Month: March 2025

Small Boats by Vincent Delecroix

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Small boats by Vincent Delecroix

French fiction

Original title – Naufrage

Translator – Helen Stevenson

Source – Review copy

I said yesterday I had only asked for one review copy. I had asked for two as this wasn’t out, but it came very soon after the longlist came out. it was maybe the book that caught my eye from the titles, as firstly I hadn’t heard of the book other than seeing it had been down for the Prix Goncourt a few years ago. The writer is better now as a philosopher and has also written translations of works by Kierkegaard. It is a book that tackles one of the things that causes a lot of argument,s immigration, and those trying to sail from France into the UK on these small boats. I prefer the French title, not quite as subtle as court it is the French word for Shipwreck. A nod to the book and what happens

While she was playing me the recordings, the policewoman sometimes stared hard at me, sometimes gazed out of the window at I know not what, because from my signal station all I ever saw was the sea, and given a choice I would much rather, like today, look out at a stretch of road with a building site, some workers, Africans mostly, but at least they were alive, not wet and chilled to the bone, not women, not children, so I was ok looking at all that, while they played me the recording of the voice saying Please, please and me saying Calm down, help is coming.

But hope never came and she is arrested for the deaths

The book follows one. A single boat, one small boat, of the many that every day cross one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, the English Channel. What happens to many of these boats when they run into trouble? When there are too many people on the ship. I kept thinking, especially when I knew the French title of the book, The Great French Painting, The Raft of the Medusa, that would be gripping to the raft after a boat has sunk. Well, this isn’t a piece. For French art, this happens daily instead of dead bodies hanging from trees like in Simone’s Strange Fruit. These are bodies that wash ashore on the shorelines!  So what happens when high figures in the French government try to single out a single Coast Guard official on the day when the 27 souls who died on this small boat were lost at sea? It follows who is to blame. Then, in the book’s middle part, it sees those souls as they drown in the middle of the Channel.The book is  a book that made me think and also get so angry about this whole subject.

They had to wait till nightfall to put the boat in the water, a wide, semi-rigid Zodiac, six metres long, with a flimsy deck and a spluttering outboard. They didn’t know each other, or hardly. Some had come via Turkey or the Balkans and had possibly never seen the sea, some had already made the dangerous voyage across the Mediterranean. They had squatted around Calais; most of them were Kurds, a few Africans. There were two women and a little girl. They shuffled around on the edge of the dunes without looking at each other, hardly spoke. Then the signal came and they moved forward on the beach. To their left, further down the coast, another group was creeping towards another dinghy.

Imagine the fear ebeing in. a small dingy in the dark as supertankers and container ships cross your path!!

This is a book that looks at one group of deaths but in that way captures the whole problem of who is to blame for these deaths. I often think that a blind eye is turned to this. I can’t see the problem. We may need to be a little more compassionate and look at a way to get people who want new lives to those new ones! I hate it when I hear of people spitting sand, threatening lifeboat men for saving immigrants whose boats have sunk or are sinking due to those trying to make money off those with no money chasing a dream of a better life. Even writing this post, I am getting wound up This is a subject I feel needs addressing, not just people blaming someone like a single coastguard. This is maybe the most thought provoking book on the longlist for me this is the =perfect book club book as it really shows people views when they read this as it is hard not to be moved significantly in the middle section but also about the blame that isn’t always that one persons fault as they are p[art of a system with there collective head in the sands. Do books ever affect you in this way !!

On the calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle

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On the calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle

Danish fiction

Original title – Om udregning af rumfang

Translator – Barbara J Haveland

Source – Review copy

This book wasn’t out when the long list came out, so I managed to get a review copy of it. It is the first of a series of five books that the writer initially self-published. But it has since gained ground and has been translated into many languages. Solvej Balle had an earlier book translated into English in the nineties and also wrote radio dramas. She was heard as one of the new female writers in the nineties from Nordic countries with a modernist writing style. But this book sees her taking a turn with the style of this book, which is the first in a series of seven books that follow people like the main character in this book, Tara, as she is caught in a loop of time reliving the same day. Now Balle says she had the idea for this book years before Groundhog Day, which is a film with a similar idea. But the time loop was in science fiction before Heinlein wrote a short story in the late fifties around time travel (I used to like his books and short stories as a kid)

I have moved back to the table by the window and before long I hear Thomas’s feet on the stairs and the passage again.

