Book of the Month
A Fork in the Road / ‘n Vurk in die Pad
by André Brink (available in both English and Afrikaans)
André Brink grew up in the deep interior of South Africa, as his magistrate father moved from one dusty dorp to the next. With unscrupulous honesty he describes his conflicting experiences of growing up in a world where innocence was always surrounded by violence. From an early age he found in storytelling the means of reconciling the stark contrasts – between religion and play-acting, between the breathless discovery of a girl called Maureen and the merciless beating of a black boy, between a meeting with a dwarf who lived in a hole in the ground and an encounter with a magician who threatened to teach him what he hadn’t bargained for.
While living in Paris in the sixties his discovery of a wider artistic life, allied to the exhilaration of the student uprising of 1968, confirmed in him the desire to become a writer. At the same time the tragedy of Sharpeville crystallised his growing political awareness and sparked the decision to return home and oppose the apartheid establishment.
Not an autobiography of the and then I did this and then I did that variety, this memoir takes the form of a collection of beautifully written snapshot of important and interesting times in the life of one of our most celebrated writers. An alternative title may have been, A Life Lived, and we are privileged to share Brink’s reflections on the times he has lived through and the people whose paths have crossed his. Highly recommended.
Win with the Book Lounge
The illustrious Faber and Faber turn a stately 80 this year, and to celebrate they have put together the 40 Fab Fabers – 40 of the very best titles from their history. One of our readers will have the chance to win five titles of their choice from this list – just name the six books (and their authors) with which Faber have won the Booker Prize. Competition closes February 28th 2009.
Settle Down For A Story
By George
by Wesley Stace
Wesley Stace is the nom de plume of singer John Wesley Harding – also the author of the wonderful Misfortune. This is the utterly original story of a flawed but formidable family – and of two very different boys. One is an eleven year-old schoolboy, the other ventriloquist’s dummy. With no voice of his own, but plenty to say, the dummy tells his life story – from his humble beginnings in the 1930s to his rise to fame as forces’ favourite during the war and the horrible secret he’s been made to keep.
Years later, his self-possessed but vulnerable namesake finds himself packed off to boarding school, far from his mother and his redoubtable family – where he sets out to learn about his dead grandfather’s past as a world-famous ventriloquist, his magical powers and their family’s curious history. An insight into a forgotten or never known world of delights and make believe, this is a fascinating and engaging, funny and sad, simply lovely book.
“Stace has a startling imaginative talent and an anarchic sense of humour but, crucially, he has an ability to bind good ideas to an absorbing plot.” Times Literary Supplement
Nikolski: A Novel
by Nicolas Dickner
Intricately plotted and shimmering with originality, Nikolski charts the curious and unexpected courses of personal migration, and shows how they just might eventually lead us home. In the spring of 1989, three young people, born thousands of miles apart, each cut themselves adrift from their birthplaces and set out to discover what ” or who ” might anchor them in their lives. They each leave almost everything behind, carrying with them only a few artifacts of their lives.
Noah, taught to read using road maps during a nomadic life with his mother ” their home being a 1966 Bonneville station wagon with a silver trailer ” leaves the prairies for university in Montreal. Joyce, stifled by life in a remote village in Quebec and her overbearing relatives, hitches a ride into Montreal, where her Internet piracy career takes off. And then there’s the unnamed narrator, who we first meet clearing out his deceased mother’s house on Montreal’s South Shore, and who decides to move into the city to start a new life. This beautifully crafted story entwines the tale of three individuals and their continuous search for a feeling called home. This gentle read affects you more than you realise at first. Noah, Joyce and “the narrator” have all left behind the spaces in which they grew up to find their own worlds. Dickner cleverly manipulates character and reader along the way as you wait for them to meet. Breathtaking descriptions of oceans, roadmaps and second hand books feed the reader along the journey. May Dickner keep on writing and be yet another great Canadian voice on our shelves.
