Month: June 2023

That was the June 2023 lets look back

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  1. The Atom Station by Halldor Laxness
  2. While we were dreaming by Clemens Meyer
  3. In the Belly of the Queen by Karosh Taha
  4. Brendals Fantasy by Gunther Freitag 
  5. The Widow Couderc by Georges Simenon 
  6. The Boarding House by Piotr Paziniski
  7. Nightwalking BY John Lewis stempel 
  8. Azúcar by Nii Ayikwei Parkes 
  9. The Strangers by Jon Bilbao

I felt I was back on track blogging, is I had managed 9 reviews in the last month. I started in Iceland and a political satire told by a made in the minister’s house. Then we have a group of lads growing up in post-unification Germany a thinly veiled piece of Autofiction of the writer’s years growing up. Then we have a pair of stories telling the outcome of a group of Kurdish refugees when one hits another, causing waves we have two narratives from this event. Then a dying man went to Northern Italy to stage a show. A widow lets a man into her house. What will happen when he meets her kids !! Then a man travels to visit the boarding house his grandmother lived in with fellow holocaust survivors. The ghost of the memories lingers in the air. Then four seasons of walking through the night and what you see. Then an imagined Caribbean country has issues when its sweetened rice crop begins to fail, and a couple that met years ago reconnect. When a couple wintering at the coast as UFO appears an unknown family? We went through 8 countries, a number of genres and one new publisher.

Book of the month

I had some great reads this month, but this grabbed me and was the one I had hoped would win the Booker International. It is a great coming of age for a group of hard living working class lads.

The halfway mark

A lot of you tubers have a half check-in. Well, here is mine. I have reviewed 43 books on the blog. I have read 58 books this year, Goodreads tells me. I had set 125 for the year and think I will hit that in my head. I want to review 100 books here if not a few more. I had added up and the country counts for the blog is at 116. Another plan is to get to 120 by the end of the year.

The book so far – while we were dreaming by Clemens Meyer

Discovery of the Year – all the devils are here by David Seabrook; a repeat of backlisted put me on to this gem.

A new writer to me – well not a new writer but I have read one and am finishing another by Javier Marias. I had read him before, but this year I finally got him as a writer which is great. I have a lot by him to read.

looking forward to The new Mathias Enard sound simply mad, then I have ordered the second book by Olga Ravn, and there is the two Peter Nadas books coming out.

Non-book events last month-

We finished a small light, and then we started to watch Archive 81, a horror series on Netflix from a podcast about a woman and a strange building in New York. I’ve been watching the two Denise Mina adaptions that BBC brought it a few years ago.

The month ahead

I am in Scotland for a family funeral the first week in July so I may not get to blog much that week, but I will try. I have a number of books on the go at the moment A long Hebrew classic I am midway through, a short German Satire and then Berta Isla. I have after this a plan to read a Nyrb classic and an Archipelago book not sure which I do yet I have so many on my shelves, and I plan to read one a month for the rest of the year. I am always inspired by the like of `Trevor at Mookse and the guys behind the unburied books podcast to read some more from these publishers but as ever I am a reader in the wind so plans can change just like the wind!

What has your month been like?

 

 

The Strangers by Jon Bilbao

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The Strangers by Jon Bilbao

Spanish fiction

Originl title- los extraños

Translator – Katie Whittlemore

Source – Personal copy

I often talk about publishers I like and one of them the is Dalkey Archive in the last few years they have brought a few great books from Spain so when I was browsing for a new book to buy and saw this had just come out from them I chose it as it is a perfect read in a day book as it clocks in at just over 120 pages. Plus, the blurb sounds to me like it could have been an old episode of X Files a family move to a town where there have been UFO sightings, and there have been so many great books from Spanish in recent years that have Erie or another feeling to the narrative, and I felt this may be like those books.

The estuary curves around the base of Monte Corbero and discharges into the sea at one end of the beach. It courses, piguant, after all the rain. The beach looks very different from the image it projects in the summer, when she and Jon typically come to spend a few days and his parents are home and take care of everything and insist that Katharina and Jon go have a swim and relax as much as they can. Now, dark bands of marine litter and plastic debris cut across the sand.Jon’s parents winter in the Canary Islands.

The arrival at the winter home seaside at winter always an odd place.

The book sees a couple Jon and Katherine take a trip to the Cantabrian coast to overwinter there they have got sort of jobs which means they can now work remotely after living for years in the city.There is a sense this is maybe a chance to come together again as a couple. So They are stay overwinter in a family members house at the coast. but as the time goes by they drift apart this is the first off the three parts of the book the couple settling in and then coloured lights appear at night and the winter retreat becomes home to some more family when another couple claiming to be cousins appear said to have been raised by grandparents in Latin America.Markel and Virgine appear and initially Jon is wary of them but his wife persuade him to let the couple habng around. BUut are they connected to the lights. There is also a growing amount of UFO watcher and a feeling of something other than them being around them.

