Man Booker Shortlist - Book 04 - We need new names - NoViolet Bulawayo

WoodsieGirl's 

Man Booker
Challenge

Our good friend WoodsieGirl has read all the books on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize for the last few years. This is not because she is an avid reader, with varied interests and is constantly on the lookout for new great fiction. She does this purely to mock my inability to organize my book list. Honestly. It's evil. 

Anyhoo, once again, she has kindly written up reviews of each book for us.  

WE NEED NEW NAMES

NOVIOLET BULAWAYO

THE BLURB (Amazon)

'To play the country-game, we have to choose a country. Everybody wants to be the USA and Britain and Canada and Australia and Switzerland and them. Nobody wants to be rags of countries like Congo, like Somalia, like Iraq, like Sudan, like Haiti and not even this one we live in - who wants to be a terrible place of hunger and things falling apart?'

Darling and her friends live in a shanty called Paradise, which of course is no such thing. It isn't all bad, though. There's mischief and adventure, games of Find bin Laden, stealing guavas, singing Lady Gaga at the tops of their voices.

They dream of the paradises of America, Dubai, Europe, where Madonna and Barack Obama and David Beckham live. For Darling, that dream will come true. But, like the thousands of people all over the world trying to forge new lives far from home, Darling finds this new paradise brings its own set of challenges - for her and also for those she's left behind.

THE REVIEW

NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names is a coming-of-age tale. It follows a young girl, Darling, through her childhood in the optimistically named Paradise, a slum somewhere in Zimbabwe, and her move to America as a young adolescent. 

In the first part of the book, we meet Darling's gang of friends in Paradise - kids with names like Godknows and Bastard, who spend their days playing games made up from hearing the news around them (like "Find Bin Laden") and leading raids on the nearby, wealthy town to steal guavas from the trees. Life is hard in Paradise: there are frequent references to the children's hunger (hence the guava raids), and hints of the violence that characterises their lives. In one memorable chapter the kids find the dead body of a young woman hanging from a tree, and after initially running terrified from the scene, they return when one of them points out that the dead woman's shoes looked new, so they could make good money from selling them. Darling's father is dying of AIDS, and 11-year-old Chipo is pregnant after being raped by her grandfather. However, it's not a bleak book: despite the hardship, Darling and her gang of friends act much as children everywhere do, accepting the world the way it is and playing their games.

We see the social and political upheaval of the area through the children's eyes, as they describe incidents they don't really understand: such as the displacement of their families from their homes that lead to their lives in Paradise, and the initial jubilation followed by disappointment of democratic elections in the country. Sometimes these moments are successful, but I sometimes found them a bit unconvincing: as when the children act out the murder of a revolutionary leader. This could have been a very powerful scene, and it is graphic enough to pack a punch, but I just found it a bit contrived. By comparison, another scene describing a visit from an NGO handing out toys and clothes for the children, and food for the adults, is much more affecting - Bulawayo does a fantastic job of portraying the children's excitement at the visit, mixed with the shame they feel and sense from the adults. "They just like taking pictures, these NGO people...they don’t care that we are embarrassed by our dirt and torn clothing, that maybe we would prefer they didn't do it...We don’t complain because after the picture-taking comes the giving of gifts."

All the children dream of escaping Paradise, but it's only Darling who manages it: she has an aunt in America, and as a young teenager she is sent to live with her. The second half of the book focuses on Darling's life in America, and the disappointment she finds. It is not how she expected it: it is cold (Darling is unnerved by the snow: "coldness that makes like it wants to kill you, like it's telling you, with its snow, that you should go back to where you came from."), unfriendly, and she misses the familiar sights, sounds and smells of Paradise. Ultimately she feels guilty for leaving Paradise. When she speaks to Chipo (by now raising a young daughter) on the phone, Chipo chides her: "You think watching on the BBC means you know what is going on? No, you don't...it's us who stayed here feel the real suffering."

We Need New Names is a book with a lot to say about Zimbabwe, immigration, cultural and physical displacement, poverty and relative poverty. However, I didn't think it hung together all that well as a novel. It felt more like a series of short stories, and I think it might have worked better in that way. The second half of the book in particular is fragmented, which made it difficult to really get invested in the story or with the characters. I enjoyed it, but I don't think it's the strongest off the shortlist - it's not a patch on The Lowlands, which deals with some similar themes.

