The Booker Prize Shortlist 2024

Hello Gentle Reader, 

After longlist which the judges stressed was not about the immediate pressing issues and concerns of today, and then turn face and engage in rhetoric that alluded to the writers being more concerned with immediate social issues; the shortlist also has raised a few eyebrows. Following is this year’s shortlist:

            Charlotte Wood – Australia – “Stone Yard Devotional,”
            Anne Michaels – Canada – “Held,”
            Yael van der Wouden – The Netherlands – “The Safekeep,”
            Percival Everett – United States of America – “James,”
            Samantha Harvey – United Kingdom – “Orbital,”
            Rachel Kushner – United States of America – “Creation Lake,”

For the first time in the Booker Prize’s history, the shortlist is almost made exclusively of women. The American author Percival Everett is only male castaway amongst a feminine sea. Everett’s novel “James,” takes the titular character from the American classic “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” and dusts off the cliches and embodies him with a more complex character and hell filled history. Everett proves himself to be an accomplished pastiche writer, forging Twain’s signature parody and satire rooting the novel within its source material, but introduces elements of horror, adventure, and children’s story to examine the framing of race through language, stereotypes, and cliches, to change those narratives. Samantha Harvey’s novel “Orbital,” relays the experience of six astronauts stranded on a space station orbiting earth (much like the current astronauts abandoned above earth). “Orbital,” is described as a science fictional pastoral novel, and indeed dire elegy as it reflects on earth below and the ever-present reality of climate change becoming an ever-present reality and dangerous reality. Rachel Kushner in turn tackles very immediate and present realities in her novel “Creation Lake,” eco-radicals on the verge of terrorism, the absurdity and asinine rhetoric of a post-truth political age, a mounting anticorporation sentiment, all wrapped up in the conventions of a cheap espionage novel that attempts to engage in philosophical digressions. Charlotte Wood’s novel “Stone Yard Devotional,” touches the climate crisis in turn, but enters a quieter and more personal contemplative world, as a conservationist retreats from the world into a monastic life, despite having no attachment or faith in God or any religious proclivity. Yet, from there she reflects on her mother death and ruminates on the nature of forgiveness, grief, and the loss of hope.

Anne Michaels emerges as the dark horse candidate with her novel “Held.” A poet by trade, Anne Michaels is a consummate wordsmith refusing to engage in prosaic language or linear narratives. “Held,” is an elliptical kaleidoscope where dazzling and polished snapshots which grapple with Michael’s persistent themes of memory, history, extended and everlasting trauma, and the human capacity for love and to heal. The novels architecture is collage based, whereby different characters and stories cycle through. The repetition of association and motifs propels the narrative and burrows deeper into the characters consciousness. Rather than sculpting and defining, Anne Michael’s provides exquisite flashes of insight to detail her characters rather then delineate them into stationary existence both in reality and time, as the novel fluidly maneuvers through the 20^th century recounting four generations of a family. For Anne Michaels time is not an obstacle but a current.

Yael van der Wouden remains the first Dutch writer to be nominated let alone shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and her novel “The Safekeep,” is the only debut work on the shortlist. “The Safekeep,” pathologically examines the guilt of history and one’s own denial of their failure and perhaps complicity in the atrocities. Taking place 15 years after the Second World War the novel described as a society failing to come to terms with the fate of the Dutch Jews. The stoic, sour, and ill-tempered Isabel resides alone in her childhood home after her moth dies. Her life is ordered by routine and indignation towards her brother disapproving of them in turn, for the one is gay and the other a dreaming romantic fool, who sends his fiancé to Isabel, like a lamb to slaughter, which only ignites an even more twisted and erotically charged narrative. Yael van der Wouden explores themes of repression both on a macro and personal level, which moves further and further away from other shortlisted titles and their socially concerned novels.

The shortlist certainly has its standout and stellar novels, but also provides enough suspicion on topics they judges felt compelled to highlight or single out. When they attempted to dismiss the longlist as novels concerned with the pressing concerns of today, they failed to sell point and the shortlist only distills that some of the novels have more topical agendas then others. There is nothing wrong with that, but don’t attempt to conceal this glaringly obvious fact.

Best of luck to the shortlisted writers.

