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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Books by people not like me

20:50 / 01.09.03

I recently noticed that I have a default setting of reading novels by white British or American middle-class people. Now, I think part of the reason of this is that a lot of novels are by white British or American middle-class people, but (as I'm in the middle of thinking about JK Rowling, Ruth Rendell, Diana Wynne Jones and cross-gendered erotica [um, four separate projects, mostly: I am *not* writing Wexford slash]), I started thinking about the way stories rely on shared assumptions between author & reader in order to be intelligible/ enjoyable. And I've decided to spend a month reading only novels with a different set of assumptions from the ones I normally do, ie novels from non-British, non-white and/or non-bourgeois literary traditions, basically because I think it's bad for me to be allowed to exist in a world where I'm constantly (if subliminally) told that it's normal to fit my sociological niche.

Any recommendations? Any theoretical observations? Any thoughts? I'm currently planning to start with Samuel Delaney, who I've been meaning to read for years, and Toni Morrison, and then just trawl the library and see what I come up with. I'd be particularly interested in recommendations for genre or children's literature, or 70's feminist novels-of-ideas (cf Doris Lessing, Marge Piercy), and also stuff from *completely* different narrative traditions, cos I find literary fiction kind of hard going.

Tryphena Absent

21:01 / 01.09.03

I know I'm being terribly unconstructive here but yuk Toni Morrison!

21:24 / 01.09.03

Really? I liked Beloved okay, but that's all I've read of Toni M's (and I read it in, like three hours flat for a feminist-theory seminar led by a woman who only ever teaches/discusses stuff about motherhood)... why do you not like her?

At this point I should probably say that one of the things I have in mind as I embark on this project is Joanna Russ, who used to defend the lack of black writers on her literature course by saying that there just weren't enough good enough to be in the canon - until she spent a long time reading novels by black women, picked up on the traditions/assumptions she was missing, and realized she'd been judging them all on the wrong standards. I'm kind of hoping to induce a similar perceptual shift in myself.

23:02 / 01.09.03

Try Pauline Hopkins, perhaps. I don't know how available her work is... she wrote four or so serial novels at the end of the 19th century. I think they were republished under an imprint that Henry Louis Gates has something to do with. Contending Forces is one title, and Hagar's Daughter is another.... I don't remember the others, though.

Whisky Priestess

00:17 / 04.09.03

In terms of busting that familiar Anglophone voice you might want to just read European writers in translation, although come to think of it, while I can think of enough nonwhite Brit/USA writers, I don't know of a single nonwhite French/Polish/German/Russian etc. modern novelist. I expect I'm just ill-informed. Yeah, anyway my point is that the cultural assumptions and tone in European writing should be different enough to give you a change of perspective if that's what you're after.

I often commit the cardinal sin of not reading enough modern woman writers, especially science fiction (I once had a terrible experience with some dreadful Virago so-called sci-fi which was reams of shite about our main character's fucking menopause - self-indulgent wasn't in it). But I expect I'm just jealous that they're published and I'm not.

Goodness Gracious Meme

02:20 / 04.09.03

thinking on racial/cultural terms:

how are you with poetry? i'm an appalling poetical philistine but my one true love is Derek Walcott, especially The Schooner Flight, long, narrative, political poem. His stuff connects to Western cultural norms via colonialism, but is also very non-western?

Personally I really liked Beloved, but expect that's just me.

second-generation/mixed race narratives:

As an easy, 'on the bus'/bridging read I'd really recommend Hanif Kureishi's Buddha of Suburbia. Yep. Thoroughly english/bourgeois on the one hand, but on the other, one of the most convincing examples of second generation life-writing I've ever read. Conveys what its like to grow up/evolve narrative from two cultures really well.

ditto The Joy Luck Club. not very well written but the one thing it does do well is present/contrast different narrative styles to evoke the culture gaps in cross-cultural, sino-american, mother/daughter relationships.

sorry, head stuck on race/culture/easylit atm.

14:00 / 05.09.03

Try some stuff by Jorge Luis Borges. He's an argentinian author, poet and philosopher. Weirdly amazing stuff mostly written as kind of biographies and artificial histories. Not your classic narative, but still very engaging.