I hear him in the kitchen and the hall. I hear him open the door facing the road and go out to fetch a leek from the garden and some onions from the shed. I can hear him pulling on the pair of wellingtons by the door. I can hear him walking down the side of the house, and then nothing until he returns with his vegetables. I hear him chopping vegetables for soup.

Hear the rattle of the pot on the stove and, once the soup is ready, the scrape of chair legs on the kitchen floor. A little later I hear the gush of water through the pipes as Thomas washes his plate in the kitchen sink, then I hear him putting the plate back in the cupboard before going through to the living room. He spends his evening reading Jocelyn Miron’s Lucid Investigations and it’s almost midnight before he switches off the hall light and goes upstairs, but that is a while off yet, the evening is just beginning. Thomas is getting changed in the bedroom above and I am remembering a long succession of November days that have begun to run together in my mind.There are 121 days to remember. If 1 can.

The opening as she starts tio record the days in a journal

SO the framing devices of this book are that Tara and her husband Thomas are antique book sellers and are in Paris  for one night on the way to attend an auction and buy books. But we meet Tara as she wakes on her 121st, 18th November. One day she got stuck in. The lop of this day, but for her, she has just settled for this as her life, and what we see is what happens when you accept b43eing in the same day, how those subtle little changes occur every time she relives the day, change the day slightly this is a nuanced book about little changes. The only actual event in the whole day was meeting an old friend and his girlfriend for a meal, in which her hand was burnt and thus held in cold water. The title is a nod to this moment, and it is a way to calculate volume from the displaced water. Paret me things, this book has a huge nod to the French Oulipo group. The circumstance of this book is that the character is stuck on 18th November for a year, as the book carries on . But how do you take that as a way to write ?

Our love has always been microscopic. It is something in the cells, some molecules, some compounds outside of our con-trol, which collide in the air around us, sound waves that form unique harmonies when we speak, it happens at the atomic level or that of even smaller particles. There are no precipices or distances in our relationship. It is something else, a sort of cellular vertigo, a sort of electricity or magnetism, or maybe it’s a chemical reaction, I don’t know. It is something that occurs in the air between us, a feeling that is heightened when we are in each other’s company. Maybe we are a weather system – condensation and evaporation: we are together, we look at one another, we touch one another, we condense, we come together, we make love, we fall asleep, we wake and revert to our strange bond, a quiet weather system with no natural disasters. Or a weather system which, until the eighteenth of November saw no disasters.

Later in the book her view of it all in a way

That is the question she has taken a different route to than Groundhog Day. What happens when the person stuck in the time loop just accepts it instead of making use of it like in Groundhog Day? What happens when the changes over the day after day are ever so subtle and gradual? This is what she has captured. If Knausgaard wrote sci-fi, this would be the subtle little things that happen in the days as they unfold. As I say, it reminds me of the sort of challenge Oulipo writers set themselves in their writing. A sort of waiting for Godot, but this is a woman just waiting for the 19th of November, stuck in the 18th, like Beckett’s characters stuck waiting for the elusive Godot. I love to see how she will carry this on in the following six books. I have been told there are other characters in the other books! Have you read this? What are your thoughts?

on a woman’s madness by Astrid Roemer

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On a woman’s madness by Astrid Roemer

Suriname fiction

Original title – Over de gekte van een vrouw

Translator – Lucy Scott

Source – subscription book

I did have a few of the books when the Booker international longlist came out as I have several subscriptions from different publishers one of the first I signed up for was the publisher of this book Tilted Axis as over the time they have been publishing they have push boundaries and brought new voice to English in there books and this is a p[perfect example of there books. Why we had to wait forty years for this book I wonder why it has taken so long. But this book would have been a lot more hard-hitting forty years ago. I feel. Now, Astrid Roemer reminds me of Wilson Harris. They come from countries very close to one another in Latin America. I have looked and can’t see a connection other than they were writing simultaneously. So we follow Noenka story a woman that has chosen to escape her marriage after just nine days.

My marriage lasted exactly nine days, making waves in our tiny riverine country and setting me adrift for the rest of my life.

It started with my extended family, when I knocked on my

parents’ door that ninth night to wake them.

It was raining, heavy and overbearing, and as the roof of our home was fairly flat, the sound of my knuckles rapping on the wood didn’t travel inside: it was, instead, immersed in the beat of the falling rainwater. Dead silence filled the house.

