Month: December 2023

Winstonsdads books of the year a dozen or so

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I have picked 13 books I loved from the last 12 months. I am putting them down in no particular order. These are the cream of what I read in the last 12 months. All but one are books in translation. I avoid the Booker international books as they have had lots of attention due to being on the. longlist and shortlist, etc, and it gave me a chance to shine the spotlight on books that maybe others haven’t mentioned in the last year.

Black box by Shiori Ito translator Alison Markin Powell

A powerful work of nonfiction from an up-and-coming tv journalist that was sexual assault by an older renowned presenter, a powerful look at how sex attacks in the workplace are dealt with and how rape around the world is dealt with. After I read this, the writer finally saw justice for what had happened to her.

Balkan Bombshells various writers and translators

a collection of female writing from the Balkans showing the wide range of voices, from a woman with all she owned in a single blue bag to a woman in Belgrade and the leader died. Then elsewhere. There were creepy supernatural tales, an insight into Eastern European writing at its best.

The most secret memory of men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr translator Lara Vergnaud

I haven’t shut up about this since I a wonderful mix of being an African writer then and now a novel that was withdrawn that parallels a real-life event and then a writer falling down a rabbit hole to find the lost writer of that book and find out what really happened makes it part road trip fiction as well.

My rivers by Faruk Šehić. translator S D Curtis

I think this will be the first time I have featured poetry in my end-of-year books, but in this cycle of poems, three of them are set around the great rivers of Europe from Berlin, then back to the Balkans and beyond. In the last cycle, he sees a man escaping the horrors of war and looking for peace and hope.

Black foam by Haji Jabir translators – Sawad Hussain and Marcia Lynx Qualey

this is a twist on the other stories IO have read of people trying to find a new life on the migrant trail it follows a man called various names Dawood, David among them a man trying to reach Israeli as a Falasha Jew but is he it shows you how fluid nationality can be and how we can change it to get by and survive.

All devils are here by David Seabrook

I blame an old Backlisted episode they replayed over the summer that just grabbed me with the description of the book, a series of essays around Rochester, the late home of Dickens, but also the artist Richard Dadd. Who was a killer in his time.  Did he inspire Dickens? This is a look at the darker side of those old seaside towns.

Karios by Jenny Erpenbeck translator Michael Hoffmann

I am on the fence with hr as a writer I am not as much of a fan as some of my fellow bloggers have been over the years but this story of a relationship that had failed was interesting enough and used some clever tricks in the book.

Wound by Oksana Vasyakina

This mixes a personal journey of a daughter taking her mother’s ashes to her home village in Siberia, but also a look at her own relationship as a lesbian in modern Russia. This is one of the first openly lesbian novels written in Russia. It is a powerful look at love, loss and memories.

Rombo by Esther Kinsky translator – Caroline Schimdt

It was a toss-up between this or the Kluge I read this year, but this collection of recollections of an earthquake in a small Italian village and how it affected seven people who were kids at the time and how it looked then and now, I love her books and this is another gem from this writer.

The Rider Tim Krabbe translator -Sam Garrett

Now if push came to show my book of the year would be this book. I loved the way he managed to get on the page about what it is like to cycle, the way you think the way he races in those big races the tactics he captured it so well no wonder he is a chess-playing cyclist and in some ways, the two share a certain amount in some cycle racing is a game of chess for the riders. one move can change the day the same as chess.

The missing word by Concita De Gregorio translator Clarissa Botsford

There is no word for a parent that have lost there children we have orphan and widower but there ins’t a word for a parent whose children have gone this follows a case where the husband takes the kids and then he is found but there is never a trace of the children he took and he won’t say hat happened to them powerful work.

Tranquillity by Attila Bartis translator – Irme Goldstein

I had this on my shelves for years and then decided to read it. I loved it, a tale of a mother and son living together as his sister got away from their mother, and he is stuck in a very Thomas Bernhard-like world. I just hope I can get his next book which came out this year but seems to have sold out and that is what spurred me to read this book.

Mothers don’t by Katixa Agirre translator – Kristin Addis

I finish with a powerful tale of two mothers one how killed her twins and the other a journalist who realises she knew this woman when they were at university together. another gem from Three Times Rebel Press.

So here are a few stats

I read 125 books this year, the longest being The End of August by Yu Muri. I just finished today. A total of 27,544 pages. I reviewed 98 books. I read 8 Japanese books this year the most from any country. I read books from 34 countries this year. I have posted 123 posts 100,000 words at an average of 812 words per a post.

How was your year ?

 

That was the month that was December 2023

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  1. Vengeance is Mine by Marie Ndiaye 
  2. My rivers by Faruk šehić
  3. The river between Ngūgí was Thiong’o 
  4. This is Amiko,Do you copy by Natsuko Imamura
  5. Snow by Marcus Sedgwick
  6. A Girl’s Story by Annie Ernaux 
  7. The Delivery by Margarita Gracia Robayo
  8. Nothing belongs to you by Natathacha Appanah

I had wanted to get to 100 reviews on the blog for the year, but it is as it is called Twixmas, that time between Christmas and New Year when the world comes almost to a stand, so I decided to do a roundup today, and on Sunday do my books of the year. Anyway, the last. Month of the year saw me start in France with a tale lawyer hired by a man she may know to defend his wife that killed their children has many a twist and turn. Then there is Faruk’s collection of poems about rivers in places he has lived after the Bosnian war and moving on beyond the war. Then, another river,, a valley,, and a tribe divide between tradition and the modern world. Then, in Japan, we. have a young girl with Autism or some similar condition is going through her teens, and no one seems to know she has this condition. Then, a collection of essays about snow and how it affects our lives. Then we move to France and the Young Annie Ernaux, her first sexual encounter, and the summer she grew up. Then, a young woman has left her homeland only to have her. Mother arrives in a gigantic parcel and causes uproar in her world. Then OI finished with a grieving woman connecting with her past after seeing. Young boy when she was an orphan and had a different name. No new publishers or countries. I finish 98 reviews for the year.