The Paris Enigma
by Pablo de Santis
An elegant and atmospheric literary thriller. In late nineteenth century Europe, Jack the Ripper stalks the streets of London and the city of Paris marvels at a new spectacle: the Eiffel Tower. As visitors are drawn to glimpse the centre piece in an exhibition of wonderful scientific creation, another momentous gathering is taking place in the city. Twelve of the world’s greatest sleuths have gathered to discuss their most famous cases and debate the nature of mystery. When one of them is found viciously murdered, however, the symposium becomes an elite task force dedicated to solving the outrage. For a young apprentice detective, Sigmund Salvatorio, this is the chance to realise a dream of working with some of the finest criminologists to ever practice. But as, one by one, members of the committee fall prey to the mysterious killer, the dream becomes a terrible nightmare.
Once on a Moonless Night
by Dai Sijie
By the author of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. A haunting story about language and identity, about Chinese history and politics – but at the same time a search for an ancient text and a love story. A young French woman in Peking in the 1970s is acting as interpreter between Chinese professors and Bertolucci, who is filming The Last Emperor. Afterwards, she follows a disgruntled old academic who tells her of a sacred text believed to have been taken directly from Buddha’s teachings, written in a now dead language, and inscribed on silk cloth many centuries ago. The story covers nearly a century of China’s history and brilliantly combines harsh reality, tenderness and mystery as the characters search for love and the lost text.
A Matter of Fact
From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States Can Change the World
by Duncan Green
As Head of Research for Oxfam Duncan Green is well placed to make an effective argument for a radical redistribution of power, opportunities and assets to break the cycle of poverty and inequality worldwide, and to give poor people power over their own destinies.
Why active citizens? Because people living in poverty must have a voice in deciding their own destiny, fighting for rights in their own society, and holding the state and the private sector to account for their actions.
Why effective states? Because history shows that no country has prospered without a state structure that can actively manage the development process. There is now also an added urgency beyond the moral case for tackling poverty: we need to build a secure, fair and sustainable world before climate change makes it impossible.
This book is a tour de force – accessible and vital to academic and private readers alike, with an urgency and a persuasiveness that cannot fail to touch and motivate readers.
Goodbye Mr Socialism
by Antonio Negri, in conversation with Raf Scelsi
Antonio Negri is something of a modern-day Gramsci – he has been involved with worker’s struggles in Italy since the 1950s, was a leading light of the Autonomia Operaia movement and was exiled and eventually imprisoned for revolutionary activities in the 1970s. He also happens to be – again, like Gramsci – one of the most brilliant and innovative Marxist theorists of his time, and a truly engaged organic intellectual. He is perhaps best-known for his collaborations with Michael Hardt (Empire, Multitude and others), but for those daunted by the complexity of those works, this new collection of conversation transcripts is a fantastic and accessible introduction to Negri’s thought, and a wonderfully productive and pragmatic, lived and learnéd leftist analysis of the contemporary world. The title might seem surprising coming from someone like him, but Negri’s project has found a new postmodern Marxism for a new postmodern world, and if it is “goodbye” to socialism, then it is a move beyond, not away from, the forms of 20th century socialism that Negri is quite busily mapping out.
From the Freedom Charter to Polokwane: The Evolution of ANC Economic Policy
by Ben Turok
Trevor Manuel has just delivered what may be his final Budget. This might be the end of an era… or not. There can be few people better-placed to answer that question than Ben Turok. Not only is he a respected academic, but he’s also a long-serving veteran of the ANC, especially in regards to its economic policy. And as the “evolution” of the title indicates, Turok is concerned as much to show the continuity as the discontinuity in this economic policy, and he does this in an extremely elegant and accessible way. While this is – as one might expect – a very sympathetic (though not uncritical in places, and certainly not obsequious) treatment of the ANC’s economic vision, this is an invaluable guide to how the ANC itself has analysed the world and South African economic climates through its existence, and how it has weighed its options within these circumstances. Turok also succinctly and clearly gives a historical account of the evolution of economic thought within the party, as well as providing clear analyses of the position of South Africa both within the world economy and within Africa. A timely and essential book.
