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The Guardian
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
A Room Above a Shop by Anthony Shapland review – a fantastic debut of forbidden desire
Set during the late 1980s, against prevailing Aids paranoia and the Tories' Section 28 bill forbidding the promotion of homosexuality in education, Anthony Shapland's taut debut novel about the relationship between two men in the Welsh valleys packs a considerable punch. In an interview, Shapland suggests there was 'a generational howl of film and literature about that era when legislation combined with moral attitudes and misconceptions'. Indeed, there are echoes of 80s queer cinema, such as the work of Derek Jarman and My Beautiful Laundrette, in the forbidden liaison between the men, who are known only as B and M throughout. The difference here is that their world is not metropolitan but suffocatingly provincial, a fact that adds considerably to their predicament. The novel begins on New Year's Eve 1987, a time when 'Don't Die of Ignorance' HIV information leaflets were being pushed through letterboxes, with their melodramatic images of icebergs and black marble slabs, warning 'the virus can be passed from man to man'. At the time, B is living with his father in a cul-de-sac near a 'man-made mountain' of coal waste, a 'place to be alone with this feeling he's different to the others'. In the pub, he meets the 'good-natured M' from the ironmonger's, who is 11 years his senior, and with whom he feels an immediate spark. They agree to meet the following day on the mountain, where they begin an intense and tender love affair, which plays out against the backdrop of a postindustrial landscape, captured in Shapland's muscular prose: 'a brownfield slicked in frost above the river and road, railway and town … The valley is shrinking. Houses fall apart, worthless. A place of industry now sagging, underfed, starved of purpose.' Respected in the community, M has a daughter who lives with her mother and stepfather, and thus has a lot to lose from this risky affair. Before long, he offers B a job and lodgings at the ironmonger's shop, where the younger man 'handles stock, bulky farm deliveries, paint orders'. Soon he can 'signwrite, sharpen knives, occasionally turns his hand to shoe repairs … A language of admiration builds between the two men.' Much of the novel's tension derives from the duplicitous life B and M are forced to live in the homophobic, close-knit community. The risk of exposure is a constant threat. The titular room above a shop is in reality two rooms, one for each of them, though 'nobody comes up here to discover only one bed unmade'. From adolescence, B has learned to pass as straight with other men in the dominant pub-culture: 'Men with men, mates. He understands how to behave, what to talk of, how far apart to sit.' To come out in this world would be suicidal. With a litany of slurs, he acknowledges that men like him are seen as 'against nature, effeminate, weak. Light in their loafers, shirtlifters, nancies, benders'. He finds he and M are 'always lying. Exposed, they would be shamed. Shamed in the town that knows their fathers and their mothers.' It's a situation that ultimately proves corrosive to their love. While the novel covers territory familiar from the early work of Alan Hollinghurst and others, it takes stylistic risks with its fragmentary structure, allowing a nimble alternation between the points of view of B and M. In spare sections and single standalone lines, Shapland's prose achieves a poetic intensity, shifting from vivid evocations of sex to childhood memories. B and M's fraught but freeing first coupling is full of 'spit and awkwardness … This thing is happening. They are both laughing, smiling. Kissing.' Later, Shapland distils the freedom of a 1970s upbringing into a single paragraph: The summers were full of falls and leaps and forfeits. Of scabs picked at the edges and tarmac-grit grazes, dock-leaf salve on stings, breath held underwater. Of running alongside trains and freewheeling bikes down the steep rutted tracks. Summers of dares and whispers of what men do and what women do, and who has seen what. With its poignant rendering of a loving relationship undertaken against great odds, compounded by a hostile political climate, A Room Above a Shop is a powerful and luminously pure novel. At 53, Shapland has arrived with his talent fully formed. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Jude Cook's novel Jacob's Advice is published by Unbound. A Room Above a Shop by Anthony Shapland is published by Granta (£14.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply.
