2016 in Books

I cannot remember another year where I read so many books that made me sit back, close my eyes, and say to myself, “I haven’t read something like that in quite a while!”

African Fiction

1. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The Wizard of the Crow (*****): A brilliant, satirical novel, set in a nameless African country, soon after its independence. A dose of the Latin American magical realists, but in its own unique way, and savagely funny. One of my books of the year. “Queues were a Marxist invention, according to the Ruler, having nothing to do with African culture, which is characterized by the spirit of spontaneity. Mass disorganization – pushing and shoving – was to be the order of the day…”
2. Kossi Efoui, The Shadow of Things to Come (****): Like Thiong’o, set in a post-Independence African dictatorship, but much more pared-back, spare, almost coldly abstract. A great read, especially the bits about language and nationhood.
3. Ahmadou Korouma, Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote (****): This was written before the two novels above, and you can see how they take some of its main themes, and build upon them. The story is told by an African griot. “Koyaga, you have many faults, grave faults. You were, you are as tyrannous as a savage beast, as untruthful as an echo, as brutal as a lightning strike, as murderous as a lycaon, as emasculating as a castrator, as populist as a griot, as corrupt as a louse, as libidinous as a pair of ducks. You are… You are… You have many other faults which if one were to try to expound them all, catalogue each one at a stroke, it would surely tear one’s mouth at the corners. So specifies the responder, redoubling his jeers, which draw a good-natured smile from him they appear to insult.”

South African Fiction (a separate category, since I was specifically seeking out South African novels)

1. Zakes Mda, Ways of Dying (****): A powerful novel about South Africa’s first “professional mourner”, during the extreme violence of the transition.
2. Zakes Mda, The Heart of Redness (****): Moves between the Xhosa cattle killing of the 1850s and post-colonial South Africa, where a village struggles to resist “development”. A savage and satirical take on the “new South Africa”, and the similarities with colonialism.
3. Lewis Nkosi, Underground People (****): A political thriller set in the context of the armed resistance to the apartheid regime that exploded into violence a little before Transition – but also a deeply personal work.
4. Achmat Dangor, Bitter Fruit (*****): One of my books of the year. An astonishing portrayal of the disintegration of a family in the years after the transition. Issues of race, colonialism, sex, personal relationships, and above all, the constant human need of myth-making and construction of meaning, are handled with deep and profound empathy.

Arab Fiction

1. Elias Khoury, The Broken Mirrors: Sinalcol (****): Khoury’s latest novel doesn’t quite scale the heights of Gate of the Sun (honestly, what could?), but it is still a fantastic work, and has all the elements of classic Khoury: yearning, failed love, failed revolution, the weight of history, and such beautiful language. “Written with needles on the eyeballs of insight.”

Asian Fiction

1. Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathiser (*****): An absolutely brilliant novel about the Vietnam War, written by a Vietnamese-American. Nguyen’s way with words, and with sentences, is unalloyed genius at work. One of my books of the year. I reviewed it for The Wire.
2. Yasushi Inoue, The Hunting Gun (****): A marvellously contained novella that explores human feelings in a uniquely perceptive manner.

