2024/172: The Book of Chameleons — Jose Eduardo Agualusa (translated by Daniel Hahn)

The train gave a long whistle, then a bewildered, long drawn-out howl, like a red ribbon stretched across the seafront. [p. 122]

Félix Ventura, an albino, lives in a crumbling mansion in Luanda with his best friend, Eulálio, who happens to be a gecko. Félix is in the business of creating well-documented family histories for those who need them: "businessmen, ministers, landowners, diamond smugglers, generals". The novel (originally published in Portuguese with the title O vendedor de passados, 'The Seller of Pasts') opens with a photojournalist seeking an authentic new identity. Félix names him José Buchmann, and Buchmann goes off to explore his invented past -- finding elements that seem to be real.

Meanwhile, Félix begins a romance with the glamorous Ângela Luciá, who in turn introduces him to Edmundo Barata dos Reis, a homeless derelict who she says is an 'ex-agent of the Ministry of State Security'. No, howls Edmundo: "‘Not ex-agent, say rather ‘ex-gent’! Ex-exemplary citizen. Exponent of the excluded, existential excrement, an exiguous and explosive excrescence. In a word, a professional layabout." And (of course) Ângela, Edmundo and Buchmann turn out to have history together. 

This is a novel about real and invented stories, about people's pasts and how they shadow the present. Eulálio, who shares dreams with Félix, believes that he was once a man: "It’s been nearly fifteen years that my soul has been trapped in this body, and I’m still not used to it. I lived for almost a century in the skin of a man, and I never managed to feel altogether human either." (There is a subtle hint that he might have been a particular man, a famous author. There are also hints that Félix has created a history for his reptilian friend.) The prose is gorgeous, the underlying story -- rooted in the Angolan civil war -- brutal and violent. I loved Agualusa's prose and will read more by him: and I look forward to rereading this novel to better appreciate how the final conflict(s) are foreshadowed.

Fulfils the ‘A Book By A Central African Author’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge.

2024/171: The Truths We Hold — Kamala Harris

... something ugly and alarming was infecting the presidential election. The Republican primary was turning into a race to the bottom—a race to anger, a race to blame, a race to fan the flames of xenophobic nativism. And the man who prevailed crossed every boundary of decency and integrity—bragging about sexually assaulting women; mocking people with disabilities; race baiting; demonizing immigrants; attacking war heroes and Gold Star families; and fomenting hostility, even hatred, toward the press. [loc. 2164]

I started reading this just before the US election, confident that it would give me an insight into the next President. ... It's taken me a while to finish it: a glimpse of a lost future. Harris is passionate about equality, about unity, about justice. I was shocked by some of the statistics she quoted ('Black babies are twice as likely as white babies to die in infancy, a stunning disparity that is wider than in 1850, when slavery was still legal') and inspired by some of the work she's done, as Attorney General of California, on reforming criminal justice. She comes across, in this 2019 book, as driven, energetic and determined: as somebody I'd enjoy knowing personally. The quotation at the top of this review is from her account of the 2016 election -- and her discussion of Russian interference in that election was chilling.

I wish she had won in 2024.

2024/170: Minor Detail — Adiana Sibli (translated by Elisabeth Jaquette)

... there was nothing really unusual about the main details, especially when compared with what happens daily in a place dominated by the roar of occupation and ceaseless killing. [loc. 748]

A short, powerful, harrowing novel, in two halves, that examines helplessness, brutality and occupation. The first half of the novel is set in 1949 and follows a squad of Israeli soldiers, focussing on their commander, who's suffering from a festering insect bite. In pain and hallucinating, he perpetrates horror: the slaughter of a group of Bedouin and the gang-rape and murder of a young woman. The commander is never named: nor is the girl. Her dog follows her, howling, as she's driven to her death.

The second half of the novel shifts in tone. A young Palestinian woman, never named, is determined to investigate the murder, which happened exactly 25 years before she was born. Her life is described in minute detail. (I suspect she's neurodivergent). She borrows a colleague's papers so that she can circumvent the travel restrictions and visit the IDF Museum, and the site of the Bedouin girl's death. It's a military zone. A dog is howling. She is shot.

The matter-of-fact, emotionless tone of the first half of the novel is deeply unsettling: we are told nothing about the emotions of those involved, or what happened afterwards. The young woman's narrative, which forms the second part of the book, is full of her fears of crossing borders, especially borders that she doesn't recognise. Perhaps this lack of confidence in her response to social cues is what makes me think that she might be neurodivergent. Or perhaps it is the only way she can stay sane in an occupied country, in a place where her culture has been destroyed like the villages that pepper an old map she uses, but have left no trace in the land through which she travels.

The detachment and restraint of this novel, and the clarity of the translation, made it a superficially easy read: but like blood into sand, or petrol into clothes, Minor Detail has sunk into me and affected my world view.

