Notes from a Small Population: 40+ places with under 500,000 inhabitants

(Please note that this theme runs from January to March 2021 but I've posted early to allow readers to access a recs list in advance due to many members experiencing reduced library and bookshop services or, if they're lucky, increased likelihood of midwinter gift books. The Russians Write Revolutions quarterly theme continues until the end of December 2020.)

This quarter visits the many places with a population of under 500,000 permanent inhabitants.

The theme of a population under 500,000 gives an interesting group of 40+ disparate places with the largest common geographical group being island nations. The official and unofficial languages are equally varied, with dozens of local languages, including Italian, in addition to the colonial influences of English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Arabic.

Although you could extend the group to under 1 million population which adds the Maldives, Cape Verde, Suriname, arguably Western Sahara (Sahrawi / Morocco), Luxembourg, Montenegro, arguably Macau (China), Solomon Islands, Bhutan, Guyana, Comoros, Reunion (France), Fiji, and Djibouti.

I found it difficult to decide whether to list the following suggestions by population, geographically, or alphabetically, so my apologies if I haven't used your preferred categories. I also apologise for leaving out diacritical marks but touchstones doesn't seem to appreciate them.

I've included various forms of colonial overseas territories so you can decide for yourselves whether they count or not for this theme, with the UK and US territories separated as per Reading Globally norms: some overseas territories are self-governing and politically distinct from the colonial power; some have disputed governance; some are culturally or linguistically distinct from the colonial power; some are mostly military bases with few permanent local inhabitants.

I've also included notable non-fiction which had global impact, such as Alfred Dreyfus' prison memoir, Aime Cesaire, and Frantz Fanon, because I know the group tolerates non-fiction when it's interesting enough and on topic (and, let's be honest, much autobiography is a form of fiction anyway). I've listed a few selected books catering to previously stated interests, e.g. prison writing, gay fiction, crime novels, anthologies, and children's books, but many more are available.

Please feel free to add further book suggestions and any corrections in comments!

Americas

Saint Pierre and Miquelon (France)
• Francoise Enguehard, no reviews but fiction in French and English

French Guiana (France)
• Leon-Gontran Damas aka Lionel Cabassou, poetry, essays, and short stories, in French and English translation
• Auxence Contout, poetry, essays, and short stories, in French
• Sylviane Vayaboury, novels in French
• Rene Jadfard, novels in French
• Five Years of My Life is famous prison writing by Alfred Dreyfus
• Papillon is prison escape writing by Henri Charriere

Belize
• Zee Edgell, novels Beka Lamb, Time and the River, In Times Like These, and The Festival Of San Joaquin
• Zoila Ellis, short stories in On Heroes, Lizards and Passion
• Anthologies Memories Dreams And Nightmares: A Short Story Anthology By Belizean Women Writers and Snapshots Of Belize, An Anthology Of Short Fiction

Caribbean 1

Caribbean Netherlands (Netherlands)

Sint Maarten (Netherlands)
• Lasana M. Sekou is a prolific author, e.g. Brotherhood of the Spurs, and edited Where I See The Sun: Contemporary Poetry in St. Martin

Saint Kitts and Nevis
• Caryl Phillips, novels A State of Independence, The Final Passage, and Cambridge
• Bertram Roach's novel Only God Can Make a Tree

Dominica
• Jean Rhys is famous for the novel Wide Sargasso Sea, but she also wrote a few short stories reflecting her childhood background which are in Sleep It Off Lady
• Phyllis Shand Allfrey, novel The Orchid House, short stories in It Falls into Place, and poetry
• Marie-Elena John, novel Unburnable

Antigua and Barbuda
• Jamaica Kincaid, novels including Annie John, The Autobiography of My Mother, Mr Potter and Lucy, short stories in At the Bottom of the River, and travel essays including A Small Place about Antigua and Talk Stories about the US

Aruba (Netherlands)
• Three of Nydia Ecury's short stories are in The Whistling Bird: Women Writers of the Caribbean edited by Pierrette Frickey
• Henry Habibe is a poet who occasionally writes in Spanish or Dutch

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
• Cecil Browne's short stories in The Moon Is Following Me and Feather Your Tingaling (or Cassie P Caribbean PI if you must)
• H. Nigel Thomas, novels (some set in Canada), Spirits in the Dark has a gay protagonist
• Shake Keane was a legendary jazz trumpeter (and poet)

Grenada
• Merle Collins, Lady in a Boat poetry, Angel and The Colour of Forgetting novels, and The Ladies are Upstairs short stories
• Jean Buffong, novels such as Under the Silk Cotton Tree
• Jacob Ross, mostly crime novels Black Rain Falling, The Bone Readers, but also Pynter Bender
• Tobias S. Buckell is a science fiction novelist born in Grenada

Curacao (Netherlands)
• Radna Fabias, Habitus is poetry in Dutch, and 9 Dutch poems with English translations online here:
https://www.versopolis-poetry.com/poet/219/radna-fabias

Caribbean 2

Saint Lucia
• Derek Walcott, Nobel prize winning poetry, famously Omeros
• Garth St. Omer, novels (just read Walcott, mkay?)
• Earl G. Long, novels (or Waallccccootttt!)

Barbados
• Edward Kamau Brathwaite, poetry (bookshop / library search tip: Edward Brathwaite)
• George Lamming, novels including In the Castle of My Skin, essays The Pleasures of Exile
• Austin Clarke, novels including The Polished Hoe, short stories, memoirs and poetry (note: the other poet Aibhistín Ó Cléirigh / Austin Clarke was Irish)
• Timothy Callender, short stories in It So Happen
• Glenville Lovell, novels Fire in the Canes and Song of Night (also writes crime novels set in US)
• Cecil Foster, novels including No Man in the House
• Adisa Andwele, poetry in Bajan nation language Antiquity
• (Note: Inkle & Yarico is a Caribbean classic set in Barbados but Beryl Gilroy was Guyanan-British - she also founded Peepal Tree Press)
• (Note: Paule Marshall was a great novelist but African-American)

Martinique (France)
• Patrick Chamoiseau, novels in French and English including Texaco, Slave Old Man, School Days, and Solibo Magnificent
• Joseph Zobel, novels in French and English including Black Shack Alley
• Aime Cesaire, non-fiction Discourse on Colonialism, and Collected Poetry which presumably includes Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
• Frantz Fanon, non-fiction The Wretched of the Earth

Bahamas
• Ian G. Strachan, novel God's Angry Babies

Gualdeloupe (France)
• Maryse Conde, novels in French with at least 14 English translations including I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (set in US), Segu and sequel (set in Mali), Crossing the Mangrove, Windward Heights, and Victoire: My Mother's Mother
• Simone Schwarz-Bart, novels in French and English including The Bridge of Beyond and Between Two Worlds
• Myriam Warner-Vieyra two novels in French and English, As the Sorcerer Said and Juletane (set in Senegal), and short stories in French
• Daniel Maximin novels in French
• Guy Tirolien, poetry in French

Africa

Seychelles (East African island)
• Arguably eligible, Glynn Burridge's Voices, short stories, is available on kindle

Sao Tome and Principe (West African island)
• Four Poems by Conceicao Lima in Portuguese and English are online here:
https://www.poetrytranslation.org/poems/from/saeo-tome-and-principe
• Olinda Beja, novels in Portuguese

Mayotte (East African island, France)
• Short story by Nassuf Djailani, set in Mayotte and the Comoros, online here:
https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/the-crossing-toward-hope

Europe

Vatican City
• Popes, Catholicism, art, and architecture, or insider conspiracy literature such as...
• Shroud of Secrecy: story of corruption within the Vatican by Millenari

Gibraltar (arguably United Kingdom)

San Marino
• Short story by Roberto Montis online here:
https://theculturetrip.com/europe/articles/read-sammarinese-writer-roberto-monti...

Liechtenstein
• Not eligible for Reading Globally but Paul Gallico, who was American, wrote Ludmila, an illustrated children's folktale

Monaco

Faroe Islands (arguably Denmark)
• The Old Man and His Sons by Heðin Bru
• The Lost Musicians by William Heinesen
• The Brahmadells by Joanes Nielsen

Greenland (arguably Denmark)
• Last Night in Nuuk (US) aka Crimson (UK) by Niviaq Korneliussen
• The Will of the Unseen is a novel by Hans Lynge
• The Veins of the Heart to the Pinnacle of the Mind is poetry by Aqqaluk Lynge who also has poems online
• A Journey to the Mother of the Sea is an illustrated children's book by Maliaraq Vebaek
• An African in Greenland by Tete-Michel Kpomassie from Togo (note: African-American explorer Matthew Henson, not technically eligible for Reading Globally but certainly a minority author with strong personal connections to Greenland, also wrote A Negro Explorer at the North Pole, 1912, which is available online)

Andorra

Isle of Man (arguably UK)

Channel Islands (Balliwick of Guernsey, Balliwick of Jersey, arguably UK)

Iceland
• You could begin with the creation of Iceland in The Prose Edda

Malta
• Guze Stagno if you read Maltese (someone should translate him!)
• Francis Ebejer, seven novels in English and one in Maltese
• Immanuel Mifsud, novel In the Name of the Father, and poetry The Play of Waves

South East Asia

Brunei
• Written in Black by K.H. Lim, possibly?

