Why 2013 Will Be The Year Of The Woman Writer

This week's Sunday Guardian column.

There are still some months to go before the end of the year, but one thing seems certain: when it comes to English-language fiction, 2013 belongs to the woman writer.

Take the Man Booker shortlist. Four of the six titles are by women: Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, Eleanor Katton’s The Luminaries, Noviolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. It’s not that Booker shortlists haven’t featured the same number of women before, but it’s significant at a time when they’ve written so many notable novels.

Arguably one of the most talked about titles of the year is by another woman: Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers. This novel of motorbikes, art and terrorism in the 1970s was rapturously received, even hailed as “the Great American Novel for the 21st century”. At the Edinburgh Book Festival in April, Colm Toibin, tongue somewhere near cheek, said that it was as if the author had announced, "if anyone thinks there is a 'male novel', and anyone thinks that women should write a different kind of novel, I've just arrived on a motorbike covered in leather and I am ready to eat you all".

The Flamethrowers was one of those on the National Book Awards Fiction longlist announced this month. Here, too, half of the ten titles are by women -- last year there was only one, by Louise Erdrich. This year, Kushner and Lahiri apart, there’s Alice McDermott, Elizabeth Graver and Joan Silber.

Silber’s Fools is a collection of six intricately linked short stories; in this genre too, one finds women at the fore. Karen Russell, for example, whose Swamplandia was a Pulitzer finalist last year and who’s just received a MacArthur ‘genius grant’, published Vampires in the Lemon Grove, a collection of stories that’s gothic, mythic and comic, sometimes all at the same time.  On the other side of the Atlantic, every single writer on the shortlist for the BBC Short Story Award is female, among them Sarah Hall and Lionel Shriver. 

To return to the novel, 12 of the 20 in Granta’s new ‘Best Under 40’ British novelists are women -- the first time since the inaugural list in 1983 that they're in the majority. Their backgrounds reflect the country’s diversity: from Kamila Shamsie and Tahmima Anam to Taiye Selasi and Helen Oyeyemi to Xiaolu Guo. The American National Book Foundation went one better in this year’s ‘5 Under 35’ awards: for the first time, all the five were women.

It’s heartening that in India, too, four of the six titles shortlisted for this year’s Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize are by women:  Janice Pariat’s Boats on Land, Nilanjana Roy’s The Wildings, Sonora Jha’s Foreign and Aranyani’s A Pleasant Kind of Heavy. 

Leave aside shortlists and awards as a yardstick, and you’ll still find riches. There’s Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings, which, like The Flamethrowers, starts in the 1970s and follows a group of teenagers into adulthood. There’s Charlotte Mendelsohn’s Almost English, with its engaging, quirky voice. There’s Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah, about love and race in the 21st century. (And there are follow-ups by Donna Tartt, Curtis Sittenfield and Marisha Pessl which, though many felt didn’t match their previous work, displayed more virtuosity than most.) In detective fiction, one hears that the bestselling The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith was actually written by a woman.

 

In structure, style and subject, women have led the way. Perhaps it’s time to heed the words of novelist Peter Hobbs, one of the judges of the BBC prize: "We've got to the stage where an all-female list is not even worth mentioning. I don't really pay any attention to gender.” This raises a problem for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, which did have a strong shortlist this year, comprising Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life and Zadie Smith’s NW, among others, being won by A.M. Homes’ dark suburban saga, May We Be Forgiven. It’s an award in danger of losing what sets it apart – for all the right reasons.

Margaret Atwood's Brave New World

This appeared in today's The Indian Express

Browse through Flipboard, the tablet and mobile-based social media aggregator, and you’ll come across a section entitled ‘Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam’s World’. This contains “the science, the nature, the gardening, the tech, the outfits” and provides links to articles on the science of storytelling, the progress of genetic engineering, lab-grown food and the ethics and consequences of mixing animal and human DNA, among others. All of these are present in Atwood’s new novel and as such it’s the perfect introduction to the book as well as companion piece for those entranced by it. It’s also a reminder that Maddaddam isn’t science fiction, as the digitally-savvy 73-year-old author has taken pains to point out, but speculative fiction: “it does not include any technologies or biobeings that do not already exist, are not under construction, or are not possible in theory”.

