Lara Pawson was for some years a journalist for the BBC and other media during the civil wars in Angola, and on the Ivory Coast. In this book, her experiences of societies in trauma, and her idealism for making the 'truth' known, are fragmented (as memory is always fragmented) and mixed with memory fragments of her childhood and of her relationships with the various people she encountered before, during and after the period of heightened awareness provided by war.
"Lara Pawson’s lucid, sudden and subtle memoir unpicks the spirals of memory, politics, violence, to trace the boundaries and crossing points of gender and race identity." – Joanna Walsh
>> Read Thomas's review.
>> An interview with the author.
>> We're featuring the publications of CB Editions, who published this book.
>> Lara Pawson and some other CB Editions authors read at Shakespeare and Company, Paris.
>> Pawson's book In the Name of the People, on Angola's 1977 forgotten massacre. She talks about this here.
>> She also has a blog.
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Women in Clothes: Why we wear what we wear by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, Leanne Shapton and 639 others {Reveiwed by STELLA}
This is a fascinating book about the philosophical, practical and emotional connections we have with what we wear. This book is jam-packed with interesting ideas, photographic essays, explorations of personal collections, candid discussions and intriguing questions and responses. This unique project is unexpected and familiar by turns, sating your desire for intelligent conversations about clothes, as well as being a visual gem. From Mae Pang's safety pin collection (there are numerous collections - white canvas sneakers bobby pins, navy blazers, hand-made print frocks) to Miranda July's 'Thirty-Six Women' dressing project, this is a must for those who love clothes, who appreciate the place of objects in our psychological life and are intrigued by collecting. |
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Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be? - in parts memoir, in turns fiction - is both a delightfully indulgent and a searingly cynical exploration of herself. Heti, in her late 20s, is struggling to write, has become disenchanted with her marriage and life in general, and keeps asking herself how she should be. It's almost as if around the next corner she expects to find the elusive 'answer'. As she records her best friend Margaux's thoughts and feelings, and their conversations, the book becomes a chaotic journey of self-discovery. There are some vicious portrayals here of friends, acquaintances and her social circle, and some delightful moments of honest and enduring relationships. This is strange, brave and hilarious novel.
{Reviewed by STELLA}
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 | Rachel Kushner's ability to take a large difficult subject and make it personal, meaningful and funny appeals to me a lot. In Telex from Cuba the voices of her young protagonists, children looking on as mayhem descends, are vital and honest. This novel is a delicious insight into Cuba pre-Castro revolution; it is a Cuba financially dominated by American companies and their company men, by corrupt officials and a military dictatorship, a Cuba of one-up-manship and power games that ultimately turn in on themselves. It is also very funny - Kushner sends up the rebels, the Americans and the Cuban businessmen with aplomb, and yet it is also a tragedy on many levels - the son who is disenchanted, who joins the rebels in the jungle but in later years lives an uncomprehendingly conservative life in middle America; the teen who is Cuban-born but American, always looking from the outside, who yearns for what is missing; the girl who sees the injustice but is powerless; the complicated lives of paternalistic overseers who neither belong in their adopted country nor in their native one. The concepts of colonialism (cultural and financial), cheap labour, power struggle, political manipulation, corruption and class are played out convincingly within this novel. Kushner takes Cuba and her array of misfits and gives us a novel lush with description, full of violence and pleasure, and wonderfully absorbing. {Reviewed by STELLA} |
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The Doll's Alphabet by Camilla Grudova {Reviewed by THOMAS}
As surreal and "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella" (to use words written in anticipation by le Comte de Lautréamont (with particular emphasis with reference to this collection upon the sewing machine)), Grodova's stories, full of baroque detail worn via patina to a thinness that makes them dangerously sharp to handle, take place in a world governed by strange customs, where significance is found in odd conjunctions, where obsessions assume the fatal ordinariness of custom, where only misfits approach normal, and where childhood is the conduit of immense threat, to children, parents and to wider society. All that is riven will henceforth continue to diverge, but Grodova's stories, lying on an axis of mitteleuropean flavour somewhere between Grimm's tales and accounts of Soviet privations, and on another axis somewhere between the stories of Angela Carter (pleasantly close to these) and those of Ben Marcus, have as much delight (and even hope) in them as they do despair, for, after all, with an imagination as fertile (and a hand as steady) as Grudova's, anything could happen (not only the dreadful).
