In The Beginning Was The Sea - Tomas Gonzalez (translated by Frank Wynne) - 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

I’ve travelled to quite a few countries in my world literature journey, however I do believe this is the first time I’ve stopped off in Columbia, if I’ve been here before the work didn’t leave much of a lasting impression upon me. “In The Beginning Was The Sea” is Tomas Gonzalez’s first novel, written whilst he was a barman in a Bogota nightclub, it was originally published by the bar’s owner in 1983. Although Gonzalez lived in the USA for twenty years this is his first work to be published in English and he has now returned to live in his native Columbia.

Our story focuses on two “hippies”, who decide to leave the bustle of the city behind and move to a remote island and become self-sufficient. Our couple are Elena and J and our book begins with a bus trip towards a fetid shoreline village, includes a broken sewing machine and leads to a trip to the island by a drunken local. Our language elicits the coastline of Columbia, however the romanticism is totally destroyed by the descriptions of the rusty cars, discarded oil cans and pot-bellied locals.

As an observer of Elena and J’s world we can see that we are in for a stormy ride right from the beginning, their dream is not a reality.

The rains came and so began the first of the two winters J. would spend on the finca; the first of his last two winters on earth.

Thick grey clouds massed over the sea, lending it a mournful, boundless beauty. Before the first drops fell, the sun would slip through a chink in the clouds spilling showers of light over the dark waters. Lightening shattered the skies with a thunderous boom as gulls shrieked high in the heavens. Then the clouds merged and fat raindrops chimed like pebbles on the corrugated iron roof, heralding torrential downpours that seemed to last forever. The muggy heat that preceded the cloudbursts would give way to a bleak, dusky coolness as the leaden outlines of the clouds melted until it seemed as though the land and the waters had merged again and the darkness was one with the light. Sometimes it was possible to hear above the raging elements the muffled purr of a boat, its blurred outline barely visible out at sea.

As their stock begins to die or go missing, as Elena pushes back against the locals and as their meagre funds dry up, our idyllic couple’s relationship strains even further. Desperate plans to find an alternative source of income, Elena’s hatred of not being able to swim without disturbance, and relationships with the locals brings our couple towards their only concept of escape….alcohol. The world of endless senseless partying and consumerism again has them in its grip.

When J. got to his feet, dizzy and reeling from the drink, the woman slipped under his arm. Together, they disappeared behind a low curtain while Julio watched, his face flushed. An hour later, the madam – an ageing malicious old shrew decked out with tinkling bracelets and thick makeup – came and told Julio to take his friend home as he was drunk and had fallen asleep in the bedroom. Julito work J. up as best he could, helped him outside and took him back to his house.

Four days later, when he arrived back at the finca, J. saw that there was a new barbed-wire fence encircling almost a thousand square metres of land and a small strip of sea. Running from a stake planted in the sea, five strands of razor wire were strung across the beach, the barbed wire snaking through two hundred metres of forest and then back across the beach where it was nailed to another stake embedded in the water, completely sealing off the little cover where Elena went swimming.

This novel is written in a style where we, the readers, are clinically distanced from the events that unfold, whilst already knowing the tragic outcome, but need to continue our journey to know how those events transpire. Apparently “J.”, one of the two protagonists in this work, is based on Tomas’ brother Juan and his tragic life. I was intrigued to find this out as this work is quite clinical in the descriptions of the facts and very much removed from the sentimentality that you would generally find in a biographical work.

Personally I found this an easy read, however the connection to the characters was difficult as the matter-of-fact style didn’t allow me to meld into their world. This is a work which explores fate, desperation and the power of nature over all well made plans. Whilst a tragic tale it also explores the themes of relationships, responsibility and love. Whilst this could have been a romantic tale, with a connection to nature with a tragic ending, the style dictates that the dark side is bubbling alongside and isn’t far away from any celebration or joy.

Personally I preferred other works on the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist and was surprised when it made the official shortlist as some of the mixture of styles (for example, a diary appears for a very short period). Another Pushkin Press work from their “Pushkin Collection”, (I have previously reviewed three works by Yasushi Inoue and one by Paul Fournel from this collection), it is beautifully designed and hand stitched by an independent printer on acid free paper, it is one of those joys to hold. A book for lovers of books.

