Month: March 2024

Wow that was March 2024

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  1. Star 111 by Lutz Seiler
  2. The end of August by Yu Miri
  3. The silver bone by Andrey Kurkov 
  4. what I’d rather not think about by Jente Posthuma 
  5. Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener 
  6. A Dictator calls by Ismail Kadare 
  7. The Details Ia Genberg 

This month is the same as every year. It starts with a couple of hopeful reads for the Booker International longlist. This book from Korea was written in Japanaese about two generations of runners. Then a story of the wall coming down in Germany as one part of a family heads West and their son stays in the West, Then the Bokker international longlist came out. I started with a historical crime novel with a touch of Magic realism set In Kyiv. Then to a tale of twins what happens to the other when ones decides to take their own life .It picks apart their lives and asks why. Then what happens when you see objects taken from your homeland and then see it was a relative that brought them what does this say about your family history. Then, a slice of history is replayed. What really happened when Stalin called Boris Pasternack? Then, four friends and a woman’s interactions with them are recalled as she is getting over a fever in a fever dream of a book.

Book of the month

How this epic work of the wall falling down missed the list I don’t know. As for the long list, I am now on book 12 of the 13. Part of the reason I have blogged a little less is to push on and get them all read  I had hoped by today but I failed in that but a small insight into the longlist from me is that I had only one book I had mentioned in my longlist and had only read two books from the longlist when it came out the lowest total for a long time. For me as a reader, this list may be the one I have least enjoyed reading. not that any book is terrible, but that said, no book is a stand-alone book, possibly barring the two I had already read, Karios and Not a River. I then wonder if it is time for me to consider swapping prizes. I have questioned this the last couple of years as there is a new prize that has been around for a few years called the ERBD Book prize; now, if I hadn’t brought the books for the Booker international longlist, I could have shadowed this prize this year. I will be from next year, though, as the last few longlists of this prize have appealed to me if you are a publisher on this year’s list, I would love to review your books. So if you would like to join the SHADOW EBRD prize from next year let me know.

  • The End by Attila Bartis, translated from the Hungarian by Judith Sollosy and published by Archipelago Books
  • Niki, A Novel by Christos Chomenidis, translated from the Greek by Patricia Felisa Barbeito and published by Other Press
  • The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales by Ferit Edgü, translated from the Turkish by Aron Aji and published by New York Review Books
  • Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv by Andrey Kurkov, translated from the Russian by Reuben Woolley and published by MacLehose Press
  • Exiled Shadow by Norman Manea, translated from the Romanian by Carla Baricz and published by Yale University Press
  • History of Ash by Khadija Marouazi, translated from the Arabic by Alexander E. Elinson and published by Hoopoe, an imprint of the American University in Cairo Press
  • Let’s Go Home, Son by Ivica Prtenjača, translated from the Croatian by David Williams and published by Istros Books
  • This Thing Called Love by Alawiya Sobh, translated from the Arabic by Max Weiss and published by Seagull Books
  • A Sensitive Person by Jáchym Topol, translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker and published by Yale University Press
  • Barcode by Krisztina Tóth, translated from the Hungarian by Peter Sherwood and published by Jantar Publishing

Non book events

as for records, I got the new album from Adrianne Lenker called Bright future,I loved the debut record from the Big Thief singer.

TV-wise, the new series of the short comedy show Mandy has come out. This surreal series is just laugh-out-loud at times as we follow the jobs Mandy gets and loses, usually in a surreal nature. I just watched a film, Cat Person from a New Yorker story, a comic horror film that is cut above most of what is around, and earlier in the month, I watched American fiction after I read Erasure, the book it is based on last month.

Next month plans.

I hope to get the booker reviews finished in the next week or two. I will move on to the backlog of new books I have and hopefully a few books from the EBRD prize I do hope get a few read. I have the book at the end of the list and have reviewed another book on the list. I also hope to review Until august the last Marquez book as well. What are your plans? what are your thoughts on the Booker international longlist?

Some recent buys

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A break from all things booker today. I’ll do a round-up of some books I got on two recent days out. First, as many of you know, My Mum’s ashes are spread in Macclesfield, and as it was recently Mother’s Day here in the UK, I went to take some flowers, and we had a couple of hours in Macclesfield. They have a small Waterstones. I always get a nature book from there as my mum loved Nature, and this time, I chose another from the Little Toller classic series.

This was an earlier work from the Children writer Michael Morpurgo about a farm he ran in the countryside for Farms for city kids at his farm in North Devon. I was torn between this and another in the series. I hope it will be there next time I go back. There is also a OXFAM small again but it has not often had any good books but this time I hit a nice selection of books.

First up the title of this book Kafka was the rage a memoir written by a former leading book critic for the New York Times book critic about his time in Greenwich Village when it was there hip place to be,

One that has been on my radar for a few years is the first part of four of Dorothy Richardson’s Modernist masterpieces, the Pilgrimage. I will watch over time for the other three parts of this series. dealing with the life of Miriam Henderson

Next up is another on the series of short story collection from Oxford university press this collection is set in Barcelona compiled by Peter Bush who also translated them all they range from Cervantes through Josep Pla and Juan Marse to Quim Monzo as one of the modern writers involved in this vibrant city. I have other books from this series.

