The Danger of a Single Story

In a very interesting lecture in the excellent TED series, Nigerian author, Chimamanda Adichie, talks about the danger of misunderstanding which can arise when we only hear a single story about another person or country.



(Thanks, Reza, for the link.)

Shih-Li for Frank O'Connor

Congratulations to Shih-Li Kow and to Silverfish. Ripples has been longlisted for the Frank O'Connor Short Story prize (as Wena Poons Lions in Winter was last year).

The list is 57 strong (up from 38 last year) with most entries coming from the US and UK, and there are some pretty big names on there, including Chimananda Ngozi Adichie and Kazuo Ishiguro.

As The Short Review says :

... this is a wonderful move on the part of the organisers, giving much-needed publicity to many, many books not published by mainstream publishers but by small presses without teams of publicists ... . What is also wonderful is that "big" names are alongside newer writers, showcasing that the short story is not just the province of those who have yet to "graduate" to novels!

(Thanks Steven of Horizon Books for sending me the news and the links!)

Amis the Gynocrat, Adichie the Arrogant

A couple of nice author stories from The Independent today. Martin Amis describes himself as a "gynocrat" in an interview with Christina Patterson, and says he believes that the world would be better run by women. His new novel, The Pregnant Widow, is about the sexual revolution, and is due out in September Her teacher once wrote of her "She is stubborn, arrogant, she has no respect," but Chinua Achebe calls her is "a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers." Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has a new collection of stories out, set between Nigeria and America called The Thing Around Your Neck. (You can read the title story over at Prospect Magazine.)

Genius Grant for Adichie, Crystal Ball for Atwood, Porn for Proulx

Recent news of three of my favourite literary ladies.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been awarded one of this year's MacArthur Foundation's "genius grants", as its fellowships are more popularly known and receives a free annual grant of $100,000 for a five-year period. other authors who have won the award in previous years include Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott, Cormac McCarthy and the late David Foster Wallace

Margaret Atwood has a gift for social prophecy :

In 1984 she wrote a dystopian vision of a fundamentalist society in which women are reduced to the status of child-bearers and servants, forcibly desexualised and veiled - The Handmaid's Tale pre-empted the Taleban's misogynist regime in Afghanistan, and the rows over Islamic women's dress and rights in Europe. Another futuristic novel, Oryx and Crake, charted the destruction of the Earth by global warming, pandemics and rampant genetic engineering. It was published in 2003, before Sars, bird flu, An Inconvenient Truth, and the genome revolution.

Her latest non-fiction book is Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth - which examines :

... ideas of debt, balance and revenge in history, society and literature.

With the current finanacial turmoil in mind, Gatti asks :

So where does she keep her crystal ball?

Meanwhile Annie Proulx tells Robert J. Hughes in the Wall Street Journal [found via] that she is having problems with fans sending offering her their interpretations of the Brokeback Mountain :

There are countless people out there who think the story is open range to explore their fantasies and to correct what they see as an unbearably disappointing story. They constantly send ghastly manuscripts and pornish rewrites of the story to me, expecting me to reply with praise and applause for 'fixing' the story. They certainly don't get the message that if you can't fix it, you've got to stand it.

Proulx's latest her latest story collection Fine Just the Way It Is is her third set in Wyoming.

A Window on Biafra

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, got a thumbs up from every member of our book club at our meeting last night. The novel was discussed up and down and inside out after a lovely supper cooked by Shashi (though it did seem a little wrong to be discussing a book in which the characters are literally starving to death, with comfortable full tums.)

I think the novel profoundly affected all of us.

Renata and I who had grown up in Britain, remember the shocking footage of the war in Biafra shown on the television news, and especially the images of starving children with bloated bellies. It was the first time ever that such a thing had been shown. (Ethiopia ... Darfur ... haven't we just got so blase about the images of starvation since then?) Our Malaysian friends, and Naho in Japan who joined in our conversation via Skype (ah the miracles of modern technology!) had not heard of the war at all, or only heard it mentioned in the vaguest terms and so were grateful to learn about it.

