Monthly Archives: June 2012

Estonia: the past is another country

June 14, 2012 By in Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , 17 Comments

The Estonian Literature Centre was one of the first national literature organisations on the web. It launched in 2001, back when Mark Zuckerberg was just starting out at Harvard and tweeting was something only birds did. Judging by my correspondence with it, the organisation is also one of the most efficient of its type: within a few days of my query email, I received a message from Kerti at the centre. She sent me a list of three recommendations and attached the manuscript of a crime novel set in medieval Tallinn, for which the centre is trying to find an English-language publisher.

Tempting though the crime novel was, I decided to go with The Beauty of History by Viivi Luik. This was largely because, from what I could find out, she is one of the country’s most highly acclaimed writers behind Jaan Kross, the Estonian writer most well-known to the rest of the world.

The novel follows a young woman who agrees to pose for a sculptor around the time of the Prague Spring in 1968. With change sweeping across Europe and shivering the Iron Curtain, the woman sees life around her tilting out of alignment as old certainties buckle and the authorities rush to clamp down on underground networks. The sculptor senses it too and is preparing to escape to the West in order to avoid military service, but for his model the events have less tangible and more emotional consequences that send her groping through the past, present and future, trying to locate herself in a world that will never be the same.

This is a book about the power of words – words that forbid, mask and betray, and ‘must be soaked in blood in order to be effective’. With the oppressive Soviet regime necessitating the adoption of a ‘secret language’ for communication about the sculptor’s plans, innocent, everyday terms take on sly, double meanings that mean the heroine ‘can never understand whether the talk is simply of buying butter and cream or of the arrival of fateful news’.

Luik further emphasises the infiltration of terror into daily life through her use of quaint and everyday objects in her imagery: fear ‘flashes like a silver ear-trumpet into which one cannot speak, but only whisper and wheeze’, and ‘glows in naked forty-watt bulbs like an egg’.

In addition, the author’s spiralling of her heroine and her reader through time underlines the interconnectedness of personal and national narratives, revealing how political upheavals change not only the present and the future, but also the way we look at the past. When ‘all ages are flung together’ and ‘years are linked to one another like human vertebrae’, a single shock affects the whole organism.

The blending of myth, memory, past and future has a disorientating effect, which makes the narrative seem to whirl wildly at certain points, flinging the reader into confusion. This was no doubt exacerbated by my ignorance of Estonian political history, which meant that several references that might have provided hand holds slipped through my grasp.

Taken as a whole, though, this was an absorbing and beautiful tribute to the desire for freedom of thought, movement and self-determination. It left me with a powerful impression of what living under occupation might mean and a strange, wistful sense of the secret lives of everyday things.

Thanks, Kerti, for the recommendation – if any English-language publisher is looking for a historical Tallinn crime novel for its list, the Estonian Literature Centre may have just the book.

The Beauty of History (Ajaloo ilu) by Viivi Luik, translated from the Estonian by Hildi Hawkins (Norvil Press, 2007)

Jamaica: divine retribution

June 13, 2012 By in North America, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 7 Comments

This was a recommendation from novelist and blogger Stephanie Saulter. She said that as I’d enjoyed Gaiman’s American Gods she thought I might like this ‘wonderfully dark fantasy that weaves folk tales and superstition into a real-life story of betrayal, deprivation and alienation’. I was intrigued.

Set in the fantastical town of Gibbeah – where birds attack humans and certain houses assume magical powers – Marlon James’s debut novel John Crow’s Devil examines the lengths that fear and hearsay will drive people to. When the self-proclaimed ‘Apostle’ York strides into the midst of a church service to drag the drunkard Hector Bligh, known as ‘the Rum Preacher’, from the pulpit, many see it as the wake-up call their sleepy community needs. But as the Apostle assumes control and begins to preach an erratic gospel of fire, brimstone, vengeance and violence for all those who do not stick to the path of righteousness, a darker truth emerges that tips the town into a spiral of hell.

James excels at portraits of outsiders. All his major characters harbour some secret suffering that sets them apart from the community and on course for the collision that blows the narrative into the stratosphere in the closing stages of the book. There is the self-loathing and prudish church administrator Lucinda, the fanatical and warped Apostle, the lonely widow who harbours the Rum Preacher, and of course guilt-ridden Bligh himself.

