Sunday, December 1, 2013
Triumph for Donal Ryan
He has done it! Donal Ryan has walked off with the Guardian First Book Award with his novel, The Spinning Heart. If you haven't already bought it, do so now and, if you are in any doubt, do read the awesome review published yesterday in the Guardian Review section. Find it at http://tinyurl.com/phyazgt.
Monday, November 18, 2013
The Spinning Heart
Irish authors are making their presence felt! Following rapidly on the success of Eimear McBride in the Goldsmiths Award, Donal Ryan has now been nominated, as one of six authors, with The Spinning Heart in the Guardian 2013 First Book award. The winner will be announced at Tate Modern on 28 November.
Already a winner of Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards 2012 and long listed for the Man Booker Prize, Donal Ryan has written an intriguing and very original spin on the effects of the recession in Ireland. But it is also much more than just the effects of the recession. The book is set in a village in Ireland where a local developer, Pokey Burke, has crashed and disappeared leaving unpaid bills and wages, a situation devastating for the locals. But like any village, its not just all about work - there are local antagonisms, resentments, fears and, above all, tremendous stress in relationships leading eventually to both a murder and a kidnap. Ryan himself said that 'there's a marriage at the centre of The Spinning Heart, and a relationship between a father and son, and they're what I was most concerned with'. And that is the triumph of the book - we have lived and are living the recession, we've bought several of the t-shirts and might think we have read enough about it. But this is different. There are 21 characters involved and Ryan has given each one of them a chapter and I have to say that the quickest you can read this book - its only 150 pages - the better as it makes more impact when one can remember clearly the different sentiments expressed by each character. This format that Ryan has chosen gives a new insight into the lives and thoughts of a disparate group of villagers and their relationships with each other, their jealousies and desires. That between Bobby Mahon, one of the leading characters, and his father is told with huge skill and not a little surprise and will certainly give you pause for thought.
Ryan writes with a delicacy and perfection that is a pleasure to read. He captures a world reminiscent of McGahern though with none of that grim misery. As with many short novels, the language is spare and precise and yet he gives us a complex and involved narrative superior to many books twice its length. Definitely worth a read.
Published in paperback by Doubleday Ireland, £10.99
Already a winner of Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards 2012 and long listed for the Man Booker Prize, Donal Ryan has written an intriguing and very original spin on the effects of the recession in Ireland. But it is also much more than just the effects of the recession. The book is set in a village in Ireland where a local developer, Pokey Burke, has crashed and disappeared leaving unpaid bills and wages, a situation devastating for the locals. But like any village, its not just all about work - there are local antagonisms, resentments, fears and, above all, tremendous stress in relationships leading eventually to both a murder and a kidnap. Ryan himself said that 'there's a marriage at the centre of The Spinning Heart, and a relationship between a father and son, and they're what I was most concerned with'. And that is the triumph of the book - we have lived and are living the recession, we've bought several of the t-shirts and might think we have read enough about it. But this is different. There are 21 characters involved and Ryan has given each one of them a chapter and I have to say that the quickest you can read this book - its only 150 pages - the better as it makes more impact when one can remember clearly the different sentiments expressed by each character. This format that Ryan has chosen gives a new insight into the lives and thoughts of a disparate group of villagers and their relationships with each other, their jealousies and desires. That between Bobby Mahon, one of the leading characters, and his father is told with huge skill and not a little surprise and will certainly give you pause for thought.
Ryan writes with a delicacy and perfection that is a pleasure to read. He captures a world reminiscent of McGahern though with none of that grim misery. As with many short novels, the language is spare and precise and yet he gives us a complex and involved narrative superior to many books twice its length. Definitely worth a read.
Published in paperback by Doubleday Ireland, £10.99
Thursday, November 14, 2013
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing
I haven't been this excited for a long time! Eimear McBride has won the Goldsmiths Prize for original fiction with her extraordinary and ground-breaking novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. Look back at my blog of 7 October. As I said then,
'A shortlist of six books is going forward, the winner to be announced on 13 November. And what is really exciting is that one of the six is A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride, an Irish born author now living in England and a true inheritor of Joyce. Anne Enright has already called her a genius, an opinion with which I concur. In form and language, it is unique written as it is in half-formed sentences but with each word chosen to implode in the text with astonishing power that drives the narrative. Though we are living in the mind of a young woman, this is not a stream of consciousness but a frightening look at the travails of childhood, schooldays and beyond to the age of 20. She grows up in a household where the father has left, her elder brother has survived a childhood brain tumour which has left him damaged and her mother becomes a charismatic christian. While religion or, rather the outward forms of a public piosity play a part in the book, it does not dominate. She deals with the cruelty and mindless viciousness that can happen in school. She discovers sex and pain and the power sex gives. McBride deals particularly elegantly with the love the narrator has for her disabled brother coupled with the frustration and hate of his handicap. All her characters are nameless.
