Month: August 2023

Czech lit month reminder

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I just wanted to post a reminder that it is the first Czecxh lit month next month I  have found a list of the best Czech and Slovak Literature the list is Czech heavy to give you a few options of what to read . I found a list from the Guardian as well . A list from Culture Trip as well of ten books.Radio prague also had series of programs around Great Czech novels. There is also Twisted spoon press that I have reviewed a number of books from the Czech based press. I have a number of books in mind I am yet to nail down my choices for the month other than Michal Ajaz  Book Golden Age which I am reading at the moment. what books have you picked or suggest for others ? I have reviewed 17 czech books on the blog over the years

A Bookshop in Algiers by Kaouther Adimi

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A Bookshop in Algiers by Kaouther Adimi

Algerian fiction

Original title Nos Richesses

Translator – Chris Andrews

Source – Personal copy

I brought this in this year’s Waterstones sale. It caught my eye as it is about a famous bookshop in Algeria. Kaouther moved to France with her family when she was eight. One of her incredible memories is of her father taking her to the library every week( I used to love my library trips as a kid and actually still do, although I don’t use my library as much as I should these last few weeks have been great getting books for the woman in translation month). She took up writing after doing well in a short story contest while at university. This book is set in her homeland; she did go back to the mid-90s to report on what was happening in the country at that time. The book uses the shop as a prism to all that has happened in Alegria in the 20th century.

But you will follow the alleys that lie open to the sun, won’t you?You’ll come at last to Rue Hamani, formerly known as Rue Charras.You’ll look for b: it won’t be easy, because some of the numbers have disappeared. You’ll stand there facing a sign in a window: One who reads is worth two who don’t. Facing History, with a capital H, which changed this world utterly, but also the small-h history of a man, Edmond Charlot, who, in 1936, at the age of twenty-one, opened a lending library called Les Vraies Richesses.

In the present its ghost lives on in the library on the same site.

The book drifts from the present, where the shop’s site is now a lending library, so the spirit it had is still living in a way. Then back in time to the glory years of this shop that was opened by Edmond Charlot a free thinker if there ever was one, he imagined Les Varies Richesses as a melting pot of literature, art and friendship a meeting place for those in love with books, not only did he open a shop he also published books from that shop as well. It had been where Camus first saw fame with his first book launched at the shop. It was also used in the war to publish FREE French propaganda. A book is in a number of forms, all different the present is in Alegeria with its problems and Post-independence as we see Ryad clearing the book to sell but is the shop just a shop? What is it soul? We have Charlot’s own journal that sees how he got books out there from Camus and Giono, how the shop managed to just get through the war, and then in the years after the war, we see how Alegeria is moving towards independence so many countries started to after world war two.

May 5, 1936

This will be a library, a bookstore, a publishing house, but above all a place for friends who love the litterature of the Mediterranean. As soon as I took possession, I was overjoyed. I’m starting to meet the neighbors, the storekeepers, the waiters. These new characters in nmy new world. REVOLT IN asturias is on sale. People are saying that e.c stads for EDITIONS camus. They’ll see through the ruse soon enough, but we’re in no hurry to set the record straight, the main thing is, the play is Selling

Camus the man he first publuished and a man thart would sit outside the shop and smoke from timt to time.

This book is clever as its main character is the shop but not the shop. More of the dream of what the shop could be, a place for ideas. The shop and its history is a lens on the country around it as history happened to like those involved in the wars of the period took damage, so did the shop. But its spirit is still there in some way. I loved the parts of Charlot’s journal that harks back to an era when dreamers and free thinkers could have almost changed the world when a bookshop can be so much more a publisher, a melting pot of ideas, a place for thinkers to chat and talk over the world this is a book that reminds you of the power books can have and the freedom even in the present there is the chance to get a book and break free in those words of your present. This is one of those odd books that walks the line between fact and fiction and leads us to a small shop and a man with dreams and one of the greatest writers in the 20th century in Camus, that loved the shop. Have you read this book?

Winston’s score = +B, A tale of a long-gone shop and a place I would have enjoyed, I think !!

 

Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza

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Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza

Argentine fiction

Original title – El Nervio óptico

Translator – Thomas Bunstead

Source – Library copy

I took a break over the weekend I had originally intended to blog every day of the Woman in Translation month but I had a busy weekend with Amanda my Father visited my house, and we had a meal then we had a day in the peaks Sunday and a roast which we hadn’t had for a few weeks with all the trips to Scotland anyway I am back and back to the woman in translation month reviews and this a writer I have had on my list to get to and so when I saw this on the shelf at the library I felt it was time. Maira Gainza is a well-known art critic and writer for a number of papers in Argentina. She also writes for the Magazine Artforum, which is, of course, the title of a novella by her fellow Argentina writer Cesar Aira. This was her debut novel. This book is about art a woman that loves art but what also connects us to art.

Hunting scenes were quite common in Dreux’s day, evocations of a sport that had been a class marker since the Middle Ages, when the hunt became an elite pastime and often the only means of preparing men for war. An unintended by-product was that it gave the nobility a way of measuring itself – though only against itself. The first ever enclosures of forests and common land came about to enable exclusive access to big game. Commoners had to make do with birds and rabbits; bears, wolves and deer became the landowner’s right.

The hunting scenes in the opening chapter remind me of those I seen in a country houses over the years.

We meet our narrator as she is showing rich people around the art sights of Buenos Aires. This is one of those books that hasn’t any plot other than her describing her interactions with art and how others connect to the art she loves. this is one of those books you need your phone nearby to google the art she is talking about I hadn’t heard of Dreux a painter of wildlife scenes hunting scenes with Deer in the sport that many years ago we saw in most country inns. the `Candido Lopez, so the book goes on as she mixes art and literature in that way I WISH i could I have a visual memory I can recall most of the art I have seen and place in find=e detail, but when it comes to quotes IMy mind is a sea of jumble words with islands of pictures so I envied her as a narrator. The one artist I did know a little around is Mark Rothko an abstract painter that art you can fall into. So when she sees  A rothko on a hospital wall(an odd choice for hospital art imho), she makes a connection as her other half is ill.

