Month: November 2024

An oxfam trip

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I love to visit our Oxfam. I may go twice a week, but unfortunately, we don’t have a bookshop, just a regular store, but it can turn up some real gems. So when Amanda and I headed to town, I wasn’t sure what would turn up as I had only been a few days earlier, so when I found four great books today, it was a real turn-up for the books as I had only been in a few days earlier. But the book gods had looked down and said you need these gems on your shelves, I found two and Amanda saw two for me.

Now, the two I found would be ones on my long, long list of books to get. The first is Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow, a tale of a mother and daughter who wander around Tokyo looking at art and talking weather horoscopes and clothes as one would in Tokyo, a city on my list of places I want to go most in the world who knows one day Amanda. I may get there/ Then Another book on my trip around the works of Cesar Aira. The proof was one of the books from him I hadn’t got. There is a number I need to get, and when I see them over time, I will be getting them as I want to read all his books over the coming year. I feel that the more you read from him, the clearer the picture of the bigger view of the world he has as a writer. I had hoped for a few more gems as they were on the first part of the shelf, but I had no such luck. There is nothing else in the fiction. Now Amanda loves a little bit of true life and was looking through the biography section, she will look at books she thinks I may like as she says usually an unusual name will be the ones she may show me the book and today she found two gems. For me

Amanda showed me the Pamuk, which has been on my list of books to find at some point, and his memoir of Istanbul and his books around the city he lives in are always an ode to the chaos and world that is Istanbul, I had this down significantly as the collection of his illustrated journals has just come out. I first saw these on a BBC tv show he did a few years ago, and you saw him painting and writing in his journal. And I remember thinking at the time, I wondered if we would ever get to see these in English, and we have, so I will be getting a copy of them at some point. I can’t wait to read this. Next to that was Tove Jansson’s collected letters. I have read most of her adult works and thought her letters would be insightful and excellent books to dip in and out of over the years. A great selection of books from three writers I have read before and one I really wanted to read,

 

 

The Sea in the Radio by Jürgen Becker

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The Sea in the Radio by Jürgen Becker

German fiction

Original title – Im Radio Das Meer

Translator = Alexander Booth

Source – Personal copy

Now I start with a far better review of this book by Joe at Roughghost. Not to put myself down, I don’t really know how to get into these experimental novels like this. I ordered this after seeing he had died earlier this month. The name was one I had seen on the list of writers connected with the post-war group of German Writer Gruppe 47, I have long been a fan of this loose collective of writers shaping post-war German writers. I, like many, feel this from reading Böll and Grass, which may be the two best-known names. When I read them, they were, and in recent years, I have read some others from the groups, especially Alexander Kluge, a writer I hold in the upper echelons of my personal pantheon of writers. Now, as for this, this is a collection of snippet sentences around a village. For me, it is like he has taken the world he sees down to the bare minimum. I saw this in Helmut Heißenbüttel’s work texts , which I reviewed a few years ago. He was another member of the group.

Where were you last night?

The small yellow plane is back, somewhat further away, somewhat higher.

At night you could hear trains. Nights you would always hear trains.

The first tractor out on the fields. Still. Then it begins to make large circles.

Now the bumblebee buzzes out the open door.

Glancing at the clock. One’s startled. Or one’s not.

The filling-station attendant says, You don’t see the fuel, but it’s there.

A bit slower getting up the stairs today.

We’ll have one more little one, but then we’ve got to get going.

When Charlie was still here, the neighbour says, Evenings I’d always be entertained. But she doesn’t want a new cat.

Preparations for a trip one doesn’t want to take at all.

The morning begins cloudless. At midday a few. Cloudless again in the evening.

An example of the style of writing

The novel is not really. It is maybe more like a redacted journal if you removed all personal details from it and dates and places, so what you have is like snippets one after another. If you took Under Milkwood and removed the characters and names from it there is, for me a connection to that. I find this is like a radio of images and thoughts going around the dial, I was reminded at times how, as A kid, I used to marvel in bed at night, slowly moving the dial on my short wave radio and moving over the stations from around the world. This is the effect here. We grasp just a bare thought, a tiny observation of nameless characters. What we have is the space in between these sentences. These aphorisms are ours to fill or not fill. That is the beauty. Like John Cage’s 4′ 33”, the silence is individual and just yours to saviour so it is heard with the gaps in. The sentence’s voids to fall in or steeping stones sometimes when the thoughts suddenly loop back to an early idea.

