Parole dette al vento - Niente narrativa dal 1971!

Un paio di settimane fa su Internazionale (n.824 – 4/10 dicembre 2009) è uscito un articolo di David Randall, un autorevole giornalista britannico, intitolato “Ho smesso di leggere i romanzi”.

Randall sostiene di non leggere un’opera di narrativa dal 1971 e di leggere solo ed esclusivamente saggistica. La cosa sconcertante non è tanto che David Randall preferisca la saggistica alla narrativa, ma che accantoni la narrativa con la motivazione che se i personaggi sono plausibili, non vale la pena leggere un’opera uscita dalla fantasia di uno scrittore.

Visto l'argomento del mio blog, non potevo che non essere d'accordo. Non leggere narrativa è un po’ come dire “non mi piace la fotografia d’autore perché conosco già com’è fatta la realtà”. La letteratura è una forma d’arte come la pittura o la scultura, come il cinema o, appunto, la fotografia. Secondo me i romanzi ci offrono punti di vista alternativi ed originali, a cui altrimenti non avremmo mai accesso. Un’opera di narrativa può scandagliare la mente umana in modi che i saggi scientifici non faranno mai, perché indaga le emozioni da un punto di vista personale, soggettivo, e non sempre affidabile (vedi per esempio “Il Giro di Vite” di Henry James). La narrativa fa riflettere sull’esistenza umana, sulla complessità e la vastità dei sentimenti e delle esperienze umane, ci fa conoscere parti del mondo e categorie di persone che altrimenti ci sarebbero inaccessibili.

Se per esempio leggiamo un saggio di storia sulla Londra vittoriana, avremo davanti ai nostri occhi una serie di dati e la consapevolezza, per esempio, dell’estrema povertà di un certo strato sociale di Londra, la presenza endemica di orfani e del lavoro minorile. Ma la storia, oltre a fornirci dati sulle masse, ci racconta quasi solamente dei grandi personaggi: la regina Vittoria o al massimo il suo consigliere prediletto. Per entrare nella vita delle persone comuni, per esempio di un ragazzino dell’epoca vittorian, e capirne le sofferenze e le emozioni non possiamo fare altro che leggere Dickens. Ho studiato a fondo la guerra di secessione americana e le sue cause, legate allo schiavismo e all’abolizionismo, ma posso dire di aver “capito” che cosa volesse dire essere uno schiavo nel profondo sud americano – se si può affermare di poter capire una cosa talmente orrenda - solo leggendo “Amatissima” di Toni Morrison! Ho pianto lacrime amare leggendo quel libro, cosa che non mi è mai capitata leggendo un libro di storia sull’argomento. E un'ultima cosa vorrei aggiungere, che tra l'altro calza a pennello perché ho appena citato Toni Morrison, che è una scrittrice dalla prosa a dir poco "poetica". La letteratura è spesso poesia! Il modo in cui vengono usate le metafore, le sinestesie, le allitterazioni... e poi l'ironia, il sarcasmo, la satira. C'è tutto e ancora più di tutto nella letteratura: c'è la sociologia, la psicologia, la storia e la politica.

PS: Mi sono ricordata che circa un anno fa avevo dato vita ad una serie di post intitolati "Parole dette al vento", scritture volanti rigorosamente in italiano dove intrecciavo autori che amo e parole o poesie nella speranza che qualcuno le "cogliesse" come le avevo colte io. Ne ho scritti solo due (e uno su Toni Morrison!) e poi me ne ero dimenticata, ironia della sorte. Ora ho rimesso il tag, ma credo che ci fossero altri post che potrebbero essere taggati con quel nome...

PS2: il link ad un'altra opinione sull'articolo di David Randall, da parte di un blogger di nome Patassa.

37. “Sostiene Pereira” di Antonio Tabucchi

Anno di prima pubblicazione: 1994
Genere: romanzo storico
Paese: Italia

In English: Pereira Declares by Antonio Tabucchi (or Declares Pereira)

La recensione di questo libro è uscita nella rivista on-line Paper Street.

Antonio Tabucchi is one of our greatest writers. If you want to read more Italian authors you could try this book. Tabucchi is on the same level as Calvino or Baricco in my opinion. It is set in Portugal in the 1930s, but those who know Italy will recognize some hints at things we have experienced in the past (or are we experiencing it now?). It is an existentialist novel, but not in an annoying way. It's also a novel about literature: Pereira, the director of the literary page of a newspaper hires Monteiro Rossi, a young boy to write some obituaries, in case some important writers like Gabriele D'Annunzio might die. However, what Monteiro Rossi writes is impossible to publish, because it is all imbued with politics. In Salazar's dictatorship, few people had the courage to express their opinions and the young boy is one of them.

Sull’autore: Antonio Tabucchi è nato a Pisa nel 1943. Studia per un periodo a Parigi, dove per caso compra in una bancarella un libro del poeta portoghese Fernando Pessoa e si innamora della sua poesia. Inizia così una vera e propria passione per il Portogallo e per la sua letteratura, tanto da diventare docente di lingua e letteratura portoghese a Bologna e il più importante studioso dell'opera di Pessoa in Italia. Il suo primo libro è Piazza d’Italia (1975) a cui fanno seguito molti altri romanzi e raccolte di racconti. Uno dei suoi romanzi più importanti, oltre a Sostiene Pereira, è Notturno Indiano (1984), storia di un uomo che sta cercando di rintracciare un suo amico scomparso in India. Nel 1994, quando viene pubblicato Sostiene Pereira, l’opposizione all’entrata in politica di Silvio Berlusconi si stringe intorno a questo libro, nonostante Tabucchi ribadisca che si tratta di un libro più esistenzialista che politico. Tabucchi, tuttavia, è attivo anche dal punto di vista politico (collabora per esempio con Il Fatto Quotidiano, il giornale “di opposizione” fondato nel 2009 da Antonio Padellaro ed ha partecipato alla trasmissione di approfondimento politico Annozero).

Da Sostiene Pereira è stato tratto anche un film, con Marcello Mastroianni come protagonista.

36. “The Glass Palace” by Amitav Ghosh

Year of first publication: 2000
Genre: novel, historical novel, family saga
Country: India (the author is Indian, but the novel also has strands in Burma and Malaysia)

In italiano: Il Palazzo degli Specchi di Amitav Ghosh, edito da Neri Pozza (2007), € 14,00

