Month: September 2024

Beloved by Empar Moliner

~ winstonsdad ~ 1 Comment

Beloved by Empar Moliner

Spanish (Catalan) fiction

Original title – Benvolguda

Translator -Laura Mcgloughlin

Source – review copy

I was sent this by the lovely folks at three-time Rebel Press. I have reviewed several of their books, as they are trying to give voice to the minority languages around Europe and female writers in those languages. This is a more recent novel from the writer. She has won many prizes in Spain for her fiction, including the Joseph Pla prize. She also writes for Newspapers, television, and radio. I need to mention that part of the profits from this book is going to cancer research as the illustrator of the covers for 3TIMESREBEL. Anna Pont has sadly passed away from Cancer. Her covers for this publisher have all been eye-catching and, I know, thought-provoking as well. So sadly, this is her last cover, and as ever, the image captures a little of the book as we follow Remei, an illustrator in her fifties.

She’s a violinist. The girl sitting in my place (who he will fall in love with) is his new desk-partner at the orchestra where he’s had a permanent post for the last ten years. She’s the stand-in violinist (a friend of the conductor’s friend’s daughter, it seems) who is coming home to rehearse. Danger indeed. All female musicians are sexy. All men have drooled one time or another over imaginary double bass players (always barefoot) playing pieces with sweet vigour.

They sit in pairs when a concert is performed. One music stand for every two musicians. It so happens that the desk-partner who’s sat with him until now has lung cancer.

My man is happy about having a substitute. He doesn’t like his partner at all; he says he stinks, doesn’t study, is very neurotic. He wishes him dead, half in jest.

The time she sees her husband and other violinist

Remei sees herself as an attractive, happy fifty-year-old. This is until she is heading out with her younger husband. He is a violinist in an orchestra, and as she is in the car, she sees a flicker of something between him and the person sitting next to him in the front of the car, a fellow violinist from the orchestra; she knows what she has seen even thou her husband denies this is the case. What follows is a look at Remei’s life and how she has battled to get where she is today, but this one evening has brought it all tumbling down, and now the horror of being in her fifties and maybe her younger husband will fall for the younger violinist sat next to him. She has done all the sports she can. Remei Duran has tried to stay an attractive woman of a certain age. But This is a view of heartbreak happening because of the way age can sap sexual energy.

All of a sudden I start coughing a lot too. Of course you never realise the exact moment it appears, but I do because for the first time in my life with this very dry cough, I fully understand ads for incontinence pads.

This is it. It’s been years since I coughed and I didn’t know, it hadn’t even occurred to me, what happens to a woman of my age (who runs and has given birth) when you cough this way. They told me about laughing, but not this.

All of a sudden it’s happening to me. All of a sudden. Not little by little, as it should have, to have time to get used to it and sign up for hypopressive gymnastics and buy a box of vaginal tablets. A quaver of trumpet and timpani. And those ads I’ve always found humiliating seem so friendly now. I’m the same person I was a day ago. Yesterday, in a jeans outlet shop (cheap because they’re the ones worn by mannequins tried on a pair in size 8, because they were lovely and because I wanted to debut a pair

Remei trying to keep a hold of the past

This is one of those book that is hard to capture. It is about that moment in the book when she sees her world shatter about being a woman of a certain age, no matter how much you have battled to where. What happens when menopause has taken over your life, and your husband now has this younger model sitting next to him? They don’t know what will happen, but she sees it just a little moment in the back of that car, little things that make her know what will happen. We also see how hard she has tried to stay the way she is. As always, this is what I like about the books from 3timesrebel Press. They publish those books you’d not see otherwise. This is a powerful account of how menopause can break a woman but also make her stronger, from heartbreak to hope. Have you read any of the books from 3timesrebel ?

Winstons score – A one-womans tale has a universal ring to it

 

Living Things by Munir Hachemi

~ winstonsdad ~ 1 Comment

Living Thing by Munir Hachemi

Spanish fiction

0riginal title – Cosas vivas

Translator – Julie Sanches

Source – personal copy

I have missed several fitzcarradlo books over the last few years. So I decided to cancel a subscription and try to get some of the books I missed from their backlist. This is another writer from one of those Granta lists. Munir was on the 2021 list of the best Spanish language writers. His story of vital signs was part of that collection. The first book of Spanish writers produced so many great writers like Rodrigo Hasbun, Pola Ooixarac and Andres Neumann, to name a few. There have been a couple from the second collection that came out. I reviewed another book by the writer Martin Felipe Castagnet. Munir Hachemi’s father is from Algeria. He studied Spanish and has a master’s degree in Spanish. This was his debut novel. It is part auto-fiction, part dialogue on industrial farming.

