To Be Read...

Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes

Zinzi December is a disgraced journalist living in a bad part of an alternative  Johannesburg, scraping by partly through a mashavi gift for finding stuff other people have lost, and partly by using her writing skills to draft scam emails that cheat the gullible into handing over their life-savings to a gangster.

Oh, and she is "animalled" - mysteriously, irrevocably attached to a Sloth.  Animalling, or Acquired Aposymbiotic Familiarism, is something like Aids, something to do with guilt, and very different from the daemons Philip Pullman gives his Dark Materials characters. If there is a more coherent explanation for Sloth, or for the other creatures attached to the low-lifers who are exiled in Zoo City,  it escapes me. Intriguingly, this doesn't actually matter very much, for Lauren Beukes writes so vividly that, like Raymond Chandler, the mood and place are so strong you don't really notice that plotting and explanation are often merely distractions.

Zinzi and her war-scarred boyfriend Benoit are compelling characters, fighting for survival in a South Africa that may be a little way into the future, but may just as well be here and now. Zoo City pounds with music, magic and violence, and I have no idea which parts are real and which imagined.

Struggling to pay off an unpayable debt to drug dealer Vuyo, Zizi is compelled to use a mix of unethical reporting skills and vaguely defined magical gifts to  try and track down Songweza, one half of a brother and sister teen band iJusi, put together by vile music producer called Huron.

Mr Huron, I presume, emerges onto the balcony with a flourish. He's not so much a barrel of a man as a bagpipe, all his weight loaded in front, straining a t-shirt that bears the legend Depeche Mode Rose Bowl Pasadena 1987. He's balding on top, but he's grown the rest of his hair and pulled it into a thin scraggly ponytail. The genuinely powerful, unlike the Vuyos of this world, don't give a fuck about making an impression.

Zinzi is tough and flawed. Bad things have happened t her and she has done bad things - she was jailed and animalled for killing her brother. There's a bit of Lisbeth Salander in her (but even with Sloth, she is a little more believable). 

I hand over an old card to each of them, from FL[Former Life, pre-animalling]. Cringingly, it reads:

ZINZI DECEMBER WORD PIMP

That's just the kind of cocky idiot I was. "Wordsmith" was too wanky. But why I couldn't have just gone with "writer" or "freelance journalist", only my cocky idiot FL self knows. At least I managed to keep my old number.   

"What's a word pimp? Like you rent out words by the hour?"   

"For dodgy assignations in tacky motel bedrooms. Yeah."

The investigation twists and turns, driven by Zoo City beats and Beukes' adrenaline prose to a bloody and rather overwrought conclusion.

A strange book to sandwich between the brilliant and beautiful fairy tale, Eucalyptus and the mannered charm of Ngaio Marsh who is adding New Zealand to my Global Challenge reads, but neither of them made me download the soundtrack...  

Eucalyptus, by Murray Bail

Could you, with certainty, identify a Scribbly Gum, Pumpkin Gum, Yellow Jacket, Barber’s Gum, Kakadu Woollybutt, Manna Gum, Gympie Messmate, or a Bastard Tallowwood?

Probably not. In which case you would not win the hand in marriage of the beautiful Ellen Holland.

For Ellen's father has set potential suitors the task of identifying all the Eucalyptus trees on his New South Wales estate. Not surprisingly, most fall by the wayside but the rather dull (he would be, wouldn't he?) Mr Cave , seems set to succeed...

That's the fairy tale premiss of Murray Bail's lyrical evocation of Australia's iconic gum tree, of which there are apparently 700 variations.

The eucalypts may be seen as daily reminders of the sadnesses between fathers and daughters, the deadpan stoicism of nature (which of course isn’t stoicism at all), drought and melting asphalt in the cities. Each leaf hanging downwards suggests another hard-luck story or a dry line or joke to wave away the flies... 

There are may hard-luck stories to be told, and many dry lines too, as we learn a little of the history of this tough environment, which is home to tough people :

The men walking about either had a loose smile, or faces like grains of wheat. And every other one had a fingertip missing, a rip in the ear, the broken nose, one eye in a flutter from the flick of the fencing wire.