>> Read 'Unstitching'.
>> The author's playlist for the book. >> Posing. |
 | Glaxo by Hernan Ronsino {Reviewed by THOMAS} Told from four different viewpoints and in four different decades, the story of both the effects of and the contributory factors to a murder does no so much unfold as fold in and in upon itself, becoming increasingly claustrophobic, despite the beautifully spare and open prose and the pampas setting, until it closes in upon the pivotal act itself, which causes all the previously read sections to shift and realign and reveal their significance. The mechanism is so well-oiled and precisely wrought that the great weights of economic change and the political turbulence of the 1950s (including of the León Suarez massacre) swing just out of sight. When the train tracks are torn up in the 1970s, the Glaxo pharmaceutical factory continues to loom above the town and above the novel, out of sight, a shadow across the text. |
 | What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund {Reviewed by THOMAS} Peter Mendelsund has designed some of the best book covers of recent years, and one of the reasons that they are so successful is that they arise from his careful reading of the texts. In this book, which reminds me of Ways of Seeing and The Medium is the Massage in its interplay of image and text giving an appealingly light touch to a heavy subject, he is particularly interested in the visual effects of reading. These visual effects are non-optical and comprise mental images fished into awareness by the ‘unseen’ black hooks of text; they are the fictional correlative of the visual effects fished into awareness by ‘actual’ optical stimulation. I suppose a difference between reading text and reading actuality is that when reading text the scope of our awareness has been set for us by the authority of the author (our surrogate self), whereas actuality is undifferentiated and incomprehensibly overstimulative and the necessary repression of stimuli in the reading of it is dependent on personality, conditioning, socialisation and practicality. Emphasising that he is interested in the experience of reading rather than the memory of reading (if such a distinction can be sensibly made), Mendelsund treats in depth an aspect of what I would call ‘the problem of detail’: what is the role of the reader in ‘completing’ the text? Whereas the reader’s ‘actual’ experiences of course inform and colour their reading of detail, I’m not sure I entirely agree with Mendelsund’s opinion that when reading we ‘flesh out’ characters in our imagining of them or place them in ‘familiar’ contexts – while we are reading we may well also indulge in such extra-textual self-massage, but I don’t think that this is the reading itself. |
CB Editions have published some of my favourite books of the last several years, so I feel somewhat bereft to learn that Charles Boyle, who runs the press entirely by himself, is 'retiring' and not taking on any new titles. {Thomas}
Make a reading discovery with any one of this selection from our shelves (click through for our reviews (and more)):
Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine by Diane Williams
Diane Williams’ short, energetic, hugely disorienting short stories pass as sal volatile through the fug of relationships, defamiliarising the ordinary elements of everyday lives to expose the sad, ludicrous, hopeless topographies of what passes for existence. So much is left unsaid in these stories that they act as foci for the immense unseen weight of their contexts, precisely activating pressure-points on the reader’s sensibilities. These are some of the finest stories you will read.
This is the Place to Be by Lara Pawson
What do you report when you become uncertain of the facts, of the notion of truth and of the purpose of writing? By constantly looking outwards, Pawson has conjured a portrait of the person who looks outwards, and a remarkable depiction of the act of looking outwards.
Mildew by Paulette Jonguitud
Despite the great psychological weight carried in this book it is written very lightly and directly, with a sharp pen and not a wasted word, and the damp claustrophobia of the narrator’s mind is perfectly expressed, as is the release she (sort of) experiences as the mould or fungus becomes a symptom and externalises whatever it is that it is a symptom of.