James puts these individual stories against a backdrop of suspicion and narrow-mindedness – ‘a town that preferred things black or white’ where ‘church people, through their stares, created a boundary of shame that few climbed over’. Oscillating between a more detached third-person narrative style and a collective, community voice, he weaves a web of whispers that evokes small-town gossip-mongering in all its terrifying yet seductive fullness:

‘Yes baba! Rumour jump from her yard and race down the street and stop at Mrs Fracas house, then Mrs Smithfield house where it pick up two more story, then it hop and skip and jump from one yard to the next, then it race to the grocery shop where it bounce and bounce like American ball. And every time rumour bounce, the story pick up something new.’

This use of multiple, characterful voices combines with superlative, supple writing that is more than equal to the horrors it unfolds – among them one of the most graphic and powerful flogging scenes going. What in another writer’s hands might descend into cheap sensationalism here grows in stature and subtlety with every twist of the knife. An outstanding piece of work. Thanks for the tip-off, Stephanie.

John Crow’s Devil by Marlon James (Macmillan Caribbean, 2008)

Marshall Islands: telling tales

June 12, 2012 By in Oceania, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 13 Comments

The Marshall Islands posed a dilemma: preliminary research showed that all storytelling on this remote archipelago in the Pacific was done orally. As far as I could find out there was no such thing as a Marshallese writer.

Beginning to wonder if I was going to have to fly to the Pacific to listen to the stories myself, I contacted Peter Rudiak-Gould. An anthropology PhD student at Oxford University, he has written a textbook on Marshallese and Surviving Paradise – an account of the year he spent as a volunteer English teacher on one of the Marshall Islands. If anyone could help me, surely this was the man.

Rudiak-Gould came back with two suggestions: Melal: A Novel of the Pacific by Robert Barclay (a non-Marshallese national – although he did grow up in the Marshall Islands) and Marshall Islands Legends and Stories collected from indigenous storytellers by Daniel A Kelin II, a non-Marshallese national and Director of Drama Education for the Honolulu Theatre for Youth.

Both sounded like contenders, but in the end I plumped for the Kelin. This was because I was curious to see what the country’s traditional stories were like, but also because I wanted to test how it felt to read stories that were originally told in another medium. I had a suspicion that folk stories transcribed and set down in a book might have the dry, correct feeling of exhibits in an old-fashioned museum: neatly curated and labelled, with all the life and sense of their original purpose sucked out of them. Would Kelin, himself a performance artist, have managed to preserve some of the immediacy of the tales?

The 50 stories in Kelin’s collection present a broad and intriguing picture of Marshallese folklore. These are creations in which the impossible is commonplace: whales sleep on the roofs of houses, women fly, children are born 12 at a time and kingdoms exist at the bottom of the sea. Sometimes containing explanations of aspects of island life – such as how turtles first came to the nation or how women learnt to survive childbirth – they weave a complex web of duties and preoccupations, in which the importance of hospitality and respecting customs and authority jostles with a love of ingenuity, wit and cunning. There is the youngest son who defies his older brothers to feed his family, the iroij (chief) who strikes a deal with demons and gets washed out to sea when he fails to keep it, and the fishermen who lose the art of magic fishing because they do not pay attention to their elders.

Even more interesting than the stories themselves are the potted biographies of the storytellers and their incidental comments (included in italics), many of which reveal an extraordinary sense of connection with the tales they are telling. ‘They invited me to eat with them that day. If you ever stop by my island, I’ll show you the hole where the boys stayed,’ says Tonke Aisea at the end of a story about brothers tricking a demon, while Jeljel Jerbal leans out of his house to point out where the boy who wrestles a demon to death in his story lived.

This sense of ownership is complemented by Kelin’s explanations of the lengths he had to go to to obtain permission from the local iroijes to hear the stories  – the right to tell and listen to the stories is only granted to a lucky few – and the narrators’ moving comments about the slow death of their tradition through the westernisation of the younger generation. In addition, there are the illustrations by local artist Nashton Nashon, which give the book a striking character – so striking in fact that a woman on the tube even asked me what the book was about because it looked so unusual.

There’s no doubt – particularly in the tales with a lot of poetry and song – that something of the experience of hearing the stories in person is lost in the book. There were points when I found my ears straining in vain to catch the voice singing or chanting far away across the sea.

