Felix Culpa by Jeremy Gavron

Part of me was so drawn to reading “Felix Culpa” simply for the sheer audacity of its creation and out of a curiosity to see how it would work. This is a novel that’s composed almost entirely from the lines of other works of fiction by (approximately) eighty authors as varied as Italo Calvino, Willa Cather, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack Kerouac, Cormac McCarthy and Mary Shelley. In poetry this is known as a cento where different verses or passages from multiple authors are composed into a new order. Jeremy Gavron forms in this fictional collage experiment a story about a young man named Felix who mysteriously died after he was arrested in a botched robbery. The narrator is a writer/teacher at the prison where Felix was incarcerated and he embarks on a mission to discover more about Felix’s life and what happened to him. Amidst his travels to interview people Felix encountered he slides into his own epistemological crisis and radically alters his life. It’s a moving tale in itself, but through the very nature of its innovative construction it also poses fascinating questions about the meaning of narrative and the way in which readers connect with fiction.

I think one of the greatest works of art produced thus far in the 21st century is Christian Marclay’s video art installation ‘The Clock’. This is a looped 24-hour video montage that takes scenes from hundreds of films and television shows featuring clocks that are synchronized to show in real time. In doing so, these pieces of disparate video footage link up in a mesmerising way and meaningfully comment upon the way we are all caught in the flow of time. It’s interesting how when we’re confronted with a series of fictional works that are artfully mixed together we begin to imaginatively form narratives in our heads. As I was reading “Felix Culpa” I became aware that I was filling out scenes or adding details to characters based only on a few suggestive phrases that Gavron has paired. Of course, this is what we do all the time when reading fiction. But, somehow, because I was aware that this narrative was a construct of preformed sentences, I had a greater self-consciousness about the active role I play as a co-creator of the fiction that I’m reading.

Some sources used for the text of Felix Culpa

In the course of reading this novel I also became more aware of the playful ambiguity of language and the plasticity of sentence construction. Lines or phrases that mean something in one context can come to mean something entirely different in another. Again, this is something fiction does all the time and part of its great beauty is how it can mean many things all at once. In this novel lines are spaced out with gaps in between them to demarcate how they’ve been taken from different sources. This also has the effect of highlighting passages and the reader must take an infinitesimally small pause in going from one line to another. This is something that’s often done in poetry, but in this book lines consciously flow together to form a cohesive narrative. So a line like “Time comes to leave” stands on its own. This has a meaning within the story where it’s time for a character to depart to go somewhere else. However, staring at this line on its own it also takes on connotations of how time is fleeting, that a moment only arrives to depart. But, in reading these lines on their own, I also often felt curious about how this line might have been used in its original story.

What’s impressive about “Felix Culpa” is that this elaborate self-conscious assembly of hypertext doesn’t detract from the pleasure of the story Gavron forms himself. I felt totally emotionally drawn into this tale and sympathised with Felix’s struggles in life as the narrator uncovers piece after piece about the journey that led to Felix’s untimely death. This character is formed more through an outline than through direct descriptions of Felix himself, yet the reader is still keyed into the ambiguities of Felix’s heart and mind. I grew to feel a sense of loneliness in Felix where his circumstances led him to make poor choices and end up in isolation. I haven’t felt this way about a character since reading about the nearly silent figure of Stevie at the centre of Rachel Seiffert’s brilliant novel “The Walk Home”. Felix’s struggle is something that the narrator of the novel also connects with and his obsession with Felix’s plight says something significant about the unspoken crisis in the narrator’s own life. This novel is a richly rewarding work of art.

