I'm a UK-based editor for a major publisher. I'm making it my off-duty duty to experience FIVE books, FIVE films, art, TV, music and food from every country in the world (where feasible). See drop down menus for my progress.
Homegoing was published in 2016 to much praise. Gyasi was born in 1989 in Ghana, but grew up mainly in the USA. However, Homegoing, her first novel, was apparently inspired by a trip back to the country of her birth in 2009.
At first the novel was a little disorientating, as the story cut away after the first pages to another character’s perspective, and it develops in that way through the course of the novel, following the interconnected lives of generations, whose lives diverge dramatically. It ends up as a collection of linked short stories, really, and I’d have preferred a more coherent narrative, as I found some of the stories worked better than others.
Initially set in the late 19th century, the action opens on the Gold Coast (later Ghana) with Maame, an Asante slave within a Fante household. She runs away, but her newborn daughter, Effia, is left behind. Maame later has another daughter, Esi, with an influential Asante. Effia ends up as the wife of a British slave trader. In stark contrast, her hitherto cossetted half-sister is captured in a raid and, in a slightly heavy-handed reversal of fortunes, eventually finds herself in America as a slave. Each chapter is narrated from the perspective of one of the sister’s descendants, travelling through successive generations until the present day.
Gyasi brings a new, often gruelling focus on the participation of West Africans in the slave trade, and in its epic scale and ambition the book is impressive. However, it felt a bit like a history lesson in places, and some of the characters felt a bit of an incoherent hotchpotch, with each compelled to somehow represent the imagined experience of a whole generation. Nevertheless, some episodes worked brilliantly, with the decisions that sealed one generation’s happiness being seen to visit misfortune on a subsequent one, for example.
A couple of weeks ago I was looking through my shelves for pandemic lit, and was reminded of the book The Wall by Marlen Haushofer. This book, her most famous work (published in the 1960s, and appearing in English translation in 1991), seems to have fallen off the radar a bit since the author’s death in 1970, but was a very well-known feminist novel in the German-speaking world in its heyday. It was also revived as a film a few years ago, which I may need to check out.
The protagonist, holidaying in the Austrian mountains, wakes to find herself apparently the only living survivor of a bizarre event that has caused an invisible wall to spring up, beyond which all humanity seem to have been instantly frozen, struck dead doing whatever they were doing when the wall appeared (perhaps the result of some kind of a nuclear event?). This premise sounds ridiculous, and I guess it is, but the seriousness and reflectiveness of the prose means it doesn’t seem silly, just odd and terrifying
The nameless, middle-aged woman, in her previous life the mother of two grown-up daughters, now finds herself unexpectedly completely alone except for a loyal, loving dog, Lynx, a cat or two, a cow she calls Bella and her calf, Bull. The woman, who was staying with her cousin Luise and brother-in-law Hugo before humanity was seemingly wiped out, makes use of her slightly neurotic brother-in-law’s living arrangements, which means, as a consequence, she is initially handily well-stocked for surviving the apocalypse.
Nevertheless, Hugo’s supplies can only take her so far, and she is compelled to learn various survival skills, such as basic animal husbandry and farming, and finds herself revelling in her body’s unexpected capabilities even while her anxieties mount as to how she will endure.
The book is a first-person, diary-style account of the protagonist’s experience of life in the dystopia in which she finds herself. My copy includes an accolade from Doris Lessing on the cover, comparing the book to Robinson Crusoe. And it is perhaps a sort of female version of that tale. The woman’s painstaking descriptions of the tasks she undertakes day to day are meditative – and sometimes monotonous. I suppose there is an inherent monotony in relating the essential tasks of seasonal survival!
“One day I shall no longer exist, and no one will cut the meadow, the thickets will encroach upon it and later the forest will push as far as the wall and win back the land that man has stolen from it. Sometimes my thoughts grow confused, and it is as if the forest has put down roots in me, and is thinking its old, eternal thoughts with my brain. And the forest doesn’t want human beings to come back.”
