28. “Maximum City. Bombay Lost and Found” by Suketu Mehta

Year of first publication: 2004
Genre: narrative non-fiction, memoir, travelogue, reportage, socio-political analysis
Country: USA / India

In italiano : “Maximum City. Bombay Città degli Eccessi”, edito da Einaudi (2006), € 13,80

About the author: Suketu Mehta (born in 1963) is a writer based in New York City. He was born in Calcutta and raised in Bombay until the age of 14, when he moved with his family to the New York area. Maximum City, which is an autobiographical account of his experiences in Bombay in the two-and-a-half years spent to research the book, was released in 2004 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Suketu Mehta also co-wrote the screenplay of Bollywood movie Mission Kashmir with novelist Vikram Chandra. He is currently writing a book about the New York City immigrant experience.

What it’s all about: This book offers a fascinating insight into one of the world's largest, most vibrant and most chaotic cities in the world: Bombay (now renamed Mumbai). It covers everything from organized crime and prostitution to the Bollywood industry, from the political parties that control the city to the religious conflicts and riots between Muslims and Hindus.

Some thoughts: Maximum City is neither a common travelogue nor an average non-fiction book about Indian society; it’s more like an engaging novel with political and social insights. In a whirlwind of unforgettable characters, Suketu Mehta takes you to the flamboyant city of Bombay a.k.a. Mumbai a.k.a. the Gateway of India.
The people encountered by Mehta during his time in Bombay are not the boring people of everyday life, but peculiar, interesting people who could easily come out of a novel, almost to the point that you ask yourself how much of the book comes from firsthand experiences and how much is the result of the author’s re-work of these same experiences. Each Bombayite in the book inhabits his own Bombay: from Sunil, a Hindu nationalist who rises from street thug to Shiv Sena party leader, to Monalisa, a “beer bar” dancer, and Ajai Lal, who claims to be the only non-corrupted policeman in Bombay.
On the back cover of my Italian edition, there’s a recommendation from Salman Rushdie who says that Maximum City is the best book ever written about Bombay. Moreover, travel writer William Dalrymple considers it one of the best city books ever written and he must be right, because this book is excellent! Suketu Mehta is a successor of that tradition of travel writing that has Bruce Chatwin and Ryszard Kapuscinsky as their mentors.
Mehta portrays a city of shocking contradictions, where extreme poverty and opulence live close together. He meets gangsters, hit men, prostitutes, transvestites, policemen, wannabe poets, actors, film directors, aspiring jain monks and every kind of person that makes the incredible city of Bombay as it is. Bombay appears to be built entirely on sex, money and criminality: the aura of spirituality that pervades the western idea of India is completely swept away by the materialism of the people who inhabit the city, from its slums to its richest neighbourhoods. Those who are not part of this materialistic society, like the aspiring poet Babbanji, are crushed by the cruelty of Bombay.

By reading this book, I think I came to understand what writers such as Salman Rushdie (another Mumbaikar!) mean when they say that in a country like India “magical realism” is reality and not just fantasy: the violence that spurts out of Bombay is so shocking that it seems unreal to the reader of this book, sit in his comfy chair in a Western living room of a first-world country.

After reading this book, I almost came to the conclusion that I don't want to set foot in Mumbai whatsoever. Let's see if some other Bombayite book is going to make me reconsider this.

If you want to know more: read an extract from Maximum City and listen to a podcast interview with the author.

