Month: April 2025

April showers did it rain books ?

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  1. Solenoid by Mircea Cartaescu 
  2. Celebration by Damir Karakas
  3. My Women by Yuliia Lliuk
  4. A carnival of Attrocites by Natalia Gracia Freire
  5. Under the eye of the big bird by Hiromi Kawakami
  6. The book of Disappearence by Ibtisam Azem 
  7. An untouched House by Willem Frederiks Herman
  8. Wayward Heroes by Halldór Laxness 
  9. The Palm Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola
  10. The sailor from Gibraltor by Marguerite Duras
  11. Spark of Life by Erich Maria Remarque

I t was a bumper month for reviews. I managed 11 reviews. We start in Romania, following a teacher in a dark, surreal Bucharest. Then of to Croatia and a story of a man coming home from the war. Then another war, this time the current conflict in Ukraine, is seen through the woman having to cope with the loss and changes to their life it brings.Then, a girl is considered a witch in a distant village in Ecuador. Then, humans have to start evolving to survive and flourish. THEN we see through two neighbours what happens when, one day, all the citizens from Palestine just disappear, how does everyone and the government take it. Then a man seeks refuge from the end of the Second World War in a house untouched by the war, as things happen. The lives of the two brothers as Vikings are retold in retellings of the Icelandic sagas. Then a man goes to find a new man to make palm wine in a folk tale-like trip. Then a woman hunts for a sailor she just saw and fell in love with, and now is trying to find him. Then the Second War is ending as we see this view from the point of view of a German prisoner in a concentration camp, as it all starts to draw in around the Germans, will the narrator survive to the end ? Well, I had one new country, Ecuador, the first this year. It’s getting hard to tick off countries, as there are fewer than there were a few years ago.

Book of the month

It is hard; there were a few longlist prize-winning books, but this hit home and had that small epic feel to the writing. It’s a book that I will think about for a long time after I finish it. Some of the descriptions of the world and nature were staggering.

Non book events

Well it was Record Store Day this month, and an early start and further back than other years, even though I was there at five. I did get a few records. Highlights included Pale Saints’ slow-building.Hindu Love Gods, which is a collaboration between REM and Warren Zevon, created this single album; it has a blues feel to it. Then I also brought lps  Talking Heads live, Belly (and a few more as well). TV-wise, it has been YouTube. With the country diary of an Edwardian lady, a twelve-part series follows the diary month by month. It wasn’t till I watched it this month that I saw it was filmed very near where my dad lives.The second series I had missed when I was younger, Squadron, follows an RAF squadron in the early 80s. Ok, this is very dated politically. But great to see the old planes flying. Other than that, the second series of the Star Wars series, Andor, is the best of them. It is a political thriller in style, with action, and never quite sure how the tale will turn out which makes it refreshing.

Next month

It will be mostly novellas next month. Plans are up in the air, and I don’t really have any books in mind. The only thing I can say is the recent turn of the club’s year last week has made me think that I need to read some of my backlist and the old books on my TBR. I have a few books already read to review. I’m in a good place, blogging-wise. In fact, every day, really. I’m not wanting to jinx it. My mental health is maybe in the best place it has been for at least five years. I have just finished a few sessions of talking therapy, which has helped me so much this time around. I think it shows in my blogging, to some extent. Hope you all had a good month, and remember it’s good to talk if you are struggling with your mental health!

 

 

 

I READ , I am a reader , I am Male Reader, I am a Straight Male reader oh no I read fiction as well how did that happen!

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I’ve been thinking of writing this post for a week or two. I’m not sure how I want to proceed, but let’s go anyway. I watch a bit of BookTube and other things on YouTube, and one of the things I’ve seen a lot recently is reactions to various posts about studies on men and reading. A lot is about how younger men, I’ll admit, I’m in my early fifties, so I know I look younger for my age. Some of the main points from the various posts I have read are, firstly, around specific figures in the Manosphere, as it is called. I won’t mention their names, as this particular field of people is something I have never had nor will I have an interest in. Anyway, they seem to promote anti-art, anti-reading ideas. Well, as someone who grew up loving culture, I find this whole thing just beyond me. I am going off track here, I’ll get back to the title as that captures what I am a straight male that reads fiction, we may be on the WWF endanger species, it seems. I wonder how we got here. How have my early years and life to the current situation with younger generations? I l start with me and then see how that may show how things have changed. I grew up with seeing my dad and granddad reading. They read lots of books, went to the library, and brought books. I already had a lead on most people, as males tend to read less than females, even years ago. Having a male reading role model is harder for some people. I also grew up in maybe a golden age of books, Roald Dahl , William Price maybe as early examples. Then on in my mid to late teens Great Fantasy this was a time of wonderfully evocative covers for books like The dragonlance series, Raymond Feist books. Then, Stephen King, I loved and literally just ate his books as a reader. Now, I didn’t go to university, and yes, like many men, I read less after my teenage years. I still brought books. Mainly literary fiction I will hold my hand upo and say I read mostly male writers, Thompson, Burroughs etc. Then it is Updike, Bellow, etc. I never got into Martin Amis but loved Will Self and Irvine Welsh. Then, maybe twenty years ago I became more drawn to world lit. I had read one or two books in translation in my twenties. Till now, where it is all translation bar the few books I pick in English still occasionally (i could do a whole post why this is less than it used to be as a straight male reader ) . Because my reading is so focused and driven, I have had a say in the way things have gone over the last twenty years. Translated fiction has first grown. But it has also become more and more diverse, and I tend to read more female writers than male writers, which sets me apart from many readers. So, I’m maybe an oddity. I love books, and I also grew up watching a lot of arts TV, back when it was actually arts TV, not what passes for arts TV or book shows these days. Sorry, I think about the poor state of Arts TV in the UK is an utter disgrace, and what these sorts of let’s make it hip and trendy and about the book tok or half dozen books that the UK press now seems to think are essential needs to change.Off on another tangent, let’s get back to the whole point of this: why do men read less, and why do they not read fiction ? I will throw my hat in with a few thoughts. The first and often mentioned is screens, whether it’s a computer, a game console, a phone, etc. These were so much less of a distraction and i can even see on my own reading how they have an effect, and I remember a pre-Games, pre smart phone age. So, that’s maybe the first issue. Then I am wary of saying this, but we may have, in a way, let the male novelist die out slightly over the last ten years. I think of the writers I grew up with, yes, they aren’t by today’s standard acceptable. Not that said, they did draw in males to reading. I think we need a new wave of charismatic male writers. But also maybe the demise of music papers, etc, has something as well. I remember a lot of the books I first read, which were new to me, came from interviews with singers in NME or Melody Maker, etc. List like Bowie’s favourite books. Then there is this sort of anti culture manosphere all about productivity, being a man or just how to be a complete arse really. Isn’t there enough of them? Surely, we need new male role models who can draw young men into books. In the early days of the blog, I did things like books about Eurovision. Books from teams involved in the World Cup. I used to do these to try to connect my love of football with my love of books. There are many great travel shows made these days that capture the world, but they often miss the writers and spirit of the place. I think translated fiction offers some great male writers, but also so many other avenues for male readers. The real answer is I don’t know what the anser is only it needs to be addressed soon rather than later or we will lose more and more men to boring how to be a better this that and the other productivity books. Rather than that, let’s stick to something that will feed there mind and take them elsewhere, or even give them empathy. What are your thoughts about this? Sorry to ramble on, I’m not sure what this does, if anything. I wish more people had my path and sheer desire to discover and read. I start with the picture from a well-known image of a woman reading, I saw it in Cambridge, nd will end with a sort of aAIhomage with a man ,this man in the style of that reading . WHta are your thoughts about men reading habits or lack of reading

