City of Bohane - Kevin Barry - IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Winner 2013

The city’s mood was a blend of fear and titillation. There was going to be an almighty collision and a small world shudders when giants collide.

This novel’s so chunky you could carve it, y’check me? Imagine you could blend James Kelman’s “How late it was how late” with a hint of Anthony Burgess’ “A Clockwork Orange”, a smidge of Nick Cave’s “And The Ass Saw The Angel”, a touch of Jon McGregor’s “Even The Dogs” and a whole bunch of Tom Waits. Set it in a dystopian future, use local (and unknown or invented) slang and have a bunch of anti-heroes about to enter a feud. That would only give you part of the concept.

“City of Bohane” is set in 2052 (you only learn that very late in the novel and the time this novel is set, was to me quite irrelevant) and centres on the ‘bino (tall white character Logan Hartnett who resembles an albino) who controls the degraded area. His flunkies consist of late teenage boys Wolfie Stanners and Fucker Burke and a cat suit dressed lithe Asian girl Jenni Ching. They frequent places such as the Ho Pee Ching Oh-Kay Koffee Shoppe speaking in slang and discussing the return of Gant to the area, Gant’s been gone for twenty-five years, was considered a future leader along with the ‘bino and was sweet on the ‘bino’s now wife Macu. Through this murky underworld runs the river of Bohane, black and bleak, along with bogs, the people from all parts of the city, the weather:

The Rises is a bleak, forlorn place, and violently windy. Too little has been said, actually, about living in windy places. When a wind blows in such ferocious gusts as the Big Nothin’ hardwind, and when it blows forty-nine weeks out of the year, the effect is not physical only but…philosophical. It is difficult to keep a firm hold on one’s consciousness in such a wind. The mind is walloped from its train of thought by the constant assaults of wind. The result is a skittish, temperamental people with a tendency towards odd turns of logic. Such were (and are) the people of the Northside Rises.

We also have gangs of sand-pikeys who keep kidnapped women in cages for “entertainment”, an angina effected editor of the local newspaper who has a thing for hairbrushes, the ‘bino’s mother Girly who lives on Jamieson’s and tranquilizers and spends her days watching movies from the 1950’s but still controlling the whole city, mysterious owners of numerous dodgy businesses and of course gang or clan leaders and more. This is a city on the edge, one that is ready to explode but as the opening sentence says: “Whatever’s wrong with us is coming in off that river”.

Daintily with forefinger and thumb he raised the ankle cuff of his trouser leg and dipped a Croat boot into the water to wash it clean.

Saw a red vibrancy mingle with the tarry brown of the bog water and so quickly disappear in the great mass of the river.

As you can imagine this novel is peppered with extreme violence and language, but amazingly it has humour, tenderness, lost love, grieving and humility. This is not an easy read, by any stretch of the imagination, and I did find myself re-reading numerous sentences or conversations, literally translating them into my own language as at times the slang and inflections are almost undecipherable. But I can guarantee the effort is worth it, Kevin Barry has created a dark world that seems beyond redemption, a place where human life is not at all valued, power and control are the measure of worth – along with your clothes:

Wolfie wore:

A neatly cut Crombie of confederate grey above green tweed peg pants, straight-legged, a starched white shirt, collar open to show a harlequin-patterned cravat, and a pair of tan-coloured arsekickers on the hooves that’d been imported from far Zagreb (them boys knew how to make a boot, was the Fancy’s reckon; if the Long Fella wasn’t walkin’ Portuguese, he was walkin’ Croat).

Of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award shortlisted novels I have completed this was the standout for me, a change of pace from the raft of historical fiction that has been making the shortlists of late – a novel that will challenge and enthral you, another great work to come out of Ireland!!!

Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction

Just a quick update on another award that was announced during the week. Tan Twan Eng picks up a further 25,000 pounds (to go with his Man Asia Award) for his Booker Prize shortlisted novel “The Garden of Evening Mists” – my review can be viewed here http://messybooker.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/2012-booker-shortlist-garden-of-evening.html  - the novels he beat, the shortlist, for this award were:

Pat Parker – Toby’s Room

Thomas Keneally – The Daughters of Mars

Hilary Mantel – Bring Up The Bodies

Anthony Quinn – The Streets

Rose Tremain – Merivel: A Man of His Time

Pure - Andrew Miller - IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2013

I first read Andrew Miller back in 2001 when he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for “Oxygen”. I must admit I did have to take the novel down from the shelf to remind myself what is was about, but I will never forget the Booker that year, it was when Peter Carey won for “True History of the Kelly Gang” (a hugely over rated piece of writing in my opinion) over my favourite Ian McEwan novel “Atonement”. That year also featured Ali Smith’s “Hotel World”, David Mitchell’s “number9dream” and Rachel Seiffert’s “The Dark Room”, which has been wonderfully adapted into the Australian/German co-produced movie “Lore”. I wasn’t reading the IMPAC Dublin Awards until a few years ago so missed the year Andrew Miller won with his debut “Ingenious Pain”. His latest novel. “Pure” is set in Paris, 1785 (or so the back cover tells us), and our protagonist Jean-Baptiste Baratte is awaiting his fate in an anteroom of the Palace of Versailles. We soon learn that he is an engineer by trade (has made a small insignificant bridge on a private property) and the “minister” hires him to clean up the cemetery of les Innocents as it has been “swallowing the corpses of Paris for longer than anyone can remember”. The effects are horrendous, the smell disgusting, the locals their breath is tainted, “it may poison not just local shopkeepers but the king himself.”