Eve Out of her Ruins by Ananda Devi (published with Les Fugitives)
"Eve out of Her Ruins is a spare, traumatic and enriching novel, a rich and subtle depiction of young lives that are being lived under, and in some instances contributing to, terrible social, cultural and economic duress. Devi confronts us with instances of great pain and suffering, yet seldom without embracing the redemptive qualities of attentiveness, spirit, beauty. This is a novel that can take you to fathomless depths. Its artistry is such that you are unlikely to close it feeling ruined." - The National
by the same author by Jack Robinson
This is a book about what books are, how they touch upon our lives and how our lives touch upon them (and upon each other because of them). The book is charming without being cloying, joyful whilst remaining critical, brief yet universal, profound yet light, pellucid whilst wary of the devotion we direct towards these portable vectors of something made by a stranger yet somehow integral to ourselves.
Things to Make and Break by May-Lan Tan
The eleven stories in this book seem preoccupied with ‘the body problem’, which is not a problem but a number of interrelating problems or potentials clustered around the disjunction between the kinds of relationships had by bodies and the kinds of relationships had by their correlated minds. Minds and bodies are subject here to differing momentums, and one bears the other away before the two can coalesce. Tan is concerned also with the interchangeability of persons, and with the contortion of persons, physically or psychologically, that enables this interchangeability. The stories have a raw elegance and precision and are full of intense and sometimes surprising images which give them a very realistic texture.
Only Joking by Gabriel Josipovici
"Only Joking has the light heart which can be revealed at the further end of a literary career. The great success of Josipovici’s technique here is that not only is the effect like that of watching something between an Ealing comedy and a very sparky and accessible French nouvelle vague film, but it also sharpens our own responses to the layers of deceit going on. Frivolous or not, it is a complete pleasure." – Nicholas Lezard, Guardian
The 5 Simple Machines by Todd McEwen
"The stories in this book offer a rare kind of humour: it is not only a matter of verbal deftness – a word, or a comma, popping up unexpectedly – but of intelligence, lightly applied. These stories manage to be unflaggingly funny, yet never wearisome: the tonal control is complete. And the deeper message is that laughter is a cure." – Nicholas Lezard, Guardian
Killing Auntie, And other work by Andrzej Bursa
"Dead at 25 in 1957, the Polish postwar firebrand Andrzej Bursa acquired a reputation as a quick-burning, existentially tormented rebel: a literary James Dean of the Stalinist era. This selection of his quirky, darkly witty work does indeed summon the shades of Beckett or Kafka from time to time. Everyday life slips into scenes of fantasy or horror, yet Bursa’s dark humour and deadpan satire keep utter bleakness at bay. Some will think of Dostoyevsky when it comes to the snuffed-out relative in the novella; read to the end and you hear something like Joe Orton’s wicked cackle too." – Boyd Tonkin, Independent
Visit the CB Editions website.
Our Book of the Week this week is Helper and Helper by Joy Cowley and Gavin Bishop.
We have a lovely hardcover copy to give away, courtesy of Gecko Press. To go in the draw, just tell us your favourite book by Cowley and/or Bishop.
Snake and Lizard are back, negotiating their life together and finding out what the world has to offer. Cowley's wry, warm tales about the give-and-take nature of friendship, beautifully illustrated by Bishop, are perfect for reading aloud or as an early chapter book.
>> Read Stella's review.
>> You will like the other 'Snake and Lizard' books, too!
>> An interview with Joy Cowley (which includes her reading a Snake and Lizard story).
>> Sing along to the Snake and Lizard song.
>> When things go wrong.
>> We have a copy of Helper and Helper to give away, courtesy of Gecko Press. To go in the draw, just e-mail us the title of your favourite book by Gavin Bishop and/or Joy Cowley.
