bell hooks: The Last Interview and other conversations

The Last Interview is a series of books each entitled, The Last Interview and Other Conversations that offers a fresh look at some of the world’s leading innovative writers and edgiest cultural figures by gathering conversations from throughout an artist’s career and collecting them in one volume. There are currently 41 books in the series and the next one coming will feature Sinead O’Connor.

Having read two of the books in bell hooks Love trilogy, All About Love and Salvation (the third book Communion, I have – but yet to read), I was interested to read these interviews. They provide more background on the author and allow for the greater understanding and depth in a subject that conversation can bring. They include an exploration of her affiliation and interest in Buddhist thought.

Overall, while the interviews are interesting, I think it is great to read the work of bell hooks, as she was quite prolific on a number of topics and a very engaging writer and thinker. If you have read all her work, this will be a bonus read and if you haven’t these interviews, some of which you can find online are a great introduction.

Meet and Read bell hooks

bell hooks (born Gloria Jean Watkins) (1952-2021) was an African-American author, feminist, and social activist. Her writing focused on education, political theory, the interconnectivity of race, class, and gender and their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and domination.

The pseudonym she used, was the name of her great-grandmother, to honour female legacies, spelling it always in lower case letters, to focus on her works and message, about ideas and not herself.

She published over thirty books and numerous scholarly and mainstream articles, appeared in several documentary films and participated in various public lectures. Primarily through a postmodern female perspective, she addressed race, class, and gender in education, art, history, sexuality, mass media and feminism.

The bell hooks theory

She is most well known for her feminist theory that recognizes that social classifications (e.g. race, gender, sexual identity, class, etc.) are interconnected, and that ignoring their intersection creates inequality and oppression towards women and changes the experience of living as a woman in society.

On Love

In her book All About Love, bell hooks perspective is heart lead, her definition of love leaves behind conditioned perceptions of romance and desire and the traditional roles of carer, nurturer, provider – and suggests that it might be ‘the will to do for oneself or another that which enables us to grow and evolve spiritually’ love becomes a verb not a noun.

“All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way.”

I find her work particularly interesting as it sits alongside the work of another cultural commentator, Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade and Nurturing Our Humanity in addressing those systems of domination such as class, gender and race that interfere with our ability to commune with one another.

It is also in alignment with the work of Anita Moorjani, another heart based spiritual commentator, who wrote Sensitive is the new Strong, Dying To Be Me and What If This is Heaven?.

The Interviews – No Such Thing as Bad Publicity?

One of the interviews addresses the controversy of her decision to appear on a live talk show, something she did as a way for her to reach a different, wider audience. It was a strategy that in one sense did not work that well for her, due to the hard time she was given on the show. However, despite the public take-down, her aim was still achieved, as the silent majority who watched it from their homes, will have become more aware of who she was and the message she was trying to portray, in particular to Black women.

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In the collection of seven interviews, stretching from early in her career until her last interview, she discusses feminism, the complexity of rap music and masculinity, her relationship to Buddhism, the “politic of domination,” sexuality, and love and the importance of communication across cultural borders.

Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, reveling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.
– Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, 2003

Whether she was sparking controversy on campuses or facing criticism from contemporaries, hooks relentlessly challenged herself and those around her, she inserted herself into the tensions of the cultural moment, and anchored herself with love.

For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?
– in conversation with Maya Angelou, 1998

On Tough Love, Loving Environments and Community

This was an interview by Abigail Bereola for Shondaland in December 2017 on self-love, discussing why we know so little about it or how to even cultivate it, and how a lack of it has played into the patriarchal culture of workplace abuse and assault.

I think that societies begin with our small units of community, which are family — whether bio or chosen. I am often amazed when I meet people that I see have been raised in loving families because they’re so different and they live in the world differently. I don’t agree that every family is dysfunctional — I think we don’t want to admit that when people are loving, it’s a different world. It’s an amazing world. It’s a world of peace. It’s not that they don’t have pain, but they know how to handle their pain in a way that’s not self-negating. And so I think insomuch as we begin to look again at the family and challenging and changing patriarchy within family systems, irrespective of what those families are, there’s hope for love.

I have enjoyed her books considerably and the interviews extend her work into the joy of what conversation can bring. Though some of her work is clearly targeted at Black women, I believe there is value in it for all, indeed, it is necessary to read outside one’s own race, gender, culture, ethnic group and language, to understand other perspectives and the issues that others face. Sometimes we find resonance, other times, we pay attention, listen, read and learn. There is plenty to learn and consider in the writings and conversations of bell hooks.

N.B. This was an ARC (Advance Reader Copy) kindly provided by the publisher via NetGalley.

Seaborne by Nuala O’Connor

Formative Years Bring a Taste of Freedom

Seaborne is an adventure story about a young girl born in Kinsale, Cork to a maid, who, in order to keep her with her, styles her as a boy growing up, so she can stay in her father’s house (a local lawyer) and be apprenticed to him.

Anne becomes Anthony in her childhood and loves nothing more than going out on the boat with her father, being at sea.

Eventually, in order that her parents can be together, the man abandons his wife and family, and travels with Anne and her mother to the Carolina’s where he will run a plantation.

Life As A Girl is Restricted

But Anne having had significant freedom as a boy is none too pleased by the restrictions and rules that presenting as a girl puts upon her.

‘Three times trouble, girl, with your red hair, and your forward manner, and your obsession with water and boats. For a lady, one is ill luck and the others are ill conduct. The three do not match well.’

And I give my ever honest reply. ‘They match the finest with me, Father.’

Finding a Way to Seascape

She finds solace and much more, with her friend and servant Bedelia and finds a way to have the occasional sea journey thanks to a young man they hear of, Gabriel Bonny, who for a few coins will take a person to sea. At first he declines to take her, she will visit a tailor and have a set of clothes made, more suitable for seafaring, eventually she wins him over, he can not refuse her.