There’s a dog in the foreground at one edge of the frame. Only the back half of it is visible, out of focus. Definitely a German Shepherd. It walked in front of the camera just as the photo was taken.

The boys are looking at it with identical expressions: mouth opened in an “O” of surprise and smiling eyes. The dog has turned them into twins.

“I thought you two had never seen each other before,”

‘ says Katharina.

“That’s what I thought,” Jon replies.

“Me too,” Markel agrees.

“Where is this?” Katharina asks, peering closely at the picture.

Have the cousins meet before ?

This is a short book that has three parts to it the  couple settling in the lights appearing and the second part the cousins or supposed cousins of Jon he has no memory of them but some families can be like that we have second cousins I ‘ve met maybe twice in my life from my father generation . Then the last part is what the other is in a way . This has a wry feel to it remind me of a mix up of xfiles episodes there is the comic ones there is a sense of humour in this book but also that sense of creepiness the sense of the other being there something that I have seen so well done in recent years in Argentina fiction fever dream or the danger of smoking in bed. Its as if the xfiles had a latin American writer the main couple have a feel of any modern couple trying to escape the rat race but the grass insn’t green and that is just where they were at when the lights appeared adding a turning point of the story the other couple could have walked of a x files episode they have that feeling of holding secrets and not quite seeming what they are how many of these type of people are their in the x file episodes. As you can tell I was a huge X file fans so anything with a ufo theme is going drawme back into the world of mulder and scully bnut this has a distinctive Spanish twist. Have you read this book ?

Winstons score – A – tightly told tale in three parts of a couple trying to escape and rebuild but then buzzed by UFO’S

Azúcar by Nic Ayikwei Parkes

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Azúcar by Nic Ayikwei Parkes

British Ghanian fiction

Source – Review copy

As you all know it is rare for me to review a review copy that isn’t a book in translation but this is one of those that fit the books that aren’t in translation I will review they are books that appeal to me from small publishers, books from either Africa or the Caribbean and lastly a book from a writer I have read and love well this is a rare occasion of a book that ticks every box for me. I reviewed his debut novel very early on in the blog and so when the chance to get to read his second novel as Nii Ayikwei Parkes is one of those writers that writes in any form, he has published a number of volumes of poetry and written children’s books in the 14 years since his debut Tail of the bluebird which I Reviewed very early on in the blog and was one of my favourites the year I read it . I managed to Cath his interview on open books about this and why he choose to set it in an imagined Spanish Caribbean island to move it away from the place and make it about the situation and the characters.

His name was not Yunior; it was Oswald Kole Osabutey Jar.

When the Spanish tutor first asked for his name, he had said it clearly, but Profesor Hernandez had forgotten, and the next time he called Oswald to conjugate a verb, instead of pointing and asking what his name was, as he did with some of the other students – mainly boys from Angola, Southern Sudan, Cape Verde and a sprinkling of girls – Profesor Hernandez snapped his fingers and blurted out, «Yunior.”

Overwhelmed by the newness of everything – the fertile green of our vegetation he could see clearly from his seat by the open window, the weight of concentration it took to follow what he was being taught, the thickness of our Cs and dip of our double Ls, Oswald Kole Osabutey ]nr. opted for the safest utterance – “Si,” he responded.

As a young boy wide eyed at the place and overwhelm the young Yuinor

Fumaz the imagery country at the heart of this book, could, in fact, be any island in the Caribbean in the Guardian review they said it was Cuba but I felt a bit of Haiti init when I read the book follows a number of characters Yunior a young boy from Ghana a boy that has come to study music and has two loves music and plants so when he gets the chance to study on the island of Fumaz that is famed for its very sweet rice crop. He later decides against it. music and follows his heart and studies to become a scientist on plants which is how the two later on meet in the book. Then we have Emelina Santos her grandfather started the whole sweetened rice for the island to grow and made a fortune with it so she is from the upper class of the island her time is split between the island and the US growing up. She sees the young boy in a band Yunior and we follow her life and find out how her family came to make so much money. But the two collide later in adult life as the rice sweetened by sugar is failing and the one man that may help is the boy now a man Junior. As they try to save the island.

His name is Juan Soñada Santos. She already knows this, but he tells her anyway. His family own a chain of shops on the Sun Coast, but their wealth derives mainly from sales of sweet rice grown on their family farm in Fumaz. When he speaks, she notes the gentle movements of his hands. His African ancestry is not obvious, but she traces it in the undertone of his skin, the kinks in his hairline, the tremulant bass of his laugh

Emelina’s forefathers started the sweetened rice craze that the island is so well known for.

