Month: July 2024

The Land at The End of the World by Antonio Lobo Antunes

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The Land at the End of The World by Antonio Lobo Antunes

Portuguese fiction

Original title – Os Cús de Judas

Translator – Margaret Jull Costa

Source – Personal copy

I was talking earlier on Twitter about Antunes, and I a quote from him when he found out Saramago had won the Nobel prize; he said it had gone to the wrong Portuguese writer. It was a comment about Saramago and how his books are good but not ones that you think about for weeks after finishing them. For me, that is what Anutnes has. He has the richness of Faulkner, like someone else, like Ernaux. He mines his own and his own country’s dark past. he is one of those writers that once you have read, you will continue reading his book linger in your mind for weeks after you put them down. I have Frank Wynne to thank. He suggested in the early years of this blog that he should be a writer and I should try. Antunes, like the character in this book, spent time in the 70s as a doctor during the war in Angola. This is drawn from what he saw when he was there.

No. im no in any pain, athough my head does ache a lite butit’s nothing, a feeling, a touch of dizziness. The monotonous buzz of talk, the mingled smells, the way faces shift and rearrange themselves in the act of speaking, make me giddy: I don’t know anyone here, I rarely frequent these exotic temples where people no longer sacrifice the entrails of animals but their own livers, these modern catacombs given a kind of sacrilegious religious feel by the votive lamps of strange lights and the prayerful murmur of conversation, and where the barman is the golden calf, motionless behind the high altar of the bars, surrounded by the deacons or habitués, who raise a ritual glass of black velvet in his honor. Thymol crosses stand in for crucifixes, we fast at Easter in order to lower our cholesterol levels, on Sundays our Holy Communion wafers take the form of detox vitamins, we confess our infidelities to our group analyst, and our penance is his monthly bill: as you se, nothing has changed, except that now we consider ourselves to be atheists because, instead of beating our breast, the doctor does this for us with the end of his stethoscope.

One of his conversations rich and about the church over there

The book’s original title, as we are told in the Intro by the Translator Jull Costa, is a Portuguese term that means back and beyond, or as many of you may know, I love the word hinterland for this. It follows a doctor, and you are his interlocutor, his sounding board for what he sees whilst he is surviving the horrors of the war as he meets a woman in a bar. What we get is a snippet-like view of those war years it like e has little bits he is slowly letting out as he talks to her but the horror of the things he saw. In the field hospital, going and find young men blown up by mines and such the conditions they had to great the men in these are long sentences that draw you into his world of blood and war. This is one man’s account of a brutal and eye-opening war to him and everyone involved.

I got married, you see, four months before I left for Angola, it was on a sunny August afternoon, and my memory of the occasion is confused but intense, the sound of the organ, the flowers on the altar, and the family’s tears lent an improbably gentle Buñuelesque touch, and after a few brief weekend encounters, during which we made urgent love, inventing a kind of desperate tenderness full of the anxiety of imminent separation, we said good-bye in the rain, at the dockside, not crying but clinging to each other like orphans.And now, six thousand miles away, my daughter, the fruit of my sperm, whose slow subterranean growth beneath the skin of her mother’s belly I did not witness, suddenly burst into the communications hut, among newspaper cuttings and calendars bearing pictures of naked actresses

His marriage like many on there way to war

This is hard to describe as it is just a man talking about his time it drifts it has a rich, dark nature to his prose it has a little bit of someone like Laszlo Krasznahorkai or Bernhard, a bitterness to his words for someone from Portugal there involvement in Angola is like the US in Vietnam a war that was always doomed for all involved so this is like if Bela Tarr had done a cross between Mash and Apocplaypse now but in Angola, it has the blood and gutters the doctors see but also the pointlessness of what they are doing in that way it also has a nod towards the like of Beckett. One man trip into the hell of war and the aftermath on him as he sits at a bar with a woman and spills his guts as he tells about the blood and guts he had seen and the pointless nature of a war run by those who never take part in the actual war himself. I was reminded at points of the pointless nature of the war we see in the fourth series of Blackadder and the figures behind the lines directing the bloodshed. Have you read any of his books or this book for me this is maybe the best of his books I have read so far. There are three books by him on the blog, and I have several others to read. Hope you discovered him this month. For me, his is a potential Nobel winner

Winston score – A Doctor’s Horrors of war retold in a bar

 

 

The time of Cherries by Montserrat Roig

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The time of Cherries by Monrserrat Roig

Catalan fiction

Original title – El temps de les cireres

Translator – Julia Sanches

Source – Review copy

I have been somewhat remiss with my Spanish lit month reviews. I will have to do one next week, but this is a book I had seen around, and when I got the chance to be sent it from Daunt Books, I had to say yes. I have read several beautiful books in Catalan by female writers, so this appealed, and I have always had a fancy for the Franco years and after in Spain. She had taught in the UK and was a socialist and strong advocate of the Catalan world she has written books about Those from Catalan who suffered under the Nazis in the war. The story is of a woman in her forties returning to Barcelona after several years away.

