Month: October 2024

October 2024 Round up

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  1. Stay with me by Hanne Ørstavik
  2. A simple intervention by Yael Inakai
  3. Your Little Matter by Maria Grazia Calandrone
  4. Night of the Crow by Abel Tomé
  5. Count Julian by Juan Goytisolo
  6. The dead Mountaineer’s inn by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky
  7. Last summer in the city by Gianfranco Calligarich
  8. The Lime Works by Thomas Bernhard 
  9. Eden,Eden,Eden by Pierre Guyotat
  10. The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie 

I managed 10 reviews last month. I said a week or so ago that I may ease off a bit, but let’s see. This month I went from A danish novel set in Italy. Then, a Swiss novella is set in a creepy hospital doing a miracle op on a woman, which we see from one of the nurses’ points of view as she falls for a fellow nurse. Then, a woman traced her mother, who abandoned her, one of the most influential books I have read in recent years. Then a detective goes to solve a crime with his team on an island stuck in the past with two families running it. Then we stepped back for a collection of books first published in 1970. Count Julian sees a man look back on his beloved Spain with a bitter eye from North Africa. Then, a detective heads to a remote inn set in the mountains for nothing, it seems, but then something happens overnight. Then, a young man gets his heart broken in Rome. A man buys a lime factory and tries to write a great opus but never entirely does. Then kills his wife. Thedr a endless stream of sex and violence in a book banned in France. To end the month an affair in photographs from Nobel winner Anne Ernaux.

Book of the month

Your Little Matter is one of those books I read in translation for those gems worldwide. It is a tale of an abandoned child tracing her mother to work out why she was abandoned and to know a Woman she never fully knew ! A new publisher is the third book from Foundry Editions, which is a publisher worth trying.

Non book matter

Here is where I chatted about non-bookish things over the last month. There was a few rec0rds I got. I visited the local record fair and it was National albmu day. So I had an Idlewild and Prefab sprout album from the National Album Day selections. I got albums from the record fair over the month by Songs Ohio, Destroyer, Dead Can Dance. The Until the End of the World soundtrack (I had this on tape years ago and also a CD, but it is one of the best film soundtracks ) , Simon Raymonde’s Solo works and Mercury prize-winning English teacher. I also brought a new Paul Heaton Album and book for Amanda and me to see him next year in Sheffield. Then I also got the Wolfgang Press new album (More 4AD bands ) and then to be a bit with the hip kids Geordie Creeps’ debut solo album, the former Black Midi lead singer. A rather lot of records, more than normal, but I hit one record fair on a good day and brought more than usual. Series wise Amanda and I watch Queens Gambit both loved this not sure why it took us to now to watch it and are working through Maid on Netflix a series based on a new york times best seller of how hard it is to get by in the US with no money. We had a nice day in York, although it may have given me a cold looking at the ghost, and just two days ago, My wonderful Wife passed her driving test for the first time. I am so pleased for her, and it also means I haven’t to drive her to work and pick her up, which means I will have a chance to lie in and thus should be able to blog with the time and not get up early every day. How was your month outside books?

Next month

Well, it is German Lit Month, but there is also the New Month from Bellezza, Norway in November. I hope to review a couple of books. For each, I have read one book already. Let’s see what else I can find to read. I hope to read Robert Walser at some point, a writer missing from the writers I have read. I also have a great Book from a prize-winning writer, their latest novel, I’m reading, AND a Yiddish novel to read. What plans have you for next month ?

 

The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie

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The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie

French memoir

Original title – L’usage  de la photo

Translator – Alison L Strayer

Source- personal copy

I heard Ernaux and Modiano the two most recent winners of the Nobel prize s, work described as a whole piece like a greater universe. Each book is almost a part of great work in the same universe like a Star Wars universe or Marvel universe. These writers’ books populate a world of there now each piece a little bit of a great worker in Enraux world is her life she mines. Still, here she is helped by the photographs of her affair (she is very french with all these affairs, isn’t she just ). The pictures are by the French photographer and writer Marc Marie, with whom she had an affair more than twenty years ago. There is a sense this is the time photos cross from an object maybe to something. We all have phones full of pictures at this time and dig cameras with great storage, so when she starts to take photos of the aftermath of their meeting, the crumpled clothes, it is like a moment caught in Amber.

Clothing and shoes are scattered all the way down an entrance hallway with big pale tiles. In the foreground, on the right, is a red jumper or shirt and black tank top that appear to have been torn off and turned inside out in the same movement, resembling a low-cut bust with the arms cut off. A white label is clearly visible on the tank top. Further on is a pair of curled-up jeans with a black belt attached. To the left of the jeans, the red lining of a red jacket is spread out like a cloth for cleaning the floor.

On top of that, a pair of blue-chequered boxer shorts and a white bra, one of whose straps is stretching out towards the jeans. Behind, a men’s boot lies on its side next to a rumpled blue sock. Standing far apart and perpendicular to each other are two black high-heeled pumps. Even further away, protruding from under the radiator, is the black splotch of a jumper or skirt.

There first meet with a photgraph

 

Annie was just recovering from chemo and had lost hair so this affair, with its burning passion, serves in the photos as she is recovering. The pictures capture the affair and recovery both in a way , capturing that passion in the crumbled discarded clothes between them on the floor as she recounts each encounter with Marc when he found out she was doing this she had said he had thought of taking pictures it is like an animal marking it territory or a bird building a nest these clothes the symbol of the previous night’s passion of sex between the pair. The lingering heap of clothes. Capture how an affair burned brightly and is remembered in her usual open style.

A black beast with a huge head and an atrophied body ending in a heart-shaped appendage seems to be tumbling down a yellow wall, along with an object bent into a V shape, a boot twisted into a V, and a large desert rose, made of stone. Underneath is another boot, folded over on itself, which has landed on a pale floor. There is no perspective in this tableau, in which the yellow wall and white floor are extensions of each other. Everything appears flat, weightless, immaterial, caught in a long slow descent, like Don Juan as played by Michel Piccoli in the Marcel Bluwal film, whirling towards hell to the music of Mozart’s Requiem.

