2018, as picked by writers / Part three

 

Jon McGregor

2018, as picked by writers – part three

Surrealist artists, dogged detectives, modern lovers and spies behaving badly ... leading authors pick their best books to enjoy these holidays

Saturday 7 July 2018

Jon McGregor

People always say not to judge a book by its cover, but people are wrong. Ashleigh Young’s collection of smart, funny, insightful and unexpected essays, Can You Tolerate This? (Bloomsbury), has a bright yellow cover, making it perfect summer reading. I love it. I’ve been telling people about Lucy Wood’s short stories ever since her debut collection came out a few years ago; she’s back with another collection, The Sing of the Shore (4th Estate), and she’s better than ever. Finally, Melissa Harrison’s forthcoming All Among the Barley (Bloomsbury) is an astonishingly good evocation of rural England in the 1930s, complete with creeping fascism and the subjugation of women. It’s subtle and mesmerising and brilliantly detailed, and I’m going to lie down in a meadow and read it all over again.

Pankaj Mishra

Fiction in English from Pakistan has redeemed its promise with dazzling consistency. Mohammed Hanif’s Red Birds (Bloomsbury) is a fresh marvel, describing with cool wit and steely yet tender intelligence the interlinked fates of antagonists in a forgotten war-scape – and the complicity of our own sheltered lives in remote conflicts. Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (Princeton) is a poetic and remarkably fertile exploration of the relationship between human beings and the natural environment, and what can still be done to stem its rapid deterioration.

The term neoliberalism provokes much choleric denial. But Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard) decisively establishes it as a coherent project, tracing it back to the political and intellectual synergies of the 1920s. Michelle Dean’s Sharp (Fleet), a portrait of 10 female writers and thinkers, is a bracing tribute to the life of the iconoclastic mind: a reminder, in our age of flashy hot takes, of the matchless power of sustained and elegant argument.

Blake Morrison

Kept from the world by a crazed fundamentalist father, cowed herbalist mother and violent misogynist brother, it’s a miracle Tara Westover escaped her childhood in rural Idaho. Her memoir Educated (Hutchinson) brilliantly recounts her journey towards knowledge and enlightenment; bravely, too – her family are still alive. With Rachel Cusk as with Karl Ove Knausgaard, you wonder what makes you keep turning the pages. But while he’s confessional, her narrator Faye lets other characters do the talking, giving little of herself away; Kudos completes a remarkable trilogy. The crepuscular, dreamlike, post-1945 London that Michael Ondaatje invents in his novel Warlight (Cape) continues to haunt you long after the plot itself.

Andrew Motion

Three Poems by Hannah Sullivan is the best first collection I’ve read for a long time: moving, technically adroit, clever in all the right ways, and full of brilliant small-scale effects as well as large achievements. Angela Leighton’s Hearing Things (Harvard) is as good as her previous book on poetic form – which is to say it’s terrific – and illuminates a great deal about the sound effects of poetry that cannot be disentangled from its page-sense. Rachel Cusk’s Kudos brings her enthralling trilogy to a well-judged conclusion, at once rounded and open.

Sarah Perry

Now that Terry Pratchett is gone, Stephen King is one of the only authors I buy in hardback on publication day. His latest, The Outsider (Hodder), is both a detective and a horror novel, and it gripped me to the point of checking under the bed before I went to sleep. It reminded me of what it was like to lie reading by torchlight late at night, when camping in the summer.

I’ve never been much of a reader of contemporary poetry, but I have been seduced by some of the brilliant young poets writing now, of whom Amy Key is perhaps my favourite. Her new collection, Isn’t Forever (Bloodaxe), is playful, surreal and enchanting but also rooted in brutal emotional honesty. She is writer of a rare and strange magic.

I am lucky enough to have an advance proof of Mrs Gaskell and Me, the new book from the brilliantly gifted Nell Stevens: she describes it as a love letter to “her own very special, dear friend”, Mrs Gaskell, and I have it patiently waiting on my desk.

