Columba’s Bones

Polygon’s Darkland Tales series – which began with Denise Mina’s Rizzio and has continued through Jenni Fagan’s story of the North Berwick witch trials (Hex) and Alan Warner’s tale of Bonnie Prince Charlie (Nothing Left to Fear from Hell) – has proved remarkably consistent in quality and entertainment. For its fourth volume, Columba’s Bones, it departs from the practice of selecting experienced novelists and turns instead to a debutant, David Greig.  Greig, of course, is already well known as one of Scotland’s best dramatists (Midsummer and The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart are two of my particular favourites) and already has some history with history (in its mythic form) with his Macbeth sequel Dunsinane. “I found it to be a huge advantage to have written plays,” Greig has said of his debut, especially when it comes to the restrictions of the novella form, adding:

“I tried to avoid writing dialogue… I didn’t want people to say, ‘he’s just done a play’.”

Elements of theatre can be seen in the control Greig has over his material, from the single setting (the island of Iona) to the limited number of characters – which allows their varied natures to stand out.

The novel opens, however, with scene that would be unlikely to transfer successfully to the stage: a Viking attack on Iona in which most of the inhabitants are murdered and the buildings burned down. There is no disguising the brutality as the Abbot is torn limb from limb for not revealing the hiding place of Columba’s bones. Greig’s focus, though, is one of his central characters, Grimur, whom he quickly humanises:

“Grimur struggled through soft beach sand… He was already out of breath. He’d started too fast.”

Grimur is a man who knows he is past his best – “anything he would ever achieve had been achieved already.” As the others interrogate the monks, he heads for the smithy where, after killing the smith, he tastes the best mead of his life, made by the second of Greig’s characters, Una, the smith’s wife. The next time we see Grimur he is being carried from the smithy by his comrades before being buried.

Meanwhile, Greig’s third character, a young monk called Martin, is hiding in the privy – that is, down among the shit. After the raid is over, it is decided to abandon the monastery and the island, but Una and Martin refuse to leave:

“I spent a night alone amongst filth… The Lord Jesus kept me strong. In return I made a promise to him that I would serve Saint Colm.”

And so, Martin, Una and Grimur (don’t ask, just read the book) live together on Iona, knowing that eventually the Vikings will return. Grimur rebuilds the church and Martin completes a copy of the Gospels which was being produced by the monks – though only because Grimur encourages him to do so:

“This is your fate. Woven into your story… Even a pagan like me can see that. The task is given to you by your god.”

Iona becomes a haven, as it does for a young woman, Bronagh, who comes to live as an anchoress, and both tests and strengthens Martin’s faith. Greig treats Christianity sensitively in the novel – it is not a Christian book, but it is, at times, a spiritual one, with all the characters reflecting (in action as much as thought) on the purpose of their lives. It is filled with songs and prayers, and, symbolically at least, Iona is a holy place. Of the Darkland Tales so far, it is the furthest removed from our time, and Greig captures both the religious fervency of the monks and the gleeful violence of the Vikings. At the same time, in its presentation of a moment of calm in the storm of the world, it is perhaps the one most likely to speak to us, offering us “a miniature of the world.” The Vikings do return, and Greig delivers the dramatic conclusion we would expect from a writer of his skill, as well as revealing one trick he has (almost literally) kept up his sleeve. While it does not perhaps end with a miracle, it does at least end with hope.

Lost Books – Providings

The cover of the John Calder edition of Elspeth Davie’s 1965 debut novel, Providings, features a photograph of jars of homemade marmalade and raspberry jam, provisions (which the title deconstructs into a verb before adding an ‘s’ to create a noun again, focusing on the action rather than the object) that the novel will, indeed, focus on with the same unhealthy fixation as its protagonist, Peter Beck. Beck is a young man who has recently left home and is lodging with a Mrs Tullit and her family, who finds himself inundated with packages of homemade jam sent by his mother. The accumulation of jars has already put on hold his plan to change his lodgings frequently in an attempt to escape the constraints of the life he led at home:

“When two of his cupboard shelves were filled, he knew that he would not realise his freedom by moving in six weeks or so to other rooms.”