The story is based on a documented incident: the commander in question stood trial.

Fulfils the ‘A Book Set In A Place That Has Experienced Genocide’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge. Palestine is still experiencing genocide: I don't think it has ever stopped, and since the Hamas-led attack on Israel it has become catastrophic. In 2023, Shibli won the German LiBeraturpreis, an annual award for women authors from the Global South, for this novel: the award ceremony was cancelled due to the October 7th attacks.

2024/169: Hadriana in All My Dreams — René Depestre (translated by Kaiama L Glover)

One thing he said was very true: even in my coffin I was far closer to a carnival drum than to the tolling of church bells. [loc. 1580]

Set mostly in 1938, in the Haitian seaside town of Jacmel, this is the story of Hadriana Siloé, a white French girl who dies at the altar on her wedding day -- but has actually been zombified. The story's told, mostly, by her friend Patrick Altamont: they shared the same godmother, Madame Villaret-Joyeuse, who's reputed to have seven loins (there's a note in the afterword about the translator's difficulty in 'figuring out how to translate Depestre’s twenty or so terms for human genitalia') and whose final lover was a 'diabolical deflowerer' who'd been transformed into a butterfly. Patrick remains infatuated with Hadriana, whose death came after she said 'yes' to her wedding vows, and who's therefore the widow of Hector Danoze; whose death is celebrated not with a solemn mass but with a bacchanalian carnival; whose body mysteriously vanishes from her grave.

I liked the different modes of the narrative, from Patrick's breathless account of Hadriana's death to Hadriana's own account of ... well, of what happened next. (And what happened before the wedding: despite her family's wealth and whiteness, she was far from the helpless virginal heroine of other zombie stories, and clearly relished her sexual adventures and her 'sinfulness'.) The novel is erotic, fantastical, phantasmagorial and often very funny. I also found some scenes harrowing, in particular when Hadriana, escaping her captors, sought help in the town. The townsfolk loved their 'Creole fairy' and had just spent an evening celebrating her life and mourning her death -- but nobody would respond to her frantic banging on doors.

The Introduction by Edwidge Danticat contextualises the story as a deconstruction of the zombie trope, a negation of the typical Hollywood offering of brainless monsters. While the political context is only lightly sketched, the romanticism that echoes through this novel written in exile is lush and poignant. Danticat's introduction also mentioned 'lodyans', a term with which I wasn't familiar: it's a Haitian literary tradition, 'a tongue-in-cheek narrative genre meant to provoke laughter'.

Fulfils the ‘Inspired By Caribbean Mythology, Legend, or Folklore’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge.

2024/168: The Gathering Night — Margaret Elphinstone

If young men didn’t die there’d be too many... Young men must die, just as young Animals must die when we hunt them. If there weren’t so much death we’d all perish, and not be able to come back. I’d always known that young men must die. But not my son! [loc. 258]

Set in Mesolithic Scotland, around the time of the Storegga slide, this is the story of Nekané and her family, who are of the Auk People: her daughters Haizea and Alaia, Alaia's partner Amets, Nekané's dead son Bakar, and Kemen of the Lynx People who joins them after his home and clan are swept away by a monstrous wave. Kemen also forms an attachment to Osané, a woman from another camp who's been badly beaten and does not speak. It soon becomes clear that something is wrong, perhaps in the world of the spirits: the hunters come home with less meat, and the winters are harsh. Nekané, who becomes a Go-Between -- a shamanic figure -- after her son's disappearance, slowly comes to recognise the root of the wrongness.

There's a solid belief in reincarnation, and a baby is not named until its soul is recognised: when someone dies, their name is not spoken again until they've returned. There's a strong spiritual element, but it's firmly rooted in the mundane business of survival, the constant busyness of finding food, rearing children and gathering fuel. Though Nekané and the other Go-Betweens talk of spirits and guides, there is nothing supernatural in this slow, thoughtful novel: just the accounts of the various characters, each with their own voice and concerns and bias, and the gradual revelation of crimes committed and the punishments that must be imposed.

In an Afterword, Elphinstone discusses her use of Basque names (which did feel slightly odd, but 'Basque is thought to be the only extant language of pre-Indo-European – which is to say, pre-agricultural – origin on the western seaboard of Europe.') There's more about the writing of The Gathering Night here.

I've owned a paperback of this novel for many years, and never managed to get past the first few chapters, which I find slow and melancholy. (I note that I also found Voyageurs difficult at first, though I don't recall having this problem with pre-blog Hy Brasil, or with Light or The Sea Road.) I finally read the Kindle version, and think it counts as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2024/167: Confounding Oaths — Alexis Hall

Gentlemen with fairer fortunes, fairer skin, and more interest in the fairer sex might have been able to get away with cocking a snook at a world that at once despised and admired them. [loc. 1387]

Standalone sequel to Mortal Follies, which I enjoyed very much: again, the narrator is Puck, unaccountably exiled from the court of Oberon and forced to live in modern London and pay rent. 'This is the second of those stories I have chosen to share. If you have not read the first, why not? Do you personally dislike me? Are you determined to see me suffer, interminably and without even the comforts of a scribbler’s income to lighten my exile?' 

