Tag: Big jubilee read

The Palm wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola

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The Palm Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola

Nigerian fiction

Source – Library book

I have been on the lookout for a second-hand version of this book on one of those lists that readers of many books keep, noting and thinking critically acclaimed or essential in a canon when they were written, and still do today. This is one such book, the debut novel by Amos Tutuola, which was considered one of the first modern African novels in English when it was published in the 1950s. Tutola was born to his father’s third wife and was from the Egba people, which is why he knows the traditional ways. AS THEY follow the Yoruba religion, and also he will have grown up with the Yoruba folktales, which this book is a retelling of. The book was described by T.S. Eliot as a creepy, crawly imagination. Another early champion of the book was Dylan Thomas (I can see this in the palm wine drinking, and also the sense of community and place was strong in Thomas’ work, like it is in Tutuola’s)

I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age. I had no other work more than to drink palm-wine in my life. In those days we did not know other money, except COWRIES, so that everything was very cheap, and my father was the richest man in our town.

My father got eight children and I was the eldest among them, all of the rest were hard workers, but I myself was an expert palm-wine drinkard. I was drinking palm-wine from morning till night and from night

till morning. By that time I could not drink ordinary water at all except palm-wine.

But when my father noticed that I could not do any work more than to drink, he engaged an expert palm-wine tapster for me; he had no other work more than to tap palm-wine every day.

the opening and shows how much he drinks !!

The book is told by the narrator a son of a wealthy man, who said Palm wine drtnkard of the title of the book, as his wealth means he has the money to be able to afford a Palm wine tapist who are those that can tap the Palm tree and make the Palm wine for him to drink. But when this tapist falls to his death, he loses his supply of Palm wine, and the book becomes a sort of Quest novel as he hunts for a new tapist. Along the way, he meets an old man, a kind of sage, in a way that tells him things. But as the quest heads in, he faces obstacles and changes as he fights beasts and saves people, and the narrator changes. This is a richly told book that is steeped in the local folklore of his people. In a way, you feel that the places and world Tutola has described of wealthy tribal sons and their servants are long gone.

THE DESCRIPTION OF THE CURIOUS CREATURE:-

He was a beautiful “complete” gentleman, he dressed with the finest and most costly clothes, all the parts of his body were completed, he was a tall man but stout.

As this gentleman came to the market on that day, if he had been an article or animal for sale, he would be sold at least for £2000 (two thousand pounds). As this complete gentleman came to the market on that day, and at the same time that this lady saw him in the mar-ket, she did nothing more than to ask him where he was living, but this fine gentleman did not answer her or approach her at all. But when she noticed that the fine or complete gentleman did not listen to her, she left her articles and began to watch the movements of the complete gentleman about in the market and left her articles unsold.

the adventure along the way have chapter heading like this

Over the years, I have run this blog, I have tried to cover a lot of fiction from all the different countries in Africa, thus making the fiction not just African, but this is a book from the Egba people of Nigeria and uses the Yoruba folktales,, just as in the last pos,t Laxness has used Icelandic sgas. To talk about his world, well, this was written just after World War II, and he saw Tutola, who had been in the RAF. But he had struggled when he was demobbed to find work, as everyone else had, and he ended up writing this book from his folklore past. It is considered a classic of the first Books from Nigeria to come out in English and lead the way for many of the great writers from his country that followed him. The book was also the first on the Jubilee list to come from books published in the Commonwealth during the Queen’s reign. I hope to read his second novel sometime. Have you read any other books by him?

 

 

The Blue Bedspread by Raj Kamal Jha

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The Blue Bedspread by Raj Kamal Jha

Indian fiction

Source personal – copy

As it is Jubilee weekend here in the Uk I decided to try and read a couple of the books from the Jubilee list and this is the first one I choose to read as I just love the title of this book that is the only reason I had to on my TBR pile it was in the small shop in Bakewell that sells second-hand books and it just caught my eye with the title and then being described as an Indian coming of age novel on the front cover(which I think is maybe deceiving ) The writer Raj Kamal Jha has written five novels and is editor in chief of The Indian express. This was his debut novel he has won a number of prizes and his literature has been said to take its lead from the news he works on as an editor in a newsroom.

I could begin with my name but forgot it, why waste time, it doesn’t matter in this city of twelve million names. I could begin with the way I look but what do I say, I am not a young manny more, I wear glasses, my stomach droops over the belt of my trousers.