Book of the month

My Rivers is a wonderfully powerful poetry collection that mixes getting over the war identity, travel, place the spirit of place and what makes us human so well. Wonderfully translated by the publisher of Istros books herself .

Non-bookish events.

I brought a few records this month, one of the P J Harvey demos, the Dry one her first album I had this on cd the orginal album and I have most of her records on CD. A little raw at times her voice is wonderful. I had held off on these, but it was cheap at the record fair. Then I got a Tom Waits at the same record fair and another of his recently reissued albums later in the month. Finally, the second National album came out last month . We also have been watching The Crown. We did watch a couple of episodes when it start but have now watch one and half seasons since just before Christmas. Im still loving the new Slow Horses series Oldman is such a greart acrtor as his Lamb character a sort of anti Smiley spy is just a wonderfully played character. I also been watching the.Monartch series. We had a few days in York at the start of the month I like wandering the city it is a lovely city walkable the christmas market was fair , I found it hadn’t much I woud want gift wise for people. The two Highlights where a christmas walk around york where the history oif the city and christmas are mixed from roman emperors through viking logs, Dickens talking in York, mince pies and of course Choclate it was a wonderful walk around the city.

Next month

Well I had plans to rush through lots of books for January in Japam. But I am now thinking I would prefer taking time I’m letting the figures get to me again. I need avoid think it is a race its not it about the journey I take. So I watched one of my favourite You tuber Ruby Granger a young student , I loved her idea of a classic once a month and that seemed to come at about the same time as Trevor showed how he had got t6he first gfive Emila Zola novels from Rougon Macquart series which I have a number of on my shelves and I’ve had them for a number of years and reading the series on my mind. But I feel I will stat with one every two months from next month.Then the other month I will read other classic novels from around the world . I had said a few years back I felt one of the failing of this blog was a lack of classics from around the world in translation. So this is the chance to fill that void slowly. I have a few books in mind. Other than that I am not sure where the month will take me as a reader. What are your January plans ?

Nothing Belongs to You by Nathacha Appanah

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Nothing belongs to you by Nathacha Appanah

Mauritian fiction

Original title – Rien ne t’appartient

Translator Jeffrey Zuckerman

Source – Review copy

It took years between her first book I read and her the last Brother, which I reviewed on this blog. The Last Brother 13 years ago, I’ve read another of the two books that have come out since by her,, but this is her latest and is with a new translator. Jeffrey Zuckerman has taken over for this book, the last but one novel to come out in French. Like her other books, she is very good at mixing childhood with the present. Also, a theme I have seen in the other novels I have read from Mauritius is a class divide, and the main character in this book is someone who has seen both sides of the divide as a kid and then as an adult. We meet Tara in the present but see how her life has twists and turns.

My heart aches again. I should start by clearing the sofa, arranging the cushions, tossing a tartan rug over it, that’ll be the first thing Eli sees, sentimental man that he is, inclined to believe that belongings gain a mysterious, almost human, aura in how they enter our possession, over the years or in connection to some particular moment. He’s attached to things, a dried leaf, a pebble, an old toy, a yellowing book, a faded T-shirt, a broken wooden necklace that belonged to his mother, this sofa. It was on this sofa that his father died three months ago, and I can still smell it there, his scent, trapped in the cushions fibres. It’s not really the scent he had when he was alive but something that remains of him, that tugs at my heart, that brings me back to his absence and everything that’s fallen apart since his death. Notes of vetiver, a touch of lemon, but also a trace of something powdery, slightly rancid.

Her flat is in disarray

The book follows our Narrator, Tara. She is at a low point in her life. Her husband Emmanuel has died, and her world has fallen apart. Her Parisian Is she going mad? Is she losing it? Her kids are worried about her. She is raising a small boy, and this, as she sees him around the house and area, unlocks the past for her. She had a different name. She was called Vijaya and had a privileged childhood with her parents. They were outspoken, and when disaster struck them, she left the young girl in an orphanage and faced a different future than the one she was expecting. The young girl became the woman Tara, and the past is a way for her to change the present. Like most of her books, she deals with death, class, and also memories so well. Also, the dark past of her country shadowed the life of these two characters, who are the same girl/woman. The lost dream of her youth when her parents and now the loss of her husband bring back the past and her struggle after her parent’s death.

When we went into the village, my father didn’t let go of my hand. All eyes followed us, the rich atheists from the huge house, the girl who danced but didn’t go to school, the man who went on the radio and even IV to say that all this coun try’s inhabitants were the same, that every soul should have the freedom to pray to the god he wanted to or not to believe in just one god, that the leaders were idiots, the man who spoke several languages in the same sentence, the husband of the sorceress. Those glares became a swell behind our back.