The finale of the trilogy that began with Oryx and Crake and continued with The Year of the Flood, Madaddam contains most of the central characters of the earlier two books and is set in the same post-apocalyptic world. It certainly helps if you’ve read the first two, but just in case you haven’t, Maddaddam’s opening pages provide a synopsis. Most of humanity has been wiped out by a virus (“the Waterless Flood”) engineered and unleashed by a scientist disappointed by the world’s corporatised, consumerist ways. Survivors wander over a new earth, finding ways to thrive and food to eat, mingling with genetically engineered species – some naïve and childlike (the Crakers), others vicious and brutal (the Painballers).

Maddaddam primarily concerns itself with two characters: the first, Toby, from the “pleeblands”, the plebian hinterland, who has taken refuge in a compound along with other survivors where they mull over their past and future, occasionally praying to new saints (one of them being “Saint Vandana Shiva of Seeds”). The second strand involves the travels of Zeb, brother of AdamOne, who created the environmental community known as God’s Gardeners which Toby was a part of. The events of Toby’s life take the saga forward, while tales of Zeb’s chequered past provide the backstory, both of which meet and then culminate in a final showdown.

The regenerative power of storytelling is one of the themes of Maddaddam, and appropriately enough, the novel is structured around stories: those that Toby narrates to the Crakers, those that Zeb narrates to Toby and ultimately, those that one of the Crakers starts to tell. At times, though, these criss-crossing threads can make Maddaddam somewhat bewildering; in a world where things have fallen apart it's perhaps fitting that the novel's centre doesn't always hold. (Ironically enough, this is again similar to the experience of flicking through Flipboard, with its loosely-themed sections.) As such, it is less compelling than her other dystopian novel, the classic The Handmaid’s Tale, which gained so much of its impact from the focus on the subjugation of women.

What’s evident thoughout Maddaddam, however, is that Atwood is enjoying herself greatly, and that this is a world which is fully-fleshed out in her imagination and on the page. She employs different registers in her telling: to begin with, there is much that is satirical and parodic, with fingerprint detectors called Fickle Fingers of Fake, the AnooYoo Spa, BlyssPlus Pills and even a magician who calls himself Slaight of Hand (after Canadian media baron Allan Slaight) who names his assistant Miss Direction. At other times, there’s a William Gibson-like technocalyptic tinge to the prose, such as when Atwood describes Zeb’s antics as a cyber-hustler in Rio. All of this is interspersed with passages that are haunting, such as when Toby muses on the fates of those no longer present: “The dead bodies evaporating like slow smoke; their loved and carefully tended homes crumbling away like deserted anthills. Their bones reverting to calcium; night predators hunting their dispersed flesh, transformed into grasshoppers and mice.”

In an earlier essay on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Atwood had written that it was a world “of conformity achieved through engineered, bottle-grown babies and hypnotic persuasion rather than through brutality, of boundless consumption that keeps the wheels of production turning and of officially enforced promiscuity that does away with sexual frustration, of a pre-ordained caste system ranging from a highly intelligent managerial class to a subgroup of dim-witted serfs programmed to love their menial work, and of soma, a drug that confers instant bliss with no side effects.” Maddaddam has many if not all of the same elements, yet it is utterly original in the way that Atwood transforms the details and creates new ones to resonate with the way we live and think of science and society today.

The Best In The English-speaking World

Today's Sunday Guardian column.

Announcing the rule change that would make American novelists, among others, eligible for the Man Booker, Ion Trewin, administrator of the prize, said: "The winner of the 2014 prize will be able to say: 'I am the best in the English-speaking world'.”

- From a report in The Bookseller

As I rise to thank you for this honour, there’s just one thing I want to say to all of you gathered here today. I’m the best in the English-speaking world.

When I say that, I refer to all the various forms of English that are prevalent today, from Singlish to Hinglish to Chinglish to Churlish. I’m the best in all of them. All you millions of people out there who speak English, or some form of it, bow down now. I am the best among you. If you have the equivalent of an Iron Throne, I’m ready to sit on it.

