What I'm reading now...

I've just started reading Suspended Sentences by Mark McWatt, a collection of short stories which a group of sixth-formers in Guyana were 'sentenced' to write as a punishment for trashing a club at the end of their exams.

Not all of the stories were written in the 1960s when the punishment was issued - but after the death of one of the group years later, McWatt reminded them of the punishment, called in the stories and created this collection.
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Wetlands, Charlotte Roche

I'm not sure why I wanted to read Wetlands - I'm a very squeamish and repressed person when it comes down to it, so it might not seem like the most sensible choice of reading matter for my daily commute. The Mail described it as 'profoundly unsettling'(but to be fair the Mail sees most things this way) while the Guardian reviewer wrote 'if you ever wondered what you'd be like if you weren't shy, polite, tolerant, modest, sexually repressed, logical and constrained by modern standards of hygiene, this may be the book for you.' That's a slightly crude description of what I think is a clever text, but it does give you a good frame of reference if you haven't read it.

The protagonist and anti-hero Helen Memel is completely without the sense of shame with which most women inhabit their bodies. We often talk about people who dare to say what we're all thinking, but Helen takes it further and says and does things that most women don't even dare think, because of the attitudes we have about our bodies, what it is to be female and about cleanliness and purity. Helen has none of these taboos. No bodily function or discharge is strange or unpleasant to her. (I shuddered just writing the word 'discharge' by the way.)

Roche says that in Wetlands, she wanted to 'write about the ugly parts of the human body. The smelly bits...in order to tell that story, I created a heroine that has a totally creative attitude to her body'. To me, it seems like in Helen, Roche has created a character to play with the biblical archetype of Eve. Helen is simultaneously both without sin and full of sin; she breaks every female taboo in the European-Christian tradition. Her lack of shame seems like something from before the Fall - she has the kind of understanding of and appreciation for her body and sexuality that women might have were it not for so many years of society shaping how we all imagine what it is to be female, based on the idea of Eve as the mother of all sin.

There's something distinctly rabble rousing about Wetlands it gets you angry and fired up at how we've become strangers to ourselves. It's seductive even as it repels you. At times you can't believe what Helen is doing/thinking/ saying and you screw up your face in disgust, but you simultaneously wish that you could be even a fraction as at ease with her body as she is.
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Great interview with Reif Larsen http://www.bookslut.com/features/2009_06_014543.php#

Just came across this great interview with Reif Larsen, author of The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (one of my favourite books of the year so far) in Bookslut.

I couldn't believe that Larsen said he didn't include the illustrations, map and diagrams until after he'd written the first draft - the seem like such an integral part of the text.

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Book of the week podcast: Roma Tearne on Brixton Beach | Books | guardian.co.uk

via guardian.co.uk

The Sri Lankan-born author talks about how her life and fiction have been informed by a mixed heritage on both sides of a brutal conflict

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Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre

I picked up Jean Ryhs's Wide Sargasso Sea again reaently (I'm going through a rereading phase at the moment) and I got think about how although each time I've read it, I've thought about Jane Eyre, I've never read them in succession.
So I'm going to do it now. It's going to be an odd experience, and a bit like a weird kind of time travel - Rhys wrote her book long after Bronte, but chronologically, it pre-empts Jane Eyre as it writes back in time to it. Also, like most people, I read Wide Sargasso Sea as an adult, long after I first read Jane Eyre - which my grandmother bought it for me and I loved when I was younger. Rhys's novel was also one of the first texts to bring home the concept of the postcolonial to me - perhaps because it made me completely rethink a text that I thought I knew so well. Why had I never thought about 'the madwoman in the attic' before? It's unsettling to have your literary map upset like that, and I suppose I'm wondering if rereading the two texts in succession will do it again.

I heart Ian McEwan

I heart Ian McEwan....I haven't read one of his book for such a long time, and On Chesil Beach brought it all flooding back to me.

He's a controversial author, but I can forget about all that when I open one of his books. I'm completely won over by the devastating subtlety of his writing.

In On Chesil Beach he unfolds a whole relationship through the filter of the couple's wedding night. It's a slim volume, but he captures the tension, all the insecurities, anticipation and longing in that pivotal moment in their lives:

'And what stood in their way? Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience or easy manners, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself. Nothing much at all.'