Michael Pollan

On my bedside at the moment: Go, Went, Gone (Granta, translated by Susan Bernofsky), a novel about the refugee crisis in Germany by Jenny Erpenbeck that is not only timely but masterful; Matt Walker’s illuminating review of the science of sleep and how we’re all doing it wrong: Why We Sleep (Allen Lane); The Overstory (Heinemann), Richard Powers’ weird and wonderful novel about the intricate relationships among trees and humans; and Carlo Rovelli’s mindbending The Order of Time.

Ian Rankin

Liz Nugent’s Skin Deep (Penguin) is the perfect holiday read for those who like their escapism on the darker side. If Patricia Highsmith were Irish she might well have come up with this tale of a scarred woman who taints all she touches while remaining as charismatic as she is enigmatic.

In The Smiling Man (Doubleday) Joseph Knox pulls off the “difficult second novel” with ease and considerable style. Labyrinthine Mancunian noir with the obligatory battered but dogged detective.

Ambrose Parry, The Way of All Flesh isn’t published until late-August, but it’s a rip-roaring tale of murder amid the medical experiments of 19th-century Edinburgh. The book brings both city and period to colourful life and is a joy to read. It’s a collaboration between seasoned novelist Chris Brookmyre and his wife, consultant anaesthetist Marisa Haetzman.

Irish lawyer Steve Cavanagh writes excellent courtroom thrillers set in the US. His latest, Thirteen (Orion), sees him at the top of his game. It features a serial killer who’s sitting on a jury. Terrific premise, and the resulting story doesn’t disappoint.

Sally Rooney

I recently read Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar (Faber, translated by Srinath Perur), a perfectly formed short novel about a family in India undergoing a rapid change in fortune. Published in translation last year, it’s an admirably slim book – you could read it in one sitting – and for me it conjured up a whole world.

I’d also recommend Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman (Portobello, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori), an exhilaratingly weird and funny Japanese novel about a long-term convenience store employee. Unsettling and totally unpredictable – my copy is now heavily underlined.

Finally, I don’t think I’ll ever forget the day I spent reading Olivia Laing’s Crudo (Picador). I couldn’t put it down, and then it overwhelmed me so much I had to put it down, and then I had to pick it back up again. A beautiful, strange, intelligent novel.

Katherine Rundell

My favourite book for adults this year, by some margin, has been Fifteen Dogs (Serpent’s Tail) by André Alexis. It opens with two gods having a quiet drink at The Wheat Sheaf in Toronto and debating whether, if animals had human intelligence, they would be only as unhappy, or more unhappy, than humans. It’s unhinged, wise, sharp, witty and daring. I’ve also fallen in love with Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy; her work is staggering.

In the world of children’s books, I can’t wait to read Hilary McKay’s The Skylarks’ War (Macmillan), set in the approaching shadow of the first world war. McKay couples warmth and grace with wry humour like nobody else out there.

Salman Rushdie

My recent (re-)reading includes Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Speak, Memory, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, all books that don’t need me to recommend them. I have, however, immensely enjoyed David Grossman’s A Horse Walks into a Bar (Cape) for its pitch-perfect black comedy and Jeet Thayil’s The Book of Chocolate Saints (Faber), easily the most original and formally inventive novel to come out of India in years.

THE GUARDIAN

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje review – a novel shrouded in secrecy

A boy alone in postwar London is drawn into shadowy worlds in this suspenseful yet frustrating story from the English Patient author

Andrew Motion
Sat 16 jun 2018

Michael Ondaatje likes writing about uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, not quite with the Keatsian ambition of resisting “any irritable reaching after fact and reason”, but because he relishes the idea of thoughts being fluid and characters essentially unknowable. Hence the tactics of his best-known novel The English Patient, joint winner of the 1992 Booker prize, in which a potentially very dramatic set of circumstances is generally delivered to the reader by means of hint and indirection: scenes are habitually softened by half-lights, and all action and most reflection are slowed by rich (some would say overwritten) prose. Hence, too, the procedures of his other novels, in which similarly striking narrative potential is mostly kept in check, or actually stifled. I’m thinking of the lurking crime drama and love drama that remain in the background of his shipboard story The Cat’s Table, for instance; or the absences, stoppages and indirections that prevent Anil’s Ghost – set in war-torn Sri Lanka – from becoming a straightforward war story.