The End Of Days - Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Susan Bernofsky) - 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

In 1990 ‘The Independent’ launched the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize to honour contemporary fiction in translation within the United Kingdom. It only lasted six years before being suspended, however it was revived in 2001 after Arts Council support, with the Award being made in 2002 for a work published in 2001, and in 2011 Booktrust took over the administration of the award, however the “independent” was retained. So we have had nineteen award winners since the award started and to date it has been won by nineteen male writers.

This year four of the final fifteen books were by women, last year it was four as well, however two of them made it to the final six works. It has been a similar tale throughout the history of the award with women sadly under represented. This year the females have a lone work on the shortlist, and it is “The End of Days” by Jenny Erpenbeck (she was longlisted for her book “The Book of Words” in 2008 and made the shortlist in 2011 with “Visitation”), all of her works on the lists being translated by Susan Bernofsky.

Our novel opens with a very small child, just born, taking her last breath and dying. We have the impacted lives voices telling their emotional tales. Due to the premature death, the husband wife relationship cannot bear the strain and they go their own separate ways, him to America:

When it’s his turn, he’s brought into the examination room and told to undress completely. He doesn’t understand the instructions in English, but even after an interpreter translates them for him, he doesn’t move. Have the Americans lost their minds? Or do they really think of it as a second birth when you set foot in their country? In any case, his examinations at the Technical University in Vienna – which certainly weren’t easy – had gone differently.

Come on they say, meaning: Hurry up.

There’s no help for it: More naked than he ever stood before his wife, he must now, like it or not, stand here in the light and present himself to an entire group of doctors. If only you could know in advance where the path you choose freely will lead. His coat and clothing are meanwhile being disinfected, when he gets them back after the examination they are crumpled. Shame, then, is the price one pays for this life of freedom, or is this itself the freedom: that shame no longer matters? Then America really must be Paradise.

This early section deftly plays on your emotions, it draws you into the shattered world of the players, the wife, the husband, the grandmother. It is a world destroyed by a child’s death.

But what if one of the parents had thought to grab a handful of snow and put it on the child’s chest, forcing it to breathe again? The story would be reimagined. Could there be a different outcome?

In between the “Books” (five in number) there is an “Intermezzo” where the story of the child is changed, generally due to a very minor event, causing the whole future of events to be profoundly different (or are they?). Book Two imagines the life of the young girl, but does she die a tragic death as well, only to have an “Intermezzo” and a different sequence of events occurs.

Set in pre-World War Two Vienna, through the War, into Stalin’s Moscow and onto a recent Berlin, this work also addresses Germany through extremely turbulent times. Our longlist this year had a large representation of German works (Daniel Kehlmann’s “F”, Judith Schalansky’s “The Giraffe’s Neck”, Stephanie de Velasco’s debut “Tiger Milk” and Timur Vermes’ “Look Who’s Back”) – possibly too many for my liking, making it a little top heavy for one language and country.

Addressing a raft of human issues, from refugees, to underground meetings, from prostitution, to loving relationships, from birth to death:

A day on which a life comes to an end if still far from being the end of days.

We have references to Goethe, more specifically “Iphigenia”, who was saved from death but not in her homeland. And if I was writing a thesis, I’d probably research that work and the parallel’s here, but I’m not, I’ve got more translated books to read!!!

Book three overs to a detailed explanation of our protagonist (the girl who dies on page one or thereabouts) and her joining the Communist Party of Austria, a reverse explanation whilst she is living in Russia, writing to get her citizenship. What pile will her application end up on, the one for the firing squad? Such random events determining our existence.

Generally I like to put a few different quotes from works into my reviews, however with this work, I believe you need to fall into the flow of the story and the style of the writing as you read it, and to quote sections from later parts would destroy the context and the emotional train that took you there.

Personally I found the clinical Stalinist section a little too removed (so it did as it set out to do???) as each reimagining of a life melds your mood into a different shape and form.

I’m going out on a limb here (or am I???) this book is by far the stand out work of the 2015 official shortlist, and in my mind Erpenbeck will be the first female writer to win the award – about time!!! One from twenty? Hey judges you got a bit of catching up to do!!!

PLEASE NOTE: After publishing this post, it was pointed out to me that there was a "lost" winner of the 2001 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and it was taken out by a female. The work was "The Alphonse Courrier Affair" by Marta Morazzoni. Although the shortlist was provided to me from a blog (a reliable one at that) this win is probably confirmed by "The Guardian of 13 October 2001" which stated "The Alphonse Courier (sic) Affair, winner of numerous awards, including this year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize."

