Two weeks ago, we found out all about Nigerian literature; this time, as the climate gets considerably chilly at home we’re diverting to an altogether different kind – that is, the South American republic of Chile (please excuse the terrible pun…). Our tour guide is former Communications intern Mike Butler (who previously showed us around the literary delights of Iraq), who examines two of Chile’s finest writers…

‘We were going to be perfect, we were going to be brave, we were going to be beautiful’ – Jorge Guzman

If September 11th 2001 signalled the end of the 1990s, when the end of history had been declared and we were set to live under the aegis of a prosperous and triumphant liberal democratic system, then, as Christopher Hitchens observes, September 11th 1973 could be seen as the day when the curtain fell on the optimism and idealism of the 1960s. This was the date of the Chilean military coup led by Augusto Pinochet and backed by the White House administration of Nixon and Kissinger, which saw the bombing of the Presidential palace in Santiago and led to the death of the socialist-leaning President Salvador Allende; the rule of the ensuing military dictatorship would last until 1990.

Pablo Neruda, the most famous Spanish-language poet of the twentieth century, died twelve days later in unrelated circumstances. (The celebrated theatre director and folk singer Victor Jara was imprisoned, tortured and killed in what might be called ‘related circumstances’.) Neruda is best known for his early collection Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair, a series of sensuous and melancholic poems whose imagery draws heavily on the nature and wildlife of southern Chile. He was a member of the Chilean Communist Party and was a close associate of Allende, and his political awareness is displayed in poems such as The United Fruit Co. (the identification of whose corrupting influence in Latin America presaged that company’s role in the US-sponsored anti-socialist coup in Guatemala in 1954) and They Receive Instructions against Chile (‘they decide from above, from the roll of dollars, / … / and the trunk of the tree of the country rots’). Neruda was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971, joining his compatriot Gabriela Mistral, who became the first Latin American writer to win the prize in 1945.

‘Paul Celan shall rise from his ashes in the year 2113. André Breton shall return through mirrors in the year 2071. Max Jacob shall cease to be read, that is to say his last reader shall die, in the year 2059.’  If you enjoyed reading that sentence, from his 1999 novella Amulet, then you’ll probably enjoy the rest of Roberto Bolano’s oeuvre, most of which has been translated into English only since his death in 2003. He left Chile for Mexico at the age of fifteen and returned in August 1973 ‘to help build socialism’, although this ambition was soon thwarted by the circumstances outlined above. He was briefly imprisoned following the coup and left Chile for good soon after, although his work is haunted by the events of that year and the brutality of the subsequent junta and dictatorship.

Most of his stories and novels are about fictional or fictionalised poets and writers, although they express ambivalence and suspicion about literary writing: Nazi Literature in the Americas is a series of fictional biographies of Fascist or Fascist-sympathising writers; The Savage Detectives is centred on a pair of poets, including one ‘Arturo Belano’, whose work is largely forgotten. Bolano’s own writing has an unmannered and inconclusive style that brilliantly captures the messiness and disorder of real life; avoiding the imposition of any kind of false order or lyrical grandiosity and disregarding conventional narrative authority and clarity, it could be described as a kind of anti-fascist aesthetic.

Neruda also had a certain distrust of literature and books: ‘I am a man of bread and fish / and you won’t find me among books’, he writes in Such is my life, following Wordsworth and Whitman in giving an apparently self-negating precedence to direct experience over words on a page. In a similar vein, he writes that ‘poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.’ Neruda and Bolano seem to offer differing views on the importance of writing: for Neruda, ‘the poet of my people’, who read his work to a stadium of 70,000 of his compatriots after collecting his Nobel Prize, poetry is a vital part of the life of a society that should transcend books and learning; for Bolano, poets are frustrated outsiders who squabble amongst themselves and leave little of value behind. Either way, it’s hard not to be swayed by Neruda when he says that ‘the poet gives us a gallery full of ghosts shaken by the fire and darkness of his time’ – and there was certainly enough fire and darkness to keep Latin American poets well occupied during the twentieth century.

