Neil Griffiths's Reading List

"I think Zone , which Enard had published in 2014, is the most serious work of fiction ever written. In terms of its level of engagement with the darkest side of the 20th century and its formal inventiveness … it’s a most astonishing book. And I don’t think Compass is as good. Very few books are as good. But it is a brilliant book, and incredibly timely in terms of the west’s relationship with the Middle East. And in a sense it’s a kind of fictionalised version of Edward Said’s Orientalism . It tells us something about how we, in the West, established our perceptions and our relationship with the East, with Otherness, and I found that deeply compelling. Enard found the ideal form with which to render it. His idea of a real-time sleepless night takes on a kind of dreamlike quality reminiscent of Arabian Nights . There’s an endless focus-pulling, and sometimes you think you’re in one city but you’re in another…. It’s a study of how we got where we are – and it’s deeply relevant in this age of Islamic State, but without overtly dealing with social issues or political issues. I am cautious about novels or art that are overtly politically or socially engaged because if a work of art can’t transcend the here-and-now it will fail. Enard’s work absolutely transcends this current moment in the West’s relationship with Islam. There’s a real, lasting greatness to his work. It should have won the Man Booker International. Fitzcarraldo Editions is, I think, making the best commissioning decisions in the UK."

"She is, but her novel doesn’t feel like it’s been written by an academic, whereas Compass is full of academics. I have to say while I did love it, it wasn’t an uncomplicated reading experience for me. It’s a reworking of King Lear , and if you really love King Lear , as I do, it actually it makes it quite a weird read, because you’re constantly guessing at what the author is doing: ‘Ah, is she doing this here?’ ‘Is she subverting that?’ ‘Is this supposed to be read like this?’ etc. It would read like a loud, raucous and rambunctious, multifaceted, classic Anglo-Indian novel, full of characters, lots of colour, lots of light, lots of voices… creating a really immersive reading experience. But for me, the text actually moved in and out of focus as I read it. I was absolutely immersed one moment and then jolted out of it, asking myself: ‘Is this? … who is this? … Oh, right.’ The flitting between levels may be a bit problematic for some, but it is an interesting, intellectually stimulating experience to watch what she’s doing with Shakespeare’s biggest and most emotionally exhausting work. Yes, the writer is putting up certain hurdles between the reader and the novel. Interestingly, Galley Beggar’s last novel, Forbidden Line [2016] by Paul Stanbridge, was a rewriting of Don Quixote . That played really fast and loose with the original – that really was, without a doubt, a novel with its own original genius in it."

"…and part memoir of the author Charles Boyle [Jack Robinson is a pseudonym]. He’s also the founder-publisher of CB editions. Quite apart from the rendering of its themes, what makes this book so wonderful for me is its gentle sentence-making. Boyle was (and might still be) poet. I love the way, in about a page and a half, Boyle reduces something essential about Englishness, colonialism, the public school system to the self-sufficiency of Robinson Crusoe, and then just riffs on that, with erudition, wit and warmth. What more do you want from a short fiction than to do all that? I have to say, I probably loved this work of fiction most this year. I think it’s just the warmest, most playful, witty, erudite and unique offering. There is such creative intelligence at play at; it is just so generous. I also love the unclassifiability of it, too. It’s one of those things where you kind of go, ‘Is it fiction?’ ‘Is it about fiction?’ Jack Robinson is ploughing a literary furrow that I think is very narrow, but very deep."