 

Spark of Life by Erich Maria Remarque

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Spark if Life by Erich Maria Remarque

German fiction

Original title – Der Funke Leben

Translator – James Stern

Source – Library book

I now reach the fifth and last book of this round of Simon’s and Karen’s year club. Last but not least is a powerful work from the German writer Erich Maria Remarque, He is best known for his book All Quiet on the Western Front, seen as one of the best books to capture the horror and utter madness of war. He fell victim to the Nazis when they came to power in Germany as they tried to smear his name and make out the events in All quiet fdidn’t happen and that he had fought in the war. Anyway, he left Germany and lived first in Switzerland and later in the US, where he became a citizen after Germany revoked his citizenship and banned his books. He in turn, changed the spelling of his surname from Remark to the French spelling Remarque. This book was dedicated to his sister, who had stayed in Germany and was killed for being a traitor by the Nazis Regime.

509 stared absent-mindedly at the wall. Silber, the Pole, while still lying in the barrack with bleeding intestines, had called it the Wailing Wall. He had also known most of the names by heart and in the beginning had even made bets as to which of them the spot of sun would reach first. Soon afterwards Silber had died; but on bright days the names had continued to wake to a ghostly life and then disappeared again into the dark. In summer when the sun stood higher others, scratched in lower down, became visible, and in winter the square moved higher up. But there were many more-Russian, Polish, Yiddish-which remained forever invisible because the light never reached them. The barrack had been put up so fast that the SS had not bothered to have the walls planed.

The inmates bothered even less, least of all about the inscriptions on the dark sections of the walls. These no one even attempted to decipher. Nobody was foolish enough to sacrifice a precious match simply to grow more desperate.

His fellow prisoners and how the ss came in

The book is set in the dying embers of World War II as the Allies and Russia are slowly putting a stranglehold on Germany. We join 509, he is a German political prisoner in a Concentration camp, they haven’t been lined up to be killed but just worked to the bone, he has been there for ten years. So when they get news that the war is coming to an end. There are snippets throughout the book, like the Bridge at Remagen, which had been taken, meaning they can cross into Germany. These men, the veterans of the time, started doing things that maybe a while ago would have got them killed, pushing the lines, hiding from fellow prisoners, as the feeling of the war got near, with the local towns now being regularly bombed. Can 5009 and his friends make it through the war? What will happen when the SS take over the running of the camp? There are some moment when they see one man talk about the washroom and how at another camp it had been a way to kill people and how when one soldier would come it measnmt one thing and then another soldier later on starts freeing some of his fellow prisoners this is the look at those german held in the death camps not killed but worked to they are virtually dead on the whole these are all educate menmiddle class souls broken by the camp

The roll call had already lasted more than an hour, but it still didn’t tally. It was due to the bombing. The labor gangs which worked in the copper foundry had suffered losses. One bomb had fallen into their division and a number of men had been killed and wounded. On top of this, after the first shock, the supervising SS-men had started firing on the prisoners who sought cover; they had feared they might escape. Thus a further half-dozen had perished.

After the bombing the prisoners had dragged out their dead from under the rubble and wreckage-or rather what was left of them. It was important for the roll call. Little as the life of a prisoner was valued and indifferent as the SS were to it, dead or alive the numbers at the roll call had to tally. Bureaucracy did not stop short at corpses.

This made me smile german effiency failing as madness starts to descend

I read All Quiet on the Western Front, and over the years, I’ve picked a few of his other books to read; they are still on my TBR. But when I looked up the books for this week, I saw what had happened to his sister and how it had led him to talk to some of the famous German survivors of these camps. He came up with 509, and this novel serves as a tribute to her. Unfortunately, when he published it in Germany, he initially removed the tribute to his sisters, as she was still viewed by many Germans as a traitor for what she had done. With recent events around the world, it may be worth reading this about what happens when a country turns against its own citizens with hate and lies! This is one of the reasons I love the club years is unearthign gems like this book. Have you read any of his other books besides All Quiet on the Western Front?

The Sailor from Gibraltar by Marguerite Duras

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The Sailor from Gibraltar by Marguerite Duras

French fiction

Original title – Le Marin de Gibraltar

Translator – Barbara Bray

Source – Personal copy

This was another book that fell off the list from 1952. It took a while to browse the list of books from that year and find this, which is an early work by Marguerite Duras. She is best known for her book “The Lover,” but also wrote many other books during her time. A number of them were also translated into English by Barbara Bray, a champion of French literature who supported many writers in the 1950s and 1960s. She also worked very closely with Beckett!I have reviewed three other books by Duras since starting the blog. She is a writer whose books are different from each other, but love lost, desire and the lack of desire, as well as the places she writes about, all feature in the books I have read!

