End of year review, 2020

I started my end of year review last year by calling 2019 an annus horribilis.

What a melon!

There is no need to rake over how bloody awful the pandemic has been. The other day someone on Twitter said: “The worst thing about writers is that they think they’re the first person to experience everything they experience”, and I don’t have anything new to say about the year we’ve all lived through. I’m lucky enough to have not gotten ill or to have been in work that’s exposed me to risk; as for most other people, 2020 has just been really exhausting. Let’s hope 2021 is more invigorating – that there are more chances to do things, to see people, to make changes. Now – the reading.

At the beginning of the lockdown, I managed to keep a good habit of reading for an hour or so in the morning in the time that had previously been my commute. Having a read in bed with a tea is much better than reading in the Tube crush, with one eye on getting a seat after Bank. By the summer, my attention span and my drive to work completely packed in. I managed a handful of articles for the blog but really I’ve neglected writing all year, and I’m a bit disappointed. I owe lots of people reviews and I’ve got a shamefully big backlog of Advance Reading Copies to get through. I have still enjoyed dozens of really funny, absorbing and fascinating books this year, and lots of my reading was in preparation for one article or another that I was either too lazy or too overwhelmed to write.

But I think we’ve all earned some slack. So instead, I’m going to view my reading in 2020 as a gigantic pre-reading to all the superb, Witty, Original and Viral (👉👈🥺) content that I’m going to do, I promise, in 2021. You have been warned. And really, I can’t sing the praises enough of the books below. They really have been the highlight of my year.

Books that I loved…and which really deserve reviews

I had a long list of debut titles and new releases that I was hyped to read this year, as well as loads of debuts from 2019 that I was late to the party for. An early favourite was Candace Carty-Williams’ funny, truthful Queenie, which lifted my spirits in January after a rubbish Christmas election. I loved the run-down, almost noir vibe of Elisa Shua Dupin’s Winter in Sokcho, a slim novel translated from French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins. It’s the story of an intelligent, overlooked French-Korean girl working at a guesthouse near the North Korean border in the middle of a bleak winter. An unexpected guest arrives, a French cartoonist determined to cross the border, and they strike up a sort-of-friendship that unfolds with a sly conclusion. The setting is cinematic and striking; I went through this one in two sittings.

Such a Fun Age, Kiley Reid’s sharp satire on race politics in America and the double-standards of liberalism, was entertaining and thought-provoking. It’s 2015 and Emira is a young black woman who works as a babysitter for Alix, a feminist blogger who’s looking forward to helping coordinate Hilary Clinton’s campaign. A white police officer accuses Emira of ‘kidnapping’ Alix’s daughter whilst grocery shopping. Footage of the incident goes viral, leading Alix to feel duty-bound to intervene and ‘help’ Emira in any way she can. But Emira is wary of this help, and Alix has her own reasons for wanting to make friends with a woman she really knows nothing about. I loved how Reid gets inside the heads of her characters, and exposes their prejudices, blind biases and their virtues; she’s also great at building tension, and some of the messy confrontations between Alix, Emira and their friends were priceless.

I finally got around to Girl, Woman, Other, too (another fresh take: Bernadine was totally robbed last year) which for me read like a marvellous state-of-the-nation novel. Although you should rightly shudder at the thought of something like a Brexit novel, Girl, Woman, Other takes on the questions of identity, politics and race that have defined the last few years (although Bernadine Evaristo and lots of other Black writers have been doing this for years anyway). On the day that Brexit has finally passed into law, and in the wake of a year that’s seen mass protests for racial equality, police violence on both sides of the Atlantic and a government that refuses to admit even that institutional racism exists, it’s important to read novels that feel properly, directly political.

One debut that really got in my head was Eliza Clarke’s Boy Parts. I had actually been anticipating Boy Parts for something like seven months before it was published by the inimitable Influx Press this summer, and, unlike basically everything else that you hype up for yourself for that long, Boy Parts was even better than I hoped it’d be. Irina is a 20-something artist in Newcastle who takes explicit photographs of average-looking men that she picks up, who are desperate to please her. She’s been offered a solo show at a gallery in London, just as she’s found a new model: the deliciously naive and gawky checkout boy from Tesco. Irina is really grim – which is hilarious, and following her nasty monologue as she schemes, manipulates and photographs her way around her friends and subjects is like riding a rollercoaster. If you have a strong stomach and a taste for sociopaths, Boy Parts is great fun and a brilliant inversion of the male gaze. I think I’m going to re-read it and write something in the new year. Much To Think About.

Speaking of strong stomachs, I was blown away by Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, a story of black magic and ultraviolence in rural Mexico that unfolds with a hypnotic speed. One memorable tube journey I re-read an opening of a chapter over and over, thinking, how did she do that? In the village of La Matosa, the Witch is dead – her body found mutilated in an irrigation ditch at the height of a boiling, intolerable summer. Melchor writes in breathless paragraphs, with very few breaks or full stops, and as we move between people connected with the Witch and her murder we slowly learn what violence, cruelty and magic have led to her death. I think, objectively, there’s more twisted violence and terrible things in Hurricane Season than anything else I’ve ever read (Blood Meridian has been staring at me from the shelf for years). If you’re a fan of folk horror or True Detective, then get on this. All credit to Sophie Hughes for her excellent translation.

The final, most magical novel I wanted to write about this year was the slim Piranesi, the latest book by Susanna Clarke. At the moment I’m re-reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which is an absolute favourite of mine, and Piranesi doesn’t disappoint: another weird, pretty tale of magic. The House is an endless labyrinth of vast, empty halls filled with thousands of crumbling statues and populated by birds, fish and bones. Piranesi has lived here alone forever, maybe, visited only by the mysterious Other, who wants to unlock and harness the power of the House. Is he a friend or a foe? A melancholy meditation on loneliness, with an abundance of Gothic Wonders. What’s not to love.

Non-fiction

As anyone who saw me before lockdown and my Twitter avi will attest, my January was consumed by Helena Atlee’s The Land Where Lemons Grow. I got this as the ultimate escapism and wholesome content from the wretched mess that was December 2019 and the prospect of another four years of listening to Boris Johnson; how naive I was. The Land Where Lemons came out in 2015: an expert on Italian gardens and culture, Atlee takes us on a surprisingly fascinating and richly interesting tour of Italy and the country’s rich appreciation and culinary heritage surrounding citrus fruits. A nice mix of history and culinary memoir, I especially liked reading about Sicily, where it’s the cold of the mountain air around Etna that makes the blood oranges so…orangey. The Land Where Lemons Grow also prompted me to make some shite gloopy marmalade, and proved my belief, from Umberto Eco, that every subject in the world is fascinating when looked at and written about in the right way.

Another book that fits that mould is Owen Hatherley’s Red Metropolis: Socialism and the Government of London. London – the home of the overpaid and out-of-touch metropolitan liberal elite – is far more complicated and neglected than the tabloids and rural Tories might have you think. In fact, despite the fact that it’s the heart of central government and home of some of the wealthiest people in the country, most Londoners suffer from some of the very worst wealth inequality and housing that a decade of austerity have inflicted upon the UK. Hatherley, an architectural critic and culture editor of Tribune, investigates London’s surprisingly left-wing history, from the decent council housing built by the Greater London Authority to the radical legacy of Red Ken, Boris Johnson’s typical uselessness and what Sadiq Kahn can do to put the city on the right tracks again. Since moving to London, I’ve worked hard to learn as much as I can about our capital and its contradictions, and Red Metropolis has ignited my interest in architecture, council housing, and municipal local socialism. With the Mayoral elections coming in May 2021, we can all do with a more nuanced understanding of our capital city, and the ways that we should govern the entire country better.

Another really important study of social welfare in Britain today that came out in 2020 was Feeding Britain, by Tim Lang, a former policy advisor and currently Professor of Food Studies at City University. The food system in the UK – what food we eat, where it comes from and how sustainably it’s sourced – is in perilously bad shape. We need to rethink how we feed ourselves and how we can make sure that food policy creates an equitable, truly fair society. As Marcus Rashford’s campaigns over the summer have shown, food is about so much more than hunger – it’s about opportunity, and fairness, and only a properly resilient and locally-driven food system will make sure that everyone in Britain eats and lives decently. I have no brain for figures or statistics, but Feeding Britain is replete with diagrams, tables and percentages, and Lang’s straight-speaking, plain prose does a fantastic job of explaining the knotty worlds of food supply and social change. If you want to understand the full impact of austerity and what we can do to make social life fairer and more decent, start with Feeding Britain.

For lighter reading, I can’t recommend more highly Tete-Michel Kpomassie’s An African in Greenland, which I reviewed back in June. A remarkable true tale, An African in Greenland is a young man’s story of how in the 1960s he ran away from his home in Togo, West Africa, and went to live among the Eskimo of Greenland, who welcomed him with open arms. It’s a surprisingly upbeat and innocent story, perfect as we won’t be travelling abroad anytime soon. I also only have good things to say about Brian Dillon’s Suppose A Sentence, from the same publisher as Hurricane Season, which is a series of essays investigating twenty-seven sentences: what makes them brilliant, and how grammar, language and syntax can elevate prose.

