Month: February 2025

Booker international Longlist 2025 Stu is shadowing again !!!

~ winstonsdad ~ 4 Comments

The longlist has just come out, Initially I was shocked as I hadn’t a lot of the books, and also, a number weren’t out. of the list, I have just finished The Book of Disappearance and had read Solenoid last year but had wanted to reread it before reviewing it and never got to it. So, I will be starting that today. I have the Heart of the Lamp on my TBR and have ordered all the other books I don’t own. I will just be doing it myself for this long. I will have a review for the book of the disappearance up in the next couple of days and hope to finish at least another book by the end of the week when they come tomorrow. Have you read any what are your thoughts on this years Longlist

 

  • The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem, translated from Arabic by Sinan Antoon)

  • On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara J Haveland

  • There’s a Monster Behind the Door by Gaëlle Bélem, translated from French by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert

  • Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated from Romanian by Sean Cotter

  • Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda, translated from Spanish by Heather Cleary and Julia Sanches

  • Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson

  • Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, translated from Japanese by Polly Barton

  • Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda

  • Eurotrash by Christian Kracht, translated from German by Daniel Bowles

  • Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes

  • Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi

  • On a Woman’s Madness by Astrid Roemer, translated from Dutch by Lucy Scott

  • A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson

Stu’s International booker Five for 25

~ winstonsdad ~ 2 Comments

I had initially opted to miss doing the shadow Jury, but after saying I was;’t going to do it I got a touch of nostalgia, I loved doing the shadow jury ok last year, but the books were maybe not to my taste, but it is about the people I do the jury with year after year it the only time I ever really talk about books , if anyone wants to chat about books regularly I am always free to chat !! other than this post I do. Anyway, in the last year, I may haven’t read as many books as I usually would for a long time. I have thus chosen five books I have read and reviewed that I’d like to see on the longlist this year.

Brandy Sour by Constantia Soteriou

A short novella that use the drinks people order to tell this history of one of the most famous Hotels on the Island and the island’s history and how the split came about. One of the most refreshing ideas for a book I have read in a long time

Un Amor by Sara Mesa

I like this tale of a woman heading to a small village in the Spanish hinterland is one of my favourite settings for a book and this had a number of twists and turns.

Clean by Alia Trabucco Zeran

We find a woman held against her will and the story of her and the family she had been a nanny to slowly unfolds.

My favourite by Sarah Jollien-Fardel

Now, if Un AMor was a woman going to a village to escape, this is the opposite: a woman escaping her abusive father from a small Swiss village to head to a bigger town and start a life of her own away from the village.

Stay with Me by Hanne Ørstavik

Now, a Danish woman in Italy falls for a younger man but experiences echoes of her childhood. This is the latest from one of the best writers around in recent years.

Now I have read the book The Disappearance by Ibisam Azem, We Do Not Part by Han Kang, and On the Greenwich Line; I would like to see them on the longlist, but time is running out. I hope to review them in the next few days. But time is short.

What would you pick?

Like a sky Inside by Jakuta Alikavazovic

~ winstonsdad ~ 6 Comments

Like a sky inside by Jakuta Alikavazovic

French fiction/ essay

Original title – Comme un ciel en nous.

Translator Daniel Levin Becker

Source – Personal copy

Is there ever a time when you see little bits about a book and you just know it will be one of those books that will be with you forever? There aren’t many books like that. They come along once in a blue moon, the ones. that touch you. I had an idea that this book might be one of those books. Firstly, it has a writer of Balkan heritage writing in French, and me, they are my two favourite places to read books, so I knew this book from the daughter of Yugoslavian parents born in Paris. Her parents were from Bosnia and Montenegro. She has also worked as a translator on books by David Foster Wallace and Ben Lerner, which means she also has great taste in literature.

The Louvre was the first French city where I felt at home, my father used to say. The official story: he came to Paris in 1971, for the love of my poetess mother. He stayed for the Louvre. He was twenty years old and the twenty years that followed – covering, in part, my childhood – would unfold as though in a dream.

His joie de vivre. His appetite for the world. His opti-mism, and the limits thereof. He had no money and still believed it made no difference, because he had enough to act like he did. To pretend.

