Auto Added by WPeMatico
With fans eagerly awaiting the reclusive author’s first book in more than a decade, the noir caper Shadow Ticket, we assess his best fiction of the past 60 years
A collection of early short stories that is chiefly of interest for the introduction, in which the author spells out why he thinks they fail. Pynchon does not spare himself but, unfortunately, he is right. For aficionados only.
Kim’s meditation on the disruptions experienced by family members during the Korean war and North Korean dictatorship explores absence, searching and separation
Search Engine: Notes from the North Korean-Chinese-Russian Border
By which a strip of land became a hole in time – Durs Grünbein
An exhilarating collection distills the late writer’s thinking on power, exile and the importance of the mother tongue
On 17 July 1979, the great Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o gave a speech in Nairobi in which he questioned the logic of an African literature in European languages. He had recently been released from prison, where he had been held after his critiques of corruption and inequality had touched a nerve among leaders of the recently independent nation. But his address provoked strong reactions for another reason: up until that moment, Ngũgĩ had been closely associated with the emergence of an African tradition of writing in English and acknowledged as a key figure in the rise of the novel as a major genre on the continent; his fictional work was often cited as an example of how English was being remade in formerly colonised societies. His early novels, from 1964’s Weep Not, Child onward, struck a chord with a global Anglophone audience partly because they echoed the English novelists he had read as a student at Makerere University College, the Ugandan branch of the University of London, and Leeds University, the seat of “Commonwealth” literary studies in the 1960s.
By the time of his speech, Ngũgĩ was a member of the literary establishment in Africa, a leading figure in world literature, and a leader in postcolonial thought. And while it is true that he had challenged what he saw as the hegemony of English in a 1968 manifesto, On the Abolition of the English Department, co-written with two of his colleagues at the University of Nairobi, Ngũgĩ assumed that the abolition of English did not mean dispensing with the colonial language. In fact, for most of the 1960s and 1970s he shared a belief, common among the postcolonial elite, that a literature in the ex-coloniser’s language could indeed be revolutionary. But now the novelist had decided to break away from English, to depart, as he put it, “from Anglo-Saxon literature in order to reconnect to the patriotic traditions of a national and culture literature rooted among the people”. He would henceforth write in his mother tongue, Gĩkũyũ (known to Swahili and English-speakers as Kikuyu).
They helped create the modern world but are dangerously overused. How can we harness them sustainably?
In 1954, just a few years after the widespread introduction of antibiotics, doctors were already aware of the problem of resistance. Natural selection meant that using these new medicines gave an advantage to the microbes that could survive the assault – and a treatment that worked today could become ineffective tomorrow. A British doctor put the challenge in military terms: “We may run clean out of effective ammunition. Then how the bacteria and moulds will lord it.”
More than 70 years later, that concern looks prescient. The UN has called antibiotic resistance “one of the most urgent global health threats”. Researchers estimate that resistance already kills more than a million people a year, with that number forecast to grow. And new antibiotics are not being discovered fast enough; many that are essential today were discovered more than 60 years ago.
Richard Blair on the role his mother played in developing the 1945 political fable – and how it nearly didn’t get published
As the second world war reached its height, the winter of 1943-4 was one of the coldest of the century. My parents were living in a poorly heated flat in Kilburn, north-west London. My mother was working at the Ministry of Food. She was deeply involved in BBC Radio’s Kitchen Front which tried to help people conjure nutritious meals from their rations. My father became literary editor of Tribune magazine in November 1943. He was only required in the office three days a week, which gave him the time to write Animal Farm.
Every evening, my father would read what he’d written to my mother under heavy blankets in bed. It was the only warm place in the flat. They would discuss the developing story and where it might go next. Lettice Cooper, the novelist and my mother’s Ministry of Food colleague, remembered my mother updating them every morning with the animals’ latest adventures. That my father and mother worked together so closely is no surprise. My father respected my mother’s talents greatly and later told a friend she had helped plan Animal Farm.
Can fiction make us more optimistic about tackling Earth’s environmental emergency? These eco-focused books have hope at their core
‘Can literature be a tool to encourage something better – creating eco-topia on the page, so it might be imagined off it?” asks the novelist Sarah Hall in this weekend’s Guardian magazine. Climate fiction – or “cli-fi” – continues to grow as a genre in its own right; the first Climate fiction prize was awarded this year. And while the roots of environmental fiction are in apocalypse and despair, these five writers are moving beyond dystopia to hopeful possibilities.
