15 FROM 15 READS
A selection of favourite ‘reads’ to mark our 15th list
MATSUDA AOKO
WHERE THE WILD LADIES ARE
Iconoclastic, witty and subversive, these linked short stories are inspired by traditional Japanese myths, transmuted to contemporary Japan.
Matsuda Aoko, translated from Japanese by Polly Barton, Where the Wild Ladies Are, (first published in Japanese, 2016), Tilted Axis Press, 2020.
Iconoclastic, witty and subversive, these linked short stories are inspired by traditional Japanese myths, transmuted to contemporary Japan. The same characters appear across the collection, observed from different perspectives or simply glimpsed in the background in one story, to emerge more fully in another. Here the boundaries between the living and the dead are blurred: ghosts return to advise, love and complain to the living in the quotidian settings of offices, hotels, shops and flats, whilst shape-shifting between human and animal form offers liberation, hope or perhaps simply another perspective
LUCIA BERLIN
A MANUAL FOR CLEANING WOMEN
Inspired by the author’s tumultuous rackety life these are stories of bravado, humanity and violence, seamed with dark humour, sharp observation and pathos.
Lucia Berlin, with a forward by Lydia Davies, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories, (1977), Picador, 2016.
Inspired by the author’s tumultuous rackety life these are stories of bravado, humanity and violence, seamed with dark humour, sharp observation and pathos. Stories of struggle, love and disillusionment are skilfully and tightly crafted, belying the apparent ease of expression which creates an intimacy between reader and author.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
POEMS
Centred in everyday places—a waiting room, a long-distance bus—& often transforming everyday experiences—washing hair, a street at night—ideas are contained below the surface shifting from outward appearance to inward reflection.
Elizabeth Bishop, Poems, Chatto & Windus, 2011.
Centred in everyday places—a waiting room, a long-distance bus—and often transforming everyday experiences—washing hair, a street at night—ideas are contained below the surface shifting from outward appearance to inward reflection. Like a miniature painting each situation is a contained world, described in a language which appears straightforward, seemingly confuting the complexity of her subjects: love, loss, belonging and alienation.
PATRICK CHAMOISEAU
TEXACO
To read Texaco is to enter an experience. To read Texaco is to be invited to bear witness to a time in Martinique told with the powerful cadences of folk narrative and the Creole language.
Patrick Chamoiseau, translated by Rose-Myrium Réjouis and Val Vinokurov, Texaco, (first published in French, 1992), London: Granta Books, 1997.
To read Texaco is to enter an experience. To read Texaco is to be invited to bear witness to a time in Martinique told with the powerful cadences of folk narrative and the Creole language incorporating slave-memory and the incisive notes of an urban planner writing on the nature of City. In a series of notebooks Marie-Sophie Laborieux records her father’s memories of life on the slave plantations, his own emancipation, the freeing of all slaves, and his own subsequent survival. These are intertwined with the story of Marie-Sophie’s own life, during which she has experienced the great shifts of the twentieth century and realised the founding of the shantytown Texaco. Race, colonialism, politics and the push and pull between city and country are brought together with the personal stories of loves and loss, hope and struggle in this Prix Goncourt novel.
VIOLETTE LE DUC
THE LADY AND THE LITTLE FOX FUR
In the heat of summer, an old lady rummages in a bin seeking an orange to quench her thirst but finds instead a moth-eaten fox fur.
Violette le Duc, translated by Derek Coltman, The Lady and the Little Fox Fur, (first published in French 1965), London: Penguin Books 2007.
In the heat of summer, an old lady rummages in a bin seeking an orange to quench her thirst but finds instead a moth-eaten fox fur. The fox becomes her treasure, her confidant, her courage, bringing solace to the loneliness of her Parisian attic. Surreal descriptions vividly express each shifting emotion and mood.
