White Fever | Jacek Hugo-Bader | Book Review

 

I'm terrible at reading translations. It shouldn't make a difference, but it does. I wonder if you're familiar with this feeling - that fear of the avid reader that by not reading something in its original, intended language, you're losing out on something vital. That perhaps something important gets lost in translation.

It's not fair, really. Translations have been winning prizes left, right and centre over the past few years - Flights by Olga Tokarczuk comes to mind which, after winning an International Booker prize, went on to win a Nobel Prize in literature for Olga and which, by the way, I still need to read. And I have no doubt that thousands of brilliantly translated books keep appearing on the market that, due to this ungrounded fear, so many of us miss out on.

This is a convoluted way of telling you that White Fever: A Journey to the Frozen Heart of Siberia by Jacek Hugo-Bader is translated from the original Polish, and it is an exquisite work that took me by surprise. 

In a modified Russian jeep, Jacek sets off on a journey of nearly 13,000km from Moscow to Vladivostok, documenting the people, lives and customs he encounters on the way. With a sharp eye and an even sharper interview style, the author gives a clear glimpse into not only the country as it is now, but the traumas and history it continues to grapple with 30 years on from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Through fragments of conversations and insights, he creates a full picture.

Snapshots

The author presents a wide range of lives, from the stereotype of what an ignorant Westerner like me imagines life in Siberia to be - viewed through a lens of American films and the perceptions I scraped together over the years - and all the way to the other end of the spectrum where, for example, shamanism and religious cults reside. He explores a dying hippie culture, the music scene (from hip-hop to anarcho-punk and fascist rock) and the AIDS epidemic in Russia, moving on to meeting Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov - yes, him, and a shocking encounter it turns out to be - and travelling on to villages in old nuclear testing grounds, religious congregations and the isolated indigenous communities.

There is no 'everywhere' in this book. Each new place or peoples Jacek meets, the revelations, opinions and reactions differ widely. And yet through these snapshots, a feeling starts to emerge, a sense of Russian values and mind sets. A stubbornness, perhaps, or 'their languid way of waiting for disaster to happen before getting on with anything', as he describes it. 

Self-preservation is a recurring theme, a priority especially in these harsh conditions. When Jacek suffers an accident in his car while driving, the lorry driver he was trying to overtake makes sure Jacek is alive, then drives away hurriedly without giving him a ride. The book also opens with telling the reader that in Siberia, no one will stop for you at night if your car breaks down. They are afraid of bandits. People die of hypothermia out there, setting their cars on fire as a last effort to keep warm. Without success. But they know no one will stop.

It is not an easy read by any measure. Alcoholism, suicide, terrorism and death occur much more often in this work than love or even satisfaction. With temperatures reaching minus forty in winter, with no cities - and often no electricity - around, with a police culture that is only there to protect if you can buy that protection (the 'impunity, rapacity and corruption' of the militia is legendary), this is as desolate a landscape as it gets. Jacek has a masterful style in selecting what is relevant for the reader to get some kind of an understanding of why things are the way they are, without holding back. 

Jacek often employs a brilliant toungue-in-cheek approach to coax people to talk to him. He provokes, takes small stabs and waits for the reactions. He gently mocks and questions, and this kind of witty approach to all the horrors he encounters allows us not just to be truly horrified by what we are reading, but to really engage with it. He puts a hand on the subject matter saying 'look, it's fine to touch'. 

'The technical term is delirium tremens'

White fever itself is a condition that can set in after a few days of boozing, even once the person has sobered up. It is an after-effect, a sort of whiplash after days of heavy drinking. Its effect is delirium, often with hallucinations - hearing or seeing demons and voices. 

'One day he ran out of the tent in the middle of winter without his jacket and hat. He was entirely sober, but this was soon after a tremendous, four or five-day drinking spree. He ran blindly ahead without stopping for two days and nights.' (Later, when discussing this story: 'He wasn't running, he was fleeing.')

It is discussed in what is perhaps the hardest part to read in the book, a chapter about the Evenks, one of the indigenous peoples of the Russian North. Jacek spends a week or so with them, recounting a truly staggering amount of death and suicide, narrating the story of Brigade Number One, a collective of seventeen reindeer herders, falling victim to the white fever one by one. 

The story of the ex-nuclear test sites comes close. Here, he explores the shocking effects and attempted cover-ups of nuclear testing in the 1950s. The cancer that still affects those whose parents or grandparents lived here during that time. When bombs were tested not 50kms away from villages. 