Ever since I had seen this had come out from And other stories in a new edition, I was reminded I wanted to read more from Hines, best well-known for Kes, and the script for Threads, which I recently watched a terrifylng look at how a nuclear war would end up shocking as it was set in Sheffield. So I was pleased to see this old film tie on of the Gamekeeper on the shelf.

Amanda and I also had a nice day in Sheffield where they have a large waterstonmes. BNut as I had literally three days earlier brought most of the booker longlist as I need most lof the books I limited myself to three books from there this time.

First off was Butter by Asako Yuzuki. I have seen this posted a lot. It has a very eye-catching cover, a story of a female serial killer who cooked  for and then killed her men. She is interviewed by another woman as the two talk. The woman is interviewing and starts to see the world like the serial killer, an interesting-sounding book. I need a few new Japanese books as I read a lot of the ones I had at the start of the year

Then, another from Japan, a woman pretends to be pregnant for nine months. How will she get away with it and why? I liked the sound of this, and it has been on a lot of other blogs, so I wait and it will be reviewed next January, I think. A little forward planning from me. I also love the cover of this book.

Then this was the main book I had gone for as I am a huge fan of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I have reviewed six other books from him at the time of the blog. I was excited when I heard that his last novel had survived. He wanted it bin, but his sons kept a copy, and we have this story of a faithful wife who goes away on holiday every August and has an affair whilst she is on Holiday. It is strange as he mostly had male lead characters in his books. But illicit love is something he always tackled in his books.

What new or second hand has hit your shelves recently. Are you looking forward to the Marquez as well? It is a writer’s last book he wanted to be destroyed. Was it worth saving just to have it ?

The Details by Ia Genberg

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The details by IA Genberg

Swedish fiction

Original title -Detailjerna

Translator – Kira Josefsson

Source – personnel copy

Now I wasn’t aware of much of this book. But I wasn’t shocked when I saw it on the longlist as it is one of those books I had seen on Instagram and mentioned in a few year-end lists. I felt from its cover it was maybe a work of contemporary fiction. But when I read the blurb on the booker longlist, it seemed interesting enough: a woman is in bed with a fever and has fever dreams about her life. This may be a work of auto-fiction it is alluded to. Ia Genberg started as a Journalist before publishing her first novel in 2012, and since then, she has written a further novel and a collection of short stories, making this her third novel. It was a big seller in Sweden when it came. This seems to be her first book to be translated to English.

Literature was our favourite game. Johanna and I introduced each other to authors and themes, to eras and regions and singular works, to older books and contemporary books and books of different genres.

We had similar tastes but opinions divergent enough to make our discussions interesting. There were certain things we didn’t agree on (Oates, Bukowski, others that left us both unmoved (Gordimer, fantasy), and some we both loved (Klas Östergren, Eyvind Johnson’s Krilon trilogy, Lessing). I could tell how she felt about a book based on how fast she worked her way through it. If she was reading fast (Kundera, all crime fiction), I knew she was bored and rushing to be done, and if she was going too slow (The TinDrum, all sci-fi), she was equally bored but had to struggle to reach the last page

I loved the discucssion of books and sharing a love of literature something i rarely do in person.

 

Whilst in bed with a fever. She starts looking at a novel she got many years ago from an old girlfriend, which sparks a look into four of her old friends and connections over the years. We have a subtle book; the writer calls it a quiet novel. It is about all those tiny little events in one’s life; the book itself is described by the writer as a quiet novel. It captures those little things from a signature in a book like a Prosutian moment. The book she is reading is New york trilogy by Paul auster another writer that deals well at times with those littloe moments. She remembers how she and Johanna introduced each other to writers (I must admit in a way I was a little jealous of this as Amanda and I rarely talk books and she loves true life books and isn’t a quick reader like me that’s aside ) so yes this is her connection with Joanna as she drifts she is then drawn to three other connections over time the book hasn’t a; linear narrative, and that adds to the sense lof fever dream. But it also felt very personal at times.

Johanna became a person of my past, one of many, and had she not turned into a public figure I’d probably have been more successful in forgetting her. Her memory would have been allowed to fade and only rear its head again during fevers like this one, or during bouts of self-pity and nostalgia; it would have waned and withered until, like a badly restored painting, only a few incoherent fragments remained.Maybe I’d have walked by Fyra Knop and caught a scent linked to a voice. I might have dedicated a little thought to her every time I passed by the coffee shop on Linnégatan, or paused at an article about the laborious making of The Sorrow Gondola after Tomas Tranströmer’s passing. Like most people who’ve been abandoned I held the simple hope of never having to see her again;

I held it there as this little passage remind me of the last lines of Stand by me when the adult Geordie talks how two of his friends became faces in the crowd over time.