27. “Gli Arancini di Montalbano” by Andrea Camilleri

Anno di prima pubblicazione: 1999
Genere: racconti gialli

Paese: Italia

Sull’autore: Andrea Camilleri nasce a Porto Empedocle (Agrigento) nel 1925. Dal 1945 inizia a pubblicare racconti e poesie, iniziando poi a lavorare come sceneggiatore e regista. E’ il primo a portare in Italia il teatro assurdo di Beckett nel 1954, prima in teatro e poi in televisione. Lavora come delegato alla produzione di molte produzioni RAI, tra cui numerose fiction e messe in scena di opere teatrali. L’esordio narrativo avviene con Il Corso delle Cose (1978), ma il primo romanzo ambientato nella fittizia cittadina siciliana di Vigata è Un Filo di Fumo (1980). Dopo una pausa di dodici anni dalla narrativa riprende a scrivere. Del 1994 è La Forma dell’Acqua, primo romanzo poliziesco con protagonista il commissario Montalbano, ma il “fenomeno Montalbano” esplode solo nel 1998. I suoi romanzi vanno a ruba anche quando non è presente il simpatico commissario di Vigata, in particolare Il Birraio di Preston (1995), La Concessione del Telefono (1998) e La Mossa del Cavallo (1999). Nonostante il grande successo di pubblico, non tutti i romanzi di Camilleri incontrano il parere favorevole della critica, che spesso lo accusa di essere ripetitivo. Sono ormai più di venti i romanzi di Camilleri con protagonista il commissario Montalbano, il cui successo è stato aumentato dalla nota serie tv.

Di cosa si tratta: "Quando Montalbano incornava su una cosa, non c'erano santi". Il narratore che da anni racconta le storie del commissario di Vigàta, lo sa bene. Una parola stonata, un gesto incontrollato, un dettaglio incongruo bastano a mettere in moto le sue indagini. Così da un'impercettibile crepa nella "normalità" prendono avvio anche queste nuove storie, in cui Montalbano si imbatte nei crimini e nei criminali più eterogenei e insoliti: vecchie coppie di attori che recitano, nel segreto della camera da letto, un funereo copione; insospettabili presidi in pensione che raggirano generose prostitute; mogli astutamente fedeli che ordiscono crudeli vendette ai danni dei loro tronfi mariti ... Lasceremo Montalbano a Capodanno, colpito da una “gran botta di malinconia” dopo l’ennesima “azzuffatine” con l’eterna fidanzata Livia e confortato solamente dagli arancini della cammarera Adelina, “celestiale bontà” e conclusione saporitissima di una nuova serie di indagini del commissario più famoso della narrativa italiana. [dalla quarta di copertina perché oggi sono pigra]

Alcuni pensieri: *Contiene spoiler* Questa raccolta di racconti è il mio primo libro di Camilleri (e di Montalbano), anche se ovviamente conoscevo il simpatico commissario dalla famosissima serie televisiva della RAI.
Quello che mi è piaciuto di più di questi racconti è la lingua, un misto di italiano e dialetto siciliano. Tanto per farvi capire e prendendo praticamente a caso dalla prima pagina: “No, non era proprio cosa, l’unica era farsi una doccia e andarsi a corcare con un libro. Sì, ma quale? A eleggere il libro col quale avrebbe passato la notte condividendo il letto e gli ultimi pinsèri era macari capace di perderci un’orata”.
La soluzione dei casi affrontati dal commissario Montalbano non è mai scontata, ma è sempre una sorpresa che mette in luce l’astuzia e le infinite risorse del protagonista.
Ci sono anche racconti che ammiccano al lettore, per esempio “Montalbano si rifiuta”, dove nel bel mezzo di un’indagine un po’ macabra, con degli assassini che friggono gli occhi delle loro vittime in padella per poi mangiarseli, il commissario siciliano si reca ad una cabina telefonica e chiama l’autore, il signor Camilleri. Montalbano dice al suo inventore che si rifiuta di proseguire l’indagine perché questa cosa con “un tanticchia di sangue” di troppo non è nel suo stile (e neanche in quello di Camilleri, che infatti in questo modo si difende ironicamente dalle accuse di essere diventato ripetitivo e mieloso). Un altro doppio “ammiccamento letterario” è il racconto “Sostiene Pessoa”, in cui Montalbano viene aiutato a risolvere un caso dal libro che sta leggendo in quel momento (Montalbano è un assiduo lettore, oltre che un ottimo investigatore). I due riferimenti sono naturalmente al romanzo Sostiene Pereira di Tabucchi (che guarda caso ho appena finito di leggere!) e a I casi del dottor Abílio Quaresima, raccolta di racconti polizieschi del poeta portoghese Fernando Pessoa. Due autori che si tengono per mano nella mente del lettore, visto che Tabucchi è un grande esperto di letteratura portoghese e un amante della poesia di Pessoa.

