Now Unsurprisingly Nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2024 Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023 It's always a dangerous game when the Booker Now Unsurprisingly Nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2024 Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023 It's always a dangerous game when the Booker dismisses all strong contenders and instead presents a list composed of left-field entries, especially when they add young, promising authors who are not quite at the Booker level yet, but will then inadvertently be judged by Booker standards - to their own detriment. "Western Lane" is a decent book, but Booker material this is not (unlike The New Life, Chain-Gang All-Stars, Biography of X and all the other literary hits that went without a nod). Maroo tells the story of 11-year-old Gopi, whose mother has recently died. Now her father is alone, trying to take care of his three daugthers and pondering whether Gopi, the youngest, should go live with his childless brother and his wife instead.
Apart from the topic of grief, which is subtly rendered in Gopi's precise and often seemingly mundane observations, we learn about the bond between father and daughter through sport, in this case squash, which he wants the kids to take up in order to keep them occupied: While her sisters are not particularly dedicated or interested, Gopi and her dad do not only communicate through squash, spending time together on the court, their movement and alertness during the game is also connected to present physicality as opposed to the ephemeral process of grieving.
As Gopi develops a crush on Ged, the talented 13-year-old son of an employee at the title-giving sports establishment Western Lane just outside London, the element of race enters the narrative, because Gopi is British-Indian and her relationship to the white boy is seemingly deemed problematic by some, just like the the friendship her father strikes with Ged's mother. The migration background also plays a role when Gopi ponders the language barrier between her late mother and the siblings, as English was not her first language, but Gujarati. Silence is a major theme throughout the book, as are cultural differences and how Gopi's generation can deal with them.
So all in all, this quiet, shortish text offers many good ideas and is an interesting investigation into the nature of grief, but it is oh-so-slow and the set-up is very transparent and thus not particularly elegant, and sometimes even formulaic. I'm afraid this story is overall a little forgettable, but I feel like Maroo is very talented and could soon come up with a banger - this ain't it though, and the judges didn't do her any favors by nominating her now.
Also, I hate squash. On to the next.
EDIT: Of course this got nominated for the Women's Prize, a prize that generally celebrates highly accessible literature that is not big on ambivalence on the plot level or experimental designs on the aesthetic level. ...more
Ganz klar einer der schwächeren Strunks, aber ich kann Heinz Strunk, der den Heinz Strunk von der Kette lässt, einfach nicht weniger als drei Sterne gGanz klar einer der schwächeren Strunks, aber ich kann Heinz Strunk, der den Heinz Strunk von der Kette lässt, einfach nicht weniger als drei Sterne geben. Plus: Dieses Buch hat ihm den Vergleich mit Michel Houellebecq eingebracht - und zwar in der FAZ! Dort heißt es: "Strunk hat eine fast beängstigende Routine darin entwickelt, menschliches Elend mit einem einzigen Blick zu erfassen und es einzuspeisen in ein Weltbild, das immer mehr an einen anderen Desillusionskünstler, Michel Houellebecq, erinnert. Das ist schon an thematischen Ähnlichkeiten wie Sextourismus, alternde Gesellschaft oder der immer wieder aufblitzenden negativen Utopie einer absolut gefühllos gewordenen Gesellschaft zu sehen." So isses.
"Thought for despair? No! I am part of a living struggle. And without struggle, there is no movement, there is no life."Will this man now finally get"Thought for despair? No! I am part of a living struggle. And without struggle, there is no movement, there is no life."Will this man now finally get his well-deserved Nobel Prize, for God's sake?!
It's actually bizarre to even rate this, the memoir of a man who was once thrown into a maximum security prison after writing a play in an African language and staging it with local workers and peasants. Today, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is considered one of the main contestants for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his writings on Kenyan culture and about the consequences of the British rule over his home country are invaluable for everyone trying to understand African history or colonialism in general.
This is the first time this memoir is published in English, in a re-edited version, although its original version in Gikuyu was already put out in 1982. Ngũgĩ wrote most of the text secretly on toilet paper in his prison cell in 1978, as a means of resistance, to uphold his own sanity and intergrity, and as a testimony to let others know about the faith of political prisoners under the authoritarian Kenyatta regime.
Jomo Kenyatta was the country's first black head of government and played a significant role in the transformation of Kenya from a colony into an independent republic. Born in 1891, he experienced the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial era - and this man's policies were just as contradictory as Kenya's history (see Ngũgĩ's highly interesting postscript). In his memoir, Ngũgĩ strongly criticizes the man who jailed him and many of his fellow intellectuals, describes the connection between colonial atrocities and the wrongdoings of the Kenyatta government, and elaborates on the power which the ideology of colonialism still holds over the Kenyan people, from poor peasants up to the head of state.
From his prison cell, Ngũgĩ fights the colonial "culture of silence and fear" and its "aesthetic of blind trust and obedience to foreign economic, political, and cultural occupation and encirclement" with many acts of resistance, his art being one of them. After dozens of years of being indoctrinated that they are worthless and that their actions are futile, Ngũgĩ sees Kenyan culture and creativity as the constructive force that will enable Kenyans to overcome the legacy of the "colonial Lazarus":
"It's the history of Kenyan resistance culture, a revolutionary culture of courage and heroism (...). It's a creative, fight-back culture unleashing tremendous energies among the Kenyan people." "(...) even behind the barbed wire and stone walls of the colonial Jericho, they (the Kenyan people) went on composing new songs and singing out a collective defiance that finally brought those walls down."
In contrast, "(b)eyond drinking whiskey, drugging themselves into sexual fantasies, whoring each other's spouses, and gunning lions and natives for pleasure in this vast Happy Valley, the settlers produced little."
The text has a peculiar structure, containing foreshadowings and flashbacks, providing historical and political context, giving insights into the physical and psychological measures applied to subdue or even destroy prisoners, and letting the reader get really close to the author: The way Ngũgĩ talks about his feelings, his pain, but also his strength is powerful and highly impressive. The memoir is closely connected to his novel Devil on the Cross, which he also wrote in prison (but it is not necessary to know the novel to appreciate this book).
Full disclosure: I didn't know much about Kenya before reading this book, but now I want to learn much more about this country which is located around 10,000 km away from me - and I want to read more Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. This is a fascinating book, and it is almost impossible to put it down....more
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