If you subscribe to Granta you also get access to the electronic edition, including the complete archive of all Granta articles going right back to 1979.  I have learned that I can save any article I am interested in by using the website instapaper which puts a nifty little “read later” button on my toolbar and then provides a mobi format Kindle download for whenever I want it.

In Granta 114, the theme is “Aliens” – not as in beings from outer-space, but rather the experiences of alienation that come through being a stranger in a new country.  The articles are as always immensely varied, the writing however being consistently fine.  Here is a small selection:

Come Japanese – Julie Otsuka

In the early 1900s, a group of “picture brides” sail from Japan to America to meet their betrothed American men.  Life is not going to be good – they will end up as migrant workers and domestic staff, only to be interned as enemy aliens when the Second World War begins.

Beach – Robert Bolano

A recovering heroin addict gets his daily dose of methadone and goes sunbathing on the beach.  A vignette of life from the viewpoint of a young man in transition from addiction to a new-found freedom.

Walking on the West Bank – Robert McFarlane

The writers visits Israel to conduct a number of day-long walking trespasses  into restricted-access Zone C landscapes with a Palestinian human rights lawyer.

The B.O.G. standard – Philip Olterman

The experiences of a teenage German boy who is moved with his family to live in a London suburb.

Like most Northern Europeans we were dedicated Anglophiles.  Which is to say that we were practically half-English before we made the move: tea drinkers, shortbread nibblers, watchers of non-subtitled BBC comedies.  When my father was offered a position at the London office of his company, it was a chance to complete the metamorphosis. My parents were ambitious: within weeks of our arrival, my father started demanding fried bacon and beans on toast for breakfast.  My mother tried her hand at a Sunday roast.  I was encouraged to take up cricket.  But the road to Englishness wasn’t always smooth . . .

Here is what you do – Chris Dennis

We read of the experience of being in an American jail for the first time. Chris writes of committing a minor drugs offence and then receiving a year in a Texan Prison – something that would terrify the brave.

You spent eight days in a holding cell with a car thief called Teddy from Houston, then down a long, loud hall full of men yelling and watching as the guard took you to your room. Donald was sitting on the edge of the bunk reading.  The guard handed you your toiletries.  The door made a shocking click-clicking noise when it closed.  Donald moved his hair out of his eyes, held his out his hand for you to shake . . .

This is just a small selection of articles from the magazine.  There is also a photo section, “Inland Iran” and another “Contacts” with photos taken in Belfast of British Military activity during the Troubles.

I usually find something in each edition which makes me glad I subscribe to Granta.  As someone who usually read full length novels and non-fiction, occasionally its nice to have a miscellany like this, particularly one so full of fine writing.

Because it only comes out once every three months, I find there is always an occasion when Granta is just the right reading material. I remember last year, taking the summer edition on holiday to Germany with me, and then realising as I embarked on a four-hour ferry journey home that I’d forgotten to read it. I opened the envelope and found that every article spoke to me in one way or another, and when I got my new Kindle I downloaded the whole of that edition and have kept on referring back to it.

I’ve been reading three review copies over the last week or so, all of which are embargoed until May or June. I should make sure I read books I can write about as soon as I’ve read them.  As it is, I’ve had to take copious notes but will have to dip back into them in order to be able to write something sensible when the time comes.  I don’t normally focus so much on review copies – my own choice of reading material is usually quite enough to keep me going, but these three are so good I just couldn’t wait before reading them.  So watch this space.

In The Education of a British Protected Child we find a collection of essays and transcribed talks given by Achebe covering a wide range of topics from memories of his early life to mature reflections on his work and its impact on readers around the world.

The book is not a difficult read in terms of complexity, the message of the various chapters being quite straightforward.  It could however be uncomfortable reading for anyone not familiar with development issues. Achebe challenges most Western attitudes to Africa, and one of the most enlightening messages is that Africa has had cultured and successful kingdoms in previous centuries, the fruits of which were destroyed by colonialism.  For example, the King of Congo in the late 15th century took the Western name Dom Afonso I and Achebe reports that Congo was represented in the Vatican by a bishop who addressed the Pope in Latin.

Joseph Conrad’s name occurs again and again in the book, and Achebe blames Conrad for creating powerful negative images of Africa in his book Heart of Darkness and other writings.  This book, and a long line of predecessors, “has invented an Africa where nothing good happens or ever happened, an Africa that has not been discovered yet and is waiting for the first European visitor to explore it and explain it and straighten it up”.  Achebe goes on to list highly educated Africans from previous centuries, not least Ignatius Sancho, an eighteenth century man of letters painted by Thomas Gainsborough in 1786 and also Frances Williams, a graduate of Cambridge, a poet, and a founder of a school in Jamaica.

Achebe was educated by Christian missionaries, and indeed, his father served 35 years as a Christian evangelist.  Despite Achebe’s later stance as a critic of colonialism, he never demolishes the value of work done in education and health care by the missions, but he does point out its historical context:

My father had a lot of praise for missionaries and their message and so have I.  But I have also learned a little more skepticism about them than my father had any need for.  Does it matter I ask myself that centuries before these European Christians sailed down to us in ships to deliver the Gospel and save us from darkness, their ancestors, also sailing in ships had delivered our forefathers to the horrendous transatlantic slave trade and unleashed darkness in our world?

It was of course the slave trade that caused Westerners to denigrate African people.  How much easier to oppress and harass people who are described as backward and barely human.  Theologians could debate whether the African had a soul and educators could express surprise that black children could actually be taught to read and write. The alternative view, that black people are in fact our equals could only bring condemnation on those who tore them from their lands and shipped them off across oceans.