Late one afternoon – in the 1940s – the last of the bachelor-brothers fell in the river. No one could remember a word he had said during his life. He was known for having the slowest walk in the district.

Not surprisingly, Holland the incomer from Sydney who takes over the estate, doesn't quite fit in:

People didn’t trust him. The double smile didn’t help. Only when he was seen to lose his temper over something trivial did people begin to trust him.

A few months later, his daughter arrives. Ellen has never known her mother, but knows her parents met through a "matrimonial advertisement" he had placed in a newspaper notice: “What’s wrong with that? It has a high curiosity value for both parties."

Before the birth Holland had taken out an insurance policy against his wife having twins. Ellen's brother died only a couple of days old, but the big cheque he received would pay for the estate.

To claim ownership of his new land Holland feels compelled to name every bird, rock and tree. And he plants an eucalyptus tree in front of the house.

The gum tree has a pale ragged beauty. A single specimen can dominate an entire Australian hill. It’s an egotistical tree. Standing apart it draws attention to itself and soaks up moisture and all signs of life, such as harmless weeds and grass, for a radius beyond its roots, at the same time giving precious little in the way of shade. It is trees which compose a landscape.

That first tree led to an obsession, and that obsession leads him to lay down the challenge that like his own advert for a wife, will define his daughter's life. The challenge of naming every one of the rare and obscure eucalypts will defeat many, but Cave is different.

Holland and Cave spend many days walking the estate but, as Cave is demonstrating the botanical prowess that seems destined to flower into an arranged marriage, Ellen becomes entranced by the storytelling of an enigmatic stranger. Some of his stories are tragic, some very funny, and many are both.

We learn that "in one of the countless culs-de-sac in Canberra lived a retired public servant and his wife. For the last seventeen years they had only spoken to each other through their dog." (We are not told whether the dog features in  Kaleski’s classic 1914 study, which was called - this is true! - Australian Barkers and Biters).

We are told that clarity, lack of darkness  might be called “eucalyptus qualities.”  There is darkness in Eucalyptus, but Bail's writing glitters with extraordinary qualities, carrying both science and poetry.

I am hugely grateful to Kim at Reading Matters for the recommending Eucalyptus,  a five star read and quite possibly the best novel I have read this year.

Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

 
I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible fom his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came

 Although the war in Biafra was in the news a lot when I was a child, I would have difficulty explaining what it was all about.

I remember pictures of starving, pot-bellied children, with big eyes and fly-covered faces.

If I am being honest, I remember hearing, and, I presume, telling Biafra jokes. Thankfully, none have stayed with me.

After reading Half of a Yellow Sun I now know a lot more about Biafra, and the Igbo struggle for freedom. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2006 novel is an immensely powerful work, brilliantly weaving together the often very ordinary lives of a group of people loosely connected through the radical university at Nsukka, who will soon be engulfed by extraordinary violence and suffering.

In the early 1960s, a young boy, Ugwu comes to work for an revolutionary academic, Odenigbo. Odenigbo's partner, Olanna has a twin but not identical sister, Kainene, who falls in love with a diffident English journalist, Richard, who is entranced by Igbo culture and has vague aspirations to write about ancient rope pots.

"Socialism could very well work in Nigeria if done right, I think," (Richard ) said. "It's really about economic justice, isn't it?"

Kainene snorted. "Socialism would never work for the Igbo... Ogbenyeau is a common name for girl and you know what it means? "Not to Be Married by a PoorMan." To stamp that on a child at birth is capitalism at is best." 

These relationships develop against a complex network of professional and social rivalries, often seen through the shrewd eyes of Ugwu, and illuminated by vivid description and texture. Few of the characters are fully sympathetic, and many are relentlessly arrogant and unpleasant, and throughout Adichie has little room for sentiment in her portrayals of superstition and small-mimded resentments.

The book is in four parts, first telling of the years of optimism, when the intellectuals debate Pan-Africanism, when Odenigbo's claim that "the only authentic identity for an African is the tribe" sounds positive and liberating,  then fast forwarding to massacre and war, before revisiting the same to periods from a slightly different perspective. It is a clever technique that demands great confidence in the writer, but Adichie is very much on top of her story and she seldom puts a foot wrong.