Therefore may Jenny Erpenbeck become the second female winner of the prize and may she not be "lost" to history.

You do know what that means for this crazy reader, don't you? I'm going to have to find a copy of Morazzoni's work and review it!!!

Ohhh- and I've updated Wikipedia to reflect the win. No longer a "lost" winner.

Independent Foreign Fiction Prize the Shadow Jury announces shortlist 2015

As regular visitors here would have noticed, since the beginning of March I have been reading my way through the "official" longlist for the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. To what end? I am a member of the Shadow Jury for my second year, and we now have eleven dedicated readers and bloggers who intend to separate the wheat from the chaff and give you the best translated book (within the rules) published in the United Kingdom in 2014.

The eleven esteemed judges conferred and even allowed an extra work to be included on the longlist, "Zone" by Mathias Enard, a number of us had read and highly rated the work and when we learned that it was eligible for the prize AND it had been entered we were amazed that it didn't make the final cut of fifteen works, so took matters into our own hands and added to our list. Just because we can, and we love to add 500+ pages of reading (and in this case a single sentence!!!) for the judges.

Over the last month the eleven of us have been reading, conferring, arguing, debating, reading and reading and just prior to the official list being announced we came up with our favourite six translated works published in the UK (by a living writer etc etc) in 2014.



Bloodlines by Marcello Fois (translated by Silvester Mazzarella)

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami (translated by Philip Gabriel)

The Dead Lake by Hamid Ismailov (translated by Andrew Bromfield)

The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Susan Bernofsky)

The Ravens by Tomas Bannerhed (translated by Sarah Death)

Zone by Mathias Enard (translated by Charlotte Mandell)

As you can see only two common works between the Shadow Jury and the official Jury, Murakami and Erpenbeck. So there is still a chance we will have the same winner!!! Last year the Shadow Jury's winner wasn't even on the official shortlist!!!

Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2015 Shortlist

The Shadow Jury voted yesterday and came up with their favourite six titles from a longlist of sixteen books (yes we added one to the official starting list of fifteen as we know it was eligible and it was entered, "Zone" by Mathias Enard)  and today the official judges named their six books to make the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize shortlist.

We have agreed on two works only!!!

In the coming days I'll post the Shadow Jury Shortlist.

The official list is as follows (with links to my reviews where I have reviewed them, four of the six featuring here already - if they are still to be reviewed you have surprise reviews coming up from me AND soon!!!):

By Night The Mountain Burns by Juan Tomas Avila Laurel (translated by Jethro Soutar)

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami (translated by Philip Gabriel)

F by Daniel Kehlmann (translated by Carol Brown Janeway)

The End Of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Susan Bernofsky)

In The Beginning Was The Sea by Tomas Gonzalez (translated by Frank Wynne)

While The Gods Were Sleeping by Erwin Mortier (translated by Paul Vincent)

Personally I'm a little disappointed at a couple of titles on the list (Murakami's is not his strongest work but it was very popular upon release). All up this is not a poor list by any stretch of the imagination and you could do a lot worse than hunting any of these works down. I already have a personal choice from these works - no hints but maybe a female is about to win it at last!!! (Oops there's only one on the shortlist!!!)

While The Gods Were Sleeping - Erwin Mortier (translated by Paul Vincent) - 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

Erwin Mortier is a Belgian author, writing in Dutch and as an awarded poet it is quite easy to see the celebration of language and the written word in his fourth novel “While The Gods Were Sleeping”.

Our novel is narrated by writer Helena Demont, a woman close to 100 years of age, at home being attended to by a Moroccan carer Rachida, she is writing her memoirs, reminiscing:

Her sarcasm served a higher purpose. She wanted to thrust me into the everydayness of the word, squeeze my thoughts into sturdy winter clothes. Dreary but hard-wearing, and above all waterproof. For my mother trains of argument and items of clothing were one and the same: they must button up tight, while I liked nothing better than lazing about in the hanging gardens of Babylon in my open nightdress, proud of my blossoming curves, and climbing the ziggurats of books. I surrendered myself to the cadence of silent speech that rose from their spines, the Styx of sentences, in which here and there, like driftwood or drowning people, words and images floated, which I more or less already understood, alongside much else that was not much more than shadowy stains in a dark flood.