Thank you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read

 

M. Mary

Elias Khoury Dies Aged 76

Hello Gentle Reader, 

Elias Khoury was a renowned novelist, journalist, playwright, and public intellectual. Khoury greatly opposed the authoritarian governments that run through out the Middle East and North Africa, as well as a staunch defender of freedom of speech, and critic to the acceptable promotion of holocaust denial in the region. A proponent of the hopeful Arab Spring, Khoury celebrated the small victories, while lamenting the missed opportunities. Elias Khoury’s literary work explored universal concepts of collective memory, identity, war, exile, plights of the refugee and displacement. Khoury’s novels “Little Mountain,” and “Yalo,” directly dealt with the Lebanese civil war, which Khoury also fought in and was injured. “Little Mountain,” is a triptych of perspectives from a Joint Forces fighter, a distressed civil servant, and a chameleonic third, whose shifts and shapes between fighter and intellectual. These three perspectives provided a panoramic and layered review a lengthy and brutal civil war. In “Yalo,” the civil war is returned to once again, but from the perspective of a prisoner, whose accused of rape. Interrogated by means of beating and torture, the titular Yalo save himself by telling a new story through each interrogation. In this confinement and brutal oppressive regiment of torture, Yalo also discovers himself and reconciles with his own past and sense of history. What separates Khoury away from being a simple political oriented writer, is not only a lushness of prose and flourish for the poetic, but the human ability to transcend the horrors and achieve or strive for something greater. Khoury was a novelist who traced not only political horror and destitution, but explored the vastness of love, memory, and the resilience of the human spirit. In “White Masks,” Khoury creates a mystery, as a journalist seeks to piece together the ambiguity of a civil servant’s suspicious death, his body discovered in a mound of garbage. Through his investigation, the journalist hears how the Lebanese civil war still reverberates within the citizens and survivors. How the horrors and actions of those fretful events have carved deep wounds and trenches within the citizenry. Beyond his creative prose, Elias Khoury was an accomplished journalist in his own right and edited many publications throughout his lifetime. At his death, Arabic literature has taken a direct hit to one of its most important and steadfast writers, who stood on the sanctified grounds of democratic values and freedom of speech. The driving ideals of revolution, which now find themselves once again under threat and attack.

Rest in Peace Elias Khoury.

Thank you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read

M. Mary

– XXXI –

Pity the poets, chronically underappreciated, all the while being offered as the greatest compliment and title. 

A Little Party Dress

Hello Gentle Reader, 

August is summer’s au revoir. While the days persist with scrutinizing and punishing heat, they conclude quicker. August evenings maintain and retain their own quality. Whereas June is a month of uneven temperament. Spritely and green, while dour the next, pouring rain. July burns with enthusiastic fervor, and while the plants celebrate the newfound sunlight, they too become parched and pray for rain. In July’s unabashed brilliance and burning, insects are awakened and begin their assault. Swarming and swamping the unexpected, the uninitiated, and the casual summer holidayer with glee. August settles in. Surviving crops and flowerbeds who have not wilted or burned by the sun’s inquisition, have blossomed, ripened, and bloomed; while the harvest lurks like a shadow around the corner. August evenings deserve special mention. The light softens into a sherbert afterglow; August compliments itself with oranges warmth, abandoning the briskness of a still uncertain season. The clouds are more apt to blush in the evening light, rather than radiate in burning reds, all the while entertaining a blue tint. The evenings do moderate themselves, and one should be reprimanded if they say ‘cool off,’ or inject the accusation that there is a ‘chill,’ in the air. August evenings provide a necessary reprieve and entice the young to go out, embrace the night and enjoy it.  The evening skies in turn are equally changed by August’s arrival. Less convoluted by summer haze, with the few stars capable of pushing through the light pollution glitter away. There are absences as well. Mornings are reluctant and tiresome. The sun pulling itself over the horizon with exhausted enthusiasm. The robins are gone. Those harbingers of spring. Bringers of dawn with their insistent twilight twitterers have since packed up and moved on for the season. A crow’s caw rings hollow, beckoning winters bite and hunger. With August aglow, winter is held back for now, but as the threshold of autumn, winter will inevitably begin to thread its frost in the morning, tracing its filigree across windowpanes.

