How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

You can see the original review at http://www.nudgemenow.com/article/person-sheila-heti/

It’s been three days since I finished How Should a Person Be? and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. Like a modern-day On the Road, it’s sprawling and playful, expressing the hopefulness, creativity and uncertainty of today’s urban twenty and thirty-somethings. I’m not sure it’s great writing. But does it matter?

Heti’s book is a tapestry of different forms, a fictionalised account of real life. Into a first-person narrative she weaves emails between her and her friends and transcripts of their long, meandering musings on life and art. Within the book, other art forms are being created and dissected, from the play Heti is struggling to write to the art work created by her close friend, Margaux Williamson. It’s a book that asks whether telling a story through art or literature can ever bring meaning to your own life; make you feel more anchored in the world.

It’s also about how we position ourselves, and shape our perception of the world, through our social circles. Heti and her friends, all artists of some kind, are like flints and steel rubbing together, trying to create a spark. The transcripts of their rambling conversations appear unedited (although this may not be the case) and Heti illuminates a wonderfully messy and vibrant world, which occasionally yields what seem to be life-changing moments. There are drugs – “when we took them, we expanded into a thousand pieces” – and there are drunken revelations: “The bar around us became rich and saturated with colour, as if all the molecules in the air were bursting their seams.” However, Heti undercuts this idealism with a wry humour, and often these experiments and encounters turn out to be dead ends. She is particularly scathing about the well-meaning men she meets: encounters which often start off positively but conclude with her realising, with disappointment, that “he was just another man who wanted to teach me something.”

The patchwork approach of the novel reflects Heti’s own chaotic attempts to find direction: as her psychiatrist warns her, “it is the everlasting switching that is the dangerous thing, not what [you] choose.” This would have been an apt warning for the book itself, which is messy and unconventional, sprawling and unconstrained. It can be joyous and bright, but at times it is frustrating and insubstantial, like eating air. The circular conversations are funny to a point, and yes, the characters know their own narcissism only too well – but the plot goes so round and round, so centred in someone’s head, that it makes you feel dizzy; it’s like being carried along in the clouds, desperately grasping for solid ground.

Like Heti – or, at least, her character within the book – How Should a Person Be? tries to do and say too much. It’s a play within a book, it’s Sheila but not really Sheila, some of it really happened and some didn’t; it’s a book about her and it’s a book about all of us. It’s an experience to read, it’s perceptive, it reflects what it’s like to be endlessly searching to make sense of your presence in the world. It’s often invigorating but also infuriating and, like its characters, lacks any real sense of purpose.

It’s been three days since I finished How Should a Person Be? and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. Like a modern-day On the Road, it’s sprawling and playful, expressing the hopefulness, creativity and uncertainty of today’s urban twenty and thirty-somethings. I’m not sure it’s great writing. But does it matter?

Heti’s book is a tapestry of different forms, a fictionalised account of real life. Into a first-person narrative she weaves emails between her and her friends and transcripts of their long, meandering musings on life and art. Within the book, other art forms are being created and dissected, from the play Heti is struggling to write to the art work created by her close friend, Margaux Williamson. It’s a book that asks whether telling a story through art or literature can ever bring meaning to your own life; make you feel more anchored in the world.

It’s also about how we position ourselves, and shape our perception of the world, through our social circles. Heti and her friends, all artists of some kind, are like flints and steel rubbing together, trying to create a spark. The transcripts of their rambling conversations appear unedited (although this may not be the case) and Heti illuminates a wonderfully messy and vibrant world, which occasionally yields what seem to be life-changing moments. There are drugs – “when we took them, we expanded into a thousand pieces” – and there are drunken revelations: “The bar around us became rich and saturated with colour, as if all the molecules in the air were bursting their seams.” However, Heti undercuts this idealism with a wry humour, and often these experiments and encounters turn out to be dead ends. She is particularly scathing about the well-meaning men she meets: encounters which often start off positively but conclude with her realising, with disappointment, that “he was just another man who wanted to teach me something.”

The patchwork approach of the novel reflects Heti’s own chaotic attempts to find direction: as her psychiatrist warns her, “it is the everlasting switching that is the dangerous thing, not what [you] choose.” This would have been an apt warning for the book itself, which is messy and unconventional, sprawling and unconstrained. It can be joyous and bright, but at times it is frustrating and insubstantial, like eating air. The circular conversations are funny to a point, and yes, the characters know their own narcissism only too well – but the plot goes so round and round, so centred in someone’s head, that it makes you feel dizzy; it’s like being carried along in the clouds, desperately grasping for solid ground.

