Andrew Blackman

This is an interesting book about a conflict that has been going for decades and yet rarely grabs the headlines. When Western Sahara won its independence from Spain in 1975, Morocco laid claim to the land and sent thousands of settlers. Since then, an organisation called the Polisario has been fighting against Moroccan occupation.

This book tells the story of Azeddine, a young doctor who, during a brief stint of compulsory military service, is captured by the Polisario and kept in a POW camp in the desert for more than twenty years. Thomas Hollowell does a great job of telling Azeddine’s story, making us feel the raw injustice of it. He tells us all about Azeddine’s family, his hopes and his plans. The military service was only supposed to be for a few months before he continued his career, and so you really feel the terrible injustice when the village he’s stationed in gets attacked and he is captured. At first you hope he’ll escape, and then the hopes become more distant, and then twenty years have passed and his life has gone by.

There’s plenty of good, lively description, and you really get a sense of life in the camp. Hollowell says the account is based on a true story, and he spent months interviewing the protagonist Azeddine. The account has been fictionalised, however, in order to bring it to life. Some scenes come from other books and articles. I’m glad that he says this up front and so it’s clear what’s what, but I can’t help feeling that it would have been better to stick to the facts (maybe that’s just the old journalist in me speaking). Azeddine really was imprisoned for over twenty years, and that’s a powerful story that doesn’t necessarily need spicing up with extra fictionalised episodes. Of course, real-life people are not always great interview subjects, and I can sympathise with that. Sometimes you just don’t get the material you want or suspect must be there – people don’t remember, or don’t want to remember, or talk in generalisations when you want them to be specific. Still, as powerful as this was as a fictional account, I feel it would have been more powerful if the author could have pushed for enough real-life details to tell it entirely as a true story and said in his foreword “All of this happened exactly as it’s written.” The fictionalisation thing always leaves me wondering exactly what’s real and what’s not.

The only other thing that didn’t work so well for me was the interspersing of Hollowell’s own narrative of his time in the Peace Corps. Particularly in the early chapters, I found myself wanting to skip over them and get back to Azeddine’s story, which is so compelling that you don’t want to be interrupted with details of the Peace Corps application process. Azeddine’s struggle is such a vivid, desperate, life and death struggle that Hollowell’s reminiscences inevitably seem petty by comparison. Perhaps this contrast was deliberate, but I would have preferred just to hear Azeddine’s story. I’m not saying Hollowell’s own story isn’t interesting or worth telling – it’s just that for me it didn’t stand up side by side with Azeddine’s. Nobody’s really could.

So overall I enjoyed the book, and learned a lot more about Western Sahara than I knew before. I was drawn into the characters and some of the descriptive passages were very good. The book was clearly well researched and the details really added to the story, giving a clear and vivid picture of the brutal life as a prisoner of war in the Sahara Desert. I rooted for Azeddine all the way through, and read quickly to the end, always a good sign. The reservations I had were not major, and I would recommend this.

Andrew Blackman Thomas Hollowell allah's garden, book review, morocco, peace corps, thomas hollowell, western sahara

In a way, the plot of Last Orders is very simple: a group of friends drive to the coast to scatter the ashes of their friend Jack. Yes, that’s it. Along the way they have arguments and fights and endless pints of beer, but none of that is really the point. The real action of this book takes place in the past, appropriately enough for a novel about scattering ashes. These are old men remembering not only Jack but also their own former selves.

There are lots of lies and secrets and betrayals, but most of all there’s a sense of missed chances. There’s a phrase that really stuck in my mind, “If we could see and choose”. Meaning that all the characters had ideas of themselves as young men, ideas of who they wanted to be. Jack wanted to be a doctor, Ray a jockey, Lenny a boxer. But then things got in the way: the war, family, health, and a hundred other reasons why things didn’t work out the way they should have done. If we could see the way everything would pan out and choose based on the outcomes, things would be very different. But we can’t. We choose based on what seems best at the time, or easiest, or what other people want us to do. And sometimes we don’t really get to choose at all. And so our lives are not what we would have chosen, but what we end up with.

