Latest news with #literature
The Guardian
19 minutes ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Siang Lu wins Miles Franklin award for Ghost Cities, ‘a genuine landmark in Australian literature'
When Siang Lu found out he'd won the Miles Franklin literary award, he had a physical reaction. 'I was in such shock that I lost all feeling in my hands and legs,' the Brisbane-based author says. 'I teared up. I lost my voice a little bit. It was the first time in my life that I've ever had to ask someone with a straight face, 'Can you just please confirm to me that I'm not dreaming?'' The feeling Lu describes is akin to the surreal nature of his experimental, prize-winning novel, Ghost Cities. Set between modern and ancient times, and inspired by the vacant megacities of China, the sprawling, ambitious novel is shot through with absurdist humour, cultural commentary and satire in what the Miles Franklin judges describe as 'at once a grand farce and a haunting meditation on diaspora', and 'a genuine landmark in Australian literature'. Many of Ghost Cities' characters, from emperors to civilians, are devoted to telling, and preserving, stories. It's something Lu hadn't realised until a keen-eyed reader pointed it out – now, he says it's key to the novel itself and the $60,000 prize he's just won. 'I think people are responding to a combination of the humour, which I care very deeply about, but also the idea that we should venerate art, storytellers and storytelling,' he says. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning 'Amongst the cast of characters in Ghost Cities … It was the storytellers that had any hope of claiming agency. I did not consciously do that or plan that, but I recognise it now as something that is true, that my mind was working towards. I hope that at some subconscious level, this is what readers and the judging panel might have responded to: the love for storytelling and literature.' Like many of Australia's most acclaimed writers, Lu works a full-time job (in tech) and has two children, aged nine and 11. Some of Ghost Cities was written many years ago on his hour-long commute to and from the office. 'From the outside in normal, real life, it might appear that in some ways, I've de-prioritised literature in my life: I work a normal job, try to be as present as I can for my children, do what I can for the community,' he says. 'But in fact, secretly, I've put literature above everything … I'm grateful for the things that ground me, because they inform the things that I want to write.' Ghost Cities is Lu's second novel and follows 2022's The Whitewash, a madcap, satirical oral history blending real and fictional stories of Hollywood's race problem. An online project, The Beige Index (described as 'the Bechdel test for race'), is a companion piece of sorts. The perennially shy author says it was a 'gift' for this to be his debut in the Australian literary world, because it meant 'I could be an advocate for something that I care about very deeply, which was more and better representation – that very quickly became like armour for me. I thought, 'Let me be a good advocate for this cause, and then I don't need to talk about myself,' which is a win-win.' This year Lu was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin alongside Brian Castro (Chinese Postman), Michelle de Kretser (Theory and Practice), Winnie Dunn (Dirt Poor Islanders), Julie Janson (Compassion) and Fiona McFarlane (Highway 13). He observes that prize shortlists have become more diverse. 'I don't think that is possible without people behind the scenes, the judges themselves, the readers who are reading critically and thinking about these questions: where are we, where are we going, and how do we get there?' he says. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion But the author also believes it is, first and foremost, about the work itself: 'I've been in judging panels and session groups … [In] the conversations about whose voices we want to champion, always, always, the first cornerstone to that is quality.' The writing community matters a lot to Lu. He expresses it in his own idiosyncratic way through what he calls 'Silly Bookstagram', where he Photoshops fellow authors' book covers to be about himself. Lu stresses that the braggadocious nature of the posts is an exaggerated persona but he enjoys connecting with, and promoting, other writers through this tongue-in-cheek project, which has had a real-life impact. 'It started to hit me when those fellow authors actually showed up for my book launch in Sydney,' he says. 'I didn't know them other than through Instagram but it felt like a way to connect in the most 'me' way possible.' So what's next for Australia's latest Miles Franklin winner? Lu is tight-lipped but promises one thing: 'It's gonna be weirder than Ghost Cities.'