The Word for Woman is Wilderness by Abi Andrews

Sometimes it can be so difficult to separate my emotional response to a book compared to my critical response. I don't think I necessarily have to which is one of the great things about a book blog! But reading Abi Andrews' debut novel “The Word for Woman is Wilderness” I was even more aware of this dilemma because it's inspired by and about subjects I'm really interested in and sympathetic towards. It's narrated from the perspective of nineteen year old Erin who has a passionate interest in the writing of Thoreau and the life of Christopher McCandless whose tragic journey led to his accidental death in the Alaskan wilderness. This was chronicled in Jon Krakauer's nonfiction book “Into the Wild” and a film with the same name directed by Sean Penn. Erin observes how the famous instances of individuals pioneering into the wilderness to establish a distance from the society whose values they question have all been directed through a men's perspectives. Certainly the experience and perspective of a woman who sets out on such a journey would be very different. So (against her parents' wishes) she ventures out from her home in England to the Alaskan wilderness and chronicles her journey on video with the plan to edit it into a documentary. She states: “if running into the wild is so often a wounded retreat from societal constraints and oppressions, then shouldn’t anyone but straight white men be doing it more?” Erin charts the mental and physical struggles she faces on her way while also contemplating both the dynamic distinctions and commonalities between the journey of mankind vs womankind.

The novel is evenly broken up into two sections: Erin's journey through the Arctic circle and hitchhiking across Canada to arrive in Alaska and her time inhabiting a remote cabin in the unpopulated wilderness. But throughout she makes references and draws in concepts from an enormous amount of sources: everything from quantum mechanics to Cartesian philosophy to the history of the Cold War space race to David Attenborough documentaries to the novels of Jack London. Such a dizzying array of topics is impressive and fascinating. It leads her to propose enticing new connections and pose deeply-thoughtful questions. But it has the effect of feeling like you've sat up all night with a fellow university student who is excitedly talking through everything they've been reading about. It can get a bit overwhelming at points and detract from the through line of the narrator's journey. Along the way Erin encounters several fascinating characters from an Icelandic woman she meets on a ship to a Native American who aides her after meeting a nasty trucker to a misogynistic interloper in Alaska. It felt like if Andrews had spent longer developing scenes with these characters and rounding out their personalities the novel would have felt more like a story than a collection of interesting concepts.

Frequent references are made to author and conservationist Rachel Carson

Erin's determined will to enter the wilderness leads the story. There are some beautifully poetic observations about our subjective experience of landscapes and the environment. When viewing the barren icy terrain of Greenland she states “It feels like trespassing to be alive in a place that is not dead but is inexistence, negation of potentiality. Anything alive is only ever passing through.” Then, at another point she remarks how “The tundra is always in soliloquy. Mostly it whistles and sings, but now and then the wind will die down suddenly and in the utter silence and still it feels like you are on stage. As though you did not know there were curtains until they just suddenly opened. Then the cacophony of noise again like applause.” There are also some great comic moments where she makes wry observations about the nature of travel like trying to understand the native language of a country you've entered through travel books: “I enjoy the narratives of phrase books. They always seem to follow a haphazard protagonist who is forever getting lost and bothering the emergency services.”

Of course, it's Erin's inner journey which is the real focus on this novel. She comments how “An esoteric landscape does not help a person to find their way if they are lost; you could walk from the centre of here and never find your way again.” It's necessary for her to physically travel in order to arrive at a new place of understanding and radically reform her sense of self. It's also necessary that it's a journey she makes alone: “It is not a casting out with purpose but a getting lost. It is the difference between solitude and loneliness.” It's touching how her time in Alaska leads her to reflect much more strongly about her own upbringing and the machinations of her psychology. She's aware of how much she's internalized stories of explorers as being strictly male enterprises because almost all the literature about it is written by men. She catches herself “Positioning myself as male again; my masculine counterpart who lives in my brain, appending a fraud penis so I can traverse Scott’s Antarctica in my imagination.” The fact of her journey makes a powerful statement that women also enter (both the spatial and inner) Wilderness. So, while I think it's sometimes too erratic, this novel was a great pleasure for me to read and it's also a flag that needed to be planted because Abi Andrews is marking new terrain.