Plot: The novel begins in Mandalay, Burma, in 1885, when the British are about to seize the city with a powerful army of Indian sepoys. The Burmese royal family will be sent into exile in a small Indian village and the royal palace ravaged. Rajkumar, a Bengali orphan boy, has a chance to enter the “glass palace” during the chaos following the fall of the Ava Kingdom, and there he meets one of Queen Supayalat’s maid servants, a breathtakingly-beautiful young girl called Dolly. Rajkumar will make a fortune with teak and finally marry her. In the meantime, the royal family is “incarcerated” by the British in a place called Ratnagiri, on the western coast of India, almost forgotten by the Burmese and everyone else. They make friends with their jailers nonetheless: Uma Dey, the District Collector’s wife, and Dolly become close friends. When her husband dies, Uma reinvents herself as an activist for Indian independence and has a chance to travel to Europe and America. Another strand follows Uma’s nephew Arjun, a dedicated officer in the British Indian Army, who has a conversion and starts to fight for India’s own side after realizing the contradictions of being a colonial and fighting for the British. The novel follows three generations and three families across borders, giving us a multi-layered portrait of colonial and post-colonial India, Burma and Malaysia. The novel spans more than one hundred years, finally ending in the 1990s, when Rajkumar’s grand-daughter Jaya embarks on an internet search to find her long-lost uncle Dinu, who now lives in Rangoon. Burma, now called Myanmar, is no longer the “golden country” it used to be: bad politics, famines and the selfishness of its rulers have turned it into an impoverished land, where the military junta has seized the power and incarcerated opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Some thoughts: This is a superb and unique novel. There is so much in this book that I don’t know where to start. It’s a book that will stay with me for a long time. Once again Ghosh confirms his gift for storytelling, giving life to unforgettable characters such as Rajkumar, Uma or Dolly.
He demonstrates that South East Asia in the 19th and early 20th century could be as multicultural as cities like New York or London are today. Ghosh’s novel has nothing to envy from multiracial family sagas set in the late 1990s or early 2000s as written by Zadie Smith or Hanif Kureishi. Rajkumar is a Bengali-born peasant who makes his fortune in Burma and feels more at home in Mandalay or Rangoon than in Calcutta, whereas Dolly is an attendant of the royal family, a Burmese by birth who ends up feeling more at ease in India than in Burma. Saya John, Rajkumar’s mentor in the teak trade, is a Malay raised by Catholic priests, whereas Uma is an upper middle-class Indian widow who lives between New York and the subcontinent. Their nephews, children and grand-children Neel, Dinu, Arjun, Manju and Alison are part Indian, part Burmese, part Malay and part American. All of these characters cross borders between countries and social classes, having multiple identities that Ghosh loves to explore. Rajkumar’s rags to riches story is only an example of social mobility in the novel, but there are many others (for example Mohan Sawant, a coachman, who ends up marrying one of the exiled princesses, but keeps leading a modest life). Ghosh wants to demonstrate how common it was at that time to float between borders of social class (the novel is obviously highly-researched). The theme of multiculturalism and social mobility in the British Raj is also featured in Sea of Poppies, Ghosh’s latest novel.
A lot is devoted to reflections on British colonialism in South East Asia. For example, when Uma criticizes Dolly for her faith in Queen Supalayat because she is believed to have had a lot of people killed, Dolly answers that she is scared by the picture of Queen Victoria hung at Uma’s, instead. She reminds her friend of how many people have been killed in the name of Queen Victoria. Uma starts to be more conscious about the injustices of the British rule while she is travelling abroad. Initially, her point of view is that of the Indian Independence League, but later in the novel she becomes a supporter of “the velvet glove”, that is to say a supporter of Gandhi. Her nephew Arjun has a slower transformation from officer of the British Indian Army to revolutionary fighter for the independence of India. Ghosh details the doubts of Arjun’s fellow soldiers: they swore to be loyal to their country but which one is their country, India or the British Empire? They resent the fact that they are sent to Malaysia to defend the British Empire, which prevents them from defending India, their own country. Uma debates with Rajkumar’s youngest son, Dinu: shall India fight in the Second World War with the British and against the Nazi or shall India fight only with a concrete promise of self-rule? Uma thinks that fascism and colonialism are both evil and she doesn’t see much difference between them. Uma and Arjun’s transformation equals that of Indian people from subjugated colonials to fully independent members of a big democratic nation.
The Glass Palace is an ambitious novel, with vivid descriptions and complex characters. It has a “gloss” of history without being boring or difficult and it’s multi-layered, packed with details and undoubtedly cinematic. It has some minor flaws nonetheless. Sometimes Ghosh alternates tales of war and distress with accounts of sappy relationships including sex scenes on the beach, falling into the stereotypes of Bollywood movies too often. Towards the end it feels like it’s several novels edited into one (I think it’s inevitable when you write such a long book, unless your name is Lev Tolstoj!). Ghosh is not able to leave his characters to their faith, telling us exactly what happened to each one of them. Sometimes years pass in a paragraph and characters who where children are suddenly grown up. Also, the ending is a bit rushed and sloppy: Ghosh wants to comment on the current situation in Myanmar, where the democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi is at house arrest, but it all feels a bit too sketchy, also considering the details crammed in the rest of the novel.
Something curious and albeit interesting about The Glass Palace: the book was a regional winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, but Ghosh, unaware that the publishers had submitted his book, withdrew the novel from the competition, objecting to the idea of his work being classified as “Commonwealth literature” when the prize is only open to books written in English. By doing this, he didn’t betray the spirit of the novel, which criticizes British colonialism quite harshly.

Ghosh also wrote a non-fiction book, Incendiary Circumstances: A Cronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times (2006) where there is an essay on Burma called "At Large in Burma". Here he writes about an uncle who used to live in Burma and was probably the inspiration for one of the characters in the book.

About the author: read this post or follow this link.

Writing about Africa and not for Africa

How many occasions do we have for celebrating famously inflation-racked Zimbabwe, a country run by somebody defined by many as a tyrant? Well, now we have at least one. Petina Gappah’s collection of short stories about her home country, Zimbabwe, has won the Guardian First Book Award. An Elegy for Easterly has been praised by many critics and I’ve read a great deal about it. Even though the country is living in a permanent economical depression, life still goes on there: people are falling in love, getting married and having children. We should think more often about that.

The author is a Zimbabwean lawyer who now lives in Geneva, Switzerland, and was partly educated in the UK. She said that she doesn’t want to be labelled as “the voice of Zimbabwe” and that she doesn’t write for Zimbabwe but about Zimbabwe. I really want to read this book. Maybe for Christmas I could have it posted from the UK…

By the way…

Some weeks ago an article appeared on The Guardian website telling us that Chinua Achebe, the great Nigerian writer, had rejected the definition of “father of modern African literature”* on the grounds that “there were many of us”. Now a new article, written by Ghanian author Nii Ayikwei Parkes, has some interesting thoughts on the matter. Apart from the fact that it is obvious that there cannot be only one father of African literature as African literature is diverse and written in many different languages, he reflected on the meaning of the expression “father of modern African literature”. Immediately after reading the piece, he googled “father of European literature” and “father of primitive African literature”, thus underlining the eurocentric undertone of the aforementioned expression!

This made me wonder at the way we still "patronize" Africa, we consider it as a whole, even when we are sponsoring what we call "postcolonial literature" (without thinking that this label also implies an eurocentric point of view).

* This expression was coined by Nadine Gordimer in a completely different context. The original sentence was "Chinua Achebe's early work made him the father of modern African literature as an integral part of world literature".

35. “Pecore Nere” di Gabriella Kuruvilla, Ingy Mubiayi, Igiaba Scego e Laila Wadia

Anno di prima pubblicazione: 2005
Genere: raccolta di racconti
Paese: Italia

Editori Laterza (€ 9,50)

La recensione di questo libro si trova nella rivista culturale on-line Paper Street a questo link.

Nell'articolo pubblicato su Paper Street non ho potuto parlare molto delle autrici per motivi di spazio, ma forse le conoscerete già un po' perché tutte e quattro scrivono per la popolare rubrica "Italieni" che esce settimanalmente su Internazionale.

Gabriella Kuruvilla è nata nel 1969 a Milano da padre indiano e madre italiana. Si è laureata in architettura ed ha collaborato con numerose riviste. Ora si dedica a tempo pieno alla scrittura e alla pittura. Nel 2001 ha pubblicato con lo pseudonimo di Viola Chandra il libro Media Chiara e Noccioline. Nel 2008 ha pubblicato la raccolta di racconti E’ la vita, dolcezza. I suoi quadri sono stati esposti sia in Italia che all’estero. Leggi un suo racconto a questo link e visita il suo sito personale per vedere i suoi quadri e leggere degli estratti.

Igiaba Scego è nata nel 1974 a Roma da genitori somali espatriati nel 1969 dopo il golpe di Siad Barre e fino alla prima media andava ogni estate a Mogadiscio. Dopo essersi laureata in lingue straniere alla Sapienza, ha fatto un dottorato di ricerca in pedagogia. Scrive per numerosi quotidiani e riviste, tra cui L’Unità (qui la sua rubrica) e Nigrizia. Ha scritto i romanzi La Nomade che Amava Alfred Hitchcock (2003), Rhoda (2004) e Oltre Babilonia (2008). Inoltre, ha curato Quando Nasci è una Roulette insieme a Ingy Mubiayi e la raccolta di racconti Italiani per Vocazione (2005). Un suo racconto è anche presente in Amori Bicolori (2008). Recentemente ha curato un programma su Radio3 intitolato “Black Italians”. Leggi un suo racconto a questo link.