European Fiction

1. Jose Saramago, Baltasar and Blimunda (***): This book was a birthday gift in 2012, but a complicated relationship with the person who gifted it meant that I only got around to reading it in 2016. Certainly worth the wait: this fantastical story set at the time of the Inquisition and presaging the invention of the aeroplane, was notable for a heavy dose of magical realism, and a scattered and fragmented form that still somehow held.
2. Colm Toibin, The Master (*****): Toibin’s wonderful reconstruction of the life of Henry James, and his sensitive treatment of the failure of relationships, of intellectual isolation, and of the futility of things enduring… one of my favourite books of the year, perhaps one of my favourite books ever. “Only sentences are beautiful.“
3. Flann O’Brien, At Swim Two Birds (**): A dense, modernist style that completely passed me by (unfortunately).
4. Jose Eduardo Agualusa (***): A surrealistic story about the Angolan revolution, told from the perspective of a woman who barricades herself in her house for three decades, starting the day prior to Independence. I’m not sure what I made of this novel at all!
5. Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (***): Nothing like a Francophile Englishman writing about Flaubert!
6. Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (*****): I have nothing to add to what has already been said about Ferrante. As someone once said of Wodehouse, she “exhausts superlatives.”
7. Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name (*****): See above, but even better.
8. Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (****): Finally got around to reading this classic.
9. Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time (***): From a writer I love and admire, this was… disappointing.
10. Diane Meur, The House of Shadows (***): Poland during the tumultuous mid-19th century. The catch is that the narrator of the novel is a house – an old country mansion, that sees change, transformation, and all the accompanying joys and sorrows.

Latin American Fiction

1. Eduardo Galeano, Days and Nights of Love and War (*****): Beautiful. And with an equally beautiful introduction by Sandra Cisneros. “I select some lines that describe how lovely sudden anger can be.”
2. Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of the World (**): Came highly recommended, but I found it disappointing. Must be a subjective thing.

Indian Fiction

1. Easterine Kire, When the River Sleeps (***): I picked this up at the Book Fair. An enjoyable (and a different kind of) novel about one man’s quest among the Naga forests.

Speculative Fiction

1. Jo Walton, The Philosopher Kings (***): Book 2 of Walton’s Thessaly series, about the quest to set up and administer Plato’s Republic (and the ways in which it goes wrong, and right). This one didn’t quite reach the brilliance of Book 1, in my view. I reviewed it for Strange Horizons.
2. Patrick Flanery, I Am No One (***): A story of surveillance and loss of identity in the 21st-century world, that flickered promisingly, but didn’t quite succeed (in my view).
3. Nick Wood, Azanian Bridges (****): A thrilling – and deeply political – novel about an alternate South Africa in which apartheid never ended. A twist of the knife at the end. I reviewed it for Strange Horizons.
4. Dietmar Dath, The Abolition of Species (***): An absolutely wild futuristic SF novel that I picked up at Seagull Bookshop in Calcutta. Brilliantly clever and inventive, talking about themes that you’d think need a new language and vocabulary of their own – but at times, almost consumed by its own cleverness!
5. Nalo Hopkinson (ed.), So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy (***): A solid collection of short stories, aimed at decentering the SF canon.
6. Nalo Hopkinson, Midnight Robber (***): An inter-planetary SF novel marked by dialogue in Caribbean American-English, and a very different way of storytelling. Very enjoyable.
7. Patricia A. McKillip, Kingfisher (****): An almost-Brechtian SF novel by a writer who is normally known for her lush high fantasy. I reviewed it for Strange Horizons.
8. Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (***): Finally got around to reading this chillingly dystopic story about a dying Earth.
9. Adam Roberts, The Thing Itself (***): There should be a new genre called “Philoso-SF”, for books like this. Roberts’ novel is based on Kant’s argument about the nature of reality.
10. Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem (****): The best of SF in this book: hard science combining with all the doubt and questioning about our place in the universe.
11. Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning (****): A sprawling and complex SF novel in a future utopia; maybe a trifle too complex at times!
12. Jo Walton, Necessity (***): The final instalment of the Thessaly series, with Plato’s Republic now on another planet, and featuring time travel.
13. Anil Menon, Half of What I Say (***): An interesting, genre-bending novel about a new-futuristic India with a tyrannical, all-powerful and militarised anti-corruption government unit. I reviewed it for Strange Horizons.
14. Yoss, Super Extra Grande (****): This Cuban SF writer was one of my finds of the year, courtesy Strange Horizons. This book is a rollicking space opera, with seven space-faring species, a lot of inter-species sex, “Spanglish” dialect, and a smash-and-grab in the tradition of the best space opera. I reviewed it for Strange Horizons.
15. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, The Doomed City (****): The Soviet SF masters’ darkest, most enigmatic work about an imaginary city in which the Sun is switched on and off, and there is a “purpose” that nobody knows. They did not dare to publish it when it was first written (1973); it was published in 1989, and the translation came out this year.
16. Yoss, A Planet for Rent (*****): See above, but even better. A Planet for Rent is a set of short stories in which earth has been colonised by superior spacefaring species, and turned into a holiday destination. The stories here are savagely funny and darkly beatiful.
17. Hassan Blasim (ed.), Iraq +100 (****): A set of short stories imagining Iraq a hundred years after the American invasion (2103). Moves between genres and themes.