Let it be enough to say that the chapter is constructed according to the nine circles of hell.

'Are you happy?' 'I don't know. But I don't feel sad.'

I'd like to think things must be different now, over there in this strange and far-removed world. But this was written in 2008. 

Often it is crazy, absolute madness, outrageous. Something inside me screams the whole way. How are these things possible in today's world? But the people might just shrug at me if I asked them. 'How should I know?'

Some of the scenes casually recounted in this book will continue to haunt me, but it's possible to see beauty too. It's as bittersweet as Russian music sounds to me, the sad notes somehow constructing a slightly more upbeat melody. An enlightening read, for sure, and an excellent piece of reportage. 

8/10

This One Sky Day by Leone Ross | Book Review | Faber

 

Everything I know about writing, I learned from this magical woman. Leone Ross is a writer, lecturer and to be honest, a presence to be reckoned with - and to this day, I am grateful that I got to study with her at university for a few short years.

But enough of my gushing emotions. We're here to talk about This One Sky Day, the latest novel from Leone, published by Faber in April 2021 - so yes, I was lucky enough to swindle a proof copy from the publisher. Hugs and kisses to them.

You might already know some of Leone's writing, or perhaps you've come across her after she published a short story collection in 2017, Come Let Us Sing Anyway, with Peepal Tree Press - but if not, welcome. You are among friends.

This new novel was, according to The Bookseller at least, 15 years in the making, and takes readers on a dazzling journey to Popisho, a land where everything is bursting with colour and magic; where food is as important as life; and where we follow Xavier and many other wonderful and colourful characters through one fateful day.

Under a pink sky

When I close my eyes and think about This One Sky Day, I immediately see colour. Leone creates a world where sensations are everything. Touch, smell, taste, hearing and sight are so important to the story - and she is so good at bringing her world to life - that I felt as if I was living through it. I tasted the food that the macaneus, Xavier, cooks individually for every living soul in Popisho, once in their lifetime; I felt the desperate touch of a rejected lover trying to win back their partner; I was there when a couple broke open and licked, sucked, devoured a fresh mango, peeling the skin off with their teeth. 

In Popisho, everyone is born with some kind of magical power (or cors), be it healing, growing wings on your back, or being an unbelievably good shag. (Yes, there is good reason why the novel is being described as 'sensual'.) Everyone loves argument. The land is kept prosperous by the sale of exquisite toys to foreign - "big yellow toy chests, stuffed with knitted mice and parrots, with creaky hinges that made her laugh and sandalwood smells that made her sneeze ... Wooden alphabets, each letter so elaborate, she could call them nothing but jewellery ... little tables and chairs in the shape of animals: not cats or dogs, but goats and wasps and one she'd never seen before...". 

The writing is strong, clear, distinctive, consistent throughout. It is visual and gripping. Tastes illustrated with memories, pain with action. Words that I might not understand, phrases I'm not familiar with at first become clear quickly. I take it in my stride, busy being carried away by the story. It's an enchanting world, and in the middle of it all sits love.

"In her chest cavity, she'd stuffed a white, fat cloud"

No one writes love, or breaks hearts with words like Leone does. "In the damp of his neck, where she'd been so many times, she caught the new love ... Xavier tried to hold her, horrified at her eyes, but she tumbled to her feet, lurched across the yard, body in rictus, backbone unhinging, her hearts exploding." On this one sky day (if I may), loves will break and mend; things will be revealed that couldn't remain hidden anymore. In Popisho, even secrets are manifestations that can attach themselves to you and weigh you down. 

There is so much hidden pain and liberation as we go along; heartbreak - "and here Zebediah sighed so deeply, Xavier wondered if he'd ever been loved as hard as this man loved" - and joy and misunderstanding. 

The day is up-and-down, messy like a fever dream. People collide and ricochet away from each other; make plans and then break them. But somehow we always know where we're heading, which makes it clear that we aren't lost, not even for a second. Leone know exactly where she wants to go, and she's holding us firmly by the hand throughout the day.

"This was going to be so much fun"

I can't recount all the magic and wonder that Popisho is - half the pleasure is discovering it for yourself. But I can say that everything moves, changes, crests and falls like waves. It is complicated and beautiful. 

