We're Reading
February 11th, 2010 by Andrew.
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On occasion, booksellers are pleasantly surprised by the recommendations that we receive from a customer tip-off. At The Edinburgh Bookshop, we devote a lot of time to tweaking the range of books we stock. Did you know, for instance, that there are more books available and in-print in the UK than in the USA? We spend a lot of time talking to publishers, other booksellers, agents and authors, to ensure that the eclectic range we stock is also the best we could possibly stock at that time. In short, it is a labour of love that necessarily includes the feedback we get from every customer who visits us.
A customer recommended Nicolas Dickner’s debut novel on the basis that it was ‘the best book since Richard Flanagan’s novel, Gould’s Book of Fish’. High praise.
Nicolas Dickner has won a raft of awards for the French-language edition (he’s from Quebec) of his book but remains unknown to the majority of English readers. The publisher’s own description of this fantastic novel states that: “Intricately plotted and shimmering with originality, Nikolski charts the curious and unexpected courses of personal migration, and shows how they just might eventually lead us to home…” but that doesn’t do justice to a book which offers a breathtaking and original perception of the world, written in a language and style that is both emotionally affecting and sophisticated. A treasure hunt of great inventiveness and passion, this humorous and poignant novel offers an exploration of the idea of connection.
Nikolski is a novel with a distinctive voice. In the author’s unwillingness to tidy up all loose ends, we are left with lasting imagery that creates a story comparable to the best novels of Michael Chabon, Thomas Pynchon, Georges Perec or David Mitchell.
Born thousands of miles apart, three people grow up feeling curiously at sea. In the spring of 1989 each cut themselves adrift from their birthplaces and set out to discover what — or who — might anchor them in their lives. They leave almost everything behind, carrying with them only a few artefacts of their lives so far — possessions that have proven so formative that they can’t imagine surviving without them — and the accumulated memories of their own lives and family histories.
Noah, who was taught to read using road maps during a life of nomadic travels with his mother — their home being a 1966 Bonneville station wagon with a silver trailer — decides to leave the prairies for university in Montreal. But putting down roots there turns out to be a more transitory experience than he expected. Joyce, stifled by life in a remote village on Quebec’s Lower North Shore, and her overbearing relatives, hitches a ride into Montreal, spurred on by a news story about a modern-day cyber-pirate and the spirit of her own buccaneer ancestors. While her daily existence remains surprisingly routine —working at a fish shop in Jean-Talon market, dumpster-diving at night for necessities — it’s her Internet piracy career that takes off. And then there’s the unnamed narrator, who we first meet clearing out his deceased mother’s house on Montreal’s South Shore, and who decides to move into the city to start a new life. There he finds his true home among books, content to spend his days working in a used bookstore and journeying though the many worlds books open up for him.
Over the course of the next ten years, Noah, Joyce and the unnamed bookseller will sometimes cross paths, and sometimes narrowly miss each other, as they all pass through one vibrant neighbourhood on Montreal’s Plateau. Their journeys seem remarkably unformed, more often guided by the prevailing winds than personal will, yet their stories weave in and out of other wondrous tales — stories about such things as fearsome female pirates, urban archaeologists, unexpected floods, fish of all kinds, a mysterious book without a cover and a dysfunctional compass whose needle obstinately points to the remote Aleutian village of Nikolski. And it is in the magical accumulation of those details around the edges of their lives that we begin to know these individuals as part of a greater whole, and ultimately realize that anchors aren’t at all permanent, really; rather, they’re made to be hoisted up and held in reserve until their strength is needed again.
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You can watch an interview with Nicolas talking about Nikolski here on YouTube.
From deep down in the interweb, I found a review from The Guardian online by author Patrick Ness for those who are interested in reading more.
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Different passages will stand out for each reader but a personal favourite includes this description of the peculiar world of the bookshop: “The work is not as simple as it may appear; the S. W. Gam Bookshop is one of those places in the universe where humans long ago relinquished any control over matter… it takes more than good pair of eyes and a few ounces of memory to work here. It’s crucial to develop a particular perception of time. The thing is – what’s the best way of putting this? – that different avatars of our bookshop coexist simultaneously in a multitude of discrete times, separated by very thin ellipses.”
January 19th, 2010 by Andrew.
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By accident (by way of periwigs on the way to the restaurant), The Thought Gang, became one of the book group’s selected novels for reading.