Journalism

I’ve been paying more attention this year to which journalists I’m reading and where I’m reading them. One of my favourite stories this year was Tom Lamont’s ‘The invisible city: how a homeless man built a life underground’, about a man who dug a bunker under Hampstead Heath. It totally grabbed my attention and didn’t let me go until I realised I’d lost a whole day I was supposed to be writing something. I religiously read The Guardian‘s Long Reads, but it was a few more months until I realised all my favourite long reads of the past few years – including ‘Speed kills: are police chases out of control?’, and the spellbinding ‘Dulwich Hamlet: the improbable tale of a tiny football club lost its home to developers – and then won it back’ – were all from Tom Lamont. Spend a day or two going through his backlog, you won’t regret it.

Food writing has occupied a lot of my time and reading this year, and Jonathan Nunn’s newsletter Vittles has been a firm friend throughout the year. Nunn, a food writer (who had the great twitter handle of @aadril), started Vittles back in March as a way of covering the anxious, terrible condition that the food world found itself in during the first lockdown – not to mention the troubles it still faces, many of which have been evident long before Covid. Written by chefs, critics and community leaders, you’ll always find something new and different in Vittles – from a guide to foraging in the city to an appreciation post of the UK’s regional chip shop vernacular. You can subscribe for very little, and support the future of good, open food writing.

The Crumbs of One Man’s Year

What is going to be hard about 2021 is that nothing about it is certain. During the first lockdown, you could console yourself with the knowledge that, eventually, the restrictions would be eased and life would start slowly going back to normal. But after the second lockdown, and Christmas being cancelled, and the likelihood of a third lockdown in the next fortnight or so, we don’t even have the security of an end in sight. It was going to last three weeks, then it was going to be over by Christmas, and now we’ll be lucky to go outside next April. Although no one can make the virus less contagious or deadly, there is absolutely no excuse for the way that the government has handled the crisis, and many hundreds of lives, not to mention jobs, businesses and social services, have been lost as a direct result of the current administration. For some reason, many millions of people in Britain refuse to hold the Conservatives responsible for anything they do, and that has to change. Honestly, we just love being miserable too much.

One more book that it’s nearly impossible to characterise: Etty Hillesum’s diary. I’m grateful to a Twitter mutual for making me aware of this book. Published by Persephone under the title An Interrupted Life, Etty was a young Jewish woman living in Amsterdam during the Second World War. She lived on the other side of the city to Anne Frank and had a very different life: a graduate student, she spent most of the first part of the occupation studying Russian, visiting friends and cycling around the canals. When the Nazis began introducing antisemitic laws, Etty bears each humiliation with courage and dignity, more than you can easily conceive. After a German soldier threatens her in the street, Etty is steely calm, channeling her fear into a commitment to bear witness to the horror around her:

I am not easily frightened. Not because I am brave, but because I know that I am dealing with human beings and that I must try as hard as I can to understand everything that anyone ever does…What needs eradicating is the evil in man, not man himself.

Etty’s courage was superhuman, and when the Nazis began rounding up Jewish people in preparation to deport them to the camps in the East, Etty volunteers as a go-between for other Jews who are less well educated and less able to get around the bureaucracy. She does what she can, from inside a camp, to make life more tolerable for her people. Of course that doesn’t save her. Although it sounds bleak, An Interrupted Life made a deep impression on me, and before the pandemic I managed to visit the house where Etty lived in Amsterdam. I don’t want to make a sham connection between what Etty went through and the experience I’ve had of the pandemic: all I can say is, in a year that has been full of frustrations, tragedy, fear and anger, I learnt a lot by reading and thinking about what Etty Hillesum wanted to tell us about her life.

Well there it is – lots of great novels, and fascinating non-fiction. Let’s hope for a better 2021 – it can’t be worse than 2020, right…? (please say right). Exciting, interesting stuff on the horizon.

Searching for sensibility: Brian Dillon’s SUPPOSE A SENTENCE

Great sentences are like earworms: they stick with you, sometimes without consent. I am an inveterate earworm sufferer. If I’m stuck with a song (one day of Northwest Passage is great, three or four days are more than enough) I find the best way to rid myself of it is to listen more closely, to think about the lyrics and the rhythm and try to put my finger on what it’s holding over me.

It’s the same experience if you’ve ever scribbled down a line from a book or a quote from an author. You might not really know why you like the line so much, but you’re still compelled to collect and keep the sentence. If, as Virginia Woolf tells us, words themselves are ‘highly democratic’, believing (amongst themselves) that ‘one word is as good as another’, why are some sentences so much better than others? And how do the writers we idolise pull it off?

As with an earworm, the way to answer these questions is to pay close attention. In his essay on Claire-Louise Bennett from his new book, SUPPOSE A SENTENCE, Brian Dillon talks about the idea of writerly ‘sensibility’ – the thing that distinguishes a writer’s voice and style:

Old-fashioned word, but how else to describe this fog of feelings, attachments and fantasies […] express[ed] so precisely and yet so enigmatically in her prose?

It is this often-intangible quality that Dillon is looking to unpack and introduce to his reader in SUPPOSE A SENTENCE, the thing that turns a good sentence into a welcome earworm, the sort of thing worth copying into and between notebooks and that rewards twelve pages’ close reading. Each of the twenty-seven essays collected in SUPPOSE A SENTENCE examines a single sentence that has stuck with Dillon throughout his time as a reader and a writer.

Some essays stretch to ten or fifteen pages, others cover little more than a page. We move from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, starting with Shakespeare and ending with Anne Boyer. Often they come from a writer’s B-side: we’re read to from John Ruskin’s diary; Joan Didion’s Vogue captions; John Donne’s funeral elegy and Shakespeare’s early drafts. (Even they had howlers.) In some essays, Dillon focuses on a single word choice, or possible word choices, examining the etymology and history of the verb or noun upon which a sentence hinges; in others, he considers how different clauses are weighted and stacked against one another and how this shapes meaning and expression. Dillon is a knowledgeable guide, and alongside the practical criticism his asides about how he came to each author give SUPPOSE A SENTENCE a personal, persuasive tone. Here is an interesting friend talking you through something cool he once read, oh, years back now.

With each sentence acting as a roundabout introduction to a writer, I ended up treating SUPPOSE A SENTENCE as a collection of biographies-in-miniature, a set of potted histories that introduced me to a handful of new writers I’d never heard of and whetted my appetite to finally take a punt on a few others I’ve been neglecting. This was something I enjoyed most about SUPPOSE A SENTENCE, the sense of discovery; I’m grateful for the tip-offs, and I will look out especially for Whitney Balliet and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

More than this, Dillon illustrates how each writer’s prose style typifies their anxieties as writers and the conditions under which they wrote. The extreme rigour of Joan Didion’s editors at Vogue in the 1960s, who pared down her captions to the minimal and often left journalists in tears – ultimately this experience taught her to write well and better. John Ruskin’s cloud-diaries reveal more than anticipated about his mental anguish and the encroaching terror of modernity. Woolf’s thought on illness is etched into the rhythm and grammar of her language. And has anyone ever been so bodied in prose as Norman Mailer when James Baldwin called him “a real sweet ofay cat, but a little frantic”? These sentence crystalise the essence of how great writers write so well, and go some way to illuminate the greatness of their works.

From Trump’s loggorea to the wording of a user license agreement, the language we use matters as much as what we mean to say by it. Looking at how some talented writers have wielded the nuts and bolts of language, Dillon raises compelling questions about where the sentence has been and what we can do with it next. That essay on James Baldwin introduced me to the word ‘ofay’, which I hadn’t heard before. Ofay is an offensive term for white people but, as Dillon reveals, its origins, meaning and the rudeness have never been fixed. Baldwin’s using it to describe (indirecily) Norman Mailer, a witless cultural appropriator of the Afro-American jazz scene, is a brilliant taste of how a writer like Baldwin can break down and remake language and make words do something new and interesting.

These sentences have been collected over a lifetime’s reading, sifted from the hundreds of lines and phrases that Dillon has copied into the A5 commonplace books ‘at home in the hand or on the desk’. It is a novel constraint for an essay collection; Dillon’s earlier collection ESSAYISM (2017) touched on a similar idiosyncrasy in considering how to critically approach, somewhat paradoxically, the tricksome essay form. I was prompted to look back over my own A5 notebooks and see which sentences have stuck with me over the years. I want to give this a go myself. Whose sentences would I choose; whose would you? Dillon surprised himself with who he left out – no Melville, Sebald, Joyce or Burton (‘No Proust – no Proust!), and other writers didn’t make the cut, whether because working on them was too dull or because Dillon felt ‘shamefully, in at least one case, I found I was not up to the task’. But the sentences which did make it into the final manuscript are those worth the time. These are Dillon’s earworms, and SUPPPOSE A SENTENCE is a delightful exercise in taking pleasure in writing and good craft.

Brian Dillon’s SUPPOSE A SENTENCE is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. Buy it from their website or from Foyles or Waterstones.

Travel in lockdown: Tete-Michel Kpomassie’s ‘An African in Greenland’

Very few people have their arrival announced on national radio when they come to a new country. Unless you’re royalty, a celebrity or a wanted murderer, it’s unlikely that anybody would consider your touching-down on a foreign land remotely newsworthy. Yet this was exactly what greeted Tete-Michel Kpomassie when, after eight days at sea from Copenhagen and eight years journeying from his native Togo in the west of Africa, he stepped off a boat in Greenland in the mid-1960s. In those days, crowds gathered at the docks when ships landed because they brought everything that Greenlanders couldn’t get at home: tobacco, coffee, alcohol. Almost nobody standing on the dock had ever seen a black person before – they were stunned. It was only later that Michel learnt that in the capital, Nuuk, they’d broadcast the story of a black man’s arrival in Greenland on the evening radio. He was described as ‘a very tall man with hair like wool’. Michel himself wrote: ‘I had started on a voyage of discovery, only to find that it was I who was being discovered’.