As the years went by and the swell grew, I had the feeling that it was hissing at us, berating us. At those moments I couldn’t get back to the house soon enough to find my mother, Aya, the school in the alcove, the evenings listening to music and playing cards. I started wishing I wouldn’t grow up, wouldn’t understand, would stay as I was: Vijaya in the grown-ups shadow.

Remembering  her parents and when she wasn’t called Tara but Vijaya a rich girl.

I love her writing it always uses childhood and memories so well. Also, the past is another theme in her books and also her homeland and its highs and lows, the slums, and the high-class world that lives alongside one another.It is one woman’s painful life at the two lowest points in it and how the heart can be broken and rebuilt but at what cost. Loss of parents then the loss of her opartner but the small boy makes he rember how she got past the pain in the past . But also she has held bqack all the sorrow over time and that is shown at the start of the book. Where we see a woman faling apart after the loss of Emmanuel she has stop caring and her flat is in total disarry as her son tries in vain to help her out f the maze of grief it takes a boy and memories to see her change. Like her other novels she seems to pack a lot into a small book this is under two hundred [ages and is one of those books that feels like an epic novel after you have read it.

Winstons score -A One of the best french language writers around.

 

 

 

The Delivery by Margarita Garcia Robayo

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The Delivery by Margarita Garcia Robayo

Columbian fiction

Original title – La Encomienda

Translator – Megan McDowell

Source – Review copy

I was lucky to get sent this by Charco press there have been bring some tremendous Latin American fiction the last few years and this is the second book I have read by the Columbian writer Margarita Garcia Robayo I read Holiday heart and loved it. She has written for a couple of newspapers in Columbia and Argentina she was also director of the Tomas Eloy Martinez Foundation (A writer I loved when he was alive). She has written four novels and number of short story collections. I read this and it remind me of a song I loved by Velvet Underground The Gift saw a boyfriend decided aft er a long sepration and longing to be with his girlfriend post himself to her. This ism a story about a woman that has escpaed her past and she thought her mother as well.

A few years ago, I went back to my country to renew my passport. My sister invited me to stay at her house with her family. Since she and her husband worked and the kid – back then it was just the one – went to day care, I was home alone a lot. They gave me my nephew’s room, and I slept in a low little bed with Power Rangers sheets, and I had to bend over a little to look at myself in the closet mirror. Then I would go to the dining room, make some tea and sit down to write. Sometimes I took breaks to nose around. I didn’t find much that was remarkable; my sister is an obvious person. Her only secret was a photograph of our father hidden in her closet. I’d seen that photo before – when I moved away from the country, she told me I could take it if I wanted.’No, thanks, you’ll take better care of it, I told her. So why was it a secret, then?

She had come home once but it felt odd.

 

The delivery has a narrator  that tells us early on that she had left her homeland. never mention where  but a latin american country .She had tired to be a writer and failed then left snd she has a freelance job currently working ion a piece about a cow .it isn’t what she dreamed for her life and this is ashown in her attitude to others around her. But she is settled but her life is maybe empty and there is a feeling of a woman hs broken free but then hit a wall on whart to do. Her only connection to the past life is a conversation via the internet and letters with her sister. But when she  learns her sister is off for a long break and days after there is a large box delievered to her house she leaes this box eventually bring it in and opening it up and she discovers it has her mother. Now this is a mother that is one of those overbearing take charge types it immediately becomes so clear why she had to get so far away from her as she takes over the runnning of the house. As the past and present collitde this is a book that follows a few days after shegets the parcel and the finds out it had her mother in it and then facing ones own past and the mistakes that happened.

‘It was delivered almost two days ago, and it’s still sitting out here?’

The weight of the box is too much for me.

“Can you help me, Máximo, please? It’s really heavy.

Máximo snorts. He slides in on one side between the box and the wall and grabs it long-ways with his arms outstretched. He says ‘excuse me’ but still pushes me with his body, which is bulky like a bulldozer, and he half-drags, half-lifts the box inside and drops it onto the sofa, sideways.

What is this?’ I ask.

Máximo snorts again. He takes a handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and wipes his sweaty face. He mutters on his way out and slams the door behind him.

The box waited days how was the mother still alive ? I do wonder this

I said it vaguely remind me of the giftas is the mother there I asked my self left for days in the box then she appears ? I do wonder if that is what happens or if ther fact her sister is going on a cruise made her think this is what may happen. I also thought of the end of the The gift by Velvet Underground were the boyfriend is stabbed is this what hapened here it isn’t mentioned but I just wonder is the mother there or her spirit at times. In a sort of surreal idea not unlike FIaght club where the Brad Pitt character is just imagined and maybe she needed a character and that character is her mother as she is maybe smothering and as I said one of these take over mothers.For me a book about families but also about the sort of cautionary tale of how when we get to the othe side of the fence irt isn’t always as green as it seemed when we were at home. I liked this book it isabout family and also about loneliness and loss.

Winstons score – A solid tale of a daughter that tried to escape her mother and maybe lost something more.