Ingy Mubiayi Kakese è nata nel 1972 al Cairo da padre zairese e madre egiziana. E’ arrivata in Italia nel 1977 e si è stabilita a Roma con la famiglia. Ha frequentato prima le scuole francesi e poi quelle italiane. Ha iniziato a scrivere folgorata da scrittori francesi come Sartre e Camus, ma anche da Italo Calvino. I suoi racconti sono stati pubblicati in varie raccolte, tra cui Amori Bicolori (2008) e Italiani per Vocazione (2005).

Laila Wadia è nata a Bombay nel 1966, da genitori indiani seguaci di Zarathustra. E’ arrivata in Italia da adulta e si è stabilita subito a Trieste, dove lavora come collaboratrice esperta di lingua inglese all’università di Trieste. Ha scritto una raccolta di racconti, Il burattinaio e altre storie extra-italiane (2004), e il romanzo Amiche per la Pelle (2007).

Io, a parte quest'antologia e Amori Bicolori, ho letto anche tre romanzi bellissimi che intrecciano l'Italia e il corno d'Africa nella loro narrazione. Ho deciso di parlarvene un po'. Il primo è scritto da una delle quattro autrici di Pecore Nere, si tratta di Oltre Babilonia di Igiaba Scego (Donzelli, €17,50), di cui per altro avevo già parlato in questo blog. Quando ho iniziato a leggere questo libro ero in partenza per Londra. Guarda caso il mio ostello era a Willesden, il quartiere dove è ambientato White Teeth di Zadie Smith (e dove è anche cresciuta). Nella mia mente non potevo fare a meno di fare il paragone: Igiaba Scego è la nostra Zadie Smith! O lo sarà, se preferite. A parte il colore della pelle, tutte e due riempono le loro storie di personaggi dalle geografie più disparate (ma che immagino siano le persone che conoscono e con cui hanno a che fare tutti i giorni), ci si diverte da matti leggendole, ma non a scapito del contenuto, e infilano nelle loro storie tutto quello che le emoziona e le interessa, dalla musica alla letteratura. Non mancano però momenti amari, come la descrizione della Somalia martoriata dalla guerra o dalla crudeltà dei colonizzatori. Ecco un pezzettino del libro, preso quasi a caso, per darvi un'idea del talento della ragazza:

“La Nus-Nus *

C’è qualcosa nella morte che assomiglia all’amore.
Antologia di Spoon River, pagina 103, versione comprata in edicola, allegata a un giornale. Quale? Mar non se lo ricordava più. Testo a fronte. Mar comprava solo poesie con testo a fronte. Rilesse il verso in inglese There is nothing about death like love itself.
Il ritmo era abisso. Come la canna della pistola dentro la bocca di Patricia.
Le faceva paura. Era seduta in mezzo al niente di Villa Borghese, Mar. Intorno i bambini giocavano, le coppiette si baciavano e i tossici speravano di rimediare la loro dose in vena con qualche borseggio sul bus 490.
La vita scorreva fluida intorno a Mar. Il cielo era terso come in certi telefilm tedeschi. Le nuvole distratte. Gli uccelli esitanti. Niente solcava quel blu finzione. Roma sembrava un set cinematografico. Sembrava uno studio della MGM degli anni d’oro. O forse era solo Cinecittà. A ogni angolo, inaspettati, potevano spuntare Visconti, la Magnani, Alberto Sordi. O perché no, il grande Federico Fellini con una Ekberg e una fontana. Con un Mastroianni e una soubrette.Federico Fellini che gira il suo nuovo film con Mar Ribero Martino. Una ragazza nera. Troppo nera. Con una madre bianca, argentina, italiana, portoghese. Una famiglia di errori la sua. Una famiglia di pazzi."

* La <>>, in lingua somala.

Nella prossima puntata, Cristina Ali Farah. :-)

The book to redemption

The Man Asian Literary Prize was awarded to Su Tong’s The Boat to Redemption. Now, you might have never heard of Su Tong, but apparently he’s a bestselling author in China. His novella Raise the Red Lantern was made into an Oscar-nominated movie directed by Zhang Yimou (it’s called Lanterne Rosse in Italian if anybody’s wondering). The Boat to Redemption is set in the period of the Cultural Revolution and it’s about a womaniser who’s banned from his home by the local authorities and starts his redemption by living on a boat (read an excerpt here, it’s really worth it). I’m happy that a book not originally written in English has won the prize and I’m even happier because a Chinese author has won it. I want to see more Chinese names on the shelves of our bookshops!

I didn’t blog the shortlist for the prize (only the longlist and some musings on the prize itself), but there were some interesting pieces in there. Apart from “the Chinese treat” aforementioned, the list was dominated by writers from the Indian subcontinent. The most interesting book, in my opinion, was Residue, written by Kashmiri-born Nitasha Kaul, which explores the evolving relationship between Keya Raina and Leon Ali, two Kashmiris who have never lived in their “homeland” (read excerpts here). Then there’s Omair Ahmad’s Jimmy the Terrorist, about politics in an Indian Muslim community (read an excerpts here), and Siddharth Chowdhury's Day Scholar, which tells of a powerful Delhi property broker and political dealer, who brings his mistresses to the hostel he runs (read excerpts here). The list is completed with The Descartes Highlands by Manila-born Eric Gamalinda, the story of a woman who buys a baby in Manila (read excerpts here).

This prize is three years old and, apart from raising criticism for its geographical definition of Asia, aims to bring Asian literature to the attention of the public. I really hope that some of these books (especially if they are in translation, I can’t really understand which ones are apart from the winner) will come to the attention of the Western readers!

By the way...

Other “Chinese-themed” books I’d like to read: A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo, Waiting by Ha Jin and American-born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang.

Zadie Smith’s new collection of essays is out, it’s called Changing My Mind: Ocassional Essays and I’m very excited to read it. Some people say that she is better as a critic than as a novelist. I'm not sure about that, but she has a sharp mind. Here's an essay called "Speaking in Tongues", based on a lecture that she gave at the New York Public Library in December 2008 and a sneak peek of Zadie's literature criticism.

34. “Due volte” di Jadelin Mabiala Gangbo

Anno di prima pubblicazione: 2009
Genere: romanzo
Paese: Italia

Il libro è edito dalle Edizioni e/o (€16).

Trama: Due gemelli rasta di origine beninese, Daniel e David, crescono in un istituto di suore vicino a Bologna, insieme a compagni di avventure e disavventure dal passato difficili: c’è Pasquale, piccolo camorrista di origine napoletana, che legge poesie e le vuole scrivere sui muri nonostante il divieto delle suore, e poi c’è Agata, che è stata “sputata” dallo zio, o almeno così capisce Daniel. Il tutto ambientato nell’Italia degli anni ottanta, tra una partita a Subbuteo e una gita al negozio di giocattoli per comprare, con i soldi risparmiati, i tanto agognati transformers.

Qualche pensiero: Dalla recensione di Michael Braun della Tageszeitung uscita su Internazionale (n.813, settembre 2009):
“[…] l’autore ha scelto di raccontare la storia con gli occhi e le parole del bimbo di dieci anni, frugando fin troppo nei suoi ricordi. Il risultato è un romanzo dal linguaggio eccessivamente semplice che alla lunga stanca, prolisso in molte descrizioni a scapito dell’intensità di una storia che riesce solo in parte a essere un romanzo di formazione. Bellissimi i ritratti dei due compagni di sventura […]. Dal libro non emerge che il bambino è nero, a parte qualche disquisizione sui capelli. Chi si aspetta un racconto sulla vita di un bambino africano in un paese bianco rimarrà deluso.”

Sono in parte d’accordo con queste critiche al libro: ci sono un paio di cose che non mi hanno convinto e ha ragione Michael Braun a pensare che l’autore avrebbe dovuto lasciare più spazio alle storie dei compagni dei due protagonisti, che sono molto toccanti anche attraverso il filtro dell’ingenuo narratore. Mi è piaciuto, tuttavia, il fatto che queste storie fossero fatte intuire e non raccontate esplicitamente, viste con gli occhi di un bambino che non le capisce fino in fondo o non gli dà troppo peso. Non ci è dato sapere, infatti, chi fosse in realtà lo “sputatore” della bambina Agata, o come un bambino napoletano è finito in un istituto di suore bolognese.