I’m on the wall with this. I love her taste in books describing Auster as a writer; he was a writer many years ago. I loved it when I first got really back into reading, which would be about 20 years ago. The New York Trilogy was one of my favourite books. also, I fell in love with the film scripts he made for two films, Smoke and Blue in the Face, which, like this book, deal with those quiet little moments of life caught from a signature or in smoke around a camera and pictures. This is maybe a book aimed at a reader twenty years younger than me. In fact, this is one of my feelings about the longlist as a whole. It is a very Gen Z list book. So this book worked but, in a way, didn’t grab me as I wanted it to. Maybe it needs to be Knausgaard in length for me as a reader if that makes sense?

Winston score – B love bits and others didn’t fully connect with me

A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare

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A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare

Albanian fiction

Original title -Kur sunduesit grinden. Rreth misterit të telefonimit Stalin-Pasternak

Translator – John Hodgson

Source – Personal copy

I initially shook my head when I saw this book on the longlist of the book it is just I think his books had bene on the longlist over the years and he is a writer  I have read several books from the year. In fact, he is a writer I liked reading over the years, but it was just that initial disappointment with this longlist.I think we all on the shadow jury felt this just the sheer number of books we had to read. This one in case is a book I’d call a shelf book it is one I wouldn’t have got but would have firstly borrowed from the library or got second-hand with the intention of reading at some point. Kadare is a writer. I’d love to read all his books over time as he is one of the few voices to break through from Albania, I know in recent years we have got a few more voices, in fact, I have two other writers under review from Albania and five books from Kadare reviewed over the years. He is near the top of the list of writers for the Nobel prizes, as he has won every other prize. He won the earlier version of the Booker International Booker, awarded for a body of work rather than an individual one. He had been on the longlist twice in the old IFFP days and once before since the prize became the booker international.

The telephone call had to do with a mystery that we all share in. The poet entered the stage not of his own free will but because the laws of tragedy demanded it.So, there were three: Pasternak, Stalin and Mandelstam. Two poets and the tyrant between them.The first thought was an exciting prospect: the two poets could unite to bring down the tyrant.

Both secretly despised this tyrant. Mandelstam had called him the Kremlin mountaineer. Pasternak was said to have described him as a dwarf with the body of a fourteen-year-old and the face of an old man. Now they had him in their grip, two against one, and could destroy him with all the cruelty that poets know how to use.

From Part two of the book and the event is explained

This is an odd book; if anything, it is more experimental than the other books I have read over the years from Ismail Kadare. But in other ways, he has much in common with his other books, a look at dictators, which he does in his other books, mainly Hoxha. But he had spent time in the USSR, and in 1960, he was called back to Albania. This book deals with an actual supposed event, a terse call between Josef Stalin and Boris Pasternak when a fellow Soviet writer and Poet Osip Mandelstam had been arrested. Of course, this was before Pasternak got in trouble with the regime. He tries to reconstruct the events of that call from fellow writers who may have been there in the day. As we see each retelling of the story, we know how each person’s view of the call is affected by their own position and thoughts. It is also an exciting twist of literature and politics and how they occasionally try to create artwork together and against one another.

The mystery surrounding Samoylov grew after the Pasternak scandal, when there was so much talk of the three-minute conversation with Stalin. Stul-pans said to me one day, half joking, that I was the best person to provide accurate information about that phone call. It took me a while to work out that what he meant was information that might come from Samoylov, who had been involved in the same circle as Pasternak and Akhmatova, including Lydia Chukovskaya, Zamyatin and perhaps Mandelstam himself.

I said I didn’t believe they were close enough friends to talk about such delicate matters.

How this call grew over time

This is one of those books that is hard to put down as it is basically 13 retellings of the same event from a slightly different angle and person each time. In our shadow chat, I felt that is why they’d gone for this a little in English, as it is a small nod to J B Priestley, an inspector call which uses the retelling of a life from different points of view. One of our group also pointed out the connection to Javier Cercas’ theory of a blind spot in a book, which is the turning point of a story that happens outside the book and turns the events of the book. Another thing that I felt about this book and the style it was written in is that two of his old translators, Babara Bray and David Bellios, are known for their work with the Oulipo writers. Kadare has lived in France for thirty years. He is sure to have read Oulipo’s works, and the constraint of just retelling the same event in so many ways struck me as Oulipo in style, a sort of Albanian homage to Oulipo? Anyway that is my thought on this odd book. So far, one of the better books from this year’s list. Have you read KADARE?

Winston score:  A -It’s interesting to see such an experienced writer trying something a little different with his writing.

Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener

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Undiscovered by Gariela Wiener

Peruvian fiction

Original title – Huaco Retrabo

Translator – Julia Sanches

Source – Personal copy

when the Booker International longlist came out, one of the names I recognised straight away was the Peruvian writer Gabriela Wiener,. I reviewed her book Nine Moons around her pregnancy a few years ago. She is one of the many talented female writers from Latin America, although she has lived in Spain for several years. She writes columns regularly for a Peruvian paper and magazine and occasionally for El Pais. She has also worked as an editor. She is related to the Austrian French explorer Charles Wiener. This fact is what makes the starting point of this book. A look into her own family history.

