Tag: Sean Hewitt

Best of the Year: New(ish) Releases

Now that my family is back for Christmas, I don’t think I’ll have as much time for reading, so I might as well continue my Best of 2023 lists.

I’m starting to be less and less enamoured of much-hyped new releases and usually wait at least a couple of years before I read them – by which point, very often, the buzz has died down and people wonder what all the fuss was about. So I haven’t actually read all that many books released this year, but will also include those published a few years ago which I finally got around to reading.

Some of those hyped books were ok while in the act of reading, but did not linger in my mind afterwards, although I appreciated they were cleverly written and tied together some themes that would appeal to a broad audience: gaming, friendships and business rivalry in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow or cookery, feminism and quirky families in Lessons in Chemistry. Meanwhile, Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss actively irritated me.

However, 2023 was also the year in which certain favourite authors of mine released new books, so I eagerly read those… and was somewhat nonplussed by them. They were OK, but not as good as some of the previous books I’d enjoyed by those authors. I’m talking here about Paul Auster’s Baumgartner (moving but slight) and Deborah Levy’s August Blue, a bit dull and repetitive, if I’m honest.

When you read over 170 books a year, you can get a bit curmudgeonly about it, and only a few will really raise their dolphin heads out of the waves. The following books have stayed with me even after I finished the last page, and I really appreciate what the author is trying to do in each case. They were worthy and thoughtful, with appealing passages that I marked with post-its, but they didn’t quite get my heart singing or pounding in excitement. It’s almost as if I contain multitudes and these books only touched certain strands within me! In this category, I would include Helon Habila: The Travellers, Ling Ma’s Severance, Miranda France’s The Writing School, Joanna Biggs’ A Life of One’s Own and Polly Atkin’s Some of Us Just Fall. I relished the Gothic set-up of Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno Garcia (but was slightly disappointed by the ending) and Florentina Leow’s How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart was poignant and charming, would like to read more by this author.

I would also like to give a shout-out to books I either re-read or that are reissues, so cannot fall under recent releases. These felt much more substantial and memorable than many of the new releases (I suppose that’s why they have withstood the test of time): Frank Baker’s Miss Hargreaves, Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home, Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Something in Disguise, Beryl Bainbridge’s Sweet William and Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost.

So, after all that pre-amble of excuses and also-rans, which are the books that did make it on my Best of 2023 list? Just six of them and they are a very motley assortment, most of them quite experimental.

Two Recent Memoirs: Seán Hewitt and Catherine Taylor

Two memoirs that begin in (and return to) graveyards, although they don’t have much else in common. I enjoyed them both for very different reasons. Although we grew up in very different places (and countries), Catherine and I are near contemporaries, so the richness of period detail appealed to me. I can relate far less to the much younger Sean’s memoir of growing up gay, but I was captivated by his prose. Both of the books have an elegiac tone to them at times and discuss difficult topics; above all, they don’t feel as self-indulgent as some other memoirs I have read in recent years. They both capture a time and place, as well as social attitudes, and contain vivid descriptions and concern for others.

Seán Hewitt: All Down Darkness Wide, Jonathan Cape, 2022.

I first encountered Seán’s poetry when I was in the Shadow Panel for the Times Young Writer of the Year Award in 2020 and he was my personal favourite to win. (My second favourite, Jay Bernard’s Surge, won in the end.) As one might expect from a poet, this memoir is full of breathtakingly beautiful (but not overwritten) passages, but I certainly wasn’t expecting its rather Gothic, sinister tone (not just in the graveyard scene). Yet it fits the subject matter very well.

The author reminisces about his relationship to two young men, one his friend from university, the other a Swedish man he met while travelling in South America after graduation. He discovers, to his dismay, that the friend he felt such a connection with at university but with whom he had lost touch died by suicide, and that he only has one random photo by which to remember him. Later on, he falls in love with Elias and they move in together, first in Liverpool and then in Sweden. But Elias falls into a deep depression and becomes suicidal, and this is such a raw, emotional account of what it means to live with someone whom you wish to ‘save’ and remind of the beauties of life, but no matter how much you love them, no matter what you do, you cannot really help them.

There is no morality to depression, no way to apportion blame for what either of us did, but every day I felt that weight crushing down on me, tightening my lungs, making my breaths quick and shallow. I felt that everything was to be given away; that nothing was my own. If I was to save him, I needed to be a non-person, to subsume myself; and if I broke… I felt that threat rising through the room. I would be abandoning him. I would be confirming all his darker suppositions. Any wrong turn might lead to disaster. Not for the first time, I had to displace myself from myself. Not for the first time, I found myself caught inside a secret.