This is a book that feels like a 1000-page novel squeezed into a novella but without feeling cheated rich in imagery of leaving home, lost dreams, island life, a storytelling tradition. You feel the island come to life through the two main characters’ eyes that of coming and trying to make your way and then someone that has come from a family that made it as we view their rise over the years. It is a book rich you can tell Parkes is a poet but also his love of music shines through I did in parts imagine the Buena Vista social club those beats that mixture of music that can only come from the Caribbean a melting pot of the US, Latin America and Africa. You could also say the book has the same mix of voices  Marquez the vibrant world he brought to life, a writer like Toni Morrison for family tales of the hard world we can live in and then a writer like Asare Konadu an early writer from Ghana whom I compared to his debut novel a number of years ago. This is a book that follows two people but also is a history of an island and those that left Africa to try and get a better life in the Caribbean. Another thread is an ecological warning about plants and crops and why we want to grow crops a certain way, all packed into less than 180 pages. Have you read this or his debut novel? Azúcar by Nii Ayikwei Parkes is published by Peepal Tree Press the UK’s leading publisher of Caribbean and Black writing, available in paperback from Amazon and Waterstones.

Winstons score – A- a stunning epic in miniature,  let’s hope I don’t have to wait 14 years for his third novel !!

Nightwalking by John Lewis Stempel

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Nightwalking four journeys into Britain after dark by John Lewis STEMPEL

Nature writing

Source – personal copy

Life is made of routines at times or things we do at a certain time or place. For me one of these routines is whenever I go to Macclesfield to put flowers where we spread my mum’s ash a number of years ago. We pop to the town centre and I always now buy a piece of nature writing at the Waterstones there it is a ritual a connection to my mum but also my grandfather is there as well a man who paid for my young ornithologist membership when I was young g in fact that was the first connection to nature writing the magazine there but also the many young people that wrote in around there own local nature. So with the Alfred Wainwright’s longest, I may try and read a number of the books from the list like last year. So the choice of a book from a writer that has won said prize twice before is a good choice before the list comes out and it also reminds me of my late-night walks back when I lived in Alnwick many years ago.

I began night walking out of necessity. The congenial village pub that served Wadsworth’s 6X the underage was not, alas, situated in my village, so required a three-mile perambulation home at closing time. The path to my den was along the downstream bank of the River Wye. One midnight I witnessed barn owls, ghostly raptorial spheres, hunting over the December-frosted water meadow. In the heat of a summer night, aroused with the aroma of elderflowers, Daubenton’s bats vortexed around my head so closely that I knew the cooling breath of their leather wings on my face. Often there was the sheer romance of moonlight on water. And thus a teenage prerequisite became a lifetime pleasure.

I remember many a walk back from the pub in my youth as well.

We see much of the season changes in the day in Nature writing it is easy to see and observe but the night is another question either too cold or too short in the summer. But we follow John on some walks over the seasons winter I remember winter walks dark of the night like HJ=John I have seen owls and bats on those cold dark nights I used walkthrough the edge of the Duke land a strip of land at the back of the estate once a victorian tip it still had many a broken bottle and pots from the era visible. I loved this walk in a dark night a time before phones had absorbed what we have to think about the breath in the air as a flutter of wings passes you or as in the book we hear and see Badgers those shy creatures of the night. We see John as he observes nature both wild and those farms as he passes them sometimes on the way home from the pub as he has had a couple of Wadworth 6x a pint I may have two or three of them over the years. Hedgehogs seen going about their business like in the Potter books they do look like little busybodies as they go through the night. Then there is the spectre of TB  over the land he farms those creatures of the night are often the villain of its spread. He captures nature throughout the year when the night is there.

20 June: I stopped by the copse, where the track enters the trees, on the second lightest evening of the year. It was past ten, but I could see the shape of the hills, the thirsty cattle drinking from the trough down in the meadow, the breeze in the barley, and the watermark tracks where the deer had wandered through the wheat. Across the twilit valley, the hay had just been cut, the bales stacked in dark towers, but the mowed ground glowed with the heat of the days. Getting out of the car, the pale mauve sky was gentle and warm, and it seemed to me then that winter had never been, and never would be again.

The noise of farm animals at night  always sounds so much louder than in the day.

