Month: May 2024

The wounded Age and Eastern Tales by Ferit edgü

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The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales by Ferit Edgü

Turkish literature

Original title – Doğu Öyküleri & Nijinski Öyküleri

Translator Aron Aji

Source – Personal copy

I move on to a couple of works from Turkey. Firstly, he is an established Turkish writer who has written several books and works as a writer, but he, like many of his contemporaries, chose national service. To become a teacher in the Kurdish area of Turkey. This initial visit to the part of the country was eye-opening and formed the basis of his best-known book, A Season in Hakkari, the region he was sent to. He was shocked by the difference between himself and the locals and how his view of the Kurds differed greatly from the actual region and people. He has since written many books, and this book has two novellas he wrote at a later date, but he writes books about the region still, and these both came out at times of tension and conflict between the Turkish people and the local Kurd population in the area. I will focus on the first novella here.

They escaped with their animals.

Not just horses or mules. Sheep as well, thirty, forty of them.

Most perished on the way, a man says.

He’s not crying. Maybe smiling.

They carried two of the wounded sheep on their shoulders.

He gestures at the big cauldron nearby: Now they’re both in there.

A woman is standing by the boiling cauldron.

Her belly up to her nose.

She uncovers the cauldron, stirs.

A pungent meat smell.

Fate is fate. Born this side of the mountain or the other, makes no difference for the baby.

Is that what she says, I ask Vahap.

Yes, that’s what she says.

And that she’ll name the baby, Ferman —decree.

It’s this land’s custom, Vahap says.

Ferman’s the child born in exile.

As the journalist and interpreter head into the moiuntains he sees those escaping the violence.

As I said, this is all about the Wounded age. Where we follow a journalist as he is sent to the southeastern area of Turkey as the is a rise in conflict and killing in the region as the Kurds try to fight for their freedom. He heads to the mountains and sees the locals as they are firstly trying to escape the Turkish army what will follow when they come in, and the repercussions of the violence from the Kurds as they struggle in their fight for freedom. The massacres happen in the region, with many people dying. This was a starting point for this book when the journalist has a fever-like dream of an old man fishing the great river Zab as he draws his nets in. There are the bodies of the dead woman and children in the nets. When he awakes, he finds it was a dream, but the trauma iof this vision changes his views of the region of the locals and what is happening to them.

This time, I screamed. The old man, still holding on to the net, straightened his body, and, passing the net to his left hand, wiped his sweaty brow with his right hand. I told you to leave, he yelled, this time in my language. Now leave, you saw what you wanted to see. Go the hell away. I started walking backward to the edge, my eyes still fixed on him.

Corpses of women, of children, swept in the current, brushed past my legs. I screamed. When I came to, my heart pounding against its shell, I was sure I woke up in the afterworld.

The old man fishing the Zab and just catching bodies in his net.

Both novellas are set in the Hakkari region of Turkey, which is predominately Kurd in population. Some of the things that the journalist sees and talks about remind me of a friend I had when I worked in a factory in. German, he was from Kosovo, a Kosovian Albanian. When we chatted over the time I worked there about the oppressive nature and society of the Serbians, he also loved Glenn Hoddle, the footballer. So, this is a similar society, and there have been several significant massacres over time. The one that inspired the book still haunts Turkey, and the violence and deaths in the region still need to be addressed as they tried to wipe out the PKK but instead wiped out villages, like in the story where we see a dead woman and children floating in the river. There is a great interview with the translator on the Turkish Books podcast. Where he talks about translating this book, how he discovered Edgu as a writer, and the plan to bring more of his books out and, eventually, A Season in Hakkari. His style is poetic, sparse, and brutal at times with the images of the dead bodies floating in a river. He is a writer who makes an impact on you as a reader. Have you read a book about the Kurdish Conflict?

 

The Following Story by Cees Nooteboom

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The Following Story by Cees Nooteboom

Dutch fiction

Original title – Het volgende verhaal

Translator – Ina Rilke

Source – Personal copy

I saw this book on Both Karen’s and Simon’s blog recently. I had brought this copy a couple years ago second-hand. I have long been a fan of Cees, he did an interview many years ago for the blog. Over the time of the blog, I have reviewed five other books by Cees over the years. He is ne of my favourite writers a man that mix classics, his love of travel and places and most of all being Dutch into his fiction. I have read an earlier book by him that was brought out by Machlehose a few years ago in the Dutch mountains. But this book that came out thirty years ago brought him to a wider speaking audience.In fact, maybe this book is best summed up by what he said when I asked him about Dutch literature. He said Dutch literature may be an acquired taste; we are a metropolitan country, very densely populated, forced by size, inclination and the necessity of trade to be international, though lately rather inward looking. There is not enough land to serve as a counterweight to the cities. That makes for a rather special society. The language is spoken by 21 million sometimes conceited citizens, with opinions about practically everything, in an eternal dialogue with each other.

I had woken up with the ridiculous feeling that I might be dead, but whether I was actually dead, or had been dead, or vice versa, I could not ascertain. Death, I had learned, was nothingness, and if that was the state you were in, as I had also learned, all deliberation ceased. So that was not the state I was in, since I was still full of musings, thoughts, memories. And evidently I was still somewhere: pretty soon it would also become apparent that I could walk, look around, eat (the sweetish mother’s-milk-and-honey taste of those little buns the Portuguese have for breakfast lingered in my mouth for hours). And I was able to pay with real money. This last, as far as I was concerned, was the most convincing evidence of all. You wake up in a room in which you did not go to bed, but your wallet is lying as it should on a chair beside your bed. That I was in Portugal I already knew, though I had gone to bed in Amsterdam as usual

The clue to the book is here in the opening to the book.

This book focuses on one Dutchman, a classic teacher of Latin and Greek. Herman Mussert. But what happens is that he falls asleep in Amsterdam. Still, then a few seconds later, he is awake at the end of Europe in Lisbon; when he awakes in a room many years earlier, he had an affair with a fellow teacher’s wife, a knock-on effect in his life that led to him losing his job and taking a career in later life as a travel writer. As Mussert drifts through Lisbon he rcalls the events of his life. As he does, he bumps into a form student. At this point, he starts to resound the following story, which is the story Cees has told us, so we have a book that is Mobius loop end where it started or ending where it started, so to speak.