The first day I went from our hotel to the cafeteria. I intended to have an iced coffee and then go for a walk round the town. I stopped there the whole morning-Jacqueline found me there at midday, drinking my sixth beer. She was furious. What was the point of being in Florence for the first time in your life and spending the whole morning in a café? “This afternoon,” I said, “I’ll try this afternoon.” It was understood that we’d each go about on our own and just meet for meals. So after lunch she went off again. I went back to the cafete-ria, which was near the restaurant. The time went quickly. At seven o’clock in the evening I was still there. Jacqueline found me drinking a crème de menthe this time. She was furious again. “If I move it’ll kill me,” I told her. I was sure of it, but I thought it would be better the next day.

His visit to florence where he meets Anne

This book is again like yesterday’s, a sort of quest in a way. The book is told by a disillusioned French official who has spent the last eight years of his life in a job that merely rubber-stamps forms. He is also caught up with a mistress whom he has slowly grown to hate. So when the chance comes to work on a boat called the Giubraltor as they leave Florence. The ship is captained by the beautiful but lonely young American, Anne. She is haunted by the memory of a young sailor whom she has since fallen in love with So they are now endlessly sailing for what is now just known as the “Sailor from Gibraltar|”The story has a thriller feel to it as it seems to twist as we find out from are charac ter more about Anne and the man she is hunting for! The tale unfolds as we find lose , love and murder along the way

“Tell me about the ship,” I said. “About the Gibraltar.”

“The ship’s not the most important thing.”

“No, they told me it was a man. Was he from Gibraltar?”

“No. He wasn’t really from anywhere. Perhaps,” she added, “per-haps I could stay until the day after tomorrow.”

What had I been thinking? When they’re at sea, Eolo had said, she must make do with the sailors. My hand wasn’t trembling now, and I didn’t feel faint any longer at holding her in my arms.

“And you don’t live with him any more?”

“No.”

“You’ve left him?”

as he learns more about the ship and heads off with Anne on her quest

I am a massive fan of Duras; she captures a sort of longing and loss of desire very well in her work. But she has also captured a kind of thriller feel in this book, as the events involving all the characters are slowly revealed throughout. You are never quite sure as the reader which way she will take the book. This is one of the books that follows what happens when you try to capture that moment of a perfect glance and the seemingly perfect man or woman. I was thinking about what would happen if James Blunt had found that girl in the station; he was inspired to write ‘You’re Beautiful’ about her. What if Jesse and Celine in Before Sunset had tried to see each other again? This is what this book captures: those moments that are moments, but what happens when you don’t know that they’re madness, driven by a desire and told from the perspective of a man escaping his own demons.It is a surreal tale of twom people on a boat for very different reasons that can be very dark at times, I saw  A review compare the pacing and some of the setting in the book to Patrica Highsmiths The Talented Mr Ripley although this vcame out before that book it has similar feel to the book and film that never quite owning everything about ripley is echoed here somewhat! Have you read any books by Marguerite Duras?

The Palm wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola

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The Palm Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola

Nigerian fiction

Source – Library book

I have been on the lookout for a second-hand version of this book on one of those lists that readers of many books keep, noting and thinking critically acclaimed or essential in a canon when they were written, and still do today. This is one such book, the debut novel by Amos Tutuola, which was considered one of the first modern African novels in English when it was published in the 1950s. Tutola was born to his father’s third wife and was from the Egba people, which is why he knows the traditional ways. AS THEY follow the Yoruba religion, and also he will have grown up with the Yoruba folktales, which this book is a retelling of. The book was described by T.S. Eliot as a creepy, crawly imagination. Another early champion of the book was Dylan Thomas (I can see this in the palm wine drinking, and also the sense of community and place was strong in Thomas’ work, like it is in Tutuola’s)

I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age. I had no other work more than to drink palm-wine in my life. In those days we did not know other money, except COWRIES, so that everything was very cheap, and my father was the richest man in our town.

My father got eight children and I was the eldest among them, all of the rest were hard workers, but I myself was an expert palm-wine drinkard. I was drinking palm-wine from morning till night and from night

till morning. By that time I could not drink ordinary water at all except palm-wine.

But when my father noticed that I could not do any work more than to drink, he engaged an expert palm-wine tapster for me; he had no other work more than to tap palm-wine every day.

the opening and shows how much he drinks !!

The book is told by the narrator a son of a wealthy man, who said Palm wine drtnkard of the title of the book, as his wealth means he has the money to be able to afford a Palm wine tapist who are those that can tap the Palm tree and make the Palm wine for him to drink. But when this tapist falls to his death, he loses his supply of Palm wine, and the book becomes a sort of Quest novel as he hunts for a new tapist. Along the way, he meets an old man, a kind of sage, in a way that tells him things. But as the quest heads in, he faces obstacles and changes as he fights beasts and saves people, and the narrator changes. This is a richly told book that is steeped in the local folklore of his people. In a way, you feel that the places and world Tutola has described of wealthy tribal sons and their servants are long gone.

THE DESCRIPTION OF THE CURIOUS CREATURE:-

He was a beautiful “complete” gentleman, he dressed with the finest and most costly clothes, all the parts of his body were completed, he was a tall man but stout.

As this gentleman came to the market on that day, if he had been an article or animal for sale, he would be sold at least for £2000 (two thousand pounds). As this complete gentleman came to the market on that day, and at the same time that this lady saw him in the mar-ket, she did nothing more than to ask him where he was living, but this fine gentleman did not answer her or approach her at all. But when she noticed that the fine or complete gentleman did not listen to her, she left her articles and began to watch the movements of the complete gentleman about in the market and left her articles unsold.

the adventure along the way have chapter heading like this

Over the years, I have run this blog, I have tried to cover a lot of fiction from all the different countries in Africa, thus making the fiction not just African, but this is a book from the Egba people of Nigeria and uses the Yoruba folktales,, just as in the last pos,t Laxness has used Icelandic sgas. To talk about his world, well, this was written just after World War II, and he saw Tutola, who had been in the RAF. But he had struggled when he was demobbed to find work, as everyone else had, and he ended up writing this book from his folklore past. It is considered a classic of the first Books from Nigeria to come out in English and lead the way for many of the great writers from his country that followed him. The book was also the first on the Jubilee list to come from books published in the Commonwealth during the Queen’s reign. I hope to read his second novel sometime. Have you read any other books by him?

