Book review: Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg by Emily Rapp Black (USA)

(TRIGGER WARNING: Child loss; trauma; bereavement)

A few years ago I read Emily Rapp Black’s 2006 US memoir Poster Child, a memoir about growing up after the loss of her left leg at the age of four. It seems to be out of print now, so I wish I had kept my copy. I remember being struck by her story, which resonated due to my daughter’s hemiplegia, which means she has lifelong struggles with her left side, and especially her leg, following a stroke just before birth. I don’t remember the writing being absolutely stunning though.

Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg, published this year, though, is an astonishingly well-written, angry, eloquent book about surviving almost unbearable trauma, about disabled identity, and about beauty and creativity.

What can all of us learn from Frida, no matter our embodiment?

This: Love and bodies come apart. Also, this: Art remains.

Emily Rapp Black was fascinated by Frida Kahlo when growing up. Kahlo’s story is well-known: she suffered polio as a child, which withered her foot, and at 18 she was involved in a terrible road accident that broke her spine, ribs, collarbone, pelvis, leg and foot and dislocated her shoulder. A handrail injured her vagina. She lived for almost 30 years after the accident, going through 32 surgeries and eventually losing her leg, as well as losing several pregnancies. Her suffering has been eulogised and fetishised: Kahlo is as famous for her suffering as for her art or for her arresting beauty.

Like Kahlo, Rapp Black is familiar with living with a dual identity, “passing” as “normal” from the outside, thanks to a prosthetic leg, but with a consuming physical difference. She pored over Kahlo’s journal, and describes later visits in adulthood both to the Casa Azul, the home that Kahlo shared with the sexually incontinent painter Diego Rivera (he even slept with her sister), and the show that came to London’s V&A in 2018, where Kahlo’s most personal items, both decorative and medical (and sometimes both) were displayed. I remember that London show, and the strange, faintly reverential atmosphere of passing through its under-lit rooms.

Rapp Black’s first child, Ronan, died from Tay-Sachs disease before his third birthday, an experience that was the topic of her second book, The Still Point of the Turning World (which I haven’t read, and don’t think I will). She quotes Kahlo, writing a year after her accident, in describing her own grief at her son’s diagnosis:

“A short while ago, maybe days ago, I was a girl walking in a world of colours, of clear and tangible shapes. Everything was mysterious and something was hiding; guessing its nature was a game for me. If you knew how terrible it is to attain knowledge all of a sudden – like lightning elucidating the earth! Now I live on this painful planet, transparent as ice. It’s as if I had learned everything at the same time, in a matter of seconds“

Rapp Black’s emotionally raw book meets the beauty and brutality of life head on. She is intimidatingly clever, quoting Kafka and Simone Weil, in an erudite, searingly honest but nevertheless very readable meditation on creativity, grief and disability. She wrestles with different aspects of her female identity, such as societal expectations of attractiveness (“being disabled means knowing that you are not somebody others want to fuck“) and motherhood (how to consider yourself a mother once your only child is dead?).

“I am not a … good or kind person, but a damaged and bitchy pregnant woman, still grieving, unkindly wishing on other women the kind of despair that comes from being invisible to the gaze of the other that I have so ardently dissected, criticized and, occasionally, been able to dismiss.”

Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg is published by independent non-fiction publisher Notting Hill Editions, and is expensive, at £14.99 at full price for 145 pages of text. However, it is also a beautifully produced little hardback, clothbound in red fabric, with thick creamy paper and some beautiful reproductions of Kahlo’s work. I don’t feel cheated out of my cash. The book would be a worthy winner of the second Barbellion Prize, awarded to a writer whose work deals with the experience of living with chronic illness or disability, the longlist for which is due to be announced in December.

A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler (Austria)

Translated from German by Charlotte Collins

A Whole Life is an Austrian novella, 149 pages long in my Picador paperback, which has been a quiet international bestseller. Published in English translation in 2015, it was shortlisted for the International Booker 2016. Interesting titbit: author Robert Seethaler is also a sometime actor who has appeared on TV as well as on the big screen, notably playing a small role in legendary director Paolo Sorrentino’s film Youth.

I read A Whole Life to review in time for German Literature Month, hosted annually by Lizzy’s Literary Life and Caroline at Beauty is a Sleeping Cat (week 1 focuses on books from, or set in, Austria), as well as Novellas in November, co-hosted by Cathy at 746Books and Bookish Beck (this week focuses on contemporary novellas).

