Posts Tagged "featured"
Episode 63: The iPad, Dante’s Hell And Ribena Berry Nipples
Bookbabble Episode 63: The iPad, Dante’s Hell And Ribena Berry Nipples
Recorded 8 Feb 2010
Babblers: Gem, Lone, Marcel, Bjorn and Donny
Synopsis:
The crew welcomes a visit from our favourite English farmer (Gem) as they discuss the recently announced iPad, and all the jokes that come with it. Also, Marcel brings our attention to Electronic Arts’s new Dante’s Inferno, based on Dante’s classic of the same name. Is having a half-naked monk killing monsters in the depths of hell a brilliant idea? Also, Terry Pratchett and euthanasia, and find out what the Odyssey has in common with scantily-clad berries.
Show Length: 1:28:36
Mentioned
- The Death Of Bunny Munro, Nick Cave
- The Divine Comedy: Volume 1: Inferno, Dante Alighieri
- Romance of Three Kingdoms, Lo Kuan-Chung
- The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Franz Kafka
- Journey to the West: The Monkey King’s Amazing Adventures, Wu Cheng’en
- Roadside Picnic, Arkady & Boris Strugatski
Links
- Ribena Advert
- The Apple ‘iPad’
- The Onion – Steve Jobs with the iPad
- iPad vs Stone
- Willy Vlautin’s Northline, which has an accompanying soundtrack
- Marcel’s favourite pro-silent music advocate
- Shigekuni – Welcome to Hell
- Terry Pratchett: my case for a euthanasia tribunal
Download the show here.
Read MoreEpisode 61: The Ebook Babble
Bookbabble Episode 61: The Ebook Babble
Recorded 25 Jan 2010
Babblers: Bjorn, Donny with guest Umapagan Ampikaipakan
Synopsis:
The guys talk about Apple’s impending announcement of their supposed tablet device (which we now know as the Apple iPad) and its supposed killer ebook-reader features, and the ebook industry in general. Bjorn taps into his experience in the ebook industry for this one.
Note: This show was recorded several days before the announcement by Apple on Jan 27 2010. Also, this is another episode where we jumped in without introductions at the start.
Show Length: 52:51 mins
Links
Download the show here.
Read MoreBookbabble Episode 57: 2009’s Great and Not So Great Reads
Bookbabble Episode 57: 2009’s Great and Not So Great Reads
Recorded 14 Dec 2009
Babblers: Bjorn, Renee, Marcel, Donny
Synopsis:
The group discusses their best reads of the year, plus some not-so-great reads as well. Also, what books best defined the past decade, given all that has happened in the past 10 years? Plus, Renee treats us to a wonderful rendition of bad sex prose, courtesy of this year’s winner of Literary Review’s 2009 bad sex in fiction award.
Show Length: 1:41:42 mins
Mentioned
- The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell
- Swann’s Way: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1, Marcel Proust
- My Uncle Oswald, Roald Dahl
- Doctor Glas, Hjalmar Söderberg
- Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon
- Code of the Woosters, PG Wodehouse
- 2666, Roberto Bolaño
- Atemschaukel, Herta Müller
- The Land of Green Plums, Herta Müller
- The Passport, Herta Müller
- Landscape Painted with Tea, Milorad Pavic
- Song of Lawino & Song of Okol, Okot p’Bitek
- Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga
- The Restless Supermarket, Ivan Vladislavic
- Reine Pokou, Véronique Tadjo
- Sleepwalking Land, Mia Couto
- Leo Africanus, Amin Maalouf
- Replay, Ken Grimwood
- The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon
- Naked, David Sedaris
- The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett
- The Road, Cormac McCarthy
- The Death of Bunny Munro, Nick Cave
- The Walking Dead Vol1: The Days Gone By, Robert Kirkman
- Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
- No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
- The Abstinence Teacher, Tom Perotta
- Left Behind, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins
- The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid
- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
- Against The Day, Thomas Pynchon
- The collector of worlds, Ilya Troyanov
- When Gravity Fails, George Alec Effinger
- Colson Whitehead
Links
- Bad sex award goes to Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (Literary Review)
- Véronique Tadjo
- “Den danske oversættelse af Atemschaukel udkommer på Gyldendal medio 2010.”
- Bjorn’s Review of Tom Perotta’s The Abstinence Teacher (forum)
- Shigekuni: Field Work: Ilija Trojanow’s “Der Weltensammler”
- Shigekuni: Gotham City: Colson Whitehead’s ”The Intuitionist”
- Shigekuni: Rotter: Colson Whitehead’s “Apex Hides The Hurt”
Download the show here.
Read MoreBookbabble Episode 55: Christmas Gifts!
Bookbabble Episode 55: Christmas Gifts!
