Tag: Pushkin Press

As one half of a tiny indie publisher myself, I obviously appreciate and adore the #ReadIndies initiative for the month of February, launched and hosted by Kaggsy59 and LizzySiddal (I will call them by their Twitter handles, as this is how I got to know them, but please click through to their websites and you will instantly know whom I mean, and the interview with Will from Renard Press is especially eye-opening about the challenges that indie publishers face in today’s market – and as you might have seen recently, indie bookshops too).

So here are some books by indie publishers that I’ve recently read. No time, alas, for full-length reviews (except perhaps for the two French ones, which also fit in with my French February personal reading initiative), but they are all well worth your time!

From Faber & Faber:

Erasure by Percival Everett

If you thought Yellowface was a vicious satire of tokenism and hypocrisy in publishing, make room for this, which precedes it by several years. I laughed out loud at some of the scenes in this story of a highly erudite and sophisticated black writer who angrily pens a satirical take on people’s expectations of ‘black literature’, only to find that it achieves the success and brings him the money that have hitherto eluded him. I’m not entirely sure how this will work as a film, but I look forward to seeing the film adaptation, entitled American Fiction. Although this does not feel just American – I can’t help but see this across much of translated literature: if it’s Scandinavian, it’s gloomy; if it’s East European it’s about war and dictatorship and trauma; if it’s Japanese, it’s about cats and books and quirky, lonely personalities etc.

But this is more than just satire. The narrator Monk Ellison has never quite had a sense of belonging to a particular community because he lacked the vocabulary to fit into black culture, but would never truly be accepted into white culture because of the colour of his skin. There is a poignant parallel here to his mother losing her grasp of language as she slips into dementia. The moments of hilarity (the judging for a book award, or the meeting with a film producer had me giggling) and the truly awful extracts from the novel entitled (at first) ‘My Paphology’ are interspersed with thoughts about writing, language, and the search for meaning. Some are slightly pretentious at first, but gradually the narrator seems to move from living entirely inside his head to at least acknowledging the emotional child within him (and perhaps within every one of us).

From Saqi Books:

Discretion by Faïza Guène, transl. Sarah Ardizzone

A portrait of a remarkable immigrant woman in Paris, alternating between her past during troubled times in Algeria and her present-day life, being insulted and ignored on the streets and in the offices of contemporary Paris. Her resigned way of looking at life comes up against her children’s more fierce demands for equality, the exasperation they feel at not really belonging anywhere. This fitted in well with my previous read Erasure.

This is narrated in third person and moves from one character to another, so it doesn’t quite have the immediacy and strong voice of Guene’s debut novel Kiffe Kiffe Demain, which is often used for A Level French over here. But, having wisened up now to the reductionism of a single voice claiming to represent a whole category of second-generation immigrant, perhaps the multiple different points of view give a fairer picture of the Bobigny estate on the outskirts of Paris and the lives of Algerian immigrants.

From Fitzcarraldo Editions:

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild by Mathias Enard, transl. Frank Wynne

I have two books by Enard in French sitting patiently on my shelves, but have been somewhat intimidated by his reputation of being extremely erudite and complex. In many ways, this book is not characteristic of his other work, but it might prove to be an easier way in, because it is very funny (if occasionally long-winded) and introduces us to a part of France that few of us care to visit or spend much time in, the much-vaunted ‘la France profonde’.

Predictably, I particularly enjoyed the first part, where a rather naive, pretentious anthropologist goes to study the ‘backward’ rural are in the Marais Poitevin, those marshlands in the west of France, between Poitiers, Niort (the capital of French paperwork) and La Rochelle. This is the region the author grew up in, but its national park status has been curtailed because of intensive agricultural encroachment – and this tension between farmers and the struggle for the environment appears in the book too, and in fact keeps the ending from becoming too saccharine. David, the anthropologist, is endearingly clueless, and it’s funny to read extracts from his diary and then see the same scenes through other people’s eyes, including the British expats to the village.

But the book is not a straightforward narration, and even the gravedigger’s banquet of the title (although it does seem interminable while reading all the speeches and lists of delicious foods in the somewhat baggy middle of the book) only occupies about 80 pages. What the book seeks to do is to give a social history of the region via its inhabitants, both human and animal, as each living creature is reincarnated and its past and future iterations are shown to us by the omniscient narrator. Naturally, this gives rise to humorous scenes such as the priest struggling with his carnal desires who gest reincarnated as a boar in heat, or the mosquito buzzing around Napoleon’s thigh, but there are also plenty of stories of quiet tragedy and loss of dignity.