Like Heti – or, at least, her character within the book – How Should a Person Be? tries to do and say too much. It’s a play within a book, it’s Sheila but not really Sheila, some of it really happened and some didn’t; it’s a book about her and it’s a book about all of us. It’s an experience to read, it’s perceptive, it reflects what it’s like to be endlessly searching to make sense of your presence in the world. It’s often invigorating but also infuriating and, like its characters, lacks any real sense of purpose.

– See more at: http://www.nudgemenow.com/article/person-sheila-heti/#sthash.1EPUQa9z.dpuf

It’s been three days since I finished How Should a Person Be? and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. Like a modern-day On the Road, it’s sprawling and playful, expressing the hopefulness, creativity and uncertainty of today’s urban twenty and thirty-somethings. I’m not sure it’s great writing. But does it matter?

Heti’s book is a tapestry of different forms, a fictionalised account of real life. Into a first-person narrative she weaves emails between her and her friends and transcripts of their long, meandering musings on life and art. Within the book, other art forms are being created and dissected, from the play Heti is struggling to write to the art work created by her close friend, Margaux Williamson. It’s a book that asks whether telling a story through art or literature can ever bring meaning to your own life; make you feel more anchored in the world.

It’s also about how we position ourselves, and shape our perception of the world, through our social circles. Heti and her friends, all artists of some kind, are like flints and steel rubbing together, trying to create a spark. The transcripts of their rambling conversations appear unedited (although this may not be the case) and Heti illuminates a wonderfully messy and vibrant world, which occasionally yields what seem to be life-changing moments. There are drugs – “when we took them, we expanded into a thousand pieces” – and there are drunken revelations: “The bar around us became rich and saturated with colour, as if all the molecules in the air were bursting their seams.” However, Heti undercuts this idealism with a wry humour, and often these experiments and encounters turn out to be dead ends. She is particularly scathing about the well-meaning men she meets: encounters which often start off positively but conclude with her realising, with disappointment, that “he was just another man who wanted to teach me something.”

The patchwork approach of the novel reflects Heti’s own chaotic attempts to find direction: as her psychiatrist warns her, “it is the everlasting switching that is the dangerous thing, not what [you] choose.” This would have been an apt warning for the book itself, which is messy and unconventional, sprawling and unconstrained. It can be joyous and bright, but at times it is frustrating and insubstantial, like eating air. The circular conversations are funny to a point, and yes, the characters know their own narcissism only too well – but the plot goes so round and round, so centred in someone’s head, that it makes you feel dizzy; it’s like being carried along in the clouds, desperately grasping for solid ground.

Like Heti – or, at least, her character within the book – How Should a Person Be? tries to do and say too much. It’s a play within a book, it’s Sheila but not really Sheila, some of it really happened and some didn’t; it’s a book about her and it’s a book about all of us. It’s an experience to read, it’s perceptive, it reflects what it’s like to be endlessly searching to make sense of your presence in the world. It’s often invigorating but also infuriating and, like its characters, lacks any real sense of purpose.

– See more at: http://www.nudgemenow.com/article/person-sheila-heti/#sthash.1EPUQa9z.dpuf

Book launch: Fiona McFarlane’s The Night Guest

This week I headed to the top floor of Hachette’s offices on Euston Road for the launch of Fiona McFarlane’s debut, The Night Guest – part of the build up to the inaugural Australia and New Zealand Festival of Literature & Arts, later this year.

The sounds of the waves and burnt warmth of the Australian sun came to London this week, as Australian author Fiona McFarlane launched her debut novel, The Night Guest. This hypnotic tale explores ageing, love, dependence, fear and power, set against a backdrop of coastal Australia.

At the launch, hosted by the Australian Women’s Club and the Australia & New Zealand Festival of Literature & Arts, McFarlane discussed the thought processes behind her novel and read a passage to the audience. The book is, she said, about many things: ageing and vulnerability; imagination, memory and nostalgia; and even the shadow of colonialism that hangs over the South Pacific.