Perhaps all this has something to do with Ondaatje’s less well-known life as a poet (he has published nearly twice as many collections of poetry as he has novels). Paradoxical as it might sound, in this alternative existence he often renders hard facts and moments of explosive action more directly than he does in his fiction: think of his early verse novel The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. But why? Maybe because in fiction Ondaatje feels compelled by the form itself to deal with significant events (bomb disposal, prisoners in cages, civil-war murders) but is faintly embarrassed by the risk of overextrapolating them – and so making them seem banal – in the comparatively roomy spaces of prose. This means that he ends up blurring or disguising everything. Whatever the reason, there exists at the centre of his imagination, and therefore of his work as a whole, a tussle between the urge to reveal and the instinct to suppress and/or conceal. Characteristically, it manifests and seeks to resolve itself in a profound attraction to secrets.

In Ondaatje’s new novel, his eighth, his appetite for imprecision is stronger than ever (the title itself shrouds the action in a kind of twilight: the dimmed warlight in the wake of the blitz). It opens in 1945 with the departure of 14-year-old Nathaniel Williams’s father to Singapore, ostensibly to work for Unilever, and with the disappearance of his mother, Rose, soon afterwards – probably but not certainly to join her husband overseas. This double abandonment leaves Nathaniel and his elder sister Rachel in the care of a mystery man they call The Moth, who is apparently acting on their parents’ orders, and soon allows them to swap their boarding schools for day schools and so share in the life that he has instigated in their London home. In a swirl of glimpses, one figure at least becomes clear to Nathaniel, even as his nature remains obscure: a character whose given name eventually turns out to be Norman Marshall, but who is known to our narrator as “the Pimlico Darter” – “the best welterweight north of the river”.

 Nathaniel, who even at this tender age is convinced that life is best understood as a scattering of fragments, soon finds himself drawn into even more shadowy worlds. Working during his out-of-school hours in the laundry room of the Criterion hotel, he consorts with Mr Nkoma, whose elaborate storytelling confirms the unreliability of things. When his sister Rachel joins the theatre, she vanishes into a realm of make-believe; when Nathaniel works with the Pimlico Darter on the river he enters a world of mists and mellow obscurity; when he finds a girlfriend she is as shadowy in name and nature as the empty house in which they habitually meet; and when his mother eventually returns to London, there’s no clear sense of what’s she’s been up to – except that it has something to do with the war, and has landed her in such danger that she has to pack Nathaniel off to school first in America, then in the north of England, before they cautiously settle under one roof in a remote part of Suffolk.

So deep is the shading of motive and 

consequence, that it’s hard not to feel a degree of impatience

Ondaatje is a skilfully deliberate writer, and these secrets inevitably generate a certain degree of suspense. Over the years his style has purified a good deal, so elements that overdecorate the prose of The English Patient are largely absent here. But so regular is the pattern of uncertainty in this opening section of the novel, and so deep is the shading of motive and consequence, that it’s hard not to feel a degree of impatience. This feeling is compounded in the second section, in which we are transported to Suffolk in 1959 to watch the now 28-year-old Nathaniel buying a cottage from the elderly Linette Malakite – who, it turns out, was formerly married to Sam Malakite, another uncertain sort of fellow, who was deputed by Nathaniel’s mother to look after him during their previous rural sojourn.

Because Linette is no longer of sound mind and Sam is dead, Nathaniel makes very little progress in discovering the story of his mother’s life, or her reasons for treating him as she did. Neither do his own memories help much. As he reminisces about affable chess games and such like, he recalls feeling that his mother was in danger – but what sort, and why, remains beyond his ken. Actual research into her past is slightly more rewarding. When Ondaatje – with an audible clashing of plot gears – sends Nathaniel to work for the Foreign Office, we are allowed to learn what his mother was up to during the war, and that she may have been implicated in some nasty business that meant her life was still at risk in peacetime.