Sunday, 14 July

I read Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory from start to finish. An unexpected surprise. It’s a social novel where the main character – a guy – takes us through the ins and outs of the artistic field; there is no anecdote outside the field of cultural production (exactly!). The book was recommended by my ex-girlfriend Mónica, now a close friend. Her current boyfriend recommended it to her. I consider ringing her but don’t actually want to; besides, it’d be expensive and I’m not sure she’s read the book yet.

Instead I call Marta, my current girlfriend, and realize I don’t have a lot to share. I say things are all right; I have no idea if she can tell it isn’t true. My mission to obtain experience, as I referred to it, has been a failure. I have a new understanding of Piglia’s famous question: how to narrate the horror of real events?

We’re running out of food.

A mixof reading and the slow way the trip falls apart as the food goes and the still drink

The book follows what happens when four friends from university decide to head to France with the initial idea of joining the grape harvest.( I did something similar in Germany many years ago, working in a vineyard for a week. ) Munir, G, Ernesto and Alex head in a Suzuki Swift. Our Narrator, Munir, is full of ideas about being a writer. In the book’s first part, he describes how different writers describe being and how to start writing as they head for this summer of what they feel will be fun grape picking. But then, when they get there, they are told there isn’t any work in the vineyard to harvest grapes for four Spanish students. This shatters their plans, so they take what turns out to be a dark turn and find a chop in an industrial chicken factory where the four start to work and have their eyes open to the horrors of industrial-scale factory farming and the effect of this on the four of them. The co-workers’ menace and the place turn this from what would have been a fun summer working trip into something darker. As they drink, they become a little wild and don’t fit in on the family campsite they are living on, as the madness and horrific nature of the day job leads to wild nights. We see all this through Munir’s journal, but as he says earlier in the book, this is the writer; this is another Munir.

Today work has shown me the true nature of animal ex-ploitation. The site reminded me of the end of the world: a massive, modular, bleach-white industrial unit in the middle of a scorched wheat field. In the background the sun rose, wanting to drown the world in the blistering co-lours of dawn but finding everything in that narrow space to be yellow or white, and nothing else. Access to the complex was through a pavilion-like annexe. We got in a queue, and a veterinarian handed each of us a soft plastic suit that looked like a giant, shiny white potato sack, and a headpiece made of the same material with a see-through window for the eyes. Then he sprayed us with some sort of disinfectant hose. The scene reminded me of Holocaust documentaries, except we weren’t so much naked as overdressed. They informed us we wouldn’t be able to leave until our (lunch) break at eleven-thirty. At first I was alarmed because I had to pee, but it took me less than an hour to sweat every last drop of water from my body. Even though I bore it out, I’d go so far as to say it was unbearable.

The descripition of where they end up working in the factory farm.

This is only 114 pages, but as you see, it has a lot more to it. The writer discovers his voice in the book by describing the books he loves and the four having a wild summer. Part criticism of the other nature and brutality of factory farming and its effect on the four of them. As we follow Munir’s journal of the summer. This had echoes of Bolano in many ways. The description of writers he loved reminds me of the love of poetry and poets in the first part of Savage Detectives. But then it vias into environmental and green issues around factory farming and the horrors he sees he compares at time to the way we looked at the holocaust pictures. This is a powerful debut from a writer who seems to love playing with the nature of his writing and the genre he is writing. This has auto-fiction, thriller, Bolano-like prose, and green themes all thrown into a hard-hitting short novella. Have you read any of the writers from the second collection of Spanish writers from Granta?

Winston’s score is a B. It is a solid debut novella that is fast-paced and can be read in a few hours.

Dendrites by Kallia Papadaki

~ winstonsdad ~ 2 Comments

Dendrites by Kallia Papdaki

Greek Fiction

Original title – Δενδρίτες

Translator – Karen Emmerich

Source – review copy

I don’t read many books based in the US just because I didn’t read my US writers many years ago. I did. Growing up, I was a fan of Bellow, Mailer, Roth, etc and the beats. But in recent years, I have maybe read one or two books a year from the US, and occasionally, I like this book set in the US by writers. Outside the US, or like Kallia Papadaki, who grew up in Thessaloniki in Greece, then studied in the US at Bard, and Brandeis, the former in New York, isn’t that far from the setting of this book in Camden, New Jersey. The book follows the events in the 1980S, but it also follows the family history and how the town fell apart around the families. Kallia has since returned to Greece to study film studies, and this was shortlisted for the EU Prize for literature.