Even more remarkable (for the mid-1960s) is how well the Greenlanders treat Michel – he’s their honoured guest, and by evening the villagers are fighting for who gets to put him up for the foreseeable. Taller than most Greenlanders and Danes by a fair bit, Michel is soon dubbed Mikili – Big Michael – and everyone wants to know him. He is charming, attractive and intelligent, having taught himself at least four languages (and picking up Inuktitut, the language of Inuit peoples, fast). Michel’s lifelong dream had been to visit the Greenlanders in the far north and, against all the odds, his experiences would largely live up to his expectations.

An African in Greenland by Tete-Michel Kpomassie

It feels like a cruel joke that the weather’s been so good for the majority of lockdown. So many bank holidays have gone to waste. Like most people, I reckon, what gives me a lot of solace right now is planning the trips I’ll make when lockdown is over (or rather, when it’s properly safe): the pub, day trip to Brighton, visit to Norfolk seaside, the pub, seeing some friends in Cambridge, the pub…

For escapism there are still travel books, and few are as singularly memorable as An African in Greenland. Every travel book is essentially a story of culture shock, a question of how far the visitor is willing to do as the Romans do. What’s unique about An African in Greenland is that Michel understands Greenland very much through an African upbringing, not a wholly Western one. 

Michel and Alfred. “From the second day of my visit, he called me Uncle”.

Now 79, as a teenager Michel harboured the dream of travelling to Greenland and living among the Eskimos (more properly, Greenlanders or Kallallisut). One day, climbing a coconut tree, Michel was bitten by a snake and taken to a cult of snake-worshippers to be made well again. The snake-worshippers promised to heal Michel on the condition that he join their religion when he recovered, which Michel’s father begrudgingly agreed to do. Resting up, Michel read a book in a French bookshop about Greenland – a country unimaginably cold, but without a single tree, snake or overbearing father. Not content to sit around and wait to be sent to the snake-worshippers, Michel ran away from home on the back of a jalopy to Ghana, where he found work and started saving for the next of many trips which would eventually take him north.

It seems a strange way to start a book about Greenland, a sixty-page description of life and customs in 1950s Togo and a whistle-stop tour of Africa and Europe. Yet the narrative is energised by Michel’s indefatigable sense of optimism, his openness to the new cultures he comes in contact with and his willingness to throw himself into life wherever it takes him. To Michel, the social niceties of the French are as exotic and peculiar as any French person (or Greenlander) would find his own. There are no wrinkled noses in An African in Greenland; the best kind of traveller, Michel is just excited to learn and see.

But even he is freaked out at first by some of the ‘queer customs’ in Greenland – especially their food. The first dish he tries is mattak – slices of raw whale skin dipped or spread with yellowy seal blubber (and blood):

We took each slice and clamped it between our teeth; then, holding the other end in one hand, with a knife we cut off a bite, Eskimo fashion – that is, cutting upwards close to the lips, so that you run a great risk of slicing off your nose.

It’s understandable that Michel needed some time to adjust. He is a fresh, witty narrator, who soon gets over his culture-shock and earns the ‘precious friendship’ of his hosts. As a guide to Greenland customs, An African in Greenland probably isn’t the most comprehensive – the joy is found instead in hearing about Michel’s experiences learning to ice fish or dog-sled, and all the long, polar nights he spent drinking and dancing with the Greenlanders. 

Robert Mattaq’s cottage in Thule, plastered with news clippings of the Western world.

Michel’s breezy positivity was just what I needed in April, when I read An African in Greenland. This is a land before modern conveniences were widespread, before any mention of climate change or glacial retreat (though at one point, to illustrate the gargantuan size of Greenland, Michel tells us that if all the ice were to melt the sea would rise ten metres – which just felt like a cruel joke). All travel is done by boat or sled, and from Michel’s perspective the Greenlanders seem to struggle to live a modern lifestyle, or simply don’t care to. Fishing and hunting is done for subsistence, and subsidy money from the ruling country, Denmark, supports citizens with income enough to undermine a capitalist work ethic. One of Michel’s last hosts, an old Kalaallisut man called Robert Mattaq, has papered the walls of his igloo with newspaper clippings of the West, the countries that he is fascinated with but which he will never live to see or experience beyond his black-and-white pictures. The Greenland that Michel describes is a vanished world, where for the relative poverty and the lack of modern conveniences life had a genuinely simple, uncomplicated feel.Some of the book’s most heartfelt scenes depict the Michel and his hosts doing the rounds at friends’ houses:

Soon afterwards, the door opened again: another visitor. Then a fourth and a fifth, and so on. The visits has begun and would continue without interruption all day long… Each time new visitors arrived, Paulina put fresh cups on the table and also served me, herself and Hans. As I wanted to find out the local people’s capacity, I never refused a fresh cup.Before leaving [to see more friends], Paulina made a fresh pot of coffee, which she left on the stove, and set cups and saucers on the table for any visitors who might arrive (since the door stayed unlocked) during our absence.

The Greenlanders’ openness towards a traveller, the likes of which no one has ever seen before, recalls the Greek value ofs of Xenia, the quality of “guest-friendship” which measures a host’s decency and civility by how well they treat a stranger far from home. Michel’s blackness is never not a source of novelty to the Greenlanders, and yet by the sixth month of his stay he is at home in this baffling country – ‘A True Greenlander’.

Sledding with Huskies, near Thule – in the furthest north of Greenland.

Gift-giving is a big part of guest-friendship and, to commemorate Michel’s chops as a man of the Arctic, he obtains a snow-white set of dogskin clothes and kamiaks (sealskin snow shoes). In the Kalaallisut cosmology, most objects and things in the world have a life-force, or inua. Though Michel and his friends are carefree enough with beer, coffee and sex, I was often struck by the care and respect that Michel and his hosts afforded certain objects. Be it a weatherbeaten canoe, a pair of kamiaks or the scraps of newsprint that Robert Mattaq plasters around his bedroom walls, each of these things is a lifesaving tool that guarantees a family’s survival. Living through freezing polar dark probably teaches you to respect the things that matter – other people included.

I’ve never read a travel book like An African in Greenland – the story of a truly singular cross-cultural connection. It is a remarkable document and a witty, entertaining piece of writing, though as a guide to Greenland the country or its customs it is probably too anecdotal. It’s a charming book that evades Eurocentric perspectives of Africa and Africans as much as Greenland and the Arctic. Lockdown feels like a good time to be reminded of the friendship that can blossom when you make the right connections.

Tete-Michel Kpomassie’s ‘An African in Greenland’ was translated from French by James Kirkup and is published by NYRB. It’s no longer in print and so can be a bit difficult to find, but there are loads of copies available second-hand. 

• Pictures taken from ‘An African in Greenland’, the author’s copyright.

Two recent thrillers: ‘Liar’ and ‘Tender is the Flesh’

Choosing what to read in isolation has been all about escapism. Even if the big Morrisons has run out of flour, toilet roll and any decent stewing lamb, worry not, books remain plentiful. You can’t go out, you can’t go the library, but that doesn’t mean you can’t buy books! This really handy map shows you which local independent bookshops are still open, taking orders online or over phone and posting books out for a small fee – and you can always buy from one of the big boys, too. 2020 was shaping up to be a great year for books and, thanks to the ingenuity of booksellers, publishers and writers all over, it is still going to be. How exciting! Here are two recently published thrillers that I’ve enjoyed this year.

If anything, the last few weeks have shown how easily small problems can spiral out of control. Liar is a familiar story: Nofar is a teenager dismayed at her averageness and desperate to escape her dull summer job in the ice-cream parlour. Her younger sister is far more glamorous and popular than she is, and it’s humiliating to serve ice-cream to kids from her school who barely recognise her. One day, an arrogant celebrity starts shouting and berating her when he comes in for ice-cream. It’s all too much for Nofar; she runs crying into the alley, he follows her, and when the police find a distraught girl in an alley with a violent man they naturally assume the worst. But now, cast in the media as a survivor and a hero, Nofar finds that lying is the best thing that’s ever happened to her. She doubles down.

From then on Nofar’s life is shot through with self-doubt, shame and envy; Ayelet Gundar-Goshen is excellent at drawing her world through her characters’ eyes, using their warped perspectives of themselves and what they are doing to obscure the consequences of being a liar. But despite the fear of getting caught, Nofar is better, braver, more fun and more assured in the new world of the lie. It’s seductive, and worth the risk.

as she spoke – how strange – her eyes became bluer. Her lips grew fuller. Her shoulders, usually stooped, suddenly spread like wings. And her breasts, usually concealed by those dropping shoulders, now appeared quite attractive […] Water plants need the heat of summer in order to blossom. And Nofar Shalev needed the excitement of the story to redden her cheeks.

Gundar-Goshen likes to extend metaphors – occasionally I found myself a little lost in a paragraph – which lend Liar an unexpected, dreamy quality. The world really does revolve around the characters; the city lights ‘blush’ for Nofar’s beautiful sister; the lie is a ‘newborn story’ literally with a life of its own; during an interrogation scene, a wooden table begins to reflect on its miserable life being constantly thumped by detectives and wonders whether its brothers from the factory are doing any better. Credit goes to Liar’s translator, Sondra Silverston, who’s captured the breezy humour of Gundar-Goshen’s original.