I must get out of this room! Which room? This one here, this room in Lisbon. Socrates is scared, Di Strabo doesn’t dare show his face, Herman Mussert doesn’t know whether he has been registered at the reception.

“Who’s that funny-looking guy?” “Which room is he in?” “Have you entered his name?”

Nothing of the sort happens. I gather up my green Michelin, my map of Lisbon. Everything was to hand, naturally. Travellers’ cheques, escudos in my wallet, someone loves me, ipsa sibi virtus praemium.* And the fear was unfounded, for the radiant nymph to whom I give my key envelops me with the brilliance of her eyes and says : “Bom dia, Doctor Mussert.” August, the imperial month. The pale blue remnants of the wisteria, the shaded patio, the stone steps descending, the same doorman stewed in twenty years of slowly passing time.

As he awakes and finds his away around Lisbon.

This is a masterpiece of two seconds of a man’s life as this story is the last moments glimpsed in a dying man’s eye, and in Cee’s style, it has his love of travel of the classical world of romance and is very Dutch as well. What I loved about this book is that it has so many ideas and strands in it as we follow those last moments of the life of this classic teacher and his life and events. And things that were important and memorable in his life, from that affair to his subjects to the travel writing. This is all squeezed into an espresso-like shot of a book that, like a coil, starts as it ends, and we follow those last moments. I was reminded of the film Pulp Fiction, as this is how my neurodiverse mind works. Hold on with me on this one, as that film ends with John Travolta still alive as, in reality, he is dead, and this book is like that. The hints Herman is dead and this is just a blink of an eye in a dying man. Have you read this book or any other by Cees?  I always think he would make a good Nobel winner.

Winston’s score – a little gem of a book that ciils and twists as a story but in your mind after you have read it.

Birthday by César Aira

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Birthday by Cesar Aira

Argentinean fiction

Original title – Cumpleaños

Translator – Chris Andrews

Source – Personal copy

I am back in Argentina this evening and a writer I came late to I think I did first review AIra in 2010. But then left it till two years ago, and I think it was the frequent mentions on the Mookse and the Gripes podcast about him they did a special episode about him. It reminds me that I need to read more from him. He has written over a hundred books, and they are all fairly short, and a lot of them are focused on Pringles, which is where he grew up as a youngster. His book also features autobiographical details like this, set around the time the writer turned fifty and is about the writer returning to his hometown.

 

My style is irregular: scatter-brained, spasmodic, jokey – necessarily jokey because I have to justify the unjustifiable by saying that I didn’t mean it seriously.But if necessity intervenes, it’s no joke. I wasn’t really joking when I made that stupid quip about the moon.And of course it didn’t fool anyone. The gaps go on being gaps forever, unless some wildly improbable circumstance happens to correct me. If they were only gaps in knowledge, I wouldn’t be so worried; but there are gaps in experience too, and again they can only be  plugged by serendipty.The numbers in this game of chance are so enormus that just thinking about them make me dizzy . Whahcan I hope for , realistically. IF all the pbjective conditions required for such an event  line up once in a million years.

I wonder if that what he means about his own writing ?

He opened up about what it is like to turn fifty. This was, for me, a nightmare mare; I just felt it was a huge turning point in my life in the book, a writer is in his home town of Pringles. But this is what happens after his birthday: a series of small events. A walk with his wife leads him to talk about the moon and a childhood idea that he has kept thinking about. Then there is a section where he visits a shop, and the is a 17-year-old female shop assistant who knows he is a writer, but as she asks him what it is like to be a writer, he actually finds more about her than he even reveals, to her about his life and being a writer. As with other books art creeps up its a book that has ten short chapters and drifts from here to there like the other books i have read by Aira over the last few years.

For the same reason, my mind is in continuous move ment, flittering restlessly. Making a note of everything is beyond the bounds of human possibility. One thing I have idly fantasised about is inventing a notepad capable of capturing the hyperactivity of the brain.That must be the source of my fetishistic attachment to stationery and pens. I really should use some kind of shorthand, but I manage more or less with normal writing. In the end, all these daydreams about being the designer of one’s own peculiarities are futile because they are just metaphors for what ends up happening anyway: I became a writer and my little novels fulfil the roles of mystic writing pad and shorthand.

Again about the writing process maybe for Aira Himself.

I will hold my hand up and say I am late to Aira as a reader I wish I had followed up the first book I  read in 2012 and come back quicker to him.I have seven books by him. But there is a lot more out there, and I feel for me to get him more, I need to line up several books by him. I like the mix of memoir and surrealism at times. In this book, he seems to be a writer that can jump from the everyday to the surreal in such a small book, and it all seems to flow. I like the discussion with the shop assistant that felt like something he may have done I know writers often get asked about the writing process and must often like this hear more about her[person than explaining how it is to be a writer. I struggle with this as it is different from the first one I had read by him but is set around the same place as Artforum this is a writer whom I need to discover more as a reader to build his world and style in my mind. Have you read Aira? If so, which would you recommend buying? I may try and read a run of his books later in the year as they are all short.

Winston’s score: B. I need to read more of his work to discover him more as a writer.

January by Sara Gallardo

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January by Sara Gallardo

Argentine fiction

Original title – Enero

Translators -Frances Riddle and Maureen Shaughnessy

Source – personal copy

I have long been a fan the American publisher Archipelago books there books are works of art the titles they choose are always interesting like this one which go even the wave of Argentine female writers we have had the last few years. It was about time someone published an earlier female writer from Argentina. Because this debut novel from the writer Sara Gallardo is required reading in some schools in Argentine the writer was from an Upper-class family that had farming interest one could imagine one of the farms or farmworkers the family had was the inspiration for the main character intro book which in a way is a vary forward thinking book for one that came out in 1958. But it also fits in with other books around the world by female writers of the time.

She carries the package in front of her on the sheepskin where it crinkles with every step the horse takes. She passes countless hoof prints on the road that the wind erases like a huge hand wiping them away. The ears of the dapple-gray horse twitch at the sound of an automobile that kicks up a trail of dust as an arm waves out the win-dow. Luisa, Nefer thinks, on her way to buy cigarettes… and she watches as her horse’s hooves speed up in agitation along the road.

She dismounts when she reaches the gate: held shut by a rough branch that has been rubbed smooth by wire. She pulls it open and sidesteps the mud churned up in the night by the cows from the milking yard. In the yellow-green field the lapwings shriek and flutter and the pond gleams in the sun, prickly with reeds.