BBC News
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Rainbow plaque to be unveiled at former home of Jackie Forster
London's latest "rainbow plaque" has been unveiled at the former home of actor, broadcaster and lesbian rights activist Jackie the scheme, blue plaques bordered with rainbow stripes have been installed in several locations in the capital, to commemorate significant people, places or events in LGBTQIA+ publicly came out as a lesbian in 1969 and joined the Campaign for Homosexual Equality. She later co-founded the long-running lesbian social network and publication organisation Studio Voltaire, which runs the plaque scheme, described Forster as a "true trailblazer who paved the way for LGBTQIA+ people through her pioneering work". Following Sappho, Forster joined the Greater London Council's Women's Committee and became an active member of the Lesbian Archive and Information Centre Management Committee. "Jackie spent the last half of her life working increasingly for LGBTQIA+ rights and visibility," said Anne Lacey, Forster's partner."From the day she 'came out' at Speakers' Corner in 1969, she fought for the celebration of the word 'lesbian.'"The plaque was unveiled in front of her family, friends and fellow activists on Wednesday, at Forster's former home in Warwick Avenue, where she lived for 21 years until her Sanders, Founder of LGBT+ History Month said Forster was a "whirlwind and a massive champion for lesbian visibility"."Importantly, Jackie ensured there was a weekly safe space at Sappho's Notting Hill meetings. "Her kindness was legendary," she added. Forster was chosen for the commemoration through public nominations, with this being one of five new plaques being installed across London since initiative, supported by the Mayor of London, has already installed plaques for playwright Oscar Wilde (Clapham Junction Station), the film My Beautiful Laundrette (Vauxhall) and he Black and Lesbian Gay Centre (Peckham).
Boston Globe
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Tamara Lanier writes about fighting Harvard to reclaim her ancestor's narrative
As Lanier learned, the daguerrotypes of Renty, his daughter, Delia, and several other enslaved people had been created for the use of Louis Aggasiz, a Swiss scientist then at Harvard and now known mostly for his Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'I was excited because I had heard so much about this man,' she says. Knowing that Renty's image had been used as part of Agassiz's pseudoscientific project to prove white supremacy made her feel queasy. 'I knew that was not his legacy. I thought it was so bizarre that Advertisement The journey Lanier describes, driving to Cambridge to see the image in person at Harvard's Peabody Museum, being turned away, then The Supreme Judicial Court Advertisement Lanier hopes readers will take heart from her story. 'Everything that my mom told me, I was able to later substantiate. That's how accurate our oral history was, and is,' she says. 'So many people have these stories and they don't know what to do with them. Write it down, that's the first step. This is our history.' Tamara Lanier will read at 6 p.m. Wednesday, February 5, at . And now for a few recommendations…. Because we simply can't squeeze all the books we want to talk about within the limits of these pages, I hope to highlight a few titles you should look for at your local bookstore this week. From 'The Buddha of Suburbia' to 'My Beautiful Laundrette,' Hanif Kureishi has has spun adventurous and often subversive tales about sex and race set amid English conformity. In ' A pair of novels draw from history's inspiration. In ' Advertisement Finally, two takes on machines and humanity. From David Hajdu, whose ' Kate Tuttle edits the Globe's Books section.