La semplicità del linguaggio non mi ha dato fastidio, anzi; Daniel ha pensieri originali e il modo di vedere le cose di un bambino di dieci anni è sempre interessante e divertente (e Gangbo riesce bene nell’impresa di creare un narratore-bambino, con storpiature di parole e pensieri dissacranti). Tuttavia, i continui riferimenti alle marche di giocattoli o di vestiti che andavano di moda negli anni ottanta alla lunga stancano: forse nei coetanei dell’autore evocheranno anche una forte nostalgia, però nel resto dei lettori (e io ho solo sette anni in meno dell’autore!) servono solo a sottolineare eccessivamente l’ambientazione italiana del libro e “l’italianità” dei due gemelli, che pur essendo di origine africana sono culturalmente italiani. David e Daniel sono per altro un ibrido: 100 % italiani ma anche africani (con le seconde generazioni della migrazione la matematica non funziona). L’influenza che ha la cultura rastafari trasmessagli dal padre, che loro credono in prigione, c’è, ma è una cosa che tengono per sé. Daniel e David sono alla ricerca del “cuore nero”, anche se non sanno bene che cosa sia, e ricordano con nostalgia quando il papà gli faceva ascoltare la musica di Bob Marley e Linton Kwesi Johnson, raccontandogli della corruzione di Babilonia. In realtà, il fatto che i due bambini siano neri non influisce molto sulla storia, a parte, appunto, qualche disquisizione sui capelli. Forse l’autore ha cercato di spiegarci che ci possono essere storie con protagonisti appartenenti a minoranze senza che queste storie vertano per forza sul dilemma dell’identità o sull’avversione per il diverso*. D'altronde, il fatto che i due gemellini siano di origine beninese, e non congolese come l'autore, avvalora la tesi che l'etnicità non sia fondamentale all'interno della storia. L’autore, infatti, rigetta l’etichetta di “scrittore migrante” e preferisce quella più semplice e “non ghettizzata” di scrittore (vedi quest’intervista).

Detto questo, mi è sembrato che la mancanza di riflessioni da parte del narratore-bambino su questi temi o la mancanza di reazioni e giudizi sulle origini africane dei bambini togliesse autenticità alla storia. A togliere ulteriore autenticità alla storia, a mio parere, è l'improbabile religione dei gemelli, il rastafarianesimo.

In conclusione, ho trovato stimolante la storia, ma avrei accantonato qualche marachella probabilmente autobiografica, che oltretutto rischia di ridurre il libro ad una mera serie di episodi, e sviluppato maggiormente le storie di vita dei bambini dell'istituto.

Sull’autore: Jadelin Mabiala Gangbo è nato nel 1976 nella Repubblica Popolare del Congo ed è in Italia da quando aveva quattro anni. Cresciuto tra Imola e Bologna, ora vive a Londra. Ha pubblicato i romanzi Verso la Notte Bakonga (1999) e Rometta e Giulieo (2001), versione contemporanea della tragedia di Shakespeare con protagonisti una giovane studentessa e un consegnapizze cinese.

* Ricordo di aver riflettuto su questa possibilità guardando Radiance di Rachel Perkins, un film australiano con tre protagoniste aborigene.

33. “The Garden Party and Other Stories” by Katherine Mansfield

Year of first publication: 1922
Genre: collection of short stories
Country: New Zealand

You can read all the short stories in the collection on the web, at this link.

In italiano si può trovare: Tutti i racconti di Katherine Mansfield, edito da Mondadori (2006), € 18 oppure Tutti i racconti edito dalla Newton Compton (2008), € 7.

What it’s all about: This is a collection of fifteen short stories, most of which deal with everyday tasks or uneventful things. The beauty of the stories lies in the description of the inner life of the characters, from the delicate Laura of “The Garden Party” who is shocked by the death of a man down the street to Linda of “At the Bay”, who is bored with domestic life in provincial New Zealand but probably disapproves of different lifestyles, such as that of Mrs Harry Kember, who’s considered a scandal in town for her peculiar behaviour with both men and women.

Some thoughts: In the front cover of this book (a Penguin edition) there is a painting by Vanessa Bell, sister of Virginia Woolf and a member of the Bloomsbury group. Virginia Woolf was in fact a friend of the author and one of the first people to recognize her talent. She published some of her work and extolled "the only writing I have ever been jealous of”. Another connection might be that Vanessa Bell led, to some extent, a bohemian life (she had an open marriage ante litteram), which is something Mansfield experienced as well. Woolf and Mansfield are considered two of the best women writers of their time, the former for her wonderful novels and the latter for her beautifully-written short stories.

As it usually happens, in this collection there are bad stories and good stories. I had already read four of these stories for a course on New Zealand literature and rereading them was like meeting with old friends. Some of the other stories were almost inconsistent, easy to read but also easy to forget. I’ll write about the two I liked the most.

In the first one, “At the Bay”, we are introduced to New Zealand as if reaching the shore on a ship: bungalows, paddocks, bush-covered hills, silvery, fluffy toi-toi and, of course, a flock of sheep are in sight. There are no doubts: we are in “the land of the long white cloud”. The sky is ‘bright, pure blue’ and the sea is ‘leaping, glittering, […] so bright it made one’s eyes ache to look at it’. The contrast with an English landscape is evident and appalling. The story is mostly about gender relationships: Stanley is the man of the house and gives for granted that women should serve him and look that his walking-stick is not lost, but then worries all day because he didn’t say goodbye to his wife before leaving home in the morning. His wife Linda, instead, is looking for something more than just domestic life. She becomes infatuated with Jonathan, who’s fond of music and books. Mansfield’s feelings about life in New Zealand are summarized in his words: ‘And all the while I’m thinking, like that moth, or that butterfly, or whatever it is, “The shortness of life! The shortness of life!” I’ve only one night and or one day, and there’s this vast dangerous garden, waiting out there, undiscovered, unexplored’. They’re both probably bored with the provinciality of life in New Zealand. Then there’s Beryl, the unmarried aunt, who goes swimming with a Mrs Harry Kember, whose behaviour borders on homosexuality (she pays a compliment to Beryl for her beauty, she behaves as if she were a man, she smokes, plays bridge and, most important of them all, she has an open relationship with her much-younger husband). The part with the children playing a game of cards until dusk reminds me of some short stories by Janet Frame, another New Zealander who liked to write about her childhood memories. Another thing that Mansfield has in common with Janet Frame is the funny distortion of the English language that they both put in the mouth of their characters: ‘a jug of what the lady-help called “Limmonadear”’ or ‘a bee’s not an animal, it’s a hinseck’ (uttered by one of the children) are just some examples of it.

The second story, “The Garden Party” is maybe her best one. The main character is Laura Sheridan who, like Clarissa Dalloway, is preparing for a party. Even the opening line, ‘And after all the weather was ideal’, reminds me of Woolf’s book, which begins with ‘Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself’. It’s the same way of throwing us immediately into a world that already existed before the beginning of the story: no Dickens-style introductions and no three-page long descriptions of the characters. The main concern of “The Garden Party” is the social-class divide: Laura and her family learn that a man has died down the street, just before their garden party is to be started. He belongs to another class and lives in an unhealthy, smelly ‘poky, little hole’, where Laura and her sisters are forbidden to go. Unlike her mother, Laura claims that she doesn’t care for class distinctions (it sounds like Miss Quested from A Passage to India when she says she wants to see ‘The real India'). She would like to cancel the party but her family doesn’t agree, so she finally decides to visit the family of the deceased and bring them a basket of spare sandwiches. It’s only when Laura is in the house with the mourning women that she realizes that it was not really a good idea and that class distinctions exist in spite of her. New Zealand’s society, as portrayed by Mansfield in these stories, is not dissimilar from English society: the upper middle-class enjoys drinking tea and having garden parties with marquees, but they’re completely disconnected to common workmen.

Some of Mansfield's longer stories (“At the Bay”, for instance) read like section of novels, because the characters outgrow the short-story format and could easily fit in a novel. I’m not sure whether this is good or bad, but I enjoyed “At the Bay” all the same. Another reason why some people dislike Mansfield’s fiction is that sometimes the stories have abrupt endings and no resolution (in “The Voyage” for instance, where a young girl and her grandmother experience a night on a boat): nothing of importance occurs and all the story is about small incidents.