The last meeting has a darkness and sorrow in the opening her

Discussing her books is hard as we know what we are getting from her life. It is a chronicle of her life. Her open look at her life captures her so well. Photos, I remember an interview with Wim Wenders, a prolific photographer. He said,”I see a young man who impulsively took photos. I still recognise the impulses, and seeing that some have remained the same is a pleasure. Some, of course, got into my body, so I sometimes wonder who took those pictures. Was it my body – my thumbs and hands, my eyes – or was it a conscious act”

I thought of this when I read this book. He is a man who has taken thousands of pictures and is like Ernaux, someone whose whole life seems to be a project. His films all have a theme of the journey of life. I ve drift and now going drift again into another favourite artist of mine is, Robert Smith. Of course, with the new Cure album due, I’ve been thinking back on his lyrics as I read this book and, of course, the opening of his song Picture of You. “I’ve been looking so long at these pictures of you
That I almost believe that they’re real
I’ve been living so long with my pictures of you
That I almost believe that the pictures are all I can feel”

Maybe that is the feeling of the affair in the pictures—that ripping of clothes, that brief fling captured in the crumbled discarded clothes of the evening before the flotsam and jetsam of passion on the morning shore, so to speak. I hope you don’t mind. I’m trying to be a little more fluid in my reviews and digressive, so belt up, and let’s see where in my mind the reads I am reading take me!

Have you a view on Ernaux?

 

 

Day in York and blogging moving forward

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I visit York on sunday it was raining and wasn’t the best day to go as I have since got a horrendous cold. But I want to see a collection of ghost around york from wire that will be gone by the beginning of next month. so aMnada and I went to see them

I also visited Waterstones and got as couple of books. But this isn’t a book haul post. I have had a lot of time of work this last six months. We had a huger change around at work, lots new staff at my level. I hadn’t cope with this well. Added to that, Amanda had been in constant pain with a back problem and pain in both her wrists. This means she has been getting up and down a lot during the night for the last twelve months. Which has an impact on my sleep, and I take her to work, which means I wake up between 5-6 every morning. I work three or four longs a week at my job. Anyway, with this, I have just been for the last twelve months getting tired and tired. I need to loss weight but this is hard. When I’m constantly exhausted. So I have to cut back somewhere. I can’t afford any more time of sick. Amanda health isn’t going suddenly get better. We are slowly trying to get a second bed, etc, but we need to get wardrobes built in our room, which we will have done next month. So I have to find some space and the only thing I can do is cut back on my reading and blogging. The two go hand in hand. I have pushed myself to keep up with the postings I did many years ago. However, with my stats not being that high, I get 140 views a day on average, which is up this year. But seemingly a lot lower than other bloggers. So i am going to put the blog on the back burner this winter I will post a post here and there. But this will take me off the feeling of having to read for content, which is what it has felt like for the last few years. I need to take a breath relax. Sink into a book slower than I have been and just come back here probably every 7-10 days I hope to post a review. I hope that maybe in the new year, we will have a few things sorted. Hopefully, Amanda will be driving and not need me to take her to work. I can get a better sleep pattern and hopefully get my room sorted out to blog in as it is a little chaotic since we moved, and I need to sort a new book and my records in order, I want to get a new iMac to blog from. But none of this is possible when I am constantly fatigued, as I am at the moment. I hope less reading time will also help me get fit as I need to go back to the gym. Hopefully, in new year I’ll be back to blogging as I have but for now see you in a week or so

Eden,Eden,Eden by Pierre Guyotat

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Eden ,Eden,Eden by Pierre Guyotat

French fiction

Original title- Éden,Éden,Éden

Translator – Graham Fox

Source – Personal copy

I saw this on the list of books published in 1970, I bought it up a couple of years ago just as it had Michel Leris’s quote on the back, and I knew he was a leading intellect in France around this time. Well, when I looked a little more into this book, I found out it is much more than that it was Banned in France for sale to minors. This caused figures like Pasplinl, Satre, Beuys and Genet, to name a few, to sign a protest to that happening. It also led to the Nobel-winning writer Claude Simon resigning from the Prix Medicis when it lost out on the prize by a single vote. This book is of its time in many ways , of the style of writing and the events of the time, It is also hard to describe as a work. Given the sheer power of the way he set out the book to the reader, it is an assault on you, and it is just so full of words and events just happening constantly told in a single breath.

Khamssieh moaning: nauseated by workers’ jism mixed, bland, with saliva in mouth; wrinkled penis retracting into pubic fleece / ; date-picker’s other hand grabbing, squashing Wazzag’s hardening member against belly, palm hollowing pubis, orgasm – thread of blood-scented jism streaming, without spasms, out of glans – shining and crying through whole body of date-picker; youth rolling, fastened to whore, over strip of floor along counter, pulling member from between Wazzag’s buttocks, standing up, bare legs spread planted on one side, other side of rump of whore sprawling on belly, toes delving into hairs, under armpits; slow, stroking, with dusty heel, shoulder, neck, greasy curls over sticky nape, palpating balls against jism-spattered thigh; toes closing eyelids of whore against wood:

One of the pasages much the same all the way through just relentless at times

How to describe this book well, the book is set in a hinterland of Algeria in what may now be a sort of apocalyptic future at a whorehouse, as the war is all around them. The book is a massive nod to writers like Beckett, Joyce, and Burroughs. It is a single breathless splattering of words in fact when IO put a picture of it up a fellow book lover described it as like a machine gun of words as bodies, sex, violence and the world they are in blur into just a stream of words are never ending no gaps no real breath in the text itself as the sex of the whore house and the violence of the Algerian war which he had seen for himself.

