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When I read Under the Tongue a bunch of years ago I couldn't quite get into it. Whether it was the book or me, or both, I don't know; but Vera's writing is very busy, the kind that in a lesser writer would reek of thesaurus overuse. and at that moment I didn't quite think the payoff was worth the effort I had to make to piece it together. This time, something clicked. Which isn't to say that Butterfly Burning is straight-forward. Here's some builders at work:

We are here. This is said urgently and with wisdom. We are here. The here of it and the now of it make the honey. Rocking and touching, each man holds on to the word the other has offered and each word raises the moment. The birth of a word, violent, mute. They are pitched against an opposite world so they plunge and pull.

...and so on and so forth. But yes, when you hit that sweet spot between understanding and absorbing, it's often brilliant. It's all in the way that Vera comes at her story; not as particles but as wave forms, oscillations on themes that build both the characters and the plot up rather than starting with the outline and digging in. It's like being caught up in a swirl of pointillist influences, where layers and transparent layers of story are all visible at the same time, as her characters fight to find a fixed point to hold on to or push off from, only to occasionally throw in an unstoppable physical FACT where the characters and the plot can't get through, have to bounce and eddy around. Like that masterful ending of chapter two, where the swirl of half-told details gets jerked awake by a passing car. It's a cliché for a reason, could be anywhere, just happens to be 1940s Rhodesia.

It's set 50 years before it was written, in the "safe" past of apartheid - "safe" in the sense that everyone in it is dead, historians and politicians have drawn a line and accounted for it. Soldiers have come home from fighting a war they lost even when they won, stores have started selling plastic and skin lightening creams, people have started taking English names as soon as they reach the city and settled into asbestos shantytowns. Fumbatha never knew his father, he was hung by the British before he was born, he's born up against a wall; Phephelaphi is younger, she wants to try and be something more than just his girlfriend, a new concept - word is they may let blacks get actual professions soon! Vera coaxes out her characters, carefully, with an archaeologist's brush uncovering every little detail slowly, almost as if she wants to protect them from what's already happened. She has to expose them to do this, so she does it gently.

Butterfly Burning is ridiculously beautiful, even when it gives me a headache. Or heartache. Either works. Sensual, harsh, endlessly detailed from a distance where she never lets you step back and look at it at a safe distance.

Treasure Island retold from the POV of Long John Silver's creole wife and the servant girl at the Spyglass Tavern, queering the story in more ways than one. Kicking off with Silver's death, drunk and bitter over what he lost, Boardy builds a grief-driven story that's both clever and imaginative; not just a POV shift but using the established story as a history in the shadow of which other histories pass under the radar. If I don't quite buy it as the 1st-person narrative of an uneducated 18th century servant girl, and if some of the secondary characters are a bit flat, it's still engrossing enough for me to read most of it in one sitting.

Untranslated so far. Anglogaggle could do worse.

3.5.

Very short novel about an old Catalan woman telling her life, from her birth in a small village to growing up, falling in love, working hard, finding herself in the middle of the Spanish civil war... Y'know, everyday stuff. Deceptively low-key and straight-forward, scrubbed clinically free of any heavy arguments, just sticking to those far-between glowing moments that really matter. Liked it more than I thought I would.

She's 60, East German, and it's winter 1989. Burst appendix that she's tried to ignore for far too long. Bouncing ambulance to the hospital. The doctors find an abdominal cavity full of infections and germs. Feverish months pass as she sweats away in her hospital bed, regularly taken for x-rays and surgery, again and again, and while they struggle to save her life she drifts between memories and real life, between first person and third person, one long near-death experience. Life flashing before her eyes.

She's 60 and East German in spring 1989. She remembers her aunt who loved a Jewish doctor and paid for it. She remembers other party members who disappeared, she remembers whispering every conversation that meant something. The doctors struggle to find a pair of GDR-made rubber gloves that don't break, and demand an explanation from her how her immune system can be in complete collapse like this.

And they call me "doctor" even though they know it's not my title. I don't need that title. They need it. The patient asks Kora if the medical director, the professor, is aware that he's hurting her, cutting in her flesh, to cure her, sure, cut the evil out of her since she can't be free of it herself.