The Night Guest tells the story of Ruth, an aging widow whose life in a remote Australian beach house is disrupted when a carer comes to live with her. However this isn’t the only new guest. Ruth begins to hear a tiger prowling around the house, which brings back memories of a childhood spend in Fiji, long ago.

Speaking to Kim Forrester, editor of the blog Reading Matters, McFarlane explained that she deliberately avoided stereotypes when exploring the relationship between carer and cared for. Instead of “a feisty Downton Abbey old woman, or a sweet old lady” she aimed to paint a nuanced portrait which deals with “ideas of ageing, mental decline and memory”. The tiger, which Ruth hears but never sees, doesn’t just reflect her state of mind but her attempts to process the life she has lived. “Ruth’s life in Fiji was extraordinary,” McFarlane said, “but she’s lived an ordinary life since then. She wants something extraordinary at the end.”

McFarlane became interested in memory and nostalgia when writing her PhD thesis, but it wasn’t just this which influenced her work. The idea for the book came from a conversation with a friend who was researching Victorian children’s fiction, in which “exotic animals from far-flung corners of the empire” were common motifs. Eventually, the animal in Ruth’s story came to mean more than that as well. “The tiger represents terror and wonder: the two poles of human experience,” McFarlane explained.

Forrester observed that McFarlane masterfully mirrors Ruth’s own confusion in the language of The Night Guest, which doesn’t draw clear lines between what is ‘real’ and what is imagined. One audience member concurred that the novel was startlingly powerful in its depiction of old age and, in a question and answer session at the end of the book launch, those who had read it were unanimous in their praise.

You can see the post on the festival website here

Book review: Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond

Short story collections can be a literary lucky dip: you’ll find plenty to surprise and delight, but you’ll have to work through much less exciting stories to get there. Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond is no exception. Sometimes, the writing is as bold and forward-thinking as its title suggests, with spikey, experimental reworkings of old narratives. But in a collection that stretches to nearly 350 pages, there are plenty of tales which don’t quite pack the same punch.

With limited space, the best short stories grab the reader from the start, throwing them headfirst into an imaginary world. Tade Thompson’s story, ‘One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sunlight’, does exactly that, and it’s one of the best stories in this collection. A delicate, eerie tale, it uses west African folklore to disrupt the everyday reality of life in a quiet village; it’s both shockingly visceral and beautifully erotic, with an original voice and a love of flesh and the physical which seeps out of the page.

Lisa Allen-Agostini’s vibrant and playful story, ‘A Fine Specimen’, is another delight. As its female narrator dances through carnival in pursuit of a man, the language follows the beat of the music, with its ‘tang-tang ka-tang-ka-tang-ka-tang’. A sense of disquiet slowly builds as it becomes clear that something sinister is afoot, but it’s an absolute joy to get there. In Junot Diaz’s story, ‘Monstro’, he uses his characteristically dry, delicious voice to create a sci-fi story as addictive as his tales set in contemporary America. Elsewhere there are plenty of amusing, playful concepts, from Lauren Beukes’ ‘Unathi Battles the Black Hairballs’, a zany tale set in a futuristic Tokyo, to Thaddeus Howze’s ‘Bludgeon’, in which mankind must play a game of baseball against some alien invaders to decide its fate.

With no introduction to explain how the editors defined ‘afrofuturism’, we are left to search for a common thread that ties the stories together. Most of them explore the concept of cultural difference through the lens of sci-fi or fantasy and sometimes this opens up new, exciting possibilities. Many of the stories borrow playfully from familiar narratives, twisting and changing age-old divisions and prejudices and planting them in new environments: in Tenea D. Johnson’s provocative story, ‘The Taken’, a protest group demands radical reparations for slavery by kidnapping politicians’ children and imprisoning them on a boat to recreate the Middle Passage.

At other times, this juxtaposition doesn’t work quite as well. ‘Fées des Dents’, by George S. Walker, brings together ‘cholera, malaria and dragon venom’ in a story about a doctor working for Médecins Sans Frontières in Sudan. It’s a jarring combination of real-world trauma and fantasy violence that doesn’t say anything new about either. Too many of the stories seem like little more than experiments in form, sketches trying on sci-fi for size. Reminding the reader that this can be male-dominated genre, some contain lusty descriptions of women that seem straight out of hormonal teenagers’ fantasies. In Tobias Bucknell’s ‘Four Eyes’, a woman emerges from the sea with water running ‘down between her breasts, her stomach, her inner thighs’. In S.P. Somtow’s creepy, sinister ‘The Pavilion of Frozen Women’, a gifted female journalist finds out that an artist is sleeping with women, killing them and creating sculptures out of their bodies; of course, she can’t resist his charms either. In a story collection which challenges some modes of cultural exclusion and dominance of some groups over others, there’s a surprising amount of sexism.

