Review: Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

The 2016 Man Booker Prize was won by Paul Beatty's The Sellout which I reviewed on this Blog 2nd November 2016. Madeline Thien's much longer book ( 470 pages against 288) was short-listed. Both books will be challenging for most readers because they are written from inside specific cultures about which many readers will have only schematic knowledge. Beatty's is written from inside Black American cultures and Thien's from inside the cultures of  Western classical music and Chinese literary, musical and political life.

So I am sure I missed a lot reading both books but I ended up feeling that Thien's multi-layered historical novel is a much more significant work than Beatty's. She takes seventy years of Chinese history, a cast of characters in love with stories and music - and in the central cases, professionally engaged with Western classical music -  and she writes about the experience of civil war, The Great Leap Forward, The Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square,  Bach, Beethoven, Profokiev, Shostakovich and much more besides. The novel is not only panoramic but complexly structured and at times I had to check back when I lost a thread. I read the book slowly.

It has very clever aspects especially in the way it acknowledges its own partiality and incompleteness, just one among the millions of  stories which circulate in the world. It emphasises how things are lost but often not completely so that fragments remain, which may be greatly valued in themselves - a theme which I no doubt responded to because I make something of it in my own book Materials and Medium: An Aesthetics (2016).

There is an extraordinary, haunting theme about searching for lost others by leaving coded stories lying around the world in bookstores, libraries, on Blogs and websites.

The book is an extraordinary achievement. It must be out there at the limits of what a single writer can be capable of creating. Maybe the sheer layered complexity of the book put off the Man Booker judges. I just hope it wasn't the severe, critical narrative of Chinese political history since 1945 which deterred them.

Review: Sebastian Barry, Days Without End

This novel belongs to the Stiff Drink school of writing. You adopt your voice, you start in the middle of things and you keep going until, ninety thousand words later, you bring it all to a close. You provide the reader with no more than a small geographical map of Civil War America and you offer no Acknowledgements to anyone for anything. I guess when it’s all over, you pour another stiff drink.

So you begin with the sentence, “The method of laying out a corpse in Missouri sure took the proverbial cake” and, starting from that, introduce your two main characters, John Cole and the narrator Thomas McNulty – who start out as two teenage boys saving themselves from famine and disease, lost in the frontiers of frontier America. They make shift as improvising stage artists, join the army to fight the Indians, join again to fight the Confederate rebels and along the way of killing for their supper, acquire a child - an orphaned Indian Sioux to whom they give the name, Winona.

Winona is not much more than a cypher. She is young, traumatised, pretty, clever and determined. In a world which has not yet replaced brute force with bureaucracy, she easily becomes their daughter and more precious to John and Thomas than their own lives. The reader is led to agree. Nothing bad must happen to Winona, absolutely nothing.

On this foundation, Sebastian Barry is able to carry off John and Thomas as gay men and Thomas as a cross-dresser when opportunity demands and with a taste for continuing that way anyway. In a society no more regulated by convention than bureaucracy, John and Thomas also carry off their difference, indulged by the black members of the household they eventually join, and enjoying Winona’s uncurious love.

Inevitably, there is a whiff of opportunism in this gay men and cross dresser casting but the Stiff  Drink approach allows Sebastian Barry to carry it off. But not only that; it is the rootedness of a story of violence and suffering in some very simple values which carries us along. At one point, I felt that all was revealed when at page 136, John occupies himself trying to soothe a restless, troubled Winona to sleep. He succeeds. “Got her sleeping” he says, “You sure do” says Thomas and adds for the reader one of his short, characteristic lines of laconic wisdom, “Not much more than that needed to make men happy”. All’s well in a world where grown men can soothe troubled children to sleep. If they can do that, who’s gonna care if they’re gay?

Social Text two decades on from the Sokal Affair

Social Text covers a broad spectrum of social and cultural phenomena, applying the latest interpretive methods to the world at large. A daring and controversial leader in the field of cultural studies, the journal consistently focuses attention on questions of gender, sexuality, race, and the environment, publishing key works by the most influential social and cultural theorists. As a journal at the forefront of cultural theory, Social Text seeks provocative interviews and challenging articles from emerging critical voices. Each issue breaks new ground in the debates about postcolonialism, postmodernism, and popular culture.