The years of his greatest success, from 1949 to 1964, coincided with Rothko’s life unravelling: his marriage fell apart, his friends got as far away from him as they could, he drank just about anything he could get his hands on and became racked with hatred. He was on his way down, the spiral tight-ening. One stormy night, as he went to leave his apartment building, the porter told him to take care in the foul weather. To this Rothko said: ‘There’s only one thing I need to take car of : stopping the Black from swallowing the red”

How tru Rothko art is alway one I felt can overwhelm when  you see them!!

I loved this book it reminds me how much I miss art shows we used to have on tv I don’t go as often as I should to see the latest art shows not as much as I did a couple of decades ago when the art world was more covered, and I knew the artist names more then. I miss those days. This reminds me how much one can connect with great art and the power it can well up in a great writer here like Maira Gainza I know she has been compared to some English language writers Oliva Laing and Rachel cusk both of whom I have to read, although I recently brought a CUSK.  So for me as a blogger and reader, I can only reference a couple of her fellow Argentine writers. Firstly is Luis Sagasti, another book that deals with how we experience and deal with art, another book where the feeling and connections are more than the plot. Then we have the great Cesar Aira I wonder if they know each over give his book around his obbbsession with the magax=zine Art Forum which I think in his book is more an imagined concept of a magazine but he has a love of art as one of the other books deals with a famous painter.

Have you read this book or have you a favourite novel that blends art and literature

Crimson by Niviaq Korneliussen

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Crimson by NivIaq Korneliussen

Greenlandic Fiction

Original title – Homo Sapienne

Translator -Anna Halager

Source – Library

I was shocked to find this at the library as it is a book that had completely passed me by as a reader, I look out for things from countries I haven’t read from I am not a completist for the world; I would like to get as near as I can so when this book from Greenland was on the library shelves I couldn’t say no as it is also an LGBTQ novel NivIaq Korneliussen is a writer that had initially written this in Greenlandic before translating it her own book into Danish. She was drawn into writing by a project in Greenland that encouraged young people from Greenland to write about their lives. This book follows the life of five young people in Nuuk, the largest city in Greenland well it is a city of 20000 people, and here is five people and their tales.

Peter. One man. Three years. Thousands of plans. Millions of dinner invitations. Vacuuming, dishwashing and cleaning, rushing on forever towards infinity. False smiles turning uglier. Dry kisses stiffening like desiccated fish. Bad sex should be avoided at all costs. My faked orgasms get harder to believe as time goes by. But we’re still making plans.

The days become darker. The void in me expands. My love no longer has a taste. My youth’s turning old. What keeps me alive is dying. My life has become worn, aged.

Life? What life? My heart? It’s a machine.

Fia talking about Peter as there relationship is falling apart.

The five characters are all connected. They have their own tales of growing up in Nuuk as they discover their sexual orientations as they fall out of those first relationships like Fia had just split from her relationship with  Pete, whom she grew to hate his body. But she is then drawn to Sara, and this connection leads to the title as they seem to hear the same song with the tile Crimson. after the break, she lives with her brother Inuk he is struggling with his sexual orientation, and this is at the heart of the book how do you be queer in Greenland a country with a past connected to Denmark. Inuk struggles as he wrestles with his own desires. He lives wirth a female friend ARNAQ THAT SEES Fia’s attraction to Sara and uses that to try and seduce her. This is a collection of five lives where they all criss and cross a bunch of young people growing up in a world that isn’t as wide as their worldview is. This is a novel that shows how hard it can be but also what family and friends can it mixes things like texts between the characters.  As they discover not only who they love but who they are.But also how those around them can use them and also have affairs.

Friday once again. It’s a strange week for me. I haven’t been to classes and I need to get out a bit. I decide to switch off the computer although I keep thinking of stuff I’ve found on the Internet. Romantic attraction, sexual attraction or sexual behaviour between members of the same sex or gender. Google knows everything. But I still haven’t found the answer. Doubt, ignorance and confusion make me rest-less. But even so, I don’t want to go back to my comfort zone.
My comfort zone is gone. I’ve recovered from that fucking travesty last Friday, and Arnag and I have decided to deal with our restlessness. Hope has returned from the dead, popping up like the devil. All I need is to see her briefly.
Because I need to get to grips with my desperate brain.

I loved ther Googler line how much more do people know because of google how has it expanded peoples views and ideas !!

This is a gem of a book from a country with very little translated into English. It is beautiful that it is an LGBTQ book for a country that has just started to be open about sexual identity and orientation in the last twenty years. The kernel of the book was in the short story she had written as the incentive to encourage young people to write about their lives. She is a lesbian writer, so she drew us into that small community in Nuuk and their loves and lives. It is a coming-of-age story, a book of discoveries.  This is also why I love the library it had been in the limelight a couple of years ago, but I had missed or maybe not written this book down. So it has given me a new country and a new voice to follow as well. This is a fresh voice and a part of the world we know little about. Have you read any good LGBTQ books in translation?

Winstons score -+A new voice, new place and some interesting characters

 

A Sunday in Ville- d’Avary by Dominique Barberis

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A sunday in Ville-d-Avray by Dominique Barberis

French fiction

Original title – Un Dimanche á Vile-d’Avray

Translator – John Cullen

Sources -Personal copy

This book is another holiday buy, but this time it was last year’s trip to Northumberland I brought this book. I think I may have seen Jacqui mention it 9feels like a book she would love to me ). So I got it. I have seen several excellent books in translation in the last couple of years from Daunt books. Dominique Barberis was born in Cameroon as her father was a diplomat. She studied at the Sorbonne, then went on to teach, had a job in insurance and then became a professor of foreign languages. She has published several Literary studies books as well as eight novels. This was her latest novel and focused on the relationship between two sisters.