At night the man would sleep in his tent, hidden in the woods; during the day he’d go eat soup and pick up his mail.

Before flying off, the woodpecker lets himself drop.

It is hot and damp, and out in the garden there are snails.

The day hasn’t ended yet, and you don’t know what’s still to come.

Flags hanging from the windows. That hasn’t happened in a long time, and he almost got scared. Not all windows have flags. But some of them do.

The filling-station attendant says, Air doesn’t cost a thing, air is priceless.

Cloudless the night. You should be able to see the stars. If you can’t see any stars, the night isn’t cloudless.

The boy had come along to the station and waved after the train. He didn’t realize how soon he would be sitting on the same train himself.

It’s the same house, but the people living there today don’t know it.

After that, he began to count the days. At some point, it became too much, so he began to count the months instead.years

Another snippet from the book

So you get the idea. If you want a better idea, look to Joe. This is through my limited prism of the world and my limited knowledge of the language. But in a slight nod to Joe. The other piece of media, well, two, but the first links to Joe and the fact they live in Canada, I love the Guy Maddin film My Winnipeg: A Glimpse of his Childhood in That City, but the film was made up of little snippets like this another film directors work I felt connected to this was  Jonas Mekas the avant grade filmmaker his films flash from place to place and through time in a way maybe its all the effect of the world war on these figures. I can see Kluge in this as well it is the way the war is always a prism for the events and way a writer filmmaker looks at the world. An experimental poetic collection of journal sentences that left me wanting more from this writer. I think this may be his only book in English so far. Another book for German lit month. Before anyone says I admire Joe, and yes, his reviews are a million times better than mine, I aim to hit his hits one day, but I now find myself in my own orbit of reviewing books.

The Seed by Tarjei Vesaas

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The seed by Tarjei Vesaas

Norwegian fiction

Original title – Kimen

Translator – Kenneth G. Chapman

Source – Personal copy

I move on to one of my all-time favourite writers in Tarjei Vesaas; although I have only read a few books by him, there is something about how he describes his world: the second you open a book by him, you fall into it. I have a number of his books on my shelves, and I had a look at them all for men; this stood out as it sees him move from his earlier books, which are maybe the lesser known of his works now, to the later books that are more symbolic and set in the world he lives in the place almost becomes a character in the lot of the books I have read the ice in the Ice Palace. This Island reminds me of the Island we spent a summer or two on when I was younger. The cost of Donegal Islands is that they are such little microcosms in themselves, although there was never a murder like in the book.

 

Inside the summer-hot barn itself there was commotion and turmoil – in sharp contrast to outside. The youngest sow was having her swarm of young.

A girl sat there and saw that everything went as it should. But she sat staring and absent-minded.

The barn was full of buzzing flies. All the windows and doors were open. The strong sun intensified the odor from the pig pens.

The flies buzzed dully, as if on the point of falling asleep in a dark

corner.

The girl was young. She sat bent over on a stool. Leaned forward with her adolescent arms pressed against her breast. What was happening in front of her eyes was nothing new to her and it was going well, so it was something else that was causing her tenseness, her sadness. She thought: I’m not happy. Things should be different.

How? I don’t know, just somehow

The young girl looking after the pigs when he meets her

This novella is brutal at times. A Troubled man with apparent mental health issues comes to the tiny island where Pig farming is the primary industry and way of life and kills a young girl in the height of summer. This sets off a chain of events where the locals all go feral and chase this man down, and the brother of the dead girls kills the man. This book mixes the brutality of nature with the darkness of the human soul and the way one moment can change so many lives and affect so many. All this is mirrored as a mother pig eats its own young, A piece that reminds me of the line in Snatch where a gangster talks about how pigs will eat anything. This is also a scene in the film Hanibal where a foe of Hanibal ends up getting eaten by the pigs. We also have echoes of the madness in Lord of the Flies. One of the characters is called Piggy, and I wonder if Golding had come across this book as it came out 14 years before the lord of the Flies, and one also thinks of the island-wide madness of Whicker man. But this also is the way he uses the scenery of his homeland. In this case, it adds to the darkness on a bright summer day, which, when reading it, can send a chill down your spine. Sun and Darkness can lead to madness. One only has to think of the Spike Lee film Do the Right Thing, where heat adds to the tension and leads people to act differently.

The baby pigs lay in a pile in a corner. They had ducked down, and lay there unmoving. Something in them had forced them into this position. The danger. The tumult. Something incomprehen-sible. They ducked down and lay still.

