Taiye Selasi on why she can never go ‘back’ to Africa
By Fleur Macdonald Photography by Frederic Aranda September 25, 2015
Taiye Selasi is relentlessly charming. Her enthusiasm is also completely disarming. She peppers her emails from Rome to the photographer Frederic Aranda, who shot her in New York, with Italian words and exclamations, signing off ‘Abbracci forti’ (‘Strong hugs’). It would seem over the top if it didn’t also come across as genuinely affectionate. The same warmth and humanity shine in her essays, short stories and novels.
One of the world’s best beautiful and charming cities is also the new home of novelist Taiye Selasi. She talks to Henry C. Krempels about her favourite haunts, why the city insipires her, and new writers not to be missed.
One hundred pages into her career as a novelist, Taiye Sleasi had signed a two-book contract and could count Nobel winner Toni Morrison as a fan. Perhaps it’s understandable then, that the next hundred or so pages that completed her debut took much longer to write, with an agonizing six-month block and two different emigrations in between. Now living in Rome (via Paris) the part Ghanaian, part Nigerian, British-born, American-educated author of the widely admired Ghana Must Go, is writing the second book set in the city she now lives.
Surrealist artists, dogged detectives, modern lovers and spies behaving badly ... leading authors pick their best books to enjoy these holidays
Saturday 7 July 2018
Taiye Selasi
Uprooting her life, London-based Kamin Mohammadi relocated to bucolic Florence. Her glorious memoir Bella Figura is witty, intelligent and heartfelt in equal measure and will delight anyone dreaming of a summer holiday – or a brand new life – in Italy.
Recently optioned to become a film, Katja Meier’s timely memoir Across the Big Blue Sea: Good Intentions and Hard Lessons in an Italian Refugee Home avoids easy sentiment in favour of honesty and humour. The African women we meet at this Tuscan refugee home are fierce, scared, brave, vulnerable — triumphant yes, but human too. A beautifully complex account.
And finally, I cannot heap enough praise upon Freshwater, a daring, sexy debut. Raw and lyrical, Akwaeke Emezi’s semi-autobiographical narrative takes on sexuality, spirituality, family and more — all with a clarity that belies her 30 years.
Will Self
I basked in the interwar twilight of Cressida Connolly’s After the Party(Viking). The novel a beautifully written evocation of the era, and the woolly self-absorption of its party-going protagonist. However, it’s also a pitiless exercise in ideological revelation, as it becomes clear that the party in question doesn’t feature dancing until dawn and a sumptuous breakfast buffet, but men and women wearing black shirts, who greet each other with fascist salutes. In a year that’s seen bigotry of all kinds on the rise, and the storm clouds of nationalist intolerance gathering on the near horizons of Europe, Connolly’s novel achieves the rare feat of at once summoning that foreign country, the past, then returning us, uncomfortably, to a contemporary Britain with a burgeoning fatherland complex.
Elif Shafak Photograph: Adrian Sherratt
Elif Shafak
I have just finished reading The Reactionary Mind (Oxford) by Corey Robin. So many writers and thinkers today, East and West, are questioning the rise of conservatism, populism and tribalism. What makes Robin’s book extraordinary is the long-term pesrpective he introduces in this book. Robin shows that Trump is not a break from the conservative tradition, in fact, he is the fulfilment of a tradition that goes all the way back to Edmund Burke and his reaction to the French Revolution. It is a deeply thought-provoking book with utmost clarity and astonishing depth.
What struck me about Neel Mukherjee’s novel A State of Freedom(Vintage) was the mesmerising complexity and the sharpness mixed with compassion and empathy. All the stories are beautifully written, and while they remain semi-independent, they are also subtly interconnected. Long after I finished it I realized the characters were still with me, vivid, compelling, haunting.
Janesville: An American Story (Simon & Schuster) by Amy Goldstein is incredibly well-researched, empathetic and moving. Political experts and pundits talk about “the American working class” all the time, making massive generalisations without paying much attention to individual stories, but this book is extraordinary in the way it sheds light on an industrial town in America’s heartland by masterfully combining analysis and storytelling.
Kamila Shamsie
I’ve already read Tishani Doshi’s poetry collection Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods (Bloodaxe) but I know I’ll return to it many times. One of the poems talks about poets ‘holding the throat of life/ till all the sunsets and lies are choked out/ till only the bones of truth remain’ - that’s precisely what Doshi does in this intelligent, elegant, unflinching collection. It’s very much a collection for this moment in history, but one that will endure long past it.
