Minor Detail by Adania Shibli (translated by Elisabeth Jacquette) {Reviewed by THOMAS}
Sand absorbs water poured upon it just as it absorbs blood spilt upon it and the actions committed upon it. Where does this water, this blood, and where do these actions go? Can they be recovered? How do they return? Adania Shibli’s remarkable novel is comprised of two parts. The first, told in the third person, describes with elegant impassivity and equivalence the actions and movements of an officer in the Israeli army in the Naqab/Negev desert during the 1948-49 Naqba/War of Independence. Although we gain no access to his thoughts (how could we gain access to his thoughts, after all?), we are witness to his obsessive washing routines, his watchfulness for spiders and insects within his hut and his destruction of them, his tending of a festering spider bite on his thigh, his journeys into the surrounding desert either in vehicles with his soldiers, using maps, searching for Arab ‘insurgents’, or alone, on foot around the camp, following the topography. The other soldiers have no reachable dimension other than being soldiers because any such dimensions would be irrelevant. The officer is the only one who speaks, and that hardly at all except for a long lecture expressing the view that the desert is a wasteland that can be made fertile when cleansed of its current inhabitants. As the rituals of army life are repeated and repeated, the tension builds beneath the narrative. The soldiers come across a group of unarmed Bedouin at an oasis and kill them and their camels, taking a dog and a young woman back to the camp. Their mistreatment of her, culminating in gang rape and later her murder and burial near the camp, can be felt in the narrative long before they occur. The howling dog witness shifts the first section of the book to the second, where a howling dog keeps the first-person narrator awake at night in her house in contemporary Ramallah. She has become obsessed with the fate of the young woman, which she has read about in a newspaper article, and by “the conviction that I can uncover details about the rape and murder as the girl experienced it, not relying on what the soldiers who committed it disclosed.” What happens to those who have no agency in their own story? The narrator cannot accept that the young woman is “a nobody who will forever remain a nobody whose voice nobody will hear,” and, with a borrowed ID, which will help her to enter different areas, and a rented car, one weekend she sets out to see if she can find out more. She takes a pile of maps: the official Israeli maps that show the roads, checkpoints, settlements and army zones in the Negev but do not mark even still-existing Palestinian settlements, and maps of the Naqab before 1948, which give information possibly relevant to her search. Maps are a way in which power imprints itself on territory, and Shibli spends a great deal of careful attention in both parts of the novel to the movements of her main characters over the land, contrasting the movement associated with maps with that concerned with and guided by the terrain. These different ways of moving have, for each of them, quite different results. The movements of the officer in the first section imprints power upon a territory, a pattern traced by the woman in the second section over land that holds the trace of violence in itself. The past is never left behind though it can never be recovered, either. In the first part, the officer has complete ease of movement, heading wherever he wishes, inside or out; in the second part the narrator has her movement checked and restricted wherever she goes (until she reaches the Naqab). “The borders imposed between things here are many. One must pay attention to them, and navigate them, which ultimately protects everyone from perilous consequences,” she notes, waiting at the checkpoints in the wall that divides the territory. “There are some who consider focusing on minor details as the only way to arrive at the truth, and therefore proof of its existence, to reconstruct an incident one has never witnessed simply by noticing little details that everyone else finds to be insignificant,” she says, as a reason for her search. This may be true, but if such minor details exist their significance may also be unrecognised by the searcher. In the military museum that she visits, the only ‘evidence’ is the soap, the jerrycans, the uniforms, the vehicles and the weapons mentioned in the first part. Intention leaves no residue. Also these objects constitute the majority of the soldiers’ experience, given how little the woman meant to them. Part of the narrator’s and Shibli’s project is to uncover the particular from the general, the experience from the history. Although both she and the author bewail injustice, the narrator shows no enmity towards any of the people she meets, all are treated with sympathy; harm arises only from structures of power. Power withdraws the evidence of its actions, hides its victims, disappears into the understructure of everyday life. There is no residue unless the land holds a residue. The second half of the book is lightly told, in keeping with the personality of its narrator, and often funny (she describes a film rewinding in a museum and the settlers dismantling their houses). She visits the settlement with the name of the place where the crime occurred and learns that the actual place is near by, she visits the place and finds nothing of interest, she walks through the surrounding plantations where the desert has been made fertile, but is frightened back by a dog. “I am here in vain,” she says. “I haven’t found anything I’ve been looking for, and this journey hasn’t added anything to what I knew about the incident when I started out.” Reluctant to return to Ramallah, she drives back and forth in the desert, gives a ride to an old woman, and then decides to follow her through a military zone, where she comes across an oasis. The land has drawn her to the core of her quest, but she has no way of recognising it as such, and she does not expect that her quest will be, still unknowingly, fulfilled in the last sentence of the book.
In Shy, Max Porter again shows an incredible ability to get completely inside the head of his narrator, his spare and unconventionally effective prose delivering us an experience that enlarges our empathy and understanding. Shy is a young man who is both damaged and damaging, troubled and troubling, inmate of the residential institution Last Chance but also creature of a pervasive trope of masculinity. Shy is suffering; people want to help him, but can he be helped? What can he find inside him that can help him find his footing? An affecting and humane short novel, presented as a beautiful hardback.
>>Absolute horror at the political present.
>>Men and masculinity.
>>Lucky.
>>Entering the hinterland.
>>His father’s voice.
>>Are novels miniature villages?
>>Pebbles.
>>Read our reviews of Lanny.
>>Read Thomas's review of The Death of Francis Bacon.
>>Grief Is the Thing With Feathers.
>>Your copy of Shy.
A selection of books from our shelves. Click on the titles to find out more.
Greek Lessons by Han Kang (translated from Korean by Emily Yae Woon and Deborah Smith) $40
In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight. Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it's the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages. Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish - the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to one another. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity — their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to expression.
>>How language misses the mark.
>>Losing language.
Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright $45
The much-anticipated new novel from one of Australia’s outstanding authors. Praiseworthy is an epic set in the north of Australia, told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned. In a small town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors, a crazed visionary seeks out donkeys as the solution to the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife seeks solace from his madness in following the dance of butterflies and scouring the internet to find out how she can seek repatriation for her Aboriginal/Chinese family to China. One of their sons, called Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide after being labelled a paedophile. The other, Tommyhawk, wishes his brother dead so that he can pursue his dream of becoming white and powerful. When the town is overrun by donkeys, the residents and their strange religious sects react with anger, led by the Mayor, the albino Aboriginal named Ice Pick, and his outlandishly dressed groupie women. This is a novel which pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a fable for the end of days.