Davie even manages to make his mother’s gifts feel threatening by describing the occasional broken jar and Beck’s attempts to pick out the shards of glass from the jam. Beck’s efforts to rid himself of this burden (as he tells anyone who will listen, he does not particularly like jam) begin with his landlady (who already makes her own jam), and his work colleagues at the furniture shop, who each receive a jar. These exchanges are described at length as Beck’s connections with others become increasing centred on ridding himself of the jars:

“He left the shop as soon as he could, lightened of the heavy load he had brought with him in the morning, but at the same time a little oppressed by the contacts he had made through his gifts.”

Next, he offloads further jars by donating them to a jumble sale, only to turn up and be disappointed not to see them for sale but being used in the tearoom. His inquiries discomfit the woman he is asking – “Uneasiness had gradually stiffened the plump woman’s still kindly smile.” This is one of a number of examples of Beck’s awkwardness in conversation and reluctance to develop friendships. He often accidentally offends others, as when, on a rare day off at the seaside, he points out to the landlady of a guesthouse that the sea cannot be seen when the tide is out, or when he asks Mrs Tullit what “the essentials… of a room which you yourself would enjoy living in” are, which she interprets as an insult. In fact, Beck has been tasked at work with fitting out model rooms for the furniture shop. He is eventually inspired by a young woman, Clara, who comes to the shop, in which he perhaps finds a kindred spirit, showing interest in the rooms:

“Simply to get away. To escape up any flight of stairs, down any side lane. It’s all the same – a way out, even for a moment or two.”

Both Beck and Clara are searching for a freedom that remains elusive, but for Clara this lies outside a house:

“When I’m finished she’ll have given up any idea she’s ever had about tents, caravans, ships’ cabins and the like. What’s more, my place will have an air of freedom those other hideouts could never even touch!”

A house represents constraint for Clara in the way the jam jars do for Beck. “Walls are an anathema to her at the moment,” Beck tells the liftboy, Lukin, who is helping him construct his rooms, “To her four walls are a prison.” The jam continues to cause him anxiety as barrier to his, and her, freedom:

“Her mind is set on all the usual ideas of freedom. She wants to travel light… How will she manage that attached to a chap weighed down by dozens and dozens of pots of jam.”

She, too, has objects which weigh her down – a rug made out of the skin of dog, a wardrobe filled with the shoes of the dead. Davie is a very physical writer – though the question here is metaphysical – how can we be free? – in her novel it is acted out using the most deliberately banal objects – so banal, in fact, the novel almost veers into the absurd at times (for example when Beck spots a missing letter on a caravan’s sign which reads ‘Pearly hell’ instead of ‘Pearly Shell’ and he goes to a hardware store to buy a letter ‘S’, paint and brush). Providings is an early example of Davie’s skill at synthesising character and environment, where it feels as if the physical landscape the characters inhabit is as important as anything we discover of their internal life.

A Wreath of Roses

Elizabeth Taylor’s fourth novel, A Wreath of Roses, might be said to be about the unhappiness of women – an unhappiness, it suggests, that will not be assuaged by men. Its three central characters – Camilla, Liz and Frances – unite for the summer at Frances’ cottage as they have done year after year, but the mood has changed. Frances, once Liz’s governess, has retired to paint but is unsatisfied with what she has produced, and troubled by the rheumatism in her hands. Camilla, who has a knack for finding the fault in others, perceives Frances has aged rapidly since last year:

“…she looked, Camilla thought, not just one year older, but as if age had for a long time being gathering itself for a spring and had now quite overcome her.”

Liz is newly married with a baby to look after and living a life quite different from Camilla:

“She would never, she decided, accustomed herself to the strangeness of Liz married and a mother.”

Camilla disapproves of Liz’s marriage to Arthur, a vicar – “he will poison your life” – declaring:

“He will turn you into someone like himself.”

By this she means conventional and boring, a lifestyle she resists by pursuing a romance with a man she meets in the train, Richard, even though she is well aware the relationship is inappropriate. When she is asked to find a room in the Griffin for a guest of Frances’, Mr Beddoes, she loiters in the bar in the hope of meeting him:

“She felt shamed and deflated at her behaviour, especially humiliated when she considered the reason for this behaviour, the rather contemptible man who began to obsess her…”

Thie relationship begins inauspiciously when they witness a man jumping in front of a train from a bridge at the railway station. In a touch typical of Taylor, the train misses the man, but he dies in the fall. This incident casts a fatal shadow over the two of them, something Taylor uses to build towards the novel’s climax. That Richard is not entirely what he appears is evident when he enters the bar, his initial expression showing fear:

“First, he was not glad to see her, and then, as if he recollected something, very glad.”