My hands hurt, more than my head and my stomach, and I was soaked through. And scared, not only of the ominous graveyard nearby that the lightning transformed into an even more nightmarish setting, but also of the city’s overall bleakness when asleep – this city that let itself be vanquished by water.

Scared of my mother and father’s house, which was refusing to let me inside on my flight to the odors of talcum powder and brass polish, tobacco and old newspapers, which would get rid of the smell of blood hanging around me.

The opening of the first chapter

We follow Noenka as she bravely tries to escape her marriage. After just nine days of marriage, she knows it was a mistake. But this small town in Suriname is going back 40 years, even then, so the answer is no. She has to escape to the biggest city in the country, Paramaribo. This is the tale of her life there from her escape, hiding in orchids. Flowers are a recurring theme in the book. But also the violent nature of trying to escape marriage in a world that isnt’ queer freeindly we see a woman on her own journey of discovery and her attraction to woman and all that this entails. As well as being black in this world of hers. A society with a very male-dominated view of the world. This is a struggle to be herself, but also a look into how brutal and how much violence was aimed at her. Showing how hard it was to be a lesbian in society at the time.

When I was five, I lived the dream at the lady’s house. Floors that gleamed like the mirrors in brass frames, furniture in dark wood with scroll legs, and colorful satin upholstery, cushions that smelled of flowers. Heavy portraits on the walls, a candelabra full of white candles, and scores of porcelain figurines, sadly locked away in glass display cases.

And there was Ramses. Dressed like a crowned prince from a Western fairy tale: white shirt, bow tie, slim trousers in dark velvet, pristine white socks, and black patent leather shoes, roaming the house when his mother wasn’t looking – playing the organ or reading from an English picture book under her watch. I doted on him with my eyes, my ears pricked up whenever he spoke, and I dreamed that he became a bird and flew away with me and his flock of parakeets.

I like the idea of being a flock of Parakeets

This book leaves you as a reader thinking how much the world has changed. But also for those other Noenkes still worldwide struggling in their own violent macho worlds. This tale is about trying to break free, never quite getting the dream, but it is about trying to be oneself in a complex world. I said Wilson Haris came to kind it is in the richness of Roemer world, and the way the world around Noenke sometimes drifts towards nightmares reminds me of the fever dreams in Harris’ writing. The heat and Humidity of their shared world must draw this writing style. I liked this book; it is a complex and complicated book to follow. One of my fellow Jurors wondered if she had done this after the book was written, but no, it was written in the fragmented style, which, as it was an early novel, makes you wonder what her other novels are like. As I said, this would have been even hard hitting had it come out in English then. But it still rings true and makes you think of other women worldwide struggling to be themselves. Have you read this book?

 

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

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Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

Italian fiction

Original title – Le Perfezoni

Translator – Sophie Hughes

Source – Subscription copy

Now one thing we can always count on is a book from Faaitzcarraldo =being on the booker longlist, Well you hope there is asa they are bring out the cutting edge of fiction from around the world and yes they have a clever knack of having published future noble winners and may continue with that lets see, So this maybe wasn’t the book from there recent books that people had picked for the longlist. But for me, it is a perfect book for the way the Booker Prize is moving, it is the tale of some millennials, social media, and life in general. It captures how the world has shrunk and, in many ways, is a very similar world we all live in now.

The kitchen is fitted out with glossy white subway tiles, a chunky wooden worktop, a double butler’s sink.

Open shelves are lined with blue and white enamel dishes and mason jars filled with rice, grains, coffee, spices. Cast-iron pans and olive wood ladles hang from a wall-mounted steel bar. Out on display on the worktop are a brushed steel kettle, a Japanese teapot and a bright red blender. The windowsill is filled with herbs growing in terracotta pots: basil, mint, chives, but also marjoram, winter savory, coriander, dill. Pushed against one wall is an antique marble-top pastry table and salvaged school chairs

This made me laugh as it remind me of some many oictures coffee shops etc I have seen with a similar vibe and style

The book follows Anne and Tom as they live out that expat dream of living in Berlin (I, for one, had shared this dream as well; I had lived in Germany but would have loved to have been in the post-wall era Berlin). What is captured in the modern world, a new take at the start of the book, is a nod to a book by George Perec in the sixties, when the first explosion of consumerism happened, when things price-wise became within the grasp of many people. Well, this is maybe the 2020s version of how social media has taken over the world. Instagram, Pinterest, etc. So we all have plant-filled apartments with similar posters and art, with Gooseneck kettles and V60  with filters to make the perfect pour over. The local coffee roasters. But this world is also ideal, and as they see those around them come and go, they start to lose the love of this world, and what to replace it with. They start to do something which too few people do these days, and become political and try slowly, but over time, become more radical in the steps they take to make the world around them more real. This is about the modern dream, those filtered pictures. Those idolised lives.