Irish Times
3 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
This summer I'm taking a Maga approach to reading: self-serving and isolationist
July means one certain thing. Summer reading lists are upon us – magazine and newspaper editors sit around and, with some effort, dash together a 20-or-so long list of the books you should bring on holiday. The lists usually look like some combination of the following: an obscure new novel, authored by a friend in need of a favour; the second book of the most recently zeitgeisty novelist – quality of these vary; something from the 'smart thinking' or popular science category (designed to make you feel clever, actually makes you dumber); a history tome so dense and unfriendly it is hard to imagine any normal person wanting to read it, let alone on a beach; a blandly feminist pamphlet titled something glib such as Women Are Powerful; a crime thriller, ordained to be on every popular reading list by some unknown force of the universe. The publishing houses are happy, the featured writers too. Meanwhile, the newspaper believes it has paid a service to its reader – but of course it has done the opposite. Because it is abjectly implausible that even five of the books on these lists will stand any kind of longevity test, let alone all 20 (how many books are there are in total from, say, 2002 that have had lasting impact on the culture?). The summer reading list necessarily emphasises the new. This comes at the cost of recommending the quality. And so the likelihood that these lists are stuffed with duds and wastes-of-times is so strong it is approaching inevitability. READ MORE In a bid to avoid gutting but predictable disappointment, this summer – with the exception of the books I am lucky enough to read for work – I have committed myself to the act of rereading. Why risk something untested when I know for sure that most of Hemingway 's are pretty good? I will have a good time with Cormac McCarthy , I always do. If you're an Austen fan, check out Pride and Prejudice again, you'll love it. This is an obvious and dishonourably parochial instinct. There is a whole world out there I am cutting off from myself: what about the great Malay playwrights (I assume there are some); or Danish masters of genre fiction (Danes, enlighten me); or Afrikaans poets; or the next VS Naipaul surely hovering somewhere on the horizon waiting to be plucked from obscurity and rocketed to fame one summer reading list at a time? What secrets of the universe am I wilfully keeping from myself? Well, I'm contented with not knowing for now. This is the ultra-Maga approach to reading: self-serving, isolationist, retreating from all those cosmopolitan obligations somehow acquired over the years, harking after an imagined halcyon past when books were good (and jobs were American!). Hell, I might even buy a red hat. Or maybe we needn't be so cynical. The art of rereading is a romantic pursuit, too. The Italian writer Italo Calvino describes 'a classic' as a book that never finishes saying what it has to say. Twee, maybe. But it's a good test. Every reread of your favourite story will bring you something new. I am not the same person as I was at 24, mid-pandemic, reading The Secret History for the first time. I should try it again – there may be as many more secrets of the universe to discover in that activity as there will be in an attempt to develop a hinterland with those Danish genre-fiction writers. 'You can't step in the same river twice,' said some zany Presocratic philosopher a very long time ago. I suspect this is true of reading books too. Time for a hard-pivot to the doldrums of low culture (where I am, to be frank, more comfortable dwelling), because this is not a feature limited to the written word. I suppose it was on my fourth rewatch of Gossip Girl that I truly came to understand myself; the monorail episode of The Simpsons on the fifth go taught me something ineffable about humanity's unquenchable optimism; and that same tomato pasta I have been making for 15 years now is not boring, thank you very much, it's a paean to nostalgia and memory, or something like that. In search of a truly balanced life, I should teach myself how to do both. But for now, which is more important? Possessing the bravery to face the new, so we don't confine ourselves unnecessarily? It is perhaps too obvious to point out the virtue in that. But what of being too insecure to sit with the familiar? Could that be just as limiting? What's left of that instinct is a Sisyphean project of casting around the artistic realm trying to keep up with every trend and development, never satisfied because the work will never be done. And all the while there are expansive universes still undiscovered in whatever your favourite novel was when you were 26. I am not sure of the answer. Let me consult Gossip Girl, or Cormac McCarthy, just one more time.