When my friend passed this 624-page novel to me, starting it honestly felt like a bit of an epic endeavour: I am, admittedly, a very slow reader. It also didn’t help that it was set in, and describes, a period of political history in a country that I at that point had never visited and knew nothing about: 1970s India. However, I was also incredibly curious because the aforesaid friend had been reading the book for the past three weeks of our travels together, and I had been forced to sit next to her on trains, planes, buses and boats as she gasped with horror, laughed out loud and, eventually, finished the book with her hand clasped against her mouth with tears running down her face. Sworn to secrecy so as not to spoil it for me, she hadn’t breathed a word about the plot: but had thoroughly convinced me that this was a book I needed to read. Also, when she finally passed it to me, we were 2 hours into a 42-hour bus ride in Africa. So time was something I wasn’t short of…

I can honestly say that reading this novel was one of the most intense experiences I have had with a book. You are literally tossed between extremes of emotion, thrown back and forward through time, and transported into new worlds: both bewitching and unspeakably cruel. The story centres around four unlikely characters who are thrown together as a result of the tumultuous political and social circumstances in the present-day of the novel. However, as Mistry skilfully reveals the very different, and often very sad, back-stories that have led each of the characters to where they are now, the relationships formed between the four become all the more moving…

And yes, at the end, I cried. (It took me somewhat longer than the 42 hours of the bus journey…not least because the bus had no lights, and my head torch had packed-up). But the tears weren’t just because of the events that take place at the book’s conclusion. They were because suddenly, at that final moment, the whole of the book was brought crashing back into my head all at once: I remembered all of the terrible things that meant, it couldn’t have ended any other way; I remembered the parts that made me smile and laugh and forget about all the enormous, ugly, impossible things the characters are pitted against. It was overwhelming, to say the least…. my friend had to hold my hand.

If you have ever wanted to know anything about India, or contemporary history, or raw human survival and connection: READ THIS. I dare you.

A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry, Faber and Faber (2010)

The latest instalment comes from one of our Hope Readers Dave Cookson, who is exploring Nigeria… (if you want to catch up on any of our previous Readers of the World posts, you can take yourself on a mini round the world trip right here)

Nigeria has the 7th largest population in the world, and English is its official language, often used in educational settings and is used by many as a second language.

The diversity of Nigeria means there is a wide range of literature in a variety of languages. Yoruba is spoken by 20 million, with the first novel in this language (The Forest of a Thousand Demons by D.A. Fagunwa) published relatively recently in 1938. Hausa is spoken by 25 million and the language’s first novel emerged from a competition ran by Northern Nigeria’s Translation Bureau. The winner was Muhammadu Bello’s 1933 work Gandoki. Igbo is a language spoken by some 20 million Nigerians, and The Proverbs of Omenuko by Pita Nwana was the language’s first novel, published in 1933, when another famous Igbo person was just three years old: Chinua Achebe.

Despite his Igbo background Achebe wrote in English, producing one of the most highly-acclaimed and widely read African books in history: Things Fall Apart. The novel is fiercely anti-colonial whilst acknowledging the flaws of pre-colonial society, following the deeply-flawed protagonist Okonkwo as he tries to dominate the village of Umuofia and then prevent it succumbing to the English colonialists. Things Fall Apart clearly drew on the proverbial influence of the Igbo culture demonstrated in the very first Igbo novel and throughout its rich history of story-telling.

Achebe’s novels are examples of the power of good story-telling, but his own experiences of storytelling and its benefits are not limited to politically-tinged novels. In the essay ‘My Daughters’ he tells of a time when his two-and-a-half year old daughter, Nwando, would cry on the way to her new American nursery school, not speak to anyone once she was there and on the way back would seem ‘desolate’. What happened next was beautiful:

“In the end we struck a bargain that solved the problem. I had to tell her a story all the way to school if she promised not to cry when I dropped her off. Very soon she added another story all the way back. The agreement, needless to say, taxed my repertory of known and fudged stories to the utmost. But it worked. Nwando was no longer crying. By the year’s end she had become such a success in her school that many of her little American schoolmates had begun to call their school Nwando-haven instead of its proper name, Wonderhaven.”

Despite being a country with such a short history involving the English language Nigeria has consistently produced brilliant writers including poets Christopher Okigbo and Wole Soyinka; author of The Voice, Gabriel Okara; Booker Prize winning author of The Famished Road, Ben Okri and author of Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

The frustrating thing about Nigeria and its rich literary history is that reports claim around half the country suffers with literacy problems. In a bid to combat this, President Goodluck Jonathan introduced the ‘Bring Back the Book’ initiative in December 2010. This was a national pledge to protect libraries, conduct readings of the country’s literature in educational institutions, research issues relating to reading and support organisations conducting reading-related activity. The ultimate aim of the initiative is to revitalise a reading culture in Nigeria.

BBB has incorporated numerous events into the initiative, with authors nominated for the Nigeria Prize for Literature being paired with children to read. However, the event took a surprising turn when an argument about witches erupted between a high school pupil and one of the nominees! At the same event a cultural activist claimed foreign cartoons were killing the folk tale tradition of Nigeria, and cartoons did no good to a child’s moral upbringing.

To take a nationalistic view of the merits of writing, particularly in English, Nigeria is a literary giant. If you’ve never read anything by one of Achebe, Okigbo or Soyinka then it’s about time you right that wrong.

Two nights ago I woke up after having a terrifying dream. I was sitting down in a hall surrounded by large open fields, the hall looked like an old school hall, and there were a panel of people sitting down some distance from myself. I knew these people were there to judge my sanity in some way but felt powerless to have any input on how they judged or viewed me. I just had to sit and wait and in the process felt extremely vulnerable and frightened. As you would expect,  I woke up feeling rather disorientated but also found myself recalling the name of Randle McMurphy, one of the central protagonists from Ken Kesey’s classic novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a novel which I had only just finished reading for the first time a few days before.

My memory of McMurphy’s highly disturbing experience of a psychiatric institution during the 1960s and his relentless commitment to challenging the ‘all-powerful Combine’ in which he finds himself trapped no doubt had contributed to my nightmare but also helped me to refocus and get up out of bed that day. 

I don’t know why remembering McMurphy’s experience should have helped to steady my nerves that morning.  The book is a terrifying read and McMurphy both undergoes and witnesses some horrendous treatment while he is at the asylum. McMurphy is also a morally dubious character himself, having supposedly faked insanity to escape serving time in a state penitentiary for being convicted on a charge of rape. I think however McMurphy comes to encapsulate a massive challenge to the system during the novel and champions the cause of many of the vulnerable men also staying on the ward and I think this is why I found myself trying to remember his name after the dream and, shortly after his, the name of Chief Bromden, the narrator of the story who rediscovers his voice quite literally through his relationship with McMurphy. The book taps into that deep-seated fear which I’m assuming lurks within many a soul at any one point in their lives – the fear of losing one’s sanity in life, and in that sense the book, however harrowing, provides a language and a narrative through this darkness. The reader sees McMurphy not only challenge the psychiatric system, but also help to reawaken the hearts and minds of the other male inmates – most of whom, he discovers to his shock, are voluntary patients of the hospital, frightened to live in the world outside.

So if you can withstand and get through some of the more harrowing passages in the book, it is certainly worth reading. Reading this book will take courage, but the experience will stay with you forever and as well as remembering the pain in the novel, you will never be able to forget how McMurphy makes men laugh again, men who for a long time have been too frightened to laugh. The novel is about therefore the possibility of reawakening back into life as much as it also follows the tragic loss of life.  It is a shame Kesey didn’t write some more.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest , Ken Kesey, Penguin Classics (1962)

You can read his insightful piece on watching Dickens in the act of writing David Copperfield here.