My family doesn’t have a single photograph of María Rodriguez. We’ll never know what she looked like.The woman who inaugurated the Wiener lineage inPeru, who carried a pregnancy to term by herself and breastfed a half-orphaned boy, has been swallowed by the earth. Much like traces of an ancient world that vanish beneath the sand for years. There’s a science to gathering materials scattered across a region and salvaging whatever time hasn’t corroded in order to piece together a fleeting image of the past. Huaquear, on the other hand, is opening, penetrating, extracting, stealing, flee-ing, forgetting. Yet in that rift, something was implanted inside her and germinated far from the tree.

They know who Charles had slept with but there is no photo of her great great grandmother around.

 

The book starts while she is in Paris; she visits an exhibition of Columbian artefacts, plunder from a time before Europeans had been to Latin America. Some of the female statues she starts to look at she sees herself in them., But then is shocked when she sees these statues were brought back to Europe by her own great -great grandfather, Charles Wiener. She then goes down a rabbit hole of her own personal history but also her own family’s background as half Peruvian and European, a deep look into race and place. I loved a remark that was sent to her about her having a Peruvian face. A off the cuff but racist remark or a statement of fact not sure but it in a way is at the heart f her journey to find out about Charles, but also about the plunder and violence of that time for the natives in Peru. As Charles took the portrait vase, she looked back to Europe, and they ended up in Paris. He also left a son and the family line that led to Gabriela and her family line.

SINCE MOVING TO SPAIN, I REGULARLY MEET PEOPLE WHO tell me I have a “Peruvian face.” What is a Peruvian face, anyway?The face of those women you see in the metro. The face in the pages of National Geographic. The face of María who saw Charles.My face looks a lot like a huaco portrait. Every time someone tells me this, I picture Charles brushing dust off my eyelids as he tries to determine when I was made. Huacos are handmade pieces of delicately painted ceramics. Pre-Columbian, they come in a variety of forms and styles, tending to be either decorative or part of a ritual or funerary offering. They’re called hua-cos because they were found buried next to important people insacred temples known as huacas. But out of all the huacos, the huaco portrait is the most interesting. A huaco portrait is a pre-Columbian photo ID. Its depiction of an Indigenous face is so realistic that when I look at one up close, it feels as if I’m gazing into a cracked mirror of bygone centuries.

The comment she gets about her faces and her view on it

I really liked her other book. I think she is in the tradition of auto fiction writers. This is the problem here. For me, this is more a work of nonfiction than a novel. But it is an interesting insight into the dark secrets a lot of families can have in their background. What is at the heart of this book is the bloody past of Latin America when people like Wiener came and took so much history back to Europe. Most of the artefacts he got are from the area around Machu Picchu, although he never got there as it was years after the Europeans first found the city he was in Peru and was near the city so the pieces he brought is from Peru and the family history means that the pots in the Museum had a historical resemblance to her when she looked at them but then this unusual family connection and this brought to the fore the history and what it is like to be colonised and coloniser. A great piece of autofiction and goes down a rabbit hole of our family history. If you like annernaux ora book around personal family history, this is one for you also about growing up between being a native and being a coloniser. Have you read any of her other books ?  she has another around the sex industry.

Winston’s score – B solid book, well written, but is it a novel?

What I’D Rather not think about by Jente Posthuma

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What I’d rather not think about by Jente Posthuma

Dutch fiction

Original title  Wear Ik Liver aniet aan denk

Translator Sarah Timmer Harvey

Source – personal copy

When the Booker International longlist came out I looked at the books, most I had a vague awareness of . But I read the small blurb on each and then set out on which order I’d read the longlist in part of this was decided by the arrival of the books on the longlist. This was one that I felt I’d get on with I love works told in Vignettes for they can work like a patchwork slowly building the picture of the book as a whole. Jente Posthuma’s first novel People Without Charisma was well-received and was up for several prizes in Holland when it came out. This is her second novel and deals with twins and the aftermath of when the older twin kills himself from his sister’s point of view.

MY Brother called himself one and Me two because he had been born forty-five minutes earlier than I was on a sweltering day in August. He treated me like his little sister, was longer and heavier than me at birth, and had taken up almost all the space in my mother’s belly. I’d been stuck behind him with my left leg thrown over my shoulder, or so the story goes. This was why it took a little extra time for me to emerge. Our actual due date had been a month later but my brother had gone ahead, and I wasn’t about to be left behind.

The fact that we weren’t identical was something I’d long considered a handicap, a consequence of our premature birth, even once I understood the difference between identical and fraternal twins. We could have grown even closer in that ninth month.

The names they used no identical but so close.