Oceania

Tokelau (New Zealand)
• Did you know the language of Tokelau is mutually intelligible with the language of Tuvalu?

Niue (New Zealand)
• John Pule is a diasporan artist, novelist, and poet, living in New Zealand, who has written novels such as The Shark that Ate the Sun, and published art books such as Hiapo and Hauaga

Nauru (Micronesia) and Manus Island (Papua New Guinea)
• Controversially used to imprison refugees seeking asylum in Australia. The most famous books written by inmates are from Manus.
• No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison by Kurdistani refugee Behrouz Boochani
• From Hell to Hell by Ravi (aka S. Nagaveeran) was written on Nauru

Wallis and Fortuna (Polynesia, France)
• Futuna: Mo ona puleaga sau or Aux deux royaumes or The two kingdoms, edited by Elise Huffer and Petelo Leleivai. I know nothing about this book but it appears to have been translated into French and possibly also English

Tuvalu (Polynesia)
• Songs of Tuvalu collected by Gerd Koch, includes 2 CDs and an English translation

Cook Islands (New Zealand)
• The children's novel Miss Ulysses of Puka-Puka, 1948, by Johnny Frisbie was the first published work by any Pacific Islander woman. The Frisbies of the South Seas is also available in English

Palau (Micronesia)
• The Palauan Perspectives: a poetry book by Hermana Ramarui was published in 1984 and is showing its age but it does represent Palau well at that time

Marshall Islands (Micronesia)
• Iep Jaltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner

Tonga (Polynesia)
• Konai Helu Thaman, poetry
• Epeli Hauʻofa, fiction, poetry, and essays

Federated States of Micronesia: Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei, and Kosrae
• Pohnpei: My Urohs, poetry, by Emelihter Kihleng
• Anthology: Indigenous Literatures from Micronesia

Kiribati (technically in all four hemispheres!)
• Waa in Storms, poetry +, by Teweiariki Teaero

Samoa (Polynesia)
• Albert Wendt, known for his own writing and as an anthology editor
• Sia Figiel, novels including Where We Once Belonged, They Who Do Not Grieve, and Freelove: a novel, and poetry
• Scar of the Bamboo Leaf is a novel by Sieni A.M.

French Polynesia (France)
• Celestine Hitiura Vaite wrote a trilogy of chicklit beginning with Frangipani

Vanuatu (Melanesia)
• Grace Molisa's poetry in Black Stone II, and Colonised People, and the original Black Stone

New Caledonia (Melanesia, France)
• Dewe Gorode's novel Wreck (warnings for sexual abuses, plural)

Self governing overseas territories of the UK

Cayman Islands
Bermuda
Turks and Caicos Islands
Gibraltar
(British) Virgin Islands
Anguilla
Saint Helena
Monserrat
Falkland Islands

Overseas territories of the US

American Samoa
Northern Mariana Islands
US Virgin Islands
Guam (arguably Cuba)

Enjoy! :-)

Barbados: also Karen Lord, science fiction novels and stories (usually science fiction plus, e.g., SF plus a murder mystery and labyrinths in Unraveling).

How about Gaeltacht, the area within Ireland where Irish is still predominantly the population's first language? As per Wikipedia, there seem to be between 70,000 and 170,000 who use Irish as their first language.

>11 karenb: Excellent!

>12 rocketjk: It's your reading. If you want to include minority languages within larger states, anglophone or otherwise, then that's your decision. :-)

Also, arguably: http://www.librarything.com/groups/readinggloballyii1

ETA also this thread: http://www.librarything.com/topic/260611

There was also a great list of writers compiled by RebeccaNYC for the 2015 Caribbean thread (post 8 onwards) https://www.librarything.com/topic/209482#5384242 — obviously you’ll have to skip Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica, etc.

Two of us read Texaco, I think that was the biggest hit from a small island in that theme, highly recommended. But I was glad to have read The arrivants as well.

>14 thorold: I can't see any fiction authors I've missed on the previous thread's list, although there's one I left out deliberately, lol.

I'm planning on reading Jamaica Kincaid's novel Annie John and travel writing about New York in Talk Stories, and if I have time then also Merle Collins' The Ladies are Upstairs or The Colour of Forgetting.

Thanks for this great introduction, spiralsheep! I own at least a dozen unread books that fit this category, three of which are on my list of books to read in 2021, so I'll plan to get to them at least: In the Castle of My Skin by George Lamming, A State of Independence by Caryl Phillips, and Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau.

Extremely nice list and introduction.

For the Caribbean, Peepal Tree Press is searchable by national identity. Listing some extra authors (lots of poetry). Their collection is also searchable by author's residence, place of birth, or by book setting. Broken touchstones are either because I can't spell or because they aren't working. :\

Dominica: Elma Napier (A Flying Fish Whispered)

Grenada: Malika Booker (Pepper Seed) and Jacob Ross (Tell No-One About this, others)
Saint Lucia: Adrian Augier (Navel String), Kendel Hippolyte (Wordplanting, others), Jane King (Performance Anxiety), John Robert Lee (Pierrot, others), Vladimir Lucien (Sounding Ground)

Barbados: Kevyn Alan Arthur (England and Nowhere, others), Christine Barrow, (Black Dogs and the Colour Yellow), Jane Bryce (Chameleon and Other Stories), June Henfrey (Coming Home and Other Stories), Carl Jackson (Nor the Battle to the Strong), Cherie Jones (The Burning Bush Women & Other Stories), Antony Kellamn (Tracing JaJa, others), Sai Murray (Ad-liberation, others), Esther Phillips (The Stone Gatherer, others), Dorothea Smartt (Ship Shape, others)

Bahamas: Robert Antoni (Cut Guavas, others), Marion Bethel (Bougainvillea Ringplay), Christian Campbell (Running the Dusk), Helen Klonaris (If I Had the Wings), Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming (Curry Flavour)

I wanted to read from the books on my world literature book list that I can get.

Nuanua: Pacific Writing in English since 1980 (Kiribati), something by Albert Wendt (Samoa), Nart Sagas (Abkhazia), "Young People of the Pacific Islands" (French Polynesia)

.... and Omeros by Derek Walcott (Saint Lucia). Finally got around to reading The Odyssey specifically to read that one.

I’m happy I’ll be able to participate for the first time in a long time as I have Texaco on my TBR and as it’s a book my mom has been telling me to read for the past 20 years or so, it’ll be nice to finally get to tell her I read it.

(>1 spiralsheep: Oh, I forgot to say thanks for doing all the setup work!)

>17 Settings: Thank you for the lovely long list of additions!

Elma Napier was Scottish although she did live in the Caribbean for a long time and I think long-term residents should count if readers want.

Malika Booker was born in London and considers herself British (I've met her!). Her work does deal with the Afro-Caribbean-British experience though, which often includes long visits and temporary residence in various "home" places.

I'm not familiar with all the authors you've listed but anyone reading to fulfil a challenge might need to check their personal criteria for some of those other authors too.

Yeah, Peepal Press could be listing past and current national identities or they are not very accurate / up to date / have their own perspective.

Challenge reading with this kind of thing is a challenge in itself.

>22 Settings: Peepal Tree Press are an excellent publisher so I'll excuse them if they're not also perfect admins (as long as everyone gets paid what they're owed). :D

Posted in the wrong thread. :|

Edit: Gah now I've gotta find something to write that's potentially worth the post.

The Roar of Morning by Tip Marugg is what I have for Curacao on my list (author is possibly not strictly from Curacao but close enough for my purposes). Also read Haiku in Papiamentu, which I did not like, and Carel de Haseth's "Slave and Master", which I didn't like either but admit has a great deal of historical value.

Have also read stuff by Jamaica Kincaid, Jean Rhys, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and Aime Cesaire, all of which are phenomenal authors.

2021 is going to be a "reading from my own shelves" type of year. I want to cut my TBR by 50%. Therefore my choices are limited: The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and Burial Rites, a true story in novel form about the last woman executed in Iceland.

>24 Settings: Have also read stuff by Jamaica Kincaid, Jean Rhys,

These are the only two I am familiar with and really like their books. Will have to check the other two authors you mentioned

Anyone seeking a read-a-like for Wide Sargasso Sea might want to consider Windward Heights by Maryse Condé which is probably also available via many libraries.

That looks interesting, but what if you really hated weathering (spelled on purpose) heights and wanted to slap both characters silly? Or will I be pleasantly surprised?

>24 Settings: I enjoyed The roar of morning, in a low-key kind of way. Plenty of Curaçao geography there, too.

>28 cindydavid4: Lol, I'm probably the wrong person to ask, as I also rolled my eyes at the protags of Wuthering Heights, even when we read it at school (or maybe that was the point - literature as inoculation?). I do find that, as with Wide Sargasso Sea, I often like new perspectives better than the original. I also like sharing info about available options but I rarely rec books to individuals because I think people can decide better for themselves.

You'll know what you want when you see the shiny thing! :-)

Icelandic fiction it is for me in Q1 then -- Independent People had been on my TBR for way too long and I have a few Icelandic crime series I need to catch up on. :) And I have The complete sagas of Icelanders, including 49 tales on my shelves.

Not sure if I have anything else suitable but who knows - need to do some digging.