“The Garden Party” is more self-contained and yet so much detail is crammed into one single short story - sibling rivalries, the class divide, the opposition between the inner life of Laura and her outer, more respectable self (also reminiscent of Mrs Dalloway’s introspection), the reality of death happening on your doorstep (which is something recurrent in Mansfield’s stories, it’s also the main theme of “The Stranger”, another piece of good work) - to me it's the flawless short story.

About the author: Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) is considered one of the most accomplished short story writers of her time. She was born in Wellington, New Zealand, into a prominent colonial family. She went to England to finish her education and, after having journeyed across continental Europe for a few years, she went back to New Zealand. However, she found her native country terribly provincial and headed again for London. In London she led a bohemian life, had lesbian love affairs, got pregnant out of wedlock and married a man whom she left the same evening and finally had a miscarriage. Her first book, In a German Pension, was published in 1911. In 1912 she began to write for Rhythm, edited by John Middleton Murry, whom she later married. She broadened her literary acquaintances, encountering modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf with whom she became close friends. With the publication of Prelude in 1916 (which was requested by Virginia and Leonard Woolf to be published for their Hogarth Press) she showed herself to be master of her own style. She contracted tuberculosis in 1917 and from that time led a wandering life in search of health, even though she kept writing short stories almost until her death in 1923. Before dying she published Bliss (1921) and The Garden Party (1922). Most of her work was still unpublished at the time of her death, so her husband took on the task of publishing her works.

By the way, I wrote a post on New Zealand literature (in Italian) just a few days ago.
For a series of articles on the best short story writers of world literature (including Franz Kafza, Julio Cortazar and, of course, Katherine Mansfield) follow this link.
The piece on K.M. also reflects on the fact that she wrote wonderful short stories as well as lousy ones.

Guardian's First Book Award 2009 - shortlist

• The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey (UK): also shortlisted for the Orange Prize and longlisted for the Booker Prize, it’s the story of an architect whose memories are being lost because of Alzheimer.
• The Selected Works of TS Spivet by Reif Larsen (USA): About a genius 12-year-old cartographer from Montana. Much of its story is told in the maps and diagrams supposedly drawn in the margins by Spivet.
• The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton (New Zealand): two linked narrative threads, one set in a girls' school in the aftermath of a pupil-teacher affair and the other in a drama school where details of the affair are used for the end-of-year production.
• An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah (Zimbabwe): 13 short stories that show different aspects of Zimbabwean life from the shanty towns to the mansions but which also have universal resonances such as betrayal.
• A Swamp Full of Dollars by Michael Peel: the chaotic story of Nigeria and its oil written by a corrispondent of the Financial Times.

Last year’s winner was a non-fiction book, Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise (read this post). Mark Brown, The Guardian’s art correspondent, claims that in this year’s shortlist, fiction is resurgent.

Note:

The Guardian First Book Award is open to all first-time authors writing in English, or translated into English, across all genres.
The fact that, for the sake of diversity, there should be some non-fiction books, at least a collection of short stories or a poetry book is always underlined by the commentators of the shortlist. The fact that every now and then there should be a translated book in the shortlist is never mentioned. I wonder if some translated books enter the competition at all and if the jury (usually very British) even takes them in some consideration.

For the longlist of this year’s Guardian First Book Award, click here.

For posts covering last year’s award, click here and here.

By the way, this month the Guardian book culb has Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss as its choice! Click here to read how much Sam Jordison struggled with this novel and here to read John Mullan talking about divisions in the novel.

32. “Journal d’Hirondelle” by Amélie Nothomb

Year of first publication: 2006
Genre: novel
Country: the novel is set in France, but the author is from Belgium

In italiano: Diario di Rondine di Amélie Nothom, pubblicato da Voland nella collana Amazzoni (2006), €12,50

As far as I know, this book hasn’t been translated into English. I can’t help saying once again that they should translate more literature into English, at least from European languages.

Plot: A man decides to take up a job as a hit man after a love story gone wrong which left him unable to feel any emotion. He’s the best of killers: cold-blooded and meticulous. One day he’s hired to kill a Minister and his family, but when he enters the house the man’s daughter is about to kill her father because he has read her diary. Moved by the encounter with the girl, who he was obliged to kill nontheless, he decides not to hand in the diary she was keeping.

Some thoughts: This is a very short novel, only 92 pages. The style is crude, almost grotesque, and the characters are not fully introduced. In fact they hardly have names or a biography. The explanation is probably that the main character is everyman, potentially the reader himself after a failed love story. Amélie Nothomb is usually praised for the psychological depth of her novels: Journal d’Hirondelle (“diary of a swallow”) describes how a person would react if he/she is deprived of all emotions. It is a weird novel, I don’t know if all Nothomb’s novels are like this, but the situation and the plot twist are very unusual. She comes to me as an experimental writer more than a good story teller (most contemporary Anglophone or Italian writers are good story tellers but don’t experiment much with literature in the way that Nothomb does with this book). She reminds me of Frédéric Beigbeder* because of her crude minimalist style, her anecdotes and wittiness, but also because of her permanent resolution to stupefy and challenge the reader.

About the author: Amélie Nothomb was born in 1967 in Japan into an aristocratic family of Belgian diplomats and politicians. She has also lived in China, New York, Bangladesh, Burma and Laos. The itinerant life of her parents didn’t have a positive influence on her upbringing and she lived the distance from Japan almost as an exile. She didn’t live in Europe until she was 17, when she moved to Brussels. After some family tensions, she returned to Japan to work in a Japanese company. She remained there one year and after this disastrous experience she moved again to Belgium. Her first novel, Hygiène de l'assassin (The Hygiene of the Assassin in English) was published in 1992. Since then, she has published roughly one novel per year. Her most famous works are probably the autobiographical novels Métaphysique des Tubes (2000, strangely translated as The Character of Rain), which details her Japanese childhood, and Stupeur et Tremblements (1999, translated as Fear and Trembling in English), which recounts her experience as a translator in a Japanese company.

* I just read by coincidence that yesterday Frédéric Beigbeder was awarded the Renaudot prize, one of the most important literary prizes in France, for his novel Un Roman Français (2009). Frédéric Beigbeder is a controversial writer in France, a sort of “enfant terrible, especially because of the depiction of drug abuse in his books (he admits that his characters are often autobiographical). In 2008, he was arrested for sniffing cocaine on the hood of a car one. In his new novel he takes his revenge on his prosecutor. However, the four offending pages disappeared from the book between the time some copies were sent to the press and the publication of the novel. Some say this was a marketing ploy, since Beigbeder used to work in advertising.

Aspettando la recensione del libro di Katherine Mansfield...

Qualche settimana fa, per la precisione il 17 ottobre, è uscita una puntata di "Che libro fa..." particolarmente gustosa, perché riguardava un paese di cui mi sono occupata qualche anno fa per la mia tesi, cioè la Nuova Zelanda. Qui le parti più interessanti della meravigliosa rubrica di Giovanna Zucconi:

"[...] È l’occasione per fare un giretto nei giornali di quell’altra Italia remota e capovolta. Sollievo: si parla d’altro, non c’è traccia delle nostre ossessioni collettive e neppure della vigente (qui) battaglia contro il «culturame». Si parla di libri, scrittori, e anche di cinema e delle arti, con toni normali, né spocchiosi né manganellanti, e con rispetto condiviso. È considerato naturale, laggiù, che esistano libri popolari e altri che popolari non sono: e che quelli che amano Dan Brown e quelli che amano Proust possono convivere pacificamente (talvolta nella stessa persona).

Agli antipodi, agli antipodi! La polemica più accesa, beati loro, sembra essere su questo tema: perché i Kiwi (nomignolo nazionale) leggono così poco la propria letteratura? Se esista o no una letteratura neozelandese non è il legittimo dubbio di chi come noi saprebbe citare sì e no Katherine Mansfield e Jane Campion: è la questione centrale, in un piccolo Paese ai margini dell’imperium angloamericano. Guardando alle classifiche: Diana Gabaldon è americana, Dan Brown pure, e fra Marian Keyes, Stieg Larsson, Ian Rankin, Clive Cussler eccetera, non ce n’è uno nato fra Wellington e Auckland.

