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One of the many startling things about José Saramago was that he was an overtly political writer in a literary world in which being political does not pay. Remarkably, at the age of 85 he began a highly controversial blog and these occasional pieces, collected in The Notebook (Verso, 2010) – squibs, memoranda, appreciations of friends, and diatribes against a wide range of targets including the Vatican and the church (‘parasites on civil society’), Bush (‘a liar emeritus’), Berlusconi (‘absolute lord and master of Italy’), Sarkozy (‘the irresponsible’), racism, anti-immigrant policies, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, and the right-wing government of Portugal – are a fascinatingly direct insight into the mind of a literary Nobel prizewinner who no longer cared very much what effect his opinions could have on his own standing, but who wanted passionately to cut through the fake discourse, the lies that he called the ‘other truth’, that allow our modern form [...]

I haven’t read more than three chapters of Steve Stern’s The Frozen Rabbi, but I’m moved to blog about it straight away for a couple of good reasons.
First off, I just love the title, and the premise of the book. The novel starts with a fifteen year old boy rooting around in his family’s giant freezer – a kelvinator – groping around for a piece of meat (inspired by his reading of Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint). Instead of a hand-replacing slice of liver he comes across a frozen rabbi.  In the three words of the title you’ve got a beautiful mix of the concrete and the fantastic, the surreal and the solid.
The premise, though, in the hands of the wrong author could be a disaster. It’s clear, though, from the first two chapters, that you’re in safe hands, with author Steve Stern. There’s comic timing, a love of words, and a sure-handedness in the telling that [...]

The American Academic Cass R. Sunstein has an interesting argument in his book Republic.com.2.0 Revenge of the Blogs, that the abundance of information, choice, and social networking available on the internet ultimately leads to a more restricted closed culture. For a well functioning system of free expression, Sunstein argues, there are certain requirements that go beyond the absence of government control and censorship; one of these is that people should be exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance. “Unplanned, unanticipated encounters are central to democracy itself’. The scope for those unplanned encounters are rapidly being diminished by friendly algorithms that analyse your online activity and focus on things you should, in all probability, like.
In book-selling terms this is nothing new really. With the advent of major chain bookstores we’ve become accustomed to clearly delineated sections – books fit into popular fiction / literary fiction / crime etc and rarely is one [...]

So, you want to write a thought-provoking novel about consciousness, death, fatherhood and the role of narrative in our lives? What’s the best way to do it? A stereotypical gothic mansion turned into a health clinic run by a mad scientist doesn’t sound like a promising start.  A split universe setting whose hero is chick, a circus freak troupe character who is basically a chicken-boy,  wouldn’t be the average novelist’s choice either.  Jack O’Connell, whom I had never heard of before picking up The Resurrectionist*, is thankfully far from average, and has managed to dive into these themes in exactly that manner, and in the process has conjured up a dark, delirious, and gripping story that remained with this reader long after the final page was turned.
The story centers around Sweeney, a pharmacist desperately seeking a cure for his comatose son Danny. He moves his son to the fortresslike Peck clinic, where hushed voices suggest [...]

Daisy Godwin’s relatively recent (at least by our standards) lament about the lack of redmption in so many of today’s novels – made whilst chairing the Orange Prize judging panel – put her in good company. Samuel Johnson famously endorsed  Nahum Tate’s sugar coated revision of Shakespeare’s King Lear, commenting:
“Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity. And, if my sensations could add anything to the general suffrage, I might relate that I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.”
From the old King wandering madly in a violent storm, and the savage gouging out of Gloucester’s eyes, through to the  dramatic dashing of the audience’s hopes with Cordelia’s death, Johnson was right – at least about one thing. It is truly shocking, and [...]

Most of the drama of this year’s World Cup in South Africa seems to be taking place off the pitch (thanks to the likes of John Terry, Raymond Domenech, and Nicolas Anelka), but that just serves to point out what Catalan  novelist Manuel Vazquez Montalban (creator of the excellent Pepe Carvallho detective novels) put his finger on when he described football as a “post modern religion [..] Its cathedrals are stadiums, its gods footballers, its faithful the millions of fans who not only participate in this ritual every matchday, but practise their faith on a daily basis, thinking about and reflecting on the deeds of their gods.”
Or to put it in simpler terms, football is about much more than just football. And with that in mind, we’ve lined up a short list of great (and perhaps surprising) books that go well with the beautiful game, both for footie fans and literary types  who are already fed [...]

I discovered Samuel Beckett’s Murphy after a Friday-night friend boozily extolled its dark and comic virtues (‘he wants his ashes to be flushed down the jacks of the Abbey theatre, but instead they get spilled in a barfight!’).  In similar circumstances I’ve had the good luck to stumble upon great books by writers as varied and diverse as Mervyn Wall, Flann O’Brien, Anne Enright and Sebastian Barry.
It may be the company I keep, or indeed the courses I took in college, but nobody has ever sat me down, in a bar or otherwise, to enthusiastically sing the praises of Edna O’Brien. She’s a writer who, perhaps more than any of her Irish contemporaries, seems to have fallen into public disfavour, to the point where – in my experience – nobody discusses her work, and if her name comes up it is usually to focus on her personality (volatile, eccentric, stagey – so the spiel [...]