And it is a happy life, or so it seems from the pictures in the post advertising the apartment for short-term rental at one hundred and eighteen euros a day, plus the fee to cover the Ukrainian cleaner, paid through a French gig economy company that files its taxes in Ireland; plus the commission for the online hosting platform, with offices in California but tax-registered in the Netherlands; plus another cut for the online payments system, which has its headquarters in Seattle but runs its European subsidiary out of Luxembourg; plus the city tax imposed by Berlin.

I’ve looked on Air BnB to see how long a mon ths rent here and there would cost.If I had the time and money !

I am old enough to be from the pre-social media generation. Social media waves have come and go in the last couple of decades. Like Fury in the slaughterhouse said in the song, every generation has its disease or in this case, social media. This is the Instagram world of perfect clips and how it affects one couple, but also shows the hollow nature of these dreams and worlds. Berlin was the ideal choice, it is a hipster place to live, always has been. For Nick Cave or even Lou Reed before him. Through to a singer like Lloyd Cole, who also wrote a song about how hip Berlin was back in the day. Anne and Tom could be any couple on social media. But the main thing around this book is that the writer is George Orwell’s Italian Translator, and this is a sort of Orwellian tale of the modern world and how all that shines isn’t what it seems. A great picture has a story behind it every time! I am someone who spends a lot less time on social media than I did a decade ago. I know the feeling of losing who you are somewhat. But for me, social media also opened doors. What is your take on this novella? It is one of the most interesting books on the longlist so far !

Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa

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Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa

Japanese fiction

Orignal title – ハンチバック

Translator Polly Barton

Source – Personal copy

This was another book from the longlist i was vaguely aware of , I remember reading when the writer had won the Akutagawa prize a couple of years ago as she was the first disabled writer to win such a big prize in Japan; in fact, in any big book prize worldwide, let’s face it there are not many disabled voices out there in the books we read. So I had this on my radar to read; given the nature of my job, anything that deals with disability and is written from that point of view captured my attention as a reader. As I feel it is a world underrepresented by readers. In some ways, this book is a thinly veiled tale of the writer’s own life, but maybe in HD, can I get away with saying that this is her world turned up to fully steamy!!

Meanwhile, S was leaning up against the tinted glass while the trader sucked on her E-cup tits. The black turtleneck hoisted up around her mouth muffled her moans so they sounded super horny. Her enormous white breasts were glistening and bouncy like ripe Japanese pears. You had to hand it to 2I-year-old college students! Huge but still pert, they really were a flawless set of tits.

No wonder 26-year-old Y was hanging her head, her cheeks reddened by the humiliation of defeat. Although, if I’m being totally honest, I’m not that into big-breasted women. Y’s regular-sized, slightly saggy tits were actually way more up my alley. Yeah, she was really turning me on. I stuck a hand into her panties to find she was already dripping wet. ‘Can 1 fuck you?’ I groaned into her ear. ‘Sure &’! she replied. I grabbed one of the condom packets that had come pirouetting down from the ceiling at just the right moment, and so began

The tale of hers that opens the book

The book opens with our narrator writing one of the erotic stories that she has been publishing under a pseudonym on erotic websites. In her stories, she explores the experiences of sex as a disabled woman and reflects on how it would feel. She lives in a nursing home, a place her parents chose for her, where she tweets and writes. One day, her new male carer suggests that he knows about her secret life as a writer. This revelation adds a twist to the narrative as the fantasy worlds she creates spill into reality. Because of her circumstances, she finds she can prompt this man to act out some of the scenarios she wishes to explore. Her own sexual journey with this young man. It is a tale of power in a way being switched to the way this may happen otherwise.It also shows a subject until recent times, a taboo, and that is the desire of people like our narrator and the writer herself. Trapped in their own way, seeking freedom of their desires!