The novel, which won the 1996 Booker Prize, is written from multiple perspectives. The voice of each character is believable, with working class language and speech patterns (the opening line, for example, goes “It aint your regular sort of day”). This book is a good reminder that language doesn’t have to be correct to be beautiful. I think it’s quite hard to do it well, and if you get it wrong then too much dialect of any kind can be quite annoying. The only other book I can think of where I liked the dialect and found it not only believable but beautiful was The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Graham Swift, like Walker, manages it perfectly: even though he went to the same posh public school as I did, and Cambridge after that, there’s never a moment when his Bermondsey slang rings false.

It’s a maudlin kind of book, again appropriately – not just because of the death at the centre but because of the pubs that feature so heavily throughout. It feels like the sort of story you’d be told by an old man sitting at the bar nursing his half-finished pint on a slow Tuesday afternoon in one of those old-fashioned pubs where there’s no music or TVs to drown out the melancholy thoughts that quiet drinking can bring on. You can feel the longing in the characters, sad and resigned to what their lives have become but still remembering what they would have done, if only they could see and choose.

Andrew Blackman Graham Swift 1990s, book review, booker prize winner, british fiction, graham swift, last orders, multiple narrator

What I liked about this book was the complexity of its characters. It tells the story of a former Communist dictator being put on trial by the new democratic government. In another author’s hands, it could have been unbearable. The Cold War is often viewed in simplistic terms: we won, they lost, democracy=good, communism=evil. It would have been easy to make the characters into cardboard cutouts, the dictator into some kind of James Bond villain.

The reality, of course, is that nobody thinks of himself as evil. We might think others are evil, but for our own actions there is always a justification. It’s the way human beings operate: we act, and then our brains go into overdrive telling stories and rewriting history with ourselves as the heroes. The main character in this book, former dictator Stoyanov, is no different. He has been a dictator for decades, has spied on his own people, jailed those who opposed him, stifled freedom of expression, etc etc. But in his eyes, he was serving his country, building Socialism, doing what needed to be done. As he writes in a letter to the new government:

I have done everything in the belief that it was good for my country. I have made mistakes along the way, but I have not committed crimes against my people. It is for these mistakes that I accept political responsibility.

Reading this book, in fact, I was reminded of Tony Blair’s resignation speech:

Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right. I may have been wrong. That is your call. But believe one thing, if nothing else. I did what I thought was right for our country.

Blair, of course, was democratically elected and did not infringe his people’s freedoms in the way an Eastern Bloc dictator did. That’s not what I’m trying to say. I just mean that in many people’s view, including mine, he committed serious crimes while in office. Whichever way you look at it, he’s certainly responsible for many thousands of deaths. There’s even a campaign to have him arrested. But he retells the story to make himself the hero. I may have made mistakes, but I honestly tried to do the right thing. Listen out for it – it’s a common line people use when they’re accused of doing wrong. I’ve probably used it myself a few times.

The other characters in the book are well fleshed out as well, from the prosecutor to the random people watching on TV. Everyone has their ambiguities, their own personal mix of higher motives and blatant self-interest. The trial delivers a verdict, but fails to deliver what people really want, because what they want is unattainable. An oppressive regime affects the whole society for generations, corrupts and co-opts ordinary people, blurs the distinctions between right and wrong. Justice is hard enough to attain in a simple criminal trial. When it’s an entire nation’s policies for half a century that’s being put on trial, it’s not surprising that the results often fail to satisfy.

So Barnes does a good job of bringing out the complexities of a particular political moment. His writing is also very engaging, very smooth and elegant right from the beginning. The plot was not the most compelling, because it basically just follows the trial, and apart from a few twists and turns along the way, you know more or less where things are heading. Thankfully it’s a relatively short book, otherwise I think it could have started to drag. But at the length it is (138 pages), the interesting characters, clever observations and elegant prose were enough to sustain my interest. I definitely want to read more Julian Barnes books now, with A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters being top of the list.