 

 

Wayward Heroes by Halldór Laxness

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Wayward Heroes by Halldór Laxness

Icelandic fiction

Original title – Gerpla

Translator Phillip Roughton

Source – Personal copy

When I first looked at the list of books for the year of 1952,, this book was one of the first to catch my eye as I had a book set in Iceland in the last club year, and I have also covered a couple of other books from Laxness and I love the fact that his books are getting newer translations in recent years. This is the case with this book, which came out a few years ago. I bought the American copy, so I’m not sure how it was published in the UK. As I’m a massive fan of Archieplagpo books, I think they’re works of art in themselves. Anyway, this came in the later part of his writing years and was his take on the Icelandic sagas. But apart from that, he had used the saga style of telling a story to make an ancient saga, as told, reflect events that were happening at the time the book was published, not long after World War II, at the start of the Cold War. He has cleverly rebuilt the sagas to use the past as a mirror to the present

Then Jöour Klangsson rode away. It was near sunset. When Jour was gone, the boy jumped down, walked over to where his father was lying across the path, and took a closer look at his body. The blow had disfigured his face, and blood and brains oozed like porridge from the crack in his head. One of his arms jerked at the shoulder before the man went limp and died – that twitch was his last. Porgeir Hávarsson was astonished at how easily his father died, despite his having fought berserkers in Denmark and brought fire and slaughter to Ireland. He had always believed his father to be one of the greatest champions in the North. The boy stood outside for a long time before going to tell his mother. Finally, he went in. He was seven years old at the time.

The end of the first chapter

 

What he has done in his retelling of the sagas is turn them on their head and see how the violence the Vikings committed all over Europe was, at times, senseless violence that followed them around the world. So at the heart of the tale, brothers Þormóður and Þorgeir are based on actual figures in the Icelandic sagas. But what he does so well as he recounts their adventures and eventual deaths is that it is barbaric, and also tells the story comically, with a nod towards events happening in the world he knew in the 1950s. From them getting stuck and what others view as trollo like figures in the North of Greenland looking after them (I found it strange with all the recent coverage of another barbarian in Trump wanting this country) The style is like being sat at a fire for weeks at the brothers years of travel and m ishaps and violence is recounted!

PÓRELFUR, PORGEIR Hávarsson’s mother, came from Hordaland in Norway, a region harsh and forlorn, where it had long been the custom for men’s sons who had little chance to thrive to travel abroad and acquire wealth through plunder.

Some went to Russia, others to the British Isles. In Hordaland, those who never undertook a Viking raid were deemed worth-less. Yet none knew more valiant tales of the trials of the Vikings, their battles and sea-voyages, than those who never ventured from home. Among these, it was the nursemaids who had the best stocks of lore. In fair verses, they extolled the Vikings feats: the prowess, valor, and gallantry that true men display in distant lands, yet do so more rarely the closer they are to women. For the young sons of Hordaland crofters, such lore was the only provision and dowry that they received from their mothers before leaving home – and likewise, Pórelfur had little else to lavish on her son than tales of the prowess of champions of yore and paeans to kings who win the devotion of ambitious crofters’ sons with their bounteousness, rewarding stout hearts with weighty rings.

The openiong of the third chapter capture that saga style well, as far as I know !

Now I haven’t read the Icelandic sagas, I felt this might help with the style of the book, which has a specific flow that feels remarkably like it is trying to be in the style of the sagas with a modern twist and comic in style, which is hard to pull off. Still, he does in parts, and thus the novel could be told by firelight. At times, this makes it hard to follow as every detail of people is built as the prose slowly builds at times and is also maybe a little hard to follow as A reader, I had start this monthgo and if it wasn’t for the fact I had pick it up now for this week I would maybe waited a while to get back to it. But it is also easy to see how the brother’s adventures could be a mirror of all that is going on at the time the book was written, and also now. A lot of the book is around the brother sailing and taking over different places, but also in a way, this has a modern twist to the time, just as the Cold War is beginning, and those lines around Europe are being changed, and violence and people taking over places is still happening. Have you ever read any books by Halldór Laxness?

 

 

An Untouched House by Willem Frederik Hermans

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An Untouched House by Willem Frederik Hermans

Dutch Literature

Original title – Het behouden huis

Translator -David Colmer

Source – Personal Copy

Well, it is back to Simon and Karen’s twice-yearly book club, where everyone is asked to read a book from a particular year. This time around, the year is 1952, as ever, I have taken that as the year the book was published in its original language, and I had to look hard to find some gems. This is the first book and is a Dutch classic. I first came across Willem Frederik Hermans when he was included on a list of the best Dutch novels ever compiled by NRC in 2007. At that time, some of the books on the list weren’t available, and over time, I have read a few from this list, but this is the first time I have got to Hermans. I decided he would be a writer, I leave for a rainy day, if that makes sense. He is considered one of the greatest post-war writers in his country.I decided it was time to read him as this is one of the earliest books from him as a writer, and before the two books that made the best Dutch novels (if this is the third best of his books, I can’t wait to read the other two at a later date). Do you have writers you have put on the back burner?

“Me from Spain when civil war,” he said. “Me Communist. Captured by French. In camp. Then escape. On ship. Turkey. Russia.”

Having got this far, he began to talk faster, using more and more Spanish words. It seemed that Russia had not lived up to expectations. That was why, for the first time since leaving the German sphere of influence, I said, “Me no Communist!”

He laughed.

“Merde! Tout ça, merde!”

“Comrade! Give me a cigarette!” Talking had only made me thirstier. He didn’t even have a canteen.

He broke his last cigarette in half and lay down,

leaning on one elbow.