It is a complex narrative, with a lot of characters, but but they are well-drawn and utterly convincing. A million people died in 30 months of conflict, so you know from the start that not all with survive, and none will be unscathed;  many tears will have been shed by many readers, but Half of a Yellow Sun is a journey well worth taking.   

As Odenigbo tells the young Ugwu: "There are two answers to the things they will teach you about our land: the real answer and the answer you will give in school to pass.

"They will teach you that a white man called Mungo Park discovered River Niger. That is rubbish... But in your exam, write that it was Mungo Park."

The Informers, by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

What comes to the son directly from his father isn't worth anything, because children don't believe their parents, not a word, and that is how it should be.

...Raising a son is tough, but explaining to him who you, are what kind of life has made you who you are, is the toughest thing in the world

In 1941, the United States persuaded the Colombian government to implement the Proclaimed List of Certain Blocked National. It was a blacklist of Nazi sympathisers, and inclusion meant 'civil death', making it impossible for someone to carry out any economic activity.

Although some deserved their place on the list that brought internment and ruin, inevitably, it also bought disgrace and disaster for other against whom the allegation were less clear-cut, perhaps even malicious, and with consequences still felt decades later.

Ostensibly, The Informers is about a writer, Gabriel Santoro,  who decides to tell the story of an enigmatic German exile, Sara Guterman, who has became a friend of his father, a lawyer and renowned academic.

For some reason, he reacts with great hostility to his son's account, publishing a scathing review, and they are estranged until the father faces a life-threatening operation and a reconcilliation of sorts begins.

Just before the War, Sara's family had fleed from Emmerich to Bogota, where her father opened the Nueva Europa Hotel, frequented by, among others, German expatriats.

In an interview with Gabriel for his book, she explains:

The war was in the hotel, we carried it in our pockets... I can't tell you all the things I saw, because there are people who are still alive, and I am no informer; I don't want to destroy reputations or dig up anything that someone wants to keep buried. But if I could, if we were alone in this world, you and I... I could tell you everything....

Later you'd be sorry you knew. One gets contaminated by the this kind of knowledge. 

The Informers is beautifully written, revealing layer upon layer of complex relationships, between father and son, but also of a strained and challenging society. By the 1990s, when much of the story unfolds, Bogota is rocked by terror, and the drug war centre of Medellin is not far away; sometimes the concerns seem distant, sometimes they are very close indeed.

• The Informers, by Juan Gabriel Vasquez (trans. Anne McLean) Bloomsbury, 2009.

 

 

In The Country Of Men, by Hisham Matar

It is 1979, and through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy, Suleiman, Tripoli sounds so beautiful. It is a city of fragrances and light, Roman ruins and sunshine, but also one where the prudent display their allegiance to  the Benefactor, the Father of the Nation, the Guide of the Libyan Popular Revolution.

"Stopping at the next traffic light, (Mama) whispered a prayer to herself. A car stopped so close beside us I could have touched the driver's cheek. Four men dressed in dark safari suits sat looking at us.  At first I didn't recognise them, then I remembered. I remembered so suddenly I felt my heart jump. They were the same Revolutionary Committee men who had come a week before and taken (university professor) Ustath Rashid.

But the boy has faith: "The imam... of our local mosque, had told me, have no cause to fear; only the guilty live in fear."

Anyway, he is with his mother and their relationship is close. They are, she says, "Two halves of the same soul, two open pages of the same book..."

But many of the Pages aren't open to Soolma and there is much about her life , and her mysterious illness, that he doesn't understand. Even her own mother's favourite and much-repeated story was not what is seemed: "Scheherazade was a coward who accepted slavery over death."

Her life is shaped by an arranged marriage at 14 to an ancient man fully nine years older than her and of whom she had not been allowed even to see a photograph; she would be taunted by a maid who said the future groom was a ugly, with a big nose. 

Fearful that the wedding night would not go as planned, her father had buried a pistol in his pocket: "Blood is going to be spilled either way."

Faraj is a Bedouin who has left the desert behind to become a business man, importing trees from Sweden, and less, successfully, cows from Scotland: "Where they are from the sun has no heat and barely any light."