Guardando invece ai dati (anche qui, invidia antipodea): il 44% degli adulti dichiara di avere acquistato almeno un libro nelle ultime 4 settimane, e il 39% è andato in biblioteca. Soltanto il 5% della fiction venduta è pubblicata in Nuova Zelanda, contro il 30% della saggistica e il 12% dei libri per bambini. Ancora più interessante il confronto con gli altri consumi culturali: il 34% dei contenuti televisivi nelle sei reti principali è nazionale, e anche il 19% della musica radiotrasmessa. Che cosa significa? Scrittori, editori, giornalisti, autori di alcune delle trasmissioni di libri (ce ne sono parecchie, nell’Italia alla rovescia), ne discutono in profondità. Il dibattito ci appassiona. Se non altro perché per qualche minuto ci distrae dal nostro, di dibattito."

La Stampa, 17 ottobre 2009

31. “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter” by Mario Vargas Llosa

Year of first publication: 1977
Genre: novel, satirical novel, comic novel
Country: Peru

In italiano: La Zia Julia e lo Scribacchino di Mario Vargas Llosa, edito da Einaudi ET (1994), €11,50
En español: La Tía Julia y el Escribidor de Mario Vargas Llosa

Plot: Lima, 1950s. Pedro Camacho is a Bolivian-born, eccentric writer of radio soap-operas that have a tremendous success all over the country. The story of Pedro Camacho, told through his scripts, is intertwined with that of Mario, a student and a wannabe writer who works as a news bulletin editor for Radio Panamericana and falls in love with the divorced wife of a cousin, his Aunt Julia, thirteen years his senior.

Some thoughts: This is the third novel by Vargas Llosa that I read after The Way to Paradise (El Paraíso en la Otra Esquina in Spanish) and The Feast of the Goat (La Fiesta del Chivo in Spanish, read this post) and I was not disappointed. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is actually one of Vargas Llosa’s most popular novels and it is partly autobiographical, seen that Vargas Llosa also married one of his in-laws who was thirteen years his senior. This book was written some twenty years after Vargas Llosa’s first marriage, when the couple was already divorced. In fact, Julia Urquidi Illanes, the real Aunt Julia, published a novel called Lo que Varguitas no Dijo (What Varguitas didn’t say), telling her version of the love story. Half autobiographical account and half work of fiction, La Tía Julia is a very engaging and enjoyable novel. The author used raw material from his life in Lima in the 1950s as well as much imagination in order to give shape to the funniest character of the novel, Pedro Camacho. Almost a dwarf, obsessively dedicated to his job and with a profound and exaggerated hatred for Argentinians, Pedro Camacho writes radio serials full of clichés, but the ability of Vargas Llosa makes them as captivating as the rest of the novel. There’s a clash between the epic, tragic and surreal stories written by Pedro Camacho and what Mario attempts to do with his realistic fiction. Vargas Llosa certainly intends to make fun of the clichés of soap-operas and cheap literature, for example through Pedro Camacho’s confused and entangled plots, but he also pays homage to the act of writing, detailing the way in which the two writers, Pedro and Mario, write their stories (the former writes 10-12 hours per day without stopping, whereas the latter is never satisfied of his work and throws away every single story that he writes). They are both writers, though very different, and success comes to them at different times. Whether “the truly good writer”, if such a thing exists, is more like Pedro or Mario is left to the reader to judge.
Vargas Llosa’s usual device, that is to say telling two different stories in alternating chapters, works perfectly for this novel. Every second chapter is a story written by Camacho, thus it is completely independent from the narrative of the other chapters. What is amazing is that Vargas Llosa is able to give life to a character, Pedro Camacho, almost entirely through the stories that he writes.
Comical and satirical, but never gross nor boring, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter really was a joy to read. By the way, not many people know that the novel was made into a Hollywood feature film called Tune In Tomorrow (1990) starring Peter Falk as Pedro Camacho and Keanu Reeves as Mario.

About the author: see this post

If you want to know more about this book, listen to the podcast from BBC's World Book Club.

By the way, The Guardian celebrates another great Latin American writer and one that I love, Julio Cortázar, in this article from a series on short story writers.

(turbo) traduzioni

Ancora una volta ho trovato spunti incredibilmente interessanti nella rubrica “Che libro fa…”, curata da Giovanna Zucconi per La Stampa. Ormai sono tre le puntate che vi vorrei “passare”. Prima di tutto andiamo in Germania:

In Germania il nuovo Dan Brown non è ancora uscito, eppure è già in cima alla classifica. Perché in tantissimi lo comprano in inglese, senza aspettare che Das verlorene Symbol compaia in tedesco, a metà ottobre. Poveri traduttori. Sono sei, hanno avuto dieci giorni per tradurre 780 pagine, lavorando dalle sei del mattino, senza neanche aver potuto leggere tutto il libro prima di chinarsi a picchiettare freneticamente sulle tastiere, e la loro fatica è inutile, se tutti lo leggono in inglese. In un video su Internet si vedono due di loro, abbastanza affranti, ciascuno al suo computer, intorno a un lungo tavolo che sembra tanto una catena di montaggio, mentre spiegano i segreti della «turbotraduzione», la chiamano così. Spiritosamente, nel sito di lancio del libro, con tanto di conto alla rovescia neanche fossimo a Cape Canaveral, uno dei traduttori per spiegare quant’è difficile il suo lavoro prende ad esempio la frase «The secret is how to die». Come renderla in tedesco, ma soprattutto come evitare di applicarla ai forzati della traduzione?Chissà se la qualità sarà decente, vista la fretta. E dire che la Germania investe tantissimo sulle traduzioni. Per esempio, il più importante premio di translation in lingua inglese, cioè il «Foreign Fiction Prize» del giornale The Independent, assegna 10.000 sterline ai vincitori, mentre il neonato omologo tedesco, «Internationaler Literaturpreis», ha stanziato 25.000 euro per lo scrittore vincente e 10.000 per il suo traduttore. Fra 131 titoli tradotti in tedesco da 33 lingue diverse, ha vinto il peruviano-americano Daniel Alarcón con Lost City Radio nella versione di Friederike Meltendorf. Consegna il 30 settembre, San Girolamo, patrono dei traduttori. Inclusi quelli dei turbobestseller?[…]

Sabato 3 ottobre 2009 “La Stampa”

Memole scrive:
1) I tedeschi leggono romanzi in inglese, mitici! Dovremmo imparare da loro!
2) Come si può tradurre bene un romanzo in così poco tempo e soprattutto come può essere che un équipe di traduttori lavori allo stesso romanzo? Immagino che ogni traduttore abbia il suo stile e il suo metodo, il risultato potrebbe assomigliare paurosamente a Frankenstein (avete presente l’omonimo gioco a “Per un Pugno di Libri”?).

3) Ma in Italia esiste un premio per la miglior traduzione così prestigioso? Ne dubito.

30. "Snow" by Orhan Pamuk

Year of first publication: 2002
Genre: novel, political novel
Country: Turkey

Nobel Prize for Literature 2006

In italiano: Neve di Orhan Pamuk, edito da Einaudi (2004), €12,80

Plot: Ka, a renowned Turkish poet who has been living in Germany for some 12 years, decides to go back to his home country. A friend suggests that he should go to Kars, a town on the border with Georgia and Armenia, and pose as a journalist there. In Kars a number of women have committed suicide because they didn’t want to take off their head scarves in the university buildings. The fact has caused a lot of debate in the country, as suicide is notoriously forbidden in Islam. In the small snowy town of Kars, Ka reunites with Ipek, a woman whom he once had feelings for, and finds himself in the middle of the tensions between political Islamists and secular nationalists. Ka becomes increasingly involved in many-sided intrigues in an incredible and absurd whirlwind of events.