A crash. The pen gave way under a heavy side blow. The sows tumbled out into the barnyard and headed for the people standing there. They attacked the people – at the same time that they were fighting with each other to the death and gashing each other’s sides.

They attacked everything that moved.

The two men and the woman ran for the house. The girl slipped. back into the barn.

But the devil was in the sows now. No sooner had the people begun to collect themselves a bit behind the closed door of the tidy house than the door flew open. They had not thought to lock it, and the door opened inwards. The sows were suddenly there and stuck their bloody snouts through the door. They stopped and stood still an instant to take aim.

The effect of this sight on the three people in the room was para-lyzing. An instant of fear. Wild beasts. Demons.

What was it? What would happen?

Nothing! It was only the two sows that Bergit carried food to many times a day! No; they were transformed. They were something else. Bestiality itself stuck its snout into human life: dark, filthy and consuming.

Thje brutal nature of the pigs later mirrored in the islanders

This saw Vesas shift in his writing style; he had written 12 books before this, and the books after this all have a more symbolic nature. But also his world of rural Norway, which, like I said in the start, really draws me in with his writing, is that mix of symbolic world and the rural Norway he so loved, which becomes another character in his books. Do you know any other writers whose place is so connected to their works?

 

The book against Death by Elias Canetti

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The Book Against Death by Elias Canetti

Bulgarian literature

Original title – Das Buch gegen den Tod

Translator – Peter Filkins

Source – Subscription book

I should have got to Canetti sooner than this. I have Aut de Fe, his best-known novel, on my shelf and his non-fiction writing from his time in the blitz in London. Born in Bulgaria, he spent his first few years in Manchester. His mother then moved him back to central Europe. They eventually settled in Vienna. He spoke many languages and was the perfect example of the Jewish intellect in central Europe in those pre-war years. He escaped and was in London in the war. He wrote in German he started this book in the war years. A book that has years of him raging against death was abridged from over 20000 pages of notes he had on the subject and other thoughts he had collected together with the idea of the book against death. This came out after his death and was distilled to a few hundred pages.

15 June 1942

Five years ago today my mother died. Since then my world has turned inside out. To me it is as if it happened just yesterday. Have I really lived five years, and she knows nothing of it? I want to undo each screw of her coffin’s lid with my lips and haul her out. I know that she is dead. I know that she has rotted away. But I can never accept it as true. I want to bring her to life again. Where do I find parts of her? Mostly in my brothers and me. But that is not enough. I need to find every person whom she knew. I need to retrieve every word she ever said. I need to walk in her steps and smell the flowers she smelled, the great-grandchild of every blossom that she held up to her powerful nostrils. I need to piece back together the mirrors that once reflected her image. I want to know every syllable she could have possibly said in any language.

Where is her shadow? Where is her fury? I will loan her my breath. She should walk on my own two legs.

I fear living historians. If they’re dead, I read them gladly.

I ;loved the last line about historians

He talks early on in the book about how the book came to him five years after his mother’s death. He seemed to have lost both his parents when he was at a young age. In addition to the war, it is easy to see why young Elias raged so much against death. He deals with death from mass deaths he mentions Saddam Hussein a lot in this regard. Then, To The Death of Saints, which discusses how writers have tackled death, is a book that goes from here to there. What comes across is a humanist view of the battle against death and how he tackled it in his life. He talks about a fellow writer I love, Thomas Bernhard, and yes, he likes him as a writer, but isn’t he obsessed with death? This is a man wandering in his thoughts, getting snippets of his fellow writers as he tries to learn what dearth is by raging against it. He is very much the character Dylan Thomas had in mind when he said rage against the night!

Everyone asks me about Thomas Bernhard, everyone wants to know what I think of him. I praise him and explain what he’s about, I try to help others better understand him. I elevate him to my disciple, and naturally he is, and in a much deeper sense than someone like Iris Murdoch, who is always so pleasant and light, while underneath it all she has become a brilliant and amusing popular writer. She is not really a disciple of mine, because she is so obsessed with gender. However, Thomas Bernhard is obsessed with death.

On the other hand, in recent years he has come under the influence of another, which conceals my own, namely that of Beckett. Bernhard’s hypochondria makes him susceptible to Beckett. Like him he gives in to death, rather than opposing it. He sees it everywhere and passively damns all to it.

Therefore I think that now, because of his empowerment through Beckett, Bernhard is somewhat overrated, but overrated by the higher-ups: the Germans have found their own Beckett in him.