And so we follow the adventures of Jean-Baptiste as he works in Paris, hiring ex-miners to clear the graveyard and planning for the demolition of the church. He meets a vast array of characters, the organ player, his host family, the family who live on the cemetery grounds, various miners and ladies of the night. This is a novel which promises much – could Jean-Baptiste be a modern day Faust? Could the impending demise of the cemetery be linked to his own personal demise? The tight language that takes you right into the heart of Paris in the late 1700’s leads you to believe so…

A girl is crossing the burying ground of les Innocents. In one hand, from a length of twine knotted about its feet, she carries a hen; in the other a wicker basket full of vegetables, some fruit, a dark loaf. She was, as usual, one of the first at the market, her slight figure, the thick auburn hair, a familiar sight among the servants who make up the greater part of the early trade. Where she stops, the stall-holder never tries to cheat her. Nor does she need to squeeze and plump the produce, the sniff or haggle like the cook’s maids with their chapped fingers, or those bony matriarchs of pared-down households who live a peg or two above destitution, She is served quickly, respectfully. Perhaps she will be asked about her grandfather’s health, his stiffening joints, but no one will detain her long. It is not that they dislike her. What is there to dislike about Jeanne? But she comes from the other side of the cemetery wall, a place, in this last quarter of the eighteenth century, many people would prefer not to be reminded of. She is sweet, pretty, well mannered, She is also the little auburn-haired emissary of death.

I spent the first half of the novel wondering how the multi layers of death, pestilence, destruction and self-gratification would play out. I then spent the last half of the novel wondering why it was meandering to its logical conclusion. There were great passages describing Jean-Baptiste’s cramping innards, which simply led nowhere, a reoccurring theme of headaches, which simply filled in pages and an “affair” of the heart that simply had no real consequences.

Although an enjoyable read personally I felt this fell a little flat, that is not to say it isn’t a novel worth reading, simply I believe it is not up to the same lofty standards as a couple of others on the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award shortlist. And how this beat Julian Barnes’ “The Sense of an Ending” in the 2011 Costa Book Awards is beyond me, that doesn’t auger well for me to be venturing onto that list for reading material.

The Buddha In The Attic - Julie Otsuka - IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2013

In the 1920’s a large number of young Japanese women travelled to Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States as “picture brides”. These women were lured by letters and photos of potential working men in the USA, however the men sent old, retouched or even fake photos of themselves posing with luxury items that they did not own. After travelling by boat to their location these brides were met by grooms who were between 10-15 years older than their brides and then taken to live in squalid living conditions. Generally plantations that practiced segregation of the Japanese workers.

Julie Otsuka’s novel follows innumerable tales of these brides. It is not a novel that follows a single bride, nor a group of families, but more a collection of brides. In a poetic style that is raw, short and sparse we follow these women through their harrowing ordeal. The novel opens with the brides on the boat:

On the boat the first thing we did – before deciding who we liked and didn’t like, before telling each other which one of the islands we were from, and why we were leaving, even before bothering to learn each other’s names – was compare photographs of our husbands. They were handsome young men with dark eyes and full heads of hair and skin that was smooth and unblemished. Their chins were strong. The posture, good. Their noses were straight and high. They looked like our brothers and fathers back home, only better dressed, in gray frock coats and fine Western three-piece suits. Some of them were standing on sidewalks in front of wooden A-frame houses with white picket fences and neatly mowed lawns, and some were leaning in driveways against Model T Fords. Some were sitting in studios on stiff high-backed chairs with their hands neatly folded and staring straight into the camera, as though they were ready to take on the world. All of them had promised to be there, waiting for us, in San Francisco, when we sailed into port.

Fifteen of the twenty four sections in chapter one begin with the phrase “on the boat” and every subsequent chapter is similar in style. We follow the women through their journey, their reality upon arrival, their living conditions, their pregnancies, their growing children, their employment, their exclusion and eventually what happens to them once World War Two commences.