Her parents had met at the Campbell Soup factory, where a twenty-four-year-old Susan stacked cans on a conveyer belt eight hours a day, six days a week, and where, at twenty-eight, Basil was a manager, responsible for nearly a thousand people per shift, plus hundreds of thousands of identical cans of concentrated tomato soup. Susan had once been a student at Ohio State University, but a year before she was set to earn her degree in political science with a focus on political economy, she fell in love with the hippie son of an industrialist, dropped out, and followed him accrossthe country, all the way to Haight-Ashbury, San Fran-cisco. Their romance lasted a year and a half-one summer at a commune and two mild winters on the streets panhandling love from passersby and handing out flowers in return, until Leto and Woodstock came between them, and the harsh winters of the Northeast, which were nothing to laugh at, and so after the rain and mud of the festival they limped their separate

Susan past with the hippie and then meeting Basil

The book follows the Campanis Family from the arrival of Antoinis in a time when this part of NEW JERSEY WAS Thriving, his children find work around the Campbell soup factory, and when a daughter falls for the hippie son of the factory owner in the sixties. we see how their children in the 80s are seeing the first cracks in the town of Camden as the city is starting to change. This is a mix of all the family’s stories from the theAntoinnis arriving in the winter and making his way to the kids making their way to what happens when the American turns sour in the generation that follows. We see Minne in the eighties as an orphan. She is taken in by the hippie daughter Susan of the Campanis family, who married Bsil, her second husband, a manager at the factory. Their daughter Leto is Minie’s mate, but taking her in opens family scars, which adds to the fact that a missing child, the world they live in, and the factories close the house get boarded up. As it says at the start of the book, a town now has the highest crime rate in New Jersey.

Susan waits in the car to make sure the girl can get inside as Minnie knocks on the front door for Louisa to open, in her haste that morning she forgot her keys on the kitchen counter, but the door doesn’t open and Minnie keeps knocking with no response, so Susan locks the car, walks over to the girl and asks if there’s a back door or a window that might be open, and Minnie leads her around the side of the house, where the kitchen window looks sidelong onto the street, and Susan cups her hands and rests them against the glass to banish the glare as Minnie stands on tiptoe to peek in, only she’s too short by a good ten inches and Susan feels the chilly November wind slipping under her blouse, a wind that’s picking up, blowing down from Montreal and the distant Arctic beyond, a wind that freezes everything except time

Susan in the 80s when they take in the Orphan in to their family home

I liked this family saga, but it does jump from time to time as we build the layers of three generations of the family and how the world around them fell apart in the 80s. This is a book that the writer said she thought of after seeing a man in his nineties in New Jersey like Antoinis, who came to the US and never came back to Greece as she saw him at a Greek dinner in New Jersey. She then spent a year researching Greek Americans’ history and then two years writing it. But it is a book that could be anyone it could be an Irish American in a bar not having gone back, etc. it is also about the loss of the American dream, how those factory jobs vanished and when they did the towns built around these industries fall apart and this in the later years in this book is the aftermath of the broken American dream. This is the sort of place Springsteen used to sing about those hard streets of tough men and hard-working women and what happened when the American dream fell apart. I like how she drifts through time and stuck the time in music, places, and memories of those years. it is a book that is dark in places as it is about a place falling apart and about how those dreams that started so well fell apart, and we end up with a ninety-year-old man unable to afford the ticket home to Greece. Do you have a favourite tale in the US by a non-US writer?

Winstons score – B, solid account of the American dream falling apart over three generations.

 

Little Jewel by Patrick Modiano

~ winstonsdad ~ 11 Comments

Little Jewel by Patrick Modiano

French fiction

Original title – La Petite Bijou

Translator – Penny Hueston

Source – Personal copy

I just started on to another Modiano after reviewing Sleep of Memory the other day just as we went away, and that was it I read it whilst we were away I always take a pile of books, but we get an early start to get places when away have a full day wandering and buying bit places by the time we get back we just chatted and watch a bit of tv anyway this is a later Modiano written a couple of years before he won the Nobel prize ad is a new translator to me and also is from another publisher of his books Text. As ever, it is set in Paris.

IT MUST HAVE been about twelve years since anyone had called me Little Jewel. I found myself at Châtelet metro station at peak hour. I was in the crowd heading along the endless corridor on the moving walkway. There was a woman wearing a yellow coat. The colour of the coat caught my eye and I observed her from the back on the walkway. Then she headed down the corridor marked DIRECTION CHÂTEAU DE VINCENNES. Now we were all squashedagainst each other in the middle of the staircase, waiting for the barrier to open. She was standing next to me. I saw her face. She was so like my mother that I thought it must be her.