Historical Fiction

1. Robert Harris, The Cicero Trilogy (Imperium, Lustrum, Dictator) (****): Robert Harris is a wonderfully atmospheric writer, and these three books about the life, rise, fall, and death of Cicero are evocative and deeply moving. Cicero’s epigram – “nothing dries more quickly than a tear” has stayed with me ever since I read the books almost a year ago.

Theatre

1. John Paul Sartre, No Exit and Other Plays (****): I can’t follow Sartre’s philosophical writings, but I enjoyed his short stories in Intimacy, and I loved No Exit for its remarkably acute, almost forensic, excavations of the human character. Whether it was the eponymous play (three characters together in a room after death, and the famous phrase “Hell is other people“), a retelling of the Oresteia, or a wonderful drama about a Communist Party assassin whose interior landscape and moral assessment about his own actions is subservient to the Party’s ever-changing versions of history, these plays were gripping, evocative, and haunting.
2. Michael Frayn, Copenhagen (*****): Every once a while, I come back to read this play, to be shaken inside out and to feel tears. Frayn’s play is set in heaven, where Niels Bohr, Bohr’s wife Margrethe and Werner Heisenberg meet again, and relive Heisenberg’s trip from Nazi Germany to meet Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941, at the height of World War II, and talk about… what? The play is a speculation about what happened at the meeting, but is so much more than that: about science, about friendship, and about humanity.
3. Brian Friel, Plays: Volume 1 (*****): Brian Friel’s plays struck me like lightning bolts. I had never heard of him until a friend recommended his work; his plays are a masterful blend of the public and the private, the political and the personal, and they put you through an emotional wringer. Translations, in particular  – a play set during the time when the colonial English were bent upon renaming Gaelic names in Ireland, and dealing with love across linguistic and political boundaries – was haunting. There’s something about the Irish…  “Maire: Master, what does the English word ‘always’ mean?’ Hugh: Semper – per omnia saecula. The Greeks called it ‘aei’. It’s not a word I’d start with. It’s a silly word, girl.”
4. Brian Friel, Plays: Volume 2 (****): See above.
5. Athol Fugard, Plays: Volume 1 (****): The famous South African playwright, whose works are set in the Karoo region of the Eastern Cape, blends the personal and the political in distinctive and empathetic ways. His characters are diverse and all memorable.

