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• とっつきにくく、けれども忘れられない2018年の意外なブッカー賞受賞作

  2018年のブッカー賞受賞作Milkmanは、受賞作が発表された時点ではまだアメリカでは出版されていなかった。それほど多くの人にとって意外だったのだろう。 ブッカー賞は世界で最も「文芸賞らしい文芸賞」とみなされていて、候補になる作品には難解なものも多い。このMilkmanもそのイメージを裏切らず、とっつきにくく、読みにくい。 まず、プロットらしいプロットはない。 そして、かなりの数がある登場人物には名前がない。主人公は「middle sister（真ん中の妹）」で、タイトルになっているMilkman（牛乳配達人）は、牛乳配達人ですらない。そこに、主人公の母が恋心を抱いている本物の牛乳配達人はreal milkmanまで登場するからややこしい。主人公が付き合っているが公式の関係にするのを避けているような「Maybe-boyfriend（かもしれないボーイフレンド）」は、いつしか「（元かもしれないボーイフレンド）ex-maybe-boyfriend」になる。 興味深いのは、Anna BurnsのMilkmanを最初に読んだときにイライラしたこれらの特徴が、二度目に読んだときにはユーモラスで意味深く感じることだ。 最初に読んだときには、「面白いのか面白くないのか、好きなのか嫌いなのかよくわからない小説」だと思った。イライラして放り投げたくなる部分と、ものすごく同感して「そのとおり！」と大声を上げたくなる部分が同じくらいあるのだ。そして、読後ずっと頭にこびりついて離れない。 小説Milkmanでは主人公に名前がないのと同様に、場所も時間も書かれていない。 だが、1980年代にイギリスに3回住んだことがある私のような者にはこれが70年代の北アイルランド、ベルファストだとすぐわかる。読了後に作者のAnna Burnsについて調べたら、やはり私より2歳年下のベルファスト生まれの女性だった。 この小説に入り込みやすいように、この小説の背景を説明しておこう。 ベルファストがある北アイルランドは、1920年から「北アイルランドはプロテスタントによるプロテスタント国家」とする「アルスター統一党」政府が統治してきた。カトリック系の住民はプロテスタントの政府やプロテスタント系の住民から長年差別され、抑圧されてきた。そこに、差別されてきたカトリック系住民を守るためには武力行使も肯定するというIRA（アイルランド義勇軍）から分裂した「IRA暫定派」が加わり、血みどろの「北アイルランド紛争」にエスカレートした。有名な「血の日曜日事件」と「血の金曜日事件」が起こった1970年代のベルファストが、小説Milkmanの舞台だ。 主人公は歩きながら読書をすることが好きな18歳の少女だ。自分よりずっと年上のMilkmanから勝手にみそめられ、つきまとわれるようになる。牛乳配達人ではないがMilkmanと呼ばれるMilkmanは、テロ組織の指導者的立場にあるパワフルな存在でもあるようだ。自分が望まない相手から監視され、ストーキングされ、愛人関係になることをほのめかされる。彼女はMilkmanを嫌い、恐れているが、何もできないでいる。 「身体的な暴力を受けたのではないかぎり、自分に向かってあからさまに侮辱的な言葉を投げかけられたのではないかぎり、侮蔑の視線で見られたのではないかぎり、何も起こったことにならない。そういう基本ルールがある一触即発の社会で育てられた18歳の自分が、そこに何もないことに対して攻撃を受けていると言えるだろうか？」と彼女は思う。だから、かなり年下の主人公に対して不健全な性的感心を抱いているような一番上の姉の夫が彼女とMilkmanが愛人関係にあると決めつけて説教をしても何も言い返さない。 労働者階級の家庭で育ちながらも、豊かな知性を内包していることがわかる主人公だが、男たちが安易なヒロイズムにかられて互いを殺し合い、隣人同士が疑いをかけ、噂を流し、女は若くして結婚することが要求され、結婚の失敗や離婚は許されず、未亡人が貧困の中で数多い子どもたちを育てる社会では、18歳の利発な少女の内面などには誰も関心を抱かない。 何の関係もない相手と愛人関係にあると社会から決めつけられた主人公の日常は「不条理」そのものだ。 だが、その不条理は、70年代のベルファストではなく、同時期に日本で育った私も感じたものだ。なぜ我慢してきたのかと今になっては思うが、それはそういう「基本ルール(ground rules）だったからだ。「性的な目で見られて、つきまとわれて怖い」と思っても、「何もされていないだろう？」とか「お前につけ込むスキがあるのが悪い」とかえって悪者にされてしまう。わかりにくい文章であっても、同じような体験をしている読者はきっとわかると思う。 彼女の内声には繰り返しも多く、くどいようにも感じるが、二度目に読むと、鋭い視点や洞察力とストリートスマートな表現力に膨大なユーモアが含まれているのがわかる。 最初に読んだときには「面白いのか面白くないのか、好きなのか嫌いなのかよくわからない小説」だと思ったが、今は「ものすごく深くて、面白くて、好きな小説」だと胸を張って言える。

• Worth the money.