I would also like to take this opportunity to say that I mean no disrespect to those who consider themselves the best in the Urdu-speaking world, the Swahili-speaking world, the Cantonese-speaking world or any other world that speaks. Some of the people from these worlds are sterling chaps, and if you’re watching this on TV tonight, there’s one just thing I want to say: I’m the best in the English-speaking worlde

This, my fellow beings among whom I am the best, is a tremendous responsibility. I was never the best in anything earlier, not counting that memorable moment when, as a schoolboy, I was admonished by the principal for being equal to none in passing notes in class. (Mrs Trevelyan, if you’re still out there in front of a TV screen somewhere, I say to you that I am now the best in the English speaking world. And yes, I admit that I’m the one who poured indelible ink on your cat’s tail. You may still be able to discern the smudges.)

Now that this august prize is also open to nationals of the great United States, I must confess here and now that in my next work, I am going to take what some may say are liberties -- but what I claim is a tip of the hat to this change in the rules. Let me explain. I plan to drop all unnecessary ‘u’s – yes, I will henceforth be using words such as humor, clamor and enamor. Proofreaders, take note. I will also henceforth be referring to lifts as elevators, footpaths as pavements and hula hoops as – well, as hula hoops. No one dare correct me. I am the best in the English speaking world.

More champagne, please. Ah, thank you. Let me confess another ambition. Now that I am the best in the English speaking world, I plan to set my sights higher. Not failure but low aim is a crime, as the man said. Who was it? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. What I was going to say, now that I have consumed a magnum or two of this excellent Bollinger, is that I want to be known as the best in other worlds, too. With this in mind, I shall be enrolling in Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, Russian and, for good measure, Latin and Sanskrit language classes. My friends, the day is not far when I will be able to stand here before you (more champagne, please) and claim that I am the best in not just the English-speaking world, but in the language-speaking world – whatever that language may be. Klingon-speakers, beware. To you I say: nIteb SuvnIS DevwI'.

But that is still some time in the future. Meanwhile, those of you in the Anglosphere can gaze upon me and know that of all your tribe, I stand unequalled. The flower of centuries of writing. One final word before I step away from this shaky podium and quaff some more of that bubbly. Make that three final words: Buy my book! After all, it was written by the best – ah, I see you know it already. Thank you for this award, judges. I am humbled, most humbled indeed.

Agatha Christie In Syria

Today's Sunday Guardian column.

“In a few weeks’ time, we are starting for Syria!” That may seem like the optimistic assertion of someone from the US administration, but it’s instead the opening sentence of Come, Tell Me How You Live, a memoir by Agatha Christie about her time on an archaelogical dig in the country with her husband, Max Mallowan, in the 1930s. It’s a good-natured and self-deprecating work – but reading it today reveals much about colonial attitudes towards the Middle East, the legacy of which can still be seen in the region’s current state of unrest.

Christie herself seems to have been curiously self-effacing about the book, perhaps because it’s such a departure from her better-known mysteries. “This meandering chronicle,” she calls it, and then again: “a very little book, full of everyday doings and happenings”. (Indeed, the preponderance of exclamation marks and somewhat breathless comments sometimes puts one in mind of Enid Blyton – whose own The River of Adventure was set near the Syrian border.) Christie wrote the book, she says, as “the answer to a question that is asked me very often. ‘So you dig in Syria, do you? Do tell me all about it. How do you live? In a tent?’ ”

Much of her time there was spent at Chagar Bazar, near the city of Al-Hasakah in the country’s north-east. Today, the area is among those witness to aerial bombardment and deadly sectarian clashes. In the Thirties, though, Christie had other problems to contend with: “The arrival of plumbing in the East is full of pitfalls. How often does the cold tap produce hot water, and the hot tap cold!” That’s one among the many breezy generalisations, along with others such as: “No dish that needs to be eaten as soon as it is cooked should ever be attempted in the East”, “The spending of money seems a point of honour with Arabs” and “Servants in the East are rather like Jinns. They appear from nowhere, and are there waiting for you when you arrive.”

The author spent her time there helping her husband and his cohorts; as Mallowan was to tersely note in a later archaelogical publication, “my wife was also present throughout, and assisted in the mending of the pottery and the photography.” Their painstaking labours at the mound revealed that the area was inhabited during the sixth millennium BC, and was finally abandoned over three centuries later.  Christie writes: “It must have been on a much-frequented caravan route, connecting Harran and Tell Halaf and on through the Jebel Sinjar into Iraq and the Tigris, and so to ancient Nineveh. It was one of a network of great trading centres.”