Of course, his head must have spun. To imagine the City of Light, to dream of it, is one thing; to discover it, to be a body, a twenty-year-old body wandering its daytime and nighttime streets, is another. All forms of difficulty

– loneliness, poverty, the roundly accepted fact that the slightest cough, the slightest cold, is far graver in a foreign language — all forms of difficulty have disappeared from his official story. Among them, his reasons for emigrat-ing: Paris, certainly. My mother, of course. The Louvre, naturally. But it would take me years to learn that he did it the way he did to escape military service in Yugosla-via, his country of origin, which today no longer exists.

Her parents Home Yugoslavia imploded and split

The book has the premise that she spends an overnight stay in the Louvre Gallery, where her young son is at Over. Over the evening, we see how art, family, memories, and how you could steal the Mona Lisa all drift by. This is a book that is one of those you sink into as a reader. It shows us how art and memories can connect from a piece that remembers her heading to New York against her father’s wishes when she was younger. The satyr she saw has a fellow sculpture now in New York that she had seen on the trip her father didn’t want her to do, as it drifts in her mind. Like the star in the sky, it follows her life’s path and her relationship with her father, alongside her evident love of art and how she connects with art. A night that sees her move far out of the bounds of the walls of the Gallery and the sense of time and place.

When I think about my father, I often think of those strange and beautiful images of wild animals, great and mighty deer, descending upon cities, wandering through streets. What they are experiencing is also an exile -quite solitary, like my father’s, quite majestic.They seem immediately at home, and their presence breathes a new enchantment into what we thought we knew: the sidewalks, the intersections, the asphalt under our feet. Nonetheless, an exile. They come driven by hunger. Or curiosity. Which for some, such as my father, such as me, is more or less the same thing. Yes, there is something deerlike in the familiarity I feel for him; a hint of wildness, of the unknown, forever inaccessible to my words but not to my heart. My heart, of which it is one of the centers. One of the places most intimate to me and, in spite or because of this, one of the most foreign.

I loved this observation of her father

This is a book I read as it was on the Republic of Consciousness longlist. But when I put a picture up and people like Anthony at times flow stemmed said they loved this book, I knew it would be one I would like. I love books that deal with Art, travel, memory and that bond between father and Daughter. It captures how your mind can drift from it, and it is with my dad’s engineering or castles that is our connection. Edinburgh castles or a dam make me think of my father and his past his life. I connected with this work as I said, there are just some books you know before you turn over the first p[ages you hope and think will be with you for the rest of your life. This is one of those books like Panorama by Dusan Sarotar or Fireflies by Luis Sagasti or back even further for me the Encyclopedia of Snow by Sarah Emily Miano. Those books that just touch you in a way you can’t say other than it’s about a connection on an emotional level with the writer at that moment of reading that will last forever after you put the book down. Have you ever had that feeling about a book and that connection that makes you drift into your own life as a reader and son of a daughter, in this case!

 

Far by Rosa Ribas

~ winstonsdad ~ 7 Comments

Far by Rosa Ribas

Spanish Fiction

Orignal title – Lejos

Translator – Charlotte Coombes

Source – Personal copy

you are probably fed up of hearing me blow the trumpet for Foundry editions I actually have no connection to this publisher it is just they have brought out such great books in their first year, and this is the last of them Far from a writer considered the queen of Spanish Noir and the two trilogy of books she has brought out in the most have been well received in Spain. She has written a series set in 1950s Spain. This book saw a change of direction as it is set in La Mancha in a building site of an estate that was never finished. It captures the life of those caught when the real estate bubble burst in Spain. It appears this is the first book of hers that she translated. The book she wrote with Sabine Hofmann also seems to have been translated into English.

First, she zigzagged her way through the area of terraced houses where she lived. Then into the part where the large villas were. Each one was a different colour, so nobody got their houses mixed up. Luxurious two-storey villas, with double garages, terraces, balconies, gabled roofs, and dor-mers; with extensive gardens, with ponds and flower beds; with loungers in dark wood and cast-iron tables and chairs, covered with custom-made cushions for sitting and drinking beers or lemonade in summer. All built nice and far apart.She carried on through the streets of apartment blocks.