What makes great nature writing to me is a writer that draws you in and makes the world around them seem to come to life those little observations and mannerisms of creatures he picks up so well on I have a couple of other books by him and will be reading them over time as he is called the finest living nature writer that is a hard burden but he brings to life that world he is observing .and reminds us how much of nature is there after dark from the birds and bats of nights to those creatures we rarely see other than when they sadly get hit overnight on the way around their world I miss my late night walks but who knows there is many a year left to take a walk at night and see those creatures of the night in the habit. Have you a favourite nature writer ?

Winstons score – a . A book that evokes a year of night walks.

14 years and counting Winstonsdad here to stay

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Yes another year has flown by, well it feels that way but the last year in many ways, had a lot of ups and downs. I had a lot time of work this time last year, and this eventually led to a full redeployment at work which I have say is the best thing that could have happened I love my new position, the team I work with the job we do it is just as thou I have fallen into the place I should have been. Then Amanda and I brought our first house a stressful event for someone like me that has struggled these last couple of years. But actually, after it all it wasn’t so bad so I missed blogging for a while as Ifor the last 12 months plus I had been toying with the idea of switching in part or fully to vlogging, I had been caught by some vlogs and brought a camera and stuff to try and start one. But after one post I decided it just isn’t me, and actually, I love writing about books, and in the time I have blogged, I have written more on my little reviews. I am to be the everyman of world lit I love that role I am the oddball, the man with bad grammar, and yes, in part, this is connected to my dyspraxia I have a brain that works so much faster than my fingers ever will, and as my work now involves a lot more typing, I am just about to get some software to help me with my work and if it helps I will more than lightly get it for the blog. I  loved doing the shadow jury and often feel out of my depth when people talk, but I take this as just the way I view the world i just hate things being over-complicated, and that’s just me. I slowly get back to the way I used to blog many years ago with just that sheer love of books and discovery and just wanting to pass on that to people. Hence Czech Lit month I love events and planning for them, so look out for more from here.  As I had a feeling over the last few years which I don’t want to call imposter syndrome; I hate that term. I had just felt out of place a lot, and a lot of that is from my own thought processes and why should I be comparing myself to any f***er I don’t know. why, as I am unique !!. The blog is going strong after 14 years. I have 1270 reviews and 2190 posts over the last 14 years. This equates to 90 plus books a year in review and a post every 3 days as well. The blog has covered more than 100 countries, a lot more than most people. I intend to slowly add over time till I get a book from every country in the world. The next year I hope to post my reviews a little more regularly, and now I am feeling settled and positive a lot more than I have last for the last few years. I hope to get back out and get to London again and reconnect with some people in the translated world and just put winstonsdad back out there again. Thanks for sticking with me for the last year or two. Let’s carry on reading around the world one book at a time!

Czech Lit Month September 2023

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I have opted to miss Spanish lit month for a couple years Richard, my co-host, isn’t blogging these days and I like a new Challenge so How did I come about Czech Lit Month. This will show how lateral my mind can be I have been thinking of an autumn project for a while a replacement for Spanish lit month, but I hadn’t intended to do another country month I had wanted something else, but then I was listening to some music and the song from THE film Once the duo of Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová a Czech singer and I remembered there was a couple of albums and they were called the Swell season after Glenn’s favourite book by the Czech writer Josef Škvorecký a writer whose books I loved and that lead to a rabbit hole of Czech Literature. Capek, Hašek, Klima, Hrabal, and Kundera, but there is so many older writers in translation and some great new writers from publishers like  Jantar Books publishing some new voices. Then there is Twisted Spoon have brought out the best of 20th-century avant-grade Czech writing. There is also the best of Modern Czech classic series I have a few from this series. I will be posting updates. I plan a read-along book which I have yet to pick. I also plan to watch a few Czech films over this period as well. Have you a favourite Czech writer or publisher that brings Czech books that I haven’t mentioned. Also, love someone to co-host this with me.

The Boarding House by Piotr Paziński

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The Boarding House by Piotr Paziński

Polish fiction

Original tilte Pensjonat

Translator – Tusia Dąbrowska

Source – Personal copy

I’m going to start to work through some of the many Dalkey Archive books I have brought over the last few years, just a drop in the ocean of what they have published. According to Chad Post, there is well over 1000 title that has come out over the many years the press has run. He is currently putting together that list, and in the meantime, I will cover what I. have. This one jumped out for two reasons it was a European Union book prize winner, an odd book prize that has had several books over the years I have read. The other fact was that Piotr Paziński is a Joyce fan. He has written two books around James Joyce, one a cultural map of Joyce’s Dublin. The other fact os he is editor-in-chief of the Jewish magazine Midrash. This was his debut novel. He has written another since both have been translated into English and are set in the Polish Jewish world. Here we find a grandson heading home to where his grandmother used to live.