The entanglement of my influence on Bernhard with that of Beckett is curious and obvious. It’s a little too simple to really please me. So, I declare here, for myself, that I have defended him too much out of generosity. I am not entirely sure if it serves him.

His thought around Thomas Bernhard

I know that post-war, he struggled to write another novel. One wonders if all this collection and raging against dearth was his way of dealing with the horror of the war years and the wiping out of his central European Jewish world. This is maybe his momento mori. He never quite finished. Part of me would happily love to have seen the total 2000 pages that made up his vision of the project even if he never got to thin it down I imagine there are some real gems to be uncovered from one of Europe’s leading thinkers of the time. I hope to get Auto de Fe read next year. I like this. I had hoped for something, maybe a little more digression and drifting, as this is collected in the years from 1942 until his death. One wonders how he would collect them if he had got around to it? But this is an exciting view of one man’s fifty-year struggle to deal with death. Have you a favourite book about death?

 

Classics around the world 2025

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I signed up to join a read-along of Proust, which Trevor from Mookse and Gripes has been setting up for the new year around the same time. I felt the need to read Dickens. My mind then started to drift, and as I have for many a year, I always feel even though I have reviewed over 1400 books, the blog is light on classic books in translation. Now, this is partly the fact I am to drawn to shiny new books and a little bit of me not being overly confident in reading classics. I often get upset, but I have been putting off reading a pile of books on my TBR. So I’ve drawn. Line in the sand and decided on 2025 as a year for classic books worldwide. I have put the cut-off year of 1939 so they have to have been originally published before 1939. To me, that seems a good point, including World War I and the run-up to the war in Europe, which has always been a period that has interested me. Of course, as far back Greek classics I read Homer and a few other years ago, but know there is some great new translations of classic around and some publishers have been brought out lost classics and new translations of books.. I am due to sort out my library at home early in the new year and will be doing a shelf for the coming year and I will also be going through my copy of 1001 books to see if there is any books to get. I want to cover as many countries in the next year.

Have you a  favourite classics from around the world ?

The ways of Paradise by Peter Cornell

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The ways of Paradise by Peter Cornell

Swedish memoir

Original title – Paradisets vägar

Translator – Saskia Vogel

Source – Subscription book

I had some money come and I decided I wanted to get the Fitzcarraldo subscription and paid for the 20-book subscription as I knew that it would have some great books I had heard about this book earlier this year, and out of the new and upcoming books from them it was easily one I knew I would read the second unit hit the floor through the letterbox, something that maybe doesn’t happen as much as it used to for me as a reader. When I heard Peter Cornell had put together the pieces left behind by an unknown academic researcher  who for thirty years, had spent the previous three decades working on something, what was found is her within this book. Fare to say it is no Pessoa or Bolano trunk full;l of papers or a hard drive of many nearly finished novels. This was just a hundred or so pages of writing. But this was 1987, an age before Google thought this was a man connecting the world, and like the knots in Rushkin’s pieces, he talks about tightening knots around his prose, and this is what is left is like an espresso shot a brutal hit of Knowledge and connections. He links those brilliant minds of the last 2000 years here, there, and everywhere!!

  1. Leonardo da Vinci’s and Dürer’s labyrinthine ‘knots’ without beginning or end can be seen as maps of the universe. They are, along with a few late drawings, the kind of hieroglyphs that may have been stimulated by Leonardo’s well-known exercises around the imaginative eye – to lose one’s self in the damp patches on a wall or other fragmentary forms. ‘One gets the impression that the Leonardo] drawings held at Windsor Castle, which symbolically represent the world at once in its birth and its final cataclysm, stem from similar visions.’ See Gustav René Hocke, Die Welt als Labyrinth, 1957; Ananda K.

Coomaraswamy, ‘The Iconography of Dürer’s “Knots” and Leonardo’s “Concatenation”, in Art Quarterly,1944

Knots and labyrinths a a recurring theme in the book

The three pieces in the book run over and interconnect with one another. They all seem to revolve around labyrinths or the complex nature of the world and how one thing can connect to another. The Greek history of the minotaur and labyrinth through Rushkins integrate knot drawing and then ending with the chaos of Jackson Pollock, but the feeling of a connection through how the pieces connect.. Almost like a knight tour of a chess board, the text moves forward but never quite the way you think it will. You can see the mind of those thirty years crossing and reconnecting these pieces like a giant Meccano set of his mind. This just has to be read !!