“What you do?” he asked, making it clear that he wanted to know what I had done long ago, before the war.

The partisan had been all over during the war !

The book is told by a Dutch Partisan who is heading back after fighting; he had just killed five Germans on the Eastern Front in the tail end of the Second World War. So when he happens across a near-perfect villa after being sent there, he finds the house is clear of booby traps and then decides to take of his uniform and have his first bath in a very long time and puts on some clothes he finds in the house. So when a troop of Germans are sent to secure the house, they think he is the owner of the house. Later on, the actual owner of the house appears, and the partisan thinks he is actually a local who has come to clean the windows. Then there is a single room with a locked door leading to a bedroom, where someone is obviously on the other side. SO, what happens when the real owner and his wife have paper, and who is in the locked room? I leave these threads for you to discover by reading the book.

The house itself wasn’t that big, but all of its parts were. The windows were single sheets of reflective glass; the portal was as high as two floors; a balcony stretched across the entire façade.

There was a sloping, dark green lawn with a large plane tree in the middle that had been pollarded so many times it now looked like a gallows with room for an entire family. The front door, made of glass and wrought iron, was well ajar.

The house is almost a character itself in the book

I loved this book, it is one of those miniature epics of a book that is less than a hundred pages long, but to the reader it feels like a hell of a lot more than that !. It has an authentic thriller style to the writing, a sense of violence and death happening at every turn, which keeps you gripped as a reader. It is also about regret, as the story seems to be someone looking back on the events. There is a certain feel of being a little too used to the killing and bloodshed of war, if that makes sense. It is also a book that is very tightly written; there isn’t a wasted scene or passage in this book. It is so neatly written. Have you read Hermans? There is also a fascinating afterword by Cees Nooteboom about the book, Hermans, and Dutch literature. He said this on my blog about Dutch literature and mentioned Hermans in an interview he did for the blog 14 years ago. “The Dutch are a rather special tribe, like the English, but smaller.On the other hand, Holland is not an island. It has taken the world a long time to recognise that there are some interesting writers out there, like Hermans, Mulisch, Claus, Mortier, van Dis, Grunberg, and many others. And of course, it does not help that we know much more about English writers than English readers know about Dutch literature. A small language can be a prison. Translation is liberation,” Cees Nooteboom . I love the last word of that quote

The book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem

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The book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem

Paslenstenian  fiction

Original title -سفر الاختفاء

Translator Sinan Antoon

Source – Subscription edition

The translator of this book was a finalist for the old IFFP prize many years ago, before it became the Booker International Prize. I think we all want some novels that capture why events are happening in Palestine and Israel. This book, in some way, captures that by doing something so out of the blue, it leaves a void. What happens when the whole country, all of Palestine’s citizens, just aren’t there one morning? How will the Israelis react? That is the premise of the book. It is set in the Jaffa region. As I said in the last post, I’m drawn to speculative fiction, and this concept, as a way to describe the whole situation, grabbed me.

He went out barefoot and ran down to the third floor.

He rang the bell, confident that Alaa would open the door in no time, if he wasn’t at work. Taking time to open the door doesn’t mean anything necessarily. Alaa’s usually late.

Ariel rang the bell several times and then started banging on the door and calling out, “Alaa, Alaa, ata bu?”

When he went back up Zohar was getting ready to leave.

“He’s not answering.”

“You mean he disappeared with the others.”

“I don’t want to get into an argument, but I don’t think he’s disappeared. Maybe he’s wiped out and wasn’t able to go to work. We drank a bottle of wine last night and he was tired.

His phone is off and he only turns it off when he’s asleep.”

“You still don’t get what’s happening. Listen to your voicemail. Listen to the news. This is the nonchalant attitude that ruined our relationship. I’m going.”

He thinks his friend will still be there but isn’t

So what we see is the tale of what happened just before and then after, when all the Palestinians went through two friends on either side of the divide. Alaa is Palestinian. She is haunted by the events many years before, which were recounted to her by her grandmother about when she was thrown out of Jaffa and forcibly moved by the Israelis. Where our neighbour is now, Ariel, is a liberal Zionist. So when he wakes up the very next day, Alaa and all the Palestinians have gone, with no clue where or even how they just disappeared. Night. Add to this, we get Alaa’s notebooks that recount the event her grandmother had told her. The more significant part of the book focuses on how the authorities and Ariel react to the disappearance, and how their reactions are explained, which is at the centre of the whole book. This is one of those ‘what-if’ moments imagined.

Press offices have refused to give any special entry permits during the coming forty-eight hours. Going there would be of no use anyway, he thought as he took a sip of the coffee, which scorched his tongue. He called the IDF press office and the Tel Aviv municipality to check if it was necessary to get a special permit to go to Jaffa, or any other Arab area. He got the same answer. No permits are being given and he should call the following day.

How the goverment scrambles to cope twith what has happened!

As I said, I like certain speculative fiction, and this is one of those books that appealed to me before the prize. I think we all want to know a little bit more about this whole situation in Israel and Palestine. One must remember we have a massive part in the past history of this conflict, as we were at the heart of the discussions and plans to start Israel. The other thing about this book I’m talking about is that it was written over a decade ago, and maybe that’s why it could have been written at any time in the last few decades, which is a scary thought. I was reminded of what Dasa Drndic said about the tear-away section in her book, in Italy, with all the names of the dead Italian Jews. When they are taken out of the book, the book and the country fall apart in a way. What happens when your enemy disappears? This is what fuels the book, the questions of how, why, the aftermath and what happens with that void? But also it in someway for me as a reader left a few unanswered questions, I m not sure if I am dsoemtimes a read that likes to have everything tied up at times and in a way this book isn’t abkiut that it is about that void and the questions it gives those who are left but also how people react to that happening. It’s an interesting perspective on the whole situation and a fresh take on it. I wonder if they had read books by Saramago or something like ‘The Day of the Triffids, ‘ which deals with a sudden change. This is something like what Wyndham might have written about this situation.I like the idea of this book in part, it works, but for. Me there was a part that was missing at times if that makes sense a sort ofwhy and how to the events but maybe they were left vague for a reason!

