Tag: War

Bindlestiff

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Bindle stiff (noun): Hobo, especially: a person who carries their clothes or bedding in a bundle ~ Merriam Webster online dictionary

Bindlestiff is the first novel by Wayne Holloway, a director and screenwriter whose career has travelled from Channel 4’s Dogma TV at the start of the century to the docudrama Snake and Mongoose (2013). His debut novel is set in Hollywood in 2016, where a director is trying to get a film off the ground. The film is the futuristic Bindlestiff, touted as the story of “a black Charlie Chaplin” named Frank wandering a post-federal USA in 2036.

Bindlestiff the book is a satire. It mixes the bleakness of 21st century creative industries with climate disaster, the zombie lurch to the right orchestrated by the ones who will benefit the most from the civil war it will bring, the socio-economic and racial divisions embedded in US society, and the live streaming overwhelm of social media.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 2

Hardly War

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Don Mee Choi’s Hardly War arrived earlier this year as part of my And Other Stories subscription. It is categorised by the publisher as poetry, but it is more than a down the line collection of verse. Choi draws from her father’s archive, combining photographs, drawings, postcards, bold graphics, memory and opera to examine her heritage, her relationship to a father who professionally photographed the Korean and Vietnam wars, and their shared relationship with colonialism and dictatorship. She weaves in lines from newspapers and cine news, other writers, political speeches, and plays with English words that are homophones for Korean words.

It is like nothing else I have ever read.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 1

The Crowded Street

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“What on earth shall I do when I get home? Read? All books are the same – about beautiful girls who get married or married women who fall in love with their husbands. In books things always happen to people. Why doesn’t somebody write a book about someone to whom nothing ever happens – like me?”

So asks Winifred Holtby’s heroine Muriel Hammond towards the end of The Crowded Street. Muriel can be seen in part as a version of Holtby that never came to be, and The Crowded Street the book Muriel longs for.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 6

Verdigris

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Like a Bryan Adams song, Verdigris takes place over a single summer; the summer of 1969. Unlike a Bryan Adams song, Verdigris squirms with horror and questions what makes reality. In that summer of ’69, the novel’s narrator Michelino is 13 and a half years old (the half year is important to him) and spending the holiday with his grandparents in Nasca, Italy. Neither grandparent takes an interest in the boy, and he is left to entertain himself. That entertainment doesn’t include buying a guitar and starting a band. Michelino is far too esoteric for that.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 6

The Island of Missing Trees

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Elif Shafak’s part-magical realism novel about family, ancestry, war and the inner thoughts of trees is a wonderful wintery read. The Island of Missing Trees crossed my path thanks to Emma’s review at Em with Pen. Emma’s thoughts on the novel made me want to read it, so I reserved it at the library.

The story starts with a history of an island divided by war. The island is Cyprus, its long history bound up with legend, its recent history one of violence. In a well lies a pocket watch and the chained together bodies of the joint owners of a tavern. The tavern is significant to the story in this novel.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 6

The Rings of Saturn

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The Rings of Saturn by W G Sebald is a novel disguised as a travel book, recording a walk along the Suffolk coast and inland to Norfolk but also documenting local culture, the interplay between people and landscape, and how transient life is. I read Sebald’s Vertigo a few years ago and loved it, and have wanted to read more by Sebald since.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 6

The Book of Ramallah

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Read 29/05/2022-02/06/2022

Rating 5 stars

Comma Press in Manchester publishes a series called Reading the City, in which stories from cities around the world are brought together in an anthology, often stories that have not been translated into English before. I picked up The Book of Ramallah at the recent Northern Publishers’ Fair at Manchester Central Library.

During the pandemic, I’d watched Mayor, the 2020 documentary by David Osit that follows Mousa Hadid as Mayor of Ramallah over a two year period. Hadid comes across as that rare thing – a man of honour in politics. It’s a moving, funny, heartwarming look at what it means to be a Palestinian in a city hemmed in by occupation. It made me want to know more about Ramallah. This collection seemed a good place to start. Continue reading →

Posted on by Jan Hicks 8

The Silence of the Sea

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Read 07/04/2022

Rating 4 stars

The Silence of the Sea is a novella of occupation and resistance. It was published in German-occupied France in 1942, not quite two years after the occupation began. Its author, Jean Bruller, wrote it in roughly eight months, publishing under the pseudonym Vercors. I borrowed a bilingual edition from the library that reproduces the definitive French text published in 1964 alongside Cyril Connolly’s 1944 translation into English. Continue reading →

Posted on by Jan Hicks 5

Six Degrees of Separation: From The End of the Affair to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

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Here we are at the first Saturday in March, meaning it’s time for Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best.

The starting book for this month’s chain is Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, about extramarital love in a time of war. Although I haven’t read this one, I like Graham Greene’s writing and am interested in reading this novel at some point.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 7