And this is where the author does something really interesting, by moving away from the specific to the far more common story (among gay teens in particular) of pretending to be something that you are not, of lying in order to please others or make life easier for yourself. Furthermore, he links this to Gerard Manley Hopkins, who became a Catholic priest and struggled in his life and his poetry with his sexuality and desires. Hewitt feels a special connection to Hopkins (the title comes from one his poems), but he also sees him as part of the queer community, a sort of historical inheritance that he can feel in his bones or running through his blood.

The ghosts of the past haunt this work in both subtle and sometimes quite harsh ways: I could easily see this adapted into a film directed by Christian Petzold (or maybe that is because soon after reading this, I went to see Petzold’s latest film ‘Afire (Roter Himmel’). There is something timeless and Dickensian about passages such as these:

Past midnight, one mid-January, standing in the church gardens, I felt the wind blow up from the River Mersey, weighted with Atlantic salt. It blustered up to the city, battering the red bricks of the warehouses on the dock, rattling the barred doors of the pump house and the locks of the customs house. I heard it rush south-east between the empty units along St James’s Street, clapping the tattered flags of the old sailors’ church, and spinning frantically in the bell-turret of St Vincent’s…. scurried down the tree-tunnelled sandstone path into the cathedral cemetery, resting, finally in a swirl of leaves and a ripple of the spring water by that catacombs, unseen by anyone except a carved angel weeping over a nineteenth-century grave, and the lone figure of a man- me- kneeling and drinking from the water flowing in runnels down the old cemetery wall.

Catherine Taylor: The Stirrings: A Memoir in Northern Time, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2023.

Catherine Taylor’s memoir is also rich in visual detail, but the style is far more contemporary – or rather, it is above all the sound of the 1970s and 80s that she brings to life. This is the book of a journalist (critic and essayist), interested in the social and political history of the decades when she grew up, highly observant of place and customs and character quirks. She somewhat self-deprecatingly describes her book as being about ‘a typical family and an ordinary story, although neither the family nor the story seems commonplace when it is your family and your story’, but it is also a fascinating portrait of Sheffield.

Much has been made in the media about this being a ‘coming of age tale in the shadow of the Yorkshire Ripper’, but this feels reductionist. It is about much more than that: it is about the constant fear that women grow up with (then and now), a story of political activism and striving to be taken seriously but then having your hopes crushed (Miners’ strikes, Greenham Common), about making and losing friends, about a family falling apart, and then the profound grief of losing a friend at a young age. Taylor feels a sense of community and inheritance with the place she grows up in, but is also made to constantly feel like an outsider: for being too bookish, for being ‘frit’, for being the only child with divorced parents, for being diagnosed (and initially misdiagnosed) with Graves’ disease.

The book is filled with anecdotes both hilarious and poignant, as this solemn child, whose head was constantly stuck in a book, tries to make sense of the world around her, including those dramatic teenage monologues.

At sixteen, I saw myself slipping easily into the Cassandra role. No one ever listened to me, either.

In tribute to Cassandra and the women of Greenham, I composed a song (working title: ‘Cassandra and the Women of Greenham’) in the style of Kate Bush and played it mercilessly on the piano.

In the next room, my mother sighed and turned the TV up louder.

The graveyard scenes at the start and end of the book are tremendously atmospheric (though not quite as Gothic as Hewitt’s, there is nevertheless a sense of menace), but what a difference between them, what a journey we have been through. Because, above all, this is a wonderful story of resilience, and how each so-called ‘ordinary’ life is in fact extraordinary. It made me want to examine my own personal story and see what social forces shaped me. A memorable and very enjoyable ride.

Annual Summary: Contemporary Writing

This post was going to be named Contemporary Fiction, but I actually had a very good year of reading poetry and non-fiction, so I wanted to include those, and didn’t know if I (or you) would have the patience for separate blog posts for every single category. So these are books published recently (not just this year, but in the past few years), some of them have been reissued or have only just been translated. There are 59 books that would fit in this category out of my total of 127, so roughly half of the books I read. A higher proportion than I expected, driven partly by my desire to help small independent publishers and bookshops in this difficult year.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

Here are the ones that stayed with me:

Fiction

Aoko Matsuda: Where the Wild Ladies Are – a clever, ferocious, fun subversion of Japanese ghost stories and folk tales, made all the more interesting by getting a chance to hear the translator Polly Barton talk about it at the Borderless Book Club organised by Peirene after lockdown in March

Lucia Berlin: A Manual for Cleaning Women – another short story collection with a wry look at the gender gap (I seemed to find short stories more accessible and suitable for my attention span, particularly during the first lockdown). Although these stories were written during the 1950s and 60s, they have been collected and reissued recently… and still have a lot to say about today’s world.

