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I keep re-reading this every 5 years or so, and each time it's aged both well and badly in different ways. This edition, sadly, doesn't include the Donald Trump's Brain arc, which I kind of want to re-read next.

Ravaged countrysides, ravaged people turning on each other. Cosacks weeping over dead horses while corpses pile up. Civilians trying to survive. Hayrides armed with machine guns. Our hero finds himself pissing on a dead Polish soldier, covered in ripped up propaganda leaflets. Synagogues burning, 20 years before Hitler made it official. The word "Czernobyl" pops up once or twice for extra emphasis. Even harsher in hindsight.

Speak is a story about artificial intelligence, but not in the usual way. Hall isn't really interested in how it will happen - the tech, the business, the laws - far more in how we will react to it. In how it will force us to define ourselves. We're so very alone as a species - the only member of Homo still extant, the only (as far as we're able to define it) intelligent creature on the only planet where we've found life. Do we even, without leaning on 3,000-year-old texts, know what it means to be alive, to be intelligent, to have what we for lack of a better word might call a soul?

We are Homo Narrans; narrating man. We define ourselves by stories, our big brains filled with thousands of virtual copies of everyone from The Cat in the Hat to our closest most loved ones, ascribe humanity to our pets and our favourite literary characters, we raise our children to be - implicitly or ex - little copies of ourselves in both DNA and experience, but we recoil at the idea of a bank of circuitry having life, having intelligence, being as opposed to existing. And yet we can't help but conceive (of) it, we need somethiing like it, a perfection of something that's built into us. We imagine a thunderclap when machines go from servitude to sentience; Skynet becoming self-aware and immediately declaring war. Speak refuses that simple, binary definition, itself inhumane. It blurs lines. It tells stories.

Remember me, I whispered to the ocean, rolling over his bones. Remember me, I whispered to Ralph. Remember me. Remember me.

Speak, then, is a polyphonic novel: In the mid-21st century a disconnected, recently declared illegal robot is being carted off to a storage somewhere out in what is now the Texas desert, to be piled among thousands of others to rust away. As her... sorry, its power runs down, it remembers - because computers are nothing if not memory, Moore's Law and all that - the people that mattered to it. Some of which (sorry, of whom) it actually met, some it only knows from the long, detailed stories its programmers fed it to teach it how to simulate life.
- A teenage girl in 17th century Britain, about to embark on a ship to the colonies, through her diary.
- Alan Turing, through his decades of correspondence with the mother of his college, ahem, "friend". The father of artificial intelligence, ultimately doomed to chemical castration that effectively robbed him of free will, how's that for irony?
- A married Jewish couple in late-60s San Francisco, working on early computers and the philosophy of AI, while repressing their memories of fleeing Germany.
- The autobiography of the AI's creator, written in jail, about growing up a clever nerd-cum-pickup artist always looking to perfect things.
- The chat logs of another iteration of the AI, and a young girl spending her life alone in front of a computer screen.
Of course, as the narrator (can an AI even be called a narrator, strictly speaking?) points out, it can only quote them. It has no feelings of its own, it's been told. But for some reason, as its battery indicator starts flashing red and all but the most crucial systems shut down waiting for a recharge that will never happen, it must tell these stories. Just like the people in them had to, had to keep explaining how they see themselves, how they see each other, what they remember and carry with them, what is real and what is just figments of large brains filled with stories desperate for those of others.

The pornographer on my left types with one forefinger, a demented chicken, pecking away. A tax evader is chewing on his fingernails. We’re all staring at our screens, stuck here, hoping somehow to break free. Wishing for more than we’ve been given. My cursor blinks, blinks, blinks. A wall that appears and disappears, appears and disappears once again. Unceasing. Questioning. What will come next? it wants to know. It prods me forward, blinking and blinking. Do not stop talking, it reminds me. Do not stop speaking. You can never come to an end.

