Festival Books
R E G U A M E N R E H T A C
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Age of reason
With 30 years of writing behind her, Sharon Olds is a genuine literary legend. Bidisha analyses the honest approach of one of America’s most important poets
It’s time to assess the sins of the father – and the mother. And there’s no one better to do so than one of America’s most influential poets, Sharon Olds, as famous for her tough stylistic swagger as her unflinching mind. Olds was born in 1942 and is the ultimate American creative myth made flesh, a small-town woman with a fire-and-brimstone Calvinist childhood who studied at Columbia and decided, standing on the steps after her graduation ceremony, that she would be a poet. With all the spirit of her nation’s famous chutzpah she did so, and her first collection, Satan Says, was an award-winning dissection of sex, love, power, violence and family written with slicing honesty and hard, glamorous panache. Nearly 30 years have passed since that book and Olds has never put a foot wrong. Her work has grown in fierce power and intelligence, with her second volume, The Dead and the Living, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984. Seven subsequent collections have wrestled, in an epic bravado style, with the issues that get you right where you live. Not only that but she hit a personal high note in 2005 when she publicly threw Laura Bush’s invitation to read at the National Book Festival in Washington DC right back in her face. Writing elegantly of the ‘clean linens . . . and the flames of the candles’, she anticipated seeing at the reception, she sighed with mock despondency, ‘I could not stomach it.’ But the comic triumph of that diplomatic dig at the former First Family shouldn’t detract from her seriousness and importance. Her 1992 collection The Father – about father-daughter relationships and the loss of her own dad to cancer – is an acknowledged masterpiece, topped only by the most recent, One Secret Thing, a work of towering and fearsome might. Its world is one of beautiful but spurious ideals and careless, brutal violence and begins with a series of scorching pieces about the wretched degradations of war, before moving onto a terrifying confrontation with a once- tormenting, now-tormented dying mother whose body is growing ever weaker. The entire collection crackles with an awareness of human cruelty, everyday monstrousness and yearning pathos. One Secret Thing shoves the fantasy aside and rhapsodises the often vile reality. ■ Sharon Olds, 23 Aug, 7pm, £9 (£7).
12 THE LIST FESTIVAL MAGAZINE 20–27 Aug 2009
BOXING
CLEVER Spanning the Scottish Highlands and the wilds of Pakistan, Suhayl Saadi’s new novel is a weighty affair. Doug Johnstone speaks to the Glasgow scribe about writing a vast, tangled web
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‘E pic’ and ‘ambitious’ are adjectives often bandied about the description of novels that in fact display very little of either. That’s not an accusation you could level at Joseph’s Box, the sprawling, expansive, strange and moving new novel by Glasgow-based author and doctor Suhayl Saadi. This is Saadi’s second novel to be published, and follows in the footsteps of his hugely acclaimed debut Psychoraag, named in The List’s Top 100 Scottish Books of All Time. While that debut was a scintillating Scots-Asian stream-of consciousness rant, Saadi’s new offering is more conventionally delivered, but at 670 close-packed pages that play with ideas of myth and legend, hallucination and reality, music, storytelling, history and cultural cross- fertilisation, it’s a quite remarkable book. And yes, it’s very definitely both ‘ambitious’ and ‘epic’.
Joseph’s Box is so laden with fascinating ideas, it’s hard to know where to start describing it. The plot focuses on Zulie MacBeth, a recently bereaved doctor who wades into the Clyde and discovers a large box. Along with Alex, a lute-playing clerk who she meets while making the discovery, she becomes obsessed with the box, which they open to discover a cryptic clue and six more locked boxes inside. The subsequent quest which the pair embark on takes them from the Scottish Highlands to the remotest parts of Pakistan, by way of Sicily and England, in a story which builds like tributaries joining a river, until a final dam- bursting climax. Talking to Saadi is a bit like reading one of his novels, the listener assaulted by a stream of ideas delivered in a fast, high-pitched, excitable blether in which the writer seems unable to talk fast enough to let all the disparate notions out of his brain. ‘I wanted to explore different streams to do with music, spirituality, love and death and all that, as
‘IT’S ALL A BIT LIKE A SPIDER’S WEB, IT COULD BE ENDLESS, ACTUALLY’ writers do,’ he laughs. ‘Also, I was always interested in exploring place and music of different sorts, and loss, things that are common to humanity. I wanted to talk about the fact that civilisation is one giant rubric, it’s not hermetically sealed boxes. Folk music is a great metaphor for that, because of the