IN THE BEGINNING, there were train tracks. In the greenery, between heaven and earth. With stations, like beads on a string, placed so close together that even before the train managed to accelerate, it had to slow down in preparation for the following stop. Platforms made of concrete, narrow and shaky, equipped with ladders and steep steps, grew straight out of sand, as though built on dunes. The stations’ pavilions resembled old-fashioned kiosks: elongated, bent awnings, and azure letters on both ends, which appeared to float on air,

I’ve always enjoyed peering at them, beginning with the first station outside the strict limits of the city, when the crowded urban architecture quickly thins out and the world expands to an uncanny size.

The opening as he is on the Train

The book opens as he is on a train, that echo of earlier trains but also his childhood as he starts to count down the stops as he heads back in Journeys through Poland people had made as he sees the stops he had many years earlier also gone past to visit his grandmother at the Pesjonat (boarding house for the old). He is visiting for one last time to see the ghost of the Boarding house but living and dead; as he gets there, he meets two women he vaguely remembers. One talks to him, but the other her mind is gone as they talk about his grandmother and her time in the house. They are all Holocaust survivors like his Grandmother, but age has caught up on them. Even the house itself is caught up in time. He wakes and looks at the stained ceiling of the house. He meets those who remain the doctor, the director. As he drifts back and forth through time as he tries to remember his late grandmother those summers, they also draw him back into those pre-war and war years, and being Jewish is a sort of last call of these memories to pass them on to the next generation.

“Do you see? And how can you talk to her? She’s lost it completely! Do you understand? This is impossible!” She held me under my arm.

“She knew your grandmother, you know?” she didn’t stop talking. She dug into my arm and told me to turn around as if she wanted to go back to the house already. “She remembers everything very well, but right now she isn’t doing so well. She’s lost her mind a little.”

She stopped to size me up properly.

“Why did you come? For the company? Almost no one is left here, each week they’re taking someone. I also don’t know how long I will stick around. And the young ones aren’t eager to come, so what will you do here? It’s boring to be around old people. Come, you will walk me upstairs now.”

We tottered down the path. The doors were open.

Meeting people that knew his grandmother well but are dying out or forgeting her.

This book tackles being Jewish now in Poland, a smaller community but one heavily tied to the past, but this is the point the guard is changing those last survivors are dying, and the world they grew up in and that past is in a generation now gone. I remember meeting Aharon Appelfeld the Romania – Israeli Jewish writer he was at the IFFP the year he won the prize to briefly chat and hear him talk was an opportunity that is rare these days as so few survivors left. I was also reminded of the words of Dasa Drndric forget this happening, and you open the door to it happening again! But the main thing in this book is a personal feeling. This may be Piotr’s journey on the train, a relative living in the country, or as he said to his translator, the Borsch belt that made me smile. These houses are typical in the middle European countryside, and as it says, this community of survivors’ stories needs protection. A book that has a whiff of folk tales to it as we see a man drift through time. My only complaint is that it could have been a bit more beefed out.

Winstons score -A solid book would have loved a little more!

The Widow Courdec By Georges Simenon

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The Widow Courdec by Georges Simenon

Belgian fiction

Original title -La Veuve Couderc

Translator – Siãn Reynolds

Source – Review copy

I had planned to review this last month, but with reviewing strangers in the house for the Club year. So  I held this back. This was written in the mid-war years by Simenon, taken on an existentialist novel it happened to have come out the same year as Camus’s novel The Outsider, which has always overshadowed this work from Simenon. Something that annoyed Simenon as he felt his book was just as good. We have a new translation here as part of the Penguins project to bring everything they can by Simenon into English, a job they have been doing nearly as long as this blog has been going he wrote so much, over 400 books, some in his own name others with a varioety of pen names he used over his life. This is the 14th book I have reviewed in the blog from Simenon, and I will carry on as long as I keep getting either sent or see them around.

He was walking. For at least three kilometres, he was alone on the road across which tree trunks cast oblique shadows every ten metres, and he strode on, without hur-rying, from one dark strip of shade to the next. Since it was near midday and the sun was reaching its height, a grotesquely foreshortened shadow, his own, slipped along ahead of him.

The road led straight up to the summit of the hill, where it seemed to vanish from view. On the left, things rustled in the woods. On the right, in the gently rolling fields there was just one horse, far in the distance, a white horse, pulling a wine-vat mounted on wheels; in the same field stood a scarecrow, or it might have been a man.

The opening as we see Jean appear and what efrfect he will have on this whole story!