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Memoirs of A Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada is a novel told in three parts, each part the story of a member of three generations of polar bears. The matriarch of the family opens the book. I was captivated by view of her life, which begins in the circus. Her description of learning to walk on her hind legs and the mystery of the human world is compelling. She leaves the circus to follow her real calling - being a writer. She’s a tough character, who follows her whims and retains her sense of self and all her ursine nature while living a very human life as a celebrated writer. This is surreal, but as I read I found it more and more believable. Tawada is able to make you believe even while you are disconcerted by the idea of the matriarch being simultaneously bear and human - it is all too possible. The next part tells the story of her daughter, Tosca, who is a performer in a circus in East Germany. In this story, a charged affair takes place in the mystical dreams of Tosca and her trainer. The third part tells the story of the grandson, Knut, and his life in the Berlin zoo. This could easily be a farcical novel, but Tawada’s ability to make you believe in the lives of the polar bears, her clever writing in creating different scenarios for telling memoir, and some wry, subtle commentary about Eastern European politics, social structures and class struggle all add to the intrigue of these three lives linked by fame and circumstance.
{Reviewed by STELLA}
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    | The 'Cult Recipes' series from Murdoch Books are excellent insights to regional cooking. Very far removed from the staid regional cookbooks of days past, which tended to be packed with hundreds of recipes (worthy but sometimes dull or complicated) and few pictures, the 'Cult Recipe' books focus on particular cities, capturing the essence of that particular region’s cuisine with signature dishes from some of the best eateries, explanations of base ingredients, and wonderful insights into places and the people who are passionate about their food. Delving into Tokyo Cult Recipes by Maori Murota is inspiring and informative. The chapters take you from breakfast through to dinner, with further chapters on Izakaya (tapas-style bar food) and home cooking. There are small descriptive details about food-related utensils (ceramics, kitchenware) and Japanese classics (miso, rice balls) that lend nice breaks between the recipes. This isn’t a series for the beginner cook, but for those who love food and are curious to stretch their culinary repertoire. The photography and layout are stylish and include the food, the places (markets and eateries) and the chefs of everyday Tokyo. {Reviewed by STELLA} Also in stock: 'Cult Recipes' of Istanbul, Venice and New York. |
 | Helper and Helper ('Snake and Lizard' #3) by Joy Cowley, illustrated by Gavin Bishop - our BOOK OF THE WEEK! {Reviewed by STELLA}
Another wonderful 'Snake and Lizard' collection from the talented duo Joy Cowley and Gavin Bishop. Helper and Helper is the third collection of tales about the desert dwellers Snake and Lizard. Snake, as charming and deviously clever as ever, and kind, sometimes gullible, Lizard are up to their usual excellent antics. Lizard discovers democracy, not that it helps much to thwart Snake's plans; the Grey Rabbit steals their clients with his special healing abilities until Lizard has a cunning plan; Snake becomes an honorary lizard family member, which entails fifteen aunts making themselves at home in the burrow; and the good friends, our helpers, need to visit Wise Tortoise for a dose of help. These stories, with best friends Snake and Lizard, will delight young and old. Cowley's engaging storytelling allows children to explore big ideas and what really matters with humour and compassion. Gavin Bishop's illustrations are the icing on the cake, or, in the case of Snake, a particularly good quail's egg or, for Lizard, a breakfast of many fat blue flies.