The opening lines of the book and Therese seeing the woman in the yellow coat

What happens when you lose your mother, then one day you are on a metro and think you see her in a yellow coat and decide you want to follow this woman? This is the heart of this story as we follow Little Jewel as she says no one had called her that since she was twelve so now nineteen, Therese has broken memories of her earlier life and when she follows this woman that may be her mother, those memories come to mind as we see her follow this woman everyday life. In the hope that she can patch together her own past.As is the woman, the countess that had died years earlier? What is her life, this mystery woman as ever we see place drift, and her memories and where we follow the woman mix this is one of the things he does so well place and feelings. He is a teen viewing the world, and as we see her trying to grasp what happened in the past to answer those questions, does she need the answers?

SOMETIME BEFORE THE evening when I thought 1 recognised my mother in the metro, I had met a person called Moreau or Badmaev at the Mattei bookshop on Boulevard de Clichy. It stayed open late. I was looking for a detective novel. At midnight, we were the only customers, and he recommended a title on the Noir list. Then we talked as wewalked together along the median strip down the boulevard. Occasionally, his voice had an odd intonation that made me think he was a foreigner. Later, he explained that Badmaev was the name of his father, whom he had hardly known. A Russian. But his mother was French. At that first meeting, he wrote his address on a piece of paper, under the name Moreau-Badmaev.

I like this looking for a detective novel is maybe a summing up of his style a novel looking to be a detective novel always .

As I said in the previous post on his bookmI feel Modiano has a bag of ideas that he uses, and he also has used some truth in this book it is based on an actual news story he had read, and it turns out he had edited the book when he found out from the actual Little Jewel that her mother was still alive. He always uses his hometown of Paris as the backdrop for this book. At the point where he started the book, I was reminded of the scene in Wim Wenders’s film until the end of the world where William Hurt’s character is seen by Solveig Donmartin’s character on a platform and follows him. Then I was reminded of what happens when a parent is reunited with a child in the film Secret and Lies. Those secrets and unanswered questions may sometimes be best left unsaid. Another Modiano trait is the lost person. This time, it is a mother, not a daughter. Then, how we remember the past is another trait of his works. Those fragments we remember are often real, but what happens when the past is blurred by the present. It is fair to say I loved this again. I think he is a writer I click with as a reader. He makes me want to wander aimlessly around Paris or sit in a cafe, watch everyone go past, and imagine them in a Modiano way. Do you have a writer you click with as a reader?

Winstons score – +A Another dive

Sleep of Memory by Patrick Modiano

~ winstonsdad ~ 5 Comments

Sleep of Memory by Patrick Modiano

French fiction

Original title –Souvenirs dormants

Translator – Mark Polizzotti

Source – personal copy

Am I the only one blogging-wise that you see you’re getting to a milestone? In this case, 1400 reviews on the blog are not wrong in 15 years of blogging, especially when the first few months I did very little, so I have averaged 100 books a year for the last 14 years. I have been trying to think of which book to pick, and then, in one of those weird things that happened, I ordered a few books from World of Books as I tried to move away from Amazon for my books. One of the publishers I love is Margellos World Republic of Letters, and I looked up books from them and ordered this book. Then this week looking for a podcast to listen to one morning whilst having a coffee out I listened to an old episode backlist on Patrick Modiano’s honeymoon. I then looked back and saw it had been a while SINCE I had reviewed him. I had reviewed Dora Bruder (search warrant) as before his noble win, it was the only book readily available, so I reviewed days before he won the Nopbel and then, in a couple of years after, reviewed a few more. I really liked his books so with the first wave of books post Nobel I reviewed a number nad then since not so many, which is a shame he is a writer I love his books have similar themes and subjects but are different enough to make them interesting. So this one of his most recent books has several things we expect from Modiano: a look back at war, Parents that are useless or have caused issues to the person in the book. Mysterious women. all are here.

Geneviève Dalame was always the first to ar-rive, and when I entered the café I would see her sitting at the same table, way in back, head bowed over an open book. She’d told me she slept barely four hours a night. She worked as a secretary at Polydor Studios, a bit farther down the boulevard, which was why we would meet in that café before she went to work. I had gotten to know her in an occult bookstore on Rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire. She was very interested in the occult. I was too. Not that I wanted to submit to a doctrine or become some guru’s dis-ciple, but because I liked mystery.

One of the women he knew over this time and had relationship with

The book follows a writer as he looks back at his early years, his teens to early twenties, and the woman he had met and had relations with over those years. Add to this, he is the son of a couple that had issues during the war years a nod to the trouble he had with his own parents as we see the odd collection of women he had meet over those years from someone interested in the occult. A woman floats through her life in a way an older woman, and maybe it is the death he may have been involved with one of the the ladies. Like in his other book, the exact facts of these women blend and drift as he remembers the crumbs left behind of his memory of each of them in vary amounts from the family friends he met when young to an almost Mrs Robinson-like lady several years older than himself, that he says he remembers very little of, but one thinks there maybe more. It is all set on the backdrop of post-war Paris, the awakening that happened in the sixties and eventually led to the events of 1968.