 

Under the eye of the big bird by Hiromi Kawakami

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Under the eye of the big bird by Hiromi Kawakami

Japanese fiction

Original title – 大きな鳥にさらわれないよう
Ōkina tori ni sarawarenai yō

Translator – Asa Yoneda

Source – Personal copy

I will hold my hand up now when the long list for the Booker International comes out, and I have read through the list of books that have made the cut. This is the one that appealed least to me. I have read two other books by the writer over the years; I really liked her book The Briefcase, as it was called when I read it for the Man Asian prize many years ago. Now, I am in the mood for sci-fi. I am not a huge sci-fi fan, and speculative fiction has to appeal. The problem with this book is that I may have read it in the middle of all the books, but it is very different from the other books. Plus, I was dreading it in a way, so maybe I hadn’t given it a good enough chance anyway. Fair to say I scored it lowest for the Shadow Booker International. Anyway, here is my take on it for what it is worth lol(I rarely am so unexcited by a book I have read )

Are things going well at the factory? I ask my husband.

He shrugs his shoulders in a way that can be taken as

either uh-huh or nuh-uh.

They say the factory in this region was built around a hundred years ago. The other regions’ factories are around the same age. The very first one was built several hundred years ago, but that one no longer exists. Also, at that time, there was a unit that contained multiple regions, called a country, and that country was named Japan. And as well as Japan, there were countless other countries, each of which had a name. I learned all this from my husband, who enjoys reading old documents.

What was life like back then? I ask him.

The factory and the past what was it like?

 

The book is fourteen stories that roughly link together to make it a novel set in a distant future when men’s DNA has started to unravel, and thus science has begun to splice human DNA with animal DNA. So the species has evolved into various types of men, which is all overseen as the stories unfold by some AI  and watchers. However, they are trying to turn back the tide of man’s decline in a way. This is a story of what happened at the end of man’s time. I struggled to find the thread and saw this done in several other similar books. I’m thinking of The Last Children of Tokyo, which is about just Japanese dying out, but has a similar theme. Sorry, this is so short, there are other fans of this book to read their reviews !

“Things that live are things that die. In time.”

Die. I didn’t understand the meaning of the word until the cat I kept brought in a mouse. The mouse, which had always moved, stopped moving at all, and grew cold before

my eyes.

There were many animals at that house. Cats. Dogs.

Mice. Rabbits. Cows. Horses. Chickens. Bantams. Ducks.

Geese. Peafowl. Dozens of waterbirds bobbed on the big lake in the garden. The one who liked to sit very still and watch the grebes dive was me, the shortest of us three.

“You like that? Just watching those birds go into the wa-

ter?” I asked, and the shortest me nodded.

“Sometimes they dive for a long time, and sometimes

they don’t.”

The mothers always told us how important it was to no-tice things. When the shortest me gave an account of the grebes over dinner, they were full of praise.

“Observe carefully. Never rush to conclusions. But com-mit everything to memory, without neglecting the smallestdetail,” they said.

That first bit here did make me think back to some scenes in Blade runner (the orginal film )

As you can see, this book just didn’t get me.I rarely have this effect with a book, but I can’t say that I loved a book I had to push myself to read through. But that said, I may go back and reread it later and see if a different time makes a difference. I do have a couple of her other books to read as well. For me, this had two ideas that could make it a significant part of the Matrix and also part of Studio Ghibli’s nightmare. I think it would make a tremendous Japanese sci-fi film. But I rarely am hard on a book. But this just isn’t my type of book. I will read sci-fi if it appeals, but this wasn’t a book for me. I would love to know if you liked the book and why? Are you a sci fi or speculative fiction fan?

A carnival of Attrocities by Natalia Garcia Freire

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A carnival of atrocities by Natalia Garcia Freire

Ecuadorian fiction

Original title -Trajiste contigo el viento

Translator – Victor Meadowcroft

Source – Review copy

I took this away with me as I just needed a break from prize-listed books and something different from what I had been reading in the last few weeks. Plus, when I saw it was actually the first book from Ecuador I had read, I was even keener. Natalia Garcia Freire has a master’s degree and teaches creative writing in Madrid. It is noted in Hay-on-Wye’s biography that she also has a cat and a garden. This is her second novel to be translated into English. As I say, it is also the first book from Ecuador on this blog9i have a collection of short fiction from there, I thought. I had reviewed, but I hadn’t. This caught my eye as it is set in one of those far-from-anything villages, as it says, nestled between the Jungle and the Andes.

The whole of Cocuán continued to sing, but other voices, the voices of a man, woman and child said:

Mildred.

Sweet and powerful Mildred.

Those who live in fear will become savages.

Look at them, they said. And the voices swelled like the high tide, the waves crashing into my ears. Look at them in their Sunday finest, huddled so close together.

Look at them, Mildred, deaf to the wind and blind like corrupted animals. With the wills of slaves. Look at the men and women created by the Word, molded from the dust of dead stars. Look at their body, which is the body of Christ, and look at their disoriented eyes, their old bones on the brink of snapping. Look upon the town of God that has abandoned you. Look upon the town of God that you have cursed.

This is an example early on in the book how she is viewed

The book uses a chorus of voices from the same village, Cocuan, as they all recount incidents and events surrounding a young girl who, many years earlier, had been taken from the town when her parents had both passed away after a series of strange events. What I loved about this book is that we have nine different people talking about the Girl Mildred and how she was, and it shows what can grow into a void left when someone leaves a small village under a cloud. So is this girl the witch, as some of those retellings remember their view of the events, and as they do, the lines between what is real and what is a dream world blur. Some strange events around the time Mildred and her parents died are recalled. A priest cut off his ear. The woman dies, and as her husband is there, someone attacks her body. A man goes to desperate ends to settle a debt. Did Midlred really see future events, and why did certain things? Locals want her to join them? This is a tale of a young girl who has had a bad life, then maybe sees things that might happen, and thus gets caught up in a whirlwind. With what happened with her mother dying and her father running off, it is one of those situations where myths are born.

Death is just like a pirate,

It eats tough meat and drinks salt water.