AUDRE LORDE
ZAMI: A NEW SPELLING OF MY NAME
Lorde emerges from the confusion of childhood and a turbulent adolescence into 1950s New York, seeking her place as a young black gay woman in a racist, homophobic world.
Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of my Name: A Biomythography, Penguin Books, 2018.
Lorde emerges from the confusion of childhood and a turbulent adolescence into 1950s New York, seeking her place as a young black gay woman in a racist, homophobic world where too often the fall-out was narcotics, mental illness and suicide. But Lorde is a survivor, a seeker of life and love. Sustained by her writing she describes her determination to educate herself, her relationships and an experiment with communal living; the titular name Zami signalling this ideal: Zami, a Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers
TOMASZ JEDROWSKI
SWIMMING IN THE DARK
Living in exile, Ludwik reviews his past, addressing Janusz his first love, as he recollects the heady freedom of their sexual awakening.
Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark, Bloomsbury, 2020.
Living in exile, Ludwik reviews his past, addressing Janusz his first love, as he recollects the heady freedom of their sexual awakening. This is contrasted in his memory with the restrictions of life in Communist Poland of the 1970s and early 1980s. Delicately layered within this story is the ever-present history of the destruction of Warsaw during the Second World War and the later endurance by Poland’s population under martial law as the solidarity movement begins its struggle. Subtle, sensitive and finely controlled, this is a novel which explores conscience, choice and the price of both personal and political freedom.
N. SCOTT MOMDAY
HOUSE MADE OF DAWN
The young Native American Abel returns home from the war and tries to re-find a place in the established practices and rituals of his community, but circumstances interfere, and he is forced into exile.
N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (1966), Harper Perennial, 2010.
The young Native American Abel returns home from the war and tries to re-find a place in the established practices and rituals of his community, but circumstances interfere, and he is forced into exile. Subsumed by the discriminating Anglo-American city culture, Abel only finally returns to the land of his Kiowa forebears following serious injury. Shaped by traditional storytelling, but distinctly modernist in style, Momaday’s examines the bonds between people and place, the things lived with, the traditions lived by and what arises when these bonds are destroyed. For Abel however there is redemption, when like his grandfather before him, he takes his place in the dawn run.
SHOLA VON REINHOLD
LOTE
Mathilda, a seeker of truths and beauty is transfixed by the black-afro Scottish modernist poet Hermia Druitt. This obsession takes her to a peculiar ‘thought-artists’ residency in the European town of Dun.
Shola von Reinhold, Lote, Jacaranda Books, 2020.
Mathilda, a seeker of truths and beauty is transfixed by the black-afro Scottish modernist poet Hermia Druitt. This obsession takes her to a peculiar ‘thought-artists’ residency in the European town of Dun, where she moves between the extreme counter aesthetics of the residency and the radical decadence and high baroque epitomised by Erskine-Lily. In so doing, she discovers a world of subterfuge and the secret societies of the inter-war ‘Bright Young Things’. Mischievous, gloriously pleasurable and radical in its literary concepts, this is a serious novel which shows the role culture has played in hiding and eradicating black, queer, and mixed-race lives from history. Interlacing fiction with fact, von Reinhold synthesises fabulation, ornamentation and black, queer and trans identity with solitariness and the life of the outsider.
ALAN GARNER
THE OWL SERVICE
In a remote valley in North Wales, legend and the past collide with the present, in a story steeped in myth.
Alan Garner, The Owl Service, (1967), London, Harper Collins, 2007.
For younger readers
In a remote valley in North Wales, legend and the past collide with the present, in a story steeped in myth. Three children discover intricately decorated plates in the attic of a house where they are spending their summer holidays. Locked into the pattern is a darkness that once activated threatens to repeat a tragic cycle unless the children can undo the destructive magic which the triangle formed by their complex relationship has released.
ABDULRAZAK GURNAH
BY THE SEA
Saleh Omar arrives in London from Madagascar carrying a mahogany box containing incense.