Through his intentions are not clear, Taylor reveals he cannot be trusted by, for example, having him tell Camilla his mother is dead, and then later showing him writing to his mother.

Mr Beddoes is an admirer of Frances’ paintings and they have corresponded (as much as Frances corresponds with anyone) for a number of years. “Frances grew very close to him,” we are told, “closer than any wife.” Frances, however, has become increasingly reclusive over the years and marriage seems unlikely, but Camilla regards the relationship (which she describes as “a curious intimacy”) as “a miraculous thing”. (This fits with the general disparagement of marriage in the novel).

Taylor is skilled at presenting characters who do not get on but are forced together by circumstances, for example Camilla and Arthur. When they all go to the fair, and Camilla admits she ‘detests’ him, Taylor captures Arthur’s reaction:

“He smiled the mysterious smile which meant his adversary had betrayed herself in a way he need not underline in words.”

The single sentence captures both the naivety Camilla attempts to hide behind her bravado, and something of why Arthur might be hateful beneath his polite exterior.  She similarly draws attention to Arthur’s irritation with Beddoes when they are picnicking and he places a knotted handkerchief on his head: “Arthur blamed him silently for looking so absurd.” In this way, she outlines the changing moods of her characters, creating an ever-shifting, subterranean web of tensions between them.

She also uses setting wonderfully, particular towards the end of the novel when Camilla and Richrd visit a house he claims to have once lived in:

“The smell was suffocating. Cats had wetted the carpets for centuries, Camilla decided. Bushels of onions had been fried. No one had washed, or opened a window.”

Camilla’s disgust is registered with an exaggerated humour, but the tone is quite different in the final chapter when the couple shelter from the rain in an empty house:

“A calendar of the year before hung on the back of the door, but the house might have been empty for generations. A great spider sat in the sink, the tracks of slugs silvered the stone floor.”

Here Taylor adds to Richard’s menace by emphasising their isolation.

A Wreath of Roses is another accomplished novel from Taylor, a little darker than what has gone before. Unhappiness lies at its centre, and the only answer is making do – “For even Liz’s marriage,” as Frances believes, “is better than no marriage at all.” Camilla, too, admits its positive side compared to the “utter blankness she feels” – “the future looks so desolate.” Much of that unhappiness lies with the female characters, but, as we discover in the final pages, unhappiness is not limited to one gender.

Captains of the Sand

In 1937 Jorge Amado published his sixth novel, Captains of the Sand, the last in a series of novels he called ‘The Bahian Novels’ which began in 1931 with Carnival Country. In an afterword, Amado admits (with a certain amount of false modesty) they are the work of a young man and “could not help but be full of defects” but goes on to highlight what he regards as their most important achievement:

“…an absolute solidarity with and a great love for the humanity that lives in these books.”

Captains of the Sand (translated by Gregory Rabassa) tells the story of a gang of homeless boys who live a lawless life with its own code, led by the charismatic ‘Bullet’. The novel’s link to the reality of life in Bahia is emphasised by an opening section consisting of a newspaper article about the “group of assaulting and thieving children who infest our city” bemoaning the failure of the official response, followed by a series of buck-passing letters from those accused of inadequate action. This, of course, immediately places the reader on the side of the boys who have little hope of support to escape the desperate and often dangerous lives they are forced to live, sleeping in an abandoned warehouse, “urchins of all colours, and of the most varied ages, nine to sixteen.”

The story of their leader, fifteen-year-old Bullet, is typical:

“He never knew anything about his mother, his father died of a bullet wound.”

The other boys we become acquainted with also have nicknames, generally self-explanatory: Big Joao is large and strong; the Professor steals books to read; Cat is a ladies’ man (boy), vain enough to steal a ring just to wear it. Legless is lame and is used by the group to infiltrate houses they intend to rob; playing on the sympathy of adults to ask for work then staying for a few days to case out the target before informing the others where all the valuables are to be found. Though he plays the part of an angel, Legless has a reputation for being mean, no doubt fuelled by a past in which he has never known a family, and one particularly traumatic incident when he was arrested and the drunken policemen “made him run around a holding room on his lame leg.”