A great Japanese author who seems to be enjoying a resurgence is Haruki Murakami. The only book of his I've read is Hardboiled Wonderland And The End Of The World. Which is sureal and even in traslantion has a wonderful way with language. Very languid and emotive books, more traditional narative but very mixed up. My Girlfriend discovered him and read just about his whole back catalogue over the space of a couple of months.

If you want to try some science fiction try Stanislaw Lem. Old school mind bending scifi.

17:37 / 05.09.03

James Baldwin? You will no doubt have read James Baldwin... It's been almost ten years since I read any of his work, so I haven't really got anything insightful to say. But yeah. I really remember liking 'Another Country' in particular, when I was 13/14 and reading all the sort of modern classic queer-fic I could get my hands on.

OT, but I still have a plot plant called Giovanni thanks to James Baldwin.

at the scarwash

20:01 / 06.09.03

Well, I have no idea what you mean by "literary fiction," but Mo Yan's The Republic of Wine challenged the hell out of my preconceptions of what the novelistic form could be. Part detective novel, part epistolatory deconstruction of classical chinese narrative forms. Funny, really weird, lushly detailed, and a little scary.

10:27 / 12.09.03

Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood is fantastic also. Nevertheless, if you want to read a novel that will challenge rather than reaffirm your ideas on anything, it's The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

10:50 / 12.09.03

Borges and Bulgakov both TOTALLY fucking rock. As does Solzhenitsyn.

Although, in terms of fiction by non-Brits/Americans, I've been getting a little too into Jean-Christophe Grange's thrillers recently... well, until I ran out. There're only three, I think. And they're more written in the style of UK/US thrillers than French ones, which means they're probably not much help to this thread. Oh dear.

Umm... what else? There's Camus, of course... Lautreamont... (yeah, I guess just choosing French fiction is probably cheating, cos we're so close and all...)

Mishima? Beautiful, when well-translated.

I dunno... I have a friend who's a total literary purist... in that, while being obsessed with the Classics, still maintains he's never read the Iliad because he's only ever read it in translation... (by which criterion, I guess the majority of Xtians have never read even PART of the Bible...)

11:31 / 12.09.03

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov - another Russian author, but (by the time he wrote this) living in America and writing in English. The book takes the form of an annotated poem, and the different layers of the story are interesting; what is happening in the poem as opposed to what the annotator (narrator) claims is happening, what can be extrapolated from the annotator's words, and so forth. It's quite funny as well...

12:37 / 12.09.03

I'd second The Schooner Flight. It's amazing.

Perhaps some JM Cotzee - his "Foe" is a kind of deconstruction of the Robinson Crusoe story. Wonderful stuff.

Sam Sheldon's "London Londoners" maybe? - about the experiences of the first post-war black immigrants to the UK. If you really want to push the boat out though why not look at some african writers?

"Things fall apart" by Chinua Achebe is marvellous as is "God's bits of Wood" by Sembene Ousmane. The former is an encounter of an African tribes slow death through encountering colonialsim and the latter is an account of a stike on the Dakar-Niger railway. Still, both of these evoke encounters with colonialsim/post-colonailsim so there stil kind of constucted in Western terms in a sense. Are you trying to escape this sort of thing compleley?

Let us know what you choose/how you get on. though.

12:52 / 12.09.03

Oh, and one of my favourite books ever is "Red Earth & Pouring Rain" by Vikram Chandra. It's a bit of a sprawling epic, but it's marvellous. It's a story telling competion between a typing monkey and a young Indian, and swithces back and forth between an epic of warriors, kings and beuatiful princess and magic and a comtmpoarary American traveloue. Again don't know if this is what your after but it's so good I had to mention it. Anyone else here read it?

18:43 / 12.09.03

I'm Italian, so I'll give you some suggestions about italian contemporary literature:

Try with "Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore..." by Italo Calvino(something translable as "What if a traveller, in a winter's night..."). This novel has surely been trasnlated in English and is absolutely surprising. The main character? Is you...The reader!

