Tag: literary fiction

#BookReview A Hundred Million Years and a Day by Jean-Baptiste Andrea @BelgraviaB

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A Hundred Million Years and A DayAbout the Book

When he hears a story about a huge dinosaur fossil locked deep inside an Alpine glacier, university professor Stan finds a childhood dream reignited. Whatever it takes, he is determined to find the buried treasure.

But Stan is no mountaineer and must rely on the help of old friend Umberto, who brings his eccentric young assistant, Peter, and cautious mountain guide Gio. Time is short: they must complete their expedition before winter sets in. As bonds are forged and tested on the mountainside, and the lines between determination and folly are blurred, the hazardous quest for the Earth’s lost creatures becomes a journey into Stan’s own past.

Format: Paperback (176 pages)  Publisher: Gallic Books
Publication date: 7th May 2021 Genre: Literary Fiction, Literature in Translation

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My Review

‘It’s true that a story often begins with a road, but I wish I knew what made mine so tortuous.’

The book opens with Stan’s poignant childhood memory of returning home after school, seeing the closed shutters of a bedroom window and realising, even as a six year old, that he should not disturb his mother. ‘In such moments she needed darkness, and darkness alone.’ The reasons for this will gradually become apparent.

Stan’s discovery near his farmland home of a fossil – a trilobite – awakens an interest in palaeontology. ‘It was three hundred million years old, and I was six.’ It’s an interest that is encouraged by his mother but discouraged by his bully of a father (known as the Commander) who desires Stan to take over the family business.

Moving ahead forty years to 1954 and Stan is now a Professor of Palaeontology in Paris. He has never forgotten the story of an old man’s discovery of a dinosaur fossil in a cave within a glacier in the Alps. Finding the site has become an obsession. Along with Umberto, a friend and colleague of many years, Umberto’s assistant Peter, and local guide Gio, the four men embark on the expedition of a lifetime. (There is another member of the group but I’ll leave you to read the book to find out more about him!)

I loved the way each of the men were fully rounded characters.  Umberto is a giant of a man with a ‘good, big, stone soul’.  When it comes to excavation he has ‘magic in his hands’ able to gently release ‘time’s grip’ on a fossil. His loyalty to Stan means leaving personal commitments back home. Gio’s instinct for changing weather conditions and his knowledge of the mountains is unparalleled.  However, he also knows only too well what dangers they hide. Peter is described as having a ‘genius for the absurd’ which will be demonstrated all too clearly.

I admired the way the author explored the dynamics between the men, especially as summer gives way to autumn and every day seems to present a new obstacle to overcome in order to achieve their objective.  The frustration and anger that festers beneath the surface is vividly brought to life in a memorable paragraph delivered in stream of consciousness style.

Another striking aspect of the book is its use of anthropomorphism so that even the weather seems to exhibit a life of its own.  For example, autumn is described as ‘prowling at the edge of the plateau… a beast of flesh and claws’.  As weeks turn to months it becomes akin to a battle of wits between the men and the glacier, as if the glacier is actively seeking to thwart their efforts.  It certainly feels that way to Stan.

When winter truly arrives, every day, every hour even, becomes a struggle to survive and retain a grip on sanity. I really felt I was there on the mountain alongside Stan but, of course, invisible to him, which makes his feelings of loneliness and attempts to ward off madness all the more poignant. At one point he observes, ‘I am surrounded by millions and millions of cubic metres, acres, tons of nothingness, void, absence’.

Interspersed with the story of the expedition are Stan’s memories of events earlier in his life: memories of rejection, loss, cruelty and violence.  However, Stan’s history of misreading situations or misinterpreting the feelings of others made we wonder how much I could truly trust his viewpoint.  The author challenged me to think about Stan’s real motivation. Is it the professional acclaim that will come from the discovery of possibly a new species of dinosaur, the achievement of a long-held dream, or a belated attempt to prove to his father that he is not the failure and weakling he was accused of being?

Sam Taylor’s translation expertly showcases the author’s wonderful turns of phrase. For example, the description of the valley from which the group start their climb as being an ‘eternal vendetta between stone and water’.  Or when, later in the book, the men awake to a heavy snowfall that finds them in snow up to their chests, the scene is likened to a ‘polar morning in Pompeii: our torsos floating on an ocean of powder, statues lost at sea’.