There’s something wrong with my trousers. The waist, where the loops for the belt are, folds over every time, so if you look at me carefully while I am walking by, on the street or at the bus stop, you will see a flash of white, the cloth they use as lining, running above my belt, peeping out

The opening lines of the book as he sits to write to the baby that is to be adopted tomorrow

The blue bedspread is a bedspread from a family and this night it has a small newborn baby on it and we are in a house in Calcutta as we see a man writing a long note to this babe the babe is the daughter of his dead sister and is due to be adopted in the morning and what he is writing here is a description of the events that lead up to that moment. In the story of a lower-middle-class Indian family. As the brother recalls the events of the past the blue spread iOS is a sort of recurring motif in the book. As the past and what has happened within the family are slowly revealed. the book is formed of chapters around each family member but starts with the narrator’s visit. the police station after a call telling him of his sister’s fate that she has died. What happens is we see what lies behind those curtains and here in this family it is a broken twist and as the book moves on becomes more so to its shocking last story of the last eight words of the narrator!

Blue bedspread

The bedspread was ten feet by nine feet, dark blue, almost purple, but her the years it had faded until it was blueish white, like our breakfast of milk and cornflakes. When we returned from school in the afternoon, we would lie on the bed, sister and I, our cheeks pressed against the thick fabric, our eyes fixed along the surface, imaging we were looking at the sky. And that the discoloured patches were clouds

The Blue bedspread I also think the fact they are on the bed together is maybe more than it seems!

This is a slow-burning book that sees what has happened in the family and between this brother and sister and their parents to get to that night as our unnamed narrator sits and writes this note to this newly born babe. As he puts it He could begin Wirth his name but he has forgotten it. This is a book that lingers with the reader long after you put the book down it is lifting the curtain into a family broken and twisted. The last book I remember hitting me so hard was Besides the sea although on a totally different subject it has the same impact and this book has an ending which is horrific. The book iS at times here and there in how the story is told,  but for me, this was the style it was meant to be as our narrator is a drinker and to me, this was how his mind was remembering events not in order in a linear way but as he thought of one person then he connected it to the next and as he kept longing at the babe and the blue bedspread it was as thou was the Proustian Madeleine as it was part of the family home and like the memories, it is worn and old. I was reminded in part of the Beautiful south song “The table” where a table is almost a character and this is the same the bedspread keeps cropping up and recurring in the stories this is a style I have also seen in the story collection Timoleon Vita come home where a dog is a recurring motif in the stories. Have you read any book like this that lifts the lid on a dysfunctional family?

Winstons score – B is an interlinking collection of stories told over the course of a night a family history that is horrific in parts.

To sir with love by E R Braitithwaite

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To sir with love by E R Braithwaite

Guyanese fiction

Source – personal copy (on kindle)

I posted my interest in the Jubilee reading list and this is one of the books on the list it appealed as I hadn’t reviewed a book from Guyana and I have never seen the film and it is rare I’ve not seen the film to a book especially when it is a well known film so I decided to read to then hopefully at a later date I will be able to see the film. Anyway E r Braithwaite Had studied in New your before he joined the RAF this is where this novel starts as it is autobiographical.He like the character in his book went to the Uk after the war. We see his struggle and how he Fell into teaching this lead to him have a long connection in. the education system where he worked for a number of years along side his writing career as a educational consultant for UNESCO. He actually lived to the ripe old age of 104 when he passed in 2016.

The bus pulled away from the stop, but I remained standing there, feeling suddenly depressed by the prospect around me. I suppose I had entertained some naïvely romantic ideas about London’s East End, with its cosmopolitan population and fascinating history. I had read references to it in both classical and contemporary writings and was eager to know the London of Chaucer and Erasmus and the Sorores Minores. I had dreamed of walking along the cobbled Street of the Cable Makers to the echoes of Chancellor and the brothers Willoughby. I wanted to look on the reach of the Thames at Blackwall from which Captain John Smith had sailed aboard the good ship Susan Lawrence to found an English colony in Virginia. I had dreamed. . . .

Braithwaite, E. R.. To Sir With Love (Vintage Classics) (p. 9). Random House. Kindle Edition.

His dream ideas and reality hit one another

The book follows Ricky Braithwaite a fthinly veiled version of the writer himself and the book opens as he is in the Rf and is getting demobbed where he struggles with getting a job in the field he is trained for from his RAF job as an engineer so struggling he takes the one job he can get as a teacher in an East end school. The school is eye opening for Ricky as the students aren’t ike he was as they struggle to read and learn this along with the fact he is constantly tease and disrupt with noise and other things by the students. Then he worries about the female students and their periods. This see him try a new approach where he want to show them there is more to life and with Gillian another young teacher he tries to show them Museums and the wider world. As the two teacher grow closer. His methods work but not everyone sees that as some prefer the old fashioned tough approach to the students and the way the behave.