Hamza, running back to camp, crossing through bunk-house packed with

simmering bodies, naked, half-naked,

sprawled out away from scorching partitions, opening bag, taking out vapotizer of Eau de Cologne, stuffing bottle into pocket, running back in long strides, running back towards cirque: nomad, lizard devoured, wiping lips with strip of veil spread over shepherd’s chest; shepherd seated between thighs of nomad, crunching scales of lizard’s tail, claws, tongue of youth protruding, thick, between teeth, to lick greasy fingers of nomad; Hamza crouching down, breathless, vaporizing, between thighs of shepherd, rag sheathing sexual cluster; nomad wrenching vaporizer from Hamza’s fist, caressing blue bottle, grey bulb, vaporizing skull of shepherd huddled against chest, placing lips bridled by veil onto perfumed skull; beneath rag, shepherd’s member twitching, stiffening; nomad laying hand over shepherd’s sexual cluster: abscesses bursting with hardening of flesh:

Again just a barage of words and images actions for the read to work through

As you see with the quotes, it is hard to capture what is happening. It is more a mass of emotions, sex,horror, violence, body parts and bodily fluids drifting over you as you read the book. This isn’t a read for the faint heart and is very much a book of its time in many ways. I think it is a cousin to Penolpe from Ulysses, where we see Molly Bloom sexually outbursting in one breathless cascade of words like this book. Beckett’s play Not I, which is after this book, has a similar feel of that breathless torrent of words of images of prevents in a way this would be served performed like Not I is that mouth and those torrent of words. But for me, the work it hit most was the Burroughs Red Night Trilogy, a book that came out after this, but I wonder if Burroughs had read this book or if it was just the fact he had spent time in North Africa and in the desert. I can see its part in the books of the time as I said at the start. It isn’t a book for everyone, but more for those who like a challenge and love stream of consciousness as a writing style. This is it at its most abstract, though. The other image I had when I finished the book was what if the cinema Pardiso had been a bookshop, not a cinema and the priest had cut out the violence and sex and the bookshop owner pieced those cutouts together, like in the film, had put them all together well this is that book it is like the worst piece of the most sexual and violent books you have read thrown into one book! Have you read this book? my final read for this weeks Club 1970

The Lime Works by Thomas Bernhard

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The Lime Works by Thomas Bernhard

Austrian fiction

Original title – Das Kalkwerk

Translator – Sophie Wilkins

Source – Personal copy

When I first read the list of books for 1970, I thought I read this, but I didn’t want to get a secondhand copy as they were a little pricey. I then saw it is available as a Kindle book which I rarely use so it meant I got use it I do have a couple of Bernhard’s I haven’t read on my shelves as I still thinking of doing another Thomas Bernhard week. This was his third novel, and alongside a play he had staged that year, he won the Georg Buchner Prize in 1970. I feel this had some of the pieces from later books, most of which I have read by him. It focuses on the line works and opens with a woman dead shoot and her brains all over the floor of the Lime Works.

If only he could get his book written before he grew too old, absolutely too old and unfit to write it, he is supposed to have said to Fro and to Wieser. The minute he got to his room he went to bed. But the inner restlessness into which he was driven by the outward quiet would not let him sleep even when mortally ex-hausted, and so he wandered all over the lime works, several times all over the lime works, and spent the rest of the night lying on his bed quite unable to fall asleep. Once you have passed that boundary line between fatigue and exhaustion, it is absurd to believe that you can fall asleep, absurd to try to sleep, to force yourself to sleep; you weren’t going to fall asleep. In-stead, he got the opposite of the hoped-for re-laxation, the serenity he meant when he dreamed of finding a quiet place to work; instead of being able to relax, he only grew increasingly restless, so restless that he inevitably broke his own rest by doing something or other that brought unrest into it.

We know he never quite gets to finish his book

The lime work then works to how that happened, and we meet the husband, Konard a man who has spent several years working on his scientific opus, a book called The Sense of Hearing (Odd I thought of the Herzog film of that time, the land of silence which came out a year after this book ). We meet his wife, the woman killed at the start of the book, but this is a grim world of a man who does nothing. He has spent twenty years writing or not writing the book whilst living in the Lime Works he brought with the last of his money. Add to this the locals to the lime works, and we have a slow-moving, menacing account of a man descending into a hell that could be rather like a factory that was also a concentration camp. We know little other than the ins and outs of their life and never described much of what the pair of them are like other than the wife being wheelchair-bound. A nod to his medical issues, maybe the whole atmosphere feels like a world collapsing on the two of them.

it. People don’t instinctualize any longer, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, mankind no longer instinctualizes. Aha, so that’s the idyll the Konrad couple have moved into, they may think, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, but in reality the Konrad couple, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, moved into quite the opposite of an idyll when they moved into the lime works.

The return to an idyll, they think. Compared with the lime works, everything else is idyllic, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, London is an idyll compared with the lime works, Wuppertal is an idyll; the ugliest, the loudest, the most malodorous place is an idyll in comparison. But even the surroundings of the lime works have been deliberately falsified into an idyll. An intelligent person arriving in the area, of course, will realize at once that the place is no idyll,

I cut it ioff there as the last word the lime r=works was no idyil thou ot was meant be capture a loty of what i meant about the place as a character in the book

 

This has at its heart the character that would go on to a stock character for Bernhard in Konrad, a man full of bile and hatred. Here it is both at the way his life has gone. There is a sense of inertia in his life twenty years of writing a book that hasn’t moved on in the two decades he has tried to write it . Then, his wife echoes Bernhard’s own medical issues that, in the end, would see his life cut short. Then there is the place itself. The Lime Works is a grim-sounding place he has brought that, like the pair at the heart of the book, seems to draw out the worst of those around it, like the ghosts of those who had worked and maybe even died there are there dragging those in the present down weighting them down if that makes sense. This is a tense book of a couple falling apart a man losing his grip on the world. I still have Frost his debut to read, but this seems like a writer who has honed the Konrad character in his later books. This is like the Mark One Bernhard male character soon to be replaced by the Austrian-hating Mark Two of the later books her would write like The Correction and Woodcutters. A great fourth book for this week’s club1970! Have you read this or any books by Bernhard?