The woman has plenty of time to reflect on the nature of her isolation, and the nature and meaning (if any) of humanity, while caring for her animals and being totally self-reliant. Becoming reliant too on the company of her fellow living creatures, she is heavily aware of the burden of care that they have entrusted to her, and also nails the constant underlying concerns that underpin motherhood:
“I’ve suffered from anxieties like these as far back as I can remember, and I will suffer from them for as long as any creature is entrusted to me. Sometimes, long before the wall existed, I wished I was dead, so that I could finally cast off my heavy load; a man wouldn’t have understood, and the women felt exactly the same as I did. And so we preferred to chat about clothes, friends and the theatre, and laugh, keeping our secret, consuming worry in our eyes.”
Her physical appearance becomes irrelevant, even as she marvels as her increasingly gender-less, strong, wiry frame.
“I thought about my old life and found it unsatisfactory in all respects. I had achieved little that I had wanted, and everything I had achieved I had ceased to want.”
At times, the woman’s life seems almost utopian, as she basks in nature during the summer months, surrounded by the uncomplicated warmth of her animals.
“I’d spent most of my life struggling with daily human concerns. Now that I had barely anything left, I could sit in peace on the bench and watch the stars dancing against the black firmament.”
At other times, the harsh brutality of her existence is all too evident. A bout of terrible toothache is all but impossible to bear, and when it settles she ponders how her teeth are “fixed in my jaw like time bombs“. (Now that my own local dentist is closed for who knows how long I’ve been feeling this, and obsessively tending to my own teeth, after having a nasty abscess and root canal treatment at the end of February!)
It was a little unsettling (bit of British under-statement there) to re-read this book at a time when a killer virus is raging its way throughout the world, with a vaccine seemingly a long way off, and with no real knowledge of whether it is possible to build up long-lasting immunity. When the protagonist sees her life in an unblinkered way, it forces the reader (er, me!) to confront new, very uncomfortable realities in their own life.
A few years ago my husband and I set ourselves the task of working our way through the IMDB’s “top 250” list of the highest rated films by users of the app/site. We worked in reverse order, and gave up after a few months after encountering a fair amount of dross, amid the gems.
I was never convinced the list contained the “best” films (though it is always going to be subjective). It struck me that perhaps the demographic that was rating films on IMDB was skewed towards young people (maybe under 30), and men, so it included a preponderance of (to me) tedious action flicks. If I ever revisit this task, maybe this time it would be a good idea to start at number 1 in the list rather than number 250!
Checking back at the list today, which obviously changes over time, I’ve noted one thing that never seems to change: The Shawshank Redemption is still sitting firmly in first place – and 3 Idiots also remains fairly high up, given the list is dominated by US blockbusters, sitting at number 80.
3 Idiots is a 2009 Hindi buddy movie co-written and directed by Rajkumar Hirani and set at an engineering college. It is billed as a comedy-drama, but I didn’t find it funny. I have never seen so many men weeping and threatening to commit suicide in one film, let alone a comedy.
However, I liked the romance between Piya (Kareena Kapoor) and Rancho (Aamir Khan), which was lovely and fluffy and romantic, and the high point of which came with the Zoobi Doobi song. You don’t get that in Western films, which are all too often focused around cynical, damaged people (see, for example, the Silver Linings Playbook, also billed as a romcom).
All the actors were much too old for their roles as students, especially Aamir Khan who, according to IMDB, was born in 1965, making him 44 years of age on the films release in 2009. And the film was really, REALLY long at 170 mins, making it probably the longest film i have ever sat through (I walked out of JFK 120 mins in, as I had to catch a train).
I faded in and out, but fortunately the plot was straightforward, in that it centred around the principal of an engineering college (a straightforward baddie) and his students (straightforward goodies), on a path to maturity and redemption. The slapstick and romance gave the film a sweetly innocent feel. I’m not all that familiar with Bollywood movies but perhaps this is a defining thing of the genre.
I followed this film up with Taare Zameen Par (titled Like Stars on Earth internationally), a 2007 Indian Hindi-language drama film produced and directed by Aamir Khan.
I preferred this to 3 Idiots, although it shared the similarly simplistic narrative structure and lack of depth of character. I don’t know if this is typical of Indian cinema in general, or just the two Indian films that I have seen. Typically, it seems, for Indian films, this movie is long, at around 2 hours 45 minutes.