Ludovic Bruckstein: The Trap – two novellas about life as a Jew in the increasingly intolerant Romanian society of the 1930s (and the Second World War) – fascinating initially because of its subject matter, the writing turned out to be truly evocative of its time and place, with a dry, dark sense of humour

Nino Haratischwili (or Haratishvili): The Eighth Life – a mammoth of a family saga, which captivated even me, a reluctant convert to the family saga genre, always balancing between the personal and the historical, the well-trodden and the barely known.

Maggie O’Farrell: Hamnet – this book was a case of right time, right subject matter for me, not just as a Shakespeare fan, but also because I read it at a time when I was so worried about the health of my own children; perhaps slightly over-written, but with moments of real beauty, lyricism and psychological depth.

Olga Tokarczuk: Drive Your Plow… – so clever, such a beguiling voice, a great insight into a person, a way of life and a rural society, both tragic and comic all at once

Sarah Waters: Fingersmith – finally understood what all the fuss was about, just could NOT stop reading this thrilling example of master storytelling; sadly, was not quite as enamoured of the other books by the author that I then borrowed post-haste from the library

Mieko Kawakami: Breasts and Eggs – a strange novel, composed of two parts that don’t really have much to do with each other, and yet I loved the way it explored women, bodies, sisterhood, families and the meaning of parenthood in contemporary Japan

Fernanda Melchor: Hurricane Season – one of the most breathlessly enthralling and difficult stories I’ve read this year or perhaps in any other year, with voices that will leave you shattered – one of those life-changing books

Alison Anderson: The Summer Guest – by way of contrast, a gentle, subtle, utterly charming book about an exceptional man and author, Chekhov – a fictional account of his summers in the Ukraine

Poetry

I read a lot of poetry this year, but as usual haven’t reviewed much. The two that I have reviewed, however, both shortlisted for the Young Writer of the Year Award – and one the winner of this award – were truly unforgettable: Jay Bernard’s Surge and Sean Hewitt: Tongues of Fire. But this year I also discovered Jericho Brown, Safiya Sinclair, Caroline Bird, Dahlia Ravikovitch, Nina Boutsikaris and a new translation of Cavafy by Evan Jones, so it’s been an excellent year.

Non-Fiction

Deborah Orr: Motherwell – not just a family history – and the gap between generations – but also the history of a community, which helped me to understand a lot more about the UK and its working class history

Francesca Wade: Square Haunting – reminded me of just how much I loved certain women authors and introduced me to a couple of new women to admire – a thoughtful recreation of a period and women’s aspiration to be independent of thought (and financially too, if possible). Perhaps forced together into the Mecklenburgh Square concept, but it worked for me and I really regret not writing a proper review of it

Beth Ann Fennelly: Heating and Cooling – micro-memoirs, witty, charming, sharp-tongued, experimental – a delight that I discovered thanks to the recommendation of Anne-Marie Fyfe, whose poetry workshop was one of the last things I was able to attend live in 2020

Kate Briggs: This Little Art – an absolute must for literary translators, but for all readers, this is both an insight into the science and art of translation, and throws up all sorts of knotty problems for debate – another of those ‘life-changing’ books, especially since I just started being a literary translator this year.

#YoungWriterAward: Tongues of Fire by Seán Hewitt

There are two ways in which I judge poetry.

First, if it it feels like the top of my head were taken off at first reading (to quote Emily Dickinson). In other words, does it produce a moment of epiphany, of feeling ‘that is what I’ve always thought but never quite found the words to express’ or ‘wow, I didn’t even realise that?’. There are quite a few timely, urgent, angry poems being written now which fulfil that first criteria.

Secondly, are these poems that I will return to again and again, reread, bathe in the sounds and colours, images and smells evoked, and find new meanings every time? Those poetry collections tend to be rarer – there may be one or two poems that I treasure in a collection, but not necessarily all of them.

Author photo copyright: Brid O’Donovan

Seán Hewitt’s debut collection meets both of my criteria. It is not a showy piece of work, but it’s not self-effacing either. Each poem releases little hooks at first reading, which then sink into you and never quite let you go, merely bury themselves deeper and deeper. Because of the beauty of the images, the closeness to nature and the musicality of the language, it is a pleasurable experience… and yet you realise there is a lot of grief, a lot of pain in this poetry as well.

The book is composed of three different parts: the first part is closer to what one might call ‘pure’ nature poetry, although the poet is always mindful how the natural cycle mimics the human life cycle. The natural landscape is also the landscape of the mind. The darkness and stillness of nature and then its rebirth in spring has strong parallels to sinking into disease and depression, and then finding hope and recovery.

I turn home, and all across the floor

the spiked white flowers

light the way. The world is dark

but the wood is full of stars.

Throughout, we also have parallels between the beauty of the natural world and the beauty of the human body, an exploration and celebration of sexuality, particularly queer sexuality, which has been considered ‘unnatural’ for so long.

