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The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates review – a slave’s story [31 Jan 2020|12:59am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/31/the-water-dancer-ta-nehisi-coates-review This ambitious debut novel from the leading American thinker is set on a Virginia plantation Ta-Nehisi Coates’s eagerly awaited and ambitious debut novel is set in pre-civil war Virginia, on a slave plantation called Lockless in Starfall, Elm County. The stars of Lockless and other neighbouring plantations are indeed beginning to fade and fall: the slave owners, through a mixture of ineptitude and greed, have worked their lands to exhaustion and are now reduced to selling off their slaves to maintain their lives of idle luxury. Virginia is a hierarchy; at the top are the Quality, white slave owners with the power of life and death over their chief possession, their slaves. Next are the Low – poor whites, mostly uneducated, employed by the Quality to supervise the plantations and keep the enslaved in check. After them are the Freed, former slaves who were able to buy their own freedom. At the very bottom are the Tasked, the enslaved. The main character and narrator, Hiram, is no ordinary slave. He is gifted with, among other things, a photographic memory; he is also son to Mr Howell Walker, the plantation owner. Howell acknowledges Hiram as his son; he takes him out of the fields and makes him a house slave, sometimes letting him entertain dinner guests with memory tricks, and even assigning to him the same teacher as his other son – and heir – the foolish, bumbling Maynard. This open recognition by his father encourages Hiram to believe in a special destiny for himself, and “in my quiet moments, to imagine myself in their ranks” – this despite constant warnings from Thena, an older slave and Hiram’s adoptive mother, that to the Quality he will always remain a slave. Continue reading... post comment

Art Is a Tyrant by Catherine Hewitt review – the radical life of Rosa Bonheur [31 Jan 2020|09:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/31/art-is-a-tyrant-by-catherine-hewitt-review A sympathetic portrait of a lesbian cross-dressing animal painter resonates with our non-binary times Rosa Bonheur was a 19th-century animalier, or animal painter, who liked her subjects to make their own way to her studio. Over the long decades of her career she summoned everything from mouflon (small sheep with wicked horns) to mustangs (she developed a late-life crush on Buffalo Bill) to a pair of lion cubs, which followed her around like house cats. On one occasion three polar bears turned up and politely posed on command. All this provokes mild distaste now, of course, but still there can be no doubting Bonheur’s loving attention towards the animals that didn’t simply make her fortune and occasionally supply her dinner table, but also propelled her to the highest prizes, including the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. From her earliest days in a cramped Bordeaux apartment she gathered about her a small menagerie, including a sheep that she exercised in the local park, and she trained herself to look beyond the fluff and the feathers to the bony facts beneath. Later, moving to Paris, she got permission to sketch regularly in one of the city’s abattoirs. The result was an art in which animals really look like animals rather than soft toys or metaphors. You can virtually smell their reek coming off the canvas. Continue reading... post comment

Beyond American Dirt: the best books to understand Latinx culture [31 Jan 2020|09:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/31/books-to-understand-latinx-culture Mexican ghosts, a Splanglish coming of age saga, and trauma on the US border … Myriam Gurba picks books exploring the Latinx experience I believe the publishing industry made a profound mistake publishing Jeanine Cummins’s wannabe narco-novel American Dirt. While we wait for the industry to change, here’s what to read if you really want to understand Latinx culture. Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo is often hailed as the great Mexican novel. Susan Sontag described it as “not only one of the masterpieces of 20th-century world literature, but one of the most influential of the century’s books”. Imagine a ghost story stuffed into another ghost story stuffed into a coffin made of dust, memory, and soil. That is Rulfo’s Mexico, one where the dead gossip with the dead about the dead: “It doesn’t just look like no one lives here. No one does live here. And Pedro Páramo? Pedro Páramo died years ago.” Continue reading... post comment