These problems could have been remedied with more discriminatory editing, and an introduction would have helped the reader navigate through the vast range of styles on display. As it stands, this is a baggy collection, with plenty of moments of sheer, gasp-out-loud ingenuity and some wonderful work from promising new writers. But there’s plenty of filler that could have been left out or at the very least, improved. To get to the good stuff, you’ll need to flick through quite a few pages.

You can see the review on the Nudge website here.

Celebrating diversity in British literature

As a volunteer for the South Asian Literature Festival, I was delighted to attend a discussion between Sathnam Sanghera and Damian Barr on the nature of ‘difference’ in the UK. I wrote this blog post to accompany the event – you can see it on the festival website here.

“Hot, young and on the margins: that’s three factual errors right there,” joked Sathnam Sanghera in response to the introduction to a pre-festival event at Asia House on Tuesday. Discussing what it is to be ‘on the margins’ of contemporary Britain, he and Damian Barr asked if the idea of being ‘different’ was really so straightforward.

They’re not the only ones to see a blurred line between what ‘different’ and ‘normal’: over recent years British writers have crossed this line over and over again. Instead of focusing on difference, they reflect a Britain that, while often prejudiced, is also full of people who mix with each other without thought on a daily basis; who are affected by being different but don’t allow it to rule their lives.

Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, published at the turn of the new millennium, epitomises this approach. It revolves around two families headed by white, working class Archie and his Caribbean wife Clara, and Bangladeshi Samad and his wife Alsana. Both parents and children experience prejudice but they are preoccupied with other things: science, love affairs, being a teenager, the pub. It’s a generous, warm-hearted novel which doesn’t deny difference, but isn’t afraid to mock its characters’ pretensions and hypocrisies. It celebrates difference, but at the same time unravels it and most of all, makes it seem ordinary.

Diana Evans’ sparkling 2005 debut 26a focuses on precocious twins Bessie and Georgia, who have a British dad and Nigerian mother. But again, it’s not about difference (it’s about, amongst other things: twinness, childhood and what to do if William Gladstone keeps appearing in your dreams). In 26a, mixed cultural heritage is a gift both to the characters and the author. It gives Bessie and Georgia vivid imaginations and a sideways way of looking at things, and enables Evans to weave Nigerian folklore into a book about growing up in north-east London.

Then there’s Raphael Selbourne’s Beauty, a tale of a young female Muslim who strikes up a friendship with a white, working class man with a habit of drinking himself into oblivion and getting into fights at weekends. It’s a straightforward, accessible book which paints a surprising, tender portrait of a contemporary working class urban Britain. Like White Teeth and 26a, Beauty is set in a world where people recognise difference, and sometimes object to it, but readily, easily form bonds which cross these imaginary dividing lines.

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis

You may have already heard of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. Oprah Winfrey’s selection of Ayana Mathis’s debut novel for her ‘Book Club 2.0’, her gushing recommendation of it on her website and the promotion of it in her magazine will have incalculable influence on sales stateside, where the “Oprah effect” can increase a book’s sales by a million.

On this side of the Atlantic, where Winfrey is less influential, her endorsements bring with them a series of associations. Besides the fact that, as Jonathan Franzen stated, the books chosen for her book club can be “schmaltzy”, Winfrey has invested a great deal in promoting African American women’s writing, from Zora Neale Hurston to Alice Walker, which tends to explore rather well-worn themes. In the endorsement that adorns The Twelve Tribes of Hattie she makes a rather too-easy association with the work of Toni Morrison and, wonderful as these writers may be, it would be refreshing to see a debut novel with a new and challenging approach that doesn’t simply deal with familiar themes.

If a change is gonna come, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie won’t be it. It’s full of well-used tropes: the stoic matriarch downtrodden by fate; men running from internalised anger and shame; the potential of community to both envelop and condemn and the influence of music and the spiritual. There’s something comforting about these now; they’ve become signposts of African American culture as familiar as the path of American history trodden by Forrest Gump.