I lived in Nigeria in the early '80's and can attest to the fact that the war was not a topic of conversation.*

I was living in the North of the country, so far away geographically from what was then Biafra, so perhaps that was part of the reason. One of my closest friends there was an Igbo - a physics graduate from Nsukka called Frederick, who was posted to my school as a "Youth Corper" - and a handful of the girls I taught were too, so I learned much about the culture of the Igbo from them. But I can remember only one person really talking about the Biafran war with me - a taxi driver who had been a soldier with the Nigerian forces during the conflict and who had returned home badly wounded.

Adichie gives the conflict a very human face by taking her time to create a cast of characters we really care about - especially the twin sisters Olanna and Kainene, and the houseboy Ugwu who comes to lives with Odenigbo, (an intellectual of revolutionary persuasion) and Olanna's love interest. (The group felt that Adichie had probably struggled much harder with the wimpy British journalist, Richard, Kainene's lover, who decides to throw his lot in with the Igbo people .) There are a number of very well realised minor characters including the twins' wealthy parents, and Richard's comic houseboy Harrison, who delights in concocting British dishes.

The main events are seen from the vantage point of these Olanna, Richard and Ugwu in turn.

"Unputdownable" was a word that was used rather a lot, last night. As I said before, I was a bit thrown initially by what I felt were strong similarities (probably imagined?) to Romesh Gunasekera's Reef, but was quickly drawn into the book by all the human drama - love, infidelity, sisterly rivalry, family tensions, black magic. Then, when the war came, for me the physical book in my hands melted and became an open door. I wasn't watching Biafra in black and white news broadcasts - I was there. Yes, there were of course harrowing scenes, but it is the story of day to day survival in the face of starvation that Adichie portrays so well.

You can read an excerpt from the novel here, and do check out Adichie's website. You might also like to revisit Janet Tay's excellent review of the novel from Starmag.

I was wondering how the novel (first published in the US) would be received in Africa, and was very moved by the comments left by Nigerians invited to tell their own Biafra story, particularly those who mention that reading the novel gave them their first opportunity to talk about their own experiences or to find out from their parents what really happened. This is an episode in Nigeria's past that very much needed to be written about and Adichie makes that history highly accessible.

(*It isn't in the school textbooks either.)

Getting the Houseboy to Read

A young boy is taken by a relative to the house of a wealthy, somewhat eccentric man with long hair to work as a houseboy. His new master is a good man with a lovely speaking voice and a large library. He is concerned about the boy's education and gives him books to read. The boy does his best to please his new master and win his heart with his culinary prowess. The man has friends who comes to the house to discuss politics against a background of political unrest (leading to civil war) while the boy listens. There is one special woman in the man's life whom the boy falls in love with too.

Has anyone else noted the close similarity of the opening chapter of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half a Yellow Sun (my current read) and Romesh Gunasekera's Reef? Nothing more than coincidence, I'm sure, but it's making me feel quite weird ...

This, anyway, is my next read, a long-overdue want-to-read from my burgeoning to-be-read-shelf. I am as usual running behind with the reviews here of things read, but hope to post more as soon as I have a backlog of articles out of the way.

But what are you guys reading? I'm sure we'd all love to know.

Achebe's Book Hits 50

Celebrations are planned in cities across the US to celebrate the 50th anniversary of one of the twentieth centuries greatest novels, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.

Scott Timberg in the Los Angeles Times pays tribute, and looks at how it has influenced other African authors.

Chris Abani, a nigerian author based in Los Angeles calls the book :

... inescapable. ... You're either working against it or within it; you're rejecting it or you're accepting it. But the conversation has to include it.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Princeton University professor of philosophy points out that :

The book establishes a series of conventions on how things are to be written about . . . that had never been represented before. ... No one had taken the stately cadences of traditional African speech into English.