She also found time to write her whodunnits, or as she briefly puts it, “ply my own trade on the typewriter”. In Come Tell Me How You Live, she mentions a vanished time captured in some of her novels: “It was a world where one mounted a Pullman at Victoria in a ‘big snorting, hurrying, companionable train, with its big, puffing engine’, was waved away by crowds of relatives, at Calais caught the Orient Express to Istanbul, and so arrived at last in a Syria where good order, good food and generous permits for digging were provided by the French.”

Unreliable vehicles, flash floods, infestations of mice and lice, dodgy food, seedy accommodation, the caprices of her colleagues: Christie chronicles all of these with unflagging cheerfulness. Space is also devoted to the merits and demerits of domestics, labourers and associates, their varying ethnicities reflecting the Syrian mix. In words that prove ominous in retrospect, she remarks: “Syria is full of fiercely fanatical sects of all kinds, all willing to cut each other’s throats for the good cause!”

Her affection for the place, though, is undeniable: “I love that gentle fertile country and its simple people, who know how to laugh and how to enjoy life,” she says, singling out their “dignity, good manners, and a great sense of humour”. She would have been horrified at their plight today.

Still In Search Of Salinger

Today's Sunday Guardian column.

Even if you aren’t a Salinger fan, you’ve probably heard the news that more of his books are likely to be published soon, some of them dealing with the further exploits of Holden Caulfield and the Glass family, as well as musings on Vedanta. One has mixed feelings about this: elation that there’s going to be more of his work to read as well as misgivings that his last novels, influenced so heavily by his religious views, may not be on a par with the rest.

The information about the forthcoming volumes is contained in a new biography, simply titled Salinger, by David Shields and Shane Salerno, a companion piece to the latter’s documentary. Both are to be released next week. Early reports indicate that the book is a montage of interviews, newspaper articles, letters and photographs, with the New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani calling it a “loosey-goosey Internet-age narrative”.

Past biographies were hamstrung by the unwillingness of the reclusive novelist – and most of his friends and associates -- to take part in such an enterprise, a stance he stuck to until his death in 2010. This, of course, didn’t stop people from trying.  There was the poorly received attempt by erstwhile Time magazine reporter Paul Alexander, for example, as well as the more exhaustive one by Kenneth Slawenski in 2011 that, among other things, threw light on the writer’s World War II years. (Current speculation is that the horrors Salinger encountered during that time led to a form of PTSD, because of which he turned to Eastern religion and a hermit-like life.) Then, there was the self-centred – some would say self-serving – account by Joyce Maynard, who had a relationship with Salinger when she was 18; in contrast, Margaret Salinger’s Dream Catcher, about life with her father, is more honest and revealing of his eccentricities.

The one book that appeared before all of these, and which created more of a ruckus, was British journalist Ian Hamilton’s In Search of J.D. Salinger, published in 1988. This, however, wasn’t the book that he wanted to write. After Hamilton finished his biography of the writer who was “famous for not wanting to be famous”, Salinger won a copyright infringement suit against the publisher as the book quoted liberally from unpublished letters and short stories. In Search of J.D. Salinger, then, is the book that Hamilton was finally able to publish, more an account of how he went about teasing out information on Salinger than a biography proper. It often reads like a detective story, with visits to Salinger’s old haunts and associates to look for clues.

Fascinating as much of this is to read – it must have been far more so when it first appeared – there’s always an uneasy sense of voyeurism, of invading the space of someone who wants to be left alone. This is exacerbated by Hamilton’s treatment: he sets up a split personality, one of whom “grapples feebly with the moral issues” and the other a “biographizing alter ego” eager to get on with the job. A lot of time is taken up with back-and-forth between the two, a device that soon becomes annoying, if not disingenuous. (“Phony,” one can almost hear Holden say.)

Hamilton uncovers traces of Salinger’s public life: “school records, some telling items of juvenilia, frank testimony from contemporaries, some eyewitness location stuff”, and pieces together an account of Salinger's early years and how it reflected in his work. As he himself acknowledges, however, the heart of his book is without Salinger’s own voice and personality. Later in the book, he writes: “in the case of J. D. Salinger, [when] the inner life becomes virtually indistinguishable from any life that we might sensibly call ‘outer,’ then even the most intrepid chronicler knows himself to be facing an impasse”.

