Last week, Freight Books read...

Tarantula, by Thierry Jonquet. It’s always odd reading a book after seeing an adaptation of it. Thankfully, I remembered little enough of Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In to fully enjoy the twists and shocking reveals in Thierry Jonquet’s novella Tarantula (Mygale). The ‘book versus film’ debate is one which has been long argued and never concluded, but in my opinion Tarantula beats its adaptation hands down (apologies if you enjoyed the film). Not only that, but the story is different enough to work even if you do love the movie, with only the main reveal and minor details remaining the same.

To describe this book as a thriller would be an understatement. It’s hard to talk about any specifics without giving away the horrific twist and finale of the story, but Tarantula is essentially the story of three characters and the shocking way in which the human desire for revenge causes their lives to intersect. The core story follows Richard, a renowned plastic surgeon, who is keeping a woman, Eve, locked up in his mansion for unknown reasons while routinely subjecting her to extreme sexual and physical abuse and degradation. We also meet Alex, a criminal who decides to have his face surgically altered after shooting a police officer and Vincent, an art student who has been kidnapped by a mysterious figure he names ‘Mygale’. When Alex decides to abduct Eve in a bid to blackmail Richard into performing his desired surgery, the three stories begin to come together in increasingly appalling and horrifying ways.

The final reveal is so shocking it will stay with you long after you’ve finished the book. Whilst some may be able to guess the true reality of the story before it is explicitly stated, following the way in which each twist becomes clear to both us and certain characters is enough to maintain the suspense even if you think you know what’s coming. The psychological and physical effect of what comes to light is highly effective as Jonquet doesn’t rely on cheap thrills or stereotypical scares. Instead Tarantula shows the true horror of humanity and what people are able to do to each other, and the lengths some people will resort to in order to achieve revenge. It isn’t an easy read, but it’s worth the perseverance and the novella’s short length makes the story all the more effective.

Tarantula is one of the most effective horror stories I’ve read and the translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith doesn’t detract from the simplicity and effectiveness of the original text. It’s brilliant to see a novella survive translation so intact and is testament to Jonquet’s skilled writing that Tarantula remains one of the most affecting books I’ve had the pleasure (or displeasure) to read.

Last week, Freight Books read...

All the Birds, Singing, by Evie Wyld (Jonathan Cape). This has shot to the upper rungs of my best reads of 2013. Jake is a woman with a Past, living in self-imposed isolation on an island off the British coast, being a grumpy shepherd. Something is killing her sheep, however, and it is giving her the willies.

How is this for an opening paragraph;

Another sheep, mangled and bled out, her innards not yet crusting and the vapours rising from her like a steamed pudding. Crows, their beaks shining, strutting and rasping, and when I waved my stick they flew to the trees and watched, flaring out their wings, singing, if you could call it that. I shoved my boot in Dog’s face to stop him from taking a string of her away with him as a souvenir, and he kept close by my side as I wheeled the carcass out of the field and down into the woolshed.

Wow, eh? That is some powerful stuff. And I love that her dog is simply called Dog. There are so many touches to this novel which just thrilled me - delicate little movements that make it alive. The series fo events that follow on from this moment are only half the story, however. We are also taken back to her life in Australia, which without giving too much away was pretty Dark. I have begun to groan at dual stories; they seem to be everywhere at the moment, and there is usually always one strain that is carrying the other, and I always end up rushing through the weaker strain to get to the good bit. Well, here it is all good bit. What is a little stroke of genius (and which makes this dual-story really work) is that whilst the main thread, with Dog and the murdered sheep, develops in the usual manner, the Australia part goes backwards in time. So what you get at the end of the novel is the beginning and the ending simultaneously. It was fantastic. And it also means that you are looking for different things in each thread - the beginning in one and the end in the other.

Buy it and read it. You will love it.

Last week, Freight Books read...

Feral, by George Monbiot. I've been meaning to review Feral since I finished reading it at the beginning of the summer, but never knew quite how I'd tackle it. Instead I bought it for nearly everyone I knew, and this sated my desire to shout about it a bit. However, the late arrival of All the Birds, Singing last week means I haven't finished it yet, so I am left with a perfect Feral-shaped gap to fill.

This book changed the way I viewed the countryside. Utterly. I grew up in a very rural environment, surrounded by crops, grass, cows, chickens, foxes, thick hedges and thicker accents, to name but a few (only two of those things stayed the same when I moved to Glasgow, and boy was it a shock).

