Book Review: Gone to the Forest by Katie Kitamura

‘The country was in turmoil. And there was besides: sickness and growing and dying. How could they do anything but give in, to what was obvious, rather than what was good? In the face of that accumulation.’

Katie Kitamura’s debut novel, The Longshot, was one of the unexpected delights that come along only too rarely. The story of the final fight by a not-quite brilliant Mixed Martial Arts fighter, it managed to recreate the computer game feeling of having an opponent reach into my chest, pluck my heart out, and holding it aloft, gently squeezing it, from first sentence to final image. It revealed Kitamura as a brilliant writer in her own right; and an air to the minimalist legacy of Hemingway, McCarthy and Coertzee.

Gone to the Forest (The Clerkenwell Press, 2013) confirms such comparisons as entirely appropriate. With sharp, slashing prose and perfectly balanced storytelling, Kitamura explores the death throes of colonialism in a nameless nation.

Tom and his father live on a large rural farm. Ever since he came to the country, the old man has bent everything to him. His unremitting desire, big personality, and ruthless control ensure the farm has been successful, all those around him reliant on him for their safe orbit. But now disruption and native rebellion in the country threatens all he has built, and ill health begins to catch up with him. Tom, cowering in his father’s shadow, has eyes only for the land. It is all he has known. Other farmers circle, danger looms. And when a woman named Carine arrives, the future – whatever it holds – begins to bear down upon them.

In a chapter of pounding intensity, Kitamura brings these man-made tensions together in the midst of a massive volcanic eruption. Fire and brimstone filling the sky. Blocking out the sun. Then covering the land in ash that falls relentlessly. Sending animals wild and driving people to recklessness. It’s a powerful metaphor, the earth purging itself of colonial rule. The cataclysm that births a new age. Identities are questioned, relationships strained.

There’s much Coetzee here, a sort of mix of the wild frontiers of Waiting for the Barbarians and the search for peace away from troubled times of Life and Times ofMichael K. What is particularly clever is the way that Kitamura subtly questions notions of affinity with a landscape. Where much literature associates native peoples with affinity for the land, here it the character of Tom – slow, passive, uncertain; Michael K with privilege – who longs for nothing other than to escape people and live in peace with the landscape. But he is less resourceful than Michael K. Where Coetzee’s character bends a spoon to a natural well and drinks a thimble full at a time – ‘in that way, one can live’ – one does not have the feeling Tom would survive long. And his father’s health is rapidly failing.

On the other hand, the natives here ‘do not believe in property until it is theirs’, at which point they subject it entirely to their will. Cut it up into little pieces. This is the story of the colonialists, but that is not to say that this is a pro-colonial book. It is not pro-anything. Merely presents a series of characters in a fresh light, and the tragedies of upheaval.

Gone to the Forest is a tense, expertly controlled novel. One to read in one sitting. It is short, and the prose races along at a pace not even change can keep up with. Katie Kitamura is one of the most exciting voices in contemporary writing, and this is a marvellous addition to the already heaving realms of colonial/post colonial literature. If writers made swords, Kitamura would be the sort fabled in a Tarantino film. You will not find sharper, finer minimalist prose anywhere. 

Book Review: The Longshot by Katie Kitamura

“There was no ball, no goal, no base. There was noth­ing but air and inten­tion. The two fight­ers made the fight. Together they had to make it real.”

Mixed Martial Arts fighting is not a subject one would expect to find a large readership outside the sport’s loyal fanbase. But in her debut novel, The Longshot, Katie Kitamura mines this tense psychological territory, this ripe and humming ‘air and intention’, and fashions from it an absorbing, intense and terrifically written page-turner. Readers, myself included, who wouldn’t think to try it, emerge amazed at how much they have engaged with the characters and their journey. For the thing about writing and storytelling the world over is that it’s not so much what you write about that makes a story, but how you do so.