>13 spiralsheep: "It's your reading. If you want to include minority languages within larger states, anglophone or otherwise, then that's your decision. :-)

OK. The topic title doesn't say anything about "states," though. I guess that was what confused me. The Irish speaking western part of the Irish Republic is certainly a linguistically distinct "{place} with under 500,000 inhabitants."

Anyway, my question was basically academic, as I don't have any specific plans to read anything from that part of Ireland in the coming calendar quarter. Carry on!

>32 rocketjk: In the planning thread I originally suggest this topic for countries with small populations. The intro and recs list both reflect that. I've included recs for overseas territories which are culturally distinct and fall within the general aims of Reading Globally by being either primarily non-anglophone or anglophone but with restricted access to the major global anglophone publishing industry, mostly because many of them are politically disputed and locals see themselves as a separate "nation" from the colonial power, in hopes of encouraging members to read more widely.

However, people make their own decisions about what to read for any particular topic, and I have no intention of hosting differently to that established group norm.

If someone approaches me for recs for works translated from Irish Gaelic then I can certainly help them.

>30 spiralsheep: I do find that, as with Wide Sargasso Sea, I often like new perspectives better than the original. I also like sharing info about available options but I rarely rec books to individuals

I do as well, which is probably why I love twisted fairy tales (Im leading a Shakespeares Children theme in Reading through Time if anyone is interested in the above) I liked WSS, so I wll see about this one, and won't come down on you to hard for suggesting it to me :)

>31 AnnieMod: My freshman year, I ended up in enrolling in a Scandinavian Lit class coz everything else was full. Ended up being one of my fav classes loved all the sagas, as well as the history and cultural lessons. Sounds like those would be a fun reread for me

If anyone is looking for titles from Liechtenstein, there's a recent German-language novel, Für immer die Alpen by Benjamin Quaderer, which has been getting a lot of media attention.

Armin Öhri is another Liechtenstein author (whose works include the programmatically titled "Liechtenstein: Roman einer Nation", and a number of historical mysteries set mostly in Berlin...) The only thing translated into English that I could find is a volume of poetry by Michael Donhauser.

I'm a bit early but as of last year reading The good shepherd, a novella by Gunnar Gunnarsson (from Iceland), is part of my Christmas tradition. In it we follow the shepherd Benedikt and his dog and tame sheep as they go up in the Icelandic highlands to rescue any left behind sheep before winter properly sets in. As may be guessed from the title it is a deeply Christian novella but not in a preaching or shallow way. Instead it follows a good man's fight against the elements and his relationship with animals, nature, and God. It is poetic and beautiful, so, unless you are allergic to any spiritual readings, I recommend it.

I wasn't planning to read this but here I am three days early... I blame temptress cindydavid4.

I read the 1969 play A Tempest by Aime Cesaire that retells Shakespeare's Tempest, set on an island where the European colonial Prospero enforces slavery on a mulatto Ariel and a Black/indigenous Caliban. The text pushes beyond critiquing colonialism and into decolonisation. I read Richard Miller's 1985/1992 anglophone translation but wished I'd also had the original French for side by side comparison.

There are some interesting linguistic choices that aren't from Shakespeare, such as Prospero being "marooned" on the island, and the first scene very pointedly has people participating as players literally choosing their own characters: "You want Caliban? Well, that's revealing." "And there's no problem about the villains either: you, Antonio; you Alonso, perfect!" Caliban's first word is "Uhuru!" (Freedom!). Caliban rejects the slave name foisted on him by Prospero, and wants to be called "X" (like Malcolm, clearly). There's intertextual Baudelaire: "Des hommes dont le corps est mince et vigoureux,/ Et des femmes dont l'oeil par sa franchise étonne." And the play's intellectual coup de grâce is Prospero's choice of taunt at Caliban for not murdering him: "See, you're nothing but an animal... you don't know how to kill." Unlike Prospero and his fellow Europeans, Antonio and Sebastian, who have shown they know how to murder motivated by personal ambition.

In the end we find that Caliban has always been free in his own mind while Prospero continues to enslave himself to his desire for power over others.

ETA: Some context for Aime Cesaire's play The Tempest, published 1969, from Ryszard Kapuscinski's book Travels with Herodotus; a description of the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Negres, Dakar, Senegal, 1963: "Theatrical performances abound in the streets and the squares. African theatre is not as formalistic as the European. A group of people can gather someplace extemporaneously and perform an impromptu play. There is no text; everything is the product of the moment, of the passing mood, of spontaneous imagination. The subject can be anything:" (my note: anything that is a shared story which can be improvised around, from daily life to texts such as Shakespeare's The Tempest to traditional oral myths and legends.) The subject matter must be simple, the language comprehensible to all." /para/ "Someone has an idea and volunteers to be director. He assigns roles and the play begins."

>38 spiralsheep:

Nice choice! We read that for Western Humanities class. I remember it fondly but not clearly.

A topic on classic literature reworks could have an entire Caribbean section. A Tempest, Omeros, Wide Sargasso Sea, Windward Heights (I feel like there are many more...). I want to comment further on this but too difficult to phrase without falling into generalities, so going to not, haha.

>39 Settings: Yes, or expand it into a worldwide theme to include works such as A Grain of Wheat by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (Tempest, Kenya) and We that are Young by Preti Taneja (King Lear, India) etc.

>39 Settings: ...and a sub-section on writers from big countries stealing the idea, as in Coetzee’s Foe and Marina Warner’s Indigo

>38 spiralsheep: bwahahaha! My work here is done! Read that post in the shakepears children thread that looks really good. Saw it on Amazon and its now in my cart Looking forward to reading it!

>42 cindydavid4: :D

I read the Richard Miller translation, because I was offered a copy, but I think there's at least one other English translation. Reading the play was a 3.5/5 for me but I suspect it would be much more fun to produce. The script was loose enough to allow different interpretations, from broadly comedic to pointedly political.

Happy Gregorian rollover!

I decided to try noticing if these places have anything in common, in addition to mostly being islands or small coastal lands. I'm scouting for mentions of the sea, the shore, fishing and fishermen, seafood, etc. So it was amusing to read in my first book for this theme:

"I now live in Manhattan. The only thing it has in common with the island where I grew up is a geographical definition."

Talk Stories by Jamaica Kincaid (Antiguan-American) is a compilation of autobiographical essays taken from the New Yorker magazine's Talk of the Town section from 1974-83. Some are local gossip column style, some are sociology disguised as gossip, and some are travel writing disguised as sociological gossip. The first essay, which Jamaica Kincaid didn't expect to be printed without more editing, ends with an excellent carnival clowning joke referencing Malcolm X. The subsequent essays are more sedate, as one would expect from a marginalised writer trying to fit into the mainstream, but all of them are professionally written and retain more interest than might be imagined for pieces printed as 1970s gossip columns.

Quotes

Carnival clowning, 1974: "As Lord Kitchener said to me, 'accessibility is the key to success.' After that I had a large hunk of Shabazz Bean Pie. I say without reservation, this is the No.1 Third World dessert. In fact, every time I have some of it I think kindly of Mr Shabazz and everybody with an 'X' after his name."

Advice from editors, 1979, lol: "A fiction writer can write about anorexia nervosa, abortion, death, and homosexuality in hard-cover books for young adults but not in soft-cover books for young adults."

Lmao, 1981: "The other day, the people at the Ford Motor Company threw a cocktail party for Anne and Charlotte Ford at the new Palace Hotel. Almost all the guests there looked as though they never drove themselves anywhere or, if they did, they didn't actually have to."

>44 spiralsheep: I'm scouting for mentions of the sea, the shore, fishing and fishermen, seafood, etc.

I decided to start with Liechtenstein, following up one of the hints in >36 spiphany: — no sea-shore, of course, but, being in a flat-bottomed stretch of the Rhine valley between the mountains and Lake Constance, they have had their fair share of floods, apparently. I'm just reading about the one in 1927. (picture here: https://historisches-lexikon.li/index.php?title=Datei:Ueberschwemmungen.jpg&...; )

>45 thorold: Wow. We have flash flooding here despite the steepness - 2ft deep outside my friends' door last week - but, as you observe, it all runs down into the wide river valley below.

I was thinking that another aspect these places have in common is perhaps linguistic multinationalism, through sharing languages with larger neighbours or creoles / patois / pidgens / colonial languages. So Liechtenstein and Antigua would share that similarity. I'm sure there are other similarities too if people choose to pay attention.

>44 spiralsheep: As Lord Kitchener said to me, 'accessibility is the key to success.' — it took me a moment to put that one in context and work out which Lord Kitchener Kincaid was talking about there. The Windrush one, not the Khartoum one, evidently...!

>44 spiralsheep: Ive enjoyed kincaid's novels Lucy and A Small Place and think I've read some of her essays; would like to read that collection

>47 thorold: Yes, that was clearer in the carnival context, but I suspect the comparative inaccessibility of a Shabazz / X joke to the New Yorker audience was intentional following on from "As Lord Kitchener said to me, 'accessibility is the key to success.' " Kincaid did say she didn't expect her notes to be published without edits.