In American universities, in accordance with the stipulations of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, not only are digital educational teaching resources the norm, but it’s also compulsory for textbooks to be accessible to the visually impaired through a reader. Japan, on the other hand, works on the understanding that disabled people don’t exist within society, so there are no such proactive considerations made. Able-bodied Japanese people have likely never even imagined a hunchbacked monster struggling to read a physical book. Here was 1, feeling my spine being crushed a little more with every book that 1 read, while all those e-book-hating able-bodied people who went on and on about how they loved the smell of physical books, or the feel of the turning pages beneath their fingers, persisted in their state of happy oblivion.

A remindee of her own personal challenges and how society deals with them!

 

 

The story addresses the theme of feeling trapped in your body; how can she be free while confined to a chair and reliant on oxygen? It delves into the desire to be seen as something other than society’s perception. It highlights the unspoken desires of disabled people, a subject that is only just beginning to gain attention in our society. Something people are only just starting to talk about, so a book like this with is cader and frankness and a straightforward way of dealing with other erotic desires is eye-opening and also refreshing. I think the writer of this book must have a wickedly playful mind if this book is a reflection of her as a person. One of the books that has so far raised its head above the others, and also like some of the other book,s this is the sort of book I hope to see on lists like this books that open up new dimensions for us as readers but also give voice to underrepresented writers as well.

Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda

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Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda

Mexican fiction

Original title – Perras de reserva

Translators – Heather Cleary and Julia Sanches

Source = Personal copy

Now, when the longlist came out for the booker international, this was one of the books I was vaguely looking at getting myself. It has a rather eye-catching cover with shocking Pink, and the choice of Font on the cover catches the eye. I have read a lot of great female writers from Mexico in the last few years in the time I have been blogging it is amazing how many writers have become available to us in English, and this writer is an activist for females in Mexico to have abortions, which is something I strongly support so I know ew this collection would be for me it is a colle action of short stories with a loose connection between them all. Now, I have to say the collection actually tale ends with the two best stories as the first and last for me, but the others all deal with the everyday horrors and violence for females in Mexico these days.Have you a favourite recent Mexican writer ?

Okay, I made that up … There is no Gerardo. I just wanted to add some romance to the story. I got pregnant from a one-night stand. I didn’t know the guy’s name and had zero interest in finding out. His performance was underwhelming. Yup, I got knocked up by a terrible lay.

I’m the kind of girl who gets used as an argument against abortion. The kind who hooks up with the first guy who sweet-talks her on a night out. The kind who should be on birth control, get her tubes tied, or keep her legs closed. I let total strangers grope me. I like parties, getting wasted, making a drunken ass of myself.

The opening story trying to find a way to lose her baby

The book opens with a girl wanting an abortion, and instead like in the not-so-distant [past in the UK, her only route is an old wives tale or a sort of back street treatment we used to see in the UK. This is an eye-opening, horrific look at one girl’s journey to lose an unwanted birth. The other stories see us meeting women and girls trying to keep one step ahead of the violent world they find themselves in, whether that is as a teen feeling a gang is the closest to family to others when you are a mother alone or not the world this is the harsh reality faced by many women in Mexico in a way it becomes like a recurring nightmare the stories blend at times bleed into one another as violence becomes almost the norm to us as the reader. Til the final tale, whix=ch is like all the rest but with added urgency to remind you once again of the horrors facing women in this violent world. Memories bleed onto the page here and on Facebook in the story itself.

At seven in the morning, I stumbled across a news story that broke me. They’d found a body in the river. It was in a black plastic bag, in an advanced state of decomposition. The water had kept the bag hidden, but when it receded, two feet appeared. Your feet. A few kids passing by noticed the smell of decay and called the police. The corpse was naked.

It’s hard for me to say your corpse. Women’s clothing was found nearby. A denim skirt. A black T-shirt. One sneaker. It was you.

No one is ever ready for the death of someone they love. But this wasn’t death. It was theft. You were stolen, violently ripped from my side. I broke down. I’d never cried like that before because I’d never felt like that before. Rage and sadness, all at once. When I remember that moment, I still feel the knot in my throat. It was terrible. I can’t write about it. It ripped me apart. An unidentified woman. You were one more body in this genocide. Another nameless woman adding to the death count. Another pink cross.

The end story more death as we see them mark with crosses!!