Annie John - Jamaica Kincaid

I went back and re-read an old favourite recently - Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid and as I was reading it, I remembered a seminar at university where we discussed it.
My class (which was all female - as most of my seminar groups tended to be) were asked what we thought of the book - and after suffering that agonising 'I'm not going to be the first one to speak in case what I say isn't the same as what everyone else thinks' silence that typified the first two and half years of my degree, I rolled my eyes and spoke up. I said that I loved the book, because I thought it was really accurate portrayal of how teenage girls interact with their mothers.
Cue a sharp intake of breath, no doubt from the girls who think that their mum is their best friend, share clothes and go shopping with them and have never exchanged a cross word - what I said was an aberration to them, because, to put it bluntly, Annie John really seems to hate her mother.
It's fair to say that while I love my mum and have a huge amount of respect for her now, our relationship throughout my teenage years was a bit like a pitched battle - I was awkward, angry and for the most part, really unhappy, from the age of 11 to about 18 - I can't even imagine how awful living with me must have been.
I read Annie John after I had left home and moved away from my family (as Annie herself does at the end of the book) and I could look back on my own teenage years as I read about Annie's. I recognised how Jamaica Kincaid describes the way the relationship between mothers and daughters changes when you suddenly stop being a child and start having an identity of your own - one that could well disappoint your parents. In Annie I see the same conflict between wanting to please my Mum and realising that I couldn't change who I was and feeling angry that she couldn't accept my personality.
It's hard to write about teenagers without it sounding ridiculous (just look at all the comments
this article about The Catcher in the Rye sparked - and all the people saying that they couldn't stand the book because of all the self-pity and angst) and I think I love Annie John so much because it avoids that trap, and because I can read it, remember my teenage years and take them a bit seriously, rather than squirm in embarrassment.

First lines...

I love Iain Banks - but I bought Complicity months and months ago, but read the first page and decided I wasn't into it and put it back on the shelf.

I picked it up again a couple of days ago, and looked at those first lines again, and still felt disinterested but shrugged and ploughed through it because I was on my daily commute, so the only other option I had for reading material was the Metro - which isn't really an option if you actually like reading.

Complicity is a great book, classic Banks in its dark, disturbing, gritty Scottishness - I was thinking what a shame it was that those first few lines could have stopped me from reading it. I looked back to try and pin down what it was that put me off - but now I've read it, I don't know what it was. (If you click on the link you can see the first few pages - maybe you can see what I couldn't). Perhaps I got used to the tone of the novel, or I can view it in the context of the book as a whole, who knows.

There's a saying about how you can never step in the same river twice, and perhaps you can never read the same book twice. How you read and interpret text is shaped by how you feel, your situation, even where you are - for example, the experience of reading reading Joe Sacco's Safe Area Gorazde and The Fixer before and then again after I had visited Bosnia was like reading different books.

Perhaps it's also why we can reread books we love time and time again, year after year, because at different stages in our lives, we can draw something new from them.

I think I need to keep this in mind, as I'm now struggling with the first chapter of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things....

New Indian writers

As you might have noticed, I read quite a lot of Indian literature, so I was interested to see Amit Chaudari discussing new Indian authors in the Guardian.

I'm not start on the issue of nationality and whether it is birth, ethnicity, language or experience that attaches an author to a particular nation (not now anyway) but it would seem from the article that India is continuing to produce (in one way or another) an incredible wealth of talent and creativity.

'Ones to watch' from other Indian author and publishers etc are also listed - and I don't think any name is repeated, and it's certainly added a lot more names to my book list...in particular I'm on the look out for poetry by Anita Roy's recommendation, a poet called Rokkaiah or Salma, from the Tiruchy district of Tamil Nadu, which I visited a few years ago. She dropped out of school in the 9th grade, and married young, but started writing poetry at the age of 13, and, under a pseudonym (Salma) published two collections of poetry against the wishes of her conservative family.

Incidentally, I finished Manil Suri's The Age of Shiva today - I was disappointed by it to be honest. It's well written, but I struggled with the central character so much that I couldn't enjoy it - it wasn't that I disliked her, it was more that I felt nothing for her, which stopped me from really appreciating the book. I might try and explain myself better later....

The White Tiger is all it's cracked up to be...

Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger deserves the hype it's had...I resisted reading it for so long, and I wish I hadn't now.

It was one of those books that I didn't want to end because the protagonist, Balram, was so compelling - a character that you don't know whether to feel sympathy for as a victim of society or condemn as a murderer and a thief. The way the story of the servant-boy from a village in 'the darkness' who became a millionaire in India's technological capital of Bangalore is told as a 1001 Nights-like evening-by-evening narrative to the Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, is nothing short of genius too, if you ask me. The parallels between Balram and Scheherazade could definitely bear some analysis - the common girl who won the heart of a murderous king by stringing him along with magical stories night after night, and the murderous common boy who forces an international leader to listen to the story of his life night after night. Maybe I'll come back to it another time...

One of the blurbs on the book said something about how The White Tiger talks about a side of India that we rarely hear about - the underbelly. I beg to differ. People love to read about 'India's underbelly' - there's a whole market of 'poverty porn', for people that get off on the idea that they are seeing the 'real' version of any developing country from the comfort of home - Slumdog Millionaire, Shantaram, Bandit Queen to name but a few. We hear about 'India's underbelly' all the time - but not necessarily like this. The White Tiger doesn't glamourise or exoticise poverty and corruption, or horrify people by hammering them with disturbing image after disturbing image. I think Adiga attempts to explain the experience of poverty for one man - why it exists, why it thrives and the deep anger and pain it provokes in Balram, and the lengths he is pushed to by his background, and the servitude he was born into.

Twittering a whole book? Really?

