February 5, 2024 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Ockham New Zealand Book Awards longlist 2024

The NZ Book Awards longlist comes out so early in the year, I am often late catching up with it. There are longlists for fiction, poetry, general nonfiction and illustrated nonfiction, a total of 44 titles. The complete list can be viewed here.

2023 was a great reading year for New Zealand fiction, and author Catherine Chidgey who won last year’s fiction award for her novel The Axeman’s Carnival, is again nominated this year for her latest Pet. Both her novels were longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2024, a unique position to be in. This year’s longlist features eight novels and two short story collections.

From the list below, I have read three novels, though only reviewed Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton. I enjoyed both Lioness and Pet, and may reread them to review later, as I read them during the summer months, when books tend to be devoured and not thought too deeply about.

It’s good to see two short story collections nominated that address topical themes and the intergalactic indie hit about alienation that entertains and makes its readers consider what that feels like.

The links in the titles will take you to the Goodreads descriptions of the novels. I have created or copied short blurbs to give you an idea of what they’re each about.

The Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction longlist

A Better Place by Stephen Daisley [WWII visceral novel] – a novel about brothers at war, empathy and the aftermath. Aged 19 in 1939, Roy and his twin brother Tony enlist in the NZ Infantry Brigade. They fight in Crete where Tony dies. Burdened by the loss of his brother, Roy continues to Africa and Europe.

Audition by Pip Adam [Science Fiction/Dystopia] – a novel, part science fiction, part social realism that asks what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much room – about how we imagine new forms of justice, and how we transcend the bodies and selves we are given.

Backwaters by Emma Ling Sidnam [family history/belonging] – debut novel by award-winning New Zealand poet about a 4th generation New Zealander struggling with a sense of identity and belonging.

Laura is tired of being asked where she’s really from. Her family has lived in Aotearoa New Zealand for four generations, and she’s ambivalent at best about her Chinese heritage. But when she’s asked to write about the Chinese New Zealander experience for a work project, Laura finds herself drawn to the diary of her great-great-grandfather Ken, a market gardener in the early years of the British colony.

Bird Life by Anna Smaill [literary fiction/magical realism] – A lyrical and ambitious exploration of madness and what it is like to experience the world differently. Smaill teases out the tension between our internal and external lives and asks what we lose by having to choose between them.

In Ueno Park, Tokyo, as workers and tourists gather for lunch, the pollen blows, a fountain erupts, pigeons scatter, and two women meet, changing the course of one another’s lives. Two women deal with individual traumas, form an unlikely friendship, helping each other see a different possible world.

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton [Eco Mystery/Thriller(y)] – an eco-thriller of sorts that considers intentions, actions, and consequences, an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival. Featuring green activists, politician farmer and his wife, a tech billionaire and the lone wolf investigative journalist with a past.

Lioness by Emily Perkins (Literary Fiction/Blended Family, Second Wife Drama) – a novel of a woman’s self doubt and shifting place in second families and relationships.

Trevor and Therese are a power couple living in the capital city, he is a developer and she runs a chain of fashion boutiques. That’s the exterior. At home, there is his adult family (issues) to contend with and her uncertain place in a scenario that is rapidly shifting when his deals come under scrutiny and his children make increasing demands. Increasingly, she finds refuge elsewhere, inviting another kind of risk into her precarious existence.

Pet by Catherine Chidgey [Coming of Age/School Drama/Literary Fiction] – Set in New Zealand in 1984 and 2014, traversing themes of misplaced trust, bullying, racism and misogyny, a chilling novel that explores the consequences of age old complacency and silence.

Like every other girl in her class, twelve-year-old Justine is drawn to her glamorous, charismatic new teacher, and longs to be her pet. However, when a thief begins to target the school, Justine’s sense that something isn’t quite right grows ever stronger. With each twist of the plot, this gripping story of deception and the corrosive power of guilt takes a yet darker turn. Young as she is, Justine must decide where her loyalties lie.

Ruin and Other Stories by Emma Hislop (Kāi Tahu) [Short Stories on Being A Woman/Friendship/Relationships/Power] – Moving between contemporary New Zealand and London, a debut short story collection that explores power and its contortions, powerlessness and its depravities, and the ends to which we will go to claim back agency.

Women and girls walk a perilously thin line between ruin and redemption in these stories as they try—with varying degrees of success—to outmanouver the violence that threatens to define their lives.

There’s the physical violence of men against their bodies—and sometimes the violence they exact in revenge. While doubts about a romantic partner, an abandonment by a sister, the fallout of a parent’s porgnography addiction, the betrayal of a friend, even the desire to touch a stranger’s fur-like body are subtler aggressions that pack their own kinds of punches.

Signs of Life by Amy Head [short stories/earthquake/post recovery] – A ‘lest we forget’ collection.

Christchurch, post earthquakes, the earth is still settling. Containers line the damaged streets, inhabitants waver – like their city – suspended between disaster and recovery. Tony, very much alive, is declared dead, Gerald misreads one too many situations in his community patrol, and boomer Carla tries online dating. At the epicentre of these taut, magnetic stories is 20-something Flick who, just as she is finding her feet, faces a violent disruption – this time in human form – while her mostly-ex gets set to marry. Keenly observed, deftly humorous, Signs of Life turns on the smallest of details to show how we carry on.