Merry Christmas from Winstonsdad well me stu

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As is the tradition, I have found an old card from the NYPL digital collection for Christmas. I am working today, but my new job is mainly office-based, so it will be different from being on a ward. I will be having my Turkey and celebrating with Amanda. So hoping you all have a great Christmas or however you celebrate it . May you have a bookish Christmas whatever you are doing

A girl’s story by Annie Earnaux

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A Girl’s Story by Annie Ernaux

French non-fiction

Original title – Mémoire de fille

Translator – Alison L Strayer

Source – Library book

I intend to work through all of Ernaux’s books over time this is the 5th book by her I will have reviewed on the blog. Which is just a fraction of her works with a number to still be translated I can see me reviewing her books for the next few years. She won the Nobel and it was deserved she is a great advocate of auto-fiction memoir, few writers have taken apart their lives like she has over time. I last saw her go back over an affair in her late middle age and now we find her as a young girl in the fifties becoming a woman a summer at a summer camp and those years we all had when we find who we are sexually as people. But also how fragile we can be in those years.

She is disconcerted by the mingling of the sexes, unprepared for simple camaraderie between boys and girls employed to do the same job. The situation is unfamiliar.Basically, she only knows how to talk to boys with the kind of verbal sparring, at once enticing and derisive, that girls use when a group of boys follows them in the streets – defending themselves while leading them on.At the meeting that is held before the children’s arrival, she glances around at the fifteen-odd boys and finds that none correspond to her dream of falling passionately in love.

A different time but they do mingle later on

This is a book that seems she could have only written years later it takes her own life back to one summer as a young girl on the verge of sexual awakening as she spent a summer at summer camping Normandy. But she also tackles her own problems she had at that time with her own Body image, which led to her having Bulima as it is called now this is a looking back at things and how we maybe understand more of events 60 years later than we did at the time. How other events that summer other encounters scared her for life and affected her life more than she knew at the time this a writer looking back after the Me Too movement at events many years ago in a new light. I love how she does this, she also teases us with gems about the books she was reading at the time I will be going back at some point and looking at the books she mentions. I have a couple I think she mentions Sagan and Gide both of whom I have books from. She captures the difference between males and females at a certain age back then and desire and how it sometimes went too far and how the other half viewed her and other women last the time.

The place, too, is real. In my memory, it has gradually metamorphosed into a kind of castle, a cross between Les Sablonnières in Le Grand Meaulnes and the palace in Last Year at Marienbad. I tried to find it again in the autumn of 1995 while driving home from Saint-Malo, without success. I was forced to park in the high street of Sand ask a tobacconist how to get to the sanatorium, and when she gazed back at me blankly, as if she had never heard of it, I added, ‘The old medico-educational institute, I believe.’ I only discovered today on the Internet that the place was once an abbey, founded in the Middle Ages. Demolished, rebuilt, and transformed over the centuries. Cannot be visited except on national heritage days.

I could picture this place so well from this one small passage .

I think this is a book she had to wait to write it is filled with looks back at that summer and that time. I imagine it seems very different than it did at the time and how much values have changed but also the dynamics between men and women this is a world just after the war and just at the start lof teenagers being free in a way that hadn’t been for years. As I say seems to be part of the ME TOO movement it came out in 2016 just as people started to reveal things that had happened and like Annie as she recounts events from that summer and sees them in a new light how male violence is always there and how it can affect a lifetime from the first sexual encounter but also other events sexually that summer with an older man but this is a French trade on those events in a way an Annie look at those events many years ago, How much she hated herself now as she was then is eye-opening. She doesn’t have to go to confession because she writes them and we can read them !! Have you read this book by Ernaux ?

Winstons score – B solid piece of her childhood years growing up in a different time to now.

 

Snow by Marcus Sedgwick

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Snow by Marcus Sedgwick

English non-fiction

Source – Personal copy

I love to listen to a little bit of Radio or some talking in bed I tend to drop off in under ten minutes of being in bed I’m fast on anyway last week or the week before this was on over a week. I listened the first night and liked his style. Then I listened the next night and thought that the writer’s name sounded familiar. I woke next day and looked up the book and found it was one of the Nature books I buy every time I visit where my mum’s ashes are spread. I usually visit the local Waterstones and buy some Nature writing mum loved nature and I chose this as one of my favourite books of all time is Emily Miano’s book Around Snow. Marcus was mainly a writer of Children’s fiction he had won a lot of prizes for his fiction but he also wrote several non-fiction works. He wrote this a couple of years after moving to the Alps in France. Also this was published by Little Roller as part of a series alongside the other series of classic Nature writing I have loved the couple of books I have read so far.

All my life I have loved the snow; ever since boyhood, when it seemed that every year was blessed, if you see it that way, with a heavy snowfall. There were hard winters when I was a child, growing up in the Far East. The far east that is, of Kent, close enough to the continent to be swept by their snow clouds, and it was an utter delight for my brother and me when our parents declared that the roads from our village to school, only a few miles away, were impassable once again.It didn’t take much snow to do it; the sunken rural roads that ran out of the orchards and across open wind-swept cabbage fields were easily prone to collect drifting snow, sealing us happily into our tiny village.

I was reminded of a drift in 1981 that covered most of the ground floor of the house we lived in windows,

It felt right a week after the first snow to cover this collection of essays around Snow. Marcus talks about the childhood love of snow we all have..His new Home in the Alps which he pointed out was at the same height as the summit of Snowden and how he found out what real snow was when he got there. How the plough when the snow fell a certain way would block his drive. Then digressios into how flakes form different types of snow how many words some Languages have for snow and the certain myths about this as well. Seeing certain weather phenomena he had seen caused by snow. He touches on Schubert Winterrreise how he wrote it how it was so sad and dark in parts and was written near his death(I must listen in depth to this again at some point anyone suggest a good recording of it ) He was known to be a huge fan of Thomas Mann and this crops up in the book as well. It is a slim work that links into how snow affects us all at times and also how it can inspire us at times.

Today, a Schubertiade is a gathering of musicians performing works by, or inspired by, the Austrian composer. These affairs began as little salons at his patrons houses, for his friends and benefactors, often to trial new pieces. Winterreise falls into two halves of twelve songs each. The story goes that Schubert called his friends togethet, one evening in 1827, to hear him perform the first half. When he finished, there was stony silence, disbelieving faces. What was this utterly bleak and strange music that their hero had composed?

That was the first half the later part is meant be darker I must listen to this piece of music

They were dumbstruck by the weirdness and terror of the piece, and yet the first half, the half they’d witnessed, is nothing to the second, something so completely desolate it makes the first twelve songs appear like the dream of a summer’s picnic.

 

I’m pleased I got to this I had want to try read another nature book before the ned of the year and this is a great book for winter and can easily be read in an evening and if you like writers that go from point a to b but takes us on a trip as they do that this is a book for you. His view like my own we had more snow when we were young he proves this when he gets the Met Office records for his childhood home in Kent and finds yes in the 60s there were three times as many snow days as in the last ten years. He mixes art, literature and tales of snow into a book that is fun to read and packed full of little facts and insights. Other parts of the book, reminded me of a colleague I used to work with a former merchant sailor, he had gone to Siberia on an early trip and been shocked by the snow and how cold it was there is talk of people finding arctic conditions hard. Have you read any of the books in this Series.?

Winston’s score – A – perfect to be inside warm on a winter evening reading about snow!

This is Amiko , Do You Copy by Natsuko Imamura

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This is Amiko, Do You Copy? by Natsuko Imamura

Japanese Fiction

Original title – こちらあみ子

Translator – Hitomi Yoshio

Source – Review copy

This is an early book from the Japanese writer Natsuko Imamura she has been nominated three times for the Akutagawa Prize one of the biggest book prizes in Japan. I have reviewed the third book she wasp for the prize for on the blog before the woman in the Purple Skirt which won the prize she has written aa number of other books and won several prizes for her fiction. She lives in Osaka with her husband and Daughter. This is a odd little novel around one odd little girl Amiko and we see her grow into a Teen

AMIKO GREW UP AS THE SECOND CHILD IN THE TANAKA FAMILY until the day she moved out at the age of fifteen. She had a father, a mother, and an older brother who became a juvenile delinquent.

Back when Amiko was in elementary school, Mother taught a calligraphy class at home. The classroom was small and simple, with three long rectangular tables arranged in an eight-mat tatami room where Mother’s mother used to sleep. Now the floor was covered with a red rug from corner to corner.Next to this room was the so-called Buddha room, where the butsudan was placed, and across the hall was the kitchen-dining room. The classroom was connected to a veranda, and that’s where the calligraphy

Her step mother taught Calligraphy this is where she meets the boy she falls for.

I said this is the story of Amiko. I was a few pages in and said to myself Amiko reminds me of some of the people I have looked after and supported she has some condition whether it is Autism or on the ASD spectrum or some other condition. She struggles to read the world around her. She has a trait of obsession early on in the book it is a boy that her stepmother is teaching Calligraphy too this is more than a childhood crush it is obsessive in its nature. That sort of obsession and inability people on the ASD spectrum can have to find it had to read social traits and ticks and emotions or even be unable to hold back their own emotional feelings. She has a walkie talk and this is another thing that makes you think she has autism the obsessive way she uses it is a portrait of a girl but a girl alone for none of those around her seem to see her as a person with Neurodiversity. Her view of the world is strange. Even the flat way at times the story is told it makes it seem like we are in her world at times there is a clinical nature at times to the prose style. A girl misunderstood it makes you wonder how people with Autism fair in Japan she is caught as a naughty bullied child and she isn’t it upset me at times.

But Amiko, who ate like a bird, couldn’t even finish the small bowl before her. With two or three bites left, she threw her pink chopsticks onto the table. Mother tried to offer her some kara-age fried chicken, another favourite of hers, but Amiko shooed away the plate, saying, “No more.” She then grabbed the box of chocolate cookies that Father had given her and placed it on her lap. “This is what I’m having!” she announced excitedly as she opened the lid with a big heart on it. After licking the chocolate coating off the surface of every cookie, she felt so full she could barely breathe.

I loved this description of her eating so many signs of her having some sort of ASD like symptoms

As you can see this girl grows in a third person description which is suited to this type of book it works well in the book The Incident in the Night. That flat way of viewing the world that Autistic way of not being able to see social traits and ticks but also struggling with your own emotions and how to show how you feel about people either seem distant or over the top and stifling at times was caught so well, I loved her little traits like the Walkie Talkies is just perfect and the sort of obsession some would have whether it was that all just talking via text as it is easier. This of course grabbed me as it is my job but I have a neurodiversity condition and can see in hindsight how it has affected me over the years so could connect with Amiko and how people just misunderstood her so much. If you like her other book The Girl in the Purple Skirt which dealt with Obsession really well you will connect with this book. It is also a perfect choice for next month’s January in Japan event it is part of a series of Japanese novellas that Pushkin has brought out by contemporary writers in Japan I have a couple more from the series to review. Have you read any of the books from this writer?

