Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik
Original language
English
Categories

MARTIN JOHN

Anakana Schofield

A brave literary interrogation of an immensely difficult subject, one that we'd rather avoid, which only isolates its victims even further.
One in three women experience unwanted sexual acts. If abusers and sexual deviants are that prevalent, then they are not somewhere else, not somebody else's problem, not an aberration easily dismissed. They are among us: on the bus, and at our kitchen tables. Anakana delves into the mind of such a man, who leads a pitiful, strange, and isolated life. Plagued by anxious delusions, his urge to rub himself against women and expose himself, Martin John lives a life of repetitive rituals – circuits, he calls them, both on the job as a security guard and janitor, and off, as he compulsively fulfills his required routine around Euston Station in London. When he wraps himself around the wheels of a train, not the security staff, and not the police officers, but only Mary, the Nigerian who works at the bakery counter in the station, holds the power to release him. Brave, intense, and filled with unforgettable characters, as well as the most ribald and mordant black humor imaginable. MARTIN JOHN is a multilayered novel that explores the nature of sexuality, and what is knowable inliterature, and in life. From Ananaka Schofield, the brilliant and unconventional author of MALARKY, comes a dark and uncomfortable novel circuiting through the minds, motivations, and preoccupations of a character many women have experienced, but few up until now, have understood quite so well. The result confirms Schofield as one of the bravest and most innovative authors at work in English today. Anakana Schofield is an Irish-born writer, who won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award and the Debut-Litzer Prize for Fiction in 2013 for her debut novel Malarky.
Available products
Book

Published 2023-05-11 by Biblioasis

Comments

An enlightening conversation in Electric Literature between American novelist Lidia Yuknavitch and Anakana Schofield Read more...

Biblioasis

"A fearless look at a broken soul. . . Do pick [Martin John] up if you are enthralled by what the novel with its variable and elastic form can do as Schofield pushes the boundaries in careful calibrations of narrative structure and language that bites."

"Possessed of a biting, acerbic voice, influenced by Beckett, Joyce, and O'Casey, Schofield offers a sardonic, funny, and stylistically innovative breath of fresh air to a literature that too often feels starved of oxygen."

"Anakana Schofield has hit the publishing world like a storm. This book was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize despite being about an uncomfortable subject: inside the mind of a sexual deviant. Still, our reviewers picked this as one of the top five of the year with comments such as: 'Formally audacious and incisive writing that's also got plenty of heart and quirk'; 'admiring the stylistic and thematic risks Schofield has taken with it'; 'a novel that mirrors its protagonist's obsessive and deviant behavior in its elastic prose'; 'a case study in mother-son drama where mental illness and an overbearing parent collide ... A dark, comic and moving portrait of the guilt, pain and suffering of the mentally ill.'" Read more...

The 20 books you´ll be reading - and talking about - for the rest of the year Read more...

"Schofield's first achievement is to burrow into Martin John's rackety mind. Her second crucial achievement is to turn this unsettling apprehension into a necessary, extraordinary act of empathy."

"Anakana Schofield has eloquently captured the inner life of a hapless pervert — of whom there are many in our society, but who we little understand. Read Martin John and experience the ineluctable pull of one such guilt-ridden deviant and his overbearing mam."

"This is a very moving and terrific book."

"... ambiguous; funny; distressing and complicated." Read more...

CBC Radio´s 75 best books of 2015 Read more...

And Other Stories (February 2016)

"Frenetic, risk-taking . . . deliberately cryptic and bleakly funny, Martin John puts you inside the mind of a person you'd strive to avoid in real life, but also points to the fundamental elusiveness of character." Read more...

"This is an important and brilliantly unconventional work, offering a glimpse into a mind few can ever, or would ever want to, fully understand." (starred review)

". . . as an avant-garde Canadian novelist, Schofield is in a class unto herself. [MARTIN JOHN] is a novel that deserves to be discussed."

"MARTIN JOHN is an exhilarating follow-up to her Amazon.ca First Novel Award-winning MALARKY . . . The weird and recursive prose makes the language startlingly vivid, and Martin John's fractured narrative perspective is positively adrenal. . . Schofield's ability to get us jacked up from exquisitely written and deeply troubling jokes . . . makes the Irish Canadian novelist one of the highest-flying and funniest working today.

One of the top five fiction books of 2015 Read more...

"This is literature serving its most essential function: illuminating the darkest recesses; dragging the unspoken and suppressed to the foreground . . . throwing light across the blackest of humanity's vistas. This is writing at its most fearless: visceral and searing, yet textured and nuanced; the darkest of comedy and the deepest of insight."

"Martin John is the best novel I have read in years; long after reading it I feel that I am still reading it, being read by it."

New York Times Editors´ Choice Read more...

"In the cadenced, hypnotic style of Gertrude Stein, Ms. Schofield renders his consciousness through a kind of staccato anti-poetry—repetitive twitches of thought isolated on predominantly blank pages ... The result is a grotesquely memorable character pursued through his mazes of routines and obsessions and rationalizations, but little comprehended: “There are some things we aren't going to know about Martin John.”

"Comparisons have been made with Beckett and Pynchon, but Martin John is closer to Nabokov's Lolita and John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer Prize-winning classic A Confederacy of Dunces. Schofield's black vision is darker and all her own. I love the humour and the disciplined rhythms of her plain, exact prose, as well as the audacious panache. It remains a mystery why Canada's Giller Prize jury chose Andre Alexis's Fifteen Dogs over Martin John, but there will be more than enough award panels and readers eager to throw laurels at Anakana Schofield's feet." - Eileen Battersby Read more...

"The novel all your favourite novelists will be reading."

Encore

"Deploying some serious literary gumption, Schofield's frequently hilarious, and distinctly modernist, linguistic games are always gainfully employed in the uneasy, indelicate task of placing her reader nose to nose with the humanity of a sex offender . . . addictively reflexive, and potentially lethal." Read more...

"Profane, strange, hilarious, and necessary, MARTIN JOHN is a beguiling triumph."

"Simply brilliant. With its discomfiting portraiture, dazzling brain-puzzle of a storytelling technique, and utter assurance, Martin John easily matches the tremendous promise of Malarky, Schofield's debut."