Tag Archives: International Booker Prize

Book of the month: Gaëlle Bélem

April 29, 2025 By in Africa, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 4 Comments

A few months ago, I was contacted by Bridget Farrell, founder of Bullaun Press, an Irish publisher dedicated to translations. Would I be interested in reading an advance copy of The Rarest Fruit, translated by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert, the second novel they were publishing by Gaëlle Bélem and also the second novel by a writer from Réunion ever to make it into English? Since then, the first, There’s a Monster Behind the Door, also translated by Fleetwood and Saint-Loubert, has been longlisted for the International Booker Prize. To my mind, The Rarest Fruit, which comes out in the UK and Ireland later this week, easily maintains this standard.

Based on the true story of Edmond Albius – an orphan slave raised by Ferréol Beaumont, a white botanist on Bourbon Island, as Réunion was known until 1848 – the novel explores appropriation and the injustices embedded in the economic forces that govern international trade to this day. When Edmond unlocks the secret to the pollination of vanilla, the consequences ripple out around the world, changing the Western palate and enriching many of those engaged in the commodity’s exploitation. But for its bright young discoverer, who harbours ambitions ‘to become the first Black botanist in this world of Rich Whites’ but ‘doesn’t have the right colour skin to have callings’, the repercussions are much darker and more painful, bringing him up against the systemic injustices and human cruelty that robbed him of his natural parents in the first place.

Rhetoric and rhythms are at the heart of Bélem’s craft. She wields repetition with a barrister’s flair, driving home the force of what she’s presenting and, by getting the reader to look and look again, forcing us to recognise injustices and assumptions that we might at otherwise choose to ignore, or else be habituated to. Take this early passage obliging us to unpack the significance of the first question Ferréol asks when he lays eyes on baby Edmond: ‘What is it?’

‘It’ – this ebony child that casts him into partial shadow as it comes between the curve of a pale sun and his screwedup eyes. ‘It’ – three kilos and six hundred grams of tender flesh, wrapped up like a black lamb in a woollen cloth. ‘It’ – a living bundle of obvious trouble.

Juxtaposition plays a similar role. As Edmond’s life turns towards ruin and jail, and, in the wake of so-called emancipation, he, like many others, finds himself bound by a ‘freedom that shackles him’, we read of the vanilla-infused delicacies dreamed up by leading chefs to grace the tables of the beau monde.

Structures like these make the injustices at the heart of the story evident without Bélem needing to state them. By writing in this way, she leads us to construct the points for ourselves rather than proclaiming them. We collaborate with her and the book seems to throw its arms around us, bringing all readers into the human story rather than excluding and shaming those who might take criticism of colonialism as a personal attack.

This profound understanding of human motivation soaks the novel in empathy. Instead of two-dimensional actors in a morality play, Bélem gives us human beings in the round. For all his blind spots and hypocrisy, Ferréol is a vulnerable, lonely creature whose world is enriched by the relationship he forms with his adopted son. Likewise, Edmond for all his hopefulness and brilliance, is not immune to exhibiting internalised racism and double standards. We see systemic injustice, but we also see human ingenuity and specificity – the ability to manoeuvre around seemingly immovable obstacles and build bridges against the odds.

All of which makes Edmond’s betrayal and the fallout from it particularly poignant. That these two people should be able to hold themselves aloof from social mores for so long only to collapse beneath the weight of expectations and their own conditioning is a tragedy – a painful revelation of the dangers of failing to recognise the limits on our own thinking when we imagine ourselves to be free.

Bullaun Press’s edition of The Rarest Fruit publishes in the UK and Ireland on 1 May. And for readers in the US, another version, translated by Hildegarde Serle, comes out from Europa in June. It would be very interesting to compare both English versions. The fact of their release only a month apart is surely testament to the power of the original text.

The Rarest Fruit by Gaëlle Bélem, translated from the French by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert (Bullaun Press, 2025)

Photo: ‘Vanilla’ by Linda De Volder on flickr.com

Book of the month: Eva Baltasar

April 28, 2023 By in Book of the month, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Back in the Neolithic age, when I was an undergraduate student, there was a fashion at my university for professors to set provocative questions on the contemporary literature exam paper. One example went something like this: ‘The Booker prize rewards the right author but rarely the right book. Discuss.’