I woke this day knowing only one thing: I wanted to hire a boat, row it out, and feel saltwind about my face and hair. I desired to have nothing but the sway of the sea under my body and I determined to make that happen.

Seeing him as a way to escape her destiny and to a life at or near the sea, she elopes with him, taking Bedelia with her.

Passion, Piracy and Plunder

Photo by brenoanp on Pexels.com

In the town where they settle Anne discovers that her husband isn’t so keen to let her pursue her dream to be at sea. She becomes restless and rebels against the wifely life and in her restless wanderings, she comes across someone who will.

Captain Calico Jack will allow her to follow him and his crew into dangerous territory and a life she had never imagined but finds passion and excitement in.

I crave a chance to wave my sword, to fire a shot. I want to know how it feels to own such power. And I think of the riches that await us, and the wandering sea-life Jack and I will have when we have plenty of money.

They will sail around the islands of the Caribbean, looking for opportunity, trying to avoid those in service to Governor Rogers, a man with a mission to suppress piracy and protect trade, who was hell bent on apprehending the infamous pirate and his men.

A Maverick Maiden

Set in the 1700’s, Anne Bonny is a real character, though much about her is legendary and not easily verifiable. Nuala O’Connor has familiarised herself with facts and read the fictions and re-imagined a version of a deeply unconventional life for Anny Bonny, told in a lilting, of its era prose.

It is narrated in a way that allows the reader to easily visualise the life and surroundings she inhabits and the high sea adventures she participates in, even if they are shortlived. It’s a fun, imaginative read, of a woman before her time, who gave herself freedoms and lived fearlessly, despite the era she lived in and the culture she came from.

Further Reading

Irish Daily Mail: I’m Always Willing to follow a historical female maverick to see where her story leads me

RTE Radio 1 Interview: 39th Cúirt International Festival of Literature

Author, Nuala O’Connor

Nuala O’Connor is a novelist, short story writer and poet, and lives in County Galway with her family.

She is the author of four previous novels, including Nora: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce (2021), Becoming Belle (2018) and Miss Emily (2015), a reimagining of the life of Emily Dickinson, and six short story collections, her most recent being Joyride to Jupiter (2017) and Birdie (2020).

She has won many prizes for her short fiction including the Francis MacManus Award, the James Joyce Quarterly Fiction Contest and the UK’s Short Fiction Journal Prize and been nominated for numerous prizes including the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award, the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year and the International Dublin Literary Award. Nora was shortlisted for the 2021 An Post Irish Book Awards RTÉ Audience voice Award. She is editor-in-chief at flash e-zine Splonk.

Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener tr. Julia Sanches

Undiscovered was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024. I decided to read it because I did the quiz on their website which asked about 15 or so questions and then told you which book to read. Undiscovered was the result.

I was totally captivated from start to finish. Loved it.

Ancestral Threads

Gabriela Wiener is a Peruvian poet, journalist, writer who has lived in Spain for the last 20 years and her books to date (none of which I have read) seem to about body politics. This novel is about a search to unravel and understand her identity as a Peruvian woman now living in Spain, who has ties to both the coloniser and the colonised.

I was very intrigued to read this book for a few reasons, of course because it is written by a woman in translation, so that already interests me, because it is coming from outside the mainstream cultures that traditionally dominate publishing and also because of the interest in identity, in the influence of ancestry, of family mysteries uncovered.

The strangest thing about being alone here in Paris, in an anthropology museum gallery more or less beneath the Eiffel Tower, is the thought that all these statuettes that look like me were wrenched from my country by a man whose last name I inherited.

A Temporary Explorer

Gabriela is both fascinated and repelled by a ‘maybe ancestor’ Charles Wiener, an Austrian-Jew whose parents immigrated to France when he was sixteen. He became a German teacher in a French lycée, would convert to Catholicism and desired French nationality. He published an essay on the “communist empire” of the Incas;

a reign based on social equality and therefore, per his thesis, antithetical to freedom. In his writing he defended the delirious hypotheses that Louis XIV had been inspired by the Incas when he said “L’état, c’est moi.”

That publication resulted in the French government agreeing to send him on an expedition to South America in 1876. The studies he conducted and specimens collected would eventually be displayed in a large scale exhibit at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1878. He wrote a book Peru and Bolivia.

On his return to France he was naturalised, retired from exploration and became a diplomat. In the less than two years he was in Peru, he fathered a child to a young widow, Maria Rodriguez. Her son, the author’s great-grandfather, Carlos Wiener Rodriguez, was born in May 1877, by which time Charles Wiener, was already in Bolivia. And most likely oblivious to what he had left behind.

We know everything about him and nothing about her. He left us a book, she left us the possibility of imagination.

The Unfaithful Father

In Undiscovered Gabriela explores the writings of her ancestor and has conflicting feelings about him, as she has conflicting feelings about herself, and her own father. The first half of the book takes place while she is on a return trip to Lima for her father’s funeral. He had a second life and family that he lived simultaneously, one she tries to make sense of by meeting his mistress and asking her mother personal questions.

But really she is interrogating those outside of her to understand something within her. She is of a different generation and even within that she lives an unconventional life. Is she how she is because that is how she is, or is there something of the past that runs through her veins which makes it harder to be anything other than that? Even in her unconventionality, she continues to cross her own boundaries and disappoint herself. She seeks to understand why.

The irritation I feel at the cruel, colonial, and racist passages in the book Wiener wrote about my culture gives way to a sudden compassion for his unwittingly anti-academic, self-aggrandizing self.

A Polyamorous Woman

On an existential quest tracing a legacy of abandonment, jealousy and colonial exploitation, she considers the effect on her own struggles with desire, love and race in a polyamorous relationship. At the same time uncovering physical traces of her ancestor and searching for the small boy Juan he brought back to France with him.

