Best holiday reads 2017, picked by writers (II)
Last week, we brought to you some top books recommended by writers during this season and today we bring you the concluding part. Find these books, read them and enjoy. Garréta by a friend who said I’d like it. Best described as It’s a genderless love story and written by one of the few female members of the Oulipo writers’ group, and I think she’ll probably be right. Modernism might not be making Will Self a millionaire but it’s certainly helping him prove what a great writer he is. I’m still thinking about Umbrella and Shark, so I can’t wait to read Phone (Viking), the final instalment of the trilogy. Self is one of the few writers whose language and ideas are at constant war with the easyaccess tonelessness churned out by many - though not all - of today’s “creative writing” industries. He has a brilliant mind, is a master of the compound pun and never writes for idiots; what’s not to adore? Pankaj Mishra Writers from Russia and Eastern Europe remain the most eloquent witnesses to the insidious appeal of authoritarianism and demagoguery, especially as it goes global. In Miłosz: A Biography (Harvard) Andrzej Franaszek’s life of Czesław Miłosz, we see a profound sensibility living through, and grasping, the inherent nihilism of three very different promises of power and wealth: nazism, Stalinism and Americanism. Ivan Krastev’s After Europe (Pennsylvania), a sober reckoning with the challenges to Europe, defines the dangers that will outlast, and may even be aggravated by, Emmanuel Macron’s triumph. I am only half-way through Masha Gessen’s The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (Riverhead), but it already seems indispensable. I was very struck by The Story of a Brief Marriage (Granta), a novel by Anuk Arudpragasam. With its unflinchingly account of the suffering of war, it reminds you of Andre Malraux’s novel set in China’s civil war in the 1930s La condition humaine; but with its intense physicality it renders intimate what is often seen as the remote struggles for humanity of those caught up in large-scale violence. I also much admired The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin), André Naffis-Sahely’s sharp meditations on our vast but remarkably homogeneous global landscape. George Monbiot I’ve started reading Roman Krznaric’s Carpe Diem Regained: The Vanishing Art of Seizing the Day (Unbound) - and it’s brilliant. One of those rare books that forces you to ask what the hell you’re doing with your life. Jane Mayer’s Dark Money (Scribe) is a terrifying insight into how 21st-century politics works, and a great lesson in how to write non-fiction. But my book of the year so far is Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger (Allen Lane): a fascinating explanation of the roots of terrorism. Daljit Nagra Unnerved by the despicable state of the world, I shall be flogging myself with the following books to help me understand and interpret it: Teju Cole’s essays, Known and Strange Things (Faber), because I love a writer such as Cole who says: “When I cannot sleep, I rise from bed and watch Jacques Derrida talk.” Hannah Arendt’s critique The Origins of Totalitarianism (Penguin) is a highly readable
discussion about the advent of racism and its links to power. Arendt is particularly good on the insidious methods by which power is achieved for its own means. Beauty and terror, pain and forgiveness, and the healing of a breadfruit; music has no finer tune, no gravitas more earned than The Poetry of Derek Walcott 19482013 (Faber). Sarah Perry It would be a pretty paltry sort of summer without a pile of crime novels, and the one I’m most excited about is Dark Water (Bloomsbury) by Parker Bilal. These are wonderfully written, compelling thrillers that give an exhilarating depiction of contemporary Egypt. Private Investigator Makana is everything you could want in a detective hero: brilliant, bruised and melancholy - and he lives on a dilapidated houseboat on the Nile. Short stories are perfect summer reading, especially when the heat makes one indolent, and nothing could be more fitting than Attrib. and Other Stories (Influx) by Eley Williams. She is a writer for whom one struggles to find comparison, because she has arrived in a class of her own: witty, melancholy, occasionally sensual, occasionally mordant, elegantly droll without the kind of hipster quirkiness that makes me want to hurl books at the wall. She has in common with George Saunders the ability to be both playful and profound, and we are lucky to have her. I’ll be spending a little time in the Peak District, so I plan on doing some themed reading and taking with me Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (HarperCollins). I haven’t read this since the scene involving an escape down a rabbit-hole gave me a lifetime of mild claustrophobia, and ever since I have been haunted by faint memories of a tear-shaped stone on a bracelet, shape-shifting sorcerers,
While all of Makumbi’s glosses seem necessary to ground someone who doesn’t speak Luganda, the frequency of the English words - “king,” “warrior,” “parliament sessions”-elsewhere in the text raises another question: Are the Luganda words needed at all? Readers and writers often refer to the “flavor” that non-English words bestow on otherwise Anglophone texts. Occasionally, these “foreign” words are asked to carry a heavier burden, that of the distinctive cultural norms that sit inside languages, particularly oral ones: proverbs, aphorisms, idiomatic sayings, and so on. This fact of language is relevant to all literature.