As many of you may know my own wife had to deal with the loss of a sibling to suicide it is one of the most heartbreaking things that can happen to a family and this is what ai had hoped to find here. But in a way I not sure if number two as we come to know her as the younger of the twins by some 45 minutes. There is a nod in a way here too the Twin Towers she says he was taller than me and always on the side like the Twin Towers. I felt this is written just after her brother has gone it jumps from their childhood, the discovery of each other sexuality. During those early relationships then her brother settles with a man and has a pair of dogs or as he calls them three and four. Things aren’t what they seem and in her brother’s case there always seems to be that dark spectre over his life. She maybe shows this at times with a lack of emotion I felt but that is maybe from my own personal experience of someone dealing for years with this grief.

The first sweater I bought with my own money was nice and warm and made of Icelandic wool. It wasn’t as soft as some of the sweaters I’d buy once I started working at the vintage shop, when one of my bedroom walls would gradually disappear behind a mountain of wool. I hung shelves from the floor to the ceiling and filled them with piles of sweaters, which, just like my father’s biscuit tins, were sorted according to colour. By my twenty-seventh birthday, I owned 142 sweaters, and it was high time I saw a therapist. What will you do with them all, my friends would say.It’s a collection, I’d tell them. I didn’t have any pets, so I stroked my sweaters whenever I had nothing else to do.

Two has her own issues as you see here.

I said I like vignettes as a style of telling stories and it does work here . I felt sometimes the fact it wasn’t from a real-life experience showed. There is a certain way of remembering and thinking of that event and then not happening the way when you are left after a suicide you always question the reasons motivation and what you as a sibling could have done differently. For me that is what was missing here maybe it is meant be just after he has died two thinking before the full horror or of the tidal wave of grief hits the sibling. I felt it had captured some of this but was maybe not realistic enough for me as someone who has been up in the night after night with my own darling wife as she had nightmares and questions about her own brother’s death. [art of the reason I read this early on is I wanted it to be read and gone as a book if that made sense well it does to me as the reader. Have you a subject you’d prefer not to read books around? or something that has effect your life and you find is never quite captured, right in fiction ?

Winstons score – B Well written but I just quite didn’t get it as a subject for me

The Silver Bone BY Andrey Kurkov

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The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov

Ukrainian fiction

Original title – Samson I Nadezhda

Translator – Boris Dralyuk

Source – Review copy

I was lucky that when the longest for this year International Booker was released I had already had two of the books sent to me in proof form from the publishers which meant I could start that evening and this was one I was in two minds to read when I got sent it . I do like the occasional crime novel and I have liked a lot of Andrey Kurkov earlier books. It is always interesting to see a writer try a book in a different Genre. His books are often political satires in Nature about the absurd nature of life sometimes. The penguin trilogy I loved but I haven’t read as many of his recent books. I especially must get to his war diaries which were partly released in the Guardian at the time he was writing them. Anyway, this book was written in 2020 a full two years before Russia invaded Ukraine. But as it deals with the red Army taking of Kyiv in 1919 it is hard not to draw parallels with the current war and tensions. What we have here is the first of a trilogy around Samso Kolechko’s life. He is drawn to the police in this book.

The doctor, smooth-shaven and grey, silently treated Samson’s wound, applied a gauze pad with ointment and bandaged his head.

Somewhat calmed by the noiseless flat, Samson looked at the doctor in quiet gratitude and unclenched his right fist.

“Can the ear … be saved?” he asked, barely audible.

“I couldn’t say.” The doctor shook his head sadly. “I’m an ophthalmologist. Who was it?”

“Don’t know.” The young man shrugged. “Cossacks.”

“Red anarchy,” Vatrukhin replied, heaving a heavy sigh. Then he went over to the table, rummaged in the top drawer, took out a powder box and brought it back to his patient.

Samson removed the lid. The box was empty. The doctor tore off a piece of cotton wool and lined its bottom. The young man lowered his ear into the box, closed it and stuck it into the patch pocket of his tunic.

His ear in the sweet tin at the start of the book.

So the book opens with Samson losing his father to a Cossack Sabre as both Red and White armies fight over Kyiv. In the same attack, Samson himself loses his own ear which he keeps in an old sweet tin. But then discovers that he can hear through this served ear (this is a nod to the absurd and surreal nature of his earlier books).So when their flat os taken over by two Red Army soldiers he is able to hear all that they are talking about at this point. He decides to be a policeman and is drawn into a crime involving the said silver bone of the title a full-size silver copy of a leg bone draws him into murders and intrudes. But for me, this is where I had a little problem as it felt like the book ended with me as a reader wanting a little more and this is because it is the first of a trilogy.

The thought of a new regime made Samson chuckle bitterly. When there was one regime, albeit an old one, life seemed unsightly, comprehensible and routine. That regime was also routinely disparaged, although, even after the outbreak of the World War, the difficulties people experienced under its rule were, in comparison with what was to come, not so much difficulties as inconveniences.