Patrícia’s flat hadn’t changed. Though she wished she could have updated the kitchen, laid down ceramic tiles and put in new cupboards. Esteve left me nothing but problems, she said. I can’t raise the rent either – the tenants have been with us for years! I was lucky to get an offer for the down-stairs. The sale went through when Esteve was still alive, and he left me a lifetime annuity. The enclosed balcony was still the same; on one wall, the painting Francisco Ventura had given them – the watercolours that Francisco, of the Mundetas, God rest his soul, painted in the style of Modest Urgell – the two rocking chairs, one with a hole in the seat- what do I have to do to get it fixed? – the brazier table, the sewing box…

Her aunt she is close to and the way she looks at the world in tthe book

Natalia has returned to her home town of Barcelona after 12 years away, living around Europe part of that time like the writer herself spent in the UK where she had an affair with Jimmy. They lived together, and we found out he had moved on, and she had now come home to face the ghost of her past. Her family, her mother and her didn’t get on due to the fact her mother put most of her effort into looking after their brother Pere AND judit her mother has never quite been able to rebuild her relationship with her other children in fact, for Natalia it is her aunt is maybe a more of a mother figure added to that her other brother and his wife that she finds a little boring and not to her taste as we see this world through Natalia’s eyes and she describes everything in the home and world around her from the Tupperware to the food. The book is a ripping apart of a family and seeing what has brought it to a certain point as a family. her siblings =marriage her parents and Aunt patrica wh had a poet for a husband after he heard she was wealthy. Then Natalia’s past may be inspired by Roig’s, and support for causes makes her seem like she is partly from Roig’s own life. The places she loved are now ghosts a tree and pond aren’t there any more. This is a look back and edging towards a brighter future post-Franco world.

Now Patrícia says she drinks to drown her sorrows. She knows it isn’t a sin: Jesus turned water into wine during the wedding at Cana; Jesus spoke a great deal about wineries and winemakers; Jesus made the wine his blood at the Last Supper. Patrícia had read it in the Bible: ‘No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse.

Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskin , and bot are preserved .

More of her aunt but looking at how her world has changed over the years

You know I love Catalan fiction. This is a perfect example of why she has brought us to the heart of a family and a world in change. She arrives just as Puig Antich was killed after a robbery where a policeman was shot. He was a figure head of that Catalan cause a cause celebre in his time many felt Franco would cancel the killing but this was the dying years of his regime. He was one of the last killed by Franco, and a name many people remember, so she comes just after this happens. The tension of this is in the background as she does an autopsy on the family, and we see how they all end up where they are. The relationships, fallingouts, jealousy, and the outcome of a mother’s love for just one son are all laid bare in this book. s well as the political scene at the time. The city itself is almost a character in the book at times. You feel its presence throughout the book. Have you read this book ?

Winston’s score – rich prose of a family, city and time not long gone.