I still believe that books, like gods and children, inhabit a limbo in existence, a dimension in which effects can lead to causes and yesterdays crawl forth from tomorrows. It is impossible to make final judgements there: who deserves heaven and who hell. Everything is yet to happen and everything is already over; that is the essence of paradise.

On the surface this is a novel which looks at our narrator, her mother, father, brother, uncle and her marriage, all through the memories of World War I. It contains five parts, the first setting the scene as our narrator as the ageing writer and her relationship with her mother, the second her relationship with her homosexual brother, the third the war itself and her meeting her husband, a photographer, the fourth the brother and future husband coming together towards the end of the war in a hospital and the last reflections back at her home as she is writing the work we are reading.

However this is a much deeper work than the superficial plotline, where a middle class family moves to their Uncle’s property to be safe during the war and where our narrator falls in love and slyly visits the trenches. It is a work which celebrates writing as an art form, it evokes images when describing photographs from the war, and it uses the written word to languish in the joy of the written word:

Nor did she understand that a story as it develops strives for its own specific gravity. It unwinds and allows the person speaking it or writing it down to determine its fate only to a very small extent. Words, images, sentences congeal, and around that glowing core a gravitational field is created that attracts other fragments of images and sentences from mental space, sucks them in and absorbs them into the whirlpools of the imagination. Brainwaves and associations are constantly bombarding the swelling word planet. Some stories brush past the still-liquid surface, drawing at most a light trail in the sky, but most things come and go unseen, and are pulverized silently. There is so much that will never be forgotten, because no one with have ever known that it existed.

This is not an easy work to read, it contains vivid and deep language, one that evokes strong imagery, even the simple activities such as walking along muddied, cobbled streets become an exercise in word play and the painting of the scene for the reader is paramount in our author’s eyes. To use a large section of the World War One experiences describing the photographic images taken by our narrator’s husband, gives us the sense of removal from the reality, however at the same time the language is describing actual atrocities. The whole novel being one of “removal” from the horror, whether physical or through the written word. Even the country of Belgium is described as such, through the experience of sitting room embroidery gatherings:

Nowhere, except perhaps in poetry and very occasionally in music, have I experienced a more intimate interweaving of something with nothing than in the lacework that there in the beguinages split from the ladies’ pincushions and descended in milk-white waterfalls to the woven baskets at their feet, flowed over the edge and fanned out across the floorboards, so that, in particular on days of very thick fog, those rooms where only the gentle ticking of the bobbins could be heard, seemed to me nothing less than the secret maternity wards of our national mist.

Compared with this scholastic finesse of needle and thread, the sewing work of my mother and her friends represented little more than clumsy popular devotion, but more especially it seemed to me only logical that Belgium was not a country of embroidery or knitwear, but of lace. In a place where the art of lacking was practiced so exuberantly and ubiquitously, something like Belgium was bound to be born sooner or later: a nation that was constantly playing on the fringes of its own emptiness, just as all of us, driven by our soul, our most intimate vacuum, have continually to knit ourselves together.

That was more or less the conclusion of our historians. The filled bulky volumes with explanations for the creation of our fatherland, wedged between north and south, east and west: a region whose specific feature was mainly the absence of specific features, where different spheres of influence operated as capriciously as the high – and low-pressure areas in their hopeless struggle in the sky above our heads. Those learned gentlemen usually came to the conclusion that if Belgium had not been invented, someone would have had to discover it.

As the Country of Belgium is described, our work delves into the details of lives on the fringes, but then again it gives us the fringe of those lives, snatched memories, events without context, people lacking motivation. “While The Gods Were Sleeping” reminded me very much of Iris Murdoch’s “Bruno’s Dream”, maybe the ageing character on his deathbed and the memories and regrets he holds brought that forth, and even though Iris Murdoch’s work is also beautifully written is has none of the eloquence of this work. Another which sprang to mind was Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Stranger’s Child”, another work which was set in WWI, involved poetry, homosexuality, middle class avoidance and memories. Memories of both of those books is a solid endorsement of this work as I thoroughly enjoyed Murdoch and Hollinghurst.

One fellow blogger did describe this as “over-wrought” and at times it can feel like reading through treacle, however the simple pleasure of reading is brought to life here. A nice inclusion on the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Longlist and one I must admit I would not have come across if it wasn’t for the nomination. Very different from the other works I have read to date, and it will of course depend on what the judges are looking for when they cull the list to six works in just over a week’s time – if they go easy readable and sellable works, this will not make the cut, if they go literary it will remain firm.