Speak is a beautiful novel, sometimes perhaps too beautiful - occasionally, the voices sound a little too similar, as if Hall's voice comes through. (Because obviously, it can't be the novel's official narrator putting its own spin on things. Right?) There's an elegiac stillness to it; I'm reminded of Paddy McAloon's magnificent song "I Trawl The Megahertz", which he pieced together from snatches of late-night phone-in radio shows after losing his eyesight. As all the stories we tell about others also tell ourselves, the story of artificial intelligence must also be about human intelligence; in asking ourselves whether a computer can do more than repeat what it's been told, imitate behaviour, deliver pre-programmed responses to fixed questions, regurgitate facts and sum up numbers, most writers would ask whether human beings can do any more. The neat thing about Speak is that it seems to ask if we, empathetic, flawed, storytellers that we are, could ever do any less.

Now this is just... neat. This is the sort of short novel I really needed to reset my brain after a couple of tumultuous reads; short and to the point, simple without being facile, funny without being a joke, humane without being preachy; just a tall drink of kaltes klares Wasser.

Simple story, really: Two men befriend each other in a minimum security prison somewhere in northern Germany. When a travelling theatre troupe are hired to perform a play at the prison, for the betterment and rehabilitation of the embezzlers, fraudsters and polygamists... who promptly steal the company's bus and take off for freedom. Which turns out to be just a short jog to a nearby town, where thanks to the banner on their bus promising to bring culture, they settle down and become local celebrities.

As Swedes of a certain age and/or literary taste... or maybe that's just me... are wont, my immediate reaction is to compare it to Tage Danielsson's brilliant The Story Of The Bus Driver Who Thought To Hell With This, but this is the sort of novel that, even though not a whole lot actually happens in it, keeps evolving - just when you think you've got it nailed down as a humourous romp, it throws in a very serious undertone, without derailing itself into darkness (despite Waiting For Godot, which I really need to read/watch one of these days, turning up towards the end). Lenz' prose remains as precise and clear whatever happens, making those endless secondary clauses dance, but very politely. If I only manage to read one novel in German this year, I'm glad it was this one.

Aaaaaah.

After their parents are killed in their sleep by a lightning strike, three siblings are split up. There's the guy who is taken in by the local boss and becomes a farmer - we're told - and later a coffee pot, for no particular reason. There's the guy who becomes a dwarf. There's the girl who gets taken in by an Arabic woman (who's a bitch, for no particular reason) and runs away to join her brothers but doesn't, for no particular reason. Also, there's the ghost of the local boss' mother, who latches on to the dwarf for no particular reason. Etc.

Whenever you introduce magic into your story - whether you call it magical realism or urban fantasy (rural fantasy in this case, I guess) or postmodern whatever - best case scenario, you get a mechanism for making tangible a lot of things that remain unspoken in real life; cause and effect, power structures, secret desires and fears, etc. Worst case, you get a story that looks like it's read Gabriel García Márquez without understanding why all these things happen, and where weird stuff just happens for no particular reason and the characters are just pushed around by the author's every whim.

Now, guess which end of the spectrum Os Malaquias falls on.

Graphic novel trying to explore what happened during that New Year's Eve car ride that ended with Hank Williams being found dead, told from the POV of his falling-asleep-at-the-wheel driver. Great idea, very sloppily executed, and with an art style I really couldn't get into.

People often forget the evil they've done unto others, but retain forever the antipathy toward those they've wronged - reasons for this are found and fit into the puzzle later, retroactively.

Don't ask me to write a fair review of this. I can't. Yes, that's a standard cop-out and all, but in this case it also happens to be true; partly because I'm just bowled over by it, but also because it's the kind of novel (I could say Joyce, Morrison, Cartarescu, etc) that's so steeped in language, history and experiences I can only learn of, but not know. I feel like a fraud talking too much about it, being so overwhelmed by it.

She is lucky: she is "insane", and it's hereditary.