The truth is, literary prizes can be tricky things. At their best, they are great platforms, raising up brilliant books that many of us would never otherwise hear about. As I found several times during my quest to read a book from every country, they can be invaluable guides for readers with little experience of books from certain parts of the world, particularly when they are led and judged by experts on the writing of the region.

However, prizes can also be skewed by the interests and biases of their founders and sponsors. At their worst, they run the risk of rewarding literature that conforms to a certain kind of system or worldview rather than purely championing quality writing. Or, as the essay question suggests, they make awkward compromises driven by external factors, plumping for safe choices over daring, exciting work.

The International Booker Prize, however, seems to be doing a fairly good job of dodging these pitfalls. Since it merged with the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2015, it has recognised a number of brilliant and surprising works that refuse to conform to the anglophone publishing industry’s prevailing trends.

This year’s shortlist is no exception. Not only does it feature Standing Heavy, a Book of the month of mine from a little while back, but it also contains the engrossing and mind-bending Boulder.

This is a novel that resists a summary. ‘Nothing is essential when you refuse to imprison life in a narrative,’ explains the protagonist in the opening pages, as she describes her nomadic existence, largely as a chef on board cargo ships. Gradually, however, the scattered elements in the pages are pulled into alignment by a relationship that at first grounds and then overwhelms the narrator, to the point where she risks losing herself.

Part of what is so arresting and subversive in the writing is its presentation of a female voice discussing female experience as though from the outside. ‘I talk about women without counting myself among them,’ says the narrator. ‘I’m not a woman. I am the cook on an old merchant ship.’

As a result, when her lover Samsa decides to have a child, the narrator finds herself observing gestation and early motherhood, while struggling to define and defend her own role in the family. At times, her tone is misogynistic. In fact, her femaleness gives her licence to express things that may sound unacceptable in a male voice. Mired in domesticity, she explains how responsibility ‘sutures itself to the brain and contaminates the blood with its narcotic fluids’, leading her to seek solace with drinking buddies and other women in the time-honoured tradition of many a jaded husband.

But there is also a wonderful freshness to her perspective. Her description of observing Samsa deliver their child is one of the most powerful reflections on the process of giving birth I’ve had the privilege to read:

‘It becomes clear to me how imperfect nature is. Imperfect and cruel, almost furious. It’s not wise and never has been. How many centuries have to pass before a woman can give birth without it looking like an experiment? The midwife keeps a cool head. She asks the baby to flow and Samsa to flow with it. All I can think about are cesareans. I am witnessing something reckless. Like stealing jewels from a museum or breaking prisoners out of a police van—there’s just so much that can go wrong. Every second contains a possible mistake. Danger sticks out its tongue and coats everything in a layer of gluey, lethal drool.’

The use of language is key to the book’s success (hearty credit to translator Julia Sanches here). Fragments at the opening. Contradictions. Disjointed phrases and objects. The narrator drifting from place to place, garnering fleeting impressions that are gradually harnessed into longer sentences as convention snares her in its net.

One of the most thrilling aspects is the writing’s capacity to simultaneously reveal and conceal the emotional or psychological reality of the situations it describes. On several occasions, a word that the narrator seems to have intended in a figurative sense later proves to have literal truth. As she becomes unstuck from herself, so her words turn against her, at once masking and advertising the extent of her predicament.

For my money, this thrilling subversion of language and convention is what makes Boulder’s place on the International Booker Prize shortlist so well deserved. But perhaps that’s because subversiveness appeals to me. It could be that disruption is simply another kind of system and it’s in my nature to reward and promote stories that conform to it.

Either way, the fact remains that this is a wonderful, thrilling read. Slender but far from lightweight, this novel rides roughshod over heteronormative storytelling etiquette. It’s great to know that its shortlisting will mean it finds its way into many more readers’ hands.