She's 60 and East German in summer 1989 and she reads Goethe obsessively in the few moments of clarity between fever crests. She's worked in culture her whole life. Ideals, beauty, justice... They were supposed to build something on that, didn't they? Isn't it her job to find and cut out the evil from men's hearts? Every time they turn on the radio in her hospital room, it's news about death and kidnappings and terrorist attacks and collapse. What's to fight for? The story of survival itself, perhaps, not as a heroic act but as one of endurance, of prodding and exploratory prose. Abdominal surgery can't lay everything bare or everything would pour out onto the floor, even with modern equipment and computer tomography surgeons largely work by feel through the tiniest openings, much like poets.

I'm speaking of the cavities where emotions are born. I can't say how I know that. I realise I can't convince you of ever experience. They're not really born, emotions. They thaw. As if they were frozen. Or anaesthetized.
Anaesthetized by what.
By the shock that everything I say or write is falsified by what I don't say and don't write.

She's 60, German, fall 1989. Nobody survives serious illness unchanged. But scars and emaciated bodies have their own beauty, and her Russian nurse has a name that means "little hope".

My mother, like many a retired teacher, has opinions. One of them: schools should - at least some of the time - co-ordinate their classes to fit a theme. For instance, food, one of the basic 4 F:s of survival (Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing and Mating). Everybody, regardless of background and situation, has to eat. So why not have schools take a week or two out of each year and have different classes focus on their angle on the how we consume energy. Why do we eat? What do we eat? What happens to us when we eat different things? Why do we eat different things in different parts of the world? How has what we eat, and how we get it, shaped our history, our economy, our wars, our trade routes, our language, our cultures, our literature, our very geography and climate? What are our options, food-wise, when the world changes? How has food changed between when the teacher was a kid and what the kids eat now? Etc. She argues it would not only show kids a practical application of all the stuff they learn, but also - hopefully - teach them to think about the effect they have on the world and on each other.

While I'm not entirely convinced it's practical (don't tell her that), I like the idea, and when I stumbled over Salt it seemed to scratch that idea: a history of one of THE most basic ingredients there is. Salt is one of the oldest trade goods there is, it's something we need to eat in small doses, it's something that's enabled us to store food for months so we can survive without resorting to hunting-gathering, it's something that we've always needed to organise in order to get at since you very rarely find it pure and easily accessible... Access to salt has triggered revolutions and helped decide wars, excess of salt has caused pandemics of ill health, we use it for everything from making food yummy to preventing death on icy roads. Surely that should be enough fodder for a really intriguing book?

Well, yes and no. There's no faulting Kurlansky's research, and if it's salt you want to know about, you'll get your fill; from ancient Chinese and Celtic mining techniques to life for the few people who still live on Caribbean islands whose salt production shut down in the 60s, from the original recipes for garum and soy sauce to the history of Tabasco, from thrifty salt tycoons who sprang up during the US revolutionary war to Swedish salt liquorice (for which I apologize to the entire world on behalf of my countrymen), and a lot of very complex recipes... Gandhi is in it, as are Louis XIV and Aristotle, Lot's Wife and a ton of nameless pigs and herrings. And yes, it comes across a bit like a Troy McClure documentary (Salt! The other white powder!) at times, but hey, no one will complain that Kurlansky isn't interested in his subject.

Unfortunately, it's also both a bit messy - there's no real through line to it, either chronological or topical - and at times a bit myopic. At times he gets so carried away with talking about salt that he forgets to put it in a wider context; you get the impression that salt is not just an important good but the ONLY important good, and that, for instance, lack of salt was the determining factor in, say, the US civil war. If he'd collaborated with a keen historian, there might have been more to this book.

As it is, though, it'll certainly leave you with an awful lot of anecdotes about salt. And a howling urge to pickle things.

Achebe does something very clever here: basically a story about power shifts in 1920s Nigeria with his so-called Western readers in mind, but turning the tables on them, acknowledging the power a storyteller has, leaving concepts unexplained and words untranslated. If Things Fall Apart was the telling of "The so-called savages you so-called civilized already had a civilization, thankyouverymuch", this is the showing, effectively colonizing the English-language novel right back. Unfortunately the story itself meanders and plods a bit too much at times.