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The Last Wolf b/w Herman: The game warden / Death of a craft by Laszlo Krasznahorkai {Reviewed by THOMAS}
Written in one virtuosic 73-page sentence which exerts enormous pressure on language to make it more closely resemble thought and which makes form the primary content of this novella, The Last Wolf tells of an academic who is commissioned to travel to Extremadura in Spain where he seeks to determine the fate of the last wolves in that barren area. We read his relation to a Hungarian bartender in Berlin of the accounts of Extremadurans made to him via a translator (and usually based in any case on further hearsay), nesting the subject of the story in several layers of reportage, rumour and translation, the performative complexity of which is repeatedly punctured by the offhand comments of the bartender. Krasznahorkai, as usual, succeeds in being both comic and morose, this hopeless tale of human destruction and the frustrating impassivity of nature is one in which meaning is both invoked and withheld much like the presence of the last elusive wolf (or, rather, much like the story of the last wolf, for it is narrative that is the true quarry for the hunter). Herman, the other novella in this beautifully produced little book, was written earlier in Krasznahorkai’s career, yet deals with many of the same themes. The two versions, reminiscent at times of Kafka, tell of a master trapper whose disgust at his calling is turned upon his own species as the compounding of his exterminations creates a momentum from which neither he nor others can be released. What remains but the consequential force of past actions when their rationale has proven spurious? |
 | The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector {Reviewed by THOMAS} “A note exists between two notes of music, between two facts exists a fact, between two grains of sand no matter how close together there exists an interval of space, a sense that exists between senses.” Upon entering the room of her apartment that had been inhabited by her maid, the narrator is frightened by a large cockroach emerging from the wardrobe and shuts the door upon it. This act of violence creates a bond of association between the two, a bond which language-based thought is not able to withstand, and, as the narrator looks into the face of the cockroach and at the white paste that oozes from its fatal wound, she becomes indistinguishable from the cockroach and indeed from all life, she becomes what she terms 'neutral', not individuated by the spurious but 'useful' concepts of identity and time. "Until the moment of seeing the roach I'd always had some name for what I was living, otherwise I wouldn't get away. To escape the neutral, I had long since forsaken the being for the persona." Her mental disintegration is both a symptom of and an escape from life traumas that are barely hinted at (an abortion, a lost lover), and her experience with the cockroach entails a relinquishment of everything she had thought of as herself. The ecstatic and the horrific cannot be distinguished from one another. Only thinking and the use of language can keep this reality at bay. "I was abandoning my human organisation - to enter that monstrous thing that is my living neutrality." But, of course, the relation of her experience is in itself a feat of language: perhaps it is through the failure of language to reach further that the edges of experience that the shape of experience may be conveyed. "Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it - and the way I do not find it. ... The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language." After slowing time down with great austerity in the first two thirds of the novel, Lispector has her narrator progress into a delirium of religious and metaphorical ravings, which, for me, demonstrates how 'profundity' (as so precisely and compellingly delineated in the first part) has no certain point of delineation from madness (though I am not entirely sure that this was the author's intention (and I must say that the novel lost my unreserved admiration at this point)). The novel, and the narrator's identification with the cockroach, culminates in the narrator taking into her mouth, as a kind of communion, some of the crushed insect's innards. |
 | The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus {Reviewed by THOMAS} This book is a sort of fictional encyclopedia of pretty much everything you don't understand about the world but were unable quite to pinpoint and about which you are unable even to find the right sort of words to express your confusion. Familiar things and their meanings have been separated and allowed to settle in new patterns of association, clotted together by the adhesive properties of language, giving rise to new science, new culture, new emotions. Marcus is set against the deadening effect of familiarity; really, his Age of Wire and String is no more savage, tender and surprising than the world we take for granted every day: the problems he describes are the very same ones that already throng the skin dividing our internal world from our external (a concept demonstrably arbitrary and invertible) but to which we have become numbed and unobservant. This book will certainly not help you to understand anything any better, but it will make your confusion immaculate and add to it dimensions of awe and beauty that you had hitherto not suspected. This new edition pairs Marcus's text with Catrin Morgan's equally obtuse and intriguing illustrations. |
A DOZEN INTERESTING NEW RELEASES THAT ARRIVED THIS WEEK
Snake and Lizard are back, negotiating their life together and finding out what the world has to offer. These wry, warm tales, beautifully illustrated by Bishop, are perfect for reading aloud or as an early chapter book.