The first phase boasted full occupancy. There were gaps in the following blocks, but only a few. The ratio increased into Phase 2, then went down again in Phase 3, with its most recent buildings barely occupied. Phase 4 was filled with unfinished buildings and surrounded by a metal fence.

The fence that sperates these two worlds

The book came about when the writer was taken to a small town in Spain where a sort of wonderous luxury estate of buildings in Seensa was due to be built. Still, when the building bubble burst, the place was half-finished and half-filled. Some people live there with Jobs and try to get on like our narrator. She has a hu=]house built and a job but is just trying to get a new start in her life after being separated. The other half of the estate has not attracted those wanting a roof over their heads in the half-finished apartments. This is the framing for this book: a woman who is sinking more into drink and depression than a man trying to get by but is caught up in the darkness of his fellow incomers to the vacant flats. The book sees the two main characters draw together, but there is also the underlying r=tension of those who were brought into a dream of swimming pools and green lawns in the middle of the dry, arid Spanish central area. This is the land of LA Mancha that Don Quixote travelled as a fiesta draws close. Will this poowe=der keg of two different classes of people finally blow up?

Finally it was dark. He waited a few more hours, however, before going out to do a recce of the site to check if it was safe.

He toyed with the idea of having a drink. There was a drinks cabinet: one of those old-fashioned ones with a folding door and a mirrored interior that multiplied the bottles and glasses to infinity. He picked up a bottle of vodka but immediately put it down. Dust clung to that too. He wiped his hands on his trousers. He would not drink. On his first outing he needed to have a clear head. Bumping into someone could be fatal. They might alert the police to the fact that an intruder was living there. Then maybe the others would connect the dots.

His side of the fence a darker world at times

It is a common thread in Spanish literature: the unnamed narrators in there books. I know some people hate it, but for me, it makes the characters seem universal. I am hard-pressed to think of an Equivalent of this for the UK, maybe one of those dying UK seaside towns where there once hoped, and it has now gone, and the flotsam and jetson of human existence has drifted in. Maybe one of those new Scottish towns full of dreams and hope that never quite got off the ground would be the nearest. What it captures is tow worlds:s those who were brought into a dream because the bubble had burst in them are trapped as much as those who came to escape and just find shelter, a sort of drifting underclass that is never that far behind the scenes in everywhere if you know how to look at the broken capitalist world we have. This is a book that captures that clash of classes so well. You can tell she writes Noir. The Guardian review mentioned Claudia Pinerio, and I can see that myself. It has that creeping slowness and building tension she does well. It also mentions J G Ballar, the master of buildings and stories. Yeah, this has a nod to a book, maybe like Super Cannes: A Broken Utopia, a Broken Dream of a Place, the darker side of broken dreams when classes and what that brings, like uncertainty and worry about what an underclass can do. The book builds the tension of this well. Alongside the drawing closer of our two narrators at the same time! Have you read any of the Foundry edition titles?

 

Gifted by Suzumi Suzuki

~ winstonsdad ~ 4 Comments

Gifted by Suzumi Suzuki

Japanese fiction

Original title – ギフテッド, Gifuteddo

Translator Alison Markin Powell

Source – Personal copy

I moved on to a book that had two reasons I read it. First, it was on the US Republic of Consciousness longlist, but it is also a book that could be on the booker longlist after tossing and turning about the longlist for the book I have decided to do that and the EBRD lists this year, and this means I need to push on and read and clear some of my TBR  books from last year with books that could be on the longlist and this book which has many significant bits in such a short book. A mother-daughter relationship. Being on the edge of society as our writer was, Autofiction, the narrator herself was an adult actress and hostess. So lived in the after-dark world like the narrator of the book.

I’d wait until the very last minute to change my clothes, and even then, I avoided putting on outfits that looked like I was heading to the entertainment district. Whereas normally I’d take an hour to put on makeup and powder my skin, I started doing all that once I was already out. And somehow, the simple and modest guises I put on to keep my mother from stalling me seemed to her liking. There was one time when she said, “You look pretty today.” I was wearing a beige cardigan over jeans. It was the first time my mother had ever complimented my clothing or appearance. But I still ended up going out every night, after the meds had been administered and the questions had been dodged. When I left her as she dropped off to sleep, I hated the sound of the key as I locked the door from the outside.