The publishing house And Other Stories has committed to making 2018 a Year of Publishing Women – I’m planning to work my way through their entire list for the year over the summer. First up: Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline, translated by Tim Parks. It is set in a boarding school in postwar Switzerland, the opening pages are spare and beautiful, with an intriguing darkness.
Ali Smith
This summer the book I’m telling anyone who asks me about is Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City(Tinder), a novel that’s a piece of communal vitality, choral in its urgency, one that squares up to the history of division, makes contemporary disjuncture come alive on the page, doesn’t flinch, and demands change right now. The book I’ll take with me on holiday is Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight. I love his writing, I wait for his books.
Colm Tóibín
Now that America has come to seem so unsettled and so strange, two books help us to become more alarmed. One is Michèle Mendelssohn’s Making Oscar Wilde(Oxford). It charts the early rise of Wilde, with special attention to how, during the 1880s, his lecture tours in America, a country beguiled by novelty and in need of excitement, made his name. As long as it was new, it seemed, America wanted it. Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room is set in the American prison system, but manages to be a novel with its own worldview and its own textures, as much as a chronicle of a system that holds more prisoners per head of population than any other country in the world. On a more uplifting note, there is a wonderful doorstopper called Gillian Ayres (Art/Books), with a text by Martin Gayford and David Cleaton-Roberts and examples of Ayres’s work that will lift your heart.
Matthew Walker
Do you want to understand yourself? To understand why you say and do what you do? To know why you, and the rest of our human race, are capable of paradoxical extremes, from compassion to cruelty (even within minutes of each other)? With humour, sublime insight and supportive data, Robert Sapolsky serves up all the answers in Behave, his gem of an explanatory masterpiece.
Many of us feel that an occasional lie is fine, perhaps when trying to protect someone’s feelings, or when pressured to maintain political correctness. Lying by Sam Harris is a timely, well-reasoned treatise exposing how wrongheaded such beliefs are. It proves out the lack of utility in lying, in any scenario. Yet, that is not the reason I prescribe this book. Rather, it is the palpable sense of liberation and relief that you will feel when you practice what Harris preaches. Such is the truth about lying.
Sarah Waters
My most beguiling read lately has been Rupert Thomson’s Never Anyone But You (Corsair), a beautifully written fictionalised account of the decades-long lesbian love affair between surrealist artists and anti-Nazi activists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. I’m currently very much enjoying Diana Evans’s novel Ordinary People(Chatto), which takes a forensic look at the pleasures and perils of marriage and parenting and modern London living. And, as a Londoner myself, and one who likes to make as many journeys as possible by foot, the book I plan to turn to next is Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse(Vintage), which promises to be an inspiring a piece of feminist psychogeography based on the experiences of several notable female city-strollers including Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf and Martha Gellhorn.
From moving memoirs to far-reaching fiction, the wonders of science and the lessons of history, novelists, poets and critics pick their best reads of the year
Sat 26 Nov 2017
Paul Murray
First Love; A State of Freedom; Lincoln in the Bardo
Gwendoline Riley’s First Love (Granta) tells the story of a young woman in an abusive relationship. It goes to some dark places, but Riley’s prose is so electric, so alive with humour and insight and passion, that by the end you will want to stand up and cheer. A State of Freedom (Chatto & Windus) by Neel Mukherjee also shows people living at their limit; it’s a brave and frequently devastating novel whose themes of displacement and dehumanisation are all too timely. I read it six months ago but the part about the bear still gives me the shivers. Lincoln in the Bardo (Bloomsbury) was every bit as wonderful as I expected from the great George Saunders.
Emma Healey
Little Labours; You Will Know Me
A friend gave me Little Labours (4th Estate) by Rivka Galchen after my daughter was born in June. It’s a funny, profound memoir that’s sort of about what it’s like to be a new mother, but is really about lots of other things including Japanese literature and the freedom to judge others. It’s also a very short book, written in brief, titled sections, and therefore ideal for sleep-deprived parents. I’m a huge fan of Megan Abbott and loved You Will Know Me (Picador) just as much as her previous explorations into the dark, disturbing, strangely heroic world of teenage girls. She’s the queen of the uncanny analogy (someone carves a ham, “pink as a newborn”) and knows just how to draw the reader into the characters’ dangerous, painful lives and how to make those lives mysterious. Her newest novel is intriguing and entertaining from the first page.
Helen Simpson
Go, Went, Gone; Midwinter Break; Conversations With Friends
Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone (a title catchier in the original, Gehen, Ging, Gegangen) (Granta) is a deeply thoughtful and involving novel about migrancy now. Retired ex-GDR classics professor Richard, himself unhoused by war in infancy, befriends a group of African refugees in Berlin: grippingly interrogatory fiction. Bernard MacLaverty’s Midwinter Break (Jonathan Cape) shows a five-decade marriage unspooling over a long weekend in Amsterdam; 26-year-old Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends (Faber) is a latterday Bonjour Tristesse: brave and touching love stories, both of them.
