The Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses
The best written book on this year's shortlist; and the best-written of the previous winners
In today’s issue
— Our pick of the best-written book on the shortlist for this year’s Republic of Consciousness Prize, the winner of which will be announced on the 17th of April.
— And as part of our project to find the best-written books of the century, our pick of the best-written previous winner.
— A brief extract from The Demon Inside David Lynch, which we’ll be serialising later this month.
We’ve now organised the site so you easily access our archives of author masterclasses, picks from the best-written recent releases, from prize shortlists, the best-written books of the century, and extracts from many of these.
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THE REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRIZE 2024
The shortlist:
Out of Earth Sheyla Smanioto, translated by Laura Garmeson & Sophie Lewis
Avenues by Train Farai Mudzingwa
Of Cattle and Men Ana Paula Maia, translated by Zoë Perry
The Zekameron Maxim Znak, translated by Jim & Ella Dingley
The End of August Yu Miri, translated by Morgan Giles
The best-written of these is
It’s no coincidence that in Vilaboinha only Penha has a dog. It barks softly, rises with the earth, only howls in the midst of the wind. Penha knows what Vilaboinha can do, that’s why she taught her granddaughters to lead quiet, quiet little lives, sheltered and shrouded in silence. Cover yourself up, Maria de Fátima, lower those eyes, girl. Don’t lie, or you’ll end up scaring life away. That’s why she taught her granddaughters. What happened to her needn’t happen to them.
Penha knows what Vilaboinha can do, she’s lived in the town so long, my God, it’s been far too long. Penha knows, that’s why she doesn’t take chances, no, the dog’s time will come, Penha won’t take chances, no, her granddaughters have got to learn. They don’t call Penha crazy for nothing, not for nothing. She’s spent so long in Vilaboinha, since the beginning, too long seeing this bitch of a city devouring all its useless puppies. Too long, my God. Too long.
.
‘What happened, Fátima? You came on your own?’
‘Tonho’s on his way, Granny.’
‘So this is how you show up for the photograph? No shoes?’
‘I borrowed some the day of the christening.’
‘Was your hair like this, a tangled mess?’
‘You told me to put it in plaits, remember?’
‘Run your fingers through it some more, come on. It was only a gust of wind.’
‘Granny you’re so hell-bent on having everything how it was.’
‘What’s worth remembering about today, Fátima? The missing dog?’
‘I don’t know, Granny, but the christening’s long gone, there’s no photograph to bring it back.’
‘Be quiet, leper-girl. Don’t mess with my memory.’
.
In Vilaboinha there were no dogs at all except for Penha’s, not while Fátima still lived there. Twenty years isn’t all that long, if you think about it, but a dog is a kind of plant that can root in any soil. Her grandma’s guarded everything around it, a female, and so skinny my God she was skin and bones, she used to gnaw the bones in her own paws and bury herself whole so the wind wouldn’t carry her away. She only stayed by her owner when Penha’s other granddaughter — the girl hasn’t even a name, poor thing — used to soothe the earth with her feet outside, and wouldn’t let anyone dig at all.
Grandma Penha spent her days with her stomach propped against the kitchen sink, scraping a spoon around the bottom of the pot to make sure no doubts or sugar crystals were left. Enveloped in dreams of her own, the dog objected to the iron’s whining. Envious. Penha watched the girl, her youngest granddaughter, sweeping the earth over the ground outside. The dog would moan softly, dreaming of terrible bones, her tail restless. Penha’s granddaughter was watching the outline traced on the swept ground, she was watching the wind, watching the wind, and Lord Almighty the girl saw a lot more than just the wind.
Dona Penha drops the pot, the noise wakes the dog and the dog jumps up, lies down, now with her head between her paws, eyes unearthed. The girl, her granddaughter, a strange fixation, she stares at the earth, the horizon, the dust seeing people who aren’t there. Goddamn obsessive, couldn’t she hide it at least. What if the photographer arrives early and sees the girl in this state? Shameful. Since she was little her gaze has stretched far and full of people, boundless, she saw a group, convoy, herd, her finger feeling out what wasn’t there, mind that finger, come on, girl. Since she was a little girl… what is it she can’t stop staring at?
