Nonfiction November Book Pairings, Part 1 #NovNov

Belatedly, about three weeks overdue, I am finally going to finish this post I wrote for Liz Dexter’s prompt, ‘Pair a nonfiction book with a fiction book’. Apologies if it doesn’t display correctly. I changed to my phone halfway, so I’m not convinced the formatting will be consistent. Do let me know if it’s unreadable. Once I got going, I thought of lots of pairings, so I have split the post in two. The second half is about the colonial policy of sending indigenous children to residential schools so they could ‘integrate’ into the white colonisers’ society, thus suppressing and destroying indigenous cultures, languages and family structures.

This turned out to be a difficult prompt for my brain to process. I understand the idea, of course I do, but my brain was refusing to come up with ideas. If I come across similar themes during the course of reading, the link pops into my head naturally, but if I have to spontaneously generate pairs, the brain fog rises in the same way it does when confronted with a selection of Scrabble letters. I’m supposed to be the family member who works with words, but my brain blocks during Scrabble or when I’m trying to decipher anagrams, or only produces words in Dutch. My engineer husband has no such problems. Give me a game of Trivial Pursuit and my brain is quite amazing at retrieving obscure information or making random guesses that turn out to be unexpectedly correct. Sadly, book connections seem to be slow in coming.

Searching for inspiration

If I think of how I might find book pairings, it occurs to me that books set in either the same place or the same period of history ought to work well: the Caribbean, Australia, the Middle Ages, wartime, post-war. Also books that cover the same type of experience, such as illness or sexual orientation or a particular career. Oddly, as I write this, ideas are beginning to form in my head as they hadn’t before I was doing something active, just staring blankly at my shelves, hoping for inspiration.

Perhaps it’s easier to generate book pairings if you start from the fiction side of the pair. It’s relatively easy to go looking for a nonfiction book about a certain subject compared to casting about for fiction for a theme. When I add a book to Goodreads, I add tags (or shelves, in Goodreads terms) to help me search for themed books for challenges, but if the blurb of a fiction book doesn’t tell me about the setting, or I don’t have a tag for that place, then I may not recall it. For instance, I only have a generic UK tag, except for a few specific counties where I have personal associations such as Kent, Cornwall and Norfolk; the latter because I have recently noticed that there are an unusually high number of books set there, presumably because the University of East Anglia’s creative writing degree makes it a literary hotspot.

Note to self: if you don’t know what to write, just start writing something and see what happens!

Book pairs I have read or own

BRITISH HISTORY

NF: A Distant Mirror: the Calamitous 14th Century, Barbara Tuchman. 714pp. Recommended by my medieval history lecturer as a must-read background book in about 1982, I never quite managed to read it and never bought it. I do now have a copy, but it’s still unread.

Fiction: The Sunne in Splendour, Sharon Kay Penman. 936pp. Following Richard III’s life, making him human and bringing to life the royal family factions. I’ve only read the first half so far. The second half seems to be from a woman’s point of view. The family tree inside is an absolute must if you are to have any chance whatsoever of working out which Richard or Edward or John is being referred to. I read the first half a couple of years ago and was glad to take a breather. I feel I really ought to finish it. Otherwise, why has it been taking up so much room on my shelf for so long?

TRANSITION

NF: Conundrum, Jan Morris. 148pp. Journalist Jan Morris always felt as if she was living in the wrong body, even from a very early age. Born and raised as a boy, she had a successful career as a war journalist, travel author, was married and a father of five before she was finally able to transition and become the woman she had always been inside. An interesting perspective from someone who transitioned in 1974.

Fiction: Freshwater, Akwaeke Emezi. A fictionalised version of their own life, a trans writer compares the experience of being trans to being an ogbanje, an Igbo spirit that takes over a child’s body but yearns to return to the other side, so children inhabited by ogbanje often die young. Growing up abroad, Nigerian American trans man Emezi only learnt about the ogbanje story as a young adult and identified strongly with it as an explanation of how they felt, compelled to change themselves, to rebel and get involved in risky behaviours. During the book tour, Emezi presented as a woman, while feeling male. They have since transitioned. This is a book full of violent struggles and extremes of behaviour, but the writing is wonderful.

AFRICAN SPIRIT WORLD

This is a triple book match with three books about African spirits that possess children but want to return to their own spirit world. This is often the explanation given for women who have repeated stillbirths or whose children die in infancy.

NF: Dear Senthuran: a Black Spirit Memoir, Akwaeke Emezi. Emezi’s true story of being trans with a fragmented personality. Biography

Fiction: Freshwater, Akwaeke Emezi. The fictionalised version (see above).

