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Letter from Italy: this pandemic is showing us who we really are [04 Jul 2020|06:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/04/letter-from-italy-this-pandemic-is-showing-us-who-we-really-are The coronavirus response, once a parallel dance, has become a chaos of separate choreographies In March, the acclaimed Italian novelist Francesca Melandri wrote a letter to fellow Europeans “from your future”, describing experiences of lockdown. Now, as restrictions are eased, she has another message. I am writing to you from Italy, which means I am writing from the accelerated present of the pandemic. What started as a parallel dance among successive epidemics’ charts has become a chaos of separate choreographies. Depending on the country, the dance moves have been authoritarian, orderly and effective, fallible but humane, incompetent, in denial, abusive or even genocidal. The Covid-19 dancehall, however, is the same for everyone. Its walls are covered in mirrors. They are showing us who we really are and there’s no way we can avert our gaze. Continue reading... post comment

The Wild Laughter by Caoilinn Hughes review – an Irish Cain and Abel [04 Jul 2020|06:30am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/04/the-wild-laughter-by-caoilinn-hughes-review-an-irish-cain-and-abel Resentment seethes between two brothers as their father lies dying in the wake of boom and bust Caoilinn Hughes’s acclaimed debut novel, 2018’s Orchid and the Wasp, explored the long fallout from the global economic crash of 2008 through the coming-of-age story of Gael Foess, part of a formerly wealthy Irish family rapidly on the descent. Gael was a 21st-century Becky Sharp, cutting a merciless swathe through Dublin, London and the New York of Occupy Wall Street. Hughes’s follow-up, the darkly adventurous The Wild Laughter, loosely follows a similar theme of the consequences of boom and bust, but stays closer to the festering claustrophobia of home. “‘Ireland is where strange tales begin and happy endings are possible.’ Charlie Haughey said that, and mind what a hammer of an end he got.” Wisecracking and woeful, Doharty “Hart” Black is the 25-year-old younger son of a terminally ill, failing farmer, Manus, a proud man known by his sons as “the Chief”. While Hart’s brother, Cormac, two years his senior, got the university education and then founded a series of successful startups in Dublin, Hart is left toiling on the family farm in County Roscommon, along with the boys’ brittle mother, a former nun, whom Hart mostly refers to with hostility by her name, Nóra. The elder son is favoured by the Chief for his flamboyance and entrepreneurial talent and by Nóra as a co-conspirator against the hapless Hart, whose eventual scapegoating is foreshadowed throughout. Continue reading... post comment

Bread Winner by Emma Griffin review – victims of the Victorian economy [04 Jul 2020|08:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/04/bread-winner-by-emma-griffin-review-victims-of-the-victorian-economy Britain had never been richer, so how did working families become trapped in a nightmare of dirt and want? An intimate history, from darning to dinners in the gutter As a lad in 1880s Bermondsey Sid Causer appeased his hunger by filching fruit from market barrows. Louie Stride, brought up dirt poor in genteel Bath, thought nothing of looking for dinner in the gutter. Joseph Sharpe from Derbyshire was obliged to go “barefooted and barelegged” and get by on “tea sops and flour porridge”. Causer, Stride and Sharpe are just a few of the pale, pinched children who stare out at us from the photographs of late Victorian Britain. The girls are bundled up in shawls while the boys have the oyster eyes of the permanently exhausted. Together they make up a visual shorthand for “the Victorian urban poor”.  But why were they so poor? Britain had never been richer. By the end of the 19th century all those lovely inventions, from tarmac to sewing machines and toilets to telegraphs, had transformed the fabric of ordinary life. Real wages had roughly doubled. Given that Britain was a byword for progress and prosperity, what was to be made of the revelation by social investigators such as Charles Booth and Henry Rowntree that an increasing number of working families were trapped in a gothic nightmare of dirt and want?  Continue reading... post comment

Love beyond sex, money and property: a case for friendship [04 Jul 2020|09:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/04/love-beyond-sex-money-and-property-a-case-for-friendship Reading novels about groups of friends can be an emotional lifeline in times of isolation – from pandemic lockdown to the aftermath of divorce From Donna Tartt to Irvine Welsh: 10 great novels about friendship What claims do friendships retain, as family life takes over? How much do we live in our friends’ shadows, comparing our relationships, jobs and versions of motherhood? These were questions I asked myself, getting divorced in my late 30s just before having my second child. I was used to turning to my husband for practical help; seeking help from friends feels awkwardly regressive when you’re not used to it, and burdensome when they’re caught up in childrearing. As I emerged out of the turbulence of my 30s, I asked myself what remained of earlier friendships, and chided myself for allowing so many to take on sparse outlines, structured by occasional catch-ups rather than continuing shared experience. It was hard to know who to ask to come round when I was ill, to look after the baby when I was desperate for sleep, or just to leave their family for an evening when I hadn’t spoken to another adult for days. Anxiously grateful for the friends who were there, sad about the ones who weren’t, I sought out fictional friends. I read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, glad when Lila and Lenu’s bond reignites during Lenu’s single motherhood, curious about how much more alive their friendship seems than their marriages. There’s always been an element of friend-making for me in reading, though the writers I love are as maddening, as disquietingly alien as actual friends. Continue reading... post comment