“In each corner there was one with a long piece of rubber hose. The marks left on his back had disappeared. But inside him the pain of that hour had never gone.”

At one point he is placed in a house where he is treated so well that he is tempted to abandon the Captains, as he experiences love for the first time:

“He remembered at other times when he ran away from a house so it could be raided a great joy came over him. This time there was no joy at all.”

Though the boys have had to grow up fast, Amado reminds us that they are still children when a carousel comes to the city. Legless and another boy, Dry Gulch, get a job working on the carousel, and when Legless gets a chance to ride he does so in childish wonder:

“He goes along like a believer to mass, a lover to the breast of his beloved, a suicide to death.”

When Father Jose Pedro goes with the boys to the carousel, he sees they are “full of desire to ride the horses, spin with the lights.”

“ ‘They were children, yes,’ the priest thought.”

Father Jose Pedro is one of the few adults who wants to help the boys, much to the displeasure of the Church. His early attempts fail because he does not understand them, as he himself realises:

“He saw that it was absurd because freedom was the deepest feeling on the hearts of the Captains of the Sands and he had to try other means.”

It is freedom that the Captains prize above all.

But although Amado portrays the boys sympathetically, he does not gloss over their crimes. Those of theft may be easier to overlook given their poverty, but he also details their treatment of women and girls, whom the boys routinely assault on the beach at night. Even Bullet, when he discovers that the girl he has caught is a virgin, only concedes, “I’ll only do it in the rear.” Later, when the Professor brings a girl back to the warehouse the other boys immediately assume they can all sleep with her, “like vultures over a piece of meat”, though they eventually agree they she can stay as one of the gang.

These are only a few of the many stories, and characters, contained within the novel’s pages. Episodic in form, we also see the members of the gang grow and develop, no better and no worse than the society which has rejected them. Amado would continue writing for another sixty years, but these early novels would remain close to his heart, “based on the love a young man felt for the suffering, the joy, the life of the people of his land.”

Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

In 1937 Bruno Schulz published his second, and last, collection of short stories, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. In 1942 he was murdered by a Nazi officer in the Drohobycz Ghetto and the novel he was writing at the time, The Messiah, has never been found. Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass was not translated into English until the late seventies, by Celina Wieniewska who had earlier translated The Street of the Crocodiles. In her introduction to the latter, she describes trying to explain Schulz “in terms of one literary theory or another” as “well nigh impossible.”

While this may be true, the title story of Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is a masterpiece of short fiction. Inspired, as many of his stories seem to have been, by his relationship with his father, it concerns the visit by a son, Joseph, to his father who is residing in a sanatorium. When he asks if his father is alive, the doctor replies:

“Yes, of course… That is, within the limits imposed by the situation… You know as well as I that from the point of view of your home, from the perspective of your own country, your father is dead. This cannot be entirely remedied. That death throws a certain shadow on his existence here.”

In fact, the town the sanatorium overlooks (where his father, far from being confined to his bed, has opened a shop) is like a shadowy version of reality where “the mournful semidarkness of an undefined time descended from a sky of indeterminable greyness” and the market square has a “strange, misleading resemblance” to their hometown. The sense of unreality is intensified by the fragmentation of time – one moment Jospeh meets his father in a restaurant in town, the next he returns to the sanatorium to discover his father in bed, complaining, “I have been lying here for two days without any attention.”

“The problem is the quick decomposition of time no longer watched with incessant vigilance.”

Though he answers the question, “Are there two fathers?” in the negative, in one sense there are as in the shop he “displays an energetic activity” whereas in the sanatorium he is “very sick”. This might be seen as Schulz’s version of memory, but, as with many of his stories, the workings of the mind become the fabric of the setting.

‘Dead Season’ also features a father and a shop, a “place of eternal anguish and torment.” At one point the father transforms into a fly:

“… a monstrous, hairy steel blue horsefly, furiously circling and knocking blindly against the walls of the shop.”

The transformation is not permanent and the story ends, as most of them do, in mystery and ambiguity after the arrival of a “distinguished visitor” whom the narrator spots wrestling with his father in his bed. In the final story, ‘Father’s Last Escape’ we also see the father transformed into “a crab or large scorpion”:

“Running on wavy jerks on his many legs, he reached the wall and, before we could stop him, ran lightly up it, not pausing anywhere.”