The essay is the most mercurial and undefined literary form. In part thanks to academia and school, the introduction to the essay as a literary form is framed through a punitive perspective. Dry, boring, rigid, and constrained. The essay is the peak of academic vanity and exercise in frivolity. Research is conducted, followed by composition, ending with grading and subsequently deleted or abandoned of no consequence. Merely a taskmaster’s exercise, both futile and expected. The ability to write an essay marked one of those pre-requisite skills in engaging with the absurd ladder of the expectations called life. The essay is drilled to students as a compositional form with strict demands regarding mechanics and templated structure. Teachers and professors never indulge or reveal the essays fluidity or flexibility. Thankfully, editors and anthology series, such as “The Best American Essays,” seek to curate and expand the notion of what an essay is, beyond the limiting scholastic perspective which readers are inherently conditioned and oriented to. While writers such as Montaigne (the forms progenitor), Phillip Lopate, M.F.K Fisher, Adam Gopnik, Malcom Gladwell, Patricia Hampl, and Thomas De Quincy, prove that the essay is by far the most engaging and accessible form. Free of poetry’s strict discipline and adherence to form, line, rhythm and rhyme; while being completely disinterested in the concerns of novels or stories. The essay in turn, has been the prosaic medium for other writers, whereby they can drop fiction as a façade and engage in topics a writer is interested in, be it purely literary, personal, or inconsequently veering into the realm of public and political discourse. For a writer like Doris Lessing, the essay was both a natural medium for her early sociopolitical diatribes and then her scrutinizing candor of a century of ceaseless upheaval, existential threats, and upwelling change. For P.L. Travers, the essay presented the author as a serious scholar, as she resented continually being referred to as a children’s writer. While the beloved Mary Poppins character and series of novels brought her fame, fortune, and the love of readers, Travers found her young readership tiresome. P.L. Travers poured her intellect and anthropological curiosity into analyses and examinations of myth and folklore. Sadly, those critical texts and essays never found the same readership that her beloved Mary Poppins had.

For the late French writer, Christian Bobin, the essay was a chimeric entity. For Bobin, the essay was the natural form for his work, which lacked poetry’s rigours and intensity, demanding unwavering compliance and loyalty with historical poetic traditions, schools, and established formats. All the while impoverished regarding the basic ingredients and spices to properly define itself within the context of a piece of fictional prose. Rebellious still, Christian Bobin embraces the gilding of lyricism, without cheapening a poet’s appreciation and proclivity for language. For Bobin language is malleable. A material which can be kneaded and shaped. Bobin’s language is not static or didactic in application. Rather, its generous engulfing, where even the author embraces being swept away in the linguistic tides. This is of course where Bobin diverts from poets. Rather than distill and refine language to its ethereal essence, measured in precise lines and syllabic counts, Bobin embraces the freeform of prose. Christian Bobin’s essays are not without concern or topic. While they indulge in the finery of lyricism, they are meditative and contemplative. Not as grandiose as philosophy, grappling and wrestling with eternal questions of being, meaning, and value of existence; or proposing and arguing the nature of divinity in either a theological or personal context. Bobin’s essays observe, refine, and reflect reality through a multitude of facets. Where Annie Ernaux is the personal ethnographer, documenting and examining social waves, political events and movements with herself as the vantage point; Christian Bobin is the observer adrift within the aesthetics of reality and memory. A writer of purely literary terms, abandoning the need for social commentary and political discourse. Everyday life is enriched, enlivened, and enhanced by Bobin’s prose, as Bobin himself said, he writes to get out of himself. This otherwise brief and intensely lyrical essays are merely exercises of intrapersonal emancipations.

Encounters involving clouds, wildflowers, a voice, parable, a butterfly in flight, the frantic flee of sparrows, a spark of memory, each one is masterfully captured in prose not marred by its poetic flourish and allegiances, but encapsulating, showcasing the fully breadth and appreciation Christian Bobin has for the literary language, and its ability to provide aesthetic context to the experiences of the everyday. Mistaken marketing professionals and publicists, often misapply the notion that Christian Bobin is a writer of some special kind of self-help book. As if somehow his essays will support or facilitate readers to have some form of self-actualizing event. They couldn’t have missed the point of Bobin or his prose. “A Little Party Dress,” is not a book about providing meditative guidance to curate further gratitude or finding the happiness in the small joys of life. These are not testaments or exercises on mining or developing happiness habits. These are beautiful essays and pieces of prose which verve continually and unapologetically into the poetic. An image, a thought, a memory becomes the anchor point where by Bobin dives in further, without consideration or concern for any goal or directive purpose. By and large, the language is not only the operational mechanism, it is practicality the point of the book. It is the authors purpose to observe the everyday capture it within the limitations of language, and in turn get lost within the description of language and the tangents that arise. The sojourns into metaphysics; or the parable of Jonah enveloped by a whale, and a fickle god’s renouncement of his earlier judgement to smite in his indignation. There are examinations of fatigue from today’s world of rush and instant gratification, beautifully captured within the essay “May He Be Left In Peace,” whereas the existential anatomy of the businessman is dissected in “Promised Land.” A personal favourite was the titular ending essay: “A Little Party Dress,” a beautiful essay built of cubist images to finish up the collection, while sitting on the patio in the waning light of an August evening as summers heat burns off.