This is a truly exciting and extraordinary piece of literature in both form, language and content. The jacket of the novel carries a quotation from the text which gives a taste of her writing: 'I think your face the very best. When we were we were we were young. When you were little and I was girl. Once upon a time'.
I don't think I shall read a better book any time soon.
'A shortlist of six books is going forward, the winner to be announced on 13 November. And what is really exciting is that one of the six is A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride, an Irish born author now living in England and a true inheritor of Joyce. Anne Enright has already called her a genius, an opinion with which I concur. In form and language, it is unique written as it is in half-formed sentences but with each word chosen to implode in the text with astonishing power that drives the narrative. Though we are living in the mind of a young woman, this is not a stream of consciousness but a frightening look at the travails of childhood, schooldays and beyond to the age of 20. She grows up in a household where the father has left, her elder brother has survived a childhood brain tumour which has left him damaged and her mother becomes a charismatic christian. While religion or, rather the outward forms of a public piosity play a part in the book, it does not dominate. She deals with the cruelty and mindless viciousness that can happen in school. She discovers sex and pain and the power sex gives. McBride deals particularly elegantly with the love the narrator has for her disabled brother coupled with the frustration and hate of his handicap. All her characters are nameless.
This is a truly exciting and extraordinary piece of literature in both form, language and content. The jacket of the novel carries a quotation from the text which gives a taste of her writing: 'I think your face the very best. When we were we were we were young. When you were little and I was girl. Once upon a time'.
I don't think I shall read a better book any time soon.
Monday, October 28, 2013
Serious Literature
Philip Davis's book, Reading and the Reader, has been published in paperback by OUP and sets out to reassert the importance of literature in the digital age. It is the first volume in a series on 'The Literary Agenda'.
I have worked hard to bring you the best of literature out there and you will be glad to know that, according to PD Smith in the Guardian, 'serious literature reaches those neural pathways that other texts cannot; it awakens a sense of ontological reality, a heightened state of being in the world and "opens out the inside place in human beings"'. Can one ask for more?
See http://tinyurl.com/q2fxjx6
I have worked hard to bring you the best of literature out there and you will be glad to know that, according to PD Smith in the Guardian, 'serious literature reaches those neural pathways that other texts cannot; it awakens a sense of ontological reality, a heightened state of being in the world and "opens out the inside place in human beings"'. Can one ask for more?
See http://tinyurl.com/q2fxjx6
Monday, October 21, 2013
Children's Books
I have to admit that I don't normally spend much time reading reviews of children's books but I know there are many of you out there who probably do at times stand baffled before the shelves in bookshops wondering what on earth to buy for nieces, nephews, grandchildren - and, indeed, one's own brood. Last Saturday in the Review section of the Irish Times, Robert Dunbar, Ireland's leading children's books reviewer, published a very helpful list of his favourites from 25 years that is well worth saving and, judging from my years of book selling, is spot on. Read it here
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Booker 2013
As of fifteen minutes ago, Eleanor Catton has walked off with the Booker Prize. Her novel is Victorian in form, set in 19th century New Zealand, a murder mystery with astrological decor - a quick read at 832 pages!
Saturday, October 12, 2013
Testimony of Mary and John Waters
An extraordinary article by John Waters appeared in The Irish Times yesterday [Friday 11 October] on Colm Toibin's novella, The Testimony of Mary, which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In it Waters says he believes it vitally important for Ireland and Irish culture that the book wins because then 'we may be unable to continue ignoring, as we have done, what the book demands we address'.
In his book, Toibin paints the Virgin Mary as an old woman, unhappy and angry, and at odds with two evangelists who want her to confirm their account of the life and death of her son. Waters claims that Toibin in no sense crosses the line into fantasy but writes of facts. If he does, then he has a unique communication with the Almighty as there are no known 'facts' about Mary's life after the death of Jesus.