”I’m awed by the range, experiment and political intelligence of Alexis Wright’s work, from fiction such as Carpentaria and The Swan Book, to her ‘collective memoir’ of an Aboriginal elder in Tracker. As essayist, activist, novelist and oral historian she is vital on the subject of land and people.” — Robert Macfarlane, New York Times Book Review
>>Sovereignty of the imagination.
Participation by Anna Moschovakis $35
When the weather revolts, certainties dissolve and binaries blur as members of two reading groups converge at the intersection of theory and practice to reshape their lives, relationships, and reality itself. In Anna Moschovakis’s novel, two reading groups, unofficially called Love and Anti-Love, falter amidst political friction and signs of environmental collapse. Participation offers a prescient look at communication in a time of rupture: anonymous participants exchange fantasies and ruminations, and relationships develop and unravel. As the groups consider—or neglect—their syllabi, and connections between members deepen, a mentor disappears, a translator questions his role, a colleague known as ‘the capitalist’ becomes a point of fixation, and "the news reports" filter through in fragments. With incisive prose and surprising structural shifts, Participation forms an alluring vision of community, and a love story like no other.
”Moschovakis's take on what it means to form community in opposition to the expectations of hierarchy, anticipated outcome, or even narrative feels timely, perhaps even prescient, in an era when the only thing that seems constant is the incontrovertible need for change. Densely intellectual, the novel forces an alert reader to reconsider what it means to participate in the very act of reading.” —Kirkus
Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth (translated from Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund) $30
'To mother is to murder, or close enough', thinks Johanna, as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian. She's recently widowed and back in Oslo after a long absence as she prepares for a retrospective of her art. The subject of her work is motherhood and some of her more controversial paintings have brought about a dramatic rift between parent and child. This new proximity, after decades of acrimonious absence, set both women on edge, and before too long Johanna finds her mother stalking her thoughts, and Johanna starts stalking her mother's house.
Long-listed for the 2021 International Booker Prize.
”A darkly insightful examination of mother-daughter relationships that captivates with the suspense of a thriller. The novel's strength lies in its deft use of psychological analysis as it looks at this relationship through one lens after another.” —Kirkus Reviews
>>”The relationship between mother and child is a never-ending story.”
>>Read an extract.
>>”The better I translate, the more I erase myself.”
How Our Solar System Began: The planets, their moons, and beyond by Aina Bestard $45
We live in an amazing planetary system! From the yawning Valles Marineris on Mars and the ocean hiding beneath the ice crust of Jupiter's moon Europa, to the eerily Earth-like terrain of Saturn's moon Titan and the Sun's blazing corona, our solar system brims with wonders. This beautiful large-format book takes children on a trip across the Solar System with the aid of marvellous illustrations, lift-up flaps and a comprehensive text that helps them understand the amazing variety of landscapes within our planetary system. Lift up the layers to discover how the Sun was formed and explore the amazing landscapes of our neighbouring planets. Readers will find out which moons are the most like the Earth, what Saturn's rings are made of, where comets come from, and what lies in the Kuiper Belt, outside the very edge of the solar system.
>>Look inside!
The West: A new history of an old idea by Naoise Mac Sweeney $40
Many assume ‘Western Civilisation’ derives from a cultural inheritance that stretches back to classical antiquity, a golden thread that binds us from Plato to NATO. But what if all this is wrong? What if the Western world does not have its ultimate origins in a single cultural bloodline but rather a messy bramble of ancestors and influences? What if ‘The West’ is just an idea that has been invented, co-opted, and mythologised to serve different purposes through history? As battles over privilege, identity and prejudice rock the cultural wars, it's never been more important to understand how the concept of The West came to be. This book shows how the idea of the West was created, how it has been used to justify imperialism and racism, and also why it's still a powerful ideological tool to understand our world. Told through the lives of fourteen fascinating historical figures — from a powerful Roman matriarch to an Islamic scholar, from a crusading Greek soldier to a founding father of the United States, from a slave girl in the new Americas to a British prime minister — it casts a new light on how ‘The West’ was invented, embraced, rejected and re-imagined to shape our world today.
”One by one she takes on hoary old myths, explodes them with panache, and leaves us instead with a richer, fuller understanding of epochs, worldviews and fascinating individuals from the past. Lots of people will enjoy this clever and thought-provoking account.” —Guardian
”A bold, sweeping bird's-eye view of thousands of years of history that provides a truly global perspective of the past. A fantastic achievement.” —Peter Frankopan
>>Disjunctions between fact and fiction.
Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh $37
In 1951, the small French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit succumbed to a mass poisoning. The poison induced hysteria, violent and euphoric hallucinations, and many deaths. In the years before the disaster, there lived in the town a woman named Elodie. She was the baker's wife — a plain, unremarkable person who yearned to transcend her dull existence. So when a charismatic new couple arrived in town, Elodie quickly fell under their glamorous spell. Thus began a dangerous game of cat and mouse, the intoxication of the chase slowly seeping into everything — but who was the predator and on whom did they prey?
”A shimmering fever-dream of a novel, teasing the reader while finding a fresh narrative framework for the relationship between monotonous small-town life and repressed female desire. Cursed Bread contains more riches than many a novel twice its length.” —Telegraph
”A quietly rich maturation of Mackintosh's skill. This is a book about the power desire and greed exert over reality and memory. Mackintosh has entered a brilliant new stage of writing.” —Guardian
>>The town that went insane.
Mushroom (‘Object Lessons’ series) by Sara Rich $23
They are the things we step on without noticing and the largest organisms on Earth. They are symbols of inexplicable growth and excruciating misery. They are grouped with plants, but they behave more like animals. In their inscrutability, mushrooms are wondrous organisms. The mushroom is an ordinary object whose encounters with humans are usually limited to a couple of species prepackaged at the grocery store. This book offers mushrooms as much more than a pasta ingredient or trendy coffee alternative. It presents these objects as the firmament for life as we know it, enablers of mystical traditions, menders of minds lost to depression. But it acknowledges, too, that this firmament only exists because of death and rot. Rummaging through philosophical, literary, medical, ecological, and anthropological texts only serves to confirm what the average forager already knows: that mushrooms are to be regarded with a reverence deserving of only the most powerful entities: those who create and destroy, and thrive on both.
>>Other books in the excellent ‘Object Lessons’ series.