As she heads out to work trying to blend in

This is a slim book but depicts the last nine days of a strained relationship[ between a mother who could have been a poet but because of her choices in life has had a knock-on effect on her daughter so when she is near the end of her life and she turns upon at her daughter’s apartment. What follows is the eggshell-like connection of these two women over the last few days of her mother’s life. It isn’t about reconnecting. It is about looking back and forgiving their mother; she was cruel. it is about that last connection and days in a was. The daughter shows her pain and tough life via the collection of tattoos she has on her body. As she navigates the night in Tokyo’s red light district, this book is about life, death, and sex in a sleepless part of town where, in this short book, it seems much larger, but with its subtle telling of this last connection, Add to that a loss of as close friend this is [lacked for the size of this book in which no-one really wins.

I’d been sitting in the same posture for two days, fid-ding with my cell phone today, and yesterday flipping through-but not reading various magazines I had bought, so not surprisingly, my lower back and legs were killing me, and I took advantage of my mother dozing off after her midday meds to duck out into the hallway.

Just as I made it downstairs to go smoke a cigarette, my phone rang. The number came up as the hospital, so for a second I thought my mother had died, but they were calling to say she had a visitor. I told them I’d be right back, though since I was already on the first floor, I stepped out the entrance on the east side, took three puffs of a cigarette, and then reluctantly made an appearance at the nurses’ station on the floor my mother’s room was on, the foor where they put the terminal patients.

Her mothers last days and how she deals with it

 

I loved this. For me, this is the sort of book that seems to become more available to us as readers. This book is about subtle emotions and connections told with a slight hand. You can see the writer’s own pain. It is like she cut her wrist and wrote this in her own blood, but the pain is only slightly released. It is about the cruelty of a parent to the child and how that can manifest itself her tattoos are like her ACES (Adverse Childhood Experiences These are things that happen in childhood that have a knock-on effect in adulthood and how they can cause someone to like this character get tattoos or drink to much have no barriers etc. there is an excellent video about this, something we are thinking more and more about in my job just as an aside )As I said this remind me of Eve Baltsar, another writer that writes short, hard-hitting books about relationships and of course the mistress of Autofiction Annie Ernaux for the way it is unflinching in its talking about the world they are in. Have you read this book ?

Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust

~ winstonsdad ~ 8 Comments

Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust (in search of lost time Volume 1)

French fiction

Original title – Du côté de chez Swann

Translation by C.K Scott Moncrieff and Terrance Kilmartin (revised by D .J Enright )

Source – Personal copy

I have joined in the read-along of the Proust that is going along this year. I have done well to get so far, I am not the most organised at readalong which is why I haven’t done one since my rarther Shambolic Don Quixote many years ago which was a bit of a shambles. I have taken a two-pronged act on this book. I have read the modern library book and then listened to the free edition on Audible. This is the third time I have read the book. I will discuss Proust more in the other books, and I have five other posts to cover the man himself. Of course, this book has the most famous moment on the book, the Madeline moment. Of course, their book is about some themes in 5the books such as class, love, memory, a world in change, and family, so many it is hard to convey.

As she was the only member of our family who could be described as a trifle “common,” she would always take care to remark to strangers, when Swann was mentioned, that he could easily, had he so wished, have lived in the Boulevard Haussmann or the Avenue de l’Opéra, and that he was the son of old M. Swann who must have left four or five million francs, but that it was a fad of his. A fad which, moreover, she thought was bound to amuse other people so much that in Paris, when M. Swann called on New Year’s Day bringing her a little packet of marrons glacés, she never failed, if there were strangers in the room, to say to him: “Well, M. Swann, and do you still live next door to the bonded warehouse, so as to be sure of not missing your train when you go to Lyons?” and she would peep out of the corner of her eye, over her glasses, at the other visitors.