Oh and sheep.Lots of sheep.

I see sheep very differently now. In fact, you could probably sum Feral up in one phrase as a crusade against sheep. It would be wrong to do so, as he talks about many other things, but the sheep do stick in the craw somewhat. It is like this. Most of our National Parks are all about the rolling hillsides, the carefully managed land, all open to the wide skies and populated with heather and moorland and sheep. But this was not always the case; indeed only a few hundred years ago these hillsides were covered with mixed woodland and thick scrub, home to all sorts of plants and animals that are now lacking. Monbiot lays the desertification of these areas wholly at the door of the sheep. Like the rhododendron, it is an alien species that our native plants have no protections from, and as such cannot recover from such insistent grazing.

But there are plenty of other aspects to this book that are as entertaining and possibly more interesting than Sheepwrecked, as that chapter is called. The most lyrical sections are auto-biographical moments from Monbiot's life, fishing for mackrel in a kayak, for instance, and these pulled strongly on my homesickness strings. We are also given an insight into the frankly awful figures surrounding land ownership in Britain, and Scotland in particular. When taken on a tour of re-introduction programs, particularly that of the European wolf (introduced into every country in Europe, barring Britain and the ROI), I was particularly struck by one near-throwaway comment. That we spend so much money and put so much pressure on developing countries to protect and live alongside dangerous animals (tigers in India, lions and hippopotami in Kenya) and yet kick up a fuss if there is any suggestion of any remotely dangerous animal being returned to our shores.

Monbiot advocates the reintroduction of predators and other mega fauna into our wild spaces, which should then be allowed to go wild - to be set free to mutate freely rather than 'conserved' at the state our great-grandparents left them in.

There are problems with his argument, but then the subject he chooses is massive, and above al it is a book designed to create a dialogue that does not begin and end with the National Trust.

Just Our Type

Every month Freight aims to give you a preview of one of our designer's favourite fonts. This week David Benjamin brings you...

Clarendon

Robert Besley, 1845

The Fann Street Foundry

Background

Named after Oxford's Clarendon Press, this was the first typeface to be patented under the Ornamental Designs Act of 1842. Unfortunately for designer Robert Besley, the patent only lasted 3 years and due to it's widespread popularity, was quickly copied by other foundries when it expired. 

The Clarendon typeface was originally designed to be used as a heavy face to highlight words in blocks of roman copy. This method of highlighting text had previously been done using italics and in the mid 19th century printers began to opt for the use of slab serifs as a means of creating hierarchy in the text. However, the downside of many slab serifs were that they could appear awkward and overly prominent. This led to the development of the Clarendons or Ionic letterforms, designed to sit in harmony with the regular roman typeface used for the copy.

Clarendon was often used as a display letter, appearing as side headings in dictionaries and famously used on American wanted posters. In more recent times, it was the typeface of choice for American National Park traffic signs.

Choice

Clarendon is one of my favourite slab serifs because it is a clean, strong typeface with a nice blend of straight edges and curves in all the right places. At first glance I would consider it a traditional letter form yet it surprises me how often it suits a more contemporary application. 

Some famous brands use Clarendon in their logo and it is pretty timeless. Sony are one such example; a company whose business and products are always trying to innovate and embrace new technology, they hold design in extremely high regard and it says a great deal that their logo has barely changed since its redesign in 1957. If it ain't broke, as they say...

The horizontal and vertical strokes of the letters are straight, the serifs are cut at right angles and the characters are quite wide creating an almost square appearance to them. This rigid framework provides a strength to the skeleton of the typeface that is otherwise fleshed out with curves. The fern shaped ear of the lowercase g, the strong sweeping spine of the letter s, the vertical swashes and tails that curl off the end of the characters and stand to attention are all distinguishing elements of Clarendon, making it impossible to hide its identity. This is what gives Clarendon its organic personality and as a result, why it lends itself well to use as a display face. Modern versions of the typeface include a light weight which has a surprising elegance and lends more versatility and subtlety to the bold original letterset.

Last week, Freight Books read...

A Happy Death. All the Birds, Singing has yet to arrive for me to read, so instead I have decided to mark this centenary of Albert Camus' birth by reviewing one - possibly my favourite - of his novels. This was the first book he wrote, yet it was not published until after his death, so I feel it lends a certain roundness to the centenary.

Much of the storyline would be familiar to those of you who have read L'Étranger, as it is very much a blueprint for this most famous of novels. However, I would have to say I prefer it - there is a youthfulness, perhaps even a naivety to this version, which I really enjoy.