The plot centres on a 8 yr old boy, Ishaan, who resembles a young Freddie Mercury, with a big goofy grin and lots of imagination. From an academically pushy, middle-class family, Ishaan is expected to succeed at school, but does not, owing to his undiagnosed dyslexia. To these eyes, it is obvious that he has dyslexia, and his teachers’ unsympathetic attitudes seemed bizarrely unreconstructed; there are no SENCOs in this school. “I suppose you have seen his test papers with big fat zeros in every category” chides the boy’s primary school teacher in a meeting with his parents.
Ishaan’s workaholic business-dad duly packs him off to boarding school, where he mopes heart-breakingly, and has a life of untold misery. I must admit I did shed a few tears at times – the film is cynically designed to bring a tear to the eye. Fortunately for Ishaan a charismatic supply teacher, Ram, played by the irrepressible Aamir Khan, is on hand to save him from his fate. He recognises (finally!) Ishaan’s textbook symptoms and helps him with his letters while organising some kind of art day to provide Ishaan with a creative outlet.
Suddenly all the hitherto evil boarding school teachers have a personality change and become lovely, championing Ishaan for his achievements under Ram’s tuition. I did like the way no-one assumed that Ram taking an interest in Ishaan was indicative of underlying paedophilia, as would certainly be the case here in the UK. (Well, we did harbour Jimmy Saville.) And the songs were great.
I have long admired the work of acclaimed American artist Edward Hopper, probably most famous for his work Nighthawks. His life and work has been written about particularly evocatively by Olivia Laing in her book The Lonely City.
That book talked about the effects of loneliness on creativity, and on the particular isolation of experiencing a feeling of loneliness in a city, where it is possible to be surrounded by others and yet remain disconnected.
Room in New York, 1932. Oil on canvas.
Living in a small house with three children and a husband, loneliness has often felt more like an unachievable goal rather than a problem.
However, the state of effective global lockdown imposed by the coronavirus pandemic has made all of us more cut off from others in our life, and some feeling of loneliness and isolation is inevitable.
Cape Cod Morning, 1950. Oil on canvas.
I can’t get out to art exhibitions in a pandemic, despite living in what is, in normal times, a cultural hub. So I found myself reaching for my shelf of art books (often hardly opened), and looking for my book on Hopper.
I’ve not been the only person recently to pick up on parallels with his work and the times in which we’re living. But, like the melancholic women in his painting, I have found myself with my face pressed against the glass, voyeuristically wondering what the people opposite might be doing in their own sealed-off rooms.
Hopper is a master of depicting people sitting alone, and creating scenes featuring deserted rooms or empty streets, which convey a sense of absolute aloneness. Paradoxically, then, his paintings ultimately capture views without viewers, even while we are gazing upon them.
Morning Sun, 1952, Oil on canvas and Room in Brooklyn, 1932. Oil on canvas.
Normal service will resume on the blog later this week, but in the meantime I’ve spent a happy hour ‘arranging’ all my unread books, double stacked and higgeldy-piggeldy, on a single shelf. This is an attempt to persuade myself to use the time when I would otherwise be shopping for books, or going out, or whatever else I used to do when I wasn’t working or looking after my children, to read my way down the pile a bit. My shelf includes books I intend to re-read, especially in terms of pandemic lit, although I’m also currently re-reading, and very much enjoying, Daphne du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’.
So I’m planning on no book buying during the remaining duration of the lockdown (although I did guiltily stock up on a handful of new books at the beginning, when I panicked that Amazon might close its doors or focus on groceries etc.).
Much of the world is locked down as a result of the COVID-19 epidemic, and normal routines have been dramatically changed. I’m finding it hard to concentrate on things I usually love, which include watching films (preferably at the cinema) and reading voraciously.
Here are a few thematic ideas for books and films that might give some kind of insight into how to cope during a global pandemic.
BOOKS:
José Eduardo Agualusa, A General Theory of Oblivion (Angola): a fictional account of a woman who, on the eve of Angolan independence, bricks herself into her apartment in Luanda and survives there alone for decades.
José Saramago, Blindness (Portugal): if you think your own country is mismanaging the current pandemic, then take comfort in the fact that they’re not doing as bad a job as the authorities in this book.