Jeet Thayil: ‘The last book that made me laugh? A book of poems by Narendra Modi’ [31 Jan 2020|09:58am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/31/jeet-thayil-book-made-me-laugh-journeys-narendra-modi The poet and novelist on the literary merits of the Indian Prime Minister and changing his opinion of TS Eliot The book I am currently reading Edna O’Brien’s Girl, which serves as a corrective to the creative writing rule “Write what you know”. There is no risk or honour in writing only what you know. What a banal world it would be if writers did not use their imaginations. The book that changed me Books have changed my life more than once, but it may be the earliest collisions that persist. If I had to name one novel I’d say The Brothers Karamazov, which I read in my early teens. The Russian novel is uniquely suited to India: the feudalism, the insanity disguised as religious fervour, the regard for the written word, the scattershot passion and hysteria. I admired the drunkenness of the prose, the digressions and exaltation, the way Dostoevsky wrote as if each page would be his last. Continue reading... post comment

Little Bandaged Days by Kyra Wilder review – a mother falls apart [31 Jan 2020|11:58am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/31/little-bandaged-days-kyra-wilder-review This debut novel about a woman’s emotional disintegration is gripping, observant, wonderfully written – and extravagantly cruel When Erika moves from the US to Europe for her husband’s lucrative job, she chooses to stay at home with the children, B and E, instead of returning to work. On a video call with her mother, Erika wants to make her new life look appealing. She places a fresh baguette in plain view, but her mother is unimpressed, as mothers tend to be. Instead, the dimensions of the windows in Erika’s new apartment are found wanting: it’s too dark, the mother says. “Turn on a light. Ohforgoodnesssake.” When a woman exhibits baked goods in an attempt to impress her own mother, we know that something is going wrong. Little Bandaged Days, the debut novel from American author Kyra Wilder, is the story of Erika’s psychological deterioration as she tries, in increasingly disturbing ways, to “take care of everything”. From the beginning, the moneyed isolation of the stay-at-home mother feels shadowed by something ugly. Erika’s peppy narrative voice is a superb and sometimes very funny rendition of that glassy positivity that carries its own particular horror – she wants to “keep everyone young and happy and always together”. Continue reading... post comment

Susan Choi: ‘A lot of people seem to feel very seen by the book’ [31 Jan 2020|11:59am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/31/susan-choi-interview-trust-exercise-metoo Susan Choi had completed a draft of her novel Trust Exercise before the #MeToo movement began, but this US National Book award-winner is part of a vital conversation Susan Choi is “pretty partial” when describing Trust Exercise, which has won the National Book award for fiction and been a runaway sensation in her native US. “It’s a novel that begins with a group of young people at a performing arts school in the 1980s and follows them through a variety of events in their lives … and that’s all I say. I kind of evade.” Her reticence is driven by a fear not of spoilers, but of revealing too much about a narrative that halfway through throws the entire premise of the book into question and keeps the reader guessing even after the last page is turned. The book does indeed begin among a group of teenagers, brimming with youthful passion for theatre and for each other, and vulnerable to predation from adults – not least the charismatic drama teacher Mr Kingsley, who feeds on their surging emotions like a vampire. As one student realises much later, the trust exercises in which he pushes them to reveal their vulnerabilities – murmuring during one session, “I won’t rest until you cry” – are “a kind of pornography”. This section is an intense, immersive story of first love gone wrong between 15-year-olds Sarah and David, and Sarah’s turmoil as she negotiates her conflicting feelings. Continue reading... post comment

Rare Charlotte Brontë ‘little book’ to go on show at Haworth [31 Jan 2020|01:54pm] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/31/charlotte-bronte-little-book-on-show-haworth-parsonage-museum Miniature book written by author as a teenager returned to UK after fundraising appeal A rare book the size of a matchbox written by the teenage Charlotte Brontë will go on public display for the first time after a museum paid €600,000 (£505,000) to bring it back to Britain. Curators said they wept when they finally received the book, which arrived from an auction house in Paris. It was penned by the oldest of the Brontë sisters at the family’s home in Haworth, West Yorkshire, 200 years ago. Continue reading... post comment

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