Turncoat by Tīhema Baker (Raukawa te Au ki te Tonga, Ātiawa ki Whakarongotai, Ngāti Toa Rangatira) (Science Fiction/Literary Political Satire/Indie smash-hit!) – a futuristic novel about an idealistic human, that explores the effect of being colonised and serves as a commentary on the experiences of Māori public servants while inviting Pākehā to imagine that experience.

Daniel is a young, idealistic Human determined to make a difference for his people. He lives in a distant future in which Earth has been colonised by aliens. His mission: infiltrate the Alien government called the Hierarch and push for it to honour the infamous Covenant of Wellington, the founding agreement between the Hierarch and Humans.

With compassion and insight, Turncoat explores the trauma of Māori public servants and the deeply conflicted role they are expected to fill within the machinery of government. From casual racism to co-governance, Treaty settlements to tino rangatiratanga, Turncoat is a timely critique of the Aotearoa zeitgeist, holding a mirror up to Pākehā New Zealanders and asking: “What if it happened to you?”

Shortlist Annoucement

The 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards shortlist will be announced on 6 March, 2024.

The Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction will be judged by reading advocate and former bookseller Juliet Blyth (convenor); writer, reviewer and literary festival curator Kiran Dass; and fiction writer Anthony Lapwood (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāti Whakaue, Pākehā). They will be joined in deciding the ultimate winner from their shortlist of four by an international judge.

The winner of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction will receive $65,000.

A Year of Reading New Zealand Literature

In 2024, Lisa at ANZLitLovers and Theresa at TheresaSmithWrites will celebrate the rich literary heritage of Antipodean writing by joining forces to spend a year discovering New Zealand fiction.

Reading from their TBR and whatever else comes their way, they’ll be posting reviews on their blogs and sharing via social media using the hashtag #AYearofNZLit

Follow them or join in if you’re interested in reading Kiwi fiction!

November 25, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

So Late In the Day by Claire Keegan

So Late in the Day (2023) was recently shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year; it didn’t win that award however Claire Keegan won Author of the Year 2023.

The Literary Withhold

I read So Late in the Day as if it were a kind of literary mystery.

It is so short, (it’s a small square book of 4 chapters, 47 pages, around 11,000 words), that with Keegan’s combination of economy and precision with words, I found I was reading vigilantly between the lines as I went, not being able to stop myself from trying to guess the significance of every utterance and carefully constructed phrase. I mean, right from that opening line…

On Friday, July 29th, Dublin got the weather that was forecast.

…it read to me like something imbued with meaning. Did something or someone get what they deserved, I wondered?

Recalling other stories of Keegan’s, like Foster and Small Things Like These, I would suggest this is a motif of her storytelling, the slow reveal, the building up of a sense of something untold, omitted. The reader can’t help but wonder, question, try and guess as each page reveals a little more, what might be coming, the denouement.

Keegan herself suggested in a recent interview that the book requires a second reading:

So Late in the Day deploys her typically hushed technique to devastating effect; plain sentences unfurl their full implication only on rereading, the narration a veiled disclosure of the protagonist’s poisonous habits of thought. – extract from Guardian article

Review

A young man, Cathal, is at his workplace on a Friday afternoon and seems very conscious of the time, in the first couple of pages it is mentioned twice, it passes slowly, perhaps excruciatingly. People act on guard around him, they know something we don’t.

It was almost ready (his coffee) when Cynthia, the brightly dressed woman from accounts, came in, laughing on her mobile. She paused when she saw him, and soon hung up.

His boss indicates he needn’t stay the rest of the day, and Cathal is aware of him closing his door softly, all of which makes the reader wonder why, what has happened to this young man that people seem to be treading carefully around him? As he leaves the office at the end of the day and waits for the lift, on hearing someone approach, he pushes open the door to the stairwell.

On the bus ride home, another clue:

He would ordinarily have taken out his mobile then, to check his messages, but found he wasn’t ready – then wondered if anyone ever was ready for what was difficult or painful.

The final clue before the end of the chapter is when a young woman gets on the bus and sits in a vacant seat opposite him. He breathes in her scent…

until it occurred to him that there must be thousands if not hundreds of thousands of women who smelled the same.

A Relationship Unravelled

He returns home, steps over wilted flowers on his doorstep and spends the evening alone, consuming a weight watchers microwave dinner and opens a bottle of champagne.

The four short chapters alternate between the past and the present. When the narrative steps back in time, we learn about his relationship with a half French, half English girl Sabine that he’d met in Toulouse. The dialogue between them reveals a disconnect that goes unnoticed by him and is ignored by her.

It is the discordant undertones within their conversation and his contemptuous observations that reveal the long, dark shadow of influence and inference.

After the reveal, when we learn what has happened to him, who he is, he recalls things about his own mother, his father, things from the past that shaped them, though he does not acknowledge that.

