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Exterminate All the Brutes by Sven Lindqvist

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‘Exterminate All the Brutes’

One to make you think

‘Exterminate All the Brutes’ by Sven Lindqvist has been in my to-be-read pile for quite a while (perhaps explained by its depressing title). Those who’ve read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness might recognise the title as the last sentence of that book and this is Lindqvist’s starting point. This history-cum-travel book investigates the dark history of European colonialism and brutal extermination of indigenous peoples. It’s a distressing but highly recommended read and one which explains some of the systemic racism which still haunts the Western world.

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The Notebook by Agota Kristof

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The Notebook

A book to shock

Wow…is all I can say about The Notebook by Agota Kristof. This is one of the more disquieting books I’ve read but it’s also impossible to put down. It’s the notebook of two nameless young twin brothers somewhere in Eastern Europe, sometime at the end of the Second World War. Calmly and unsentimentally, the boys tell us what war does to people. It’s not a pretty story but it leaves an indelible impression.

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This Blinding Absence of Light by Tahar Ben Jelloun

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This Blinding Absence of Light

A remarkable, deeply unsettling novel

I am writing the review of This Blinding Absence of Light by Tahar Ben Jelloun eight weeks into the extraordinary lockdown we find ourselves stuck in. This remarkable, deeply unsettling novel, based on a true story, has reminded me of the incredible strength humans find in order to survive the darkest of situations. Strangely, although a harrowing and at times uncomfortable read, it has proved to be a perfect book for now. I hope you will feel the same.

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Girl by Edna O'Brien

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Girl

A powerful lesson in resilience

The assault on young women as an act of war is nothing new as the epigraph from Euripides’ The Trojan Women reminds us in Girl by Edna O’Brien. After a year of research including first-hand testimonies from survivors, O’ Brien brings this forcefully into the present as we confront the imagined traumatic fall-out from a schoolgirl’s kidnap and rape by Boko Haram in Nigeria in 2014. In Girl, Edna O’Brien has produced a work that sharply distils language into a reduced and banal form, journalistic in its savage editing and brutal in its delivery. Language is manipulated to transmit emotion, to reveal how men use it to assert power and how trauma denies it space.

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The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig

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The World of Yesterday

The Highs and Lows of Humanity

Few things could hold me off from starting Margaret Atwood’s latest book, but The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig actually has. Zweig, an Austrian Jew whose wonderful novellas (The Royal Game, Amok, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman) many of you will know, was the world’s most popular author in the 1920s and 30s, until Hitler banned his books. The World of Yesterday is his autobiography, finished two days before his and his second wife’s joint suicide. It’s a lament for a lost world, a love letter to creativity and artists and an eloquent analysis of events that led up to both the first and the second world wars. The parallels with aspects of our own turbulent times are hard to ignore. Highly recommended.

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Lanny by Max Porter

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Lanny

Another puzzle from Max Porter

Max Porter’s books are wonderfully strange things. They are novels, but occasionally seem to wander into the realm of poetry. The language is sparse, distilled down to the very essence of what he wants to communicate. The sentences twist and turn; literally, in this case. The first few pages of his new book were incomprehensible to me, but somehow Porter lures you in and doesn’t let you go. Lanny by Max Porter is set in a quintessential English village, where Lanny, an exceptionally creative, talented boy, his banker dad and author mum have just moved. But becoming part of this closed community is not a smooth ride. I’m not sure I liked Lanny as much as Porter’s first book, Grief is the Thing With Feathers, which I loved, but still think it’s a worthwhile read.

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Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami

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Killing Commendatore

An intense and magical novel about creativity and meaning

Disconcerting, mysterious and riveting, Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami is the story of a nine month period in the life of a portrait painter. Newly separated from his wife, he holes up in a mountaintop retreat where his discovery of a hidden painting sets in train a circular series of extraordinary events that reveal aspects of himself – and the world of instincts and ideas – that both change him forever and give him back his future.

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The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

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The Mars Room

Gritty prison drama

I started The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner knowing very little about American prison life. The little I did know, I’d learnt from watching the hit American TV series Orange Is The New Black. I finished Kushner’s novel knowing a great deal more about the American justice and penal systems and feeling deeply depressed by what I had learned. The Mars Room lays bare the grim reality of those women living their lives on the margins of modern-day America.

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21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Harari

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21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Not perfect but an accessible catalyst for thought

Fans of Homo Sapiens and Homo Deus will no doubt run to buy the latest instalment: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Harari. Whereas Homo Sapiens dealt with the past and Homo Deus with the future, his last book – you guessed it – is about now. Harari has an enviable ability to present complex ideas, however depressing, with clarity and humour. I don’t necessarily buy into all of his theories and sometimes I wish he’d gone into more depth. The book suffers from being a collection of essays written for various publications rather than a coherently planned book. (Do I smell a faint whiff of publishers’ opportunism?) But the fact that he engages millions of people around the world in thinking about ‘big issues’ is a redeeming factor for me. Read it as an accessible catalyst for your own thoughts.

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History of Violence by Édouard Louis

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History of Violence

Raw, honest and brave about rape

One of the extraordinary things about Édouard Louis’ debut novel, The End of Eddy, was the complete absence of judgment and bitterness on behalf of the protagonist. Louis’ second novel, History of Violence, shares this quality and, again, it’s a story from Louis’ own life. On the way home from Christmas dinner, Louis meets a stranger whom he invites home for a drink. They share their life stories and have passionate sex. But as the stranger prepares to leave the next morning, things turn ugly. Louis’ skill as a storyteller, intelligent observation of his own and other people’s reactions and ability to draw connections between the personal and the collective proves what an extraordinary talent he is.

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