When he is finally caught, the mother cooks him but the family refuse to eat him. (It may be significant that Schulz was a translator of Kafka).

The longest story in the collection, ‘Spring’, revisits childhood, the spring of life. Written in an overblown style, it tells of the narrator’s admiration for the emperor Franz Joseph, and the adventures on which his imagination takes him, many of which originate in a friend’s stamp album which he regards as “a universal book, a compendium of knowledge about everything human”. Even his love for Bianca is understood via the stamp album:

“Bianca, enchanting Bianca is a mystery to me. I study her with obstinacy, passion and despair – with the stamp album as my textbook.”

Schulz allows the reader no demarcation between reality and fantasy and the adventure becomes more ornate as the story progresses. In fact, Schulz’s great skill as a storyteller lies in a refusal to acknowledge the dividing line between physical reality and our mental state and this is what makes him such a fascinating writer.

What Kingdom

What Kingdom is Danish writer Fine Gråbøl’s debut novel, originally published in 2021 and now translated by Martin Aitken. Based on her own experiences of mental illness, it is set in a temporary psychiatric care unit for young people, part of a process of adjustment the narrator describes:

“You go from hospital to residential facility, from female care workers to male, from nursing to social education, from centralised laundry and night lights to conflict-ready bodies and communal activities; you adjust.”

“I liked the rooms at the hospital better,” she tells us, “there was hardly anything in them.” This need for emptiness is emphasised by Gråbøl’s description of her surroundings which seem to have a life of their own:

“Above me the ceiling hangs suspended like a fluid-filled membrane…”

She tells us that she limits the contents of her room as “furniture’s noisy just being there” and has “a tendency to rise up out of their state of thingness and assume personalities.” The novel is relayed to the reader in short chapters with a distinct focus, such as the routine of the institution, one of the other inmates, or a particular event. In this way we get to know the other characters: Waheed who plays music through the night; Marie who threatens a staff member with a butter knife; Lasse whose “room is dark, it could hardly be darker”; Hector from Peru where “they treated his psychoses with exorcism.” Such treatment is presented without comment, as is the narrator’s encounter with electro-convulsive therapy. Her attitude towards mental disorders is cynical:

“The grammar of the ill is gendered, but also matter of economics; the curable versus the chronic, benefit rates and supplementary payments, diagnoses and deductibles.”

The overall effect of the short chapters is to create a sense of stasis. When the narrator says, “I take the elevator down to the third floor,” it has no connection in time to previous or following events. This not only mimics the sense of being institutionalised but also the narrator’s inability to sleep. Though her voice is often detached, at times her pain breaks through, as when she self-harms:

“I’ve torn myself open, we try to sweep the bits of me together, but the wind whirls up dust when anyone goes through the doors.”

The novel’s second section, Containment (“They call containment of the emotional register treatment”) begins with what seems to be a suicide attempt on the narrator’s part:

“It’s getting harder to recognise myself outside my room.”

She is with the staff member she trusts most, Thomas, but later she will learn he is leaving, creating another crisis. However, the novel is neither a ‘descent into madness’ nor the slow path to recovery; it more realistically portrays the narrative-free experience of mental illness. In the final section, Secrets, there is a sense of transformation: Marie dyes her hair, Lasse gives himself a buzz cut; the narrator puts on make-up; they begin to leave the institution. This may suggest hope, but such is tension instilled by the narrative voice that the reader will struggle to accept this. This is a novel which portrays mental illness from the inside in a series of frozen moments. It also questions our approach to those who are institutionalised:

“Why doesn’t anyone wonder about the line between trauma and treatment? Why doesn’t anyone wonder about the relationship between compulsion and compliance? Why doesn’t anyone wonder about the relationship between submission and help?”

Beautifully written (and translated), What Kingdom is a novel that challenges the reader to enter a world that most will not experience, presenting it to us with openness and compassion.

The Face on the Cutting-room Floor

First published in 1937, The Face on the Cutting-room Floor is not, in fact, a novel by Cameron McCabe, its narrator, as its cover suggests, but the debut of German refugee Ernst Bornemann, who had arrived in the UK in 1933. Bornemann later described the novel as:

“…no more than a finger exercise on the keyboard of a new language. It had no message and wasn’t meant as a spoof on the great masters of the crime story. I simply wanted to know if my English was good enough to let me earn money with my pen.”

