Black Water by Louise Doughty

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British writer, Louise Doughty.

In Indonesia in 1965, fifty-one years ago, a coup against President Sukarno was crushed by the military leadership of Suharto and the blame fell on the Communist Party (PKI) which led to mass killings of suspected Communist members, sympathizers, and their families. Nowhere was the massacre more severe than in Bali: in the weeks surrounding Christmas 1965 it has been estimated that 80,000 people were killed; around 5% of the island’s population. Village people could not opt out: if you did not name someone as a Communist, you, yourself were suspected of being one. Even if you were merely fighting for land reform or education for women and girls, these communist-tainted ideologies were enough to condemn you. Villagers who huddled with their terrified, but relieved, families after naming a neighbour, then had to listen to screams as those neighbours were dragged from their beds and hacked to death with machetes; no-one could expect the relatively swift and painless bullet from a gun: too expensive. Villages only had long-handled sickle-like knives they used for cutting grass for their pigs; those and other methods that were easy at hand.

“We shoved wood in their anus until they died. We crushed their necks with wood. We hung them. We strangled them with wire. We cut off their heads. We ran them over with cars. We were allowed to do it. And the proof is, we murdered people and were never punished”.

— Adi Zulkadry, death squad leader quoted in the Oscar nominated documentay The Act of Killing

Old scores, family feuds, village rivalries that had been simmering for decades, generations, suddenly had an outlet for settlement. Any Bali villager today over the age of 60 must have memories of that time; and their families, being spared, must have had a hand in it. So the logic goes.

There have been various books, (including Christopher Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously), and films and documentaries (40 Years of silence: An Indonesian Tragedy, 2009, The Act of Killing, 2012) that were based on this ‘tragedy’.

“1965 is an event that has and continues to influence many Indonesians and as such, we chose to dedicate a proportion of the program to enriching our understanding about this, through themes of reconciliation and remembrance. We hoped that these panel sessions would enable conversations to take place that continue Indonesia on its journey of healing, particularly for those whose lives were so severely affected.” Janet deNeefe, Founder and Director, Ubud Writers and Readers Festival.

The Ubud Festival has presented many written and visual works based on the killings at various festivals but it was the 2015 festival that the police stepped in and forced the organisers to cancel various sessions; the 50th anniversary too remindful, too dangerous, too raw to allow talk and debate about such a controversial event – “the massacre of up to 500,000 or more alleged Communists between 1965 and 1968 by the Suharto regime.”
“Unfortunately, whilst we pride ourselves in bringing topical issues to the forefront of national and international dialogue, we had to consider the festival’s program in its entirety and the many other important issues which will be explored through it, including human rights, activism and censorship,’ DeNeefe said.

Indonesian President, Joko Widodo, last year refused to apologise to the victims of 1965, even though he had made an election promise to confront Indonesia’s past cases of human rights violations. The event is not taught in schools; it is being erased from the country’s history.

It was this event of 1965 that inspired British writer Louise Doughty, a regular visitor to the Ubud Festival to write Black Water, her ninth novel, which was published by Faber & Faber earlier this year.

Ironically many writers choose fiction to highlight real events.

“Novels arise from the shortcomings of history”.  So said Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, born 2 May 1772 and known by his pen name, Novalis. The facts of history are usually dry and un-engaging, so to engage readers writers use the novelist’s art of researching the facts by talking to the participants, then imagining the detail; the personal detail that can grab a reader’s attention, put them in the character’s shoes and inspire them to dig further, light their own imagination and spur them on to seek more answers: the truth can inspire fiction in the writer and then that fiction can inspire truth in the reader.

Black Water tells the personal fictive story of a mixed race (Dutch, Malay) man, an intelligence operative, called, by his English name, John Harper. The book is divided into three parts: the first set in 1998 when Harper is on ‘forced leave’ in Bali (why?) and embarks on a love-affair; part 2 is his early mixed race life in the Dutch East Indies, Holland, the US, and then Indonesia from 1942 to 1965, the year of ‘the tragedy’ which marked the making of Suharto; and finally, back to 1998 where the personal and the historical co-mingle; where we discover what really happened to John Harper.