>48 cindydavid4: Talk Stories is a light and amusing collection and I enjoyed it but I wouldn't want to read all 77 pieces in one sitting. The essays are well written, as you'd expect from Kincaid, although not as well as Annie John, which I'm currently reading, and some of them have experimental forms although not extreme experiments as they were published in the New Yorker. I wouldn't prioritise it above much of her other work but it's a fun palate cleanser.

I case anyone is still confused, Lord Kitchener's calypso song London is the Place for Me (now possibly better known as That One From Paddington), 3mins:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGt21q1AjuI

:D

Hah! What a small (online) world it is:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/317445#7277382

Not sure what to do with this theme. I'm not feeling the connection between literature and population size at all. Seems random, like "read books with a blue cover". I think I'll just wait and see what y'all do with it.

>52 LolaWalser: You'd probably like Calypso Rose's song/video Young Boy in which she mocks men who chase after partners who're too young for them.

"I'm not feeling the connection between literature and population size at all."

Apart from the sense of struggling to find one's own language and audience, I've noticed a sense of social claustrophobia, e.g. in Jamaica Kincaid's work. If you live on an island with fewer than 65,000 people, which is smaller than my nearest market town, then your extended social network includes most of the inhabitants one way or another: one main street and market where most people shop, few schools, and limited public social opportunities. The respectable people all attend the same churches and the disreputable people all drink in the same bars. Even with traffic between islands, and people coming and going for higher education and work, everyone knows you because you all see each other all the time. Little real privacy and no secrets. And people who live at the margins, either socially or geographically, are highly visible when they do make appearances.

>53 spiralsheep: To add a different example of the same close social inter-relatedness: my Icelandic friends can all recite lists of their ancestors, exactly like their ancestors in the sagas many generations ago. So that's closeness through historical time rather than physical space, but I'm guessing it has similar effects on people's minds. Most Icelanders are related to each other whether they want to be or not.

Yes, I'm picking up a lot of social inter-relatedness here too. Also a sense that when you live in a small country, independence comes at the cost of being nice to your large neighbours, and it also seems to involve acceptance that you aren't going to be able to enjoy the same kind of individual liberties (political and social) that you do in a bigger place.

This is my first read for the theme:

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Liechtenstein is 160 km² and has a population of around 39 000 (around 10 000 in 1945). For the potted history, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liechtenstein
Nauru is 21 km² and has a population of around 10 000

I visited the country on a business trip about 20 years ago (nothing to do with secret trusts or bags of banknotes, I was there to look at high-tech machinery!) — to all intents and purposes it seemed like a perfectly normal Swiss canton, the only obvious difference was in the number of banks in Vaduz.

Öhri's a Liechtensteiner who grew up in Ruggel and is president of the Liechtenstein writers' club, but now lives just over the border in Canton St Gallen. He's previously written a series of crime novels set in Bismarck's Berlin.

Liechtenstein - Roman einer Nation (2016) by Armin Öhri (Liechtenstein, 1978- )

  

This is one of those postmodern novels that is all about the adventures of a (fictional) writer with the same name as the author who is researching a book about a particular topic, and where you are kept guessing for a long time about what is going to turn out to be true and what fictional, rather like the things W G Sebald, Javier Cercas or Laurent Binet do. But with the additional twist that in this case the narrator is going through some kind of neurological illness as he's writing the book, so you're even less sure you can trust his experiences...

The narrator has been hired by a prominent Liechtenstein law firm to write a biography of the firm's founder, Wilhelm Anton Risch, conveniently born around 1920 to coincide with the re-launch of the sovereign state of Liechtenstein after the ruling family got kicked off their main estates in Czechoslovakia at the end of the First World War and had to move to the less cosy surroundings of their odd little land-holding in the upper Rhine valley. Risch experiences the disastrous floods of 1927, gets caught up in the fledgling Liechtenstein Nazi youth movement, has to go into exile after the abortive Putsch in March 1939, and serves in the German army during World War II. After the war he travels the world, spending time in the even smaller country of Nauru, then returns to Liechtenstein to practice law and manage trusts.

This gives Öhri plenty of scope to look at some of the less edifying aspects of Liechtenstein history in the 20th century, in particular the high incidence of selective memory loss among former Nazis (and their reluctance to let anyone write about national history), as well as a small selection of the most interesting financial scandals. Through Risch's daughter, he also finds space to tell us about the embarrassingly slow progress of the campaign to give women the vote — successful only after the third referendum, in 1984(!), when the proposition was passed by the narrowest of margins after a rare personal appeal to voters by the ruling prince. And the famous 2003 constitution, widely touted as the least democratic in Europe, which essentially gives the prince powers to do whatever he likes, regardless of voters or parliament.

But there are positive things as well: the pleasanter sides of living in a country where everyone knows everyone else's relatives. Öhri tells us a couple of times that the usual Liechtenstein enquiry to a stranger is "Wem Ghörst?" (Who are your folks?), and that the "Du" form is standard between Liechtensteiners. And the one reasonably positive story in Liechtenstein's history of international relations, when it was the only country in Western Europe to refuse Stalin's requests for forcible repatriation of Soviet citizens after World War II. A central episode in the early part of the book is the flight of the 500 men of General Smyslovsky's First Russian National Army, who had fought on the German side in the war, to seek asylum in Liechtenstein in May 1945. Öhri makes his character Risch a medical officer in Smyslovsky's force. It turns out that Öhri has a personal connection here: as a toddler he unwittingly photo-bombed the unveiling of a monument to the border-crossing of the Russians, and he reproduces the resulting charming snapshot of his younger self side-by-side with the general.

There's a strong Tintin flavour to the early career of Risch, at its most extreme when, aged 17, he is sent to Berlin as envoy of the Volksdeutsche youth movement in Liechtenstein, and he and his little dog are granted an audience with Hitler, but continuing with his journey across Russia and the Pacific (complete with shipwreck). It almost looks as though Öhri didn't notice he was doing this at first, then caught himself at it and decided to turn it into a joke against himself: his Russian chapter is called "Im Lande der Sowjets"!

Probably too many different things going on here to make a really strong novel, and all the characters apart from the country itself turn out to be rather elusive, but Öhri is a fluent and competent writer, and it reads like a good, page-turning crime thriller, postmodern flourishes notwithstanding.

>55 thorold: Interesting comparison of Liechtenstein and Nauru by population and geographical size (especially with Liechtenstein's population growing while Nauru's geography shrinks under rising sea levels).

"the re-launch of the sovereign state of Liechtenstein after the ruling family got kicked off their main estates in Czechoslovakia at the end of the First World War"

We have some, mostly absentee, second-home owners around here too but not quite on that scale.

"This gives Öhri plenty of scope to look at some of the less edifying aspects of Liechtenstein history in the 20th century, in particular the high incidence of selective memory loss among former Nazis"

If you want to compare former Nazis then Requiem for a Malta Fascist by Francis Ebejer fits this topic.

"the embarrassingly slow progress of the campaign to give women the vote — successful only after the third referendum, in 1984(!)"

Quoted for truth: "to all intents and purposes it seemed like a perfectly normal Swiss canton" (not until 1971 to 1991)

Sounds an interesting read.

I read Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid, which is a bildungsroman set in Antigua. It's well written and the descriptions are interesting enough to be a 4* read, but unfortunately I didn't find the protagonist personally engaging.

When describing language, the story doesn't distinguish between the familiarity of Leeward Islands Creole and Standard English but does mark out the unfamiliarity of the protagonist's mother's "French patois" from Dominica.

Both Jamaica Kincaid's non-fiction Talk Stories, which I read recently, and Annie John anticipate and revel in the potential anonymity of big city life compared to individual visibility on a small island.

And in Annie John the surrounding sea is ever present.

But I'll let the following quotes speak for the book.

Quotes

Fish, lying: "When I got home, my mother asked me for the fish I was to have picked up from Mr. Earl, one of our fishermen, on the way home from school. But in my excitement I had completely forgotten. Trying to think quickly, I said that when I got to the market Mr. Earl told me that they hadn’t gone to sea that day because the sea was too rough. “Oh?” said my mother, and uncovered a pan in which were lying, flat on their sides and covered with lemon juice and butter and onions, three fish: an angelfish for my father, a kanya fish for my mother, and a lady doctor fish for me - the special kind of fish each of us liked. While I was at the funeral parlor, Mr. Earl had got tired of waiting for me and had brought the fish to our house himself."

Swimming, or not: "My mother was a superior swimmer. When she plunged into the seawater, it was as if she had always lived there. She would go far out if it was safe to do so, and she could tell just by looking at the way the waves beat if it was safe to do so. She could tell if a shark was nearby, and she had never been stung by a jellyfish. I, on the other hand, could not swim at all. In fact, if I was in water up to my knees I was sure that I was drowning. My mother had tried everything to get me swimming, from using a coaxing method to just throwing me without a word into the water. Nothing worked. The only way I could go into the water was if I was on my mother’s back, my arms clasped tightly around her neck, and she would then swim around not too far from the shore. It was only then that I could forget how big the sea was, how far down the bottom could be, and how filled up it was with things that couldn’t understand a nice hallo. When we swam around in this way, I would think how much we were like the pictures of sea mammals I had seen, my mother and I, naked in the seawater, my mother sometimes singing to me a song in a French patois I did not yet understand, or sometimes not saying anything at all. I would place my ear against her neck, and it was as if I were listening to a giant shell, for all the sounds around me - the sea, the wind, the birds screeching - would seem as if they came from inside her, the way the sounds of the sea are in a seashell. Afterward, my mother would take me back to the shore, and I would lie there just beyond the farthest reach of a big wave and watch my mother as she swam and dove."