Quello che conoscevo dalla serie televisiva c'è anche qui: la fidanzata che vive nel nord Italia e con cui litiga sempre, le immancabili amicizie con piccoli criminali (che però non gli impediscono di portare a termine le sue indagini) e il collega Catarella, un po’ tonto (“Dottori! Dottori” Pirsonalmente lei di pirsona è?”). Tutte cose che aiutano a rendere più piacevole la lettura. Non che Gli Arancini di Montalbano non sia una lettura piacevole e leggera di per sé: lo è anche per chi, come me, non è un’amante dei libri polizieschi.

Napo Masheane

Napo Masheane is a South African writer, poet, director, playwright and acclaimed performer.
She was born in Soweto, the most famous township of Johannesburg, but grew up in Qwaqwa (Free State, another part of South Africa). Caves Speak in Metaphors is her collection of poems and essays. She has performed and shared stage with many famous poets, among which Linton Kewsi Johnson (a famous Jamaican poet).

She read her poetry a few days ago at Festivaletteratura in Mantova. I could not go but I saw a video of the performance and I would like to share it with my readers. It is very powerful, I was mesmerized.



At the beginning she performes a piece of her poem SAMBURU "My people" (read the full version here), full of words in Bantu languages. She says: "We are Samburu north butterfly / I stand on the backs / Of those who are called Bakganka / Singing songs that the rains and the winds / Never whispered to dinoka. / Badimo baka waiting to be praised / With the buzz of the bees, / The beats of the drums / They chant to my unsaid choruses. / I stride on shoes of giants, / Creating the legacy of their conquest, / Embracing their names in verse, / Reflecting their voluptuous looks on lakes, / Pulling their strings from Khalagadi, / Placing them on borwa ba AFRICA".

Here's another poem by Napo Masheane, more accesible to us who don't speak Zulu or Xhosa (yet).

SUNRISE VOICES
God grafted the lines of the universe
Making the sunshine
At the birth of every being.
The fire that lights,
Through which new rays of life breaks,
A moment of time,
Where our new voices collectively
Must heal the diseased land-souls,
Liking the aged and the unborn.
Turning our childless grave yards
Into laughing homes,
Where our people are empowered and developed.

The chains of our past
Should not trouble us forever,
But seal the lips of slavery caves.
Our people should stop
To live under the tyranny of silence,
Turn deserted lands into farm fields.
We must sow the seeds of UBUNTU
Building and shaping our future on firm grounds,
So that our royal languages can echo proverbs,
At a place where our ancestors walked.
Let us help the poor and the lame
To open the closed doors
So that they can dress our hearts differently.
Let us move earth and assemble our villages
So that our tears can become raindrops
For the sea of education
For the rivers of prosperity
For the lakes of democracy

Our voices should write new poetic bibles
And prose of golden beauty,
Casting away HIV/AIDS- unemployment and felony
Let us use our voices to fashion the old
Build strong bridges of awareness
Bridges that will take us far beyond
The skyline of time.
Bridges that will transform our core from
Dance floors of misconception
As we re-create who we really are.

Let us dress our behaviours like monks
Allowing our offspring to pick fruits
From the highest trees of spirituality
So that they can destroy the walls of orphan villages
Giving each home a name

We are pillars of a proud vote
Bound by a period in which
Every being must speak colour sounds
Of togetherness.
Let our voices find ways
In which the webs of life are woven

A place where mothers cannot escape
The messages of their own bodies.
Let’s allow our fathers’ spirits
To stretch and match science, history and politics
Let our unique voices teach us
How to dig, plant, water our seeds
So that we can buy our children’s smiles.
Let our words call peace
As ancient drums still our voices
Sending us to a place
Where the love of UNITY lives
To draw our people as a unit,
Let our SUNRISE voices shout
For we know where it all begun
We know where we are
We know where we are heading

The sparks of the sun
Opened the sealed envelop of my words
They, tied in endless riddles
Are perused out to the world by my faith
For God grafted the lines of the universe
Making the sun shine
At the birth of my soul.
The fire that lights,
Through which new rays of life break,
A moment of time,
When our voice together
Must weave the diseased land-souls
Liking the age and the unborn.
Turning our childless grave yards into laughing homes
Where our people can speak the same
Let our SUNRISE voices shout