If a part of Cathal now wondered how he might have turned out if his father had been another type of man and had not laughed, Cathal did not let his mind dwell on it. He told himself it meant little, it was just a bad joke.

A Take on Language and Lore

It is a thought-provoking, provocative read, that subtly explores a seismic patriarchal crack in Irish society, one that infiltrates language, habits, behaviours and attitudes.

It is ironic, that the title in English is ‘So Late in the Day‘ compared to the French translated title which was translated or treated as ‘Misogynie‘. One title refers to the actions of the female character while the other refers to the behaviours of the male character. The story is told through the observations of Cathal, so the English language title belongs to his perception of reality, while the French title takes on a more overarching thematic approach.

In the article below, in The Guardian, it was revealed that the American author George Saunders was a fan of the story and recently chose it when invited to pick a favourite New Yorker story to discuss on the magazine’s podcast, but stopped short of reading it, due to one of the words used.

Keegan (who read the story herself, with riveting poise) tells me she respects his reluctance “even though he considered it to be the perfect word – as I do. It’s what Irish men often call women here. Writing the language people use is part of what a writer does to portray the lives we lead, the world we live in.”

Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies (2021) by Heba Hayek

Tender, nostalgic vignettes of a childhood growing up in Gaza, often told from the perspective of the twenty-something narrator looking back from the present, now living in exile in London. She is constantly longing for old places while finding new ones, the past never far from being elicited by the present.

Each new chapter has an associated song, vignettes accompanied by a playlist.

The image of the sambac, the tree that filled our back yard with its sweet, creamy scent, appears in my narrator’s attempts to create life where this shrub doesn’t naturally thrive.

short stories Palestinian Literature Gaza Hajar Press

The little stories are so compelling, I finished them in one sitting and was left wanting to read more. I sincerely hope the author is writing more stories, preserving important memories, while there is a terrible war raging in her home town.

These stories are the anti-thesis of that violent incursion, they speak of family outings to the sea, of friendships, of Aunties, though so many are tinged with reminders that it is almost never without some reference to loss.

As the narrator grows into unlikely circumstances away from Gaza, memory is her greenhouse; her way to bring back the voice of the girl who was sacrificed and born in the hands of her identity. At her desk in a flat in Southeast London, she writes of what makes her soul flicker: community love, especially the kind embodied by circles of women and girls.

Guns and Figs

In this vignette, our narrator shares a childhood memory of driving along the Gaza coast with her parents, beside the Mediterranean, in her favourite place, by the window facing the sea, window down, sea breeze rushing in, an unchanging view for the duration of the 20 minute drive.

The song accompanying the vignette is Fairuz ”Nassam Alayna El Hawa’ (The Breeze Is Upon Us)

Photo by Kadir Akman on Pexels.com

My brother and I each had assigned places in the car, until our little sister grew old enough to claim her window-seat rights. Then the rotation became tricky, involving fights that mostly ended with my brother crying in the middle.

I usually sat by the window, facing the sun and the sea, breathing the salty, creamy air and occasionally eating grapes and figs: the ultimate Mediterranean snack.

These drives all felt the same, until the last one.

At a checkpoint, a soldier indicates they should pull over, “I’ll just be a minute” says her father. An hour later he returns, the Friday barbecue trips end indefinitely that day, though she is never told why.

I started to notice Baba paying more attention to the road; it seemed like he was avoiding certain checkpoints. Every so often, he would point out something ahead and wonder aloud whether it was a checkpoint or a fruit cart. As Fairuz sang from the cassette player, Baba drove on, trying to guess the difference between guns and figs.

Friendship, Fear and Foreign Places

Other stories ‘Ask Me Anything’ tell of school days interrupted by explosions, of friendships interrupted by disappearances, ‘A Carry-On Full Of Pictures and Letters’.

We were never trained for emergencies at school. We just knew what to do. We would sit on the floor under our tables each time we heard the recurrent loud explosions – ignore the first two, exchange a few nervous looks, and then, in one swift move, we’d all be in our places by the third. That consistency was comforting. The fact that we had survived the first two was a good enough sign that it’d be worth shielding ourselves from the rest.

In an attempt at reassurance, our teacher would remind the class: ‘The one you hear isn’t the one that kills you.’

One day her best friend Lubna leaves Gaza without telling anyone. She had visited the Al-Shifaa hospital after breaking her arm and never returned.

When she was ten, Lubna’s dad had been one of seven people martyred after the occupation forces targeted a car in the middle of a busy street. She’d been planning her exit for years; I just didn’t think it was really going to happen.

Three years later, she visits her friend in Amsterdam where she now lives.

Song: Lucy Dacus – ‘Yours and Mine’.

That day feels like the oldest memory I have. Yet somehow I can barely remember it at all, or the person I was when I hadn’t yet imagined what it meant to leave.

‘I love my mother, but she couldn’t protect me. I love you, but you couldn’t either. I’m a lot better now, you see?’ She waves her hand in the air, and I look around and nod.

A Moving Tale, Of Family Drama

Song: Nina Simone – ‘I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free’

In this vignette, we first hear that our narrator has been kicked out of her flat after secretly hosting an Airbnb guest to help pay the rent. Homeless, she moves into the office where she works and takes on additional responsibilities.

