Anne Enright / ‘As a writer, your problems are your solutions’

 

Anne Enright: ‘As a writer, 

your problems 

are your solutions’

ANNE ENRIGHT'S NEW NOVEL EXPLORES GENDER, MEMORY, FAMILY, ART AND GLAMOUR THROUGH THE STORY OF RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN AN ACTRESS AND HER DAUGHTER

Hugh Linehan
February 8, 2020

 

A little girl sits in the wings of a theatre, her face turned away from the camera towards a woman on stage, illuminated by a single spot, her arms raised to receive the acclaim of an unseen, adoring audience.

The evocative, slightly unsettling photograph is of the young Carrie Fisher and her mother, Debbie Reynolds, in the mid-1960s. Anne Enright had it on her screen when working on her new novel, Actress, and now it’s on the cover.

 

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Actress by Anne Enright review – the spotlight of fame

The Booker winner’s seventh novel investigates a woman’s memories of her starry, damaged mother

Alexandra Harris

Friday 14 February 2020

I

n Anne Enright’s seventh novel, the daughter of an iconic actor thinks back to her mother’s years of fame, distraction and difficulty, trying at the same time to work out aspects of her own history that have never been clear. For instance: who was her father, the man she imagined as a lost hero? Why could he never be named, this “ghost in [her] blood”? In her late 50s, with her own children grown up and gone from home, she assembles and studies memories of her lost mother.

Anne Enright’s Actress / A plodding, clichéd story

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Anne Enright’s Actress: a plodding, clichéd story

Enright’s new novel about the daughter of an actress finds itself in a biographical straitjacket.

Leo Robson
12 February 2020

Anne Enright’s puzzling new novel is a counterblast against reductive thinking that struggles to offer a satisfying rival vision. The narrator, Norah FitzMaurice, a middle-aged novelist, believes that her late mother, the actress Katherine O’Dell, has been consistently misrepresented. Like Cecilia Brady, the “producer’s daughter” in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, who says that people either take Hollywood for granted or treat it with contempt, Norah is careful to identify a pair of pitfalls – the laziness of journalism and the arrogance of cultural history.

Naoise Dolan confirms Exciting Times is being adapted for television

 By Bronwyn O Neill 

 July 12, 2020

Exciting Times was one of our must-read books for 2020. The debut novel by Irish author Naoise Dolan was hailed as the next Normal People.

The novel was even described by Vogue as ‘Half Sally Rooney love triangle, half glitzy Crazy Rich Asian high-living and guaranteed to please’.

Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan review / A witty, deadpan debut

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Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan review – a witty, deadpan debut

A young Dubliner in Hong Kong struggles to connect in this fresh and funny debut about love and self-knowledge

Carrie O'Grady
Fri 17 Apr 2020 07.30 BST

A

va, a 22-year-old Dubliner living in Hong Kong, describes herself as “good at men”. It’s a brilliantly concise summation of her take on relationships, which she sees as a power game, an “ultimately shallow emotional transaction” in which the greatest potential benefit might be that you get to move into an apartment better than anything you can afford on your own. Julian, her posh banker boyfriend, has such an apartment – which is just as well, since he also has an arrogance to match his salary. “Why do you like me?” Ava asks him. “Who said I liked you?” he counters. His privilege is the invisible third party in the relationship. Ava makes it her mission to get him to admit some feelings for her, purely because it would give her the upper hand.

Naoise Dolan

Though this model of relationship-as-power-struggle is hardly new, Dolan brings a fresh 21st-century sensibility to it. Ava is constantly trying to make sense of her situation by framing it in terms of identity: does sleeping with Julian make her a bad feminist? Or a good girlfriend? In this, she’s reminiscent of Sally Rooney’s precarious young women, whose struggle for self-affirmation is so snarled up with the power dynamics of sex.

Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan review / A bracing, witty debut

 

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Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan review – a bracing, witty debut

The young Irish writer’s first novel is dry and sharp in its observation of twentysomething expat lives

‘The book of the summer … Kept me rapt until the final page‘ THE TIMES

‘A sharp, smart, witty modern love story. I loved it‘ David Nicholls

Holly Williams

Monday 6 April 2020

I

’m sorry. I really am. I know it’s frustrating that any new young female writer must find themselves compared to Sally Rooney. But I’m going to just get it out of the way, for Naoise Dolan is Irish, in her mid-20s, and her debut was previewed in literary magazine The Stinging Fly while Rooney edited it. But on this occasion, it’s more than just a question of biography: Dolan’s writing does genuinely occupy similar territory. There’s a certain dry, almost deadpan quality in her observation of the lives of her twentysomething characters – the complications of attraction, and the gap between what’s felt and what’s spoken; calmly articulated self-loathing, and precise capturing of class differences – that both authors nail down dead.

So lucky us, really. Exciting Times is a fun, snappy read – ordinarily, I’d say its short chapters could be torn through on your commute, but it’ll brighten lockdown too.

Naoise Dolan

Ava is a 21-year-old who leaves Ireland, where she’s convinced everyone hates her, to become a teacher of English as a foreign language in Hong Kong. Despite the chip on her shoulder, she falls in with Julian, an Eton-educated English banker who she enjoys being with because they (supposedly) aren’t that interested in each other: “It wasn’t like normal friendships where I worried if the other person still liked me.” She moves into his swanky apartment, rent-free, and they have sex. “I enjoyed his money and he enjoyed how easily impressed I was by it.”

In Conversation / Fernanda Melchor & Sophie Hughes

 

Fernanda Melchor

In Conversation

Fernanda Melchor & Sophie Hughes

‘It’s easy to forget the power of words in an era ruled by profuse, beautiful and entrancing images.’

24th February 2020

There’s no denying that Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season includes distressing stories of the very basest human behaviours. At the same time, thanks to the striking authenticity of the voices contained within it, the novel embodies a great human act of compassion, in that its author truly listens without prejudice to what literary critic Helen Vassallo has called ‘the monsters we make’.

The Oscar-winning film director Bong Joon-ho recently wrote some lines that I find as true of Hurricane Season as of his masterpiece Parasite, ‘. . . who can point their finger at a struggling family, locked in a fight for survival, and call them parasites? It’s not that they were parasites from the start. They are our neighbours, friends and colleagues, who have merely been pushed to the edge of a precipice.’ Fernanda Melchor goes with her characters to the edge of the precipice. As her English translator, I followed her there and was left changed and with many questions about her method and influences, manipulating readers, and the unavoidable lure of darkness. We touched upon some of these topics in during the following conversation, in English, in late January 2020.

—Sophie Hughes

 

Nightmarish realism: Fernanda Melchor on the haunting voices of 'Hurricane Season'

Fernanda Melchor and German translator Angelica Ammar have won the International Literature Award for "Hurricane Season." DW had a chat with the Mexican writer, whose novel depicts life in an extremely harsh society.

Fernanda Melchor's Temporada de huracanes (Hurricane Season; the English translation is to be released later this year) was featured as one of Mexico's best novels in 2017; the writer was also listed as one of the country's top authors under 40.

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor review / Intense and inventive

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Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor review – intense and inventive

A murder mystery set in horror and squalor, this English-language debut signals the rise of a Mexican star

Anthony Cummins

Tue 25 February 2020

A

structurally inventive murder mystery set in a lawless Mexican village rife with superstition, Fernanda Melchor’s formidable English-language debut takes the form of eight torrential paragraphs ranging from one to 64 pages long.

It opens in a blizzard of gossip related to the discovery of the corpse of a notorious local woman known as the Witch, who provided abortions for sex workers serving the nearby oil industry and whose rundown mansion – a venue for raucous parties – was said to hold a stash of gold eyed up by everyone from down-at-heel gigolos to venal cops on the take.