For those who forget how to love; for those who love to explore new worlds; for those after the next greatest contemporary writer; for those after literary fiction. Really, for anyone. This book is perfect. My advice? Keep your heart and mind open as you pick up this book. There is strangeness to be reckoned with - but the kind worth opening your heart and mind for. 

And savour the words, don't rush them. You'll be sorry afterwards.

Underland by Robert Macfarlane | A Deep Time Journey | Book Review

 

I've waited for so long for Robert Macfarlane's Underland to come out in paperback. Several times I'd wander through bookshops in the past 18 months, longingly picking up the hardback but ultimately putting it back again. Soon, I figured.

There are many reasons for my waiting. It was a huge and heavy book. I have all of Robert's other books in paperback. I could delay the pleasure of reading his latest by working my way through his backlist first. But finally, after more than a year, here I am.

In a recent interview on Front Row, it was pointed out that Robert started his writing up in the peaks and slowly made his way down over time. From Mountains of the Mind, through The Old Ways and The Wild Places, he has finally descended into the Underland: a 'deep time journey' into the deepest, darkest recesses of the world. And I, reader, finally got to follow him down into the dark.

Descending

To me, the most gripping aspect of all of Robert's books - and especially Underland - is his ability to see through layers - of time, of rock, of soil. Travel writing, nature writing, adventure writing only really seems to work when there is more to the story than travelling in space, and with every place that Robert visits, there is a clear intention not just to see, but to understand: be that travelling in space and time, too, to Bronze Age burial rituals in Somerset; or exploring the incomprehensible, incredibly remote and powerfully strange locations that hunter-gatherer-fisher people in the Lofoten archipelago in Norway chose to decorate with cave paintings ('made in some of the harshest country in the world'). 

He has an ability to see with such amazement, such child-like wonder and imagination that I feel myself seeing with his eyes, too, as I read his words. His writing reawakens in me the child who believed in magic and relished the strange. He draws on the mystical, hints at the surreal: 'there by the glimmering birches is a figure standing dark on rising ground, where no figure should be'.

Although Landmarks was an ode to the joy of words, Underland puts this joy to use. It is with pure love of language that Robert scatters alliterations and musical phrases: 'Cold sleet on old slate', 'A gravel beach is reached', 'A light is struck, lifted, shifted', and this from the very first passage of the book: 'Late-summer heatwave, heavy air. Bees browsing drowsy over meadow grass. Gold of standing corn, green of fresh hay-rows, black of rooks on stubble fields.' No word carelessly placed, no rhyme or resonance accidental. This is poetry, bringing memories of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

And there, of course, is the fascination with the distant and the remote - in Underland, Robert travels across the UK to places no ordinary person would (or could, perhaps), and then heads north to Norway, Finland and Greenland, spending what feels like months on the remote fjords and glaciers, climbing unnamed peaks and descending into crevasses of deep time in the ice, playing harpoon water-polo in kayaks (as one does). He descends into deep, dark catacombs under Paris, a ghostly mirror image of the city above; and he visits a 'starless river' in the Abyss of Trebiciano. He even ventures into the underlands of Budapest. It is a true journey into deep time from the upper layers of our existence across the globe.

Ascending

Although ultimately uplifting, this is not light reading. Robert spends considerable time on exploring the threats to our existence: climate change, extinction, man-made ruin. He conveys warning messages and rings the alarm. It is not easy nor comfortable to be faced with these truths, and yet I'm incredibly grateful for it here. 

I say uplifting, but it's more of a liberation, a bubbling up of raw feelings that returns again and again throughout the book. After hours spent in a glacier 'Labyrinth', 'One of us cries briefly. We all feel hunted by this ice, haunted by it'. Or here, when locating those remote, painted red dancers in Lofoten: 'Suddenly, unexpectedly, my head begins to tingle and then my back and my chest start to shake, and I find myself crying, sobs shuddering my body in the teardrop-shaped rift, far from another human and so close to these generous figures . . . I cry there, surprised and helpless, deep in granite and darkness, weeping for feelings I cannot name.'

These passages don't leave you for a long while.

There is a masterful art in the structure of this book as it builds towards its conclusion. From Descending, through the three Chambers and finally Surfacing, each section is carefully placed and named, making the reading of this book a journey in itself. Here, again, the mystical and magical is evoked, with chapter names such as The Understorey, Invisible Cities, Hollow Land and the Blue of Time. Broken into three major sections - Seeing, Hiding and Haunting - we go deeper until we make our journey back to the surface, into the security of the light. 