It is all too easy to condemn African people for their governments, even going so far as to suggest that the people have ended up with the governments they deserve.  This view takes no account of the fact that the African nations were created by Colonialist rules and made little attempt to give Africa back the older boundaries and civic systems which had been taken from them by European colonisers.

This is a compact book and is divided up into 16 short chapters.  It is easy to read and gives a very useful overview of Achebe’s thinking.  His humanity comes across in its pages, but also the uncompromising but unfailingly polite critique of those who will read it in Western nations.  Achebe’s style is the opposite of hectoring, and I felt that he treats his readers almost gently in leading them to open their eyes to their prejudices and preconceptions.

At a time when western people tend to write off Africa as a hopeless case it reminded this reader at least that we have been a major cause of Africa’s problems and must do all we can to ensure that our governments become part of its solution, not by recolonisation, but by working together to undo the poisoned legacy which we have left in that vast continent.

Swift writes on a vast range of topic, and rarely fails to please.  I first came to his work through Waterland, one of those books which managed to draw me into a wholly believable yet utterly strange landscape (in this case The Fens) which I had never encountered before.  Since then I lingered in the Fens while on a business trip to King’s Lynn, a journey which I found myself interpreting through my memories of Waterland.

Then Last Orders came along and quite rightly won the Booker Prize (and was later filmed so effectively with Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay and others).  Since then I’ve read most of Swift’s books and enjoyed them all so it was difficult to resist this varied collection of pieces from such a wide range of sources.

In Making An Elephant, we find episodes from Swift’s life, illustrated by short articles, portraits of other writers, interviews, poems and essays.   It is an ideal book to dip into, but I found myself reading the whole thing over a couple of days, conscious that it is also a book I will enjoy having on my shelves to refer to when thinking about the writing process or just wanting to recall some of the evocative scenes described in it.

The book contains some nice stories.  I enjoyed reading about Swift’s year in Greece as a young man, and his discovery of the Russian writer Isaac Babel, who accompanied him almost as a friend through the pages of his Collected Stories.  I then read how Graham took his friend Kazuo Ishiguro (“Ish”) to help him choose a new guitar, ending up with a beautiful hand-made Spanish guitar on which he sometimes “murders Bach” after a hard day’s writing.  I agree with him that “playing a musical instrument “tells you quite a lot about the mysterious process of discovering what you have inside”.

For anyone wanting to understand Swift’s book Waterland there is a transcript of an in-depth interview with Swift, conducted by Patrick McGrath (another fine writer), which provides a huge amount of background information on this remarkable book.

The poems are accessible and evocative.  I enjoyed The Bookmark for example in which he writes about books which he started to read long ago but never finished:

Living by the sea as I do, I liked Swift’s thoughts about our attraction to the coast in his essay, “I do like to be beside the seaside”:

There is so much to mention in this book its hard to know what to leave out in this review.  However, the eponymous essay, “Making an Elephant”, is Swift’s memorial to his father, in which he managed to revive memories of my own childhood through his descriptions of a 1950s Sydenham, South London, in which I also spent quite a bit of time.  One of my uncles had a Vauxhall Wyvern like Swift’s father’s, “curvaceous and thickly chromed”.  My own father had only a Ford Popular but I, like Swift, made journeys in the passenger seat of the Ford along Crystal Palace Parade, with views of London to the north having a “fairy-tale aura . . a sea of lights, a black bowl of jewels”.

Later, Swift makes a wooden elephant from three pieces of plywood glued together.  His father suggests painting it yellow or pink from his impressive array of paint pots, but Graham chooses grey, “not a true elephant grey, but the only grey available, the one used in finishing off Airfix kits, battleship grey”.  The seriousness of children sometimes contrasts with the fantasies of adults.

I enjoyed a sample of local history in Swift’s essay on Wandsworth, and agree with him that Wandsworth Common has “an intricacy, a sheltering fragmentedness, even bit of Sylvan semi-rusticity”.  I know what he means; the villages of London still leave their mark, giving great character to what at first impression can be vaguely seedy urban sprawl.  Swift then writes in his room in Wandsworth about the process of writing, revealing that he writes his books with fountain pen and ink, believing that “a pen gets whatever is in your head onto the page more quickly and effectively than anything that’s been invented”.

Having skimmed through this book again in order to write this review, I don’t think I’ll be putting it on the shelf quite yet.  I think its one I will want to dip into for the next few weeks at least.  I’d recommend it to anyone who likes Swift’s books, or someone who writes, or maybe just anyone who’d appreciate a rich anthology of good writing.

As I read it, I began to wonder how this differed from a newspaper column, or even an Internet blog.  After all, there are countless coloumnists who write reflectively in the Sunday supplements or the weekly magazines, and even more bloggers who put their thoughts down almost daily on anything that comes across their path.  In the end, I felt that Anne Fadiman’s essays are perhaps written over a longer period and took longer in the gestation, giving them a depth and consistency across the topics which other media writers may not achieve.

Ann Fadiman is of course highly qualified to write such a book, being Writer-In-Residence at Yale University.  The books closes with a comprehensive list of academic references and other notes, and suggests that this is rather more than chance ramblings, but a well-researched set of thoughts born out of a long period of reflection.

The books is beautifully produced, and perhaps this is part of its appeal.  Its not a book to hurry through, but rather one to make last over several weeks, and return to again and again.  Any book-lover would appreciate it on their shelves, and it would make an unusual gift for anyone who likes reading and is prepared to try something a little different.