Somewhere Towards the End
End by Diana Athill
What is it like to be old? Diana Athill, born in 1917, made her reputation as a writer with the refreshing candour of her memoirs. In this latest book, she reflects frankly on the losses and occasionally the gains that old age brings, and on the wisdom and fortitude required to face death. This is a lively narrative of events, lovers and friendships: the people and experiences that have taught her to regret very little, to resist despondency and to question the beliefs and customs of her own generation.
“There is a sense throughout Athill’s work that you are making a new friend as much as reading a new story…a delight to read.” Observer
Enough: Breaking Free From the World of Excess
by John Naish
For thousands of years humankind has had a brilliantly successful survival strategy – if we like something, we chase more and more of it: more status, more food, more power, more info and (latterly) more stuff. These days, in the Western world, we have more of everything than we can ever use, enjoy or afford – but still we chase. We are burning apace through the planet’s ecology and resources and it is leaving us sick, tired, angry, overweight and in debt.
In Enough John Naish acts as a guinea pig for neuromarketing gurus, samples all-you-can-eat buffets and rifles through the unused goodies that people throw away, in order to explore just how we got so hooked on ˜more’, and how we can possibly break free from this destructive cycle.
“A cheerfully likeable manifesto for lifestyle change.” Guardian
I Hate Myself and Want to Die: The 52 Most Depressing Songs You’ve Eve Heard
Tom Reynolds
This brilliant, cackle-inducing book is a wonderfully simple concept – a compendium of the most hideously miserable-making pop songs of all time. From Bobby Darin (Artificial Flowers) through to Evanescence (My Immortal) – stopping along the way to despair with Ray Peterson (Tell Laura I Love Her), Janis Ian (At Seventeen), Whitney Houston (I Will Always Love You), The Carpenters (Goodbye To Love) and Nine Inch Nails (Hurt – obviously) and many other masters of misery.
If you’ve ever run away screaming from the radio because Bette Midler or Phil Collins were about to drown you in buckets of empathetic drear, then this is the book for you – it will cheer you up no end!
Swindled: From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee – The Dark History of the Food Cheats
by Bee Wilson
From award-winning food writer and historian Bee Wilson – this is a fascinating history of ˜bad food’. Pink margarine and whisky mash, fake tea leaves and flavour injections – have you ever wondered how our food has become so untrustworthy? Have you ever felt cheated, disappointed or just plain cross that you have been so thoroughly duped when all you were trying to do was get something nice to eat? Well you are not alone, nor is this a modern phenomenon – bad food has a history, and this book tells it. Through a mixture of food politics, history and culinary detective work, Bee Wilson uncovers the many means by which the swindlers have tampered with our food throughout history.
“Wilson is a fervent lover of food, but Swindled is no blind polemic…It is her considered and often humorous approach that makes this book so successful.” Sunday Times
Things I’ve Been Silent About: Memories
by Azar Nafisi
From the author of the acclaimed Reading Lolita in Tehran comes a personal story of growing up in Iran – memories of a life lived in thrall to a powerful and complex mother against the backdrop of a country’s political revolution.
Her pain over the keeping of her errant father’s secrets from her dreamy and disappointed mother; her discovery of the sensual power of literature; the price a family pays for freedom in a country in the midst of political turmoil – these and other threads weave through this beautiful memoir. She reflects on the powerful history of her family – generations that span the many periods of change leading up to the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79. It is a deeply personal recollection of one woman’s choices, as well as a portrait of a country going through dramatic upheavals.
Short Stories of the Month
Our Story Begins: New & Selected Stories
by Tobias Wolff
For 30 years or more, Tobias Wolff has been a doyen of American short story writers, and this solid new hardcover collection is an ideal introduction to his work. Comprising 23 previously published stories as well as 10 brand new ones, Wolff’s trademark ruminative style and sympathy for his characters are amply on show here. In fact, sympathy (expressed in small moments – or withheld, sometimes knowingly and sometimes not) is a central concern. Wolff writes men and women equally well, and his style is firmly in the stellar American tradition of the intimate, low key short story running from Hemingway through to his contemporary, Raymond Carver. These subtle portraits of seemingly simple lives lived in all their actual complexity is a treat for any fan of the genre.