Marlen Haushofen, The Wall (Austria): a woman finds herself cut off from the rest of mankind after she discovers that a mysterious wall has cut her off from the rest of humanity, including her own children, who are all presumed dead. See, it could be worse.
Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (Netherlands): world-famous testament to an incredibly talented writer and to the suffering and endurance of her and her family, who were forced to take refuge in a secret annex in Amsterdam under constant fear of discovery during the Second World War.
Ling Ma, Severance (China/USA): a satirical, fictional look at the world from the first perspective of a first generation millennial negotiating life in the USA after humanity has been brought low by a global pandemic.
Margaret Atwood, The Testaments (Canada): another kind of dystopia, but at least its different enough from the one that we’re currently inhabiting.
Emily St John Mandel, Station Eleven (USA): unexpectedly uplifting view of society after a pandemic, and an appreciation of the power of culture to save humanity.
Tété-Michel Kpomassie, An African in Greenland (Togo): an account of an incredible journey by an incredible man. A work of non-fiction travelogue and memoir to inspire your own imaginary or real post-epidemic global adventures.
FILM:
Parasite by Bong Joon-Ho (South Korea): contains essential advice on how to lie low in the basement of someone else’s luxury home for an extended period of time, for free.
Monos by Alejandro Landes (Colombia): beautiful if brutal setting and a nice reminder that at least you’ve not been taken hostage by a brutal teenage guerrilla group.
These are strange times, and I’m struggling to focus on the distractions of reading or watching TV, while running some kind of impromptu home school and holding down my job, while I still have it (hoping it outlasts this mini apocalypse). My last few posts were written in advance, in more normal times, so I’ll be gradually moving into the (hopefully very temporary) new era with my subsequent posts.
But for now, here’s my review of Mexican novel Loop, chosen by my friend Emily for book club (which had to move online at the last minute – really not the same as chatting with wine and delicious food around a big table).
I found Loop to be quite a weird book (I’ve had a run of weird books, at a time when, more and more, I just want a nice comfort read). It’s a kind of wandering series of vignettes that cover the narrator’s obsession with a particular kind of notebook and her meditations on themes as diverse as dwarves and swallows, as she waits for her boyfriend to return home to Mexico City from Spain following the death of his mother.
The novel was first published in Spanish in 2014 as Cuaderno Ideal (Ideal Notebook), and was published in its English translation in 2019. The book is littered with classical references, as the narrator sees herself as a sort of Penelope, writing a looping series of observations, full of literary references, as she waits for her Odysseus to return. She seems a bit cut off from the outside world, and although interactions with friends are described, they are somehow screened off, and her friends seem to exist only in relation to the narrator. We learn, too, that she is recovering from some kind of accident, which is, however, eluded to only tangentially.
I found the book’s structure intriguing, challenging and frustrating in more or less equal measure. There’s no plot to speak of, it’s a sort of sequence of disconnected musings, with repeated themes, as she waits … overthinks … then waits.
I suppose I prefer more conventional prose (although I have been captivated by some very unusually structured books in the past). Either way, this novel just didn’t grab me, although I did enjoy the notebook obsession – I’m rather partial to stationary myself.
I’d heard lot of praise for communist-, samizdat-era writer Bohumil Hrabal, so he felt like the obvious initial choice for a Czech writer.
The protagonist of Too Loud of Solitude works feeding books – and occasional families of mice – into a paper compacting machine, in a mixture of faint comedy and pathos, which reminded me a bit of my experience of Samuel Beckett (not that I’m any kind of Beckett aficionado – but I saw a play once).
“For thirty-five years now I’ve been compacting waste paper, and if I had to do it all over I’d do just what I’ve done for the past thirty-five years”
Sometimes visceral, there is a kind of absurdist and fatalistic poetry in the repetition of actions and phrases, interspersed with hallucinatory, inchoate memories and visions as Hanta works in a mouse-infested basement destroying books and prints of old masters:
“until suddenly one day I felt beautiful and holy for having had the courage to hold on to my sanity after all I’d seen and been through, body and soul, in too loud a solitude, and slowly I came to the realization that my work was hurtling me headlong into an infinite field of omnipotence“.