Liar by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. 

Yet the ongoing focus in Liar is on the romance between Nofar and Lavi, the boy who knows her secret and wants to be her boyfriend. This is where seeing the world through the characters’ eyes really comes into its own. Being blackmailed by a boy gives Nofar a frisson of pleasure; to an adolescent, this is all just a game, and lying about who you are and the kind of person you want to be is just another way to negotiate growing up. As it pitches towards the conclusion Liar becomes steadily more gripping, and the question of whether Nofar’s conscience will catch her before it’s too late is kept dangling in the balance.

If subtlety is the great strength of Liar, Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh goes the other way. This book is brutal. In a future world, a global pandemic has rendered all livestock deadly to humans. Eating meat kills you. Once the crisis is over and the virus has been contained (oh! we can but dream), rather than pivot towards a plant-based diet the world has started breeding and eating human beings. In the new world, questioning the morality of cannibalism is a surefire way to end up in an abattoir. Marcos had been an abattoir worker before, so now he slaughters humans (or ‘heads’ as they’re known) despite his disgust, for himself as much as the meat industry. But when he ends up with a female head in his barn, turning a blind eye to the monstrosity of the world becomes harder and harder.

Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica.

Do be warned – Tender is the Flesh isn’t for the faint-hearted. Much of the first half is given over to tours of various abattoirs, tanneries and breeding centres, in the typical manner of dystopian novels (“guiding” the reader through the world’s topsy-turvyness). Bazterrica wants to highlight the cruelty and immorality of the meat industry and she’s not shy about making it. The extreme violence of an abattoir certainly speaks for itself, and the novel is shot through with wicked irony toward the sometime double-standard of meat eating:

the farmhands are roasting meat on a cross. El Gringo explains to Egmont that they’ve been preparing it since eight in the morning, “so that it melts in your mouth”, and that the guys are actually about to eat a kid. […] “We’re celebrating because one of the guys became a father,” he explains. “Want a sandwich?”

Before the virus, Marcos’ experiences of death close to home drives his desire to leave behind normalised slaughter and retreat into a more humane, more connected meaningful past with the ‘head’ in his garden. But there’s no sentimentality from Bazterrica; abusing living beings that we have power over, it seems, is human nature.

Cattle farming is a cornerstone of Argentina’s economy and culture, and I imagine that to the initial Spanish readers of Tender is the Flesh the link between where food comes from and where it is eaten is clearer. For city people in the UK, it can be easy to forget how meat gets to the supermarket.

To mask the simple reality of cannibalism – to make it easier to swallow – human meat is sold as “special meat” and comes in shanks, rolled joints, trotters and so on. This kind of cognitive dissonance when it comes to meat and livestock lets us to turn a blind eye to the bare facts of slaughtering and eating animals. The less oversight and awareness we have of where our meat comes from, the more standards will drop – the more animal abuse is overlooked, the longer unsustainability is allowed to continue . Tender is the Flesh is a satire in the old sense, in that Bazterrica seems to shame us into better standards with our meat – or cutting it out altogether.

Liar and Tender is the Flesh are both thrillers, then, of different stripes: Liar unfolds as a slow-burn, while Tender is the Flesh is a short, sharp shock. Both novels have acquired an uncanny relevance to the recent politics: Liar a prescient reminder of the #MeToo era, Tender is the Flesh an uncomfortable look at the consequences of a pandemic. If you’re looking for some variety in your reading, check out Pushkin Press’ website – one of the advantages of reading fiction in translation is that you’re guaranteed something different with every title. Besides – how else were you planning to travel this spring?

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s ‘Liar’ and Agustina Bazterrica’s ‘Tender is the Flesh’ are both published by Pushkin Press and are available for order through Daunt Books. 

Picture Credits:

• Both cover images are taken from Pushkin Press’ website.

“I am never bored” – ‘Patience’ by Toby Litt, reviewed

‘To be is to be perceived’, wrote the philosopher George Berkley.  Forget cogito ergo sum – what if “meaningful existence” – living a purposeful life – was only achievable when other people perceive us, when they’re there to see us, laugh at our jokes, touch and smell us and understand what we mean when we speak?  It’s a slightly terrifying prospect, especially to an extrovert. As usual, art can help us out. Art should connect us: it should make us feel less alone and it should teach us to better communicate and empathise with other people, and their experiences. To live without understanding other people is sad – to live without ever being understood, or valued for who you are, is tragic.

Patience, by Toby Litt.

Elliot is the narrator of Patience. He was born with a condition like cerebral palsy and, at thirteen years old, he is unable to walk or move his body with any control, nor speak in a way that the people around him understand. It’s 1979, and nobody at the orphanage where he lives has noticed his intellect or his playful personality. Every morning the nuns that look after the disabled children wheel Elliot to the corridor and park his chair facing the window (if he’s been good) or the whitewashed wall (if he needs “calming down”). In the face of all this banal cruelty Elliot has learnt to be patient, to combat his boredom by painting the white wall with daydreams, memories and fantasies, chief among these a desire to escape the orphanage and experience a little bit of freedom for the first time in his life. Nobody perceives Elliot.

Until Jim comes along. Jim is physically strong but blind and mute. He is popular with the other children on the ward but he isn’t a bully, like knife-wielding Charlie. Together, Jim and Elliot might stand a chance of lifting the baby gate at the end of the corridor, calling the lift and running down the road. They’d never get far, Elliot knows, but it’s enough of a chance to be worth the massive risk. They could achieve anything. But Jim can’t see Elliot, and Elliot can’t reach out and touch Jim. So how do you communicate with someone that doesn’t even know you exist?

Patience is a surprisingly joyful novel. Despite Elliot’s rather limited experience of the world, he has learnt to find joy and he delights in sharing that joy with us. ‘I am never bored’, he tells us, ‘Because I am now so full of experience and potential experience and because that experience is itself so full even thinking of what I used to think about my lack of experience is enough to think about for a week’. A speaker without the privilege of speech, Elliot doesn’t need regular punctuation or the conventions of written language. We’re listeners more than readers, at the receiving end of a stream-of-consciousness:

I was more fortunate more lucky than most of the other children because I knew how to entertain myself and because I had found a way to find myself entertaining not by doing anything or getting anything new to occupy my attention but just by being able to sit and see how much was going on that was hilarious and tragic and ironic and painful within an activity that most of the children would have seen as inactivity.

Elliot has learnt to make inactivity into selfless activity, transforming his limitations into strengths. For Elliot, reflecting on his own sense of self and exploring his interior states is a productive activity. He remembers his favourite “soundworlds” – whether that’s ‘the radiators gurglingly ticklingly filling with hot water always a deep joy […] a rich series of unpredictable sounds’, or the ‘beauty-eruption’ of a greenfinch that stayed so long on the windowsill: ‘I calmed my surging heart to settle on the greenness of the greens of the greenfinch’.  It makes you want to notice more beauty-eruptions in your own life.

With such carefully-evolved powers of observation, Elliot is a tender, thoughtful friend to the other children on the ward – most of whom don’t know it. He can gauge the moods of a girl who wails on the floor by the colour of her knees:’what went on with Lise’s skin was always the same or a broadcast version of what was going on inside her in her soul’. A lot of pleasure of reading Patience comes from enjoying these minutely-observed facets of life on the ward, and the beauty, grace and understanding that it’s possible to find even in someone’s knees.

The boys start to work out a language of noises and half-words. I read Patience almost like an escape thriller, with the relatively short arc of the story drawn out and made tantalising by the agonising patience; it’s gratifying to watch the boys work out a language of noises and half-words: ‘Vroo I said Vroo and at the same time I wriggled my bottom from side to side to shake the wheelchair and Jim answered using the strength of his hands to shake me in my wheelchair and so for the moment Vroo meant Shake which was wrong but at least another word’. 

Berkeley believed the world is made up only of ideas and perception, so that a wheelchair doesn’t exist as a material object beyond how we see, smell, hear or touch it, how it feels beyond us. When Jim and Elliot learn to appreciate and notice more about one another (Elliot perceives Jim’s ‘meaty smell’, Jim gives Elliot a hug when he’s hurt) their lives and their experience of the world literally gets bigger. That’s the power of communication and empathy. This was a unique book, with a lot of depth.

after the first really meaningful communication with Jim […] I found myself living within a horn concerto of emotions like a Mozart confection including happiness love glee regret joy embarrassment and any sudden combination of these […]

Even a little empathy goes a long way, Elliot shows us. Eminently readable and richly humane, Patience is the book I gave at Christmas (to three people!). Elliot’s remarkable because he can generate such rich experience from his confined surroundings, and the same goes for Toby Litt as an author, that he can make such drama from so much inactivity.

Patience is shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, a literary prize for fiction from small publishers, and is published by Galley Beggar Press. Get a copy here – buy many more books from Galley Beggars, they’ve got some absolute slammers (like Ducks, Newburyport). 

Sources:

• Toby Litt, Patience (Norwich: Galley Beggar Press, 2019).
• As you can probably tell I’m not a philosopher. My sources for George Berkley came from the entry on him here in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2014), this YouTube video from Radio 4 and the Open University, and this early video from Oliver Thorn’s Philosophy Tube.

A Taxonomy of Melancholy – ‘Ducks, Newburyport’

You’ll have heard of it by now. Ducks, Newburyport: something of a dark horse in last year’s Booker Prize, the 1,000 page novel made up of one quite long sentence, with no paragraph breaks, following the thoughts of a middle-aged housewife. Each new thought starts with the phrase ‘the fact that’, and interspersed every sixty pages or so is the story of a mountain lion raising her cubs, written in tight, economical prose.