[from this website]


Read my post on Es'kia Mphahlele, another South African poet, here

26. “La Fiesta del Chivo” by Mario Vargas Llosa

In English: The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
In italiano: La Festa del Caprone di Mario Vargas Llosa, pubblicato da Einaudi (2000), € 18,59

Year of first publication: 2000
Genre: historical novel, dictator novel
Country: Author from Peru, novel set in the Dominican Republic

About the author: Mario Vargas Llosa was born in 1936 in Arequipa, Peru, into a middle-class family. He spent part of his childhood in Bolivia with his maternal grandfather, who was a consul for Peru there. He returned to Lima, where he studied law and literature. He started working for some Peruvian newspapers and married his uncle’s sister-in-law, 13 years his senior. He spent a few years in Europe where he began to write prolifically. His first novel was La ciudad y los perros (The Time of the Hero, 1963), a success of critic and public. His second novel, La Casa Verde (The Green House, 1965) made him one of the leading figures of the Latin American Boom. Conversación en la Catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral, 1969) is one of his most ambitious and famous novels to date. More novels came in the following years: La Tía Julia y el Escribidor (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1977), La Guerra del Fin del Mundo (The War of the End of the World, 1981) and La Fiesta del Chivo (2000). He is considered one of the most prominent Latin American writers, together with Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luís Borges and Carlos Fuentes. He is also a politician and has run for presidency in 1990.

Plot: Urania Cabral returns to her hometown, Santo Domingo, after 35 years. The city and the country are now very different: the regime of Generalísimo Rafael Trujillo has been defeated and democracy restored. Urania, now a successful lawyer in New York, is not simply another of the many Dominicans who suffered from Trujillo’s cruel dictatorship: she is in fact the daughter of Trujillo’s disgraced secretary of state Agustín “Cerebrito” Cabral. Another strand in the novel dates back to May 1961, when a group of assassins are waiting to gun down the evil dictator. All of them are very close to Trujillo but have their reasons to assassinate him. Finally, the third strand is the portrait of the Generalísimo himself and of his last days: he is charismatic, egocentric and intimidating man, but he is also cruel, violent and a chauvinist.

Some thoughts:
* It contains spoilers*

At the beginning of the book, the chapters that I liked the most were those concerning Urania: why did she leave Santo Domingo so suddenly and why did she refuse to return to her country ever since? Why is she so mad at her father after 35 years? Why is she unable to have a proper relationship with a man? The first chapters concerning the assassins who are were waiting to gun down Trujilo were not as “page-turning”, maybe because I already knew that they were going to make it and kill the evil dictator. As the novel progressed, however, I became interested in the lives and motivations of the killers and I became fond of all the characters. Still, the third strand, detailing the last days of El Jefe, was the most enthralling: entering the mind and the house of a dictator is certainly fascinating. Having read three novels by Vargas Llosa so far (this one, El Paraíso en la Otra Esquina and La Tía Julia y el Escribidor), I can say with some certainty that dividing the book in different strands of narration, alternating the chapters dedicated to each of them, is a way that Vargas Llosa uses quite often to interweave different stories that are nonetheless all connected in some way.

La Fiesta del Chivo is part of a tradition of Latin American novels about dictators. One of the most famous is, for example, El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch) by García Márquez, which unfortunately I haven’t read. Some “dictator novels” I have read are: El general en su laberinto, also by García Márquez, about Bolivar’s last days (even if he’s not usually considered a dictator, he was a great leader with some authoritarian power); A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif, recounting a series of speculations on the plane crash of Pakistan’s General Zia (read my review, in English/Italian), and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (also partly set in part in Santo Domingo during the dictatorship of Trujillo, read my review in English). The latter, so different from La Fiesta del Chivo in some parts and so similar in others, was described by Michiko Kakutani from The New York Times, as : “So original it can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets Star Trek meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West”!