By Night The Mountain Burns - Juan Tomas Avila Laurel (translated by Jethro Soutar) - 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

Ordinarily I wouldn’t start a literature review with a geography lesson, however ordinarily I wouldn’t be reading a book from Equatorial Guinea, and not even mainland Africa here, but a novel set on the island of Annobon. Equatorial Guinea is a small West Cost nation in Africa and the island of Annobon is a miniscule 17.5 square kilometres or 6.4kms long by 3.2kms wide (I know the maths doesn’t add up, but then again an island isn’t a square!!!) According to our narrator “…it is located just below the equator. If I’d studied geography, I’d give degrees of latitude and longitude, so that you might look the island up on a map,” however in our work the island isn’t actually named, you need to read the coverslip or do a little more research on Juan Tomas Avila Laurel. His parents being teachers on Annobon, where he spent his primary school years.

He is a writer who staged a week-long hunger strike in protest against Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo’s regime (the President since 1979). Obiang ousted his uncle in a military coup in August 1979, has been accused of gathering $700 million in US bank accounts, human rights abuses and even cannibalism. Juan Tomas Avila Laurel now lives in exile in Barcelona (writing in his native Spanish tongue).

When a wicked thing happens in a village, its negative consequences scatter into the air and are left hanging until a ceremony of purification is performed.

Our novel opens with an introduction of the canoe making ceremony (or hauling song) and the island itself, a mere sliver, the whole population is back and they fish by hand far away at sea, from these canoes. Ticks are removed from feet with sharp fish bones. Our nameless narrator live in one of the two double storey houses on the island, built to face away from the sea and towards the mountain “El Pico del Fuego”. A mountain which his grandfather watches all day long, never leaving his second storey room.

Does anyone know how you start when making a canoe? First you select the tree, and if it’s not your tree but a tree on a woman’s plantation, women being the ones who farm on the island, you go and speak to her. You might be lucky and she’s a widow or has no husband, or she has one but he’s away. Or you might be unlucky and she has sons who are growing up, and she knows that one say the tree will make a good canoe for the sons, when they’re old enough to go out fishing and transport things about the island. Every man on our Atlantic Ocean island has his own canoe, and if he doesn’t have one, a new canoe is brought into the world so that he does, so that nobody on the island has to borrow one from anyone else.

This is a boy’s tale, or rather the reflections of an old man of his time as a boy. It expsoes the island’s rituals, fears, sexist ways (in our world), however these are simple times where living off the land and the sea are the keys to existence. The visitors are virtually non-existent, only when the men (and at times the women, with dire consequences) go out and meet poaching fishing boats:

With the shortage of everything really squeezing at our throats, a boat appeared off the coast, and it was so close that we could tell it was taking fish from our larder, our sea. And so out we went, for we had something to say about this. But it turned out to be a boat from a friendly nation, stealing fish because it knew our island belonged to no one. Or rather that it belonged to us, but that we had no control over it. And we didn’t say anything about what they were doing, for every man’s conscience is his own, but we gave them a list of things we needed. This was it: soap, kerosene, matches and food. We didn’t ask for clothing because there was no need to say we lacked things to wear. But do you know what those men gave us? Cigarettes and fish. SO many they wouldn’t fit in the canoes our mean had done out to the boat in. Can you believe it? They gave us cigarettes and fish. It was therefore clear that the owners of the boat from the friendly nation knew the fish were ours and wished to share them with us. And what about the tobacco? Our men had an unhealthy yearning for it, because for a long time they’d been reduced to smoking papaya leaves. So the men came back from the boat and no one can say things weren’t shared out evenly: fish for the women, tobacco for the men. In fact hardly any women on the island smoked, though a few of the older ones did something similar, chewing it and stuffing it in their gums. But only a few of them, and they never used it as snuff.

Written with a childlike innocence but containing a wealth of information and childhood memories, this, at time repetitive, tale gives us a strong sense of place and culture. A replication of the strong history of oral storytelling you are drawn into our narrator’s story as though you were sitting on his porch (you never go to the sea side at night).

Our young boy tells the island’s history, with the grandfather figure not too far away. Raised in a household of women (excluding the reclusive grandfather) “there were no daddies to sleep with the mummies where we lived”, this is also a story of a young boy yearning to be the “man” of the house, make canoes and fish.