Her world around her.

The book flows 16 year old Nefer who lives in a small farming community in the countryside. She is pregnant, but we are never quite told how and why this happened it is eluded to that it was after the rape and the community she is in is a powerful Catholic community the book explains how this young girl deals with the pregnancy and is trying to find a way to explain to herself the events that lead to the pregnancy she looks at a certain boy and says it be ok isa he was the father. But he wasn’t the father. As she searches for the answer to what happened to her how did she end up like this. She is also wrestling with how to avoid anyone seeing the changes in her , whilst trying to work out the next move for her and what happens next but we have a feeling this is maybe a catch-22 situation and no matter what happens her life is fatally changed by this one event.

She kicks and takes off at a gallop, steering toward the thick grass that will absorb the footfalls. She doesn’t want to think about the end of her journey, about the old lady she’s never seen but with whom all her hope now lies. Her eyes pick out objects one at a time, attributing an exaggerated importance to each. Thistle, she thinks, thistle, par-tridge, dung, anthill, heat; and then she hears – one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four – as the hooves hit the ground. Slowly, sweat begins to appear behind the horse’s ears and runs in dark strands down his neck where the reins chafe against his coat, churning up dirty foam. Little voices, little voices speak to Nefer, but she continues her journey, indifferent to them. Cow, she thinks, a Holstein, and another and another. That one’s overheated. Lapwings. Two lapwings and their chick. Those piercing shrieks!

She follows leads to find a woman who may help her get rid of the baby for her

One of the first books from Archipelago was a new-to-English classic book, Wonder by Hugo Claus, one of my all-time favourite books. They have a real eye for a book that stands the test of time even though it is over 60 years old. It captures the world of NEFER SO WELL. it is like so many great writers around this time that were capturing female lives so well. Like Francoise Sagan and another WORK I felt really connected to this is ‘A test of Honey” by Shelagh Delany, which in a way mirrors events in this bookman unwanted pregnancy but due to the race of the baby, this is because of a rape. But both were written in 1958 and show women all around the world dealing with the same topics of birth this is the years after World War Two and pre-the pill when women want more for their lives but sometimes didn’t have control of the pill in later years. I loved the way we observe Nefer coping with what on the outside seems nothing but a downward spiral of her life after was raped and how she hasn’t an obvious out of the sad situation. Have you a favourite book that is a rediscovery like this book or others that have come out in recent years

WINSTONS SCORE – -A solid look at a hopeless situation for the main character Nefer.

Sunday a mouse called Matty

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I was at my dad’s yesterday, and Amanda spent time in his summer house as we hope to get one later this year. The summer house has a little mouse that has made his house under it, and Amanda was sat in there relaxing and captured a fantastic pic of him sitting on the bird seeds that were ready outside to fill my dad’s bird feeder, and we decided to call him Matty the Mouse. I had intended to post a book a day this month, but as Amanda hadn’t been well today and I came home to see if she was ok from work, I haven’t felt like having a read this evening and will be back tomorrow and will leave you a pic of Matty and the summer house. So say hi to Matty

The book of all loves by Agustin Fernández Mallo

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The book of all loves by  Agustin Fernandez Mall

Spanish fiction

Original title – El libro de todos los amores,

Translator – Thomas Bunstead

Source – subscription

I took out a small subscription to Fitzcarradlo as I had fallen behind with their books over recent years. They bring out a lot more than they first did. I ewas pleased this was one of the books from them I was snet as I have been a huge fan of Mallo’s Nocilla trilogy . He is a writer who likes to play with what a novel is and test the bounds of fiction. So his latest book to be translated into English is about love, but as ever, it is also about the world ending simultaneously. Only Mallo could work both these ideas into a novel. Maybe we have a future Nobel winner from the Nobel stable of Fitzcarraldo are gathering.

It is animals, not us, who live in the prison-house of language, because they are not able to leave and stand outside it and think about it. This is only because it is impossible for them to access the ideas that surround words.A dog never crosses a road, because it does not know what a road is. This, among other things, is why dogs get run over. It isn’t that the dog fails to look both ways before crossing, it’s that it does not possess the idea of a road.Its gaze is another gaze, its crossing is another crossing.Hence the fact that an animal cannot give or receive love either. It’s not that it doesn’t love, it’s that its love is other.

(Language love)

One of the love aphorisms

 

The book has several different streams to it. There is a series of aphorisms around love, such as independence, parcel, and language love, to name a few, as it runs through the book. Maybe love is all that is left, one wonders, as maybe that connects to the other story around something called the great Blackout, an apocalyptic event on earth with a single couple left. This is where we get the third stream of the husband of the couple and an earlier visit to Venice he had made. This is a mix of thoughts about love and what makes love. A past love of a place and visit to Venice, an Alexa machine while there all have the traits of Mallo’s other works, he likes recurrent themes like love, tech, and place and adds to that a couple surviving the end of the world you have a book that breaks the bounds of what fiction is. A book that need to be read to be captured fully

VENICE (1)

Month of June, first foor of a palazzo whose foundations stand below the waterline of Venice’s Misericordia Canal. There is a room, and a high window with views across the domes of St Mark’s Basilica and across a sea that will shift in colour throughout the day. There is also a woman – a writer — who, were she to look up, would be able to see all of this, but keeps her eyes down instead, tapping at the keys of a typewriter. Her typing produces slight movements in a small snow globe containing a miniature version of Venice to her right on the desk, raising a layer of snow up inside the globe, where it swirls before falling across the plastic city, and the writer goes on typing, and on, while outside, in the real Venice, the Venice of tourists and water and stone, the June humidity ushers in an early summer storm. Now, as the sequence she is working on grows in intensity, the table turns quivering fingerboard and the snow rises in the globe, and again it rises, once more hitting the tiny glass vault and falling on empty palazzos and waterless canals. The books and papers strewn across the desk, all of them on one single subject – love – receive these blows without so much as a flinch. Inside the globe, a snowflake has just landed on St Mark’s Square,

A long passage and the first remembering a trip by the husband to Venice

Mallo is a physicist I am always drawn to C P Snow and what he said about the two cultures of Humanties and Sccience he himself crossed these two cultures as he was a fellow scientist come writer. But what Malo has done is not only cross the lines between the two cultures, he has dragged the theory of Snow and thrown it in a blender by adding Calvino, Twitter, modern tech and scientific mind, also throwing in a touch of post-end of the worldness in for good measure and produced a book that only some like him could.I feel he is breaking the barriers of what fiction its and making us as readers work through this myriad of versions of love as we also witness the aftermath of the great blackout whilst also trying to remember a distant holiday with a few unusual things happening it like a waking dream of a wim wenders film it is like what he tried to do in Until the end of the world capture so much in such a small space. Have you read Mallo?

