The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante review / A girl's own story

Into the depths of Naples … Margherita Mazzucco in the TV adaptation of Ferrante’s 2012 novel, My Brilliant Friend.

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

BOOK OF THE WEEK

The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante review – a girl's own story

The confusions and clarity of female adolescence are explored in an astonishing novel set in Ferrante’s familiar Naples

Lara Feigel

Wed 19 Aug 2020 07.30 BST

Elena Ferrante is so good on the bodily feelings of female adolescence: the sweaty, clotted skin, the sudden bulges as breasts form, the awkwardly exciting transformations. She is good, also, on the way that childhood friendships change, becoming infused with desire and longing. Her characters startle themselves with their readiness to betray their friends for the newly discovered opposite sex, but they startle themselves too when they jettison their heavy, often rather insulting male suitors and return to their nimbler companions.

 

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

The Death of Jesus by JM Coetzee review – a boy who challenges the world

The final book of Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy is also its darkest, keeping the mystery at the books’ heart intact to the end

Steven Poole
Sat 4 Jan 2020 07.30 GMT

Martin Amis once complained that JM Coetzee had “got no talent”, showing perhaps that obsessive ranking of talent (here used in a far more debased sense than TS Eliot’s) is a pastime favoured by those who are not, like Coetzee, writers of genius. Even more improbably, Amis claimed that Coetzee was not funny, which bespeaks a cloth ear for the more sophisticated kind of irony. It would certainly surprise readers of the hilarious Slow Man, or indeed the first two novels in this sequence, The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, in which a dreamlike mode of nowhere and no-when reminiscent of Kafka (and Coetzee’s own early Waiting for the Barbarians) is illuminated by sparks of sardonic humour or sheer childlike silliness. The final book of the trilogy, however, as one might with trepidation expect from its title, is a far darker affair.

The Employees by Olga Ravn / Review

‘THE EMPLOYEES’ BY OLGA RAVN (REVIEW – IBP 2021, NUMBER FOUR)

Five of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2021

April 15, 2021

While the most recent leg of our International Booker Prize longlist journey involved a quiet drive into the countryside, today sees us embarking on a much more ambitious expedition, possibly the most expansive in the prize’s history.  While it’s cold outside, there is an atmosphere of sorts, and we’re certainly not alone, with about six thousand other intrepid adventurers for company.  But if nobody can hear you scream in space, that’s probably because nobody’s listening, so luckily today’s choice rectifies that oversight.  Do you have something you need to get off your chest?  Come this way…

*****
The Employees by Olga Ravn
– Lolli Editions, translated by Martin Aitken
(digital review copy courtesy of the publisher)
What’s it all about?
In the twenty-second century, far from Earth, a vessel known as the Six-Thousand Ship is on a Star Trek like voyage of enquiry, seeking out new worlds and lifeforms.  The ship eventually finds a planet dubbed New Discovery, and on exploring its surface, the crew find strange objects, unmoving yet undoubtedly showing signs of life.  The objects are taken back to the ship and placed in rooms, ready for analysis.

 

Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith's low point – her Diaries and Notebooks reviewed by Richard Davenport-Hines

BOOKS

BY RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES

November 2021

Patricia Highsmith's journals brim over with the over-emphatic, incomprehensible and rambling ruminations of an old soak. By Richard Davenport-Hines-

Patricia Highsmith was recently described by a leading American literary critic, Terry Castle, as ‘everyone’s favourite mess-with-your-head morbid misanthrope’ and a ‘mind-blitzingly drunk and hellacious bigot’.

She was also the novelist who achieved early acclaim with Strangers on a Train (1950) and later made the murderous sociopath Tom Ripley into the quasi-hero of five novels.

Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima review – Bracing, often breathtaking

The mother finds that as a woman alone in society, people want not so much to help her as to control her

John Self
Saturday, April 14, 2018

 

One way to realistically depict the months and years passing in a novel is to publish it in real time. That is what Yuko Tsushima did with this book, released in monthly instalments in the Japanese literary magazine Gunzo in 1978-79 and now translated into English for the first time.

Territory of Light by Yūko Tsushima review / Tales from Tokyo

Territory of Light by Yūko Tsushima review – tales from Tokyo

This short, powerful novel translated by Geraldine Harcourt follows a single mother’s struggles to build a life in the city

Peter Beech
Fri 20 Apr 2018 15.00 BST

The highly regarded Japanese novelist Yūko Tsushima, who died two years ago, drew on her own experiences for this 1979 novel, translated by Geraldine Harcourt, about a single mother struggling to build a life in Tokyo. Its 12 linked tales of the city are fine-grained to the point of mundanity – finding an apartment, discovering a leak, visiting a park – but in Tsushima’s hands they achieve a deceptive, luminous clarity.