Juan isn’t a ceramic piece rescued from the rubble, nor is he made of gold or silver; he isn’t even a shrivelled child mummy destined for a museum far away from the volcanoes. Yet he crosses the pond as the adventurer’s property. Juan is just another of Wiener’s small contributions to the transformation of the European concept of history. He is part of Wiener’s “expedition,” which is not like that of conquistadors or pioneers but like those of other scientific travellers who sought to “reignite the Incan sun, brutally extinguished by the Spanish cross.”

Photo S.Hazelwood Pexels.com

I was totally captivated by this narrative from start to finish. Each sentence and paragraph so carefully constructed, I often went back and reread them, because they often articulated something that asked to be considered.

I had read a few reviews that criticised the attention she gave to herself, but I didn’t feel as if this was done without context. It is a work of autofiction and the author puts herself as much under the spotlight as her ancestor, she is self aware and critical of her own behaviours, she exposes them and puts them on public display to be judged.

Wiener really is a fluid narrator, a chronicler of minor details and excesses, the kind of storyteller who knows when to set aside principles and literary convention for the sake of hooking his readers, who doesn’t think twice before using whatever’s within reach to spice up his adventures, changing the rules of the game in a context where he really shouldn’t be taking it that far. He is also, without a doubt, the creator of the story’s hero: himself. Had he lived in the twenty-first century, he might have been accused of the worst possible crime an author can be accused of today: writing autofiction.

Broken Memories, Finding Reparation

Towards the end she seeks help or healing and her solution is to join a group called ‘Decolonizing My Desire’. She reaches out to a researcher for help about the ancestor, but finds that invalidating.

Ultimately it is her imagination and poetry that perhaps provides her with answers, the blank page that she is capable of filling, the stories she is able to create, the endings she can provide herself. She controls the narrative, no one else does.

Undiscovered is a well researched inquisition of family and colonial history, ancestral threads and both modern and ancient cultural connections that reflects one woman’s attempt to better understand herself for the benefit of her close relationships. It is about looking at personal and cultural wounds and creating solutions that help a person to move forward.

Further Reading

Read An Extract From the Book: Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener

New York Times: Gabriela Wiener Does Not Care if You Don’t See Her Writing as Literature By María Sánchez Díez Oct 2023

Electric Lit: Gabriela Wiener Challenges the White Man in Her Head an interview by JR Ramakrishnan Oct 2023

In the interview, Wiener is asked about her surname growing up:

In countries that suffered colonization, both racism and classism from white creole elites towards people of Andean descent is virulent and normalized. Brown or “huaco” faces are penalized but so are brown surnames. And if you already have both you’re screwed. I used to be terrified of going on class trips to archeology museums because we would always pass by a huaco display and the kids would make fun of me, comparing my face to the huaco portraits. But at the same time my last name whitened me, protected me, it was my link to whiteness.

2018 Exposition Musée Quai Branly: « Le Pérou avant les Incas » au musée du Quai Branly

My Review of Ancestor Trouble; A Reckoning and A Reconciliation by Maud Newton

Author, Gabriela Wiener

Gabriela Wiener is a Peruvian writer and journalist based in Madrid, Spain. Her books include Nine Moons, a memoir on pregnancy and reproduction, and Sexographies, a collection of first person gonzo journalism essays on contemporary sex culture, swingers clubs and ayahuascha.

Her work has appeared in numerous publications and has been translated into six languages. She is a regular contributor to El Público (Spain), Vice and New York Times en Español. Wiener won Peru’s National Journalism Award for her investigative report on violence against women.

Hagstone by Sinead Gleeson

I was intrigued to read this debut novel Hagstone having enjoyed Sinéad Gleeson’s voice in her nonfiction narrative essay collection Constellations (reviewed here).

Island Culture and Art

On a wild and rugged island, artist Nell feels at home. It is the source of inspiration for her art, rooted in the landscape, local superstitions and the feminine.

The island has a way of tethering people to the soil, despite high watermarks of loss. Even when people leave, stories survive.

The mysterious Inions, a commune of women who have travelled there from all over the world, consider it a place of refuge and safety, of solace in nature. They have barely any contact with anyone outside of the convent where they reside.

Hagstone centres around the life of Nell, living alone in a cottage on the island (putting me in mind of Sophie White’s Where I End) where she tries to eek out a living doing tours of the island and changeovers in holiday rentals, to support her preferred activity, making ‘durational art’.

Up on a hill lies an old convent named Rathglas, inhabited by the group of women (not nuns, though they live in a very nun-like fashion) who have opted out of society, headed by a woman they refer to as Maman.

Given its gynocratic nature, Rathglas attracted activists and agitators, though you couldn’t help but wonder if some were drawn there by the sound.

A clever use of the French word for Mother and the title of French artist Louise Bourgeois’s most famous sculpture, an enormous bronze, stainless steel, and marble sculpture of a spider, found in several locations, representative of the protective and nurturing nature of her mother.

A Commission For Samhain, Rogue Elements

One day Nell receives a letter, an invitation to create an artwork for the thirtieth anniversary since the Inions arrived, to coincide with the festival of Samhain.

Then there is Cleary, a man recently returned to the island, a subject of intrigue and attraction, the two of them seeking to fill some void, craving each other’s company while avoiding attachment.

And the rich actor, Nick, a man everyone recognises but no one knows. Nell takes him on a tour and his inquisitive questioning unsettles her.

Haunting Sounds That Not All Can Hear

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There is a strange sound that emits from the island, that only women can hear and not only hear, but it has a strange effect on them. Birds fall out of the sky.

It was impossible to exactly predict the arrival of the sound. The canonball rumble of it. It paid no heed to scientific forecasts.Storm warnings in traffic light colours. Some felt it in advance, like a tingle on the skin. Others said the air felt heavier. Last night it arrived along with a new moon. The result was something never seen before.