My memory of Madame Hubersen is also rather vague. A brunette of about thirty with regular features and bobbed hair. She used to take us to dinner near her building, in one of those streets perpendicular to Avenue Foch-on the left side of the avenue, facing away from the Arc de Triomphe. And here I am, no longer afraid to provide topographical details. I tell myself that this is all so far in the past that it’s covered by what the law calls amnesty. We would go on foot from her house to the restaurant that winter, a winter that was as harsh as the ones before it, next to which the winters of today seem rather mild; a winter like the ones I knew in the Haute-Savoie

Mike Scott has a song from his early years of TH Waterboys about his girlfriends. This is Modiano’s take on that, Jean. The narrator, as ever, is a thinly veiled Modiano; he, unlike Ernaux, mines his life, but this isn’t auto-fiction. This is Modiano fiction. He rips apart his life almost like Burroughs did with his prose. Modiano cuts out the events of his life, adds themes, and then switches them back together so we have a mysterious collection of Exs. One feels these are maybe exs but made to seem more than they were. As always, parents and the past war years are added. Through a little mystery about death and Paris, we have a Modiano book unique a feeling of over books but unique at the same time. He is the master of the crumbs of our lives. Those polaroids of the mind we all have fade in a way, and the actual taking of the event is lost in time sometimes. I think this is a fitting book to be the 1400 book I have loved the Nopbel prize, I am a huge fan of french fiction and Modiano is a writer I want to read all his books over time to build the full picture of this man and his life. Do you have a writer from whom you want to read all the books?

Winston’s score – A – has set me back into Modiano World, a Paris of the post-war years, remembered in many ways and with many women over time.

 

The Fire by Daniela Krien

~ winstonsdad ~ 1 Comment

The Fire by Daniela Krien

German fiction

Orignal title – Der Brand

Translator – Jamie Bulloch

Source – Library book

Do you have any must-read writers? These are ones you have read before and loved, and you must get to their next book when it comes out. Daniela Krien is one of those writers. This is her third book to be translated into English. I have reviewed and loved the other two. She is very good at relationships and personal interplay. She has been a full-time writer since 2010 and has four books out. Her latest has not long been published in Germany. There is an interview with her and her translator, Jamie Bulloch. Where Daniela talks about how she came up with the idea behind the book but needed a way into writing the book, and when her own holiday cottage burnt down, it gave her a way to talk about the couple in the book and how their marriage is at the point of the book this is a couple dealing with the past a couple with as they say an empty nest,

They would have been leaving in three days. They’ll never be able to find something similar at such short notice, not this yeat, not in the circumstances. Without much expectation she enters her requests on a holiday apartment website.

No matches. She tries again on another site – with the same result.

Rahel goes to the website with the Alpine cabin. She clicks from picture to picture, from the geraniums in the window boxes to the small veranda with a view of the mountain range opposite, and back to the house, this time from a different angle. Then the stone basin by the well and the colourful wildflower meadow, and all of a sudden she can picture the blazing fire on the mountain. She sees animals fleeing, a column of smoke rising into a night sky studded with stars, and in the middle of it all Peter and herself, as if on a funeral pyre

The cottage is gone whwere now for them, the farm.

So when their Alpine cottage is burnt down in a fire at the last minute before they are due to go away. Rahel and Peter have to find another destination and go to a farm where, as a kid, Rahel spent many summers. She is a psychotherapist, and Peter, a professor, is one of those men struggling to cope with the modern world. This is a marriage that requires TLC. Grown daughters cause them problems when they visit them. Then, something Peter has said in his job has made him be seen as a transphobic. He is a man caught in the past. This is about when you lose touch with the youth, your wife, and your kids. It is a book about a man who is lost in time and in the West as they are both children of the East. This is the book’s point: what happens when your values are outdated and your children are Western? Your job is now Western.

He chose Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. At a castle people are celebrating a wedding that ends in a drama, while an errant planet passes threateningly close to the earth. When it speeds on its way, the danger seems to have been dispelled, but then it turns, heading straight for the earth. The collision cannot be prevented, and only the depressive Justine – the bride – is serene about the impending end of the world. The film concludes with the planet Melancholia hitting the earth, destroying it. Peter kept staring at the screen for minutes afterwards. The credits were finished by the time he snapped out of his torpor.

Peter reaction to this is maybe more than it seems mabye his world is being destroyed!!