The low page count of A Hundred Million Years and a Day belies the power of the story it contains. As is often the case, the best things do come in small packages. My thanks to Isabelle Flynn at Gallic Books for my review copy, published today in a new paperback edition.

In three words: Powerful, moving, immersive

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Jean-Baptiste AndreaAbout the Author

Jean-Baptiste Andrea was born in 1971 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye and grew up in Cannes. Formerly a director and screenwriter, he published his first novel, Ma Reine, in 2017. It won twelve literary prizes including the Prix du Premier Roman and the Prix Femina des Lycéens. (Photo credit: Publisher author page)

About the Translator

Sam Taylor is an author and former correspondent for The Observer. His translations include Laurent Binet’s HHhH, Leila Slimani’s Lullaby and Maylis de Kerengal’s The Heart, for which he won the French-American Foundation Translation Prize.

#BookReview How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

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How Beautiful We WereAbout the Book

Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, How Beautiful We Were tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean-up and financial reparations to the villagers are made – and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interest only. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. But their fight will come at a steep price, one which generation after generation will have to pay.

Told through the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold onto its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom.

Format: Hardcover (368 pages)       Publisher: Canongate
Publication date: 11th March 2021 Genre: Literary Fiction

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My Review

The story is told from multiple points of view, including a group of children, ‘age-mates’ born in the same year, who act rather like the Chorus in a Greek play. This structure allows the reader to see the story from a number of different perspectives, reflecting the varying experiences and attitudes of young and old, male and female. It also gave a sense of the oral storytelling tradition.

I was less a fan of the frequently shifting timelines meaning that the story goes back and forth in time. One moment a character is dead, the next moment they are still in prison. I confess I found this both confusing and distracting. I was grateful when I reached the section told from the point of view of Thula’s grandmother, Yaya, not just because it revealed the history of the injustices visited on the people of Kosawa over many generations – slavery, forced labour on rubber plantations, the destruction of their land by the construction of oil pipelines – but because it was narrated in a largely linear fashion, placing into some order the events featured in previous sections.

The book conveys a strong sense of the traditional beliefs and customs that form the backbone of life in the village. How its inhabitants see themselves as different from, even distrustful of, those who live in the towns; tribal and family ties being more important than nationality. The villagers of Kosawa gain strength from their belief that the spirits of their ancestors guide and protect them, as represented in the village anthem: “Sons of the leopard, daughters of the leopard, beware all who dare wrong us, never will our roar be silenced.”

The reader learns about what is a strongly patriarchal society, in which women’s role is largely confined to cooking, cleaning and child-rearing and women who lose their husbands are unable to remarry. ‘You can be alone, the men say to us. You’re a woman, you’re built to endure.’ However, it’s also a community that comes together to mark events such as births, the passage into manhood, marriages and deaths. Sadly, the village witnesses many of the latter.

The spirit of resistance is most clearly represented by Thula who is described as having ever since the day she was born ‘wanted what she wanted’. I’m always drawn to characters who demonstrate a love of books and reading so it’s no surprise I warmed to Thula for whom, as her mother Sahel observes, books become ‘her pillow and her blanket, her plate of food and the water that quenched her thirst’. Thula’s education takes her away, first from her village, and then from her country to America. However, Kosawa and its plight remains forever in her thoughts, and in her heart.  She becomes both an enabler and catalyst for action against the oil company, Pexton, and later a figurehead for much wider change.

One of the last sections of the book, narrated from the point of view of Thula’s brother, Juba, was less compelling than I’d hoped. For me, it got rather bogged down in the details of negotiations, court cases and preparations for the campaign led by Thula.  It also included a brief return to the back and forth in time that I’ve mentioned earlier, and there were some parts I felt were redundant.

Although I may have had some reservations about the structure and pace of the book, I had no doubts about the quality of the writing. If you can get past what, for me, was the book’s rather convoluted structure – and I’m conscious other readers may find it imaginative rather than distracting – How Beautiful We Were is a powerful story about the fight against injustice, corruption and environmental destruction.

I received an advance review copy courtesy of Canongate via NetGalley.

In three words: Powerful, emotional, authentic

Try something similar: Wake Me When I’m Gone by Odafe Atogun

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Imbolo MbueAbout the Author

Imbolo Mbue is the author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. The novel has been translated into eleven languages, adapted into an opera and a stage play, and optioned for a mini-series. A native of Limbe, Cameroon, and a graduate of Rutgers and Columbia Universities, Mbue lives in New York. (Photo credit: Goodreads author page)

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