Doughty is often described as a thriller-writer but in supplying the personal facts to colour the historical truth Doughty doesn’t describe the horrific violence but ‘imagines’ what could happen: dense prose of the atrocities that could befall you if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time; like most village victims. This and rather flippant drops of dryness, along with little glimpses into the future undermine any suspense as if such novelistic techniques were too commercial; or maybe it’s her attempt to dislodge the ‘thriller’ epithet. Consequently, the reader is distanced from the actual threat to Harper’s life rendering his fear as mere paranoia until well towards the end where the narrative takes on a page-turning haste that would’ve served the text better had it arrived earlier. It’s really a small point but important from a reader’s point of view. However, Doughty’s side-stepping of horrific descriptions of torture and murder may just be her novelistic skill at work: preparing us, blind-siding us, for the tense and terrifying climax. But Doughty at her best is when she is charting the geography of the heart especially of lonely, damaged people as they fumble for some support, trust, and commitment even if talk of such things are rarely on their lips.

Doughty, a British writer of Romany descent was born in 1963. She spent most of her twenties in casual teaching and temporary secretarial jobs, the latter supplying material for her first novel Crazy Paving (1995). She has been nominated and won many awards as well as being a judge for some of the prizes she has, in the past, won.

Black Water is the first book I have read that is set in the place where I live. I was interested in Doughty’s book to give colour, weight, and detail to the events of 1965 that have only filtered through to me via the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. Literature in Indonesia is not an important pastime, especially in Bali where free time is usually taken up with duties to the banjar (village council) and the temple. But this is changing although Indonesia’s most famous novelist, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, via his Baru Quartet, publishing in English by Penguin, is not known in Indonesia: the book in the Indonesian language is banned because of its anti-authority themes. Indonesia is a country that is crawling out from under its past but it’s a slow and bumpy ride. Black Water should help to it along a bit.

You can find the book here.

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2017 to-read pile

2017-to-read-pile

My 2017 to-read pile is becoming increasingly Eiffel-like.

Currently I’m reading Louise Doughty’s Black Water: it’s the first book I’ve read that is set in the place where I live but also spanning several decades and continents. Doughty, a British writer has made several visits to this place and the Ubud Reader’s and Writer’s Festival.

You’re be hearing about Black Water very soon. You can find a copy here. Read it with me.

 

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The Spy by Paulo Coelho; translated from the Portuguese by Zoë Perry

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Brazilian writer, Paulo Coelho, apparently the most translated author in history.

Reading a Paulo Coelho work has always been on my ‘to read’ list but I have never got around to it until now; the result of many birthday gifts recently arriving in my house. It is an episcopal novel being an ‘invention’ of her last written confession given to her lawyer, also a former lover, as she is lead away to be shot by firing squad on open ground just outside the army barracks of Caserne de Vincennes on the eastern skirts of Paris in 1917. She was 41.

Margaretha Geertruida “Margreet”  Zelle was a Dutch girl fostered to relatives when she was 15, when her mother died. She became aware very early that her attractiveness and sexuality were going to be her salvation… they really became her downfall. At 19 she answered an ad in a Dutch newspaper for a bride to Rudolf MacLeod, an army officer, and not a very nice man, in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) where she lived for several years until boredom, caprice, led her, penniless, to Paris. She had been enthralled by Javanese dance and excited everyone by performing it in Paris, in a gallery not far from “that dreadful metal tower”. Her version was more to do with strip-tease, which is as remote from Javanese dance as elephants are from ants; but of course, no one knew that; and, besides, orientalism and exoticism were all the rage in Europe at the time. Of course, she needed a name, Mrs. Margreet MacLeod just would not do. She chose a name from the Malay patois of Java (now called Indonesian) for the sun, Mata Hari, literally ‘the eye of the day’. There are many businesses in Indonesia today that bare this name and none of them has anything to do with Mrs. Margreet MacLeod.

If my tone is flippant, so is the book’s.

Coelho obviously assumes that Mata Hari was a victim of her own independence which ran against the male-dominated society of the time and in giving her a voice gives vent to her own redemption. However, what is most obvious is not her independence or originality but her stupidity. If she believed her looks and sex would get her somewhere why marry an unknown man, 21 years her senior via a newspaper ad?

It is a pity that the weight of this work is so feeble.