The book centres on Andreas Egger, a man of few words, who is not inclined towards an excess of introspection. He is first introduced to us in 1902 as a small child, orphaned on the death of his mother, who is sent to live on a remote farm in the beautiful but harsh Austrian alps with his abusive uncle, the wonderfully named Hubert Kranzstocker, and his family.

“So now here Egger stood, gazing at the mountains in wonder. This was the only image he retained of his early childhood, and he carried it with him throughout his life. There were no memories of the time before, and at some point in the years that followed, his early years on the Kranzstocker farm also dissolved in the mists of the past.”

A childhood beating from his uncle leaves him with a disability, a permanent limp and a crooked right leg. As the parent of a child with a disability, following a stroke in utero. I found it heartening to read of Eggers’ hardiness, and handiness. He wields a scythe and a pitchfork with ease, and gives his body over to physical, outdoor work.

“Sometimes, on mild summer nights, he would spread a blanket somewhere on a freshly mown meadow, lie on his back and look up at the starry sky. Then he would think about his future, which extended infinitely before him, precisely because he expected nothing of it. And sometimes, if he lay there long enough, he had the impression that beneath his back the earth was softly rising and falling, and in moments like these he knew that mountains breathed.”

Egger experiences a period of happy domesticity, which sadly comes to an abrupt end. Later, during WWI, Egger is permitted to enlist in the army three years after his first attempt, and despite his physical impairment, and is sent off to the Eastern front, to Russia, and spends a long time as a prisoner of war. He eventually succeeds in returning to his mountain home, which increasingly draws the attention of beauty-seeking tourists.

The book is not fast-paced, focusing as it does on the course of a simple but often very hard life. Egger’s life story has been described elsewhere as ordinary, but it is really quite extraordinary. He experiences adversity, loneliness and tragedy, but he doesn’t waste time on what-ifs or on berating himself or others for failing to have done things differently. He is not a bitter man, and he finds pleasure and acceptance in the outside world throughout his life.

Egger’s dependence on the vagaries of the implacable but spell-binding natural environment evokes a not wholly unpleasant awareness of the insignificance of the individual when set against the immutability of the natural world and the transitory efforts of people to tame it and bend it to their will. Egger appears to hold and take comfort in a somewhat fatalistic, vaguely Buddhist-like acceptance of the co-existence of suffering and beauty, and the sense that any belief in personal control over life events is in large part illusory.

Although an apparently straightforward story, the book is quietly accepting of our scars, both physical and emotional. The result is strangely uplifting rather than depressing, and thankfully this work is never sentimental, while skilfully dealing – in few pages – with big ideas such as the possibility of finding meaning without pursuing external validation, what constitutes a full life, and what defines home.

The Book of Memory by Petina Gappah (Zimbabwe)

SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

I’m a bit behind with my reading plans, as I’ve unexpectedly been doing a lot of extra hours at work after someone left. Until their replacement starts, I’ve been handed all their authors and their workload to deal with, along with my own, although the end does seem to be in sight, even if it’s still a bit blurry and far away. A large glass of wine every night, chased down with a double G&T, is keeping the stress under control (no helpful remarks from doctors/nutritionists needed, please).

Away from work, I’m attempting to clear the decks before I start mostly reading novellas from 1 November (#NovNov). I have lots of novellas in the pile(s) I posted a week or so ago, so I’ll be delving in there, and I’ve even bought a couple of extras to boost the stacks (the stacks didn’t need boosting). Then from late November to the end of the year I’m jumping into Turkish culture for what I’ve designated “Turkey month”, but what other people might think is simply the period between US Thanksgiving and Christmas. So I’ll be reading and reviewing a lot of Turkish books plus taking a look at Turkish art, film, TV and music ((the lengths I’ll go to use a bad pun!), and if you’ve read or reviewed work from Turkey I’d be delighted to read your thoughts if you link them in my comments after 25 November and until Christmas.

Anyway! I’ve read and reviewed a fair amount of Zimbabwean fiction over recent months, and The Book of Memory is the latest addition to that list. Author Petina Gappah was born in Zambia to itinerant Zimbabwean parents, and grew up largely in Zimbabwe, though as an adult she has lived in various countries, including the UK, Germany and Switzerland (where she worked as a lawyer), although she has now returned to Zimbabwe. The Book of Memory (2015) was her first novel.