Peach by Emma Glass

Sometimes reading quotes by authors I admire on the jackets of new books can very accurately indicate the experience I’m about to have. In this case, Emma Glass’ debut “Peach” comes festooned with a string of quotes by prominent authors from George Saunders who calls this a “dark poetic myth” to Laline Paull who describes how this book “shares literary DNA with Gertrude Stein, Herbert Selby Jr and Eimear McBride.” These get at the unusual quality of Glass’ writing, but this book’s radical style and approach to characters is wholly unique. It’s at once cartoonish and deadly serious. The story opens with Peach who has experienced a massive trauma and follows her in the proceeding days as she attempts to return to a state of normalcy. In doing so, Glass uses some shockingly innovative methods for getting at painful emotions and actions that can’t be described in a straightforward way.

The syncopation of Peach’s train of thought leads to a lot of word play and double meaning. When she feels her stomach growing she wonders “How big will I be before I burst? Cells linking, holding hands, making chains, chains winding, chains winding around my core. Spores sporing, pouring.” These emotive passages get at the uncommon way her imagination fuses with reality. Yet there are other moments which are straightforward and direct in expressing Peach’s reaction to her trauma. She describes how “I don't want to be a victim. One of those victims. Oh this awful thing happened to me when I was young. He stole a piece of me (said in a raspy, broken voice)”. It’s heartbreakingly tragic how throughout the story this self-consciousness prevents her from confiding in the characters closest to her especially when her violent encounter means that she’s trapped in a nightmarish present “I see his sadistic shadow now. I will always see it. Ingrained.” But her method of battling through this is extraordinary. It’s at once grotesque and hilarious and sad in a way I found utterly mesmerizing.

Just as the language in Peach’s thought process is slightly displaced, reality is also warped so that characters are at once human and embody the physical traits of their character name. Peach’s boyfriend Green is described as “shaking little leaves” when he laughs and his mouth is “mossy-soft.” Her infant sibling who is viewed as a jelly baby sweet is powdered by their parents with sugar. In a semi-comic scene in Mr Custard’s class the teacher must be formed from “yellow goop” into “Bits of arms, bits of legs, bits of bones but not really bones. Blobs” before a lesson on anatomy can continue. While this writing method might sound charmingly playful, it is also excruciatingly sinister when it comes to conveying the smell and appearance of Peach’s nemesis who stalks her. Glass’ absurdist technique of writing about characters is such an effective and new way of describing lost innocence.

Reading “Peach” is a highly unusual visceral experience whose subtleties I suspect can only be felt over time as the tendrils of this daring and imaginative narrative worm into the reader’s subconscious. Be prepared.

Sight by Jessie Greengrass

The prospect of having children can be exciting, but also terrifying. Luckily, it's something I've never strongly desired so I'm satisfied in the role of uncle, godfather and sometimes babysitter to friends' children. However, some reasons I'd be frightened of having children (beyond a total ignorance of how to care for them) is a dread of making some irreparable mistake and also the inability of protecting them from experiencing pain at some point. Jessie Greengrass describes this as “the overwhelming fear of fucking up that having children brings, the awareness of the impossibility of not causing hurt like falling into endless water”. Her debut novel “Sight” is a reflection on the process of having children and why her narrator is particularly self conscious about the continuation of her lineage. But, more than that, it's a remarkably poignant meditation on the internal and external levels of our mental and physical reality. The narrator is a young woman who cared for her mother during her terminal illness and now faces the prospect of becoming a mother herself. She sifts through her personal past and considers the lives of disparate individuals such as Sigmund & (his daughter) Anna Freud, Wilhelm Röntgen (the first man who produced and published scientific studies of X-rays) and scientist/surgeon John Hunter. In doing so, she embarks on a journey into how she might allow her child to see the multiple layers of life and thus pass on an abiding sense of happiness.