She certainly had ingenuity and a self-awareness that she used to get what she wanted, but what she wanted was usually men and their nationality was of no interest to her. In this sense, she was indeed a victim but also naïve and foolish given she was ‘working’ in Europe while Europe was at war with itself; her neutral nationality, Dutch, was very flimsy protection indeed, and in her later years her mature feminine body was no longer ripe for dance so it was her reputation alone that got her into the beds of Frenchmen and Germans alike.

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She always left her bra on.

However, there was little supportive evidence that she was actually a double agent and she may indeed have been innocent as she professed but she was never good at justifying her past, remembering her motives, or men’s names. She could never remember the name of that “unknown” Russian composer who wrote the music for The Right of Spring  which starred “that idiot” Nijinsky. Her own testimony did most of the damage. The jury took 45 minutes to convict her.

The fault of this book lies with Coelho’s choice to tell the story via her words alone. A letter may contain other characters, dialogue, and description but it is all through one person’s eyes. We know of no other person’s real feelings, love, compassion, support, or faithfulness for this woman. We only know her own version which is really Coelho’s version. It is as if he memorised her Wikipedia entry and tried to colourise it.

“When we don’t know where life is taking us, we are never lost.” That should be on her gravestone.

So I’ve now read a Paulo Coelho book. Pity it was the wrong one.

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How to be a Good Veronica by Michael K Freundt

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This is the re-publication of Veronica Comes Undone which was originally on the US publishing site, Smashwords, which had impossible tax issues; which is why I re-published it on an Australian site, Tablo, where tax issues have been taken care of. Thank you Tablo. If you have Veronica Comes Undone, this, How to be a Good Veronica is the same book.

Veronica Comes Undone, if it hasn’t already, will soon be eliminated from ibooks.

How to be a Good Veronica can be found here.

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The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs by Damon Galgut

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The South African writer, Damon Galgut

Don’t worry if you are woefully unread in South African literature, so is the South African writer Damon Galgut.

“Local writers are trying to escape a rigid set of moral gestures, if I can put it like that, which have imposed repetition upon us. Perhaps cliché is nothing more than the weight of the past pinning down your mind. In this sense, imaginative freedom is a way of finding the future, though it isn’t so easy to do.”

In other words, Galgut is looking out from South Africa not looking at it. However, there is a tone to his work that can easily be linked to his country, his continent: a tone that is built on the black and the white, the long distances, the heat, the poverty, the seemingly political ineptitude and the sense of people struggling to live a life they want but never seem to get. Most, but not all, of his male protagonists are slight in stature, indecisive, confused, loners with an ambiguous sexuality. Patrick Winter, the first-person narrator in Galgut’s 1991 novel, The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs is one such protagonist. He is also mentally fragile since his compulsory two-year stint in the military where he became not only horrified by death and boredom but he attained a sense of hatred and terror at things like the insistent regularity of bathroom tiles and the rigid diagonals of sunlight. He takes Valium twice a day.

He travels to Namibia by car with his mother to see her black boyfriend who is politically activated in the first free elections in Namibia, formally South West Africa, where Patrick did his mandatory South African national service one year earlier and, now on this trip, he constantly wonders if the locals he meets may have been the same people that he shot at; that shot at him. It’s a story about a child and his mother; she, extroverted, thrives to belong “but her glamorous strivings were hollow’’; he, introverted, convoluted, his “patterns ran inward, spiralling endlessly towards a centre that didn’t exist.” They, tragically for both of them, belong together.

This book fell out of print but it was Galgut’s shortlisting for the 2008 Man-Booker prize with his novel The Good Doctor (2003), and subsequent fame, that gave him the opportunity to refine the text for the inevitable re-print. He was never quite satisfied with the original text: ‘discordant’ he called it.

“I woke to the sound of a pig being killed. I sat up rigidly in bed, not moving till the noise suddenly stopped. Then I got up and dressed and went outside. I had forgotten this about the farm. Its calendar runs on slaughter.”

This is typical of Galgut’s prose: stark statement of fact, short clear sentences without any mention of what the narrator feels; but the arrangement of such words, sentences, creates its own feeling, supplied significantly by the reader. Galgut draws the scene, we colour it in.

I once heard an ordinary female tourist talk about the end of her wonderful and surprising holiday on a foreign isle and her inevitable return: “Home I go,” she said, “to crawl back under my rock.” For all Patrick and his mother’s yearnings and plans this is what will happen.