And Half a Yellow Sun author Chimamanda Adichie says the novel led to:

... a glorious shock of discovery. It taught me that my world was worthy of literature, that books could also have people like me in them.

I count myself very lucky to have had the opportunity to teach the novel to a class of very enthusiastic Form Five students in Nigeria who made my experience of reading Achebe even more special.

Authors on the Beeb

Don't know if you've managed to catch Hardtalk Extra on the BBC on Fridays, but the past few weeks have provided a real feast for book lovers.

I missed Barbara Kingsolver, a few weeks back and am still kicking myself.

I caught Zainah Nawawi interviewing Ishmael Beah on Hardtalk. (Though her questions made me scream with frustration as I knew many of the answers before he opened his mouth because they're in the book!)

Our friend Hari Kunzru was interviewed on Gavin Esler about the politics of identity, and perceptions of "multi-culturalism"in Britain, and of course on how freedom of expression is vital to society. On the Rushdie debate he said that he is scared of:

... the certainty that brooks no debate or otherness

and that:

... I don't believe that there is a right not to be offended.

Last Friday I caught the interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who was of course talking about the Western stereotype of Africa as a basket case (and having left a big part of my heart in Nigeria, I have to agree with her) and how she finds herself increasingly forced to become a spokesperson for things African in the media even though she doesn't see herself as political.

I have to say ... I think she is stunningly beautiful ... intelligence on a face is the best cosmetic.

(You can watch the interviews of all the on the BBC website, and Adichie's is also here.)

And there's another treat this week when another of my favourite authors, Pat Barker, is interviewed.

Really a big thank you, BBC.

James Tait Black Shortlists

The shortlists for the James Tait Black, Britain's oldest literary award have been announced. The contenders for the fiction prize are:

• The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro
• The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• Seven Lies by James Lasdun
• Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Electricity by Ray Robinson

There are some very strong contenders: Orange winner Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as well as Pulitzer winner Cormac McCarthy and Booker shortlisted Sarah Walters.

But the shortlist also spotlights other excellent works which have slipped a little more below the radar (well my radar at least!): The View from Castle Rock is a collection of stories by Canadian author Alice Munro: in the first part of the book they are based on material Munro uncovered when researching her own family history in Scotland, and in the second, they are based on more autobiographical material. (I've much enjoyed some of Munro's earlier stories - she has to be one of the best short-fiction writers alive.)

Dina will be very happy to see her friend and former coursemate Ray Robinson, on the list! (The only debut novelist on it.) Electricity, written as part of his PhD in creative writing features a protagonist who is epileptic but refuses the label. (On the Lancaster University website, Robinson describes his research and talks about working on his writing in an academic environment.)

Seven Lies is James Lasdun's second novel, and is a thriller set in Berlin and New York. The blurb on the award website describes it as:

... a page-turning study of betrayal, guilt and shame with just enough allegory about it to keep America’s National Security State in unsettling focus.

(I can see my friend Kaykay getting all excited about this one!)

You can read more about all the shortlisted fiction, as well as the books listed for the The James Tait Black award for biography here, and in the Guardian.

Let's Talk About Sex

My review of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach in the Star today.

One might think that Ian McEwan is treading on slightly dangerous ground in his new novella, On Chesil Beach, having chosen for himself a scenario which, for British readers (at least), will bring to mind smutty seaside postcards and sniggered blue jokes: a young couple on honeymoon find themselves unable to consummate their marriage. Instead, he presents us with a heartbreaking tale of misunderstanding and lost love.

It’s the early 1960’s, a few years before the so-called “sexual revolution” and the advent of The Pill and the accompanying shift in moral attitudes. Girls are still expected to “keep themselves” for a future husband and nice girls don’t “go all the way”. Edward and Florence are pretty typical of their time: they come to their wedding night with no sexual experience.