I believe my sister stayed under the spell of that literary love affair for a long time, while I, younger but clearly more practical-minded, developed a crush on my first-year Latin teacher, Monsieur Jumeau (Bernard Jumeau). My grades climbed up to the heights. I knew my declensions by heart. I worked hard to dazzle him. Things went so far that predictions for my future employment shifted from cashier to Latinist or archivist-palaeographer – which had been Monsieur lumeau’s first vocation and fondest dream; he told us about it in the course of a gathering in the faculty room. Blushing and modest, I stood between my parents the whole time. I was twelve.He suggested the same future for me, a suggestion I took as a declaration of reciprocal love and a discreet way of making our engagement official.

Her sister feel in loove with books when they were younger.

The book is about two sisters who, as kids, were close, but as often happens when we grow, the distance comes between us, and time flies, so we meet Jane. She tells us about her other half, Luc, and how he hates going to the sister who is married to a doctor, and they live in Ville-d -avary one of these posh commuter towns on the very edge of Pasris as she says it seems hard to get there, but it isn’t it is just fact the two sisters now live in different worlds than they once did. So when Jane heads out one Sunday to meet her sister, Claire Marie, she hasn’t; let her know she is turning up as she feels her sister knows how to press her buttons. (doesn’t every sibling know this !!) So when they talk, and an odd comment about Jane is happy in her life leaves her wondering and then she finds out about a connection her sister has made to a mysterious man she has just told her about many years earlier that offered her a lift one day. Marc Herman, he is a man of mystery and the two connect, and she meets him again and again. But also, the area is seeing things happen at the same time odd men hanging around, crime. Added to this her sister as a child was obsessed with Rochester from Jane Eyre as a child for a really long time. Who is Marc? He said he knew her from her husband, but does he?

Then may I drop you off?

They went back to his car, chatting as they walked, and after a detour found themselves pleasantly strolling the streets in the vicinity of the Chaville train station.’Let’s just say goodbye here,’ my sister said, all of a sudden. ‘It’s much simpler. You needn’t trouble yourself. It’s late, and mine is the very next stop. I’ll take the train.’

But Marc Hermann didn’t look like a man in a hurry. He protested: ‘But why? Don’t go yet.’ She stayed. She wondered how she’d be able to get away from him. Would she have to thrust out her hand?

When she meet the mystreious Marc Hreman he is almost a Modiano character

This is a book that captures that commuter life well but also how it can have a dark underbelly and that shimmering tension that there can be between sisters. I was reminded of Simenon or Modiano, both of which do tension. Both also show that often there is darkness and other things just under the surface no matter how perfect the streets are, and this is that sort of town perfection but with a little crack little piece of darkness and this shows a little of them but also the sibling connection it is a modern sibling story were sisters are more distant than they used to be. Desire and jealousy are here just below the surface, also lost loves. Have you read any of the recent books from Daunt books which one shall I try next?

Winston’s score – B – just below the surfaces simmer a lot between the sisters but also where she lives

 

The remains by Margo Glantz

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The remains by Margo Glantz

Mexican fiction

Original title – EL rastro

Translator – Ellen Jones

Source – Personal copy

I brought this in my recent trip to Fife I have been a huge fan of Church Press which seems to get its as readers the cream of  Latin American literature. SO I always look for them when I am in a shop I know will have some books from them Like Toppings in Saint Andrews does. I brought it forward fro this month as it was on my trolley with all the possible books for this month. I had seen a review mention Sebald and Ducks Newberryport, both books I loved, and also the mention of Glenn Gould, of course, made me think of Thomas Bernhard. Now Margo Glantz is a perfect fit for Church Press given what they had done for Claudia Pinerio. Glantz is in her nineties and has had a couple of books translated into English yet is huge in Mexico and Spain but she has never really set the English-speaking world on FIRE. I WAIT THE DAY A Lesser known writer in English wins the Nobel like MODIANO ( I struggled to get anything before his win I did and reviewed it|) Glantz maybe isn’t up in the Nobel ranks I don’t know enough to know if she would be any way I was captivated to read a book from a writer virtually unknown in English.

My name is Nora Garcia.It’s been years since I last came to the village: I park my car, then go shyly, warily, up to the front door and into the house. I barely recognise it, it’s changed, and not for the better, the garden’s overgrown, the plants are dry, the grass is yellowing, there are patches of bare earth where before there were flowering shrubs. Down in the ravine – flame trees, trees with wide canopies. The place is full and I almost lose my nerve, my heart shrinking: there are a few people I know, no one I’m especially fond of, and perhaps others I’ve forgotten: it’s been a long time.

The opening as she returns to nhis childhood village

The book has a stream-of-consciousness style. We follow a widow at a wake a celebration of his life for her Husband. Juan, he was a pianist-composer and a bit of a lad. The narrative follows his wife, Nora, as she talks to those that knew him and she drifts between the present and their long life together as in Proust moments that send her back to little snippets of her and Juans life. She is back there in her and Juan’s life. From the mildew smell around his coffin that reminds her of him. To talk to his friends about remembering him.The interactions they all had, the music they all lovcd etc. Then there are mentions of Glenn Gould with a classical pianist. It is hard to not mention him and how he played discussions around his performances and records. His heart surgery mixes as the friends and people they knew to remember Juan and her relationships.

I’m murmuring to myself (like Glenn Gould while he recorded the Goldberg Variations in the CBC studios), I cannot, cannot shake off that flowery scent, but mainly the smell of mildew: it surrounds me like a halo, like the halos around the heads of saints in paintings and statues.

I’ve listened to so much music the last few days, these terrible last days of the year, and I’ve cried so many painful, bitter tears, (black tears),I’ve cried so much while listening to music that I can’t listen any more, I can’t bearit, I’m full to the brim with it

Music can touch and make us rememebr a moment a look , a touch , a feeling !