Abdulrazak Gurnah, By the Sea, Bloomsbury, 2002.
Saleh Omar arrives in London from Madagascar carrying a mahogany box containing incense. The story of his life intrinsically and tragically linked to this box is slowly unravelled as he relives his own past and tells the stories of others with whom his destiny as an exile is inextricably bound.
DEREK JARMAN
MODERN NATURE
‘Modern Nature’ flits between Prospect Cottage (Jarman’s home in Dungeness) and London, and between quiet, reflective spells and frantic periods of working and making.
Derek Jarman, Modern Nature: Journals, 1989 – 1990, Vintage Classics, 2018.
Filmmaker Derek Jarman began the diary that would become ‘Modern Nature’ in 1989. It flits between Prospect Cottage (his home in Dungeness) and London, and between quiet, reflective spells and frantic periods of working and making. Throughout, the against-the-odds garden that he created on a shingle beach in Dungeness is central, manifesting both his anxieties surrounding living with HIV, and his joy for life, love, friendships, art and nature: arising as a defiant symbol of resistance, persistence and hope.
AHMET HAMDI TANPINAR
THE TIME REGULATION INSTITUTE
Hayri Irdals, is the luckless hero of this anarchic satire set in Atatürk’s Istanbul, which is fast transforming from traditional eastern influences to a time-bound bureaucratic western model.
Ahmet Hamdi Tanpier, translated by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe), with an introduction by Pankaj Mishra, The Time Regulation Institute, (First published in Turkish, 1962), 2014, Penguin Classics
Hayri Irdals, is the luckless hero of this anarchic satire set in Atatürk’s Istanbul, which is fast transforming from traditional eastern influences to a time-bound bureaucratic western model. Both are reflected in Hayri’s account of his life story, which incorporates detailed oral storytelling traditions and objective modernism. Caught between the old world and the new, Hayri is the victim of circumstance, never the master of his own destiny.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
LETTERS WRITTEN IN SWEDEN, NORWAY, AND DENMARK
Travelling with her one-year-old daughter Fanny and companion Marguerite, Wollstonecraft’s three-month journey through Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Northern Germany would be quite an undertaking even today.
Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796), Oxford World Classics, 2009.
Travelling with her one-year-old daughter Fanny and companion Marguerite, Wollstonecraft’s three-month journey through Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Northern Germany would be quite an undertaking even today. As it was, she was travelling on behalf of her American lover Gilbert Imlay in 1795, ostensibly to conduct business negotiations for him and at the same time attempting to save their failing relationship. Making the eleven-day sea crossing, she landed in Gothenburg in Sweden, and from there travelled across to Norway to Tonsberg and Oslo. Her efforts on behalf of Imlay and the terrain she encountered are vividly captured and were subsequently published in 1796 in the form of twenty-five letters that give an extraordinary insight into what was a remote region, Wollstonecraft memorably noting as she neared England in her return: I have only to tell you that, at the sight of Dover cliffs, I wondered how anybody could term them grand; they appear so insignificant to me, after those I had seen in Sweden and Norway.
MAGDALENA TULLI
DREAMS AND STONES
How can history be committed to paper and fixed within a narrative? How can the lives and losses, betrayals and violences of the last century be expressed in a story line, in clauses and words and whole sentences?
Magdalena Tulli, Moving Parts, translated by Bill Johnston, (first published in Polish, 2003), Archipelago Books, 2005.
How can history be committed to paper and fixed within a narrative? How can the lives and losses, betrayals and violences of the last century be expressed in a story line, in clauses and words and whole sentences? How does the narrator direct the lives of his characters—a jazz trumpeter, a red headed woman, a tightrope walker, a publisher—and the things that surround them, when each continuously subverts what should have been a simple plot? The only possible response for the long-suffering narrator is to dismantle what they have constructed and begin again from another viewpoint until yet again history breaks through disrupting the narrative. And what of the man in overalls with the photograph of the girl in his wallet?