"So you want to convince us you've been to Scotland?"

"No, I saw it in a film. I felt a chill just watching it."

Tripoli is a city of secrets - "Don't tell Moosa, nothing every stays in that man's mouth" - but Suleiman is not good with secrets, and the naivety of youth makes him an unreliable narrator

He sees life vividly, but life is not always what it seems.

Like her two sons, Um Masoud was fat. Her buttocks were the size of watermelons. Although I never tried it, of course, I was certain I could balance a glass of water on one of them."

For Um Masoud's husband Ustath Jafer, was "an Antenna, a man of the Mokhabarat, able to put people behind the sun," and as Soolma will come to realise "informing on your fellow citzens is Libya's national sport." 

The regime is brutal, and dissent is dangerous. A few students speak our and are hung; "The foolish dreamers!" says Mama.

"Here it's either silence or exile, walk by the wall or leave. Go be a hero elsewhere."

This a country where the defenders of the revoution gather crowds into the National Basketball Stadium, where a noose hangs from the backboard of a net, and a death sentence is carried out on live televison.

"In a time of blood and tears, in a Libya full of bruise-checkered and urine-stained men, urgent with want and longing for relief, I was the ridiculous child craving concern..."

This a book about growing up, about dawning realisations of the adult world, about the distance between father and son. "How much of him is there in me? Can you become a man without becoming your father?"

It is also a book about betrayal, and the languid beauty of its vivid and warm imagery and language makes the intrusion of brutality all the more shocking.

Highy recommended. I won't be disappointed of In the Country of Men turns out to be the best novel I read in 2011.

• In the Country of Men, by Hisham Matar (2006) read on Kindle.

 

April, the Ban, and In Praise of Challenges

I have to say I was a little bit sceptical about Reading Challenges. Something didn't feel quite right.

Then again, I set myself challenges in other things, and I do like to have structure to reading, so why not?

It has turned out to be a very good decision indeed. Shortly I will try and deliver on my commitment to the Eastern Europe Challenge (this won't be too hard as I regularly read novels by Eastern Europeans) and the Argentina Challenge (I am going ot go there eventually).

I have been concentrating on Dorte's 2011 'Seven Continents' Global Challenge, three books from each of seven continents, with a couple of extra rules of my own just to spice it up. I am going on author's nationality rather than setting and I am only allowing writers I am reading for the first time. (The nationality criteria wasn't well thought through - I had also decided that science fiction might be the springboard for the seventh continent section so I am nominally committed to read three books written by extra-terrestrials....).

The Global Challenge was worth doing if only for the enjoyment of hunting down possible titles; I must have spent hours combing reviews, following Amazon "Customers who bought..." and checking Wikipedia entries for country of birth etc.

And I have read some splendid books. Thanks Dorte!

The best book I read in April was In the Country of Men, Hisham Matar's insightful and moving story of a boy growing up in post revolutionary Libya. Review to follow, five stars and already a strong contender for my favourite read of 2011.

I was also much impressed by Red April, by Santiago Roncagliolo - not everyone's cup of tea, apparently, but strongly recommended, and a book purchased, rather perversely, by a negative mention on Petrona, Splinter by Sebastian Fitzek (four star review to follow, Maxine!).

I also read Stratton's War, by Laura Wilson (and would probably read more by her if I wasn't so strongly drawn to John Lawton), and Agatha Raisin and the Vicious Vet, which is a guilty pleasure partly driven by my PR in Fiction project...

I suppose I could include Asa Larsson's Savage Altar in a challenge, but including Sweden would be like including England... 

   

Red April, by Santiago Roncagliolo

Religion, ritual, corruption, murder and terror are woven into the fabric of Red April as vividly as the blankets tourists bring home from Peru. It is Carnival week, May 2000, and party-goer Justino Mayta Carazo discovers a body, badly burned and missing its right arm. Like everyone else in Ayachuco he has been drinking for several days and his memories are vague.

Justino's testimony is recorded in amusing officialese, by Associate District ProsecutorFelix Chacaltana Saldivar, a devoted bureaucrat, who lives alone, except for the heavy and present presence of his dead mother.