Abandoned lighthouse as panopticon: "The Red Girl and I walked to the top of the hill behind my house. At the top of the hill was an old lighthouse. It must have been a useful lighthouse at one time, but now it was just there for mothers to say to their children, “Don’t play at the lighthouse,” my own mother leading the chorus, I am sure. Whenever I did go to the lighthouse behind my mother’s back, I would have to gather up all my courage to go to the top, the height made me so dizzy. But now I marched boldly up behind the Red Girl as if at the top were my own room, with all my familiar comforts waiting for me. At the top, we stood on the balcony and looked out toward the sea. We could see some boats coming and going; we could see some children our own age coming home from games; we could see some sheep being driven home from pasture; we could see my father coming home from work."

>56 spiralsheep: Yes, "perfectly normal Swiss canton" is something of an oxymoron!

Öhri plays a bit with the parallels between Nauru and Liechtenstein, and he uses the phosphate mining to give his Liechtensteiner his start in business, but he could have done more, probably: he doesn't go into the way Nauru, trying to compensate for bad investments by its phosphate fund, attempted to get into the tax-haven business (as invented by Liechtenstein) at exactly the wrong moment...

I had no idea Nauru was a tax haven before going into the penal colony business (probably because UK tax haven islands tend to be more notorious).

Please imagine this is the longer and more thoughtful comment that was previously eaten by my hiccuping internet connection.

Iceland is 103 000 km² and has a population of around 360 000 — which must make it one of the biggest "small countries", in both area and population. The Icelandic population density is about 1800 times smaller than that of the Netherlands, for instance, but it's still ten times that of Greenland.

I transitioned from Liechtenstein to Iceland via Happísland and Fantasviss, jokey travel books by a Swiss writer who spent some time living in Iceland, Cédric Roserens. They were mildly amusing, but a bit off-topic here, so I'll just mention them.

This next book was written from an Icelandic perspective, but turned out to be set mostly on the Continent. I enjoyed Auður's offbeat novel Butterflies in November a few years ago, when we were doing "Scandinavia"; this one is (marginally) more conventional in form:

The Greenhouse (2007) by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir (Iceland, 1958- ), translated by Brian FitzGibbon Audiobook, narrated by Luke Daniels

  

The narrator, a man of 22 who has recently lost his mother and even more recently gained a daughter as a result of half a night spent with a woman he barely knows, has decided to pursue his very un-Icelandic passion for gardening by undertaking a project to restore the famous rose-garden belonging to a monastery in a remote village in an unspecified southern European country. He has a fairly adventurous journey to get there, including an appendectomy in the big city and a symbolically-overloaded night eating endless varieties of game in a hunting-lodge in the middle of an endless forest, but when he eventually reaches the monastery, halfway through the book, he's happy to settle in to the quiet company of the monks and the physical work of restoring the garden. But then Anna turns up with their baby daughter, and he discovers the magic of fatherhood and even starts, belatedly, to fall in love with his co-parent.

There's a lot of good stuff here, gardening, cookery, watching a baby grow up, an entertaining wise old priest with a passion for arthouse movies, and some nicely managed offstage comedy in the phone-calls with the narrator's elderly father. And a lot of subtle culture-clash between Icelandic and Mediterranean ways of seeing the world. But set against all this straightforward realism are some slightly unsettling, but not too intrusive, non-realistic elements, which give the whole thing a slightly fairy-tale feel. As though there's some great mystical puzzle that's probably not going to be unravelled in the last chapter.

Interesting, but the baby gets away with stealing the show a little too much, as babies tend to.

The audiobook narration by Luke Daniels is peculiarly annoying, as he gives ludicrous silly voices to most of the older characters, including the narrator's dad, the priest Father Thomas, the butcher, and numerous others. A kind of squeaky Hollywood-Irish, which doesn't seem to have anything either Icelandic or Mediterranean to it.

Another non-crime Icelandic novel from my TBR pile. Hallgrímur is a painter and the author of the wonderfully-titled Hitman's guide to housecleaning.

101 Reykjavik (1996; English 2002) by Hallgrímur Helgason (Iceland, 1959- ) translated by Brian FitzGibbon

  

A few years ago I read the experimental sixties novel Tómas Jónsson: Bestseller, and assumed that the smelly, old, antisocial, self-proclaimed rapist and serial-killer Tómas must be as unpleasant as an Icelandic anti-hero could get. Well, that was before I met Hallgrímur's protagonist Hlynur Björn. He's thirty-three years old, still living with his mother, and has never done a day's work in his life. He gets up around four in the afternoon, and spends his time watching porn, hanging around in bars, lusting after women he hasn't slept with yet, and running away from those who have been weak and foolish enough to have had sex with him in the past. When drunk or on drugs he's liable to indulge in unplanned bad behaviour that make the sheet-burning, sexual assault and vomiting of the classic antiheroes of sixties Angry Young Men novels look like mere boorishness.

The only reason anyone would want to spend 350 pages in the company of this walking disaster area (and it's only the slimmest of reasons: this is a book you might well decide to toss aside when you reach page two and Hlynur is already masturbating all over it) is Hlynur's hilariously frank and funny narrative voice, which makes you keep reading, despite your common sense telling you this is only going to get worse, because he makes you want to find out how Hlynur gets out of this particular mess. Brian FitzGibbon has clearly done an amazing job translating Hallgrímur's complicated puns, code-switching, pop-culture references and mockery of Icelandic culture.

There is a plot of sorts, with nods to Hamlet, Gazon maudit and Independent people (amongst other things), and Hlynur is exposed to a whole string of powerful life-changing events, all of which miraculously fail to change his life in any obvious way. Indeed, as in Tómas Jónsson, we're never completely sure how much Hlynur has really experienced and how much has been a drug-induced hallucination.

A book in the worst possible taste, and not something I would ever have picked up if I'd known more about it, but still very funny and oddly compelling.

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A very clever cover image, that needs to be opened up fully to see the joke: the photograph is by Peter Steuger.

>8 spiralsheep: I would suggest adding Russell Soaba's Maiba for Papua.

>62 Gypsy_Boy: Papua New Guinea has a population 8,000,000 people over the original limit for this theme. I only included Manus island as a side note to Nauru, which is eligible with a population under 15,000. But thank you for the book rec.

>63 spiralsheep: Oops. I saw it and didn't pause to think. (Sheepish emoji)

>64 Gypsy_Boy: It's okay! If there's one (library)thing we all have in common it's that we love books and talking about them. :-)

Lali: A Pacific Anthology edited by Albert Wendt (I'm done messing with touchstones lol)

Authors from the Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, New Hebrides, Niue, Papa New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Western Samoa (not all of those are relevant). Some of the poems are bilingual. I recognize that I don't need to be the intended audience for everything, but I'd have appreciated more background information on the literary scenes in these countries + more biographical information on the authors.

There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the selections, but don't think I got much out of this. Going to put it down to mood and my own inability to concentrate due to current events. :| It happens, unfortunately.

Albert Wendt, I believe the most famous author (and the editor), has two stories and some poetry. I'm not encourage to read anything else by Wendt.

Available free online. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL26358586M/Lali_a_Pacific_anthology

Nart Sagas: Ancient Myths and Legends of the Circassians and Abkhazians edited by John M Colarusso

This is what I have for Abhkazia (partially recognized, pop. ~250k) on my by country list.

A collection of ancient legends and myths from the Caucasus. Many of these stories are interesting reads without any of the context, but with the history, connections to similar myths (many parallels to Vedic, Greek, and Iranian myths), and Colarusso's frequent etymological notes on names, they're deeply fascinating. A lot of stories are present in multiple versions, which adds another layer of interest.

Many of these have interesting translation histories, but didn't keep it straight well enough to summarize.

There's another one, Tales of the Narts: Ancient Myths and Legends of Ossetians. Look forward to reading that too.

>67 Settings: I recently read The Border : a journey around Russia and the author Erika Fatland visited both South Ossetia and Abkhazia but apart from the geography, and the fact they're both on/off war zones, she didn't convey anything about how their cultures differ from their neighbours.

>68 spiralsheep:

I'm not sure how much you can connect those stories to the modern nation of Abkhazia. Nart Sagas are shared across the Caucasus. (Do think it'd be inaccurate to say that they don't connect though).

Suspect they were originally written down and distributed with the same sort of purpose as Grimms' fairytales, but the current editor is interested in comparative mythology and linking myths via etymology - not finding the intrinsic characteristics of the Abkhazians or fostering a sense of cultural unity. They do give some details about how Nart Sagas from the Abkhazians differ from Nart Sagas from the Circassians.

On to another small country I've actually visited myself.
There are surprisingly few of these, even in Europe: I've never got to San Marino or the Vatican, which should be easy, and even Monaco was confined to a token break-of-journey; Andorra I've only seen in the distance. Luxembourg, where I often spent childhood holidays, sadly doesn't count any more, its population, which was around 350k then, has shot up to over 600k in recent years.