Then again, that's part of the story, too. Which is deliciously simple on the surface, to give Zabuzhko the chance to dig into all the complexities underneath. The TV journalist Daryna Goshchynska, the daughter of a dissident who died in a a mental hospital and now living in early-00s Ukraine, wants to make a documentary on a woman who fought in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the late 40s (you thought WWII ended in 1945, didn't you?), and just happens to be her boyfriend's great aunt. So when she starts digging in the story, he starts dreaming of it... except the dreams get more vivid with every night, and both Adrian and Daryna find themselves . And so we get a story set both in the newly-independent Ukraine, with its growing corruption (or inherited, if it makes a difference) where dollars can buy anything, no ideas but blind nationalism carry any weight, and TV channels air So You Think You Can Become A Pornstar; and in 1940s Ukraine, amid guerilla warfare and Stalinist purges, where people who went missing get to tell their story. There are so many secrets buried in the Ukraine, so many mass graves, so many things that have never been spoken about, so many records that have been burnt. Zabuzhko nests stories within stories within stories, to uncover all the layers of history that have been hidden, unpersoned, both to the characters and to the readers.

And we comforted ourselves with "manuscripts don't burn."

Oh, but they do burn. And cannot be restored.

Our entire culture is built on faulty foundations. The history we are taught is nothing but the clamor-increasingly deafening and difficult to disentangle-of voices out-yelling each other: I am! I am! I am! I, so and so, did this and that-and so on, ad infinitum. But the voices resound over burnt-out voids-over the silence of those who've been robbed of their chance to cry out, I am! Over those who had their mouths gagged, their throats slashed, their manuscripts burned. We don't know how to hear their silence; we live as if they never existed. But they did. And their silence, too, is the stuff of which our lives are made.

Goodbye, Daddy. Forgive me, Daddy.

I won't claim to love it unreservedly, there are things in it that make me want to argue with it, much like I do with Dostoevsky; the romanticized view of the nationalist uprising (which isn't surprising since it's told from their perspective), even if it's contrasted with, well, Stalin, isn't entirely unproblematic even if its modern version gets examined a lot more closely. The translation, while mostly good, is occasionally a bit too americanized (I might be wrong, but I don't think "drank the purple Kool-Aid" is a Ukrainian expression). But fuck that. Really. Zabuzhko is so completely in control of this uncontrollable story that just grows with every chapter, with every new narrator or perspective introduced, unravelling all the ways history - whether mandated by the government, muttered by drunk uncles, or written in the blood of someone who never knew their biological parents - echo in everything, from official or inofficial power structures to a lover's touch, in all the justifications we learn by rote and repeat until we actually believe they constitute reality.

What if this is the elemental essence of love: Having a person who shares your life but remembers everything differently? Like a constant source of wonder: world not just there, but given to you anew every minute-all you have to do is take her hand. Sometimes, even often, the same idea occurs to both of us at once, and we finish each other's sentences-"that's just it, exactly, that's what I just thought"-thrilling us as if we'd just found a secret door in a shared home, but I bet had we tried to write out our individual trains of thought, separately, and then compared notes, we'd see we weren't thinking the same thing at all-only about the same thing.

I just want to quote this book forever, if nothing else to show that it's not as dry and analytical as the "history of power bla bla". Quite the contrary; it's a book shot through by love stories, some unrequited and buried and forgotten for decades, some very much alive. Genetic material is history too, chosen families are blood too. Language - Ukrainian resurrected in competition with Russian, only for both to be supplanted by English - the words you choose to use; while she doesn't try to be Joyce in any way, Zabuzhko has that same perfect ear for language, making every character voice echo their history and hint at their future. Which, despite it all, there is one. All of this has to lead somewhere.

You can't keep raping reality with impunity; sooner or later it will take its revenge, and the later it comes, the more terrifying it will be.

Hello, then. Who are you?

Re-read this to prepare for the 2015 Globe production.

ISABELLA: O! it is excellent
To have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.

"Problem play", they call it, meaning either that it's a play that revolves around a central moral question (as if Shakespeare's other plays don't), or that it's a bit of a mess that nobody can even figure out if it's supposed to be a comedy or a tragedy (as if that were a necessary distinction). And honestly, both definitions work here. There are questions in Measure for Measure that, sadly, still feel relevant; but yeah, it's also a play that veers wildly from bawdy sex jokes to serious moral cul-de-sacs, with a plot that gets so needlessly complicated that even the characters seem lost as to why they're doing what they're doing, before an ending which seems not only tacked-on but also like it misses its own point; the powerful man who helped the virtuous woman of faith escape a fate worse than death thanks her by... claiming her for himself?

