booklit

In 1958 Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart, the novel that helped usher in a new wave of African literature. Until that point literature concerning African had been written by European colonials, and was rife with derogatory depictions of African people and their varied cultures. With the contributions of Camara Laye, Amos Tutuola, and Chinua Achebe, amongst others, there came a rebellion of sorts - the African novel, going against “an age-old practice: the colonization of one people’s story by another.”

African literature is the subject of Home And Exile (2001),  a gathering of three lectures Achebe gave to an audience at Harvard University in 1998. Across these he uses his podium to to discuss the effect of colonialism on African letters and the need for balance. Of particular interest are the autobiographical elements peppered throughout, which give insights into Achebe’s early life in Nigeria and the beginnings of his adult life as a writer.

Achebe starts with his own people, the Igbo. He dismisses the notion that, in numbering over ten million, they can be a tribe by dictionary definition. He finds nation fits better, acknowledging that it’s not a perfect fit. In describing the Igbo culture, a culture of stories, he finds room to open up the differences wrought by colonialism, impressing upon the reader a little tale about a meeting of animals where the chicken, instead attending to a personal matter, is voted man’s primary sacrificial animal in his absence. It’s a fitting parallel with the native in colonial African literature whereby a portrait of the continent has been drawn up by outsiders, at least as far back as 1561, when John Lok, writing of his voyage to West Africa, describes Africans as:

…a people of beastly living, without a God, lawe, religion … whose women are common for they contract no matrimonie, neither have respect to chastitie … whose inhabitants dwell in caves and dennes: for these are their houses, and the flesh of serpents their meat as writeth Plinie and Diodorus Siculus. They have no speach, but rather a grinning and chattering. There are also people without heads, having their eyes and mouths in their breasts.

Compound that with centuries of unfair writing and you get to a moment in a Nigerian school when, having read Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson, about a young Nigerian, it strikes as being superficial:

It was a landmark rebellion. Here was a whole class of young Nigerian students, among the brightest of their generation, united in their view of a book of English fiction in complete opposition to their English teacher, who was moreover backed by the authority of metropolitan critical judgment.

In talking of colonial literature, Achebe understands the treatment of African people as a way of justifying colonialism and the slave trade it produced, citing works by the likes of the aforementioned Cary, Joseph Conrad, and, especially, Elspeth Huxley. V.S. Naipaul, for whom much was made of his nastiness in Patrick French’s authorised biography earlier in the year, is also lambasted for his ignorant portrayal of Africa in A Bend In The River.

Although she’s not named, Buchi Emecheta, also gets a notable mention: not for her portrayal of Africa, but for going in the opposite direction. Having moved to London to pursue her writing career, she is quoted on the subject of African fiction and the dilution of her Africanness. (”After reading the first page you tell yourself you are plodding. But when you are reading the same thing written by an English person who lives here you find you are enjoying it because the language is so academic, so perfect.”) This notion of going in the opposite directon echoes an account opening the book of Achebe’s first ride in a car, in which he was seated so as to watch the road behind. It’s something he returns to in the third lecture, given that he, like Emecheta, no longer lives in Nigeria:

People have sometimes asked me if I have thought of writing a novel about America since I have now been living here for some years. My answer has always been “No, I don’t think so.” Actually, living in America for some years is not the only reason for writing a novel on it. Kafka wrote such a novel without leaving Prague. No, my reason is that America has enough novelists writing about her, and Nigeria too few.

Achebe’s focus now, unlike the child looking back, is squarely on the road ahead for Africa and its literature, noting his anxiety over “what remains to be done, in Africa and in the world at large”. From his podium he calls for writers to remain at home and write about it, to post their manuscripts rather than go overseas and risk dilution. Only with the right people contributing their own stories can literature find the necessary balance be made that will lead to a universal civilisation.

On literature he calls for a fair appraisal of writers’ work, comparing Dylan Thomas’ review of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard to Huxley’s, wherein Thomas praises it for its language, Huxley uses the opportunity to take a broad swipe at African art (”It is possessed by spirits and the spirits are malign.”) Regardless of unfair treatments, Achebe notes that to read them:

…is the strongest vote of confidence we can give our writers and their work - to put them on notice that we will go to their offering for wholesome pleasure and insight, and not a rehash of old stereotypes which gained currency long ago in the slave trade and poisoned, perhaps forever, the wellsprings of our common humanity.

That Achebe covers so much ground in just over a hundred pages shows a highly concentrated approach to African literature. Those seeking a true autobiography will not find it here, given that it only touches on his early years, but what it does provide is an interesting insight into Achebe’s mind, with him pointing out the little details that have made him the influential writer that he is today, home and away.

