We are very pleased to be hosting a four-week hand lettering course taught by designer Holly Dunn, who has recently returned to Nelson from the UK. Holly specialises in book cover design and hand lettering. The course will be held on Friday afternoons, beginning on 27 October. Numbers are limited. >> Click here to find out more. 
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Exit West by Mohsin Hamid {Reviewed by STELLA}
I have been a fan of Moshin Hamid’s writing since I read The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a clever look at a hostage situation through the conversation between the captive and the captor. His latest book, Exit West, has also made the Man Booker shortlist and I’m not surprised to see his work there. An observant writer of human nature, especially in situations of chaos or crisis, he cleverly weaves in ambiguities and humour, drawing you into the world of his characters without fuss. This was tellingly so in How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia - set in India it’s a remarkable cradle-to-grave story, rags-to-riches tale that wraps an impossible love obsession into the mix with candour and black humour. Hamid has the knack of taking you into the hearts and minds of his characters in a candid manner and lightly, yet precisely, making you aware of politics and contemporary societal issues. So I was anticipating more of this social realism. And Exit West is this, but also more. Set somewhere in the middle east, possibly Syria, we meet the young lovers Saeed and Nadia. Saeed works for an advertising firm, is moderately religious and lives with his parents. Nadia works at a bank, unusually lives alone in a small rooftop apartment, is not in the least religious but wears a full black robe (mostly so she is left alone and doesn’t draw attention to herself) and rides a motorcycle. As their relationship flourishes so too do the militants, gaining more control in the neighbourhoods where they live. People leave, others don’t return from holidays or work trips. After a short time, Saeed and Nadia find themselves out of work, watching their backs and keeping their heads down, obeying the new rules. After Saeed’s mother is killed by a stray bomb, they decide to leave their home country. So this a refugee story, yet it is not a story of the journey, but much more a story about being elsewhere. Curiously, Hamid uses an interesting magical realism element - the idea of doors: doors that start appearing and are portals to other places. They are black, very black doors, that one pays a ‘door agent’ a fee to be taken to and then walks through. During this transfer to the other side there is an element of being stunned, struggling through, but this is instantaneous. I found this aspect unusual, but intriguing, and I would be curious to know why Hamid chose this metaphor for the struggle of the journey, which we see and hear so much about in our media - but maybe this is precisely the reason. Nadia and Saeed find themselves in Mykonos and while the island is beautiful it is crowded and dangerous and they feel a need for something more. Next is London, squatting in an empty and grand house in a wealthy suburb along with other refugees from far and wide. Saeed feel himself more and more disconnected from his home country, and becomes more devout in his grief of leaving his father, family and friends. He finds it increasingly difficult to relate the other cultures, whereas Nadia is more open and curious and is accepted by the elders of the house as they try to organise themselves within the chaos, find enough food and keep the authorities and ‘native’ Britons at bay. The political relevance of Exit West is obvious, and Hamid is writing in the midst of growing intolerance, increasing numbers of refugees and the social fallout and uncertainty of Brexit. As Saeed is drawn increasingly to his own people and in particular a house where they are devoutly Muslim, it feels like this may be the end of the relationship under increasing strain in the struggle to survive and the couple’s different ways of coping with change. Yet Hamid doesn’t take the option of making Saeed an extremist or Nadia throwing off her own culture, which could have been a predictable conclusion. He takes them again through another black door, this time to America. The novel is primarily a story about the breakdown of borders, about the disintegration of nation-states as we know them. It’s also about the struggle to belong, to survive in chaos, and it is surprisingly hopeful. |
 | The Empty Grave ('Lockwood & Co' #5) by Jonathan Stroud {Reviewed by STELLA} If you are a reader of the 'Lockwood' series, you will understand the excitement and also the apprehension of reading The Empty Grave. Excitement because it is the fifth in the series and there is so much to find out. What were they up to on the Other Side? Why is ‘the problem’ getting worse? Will Lockwood, Lucy and George survive finding out? And who is Penelope Fittes, and what is she up to? And apprehension, because it’s the final 'Lockwood' book! And it's so good! If you haven’t read any of this series, it’s time to start with the Screaming Staircase immediately. The Empty Grave opens with our intrepid heroes in the final resting place of Marissa Fittes, the famous and supposedly dead ghost hunter. Unsurprisingly, a jaunt into the crypt doesn’t go exactly to plan, and things just get more dangerous from there on