>> You will like the other 'Snake and Lizard' books, too!
>> Not to mention Frog and Toad.
As well as being an admired novelist, Hustvedt's knowledge of neurology, psychology and art make her an incisive feminist critic. In this book she explores the genderisation of visual culture with reference to Bourgeouis, Mapplethorpe, Almodovar, Wenders and Bausch, and also the relationship between brain function and subjective experience.
>> An interview with Hustvedt.
Is this The American Book of the Dead? Abraham Lincoln's 11-year-old son Willie died of typhoid in 1862. This inventive and much-anticipated novel from the author of the Folio Prize-winning Tenth of December has a president, "freshly inclined toward sorrow," driven by grief into communion with the disembodied spirits of the dead in what becomes a meditation on the force of death in personal and collective histories, notably the American Civil War.
>> Read the review in The New York Times.
>> Saunders speaks.
Carroll does a great job of the pretty-near-impossible task of synthesising the various fields of scientific discovery, from the cosmic to the quantum to the neurological scale, into a systematic view of the nature of reality.
"Carroll beautifully articulates the world view suggested by contemporary naturalism. Thorny issues like free will, the direction of time, and the source of morality are clarified with elegance and insight. This is a book that should be read by everybody.' - Carlo Rovelli
We have noticed a renewal of interest in the work of Angela Carter, with pleasing new editions of The Bloody Chamber and her Fairy Tales. And what an outstanding writer she was: unconventional, agile, playful, strident, and a notable stylist. Susannah Clapp was a close friend of Carter's, and is her literary executor. This brief, evocative biography is hung upon a series of postcards sent by Carter to Clapp during their friendship. It is a delight to read and, I think, really captures Carter's personality: "She snarled and she frolicked: the combination made her strong meat."
>>We also have Edmund Gordon's excellent recent biography The Invention of Angela Carter available.
>> Are there wolves in the forest?
Rees' book is remarkable for the amount of new information gathered from 25 years worth of interviews with Holocaust survivors and perpetrators. This research enables not only a reassessment of the social mechanisms that induced and permitted genocide but also of the range of the victims' responses. Also recorded here is the resistance, albeit ultimately futile, of individual stories to the overwhelming story that subsumed them.
>>> Also arrived this week: Denying the Holocaust: The growing assault on truth and memory by Deborah Lipstadt ($30), which asks why Holocaust deniers like David Irwin are on the rise in a post-factual world.
Changes to a community don't need to be large-scale and expensive to have a transformative impact. In fact, one street, park, or a single person can have an outsized effect on life in the surrounding city. Imagine the Church Street Bohemian Quarter closed to traffic and becoming a model for a new way (for Nelson) of thinking about community-focused urban use!
Is this the first talking-dog story in Western literature? All Cervantes' concerns, both with structure and content, here writ small and going about on all fours.
A novel capturing the immense creative freedom unleashed in the aftermath of punk upon youths in a small Scottish town. Memorial Device is the name of the band, and the mechanism of the book.
"Looks set to be the first best thing you read in 2017." - The Skinny
>> "It isn't easy being Iggy Pop in a small town in the west of Scotland."
Socialists, Communists, Bundists, Zionists, Trotskyists, manual workers and intellectuals: before the Holocaust decimated their numbers and laid waste to the land their radicalism addressed, the Jewish communities between Russia and the Baltic brought forth a swathe of new ideas compounded of idealism and doubt. The book examines what was lost, and what might have been.
Imagine Don Quixote set in modern Essex and London, somehow adhered to residues of the Peasants' Revolt and so full of every possible brilliant and stupid thought that it comprises an assault not only upon the realist novel but upon reality itself. Not really much like anything else.
Compiled by the historian at the Royal Horticultural Society, this solander box contains not only an illustrated history of forty rose species and hybrids and a survey of the cultivation and cultural significance of roses, but also an exquisite print of each of the forty roses, which you could frame if you felt so inclined.