Republic of Consciousness shortlist 2020: introduced by Kat Payne Ware
Ahead of announcing the Republic of Consciousness 2020 Winner on Monday March 30th, we’re sharing these mini-introductions to the each of the five shortlisted books, written by Kat Payne Ware - poet and MA student at University of East Anglia. Thank you to Kat, and if these introductions spark something, you can get the books delivered to you either direct from the press, or via your local independent bookshop.
Love by Hanne Ørstavik, trans. Martin Aitken
Aitken’s chillingly stark translation of Ørstavik’s 1997 Norwegian-language novel brilliantly captures its coldness, both in terms of its frozen setting and its cool emotional register, as mother and son try and fail to meet and understand one another. Love is a story of suppressed feeling and the failures of communication which feels as relevant as ever twenty-three years after its original publication, as saturated with interpretive possibility as the blank pages of snow which rest softly on its landscape. The brittleness of Aitken’s lexical choices — resolutely un-flowery and yet poetically illustrative of the novel’s setting and themes — exemplifies a real command over the challenges of translation, and perfectly captures the essence of Ørstavik’s text. This journey through one Norwegian winter’s night is a timeless and concise exploration of human failings, endeavours and desires.
We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff by Isabel Waidner
We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff takes the avant-garde novella to dizzying new heights — or as high as its imposed ceiling will allow, a ceiling upon which the lypard strolls, upside down ... Fractured, animated, slapstick and yet vividly real, Waidner’s creation is a striking and disorienting portrait of its specific contemporary moment. War and violence reigns, half-imagined, exploding the Isle of Wight landscape into a setting saturated with pop culture, critical theory and Steinian anxieties. Not to say the novella’s heavy with referenced material; far from it, a reader is whisked along on the narrator’s quest against the reign of the lypard, House Mother Normal, the Home Office and the English Defence League LGBTQI+ division. It’s safe to say I haven’t read anything quite like it before — a truly unique portrait of queerness, immigrant and working-class cultures, and what it might mean to be British.
Broken Jaw by Minoli Salgado
This collection of short stories and flash fiction wrestles with the legacy of the Sri Lankan civil war. Written between the early 1990s and 2011, the eighteen stories in Broken Jaw vary in length, narratorial identity, setting (both physical and temporal) and register, but their level of craft is a happy constant. The two sections of the book, ‘Rumours’ and ‘Ventriloquy and Other Acts’, mark the opposing public and private realms through whose threshold violence bleeds. War is not just a public affair, Sagaldo insists, nor only a private tragedy. Broken Jaw is an act of resistance, a refusal of silence on a twenty-six-year conflict which has been as hushed in literature as the ‘enforced disappearances’ which it entailed. For this reason, ‘A Feast of Words’, written after Sandya Eknaligoda was refused a platform to publicise her husband’s abduction at the Galle Literature Festival, is the story which resonated with me most.
Animalia by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, trans. Frank Wynne
Animalia is a book about sex, death, and violence — the animal stuff. Following one family through its five generations of the twentieth century, in the fictional French village of Puy-Larroque, the novel charts the development of their modest smallholding into an intensive pig farm. The brutality of Del Amo’s novel is visceral, unflinching, and intentionally uncomfortable to sit with: this is a piece of writing which demands introspection from its reader, a catalogue of man’s tendency to barbarity, which, in the end, far overshadows that of the animals upon whom it is inflicted. Fluids seem to ooze from the pages — blood, bile, slurry, semen — as man, animal, earth and time are engaged in battle from start to finish. Wynne’s translation has resulted in a labyrinthine, clause-heavy prose that takes its lead from the intricate weavings of the funnel spider, high up in the hayloft. A novel that stayed with me long after reading.
Patience by Toby Litt
Trapped in a Catholic children’s care home in 1979, Elliott sees the world from wherever the Sisters decide to park his wheelchair — in front of a window overlooking the courtyard, or facing a white wall, as reward and punishment respectively. The novel charts the arrival of Jim, a defiant new addition to the ward, with whose help Elliott forms a plan to escape. This is a book about communication, its shortfalls and possibilities, which is echoed in the comma-free prose of Elliott’s monologue, in which clauses lurk, wrong-foot, and often require reinterpretation. What Litt’s novel demands most of all is patience — patience with the decoding of its reading strategy, with the pace of its narrative which echoes (electrically) the fine details of drudgery, and patience with its cast of characters, whose brilliance and intelligence are compassionately drawn out from whence the able-bodied or neurotypical (the public, the Sisters) might assume there was none. An engrossing ode to the small things: or not small, perhaps, but simply quieter.
KAT PAYNE WARE is a poet from Bristol. She graduated cum laude in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Birmingham in 2019, and is currently reading for an MA in Creative Writing Poetry at the University of East Anglia. As well as working for the Republic of Consciousness, she is a coordinator of the Green Film Festival @UEA. Her poetry has been published in the Brixton Review of Books, the Verve Poetry Press Anthology of Diversity Poems and received a commendation from Andrew McMillan in the 2020 Verve Poetry Festival competition.