 

 

Last summer in the City by Gianfranco Calligarich

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Last Summer in the City by Gianfranco Calligarich

Italian fiction

Original title –  L’ultima estate in città

Translator – Howard Curtis

Source – Personal copy

I am always wary of the translated book that is a summer success. A beach reads a book you see on the list of books to read and the end-of-year list. I am wary as they often seem to be more commercial fiction but I had see this and that when he wrote it one of the writers that championed his cause was Natalia Ginzburg, a writer whose books I have loved, and I thought, yes, it may be popular but it is a book about Rome in the summer what is not to like9I’ve never been to Rome, I am the original armchair traveller in my reading ). He then chose to go into Film and television screenwriting. He published short stories many years later with much acclaim. The time of this book varies I had it done as a book from 1970 and over place it mention 1073, I’m assuming he wrote it in 1970 and it maybe came out on a broader audience in 1973. I can see him being a screenwriter. This book is rich in place and character that it would easily make a film as we follow Leo.

The wind was rising by the time I got to an apartment block surrounded by a damp, rustling garden. It was only then, perhaps because of the smell of the wet earth, that it occurred to me I should have brought Viola some flowers, but it was too late now, and I was so hungry I could barely stand. So I kept on, confronting the final test, an elevator that throughout the ride up emitted a menacing drone, as if complaining about my weight. Reaching the third floor, I quickly tidied my hair and rang the doorbell. Viola appeared. She looked surprised. Before I could say anything, she let out a little hiccup and burst into irrepressible laughter. I must have looked like a flood victim to her. “Come in, Leo,” she said, taking me by the arm. “God, how happy I am to see you. How did you manage to find us?”

As I say he capture the feel of the city well in the book

The book focuses on summer and our main character, Leo, as he has left his home in Milan and headed to Rome. He hangs out in Rome with a friend who is a drunkard but has a rich American wife . Leo has an air about him. He wants to live the high life but is failing a man who wants to be more than his parts (don’t we all, though). But Rome isn’t Milan; the summer is there, and he is struggling. He has friends who help him sell him an old ALFA, which adds to his wanting to be a specific type of man in the eyes of others. He then meets Arriane, a woman who, in the way she is described, feels a little like Italian Lucy Honeychurch. The two fall for each other, but it is that deep spark of flying love that either caries on and smoulders or dies. This is a case of the latter as we see the fall rise and ultimately the fall of Leo over one summer in Rome.

The city was caressing us. Gradually, it became less difficult to think about Arianna. Basically, nothing irreparable had happened, Nothing irreparable ever happened in this city — sad things, maybe, but not irreparable ones. And anyway, if I was going to leave town, I wanted to see her. At this hour, she must be in Eva’s store, playing solitaire.

“Let’s get the hell out of here, I said. “I know some people nearby who could offer us a drink.”

“Leftovers” he said, “nothing but leftovers.”

Graziano pulled himself to his feet and followed me up the steps until we got to Trinità dei Monti, then we took the street that went downhill, leading to Eva’s store. We climbed the front steps, holding on to the railing, then pushed the glass door. A bell rang as it opened. The humorist was there reading something aloud, along with the fashion model, Livio Stresa, and Paolo, that journalist with the special way with women, sitting next to Arianna. I was greeted as if it were the most natural thing in the world for me to be joining them.

He is so caught by the Arianna

This has the feel of a classic story from maybe years before it came out. It did for me anyway. Hence  It is compared to Catch in the Rye and Great Gatsby, but neither is near the mark. This is the flip of Ginzburg. It is a male view of those years in the late seventies in Roma, with glamour and darkness, and we see both in this book. For me, Leo has wandered of a Tom Waits song or some other ballader of those men that have broken dreams. If Waits was Italian, would he write a song called “A Letter from a Friend in Rome ?”A man who wants to be in with the crowd but never is fully in the crowd. The other character in the book is the city in the summer and how it is to be in Rome when you are just another face in the crowd. Jacqui said she found it evocative and atmospheric. It has that it captures a place and a type of man. The sort of fallen man on the edge of Wodehouse novels or a side figure in Waugh, if that makes sense. Not quite in the money but likes to think he can be, and then he finds love, but even that ends up flawed. A flawed summer of a flawed man? A nice third stop on this week’s 1970 club!

 

The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky

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The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky

Russian fiction

Original title – Отель «У Погибшего Альпиниста»

Translator – Josh Billings

Source – Personal copy

As I have seen then, I brought some books from this Melville house, the Neversink library series. So when this turned up on the list of books that had been published in 1970. In one of those strange connections that seem to happen when you read many books, maybe. I signed up a few weeks ago to Klassiki, a streaming service focused on Eastern European and Central Asian films/ So. Last week, they had a series of new films on this book in its film form, which was one of the films they had added. The Brother’s books have served well for film. They were the leading lights of the Soviet Science fiction scene. But their books have also made some great films. The best-known is Roadside Picnic, which was made into the cult film Stalker. I have that on my shelves to read at some point and always welcome a chance to rewatch Stalker.

The owner didn’t respond. His eyes were glued to the table.

There was nothing out of the ordinary on it, except a large bronze ashtray, in which a straight-handled pipe lay. A Dun-hill, I guessed. Smoke rose from the pipe.

“Staying..” the owner said eventually. “Well, why not?” I didn’t know what to say to this, so I waited for him to go on. I couldn’t see my suitcase anywhere, but there was a checkered rucksack with a bunch of hotel-stickers on it in the corner. It wasn’t my rucksack.

“Everything has remained as he left it before his climb,” the owner went on, his voice growing stronger. “On that terrible, unforgettable day six years ago.”

I looked dubiously at the smoking pipe.

“Yes!” the owner cried. “There’s HIS pipe. That’s HIS jacket.

And that over there is HIS alpenstock. ‘Don’t forget your al-penstock, I said to him that very morning. He just smiled and shook his head. ‘You don’t want to be stuck up there forever!’ I shouted, a cold premonition passing over me. ‘Porquwapa, he said—in French. I still don’t know what it means.”

“It means ‘Why not?”” I said.