Dona Penha kicks the pot, the noise wakes the dog — it’s not there any more, goddamnit, where did it go? Penha picks the pot off the floor, shaking her head to dislodge her thoughts from the bottom. Those stubborn grains of sugar, so that’s where they decide to fall.
This remarkable Brazilian novel has been garlanded with multiple awards and accolades since its initial publication, as Desesterro: the prestigious SescPrize for Literature, the Machado de Assis award and the Jabuti award. The story follows four generations of female characters as they navigate the hardships of life in the parched landscape of the Brazilian sertão. Male figures are peripheral, but are also revealed as the origin of much of the suffering in the novel, generating for the women a kind of exile not only in relation to the land but to their sense of self. This is a ground-breaking feminist work, a bracing modernist fable, of sorts, formally reminiscent of Eimear McBride's A Girl Is Half-Formed Thing.
Advaita Vedanta has a term neti neti, the nearest translation of which is not this, not that. It’s one of the primary tools employed in this school of Hinduism to help people strip away denial and other illusions and attain a nirvana that makes the world’s ups and downs irrelevant. And nirvana means snuffed out, annihilation, terminal desolation, in the best possible sense. Lights snuffed out, darkness, no-world, void, like the final moments of Twin Peaks: The Return.
Hence the need for neti neti to strip everything away, the illusions of purpose, coherence, resolution, beauty, significance, decency, basic interest and engagement, love, good versus bad, value in general, separation, time, space, any and all concepts and categories, language itself, the world itself, existence itself, the lot. For some people, this process could be nearly as harrowing as hour after hour of The Return.
So in Mr Lynch’s eyes the series may have been an attempt to strip everything from the viewer, the viewer’s illusions, as he saw them, to slap them into the terminal desolation so valued in Eastern practice, that blastedness, bereftness, nothingness, no-thing-ness, silence, void that might be our only true refuge, our only home, as the world we know comes to an end.
And there was something nicely ambitious and maverick about providing global end-times salvation within a protective bubble of nothingness mystically formed by the ultra-garbage of a telly drama.
COMING SOON:
THE BEST-WRITTEN BOOKS OF THE CENTURY
The Republic of Consciousness Prize previous winners:
2017 John Keene Counternarratives (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
2018 Eley Williams Attrib. and Other Stories (Influx Press)
2019 Will Eaves Murmur (CB Editions)
Alex Pheby Lucia (Galley Beggar Press)
2020 Jean-Baptiste Del Amo Animalia, translated by Frank Wynne (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
2021 Shola von Reinhold Lote (Jacaranda Books)
2022 Norman Erikson Pasaribu Happy Stories, Mostly, translated by Tiffany Tsao (Tilted Axis Press)
2023 Missouri Williams The Doloriad (Dead Ink)
The best-written of these is
Prolegomena to Future Agonies
When Dolores inclined her head to acknowledge the presence of her uncle the movement dragged her down toward the earth; her breasts dipped and swung in a low arc and the rest of her droopy, fat body scarcely managed to resist. The wheelbarrow in which the others had placed her wobbled dangerously until their uncle grasped its handles with his trembling hands and began to push Dolores away from the encampment and into the forest. The rest of the children watched them go with little feeling, deadened by light and heat. As she rolled down the slope that led to the green border of trees a great tremor went through her, but Dolores was not able to distinguish between fear and desire and so she made herself still again and awaited her destiny with the wooden resignation of a sinking merchant ship. Her affinity to the earth was so pronounced that she couldn’t wait to be in it, though she would never be able to articulate that in words, the trick of which eluded her, and so Dolores had faced up to the marriage and what the schoolmaster called “the dribbling monotony that was promised to her” just as stoically as she’d faced up to being born. She bounced along in her melancholy way, as patient as a stone, and Agathe watched her from the ridge above the path, having followed the two of them at a distance since their departure from the camp. She moved forward, still hidden by the dense net of leaves, and squinted down at the pair in the gully