Something was lost when movies started talking. Yes, a lot of silent movies are hopeless melodramas, overacted with simplistic plots that can be carried by intertitles. But to the greatest of the silent directors - yer Sjöströms, yer Murnaus, yer Vertovs, yer Langs, yer von Stroheims, yer Dreyers, and of course yer Mélièses - there was a poetry to it, a freedom to dip directly into that thing beyond plot, into the dream that gave rise to the moving image in the first place, that disappeared among clumsier cameras, stricter guidelines, tighter plots and louder stars. Endless possibilities unfettered by anything so prosaic as spoken language.

That's not what this book is about.

Let's see, it starts with ... No, I can't do that. The problem with a story, as soon as you hand it to a movie studio, is that the beginning is always so nebulous, it changes with each rewrite, with each new character brought on board.

It ends here: IN A WORLD nope, can't do that, you need a voiceover. Besides, there's only one world, isn't there?

It ends here: A film crew come to Venus - which, as we all know, was colonised in the late 1800s - to make a documentary about the mysterious disappearance of a small fishing village. The director: A young woman, the daughter of one of the great early directors who transformed the moon into one huge movie set (all in high-contrast black and white, of course), who's grown to hate her father's silly space dramas and just wants realism, true stories, and yes, even the SOUND of her own voice, even though everyone knows real movies are supposed to be silent. Things, as they are wont to do in space dramas, go Very Very Wrong. But of course, what's an ending without a story, so after enough years have passed, her father tries to tell that story.

Radiance is a remarkable book; a poem, a fairytale, not remotely science fiction in the sense that anything here is plausible; it lives in a world where mankind easily spreads across the solar system via rocketships fired out of cannons, where every planet is full of colourful flowers and strange animals but (probably) no intelligent life but our own, where old-time radio dramas and silent b&w movies are broadcast to the moons of Jupiter, where Charon and Pluto are connected by a bridge trafficked by stagecoach. And we get dropped into this by the means of camera lenses, gossip columns, movie scripts, interviews, diaries and interrogation records, trying to piece together not only what happened to Severine Unck and her film crew, but what it means. Because nothing is real if it's not recorded, but as any film director will tell you, anything that gets recorded (even documentaries? Especially documentaries) becomes artifice the second you yell "CUT!" Or was it "ACTION!"? You know, kind of like how if we find a huge aquatic animal on Venus, we're going to call it a whale even if it's not technically a cetacean; it fits the story we know. We think. It's the beauty of cinema: Anyone can play any part, with the right script and a clever enough crew making it look right. And sure the actual flesh-and-blood people get used up and shat out and hurt and heartbroken, but honestly, who cares what happens when the camera's off?

In the place I am showing you, no one can live anywhere but Earth.

Oh... Oh, God. What an awful, lonely place. How can a place like that be? How can they bear it?

Have you ever seen a movie?

I've never read Valente before but I'm going to have to read more of her. She bases this story (has her characters base their takes on the story) on so many sources, on tales old and new (and as we all know, fairytales are very old indeed), twisting them around each other until they bleed up new ones, throwing us from noir to space opera to murder mysteries to animated children's stories without missing a beat, but without ever getting to close to the ONE story, the ONE explanation, the ONE perspective that will supercede all others. It's a sheer delight to read, an explosion of imagination that never forgets that the almighty Power Of Stories bullshit can awake things you can't control.

...or 4.5. Utterly brilliant, but find myself miffed with the (non-)ending. This sort of book deserves more than cliffhangers. If that's what it is.

More to come.

I don't advise a haircut, man. All hairdressers are in the employment of the government. Hair are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos, and transmit them directly into the brain. This is the reason bald-headed men are uptight. (Withnail & I)

All kidding aside (and I'm not even sure I'm kidding, what with the "baldhead" reference and having read a novel centered on Bob Marley just before this one), the idea of natural black hair as a way to communicate is a nice one, I just wish there was more a bit more plot to the story. It feels like it could have done more either by stretching its legs over more than 90 pages, or by trowing in an unexpected turn or five. But I definitely want to read more of Okorafor.