It would be unfair to see the novel only through these frameworks, however, as it has a more ambivalent relationship to history than many of its forebears. At times, in its spare use of language, it resembles the writing of Marilynne Robinson, whose recommendation adorns the back cover of this edition. Like Robinson’s work, it doesn’t deal in grand themes or bold experiments with language. It’s a quiet, often melancholy exploration of American lives lived through – but not defined by – sweeping historical change.

The “twelve tribes” are Hattie’s numerous offspring, born over several decades and living in very different times and spaces. Through them the book covers the Jim Crow era, the jazz age and even the war in Vietnam. But most of all it is class which determines their lives, and the American dream which remains tantalisingly just out of reach; those who do achieve financial stability suffer the contempt of others. It’s a shame that this endless litany of problems is never leavened by more playfulness in the language or subject matter. But the characters aren’t victims: they’re as likely to succumb to their own vices as they are to poverty or circumstance.

The unreliable, self-destructive male characters aren’t as intricately explored as the more stubborn and dogmatic women; a chapter based in Vietnam reads like a pastiche of bad war films. The novel is strongest in its representation of motherhood, which is where it most resembles the work of Morrison, Walker et al. Hattie is worn out by all the “blood and milk and birthing” but the bodily connection she bears to her children runs deeper than personal angst and material gain. It’s here that the influence of the spiritual shows – Hattie can “feel their vibrating souls” – and these deep-running family ties offer some form of antidote to the relentless problems bestowed on Hattie’s kinfolk, by themselves and others.

The book certainly treads familiar ground, but it is generous of spirit, a moving depiction of motherhood and the human propensity to deal with hardship and change. There’s plenty here to satisfy Winfrey’s fan base or those familiar with the writers she champions, but many other readers will also find much to enjoy.

You can see the original review on the Nudge website

You may have already heard of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. Oprah Winfrey’s selection of Ayana Mathis’s debut novel for her ‘Book Club 2.0’, her gushing recommendation of it on her website and the promotion of it in her magazine will have incalculable influence on sales stateside, where the “Oprah effect” can increase a book’s sales by a million.

On this side of the Atlantic, where Winfrey is less influential, her endorsements bring with them a series of associations. Besides the fact that, as Jonathan Franzen stated, the books chosen for her book club can be “schmaltzy”, Winfrey has invested a great deal in promoting African American women’s writing, from Zora Neale Hurston to Alice Walker, which tends to explore rather well-worn themes. In the endorsement that adorns The Twelve Tribes of Hattie she makes a rather too-easy association with the work of Toni Morrison and, wonderful as these writers may be, it would be refreshing to see a debut novel with a new and challenging approach that doesn’t simply deal with familiar themes.

If a change is gonna come, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie won’t be it. It’s full of well-used tropes: the stoic matriarch downtrodden by fate; men running from internalised anger and shame; the potential of community to both envelop and condemn and the influence of music and the spiritual. There’s something comforting about these now; they’ve become signposts of African American culture as familiar as the path of American history trodden by Forrest Gump.

It would be unfair to see the novel only through these frameworks, however, as it has a more ambivalent relationship to history than many of its forebears. At times, in its spare use of language, it resembles the writing of Marilynne Robinson, whose recommendation adorns the back cover of this edition. Like Robinson’s work, it doesn’t deal in grand themes or bold experiments with language. It’s a quiet, often melancholy exploration of American lives lived through – but not defined by – sweeping historical change.

The “twelve tribes” are Hattie’s numerous offspring, born over several decades and living in very different times and spaces. Through them the book covers the Jim Crow era, the jazz age and even the war in Vietnam. But most of all it is class which determines their lives, and the American dream which remains tantalisingly just out of reach; those who do achieve financial stability suffer the contempt of others. It’s a shame that this endless litany of problems is never leavened by more playfulness in the language or subject matter. But the characters aren’t victims: they’re as likely to succumb to their own vices as they are to poverty or circumstance.

The unreliable, self-destructive male characters aren’t as intricately explored as the more stubborn and dogmatic women; a chapter based in Vietnam reads like a pastiche of bad war films. The novel is strongest in its representation of motherhood, which is where it most resembles the work of Morrison, Walker et al. Hattie is worn out by all the “blood and milk and birthing” but the bodily connection she bears to her children runs deeper than personal angst and material gain. It’s here that the influence of the spiritual shows – Hattie can “feel their vibrating souls” – and these deep-running family ties offer some form of antidote to the relentless problems bestowed on Hattie’s kinfolk, by themselves and others.