Ducks was released on the 4th July last year. Early reviewers cast it as something like a writer’s writer’s novel, something that you’d enjoy if you were committed enough to see the project through. In The Guardian, Alex Preston said: “98% who pick it up will think it unspeakable guff, [but] the 2% who get it will really get it”.

Setting aside the slight undertone of gate-keeping in a claim like that, it’s a fair point: it takes a lot of time, thought and effort to get through Ducks and most of us can’t commit that. There are no apologies, though, for the novel’s style or its length – you know what you’re getting into when you read it. And Ducks is worth getting into.

Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann (2019).

The unnamed narrator of Ducks, Newburyport lives in rural Ohio. She runs a business selling pies and other baked goods to local restaurants and stores; before this she was a History lecturer at a university, a job she quit after surviving rectal cancer. It’s no easy task running a home business and raising four children, especially as her husband travels for work. There is so much to worry about – from her youngest son’s refusal to eat foods without holes in them to the pollution in the Ohio river, from the senseless slaughter of indigenous Americans to the awkward exchanges with other parents. An extract, nearly at random:

the fact that Leo and I both like Katherine Hepburn and I was sure her reminiscences would be an interesting read too, but I put my foot down for some reason, I’m not sure why, “Guess Who’s Coming to Write Her Memoirs”, fifty-foot totem pole, windshield wipers flapping, Pop-tarts, upstarts, ramparts, lion rampant, sejant, sergeant, run the gantlet, gauntlet, consensual sex, tic-tac-toe, don’t sweat the small stuff, the fact that I keep thinking about that little girl who wouldn’t drink her milk and died, the fact that she was thrown out of her house at 3 a.m. because she wouldn’t drink her milk, and she wandered off and got lost, the fact that it sounds almost like a fairy tale, scrimshaw, squaw, loose pages…

It took me six months to read Ducks from cover to cover! I stopped twice, first for about a month and the second time for a few weeks, and many more times I put it on hold to read other books that I wanted to review or talk to friends about. Hopefully it wouldn’t take a more devoted reader six months to get through the book. I bound my copy in manila envelopes (which had to be repaired a lot) so that should tell you about how long i was expecting to spend on Ducks.

I thought that, given how long it'll probably take me to get through, it made sense to make a protective cover for Lucy Ellmann's mammoth Ducks, Newbury port by @GalleyBeggars… pic.twitter.com/1ADhzRtcZh

— Jon Petre (@JonPetreDish) July 22, 2019

Since then, what I’ve found interesting about Ducks and what I’ve thought worth writing about it has changed a lot. Ellmann’s publisher, Galley Beggar Press, are a two-person indie based in Norwich. Galley Beggars published Eimear McBride’s first novel in 2013, A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing – and there was incredible excitement around Ducks’ being shortlisted for the Booker Prize (although no one was happy with the Booker last year. No one). Ducks went on to win the Goldsmiths Prize, however, which is awarded to fiction which ‘breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form’. That seems appropriate. If Ducks is one thing, it’s proof that indie publishers are bringing out the best stuff these days.

A lot of people have talked about Ducks as a modern Ulysses – and, while I think there’re fruitful discussions to be had about Ellmann and Joyce, I don’t have much to say that hasn’t been already said. (In capturing every facet of life, good, bad and mundane, Ducks is more like Proust anyway.) Nevertheless, Ducks is what a classic Modernist novel would look like if it were written in the 21st century. I’m ever skeptical of using genre labels arbitrarily – but what I admire most about the best Modernist writing is its intention to connect people, and the use of experimental forms and styles to find a new way of communicating something profound about modern life. In a promo video for the Booker, Ellmann said:

I wanted to trace someone’s thought patterns, and I don’t think thinking is punctuated in the brain.

What is good – and at times very sad – about Ducks, Newburyport is how accurately Ellmann conveys probably the defining emotion of the 21st century: anxiety. The narrator worries about everything, and in daily life there is rarely time to sit and digest a thought before you need to rush into thinking about cooking, money or family life. Ducks is centred around the defining problem of an age where we can know everything from the computer in our hand. How do you worry about so much stuff, all at once?

By making lists! Ducks is filled with lists: shopping lists, recipes, lists of all the creeks and waterways in Ohio, catalogues of films and TV – the narrator is a serial list-maker. Worrying about everything all at once is chaos, and reading Ducks often means being mired in chaotic detail. But putting these items into a list and reeling them off is one way to make chaos into order. If you listed everything in your life – your objects, friends, work and worries – you’d be overwhelmed in minutes. By following a narrator who does just that, Ducks achieves a Modernist hyper-realism that feels fresh. It’s as if that sentence never stops because the narrator can’t catch her breath, can’t get to grips with her anxieties because they never stop multiplying. Besides this, the pared-down language of the mountain lion’s story is almost a parody of straightforwardly “realistic” writing.

In the narrator’s relentless quest to catalogue everything, Ducks strongly resembles The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton’s mammoth tome of the 1600s that’s often regarded as an “encyclopedia novel”. Burton was a scholar who suffered from melancholy, a generic term for depression, and he set out to write a definite guide to melancholy: where it comes from, what it’s like, what you can do to get over it. Feeling depressed is part of being human, and so to catalogue every facet of melancholy Burton tried to catalogue every facet of human life, from Greek and Roman classics to French kissing and whether elves really exist. Despite its gloomy subject, The Anatomy of Melancholy is quite funny, a catalogue that throws all the wisdom and learning of the 17th century at the timeless problem of how to be happy.

A long image of the frontispiece to Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).

The narrator of Ducks often fails to block out the melancholy. As in real life, grief comes like a stranger in the night. Isn’t that the weirdest thing? When you’re washing up, or thinking about bus schedules, suddenly the memory comes back of how a relative died, or how awfully human beings treat one another sometimes:

hamsters never seem very happy, hurricanes hardly ever happen, but it’s hard to tell with a hamster, hampster, “Buck up”, the fact that I think they’re nocturnal, Mommy, the fact that i miss her, the fact that I never got over her illness, the fact that it broke me, the fact that you gotta live in the here and now, the fat that the sun still rises every morning, and there is twilight, when the sky glows, the fact that it happens twice a day, the fact that…

‘I write of melancholy by being busy to avoid melancholy’, wrote Burton. When you’ve got too many worries to list, well, start a new list, re-arrange the heap, and see if you can walk a little further before it crumbles again. It was moments like the above that stayed with me in Ducks, and which persuaded me to keep reading: you have to imagine Sisyphus happy in his task, because otherwise there’s only despair.

The catalogues in Ducks, Newburyport are double: they exemplify the unmanageableness of modern life and the necessity of putting your problems in order before they drown you. Despite what I’ve said, Ducks isn’t an especially gloomy book. Around page 645 the melancholy reaches a fever pitch, and the narrator forces herself to think positively, cataloguing about thirty pages of things you can depend on. This was a rewarding pause in Ducks, something I was grateful as a reader to have earned:

Beethoven quartets will remain Beethoven quartets

emojis will multiply

children will roller-skate

the sky will often be blue

bees will buzz

my cinnamon rolls will generally be a hit

bureaucracy

will scare everybody

There are at least some anchors. Like The Anatomy of Melancholy, Ducks is an encyclopedia of an entire person’s internal universe. The narrator is fighting a war on all fronts – from microscopic worries about faux pas to existential dread about global warming – and there is heroism keeping your head above the water when other people rely on you.  Sometimes it takes a very big book to remind us of small joys.

Everyone has an inner life as rich and bizarre as the narrator of Ducks, Newburyport: remember that, Ellmann seems to suggest, and we might start talking to each other again. This is a catalogue that worries about not knowing enough, an incredibly specific narrator whose day-to-day obligations and fears are universal. Getting absorbed by the deep interior world of Ducks is a good tonic to the melancholy world. But however pleasant it might be to float away on a stream-of-consciousness, Ducks doesn’t let you forget that melancholy is just beneath the surface.

‘Ducks, Newburyport’ is published by Galley Beggar Press. Order a copy from their website here. 

Quotes:

• Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport (Norwich: Galley Beggar Press, 2019).

 

Image Sources:

• Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy from its Wikipedia page.
• Ducks, Newburyport from Galley Beggar Press website.

Any copyright concerns, let me know.

End of Year Review, 2019

I think 2019 has been something of an Annus horribilis (horrible arsehole). I’ve passed a few important milestones in 2019: I graduated my MPhil from Cambridge, I got my first full-time job in Communications at a local charity, and in the summer I cycled one-hundred and thirty miles around Suffolk and Norfolk – not a world-shattering feat, but one that brought me a lot of joy and fulfilment. Yet for all that it’s been hard work. My master’s has made me a better learner, writer and editor, and I will feel fonder towards the experience of being at Cambridge etc. when there’s more distance between then and now. But Cambridge is badly run and its environment of learning isn’t accommodating. I will say more about Cambridge at some point, but this isn’t the place for all that. Suffice to say that I wouldn’t be talking honestly if I reviewed 2019 without acknowledging that it’s been tough year.