So here we are, 35 years after his death, and Bob Marley is still the only bona fide rock superstar to ever come out of a so-called third-world country. (Nothing against Fela, but how many times have you heard football crowds spontaneously sing "Zombie"?) Legend (and you'll never be able to not see that title as ironic again) is one of the best-selling Greatest Hits albums of all time and it is, of course, conspicuously free of songs like "Crazy Baldheads", "Rat Race", "Them Belly Full (But We Hungry)", "War", "Concrete Jungle", "Burnin' and Lootin'"... The Bob Marley of popular Western culture, the decontextualized "Get Up, Stand Up" and "Buffalo Soldier" notwithstanding, comes across as a non-threatening teddy bear singing about birds and love, his rastafarianism as Woodstock hippyisms, and Jamaica as a tropical paradise of beaches and gentle stoners with funny accents who are only too happy to serve any white tourists.

That’s what happens when you personify hopes and dreams in one person. He becomes nothing more than a literary device.

A Brief History... is not about Bob Marley. He's a constant presence in it, although never mentioned by name (he's "The Singer", too mythical to even need a name, a huge whale shark in a small pond of hungry piranhas; there's a difference between the stars and the superstars, between those you remember and those who shape an entire narrative), but he's not the subject of it. It's the failed assassination attempt against him in December of 1976 that provides the centre of the novel, but James uses it as a lynchpin to tell a much larger story. Several times I find myself thinking of The Wire, both in terms of scope and in terms of characterisation; this is praise, in my book.

And killing don’t need no reason. This is ghetto. Reason is for rich people. We have madness.

Really, the sheer ambition of A Brief History (which, to make the obvious point, is 700 pages long and covers several decades, arguably centuries, of history) is staggering, but not nearly impressive as the ease with which James pulls it off. Watch the way he shifts narrators (some of whom are long dead, others who die along the way, and some, miraculously, who survive). A dead politician, the boss of a Kingston ghetto, the local CIA operative, a Rolling Stone journalist born 10 years too late, a woman who just knew Marley for a night and now has to spend her life running, various hitmen and dealers and slum kids who are all part of a bigger story but also have their own lives to save or lose. Watch the way he paces the story, it's been a while since I read a literary novel with such great command of the humble cliffhanger, yet every chapter here adds to the depth of the story, tells us something new, shows us a new angle, even if it's just that a character is refusing to see something new. Watch the patois; no empty sacrifice on the cheap altar of authenticity, language shapes the world and vice versa. James not only lets his characters be eloquent in a mother tongue that most of his readers (it's an American novel in the sense that all expat novels are) will automatically think of as "broken" English (much like the CIA operatives in Kingston don't see why the Jamaicans can't see that they have their best interest in mind), and when they shift from one dialect to another, watch out because something is shifting with them.

People stupid. The dream didn't leave, people just don't know a nightmare when they right in the middle of one.

Nothing is allowed to lie still here. Every concept of class, race, gender, nation, sexuality, faith is turned over and smashed into each other. The good-natured reggae music are both rebel songs and homophobic screeds. A religion that promises exodus and freedom, but expects women to serve. (Much like some other holy texts you could mention.) I find myself wondering if this is an American novel or a Jamaican one; on the one hand, there's both Faulkner and DeLillo and Morrison lurking between the lines... On the other hand, few American novels would be so painfully aware of the influence of America on others. The question is, would it be possible to write the Great Jamaican Novel without Marley? Then again, why on Earth would you want to do that, when you'd have to forego things like this?

Three girls from Kashmir sling on bass, guitar and drums, fresh faces brimming out of burkas, propped up and held together by a backdrop of the Singer streaked in red, green and gold stripes, thick like pillars. They call themselves First Ray of Light, soul sisters to the Singer smiling with the rising sun. Out of a wrapped face comes a melody so fragile it almost vanishes in the air. But it lands on a drum that kicks the groove back up to where the song lingers, sweeps and soothes. Now the Singer is a balm to spread over broken countries. Soon, the men who kill girls issue a holy order and boys all over the valley vow to clean their guns, and stiffen their cocks, to hold down and take away. The Singer is support, but he cannot shield, and the band breaks away.

But in another city, another valley, another ghetto, another slum, another favela, another township, another intifada, another war, another birth, somebody is singing Redemption Song, as if the Singer wrote it for no other reason but for this sufferah to sing, shout, whisper, weep, bawl, and scream right here, right now.

There's so much passion in this novel, so much anger and love and grief and beauty. And James makes it all sing.

Now I need to reread "The Dead"...