Sunday Musings Booktown visit , looking forward blog wise

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I’ve not done a chatty post like this for a good while. I was just saying on Twitter that I miss a lot of bookish chat; I don’t have anyone in my sphere of friends who is particularly as bookish as me. I loved Twitter, but it has died, and I am a dreadful blog commenter; I go in spits and spurts. But the thing I have found with seeking an Autism diagnosis is I struggle even online to open conversations up. If anything, this has become a real problem alongside a feeling of being the most under-read person around (I know in a way this isn’t the case, but I often feel it\). Anyway, I am just saying I am here and willing to chat. I’ve been thinking as I head towards 140 reviews, but more so, there are 1500, which I aim to get to at some point next year. I’ve been doing that gap-filling exercise in. my mind. What I have missed from around the world is a lot of classic books. I must try to get some reading over the next year. The new OUP Proust appeals, and I must read a Zola or two. Also, a few more countries from Africa and Asia would be good. I heard a chap in the recent Mookse podcast talking about when folks get excited about the next book from a place, he thinks, what about this place, another country’s, places never mentioned. I was thinking about how little Central American literature is mentioned from Mexico down to the tip of South America. Very little is mentioned, but I’m sure there are books about it.A rabbit hole for another day. I love a good rabbit hole and then a list. Even if the list is never finished, the making and finding of the list is the job. The other thing I need to try to do is change the format I review books in I have done it the same way for years but I need to break the moukld it is ease to do it to the current format as I know roughly so many words in each part makes 800 word plus quotes post. In a way, I used to be more fun about my reviews, and I miss that naive nature and not worrying about other thoughts ! One of the other things I want to do in the next 12 months is visit a booktown either Wigtown or Hy on wye . I’ve never been to either recommendation. On either. You are most welcome to suggest shops and places. As for reading, I have a few books left from this year’s Spanish Portuguese lit month to review. But move over into Women in Translation month with The Girl in the Photograph by Lygia Fagundes Telles the tale of three women in the middle of the dictatorship years in Brazil. A book from the Dalkey Archive from a few years ago. I am also slowly working through this collection of writing in Analog Sea Review, a magazine to bring you off your screens and read. This issue has a wonderful interview with Wim Wenders. Anyone else read this magazine?

The implacable order of things by José Luis Peixoto

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The implacable order of things by José Luis Peixoto

Portuguese fiction

Original title – Nenhum Olar

translator – Richard Zenith

Source – Personal copy

I hate it when the UK and US have different titles. I started to read this book, which I thought was another book by the Portuguese writer José Luis Peixoto that I had missed. I have a copy of Piano Cemetery somewhere; I hope it got misplaced in the move. I read Blank Gaze 13 years ago and had meant to read another book by him. He was at the time he wrote Blank Gaze, the youngest winner of the Jose Saramago book prize. But I hadn’t checked that this was a different book, so when I was about halfway through the book, I thought some of this sounded familiar, and then I found out it was Blank Gaze, the book I had read several years ago. But the US title is different anyway, so I continued to see if it was a book I still liked. And to review it 13 years later.

TO THE RIGHT OF OLD GABRIEL sat the two brothers with their parallel gazes, fixed on abstract, unfocused points. Their gazes were equal but didn’t see the same thing. They were the same gaze, seeing two different things. During the months when the oil press was idle, it was the brothers who looked after it. Always together, always at each other’s side, they had aged simultane-ously: they had the same curve in the back, the same halting gait, and, although they didn’t know it, the very same number of white hairs on their heads. Many more than seventy years had passed since the clear August morning when together they emerged from their mother’s womb, ripping her up inside. Old people told the story, which they’d heard from their parents, of how the mother, as soon as the umbilical cords were cut, looked and saw that they were Siamese twins. She died, without a word, a few minutes later. It was considered to be a terrible tragedy

The twins are born

The book, like yesterday’s book, is set in a village. This time, we move to the southern tip of Portugal to an unnamed town, and some of the locals, as we follow a few decades in this village, all come into contact with the devil. Firstly, a shepherd, Jose, works on the estate of the Mount of Olives, attending to the sheep. His wife is sleeping with a giant that is bullying Jose, all this is told to him by the devil. The book has an episodic feel and is filled with its share of odd characters, conjoined twins, inseparable but only connected at the tip of a finger. Fall in love with a cook who talks via her food, which she makes into art. This is an odd world. Add to that a blind prostitute to the mix a shop called Judas, and there is a religious overtones in this world of the village.

The sun of late September was almost as hot as the sun of August, but the season for sitting in the doorway at night had passed, and Moisés and the cook stopped seeing each other. But Moisés was the kind of man who won’t give up, and one day he thought: it has to be. The next day he again thought: it has to be.
The day after that he again thought: it has to be. And two weeks later he contrived to meet the cook at the door to the grocer’s.
They got married on a Saturday, the date of which they forgot.
Since the cook’s house was larger, it was the two brothers who moved. They loaded three wagons with chests and junk. They rented out their place for not very much money, but it helped pay expenses.

About the twin and the lover the cook.