Open Letter Books, based in the University of Rochester, have been blogging away at Three Percent for over a year now, and last month they finally launched their first title: Nobody’s Home by Dubravka Ugrešić (2005). What makes Open Letter special is that they will explicitly only publish works in translation. I’ve been interested in their forthcoming output for a while now and have deliberately held off buying Nobody’s Home, published last year in the United Kingdom by Telegram Books, because I never really liked the cover.

So, first a few words on this edition. It’s a hardback, the image and text printed straight on as there’s no dust jacket. It’s always good to see a bit of cover kudos for the translator - Ellen Elias-Bursac, translating from the Croatian - and the book doesn’t let us down here. Being someone who likes a bit of uniformity to their books, I’ll be looking forward to seeing how other titles from Open Letter stand together.

But to the book, and as is clearly stated on the cover, Nobody’s Home is a collection of essays, split into five sections. The first, each no more than two or three pages, are, as Ugrešić says in the afterword, a series of feuilletons written between 1998 and 2000 for a column for the Swiss newspaper Die Weltwoche. Others, longer in scope, are taken from commissioned works, appearing in the likes of Polish newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza and British quarterly The Drawbridge

Ugrešić’s main topics are identity, nationality, and the global marketplace. It should make sense - her lifestyle is peripatetic, her nationality polymorphous:

Ten years ago I held a Yugoslav passport, with its soft, pliable, dark red cover. I was a Yugoslav writer. Then the war came, and the Croats, without so much as a by your leave, shoved a blue Croation passport at me…Again I hold a passport with a soft, pliable, dark red cover, a Dutch passport. Will this new passport make me a Dutch writer? I doubt it.

The fueilletons that open the book provide a suitable introduction to the author’s style. Warm with humour, they are filled with anecdotes and, with permissable license, overstatements on all manner of topics, typically leading into wider consideration. While talking about an expensive suitcase she leads into a quick discussion on exile (”The only way exiles are able to leave trauma behind is not to leave it behind at all, but to live it as a permanent state…”) and nostalgic for the days when people were famous for, you know, doing something, she laments the rise of the celeb (”A celeb is an empty screen onto which the rest of the world projects its meaning. The celeb is a cultural text, an artifact of mass culture.”) .

In the longer pieces,  Ugrešić finds space to set out her stall and explore her observations of Amsterdam, her adopted home, or reflecting on her experiences on the Literature Express in 2000, a train journey taken by many writers throughout Europe. Amongst these longer considerations are Opium, a piece on how celebrities, with their (ghostwritten) memoirs are the prophets of the day, and one of the more memorable essays in Nobody’s Home: What is European About European Literature? In this the author’s passion is evident at her dislike of national tags:

When my first novel was published in England, a critic finished his review with the question: But still, is this what we need? Only later did I realize what the critic’s sentence had meant. I hadn’t noticed there was a label trailing along behind me as I traveled: Made in the Balkans.

In fact, it really annoys her:

The label is a fundamental assumption of the outdated institutions of national literatures, but also for the modern literary marketplace. Because ethnic identity is a tried and true sales formula which has propelled many writers from the periphery - for the right literary reasons or the wrong ones - into the global literary marketplace. The market always needs a Bulgarian, a Serb, a Croat, an Albanian. But only one. Two max. A surfeit is, naturally, confusing.

It’s an understandable ire, especially given some of the examples she cites about authors born here, living there, speaking this, that, and the other. How can you truly pin them down when even the literary marketplace has gone global? Transnational literature, she concedes, may be the way forward - a catch-all term for those writers, like her, are everywhere and nowhere.

The notion of writers flowing this way is only a small part of a wider picture, too. In other essays Ugrešić tackles the East meets West nature of Europe, with westerners buying up cheap property in Croatia and Bulgaria, with those going the other way, in search of employment, be it migrant works by free will or women, trafficked. While it all may seem serious, there are many moments of humour to be had, such as this one in reference to the new European bogeyman:

I propose that a statue be raised to the Polish plumber in many European cities. Why? Because the Polish plumber is the first victim of European unification, and, particularly of European expansion. Since everyone speaks of the Polish plumber  with such fear and loathing - outstripping even the legendary hatred of the Roma - the statue should consist only of a pedestal. And on that pedestal should be the words: Statue to the Unknown Polish Plumber.