Saving Time: Discovering a life beyond the clock by Jenny Odell $40
In her first book, How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell wrote about the importance of disconnecting from the ‘attention economy’ to spend time in quiet contemplation. But what if you don’t have time to spend? In order to answer this seemingly simple question, Odell took a deep dive into the fundamental structure of our society and found that the clock we live by was built for profit, not people. This is why our lives, even in leisure, have come to seem like a series of moments to be bought, sold, and processed ever more efficiently. Odell shows us how our painful relationship to time is inextricably connected not only to persisting social inequities but to the climate crisis, existential dread, and a lethal fatalism. As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days alongside gardens growing, birds migrating, and cliffs eroding; the stretchy quality of waiting and desire; the way the present may suddenly feel marbled with childhood memory; the slow but sure procession of a pregnancy; the time it takes to heal from injuries. Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life in which time is not reducible to standardised units and instead forms the very medium of possibility.
>>A radical act.
Still Life With Bones: Field notes on forensics and loss by Alexa Hagerty $38
An anthropologist working with forensic teams and victims' families to investigate crimes against humanity in Latin America explores what science can tell us about the lives of the dead in this haunting account of grief, the power of ritual, and a quest for justice. "Exhumation can divide brothers and restore fathers, open old wounds and open the possibility of regeneration-of building something new with the pile of broken mirrors that is loss and mourning." Over the course of Guatemala's thirty-year armed conflict -the longest ever in Central America-over 200,000 people were killed. During Argentina's military dictatorship in the seventies, over 30,000 people were disappeared. Today, forensic anthropologists in each country are gathering evidence to prove atrocities and seek justice. But these teams do more than just study skeletons—they work to repair families and countries torn apart by violence.
”When Hagerty talks about ‘lives being violently made into bones’, I defy you not to be moved. The text is unflinching, but then the crimes and the victims deserve nothing less. I guarantee this will make you think long and hard about cruelty and human rights and the dedication and humanity of the forensic scientist." — Sue Black
Abolition. Feminism. Now. by Angela Davis, Erica Meiners, Beth Ritchie, and Gina Dent $28
Abolitionism and feminism stand shoulder-to-shoulder in fighting a common cause—the end of the carceral state, with its key role in perpetuating violence, both public and private, in prisons, in police forces, and in people's homes. As these four scholars assert, abolitionist theories and practices are at their most compelling when they are feminist; and a feminism that is also abolitionist is the most inclusive and persuasive version of feminism for these times.
Blue Jeans (‘Object Lessons’ series) by Carolyn Purnell $23
Few clothing items are as ubiquitous or casual as blue jeans. Yet, their simplicity is deceptive. Blue jeans are nothing if not an exercise in opposites. Americans have accepted jeans as a symbol of their culture, but today jeans are a global consumer product category. Levi Strauss made blue jeans in the 1870s to withstand the hard work of mining, but denim has since become the epitome of leisure. In the 1950s, celebrities like Marlon Brando transformed the utilitarian clothing of industrial labor into a glamorous statement of youthful rebellion, and now, you can find jeans on chic fashion runways. For some, indigo blue might be the color of freedom, but for workers who have produced the dye, it has often been a color of oppression and tyranny. Blue Jeans considers the versatility of this iconic garment and investigates what makes denim a universal signifier, ready to fit any context, meaning, and body.
>>Other books in the excellent ‘Object Lessons’ series.
The Real Work: On the mystery of mastery by Adam Gopnik $38
For decades, Adam Gopnik has been a perceptive critic of art, food, France, and more. But recently, he became obsessed by a fundamental matter: How did the people he was writing about learn their outlandish skill, whether it was drawing a nude or baking a sourdough loaf? In The Real Work—his title the term magicians use for the accumulated craft that makes for a great trick—Gopnik apprentices himself to an artist, a dancer, a boxer, and even a driving instructor (from the DMV), among others, trying his late-middle-age hand at things he assumed were beyond him. He finds that mastering a skill is a process of methodically breaking down and building up, piece by piece—and that true mastery, in any field, requires mastering other people's minds.
”Among the uplifting pleasures of Gopnik's writing is the range and ardour of his enthusiasms. If his only truly fanatical pursuit is making sentences, he seems to intuit that his best ones — his truest — are those that are unselfconsciously committed to their subject, and vitalised by the passionate curiosity that also reins them in.” —New Statesman
”A springboard for a discussion of art, family, empathy, mortality. Via memoir, analysis and criticism he assembles a celebration of the flaws that make us human. Gopnik is at his most moving when addressing the limited time we have on Earth.” —Guardian
>>How we gain new skills.
Andaza: A memoir of food, flavour and freedom in the Pakistani kitchen by Sumayya Usmani $50
Usmani conjures a story of what it was like growing up in Pakistan and how the women in her life inspired her to trust her instincts in the kitchen. From a young age, food was Sumayya's portal to nurturing, love and self-expression. She spent the first eight years of her life at sea, with a father who captained merchant ships and a mother who preferred to cook for the family herself on a tiny electric stove in their cabin rather than eat in the officer's mess. When the family moved to Karachi, Sumayya grew up torn between the social expectations of life as a young girl in Pakistan, and the inspiration she felt in the kitchen, watching her mother, and her Nani Mummy (maternal grandmother) and Dadi's (paternal grandmother) confidence, intuition and effortless ability to build complex, layered flavours in their cooking. This food memoir — which includes the most meaningful recipes of Sumayya's childhood — tells the story of how Sumayya's self-belief grew throughout her young life, allowing her to trust her instincts and find her own path between the expectations of following in her father's footsteps as a lawyer and the pressures of a Pakistani woman's presumed place in the household.
”Sumayya Usmani is a brilliant storyteller. She transports us with her delicious descriptions of the smells and flavours of the kitchen.” —Jay Rayner
>>Look inside.
>>When spice hits the oil.
What’s That, Jack? by Cédric Ramadier and Vincent Bourgeau $30
Jack and George are resting quietly when BOOM! A huge and strange ball lands beside them. "What's that, Jack?" "I don't know, George. Maybe it's a rock?" No—too soft. But it rolls. Fast! Jack, George and the ball roll right off the cliff and now it's a parachute. But watch out, they're going to land in the river! Jack and George have a brilliant day full of adventure with this object that changes with the landscape, then turns into a blanket to keep them warm.
Read our latest NEWSLETTER and find out what we've been reading and recommending — and publishing!