I never quite understood what this was, was it an element of magic realism or something else. It was one of the threads left to the reader’s imagination, a missed opportunity or perhaps I missed something?

It all leads up to the night of Samhain, after which nothing will be the same.

Hagstone started out really well and drew me in and had a strong first half, introducing the different characters, elements of intrigue and clever satirical humour, that wasn’t sustained in the latter half where it lost opportunities to delve deeper into the intentions behind some of its characters and tie up some unfinished threads.

– A hagstone – I have a thing for them! Thank you.

– For years I just thought they were battered stones with holes in them, until Sile set me right. About the fact they’re lucky, and fishermen tie them to their boats to ward off evil.

– And that if you look through the hole, you’re meant to see a different view of the world. I think that’s why I collect them.Looking, seeing, an artist thing.

Further Reading

The Guardian: Hagstone by Sinéad Gleeson review – portrait of an artist by Jessie Greengrass

Author, Sinéad Gleeson

Sinéad Gleeson is an Irish author and artist.

Her essay collection, Constellations: Reflections from Life, won Non-Fiction Book of the Year at 2019 Irish Book Awards and the Dalkey Literary Award for Emerging Writer. It was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Michel Déon Prize.

Erasure by Percival Everett (2001)

I read this after Percival Everett’s excellent So Much Blue (my review) so my reading was influenced by having read that earlier novel, which I enjoyed more.

I did really enjoy this, however I enjoyed So Much Blue more on account of the type of reader I am, because it takes you outside of America to Paris and El Salvador – that novel was about the growth of the protagonist as a result of those experiences, whereas Erasure is more of a commentary on American culture and racial bias.

Revenge Can Backfire

In Erasure, a deeply satirical novel of the publishing industry and its biases; we have a Black American writer ‘Monk’ as protagonist, whose current work isn’t gaining traction.

I called my agent to check on the status of my novel and he had no good news for me. Three more editors had turned it down. ‘Too dense,’ one had said. ‘Not for us,’ a simple reply from another. And, ‘The market won’t support this kind of thing,’ from the third.

‘So, what now?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know what to tell you,’ Yul said. ‘If you could just write something like The Second Failure again.’ The ice clinked in his glass.

‘What are you telling me?’ I asked.

‘I’m not telling you anything.’

He feels resentful of some of what he is seeing gain popularity (fiction about the Black community using performative and pejorative racial themes and language); and he has had enough of his work being criticised for being too white.

He is middle aged and his mother is showing signs of needing additional care as her dementia begins to endanger her life. His sister and brother are both Doctors as was his late father. He visits his mother and sister, to learn his sister is being harassed by pro-life protestors every day and his mother has been lighting fires inside – a box of papers his father asked her to burn.

The Novel With A Novel

In his angst about work he writes a revenge novella using the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, one that uses every terrible trope about his race and sends it to his agent. The agent thinks it is a joke, he is instructed to send it out to prospective publishers anyway.

I remembered passages of Native Son and The Color Purple and Amos and Andy and my hands began to shake, the world opening around me, tree roots trembling on the ground outside, people in the street shouting dint, ax, fo, screet, and fahvre! and I was screaming inside, complaining that I didn’t sound like that, that my mother didn’t sound like that, that my father didn’t sound like that and I imagined myself sitting on a park bench counting the knives in my switchblade collection and a man came up to me and he asked me what I was doing and my mouth opened and I couldn’t help what came out, ‘Why fo you be axin?

I put a page in my father’s old manual typewriter. I wrote this novel,, a book on which I knewI could never put my name:

That 80 page novella, initially entitled My Pafology is contained within the novel Erasure. When I started reading, I skipped ahead to see how long it was. It is a unique experience to read a novel within a novel and one that is…well, I don’t really know how to describe it, because it is so deliberately offensive – and so then we witness the author watch his act of protest backfire as he is made to kind of account for what he has done.

Dealing With A Parent With Dementia

In the meantime he takes his mother and her maid on a short holiday, which results in hastening things forward there, dealing with a tragedy and coming to terms with aspects of the family that had been hidden.

Photo furkanfdemir Pexels.com

As in So Much Blue, where we learned that Percival Everett has a bit of a fascination for secrets, so too are they present here. He explores their impact on those whom they have been withheld from.

It is a thought provoking novel and there are many references to other writers and artists and thinkers within, like clues to the things that the author might have been thinking about while writing, that can take the reader down various rabbit holes. Like this one:

* * *
D.W. Griffith: I like your book very much.
Richard Wright: Thank you.
* * *

Going Down A Rabbit Hole

I learned that film director D.W.Griffith, in 1915, directed a controversial, silent film, Birth of a Nation, that depicted previously enslaved African Americans as uncivilised, and that order was restored to the chaotic South by the noble KKK.

African American author Richard Wright wrote Native Son, a book with a similar premise to My Pafology, one that may or may not undermine the humanity of the African American. James Baldwin objected to it, believing it confirmed the damning judgment on African-Americans delivered by their longstanding tormentors.

All that to say there are complex references and issues contained within Erasure that might require more close reading.

It also satirises the book prize industry, when our protagonist finds himself in a dilemma having been asked to judge a prize.

The Movie American Fiction

The book has recently been made into a film which I have not seen, entitled American Fiction. It was written and directed by Cord Jefferson and won an Academy Award (Oscar) for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2024. Jefferey Wright plays the role of the author ‘Monk’, he received a nomination for Best Actor in the Academy Awards 2024.

I was aware of this, although I did not look at any reviews or trailers, but did wonder how much of the depth of reflection could ever be portrayed in a film.

Highly Recommended. Read the book before seeing the film.

Have you read Erasure or seen the film American Fiction? What did you think?