The book is set in contemporary-ish Zimbabwe in the women’s section of the notorious Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison in Harare, where Memory, a young albino woman, is awaiting execution for the murder of her foster parent/guardian, Lloyd.

Memory recounts details of the horrors and everyday indignities of prison life, interspersed with her account of growing up with her mercurial mother, loving but sad father and her siblings. Her childhood has been traumatic, with the deaths of two siblings and her own (mis)treatment for her albinism, followed by a later separation from her parents, whom, when the novel opens, she has not seen for many years.

This is because at the age of nine she was sold, or so she believes, to wealthy, white academic Lloyd, with whom she goes to live on his luxurious estate, Summer Madness (I love this name). Lloyd’s support (he seems to be a genuine, nice guy, with no inappropriate intentions toward Memory) enables her to attend a private school and receive a graduate and post-graduate education in Europe. But one day, after she has returned to live with Lloyd at Summer Madness, he is found dead, and Memory is duly arrested, found guilty of his murder and sentenced to death.

However, the country’s economic collapse has led to a shortage of hangmen, and she languishes on death row, where she gives her monologic account of what happened. Or what she believes to have happened, as we can’t be sure to what extent Memory is a reliable narrator, and the uncertainty of memory is a major theme. The protagonist’s name is a not-so-subtle clue to this over-arching theme, although a useful website tells me that Memory is a very popular name in Zimbabwe (where 1 person in every 390 shares the name), so it’s not as forced as it would be if set in the UK. Fears of a family curse also pervade the book, and albinism is still a condition that can attract prejudice in some parts of Zimbabwean society.

The book is saved from a surfeit of introspective gloom by Memory’s wry sense of humour, and I was interested to read on to uncover the mysteries of Memory’s background and the circumstances of Lloyd’s death, in a book that also shines a light on issues pertinent to Zimbabwe and the wider continent, such as its rampant homophobia (which was also referenced in Tendai Huchu’s Hairdresser of Harare), inadequacies in the justice system and economic problems.

A Two-Part TBR for the Remainder of 2021 – Part 2, Books I Own

My youngest daughter (nearly 15) has taken to walking into the room and yelling READ at me, because my books have taken over the living space. So here’s the pile I need to get through by the end of the year. Maybe I should shred them if I don’t manage it – or H will no doubt shred them for me, gladly!

From bottom to top they are:

  1. An embarrassing (but oh-so-gripping) celebrity exposé of Paula Yates and Michael Hutchence’s relationship in the 90s. Probably erm won’t write a review of this one.
  2. Ghosts of Afghanistan by Jonathan Steele – I’m planning to focus on Afghanistan on the blog in February, and this is a potted modern history.
  3. The Infatuations by Javier Maras: my first read by the Spanish author, described by The Guardian reviewer as a “haunting murder mystery, embracing all the big questions about life, love and death” and “an instant Spanish classic”.
  4. In Love with Hell by William Palmer, a new release, focusing on the often tortuous relationship legendary writers have had with booze.
  5. Contemporary African Art by Sidney Littlefield Kasfir – an up to date overview.
  6. The Sewing Circles of Herat by Christina Lamb: personal stories of life under Taliban rule, by the well-respected journalist and Afghanistan expert.
  7. Dancing in the Mosque by Homeira Qaderi: a memoir of “one mother’s unimaginable choice in the face of oppression and abuse in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan” says Amazon.
  8. The Sleeping Buddha by Hamida Ghafour: Amazon says “an evocative family memoir and unique portrait of Afghanistan from a young Afghan journalist. Hamida Ghafour’s family fled Kabul after the Russian invasion. In 2003, she was sent back by the Telegraph to cover the country’s reconstruction. She finds a place changed utterly from the world her parents had described and her grandmother – an Afghan Virginia Woolf – had written about.”
  9. One Day I Will Write About This Place by Binyavanga Wainaina: a preconception-challenging memoir of a middle-class Kenyan childhood.
  10. The Matter of Desire by Edmundo Paz Soldan – my first read from a Bolivian author.
  11. My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk: Goodreads says “At once a fiendishly devious mystery, a beguiling love story, and a brilliant symposium on the power of art, My Name Is Red is a transporting tale set amid the splendor and religious intrigue of sixteenth-century Istanbul, from one of the most prominent contemporary Turkish writers.” Oooh, sounds good, doesn’t it!
  12. Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk – a memoir and love letter to Istanbul by the legendary Turkish writer.
  13. Istanbul, Istanbul by Burhan Sonmez – continuing the Turkish theme- “Below the ancient streets of Istanbul, four prisoners sit, awaiting their turn at the hands of their wardens. When they are not subject to unimaginable violence, the condemned tell one another stories about the city, shaded with love and humour, to pass the time.” Sounds a bit gruelling this one.
  14. The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa: I meant to read this at the beginning of year, but I’m dedicating much of January to reviews of Japanese culture so I’ll finally get to it. Japanese dystopia! From Goodreads: “On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses—until things become much more serious. Most of the island’s inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police…”
  15. Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima: reading this for Novellas in November, designated by co-host Cathy as a group read for literature in translation week. Goodreads says this is a “luminous story of a young woman, living alone in Tokyo with her three-year-old daughter.”
  16. A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe: a book by a Japanese Nobel Prize winner, dubbed his “most personal”. Bird is “a frustrated intellectual in a failing marriage whose utopian dream is shattered when his wife gives birth to a brain-damaged child” (blurb from Goodreads).
  17. An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine: until I saw an article on Rabih Alameddine in The Economist, for some reason I had assumed he was a female writer. This novel from the Lebanese heavyweight is “a heartrending novel that celebrates the singular life of an obsessive introvert, revealing Beirut’s beauties and horrors along the way” (Goodreads).
  18. Their Brilliant Careers by Ryan O’Neill: recommended to me a long time ago by my friend David, this is “a hilarious novel in the guise of sixteen biographies of (invented) Australian writers” (Goodreads).
  19. The Trick is to Keep Breathing by Janice Galloway: the classic novel about a mental breakdown.
  20. The Spell by Alan Hollinghurst: I love Hollinghurst’s novels, usually a beguiling mix of decadence and profundity.