The more I think back on Louise Welsh’s latest novel, Naming the Bones, which I finished just over two weeks ago, the more quietly impressed I am by it.  And if that seems like damning with faint praise, nothing could be further from the truth.  While the novel has a narrative arc that brings its protagonist on a quest from Glasgow and Edinburgh up to the wild and windswept island of Lismore, against a backdrop of the occult, infanticide, drugs and voyeurism, the story itself is told confidently, quietly, and above all else without bluster.
The story revolves around a luckless and love-lorn academic, Murray Watson, who, with his academic research, is trying to reclaim the reputation of dead Scottish poet Archie Lunan. Lunan – splendidly made-up by Welsh, who avoids making the mistake of inventing his poetry, which alwasy remains off-stage – died young in an accident/suicide having taken to the seas off Lismore foolhardily [...]

In a TMO interview with Australian novelist Tim Winton, the question of faith and doubt came up, and more specifically the suitability of different literary formats to deal with them.
“TMO:How much room  in a novel is there for the unexplained, and the unexplainable?
Tim Winton: I think there’s plenty of room. For hinting at it, for leaving the door open for mystery. Sure. Particularly now that the novel is freed from the old constraints of naturalism. Think of works by John Crowley or Jonathan Carroll or the middle novels of Brian Moore. Or Salley Vickers, or Hilary Mantel. The difficulty is in discussing the nature of mystery, which poetry does much better, because it has in its form – mostly stripped of narrative machinery – the lightness required. All these glancing moments, images, echoes which say more with less. A song has similar advantages. ”
It’s an interesting prism through which to read Brian Moore’s strange and beautiful [...]

It is a typical Harry Rent moment. The protagonist of Mark Sarvas’s well crafted novel Harry Revised is trapped – almost Bloom like – by indecision, in a bookshop where his task seems relatively simple: to buy the novel that will be his reference book for a much needed re-birth, Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo.
Abridged or Unabridged? That is the question
Harry stands in the deserted, brighlty lit Fiction & Literature secion of his favourite chain bookstore, weighing a book in each hand. In his right, The Count of Monte Cristo (Penguin, unabridged) weighing in at a formidable 1,276 pages. In his left, The Count of Monte Cristo (Puffin classics, abridged) tipping the scales at a svelte 396 pages. Harry weighs the pros and cons of each, literally as well as figuratively.
He can’t deny that an irresistible bit of cachet comes with being an unabridged sort of guy. If depth follows effort, as Harry is [...]

Imagine a 12 year old genius living on a ranch in Montana. He is a scientist and makes maps of everything from entymology to how to shake hands with God. As you might expect, he is, therefore, predictably weird and socially dysfunctional. Keeping his maps in rigorously colour-coded notebooks, Tecumseh Sparrow (yes this kid is partially named after a bird…..long story but a good one!) Spivet lives a life of documentation, which the reader can literally see as Larsen has peppered the entire novel with T.S’s diagrams and intellectual doodles. There is reading and looking in this one and definitely has the potential to seriously annoy  readers who don’t enjoy turning the book upside down, from side to side and generally looking at the thing from every conceivable angle. You really do have to enter into the spirit of seemingly random narrative formatting if you want to give this one a go.
Having a genius child [...]

I finished Kader Abdolah’s The House of the Mosque on the same day that organised celebrations (and crackdowns on civil unrest) took place in Tehran to mark the anniversary of the 1979 revolution which swept Mohammad-Rez? Sh?h Pahlavi from power and led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Looking at the pictures broadcast, of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his supporters, one could be forgiven for thinking that the population of Iran consists solely of bearded men, sharing single-mindedly one monotheistic culture. A revolution dominated by men, for the benefit of men.
Against that backdrop, there seemed little in Abdolah’s Iranian fable to excite my interest. Does the world really need yet another big (male-written) sweeping epic? Sweeping up, in this case the period before and after the revolution, and doing so in a fairly traditional narrative voice – using the trials and tribulations of one family to cast light on the society around [...]

Coming off the back of reading more than my fair share of European crime-fiction (culminating with Stieg Larsson’s posthumuous sales-phenomenon The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) – a genre where plot, reasonably enough, is tight and pragmatic, where the reader must above all else understand what’s happening – it was a palate-cleansing delight to dive into Anne Enright’s crazed and crazy elliptical poem of a novel, The Wig My Father Wore.
Like many, I had heard precious little of Enright before her Man Booker winning The Gathering, a title which remains on my ‘must get around to reading’ list. Part of my reluctance to read The Gathering has come from the reviews, and more particularly from the comments of a number of friends involved in a reading-group which almost universally disliked the book – put off by its grim theme (a family struggling to understand the suicide of one of its members).
Enright’s first novel, though, from [...]