This seems to be the fate of any such chronicle of “the Greta Garbo of American letters”, which is why I’m going to stay away from Shields and Salerno’s biography. As for Salinger’s own posthumous work, that’s a temptation to which I suspect I’ll succumb.

Against Loose, Baggy Monsters

This week's Sunday Guardian column.

One of the books on my tottering unread pile is Shamsher Rahman Faruqi’s The Mirror of Beauty which is, by all accounts, well worth reading – but I quail at committing myself to its over 900 pages.  It’s not the only recent novel longer than the norm. In a piece for the Guardian last week, novelist Kirsty Gunn commented on a recent outcrop of  “big books”, mentioning David Peace's Red or Dead (720 pages), Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (832 pages) and Richard House’s The Kills (1002 pages), with the last two longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Reading Gunn’s piece caused dismay: most novels nowadays are too long for their own good, without there being more loose, baggy monsters being unleashed upon an unsuspecting public.

She speculates that economics might have something to do with it. In a recessionary time, such volumes provide heft and spectacle, reassuring us that we’re doing OK. I suspect it also could be something to do with beleaguered novelists being told that reading and fiction don’t matter as much as they used to, and defiantly taking a stand by composing volumes of Victorian length.

Gunn goes on to point out that the three novels she mentions have “a whiff of the avant garde” and aren’t conventional triple-deckers, a welcome relief. The longest, The Kills, comprises four connected narratives each of which earlier appeared separately online, and there’s also a website with hours of video content related to the novel. This approach reminds one of the iOS app The Silent History, which calls itself “a new kind of novel” and consists of a series of linked first-person testimonials. These two, then, could well be canaries in the coalmine of the novel’s future.

To return to the contemporary long novel as we know it, not all of them can be the next Infinite Jest, Underworld or A Suitable Boy. Tedium sets in as the pages accumulate: more and more characters’ lives are delved into, subplots proliferate, details abound and eyelids droop.  As Somak Ghoshal recently wrote in an otherwise appreciative review of Shovon Chowdhury’s The Competent Authority: “Sub-plots seem to spiral out of control, characters get forgotten, and loose ends are tied a little awkwardly.” (Where are editors’ blue pencils when you need them?)

An argument often made for novels of greater length is that their bulk allows for more immersion in a fictional world. While this may be true to some extent of SF and fantasy, such engagement doesn’t necessarily call for a greater number of pages. Take the novels of Franz Kafka. Or Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, less than 200 pages.

The impact of a well-crafted novella is another reason to look askance at large novels. As I’ve written before, the best of them emit radiance and sparkle far beyond their size. Look at Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice or Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, to name a few. The titles from independent publisher Melville House’s ‘Art of the Novella’ series provide more excellent examples. For some time now, ambitious novelists have been using the laser-like focus a novella allows by thematically linking some of them together to create a larger whole. Richard House’s The Kills apart, there’s David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, for example, as well as Colum McCann’s Transatlantic, another title longlisted for this year’s Booker.

Several estimable European novels, too, are much shorter than their American and British equivalents, while leaving as much if not more of an impression. Swiss writer Peter Stamm recently said that he likes “reduction, concentration, clarity” in writing, and the same can be said of many of his Continental counterparts.

These days, long novels have to earn their stripes, and only a handful do; the vision of a Karl Knausgaard is uncommon. Randall Jarrell is often quoted as saying that “a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it”. Well, the longer it is, the more that can go wrong.

Making Family Skeletons Dance

This week's Sunday Guardian column.

Families have always furnished fodder for fiction. From Tolstoy to Austen to Franzen, novels have portrayed them as happy, unhappy and somewhere in between. Such representations are dialled up in the American genre called Southern Gothic, with elevated emotions and oddball characters casting long shadows. Though it flourished primarily in the first half of the last century, its influence continues in works such as Katherine Dunne’s Geek Love and, more recently, Karen Russell’s Swamplandia.