Further Reading

New York Times: The Book Behind ‘American Fiction’ Came Out 23 Years Ago. It’s Still Current.

NPR: Advice from a critic: Read ‘Erasure’ before seeing ‘American Fiction’ by Carole V. Bell

Percival Everett, Author

Percival Everett is the author of over thirty books, including So Much Blue, Telephone, Dr No and The Trees, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and won the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize.

He has received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His novel Erasure has now been adapted into the major film American Fiction.

His latest novel James (a reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the perspective of the enslaved Jim) was published on 11 April 2024. He lives in Los Angeles.

Women’s Prize for Fiction Shortlist 2024

The Women’s Prize for Fiction have announced their shortlist of six novels. You can view the entire longlist here.

Identity, Resilience, Migrant Experiences, Family Relationships

Many of the books depict characters who are navigating seismic changes in their identity, undergoing a process of self-reckoning and self-acceptance, with several dealing with the inheritance of trauma and the resilience of women overcoming the weight of the past.

Half of the books in this year’s shortlist explore the migrant experience through different lenses, offering moving, distinct, explorations of race, identity and family, of the West’s false promise and the magnetism of home.

The shortlist encompasses stories that both focus on intimate family relationships, as well as those that convey a sweep of history, always with an eye on the particularity of women’s experience, whether in the home or in the context of war and political upheaval.

The Shortlist

Below are descriptions of the individual titles, along with a quote from a judge, to help you discern if they might be of interest:

The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright (Ireland) published by Jonathan Cape, 283 pgs

A psychologically astute examination of family dynamics and the nature of memory. Enright’s prose is gorgeous and evocative and scalpel sharp.

Nell – funny, brave and much loved – is a young woman with adventure on her mind. As she sets out into the world, she finds her family history hard to escape. For her mother, Carmel, Nell’s leaving home opens a space in her heart, where the turmoil of a lifetime begins to churn. Across the generations falls the long shadow of Carmel’s famous father, an Irish poet of beautiful words and brutal actions.

A consideration of love: spiritual, romantic, darkly sexual or genetic. A generational saga tracing the inheritance of trauma and wonder, it is a testament to the resilience of women in the face of promises, false and true. An exploration of the love between a mother and daughter – sometimes fierce, often painful, always transcendent.

Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan (Sri Lanka), published by Viking, 348 pgs

Visceral, historical, emotional. It is 300 pages of must-read prose. A powerful book that has the intimacy of memoir, the range and ambition of an epic, and tells a truly unforgettable story about the Sri Lankan civil war.

Sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, as a vicious civil war subsumes Sri Lanka, her dream takes her on a different path as she watches those around her, including her four beloved brothers and their best friend, get swept up in violent political ideologies and their consequences. She must ask herself: is it possible for anyone to move through life without doing harm?

Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville (Australia), published by Canongate Books, 256 pgs

[It] follows the life of Dolly, who really is restless. It begins in the 1880s in rural Australia, and it follows Dolly’s ambitions to live a bigger life than the one she’s been given.

Dolly Maunder is born at the end of the 19th century, when society’s long-locked doors are just starting to creak ajar for determined women. Growing up in a poor farming family in rural New South Wales, Dolly spends her life doggedly pushing at those doors. A husband and two children do not deter her from searching for love and independence.

Restless Dolly Maunder is a subversive, triumphant tale of a pioneering woman working her way through a world of limits and obstacles, who is able – despite the cost – to make a life she could call her own.

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad (Britain/Palestine), published by Jonathan Cape, 336 pgs

How can a production of Hamlet in the West Bank resonate with the residents’ existential issues? Enter Ghost is a beautiful, profound meditation on the role of art in our society and our lives.

After years away from her family’s homeland, and reeling from a disastrous love affair, actress Sonia Nasir returns to Haifa to visit her sister Haneen. While Haneen made a life here commuting to Tel Aviv to teach at the university, Sonia remained in London to focus on her acting career and now dissolute marriage. On her return, she finds her relationship to Palestine is fragile, both bone-deep and new.

When Sonia meets the charismatic, candid Mariam, a local director, she joins a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Soon, Sonia is rehearsing Gertrude’s lines in classical Arabic with a dedicated group of men who, in spite of competing egos and priorities, all want to bring Shakespeare to that side of the wall. As opening night draws closer and the warring intensifies, it becomes clear just how many obstacles stand before the troupe. Amidst it all, the life Sonia once knew starts to give way to the daunting, exhilarating possibility of finding a new self in her ancestral home.

Timely, thoughtful, and passionate, Isabella Hammad’s highly anticipated second novel is an exquisite story of the connection to be found in family and shared resistance.

Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy (Ireland), published by Faber & Faber, 233 pgs (my review)

A full-bodied, remorseless, visceral deep dive into the maternal mind. It is ultimately a love story between Soldier, the mother, and Sailor, the son.

In her acclaimed new novel, Claire Kilroy creates an unforgettable heroine, whose fierce love for her young son clashes with the seismic change to her own identity.
As her marriage strains, and she struggles with questions of autonomy, creativity and the passing of time, an old friend makes a welcome return – but can he really offer her a lifeline to the woman she used to be?

River East, River West by Aube Rey Lescure (France/China), published by Duckworth, 352 pgs

Set in Shanghai in the 2000s, it’s a novel about reinvention. It’s original, it’s funny, and it’s sometimes heartbreaking as well.

A mesmerising reversal of the east–west immigrant narrative set against China’s economic boom, River East, River West is an exploration of race, identity and family, of capitalism’s false promise and private dreams.

Shanghai, 2007: feeling betrayed by her American mother’s engagement to their rich landlord Lu Fang, fourteen-year-old Alva begins plotting her escape. But the exclusive American School – a potential ticket out – is not what she imagined.