The UK once welcomed refugees - now we detain them indefinitely | Kamila Shamsie [04 Jul 2020|11:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/04/the-uk-once-welcomed-refugees-now-we-detain-them-indefinitely-it-must-end In a few decades, welcome centres for refugees have become detention centres built on violence and humiliation. The government must shut them down, writes Kamila Shamsie In the last few months I’ve found myself returning, again and again, to a phrase that I associate with the project Refugee Tales and its campaign to end the indefinite detention of asylum seekers: counting up. When prisoners are given a jail sentence, they can count down to their release date; when refugees are placed in detention they can only count up from the date they were incarcerated, without knowing how high the number will go. In the last few months, we’ve all been counting up. Counting up from the last time we saw people we love, counting up from the last time we were at liberty to traverse the cities and towns in which we live, counting up from the last time we planned for an imaginable future; and, for some people, those who are most vulnerable, still counting up, from the last time they left the confines of their homes. But when I say I’ve found myself returning again and again to that phrase, I don’t mean to imply that the months in lockdown led me to think that I know what it feels like to be in detention. Quite the contrary. While I was counting up I was also reading and writing and going on walks and able to see people I love, even if that was via a screen. I knew that the lockdown wouldn’t go on forever and, crucially, I knew the lockdown hadn’t been implemented with the express purpose of making people like me suffer. So when I considered those in detention centres I thought how lucky I was; I thought of how many people had been living in a counting up world well before the pandemic, and how they would continue to live in that world, regardless of treatments and vaccines. Continue reading... post comment

Books to transport you: the best travellers' tales for troubled times [04 Jul 2020|12:00pm] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/04/books-to-transport-you-the-best-travellers-tales-for-troubled-times From Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s flights over deserts to Scott’s last expedition to the Antarctic, Sophy Roberts picks her favourites In times like these, I’m drawn towards short stories, novellas and pithy memoirs with a powerful sense of far-flung places: enigmatic flights of fancy. In the 1920s, the pioneering French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry crisscrossed “desert as smooth as marble” to open up new mail routes across the Sahara. His 1939 memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars, weaves between past and present, the real and imagined, from cities of salt to antediluvian forests. He describes drinking dew to survive a plane crash, and the discovery of a single orange in the wreckage. “I lie on my back and suck the fruit, counting the shooting stars. For a moment, my happiness is infinite.” Continue reading... post comment

Maryse Condé: 'An English author can reach the heart of a Caribbean child' [04 Jul 2020|05:00pm] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/04/maryse-conde-an-english-author-can-reach-the-heart-of-a-caribbean-child The Guadeloupe-born novelist on discovering prejudice in France, making sense of the world when you’re elderly, and the power of Wuthering Heights Maryse Condé was born in Guadeloupe in 1937, earned her MA and PhD in comparative literature at Paris-Sorbonne University and went on to have a distinguished academic career, becoming professor emerita of French at Columbia University in New York. She has also lived in Guinea, Ghana and Mali, where she gained inspiration for her worldwide bestseller Segu. Condé was awarded the 2018 New Academy prize (the “alternative Nobel”), while her work has been acclaimed by Henry Louis Gates, Junot Díaz and Russell Banks, among others. Her latest novel, The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana, explores issues such as racism, terrorism and economic inequality. She lives in the south of France with her husband and translator, Richard Philcox. What was the inspiration for your latest novel? When I was a child it was easier to understand the world. Now that I’m old I don’t understand it at all, so I wanted to write about that difficulty. When you are an old writer, you tend to think all day about yourself – your parents, childhood. I decided to tell a story about the world of today, not yesterday, through two young twins, Ivan and Ivana. Another inspiration was the murder of Clarissa Jean-Philippe, a young police officer from Martinique, who was killed by Amedy Coulibaly, a terrorist from Mali, during the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris. I was upset because a black man could kill a black woman and so Césaire’s theory of négritude, which claimed that all black people are brothers and sisters, therefore, no longer had any meaning. Continue reading... post comment

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