Books | The Guardian's Journal -- Day [entries|friends|calendar] Books | The Guardian [ website | Books | The Guardian ] [ userinfo | scribbld userinfo ] [ calendar | scribbld calendar ]

The Hungry and the Fat by Timur Vermes review – broad satire of migration and hypocrisy [08 Feb 2020|07:30am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/08/hungry-fat-timur-vermes-review-refugees-germany A fatuous reality TV star leads refugees on a televised exodus from Africa to Germany in this fascinating ‘what-if?’ novel It’s the near future, and Europe has closed its borders firmly to refugees. A vast permanent camp has grown in sub-Saharan Africa, sustained (just) by western aid. But its inhabitants are stuck: even those who are able to earn find it pointless to save. The prices charged by people-smugglers are going up faster than the refugees can make money, and the days of risking it all in a dinghy on the Mediterranean are long gone. That’s the premise of Timur Vermes’s hefty new novel, and what sets the action off is the arrival of an airhead German reality TV star, Nadeche Hackenbusch, who flies to the camp to film a series of her show, Angel in Adversity. She arrives with a personal makeup artist, a pink zebra-striped car and a supply of her line of Hackenpush-up bras to hand out to the needy. There she meets “Lionel” (so named by the TV people after he says something mystic-sounding about lions), a young refugee recruited as her on-camera fixer and shortly afterwards as her lover. Their romance is tracked by a compliant journalist called Astrid who files copy like this: Continue reading... post comment

Danez Smith: ‘White people can learn from it, but that’s not who I’m writing for’ [08 Feb 2020|08:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/08/danez-smith-interview-white-people-racism-homie The youngest winner of the Forward prize and author of viral sensation ‘dear white America’, Smith is back with a deeply personal collection, Homie • Plus read an extract from Homie below Danez Smith was born into a devout Baptist household in St Paul, Minnesota. Smith’s grandmother still lives there, in one of only two black households on a street that was mixed but is becoming increasingly white. Smith grew up, on this border between the blacker areas and the white middle-class enclaves of the city, as a black, queer, God-fearing child. The future poet and spoken-word artist would listen to family members and friends telling stories on the porch, impressed by their way with words. The friends came and went but there was always one constant: church. Smith may have struggled to fit in among the congregation but Sunday morning meant worship, and more importantly a sermon. It was that rousing religious oration that opened up the world of writing and performance. Continue reading... post comment

To the Lake by Kapka Kassabova review – a dive into dark Balkan waters [08 Feb 2020|09:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/08/to-the-lake-kapka-kassabova-review-balkan-water-cure What lurks beneath? Swimming and sinister stories in a thrilling ancestral quest to Lakes Ohrid and Prespa A travel writer’s journey is often centrifugal in its bearing, from the known to the unknown; but the journey itself has the effect of inaugurating a new centre – a river’s source, a mountain’s peak, a remote island or fabled city. In Kapka Kassabova’s book, the destination is a lake – or rather two connected lakes, Ohrid and Prespa, on the Balkan peninsula. “Sometimes,” she notes, “history’s thoroughfares are disguised as geography’s outposts.” It’s a region she visited on childhood holidays, but never as an adult, sensing that she “wasn’t ready”. As with her last book, the superb Border, the destination is also a tripartite political frontier. The journey is a search for an ancestral home, something forsaken – the “lacustrine realm” her grandmother Anastasia left as a young woman and felt agonisingly, debilitatingly drawn back to. In that sense, To the Lake is a classic account of the exile (albeit at a remove) seeking completion through return. “Geography shapes history – we generally accept this as a fact,” Kassabova writes in her introduction. “But we don’t often explore how families digest big historio-geographies, how these sculpt our inner landscape.” Continue reading... post comment

Jenny Offill: ‘I no longer felt like it wasn’t my fight’ [08 Feb 2020|11:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/08/jenny-offill-interview What happens when we wake up to the climate crisis? The novelist reflects on escaping the apocalypse, division and hope in her latest novel, Weather It’s early January and freezing cold in New York when I meet Jenny Offill to talk about her new novel, Weather – an innocuous title for something that feels less innocuous every day. A couple of weeks earlier, the temperature was warm and spring-like. These fluctuations in the weather, and the warming trends they reveal, are increasingly unsettling reminders of the climate crisis, and they form the backbone of Offill’s latest novel, the follow-up to 2014’s bestselling Dept. of Speculation. Weather follows Lizzie, a university librarian, who responds to the emails sent in to “Hell or High Water”, a climate-focused podcast hosted by her former academic mentor. The job opens Lizzie’s eyes to the crisis and the myriad ways different people respond to it, from “dreary” environmentalists obsessed with composting toilets to “end-timers” eager to embrace the Rapture. Amid a growing sense of her own responsibility to the planet and fear for the future, Lizzie struggles to balance her responsibilities as a wife, mother, sister, daughter and friend. Continue reading... post comment

Peter Carey on True History of the Kelly Gang: ‘At 56, I wrote what my younger self could not have m [08 Feb 2020|02:00pm] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/08/peter-carey-how-i-wrote-the-true-history-of-the-kelly-gang Thirty years after discovering an inspirational letter by bushranger Ned Kelly, Carey found the voice for his Booker prize-winning novel In 1961 I failed my first-year science exams at Monash University in Melbourne. In the aftermath I got a job in advertising and read Joyce’s Ulysses. I was surrounded by copywriters who would soon be novelists. One of them, Barry Oakley, took me to see Sidney Nolan’s series of Ned Kelly paintings. It was 1964, around the time when Gabriel García Márquez was writing: “The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.” I was 21. All of art was new to me and nothing was not interesting. Continue reading... post comment

Petina Gappah: ‘I learned Swahili to write this’ [08 Feb 2020|06:00pm] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/08/petina-gappah-out-of-darkness-shining-light-interview The Zimbabwean novelist on her new book about explorer David Livingstone, her fascination with goodness and servitude, and being grilled by her history‑loving father Petina Gappah was born in Zambia in 1971 and has law degrees from Cambridge, Graz University and Zimbabwe University. Her debut story collection, An Elegy for Easterly, won the Guardian first book prize in 2009 and was followed by The Book of Memory in 2015. Her gripping new novel, Out of Darkness, Shining Light, tells the real-life story of how the body of the 19th-century explorer and physician David Livingstone was transported through Africa by his staff so he could be buried in Britain. When did you first become interested in David Livingstone? When I was 16 – at school we did a new curriculum of African history and I became fascinated by the faithful companions who carried Livingstone’s body and I knew I wanted to write about them one day. I started this book in 1998 – I have a floppy disk that I’ve now framed from that year – and finished it in 2018, so it took 20 years, though in between I wrote other things. Initially, it was very much inspired by William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and Livingstone’s voice was in there. But I ended up thinking: let me focus on his companions. Continue reading... post comment

navigation [ viewing | February 8th, 2020 ] [ go | previous day|next day ]