Washington Post
4 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Miss Manners: Constructive criticism not wanted here
Dear Miss Manners: My stepson is a successful novelist. I'm reading an advanced copy of his new book, which is brilliant, but contains a neurodivergent character that doesn't ring quite true to me. (I'm neurodivergent, if that matters.) In a recent conversation, I complimented him on his truly wonderful book, but when I tried to talk about this character in what I hoped was a light way, he said, coldly and dismissively, 'I don't care what you think.'
The Guardian
16 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Empire of Forgetting by John Burnside review – last words from an essential poet of our age
John Burnside died in May 2024, aged 69. In life, he was almost preternaturally prolific. He started late – his debut, The Hoop, didn't appear until he was in his early 30s – but with that first poetry collection a dam was breached; over the next three and a half decades, he published at the rate of nearly a book a year. His output was eclectic: 17 collections were interspersed with novels (notable among them the ravishing A Summer of Drowning, set in far-north Norway under a luminescent midnight sun) and a trio of bleached and harrowing memoirs that laid bare the catastrophe and disintegration of his early life. But he was a poet first and foremost, a poet in his heart. To read his poetry is to feel, just for a moment, as if the world's edges have been pushed back; as if, by standing beside him, you too can see further and more clearly. The shock of his final collection isn't that it exists; it's no surprise at all to hear him from beyond the grave. Rather, it's the realisation that, after the astonishing generosity of these last decades, what we have in our hands really are his final words. It's our great good fortune, then, that Burnside's closing work is also one of his finest. The poems are few in number – just 19 – but there's no impression, often present in posthumous collections, of a structure hastily assembled out of ill-fitting parts. In fact, The Empire of Forgetting is marked both by its coherence – thematic, imagistic and linguistic – and a sense of its fitness. These are poems that deal directly and almost exclusively with mortality. This isn't, of course, new territory for Burnside: his poetry has always been death-haunted, peopled with ghosts. But here the focus has shifted, from the general (loss, religion, afterlife, decay) to the specific. The whole collection is an anticipation of, a grappling with, his own death: 'the darkness-to-come'. In a handful of the poems, he appears to meet the matter head-on. Last Days, with its mentions of 'hospice' and funereal 'white chrysanthemums', offers a vision of 'starlight at the far end of the ward / where time has stopped, the way it sometimes stops / in theatres, when the actors leave the stage'. A little further on, in As If from the End Times, he picks up the word 'last' (which sounds like a bell throughout the collection) and weaves it through the poem, most plangently in the elegiac central stanza, which describes 'Last day of birdsong; salt rain in the trees; / the echo of someone going about / their business, making good or making hay / – you never know for sure, although you know / that something here is coming to an end'. But for the most part, his impending mortality is considered more obliquely, through the twin lenses, familiar to Burnside-watchers, of nature (damaged, depleted, but still sublime) and memory. It is memory – and its shadow, forgetting – to which Burnside keeps circling back in this collection, the space that it takes up here offering a clear and poignant mirror of the space it takes up in our lives as we move past middle age. His mother and father, both frequent presences in his work, take the stage again: the former a locus of endless longing; the latter a baleful 'trail / of Players No 6 and coal-tar soap'. Burnside's writing, particularly in his memoirs, is dominated by his father's bitter legacy, but as he himself draws nearer to the end, it is his mother to whom he turns. In the heart-catching title poem, he leans into poetry's ability to efface time, locating the pair of them in a soft-lit, sweet-scented version of his childhood. 