Book Lounge Smorgasbord
Epitaph of A Small Winner
by Machado de Assis
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis is considered by many to be the most significant Brazilian writer to have lived. His work has been held up and admired by, amongst others, Harold Bloom, Susan Sontag, Salman Rushdie and José Saramago.
First published in 1881, Epitaph of a Small Winner is the posthumous memoir of Bras Cubas, a wealthy 19th-century Brazilian, who reflects on the disappointments of life (his philosophy heavily influenced by that of Schopenhauer), although the grave has certainly not dampened his sense of humour – it is one of the wittiest self-portraits in literature.
“Machado de Assis was a literary force, transcending nationality and language, comparable certainly to Flaubert, Hardy or James…Epitaph of a Small Winner is clearly one of those books which we call definitive. It is there, complete, done, a study of ironic disillusionment couched in the most delicate suavity of despair.” New York Times
Year of Wonders
Geraldine Brooks
It is 1665 – in London the Plague rages and the streets are full of corpses. The small Derbyshire village of Eyam however, is blissfully untouched – until a parcel of cloth arrives from London, carrying the infectious fleas that have spread so much horror in the capital. Within a week the tailor who received the cloth is dead, and the disease spreads throughout the village. In panic some of the villagers wish to flee to nearby Sheffield – but the rector counsels the village to be strong, and they make the brave and historic decision to stay and let the plague run its course – thus not spreading the infection to the North and East of England. By the time the last victim dies, there are only 83 survivors from a village of 350 souls.
This history is the background to Brooks’ wonderful novel. We follow the life of Anna, a young widow, as she confronts the loss of her family, the lure of illicit love, and the opposite pulls of religion and medicine. From the author of People of the Book, this is a beautifully written novel, with a sensitive treatment of a harrowing subject, a lightness of spirit and great hope.
“A wonder indeed…fascinating” Anita Shreve
“A staggering fictional debut“ Guardian
“Year of Wonders carries absolute conviction as an evocation of place and mood. It has a vivid imaginative truth and is beautifully written.“ Hilary Mantel
House of Leaves
by Mark Danielewski
Johnny Truant, a wild and troubled sometime employee in a LA tattoo parlour, finds a notebook kept by Zampano, a reclusive old man found dead in a cluttered apartment. In the notebook is the heavily annotated story of the Navidson Report. Will Navidson, a photojournalist, and his family move into a new house – what happens next is recorded on videotapes and in interviews; and before long the Navidsons have become household names – or have they? Zampano, writing on loose sheets, stained napkins and crammed notebooks, has compiled what must be the definitive work on the events on Ash Tree Lane. But Johnny Truant has never heard of the Navidson Record. Nor has anyone else he knows. And the more he reads about Will Navidson’s house, the more frightened he becomes. Paranoia besets him. The worst part is that he can’t just dismiss the notebook as the ramblings of a crazy old man. He’s starting to notice things changing around him…Immensely imaginative, impossible to put down and impossible to forget, House of Leaves is thrilling, terrifying and unlike anything you have ever read before.
The Curious Sofa
by Ogdred Weary
Ogdred Weary is one of the many pseudonyms (and indeed an anagram) of the brilliant Edward Gorey, in his quest to illustrate his wonderful and rather odd world. This tiny masterpiece is a wickedly naughty story of the decadent upper classes at play.
He described his work as ˜literary nonsense’ – and on being accused of being gothic replied, “If you’re doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there’d be no point. I’m trying to think if there’s sunny nonsense. Sunny, funny nonsense for children”oh, how boring, boring, boring. As Schubert said, there is no happy music. And that’s true, there really isn’t. And there’s probably no happy nonsense, either.”