“I sat down on a swing and rocked myself to and fro. In a little while, I knew, I would walk back up the road to the hotel, and we would pack our bags and go, and our usual lives would resume.”

The promise of travel and the lure of a foreign place is rarely fulfilled, it takes courage to stay out from under that rock; and Galgut by writing about this makes us aware just how rare and courageous it is.

You can find this book here.

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The Good People by Hannah Kent

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The Australian Writer Hannah Kent

It is not all that long ago, 1994, that Frank Moorhouse’s Grand Days was disqualified from the Miles Franklin Award (Australia’s most prestigious literary prize because it was not Australian enough (he won the prize for its sequel Dark Palace (2000), which contains one scene set in Australia); apparently Australian literary sentiment has grown up since then, thank god – although the real problem lies from the rules of eligibility for the Prize . Here now is an Australian author, Hannah Kent, whose debut novel, Burial Rites (2013) was set in Iceland and now her second, The Good People, is set in Ireland: and still not a gum tree in sight. The only thing Australian about this book is its author; but that’s all that is needed, and rightly so, to herald Kent as a new, rising, and shining voice in Australian literature.

Kent paints time, place, and character through dialogue. The time is 1825 in rural, south-west Ireland where the Catholic Church is as powerful as ever but also where old Irish superstition and language is still rife and useful. All of this is established through how the characters talk: here a man comes to seek council from Nance Roche about his troubling dreams. Nance Roche is a wise woman who lives alone in a windowless, mud hut near the wood and who is said to have ‘the knowledge’.

 

‘Faith, what does it matter? I’d best be on my way.’

‘Sure, Peter, Go on home.’

He helped Nance to her feet and waited as she used the tongs to pluck a coal from the fire, dipping it, hissing, in her water bucket to cool. She dried the dead ember on her skirt, spat on the ground and passed it to him. ‘You’ll see no púca tonight. God save you on the road.’

Peter put it into his pocket with a curt nod. ‘Bless you, Nance Roche. You’re a good living woman, no matter what the new priest says.’

Here archaic English (“Faith, what does it matter?”), old Irish (púca means ghost) and Catholic salutation (”God save you on the road.”) all create the world of this novel: illustrative, complex, colourful, informative, and believable. The last because of Kent’s success at creating verisimilitude: the appearance of truth. You do not need to look up the meaning of púca; nor do you need to research the veracity of the use of the word ‘faith’ as an exultation in nineteenth century south-west rural Ireland; nor that the possession of a cool coal from the hearth of a bean feasa living in a mud-hut will soothe one’s dreams. As quickly as you read the lines the reader accepts this created truth because of the trust we readers place in the creator of such truth; when the real truth is that we are sitting in our reading chair scanning and finding shared meaning from little dark marks on a pale background. All hail our imagination and those that tickle it!

Kent has done her publisher proud: produced a novel with all the qualities of her first that prompted her global success and her publisher’s trust in her in the first place (it’s rumoured her earnings from rights, foreign publishers and the like, was $1 million); mid-nineteenth century far-western Europe in a valley of poverty, crime, women, faith, and fear, but with such differences that make it fresh and new, in tone, theme, crime, spine, and ending.

This is a story of three women: a new and bitter widow, Nora; a servant girl, Mary; and a feared and revered loner, Nance Roach; unwedded, unbedded, and therefore considered unworldly, but ironically, powerful despite the “fear of any woman who was not tethered to man or hearth.” In a society of family and neighbourily trust, tension and anger can boil quickly if livelihood is threatened: if cow’s milk is without butter, if a hen’s egg is yolk-less, or if a man falls suddenly dead, the inhabitants clutch at reasons, causes – be it four crows seen huddled together at a crossroads; lights seen bobbing on a fairy mound; or a cretinous child thrust on a widow who has no means to support it.

This is what happens to Nora whose motherless and afflicted grandchild is suddenly handed to her but who firmly believes it is the mischievous fairies, The Good People, who have taken her Micheál and left her one of their own. Her attempts to return the fairy to its own kind and see the safe return of her grandson is what propels the narrative to its tragic finale.

The belief systems, be it Christian or fairydom, give meaning to these ignorant people; the world is mysterious and explanations are needed for everything that ties them down, keeps them safe, or lifts them up. They need these causes of things to be certainties to allow them to get on with their poor and mundane lives; to keep planting their potatoes, milking their skinny cows, and harvesting turf to heat their hovels because their only other choice is to take to the road: the worst of outcomes.