 

This book is about grief but also about what we remember when that person is gone. Those Proustian things smell a tune, a place are the hooks we hang memories on. This is our closet of life the many coats a person wears over their lives together. This is a book that remembers a loved one. I love the bit that mentions Thomas Bernhard’s book about Glenn Gould, which they didn’t really get on with i, I loved that book, but as a musician, I could see why. This is about the essence of a person I think back on a book like Edouard Leve’s books that were about what made him at its heart, the art and likes. This is a book about what makes us look back. Another book I was reminded of was Naja Marie Aidt’s book about her son’s sudden death, which also looked at how we deal with Greif I loved this book it was an afternoon in Nora’s life but a lifetime in her and Juan’s world. Have you read this book?

Winston’s score – A – This is a writer I’d love to read more from!

 

The Missing word by Concita De Gregorio

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The Missing Word by Concita De Gregorio

Italian Fiction

Original title -Mi sa che fuori è primavera

Translator – Clarissa Botsford

Source – Library

I love it when I go to the library and find a gem like this that had passed me by I even get sent the Europa Catalogue and I nit sure how this had passed me by when I looked at it in the library I was grabbed by the mention of Truman Capote’s in cold blood a book I think is maybe the best true crime book as it is the original in many ways. Also by the story behind the book. Concita De Gregorio is a successful Journalist and editor she has hosted an arts and culture show on tv as well. The book is based on the real-life disappearance of twins and she worked with her mother to write this novel of the mother’s story and the loss of her twins.

Dearest Nonna, I’m leaving for Patagonia with Luis next Sunday. We’re going whale watching. Trekking, climbing to the top of the mountains, walking deep into the woods, sitting at the ocean shore all make me feel happy. Minuscule and at peace. Luis makes me feel happy.I’ll introduce him to you one day, I’d love to. You’ll like him. He has eves that laugh and big hands. He can create silence when it’s needed, and then he chooses his words, picks them out, and stitches them together like embroidery. Did I tell you his job is to make cartoons for kids? They’re magical. Did I tell you what he did when I rejected him at first? He gave me an incredible gift, something straight out of a film. I need to look into your sky-blue eyes to tell you, though: I want to see your shy smile while I describe the scene. It’ll be wonderful.

She escapes to South America and writes to her Gran here

Now I consider myself to know snippets of the news from around Europe not everything but have an idea what is going on here and there. So I was surprised that this case and series of events had passed me The story is of the disappearance of Alessia and Livia two twins that had been on a weekend away with their father their parents had split but still lived in the same village. He had taken his daughters away for the weekend and had travelled to Corsica and then threw himself under a train the events of the few days before he is seen with the girls texted his ex-wife. Later he sends a postcard but then when he takes his life the children are nowhere to be seen and this is where the book starts it is Irina the mother of the twins story about how she copes after and is made up of her personal thoughts and letters with her grandmother. her writing to find out of the therapist he had seen but he won’t say anything to her. Then request the girl’s school work . Her journey to find herself after this earth-shattering event. She say late on she didn’t want any more children she is a mother and will always be a mother but she then said how few languages have a word for this happening a mother that has lost there children. This is a heartbreaking tale told with real beauty in the prose.

The missing word

Parents who lose children. Who don’t murder them but lose them. What are they called, how do you say it, who is someone whose child has died? What place do they occupy in history? Missing word, missing word, missing absent. Who eliminated it? When? From all the Italian, French, German, Spanish and English dictionaries. And why?

There is words in other languages Shakol in Hebrew, but I wonder why this word doesn’t exist !!

I am a fan of true-life movies it is one of the few films Amanda and I tend to both enjoy. This book is heart-wrenching but also shows how strong Irina was after all this had happened to her. She was thrust in the spotlight after this had happened and had to escape travel to find herself and meet people that didn’t know her as the mother of the twins. I liked the mixture of styles from personal narrative, list letters. I feel it works as a novel as she has maybe changed things a little. But it still has the power of what happened Irina copes with this event that could have pushed her over the edge and even in the end is a strong voice for the charity Missing Children  Switzerland. AS I said I don’t know how this passed me by as it is such an intense tale of what is a horrific act and aftermath. Have you read this book ?

Winston’s score +a just needs to be read such a powerful work from such a sad true life event.

The Taiga syndrome by Christina Rivera Garza

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The Taiga Syndrome by Christina Rivera Garza

Mexican fiction

Original title – El Mal de la Tagia

Translators – Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana

Source – library

I went to the library just to get a few more books for a woman in translation month also maybe find a few that I had wanted to read and this is one such I remember reading about this and think that sounds odd and just up my street. When I saw Jonathan Lethem had called her Mexico’s GREATEST  living writer I was drawn to read this book first from my Library pile. Then I remembered after I had finished this book, I had actually read her book the lilac crest several years ago so this is the second book by her I will have read.

So, is she Hansel or Gretel?” I asked, truly curious, still staring at the images.
“Gretel, I suppose.” The man hesitated, taken aback.
“Maybe she is the woodsman or the witch or the woman who wants to get rid of the children in order to have enough to eat,” I said more to myself than to the man who had begun to smile, stupefied.
“This is not a fairy tale, detective,” he said, interrupting me again. “This is a story about being in love.”
“Or being out of love,” I corrected him.

when the detective first mentions Hansen and Gretel the client is taken aback.

I loved the detached nature of this story. It is just a bit bizarre a retired detective is hired by a husband whose wife has decided to run away and has seemingly gone to somewhere called Taiga with her lover. So he passes the man a fit on all he knows about his wife and her location, and then the detective says this is a bit like Hansen and Gretel in the woods. The man says no, but the detective takes the job and seems to have his own fairy-tale way of looking at this case and what it entails. To find the runaways ( or are they or have they just left to find their own love’). As the detective hits their trail, it takes him to Taiga a wacky place of kids on the loose like the wild ones almost and other characters that had just stepped. out of fairy tales This is a world were fact and fantasy blend. But maybe the old world of Grimm’s fairy tales forms a cautionary narrative on the modern world. Will he find them?