Now I have spent ages since I read this book how to best describe it bu then reading the above, it misses the dark humour that you also get in this type of world, gallows humour, the black humour you have to have to get by because otherwise, this book is the equivalent of a sort of literary waterboarding for the read quick breaths bother the violence. All that entails happens in this world. This book, I feel, would stand out for the judges as it is edgy, vile, funny, dark, and full of the violent side of the world. As I said in the middle of the book, this is normal to you as the reader reading reoccurring horrors in the tales I will never know other than in these pages, so if you want a ride into a world that will make you feel uncomfortable, read this, for me, this is what the booker is there for to highlight those books that are different that stand out like this book. Have you read this book?

Room is done and Birthday books

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I will be back to reviewing books later this week, I was out at a 60th birthday party at the weekend for someone I looked after 30 years ago that I have kept in contact with over the years. It was nice to celebrate it. I was in between shifts at work, so I didn’t drink, but then overnight, something in the buffet mustn’t have agreed with means had left me feeling a little drained. Until today, but as it is my birthday, we head to Sheffield, it’s been a while since we have been, and the Waterstones is a little larger there. They also have a couple of great coffee shops I like too. So the first part of the post is the books I have just returned home with, plus two my Amanda had brought me.

Amana asked me for some birthday ideas. I had sent her these two books. First, Peanuts has long been in my mind to collect I love Charlie Brown cartoons, so I have been eyeing these collected series of his cartoons over the last few years. Then the second is First Love, the first novella in the new Mookse and Gripes Novella club next month, and when it was described, it sounded like a book I would love.

From Sheffield, firstly, this is Sebald’s latest book. This is his writing about mainly fellow writers and a lot about Austrian writers. I have read a number of Austrian writers, so having Sebald’s views on them will be great. Has anyone else got this yet?

 

Next is a pair of Latin AMerican novellas , these caught my eye and I am not to aware of either writers other than in recent years I have read some great female writing from Latin America.

Then, the last in this trilogy is also from a Latin American writer. I heave the other two books and hope to read all three in one go later this year. Then hope to catch the film of the first book and see if they plan to make films of the other books. Have you read any of the books ?

I also finally moved all the books and old shelves out last weekend and then built new shelves with doors and lights. They are deeper shelves, so they seem less likely to tip over. I can also store all my LPs on the bottom shelf of the bookcases. I also managed to get all my CDs out for the first time in many a year. I haven’t organised the shelves in any order yet., I may at a later date sort them but for now I and finally pleased to have a less chaotic room for both working from home and to blog in. Many thanks to Amanda who had helped me loads through out the weeks of getting the room done.

 

A leopard skin Hat by Anne Serre

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A Leopard skin hat by Anne Serre

French fiction

Orignal title – Un chapeau léopard

Translator Mark Hutchinson

Source – Personal copy

Now of all the books that came out on the longlistt this year this writer is on my list of french writers to get to I had want to get the couple of earlier books that came out from another press by her but hadn’t got around to it so she her on this list is good as she is a writer that maybe needs a high profiler in English. There is a great LRB bookshop interview with her when this book came out. It makes you want to read her other books and see what an inventive writer she is. She is well known for her excellent choice of first lines. She also mentioned that the narrator in this book has cropped up in other books she has written. The book is in part about her sister.

Hardest of all for her friend the Narrator was Fanny’s astonishment – a perpetual, dumbstruck amazement, littered with question marks – at the lack of response that was her lot. That was why, on the rare occasions when she did fight back and flew into a terrible rage – even with the Narrator sometimes – he always felt relieved. There you are, there was life, there was frenzy, the desire to do battle! It was a sign she was rallying her forces, was about to march on the enemy and slay him perhaps – perhaps even slash him to ribbons, since the violence of these sudden outbursts seemed to know no bounds. They could last for days, weeks even. He can still see her, teeth clenched, seated beneath the trees in a park reading, glancing up to find her old friend there, happening by, and the look in her eyes, the language she had used to shoo him away. Had Fanny been armed she would probably have killed him that day. But sadly she had a loyal heart and would sit in judgment on herself.

Fanny could be very dangerous at times

The book is a two-hander about two friends. The book’s narrator is a man in his mid-forties who has been friends with Fanny for many years. Fanny is a woman that has some apparent issues The title of the book comes from when she steals a leopard skin hat and is so proud of stealing an item that no one really wears these days, She is the sort of person that has no idea of what to wear for the season is very unpredictable in how she interacts with people and seems to be the sort of friend that follows the others around her in the career paths. There is hints at some sort of mental illness or even neurodiverget condition but also a little of both. The book is formed of glimpses of the pair through the years, a life that, although bright, is very flawed and like a moth to likely to fly into the flame as Fanny does in her own way.