Some readers have found the book depressing; yes, the story is sad, but the writing is evocative and succeeds is creating a vanished world, surreal almost, for the reader to get lost in so when the world of this valley is pushed into a civilized courtroom the reader too is confronted by the complexities and necessities of belief, survival, and what is true, good, and right.

I urge you to read this book. You can find it here.

by Categories: Australian Literature, Book review, Literary criticismTags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy by Rumer Godden

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British writer Margaret Rumer Godden (1907 – 1998) 

This is a story of drugs, prostitution, murder, and nuns.

Of all the writers of the 20th Century the British writer Rumer Godden (1907 – 1998) best known for her 1939 novel Black Narcissus filmed in 1947 by Michael Powell and starring Deborah Kerr wrote the most searchingly and movingly about women’s servitude to the Catholic Church.

Although born in England she spent most of her life in India, growing up in Narayanganj, colonial India (now in Bangladesh), later in Calcutta where she founded and ran a dance school for children for over 20 years and where her writing began, but then in Kashmir in India’s north west. She returned to England in 1945 to concentrate on her writing. She did not convert to Catholicism until 1968 but was always interested in the mystical and emotional balance between the Catholic Church and the practical world of secular existence. She lived, from 1968 to 1973, with her second husband, in Lamb House, Rye: also inhabited at various times by writers Henry James (Portrait of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw) and E. F. Benson (Mapp and Lucia).

She wrote 27 novels, 11 works of non-fiction, 4 volumes of poetry, and 28 books for children. She was made Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1993 and her last novel, Cromartie vs. the God Shiva (1997), was published the year before she died.

Five for Sorrow Ten for Joy (1979) her 20th novel, and set in France, tells the story of Lise (just one of her names), a notorious ‘madam’ with a facial wound and known to the press as La Balafrée (The Scarface), and Patrice, her lover, her jailer, her protector, her pimp. But it begins with her journey, after her release from prison, to a nunnery: a place she can’t wait to get to. Along the way Godden weaves narratives in various tenses and voices to colour Lise’s story and her past; how a painter might use colours to give depth to a picture. But what she doesn’t disclose is why she was in prison in the first place. She saves that for later.

It’s easy to call her work melodramatic, which is probably why 9 of her works have been filmed, but her writing skills belie the degrading element of that classification.

What obviously fascinated Godden was how belief, not necessarily the subject of that belief, can completely take over a person and compel her to sacrifice herself to a god and even live a life outside of how that same god commanded them to live (“Be fruitful and multiply”, Genesis 1: 28). Lise’s obedience is not to her god but to her order, which protects her from the world, but also, and more importantly, from men. A man ruined her life so she seeks the protection of women, which, ironically, is in the service of a paternalistic church.

Parallel to Lise’s story is that of Vivi and Lucette. The former, a 14 year old whore eager to get away from the arms of the nuns and into the arms of handsome Luigi; but once that happens and she has a babe forced into her own arms she rebels and hates Luigi, his family, and his child: she denies all wifely and motherly instincts prescribed to women but which are also the instincts that are shunned by nuns; one woman is damned, others are exulted.

Lucette is a lost child who is released from prison on the same day as Lise but who sees Lise’s desire to run into the care of the nunnery as nothing but out of the frying pan and into the fire.

“They tell me that often the worst criminals make the best nuns.”

Spiritual and mystical beliefs by women to a masculine god tussle with what other women think being a woman is all about. This is what makes Godden’s work so interesting.

You can find a full list of authors and titles, including 13 by Rumer Godden – and not all about nuns – at www.openroadmedia.com or follow @OpenRoadMedia on facebook or twitter.

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Dear followers

I’m a little bit paranoid about grammar, typos, and spelling mistakes. I proof read my writing (all writing even my sms and emails) many times and often stretch friendships by asking friends to help (I wish I could afford to pay them); but no matter how hard I try some slip through. Nothing undermines a writer’s authority more than these pesky little do-dahs. If you see any in my posts Please Tell Me!

We all have to be vigilant. I usually use British English and spelling; these aside, please email me or comment on my post if you notice anything amiss.

Thanks.

Happy reading!

Michael.