That lumberjacks can be cautious I knew, or sensed: either way it doesn’t matter. Their proximity to sharp-toothed heavy tools must have something to do with it.
Occupational hazards. Their close relationship, so para-doxical, almost organic, with the forest they kill and that sustains them. Do these thoughts pass through the mind of a lumberjack as he saws and cleaves and hacks at the tree bark? During those days, I asked myself that question frequently. And I answered: They think all this and more. Or they would.
It was the lumberjacks who walked along the edge of the cabin carrying him. It was they who led him – “dragged him” would be more accurate -to the central market where just the day before the translator and I had found salt, a little black tea, sugar, three or four potatoes. Some utensils. A pewter plate. Two cups.

I couldn’t help but think ofmmonty python here it made me smile

This is a very short novella, less than a hundred pages, that mixes the real and fantasy but also sees how the old tales can be transposed onto the modern capitalist world. As it is just as cruel as the medieval time when these stories were set and our detective uses them as the cornerstones of his investigation. Children people get lost in the modern world even more than in the Grimm’s time. I loved the first couple of series of Grimm tv show where they imagined those characters from Grimm’s world as humans living in the modern world but with the same traits and characteristics as they used to have, and this is the same the old tales and yes a couple seem tempted to a far off place like Hansen and Gretel is as modern a tale now as it was then. It is a clever book that draws you into this fable-like world that seems like our own but isn’t quite. IF Grimm and Chandler had lived and written a book together, Their world in a book would be a hard-boiled fairy tale detective novel like this is !!. A world-weary detective transported to Grimm’s fairy tale world. Have you read this book or any other book that mixes the modern world with Fairy tales well?

Winston’s score – B a clever take on the modern world using old fables as a guide!

Rombo by Esther Kinsky

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Rombo by Esther Kisky

German fiction

Original title – Rombo

Translator- Caroline Schimdt

Source – review copy

There is a few writers that I really really love, and Kinsky is one of them. She is one of those writers I think I love her shopping list because, you know, with her, it wouldn’t just be a shopping list. She is cut from the same writing style as Seabed and Kluge another two writers I adore. Ester Kinky lived in London for many years. She was married to the late German translator Martin Chalmers. The last book I read by her saw how she dealt with that grief. She is also a translator from English, Polish and Russian into German. She is the German translator of Olga Tokarczuk ( This has a feel of flights at times). She now lives in Berlin.

Among the boulders, pebbles and shards of glass washed milky and smooth are variously sized concrete fragments that stand tilted, defying the water in a different way than the leftover solid and stony things which gradually submit to the currents and learn to want to reach the sea. The concrete fragments are rigid and in-flexible, positioning themselves against any current.

They distinguish themselves from the meticulously smooth stones with implicit drawings and lines and veins of a different nature, and seek the edges, the banks, the coves set apart from the current, where they come into their own as wreckage, maintain their fragmented nature and remain witness: earthquake breakage, remains of house and farm and charge, things carted away that do not submit to anything new. A young addition to the old river: the earthquake rubble.

The way the enviroment his hit as hard as those that live there !

What she does here is take a slice and event the world-changing earthquakes 0f 1976 in the Friuli area of Northeast Italy. She takes apart the events through one village and seven of the people that lived in that village and she how their lives were ripped apart after the earthquake in May 1976 as we hear the memories of that event from seven people and how each of their worlds was ripped apart and how it affected their families and changed there lives alongside this there is how the earthquake had changed the world around the people and also a collection of found items photos of those who were just lost in the events the two earthquakes months apart left nearly a thousand dead but also changed the course of so many lives like the seven Silvia on holidays Toni remembering their car. Mara thought of how many kids her mother had given birth to. Lina remembered a neighbour’s laughs as out hit each recalls over the course of the book the events and the aftermath of it on them.

MARA
My mother gave birth to nine children. Three died, three went abroad and never returned. At first they wrote occasionally, or sent a photograph, but eventually even that stopped. My mother began forgetting early on. She forgot the soup on the stove and the goats in the shed and her basket on the field. But if one of us became sick, without a word she walked to a spot where some herb grew, to remedy the illness. And she always knew where to find her favourite flowers. Sometimes she sat outside on the bench and rocked back and forth, speaking with her children dead and disappeared. She was still able to remember their names, but not ours. Had she forgotten us? I’m not sure. Although I cared for her, I was no one to her – she called me and my remaining siblings by random names, never by our own. And later, when I had to lock her in her room, she would hit and scratch me. But her children who had disappeared, who had left – they were still with her. What does it mean to remember, what does it mean to forget?

Mara thinking  of her mother and her siblings

Kinsky is a writer in the vein of Seabald. More so, Alexander  Kluge, I’d say, as his work uses a patchwork of vignettes of memories of events. to recall and describe what happens, voices and facts mix together. These make books that have no straightforward linear narrative to them, but the work is more like a giant portrait of the event given 3d and even a fourth dimension of time, as a whole, does not form a picture of the events and as you move out from the reading you see the possibilities of those earthquakes but also the aftermath which is something you don’t often see mentioned is how people cope after the event and how it changes there lives. As the book firmly ties those seven lives to the environment they live in, and the environment of those remote mountains themselves are a character twisted and changed as much as those that live on them. A combination of the life of those seven before, during and after is drawn into the pattern of words that form her style. Have you read any books by Ester kinsky or Alexander Kluge using this vignette style?

Winstons score – `+ A  – Every book by her I have read is in the top books of the year and this is just the same.