Unfortunately, under translated in English, Christian Bobin was often a bestseller in France. Bobin’s popularity may have stemmed from the European publishers and book market being less concerned with the marketization and taxonomical classification of a texts form. Fragment is as much a literary composition as essay or prose poem, readers are far more interested in the words use of language and their execution. “A Little Party Dress,” is one of the few collections of Bobin’s work available in English. There are two other collections of essays as well as appreciative reader pseudo-biography of Emily Dickinson, who Christian Bobin admired and adored; in addition to a meditative study and appreciation of the Saint Francis of Assisi, who was Bobin’s spiritual mentor. The defining feature of Christian Bobin’s work is heightened refined and distilled lyricism, never ostentatious but revealing in its craftsmanship. The fluidity of form between fragment, essay, poetry, and even diary, define Christian Bobin as a writer of his own caliber, however niche and eloquent they may be. As August burns itself into autumn with September’s yellowing leaves and harvest on the horizon, and October’s austere bone picked fields framed within gnarled knotted tree branches, with glowing pumpkins harkening and enticing the soul to return; it was pleasure to read a writer who captures the transience and fleetingness of everyday life and the passage of time.

Thank you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
 

M. Mary

Tommy Orange, Named the Future Library Project Writer for 2024

Hello Gentle Reader,

The Native American writer Tommy Orange has been named the new contributor to the Future Library Project for 2024. Tommy Orange’s invitation to contribute to the project follows other critically acclaimed and internationally renowned writers from around the globe:

2014 – Margaret Atwood, Canada
2015 – David Mitchell, United Kingdom
2016 – Sjon, Iceland
2017 – Ekif Shafak, Turkey (exile: United Kingdom)
2018 – Han Kang, (South) Korea
2019 – Karl Ove Knausgård, Norway
2020 – Ocean Vuong, United States of America
2021 – Tsitsi Dangarembga, Zimbabwe
2022 – Judith Schalansky, Germany
2023 – Valeria Luiselli, Mexico/United States of America

Recently longlisted for the Booker Prize with his sophomore novel “Wandering Stars,” Tommy Orange has made an impactful literary name for himself with only two novels to his name, the aforementioned “Wandering Stars,” and his debut “There There.” In the same trajectory as other Native American writers, Louis Edrich, Joy Harjo, N. Scott Momaday, and Thomas King, Tommy Orange explores the complexities of Native American identity and authenticity, history, loss of traditions and cultural values, in addition to the social issues of addiction, depression, and unemployment. “There There,” was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, while winning the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2019 Hemmingway Foundation/PEN Award. “There There,” was praised by Margaret Atwood (who recommended Orange as a contributor) among others as a remarkable debut, showcasing Tommy Orange as a writer of not only social concern, but of literary execution and talent. “There There,” tackled the notion of Urban Indians through a chorus of twelve characters, who reckon with a complex and violent history and loss of identity and question the notion of authenticity. “Wandering Stars,” continued to explore the violent and sanitized history that Native Americans endured and suffered from during a push for assimilation, and have since been lost within.

In announcing Tommy Orange as the most recent contributor to the Future Library Project, Katie Paterson praised Orange’s writing being marked by an “exploration of identity, belonging, and intergenerational trauma, particularly within the context of Indigenous experiences.” Paterson theorizes that Orange’s work will resonate with readers of the coming century.

Tommy Orange’s induction as a contributor to the Future Library Project, shows the projects ranging literary tastes and treatments. Each writer spans generations, literary styles, languages, themes and concerns, and Orange is no different.

Thank you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
 
M. Mary

The Booker Prize 2024, Longlist

Hello Gentle Reader,

This years Booker Prize has announced their longlist. The judges have gone so far to praise their inductions, with the judging chair stressing that the longlisted novels are not about pressing issues and concerns of today, but are (and I quote):

“They are works of fiction that inhabit ideas by making us care deeply about people and their predicaments, their singularity in a world that can be indifferent or hostile.”