 

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My Brother, My Love & Other Stories

This collection of stories is now globally available here

This book is available for download with iBooks on your Mac or iOS device, and with iTunes on your computer. Books can be read with iBooks on your Mac or iOS device. Cost $6.99

This has been made possible through the Melbourne based publishing platform Tablo

In the coming months I will move my other publications from the American platform I’ve been using (smashwords) to this convenient and very user-friendly Australian platform.

If you are interested in writing and hassle-free self-publishing…

Give Tablo a Go.

 

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Slam-Prose takes the Prize. Again.

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American writer, Paul Beatty

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

Paul Beatty is a 54 year old African American from Los Angeles and the first American to win the Man-Booker Prize (2016) since American writers were included in 2014. He has an MFA in creative writing from Brooklyn College and an MA in psychology from Boston University. In 1990 he became the first ever Grand Poetry Slam Champion of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe which garnered him a book deal. Two volumes of poetry Big Bank Take Little Bank (1991), Joker, Joker, Deuce (1994) and three novels , White Boy Suffle (1996), Tuff (2000), and Slumberland (2008) followed.  The Sellout was also awarded the 2015 National Book Critics Award for fiction.

Rappers and slam poets are never stuck for words

… And on hot 104-degree San Fernando Valley days, when we’re carrying their groceries to their cars or stuffing their mailboxes with bills, they turn and say, “Too many Mexicans,” a tacit agreement between aggrieved strangers that it’s neither the heat nor the humidity, but that the blame lies with our little brown brothers to the south and the north and next door, and at the Grove, and everywhere else in Califas;

they begin a collocated list and then subvert the last item

… Charisma flung back her long straight black hair from her face and took a hit that illuminated the mysteries of the internet, Ulysses, and the American fascination with cooking shows;

foster a slick line in similes

… and comforts you like a lover making your bed while you’re still in it;

manufacture an artistic range of compound adjectives

…My paternal grandmother was mocha-tinged, cafe-au-lait, graham-fucking-cracker brown! How come they never describe the white characters in relation to foodstuffs and hot liquids? Why aren’t there any yoghurt-colored, egg-shell-toned, string-cheese skinned, low-fat-milk white protagonists in these racist, no-third-act-having books? That’s why black literature sucks!;

add a touch of ethnic colour

… … If I was lucky, I’d catch a glimpse of Marpessa, Charisma, and their homegirls holding court at the rear gate, sassy as a brass big band, hula-hooping their hips, chanting Ah beep beep, walking down street, ten times a week …”Ungawa! Ungawa!” That means black power! … I’m soul sister number nine, sock it to me one more time…;

and toss in a joke or ten

… If New York is the City That Never Sleeps then Los Angeles is the City That’s Always Passed Out On The Couch. 

“I hate the act [of writing], definitely,” said Paul Beatty. “I mean, I don’t write much. One book every seven years or so. But it’s slow. When I’m doing it, it does give me a satisfaction. But it’s hard. It’s like how do you string together enough of these little moments where something is happening? That’s a pain in the a—.”

This is odd, or clever, because reading this book impels you to read it as fast as you can as if it was written while standing bare-foot on hot coals. But, then that, I suppose, is what slam-prose is all about.

In an age where a song lyric is suddenly, and some say at-long-last, recognised as literature – thanks to the Nobel Academy, The Sellout finally brings slam prose into the mainstream, and how? By out slam-prosing last year’s slam-prose Booker winner, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings by showing James how it’s really done. Where A Brief History … was a literary wank sprukin’ how boring seven pages of no-punctuation thought-stream can really be, The Sellout, o-n-l-y  j-u-s-t makes it over the literary line by having something to say. And no wonder publishing house after publishing house turned it down (What? A book about reinstating slavery? Are you kiddin’ me?!) until finally Farrar, Straus, & Giroux hyperventilated and agreed to take a punt.

If you like a novel to have ‘nice characters’ and a ‘good story’ stay away from The Sellout. If you like clever word-play, African-American street-speak, stand-up with balls, if you’re a book judge or a literary critic, or you like a book you can keep on the coffee table and dip in to when you’re feeling low you’ll lerve this one.

You can download the paper or ebook version here or from Amazon here.

 

by Categories: American literature, Book review, Literary criticism, Man Booker PrizeTags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment