Nepal: tall tales

January 31, 2012 By in Asia, The stories Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

 

Reading a book from every country in the world would be nigh on impossible without the schemes and initiatives that exist to promote the work of emerging authors on the global literary stage. The University of Iowa’s International Writing Program is one of the most established of these, and it was on the list of its alumni, who hail from more than 140 countries, that I came across Ajit Baral.

Even with the exposure from IWP, Ajit Baral’s English language collection of Nepalese folk tales was not easy to come by. In fact, I had to get it shipped from India via Penguin when the usual online retailers drew a blank.

Luckily Baral’s lively retelling of 31 largely oral folktales never before rendered in English is worth the effort. Illustrated by Nepalese cartoonist Durga Baral, they present a vibrant picture of some of the myths, legends, themes and cultures that have shaped the Himalayan nation.

Irreverent, funny and occasionally disturbing, the stories evoke a world full of contradictions, frustrations and marvels. Gods walk the earth, bickering and betting, ghosts steal people’s coats, rats get married and tigers talk.

Some of the tales, like the story about the old man who tries to cheat death and learns the hard way why endless life is not a good thing or the yarn about the vain Uttis tree that falls over a cliff in shock when it is insulted and is left clinging on for all eternity, have an Aesopian quality and seem to serve to explain some of life’s mysteries.

Others, like the story about the scheming barber who ends up being burnt to death when his plans backfire, seem more calculated to raise a laugh at a crook getting his just deserts.

Yet these are largely not moral tales. In fact it is rare that the good win out over the bad. If there is a common theme, it is the punishment of short-sightedness, dullness and stupidity and the rewarding of cunning and quick-wittedness — that and pushing coins up animals’ bottoms to make them appear to pass money, which happens in a surprisingly high number of these tales and which I’m at a loss to explain. If anyone from Nepal (or elsewhere for that matter) can offer a reason for this I’d be intrigued!

All in all, though, it’s the qualities that make for a good storyteller that carry the day — as must have been the case for the people who first told these tales, those who passed them down, and for Baral, who opens them up to a new audience today.

The Lazy Conman and Other Stories by Ajit Baral, illustrated by Durga Baral. Publisher: Penguin India (2009)

Norway: reality bites

February 2, 2012 By in Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

Before Coetzee’s Youth and Orwell’s Aspidistra; before Amis’s Jim got lucky and the artist revealed himself as a young man; even before Somerset Maugham wrote Of Human Bondage, there was Knut Hamsun ‘s Hunger. Published in Norway in 1890 and only translated into English 30 years later, this slight novel might have long sunk into the eternal slush pile, were it not for its extraordinary power and the fact that it contains the essential ingredients of many of the great 20th century bildungsromans to come – at times surpassing them all.

The story is simple enough: an unnamed and destitute writer wanders around the nation’s capital, railing against the cruel circumstances that make him unable to earn enough to eat. Half-mad with hunger, he goads himself into fruitless attempts at scribbling and doomed schemes to raise a penny or two, struggling along the edge of existence and endurance until he is at last forced to find some escape.

Chief among the problems that writing such coming-of-age novels throws up (as I discovered to my cost when I had a bash at one a few years ago) are the issues of making such a self-obsessed protagonist likeable and dealing with the fact that his (it usually is a he) main problem is often that he doesn’t have enough going on. Humour is the common get-out-of-jail-free card for writers such as Coetzee, Amis, Salinger and even Orwell, but Hamsun jumps another way.

Delving into the wounded psyche of his anti-hero he uses the likeability problem as an opportunity for generating poignancy, holding his character hostage to a self-imposed chivalry code that sees him unable to accept help and unable to walk past someone in need. The result of these repeated bungled encounters is a maddening, perverse and yet pitiable figure, for whom we can’t help feeling sympathy, even as he blunders on into the territory of the deranged, far beyond what most of the later greats dare to try – at one stage even toying with autocannibilism.

The endings are often another problem in such novels. Necessarily involving some sort of rebellion, transformation or shift in relation to all that has gone before, they can often have the wriggling, impatient feeling of a child scrawling ‘The End’ and scampering off to the next thing, bored now he has said all he had to say.

Does Hamsun get past this with his final solution? I’m not sure. I think he and Coetzee could have had a rewarding chat about the options here.

But, of course, Coetzee wasn’t even a glint on his grandfather’s ink stand when Hamsun was writing this and wouldn’t be for another 50 years. None of the great, modernist stream-of-consciousness works and bildungsromans of the 20th century had been realised when Hamsun created the paranoid interior monologue he spins out so skilfully in his first translated book.