Death is just like a pirate,

It bares its ass, then goes for the slaughter.

This is what we sang on the way to the waterfall where Victor believed the old man might have gone, because several times before we had found him teetering there, with his eyes closed, covered by the water, and been forced to drag him back to the house like a stuffed dummy I would have liked to watch burn on an enormous bonfire fed with ragweed and rue to chase away the old man’s evil spirit, the fleas and the flies. But no one wanted to hear my dirty plans, least of all Víctor, who loved the old man with a stupid love. So that’s where we were headed, once again, to look for him.

Things get connected like an old man vanishing

I love how this looked at Mildred through the nine characters as they cross into other stories, but each has a different take on her and the events. It also has a large chunk of the mysticism, folklore, and magic realism that make up the world Mildred and the locals are from, where simple events unconnected get drawn together and at the heart of it all is this girl now gone. I loved the mix of dream magic realism and just the way things like this can happen, a sort of super Chinese whispers around this one girl. Yes, she was a little odd, and maybe events tied with things she said, but that happens sometimes.It is just by accident, or perhaps she has that sort of second sight that D will occur because A and B have happened. I was reminded of the film The Big Fish if it had been made by David Lynch, as this is one of those tales that is about a place, the town itself, which is between the savage jungle and the barren, endless Andes, a sort of place where events happen. I was reminded in Big Fish that the events seem surreal, but there is always a little bit of truth in what you are being told. From tiny acorns mighty oaks grow, and this is the case here. Events have grown in the people’s minds.

\

 

My Women by Yuliia Lliukha

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My Women by Yuliia Lliukha

Ukrainian fiction

Original title -Мої жінки

Translator – Hanna Leliv

Source – Personal Copy

I mentioned before I went away that I was planning to work through the shortlist (their longlist really) of this year’s EBRD prize, all the books had arrived before I went away, but the one book that I hadn’t heard of on the whole list, in fact. The publisher was unknown to me. This book was written by a Ukrainian writer. Yuliia Lliukha. She is a writer and columnist from the Kharkiv region of Ukraine. Ukraine. She studied at the  Ivan Franko University (I have a novel from Franko in the pipeline to read this year \). She had written some novels before the war in Ukraine, but had a role in the war, raising funds for first aid equipment. She curated the socio-poetic, multimedia project The Mark of Home, a project to support the rehabilitation of Ukrainian war veterans through art and creativity. She compiled the poetry collection of the same name as part of this work.

The woman who was once caught by the air raid siren while she was taking a bath was most afraid of dying like that-without her panties, naked, with wet hair and hairy legs;

afraid that the first responders who would pull her from the rubble would see her white body with cellulite prominent on her thighs and a soft, sagging belly she learned to pull in with corrective underwear and think,

“Who prepares for death like that? She could’ve at least lost a few pounds and worked out for a few months”;

afraid that her neighbors who’d be lucky enough to survive would stand next to the ruins and discuss her chipped manicure and grown-out gray roots, and the old woman who’d always talked behind her back with froth at her mouth when she, happy and tipsy, fluttered out of the black car and waved goodbye to the driver, would say,

“Couldn’t she give some thought to how she’d look in the other world? My dear Irochka would’ve never made such a mess of herself, may her soul rest in peace.”

The opening story caught in the bath

SO this book is a very short story, almost flash fiction and has a clever framing device as each of them is a glimpse into a different woman’s life . Stories within the collection start with The woman who. Then, each is a little snippet of those women’s lives during the war and how it affected 40 different women. Each story is less than two pages long. From the opening a woman caught in the bath during an air raid thinking of been found pantless and with unshaven legs. To a woman who never welcomed her husband back. This tackles the fate of these women, ranging from the small everyday things of war, to those more significant problems like the loss of home and partners. This collection could only be written in the white heart of a war. It has a brutal undercurrent, as these nameless women’s lives are caught in snippets.

The woman who buried her son in a vegetable patch made a cross for him from two pine planks bound together with wire. Her son had bought those planks to fix their house up in spring. But the war broke out, and for some people, spring never arrived.

Her son died instantly. The woman could barely register that.

The first two shells fell somewhere farther away. But a fragment of the third one killed her son as they were running from the summer kitchen toward the cellar. The woman collapsed next to him. She could not even scream.

She only groaned, as if she was the one wounded, and scratched the frozen ground with her nails.

Losing a son or partner is all part of the war

It is hard not to compare this to Alexievich’s work. The comparison is on the back cover of the book. The lack of names and places makes this much more brutal and hard-hitting at times. It captures in Amber a collection of women just trying to get by in the white heat of war. How it affects them all, from thinking of being found with unshaven legs, to losing a husband, home or even homeland. I  said there was a reason I wanted to tackle the EBRD prizes for this year. It has been a prize list I have looked at over the last few years. Unfortunately, it crosses over with the Booker longlist. Which is a shame as this prize has a knack of finding visceral, confronting literature that isn’t as well known as it should be, so far both the books I have read from the shortlist have a visceral nature to the writing, that sort of edge I look for in books. I say to you all go look at this year’s list of books, I’m sure you will find a few books you don’t know on this list. Do you have a book you’ve read about the Ukrainian war that has hit you hard like this book has me?

 

Cambridge Here we come

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I’ll not be posting much on the blog this week. Amanda and I are off tomorrow for a few days in Cambridge. This is her first time e there, and the last time I went there was nearly 40 years ago so I  don’t really remember a lot. I love to watch YouTube videos of places I go, so I have a slight sense of the town itself. We are staying on the outskirts in a Premier Inn, but it is on a bus route, so I may spend the time there, not driving, which would be a nice break. I’m excited as we haven’t had a break since September, and this is the first week I’ve had off since then. I used a lot of annual leave finishing early when I was struggling with Depression, which helped at the time, but also ate up a lot of my annual leave, meaning I had only the odd day here and there after Christmas. But that has passed, I’ve sat and planned my leave a bit better for the first half of my leave this time to leave some over for later in the year. So I’m looking forward to going to the Fitzwilliam Museum, as they have two exhibitions that have caught my eye, one on Durer prints tthat he museum owns. The other cruise up combines historic art and modern artists around the abolition of slavery.  I know there is several Bookshops(always one of the first things I look for when going away) . But if anyone has any suggestions, bearing in mind Amanda struggles with her mobility, we think the punting might be too hard for her to get in and out of. But any great coffee shops, stationary shops or things to check out are welcome. I am taking three books with me. I am in the middle of an Eastern European run of books, recently starting with Solenoid and celebration. I will be packing these.