Andrew Blackman Julian Barnes book review, cold war, julian barnes, Political comment, porcupine

This is a wonderfully lucid book. I would not hesitate to take writing advice from Dorothea Brande, for the simple reason that her own writing is so elegant and clear. As I was reading, I was reminded of George Orwell’s dictum that good writing should be like a window pane. Brande’s book, written in 1934, is a perfect exemplar. It does not draw attention to itself, but simply communicates the author’s ideas in a clear, pleasing manner.

Brande states from the outset that she will not deal with issues of technique. Even in 1934, there were plenty of books and writing courses to give advice on plot, pacing, etc. In any case, her belief is that in most aspiring writers, the problems holding them back are not technical, but psychological. The reason people turn up to workshops and classes and buy endless books is not to learn the craft, but to discover the secret of being a great writer.

In almost every case he will be disappointed. In the opening lecture, within the first few pages of his book, within a sentence or two of his authors’ symposium, he will be told rather shortly that genius cannot be taught; and there goes his hope glimmering.

The aspiring writer may not believe that he/she is looking to acquire the secret of a writer’s genius, but that’s really what it is, even if only unconsciously held – an idea that there is some kind of magic about writing. And Brande agrees: “I think there is such a magic, and that it is teachable. This book is all about the writer’s magic.”

The rest of the book contains a lot of practical advice on setting schedules, etc., all of which is good. But the part that really stood out for me was her discussion of genius. For her it is not a rare gift owned only by the likes of Shakespeare; rather it’s something that anyone can access, but most people don’t know how to. She says that writers should think of themselves as split personalities: a hard-working, sensible artisan, and a free-spirited, spontaneous, sensitive artist. Both sides must be in balance: too much spontaneity and the writing never gets done; too much sense and the writing gets done but is no good.

Having recognised this need for a split personality, it is then important to cultivate the sensitive “unconscious” side even as your workaday self gets you to your desk on time. One idea I loved was not talking about your writing until it is done. This is something I have always done without really knowing why – it just seemed to work better for me that way. Brande’s view is telling a story to friends before writing it down is very dangerous:

Your unconscious self (which is your wishful part) will not care whether the words you use are written down or talked to the world at large… Afterward you will find yourself disinclined to go with the laborious process of writing that story at full length; unconsciously you will consider it as already done, a twice-told tale.

In addition, the unconscious is very sensitive to criticism, and the damage done by talking too freely can be severe:

Send your practical self out into the world to receive suggestions, criticisms or rejections; by all means see to it that it is your prosaic self which reads rejection slips! Criticism and rejection are not personal insults, but your artistic component will not know that. It will quiver and wince and run to cover, and you will have trouble in luring it out again to observe and weave tales and find words for all the thousand shades of feeling which go to make up a story.

There’s so much other valuable advice in this book that I can’t summarise all of it. In fact, I feel as if I should read this book on a regular basis. So many of the ideas resonated with me, but they’re the sort of thing that are easy to forget when you’re mired in the routine of writing. So this is definitely one to keep on the shelf, and pull out at regular intervals, especially when things are getting tough and inspiration is hard to find.

Andrew Blackman Dorothea Brande becoming a writer, book review, Dorothea Brande, Writing

I quite liked this book. I think that, perhaps, if I had come upon it by chance in a neglected corner of a bookshop and read it without any preconceptions, I would have really liked it. But I did have preconceptions. A couple of years ago this was a hot book, recommended in all the end-of-year newspaper reviews, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, winner of the American National Book Critics Circle Award. I was expecting something “Astoundingly great” (Time), “Technical breathtaking” (Time Out), “A triumph of style and wit” (San Francisco Chronicle) or “A masterpiece” (The Times).

After all that, quite liking it felt like an anti-climax.

The life of Oscar Wao is even briefer than the title would have you believe, because about half of the book or perhaps even more is devoted to the story of Oscar’s mother and grandparents in the Dominican Republic. This is a good thing – those parts of the book I really liked, as they dealt really well with life under the Trujillo dictatorship and the complex choices people faced to try to survive. In fact, I would have preferred a novel based only in the Dominican Republic, only covering those earlier generations.