Interestingly enough there is a quote attributed to Donald Rumsfeld from October 12, 2001 used as a speech by the local mayor and if I hadn’t read the acknowledgements I wouldn’t have known. It did not look out of place. In fact there were numerous sections that could relate to different races in the right here and now:

It was all, of course, because of the stories in the papers. They said that thousands of our men had sprung into action, with clockwork precision, the moment the attack on the island had begun. They said we had flooded the roads with our run-down trucks and jalopies. They said we had signalled to the enemy planes with flares from our fields. They said that the week before the attack several of our children had bragged to their classmates that “something big” was about to happen. They said that those same children, when questioned further by their teachers, had reported that their parents had celebrated the news of the attack for days. They were shouting banzais. The said that in the event of a second attack here on the mainland anyone whose name appeared on the list would more than likely rise up to assist the enemy. They said our truck farmers were foot soldiers in a vast underground army. They’ve got thousands of weapons down below in the vegetable cellars. They said that our houseboys were intelligence agents in disguise. They said that our gardeners were all hiding shortwave radio transmitters in their garden hoses and when the Pacific zero hour struck we’d get busy at once. Burst dams. Burning oil fields. Bombed bridges. Blasted roads. Blocked tunnels. Poisoned reservoirs. And what was to stop one of us from walking into a crowded marketplace with a stick of dynamite tied to our waist? Nothing.

This is a simple but disturbing read about a generation that has almost been forgotten by the history books, a lament for people long gone but at the same time highlighting the current methods we still employ. Although a poignant tale I did find some of the style quite jarring and repetitive but that’s simply personal taste.

Even though a winner of the Pen Faulkner Award for fiction in 2012 I personally can’t see this novel lifting the IMPAC gong, all three I’ve read before this (“The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Get”, “The Map and the Territory” and “From The Mouth Of The Whale”) all rate higher for me than this novel. The winner will be announced next Thursday 6/6/13.

The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am - Kjersti A. Skomsvold - IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2013

When I log into Facebook or Twitter I’m now met with a plethora of inspirational quotes, it seems the social media generation is hell bent on improving themselves. I can’t help thinking though that for every influencer there’s someone else being influenced, for every person who wins there is somebody else behind them, for every achiever there is somebody else who didn’t quite achieve. Who gives the underachieving, influenced, loser a voice? And it can’t be too big a voice or else they’ll be trampling on somebody else?

Enter Kjersti A. Skomsvold, from Norway, to put a bit of perspective on this madness. In her short, first novel we are introduced to Mathea, possibly one of the most insignificant and lonely people to ever be put into the spotlight. She is very old and her day consists of avoiding other people, reading the obituaries, watching the news and talking to Epsilon (her husband who you suspect throughout has shed his mortal coil). As Mathea realises she has only a short time left to make her mark on the world she decides to break with all tradition and heads outside wearing her husband’s watch just in case somebody asks her the time – then she would have been of use. Mathea is so insignificant she spends her day wandering her flat contemplating the green carpet, that looks like grass, and going through minor events – some so minor that they actually highlight her insignificance.

I go out into the hallway and sit on the floor in front of the desk. There’s a pile of old telephone books in the top drawer. If someone were ever to ask me if I had a hobby, I’d tell them, yes, I’m a collector. The photo album is in the bottom drawer and the stiff pages creak when I open it. Most of the pictures are from before I was born.

She makes a time capsule and buries it in the back yard of her units (only for it to be dug up and thrown out when a flagpole is installed to celebrate the fact that her units are the cleanest in the neighbourhood). She was hit by lightning twice but when returning to school it was on a significant regal day so nobody noticed, she can’t make eye contact with her neighbours, let alone speak to them, she buys jam even though she can’t open the jars, never gathering up the courage to ask the checkout staff to loosen them for her and more. But the real sadness and reality of her loneliness comes from her ruminations on life.

I identify with bananas, for not only am I hunched over, I’ve also got a flower without sex organs and fruit without seed, and therefore I am, according to Buddha, meaningless. And I also believe Buddha was on to something where the hopelessness of all earthly endeavours is concerned, because I feel hopeless; I stole from the grocery store, have Age B. the time, buried a time capsule, baked rolls, turned up the hot plate, tried to plan my own funeral, tried to become a tree, and then the most difficult thing of all – I sued the telephone, which was really too much for me – and yet I’m still sitting here in my apartment and I’m just as afraid of living life as I am of dying. And wasn’t it Buddha who also said that everything is suffering, and I think that if I’d been religious, I would’ve been a Buddhist, and if I’d been a fruit, I would’ve been a banana.

This is a tragic tale, told with humour, but another stripped back bleak and depressing tale – is 2013 the year the anti-depressant chemical companies started funding the publication of novels? At only 147 pages and small in size this is a quick read, but not an easy one – the title holds the key, it’s a novel that brings some perspective back into life.

IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Shortlist 2013

Today the 154 longlisted novels for the world's richest literary prize (100,000 euros) was whittled down to a final ten novels. The award's long list comes from nominations by public libraries throughout the world for a work in English (it can be translated). I have read two and reviewed them previously, the links to those reviews on this blog are contained in the text below.