Both are anticipating the now officially sanctioned act of sexual intercourse with trepidation. Edward worries about how the act might be achieved “without absurdity or disappointment” and is afraid of (as he quaintly puts it) “arriving too soon” while Florence has “a visceral dread” of sex which she sees as a physical violation.

To make matters worse, she has been further put off by a sex manual she has read in lieu of being able to have an intimate conversation with the women in her life. Despite its “cheery tones and exclamation marks and numbered illustrations” the book is written in a formal sexual vocabulary that almost makes her gag in places. She though realises that she has signed all rights in the gloomy sacristy after the wedding ceremony and prepares resignedly to meet her fate.

McEwan fills in the story of the couple’s path to the altar in flashbacks, and draws each as a convincing individual. Florence is a talented violinist who dreams of performing with her string quartet at the hallowed Wigmore Hall. Edward is studying history at University College and wants to write biographies. Both are idealists who actively support CND (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) and, in fact, meet when he encounters her handing out leaflets in Oxford. The later tragedy is compounded by the fact that this is a couple already very much in love. They are physically and intellectually well-matched, and they have already negotiated many of the practical difficulties which might have separated them.

But neither has yet learned how to break free of cloying convention. Neither have an appetite for the heavy roast beef dinner they are served in their room but struggle to finish it because it seems the polite thing to do. They are at liberty to kick off their shoes and run down to the beach but actually don’t because, “for now, the times held them ? a thousand unacknowledged rules still applied.” And so it is with sex.

Marked by clumsiness, down-right ignorance and an inability to communicate with each other about their feelings, their fumbling attempts at intercourse are indeed every bit as disastrous as both feared. McEwan doesn’t flinch from detail (a single kiss is given a page and a half, for example) but the writing is never prurient. Indeed, there really isn’t a word out of place in this beautifully crafted story.

In a moment of disgust and blind panic, Florence rushes out of the room. In their angry confrontation, injured pride stands in the way of any real communication and the conversation has life long repercussions for both.

How ironic it is that in the larger scheme of things their lives are destroyed – not by an atom bomb (as both feared) or by the whims of a dictator (of the sort that Edward is researching) but because the society of the time did not make discussion of intimate matters possible.

The book makes a convincing plea for effective sex education that deserves to be heard in the Malaysia of the early 21st century.

There's also a very nice review by J.N.C. Tay (Janet trying to be a bit incognito?) of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's, Half A Yellow Sun.

In the print version of the paper there are vouchers to clip that will give you a very good discount on the books. (25% off the McEwan at Kinokuniya and 20% off Adichie's book at MPH).

(Photo stolen from the Age.)

Adichie's Desks

I wrote at the dining table when I could not use my father's desk because he was working or because a sibling was on the phone. The table, light green and long, was the family dumping ground -- of newspapers, university circulars, wedding invitations, bananas or groundnuts bought on the way home -- and the tiny ants that lived underneath it appeared after breakfast to crowd around bits of sugar or bread. I always cleared a space for myself at one end, opposite the grand old wood-paneled air conditioner, used so rarely that a puff of dust always burst out before cool air followed. It was noisy and, during birthdays when the parlor was filled with friends and food, graduations, baby showers for my sisters, the celebratory party when my mother was appointed registrar, there was always a loud vacuum-like sound of the air conditioner in the background.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reminisces about the writing desks where she learned to write in this wonderfully atmospheric piece from The Washington Post.

(Photo taken from Adichie's website.)

Achebe Honoured

I'm very happy to see Nigerian author Chinua Acebe honoured with this year's Man Booker International Prize worth £60,000 .

Says John Ezard in the Guardian:

In choosing to give the award to a man who is regularly described as the father of modern African literature, the judges have signalled that this new global Booker has achieved the status of an authentic world award in only its second contest.

By honouring Achebe they have redressed what is seen in Africa - and beyond - as the acute injustice that he has never received the Nobel prize, allegedly because he has spent his life struggling to break the grip of western stereotypes of Africa. One of his most famous essays is an onslaught against Joseph Conrad's masterpiece Heart of Darkness, a novel about a European's descent into savagery in Africa.