  1. Various types of fantastical tales, ‘contes fantastiques autour des contes originaires. Jurgis Baltrusaitis, La quête d’ Isis: Essai sur la légende d’un mythe, 1985.
  2. Ibid.
  3. ‘The centre of the world’, the heart of the world’. This concept recurs in all cultures even as their geographic and topographical situations may vary: country, cave, mountain, tower, temple or city. These imagined places arise from fantasies of a holy land, described as follows by René Guénon: ‘This “holy land”, above all others, it is the finest of lands per the meaning of the Sanskrit word Paradesha, which among the Chaldeans took the form of Pardes and Paradise in the Western world; in other words it refers to the “earthly paradise” that constitutes the point of departure in each religious tradition. Here was the or-igin, here was spoken the first, creative Word. See ‘Les gardiens de la Terre sainte’ (1929), in Symboles fondamen-taux de la Science sacrée, 1962.
  4. Possibly in André Breton’s object Souvenir du paradis terrestre from 1953, a rugged rock, 11.5 x 9.5 x 5 cm, its title inscribed into the rock.
  5. ‘Paradise, from Old Persian pairidaeza, meaning ‘en-closed garden,park

The first five little vignettes of info

I am just a huge fan of digersive books of the way some writers let their minds wander and connect the dots a certain way. More accessible, maybe now, in this age with Google, this book predates Google and such; thus, the work that went into it being the way it was must have been years of refining the prose. This is A scholar caught in a Borgesian library where, like Borges, a writer who could never write a novel, his writing is like that espresso shot perfect complex and just enough of a hit. This prose is like this. I imagine a huger work pruned over those thirty years, but as you do that, the mind connects other things, and the whole thing becomes like an Escher painting or a Mobius loop where there is a point that it seems like it is an endless connection with the world and that is what happens here. It is a man caught in an Escher world, a labyrinth of his mind slowly closing as those prose-like knots grow shorter and shorter. Oh my god, I am just off on my own tangent now. Let’s just say this will quickly be the book of the year for me. I can’t see anything coming near it apart from my next read, a similar, if longer, book from Fitzcarraldo by a great German writer. Have you a favourite digressive work of literature ?

The Ring is Closed by Knut Hamsun

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The Ring is Closed by Knut Hamsun

Norweigan fiction

Original title – Ringen sluttet

Translator – Robert Ferguson

Souyrce – Personal copy

It was hard to pick this up as Hamsun is a writer that is full of controversy later in his writing life his connection with the Nazis during the world war. But Hunger is still held up as a masterpiece and I had brought several other books by him a few years ago when the Dear Rob of Robaroundbooks a much missed lit site, highlighted the Spuvenir press collection of his lesser-known books, which all featured paintings by the Norweigan artist Edvard Munch which seem to go well with the books. Anyway, this is his second to last novel, written in 1936, which has at its heart a flawed character trying to escape his small-town roots only to go full circle in his life. Like his father, the lighthouse keeper, keeping a light going full circle every night, we see Abels’s life do the same, and as we do, like the lighthouse light, it hits the rocks and pitfalls in his life.

are!

Now that the old lighthousekeeper was a widower he couldn’t manage without a little female help around the house. He advertised for a housekeeper and got Lolla. A great bit of luck! Lolla would be fine, she was quick around the house, used to chickens and pigs, unmarried, four years older now, in good health and quite pretty. Tengvald was after her, a trained blacksmith now and working as a journeyman, they could have got married any time and started a family. But Tengvald held back. Why? Probably because he lacked the courage. He was a quiet, rather shy blacksmith, nothing especially outstanding about him, but honest and steady. It wasn’t easy for him to break up with Lolla, but she had those crazy nostrils that fluttered every time she looked at him.

His excuse was that he had to take care of his mother. Okay then, said Lolla, who wasn’t too brokenhearted about it. What was Tengvald the blacksmith to her? But when, a little while later, the very same Tengvald began courting Lovise Rolandsen, and even ended up marrying her, Lolla started started passing alot of sly remarks: that, by God, those two were made for each other

His father the lighthousekeeper

At the heart of this book is the life of a care free male, as he drifts and floats through life, Abel and his life. He has a love interest all through the book with Olga, the local chemist’s daughter; we see this man drift away from his small-time life in a book written by an older. Man, in a way, Hamsun thinks of a more carefree world for him as a younger man is Abel part of Hamsun he never quite got too. Was there an Olga for him. We follow as Abel tries to escape the small-town life. He inherits and gives away to those around him an inheritance, and he fritters away. He eventually ends up in the US. But then things happen, and he has to escape that world and head home for a simpler life in a way echoing back to his father’s life. The title may be a clue to the book: Can we escape Fate, or are we just running towards it?