           

It’s a genre to which Supriya Dravid’s debut novel, A Cool Dark Place, could well belong – only, the ‘Southern’ in this case would refer to the area below the Vindhyas. The novel’s narrator returns to her mother’s childhood home in Madras, “a shambolic Versailliac, moth-ridden empire of despair”, to come to terms with the sorrow that family concealments have caused her.

The narrator informs us that her father committed suicide over a year ago -- only, as her mother reveals, he wasn’t actually her father. Now, her grandfather, the Quixote-like Don, is himself at death’s door. The mother opens up about how Don’s doings have shaped her life, and the daughter ruminates on her growing years, coming to realize how much of it was manipulated by forces she was unaware of. As she puts it: “I wanted to search for pieces that were conveniently hidden under the rug of disguise, because this is a story that is as much my mother's as it is mine, as much the man I thought was my father's as it is mine, as much my family's as it is mine.”

The flamboyant Don and his actions are at the heart of the book, with the plot comprising a series of reactions to his self-serving behavior, ripples spreading out from depth charges. “Don was good at life,” we’re told. “He liked to enjoy and destroy…he was always tipsy and spoke theatrically with his hands, eyebrows and disco ball eyes.” His enthusiasms, his bibulousness, his libido and his urge to control those around him and stack them in neat rows as he does his books make him an over-the-top, arresting figure, and the more compelling portions of A Cool, Dark Place are those in which he takes centre-stage.

Tangled family dynamics apart, what makes the novel distinctive is a tone of heightened realism, unlike much of Indian fiction in English – dealing with families or otherwise – which opts for the more conventional variety. In large part, this arises from Dravid’s rich, coiled prose. “There are pictures that are crowded with the invisible and brimming with the secret memory of lives that once filled up that spot,” she writes, “and now the walls wait sullenly for their return.”

Throughout, she makes use of most of the weapons in the writer’s arsenal of craft. There’s wordplay: “cockaigne” is conflated with “cocaine”; a staring cop is “King Leer”; a clock is stuck at “quarter past rum”; and elsewhere, a person is “as high as the man in the moon”, asserting “I have class and it’s called third”. There’s alliteration (Prozac paradise, a helium heart and a ditsy dolly, among others) and in a case of gilding the lily, there’s also rhyme: a splenetic lunatic, insane in the membrane and not wanting to be a coquette in the pocket.

For the most part, this creates a satisfying sense of the dense, dizzying experience that the narrator is living through. Writers with linguistic ebullience, however, are sometimes prone to over-reach, especially in their debut novels; here, an example would be sentences such as: “Don and my mother made no eye contact and they'd be as incongruous as a pregnant midget amidst a sea of glamazons whose legs were ladders to heaven”.

The narrator of  A Cool, Dark Place, then, undertakes an archaeological investigation into her family’s tortuous past, to enable her to live in the present. Dravid's singular talent lies in infiltrating compacted layers of remembrance, retrieving potsherds of memory and piecing them together to create a unified mosaic. As Bernard Shaw once wrote, if you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

Fiction To Frighten The Status Quo

My Sunday Guardian column.

One of the more credible stories of how the Egyptian capital got its name comes from the order of the 10th century Fatimid caliph al-Mu'izz li-din Allah, who instructed his military commander to march into the country and build “a city that would vanquish the world." Thus was created the Vanquisher, al-Qahira, known to us today as Cairo. Ironically, Cairene writer Sonallah Ibrahim writes, it “never vanquished anyone but its own people, for invaders from all places and of all races succeeded one another in it”. He goes on to call it “one of the most impossible cities in the world,” and recent events certainly seem to bear out his assertion.

Ibrahim’s first novel, That Smell, offers a bleak, penetrating look at the life of one of Cairo’s vanquished citizens, and is now available in a new translation, one that hews closer to the original than before. Ibrahim started to write it in his late twenties, after he was released from the prison where he, along with others from Egypt’s Communist Party, was confined for political conspiracy after the military coup that brought Nasser to power. (The present translation also includes a selection of Notes from a Prison, vignettes written on cigarette papers during his incarceration.) When published in 1966, That Smell was proscribed immediately – further, as translator Robyn Cresswell puts it, “local critics [were] almost as unwelcoming as the censors”.