Fiction: The Famished Road, Ben Okri. This won the Booker Prize in 1991 and I had tried to read it at least three times before finally proceeding beyond the first chapter. Once again, there is a Nigerian spirit (abiku, the Yoruba version, if I’m not mistaken) that possesses babies, then returns to paradise to be with its friends, then is reborn to the same mother, setting up repeated heartache. But this story is full of all sorts of different spirits. The child we follow is a boy called Azaro, brought up by parents who struggle to survive and to pay the rent to their evil landlord. The poor area where they live is inhabited by street urchins and a cast of colourful characters. Azaro is never quite sure what is real and is surrounded by often terrifying spirits that only he can see. Don’t try to understand what is going on; just jump on board and enjoy the ride.

WINDRUSH GENERATION

NF: Head Above Water, Buchi Emecheta. This autobiographical novel describes a Nigerian woman who grew up with a traditional background and emigrated to England with her violent husband. She then had a hard life after leaving him, bringing up her five children alone, yet finding time to study and work. She describes racism, the way she was underestimated and how she finally triumphed as a successful author and academic. Not strictly a Windrush story, but tells a similar tale of a Black woman’s struggles in post-war Britain, arriving from a country that had been a British colony. Unfortunately, much as I respect her struggle, I felt I wouldn’t have liked the author herself. She seemed pushy and prone to complaining. I love a good whinge myself, but it put me off. Nevertheless, I have another of her books lined up (Gwendolen in Dutch; English title The Family).

Fiction: Small Island, Andrea Levy. Small Island tells the story of a couple from Jamaica, the racism and friendship they meet in post-war Britain. It interleaves the stories of four people caught up in history, taking us back to the past which explains the present, and ultimately throwing them together in a human drama which grips you and involves you in their dilemmas. The story is told in a non-linear way so that often your assumptions about one of the characters are turned over later in the book, and the ending left me still wondering if their decisions were correct, and wondering what happened next. A wonderful book!

WWII / OPERATION MARKET GARDEN

NF: The Hawk and the Hare, Janet Love Morrison. The author offered to send me a digital copy of this because I live in the area where Operation Market Garden took place (part of the reason for my blog name). It is a fictionalised version of the Canadian Royal Hamilton Light Infantry’s experiences, from landing in northern France, fighting their way north, battlefield training and free time around Nijmegen, then further north to Westerbork. Based on her father’s stories, it centres on the friendship between him and a First Nations soldier; many of whom joined the army to get away from the restrictions and boredom of life on a reservation. The book is exceptionally well-researched, combining excerpts from regimental records and informal tales. It focuses on the human side, comradeship and fleeting contact with enemies, resistance and even a hint of someone who may have met Anne Frank. Wise words from the resistance fighter Tristan, who housed them in Antwerp: “when you return home, forget the hate and horror, but commemorate the comradeship, the liberation and celebration.” This book does just that.

Fiction: A Bridge Too Far, Cornelius Ryan. I grew up watching the film of this, never imagining that one day I would regularly cross the bridge in Arnhem that features so prominently. The book is as well-told as the film. I can even recommend the Airborne Museum, if you’re ever in the region, as well as the Freedom Museum in Groesbeek (near Nijmegen).

THE HOUSING CRISIS, A NF-NF PAIRING

NF: Cornwall With Simon Reeve. Not a book this time, but a documentary about the housing crisis in Cornwall where much of the housing stock, particularly at the lower end of the market, is used for holiday lets and second homes. Combined with a lack of year-round job opportunities, this leaves young people and the poorly paid with nowhere to live. I remember a similar problem being highlighted many years ago in Wales, when Welsh nationalists set fire to second homes in protest. It hasn’t quite reached that stage in Cornwall; I suspect that, like the Margate of my youth, the majority of people take the opportunity to leave the area after school and may only return once they retire.

NF: Homesick: Why I Live in a Shed, Catrina Davies. One of the people Simon Reeve interviewed was Catrina Davies who has lived all her life in Cornwall, but is unable to afford a house there. As a last resort, she has set up home in her father’s former shed, with no facilities and no hot water. “The opposite of slavery is freedom, not idleness, and freedom is what my shed represents. Freedom to work, and work hard, on things that matter to me. Freedom to be paid badly to do things well. Freedom to refuse to do bad things just because they pay well. But everything has a price, and the price of freedom is security.” Highly recommended if you’re interested in social justice and the lack of it. I’ve also read her later book, Once Upon a Raven’s Nest: A Life on Exmoor in an Epoch of Change, about the life of a disabled man, who had worked all his life on the moors and woodlands, for whom she worked as a carer. Her record of his life and memories is wonderfully written.

I’m glad I did try to think about Liz’s prompt because it has produced some wonderful pairings. So many, in fact, that I wrote Part 2, a post-colonial post. Given the subject of boarding schools for indigenous children, post-colonial probably isn’t the correct term, but I liked the palindrome-like phrase, so I’m keeping it.