ABEL WAS INFORMED BY TELEGRAPH OF HIS FATHER’S DEATH, but he was in no great haste to travel. The months passed, and if he responded at all to announcements and calls to attend meetings of the beneficiaries of the will it was only to answer that he was doing just fine where he was and felt no call to travel home.

But things must have been pretty tough for Abel one way and another, because he wrote that he had neither clothes nor money for his ticket.

No clothes and no money for his ticket… and him the son of a wealthy man!

Hisa father left him a little bit of money

Its fair as I l, liked part of this book. Abel had a feeling of a character we see in a lot of books that young man escaping his world, Holden Caulfield or even a character like Blaugaust, where you never escape your fate his fate I sto be like his father a man in the solitary world in a way. I also see a connection in a way with How Hamsun maybe connected with Nazis like Henry Williamson had that a simpler world was sold as part of fascism’s false dreams. But Abel also felt like part of an older man, maybe living a different life through his narrator looking maybe at that love that he never quite had a dream of a different lie he never quite got. It also captured a world gone after the war, a world where a young man could be carefree with money yet, because of who they are, get around the world. Some years ago, I read Hunger, his other book, but it also had a strong character at the heart of the book. Anyway, this is my second book for Norway in November. Have you read any Hamsun?

Twenty two days or Half a lifetime by Franz Fühmann

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Twenty two day or Half a lifetime by Franz Fühmann

German Fiction

Original title -Zweiundzwanzig Tage oder Die Hälfte des Lebens

Translator – Lelia Vennewitz

Source – Personal copy

For my second book for German Lit Month, I moved off the Guide Crime novel and picked a book I had decided on earlier this year. Joe at Rough Ghost had put up a picture on social media of a book by Fühmann, but I’m not sure if it was this one or another. U had read The jew car by him a couple of years ago and hadn’t known he had some other books coming out years earlier, so I found a cheap copy of this book which is on a subject that he talked and wrote about a lot in his later life, and that is Germany’s past he hAD BEEN IN THE nazi party during the wart but lived in East Germany after the war and was a staunch socialist. This book, written later in his writing life, is part memoir, part travelogue. It follows a three-year period he spent in Budapest in 1972.

October I9

Budapest: perhaps even more mini-skirts than in Berlin, in any case shorter ones, sometimes ending above the top of the stocking, usually cheap materials with an inverted pleat back and front and the skimpiest ones covering the ungainliest thighs

The intersection outside the Astoria is a No Stopping zone, a taxi stops, the customer has trouble with his money, the driver explains, the customer searches, cars block the inter-section, the cars blow their horns, the cars make a racket, the customer negotiates, the driver shows the figure on his fingers, the cars are now jammed up beyond the intersec-tion, the customer doesn’t understand, the cars roar, the driver of the car behind the taxi jumps out, cursing as he thumps the rear end of the taxi, the driver waves him off, the curser flings up his arms, and the cars way at the back reverse or turn and look for another route.

I liked this observation about skirts very of its time !

Fühmann finds himself in Budapest as a 50-year-old on a trip to a writer’s conference.(I’m always amazed how much more in  Eastern European states’ Literature is taken)  We see him talking with his fellow writers and his own poetic piece a few times in the book as he wanders around Budapest, talking about the city but also looking back at his own past and those war and post-war years. As the ghost of the Warsaw apcts invasion of Budapest some fouyr years before this book a book that start like a travelogue about the place thew writers become a darker book a writer thinking about his writing and also the past isn ever good as he wanders dark street drinks with his fellow writers. Talking about their works and place, it is a world caught in Amber.

Among pillars, in niches, under arcades: four pools, three large, one smaller, one shell-shaped, one shaped like a stadium, the water rising in temperature from the smallest to the largest pool each time by four degrees, from twenty-eight to forty degrees Centigrade, and on the water in the circle of the talking heads, bibs floating like lotus blossoms

Thirteen Leopold Blooms: what a metamorphosis

In the sauna: the old men have left, and now above the common people an athlete sits on the arm of a chair, wringing himself out. Doggedly, as stubbornly solemn as an athlete who has come in eleventh at the regional champion-ship, he squeezes the water out of his tissues, pore by pore, and every time he lifts his elbow he ripples the muscles of his arm, and no one pays any attention, wise nation! For fifteen minutes he works the section between collarbone and the top of his left breast, I might have been curious to see whether he kept up this pace, but the heat drives me out