I am not a bigger rereader, but this was a book I loved the first time around. It was one I loved in the early years of this blog. It stood up, and I liked how I noticed more of the religious overtones in the book.It has an episodic feel that shows the village around the Mount of Olives is a place that feels it is drifting on the edge of the Abyss with the devil causing trouble. This is a sunnier cousin to Satantango. This has nods to religious world names shared with figures from the bible. The devil tempts folks and tells folks home truths. I found it poetic again but this time it seemed a little darker than the first read. There is a menacing feeling behind this world. They are stuck in a sort of world that is dying but don’t know it as we see how, over time, things are changing as we watch it over a couple of generations. Have you ever read a book as the title differs from the UK edition especially after 13 years. I will get to Piano Cemetery, his other book in English. This has been wonderfully translated by Richard Zenith. Have you read any books by Peixoto ?

Winstons score – -A dark world on the abyss and the devil is hanging around ?

Un Amor by Sara Mesa

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Un Amor by Sara Mesa

Spanish fiction

Original title – Un Amor

Translator – Katie Whittemore

Source – subscription

I haven’t reviewed as many of the recent books from Peirene Press as I used to the older ones, but this came from a subscription to them, and I had seen them picture it on social media. I was pleased to have the chance to review another book from Sara Mesa, as I had reviewed Scar from her a few years ago when it came out from Dalkey Archive. She has also had open-letter publisher books in the past. She is known for how she can put her characters into uncomfortable and unusual situations. Thus, she gives them depth as we see how they cope emotionally with the conditions. So, this story of a woman escaping past mistakes to only face a whole load of new challenges appealed to me.

Country people, he sighs. Nobody keeps track of these things. They’re stupid and stubborn, and often cruel to the point of savagery. He was brought a greyhound the other day. The animal was torn to bits. Nothing he could do to save it. She simply cannot imagine how hard it is to work in a place like Petacas. Like running into a brick wall, he says, day after day. Nat listens wordlessly. Her problem now is an economic one. Chipping and deworming Sieso, plus buying good dog food, is going to cost a lot more than she’d bargained for. And still, she fears, there’s the question of his shots. But even with the money she’ll spend, the blow to her budget, the most unpleasant part of the process, the most costly, will be interacting with the landlord

Here is a great observation about those left in the village

Nat has left her past in the city, where she had some problems that led her to move to the rural village of La Escapa. She has found a small house she feels is okay, miles away from her past, and is settled. She and the dog got a gift from the landlord, but the dog isn’t a fan of its new owner. She starts with an idyllic life in her new home, but even a feeling of more is in the background. But she soon. Little things begin to happen around her, like the house having a few things that are not right, then the strange bunch of locals. This is a twist on the. Village life where things are weird, she isn’t local, and this shows. Then a intense relationship with a man known as the German he had come to help fix the roof. The village is a holiday place as many houses are empty. Maybe this is part of the reason those left have become such an odd bunch of characters. The book gets darker as it goes on after she accepts a strange request, and things turn sour for her.

‘I left my job,’ she says at last. I couldn’t take any more.’

*What did you do?’

Nat pulls back. She doesn’t want to go into detail. It was an office job, she says. Commercial translations, correspondence with foreign clients, stuff like that. Not badly paid work, but definitely a far cry from her interests. Piter lights a cigarette, squints with the first drag.

Well, you’re brave.’

‘Why?’

‘Because no one quits their job these days.’

Her past is hinted at her and there in the book like this about leaving her old job

This is a slow burner of a book, a woman with scattered fragments of why she ended up in the village. She and the dog make an odd couple, but things start sour. it is like the sepia glasses she had the first few days have gone, and we see that you can’t outrun problems as you may have left them behind. But there is always a new problem and new set of issues to deal with, and this is what Mesa does so well in her books; I have found how people deal with those twists and turns and the slow-burning tale of one woman escaping from the city, fast love affairs, and the outcome of both. Unsettling ideas and plot lines leave you unsettled as you read. This book would make a great series as it slowly burns, and like all the great Peirene books, it feels much larger than its mere 150 pages. A book that takes you into one woman’s journey and eventual escape back to the city. It shows there are problems no matter where, but also how vulnerable a single woman can be in certain situations. One wonders if the title of the village is twofold: an escape to go to and escape from? Have you read this book?

Winston score – A reminds me of what I loved about the early Peirene books: As an escape into another world for a couple of hours.