The shortlist is:

City of Bohane - Kevin Barry

The Map and The Territory - Michel Houellebecq - (See my review here http://messybooker.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/2010-goncourt-prize-winner-map-and.html )

1Q84 - Haruki Murakami


Pure - Andrew Miller


Buddha in the Attic - Julie Otsuka


The Tragedy of Arthur - Arthur Phillips


Swamplandia! - Karen Russell


From The Mouth of The Whale - Sjon - (See my review at http://messybooker.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/2012-independent-foreign-fiction-prize.html )

The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am - Kjersti A. Skomsvold


Caesarion - Tommy Wieringa


I'm very much looking forward to tackling the eight I have not read to date, as last year's list had a few gems and I'll be back a few times in the coming days with a review of "Captain of the Steppe" by Oleg Pavlov and the announcement of the shortlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

The Map and The Territory - Michel Houellebecq - Goncourt Prize Winner 2010 - IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2013 - Best Translated Book Award 2013

This is the second Goncourt Prize winner that I have read, the other being “The Patience Stone” by Atiq Rahimi and I am now trawling bookstores to get my hands on the other winners as this is a truly memorable novel.

This book reminded me about the joys of reading, what can be done with the written word and how as an art form the novel can often be underestimated.

Our story centres on artist Jed Martin, hugely successful with his first exhibition of photographs of Michelin maps, coming out of a ten year hiatus with a new show. An exhibition of paintings that centre on celebrities such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates is about to be launched and he approaches the celebrated novelist Michel Houellebecq to write the introduction to his exhibition catalogue. Our protagonist Jed has a number of issues to deal with, a broken boiler, a once in a lifetime love affair that he let slip from his grasp, an ageing father who he dreads seeing for Christmas dinner each year as well as a painting of Damien Hirst And Jeff Koons Dividing Up The Art Market. For the non-art readers Damien Hirst is reportedly Britian’s richest artist (a show selling at SOutheby’s for 110 million pounds) and Koons holds the world record for an auction price for a work by a living artist (over $33 million US).

As you can probably tell this is a lamentation on what constitutes art, how are artists motivated, how Jed manages to get 500,000 euros plus for a single work.

Jed’s studies had been purely literary and artistic, and had never had the occasion to meditate on the capitalist mystery par excellence: that of price formation.

Throw in the character of the novelist himself, who is revealing his warts and all alcoholism, sloth and general banality and besides the obvious self-parody, we have a masterful piece in our hands.

To make matters more interesting our novelist Houellebecq himself is brutally murdered and we then have lamenting, ready for retirement, policemen, tired of investigating celebrity murders because of the pressure they bring. And with no clues, as Houellebacq is a despised loner, the story has to lead back to Jed, our artist.

How one can weave a masterful plot about himself, who is actually dead in our novel (and living from 1956 to 2010 on the back cover which presents the novel  itself as an artwork), as well as have a cutting attack at the art world’s fickle nature and lack of sincerity whilst presenting itself as art? This alone makes this one of the most entertaining books I have read in years.

…Anyway, Picasso’s ugly, and he paints a hideously deformed world because his soul is hideous, and that’s all you can say about Picasso. There’s no reason any more to support the exhibition of his works. He has nothing to contribute, and with him there is no light, no innovation in the organisation of colours or forms. I mean, in Picasso’s work there’s absolutely nothing that deserves attention, just an extreme stupidity and a priapic daubing that might attract a few sixty-somethings with big bank accounts.

Or the wonderful passages describing the dead author himself:

The funeral had been arranged for the following Monday. On this subject the writer has left extremely precise instructions, which he had put in his will, accompanied by the necessary sum. He did not wish to be cremated, but very classically buried. ‘I want the worms to free my skeleton,’ he added, allowing himself a personal note in an otherwise very official text. ‘I have always had excellent relations with my skeleton, and I am delighted that is can free itself from its straightjacket of flesh.’ He wanted to be buried in the cemetery of Montparnasse, and had even bought the plot in advance, which by chance was a few metres away from that of Emmanuel Bove.

Emmanuel Bove was a famous French writer whose first work in his own name was published with the assistance of Colette,  “My friends” (or “Mes Amis”) .

This is an intricate novel, one that goes to such extremes that it has lamentations on flies (I learned a lot), and one that demands rereading. One of my absolute favourites of 2012 and a further startling example of what the written word can achieve. From the two examples I’ve come across, I will be seeking out more Goncourt Prize winners, which, naturally, I will review here.

Note this novel has also made the 2013 IMPAC  Dublin Literary Award (the world’s richest literary prize) long list. I’d love to hear the acceptance speeches if the deceased Michel Houllebecq won such a large sum of money!!!