Recorded 30 Nov 2009
Babblers: Lone, Marcel, Renee, Donny
Synopsis:
The group talks about Christmas gifts – books we’d like to give people, and what we’d like to receive. We covered Black Friday and Cyber Monday, many books, and a toaster. Also, find out what Doraemon and Renee’s handbag have in common (hint: it’s not the colour).
Show Length: 1:35:20 mins
Mentioned
- Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
- Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol 1, Virginia Woolf
- Intimacy, Hanif Kureishi
- Invisible, Paul Auster
- Lars Saabye Christensen
- Heiner Müller
- PG Wodehouse
- The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940, Samuel Beckett
- Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails: From the Alamagoozlum to the Zombie:100 Rediscovered Recipes and the Stories Behind Them, Ted Haigh
- Barry Trotter and the Unauthorized Parody, Michael Gerber
- Die Reise, Bernward Vesper
- Cromwell, Victor Hugo
- The Passport, Herta Muller
- An Equal Music, Vikram Seth
- A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
- Collected Poem, Paul Auster
- Beautiful Days, Franz Innerhofer
- Raven (Raabe Baikal), Thomas Strittmatter
- The Magicians, Lev Grossman (and the article of Grossman’s that Marcel found)
- The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafón
- The Sorrows of An American, Siri Hustvedt
- The Johnny Maxwell Trilogy: Only You Can Save Mankind, Johnny and the Dead, and Johnny and the Bomb (Johnny Maxwell, Vol. 1, 2, 3), Terry Pratchett
- I like you: Hospitality under the Influence, Amy Sedaris
Links
Download the show here.
Read More“In the Kitchen” by Monica Ali
British Asians:
Monica Ali was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, to a Pakistani father and an English mother. The family immigrated to Bolton, England, when Ali was three years old.
Today 4.2 million immigrants from South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh or Sri Lanka) are living in the United Kingdom; their presence has caused this group to be named British Asians. Monica Ali may not consider herself a member of this group, but to the outsider she fits the profile of the young South Asian artist who often starts out writing about her own culture as she did in her debut “Brick Lane”.
Several very successful South Asians have shown up in the popular entertainment industry since the 1970s, such as Freddie Mercury forming the rock band “Queen” and music producer Biddu Appaiah who composed famous songs like “Kung Fu Fighting” and “I Love to Love”. In 1982, Ben Kingsley starred in his ground-breaking role as Mohandas Gandhi, and in the beginning of the new century, Parminder Nagra joined the US American medical drama series “ER” playing a doctor. Naveen Andrews, who started out in Hanif Kureishi’s film “London Kills Me” (1991) and the miniseries “Buddha of Suburbia” (1994), is now one of the main characters in the American TV series “Lost”.
Besides the obvious universal talent of the aforementioned artists and several others, the British film industry found it hard, at first, to see how the lives of Asian immigrants could be of interest to a wider audience. It was not until 1985, when the film “My Beautiful Laundrette”, written by Hanif Kureishi and directed by Stephen Frears, hit the movie theatres that the filmmakers got convinced of good stories hidden within the Asian community. This gave Asian artists a chance to address and display prejudices and urban myths in a satirical manner, forcing white Englishmen not only to laugh at the Asian people but also at their own stupidity. The miniseries “Buddha of Suburbia” and the comedy talk show “The Kumars at no. 42” charmed the audience with this humorous approach to such a delicate subject and unarmed many, also outside the British Isles.
British Asian writers first appeared in the beginning of the 1980s, and have since bred household names such as Hanif Kureishi, Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul and Raman Mundair. Now, a group of famous and upcoming British Asian writers have launched a website, “The Asian Writer”, where you can find many authors still unknown to the mainstream literature world in Europe.
Monica Ali:
Monica Ali started writing about her own culture and particular environment in “Brick Lane”, which follows a Bangladeshi woman settling down in an arranged marriage in East London. Eventually adapted for screen, the portrait of this woman, her choices and actions which include adultery, caused protests from the local community around the real Brick Lane. Yet the novel won the British Book Award prize “Newcomer of the Year” in 2004. Ali’s second book, “Alentejo Blue”, takes the reader across the water to Portugal with not one main voice but a set of voices, from a small village in the area called “Alentejo”.
In her latest novel, “In the Kitchen”, Ali returns to England and speaks through the voice of the white English Chef, Gabriel Lightfoot. Gabriel is a middle aged executive chef working in an underground kitchen in an old worn down hotel in central London. Here, he manages a multicultural staff from places like Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Russia. Often, Gabriel does not know whether his employees are refugees, illegal immigrants or part of the anonymous foreign low paid migrant workers doing “the odd job” in London. In order to make something of himself, he makes a plan for his life that involves buying his own restaurant and getting married to his girlfriend, Charlie. According to his plan, he will be leaving the kitchen in six months, so he has not bothered to get the proper names or personal data from his staff. But the sudden death of Yuri, a porter from Ukraine, changes everything.