Perhaps I’m just in a foul mood, but to me, that sounded an awful lot like a marketing campaigns mission statement, attempting to gloss over the glaringly obvious concern and choices that went into compiling the longlist as one being concerned making a heavy handed statement on the immediate issues and concerns of today, all the while attempting to deny that the novels are in fact about the issues and concerns of today, be they are political, social, or ideological in nature. Much like many of the meetings I attended today, I was left at the end saying: what are you talking about?

The novels included on this year’s longlist are not necessarily all that interesting, as compared to some which have been interestingly omitted. This year’s longlist in no particular order:

            Tommy Orange – United States of America – “Wandering Stars,”
            Anne Michaels – Canada – “Held,”
            Colin Barrett – Ireland – “Wild Horses,”  
            Rachel Kushner – United States of America – “Creation Lake,”
            Richard Powers – United States of America – “Playground,”
            Sarah Perry – United Kingdom – “Enlightenment,”
            Samantha Harvey – United Kingdom – “Orbital,”
            Claire Messud – Canada – “This Strange Eventful History,”
            Percival Everett – United States of America – “James,”
            Yael van der Wouden – The Netherlands – “The Safekeep,”
            Hisham Matar – United States of America/United Kingdom – “My Friends,”
            Charlotte Wood – Australia – “Stone Yard Devotional,”
            Rita Bullwinkel – United States of America – “Headshot,”

Again, to reiterate: perhaps I am in a foul mood, but I found the longlist left a sense of ‘wanting,’ on my end. The list itself is almost glaringly dominated by American writers.

Richard Powers returns to contended for the Booker Prize, after his previous novel “Bewilderment,” was shortlisted in 2021. Returning with his new novel “Playground,” Powers has crafted another novel of dystopian parabolic ideas, writing about the beauty of nature and the desolation of the environment, with a shifting concern to the rise of Artificial Intelligence, Richard Powers as crafted a panoramic portrait of the reality of today. Percival Everett in “James,” uses Mark Twain’s classic novel: “Huckleberry Finn,” and the character Jim as a springboard to trace the racially violent history of United States of America, and the traumatic fissures it has sowed within the African-American identity. In “Wandering Stars,” by Tommy Orange, generational trauma ripples throughout the ages, from the brutality of the American Indian Boarding School, run by an evangelical sadist whose purpose in not only spreading Christian messaging, but also to eradicate Native American culture, language, and traditions, which reverberates to contemporary United States of America, rife with poverty, gun violence, and prescriptive drug addiction. Again, however, none of these novels are a testament to the issues of today, be it climate catastrophe and calamity; or racial injustices and the traumatic history of the United States; or the disparity of wealth, rampant poverty, and ever-present violence of daily life.

Sarah Perry and Anne Michaels strike me as this year’s dark horses. Anne Michael’s is a poet in addition to being a prose writer, and her work maintains a sense of the cerebral. “Held,” showcases Michael’s enjoyment of loose narrative structure and her mastery of language. Sarah Perry’s novel “Enlightenment,” is one that shines in its own eccentricity and delights in both its earthly pleasures and otherworldly intrusions. Harkening back to what has been described as old-fashioned narrative reminiscent of the high postmodernist pastiche of the late Dame A.S. Byatt, transporting the Victorian and Edwardian into the contemporary consciousness.

Its curious, however, to note that neither Rachel Cusk or Sally Rooney made this year’s longlist. Cusk’s most recent disembodiment experiment of the novel “Parade,” was recently released; Sally Rooney’s newly anticipated novel “Intermezzo,” would have made the deadline for nomination for the prize. I found their exclusion interesting and perhaps telling. Rachel Cusk for example, has always struck me as very privileged middle-class writer, whose cipher oriented novels are not so much an exercise in usurping the novels conventional elements, as they are discombobulating diatribes of no consequence. She can craft an eloquent sentence, but the praised innovation is lost on me. As for Sally Rooney, the oracle of the millennials, perhaps she’s an acquired generational taste.

Its an interesting shortlist, one certainly not concerned with the issues of today, but instead empathetically impactful narratives. Congratulations to the longlisted writers.