Yet the old royal regime collapsed, and in its wake came many petty furious ones, replacing one another with much shooting and hatred. It was only during the time of the German garrison and the invisible Hetman of Ukraine, Pavlo Skoropadskyi, that life seemed to grow relatively safe and quiet again, but this lull ended with the terrible warehouse explosions and fires in the Zvirynets district that left hundreds of Kyivans dead and thousands crippled and homeless.

This insight tickled me about the change of regimes

As I said I like the setting and some of the plot to this book I felt it was a decent description of the chaos of both red and white armies and the Ukrainians themselves this is all a nod to the events that followed shortly after this book where again Russia tried to take over Kyiv. Samson is a character I would read more from there is a few of his absurd pasts that crop up in this crime novel. The worst point for me was the actuqal crime at the centre of the book just seemed to end a little to quickly and there was more I WANTED FROM Samson but maybe that was the point of leaving you hanging as a reader. It is hard to weigh it up as a crime novel as I read so few of them. But as a historic work, he seemed to capture the Kyiv of the time. I feel this is a trend of having a book from Ukraine on the longlist. To be honest iI haven’t read many other novels from Ukraine in the last year to say if this was the best choice but it is worth having a book from Ukraine on the longlist to remind us all of what is going on as hot shows history has a habit of repeating itself. Have you read this book or any other interesting books from Ukraine?

Winston score- B will look forward to parts two and three to get the full picture pop this as a series of novels.

Booker longlist 2024 Winstonsdads Thoughts on the list

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  • Not a River by Selva Almada, translated by Annie McDermott
  • Simpatía by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón, translated by Noel Hernández González and Daniel Hahn
  • Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann
  • The Details by Ia Genberg, translated by Kira Josefsson
  • White Nights by Urszula Honek, translated by Kate Webster
  • Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong, translated by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae
  • A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare, translated by John Hodgson
  • The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Boris Dralyuk
  • What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma, translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey
  • Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo, translated by Leah Janeczko
  • The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone, translated by Oonagh Stransky
  • Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior, translated by Johnny Lorenz
  • Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener, translated by Julia Sanches

That is this year longlist from it I have read and reviewed two books, that is the worst showing I have had for many a year.

The two I have reviewed and Not a river and Karios 

That left eleven books to read .

Now I had two proofs of The silver Bone by Andrev Kurkov a crime novel set over 100 years ago. The house on Via Gemito is an italian epic that came out 20 years ago and follows one family with a man that isf he wasn’t a railway man and had a family he’d been a great painter. SAo  willbe making a start shortly on the 11 books ledft and trying to get them read before the shortlist is out.

Off the rest, Ill pick three that have caught my eye

White Nights- stories here are set in the Polish countryside, interlinking stories around a village, and death sounds just up my street.

Undiscovered-  This is written by a writer I have read before. I read Nine Moons by Gabriela Wiener, a work about her pregnancy. This is about a woman also named Gabriela confronting her owns family past a coloniser and colonised as she visit a art show. I loved her other book.

What I’d rather not think about  – What happens when one twin wants to take there own life and how will effect the other twin this sounds like an interesting insight into twins and how they feel and act similar sometimes.

I will review all the books I have ordered, including the others. This is a list of books I had heard of barring White Nights, which is out of the blue. As I said in our shadow chat, they are like a certain type of football player. They are in a winning team but aren’t the star or the Maverik. They are Gary Neville’s of the book world . He was the first name on an England manager list. Essential and an important cog in the team, but just there a player but not a huge star but won lots of caps, if that makes sense. I had seen most of the books. They were on the end-of-year list of books to watch for list. But they as the poll of prediction longlists barring a couple they were mentioned on a few prediction posts as for my post I didnn’t get a single book. That is what makes this a journey of discovery this time. Have you read many of the longlist ? what are yur thoughts. This is a rather quick post I had worked 12 hours today and wrote this when I got home?

Winstonsdad annual Guesses at the BOOKER INTERNATIONAL LONGLIST 2024 edition

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Its that time of year when all us bloggers that love books in translation look into our Crystal ball well in my case what I have read in the whole 9 of the 12 books I have picked will be ones I have read  and 3 are books that I hope to read.

I start with The end of August by Yu Muri the tales of a century of Japanese Korean history told through a pair of marathon runners grandfather and granddaughter in Morgan Giles stunning Tranlstion. This is one of the two I really hope make the longlist.

Star 111 by Lutz Seiler Translator Tess Lewis is the other book I have longed to see on the longlist. It is set during the Berlin War and partly based on the writer’s own life at the time and also his parents’ life at the time, as he stayed in the East and they headed west.

Next up are two choices from Machlehose Press. First is Vengance is Mine by Marie NDiaye. is bout a middle-aged lawyer who is hired by someone she used to know to try a case, and as she does, the past becomes clearer. Translated by Jordan Stump Then we have Wound by Oksana Vasyakina. It is the tale of a daughter taking her mother’s ashes back to her mother’s village in Siberia. As she is doing so, she looks back on her life. It is one of the first openly lesbian novels in Russian. Translated by Eliner Alter

Next and Epic prose novel from Sweden Ǎdnan by Linnea Axelsson Translator Saskia Vogel is the tale of two Sami Famlies through the 20th century shows how there world has changed. Also be a great to see and indigenous writer on the longlist.It has the feel of a epic told in verse could be told around the campfire.