Chanced upon an interesting review of Anne Enright’s ‘The Gathering’ http://bit.ly/ZyJvW #
Hearing good things about David Vann’s ‘Legend of a suicide’ http://bit.ly/215OEP #
So it turns out that @wuming6 is not, in fact, Wu Ming – see: http://bit.ly/D7AED Cheeky! RT @VersoBooksUK #

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When I first saw the candy crusted bunny leering at me from a shelf in a bookshop, I thought ‘ah…another post- modern whatever self-absorbed ramble from a worthy author’s jadedness’. I have a particular weakness for being both attracted to and repelled by such narcissism which is why my eye wandered up to ‘The Death of Bunny Munro’, the latest fictional offering from Nick Cave following the fairly well received ‘And the Ass Saw the Angel
’. When, a second later, I actually realised that it was in fact Nick Cave’s new novel that I was looking at, I felt a characteristic shift in my (now) second impression. The cover now looked eccentric, quirky and obviously sinister. I snatched it up immediately. I mean, it’s Nick Cave, why wouldn’t I? I was absolutely certain that this novel was going to be downright profound. I was already forming opinions on the bus on the way home, which [...]

Should the laws of physics apply? Oyeyemi’s White is for Witchinghttp://bit.ly/14Uaxc #
Flightpaths – a networked novel
http://www.flightpaths.net/ #
Ruth Dudley Edwards takes Banville to task. Is he slumming it when writing as Benjamin Black?
http://bit.ly/IdN2H #
The Guardian ‘not the booker’ prize longlist is here – you can vote until the 23rd August
http://bit.ly/7P6p0 #
Coetzee reads from his new novel Summertime, at the NY Review of Books http://bit.ly/4lOOeB #
The short story that earned George Saunders a fellowship
http://bit.ly/mOsOJ #
‘How can you be a great writer if you’re just an ordinary little man’ – Coetzee’s Summertime reviewed
http://bit.ly/OWjpi #
The Future of fiction
http://bit.ly/1xj1V #
“Like a man riding a bicycle on board a ship.” – Readers take on Ulysses http://bit.ly/39Rxk6 #

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Should the laws of physics apply to a novel? There are readers who,  not without reason, demand that yes, the laws of gravity, and thermodynamics must apply at all times if the work is to be taken seriously.
For example, if a character is to cross a room, they should do so – with or without purpose (for psychology within the novel is a whole different ball game) –  obeying the laws of motion, where mass, force and acceleration combine to produce movement.
To put it another way, a house should not be able to propel a character through its rooms.
This is, of course, rubbish. When you pick up a novel you are automatically negotiating with the author that famous suspension of disbelief. You know the characters and events are not ‘real’, but for all the reasons we value literature you are prepared to get past that fact – if the novelist is good.
Helen Oyeyemi is a [...]

Did you know socialism was bad? You did? Good. Because it is, you know. Bad, that is – not good. Just thought you might need straightening out on that point, the one about socialism being bad. A lot of you westerners think it’s good, you see. But it’s not. It’s bad.

This kind of preaching mars the work of many an older Polish writer. (You don’t find it so much in the younger generation.) Along with the constant reminders that socialism is bad there often goes a chippy, complaining tone about how westerners not only don’t appreciate how bad socialism is (not even “was”) but have the cheek to complain about conditions in the west. As if any kind of attempted move by westerners in the direction of social justice was a betrayal of Sakharov, the Warsaw uprising, Katy?… there’s nothing in the shops goddammit! You can probably imagine how much sympathy they have for [...]

‘Tragic’ was always one of those easy-to-reach for words used to describe Northern Ireland’s ‘troubles’. It managed to avoid picking sides, and recognised that things were more complicated on the ground than the simple catholic vs protestant / irish vs british equations.  Not such a bad thing, but more often than not it was also used as an embarassed sideshuffle to simply avoid expressing an opinion – the simultansous turning of the cheek and a blind eye.
Bernard McLaverty’s superb 1983 novel Cal is tragic in a more thoughtful and traditional sense. This is a thoroughly engaged novel that lays brutal facts on the table – it demands of the reader a conclusion while providing no simple answer.
Cal is a young catholic who lives with his father in a once-mixed neighbourhood where they’re a heartbeat away from being burnt out by a sectarian mob. Long haired, he spends much of his time in his room listening [...]

It’s refreshing to hear an author declare in no uncertain terms that they don’t like the cover of their novel. M.J. Hyland did exactly that on a recent radio interview when asked about her latest novel This is How. Not, presumably because there’s anything wrong with the cover per se – it’s an elegant and striking image – but because it has nothing to do with the novel it contains (in the case of Hyland’s book, from what of it I’ve read so far, the cover is actually actively misleading).
I wonder what Christine Dwyer Hickey makes of the cover of her latest novel, The Last Train from Liguria ? It’s not actively misleading – it gives the impression of a historical novel shrouded in mystery, which is what the book essentially is – but something about it gave me the wrong impression. It’s hard to pinpoint it, but perhaps that soft-focus photo on the cover [...]