The Faroe Islands have a land area of 1 400 km² and a population of around 52 000. Since 1948, they have been an autonomous part of the Kingdom of Denmark.

One of the things that ran through my mind when this topic was first proposed was that it would be a motivation to read some more William Heinesen. When we did Scandinavia I read The lost musicians and The good hope, both of which I enjoyed very much. The good hope is Heinesen's masterpiece, a powerful historical novel about the colonial oppression of the islands under a corrupt governor in the 17th century, and that's the book you should read if you want to know about the history of the islands.

Heinesen grew up in a middle-class shipowning family in Tórshavn, studied in Copenhagen and worked there as a journalist for a while before returning to the islands to help run the family business. He was a poet and visual artist as well as a novelist of international standing. Because of his background and education, he wrote in Danish, rather than Faroese, which was not taught in schools in his day and was only just in the process of being revived as a written language. When there were rumours that he was in line to win the Nobel, towards the end of his life, he announced that he didn't want to be considered for the prize because the first Faroese winner should be someone who wrote in Faroese.

(There was already one Faroese laureate, Niels Rydberg Finsen, who won the 1903 medicine prize. Wikipedia tells us that this gives the islands the highest per capita ratio of laureates anywhere in the world!)

Glyn Jones was professor of Scandinavian languages at UEA and a long-standing friend of Heinesen: his 1980 translation of The black cauldron seems to have been largely responsible for establishing Heinesen's reputation in the English-speaking world.

The Tower at the Edge of the World: A Poetic Mosaic Novel about My Earliest Youth (1976) by William Heinesen‬ (Faroes, 1900-1991) translated by W Glyn Jones (UK, 1928-2014)

  

Heinesen's last novel is an autobiographical look back from the perspective of old age at how a child experiences the process of discovering the world it lives in.

The narrator, Amaldus, in 1976, looks down from his metaphorical tower at the (chronological) end of his own world at the child-Amaldus living in the early years of the 20th century on a little rocky patch of land in the sea, a world that clearly stretches no further than the lighthouse at the tip of the island. But the years pass, he learns that there is a bigger world out there, places his father's ships sail to, and indeed that he is living on a round ball, spinning through space, that can project its shadow onto the Moon.

He is also, as children are, brought face to face with the realities of birth and death, with the inscrutable complexities of adult relationships, with the mysteries of religion, folklore, and witchcraft; with the complicated feelings he has for his friends, the clever and subversive girl Merrit and the would-be juvenile delinquent Hannibal, and so on.

But this isn't just an "end of innocence" novel, it's more complicated than that. Heinesen plays with biblical metaphors, weather-imagery, and all kinds of other structural and poetic devices, he brings his older narrator-self in and out of the story. And, as ever, there is a lot about the human need for beauty and the arts, and the damage that happens when that need is frustrated.

In the background to start with, but gradually taking over at the centre of the plot, there's another version of the story of The lost musicians, in this case driven by the ambition of Amaldus's hard, "practical", sea-captain/capitalist father to gain full control of the family business from his "feckless idiot" brother-in-law, Amaldus's uncle Hans. Hans prefers to spend his time drinking and making music with three close friends, when he isn't chasing girls or sailing his pleasure-yacht. Of course, there are tragic consequences to the father's intervention, but it's strange to see how strong the parallels are between the crazed Evangelical bank-manager in the earlier book and the ultra-sane, sceptical captain in this one.

Another lovely little book, and it makes me want to leap onto a ship and head for the North Atlantic!

(I don't know why Heinesen picked the unusual name Amaldus for his fictional self: in the text he's simply said to have been named after his grandfather who built up the shipping business. I wonder if it is meant as a tribute to the Norwegian naturalist painter Amaldus Nielsen?)

>69 Settings: Thank you for the explanation.

>70 thorold: Sounds interesting. I was supposed to be visiting the Faroes last autumn but....

>68 spiralsheep: I had no idea South Ossetia and Abkhazia existed! I've learned some about the Causas and read someab out that area, but didn't realize they were independent states (thats why I am loving this thread!)

>70 thorold: do you think that book would be a good one for the childhood theme? Id certainly like to read it

>67 Settings: Fazil Iskander is a fun author for Abkhazia, though I suppose the collection of Nart Sagas covers more ground if you have a limited number of slots on your country list.

>72 cindydavid4: The empire formerly known as Russian still includes many potential autonomous regions and/or breakaway states. For a list of the most likely possibilities with a map:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republics_of_Russia

Some context for Aime Cesaire's play The Tempest, published 1969, from Ryszard Kapuscinski's book Travels with Herodotus; a description of the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Negres, Dakar, Senegal, 1963: "Theatrical performances abound in the streets and the squares. African theatre is not as formalistic as the European. A group of people can gather someplace extemporaneously and perform an impromptu play. There is no text; everything is the product of the moment, of the passing mood, of spontaneous imagination. The subject can be anything:" (my note: anything that is a shared story which can be improvised around, from daily life to texts such as Shakespeare's The Tempest to traditional oral myths and legends.) The subject matter must be simple, the language comprehensible to all." /para/ "Someone has an idea and volunteers to be director. He assigns roles and the play begins."

The Isle of Man has a land area of 572 km² and a population of around 83 000. Although it's at what could be called the geographical centre of the British Isles, and has been under English feudal control since the 14th century, it's never been part of the United Kingdom, and retains its own medieval Norse parliament.

It seems to have played a surprisingly small part in British cultural history: if you were to ask people on the mainland, they might perhaps mention it as a place famous for high rainfall, low taxes, motorcycle races, Victorian narrow-gauge railways, and a population of retired gangsters, entertainers and novelists with the sort of political attitudes that see the Daily Telegraph as the vanguard of socialism. But that's about as far as it goes. I last visited the island somewhere around 1975, on a family holiday.

The list of "famous" people of Manx origin, besides Sir Frank Kermode, the Bee Gees and Fletcher Christian, always includes the mega-best-selling late-Victorian novelist Sir Thomas Henry Hall Caine, who may have been born in unromantic Runcorn on the mainland, but came from a Manx family and spent a large part of his life in the island. Many of his novels are set there. Few have been read since the 1930s.

This is one of the most famous, selling half a million copies after serial publication, and was made into several plays and adapted as Hitchcock's last silent film:

The Manxman (1894) by Hall Caine (UK, IoM, 1853-1931) (read as Gutenberg ebook)

  

This long, shaggy Victorian novel centres on a classic love-triangle plot: the cousins Philip and Peter, poor relatives of a distinguished Manx landowning family, are boyhood friends. Charitable relatives fix up for Philip to go to school and train for the Manx bar, doors that are closed to the illegitimate Pete; he grows up to become a semi-literate fisherman. But the boys remain close, and when Pete decides to join the Kimberley diamond rush to try to earn enough to satisfy the father of his intended bride, Kate, he charges Philip with the responsibility of looking after her until he gets back.

The inevitable happens, ambitious Kate falls for the dashing young law student, and when false news of Pete's death arrives the two of them take an ill-advised roll in the hay after the Melliah (harvest dinner). Pete turns up alive shortly afterwards, and Kate finds herself pressured into going through with the planned marriage after all. Needless to say, there is no good way out of this situation, and things rapidly get worse...

I started reading this book with the hope that I would find that Caine had been unfairly neglected, as happens to so many hugely popular authors after their deaths. But, whilst it's easy to see why he was so successful, it's also hard to make a case for reviving him, at least on the evidence of this book.

He's a wonderfully fluent, easy-to-read writer, his prose doesn't have any of that late-Victorian stiffness or Edwardian archness that often plagues books from the turn of the century. And he has an obvious gift for lively, funny, original dialogue: the Manx dialect and syntax are never allowed to get in the way of intelligibility. The book is full of quaint local colour, from rustic inns and agricultural customs to the pageantry of Tynwald Day (Caine is credited with founding the Manx tourist industry), and there are plenty of comic incidents, many of them centering around Kate's father, Caesar, who somehow manages to combine the roles of miller, publican and evangelical preacher.

On the other hand, Caine never refuses an opportunity to throw in a melodramatic incident or a moralistic cliché. The timeline makes no sense at all: Philip goes through his entire career from pupillage to being a respected senior judge in the time it takes his putative daughter to get from conception to first steps. The characters consistently act in ways that are — at best — implausible in psychological and narrative terms, and Caine is clearly not the kind of writer to fuss himself about piddling little details like calendars, wind-and-tide, legal procedures, inheritance customs, etc. The closing scene, while spectacular, is one that would have a hard time being taken seriously even on the stage of an opera house. In a novel it comes over as pure fantasy: this is not the Manx Tess so much as the Manx Iolanthe...

>76 thorold: PS: The Isle of Man is borderline off-topic for RG, but I thought it was worth including The Manxman in the context of this discussion, as an inside-view of a place that doesn’t have much of a footprint in literature otherwise. Thinking back, I can’t remember ever reading a novel entirely set in the island before, and those that are partly set there are almost invariably talking about the WWII internment camps (e.g. Ali Smith’s recent Summer).

The island does get a lengthy section in Jonathan Raban’s Coasting, but that’s a travel book covering many different parts of Raban’s psyche and several parts of the British Isles.