Thank you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read

 
M. Mary

Edna O’Brien Dies Aged 93

Hello Gentle Reader,

In 2015, the then Irish President, Michael D Higgins, bestowed on Edna O’Brien the countries highest creative arts honour, the Saoi of Aosdána, referring to Edna O’Brien as a “fearless teller of truth,” high praise from the president and country, which only decades before often had a contested even strained relationship with the writer. At times, O’Brien’s work suffered publication bans and censorship. A few parishes even conducted their own book burnings. Born to a large Catholic family, Edna O’Brien remarked that her early life was marked by the usual Irish condition of the time, austerity coupled Catholic sanctioned poverty. Her father’s family fortune was squandered by his gambling compulsions and alcoholism; while her mothers strength kept the house in order and the wolves at bay. Irish society—much like her childhood home—was marked by an atmosphere of control be it parental, marital, or religious in its incarnation. Its chokehold was ever present subjecting and suffocating. Edna O’Brien gained notoriety with her debut novel “The Country Girls,” detailing the rural oppression and squalor of Irish country life, and realities of girls, their thoughts, their dreams, their desires. The frankness in which sex was discussed and written about scandalized Irish society, and endeared Edna O’Brien to readers abroad. Subsequent novels continued to examine and dissect Irish society and continue to push the Irish experience from a feminine perspective to the forefront of literary discourse, expanding the literary perspective and providing a fuller portrait of the human and Irish condition. Despite this, O’Brien’s relationship with Ireland would be noticeably strained for some years. It would be disingenuous and limiting to think of Edna O’Brien as only limited to the female perspective and view of Irish life. An engaged humanist, O’Brien trained turned her pen to perspectives and stories outside of her own. “The Little Red Chairs,” heralded as a masterpiece by many, recounts the immigration of an imagined Eastern European war criminal to a rural Irish countryside. The once provincial backwater of the Irish countryside is now reimagined as a place of mixed immigration, granting O’Brien the ability to provide commentary on a variety of issues, such as forced emigration and suffrage of women (a perennial theme). “Girl,” her last published novel, departs to a more international level of concern, imagining the experience of the girls who were kidnapped by Boko Haram. The novel reaffirms Edna O’Brien as a writer of ideal and humanistic strength, who recounts both the horror and the tenderness of the human experience, and one girl’s unshaken resilience to continue on, even after the abduction and the abandonment of society at large. Edna O’Brien was a fierce and uncompromising writer, whose style was equally matched by her literary perspectives, she is truly one of Ireland’s greatest contemporary writers, who undoubtfully has influenced the direction of Irish literature, but also introduced new areas of discourse and discussions.

Rest in Peace, Edna O’Brien.

Thank you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read

M. Mary

– XXX –

I am concerned when solidarity promotes sterilization and the sanitization of facts. Facilitates censorship. Encourages tribalism and ghettoization. Stimulates falsities and assassinates cultures and historical truths. Solidary has lost its gravitas. An emptiness of cannibalistic skewered ideological principles has taken its place that disregards truth. That is not solidarity.

Greek Lessons

Hello Gentle Reader, 

After winning the Man Booker International Prize in 2016 with “The Vegetarian,” Han Kang, has become a permanent translated fixture in the English language. An appreciated literary star in the company of Bae Suah and Hwang Sok-yong. “The Vegetarian,” took inspiration from the line: “I believe that humans should be plants,” by the avant-garde Korean writer Yi Sang. What follows is the decision of a woman who decides to stop eating meat. This otherwise mundane decision will have dire and violent consequences for herself, husband and family. “The Vegetarian,” refused to be defined as either a surreal or horror novel, but it proved Han Kang was a master of the slow burn discourse and a cartographer of the interior. Subsequent works translated into English were equally engaged in themes of violence, memory, grief, and guilt. “Human Acts,” poignantly recounts the Gwangju Uprising of the 1980’s and the resulting massacre that took place. “Human Acts,” is a symphonic novel. An orchestral arrangement of voices each rising and adding to the cadences and chorus, recounting event, experience, and memory. Rather than focusing on the massacre itself, Han Kang traces the ripple effect of the events from those historical days through both a macro social lens and individual realities, providing a panoramic novel of different cadences blending into a symphonic narrative chorus detailing the legacy of the uprising and massacre on not only individuals or their families, but also, how it is incorporated into the social and political fabric of a society. In turn, “The White Book,” surveyed private tragedy. A vague composition that defies categorization, “The White Book,” is a psychological exploration of the nature of grief and guilt. At once a meditation on the colour white and its associative items, objects, and appearances in nature, such as: breast milk, swaddling bands, or snow; to the interior monologue of an unnamed narrator, a writer (much like Han) wandering through Warsaw in a snowy evening. A treatise on memory, the unnamed stand in narrator for Han Kang, recounts the abrupt birth of her older sister, who died two hours later in her mothers’ arms. The narrative is an elegy of grief, guilt, and sorrow, which form a trio of shades of white tinting the narrative. In turn the landscape of Warsaw and its own history of ruin and destruction during the Second World War and rebuilding, becomes a metaphor for the death of the authors older sister and her own life made possible by her passing. Through each of her novels, Han Kang has proven herself to be an unflinching documentarian and cartographer of violence in all its incarnations – be it political or personal – in addition to being a writer of emotional resonance and skilled stylist, whose prose is lyrical and graceful as it is technical, eschewing sentimentality and sensationalism in favour of psychological insights and imagistic brilliance.