With the introduction of Oscar, though, the book becomes something more familiar to publishers, booksellers and readers alike: an immigrant family saga. Oscar is a nerdy adolescent, overweight, hopeless with girls, into fantasy and role-playing, and with strange, C3PO-like speech patterns. We follow him around the malls of New Jersey, watching him being humiliated in various ways, and then he goes back to the Dominican Republic and some fairly unbelievable stuff happens which… well, I won’t give away the ending, but the title of the book should give you a clue. Oscar never felt as real to me as the characters in the historical section of the book, and ultimately I didn’t really care that his life was brief. I felt much more empathy for his grandfather and the impossible balance he tries to strike between protecting his daughter from Trujillo and protecting himself.

The narrative style is energetic and interesting, effortlessly mixing colloquial and poetic until you don’t know which is which any more. It kept me reading even through the parts I wasn’t that interested in, and in the historical sections it really soars. So overall a good book and one that I am glad I read – just wish I hadn’t approached it with such impossibly high expectations.

Andrew Blackman Junot Diaz book review, dominican republic, fiction, Junot Diaz, literary fiction, oscar wao

A short book of four short stories. I liked the main one, Bon Voyage Mr President. It’s quite a straightforward story, with none of the magical realism for which Marquez is known. The dying ex-president of a Caribbean nation is in Geneva, seeing doctors about a mysterious ailment. A man from his home nation recognises him and invites him to his house, with the initial intention of making money out of him by selling him funeral services (the man is an ambulance driver and makes extra money working for funeral parlours, selling their products to dying patients). But as they have dinner and talk, the relationship becomes more complex, and they end up giving more than they take.

Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane is just a snapshot about a beautiful woman who sits next to the narrator on a long-distance flight. He watches her sleep and admires her beauty, imagining things he will say to her but finally saying nothing and letting her leave the plane and disappear into New York. It’s well-written but didn’t really feel like a story, more a scene from a potential story.

In I Only Came to Use the Phone, a woman breaks down on the way home and goes to the nearest building to use the phone and call for help. Unfortunately, the nearest building is a mental asylum, and because she enters at the same time as a new batch of patients, she is taken for one of them. Her story about a breakdown and a husband to call is seen as a symptom of her mental illness: her notes reflect the doctor’s concerns about her obsession with the telephone. Years pass, and she finally finds a way to pass a message to her husband, but when he arrives, he believes the doctor’s diagnosis of her and treats her with the same patronising condescension as the nurses, telling her he’ll visit her but she can’t leave just yet. She is furious, and her anger and violence are noted as more symptoms. It’s a good story, not entirely believable but making some good points about the institutionalisation of people, the way we believe anyone in a white coat and discount the words of anyone tainted with a diagnosis of mental illness.

The last one, Light is Like Water, is a short piece of pure fantasy. A child asks why the lights come on with a flick of the switch, and the narrator makes a flippant response, “Light is like water. You turn the tap and out it comes.” After that the boy and his brother ask their parents for a boat, and every time their parents go out they break a light-bulb and let light pour out to a depth of three feet, and go sailing around the house. It works OK until, one night, they turn on too many lights at once and the apartment becomes flooded, drowning the children and their friends. Weird but captivating little story.

Andrew Blackman Gabriel Garcia Marquez bon voyage mr president, book review, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, short stories

I’m sure that for sociology students, this book is a very valuable text. It’s very methodical and thorough – it looks at its subject from every angle, and almost every paragraph contains at least one reference to a book in the large bibliography at the end.

For me, though, the book was a bit of a struggle. Although I have often thought I would have liked a life in academia, to tell the truth I am not suited for it. I don’t like the dry, passive, non-committal tone, the judgements wrapped in so many caveats and clarifications that they become almost completely opaque.

I understand why academic writing is often like that. Spend years immersed in any subject and your knowledge becomes so extensive that to communicate it in plain language must be a challenge. With every argument you immediately anticipate the potential counter-argument, and so counter it pre-emptively with a counter-counter-argument which, itself, seems incomplete without reference to another idea which also needs buttressing by facts and references and footnotes and a thorough consideration of all possible objections.