But the books! I’ve read more books in 2019 than I ever have before (sixty to be precise). We as readers are really lucky at the moment because there have been some phenomenal books out in the last couple of years. From smart non-fiction to the emergence of new, more diverse novelists, we’re spoiled for choice. At least for readers, the book world is more exciting than it was a decade ago, when everyone was predicting the death of the novel.  I’m really looking forward to seeing how culture shakes up and evolves in the 2020s.

Because I’ve read quite a few more books than in 2018, and because I’ve read so many good ones, it’s a tough and also slightly futile job to try and judge or compare them against each other. Instead, I’m going to walk through what I’ve read and what’s stood out for me in 2019.

The Books of 2019. Blank books represent books from libraries or that I’ve loaned to people; yes, I’ve cheated by reading lots of little ones and short stories…

Fiction

2019 started strong, with me burning through a load of course books for my last two modules on the MPhil. This brought me back to one of my favourite periods in British writing, the 1950s (also subject of my undergrad dissertation) – I particularly enjoyed John Berger’s A Painter Of Our Time and Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls trilogy. We had some great discussions about how realist writing can address political and social fracture: I wonder how contemporary writing will evolve and do the same, without relying on stylistic experimentation. It was Anna Burns’ Milkman, however, that took the crown and set the stage for most of my reading in the early part of 2019. “Complex without being complicated” is what I called Milkman in my review: at times seriously chilling, Milkman is easily one of my favourite books I read this year. Anna Burns builds up a weird, uncanny setting which her characters populate in a believable way – it feels like a world which makes sense according to its own rules – and once you’ve begun to accept the reality of those rules, the rug is pulled from you and the real terror sets in of what it’s like to live in a world where silence and suspicion are the norm.

I went through a bit of a French period in March, reading Les Grand Melaunes, Leïla Slimani’s Lullaby and Édouard Louis’ (then-latest) novel History of Violence in quick succession. Reviewing History of Violence started me on a trend of new releases about trauma and recovery, related, I suppose, to the research I was doing on art and trauma for my thesis. I burned through Edward St Aubyn’s ‘Patrick Melrose’ novels in about two weeks as well, and that has got to rank as one of the sharpest, most brutally engrossing series about addiction and recovery that I know. Talking about identity troubles in Melrose was one of my favourite things to write in 2019.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

A new release from 2019 that hit hard was Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which I reviewed in August, and which has got me seriously excited to read more about recent and contemporary immigration to America. On Earth was a strong start, but I need to read more queer writing in 2020 – recommendations, as always, are actively encouraged. Will Eaves’ Murmur was a brilliant re-imagining of Alan Turing’s queer experience, and I’m curious about how you depict the lives of real people in a way that’s tasteful and illuminating.

One of best things I discovered in 2019 was the amount of great literature being published by independent publishers in Britain and Ireland. I don’t know why – maybe it’s because, at smaller presses, editors have more freedom (and risk) over what they commission and how they work with authors – but publishers and authors at Galley Beggar Press, Influx, Fitzcarraldo and Salt have been smashing it recently. Like many others, I ploughed through Lucy Ellman’s Goldsmith-winning Ducks, Newburyport, a process which took me nearly six months and which I’m still digesting.  It’s proved difficult to write about Ducks because, as it took so long to read, what I’ve thought is worth saying about it has changed a lot since I started it. Expect a full review/think-piece on Ducks in the new year. For now I’ll say that I liked Ducks very much, and I definitely think everyone should have a crack of it – if only to join the conversation.

Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport. 

Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead was another triumph from small publishers – big congratulations to Olga for her Nobel Prize win. Of this year’s two awards, Olga, at least, really deserves the recognition. I was a huge fan of Gareth E. Rees’ Car Park Life, and I can’t wait for more Influx titles in 2020 like Eliza Clarke’s Boy Parts and Anne Vaught’s Famished. If 2019 started on a high with Milkman, I’m happy to say that it’s ended on one too: Toby Litt’s novel Patience (also from Galley Beggars) was phenomenal. From the perspective of a physically disabled boy unable to communicate with his carers, Patience was heartbreaking, smart, and stylistically inventive (in the best way!). This is the book I’ve been giving out for Christmas.

So many great novels in 2019!

Non-fiction

I’ve been big into literary biography this year. Once again, this came from my studies: I read Thomas Dilworth’s biography of David Jones (David Jones: Writer, Painter, Engraver, Poet) which is unfortunately the only Jones biography yet written but which suffers from the author’s clear, often clouding attachment to Jones. I read Jonathan Coe’s inventive biography of B.S Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, which really started the biography hype. Johnson was such an unusual person, and because he allowed his life to totally govern how he wrote and what he wrote about is really worth your time if you’re a Johnson fan. I followed this with Bernard Crick’s classic George Orwell: A Life, and I’ve got a few other biographies ready to go next. It’s probably for the best if I start reading about the lives of people other than white British male authors who died before I was born.

I’d recommend No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference, Greta Thunberg’s speeches from her various protests and strikes since 2017, as an appetite warmer to educate yourself about climate change. It’s happening whether you like her or not, and, though Greta’s not exactly Martin Luther King, her straightforward, no-bullshit speech cuts through about the reality of global warming.

Underland: A Deep Time Journey, by Robert Macfarlane.

Perhaps if you want something a bit more engrossing, definitely read or listen to Robert Macfarlane’s magnum opus, Underland, an epoch-spanning survey of how the human race lives in relation to the underground world. We bury our dead, extract our treasures from and hide our crimes in the underland: what does that say about us, our times, where we’re headed as a species and where we’ve been? Underland is always clear and digestible, whether Macfarlane is talking about literary theory or geological history. The best non-fiction is like Underland: it’s direct without skimming details, and it inspires in the reader the same passion and fascination that so clearly drives the author. The last chapter gave me chills.

Poetry, Philosophy and Food

I never read as much poetry as I’d like. I’ve been lucky to review two books of poetry this winter for SPAM, one of my favourite poetry zines that you should definitely be reading. Get following SPAM and look out for my reviews of Rowan Evans’ The Last Verses of Beccan and Cathy Galvin’s Walking The Coventry Ring Road With Lady Godiva in the new year. I hope I can write more about poetry in 2020, and in more interesting ways.

Philosophy? Who do I think I am? I haven’t read philosophy in a serious way this year, but one book that’s stuck with me (I read it for my thesis) was Rowan Williams’ Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love. Based on a series of lectures Williams delivered in 2005 on David Jones and Flannery O’Connor, Grace and Necessity is an extraordinarily universal insight into what makes art good or bad. To distil this in one sentence: “bad art is art that does not invite us to question our perceptions or emotions”. I’m grateful for it and, alongside On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Grace and Necessity has had a big impact on my taste and critical judgement this year.

Another huge impact on my life in 2019: Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver’s The Complete Nose to Tail Eating, a cookbook-cum-food philosophy that is said to have revolutionised British cooking. Henderson and Gulliver are the founders of St JOHN, a restaurant which has (if food writers are to be believed) resurrected traditional British cooking and the use of offal and off-cuts in fine dining. Expect pigs’ trotters, oxen tongues and potted goose alongside favourites like cabbage, parsley sauce and new potatoes. Trust me, it’s better than it sounds! I’ve been working my way through the recipes in Nose To Tail Eating for a few months now and it’s immensely satisfying to make these complicated, vile-sounding dishes, which haven’t yet failed to be delicious. The St JOHN cookbooks have been a much-needed salve in 2019.

The Complete Nose to Tail and The Book of St JOHN, in all their glory. Easter egg: spot the shadow of my hand and phone over The Book of St JOHN!

Closing Thoughts & Resolutions for 2020

I need to read more diversely! There’s no excuse really: I haven’t read enough non-white authors, but at least I’ve got some great reading ahead of me. I’m going to start with authors like Bernadine Evaristo (of course!) and Jeffery Boakye and then add to my 1950s repertoire with The Lonely Londoners and The Pleasures of Exile. Stormzy does so much good with his platform and influence – after he told people to register to vote on Instagram, 45,000 people registered in ten minutes. Stormzy’s imprint, #MerkyBooks, is publishing some great stuff, and I’m looking forward to reading their writers.

I have to mention politics, sadly! The election has got to be one of the bitterest and worst-fought in generations. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, the People’s Prime Minister, lied through his teeth in the election, because there’s a difference between making a promise that you know you can’t keep and saying something that you know is untrue, like 88% of Conservative Party adverts did. They have already walked back about protecting the environment, they’re still selling off the NHS piece-by-piece, and we will continue to turn away child refugees (something we were proud to do in 1939).

Regardless of your stance on Brexit, or anything else, the facts are obvious – the people in charge have attacked the courts, the Royal Family, Parliament, and the other institutions that safeguard Britain’s democracy, and that is cause for alarm. It’s going to get worse before it gets better (and I’m not talking about Brexit) and now, more than ever, we need to be wise to the efforts of the far-right to destroy anything decent, progressive or morally admirable about Britain.

Paul Klee, The Twittering Machine (1922). Just a piece of art I like; Hitler called it “degenerate”.

All the more need for robust criticism and good books. I want to do a series on responses to totalitarianism in literature, how writers who have lived under different despots have found a way to articulate their outrage and fight back against tyranny. With the rise of Modi, the repression of Uighurs in China, Bolsonaro in Brazil and Salvini in Italy, fascism is on the rise around the world and I want to learn how it can be stopped. At the moment I’ve got Hannah Arendt, Etty Hillesum and Alexander Solzhenitsyn on the reading list – exciting stuff ahead!