This starts with two souls that meet on a bust. They seem similar initially, but as the book goes on we see they are not. Jean is a middle-class man who has had a hard time, and he was just released from Prison when he meets Tati, the Widow Courdec of the book title. She is a woman that married the son of a rich family whilst she was a servant in that house and had been there since she was 14 and grown closer to the older brother. So you can get her place in this FGamily home with the sisters of her Husband when she has left the Estate as he was the only son in the Family. Tati loves the control this gives her, and she even uses it on Jean at times ! She sees Jean as perfect to be here, Valet. As the two grow closer. But as events change when Tati is attacked and bedridden by one of her husband’s sisters, Jean has to look after her in bed. As this is happening, it means there is a shift in the dynamics which means that Jean is spending a lot more time with the sister than he had before, so he is drawn to the youngster in the family, Felice, but does  Tati Know what knock-on effect will this have to them all?

First in the queue was the woman wearing mourning, dignified and disdainful, next the woman from the grocer’s shop, her neck swathed in a flannel bandage. That morning she had lost her voice.Then it was Felicie’s turn. There were other women as well, coming out of houses from every direction and approaching the butcher’s van. They took their time.Many of them had a gait like geese, swinging heavy stomachs ahead of them and eating as they walked.

The back of the van lifted up to reveal a kind of shop: whole quarter-carcasses were suspended inside; there was a set of scales with its copper weights, squares of brown paper hanging on a string.

Who’s next?

Felice is seen more by Jean later on but what effect will that have ?

This has themes of money and family power. People of the different class clash. Jean is a catalyst for these events. His introduction to the house is like The stranger appearing in Camus. The sheer fact he is there and the dynamics of the situation have changed will lead to an ending of some sort, but as the book unfolds, things seem to go one way and then another as other events happen. He wrote this a couple of years after strangers in the house, and you can see how he has grown as a writer. This has a complexity that some,e of his other books haven’t, but this is a dark book with a lousy relationship, a terrible family, and a man just out of prison. That is all you need for a book that is dark and uncomfortable at times. It questions who they are and what they desire as, over time, you see this change in all those within the house. This book is in a Different Translation from the US publisher NYRB Classics and is called The Widow by them. Have you read either translation ?

Winstons score -B solid piece of writing from Simenon lots of ideas here but maybe a little dark as well.

 

Brendel’s Fantasy by Günther Freitag

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Brendel’s Fantasy by Günther Freitag

Austin fiction

Original title – Brendels Fantasie

Translator – Eugene H. Hayworth

Source – Personal copy

After the last two books followed growing up in Germany. We are moving now to neighbouring Austria. And a book from Haus Publishing. A novel by the Austrian novelist Günther Freitag a writer who is also a teacher and has had a number of novels and plays published in German, and he has won a number of prizes over the years. A number of them over the years are around classical music like this one. Here we meet a man at the end of his life as he is dying and wants to see his final and grand ideas. The book follows his decision to move to Italy for a man dying.

CASTELNUOVO SITS ON two sprawling hills, whose slopes are planted with thick vines. Vineyards, a few craftsmen, several shops with food for daily needs, at the edge of the village a manor that has specialised in sheep farming. The ideal place for the Fantasy, Höller thinks on the way to Felsina farm.The rest home is situated on an elevated point from which the entire city can be viewed. In a display case in front of the community hall, a poster annoujncess a meeting of the delegates of the province abd the mayors from the surrounding areaa. A discussion of  enviromental devastation and sale of land to foreign investors.

Maybe this is why he struggles to get his idea off the ground to the local.

 

The book follows what happens when a successful businessman Höller is told that he has a terminal brain tumour. He is at the crossroads of what to do with the time left. Like many in his position, we see a man who has a family that has been pulled apart and affected by his job and work. His with high flying and sons that pay little heed to him now. He has one other passion in his life: Franz Schubert’s works, especially when they are conducted by the Great Alfred Brendal. So what follows is his decision to sell up and use all the money he has left to Go to the sleepy Tuscan village of Castelnuvo. There he decides he wants to put on his own piece of Schubert, the one he has always loved Wanderer fantasy using the locals, which are a bunch of unusual characters including the old man from theold people’s home, a drunken priest a dwarf that is the mayor’s right-hand man these all stand in his way. But he wants Brendel to perform it for him, so he writes a series of letters to grab the great pianist’s attention and bring him to this sleepy backwater. As events unfold, his mind becomes affected, and reality and hallucinations become hard to work out, which is when dreams and reality mingle. But will Höller finally get to see his dream of Franz Schubert done by Albert Brendel in this sleepy Italian village be he shuffles off this mortal coil !!