in. As the forces that police the ghost-hunting agents become more draconian in an attempt to stifle the truth, Lockwood & Co. become increasingly curious and determined to find out what is going on. The Fittes agency is on the offensive, the Orpheus Society more secretive, and someone wants Lockwood, Lucy and George eradicated. Whose empty grave awaits, and will this be the end of the road for our young agents? There are plenty of twists and turns in this last action-packed book, and also answers, some that may surprise you! Always a tricky thing, a final book to a wonderful series, but Jonathan Stroud expertly pulls it off. It has the classic intrigue, deceptions and scariness of the first four, as well as all the failings of our human team, their commitment to truth, and their determination to overcome the evil misdoings of others who are obsessed with the ghosts, the dangerous pull of the Other Side and the desire to manipulate life and death. Thrilling, frightening and altogether brilliant. |
 | This Little Art by Kate Briggs {Reviewed by THOMAS} A translator interposes themselves invisibly (or quasi-invisibly (invisible by convention)) between the author of a text, for whom the translator stands in the position of a reader, and the reader of that text, for whom the translator stands in the position of the author. The translator negotiates the text on behalf of a reader whose language is not that of the author, and adds, for the eventual reader, another layer in the suspension of disbelief in their willingness to accept that the words of the translator *are* the words of the author while at the same time acknowledging that they are entirely different words in a different language. To translate, in the words of Kate Briggs in her fine, thoughtful work on translation, “complicates the authorial position, sharing it, usurping it, sort of dislocating it.” Although the translator aspires to invisibility as a remaker of text, translators are not, and should not be considered as, by themselves or by others, “neutral, impersonal transferring devices.” The remaking of text in the person of the translator refracts both in their capacities as a reader and as a writer. “I read with my body,” says Briggs. “I read and move to translate with my body, and my body is not the same as yours. Translation is a responsive and appropriative practising of an extant work at the level of the sentence, working it out, a work-out on the basis of the desired work whose energy source is the inclusion of the new and different vitality that comes with and from me.” Translation is the most intimate possible relationship between two persons, though one of those persons may well be unaware of this intimacy. The translator assumes responsibility not only for the words and intentions of the author, but also for their identity as an author, at least in so far as the readers in the host language are concerned. The translator *becomes* the author for those readers. Or, rather, translation is the most intimate possible relationship between three people, for the willingness of a reader to allow the subsuming of their awareness by the author is replicated in the translator-as-reader who must concurrently become the translator-as-author for the host language reader. Briggs describes the relationship she has with Roland Barthes, whose ‘Le Préparation du Roman’ she is translating as ‘The Preparation of the Novel’, and, indeed there are passages in her account in which the identities of the two elide and it is uncertain whose words, and whose ideas, are on the page. Briggs sees the role of the translator as to *identify* with the author, rather than to supplant, or to be compared with, the author. The translator “undertakes to write translations not as a means to demonstrate their expertise but precisely because they know, without knowing exactly how or in what particular ways, doing so will be productive of *new* knowledge.” The constraint of the extant text liberates the translator-as-writer from the perils of self-expression and the impediments to discovery imposed by one’s identity. To express oneself lies within one’s capabilities and is a fundamentally reductive procedure. Only constraints will lead a writer beyond safe territory, and the constraints of an extant text can lead a translator-as-writer to new discoveries about language and about the limits and potentials of praxis of both writing and reading. “Don’t all writing projects,” Briggs asks, “involve working within existing rules and parameters that guide and to some degree direct what is possible to write? All writing is to some greater or lesser extent determined by constraints. The constraints on how far I can go, the limits on my making-up, the limits on doing what I want, are what interest me. They interest me because they instruct me, leading me (forcing me?) outside of what I might already be capable of writing, knowing and imagining. I don’t want to just make something up.” An effective way to make without making up is to remake. Praxis without ego reveals much about the mechanisms of personhood, so to call it, readership, authorship, and about the mechanisms of language that give rise to these roles of praxis. A translation is a product of its time can be replaced by new translations, more in keeping with the times of new readers, perhaps, in the way that the original cannot be so renewed or updated. An original text goes on being the original