Blue Self-Portrait by Noémi Lefebvre (translated from French by Sophie Lewis) {Reviewed by THOMAS}
It takes approximately an hour and a half to fly from Berlin to Paris. Upon that hour and a half, a human memory, especially one working at neurotically obsessive speed, can loop a very large amount of time indeed, an hour and a half is plenty of time to go over and go over the things, or several of the things, the unassimilable things, that happened in Berlin, in an attempt to assimilate those things, although they are not assimilable, in an attempt, rather, albeit an involuntary attempt, an unconscious attempt, if that can be called an attempt, to damage oneself by the exercise of one’s memories, to draw self-blame and self-disgust from a situation the hopelessness of which cannot be attributed to anything worthy of self-blame or self-disgust but which is sufficiently involved to exercise the self-blame and self-disgust that seethe always beneath their veneer of not-caring, of niceness, the veneer that preserves self-blame and self-disgust from resolution into anything other than self-blame and self-disgust. Upon this hour and a half can be looped, such is the efficacy of human memory, not only, obsessively, the unassimilable things that happened in Berlin but also much else that happened even into the distant past, but, largely speaking, the more recent things that have bearing upon, or occupy the same memory-pocket, not the best metaphor, as the unassimilable things that happened in Berlin, for disappointment and failure seldom happen in a vacuum but resonate with, even if they are not the direct result of, disappointments and failures reaching back even into the distant past, perhaps especially into the distant past, self-blame and self-disgust having the benefit, or detriment, if a difference can be told between benefit and detriment, of binding experiences, or clumping them, to form an identity, and, not only this, upon that hour and a half can be looped also an endless amount of speculation and projection as to what may be occurring in the minds of others, or in the mind of, in this case, a specific other, a German-American pianist and composer with whom the narrator, who has been visiting Berlin with her sister, has had some manner of romantic encounter, so to call it, the extent of which is unclear, both, seemingly, to the narrator and, certainly, to the reader, the reader being necessarily confined to the mental claustrophobia of the narrator, on account of the obsessive speculation and projection and also the inescapable escapist and self-abnegating fantasising on the part of the narrator, together with the comet-like attraction-and-avoidance of her endless mental orbit around the most unassimilable things that happened in Berlin, or that might have happened in Berlin, or that did not happen in Berlin but are extrapolative fantasies unavoidably attendant upon what happened in Berlin, untrue but just as real as truth, for all thoughts, regardless of actuality, do the same damage to the brain. Lefebvre’s exquisitely pedantic, fugue-like sentences, their structure perfectly indistinguishable from their content, bestow upon her the mantle of Thomas Bernhard, which, after all, does not fall upon just any hem-plucker but, in this case, fully upon someone who, not looking skyward, has crawled far enough into its shadow when looking for something else. Where Bernhard’s narrators tend to direct their loathing outwards until the reader realises that all loathing is in fact self-loathing, Lefebvre’s narrator acknowledges her self-loathing and self-disgust, abnegating herself, rather, for circumstances in which self-abnegation is neither appropriate nor inappropriate, her self-abnegation arising from the circumstances, from her connection with the circumstances, from her rather than from the circumstances, her self-abnegation not, despite her certainty, having, really, any effect upon the circumstances. Not at all not-funny, pitch-perfect in both voice and structure, full of sly commentary on history and modernity, and on the frailties of human personality and desire, providing for the reader simultaneous resistance and release, Lefebvre shares many of Bernhard’s strengths and qualities, and the book contains memorable and affecting passages such as that in which the narrator recalls playing tennis with her mother-in-law, now her ex-mother-in-law, and finding she is not the type for ‘collective happiness’, or her hilariously scathing descriptions of Berlin’s Sony Centre or of the restaurant in what was Brecht's house, or of the narrator's inability to acknowledge the German-American pianist-composer's wife as anything but 'the accompaniment' — or, indeed, many other passages — but the excellence of the book is perhaps less in the passages than in the book as a whole.
The Ruby in the Smoke by Philip Pullman {Reviewed by STELLA}
You will know Philip Pullman’s 'His Dark Materials' trilogy and you may be a fan awaiting the third installment of 'The Book of Dust' — fingers crossed for later this year. In the meantime, you can always delve backward. Pullman's excellent 'Sally Lockhart' series is worth seeking out. Sally Lockhart’s father has drowned at sea. Orphaned sixteen-year-old Sally doesn’t wait around to be rescued from her plight. Marriage? No thanks. She’s ready to head into the world and is spurred on by a letter of anonymous origin. The letter contains a warning of dire consequences and adds fuel to the strangeness of her father’s death. Sally sets out to unpick the mystery. Not an easy task. It’s Victorian England and young women are not meant to be independent, let alone smart or feisty. That won’t hold Sally Lockhart, Detective back, and with a little help from some new acquaintances including the young photographer Frederick (rather hapless yet brave and quick-witted), Jim (the sharp office lad), and an assortment of useful but not necessarily trustworthy characters, Sally Lockhart delves into the underbelly of London. It’s a risky business of cutthroat villains, aspirant investors, the pull of the opium den, poverty, and the allure of wealth; and at the heart of it all is a jewel with a bloody history. Fortunately, Sally’s father has equipped her for a life of independence, schooling her in accounting and marksmanship — useful; even if her French and embroidery are lacking. The Ruby in the Smoke is the first in the series and it’s a rip-roarer — gripping drama, daring escapades, an excellent heroine, humour laced through, and a bit of romance thrown in for good measure; as well as some spiky history (the dark side of the Victorian era) and intriguing social commentary. Great for 12+ and appealing to older teens as well.
NEW RELEASES
Things keep slipping up for Shy. All he wants is sex, spliffs and his own turntables, and for all the red noise in his mind to disappear. But again and again he spirals past his senses and ends up with his head in his hands and carnage around him. You mustn't do that to yourself Shy. You mustn't hurt yourself like that. He's been kicked out of two schools, been cautioned, arrested, stabbed his stepdad in the finger and bottled a former Tumble Tots playmate, but it's the taunts and teasing of his new schoolmates that haunt Shy. Shy's got no armpit hair / Shy needs fake ID to buy fags / Got your special meds, nutcase? At Last Chance — a home for 'very disturbed young men' — he is surrounded by people who want to help him, but his night terrors aren't getting any better. The night is huge and it hurts. So tonight he's stepping into it, with the haunted beginnings of a plan. Again, Porter shows an incredible ability to get completely inside the head of his narrator, his spare and unconventionally effective prose delivering us an experience that enlarges our empathy and understanding. A beautiful hardback.
>>Men and masculinity.
>>Entering the hinterland.
>>Read our reviews of Lanny.
>>Read Thomas's review of The Death of Francis Bacon.
>>Grief Is the Thing With Feathers.
Pirate Enlightenment; or, The Real Libertalia by David Graeber $40
The Enlightenment did not begin in Europe. Its true origins lie thousands of miles away on the island of Madagascar, in the late seventeenth century, when it was home to several thousand pirates. This was the Golden Age of Piracy, a period of violent buccaneering and rollicking legends - but it was also, argues anthropologist David Graeber, a brief window of radical democracy, as the pirate settlers attempted to apply the egalitarian principles of their ships to a new society on land. For Graeber, Madagascar's lost pirate utopia represents some of the first stirrings of Enlightenment political thought. In this jewel of a book, he offers a way to 'decolonise the Enlightenment', demonstrating how this mixed community experimented with an alternative vision of human freedom, far from that being formulated in the salons and coffee houses of Europe. Its actors were Malagasy women, merchants and traders, philosopher kings and escaped slaves, exploring ideas that were ultimately to be put into practice in by Western revolutionary regimes a century later.