The @WoodsieGirl Challenge 2013

Shortlist 06 - The Luminaries - Eleanor Catton

Shortlist 05 - The Lowland - Jhumpa Lahiri

Shortlist 04 - We need new names - NoViolet Bulawayo

Shortlist 03 - A Tale for the Time Being - Ruth Ozeki

Shortlist 02 - Harvest - Jim Crace

Shortlist 01 - The Testament of Mary - Colm Toibin

The @WoodsieGirl Challenge 2012

Shortlist 06 - Umbrella - Will Self

Shortlist 05 - Bring up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel

Shortlist 04 - The Lighthouse - Alison Moore

Shortlist 03 - Swimming Home - Deborah Levy

Shortlist 02 - Narcopolis - Jeet Thayil

Shortlist 01 - The Garden of Evening Mists - Tan Twan Eng

Visit her blog HERE

Visit her other blog HERE

* * * * *

Guest Stars - Table of Contents

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Full - Table of Contents
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The Doubleclicks - Nothing to Prove

I apologise now to anyone kind enough to follow more than one of my blogs. This is going to be a cross-post.

It's just BRILLIANT and I'm actually a little emotional after reading many of the placards. 

For such a long time I would refuse to call myself a geek (aside from the whole 'do I really need to put a label on this?') because I felt that I hadn't anything like the knowledge base to justify the title. 

It was meeting people like @SteveCult, @BookElfLeeds @Cidergirli, @LYOC8, our awesome Browncoats captian and the team at @OKComics that demonstrated that 'Geek' isn't a closed garden, a preserve of tech wizards - rather it's anything that makes you passionate, inspires you and teaches you outside of the mainstream. 

Fortunately, I've never encountered any gender based bias so I would have been just as happy to have an equal gender mix of geeks represented in the video. 
The cons that I attend are usually fairly evenly split and the guys that attend aren't dicks so it's never been an issue for me personally, ditto with my book clubs and certainly within the Whedon fandom, equality and inclusion tends to be a given.  
But from the reports coming out of certain sections of the gaming community and fandom as a whole in the US, I appreciate the need for this song and the wonderful representation it provides. 

Anyway, sorry this is a bit long. And possible lacking in coherency. I'm just in the midst of having all the *feels* right now. 

Must be a chick thing right? ;)  

Man Booker Shortlist - Book 03 - A Tale for the Time Being - Ruth Ozeki

WoodsieGirl's 

Man Booker
Challenge

Our good friend WoodsieGirl has read all the books on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize for the last few years. This is not because she is an avid reader, with varied interests and is constantly on the lookout for new great fiction. She does this purely to mock my inability to organize my book list. Honestly. It's evil. 

Anyhoo, once again, she has kindly written up reviews of each book for us.  

A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING

RUTH OZEKI

THE BLURB (from Amazon)

'Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you.'

Ruth discovers a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up on the shore of her beach home. Within it lies a diary that expresses the hopes and dreams of a young girl. She suspects it might have arrived on a drift of debris from the 2011 tsunami. With every turn of the page, she is sucked deeper into an enchanting mystery.

In a small cafe in Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao Yasutani is navigating the challenges thrown up by modern life. In the face of cyberbullying, the mysteries of a 104-year-old Buddhist nun and great-grandmother, and the joy and heartbreak of family, Nao is trying to find her own place - and voice - through a diary she hopes will find a reader and friend who finally understands her.

Weaving across continents and decades, and exploring the relationship between reader and writer, fact and fiction, A Tale for the Time Being is an extraordinary novel about our shared humanity and the search for home.

THE REVIEW

A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki, is a strange and sprawling book. It's two intertwining stories: that of Nao (pronounced 'now'), a Japanese schoolgirl writing a diary about what she intends to be the last days of her life; and Ruth, a Japanese-American writer who finds Nao's diary washed up on the shores of her remote Canadian home. The chapters alternate between Nao's diary (translated and with added footnotes and comments from Ruth), and Ruth's story of reading the diary and trying to find out what it means and what has happened to Nao.

Both tales are fairly sad. Nao, having grown up in Silicon Valley but moved back to Japan as a teenager when the dotcom bubble burst and her father lost his job, doesn't fit in and is horrifically bullied by her classmates (culminating in an attempted rape and a humiliating online auction of her underwear). Her parents don't seem aware of their daughter's struggles - particularly her suicidal father. Her only real support comes from her grandmother Jiko, a Buddhist nun.

Ruth's tale is less dramatic, but still melancholy. She is suffering from writers' block, grieving from the recent death of her mother, and struggling to adjust to life on a remote island in British Columbia, having moved there from New York to be with her husband. She becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to Nao. Her claustrophobic days spent Googling Nao and her family and avoiding her gossipy neighbours are a sharp counterpoint to the drama of Nao's life.