Sometimes, I even feel content in my windowless bunker, stealing bits of people’s lunches from the common lounge – not the entire meal. As I look up flats in my small college town, I think of my first big move.

Here, we learn of when our narrators parents leave the family home, the summer she turns six, after problems around inheritance became intolerable. Their last day living in an apartment above her grandmother Sitti, arrives:

Moving out of the family house was never a casual affair, but rather a statement. It’s like leaving home for the first time – making a point that it’s time to move on. Changes like these usually carried an undertone of wives taking their husbands away from their families and keeping them for themselves.

The move also meant that no one was going to interfere in how to raise us, except for my parents. It was a bit of a slap in the face, especially for Sitti. But I was excited about it; I wanted to be like my other cousins who visited only on Fridays and wore something new each time: a little bag or a hair tie, or even a completely different hairstyle. I was ready to rebel with my parents and become the daughter of a mean woman. I started to imagine what I would wear the next Friday.

Some years later, she visits her grandmother in Belgium, where she now lives and finds her safe, but malcontent.

Song: Idir – ‘A Vava Inouva’

Seventy years since her birth,our Grandma is in a French-speaking town, barely able to move, again a refugee. She tells me she didn’t want to leave Gaza, and that she regrets it.

‘Who leaves at this age?’ she says, slightly ashamed of her attempt at survival. As though there were an age limit to craving life, or to that quiet longing older folks back home often fear expressing.

It is a wonderful collection, that preserves childhood memories and shares with the rest of us, a slice of life for a member of a Palestinian family in Gaza, where growing up is fraught with uncertainty, trauma and nothing can be taken for granted.

From afar, the beauty of family and fragmented moments of friendship gain additional significance, as a way of life is slowly and methodically destroyed.

A must read, excellent portrayal of a lonesome yearning for home.

To order a copy of this book, visit Hajar Press here.

Heba Hayek, Author

Heba (she/they) is a London-based, Gaza-raised Palestinian author, creative and facilitator. She completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Miami University, Ohio, and studied for an MA in Social Anthropology at SOAS University of London.

Rooted in anti-nation-state, decolonial, queer, Afrikan feminist thought, Heba’s work navigates topics such as disposability, Global South solidarity movements, land justice, Palestinian drill music, and more.

Heba’s first book, Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies, won the Creative Award in the 2022 Palestine Book Awards and was chosen as a 2021 Book of the Year by The White Review, Middle East Eye and The New Arab.

April 15, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Dance Move by Wendy Erskine

Dance Move is Belfast author Wendy Erskine’s second volume of short stories and the first one I have read. Her debut Sweet Home was reviewed to critical acclaim, so I was looking forward to reading this collection published in 2022 and appropriately I chose to read it in-flight, on my way to Belfast for a weekend visit.

I also was reading it for Reading Ireland Month 2023, but did not have time to review it before that ended.

In-flight versus On-Train Entertainment

Dance Move Wendy Erskine It was the perfect choice for in-flight reading, as the stories were thoroughly entertaining and kept me gripped in between flight delays, air traffic control strikes, and would have kept me company on the Elizabeth Line had I not been engrossed in eavesdropping on a conversation between two captivating young men where they discussed how they create fashion insta stories, the merits of studying in Portugal versus London; a recent concert one of them performed in Cuba last week (as you do) and gossiping about their friend who found love after challenging himself to go on 100 tinder dates – not the kind of conversation one might overhear where I live, thus book aside and ears wide open!

And so to some of the stories that have stayed with me:

Mathematics

In the first story, the opening line reads:

“The drawer beside Roberta’s bed contained remnants of other people’s fun”

It is a wonderful encapsulation of all that is to come, referring to a collection of things that have been left behind in the various short-let rentals our protagonist has cleaned. She works in a hotel that has a policy of holding lost property for 2 months before the staff can claim them, but her other boss goes by the saying ‘finders keepers, losers weepers’. Unless it is a weapon, then it should be given to him.

“Mr Dalzell had said that anything she found was hers, automatically.”

She gets driven around from place to place by another employee with a van, cleaning up after all kinds of people, who we never see or know who they are – but clearly they are not so much the short holiday crowd, more like overnight partying groups. One day she finds something left behind that creates a significant dilemma. Perhaps it was only a matter of time, but from this moment on the story captivates and builds tension as we wonder what choices she will make. Brilliant.

Mrs Dallesandro

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Mrs Dallesandro opens as she leaves the hairdresser, giving a wave and observing her reflection as she leaves. She has been married twenty-three years, knows what to expect from her predictable life, is well maintained and under no illusion regarding her husband’s various dalliances with much younger women.

Mrs Dallesandro wouldn’t call them affairs or relationships, since that would elevate them to a status they didn’t warrant. She has never once felt threatened by them.

She is on a mission to go to a sunbed clinic, an activity that she perceives as a minor transgression, that ultimately will give her something she does not get elsewhere. She recalls an episode in her youth with a shopkeeper’s son and we wonder if that had an impact on the way she is now, the choices she subsequently made.