Winston score – A may be the first of next year Booker international books ?

 

Two for the road by Roddy Doyle

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Two for the road by Roddy Doyle

Irish literature

Source – library book

I am going to try to review it. Book a day in May, and I felt I needed a top-up from the library of short books to read. This was one of those books I remember people saying he had caught a type of guy that sits in a pub so well. I had read several Roddy Doyles books when he won the booker with Paddy Clarke ha ha. I read The Van and several others as well over the years and always loved the films made of his book. For me, he captures the funny side of Dublin life and the special characters that make that city rich, especially like this pair in a pub.
  • See Joe Cocker died.
  • What a fuckin’ voice.
  • Ah, man— But the best thing about him – he taught me tha’ Beatles were shite.
  • Hang on – wha’?
  • Me brother – he’s three years older than me – he brought home Sergeant Pepper’s. An’ everyone in the house loved it. Me ma sang ‘When I’m 64’ and she always cried at ‘She’s Leavin’ Home’, and me sister said, ‘Don’t worry, Ma, I’ll never run away like tha’? But she did – to fuckin’ London. She even met a cunt from the motor trade. But that’s a different story. Anyway—
  • What’s this got to with Joe Cocker?
  • I’m gettin’ there – calm down. They all loved ‘A Little Help from My Friends’ – in the house, like. Even me granny – an’ she hated fuckin’ everythin’. An’ I just thought somethin’ wasn’t right. But then he – me brother, like – he brings home Joe Cocker’s version. The single.
  • Brilliant.
  • No question. An’ me da shouts, five seconds in –

‘Turn tha’ shite down!’ An’ I knew it – in me heart. That’s the way it should be. If the oul’ lad reacts tha’ way, it’s good. If he hums along, it’s shite.

I pick this as I remember the cocker song being the theme to Wonder Years

Two for the Road captures those characters you find in a pub anywhere. Those people you meet for a brief moment or here every afternoon, this is a pair on the way home via the pub, a dying breed in the modern age, chatting about what has been in the news, the latest dead star, whether an actor or singer or a digression about a footballer I loved these as most of the players I knew or an event from the news. He really captured the voices. The use of language and words made these a pair of working-class guys. Some great insights into songs from the dead singers and the memories attached to them, like when Leonard Cohen died, they joked it was because he was a fan of women as a singer, and that had made Trump want him dead. Some classic football chats about great Irish players discussed which was the best. The last piece I laughed at was one of the books by Doyle that had been made into a film, The Snapper.
  • See Trump killed Leonard Cohen.
  • Saw tha’.
  • He doesn’t only hate women. He hates the men tha’ women love. ‘Specially older women.
  • Fuckin’ Clooney’s gone into hidin’.
  • Fuck him an’ his Nespresso.
  • And the Pope.
  • Fuck the Pope?
  • No. Women – they love him. Mine does, an’ anyway.
  • Poor oul’ Leonard. He was good, but. Wasn’t he?
  • Ah, he was. You should hear me grandkids singin’ Hallelujah’.
  • Good, yeah?
  • Fuckin’ hilarious.
  • The wife loved him.
  • Leonard?
  • She even became a Buddhist cos o’ Leonard.
  • Is tha’ righ’?
  • For a few weeks, just. Then she saw me eatin’ a quarter pounder an’ she said, ‘Fuck the Eightfold Path?

But she’s always on at me to wear a hat like Leonard Cohen’s.

Then I laughed at this about the passing of Leonard cohen

Doyle is the chronicler of Dublin’s working class and has a real ear for the way people of the city talk. He has an ear for his home town and how males, in particular, chat. When you speak this out loud, it seems perfect to me. He gives the two guys a true voice, and they seem real. There is a world-weariness in the way. They are speaking. I felt they are maybe in their 60s, with grown-up kids nearing the end of their working life. One imagines Doyle has chatted or observed pairs like this all his life. You have a sense he has an ear for a conversation overheard. These are like those. Each chapter is a day the two chaps meet over the course of five years. The book ends in 2019, a full year before COVID-19, and one wonders if these two would make it through the pandemic?  This book can be read over a beer or two easily. Have you read any books by Doyle? What is your favourite?
Winston Score – A a fun novella with a quirky pair chatting over their world

What is mine by Jose Henrique Bortoluci

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What is Mine by Jose Henrique Bortoluci

Brazilian memoir

Original title – O que é Meu

Translator – Rahul Bery

Source – subscription copy

I said yesterday I was staying in Latin America and a second work of nonfiction. This time, we move to Brazil and Jose Henrique Borotoluci’s account of his father’s life as a working-class trucker in Brazil from the 1960s onwards.I was drawn to this after reading the back cover, where He said he had been influenced by Annie Ernaux and Svetlana Alexievich. He has caught his father’s words in some interviews he had done over time since Cancer had taken its toll on his father’s life. This is the sort of book that Fitzcarraldo has been doing so well, and they managed to get such great non-fiction works.

My father studied until he was nine, worked on the family’s small farm from the age of seven, moved with them to the city at fifteen. He was only twenty-two when he became a truck driver. I was young, but I was as brave as a lion. He started driving trucks in 1965 and retired in

2015. The country that he traversed and helped to build was very different then from how it is now, but in recent years there has been a sense of familiarity: a country seized by frontier logic, the principle of expansion at any cost, the ‘colonization’ of new territories, environmental vandalism, the slow and clumsy construction of an ever more unequal consumer society. Roads and trucks occupy a key position in this fantasy of a developed nation in which forests and rivers give way to highways, prospect-ing, pasture and factories.

His father had to take work up early.