That Smell is not, as one might imagine, a novel that concerns itself overtly with politics. Rather, it is written in a self-consciously minimal style, creating a world that can be seen as one in which politics has done its work and moved on, leaving only broken remnants behind. It tells of the travails of a disaffected young man recently released from prison for an unnamed offence, who spends his days catching up with friends and relatives, reporting daily to the police as well as rediscovering Cairo. His daily routine, his furtive glances at his neighbours, his trips around the city and his visits to former compatriots establish a repetitive rhythm. He smokes, masturbates and tries and fails to write an unspecified text. A sentence early on in the book just about sums up his life: “I stayed stretched out on the bed without sleeping. I smoked a lot. In the morning I got up and dressed and went out.”

All of this is laid out in chunks of paragraph-less prose broken by italicised flashbacks, in a style markedly different from the floridness and classical realism that marked fiction from Egypt at that time. As the narrator sarcastically says at one point: “I picked up a magazine and there was an article in it about literature and how it should be written. The writer said that Maupassant said that the artist must create a world that is more beautiful and more simple than our world. He said that literature must be optimistic and alive with the most beautiful sentiments.”

“Affectless” is the word that J.M. Coetzee used to describe Ibrahim’s prose and that is indeed the mot juste.  It’s an iceberg style indebted to Hemingway in which little is shown and much concealed. Ibrahim, however, eschews Hemingway’s macho bluster. At one point, the narrator is pushed by friends to visit a prostitute, a dalliance he is unable to consummate, and one way of reading this is as a comment on the impotence of the average Egyptian when faced with a brutal regime.

The preface to the original edition of That Smell contained a self-important charter spelling out the effect that Ibrahim was trying to produce: “If you do not like the novel now between your hands, the fault isn’t ours. It is instead the fault of our cultural moment, dominated as it has been for many years by works of shallowness, naïveté, and conventionalism.” The novel, then, is a brave stand against such attitudes that still prevail in so many parts of the world. Creswell has felicitously described it as “a fiction to frighten the status quo”, and it’s a pity that more novels don’t do the same.

Literary Prizes, Literary Envy

This week's Sunday Guardian column.

“The book of my enemy has been remaindered,” Clive James once wrote, going on to end his ditty with: “And I rejoice”. Literary schadenfreude – and envy, the other side of the coin – shows up every once in a while in fiction too, with books about novelists struggling to write, brooding over the success of others and letting rip on the publishing industry. There was Martin Amis’s The Information, for example, which dealt with a middle-aged writer consumed with plotting the downfall of another. More recently, in Howard Jacobson’s Zoo Time, a writer rants over the state of the novel, of publishing and the bestseller list. (Nice to see that novelists, like the rest of us, aren’t immune to water-cooler bluster about colleagues and the work they do.)

The latest addition to this subgenre is Filippo Bologna’s The Parrots, ably translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis. A satirical take on writing and publishing that often enters the realm of farce, The Parrots is about three writers – simply called The Beginner, the Writer and the Master – vying for a prestigious literary award. Representing stages of a writing career, the three of them variously brood, connive and fret over which one is going to win.

Bologna’s writing style is dry, detached and omniscient, cutting between events in the lives of the writers, pronouncing on their past, present and future and dwelling on their petty stratagems, spoils and skeletons in closets. “In Rome strange things happen that can only be explained by the fact that they are strange and happen in Rome,” is a typical example of his sardonic take, as is his definition of a bunch of flowers: “Pointless, wonderful, scented tributes to human frailty”.

While he reserves his bile largely for the state of his fictional novelists and their discontents, Bologna isn’t above taking swipes at other aspects of the writing industry. Literary blogs, for example, are places where “all the losers who can’t get their books onto bookshelves badmouth each other and which are the equivalent of a soya beefsteak for a carnivore forced to subsist on a vegetarian diet”. Ouch. Parodying the way books are described, he has a publisher comment: “Yours is a very special book, almost a kind of prose poem, with an epigrammatic, fragmentary quality that somehow magically recreates unity”. Elsewhere, the fashion for providing a long list of acknowledgements in a novel is compared to the end credits of a Hollywood film. It’s a point of view you could call jaundiced had it not been for the fact that Bologna is clearly having a lot of fun pricking inflated literary balloons.