On the whole though, it was hard not to be impressed with Kelin’s passion and diligence and his evident efforts to present as much of the experience of listening to the stories as he could, even down to including photographs of many of the narrators. It made me glad that I had trusted him to transport me rather than making the trip myself. Besides, who’s to say whether I would have been allowed to hear the tales when I got there?

Marshall Islands Legends and Stories told by Tonke Aisea et al, collected, edited and translated by Daniel A Kelin II, illustrated by Nashton T Nashon (Bess Press Inc, 2003)

Finland: a walk on the wild side

June 10, 2012 By in Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

As I’ve found repeatedly during the course of this project, some books select themselves. In the case of Arto Paasilinna’s The Year of the Hare, the sheer number of people who recommended it made it the only choice. Everyone I spoke to who had anything to say about Finnish literature wanted me to read this book.

The narrative follows Vatanen, a washed-up hack, who finds himself stranded when his photographer drives off and leaves him after their car hits a hare on their way to an assignment. Alone in the woods with nothing but the wounded animal for company, he decides to break with his joyless existence and takes off on a madcap adventure that sees him fighting forest fires,  dragging a cow out of a swamp, evading the police, and pursuing a bear to the edge of the White Sea.

This is a deeply funny book with its comedy working on several levels. Paasilinna engineers delightfully ludicrous scenarios – from the crazed bulldozer driver who ploughs his machine out to its doom in the middle of a frozen lake and then sits on its roof cursing onlookers and appealing for rescue, to the genteel woman politely picking hare droppings out of her soup. But he also excels at capturing the knots and non sequiturs in which people tie themselves up – none more so than Vatanen’s wife, whose reaction when she finally gets him on the phone is priceless:

‘If this is looking for a divorce, it won’t work, I can tell you! I’m not letting you off that way when you’ve ruined my life – eight years down the drain because of you! Daft I was to take you!’

The comedy is only one side of it, though. Beneath the robust surface of the jokes and the delicious, picaresque plot, which sees new intrigues erupting in every chapter, moves the swell of a much more profound coming to consciousness. Stripped of the trappings of his lacklustre, urban existence, Vatanen has the space to work out what he really needs for a fulfilling life. His discovery of the simple truth is quietly beautiful:

‘There was a half-moon, and the stars were glimmering faintly in the frozen evening. He had his own world, this one, and it was fine to be here, living alone in one’s own way.’

This undertow of self-discovery pulls the narrative along, making the more random episodes – which occasionally feel like short stories rather than chapters in a novel – skim effortlessly along its currents. With the hare as a kind of yardstick for his emotional state, Vatanen sounds the depths of experience. The result is joyful, surprising and touching – definitely one I’ll be reading again.

The Year of the Hare (Janiksen vuosi) by Arto Paasilinna, translated from the Finnish by Herbert Lomas (Peter Owen Publishers, 2009)

East Timor: poetry in motion

June 9, 2012 By in Asia, Oceania, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

This book was recommended by The Modern Novel, a blogger writing about the development of the literary novel worldwide. TMN kindly posted a comment on this site helping me out with a few of the harder to reach destinations (there are still quite a few gaps on that there list and plenty of countries with only one or two titles suggested – go on, have a look and let me know what I’m missing).

Several of the recommendations weren’t available in translation – much more linguistically gifted than I am, TMN reads in French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, as well as English – however there were some great additions to the list among them. The Crossing by Luis Cardoso was one of these.

In actual fact, The Crossing is not technically a novel, it’s a memoir. Like me, TMN holds the view that the boundaries between these two genres blur the more closely you look at them, which is why we’re both including memoirs in our projects.

Telling the story of Cardoso’s childhood and adolescence in East Timor, the book reveals the nation’s troubled recent history through a small and touchingly precise lens. As waves of Portuguese, Japanese and Indonesian colonialism wash over the country, the author records the tragic impact of these events on the ‘people lost in time’ who have to live through them, caught between the oppressive yet relatively stable patterns of the past and the fragile freedom ahead.

This is a book as much about forgetting as it is about remembering. While Cardoso’s traumatised and exiled father frames the narrative – bumbling about Lisbon where his son is studying trying ‘to recover the memory he had lost’, all his fire and bluster gone – Cardoso himself seeks to reconcile the partial versions of events he encounters with his own fragmentary memories of his homeland.