A week in Norfolk and some books I brought

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Sometimes you have the best intentions; I had brought my laptop away to write some posts whilst we were away. But I found I just relaxed in the evenings when we watched a film,I didn’t make much of a dent in the pile of books I brought. But we had chosen East Anglia as our summer holiday this year as my only living Aunt is there and so it was a chance to see them and a cousin that lives nearby, so we picked a rural cottage just outside a small village called Lodden. This was the perfect retreat of the road, about a quarter of a mile in the middle of fields. The owners had chickens and DUCKS, and there were woodpeckers just outside the cottage’s back door.

We called in Norwich on the way to the cottage. We had intended to go another day, but this was our only visit, and I managed to get to the Book Hive, an independent shop I had been told about. I brought four books, and they had a rather nice tote bag as well to buy.

 

For Spanish lit month, I brought two books in mind, The Simple Art of Killing a Woman, by Brazilian writer Patricia Melo, about oppressed women in the AMazion. It appealed as it was from Indigo Press, which has brought a few books that have caught my eye for months. Then Forty Years follows a woman who rises to be  a dressmaker during the Franco era and covers the years of his rule in Catalan .and two others that I had seen good reviews about Yell Sam if you still can is about the last years of the Irish writer Samuel Beckett in France. Then Vladivostok Circus by Elisa Shua Dusapin is a writer I needed to read more of.

On our first full day, I had lunch with my Aunt and spent an hour in Lowestoft and Southwold. iI bought a single book at the Waterstones in Lowestoft a small  shop like ours in Chesterfield I brought the latest books from Yoko Tawada just because the title made me smile.A short novella one imagines has  Surreal edge with the title The bridegroom was a dog

Then we had a day in Norfolk on the Norfolk Railway , I love a ride on an old train line. It was only an old diesel pacer train from the 70s, but it was a good half-hour ride. They had five stations on the line we went to the end station at Wymondham Abbey. we meet a lovely chap in a cafe in the local church who we chatted with for over an hour and then had a picnic lunch in the Abbey grounds and back on the train.

Then we had a day in Yarmouth, which had a nice pier, but I found a little to buy for me and maybe not to my taste, but we got some rock to take home. Then we visited Aldeburgh on what is the hottest day this year. This has a pebble beach and a nice little high street. We got a lovely cake at a local baker called Two Magpies and walk on the beach plus they had two bookshops but I visited one as we only could for two hours the larger Aldeburgh books had a great selection infact a wonderful collection of travel writing books. I found two books here

Elias Canetti spent his life collecting a mixture of his own words and others around death in this collection from Fitzcarraldo. I recently picked a collection of his wartime writing. Then, Denis Theriault’s latest book, which I thought I had read his earlier books from several years ago, which a lot of people loved, The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman. But I may be read it but hadn’t reviewed it. But this cover just jumped out at me. We then head back to Southwold. Tried to park in the centre but had to go back to ear the pier we walked into the small town and had lunch at a small cafe; I can’t remember the name but it was just down from Southwold Books. I had wanted to look at this shop as it was one of those Waterstone bookshops that looks and does feel like a small local type bookshop which it did in a way. I brought two more books here

Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence, I got it because I wanted to try him. I think I do have about book by him, but this was an Archipelago book by a favourite publisher of mine with the lovely square books . Then, Another World tackles a migrant story. I hadn’t heard of this book. It just appealed from the blurb. We then played quirky games on Southwold Pier. The arcade has homemade arcade games such as Whack a Banker, bathysphere a Submarine under Southwold, and watch the Sewage and Fish in the local waters. Also, you can fly around as a fly trying to escape getting hit whilst in a human’s house. These are real fun games .We met up with my cousins, and their wonderful kids had a meal with them. It was good to connect with them after so many years. We will be back in this part of the world; we want to see a lot more so another visit is on the cards.

 

Manual of Painting and Calligraphy by Jose Saramago

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Manual of Painting and Calligraphy by Jose Saramago

Portuguese fiction

Original title –  Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia

Translator – Giovanni Ponteiro

Source – Library edition

I’m having a slow Spanish / Portuguese  Lit month this year, but I aim to review mainly books from Portugal, which is the second from Portugal. This is also from the best-know Writer from Portugal, the late Jose Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize. I picked this from the library because it was an earlier book I have reviewed a later novel and the earlier novel by him Skylight that came out a few years ago in English for the first time. It also came not long after the fall of the fascist regime in Portugal that had reigned the country for many years. The book looks at the later part of the Salazar regime and the use of the Painter and Industrialist as the book ends those hit by the government.