Hanta, who is often, perhaps necessarily, drunk, has rescued tons of rare books, which are piled perilously, looming over his bed, and threatening to squash him in his sleep:
“There are nights when I think the books are plotting against me for compacting a hundred innocent mice a day, that they want to get even with me.”
Through Hanta’s work and his secret reading he has become an autodidact, and he quotes the German philosopher Kant:
“When the tremulous radiance of a summer night fills with twinkling stars and the moon itself is full, I am slowly drawn into a state of enhanced sensitivity made of friendship and disdain for the world and eternity.“
However, his emotional ups are counterbalanced in the second part of the book with increasing drunken despair, in response to the arrival of a much larger, industrial-strength compactor with threatens Hanta’s livelihood. This book is thought of as Hrabal’s most autobiographical novel (he too worked for a time as a compactor).
I found the book to be a quick read, but not an easy one, although I’m glad I made the effort to read it.
This book is a fictionalised account of incidents from the wine-soaked latter part of the life of the Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani, known for his elongated, asymmetrical portraits. Modigliani settled in Paris, and died in 1920 at the age of 35; famously, upon his death his pregnant wife committed suicide, killing herself and their unborn child. I was intrigued when I unearthed the book in a charity shop, as I was looking for a work by a Bosnian author that wasn’t set during, or in the aftermath of, the conflict that ended in 1995. Not because I don’t think that a valid topic, obviously. But I figured Bosnian writers write about other things, too, although all the books I kept coming across were very war-based, and professionally I have spent enough time picking over the Bosnian conflict.
Unfortunately, there’s no other way to say this: I thought this was a terrible book. First published in 2000, and published in English translation in 2001, the book is subtitled “a mosaic novel”, which could mean a series of powerful vignettes, a kaleidoscopic tour through the mixed-up mind of a master. In this case though it just meant a disjointed mess. No doubt the pretentious ramblings are supposed to evoke the psychological fracturing of the artist’s drink- and drug-addled mind, but it really didn’t work for me.
At times the book has a dark humour, and there are some occasional flashes of descriptive brilliance, but these alone are not enough to save the novel from a pervading sense of inchoate tedium. At least it was short and some of the pages were blank…
Translated from the French by Christopher Schaefer
AFRICA
"Bukebuke bushikana umusiba ku mugezi"
"Only with great patience does the worm reach the stream"
Baho!, we are told, is the first Burundian novel to be translated into English, and is written by an author described by the cover blurb as “the leading writer of Burundi’s younger generation”.
Nyamugari is a teenage mute, orphaned, who is accused of attempted rape after an unfortunate misunderstanding. A 14-year-old girl is – quite understandably – terrified by the sight of him pounding towards her, desperately looking for somewhere to relieve himself, after he’s struck down with a dicky tummy. Assumptions are made, Nyamugari is unable to explain himself, and he is subjected to a kind of trial by mob. It is clear that justice cannot be guaranteed.
The book struck me as having a sort of off-kilter, mischievous humour to it, alongside a sad acknowledgement, and almost acceptance of, violence as a societal norm. There are references to hugely traumatic losses as part of everyday life, although the genocide is only alluded to in passing.
There is a subtle message of accepting differences and valuing the rhythms of nature, and embracing slow rituals over pushing for change. Each chapter is prefaced with, and sometimes complemented by, a little proverb in the Kirundi language, such as “ibuye riserutse ntirimena isuka” – “the pebble that peeks out of the dirt cannot split the hoe” – basically, “don’t fret over things that are troublesome but obvious, and continue with your life”.
The novel’s form is different from the novels in the western tradition that I’m used to reading, and I found it difficult to judge whether it was any good or not! I found the book dragged quite a bit, despite being short. I was also a bit riled by the preponderance of exclamation marks, and I found that the narrative was sometimes confusing. The translator acknowledges this in his afterword, writing that “Burundians will often overwhelm their conversation partners with a verbal barrage of sometimes contradictory information.” He also says that the author, Roland Rugero, has attempted to give a sense of the orality of Burundian story telling in this short novel.
What is definitely great is that publishers like Phoneme Media, which published this edition, are making books from African countries that get less attention in the literary world available to a wider number of readers.
Imogen is Reading and Watching the World: On Books, Film, Art & More 