Back OUTSIDE, Höller imagines the dwarf as an usher. The black uniform with gold braid shall make the deformed man an authority who will not tolerate any rebellion and will squelch every insurrection with his squinting gaze, emphasised by an ominous, dancing Adam’s apple. But he will not be able to buy the uniform readymade.Höller walks to the piazza. More than four hours before the meeting begins. The political bigwig will already have made the journey, sitting in the back of a black Lancia and studying the press reports on the parliamentary sessions of the last week. How did the journalists react to his speech? Do they quote one of his colleagues for his remarks? Does the chairman of the party advance their position? Then he reads letters from his constituents, all written in clumsy sentences and always with the same requests. Can’t you drive any faster? As you command, Onorevole, whispers the pale driver.
The carabinieri drive past Höller in their blue Alfa at a walking speed. The passenger in the front seat looks at him briefly, then the car accelerates and races on toward the centre of town

As he imagines what will happen if it gets it off the ground

This is a dark comedy of the final roll of the dice of one man and the madness of it as he dreams of the great performance he is bringing. This is a smaller-scale version of the dreams of Herzog in Fitzcarraldo when he dreamed of bringing the Italian Opera Tenor Caruso to those in the Jungle. This is an equally bleak journey through the sleepy village and the hurdles they put in the way of his dream. The last effort of a dying man to escape and live in a dream, almost away from his present, will succeed. This is an unusual book mix of death and desire and hopes all in one book are hard to make work.

Winston’s score – B  interesting idea for a book

 

In the Belly of the Queen by Karosh Taha

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In the Belly of the Queen by Karosh Taha

German Fiction

Original title -Im Bauch der Königin

Translator Grashina Gabelmann

Source – Review copy

I was sent this unusual book from V&Q by the Kurdish-German writer Karosh Taha; she came to Germany with her parents when she was just ten. Her family settled in Duisburg, which isn’t to far from the part of Germany in Kleve in the Ruhr area. She had trained as an English teacher and worked teaching English initially as her writing career took off. This is her second novel. Both are set and deal with close-knit Kurdish communities living in Germany in high-rise buildings. This book tells the same story from two different angles and can be read in two ways female first, then a male story or the opposite. Way around. The book uses a fight Amal has with her young classmate Younes and the book is told from her perspective and Younes’s best friend Rafiq’s perspective.

I tell Younes my father never wore jeans, and he nods, he knows that, and he smokes like my father did. Younes remembers my father better than his own. For Younes, his father means waiting and enduring, enduring the wait.
I tell Younes he only ever wore black trousers with his shirt loosely tucked in, he was lanky, that’s why the shirt fluttered around the sides of his torso – his clothes seemed too large for his body, yet just right. His only accessory was nonchalance, and I wonder how he dresses now, whether he still wears clothes from his time as a student.

Amal remembering her father and the way he was.

As I said, the book is really two novellas that follow the same events over the same time frame from Amal the young female and the main character of the book. As she hits the young Younes, her father jumps to protect his daughter, but he abruptly leaves her, and she ends up. Living with the boy she hit and his mother, as they like her, have been pushed outside. Her father defended her, but at what cost to himself and what knock-on effect does this have on her life after this, even in this close-knit community as Younes is an outsider due to his mother Shahira, a free spirit, a woman that lives by her own rule. This world of Younes. We see through the eyes of his best friend Rafiq, a young boy initially drawn to his mate’s mum but then repulsed by her free spirit as he sees his Kurdish culture come through. But he ends up in a relationship with the equally free-spirited Aal. What does he want thou, Rafiq? This is the sound of the two cultures clashing the tight-knit and relatively similar to their homeland Kurdish community. They live in the high rise tight-knit choking on its way, or can they escape to live as Germans? All these floats around the three youngsters as they grow up. This book has layers to it it follows the aftermath of one event and the tug of war growing up in this situation. This is maybe closer to English books like Brick Lane or the early books from Hanif Kureishi than most German books.

I want Shahira  to lick her spoon; I want to see her tongue wan. But she never does, and she’s always pleased to see me tion. burn in, Raffig: She saunters barefoot into the kitchen She’s wearing leggings like the girls in our year, with her shir just covering her butt. Every curve’s still visible. When she’s nor wearing heels, she’s the same height as Amal, and I could easily put my arm around her. Her dark hair falls in waves over her breasts and shoulders. Sometimes she puts her hair up – then you can see her neck, which is browner than the rest of her body.I don’t know what her belly looks like or the folds underneath her arse. Amal’s are white because she goes to the tanning studio.Shahira sometimes tans in the afternoon sun, but not often – it gives you ugly wrinkles and spots, she says. She used to sit on her balcony wearing a summer dress and let the sun shine on herglistening legs for half an hour

Rafiq sexual awakening are muddled here

This is another book that reminds me of my time in Germany. I worked alongside a number of refugees some from Iraq and others from Former Yugoslavia. Some people in this book could have quickly been working in the Jugendwerkstatt I worked at. The wonder of this story is how it shows the gender divide in the community she grew up in and how people can view one event and the aftermath differently over time. It follows a girl that goes on to be a very strong woman in Amal. But it also shows the outfall of war and having to move on children when thrust into a different society with different rules. As I said, this book is maybe nearer to some books like Bribk Lane or A book like Interpreter of Maldives, both books that follow second-generation immigrants, those kids growing up on that divide between family past and the present and the country they live in. I loved the use of two narrations for the same event it is like what Durrel did with Alexandra Quartet as the same timeframe is told two ways the unreliable nature of the youngster’s narrative comes to the fore, and also how swayed they can be by gender and their own culture. Have you read this unusual book ?