text. For someone to write it again in the original language is generally considered a crime against the text (except perhaps when the rewriting is so different from the original as to constitute a commentary or a riff upon it). A translation can be remade without affecting the authenticity of the work. Does this suggest that translation is more akin to reading than to writing (as in the generation of texts), in that the text is fulfilled in an interchangeable other? Is all reading in effect, in any case, a translation from the language of the text’s composition to the language of the reader’s comprehension, even though those languages are ostensibly the *same* language? Is an interlingual translator nothing more (and nothing less) than a textual vector, broadening the scope of the writing/reading project performed by persons whose intimacy is entirely inherent in this vector? In this respect, translation should be considered to take its risks on criteria of soundness and comeliness, rather than on criteria of exactitude or goodness. “My work is fascinating and derivative and determining and necessary and suspect,” says Briggs. “It is everywhere taken for granted and then every so often [inappropriately] singled out to be piously congratulated or taken apart.” |
 | The Absent Therapist by Will Eaves {Reviewed by THOMAS} To read this book is to be drawn into a kaleidophone of voices, first-person narrative fragments, tiny stories bearing the impress of larger, untold stories; wry observations unknowingly made by unobservant people, anecdotes with perfectly deflating punch-lines, almost-jokes that meticulously leave off at being almost-jokes without aspiring to be jokes; gauche quips, mundane miseries treated with both sympathy and humour; small lives writ small and at once satirised and celebrated for their smallness; an encyclopedic accumulation of human experiences of the kind that usually evanesce without being recorded even in the experiencers’ memories let alone on paper. All these thousands of voices are captured pitch-perfectly by Eaves, who, with a cold eye and a warm heart, and with an unbelievably sensitive ear for what all sorts of people say and how they say it (or, what they think and how they think it), has written a very enjoyable book that manages to be both sharp and blunt at the same time to the extent that the distinction between sharp and blunt has been removed. |
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Elmet by Fiona Mozley {Reviewed by STELLA}
One of the two debut novels shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker prize, Fiona Mozley’s Elmet is an unsettling portrayal of family and loss, of violence and deep love. Daniel is looking for someone following the path north - following the railway tracks across the moor and through the townships of Yorkshire, taking in the layers of time, of history, in a subtle, almost unconscious manner. It’s as though Daniel carries with him not only his own past, yet all the stories of those wandering and searching. Mozley’s narrator is a gentle loving boy, a young man who lives for his sister, Cathy and to please his Daddy. The family have returned to the land eking out a life, their home built by Daddy’s hands from the woods that surround them, with odd jobs, trades of goods and services and hunting for food. Cathy and Daniel live a solitary life, no longer attend school, yet have an understanding of their environment and a care for the wilderness that surrounds them. Yet all is far from serene. Daddy is known for his fighting prowess and a violence that brews within him. Coming back to the village also means returning to his past and the connection with the children’s mother, who has long disappeared. Simmering under the surface are hurts and unsettled scores, pride and suffering. Cathy is tough and sure, aware of her surroundings and the impending doom while her brother blithely carries on in his childlike way. The family’s presence on the land raises the ire of the landowner, Mr Price, and highlights a community riven between the landowning classes and the working and unemployed poor. Described as a 'rural noir', the story opens with Daniel on the road, the setting feels timeless - is it the past or some altered future? In fact, it is the present. It’s a beguiling opening that draws you in and endears the narrator to you: a young man searching, loyal to his family, as he tells his story of what has gone before, of their lives in the house, the simple pleasure of crafting their own way, making from scratch, following the rules of nature rather than the laws of man. The setting is beautifully described, almost dreamlike at times, yet the prose always fizzes with an underlying tension, a sense of something dreadful to come, and of secrets, of things unsaid. The violence is raw and brutal, it has a gothic element reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and the work is seething with history alongside its clearly contemporary setting. It’s a remarkable debut novel and a fitting contender for the prize. |