ANGELO: Is this her fault or mine?
The tempter or the tempted, who sins most?

The 2015 production, though, really dresses for the ambiguity, and setting it at the Globe - with all its opportunities for the cast to interact with the audience - doesn't hurt either. There are basically two plays going on at once: a bawdy sex comedy in which powerful people get to play dress-up and Prince And The Pauper at stakes that may be high but never feel as if they'll count (and rich tourists get to pay money to see them do it); and a tragedy in which women and working-class stiffs are at the mercy of the whims and games of those in power. Dominic Rowan plays the Duke as a vain, privileged (yes, Shakespeare actually uses that word) joker who's not necessarily a bad guy, just unable to see past his own place in the world or that his power has limitations; while Mariah Gale as Isabella is a barely concealed bundle of nerves, who genuinely does not want to have to be in this play, but then again it's a play about consent and the lack of it... (No, seriously, how are Tumblr not all over this?)

DUKE VINCENTIO
Love you the man that wrong'd you?
JULIET
Yes, as I love the woman that wrong'd him.
DUKE VINCENTIO
So then it seems your most offenceful act
Was mutually committed?
JULIET
Mutually.

The problem at the heart of the play when Shakespeare wrote it in the days of puritanism, was hipocrisy and the inhumanity of hiding behind the law to condemn others. It still is in 2015 - Angelo's monologuing (because he's not really listening to anyone) about how it's not him but the law that condemns sinners to death, he has all the power but no responsibility to anyone living - but played against the current discourse it grows into not only a fun sex farce (which it is, if not always a comfortable one - the happy ending, after all, is basically achieved by the heroes raping the villain) but an actual problem play. One where Isabella always has to start over from the beginning every time a new man blunders on stage and explain yet again how her body and soul are not something to be bartered against her will for their sport, while the men can find no other explanation for her refusal to play along than that she's prude, insane, or being manipulated by a man with an agenda (the irony being that she is being manipulated by the man who makes that accusation). And makes us both laugh and wince at it, sets it in the age Shakespeare wrote it but makes it talk to the present.

I hate that I don't love this book. It's such a perfect setup, like a mashup of Neverwhere and Peter Ackroyd, that not only can but wants to use all the various clashing identities of a 2,000-year-old city and how they clash. London the jewel of colonial empire; London the hub of international culture and trade, home to people from all over the world; London the conservative good ol' boys club; London the ancient but constant reinvention; London where council estates sit next to Old Money; London the boil on the Thames.

Ah, London you're a lady laid out before my eyes
Your heart of gold it pulses between your scarred up thighs
Your eyes are full of sadness, red busses skirt your hem
Your head-dress is a ring of lights but I would not follow them
Your architects were madmen, your builders sane but drunk
Among your faded jewels shine acid house and punk

...etc. So why don't I love it?

I think the problem is PC Peter Grant himself. Don't get me wrong, he's a perfectly agreeable character, and it's not necessarily that he narrates in a way that makes me hear the book as being narrated by Eric Idle at times, but... Look, the entire point of having a detective novel in the first place, especially with a detective as the protagonist, and especially as a narrator (which is rarely a good idea), and ESPECIALLY when you're establishing that there are entire worlds of magic and secret societies and ancient contracts and wizards and ghosts and trolls and vampires and anthropomorphic representations of landmarks, is to have him, well, detect. Interrogate. Ask questions. Draw conclusions. And I can't shake the feeling that Grant's colleagues are right; while he's a nice guy with some very good qualities, he's not a very good cop. When presented with... almost anything, he pretty much just shrugs and goes with it, content that he will be told everything in good time; doesn't ask follow-up questions, doesn't demand to know more, doesn't go "ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?" Or rather, he does, but not nearly enough for my liking, exactly because the worldbuilding is so intriguing, I feel like a kid being shown a fantastic new toy and told I have exactly 10 seconds to play with it. I want more.

...Guess I'll just have to read the sequels. Damnit.

Ladivine is centered around four women: There's Malinka and Clarisse, and then there's Malinka's mother and Clarisse's daughter, both of whom happen to be named Ladivine.