***
Environmental fiction is booming – but can it move beyond dystopia to a brighter vision of the future?
Nearly a quarter of a century ago when I published my first novel, Haweswater, about the impact of dam-building in north-west England, nature writing felt quite different, at least for me. Several landmark novels about climate apocalypse and survivalism had been published, including Z for Zachariah by Robert C O’Brien and The Death of Grass by John Christopher, but there was no imperative to write about such things. These stories involved anomalistic catastrophes – a mutated virus, nuclear war – and they were very bleak. They resonated but also seemed unusual. At the other end of the scale, Ben Elton’s Stark had comedically outlined the nature of oligarchic greed, resource consumption, and the ruination we were hurtling towards, while the Bezos and Musk equivalents could head off-world – not quite so funny now.
The public knew about climate issues, though terminology often stressed them individually – ozone depletion, greenhouse warming, desertification, coral bleaching – rather than total Earth systems breakdown. Disparate, visionary science fictions didn’t indicate a genre movement yet. There was a luxury of choice regarding stories related to nature – no elephant in the room (or polar bear), if you didn’t tackle climate-change concerns.
An intensely political story of a new father’s escape with his baby through a rainforest during wartime
Richard Lloyd Parry, a longtime foreign correspondent whose experiences of war and regime change are recorded in his remarkable 2005 memoir In the Time of Madness, can be said to know whereof he speaks. Many of that book’s issues, including the psychic damage he incurred from events he witnessed in Indonesia, East Timor and Afghanistan in the 1990s and early 2000s, are reinflected in this, his first novel.
Kit and Lara live in a remote village in the deep rainforest. She works for a small, undependably financed NGO. He’s a stay-at-home husband, living for their baby daughter Helen. While Lara presents as impulsive yet practical and barely able to contain her own energy, Kit is dreamy, internalised, exhibiting a calmness that falls easily into dissociation. “This is your life,” she shouts at him shortly before they leave the UK, “a day of your life, and it requires your presence.” He’s struggling with the local language. His wife has neglected to tell him that he’s speaking it in the female register, which is why the villagers are so amused by him. Beneath the trees, the light is “filtered to a soupy dimness”. The villagers claim to be able to tell a child’s fortune from its teeth. The baby, kept in a heavily air-conditioned pod in the space beneath their stilted house, has a rash. Her future, it seems, will feature a long journey: a prediction, Kit observes politely, that he recognises from fortune tellers in his own country.
The bestselling author’s sixth novel is far from perfect, but this journey into the underworld is delivered with heretical glee
The more academia has broken your heart, the more you’ll love RF Kuang’s new novel. Katabasis knows the slow grind of postgrad precarity: the endless grant grubbing and essay marking; the thesis chapters drafted, redrafted and quietly ignored by a supervisor who can’t be bothered to read – let alone reply to – an email. Living semester to semester, pay shrinking, workload metastasising, cannon fodder in a departmental forever war. Katabasis knows how it feels to spend your best thinking years doing grunt work to further someone else’s ideas, clinging to the bottom rung of a ladder you will never be allowed to climb: less an ivory tower than a pyramid scheme.
Academia is a hellscape; Katabasis just makes it literal. The American author’s sixth novel is an infernal twist on the campus farce: David Lodge with demons. Kuang’s previous book, 2023’s Yellowface, satirised the publishing industrial complex with an irresistible mix of gallows humour and gossip. A tale of toxic allies, commodified identity and hollow moralising, it was lapped up – with predictable irony – by the very people it skewered, like a real-life version of the stunt novel in Percival Everett’s Erasure. The year before Yellowface, in the cult hit Babel, she invented an elaborate, counter-historical version of Oxford University – and then blew it up. A literary Rhodes Must Fall.
The Indian author is the next Future Library writer, set to submit a secret work to be locked in a library until 2114
The next manuscript by Indian writer Amitav Ghosh will not be read for 89 years, as he becomes the 12th author to contribute to the Future Library project.
Ghosh joins Margaret Atwood, Han Kang, Ocean Vuong and other prominent authors who have written secret manuscripts, which are locked away until 2114.