 | Worlds from the Word's End by Joanna Walsh {Reviewed by THOMAS} Language is the expression of intention, but to what extent does this intention spring from the utterer and to what extent does it inhere in language itself? (While we’re at it, we could (but will not) consider the extent to which the intentions inherent in the reader affect what is read or those in the hearer what is heard). The stories of Joanna Walsh’s latest collection are of such lightness that they ride the subtlest of semantic breezes and are carried to destinations implied in language that heavier material will not reach, falling from its vector under its own weight. Like those of Italo Calvino (who also saw lightness as a virtue), Walsh’s brief, crystalline stories imply more than they can objectively said to contain, even though they have objective rigour in their extrapolation of potential from scientifically isolated material, often linguistic anomalies that we had not thought of as linguistic anomalies, idiomatic remarks or the quirk of a turn of phrase to which we have been blinded by familiarity. Any of these stories could be subjected to an analysis that would exceed the length of the story. Walsh compulsively (for compulsively read scientifically) speculates upon the nature of lives in which an impulse becomes permanent or a tendency is liberated from the factors that ultimately, or immediately, ordinarily negate it. Would would it be like if words literally failed? What would it be like if waiting in a railway station was never ended by the appearance of the person waited for? What if a young girl really did kidnap the gangster Enzo Ponza and end up having him about the house forever after (“to challenge him would be to acknowledge his existence”)? Each narrator is indigenous to their story, and we are engaged in realigning our perceptions to match theirs, without the author performing the indignity of forcing the opposite upon them (a fairly usual narratorial method). In each, Walsh conducts a delicate interplay between detail and meaning, neither overwhelming the other which it embodies or which embodies it. Strangely familiar existences spring from language itself. “I am walked but, also, I am walking. Wait. What if I walked without being walked. Where would I (who would I) walk?” In ‘The Suitcase Dog’, Walsh not only imagines the language that would be used by a dog to distill its experiences of the world and of itself, but, at another step of remove, the language that would be used by a suitcase imagining itself to be a dog using the language that would be used by a dog, but contained within the fairly limited imaginative projections of a suitcase. Which sounds more complicated than it reads. It is Walsh’s ability to nuance the simplest of sentences that allows her/them to give access to the subtlest of observations and the narrowest (as in precisest) of perspectives. These brief paragraphs waft meaning that they can hardly be said to contain, but there is nothing vague or tentative in that wafting. In each, the reader’s reading faculties are sharpened in “thinking about the story - which is always to be thinking about thinking about the story.” |
 | The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro {Reviewed by THOMAS}
In many ways, this ought to have been an awful book but instead it is the opposite: a historical fantasy written against the conventions of historical fantasy. In an extended lull in the eighth-century wars between the Britons and the colonising Saxons, an elderly Briton couple set out to join their son, who long ago left for the next village. The land is covered with a ‘mist of forgetting’, which erases personal and collective history and makes sustained intentional action nearly impossible. They fall in with a Saxon warrior (who has come to kill the dragon whose enchanted breath is the mist of forgetting (oops: spoiler)) and a Saxon boy who has sustained a strange bite, and, at various times, they encounter Sir Gawain, the late King Arthur’s nephew, now elderly, cantankerous and occasionally prone to dischivalry and mental slippage. I don’t want to write too much about what happens, partly because it is important that the reader accompanies the couple in their slow struggle towards narrative memory, and partly because Ishiguro takes great pains to keep the reader from becoming absorbed in ‘the action’. Especially towards the beginning, distance is maintained by an unidentified intrusive narrator saying things like “there would have been elms and willows near the water”, and, throughout, the tropes and clichés of both historical and fantasy fiction are rigorously deflated, and what could have been ‘dramatic’ bits are treated in a deliberately cursory manner compared with the attention given to the glimmers of temporal consciousness shielded by each of the characters. In fact, as well as being an extended meditation on the nature and ambivalent power of memory, the book can also be read as an analogue of the writing of fiction: characters are slowly defined by personal and collective histories, both as narrative is wound about them out of the mists of undefined potential (the setting of this novel in a time where the line between mythology and history is undrawn (at least psychologically) is appropriate) and as their back-stories are induced by slowly moving towards recognition of what it is in their past that propels their actions. For Ishiguro, memory, as well as making identity and sustained intention possible, is the mechanism by which personal and collective trauma forces itself upon the present and upon which further harm is predicated (“vengeance relished in advance by those not able to take it in its proper place”). Ishiguro, never one to write the same book twice, has written an unusual, thoughtful and, ultimately, involving book.