There’s a lot to admire about such thoroughness, but it makes for a dull read. I came to this book just wanting to learn a bit more about race and racism in Britain, but often got bogged down in historiography. The parts that really came alive for me were when Solomos started talking about real-life stories.

For example, I was very interested in the coverage of Irish immigration. If you read the tabloids, you’d believe that immigration is a new issue, but Irish immigration goes back 200 years. And, most interestingly, the numbers are far greater than those for other groups. Yet, while Irish immigrants encountered extensive discrimination, there was little state intervention to prevent or regulate Irish immigration. In the mid to late twentieth century, though, immigration from former Commonwealth countries resulted in a huge backlash and draconian anti-immigrant legislation – the numbers were much smaller, but the colour of the skin was different.

The situation with Jewish immigrants at the beginning of the twentieth century in some ways anticipated the response to later Commonwealth immigration. Jews were used as scapegoats for unemployment and economic problems, and Parliament passed the Aliens Order restricting immigration and giving the Home Secretary the power to expel “undesirable” immigrants. Again, the numbers were relatively small – 120,000 between 1870 and 1914 – but they were more recognisably different, foreign, “alien”.

Again in the early post-war years, the majority of immigrants to the UK were from other European countries, and yet the arrival of much smaller numbers from the West Indies caused heated debate about the “colour problem”. Immigration and race became intertwined, and to this day they haven’t been disentangled (though these days, Muslims are the new black).

I was amazed to see how little has changed in anti-immigrant arguments. Here’s a quote from The Times, September 1958, in the aftermath of the Notting Hill riots:

There are three main causes of resentment against coloured inhabitants of the district. They are alleged to do no work and to collect a rich sum from the Assistance Board. They are said to find housing when white residents cannot. And they are charged with all kinds of misbehaviour, especially sexual.

This sounds a lot like the views of your average BNP member today. It doesn’t matter that there are no government agencies queuing up to give lazy immigrants housing and “rich sums”. It doesn’t matter that most immigrants work incredibly hard to get a foothold in this country, often while supporting family in their home country as well. The image of immigrants living in palaces on taxpayers’ money and committing crimes in their spare time is a persistent one.

Why? For the same reason as with the Jews 100 years ago. White working-class people are getting a raw deal, and they know it. So they are encouraged to believe that the fault lies not with the people getting rich off their labour, but with the Jews, the blacks, the Muslims. It doesn’t make any sense, but it doesn’t need to – it appeals at a level much deeper than that.

Of course, none of this is stated so overtly in the book. It’s my own reading and interpretation. Solomos words it all much more carefully, in paragraphs like this one from the summary and conclusion to chapter 3:

The story of post-1945 responses to immigration covered in this chapter shows how popular responses and state policy making have been shaped by specific national and local political situations. The circumstances that bring about particular types of policy response are not predetermined but are the product of policy agendas and ideologies, both within and outside state institutions. During the period covered in this chapter state responses to immigration were by no means uniform, although some patterns can be identified. We need to know more about the dynamics and the limits of state intervention in this field if we are to understand how the interplay between immigration and the state led to racist immigration controls becoming institutionalised.

My own conclusion is that I learned a lot from this book about racism in Britain and the development of state policies on race and immigration, but I felt that the dry academic style of writing sometimes hindered rather than helped my understanding. I liked the example of Irish immigration, although since Ireland was in the nineteenth century a part of the United Kingdom I am not sure what the state could have done to stem immigration, or even if it really counts as immigration. I would also be interested to see, in a future edition, what Solomos makes of more recent Eastern European immigration – in the early 21^st century there has been quite a backlash against Poles and other Eastern European immigrants since their countries joined the EU and they were able to work and live in the UK. They are white Europeans so you can’t really call it racism, but it seems very similar to the earlier discussions of the “colour problem”.