Books / On a Knife Edge

 

2019 HIGHLIGHTS: BOOKS: FICTION

On a Knife Edge

From Amitav Ghosh to Ian McEwan

 Nandini Nair | 03 Jan, 2019

Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh (Hamish Hamilton)

On a visit to his birthplace, Kolkata, a Brooklyn-based dealer in rare books finds his life becoming entangled with an ancient legend about the goddess of snakes, Manasa Devi. While visiting a temple, deep within the mangrove forests of Bengal, he has a disturbing encounter with the most feared, and revered, of Indian snakes, a King Cobra. This is followed by a series of uncanny episodes that seem to dissolve the borders of the human and non-human.

Far from the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson / An Excerpt

 

Read an exclusive extract from Far from the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson

Five of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2021

There is no need to know what no one will ask. Walking on gravel, boots crunching with each step, Shell doesn’t know if she is who she is because it’s what she wants or because it’s what her family expects of her. The desire for spaceflight has been omnipresent since she can remember, since she was three. Going to space, escaping the solar system, surfing wormhole relativity, none of these is any kind of frontier any more.

There will be no documentary about the life and times of Michelle Campion. She still wants to know, though. For herself. The isolation is getting to her, no doubt. No, not isolation, because she’s used to that from training. Isolation without progress is what bothers her, isolation without object. She thinks herself at the exact centre of the quarantine house courtyard. It’s like being in a prison yard for exercise, staggered hours so she doesn’t run into anyone. Prison without a sentence. They run tests on her blood and her tissues and she waits, day after day. She stops and breathes in the summer breeze, looks up to get the Florida sun on her face. She’s cut her hair short for the spaceflight. She toyed with the idea of shaving her head, but Max Galactix didn’t think this would be media friendly, whatever that means. Shell spots something and bends over. A weed, a small sprout, pushing its way up between the stones. It shouldn’t be there in the chemically treated ground, but here it is, implacable life. She feels an urge to pluck the fragile green thread, but she does not. She strokes the weed once and straightens up.

Humans in the cosmos are like errant weeds. Shell wonders what giants or gods stroke humanity when they slip between the stars. The wind changes and Shell smells food from the kitchen prepared for the ground staff and their families. Passengers and crew like Shell are already eating space food, like they’ve already left Earth. Around her are the living areas of the quarantine house. High- rises of glass and steel forming a rectangle around the courtyard. One thousand passengers waiting to board various space shuttles that will ferry them to the starship Ragtime. Shell, just out of training, along for the ride or experience, committed to ten years in space in Dreamstate, arrival and delivery of passengers to the colony Bloodroot, then ten further years on the ride back. She’ll be mid- forties when she returns.

Might as well be a passenger because the AI pilots and captains the ship. She is the first mate, a wholly ceremonial position which has never been needed in the history of interstellar spaceflight. She has overlearned everything to do with the Ragtime and the flight. At some predetermined point, it will allow her to take the con, for experience and with the AI metaphorically watching over her shoulder. She turns to her own building and leaves the courtyard. She feels no eyes on her but knows there must be people at the windows.

LITTLE BROWN

A Murder Mystery in Space / Far From the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson

A Murder Mystery in Space: Far From the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson 

Five of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2021

Alexis Ong
Wednesday 27 October 2021

There’s nothing I love more than a good locked-room murder mystery, an eternally beloved subgenre of crime writing that embodies humanity’s dogged need to know. But these can also be, more often than not, one-dimensional narrative dioramas that stick to the basic formula without distinction. This is, unsurprisingly, not the case with Far From the Light of Heaven, Tade Thompson’s newest novel which marries shades of gothic horror with a sleuthing mystery and hard sci-fi rooted in real astronauts’ accounts of living in space.

Translating a complex murder from a conventional terrestrial setting into the rigidly-controlled environment of space comes with its own risks, namely when it comes to balancing the dry technological foundations of the story’s reality—the minutiae of astronaut training, space travel and so forth—with suitably gripping momentum. The novel unfolds a bold vision of Afrofuturistic space in the form of the Lagos system where Earth is mostly a distant bureaucratic presence. Even when you edge closer toward the third act, Thompson’s light touch and subtle misdirections mostly steer Heaven away from getting overly mired in heavy-handed cliches and formulaic wrap-ups.

But Heaven is a slow burn, taking its time to build emotional connections between a tight ensemble cast: acting spaceship captain Michelle “Shell” Campion, disgraced “repatriator” Fin and his Artificial companion Salvo, veteran astronaut Lawrence Biz and his too-cool-for-school half-alien daughter, Joké. Then of course there are the AIs who go by their given ship names—the interstellar spaceship Ragtime which holds the scene(s) of the crime, surrounded by a small constellation of lesser AIs that loosely follow a familiar rubric of Asimov-like rules.

Shell, assigned to her first spaceflight as first mate on the Ragtime, wakes from sleep to find that the ship’s AI has gone rogue, along with a pile of dead body parts. The Ragtime isn’t just any old ship, either—it’s carrying the richest man in known space, a cornucopia of unknown biological experiments, and an elusive killer. Shell, who has been sculpted for this role from birth thanks to her high-profile spacefaring family, has to bring all her training to bear for a situation that theoretically shouldn’t be possible. Enter Fin, a law enforcement “repatriator” from the planet Bloodroot who shunts stray Lambers—mostly docile alien entities who offer humans drug-like comforts—back into their dimension. He, Lawrence, and Joké join Shell on the Ragtime and inadvertently get roped into solving the murders, with chaotic results.

The premise invokes one part Event Horizon, one part “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (which Thompson explicitly names as an inspiration in the afterword) with a touch of HAL 9000 and Hellraiser—there are no interdimensional portals to hell realms, but a pointed look zealotry and morality and what happens when both human and AI transcend those limits. Thompson, who has a knack for bending assorted genres to his will, borrows from the supernatural. There’s a good chunk of ominous build-up and a rather Gothic portrait of internal torture and struggle woven into mostly economical, businesslike scenes of people trying to stay alive on a malfunctioning spaceship. There’s an unintentional touch of Hitchcockian humor in Fin’s story, too, and one can’t help but think that Thompson flavors some of his more macabre snippets with his professional experience as a psychiatrist.

But Heaven doesn’t fully show its hand until well past the halfway mark when we’re introduced to the other side of population—an indentured community of miners who “belong” to MaxGalactix, an omnipotent, seemingly omnipresent mega-corporation founded by aforementioned quintillionaire Yan Maxwell.

Due to their vocation, the Tehani’s bodies are riddled with toxins (nebulously referred to as “Exotics”) so they must stay away from the rest of the world, forced to dig, and generally keep their existence as unremarkable as possible under MaxGalactix’s watchful eye. Their chosen champion is named after a Biblical prophet, and they serve mostly as a stand-in for the multitude of oppressed indigenous communities in our current reality, as well as those that will inevitably fuel the future wave of space colonization with their bones and blood.

Over the course of the novel, Thompson breaks down the lone genius detective trope into a haphazard group effort where everyone is very clearly flying by the seat of their respective pants. And for the most part it works, thanks to Thompson’s “less is more” approach to exposition and worldbuilding—for the first chunk of the novel, for instance, we’re mostly left to fill in the blanks about Lambers and their role on Bloodroot. Heaven’s well-oiled narrative is very much founded upon this small ecosystem of characters working together, but if given more time on their own, Fin and Joké, and to an extent Lawrence, might have benefited from a little more conceptual flesh on their individual bones.

The real meat of Heaven coalesces around a very distinct strain of slow, seething justice that comes at a tremendous cost. It’s the sort of justice that has the potential to bring clarity and strength to others before it’s too late. Thompson preys on contemporary fears to devise grisly but familiar scenes of machine-driven devastation, possibly because so much of modern life is pop culture living rent-free in our collective consciousness. That aside, Heaven offers refreshing perspectives on both terrestrial and space colonialism, the impact of multiculturalism and Blackness in a realm historically dominated by white capitalism; it’s a meticulously-crafted slice of Yoruba culture brought to the stars.

The most compelling thing about Heaven, though, is the way it positions Lagos at the very end of the book—cut off from Earth but bristling with a galvanized sense of solidarity that overrides its internal differences. It’s a big beautiful explodey fuck-you to the space capitalism as we know it, and perhaps a message that we should hear more often.

Far From the Light of Heaven is published by Orbit.

TOR

Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star / An Excerpt

Monica Byrne

Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star

An Excerpt

Five of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2021

A reincarnated trinity of souls navigates the entanglements of tradition and progress, sister and stranger, and love and hate…

We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star, available from Harper Voyager. Byrne spins a multigenerational saga spanning two thousand years, from the collapse of the ancient Maya to a far-future utopia on the brink of civil war.

The Actual Star takes readers on a journey over two millennia and six continents —telling three powerful tales a thousand years apart, all of them converging in the same cave in the Belizean jungle.

Braided together are the stories of a pair of teenage twins who ascend the throne of a Maya kingdom; a young American woman on a trip of self-discovery in Belize; and two dangerous charismatics vying for the leadership of a new religion and racing toward a confrontation that will determine the fate of the few humans left on Earth after massive climate change.

In each era, a reincarnated trinity of souls navigates the entanglements of tradition and progress, sister and stranger, and love and hate—until all of their age-old questions about the nature of existence converge deep underground, where only in complete darkness can they truly see.

TZOYNA

3 Batz’ 14 Pop, Long Count 10.9.5.7.11

 

9 December, 1012

Ket fell backward in her trance, away from her own slumped body, and hit a clump of soil at an awkward angle, against her neck; the clump crumbled and gave way, her heels vaulted over her head, and she somersaulted through the earth. She scraped for a hold but couldn’t find any, only more soil that burst in her hand. She couldn’t scream because she couldn’t get her breath. The light was fading, covered up by collapsing earth, and a big whip spider was leaping from clump to clump in her wake, following her progress with a bright yellow eye. Every time her body rolled to a stop, the soil strained and burst, and she was tumbling backward again. She stopped trying to find handholds. She drew in her limbs and let herself fall.

She hit open space. She opened her eyes.

She was falling into a red city in a green valley.

She alighted in the main plaza, marked by a perfect grid of ceiba trees. It was twilight here.

She recognized the city as her own. There were her brother Ajul and sister Ixul, her mother and father, and their ancestors before them, all the way back to the Hero Twins, dim tall figures whose faces were obscured. They were all standing in the grid, aligned with the trees, and drawing their hands across their chests and pointing to the sky, but the motion was halting and inexact, as if they were trying to remember it. They wore masks, as if playing roles in an entertainment: the farmer, the priest, the dwarf, the scribe, the merchant, the warrior, the daykeeper, the lackey, the refugee, the king.

The plaza cracked open and she fell through.

The whip spider leapt after her, the hunt afoot again.

She hadn’t wanted to leave that place. She’d wanted to watch the dance and maybe try it herself. But she had no control over anything. This earth wasn’t soft soil, it was hard and broken rocks, stabbing her in the back as she tumbled. She drew in her arms and legs again, miserable. She shouldn’t have let blood so young. She wasn’t ready for this.

She hit open space. She opened her eyes.

She was falling into a red city on a green hilltop. Again, she alighted on the plaza in twilight.

It was still her city, but now it sat on an acropolis so high above the earth that she could see the mountains moving in the mists below, like herds of deer. In this plaza, the stars were nearer and brighter, and the trees were lower and fatter, shedding blood-red leaves in a circle around each trunk. A grey road began at the edge of the plaza and departed into an eternity that lapped the edges of the acropolis. Ixul and Ajul were standing at either side of the road like sentinels, rigid, holding matching spears.

She started toward them, wanting to be with them. A black jaguar appeared on the road.

Ket froze.

But the twins didn’t seem to notice the jaguar. Instead, they leveled their spears at each other, as if to attack.

Ket took a step forward.

They began to circle each other.

Stop, she tried to yell, but her voice got stuck in her throat. She started to run toward them, but then the jaguar charged her and scooped her up like a little doll so that she flipped head over heels to land on its back, and as the plaza collapsed and the jaguar leapt down, she saw the twins shoot up into the sky like a pair of hawks.

She held tight to the jaguar’s neck. She couldn’t see anything in the dark. But judging by the lurches and jolts, the jaguar was leaping from ledge to ledge, deeper into the earth. Then she heard the sound of rushing water. The jaguar slid into a channel that twisted and dropped and gathered speed. Spray splashed her face. Was she in the underworld now? Or still in her own city, in the Tzoynas beneath her Tzoyna; or in the city that had existed before any Tzoyna, far older, before the humans, with no name, when there was only stone and stars?

There was a moment of sickening free fall, and then a powerful splash.

Ket held on tight to the jaguar’s neck, gripping her own wrist.

They began to swim downward. The water was warm, and Ket found she could breathe.

A glow appeared below them. The light was the same color as the light on the plaza—pink-orange, shimmering like the lip of a seashell. She began to be able to see. She made out the jaguar’s huge paws sweeping, one and then the other, as if it were crawling down the column of water. The water tasted like cacao. She relaxed. She felt that even though she was not in control, she was safe. She wanted to remember all these things: the ancestors, the red leaves, the green mountain, the grey road, the cacao water. She wanted to hold on to them and understand their meanings.

She was amazed to realize that, in one hand, she still held her obsidian blade. How had she not dropped it, so many years ago, with her brother on the ball court? How had it survived all this tumbling and sliding and swimming? She held it up to the seed of light that was growing beneath her, and as if delighted to see itself in a mirror, the blade began to turn so fast that its four spokes blurred into a circle that began to glow, and now she could see that this blade was not just shaped like a star, but was a real star, an actual star, which both signified all things and was itself all things.