Weaving through both stories are some pretty big themes - taking in Zen Buddhism, Japanese kamikaze pilots of the second world war, the morality of suicide, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011, the nature of time and memory, oceanic currents and the Pacific gyre, and even quantum mechanics. It's an ambitious novel, and it's hard not to be impressed at its scope.

So I'm not really sure why I didn't enjoy it more. For some reason, despite being impressed at the ideas and the ambition behind it, I just couldn't get into the story. It could be that I found the teenage narrator, Nao, incredibly irritating - I did sympathise with her plight, but her voice really grated on me after a while. I also really didn't enjoy the sections of the book that veer into magical realism. This is entirely a personal preference, so other readers who do enjoy magical realism may get a lot more out of the book than I did, but I generally don't get on with that particular genre!

Although the concept and the ideas within the book are fascinating, ultimately I think the writing lets it down. It's certainly not as strong as the previous two Booker shortlisters I've read so far (Jim Crace's Harvest and Colm Toibin's The Testament of Mary), so I don't think it's a likely contender for the winner.

The @WoodsieGirl Challenge 2013

Shortlist 06 - The Luminaries - Eleanor Catton

Shortlist 05 - The Lowland - Jhumpa Lahiri

Shortlist 04 - We need new names - NoViolet Bulawayo

Shortlist 03 - A Tale for the Time Being - Ruth Ozeki

Shortlist 02 - Harvest - Jim Crace

Shortlist 01 - The Testament of Mary - Colm Toibin

The @WoodsieGirl Challenge 2012

Shortlist 06 - Umbrella - Will Self

Shortlist 05 - Bring up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel

Shortlist 04 - The Lighthouse - Alison Moore

Shortlist 03 - Swimming Home - Deborah Levy

Shortlist 02 - Narcopolis - Jeet Thayil

Shortlist 01 - The Garden of Evening Mists - Tan Twan Eng

Visit her blog HERE

Visit her other blog HERE

* * * * *

Guest Stars - Table of Contents

* * * * *

Full - Table of Contents

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Man Booker Shortlist Book 02 - Harvest - Jim Crace

WoodsieGirl's 

Man Booker
Challenge

Our good friend WoodsieGirl has read all the books on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize for the last few years. This is not because she is an avid reader, with varied interests and is constantly on the lookout for new great fiction. She does this purely to mock my inability to organize my book list. Honestly. It's evil. 

Anyhoo, once again, she has kindly written up reviews of each book for us.  

HARVEST

JIM CRACE

THE BLURB (from Amazon)

As late summer steals in and the final pearls of barley are gleaned, a village comes under threat. A trio of outsiders – two men and a dangerously magnetic woman – arrives on the woodland borders and puts up a make-shift camp. That same night, the local manor house is set on fire. Over the course of seven days, Walter Thirsk sees his hamlet unmade: the harvest blackened by smoke and fear, the new arrivals cruelly punished, and his neighbours held captive on suspicion of witchcraft. But something even darker is at the heart of his story, and he will be the only man left to tell it . . . Told in Jim Crace’s hypnotic prose, Harvest evokes the tragedy of land pillaged and communities scattered, as England’s fields are irrevocably enclosed. Timeless yet singular, mythical yet deeply personal, this beautiful novel of one man and his unnamed village speaks for a way of life lost for ever.

THE REVIEW

 Harvest is Jim Crace's second book to be shortlisted for the Booker (he was shortlisted in 1997 for Quarantine). It is his 11th book, and he has said it will be his last - although authors announcing they're quitting writing rather puts me in mind of people who rage-quit Twitter, and then are quietly back a week later...

In Harvest, Crace tells the story of seven devastating days in an unnamed English rural village, in an unspecified time period (probably late middle ages?). The book opens with two linked events, on the eve of the harvest: a fire is started at the manor house; and three strangers appear on the village borders. The strangers are quickly (and wrongly) blamed for the fire, setting into action a violent chain of events that hastens the village's demise: as, unbeknown to the villagers, their way of life is about to be taken from them. Their common land is to be enclosed for sheep to graze on - wool production being more profitable: "the sheaf is giving way to the sheep".

The story is told through the eyes of Walter Thirsk, a local man for the past 12 years but still regarded as an outsider - as becomes clearer as the events of the week unfold and the villagers close ranks against these outside threats. Walter had arrived in the village as the servant of Master Kent, who had inherited the manor house through marriage. Now 12 years on, with Master Kent's wife dead, leaving him no heir and therefore no claim on the manor, the new lord of the manor, Master Jordan, arrives to claim his inheritance and usher in the changes that will drive the villagers from their land and deprive them of their land and their ability to feed and support themselves. 