I love subtle books. This is one of those books about a couple at that age when the world has changed just enough to make you seem out of time, even more so when you grow up in the old East German, and the world you live in now is like Wtrst germany values attitudes have changed. Peter is a typical male of his age if he was here he’d be a fan of Rowling and Farage I could see buying a daily mail and moaning about the world he lives in. Yes, this is a universal story of empty nest cou,le but what happens when the gap is between you and, like Rahel, she wants to light the spark, but Peter is maybe too far gone to get a spark from. This would make a great film. The tension between the couple would be perfect. The marriage in Children’s Act Falling Apart is a perfect example of two great actors. This is a tremendous two-handed film. A younger version of on golden pond in a way a couple trying to escape and find a new path as memories and the future collide. Can you think of any other books dealing with Empty nests and a marriage falling apart and how some men are just stuck in the past.

Winston’s score: A 3 down from Krien. I can’t wait for book number four. She is a must-read writer for me.

 

Tidal Waters by Velia Vidal

~ winstonsdad ~ 5 Comments

Tidal Waters by Velia Vidal

Columbian fiction

Original title – Aguas de estuario

Translator Annie McDermott

Source – subscription edition

For the last few years, I have been adding subscriptions as I get sent fewer books than I once did shame, as I only review books in translation. But my Charco subscription is one I wanted to do. They have brought out so many good books as I have 1500 reviews on the blog over the years I have been blogging I have seen the changes and how publishers like Charco have changed the horizons of what is read from Latin America, I had read a few writers from Columbia, but they were all male and none of them were writers of Colour. So when I saw this was one of the first books from an African American writer and a female writer, I knew it was one I had to read. I love her story. She had been a successful person, a TV presenter in Medina, when the chance came, and she took it to go back to her small home town, as she says, where the Pacific meets the Caribbean. Work against the local tide to get youngsters reading in the poorest communities. We all know the power of books.

What are you trying to do? Take up what little space in my heart wasn’t already yours?

Well, you’ve succeeded. You’ve filled my whole heart, you’ve won it all, by going out of your way to help us take Dayana to Medellín for her birthday. I’ve learned here that a lot of things that many people find quite ordinary, for others are a great gift. Ana wanted her daughter to take a plane for the first time, to see a city with her own eyes. You and various other friends made it possible.

The gift might seem to have been for other people, but deep down it was a great gift to me. Knowing I can count on you, knowing I can count on so many friends who have put themselves, their families and their resources at my disposal to help make this dream come true.

Did you know you’re all telling me you love me very much?

A sea of thanks.

Kisses and hugs,

Vel

One of her letter show her vibrant mood in some of the letters

The book is a novel form of letters from a fictional version of Velia writing to a friend about the time she left Medina and took the job Founding Motete her project in the Choco region, among the poorest of the five places she tries to shine a light with books and literature. Like her love of the ocean, her fluid letters see a woman battling but, as she does, has a huge sexual awakening by returning to her roots. As she pours her heart out in her letters, we never see the answers one imagines, As she deals with those whose life has always just been to work and not be touched by the culture, she struggles but carries on and finally grasps the minds of those kids she wants to bring literature to a melting pot of races and a place that has rural, sea rivers and hard-working folk but there is always the sea to wash her worries away.

Doing the accounts, paying the accountant, planning the projects, talking to other organisations, managing my time, not letting go of the chances to read or write. Sometimes I get scared. Then I remember that the best decision I’ve ever made was coming to Chocó and being able to see the children smile when we get off the bus with a bag full of books.

I remember the mothers who come over and hug me in the street, or the little hands that high-five me from a passing moped after someone aboard shouts,

‘See you, Seño Velia!’

How she touches those via her work in the project

I was touched by this epistolary work by a writer who shines a light on the struggles to bring the arts to those who often get missed. She was on a list of the 200 most powerful women on the BBC website and also took part in an essay collection in conjunction with the British Museum about artefacts from Latin America in their collection, I must try and get hold of this book at some point. This is a woman rediscovering her joy and herself both in her work and her personal life as she comes on fire in the letters it has a feel of hope and sorrow it covers a range of emotions and, like a lot of books, I have read from Charco, they have this habit of picking a small epic book that are more than the page count. Books that break barriers break new ground for the reader of their books. It is fair to say I like this book. This is one you just need to read. Have you read many female writers from Latin America and many writers of colour from Latin America?

Winston’s score – +A is one of the best epistolary books I have read.