Which rather says it all…
Club Kids: From Speakers to Boombox and Beyond
This delightful collection takes us through the underworld history of the nightclub. From London’s first nightclub – the wonderfully named ˜Cave of the Golden Calf’ – opened in 1912; through the speakeasies of the Prohibition era in America and the decadence of the 1970s typified by Studio 54; from the New Romantic era in the 1980s to the techno explosion of the 90s (remember the Haçienda?). Illustrated with many evocative photos, this simply fabulous book features some of the greatest clubs ever to have glittered with sweat and decadence – The Cavern, Copacabana, The Loft, 333, Whirl-Y-Gig, The Mudd Club and many others where the gorgeous, the outrageous, the flamboyant, the avant garde, the outcast and the really very strange have found a home.
New Swell
by Byron Loker
This collection is true to life, anecdotal, funny and poignant. The strength of Loker’s writing is in the understated, wry wit. The stories are filled with longing, adventure and fun, and will ring true for anyone who has ever taken the time to sit down with an old railway man, or lived the surfing lifestyle. It ranges from anecdotal tales like Car Guard to lost love in Dancing Queen. There is a lyrical quality to the writing, and the voice and tone are consistent enough to make the reader suspect that these tales are true, rather than fictional. Loker has a very perceptive eye for the nuances of everyday life. A relaxing, fun read that won’t disappoint. Take the opening paragraph of the story Hardon for example: “The caretakers of our block of flats, Darrington and Chastity… they had a son by accident and named him Hardon. They come from Malawi where maybe that is a good name for a boy, although I didn’t think it was such a good one in South Africa.” (New Swell, p.93).
Scientifically Speaking
A wonderful science book with a ˜laugh-out-loud or your money back’ guarantee is Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science. Ben Goldacre is a Medical Doctor who writes the ˜Bad Science’ column in The Guardian. In this book he masterfully – and hilariously – dismantles the dodgy science behind what we’re told by the media and other ˜experts’ about nutrition, drugs and which treatments work. Along the way you’ll grow your own bullshit detector to protect you from being bamboozled by something that sounds science-y, but isn’t REALLY ˜scientifically proven’.
Do you consider yourself a cultured, educated person? Yes? Great, then you’ll be able to explain how electricity works. Or what DNA is? No? New York Times science writer Natalie Angier argues that the basics of science should be essential knowledge – like Shakespeare, Beethoven or Picasso – for any cultured person. In her book The Canon: The Beautiful Basics of Science, she explains the fundamentals of science in a clear and (I promise) interesting way.
I Am A Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose and Provocation
by Francis Picabia
I’ll leave this to the words of Charles Bernstein: “Francis Picabia’s raucous early Dada poems dare the unprecedented and traffic in the sheer possibilities of abstract shimmering gesture. His latest aphorisms are startling bolts of congealed thought.” Wow!
Children’s Corner
Society of S
by Susan Hubbard
All we know about Ariella at the beginning is that her mother is not in the picture, and her father is terribly over protective. She makes friends with the housekeeper and her children and soon realises that her own lifestyle is very far from the norm. As Ariella discovers more from her secret life, she is forced to run away from home and discover the answers to all of her questions. Society of S puts such a cool and different spin on vampire life that you are once again left very unsure if even your neighbour is one!
Aural Poetry (or new music from Down Under and closer to home)
We are very excited to have a whole new treasure trove for music from the vibrant Australian indiepop scene. Some of you are already acquainted with The Lucksmiths, those wonderfully melodic songwriters and witty lyricists from Melbourne – for those of you who aren’t, you should be! This is real favourite-band-in-the-world material, as albums like Naturaliste and the double CD collection of rarities, Spring A Leak, make very clear. And the best news is that they’re getting even better – new album First Frost is their first as a four-piece, all of whom contribute songs, and the added variety as well as fuller sound pays handsome dividends when laid over their trademark perfectly-crafted songs.
Before there were The Lucksmiths, Australians were lucky enough to be treated to the heart-on-sleeve pop delights of Cat’s Miaow, one of many brain children of the prolific and dead-brilliant Bart Cummings. The 36 songs collected in Songs for Girls to Sing are short, bittersweet, pretty as pearls and as enigmatic, borne aloft by Kerrie Sutherland’s dreamily swoonsome voice.