It is an evocative story of the shallowness of a life half lived, of the things a person might occupy themselves with when life has hollowed them out, the strange lengths one might go, to find a substitute for human connection. It reminded me a little of Forbidden Notebook by Alba des Céspedes, another woman living a half-life, who discovers an interior version of herself at odds with how she acts, when she begins to keep an intimate journal.

Golem

In this story jealousy and resentments between sisters surface alongside familial expectations and judgments. A birthday party creates the scene for family dysfunction to play itself out, imbued with the symbolism and pointedness of the gift, with the observations of what people wear, how trivial objects trigger emotions, how the laid-back and the intense personalities function side by side in the great mix of extended family. How human connection blossoms in surprising ways despite the circumstances.

His Daughter

A story of family loss, of grief, of obsession and activity. Just as the family are sitting down to dinner, Curtis pops outside for a minute. He does not come back. Ever. Posters go up all over town, they keep the mother busy. Time passes and signs appear of life changing, reforming, resisting, resenting, of repeat patterns that overtake the old reality. A provocative profound observation of life and death.

Dance Move

In the titular story, a mother takes a pole dancing lesson and at home tries to push her daughter to enrol in ballet. She watches her daughter and friends have fun dirty dancing with a critical eye and is quick to apportion blame.

We learn of an event from her past relating to her brother, an accident, her parents. The reader takes in the present and the past and will make their own connections between them, forced to use their own imagination to ponder any cause and effect on relationships.

Family Dynamics, Human Connection, Cause and Effect in How Lives are Lived

Coastal pathway, County Down, Northern Ireland

It’s not easy to make any overall assumptions or impressions about the collection, as each story took me to a different place through their characters and circumstance, that pulled me in quickly and left me pondering one thing or other.

Perhaps as I describe above, it is that setting up of a dynamic, a situation and the observation of how people react or respond, the reader being given a little or no insight into a person’s past that makes us wonder why people decide to act the way they do.

The China Factory by Mary Costello

It’s week three of Reading Ireland Month and today I’m sharing thoughts on a book of short stories by Irish author Mary Costello, The China Factory.

Threads of Inspiration

Irish Literature Reading Ireland Month I’ve heard many say good things about her debut novel Academy Street and when her most recent novel The River Capture was published, a self-confessed homage to James Joyce’s Ulysses, I decided I would start at the beginning with Costello’s short stories.

I will read The River Capture later, as April is the One Dublin, One Book initiative and their chosen read for 2022 is Nora by Nuala O’Connor another book with a James Joyce connection. It is a bold reimagining of the life of James Joyce’s wife and muse, Nora, the model for his character Molly Bloom in Ulysses.

The Dublin City Libraries initiative encourages people to read a book connected with the capital city during the month of April every year.

Capturing a Voice

Photo by cottonbro Pexels.com

The 12 stories that make up The China Factory create a strong sense of authorial voice. Highly observant, sensitive characters, steeped in melancholy. They are practiced at holding back, trying not to make a ripple in the external world, until unforseen events pitch them into interactions, all the while controlling that emotional seepage.

In the opening story, The China Factory, a young woman works a summer job in a china factory, catching a ride with a quiet man named Gus, who she is distantly related to. She works at the sponger’s station, wiping off lines the moulds leave on clay cups.

I smiled when I passed the other girls those first days, and longed to speak, but feared that words would betray the yearning for friendship that I felt inside.

For a while she becomes closer to the girls, listening to their gossip, they quiz her about Gus, the freak, sharing an overheard story of his childhood that disturbs her. When a wayward man appears with a gun, Gus will surprise them all, and years later the impact of that summer job, his actions and her guilt will continue to haunt her.

dreamy woman with crossed legs sitting near window

Photo by L.SummerPexels.com

In Things I See a woman lies in bed, hyper aware of her husbands movements downstairs, she relays scenes in her mind of being close to him, but even in her imagination she holds back. She fears not growing old, but of growing different.

There is something severe and imperious in Don’s bearing that makes me resist.

She works full time and her husband cares for their six year old child. Her sister Lucy who is visiting, seems more at ease in the family than she does. The things she sees, hears, picks up on, imagines, occupy her mind, creating a distance, a corner from which she has entrapped herself. A witness. Stifled. Knowing she will not change anything, though her indecision will imprint itself on her face and in her demeanour.

And I think this is how things are, and this is how they will remain, and with every new night and every new wind I know that am cornered too, and I will remain, because I can not unlove him.

Drudgery, Dignity and Denial

The stories examine aspects of everyday life and highlight the hidden selves, the thoughts beneath the actions, the things that people hide from each other, from themselves, the cover stories and meaningless conversations that patch over the cracks that might reveal the reality.

In The Patio Man, a gardener knows nothing about his employer, a young frail woman observes him from the window, she struggles to articulate what she requires from him, until the moment she must ask him to drive her to the hospital. Still nothing is ever said, just small talk that takes the mind elsewhere, far from the catastrophic event occurring in the present.

The collection opens with an epigram from Rilke’s poem Autumn:

And night by night, down into solitude,

the heavy earth falls far from every star.