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In 1996, the academic journal Social Text was hoaxed by an academic physicist, Alan Sokal, who submitted a deliberately absurd, ridiculous and partly unintelligible article - but laced with “Right On” references. A pre-Twitter furore and debate ensued. In connection with something I am writing now, I wanted to check what happened to Social Text. Well, surprisingly, it didn’t fold and above I quote from its initial self-presentation on its current website page.

I found myself thinking, What would a tutor say if this little bit of text was submitted in fulfilment of the requirement for a course in Writing Publicity Blurbs? Would the tutor wonder, Does this student want to fail the course? Or would they confine themselves to a Comment, Too many adjectives? Or Well, I suppose at least you avoided the ultimate cliché, "cutting edge".

The idea of reading and interpreting the “world at large” as if it was a literary text is not absurd and has a long pedigree, starting I suppose with the idea of the “Open Book of the World”. So we are already into centuries of effort. But in post-modernist / post-structuralist or simply low-grade academic writing, the genre has been much abused. You can try to get away with anything and you will probably be applauded if you provide enough Right On signalling.

The really idiotic part of this PR blurb is in the last sentence in which the breaking of new ground is confidently  programmed according to the requirements of a publishing schedule. Oh vanity! I thought that intellectual discoveries came along at ten or twenty year intervals and that then three came along all at once. But, no, your Subscription to Social Text  will guarantee Order.

Review: Svetlana Alexievich, Second-Hand Time

It’s often said that in Russia human life has never been valued. Ever since the Romanovs installed themselves back in 1613, human beings have been at the mercy and disposal of state and state-backed power. Tens of thousands serf labourers died to create Peter the Great’s capital, St Petersburg. Plough a field almost anywhere in Russia and you turn up more recent human bones.

I don’t often read a 700 page book now, but Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history, Second-Hand Time is gripping. It’s also harrowing and I found myself putting it down at the end of a section, as if it would be indecent to hurry on to the next tale. People tell her their stories back to the 1930s and in to the early 2000s and the themes are repetitive but realised in different ways in every case. State violence, a mendacious bureaucracy, poverty, alcoholism (without end), domestic violence, forced separation of parents and children, husbands and wives, love in a cold climate, the importance of books, the failure of perestroika, a seemingly unshakeable loyalty to Stalin. And then there is the thin and uncertain line which separates those who do evil from those who try to do good.

Alexievich is a seventy year old Nobel Prize winner and what is remarkable in this book is how she elicits narratives from her cast of mainly female characters and how, in what I guess is an exceptionally good translation, those narratives pull you along. You never want to stop reading.

Many of her cast want to memorialise lost grandparents, parents, lovers, children. It’s one of the few things you can do to try to make reparation to them and to heal yourself. In the week when I was reading this book, I came across a story of a man, Andrei Zhukov, who has just completed a twenty-year  self-imposed task. He has sat in the archives and made a list of all the names of all the 40 000 NKVD officers who executed Stalin’s Terror in the 1930s. The victim count is thought to number 12 million and the Russian organisation Memorial has so far managed to list about a quarter of the names. In Alexievich's book, that Terror still affects everyone.

This book should sit alongside the kinds of memoir and historical work which I have reviewed elsewhere on this Blog – see the labels to this post.

The footnote apparatus provided by the translator to assist the reader is excellent; I noticed only one error, Latvia rather than Lithuania (page 341). As for the translation itself, I queried only kikeling (basically, little Jew) finding that little kike sounded better to me.

Trevor Pateman, Silence Is So Accurate

Available now. The book is only available in Hardback and offers 224 pages of essays in autobiography and criticism. Find it at Amazon or order from your bookseller.

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Review: Sarah Perry, The Essex Serpent

The Victorians have left us so many narratives of themselves that we are spoilt for choice if we want to re-invent them for ourselves and in our own image. Sarah Perry’s historical novel – set in 1893 -  is very well crafted and constructed, the scenes tight, the prose never slack, but her characters do tend to those which will be handled without too much difficulty in the polite Creative Writing class discussion or the Sunday School (or Guardian) book club. Oh, true, there is adultery but not too much and even-handed lesbianism and male homosexuality but of a delicate kind to which even a vicar would have to give his blessing. It’s one of the helpful things about the Victorians; they did generally keep their clothes on. There is a minor sexual assault (p 178), but even then everyone appears to remain fully clothed. It sits rather awkwardly but  I assume it is there to provide one more motive for Naomi Banks to run away from home, but those motives are so dispersed through the book that I suspect readers may have forgotten them by the time Naomi reappears two hundred pages later.