New York Times
27-01-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Paralyzed by a Fall, a Writer Learns Resilience (and Kindness)
In December 2022, in Rome, fate took Hanif Kureishi by the wrong hand. He was sitting in the living room of his girlfriend's apartment, watching a soccer game on his iPad. Suddenly he felt dizzy. He leaned forward and blacked out. He woke up several minutes later in a pool of his own blood, his neck awkwardly twisted. Kureishi was 68. He was rendered, instantly, paralyzed below the neck, able to wiggle his toes but unable to scratch an itch, grip a pen or feed himself, let alone walk. Kureishi, who is British Pakistani, is a well-known screenwriter and novelist. His paralysis made international news, and many began to follow his updates on his progress, which he posted via dictation on social media. Now comes a memoir, 'Shattered,' with further updates. The news this book delivers, as regards his physical condition, is not optimistic. He has progressed little. He wrestles mightily with who he is, now that he must rely on others for nearly everything except talking and breathing. His memoir is good but modestly so. It contains a great deal of black comedy but its most impressive emotion is regret — for things undone and unsaid earlier in his life. It's hard to get across how counterculturally famous Kureishi was in the 1980s and '90s. He wrote the screenplay for Stephen Frears's raffish art-house film 'My Beautiful Laundrette' (1985), about a young Pakistani man who is given a derelict laundromat in London by his uncle and hopes to turn it into a success. That movie arrived in the wake of Salman Rushdie's 'Midnight's Children' (1981), the most influential novel of the late 20th century. Both were fresh and sharply drawn works about postcolonialism and its discontents, a topic that Rushdie and Kureishi dragged, alive and squirming, to the forefront of the culture. The men became friends. Kureishi photographed a bit better than Rushdie did. With his lion's mane of dark curls, he resembled a pop star or a hipster prince more than a writerly mole person. Thus, it is one of the jokes in 'Shattered' when Kureishi recalls the time a nurse asked, while plunging a gloved finger into his backside: 'How long did it take you to write 'Midnight's Children'?' He replied that if he'd written 'Midnight's Children,' he would not be in the care of England's public health system. In a darker parallelism, Rushdie too has written a recent memoir of horror and recovery. Kureishi wrote the screenplay for Frears's next movie, the romantic comedy 'Sammy and Rosie Get Laid' (1987), and then published his first and best-known novel, 'The Buddha of Suburbia,' in 1990. He has since written many more screenplays and novels but none have so captured the conversation. When the press began to write about his accident, Kureishi says in 'Shattered,' he began to feel like Huck Finn at his own funeral. Most of the accounts of his life and career were flattering. There is a bit of that life and career in this memoir, but more often we are in the present tense, as in: 'Excuse me for a moment, I must have an enema now.' Bodily eliminations are a central topic. He learns to get over the humiliation of not being able to cope with these on his own. Caregivers always seem to be feeling around back there. At one point Kureishi cries out to his readers, 'I now designate my arse Route 66.' The importance of touch, of small physical kindnesses, is felt in nearly every paragraph. It has ever been true: Kindness is the coin of the realm, accepted everywhere. Looking back at his life, Kureishi writes: 'I wish I had been kinder; and if I get another chance, I will be.' Remorse runs through this memoir's veins like tracer dye. Kureishi stares hard at himself; he studies the blueprint of his own heart; he does not always like what he sees. He recalls being spoiled and self-centered and not, for example, welcoming the arrivals of his three sons. He hated taking them to sports events; he was used to doing what he wanted. While his girlfriend and later wife, Isabella, cares for him in his new state, he wonders if he would have done the same for her. He was often distant, to her and others. His injury has brought him so much good will from so many people; he wonders if he would have reacted similarly. Kureishi comes to feel 'like a Beckettian chattering mouth, all I can do is speak, but I can also listen.' His favorite visitors are big talkers. Speaking takes a lot out of him. He remarks that 'becoming paralyzed is a great way to meet new people.' While he is in rehab, trying to regain motor skills, Kureishi confronts the contingencies of all our lives. Those around him have suffered motorcycle crashes, falls from ladders and trampolines, dives into empty swimming pools, sports injuries, a litany of freak and not-so-freak accidents. Many incapacitated people, including famous ones like Christopher Reeve, have written books. The paralysis memoir with the most sophistication and sensitivity, that constantly taps into life's mother lode, is 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly' (1997), by Jean-Dominique Bauby. He was 43, the editor of Elle France, when he suffered a brainstem stroke. He wrote his sumptuous book by blinking to select letters while the alphabet was recited to him. 'Shattered' does not reach such heights. We confront the bare wood beneath the bark of Kureishi's best earlier writing. But he is good and bracing company on the page. His book is never boring. He offers frank lessons in resilience, about blowing the sparks that are still visible, about ringing the bells that still can ring.