I have no argument with Toibin who writes beautifully as always but rather with Waters' assertion that it presents a challenge to believers. It is difficult to see why any work of fiction should do so, much less cause them to jettison their beliefs. Waters writing is opaque and even confusing. He claims the book 'throws down a gauntlet to the very method of our reasoning, and drops into a cultural moment when a sense of the strangeness of everyday reality has become lost to the extent that anything beyond the banal nowadays seems implausible'? Waters considers that we have, so to speak, hunkered down in a bunker we have built to 'inhabit and behold the world from'. If by that he means that we have become unquestioning of our faith and reluctant to face the bigger existential questions out there, he is gravely mistaken for I firmly believe, through my own experience, that issues of faith and morals are very much alive and being debated widely. For example, figures published recently show that the biggest turnouts at referenda were on moral issues.
Toibin has said, according to Waters, that his interest was not in what people nowadays believe but in the mind and heart of Mary at that moment. I find myself less challenged and more saddened by his version.
In his book, Toibin paints the Virgin Mary as an old woman, unhappy and angry, and at odds with two evangelists who want her to confirm their account of the life and death of her son. Waters claims that Toibin in no sense crosses the line into fantasy but writes of facts. If he does, then he has a unique communication with the Almighty as there are no known 'facts' about Mary's life after the death of Jesus.
I have no argument with Toibin who writes beautifully as always but rather with Waters' assertion that it presents a challenge to believers. It is difficult to see why any work of fiction should do so, much less cause them to jettison their beliefs. Waters writing is opaque and even confusing. He claims the book 'throws down a gauntlet to the very method of our reasoning, and drops into a cultural moment when a sense of the strangeness of everyday reality has become lost to the extent that anything beyond the banal nowadays seems implausible'? Waters considers that we have, so to speak, hunkered down in a bunker we have built to 'inhabit and behold the world from'. If by that he means that we have become unquestioning of our faith and reluctant to face the bigger existential questions out there, he is gravely mistaken for I firmly believe, through my own experience, that issues of faith and morals are very much alive and being debated widely. For example, figures published recently show that the biggest turnouts at referenda were on moral issues.
Toibin has said, according to Waters, that his interest was not in what people nowadays believe but in the mind and heart of Mary at that moment. I find myself less challenged and more saddened by his version.
Read it for yourself at http://tinyurl.com/njdop5b
Monday, October 7, 2013
Goldsmiths Prize and A Girl is a Half-formed Thing
For some reason, this Prize almost passed me by which is alarming as it sets out to award a prize for exactly the kind of book I am constantly praising, one concerned with formal inventiveness, one 'that
breaks the mould and opens up new possibilities for the novel form', in the words of its founders [read more http://tinyurl.com/nbc65s3].
Even better, one of the judges is Gabriel Josipovici whose book Whatever Happened to Modernism? was a clarion call on the quality of today's literary writing. He laments that 'existing prizes in effect reward the kinds of novels that can only be talked about in terms of their content. The notion that to talk of form in fiction is to despise content is deeply ingrained in English literary culture - in fact the opposite is the case'.
A shortlist of six books is going forward, the winner to be announced on 13 November. And what is really exciting is that one of the six is A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride, an Irish born author now living in England and a true inheritor of Joyce. Anne Enright has already called her a genius, an opinion with which I concur. In form and language, it is unique written as it is in half-formed sentences but with each word chosen to implode in the text with astonishing power that drives the narrative. Though we are living in the mind of a young woman, this is not a stream of consciousness but a frightening look at the travails of childhood, schooldays and beyond to the age of 20. She grows up in a household where the father has left, her elder brother has survived a childhood brain tumour which has left him damaged and her mother becomes a charismatic christian. While religion or, rather the outward forms of a public piosity play a part in the book, it does not dominate. She deals with the cruelty and mindless viciousness that can happen in school. She discovers sex and pain and the power sex gives. McBride deals particularly elegantly with the love the narrator has for her disabled brother coupled with the frustration and hate of his handicap. All her characters are nameless.
This is a truly exciting and extraordinary piece of literature in both form, language and content. The jacket of the novel carries a quotation from the text which gives a taste of her writing: 'I think your face the very best. When we were we were we were young. When you were little and I was girl. Once upon a time'.
I doubt I shall read a better book anytime soon.
A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride, published in pb by Galley Beggar.
Even better, one of the judges is Gabriel Josipovici whose book Whatever Happened to Modernism? was a clarion call on the quality of today's literary writing. He laments that 'existing prizes in effect reward the kinds of novels that can only be talked about in terms of their content. The notion that to talk of form in fiction is to despise content is deeply ingrained in English literary culture - in fact the opposite is the case'.