Off to Italy its been a while since an Italian book has been on the longlist and I loved this novelisation of a true life event The city of the Living by Nicola Lagioia translatror Ann Goldstein pulled apart the events that lead to the death of Luca Varni was killed by two men similar age to him in a planned murder that looks at the darker side of masculinity and being male in Modern Italy.

I love to support small presses, and one of my favourites in the last couple of years is Three Times Rebel Press. They have been bringing out thought-provoking books for the last couple of years. The Dear Ones by Berta Davila. This is a powerful little novel about motherhood and struggling with motherhood when you have a child but then have an abortion. Translated by Jacob Rogers

The most secret memory of men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr translator Lara Vergnaud this is part road novel part look at being an African writer in France also use a real novel that was accused of plagrism and has also just come out as a starting point when a writer reads the imagined novel that was withdrawn and goes on the hunt for the writer. I hope this makes the longlist ine I really connected with as a reader.

About uncle by Rebecca Gisler  Translator Jordan Stump. This has been my favourite Peirene for a long while and follows a family looking after an odd war veteran and his odd habits about family and what happens when one member need all the other to look after him.

Now my three I haven’t read with a quick explanation why

The annual Banquet of the Gravediggers Guild by Mathias Enard translator Frank Wynne

Just about to start this hard say why I haven’t got to it as it is translated by one of my favourite translators Frank Wynne and Enard ois a writer I love to read.

Anomaly by Andrej Niokladis Translator Will Firth  Lets hope this is out from Peirene a new publisher for his works he is a writer I have long championed and have met he has also done a piece for this blog. He is one of the best writers from Central Europe at the moment

Lasstly is a Nobel winner The children of the dead by Elfriede Jelinek Translator Gitta Honegger is meant to be her greatest book I have read a couple by her so am looking forward to this one.

The end of August by Yu Muri

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The end of August by Yu Muri

Korean fiction

Orignal title -『8月の果て』

Translator – Morgan Giles

Source – Personal copy

I said there was tweo books I held back my review of till near the Booker international coming out well this is the other book. I hadn’t got Tokyo Uneo station, I have since brought it; this came out between my last subscription and when I started my new subscription to Tilted Axis so I am rather late to Yu Muri as a writer and this is a book that had appeared on several lists of books to watch out for when it came out. For me I was going read this as it has a generational story. It also uses a piece of Actual history as a starting point for the story. Also I have an admiration for any one able to run long distances. TYu Muri is a writer who is often called the Asian Salman Rushdie as he books poke and prod at the dark piece of Japan’s history like it do here and also their savage years in Korea.

In-hale ex-hale the muscles in my legs can’t hold up 110 kilos of body weight anymore juddering and trembling with each step in-hale exhale each minor bump and dent in the asphalt reverberates in my knees in-hale ex-hale the road isn’t even both sides are tilted in-hale ex-hale if I don’t run in the middle the balance of my left and right knees will in-hale ex-hale ow! there are some seams in the asphalt in-hale ex-hale if don’t pay attention I’ll fall in-hale ex-hale ow! another seam in-hale ex-hale seams in the asphalt are something you only more or less notice when you’re riding in a speeding taxi but in-hale ex-hale in-hale ex-hale can’t hear the pacemaker’s whistle anymore in-hale ex-hale there’s just the road stretching ahead like anger in-hale ex-hale in-hale ex-hale in-hale ex-hale

I love how Morgan has translated these sections of running it has a real rhythm to it

The book spans the 20th Century from the 1930s when Japan occupied Korea and then til modern-day Korea, like the writer herself, a Korean who lives in Japan and now writes in Japanese. The book focuses on two long-distance runners (well marathon runners, I know we have those ultra runners) first is Lee Woo-Cheol as he is trying to make the Olympics squad. This was the golden era of Japanese running, and this Korean is trying to make the squad even though he is Korean. Now nearer the present we have his granddaughter she is also a runner but the drifts when running and we see the years in between and the family’s particular the plight of Korean women that became comfort women for Japanese troops.A fate that befell the neighbour of Lee and his brother during the war.  For me I loved how the act of running is still captures and flows even in translation with the act of running the breathing is captured in out but also the feel of how to run.and when a mind drifts from one place to another as we are doing sport that internal dialogue is caught well.

