This week, as part of the continuing global commemorations of the First World War, World Book Club is in sombre mood with another timely chance to hear multi-award-winning British writer Pat Barker.
She talks about her internationally renowned novel Regeneration, the first in the trilogy of novels which culminated in the Booker Prize winner The Ghost Road.
Also shortlisted for the Booker Prize and now recognised twenty-two years after its publication as a modern war classic, Regeneration is a part historical, part fictional exploration of how the traumas of the so-called Great War brutalised a generation of young men.
Picture: WW1 patients recuperating in hospital in 1918. Credit: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images.
In Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Mark Rifkin, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro and incoming president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, explores three of the most canonical authors in the American literary awakening–Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville–demonstrating how even as their texts mount queer critiques of the state, they take for granted–even depend upon–conceptions of place, politics and personhood normalized in the settler-state’s engagement with Indigenous peoples.
Rifkin’s exegesis is relevant far beyond nineteenth-century literary studies. As “settler colonialism” gains currency in left and academic circles as a descriptor of the present reality in the United States, Canada, Israel and elsewhere, there is a tendency to identify its workings only in the encounter between the colonizers and the colonized, the state and Indigenous peoples.
This is a mistake, Rifkin warns. None of the novels he interrogates deal specifically with Native people. Yet colonialism is not, he writes, a dynamic that inheres only Native bodies. Rather, it’s a persistent “phenomenon that shapes nonnative subjectivities, intimacies, articulations and sensations separate from whether or not something recognizably Indian comes into view.”
Harriett Gilbert talks to award-winning writer Janice Galloway about her novel The Trick Is to Keep Breathing. Recorded at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, Harriett discusses her novel about a drama teacher, Joy Stone, who is losing her grip on reality as she struggles to cope with the loss of her married lover and her mother.
Through the wit and irony that helped gain her international acclaim, Galloway crafts a picture of modern life and depression. Yet even as she sees her family and friends metamorphose into suspicious characters, Galloway's protagonist and the reader find the trick in living rests with the simplest things.
Photo: Janice Galloway (left) and Harriett Gilbert
Slate's Dan Kois and David Haglund talk with New York Times Book Review editor Parul Sehgal about Book 1 of Karl Ove Knausgaard's 6-volume autobiographical epic.
In this edition of World Book Club on BBC World Service, Jostein Gaarder talks to Harriett Gilbert about his novel Sophie’s World at The House of Literature, Oslo.
A chart-topping global surprise bestseller Sophie’s World draws us into the world of the great philosophers through the intriguing character of 14-year-old Sophie and her mysterious teacher. As their relationship develops a story emerges which raises profound questions about the biggest questions of all: where we come from, the origin of the universe and the meaning of life.
The prolific and prize-winning Norwegian writer explains to a room full of his readers how amazed he was by the phenomenal success of the novel and how attached he got to his characters as he created his multi-layered tale.
This month World Book Club comes to a surprisingly sunny Oslo as part of our mini Norwegian season to talk to one of the country’s most feted novelists Per Petterson, about his phenomenally successful novel Out Stealing Horses.
Per will be answering questions from a rapt audience here in the elegant canteen of his publishers about his poignant, compelling multi-award-winning tale.
Through passages of often achingly beautiful prose Out Stealing Horses explores universal themes of isolation, loss of innocence, paternal love and sexual passion and the unexpected betrayals that can follow in their wake.
For all the incisive work published in Native American and Indigenous studies over the past decades, troubling historical myths still circulate in both academic and popular discourse. One of the most persistent is how we tell the story of the Atlantic world as a set of unidirectional processes dominated by Europeans and populated by enslaved Africans, neatly summarized in those triangle-trade illustrations we all studied in high school history class. Paul Gilroy’s seminal work The Black Atlantic opened fresh scholarly ground, conceptualizing the Atlantic world as a cosmopolitan space of cultural exchange and alternative modernities. But for all its originality and profound importance, Gilroy remained entrenched in a black-white dyad; Indigenous people of the Americas were almost entirely ignored.
Enter Jace Weaver, Franklin Professor and Director of the Institute of Native American Studies at the University of Georgia (and a former guest on this program), and his new book The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927 (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). In this sweeping and skillful book of synthesis, analysis, and original research, Weaver places Indigenous people at the heart of the Atlantic world. Native people, their ideas, their culture, their products, and their labor traversed the Atlantic in staggering numbers, reconfiguring destinies on both sides of the great ocean. Much like Gilroy, Weaver’s new paradigm is sure to launch numerous further studies.
Maya Angelou reflects on some of her earliest and most difficult memories and talks about her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in this special commemorative edition of World Book Club from our archive.