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 | A Line Made by Walking by Sara Baume {Reviewed by STELLA} A young artist is retreating into herself. She finds comfort face-down on the grotty carpet of her small bedsit in Dublin, miserably curled around herself, thinking about the carpets of her childhood and the failure of her adult life. Realising that she must quit her unsatisfactory job at the art gallery, she calls her mother, packs up, eschewing her seemingly few friends, and leaves the city to return to her childhood home. After a week or so in what she refers to as the ‘famine hospital’ - her childhood bedroom, packed with memories and mementos that she has a love/hate relationship with, she asks to stay in her Nan’s rundown cottage. Her grandmother died three years previously and the house with its tired 'For Sale' sign is still vacant. Staying here gives Frankie a sense of being centred, but she is still at odds with herself, and depression is forever on her back. She observes all the decaying mess that is nature and humanity, noticing the rundown, the broken, and the left behind. The nick-nacks of her Nan’s life on the sills of the windows both represent the pointless and the holders of memory - odd talismans. Frankie can’t quite seem to work up enthusiasm for much, but she has the observant eye of an artist. When she spots a dead robin on the roadside, she starts a project: photographs of dead things. Each chapter is entitled a dead animal, representing her finds: mouse, rabbit, fox, hedgehog, badger. The novel is set in rural Ireland: it’s both beautiful and bleak. Sara Baume’s A Line Made by Walking is an intimate portrait of mental illness, anxiety and acute awareness. While it is sometimes gruelling to be inside Frankie’s mind it is also fascinating: a mix between what we all hang onto in our lives (memories and safety nets), what we think but don’t say (Frankie has a tendency to speak ‘reality’ - she doesn’t hold back her thoughts - making observations which are like puncture wounds), and what it means to suffer the anxiety of being or trying to become an artist. Frankie’s issues lie in her deep uncertainty about her life and her inability to produce anything as an artist. Baume cleverly shapes the novel - it is written in the first person with clusters of capsule-like considerations, musings and memories, fleeting thoughts which build to capture this complex person. Interspersed within these deliberations are references to visual artworks - over 70. Frankie is constantly testing herself, drawing on her knowledge, trying to make herself relevant: “Works about Being, I test myself: On Kawara, beginning 1966. A series of paintings showing nothing but the date upon which they were made. He also sent missives to acquaintances and friends which simply read: I AM STILL ALIVE, followed by his signature.” If you know the works it adds further layers to the texture of the writing; if you don’t it leads to further discoveries. The chapters also feature the photographs of the dead animals. Baume isn’t interested in plot, she is investigating what it means to think and feel deeper, what sadness looks like, particularly inside the head of Frankie, a young woman stymied by her inability to act on her desires and overwhelmed by depression. It’s not all gloom; it is lifted by some wry observations, the lack of sentiment, and Baume’s excellent writing - sharp, astute and lyrical. |
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The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison {Reviewed by STELLA}
A woman is dealing with a virus - she’s a nurse, a midwife, and works in a large American city hospital. But this isn’t just any virus, it’s a plague, one that is fatal to nearly all women and children. Babies are stillborn or die soon after birth, their mothers not far behind them. As the authorities shut down borders and quarantine the sick, the medical teams work frantically to find a cure as they fall to the fever. Men are dying too, and the airborne virus is unstoppable. Our heroine awakes from her fever to find the hospital deadly quiet, bodies surrounding her. She leaves and walks home. The electricity is out, the roads quiet, cars abandoned, stores ransacked, no water - chaos, no people. When she wakes to find a stranger in her room, she fights him off and takes flight. And so begins her journey across America - a journey of survival. She quickly realises that she is one of very few women, and to hide she must disguise herself as a man. Groups of marauding men, gang-like in their behaviour, are out to seek every advantage, and women are in demand. Conversely, there are women (queens of a hive) who have their own male harems. There are religious cults. The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison is a disquieting post-apocalyptic novel about the aftermath of a catastrophic plague. It’s a sharp look at gender politics and at power structures, and the speed of collapse of a complex society is all too devastatingly convincing. The novel is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (not so bleak, but just as gritty), Naomi Alderman’s The Power and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, and it is very good. Gripping, intriguing, with a compelling main character who will hook you immediately. Her encounters with others make perfect foils for Elison to explore the strengths and weaknesses of humans in crisis, but it is the months that the midwife spends alone that are the highlights of the novel. Her contemplation of what she had previously and her connection with this ruined world and with the increasingly new world in which she must learn to live are captivating. The series is called 'The Road to Nowhere', and the second, The Book of Etta, takes place 100 years on. Elison is working on the third and final title, The Book of Flora. |