Odd that — as far as I know — none of the many writers who settled in the island when they got fed up with paying income tax ever produced a significant novel set there. Perhaps that’s part of the deal?

>76 thorold: "if you were to ask people on the mainland, they might perhaps mention it as a place famous for high rainfall, low taxes, motorcycle races, Victorian narrow-gauge railways, and a population of retired gangsters, entertainers and novelists with the sort of political attitudes that see the Daily Telegraph as the vanguard of socialism."

Can't stop laughing. And that was before I remembered The Fast Show characters from Man.

And as a reader I can certainly identify with this experience:

"I started reading this book with the hope that I would find that Caine had been unfairly neglected, as happens to so many hugely popular authors after their deaths. But, whilst it's easy to see why he was so successful, it's also hard to make a case for reviving him, at least on the evidence of this book."

I read The Ladies are Upstairs by Merle Collins, which is a collection of short stories set mostly on a fictional Caribbean island resembling Grenada. The first part is a reprinting of the author's 50 page story Rain Darling, which revolves around child neglect and the adult mental health consequences in a fully realised community setting, and was an innovative and unusually sympathetic perspective on the subject in 1990 when it was first published (and continues to stand out now). The next 100 pages are a set of ten short stories revolving around the life of Doux from girlhood to old age, and her family and communities. These successfully manage to be a bildungsroman, a detour into folktales (told in contemporary legend style), and an honest account of ageing. The language is plain but powerful, as readers would expect from Merle Collins who is known for her poetry. Every word is necessary to the overall effect, especially the occasional repetitions for emphasis, exactly as in the author's poetry. I'll mention that two of the three contemporary legends might not be as effective for readers not familiar with that style of storytelling but they should work for readers unfamiliar with the particular folktales on which they're based (and I personally find stories about sensible Joe from the garage seeing a ghost are much more effective than squamous eldritch whatnots). Oh, and the final line of the book is an absolute winner, but I won't spoil it. 4.5*

Quote

"Tisane's mother always said, 'Don't wait on nobody to make you happy, especially not no man. (...) Take you happiness outa de general world and don't wait on no one person to make you happy.' "

I read Tiare in Bloom by Celestine Vaite, which is a chicklit-style novel set in Tahiti about a middle-aged couple in their forties but told mostly from the husband's point of view and especially delves into the meaning and practice of various forms of fatherhood. It's technically the third novel in a series but it worked for me as a standalone. As ever with this relatively light-hearted style of social commentary, a reader is either in tune with the author's humour and perspective on life or not but I think this novel is easy to enjoy (and I'm not the target audience for this genre). 4*

Reading Tiare in Bloom, with its focus on various types of fatherhood, immediately after The Ladies are Upstairs made the fatherhood issues in the short story Rain Darling stand out even further. In a small community everyone knows who a mother has been spending time with, and who a child looks like. Everyone knows if a father is good, indifferent, or bad in various ways. If a child is rejected or neglected then everyone knows why, including eventually the child. The status of a child, not only economic but also social, is effected by the perceived legitimacy of the child's relationship to its father. And, of course, the deeply multifarious family structures in Tiare in Bloom emphasised how colonialism and enslavement destroyed kinship-based support networks in many societies.

Also amazing to learn that Tahitians continued to be forbidden from speaking the Tahitian language (Reo Tahiti) in school classrooms and playgrounds into the late 1970s, that Reo Tahiti was only added to school curricula in 1981, and French remains the only "official" language of Tahiti.

Quotes from Tiare in Bloom

Small islands: 'And being Tahitian means... being diplomatic with the relatives, because you're going to bump into your relatives day after day after day until you die, so it's important to get along.

Context is for the weak: ' "Our story wasn't just a story of arse..." Leilani's voice cracks.'

When your mother doesn't like your husband: 'Materena remembers a conversation she had with her mother a few days ago about how in her next life she might comes back as a lesbian. And her mother said, "Why wait?" '

Find a wife, or else: ' "Mama organized a prayer night at my place." Then speaking between his teeth he adds, "It's to help me find a good wife. All my aunties are here, they're driving me mad with their church songs." '

>80 spiralsheep: I read Breadfruit recently because I was having a hard time finding a copy of Island of Shattered Dreams. While Vaite was light-hearted reading with dark undertones (like language suppression,etc.), Spitz is much more direct and I would say it is THE book to read if you want to read a Tahitian writer.

"Because there's nothing more dangerous than a colonised people standing tall."

>81 jveezer: Thank you for the rec.

"I would say it is THE book to read if you want to read a Tahitian writer."

I'd say we're allowed to read more than one book each. :-)

>60 thorold:

From Iceland, Jón Kalman Stefánsson gets my nod, especially Heaven and hell.

>82 spiralsheep: For sure, it's just that Spitz and Vaite are the only indigenous Tahitian writers I've found so far in English, so there's not a lot to choose from...

>70 thorold: the Brahmadells is the only book I know that is translated from the Faroese, and it is delightful. Published by Open Letter books a couple of years ago...

>83 librorumamans: >85 jveezer: Thanks! Both of those sound really interesting.

>80 spiralsheep: When your mother doesn't like your husband: 'Materena remembers a conversation she had with her mother a few days ago about how in her next life she might comes back as a lesbian. And her mother said, "Why wait?" '

I yelped so loud at this the cats jumped up in fright! Oh my....yes I do want to read this

I read the 50 page selection of Edward (Kamau) Brathwaite's poems published in Penguin Modern Poets 15 in 1969, from his first three books Rights of Passage, Masks, and Islands. There are a few good lines but on the whole they didn't make me want to re-read any further into his works.

From The Emigrants: "In London, Undergrounds are cold.
The train rolls in from darkness
with our fears."

From South: "And gulls, their white sails slanted seaward,
fly into the limitless morning before us."

My plans went sideways because my books are hiding :) So ended up reading a newish novel instead. Still Iceland though - and I have a few more lined up ;)


The Fox by Sólveig Pálsdóttir

Type: Fiction
Length: 205 pages
Original Language: Icelandic, translated by Quentin Bates (2020)
Original Publication: 2017
Genre: Crime
Part of Series: Guðgeir Fransson (4)
Format: Kindle
Publisher: Corylus Books, 2020
Reading dates: 26 January 2021 - 27 January 2021

A year ago, a police investigation in Reykjavik went terribly wrong and detective Guðgeir Fransson was suspended for a year. His family life also suffered so he moved on his own to a small village somewhere among the fjords of Iceland and found a job as a security guide. After the stressful job he did for years, this left him with a lot of time.

Meanwhile, Sajee, a young woman from Sri Lanka, arrives in the same village based on a job offer after having worked in Reykjavik for awhile. Except that the job does not seem to exist so a helpful stranger helps her to find a place to sleep and then even assist her in finding a job. Then things start going weird.

The bored detective hears about that woman who seemed so much out of place and becomes curious. And the whole story unravels.

There are both Sri Lankan and Icelandic legends weaved into the narrative; there is the old US presence which rears its head again. And there is madness and cruelty. It is not always clear if a certain scene is inside of one's head or is really happening; there are times when you know it is reality but you wish it was not.

Sajee's life on the fjord is anything but easy and a lot of the story around that is hard to read. But one still returns to see what happens next. Although in places the novel tried too hard and almost seemed to be going to places just for the shock value. Still pretty readable.

This is the 4th in a series and that explains why we never really get all the details of Fransson's past. There are glimpses here and there and one can almost put the story together. And I suspect that some of the weirdness in the detective is based on what you are supposed to know already from previous books... Why the publisher (and/or translator) decided to start the translations with the 4th in a series is a mystery.

>89 AnnieMod: I wonder if this will prove to be the ultimate on topic book: a small population of one outsider, inside a small settlement, in a country with a small-by-global-standards population? :D

...I've just finished an "outsider in Iceland" novel too, by coincidence:

The hitman's guide to housecleaning (2008) by Hallgrímur Helgason (Iceland, 1959- ) Audiobook read by Luke Daniels

  

This is a variant of a classic formula very popular in Hollywood: the bad guy on the run arrives in a small, peaceful community, and, supported by the Love of a Good Woman and the good advice of wise Father and Mother figures, builds a new life for himself as an honest citizen. But he still has one last, decisive confrontation with the ghosts of his past to deal with before the film ends.

Hallgrímur is clearly interested in this idea mainly by the scope it gives him for looking at Iceland through the eyes of someone as incongruous as possible to Icelandic society, the New York-based Croatian Mafia hitman Tomislav Boksic, alias Toxic, formed by the unspeakable atrocities he took part in as a youngster during the Balkan wars and proud of his professional, detached and efficient approach to murder. He's on the run from the Feds after his 67th hit went wrong, and has somehow ended up in Reykjavik assuming the identity of a televangelist from Virginia.

Needless to say, Hallgrímur — who wrote the book in English first, then translated it into Icelandic — has endless fun letting Tomislav narrate in exaggerated, pastiche Raymond Chandler noir language, in the most impeccably bad taste. In the audiobook, the corny cod-Balkan accent Luke Daniels uses for Tomislav feels exactly right, and enhances the effect. Inevitably, Tomislav also has his own Balkan slant on Hlynur Björn's most tasteless running joke (cf. 101 Reykjavik) — he gives every woman he sees a score based on the number of nights it would take before he started dreaming about her, if he were stuck in an army camp where she was the only woman.