We are all falling. This hand’s falling too –

all have this falling-sickness none withstands.

which sets the tone and theme of falling – into and out of love, of relationships, to one’s death, in and out of the kaleidoscope of emotions, whether expressed or suppressed, no one is immune to the falling-sickness.

While the stories capture that voice particular to the author, that melancholy can wear on the reader, repeated time and again as it does, manifesting in the many losses and unfortunate events each story portrays, the quiet outer acceptance of discordant inner turmoil.

That said, I am looking forward to engaging with a longer story, hoping for the chance of redemption a novel might bring.

Mary Costello, Author

Mary Costello is an Irish short story writer and novelist from Galway now living in Dublin.

Her collection of short stories, The China Factory ( 2012), was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award.

Her second book and first novel, Academy Street, was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, the Costa First Novel Prize and the EU Prize for Literature in 2014. The novel went on to win the Irish Novel of the Year Award as well as the Irish Book of the Year. Her second novel The River Capture was published in 2019.

January 4, 2021 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Everything Inside by Edwidge Danticat (2019)

Everything Inside is a collection of short stories by Haitian author Edwidge Danticat.

Little Haiti in Miami, Florida

Edwidge Danticat Literary Fiction Short Stories Having left Haiti when she was twelve years to live in America, it’s not surprising that her stories involve a cast of characters with connections to her home country and a neighbourhood in Miami Dade County, Florida referred to as ‘Little Haiti’ after a Haitian pro-democracy activist wrote to a Miami newspaper referring to his new home as “Little Port-au-Prince” which was shortened and known thereafter as ‘Little Haiti’.

Many Haitians fled their country in the sixties and seventies, to escape the brutal dictatorship of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier.

The stories concern those who left, those who stayed, those who visited one place or another for a short time, those who belong, those who are trying to find their place, those who have found success by honest means and those who resorted to taking advantage of the vulnerable.

The Immigrant Dilemma, Stay or Return?

When the dictatorship in Haiti ended, so did a lot of marriages. This tension and divide is also explored within the stories.

There was a hard line between those who wanted to stay in America and others who wanted to go back and rebuild the country.

Exploring the connections that bind people together and the events that force them apart, they could be tales of any number of immigrant individuals or families. The clash of cultures shifts and evolves as immigrants find themselves seen as the other, if they stay too long and get too used to life elsewhere.

Character Driven Narratives

Everything Inside Hope Edwidge Danticat short stories Haiti

Photo by Sudipta Mondal on Pexels.com

There are eight contemplative, character driven stories that are slightly melancholic, that all represent some change in the status quo, but that each provide the prospect of hope.

This is the third book I’ve read by Edwidge Danticat and I enjoy the way she fuses the characters of her origin country with present day life in America and the intersection of the two.

It maps the slow beginnings of a divide between the generations, grandparents who have never met their grandchildren, business people trying to entice successful Haitians back to their motherland and the increasing disconnect between the two, as their worlds grow further apart. And the vulnerability of women who put their trust in another.

The stories were published over a twelve year period, so pick up on historical events that create turning points in her stories, the earthquake of 2010, the actions of foreign aid workers, and the elevated perception of North America.

Her debut novel Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) a story of four generations of women was excellent, as was the gripping memoir Brother, I’m Dying (2007) which focuses on the relationship between her father and her Uncle Joseph.

Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout

The inhabitants of Amgash appear to have invaded the imagination of Elizabeth Strout, not satisfied with being mere peripheral characters in her excellent novel My Name is Lucy Barton.

That book, which was a novel to us, is a memoir to them, one that a few of the characters we encounter in this set of stories will buy and read, one of them even attending a book signing near Chicago and meeting her again many, many years post their shared childhoods.

The characters vary in their kindnesses and quirks, in the opening story Pete, Lucy’s brother, resents his neighbour Tommy’s visits, carried out with heartfelt intention and yet perceived as a kind of torture, so much of what occurs between people is misunderstood due to the lack of communication or misreading of intentions.

In a voice without belligerence, even with a touch of apology to it, he said, “Look Tommy. I’d like it if you didn’t keep coming over here.” Pete’s lips were pale and cracked, and he wet them with his tongue, looking at the ground. For a moment Tommy was not sure he heard right, but as he started to say “I only-” Pete looked at him fleetingly and said, “You do it to torture me, and I think enough time has gone by now.”

We find out what happened to the pretty Nicely girls, whose mother left the home after a brief affair that went wrong and lived a quiet life of regret nearby for years afterwards. Through Patty, we meet Lucy’s niece Lila, who has never met her Aunt but shares strong opinions of her with Patty, her school guidance counsellor.

Patty said, “That’s a nice name Lila Lane.” The girl said, I was supposed to be named for my aunt, but at the last minute my mom said, Fuck her.”

Patty took the papers and bounced their edges against the desk.

The girl sat up straight, and spoke with suddenness. “She’s a bitch. She thinks she’s better than any of us. I never even met her.”

Dottie runs a Bed and Breakfast and the steady churn of customers keeps her busy and entertained with company. Sometimes she meets the wealthy who wish to confide in her, it turns out they can be lonely too.