Voices of the lost by Hoda Barakat

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Voices of the lost by Hoda Barakat

Lebanese fiction

Original title – Bareed al layl

Translator -Marilyn Booth

Source – Personal copy

Now I  move on to a prize-winning Arabic novel this won the ARABAIC booker prize a number of years ago. I am wanting to cover as many places as I can with this woman in translation. month so the next stop is a Leabanon and a writer that has won a lot of prizes for her writing she lived in Lebanon as her studying to her PHD which she did in Paris. She then took the brave design to move back to Lebanon and work initially as a teacher translator and journalist and then in the mood 80s she began to write. She finally left Lebanon to live  Paris in 1989. She has lifted there since other than when taking posts to work at colleges teaching. She has published six novels all in a way deal with her homeland of Lebanon. But the beauty of this book it is in an unnamed place and gives a sense of being anywhere.

The letter I found inside the hotel directory perplexed me. It worried me, actually. It talks about a young man, the letter writer himself. He wrote it in a cheaply rented furnished room in a street nearby, a rather run-down one, it seems. So how did the letter get here? Plus, it comes to an abrupt stop: it doesn’t really end. All in all, because of this letter, I’m feeling very uneasy about the writer. It’s not hard to imagine that he’s in prison, for instance. The letter has it that he was full of terrible imaginings about the secret police from his country of origin mounting surveillance on him. So it looks like he went to talk to their man,

The first letter a man that had run-in with the secret police

The book is formed of a chorus of unnamed voices of people as they each write a letter to someone close to them as they are on their way as a refugee on an unknown journey with an unknown destiny this means they open up in each of these letters to their family or a lost lover. As each letter tells the individual stories of secret police being watched, the horror of war. we aren’t told anything of the person just see the current person reading the letter they have found whether in a magazine or left on a seat or in the trash the stories of lost loves, children left behind those dreams broken by a war or just having to escape the situation you are in. A series of broken dreams lost hopes a chain of woe and hope at the same time.

My dear brother

I have been thinking about writing to you, now that you have learned what you call the truth?. You’re right to call it that, up to a point. But the pure, unadulterated truth is something other than what you believe it to be. Everyone has secrets, and you must help me with a secret of mine, because it is in both our interests. I don’t have much time.

We are waiting for a plane to land; it’s still in the air because the plane at this gate that was supposed to make way for it was delayed. They pulled a passenger off that departing flight. The plane had already taken off but they made it turn around and come back to the airport. I know why security took him away in handcuffs because I have a letter in my pocket that this man wrote to his mother.

another handover of letters.

 

The beauty of removing place is it makes it a universal tale of trying to escape where you can be trapped this reminds me of the opposite side of the Bushra Al Marqui book what have you left behind a series of witness statements of the Deaths and Losses in the Yemeni war personal reflections of their own worlds collapsing. Well this is the flip side of that story of what happens when you finally decide to leave behind community family, love children a million things and head on that uncertain refugee trail where the end is not known or even thought about just the wanting to get away from that place. as it has been retitling the voices of the lost and that is what it is a series of voices unknown people snapshots of the last thing they think but also the horror they have witnessed that lead them to leave their homeland.AS  they head into the world on an unknown trip the use of the letter is a great device it makes them seem more personal because are they even meant to be read or just the act of writing them is helping them on their way ! Have you read any good books dealing with being a refugee?

Winstons score – B a strong collection of lost letters that make a compelling novel .

 

The performance by Claudia Petrucci

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The Performance by Claudia Petrucci

Italian fiction

Original title – l’esercito

Source – Review copy

MY fourth book for this women in translation month sees us with another triangle like yesterday but this is a love triangle, Claudia Petrucci studied in Milan and then went to live in Perth in  Australia. Her short fiction and reportage have ranged from being realistic to experimental to science fiction. She has been published in a number of publications and has won a prize for being one of the best Italian writers under 30. This is her debut novel. Now this is a book I started last year then I put it on the side and never got back to it even thou I was enjoying it. I do love a great love triangle in a novel but this book has a darker edge to it.

Giorgia and I say goodbye to each other at the door and our last day branches off in separate directions.She lingers in the bathroom, and under the hot jet of the shower, stares at the little boy’s silhouette that appears in shadow beyond the glass. He is unusually quiet but always close by, and doesn’t leave her side; He clings to the sleeve of her bathrobe while she dries her hair. They go out together, there’s no seat on the tram, He sits on her lap.

Empty theaters carry the promise of infinite space.When the lights are off and the seats unoccupied, the dark rear depths dissolve, creating the illusion that they continue on. Giorgia likes to think that, if she wanted to, she could explore the theater for eternity, settle among the orchestra seats awaiting no one. Only when vacant, deprived of its function, does the theater show itself for what it really is an escape, an imaginary realm-and yet here, only here and nowhere else are they able to exist.

There is even her early in the book a sense of something !

The book has a usual story of a woman that had been close with one man and they had parted when she was young and she had settled down with another man and as she has done this her dreams and career had taken a back burner. So the woman in question Giorgia happens one day to bump into Mauro a man that had a flame for her and was in the theatre world she used to be in before she had settled down with her current lover Flippo and given up on her stage career. So when Mauro tries not to get her to come back on the stage and fans the flames of her hidden desire to get back on the stage we feel the book is going one way but when Gigia has some sort of mental health breakdown and is section and ends up in a clinic the two men life course is changed and now they have to try and help the woman they both love in the ways get back into the world after this massive breakdown. But as the two lovers try to help her get back into the world the lines between their love and controlling this fragile soul as it becomes about winning her back not but not her as a person

Mauro subjects me to a strict discipline. We enter the month of December with the days of the week organized by activities: he’s established a program that allows very few deviations. At set times- from seven to eight, Monday to Thursday, eleven to one on Saturdays I have to write. I start writing under his supervision, at his house, with him urging me on when I think I can’t do it. The first pages are full of just adjectives, some have scrawls that I myself can’t make out.

At first Mauro is satisfied, then he imposes a more methodical form on me, he makes me work at his computer. When I have moments of disillusionment, he tells me to focus on the exercise, he assures me that soon it will become an automatic action- from some point on, he says, the characters will begin to move independently, and in my case it will be a matter of choosing where to have Giorgia move, which memory to have her inhabit:

The way they treat her is just wrong out love but wrong.