Didi Jose’s father had been a truck driver all his life, and we have his personal recollections of the time from the sixties onwards as he worked on some of the mega projects in Brazil, like the trans-amazonian highway. He says earlier on, his father never wanted to talk about the military dictatorship years but he will talk about his fellow drivers and the route he took. He says he always spoke about giant muddles where he got in the back and beyond. His fellow drivers, Like Nestor a driver showed him that if they tied meat to the outside of the exhaust in a certain place, he would have barbecued meat by lunch to eat.  The places they stopped deep in the jiungle. The protesters had dived or disappeared over the years. Another driver friend of his dad’s had died of Aids. All this as his father is fighting cancer about how the fight is going. He has taken recording and this is where the book comes from the recollections of the years spent in his wagon. For me, one of the hardest scenes is where he talks about his dad asking him about money and how he sees the gulf between his father’s life and his own as his father had to watch every penny growing up. There is a reference to movies about being a trucker that had been made in the seventies.

It was Nestor who taught me about exhaust barbecue. Above the truck’s exhaust there’s a plate that gets red bot. This is inside the engine, not the pipe where the smoke comes out. It’s a part that’s attached to the engine, welded metal, concave, big enough for one or two kilos of meat. You’d tie a piece of meat there in the morning and when you stopped at midday the barbecue would be ready. It was delicious, so good. Or you’d make the food at lunch and fill a pot with food for dinner, but at night you didn’t need to light a fire, just open the truck’s bon-net, put the pot there, leave it on top of the exhaust which bad been beating up all day. Then you could shower at the petrol station, have a few drinks, come back to get the pot and it was piping hot. That was life.

Didi talking about the tricks Nestor had taught him.

This is a personal look at a turbulent time in the country’s history but how one man and his family had made their way through the world. Didi’s story reminds me of when he talked about cooking on the truck. I remembered an episode of Home Improvement with some truckers talking about the ways they could cock on the trucks. Then the talk of trucking movies took me back to my own childhood and the movies of the seventies that were about truckers. There is a quote from Joao Guimaráes Rosa: ” My father always away and his absence always with me. And the river, perpetually renewing itself” hit the nail on the head. This is full of love of his father and the sacrifice he and many more of his generation made in the country. We can see the nods to Alexievich and Ernaux in how he worked around his father’s memories of his trucking life. Have you a favourite book about being working class?

Winstons score – A This is what we love Fitzcarraldo for these gems from around the world they find

The Book of Emma Reyes by Emma Reyes

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The book of Emma Reyesa memoir in correspondence by Emma Reyes

Columbian Memoir

Original title – Memorias por correspondencia

Translator – Daniel Alarćon

Source – personal copy

Well, I will now review a couple of Latin American memoirs. This is the first from the Columbian artist Emma Reyes, who was known as the godmother of Latin American art. Her art ranges from simple child like sketches to vibrant painting. One of her fans was her fellow Columbian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who had encouraged he to write down her life story. She struggled to put down her thoughts until she happened upon the letter form, and hence, the letter she wrote over a few decades described her early years. She had a hard childhood, and when she grew up, she became a citizen of the world and mixed with leading artists and writers of the time. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, in particular, The book has 23 letters that give an insight into what happened til she escaped a convent at 19 and started her life.

The house we lived in consisted of just one very small room with no windows, and a door that faced the street. This room was located on Carrera Sép-tima in a working-class neighborhood in Bogotá called San Cristóbal. The tram passed directly in front of our house and stopped a few meters ahead at a beer factory called Leona Pura and Leona Oscura.

In that room lived my sister, Helena, another child whose name I didn’t know whom we called Piojo, and a woman I remember only as an enormous tangle of black hair; it covered her completely, and when it was down I’d scream with fright and hide under the bed.

The house she was born into as a child with her older sister

It is easy to say Reyes had one of the toughest childhoods with her older sister. She was born in a room with no windows in a working-class area. Her mother was troubled, and they had a tough childhood. Emma’s earliest memories are of emptying the family bedpan on the garbage heap in the morning. She and her sister follow their mother around various rooms in Bogota and are looked after by various community members who take care of the girls. They also try to avoid being seen when left alone by their mother. But all this ends when she leaves them at the gate of a convent for an orphans where her and her sister 6 and 7 at the time spend the rest of their childhood a tough Christians upbringing as they are viewed as being born in sin. They live with a variety of nuns, from the strict to an aged Italian nun with poor Spanish, but all are hard on the sister as she seeks to use her mind to escape the world she finds herself in. Parts of this feel like a nod to Marquez at times. A hard few years in the convent where all they earn is by attending masses for this and that; I loved the list of how many they had attended.

My dear Germán:

There were no girls in that convent. It was a convent where they made nuns. There were some very young ones, but they were all novitiates, and we weren’t allowed to be with them. We weren’t allowed beyond the first courtyard, where the entrance and the visitors’ rooms were. Next to the entrance were two rooms, one where the doorkeeper slept, a very old, pigeon-toed lady who talked to herself all day; in the second room, full of furniture and packages, they arranged a bed for the two of us, because Helena didn’t want me to sleep alone. In the doorkeeper’s room was a large table, where food was left for us whenever the nuns brought food for the doorkeeper.

When they were left at the convent door

I brought this up after seeing it had made some end-of-year list a few years ago, and the quote from Diana Athill she said, “No other book I’ve read has left me so deeply involved with the author” This is so true, I think hitting on the letter as the form to tell her story draws you in as a reader the little snippets love the years the letters are from thirty years she wrote them from mainly Paris you sense how she must have tried to remember every detail, but she also captured the childlike feeling of being in these horrific situations living hand to mouth with her mother., then the brutality of the convent life. I think this should be better known. It is a wonderful insight into poverty, sisters , a mother that abandons you and the horrific nature of growing up in a covenant. Have you read this book?

Winston’s score – B solid memoir of the early years of one of the leading Latin American artists of the 20th century.

Ultramarine by Marietta Navarro

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Ultramarine by Marietta Navarro

 

French fiction

Original title – Ultramarins

Translator – Cory Stockwell

Source – review copy from translator

Now, I was sent a couple of proofs from Heloise, which was kind. I had been sent their first book, and I just never got around to reviewing it. So, I owe them a review or two. They are another publisher that champions female voices as they say on the website. Héloïse Press champions worldwide female talent. Héloïse’s careful selection of books gives voice to emerging and well-established female writers from home and abroad, with a focus on intimate, visceral and powerful narratives. This is the debut novel from French poet and playwright Mariette Navarro. She came up with the idea of the book after she went on a writer’s retreat that was two weeks on a cargo ship from France to the West Indies. Although she had seasickness, the book was inspired by the notes she took while on the ship.