I once wrote a college paper about James Joyce’s 1922 Ulysses in which my whole argument about identity and homelessness pivoted on a question that Molly Bloom poses to her husband when he speaks of metempsychosis: “Who’s he when he’s at home?” The Greek term is glossed repeatedly in the novel. By the time Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus-to say nothing of the many scholars who have annotated Ulysses-are and ordinary children plunged into peril. I’m hoping it will do what the very best children’s fiction has always done: offer promise of hope and heroism in a world which seems to offer none. Philippe Sands History and memoir offer insights into other times and lives that make Britain’s current miserable travails marginally more tolerable. The Greatest Comeback (Biteback) by David Bolchover is astonishing, not least for its unlikely melding of football and mass murder, two of through, we have a pretty good idea that the word Molly mispronounces as “met him pike hoses” means transmigration of the soul. No such luck for the idiomatic British phrase I thought so profound. It took me years before I learned that “Who’s he when he’s at home?” is just a lovely roundabout way of asking “What is that word in plain English?” That I did not know what that question meant in plain English is all too fitting.
Joyce, like many modernists, played with paratext all the time. The very title of Ulysses is a kind of Borgesian pun on Homer’s classical epic. Joyce gave his friend Stuart Gilbert a schema of all the allusions and subtexts that he was playing with in his novel-some have conjectured that the correspondences in the Gilbert schema are fake or meant to be funny. Writers from Vladimir Nabokov to W. G. Sebald to Salvador Plascencia have made great use of paratext and translation for experiment. my daily passions; there is no escape from the continuing powerful embrace of Hisham Matar’s The Return (Penguin), recently awarded a Pulitzer prize even as President Trump would, no doubt, if he possibly could, ban the author from setting foot in the US; and Han Kang’s Human Acts (Granta) offers a gripping Korean perspective on the human consequences of abuses of power. Three extraordinary stories. Nikesh Shukla I’m looking forward to reading Olumide Popoola’s When We Speak
It is striking that, given the robustness of African fiction now-it has been heralded as “a new wave” at least thrice in the last decade-its experimentalism still seems to be limited to linguistic play, genre bending, and narrative convolutions of time and space. What about playing with the book? Readers have come to anticipate glossaries and italicized words in African fiction, even demand them. What better way to thwart expectations than to fake or fiddle with these conventions?
Makumbi’s Kintu has laid down one gauntlet. It offers neither the definition nor the origin story behind its Luganda title. Nowhere in the novel does anyone even tell you how the word kintu is pronounced in Uganda. Who’s Kintu when he’s at home? He’s “Chintu.”
Namwali Serpell is the winner of the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing
I just chanced on Eleanor Catton’s first novel The Rehearsal (Granta), the one she wrote before the Man Booker winner The Luminaries, and it looks very promisingly disconcerting: a book about the ironies of adulthood’s appetite for youth and vice versa. That’s definitely going on the heap for summer, and so is China Miéville’s October, both because friends I trust tell me it may complicate my present sense that the October Revolution was a straightforward catastrophe for 20th-century socialism, and because I really want to see what happens when a brilliant fantasist turns to narrative history. And I’ll be working my way on backwards through George Saunders, having been hooked conclusively by Lincoln in the Bardo (Bloomsbury), tonal