Essays/Other Non-fiction

1. Seamus Heaney, The Redress of Poetry (****): So much wisdom, such depth and breadth of knowledge, such an acute sensitivity, and such self-awareness. This book of essays on various poets is a joy to read. “The dream of a world culture, after all, is a dream of a world where no language will be relegated, a world where the ancient rural province of Boeotia (which Les Murray has made an image for all the outback and dialect cultures of history) will be on an equal footing with the city-state of Athens; where not just Homer but Hesiod will have his due honour.”
2. Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Cafe (***): A very well-written, enjoyablem and accessible introduction to existentialism, albeit with some irritating interpositions of the author’s political biases.
3. Edmund White, The Flaneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris (***): An off-track travel-guide to Paris liberally sprinkled with doses of history and politics.
4. Sue Roe, In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse, and the Birth of Modern Art (***): A companion to The Private Lives of the Impressionists, this is an accessible and enjoyable introduction to that era in Montmartre when Picasso, Matisse and the rest lived in close proximity and created a whole new set of art forms. Guilty of a few omissions that might reflect a little less flatteringly on its protagonists.
5. Edmund White, Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris (**): Entertaining at times, but a little too much name-dropping for the uninitiated.
6. Dominique Eddie, The Crime of Gean Jenet (****): A very perceptive account of Genet.
7. Tom Paulin, The Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State (*****): A brilliant collection of essays taking various poets and discussing their work in the context of language and nationhood. Features mostly English and Irish poets, but there are also excursions (Zbigniew Herbert). His evisceration of Geoffrey Hill was particularly enjoyable.
8. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secure the Base (****): A fascinating set of reflections on colonialism, nationalism and language. These essays are made particularly interesting by the fact that Thiong’o consciously gave up writing in European languages in the 70s, and then wrote only in his native tongue, based on his view that language had to be liberated from colonialism as well.
9. Bashir Abu-Manneh, The History of the Palestinian Novel: 1948 to Present (*****): a very accessible introduction to Palestinian novelistic literature after the nakba, that places it in the context of Pan-Arab politics (featuring Kanafani, Habibi etc.). Some truly eye-opening facts and analysis about the relationship between literature, politics, and revolution – highly recommended.

History

1. Eric Hazan, The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps (*****): Eric Hazan’s historical reconstruction of one of the most enigmatic cities of the world is a joy to read; much of it is a work of political geography – taking us through each street, each neighbourhood, and telling us about its place in the economic, social, political and cultural history of the city. There are also brilliant sections on the history of revolutions in Paris (Victor Hugo does not come well out of this), and the invention of photography.
2. Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa (***): A fairly comprehensive – and basic – introductory text.

Memoirs/Biographies/Autobiographies

1. Henri Alleg, Algerian Memoirs (*****): Picked up at The Seagull, a beautiful little bookshop in Calcutta, Algerian Memoirs is a wonderful account of the life of Henri Alleg, an important figure in Algeria’s liberation struggle against colonial rule. Alleg, originally a Frenchman, came to Algeria as a young man, and was a co-founder of its most important pro-liberation newspaper. Alleg was imprisoned and tortured by the colonial regime, and his account of his torture – La Question – was an important book and marked a turning point in the struggle. Algerian Memoirs is a great story of a tumultuous time, told with a clear eye and no sentimentality.
2. Leopold Infield, Whom the Gods Love: The Story of Evariste Galois (*****): This is a beautiful biography of Evariste Galois, the great mid-nineteenth century French mathematician and political revolutionary, who was killed in a duel at the age of 21. Through the extraordinary and tumultuous life of Galois (expelled from school for pro-revolutionary sentiments and imprisoned twice), it also paints a gripping story of France in the throes of violence and revolution.
3. Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (***): Hemingway’s spare – yet moving – account of writers and artists in Paris in the 1920s. His description of Shakespeare and Co – the bookshop – stood out.
4. Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land Between (*****): A beautiful and haunting book about a son’s search for his father, who was vanished by the Gaddafi regime. I reviewed it for The Wire.
5. Dikgang Moseneke, My Own Liberator (*****): From Robben Island to Deputy Chief Justice of the South African Constitutional Court, via a successful law practice, surviving assassination attempts, and overseeing the first democratic election in South Africa. This is an extraordinary story of an extraordinary life.

Poetry

1. Tom Paulin, Love’s Bonfire (***): An interesting – if somewhat uneven – collection.
2. Alastair Reed, Weathering (****): Small, contained, and wonderfully shaped poems. A poem about his dying father was among the best (My Father, Dying)
3. Zbigniew Herbert, Collected Poems (*****): I discovered – and fell in love with – Zbigniew Herbert, and his contained poetry that disavows romanticism and grand narratives, but takes no refuge in cynicism. Elegy of Fortinbras is my personal favourite. “What I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy.“

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