Culture Wars reviews contemporary fiction along with regular feature coverage of fiction festivals such as Jewish Book Week and prizes like the Orange Prize and Man Booker.

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The Observations - Orange Prize 2007 SHORTLISTED

Jane Harris

Hmm, one is supposed to say, a real, vital, human voice has been found here, what a wonderful, picaresque creation. In actuality, Bessy’s sense of speech comes across as no more realistic than that of Mrs Potts from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.

Half of a Yellow Sun - WINNER

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

None of Adichie’s characters are free of humanising flaws, and in this, perhaps, lies her greatest strength as an author. She is merciless in pinpointing the prejudices that can divide not only whole nations, but classes, villages, and even families.

Flushed with Orange

An independent publisher’s perspective on the Orange Prize.

The Orange Prize: Friend or Phony

Culture Wars’ commissioning editor for books considers a vexed question.

The Book Thief

Markus Zusak

Death and, for the Western World, the Holocaust in particular, is a negation of words: silent and indescribable. So for Zusak to give a voice, especially such a distinctive and whimsical voice, to the quintessential concept of nothingness, is essentially a nice surprise.

Dirty Work

Julia Bell

Oksana is a Russian teenager who was lured to Europe under the promise of a better life, and Hope is a spoilt English girl. The alternating narrative voice is fine when the two characters are racing to their inevitable collision, but when they’re sharing a bed in a room with two freebasing Estonian prostitutes?

Jakarta Shadows

Alan Brayne

Brayne mines just about every murder mystery thriller there is to put his protagonist through a truly cathartic experience, forcing him to confront his selfish amorality and emerge a changed man. Aside from the pager turner narrative are Brayne’s efforts to explore and explain the practical and moral dilemmas of the ‘free’ Indonesia.

The Dictator and the Hammock

Daniel Pennac (translated by Patricia Clancy)

Drunks have the advantage over ideologues because, periodically, the drunk sobers up. There is more than a hint of ambiguity from Pennac on this one. After all, ‘The people pretend to believe what we want them to believe, to the point where they sometimes talk themselves into believing that they believe it’.

Greed

Elfriede Jelinek (translated by Martin Chalmers)

Jelinek, a Nobel Prize winner, certainly has a darkly comic view of human nature, and the skill with which to render it vividly. It just seems that sometimes in detaching her voice from herself, she forgets the clarity that structures and drives the most compelling literature.

Incidences

Daniil Kharms (translated by Neil Cornwell)

The satire is rich and thick, and often written in coarse, colloquial language, which makes it all the funnier. Nonsense, amusing literalism and striking or surreal visual evocations find the citizens of St Petersburg constantly subjected to bizarre happenings, and yet hardly flinching.

Going Under

Ray French

One by one the elements that make up Aidan are being shut down - so he decides to shut himself down. What he opts for is nothing as grand and Continental as a suicide. No - Aidan decides to bury himself alive in his own garden. The British are, after all, a nation of gardeners.

The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs

Irvine Welsh

Despite the sense of familiarity, Welsh is a technically better writer than a lot of his critics give him credit for. Although it may often have felt that he was trying to relive past glories, he can still provide vivid and interesting insights into addiction and self-destruction.

The National Short Story Prize 2006

Various authors

All five stories display a dissatisfaction with contemporary life and all its trappings that is hard to articulate, and it is this elusive extra that these stories are striving to find; stretching out and brushing against salvation with eager finger tips, only to find it just out of reach.

Mortality

Nicholas Royle

It is telling that the stories keep returning to empty spaces and hollowed-out shells. They appear to hold a fascination for Royle. Here, I think, lies the problem with the collection: Royle’s writing itself is strangely hollow and substance-less and unsatisfying to read.

Everyman

Philip Roth

The fear of Death, Roth shows us, might be the fear of the life we could have, maybe should have led. His ‘unchangeable’ story of man stalked by thoughts of his own demise may be a lesson in ‘how to die’. It is also - perhaps because of this - a lesson in how to live.