Even on his arrival it is a little odd

The book isn’t sci-fi as such for the most part, but it does. Ultimately, it is like they tried to write a crime novel but then remembered they were sci-fi writers. The book follows Inspector Peter Glebsky, who has been sent to see if a crime has happened at a remote hotel called the Dead Mountaineers Inn. He is also planning to ski and spend time there. The hotel is remote and has a cast of characters. Any Agatha Christie novel would be happy with a hypnotist, physicists, gamblers, strangers, and a huge dog. But as the day moves on and it becomes night, the inspector might have more to deal with than it seems at first, as the hotel is more than it appears on the surface, and strange things start happening. Will he be able to put it all together? The bodies tied up, what has happened to some of the gamblers, and will they all escape the hotel?

“The bottom line is that amazing things don’t just happen in our inn,” Du Barnstoker said. “One has only to recall, for example, the unidentified flying objects..”

The kid pushed its chair back with a crash, stood up and, still munching on the apple, made its way to the exit. Well I’ll be damned-for suddenly I seemed to be watching the slender figure of a charming young woman. But as soon as my heart softened the young woman vanished, leaving behind her, in the most obscene way, a brash and impertinent teen-ager: the kind that spread their fleas over beaches and shoot drugs in public bathrooms. Was it a boy? Or, damn it, a girl?

I had no idea who to ask, and meanwhile Du Barnstoker was prattling on:

Early on he skis and then he finds maybe a clue to things l,ater on in the book?

 

I loved this book. As I said in my post the other day, I don’t like crime novels; well, that isn’t true. I like crime books that play with the genre, and this does. I t has those nods to the classic crime of the like pof Agatha christie a selection of characters gathered together. The remote hotel and the ski remind me of the Poirot story The Labours of Hercules, which saw him cut off like Glebsky in a remote ski resort. The book then has some other touches, and we see it the way they wanted us to know the book as a crime novel. But then it turns on a few things later in the book and you see the story isn’t the way you saw it in the boo. I didn’t help myself reading half the book and then seeing the film where there is some pieces cut and the story is slightly different on the film to make it work as a film. But it is a book that would;ld appeal to crime and sci fans. A great second book for this turn of the club years a book of its time 1970. The film is worth watching if you can catch it. It is no stalker, but it is still a very quirky seventies-styled piece of soviet cinema. Have you read any books by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky?

Count Julian by Juan Goytisolo

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Count Julian by Juan Goytisolo

Spanish fiction

Original title –  Reivindicación del conde don Julián

Translator – Helen Lane

Source – Personal copy

One of the events I love is Simon and Karen’s twice-yearly clubs, where we are all encouraged to read books published in a certain year. I always buy too many books each year, and this is the case this time, but I will not mention unread books. But this was the first of the books I read for this round of the club 1970. This jumped out of the list of books as I had reviewed Marks of Identity several years ago, which is the first book of this trilogy. I had also found a copy of Juan the Landless, the last book, so when the chance came up to review this and thus, at some point, get to Juan the Landless, I couldn’t say no. As I was reading this last week, I was brought back to the blog’s early years when Juan Goytisolo was a regular name mentioned around the Nobel, which was announced last week. Still, as I am writing this, it is tomorrow. He ended up on the list of writers alongside his brother of writers that should have won. Nobel, that alternate list of writers. I would love to make a list of those writers one time. So, as I listen to the Door play Spanish Caravan, we have a book like many of his books written in Exile, but as much as that is about the heart of his homeland, he so wants to see change.

the life of an émigré of your stripe is made up of a discontinuous series of events that are very difficult to assemble into a coherent whole: though it no longer enjoys its former prestigious international status, the city is still a melting pot for all sorts of exiles, and its inhabitants appear to be living in an uncertain present that is very enjoyable and full of material riches for certain people and a time of hardship and austerity for the rest: a test tube for complicated chemical experiments involving elements of the most disparate origins and background: cautious bourgeois, nobles mournfully remembering the past, suspect petty tradesmen, dishonest speculators, examples of all the infinite gradations and subtle shadings within the very complex, multicolored, prodigious family of sexual flora: ingredients that are juxtaposed but never mingle: like geological strata formed by centuries

The Narrator like Goytisolo himself was is in Exile in North Africa

 

It is difficult to describe this book. In part, it is about a man in North Africa, Tangiers, looking back at how he ended up there. But as the back cover describes, this book is like Finnegan’s Wake of the South! So we have a book that is rich in words in culture, in ideas shot through with a trace of bitterness and longing for me; this is a book about what the Portuguese call Saudade. That yearning and longing is what is at the heart of this book. Goytisolo picks Count Julian as the figure like Franco, who was at the crossroads of his country’s history. Added to that a rfage at what his country is this is a book of extremes from Seneca to queens there is very few people that s[=don’t get filled with his bile and wanting for a land he wanted. As he tore apart the fascist state, his country had become piece by piece and dreamt of a new world.

Seneca? yes, Seneca

that is to say, his portrait in the Prado Museum

if not a gypsy’s head, then that at any rate of a retired torero, standing on the threshold of old age listening

it used to be said of the famous Lagartijol that he talked like Seneca, and Nietzsche called Seneca the toreador of virtue: as for Manolete, his life and his art, his entire career, his philosophy so eloquently summed up in the proverb what’s bred in the bone will come out in the flesh, are fed by the eternal springs of the Senecan tradition at its purest: the family line of Seneca, resembling a river at times disappearing underground like the Guadiana, at times meandering across the land at surface level, at times swelling to a mighty, majestic stream, has never died out in Spain: the stoic acceptance of the fate of the nation is 1 A celebrated matador of the beginning of the century.—-It.

He picks various Spanish figures to talk about.

This is one of those books that is virtually impossible to review as it is more a piece of art than a prose piece a man looking at despair at the land he loves and now hates so much. I said Saudade in other parts, it is a sort of Saudade. It is a man wrestling with being in exile, those tortured ideas and dreams broken. I love his words pl, and it cover over my head. Helen Lane has done an excellent job of bringing what must have been a complex book into a readable state in English. As he dives from here to there back and forth in history from Myth to fact. All this as he is in Tangiers and all that involves.