This novel is a good example of how the culture of literary criticism simply does not work .ie. Writer A publishes a book, Writer B – his friend – gives it a glowing review before publishing his own book which Writer A then reviews positively and so on.
As you wil know, the best recommendations are always free.
I was recommended Tibor Fischer’s ‘The Thought Gang’ by the representative of a publisher who was still miffed that a rival company had bought the rights to publish this book. He rated this as the funniest book he’d ever read and ‘definitely better than anything I’m trying to sell you.’ When the equivalent of a car salesman says ‘don’t buy from me, try him’, you know something special is going on.
The trouble with books that are hyped so extravagantly is that they tend to disappoint. In five subsequent re-readings since 1998, Eddie Coffin and Hubert have never failed to get a chuckle. But the point is… this novel isn’t written as a comedy. Hubert is dying, Eddie knows he’s drunk himself out of a liver. Both men are failures and this story is about how we have to try to learn to live with the disappointment of finding that we are not who we first promised to be. No, that’s getting to what the book is about either…
If I described this book as Keystone Kops meets A Year in Provence but with better writing, you might have an idea of where this book is coming from. At the time of publication, Nick Hornby wrote: “The Thought Gang is The Lavender Hill Mob rescripted by Georges Perec and Will Self, and yet Fischer somehow emerges from it all with credit.” Hornby, it should be said, wears his jealousy poorly.
This novel is essentially the interior monologue of a fifty-something, overweight, bald philosophy lecturer who is too clever for his own good and too lazy to care. He absconds from England with his departments funds and promptly loses them when the hire care he is driving comes off the road. In the cheap hotel he retreats to, he is mugged by a one-armed, one-legged ex-con just released from prison. The next morning, with no funds for a breakfast but a pistol, Eddie Coffin – our soon-to-be former philosophy lecturer and specialist in the Ionian philosophers (there’s a sly joke in there for those readers who’ve studied philosophy) – goes to a bank and makes a withdrawal. Hubert, the French ex-con, is inspired and together, they create The Thought Gang.
As a novel, The Thought Gang should fail in many, many ways: the improbable characters; the zany set-pieces; the constant word-play and the sometimes too-abrupt injection of historical fact; the frankly massive and too-obvious word-game contrived by the author but rehearsed by the main character, Eddie, to whit the use of every single instance of a word beginning with ‘z’ in the English language. But this is to miss the point: Tibor Fischer has amply demonstrated that he can write a great novel, he achieved this goal first time around with the Betty Trask Prize-winning ‘Under the Frog’ and then again with the frankly outrageous ‘The Collector Collector’ which is no more than a weekend in London as described by a 5,000 year old Sumerian bowl. The Thought Gang consists of the wry, dry observations of an enormous intelligence fronting the frothy humour of an even bigger mind reflecting on the absurdity of life. The big game in this book is an author at the height of his powers saying: ‘Look how easy it is? Typing with no hands, no feet… Now, how about I entertain you some more while you’re here?’
Too many authors throw their intellectually superior posteriors around as though we as readers could be arsed. No. We sometimes want escapism even as we pretend to want literary and pretentious. Neither do we always want thinly-veiled autobiography from authors who may as well be heard begging: ‘Please, sir, please… Give me The Booker Prize. I want it, I want it now!’ Tibor Fischer is obviously a voracious reader (it shows in the prose) because he understands that readers want to be surprised, humoured, treated as equals and then astonished.
As competent as Amis and others may be at writing novels, they are not truly great and perhaps never will be. True genius, especially in the realm of comedy-drama, wears its talent lightly with no more than a shrug of the shoulders and another look at the menu as the zarps hurry to the latest bank job.
November 28th, 2009 by Andrew.
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We have come to call this novel The Ploughing Book… To be honest, there is no ploughing though there is a critical scene that revolves around 3 pages of hay-making. Elsewhere, there are other scenes that we joke revolve around ‘agri-business’. We joke about the novel perhaps because of a sense of lost time, of missed opportunity and a sense of loss that pervades the lives of the characters.
‘Out Stealing Horses’ is not an uplifting read but it is truly awesome. When we look back over which books have proven most popular since we opened in September, the popularity of this book among our regular customers – and those who have visited us for the first time because this novel was so highly recommended – has really surprised us because Per Petterson’s Dublin IMPAC Award-winning book has been around for a while and we’ve done no price-promotion on this book. Simply put, the popularity of this book locally is purely down to word-of-mouth recomendation.