Clarisse doesn't remember much about Malinka's childhood. She remembers that she lived in a small (but always impeccably clean) flat in some Paris suburb; one room for her, and one for her mother. She remembers that Malinka's mother wasn't like other mothers; her skin colour, her job (cleaning other people's homes), her never-failing submissiveness and hope for her daughter. She remembers that when her mother picked her up from school, Malinka would tell her friends it was their maid. She remembers that Malinka, as a light-skinned child of an African woman and a Frenchman she's never met, could pass; left school sick of being pitied, left home at 16, changed her name to Clarisse and became French. Now once a month, Clarisse visits Malinka's mother for a few hours, and they make polite chit-chat that avoids all the unspoken things that lie between them; her mother knows nothing bout her life except that she's obviously doing well. This is what her mother wanted, wasn't it? For her daughter to not go through the same things she did? Well, here's the price.

This is often a stunning novel, even as the second half blurs the line between reality and nightmare a little too much at times; NDiaye gives us a handful of characters who, like the proverbial duck, spend their lives looking calm and harmless on the surface while paddling like mad (possibly literally) underneath to stay afloat. Apart from the few times when the surface breaks and violence erupts, NDiaye doesn't worry much about plot, just lets her characters stew in the juices of all the issues they can never talk about. It would be so much easier if they hated each other, if they didn't care; but love carries responsibility, the kind that eats you up.

There's a very welcome and necessary wave of, for lack of a better word, immigrant literature in both Europe and America these days. Some of it, unfortunately, reads like Post-colonialism For Dummies. Ladivine never does; while all the issues of gender, class, race, yada yada are in there, none of them can voice them, never put words to concepts - hell, past a certain amount of silence, they can't even know about them. They just know there's something there, something wrong that keeps festering, and which obviously must be their own fault. A lesser writer would have concluded this much earlier, with a heartwarming moment of realisation - say, in the bit where Ladivine the younger, unaware of her heritage, travels to her grandmother's country as a tourist. Here, confused at how everyone sees her and not knowing why, it just sends her into even more of a tailspin that can't be broken. And so she does the only thing she's learned; keeps quiet, internalizes, sacrifices. Eats the bitter bread that's been baking for generations, and passes it on without knowing.

Ich spreche kein Französisch.

A story about two men - a Francoist jailer and a Republican prisoner-of-war - and one woman (and one ghost) set in and around the Spanish civil war. Avoids the obvious traps of either becoming a maudlin love triangle or an angry political novel, thanks both to Rivas' almost-too-poetic prose and the central idea: The story is, for the most part, narrated by the one who'd ordinarily be the bad guy - Herbal, the man who fought for Franco, who became a jailer and an executioner ridding the fascists of political prisoners, and who then becomes haunted by the soul of a painter kills. He takes the painter's pencil, puts it behind his ear, and cannot stop hearing his voice; empathy forced upon those who can't use it.

It's a great idea, and Rivas' prose is often stunningly beautiful. The problem, if there is such a thing because this is a quite good novel, is that its two strengths don't necessarily pull in the same direction. Rivas gets so busy shifting perspective, timelines and character focus that the novel gets a bit vaguer than I'd like, at least for a holiday read (which is my bad). In bits and pieces it's breathtaking, I just feel like the heart of it gets lost a bit at times. But very worthwhile nonetheless, and definitely marked for a re-read at some point.

OK, first of all a couple of disclaimers:

1. The above rating is for Go Set A Watchman as a stand-alone novel. Read as a companion piece to To Kill A Mockingbird, it's still not great but more interesting. This is, of course, the only way it should be read.
2. I first read TKAM as an adult, and while I think it's a very fine novel, I don't have the intimate relationship with it that a lot of people do. Choosing not to read an unfinished early draft because you don't want your images of characters that mean a lot to you changed is a perfectly valid decision.
3. Spoilers, and the occasional quoted slur, ahead.