In brief, the protagonist Mersault (for it is he, yet isn't he) is given the oppourtunity of a lifetime, the chance to have enough money that he need never work again, on the condition he concentrates on living. The only downside is that he has to kill a man (the man offering him the money, nonetheless). He does this, travels round Europe, gets horribly sick, returns to North Africa, visits the House Above the World (possibly the most perfect place that now exists in my imagination) then leaves there and dies. And it is a beautiful death.

At only 106 pages this is a very short, but oh so sweet, examination as to whether a happy death is possible. If only it could have been so for the man himself. If you've never read any Camus, I urge you to read this first. If you've read lots of his work but not this, you know how good his books are,  so just buy it.

The cover shown is the new Penguin edition. I can't decide if I like it and I think this is a bad thing, though it does make me think of swimming off the Algerian coast, which I have never done, so it must be good, right?

Last week, Freight Books read...

Death and the Penguin is wonderfully surreal. Victor, the protagonist, is a an aspiring writer living on his own in a flat in Kiev. Well, nearly on his own. There is also the Penguin, Misha, who Victor bought from the zoo when they were strapped for cash after the break-up of the Soviet Union. They live together quite happily, Victor feeding Misha frozen fish and Misha shuffling about sounding rather depressed. 

Then Victor gets a job writing obituaries for a newspaper and things change. Suddenly he has steady money, and even makes a friend or two, but the the people he is asked to prepare obits for start to die. Misha gets a job too, as a silent companion at funerals. 

If that hasn't got you intrigued then I don't know what is wrong with you. It is great. I've yet to read any more by Andrey Kurkov, but he has jumped to the upper reaches of my shopping list. 

Last week, Freight Books read...

From the Mouth of the Whale, by Sjón and translated by Victoria Cribb, will not be to everyone's tastes, but I found this to be a great read, filled with the visceral trappings of a time when Science and Magic were often thought to be the same thing. The year is 1635, and though Iceland is under the rule of Denmark it is a long way from anywhere. The main character, Jónas, has been exiled to a remote island off the coast of this remote island - just about as far as a man can be pushed without discovering a new continent. His crime is his intelligence (he is a self-taught healer), his heresy (a Catholic in a country where Protestantism has taken sway) and that he has earned the enmity of the local magistrate.

As he languishes on his island, he writes about his life, and through that we hear about the nature of the land. We learn of the deaths of three of his children, of the brutal murder of Basque fishermen, and of the harsh lives eked out on the edge of the world.

Jónas is then taken from his exile to Denmark, where opportunities suddenly flourish around him, but I don't want to give too much away here. There are some beautiful touches to this novel - the search for dead ravens in the hope of retrieving a life-giving stone from their heads (as reported in the classical texts of Paracelsu), the unveiling of unicorn horns sold throughout Europe to be the teeth of narwhal, and the exorcism of a walking corpse.

Victoria Cribb has done a brilliant job of  translating this book. It flows with lyrical poetry, but retains those harsh edges, like a sea wind blowing over marram grass.

I take it back, this should be to everyone's tastes because it is beautiful and brilliant.

Last week, Freight Books read...

War with the Newts is weird yet wonderful. Sold as a humorous allegory of early 20th Century Czech politics, I was expecting to have my knowledge of Slavonic history stretched to breaking point, but couldn't resist the title nor the cover artwork. If there were any specific references to Czech politics they passed me by. The novel contains allusions to the League of Nations, the slave trade, and imperialism, but you could get away with not knowing about any of those things.

A sea captain looking for pearls comes across a colony of giant newts. He teaches them how to protect themselves from sharks, and in return they collect pearls for him. This relationship soon becomes one of exploitation, as the newts are the perfect form of cheap labour, but as a new age of prosperity begins for mankind nobody notices how fast the newts are breeding...

On the whole a good read, which I banged through quickly. If it was to be your first foray into Czech literature, however, I would counsel you to read Closely Observed Trains, I Served the King of England, The Good Soldier Svejk or The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Last week, Freight Books read...

The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared is, so far, one of the best books I have read this year. A tale of an extraordinary man looking for one last adventure, there is a back story running through the book that channels the Good Soldier Svejk whilst at the same time critiquing Sweden's stance of neutrality over the last century. And above all this politicking there is a varnish of beautiful prose that makes the book flow almost too fast, despite it's length. A fantastic translation, a great book, well worth a purchase.