Qingdao, 1985: newlywed Lu Fang works as a lowly shipping clerk. Though he aspires to a bright future, he is one of many casualties of harsh political reforms. Then China opens up to foreigners and capital, and Lu Fang meets a woman who makes him question what he should settle for.

The 2024 Winners

The winner of both the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non Fiction will be announced on June 14th, 2024.

I have only read one from the list, Claire Kilroy’s excellent Soldier, Sailor. I’m most interested in reading V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night and Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost and am reminded that a friend recommended her debut The Parisian back in 2019 (but you know, 700+ pages).

Have you read any of these from the shortlist? Let us know what you thought in the comments below.

So Much Blue by Percival Everett (2017)

This is my first read of American author Percival Everett, a prolific writer I have been aware of for a few years and wanted to read. So Much Blue is partly set in France so I chose to read that first. I loved it. It’s a multi-layered novel with different strands contributing to an eventual shift in the main protagonist.

A Triple Timeline Narrative

It starts out light and comical with a number of laugh out loud moments and as the story develops, the reflections grow deeper and the experiences become more risky, it becomes more serious.

There are three timelines and the narrative switches between the three, as all are important to the present situation, where the protagonist, artist Kevin Pace is painting a large 12 X 21 foot canvas in his shed and will not show it to anyone, not his wife Linda, his best friend Richard or his children. The painting harbours his secrets. In a rare interview Percival said:

“I’m interested in secrets: how important they are, and how much secrets contribute to the truth of something.”

House – Present Moment

The chapters entitled House are set in the present. Pace is fifty six years old, a recovering alcoholic and abstract artist, living with his wife Linda and their two children Will (12) and April (16). He is experiencing a kind of reckoning with himself. It has something to do with the locked shed where he works on a ‘maybe masterpiece’ he is creating, and events of the past that he is reconciling with. At the same time, right now, there is a situation with his daughter, which he is not managing very well.

I considered myself a significant and singular failure as both a husband and a father.

Paris – Ten Years Ago

To understand who he is and what is behind his painting, we read about two life changing experiences he went through, that have contributed to who he is today. The first, in the chapters entitled Paris took place ten years ago when he was 46 years old; a brief affair with a very young Parisian woman. Though it is one of his secrets and regrets, it was the first time he had experienced something and it contributes to his later understanding and growth.

It could have been argued that ten years earlier I had succumbed to a banal midlife crisis, but now I was falling victim to something far worse, a late-life revelation.

1979 – 30 years ago

The second experience was a covert trip to El Salvador in 1979 with his friend Richard, while they were still university students. They travelled there to look for Richard’s brother Tad, who was missing, believed to be involved in bad business. The two boys went there without knowledge that the country was on the brink of civil war and witnessed terrible things, that would haunt Kevin for years to come. The 1979 chapters are a wild ride and a shocking wake up call to the young men.

If only I had the excuse of misunderstanding why I was there, perhaps then some of the guilt would not exist, perhaps then I would not have blamed myself to this day, perhaps then I would not long for a piece of me that died that day. But my friend had come to me, depressed, fearful, lost, and he had asked for my help. I offered it willingly, if not completely innocently or selflessly. That was 30 years ago. It was May 1979.

Alcoholic or Workaholic

As an artist, he is interested in colour and its representation and so we too come to understand what that means to him. Though we are not able to see what he creates, we can imagine. Ultimately, the art is not enough and he must revisit some of the past in order to realise what he must do to make amends.

It was far more socially acceptable to be a workaholic, the obsessed artiste, than it was to be a drunk, but using an old neighbour’s phrase, I’m here to tell you that one addiction was as bad as the next.
The real sadness was that I drifted away from my life and children because of alcohol, but instead of finding the current back to them when I ceased, I camped out on an uncharted island in the middle of myself. Nonetheless, selfish as I was, things were better. I was more trustworthy. An absentminded artist is more forgivable than an alcoholic.

So Much Blue After the Reds, Browns and Ochres

I found reading it very vivid and could imagine the scenes so well. The character of Kevin is flawed but self-aware, he is aware of his failings and there will be transformation of sorts by the end.

I looked across the dining room at a small canvas of mine. There was no blue in it. It was often pointed out that I avoided blue. It was true. I was uncomfortable with the colour. I could never control it. It was nearly always a source of warmth in the underpainting, but it was never on the surface, never more than an idea on any work. Regardless that blue was so likeable, a colour that so many loved or liked – no one hated blue – I could not use it. The colour of trust, loyalty, a subject for philosophical discourse, the name of a musical form, blue was not mine. And by extension green was not mine. In fact, in Japanese and Korean, blue and green have the same name. As blue as the sky is, the colour came late to humans.

Brilliant. Look forward to reading more.

‘A picture is a secret about a secret’. Diane Arbus

Further Reading

NPR Review: So Much Blue is Everett’s Best Yet by Michael Schaub

New York Times: In ‘So Much Blue,’ a Married Painter Spills Secrets by Gerald Early

Percival Everett, Author

Percival Everett is the author of over thirty books, including So Much Blue, Telephone, Dr No and The Trees, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and won the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize.

He has received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His novel Erasure has now been adapted into the major film American Fiction.

His latest novel James (a reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the perspective of the enslaved Jim) was published on 11 April 2024. He lives in Los Angeles.

Yellowface by R. F. Kuang

Yellowface is a satirical novel about the publishing industry and cultural appropriation, by the New York Times bestselling author R.F. Kuang who wrote the equally popular, ambitious novel about the British Empire Babel.

Being so popular, I had seen it pop up in many bookish places, but what made me get a copy and find out for myself was listening to writer and journalist Afua Hirsch’s one minute description of it here. Her commentary is so interesting, I share part of it below.

Afua Hirsch created the podcast We Need to Talk About the British Empire where she talked to six different people about their family history and education, in the context of the British Empire and colonisation.