 

Night of the Crow by Abel Tomé

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Night of the Crow by Abel Tomé

Galician fiction

Original title – a noite do corvo

Translator – Jonathan Dunne

Source – Review copy

I have long been a fan of thePress Small stations, run by the translator Jonathan Dunne. I first came across him with the books of Manuel Rivas he had translated, which, early on in this blog, were my favourite books I read. So when he kindly sent me three of the newer titles, I was excited. This one jumped out as I don’t read many crime novels, but for me, this had some classic crime novel traits Abel Tomé is both a Journalist and a welder, it said on the rear cover ( I read that and immediately thought of the Smiley quote it is such circumstances that produces certain people) He is known for his ability to take readers to new settings and the attendant myths. This book is a perfect example of that!

“It was the night of the crow. I heard it sing and jump with the full moon on top of the thatched roof.

After that, it went away, but carried on singing.”

“Singing? Since when does a crow sing?”

Lúa looked at me. This didn’t stop the old woman picking up on the irony.

“You know what I mean, inspector. It was the night of the crow. I’m sure of it. And when the crow sings at that kind of time, it’s for only one reason. The premonition of death. That’s right, death.”

I hated all of that. Superstition. The divine. Miracles.

“Thanks be to God.” Something beyond. Beyond? Where?

What a pile of nonsense! The old woman dressed in

mourning for twenty years, talking of crows that presage death. In Galataz, people leave whatever small change they have in the church’s basket.

The island is steep in Myths and the old tradtions as well !

I said this had classic crime novel traits. Well, we have a family of four found dead on a house next to a lighthouse on an island that has two prominent families, and the island itself can be self-governing. In addition, the police have to call in to solve the crime. The police inspector called in is a man haunted by the loss of his wife. He ends up butting heads with the locals as the island has its own way of doing things. Inspector Goncalves is handed the case and gets his two assistants to meet him on Gothard Island. Pierre, a sex addict who chain smokes, and Lua, who has a father with Alzheimer’s. he is the one member of the police who has a connection through his family to the island. The crime of the death of the schoolteacher and his family lead the team into the heart of the island and the community divide y the family and also the laws like they still have the death penalty and how a trial would run shock the police. It seems Gothard is stuck in the past and hasn’t changed its legal system since the Middle Ages. This crime novel sees them dealing with everything on the island as much as solving the crime. It is more than just murder and links to events in the town they are from

Rowan Faol lived in the north of Gothard, in a kind of luxury residential development with about fifteen houses. The strange thing is some of the houses belonged to big shots from Beth. On the island, they could enjoy some privacy. They paid the chancellor to drive away those journalists who stick to famous people’s butts.

Celebrity magazines and the like. The truth is in that place there was lots of discussion about the future of the city. I always imagined them sitting at a round table, discussing ways of earning more money at the expense of Beth’s naive inhabitants. An epidemic, the threat of economic crisis, a new law…

One of the people theymeet from one of the two main famlies the Faols and the Carthaigs !

What caught my attention about this book is the setting, the Island of Gothard, which reminds me of places like the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man, where bits of the old feudal system are still around on the island. Add to that, the two main families. Then, the secrets of the island’s two main families, the three main officers, all have their own burdens, from constantly looking at the females of the islands to Lua’s own connection to the island. Then add the four dead bodies, and you have the making of what is an excellent gem of a novel. It is what made Agatha Christie’s books work well. Islands were one of her favourite settings for a novel. Then, the classic incoming police officers clashing with the locals is a common theme of great crime fiction. Then, he throws in a local leader who wants to have his fingers in the case and wants it done his way. I said I hadn’t read any crime novels, but this was the first of two I read in the last couple of weeks. Both twist the genre. Do you like crime novels that are more than just a crime novel like this?

 

 

Han Kang wins the Nobel

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Han Kang is a South Korean author known for her poignant and thought-provoking works that explore themes of identity, trauma, and the human condition. Born on November 27, 1970, in Gwangju, South Korea, she gained international acclaim with her novel “The Vegetarian,” which won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016.

Her writing often blends elements of the surreal with deeply personal narratives, reflecting the complexities of life in contemporary Korea. Other notable works include “Human Acts,” which delves into the Gwangju Uprising, and “The White Book,” a meditation on loss and memory. Han Kang’s literature is characterized by its lyrical prose and emotional depth, establishing her as a significant voice in modern literature. I love this winner. This book touched me so much. She wasn’t on my radar as a winner, and it is great to see an Asian winner and a female writer win. I am also pleased for Deborah Smith her English translator, that has done so much for Asian fiction over the last few years

Your Little Matter by Maria Grazia Calandrione

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Your Little Matter by Maria Grazia Calandrone

Italian Memoir

Original title –  Dove Non Mi Hai Portata

Translator- Antonella Lettieri

Source – Personal copy

I saw Foundry editions online and ordered their first three books as they appealed to me. They are doing books from around the Mediterranean as reflected in each of the cover designs for each book reflects some from each country’s culture. This book is from the Italian writer Maria Grazia Calandrone. An Italian poet, journalist and tv host. She also works with prisoners and schoolchildren doing poetry workshops. This is her fist book to be translated to English, The book was a huge hit when it came out in Italuy and won prizes and spent weeks on the bestseller lists. In a way this is a book about those poor woman in Italy that haven’t ever had a voice people like Maria own Birth mother this is her story and how as a baby at 8 months she was abandon at the Vila Borghese by her mother. She was adopted and has written another book about her adoptive mother, but this is the story of Lucia and what brought her to abandon and then take her own life.

Of my mother, I only have two black and white photo-graphs.

Apart, of course, from my own life and some biological memories that I’m not sure I can tell apart from suggestion and myth.

I am writing this book so that my mother might become real.

I am writing this book to tear my mother’s smell from the earth. I am exploring a method for those who have lost their origins, a mathematical system of feeling and thought – so complete as to revive a body, as hot as the earth in summer and as firm.

I am starting from what I have, the two photographs that portray her, in the order in which they appeared in my life.