The plot follows Cal - once the next big thing, a fighter with the potential, the skill to become champion – and his friend and trainer Riley, as they head down to Mexico for a long-awaited rematch with Rivera, a legendary and undefeated fighter. Four years ago, Cal took him the distance, the first fighter to do so. But it cost him. That defeat, the realisation of his fallibility and the memory of pain. These have left their mark. This time, the fight is all or nothing for Cal.

Set over four days leading up to and including the big fight, The Longshot is a fast paced, insightful and exhilarating work of fiction by a major new talent. Kitamura matches her style to the violent masculine subject matter, producing a taut and convincing tale of two men on the edge of a psychological precipice, a glimpse of the intensity of an athlete/trainer relationship, and a powerful portrayal of the joys and pitfalls of dedicating life to sporting success. Kitamura demonstrates an economy of descriptive prose – take away place names and there are perhaps only a handful of words of more than three syllables in the entire book - but not of either intensity or emotion. She employs her sentences like short sharp jabs and kicks, elucidating the psychological landscape of fighter and fighting in a way that is accessible and attractive both to fans of mixed martial arts and the lay reader. She recreates the rhythms and intensity of a fight. Yet does so in a way that simultaneously conveys violence and the synchronicity of movement characteristic of ballet, of two physical people enacting an age old series of steps that contain narrative and personality and, yes, beauty.

That Kitamura knows her mixed martial arts fighting is unquestionable: intricacies of movement and intention, the significance of a look here or a tactical manoeuvre there, individual styles and possibilities and outcomes. The Longshot grips you by the scruff of your neck and drags you on, dangling the inevitable conclusion before you but intertwining it with moments of hope and expectation that you cling to in the hope of a different outcome. The fight is the book: its outcome will be the books outcome, and like the best sport (and fiction) its drama is created by the gap between what you expect will happen and what actually does.

The Longshot has some of the power and unexpurgated lure of The Call of the Wild by Jack London, speaks both to our primitive and visceral natures and the refined order we expect from sporting contests. There is something of Patrick Ness too, in the power of the narrative voice and concise ability to use punchy, short sentences to supreme effect. More apparently the spare style owes something to the likes of Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy.

It’s not just the fight that packs a punch. There are amazing scenes throughout: the relaxed journey down to Tijuana; Riley watching Rivera train; Cal taking an early morning jog to clear his head before the fight. It’s a complete work of fiction. No chinks in the defence, no wasted sentences. Kitamura writes these men so convincingly that it is impossible for even the most gender focused critic to argue that writers cannot write successfully across gender boundaries.

The Longshot takes readers out of their supposed comfort zones and into the psychological and physical heart of a fight. It hooked me inside the first ten pages and didn’t let go until long after I’d finished. With strong characters one can engage with and a plot that is hard hitting, intimate and raw, it’s an enjoyable and rewarding read. Without a doubt, it’s one of my very favourites of the year.

The Longshot was first published in the UK by Simon & Schuster in 2009. Edition shown was published by Pocket Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, in 2010. ISBN: 9781847395214, pp191

Summertime - J.M. Coetzee

Read: August 2009

Summertime in one tweet-sized chunk:

Coetzee at his most human. Passionate, illuminating and razor-sharp, it’s a stunning work of semi-biographical fiction.

31 May 1975
South Africa is not formally in a state of war, but it might as well be. As resistance has grown, the rule of law has step by step been suspended. The police and the people who run the police (as hunters run packs of dogs) are by now more or less unconstrained. In the guise of news, radio and television relay the official lies. Yet over the whole sorry, murderous show there hangs an air of staleness. The old rallying cries – Uphold white Christian civilization! Honour the sacrifices of the forefathers! – lack all force. We, or they, or we and they both, have moved into the endgame, and everyone knows it.