A nostalgia for Portuguese rule – warmer than any other attitudes to colonialism I’ve read about so far this year – permeates much of the book. For characters like Cardoso’s father the Portuguese administration, despite its enforcement of apartheid, and its rigid and sometimes brutal practices, is ‘the erstwhile mother country […] even though the umbilical cord had been cut in such a way as to make the child bleed and the mother grieve’.

As well  as blending novel and memoir, Cardoso brings in elements of poetry too through his descriptions that conjure places and people as deftly as the briefest of stanzas. Time and again, he captures complex situations in a net woven only of a single sentence, as when he sets out his father’s deluded hopes for his son’s future:

‘He dreamed that, one day, I would take up a post in [an] administration [made up of people educated in Portugal] – the dreams of someone who has built a boat and wants to go on sailing through time, along the lost route of the colonizing caravels’.

The huge cast of walk-on characters and vast catalogue of events mentioned in this relatively slim book mean that occasionally the narrative can jump like a scratched record from one scene to the next. Several times, I found myself having to turn back a page or two, trying to work out how I had been thrust into a storm that seemed to have gusted up out of nowhere. Sometimes, there wasn’t really an explanation.

Taken as a whole, though, this is a touching, lyrical and sometimes playful account of the search for identity in a land you can only fleetingly call your own (East Timor only managed a few months of independence in 1975 before it was conquered by the Indonesians and at last gained its sovereignty in 2002). It makes a compelling artwork out of a shifting kaleidoscope of personal and political allegiances. A great suggestion.

The Crossing: A Story of East Timor (Cronica de uma travessia: A epoca do Ai-Dik-Funam) by Luis Cardoso, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa (Granta, 2000)

Czech Republic: out of bounds

June 7, 2012 By in Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 12 Comments

This book breaks the rules. So far, everything I’ve read for this project has been written and published since the country in question existed in its modern-day form (hence the fancy footwork getting a story from South Sudan). However Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal first appeared in 1976 in what was then Czechoslovakia — in the days when the Czech Republic was nothing more than a figment of Communist leader Gustáv Husák’s nightmares.

I say ‘appeared’, but that’s not quite right. In fact, because of the repressive mechanisms of the state at the time, the book was self-published secretly. It wasn’t until 1989, around the time of the Velvet Revolution – when the country moved from Communism to liberal democracy paving the way for the split from Slovakia in 1993 – that it came out officially.

This made it the last novel that Hrabal, dubbed ‘the sad king of Czech literature’ by one biographer, published before his death. Clearly, this was an important literary milestone on the road to the new republic. I was going to have to take a diversion and have a look.

As antiheroes go, they don’t come much more dubious than Hanta, an eccentric loner who has spent 35 years crushing outlawed books and waste paper in a sinister police state. Working alone with his hydraulic press turning rare book collections into bales of compacted paper, he is an agent of forces that all freethinking readers must abhor.

Yet, as we enter into Hanta’s ‘heavily populated solitude’, we come to discover the love of books that he has developed through his work and the inadvertent education it gives him. As we read about the care he takes over the thousand of volumes he processes – and often rescues for his private collection – we encounter one of the most moving, passionate and devastating testaments to the power of literature the world has ever seen.

Hrabal’s descriptions of a book lover’s interactions with texts on every level are extraordinary. From Hanta’s accounts of his reading fuelling ‘an eternal flame I feed daily with the oil of my thoughts, which come from what I unwittingly read during work’, to the thought he puts into the construction of bales – frequently placing a favourite text in the heart of them or a picture that might catch someone’s eye from the side of the truck that transports them for pulping – we inhabit his obsession with books as objects and as windows on other worlds.

Perhaps the most powerful example of this is Hanta’s violent reaction to the ‘inhuman’ modern press he goes to visit at Bubny. Processing books at breakneck speed, the machine reduces the workers who feed it to thoughtless minions:

‘pulling covers off books and tossing the bristling, horrified pages on the conveyor belt with the utmost calm and indifference, with no feeling for what the book might mean, no thought that somebody had to write the book, somebody had to edit it, somebody had to design it, somebody had to set it, somebody had to proofread it, somebody had to make corrections, somebody had to read the galley proofs, and somebody had to check the page proofs, print the book, and somebody had to bind the book, and somebody had to pack the books into boxes, and somebody had to do the accounts, and somebody had to decide that the book was unfit to read, and somebody had to order it pulped […] and somebody had to drive the truck here, where workers wearing orange and baby-blue gloves tore out the books’ innards and tossed them onto the conveyor belt, which silently, inexorably jerked the bristling pages off to the gigantic press to turn them into bales, which went on to the paper mill to become innocent, white, immaculately letter-free paper, which would eventually be made into other, new books’.