It was not until fifteen days later that S. explained why he wanted this portrait, so much at variance with his nature and outlook as a man of his time. I never ask my clients in this blunt manner why they decided to have their portrait painted. Were I to do so, I should give the impression of having little esteem for the work which provides me with a living. I must proceed (as I have always done) as if a portrait in oils were the confirmation of a life, its culmination and moment of triumph, and therefore accept the inevitable fact that success is the prerogative of the chosen few. To ask would be to question the right of these chosen souls to have their portrait painted, when this privilege is clearly theirs by right and because of the large sum of money they are paying and the sumptuous surroundings in which they display the finished work, which they alone appreciate according to how they value themselves.

Talking about the painting

The book follows an artist called H, who is commissioned to do a portrait of an Industrialist called just S. There is a fun line early on in the book when he passes comments on the art and how S looks in real life. While doing this, he also beds the great man, the secretary of S, while doing the painting. All this is told by H a man in the Bourgeois world of the regime just keeping in there by his art, which isn’t the best, but he dreams of being like the great artists of the world as he talks about their paintings, this saw a lot of looking up art like the man with grey eyes.All this is because he is having his fling with Olga. Alongside this, a close friend of his is arrested by the secret police and is in prison. He meets and has another fling with his friend’s sister. He talks about the pictures he has seen as he works on this second portrait of the great S. Another interesting was a list late on of great Portuguese novels and then trying to find them in English and discovering there were only a couple available to us in English.

In the presence of the couple from Lapa (reminiscent of certain characters in Portuguese novels: Os Fidalgos da Casa Mourisca by Júlio Dinis, A Morgadinha de Val-flor by Pinheiro Chagas, Os Teles de Albergaria by Carlos Malheiro Dias, As Donas dos Tempos Idos by Caetano Beirão, O Barão de Lavos by Arnaldo Gama, Os Maias by Eça de Queiroz and O Senhordo Paço de Ninães by Camilo Castelo Branco) the chameleon did not change its skin.

Boring but this was the liost of portuguese novels with just a few availlable in English

I like this book steeped in art. I think this is Saramago making a personal voyage around the art that has touched him as a writer. It is a very visual book but a book full of relationships that are passionate in nature but brief, firey sex and games. He fleshes out H as an artist with this. He is a man who has that artistic charisma, if not maybe the talent that always goes with it. It also has the backdrop of a secret police coming and taking artists and intellectuals.The latter bitter and of the Salazar regimes is burning in the background. the creative process seen through H eyes but also a man struggling with the desire to be like those great portrait artist he has seen over the years. Have you a favourite book by Saramago? Where next do I want to leave his big ones to review last. Have you a favourite book by him,

Winston score – B exciting look at an artist and what inspires him in the later years of the Salazar regime?sa

Joesph Walser’s machine by Gonçalo M. Tavares

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Joesph Walser’s machine by Gonçalo M Tavares

Portuguese Literature

Orignal title -A Máquina de Joseph Walser

Translator – Rhett McNeil

Source – personal copy

I am going to try and focus mainly on Portuguese writing this Spanish/Portuguese lit month. As for me, I felt it has been a country in Europe that, as a blog, I haven’t focused on or reviewed enough books from over the time I have blogged. But also, it is a country that isn’t mentioned much. I got a couple of novels from Gonçalo M Tavares. When I first came across him, I read Jerusalem, another book from this series of books he called his Kingdom series. They are all set in an unnamed country of vaguely Germanic country. His fellow Portuguese writer Jose Saramago said he would win the Nobel prize. His books have inspired plays art, videos and operas. I didn’t get around to reviewing Jerusalem, but I will get it reviewed at some point, as his other books are hard to get hold of now.

“No one wears shoes like that anymore.”

How many times had Joseph Walser heard that phrase in the last two weeks? What was going on? He had worn these shoes, or similar ones, for years. No one had ever bothered him about them before. No one had ever before cared about his shoes in the least, neither their color nor shape. Why now?

“I don’t care about your shoes or your ideas, do you understand, my dear Walser? What I told you yesterday isn’t important to me, but it is extremely important to you. Can you see the difference?

Can you see the difference that exists between the two of us?