Real Life by Brandon Taylor review / Violent legacy of the past

 

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Real Life by Brandon Taylor review – violent legacy of the past

This Booker-longlisted snapshot of the life of a queer black postgraduate forcefully tackles the effects of racism and abuse

Michael Donkor
Fri 21 Aug 2020 09.00 BST

W

allace, the queer black biochemistry postgraduate at the centre of US author Brandon Taylor’s Booker-longlisted debut, often seeks out solitude. On the Friday evening on which Real Life begins, Wallace abandons his carousing colleagues and the bars of their midwestern university for the tranquility of a local lake. He dangles his feet in the ripples. He enjoys the bracing freshness. In this formally and conceptually testing book, however, such moments of repose are never without threat. Wallace soon reflects that “there was something slick in the water, something apart from the water itself, like a loose second skin swilling under the surface”.

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi review / Electrifyingly truthful

 

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Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi review – electrifyingly truthful

When does self-determination become selfishness? This intelligent Booker-shortlisted debut examines the legacy of a toxic mother

Shahidha Bari
Sat 26 Sep 2020 07.30 BST

I

n the 1970s the British paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott described a kind of parenting that need not be all-consuming and self-sacrificing, but which could instead be simply “good enough”. Rather than rushing to feed the child immediately, the “good enough” mother allows an infant to cry a little, teaching them about the reality of frustration and expectation. But what can you learn from a bad mother?

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi / An extract

 

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Burnt Sugar

by Avni Doshi

An extract

I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure.

I suffered at her hands as a child, and any pain she subsequently endured appeared to me to be a kind of redemption – a rebalancing of the universe, where the rational order of cause and effect aligned.

But now, I can’t even the tally between us.

‘The New Wilderness’ / Humanity returns to nature in Diane Cook’s timely ecological tale

 

Diane Cook

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‘The New Wilderness’: Humanity returns to nature in Diane Cook’s timely ecological tale

Eliot Schrefer
AUGUST 9, 2020

Been to a national park recently? There’s a feeling when, trees at your back and songbirds above, human stresses (like pandemics) seem to fall away. In the United States, whose limited wild spaces are increasingly under threat from pollution and overcrowding, access to wild calmness is becoming a scarce resource. Diane Cook’s inspired debut novel “The New Wilderness” (Harper, 416 pp., ★★★★ out of four) imagines a future in which the wilderness itself has become invite-only.

The New Wilderness by Diane Cook review / A dazzling debut

 

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The New Wilderness by Diane Cook review – a dazzling debut

A community of strangers attempt to live in a natural world made inhospitable by the climate crisis in this tale of survival and strife

Téa Obreht
Fri 4 Sep 2020 07.30 BST

I

n The New Wilderness, Diane Cook’s Booker prize-longlisted debut novel, the end isn’t so much “nigh” as “come and gone”. The cataclysm of civilisation has overwhelmed all but a single natural preserve called the Wilderness State, home to the last remnants of North American wildlife, and a small band of nomads called the Community. We venture into this inhospitable world in the varyingly close and distant third-person company of Bea, a young mother who has made the impossible and inadvisable decision to join an experiment in the Wilderness State in order to save her little daughter, Agnes, from the wasted City, whose poisoned air has been killing her since the day she was born. One of 20 initial volunteers, Bea is part of an experiment allegedly intended to determine whether humans can exist in nature without destroying it. The Community, of which she is a reluctant and pragmatically sceptical member, is tethered to meaning by a set of precious implements – the Cast Iron, the Book Bag, and most importantly the Manual that spells out the rules of their existence, over which the Rangers, to whose whims the experiment and its participants are subject, hold sway.

Booker Prize 2020 / Douglas Stuart may have won but here’s what you need to know about the other shortlisted novels

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Stuart may have won but here’s what you need to know about the other shortliste novels

Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain may have been declared the 2020 victor but there’s still a whole list of other excellent reads

The winner of 2020’s Booker Prize has been revealed as Douglas Stuart with Shuggie Bain. Never heard of him? Don’t panic. In fact, it’s hardly surprising if this year’s Booker shortlisted names don’t ring any bells as  four of the six novels are debuts, and none of the authors are English.

1. Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99)

Storyline: We are in Pune, India, and Antara’s mother, Tara, who was always difficult, is becoming forgetful. As we delve into her past — her breakup with Antara’s father and going to live in an ashram with a small child in tow — we come to understand the effects of her neglectful parenting on Antara, and why Antara is powerless to exact revenge.  