'What if my mother walked home in the grey of morning, one last day', he writes, going on to imagine a reunion that is almost epiphanic, a 'momentary // halcyon of everyone / together, voices, singsong in the dark'. To Burnside the afterlife isn't a voyaging out, but a voyaging in: a route back into the lost past. And this past, when he conjures it, is marked by its externality: it's not the houses and furniture of memory that he craves, but the seasons, the 'evening dusk', the 'quince, or damson, strafed into the grass', 'the field where, once, / we played Dead Man's Fall'. The purity and clarity of nature in the past is counterpointed by the present: 'a ruined / thicket, sump oil / rotting in the grass, a spill / of Roundup in a rut of mud and dock'. This is the Burnside we know: attentive to the degradation of nature; staring it in the face and obliging us to stare at it, too. But in his final collection, more often than not, it's the beauty that possesses him. These are poems filled with songbirds, orchards, 'birch woods', litanies of flowers ('foxgloves, purple / loosestrife, sprawls / of clematis'). The weather is beneficent: sunlight filters, snow drifts and blankets, frost 'performs its secret ministry', there's the sound of 'small rain in the leaves'. The world we see here, through the eyes of a poet at the end of his life, is almost unbearably beautiful – which makes the leave-taking unbearable too. At the heart of the collection is The Memory Wheel, in which Burnside imagines his way into death, and in doing so comes close to writing an epitaph for himself. The poem concludes on the image of a memory: of 'those mornings / when we shivered from our beds / and lit a fire / to magnify the dark'. If Burnside's poetry – all his writing, but his poetry most powerfully of all – can be summed up, it might be like this: a bright light, an illumination that, in its beauty, reveals the depth of the darkness that surrounds us. It's impossible not to love the world more when reading Burnside, and impossible not to be more scared and saddened while doing so. He was the ideal laureate of our age, painfully alive to the glory of what we're losing. Now we've lost him, our Anthropocene spirit guide. A light has gone out. The Empire of Forgetting by John Burnside is published by Jonathan Cape (£13). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Irish Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Translated fiction: convincing first-person narration, personal stories through political turmoil, and sharp but subtle humour
In When The Cranes Fly South (Doubleday, 308pp, £14.99), translated from the Swedish by Alice Menzies, the author Lisa Ridzén, a woman in her 30s, inhabits the mind of an 89-year-old man, through a convincingly rendered first-person narration. Thus she demonstrates how wrong it is to advise writers to only draw on their own experience and identity. Details of the daily humiliations wrought by age mix with recollections of his work at sawmills with a cruel father, or his friend Ture, who is also enduring the torments of old age. Such moments of memory are often visited through dreams, which linger briefly in the disconcerting juncture of waking. Bo's wife is in a nursing home and can no longer recognise him or their son, Hans, who provides the main tension of the novel, attempting to assuage his self-doubt by issuing ultimatums about his father's supposed inability to manage his dog, Sixten. Through lucid, observant writing, Ridzén conveys the lack of autonomy allowed to elderly people in a heartfelt novel that gives voice to a sensitively realised old man. In Omerta: A Book of Silences by Andrea Tompa (Seagull Books, 718pp, £22.99), translated from the Hungarian by Bernard Adams, the author creates four separate first-person narrators, to outstanding effect. Kali's tale is told in an accented translation, which is sometimes confusing ('they'd just got two or three 'old an' wouldn't let go of it'), but her voice soon becomes persuasive, especially when indulging her propensity for telling folk tales. READ MORE After a brutal marriage - violence and suicide appear as natural as the wind - she eventually finds work with Vilmo, a rose breeder who is preoccupied with creating blossoms that will rival those produced by the famous Meilland family in France. [ Fiction in translation: The strange workings of myth and history, a work of limpid beauty set in the Bosnian countryside, and more Opens in new window ] Vilmo's narrative voice is very different. Analytical and unemotional, his perspective on fathering a child with Kali solidifies an imbalance of power that also pertains in his relationship with a teenage girl called Annush. However, when we hear her affecting voice, critical judgment is challenged by the temporary escape this illicit affair allows her from a merciless, alcoholic father and the ceaseless work he demands of her. These personal stories are repeatedly impacted by the political turmoil of communist Romania and the 1956 uprising in Hungary. This is especially the case for the fourth narrator, Eleanóra, Annush's sister, who has recently been released from prison for being part of an unofficial convent of nuns. Her contemplative reflections regarding the position she can usefully occupy in a political milieu she barely understands are