In-hale ex-hale in-hale ex-hale my brother will be born soon in-hale ex-hale Eomoni had a dream where she was eaten by a tiger, so she says it’ll be a boy and Abeoji had a dream where Eomoni was wearing a silk chima jeogori, so he says it’s definite in-hale ex-hale in-hale ex-hale it’s been tough since Eomoni got pregnant Halmoni and the ladies nearby keep going on about how in-hale ex-hale if she steps over a fire she’ll give the baby boils if she steps over a hedge a thief will be born if she pushes firewood into the stove with her foot the baby will cry at night if she eats a frog the baby will have six fingers and so on in-hale ex-hale in-hale

Again the sound of running is here in the 1920’s

I flew through this book in a way firstly it is a Stunning translation from Morgan Giles. She seems to have captured the act of running and the pace of the runner and their thought so well and how it must have felt in the original language. I was remind at times of The rider where the rider in that has his mind wander.  there a stream of consciousness of how the mind drifts when you are running. Yu Muri also tackles the dark history between her homeland and where she lives now the horrors of being a comfort woman in the war but also sports and how that can be used to oppress people. This is a nod to the great Korean Hero Kitei Son he was the runner that won Gold in the Berlin Olympics was running for Japan at the time. But was Korean. It is hard to describe this at times as part of it are just a Mind drifting as they run but there is a constant feeling of the past and present connecting as this happen thinking of her Grandfather. Have you read this or her other book Tokyo Ueno Station?

Winstons score A as I said yesterday this is one of two books I had held back as my two favourites for the Booker international longlist.

Star 111 by Lutz Seiler

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Star 111 by Lutz Seiler

German fiction

Original title -Stern 111

Translator – Tess lewis

Source – Library copy

I remember this was shown a lot around Twitter or whatever it is called now(I hate calling it x wtf does that mean, really ). Anyway, rant over. So it was all over as it was one of the first two books from and other stories to have their new design, which is very eye-catching and unique. I had intended to read Lutz Seiler a few years ago when Kruso came out, but a mishap and the proof I was sent to my old address, and I never got a replacement but when I read this, and it took me back to the time in the early 90s in Germany, it seemed a perfect read for me and also I felt it maybe would be a booker book it is a while since I finished it and now I think it may actually be more of an IFFP book but it does capture that time just after the Berlin wall fell so well. Anyway I would still like see it on the longlist myself.

A man stepped out onto the street heading toward the city center and raised his arm. It was three o’clock in the morning. Without a word of thanks, he got in the car and leaned back in the seat.

They drove for a time without engaging in conversation. “Stop just up ahead,” the man ordered and stuck a bill rolled into a cylinder the size of a cigarette between the heating vent louvers on the dashboard. Carl had heard about illegal cabs, but never imagined it would be so easy.

Just before Alexanderplatz, he turned onto a street that seemed suitable at first glance. It was called Linien Strasse.Only two streetlamps were working in the first hundred meters, and Carl parked the Zhiguli somewhere in the half-light between them.

Carl as he heads in to Berlin and thos names and places that we have seen so often in books and films about Berlin.

Star11 follows the outcome of the wall falling through the prism of one family. When the wall falls what happens when the parents want to go west and seek a life in the West and the son here wants to stay in. the east.. What follows is wjhat happens when Inge and Walter end up leaving the son Carl behind in East GermanyThey call him baxck from his studies to his home town of Thüringham where they tell him they are going west. His father kleaves behin=d his Car a russian Zhiguli or as we knew them Lada’s bck in the day. Carl ends up as a bit iof a Jack the Lad; he is eventually drawn to Berlin and the anarchy scene there he ends up as a Squatter and becomes friends with his fellow squatters. Carl who was a bricklayer. Starts to run an illegal taxi service. His life is interspersed with snippets of his parents and how they fair in the West. as they go from place to place. Their son is drawn by a different world of poetry and life in East Berlin as the wall falls and the corner is turned and many people flow into East berlin drawn by the cheap and vacant properties left behind by those heading west.

The first letter seemed to have been written in a state of great agitation and confusion. It contained a fragmented description of her first stops in the West, a muddled sequence of places, which Carl later tried to untangle in a sketch. What emerged was the image of a large circular movement over hundreds of kilometers, first northwards to the Dutch border, then back southwards along the Rhine, “our emigration”” as his mother had begun calling it. Carl pinned the page with his topographical sketch above his workbench, next to the flute player: “The Way of My Parents.”

This made me think of where I lived at the time which was five miles from the DAutch border and not far from the Rhine

This is a classic come of age in fact it has a nod to Gunter Grass I felt in the style of the writing. He is one of the voices of the Wende generation that grew up when the wall fell. Like Clemens Meyer he uses hius own life he was a bricklayer and he went ot East Berlin and his won parent took that trek through the west to settle and find there new home. This is from the era of films like Goodbye lenin, the Follow up to Wings of Desire wherwe see Berlin after the Wall has fallen the madness of the place chaotic and full of possiblites and we see this in  Carls world. In an interview, he says you must invent to tell a true story using authentic start points to retell the times. He mixes his own life with the world he lives and sees. I felt this captured a time that is now part of history wreally fresh in my own mind was the wall falling and spending time in Germany not long after the wall fell. I feel he captures a time that has long gone well a different world. Have you read Lutz Seiler ?

Winstons score – A one of two books I held back to review and want see on the longlist most.