My Struggle - Book One - A Death in the Family - Karl Ove Knausgaard (Translated by Don Bartlett) - IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2014 - Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2013 - Best Translated Book Award 2013

2013 has very much been a year of translated fiction for myself and yet again I’ve accidentally stumbled across a mind blowing work. I came across Archipelago Books when searching out Japanese Short Stories for Dolce Bellezza’s Japanese Literature Challenge (I purchased and read, but did not review – maybe one day - Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s “Mandarins”) . Being on their email list Archipelago Books contacted me and asked if I could contribute funds to get Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle Book One” published as a special hardback edition – the series runs to six books and to date only books one and two have been translated and published in English. Always a sucker for funding not-for-profit arts ventures I chipped in enough to receive a hardback edition of Book Three, a softback edition of Book One and my name listed as a sponsor in the Special Edition Hardback which will be released alongside Book Three in July 2014.

Karl Ove’s semi-autobiographical masterwork has been a massive success in the homelands of Norway, media reports stating that over 450,000 copies of this work have been sold in Norway, a place of 10 million inhabitants – close to one in 20 people owing a copy!!!.

A lot of quite trivial preamble for a review I suppose, but if you’ve read “My Struggle” you’d appreciate that nothing is trivial. Our opening book dealing with his relationship with his father and his own personal struggle dealing with his dad’s death from alcohol abuse. Mentioning the fact that the work contains minute detail and everyday descriptions may relay a fear of tediousness, however not an event seems out of place, whether it is Karl Ove lighting yet another cigarette, observing the buildings over the road whilst he’s writing this work or even observing the surrounding landscape, each and every nuance, activity and observation builds on Karl Ove’s struggle with existence.

The air had become cooler now, and being so hot from work, I was aware of it enveloping me, pressing against my skin, and wafting into my mouth. Of it enveloping the trees in front of me, the houses, the cars, the mountain sides. Of it streaming somewhere as the temperature fell, these constant avalanches in the sky which we could not see, drifting in over us like enormous breakers, always in flux, descending slowly, swirling fast, in and out of all these lungs, meeting all these walls and edges, always invisible, always present.

But Dad was no longer breathing. That was what happened to him, the connection with the air had been broken, now it pushed against him like any other object, a log, a gasoline can, a sofa. He no longer poached air, because that is what you do when you breathe, you trespass, again and again you trespass on the world.

This book moved me in ways that I haven’t been moved before, the explanations of recollections, the memories of youth, the banal being influential, and the open raw honesty of Karl Ove’s relationships. It would be easy to understand if nobody in his circle talks to him anymore as his pouring of his feelings and angst is not spared for anybody. His own relationship with his partner, his brother, his children, nothing is considered sacred. And this is a bold approach, Karl Ove expressing what we surely all must (at times) think but aren’t brave enough to verbalise.

You know too little and it doesn’t exist. You know too much and it doesn’t exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing’s location and aim. But how to get there?

The prose is startling, complex issues are raised and assessed and then they flitter away to nothing as he buys a can of coke or closes the car door. A mirror on existance and one that had me reflecting quite often (for me it was not a page turner as I slowly let the reality sink in). Karl Ove’s struggle is not only with his father’s death in this novel, it is with his writing of existence, of struggling with the day to day. This is a moving and important piece, a novel which has addressed so many subjects where others fear to tread. I was that entranced through the first 200 odd pages (my edition runs to 430 pages) I immediately purchased Book Two, only to feel let down because I will have to wait until July in 2014 to tackle Book Three and goodness knows when for Books Four thru Six. I’ll have to struggle through I suppose – nothing caffeine and cigarettes won’t assist.

For more information on Archipelago Books and their beautifully presented works in translation go to http://archipelagobooks.org/ or if you want to buy it directly from the non for profit publisher http://archipelagobooks.org/book/my-struggle/

One of my highlights for 2013 - but I'll be back before the year is out with my final list...I'm reviewing my reviews.

IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Longlist and Update

It would appear as though I've dropped off the face of the earth as the updates to this blog have been non existant. I am still around, as followers of my other blogs will know I've been on a month long holiday through Sri Lanka and have now taken up a job working with Indegenous Communities in the remotest parts of Australia. These areas have little or no telecommunications so blog updates are nigh on impossible.

That doesn't mean I've been out of touch with the literary world. I was chuffed when "The Luminaries" won the Man Booker Prize as it is a serious piece of work and a deserved winner, a review will be forthcoming, however I want to be able to do the work justice so that may take some time.

On the prize front the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award has announced their 2014 long list of 154 novels (no I'm not going to list them here) and if you're interested the list can be found here:
http://www.impacdublinaward.ie/nominees/

I have reviewed 12 of the longlist here previously - simply use the "search" function on the right hand panel to locate my reviews:

The Detour - Gerbrand Bakker
The Teleportation Accident - Ned Beauman
HHhH - Laurent Binet
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry - Rachel Joyce
The Hunger Angel - Herta Muller
Traveller of the Century - Andres Neuman
The Spinning Heart - Donal Ryan
Umbrella - Will Self
The Garden of Evening Mists - Twan Eng Tan
Narcropolis - Jeet Thayil
The Testament of Mary - Colm Toibin
Dubllinesque - Enrique Vila-Matas

Some I liked more than others but all worthy of making the longlist. This year I won't be tackling the shortlist for the prize as the last two years I've found quite a few of the novels to be not to my liking so I'm not going to slog through a pile just to judge the one that I liked best from a mediocre bunch - having said that all of the above books that I have read have merit with probably Beauman's, Binet's, Joyce's, Ryan's and Toibin's falling a bit short - in my humble opinion of course.