Summertime is the third of John Coetzee's fictionalised autobiographies, taking up its story ten years after Youth. Following the premature end to his six years in America, John has returned to South Africa to live in a dilapidated shack on the outskirts of Cape Town with his father. He is chastened by his experiences abroad, embarrassed by the country he has had to return to. It may be titled Summertime, but this is no tale of a man in the prime of his life. The Coetzee we meet here is lonely and frustrated, uncomfortable with almost everything about who he is and where he lives. The decade since Youth seems not to have changed him much, save that perhaps the hint of optimism which illuminated the ending of that work seems now to be thoroughly extinguished.

The biggest change from Boyhood and Youth, is in the structure of this work. Whereas they followed a straight forward linear narrative told through an incisive third person singular voice, Summertime sees a more stylistically adventurous approach. It is narrated by a young biographer who is writing a biography of the late John Coetzee. He decides to focus on the period between 1972 and 1977 when, he suspects, Coetzee was finding himself as a writer. In order to get an idea of the man he was, the biographer embarks upon a series of interviews with people who were significant to him at this time, whether they knew themselves to be or not. Through their stories emerges an impression of a less than ordinary man, an eternal outsider: shy, recalcitrant, uncomfortable in his own skin, his family, and his country. He takes up dancing to try to woo a women only to make a fool of himself; he is regarded with mistrust by his family; he struggles valiantly (though ineffectively) to assuage the guilt he feels about the society around him. We see him engaging in manual labour as penitence for his countries long history of “making other people do our work for us while we sit in the shade and watch.” He mends his own car, badly, leading to an awkward and cold night alone in the middle of nowhere with his cousin Margot. He takes up brickwork to protect the house from rainwater. His love of Voelfontein, the Coetzee family estate in the Karoo, remains as passionate as ever it was in Boyhood but everywhere else he is lost. South Africa has become a “loud angry place.”

Yet the problem is he does not belong anywhere. He has tried England and struggled, been rejected citizenship in the United States. For better or worse South Africa seems to be the only place that will have him. So he channels his frustrations, fears, and tentative hopes into his writing. While we do not get much of a view of Coetzee the writer, his passion occasionally pokes its way through his flaccid persona. At one point he tells a women with whom he is having a passionless affair: “There is always something or other I am working on...If I yielded to the seduction of not working what would I do with myself? What would there be to live for? I would have to shoot myself.” At another he describes books as a “gesture of refusal in the face of time. A bid for immortality.” Yet despite this there seems little evidence of the writer he will become. As one of the women states: “How can you be a great writer if you are just an ordinary little man?”

Summertime is a fascinating portrait of life, and like most lives it is full of contradiction and dichotomy. It is biographical in most of its content yet largely fictional in the manner of its telling. It is meant to be about one man, but spends more time being about other people. The story is largely told by women who he felt were significant in his life, yet there is no passion there whatsoever. Then there is the contradictory title itself. But far from spoiling the portrait, the result of all this dichotomy is a stunning character study which manages to present a compelling and vivid account of a man stuck in a rut, struggling to find his place in a society in which he doesn't want to fit in. Through the eyes of the other characters we get fascinating little insights into his character. One of the most enthralling pieces comes from a former colleague at the University of Cape Town who reflects upon his political standpoint, shedding light on the always present basis of his fiction.

'He thought that politics bought out the worst in people. It brought out the worst in people and also brought to the surface the worst types in society. He preferred to have nothing to do with it...'
What would have been Utopian enough for him?
'The closing down of the mines. The ploughing under of the vine-yards. The disbanding of the armed forces. The abolition of the automobile. Universal vegetarianism, Poetry in the streets. That sort of thing...'
'In other words, poetry and the horse-drawn cart and vegetarianism are worth fighting for, but not liberation from apartheid?'
Nothing is worth fighting for...because fighting only prolongs the cycle of aggression and retaliation.

It is a wonderful passage, reminiscent of that beautiful phrase towards the beginning of Waiting for the Barbarians in which his narrator reflects: “I believe in peace, perhaps even peace at any price.” It is this sort of simple-yet-laden-with-significance phrase which has marked Coetzee's career. He has that uncanny Hemingway-esque knack of striping things to their very essence and presenting them clearly, functionally, yet poetically.