bolstered by her unwavering beliefs. Through vividly imagined prose, each character's voice emerges distinctly and engagingly, allowing all four to express their perspectives on the uniqueness of their lives within the collectivised society they inhabit. Set in a milieu in which seeking the approval of others is paramount, Cooking In The Wrong Century (Pushkin Press, 172pp, £16.99) by Teresa Präauer, translated from the German by Eleanor Updengraff, deploys sharp but subtle humour to undermine their anxious solipsism. A sense of playfulness is central to a novel in which a couple host three people - all unnamed - for drinks and a meal. The central premise is replayed in several permutations, interspersed with chapters in which the reader is addressed with a familiarity that suggests their complicity in a gathering where every ingredient, gadget and piece of music is a signifier of taste, status and level of sophistication, or lack thereof: 'What Is Culture? ... The book that bore this title had endured four house moves in 20 years and had still never been read. What is culture? Perhaps a short version of the answer could be found in the blurb." Every action is a performance, functioning as potential content for social media posts. The irony is pointed but never overstated, in a witty translation that, despite the satirical intent, also acknowledges the sensuality of food and the ingenuity of jazz. A flood that prevents the guests from leaving hints at the influence of Luis Buñuel's Exterminating Angel, and this brilliantly clever novel shares that film's sense of absurdity. Nothing described in the novel can, with complete certainty, be said to have happened. There is uncertainty too in The Arsonist (Twisted Spoon, 180pp, £11.50) by Egon Hostovský, translated from the Czech by Christopher Morris, regarding the identity of the person setting fire to buildings in a small Bohemian village called Zbečnov. Central to the novel is the family who live above the Silver Pigeon pub, run by the mercurial Josef Simon. 'Here is home, beyond them, the world.' His teenage children, Kamil and Eliška, are suffused with burgeoning desire in search of an object. Eliška spent three years in a convent because of their mother: 'She's always been bad.' But she too is adrift and unhappy. Outside the confines of their home, the suspicion and distrust of outsiders - already a feature of the village - is heightened when buildings begin to go up in flames. But, as always, the truth is more complex and less convenient than the locals would wish. This sense of an outsider threatening a small community, initiated by their collective paranoia, is like a precursor to the novels of László Krasznahorkai. First published in 1935, the novel is beautifully written, with a narrative style that whispers confidences to the reader. The lyricism of Hostovský's superbly translated descriptions is a pleasure to read, capturing both the delight and ennui in village life: 'The rooftops gleam in the sun, two small clouds sail over the church, the sparrows make a commotion on the fence, somnolent warmth, Sunday outfits and tedium.' A Fortunate Man (NYRB, 870pp, $29.95) by Henrik Pontoppidan, translated from the Danish by Paul Larkin, has previously been translated into English as Lucky Per from a novel that was first published in 1905, having appeared in serial form earlier. Using free indirect narration, the novel is ostensibly a birth-to-death narrative about Per Sidenius, born into a family deeply rooted in religious service and sombre conformity. But Per's questioning nature is ill-suited to accepting received doctrines, and his break with his family personifies a journey both outward and inwards, embodying the faltering modernisation of a country and the search for a true self. His personal story, encompassing his far-seeing ambition as an engineer - already envisioning the energy potential of wind and wave power - and indecisiveness in relationships, is at every moment fascinating and unpredictable. But of even greater interest are his discussions about religion, especially those with the ostracised Pastor Fjaltring, and his desperate search for an authentic way of being in the world. Despite its length, the novel never loses focus and includes much elegant, expressive writing, meticulously translated by Donegal-based Larkin, who includes a few phrases that will be familiar to Irish readers: 'the lark in the clear air' appears twice! While the novel inevitably includes the prejudices and assumptions of its time, it also echoes the ever-changing, irresolute, self-questioning and contradictory reflections of Per in a search for the self that leads into the lonely morass that constitutes that self. He is the conscience of a novel that deserves to be considered among the greatest works of world literature.
