

In this opening scene, one of the dogs has got lucky, and the woman has to put the squirrel out of its misery. This is a gruesome little episode that doesn’t fit neatly into the woman’s life as a university lecturer. It sets the tone for a novel that explores what darkness might lurk beneath the everyday.

In the main part of the novel, the woman’s banker husband has moved them from London to Singapore. At first, it seems as though life there will be idyllic, but the shortcomings soon become apparent. It’s too hot even for the dogs to enjoy their walks, and the narrator is disconcerted by the distorting effects of globalisation (such as coffee grown nearby, sent halfway across the world to be packaged, then back to Singapore).

The woman essentially ends up as an affluent expat housewife, which is tedious and puts her high up in a hierarchy where she doesn’t want to be. These frustrations lead her to give free rein to her darkest thoughts, and it’s written in a way that blurs the line between reality and imagination. This is what makes Singapore such a striking debut.

Published by Holland House Books.

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