We are reunited with Miss Bickle, who's writing a story entitled 'The Heir and the Wastrel', which is about Mr Wickham and Mr Darcy: 'carefully constructed, enthusiastically delivered, and contained a number of details that the anonymous lady author of Sense and Sensibility had necessarily elided for fear of the censors'; with Miss Maelys Mitchelmore, protagonist of Mortal Follies, and her lover Lady Georgiana; and with John Caesar, son of a Senegalese freedman and an earl's daughter. Confounding Oaths is the story of John and his relationship with Captain Orestes James, 'Wellington's favourite', a Black soldier whose squad of Irregulars includes a vitki (a Norse-flavoured seer) and Sal, who's 'a woman in a dress, a man in uniform and a devil in battle'. When the elder and plainer of John's sisters, Mary, asks a helpful fairy for 'Beauty Incomparable', Captain James and the Irregulars come to the aid of the Caesars.

This, like Mortal Follies, is great fun, witty and frothy, and full of pointed observations from our cynical narrator. The Norse influence is strong, and we pay a visit to the temple of Isis-Fortuna. Titania plays a major role, and there's an attempted sacrifice to Artemis at the climax of the novel. Confounding Oaths is much more about the fae than about the old gods, and it's set more solidly in the demimonde of London. It's a bigger world in some ways, with references to the war with Napoleon and the unsavoury occult habits of Europeans. Captain James is pleased to be 'on the side of monarchy, serfdom, and the sceptred isle, rather than the side of liberty, equality, and subjugating Europe'. 

Also features a trip to the opera (Fidelio), a visit to the Tower, and a cult named after Iphigenia. Never mind the cultists, the racists, or the misogynists: this is an excellent remedy for bad weather and low mood.

2024/166: Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night — Julian Sancton

In the absence of easily accessible natural resources to exploit, stories were what polar explorers extracted from these barren icescapes. And the best stories weren’t the ones in which everything went well. [loc. 2192]

An enimently readable account (I stayed up past midnight to finish it!) of a Belgian expedition towards Antarctica from 1897 to 1899. The leader of the expedition was aristocrat Adrien de Gerlache de Gomery (not a born leader): Roald Amundsen (later the first person to reach the South Pole) was the first mate, and Frederick Cook (later to claim that he'd been the first person to reach the North Pole) was surgeon and photographer, with a side order of anthropology. Georges Lecointe, the captain, was temperamental and threw a live cat (named Sverdrup) overboard. Various members of the crew shot albatrosses. Is it any wonder the expedition suffered from scurvy, mental illness and mutiny? I think not.

Madhouse at the End of the Earth opens with Amundsen visiting Cook in Leavenworth, where he'd been imprisoned for fraud since 1923. Sancton's account of the expedition is also, in part, a vindication and celebration of Cook: without him, and his knowledge of Inuit diet and the symptoms and treatment of scurvy, it seems probable that the expedition would have vanished in the icy waters of the Weddell Sea, where Gerlache had deliberately sailed the ship into pack ice, so as to overwinter there. 'Despite its dangers—rather, because of its dangers—an imprisonment in the ice would solve each of those problems. It wouldn’t cost any more money, de Gerlache wouldn’t lose any men—at least not to desertion—and it would make for a dramatic story.' [loc. 2185]. Gerlache was very much aware of how the story would be reported, and the importance of good press. Cook -- a natural problem-solver who devised gruesome fenders made of penguin corpses to protect the hull from the ice -- was fascinated by the Antarctic: his work as zoologist and botanist identified many new species. And Amundsen, still in his twenties, was determined to prepare for polar expeditions of his own.

Sancton brings the Belgica's crew to life: the hard cases, the anti-scorbutic diet (rat meat would be fine, human meat wouldn't, because humans can't synthesise their own vitamin C), the moments of levity (Lecointe trying to insert the roll for the Belgian national anthem in the coelophone (barrel organ) while drunk, and putting it in backwards), the increasingly fragile mental and physical health of the crew members. The Belgica didn't make it to the Pole, but it did overwinter with only two four deaths (one man overboard, one man with pre-existing heart condition: one cat monstrously thrown overboard, the other cat -- named Nansen, though female -- dying of kidney disease) and considerable gains to Antarctic science.

I bought this in September 2021, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

Though Cook is remembered today -- if he is remembered at all -- as the charlatan who lied about reaching the North Pole, he may yet find redemption in the next phase of human exploration: manned missions to Mars... Cook’s observations, his warnings, his ad hoc remedies and recommendations, have directly influenced NASA operating procedures. [loc. 5245]