below her. Their uncle shuffled along with his unwieldy burden and the cracked lenses of his glasses repelled the sun; the light bounced away from him, splintering into new delusions, and those bright disks, fixed to the head and the long, dry stick of his body, gave him the appearance of a watchtower on the move. It was no surprise to Agathe that their mother had entrusted their uncle with the transporting of Dolores, the success of which was already a source of much speculation among her children, because his loyalty to the Matriarch was ancient and unquestionable; at all times he bowed to her stronger will. And then there was Dolores herself and whatever soul remained to her after nineteen years of stony submission, although Agathe couldn’t find it with her narrowed eyes. The sun slipped through the green canopy above them and moved over her sister’s white body. She was a blinding point, all the more blinding given her placement within the bright forest, sodden with light, and suddenly it was painful to look at her. But this was the last sight that Agathe would have of her sister before she was gone with no guarantee that she would ever come back, and so she blinked the tears from her eyes and committed the image to the vault of her memory, scrabbling in the earth with her dirty, restless fingers as if anchoring herself to the damp mulch of the forest floor. The creaking of the wheelbarrow—the whoosh of air as it moved from one side to another, tilting with the weight of her sister’s body—her uncle’s dry cough. Up on the ledge watching the pair through the screen of vegetation, Agathe felt as though she were really down there, next to her uncle and the wheezing sound he made as he pushed the wheelbarrow along the rough dirt path, and she could smell the sweat pooling in the deep folds beneath Dolores’s armpits without having to imagine it. But this sense of herself dispersing, of occupying multiple spaces at once, was something Agathe knew how to dismiss, and so she pushed herself back through the green forest and through the arrow loops of her own dark eyes all the way into her own dark head, and concentrated on the stupid smile she thought she saw on her sister’s lips. Even if she had had legs, Dolores wouldn’t have known how to use them to get away. There was a poison in her and the theft of her legs had not been enough for it: those melted stumps were simply the sign of that greater corrosion, much as the trappings of a church are only there to point to the presence of the god, and it was this hidden thing, not their uncle, that was leading her into the forest. It was the blunt promise of her anatomy: the slack mouth and the round pig eyes; the antiquated languor of her fat white hands—these small acquiescences all pointed to the answer of a question never asked: a great pale feminine yes. Agathe knew all this and knew not to feel sorry for her.
"[The Doloriad] just might be what your rotten little heart deserves." ―J. Robert Lennon, The New York Times Book Review
One of Vulture's Best Books of 2022 and short-listed for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award.
Macabre, provocative, depraved, and unforgettable, The Doloriad marks the debut of Missouri Williams, a terrifyingly original new voice
In the wake of a mysterious environmental cataclysm that has wiped out the rest of humankind, the Matriarch, her brother, and the family descended from their incest cling to existence on the edges of a deserted city. The Matriarch, ruling with fear and force, dreams of starting humanity over again, though her children are not so certain. Together the family scavenges supplies and attempts to cultivate the poisoned earth. For entertainment, they watch old VHS tapes of a TV show in which a problem-solving medieval saint faces down a sequence of logical and ethical dilemmas. But one day the Matriarch dreams of another group of survivors and sends away one of her daughters, the legless Dolores, as a marriage offering. When Dolores returns the next day, her reappearance triggers the breakdown of the Matriarch’s fragile order, and the control she wields over their sprawling family begins to weaken.
Told in extraordinary, intricate prose that moves with a life of its own, and at times striking with the power of physical force, Missouri Williams’s debut novel is a blazingly original document of depravity and salvation. Gothic and strange, moving and disquieting, and often hilarious, The Doloriad stares down, with narrowed eyes, humanity’s unbreakable commitment to life.
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