A Two-Part TBR for the Remainder of 2021 – Part 1, The Library Pile

Since the libraries re-opened I’ve been enjoying browsing – maybe enjoying it a little too much – and have maxed out my library card with the following books.

From bottom to top these are:

1 and 2 – Two Booker shortlistees, The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed and hotly tipped saga The Promise by Damon Galgut. These have been talked about ad infinitum elsewhere, so I won’t add a precis here.

3 – Heatwave by Victor Jestin, a very slender French novel that has drawn comparisons with Call Me By My Name, and according to Goodreads is: “A vivid, mesmerizing novel about a teenage boy on vacation who makes an irrevocable mistake and becomes trapped in a spiral of guilt and desire.”

4 – The Animal Gazer by Edgardo Franzosini: says Amazon, “A hypnotic [Italian] novel inspired by the strange and fascinating life of sculptor Rembrandt Bugatti, brother of the fabled automaker. With World War I closing in … Bugatti leaves his native Milan for Paris, where he encounters Rodin and … obsessively observes and sculpts the baboons, giraffes, and panthers in the municipal zoos, finding empathy with their plight and identifying with their life in captivity”.

5 – Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty and Truth by A. O. Scott – why we need critics.

6 – The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley – a bit of modern Gothic nastiness for Halloween month.

7 – Beloved by Toni Morrison – because I should have read this and haven’t; indeed, haven’t read any Toni Morrison.

8 – The Underground Railway by Colson Whitehead – now something of a modern classic.

9 – Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler – because it sounds relatable and I love Anne Tyler. Possibly I’ve read it before.

10 – All Among the Barley by Melissa Harrison – not mad on bucolic fiction, but this one has been raved about.

11- Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector – because I’ve not read any Brazilian fiction, and Lispector seems to be the go-to writer, plus it’s novella-length.

12- White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector by Nicholas Royle – because there’s no more enjoyable nerdery than book nerdery.

13 – Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali: because I’ve decided that 25th November to 25th December is going to be ‘Turkey month’ (bad pun, get it?), when I’ll be focusing on Turkish culture for a month.

14 – Shadowplay by Joseph O’Connor: historical, Dracula-orientated fiction.

15 – Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas – acclaimed life-writing by the Cuban writer, who died of AIDS.

Blaming by Elizabeth Taylor (UK)

review by Imogen G.

I read this book for #1976 month, hosted by Karen at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon at Stuck in a Book. This is a bi-annual week celebrating books published in a particular year, and I’ve intended to participate before but never been organized enough, especially as work is always frantic in October. Anyway, I settled on Blaming, a short 1976 novel by Elizabeth Taylor, published after her death the previous year – Taylor wrote it in the knowledge that she was terminally ill. Not to be confused with the iconic actress, her writing has been described – by Anne Tyler no less – as that of a writer who can hold her own against Jane Austen, Barbara Pym and Elizabeth Bowen in her intelligent, domestic novels. I’m sure her writing must have influenced contemporary writers of everyday life, such as Tyler herself, of course, and Tessa Hadley.