The book certainly treads familiar ground, but it is generous of spirit, a moving depiction of motherhood and the human propensity to deal with hardship and change. There’s plenty here to satisfy Winfrey’s fan base or those familiar with the writers she champions, but many other readers will find much to enjoy.

– See more at: http://www.nudgemenow.com/article/the-twelve-tribes-of-hattie-by-ayana-mathis/#sthash.YxpCDSXK.dpuf

You may have already heard of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. Oprah Winfrey’s selection of Ayana Mathis’s debut novel for her ‘Book Club 2.0’, her gushing recommendation of it on her website and the promotion of it in her magazine will have incalculable influence on sales stateside, where the “Oprah effect” can increase a book’s sales by a million.

On this side of the Atlantic, where Winfrey is less influential, her endorsements bring with them a series of associations. Besides the fact that, as Jonathan Franzen stated, the books chosen for her book club can be “schmaltzy”, Winfrey has invested a great deal in promoting African American women’s writing, from Zora Neale Hurston to Alice Walker, which tends to explore rather well-worn themes. In the endorsement that adorns The Twelve Tribes of Hattie she makes a rather too-easy association with the work of Toni Morrison and, wonderful as these writers may be, it would be refreshing to see a debut novel with a new and challenging approach that doesn’t simply deal with familiar themes.

If a change is gonna come, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie won’t be it. It’s full of well-used tropes: the stoic matriarch downtrodden by fate; men running from internalised anger and shame; the potential of community to both envelop and condemn and the influence of music and the spiritual. There’s something comforting about these now; they’ve become signposts of African American culture as familiar as the path of American history trodden by Forrest Gump.

It would be unfair to see the novel only through these frameworks, however, as it has a more ambivalent relationship to history than many of its forebears. At times, in its spare use of language, it resembles the writing of Marilynne Robinson, whose recommendation adorns the back cover of this edition. Like Robinson’s work, it doesn’t deal in grand themes or bold experiments with language. It’s a quiet, often melancholy exploration of American lives lived through – but not defined by – sweeping historical change.

The “twelve tribes” are Hattie’s numerous offspring, born over several decades and living in very different times and spaces. Through them the book covers the Jim Crow era, the jazz age and even the war in Vietnam. But most of all it is class which determines their lives, and the American dream which remains tantalisingly just out of reach; those who do achieve financial stability suffer the contempt of others. It’s a shame that this endless litany of problems is never leavened by more playfulness in the language or subject matter. But the characters aren’t victims: they’re as likely to succumb to their own vices as they are to poverty or circumstance.

The unreliable, self-destructive male characters aren’t as intricately explored as the more stubborn and dogmatic women; a chapter based in Vietnam reads like a pastiche of bad war films. The novel is strongest in its representation of motherhood, which is where it most resembles the work of Morrison, Walker et al. Hattie is worn out by all the “blood and milk and birthing” but the bodily connection she bears to her children runs deeper than personal angst and material gain. It’s here that the influence of the spiritual shows – Hattie can “feel their vibrating souls” – and these deep-running family ties offer some form of antidote to the relentless problems bestowed on Hattie’s kinfolk, by themselves and others.

The book certainly treads familiar ground, but it is generous of spirit, a moving depiction of motherhood and the human propensity to deal with hardship and change. There’s plenty here to satisfy Winfrey’s fan base or those familiar with the writers she champions, but many other readers will find much to enjoy.

– See more at: http://www.nudgemenow.com/article/the-twelve-tribes-of-hattie-by-ayana-mathis/#sthash.YxpCDSXK.dpuf

Books and brunch in Paris

Shakespeare & Co bookshop, Paris

There are two things I really like to do when I travel. The first one is eat, and I did plenty of that when I visited Paris recently, including an incredible meal at Soya, a vegetarian restaurant in Le Marais. But my favourite was probably brunch at La Loir dans la Théière. It’s the kind of eclectically decorated, bustling place that Parisians eat at in films but my, the brunch was spectacular: they kept bringing out dish after dish, from eggs en cocotte to brioche and other delicate pastries. I was so full afterwards that I didn’t feel ready to eat again until 7 that evening, but at least I got my money’s worth.

