Jack’s story

“Jack” by Marilynne Robinson, pub. Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Expected, but still thrilled by the formal announcement of Marilynne Robinson’s new Gilead novel – the fourth. Finally (and is this the final word?), we are going to hear Jack’s side of things – at least the St. Louis story, for I recall Robinson stating last year that the new instalment would go to Gilead; though in some respects the place “Gilead” – real and mythical – and its effect on the characters, is always present.

A folk’s jester goes to war

“Tyll” by Daniel Kehlmann, original pub. Rowohlt, Germany, 2017

Coming to my notice via The New York Times is publication of the English translation of Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll. Only a couple of years old in original, I seem to recall it as being well received, and ‘Daniel’ is a bit of a “Publikum” darling anyway – hence the familiarity of a first name being enough to identify him by many literary minded sorts in Germany. My interest piqued, I have just visited the local library and duly got myself a copy; begging the question exactly where to fit it into my reading agenda!

Coincidently some of my favourite UK podcasts have recently lured Kehlmann into their studios for interesting chats that further whet my appetite. Firstly, the Arts & Ideas podcast available directly from BBC Radio 3 or at Apple Podcasts, and then there is the Times Literary Supplement Freedom, Books, Flowers & the Moon podcast also at Apple.

For a little more context and historical background, here are the Wikipedia entries for the Thirty Years’ War and Till Eulenspiegel. I’m very much looking forward to the read.

Home fires burning

My paperback edition ( Bloomsbury Publishers, 2018)

Wanting to make clear that I do read beyond the precious canon of sorts that I have created for myself; Kamila Shamsie’s highly acclaimed Home Fire comes to mind as a recent example. I must say I often shy at a crescendo of superlatives, so whilst I do agree this is a terrific read I don’t necessarily consider it an extraordinary literary highlight as some would have it – just a really good contemporary novel (finding its way onto the BBC list of “Novels That Shaped Our World”) with a lot more depth than most; exploring the themes of belonging (or not) to nation, family, religion, and what is to be done with the divided loyalties that may almost certainly arise in our globalised world amongst the many of us moving on from the place of our birth. And courageous it is, especially as a British-Pakistani Muslim woman, to write a novel in which the jihadi, ISIS, and so-called “home-grown terrorism” are central themes. And the latter leads one to consider all the connotations to be imagined in the title; “home” is just one of those words I guess – where the heart is, where fires are kept burning, that has an Office and a Secretary. And who has the right to claim a place as home, and who has the right to take it away. And how many homes can any one person have. A concept I would suggest that may very well have lost its place in our contemporary world – too tainted by a multitude of identity crises gone haywire.

Spoken in the varying participant voices, the narrative is well paced and succinct. A British Muslim family is drawn, through circumstance or design, into the cesspool of Islamic fanaticism, and must navigate the conflicting loyalties of family and state, tradition and reason. So confronted, the sisters, Isma and Aneeka, react differently in their attempts to extricate their brother, Parvaiz, from his dangerous predicament – Isma, the senior member of this fractured family, places hope in the machinations of the state, and Aneeka, the younger and Parvaiz’s twin, distrusting of government and its institutions, and its prejudices, either real or perceived, seeks to intervene directly. Neither woman will save Parvaiz, but his death is only the prologue – for Aneeka, if she can not save her brother’s life, is determined to save his death.

Bringing home Parvaiz’s body becomes for Aneeka more than just a religious ritualistic gesture, but an act of defiance against the State that deprived her brother of his statehood and right of burial. The personification of that despised entity is satisfied by Karamat Lone, who has seemingly conquered all the societal and institutional hurdles placed before him and risen to the political heights as new Home Secretary; at the expense of being ostracised from the Muslim community. The relationship Aneeka forms with Lone’s son, Eamon, in the first instance as a means to secure Parvaiz safe return, is ultimately the fatal link between two families, two traditions on collision course.

Antigone in front of the dead Polynices by Nikiforos Lytras 1865

We know – from author, blurb, review – that this is a modern adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone, and a reading of the tragedy, or even a summary of, confirms that. Shamsie is not alone in turning to the classics as a narrative device, but her elegant fitting of a very contemporary story within the frame of an ancient drama works I think very well. Striking are the parallels between Antigone’s and Aneeka’s respective acts of civil disobedience and the accepted consequences. One may wonder that, two and half thousand odd years after Sophocles, the repatriation of the dead to their nearest and dearest remains a matter of contention – and a tool of statecraft.

Fiction 2020

Alex Preston from The Observer bemoans the mediocre year just gone, but offers good cheer for the year to come. Here are some of his suggestions that particularly interest me:

  • The long awaited and highly anticipated finale to Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror and the Light (4th Estate, March) – under strict embargo!
  • Hamnet (Tinder Press, March) by Maggie O’Farrell – “an […] imagination of the short life of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, and the untold story of his wife, “Agnes” Hathaway.”
  • Apeirogon (Bloomsbury, February), by Colum McCann “…ambitious formally and thematically, taking on the Israel-Palestine conflict in a work that is both spectacularly inventive and grounded in hard, often brutal fact. It is about grief and forgiveness, about family and politics… If you can read it without sobbing, you’re a monster.”
  • Sebastian Barry’s A Thousand Moons (Faber, March). “Set in the wake of the American civil war, it tells the story of Winona, a brave, bruised orphan from the Lakota tribe whose new life on a Tennessee farmstead is threatened by the past.”
  • “…the final part of Ali Smith’s era-defining seasonal quartet, Summer (Penguin, July)”
  • Kate Grenville’s  A Room Made of Leaves (Text, July) (“..which I’ve read and it’s every bit as good as The Secret River” says Preston – let us hope!)

A very nice start I would say. Preston’s preview in its entirety can be found here on The Guardian site.

Daring to presume

A new essay by Zadie Smith in the current October 24 2019 issue of The New York Review of Books, and for the moment at least online, eloquently argues against a particularly stringent interpretation of cultural appropriation prevalent in the literary world in recent times and the strident sometimes virulent debates that inevitably ensue, and pleads instead for a fiction that dares to presume rather than contain, that is driven by the imagination rather than the manifest self and finds its voice in revealing what it doesn’t know.

How I have longed for an argument along these lines to be so articulated.

On Reading Robinson

Though coming late to Marilynne Robinson, I was immediately captivated by her narrative form, the power of the characters and the moral integrity that rises above moralising.

Having written several posts during 2018-19 in respect to Robinson’s Gilead trilogy, I have taken the time to experiment a little and put together an edited collection; compiled in LaTeX and available in PDF from my Downloads page.