As demonstrated in her superb short story collection “An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It”, Greengrass has a particular creative talent for not only plucking out and creatively reimagining unusual stories from history, but finding a wondrous pertinence in them. It's fascinating when talented writers can pair distinct elements of fiction and nonfiction to create a story which is still deeply emotional. Ali Smith also accomplished this in her novel “Artful” where she essentially took a series of her lectures and threaded them together around the story of a narrator who is grieving for (her or his – the narrator's gender is never specified) lost lover. It still worked as a piece of fiction for me because I felt drawn into the journey this narrator took towards a new understanding through intensely contemplating these different subjects. Greengrass similarly pairs her narrator's struggle with accepting the identity of motherhood by considering the multiple innovative methods particular historical figures took in seeing one's self: whether that be the bones of our bodies, the internal workings of a woman's womb or a method of understanding the unconscious mind.

Sometimes it's not what these figures found which the narrator identifies with, but their process. For instance, she speculates “if we could understand these moments and the weeks that followed them when Röntgen, alone, placed object after object in front of his machine and saw them all transformed, then we too might know what it is to have the hidden made manifest: the components of ourselves, the world, the space between.” In her connection with the challenges and moments of revelation these individuals experienced over a century ago their scientific practices act as touchstones and channels towards the narrator's own working towards a cohesive sense of being.

The sections where Greengrass recounts Freud's professional/familial relationship with his daughter Anna take on a very personal feel for the narrator. Her grandmother, who referred to herself as Doctor K, was a psychoanalyst so her ideas were directly inherited from Freud and influenced the icy grandmother-grandaughter interactions at her Hampstead Heath home. This challenging relationship combined with her mother's terminal illness heavily colour the narrator's complicated distress over the prospect of motherhood. They make her yearn for that clarity of vision which can be passed on, but she also acknowledges with caution that “the price of sight is wonder’s diminishment.”

X-ray of Bertha Rontgen's hand

One lovely moment in the book which will no doubt be highly relatable to avid readers/introverts is the default compulsion the narrator feels to read. At one point she states “I read not with any particular object in mind, nor really with the intention of retaining any information about the subjects that I chose but rather because the act of reading was a habit, and because it was soothing and, perhaps, from a lifetime's inculcated faith in the explanatory power of books, the half-held belief that somewhere in those hectares upon hectares of printed pages I might find that fact which would make sense of my growing unhappiness, allowing me to peel back the obscurant layers of myself and lay bare at last the solid structure underneath.” Part of the joy of this novel is in its inherent belief in the power that reading has to connect us to the past and ideas when we're grappling with life's challenges – even when we only turn to books in a disconsolate and disordered way.

The way that Greengrass combines disparate elements from the past with her narrator's dilemmas is done with such fluidity that it reads with stunning ease. Like Virginia Woolf's writing it's often poetic and philosophical at the same time making statements such as “what are we if not a totality of days, a sum of interactions; and a glimpse of what is underneath the surface, the skeleton on which the outer face is hung, cannot undo the knowledge of skin but only give it context, the way it rises and falls, its puckering, its flaws.” This novel seeks to account for the unruly fluctuations of emotions and disparate elements which make up our existence. As a deeply introspective work of fiction it won't appeal to everyone because its drama is primarily in how it marks the subtleties of transitions in life (from child to adult, from daughter to mother.) But it does so in such a captivating and meaningful way that sensitive readers will find “Sight” utterly gripping and profound.

In this video I predict why I think "Sight" will win the Booker Prize in 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbwWlqMJqaA

The Sealwoman’s Gift by Sally Magnusson

There’s something so wonderful about being wholly drawn into a richly imagined historical novel that both illuminates a somewhat forgotten or not-widely-known period of history and gives voice to people who are only glancingly referred to in the history books. Sally Magnusson does all this in her debut novel “The Sealwoman’s Gift” which recounts the abduction of over four hundred Icelandic citizens from their homes in the year 1627 by pirates from Morocco and Algeria. These prisoners were sold into slavery and a ransom for their release wasn’t obtained until several years later – by which point many of those abducted had either died, been irretrievably lost or converted/integrated into life along the Barbary Coast. Copies still exist of a famous account of these abductions written by a Reverend who was captured himself, but Magnusson focuses her novel more on the journey and inner-struggles of his wife Ásta. It’s noted how “others may have written their own accounts of captivity. Men, of course. Does it matter that nobody will know how it was to be a woman?” In doing so, this novel brilliantly engages with many of the heartrending conflicts a woman in Ásta’s position must have faced while also powerfully illuminating the cultural importance of storytelling and the complicated dynamics of love.