Trond, the main character, is not an easy character for a reader to empathise with. He is old and he is miserable. The question is why.
The narrative alternates between Trond reflecting on how he lives now, hidden away in a remote part of the Norwegian countryside, and one magical summer from his youth, Trond reveals how small, insubstantial family dramas can forge a lasting legacy that haunts us even in our twilight years.
In interview, Per Petterson has revealed that on reading the English translation of his novel, he was astounded to discover an almost entirely new story. He is quoted as preferring the English version of ‘Out Stealing Horses’ to the original and this is testimony to the skill of the translator, Anne Born.
One of the most striking things about some books in translation is the sense of timelessness. I personally prefer his earlier, semi-autobiographical novel ‘In The Wake’ but as a dramatic account of the age-old struggle of fathers and sons to communicate clearly those feelings for each other that cannot always be expressed in words, it is ‘Out Stealing Horses’ which will endure and prove to be the greater, more popular, novel.
A full article containing an interview with the author, can be found on the website of The Washingon Post.
October 15th, 2009 by Andrew.
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A year of reading from home without succumbing to the temptation to buy yet more titles to add to our collections would still leave many of us with a huge surplus of books to enjoy. I was fascinated by the idea of this book when given an advance reading copy. Susan Hill leads us through a grand adventure of books, authors, libraries, reading and writing, revelling in a world whose mysteries have never faded but open up to us each time we linger over a beloved narrative, fondly recall our years of learning or a treasured encounter with a sorely-missed mentor.
Having enjoyed a life rich in the vibrant heritage of literature in Britain, Susan Hill’s epic year embraces such differing experiences as the pop-up books of Robert Sabuda to an accidental encounter with an ageing E.M. Forster. Each step of her journey through the tapestry of a life written with such verve and passion will be the envy of writers just beginning their careers. As an autobiography to savour on the sofa or as a brief affair with one of England’s greatest living authors, this rich pageant is simply irresistable.
September 10th, 2009 by Becky.
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The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffennegger is one those books for me: my copy is dog-earred, bruised and battered, the victim of accidental bath-dunkings and spine-crackings. It looks, in short, like a loved teddy bear with only one eye. Jen, Polly and I have been waiting for Her Fearful Symmetry for a while now; Polly was there when the proof arrived and so had first dibs. When she passed it on to me, she commented that she had liked it, but in completely different way to The Time Traveler’s Wife. Having read Her Fearful Symmetry, I think I agree.
Elspeth Noblin dies, leaving her flat overlooking Highgate Cemetery to her twin American nieces, even though she has only seen them once and has an acrimonious relationship with her own twin sister. Julia and Valentina decide to live there, meeting the other residents of the nearby flats, for example Robert, Elspeth’s long-term boyfriend and Martin, the OCD sufferer from upstairs. Much of the book is also from the point of view of Elspeth herself.
If this sounds like a thoroughly uninteresting beginning, it’s because I can’t tell you anything else, for fear of giving away any of the numerous plot twists. The premise seems almost like a Scotland Street book, but rapidly becomes very, very creepy; in fact it reminded strongly of The Prestige. Highgate Cemetery itself sets the tone for the book: the home of people dead for perhaps hundreds of years, yet somehow made eerily present by visitors, students like Robert and Audrey Niffenegger herself. Elspeth is present and yet not present – powerless and yet also incredibly dominant. Julia and Valentina are technically separate people and yet often one seems submerged by the other; Martin is beseiged by anxieties that are an anathema to his job as a crossword compiler, and yet in the context of the rest of the book he seems amazingly sane.
Audrey Niffenegger has the talent of all good storytellers to make you believe for a short period after you put the book down that clocks really can strike thirteen. I thought Her Fearful Symmetry was skilfully and meticulously written, even the British characters who I was worried would be a sort of hyperreal version of “Britishness” or just Americans who lived in Britain (I was consciously looking out for Americanisms that had slipped through the editing process into the characters’ mouths- the only two I found were ‘xerox’ and a uk.com email address). I can’t say that I enjoyed Her Fearful Symmetry exactly, because at one point I put it in a drawer so that I could sleep properly, but it is a compelling book you can thoroughly live in for the duration of your read.