Winston’s score – A – This is a look at growing up in two cultures in this case in Germany but it is a universal story of two cultures clashing

While we were Dreaming by Clemens Meyer

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While we were Dreaming by Clemens Meyer

German Fiction

Original title -Als wir träumten

Translator – Katy Derbyshire

Source – Personal copy (I did have an e-galley)

I am late to a couple of the international booker reviews. I have left this as it was my personal favourite of this years longlist. Meyer is a writer whose work I have long admired. He was first brought to us by And other stories that brought out All the Lights which I reviewed on the blog 12 years ago. He has since then been published by Fitzcaraldo; such is the nature of books in translation that this was his debut novel, and his second novel, bricks and mortar, which I had also reviewed, came out I loved. But this novel captures him. as a raw young writer. Meyer is a writer who has lived a life growing up in the East. He has worked blue-collar jobs as a security guard and forklift driver. He has been in the situations and worlds his characters live in. This writer has lived in part of the world he writes about, and this group of lads trying their best to make their way in their world after the wall fell and their world changed utterly.

The shooting was over. The green lamp at the shooting range for the electric rifles had lit up one last time, a hit, my last shot, six out of ten, not bad at all, and the pop of the air rifles had stopped over in Room Two where the Free German Youth had been shooting. We put the electric rifles down on the tables and went to the door.
‘Did you see, Danny? I was really good,’ Mark said down in the schoolyard, and he laughed and slapped his chest. ‘Almost like Old Surehand! You’ll never beat my nine

The boys at the fair shooting early on things get darker when they get older .

 

This classic piece Bildungsroman focuses on the tight n=knit group of four boys living in Leipzig and trying to see the world beyond their brewery quarter hard living tough streets.Rico, Mark, Paul and Daniel. We see their world as they try to get through every day in their hard-hitting world. From drinking, stealing cars, Danny getting prison tattoos, the boxing matches, this is a man’s world. Danny and his dad support football his dad an alcoholic. We see the football club they love and the violence involved in the football of the late 90s, as the boys try to get to Manhood as they run through the nights, escaping the law and running illegal clubs. This is a world of a world emerging from oppression, hope but no hope really at this time. Danny is Meyer. He is, as Tony put it in our group chat, the one that is there but seems to avoid the worst of the trouble. One imagines Clemens has rewritten himself slightly.

the Tattooist and Thilo the Drinker donit know each other, and that’s a good thing cause Thilo be Drinker talks a lot of crap and pisses people off and wort stop talking stupid crap at them when he’s had a drink and he’s almost always drinking.
Tattoo-Thilo doesn’t drink much; he broke the habit in jail. He’s been to jail a couple of times even though hes not yet twenty, and he doesn’t like people talking stupid crap at him. I don’t know exactly what he did time for, but GBH was on the list.
I get my tats from Tattoo-Thilo ’cause he’s got a pretty good reputation when it comes to tats, not just in our neighbourhood. Rico told me there are even guys from the red-light district who go to him, and Rico got inked by him as well, but that was in jail. Rico doesn’t talk about jail much, but I know almost all tattooists get their training there.

Danny gets his tattoos

I was drawn to this before it came out or was on the list of comparisons to Irvine Welsh. I get that part.I was a huge Welsh fan back in the day. I was in my 20s a lad I loved drinking, loved football, got in fights, have been in tricky situations and have known a number of shady characters, but I am maybe more of a Danny than any of the other characters I am a bit straight-laced at times. But to me, this is more bloody Shane Meadows all four of these characters could have fallen off the screen into the pages of This is England series set over the same period and also following a similar group of lads through their ups and downs. I know there is a film of this but I tell you, Meadows would make this book a masterpiece of a film. It captures the lost hope of the working-class world. It is the ghost of those early Springsteen songs running the streets on the edge of the law. It is hard to hold back how much I loved this it reminds me of the kitchen sink and working-class novels I loved in my youth. Have you read any books from Meyer?

Winston’s score of A++++++++ is just stunning !!!