Another great novel is "Romanzo Criminale" ("A Crminal Novel")by Giancarlo De Cataldo. The author is a judge. He knew some members of the infamous crime gang "Banda della Magliana" and he wrote a novel about their lives. Imagine three young and ambicious criminals, all of them with different personalities. They recruit many hench men, all of them with a different story. They want to be at the top. They want to conquer the '70's Rome. And they will do it. Fucking great, and I think is going to be translated in English (surely is tranlated in French)

21:27 / 12.09.03

"Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore..." by Italo Calvino(something translable as "What if a traveller, in a winter's night...")

It has been translated into English, and it's called If On A Winter's Night A Traveller - speaking of Calvino, I also liked the short stories in Adam, One Afternoon.

01:49 / 13.09.03

Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia maybe? England from the perspective of a half-Indian, half-British main character?

09:53 / 13.09.03

Glad you liked Calvino, Vincennes. What about some other Italian writers? I think the most famous abroad, at the moment, is Umberto Eco. Speaking of which ,"Foucault's Pendulum" is very..."Invisiblish"!

10:06 / 13.09.03

Some good book and author recommendations, but I am a little unclear on what exactly constitutes 'people not like me'

If you are a white english speaking european, does a book from a white non english speaking european count as 'not like me' or are you both still the same on the basis of being white westerners.

how different is isfferent from me..

07:19 / 15.09.03

Good point, Sleaze. I think some of the suggestions upthread (including some of my own) aren't really to the point, they seem to be rather emphasising simply foreign authors, rather than the difference of perspective thing. With regard to my sugestions, if you're interested Deva go for Chinua Achebe, I think, I think I'm going to re-read this myself now.

16:53 / 15.09.03

still maintains he's never read the Iliad because he's only ever read it in translation...

And, indeed, he hasn't (nor have most Christians read the Bible). Though in this imperfect world, I don't have the time, the energy or the inclination to learn another language just yet, so I'm going to have to make do with translations.

Apart from a brief fall back into white-bourgeois-Anglophone lit prompted by going up into my parents' attic and being reunited with a ton of children's books (Gene Kemp! Marilyn Sachs!), so far I've been reading mostly stuff I grabbed almost-at-random off the library shelves: a few Young Adult novels by black English or American authors (Millie Murray and Sharon Flake); I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings; and some random Anglo-Indian novel called The Uncoupling by Cauvery Madhavan. It's prompted a good deal of rambly and inconclusive thinking, and the realization that I have to refine my project: reading heaps of completely unrelated novels at random isn't really what I had in mind, and all I'm really getting out of it is that I love Andre Alexis's prose style and find Cauvery Madhavan's sentences ungraceful.

There are two things that I want to do, I think: one is to find out about and come to some sort of preliminary understanding of a non-Western & hence probably non-novelistic literary tradition; the other is to read stories that... immerse me in an unfamiliar world. The Joy Luck Club, which I've just finished (thanks, BiP, I thorougly enjoyed it) has been interesting in that respect, in that it's obviously trying to prompt some sort of identification through/despite cultural difference - heterosexual love/sex seem to be a common 'universal' theme brought in for this purpose.

Anyway, thanks for all your suggestions. My library list for tomorrow includes Pauline Hopkins; The Schooner Flight; The Republic of Wine; Norwegian Wood; Things Fall Apart; God's Bits of Wood and Red Earth and Pouring Rain. Hopefully after all that I should have some idea where I want to go next...

(Incidentally, there's a very good Blake's 7 version of If on a winter's night a traveller here.)

17:38 / 16.09.03

Lydia Davis, Barbara Barg & Thomas Bernhard certainly changed my ideas about storytelling, though all are white. Chester Himes is a great crime/noir genre writer who's bigger than the genre, and of course Iceberg Slim is weird & wonderful.

Ex

14:58 / 18.09.03

If you liked Chinua Achebe, then Buchi Emecheta does interesting similar things with female protagonists. The Bride Price is good but miserable.
Tibor Fischer's Under the Frog is amazing. It's a black comedy about growing up in Hungary. Full of memorable phrases and nicely-turned sentences - when the school begins again after the Soviet invasion, the teacher berates the class for not having done their homework. They mention the invasion. He says "This is Hungary. You should be used to that kind of thing by now." And then suggests if the hero was hiding in the cellar for ten weeks, he must have had plenty of time to get it finished. Fischer's other work is good (The Collector Collector is a tiny perfectly balanced frothy thing) but Frog gives big doses of other-culture perspective.