To end on a happy note: I have some really fantastic books to read in the new year and I can’t wait to share my thoughts on them with you. I want to do more creative writing and I want to write more about food. Something I love about not being a student is that all of my reading, learning and writing I do for my own pleasure. I really do feel freer now than last December. Let’s keep our chins up and think of all the brilliant books that are going to be released in 2020. It’ll be our year, lads!

 

Images:

• Image of Ducks, Newburyport, came from the Galley Beggar Press website.
• Images of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Underland belong to Penguin Books.

Contact me for any copyright infringement.

Debauchery and Despair at Morrisons: Gareth E. Rees’ ‘Car Park Life’, reviewed

‘Everyone has a car park story’, says Gareth E. Rees towards the end of his new book, Car Park Life. Have you ever heard a great story about a car park? Who hasn’t. Mention this book to someone and I guarantee they’ll start telling you their story. You probably think you know about car parks: they’re everywhere, and, like coal, so long as there are cars and capitalism people will always need car parks. Yet remarkably few writers have given them any serious thought. But why not? It’s estimated that there are three to four million parking spaces in the UK. Assuming that most spaces are an average of 4.8 metres by 2.4 metres, car parks therefore account for forty-six million, eighty thousand square metres of Britain. The more you think about it, the weirder it seems that no one’s written about car parks like this before. Car Park Life is here to address that need.

Gareth E. Rees’ Car Park Life (Influx, 2019).

Gareth E. Rees has set out to test a hypothesis: that the car park is not, as often presumed, a place of emptiness, but is instead one of potential. From road rage to drug deals, dogging to dodgy DVD-sales, a lot goes on in a car park. They bring out the worst in us, and Car Park Life is one man’s attempt to figure out why the concrete wilderness exerts such a ‘strange energy’ on its inhabitants. Each chapter explores a different car park and, as Rees illustrates, every car park has some unique quality that makes it as worthy of exploration as any jungle, desert, or underland. Outside a Somerset B&Q we discover a water channel dug by Sir Francis Drake; the sculptures in a Wiltshire retail park try to claim the car park as the decedent of Stonehenge; and there’s something deeply, deeply wrong the Leyton Mills Industrial Estate.

Gareth E. Rees.

There’s something of J.G. Ballard in Car Park Life – the idea that landscape (and especially Brutalist architecture) changes our psychology for the worse. In Ballard’s novel High Rise, life in a gleaming new skyscraper is enough to send residents into a state of violent anarchy, fighting for bloody control of the lifts and roasting dogs on the balcony. A psychogeographer is a researcher who’s interested in how places are shaped by our ideas of them, and how those ideas shape us in turn. Car parks are places where lots of people meet and interact, but where we rarely seem to get along:

There is unrest in the car park. People want their shopping done, and they want it done quickly, without impediment by those they deem to be lesser-skilled in the ways of parking.

What sets apart Car Park Life is its sense of humour, which in my experience (Robert MacFarlane and W.G. Sebald) is something that a lot of psychogeography lacks. There’s no pretending that roaming a car park is particularly normal endeavour (though why shouldn’t it be). It’d be hard to write a book about what Rees’ friends and family call ‘this car park nonsense‘ without acknowledging the ostensible ridiculousness of the enterprise, and Rees’ blend of dry humour and weary insight gives Car Park Life a fresh, pacey feel.

I don’t known yet that talking incessantly about car parks and arranging a week-long holiday around a series of ca park visits between Hastings and the Scottish Highlands will contribute to the end of my marriage, but I cannot change the future.

J.G. Ballard with a little hit of Sightseers, maybe?

Chapter four gives us Rees’ five-point manifesto: 1) WALK THE TERRAIN, 2) CHAINS ONLY, 3) NO MOTORWAY SERVICE STATIONS, 4) NO INTERVIEWS, and, perhaps most important of all, 5) ONLY FIVE POINTS IN A MANIFESTO. Number two seems the crucial element to Car Park Life: as the high street dies and retail parks become ever more common, though themselves under threat from online retailers, we need to understand these whopping great parts of our towns and cities if we’re to understand those places at all.

From Car Park Life I learnt about the growing trend of Facadism – where developers buy a beautiful old building, gut it and build a modern interior, but keep the facade for aesthetic reasons – which characterises the Sainsbury’s in Glossop, Derbyshire. Supermarket developers have gone to great pains to fool consumers into thinking that warehouse-sized supermarkets are a natural part of our communities, which have had their libraries closed and their organic character demolished. Late capitalism has done some funny things to the human mind, as Car Park Life shows.

Because it would be wrong to write about car parks and supermarkets without acknowledging their rampant environmental cost. Take ham, for example – where the hell does it all come from? Where is it cooked? How on earth can we keep living like this? When you think about the level of stuff that each of us consumes and throws away in a year it is pretty nauseating. The psychology of a car park is fundamentally designed to make us buy more stuff, and that’s not sustainable at current levels. Looking at car parks becomes yet another mirror to reflect late capitalism’s monstrous impact.

A car park.

Yet for all its ills, Car Park Life is proof that humankind will survive the car park. In one of the most entrancing chapters, Rees talks about his fascination with the ‘squiggly geometric patterns’ left behind on the concrete pillars of a Sainsbury’s in Penrith. They’re probably dried glue from posters, or abstract graffiti, but look at them without context and you would be forgiven for thinking they were markings left behind by an ancient civilization. It’s startling, and a bit scary, to think that car parks are one of the defining features of how we live today. You could imagine future historians preserving a car park in the way that current historians are keen to preserve something like a Roman bath house. Yet it’s all the dogging, murder, road rage and delinquency that makes car parks liveable, human places. At the launch of Car Park Life Rees said:

I want to find the shoots of the new folklore as it develops.

And writing about that is so, so exciting to me. Car Park Life marks the finale of a loose trilogy of psychogeographies that Rees has been working on for the last couple of years; the first two being Marshland and Stone Tide (both are also published by Influx Press). I’m excited to go back and read these two earlier works, which as far as I remember intersperse the narrator’s wanderings with both fiction and more direct autobiography. There is no reason why your critique of late capitalism and the destruction of public space shouldn’t be funny, or about car parks.

Car Park Life is proof that you never know a place as well as you think you do, and that the best way to find out what’s really going on is to go hunting for the truth yourself. And don’t trust the Leyton Mills Industrial Estate.

Gareth E. Rees’ ‘Car Park Life’ is published by Influx Press; buy a copy here.

Image Credits:

• Book cover and author photo taken from the website of Influx Press. Contact me for any copyright concerns.

Anthony Gormley at the RA, or: Spaces, Places, and Traces

Antony Gormley’s solo exhibition is at the Royal Academy until 3rd December. Tickets here.

Our bodies and the spaces that sustain us – where we live, where our food comes from, where our waste goes – are becoming harder to ignore. As the climate changes, as borders continue to be redrawn, as people around the world agitate for progress, living in the 21st century means being forced to re-negotiate how we inhabit a space and how we treat our environment. How are we changed by our surroundings? What will it mean for us as individuals when our environment changes, irreversibly? How do we live with ourselves?

For Antony Gormley, all these questions can be answered by looking at our own bodies. Whether they go Gormley’s lead people transform spaces: whether it’s a beach in Liverpool or a hill overlooking Newcastle, a space is impossible to see the same way once Gormley’s left his mark. In Slabworks (2019), the first room of the RA’s ‘Antony Gormley’ exhibition, fourteen blocky steel sculptures are draped around the room. At first the Slabworks are vaguely Spartan things, machine-sawed blocks of metal; notice heads, feet, a crooked arm or a bent neck and the slabworks reveal their human forms. They are no longer things in a space but people in a room. It’s a kind of full-body pareidolia; recognise the person and the space starts to make sense. Understanding our bodies is the first step to understanding the world.

Antony Gormley, Slabworks (2019). 90mm weathering steel slabs. © David Parry / the RA. 

Anthony Gormley is so famous that apparently his exhibitions don’t need names. I suppose this is a retrospective – exhibiting works from across his career – this is a show that tries to take on some of Gormley’s biggest and most general themes. Bodies are the central topic, and there’s a distinct emphasis on bringing the viewer to interact with the art as directly as possible. There are sculptures to step over and walk under, to duck past and crawl through; one of them even smells. You can even take a selfie without getting a filthy look.

Gormley is interested in whether the different ways that we take up space change how we live and how we relate to our bodies. In the courtyard outside there is a tiny iron baby, a cast based on Gormley’s six-year old daughter that was made in 1999. It’s barely a quarter the size of the paving slab it rests on and it’s quite difficult to get a good look at, there’s so many people crowded around it. Two more installations – Clearing VII (2019) and Cave (2011) – are so massive that they require contortion and squeezing-past to be properly experienced. Gormley says he likes sculpture because the audience is part of the art – the space where the art is and where we the art-lovers are is one and the same. One of Gormley’s strengths is his ability to make his audience consider the different ways that we expect art to be presented and how we think we’re supposed to act when we’re around it.

Other pieces aim to capture fleeting moments, exploring the contrast between the experience of seeing something beautiful, which is normally over quite quickly, and sculptures as things which can last for centuries. One Apple, a series of 53 lead casings that stretches across the gallery, shows each stage of an apple’s life from blossom to rot. Each casing contains the remains of the apple inside the lead. In ordinary time, an apple rots after a few weeks; the artist’s intervention freezes the apple in time and edifies a single moment. The wall drawing Exercise Between Blood and Earth is a chalk outline of something like a tree’s rings, and each time it is exhibited Gormley re-draws the outline and preserves another moment of energy and motion. These are works that look at the traces our bodies leave behind and the marks that we make.