 

Excerpted from The Actual Star, copyright 2021 by Monica Byrne.

TOR

 

When History Echoes / Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star

 

When History Echoes: Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star

Five of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2021

Tobias Carroll

Fri Oct 1, 2021 9:00am

Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star is one of two big novels released this year structured around parallel narratives in three distinct time periods. (The other is Matt Bell’s Appleseed.) Byrne herself is no stranger to parallel plotlines set at different points in history; her previous novel, 2014’s The Girl in the Road, also made use of this device, albeit a little closer together, temporally speaking. The Actual Star, like Appleseed and Alan Garner’s Red Shift, offers plenty of time between its respective strands. These are books about the ways that one day’s urgent events can become ancient history from someone else’s perspective. It’s not hard to see what draws certain writers to this.

In The Actual Star, this sense of parallel timelines makes use of an especially grand scale; a thousand years separates each of the three timeframes. They’re set in 1012, 2012, and 3012 CE, respectively; a constant motif in the novel is seeing how the events described in one part are faithfully (or not) remembered a millennium later. Complicating this somewhat is another recurring motif: that of a trio of characters who recur in each of the timeframes. Reincarnation is taken as a fact of life by the planetwide culture of the 3012 sections—though this is handled subtly, closer to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas than Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt.

Each of the three segments could stand on its own relatively well as a short novel; even so, the way these plotlines converge makes each one stronger. There’s a point at the end of A.S. Byatt’s Possession—a book about the study of history—in which Byatt reveals just what has been left out of the historical record that her novel focuses on, and The Actual Star at times feels like a sprawling meditation on that, along with a host of other topics.

In 1012, twins Ixul and Ajul, and their sister Ket, deal with the challenges of power and the twins’ pending rule over a Maya kingdom in what is now Belize. The dynamic between the three siblings is established quickly: The twins are enmeshed in a clandestine relationship, while Ket’s interests tend towards the more mystical. A thousand years after that, a young woman named Leah makes plans to leave her home in Minnesota to travel to Belize, where her father lived, and to explore Actun Tunichil Muknal, a sacred cave with a deep historical meaning. And a thousand years after that, in a world transformed by climate change—the novel’s prologue notes that “the last of the world’s ice is gone”—a philosophical debate between Niloux and Tanaaj, dueling political thinkers, threatens to upend society.

This is an epic, visceral novel—and one in which several characters engage in self-cutting. It’s also an eminently philosophical one, in which the question of the nature of Xibalba is at the heart of these three parallel narratives. As a whole, then, it’s a book about human transcendence, and whether or not that should be taken as a matter of faith or as a more metaphorical (and achievable) goal.

If that sounds like I’m being vague, I am; part of the pleasure of reading this book is in seeing just where the different timelines link up. In the first chapter in which the reader encounters Niloux, for instance, we’ll learn that Leah is regarded as a saint at that moment in history, so figuring out how her travels through Belize will result in canonization centuries later becomes an ongoing source of suspense throughout the book. But there are other, less overt, moments in this vein as well; re-reading passages to write this review, it became more clear the extent to which Byrne lays the groundwork early on for some of these connections, and some of the larger plot twists to come.

And while the historical and present-day (well, present day minus nine years) segments are wholly compelling, it’s Byrne’s future society that stands out as a massive achievement. Laviaja, described in a glossary in the back of the novel as a “global system of nomadic, subsidiaries, anarchist self-organization,” is fascinating both for the extent to which it’s described, as well as for its rather unique place in science fiction: It’s a society set in the aftermath of a massive, even apocalyptic event that seems like somewhere you’d want to live.

Admittedly, it’s also fundamentally different from our own society in a number of ways, from societal units to body modification, some of which come up over the course of the novel and some of which turn up in the glossary. And while this society feels thoroughly lived-in, it also doesn’t feel perfect—you can see why some people would chafe at their society’s prohibition on large traveling groups, for instance. And, more broadly, Byrne puts this into a larger context, making all three of this novel’s time periods feel as though they’re set in lived-in societies, with all of the flaws that that implies.

The Actual Star is not a book that engages in much hand-holding. Most of its readers will find themselves immersed in two cultures very different from the one with which they’re most familiar. But this novel bristles with ambition, asks unfamiliar questions, and has one of the most effective examples of worldbuilding you’re likely to see on a page this year. It meticulously shapes its own territory, and draws a new map of what the genre can do— while rooting that in its characters’ own investigations into the world.

TOR