From an image of Vladimir Putin kissing a fish in another essay, Ugrešić notes the difference between a totalitarian Moscow (”…the less you said about yourself, the thinner the police files would be.”) and the world of today, where everyone is rushing to fill their files, chasing that Warholian fifteen minutes. You’d think we’d know the Polish plumber to see. But as she notes, it’s a media paradox:

The paradox is: the more we eat, the hungrier we are. The more opportunities we have to inscribe our name on the map of the world, the greater the fear of disappearing. The more traces we leave behind us, the faster these traces are erased. The more books we publish, the quicker they are forgotten; the more movies we watch, the less able we are to remember what they were called.

Perhaps that’s why Open Letter are only publishing twelve books a year. That they may not be forgotten so fast. As the inaugural title, Nobody’s Home is an interesting choice for the American publisher, not least because it’s a collection of essays. But in that it introduces a whole other continent and the changes it’s currently undergoing to an American audience, and is written, for the most part, in a witty, easygoing style, it may just prove an ideal grounding for those who subscribe to later releases.

Although it was his first novel, Vladimir Nabokov’s Mary (1926) was not translated until 1970, and one can well imagine the author peering over translator Michael Glenny’s shoulder as he rendered the Russian into English, suggesting changes here, le mot juste there. Either way, it all comes down to an apprentice piece by Nabokov that serves to demonstrate the early development of one of his major themes in later works: memory.

Less tricksy than later works, Mary is an extremely tight narrative centred around Lev Glebovich Ganin, a Russian émigré, uprooted by the revolution, currently living in a Berlin pension. Stuck in Berlin, and similarly stuck in a dull relationship, he spends his time dreaming of escape, of moving on with his life. All around him, also resident in the pension, are a number of fellow Russians, similarly displaced, who act as cyphers to Ganin’s predicament, while still showing enough character to be strong in their own right.

Of these residents, Aleksey Ivanovich Alfyorov provides the spark of the novel when one day he shows a photograph of his wife, Mary, to Ganin, who immediately recognises her as his lost love from many years before. And with the revelation that she is due to arrive in Berlin on Saturday, Ganin becomes preoccupied with his past with Mary, convincing himself that she may still be in love with him.

While Ganin’s memories recall the ealier time, his idea of what happened would seem to colour the reality, as in one scene where she submits herself so easily that one can’t suspect element of fantasy:

‘I am yours,’ she said, ‘do what you like with me.’

Like his country - a past irretrievable; no future in sight - Ganin’s state of flux allows him to find comfort in his recollections of Mary, and he finds himself delving so deep that the delights of the past are much stronger than the reality of the present:

It was not simply reminiscence but a life that was much more real, much more intense than the life lived by his shadow in Berlin. It was a marvelous romance that developed with genuine, tender care.

That Mary is only a few days away in arriving to see her husband, so Ganin spends those days idly dreaming of her. It would seem from all that happened between them there was never a dull moment. And if there was, Ganin won’t let it cloud his vision:

And although his affair with Mary in those far-off days had lasted not just for three days, not for a week but for much longer, he did not feel any discrepancy between actual time and that other time in which he relived the past, since his memory did not take account of every moment and skipped over the blank unmemorable stretches, only illuminating those connected with Mary. Thus no discrepancy existed between the course of life past and life present.

With Ganin having trapped himself in the past, it therefore seems appropriate that he should, in the drab pension, be equally trapped. Other residents, such as the elderly poet, Podtyagin - who can’t return to Russia and whose French visa proves consistently problematic - find themselves similarly static.

Where Mary comes alive most is in Nabokov’s descriptive ability and the musings on memory. Not reaching the heights of Lolita - or, indeed, coming close - it comes down to what the author chooses to show. In one scene Ganin returns to his childhood, the brightness of the details coming to the fore, accompanied by nostalgia, and the notion of what was lost then comes back, once more, to Mary:

‘And where is it all now?’ mused Ganin. ‘Where is the happiness, the sunshine, where are those thick skittles wood which crashed and bounced so nicely, where is my bicycle with the low handlebars and the big gear? It seems there’s a law which says that nothing ever vanishes, that matter is indestructible; therefore the chips from my skittles and the spokes of my bicycle still exist somewhere to this day. The pity of it is that I’ll never find them again - never.

All that Ganin can hope for is to meet Mary once more and for them to run off together, to France, and continue their lives there. The only problem is that her husband is still very much on the scene. That, and the girl of his past is a malleable, comforting image compared to whoever she could be today. The ultimate joy is the ticking down to Saturday and Mary’s arrival, leaving a delicious question mark over Ganin’s head and the reality of the remembered relationship.

When it comes to choosing a book there are all manner of things that can - and do - influence my choices. An interesting cover is one such way to grab my attention, as is an alluring title. And then there’s the matter of my ongoing mission to discover new writers. Of those three, Arto Paasilinna’s The Howling Miller (1981) ticks each box - and so it was a dead cert to be read. And the sooner the better.