On one level, Harvest is a superb historical novel. It's a vivid depiction of the lives of subsistence farmers in the middle ages. I loved the descriptions of the harvest, and of the traditions and rituals that surround it - such as the harvest feast, and the selection of a "Gleaning Queen" from among the village girls. I also really enjoyed the depiction of the tensions, rivalries, family feuds and gossip of such a small, closely-knit settlement - where there are only a few family names, and everyone is related to one another either by blood or by marriage. The link between the people and the land is close - these are people that have lived in the same way, on the same land for generations. It is this that makes the threat of enclosure so dire: it is not just the land that is threatened, but the very history of the village:

"We're used to looking out seeing what's preceded us, and what will also outlive us. Now we have to contemplate a land bare of both. Those woods that linked us to eternity will be removed by spring... flocks will chomp back on the past until there is no trace of it."

On a deeper level, Harvest is also an allegory for displacement and exclusion. The main protagonists are all outsiders: Walter Thirsk, still not accepted despite marrying into and living among the villagers for 12 years; Master Kent, who stands apart as the lord of the manor already, but whose precarious position is exposed by the arrival of Master Jordan; Mr Quill, the mapmaker employed to map out the land and the new enclosures, who cannot find a place among either the villagers or the masters; and Master Jordan himself, who wields his outsider status as a weapon, imposing devastating changes on a land and people that he neither understands nor cares to. And then there are the three strangers whose arrival is the catalyst for the changes that ensue - two men and a "dangerously magnetic" woman - displaced from their own land by the same type of enclosure that is threatened here. By the end of the novel the villagers, their efforts to present a united front to all these outsiders having proved worthless, have lost their land and become wandering outsiders themselves.

I thought this was an excellent book. The writing is vivid and detailed - occasionally comical, but mostly tragic. The narrative occasionally wanders a bit, as our narrator struggles to make sense of events that are rapidly overtaking him, but this just added to the general sense of powerlessness within the novel. My only complaint is about the characterisation of the woman who appears with the trio of outsiders at the beginning of the novel - or rather, the lack of characterisation. We are told she is "enthralling to behold in ways they never could explain". We never find out her name - the villagers nickname her Mistress Beldam: "Beldam, the sorceress. Belle Dame, the beautiful". And all the village men - our narrator, Master Kent and Mr Quill included - appear instantly infatuated with her. And I was never satisfied as to why: either why Mistress Beldam is so beguiling, or why it was necessary for the purposes of the plot that she be so. Perhaps I'm missing something here, but it just irritated me: the "beautiful, mysterious woman" trope is so overused in fiction, and I really expect better of a Booker shortlister.

Other than that point, which irritated me but didn't spoil the book for me, I really enjoyed Harvest. Based on this and The Testament of Mary, this is shaping up to be a very strong shortlist indeed!

The @WoodsieGirl Challenge 2013

Shortlist 06 - The Luminaries - Eleanor Catton

Shortlist 05 - The Lowland - Jhumpa Lahiri

Shortlist 04 - We need new names - NoViolet Bulawayo

Shortlist 03 - A Tale for the Time Being - Ruth Ozeki

Shortlist 02 - Harvest - Jim Crace

Shortlist 01 - The Testament of Mary - Colm Toibin

The @WoodsieGirl Challenge 2012

Shortlist 06 - Umbrella - Will Self

Shortlist 05 - Bring up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel

Shortlist 04 - The Lighthouse - Alison Moore

Shortlist 03 - Swimming Home - Deborah Levy

Shortlist 02 - Narcopolis - Jeet Thayil

Shortlist 01 - The Garden of Evening Mists - Tan Twan Eng

Visit her blog HERE

Visit her other blog HERE

* * * * *

Guest Stars - Table of Contents

* * * * *

Full - Table of Contents
* * * * *

Happy National Poetry Day!

Happy National Poetry Day.




I taught myself to love simply
Anna Akhmatova


I taught myself to live simply and wisely,
to look at the sky and pray to God,
and to wander long before evening
to tire my superfluous worries.
When the burdocks rustle in the ravine
and the yellow-red rowanberry cluster droops
I compose happy verses
about life's decay, decay and beauty.
I come back. The fluffy cat
licks my palm, purrs so sweetly
and the fire flares bright
on the saw-mill turret by the lake.
Only the cry of a stork landing on the roof
occasionally breaks the silence.
If you knock on my door
I may not even hear.