Had pick this bit with its nod to Joyce

This is one of those lost gems that maybe would be great reissued a man wandering post-68 Budapest, a writer remembering his past draft into war by the Nazis and then those post-war socialist years, a time when the world he knew seemed perfect. But as he wanders around Budapest, you can see how that changes, and he talks to other writers. This has a bit of everything in his poetry, fiction, travelogue, and memoir. In the days when reading of a place was how to feel it before the age of celeb travels, he makes us feel the town, the Acacia trees, and the writers he meets. The city itself wound but still getting by. I hope it gets a new publication. My book is over thirty years old. I know Seagull Books has brought a few of his other books out. Described as one of the most sensitive books in East Germany. It captures those two extreme views of German life from the mid-thirties to when the book was written in 1972. Have you a favourite East german writer ?

Brightly Shining by Ingvild Rishøi

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                                                                                                                                                    Brightly Shining by Igvild Rishøi

Norweigan fiction

Orignal title – Stargate – en julefortelling

Translator – Caroline Waight

Source – Review copy

There is nothing better than an unexpected review copy that actually matches something upcoming, and this literally fell on the doorstep a few days after I had mentioned her new month, Norway in November, by Meredith (Dolce Bellezza Blog), one of the fellow judges on the Shadow Booker panel. So, as I often think, the is a synchronicity to book blogging. So this is the first novel from a talented short story and children’s writer appeared with its wintery theme around a family in the run-up to Christmas. She has previously won the Norwegian book critic prizes. It is a perfect first book for Norway in November. The book is about a family in which two daughters decide to help their father, who is out of work. So when they find a job at the Christmas tree lot is available.

And Monday came and Tuesday and Wednesday, and he talked about the cabin we would buy if he could just get a regular job. Thursday came and Fri-day, and he talked about the path and the fence and how we’d sit out on the doorstep and look up at the Big Dipper, and then it was Saturday, and there was a knock at the door.

Dad let go of my hair and stood up off the bed. But ours wasn’t really a flat where people came knocking.

Only Aronsen came knocking round our flat, I’m calling the police, he’d say, but he never called the police. But before, when I was little, I thought he would. He’d be standing there in his dressing gown and I’d be clutching Dad’s legs and crying, don’t call, don’t call, until Aronsen looked down and said, hush now, I’m not calling anybody, I’m just trying to get this into your dad’s head.

Dad is a violent drunk at times

Ronja, the ten-year-old daughter, first sees the job on the Christmas tree lot and initially thinks her father will be perfect for the `Job. He does take it, but then he is drawn back to the pub, so the cupboards start to go bare again at this point, the older sister Melissa steps in and takes her father’s job selling Christmas tres a world as she observes isn’t as cheerful as it may seem to sell the tres is a hard job and those doing it aren’t that full of the Christmas spirit. But she puts her head down as her sister dodges the Drunken father, a neighbour dying to report the father and his daughters to social services. We see a family on the deg a world of getting by day to day and the bond between to sisters. But there is also some great characters they meet at the tree lot. This is a book that will break your heart and then see the hope of the two sisters.

“Melissa,” Tommy yelled. “Come here.”

Melissa was sitting on the ground, midway through righting a fir. She looked up from underneath the branches and crawled out. She looked scared.

“Relax,” Tommy said, “It was me who went and got her.”

He walked over to the shed and opened the door.

“Take a seat,” he said. “Have a ginger biscuit.” There was warmth inside, and a radio, and the floor brown with dirt. Some children singing “O Holy Night.” I sat down on one camping stool, Tommy sat on the other. Melissa stayed standing in the doorway. A thrill of hope, sang the children.

The weary world rejoices.

“Melissa,” said Tommy. “Your sister can’t spend all day sitting out there on a box when it’s below freezing out.”