My Favourite by Sarah Jollien- Fardel

~ winstonsdad ~ 4 Comments

My favourite by Sarah Jollien-Fardel

Swiss fiction

Original title – Sa préférée

Translator – Holly James

Source – Review copy

I was so pleased to get an email from an old PR connection about this book as Indigo Press has just brought some real gems out in the recent past, so this book was longlisted for the French Goncourt prize and won the Swiss version of the prize. I was also interested after reading it. One of the other prizes it won was a prize for books read by prisoners! Sarah Jollien -was born in a village like the main character in this book and fled to live in Lausanne; she is also a volunteer at a battered women’s society. She has also been a journalist for 30 years. This is her debut novel and multiple prize winner. The book is set in the 1970s in a small Swiss village in the mountains.

My dear friend. As we were leaving Mass, I’d heard those words, spoken by Dr Fauchère, whom we deferentially referred to as The Doctor’. The Doctor was one of the few people in our village back then who had a degree. That morning, Gaudin the butcher had given the Doctor a little bow on the church esplanade. Dr Fauchère interrupted his conversation to say: ‘Morning, my dear friend.’ How elegant those words sounded coming from his mouth. That warm smile, just the right amount of politeness and restraint. I saw how that ‘my dear friend’ gave the speaker an air of importance and made it clear to their interlocutor that they were not of the same rank. In a gentle, subtle way. So I decided to be bold and say it myself: ‘My dear friend.’ My father was not an educated man, but he had that instinct bad people and animals have.

She saw the Doctor as a man she could trust how wrong she was.

My only memory of the ’70s and Switzerland is Hedi, which we had on Tin the UK. This is the polar opposite of that romantic view of a mountain village. This is about the fear of silence when people can see what is happening but do nothing. Jeanne has grown up seeing both her sister and mother suffer at the hands of her father. So when he finally turns on her when she is 8 she decides she will go to the one man she seems to trust, and that is the village doctor, hoping with the power he has in the village of the one man with an education that people listen to she opens her heart about the violent attack of her father. Still, when he does nothing, her world looks set until she escapes to a boarding school and then later in life, after a brief return to the village, she finally gets to Lausanne a big city and feels invisible there as she recounts those years of her fathers abuse the effect the loss of a sister that was the fathers favourite that he did an unspeakable act. Her mother is caught in a catch-22 situation around her husband, and his violence is no escape. This is what you do about the monster at home.

Was my sister trying to frighten the life out of us all with her sudden death, or was it just to frighten him? Did she think she could give us a wake-up call to change things?

Or was it that everything – being rejected, the abortion, the child that was never born – had plunged her into such a black despair that death was the only thing that could put an end to the pain? I can’t accept that dying is the only way to stop suffering. It’s too absolute. It means we’ve lost against our father. I can’t accept that I was incapable of saving her.

The loss of her sister another victim of her father.

This is a brutal book about a violent man, a father and a husband from hell. This is about the silence we can see attached to domestic violence in a small village. Everyone seems to know what he did, but like the doctor, there is a wall of silence, which makes it even worse. This is a survivor’s tale. I was reminded of the violent father in This is England when reading this book. If you do not watch the series This is England, it captures domestic violence and asexual assault brutally. This is a powerful novella, and like the other book I have read from Indigo Press, it has a powerful voice behind the writing. It is a book about the darkest moments and how to escape, but do you ever escape that violence? Jeanne is in Lausanne, but there is still a feeling of what happened in the past. Have you read a book about domestic abuse?

Winston’s score – A – This is near the top of the year’s books so far.

The Full Moon Cafe by Mai Moochizuki

~ winstonsdad ~ 3 Comments

The Full Moon Cafe by Mai Moochizuki

Japanese fiction

Original title – 満月珈琲店の星詠み

Translator Jesse Kirkwood

Source – Review copy

This is one of the books I read for Women in Translation Month. I have been a fan of the quirky Japanese novels we have seen a lot over the last couple of years. So when I was asked to review this, I said yes as I like a little light read like this occasionally. Mai Mochizuki Has written several books.  she had a series called Alice in Kyouraku Forest series. This is the first of a new series of books set around a mystical cafe that only appears on a full moon. Mai was born and raised in Hokkaido and now lives in Kyoto, where the book itself is set. This is the first of a series of novels. Following the ever-moving Full Moon Cafe as it moves around Koyto, it helps some souls in that city.

I was living in some absurd fairy tale. Maybe I’d fallen asleep? I mean, this kind of thing only happened in dreams. Yes, this had to be a dream. Once I had convinced myself of that, I began to relax slightly.

In response to my question, the three cats exchanged a series of glances, then nodded vaguely.

‘You could say so, yes,’ said the tuxedo cat.

‘Though this isn’t our real form, either. said the Singapura, scratching behind his ear. Just as he was about to go on, the tuxedo cat cleared his throat loudly. The Singapura hastily clapped a paw to his mouth.

‘The Full Moon Coffee Shop has no fixed location,” said the master of the café. It might appear in the middle of a familiar shopping street, by the station at the end of the railway line or on a quiet riverbank.