In both La Fiesta del Chivo and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao I found the same way of speaking about Trujillo: with rage, hatred and humour. There’s no magical realism in Vargas Llosa, though (there’s no trace of fukú, the Dominican curse), as his novel is often described as “realist”.
At the beginning of the book, there is a passage about the chauvinism of Dominican men that becomes quite important if you think of the ultimate meaning of Urania’s story (Santo Domingo has been politically and physically violated by Trujillo):

“A ratos, de algún vehículo asoma una cabeza masculina y un instante los suyos se encuentran con unos ojos varoniles que le miran los pechos, las piernas o el trasero. Esas miradas. Está esperando un hueco que le permita cruzar y una vez más se dice, como ayer, como anteayer, que está en tierra dominicana. En New York ya nadie mira a las mujeres con ese desparpajo. Midiéndola, sopesándola, calculando cuánta carne hay en cada una de sus tetas y muslos, cuántos vellos en su pubis y la cuerva exacta de sus nalgas. Cierra los ojos, presa de un ligero vahído. En New York, ya ni los latinos, dominicanos, colombianos, guatemaltecos, miran así. Han aprendido a reprimirse, entendido que no deben mirar a las mujeres como miran los perros a las perras, los caballos a las yeguas, los puercos a las puercas”.

Urania's story is important because it represents the way in which the dictator ruined his country and his people, violating them and changing them forever. Quoting Junot Díaz again: this book is perfect if at school you “missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican history”!

Philip Roth on American Literature

Do you remember that a few months ago the permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize jury said that it was unlikely that an American author would be awarded the prize, because according to him "the US is too isolated, too insular", adding that "they don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature"? He called this attitude a "restraining ignorance" (read my post and my opinions on the matter here).

Philip Roth, one of the most prominent living writers in the US, during an interview concerning his book Indignation, was asked what he thought about this. He answered (I'm translating Philip Roth back to English once that his words were translated into Italian in this article published in La Repubblica):

"It is such a ridiculous polemic that I can't even understand it. I think that American literature, from after the Second World War until now, has been the most important of the world, with authors like Faulkner, Hemingway and Bellow. And also nowadays we have top notch writers such as Don DeLillo, E. L. Doctorow, Cynthia Ozick, Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison. I feel that I am in the company of excellent colleagues".

Take that Mr Engdahl!

But of course Mr Roth is himself an "isolated, insular" American, what does he know about world literature? :-P

25. “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding

Year of first publication: 1954
Genre: novel, adventure novel, allegorical novel
Country: England

In italiano: Il Signore delle Mosche di William Golding, edito da Mondadori nella Collana Oscar Classici Moderni (1980), € 8,40

Nobel Prize for Literature 1983

About the author: William Golding was born in 1911 in Cornwall, England. After graduating from Oxford, he worked as a teacher actor and director, then became a schoolteacher. He participated in the Second World War and became aware of the evils of which humanity is capable. After the war, he resumed teaching and began writing novels. His first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), after having been rejected by more than twenty publishers, became a best seller in both Britain and the USA. Golding retired from teaching and published several other novels, notably Pincher Martin (1956), and a play, The Brass Butterfly (1958). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983.

Plot: A group of English schoolboys crashes on an uninhabited tropical island during a raging war. Free from the rules of society and civilization, they descend into savagery. The boys divide in two factions: a group works together and tries to achieve common goals, while the other seeks only violence and conflict. The novel is an allegory of the conflict between the civilizing instinct and the savage nature of humanity.