FANNY AND THE NARRATOR had been close friends since childhood, but within that friendship roles that would normally shift about and change had been frozen for years now, and that wasn’t good. Nor did it bode well. The Narrator was stuck in the role of the watchful friend, steadfast and reliable, Fanny of the one who strays, is forever losing things – possessions, lodgings, friends – and only with the greatest difficulty manages to maintain a semblance of stability. He would have liked to have broken out of this box, not because he wished to fall apart in turn, but so that his friend could play the role of the steadfast, reliable one for a change.They could manage this for a minute or two, but not much more. For though Fanny liked to poke fun, and cruelly at times, at the Narrator’s chronic good health, she couldn’t stand him being weak. It would have been too much of an upheaval in the order of things.

The narrator and Fanny have been very close over the years

It is strange that I chose this as the second book for this year as it has little in common with the first book. Both are takes on AUto fiction without being strict auto fiction. Both have a relative with a mental illness and flawed relationships. This is a story of a woman that has an obvious opinion. It is never quite pinpointed, and given that it was written nearly twenty years ago, it is excellent as to how we view mental illness, which has moved on so much in the last decade or two. What we get is a friendship down the years told in snippets as we see how Fanny copes with the world but also can be wild and free in many ways. The book is an ode to a sister. Like Fanny, the narrator is a man, but the book also has a thinly veiled version of the writer herself coping with her own past.  Serre has described writing each book as a chess game where each game takes its won course, and her books take their won course. Have you read any of her other books? If so, which would you tell me to get next? I hadn’t heard of the translator, but he had been a close friend of Serre for forty years and knows her well.

 

Eurotrash by Christain Kracht

~ winstonsdad ~ 1 Comment

Eurotrash by Christain Kracht

Swiss fiction

The original title is Eurotrash

Translator – Daniel Bowles

Source – personal copy

I’m a bit slow off the block with my Booker international reviews. But life sometimes just catches up with me. I have read a number of the books in fact tonight I hope finish the fourst of the list anyway this was the first I read, I had seen this pop up a couple of times before the longlist and I had vaguely heard the writers name, maybe because it was shortlisted when it came out for both the German and Swiss book prize both of which I look at most years, hoping at some point to maybe read one fo those shortlists in there original language. Christian Kracht is both a novelist and journalist; he is known to consistently perform as a writer. He has said some things to maybe provoke a reaction. This book is a follow-up to his debut novel, but 35 years later, as a writer, he takes his elderly mother on a road trip.

I had once inquired: the University of Montana held no records of his ever having studied there, let alone grad-uated. Neither the alumni association nor the university archives found a Christian Kracht. There were also photos that showed him at his fake job at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Then he’d returned to Germany, into the benevolent clutches of Eduard Rhein and British Major George Clare, whose parents had been murdered in Auschwitz and who worked in the denazification bureau in Hamburg as liaison officer to the newly emergent, democratic German press and who committed Axel Springer to eternal friendship with Israel, an effort that so repulsed many SS alumni that they went off to Rudolf Augstein’s Der Spiegel magazine instead.

My father and Augstein often sat together in their favorite restaurant, Mühlenkamper Fährhaus. Each only ever ordered the Schlemmerschnitte-caviar and steak tartare on thickly buttered black bread-which, Augstein claimed, Hans Albers had always eaten there before the war. To accompany it Augstein drank ice-cold glasses of Linie aquavit, my father mineral water.

The past and of course the wealth does show through at times

SO what wee have Kracht discusses his family history and how his family made a lot of money of the Nazis and this book is how him and his mother in her 80s deal with that she has just be released from a mental institution. As the two follow a road south through Switzerland through the places he grew up, his mother also knows they had planned to give away some of the fortune made from the family to clear their shoulds. The book isn’t overly plot heavy and more a group of meeting along the way that see them trying to get rid of the money and condf=fronting other horrors from there past now the mother running of prescription drugs and Booze. Her son is full of the ghosts of his own past, overbearing family members, sexual abuse and the dark history of the making of the family fortune. This makes for a black comedy of a book about two people trying to reconnect and put things right, but along the way making some falls.

