Fiction

In the history of Black authors writing in French – and in Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s new novel, winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt – it turns out that authorship matters very much.

As science fiction demands to be read differently to other genres of fiction, why then would we evaluate it according to the same matrix as literary fiction?

Stanišić’s books play with time as much as they play with fantasy, which are more entangled than one might suspect, but perhaps understandably so for someone like Stanišić, or someone like me, that is to say: children born into Yugoslavia and made refugees by the genocidal war that followed its fracturing.

To call into question the literary value of Dalton’s fiction is not to disqualify the pleasure and imaginative release that hundreds of thousands of readers have found in his novels, especially Boy Swallows Universe; it is to take that popularity seriously.

What the First Nations writers in This All Come Back Now reveal is that the only civilization in need of saving is the present western capitalist one – for its capacity to self-destruct and for its inability to listen.

It is Winkler’s attempt to document Grim’s unfathomable life – to indirectly, absorb and transform some of his pain – that allows us, humbly, to see the beauty and validity in all lives, and to better see our own.

What are the aesthetic possibilities offered by Beautiful World, Where Are You, Sally Rooney’s blockbuster 2021 novel? To answer this question, we might look at the novel’s plot, characters, themes, style, narrative form. But we might also, inspired by a pragmatic view of art, look at how readers have made use of the novel.

Here in Neave’s second novel, the author tackles the essential unknowability of our parents and who they once were. Believe in Me tells the story of Sarah as recounted by her daughter Bet. The narrator, whose name we do not learn until page 104, begins her mother’s story in 1974 and, like the narrator of Neave’s previous novel, must also grapple with impressions and events she cannot fully understand.

If the narrative has a driving question, it is the eternal one of how to live, find meaning, amidst all the sorrow and horror.

While they were written at a time of highly charged crisis – both politically, and personally for their authors – their urgency still speaks to us as readers of our own charged times. For as well as the stripping of a person, the reduction of a man to ‘a swear-word on two legs’, the question that cannot be avoided is what about the rest of us? What does such stripping say about the polity, the social and political order, that encompasses us all?