The first

was taken on her wedding day, Saturday, 17 January

1959. Lucia is twenty-two, she is dressed all in white and she is not smiling.

The starting point is two old b&w pictures of her Mother

Maria sets about trying to find out more about her mother and her birth father to piece together the bits. What she does is build up a tale in little vignettes of how Lucia, her mother. A woman did something not many women did in those years as it was illegal. Divorce was illegal. Even leaving the marital home would have meant she was sent to Jasil, so she left her parents-in-law when she did all this. Her marital bed was separated from the in-laws bed by a white cotton sheet. This is a hard rural side of Italy, where the world hadn’t changed, and Lucia had left and fallen for an older married man. Although imperfect, everything is broken when this Builder, Guiseppe, has to go to Africa as Il Duce fought for his piece of Africa. So she finds her self on the run with a child a partner hundreds of m, miles away. She tried to defy all around them by setting up a home together, but with him gone, the world around her fell apart. It is almost as if Maria looked at her mother and those times. The doors were all closed as her world dropped into despair. Shwe uncovers the fallen woman’s story of the country that hid or, just like this, let these women suffer and die.

When they betroth her, Lucia runs away. Luigi, her fiancé, is the village buffoon; they call him Gino or Centolire: like the emigrant in that old song, he too is infected with a childish American dream, even though he is a thirty-one-year-old bachelor lost in his inner world. Who knows what kind of elsewhere Luigi dreams of, what kind of life inconceivable here… He certainly has no interest in women, he is the laughing stock of the village children:

“You’re not a real man!”

However, he owns the piece of land next to the Galantes.

Tall and lanky to the point that, when he rides his donkey, his feet drag on the ground, he is a handsome man with sharp features and a chiselled jaw. Gino went to school until the end of third year and rumour has it that he is completely henpecked by his mother and sister

Her Husband Luigi and his family were to much for her

I absolutely loved this book; it is heartwrenching and opening and follows Maria’s journey to discover their mother. She never knew her Father and didn’t know how they met her mother’s life in the village. It is also an account of other women like her mother who have no one to tell their stories of being marginalized in a country where divorce is banned and even living separate lives isn’t allowed. This is a perfect example of why I like small presses. Yes, this was a best seller in Italy, but it had not been picked up by a relatable story. We heard of many an abandoned baby many years ago. This fills in what happened after but also what can lead a parent to do that act. Then take their own life, she drowns; Maria seven finds out how she’d looked after this and how the body blows up with gas in the water. I like the vignette style of the book as she pieced the stories of her family bit by bit over time, and everyone she met told her a little more from the pictures in the book as well. Have you ever read a book about an abandoned baby or their mother?

Nobel thinking 2024

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I had said I wasn’t going to do a Nobel post but I have bowed as Grant did yesterday. I felt I threw my two penneth in for what it is worth these days. I am going to mention fiver writers, but I am picking ones I have read, I’m Beiung fun this year as I think I going to pick names not mentioned elsewhere.

Alain Mabanckov

I think we have mentioned a couple of names from Africa for the prize for the year. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o top of that list. I know of the younger writer Scholastique Mukasonga, who is mention most for the Nobel, but I have always loved the way Alain can mix magic realism, realism and humour and pathos in his writing.

Mathias Enard

I think he is starting to get mentioned he is a writer that seems to change style book after book and another win for Fitzcarraldo ? maybe to soon as there has been a couple of french winners in recent years.

Jon Kalman Steffanson

Has capture modern and recent past in Iceland in such a poet and dark way at times. OK Fosse won so another Nordic win may be a while away but I think it is thime he is in the talking for the Nobel he has been up for th Nordic literature prize three times and was also up for the Booker international.

Peter Nadas

I know for most people iof it is going be a writer from Hungray these days Laszlo Krazsnahorkai has the edge.But for me Nadas has produced one masterpiece in Parallel stories a book so wide in scope it captures the cold war in central europe add to that his huge two volumme meoir i have sitting on my shelves to read at some point. A lesser known name but for me Nadas just edges it.

Andres Neuman

I loved Traveller of the century , I maybe haven’t read many of his other books I wish I had got to more of them , he is a gem of a writer and his recent boook is about his son. I could mention Cesar Aira9the guys from Mookse podcast be happy they love him|)

I ve had some fun with these five maybe they are more choices for the next decade or so! I may ndo a more focused post next year but I just want to throw a curve ball of five names outside the usual list

I will mention just a few other names often mention and two w=riter I long hoped would win

Laszlo Krasznahorkai – I am a fan of his but I just like see Nadas win

Alexis wright – I have to read yet to read her, I have Praiseworthy on my shelves like the other Australian writer often mention Gerald Murnane , I just haven’t got to either of these , I should have by now!

Norbert Gstrein- I always like a left field odd wqriter in the betting and this year this writer has been in the lower end of the betting I have read one book by him.

Can Xue – Another name near the top of the lkist in recent years , I have read just a book from over the years. I thought i reviewed a couple oh well.

The two I have championed before Antonio Lobo Antunes and Cees Nooteboom both long overdue the nobel but I think there time is gone maybe which is a shame

 

 

 

 

A simple intervention by Yael Inokai

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A  simple intervention by Yael Inokai

Swiss fiction

Original title – Ein simpler Eingriff

Translator – Marielle Sutherland

Source – subscription book

I am back to the latest book from Peirene and a book from a coming Swiss writer, Yael Inokai; this is her third novel and ias the first to be published in English (don’t get me started on publishing books in the order they came out ) so we have a couple more books at some point. She has won several prizes, such as the Swiss Literature Prize and the Anne Seghers Prize (this book won the prize). This book is one of those books that have themes about females getting operated on by men. What medicine can do, love, and what happens when the world you are in is far different than it seems at the start of the book. It has been compared to Attwood and Ishiguro for making a dystopic tale.

The brain is a map. Everything I am is located there. I grew into my profession with this image in my head. It made sense. Tumours crush optic nerves, leading to blindness.

Neurological diseases erode people’s memories, their lan-guage, their motor skills, little by little, until their hands can’t even keep a grip any more. These diseases can be located. Why should it be any different with psychological disorders? Why shouldn’t we be able to remove these too, and release people into a life worth living?