Over the Christmas break, I read William Trevor’s Two Lives. It was a Christmas gift from my mother, who told me as I opened it that it had been the mutual love of its first story, Reading Turgenev, that had cemented her friendship with her closest friend, Ian; ‘It’s just beautiful Soph’. I’d read ‘An Idyll in Winter’ in the short story collection recently given away by the Guardian and loved it, so Two Lives immediately went to the top of the pile.

It is beautiful. Trevor is deeply concerned by the disparity that can develop between the life that you’ve imagined for yourself and the reality that you find yourself in, a situation that many of us will certainly have known at some point in our lives. In Reading Turgenev, the gentle, young Mary Louise aspires to work in the local town and to become self-sufficient, which leads her to marry the local draper, Elmer Quarry. The marriage soon beings to deteriorate, with the constant presence of his overbearing sisters and Elmer’s developing alcoholism creating a distance within a relationship that had never been close to begin with. Mary Louise finds herself inhabiting an unbearable, lonely reality that only her secret, unspoken worlds can attempt to liberate, and she falls deeper and deeper into these fantasies as the years pass. It is a very powerful story, one that forced me to think deeply about how vital it is that you try to deal with your problems as they appear through sharing them with others.

It may sound rather bleak in its overview, but I found Trevor’s poignant account of Mary Louise’s love for her late cousin and its ability to redeem this ‘wasted’ life the most striking element of the story, restoring her despite his absence. It was a great read, and definitely a book that I shall return to.

 Two Lives, William Trevor, Penguin (2010)

Novelist and flash fiction writer David Gaffney, author of Sawn-Off Tales (2006) and Aromabingo (2007), will be appearing at Spellow Library on Monday 30th January, 6pm-7:30pm. David will be discussing his recent book, The Half Life of Songs.

Then, on Wednesday 1st February, 6pm-7:30pm, Childwall Library will play host to Gladys Mary Coles. Best known as a poet, with publications including The Song of the Butcher Bird (2006) and The Echoing Green (2002), Gladys will discuss her body of work and her debut novel, Clay.

Entrance for both events is free and seating is available on a first come, first served basis. Copies of the authors’ books will be on sale.

For more information about the David Gaffney event, please contact Spellow Library, County Road, L4 3QF; 0151 293 8365.

For more information about the Gladys Mary Coles event, please contact Childwall Library, Fiveways Centre, L15 6UT; 0151 233 2746.

For more information on Liverpool Libraries see www.liverpool.gov.uk.

For more information on regional events, reading groups and suggestions for further reading, see www.time-to-read.co.uk.

Editor: Please not that there was an error in the date of the Childwall event. This event will actually be taking place on Wednesday 1st February.

Keen Readers should tune into Radio 4 next week, as Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! has been chosen as Book of the Week.

This new collection of essays from Vintage Books is a funny and inspiring mission statement about the transformative power of reading; the tangible impact it can have on our wellbeing and its importance as a fundamental part of our existence.

Five of the ten essays have been adapted for the radio, including those by Michael Rosen, Jeanette Winterson, and Mark Haddon. The book itself contains a contribution by The Reader Organisation’s Jane Davis, sharing her passionate belief in improving lives through literature and spreading the message of the Reading Revolution.

Don’t forget to join the conversation on the Stop blog where you can share reading recommendations, discuss the future of the book, and much more. Jane herself has just posted a piece: ‘To Go Forward, Go Back’.

Already Number 1 on the Guardian Bookshop’s bestseller list, you can read her full contribution by buying your own copy here.

Book of the Week: Stop What You’re Doing and Read This!

Radio 4, 9^th-13^th Jan, 9:45am and 00:30am.

The book’s editor, Frances Macmillan, tells us on the book’s blog:

The writers are all from very different backgrounds. Some grew up with a multitude and variety of wonderful books within their reach; some had parents who imparted to them a fierce desire for books and for learning; for others, books were hard to come by, or even illicit. But all ten are united here in a passionate belief in the distinctive and irreplaceable pleasures and powers of reading.