Young Marcel remebers the Swann visiting his family

The book shows the young boy Marcel, and when he has the famous cake, he returns to his boyhood years and summers at Combray. The many summers spent there, and of course, this is where we get introduced to Swann, the leading figure late in the book. We see the house where he spent his summer, his Aunt, one of those figures who knows everything, all the gossip and the world around her, and her ever-faithful servant for me, these good characters in Downton Abbey. Parisian families in the country have excellent descriptions of parties and the class system. But who is Mrs Swann? As she never came, the path he used to walk had names. The book then focuses on Swann, a man who is in demand but falls for a woman called Odette. He meets a family he has a metal with and becomes obsessed with not just that but also who she is meeting and what his very gesture means towards Swann. Then, in the later part of the book, we return to our narrator and his love for Swann’s daughter and his hunt for the mysterious Mrs Swann ? is she who we think she is? Now, an older woman with grey hair just stops, but is this woman the same in the middle part of the book?

The reality that I had known no longer existed. It sufficed that Mme Swann did not appear, in the same attire and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered. The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.

The last lines of the book I loved

I’m teasing a bit there, and this is just a quick view of the book it is a book you sink into the world of parties, artists, money, love and class. Where falling for one woman can cost a man so much. But this is also an age where their world is changing, but they don’t know it is also a world where you listen to music, look at pictures, read, and talk about all this. For anyone under thirty-five, this world may seem more distant than it did to me. I know there is a book of paintings in the book, which I hope to get at some point, but here is a question is the book about the music in the book that gathers it together. As I mentioned,e I am not a huge classical fan. But if there was a playlist of the music mentioned in the book, that would be great. I love the main narrator, a sickly book that loves his mother. Proust paints himself as this sickly boy in Cambrey awaiting a mother kiss so well. You feel for him when he doesn’t get one. Swann is a fascinating figure who makes everyone he seems to come into contact with talk about him. She also has this obsession with Odette, how she may have spent time with other men, and how she may view him. I no move on to within a budding grove. What did you like about Swann’s way ?

The Waterfalls of Slunj by Heimito Von Doderer

~ winstonsdad ~ Leave a comment

The Waterfalls of Slunj by Heimito Von Doderer

Austrian Fiction

Original title – Die Wasserfälle Von Slunj

Translators – Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser

Source – Personal copy

I’m back on with a classic, I will still be trying to read mainly classic this year. Oddly, today is the first day I have felt my usual bookish self this year. This year, I have struggled to read, blog, and use social media. So I was so happy I managed to sit earlier and read under pages in a coffee shop. Thought about the upcoming weeks. One of the books I struggled to get through this year was by Austrian writer Heimito Von Doderer. He was born into a privileged family at the time, one of the wealthiest families in Austria. I have two other books, the one that came out from NYRB a while ago and the genuinely epic two-volume The Demons, which was republished by an American publisher and has over 1000 pages. This book was meant to be a multi-volume series, but he only wrote this, and the second volume was published after he died. So we are thrown into The Tale, the end of the Austor Hungarian Empire. The book was meant to be seven books from 1880 – 1960, but only the first two were released.

However, all these rather grand houses, each standing alone at the edge of the grassy park, suffered from the same fundamental trouble. They were damp. Their basements were dank as dungeons. But just at this time, when the Claytons settled down here, a Vienna firm put on the market a drying-stove of a new design. The poster by means of which this new product was brought to the public notice was terrifying. It showed the new stove standing in the gloom of a cellar, its maw fiery; from the left and the right side of the stove there grew arms with fists uplifted; and from this monster panic-stricken toadstools and mildewy hobgoblins were fleeing, their faces contorted with mortal fear, while the wildly flickering rays of ferocious heat from the stove’s mouth pursued them in their headlong flight, decimating them. One could scarcely help feeling sorry for these doomed creatures, these little galloping fungus legs, wailing toadstools, and hurrying vapors. That poster of the stove with the threatening, whirling fists was to be seen in Vienna for many years. It was still there in the time of little Donald Clayton.

Grand House was a world the writer grew up in !

