Blog Archives

Is there a new trend for fiction with footnotes?

29/9/2018

I might have mentioned before that I’m something of a traditionalist in my reading. Print suits me better than ebooks and, while I’ve enjoyed novels narrated on the radio, I don’t think I’ve ever chosen an audiobook in preference to text. Regarding the content, while I relish originality, novelty for its own sake can be a turnoff. Post-modernism gives me the shivers. So I was surprised to read three novels in as many months with footnotes. Is this a new trend?

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Psychologists Write: Suzanne Conboy-Hill

25/9/2018

It’s almost a year since the Harvey Weinstein business blew, sparking the #metoo movement in which more and more women spoke out about unwanted sexual attention and rape. So timely to welcome Suzanne Conboy-Hill to this series, along with her novella, Fat Mo. Like When I Hit You, it’s a painful read in places, but an important one. While the reader can find relief in the elegance of the language, there’s little consolation for Mo in a community that colludes with the systematic abuse of women, young and old, until she finds the strength within herself to say no. But let Suzanne tell you more about it …

Reading the world

21/9/2018

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A recent comment from Norah Colvin got me wondering (as they often do): how many countries had I visited recently in the pages of a book? Perhaps I’d set myself a reading goal for next year: around the world in eighty books! As a comparison (or perhaps as a way of avoiding knuckling down to some real work), I thought I’d check where I’d travelled so far this year. Omitting mainland UK and the USA, where I find myself all too often, I’m not even halfway to eighty, but it’s nevertheless a spread.

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Boy slaves: Beyond the Rice Fields & Washington Black

18/9/2018

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Two tales of boy slaves in the nineteenth century, both of whom gain their freedom and travel overseas. Born into slavery, Washington Black’s story begins on the familiar territory of a Caribbean sugar plantation, but his adventures take him right around the world. Tsito’s enslavement in his native Madagascar is one many English readers will be unaware of; although beginning less brutally, he’s witness to a terrifying purging of Christians and suspected traitors by a vengeful queen. (Follow this link for reviews of two other less well-known slavery stories.)

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Italy translated, urban and rural: The Eight Mountains & The Night of Rome

17/9/2018

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These two novels translated from Italian couldn’t be more different: a pastoral coming-of-age story in the Italian Alps follows a twisty-turny political thriller in modern-day Rome. Yet together they build a picture of contemporary Italy amid the ruins of the past.

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Dads distancing their daughters from modernity: The Water Cure & Ghost Wall

11/9/2018

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Earlier this year, I reviewed two novels in which disgraced daughters were banished from home. Although not cut off from family, the daughters in these two new novels have an even harder time in their enforced separation from wider society, with a violent father – or his proxy – governing their every move. While in Ghost Wall, Silvie’s participation in the Iron Age re-enactment is temporary, the three sisters in The Water Cure, are persuaded that without their seclusion they would die.

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Taking our characters to work

10/9/2018

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If there is one area where struggling-to-be-noticed writers have the advantage over those who’ve been published since they were barely out of school, it’s our inside knowledge of the world of work. Coming to writing later in life, or merely being part of the majority unable to support themselves through writing, we have the experience to bring our characters’ jobs alive. But there can still be challenges in taking our characters to work.

For example, while setting your novel in your current workplace obviates the need for a research trip, you might have to smooth some colleagues’ ruffled feathers once the book is out in the world. From another angle, if you’ve gained your work experience in settings crowded with colleagues, you face the challenge of rendering it authentically without overwhelming the reader with an overabundance of characters.

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Two more women in translation: Strike Your Heart & Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead

6/9/2018

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Women in Translation month was barely over when I picked up these two novels that should help me beat the last twelve months’ total of seven in the coming year. The first French, the second Polish, both focus on women living their lives somewhat apart from their peers. Diana because, growing up without maternal affection, she fills her emptiness with work. Olga, on the other hand, is more outwardly eccentric, and her beef is not with a mother, but with men.

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Dreamscapes: States of Passion & Murmur

4/9/2018

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Two novels about same-sex love and sex in communities which frown upon such couplings: the first between women in 1930s Syria and the second between men in 1950s England. Both novels feature dreams, or dreamlike occurrences: in the first, a bureaucrat stumbles upon an isolated house on a rainy night where he’s mesmerised by an old man’s story; in the second, a scientist undergoing “chemical castration” has some vivid dreams.

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Pushing through the publishing bottleneck: is there an ingredient X?

1/9/2018

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Yesterday, on the last day of meteorological summer, I shelved my 100th book for the year. But even a reader as voracious as I am will never find time to read all the books she might enjoy. While the superabundance is great for readers, it’s less so for writers competing for their attention and time. However big and colourful our books, we’ve only one shoal in a pond so extensive we may never see, let alone touch, its banks.

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