2011 has been, in many ways, a seminal year for books. It's been a tougher than the rest year - full of shouts of disquiet, increasingly loud and discombobulated grumblings about the futures of book-selling, and the remnants of the publishing industry, amid protestations about writing, new and old, being shit and shiteful.
None of this is true - 2011 has seen some marvellous books published.
I've been a fan of Jeanette Winterson since the publication of her semi-autobiographical debut novel 'Oranges are not the only fruit.' A truly terrifying tale of religious fanaticism and emotional sublimation, its horrifyingly personal exigencies are examined and explained further in Winterson's actual recently published autobiography 'Why be happy when you could be normal?'
The mighty Dalkey Archive published the most criminally unsung novel of the year. 'The faster I walk, the smaller I am,' by Kjersti Skomsvold, translated by Kerri A Pierce, is a beautifully unforced gem - 140 pages of unrelenting misery, loneliness and despair. Of course I loved it. (Nothing, in 2011, came barely close - although Patrick DeWitt's glorious, and gorily anarchic, 'The Sisters Brothers,' almost, tantalisingly, very near stole this particular show).
There has been some remarkable fiction published this year - much of it by writers who continue NOT to know better...
Alice Munro continues not to know better. Her recent collection of selected short stories, published by Chatto and Windus, confirms her as a short story practitioner of the first rank - forget about the often and reedy comparisons to Chekhov.
Alice Munro is Alice Munro. Read everything she has written.
Others, whether alive or dead, also continued not to know better....Saramago, DeLillo, Nabokov, Murakami, Foster Wallace and, gloriously so, as per the re-issue of his western themed novella, the young(er) Denis Johnson, in his 'Train dreams;' a wonderful, and wonderfully human, elegy to an America unrecognisable today.
Lynne Tillman's new collection is available to read in its entirety here - 'Someday this will be funny.' It's her first new writing in ages and belies her reputation as a dour and rather rigid post-modernist. It is funny. And it's funny now.
There are three more fiction titles that have destroyed the heart this year...
Yannick Murphy's, 'The Call,' is a magical story. In many ways reminiscent of the 1990's TV show, 'Northern Exposure,' Murphy's novel of ordinary characters drawn into intoxicatingly extraordinary situations, is a readily readable treat.
Donald Ray Pollock's first novel continues the same themes as those contained in his 2008 short story collection, 'Knockemstiff.' 'The Devil all the time,' is very much in the five minute hard boiled bracket of crime fiction - populated by outsiders, freaks and the mightily disposessed...eager to introduce a whole new world of suffering with a shrug and a twisted smile.
This twisted smile becomes an all too profound grimace in the hands of one of the great writers working today. Daniel Woodrell's latest collection of short stories 'The Outlaw Album,' is, at turns, a conflicting and confounding read. Containing all the hallmarks associated with his stark, intense prose, each of the stories jars incessantly, confusingly, with the other, the pieces don't seem to fit. Or fit together. It is this apparent disjointedness, apparent desire for disunity, that makes each of these blazing stories; in all their height and breadth and depth and languorousness of soul, a separate sweet entity in themselves.
And what makes all these books a profound pleasure to read.
Part 2 to come...
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