A number of years ago I visited Iceland and took a road trip around the country. It’s such a bizarre alien-like landscape with its flat volcanic-soil and coastal shores dotted with black & white puffins and their colourful beaks. I admired how the stark beauty and bleakness of this striking environment is powerfully evoked in this novel. But the author also brings to life the culture and daily life of its people from the production of Skyr (a yogurt-like foodstuff traditionally made from sheep’s milk) to the use of puffin bones to keep the kitchen fires going or the frequent retelling of Icelandic Sagas which are such a rich part of the country’s oral tradition. I also got such a strong sense of how the country basically operates as one small hardworking community. As Magnusson notes, it’s easy to empathize with how the kidnapping of over 400 citizens back in the 1600s would deeply traumatize the entirety of this sparsely-populated country. The story also conveys what an enormous culture shock it’d be for these very isolated Christian people who were abducted to suddenly be engulfed in the brightly-coloured multi-national predominantly-Muslim community of Algiers.

I’ve always been fascinated by the psychological implications of a diaspora, especially when people are forcibly removed from their native homeland or are forced to leave because of severe problems in their birth country. The real heart of this novel lies in Ásta’s dilemma as she’s suddenly left on her own in Algiers with a daughter and an infant son. Her rambunctious husband Ólafur is swiftly used as a negotiator between the Ottoman Empire that was seeking ransom for these slaves and the king of Denmark (because Iceland was under Danish rule). Throughout the many years of their separation Ásta is torn between maintaining her faith in their rescue and building a new life in this foreign land. This includes conflicted feelings about religion, loyalty to family and maintaining her own sense of cultural identity. There comes a point when the workings of time create a certain psychological distance from her homeland. Her existence beforehand becomes idealized and nostalgia takes on a life of its own: “memory is like that, always so eager to aid you in missing what you can no longer have and forgetting the rest.” Magnusson writes poignantly about how story-telling is a means of psychological escape from the horrors of reality as well as a way of maintaining a connection with one’s own culture and personal genealogical history.

Barbary corsairs

The author also weaves into her story two somewhat fantastical elements and characters who tread the border between myth and reality. One is an eccentric old woman who has visions and believes herself to be a seal that has lost its skin and is consequently stranded on land in the shape of a woman. Another is an elf from the legends Ásta heard in her youth. At first I thought this later character was merely an eccentric quirk within the story or simply a fanciful notion within Ásta’s imagination, but his inclusion comes to powerfully represent her character’s inner conflict, her stymied desires and a representation of her own “otherness” as someone that doesn’t necessarily fit anywhere. These characters also show the way that our daily lives are composed of both the hard fact of reality and our subjective experience of the world.

As I neared the end of reading this tale it became something much more for me than simply a vividly-imagined historical novel, but a personally touching meditation on the choices we’re forced to make in life. Over the years we’re inevitably presented with crossroads where we must choose to take one path or another and it’s difficult not to be consumed with grief for the potential joys we’ve had to sacrifice in making these hard decisions. But Magnusson writes how “we cannot live in two worlds. And in lamenting too long what belongs in the other we bring upon ourselves and others only destruction.” In dramatically bringing to life Ásta’s story she sympathetically presents a fully rounded understanding of this turmoil and the importance of fostering the lives we’ve chosen. “The Sealwoman’s Gift” also powerfully shows the numerous and complicated repercussions of how the evil industry of slavery caused rifts in communities which have never been and can never be repaired. 