As he has done 36 times before, he has just completed a doomed supply requisition for a new typewriter, two pencils and a ream of carbon paper. On the way to work he stops to buy a newspaper.

The vendor said that today's edition hadn't arrived in Ayacucho yet, but he did have yesterday's. Chacaltana bought it. Nothing can change much from one day to the next, he thought, all days are basically the same.

 Of course, however hard the diligent prosecutor tries to follow the rules, and simply do his job, the coming days will not be the same. Even his trips to the restaurant, where the enchanting girl in the pink embroidered blouse works, where he wants to drink mate, will change.

"Today we only have coffee."

"Coffee would be fine."

"Coffee with guineapig? You're very strange, Senor...."

The shadow of Shining Path terror hangs heavy over Ayachuco. It is a decade since the war subsided, but scars are deep and fears that the Senderistas will return are visceral and ripe for exploitation by army, police, politician and anyone else trying to win advantage in fragile times.

As the police captain tells Chacaltana,"I don't want to know what evidence you have. I don't want to have anything to do with this case. Elections are round the corner. Nobody wants to hear about terrorists in Ayacucho."  

Puzzled, the dutiful prosector says it is their duty.

"Our duty is to shut up and do what we're told!"

But Chacaltana continues to investigate in his leaden, jobsworth way. He continues as the Carnival goes on, and the death toll mounts. The killings are linked by a sequence of severed limbs ... and the immediate presence of Chacaltana. The inquiries bring brutal interrogations, where people disappear and mass graves are just part of the horrific landscape of terror and counter-terror, where morality was long since dissolved by frightened pragmatism.

"I was once like you, Chacaltana I hought we could stop this. But it's stronger than the two of us. This is the history of our country. Spare yourself the dispoointment."

Santiago Roncagliolo has written a wonderful novel that works well a crime story, but is layered with vivid insights on so many levels, at once funny, gripping  and shocking. Some of the events are brutal, but there is no glorification of violence here, simply the unnerving presence of a terrible reality. As the author notes:

The Senderista methods of attack described in this book, as well as the countersubversive strategies of investigation, torture and disappearance are real. Many of the dialogues of the characters are in fact citations taken from Senderista documents or the statements of terrorists, officials, and members of the armed forces who participated in the conflict. 

• Red April, by Santiago Roncagliolo (Kindle edition), trans. Edith Grossman  

Night Train to Lisbon, by Pascal Mercier

"Do you have the impression that people see you as you are?"

The Greek burst out laughing. "Of course not!"

The man asking the question knows people see him as a brilliant scholar and linguist, reliable and predictable, but dry as his nickname, Papyrus. Many at the college in Bern at which he teaches will shorten the "impossibly old-fashioned, even archaic" Raimund Gregorius, to Mundus.  

He sees with a woman on a bridge and fears she may be about to jump. He approaches her, they talk, and she writes a phone number on his forehead.

He asks her what language she speaks, and the way she says "Portugues" changes everything.

At the age of 57, Mundus was about to take his life into his own hands for the first time.

He walks out of his job and takes the night train to Lisbon. Here begins a quest to discover all he can about a mysterious writer, Amadeu de Prado. Prado was a doctor,  whose life changed irrevocably when he saved a life. The man worked for the secret police and Prado's act of professional mercy would not be forgiven by a community brutalised by Fascist oppression.

Night Train is a long, complicated and demand novel, full of reflection on the nature of frienship, family, loyalty, and on the reading, writing and our perceoptin fo the world.

It is a also splendidly evocative of Lisbon, and not least its terrible history.

Slowly Mundus pieces together Prado's story, and fills in the spaces behind a book he wrote that is quoted at length. It is a bold move by Mercier to compose what is heralded to be such brilliant prose, but Night Train has tremendous confidence and power.

"Life is not what we live; it is what we imagine we are living, said a note in Prado's book.

It is a book about devotion and separation.

Maria Joao says of Prado: "He loved trains , they were a symbol of life for him. I would like to have travelled in his compartment. But he didn't want me there. He wanted me ont the platform. He wanted to be able to pen the window and ask me for advice." 

Jealous and distraught, his sister Adriano wanted him all to herself but "had realised that you can never have for yourself someone who is not on good terms with himself."