Between my shoes and your shoes, between my ideas and your ideas? I’m not interested in your shoes and I’m not interested in your ideas. But you’re interested in my ideas; that’s the difference between us, you see

His shoes this made me smile as for me they always say oh your laces is loose as it is alway undone

The book opens with the lines that he was a strange man. That strange man was the lead character of the novel Joseph Walser a man living in an unnamed city. He is a man of routine and habits. But also the style of Joesph’s shoes, which are an older style. He is a man that stands out in a crowd. But what happens when the city he lives in is suddenly invaded? How will this man of routine be? As the world around him dissolves and the people and world he knows to start to change, he just wants to follow the routine of working on his machine and then, in the evening, play a game with people he knows. The chapters see little by little how he copes as one more thing is thrown in his way and in the way of his routine. What happens when a character stepping out of a lowry is stuck in a war?

Joseph Walser went out every Saturday night to Fluzst M.s house, where he played dice for low-stakes bets with three other work-mates. The five men all worked at the same factory. They were all low-level employees and made average wages. Over the years their passion for games of chance had brought them together. There was no exceptional friendship among them, but they rarely missed a Saturday. The amounts being bet in the game could be considered small, when compared with other underground games around the city, but in proportion to their wages the amounts were large. All five men were married; for the players, their wives were the most difficult thing about their gambling. There wasn’t a single wife who didn’t complain about her husband losing a certain amount of money in the game.

More of his routiune life here

Now, I have read this through my eyes. I am going through the process of a late diagnosis of Autism, having done several tests and scored high in them. So autism is in my mind at the moment, and when I read about Joesph Walser, it was like, yes, this guy is so autistic his life is led by a routine, but it seeing how he copes, which he does, but you can always see he may be on the verge of melting down as the world he knows collapse around him. This is a nod to how that war machine interferes with a man-machine in Joseph’s daily routine. Add to that his collection the hyperfocus a lot of autistic people have. Outside as ever, I connect with the book I am reading. This is just how I read. Connections over the distance between different worlds and lives give me the greatest pleasure. Still, that thread that runs between the fictional world and mine really connects me with literature in translation, which is, of course, my area of hyperfocus.I imagined Waslser as a lowry-like matchstick man marching through his city to his machine every day, and how would that connect to the horror of an invasion happening? Have you read any books from Tavares?

Winston’s Score B is a vital book with an exciting but mundane character’s reaction when his routine world is smashed and changed. Need to read more of this series.

Last Date in El Zapotal by Mateo Garcia Elizondo

~ winstonsdad ~ 3 Comments

Last Date in El Zapotal by Mateo Garcia Elizondo

Mexican fiction

Original title – Una Cita con la Lady

Translator – Robin Myers

Source  – subscription edition

I am late to Spanish lit month, but I must start with this book. Which book better says why we read books translated from Spanish? This is from Charco Books, a publisher that, for me, has been bringing out the best of Latin American fiction in recent years. This is a new writer but a writer with a fantastic heritage, as both his grandfathers are among the cream of the first wave of Latin American writers. He is the grandson of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Mexican writer Salvador Elizondo. In this book, he has cited another great writer, Juan Rulfo, as the novel nods toward his great book, Pedro Paramo. The book is called Date with a Lady in Spanish, and the lady in the title is Drugs.

It’s been a long time since I’ve managed to control the part of my mind that takes logical decisions, although I know it still exists. I know I’ve still got some reason in me, I just don’t really know what governs it. Maybe there’s more than one kind of reason. Sometimes I get the sense that there are two people inside me: one – the one I identify as ‘me’ – trying to extinguish itself, which means shedding the weight of matter by using the quickest, most painless methods at his disposal, and another one, far more stubborn and vicious and evasive, who stays alive in spite of everything and drags me around wherever he goes.

As he admits how his life is going the loss of his mind to drugs

The book is told by an unnamed narrator as he heads to the small village of El Zapottal to end his life in the backwaters of Mexico. The town is full of lowlifes, and the flotsam and jetson that wash up in small towns like this are the places people go to die, and this is what the narrator is doing. He is a heroin addict, and he hasn’t said he is going to take his life. He has just run out of the road, and like all those that run out of road in this life he has washed up in EL Z capital, a sort of Blackppol or such in the jungle a place of broken dreams and lost souls ghost of his past the regrets a woman a dog so many offer the years as he replays where it all went wrong and other pasts of other lost souls blend in. He is looking for a man called Juan. Who is this strange man? This is also made a nod to Rulfo as he heads into the jungle. He starts to lose the boundaries between what is real and what is dreams as the ghost walks, or is he a ghost thinking he is alive? The book is so fluid that his point.