Winstons score – A solid little novella around a young girl growing up with an ASD condition.

Looking Forward 2024 reading plans

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This is the first time I can think of in all the time I have been Blogging I have done a post about the year ahead and thought that far ahead in Blogging terms. But I feel like I have been reading Water for many years, happy with the figures I get, and just doing the same year in year out about 120 posts about 90-100 reviews in a year. Well, I think next year I need to shake things up and raise the bar. I will again pass 100,000 words for the year this year. The fact is, I could easily carry on and do the same next year, but I feel the need to plan the year a little more and have firmly in my mind what I am doing throughout the year.

I have been buying lots of Japanese books for January in Japan. That is always a fun meme to join and always a good start to the year. Then I am planning to read 28 translations in February; I tried something similar last year, spurred on by Simon in Suck in the Books, that have done a few years with Novellas, where he reads one a day for a month. I loved trying to do it last year it meant I got to raid the Library for choices to read. Then we head into Booker International season. I will be reading the Longlist as I have for the last 12 years before it was the Booker International and was the old IFFP. I will then be looking at reading a few long books, getting ready for summer, and bringing back Spanish lit month in its original form, just Spanish Language literature. I’ve several books from Charco Press and other presses I want to read this month. I miss Richard, who started this with me many years ago. But I will do it Binnually with Czech lit month returning in 2025.  Then I will be doing Simon and Karen years in April. They take us back to 1937 , and what I love about this is the deep dive into the year. The books came out, finding those lost gems for every year they chose. Then we have German lit month which I didnt’ plan for this year and intend to have plans in place for next year. The hope is to increase the number of reviews to be similar to what I actually read in a year with 120 books. I said I have hit 100,0oo words in the last few years, so I aim to write 125,000 words. I will try to engage a little more on social media like I did when I first started this blog. I need to chat more; I miss the chat out there. I miss that. Well, there has been a whole lot of I, but it is me behind the blog, and it is time to step up and stop being so comfortable with the blog as we need to move on to winstonsdad the middle-age years. What are your plans for next year with your blog or just with your reading?

 

The River Between

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The River Between by Ngūgī wa Thiong’o

Kenyan fiction

Source – Personal Copy

I keep thinking every year would be Thiong’o’s year to win the Nobel Literature Prize, but as the years go by, you think time is running short for him to win the prize. So I decided it was time to review another of his books. I recently bought a Penguin edition of another of his books, so it seemed time to get to this one. It has been on my shelves for years and is one from the African writer series, and it felt time to review it. I know Lisa had reviewed it years ago. It is a timely novel I think whenever you read it the themes within the book are still present not just in Africa but elsewhere in the world where modernity and tradition class and history and the present class This is the tale of kids turning into adults and the rituals around them but is also a tale of the modern and ancient traditions clashing

Soon Waiyaki joined again in the daily rhythm of life in the village. He went out to look after cattle; organized raids, went out hunting. He joined in the dances for the young boys and felt happy. Days came and went; and still it was the same life.

His yes retained a strong and resolute look. Some people said that there was something evil in their glitter. But his father must have had the same sort of eyes; in a body becoming distorted with wrinkles, his eyes remained alive and youthful.

One evening, a few wecks after his second birth, Waiyaki was called by his father, who liked holding talks in his thingira, the man’s hut. Waiyaki entered very quietly, because he was always uneasy in the presence of his father.

Wayaki soon became his father favourite

The plot follows two villages and the different paths they take, but it is a more complex and twisted story than That at the heart of it is three sons who are sent by the father to study at the local school it soon becomes clear the youngest of these sons Waiyaki is not just a great student but a natural at s]keeping the peace and sorting out fights there Father sees himself as the saviour his boys learn at the Christian school. In the next village, there is a young girl coming of age, and in line with Tradition, she is due to undergo Female circumcision or FGM (Female Genital Mutilation), a come act in many tribes, and the title alludes to some of the tales a river and hills etc the traditional tales used to make this barbaric act seem part of a tradition. But as this Girl dies as the procedure goes wrong, it sets ripples through their villages and pits past and presents modern ideas against Ancient traditions. Add to this, an exlict love affair that Waiyaki gets involved in, and we have a melting pot of Christian tribal history and how to move a tribe into the modern world and two ideas of what is the best way as those on both sides split and the Gikuyu’s tribe future is at stake.

The sacrifices went hand in hand with preparations for the coming circumcision. Everywhere candidates for the initiation were gathering. They went from house to house, singing and dancing the ritual songs, the same that had been sung from the old times, when Demi were on the land.

Waiyaki was one of the candidates. He was now a young man with strong, straight limbs. He did not like the dances very much, mainly because he could not do them as well as his fellow candidates, who had been practising them for years.After all, it was soon after his second birth that he had gone to Siriana, and he had lived there for all those years, although he normally came home during the holidays. Waiyaki was often surprised at his father, who in some ways seemed to defy age.His voice, however, thin and tremulous, betrayed him. Waiyaki often remembered why he was sent to Siriana.