In a year of rude awakenings to low levels of literacy and a widespread apathy towards books and reading, this book demands an interruption. Stop What You’re Doing and Read. Read these essays, because they aim to convince you to make reading part of your daily life. Read a novel because it will enable you to travel in time and space, or else quicken your sense of ordinary existence – family tensions, falling in or out of love, growing up or growing old.  Read a poem, because it won’t be as difficult as you think, and it might help you uncover and articulate a thought or a feeling previously buried deep. Read a story, if you’re short on time, because it imposes a unique period of peace and concentration into your busy life. Read out loud, to your children, to a partner, because reading together casts a potent and intimate spell.

The book aims to start people talking and thinking about books, and valuing reading itself in a new way, so we’re starting up a blog as a way of carrying on that conversation. We want to hear from readers – which books or poems do you love? Which book or poem changed the way you see the world? Have you ever found consolation or relief in reading a great book? Do you ever read books or poems aloud? We’ll be recommending great books throughout the year, encouraging debate about the importance of reading and we want to hear from you.

Read more about the book and share your comments on the Stop blog. You can also ask questions, recommend great books and join in the debate.

Help us remind everyone about the transformative power of reading and to build the Reading Revolution even further. Buy your copy now. Stop what you’re doing and read it.

You can follow Jane Davis, Director of The Reader Organsiation, here on Twitter and also over here, on her blog.

The festive season has officially begun!

Last night saw The Reader Organisation once again take over the small concert room in St George’s Hall for our annual Dickensian extravaganza, the Penny Readings.

Judging by the reaction from the audience and on Twitter, the night was a resounding success.

“It was a perfect evening”

“The Penny Readings by @thereaderorg was fantastic. Completely surpassed my expectations. So entertaining, accessible and cultural!”

“Maybe only at Liverpool’s ‘Penny Readings‘ d’ya get David Morrissey being Macbeth on the same bill as a ukulele orchestra #splendidtime”

Frank Cottrell Boyce had the audience in stitches, magician Darren Campbell left us dazed and confused, we had some wonderful readings from The Reader Organisation’s very own Angela Macmillan, Casi Dylan and Beverley LaRoc, whilst Raven Sinclair-Edmonds treated us to some…interesting poetry of her own. The musical talents of trumpeter Grace Farrington and pianist Jasmine Scarisbrick were followed by the stunning voice of Lauren Spink, whilst the Wirral Ukulele Orchestra brought the house down with their flamboyant Hawaiian shirts and Santa hats.

Our special guest David Morrissey read a passage from Our Mutual Friend and performed one of Macbeth’s most famous speeches in homage to his recent starring role at the Everyman Theatre.

The evening was rounded off by the traditional rendition of a passage from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol by Professor Phil Davis. No doubt the great man himself would have approved of this early start to his bicentenary celebrations.

Our younger readers weren’t forgotten in all this excitement, as we held our second Ha’Penny Readings earlier in the day. Kids young and old enjoyed an afternoon of laughter and Christmas cheer led by MC extraordinaire Patrick Fisher and his friends from improv comedy group Sticky Floor. The Christmas party attended by Jedward, Horrid Henry and a hungry Tyrannosaurus Rex was the stuff of nightmares!

“Wacky fun!”

Pianist Jasmine popped up again with a wonderful composition of her own, there were more readings by Angela Macmillan, whilst Scream Street author Tommy Donbavand roped in some audience members to help act out a story of werewolves, mummies, vampires and dragons. Two of our Young Person’s Project workers, Samantha Shipman and Anna Fleming, entertained the audience with their favourite festive poems; Anna was especially convincing as a bird from ‘Turkeys United’ demanding ‘No to Cuts!’. There was even a special appearance from Santa Claus, who took time out of his busy schedule to read a little something and deliver a gift to all those readers who fulfilled his ‘naughty or nice’ criteria.

If you were at either event, we’d love to hear your thoughts, so please leave a comment below.

A big thank you to everyone who made the day such a special one – time to start planning next year!