The book follows the Claytons and the English industrialist family trying to set up and move into the Austro-Hungarian with their new Office in Vienna. Along with this, the title of the book comes from the fact. Early in the book, Robert and Harriet, the parents of the two main characters, their sons Robert and Donald, spend the Honeymoon at the Hotel at the Falls, located in Croatia. This book sees the sons setting up the factory and the people working in the factory [particularly Chwostik, the deputy director of the Factory, who used to live with p[prostitutes. The factory makes agricultural machinery and, in some shadow,s actual companies working there at the time. It captures the later end of the 19th century as the world suddenly sped up. As we see how, all, this world is a lot of characters and, in a way, memories of the time. It all stems from the Claytons, the father and his sons.An epic book that also has a bit of humour at times and sees a world long gone and, as it was happening, was doomed, which I love to read.

At this point in developments a gingerly key was inserted into the lock (Münsterer always went about very quietly here, without himself knowing why; perhaps it was a sort of echo of his reverence for Chwostik that made him behave in this way).

He did of course also hear the voices that came from the room now his, for the door was open. At the same instant he realized, in retrospect, that the front door had opened when he had turned the key once; so it had only been shut, not locked. He could hear his stepmother talking. She had simply walked into his room with someone (new tenant?), and there she was talking; and he came slinking in like a dog. Now he could make out what she was saying: “… yes, that’s how it is, sir, it’s for my stepson, who lives with us, and us having no room for ourselves as it is. He wants to get married. In the post office, he is.”

But our poor Münsterer did not merely slink, he also kept his mouth shut. He was an underling of caretakerdom, the advance guard of caretakerdom, a pawn in Frau Wewerka’s sphere of influence (homo conciergificatus Wewercae

Chwostik the depty from the factory is anothher main character part from the Claytons

I think this is one of those books you drift in. It has a style that drifts like memories can drift. There is a feeling of Freud in the background of the book. It is one of those books in a notebook that is handy with the characters to keep track of them. But also, it is a world that is now gone. It uses both the personal world of the Claytons and the dying Empire like the river that follows over the fall clashing and mixing this is a book that was the start of what would have been a truly epic book I feel it captures the world before world war one. This book captures the historical and societal changes around the Claytons. Have you read any of his books?

Spanish Beauty by Esther Garcia Llovet

~ winstonsdad ~ Leave a comment

Spanish Beauty by Esther Garcia Llovet

Spanish fiction

Original title – Spanish Beauty

Translated – Richard Village

Source – Subscription

I am so pleased Foundry have gone the subscription route as last year the books I read from them were both in my books of the year. So when this the first book of this year fell through my letterbox, I put aside everything else and read it in a couple of sitting . Esther Garcia Llovet qualified in clinical psychology, but she also studied screenwriting and became a documentary scriptwriter. She has cited Bolano as an influence on her writing. Also; the work of Raymond Carver is a Noir Novella, the first of a trilogy. This is set in the least Spanish city of Benidorm and has a world-weary detective that walks the line of the law on both sides. But this detective is a female with a British father in the most British place outside the UK.

Benidorm. Cheap culture. Beach culture. People who speak three languages without ever studying, corner shops, Belgians, watered-down gin and tonics, gays. Second-hand Tom Clancy novels, swollen with damp, crunchy with sand, sand on your pillow, sand in your paella, in your G-string, in the shower, all-day fry-ups, all-day Thai massage, cicadas at night. Piles of sick, pissing against walls, and Tom Jones songs. Melanomas, cystitis, diarrhoea all round. ChlamydiaAnd the sea. Like the desert of the Levant, of the West, of Las Vegas, shadows of skyscrapers on the beach, reaching higher and higher, shadows that go on for miles, stretching over the surface of the lukewarm sea at ten at night whilst families eat fried chicken on the shore, Mediterranean steel Godzillas on the cold dawn sand.

This opening capture some of what I said about eindorm as a place

Michela McKay is maybe the best way to describe her is rather like DI Burnside from The Bill; she is one of those [police officers with a dodgy reputation about her. We see her trawling through Beindorm in a twin quest. At first, she heard that a famous Dunhill lighter that was once owned by Reggie Kray and last time it came about, had been sold to a Russian Mafia figure is in her City. The other hunt is that of her Absent British father. It captures the dark side of a seaside town the seediness that often in the place of pleasure is just below the surface. This is like a modern take of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock in Modern Spain. She sees the gangsters, lowlifes, and ex-pats among those everyday holidaymakers. It is a ride through the darker side of a place of sun, sea and sex.