Curtis Sittenfeld
The History of the Future; The Rules Do Not Apply
There are two 2017 books of nonfiction that have really stayed with me. The History of the Future (Coffee House Press) by Edward McPherson is a collection of impressively researched yet conversational essays about environmental degradation, place and time. The Rules Do Not Apply (Little, Brown) by Ariel Levy is simultaneously the personal story of a dramatic miscarriage, a frank, powerful look at shifting gender roles and how we make a life for ourselves, and an inside glimpse into Levy’s work as a journalist for the New Yorker.
Taiye Selasi
Things That Happened Before the Earthquake; Always Another Country; Freshwater
Chiara Barzini’s Things That Happened Before the Earthquake (Doubleday) strikes that rarest balance: a brilliant literary novel with all the effortless delights of a beach read. It’s a new-girl-in-town Bildungsroman that follows a precocious Italian teenager through 1990s Los Angeles. Sisonke Msimang’s Always Another Country (Jonathan Ball) is my favourite kind of memoir, so lyrical and dreamlike that it reads like a novel. It’s an artful meditation on exile and return, womanhood and motherhood unfolding against the backdrop of post-apartheid South African politics. Freshwater (Grove Atlantic) by Akwaeke Emezi is sheer perfection: sexy, sensual, spiritual, wise. One of the most dazzling debuts I’ve ever read. Ever since falling in love with Milan Kundera in secondary school, I’ve been obsessed with love triangles.
Katie Roiphe
Difficult Women; Transit; Forest Dark
The first book I loved this year was the NYRB reissue of David Plante’s Difficult Women, an incredible first-hand account of his encounters with three prickly and charismatic women: Jean Rhys, Germaine Greer and Sonia Orwell. Another book that stands out is Rachel Cusk’s Transit (Vintage), part of her masterful trilogy about a woman in a moment of radical transition (a genre I generally love, which also includes Nicole Krauss’s excellent Forest Dark (Bloomsbury).
Marina Warner
A Chill in the Air; The Golden Legend; Lygia Pape: A Multitude of Forms
Iris Origo’s A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary 1939-1940 (Pushkin Press) unfolds from week to week the horrible confusion, fear and misery as Mussolini shouted and swaggered; her clear-eyed account reads with truly alarming timeliness. Nadeem Aslam interweaves rich, poetic symbols with stark political realities in The Golden Legend (Faber) and manages to keep up hope in the strength of love and imagination. The art of the Brazilian-born Lygia Pape was a revelation to me: potent, playful and sometimes sublime works (Lygia Pape: A Multitude of Forms, ed. Iria Candela et al, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).
Joe Dunthorne
The Evenings; Conversations With Friends
I loved The Evenings (Pushkin Press) by Gerard Reve, surely the funniest novel ever written about boredom. It’s a classic of Dutch literature – first published in 1947 – but has only just found its way into English. The translation by Sam Garrett is perfect. I also adored Conversations With Friends (Faber) by Sally Rooney; a witty, nuanced and perfectly observed novel of modern love and friendship.
John Gray
Six Minutes in May; My House of Sky
Using new evidence with a novelist’s feeling for personality and atmosphere, Nicholas Shakespeare’s Six Minutes in May: How Churchill Unexpectedly Became Prime Minister (Harvill Secker) tells how a military disaster, parliamentary intrigues, a hidden love affair and a six-minute meeting enabled Winston Churchill to come to power. Reading this unputdownable story, I was reminded how the fate of the world can turn on the fall of a leaf. I’ve been engrossed by My House of Sky: the Life of JA Baker (Little Toller Books) by Hetty Saunders. This definitive biography of the author of The Peregrine, Baker’s lyrical account of his 10-year struggle to see the world through the eyes of the falcon, is a pioneering study of a solitary British visionary who recorded his attempt to break open the doors of perception in prose of astonishing power and originality.
Rupert Thomson
First Love; Madame Zero; Night Sky with Exit Wounds
Gwendoline Riley is a writer who cuts right to the heart of things, and her fifth novel, First Love (Granta), is predictably raw, fierce and true. If you like your fiction reassuring, look elsewhere. Sarah Hall is another voice I love. Her new book of short stories, Madame Zero (Faber), is a showcase for her clean, vivid style and her surreal, often feral imagination. Ocean Vuong’s collection of poems, Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Jonathan Cape), startled me with its urgency and its relevance. An eerily sure-footed debut.