THEY SLIP INTO THE WATER.

The tips of their toes and then their entire bodies: the sharp pain of the cold and the burning salt that seems to become more potent as it touches the skin. Ribcages compressed by the immense ocean, as though the enormous mass, grey in places, didn’t allow itself to be penetrated quite so easily – witness how, from the beginning of the voyage, the water has systematically closed back in upon itself behind the freighter that does everything in its power to cleave it. You can’t tear it like a piece of cloth; you don’t leave any imprint on it, as you would in sand or snow. By plunging into it, you condemn yourself to invisibility

There is something sexual as she watches them in the water

 

Ultramarine is a poetic book that follows a cargo ship on the journey she took from France across the Atlantic. The big difference she wants to make in her story is that the captain of the ship in the book is female. She is the only female on the ship, but she is respected and well-known, as her father was also a well-known captain on the same shipping line. But when she decides that as the sailors would all like a swim in the ocean a sort of  take on the Neptune festival when you cross the from the hemispheres so they are all lower in a lifeboat the twenty of them but did more come back, there is a point while they are swimming where they try to count the sailor and get 21? But after this piece of freedom, the boat has a weird feeling. The boat slows, and things are going strange. Her connection with the crew changed after that event.

She kept going along these lines, feeling her way for-ward, and for a few weeks that was enough to recreate a kind of link – tenuous, shifting – between her and this captain without a ship. Among her clearest visions was the face of death, which her father had clearly witnessed in a way no one living should see, and which explained his silences better than all the medical scans he was made to undergo.

She thought of that passage from the Odyssey that had made such a mark on her when she was small. Ulysses, lost at sea, arrives by chance in the kingdom of the dead, and proceeds to visit them. He meets sailors who have recently died, shipmates whose death he’d been unaware of, and finally, after a dramatic and tearful build-up, his mother. He’s the only person in the world to have ever been offered the chance to speak to his mother one last time. As for her father, perhaps he also found Ulysses’ secret pathway, but didn’t come all the way back, instead remaining there in this world between worlds where it matters little whether you walk in the rain

this is near the end but Mariette said she loved the Odysessy so this passage jumped out at me

This book has a poetic feel. The Beyond the Zero Podcast features an interview with both the writer and translator, which made me want to read the book. It explained that the seed of novella was from the two weeks she spent on the cargo ship. But the main part of the text is from her notes on the two weeks she spent on the boat. But she wondered what would happen if. The captain, instead of a man, was a woman, and if they had this event in the middle of the cruise, what would happen? The later part of the book has an eerie feel. At times, something isn’t quite right, but you can’t put your finger on it. She mentioned she is a fan of sea-based books from Odyssey to Moby Dick, even though the title is a nod to the deepest blue, a nod to the ocean, a title that was also used by Malcolm Lowry for a ship-based book. Also, there was a band called Ultramarine, best known for the United Kingdom album, which would fit well with this book. it is poetic and dreamy at times. The writer is working on a new novel that will be out later this year in France, and hopefully, we get another poetic slice from this writer. This is one of those books that hasn’t a lot but has such beauty in the writing and the translation. They talked about how some of the ship terms were hard to translate and how poetic Mariiette’s writing is? Have you read any of the books from Heloise Press yet?

Winstons score +A stunning poetic book about a captain and her crew after a swim

 

Clara reads Proust by Stéphane Carlier

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Clara reads Proust by Stéphane Carlier

French fiction

Original title – Clara lit Proust

Translator – Polly Mackintosh

Source – Personal copy

I’ve long been a fan of Gallic books, but it has been a break since I reviewed one of them. But yesterday I was in Sheffield we had gone for a morning out, and I happened on this that hadn’t long come out from them it jumped out as the next few weeks I’m after relatively short books to try and get some more reviews done .it was a reminder to me that I still have to get past swans way in Proust myself but like a lot of projects i needed to get a move on with  this is the tale of a hairdresser discovering a copy of swans way and finding a connection in the modern day to Proust. Stephane has spent time abroad working for the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs. He spent a decade in the US. This is his eighth novel but the first to be translated into English.

That same evening, Clara will pick the book up and put it in the bookcase in the corridor, on the same shelf as L’Appel de l’ange and La Fille de papier by Guillaume Musso, Ma médecine naturelle by Dr Fabrice Visson, Glacé by Bernard Minier, I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovidby Zlaran Ibrahimovie, The Secret by Rhonda Byrne (a gift from Anais, Clara’s childhood friend), The 30 Most Beautiful Hiking Routes in Burgundy (a gift from her father), Trois baisers by Katherine Pancol, Bélier: Daily Horoscopes, the 2011,2013, 2015, 2016 and 2018 editions, as well as a dozen Akira Toriyama mangas, which JB loves. The book will stay there for precisely five months, twenty-nine days, two hours and forty-seven minutes.

The other books she has brought back the cindy Coiffeur

Clara describes the clientele at the quiet hair salon she works, those that come in regularly and how they like their hair on of them decide out of the blue to go Blonde.  Then he colleagues within the hair salon like her tan mad boss . The daily to and fro of a small hair salon in France, she has over time found several books, so when she finds a copy of Swannn’s Way left behind in the salon, she thinks nothing of it till she then falls into Proust world as she is drawn in more than any of the other books she has read over the years. There is a list of the books she has taken from the salon, a footballer biography, horoscopes in books, and a couple from the best-selling French writer Guillaume Musso. But this book captures her with that lightbulb moment when you move from the occasional reader to a fan of books and literature that we all have. So much so that she decided to attend a festival and read the piece of Proust that she loved on the street.

It began with the thought that Nolwenn’s mannerisms were similar to those of Françoise from In Search of Lost Time. Then it was Madame Habib who seemed like a character from the book, with her fits of snobbery, her physical and verbal tics, and her mournful, frog-like eyes. Clara eventually realised that the book is so vast and encompasses so many topics that it is virtually impossible not to see the world through its lens while you are reading it. Even the smallest things become Proustian. A cluster of wisteria, the violet colour of its flowers against its green leaves.Dust suspended in a shaft of light in an otherwise dark room. And Annick, her mother, who always turns her head slightly and half opens her mouth when she is photographed, as if there is someone calling her at the exact same moment. That is Proustian, truly Proustian.