The book opens with Amy and her artist husband Nick, in early old age I guess, taking a cruise around the Aegean, after Nick has spent a bit of time in hospital with an unspecified (to us) ailment. During the holiday, Amy resents Nick’s forays into art galleries and identical-looking mosques, and his insistence on contemplating tedious (to her) Ming vases and suchlike for what feels like hours on end, and she also resents his friendship with a younger American woman, writer and academic Martha, who hangs around with them as one of the only other English speakers, and shares her art books with Nick.

Then tragedy strikes, and Amy is forced to return home without him. (This isn’t a spoiler, it happens in the first few pages, and is flagged up on the back cover too.) Martha looks after her in the immediate aftermath of her loss, and escorts her back to London, but although acknowledging the American woman’s kindness Amy doesn’t warm to her and finds her presence grating. As best she can, she picks up life where she left it, alone except for her ex-publican housekeeper Ernie, who calls her “madam” and has a “mixture of servility and familiarity, like a human-being lost to his own place in the world” (despite it apparently being set in the early 1970s!).

Amy also sees her patronising son James and his family – comprising efficient wife Maggie and two well-drawn, often wittily portrayed little girls – and Nick’s good friend Gareth, an attentive, faintly smug, widowed doctor. And she sees Martha regularly too, for having forged a bond with Amy, however unreciprocated, Martha is unwilling to let it go.

In one part of this book our heroine Amy picks up a book written by Martha and notes that “the writing is spare, as if translated from the French”, and the same could be said for Elizabeth Taylor’s prose in this book really. She’s very good at cutting through to essential truths and an intensity of feeling in just a few words.

Amy keeps her feelings to herself much of the time, in her role as a buttoned-up, upper middle-class English woman of a particular generation, but, as readers, we have access to her thoughts. She can be selfish: for example, she has little interest in throwback housekeeper Ernie and his various minor ailments, while Martha points out to her on a visit to her home that she never asks a single question about her, while Martha’s questions, in contrast, tend towards the relentless.

Perhaps we’re not supposed to warm to Amy, who is penny-pinching in contrast with Martha’s generosity of spirit, who finds her grand-daughters wearing (though fair enough, small children are exhausting), and who hangs on to outmoded hierarchies. But then who hasn’t felt resentful at being forced to spend time with someone who simply feels like a massive effort, however kind?!

Amy’s deeds might seem mean spirited without our access to her inner world, and ultra-English but intensely relatable reticence. Taylor is highly adept at recognising the emotional complexity that can underpin even the most everyday of interactions. I rather liked Amy, I found her a largely sympathetic character and also found quite a few of her reflections uncomfortably familiar. For example, sadly I too am inclined to a bit of random sentimental but fairly disengaged weeping:

“Tears often came to her eyes when writing insincere letters, and they came now for a moment”

I enjoyed this book much more than the tragicomic Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, which tends to attract perhaps the greatest praise (I rated it a 3/5). Looking back at Goodreads, eight years ago I also read Elizabeth Taylor’s The Wedding Group which I didn’t particularly love – I rated it 3 out of 5 at the time, and can’t remember much about it. Blaming is a great book, and a wise book I thought, which examines the sometimes terrible consequences of an excess of self-absorption. I need to read Taylor’s Angel now, which has been sitting on my shelves for way too long.

Documentary film Mystify: Michael Hutchence (Australia)

review no 182, by Imogen G

My husband went camping for the weekend so I watched this 2019 documentary film, although actually he’d have been happy to watch it – INXS were the first band he saw live, back in the late 80s. I’d wanted to see the film since an algorithm on Facebook or elsewhere targeted me with unexpectedly candid home video footage of Kylie Minogue and Michael Hutchence looking beautiful and radiant and open and joyful in the late 1980s, frolicking on a boat in, I think, the South of France.

Hutchence, the singer with INXS, and a famously magnetic performer, was one of the last rock stars in the traditional mould inspired by Mick Jagger and David Bowie, and the only truly global Australian rock star that I can think of.