Antony Gormley, Exercise between Blood and Earth (1983). © Antony Gormley / the RA.

It’s significant that most of Gormley’s art responding to ideas of time and preservation dates from the Cold War, when the threat of nuclear obliteration was a daily fear. It would only take four minutes or so for an H-bomb to wipe out most of life in Britain and Ireland, about as long as it’d take to sketch the concentric circles of a tree. But that chaotic instant, like all other instants, would be recorded for centuries in the tree’s rings. The Cold War may well have inspired Gormley to make these works back in the 1980s but, with the knowledge that every plastic bottle I’ve ever used will remain on Earth longer than I will, Exercise in Blood and Earth still holds the power to disturb.

Gormley’s sketches on paper and notebook studies are on display, adding a useful context to Gormley’s process and thinking over the years. I’ve always found Gormley’s sculptures to be slightly unmoored, unrelated to any obvious themes or politics that I could suss out. Of course, not knowing where the metal people have come from or why they’re here is part of the mystique of Gormley’s sculptures. The difference between a space and a place is how you look at it. A space is generally empty (the sea, the wild, outer space) whereas a place is a specific space filled with things (a house, a country, a political rally). And yet while Gormley’s sculptures undoubtedly transform the spaces they enter, I often feel they don’t say very much.

Antony Gromley, Clearing VII (2019). © David Parry / the RA.

I do like Antony Gormley’s work, and there is of course no rule that says an artist should be tied to something loud and political. With Concrete Works (1990-93), what look like blank concrete blocks are revealed (by the programme) to be hollow, with the contorted shapes of human beings kneeling or praying trapped inside the stone. Notice the similarity with Slabworks? These blocks are the minimum space that a human being could occupy. You can’t help feeling that Concrete Works might mean something if, say, Gormley were responding to political violence, or religious persecution – instances where this kind of violence is very real.

On the other hand, it’s the fundamental unexplanability that gives Gormley’s work its bite. Because Gormley’s sculptures are just weird. They stand, staring out to sea, and we’ve got no clue what they’re thinking about. It’s the absence of meaning, familiarity, and simple explanations that gives them their magnetic pull. With lead men standing among the crowd, on the walls and hanging from the ceiling, it’s hard not to be awed by the eeriness of Gormley’s best work.

Anthony Gormley, Lost Horizons I (2008), 24 cast bodyforms. © David Parry / the RA.

Besides, Gormley is basically a personal artist. Artworks like Matrix III (2019) are all about how we as individuals exist in space. This is a house, Matrix III says; this is where you’ll want to spend most of your life, if you can afford one of these. I overheard someone beside me in the gallery say that she was ‘mesmerised’ by the lines. Revealing the surreal elements of everyday things can’t fail to impress.

Antony Gormley, Matrix III (2019). 6 tonnes of reinforcing steel. © David Parry / the RA.

The logical conclusion of all this thought about how we live and how we make our mark on places is the final installation, Host (2019). Gormley has filled an entire gallery space with mud and seawater, making the white-walled, 18th century room look like Shoeburyness at tide-turning. It smells, faintly. Unlike Matrix III, or the solid casings of apples and people, this is a formless, undefined artwork. The formerly safe and specific place “the RA” is now a smelly, hazardous space “the sea” – a nasty inversion that’s familiar to anyone who’s ever had their house flood. The outside is inside, and there it is again – that sense of how strange the world can easily become. Only Anthony Gormley can give you this. The RA wouldn’t let anyone else.

 

Picture Credits:

• All images except Exercise between Blood and Earth were taken from the RA’s Exhibition page, here.
• Exercise between Blood and Earth is © Antony Gormley, and I sourced the image from this Tumblr blog. I assume the image copyright lies with Antony Gormley or the RA, but if not it’s the property of berndwuersching.

Please contact me for any copyright concerns.

“Writing to reach you” – ‘Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’, reviewed

Is there such a thing as a ‘poet’s novel’? If there isn’t, and if making up a category like that wouldn’t be a waste of time, then Ocean Vuong’s first novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous would rank as one of its shining examples. Vuong is a master of the light touch; On Earth is full of beautiful phrases, well-turned metaphors and short, powerful lines like this: ‘A bullet without a body is a song without ears’. The challenge of writing descriptively is always to get information across without overwriting and, as a guilty over-writer, I appreciate Vuong’s talent for summing up, in lines like these, ‘what it’s like to be awake in American bones’.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong (in case you couldn’t tell)

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who can’t read, chronicling twenty-seven years’ experience as a Vietnamese immigrant in America. It’s a difficult portrait of love, trauma, and sacrifice, one that’s struck through with a commitment to find beauty even in these experiences. It’s a blend of autobiography and fiction, often in direct address to the reader. The narrator is writing to ‘reach’ his mother – even though she’ll never read his letter – and to unearth a family history stretching across two continents and thirty years, from the Vietnam war to Hartford, Connecticut.

The narrator ‘ha[s] had many names’ but here he goes by Little Dog, his grandmother’s name for him. The name is a form of protection: in the village where he was born the smallest children are given derogatory names like ghost, demon, or buffalo bead, so that evil spirits can be fooled into thinking they’re not worth abducting. The ways that we express love can be difficult to understand, and hard to explain to outsiders:

It’s true that, in Vietnamese, we rarely say I love you, and when we do, it is almost always in English. Care and love, for us, are pronounced clearest through service: plucking white hairs, pressing yourself on your son to absorb a plane’s turbulence and, therefore, his fear.

Language, or a lack of language, becomes a way for Vuong to explore the power dynamics of migration. Not being able to speak English in America leaves Little Dog and his mum powerless at first, as in a humiliating scene where his mother is laughed at because she can’t describe what she wants in a butcher’s. But Little Dog learns to use even ignorance as a tool for survival in America, as when school bullies daub homophobic slurs on their front door and Little Dog assures his mother that they’ve written “Merry Christmas”.

It isn’t long before Little Dog discovers his love of language, or the power that mastering words can give you. On Earth is often delightful to read – as in this passage, where Little Dog marvels at the power of language at church:

I was enamoured with the verve, torque, and tone of the pastor’s voice […] It was, to me, a new kind of embodiment, one akin to magic, one I’d glimpsed only in [my grandmother’s] storytelling.

I was reminded here of James Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It On The Mountain, where, in a community that places its church at its heart, the power of religious language is intoxicating to a young protagonist much like Little Dog. Baldwin called his first novel: ‘the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else. I had to deal with what hurt me the most’. I don’t want to presume too strongly on Vuong’s own life and motivations in writing, but On Earth certainly deals with what hurts. It’s a special gift – and a kind of translation – to make pain into poetry.

As Little Dog grows up, the focus of On Earth moves from the complexities of his relationship with his mother to those between him and Trevor, a white boyfriend from the countryside. Among poverty and violence, the love between the two boys is yet another ray of beauty that Vuong is keen to put on show. On Earth isn’t a tragedy, not entirely. It was here however  where I felt Vuong’s anger most strongly – anger at the internalised homophobia and the outright bigotry of others, and anger at the caustic danger of America’s opiod epidemic. In short, On Earth is a powerful bildungsroman that is remarkably even-handed about injustice. Ocean Vuong hasn’t got time for your pity, or mine.

Vuong has stated that, to write about contemporary society, poets and novelists need to capture the sense of fragmentation that seems to characterise everything we do: fragmented politics, fragmented borders, fragmented identities. With the novel’s jumps between past and present, America and Vietnam, and frequent shifts between prose and poetry, Vuong is searching for a narrative form that’s true to these experiences, beautiful and traumatic. I haven’t yet read Vuong’s poetry but I’d like to see how he breaks and remakes poetic structures: his last collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, won the 2018 TS Eliot Prize. Take my money for the title alone!

Ocean Vuong. Credit: Tom Hines

To use a horrible cliche, reading Vuong felt like a breath of fresh air. I find a lot of canonical American writing can be a bit bland – and I’m excited that younger writers are coming of age and breathing life into literature. Some of the greats pale in comparison (can’t leave off with these cliches)  – how could you rate a novel as immature as On The Road over the sober sentimentality of Vuong? But I feel such comparisons (that no one asked for) – who is “better” than who – aren’t helpful for me to make. Writers like Vuong seem to be agitating for a new hegemony of culture, one based around compassion and communication rather than some masculine hierarchy of taste. I shouldn’t talk so much about my critical process in a review of someone else, but reading On Earth has made me question how I think and how I develop my judgement. Telling you so is a way of celebrating the book. I feel like I’ve spoken a lot in this review but I’ve said little; all I can ask is that you read the book and see if you agree. Literature should make you grow and expand your thinking, and I’m happy that On Earth has given me that opportunity.

When On Earth was published back in June, Max Porter said: ‘it seems obvious now that a gay poet born in Saigon would write the great American novel’. I’m very skeptical of the idea of ‘the Great American novel’, – it’s even flimsier than ‘poet’s novel’ – but it’s a truth that’s undeniable: America’s story, if it has one, is a story that belongs to immigrants. It’s stories like these that are going to make America great again.

Read more about Ocean Vuong and his work at his website.

Sources

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (London: Faber, 2019)

James Baldwin, Go Tell It On The Mountain [1954] (London: Penguin, 2001)

Picture Credits

• Tom Hines / oceanvuong.com/about
• Amazon 

 

Contact me for copyright claims.