  Very very good.

• What is going on?

  Could not read it. It felt like a punishment to read this book. More than 5 pages into it and I was already so confused about what was going on and what kind of story the author was trying to tell. I wasted my money on this.

• Entrega conforme anunciado.

  O produto (livro) e entrega sem problemas.

• The Milkman Burns

  Perhaps it’s not right to invent a title for a review that concatenates the title and author of the book under consideration but in this case it seems so appropriate. This novel so well written, so lyrically Irish, such dark humour hurt me, burnt me. I’ve not read anything else that so successfully conveys what it must have been like to live through The Troubles of Northern Ireland and the impact this had on the minds of the people who felt they had no choice but to endure and survive those times as best they could. We are told the active voice of the principal character, nameless Middle Sister, a girl of 18 , of events unfolding around and over her, covering a period of just a few months. Through rambling sentences spiced with recall and speculation a current and historical profile of unnamed neighbourhoods (I guess Belfast) emerge populated by lithe, criminally inclined, politically bloated, blighted as well as delightful inhabitants. Burn’s skilfully conveys the agony of living in a repressive society beset with tribal loyalties and fear. I had to force myself to keep reading Burn’s intimately affective, ‘fictional’ account and accept the shadowy presence of clumsy British occupying soldiers and violent IRA patriots. Middle Sister is stalked by a powerful figure in the resistance: Milkman. He is married, in his thirties, a looming criminal. The threat of his presence alone in the absence of touch is nevertheless too close, visceral, overwhelming. She is incredibly brave. She feels she must protect her bisexual Sometime Boyfriend, watch out for more than poisoned words,defend herself from the unsympathetic narrative of her best Old Friend, ignore the constant harassment of her mother, First Older Sister and others.She must deal with the attention of a rejected suitor Somebody McSomebody, a young, pathetic pistol packing neighbour who attacks her in the loo. Perhaps most terrifying of all, our narrator, Middle Sister is caught in a culture of hostile gossip whose actors compulsively invent false stories about her, disarm and imprison her in a silo of alienated silence. We wait with growing impatience under salvos of words for something to break her entrapment. Burn’s conveys the tension between Middle Sister and those closest to her and the events that surround her in a simultaneously frightening, funny and entirely convincing way. We forget the inherent contradiction between who the truly articulate Middle Sister is who is writing the text and the girl who cannot ask for help from those in a position most likely to provide it is the same person. The Middle Sister who wrote this novel may not be the author but the author knows her so well I feel it is her alter ego talking to her younger self. Burn’s describes the prison of what seems to be her own internment. There is no need for her to explain why her eminently capable narrator is incapable of helping herself. The profound message intended or not is the way this wonderful story captures a time and place, a state of mind, what is was to be living inNorthern Ireland during The Troubles. In such a milieu, such a volatile and dangerous space it is best to fain ignorance, avoid extending to much trust in others, sensible to remain silent. There is nothing as boring as didactic intent in Burn’s wonderful novel but the lessons are there. What of current day tribalism and where it could take us? Why so many closed narcissistic minds? Why the unwillingness to listen to and respect other people’s point of view? How come we never learn? Yes, it’s complicated. Let me make it even more so. Oscar Wilde writing of a much earlier phase of The Troubles wrote something like this “if only the English would learn to talk and the Irish to listen we would have a very civilised society”

• Literatura de cualidad

  Un libro impactante, muy bien escrito con un estilo singular.