His mannerisms and facial expressions came straight out of the Jagger playbook, while the way he planted kisses on his band members, slinging a casually affectionate arm around them while performing, are reminiscent of David Bowie’s homoerotic and, at the time, scandalously ground-breaking, draping of an arm around Mick Ronson’s shoulders while dressed in snakeskin in 1972.

Mystify, directed by ‘veteran’ Australian filmmaker Richard Lowenstein reportedly took 10 years to make. Lowenstein is quoted as saying he made it as an ‘apology’ to Hutchence, a friend, for not being there for him at the end. The number of people of who feel culpable after a suicide is another tragedy.

The film is gripping. It probably helps if you really fancied Michael Hutchence, but what straight woman didn’t? There are candid interviews with people who were close to him, such as Kylie Minogue, Danish supermodel Helena Christensen and U2 singer Bono, and concert, video and TV footage is inter-cut with more personal video clips to create a patchwork-style documentary.

While dating Christensen, Hutchence was assaulted by a taxi driver in Copenhagen, which resulted in him falling and hitting his head on the curb. Those close to him reported a change in behaviour after this incident, which is repeatedly (and, yes, mystifyingly) described in the film as “the accident”. Hutchence became more moody, mercurial and prone to violent outbursts.

We know the rest. An improbable romance with British TV presenter and rock wife Paula Yates led to a bitter custody battle with Bob Geldof, and ended in drugs scandals, attacks on journalists and Hutchence’s suicide in a hotel room in 1997. Yates died three years later.

The film is mesmerising and kaleidoscopic, providing some genuine insights into a warm, complicated man who epitomized rock god sex appeal in the late 1980s and early to mid-1990s – even as it unspools towards the inevitable tragedy at its end.

Prince: Welcome 2 America review and my Top 7 Prince songs (USA)

AMERICAS AND THE CARIBBEAN

review no 181, by Imogen G

I’ve been feeling for a while that it is more or less impossible to pick a “best” US musician, as (along with the UK) the USA has dominated popular music basically for ever, or certainly throughout my lifetime.

Then I started listening to Welcome 2 America, the “new” album by the late, great sexpot performer Prince, another of 2016’s sacrificial lambs. Combined with Brexit and Trump, and with the losses of Bowie and George Michael book-ending the year, no wonder “fuck you 2016!” has become the exclamation of choice in our family, no matter the year. I feel lucky to have seen Prince perform live here in London, though it was a few years after his 80s heyday (2007 to be precise).

Welcome 2 America is made up of material that was recorded in 2010, but which Prince did not deem worthy of release – rather than having been salvaged from old filing cabinets and down the back of the sofa as I had expected. It’s actually really good, much better than anything he put out for release in the last 15 or 20 years of his life, and there are a couple of stand-outs on there, plus some unexpected and not unwelcome politicising on the eponymous track and others, including 1000 Light Years from Here. My husband noted that the track Stand Up and B Strong is distinctly cheesy, with the feel of a rousing finale from a stage musical, or perhaps a Year 6 leaver’s concert, while another track seems to channel ’80s Lionel Ritchie. Nevertheless, although Welcome 2 America lacks the raw sexual energy of Prince’s earlier (and best) work, it’s well worth a listen.

To round off, I thought I’d compile a little list of my top 7 Prince songs:

  • Purple Rain: I didn’t love this when it came out, and the film was frankly confusing – unsurprisingly, given it came out in 1984, when I was 10. But it’s grown on me over the past four decades!
  • When Doves Cry: this is my preferred track from the Purple Rain album, a beautiful classic.
  • Nothing Compares 2 U: Gorgeous track. He’s got the moves, too.
  • Raspberry Beret: Worth inclusion for the vid alone.
  • Gett Off: “let me show you that I’m a talented boy”, pure filth, with an excellent high-energy dance routine.
  • Cream: with a 6 minute video, almost 2 minutes of which are taken up with shots of erm yeah Prince licking cream off the fingers of sexy ladies.
  • The Beautiful Ones – another Purple Rain classic.

Alligator and other stories by Dima Alzayat (Syria)

review no 180, by Imogen G

I’ve not had much time recently, but one book I have managed to get through is Alligator & Other Stories by Syrian-born, US-raised, UK-based writer Dima Alzayat. Alligator is a short story collection that was shortlisted for the James Tait Black prize for fiction this year.