Delightful as much of this is to read – Bologna takes careful and considered aim at his targets and their peccadilloes – as The Parrots progresses, one can’t help but note that, on many occasions, the twists and turns of a somewhat implausible plot bring the pleasure down a notch. (Even Google Street View has a small part to play in one such turnaround.) Rants, after all, are much more fun when they’re loose and unstructured. Many times, though, this pays off – in a richly farcical and very funny scene, the Master, who, like Nathan Zuckerman has been diagnosed with a prostate problem, is left with no choice but to read out a section from a medical diary containing the time and frequency of his urination to an audience expecting to be regaled by a poem. All goes well, however: the Master’s reading is described as “an attempt to convey the tragic nature of existence, in a classical form invigorated by postmodernism, which recovers and recycles heterogeneous material”. (Thomas Bernhard, who himself ranted at literary awards in his My Prizes, would have grinned.)

In a week in which literary news has been dominated by the announcement of the Man Booker longlist and the reactions to it, reading Bologna’s The Parrots is a palate-cleanser of sorts: a reminder that though such prizes certainly have their uses, to treat them as the be-all and end-all of artistic merit would be a mistake.

Writers And Alcohol

This week's Sunday Guardian column

Ted Hughes once wrote that the progress of any writer was marked by “those moments when he manages to outwit his own inner police system”. For many, one way to hoodwink the cops was by liberal doses of CH3CH2OH – in other words, alcohol. Writers from America have been particularly susceptible  – as Lewis Hyde tells us, four of the six Americans who have won the Literature Nobel were alcoholic. In her new book, The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing sets out to show “what effect this stew of spirits has had upon the body of literature itself”. She does this by looking at the work and lives of six of the most well known: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, John Berryman and Raymond Carver.

The resonant title is from Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: Echo Spring is the nickname one of the characters gives to his liquor cabinet, from a brand of bourbon it contains. Symbolically, though, Laing writes, “it refers to something quite different: perhaps to the attainment of silence, or to the obliteration of troubled thoughts that comes, temporarily at least, with a sufficiency of booze.” Laing isn’t here to censure or proselytise, but to understand: “it was an expression of my faith in literature, and its power to map the more difficult regions of human experience and knowledge.”

The book is also a personal exploration, as Laing grew up in an alcoholic family, seeing at first-hand what liquor can do to lives. In her quest, she travels to many of the places her six writers were associated with, from New York to New Orleans, from Key West to Port Angeles. A travelogue, a memoir and a close reading of some key works: A Trip to Echo Spring combines these ingredients to create a somewhat uneasy though potent mix.

Most of the authors she writes about were connected in various ways: "They were each other’s friends and allies, each other’s mentors, students and inspirations." Of the famous liaisons between Cheever and Carver in 1969 at the University of Iowa, the latter was to recall: “He and I did nothing but drink. I mean, we met our classes in a manner of speaking, but the entire time we were there . . . I don’t think either of us ever took the covers off our typewriters.” There are also tales of the friendship between Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and Laing delves into the differing accounts that both offered later, in works such as A Moveable Feast and The Crack-Up.

"Write drunk;edit sober"

This is not to say that Laing romanticises their lives. She details the ravages of alcohol on mind and body; the accounts of John Berryman and Tennessee Williams are especially harrowing. Laing also takes some half-hearted detours to explain, in neuroscientific terms, how alcohol creates its effects, as well as the workings of Alcoholics Anonymous, which was of considerable help to some of those she writes about.

She’s at her best in her scrutiny of the roots of alcoholism, and though she mentions its genetic component, she’s more at home in a neo-Freudian analysis. One of the key moments is her recollection of one of Berryman’s Dream Songs: Hunger was constitutional with him,/wine, cigarettes, liquor, need need need/until he went to pieces./The pieces sat up & wrote. She associates this with “the terrors of the adult whose childhood sense of security was ruptured before they’d managed to build a sturdy enough skin with which to face the world”, speculating on the relationship between drinking and writing: "both had to do with a feeling that something precious had gone to pieces, and a desire at once to mend it – to give it fitness and shape, in Cheever’s phrase – and to deny that it was so.”

The question remains whether these writers would have -- could have -- written the way they did without the crutch of alcohol. Liquor exacted a ruinous toll on their health and relationships, but these six, in Laing's words, managed to produce between them“some of the most beautiful writing this world has ever seen".