>>How enlightened were the pirates?
>>Other books by David Graeber.
Fate of the Land | Ko ngā Ākinga a ngā Rangatira: Māori Political Struggle in the Liberal Era, 1891-1912 by Danny Keenan $65
In the second half of the nineteenth century, settlers poured into Aotearoa demanding land. Millions of acres were acquired by the government or directly by settlers; or confiscated after the Land Wars. By 1891, when the Liberal government came to power, Maori retained only a fraction of their lands. And still the losses continued. For rangatira such as James Carroll, Wiremu Pere, Paora Tuhaere, Te Keepa Te Rangihiwinui, and many others, the challenges were innumerable. To stop further land loss, some rangatira saw parliamentary process as the mechanism; others pursued political independence. For over two decades, Maori men and women of outstanding ability fought hard to protect their people and their land. How those rangatira fared, and how they should be remembered, is the story of Maori political struggle during the Liberal era.
>>Ten questions.
OK as a word accepts proposals, describes the world as satisfactory (but not good), provides conversational momentum, or even agrees (or disagrees). OK as an object, however, tells a story of how technology writes itself into language, permanently altering communication. OK is a young word, less than 200 years old. It began as an acronym for "all correct" when the steam-powered printing press pushed newspapers into the mainstream. Today it is spoken and written by nearly everyone in the world. Drawing on linguistics, history, and new media studies, Michelle McSweeney traces OK from its birth in the Penny Presses through telephone lines, grammar books, and television signals into the digital age. Nearly ubiquitous and often overlooked, OK illustrates the never-ending dance between language, technology, and culture, and offers lessons for our own techno-historical moment.
>>Volume 2 due soon!
"Amanda Svensson’s raucous, sprawling novel takes on the enigmas of our origins, riddles of human consciousness and animal cognition, doomsday cults, and the most bedevilling of mysteries – the minds and choices of our closest intimates." —judges' citation on listing the book for the 2023 International Booker Prize
>>Read an extract.
>>Six years of fun.
>>A funny book taken seriously.
>>Other books listed for the 2023 International Booker Prize
>>Where to begin?
The first children's picture book on Hilma af Klint. Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) began painting her abstract and highly symbolic images as early as 1906, long before Kandinsky and Malevich arrived at what is generally regarded as the birth of modern abstract art. She was heavily influenced by spiritual ideologies and claimed that she painted on instruction from the spirit world, for the future. Includes reproductions of several of her works.
>>Look inside!
>>Other books on Hilma af Klint.
VOLUME FOCUS: How To Be
A selection of books from our shelves.
How to Be a Good Creature
How To Be You
Living and Dying with Marcel Proust
How Should A Person Be?
How to Live a Good Life
Philosophy and Life
How to Live
How to Be Happy Though Human
I, Object is a collection of short texts by jewellery objects, as told to jeweller Stella Chrysostomou.
In these 38 stories, jewellery objects reflect on their relationship to the world, to each other, and with their human acquaintances (their makers, wearers, viewers, and owners).
These texts ask us to reconsider our attitudes to, and our thinking about, jewellery, and — the tables turned — to experience jewellery afresh.
Stella Chrysostomou is a jeweller and writer (and co-owner of VOLUME). As editor of I, Object, she is immensely grateful to the jewellery objects for their co-operation and contributions. Any errors in translation are her own.
Reviews
"What?" — Steve Braunias, NewsRoom
"Whimsical and delightful." — Alyson Baker (>>read the full review here)
Listen to Stella read some of the stories:
The Apartment by Alexandra Litvina (translated by Antonina Bouis), illustrated by Anna Desnitskaya
I’ve had my eye on this book for a while now, and happily, I can now slip it out from my own shelf to browse whenever I wish. (Luckily for you, we can order you a copy). I like history for its stories as well as the knowledge it can impart about how we live now and how we should behave in the future. It’s always a pleasure to find a book that approaches history in a different and accessible way. This children’s book, just as enjoyable and fascinating for adults, tells the story of a Russian century through one apartment and one family over several generations. The narratives are in the voices of various children and while this gives us a child’s viewpoint and interests, the author Alexandra Litvina manages to tie in major events without shirking from contentious issues of protest, purges, hardships, and dictators. These are cleverly revealed through snippets of conversation, newspaper cuttings, and a succinct yet informative paragraph for each of the years highlighted. We follow the Muromstev family from 1902 to 2002. In 1902, Irina tells us about the new apartment in Moscow. The paint is still fresh, and the floors just polished. The nursery is big, Papa has his own study, and there is plenty of room for everyone. We can look into each room as the family moves in and meet the family as they organise their new home. Moving forward to 1914, it’s her brother Nikolai’s turn to tell us what is happening in the apartment. It’s Christmas and Papa is on the frontlines tending to the wounded, but everyone thinks that this war will be over soon. The younger sister, Marusya, takes up the story next. 1919 — food, medicine, and fuel are in short supply — revolution has turned the country on its head. Jump to 1927 and the apartment is looking very different. More people live in the same building and the Muromstev family’s lives have changed remarkably over the last three decades, not least the size of their apartment. And so it goes. We meet their friends, enjoy their discussions about politics, dabble in art and literature a little, and follow the ups and downs of this Russian century through the eyes of a family. It’s well told and wonderfully illustrated. Anna Desnitskaya's cut-away apartment illustrations are fascinating on every spread and the intervening pages are filled with details in text and drawings of quotidian culture showing us typical foods, toys, and clothes of each period alongside the more poignant mementos of ration cards, war victims, and propaganda. Here you’ll find Stalin, the Cold War, and father’s bag packed just in case of arrest, as well as family celebrations, the excitement of the race to the moon, and the significance of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Excellent!
Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard (translated by Ewald Osers) {Reviewed by THOMAS}
It is very tiring to get everything done properly, he said, it is exhausting and, really, a waste of time to get everything done properly, but it is just as exhausting and just as much a waste of time to get everything done not properly, to do a mediocre job, so to speak, he said. As not doing anything at all does not seem to be an option available to me, despite its attractions, he said, as doing nothing is fraught with its own existential dangers, so to call them, I may as well do everything properly, he said. This is a terrible trap. I will exhaust myself and waste my time whether I do things properly or not, nobody will notice whether I do things properly or not, I am uncertain if I can tell whether I am doing things properly or not myself, but they would notice if I do nothing at all. Perhaps what I call properly is in fact mediocre, I aspire to the mediocre but fall short, or I aspire to excellence and fall short, it makes no difference, I fall to the same point, somewhere below the mediocre, far below excellence, I fall to my place in the order of things whether I aspire to the mediocre or to the excellent, I may as well aspire to excellence, whatever that means, and fail more grandly, he said, though he was unsure if this failure was more grand or more pathetic. He had, he said, entertained the intention, at least briefly, of writing a proper review of Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard, he had been rereading Old Masters not merely but at least partly for the purposes of writing this review, and he had even, while researching this review or this book, discovered what seemed to him to be a video game in which he could move around the galleries of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, although there were some galleries he could not enter for some reason, perhaps he had to advance to another level or perhaps he was just clumsy, avoiding the gallery attendants, searching for the location in which almost the entire book is set: the bench facing the painting White-Bearded Man by Tintoretto. Using the navigation arrows provided for the purpose by Google, he found, the player of the game can become well acquainted with the endless parquet flooring of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, with the marble staircases and gilded cornices and door-frames of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and with much of what Reger, the dominant voice if not the narrator of Bernhard’s book, dismisses as its collection of “Habsburg-Catholic state art. The Kunsthistorisches Museum is entirely in line with the artistic taste of the Habsburgs, who, at least where painting is concerned, had a revolting, totally brainless Catholic artistic taste,” writes Bernhard as Atzbacher quoting Reger, Atzbacher being the book’s narrator, even though pretty much all he does is quote what Reger has at some time said. He must concentrate on his review, he thought, I am determined to write a proper review, he said aloud, forgetting that he had already reviewed the book with a proper review, or in any case something slightly closer to a proper review than what he felt himself now capable of, not that that is saying much, some years before. Old Masters is an entirely musical book, he wrote, starting at last in a sensible way, despite being set in a painting gallery it is entirely musical both in its phrasing and in its structure, if there is a difference between the two, he thought, drifting from the task, the musical form of the book is what matters, he wondered if he could say the form is all that matters, that form is all that ever matters. Old Masters is narrated in one unbroken paragraph by Atzbacher, about whom we learn little, he wrote, but the voice that reaches us is the voice of Reger, an elderly music reviewer, who has arranged to meet Atzbacher on their regular bench in front of the White-Bearded Man but on an irregular day, they normally meet there on alternate days only. Atzbacher arrives early in order to watch Reger waiting for him from the next room, and the first half of the book consists of Atzbacher telling us what Reger has previously told him, of Reger speaking through Atzbacher, so it seems, just as Reger also speaks, as Atzbacher notes, through the museum attendant Irrsigler: “Irrsigler has, over the years, appropriated verbatim many, if not all, or Reger’s sentences. Irrsigler is Reger’s mouthpiece, nearly everything that Irrsigler says has been said by Reger, for over thirty years Irrsigler has been saying what Reger has said. If I listen attentively I can hear Reger speak through Irrsigler.” As with Irrsigler so with Atzbacher, he thinks, Atzbacher seemingly unaware of the irony. Old Masters is a very funny book, he thinks, Reger’s reported opinions amount to a stream of invective against pretty much everything held in esteem in the society in which Reger lives, and in which Bernhard lived, separated as they are only by tense, admiration, after all, being for Bernhard a form of mental weakness. “There has virtually been no culture in Vienna for a long time, and one day there will really be no culture of any kind left in Vienna, but it will nevertheless be a cultural concept even then. Vienna will always be a cultural concept, it will more stubbornly be a cultural concept the less culture there is in it,” writes Benhard as Atzbacher as Reger and perhaps again as Bernhard. Well, he thought, as with Vienna so with Nelson, though I will not write that down, he thought. Heidegger, Stifter, Bruckner, Vienna’s public lavatories, restaurants, politicians, all are derided in the most amusing fashion and at length, he wrote, in this first section, in the words of Reger as remembered by Atzbacher as he watches Reger waiting for him to arrive. This might even be Bernhard’s funniest book, he thought, the way Reger’s ridicule surges through it, builds and collapses. When Atzbacher keeps his appointment with Reger, Reger’s rants continue via Atzbacher, but at one step less remove, the rants continue but the tone changes, subtly, Old Masters might be Bernhard’s both least and most subtle book, he thought, the least subtle because of Reger’s ranting but the most subtle because of the modulation in that ranting, all in this one paragraph, the rant no longer filtered by Atzbacher’s memory is more extreme, nastier, less enjoyable, clumsier, is the fact that I can go along with Reger’s rants in the first half a mark against me, he wondered, and if so am I redeemed by being put off when we meet Reger himself in the second, so to speak, when we meet Reger in the raw, so to speak, he wondered, and Atzbacher intercuts what Reger says to him at this time in the gallery with recollections of what Reger has said to him previously at the Ambassador cafe, and the depth of Reger’s unhappiness since the death of his wife is expressed in sequences of sentences, each ending “...Reger said at the Ambassador then,” repeated like sobs, and the unhappiness flows through and gives depth to the rest of the book, which principally concerns the difficulties of carrying on living is a world devoid of value, Old Masters is perhaps Bernhard’s funniest book and his saddest. “Oh yes, Reger said, the logical conclusion would invariably be total despair about everything. But I am resisting this total despair about everything, Reger said. I am now eighty-two and I am resisting this total despair about everything tooth and nail, Reger said.” Reger’s vitriol is a survival mechanism, he wrote, to despise is to survive, that is clumsily put, he thought, too clumsily put to write down. “One’s mind has to be a searching mind, a mind searching for mistakes, for the mistakes of humanity, a mind searching for failure. The human mind is a human mind only when it searches for the mistakes of humanity, Reger said. A good mind is a mind that searches for the mistakes of humanity and an exceptional mind is a mind that finds the mistakes of humanity, and a genius’s mind is a mind which, having found these mistakes, points them out and with all the means at its disposal shows up these mistakes.” Reger despises nothing more than old masters, so Reger says, and this is why he has sat on his bench at the Kunsthistorisches Museum every other day for thirty years. “Art altogether is nothing but a survival skill, we should never lose sight of this fact, it is, time and again, just an attempt to cope with this world and its revolting aspects, which, as we know, is invariably possible only by resorting to lies and falsehoods, to hypocrisy and self-deception, Reger said. … All these pictures, moreover, are an expression of man’s absolute helplessness in coping with himself and with what surrounds him all his life. … All these so-called old masters are really failures, without exception they were all doomed to failure.” Our obsession with art, he thought, if we have an obsession with art, or with celebrity, if we have that, or with sport performers, so to call them, or with wealthy people, or actors, or singers, is not with how these apogees of achievement are more successful than us, more skilled, more wonderful, more spiritual even, whatever we mean by that, but with the flaws, the weaknesses, vices and misfortunes that make them like us after all, failures, and we are reassured that not even great success, however that is measured, not even great skill, not even great fame would stop us from being failures, and so we need not therefore even strive for these things, they would not in any case save us, so to speak. When the worst happens, though, we are devastated but it is not true to say that we do not also feel relief, and this is the saddest thing of all, he thought. “Reger was looking at the White Bearded Man and said, the death of my wife has not only been my greatest misfortune, it has also set me free. With the death of my wife I have become free, he said, and when I say free I mean entirely free, wholly free, completely free, if you know, or if at least you surmise, what I mean. I am no longer waiting for death, it will come by itself, it will come without my thinking of it, it does not matter to me when. The death of a beloved person is also an enormous liberation of our whole system, Reger now said. I have lived for some time now with the feeling of being totally free. I can now let anything approach me, really anything, without having to resist, I no longer resist anything, that is it, Reger Said.” Atzbacher accepts the ticket Reger offers him to attend a performance of Kleist’s The Broken Jug, a work also mocking human faillings, at the Bergtheater that evening, but, Atzbacher says, “The performance was terrible,” ending the book with the first opinion he has expressed that might be his own, though, given the formative influence of Reger upon him, can any opinion be his own, can anyone’s opinion anyway be considered their own, he wondered. I will give up on this review, he decided, I cannot write the review properly he realised, whatever could constitute properly, perhaps I could have done so once but I can do so no longer, at least not today, the only day I have to write it, he thought, my mind no longer performs in that way. He had spent a long time playing the Kunsthistorische Museum game but he could not find the painting of the White Bearded Man.