Set in post-war Finland, a man named Gunnar Huttunen (”as lean as he was tall”) arrives in a rural village and takes control of the local mill, rundown due to the war, and restores it to past glories. For this the villagers are happy to have him and, of an evening, he proves great company with his ability to mimic animals - cranes, bears, elks - but this all changes when, prone to mood swings, he finds a release in howling “from dusk until the early hours and, if it were carried on the wind, every dog for miles around would answer his desolate cry.”

And this is just the opening pages, to which the villagers react by deciding that, since he won’t conform with their wishes, he must be mad. It’s not long, then, before the local doctor has officially certified him and he’s transferred to “the loony bin” from which, with the help of an inmate, he soon escapes. What then plays out is an extraordinary conflict between Huttunen and the people of the village as they try to out him from the woods in which he hides in order to return him to the asylum. As the hunt for Huttenun escalates in scale, all he has to side with him are the local postman - also the local drunk - and Sanelma Käyrämö, his girlfriend who, because of his madness, isn’t quite willing to settle down lest they “have a baby, the mad child of a mad man.”

It’s a riotous novel, full of deadpan humour told in a comic style that, as the opening paragraph suggests, comes across like a fable, throwing in some period references:

Soon after the wars, a tall fellow appeared in the canton who said his name was Gunnar Huttunen. unlike most of the drifters who came up from the south, he didn’t go to the forestry department looking for work digging ditches, but bought the old mill on the Suukoski rapids of the Kemijoki River. This was judged to be a hare-brained scheme, since, having stood idle since the 1930s, the mill had fallen into a state of extreme dilapidation.

If I were to have any complaint of The Howling Miller it’s only that the translation felt adequate and nothing more, coming as it did from Finnish via a French translation, an approach I felt similarly lacking in Ismail Kadare’s Spring Flowers, Spring Frost. There’s always that sense something gets lost in translation, but one wonders what gets lost in translation of the translation. Certainly not the humour or the tone, in this case. But Paasilinna’s other novel currently translated to English, The Year Of The Hare is direct from Finnish. So why not this?

But that’s a small grumble as the gist of the novel is still there and it’s enjoyable, maintaining interest all the way through, the narrative never waning, as it winds its way through themes of persecution, corruption, and madness with more subtle content concerning agrarian principles, demonstrating Paasilinna’s seeming love of nature. The Howling Miller, as a read, has worthwhile concerns to explore but here there are no answers - or attempts to assert opinion - here; just a straightforward tale that may just have you howling too.

With the Man Booker 2007 being over, and Self Help (Pravda, to US readers) long since fallen from the competition I approached Edward Docx’s second novel with indifference. The cover, being as basic as it is, didn’t scream out to be read and at over five hundred pages I wasn’t exactly looking forward to ploughing through it. I’m glad I did, if only for completism as regards my (unenforcable) pledge to read all thirteen longlisted titles. But I’m left to leave this novel the same way in which I came to it: indifferent.

Set in varying stages across London, Paris, and St Petersburg, it tells the story of the Glover family, scattered as far afield as the story itself. There’s the twins, Gabriel and Isabella, in London and New York, respectively. Over in Paris is their estranged father, Nicholas. And, in St Petersburg, the twins’ mother, Maria. Also skulking about in the storyline is a Russian named Arkady Artamenkov, for whom life has been spent growing up in orphanages.

With all these characters Self Help takes a serious number of pages just to introduce them and it does so using with the predicament that Maria has died. And so it goes that these scattered players come to look at their lives, make plans - sometimes, even, make changes - and come together to find that:

…when a parent passes away, the family demons do not retreat, but rise from their sarcophagi instead, and move out across the borders of the mind…

Gabriel has two women in his life, Isabella is prone to giving up on things - jobs, relationships - at a whim, and Nicholas, since separating with Maria ten years previous, has been enjoying a bi-curious and lavish lifestyle. And Arkady? Well, even the dead have secrets.

The storyline, for the most part, is enjoyable and believable; the dialogue between similarly. There are occasional flashbacks given chapters in their own right to fill in history - and there’s even more backstory when attempting to flesh out minor characters. Ultimately, given all the strands making up this story, Docx does a fine job of seeing them all to a logical and apt conclusion with some fine plotting.

But my biggest problem with Self Help was Docx’s writing. There’s no doubt skill there but he likes to indulge - strain, sometimes - in over elaborate metaphors and similes:

The naked body of this other human being entranced him, engrossed him, bewitched him like a river god rising in vapours of jasmine and myrrh with a different violin sonata for each of his senses.