The village darkens around me, the trees and their foliage blur into the background, the contours of the houses dim, as if the whole place were draining of light. Or maybe I’m going blind. I walk straight ahead without encountering a single obstacle or exiting the town limits. I still haven’t found the road to All-Souls’ Hill, but as I search I come across a stone cabin shining from the inside. I see five kids kneeling on the floor, holding hands, a lit candle in the middle of the circle.The oldest is a girl who looks to be about sixteen

As he heads into the jungle his world starts to disolve from around him

In the chorus of Japan’s song, ghost David Sylvian sings just when I think I’m winning. When I’ve broken every door, the ghosts of my life blow wilder than before. Just when I thought I could not be stopped when my chance came to be king, the ghosts of my life blew wilder than the wind. Ghosts are there; they are the same ghosts and demons that we see in films like Leaving Las Vegas, which drew Nick Cage’s Character to the end of his life in Las Vegas and Lost Souls’ ghost of his life as well. Yes there is a huge nod to Rulfo, it reminds me there is a new translation of  Pedro Paramo I need to get to at some point. But in the later stages of the book, when he heads to the edge of the jungle, I was reminded of the fluid nature of the writing of Wilson Harris in his book about the ghost of the jungle he writes about. This is a book about those last days of a junkie when the end is there and you hooover between life and death as the world drifts away and you go into another world of death. Have you a favourite book about the last days of a Junkie?

Winston score – A powerful new voice from Mexico with a fever nightmare of regrets and ghosts.

Edited in Prisma app with Watercolor

That was the month of June 2024

~ winstonsdad ~ 5 Comments
  1. A Terrace in Rome by Pascal Quingard
  2. Elly by Maike Wetzel 
  3. Eastbound by Maylis De Kerangal 
  4. Engagement by Ciler Ilhan 
  5. Out of Mind by J Bernlef
  6. The hairdressers son by Gerbrand Bakker 
  7. French windows by Antoine Laurain 
  8. Götz and Meyer by David Albahari 
  9. Family and Borghesia by Natalia Ginzburg

I managed to review nine books this month. Our journey started with an engraver injured for his love of a woman and the aftermath of that. Then a missing girl comes back, or does she? Then, two souls meet and connect on a train eastbound to Siberia. Each has their reason for wanting to escape where they are at that moment. Then there is a massacre told piece by piece by those killed on the evening it happened; then, a man is slowly losing his mind as dementia takes hold. Then a man goes to Spain to find out what really happened to his dad and what is the truth about the past. Then a woman may have seen a murder writes a story around her fellow occupants in the apartment building she lives in. Then we see a pair of truck drivers as the only link to a Jewish family in Belgrade as a relative imagines these two drivers’ day-to-day working. Then I finish with a great pair of Italian novellas from a great Italian writer.

Book of the month

To be honest, this was the hardest month in a long time. There wasn’t a bad book this month, reading-wise. But this lost gem—well, I say lost—is considered one of the best Dutch novels of all time. I think this book deserves a reissue. It captures how someone’s mind falls away from them due to Dementia.

Non book events .

Well, I have been watching the new Star Wars series. It’s not the best series, but it could get better as it goes on. Music wise I brought three albums this month

I brought two albums at my local shop as part of an offer they have the first is this John Grant Album I have two other albums by him and a couple of CDs so I was pleased to add another to the collection.

Then, a live album by Joy Division strangely ties into yesterday when I went with Amanda to where my mum’s ashes are scattered, and in the same graveyard is the stone that is the memorial to Ian Curtis, who was from Macclesfield. I didn’t visit the stone, but I know where it is. I find the pilgrimage there bizarre, but each to their own. I knew his connection to Macclesfield and my own connection, so this was a live set I hadn’t heard before.

Then we went to Bakewell the other day it is a nice place for a coffee and there is a record shop and I had decided to complete all the Nick Cave albums on VInyl I have all the older albums on cd and have brought a number of of already this was one of the few I hadn’t got and captured the rockier darker Nick Cave when he was younger and living in Berlin

Next month

Thigs will all be Spanish or Portuguese in Nature as it is Spanish and Portuguese lit month 2024. I did make badges for all those who want to join in

Edited in Prisma app with Watercolor
Edited in Prisma app with Watercolor
Edited in Prisma app with Watercolor

The three badges look forward to your reviews. Thanks in advance for joining this month again or for the first time . I look forward to all the upcoming reviews.

What are your plans?

How was your reading month ?