Literary Opportunity or Cultural Theft

Yellowface is a fascinating look into the game of being a published writer, the universe of social media, the dangers of cultural appropriation, cancel culture, revenge and who can get away with things and who can not.

Two women, June Hayward and Athena Liu, who knew each other while at university, who may or may not have been close, are now launched into their adult lives as newly published writers, one a rising star, the other fast becoming a nobody.

It is a kind of psychological thriller, as June capitalises on the death of her friend, rebranding herself to take advantage of what she is planning to do. To steal her friend’s unpublished work. But can someone who has none of the life experience of their protagonist or witness to the testimony of people interviewed, get away with convincing readers of the authenticity of their work?

“Quirky, aloof and erudite” is Athena’s brand. “Commercial, and compulsively readable yet still exquisitely literary,” I’ve decided, will be mine.

Authorial Projection or Authentic Voice

Ironically, the one thing that doesn’t ring true is the main protagonist, a white girl appropriating her Asian friend’s work and passing it off as her own. Kuang writes from this perspective, a role she is required to step into, and perhaps because we can see she is not that, it felt a little like acting. Therein lies the point, that the only way to be authentic is to be authentic.

Of course, I have my detractors. The more popular a book becomes, the more popular it becomes to hate on said book, which is why revulsion for Rupi Kaur’s poetry has become a millennial personality trait. The majority of my reviews on Goodreads are five stars, but the one-star reviews are vitriolic. Uninspired colonizer trash, one reads. Another iteration of the white woman exploitation sob story formula: copy, paste, change the names, and voila, bestseller, reads another.

A riveting read, if you’re prepared to follow the paranoid delusions of a writer playing a risky game, but along the way we learn all about the world that certain writers aspire to, that of traditional publishing and the very capitalist desire to overcome all obstacles in pursuit of profit, with little regard for the exploitation of other cultures, the dead and vulnerable.

Have you read Babel or Yellowface?

Further Reading

The Guardian: Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang – a wickedly funny publishing thriller

New York Times: Yellowface review: Her Novel Became a Bestseller. The Trouble: She Didn’t Write It.

Author, R. F. Kuang

Rebecca F. Kuang is the #1 New York Times and #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy, Babel: An Arcane History, Yellowface, and Katabasis (forthcoming). Her work has won the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, and British Book Awards.

A Marshall Scholar, she has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford. She is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale, where she studies Sinophone literature and Asian American literature.

Afua Hirsch on Reading Yellowface

It is the story of two young women, one of Chinese heritage, the other white, who become intertwined in a complicated way, and it’s really about, in my opinion, the reality of what happens when someone who does not have the lived experience of a character they are writing about, attempts to tell a story in that person’s world, but lacks the complexity, the perspective and the humility to know that there is an integrity to that experience that they don’t share and the result is something problematic, no matter how much research that person has done. 

I relate to that and I think that my position on cultural appropriation is that we shouldn’t police the stories we can tell, but if you are going to tell the story of somebody whose life and perspective and truth is very different to yours, you better be prepared to acknowledge what you don’t know and ask yourself hard questions about whether you can do justice to that story. 

The character in this book doesn’t and it is a great morality tale of what happens when somebody who doesn’t have that credibility insists on taking up space.

I also think this book is a metaphor for something deeper about western cultures and how they have been predatory for centuries, not just the land and the resources of other people, which we talk about a lot in the history of colonisation, but the intellectual property, the ideas, the art, the genius, the innovation of other cultures. Afua Hirsch

Sagittarius by Natalia Ginzburg (1957) tr. Avril Bardoni

After just finishing Domenico Starnone’s The House on Via Gemito (my review here) featuring a domineering father, it felt appropriate to read another Italian author Natalia Ginzburg and her fictional account of a domineering mother.

The Interfering Parent

However, Ginzburg’s parent in the novella Sagittarius might be considered timid compared to Starnone’s Federico. While she is over invested in the lives of her two daughters, they seem able to pursue their own desires in spite of her interference.

Fed up with life in a small town she moves to the suburb of a city to be closer to her sisters, who run a china shop and her student daughter (who narrates the story), then demands that her second daughter and husband move with her, she has promised to give him money to set up a practice.

What he needed was a practice of his own in a good central location. My mother had promised to give him the money for this as soon as she had won a certain lawsuit against the local council in Dronero, concerning a property dispute; she had made the promise lightly, finding it easy to part with money that was so far away and so unlikely ever to be hers; the litigation had already dragged on for more than three years, and Cousin Teresa’s husband, a solicitor, had told us that our chances of winning were nil.

Photo by Ylanite Koppens on Pexels.com

We learn she disapproves of the husband Chaim, a Jewish Polish Doctor with only one brother left in his family, having lost his family in wartime. She was initially distraught over the one that got away, – a rich, blond, young man her daughter met on holiday, until she became ill and her mother arrived – not realising that her overbearing parental behaviour might have had something to do with it. She had done everything to ensure her daughter would marry well.

Every time she thought about the boy with the blond crew cut my mother became enraged. Not one spark of generosity had he shown! No crumb of comfort had he offered! And to think he had disappeared without even saying goodbye! Without a single word of any kind: The very memory of the blond crew cut and of the afternoon spent with is family now filled her with disgust.

There were days when my mother was almost as bored in town as she had been in Dronero. She already knew the central shopping district like the back of her hand, having walked the length and breadth of it looking for suitable premises, small but attractive, for her art gallery; but the rents were all extremely high and, besides; another problem was beginning to occur to her, that of finding painters willing to show in her gallery. She knew nobody.

Making Friends in the City

Finding it more lonely and isolating than she imagined, she is happy when she meets Pricilla (call me Scilla), a woman who (eventually) listens to her dreams and desires and seems in tune with them and even willing to partner with her on her project to open an art gallery.

