Damien Wilkins
Author favourite books.
All Aunt Hagar’s Children – Edward P. Jones
A stonking masterpiece. If I say it’s a book of stories, half the people leave the room. But this is no pick’n’mix pretty collection from the US fiction warehouse.
Jones takes the city of Washington DC, in which you don’t need any special interest, and tells stories of its citizens across the span of the 20th century.
I don’t understand how he does it. Must re-read.
The Four-gated City – Doris Lessing
Nell Zink recently wrote a great piece about Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, a book that might have easily been on my list too. Zink: ‘‘(Lessing) comes across as handsdown better than men at what, in her hands, doesn’t seem like a man’s game at all: the 20th-century novel. She wins. It’s her game. She makes every other novelist I know seem shallow.’’ Agreed. I like this book just as much as the better-known The Golden Notebook.
Faces in the Water – Janet Frame
My favourite Frame. Her famous life was hardly a gift – incarceration, anxiety, pain – but she turned unbelonging into some glorious art. What an amazing and odd revenge to be told finally, you belong. This is a perfect book and its final sentence is the one I cherish above all in literature.
Monnew – Ahmadou Kourouma
Kourama (1927-2003) was from the Ivory Coast. His own biography (fought in the French army in Indochina, later imprisoned on political grounds, lived in exile) is extraordinary. As with all great novels, a subject sketch is an injustice and a potential turn-off. Monnew is sort of about limitless French colonial oppression in Africa but also about distorted African communities in the wake of that oppression. But that’s not why it’s a great work of art.
A Million Windows – Gerald Murnane
With me, Murnane is a love affair going back to the late 1980s. I fully admit his peculiar and labyrinthine work is not very loveable and he’s not one of those writers you ever force on someone. It would be like recommending your father to someone. I say his name a bit and if anyone follows up, good. If not, too bad. He’s a genius.