"I tend to find first-person narratives difficult. They’re either too arch, too writerly, or not arch or writerly enough, a bit clunky. But I think when it is got right, like Noémi Lefebvre does here, it can be incredible. One of the reasons I called the prize the Republic of Consciousness is to push against this notion that neuroscience and materialism promote … that basically all we are is independent sets of firing neurons, and so we can’t know each other or relate beyond physical stimuli. Writing puts us right into the middle of someone’s consciousness, wraps us up in someone else’s interior world. Lefebvre does this extremely successfully. I think she captures something very essentially about how we think. We think we think in full sentences, but we don’t, we think in fragments. It’s when we reflect on our thoughts and how we think that we put them into full sentences. We don’t really have access to how fragmented our thoughts are as thinking is happening. What Lefebvre achieves in this book – like Eimear McBride in A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing – to capture the simple fragments of thought she’s having. If she were to tell the story , she’d fill in the gaps; instead, she drops us into her mind as it’s happening. I like the brilliant combination of a slight gaucheness of articulation, while at the same time she’s reading the letters of Theodor Adorno and Thomas Mann while sitting on an airplane … And yet the mixture of gaucheness and seriousness somehow doesn’t feel pretentious. The character is very charming, a little bit hopeless, slightly nihilistic, smart, but not confident. Personhood like that is quite difficult to do in literature. You end up with characters or symbols rather than something that feels real. And I liked spending time with her going from funny to serious to funny. Few novelists can combined Schoenberg’s painting and grieving cows. The designs promise a certain tonality. Galley Beggar have their black covers. In my day job, I did research into book finishes for a major publisher, and so I spent a lot of time walking around bookshops with customers trying to get a sense of why they pick up a certain book. It’s an implicit decision. You don’t sit down and study all the covers. You glance and pick one up instead of the others. And it was extraordinary how much attention the small press covers got – because they always look different. Sadly not. What’s also interesting is how quickly people put those books down again, because they don’t necessarily conform to the decision-making process that a normal reader wants. “Writing puts us right into the middle of someone’s consciousness, wraps us up in someone else’s interior world. Lefebvre does this extremely successfully” They pick up a paperback because they like the cover, but the next step is key: turning it over to read what it’s about. It’s as straightforward as that. And actually on the back of the original Galley Beggar books, for example, they would turn to the back of this striking black design, and not finding a plot blurb and rave reviews, and would it down again. It wasn’t making it easy for them to make a decision. They still have the black editions as special editions, but their bookshop editions are just a single colour, with the right essentials on the back. I suppose the point is: great design is crucial in construction an identity as a publishing house, but you still have to conform to how people buy books. Another thing is, if you ask a bookseller she’ll say, ‘If I were to be published I would want to be in hardback. But if you want to sell books, you should go straight into quality, premium paperback.’ Hardback is a vanity project. So the French flaps paperbacks of most of these small presses is right for the market."

"Once again, I think this is a slightly problematic book. It started as an award-winning short story that has been turned into a short novel. One can feel that. I love Tramp Press, I think they are commissioning some of the most interesting fiction this side of the Atlantic. They’ve got a brilliant eye. The Iron Age does two things very well indeed. First, it conjures Finland, which strikes me as a very mysterious place, especially in the early 20th century when this story is set. It’s steeped in myth and that is deeply entrancing in itself; it feels Other, like if one was stranded in Finland, one wouldn’t necessarily be able to operate with one’s western coordinates. The line between magic and reality is troubled. Strange people might turn up in your cabin. Some things are just slightly wrong…. Take the cover: there are these two cute children in dungarees and then you notice that one is smoking. Things are slightly off kilter. It’s probably the reason I picked this book: the portrayal of the father. Yes, he’s ignorant, tyrannical, and bullying, but Kajermo is also sensitive to his lack of self-awareness, his existential vulnerability – a kind of despair. Again, the author dimensionalizes the character so you actually feel there is a person in there. He could just be a representative of a certain kind of man, but Kajermo kind of pushes him beyond that and into life. You feel there’s nothing for him – in Finland, but perhaps also in Sweden when the family moves to. Perhaps there is nothing for him anywhere, and he kind of knows this. Yeah, Sarah Davis-Goff and Lisa Coen at Tramp Press were in the Guardian again over the fact that they still sent letters that say, “Dear Sirs.” They said ‘we are not going to look at any the work of anyone who assumes we are men.’ Which is not to say that they publish women exclusively. “Tramp Press are commissioning some of the most interesting fiction this side of the Atlantic. They’ve got a brilliant eye” Other publishers like Cassava Republic Press and Peepal press do publish on an exclusive basis – African writing and Caribbean writing, respectively – and that does mean that certain highly original and important novels that might not have got on the radar in this country get some exposure. Two novels that made the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses longlist and shortlist respectively were both incredible imaginative acts that no major publisher would ever buy. The Marvellous Equations of the Dread by Marcia Douglas and Born on A Tuesday by Elnathan John. All I can say is that while I’m not on the judging panel of the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Press this year (at this stage) – my sense is the long list is going to be super-competitive, stronger than last year, with more translated fiction, single author short-story collections of real originality, and formally inventive novels – who can ask for more than that?"