Some thoughts: In the light of Turkey’s desire to join the European Union, this is a good novel to read if you wish to have an idea of some of the problems of Turkey, which is a secular country with a large Muslim majority. As a result of its position between Europe and Asia and of its troubled history, in Turkey there are both firm believers and atheists, religious extremists and secularists. Pamuk shows that even inside the same family there can be very different opinions on religion: for example Ipek and Kadife, two sisters, have opposite views of religion (one wears hijab as a flag of her religious beliefs, whereas the other doesn’t wear it and has extramarital sex). Religion and politics are the big topics of this novel, with their complexities and contradictions. The main character, though, doesn’t even know if he believes in God or not: when asked if he is an atheist he cannot answer. He doesn’t care for politics or religion and this makes him profoundly different from every one else in town. All he wants is Ipek: he childishly dreams of taking her with him to Germany where they would be happy forever after.

You can easily spot two obvious literary influences in the book: the first one is Franz Kafka (the absurdity of the farcical situations experienced by Ka, whose name is a reference to K, the main character of The Castle) and the second one is Dostoevsky (the introspection, the snow, the wanderings around town, the political commitment of the characters are all reminiscent of his works). There is also some postmodernism in the fact that the novel is largely seen from the point of view of Ka but it is written by one of his closest friends, Orhan, who may or may not be the same Orhan who is writing the actual book. Ka, like the author, comes from a bourgeois, wealthy family of Istanbul and he is a political exile in Germany, thus he’s very different from the inhabitants of Kars, who, according to Orhan, are poor, isolated and provincial. Orhan, who’s reporting Ka’s story, at a certain point apologizes if he has portrayed them in a simplistic way, assuring his readers that he has done his best to avoid this. I’m unsure if this is a small flaw in the book, or if it’s rather a very nice way of being honest about writing of a place you don’t belong to.

Snow is not an easy read, with all its politics and intrigues, but it is certainly worth a try. It is a novel in which poetry plays an important role: not only is Pamuk's style poetic, but he uses Ka's poems as an important device to keep the novel going.

About the author: Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952 into a bourgeois family. He studied architecture in Istanbul, but left the career and then graduated in journalism. Popular success came in 1990, when his novel Kara Kitap (The Black Book) became one of the most controversial and popular readings in Turkish literature, due to its complexity and 1995 publication and became the fastest-selling book in Turkish history. By this time, Pamuk had also become a high-profile figure in Turkey, due to his support for Kurdish political richness. Pamuk's international reputation continued to increase when he published Benim Adım Kırmızı (My Name is Red) in 2000. My Name is Red is set in 1591, during the reign of Ottoman Sultan Murat III. As many of Pamuk’s novels, it explores the relationships and the tensions between East and West. Pamuk's next novel was Kar in 2002 (Snow), which takes place in the border city of Kars and explores the conflict between Islamism and Westernism in modern Turkey. In 2005 he made a statement regarding the mass killings of Armenians and Kurds in the Ottoman Empire and a criminal case was opened against him for insulting Tukey and Turkishness. The charges were finally dropped in 2006. In that same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature with this motivation: "In the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city, [Pamuk] has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures”. His newest novel is Masumiyet Müzesi (The Museum of Innocence).

On Snow you can also read

“Anatolian Arabesques”, John Updike’s review in The New Yorker. And here’s a link to a short story by Orhan Pamuk if want to “taste” him (also from The New Yorker).

Guarda le interviste a Orhan Pamuk a Che Tempo Che Fa del 16 maggio e del 10 ottobre 2009 (due volte da Fazio!).

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story

I am currently reading The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Needless to say, I'm enjoying it very much. Everything that this young Ningerian novelist writes is a blessing.

As a quick snack, I would like to share this video with you. Adichie speaks about the danger of falling into stereotypes if you have only one story as reference.

By the way, Half of a Yellow Sun by Adichie has been chosen for this month's Guardian book club and there is a beautiful article by John Mullan, the man behind this book club, about the crossing of Igbo and English in the novel. Make sure you click on the links provided!

Herta Müller has won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature

As I did last year, when French author Le Clézio won the Prize, I scratched my head and said: “Uh?”. While all the world is congratulating the President of the United States of America for being awarded, quite unexpectedly, the Nobel Prize for Peace, yet another time the Nobel Prize for Literature has been won by a not-exactly-well-known author, Herta Müller.

So I read something about her life and works and surfed the web for some reactions to the prize. Here’s what I found out:

Herta Müller is a Romanian-born German novelist, only the 12th woman to win the prize in 108 years. Some people have ironically noticed that she fits into the criteria chosen by the Nobel Prize judges: she comes from a bicultural/ethnic minority background and she often writes about hard life in a totalitarian regime. Many think that recently the Nobel Prize for Literature seems to put political considerations ahead of literary merit. The criticism comes from the observation that many recent laureates are from ethnic or linguistic minorities (Le Clézio, Jelinek, Kertész, Gao and Szymborska) and therefore write about the political or social oppression that comes from this condition.

Herta Müller was born in the once Austro-Hungarian province of Banat, now part of Romania, and is therefore a part of the German minority of Romania. She writes, of course, about Ceauşescu’s communist regime: Herta Müller was in fact dismissed from her job because she didn’t want to cooperate with the Romanian secret police, moving to Germany in 1987 as a result of threats by the communists. The traumas of being in exile in her own country, Romania, and of being a minority in an oppressive communist regime have great influence on her works.

Unfortunately, only five of her works are translated into English and even in Germany she is not well known. Her masterpiece is considered to be Herztier, published in English as The Land of Green Plums: in Romania at the height of Ceausescu's reign, several young people leave the impoverished provinces for the city in search of better prospects, but they must face betrayal, suicide, and the reality that even the strongest must bend to the oppressors or resist and die. Other important works are The Appointment, about a young woman working in a clothes factory during Ceausescu's regime and The Passport (here’s a link with an extract), the story of a village miller in a German-speaking village in Romania, who applies for permission to emigrate to West Germany.

Reading the reactions to this award, I gather that everybody who has read her books agree that she is an exceptional writer, but the point of debate is more the meaning of this prize for the literary world, as if the commettee was trying to send a message. Similar polemics and observations arouse last year when JMG Le Clézio, also little known outside of France, won the prize (here’s a link to my post on the topic).

The Guardian reports that “Pete Ayrton, who has published Müller in translation at Serpent's Tail, said he was ‘absolutely thrilled’ at the news. "It's terrific and I think it shows the Nobel prize are doing their job to bring the writings of wonderful, neglected writers, who are underappreciated in the Anglo Saxon world, to our attention" he said.”

Two book bloggers, also of The Guardian, reflect on the award. Marting Chalmers in “Why Herta Müller Matters” writes: “It is once again challenging the self-satisfied Anglo-centrism of the English-language publishing business, with its rather narrow definitions of what constitutes good writing, and it is widening our ideas of Europe. And it is perhaps in its failure to engage with European literatures that the English culture, for all the advantages of the global reach of the English language, shows itself at its most provincial.”

It is very selfish and imperialistic to think that the judges were thinking of sending a message only to the Anglo Saxon book business, rather than to the whole literary world. Richard Lea is less "anglocentric" and, even admitting that he’s not an expert on Ngugi Wa Thiong’o or any other non-European writer, he thinks that the Swedish Committee is “running a European Club” and actually, if you read the list of recent winners, you only find writers who are not that far away from Sweden: JMG Le Clézio (France), Harold Pinter (England), Orhan Pamuk (Turkey, almost Europe), Elfriede Jelinek (Austria), Imre Kertész (Hungary) and Günter Grass (Germany).

Memole says: I don't know what to think. It's good that they are encouraging European literatures and that they don't stick to British/American authors, but it's also true that they could open their minds and give the award to an Asian or African writer, there are so many. On the other hand, I'm afraid that in 20 years' time we will be musing over the fact that Philip Roth or Amos Oz didn't receive the prize (the writer must be alive to be eligible), as we do now with Virginia Woolf or James Joyce. It seems to me that the judges decided to award the prize to a writer who's from an ethnic or linguistic minority, who suffered the injusticies of Nazism or Communism or any other dictatorship, fought against it and wrote about it, who's European but not British, better if from the new members of the European Union, who's a woman, who's not translated enought into English... and only after that agreed that the only writer who answers these characteristics is Herta Müller.

