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Madeline; I much preferred The Silent Companions to this one. I just thought the tropes used for the villain were too easy and predictable. The ending is completely ambiguous!

 

Queer Africa: Selected Stories edited by Makhosazana Xaba and Karen Martin

This is a collection of short stories; a compilation from two previous volumes. There are stories here from Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe and Uganda amongst others. There are none from north of the Sahara, which is perhaps a weakness. One of the strengths is discovering a whole host of writers previously unknown to look out for in future. There are twenty-two stories here. In the introduction Chike Frankie Edozien makes some important points:

"African books - by Africans, for Africans - have broken through the walls of major markets in international publishing, reclaiming our narratives for generations to come. Many exciting new voices have emerged to pick up the mantle for the next several decades.

But while this was happening, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex Africans found themselves under sustained, ferocious and often brutal attacks by the state. Religious fervour, often stoked by US evangelical Christians has led to countries ratcheting up anti-gay sentiments…This sparkling collection...means people all over the world will now have access to writing from across the continent that shows us as we really are, multidimensional and full of complexity."

The stories cover a whole range of emotion and experience. Jambula Tree by Monica Arac De Nyeko was particularly good. There was one story which was out of place and with which I was very uncomfortable. My Dad forgot my Name by Victor Lewis is about a father and son who accidentally meet at a spa where men go to have sex. The meeting is uncomfortable, but leads at a later time with the father seducing and having sex with the son. I don’t think incest has any place in this sort of collection and sends the wrong sort of message. Or am I being too delicate?

There is a general emphasis on youth and discovery of sexuality, as you might expect and they cover a range of emotions and problems as you would expect. Many of the stories come from places where being queer is challenging and this adds to their strength. Despite some mixed feelings this collection is well worth reading.

6 and a half out of 10

Starting Folk by Zoe Gilbert

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Academy Street by Mary Costello

A deceptively simple novella about a woman of no significance or importance: an ordinary life. Tess is born in rural Ireland in the 1940s in a typical Catholic household. The novel takes us through seventy years of life (in about twice the amount of pages). Tess loses her mother at a young age and this is a pivotal experience:

“The stairs sweep up and turn to the right and it is here on the turn, by the stained-glass window, that her uncle’s back comes into view. Light is streaming in. Her heart starts to beat fast. She sees the back of a neighbour, Tommy Burns, and her other uncle, struggling. And then she understands. At the exact moment she sees the coffin, she understands.”

This starts Tess’s sense of isolation and an existence on the edge of life for the most part. We see snapshots of a childhood and then Tess trains as a nurse. The narrative is deeply part of Tess’s mindset. The warp and weft of her life can be seen by the reader and will resonate with many:

“She goes to the cinema with a girl from Cork, but mostly avoids social gatherings and nights out. The shyness she feels among others, and the terrible need to fit in, cause her such anxiety that when the evening arrives the prospect of going among people renders her immobile, disabled, sometimes physically sick. Whenever possible, she opts for night duty, the low lights and the hush of the ward offering the closest thing to solitude available in a working life.”

Tess moves to New York following her sister Claire and continues her career. She has a very brief romance: a child is born and she is a single parent to a son, Theo. She finds a best friend, Willa and life seems set in particular patterns. Tess has internal restrictions on her life which make her quite passive:

“But never in her whole life had she had one iota of courage. She had sought, always, silent consent for everything she had done – as if she were without volition, as if a father or mother or God himself sat permanently on her right shoulder, holding sway over her thoughts and actions. And when consent was not gleaned, or was felt to be withheld, she resumed her position of quiet passivity.”

There is a great humanity about Tess. We see her longing for the touch of another person. At times just wanting to touch and hold a man, but not wanting to disrupt her isolation; also wanting to touch/hold a particular woman, but again not wanting to disrupt a friendship. Tess is tentative and this can be a frustration for the reader, but she is very likeable:

“Occasionally she thought about retiring, moving house, taking a trip back to Ireland, but she did none of these things. There was, in her nature, a certain passivity, an acquiescence that was ill-suited to change or transformation, as if she feared ruffling fate or rousing to anger some capricious creature that lay sleeping at the bottom of her soul.”

Loss, grief and death gradually take hold. One slight irritation for me was the use off 9/11 to kill off a significant character, it felt a bit clumsy. But on the whole I loved this: it’s understated, moves slowly and has great warmth.

“This was it. This was her life, the summation of her life, her dreams run out. She would not encounter love again. She would not lie down with a man or hold a child in her arms. She was at the end of her destiny.”

8 out of 10

Starting The Salt Path by Raynor Winn

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The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

This is a collection of short stories, twenty-one in all, each one named after an element of the periodic table. In the UK the Royal Institution has voted it the best science book ever. There is a variety of stories: some are very personal memoirs, a few are fictional, some look at industrial processes and there is a good deal about the nature of words. Sometimes Levi does describe a search for a particular element, but in others he uses the fundamentals of the element for comparative purposes. In Argon he uses its almost complete inertness as a symbol for the marginalisation of his Piedmontese Jewish ancestors.

Levi explains his passion for chemistry and the reasons for his pursuit of it as a career; as always the reasons are complex:

“I have often suspected that, deep down, the motives for my boyhood choice of chemistry were different from the ones I rationalised and repeatedly declared. I became a chemist not (or not only) from a need to understand the world around me; not in reaction to the cloudy dogmas of Fascism; and not in the hope of riches or scientific glory; but to find, or create, an opportunity to exercise my nose.”

Levis also writes well and tells a good story and there is a lyricism to his writing and even humour:

“Zinc, Zinck, zinco: they make tubs out of it for laundry, it is not an element which says much to the imagination, it is grey and its salts are colourless, it is not toxic, nor does it produce striking chromatic reactions; in short, it is a boring metal. It has been known to humanity for two or three centuries, so it is not a veteran covered with glory like copper, nor even one of those newly minted elements which are still surrounded by the glamour of their discovery.”

There is a poignancy to it as well, as when he leaves a job at a nickel mine to go to a lab in Milan, describing his essential belongings:

“..my bike, Rabelais, the MacaronaeaeMoby Dick translated by Pavese, a few other books, my pickaxe, climbing rope, logarithmic ruler, and recorder.”

The most powerful piece in the collection is Vanadium. It is post war and the firm Levi is working for has a query about the quality of some compound being purchased from a firm in Germany. He begins a correspondence with his opposite number. Gradually he realizes that he knows the man, a civilian scientist in the war who worked for the Nazis and he met him in Auschwitz. Levi explores his feelings and reactions to a man who was not unkind to him, but who essentially was a moral coward in the face of evil. The last chapter on carbon could be described as a little sentimental, but I can forgive Levi that.

This isn’t a book about science, although there is plenty of science in it; it’s about humanity and the quirks and idiosyncrasies of everyday life. Levi is a good storyteller expressing human warmth, puzzlement and a sense of justice. A must read.

8 and a half out of 10

Starting Winter by Ali Smith

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