A shortlist of six books is going forward, the winner to be announced on 13 November. And what is really exciting is that one of the six is A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride, an Irish born author now living in England and a true inheritor of Joyce. Anne Enright has already called her a genius, an opinion with which I concur. In form and language, it is unique written as it is in half-formed sentences but with each word chosen to implode in the text with astonishing power that drives the narrative. Though we are living in the mind of a young woman, this is not a stream of consciousness but a frightening look at the travails of childhood, schooldays and beyond to the age of 20. She grows up in a household where the father has left, her elder brother has survived a childhood brain tumour which has left him damaged and her mother becomes a charismatic christian. While religion or, rather the outward forms of a public piosity play a part in the book, it does not dominate. She deals with the cruelty and mindless viciousness that can happen in school. She discovers sex and pain and the power sex gives. McBride deals particularly elegantly with the love the narrator has for her disabled brother coupled with the frustration and hate of his handicap. All her characters are nameless.
This is a truly exciting and extraordinary piece of literature in both form, language and content. The jacket of the novel carries a quotation from the text which gives a taste of her writing: 'I think your face the very best. When we were we were we were young. When you were little and I was girl. Once upon a time'.
I doubt I shall read a better book anytime soon.
A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride, published in pb by Galley Beggar.
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan
Let me say straight off that I can understand why Philip Hensher got so uptight about the extension of the Booker Prize to include American authors when I read this latest offering from Ian McEwan if we are to take it as representing the acme of British literature. Hensher finds it 'hard to see how the American novel will fail to dominate' the new look Booker. Never mind that he claims that it is understood that 'the Booker is a recommendation about the British or Commonwealth novel'. John Banville and Roddy Doyle inter alia will be delighted to read that! [Read more http://goo.gl/tK8OzL]
Sweet Tooth is not the kind of spy thriller that has you on the edge of your seat, indeed it is at times tedious and neither particularly 'acute' nor 'witty' - as claimed on the dust jacket - relying totally on an Atonement-like conceit in the final 22 pages [and you will have read 348 pp to get there!]. On the way, one gathers a lot of McEwan opinions on literature not least his railing against postmodernism when his protagonist avers “I wasn’t impressed by those writers . . . who infiltrated their own pages as part of the cast, determined to remind the poor reader that all the characters and even they themselves were pure inventions. . . . I believed that writers were paid to pretend.” McEwan then goes on to gainsay this and write himself extensively into the narrative. One of the two main characters, a writer, Tom Haley, is clearly a poorly cloaked version of McEwan himself and his previous stories are rehashes of McEwan's books.
The narrative, set in the late sixties and early seventies, concerns a beautiful young woman, Serena Frome, a bishop's daughter, who goes up to Cambridge to read Mathematics. She eschews the counterculture of the time finding cannabis boring and dislikes rock music but is, nevertheless, rather taken with the sexual liberty of the period which she samples liberally before falling into an affair with her considerably older history tutor. Surprise, surprise, this being the sixties and Cambridge, this tutor recruits her to MI5 following her graduation with a poor third.
Serena's one passion is reading and she is an eclectic reader, anything from Valley of the Dolls to Jane Austen until she becomes totally captivated by Solzhenitsyn, a champion of liberty. Rather curious, as the mission she takes on in MI5 is to recruit an author that is felt could champion the MI5 led capitalist philosophy of the west. Tom Haley is the target, a lecturer in English in the University of Sussex who would be offered funds through a front, an existing Foundation, sufficient to allow him to write rather than lecture for a year or two. These were the pre-electronic social media days when books really mattered and when the CIA and MI5 believed that encouraging the 'right sort' to write would have an effect. Serena meets Tom and promptly falls in love. All rather straightforward and a long way from the typical Cold War thriller and John Le Carre. Probably the most crucial thing that concerns Serena is how she can continue in a serious relationship with Tom while still concealing that he was targeted by MI5. In the meantime, she gets by consuming quantities of Chablis and oysters. As I have said, the book hangs on a conceit and I am not enough of a spoil sport to let that out.
There are good pieces that McEwan does well such as the period details particularly how women were treated in the workplace. Though our heroine, Serena, only has a third, most of the women she works with in MI5 are first class honours graduates who, nevertheless, are treated almost as filing clerks and the glass ceiling at the time was very very low. He also captures the atmosphere of the revolutionary counter culture of the time in the universities [well, he was a student at the same time!] using as a vehicle, Serena's sister, who is a hippie.
I think the correct comment is 'could do better'!
A good book to read in hospital or on a plane to Australia!