It took no time at all to complete the intervention. We were usually in theatre no longer than an hour. It was simple, and like everything simple, it had taken a long time to develop and refine. The right tools, the right hands that knew how to use the tools, the right voices to guide the procedure. And the failures, of course. No one liked to talk about those. But failures drove development.

The op helps people cope it says !

The book is set in an unnamed town in Switzerland. We meet a nurse who works at a state-of-the-art hospital and performs special operations to free people of their psychological problems. We see this all through the eyes of Meret; she loves her job and is a rising star in the hospital, so much so that she has been given the job of aiding those in the operating theatre to make sure the patients go through the op ok. But the two grow close when a new nurse, Sarah, is in the dorm. The only problem is Sarah questions the op that in some ways looks pretty similar to the old-fashioned lobotomy, and it is strange it is mainly female patients in for this treatment and the outcomes it can have. So when an operation on a patient called Mariella goes horribly wrong, she starts to question her job, and the world around her changes. It is how this procedure has dealt a blow to one woman and made the other wary, and the one between them is now questioning her own part in all this. There is some hope with a wonder drug that may help, but it answers: is this the way to treat mental health?

I waited for her. Sometimes I lay in bed in our room and waited for her.

I’d always tried to bundle together my days off to give me enough time to travel home. This didn’t always work out. Sometimes I had the odd day left over – not enough to make the trip.

Once I began sharing a room with Sarah, I stayed in bed longer than usual on these days. I wanted to see her, exchange a glance, a few words. I wanted to know she really existed, the woman who lived in this room without being here. The more time that passed after our first encounter, the more I seemed justified in doubting it had happened at all.

When Sarah moves in she is drawn to her

I love the fact it tackles the question of how we treat mental health. It is much easier to talk about one’s mental health issues. I think most people struggle with their mental health, and it shows those who need meds and maybe life hasn’t been kind. But will this one procedure work, and why is it just a woman seemingly having the op. I was reminded of the doctors that in the fifties and still some places would do a lobotomy in seconds, not gathering the long-term horrors it would incur. It has a love story at its heart but also how women are treated by medicine. I think we’d all love a simple op that could sort out our mental health issues, but there is no such cure. One must question why the op is so popular, who is getting the treatment, the moral questions around that, and how love can change people’s view of their world. It has a feel of what could become something to make a dystopic world without ever feeling too unreal in how it is portrayed. Do you have any books that deal with Female mental health issues? Ill add the cover soon it wasn’t let me up load it at the moment

 

 

Stay with me by Hanne Ørstavik

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Stay with Me by Hanne Ørstavik

Danish fiction

Original title – Bli hos meg

Translator – Martin Aitken

Source – subscription edition

I am a huge fan of Hanne’s earlier books. I have reviewed Love and The Blue Room by her before. I had a strange thing when I picked this up the other day. It was as though other books in my TBR pile had dripped down into this book a violent father I had come across a few weeks ago in My Favourite and then a woman in her fifties like the main character in the last book I had read had read a point in her life where she is going be alone this is a widow that then takes a younger lover.

They never touched each other, caresses, there was no tenderness between them. Mamma thought Pappa was senti-mental, pathetic, pitiful, and at the same time she was afraid of him, afraid to death, there’d been that business with the axe out in the fields in the snow, in the middle of the night, Pappa had been drinking home-made vodka (so Mamma said, he went mad, ran wild and jumped over the stone wall, I can see it in my mind’s eye, over the wall in one leap, in the snow, so young and strong and lithe he must have been then, Pappa, younger than M is now, thirty-three or thirty-four, but now Pappa tells me it wasn’t like that at all, he hadn’t touched a drop, and he hadn’t gone mad either, the axe part had been misunderstood, he hadn’t been going for anyone but had taken the axe with him to use as a gavel, like in court, to emphasise something, a standpoint

The memory of her father and the axe

We live in the age of the unnamed narrator. We meet a Norweigan writer in Italy just as she has lost her husband a year before, and then she sets out on the dating scene again and falls for a man who is seventeen years younger than her. This is one of those c connections that is explosive; the connection is intense. It is like the pull of a powerful magnet, and what happens when you try to pull apart a magnet for the attraction? There has to be a counter effect to that, and this is when her younger lover a plumber by trade has an other side appears a darker side that then in a way awakens a memory of her own past He Papa a violent drunkard of a man. A memory of him with an axe and the outcome of that. Our narrators is also writing a story of a Norweigan designer living in The us and with her husband so when n the street, mistrust and horror that follows the violence she had seen when younger and again with her younger lover it questions what love is like Orstavik has done in her other books.

The days that follow – he’s so quiet. You’re so quiet, I say, and he musters a smile, as if he’s pleased and ever so slightly proud that I’ve asked, about him, the person he is, doesn’t he know I’m always interested in the person he is, only now I’m asking in order to draw him out towards me, towards us. You don’t know me yet, he says, the person I am, my caratteraccio, and he looks at me. His bad temper, okay, but I’m not really listening, and imagine anyway that his softness will come out stronger, its the softness that’s most important, truest, it’s what we are, we’re the nakedness at our core,fragile

When you see a little of his temper maybe a ripple to the past is awakened

What happens when there is a moment when the dream romance turns sour and you see the real face of your younger lover, and it is the same face you saw as a young child in your father. Does history repeat itself? Had the younger man part of what her mother maybe saw in her father? Does fear fall down through generations? Hanne captures the feeling of love crumbling into fear and something much darker, as well as the echoes of one’s past. I was reminded of the rages I saw of my stepfather, a man with many issues who was extremely violent to his own kids. That fear never leaves you and also makes you wary. I question how the same mistakes can fall down through time. But also, what is love? Is it passion because the passion at the star is passion, but is that love? I feel our narrator had love. When you lose it, how hard is it to find it again? At fifty years old, setting sail again on the sea of love can be a really choppy trip when you meet a man who turns out to be a Tempest for her. Have you read any of her books over the years ?