Tomislav seems so extremely divorced from any kind of moral universe we could identify with that at first it's like looking at Iceland through the eyes of a Martian, but of course Hallgrímur gradually humanises him as we go on through the story, trying to get us to the point where we start asking ourselves whether we would have turned out any differently from him if we'd been plunged into the middle of a civil war in our teens. Perhaps fortunately, he doesn't quite take us along with him that far, but Tomislav does turn out to be a long way from being the cardboard cutout he seems in the opening pages of the book. The other characters also quietly subvert the stereotypes the plot seems to be asking for: Tomislav's ice-princess/anima, Gunnhildur, has all sorts of important character flaws, including the inability to keep her apartment tidy that gives Hallgrímur the hook for his title; the older generation of Icelandic Evangelicals who offer Tomislav salvation all turn out to be very damaged people themselves, but not necessarily the worse for that.

And, what's more, the book contains at least two important life-lessons for anyone intending to visit Iceland: (i) don't even think of keeping your shoes on indoors, unless they cost more than 200 dollars; and (ii) if the doorbell rings during Eurovision you probably shouldn't answer it.

It's not quite on-topic for this thread, but the book I've just finished, Notebooks from New Guinea, by the Czech entomologist Vojtech Novotny, turned out to have some passing reflections in it on what we mean by a "small nation" complex. Papua New Guinea has a thousand or so separate language-communities who, until very recently, would all have thought of themselves as independent nations (insofar as that term means anything in that context), and in many cases lived so remotely that they were not aware that there were any other human communities around them at all. Most of these groups would stabilise at a population somewhere between 300 and 2000. On the other hand, the Czechs, a group of around 10 million, are sitting in the middle of Europe surrounded by much bigger nations, and can easily persuade themselves that theirs is a small and threatened community. It's all relative, apparently!

I read Angel (revised 2011 edition) by Merle Collins, which is a novel about three generations of Grenadian women, during the thirty years from 1951 to 1983, that the author originally wrote and published in 1987 and then rewrote and republished with Peepal Tree Press in 2011.

This book is mostly written in Standard English but various characters also speak varieties of Grenadian Creole English and even Grenadian Creole French. There's more older Creole than I'm used to reading in Caribbean literatures and I was glad of the two page glossary at the back, especially for words of African or Carib or French origin, so I wouldn't necessarily recommend this to every reader although there's no deliberate obscurity (or obfuscation to use my own specialist vocabulary, lol) by Collins who clearly wants her work to be read as well as being representative. Many scholars consider this text to be a valuable archive of historic language in addition to a historical novel.

In form the novel is divided into chapters and each chapter divided into shorter scenes headed by Creole proverbs. In style and content this reads as much like an oral history collection as a novel, which is intentional on the author's part, with the structure following three generations of women in one family: through ageing and death, through motherhood, and through growing up and coming of age, through Independence from Britain, through the revolution, and through the US invasion.

The conclusion of the book is, of course, not happy: that Grenada doesn't count as a country with its own borders because economics dictate people must work abroad, and because the US (or any larger power) can impose its will through military or economic violence at any time it pleases; that those (men) who fight their way into leadership positions are often either destructively corrupt or destructively egotistical; that if only the chickens would work together as a flock then the chickenhawks would go home hungry more often than not, but chickens scatter by instinct and have to be taught their best hope is mutual aid. 4.5*

Quotes

Bush: "When she looked up, the other trees around had started rustling too as the breeze got stronger. She lowered her eyes, left them to their conversation, and went on inside."

Proverb: "Never trouble trouble until trouble trouble you."

Poverty ("caan" = can't): "'Well is so it is!' Cousin Maymay said, 'We caan let one another sink. Is you, is me. We ha hol one another up!'"

Education ("djab" = diables = devils): "We did just know bout Britain an we feel British, so we great! Poor djab us!"

Chickens and chickenhawks ("caan" = can't): "'Allyou self too stupid,' she said to the fowls, 'Don run when they try to frighten you. Stay together an dey caan get none!'"

>92 thorold: I think most people who've travelled solo have felt like a small island with a population of one.

Slightly off topic once again, as Suriname is just over the 500k cut-off, but for those who aren’t too fussy, it might be worth checking out Surinamese author Astrid Roemer, who has just been announced as the winner of the prestigious Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren. She also won the P C Hooft Prize a few years ago. She’s someone I’ve been meaning to read for ages, maybe I’ll get to her now...

She writes in Dutch, a few of her books have been translated to German, but there doesn’t seem to be much in English apart from a few stories in anthologies. There is a mention that her most recent book Gebroken Wit has been translated as Less than white, but I couldn’t find the translation listed anywhere apart from an excerpt on the DNBL site. (Translation DB: http://www.letterenfonds.nl/en/author/205/astrid-h-roemer )

Very late, but here's a place that was claimed as "smallest in Europe" in its time. At just over 3 sq km, if it still existed it would be bigger than the Vatican and Monaco as they are today, but a tiny fraction of the area of a giant like Liechtenstein or San Marino. But it was never really an independent country, and it ceased to exist practically in 1914 and legally in 1920. Here's more Neutral Moresnet than you can shake a stick at:

Moresnet: opkomst en ondergang van een vergeten buurlandje (2016) by Philip Dröge (Netherlands, 1967- )
Zink (2016) by David Van Reybrouck (Belgium, 1971- )

    

(Photo of Dröge by Vincent Boon, from philipdroge.nl — obviously there's something very interesting going on to the right of the camera in both these author photos...)

The zinc-ore mine at Kelmis, south of Aachen, had been in use since Roman times, but it suddenly became very important around the beginning of the 19th century, when the Liège industrialist Jean-Jacques Daniel Dony invented a new and highly efficient process for refining zinc. Napoleon — possibly encouraged by the ingenious portable zinc bathtub with built-in water-heater that Dony had given him — awarded him a fifty-year concession to exploit the mine. However, it was the post-Napoleonic settlement of the Congress of Vienna that was responsible for turning Kelmis into a fascinating geopolitical anomaly as well: through an unfortunate drafting error, one article of the treaty assigned the village and its mine to Prussia, and another gave it to the new United Kingdom of the Netherlands.

The problem wasn't discovered until the border commissioners got down to serious work in 1816. When the problem was referred to higher authority, it became clear that neither of the mule-like monarchs was going to back up an inch, so the Treaty of Aachen specified that the part of the the commune of Moresnet containing Kelmis and the mine — a triangle with an area of about 3 sq km and 250 residents — would be treated temporarily as a neutral zone. A joint committee would be established to find a more permanent agreement. Of course, anyone who's ever been involved in public administration knows what happens when you do that: in this case, 98 years of inactivity at the highest level while the people on the spot came up with ever more complex workarounds for the problems. Moresnet was clearly one of those political problems where any solution was likely to be more damaging to the people taking the decision than the minor inconvenience of letting it drag on.

During the nineteenth century the mine prospered and Neutral Moresnet acquired various other typical "small-country" industries, such as smuggling, alcohol production, draft-evasion and baby-farming. The village grew to a population of around 4000 by the end, roughly equally divided between Germans, Belgians, Dutch and "neutrals", these last being descendants of the original 250 and officially stateless.

Attempts to resolve the status of the region and eliminate the illegal activities were usually smothered by lobbying from the mining company, which was owned by the prominent Brussels business dynasty, the Mosselmans. Even after the exhaustion of the mine at the end of the century, they carried on refining zinc there, taking advantage of the legal vacuum and favourable tax-regime. The Belgian government was also reluctant to sign an agreement that would have resulted in people who considered themselves Belgian ending up under German rule. In the early twentieth century there were even some attempts to turn Moresnet into an independent country with Esperanto as its official language (Google "Amikejo march" for the proposed national anthem).

The Germans ultimately rendered the whole question moot by invading Belgium in 1914 (and again in 1940 and 1944...). During the two world wars Neutral Moresnet was treated as part of Germany, and from 1920 it and the surrounding villages were assigned to Belgium by the Versailles treaty.

Dröge and Van Reybrouck were obviously both prompted to write about Neutral Moresnet by the bicentenary in 2016. Dröge's book is a fairly comprehensive history, starting with Napoleon's bath and ending with the Versailles treaty, and with plenty of interesting anecdotal detail as well as a bit more background about the diplomatic and legal situation. He has fun with some of the more colourful characters, like Fanny Mosselman, who bridges the roles of 18th century royal mistress and 20th century businesswoman, and really deserves a book to herself...

Van Reybrouck's 60-page essay was the 2016 Boekenweek gift — he sketches in the historical background, but his main interest is in the oral history he put together talking to modern residents of Kelmis about their early memories and family history. At the centre of his book is the baker Emil Rixen, born in 1902 to an unmarried German woman and adopted (for a fee) by a Moresnet family, who grew up to change nationality five times without needing to leave home, and to serve (against his will) in the armies of two different countries.

>96 thorold: wow that is really fascinating. As for the mistake, its another version of 'grammar matters' . Thanks for that eye opener

>97 cindydavid4: Moresnet is also the only (former) European country I can say I’ve walked across from East to West without ever noticing it was there (it takes about ten minutes).