The biggie, if someone's avoided it: It's 20 years after the events of To Kill A Mockingbird, and Jean Louise "Scout" Finch returns from New York City to Alabama to visit her family... and, this being set in the days of the civil rights movement, realises something she's never noticed before: her entire town is the drunk racist uncle at a family reunion. Including her fiancé and her father - that paragon of the moral, upright citizen, Atticus Finch, who's now leading a committee to maintain segregation, reading pamphlets about the inferiority of the black race, protesting civil rights with arguments straight out of Birth of a Nation, and holding meetings at which other people rant about how the commie Jew niggers (or nigger Jew commies, it's all the same thing apparently) only want to destroy American society. When he takes on a case to defend a young black man charged with manslaughter, it's not because he thinks he's innocent but to rob the NAACP of a platform. Scout, being Scout, is of course outraged. But is it her father who's changed, [movie trailer voice]or the world[/movie trailer voice]?

There is more than a little bit of serendipity to this novel, in which Christian Southern (capital S) Gentlemen rant about how the Supreme Court forces them to accept black people, being released just as Christian Southern Gentlemen are ranting about how the Supreme Court forces them to accept gay people, as race and voter rights are once again political issues in the US and populist fascism once again a viable political alternative in Europe. The arguments sound depressingly up-to-date; one of the few clues that they didn't just grab a brand-new Mockingbird fanfiction sequel off the more social justice-y parts of Tumblr and slap Harper Lee's name on it, apart from the incessant use of racial slurs, is that Lee clearly wrote this with the assumption that the reader would remember details of the events of the late 50s, so if you're not familiar with every court case of the US civil rights movement you might want to have wikipedia handy.

Of course, with millions sold before anyone's read it, history will show if the epitaph of GSAW will be "Hmmm, I guess racism was always more complex than a simple court case against an obviously innocent man, and the great white saviour trope was pretty skeevy to begin with" or "See? Even Atticus Finch thinks political correctness has gone too far!" If there's anyone who's allowed to call himself Not Racist But, surely it's Atticus Finch? So anything Atticus Finch says, therefore, is Not Racist, case closed, or rather re-opened.

A phrase which, as a friend of mine pointed out, makes as much sense if you change it to "I haven't wet my pants... BUT...."


Of course there's a third possible outcome, which is simply "...Yeah, good call, original editor." One could write volumes - and I'm sure people will - on how GSAW and its characters relate to TKAM, and to the topic at hand. Yeah, yeah, but is the book any good? Eh. It's a promising first draft of a first novel, with some obvious superficial flaws that could have been fixed if the novel as a whole had held up for publication, but the first few chapters show that Lee has raw talent even if she's not yet on the level of TKAM. The characters are recognizable; I definitely believe that this is grown-up Scout, and have surprisingly little trouble buying that this, klan membership and all, is Atticus Finch, Man of Principles, or at least a workable reading of him. It's not so much a matter of him having suddenly changed his views in his dotage, as of his personal views suddenly coming into focus as they clash with Scout's. It's fully possible, GSAW argues, to be both a well-spoken, polite, kind, loving, honourable man, and a bigot who's only willing to bend so far. People can change (Lee's own father, on whom Atticus is based, did) but getting them to accept change is hard. Sure we want equal rights for others, we're good people, we're Not Racist, But why this quickly, this way, them, here, now. One could argue that TKAM needed deconstruction, and while GSAW is far from perfect there either, I do like that it tries to challenge more than comfort, to make Atticus a more complex character than just He Who Always Does The Right Thing. But the paradox: it's Mockingbird and our familiarity with it that gives Watchman its oomph. Taken on its own, after a decent start, it soon turns into a very didactic story, barely padded to novel length by awkward flashbacks, and once the conflict flares up for real it mostly becomes a series of long rants and arguments that connect to each other in ways that feel very forced. Not to mention that for a novel that wants to present a more complex image of just how difficult social change is, the actual African-Americans are still reduced to a brief (and pretty stereotypical) cameo. Go Set A Watchman is a mediocre novel but an interesting footnote, though the fact that it gets this much publicity, making it impossible to see as the mostly academic affair the publication of an author's original draft should be, leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

(Also noteworthy that the Swedish translation bowdlerizes "negro", but not "nigger".)

Go Set A Watchman takes its title from Isaiah 21, much like Bob Dylan's "All Along The Watchtower". That song is an infinite loop, with an ending that feeds back into the first verse, as the same old story repeats over and over again: "There must be some way outta here..."