Often, when old people who have lost touch would like to suggest elegance, they resort to Bulgari. In my youth, there had been a Bulgari glass case with Bulgari jewelry in the dreadful discotheque Club Rotes Kliff on Sylt, in Kampen.

And in the dreadful luxury hotels in Marbella and Venice and Positano there were always Bulgari grooming products lying around in the bathrooms. Dreadful places like Qatar and Dubai were serviced by dreadful luxury airlines who likewise offered Bulgari products in their in-flight shower stalls.

Over the years my mother had internalized the idea that Bul-gari must embody something elegant, something desirable, while in reality these products and this name only triggered depression and thoughts of suicide. In which wardrobe were her cashmere sweaters, please, I called down the stairs.

His mother is a unique character in this book

I am aware this writer has been compared to Brett Easton Ellis, and I can see that it is a couple of decades ago that I read Less Than Zero by Ellis. I also see a come thread in German literature the Past ghost of family being Nazis haunting the present. It is also a road trip , a family drama with a large chunk of black humour. This book would make a great movie The mother would suit a German Maggie Smith if there is such a thing one of those great character actors that can capture a sort of upper class aserbicness like a Nazi Violet Crawley mixed with the queen mother in a jaunt thri=ough her and her sons past. The Father was working for the German Rupert Murdoch, and the book is a mix of a journey and a memoir of his life. It’s a book about money facing your own family’s past and how to cope with that in the present. Have any of you read his debut novel, Fraserland, which I think hadn’t yet been translated to English, which is a shame, well, according to the Wiki page.

Feburary 2025 Booker international month and what else ?

~ winstonsdad ~ 1 Comment
  1. Overstaying by Ariane Koch
  2. Spanish Beauty by Esther Garcia Llovet
  3. The waterfalls of Slunj by Heimito Von Doderer
  4. Swann’s way by Marcel Proust
  5. gifted by Suzumi Suzuki
  6. Far by Rosa Ribas
  7. Like a sky inside by Jakuta Alikavazovic

Well, February was another slow month of reviewing, and the library is still being done. I am a master of demand avoidance. I have shelves up, a new record stand up, and the bookcase comes next week, so I hope to have the room done in the next two weeks and get a new chair for my room when I see how much room there is. I start with a novel about a stranger over staying his welcome, then the first of two Spanish novels from Foundry editions, the first a hunt for a lighter once owned by one of the Krays. Then a proust like novel about the Austro hungarian empire from the point of view of an English family setting up a factory there. Then I finished Swanns Way but have fallen behind with the second volume of Porust. I love finding out about Marcel and Swann and their summer childhoods. Then a Mother and daughter spend time as the mother dies. Then, the second Spanish Novel and then the last book, a slim volume that is part of the Repulic of Consciousness Prize.

Book od the month

Like a Sky Inside is one of those books you have a feeling about before you read it, just from the blurb. It is going be a book you love, and this was, in fact, one of my favourite books of recent times. Art, family , memories and a night in the Louvre gallery what is not to love !!

Non book events

I haven’t brought many records this year with record store day due and the room being a little bit in Chaos. I watched a BBC series that was on YouTube called STRANGE A EX PREIST FIGHTS THE DEVIL IN modern-day London with Ian Richardson as the local bishop trying to keep all this under wraps. I missed this at the time. I loved most of the things I saw Ian Richardson in; one of those character actors should’ve been better known. I watched Daughters of the Dust, about a group of African Americans living on the American coast and living in their own world. Then I watched one part of the trilogy of films The White and the one with a great twist in the tale. Then Matt and Maura, an old couple, reunited just as Maura is struggling in her marriage. Mtt, a writer, appears. It is a film about what might happen, but it never gets there. It shows how the path we take in life sometimes is right.

Next month

I’ve fallen behind reviewing this year, but once my room is done, I will have more time and be keener to review books. Anyway, the Booker International came out, and since it came out, I have been keener on this year’s list of 13 new writers. New languages to read from a mix of novellas, novels, and short stories are fascinating. I have read one and have two more I am currently reading. I read Solenoid last year. I will be rereading it and reviewing it this time. I need to get back on track with Proust and my classic reading for this year. Also, the EBRD Shortlist is due out near the end of the month. I will be reviewing these books in a solo project and doing the usual shadow booker with the guys I’ve been doing it with for a year. What are your plans for next month? Are you reading any books from the booker list?