The mountain in our story of course catches fire (as the title and cover art would suggest), due to the inattention of two sisters attempting to burn down a large tree. Their mother is apparently a “she-devil”, a woman who can’t control her temperature at night and who needs to bathe in the sea. When the most senior man on the island falls to his death whilst collecting palm oil, the “she-devil” is blamed and beaten to death with sticks.

This is of course a tribal tale, however one that puts a mirror on the innocence of childhood, the curiosity about death, the confusion about “adult matters” and the lack of knowledge about more serious matters (for example, the outbreak of cholera on the island).

As somebody who has recently had exposure to living in remote communities it was a revelation to pick up a story of this kind, to find a tale from a miniscule place on our planet is startling indeed. To have made the Independent Foreign Fiction Longlist is an achievement in itself, the romance of being from such a remote place may push it further along the prize journey, purely as a curiosity, however I’m thinking a fall at the first hurdle in in store.

Thanks to And Other Stories for their independent work which brings novels such as this to the English speaking world, I’m quite proud to say my name is in the credits at the end of the book as a small contributor in getting it to print (that in no way influences my review here, it possibly makes me even more critical as my own hard earned is on the line!!!)

F a novel - Daniel Kehlmann (Translated by Carol Brown Janeway) - 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

In 1980 the world was introduced to the “best selling toy”, the Rubik’s Cube. Now surely you’ve all heard of it? The six sided cube which has an internal pivot mechanism, with nine stickers on each of the six sides. You mix it up, and attempt to get the white, red, blue, orange, green and yellow all aligned on their correct sides. I could go all weird on you now and explain that the white is opposite the yellow…blah blah blah. Basically a six sided puzzle will possibly suffice for an opening foray.

“F” by Daniel Kehlmann is a puzzle too, however it contains a character who is obsessed by the cube, enters championships, talks about his progress and carries the optimal solution to another level. But wait, there’s more, our novel contains six sections (are they the six sides to the cube?) but only four main players…yes four.

Our work opens in the third person with the father Arthur taking his three sons, Martin (who didn’t know his father until he was seven years of age, and lives with his mother) and twin boys Eric and Ivan (who live with Arthur and his current partner) to a hypnotist’s performance. A façade?

Arthur doesn’t believe in hypnotism, however both Ivan and himself are called on stage, Ivan has his hands stuck together, but it is the sceptic Arthur who goes onto the stage, appears to have a normal conversation about his life ambitions, who appears to fall under the spell of the “Great Lindemann”. He drops the children home, empties the bank account and promptly disappears. He sends a telegram, one; he’s fine, two: don’t look for him. Yes he’s fine.

We then move many years into the future to the first person narrative of Martin, who reveals that his father is now a famous novelist, the author of “My Name is No One”, a novella about a young man called “F”:

Is My Name Is No One a merry experiment and this pure product of a playful spirit, or is it a malevolent attack on the soul of every person who reads it? No one know for sure, maybe both are true.

The opening sets up an old-fashioned novella about a young man embarking on his life. All we know about his name is its first initial: F. The sentences are well constructed, the narrative has a powerful flow, the reader would be enjoying the text were it not for a persistent feeling of somehow being mocked. F is put to the test, he defends himself, fights, learns, wins, learns more, loses, and develops as he moves on, all in the grand old manner. But there is a sense that no sentence means merely what it says, that the story is observing its own progress, and that in truth the protagonist is not the central figure: the central figure is the reader, who is all too complicit in the unfolding of events.

Slowly but surely the little discrepancies accumulate. F is home, looking out at the rain, puts on a jacket and cap, takes his umbrella, leaves the house, wanders the streets, where it isn’t raining, puts on a jacket and cap, takes his umbrella, and leaves the house, as if he hadn’t just done that already. Shortly after that a distant relative appears, who has already been registered in a subordinate clause as having died ten years ago, an innocent visit to the fair by a grandfather and his grandson turns into a labyrinthine nightmare, and a piece of clumsiness on F’s part with major consequences is would backward until it clearly never happened. Of course this all leads to the construction of theories. Very slowly there comes a dawning sense of comprehension, then the realization of being on the brink, and then the story breaks off – just like that, without warning, right in the middle of a sentence.