Andrew Blackman John Solomos book review, britain, John Solomos, race, racism

Reading this book made me realise how much has changed, both in literature and society, in the half century since it was written. First of all, the writing struck me as extremely old-fashioned. For the first few pages, we learn nothing except that it’s the narrator’s ninth birthday and it’s raining. There are long, detailed descriptions of the rain, the house, the village, and still nothing happens. I could feel my impatience building. I didn’t care what colour the shingles were – I wanted to know who the story was about, what issues they were grappling with.

And then I remembered: novels used to be written this way. Start with the weather, then the roof, then fill in the walls and the furniture, sketch the village and the surrounding countryside, and only then get around to telling the story. I suppose it’s a form of writing that made sense in a less hurried age. I also think that, before TV and film, there was an acceptance of the fact that people needed a visual picture before they could start to listen to a story. Movies convey the visual stuff instantly, so can go straight into the story without delay, and I suppose at some point we began to expect the same of books. But for a long time, this is how novels were written – slowly, methodically, painting the background in painstaking detail before allowing any characters to come into the foreground.

When I remembered that, I enjoyed the book much more. I stopped waiting for something to happen and just enjoyed the descriptive prose, much of it beautiful. Finally around page 50, something like a plot began to form, and by about page 150 I was really into it. The long build-up had played an important part. By telling me about a whole load of irrelevant minutiae, Lamming had set me up to care about and believe in the characters, so that when things did eventually begin to happen, I felt much more of an emotional attachment than I expected.

Now onto the social change, which is a major theme of the book. The small Barbadian village in which the book is set is like something from another era altogether. The set-up is feudal, with the white plantation owner Mr Creighton owning the village and a strange relationship of mutual resentment and dependency between him and the villagers. He helps them when things are bad – for example when the village is flooded he pays for repairs – and he has a kind of paternalistic attitude of caring for them which they reciprocate with respect for him. But they also join a strike against him for unfair wages, and one of them is tempted to kill him during a riot. And when he’s had enough, he sells up.

The villagers have mostly saved up to buy their own houses, but don’t own the land on which the houses sit. So when Mr Creighton sells, they have to move, and the village is destroyed. Some of them try to move the houses, but they are old wooden houses and crumble when they are moved from the foundation blocks. It’s quite a tragic ending, and mirrors the boy’s gradual development from a nine-year-old boy to the verge of adulthood. He, like his boyhood friend Trumper, is planning to abandon the village and go abroad. The old man, known only as Pa, has to go to the poor house. Worst of all, the land has been bought by the penny savings bank into which they have been putting their own savings. It’s run by Mr Slime, a former teacher in the village who promised them they would own the land one day. To get enough money to buy all the land, he has to attract investors from outside the village, and of course they don’t care about the people and their families having lived on the land for centuries – they just want their own space to build a house of their own.

It’s very well communicated – I felt real anger at the injustice of the villagers’ situation, but also could empathise with Mr Slime and the other investors, who were coming out of poverty themselves and just wanted a piece of land to build a house and a middle class life. It was a betrayal, but I could understand them and empathise. The landowner Mr Creighton is not evil, either. It’s a good, complex situation, and Lamming’s great care in describing it all in so much detail means that it all feels real and believable in the end, and is quite emotionally affecting. Definitely glad that I persevered through all those pages of rain.

Andrew Blackman George Lamming book review, george lamming

One of the things I have always loved about a good book is the way it takes you into places and times you’d never otherwise have a chance to experience. This book conveys utterly convincingly the experience of growing up in a small mountain village in early 20th century Catalonia. I really felt as if I was there with Conxa and Jaume and their children and the aunt and uncle.

This is a historical novel that spans several generations and takes in major historical events like the Spanish Civil War. Yet it is only 126 pages. And yet it doesn’t feel rushed. In fact, most of the time is spent embroiled in the details of everyday life, describing the buzzing of flies looking for food, the walnut trees turning green, and exactly how the meadows looked as the characters went picking mushrooms. Births and deaths are skipped over, decades pass, wars and revolutions come and go, but more importantly it’s time to take the animals to pasture and the poplar trees are waving in the wind.