VOLUME FOCUS : Cats
A selection of books from our shelves.
All My Cats
The Master and Margarita
Lost Cat
Mutzig the Clown Cat
I Like Cats
Kafka on the Shore
Feline Philosophy
Book of the Week: Ninth Building by Zou Jingzhi (translated by Jeremy Tiang) is a memorable, sparely written and often darkly funny set of vignettes based on the author’s experiences during China’s Cultural Revolution, first as a child in Beijing and then as a teenager sent to work in the countryside. The book captures the unseen and usually unrecalled aspects that actually comprise the majority of history, even in dramatic times; the tedium, the uncertainty, the strange acceptance, the perspective limited to the immediate time and place, the eruptions of humanity or brutality into otherwise unresolved and seemingly irresolvable circumstances.
>>”I wrote this book to let go of my childhood.”
>>Read an extract.
>>”Everyone should translate.”
>>Everything is taken for granted.
>>Your copy of Ninth Building.
>>Other books listed for the 2023 International Booker Prize.
>>Which book should you read first?
>>Read an extract.
>>Part of the world.
>>Revenge plays.
>>The news in Korea.
>>Your copy of Whale.
>>Other books long-listed for the 2023 International Booker Prize.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 |
“Call me Bathsheba,” are the first lines of this inventive novel mimicking another famous story. Patrick Ness’s And the Ocean Was Our Sky is a stunning wonder of a story. In this inverse Moby-Dick, we are introduced to a pod of whales that hunt man. In this world, the sea is the right way up and our sky is the Abyss. The action takes place in and on the ocean as we travel with the whales. Our narrator Bathsheba is the Third Apprentice under the lead of Captain Alexandra — a fearless giant of a whale, a harpoon embedded in her head, survivor of numerous battles with man. When the pod come across a wrecked human ship, bodies afloat, drowned, it is difficult to tell whether this is the work of man or whale. If whale, it is messy — wasteful — the bodies haven’t been harvested for their teeth nor bone. If man, why? As they approach the ship, a hand clutching a disc protruding from the capsized hull is spied: a hand that belongs to a young man — a prisoner — called Demetrius, and he has a message about (or from) Toby Wick - the nemesis of the whales. Toby Wick, feared and hated by man and whale, is a mysterious and vicious hunter — a legend. None who have seen him live to tell the tale of who he is and the powers he can summon to win every battle. Alexandra, obsessed with overcoming Toby Wick, is determined to fulfill a prophecy — one that has been passed down through generations. The great Toby Wick will be confronted. Demetrius is kept alive under the ocean and Bathsheba is commanded to interrogate him. A relationship builds between man and whale - for centuries prejudice and hatred have reigned supreme between the species, each hunting the other, each having just cause for revenge. Yet Bathsheba is intrigued by this meeting with Demetrius, who is merely a pawn in Toby Wick’s game — not a hunter, not an enemy. As Bathsheba’s loyalty is tested, the pod swim closer to their meeting with the mythic Toby Wick. What awaits them is fearsome and surprising. And the Ocean Was Our Sky is an epic journey for Bathsheba — physically but even more so philosophically and emotionally. Her interactions with Demetrius and the encounter with Toby Wick will change her forever, and the relationship between man and whale will create a new prophecy. This mind-bending story about fear, prejudice, loyalty and legend is brilliantly and beautifully illustrated by Rovina Cai. It’s a tale for any age much like Ness’s excellent A Monster Calls. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
   | Poetics of Work by Noémi Lefebvre (translated from French by Sophie Lewis) {Reviewed by THOMAS} How should we occupy ourselves, he wondered, whatever that means, lest we be occupied by someone else, or something else, how do we keep our feet, if our feet at least may be said to be our own to keep, by leaning into the onslaught or by letting it wash through us? Too many metaphors, if they’re even metaphors, he thought, too much thought thought for us by the language we use to think the thoughts, he thought, too many ready-made phrases, who makes them and why do they make them, and what are their effects on us, he wondered, where is the power that I thought was mine, where is the meaning that I meant to mean, how can I reclaim the words I speak from those against whom I would speak them? No hope otherwise. The narrator of Noémi Lefebvre’s Poetics of Work happens to be reading Viktor Klemperer’s Language of the Third Reich, in which Klemperer demonstrates that the success of, and the ongoing threat from, Nazism arose from changes wrought on the ways in which language was used and thus upon the ways people thought. Whoever controls language controls thought, he thought, Klemperer providing examples, authority exerts its power through linguistic mutation, but maybe, he thought, power can be resisted by the same means, resistance is poetry, he shouted, well, perhaps, or at least a bit of judicious editing could be effective in the struggle, he thought, rummaging in the draw of his desk for his blue pencil, it’s in here somewhere. Fascism depends on buzzwords, says Klemperer, buzzwords preclude thought, and the first step in fighting fascism, says Klemperer, is to challenge the use of these buzzwords, to re-establish the content of discourse, to rescue the particular from the buzzword. Could he think of some current examples of such buzzwords, he wondered, and he thought that perhaps he could, perhaps, he thought, if terms such as the buzzword ‘woke’ or the buzzword ‘cancel’ were removed from discourse and the wielders of these buzzwords had no recourse but to say in plain language what they meant, these once-were-wielders would be revealed to be either ludicrous or dangerous or both ludicrous and dangerous and the particulars of a given situation could be more clearly discussed. That is a subversive thought, he thought, to edit is to unpick power. “There isn’t a lot of poetry these days, I said to my father,” says the narrator at the beginning of Poetics of Work. A state of emergency has been declared in France, it is 2015, terror attacks have resulted in a surge of nationalism, intolerance, police brutality, the narrator, reading Klemperer as I have already said, is aware of the ways in which language has been mutated to control thought, power acts first through language and then turns up as the special police, it seems. What purchase has poetry in a language also used to describe police weaponry, the narrator wonders. “I could feel from the general climate that imagination was being blocked and thought paralysed by national unity in