“I want to have a laugh with the Russians. We have to have a laugh with the Russians, right, because the Russians know all bout laughs. Vodka, polonium-210, and a stray dog in space. Who can top that? They never go brown, so they come here, to Spain, to our bottled flamenco sun, and we can’t get our heads round why. To buy flats, apartment blocks on the beach, the biggest mansion on the whole Costa de la Luz, a villa with acres of land around it, a Mediterranean pine forest and a golf course with a president chucked in.We see them, all these Russians, in the clubs, in cars, in the restaurants in packs of six or seven. The French and the English, sometimes you see a lone one on the loose, but never a Russian. You only ever see lone Russians lurking around the doorways of five-star hotels, neither in nor out, as if they can’t make up their minds, but they know exactly what they want. They want Spanish hedonism. Dionysian hedonism that only the tourists and the travel agents get to see, because the reality here is that we’re always really pissed off, and really burnt, not just by the sun. The Russians want the hedonism we don’t get to enjoy, they want the prices we can’t afford, they want the siesta we can’t even take. And they want music, music all night long, Benidorm! Fiesta!”

The russians behind the scenes

I liked this. I can see she is a Bolano fan. I read a review that mentioned this book as having a fragmented nature, and it reminds me so much of those early Bolano books, like Skating Rink. Which had a similar feel of being told in little snippets at times. It also felt like a detective novel, but it never was, and this is the same. It is a crime novel but more about the hunt and the people Michela meets. It also has a feeling of being. Made to be filmed . So when I heard it had already been sold and was being made into a film, I wasn’t surprised it had that feel of a book that would work well. The range of characters would suit many British and other character actors .As we trawl the darker side of Benidorm. A place where dreams are made and broken like most Flash seaside towns, it has a darker side. Blackpool in the sun, as it is called, is a place where, just a few corners away from the front, you can be caught up in a darker world than you can imagine. Place full of lost souls, souls on the run. And broken dreams make the world of Beindorm Michela Mckay work through a darker place than many see on holiday. Do you have a favourite book set in a seaside town?

 

Overstaying by Ariane Koch

~ winstonsdad ~ 1 Comment

Overstaying by Aeriane Koch

Swiss fiction

Original title – Die Aufdrängung

Translator – Damion Searls

Source – Personal copy

I said yesterday I was tempted by the translated titles from the US Republic of Consciousness prize longlist. This was already on my radar after hearing it on the One Bright Book podcast it is the debut novel from the writer and had won several book prizes when it came out. I think this is one of those books that is hard to say what it is as it isn’t sci fi sci-fi horror it is lots of bits put together. It’s one of those books that seems to have come from nowhere. The writer is a performance artist on the side; you can see it in the book. I will try and do what they did on One Bright Book and try to add context to this mad book.

My reputation seems to have improved since the visitor has been occupying my house and my time. For example, there are neighbor children who never used to even glance at me, who now constantly kick soccer balls into my yard, supposedly by accident, so that they can knock on my front door and gawk at the visitor.

Every time this happens the visitor jumps up to offer them candy, and I don’t prevent him. It’s all the same to me whether or not he’s planning to poison the neighbor children. They’re all right, because they’re small, but then again they’re not that small; now that I think about it, they have chubby thighs.

The neighbor children suck on their exotic candies, still gawking, but they don’t move from the front door.

I contemplate availing myself of the broom, or the herd of spooky vacuum cleaner nozzles. The visitor beats me to it, though, by laughing and trying to hold the children’s hands, at which they run back outside, shrieking.

The vacumm cleaners that had risen up it seems alla bit weird!

 

The book is set in what seems to be a sort of near future where there aren’t many people, and there are visitors. We glimpse the visitor who, hat, lives with our Narrator. Then we have odd little pieces like the Hooovers, who seem to have come to life and tried to take over. We have the narrator, the daughter and granddaughter of a family that has lived in this village for many years. She seems to have a past hinted at throughout the book. The Visitor is never described. We have things mentioned like him having a sort of relationship with the hoovers and brush fingers. There is a sense our narrators are drawing close to each other. The book is odd erie at times and overs like a typical everyday story. It is one of those that you need to read. It is surreal in a different way. The book seems to drift as well at times, it seems like time has stopped, if that makes sense, this could have been days, weeks or even years in the book

The visitor refuses to accept that the earth turns, that the sun alternatingly rises and sets. He takes every day like the first ever, gets out of his bed, puts on a blinded face, and waddles across the balcony, squinting at the surrounding panoramic vista – he knows no name for anything, has no memory at all of yesterday when I identified each individual mountain peak for him by means of a short lecture.