The smells arose from everything, everywhere, flowing together and remaining as a sickening, tantalizing discomfort. They flowed from the delicatessen shop with its uncovered trays of pickled herrings, and the small open casks of pickled gherkins and onions, dried fish and salted meat, and sweaty damp walls and floor; from the fish shop which casually defied every law of health; from the Kosher butcher, and the poulterer next door where a fine confetti of new plucked feathers hung nearly motionless in the fetid air; and from sidewalk gutters where multitudes of flies buzzed and feasted on the heaped-up residue of fruit and vegetable barrows.

Braithwaite, E. R.. To Sir With Love (Vintage Classics) (p. 9). Random House. Kindle Edition later on the same and next page this evoked for me Call the midwife so much in this description of the smell of the East End!!

This is a book that opens the eye to attitudes in post war Britain and how they changed for Braithwaite character from the time he was in the RAF in the war where he felt that he was an equal the shocking crash to earth afterwards where the doors close. But that lead to him teaching and that was a passion he had all his life. I loved the descriptions in the book of theEast End of the day it was similar in feel to the early series of Call the midwife in fact as I reed through the book I imagine the class full of the students and kids seen in that show. It shows what one person can do to change those pupils life it is a look at the old system of teaching that was around discipline to what were newer ideas to nourish and inspire pupils which is what I always try to do here. I really want to watch the film which I haven’t seen or if I had I can’t remember this sits along side the early wind rush books as showing how it was to come to the Uk from Guyana or the Caribbean in those post war years when the were hopes for a better life often dashed like early in Ricky’s time but some do like Ricky make a way and become a success.I would love to read another book that was written by one of his former pupils to see how he viewed the experience of Ricky teaching him. Have you read this book ?

Winstons score – -A an interesting ;book at post war Britain and education from a teacher struggling to teach and be accepted.

Crime dagger Translation and the Queens jubilee read projects

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I am best when I have an idea or  a project to make me blog.  but sometimes as it has happened with what should off been Archipelago books week which I missed. Anyway I have two personal projects I am keener on my own individual projects so when I got a email for the Crime dagger awards on the short list for the awards. Which features the Award for crime novels in Translation which had two books I had one I had read Bullet train and the other The rabbit factor.

CRIME FICTION IN TRANSLATION DAGGER

  • Hotel Cartagena, Simone Buchholz translated by Rachel Ward (Orenda Books)
  • Bullet Train, Kōtarō Isaka translated by Sam Malissa (Penguin Random House; Harvill Secker)
  • Oxygen, Sacha Naspini translated by Clarissa Botsford (Europa Editions UK Ltd; Europa Editions)
  • People Like Them, Samira Sedira translated by Lara Vergnaud (Bloomsbury Publishing; Raven Books)
  • The Rabbit Factor, Antti Tuomainen translated by David Hackston (Orenda Books)

So I order two from the net and one from the library and will read them over the next few weeks. I’m not timetabling myself it features two books from Orenda books who had sent me a lot of books in the past and have always been great promoters of crime in translation. Have you read any of the books on the list.

The complete Big Jubilee Read list

From 1952 to 1961

  • The Palm-Wine Drinkard – Amos Tutuola (1952, Nigeria)
  • The Hills Were Joyful Together – Roger Mais (1953, Jamaica)
  • In the Castle of My Skin – George Lamming (1953, Barbados)
  • My Bones and My Flute – Edgar Mittelholzer (1955, Guyana)
  • The Lonely Londoners – Sam Selvon (1956, Trinidad and Tobago/England)
  • The Guide – RK Narayan (1958, India)
  • To Sir, With Love – ER Braithwaite (1959, Guyana)
  • One Moonlit Night – Caradog Prichard (1961, Wales)
  • A House for Mr Biswas – VS Naipaul (1961, Trinidad and Tobago/England)
  • Sunlight on a Broken Column – Attia Hosain (1961, India)