This is a novel for people who love novels and the act of writing reading, and believe that one can discover a city through its bookshops.

"There were people who read and there were the others. Whether you were the a reader or a non-reader was soon apparent. There was no greater distinction between people."

  Night Train to Lisbon, by Pascal Mercier, trans Barbara Harshav

Havana Red, by Leonardo Padura

Havana is hot.

The heat is a malign plague invading everything. The heat descends like a tight, stretchy cloak of red silk, wrapping itself round bodies bodies, trees and things, to inject there the dark poison of despair and a slower, certain death. It is a punishment without appeal... It tortures mangy, forlorn steet dogs searching for a lake in the desert; old men dragging sticks that are more exhausted than their own legs...

Lieutenant Mario Conde, known to everyone as the Count, has made his decisions. Shunned by sons of childhood friends for being a policeman, he is now shunned by some colleagues for a previous 'disagreement', suspended  and put on form-filling.

With Skinny Carlos, now wheelchair-bound and not-so-skinny, now too fat to risk a reunion with a childhood sweetheart, he visit bars that are dangerous for someone with his past, and liable to erupt into sudden violence. 

A body is found by the Havana Woods, wearing a scarlet dress. Sergeant Palacious brings him up to speed.

"What do you reckon, Conde? Yes, it's a man. Dressed and face painted like a woman. Now we've got murdered transvestites, we're almost part of the developed world. At this rate we'll soon be making rockets and going to the moon..."

This a tough, gritty Havana of hard characters, and their comments on sexuality and many references to skin colour  presumably reflect a Cuban reality.

It is going to be tough investigation for Conde: "The fact is I love prejudice and can't stand pansies."

Worse, the victim is well connected and powerful people are asking for discretion, that links must not not be made  between an important family and "that mess of transvestites and queers their son was mixed up with." 

The Bitter Lemon website tells us;

Leonardo Padura was born in 1955 in Havana and lives in Cuba. He has published a number of short-story collections and literary essays but international fame came with the Havana Quartet, all featuring Inspector Mario Conde.

Like many others of his generation, Padura had faced the question of leaving Cuba, particularly in the late 80s and early 90s, when living conditions deteriorated sharply as Russian aid evaporated. He chose to stay. And to write beautiful ironic novels in which Soviet-style socialism is condemned by implication through scenes of Havana life where even the police are savagely policed."

Padura's writing is rich and dense, laden with vivid imagery, and the dialogue crackles with idioms that that must have challenged translator Peter Bush; indeed, as the Count would say, "I'll bet my buttocks on it."

(I read Havana Red believing it to be the first in a series, but it is actually number  I should have started Las cuatro estaciones (The Four Seasons) with Havana Blue.)   

Havana Red by Leonardo Padura, trans Peter Bush, published by Bitter Lemon Press

Carte Blanche, by Carlo Lucarelli

The first Commissario De Luca novel is set in the chaos of 1945 Italy. Bologna is occupied by the Germans and run by fascists. 

It is a dangerous time to be a police officer; in Milan alone there were 16 competing forces - including the Gestapo - investigating and arresting each other.

"What an ugly mess, De Luca said to Sonia's motionless profile, all curves, under the damp fringe. "Whatever I do is wrong. If I follow you, your father'll have me killed, if I don't, Vitali'll kill me. If I investigate I'm dead. If I don't investigate, I'm dead the same. Is this any way to work?

In a valuable introduction Lucarelli describes the "enormous moral and political confusion that mixes together the desperation of those who know they are losing, the opportunism of those ready to change sides, the guilelessness of those who haven't understood anything and even the desire for revenge in those who are about to arrive."

Carte Blanche is just 93 pages long and the action takes place over a short time. I suspect many Italian readers would find it the politics and acronyms tasking. Most authors would have fleshed it out with background that at last doubled the length, but the Lucarelli has the confidence to keep his delivery taught and compelling - but perhaps at the expense of emotional engagement.  

• Carta Bianca, first published in 1990, English translation in 2006 by Michael Reynolds. 
• Thanks to Norman at Crime Scraps for leading me to De Luca (review).