His morning rituals are a mystery to me. He twirls his hair with his fingers, slurps milky liquids from giant bowls, wears fake fur draped around his shoulders. The visitor is one big tackiness, an insult to the aesthetic eye. I feel sympathy for him, for he imitates a hippie or a woolly mammoth or some other extinct species, which doesn’t much help him understand the present. He stays lost in his own thoughts while work is being done, while money is being shoveled into accounts, while the day is being given a certain rhythm.

He, on the other hand, moves through time in circles.

At times is he a post war cave man I wondered as well !

I said I try to capture this book well. If a Swiss post-apocalyptic soap opera was set in a small village directed by David Lynch, it would be this. But then I recently rewatched the early Whose Line is it anyway? The recent death of Tony Slattery made me think this could be a sketch of the setting of a soap opera, the characters from an alien encounter film in the style of slow-burning romance as the world falls apart.  I feel this is one of those books that you just can’t say it’s like this book or that book I’ve read as it is just a little surreal in that what she has done is captured that ordinary story but with a few surreal pieces. Another image I had was Dysons marching around like the hammers did in the film The Wall, but that is just me. Have you read this book or have a favourite work that is a little surreal?

January 2025 A slow start to the year

~ winstonsdad ~ 4 Comments
  1. Strait is the Gate by Andre Gide
  2. Eugenie Grandot By Honore de Balzac 
  3. Mozarts Journey to Prague by Eduard Mörike
  4. Night Flight by Antoine De Saint -Exupery
  5. Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Nikolai Leskov
  6. The Doctor’s Wife by Sawako Ariyoshi 
  7. The Frolics ofThe Beasts by Yukio Mishima

I managed just seven reviews for the first month of the year. I start with a few French classics and then a book following Mozart. Then, the daring early avatars’ lives told. Then a woman goes on a killing spree. A doctor’s wife tells her life with an overbearing mother. Then a final Japanese novella that I didn’t really get on with. No New countries and no new publishers.

Book of the month

 

I loved this book about those early pilots flying over the Andes as the earliest commercial flight started taking off the ground. I have a couple other of his books on my tbr I hope to get to this month.

Non-Book moments

January is slow for new albums, and I haven’t brought any as of yet this year. I streamed the Newq Anne B savage album, which is the second I have the debut album. This album is good I loved the song Donegal as it is a place I have many happy thoughts about. On TV, Skelton Crew finished a little bit of an anti-climax in the end. Then I love a bit of cheesy crime TV, so the new series of the good ship murder has been fun, a silly holiday destination crime series. Chanel Fives’ take on Death in Paradise has a few twists. Then at the end of the month, Disney Plus had a new series High Potenial a sort of Female Monk a woman with a high IQ and unique way of viewing the world gets a job as a detective after solving a case whilst working as a cleaner at the police station.

Next Month

I think I will be slow for a while. I am still just in the middle of sorting my reading room, office, and library. This involves storing a lot of books as I need a clear out. Then, I will buy new bookcases and a new hi-fi unit with some shelves. I am not the quickest at this. I hope to have it all done by the end of February. I am also mixing some new books in I had dreamed of reading Classics all year, but I now know after a Month the reason I don’t read a lot of classics is maybe I was too caught up in the latest thing, but that said I still have several new books building up over the month I will be reading a few new books each month just keep on top of my subscriptions and prize list I brought the five translated books on the republic of consciousness US longlist that came out earlier this month. I am still a million overdoing the Booker International. I have shadowed for so many years, and I can’t think of not doing it.  I may do a piece when my library is done I am looking forward to it. Done, I don’t cope well with the Chaotic Room, and this room is the place I blog  from these days. I will be happier when it is all finished. What are your plans for next month?