The author RN Morris is serialising his crime novel A Gentle Axe through social networking site Twitter.
Apparently the 'Twitterisation' is only a slightly abridged version of the full novel but I can't help but wonder who on earth would want to read a novel in 144 character chunks?

Alex Holroyd, press officer at Faber, Morris' publishers told The Bookseller: “His intention is to do the whole thing online, although it will depend on feedback and interest. It’s a bit of an experiment – he is already a keen blogger and has quite a presence on the net, so we are hoping it will transfer over.”

Sounds like a bit of a PR stunt to me, featuring the much talked-about buzzword of the day 'Twitter'...which I too was briefly conned into thinking was the future, before realising it was mildly diverting and kind of useful, but not the earth-shattering technological revelation it's made out to be...

I had a look at Mr Morris' Twitters - as a PR stunt it doesn't seem to be working that well, so far he's got just over 200 followers, a low number in Twitter terms, but then perhaps this is a literary experiment rather than attempt to court the press with a gimmick...

The benefit of reading a novel 144 characters at a time I suppose is that you really get to focus on the words, what they mean, the subtext behind them. The process also displaces you as a reader, making what would otherwise be a normal text strange - each individual line is rendered in a completely different light by being Twittered - "But what did they know of the cost to her soul, or of the tears she had shed over the years?". But then again, you have to wait another hour to get the next few words and how can you remember what came before and get engrossed in the plot in the same way you would if you could read the text normally?

I don't think the novel and Twitter are going to best friends - to be honest, I can't see much replacing the book. In the printed paperback, literature has found an amazing format that has stayed almost unchanged for decades, and for good reason too - its perfect. I can't imagine reading any other way - although I would secretly love to test out e readers although part of me would feel like I was betraying my books...

Truman Capote - Breakfast at Tiffany's

I've always loved the film Breakfast at Tiffany's - in that film, Audrey Hepburn is pretty much the most beautiful woman ever to walk the earth, so when I saw a free copy of Capote's novel with The Times a few weeks ago, I snapped it up.
What really struck me reading the book, was how well the film captures Holly, her speech, her mannerisms, and the overall tone of the novel, despite the difference in the ending. I go through different phases -one where I can believe that Holly would stay, and another where I know she'd go, so rather than being angry that the film betrays the plot of the novel, I can accept it and be pleased by it in a way. And it ends well for the cat in both versions, which is just as important.
In the version I have, Breakfast at Tiffany's is anthologised with a few short stories, which I enjoyed too, particularly House of Flowers a funny little romantic story that really caught me off guard, because it was so unconventional and offbeat.

Amitav Ghosh - The Calcutta Chromosome

This book is unique. I've never read anything quite like it before and can't really define it. I first encountered it on a postcolonial literature course - I think it was there in part to confound the idea of a neat category called 'the postcolonial'. The Calcutta Chromosome is, at it's heart, a science fiction fantasy historical medical thriller - and there is an element of the postcolonial to it too, for the not-very-subtle reason that its written by an author from India, and part of it is set during the British colonisation of India. It is interesting that the postcolonial discipline almost cannibalises the work of the authors and writing it seeks to promote, by pigeonholing them as 'postcolonial' and denying the diversity and uniqueness of a text like The Calcutta Chromosome.

But I digress. This is a fast paced thriller, using a few shameless Dan Brown-esque tactics, (cliff-hanger chapter endings and moving between different story lines) that leave you excited and dying to read on as the pace picks up. The novel is centered on a mysterious conspiracy theory surrounding malaria - I don't want to give too much away, in case you go on to read it, but I will say that Ghosh has an incredible imagination and is a fantastic storyteller. Chaos theory (in the simplest terms - the idea that small, inconsequential events can have unforeseen and powerful consequences) seems to be a theme in the novel. Tiny events, that you almost ignore as you read, move along the plot and really left me wondering at Ghosh's capacity to think out such an intricate and involved plot. It's worth reading The Calcutta Chromosome, and then reading it again, to really soak up all the detail that Ghosh has put into it.

The Enchantress of Florence, Salman Rushdie

I expect a great deal from Rushdie - as I've mentioned before, he's one of my favourite authors - but The Enchantress of Florence left me wanting more.
This isn't a criticism as such, just an observation. The book didn't provoke the kind of response that I usually feel when I read Rushdie's texts - and no, I'm not just talking about the Satanic Verses scandal.
I've always thought that Rushdie is a by nature a provocative author, whether he's reimagining the origins of Islam, highlighting the potential and limitations of multiculturalism or trying to write a history of modern India.
The Enchantress of Florence didn't provoke me - it is a beautiful text, 'exotic' (I hate that word, for numerous self-conscious, pseudo-intellectual reasons, but more of that another time) and full of rich imagery. It's also a good story, with fiction embroidered with historical detail that Rushdie must have put significant labours into gathering. Of all Rushdie's texts, this reminds me of Haroun and the Sea of Stories the most - his fantastic book for children and at its heart, this is a very diverting fairy tale for adults - which I suppose is no bad thing, but it left me missing the Rushdie of Midnight's Children, Fury and Shame.