The next morning at breakfast Shelley did not acknowledge Dottie. Not even a thank you for the whole wheat toast. Dottie was very surprised; her eyes watered with the sudden sting of this. But then she understood. There was an old African proverb Dottie had read one day that said, “After a man eats, he becomes shy.” And Dottie thought of that now with Shelley. Shelley was like the man in the proverb, having satisfied her needs, she was ashamed. She had confided more than she wanted to, and now Dottie was somehow to blame.

In a later story though we become aware of a change, often there’ll be just a passing reference to the character who inhabited the previous story, one that informs us of what followed on, and gives a kind of quiet closure, in this respect it reminds me a lot of Yoko Ogawa’s stories in her collection Revenge, there is that thread that connects the stories, it creates a little frisson of excitement when you spot it.

It is such a pleasure to spend time within the pages of Strout’s imaginary characters, who move from references into fully formed characters with such ease, this collection had me wondering if one of these characters might push in on her and demand a novel too. Tt wouldn’t surprise me – who is in control here, the characters or the author? I have a feeling her characters have a strong will of their own, and that this book was written to try to keep a few of them quiet, so she could move on to the next story that’s no doubt already brewing.

Anything is Possible recently won The Story Prize (for an outstanding work of short fiction) and a cash award of US$20,000. The judges praised the book for its “subtle power,” and described Strout as:

“a specialist in the reticence of people, and her characters are compelling because of the complexity of their internal lives, and the clarity with which that complexity is depicted.”

Today the long list for the Women’s Prize for Fiction will be announced (at midnight), it will be interesting to see if this collection will be nominated, I certainly hope that it will be.

Further Reading:

My Review: My Name is Lucy Barton

My Review: The Burgess Boys

Buy a copy of one of Elizabeth Strout’s books via BookDepository

January 16, 2018 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Granta 141: Canada – Mangilaluk’s Highway by Nadim Roberts

Granta 141 Canada

The first Granta journal of 2018, issue number 141 is focused on Canadian literature, whether it’s fiction, memoir, reportage, poetry or photography, each issue combines something of each of those categories, with new writing/work by known and little-known talent, around a common theme.

As guest editor and author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing, Madeleine Thien shares in the opening introduction, (and fellow guest-editor Catherine Leroux, writing in French), their only parameter for submissions was ‘What is being imagined here, now?’

Canada being a land with sixty unique Indigenous language dialects and more than two hundred languages reported as a mother tongue or home language, it was a wide-ranging brief.

Language becomes its own landscape in this issue of Granta. Language falls apart, twists, reformulates, shatters and revives itself. Animal and self, unfinished history, land and waterways, colonisation and dispossession, settlement and refuge – all these nouns are part of the truth of this place.

Apart from Leroux’s introduction, all the work is either in English or has been translated from English, however all work in translation is available to read on Granta.com in the original French.

It features writers such as Margaret Atwood, Lisa Moore (her novel February reviewed here), Alexander McLeod, Krista Foss, Naomi Fontaine, Kim Fu, Anosh Irani, Paul Seesequasis, Anakana SchofieldJohanna Skibsrud, and many more…

I’m reviewing here the first story and may share other’s with you as I select randomly from the journal over the coming months.

Mangilaluk’s Highway

The opening story is a mix of reportage and a retelling of the story of Mangilaluk Bernard Andreason, who when he was 11 years old, slipped out of the Inuvik residential boarding school he’d been sent to, along with two friends Jack and Dennis, to avoid being punished for stealing a pack of cigarettes, and spotting newly hung power lines, decided to follow them home to Tuktoyaktuk.

Nadim Roberts writes about Bernard’s journey in the present, interspersed with narrative reports on his own visit to Tuk in June 2017, forty-five years after Dennis, Jack and Bernard began walking that 140 kilometre stretch home. Robert’s by contrast, completes the journey from Inuvik to Tuk in thirty minutes by plane.

He tells of successive attempts by the government to build a road across the Arctic Circle, to facilitate oil and gas exploration and a stretch of highway that would connect Inuvik to Tuk.

From the plane I could see occasional glimpses of a new, near-finished road. This was the long awaited Inuvik-Tul all-season highway that would open in a few months.

Chief Mangilaluk

We learn that Tuk was a town founded by survivors from Kitigaaryuit, an Inuit settlement, that in 1902, after contact with whalers was cursed with a measles epidemic which drastically decimated their population. One young man, Mangilaluk, departed and went looking for a new place to live. His choice, a site on the edge of a harbour, would become what is now known as Tuk. He became chief and is still talked of today. Some believed he was a shaman who could shape shift into a polar bear.

In July 1961, two decades after he died, Mangilaluk’s granddaughter Alice Felix, was eight months pregnant. While home alone one evening, she heard a knock on the door. She wasn’t sure if she was awake or dreaming when the door swung open. A three-metre-tall polar bear stood in the doorway. It walked up to her, put its snowshoe-sized paw on her pregnant belly, and began to speak: ‘If it’s a boy, you name it after me.’