Yes dear reader, you are going to be complicit in this story, you have been pre-warned, the plot may not follow a normal linear course, and there could be unexplained events, maybe even a fairground which is a labyrinth nightmare. This will questions your fortitude.

Back to Martin, he’s now in the clergy, he tells us about his choice of vocation, he still plays with his Rubik’s cube, he still lives with his mother, he has had no lovers, and he’s a puzzle and a conundrum just like his toy. He also has no faith, basically he’s a failure.

Our next section is “Family”, where we have Arthur recounting numerous generations of his family tree (nearly all male), questioning how he has come into being, based upon a raft of coincidental events, a plethora of inconsequential tales. That is our lot in life….fate???

Our fourth side to the cube in Eric’s voice, “Duties”, he is now an investment “guru”, who has defrauded his biggest client. He is a meticulous dresser, highly medicated, a professional presenter but lost on the inside. He is pursued by his own demons. This section reminded me of Bret Easton Ellis’ “American Psycho”, without the serial killing, just fraud and fear.

On my way to my study I pass the open door to the salon. Ligurna, our Lithuanian made, greets me looking tragic. I not to her and hurry on past. A year ago in a moment of weakness I slept with her. Unfortunately it happened not in the kitchen or on my desk but in the master bedroom in our marriage bed. Afterward Ligurna searched carpet and bedside table like a skilled detective for hairs, eyelashes, and any other traces: nonetheless I was afraid for weeks that she could have overlooked something. Since then I’ve only spoken to her when it’s unavoidable. I can’t throw her out, she could blackmail me.

I sit behind the desk, swallow two tranquilizers without water, look at the Paul Klee, look at the Eulenboeck on the opposite wall: a canvas covered with a collage of newspaper cuttings, with a crushed Coca-Cola can and a teddy bear glued in the middle. You have to go right up close to realize that it’s all trompe l’oeil. The bear and the can aren’t real, not are the bits of newspaper; it’s all painted in oils. If you examine the cuttings with a magnifying glass, you see they’re all art criticism about collages.

We then move to Ivan, Eric’s twin brother, and a section titled “Beauty”. We learn of his career as an art critic and then dealer, his string of lovers, before ending with his homosexual relationship with the artist Eulenboeck, his further meeting with the hypnotist the Great Lindemann, and his hidden secret, he’s a forger.

The lights in the subway shrink, become a single patch, then disappear. Beauty has no need of art, it has no need of us, either, it has no need of witnesses, quite the opposite. Gaping observers detract from it, it blazes most brightly where no one can see it: broad landscapes devoid of houses, the changing shapes of clouds in the early evening, the washed-out grayish red of old brick walls, bare trees in winter mists, cathedrals, the reflection of the sun in a puddle of oil, the mirrored sky-scrapers of Manhattan, the view out an airplane window right after it’s climbed through the layer of clouds, old people’s hands, the sea at any time of day, and empty subway stations like this one – the yellow light, the haphazard pattern of cigarette butts on the ground, the peeling advertisements, still fluttering in the slipstream of the train, although the train itself has just disappeared.

By having numerous voices and protagonists, our writer is able to approach a broad range of concepts, from things such as beauty through to the complexities of living with a family.

Our final section (side six of the cube) is “Seasons”, this is Eric’s daughter’s voice, but in the third person and it is split into three chapters. The flowering apple tree (spring), the falling leaves (autumn) and snow (winter) – where is summer? Another part of the puzzle? In this section our hypnotist reappears at a side-show, now working as a blind tarot card reader. That is surely fraudulent?

We also have a reference to a written work “Family” which is actually a section in this book we are reading, we also have (in Ivan’s section) the father Arthur returning to visit his son and his lover, he is asked what he is currently working on, poetry, fiction?

“Probably going to be another detective novel. A classic locked-room mystery. For people who like riddles.”

“So is there a solution?”

“Of course! But nobody will find it. It’s very well hidden”

“Is that the case with Family too?”

 “No. That’s a story in which the solution really is that there’s no hidden solution. No explanation, and no meaning. That’s the whole point.”

“But that’s exactly what it’s not! Or rather it is, but only if you tell it in a way that makes it so. Every existence, if you look back on it, is made up of terror. Every life becomes a catastrophe if you summarize it in the way you do.”

This is a wonderful work, playful, thought provoking, smart, humorous, enjoyable and a modern day fable.

So what about the title? “F”? We have Family, fraud, faith, forgery, fate and fake or does the conundrum contain funny?

