SHELF LIFE

Prize-winning Caribbean novelist and poet Kevin Jared Hosein, whose new novel is Hungry Ghosts, shares the books that helped to shape his own ideas of what reading and writing can be

No Pain Like This Body by Harold Sonny Ladoo

‘There aren’t any rules for writing in Trinidadian Creole English. Whether or not you wish to use elisions, or spell each word phonetically is up to you. School discouraged you from writing in such a way, so you received no guidance there. I imagine embedded in each young Caribbean writer is a sliding scale for dialect. On the left there’s “Total Tonal Authenticity” and on the right is “I’m Terrified British and American Readers Will be Alienated”. Most may figure to settle for somewhere in the middle. But if Sonny Ladoo had such a scale, he wasn’t afraid to slide his all the way to the left for No Pain Like This Body.

‘This novella focuses on an impoverished Hindu family in a rice-growing community during heavy rains and floods. I’m a descendant from such a family.

The confident use of dialect in the book is identical to what I would have heard from my grandparents. It may have put off foreign readers, but you know what? We should throw away that mental scale. It’s not about being afraid to alienate anybody. It’s about writing the words and making them part of the global repertoire, just as we in the Caribbean would know what is a loo and what it means when someone has been gobsmacked.’

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby

‘I often tried to integrate my love of literature with my science students – they somehow always think of the two as opposites. Whenever we get to the nervous system and I have to talk about scary things like action potentials and sodium-potassium pumps, I like to whip this book out. Most works of art are miracles to me. That something could begin as an idea and grow into an entire world and live through generations long after its creator’s nervous system is no more.

‘For those unfamiliar, Bauby suffered from locked-in syndrome and wrote this book using his left eye, blinking at letters as a nurse jotted down the words. While the hospital bed and his condition was his diving bell, he describes, his imagination was a butterfly that could go anywhere in the world. And that even in a motionless body, he could still embark on adventures. The memoir is a testament to the imaginative mind.

‘Whenever a school invites me to talk to children who hate to read, I bring this book along. To tell them, yes, the very existence of this book is a miracle. But so can yours.’

The Pleasures of the Damned by Charles Bukowski

‘I had dial-up internet during my teenage years. Wasn’t much you could do with that. Then I discovered a website called Poemhunter and suddenly, a new world had opened up. You could download entire archives of poetry from that site at the time. These were the Napster-esque Wild West days of the Internet. There weren’t many poetry books at the libraries here, so I savoured this. I read classics like Frost, Neruda, Plath, Dickinson, Yeats.

‘Then I came across Bukowski. I remember being shocked that stuff like his could pass as poetry. In his work, Charles Bukowski creates a dystopia without an apocalypse.

Well, to me, it is dystopian. Seedy diners, one-eyed cats chasing blind mice, unfaithful partners. There is something deeply affecting about being guided right into the bottom of the barrel. I consider myself a person quite content in life. But sometimes I find myself re-reading the poems from this collection as if to prepare for a possible changing of tides. So if things ever do go south, I can look around and say, “Ha, this is familiar territory.”’

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

‘Back in the 2000’s, it was quite rare to find graphic novels in Trinidadian bookstores. When the bank approved me for a credit card, I ordered a hefty box of them: Persepolis, Maus, Ghost World, Black Hole, Watchmen, Pyongyang.

‘I had thrown Fun Home in there on a whim only for it to become one of my favourites of the lot. You may have heard of movies failing the Bechdel test. A passing grade means that the entire work of fiction must have two women talking to each other about something other than a man (I believe Hungry Ghost passes!). But Fun Home is, at its core, a work of passion. The story is a labyrinthine memoir, as if unfolding an origami chimera, cautious not to tear the paper. Still, despite this intense care, there’s a refreshing messiness to how she recounts the story of her father, how he ends his life, and the impact it had on her on the years to come. How could such things ever be shipshape? It’s remarkable how the material is handled, never striving to be faultless. It’s perhaps one of the best books I’ve read that explores sexuality and identity.’

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

‘Writing, to me, is a limitless art. The ideas and concepts that can be expressed have no boundaries. There are things – good, bad and ugly – that can be put into books that just won’t work (or won’t fly) in another medium. I had read The Road when it first came out 15 years ago, being initially utterly mystified by the sparseness of Cormac McCarthy’s prose from his lack of dialogue quotes to the short, cold sentences. Only midway through did I realise this bareness had been emulating the barren post-apocalyptic world our father and son protagonists had inhabited.

‘I don’t mind film adaptations but this was one that I’d skipped – because so much of my experience of this novel was dependent on the layout of the text and the shape of the paragraphs, similar to an E. E. Cummings poem. Those things became part and parcel of the experience to me and really made me think of the morphology of a story.’