Some thoughts: Quite a few classics of contemporary English literature are passing in my hands in this period. This novel didn’t grab me as it should, considering its reputation. Maybe it was the writing style: Golding uses a non-poetical, straightforward language that is good for young adults (as a matter of fact, this book is widely read in secondary schools all over England) but it didn’t work well with me. Apart from this, I appreciated the philosophical interludes and the symbolisms of the novel (the shell used by Ralph to ask for an assembly, for example, represents order and democratic power; Piggy’s glasses are a symbol for science and rationality etc.).
Whether the story of Lord of the Flies is a symbol of the evils of which humanity is capable or whether it is a representation of the history of civilization until the Second World War (humanity had just come out from the horrors of war when Golding wrote the novel), it is much more than the story of a group of boys crashing on an island and trying to survive (LOST, anyone?).
The central problem of the novel is the savage instinct that lurks within every human being: the monster feared by the boys, the Lord of the Flies, is not a physical beast, but rather this evil impulse that prompts every human being to enforce one’s will with the use of violence. The novel shows how different people feel the instincts of civilization and savagery: Piggy and Ralph almost don’t have a savage instinct, even though they are briefly tempted by the savages, whether people like Roger and Jack cannot even understand why the other group want to preserve their civilization. Simon is the only truly good character, because his moral code is not forced by society. Unlike Ralph, who keeps repeating that they are all English (read civilized) boys, Simon is naturally good to everyone and in fact he gets killed, meaning that the savage instinct is far more widespread and common among people. Simon is the first one to understand that the beast doesn’t really exist but it’s rather something that’s inside them. The beast, the Lord of the Flies, physically represented by a severed sow’s head that Jack had impaled on a stake, becomes the totem of the savages. Jack learns to use the fear of the beast to scare other people and turn them to his will, a reminder of how religion and superstition can be used to manipulate people and gain power.
I would recommend this book especially to students in secondary schools, maybe when they are studying the reasons that led to the Second World War, one of the periods in history when humanity lost sight of his civilization and descended into savagery.

Booker Prize Shortlist 2009

In any Anglophone country around the world, from Ireland to New Zealand, every year, at about this time, people rush to the local bookshop or library in order to put their hands on the books shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

But I am in Italy and people are scarcely aware that a few days ago Margaret Mazzantini won the Campiello Prize with her Venuto al Mondo (why don’t people read in a country with so many art lovers and defenders of Italian culture and history?).

So here’s the Booker Prize shortlist (with a short synopsis taken from The Guardian website):

A.S. Byatt – The Children’s Book
It deals with intertwined lives of four families at the turn of the 20th century as they experiment with bohemian living, each with their own secrets.

J.M. Coetzee – Summertime
This book completes his trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with Boyhood and Youth, detailing the story of a young English biographer who is writing a book about the late author John Coetzee. Coetzee has already won the Booker Prize twice (for Life and Times of Michael K and Disgrace) and he would be the first author to win for the third time.

Adam Foulds – The Quickening Maze
A historical reconstruction of the meeting of the poets John Clare and Alfred Tennyson at a lunatic asylum in Epping Forest.

Hilary Mantel – Wolf Hall
A piece of historical fiction centring on Thomas Cromwell, who was the successor to Cardinal Wolsey as Henry VIII’s most trusted adviser as the king tries to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. She’s the favourite, according to the critic, the bloggers and the odds (English people love betting on everything, didn’t you know?).

Simon Mawer – The Glass Room
An historical novel set in Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s. As war looms, newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer, a Jew married to a gentile, move to a house on a hill with a unique glass room.

Sarah Waters – The Little Strangers
A ghost story set in post-war, rural Warwickshire. She’s the favourite at the tills!

BROWSING THE WEB FOR MORE INFO AND THOUGHTS:

• Jonathan Ruppin of Independent book chain Foyles says: “It's noticeable that this year the majority of writers in contention all have a few books to their names already, which perhaps underlines the fact that most outstanding authors are like vintage wines, developing a fuller, richer appeal as their careers progress”. No flash in the pan, then! Arifa Akbar of The Independent also notes that “The shortlist was very different from last year’s selection which included two debut novelists, one of whom, Aravind Adiga, won with The White Tiger”.


• Another commentator, in an audio interview , notes that all the titles, with the exception of Coetzee’s novel, are historical fiction, what the Germans would call “faction” (!). Erica Wagner of The Times tries to explain why in this article.


• The surprise is maybe that Tolm Cóibín’s Brooklyn didn’t make it to the shortlist (it’s the only book I saw in translation in Italian bookshops so far and I was tempted to buy it) and William Trevor neither. Also, I take note that those have been shortlisted but never won are called “bridesmaids” (at least in some articles of The Guardian), because they always attend the wedding but they are never the spouse. Isn’t it a slightly cruel nickname?