I’ve always been an admirer of books that attempt to describe a rural society without looking down on it, and this book certainly conveys all the complexity and richness of every little corner of France and of its people.

From Pushkin Press:

The Meiji Guillotine Murders by Yamada Fūtarō, transl. Bryan Karetnyk

This book has been translated and published off the back of the recent success of Japanese ‘locked room’ type puzzles and apparently impossible murder mysteries which nevertheless have a very logical explanation. It’s ironic that these books, written in Japan from the 1910s onwards in imitation of the British murder mysteries in particular, are now having such a renaissance in the very countries that previously dismissed this kind of writing as derivative nonsense.

However, this one is a little different, because it is historical fiction as well, set during the Meiji period, when the shogunate fell and the Emperor Meiji was restored to power in Japan (rather than just being the Shogun’s puppet) and the country opened up to foreign trade and influence. This did not happen as peacefully as it has been portrayed in some history books, and there was a period of fighting that amounted to a civil war, and a lot of new political and administrative structures which had to be rethought and set up from scratch. This book explores the new police force being set up, the corruption and factions within the new government, and introduces two detectives Kawaji (who was a real-life person and reformer of the police system) and Kaduki (a fictional character, who brought a French guillotine to Japan – presumably more reliable for beheading criminals than a sharp samurai katana?). They have to deal with corrupt policemen under their command and investigate a series of improbable and often far-fetched crimes. It is essentially a collection of connected short crime stories (best read in order).

I loved all the historical details and explanations, but I can see that someone might come in expecting this to be a very different kind of book, in which case they will be disappointed.

From Fernwood Press:

Girl in Tulips and Other Non-Communicable Family Diseases by Julianne DiNenna

This is a devastatingly beautiful poetry collection and the fact that I know the author and her family personally, and so know the whole tragic story behind it, should not deter you from the fact that this is moving, heartfelt poetry that will help anyone going through grief and loss, particularly loss of a child. There are so many warm, tender, loving memories, but the poet also captures the frustration and resentment, the bitter cry of a mother who wonders ‘why her, why us?’. The beauty is in the details, and I know I’ll be thinking of these poems for a long, long time. Just a word of caution: maybe don’t read them all in one go, as I did, as they can hit you in the chest. Best in small sips.

Maylis de Kerangal: Eastbound (I read this in the original French Tangente vers l’est, published by Gallimard, but available in translation of Jessica Moore by Archipelago in the US and Les Fugitives in UK)

I’ll start off by saying that I think Jessica Moore really gets de Kerangal’s style, those long, dizzying sentences that start off in one direction and then spin around themselves and end up in a completely different place. So there is no particular reason why I didn’t read it in translation, but I happened to see this book on the shelves at the bookshop in Ferney this weekend and couldn’t resist. I have many of de Kerangal’s books on my shelves (I haven’t read all of them) – like Delphine de Vigan, she is a contemporary French writer that I will always read, even if they don’t always 100% hit the mark for me.

It’s a surprisingly tense little story of a chance encounter on the Transsiberian Express between two people who are both flawed (just like any one of us), can barely communicate with each other, respond unpredictably under pressure… and the stakes are high. Interestingly enough, this was initially a radio play on France Culture in 2010, after the journey the author herself made on the Transsiberian Express between Novosibirsk and Vladivostok, so there must have been more dialogue between the two main protagonists initially.

Once again, the author shows real compassion and insight into young people’s hearts, no matter how confused they might be. The short description of how Aliocha ends up unable to avoid conscription – because he has no wealthy parents bribing a doctor, no mother to join the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers (a civil society group that has been strangely silent about the most recent war in Ukraine), no girlfriend to get pregnant – is economical in its word count yet so powerful in its detail. Yet, despite the pity we feel for Aliosha and his repeated failed attempts at running away, he is not an angel: having seen that intimidation and violence are the winners in the world he grew up in, he will make use of these (and of his impressive body size) to get his way with Helene, the French woman who happens to be travelling on the same train, or with the little boy who sees him at a critical juncture.

It’s a terse, short work, and we never find out too much about the characters’ past or future, but it has a sinister, heavy atmosphere hanging over it, although it was written before the current war. But then… haven’t Russian soldiers been involved in one war or another for so many years now?