Yet Bornemann’s life, with further novels, film scripts and an academic career in Germany as a psychologist, suggests a restless intelligence which would never allow him to write simply a “finger exercise”. This restlessness can be seen in the novel’s form, which makes it such a remarkable book even today. Not only does Bornemann tell the story from the point of view of one of the suspects, he ends with an epilogue which discusses the detective genre in general and purports to quote from various reviews of the novel (the quotations come from real reviews, though not of the as yet unpublished The Face on the Cutting-room Floor). The fiction that the novel describes real events persists to the end.

The novel is set in a world Bornemann knew, that of film, which had the distinction of being both modern (having only been invented towards the end of the previous century) and commonplace – by the 1930s it was the main form of entertainment. The novel begins with McCabe being instructed by Isador Bloom to “cut out that Estella girl, every scene with her” from the film he is working on. McCabe finds the request suspicious as Estella’s part is one third of a love triangle; it seems even more suspicious when she is found dead on the cutting-room floor the next day. McCabe bursts into Bloom’s office as he is being interviewed by the detective, Smith, sent to investigate the death asking:

“Why did you want to blot out the Estella girl?”

As we will see, McCabe will often take on the detective role in the novel, developing an antagonism with Smith as if he were the main suspect. Smith, meanwhile, is presented as:

“So utterly unlike a copper. Nice and quiet and gentlemanly. Very much like Oscar Wilde’s idea of a gentleman.”

Much of the plot revolves around a camera set up in the cutting-room to film automatically if there is any movement from which the film has gone missing. The obliqueness of McCabe’s narration can be seen in the way he tells the reader that he “touched the gear it was warm” but says nothing of what happens to the film, which will appear in due course, though in two parts. The main suspect (as he confesses) is Ian Jensen, Estella’s co-star, who is convinced by McCabe to escape to his home country, Norway, only to return and himself be killed. Smith is convinced McCabe has murdered Jensen, a death that is further complicated by the fact that, although is shot, he had already been fatally poisoned.

Bornemann was not simply interested in learning English, but in the use of slang and idiom (something he said he had to relearn when he returned to Germany) and McCabe and Smith at times speak in the language of hard-boiled detective fiction: “You better let me have the lowdown”; “it’s all a big frame-up”; “You’re smoked”. In this, they are taking on roles, a verbal sparring that is both playful and pointed. It is only one aspect of the story being self-aware: see, for example, Smith’s comment:

“This isn’t a detective story where things have to click. They only do that in bad stories anyway. This is a thing that happened. Detective stories are puzzles – chess played with figures that look like human beings – but they only look like humans: they aren’t.”

The novel is so self-referential that the same passage is quoted in the epilogue. The epilogue, however, is not simply analytical but sheds new light on the crime and thus is still connected to the plot. Overall The Face on the Cutting-room Floor is a novel that will delight fans of the genre, but also intrigue a wider audience with its post-modern games.

International Booker Prize 2024 Shortlist Predictions

My (incomplete) reading of the International Booker Prize longlist has not been the most enlivening experience, overshadowed as it was by the number of deserving titles which did not find a place. It was also rather limited in its global reach with only one book translated from other than a European language. It was the year of autofiction, particularly by women (Lost on Me, The Details, Undiscovered), though with many novelists in autobiographical mode too (Kairos, The House on Via Gemito). The Prize also seems to have an American slant to it this year in terms of publication (all the books had a US publication apart from White Nights which was just as hard to obtain in the UK), translators, and the number of Latin American books chosen.

Here, however, are those books I believe should advance to the shortlist:

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Michael Hofmann)

Though Kairos is far from my favourite Erpenbeck novel it stands out as the work of a major novelist. In fact, my very dislike of the reading experience is in part testament to its strength, focusing as it does on an abusive relationship. More than that, it brings to life East Berlin in the mid-eighties, the destructive relationship echoing at times the failing state.

The House on Via Gemito by Dominico Starnone (translated by Oonagh Stransky)

The House on Via Gemito also bears the hallmarks of an accomplished writer. Though some might argue it is overlong, this echoes the experience of its narrator’s life with his arrogant, overbearing father. Artists are often portrayed as difficult but are forgiven due to their genius: here we have the difficulty without the genius. Not only is this a wonderful portrayal of an unforgettable character, it forces the reader to question what we should accept in the name of art.