That is why Coetzee's recent experimentation with complicated structure do not suit his work. As in Diary of a Bad Year the style serves only to hamper his fluent and poignant prose. The shifts in narration jar the reader. The most evocative and enjoyable passages are those annotated diary entries which make up the beginning and end of the book. Through them we travel back in time to a South Africa present in much of his fiction, a South Africa in which social atrocity is reflected in individual guilt, where things change yet everything seems to stay the same.

Most of all Summertime recounts the plateau in John Coetzee's life, before literary success transformed everything. It is a period in which he seems to be living the fate he always felt destined to live: “with an ageing parent in a house in the white suburbs with a leaky roof.” There is no sense that anything at all is about to change. And with his father just diagnosed with cancer, the book ends with the probability of many further years of struggle:

It used to be that he, John, had too little employment. Now that is about to change. Now he will have as much employment as he can handle, as much and more. He is going to have to abandon some of his personal projects and be a nurse. Alternatively, if he will not be a nurse, he must announce to his father: I cannot face the prospect of ministering to you day and night. I am going to abandon you. Goodbye. One of the other: there is no third way.
 
Summertime is over. Coetzee is about to achieve his first mainstream success with In the Heart of the Country. It is all beautifully set up for volume four of these wonderful fictionalised autobiographies. Summertime is the best book Coetzee has written since Youth was published seven years ago. It does not matter that there are big gaps which do not fit the reality of his biography. An entire marriage may have been wiped from the record books, as it was in Youth, but that only serves to make the blurring of fact and fiction more poignant. In style and character, one gets the feeling that this portrayal is true to the man Coetzee feels himself to be. It is this self aware honesty which has made his autobiographies such a joy to read. They take the ability to convey what it is like to be alive which is prevalent in all the best fiction and match it with a clarity of thought and analysis derived from biography and mesh them together. The result is a thoroughly readable account of the life of one of our greatest contemporary writers. I just hope a fourth volume is not too long coming.

7.5 out of 10

The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway

Read: November 2008

My wife hates Ernest Hemingway with passion. Something to do with him being misogynistic, and a hunter, and some other things I can't remember right now. She also had to read The Old Man and the Sea in school and hated it. So, being a contrary sort of fellow, I was eager to get my first taste of Hemingway!

And you know what? I really enjoyed it. The Old Man and the Sea is ninety-nine pages of the most simple story you can imagine. The Old Man is a fisherman from a small village near Havana, who has fallen on hard times and failed to catch anything on any of his past eighty-four days at sea. He only survives thanks to the generosity and loyalty of a boy he has taken under his wing. But his luck changes when he gets a bite on one of his hooks, a bite which turns out to be from a fish or superhuman size. So begins an epic struggle between man and fish, a struggle for life, and honour, against which Hemingway paints a view of man’s coexistence with nature. This is a story of an old man of superhuman endeavour, who is able to remain rational and focused even under the greatest strain and faced with almost impossible odds. And it is the story of the close bond of camaraderie, respect, and determination that grows up between the hunter and the hunted. At least in the mind of the hunter, anyway. For, as he observes, “no man is ever alone on the sea.”

In prose as simple and straight forward as anything you are likely to read, The Old Man and the Sea is a fantastic fable, beautifully erudite and fantastically realised. It is inspiring, and tragic, and beautiful, all at the same time.

It is said that you either like Hemingway, or Faulkner, never both. Well, I haven’t read Faulkner yet but I can definitely declare myself in the camp of those who appreciate the simple, economical prose and unromantic style of Ernest Hemingway. And I profess categorically that it does not matter who a writer was in their life, or what they did. I do not need to know them, I do not need to be their friend. It is the book, the work of art which you lay back with and give yourself to, and it remains exceptional, regardless of the character of the person who wrote it.


8 out of 10