I wonder how many of them would have existed in their present forms if Hamsun hadn’t picked up his pen.

Hunger by Knut Hamsun (translated from the Bokmål by George Egerton). Publisher (this edition): Dover (2003)

Lithuania: women’s work

February 4, 2012 By in Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 11 Comments

I stumbled across this anthology while on the trail of Lithuanian writer Laura Sintija Černiauskaitė. She was one of the inaugural winners of the European Union Prize for Literature, which, according to its website, was launched in 2009 ‘to promote the circulation of literature within Europe and encourage greater interest in non-national literary works’, and I assumed this meant I would be able to find her novels in translation.

I was wrong. In fact, the only piece of Černiauskaitė’s work I could find was the extract of her 2008 novel, Benedict’s Milestones, featured alongside the work of 19 other Lithuanian women writers in this collection.

Published by the Lithuanian government’s International Cultural Programme Centre, the anthology is the second in a series of books designed to introduce Lithuanian writers to an English-speaking readership. It is available on Kindle for the princely sum of 59 pence. I was intrigued.

As it turned out, Černiauskaitė’s piece, which opens the collection, is something of a disappointment. The choice of a sex scene may have been unfortunate (if unsurprising given that the first volume in the series was called Sex, Lithuanian Style). As the list of nominees for the Literary Review‘s annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award goes to show, even the most accomplished of writers can come a cropper (if you’ll pardon the pun) trying to describe goings on behind closed doors. Nevertheless, the descriptions of breasts ‘pointing like cannons’ and an erect ‘stamen’ had me cringing more than once and wondering what I’d let myself in for.

Černiauskaitė’s piece is by no means the only damp squib. But there are several firecrackers along the way. My interest was first piqued by Birutė Jonuškaitė’s rough and raw account of a love affair gone sour told through a letter one of the lovers leaves behind. Ugnė Barauskaitė’s earthy and funny account of giving birth also had me giggling and cringing (this time in a good way). And if any English-language publishers are looking to broaden their lists Edita Nazaritė, Laima Vincė and Paulina Pukytė deserve attention.

One of the most powerful pieces, an extract from Ruta Sepetys’s Between Shades of Gray relating a family’s violent arrest by the Soviet Police is already available through Philomel Books. I also really liked the extract from Giedra Radvilavičiūtė’s Tonight I Will Sleep by the Wall, an incendiary toast delivered by the groom’s cousin on the occasion of a couple’s twentieth wedding anniversary.

It can be reductive to look for common themes in collections like this, as though women’s writing is somehow a subset of literature proper and not every bit as diverse and creative as the stuff the big boys produce, but it would be difficult to ignore the role that migration plays in nearly all the pieces. The characters in these extracts are people who leave or people who are left behind to regret the absence of relatives living and working among the ‘synthetic’, white-bread people of the West. Emigration it seems, is such a commonplace in Lithuania, that it has almost become a cultural characteristic.

All the more surprising, then, that a nation that is so widely travelled and that seems to have one foot of its identity planted in the diaspora should be so poorly represented in the translation stakes. Who knows? Maybe e-anthologies will succeed where the European Union Prize for Literature has so far failed in raising the nation’s literary profile. Only time will tell.

No Men, No Cry (“Collective” series). Original language: Lithuanian. Publisher: International Cultural Programme Centre (2011)

Guyana: sex and how to do it

February 5, 2012 By in South America, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 6 Comments

 

I wrote in my last post about the difficulties many authors have describing sex. However it’s by no means true of all. And you’d be hard pushed to find an example of how to (erhem) do it well than Buxton Spice by Oonya Kempadoo.

Set in the fictional coastal village of Tamarind Grove in 1970’s Guyana, the novel charts the sexual, social and political awakening of a young girl, Lula. As she observes the complex, painful and mysterious relationships of the people around her — and begins to have experiences of her own — Lula tests the boundaries of her identity and growing awareness of the hidden mechanisms of the world.

Sex is graphically and variously present in the narrative, with teen fumblings, lesbian encounters, rape and voyeurism all playing a part. What makes it compelling is the freshness and vitality of Kempadoo’s language — utterly devoid of the clumsy clichés and euphemisms that make most sex scenes so excruciating — and the way she uses the physical acts to map the shifting power dynamics between her characters.