Sweet Tooth is not the kind of spy thriller that has you on the edge of your seat, indeed it is at times tedious and neither particularly 'acute' nor 'witty' - as claimed on the dust jacket - relying totally on an Atonement-like conceit in the final 22 pages [and you will have read 348 pp to get there!]. On the way, one gathers a lot of McEwan opinions on literature not least his railing against postmodernism when his protagonist avers “I wasn’t impressed by those writers . . . who infiltrated their own pages as part of the cast, determined to remind the poor reader that all the characters and even they themselves were pure inventions. . . . I believed that writers were paid to pretend.” McEwan then goes on to gainsay this and write himself extensively into the narrative. One of the two main characters, a writer, Tom Haley, is clearly a poorly cloaked version of McEwan himself and his previous stories are rehashes of McEwan's books.
The narrative, set in the late sixties and early seventies, concerns a beautiful young woman, Serena Frome, a bishop's daughter, who goes up to Cambridge to read Mathematics. She eschews the counterculture of the time finding cannabis boring and dislikes rock music but is, nevertheless, rather taken with the sexual liberty of the period which she samples liberally before falling into an affair with her considerably older history tutor. Surprise, surprise, this being the sixties and Cambridge, this tutor recruits her to MI5 following her graduation with a poor third.
Serena's one passion is reading and she is an eclectic reader, anything from Valley of the Dolls to Jane Austen until she becomes totally captivated by Solzhenitsyn, a champion of liberty. Rather curious, as the mission she takes on in MI5 is to recruit an author that is felt could champion the MI5 led capitalist philosophy of the west. Tom Haley is the target, a lecturer in English in the University of Sussex who would be offered funds through a front, an existing Foundation, sufficient to allow him to write rather than lecture for a year or two. These were the pre-electronic social media days when books really mattered and when the CIA and MI5 believed that encouraging the 'right sort' to write would have an effect. Serena meets Tom and promptly falls in love. All rather straightforward and a long way from the typical Cold War thriller and John Le Carre. Probably the most crucial thing that concerns Serena is how she can continue in a serious relationship with Tom while still concealing that he was targeted by MI5. In the meantime, she gets by consuming quantities of Chablis and oysters. As I have said, the book hangs on a conceit and I am not enough of a spoil sport to let that out.
There are good pieces that McEwan does well such as the period details particularly how women were treated in the workplace. Though our heroine, Serena, only has a third, most of the women she works with in MI5 are first class honours graduates who, nevertheless, are treated almost as filing clerks and the glass ceiling at the time was very very low. He also captures the atmosphere of the revolutionary counter culture of the time in the universities [well, he was a student at the same time!] using as a vehicle, Serena's sister, who is a hippie.
I think the correct comment is 'could do better'!
A good book to read in hospital or on a plane to Australia!
Saturday, September 21, 2013
New take on books
If any of you happen to be in Madrid now or in the near future, there is a unique exhibition of a work by Olafur Eliasson, the Danish-Icelandic artist, being held in Ivorypress Space, Calle del Comandante Zorita, 46-48, 19-28 September.
Eliasson specialises in sculptures and large-scale installation art employing light and water chiefly - he gave us the Sun in the Tate Modern in 2012. This particular exhibition is entitled 'A view becomes a window', a celebration of the book. His book is of glass and light with coloured glass sheets in leather binding, nine unique editions. Eliasson describes it as 'a homage to the book as a space in which we find ourselves. The space and the reader are reflected in the deep glassy surfaces in which ultimately you - the reader - are read by the book'.
In interview, Eliasson said he created it in support of the physical book under threat in the digital age. His creation is extraordinarily beautiful, a graceful homage to a precious commodity.
Read more on www.ivorypress.com/.../new-artist’s-book-ivorypress-view-becomes-win
Eliasson specialises in sculptures and large-scale installation art employing light and water chiefly - he gave us the Sun in the Tate Modern in 2012. This particular exhibition is entitled 'A view becomes a window', a celebration of the book. His book is of glass and light with coloured glass sheets in leather binding, nine unique editions. Eliasson describes it as 'a homage to the book as a space in which we find ourselves. The space and the reader are reflected in the deep glassy surfaces in which ultimately you - the reader - are read by the book'.
In interview, Eliasson said he created it in support of the physical book under threat in the digital age. His creation is extraordinarily beautiful, a graceful homage to a precious commodity.
Read more on www.ivorypress.com/.../new-artist’s-book-ivorypress-view-becomes-win
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