And, when not indulging, Docx has the habit of thickly layering his metaphors, one atop the other, as if asking the reader to pick whatever suits them best. A better writer would pick the most illustrative example, discard the others, and move on. Here, the many instances of said deed pad out the novel way beyond necessity. Further padding comes by way of overlong meditations and an annoying stylistic tic that frequently sees the author either repeat or run through all permutations of a phrase. But there are many occasions when the writing works, to capture the sense of a place, such as a Russian bar where :

…there were no drinks on display save single example cans or bottles of the range available - one Russian beer, one Polish beer, vodka, vodka, vodka, cheap, cheaper, cheapest - each standing strangely spaced across the solitary shelf.

While none of the characters in Self Help are likeable, their story is interesting enough although there was one character, an Englishman living in St Petersburg, who felt extraneous - as if he were only there to help Arkady move the plot forward. There’s a suspicion that Gabriel may be a cipher for Docx himself, the twin of Isabella being there to balance whatever history he’s working out - no doubt a bad father. It makes the writing of Self Help seem cathartic compared to the Self Help! (note the exclamation mark) magazine that Gabriel works on.

Given its length and serial verbosity, it’s easy to see why Self Help didn’t make it to the eventual shortlist. While it’s a hard hitting story of identity, family, and relationships touching upon exile, drug addiction, and career disatisfaction, its cast of selfish bourgeoisie types makes it hard to give a damn about them. Unless that’s your thing then you’re better off helping yourself to something other than Self Help.

The joy of browsing book shops tends to lead to serendipitous finds and recently I happened across I Could Read The Sky by Timothy O’Grady and Steve Pyke. Now, I tend to be wary of fiction authored by more than one person but, on picking it up, was relieved to find that it was a collaboration between an author and a photographer. It had also, as the cover proudly boasted, won the Encore Award back in 1998. After a quick flick through and a skim of the blurb I knew I wanted it. So I had it.

I Could Read The Sky is told by an Irish emigrant, tucked away in Kentish Town, living his twilight years. Like many before him, including his father, he left Ireland to come to England to make his fortune. But when he gets there the jobs never last and he finds himself chasing work across the land - in fields, in building sites - until he finally arrives in London. All he has is his accordion and his dreams of love to keep the loneliness at bay.

While the narrator tells us his story, the text is accompanied by a series of photographs by Steve Pyke. These range in subject from solemn landscapes to still lifes to portraits of lived-in faces. Their black and white nature encourages reflection, awards them gravitas. Although they are unrelated to the story, they follow the same path, telling of local life in rural Ireland before moving on to depict the lives of emigrants, capturing the loneliness that accompanies it. As the narrator says at the beginning, “I have sounds and pictures but they flit and crash before I can get them.” These pictures provide what he can’t find words to say.

(photos: © Steve Pyke)

O’Grady gives his narrator’s voice a light poetic touch, his skill for ventriloquism picking up Irish slang and grammatical nuances. It was for this that I was surprised to learn that O’Grady was American, although his time in Ireland will surely have trained his ear. And the other diaspora running through this novel are also painted with the subtlest of strokes:

The last time I saw Dan he was coming up from the quay with two lobster pots and the wind nearly blowing him back into the sea.

For the many Irish living in post-war England the work is manual and often dries up, forcing them to continually move around, their stories shared from Glasgow to London. Our narrator’s first job on landing in Liverpool is working in a potato field:

It’s November and coming out from under the covers in the morning is like entering the cold sea, but the work is so fierce that we have our shirts off by mid-morning. The field is all mud. There’s mud on my trousers, mud on the sack and mud up my arms. There’s mud gone down into my boots. If I hold a potato in my hand I can make no sense of it. I try to think of a piece of it buttered and salted at the end of a fork. But I can’t.

As life moves on he finds himself in London, just another nameless man responsible for building up the city:

There are bricks from all the years that make up the walls. When I pass them I try to think of the men who put them there. Who told them where to place the bricks? What way did they shave? What was the drink they liked the best? I fall in among them and among the ages of the city.

While I Could Read The Sky follows the story of one exile, doing for the Irish what Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners did for West Indians, it is the story of many emigrants the world over. A snapshot of the lonely, of what it means to be away from all that you love. It aches with experience: of growing up, of grief, of love, of death.

The collaboration between O’Grady and Pyke - echoing that of James Agee and Walker Evans in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men - ensures a work of art that accurately captures the exile’s experience through prose and photography. It’s a slim volume but that’s only because each picture is ample replacement for a thousand words. And while our narrator could read the sky, I’m certain to read this again.