The story reminded me immediately of Doris Pilkington Garimara’s Rabbit Proof Fence, a tale of indigenous Aboriginal children removed from their parents (following an Australian government edict in 1931, black aboriginal children and children of mixed marriages were gathered up by whites and taken to settlements to be assimilated) and put in a boarding school. The three girls in this true story followed a fence built to keep rabbits out of farming land, knowing that it passed close to their home.

Before 1955, fewer than 15 per cent of school-aged Inuit were enrolled in residential schools. Most children still lived on the land with their families, learning traditional skills and knowledge.

By 1964, more than 75 per cent of Inuit children attended residential schools. Their values, language and customs were supplanted overnight by a culture that saw itself as benevolent and superior, and saw the Inuit as primitive beings in need of sophistication.

Nadim Roberts interweaves Bernard’s story, his grandfather’s story and the current issues facing indigenous and local people in the region, in an evocative portrayal of one boy/man’s courage against the odds to make something better of his chance at survival.

Nadim Roberts Source: Author Provided

It’s an excellent piece of writing and combination of narrative and reportage, bringing attention to this one man’s story and the plight of both his people and the environment in which they live.

You can read Nadim’s story for free at Granta, just click on the link below:

Mangilaluk’s Highway by Nadim Roberts

Nadim Roberts is a journalist from Vancouver whose work has been published in Walrus, Maisonneuve and the Globe and Mail.

Further examples of his work can be viewed on his website NadimRoberts.com

Have you read any recommended works by any of the authors mentioned or others featured in Granta 141?

December 6, 2015 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Foster by Claire Keegan

‘Early on a Sunday, after first Mass at Clonegal, my father, instead of taking me home, drives deep into Wexford towards the coast where my mother’s people came from.’

She wears light, worn clothing and brings nothing with her. The girl is left with the Kinsella family, the father returns to her mother, soon to give birth again. There is no goodbye or word of when he might return. This is Ireland. Remember Nora Webster and all that is unspoken?

So begins Claire Keegan’s long, short story Foster, a vivid telling of the period following a girl being fostered into a family in rural Ireland. In the stranger’s home she finds an atmosphere unlike that which she is used to, one she enjoys and becomes used to, though always there is the presence of that feeling that it might soon all be taken from her.

‘When I follow the woman back inside, I want her to say something, to put my mind at ease. Instead, she clears the table, picks up the sharp knife and stands in the light under the window, washing the blade under the running tap.’

Seen and heard from the perspective of the girl, we learn the circumstances of both families that led to this situation. They fall into a regular routine, life settles in this new family and nothing appears to happen to destroy the ease with which the girl has come to know.

There is a strange atmosphere throughout the book, it is the anticipation of something, we, like the girl, are wondering and waiting for it to happen. For she seems like the pawn on the chess board, her parents on one side having handed her over, the foster parents on the other having received her. Each move, every event that is outside the daily routine, ignites in the girl heightened powers of observation, developing an acute awareness of even the most subtle changes in those around her.

‘Kinsella looks at me and smiles a hard kind of a smile then looks over to the window ledge where a sparrow has come down to perch and readjust her wings. The little bird seems uneasy – as though she can scent the cat, who sometimes sits there. Kinsella’s eyes are not quite still in his head. It’s as though there’s a big piece of trouble stretching itself out in the back of his mind. He toes the leg of a chair and looks over at me.’

Author, Claire Keegan

A touching and yet eerie telling of a story that begs to be read and reread, the writing is exquisite in its depiction and ability to create a taut atmosphere without significant plot, it showcases an author with an immense talent for the short story and makes the reader want more.

Claire Keegan is an Irish writer highly regarded for her award-winning short stories, she has published two collections Antarctica (1999) and Walk the Blue Fields (2007) which I have read excellent reviews of.

Have you read any of Claire Keegan’s work?

August 1, 2015 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Women in Translation #WITMonth

During August many I will be reading novels by women that have been translated from a language other than English. It’s an initiative created by Meytal Radzinski at Biblibio, Life in Letters and can be followed on twitter using the hashtag #WITMonth.

Literature in translation represents less than 5% of published works in the English language, compared to nearly 50% for example in France and of works translated, approximately 30% is attributed to women.

I have gathered together a stack of books I already own that are works of translation and it is from this pile that I will be reading this month. It coincides with my interest in reading what I call cross cultural fiction, or literature from another perspective than that which we have grown up and/or been educated around, which in my case was very Anglo-focused.

If you have a favourite book by a woman, that has been translated, please tell us about it in the comments below so I can add it to my list for next year.

So far in 2015, I have read and reviewed the following books by women that have been translated: (click on the title to read the review)

Stone in a Landslide by Maria Barbal (Spain) translated Laura McGloughlin, Paul Mitchell (Catalan)

Beside the Sea by Véronique Olmi (France) translated Adriana Hunter (French)

Tales From The Heart, True Stories From My Childhood, by Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe) translated Richard Philcox (French)

Ru by Kim Thuy (Vietnamese-Canadian) (read in French, available in English)

The Wall by Marlen Haushofer (Austria) translated Shaun Whiteside (German)

Victoire: My Mother’s Mother by Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe) translated by Richard Philcox (French)