Note – I’ve added my own little edge to my review – every paragraph (excluding the quotes) ends with a word starting with “F”!!!

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Haruki Murakami (translated by Philip Gabriel) - 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

‘Talent might be ephemeral,’ Haida replied, ‘and there aren’t many people who can sustain it their whole lives. But talent makes a huge spiritual leap possible. It’s an almost universal, independent phenomenon that transcends the individual.’

Great segue for Murakami’s latest instalment “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage”, a master who is this year’s favourite to win the Nobel Prize (5/1 at Ladbrokes), this novel selling one million copies in the first week of publication in Japan, atop the best selling book list at Book Depository, debut at number 4 on the New York Times Best Seller list and obviously more. A book, whichever way you look at it, will be critiqued long and hard around the globe. So has Murakami sustained his talent?

Before him lay a huge, dark abyss that ran straight through to the earth’s core. All he could see was a thick cloud of nothingness swirling around him; all he could hear was a profound silence squeezing his eardrums.

Welcome to the world of Tsukuru Tazaki, the purest form of his name meaning “create”, however our Tsukuru is of the simpler form, he “makes” or “builds”. A shadow of a man who was destroyed many years before when his four closest school friends suddenly cut him off without explanation. His friends all having colourful names, Aka = red, Ao = blue, Shiro = white and Kuro = black. Together they make an “orderly, harmonious, intimate place”.

Without overstating things, this is a book about names:

First he was given a name. Then consciousness and memory developed, and, finally, ego. But everything began with his name.

But it is also a book about color (why does the English publication insist on the US spelling? Excruciating). For example Shiro, whose name is white, is described as follows:

The Yamaha grand piano in the living room of her house. Reflecting Shiro’s conscientiousness, it was always perfectly tuned. The lustrous exterior without a single smudge or fingerprint to mar its luster. The afternoon light filtering in through the window. Shadows cast in the garden by the cypress trees. The lace curtain wavering in the breeze. Teacups on the table. Her black hair, neatly tied back, her expression intent as she gazed at the score. Her ten long, lovely fingers on the keyboard. Her legs, as they precisely depressed the pedals, possessed a hidden strength that seemed unimaginable in other situations. Her claves were like glazed porcelain, white and smooth. Whenever she was asked to play something, this piece was the one she most often chose. ‘Le mal du pays.’ The groundless sadness called forth in a person heart’s by pastoral landscape. Home-sickness. Melancholy.

For me, this section paints the purity of white, the cleanliness, the peacefulness. Although “luster” [URGH ANOTHER AMERICANISM] – I’ll stop with that now – not the writer’s fault.

Our protagonist Tsukuru has reached a point in his life where he needs to resolve the past, he has just begun a new relationship and without understanding what happened all those years ago he will never be able to fully let himself go, emotionally.

A novel which explores a number of the human “sins”, for example, jealousy:

Jealousy – at least as far as he understood it from his dream – was the most hopeless prison in the world. Jealousy was not a place he was forced into by someone else, but a jail in which the inmate entered voluntarily, locked the door, and threw away the key. And not another soul in the world knew he was locked inside. Of course if he wanted to escape, he could do so. The prison was, after all, his own heart. But he couldn’t make that decision. His heart was as hard as a stone wall. This was the very essence of jealousy.

No spoilers in my reviews so you won’t know how Tsukuru fares with his journey away from his exile and back towards his school friends, whether he finds out why they cut him off, was it because he wasn’t a colour? Or how his years of pilgrimage transpire.

It is understandable why this is a best seller, a new, and more approachable work, from a master, an intriguing plot and a masterful weaving of a simple story. However to be honest I found a few things quite frustrating, the amount of references to Tsukuru being unable to form a lasting relationship became tedious, I think I understood that after the fifth mention, but to call it out twenty or thirty times?? And in reality this is quite a shallow work, it begins with such promise and the palette of colours could be melded together quite nicely exploring the clarity and purity of blue, the rage and masculinity of red, the shade and despair of black and how Tsukuru (the “creator”) blends them all together.

For new Murakami readers this is a nice introduction to his work, and if you enjoy it I suggest you look at his other works (don’t jump straight into 1Q84 though), and I have a distinct feeling for Murakami fans this may be a little disappointing. But then again I may have missed the point, but as someone said to me today, maybe there is no point?

PS – The stickers inside are pretty cool though.