Another year, another Booker. After last year’s fun but not particularly informative blog roundup, I thought I’d take another crack at looking at what bloggers have said so far about the Booker longlist. (For my own part, I own about five of these, but have read none of them. Yet.)

Here goes… (more…)

I’ve written in the past about the strengths and weaknesses of using the present tense in fiction. At times it can be very effective, but it’s a snappy, percussive tense, ill-suited to more ponderous prose. Ian MacKenzie‘s use of the present in City of Strangers is symptomatic of an overall discord, a clash in a novel that doesn’t seem sure whether it’s a fast psychological thriller or a Saul Bellow-style portrait of a man in his city.

The story follows a week in the life of Paul Metzger, a failing writer, still smarting from a recent divorce and a long-term breakdown in his relationship with his brother. His father, an infamous Nazi sympathiser in his youth, is dying in hospital, while Paul walks the streets of New York. When he rescues a foreign boy from a street beating, he finds himself the target of one of the assailants, who begins following him around the city. (more…)

Sum is a collection of forty vignettes describing possible afterlives, written by neuroscientist David Eagleman and collected in a compact and attractive edition by Canongate. The stories, an average of 2-3 pages each, are mostly presented in the second person, describing “your” death with irony, wit and occasional poignancy.

In the afterlife, you discover that your Creator is a species of small, dim-witted, obtuse creatures. They look vaguely human, but they are smaller and more brutish. They are singularly unitelligent. They knit their brows when they try to follow what you are saying. It will help if you speak slowly, and it sometimes helps to draw pictures. At some point their eyes will glaze over and they will nod as though they understand you, but they will have lost the thread of the conversation entirely.

from ‘Spirals’

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New from Picador, Talk of the Town is the first novel from poet Jacob Polley. It’s a coming-of-age tale set in Carlisle during the summer of 1986, and narrated in vernacular by schoolboy Chris Hearsey. His friend Arthur, never the most stable of kids, has gone missing, and Chris sets out to try and find him:

There’s nee mugshot, but I’ve got one already, me own movin clip of Arthur reachin down ter give us a hand up off the deck, the sun comin out from behind his head, dazzlin away his face. I whip the paper shut and shove it back under me bed, further back than the empty mug, behind the shoebox. I get ter me feet, wipin the sweat off me palms on me jeans. There’s nowt else fer it. I reckon I have ter gan and see Gill Ross, cus it’s her who might know where Arthur is, cus of what fat Booby said yesterday on the Arches.

I shut me bedroom door softly affter us.

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Once I’d decided to start reading a little more crime fiction, it could only be a matter of time before I encountered crime publishers Bitter Lemon Press. Their current lead title, and perhaps the best place to start, is Back to the Coast, a thriller by Dutch author Saskia Noort. (more…)

While I was examining PS Publishing’s website a few weeks ago, I decided to subscribe to their flagship quarterly publication, Postscripts. A keen reader of horror as a teenager, I’m pretty out of touch with what’s happening in the genre today, and their magazine seemed like a good way to take a refresher course. Frankly, after some rather dry days under the general fiction sun, I also needed a bit of fun. As a result, it was a slow couple of weeks waiting for my first issue to arrive. (more…)

Far North is my first encounter with Marcel Theroux (son of Paul, brother of Louis), and the author’s fourth novel. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic near future / alternative present / alternative recent past (doesn’t say; probably doesn’t matter), among a series of deserted towns that form a kind of new Wild East, where an increasingly desperate American population has colonised parts of Russia before all but dying out among snow, ice, and social collapse.

Far North is narrated by Makepeace, a peacekeeper who still does her rounds in one of these frozen, deserted towns. (Her gender is kept hidden for a few chapters, before being revealed in an Amis-like flourish, surprising but not interesting.) The first third or so of the book consists of brief, disjointed encounters with a variety of pleasant, unpleasant, and deeply unpleasant people, and concludes with her imprisonment in a labour camp. Working in the camp, she begins to hear rumours of “The Zone”, a contaminated area still full of the riches of mankind’s past… (more…)

In Rhyming Life and Death, the latest novel by Israeli author Amos Oz, an unnamed author walks the streets of Tel Aviv, killing time before he’s due to appear at a talk on his work in a nearby cultural centre. He dreads the coming series of questions—Why do you write? What do you think of other writers? Do you write with a pen or a computer?—all of which he’s heard before, and all of which he will answer tonight just as evasively, as vaguely, as he always has done. Sitting in a cafe, he attempts to distract himself from the upcoming event by creating a back story for the waitress who serves him. Her name is Ricky, he decides, and he goes on to imagine the story of her first love affair. (more…)

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been dedicating odd hours to not reading Brothers, the new novel by Chinese author Yu Hua.

It started a few months ago, round about the time that we had all that fuss about Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. That book was getting a lot of coverage, and I was thinking of getting hold of a copy and reviewing it myself, but it was an awfully big book, and it was being very ably reviewed elsewhere. Still, I liked the idea of grappling with a big, translated monster, and so I was intrigued when I heard about the imminent arrival of Yu Hua’s Brothers. (more…)

A little while ago, I finally managed to visit Rome’s Porta Portese market. The main stretch is comprised of an infinite number of stalls that sell a depressingly finite range of stock; like a British high street, it seems to be the same half-dozen stores repeating themselves as far as the eye can see. The more interesting, more unique, stalls are in the side streets, where it’s more like a car boot sale. Here, on a table with perhaps a dozen English-language paperbacks, I came across a couple of books of a type I hadn’t seen before.

They were paperback novels, printed wide rather than tall, with two columns to each page. Maybe six titles in all; I bought Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge and a volume containing Typhoon and The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad. Perhaps American readers of this blog will be familiar with these editions, but the Brits I’ve spoken to haven’t seen anything like them (more…)

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