Less successful is the overall narrative structure, which rambles between fragments of experience, roping in an unnecessarily large cast of characters. Kempadoo pulls this together to some extent at the end, but the softness of focus niggles. At times, reading the book feels a bit like watching a Polaroid develop only to find that the picture was blurred all along.

In the finish, though, Kempadoo’s poetic vision and her fizzing Creole keep the pages turning. She uses these to deliver a portrait of lost childhood that is at once universal and steeped in a very particular time and place. And if you’ve ever wondered what uses two teenage girls can come up with for a battery, the answers are right here…

Incidentally, my decision to categorise Oonya Kempadoo as a Guyanese novelist is slightly controversial. Although Kempadoo was born of Guyanese parents, raised in Guyana and still holds citizenship (alongside citizenship for several other countries), she identifies as Grenadian.

I changed the book to my Grenada entry for a while because of this, but on reading Buxton Spice I felt that it was so rooted in Guyana and drew so strongly on Kempadoo’s childhood there that it would be wrong to classify it as anything other than Guyanese literature.

I’m ready to be persuaded otherwise though, so if you have different thoughts on what constitutes a book’s national identity please let me know.

Buxton Spice by Oonya Kempadoo (original language: English/Creole). Publisher: Phoenix (1998)

Albania: fire power

February 8, 2012 By in Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 16 Comments

You’d be hard-pushed to get through a Creative Writing master’s course these days without some bright spark reminding you of the old Raymond Chandler advice for livening up lacklustre stories: ‘When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.’

Usually it crops up when you and the whole room know you’ve written a terrible, dreary scene in which nothing happens and from which all the linguistic flair and literary elegance you thought you’d slathered it in at 2am that morning have evaporated overnight.

As a result, the phrase has somewhat negative connotations for me (and I suspect for a lot of aspiring novelists). But if I ever needed a demonstration of its truth (well, the gun part, at least), the brutal and brilliant opening of Ismail Kadare’s Broken April provides it in spades.

I was already excited about reading Kadare, having had several book fans rave about him to me when I was preparing for this project. Still, nothing could have prepared me for the tense magnificence of the opening chapter as young Gjorg Berisha lies in the scrub, looking down the sights of his rifle, waiting for the arrival of the man he is obliged to kill even though doing so will bring the same vengeance upon him.

His plight arises from an elaborate honour code, dictated by the ancient Kanun laws, which sees many of the mountain families of this remote part of Albania locked in blood feuds, watching their young men pick each other off and paying the blood tax on each death to the region’s prince while their lands lie fallow and their communities perish.

Into this mysterious and cruel world, comes the writer Bessian and his new wife Diana, eager to experience something rare and untested for their honeymoon by ‘escaping the world of reality for the world of legend… the world of epic that scarcely exists anymore’.

As the couple travels around the region, with Bessian discoursing on the local customs and curiosities that he has read about, and as Gjorg discharges his duty and embarks on the 30-day truce that will spare his life until the middle of April, their paths cross, setting in motion events which means that none of them will be the same again.

As with all great writers, Kadare presents the contrasting perspectives of his cast of characters in a rounded and compelling fashion. What sets him apart is his ability to make us see how it would be impossible for them to be any other way.

We feel with them even as we shake our heads at their inconsistencies and blindness, the way they forge ahead with their mistakes all the while cursing the cruelty of their lots. We see Bessian’s pomposity and inhumanity as he expounds on the absurd, yet terrifying beauty of the mountain people’s rules and codes, but sympathise with his incomprehension of Diana’s coldness. We stumble with Gjorg under the burden that has been handed down through 70 years of bloodshed, all the while wishing he would run away yet recognising the ties that bind him.

This, coupled with spare, vivid prose and an unfailing eye for the tiny shifts that precipitate an emotional landslide, puts Kadare up there with the very best. Killer.

Broken April by Ismail Kadare (translated from the Albanian by New Amsterdam Books and Saqi Books). Publisher (Kindle edition): Vintage Digital

Peru: dizzy heights

February 10, 2012 By in South America, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 4 Comments

The bloodthirsty practices of remote mountain peoples seems to be the theme for this week, with Mario Vargas Llosa’s  disturbing unravelling of a series of mysterious deaths around a lonely hill station following hard on the heels of Ismail Kadare’s portrait of blood feuds on Albania’s high plateau.

Menace is threaded into the very fibres of this book, which follows Corporal Lituma, a civil guard who features in several of Vargas Llosa’s novels, as he and his junior officer investigate three disappearances in the mining community around their post.

Yet, despite what its title may suggest, Death in the Andes  is no mere whodunnit. Instead, as he conjures up the boredom and terror of the two men cooped up in their shack as terrorist bands and stories of vengeful mountain spirits run riot through the hills, Llosa lays bare the strings that link modern violence and ancient barbarism, and run through the heart of humankind.

This is a novel where long stretches of apprehension are punctuated with bursts of vicious action. Like Kadare, Vargas Llosa delights in testing outsiders against the world he has created, smashing their value systems, assumptions and even their bodies against the hard rock of experience that awaits them among the peaks. We watch tourists’ faith in their papers shrivel in the face of revolutionary zeal and an academic’s confidence in the immunity of her ecology project from the squalls of violence that pelt the region battered to smithereens.

Occasionally Vargas Llosa packs a little too much foreboding into the run up to these naive forays into the savage mountain world. By the middle of the book you can be pretty much certain that anyone who says they’ll be back soon is gone for good. Nevertheless Vargas Llosa’s masterful grasp of the minute-by-minute shifting motivations that govern our actions and the wild beauty of the imagery with which he bodies forth the hill country usually sublimates this weakness into a strength.

Kadare isn’t the only writer to echo in the novel. There is Hemingway in the story of the townsfolk driven to massacre their peers in a heady parody of justice (which recalls Pilar’s story about Avila in For Whom the Bell Tolls), while Martin Kohan’s technique of overlaying one story with another finds its answer in the way Vargas Llosa’s characters switch between memory and the present moment, often from one sentence to another. And, in the suspiciously named Dionisio, who, with his wife Dona Adriana, goads the miners into gross excesses and revels that strip them of their humanity, Euripides’ The Bacchae glimmers through.

The compelling throughline of the story and the humour that flares up to catch you at unexpected points along the way, however, are all Vargas Llosa’s own. An engrossing and memorable — doubtless I’ll be back for more.

Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa (translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman). Publisher (this edition): Faber & Faber (1996)

Australia: neighbours

February 13, 2012 By in Oceania, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , 10 Comments

For almost any British child of the eighties, Australia feels like a home from home. Sanitised and unreal though they may have been, Erinsborough and Summer Bay were the favourite after-school hangouts in the days before cable and satellite TV and the characters that lived there were our friends. We flicked our sentences up at the end to fit in with them, talked Alibi in the playground and devised elaborate make-believe games involving Madge, Harold and Mrs Mangel. When I was lucky enough to have the chance to drive round the coast from Perth to Sydney a few years back, it really did feel like being both home and away.

I was excited to read my Australian choice for another reason too: this was the book that started this crazy venture to read a story from every country in the world. Last year, fellow blogger Jason Cooper stopped by my A year of reading women blog and said that he really wanted me to read Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet. I pointed out that Tim Winton didn’t fit with my theme, but Cooper was adamant: I would have to do another blog in 2012 and find a theme to fit round the book.

‘What about reading books from different countries?’ he suggested.

‘What about reading books from every country?’ I countered.

And so A year of reading the world was born.

Luckily, I can see why Cooper loves this book. Charting the story of two hard-up families forced to live together in a tumbledown house on the outskirts of Perth in 1943, the novel creates a world every bit as absorbing as the soap operas of my childhood — and which bears more than a passing resemblance to them: the narrative is divided up into neat little in-between-the-ad-breaks-size chunks, the story has an episodic quality as it pans round the large cast of characters and stretches out across 20 years, and there is even a relative who disappears off to Adelaide when times get tough.

But Cloud Street is more than a literary version of Ramsay Street. Against the backdrop of the war and its fallout, Winton unfolds the tribulations, rivalries and neuroses of the debt-ridden Pickles family and their tenants the Lambs, who move into town after a shrimping accident leaves their eldest brain-damaged and strips them of their faith. These he uses to test the boundaries of conventional wisdom on fate, personhood, evil and luck, charting the gradual coming together of the two clans as each of their members seeks some sort of peace with his or her lot.

It sounds like a recipe for mawkishness. What saves it is Winton’s extraordinary facility for crystallising delicate images and emotions in the bluff language of the everyday. Whether he’s describing ‘chooks racked along their perch like mumbling hats’ or someone’s reaction to the revelation of the human side of a serial killer — ‘There’s no monsters, only people like us. Funny, but it hurts’ — he manages to shuck the feeling he wants from the husk of bluster and ostentation that most writers never succeed in losing completely.

That said, Winton could have done with taking a leaf out of the soapwriters’ scripts in one respect: the last 10 per cent (in Kindle terms), where final cadence after final cadence ripples through the text, could have done with some serious cutting. Without the pressure of the six o’clock news to focus his mind, Winton gives in to the temptation to linger in the world he has constructed with the characters he loves longer than they need him.

All the same, I can’t say I blame him terribly much. It is a marvellous creation. And, hey, they tell me Neighbours is still going on Channel 5…

Cloudstreet by Tim Winton. Publisher (Kindle edition): Picador (2011).

Senegal: the other woman

February 15, 2012 By in Africa, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Discovering that your middle-aged husband has fallen for one of your teenage daughter’s school friends has got to be pretty high in the nightmare stakes for most married women. In British novels, such a scenario usually has one of two outcomes:

  1. aggrieved woman ditches the bastard, reconnects with the vibrant, inner self her marriage has stifled all these years and realises she’s better off without him
  2. aggrieved woman thinks about ditching the bastard and reconnecting with her vibrant, inner self, but, after much soul-searching, and after her husband has realised the folly of his ways, finds a complex, unconventional peace with what has happened and moves forward as a beautiful, seasoned character.

But what about countries where your husband is not only expected to fall for another, younger girl but also legally entitled to bring her into your home and family as his second wife?

Mariama Bâ’s partly autobiographical 1980 novel explores just such a predicament. Written in the form of a letter from schoolteacher Ratamalouye to her old friend Assiatou, the novel’s series of reminiscences sets out the ‘slender liberty granted to women’ and in particular the plight of first wives who are ‘despised, relegated or exchanged… like a worn-out boubou [robe]’ under Islamic polygamy.

Ratamalouye’s husband of 25 years, Modou, has just died. As the rituals of the 40-day mourning period throw her together with his extended family, she relives the hurt and indignity of losing his affections and support to one of her daughter’s friends three years previously. She rehearses these thoughts in her letters to Assiatou, who took the unconventional step of leaving her own husband when he married a second wife, and her descriptions become a prism through which Bâ is able to illuminate the frustrations of many Senegalese women.

Bâ’s work might easily tip into a rant if she weren’t so for aware of the complexity of living through the issues she describes. Though clearly a passionate believer in the importance of education for all, she tempers this with reflections on the toll academic aspirations have taken on rural life with ‘the disappearance of an elite class of traditional manual workers’ because ‘The dream is to become a clerk. The trowel is spurned’. Similarly, though full of admiration for Assiatou’s hard-worn career and independence and though she rejoices ‘every time a woman emerges from the shadows’, Ratamalouye is prevented by her love for her husband and sense of duty from following her friend’s path.

Interestingly, So Long a Letter is the first book I’ve read so far this year where Western influence is presented as a largely positive thing. Ratamalouye writes with unqualified affection of the French headmistress who strove ‘to lift us out of the bog of tradition, superstition and custom, to make us appreciate a multitude of civilizations without renouncing our own’. Given the choice of novel endings facing women in western Europe and women in West Africa, perhaps that’s not such a surprise.

So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ (translated from the French by Modupé Bodé-Thomas). Heinemann International Literature & Textbooks (1989)

Tajikistan: imagine

February 17, 2012 By in Asia, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

‘Is Tajikistan a real country?’ asked someone when I said it was next on my list. ‘Are you sure it’s not one of those made up places?’

I don’t know what ‘those made up places’ are — are we talking Neverland, Utopia or Walford here? — but strangely enough I think the citizens of Tajikistan might have chimed in with my companion’s sentiments back in the early nineties, when ‘one day everything, literally in a single instant, tore away irrevocably from its old bearings and went careering downhill like a snowball, picking up more and more atrocities on its way’.

Charting the outbreak of civil war in Tajikistan following the collapse of the USSR, Andrei Volos’s Hurramabad, which is named after a mythical city of joy and happiness, portrays the eviction of ethnic Russians who ‘suddenly found [themselves] in exile without having to move anywhere’. This is told through seven interlinked stories, each revealing the private calamity of a different individual and the way it contributes to the undermining and toppling of a collective reality that had existed for 70 years.

Anti-Booker prize-winner Volos is usually considered to be a Russian writer (and he writes in Russian), yet he was born in what is now Tajikistan, where his family had lived since the 1920s (his father suffered a heart attack and died when they were evicted). His personal perspective on the tragedies and atrocities he describes — from the man using all he has in the world to buy a gravestone for his brother before he leaves his homeland for good to the man coerced into kidnapping and sex-trafficking young girls to Afghanistan for arms — gives a muscular, biting edge to the writing, which at times launches vicious attacks on the authorities that stood by while their citizens were robbed, raped, ruined and rejected.