The second thing I love to do is visit bookshops, and the 60-year-old, English-language Shakespeare & Co, on the banks of the Seine near Notre Dame, is one of my favourites.

I first saw Shakespeare & Co in Before Sunset and it’s a perfect match for that film’s quiet, slow atmosphere. Dark wooden ladders perch up against the tall shelves for anyone brave enough to select books from the top; well-preserved second-hand books are tucked in alongside new, limited editions.

This is shopping as sensory experience: the piles of books on the tables encourage you to pick them up, feel their weight and their texture. I discovered some I’d never seen before and spent a long time thumbing through their collection of literary magazines.

Up a creaky wooden staircase is an equally eclectic children’s section and an antique books library. At the top of the stairs is a tiny booth, illuminated by fairy lights. Inside there’s a typewriter and hundreds of handwritten notes, scrawled on scraps of paper in different languages.

This time I came away with Dave Eggers’ The Best American Non-required Reading 2012, a scrapbook of American writing as diverse as that sold in the bookshop itself. So far I’ve read a very brief memoir by the wonderful Junot Diaz and several pieces on the Occupy Wall Street movement, including a selection of excerpts from minutes taken at meetings, and a detached, ambivalent piece from a writer who lived nearby. It’s a snapshot of America in 2012 but at the same time simply a celebration of the acts of observing, writing and reading. Like Shakespeare & Co it says: This is writing; marvel at it, savour it.

Today I’m (re)reading…

… this gorgeous vintage copy of A Room of One’s Own. Unfortunately my matching mug is a little worse for wear and now being used as a pen pot.

This is How You Lose Her, by Junot Diaz

This is How You Lose Her

See the post on the Bookgeeks website here

Junot Diaz is one of contemporary America’s most engaging writers and his latest work is a warm, compellingly written collection of love letters to betrayed girlfriends and elegies to past selves.

The stories are held together by the confident, playful narrative of Yunior, a Dominican in New York who has featured in two of Diaz’s previous books; he and his “boys” are cheaters and chancers, but the verve and wit with which their stories are told makes them bounce off the page. However, the loss in the book’s title doesn’t just refer to lovers. Themes of loneliness and apathy are woven throughout and as the collection moves on, we see even the proudest men become fragile.

Yunior’s voice is a rich mix of influences, deliciously peppered with Dominican slang and darting back and forth to recall fragments of memory that fit together to create a patchy narrative. In this way they resemble the photographs his older lover plasters over her wall in ‘Miss Lora’.“It was an OK life”, she says, with a resignation typical of the collection as a whole. “All things considered.”

These are stories of lives gone awry, of choosing passion over pragmatism and falling into bad habits or seedy affairs. In ‘Otravida, Otravez’, a quiet, subtly moving story, a young woman now wised-up to the immigrant experience reflects that when she first moved to New York, she “was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart”. Now, she is in the middle of an arduous house hunt with a man who has a wife and son in the Dominican Republic.

He’s not the only one who has left something behind. The tales here are too universal to be only about the immigrant experience, but many of the characters are caught between their home country and the US. ‘Invierno’ tells of Yunior and his brother’s first few months in New York. Their father forbids them to go outside, so they have to watch the snow from their windows with a mixture of awe and bewilderment, reflecting a broader detachment from their new environment. The run-down housing estate in which many of the stories are set is similarly far from the heart of the action, with the bright lights of New York City far away on the horizon.

Yunior’s mother remains isolated in part because she never learns the language after her domineering husband, a “sucio” like her sons, tells her, “It’s best if I take care of the English”. But the syncretism of Yunior’s rhythmic, flowing narrative voice enables him to straddle both worlds and marks him as a master of his heritage.

It’s this narrative voice that makes the book compelling whether it’s tackling the banality of serial cheating or themes of loneliness and poverty through the sad, quiet characters at the periphery of Yunior’s vision. He makes flawed choices repeatedly, and so do most of those around him. But the way the stories are told makes it impossible not to want to be taken along for the ride.