Here's a link to an article of the New York Times with more excerpts from Herta Müller's works.

L’unico suo libro disponibile in italiano è Il Paese delle Prugne Verdi. Sono stati pubblicati altri due dei suoi libri: Bassure, nel 1987, e In Viaggio Su Una Gamba Sola, nel 1992, entrambi ora fuori catalogo. Lei era anche presente al Festivaletteratura di Mantova (qui un link ad un articolo tratto da Il Corriere della Sera).

Hilary Mantel wins Man Booker Prize 2009

The winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize has been announced: it’s Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.
No surprise, it was this year’s favourite. She has beaten excellent writers such as A.S. Byatt and J.M. Coetzee (the favourite in my poll!).
I have never read a novel by Hilary Mantel and I didn’t know her name before reading about her nomination, but apparently she has written ten novels before this one. It’s sad when an author is awarded such an important prize and you had never heard of her/him or read one of his/her books. Wait for the next post on the Nobel Prize for Literature and you'll have the same reaction you had last year: uh?

Wolf Hall is a piece of historical fiction (most books in the shortlist were) concerning Thomas Cromwell, an adviser of King Henry VIII. It’s not exactly a quick read, the hard back being exactly 672 pages long, but most people who have read it think it’s really worth it.

James Naughtie, chair of judges said :

Hilary Mantel has given us a thoroughly modern novel set in the 16th century. Wolf Hall has a vast narrative sweep that gleams on every page with luminous and mesmerising detail. ... It probes the mysteries of power by examining and describing the meticulous dealings in Henry VIII's court, revealing in thrilling prose how politics and history is made by men and women. ... In the words of Mantel's Thomas Cromwell, whose story this is, "the fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes."

Read a review by a blogger friend, Asylum.

Other posts on this year's Man Booker Prize: longlist and comment (here) and shortlist and comment (here). On last year's Booker Prize, won by Araving Adiga's The White Tiger, here and here.

By the way, Not the Booker Prize, the competition created by Sam Jordison of The Guardian has been won by Rana Dasgupta’s Solo. I don’t know if he’s a good fiction writer (yes, it’s a man!) but I’ve read some of his articles published in English newspapers and he seems to be pretty good at writing.

29. "A Map of Home" by Randa Jarrar

In italiano: La Collezionista di Storie di Randa Jarrar, edito da Piemme (2009), € 17,50
Leggi la mia recensione in italiano nella rivista on-line Paper Street (qui link)

Year of first publication: 2008
Genre: novel, bildungsroman
Country: USA / Egypt / Palestine / Kuwait

About the author: Randa Jarra was born in 1978 in Chicago from a Palestinian father and a Greek-Egyptian mother. Randa and her family moved to Kuwait when she was only two months old and in 1990, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, they escaped to Egypt and then to the USA. She got a degree in Middle Eastern Studies from an American university and she is a translator from Arabic, but also a blogger and a short-story writer. She lives in Michigan with her partner and son. Her website is http://www.randajarrar.com/ .

The review of this book has been published in Italian on the on-line review Paper Street (link).

However, I'd like to add a part of an interview with Randa Jarrar appeared on Zocalo Public Square (link). The main character of the novel is called Nidali. Here's what the author says about her:

"Nidali is very bossy, loud, profane, funny, and she’s obsessed with her family’s history and her identity, and with how her new, sort of post-postcolonial self fits into the larger world she inhabits. She spends a lot of the novel trying to figure out who she is and where she belongs in the grand scheme, not just with her family, but with her international self, and who she want to be as opposed to who she is expected to be. Her family is full of failed artists, her dad is a failed poet and her mom is a failed concert pianist, and their main identity is rooted in their failure as artists. Their secondary identity is given to them by their own families, their places of origin—her mom’s as an Egyptian, and her father’s as a Palestinian. Nidali comes out of that, being a sort of mixed child in a somewhat homogenous culture. Even though they’re Arabs, her parents are from two different countries and it’s still seen as somewhat bizarre and out of the norm. From the very beginning, she has this feeling of being out of place, or being strange, or being a mix of things. Throughout the novel, she explores this mix, and tries to figure out a way for herself to be whole in the face of all this mixing."

And here's what Jarrar says about literary expectations on Arab and Arab American writers:

"I think readers tend to like stories by Muslim and Arab American women that detail sort of women’s oppression. Instead of a rags-to-riches story, it’s more of a hijab-to-freedom story. It doesn’t occur, I think, to most Americans, or not just Americans but the general population, that a woman can wear a hijab and can be the mistress of her own household and her own life and all that. I think there is a preoccupation with that kind of story.
There is also I think an expectation that an Arab American writer is going to tell sort of whimsical, magical stories, that Arabian Nights, genie-in-a-bottle sort of stereotype that an Arab American is an adept storyteller. That is what people expect, fantastical stories about ridiculous stuff, just bullshit. I think the oppressed woman, the ornate magic story, and maybe a third strain would be the hyper-political novel, or if not hyper-political, the somewhat didactic novel, not even set in America, or set in America featuring new immigrants, and showing the politically charged aspect of being Arab American or Arab post-9/11. Readers expect these books to be testaments of on-the-edge fundamentalists, not quite someone who is a fundamentalist, but how they might become one, how they might be understood. I think those are the preferred stories that are expected. There are more, but those are a few that seem the most pronounced, the ones that I’ve seen."

Not the Booker Prize

NOT THE BOOKER PRIZE (see this post), an alternative to the Booker Prize, created by Sam Jordison, a blogger of The Guardian. Since the process of finding the six books for the shortlist was simply by leaving a comment on the blog with the title of the book, some books arrived on the shortlist by strange means. The winner will be announced in a few days, together with the Booker Prize. The shortlisted titles are:

Rana Dasgupta – Solo (review and extract)
Solo recounts the life and daydreams of a reclusive one hundred year-old man from Bulgaria.

James Palumbo – Tomas (review and extract)
Tomas tears apart the world of the rich on his crusade against everything that's wrong with the 21st Century, including fat bankers and reality TV.

Eleanor Thom – The Tin Kin (review and extract)
When her aunt Shirley dies, Dawn finds herself back in her claustrophobic home town in Northern Scotland for the first time in years. She spends her days caring for her small daughter, listening to tapes of old country songs and cleaning Shirley s flat, until one day she comes across the key to a cupboard that she was forbidden to open as a child. Inside she finds an album of photographs, curling with age.

Simon Crump – Neverland: the unreal Michael Jackson story (review and extract)
This is a collection of interlinked short stories, interwoven against the constant presence of a certain Mr Michael Jackson. Is it the Jackson that you automatically think of? That's clearly for you to decide.

MJ Hyland – This is how (review and extract)
When his fiancé breaks off their engagement, Patrick Oxtoby leaves home and moves into a boarding house in a remote seaside town. But in spite of his hopes and determination to build a better life, nothing goes to plan and Patrick is soon driven to take a desperate and chilling course of action.

Jenn Ashworth – A Kind of Intimacy (review and extract)
Annie is morbidly obese, lonely and hopeful. She narrates her own increasingly bizarre attempts to ingratiate herself with her new neighbours, learn from past mistakes and achieve a "certain kind of intimacy" with the boy next door.

By the way...

Recently I learned from the comments that I'm not the only person who hardly buys any hardback novel. Read this article from The Times Online, about the 50 paperbacks of 2009. What is most interesting is not the list of paperbacks, but the history of this format (by Nicholas Clee).

Here's an interesting article on the similarities between Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly (main character of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, become famous for the interpretation by Audrey Hepburn, read my review) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby (unforgettable protagonist of The Great Gatsby, read my review): Is Holly Golightly The Great Gatsby in Drag? In fact, in my mind the two novels are somehow interweaved, maybe because I read them at a short distance of time one from the other.

For lovers of India, the new book by William Dalrymple: Nine Lives: in Search of the Sacred in Modern India (read here).

in the picture: La Lecture (Woman Reading) by Pablo Picasso