I will be back as soon as I can with a review of another translated work I'm just about finished, and will do my best to keep you updated with the literary world and my thoughts from the central desert of Australia.

The Teleportation Accident - Ned Beauman - Booker Prize 2012

Well I’m back from a couple of weeks annual holiday and time to update the blogs. The problem with taking this break was I finished this novel on my first day so the recollections could be a bit dimmed by the sun, reefs and rainforest.

Let me introduce you to Egon Loeser (you can follow him on twitter although you can’t find author Ned Beauman there), a set designer in 1930’s Berlin who is working on a play about the life of Adriano Lavicini, a fellow set designer from the Renaissance who presumably died when his teleportation machine destroyed the theatre on its debut. Egon is building a teleportation set, whereby people can travel across time and space and appear at any point of the stage almost seemlessly. But deep down Egon is struggling, he hasn’t has sex since he split up with his girlfriend a long time ago and a glamorous former student, Adele, has just returned to his life only to run off, for a one night stand, with an author who has stolen Egon’s hero and written an ill researched pulp story. A heartbroken Egon then proceeds to Paris to find Adele, unsuccessfully of course,come across a longevity plan where the transplanting of monkey glands might just work.  And then finally onto Los Angeles where he befriends a local writer (one of his heroes) and his charming wife Dolores Mutton as well the owner of a pulp fiction book store who introduces him to HP Lovecraft. Of course he becomes involved in time travel via a secret university study into a real teleportation device.

This novel is hilarious in parts, so much so I was laughing out loud on the train:

You could certainly write symphonies about Dolores Mutton. You could write at least a scherzo about her cleavage alone.

Dear Mother and Father. Good news: I am rich. I have cornered the market in foreskins.

As a result, no doubt, of some bureaucratic oversight, Sunset Boulevard had a beginning and a middle but no end. The cost was not far now, but Sunset Boulevard probably just rolled on down the beach and into the water and onwards to Shanghai.

I will stuff this book so far down your throat that your duodenum will autograph it in bile.

Ned Beauman’s novel is one weird piece of work. Besides the laughing out loud, the engagement with the writing styles and settings is engrossing. For over 240 pages I was totally extolling the virtues of this young writer, then the novel seemed to fall apart for 100 or so pages. The section covering the sci-fi style of Lovecraft was not my cup of tea. However I did enjoy the four leaps in time as the ending, which (for some reason or other) reminded me of David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas”.  This also had hints of David Foster Wallace, but not as detailed (no footnotes here). And the use of time (as part of a Teleportation Accident) was extremely clever – how can I person in the 1930’s discuss what it may be like in 2012 and be so uncannily accurate?

I can understand why this novel didn’t make this year’s shortlist, for me it was the flat section late in the novel, however I will be hunting down his debut “Boxer, Beetle” – as well as continuing to follow the fictional Egon Loeser on twitter. I will also be looking out for future work from Ned Beauman who, at only 27 years of age right now, will certainly become a well-known writer.

Next up will be my review of Will Self’s “Umbrella” – now that was a challenging read!!!

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry - Rachel Joyce - Booker Prize 2012 - IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2014

After four months of non Booker Prize fiction I have returned. The packages have started arriving in the post and finally I've started the Long List for 2012 and this year there was neither rhyme nor reason as to the order I would read them. The first one I picked up off the pile sitting on the shelf just happened to be this one, as we know I'm in for a 12 novel pilgrimage so it seems a good enough place to start.

Harold Fry is retired, an assuming man who never reached great heights in his schooling  or career, a man who is sitting at the breakfast table ignoring his toast and wondering if he could mow the lawn again today (he’d done it the day before), when a mysterious letter arrives. A long lost work colleague has written from her death bed from Berwick-upon-Tweed, 627 miles away. Harold writes a polite reply and heads off to catch the morning return post. That’s when his pilgrimage begins.

A novel that reaches into the unassuming mind of Harold, his motivations, his fears, his regrets, his ordinariness and his life of being an under achiever. Could a retired man with no mobile phone, sailing shoes, minimal money and no training possibly walk the length of Britain to save a dying woman? Will it help him to understand the slippage in his love for his wife? His relationship with his only son?

So how was it that a truth that could make her smile once, and rest her head on his shoulder, would years later become the source of such resentment and fury? ‘You never held him!’ she had howled when things reached their worst. ‘All his childhood you never even touched him!’ It hadn’t been strictly true and he had said something along those lines; although she was right in essence. He had been too afraid to hold his own son. But how was it that once she had understood, and then years later she didn’t?

Although the story is peppered with interesting characters, motivators for Harold’s journey, and there are chapters speaking from his wife’s viewpoint, as well as her cries for help to the widower next door, it is the pilgrimage of Harold into his own past, confronting his demons, the places where he should have gone, his failing marriage, his darkest memories where the story rings most true. A “Heart of Darkness” trip by a retired brewery worker into his own self-loathing. Not a spiritual journey of Harold finding faith from a strictly religious sense (although we do have snow globes and other memorabilia of cathedrals) but a physical and spiritual journey of an ordinary man in 21^st century Britain.

This is Rachel Joyce’s first novel (after a distinguished career writing numerous BBC4 radio plays) and a fine debut it is, a thoroughly enjoyable, although emotionally draining, work which is a worthy inclusion on any Booker Prize Long List. Hard to judge where it sits against the other 11 novels which I’m yet to tackle though. Next up “Philida” by Andre Brink.