“Greek Lessons,” can easily be summarized as a simple story about two individuals maneuvering through the process of loss in a variety of forms. For the woman it is the loss of language, brought on by the death of her mother and loosing the custody of her son; for the man, it is the gradual loss of his sight, due to an inherent degenerative eye condition. The novel is interchanged between their two experiences and perspectives. The woman’s narrative presented in the third person. The man’s in first person singular. Their narratives intersect as they both involved in Ancient Greek language classes. Language is the bedrock and basis of “Greek Lessons.” Language is a writer’s bread and butter. Their tool and craft. Language is an ephemeral subject; shapeless and figureless, lacking physical substance and material, but an immediate and intricate component of an individual’s existence. From advertisements to marketing campaigns, traffic signs and street names, to business names, titles, emails, text messages; then the buzz and conversation of daily life. Language is a continual pulse of human achievement and culture. Always beating and flowing around individuals, and in turn evolving. Many writers have used language as the basis of their literary work, such as Nobel Laurate Elfriede Jelinek, whose linguistic vivisections examines how language creates, constructs, and influences reality, becoming a method of control and exerting power over others. Fellow Nobel Laureate Herta Müller in turn, exemplified how language is extorted, utilized and abused by authoritarian regimes to control and propagate ideological messaging, which run contrary to reality and lived experience; but also, how language can be subverted as a form of resistance, offering a precarious sanctuary. Language wielded by Han Kang neither vivisects its power structures or subverts authoritarian control; instead, language is violent intrusion and projection of an individual’s being:

“Now and then, language would thrust its way into her sleep like a skewer through meat, startling her awake several times a night.”

The woman has no driving interest in learning ancient Greek. The language has no utilitarian purpose or value as its extinct. She has no fascination or curiosity with ancient Greek philosophy or literature, which the lecturer often employees to provide context to the dead language’s evolution and exemplifying its complex grammar. No, the woman hopes that by learning ancient Greek she would once again reacquaint herself with her own language. This attempt is a replication of a previous success in its rehabilitative measures, when twenty years prior, the woman found herself exiled from language and verbal communication, only to be reintroduced to it when learning French. Perhaps ancient Greek interests her, because the language itself is considered dead. Its not spoken or utilized beyond niche environments, such as the class. This ritual then of summoning it forth from the river bank of oblivion, awakens the language from its seized silence and brings it back into the world in a hollow state. Parallels of the languages status as being extinct and the woman’s own hollowed out and shapeless existence can easily be deducted. 

Language for the woman has always retained a dizzying and psychological affect. Her therapist simplistically diagnosis’s her muteness in terms of traumatic experience brought on by the loss of her mother and custody of her son. She rejects this assessment. Language is more existential; with her inability to incorporate it and manifest it in verbal structures is a disconnect between physiological failure and neurological lapse. For the woman, language is inaccessible, not psychologically blocked. The woman, however, had an apprehensive relationship with speech. Even when she did speak, the woman’s relationship with act of vocalizing language were less then assured:

            “Even when she could talk, she’d always been soft-spoken.

It wasn’t an issue of vocal cords or lung capacity. She just didn’t like taking up space.  Everyone occupies a certain amount of physical space according to their body mass, but voice travels far beyond that. She had no wish to disseminate her self.”

Han Kang’s characters often engage in unorthodox and unique forms of rebellion, be it choosing to no longer to eat meat, or in this case participate in speech or inhabit language as a physical projection of one’s self. Perhaps silence is her way of retreating from society and the world. An attempt at self-imposed metaphysical segregation. There again, this may only satisfy her therapists hurried assessment. Throughout the novel, the woman remains locked in silence, but Han fills the space with beautiful imagistic writing, both of the woman’s wanderings through Seoul at night, wandering to exhaust herself to sleep, and the few personal details that are laced through an otherwise interior distilled perspective.

