Five Indie Books You (Probably) Won't Find in the High Street
The last year or so has been a year of some absolutely fabulous reading; and – as ever – I've far more enjoyed burrowing around the more obscure fringes of the literary world than I have ploughing through the latest pile-em-high, Booker-shortlisted, must-read blockbuster. So here are some recommendations for five of the books I've loved the most over the past year, books that your local bookstore may – more fools them – have overlooked.
The Bee Loud Glade by Steve Himmer
This is undoubtedly the greatest novel about ornamental hermits of the entire year. Hell, let's go the whole hog and say this book is the greatest novel about ornamental hermits of all time. Steve Himmer's The Bee-Loud Glade is as funny as it is profound, as strange as it is compelling. This is a book about wealth and poverty, about solitude and friendship, and about – among other things – a lion called Jerome. You simply can't dislike a book that features a lion called Jerome.
Spurious by Lars Iyer
I met Lars Iyer, the author of Spurious, several years ago at a conference on Blanchot, where – dressed in a Hawaiian shirt so lurid it made my eyes go funny – he gave a punishing two and a half hour paper on Blanchot. If I hadn't known what the experience of Blanchot's il y a was before the paper began, I certainly did by the end… Spurious is a semi-autobiographical satire of academia that moves from squabbles over who is Kafka and who is Brod, to the anxiety of creeping fungal growths, to the end of world. It is the funniest book I have read for a long time. After reading it, in an outburst of generosity, I am even ready to forgive Lars for his epic paper on Blanchot (although not, perhaps, for the shirt).
Pirate Talk or Mermalade by Terese Svoboda
Mermalade? A whole novel written in pirate talk? Perhaps what's most astonishing about Terese Svoboda's book is that it is very, very good. An eighteenth century tale of mermaids, pirates, loquacious parrots and all kinds of sundry horrors, this was a book, Svoboda herself says, that was written "without hope of publication". If that is so, then – Dear God! – how I wish that more books were written this way!
The Divine Farce by Michael S. A. Graziano
Three figures are trapped in a suspended concrete tube, sustained by pear-flavoured nectar. Eventually they break tube into a strange subterranean labyrinth, a heaven or hell of sorts. Michael Graziano's brief, allegorical novel successfully treads a fine line between hope and despair. It shouldn't work – it really shouldn't. And after reading what at first glance looks like a relentlessly depressing book, this is a story that leaves behind a curiously cheerful miasma…
The Golden Age by Michael Ajvaz
Czech philosopher and novelist Michael Ajvaz's wonderful ethnographic travelogue of an invented island culture where images have the same status as objects, and where cooking is considered a form of barbarity. The Golden Age is pure pleasure – funny and clever without being tricksy, beautifully crafted, and filled with the kind of lightness that my own literary hero, Italo Calvino, dreamed of being one of the characteristics of a new literature for what is now the present millennium. Glorious!
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