The Melody by Jim Crace

When I started this blog back in 2013 one of the very first books I posted about was Jim Crace’s novel “Harvest” which had such a subtly powerful impact on me that it strangely affected my dreams. Looking back on that I’m somewhat chilled to see I discussed the book in conjunction with a documentary about Donald Trump bullying his way into developing a golf course in Scotland. The nightmares I had at that time would have been much worse if I had guessed he’d one day gain the political power he possesses today! Something that I find so fascinating about Jim Crace’s writing is that he’s able to identify many of our underlying fears and anxieties about living in an ever-changing society and situate them in a time and place that are carefully removed from reality. Crace’s fictional landscape resembles our world, but you can’t locate it anywhere in history and its geographical location can’t be found on any map. His fiction is highly realistic in tone and utilises descriptions that feel authentic, but only in the way our dreams feel true in the moment we’re experiencing them.

Crace’s new novel “The Melody” focuses on fictional famous singer Alfred Busi who is entering his twilight years living in the dilapidated villa situated in a seaside town where he was born. His position as one of the town’s most prominent and respected citizens is changing to that of a relic from the past as he’s being honoured by a placement in the town’s Hall of Fame. In conjunction with this honour, he’s been invited to give a performance that’s meant to symbolize the crowning achievement of his career. But he’s unsettled by rumblings from strange animals who plunder the rubbish bins outside his house at night and one evening when he goes down to investigate this disturbance he suffers a brief attack by an unknown naked boy who is plundering his larder. This odd occurrence sets him off on a downward spiral as he becomes aware of an impoverished section of the community that represents a perceived threat to the more civilized citizens of the town. He also discovers there are designs to bring down the crumbling villa he shared with his late wife to make way for a swish new modern development. In this way, Crace dramatizes class conflict and the angst of modern life through the collapse of a grieving musician’s life.

It’s humorous how Crace even takes the joke of his fictional counter-reality into the acknowledgements of this novel. Here he claims to have consulted a biography of Busi, the estate of his family, old issues of the town’s newspaper and also he “thanks the people of…” In not completing this sentence he affirms that this town isn’t specifically located anywhere despite references in the book to real place like Long Island or fancy foodstuff from different real nations. It’s like this quality of verisimilitude in Crace’s fiction is inviting the reader to experience his novel as if it were a play; audience members are always aware that they are watching a play, but if it’s sufficiently moving it will feel true. So Crace’s odd tale has all the marks of our reality, but it’s really occurring in some unconscious realm. There is an inflammatory journalist who seeks to stir in his readers repugnance and fear of the poor with his exaggerated reports of the threat they pose. A community is sanitised and gentrified as wildlife and homeless people are forcibly relocated. It feels like some version of these things happen all around us, but we’re usually only privy to it through second-hand information just like the citizens of Crace’s fictional town. It’s an extraordinary style of writing subtly bending place and time in a way that I don’t think many other authors have done – except perhaps Kazuo Ishiguro in his masterful novel “The Unconsoled”.

That’s not to say I think Crace is always successful in the special way he crafts his novels. While “Harvest” had a propulsive dramatic intensity to it, “The Melody” meanders somewhat and it doesn’t feel like there’s as much at stake. I thought the most effective parts are when Crace writes about Busi’s process of mourning and missing his wife: “The darkness held and always would the wife that he had loved and lost.” It’s also very powerful when he writes about how the limits of our circumstances disallow us from creating the art we’re capable of: “Some melodies are never meant to find their words.” Also, the overall tone of the novel is effectively unsettling and odd. However, the bulk of the story’s action feels too consumed with Alfred Busi’s ill-advised roaming and reconciliations that aren’t quite earned. Crace’s writing always has a graceful beauty to it and his style is utterly fascinating, but I don’t think “The Melody” is quite as strong as some of his previous novels.