It’s a slightly strange way to tell a story, but it made me realise that memories do really work this way. If I think back over my life, I don’t form an orderly, logical chronology – I see pictures and scenes, some of important events but also some that just happened to lodge in my mind because I was particularly happy or sad at the time, or it was a particularly warm or cold day, etc. There are gaps of years where I can’t remember much at all, and then a particular day I remember in great detail.

That’s pretty much the way this book is put together, and it works very well. It feels like what it is, the remembrances of an old woman looking back on her life, and the accumulation of details allowed me to feel part of the story much more than in many much longer books I’ve read. The passage of time is marked very clearly, and although the story covers a lifetime in 126 pages, the fast-forwarding never feels abrupt.

Conxa’s outlook is very limited. Her husband Jaume is interested in politics and wants to improve things, a chance he thinks he has got with the declaration of the Republic. But Conxa has no interest in these things, or in anything beyond the next village. Even Barcelona seems so far away that it has no meaning for her. She does care deeply about things close to her, though, the family and the house and the farm. It’s the changes that take place in these things, as time moves on and the next generation have different ideas about the lives they want to live, that shock her much more than the wars and political upheavals she lives through.

The title of the book provides a good insight into Conxa’s character. Here’s the context of it:

I feel like a stone after a landslide. If someone or something stirs it, I’ll come tumbling down with the others. If nothing comes near, I’ll be here still, for days and days…

This is uttered in a moment of extreme stress, when Conxa is in shock. But it also typifies the rest of her life, in which none of the major things that happen are under her control. She lives where she does because her parents sent her there as a child. She wants to marry Jaume, but when her aunt and uncle refuse, the limit of her rebellion is to cry and then be quiet and unhappy until they change their minds. Later on, when she and her children are arrested because of Jaume’s political activities, it is her daughter who finds out information and tries to get them out, while Conxa sits there like the proverbial stone. It’s a fascinating character depiction. It never feels like weakness: Conxa is, in her way, a very strong woman. But because of the way she was brought up, in that place and time, she just doesn’t try to change her fate. Things happen, and she seems to accept them all, good or bad.

I was left wanting more at the end, but in a good way. It wasn’t that anything remained unresolved. The novel had reached a satisfying conclusion, but I still wanted to hear more of Conxa’s voice, more about a fascinating life in a different world. The book is in its 50th edition in Catalan but this is the first English translation, and I would strongly recommend reading it.

Andrew Blackman Maria Barbal book review, catalan literature, Maria Barbal, stone in a landslide

I thought I would have liked this more than I did. I like most of Calvino’s books, and in this one the writing is absolutely beautiful, the observations on cities are clever and insightful, and the structure is innovative. But somehow, for me, all of these ingredients didn’t add up to a very rewarding whole.

I think the problem was the lack of plot. The structure of the book is a series of one- or two-page descriptions of different imaginary cities, with occasional philosophical conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in between. Nothing happens, there is no progress, and nothing much is revealed about the characters. It’s all a long intellectual game. The flights of fancy were certainly very impressive, but I kept finding that my mind was wandering as I read, and I had to go back and start at the top of the page, something that has rarely happened to me since the days of prescribed reading at school and university.

I was reading quite late at night mostly, so maybe that was the problem, but again that is not normally an issue for me. If I like a book, I can concentrate on it even when I am dog tired. This one just failed to hold my interest, as much as I loved the premise, the writing and the ideas. The cities, as different as they were, just began to sound the same, and the descriptions became repetitive.

I guess Calvino’s point was to describe general attributes of the city by describing different specific cities that embody an aspect of it in the extreme – for example in Leonia people refashion their lives every day, throwing everything out and using new clothes, fresh sheets, etc. “So you begin to wonder if Leonia’s true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity.” This is a great insight, beautifully expressed, and the book is full of things like this. But there are no real people doing things.

I suppose this book made me realise that while experimentation is great, and beauty and cleverness go a long way, the more prosaic basics like plot and character do go a long way.

Andrew Blackman Italo Calvino book review, invisible cities, italo calvino