What is extraordinary, however, is the way that Volos has been able to sublimate and channel this emotion into a towering work of art in such a short space of time (the original text appeared in 1998). Indeed, the things described are so shocking and so far removed from anything that we in Western Europe have had to deal with for decades that I found my brain reordering 1992 to read 1929 the first few times I encountered it, as though it simply couldn’t entertain the proximity of these events.

While the constant switching from one story to another can be a little tiring and disorientating, the pieces themselves are immensely powerful. For my money ‘The House by the River’, in which Yamninov, having been forced to sign away his property to a government thug, embarks on a desperate and soul-destroying attempt to save the family house he spent seven years building, is in a league of its own. But each piece is compelling.

Over and above this, though, Volos’s use of imagery (aided no doubt by Arch Tait’s excellent translation) is among the very best I’ve read. The text glitters with spine-tingling similes and metaphors. From the ‘low overcast sky… like a hat pulled down over someone’s eyes’ to the abandoned assumptions that ‘immediately leapt back the way mountains do when you take the binoculars from your eyes’ and the heat ‘like a poultice slapped over the eyes’, Volos demonstrates time and again his ability to reach out from this forgotten corner of the world and take you to his characters.

The result is engrossing and shaming. With this book, Volos makes the experience of being evicted from your homeland by force — an experience to which many of us have been deadened by reams of newsprint and the blue flickers of the nightly news — immediate, human and real.

It left me feeling I’d been living in a fairytale until I read it.

Hurramabad by Andrei Volos (translated from the Russian by Arch Tait). Publisher (this edition): GLAS (2001)

Antigua and Barbuda: a new departure

February 19, 2012 By in North America, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 6 Comments

Migration has cropped up many times in the books I’ve read so far this year. From tension built on the disparity between regions in a single country, in works such as Ismail Kardare’s Broken April and Mario Vargas Llosa’s Death in the Andes, to countries where emigration almost seems part of the national psyche, as in Andrei Volos’s Hurramabad and the Lithuanian anthology, the challenge of moving from one place to another seems to be a favourite topic for storytellers the world over.

Perhaps it’s inevitable that books that bridge several cultures are more likely to find an international audience. But it’s also true that there are few scenarios calculated to show up the fault lines in individuals and societies more clearly than the arrival of an outsider.

For all the books on the subject though you’d have to go a long way to find a pithier migration tale than Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy. Following the fortunes of a 19-year-old girl who leaves her home in the Caribbean to work as an au pair in the USA, the 1990 novel looks at the rupture that relocation can cause in a life, ‘like a flow of water dividing formerly dry and solid ground’, and provides a fresh, feisty and at times alarming perspective on the land of the free and on British colonialism.

From the first, Lucy’s blunt yet humane account of life with her wealthy white employers Mariah and Lewis provides some powerful insights into the contradictions of modern life. Through Lucy, we see the blind hypocrisy of Mariah’s well-meant involvement with a nature preservation campaign — ‘I couldn’t bring myself to ask her to examine Lewis’s daily conversation with his stockbroker, to see if they bore any relation to the things she saw passing away forever before her eyes’ — and the hollowness of the idyllic nuclear family she has constructed around her, a fiction to which she clings in the face of mounting evidence of her husband’s affair with one of her friends.

More interesting still is the depiction of the gulf between Mariah and Lucy, which their contrasting experiences of freedom and colonialism have engendered and which no amount of good will on both sides can conquer completely. This is powerfully summed up in Lucy’s violent reaction to a bunch of daffodils Mariah brings home. Seeing the flowers for the first time in her life, she is reminded of being made to learn and recite a poem about them at the Queen Victoria Girls’ School when she was 10. After the anger evoked by the memory subsides, she realises that ‘nothing could change the fact that where [Mariah] saw beautiful flowers I saw sorrow and bitterness’.

Lucy is no passive victim, though. Irreverent, strong-willed and uninhibited, she refuses to conform to the expectations of others and is determined to seize and taste all the experience she can. This makes her both likeable and compelling as she bucks against the ties that link her to the homeland she loves and despises.

 As she comes to ‘see the sameness in things that appear to be different’, it’s impossible not to share her sadness at the compromised nature of the world. Independence it seems, whether personal or national, is infinitely more than a question of geography.

Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid. Publisher (this edition): Plume (1991)