If the woman’s narrative is adrift and shrinking from the world’s scrutiny; then the lecturer’s is filled with an attempt to continually appreciate and record the world as its presented before him, while his sight is still intact, as it gradually deteriorates. His chapters are full of memories rendered colourfully with vibrant detail; in addition to loss and pain, as well as the unrequited love for his ophthalmologist’s deaf daughter; the estrangement of his family; and how is own relationship with the written world will inevitably change once his eyesight is gone. Throughout the novel, the lecturer and the woman (one of his students) gradually waltz around each other, engaged in their own spheres of loss both physically and personally. In the lectures chapter, introspection and drifting images and rumination are abandoned in favour of an assured and consciousness first person narrative.

“Greek Lessons,” is a bold novel, one which tackles the notion of language as a daily occurrence; a linguistic digression on the nature of phonemes; the three different voices styles of the ancient Greek language; the syntaxial differences and complexities between ancient Greek, the Hangul alphabet, and the German language (the adopted language of the lecturer); but also, how language becomes both a state of self-realization – for the lecturer Korean becomes a homecoming – while in turn, language contorts and mutilates itself, to the point of self-inflicted estrangement, as in the case of the woman. Throughout it all is Han Kang’s beautifully etched lyrical prose is graceful as it is assured, beautifully captured and translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won. “Greek Lessons,” is a slow burn, returning to the themes of everyday violence and unorthodox rebellion for Han Kang, it also presents her as an extremely literary talent, capable of not just psychological insight, but also contemplative regarding linguistics and the nature of language as a defining feature of the human experience.

Thank you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read

M. Mary

Ismail Kadare Dies Aged 88

Hello Gentle Reader,

Ismail Kadare was a singular writer. A towering figure of European literature, Kadare’s reputation was built and fortified on a literary body of work which was as immense as Balzac’s and of unimpeachable quality; uncompromising in its allegory and critique of political injustices and dictatorships; while exploring the existentially horrors such dictatorships force upon its citizens, and their reality warping and corroding effects. Ismail Kadare was a unextinguishable beacon of light, whose pen became a necessary form of resistance against the Soviet endorsed communist regime of Enver Hoxha (before Hoxha broke ties with the communist superpower, while retaining its Stalinist principles), and the infectious paranoia such a society breeds. Ismail Kadare—be it willing or unwillingly—became the palpable hope of Albania, who withered under repressive policies of communism. To quote Ismail Kadare:

“Literature has often produced magnificent works in dark ages as if it was seeking to remedy the misfortune inflicted on people.”

Allegory and irony were Kadare’s greatest literary weapons. The ability to craft a compelling metaphor, provided Kadare enough ability to criticize Hoxha, while seemingly able to avoid punitive political recourse. Where other writers were arrested (and some executed), Kadare avoided the fate, though he was exiled to a remote village for a year. How, Kadare avoided political persecution, had often been a subject of debate and attack on the writer. It turned out, however, that Enver Hoxha considered himself a literary man, and while there have been reports that the former dictator did in fact order Kadare’s arrest and execution, he always spared him in the end, perhaps out of begrudged respect or literary appreciation. I suspect, it was more international renown in addition to literary merit that saved Kadare from imprisonment and execution. If Kadare’s reputation was not as stellar and his literary talents but a fraction, Hoxha would have done away with him. By the end of the 80’s though, Kadare fled Albania for France, and his international stature was now set in stone. For the past thirty to forty years, Ismail Kadare was rumored to be a future Nobel Laureate in Literature and a perennial contender, in addition to Milan Kundera, Chinua Achebe, and Philip Roth. In 2005, Kadare won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize, for a lifetime assessment of his literary work. Further international accolades include: the Princess of Asturias award in 2009, the Jerusalem prize in 2015 and the Neustadt international prize for literature in 2020. The elusiveness of the Nobel Prize in Literature, will be marked down as another missed opportunity for the Swedish Academy.

Today, Ismail Kadare died and Europe has lost not only of its towering figures, an institution of literary resistance and political discourse, but also a writer who is perhaps one of the few writers, who remained unabashedly a national writer. The kind of writer who captured and celebrated a geographical place. In his work, Ismail Kadare, celebrated Albania as an ancient and shackled nation, overlooked or ignored by the its European neighbours. In doing so, Ismail Kadare elevated the south-eastern Balkan nation to new literary heights, as Kadare promoted and encouraged many young Albanian writers, championing their work abroad.

Rest in Peace Ismail Kadare, you were truly one of the greatest writers of the past 20^th Century and early 21^st Century.

Thank you for Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
 

M. Mary