And at this café, we don’t ask for your order? He put a paw to his chest and bowed cermoniously

As the cafee first appears on a street in Koyto

This book has a bit of everything in it: Cats; of course, Cats are a symbol of good luck in Japan. So when, every full moon, a cafe appears around the Kyoto area that is staffed by Cats and helps someone who in the past has helped a cat, so in turn, they get help. Every appearance also sees them feeding the person they help these make up some of the chapter headings. We meet five people in need of the cafe and the Cat’s help. This involves astrology and sometimes just a little logic and being at the right time at the right place. As we see each person problems solved.AS those clever cats show each other the path they need to take, this is a book that is maybe a perfect autumn read.

I couldn’t forget the cats’ words. After the Age of Pisces came the Age of Aquarius. The age of spirituality – and the internet. A time when the individual was truly respected. In an era like that, maybe I was lucky to be writing game scripts. Maybe this was actually an opportunity – one I shouldn’t let slide.

Even if I wasn’t allowed to include any breathtaking love scenes, I could still write wonderful stories. Instead of just aiming for average, I’d create the best side characters I could.

As long as they made people feel as if they were edging closer to a blissful romance with the main character, then as a writer, I’d have done my job.

And what did I need in order to do it well?

The cats words help a writer think clearer

I like this sort of lighter read; I think we all need a palate cleanser of a book every now and then. This is that sort of book fun. What more could you want than walking and talking cats to a coffee shop they run as well and then throw in astrology? You have a mix of things many people can’t resist. Imagine if Russell Grant and the Baron from Studio Ghibli Cat returned to film (I know he was in another of the films from the studio as a model of the Baron in the shop), opening a magical cafe that appears overnight on a full moon, This would be the book. It is a fun read. I read it in the evening, and for me, that makes it the perfect autumnal read. Sit with some coffee and maybe a dessert like those in the book and over an evening, as the nights draw in, find out the going ons in the Full Moon cafe. Do you have a series or type of book you read that is lighter or as I say a palate cleanser of a book?  Do you like quirky cat books?

Winstons score – B solid book Walking Talking Cats a bit of coffee culture and a feel-good factor what more could you want for a nights reading.

That was August 2024

~ winstonsdad ~ 3 Comments
  1. Alice , The Sausage by Sophie Jabes 
  2. Mammoth by Eva Baltasar 
  3. The Bridegroom Was a Dog by Yoko Tawada
  4. Brandy Sour by Constantia Soteriou
  5. Yell,Sam if you still can by Maylis Besserie 
  6. What Darknees was by Inka Parei 
  7. Clean by Alia Trabucco Zeran
  8. Living with our dead by Delphine Horvilleur 

I had a quieter August than expected. I have been off work with some problems and only returned this week. I just haven’t been focusing as much as I should. Anyway, I still reviewed 8 books. We started with a girl that just starting eating after a stray comment from her Father a quirky tale. Then, the final part of the Eva Baltasar trilogy shows a young woman heading to the country and trying to have a baby. Then a quirky novella about a teacher that makes uo a folktale that is made up but then fantasy and reality spilll over. A clever collection of vignettes based around the drinks people order and the first book on this blog from Cyprus. Then we have the dying Samuel Beckett in A Paris nursing home. Looking back on his life. Then, another old man in the German summer of 1077 looks back at the post-war years. Then a nanny is stuck in a room we see how she end up there. Finally, we have France’s leading rabbi, looking back at several funeral services she had been involved with. I visited seven countries this month and had one new publisher with Foundry edtions.

Book of the month

I loved the idea behind this book using drinks and mix a history of the drink and the place all set in a hotel in Cyprus. It was my first book from Cyprus. It covered the years after the country divide and the effect on the hotel the locals, and also the guests that come to the hotel and order the drinks.

Non book events

Well, I tried keeping track on Letterbox of what I have watched this month. I started with the Star Trek films; I also watched some seventies B movies, like Death Cruise, a murder mystery about insurance claims. I finished with Frances Ha, which I hadn’t seen before. This last week, we started watching Michael Keatoin in the series Dopesick, about a medication that got America addicted. It is compelling and eye-opening how easily it happened. I probably mention this next month. Amanda and I are halfway through it. The other series we watched was Two Stephen King One The Stand, which I had seen years ago but was interesting. It was the first version. Then we watched The Mist, which was creepy and had a few interesting twists that I didn’t see coming.

Next month

I have five books read for women in translation month to review, and then I will try and read a few chunkier books . I have noticed that most of my reading has been books under 300 pages. I keep buying larger books for quite a while and never get to them. So, I need to start throwing a few in the mix.What are your plans for next month ?