Not a River by Selva Almada (translated by Annie McDermott)

As with Kairos, Not a River is perhaps not Selva Almada’s best novel but it is still very good. Stylistically and structurally brave, it continues her exploration of masculinity and death in a ghost story with more than one ghost. As with the previous novels, the setting is intrinsic to our understanding of the characters, and the river seems to shape the novel itself.

Crooked Plow by Itamar Viera Junior (translated by Johnny Lorenz)

Crooked Plow was the longlist’s saving grace – a powerful novel which was not in my reading plans. Immersive, sometimes brutal in its descriptions of poverty and suffering, yet artfully constructed and with its central symbols (voicelessness, violence) subtly strung throughout, this is a novel which deserves to go further. It also – surely in part the purpose of an ‘international’ prize – exposes the reader to lives they are unlikely to have lived.

Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo (translated by Leah Janeczko)

Assuming that at least one of the novels where the main character is a writer with the same name as the author will go through, my preference would be Lost on Me. The Details has some well observed moments but doesn’t coalesce into significance; Undiscovered is too self-absorbed for my tastes, and is even less coherent. Lost on Me is, at least, entertaining, and with a sense of sadness behind the humour that is more moving than either of the other two.

As for the sixth book, I cannot see it being Ismail Kadare’s A Dictator Calls – more of an essay than a novel – or Rodrigo Blanco Calderon’s Simpatia (given that I have already selected two Latin American books). What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma may well be better than Lost on Me (I haven’t read it) but the most likely (also unread) are either Urszula Honek’s White Nights (the most esoteric choice) or Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong, apparently heavy-going but certainly worthy. As for winners, pick any one from the first four.

Undiscovered

If Lost on Me deflects from its narrator through humour, and The Details all but says ‘look away’ by focusing on others, Gabriela Wiener’s autofiction Undiscovered (translated by Julia Sanches) places the author front and centre (in spite of, or perhaps as a result of, describing autofiction as “the worst insult”). The novel examines Weiner’s heritage in a number of ways, beginning with her great-great-great grandfather, the explorer Charles Wiener: “his greatest achievement was that he didn’t find Machu Picchu, though he came close.” Her family has long believed itself to be descended from Wiener, a legacy he left behind when he returned to Europe. In interview, Wiener has commented of her surname:

“I was secretly proud of it because it proved that although I was perceived as racialized, there flowed a percentage of European blood in my veins.”

“All that, of course, is pure internalized racism,” she goes on to say, and the novel is heavily focused both on the racism of ‘discovery’ and skin colour. It is also however, about the mechanics of desire and relationships, those relationships, too, are often viewed through skin colour:

“My father was the only Wiener who didn’t marry a white mestiza. Unlike his two brothers. My mother’s brother married a white mestiza. My mom married a white mestiza.

“But my dad married a chola.”

Wiener’s reflections on the authenticity of her ancestry coincide with the death of her father, whose own life was complicated by the fact he had a long-term relationship with another woman while married to Wiener’s mother which also produced a daughter. In a detail so ridiculous one feels it must be true, her father wore an eyepatch in the other relationship, concocting a story to explain the loss of the eye. Wiener herself has an unconventional relationship, living with her husband and her girlfriend (it must certainly be an advantage when it comes to childcare as this hardly seems to impinge on her life at all). Even this proves to be less than she desires as she has more than one affair in the course of the story. The second of these is a woman she meets on a ‘Decolonizing my Desire’ course, Lucre, who is (naturally) also a writer. They discuss the names that have been used to describe them due to their skin colour:

“I like talking about this kind of stuff with her.”

Wiener is very aware not only of her desire but of the ideologies that infect it, commenting on her petite girlfriend, Roci:

“One time I almost broke up with her because I didn’t think I could get turned on if I didn’t feel small in bed – patriarchal garbage.”