Except we don’t really feel the threat on our pulses, since by this stage of the novel we’re either too used to living among shadows, or at risk of finding these continuing evasions rather absurd, because so predictable. Also predictable, but nevertheless a relief, is the degree of clarification that comes in the final section of the novel, where a funeral visitor – a “ghost-like” and “secretive” character named Marsh Felon (Ondaatje has always had a penchant for weird and wonderful names) – is able to shed some light. Yet, of course, even now “there is confusion and even uncertainty about what may have happened, what may have been said”.

This knowledge brings Nathaniel, and is meant to bring readers, a sense of resolution or feeling of closure, which is bolstered by a catch-up meeting with The Darter in the novel’s closing pages. And in certain obvious respects it does round things out. But the problem remains. Rather than closing the book convinced that psychological insights have been generated by Jamesian withholdings, we might equally well feel that characters have been flattened by our simply not knowing enough about them, and that our interest in their doings is diminished by the same means.

• Andrew Motion’s Essex Clay is published by Faber. Warlight is published by Cape.

THE GUARDIAN

Kazuo Ishiguro
Poster by T.A.

Neil Gaiman, Joyce Carol Oates and more on Kazuo Ishiguro's Nobel win

As Ishiguro is named the 2017 recipient of Nobel prize in literature, his fellow authors reflect on a writer who ‘moves the furniture around inside your head’

Sebastian Barry, Joyce Carol Oates, Neil Gaiman, Andrew Motion, Salman Rushdie and Madeleine Thien

Friday 6 October 2017 09.41 BST

Sebastian Barry

Kazuo Ishiguro has won the Nobel prize. His fellow writers, his readers, his friends, his colleagues and translators all over the world, will have sat up straighter suddenly with an exclamation of simple joy at the news. With the death of Seamus Heaney you had the gnawing sense that the heart had gone out of the writing world. Seamus was a radiant and extraordinary soul, and you can apply exactly the same words to the great Ishiguro.

How clever and astute are the Nobel prize committee. Having given the prize last year to Bob Dylan, they have given this year’s prize to Dylan’s biggest fan. Joseph Conrad busied himself with writing seven or eight masterpieces in a row; Ishiguro has done exactly the same. Are we allowed to say that he, like Seamus, is one of the most truly gentlemanly writers in the history of the literary world, the most agreeable, the most storied, the most kind? Perhaps none of that should matter – but it does, somehow. Between genius and gentleness he has taken his measure of the world, and is himself a measure of the best that humankind can be. How delightful that the Nobel has alighted in his garden.

Joyce Carol Oates

In his sparely written, melancholy works of fiction that suggest a monochromatic De Chirico, Ishiguro explores questions of identity that seem particularly relevant to our fractured time. Where does the self reside? Is there a “self”? His most famous novel is The Remains of the Day, deservedly honoured by being adapted into a ravishingly beautiful Merchant Ivory film. But my favourite of his fiction is the dystopian parable Never Let Me Go – a convincing and timely horror story narrated in the most unassuming prose.

Neil Gaiman

I just feel unalloyed delight about the news. Kazuo Ishiguro is a good, serious, brilliant and hardworking writer who has never been afraid to tackle big themes, nor to use science fiction (Never Let Me Go) or fantasy (The Buried Giant) as the vehicles he needed to drive his ideas.

It’s a refreshing and intelligent choice by the Nobel committee. The only cloud I can imagine would be if this takes Ish too long away from his writing desk.

Play Video

1:00

 'I thought it was a hoax': Kazuo Ishiguro on winning the Nobel prize in literature – video

Andrew Motion

Ishiguro’s imaginative world has the great virtue and value of being simultaneously highly individual and deeply familiar – a world of puzzlement, isolation, watchfulness, threat and wonder.

How does he do it? Among other means, by resting his stories on founding principles which combine a very fastidious kind of reserve with equally vivid indications of emotional intensity. It’s a remarkable and fascinating combination, and wonderful to see it recognised by the Nobel prize-givers.

Salman Rushdie

Many congratulations to my old friend Ish, whose work I’ve loved and admired ever since I first read A Pale View of Hills. And he plays the guitar and writes songs, too! Roll over Bob Dylan.