Right from when Gabriel was young, he was set on becoming a chef in a restaurant decorated with the prestigious Michelin stars, but over the years he changes his goal, and steadily gains the necessary experience to become his own boss with his own place. Based on Gabriel’s working class background being from the northern county of Lancashire, we learn that people there still live with their nostalgic dream of a cohesive community. At the same time, while suffering from job losses, they feel threatened by immigrants, and therefore their racism is very much alive. Though having tried to distance himself from this background in order to gain his own life experience and values, Gabriel is forced back to face his past due to his father having terminal cancer. This gives him a new understanding of the complexity and secrets of his family, which went unnoticed to him as a child.
Shortly after the discovery of Yuri’s body, an Eastern European worker named Lena approaches Gabriel. With the police crawling all over the restaurant and especially down in the kitchen, Lena, being an illegal immigrant, doesn’t dare to go back in search of some hidden items. Since she is claiming to be a former sex-worker and a victim of human trafficking, Gabriel takes Lena under his wings and invites her to stay in his flat. During her stay, Lena becomes more than just a friend in need for him, and this threatens Gabriel’s carefully made plan of marriage with Charlie.
The novel is not only about shedding light on the life of migrant workers in the modern Britain. It also deals with the breakdown of a man’s dreams and hopes for a better future, which triggers both a loss of identity and values, and skeletons falling out of the family closet. Abuse and using other people to get what you want from life, and the awareness of doing so, are also an important issues.
Monica Ali shows the reader, that it doesn’t have to be the immediate family or friends who end up teaching you the facts of life. The unsettling images of Yuri’s dead body haunt Gabriel in his dreams and start a journey of searching for a place in the world. So he puts to a test, what he thought to be certainties in life.
Gabriel learns that truth can be found in the most unlikely places and that he cannot run from an unsolved past. Through Lena, he discovers that love goes beyond satisfying one’s own lust and desires. And to his regret, it finally dawns on him that you should hesitate trusting a suit with money. The strangers, who play a minor role in his life, end up being crucial contributors to “making life happen” instead of his original plan.
On a larger scale the story is about the fractured lives many people lead in Western societies today, which have come with the loss of close communities where you would club together with family and friends, with a solid sense of who you are, where you belong and what your national identity stands for. Somehow Gabriel has lost all this, while his father had managed to keep both a longterm relationship with his wife and his lifetime workplace. So Gabriel’s family up north symbolizes the past, and, at the same time, the security many people nowadays see in the extended families that people in cultures outside Europe seem to have.
From this change people might gain a freedom to choose and to leave their families, jobs or their life situation, whenever they want to. But there are no longer sacred truths and certainties anymore. Not aware of this, and in his crisis, Gabriel frantically seeks for the one truth and talks to two staff members. Nicolai represents the scientific approach to understanding why humans act and think the way they do. Oona represents the belief in a more new-age world view of destiny and faith. Gabriel himself rationalises his past failures and makes up stories of what his life is like, to cover up his loneliness and sense of not belonging anywhere. He has become a drifter in a multicultural metropolitan, and in order to gain control over his life, he tries to reason with himself, still following his plan, but he forgets the most important elements in life.
In choosing a white middle aged male from the executive level as main character, Monica Ali has surprised once again and has gone in a the complete opposite direction than with the young Bangladeshi woman, Nazneen, in “Brick Lane”. Ali’s understanding of the psychology of crisis and the detailed descriptions of Gabriel’s stimuli, thoughts and actions are simply brilliantly done. The language gives a vivid insight into the life and working conditions in particularily dark corners of our society.
The initial drama is well crafted with a multi-layered theme, but the breakdown of Gabriel’s world does not lead to any other realisations, besides him going back to reconnect with his roots. Monica Ali paints a picture of the problems many people have to face in modern society. On the other hand, she does not make much use of the potential in the hard-earned lessons Gabriel has endured.
Therefore, as a reader, you end up feeling that “In the Kitchen” is treading water with a crisis that seems to go nowhere. You are left hungry for “the knot of open wounds” to be tied up and hope for at least some tangible conclusions that may lead to a new faith and understanding of life.
It is a shame the ending was not given the attention it deserved, when a longer and more detailed closure was expected and called for – a shame, because it sure is not due to a lack of skills, knowledge or talent of Monica Ali, which gives you the notion that the novel was ended in a hurry.
Lone Christensen
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Monica Ali appeared as a guest at the Danish Royal Library’s event “International Forfatterscence” which was filmed by the Danish national TV and later will be avaible to view on their webpage: http://www.dr.dk/Kultur/International_forfatterscene/20090916131146.htm
Books and film by Monica Ali:
British Asian writers in the UK:
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