She compares those around her with the porust characters later on

I have loved This sort of book from Gallic Books over the years. They do these great fun reads, light and perfect for a summer evening, and can be read in a couple of hours. It also reminds all of us readers why we love books and reading that moment we all have when we connect with a writer. I’m sure being in France and knowing where he talks about Helps with cracking  Proust a writer. I have read Swann’s way several times but not got into him as much as Clara does here. That is what this is about the power of books to inspire people and how, even over a hundred years later, you can still connect with Proust. I like the little description of the shop and how she fell in with Swann and his story. Have you a favourite book about someone getting inspired by reading?

Winston score -A: This is what Gallic does best. This type of French lit is very French fun, inspiring and like a palate cleanser.

Why did you come back every summer by Belén López Peiró

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Why did you come back every summer by Belén López Peiró

Argentine fiction

0riginal title – Por Que Volvías Cada Verano

Translator Maureen Shaughnessy

Source – Personal copyStrange, we had our annual chat on the shadow jury today about the booker international longlist books. I hadn’t noticed this was on the list of books eligible for this year’s prize. We had discussed the undercurrent theme of most of the books being auto =fiction, so when I read this yesterday, I was struck by why this piece of autofiction, although a short book is powerful it deals with an incident in the writer’s own life when she visits her uncle and he sexual assault her for several summers. When Belen had a happy childhood until the summers, she visited her uncles in her early teens. Her mother was a journalist, and she followed suit. In her early twenties, she decided to confront the past and go to the police to make a complaint about her uncle. This is a fictional version of the following events. How did the family react to what she had said?

My mother had gone to work that morning. She almost always took the bus at noon, but that day the magazine offices were closing early and my brother was at work. So I was alone, lying in my single bed in my room with pink walls, wearing the summer pyjamas my godmother had given me for my fifteenth birthday: a pair of turquoise shorts that hung low on my hips and a black tank top printed with dancing butterflies on the chest.

He walked into the apartment with a smile on his face, still wearing his uniform. I had forgotten what it was like to have to untie his boots. He set his gun down on top of the dining room cabinet, up high where it was almost out of view, and went to my brother’s room to get undressed. He wanted a quick shower before heading out on the road. I got back into bed and closed my eyes.

He comes to the house when she is young.

The book is made up of a ix of legal documents that follow the path she made through the justice system. Her uncle was a high-ranking police officer, which made it hard for her to come forward. The book opens with ther complaint to the police about his attacks over those summers to her when he put his fingers in her. She told the story as it happened, and then we had detailed reactions and nameless statements from those around BELEN about what happened. Then, we see all those involved give statements about the legal system. we get the disbelief that follows her opening up about what her uncles did over that summer and how she fights for Justice. This is one woman’s journey for justice and the truth to come out,

Hello, nice to meet you. My name is Juan. l’s a real

pleasure to meet you, you re much taller in person. Your mum told me a little bit about what happened. You’re really brave, you know that? That son of a bitch is going to jail. How could he go and screw up your life like this?

Just look at you, you’re a wreck. Don’t worry, he’s going to pay.

Come here, sit down. Tell me more about it. How did it start? Your mum told me that you were thirteen, but we’re better off saying you were eleven. That’s how things go with the law. See, you have to exaggerate a little.

To all effects, it’s the same, right? What difference does it make? One year more, one year less? He raped you either way. Ah, no. That’s right, he didn’t rape you. Then, why are you here? What was your name? Oh, right. It was almost rape. Close, but no cigar. Bloody hell. We would have been better off. This way, our case is screwed. Judges are more sympathetic to rape victims, the younger the better. With just some fingers or groping, I doubt they’ll give him more than probation. But, oh well, we’ll get something.

Meeting one of her legal team early on in the book

It is hard not to lump this in with the #METOO movement. Nut, for me, this has more power studies show how little women actually follow through rape or sexual abuse cases. This is a powerful tale of one woman’s search for justice. I am shocked this passed the judge by as it is a powerful novella it has a lot of white space in it so it is shorter than the 160 pages it takes up the patchwork nature of the book and builds up layer on a layer as everyone has say and she tells how her uncle slips his fingers in her regularly every summer when she went to live with her aunt and uncle in law in her aunts home. Tjhis capture the aftermath of accusing a family member. The courage that one act takes but then follows it through so she gets the justice she deserves. Have you read this book? Is it a powerful piece of autofiction that missed the longlist this year? I love how Charco is bringing these strong female voices out there. Have you read this book or another book maybe inspired by the #METOO movement

Winston score – A powerful personal story of one woman’s journey for justice against her uncle

 

And the stones cry out by Clara Dupont-Monod

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And the stones cry out by Clara Dupont-Monod

French fiction

Original title – s’adapter

Translator – Ben Faccini

Source – review copy

I love it when you are sent a book from a writer you have reviewed before, and the book you have been sent is completely different from the one you had reviewed. This is the case with this book from the French writer Clara Dupont-Monod. Her previous book I had also reviewed from Maclehose Press, was a historic novel that was about the son of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Here this is a book set in the present. But actually, some details are sparse. It is about three siblings dealing with a disabled brother. This has a little connection to the writer’s own life. She grew up with a disabled brother. She had already been up for some of the top prizes in France, but this won two, the Prix Femina and GoncourtDes Lyceensa; it became a bestseller in France.

Three months went by before anyone noticed the boy didn’t babble. He remained silent most of the time, apart from the odd cry. Sometimes a smile appeared, or a frown, or a sigh after he finished a bottle of milk.
Occasionally, he got startled when a door slammed. That was it: a few cries and smiles, a frown, the odd sigh or a twitch. Nothing else. He didn’t wriggle. He stayed calm.
He was “inert”, his parents thought without admitting it out loud. The baby showed no interest in faces, in dangling mobiles or rattles. Above all, his shadowy eyes didn’t settle on anything. They seemed to rove from side to side, while his pupils reeled and turned, as if following the dance of an invisible insect, latching onto nothing in particular. The boy couldn’t see the bridge, the two houses, or the courtyard separated from the road by an old wall of reddish stones.

