Which Books Should You Be Buying This Week?

Your digest of the newspapers' weekend book reviews October 14/15

Apologies for the late digest this week, it’s been a bit of a busy few days, but we’ll kick off this week not with a book but with a name: Jacques Testard. I wonder how many of you have heard of him? Yet he is quite the name on the literary scene at the moment as he is founder of FItzcarraldo, a tiny independent publishers that started with a staff of one (Testard) and a family loan, and has gone on to produce – count them – four Nobel prize for literature winners.

Last week, Norwegian writer Jon Fosse became the fourth winner to come from this particular stable, and what Fitzcarraldo has been doing which other publishers have perhaps not so much is focusing on books in translation. I’m hoping this is a sign that we want to have a more diverse reading experience, and those famously simple blue and white Fitzcarraldo covers seem to be delivering just that, as well as prizewinners.

Saturday’s Times did a piece on Testard this weekend and as the writer’s housemate said, they would pretty much buy anything with a Fitzcarraldo cover because you know it’s going to be good and not ‘twee’.

So let’s start with Fosse, The Telegraph on Saturday reviewed his latest book A SHINING and gave it a five star review. The premise for this 48-page novella sounds simple enough: ‘One night, a man drives into a forest, to the end of a silent track. He stops his car, gets out, and walks ahead into the trees. There he meets a luminous presence – which also manifests as his parents, a suited man, and perhaps a whispering voice – and at the end he embraces it.’

But it is the prose that blew this reviewer away and if you, like I, want to find out what Jon Fosse has that makes him worthy of the Nobel prize, then this little book seems as good a place as any to start.

“The prose in A SHINING is radiant, as if Fosse were sculpting it in light.”

The reviewer sounds spellbound:

‘I read four of Fosse’s books on a break from reading the shortlist for the Booker Prize, and it’s hard to describe the effect. Those realist novels with unhappy families or satirical intent – many well-crafted, many clever – set against Fosse’s light, they seemed to melt away. A SHINING is transcendental and offers us what contemporary culture rarely does: a glimpse, however slim, of the world that lies beyond.’

You can buy A SHINING here.

Next up, another of Fitzcarraldo’s prizewinners, Annie Ernaux, who I said I would come back to. I started with THE YEARS which I mentioned to you a week or so ago and since I have read her entire body of memoir which means my shelves have now been graced with those simple Fitzcarraldo covers.

In The Sunday Times at the weekend, Megan Nolan was reviewing her latest two to be published by Testard, SHAME and THE YOUNG MAN.

Ernaux won the prize in 2022 and although she has written novels, it is her work in the area of memoir that has seen her lauded. She was nick-named Madame Ovary for her work exploring topics such as sex, abortion, motherhood, obsessive love, though those who dismissed her admittedly female centric work with such a derogatory name won’t be laughing now.

Her two latest offerings which are receiving a new lease of life in the English speaking world thanks to Fitzcarraldo go deeper into those subjects. THE YOUNG MAN centres on an affair she had with a student thirty years her junior when she was in her fifties.

As always her ‘flat’ prose is precise, stark, naked and never fails to look you straight in the eye, in THE YOUNG MAN she talks about how looking into her lover’s youthful face makes her feel young (to the disapproval of those around them), but haven’t men been doing that for eons without judgement, she ponders.

SHAME starts with a sentence about the day when she was twelve that her father tried to kill her mother. It apparently took Ernaux decades to be able to talk about this episode, hence the title, and now she revisits as a study, in part, of class.

‘These are deeply intimate books,’ writes Nolan in The Sunday Times, ‘but in another way Ernaux brings a disquieting impersonality to her project. She rejects the idea that her recollections necessarily have any meaning. She sees their painstaking reassembly as the aim in and of itself. Karl Ove Knausgaard, reflecting on his own project, said that ‘writing is a way of getting rid of shame’ but for Ernaux it seems more akin to constructing an ornate, carefully tended mausoleum for her shame – one detached from herself. Shame, after all, has the helpful tendency to be indigestible, to stick in one’s throat, which is why it is of such help in a practice like hers, moments surging fully formed through the decades.’

I still recommend you start with THE YEARS if Ernaux is new to you, but don’t miss these books either. As Nolan puts it perfectly: ‘Her work is self-revealing, a series of pitiless auto-autopsies.’

You can buy SHAME and THE YOUNG MAN here.

Another brilliant female writer now, though not a Nobel prizewinner. Can you believe it has been a year since we lost Hilary Mantel? To celebrate her life, her publishers have released a new book: A MEMOIR OF MY FORMER SELF: A LIFE IN WRITING, authored by Mantel and edited by Nicholas Pearson.

This sounds like an autobiography, but it is instead her collected essays which Pearson has pieced together to walk us through her incredible life. Many people are familiar with her novels, but if you are not already familiar with her non-fiction, this book will be like chancing upon a treasure chest.

‘We must be grateful that she has left us this collection of pieces, thoughtfully compiled by Pearson into five thematic sections corresponding to different aspects of Mantel’s writing life, and illustrated with personal photographs,’ writes Stephanie Merritt reviewing in The Observer’s New Review, ‘she was a prolific contributor to newspapers and periodicals on a range of subjects from politics and religion to perfume and cricket, in addition to her numerous essays on the craft of writing fiction and on her own history…. Revisiting these pieces, with their fierce wit, their dark humour and compassion, is like hearing the voice of an old friend you had not expected to encounter again…. A MEMOIR OF MY FORMER SELF is a fine testament to that remarkable imagination – a reminder of what a voice we have lost, and how fortunate we are that she left us so much.’

What a brilliant Christmas gift this would be for any book lover.

You can buy A MEMOIR OF MY FORMER SELF here.

We’ll end with a bit of fiction, and a wildcard, SPLIT TOOTH by Tanya Tagaq is an intriguing 150-page debut novel by an Inuit singer and it received a great review in The Guardian’s Saturday magazine.

The narrator is, we’re told, an ‘ordinary girl’ growing up in the 1970s Arctic circle and is preoccupied with all the usual concerns of any teenage girl - getting her hair right, boys and make-up. But this book sounds far from ordinary.

‘The narrator’s daily life is, from the beginning, imbued with a powerful bond to the natural world that is elementally expressed… as the novel progresses we will see how animals, plants and spirits of the Arctic call to her and possess her. Running in parallel to the narrator’s deep sense of her heritage, Tagaq demonstrates - in devastatingly casual asides - the destruction wreaked on her people by European violence: lives permanently damaged by residential schools, by alcoholism and drugs… SPLIT TOOTH is a compact wonder: remarkable honesty and a sense of the deep magic of the Earth combine in this brief, compelling book.’

Going back to the beginning of this post about reading more widely and more diversely, ask yourself how much you know about teenage life in the Arctic circle? Well this little book might be the perfect way to find out.

You can buy SPLIT TOOTH here.

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