Madeleine Thien

Kazuo Ishiguro gets into your thoughts and moves the furniture around inside your head. He takes things – words like completion, detective, donation – and rotates them into something else, rotating you with them. People pass in and out of his novels, unconsoled by the paths their lives have taken. There are doubles: Ryder and Brodsky, Christopher and Akira, Kathy and her original. Or are the doubles a kind of mistaken identity? We hardly know ourselves. Time and selfhood get mixed in with the half-truths and partial vision, and it’s alarming how supremely natural it all feels.

I have loved his novels from the beginning. Book after book, Ishiguro goes on destabilising us – and, one imagines, himself – and somehow he does it with rigour and lightness. He writes with an inner freedom that is significant and rare. If the structure of a novel can be seen as a physical space of its own, he has been building wild and endlessly subtle things.

THE GUARDIAN

RETRATOS AJENOS

Kazuo Ishiguro

FICCIONES

Kazuo Ishiguro / No soy un escritor japonés

Kazuo Ishiguro / El mayordomo como metáfora

Kazuo Ishiguro / Pimpón a la japonesa

Kazuo Ishiguro / De niño

Kazuo Ishiguro / Japón

Kazuo Ishiguro / El amor

DE OTROS MUNDOS
Kazuo Ishiguro / La nueva generación literaria es un invento de los editores

Kazuo Ishiguro gana el Booker Prize de las letras inglesas

Kazuo Ishiguro y el mayordomo inglés

Malcohn Bradbury dice que Londres se abre "a todas las aventuras literarias"

Kazuo Ishiguro / Ser traducido al catalán es chic

Kazuo Ishiguro / He escrito sobre lo fácil que resulta desperdiciar la vida

Kazuo Ishiguro / Cuando fuimos huérfanos / Novela de detectives

Kazuo Ishiguro / Cuando fuimos huérfanos / Reseña

Kazuo Ishiguro / Nunca me abandones / La certeza de que somos mortales

Kazuo Ishiguro / Nunca me abandones / La historia más triste

Kazuo Ishiguro / La infancia es una utopía para niños afortunados

Kazuo Ishiguro recibe el premio de novela del Casino de Santiago

Los chicos prodigiosos de la Generación Granta

Kazuo Ishiguro / El gigante enterrado / Reseña

Kazuo Ishiguro / La relación con el cine mantiene a los libros en el centro de la cultura

Kazuo Ishiguro / Premio Nobel de Literatura 2017

Kazuo Ishiguro / Tres obras imprescindibles

Premio Nobel de Literatura / La casa de apuestas falló en sus pronósticos
Kazuo Ishiguro / Vargas Llosa / Una crítica de gran delicadeza
Kazuo Ishiguro / Un nobel muy querido por el cine
Guía sentimental para leer a Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro / Una literatura del desconcierto
Kazuo Ishiguro / Aire fresco en la novela inglesa
Kazuo Ishiguro / Ish para los amigos
Kazuo Ishiguro / Ni autor ni autoridad
Kazuo Ishiguro / De la revista "Granta" al olimpo sueco

DRAGON

Kazuo Ishiguro / The Paris Review

Haruki Murakami / I´m an outcast of the Japanese literary world

Never Let Me Go / Review

Kazuo Ishiguro wins the Nobel prize in literature 2017

Kazuo Ishiguro / Nobel prize winner and a novelist for all times

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro / Clone alone

Top 10 opening scenes in books

Kazuo Ishiguro / How I wrote The Remains of the Day in four weeks
Neil Gaiman, Joyce Carol Oates and more on Kazuo Ishiguro's Nobel win

PESSOA
Kazuo Ishiguro / Prêmio Nobel de Literatura de 2017

Kazuo Ishiguro / Vargas Llosa / Uma crítica de grande delicadeza


RIMBAUD
Biographie / Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro / Citation / Mes livres
La dignité selon M.Stevens / « Les vestiges du jour » de Kazuo Ishiguro

DANTE
Kazuo Ishiguro / «Il Nobel a me? Ho pensato fosse una bufala»