It is hard to find books that deal with mental health breakdown and this is one such at its heart is a woman strong and loved but under all that is fragile should of a person with some obvious issues that maybe meant she was great at acting as it masked her own issues in the past but the thought of returning to the mask of the stage and the added pressure it brought was just enough to flick that switch we all have!! I deal with people in crisis as a job we help keep them in mind community ok may patients have learning disabilities but mental health challenges and when people breakdown it is always the same I loved the insight into her breakdown but also how the two men tried to mend her but they weren’t they wanted her to be what she was and that will never happen a powerful debut novel from a writer that is willing to look at the darker side of relationships after an event like this. Have you read any books that deal with mental breakdowns?

Winston’s score – A  – This book is a stunning insight into a love triangle collapsing and then the lines being redrawn.

Misunderstanding in Moscow by Simone de Beauvoir

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Misunderstanding in Moscow by Simone de Beauvoir

French lit

Original title Malentendu à Moscou

Translator – Terry Keefe

Source – personal copy

I was looking in my local Waterstones for a book for this month I have a lot at home but was trying to get some other choices and I saw this I had recently brought her lost novel that came out last year and the French writer and  Simone de Beauvoir is some I had only e=read second sex in my late teens so not is time to read some more of her writing and this rediscover novella that came out a decade ago in France did catch my eye especially as I had read a couple of Gorges Simone works that were set in the Soviet Union from around this time . I know there is a strong connection between France and Russia as many Russian went to live in France. de Beauvoir herself spent time in the USSR during the sixties.

‘Your nationalism won’t be easily dislodged,’ he con-tinued, as they came out of the church. ‘The gist of what you have just explained is that you are no longer a revolutionary country and that that’s fine

‘Not at all. We have had the revolution and it is not in question. But in France you don’t know what war is. We do. We don’t want it.”

Macha had spoken angrily and André, too, felt annoyed.

‘No one wants it. What I’m saying is that if you give America a free hand, if you don’t stop the escalation, that’s when America is to be feared. Munich prevented nothing at all.’

One of the many discussions I loved these.

This is the story of three people: a retired couple Nicole and Andre are heading to Moscow f0or their summer holidays  as they are seeing Andres’s first daughter from his first marriage Macha who is living in Moscow. I loved a quip they made they could tell she is in Moscow because of her very tight perm this felt like a very French observation of Macha. The three are looking forward to the time to gather but this is a couple that are set in their ways like a pair of old slippers the spark has gone so this leads them into long discussions of the world lot about the two worlds easy and west. Talked about in what are often described in the book as a dull place of grey rooms and boring hotels. As they talk like they are on the left bank discussing in that loud way one almost pictures DE Beauvoir and Satre not Nicole and Andre as they discuss the Soviet world and how it impacts the West ad to this is the three-way relationship between father and daughter and that with stepmother love but at times there are cracks.

André found the hotel that they stayed at in Leningrad charming. Long corridors and pearl-grey doors opening onto them, with oval panes at the top framed by old-fashioned festoons and hung with silk curtains, which were pink, green or blue according to which floor you were on.

In their room there was an alcove, hidden by a curtain, and endearing old furniture: a heavy desk of false marble, a black leather sofa, a table covered by a tablecloth with fringes. Chandeliers with crystal pendants lit up the dining room, where a young, semi-naked woman in marble was adjusting her dress with a naughty smile – or was she taking it off?

There is a dullness to the hotel very unappealing how it is described here.

This was unfinished in her lifetime and there is a sense of it being a little unpolished, The Moscow she describes is the one we had imagined great building but the modern life for the everyday muscovites as grey almost murky at times. This is story of family, politics and life in general and these are subjects de Beauvoir always wrote about for me the beauty of this coming out is to imagine that it in part of her and Satre as the couple the way they discuss the world and being a fly on the wall almost. it is a couple at that age where the spark has gone and you can see that but a deep love and connection is still there  As a reader, I sit on the fence with post-HUMOUS WORKS. I think if like this they still have merit in the writer’s canon which I feel this does it comes from her own experience in the Soviet Union of the time. It is 110 pages and is what one would call a film book as it can be read in a couple of hours. Have you read any books by Simone de Beauvoir or this one , what are your thoughts on post homes publishing of unfinished for nearly finished works ?

Winstons score – b an insight into a bygone place soviet Moscow !

Wound by Osaka Vasyakina

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Wound by Oksana Vasyakina

Russian FIction

Original title -Рана

Translator – Elina Alter

Source – Review copy

Well, on to the second book for this year’s Woman in Translation month, and we are with a debut novel in ENGLISH FROM THE Russian poetess and curator Osaka Vasyakina with one of the first Lesbian novels in Russian. The book won the NOS prize in Russia when it came out. Osakana lives in Moscow, where she teaches writing and feminist literature. This book is the first of three she has written about her family. This one follows the death of her mother. The other two books are about her father, that died of Aids and her aunt Rose. The book is formed of the journey she took with her mother’s ashes to the small working-class town she grew up Siberia.

The cousin didn’t know that I was a lesbian. But I wanted to say to him that he knew nothing about gay people. Why do you have this fixation on anal penetration? Why do you want to insert an automatic rifle lubed with lard into the German’s anus? I wanted to ask. But I didn’t bother. And after all, condoms don’t hurt anyone, rather they help save lives. While what’s a rifle for? A rifle exists to kill people.

It was stuffy from the heat and the stink of the little pine tree air freshener. What misery, I thought. And said nothing.

She kept her sexuality secret from ost of her family.