There is also some brilliant local stuff: singer-songwriter Simon van Gend returns with his sophomore album Guest of my Feelings, jampacked with more of his soulful and melodic brand of bedroom folk; and Cabins in the Forest have also just released a new EP, called The White Room Sessions, featuring alternate versions of some of the best-loved tracks off their debut album, Spells for Bribes, as well as a brand new track – their last recording, as they have now parted ways to work on solo projects.
A Fond Farewell to…
John Updike
John Updike’s novels, magisterial dissections of the soul of post-World War II middle America, placed him at the very pinnacle of his profession. Works such as Couples and the Rabbit series chronicled the obsessions, passions and anxieties of three generations. Whether writing novels, short stories, essays or poems, John Updike’s work always seemed to find the pulse of modern America.
The son of a schoolmaster, born in Pennsylvania in March 1932 he attended Harvard and spent a year in the UK, before joining the staff of the New Yorker magazine, to which he contributed numerous poems, essays and short stories.
His first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, was published in 1959, to mixed reviews. The following year, however Rabbit, Run established him as one of the greatest novelists of his age, and marked the debut of his most enduring, if not endearing, character. In this and its sequels, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest Updike charts the course of one man’s life: his job, marriage, affairs, minor triumphs and death. These novels are as much about the changing soul of the United States as about any individual character. Updike was clear about the focus of his work: “My subject is the American Protestant small town middle class…I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.” Altogether, John Updike published more than 50 novels, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1982 and1993 for Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest respectively. Though often berated by critics for his seeming obsession with golf and sex, it is his mastery of the English language, its nuances, vagaries and sheer beauty, which brought John Updike millions of admirers.
John Mortimer
Sir John Mortimer was a celebrated barrister, author and raconteur. His legal experiences fuelled his writing, and his most famous courtroom creation, Rumpole of the Bailey.
“I was raised , educated and clothed almost entirely on the proceeds of cruelty, adultery and neglect,” he said of his upbringing as the son of a successful divorce lawyer. He first came to the public eye as a barrister when he successfully defended Oz Magazine against charges of obscenity in 1971. He had already acted for Penguin Books when they published Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence. Later, he successfully defended the Sex Pistols when their Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols album was the subject of a lawsuit. A beacon for the permissive society, he also defended high moral standards. “Liberty is allowing people to do things you disapprove of,” he said.
A loose set of anecdotes about his childhood and late father, Voyage Round My Father appeared in 1971, the play was successfully adapted for television starring Laurence Olivier. Two installments of autobiography, Clinging to the Wreckage and Murderers and other Friends, followed. Displaying his offbeat view of life, Sir John revealed in the latter how he found murderers “really the most relaxed people” he had come across – “Generally, they had disposed of the one person that was irritating them.” His most famous creation, Rumpole, was the channel for his adversarial character, and in many ways the barrister he would have liked to be – unhampered by concerns of others’ opinions in his pursuit of justice for the defence.
John Mortimer was the quintessential champagne socialist, a champion for reform and permissiveness, who nevertheless lived in the wealthy Chilterns and backed the monarchy and fox-hunting. He told The Times: “One of my weaknesses is that I like to start the day with a glass of champagne before breakfast. When I mentioned that on a radio show once, I was asked if I had taken counselling for it.”
Christopher Hibbert
Christopher Hibbert was probably the most widely-read popular historian of our time and undoubtedly one of the most prolific. He wrote more than 50 books as well as short stories and numerous articles and reviews. His curiosity was insatiable, ranging from King Arthur and Agincourt to Edward VII and the Battle of Arnhem. He was a storyteller par excellence, enjoying a similar popular acclaim to that bestowed on Sir Arthur Bryant by a previous generation. But where Bryant’s observations had been filtered through the prism of Empire, Hibbert’s were relatively free of subjectivity and thus more appealing to the modern reader.
Don Maclennan
One of our finest poets, critics and teachers, Don Maclennan, passed away this month at the age of 80. MacLennan’s collections included Collecting Darkness, Solstice, A Brief History of Madness in the Eastern Cape and The Road to Kromdraai. As a teacher at Rhodes University, he touched many lives and will be fondly remembered by hundreds of ex-students in different parts of the world.