This honesty is a two-edged sword, of course, as while the reader may admire her more for revealing all, there is also a danger she will admire her less for what she reveals. In fact, how we are meant to react is unclear. Should we, like Lucre “poking fun at the mess I’d made of my life,” find it amusing? Or should we treat the narrator with the seriousness she seems to take herself? The novel also suffers from another fault which can arise with autofiction in that the other characters lack complexity. Roci, for example:

“…likes me just the way I am, she’s always saying so, and she is either too nice or too feminist not to mean it.” Undiscovered is not without merit – the writing is often punchy, and Wiener is clearly unafraid of an unflinching gaze in the mirror. The many strands are interesting in themselves – whether Charles Winer is actually her ancestor; her father’s double life; her exploration of her desires – yet they do not fully coalesce: no particular structure appears as the various elements collide. This is perhaps best seen in the ending(s) – a poem (the one Lucre talks about wishing to write?) and a reference to the exhibition of ‘indigenous people’ from around the world in Paris which lasted into the 20^th century. Neither quite provides the moment in which everything which has gone before is drawn together. Undiscovered is the most experimental piece of autobiographical fiction on the longlist, but it’s an experiment which, for me, does not work

Crooked Plow

Crooked Plow is Itamar Viera Junior’s first novel, originally published in 2018, and now translated by Johnny Lorenz. The novel is set among the poor of Bahia (also the setting for Jorge Amado’s early novels) whose existence depends on the goodwill of the landowners they work for and who let them build mud houses on the land, not wood or brick, to ensure they do not conceive that they have any permanent right to live there. The novel, which is in three parts, opens with two young sisters, Bibiana and Belonísia, deciding to investigate the contents of the suitcase their Grandma keeps in her room only to discover a knife wrapped in a dirty rag. It is Bibiana who first, “so intense was my desire to taste it,” places the knife in her mouth, only for her sister to repeat the gesture:

“Her lips reddened, and I wasn’t sure if it was from the excitement of tasting the silver blade or from wounding herself, for she was also bleeding.”

The two children are taken to hospital and one of them is left mute having cut off part of her tongue – though which one we will not discover until later. This voicelessness, of course, reflects the voicelessness of the poor, though soon one sister speaks for the other and working together and helping each other are seen in the novel as the only way to improve their lives. Both their mother and father contribute to the community: the mother is a midwife, and the father a healer:

“…families placed their hopes in the power of Zecu Chapeu Grande, the Jare healer, whose mission was to restore a person’s body or mind when needed. We had always had to live with this magical facet of our father’s life.”

The novel might be said to draw on the tradition of magic realism, where the ‘magic’ is an accepted part of the novel’s world, but the vein of realism is strong and there is no disguising the suffering of the poor. We see the girls’ father treat one of another pair of sisters with similar sounding names, Crispina and Crispiniana, for madness. Both sisters will end up pregnant to the same man and one will lose the baby.

The lives of women are shown to be particularly difficult, a particular focus of the second part when Bibiano and Belonisia marry. Bibiano leaves with her husband, Severo, for the city, but Belonisia stays with the community, and her marriage to Tobias quickly deteriorates:

“As time went on, however, Tobias seemed more dissatisfied with me. He grumbled whenever he couldn’t find some item he was searching for.”

Her neighbour, Maria Cabocla, demonstrates how powerless women can be as her husband regularly attacks her:

“Her clothes were torn and she was crying, her body shaking… I couldn’t understand much of what she was saying expect for one phrase she kept repeating, ‘He’s gonna kill me.’”

Severo, on the other hand, represents a more modern approach, not only encouraging his wife to gain the education needed to become a teacher, but also criticising the way the people are treated. Here we see a generational difference with Zeca. He has used his position as healer to be granted (albeit grudgingly) a school for the children as he wants them to have a better future, but he will not rebel against the established order. As Severo speaks:

“…I could sense my father growing uncomfortable. Zeca had taught us it was a mark of ingratitude to speak ill of those who’d taken us in, who’d given us a place where we could live and work.”

In the novel’s final section when the land is sold and the people are threatened by eviction, their situation becomes even more precarious and the need to fight it more urgent.

Crooked Plow is a wonderful novel, immersing the reader in a different time and place, in the sweat, dirt and blood of poverty and the love of a family. Viera has made a deliberate decision to focus only on the poor – the landowners and those in authority exist largely off-stage. The prose is fierce and immediate, merging into a more poetic register seamlessly when required. The knife with which it opens of course returns with its own symbolism, but Veiro never loses sight of the complexity of the issues he raises. Surely it will progress to the shortlist.