• Renouncers

  Milkman is a stream of consciousness story narrated by an unnamed young woman living in an unnamed part of Belfast (probably the Ardoyne), some time in the late 1970s. By way of context, the intensity of the killings in the early 1970s – especially the civilian deaths – had subsided; there had been population movement and people had retreated into small, “safe” pockets exclusively populated by people of the same political tradition (which was also generally correlated to people’s national identity and religion). Both unionists and nationalists still thought they could win the war through armed conflict, and the political voice of Sinn Féin had not yet come to the fore. The Hunger Strikes were still a couple of years into the future and most people could remember a time before the British Army was deployed to assist the civil power… So the novel is almost a love story set in this quite specific time period. Our narrator lives in a Catholic enclave of North Belfast. She reads 19th century novels while walking, which marks her out as a bit odd. Her maybe-boyfriend is a car mechanic from another unspecified Catholic district of Belfast. She is from a large family, four-ish brothers and three sisters and Ma. Da is dead. Our narrator talks to herself extensively in a colloquial Belfast voice that hinges on repetition and over-explanation. It is a sarcastic voice, cynical about the sectarian conflict and the motives of those who engaged in it. She narrates in euphemisms: the Sorrows, Renouncers of the State, Defenders of the State, the country across the water, the country across the border. People are second sister, the real milkman, chef, the tablets girl, Somebody McSomebody. Similarly places are not names and although most are recognisable – the reservoirs and the parks is Cavehill Road; the ten minute area is Carlisle Circus; the usual place is Milltown cemetery – the euphemisms allow liberties to be taken with the geography. The resulting text is very dense, often circular (at the very least non-linear) and pretty intense. It is like Eimear McBride crossed with James Kelman. The story is one of personal love and personal tragedy set within a dysfunctional society. Our narrator wants to be with maybe-boyfriend, but is admired by Milkman (a senior ranking paramilitary) and Somebody McSomebody (a wannabe paramilitary – was this a time before spides?). In a world where normal law and order does not operate, where law is made by the paramilitaries and is mutable, where whispers and innuendoes constitute evidence, this is a dangerous space. Our narrator knows the perils and even the most mundane activities – jogging by the reservoirs, buying chips, learning French, winning a scrap Blower Bentley supercharger – can be fraught with danger. Her quirky narration and eccentric world view manage to create deliciously black comedy from these dangers. Milkman is a timely novel. This period of the late 1970s has been largely airbrushed out of both world and Northern Irish history. Nowadays the Republican movement has been rehabilitated. They are seen to champion human rights and to lead the equality agenda. Its history is seen to be the ballot box in one hand and the armalite in the other. Their community justice is seen to have been a viable – almost legitimate – alternative to the RUC and the state agencies. It is often almost assumed that those who lost their lives (apart from in the early 1970s) had been “involved”. But what we see is a violent society with kangaroo courts based on self-interest and hypocrisy, arbitrary expulsions, witch hunts, suspicion. Paramilitaries tyrannise their own communities but the communities seem to lap it up. Each fresh atrocity is just casually dropped into conversation. More than anything, our narrator, her family and friends needed stability and predictability. What they got was the law of the jungle. And we know from history that they had 15 more years of this ahead of them before the first signs of the re-emergence of normality. Of course all this is viewed from a nationalist vantage point but we can safely assume that the situation was mirrored in the loyalist community across the road. And Milkman is also relevant to current developments as we start to see the emergence of an anti-political movement based on extreme and ill-planned actions. Brexit as a response to immigration and crime. Walls and travel bans and flip-flopping between nations and leaders being best friends and beyond the pale. If Milkman has a failing, it is that the meandering narration can frustrate the reader. There are few natural pauses, there can be a feeling that we have already covered this ground, ideas and phrases repeat. But they do add up to a work that is strong enough to carry the frustration. Milkman is a mature work that does say something new (or at least say it in a new way) in a field that has been ploughed often before.

• A worthy winner

  It took a wee while getting used to the style of Anna Burns's Man Booker Prize 2018-winning novel, Milkman. One doesn't often read books with long paragraphs (at times running into five pages) and no names (not of people not of places), and lots of repetition of words and phrases (certainly no Hemingway this). Particularly no names. The 18-year-old narrator is 'middle sister' (she has six sisters and four brothers) and is given to reading while walking, a trait that puts her well on the path of becoming one of the 'beyond the pales'. This is reinforced by her carrying a dead cat's head in a handkerchief just to give it a proper burial. She has a maybe-boyfriend, she has Milkman (with a capital letter) and a real milkman, wee sisters (three of them, all below 10 and all precocious), a mother, a stalker named Somebody McSomebody, Tablets girl who goes about poisoning people, and the 'issue women'. And where is all this? No names, but still one understands where, with a 'country over the sea' and a country 'on the other side of the road' and two embattled religions. The author is, incidentally, from Belfast, Northern Ireland. One is soon drawn into the narrative, based in the 1970s, laced with gossip, rumours, misunderstandings, renouncer attacks and state counter attacks (or vice versa), arms caches being found and scattered, a big issue being made over a Roller Bentley supercharger because of the flag on it. Dead-pan humour at times lightens the tale, which soon becomes highly engrossing until you finally realise, regretfully, that it is over. I've not read the other Man Booker Prize 2018-nominated books, but I can see why Milkman is a worthy winner.

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