Boulder by Eva Baltasar, translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches (And Other Stories, 2022)

Picture: ‘Merchant ships’ by Andres Alvarado on flickr.com

Book of the month: Fernanda Melchor

February 29, 2020 By in Book of the month, Central America Tags: , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

Mexican stories have been much in the news in recent weeks. The controversy that blew up around US author Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt brought questions of authenticity and who decides which voices are heard in an industry skewed strongly in favour of white, anglophone authors to the forefront of many booklovers’ minds.

As often happens in such situations, the debate pitted two issues connected with freedom of expression against each other: the right of all communities to be heard and to speak for themselves versus the right of individual artists to allow their imaginations to venture into whatever territory they wish to explore.

This is not an easy conflict to resolve. However, it is problematic to make one title the battleground for such far-reaching concerns. Just as writers rarely, if ever, set out to speak on behalf of their nation, ethnicity or other demographic markers, so single novels are hardly ever designed to carry the weight of such issues. It is unfortunate that the way many big publishers and the mainstream media deal with books (giving a handful of titles 90 per cent of the attention and focus) means that these conversations usually remain reactionary and tied to specific events rather than opening up into more thoughtful, meaningful debates.

One positive thing that did come out of the furore, however, was a series of tweets from translators and other Latin American literature aficionados sharing titles by Mexican writers that deserve more attention. As they pointed out, there is an embarrassment of riches to choose from. Favourite names in the frame included Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World (translated by Lisa Dillman), The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza (translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana) and Brenda Lozano’s Loop (translated by Annie McDermott) – all of which, I heartily second.

For my money, however, there is one recent Mexican book that stands in a class of its own: Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, translated by Sophie Hughes. Set in motion by the discovery of the body of an ambiguous figure known as ‘The Witch’ in an irrigation canal on the outskirts of the impoverished village of La Matosa, this whirlwind of a novel rampages through an entire community, blowing back curtains, breaking down walls and cracking open skulls to lay bare the secrets within.

Each chapter focuses on the experiences of a different person, plunging into their fears and rifling their memories to reveal the steps that led to the savage killing at the book’s heart. Circling around and around, often rehearsing the same incidents several times in different words, the narrative smashes together intimacy and violence, beauty and filth, creating an accretion of details that coheres into a compelling and disturbing exploration of scapegoating and the legacy of abuse.

The urgency of the subject matter is mirrored stylistically. Each chapter forms a single block of text, often containing sentences that run for a page or more, and, although each one represents a particular characters’ experiences, the narrative perspective swings like a ceiling light in a gale, illuminating now the interior monologue of the character in focus, now the voices of the community, now prejudices internalised below the level of conscious thought. Occasionally, it even casts its glare on the reader, who is at points a bystander, gossip, police officer or other player in the action.

This approach is extremely risky – and in lesser writers’ hands it would be a mess. However, with Melchor and Hughes, the writing pulses with energy. The chaos comes from the sort of virtuosity that arises from painstaking effort; the force and bluster is the result of laser precision.

But the reader is expected to work too. The book is unapologetic in its demands. In addition to assigning the reader roles at various points, it requires intense concentration. The dense weave of the chapters does not support dipping in and out. Distractions must be put aside.

And you can forget about being babied. With song lyrics kept in Spanish and cultural references left largely unexplained, this is not a text that comes meekly to the reader but one that requires its audience to meet it on its own territory, ready or not.

The same goes for the subject matter. This is one of the most explicit books I have read. To me, it never feels gratuitous – indeed, one of its greatest achievements is the way that the events are so richly imagined that Melchor and Hughes manage to take us into extreme mindsets (from murderous frenzies and rank bigotry to fantasies involving bestiality) and show the mechanisms by which love and vulnerability can be sublimated into such things. But there’s no getting away from the fact that, for some readers, this will be too much.

I don’t expect this will do anything to impede Hurricane Season‘s progress to the lasting success it richly deserves, however. It contains that rare energy and vitality that now and then power a story far beyond its beginnings and into the collective imagination. The day I finished reading it, I heard that it had been longlisted for the International Booker Prize. I have a feeling it won’t stop there.

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020)

Photo: ‘The Walls Come Tumbling Down’ by Carl Campbell on flickr.com