He is due to be circumcisied as well but he also knows the teaching from his school

This, for me is when Thiong’o is at his best as a writer, when he talks about the world of he knows the tribe he is part of. This is the time when the world he lived in was in Flux as the past traditions changed as the Western world and Christianity crept into the world he knows this is written in the mid-60s not long after Kenya gained independence and the struggle in the book is the struggle in the country how to keep tradition and move forward. It also tackles FGM, a practice that has been banned for just a decade in Kenya. It tackles, like many books of the time, the struggle to hold on to the past and move forward into the Modern world. I like this as it seemed like a book written from the perspective of someone who had seen the struggles and the coming-of-age ceremonies within the tribe. Have you read any books from Thiong’o? do you think he will win the Nobel ?

Winston score – B solid book about the turmoil and changes in Kenya in the mid 60s

My rivers by Faruk Šehić

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My rivers by Faruk Šehić

Bosnian poetry

Original title – Moje rijeke

Translator – S D Curtis

Source -Review copy

I struggled to review this as I do read poetry not as much as I did in my late teens and early twenties, when I read a lot of poetry. But that was mainly English Poetry and not a lot in translation. But this is a collection form a Bosnian writer whose fiction I have really enjoyed. The translator is a poet herself and also the owner of Istros books. So I feel the wieght to review this poetry collection in a way but I also love how he connects events in his life to rivers this harked me back to Esther Kinsky in her book Am Fluss (river) where she connected her life to rivers asnd event that had happened but also the fluid nature of memories and rivers or Alice Oswald with Dart another poem about a river.This poetry collection won the biggest poetry prize in the Balkans.

Here the Americans and British disembarked in two world wars

Here in the bay the HMS Lancaster sunk in 1940, with the loss of 4000 souls

Fraternal flags flutter proudly on masts (two of the few that I can stomach)

Respect is the only thing I can feel imagining American warships in the centre of Saint Nazaire

The menacing grey of steel determined to defend the world from Nazism

Here was the USS Saratoga, whose name Iloved as a child, the river waters softening the smell of the ocean

The second verse of the poem liberation day

 

 

My Rivers is a poetry collection in Four cycles: From France and the Loire, Germany and the Spree River then the Great Balkan River the Drna and a final cycle beyond the river. The collection opens in Paris and the Loire and Faruk hear his name in the wind and the spirits of the world wars echo in this poem and I was so touched by the end line of this poem, Liberation Day as the sea makes us whole again it seemed so poignant and have so many means. Then as an Emigre in Berlin, he talks about being able to Podst himself there and how it feels to wander the Postdamer Platz, drink milky coffees and see exotic food served. Then, Berlin’s problematic history, but he felt it was a city for him. In the poem, Emigre’s soul opens the Spree cycle. Then a powerful and brutal imagery in a return to the Garden of Eden in the Drna cycle messages from the dead signs only he sees grubby kids Sarajevo. That smell of meat at the butcher. The pile of excuses, this is a stomach-thumping poem about a return to a place. In Beyond the River: The Last Cycle, he talks about the Revolution as an Odyssey ghost, lost books, lost texts, a tear in a spider web, and revolution like pigs eating all in front of them all ends with the lines, there is no other way but the cross on your back and the road up ahead what a powerful image.

I’m hooked on the odour of the Berlin underground promising speed and good times

I must post myself to Berlin touch the Brandenburg Gate

caress the stone buttocks of Greek goddesses the colour of milky coffee sipped in Potsdamer Platz serenaded by sparrows, those feathery balls navigating the glass domes of arcades strung with sails or what seem now like sails, now like neckties made for giants

Those sparrows surround me as I drink in the late sun, they’ll wait for crumbs while I sit in the garden of an exotic restaurant (serving crocodile steak and koala fillet)

A section from the poem Emigre’s soul

I said I struggled with how to review this. I am no poet I  struggle to convey how powerful this felt to me it is stunning in its soul, a man’s soul like the intestines he talks about in one poem laid out for all to see the innermost soul of a man the ghost of the war but then how do you move past that and that is the river in a way he is like a stone thrown roughly with edges and other time those barbs of a man and a war are heading to the sea smoothing slowly forming something else water always finds a way and this is like a soul finding a way in words. I love that Susan did this, as she is a wonderful poet in her own right she wrote a heartwrenching poem about her own life that is worth reading. As Nick Cave said in his poem Crooked River “O sullen river, wide +weary, what are you running to? to a watery grave, o doomed sailor, to the grave I’m taking you. ” The river drags your soul in with it at times. Have you a favourite poetry collection in Translation ?

Winston score – +A Heart wrenching at times. I just wish I was better placed to review and give it the just review it needs.

Vengeance is mine by Marie Ndiaye

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Vengeance is mine by Marie Ndiaye

French Fiction

Original title –La vengeance m’appartient

Translator – Jordan Stump

Source – review copies

No wonder I never get sent books. I fall behind in my review copies all the time I am just a butterfly read floating here and there, but I need to use my social media more for new books and review them quicker anyway, enough about me. But this is one I should get to soon I have read reviews of two other books from the Prix Goncourt winner Marie Ndiaye and have loved them. She is a writer I think is just getting better she has won the Goncourt longlist for the International Booker and also the International Dublin Literary Award. This was her last novel to be published in French. She is very good at using various threads of stories in her books, and this is the same with this book, all based around the case of a woman accused of killing her three children.

“Sharon, you should have gone home, they’ve shut down the tram for the night.”

Me Susane turned off the riotous lights beaming down from the ceiling.