Author vital stats: Doshi, 38, lives in Dubai, grew up in New Jersey and has an MA from UCL in History of Art. This is her debut novel.

What to say: Doshi’s inspiration for the ashram scenes came from her own family members, of whom many were followers of cult guru, Osho Rajneesh.

What not so say: It’s hard to warm to any of the characters.  

Any good? I loved the combination of spite and sensuality, and she really nails the love-hate, mother-daughter vibe.

2. The New Wilderness by Diane Cook (Oneworld, £16.99)

Storyline: Bea has left the toxically polluted City with husband Glen and ailing daughter Agnes to live in the unspoilt Wilderness, so that Agnes can recover. Together with twenty other volunteers they must learn to survive without impacting on nature, but things fall apart, obviously.

Author vital stats: A debut novel from Brooklyn-based Cook, 44, who has won awards for her short story collection, Man V. Nature.  

What to say: No surprise that it’s been snapped up by Warner Bros TV for a series.

What not to say: How come the women still have tampons after years of living in the wild?  

Any good? Preposterous! It’s a Hunger Games-style saga masquerading as a worthy climate change novel, but strangely and compulsively readable.

3. Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart (Picador, £14.99)

Storyline: Little Shuggie grows up poor on a Glasgow estate in the Eighties, knowing he’s “different” from other boys. He has a charismatic but alcoholic mother and an abusive, philandering father, but must eventually learn that his mum will never “get better”, however hard he tries to help her.  

Author vital stats: A largely autobiographical debut. Glasgow-born Stuart, 44, used to design menswear for Calvin Klein, and lives in New York.  

What to say: The lows of alcoholism have rarely been better described.  

What not to say: Stuart writes that  his characters are “sat at” rather than “sitting at” which is commonplace, but still crass.  

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Any good? An emotional battering ram; storytelling straight from the heart.  I absolutely loved it and think the judges have made the right decision.  

4. The Shadow King  by Maaza Mengiste (Canongate, £9.99)

Storyline: An ambitious feminist take on the masculine war novel, opens with recently-orphaned Hirut going to work as a maid for Kidane and Aster and eventually joining an army of woman soldiers, led by the feisty Aster, to fight for an absent Haile Selassie against the Italians.  

Author vital stats: A second novel. Mengiste, 46, was born in Addis Ababa, left aged four with her family, studied as a Fulbright Scholar in Italy and then creative writing at NYU.  

What to say: It is fiction, but was inspired by Mengiste’s great-grandmother.

What not to say: All those windy, bloated sentences and use of the present tense are exhausting.

Any good? Disappointing. There’s a great story in there somewhere, but it was uphill work to uncover it.  

5. This Mournable Body  by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Faber, £8.99)

Storyline: The conclusion to this semi-autobiographical trilogy, begun in 1988, is set in Harare at the end of the Nineties. Tambu is now middle-aged, living in a hostel and down on her luck, having quit her job as an advertising copywriter. We follow her attempting to improve her life, seizing on any opportunities that come her way.  

Author’s vital stats: Zimbabwean Dangarembga, 61, is a playwright and film maker. She was arrested earlier this year for protesting in support of the Movement for Democratic Change.

What to say: English PEN and others are campaigning to have the charges against her dropped.  

What not to say: Narrating in the second person present tense is annoying.  

Any good? With its underwhelming storyline and difficult prose style, I’m afraid I struggled to finish it.  

6. Real Life by Brandon Taylor (Daunt Books, £9.99)

Storyline: Wallace is a black, gay biochemist from Alabama studying nematodes at a Midwestern university, where all his peers are white. His sense of displacement and insecurity is exacerbated by the fact his father died recently and he was abused as a child.

Author vital stats: An autobiographical debut. Alabama-born, former biochemist Taylor, 31, is a staff writer for Literary Hub, and attended the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop.  

What to say: Can you believe he wrote the book in only five weeks?  

What not to say: How raw and visceral. Apparently Taylor hates his work being described thus.

Any good? I couldn’t get past the tone of resentment, which is both a strength, but also ultimately the book’s weakness. 

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