The James Tait Black prize lists for both fiction and biography are among my favourites, and the prize is the UK’s oldest, awarded each August by the University of Edinburgh’s School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures. Former winners have included Eimear McBride’s wonderful Lesser Bohemians (for fiction), one of my favourite books, and Lindsey Hilsum’s riveting biography of war reporter Marie Colvin, who died in Syria in 2012.

Alligator & Other Stories is a varied, experimental collection that didn’t always work for me – I found the quality of the stories very mixed, but I was impressed by the wide variety of voices and styles of writing in this collection, which has as its heart an examination of the immigrant experience.

My favourites were the moving opening story Ghusl, in which, like a modern-day Antigone, a girl prepares her murdered brother’s body for burial, in defiance of patriarchal norms, and Summer of the Shark, which takes place in a telesales call centre on 11 September 2001, and which I read, coincidentally, on the anniversary of those infamous attacks.

The collection has its eye on contemporary sociopolitical themes, so naturally there’s a #metoo-type story, Only Those Who Struggle Succeed, which reads a bit like Rachel Cusk, or perhaps more like Kristen Roupenian’s infamous Cat Person.

Alligator is the longest and most ambitious story, based around a real lynching in 1929. The story uses a collage-like style that employs both actual and imagined documentation, and combines newspaper reports, witness statements, emails and even a script for a psychic TV reality show, and links the experience of Syrian immigrants with racism and the persecution of minority groups throughout USA history.

Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe)

AFRICA SOUTH OF THE SAHARA

The opening lines of Nervous Conditions are disarming, and made me want to read on: “I was not sorry when my brother died. Nor am I apologising for my callousness, as you may define it, my lack of feeling. For it is not that at all….”.

Published in 1988, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions was the first book to be published by a black Zimbabwean woman in English. Dangarembga initially struggled to find a publisher for the book in Zimbabwe, and it was only after the Women’s Press in the UK published Nervous Conditions that Zimbabwean publishers began to show an interest.

Nervous Conditions is considered to be one of the top 12 books to come out of Africa during the 20th century, along with other greats such as Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter, which I reviewed in 2019 (though even my review of that is heavy going, let alone the book!).

Nervous Conditions was a more approachable read. It is a semi-autobiographical coming of age tale set during the 1960s and 1970s in pre-independence Zimbabwe, then still known as Rhodesia (after the now much-derided colonial-era politician Cecil Rhodes). The novel follows the experience of Tambudzai (Tambu), a young Shona girl from a family of subsistence farmers, and her wealthy cousin Nyasha, who has studied in the UK. Both girls are very bright. To Tambu, Nyasha seems crazily sophisticated, but she is a complicated and confused character, more intellectually critical than Tambu, and she questions the impact Westernization has had on her family, and resents the patriarchal strictures at home that prevent her from socialising with boys and having some independence.

Nyasha’s own mother, Maiguru, has a Master’s degree, obtained in the UK, but much good it does her – her role is as an often passive and effortfully sweet wife, mother and aunt, so she is permitted to exist only really in relation to other people. In contrast, her headmaster husband Babamukuru, the main male character in the novel, is an impassive, opinionated, authoritarian and sometimes cruelly violent presence.

Tambu’s early childhood spent working at the homestead makes her determined to escape the future that she can see laid out before her. She is a rebel in a different way to Nyasha, as she seizes the opportunity offered by Babamukuru to permit her to attend secondary school, a chance hitherto reserved for her brother, although her parents are really not in favour of her leaving her home for an education. Her father sees it as wasted on a girl, while her mother is traumatised after the loss of Tambu’s brother, as well as other infants, and wants her daughter with her.

The book is very much based around the late colonial female experience, in an environment where new educational opportunities were beginning to become available for young people, but where gender-based discrimination and traditional, patriarchal values still dominated and where racial inequalities persisted.

The title comes from a quote by Jean-Paul Sartre: “The condition of native is a nervous condition.” The characters in this novel, now a modern classic, embody that principle.

Strangely perhaps, and entirely coincidentally, I read this at the same time as the 2020 Ugandan novel The First Woman by Jennifer Makumbi, which just won the Jhalak Prize (review to follow). Set during the dictatorship of Idi Amin, and a coming of age tale partly set in a girls’ school, I could see parallels with Nervous Conditions, which was surely an influence on the later book.

Nervous Conditions is the first in what eventually became a trilogy, the final part of which was published in 2020 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. As well as a writer, Dangarembga is an academic and a political activist (and was briefly imprisoned during anti-corruption protests in Harare, the Zimbabwean capital, in 2020).