BOOK OF THE WEEK
Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith by JD Vance
“The first thing to be said about JD Vance’s Communion – a book he says he started writing in 2017, presumably as a follow-up to Hillbilly Elegy, the memoir that catapulted him to fame and national office – is that very few people would bother reading it if he were not Trump’s second-in-command and possible successor,” writes Fintan O’Toole in his review of the US vice-president’s new book on Catholicism.
In it, Vance seeks to set himself out as the moral future of Trumpism. But, Fintan observes, the book “is too dull to be innately interesting and too evasive to be taken seriously as an honest mapping of a spiritual voyage”.
WHAT TO READ NEXT
The Village on the Edge of the World: Writing and Surviving Ceauşescu’s Romania by Herta Müller
Herta Müller, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 2009, was born in Romania’s German-speaking Banat region in 1953 and grew up under authoritarian Communist rule. In 1979 she fell foul of Ceauşescu’s brutal secret police, the Securitate, when she lost her job as a translator at an engineering factory for refusing to spy on her colleagues. She was later charged with subversive activities and parasitism, and, once she became known as a published author – her works were first smuggled out to the west in the early 1980s – was simultaneously harassed by the Securitate as a political dissident and ostracised by her Banat Swabian community for “fouling the nest”.
The Village on the Edge of the World, the first non-fiction book by Müller to appear in English translation for over a decade, serves as a gloss to the rest of the author’s work, writes Ian Thomson. Comprising interviews conducted a decade ago in Berlin between Müller and her longtime German editor, Angelika Klammer, the book “radiates a dark humour and is relentlessly grim in tone”, featuring “subjects such as Securitate torture methods, flyblown Socialist shop window displays and the rationed food that left Romania an ‘immiserated’ society”.
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The Children of Light by Jean Pleyers (tr Luke Burns)
Our graphic novel of the month, The Children of Light by Jean Pleyers, is “a blazingly colourful work of madcap, intergalactic sci-fi”, writes Killian Fox. “It has a retro charm – glass elevators, monorails, little green men – but also speaks to some of the preoccupations of our time.” Pleyers has even insisted that this tale of the relatively insignificant alien civilisation the Zors, who must look for a new home since their planet is soon to be destroyed by an approaching supernova, is in fact a true story that aliens told him telepathically.
“Some readers may treat these claims, and the idea that real-life aliens sought out a Belgian cartoonist to channel their tales of woe, with a degree of scepticism,” writes Killian. “To which I say: open your mind! If we’re going to follow Elon Musk’s lead and become interplanetary, we’d do well to study the pitfalls faced by the wandering Zors.”
END NOTES
The book world is dominated by the “Big Five” publishers, major conglomerates that seem to have a hold over almost all the major successes in the literary calendar. Given this climate, it’s always thrilling to see an independent press thriving.
One such publisher is And Other Stories. The independent press has the equivalent of four full-time staff, is based in a “tiny cubby hole” in Sheffield Central Library and publishes books whose covers are made of recycled coffee cups. Given these modest resources, it’s remarkable that And Other Stories this year also became the first publisher to secure two consecutive International Booker prize wins, when Taiwan Travelogue, by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translated by Lin King, took the award, following Heart Lamp, by Banu Mushtaq and translated by Deepa Bhasthi, last year.
I spoke to the imprint’s publisher, Stefan Tobler, and senior fiction editor, Tara Tobler, about the financial realities of small-press publishing, and how by publishing fiction in translation, they are working “to decolonise English as a literary language”.
Illustration by Charlotte Durance