BOOKS: Huckleberry re-imagined and some Galician poetry

WE have a fiction bookclub at our bookshop Tertulia in Westport, and our choice last month was ‘James’, by Percival Everett, which was published in April by Mantle. Ahead of publication, it was already receiving rave reviews, with many claiming it was the ‘book to watch out for’ in 2024.
Everett is an American writer, and his last book, ‘The Trees’, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. ‘James’ is a retelling of Mark Twain’s ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’, first published in 1885 – but this time the story is told from of the slave Jim.
Jim is Miss Watson’s slave, and Miss Watson watches over Huck (Huckleberry Finn), whose father is abusive and absent most of the time. Jim overhears that Miss Watson is planning to sell him and separate him from his wife and child. He escapes to Jackson Island to hide out and decide what to do.
Huck follows him there. Jim tells him, “I had to run fo’ she done it.” “But you got a family,” says Huck. “Don’ mean nuffin if’n you a slave,” comes the reply.
And so begins the heartbreaking story of Jim’s life in bondage. As a slave, he has no voice, no right to exist, no right to be with his family. Before escaping, he would give lessons to slave children in how to speak the slave dialect. White man must never hear them speaking as they, the white people, do. They must never know that Jim can read or write.
Huck and Jim set off downriver in Missouri, a slave state, heading for the free state of Illinois. Civil war is breaking out, and they meet soldiers heading to fight.
They have many adventures and near misses. They meet con artists and are forced to be part of their tricks. Jim is re-enslaved and escapes. He wants to write his story, and he steals a book from a theatrical company that saves him but then enslaves him again as part of its ‘Black Minstrel Show’. He has a pencil another slave gave him, but then he witnesses the slave’s execution for stealing that pencil. He wonders at Huck’s youthful sense of adventure, which remains throughout all that is happening to them – saying that he’s ‘envious of it, to tell the truth, to be able to feel that in a world without fear of being hanged to death, or worse’.
There are many twists and turns to the story, some wholly unexpected. The story is not new to us, of course, in that this is a retelling – but the recounting of the tale from the perspective of what it was like to be a slave just blew me away. I am reminded of the page’s power to reveal truths. The cruelty is heartbreaking; the inhumanity is heartbreaking. We see Jim’s ability to survive and in so doing to discover his own truth.
I can only agree with those other reviews: This is a must read for 2024.

‘Whales and Whales’
Skein Press is a small publishing house based in Dublin that publishes ‘thought-provoking stories not commonly featured in the literary arts in Ireland’. I have featured some their stunning publications previously, and now I’m delighted to introduce another.
Skein’s latest book is a poetry collection entitled ‘Whales and Whales’, by Luisa Castro, translated by Keith Payne. It was first published in 1988 and is considered one of the most pivotal collections in contemporary Galician poetry. This is the first English translation.
‘Whales and Whales’ was written in post-dictatorship Spain, originally in Galego, a language which had previously been marginalised. This version has both English and Galego.
The collection reflects a time when people who ‘had come to the cities to fill the new car factories and fish canneries’ while their children – like this poet – attended university and discovered who they were in this new emerging society. ‘Disarmingly vulnerable and intensely liberating, these poems reveal the dreams and awakenings of a young girl becoming a woman in a society yet to learn how to accommodate her’, says the blurb.
Apparently, Luisa Castro typed these poems on her white Olivetti Lettera 35 in her flat in Santiago de Compostela. They are beautifully surreal at times, but they also tell her story. Her father fished in the icy waters of the Atlantic, and she opens with ‘I’m all at sea out here. Ireland’s as far away as you are, as this heart that doesn’t love you’ / ‘Todo me dá voltas. Irlanda esá lonxe coma ti, equidistantes do meu corazón que non vos ama’.
Luisa Castro is the author of nine collections of poetry and six novels. She has been awarded the King Juan Carlos Prize, The Hiperión Prize and the Herralde Prize among others. Once director of the Cervantes Institute in Naples, Bordeaux, she is currently director of the Cervantes Institute in Dublin.

•   Tertulia will hold bookclub meetings on two evenings this month – Thursday, May 23, at 7pm, and Sunday, May 26, at 5pm – to accommodate members who can not make one of the dates. This month, the club is reading ‘Enter Ghost’, by Isabella Hammad, a story about the West Bank. All are welcome.

Bríd Conroy and her husband, Neil Paul, run Tertulia bookshop at The Quay, Westport.