The sister freezing but trying to get by the best they can

I must admit I am a fan of the sad Christmas story from Dickens with Scrooge, a story tinged with Sadness, then films like A Boy’s Christmas and, of course, It’s a Wonderful Life. But you know what? One of my all-time favourite Christmas stories is from the Late Paul Auster, his Auggie Wrens Christmas story, which was filmed by Wayne Wang as part of the film Smoke when Auggie tells William Hurt’s character who had been asked to write a Christmas story for New york times and tells of a boy that dropped a wallet whilst stealing and how Auggie went found a blind woman who thought he was the grandson who had stolen from his store and they have dinner and he steals a camera from a pile he finds in a room at the woman’s house but has in the meantime had Christmas lunch with her act as the grandson Hope and love in denial at the same time just perfect like this. It has hope that comes and goes with love and fear. I was going to say about how it would be ideal. Book to be made into a film like Auggie Wren’s story was, only to google the original title of the book and find it is being made into a movie (let’s hope it isn’t then ruined by a Hollywood take on it ). This is prime Ken Roach material if it is to be made into English. The heartbreak of drunken father-daughters getting by would suit his style of filmmaking so well. This book is perfect for a winter evening in the build-up to Christmas as we follow Melissa and Ronja. One sister sells trees, and the other tries to avoid social services and just get by. Do you have a favourite Christmas story or film?

 

Hotel Cartagena by Simone Buchholz

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Hotel Cartagena by Simone Buchholz

German crime fiction

Original title – Hotel Cartagena

Translator Rachel ward

Source – Personal copy

I had read this last year when it was shortlisted for the translated crime prizes, but. I never got around to reviewing it. So when the first week of this year, GHerman lit month is m, meant to be a crime, I rarely follow Lizzy and Caroline’s prompts, but I will join in for once. This is part of a series of novels about a Prosecutor in Hamburg. But the novels seem to all be able to be read as stand-alone other than maybe knowing some of the characters a little more than if this is the book you start with, it works as a stand-alone read. We find out when the Prosecutor, Chastity Riley, the star of the series of books, is caught up when twenty heavily armed men storm into the hotel bar where she is at a birthday party.

He looked at the water and watched the ships leaving, the warm wind tickled the back of his neck, he had his hands in his trouser pockets, he was hungry. He still had a little change on him, but it wasn’t even enough for a fish roll.

He had spent all his money on the girl.

Elisabeth or whatever her name was.

Hed met her in the Markthalle, at the Black Flag concert he’d been looking forward to for weeks. When she’d given him a kind of sideways smile, he’d had a few seconds when he didn’t know who he had a bigger crush on, Henry Rollins or her. Then they danced, she was wild and laughed, and that flooded his bloodstream with happiness; after the concert, with all the loud music in his bones, he invited her back to St Pauli; she was kind of scared to come at first, but he talked her three friends round and they all went off to the Kiez to-gether.

The book takes us back to 84 had pick this as i love Henry Rollins

The hotel is owned by Konrad Hoogsmart, and it is him the heavily armed men have come to deal with as they have been sent by people he has in the past destroyed their lives. This is a book that has a clever style as each chapter is a little story in itself as we move through time and place to piece together the slow picture of the event that led to the hostage-taking over the years and around the world from the eighties when a young man now one of the hostages take left Hamburg to head to Columbia and then is now back seeking Hoogsmart whose hotel is named the Cartagena where the events of years ago had these two men following different paths that lead to the evening and the party that Chastity and her friends find themselves in as views but also hostages what will happen to them all what brought this all about ?

They ate dinner together in one of the expensive restaurants in the old town. Henning, José and this man, whose name was Esteban. He was a good head and shoulders taller than all the other Colombians Henning knew, those little men with hearty laughter in their faces. Esteban didn’t actually look like a Colombian at all, more like someone from Madrid. He looked like a torero. Long and slim and knife-sharp. His hands were something like a fan of scissors.

But he was very polite.

He wanted to know how Henning liked it in Cartagena, why hed left his home, what he liked to do in his spare time. And he was very interested in Hamburg and in the people there.

Lots of artists?

Musicians?

Jet set?

People with money?

Years later in Colubia the seeds of the hostage taking are sown.

I loved her style of writing. It is great for a backstory, which, in a way, is the central part of the book. The events that lead to the present are often missed in Crime fiction. In a way, this could have been an even bigger book than it was. It has a clever mix of humour, darkness, and menace. It also captures how one man’s life led him to be the hostage taker and take a face to the faceless. I think this is something modern crime is doing well I know a couple of recent tv series have taken the thieves as the main characters, I think the Sopranos and The wire were forerunners of this as the made the criminals as well as the detectives both as characters and there lives are shared. This is what we have here in the book: the past of the Hostage taker’s life from Hamburg through Columbia, then hiding in Curacao to the return, and the present, about Chastity and the other hostages at the birthday party. I think Rachel has captured this book so well in its tone in English. It is an exciting book by a writer, along with many other books in the series.  Have you read any books from Simone Buchholz or Orenda ?