From 1962 to 1971

  • A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess (1962, England)
  • The Interrogation – JMG Le Clezio (1963, France/Mauritius)
  • The Girls of Slender Means – Muriel Spark (1963, Scotland)
  • Arrow of God – Chinua Achebe (1964, Nigeria)
  • Death of a Naturalist – Seamus Heaney (1966, Northern Ireland)
  • Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys (1966, Dominica/Wales)
  • A Grain of Wheat – Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1967, Kenya)
  • Picnic at Hanging Rock – Joan Lindsay (1967, Australia)
  • The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born – Ayi Kwei Armah (1968, Ghana)
  • When Rain Clouds Gather – Bessie Head (1968, Botswana/South Africa)

From 1972 to 1981

  • The Nowhere Man – Kamala Markandaya (1972, India)
  • Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carre (1974, England)
  • The Thorn Birds – Colleen McCullough (1977, Australia)
  • The Crow Eaters – Bapsi Sidhwa (1978, Pakistan)
  • The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch (1978, England)
  • Who Do You think You Are? – Alice Munro (1978, Canada)
  • The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (1979, England)
  • Tsotsi – Athol Fugard (1980, South Africa)
  • Clear Light of Day – Anita Desai (1980, India)
  • Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie (1981, England/India)

  • Schindler’s Ark – Thomas Keneally (1982, Australia)

  • Beka Lamb – Zee Edgell (1982, Belize)
  • The Bone People – Keri Hulme (1984, New Zealand)
  • The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood (1985, Canada
  • Summer Lightning – Olive Senior (1986, Jamaica)
  • The Whale Rider – Witi Ihimaera (1987, New Zealand)The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro (1989, England)
  • Omeros – Derek Walcott (1990, Saint Lucia)
  • The Adoption Papers – Jackie Kay (1991, Scotland)
  • Cloudstreet – Tim Winton (1991, Australia)

From 1992 to 2001

  • The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje (1992, Canada/Sri Lanka)
  • The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields (1993, Canada)
  • Paradise – Abdulrazak Gurnah (1994, Tanzania/England)
  • A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry (1995, India/Canada)
  • Salt – Earl Lovelace (1996, Trinidad and Tobago)
  • The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy (1997, India)
  • The Blue Bedspread – Raj Kamal Jha (1999, India)
  • Disgrace – J M Coetzee (1999, South Africa/Australia)
  • White Teeth – Zadie Smith (2000, England)
  • Life of Pi – Yann Martel (2001, Canada)

From 2002 to 2011

  • Small Island – Andrea Levy (2004, England)
  • The Secret River – Kate Grenville (2005, Australia)
  • The Book Thief – Markus Zusak (2005, Australia)
  • Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2006, Nigeria)
  • A Golden Age – Tahmima Anam (2007, Bangladesh)
  • The Boat – Nam Le (2008, Australia)
  • Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel (2009, England)
  • The Book of Night Women – Marlon James (2009, Jamaica)
  • The Memory of Love – Aminatta Forna (2010, Sierra Leone/Scotland)
  • Chinaman – Shehan Karunatilaka (2010, Sri Lanka)

From 2012 to 2021

  • Our Lady of the Nile – Scholastique Mukasonga (2012, Rwanda)
  • The Luminaries – Eleanor Catton (2013, New Zealand)
  • Behold the Dreamers – Imbolo Mbue (2016, Cameroon)
  • The Bone Readers – Jacob Ross (2016, Grenada)
  • How We Disappeared – Jing-Jing Lee (2019, Singapore)
  • Girl, Woman, Other – Bernardine Evaristo (2019, England)
  • The Night Tiger – Yangsze Choo (2019, Malaysia)
  • Shuggie Bain – Douglas Stuart (2020, Scotland)
  • A Passage North – Anuk Arudpragasam (2021, Sri Lanka)
  • The Promise – Damon Galgut (2021, South Africa)

Then we have this list which I intend to try and read over the next 12 months it is the Queens Jubilee and this list has come out of a book a year and from around the commonwealth. It has a lot of books  that I have been reader favourites and I may have passed over the years.Now I am keen on the list as it has a few old favourites there is a few books on the list `I have reviewed over the time I have blogged which I will mark uo when I make a page for this project. . There is also six countries which I haven’t read books from so when I was in Bakewell today it was great to find two books from the list I had read disgrace pre blog times and I had a copy of stone diaries which I had but think I long since gave away. I have strarted on the list with To sire with love, but won’t be following an order as in years I’ll just jump from book to book. It will just be as I feel which books appeal over the next year. Which books I have at hand I need to get a most of the books on the list but I feel most my library will have or I can buy second hand. So I will try and read all seventy of the books from this may to next May. Anyone any favourites on this list?