Sharon, you don’t have to switch on every light in the apartment, M° Susane didn’t say either, because that mark of respect, that show of thoughtfulness you think you have to offer your employer when she comes home late and tired by dazzlingly illuminating her entrance, none of that suits my spirit of frugality, economy and temperance in every act of daily life, no, Sharon, really, switch on only the lights you can’t do without for your work, M° Susane would never, absolutely never, tell her.

Sharon her strange and wonderful Housekeeper

As with her other books, Ndiaye is a weaver of subplots and side stories in this book, as the main driving force in the book is Gillers Principaux, a husband trying to find a lawyer for his wife Marlyne, who is accused of killing their three sons. He arrives at the offices of Maitre Susane small town law practice. She feels she knows this man, and that is one of the threads through the book, a long-hidden event in her youth that involves this man. The other is her trying to find out what happened with Marlyne, who on the surface, is seemingly a normal housewife living a perfect life. But is that what made her break. Then we have another story of Susane’s housekeeper Sharon and her husband who are they? Why is some of the paperwork that Susane needs seemingly lost? how will she react when she hears her employer is defending this woman accused of killing her sons. What did the couple say about what they did after the children were found dead/ Will Susane remember those events many years ago?

Because Gilles Principaux seemed not so much devastated by the death of his children as bent on absolving Marlyne in the eyes of the world.

And why not? thought Me Susane.

And what did it mean to be “devastated”, what unambiguous conclusion was there to be drawn from Gilles Principaux’s dry eyes, his strange smiles before the cameras, his obvious pleasure in holding forth on the horror of it all?

According to what unassailable criteria, both moral and psychological, could one conclude, simply because he smiled so abundantly, that his children’s deaths did not affect him as deeply as they should?

Those unsavoury, vengeful sites had put their finger on one true thing, thought Me Susane: Gilles Principaux had an unusual reaction to the event that was supposed to have shattered his existence.

These lines made me think of the Parents Of Maddie and how there reactions where looked at so closely after she disappeared

I loved this I can see why others hate it as it is one of those books that is like many great French films where what is happening is never quite sure. I think of films like Le Boucher, where a murderer is slowly revealed or last year in Marianbad, where events from the past are forgotten. There is so. many levels and twists in this book. If you take the best physiological thrillers from Highsmith or Du Maurier, throw in some French noir, childhood secrets and then a housekeeper and family with their own secrets. I keep seeing this book in cinematic terms and maybe that is me imaging how it would make a great film with the flashbacks at youth side plots and the whole infanticide, which I have barely mentioned I experienced the feeling that this many years ago in another French novella Beside the sea saw a mother kill her children as well. This is a very French book it seems to me. Ndiaye takes us to dark places and looks at how memory works and how the past ripples into the present. Have you read her books? Have you ever read a book and thought that would just be a stunning film?

Winston’s score – A – One of the greatest living French writers does it again

Well November has gone my November 23 reading etc

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  1. Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux 
  2. The Blue Soda Siphon by Urs Widmer
  3. Let’s go home, son by Ivica Prtenjača
  4. Summer fishing in Lapland by Juhani Karila 
  5. Blueprint by Thersia Enzensberger 
  6. The Oppermanns by Lion Feutchwanger 
  7. Anyone who utters a consulting word is a traitor by Alexander Kluge

I managed seven books last month. I started with an affair in France. Through time travel in Switzerland. A family tried to make their way home during the pandemic in Croatia. Then a road trip and chase and a murde with a large dose of myths and magic realism in Lapland. Then, I will be a student at the Bauhaus during the day. Then a Jewish family in Berlin as the Nazis take over. Then, there are 48 stories in tribute to the German Jewish judge Fritz Bauer.

Book of the Month

so many great books but  The Oppermanns is a lovely book as it is from Perseohone. Still, it is also a book that should be more well known as with the work from Kluge I read this is about Germany ten years before Kluge’s work and the dark clouds are just starting to go over the Jewish family as the world they live in slowly changes as the events that would become the Holocaust starts to happen.

Non-book events

Vinyl finds l I managed to get the live version of Flaming Lips Yoshimi battles the pink robots that came out for Black Friday for record store day. I also got the 25th anniversary of the REM up album I brought it on cd 25 years ago but it is one of theirs I have grown to love over the years, so I was pleased to get it on vinyl. I signed up on a black Friday deal to the Paramount app so I watched nearly all of the Star Trek series Strange New World the first captain of the Enterprise, Pike is in the original series, and that is used here as he knows when he is due to die how. They also had Frasier I loved the first episode it has nods to both Frasier and Cheers. I also started the Apple TV show Monarch, a series from their Godzilla universe it has a great turn by Kurt Russell and his son Wyatt who plays the younger version of his father’s character a US officer and founder of the Monarch organisation that monitors these beasts like Godzilla. I love how it is unfolding with past and present mixing. I also watched The Velveteen Rabbit I loved this of drama of a classic book about a boy and his rabbit sad and a new favourite for Christmas. I love kids shows from this time of year, like Box of Delights, which I loved as a kid this is perfect for kids now.

Next months reading

I am on 90 reviews for the year and have read 112 books I hope to get ten reviews done to reach the 100 reviews mark. I am on the verge of 100,000 words on here for this year. I have a number of books I have been sent I want to finish the year out with from some of my favourite presses and all in Translation.