The second part of the book is a retelling of the story of Suibhne (or Sweeney), a legendary Irish king, who was cursed, became a mad poet and was doomed to wander forevermore, never quite finding rest. This was a myth I was less familiar with, but the tension between transience and permanence, between loneliness and finding a place to call home with loved ones resonated with me, particularly in a year when we have all struggled with not seeing loved ones. Also, the recognition that to love is to open yourself up to the possibility of loss and of being hurt.

There was a time when I thought

the sound of a dove cooing and flitting

over a pond was sweeter than the voices

of friends. There was a time when

I preferred the blackbird and the boom

of a stag belling in a storm. I used to think

that the chanting of the mountain grouse

at dawn had more music than your voice,

but things are different now. Still,

it would be hard to say I wouldn’t rather

live above the bright lake, and eat watercress

in the wood, and be away from sorrow.

The poems in the final part of the book were written mainly in the last few months in the life of the poet’s father, who was suddenly diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer and died before the volume was published. There is so much tenderness here, as well as the feeling of being lost without a much loved person.

But hush. No one is coming.

We are handed our lives

by a fierce work. Onto which

blank space will I lock my gaze

when my father

is gone? How am I to wear

his love’s burning mantle?

The language feels very simple, unadorned, but always uncannily ‘right’ in context. There is a lot of restraint here, plenty of breathing space, which makes the impact all the more powerful. This might be called confessional poetry, and certainly there seems to be plenty of autobiographical detail in these poems, but it’s a delicate, elliptical emotion, recollected in tranquillity. The poet himself recognises that this quieter, more personal type of poetry may feel too much like a retreat to an ivory tower at this particular moment. In an interview with the Irish Times, he says:

The lyric poem – its patterning, its rhyme, its insistent “I” – has for me a beauty that is perhaps unfashionable, and might seem to make it isolated from the political imperative. But it is my wager that in speaking of ourselves, we will find readers who share something of that emotion, that experience, that flash of strange perspective. In other words, it is my contention that no poem is ever isolated, if it is done right.

I certainly agree with that. The cover of the book features a rust fungus (also called Tongues of Fire): it is basically a cancer eating at the heart of the juniper bush. Despite its yellow beauty, it is lethal. And that is precisely the effect this volume of poetry has had on me. At a time when so many people have died of a disease we barely see or understand, it feels like an elegy, a way of coping with the unspeakable.

I think you can tell that this was my favourite of the shortlisted titles for the Young Writer of the Year Award. But was it the favourite title overall of the Shadow Panel and did we pick it as our winner? Ah, well, you will have to wait and see…

Shortlist for Young Writer of the Year Award

You may have seen the announcement yesterday about the Shortlist for the Young Writer of the Year Award. Just in case you have missed it (and admittedly, there has been a lot of newsy stuff to push it off the front page), here it is in its full beauty:

I have to admit that I am quite excited about this shortlist. You’ll probably think that I have to say that if I am part of the Shadow Panel, but the truth is I haven’t read any of them, so am curious and very much looking forward to becoming better acquainted with them.

First of all, I always like to see some poetry on a shortlist, and this time we have two volumes of poetry, both of them debut collections. Tongues of Fire by Sean Hewitt has been described as elegiac, moving, perceptive and lifting the spirits with simple language and complex thought. Meanwhile, Surge by Jay Bernard is an exploration in poetry of the New Cross Fire of 1981, linking that tragic event with Grenfell and more generally with the experience of being black in the UK nowadays.

Catherine Cho’s book Inferno is non-fiction, a memoir of the author’s time in a psychiatric ward in America, following a severe case of post-partum psychosis. Motherhood is a topic that endlessly fascinates me, and this book seems to express our deepest, darkest fears about becoming possibly a bad mother and harming our child.

Naoise Dolan is a young Irish writer, so obviously she has been compared with Sally Rooney. This is a novel about a young Irish expat stuck in a dead-end job in Hong Kong, and it has been described as a milennial love story hovering between deadpan and sincerity. I am a sucker for expat stories and cross-cultural observations, so this should do the trick for me.

Finally, Marina Kemp’s Nightingale is also a story about displacement, and sounds rather more conventional, according to the blurb at least. A young nurse is running away from her past and ends up in a remote Languedoc village, looking after a bedridden old bully of a man.

Poetry, motherhood, expat community and France – what more could I wish for? The list is tailor-made for me! I also find it interesting that all of these are debuts. I wonder if this has always been the case with this prize, or if it just happened to be a particularly strong year for debuts in 2020. While I like to think that debut writers are encouraged, I sometimes wonder if it’s been even harder for young writers on their second book to see it disappear without trace in a year of delayed publication dates, closed libraries and bookshops, and no in-person literary festivals.

So, which of these are you most excited about reading and why? Can I tempt you to read along at least one or two of these?