The brother and the house they all live in with the stones that are refered to in the title

The book is about a disabled child and his siblings. The book is told from three points of view of the brother and sister who are around when the brother is alive. There is a very detached nature book. The children are just older brothers and sisters. There are just thoughts of connection, like the older brother getting his face next to his brother and just being there with the child, described as having large black eyes that drift in and out of focus. A plump child with translucent skin and blue vein legs. It made me think of one young man I looked after many years ago who was in a wheelchair but had a child-like appearance. The sister she is distant I really felt her part having spent years working with people with Learning disablities I had seen many sisters and relatives like the sister it is hard having a brother with a disability you can resent the time they suck up from your parents and this is caught well here. Then there is the brother that comes after the disabled brother has passed the child to fill the void, but also you are touched when they said they checked to see everything was okay when he was born, but he has his own issues living in the shadow of what had come before. I loved how she took emotion and names and made the time fluid. It made it feel universal and connect with everyone who grows up with a disabled sibling.

SHE RESENTED THE BOY FROM THE MOMENT HE WAS born. Or rather from the moment her mother waved an orange in front of his eyes and realised he couldn’t see.
The sister’s bedroom window looked straight out on to the courtyard. So she’d seen the bright stain of the fruit’s colour, her mother crouched down, and heard the faintness of her tender, sing-song voice before it fell silent. She remembered the raging chorus of the cicadas, the tumbling roar of the river, the guffawing of the trees shaken by the wind. Yet nothing remained of that summer sound. There was only

The sisters story and how she feels about her brother .

Now I can see why this caught the mood in France. They love a piece of autofiction. But is does capture so well the dynamics of growing up with a disabled brother . The way many siblings go from the devoted sibling to the older brother, he has a wonderfully symbiotic relationship. He knows what every noise and twitch means. I remember a mother that used bring her son for repite that was like this that new her non verbal son so well. Then we have the sister that feels as if she is second best. I have seen this and have not seen it. The sibling mentions that she is never there. The relation, you know, feels like this. After thirty years of supporting various patients and families, these are all observations I have seen. Then, the replacement brother is well written. It captures how maybe the curious incident did capture the autistic view of the world well. It seemed a view at the time. This captures the  inner working of a family with a disabled son when he is there, the void that is left when they die and how it can touch and affect each sibling. This is a gem of a novel that should be better known. Have you read a writer who can write such different books as a historical novel and a heartfelt story of a disabled brother?

Winstons score – A gem of a novella

 

White Nights by Urszula Honek

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White nights by Urszula Honek

Polish fiction

Original title – Biale Noce

Translator – Kate Webster

Source – Personal copy

This was the book that jumped off the longlist for the booker. Firstly, this is the one book that I hadn’t heard of off the list. Secondly, when I read the description of a debut novel from a poet, which always catches my eye, the setting in a rural village ticked another box for me. Then it mentioned that the stories tackle life and death. I was lucky as all that meant it was the first book I ordered seconds after the longlist. Came up online. I have held back reviewing it as it is maybe one of the better books I read on this year’s longlist, and it has made our shortlist, so it could be near our winner, maybe. I also like that it was a completely new publisher to me which is always great to find. Were you aware of this book or publisher before the longlist came out?

A house like a chicken coop, so that if you leaned on it or kicked at it, all the planks would fall to the ground, and some would break in half, everything rotten. How it didn’t collapse on their heads over the years, I don’t know. Maybe they walked on tiptoe and didn’t cry out when they fucked, or when they had bust-ups, otherwise I don’t get it. Plus the house sits on the very edge of the hill, right next to the turnoff to Roznowice. If you drove past in a lorry, you could high-five Pilot as he leaned out of the window. Everything inside must have been shaking when they were eating or sleeping, I wouldn’t have coped with it for that long, but what can you do if you’ve got no choice? And there was just the one main room, plus a kitchen and the crapper outside, and twelve mouths to feed – well, eleven and a half, cos Pilot only counted as half. Did I use to go there?

The rural homes here is Pilots

The book is set in southern Poland in the Beskid Niski region. This mountainous region is very sparsely populated, with a wide range of nature and fauna. But for those who live and work there, it is a place where, on the whole, they are isolated and tend to be the sort of people who never go far from their home village. The stories are scattered in a way the events in the stories aren’t in a straight timeline, so characters come and go. The stories are centred around a group of friends. The first one we meet is Pilot, a name because he always seems to be looking in the air.The book opens with the author deciding to grow carp in a pond in his garden; of course, this is a regular Christmas meal in Poland. Andrej has lived with Pilot in a huge communal dwelling with other men, and this guy is haunted in many ways by his life. These are men with little education. They are just getting by in the world around them. Then add a butcher sister and families. This is a tale of a village of old lovers. What happens when one of this close group dies? How do the others take that death?

It was a beautiful day like this, summer, you could walk around in just your underpants, no one was ashamed of anyone here, because there was nothing to hide. At the last judgment, everyone will be standing side by side, not a fig leaf in sight, just as they were born, which is to say in the body they died in, but naked, that’s what I mean. Saturdays in the summer meant a trip to the Ropa river, which can be fast and deep, but that’s what rivers are, right? Not splashing around in the shallows, but going in up to your neck, up to your head, disappearing under the water. You have to feel its weight, that sometimes it will bash you about a bit, and other times it will embrace you like love, and it grows pleasant, light, and then you can die. Otherwise there’s no point. This is my carliest memory – my father and I are going to the river, we’re making our way through the big butterbur leaves, I hold his hand tight and wish I could never let go, and then I go into the water, I lose my balance and fall beneath the surface,

From the tale The cliff where the baker something happens to her

This is a harsh world. I was reminded of the pit villages near me and those in Northumberland. I used to pick people up from the rural setting and small villages where some people ended up trapped in this village. A death of a baker did she die from a fall or was she pushed. Sisters that walk in line the stories are little c=glimpsesd into this rural world that one imagines aren’t set to survive. This world is where smartphones and the wider world seem distant in their bubble. For me, it ticked the box of rural drama. I love tales that take us away from city life into those little places where everyone knows one another, and like in these stories, there is history and pasts that have sculptured their lives. I hope we get more from this poet-turned-writer . Have you read this collection? Which of the longlisted book jumped out when it came out?

Winston’s score is a rural tale of those living on the edge of Poland, living on the edge of their own lives.