The book opens as Oskana’s mother is on her deathbed. We see her talking and interacting with the nursing staff as she nears the end of her battle with Breast cancer in a hospice. Then as she passes, she thinks about her own position, and at that moment, she is dealing with an accusation of sexual assault. This leads her to feel about her partners and the consent of those partners and her current situation. So over time, this happens as she lays her mother’s ashes in her home town in distant Siberia. So she gets her mother’s ashes as she heads on a mammoth train journey into her own past her mother’s past as the train mothers closer to her mothers home town we see a woman dealing with her mother’s death as grief-stricken but also how her mother dealt with her sexuality and how that affects her life. This shows how hard it is to be a lesbian under Putin’s regime. It also has a poet’s soul in it. The middle section, an ode to her mother, is a powerful piece of writing.

And also love. Though love is more complex than death.In death only one person is involved, but love is a space of cooperation. I tried to weld love and death together inside myself. I didn’t want vulgarity; I wanted life, a daily practice, labour. And then I wrote a poem. Love brought me pain, and death brought me pain. But love brought the pain of being, while death brought the pain of non-being. And that was where they met, through pain.

women young women are becoming sand
beautiful slim in nylon glitter are becoming sand
I’m reading you Inna Lisnyanskaya’s poems from her book
In the Suburbs of Sodom
and in one poem she compares her stomach her old worn-out stomach.                                                         to waves of sands

She writes poetry around her mothers death on the train ride.

This is a powerful book from a strong female voice. In fact, this is maybe the perfect book for women in translation month. I works like this are what it is all about, those voices that should be heard worldwide. Oksana Vasyakina is a brave writer. She has written here the first openly lesbian novel written in Russian, although it is just one part of the story of her life and the life with her mother. But current events in her life, with the accusations and such, show how hard it is to be Homosexual in Russia. But most of all, this book mediates a mother-daughter relationship and the ghosts of that relationship now that her mother has passed. As she heads on the train, we see the lacework of her mind piece together the past and their relationship as we head to her mother’s cold and working-class history of the village her mother is from. The book I recalled Maria Stepnova’s book in memory of a Memory, another Russian book dealing with memories and death, the ghost we all have in our past and what happens when we open our minds and let those ghosts and memories free to walk on the page and her they have such heartfelt words. Have you read this book? What are your woman in translation plans?

Winston’s score – = A powerful book around the loss of a mother from the daughter’s perspective.

Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap

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Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap

Austrian fiction

Original title – Engel Des Vergessens

Translator – Tess Lewis

Source – Personal Copy

I start this Woman in Translation month off with a book from the Austrian writer Maja Haderlap. She was born into a family from a part of Austria where hr family where historically Slovenian and they were the only people to Stand up to Hitler in Austria this book is a family history of one such family living there and how this standing up to the nazis has effect the ethnic Slovenians that live there. It was a prize-winning book when it came out in German winning one of the biggest book prizes the Ingeborg Bachmann prize. Her own grandmother was in a concentration camp and her father was tortured by Nazis and was in the Partisans during the WAR. he hated the way even post war he and other ethnic Slovenians had been treated post-war.

GRANDMOTHER has her own understanding with nature She believes the fields and forests must be propitiated, not adorned with verses. A poem means nothing to nature, she says, we must always be humble before it. In the attic, she has gathered willow branches that she pulls from the palm bundles blessed in church every year on Palm Sunday. She makes small crosses from the willow branches, crosses we bring out to the fields in spring and stick in the ploughed earth to keep the potato fields fertile and the wheat plentiful. When a thunderstorm is brewing, she places pieces of willow on glowing embers and carries them through the house in a cast iron skillet. The bitter smoke is meant to clear the air and appease the atmospheric forces. You must carry your belief in God in your heart, Grandmother says, it’s not enough to put it on show in church. You can’t rely on the Church, according to her, the Church cannot be trusted.

I loved her grandmother she just jumped of the page

It is hard not to see this as part of this novel as auto fiction as the little girl the main narrator of the book who is growing up in post-war 60s and 70S Austria is about the age the writer would have been at the time. The grandmother and Mother are linked back to the dark day of the war years and the suffering these pheasant Slovene farmers had suffered for standing up and still do it shows how the shadow of the dark past is still there in everyday life . The way the Austrians talk around the ETHNIC Slovenians. But it is also a book about growing up on a farm and the connection a young girl can have to the creatures around her from a cow she loved that lost a calf to the horses. Her father is a man we see smoking but a man that has been broken by what happened to him in the war. The past and the inner conflicts that cause within the family the grandmother’s hours during the war Father’s sorrow and grief add to that a  mother who is often missing in the little girl’s eyes. This is a young girl; trying to make her way and seeing how her family had suffered and still are the way others talk about them as a group this is a picturesque forest and farming area but behind the natural beauty, there is some real evil still there.

When I arrive, Father is usually sitting at the end of the kitchen table with a bottle of beer in his hand. And presides near the stove on which she keeps her children’s dinner warm. As soon as I enter the kitchen, I start to examine her face and hands for scars. She was able to hide behind the stove, And says, but her little brother, who was in her arms, was shot.
On the front of the house is a marble plaque with the names of the children, the parents, and grandparents, engraved and gold-plated.
Father says he could never live in a house where he’d be reminded of the dead every day, several times a day, every time he went in or out.

I was so touched by her father and the ghost of the past here

This is one of those books that walk the line between Memoir and fiction yes it is easy to see them as her family but they are any family in those villages in the Carthinia region of Austria that were Ethnically Slovenian. This is also a universal story from the Marsh Arabs in Iraq to the Kosovian Albanians. I was reminded so much of a good friend I had working in a factory in Germany he was an Albanian from Kosovo who at the time was part of Serbias and like the girl they were classed as some sort of second-class citizens because of who they were and this is the same here the scar of the war is running deep in the locals and what they had done in standing up and the way they as a people are discussed is still the same as in the war the shadow of those acts are still there even twenty years after.I can see why this win a couple of prizes it shines a torch on a subject that few people other than those growing hip there and maybe those in Austria know about. The child narrator mixes growing up under this shadow but also the beauty of the land and the animals around them on the farm. Heidi mixed with a classic slice of war history. Have you read this book or any books on a similar theme ?