My mother was now anxious to talk about her gallery project but was unable to get a word in edgeways because Signora Fontana never stopped chattering for an instant.

In her dogged pursuit of ambition, and desperate desire for a true friend, she overlooks important signs that perhaps all is not as it should be and naively keeps her plans to herself, avoiding criticism or advice from any of her family members that might have lead her to question her association – though probably not.

A Greek Mythology Warning

Photo by Damir on Pexels.com

It is no coincidence that Ginzburg names her character Scilla, that name immediately conjured up for me the creature Scylla lurking in the sea that enticed ships onto the rocks. She is adept at luring men into a perilous and rocky waterway, thus as I read, every person that Scilla was connected to, became for me, a potential villain or obstacle in her path, some perhaps by accident, others by design.

Scilla convinces her friend to wait on the art gallery project and invites her in on another shop idea. They will decide on a name, Scilla’s zodiac sign, Sagittarius, one that could easily be transferred to an art gallery.

Ultimately she will be confronted with her own poor judgement, both those she put her trust in that she should not have and those who she neglected and would be there for her in her downfall.

This novella is often read with the excellent Valentino which I read earlier in the year and loved. Sagittarius is a little more predictable, whereas for me, Valentino was exceptional, my favourite of the two, but I highly recommend them both and look forward to reading more Ginzburg this year.

Further Reading

My reviews of other Natalia Ginzburg works: Family Lexicon (memoir), The Dry Heart (debut novel), Valentino (novella)

JacquiWine’s Journal reviews Valentino and Sagittarius

Author, Natalia Ginzburg

Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) was born in Palermo, Sicily. She wrote dozens of essays, plays, short stories and novels, including Voices in the Evening, All Our Yesterdays and Family Lexicon, for which she was awarded the prestigious Strega Prize in 1963.

Her work explored family relationships, politics and philosophy during and after the Fascist years, World War II. Modest and intensely reserved, Ginzburg never shied away from the traumas of history, whether writing about the Turin of her childhood, the Abruzzi countryside or contemporary Rome—approaching those traumas indirectly, through the mundane details and catastrophes of personal life.

She was involved in political activism throughout her life and served in the Italian parliament between 1983 to 1987. Animated by a profound sense of justice, she engaged with passion in various humanitarian issues, such as the lowering of the price of bread, support for Palestinian children, legal assistance for rape victims and reform of adoption laws. 

She died in Rome in 1991 at the age of seventy-five.

Why Did You Come Back Every Summer by Belén López Peiró (Argentina) tr. Maureen Shaughnessy

It’s been a good couple of weeks for Charco Press, with Not a River by Selva Almada (translated by Annie McDermott) on the shortlist for the International Booker Prize 2024 and Of Cattle and Men by Ana Paula Maia (translated by Zoë Perry) winning the Republic Of Consciousness Prize 2024.

An Unforgettable Summer

This week I picked up Why Did You Come Back Every Summer from the 2024 Bundle, originally published in Spanish in 2018 as Por qué volvias cada verano and published in English for the first time in April 2024.

What a book.

A young woman experiences sexual abuse by a family member when she is a teenager. Some years later she reveals what happened. And there are all kinds of responses, reactions, accusations, procedures and legal processes.

Testimony or Treason

In this lucid text, a chorus of voices speak. Often they are speaking to her, only we do not hear her voice. We hear one side of conversations. We hear what they have all said. We see what they are all doing. We understand the selfish human inclination to protect one’s own. We become witness to observing a victim in need of love and support being hung out to dry.

In between the commentaries, are the affidavits. Short, streamlined, neutral texts presented in old fashioned type that all begin and end the same way, with their two or three salient points contained within.

Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

The voices that speak are presented on the right hand page, the left hand page remains blank. It gives the text momentum, the pages pass quickly. The voices say so much more, they incriminate.

The legal texts are more dense, no white space between paragraphs and they cover consecutive pages. There is no space for reflection or consideration, as we read we can hear the sound of the keys typewriter striking the ribbon.

#MeToo Movement and the Sharing of Stories

The process for pursuing justice, rather than protect or bring about resolution, too often results in making the lives of women even worse. To pursue justice threatens exposure, judgement, scorn, rift, ostracism, it brings shame. It reached a tipping point in 2017 with the #MeToo movement. Frustrated, women began to share their stories, it was the only thing left to do and when it was done as a collective, it created community and support, if not justice. Long buried trauma rose to the surface, if not for justice, to begin to heal a wound of womanhood.

Reading Why Did You Come Back Every Summer reminded me of the recent documentary You Are Not Alone: Fighting the Wolf Pack, a Spanish feature film about a young woman seeking justice after a terrifying ideal at Spain’s iconic ‘running of the bulls’. Produced in secret, the film is told through the words of the victim survivors and recounts the mass protests the case sparked on account of the injustice experienced.

More than a million women and girls took to the streets chanting “Sister, I do believe you” and broke their silence on social media with #Cuéntalo (“Tell Your Story”).

There are many ways to share a story and Belén López Peiró has created a work of art that honours an experience that changed a young girls life forever, putting it into a form that has already become a literary, social and political phenomenon in her country and beyond.

It is a justice-seeking oeuvre narrated through a cacophony of voices that gives power to the unsaid, that allows the quiet to echo resoundingly, that shines a light on yet another shadow of humanity.

Highly Recommended.

Author, Bélen López Peiró

Belén López Peiró studied journalism and communication sciences in Buenos Aires University and has recently completed an MA in Creative Writing at the Barcelona’s Pompeu Fabra University. She currently coordinates non-fiction writing workshops with a gender perspective. 

Why Did You Come Back Every Summer is her debut novel. In 2021 she published her second book Donde no hago pie (Nowhere to Stand) which narrates the legal process the author went through to bring her abuser to justice.