• Jim Naughtie (what a surname!), a BBC broadcaster and this year chair of the judges, said that there were quite a few bad books among the big names that entered the prize. "Just because you are an accomplished writer with a great reputation it does not mean you can't write a bad book”. People exluded from the Booker race this year: John Banville, Thomas Keneally, Anita Brookner, Penelope Lively, Kazuo Ishiguro and Margaret Atwood (according to the article). So at least one of these has written a bad book this year!

More to come on the Not the Booker prize, remember what a journalist said about the books on the Booker shortlist? They're always about postcolonial guilt (not this year, babe), Irish famine (nope) or English middle-class Islingtonians having Terribly Important Thoughts about their boring love lives (are they?).

24. “Nineteen Eighty-four” by George Orwell

Year of first publication: 1949
Genre: dystopian fiction, science fiction
Country : England

About the author: see this post

Plot: Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedience and controls him through the all-seeing telescreens and the watchful eye of Big Brother, symbolic head of the Party. In his longing for truth and liberty, Smith begins a secret love affair with a fellow-worker Julia, but soon discovers the true price of freedom is betrayal.

Some thoughts: I like “dystopian” novels like Huxley’s Brave New World or Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (of this one I’ve just seen the movie, though). Of Nineteen Eighty-four I had seen the movie during high-school and I vividly remember this big eye that controls everything, the Big Brother. I don’t remember if the reality show was already on TV at the time, but I think it’s quite sad that now this words, Big Brother, only remind us of trash TV.
In both Fahrenheit 451 and Nineteen Eighty-four there is a man who discovers that there is a way out of homologation and tries to gain intellectual freedom. He fights against the totalitarian regime that controls every aspect of his life and brainwashed the whole humanity.
I loved the neologisms, in particular “doublethink”, the twisted way of thinking that teaches you how to accept the opposite of what would make sense. “War is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength” is the motto of the Party and it is the finest example of “doublethink”. I know of some real politicians that use “doublethink” with nonchalance (“war on terror”, does it ring the bell?). Nineteen Eighty-Four is a frightening novel, also because many people think that the time of the events in the novel is not far away as it may seem, but it shares much with England in the 1940s, when the novel was written. Actually, while I was reading the novel I found many similarities with the modern world and in particular with the political situation in Italy: the censorship in the medias for example or the unbelievable contradictions and lies of the government (“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it”).
It is a novel that warns you against both communism and fascism (in other words, against every form of totalitarism). The end is very sad, I could not believe in the betrayal and I was literally dying for clues of a possible – but very unlikely - happy ending or of a little hope for the future of Julia and Winston. I didn’t like Julia much, though. I don’t mean as a character, but as a woman. It is true that she is a rebellious and independent woman, but she only cares about her sexual life and the pleasures that she cannot have, such as real coffee or sugar. Winston, on the other hand, is more interested in intellectual freedom and discovering what happened before this endless war (the glass paperweight is the symbol of his desire to connect with the past). The tone of the novel is dark, frustrated and pessimistic, but it is a wonderful novel nonetheless. It makes you think a lot. It’s one of those novels that will never leave me, like Crime and Punishment or Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

Link to my review of Animal Farm (in Italian), also by Orwell

The Guardian's First Book Award - Longlist

The Guardian’s First Book Award, which had A Case of Exploding Mangoes (my review) and A Fraction of the Whole (my review) only shortlisted last year, is back again. The idea of having fiction and non-fiction, prose and poetry competing for the same prize is a bit weird, but here you go:

Fiction

The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton (novel)
The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey (novel) Also longlisted for the Booker Prize!
The Girl With Glass Feet by Ali Shaw (novel)
The Selected Works of TS Spivet by Reif Larsen (novel)
An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah (Collection of short stories) Set in Zimbabwe!

The Missing by Siân Hughes (Poetry)

Non-fiction

The Secret Lives of Buildings by Edward Hollis
Direct Red. A Surgeon’s Story by Gabriel Weston

The Strangest Man. The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, the Quantum Genius by Graham Farmelo

A Swamp Full of Dollars. Pipelines and Paramilitaries at Nigeria’s Oil Frontier by Michael Peel

A Previous Winner (2007): Children of the Revolution by Dinaw Mengestu (my review)