This understanding of destruction as part of the life-cycle of beautiful things is threaded through the text on every level. The same phrase starts each chapter before buckling under the pressure of the final section, while the plot itself, led through a spiral of literary references that are devoid of pretension and grounded in Hanta’s engagement with the beating heart of the texts he reads, folds in on a conclusion that is every bit as inevitable and necessary as it is heartrending. An astonishing piece of work. I’m not sure I’ll ever quite get over it.

Too Loud a Solitude (Příliš hlučná samota) by Bohumil Hrabal, translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim (Abacus, 2011)

Denmark: office politics

June 5, 2012 By in Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

The Exception by Christian Jungersen was one of several books suggested by Danish book blogger Christina Rosendahl. I was grateful for the tip-off as Danish-to-English translations are not particularly common and my knowledge of the literary scene in Denmark is, well, probably slightly less extensive than my grasp of 18th century marquetry.

In actual fact, Rosendahl’s words about this novel weren’t the most glowing of recommendations – she said it was ‘quite good’. However, the subject matter intrigued me, and, as it’s a thriller, I thought it might make a welcome contrast with some of the other books I’ve been reading this year.

The story turns around four women working at the Danish Centre of Genocide Information. Tasked with collating, curating and archiving data about the world’s atrocities, they come under strain from a series of pressures to do with budget cuts, politics and their own loyalties and foibles that skew and twist the office dynamics. But when two of them receive death threats, the working environment takes a turn for the poisonous and it’s not long before the barbarity they document comes crashing into their comfortable lives.

Office dynamics are Jungersen’s speciality. Adept at isolating and revealing the mechanisms that enable people to be ‘so dishonest with themselves that they aren’t even aware of what they are doing’, he lays bare the steps by which ordinarily decent people can victimise and bully a colleague, all the while believing they are doing nothing wrong. This is rendered all the more impressive by the split narrative, which sees the story told through the eyes of all four women, and the weaving in of theories about the psychology of those who commit acts of genocide, which enables Jungersen to draw interesting parallels with the mental violence perpetrated in the office.

Jungersen gets round the problem of having to shoehorn a lot of background information and theorising into the novel by having several of the characters write articles about the psychology of genocide. This emphasises the ‘cognitive dissonance’ through which they are able to hold several conflicting ideas in their heads at the same time, acting cruelly while maintaining a belief in their own goodness – just as they write pieces about the mental mechanisms of ‘evil’ without applying them to their own lives.

Nevertheless, he labours the point a little towards the end, even quoting a section from one essay twice in case the reader has somehow missed the comparisons he is drawing. Similarly, although generally well handled, one or two of the more outlandish twists in the plot – which, without giving too much away, brings a Serbian war criminal into the orbit of the women’s workplace – are a little hard to swallow.

By and large, though, this is a gripping, thought-provoking and intelligent piece of work. It makes us question the patterns we  play out in our day-to-day lives and acts as a powerful warning against the sort of lazy pack mentality that can be all too easy to slip into. It was a jolly good pageturner too.

The Exception (Undtagelsen) by Christian Jungersen, translated from the Danish by Anna Paterson (Phoenix, 2007)

Grenada: a class act

June 3, 2012 By in North America, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 5 Comments

As the UK and Commonwealth mark Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee, here’s a book from one of the 16 sovereign states around the world that still count her as their constitutional monarch.

I heard about writer Merle Collins through the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, an annual literary festival that takes place in Trinidad & Tobago, which writer Vahni Capildeo tipped me off about. Now in its second year, the event is home to the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and Collins’s short story collection The Ladies are Upstairs was on the 2012 shortlist.

The characters in Collins’s stories are people caught between worlds. Whether she’s describing the elderly woman Rain, ‘still lost in a childhood she couldn’t forget’, or the young man trapped between the strange disappearance of the woman hitchhiker he picks up on a lonely road and the conclusions of his rational mind, the author delights in pitting conflicting influences against one another in the rugged terrain of the psyche.

As the title suggests, class has a considerable part to play. Several of the characters, in particular Doux, who links the majority of the stories together, run up against the limits imposed by station. ‘You Should See Them in Church with Glasses on!’, in which the young Doux is unjustly accused of stealing during her first job as a maid, is particularly memorable.

In addition, Collins’s fascination with psychogeography and the pull of the supernatural makes for several deliciously spooky tales. ‘Big Stone’, an account of a midwife’s eerie encounter with a child during a walk home at dusk, is the best of these. Telling the story exclusively through reported speech, which gives the narrative a weird and distant feel, the writer draws on the atrocities buried in the Isle of Spice’s colonial past to create a compelling and unnerving backdrop:

‘What kind of night? Well, you know how those old estate places were. Those places used to have a lot of pain and wickedness in the past, but she wanted to emphasise that they were not like that today.’

The shared cast of characters, myths and memories that tie many of the stories together, give much of the work a familiar feel, so that by the final tales you feel as though you are part of the community, with a stake in the common heritage on which they rest. This makes the last piece – in which Doux, now an old woman living in an alarmed granny flat with her daughter in the USA, contemplates her loss of independence and approaching death – particularly moving.

Seen in the context of the celebration of one woman’s 60-year stint at the head of an association of a quarter of the world’s nations, this striking yet subtle collection of stories from one of its remotest corners reveals powerful truths about the common traits that link its subjects and the rest of the world.

The Ladies are Upstairs by Merle Collins (Peepal Tree Press, 2011)

Uganda: tough choices

June 2, 2012 By in Africa, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

I was in two minds about this one. Everyone I’d spoken to about Ugandan literature, from writer Musa Okwonga to the folks at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, had come back with the same recommendation: Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino (or Defence of Lawino, depending on which translation you read).

The only issue was that the work was a narrative poem, rather than a prose piece. While I was planning to consider narrative poetry from countries where novels, short stories and memoirs in English were in short supply, I found the idea of opting for poetry when there were prose options available difficult.

In the end, flying in the face of one of the most unanimous recommendations I’ve had so far this year, I decided to add the p’Bitek to the list but to choose a novel. Oh God, I thought as I spiralled Abyssinian Chronicles by Moses Isegawa down on to my Kindle, please be good.

Set in the 1970s and 1980s, this ambitious novel tells the story of post-independence Uganda’s turbulent struggle for peace and identity through the eyes of Mugezi. Growing up in an abusive household before, during and after the Amin years, he witnesses the impact of national events on those around him and, through the choices he makes, reveals how individuals internalise and play out the currents of politics in their own lives.

The idea of a single person or part of something standing for the whole is a running theme in the novel. Whether it’s Mugezi’s parents’ disastrous wedding night, during which the happy couple have to be helped to consummate their union by the bride’s aunt, which ‘in many ways typified the whole of their marriage’, or Mugezi’s emulation of ‘St Amin’ in his stealth campaign to take revenge on his violent mother by a series of unpleasant pranks planned with military precision and despotic flair – at least in the days before his admiration of the dictator is ‘killed by the murderous light of truth’ – synecdoche is the order of the day.

Unusually for a novel written in English, the book was first published in translation – in Holland, where Isegawa has lived since 1990. This is particularly striking  when you consider the author’s love of putting language through its paces. From the very first sentence – ‘Three final images flashed across Serenity’s mind as he disappeared into the jaws of the colossal crocodile’ – he reaches for creative forms and tropes to surprise, intrigue and emote.

Perhaps the most striking example is his description of Mugezi’s aunt’s gang rape by soldiers, in which the clinical report of the duration of the event, the precise number of thrusts and touches she endured and the quantity of bodily fluids produced communicates the emotional toll the ordeal took far more effectively than any subjective description could.

Now and then, the ambitious scope of the novel causes problems. There is so much context to explain that the work is hi-jacked by odd passages of socio-political exposition and the narrative feels distended by this, like a python that has swallowed but not yet fully digested a large meal. Similarly, the expansive cast of characters woven through Mugezi’s experiences give parts of the novel a baggy feel.

But the positives far outweigh the negatives. The book is funny, shocking and vibrant by turns, throbbing with anger and hope. Isegawa has made history his story, and that is no mean feat. How the work compares with Song of Lawino, I’ve no idea – I’ll have to read that next year and find out…

Abyssinian Chronicles by Moses Isegawa (Picador, 2011)