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

Part of what excites me about reading a debut author’s book is the originality of voice I might discover. The short fiction in “Her Body and Other Parties” by Carmen Maria Machado is so wild and inventive with an impressive variation in structure and subject matter shown from story to story. Often they branch into supernatural or surreal territories where women fade away into the stitching of designer dresses or the spirits of dead prostitutes with bells for eyes haunt a female detective. One story takes place in a post-apocalyptic landscape where the narrator numbers the amount of lovers she’s had, another occurs at a housewarming party that goes awry and one is centred around a clothing shop which seeks to “terrify our patrons into an existential crisis.” But, while this fiction often spills into a wonderful absurdity, I frequently felt an emotional resonance which made it seem very real. Throughout the narrators or characters are disarmingly assertive which gives these tales a confidential and urgent tone: “you may have heard some version of this story before but this is the one you need to know.”

Many of the stories take a different slant on the complications of desire and sex, often describing lesbian affairs or relationships. They also involve complicated ideas about women’s bodies, femininity and the way women present themselves. One that deals with this explicitly is ‘Eight Bites’ where a woman gets “bariatric” surgery in an effort to get thin after all her sisters have already done so. She asks in this “Will I ever be done, transformed into the past tense, or will I always be transforming, better and better until I die?” This is such a fascinating take on the philosophical tension between becoming and being. It’s so exhausting how our lives are frequently concerned with trying to lose weight, get fitter and eat better. Machado has a talent for dredging up all this anxiety which sounds like a low hum throughout our lives. The protagonist of the fable-like ‘The Husband Stitch’ insists that a certain adornment on her body cannot be touched like a private bit of the self that must be preserved and when this is violated she literally comes undone. Another story ‘Real Women Have Bodies’ shows women wilfully melding into designer clothes in a way that seems to provoke questions about the importance we place on fashion and commodities to enhance our sense of self-worth.

I was surprised at how Machado could stir in me feelings of nostalgia with precise descriptions of a thing or sensation I haven’t felt in a long time. For instance, she describes “hard candies twisted in strawberry-patterned cellophane” which I can recall and visualise so precisely as if their colourful wrappers were more exciting than the taste of the candy itself. Or, at one point, a character remembers being a child sitting in front of a humidifier and breathing in the dense mist being pumped out. It’s fascinating how she can use these descriptions to reach back in time to our former selves recognizing in them a more vulnerable or innocent state in our lives. One of the most sombre instances of this is the story ‘The Resident’ where a writer travels to an artists’ residency which happens to be situated on a lake where she spent time as a child camping with a troop of Brownies. Her creative process seems to compel her to physically confront her younger, more awkward self and produces an almost complete breakdown.

As with all the greatest absurd fiction, humour treads closely alongside darker sensations of dread. There are some wickedly funny and original descriptions of people from “a man mean as Mondays” to someone accused of being an “aggressively ordinary woman.” There's also many amusing commentaries on modern life: “Benson is sure that her smartphone is smarter than she is, and finds it deeply upsetting.” Quite often I felt compelled to read on just because I was fascinated to see where she'd take the story next. When it felt like the stories were becoming too ridiculously unhinged I'd come upon a line which felt startlingly heartfelt: “something inside of me is breaking, I am a continent but I will not hold.” Not only does her narrative frequently burst into odd and unfamiliar territory but the form of the story itself is often a revelation. This ranges from instructions that the listener of this tale should cut the reader's hand to the novella ‘Especially Heinous’ which takes the form of episode/season summaries for a supernatural detective television show. Only occasionally did it feel like the stories became so abstract as to be completely alienating like some sections of the stories 'Mothers' and ‘Difficult at Parties’. But, overall, this is a collection filled with such wondrous delights and sharp edges that I revelled in the experience of reading it.

Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

The novel “Kintu” by debut novelist Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi has been frequently compared to Yaa Gyasi’s hugely popular “Homegoing” because of its structure as an African family epic. However, “Homegoing” begins in the Gold Coast of West Africa (now Ghana) and “Kintu” takes place in the Buganda kingdom (today known as the Republic of Uganda). Makumbi’s ambitious tale begins in 1750 when Kintu Kidda, the leader (Ppookino) of the Buddu Province, travels with a group of men to swear loyalty to the new king (kabaka) of the entire Buganda kingdom. Kintu demonstrates what a savvy politician he is making alliances and also balancing his time between his many wives that he’s taken for political reasons. A tragedy occurs concerning Kintu’s adopted son Kalema and this sets in motion a series of calamities surrounding his favoured wife Nnakato and his heir Baale. It also sparks a legendary curse upon his family which is still felt amidst his descendants who we meet when the book leaps forward in time to the recent past. As the novel relates the backstories and present conflicts of several of these descendants we gradually understand why the clan attempts to reform and finally put this curse to rest. This deeply compelling and fascinating story describes the way oral history and local mythology continues to play a part in the daily lives and complicated political attitudes of people in Uganda today.

I was impressed by the way Makumbi organised the stories and characters in a way which is mostly easy to follow despite the intricate complexities of this tale. As with most big epics, it helps that there is a family tree at the beginning of the book to refer back to. Nevertheless it can be difficult to keep track of them all because (like when reading a big Russian saga) many characters have a few different names or nicknames. One character’s name is actually changed multiple times between his birth and his independent decision as a teenager to take a different surname. Matters are complicated a bit more because many of the characters are twins so it can be hard at times to sort out the relationships between people and the multiple branches of this large family. But Makumbi has that wonderful gift as a storyteller of drawing you into the immediate dilemmas of her characters so it’s like you can imaginatively see them in a three-dimensional way and, even if you don’t immediately grasp their exact placement within the family, you are still gripped by the drama of their situation.

Story-telling and the way stories morph over time is such an integral part of this novel. I found it quite moving how the book begins by showing the reality of the legendary Kintu and his family and then moves to the present where his tale has been mythologised and takes on different versions. The way the “curse” manifests within the lives of his different descendants reflects poignantly on their situations either as a religious fanatic whose sect is rapidly shrinking, a scholar who lived in political exile throughout the heinous killings of Idi Amin’s regime, a woman haunted by a sexual attack or a man terrified that he may be HIV+. The differences between these characters reflect the wide diversity of attitudes, beliefs and economic positions of citizens in Uganda today. Class conflicts felt between the Tutsi population and other groups reverberates from Kintu’s time all the way through to the present. But I particularly appreciated how many of the characters stand out as individuals (not just representatives of specific social issues). For instance, there’s a particularly powerful depiction of a strong warrior leader during Kintu Kidda’s time whose bisexuality is practiced openly and a daughter of the family in the current time period who is a notorious military leader.

I enjoyed the way “Kintu” incorporates history into the present day lives of its character as a way of showing how people in Uganda might differently express their sense of national identity. As a country that gained independence from Britain in the early 1960s and then suffered from a military coup and a dictator's rule in the 70s, different political parties have warred between whether the country should remain a republic or revert to their distinct pre-colonial kingdoms. At one point a character explains: “After independence, Uganda – a European artefact – was still forming as a country rather than a kingdom in the minds of ordinary Gandas. They were lulled by the fact that Kabaka Muteesa II was made president of the new Uganda. Nonetheless, most of them felt that ‘Uganda’ should remain a kingdom for the Ganda under their kabaka so that things would go back to the way they were before Europeans came. Uganda was a patchwork of fifty or so tribes. The Ganda did not want it.” Makumbi's novel provides a compelling overview of Uganda's internal struggles over national identity while also drawing the reader into the particular conflicts that her dynamic characters face.

“Kintu” is a novel that requires a lot of concentration, but contains many delights, psychological insight and drama that I found consistently entertaining while providing a compelling look at a fascinating country.