The Guardian website also has a guide to Achebe's life and work and you can read an extract from Things Fall Apart (which is one of my favourite novels) here.

Acebe himself says in the Times:

It was 50 years ago this year that I began writing my first novel, Things Fall Apart. It is wonderful to hear that my peers have looked at the body of work I have put together in the last 50 years and judged it deserving of this important recognition. I am grateful.

It has, of course, been an amazing week for Nigerian authors (and not just Nigerian - Igbo!) with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie winning the Orange Prize a few days earlier. In an interview with Stephen Moss in the Guardian she talks about the need to get right away from stereotyped views of Africa:

We have a long history of Africa being seen in ways that are not very complimentary, and in America ... being seen as an African writer comes with baggage that we don't necessarily care for. Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe Aids. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations. I was told by a professor at Johns Hopkins University that he didn't believe my first book ... because it was too familiar to him. In other words, I was writing about middle-class Africans who had cars and who weren't starving to death, and therefore to him it wasn't authentically African. ... People forget that Africa is a place in which class exists," she says. "It's as if Africans are not allowed to have class, that somehow authenticity is synonymous with poverty and demands your pity and your sympathy. Africa is seen as the place where the westerner goes to sort out his morality issues. We see it in films and in lots of books about Africa, and it's very troubling to me.

You may remember that Doreen Baigana said something very similar some time back.

Thank goodness for all those authors, Achebe in the forefront, who have managed to break the mould.

Orange-Flavoured Fiction

The 2007 Orange Broadband Prize goes to .... (drumroll, please, while I open the envelope) Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (left, at the Guardian Hay festival).

And the Orange Broadband Award for First Writers goes to ... (another drumroll) Karen Connelly for The Lizard Cage.

Am longing to read both ... the first I have, and it's shouting at me from my TBR shelf. The other I haven't seen in the bookshops here yet.

Do check out the author websites. Chimamanda has set up a site especially for the book which includes a board for readers to post their memories of the Biafran war. Karen Connelly's includes her journal.

Writers - What Did You Do In The War?

What happens when writers find themselves caught up in the horrors of war?

Richard Lea in the Guardian checks in with authors on both sides of the current conflict in South Lebanon, including Lebanese novelists Elias Khoury and Hassan Daoud, Israeli author Orly Castel-Bloom and writer of surreal short-fiction Etgar Keret, and Palestinian author Adania Shibli.

Unsurprising verdict: war isn't very good for writing. My favourite comment comes from Castel-Bloom:

I used to write books they called post-modern, but now it is pure realism.

Meanwhile, Nobel prize winner Gunter Grass's shock revelation that he once served in Adolf Hitler's Waffen SS force has ignited a firestorm of criticism, writes Tony Paterson in the Independent,with some quarters demanding that he return the award. Grass claims that writing his new autobiography Peeling the Onion (supposed to be published next month, but I believe it has already been launched) finally gave him the opportunity to face up to his Nazi past.

Also well worth reading on the case is this post on the Done with Mirrors blog (via Tailrank).

The Nigerian Biafran war provides the background to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's new novel, which is dedicated to the grandparents Adichi never knew. Adichi's highly praised first novel Purple Hibiscus was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2004 and won the Commonwealth Writers First Book Prize. The novelist is profiled by Christina Patterson in the Independent. Although writing of war at second-hand, Adichie clearly gets things right. Patterson describes Half A Yellow Sun as:

... a magnificent novel, packed with memorable characters and their different worlds. Adichie's own childhood took place entirely within the bounds of a university campus, but she captures village life, and the cocktail-drinking coteries of the super-rich, as if they too were part of the fabric of her daily life. She also captures the horrors of war: the constant upheaval, the hunger and the brutalising fear that causes ordinary people ... to take part in acts of casual brutality.

In case we need reminding.