Overall...

In Underland, unlikely as it may seem, Robert is often lost for words, feeling deeply the weakness of language compared to the majesty and all-encompassing presence of nature and the world around us. Writing this summary, or review, or call it what you may, feels that way when it comes to Robert's writing.

I urge you to read Underland if you hate the deep and the dark; if you feel claustrophobia. If you worry about the direction we're heading, but are fascinated with a constantly changing landscape. Read it for escapism, read it for a wake-up call. Just read it.

10/10

Conversations with Friends | Sally Rooney | Book Review

 

I was just re-reading my review of Normal People, the second book by Sally Rooney, and I was surprised to see that apparently I was put off reading her first, Conversations with Friends, by Goodreads reviews - strange, looking at it now.

True, I had bought this a few weeks back and every time I thought about what to read next, I kept putting it off. What could this book really offer? - I wondered. Is it just hype? "Two couples' relationships become messily entangled in this mordantly funny debut that established Rooney as the formidable new voice of a generation," reads the Waterstones description. Am I to blame that I thought this is going to be a cliché?

Then, of course, I should have known better. Similarly to Normal People, it isn't the premise that's going to make this book - it's that, and everything else, as it turns out.

What did I like about it?

Just like in her second book, Rooney demonstrates a sharp eye for details that are so obvious that most writers today just don't bother describing them, perhaps. Or perhaps it's that cool detachment that, to me, is so characteristic of her writing - a kind of alien, removed point of view that presents everyday feelings and conversations as something novel and fascinating. Simple words and expressions gain superpowers - it's your life, all our lives, on LSD.

I enjoyed the power of longing throughout, like when Frances, the young narrator, desperately longs to be understood and cared for - "I wanted to tell him about the hospital then, because he was in such a nice mood with me, and he might say consoling things, but I knew it would make the conversation serious. I didn't like cornering him into having serious conversations," - instead of feeling the usual darkness of wanting to disappear, feeling like she could disappear without a trace. "I decided to drink as much milkshake as I could without taking a breath. When my mouth started hurting I didn't stop. I didn't stop when my head started hurting, either. I didn't stop until Bobbi said: Frances, are you planning to drown there? Then I looked up like everything was normal and said: what?".

How many times have we said 'what?' just to elongate that second of attention we received just then?

I love the feelings that the story stirs up through a plot that most of us have come across thousands of times, and yet here it feels fresh and new, like we ourselves are feeling those feelings for the first time. Hands touching by accident; eyes locking in public spaces where they shouldn't; a first, stolen kiss in a storage room, all presented with style and modesty that stops it from ever feeling like a cliché. The writing is truly masterful. And when it all goes wrong, as we all know it will, we feel the hurt that Frances feels deeply, like it's our heart that is being broken. It is so unique and so powerful for this effect on readers to be achieved through words.

There's also a lot of subtle explorations of the self versus what we want others to think - a crucial theme in the book. "I don't want you to think that I like her"; "I laughed to myself although there was no one there to see me.". It's a constant struggle that's depicted through simple conversations - who can play it cooler - and small acts of rebellion. I think it's the subtlety of these small acts that make this book so brilliant, to me anyway.

What was I not massively fond of?

The only thing that I could highlight, if I had to, is the story line of Frances' endometriosis. Not the story line itself, in fact, which works very well; just the elements that sometimes step into the over-dramatic, for me. Just to reiterate this is by no means to discredit these absolutely truthful and valid experiences of this difficult condition. It is just that there seems to be a tendency in new books, concerning young women, for the protagonists to have an excuse to faint or be seriously ill, so that the love interests and friends have to dial it down and be nice to them again.

Recent examples include Queenie and Promising Young Women, both of which widely overstepped the melodrama line in the sand in my opinion.

But that's only if you really want me to say something in this section.

Overall

Do you need any more convincing?

This is a shockingly brilliant debut novel, followed by a similarly brilliant second book. It digs deep into our hearts and souls and examines us with a magnifying glass. It points to shadowy corners and memories long forgotten - 'look, it's still there!' - yeah, thanks Sally, I was trying to bury that?

I'm really looking forward to more works from her. Her writing honestly makes me feel like a living, breathing, feeling human again, and lifts me above the grey everydays.

9/10