the name of Freedom, and freedom co-opted as a reason to have more of it.” Freedom has become a buzzword, it no longer means what we thought it meant, but even, perhaps, well evidently, its opposite. “Security being the first of freedoms, according to the Minister of the Interior, for you have to work.” You have to work, is this the case, the narrator wonders, you have to work and by working you become part of that which harms you. The book progresses as a series of exchanges between the narrator and their father, the internal voice of their father, of all that is inherited, of Europe, of the compromise between capital and culture, of all that takes things at once too seriously and nowhere near seriously enough. “He’s there in my eyes, he hunches my shoulders, slows my stride, spreads out before me his superior grasp of all things,” the narrator says, embedded in their father, struggling to think a thought not thought for them by their father, their struggle is a struggle for voice, as all struggles are. “I am like my father but much less good, my father can do anything because he does nothing, while I do nothing because I don’t know how to defend a person who’s being crushed and dragged along the ground and kicked to a pulp with complete impunity, nor do I know how to get a job or write a CV or any biography, nor even poetry, not a single line of it.” What hope is there? Is it possible to find “non-culture-sector poetry”, the narrator wonders, or even to write this “non-culture-sector” poetry if there could be such a thing? What sort of poetry can be used to come to grips with even the minor crises of late capitalism, for instance, if any of the crises of late capitalism can be considered minor? “I watched the water flow south, and the swans driven by their insignificance, deaf and blind to the basic shapes of the food-processing industry, ignorant that they, poor sods, were beholden to market price variation over the kilo of feathers and to the planned obsolescence of ornamental fowls.” The book sporadically and ironically gestures towards being some sort of treatise on poetry, it even has a few brief “lessons,” or maxims, but these are too half-hearted and impermanent to be either lessons or maxims, perhaps, he thought, they might qualify as antilessons or antimaxims, if such things could be imagined, though possibly they ironise an indifference to both. “Indifference is a contemplative state, my father said one day when he’d been drinking.” Doing nothing because there is nothing to be done, or, rather, because one cannot see what can be done, is very different from doing nothing from indifference, but the effect is the same, or the lack of effect, so something must be done, the narrator thinks, even if it is the case that nothing can in the end be done. For those to whom language is at once both home and a place of exile, the struggle must be made in language, or for language, resistance is poetry, or poetry is resistance, I have forgotten what I shouted, I will sharpen my blue pencil, after all one must be “someone among everyone,” as the narrator says. “There’s a fair bit of poetry at the moment, I said to my father,” the narrator says at the end of Poetics of Work. “He didn’t reply.” |
NEW RELEASES
>>The voice that cannot be controlled.
>>Read an extract.
>>Other books long-listed for the 2023 International Booker Prize.
Rico, Mark, Paul and Daniel were 13 when the Berlin Wall fell in autumn 1989. Growing up in Leipzig at the time of reunification, they dream of a better life somewhere beyond the brewery quarter. Every night they roam the streets, partying, rioting, running away from their fears, their parents and the future, fighting to exist, killing time. They drink, steal cars, feel wrecked, play it cool, longing for real love and true freedom. Startlingly raw and deeply moving, While We Were Dreaming is an extraordinary coming of age novel by one of Germany's most ambitious writers, full of passion, rage, hope and despair.
"The cumulative power of the well-constructed, pitiless and unflinching dispatches from the underbelly of society is remarkable. Historical events often pass unnoticed by those living through them, unaware even of how much their lives have been changed. It is Meyer’s achievement to capture the profound effects those events had on the lives of those at the bottom of German society." — David Mills, Sunday Times
"A book like a fist. German literature has not seen such a debut for a long time, a book full of rage, sadness, pathos and superstition. —Felicitas von Lovenberg, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
"Clemens Meyer’s great art of describing people takes the form of the Russian doll principle: a story within a story within a story. So much is so artfully interwoven that his work breaks the mould of the closed narrative." —Katharina Teutsch, Die Zeit
>>Read an extract.
>>Other books long-listed for the 2023 International Booker Prize.
We think we know the trench coat, but where does it come from and where will it take us? From its origins in the trenches of WW1, this military outerwear came to project the inner-being of detectives, writers, reporters, rebels, artists and intellectuals. The coat outfitted imaginative leaps into the unknown. Trench Coat tells the story of seductive entanglements with technology, time, law, politics, trust and trespass. Readers follow the rise of a sartorial archetype through media, design, literature, cinema and fashion. Today, as a staple in stories of future life-worlds, the trench coat warns of disturbances to come.
>>Other books in the 'Object Lessons' series.
In the wake of an insignificant battle between two long-forgotten kingdoms in fourteenth-century southern India, a nine-year-old girl has a divine encounter that will change the course of history. After witnessing the death of her mother, the grief-stricken Pampa Kampana becomes a vessel for the goddess Parvati, who begins to speak out of the girl's mouth. Granting her powers beyond Pampa Kampana's comprehension, the goddess tells her that she will be instrumental in the rise of a great city called Bisnaga - literally 'victory city' - the wonder of the world. Over the next two hundred and fifty years, Pampa Kampana's life becomes deeply interwoven with Bisnaga's, from its literal sowing out of a bag of magic seeds to its tragic ruination in the most human of ways: the hubris of those in power. Whispering Bisnaga and its citizens into existence, Pampa Kampana attempts to make good on the task that Parvati set for her: to give women equal agency in a patriarchal world. But all stories have a way of getting away from their creator, and Bisnaga is no exception. As years pass, rulers come and go, battles are won and lost, and allegiances shift, the very fabric of Bisnaga becomes an ever more complex tapestry - with Pampa Kampana at its center.
