My Best Six Fictions in 2020

Imitating the great Dickensean phrase I can say "It was the best of times" in my reading and writing year and "it was the worst of times" in the other areas of my life in 2020. I have seen the birth of the youngest successor (nephew) and the death of the eldest predecessor (grandmother) in the midst of Covid pandemic. I have experienced a great benevolence of humanity as well as a terrible cruelty. In a nutshell, I have taken some risky decisions to bring out some best solutions of my life, on that matter the best of the best tools I have used are fiction reading and creative and critical writing. My flash fiction and book reviews written in English have got published first ever in the globally circulated literary journals. This is the year full of acceptances and rejections that teach me to value the purposes and efforts of my acts and not to take the judgments for granted.

 

This the year I have read each Booker-shortlisted novel and written reviews on half of them for the first time ever. This is the year I have read the longest novel (934 pages), The Eighth Life by Nino Haratischvili. This is the year I have not made a Booker winner prediction because every shortlistee, in my view, highly deserved the title. When the longlist had been disclosed, Shuggie Bain was my top favorite but at the eleventh hour Burnt Sugar had drawn my closest attention. This the year I had also read all of the novels in the shortlist of International Dublin Literary award and had written three book reviews, two of them including the winner Milkman which was my first ever review essay written in English published in Superstition Review produced by Arizona State University, USA and one of them, Disorientale (French) , published on my personal blog and it was a mind-blowing feeling that I have received the direct appreciation from both Negar Dejavadi (Persian-Parisian author) and Tina Cover (American translator) and surprisingly Dublin Literary Award had promoted and recommended my review on their social media (Twitter).

 

This is the year when majority of fictions I have read were new releases in which The Eighth Life by Nino Haratischvili I had ordered and paid full in advance in February but the shipping was withheld during the pandemic and after a long tiring waiting I have got the book at my hand on 10th December and it was the last book I have read this year and it has become the first in Top6 fictions (three in English and three translated in English) in 2020.

 

As soon as I read: Carpets are woven from stories. So we have to preserve and take care of them.... I'm sure we're woven in there too, even if we never suspected it, at the page 16 in Georgian-German polyglot author Nino Haratischvili's "The Eighth Life (For Brilka), Scribe, 2020, translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin from German title Das achte Leben (Fur Brilka), (2014), I recalled the  resemblance of Bengali poet Jasimuddin's "Nakshi Kanthar Maath (1929); and at page 933 I read: 

All of us will always be interwoven in this number and will always be able to listen each other, down through the centuries... Be everything we were and were not

I have regarded it a true representation of a great Caucasian novel which can only be compared with Tolstoyan style in the 21st century.

 

One of the most quoted proposition in the literary buzz in 2020 probably would be: I would be lying if I said my mother's misery has never given me pleasure from Avni Doshi's Burnt Sugar (Hamish Hamilton, 2020) which was published as Girl in White Cotton (Harpercollins, 2019) from India has shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. The debut novel is written over and over again (eight drafts). The novel is a perfect metonymy of decadence of memory and fractured relationship between a mother (Tara) and daughter (Antara) superficially.  On one side the mother is losing the past and ascending to a new present, on the other side, the daughter is sliding down from her present and walking reversely to the buried past which deals with will to be free, losing innocence, love, lies, grief and betrayal. The only novel I have read twice this year, first as a general reader's mind then with a critic's eyes, and in both ways I have enjoyed and appreciated this book at its best. I am eagerly waiting to read more Avni Doshi.

 

At chapter thirteen, when I read, or as if I were listening to the soothing conversation between Shuggie and his elder brother, Leek, behind their back where Leek was dictating the walking manual of masculinity to Shuggie that: "And you should try to watch how you walk. Try not to be so swishy.... Don't cross your legs when you walk. Try and make room for your cock." Or as if at chapter twenty I were witness when Agnes (Shuggie's mother) asked Shuggie, 

 "What kind of man are you going to be when you grow up?"

 And Shuggie answered,

 "I dunno. I just want to be with you. I want to take you away somewhere we can be brand-new."

"Shuggie Bain '' (Grove Atlantic, 2020) is the most celebrated and talked of the litworld in this year which takes over a decade to finish and Douglas Stuart is more celebrated than Shuggie as a debut novelist I know till now. To read Shuggie Bain along with The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste and to write reviews on them before the Booker Prize announcement in mid-November, I have taken a very risky and uncompromising decision and acted accordingly resulting in quitting my job in this tumultuous time. Is it the best or the worst, time will give its testimony.

 

As George Saunders had dug deep into history and brought the lost son  of Abraham Lincoln from late nineteenth century onto the pages in "Lincoln in the Bardo'' (2017), Maggie O'Farrell has also uncovered the unportrayed son of William Shakespeare from late sixteenth century in England  under magnificent baroque painted cover in the pages of "Hamnet'' (Tinder Press, 2020). As the heart-wrenching narrative of Agnes has overshadowed Stuart's Shuggie in "Shuggie Bain'', the unflinching story of another Agnes has also clouded O'Farrell's Hamnet in "Hamnet''. It was sheer shock why this novel was not long listed in this year's Booker Prize. This novel is like a Pandemic Classic in this weary time that reflects human distance and despondency.

 

 

If anyone wants to get "the complete truth" of anything, one must notify the minor detail in things that the insight I have extracted after reading Palestinian author Adania Shibli's new kind of narrative, "Minor Detail" (New Directions & Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020) translated by Elisabeth Jaquette fron Arabic title "Tafasil thanawi" (Dar Al Adab, 2016). This allegorical story is about borders between power, states, religions, histories, genders and above all human emotions. In part one narrated by a omnipresent view of an incident of "winding border" and sexual violence against an Arab girl in August 9, 1949 reported in a newspaper article by an Israeli journalist, most of the part seemed to so mundane at first, but  when I have transported to the second part by a first person narrator, a Palestinian woman who was  born coincidentally on the same date of the violence after twenty-five years and has make a very risky and dangerous secret mission trespassing the same border to find out the "calamitous consequences", I find the complete thrilling of minor detail of first part. The novel is a rising star of middle eastern narrative that will pull  lit-readers to read more Adania and her peers.

 

The last but not the least fiction book I will mention in my top6 fiction2020 is Italian-Atwood Elena Ferrante's "The Lying Life of Adults" (Europa Editions, 2020) translated by her eternal translator Ann Goldstein from Italian title "La vita bugiarda degli adulti" (Edizioni e/o, 2019).  When I read the monologue of Giovanna asking herself: "Why had my father made that statement? Why had my mother not forcefully contradicted it?" on her "parents' revulsion and fear" that she resembles with her aunt Vitttoria's ugliness, I along with Giovanna and all readers around the world face "a snarled confusion of suffering, without redemption." And starts the Odyssey to "save us from ourselves”, as Ferrante prescribed to "mitigate sufferings" and to "dilute the horrors of our time." The translation of Ann Goldstein is so smooth and affable like butter and velvet that I have faced a difficulty to accept that I am reading a translation. 

 

All of the novels are more or less a concoction of fact and fiction. Sometimes facts seem fictitious and fiction seems factual revolve around human empathy and desperation. The time we are going through is hard to accept and adjust but this worst time will hopefully pass soon as the best time has passed for a while because things are very transitory in nature.