The Spider King’s Daughter, by Chibundu Onuzo

The Spider King’s Daughter

See the post on the Bookgeeks website here

Across west Africa, young men and women sell goods at the side of dusty roads, running up to the windows of cars and buses to sell snacks, water, even shampoo to the passengers. These quiet roadside exchanges, through which different echelons of society meet, are ripe for exploration at a time when the gaps between the poor and the wealthy are widening.

Chibundu Onuzo’s debut asks what would happen if a romance was built on one of these exchanges. When Abike, a wealthy businessman’s daughter, locks eyes with a young male hawker in Lagos, the attraction is immediate. Abike teases the hawker by ordering her driver to speed up, slow down, then speed up again, watching the man run after her car – and they eventually strike up a friendship that turns into romance.

There’s something subtly disturbing about this very first encounter, and this is characteristic of the book as a whole, which is dotted with shocks and transgressions. It becomes clear that the characters’ love and lust are tangled with their own material and emotional needs; Abike describes the sparring between her and her father as ‘Frustration’, but all the characters are playing a game of some kind.

In fact, as Abike and the hawker make tentative inroads into each other’s worlds, Onuzo suggests they are products of a much wider web of corruption and exploitation. Through a series of (rather far-fetched) coincidences, we discover that their circumstances are interlinked, and it becomes clear that their romance cannot escape a destructive, violent fate.

This treatment of social issues can seem heavy-handed: the trafficking industry, for example, is shoehorned into the plot and there’s too little exploration of the different worlds inhabited by the young lovers. Were the long, winding corridors of Abike’s house or the slums of Lagos explored with the same cool ambivalence as the central relationship, this novel could really pack a punch.

However, Onuzo’s close focus on character and dialogue make this a gripping début: absorbing, fast-paced and refreshingly frank about human duplicities. As the novel builds towards its climax, it barely wastes a word. The perspective speeds from hawker to Abike and back again, with the sense that neither really knows what they are doing, tripped up both by the world they live in and their own foggy, blurred intentions.

Why we should lament the demise of print media

Printed newspapers are among my favourite things in the world so I feel somewhat concerned about their imminent demise. Here’s an impassioned rant for Nerditorial:

If the Samantha Brick Twitter storm has demonstrated anything (besides the self-promotional abilities of Daily Mail journalists), it’s the untameable nature of online media. It’s hard to tell exactly what she or the Mail anticipated: media outlets are still negotiating the eroding boundaries between writer and reader, blundering through this cacophony of voices into which you shout and hope to be heard.

The Guardian’s recent Open Weekend festival threw these struggles into the limelight, opening its headquarters to the general public, staging debates and interviews and asking what the future holds at this time of flux. The event generated extensive chatter online and could be followed through the paper’s website, blogs and Twitter; it was a rather magical thing, watching interviews and editorials made flesh, like fictional characters leaping fully formed from the page.

Yet the question of what lies ahead for the British press remains. While the free, throwaway papers that line the floors of commuter trains are thriving, the future of print media is bleak, because compared to the possibilities offered by online media, the form seems like a doddering old granddad. I can’t help but lament its demise, and not just because media institutions are struggling to make ends meet.

The publishing industry has responded to the rise of e-books through elegant covers or special editions which make the book an artefact to be treasured. What newspapers face is far more complex, but there’s still plenty to celebrate: the crisp pages of a new paper which crease as you make your way through; the weekend supplements, covered in tea stains and crumbs on a lazy morning or stuffed into a bag to read on Monday’s commute.

It’s not just aesthetics: we read printed newspapers differently. Broadsheet and tabloid websites alike promote the most striking stories to the main page, while quieter stories are relegated elsewhere. Many readers simply head to their favourite section and stay there, using links in the sidebar to flick through related articles from months or years before.

Like a book, papers are more likely to be read from start to finish, making them less tailored to taste and more likely to open new avenues of thought. Past the main headlines are reports that can, like a short story, briefly transport you to another world. It might be a piece about a terrapin sanctuary in Italy, or a war that no one talks about anymore. It won’t make it to the front page, and you probably wouldn’t seek it out online, but it embeds itself in your mind.

In contrast to the hyperactive multi-tasking that tends to characterise our time online, printed papers are something to be lingered over, to disappear into. It’s what justifies the struggle with a disobedient paper on the train, and it’s what validates the cover price. The internet offers interactivity and openness and it’s challenging us in exciting and important ways. But printed papers offer a different experience that is equally worthwhile, and it’s worth appreciating them while they’re still around.