Projection of our own wishes into the past is one of the risks in writing – and reading - historical fictions. Another and simpler risk is that of anachronism, the kind which a friend or an editor will spot. Sarah Perry knows her material well and has been left to slip only occasionally: a first-class stamp ( p 415), unknown to the Victorians proud of their classless system - for most of the period, one penny for a letter and a half-penny for a postcard; an urban housing situation which is unsustainable (p 282), a term which belongs in the  literary gutter anyway; and poor William Ewart Gladstone gadding about with hookers (p 48) which sounds to me so wildly out of place that surely I am wrong and it is a Victorianism revived by Sarah Perry. For most of us, Gladstone walked the streets in search of fallen women or prostitutes.

I read the first hundred and fifty or so pages – probably more - with ease and pleasure, but then there is a hundred pages where the chapters become over-burdened with sub-plots, specifically those set in London. These sub-plots take us away from the powerful device of the Essex Serpent, which is one of Perry’s big creative devices. Then it picks up again when the serpent returns. Her other big creative devices are her child characters, who despite what I presume are nods in the directions of autism and gender fluidity, are all splendidly imagined and largely unthinkable as modern children. Her mad woman in the attic, the tubercular Stella, is also very interestingly imagined. 

There is a short scene which moved me at page 387, a scene beautifully concluded, at the bottom of the page, by one of Perry’s infrequent and restrained flashes of humour.

I bought this book partly because I’d read an interview with the author in which she discussed her writing habits and partly because Waterstones had a very attractively bound and jacketed version on sale. The design and presentation of so many books in the shops is dire; this one has been thought about.

Review: Dear Willy ... Edited by Claire Ohlsson Geheb

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This is an unusually interesting compilation of family letters and personal journals, kept in a suitcase by Willy Geheb (1900 - 1988), a blacksmith's and small farmer's son from rural Saxony in the eastern part of Germany. After the First World War, he leaves his home village to make his fortune in Brazil, Mexico and finally Chicago where he becomes an American citizen in 1934. He maintains - and keeps - a correspondence with his parents and members of a large family much of which survived to be discovered after his death, though material from the period after 1947 is missing.

From the point of view of a social historian, there is much here of interest. There is the hard life of an immigrant, the ambivalence of his family about his departure, their own changing circumstances as Germany struggles in the 1920s, their prompt adoption of Hitler in 1933, and their total dependence on Chicago-based Willy and his wife Irma for material help after Germany's defeat and the incorporation of their region into the Soviet Zone of east Germany. The letters which detail the contents of the parcels they have received are testimony to the poverty of immediate post-war Germany. But the birth of children is a constant of the family history, and no one ever hints at the possibility of achieving a better life through limiting family size. For, traditionally, children were assets to farming and small artisanal families. But in this story,not all of them survive and many are plagued by ill health.

Willy's blacksmith father is a conscientious letter-writer and tries to hold together a narrative and a set of values for the whole family until his death in 1945. He is stern, moralising and does not have a moment's hesitation in adding Hitler and Nazism to the Lutheran Christianity which serves him up until 1933. One of his sons, Paul, who comes across as rather unpleasant in his earlier letters to his brother Willy becomes an active Nazi. Willy in his letters is always urging other members of his family to get out and make their fortune in the USA but none do. His own letters are lively and concerned and, in the end, after 1945, he becomes the typical migrant burdened by the material needs of those back home, though he never complains and goes well beyond the call of family duty..

The family documents itself in photographs as well as letters, and the documentation must be unusually extensive for a family where no one has much formal education, even though by the standards of their village, they are well-established and relatively prosperous.

There is a Wikipedia page for Willy Geheb's home village of Schmirma and this book should certainly be added to the references on that page. There was no point at which the translation struck me as likely to be forced or wrong, and the book reads easily with fairly unobtrusive editorial comments to help sustain transitions in the story.

Most books I review here are ones I have bought; this one was sent to me for review.