I’m currently reading Sons, Daughters, a book of the EBRD literature prize, about a woman in a hospital with locked-in syndrome, thinking back on her life. Then also of that list is Too great a sky. It is set in World War II in Siberia and follows exiled Romanians sent there. Then from the new press Linden editens follows a young woman looking after her dying grandmother in the small village where they live with her grandfather working on a room for her and the nearby abattoir noise in the background. This sounds like a book right up my street, I love books set in small villages and around families. Whether I will read them all , I’m not sure, but they are there and I am sure. I will find lots of gems when I am away. Have you been to Cambridge? I will show you in a week or two what I brought, etc.

Celebration by Damir Karakaš

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Celebration by Damir Karakaš

Croatian fiction

Orignal title -Proslava

Translator – Ellen Elias-Bursać

Source – Personal copy

I covered the epic Solenoid yesterday. I stay in Eastern Europe and now move to the Balkans, and what may be the shortest book I will read this year. But also one of those small epics of a book that will long sit in my mind. I have long been a fan of Croat literature I haver reviewed 15 novels from Croatia over the years. Now this is a book written by a writer that was when he was youinger a war reporter. He also spent many a year in the region of Croat where the book is set. He also made a living for many yeart in France playing his accordian this bok was Laud by the critics in Croatia when it came out a few years ago. It ids a book that looks into the past but maybe is alo a warning from Croatias own past about events in the present. The book is four stories that cover a peroid from the late 20s to the end of world war two andf are four episodes in the life of Mijo a soldier in the Ustasa force(the right wing Nazi Miltia that comitted genocide in Croat during the second world war).

He lay on the blanket that had over the last days soaked up the smell of rotten leaves and damp earth: under his thick brows he spent most of his time watching the village, then the mixed canopy above his head, noticing all the while how the colors were fading. Sometimes out of the corner of his eye he’d peek at the gleaming orb of the sun, gauging the time of day; never had time passed more slowly: he kept lying there in that one spot, sensing in his nose the sharp odor of melting resin, and all that was moving around him began to bother him: the sun, the wind, the birds that often flew low with their winged sounds over the forest.

Mijo laid hiding , I love the flow of this translation

The book opens as Mijo is on the run at the end of the war. He is near home can see his family and kids but aas they are now round up the member of his ,miltia he has to hide. Set in Lika regfion of Croatia an mounatin area and liike many of these remotre areas this is a rural isolated communoity in itself. This is the thing he does brillantly in this book the place it self is almosat another character. The second story follows the kiling of Dogs in the valley. TRhius is a brutsl story . But is maybe also a nod to the brutal nature iof the woirld and how easy it is to go from killing dogs to people maybe. Then we see his early years meeting his wife just as all the madenss of the war he has got drawn into as the couple not yet married head into antother village with a brother as a chaperon they fall behind and thew mountains and there loive almost become one. I will leave the last tale for you to discover.

Drenka looked over at Mijo and, as she walked, said, “You’ve got a patch of fungus on your neck.” He touched his neck.

“Where?” and then, confused, he shrugged. At a slightly slower pace she said, “When we get back, I have some salve made from rabbit lard I can put on it.” Then they picked up their pace to catch up with Rude and the distance shrank, but if they exchanged glances, it grew; by now they had come out onto a sunlit meadow full of blossoms. Mijo leaned over while walking and stealthily snapped off the crown of a flower in full bloom. First he thought to give it to her, but at the last minute he tucked it into his own hair. When the flower fell out both of them chuckled over it.

The couple head out before they are married again the Lika Countryside is a character in the narrative

This for me is one of those novellas when you read iotI think how did Peiren mis this one , they did small epics like this so wel. I was remind of aStonbes in a landslide another book set in a remote mountainous region. But I was also remind of the chat I had with Dasa Drndic around the growing face of Facism in Europe. I think in hindsight I think she could see the coming storm of Fcism on the horizon. This is a tale of how ordinary people like Mijo get caught up in the madness and violence of the war. This is one of those books that is  soarse in its prose style there isn’t a word to many in the writing . but even so the rivchness of the Lika mountains and even things like Mijo running his hand over the back of a dog jump of the page. and will long live in Memore and the dog kiling scene is another thagty i wouldn’t want to live again but also had that right mix of emmotions in it. This is the first oof the shortlist of booiks for this years EBRD literature prize I am reding. Have you a favourite work from a Balkan writer ?

 

Solenoid by Mircea Cǎrtǎresecu

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Solenoid by Mircea Cǎrtǎescu

Romanian fiction

Original title – Solenoid

Translator – Sean Cotter

Source – Personal copy

Now this is one of those books that over the time I have been blogging goes in an aerc in my Head, I remember first hearing about this labrythine book and how it was surreal and gritty and just one of those books that when described I think in my head oh this is so much above my head as a reader. I also hate it when a book is everywhere and everyone just focus on one book at the cost of other books this happens a a lot in the translated world I find there is usually a couple of books every year that p-eople seem to get hyped thus in my eyes become I book I don’t want to review. I always feel my voice isn’t much in the cacophony of praise for a book. I am not a critical thinker,I am maybe not the most profound reader at times. So when it came up on the long list for the Booker International part of me thought it could be the one book I miss this year as I did;t want to rreread it as I hadn’t review it two years ago.

I am, thus, a Romanian teacher at School 86 in Bucharest. I live alone in an old house, “the boat-shaped house” I have already mentioned, on the street called Maica Domnului, in the Tei Lake neighborhood. Like any other teacher in my field, I dreamed of becoming a writer, just the same way that, inside the café fiddler playing from table to table, a cramped and degenerate Efimov still lives who once thought himself a great violinist. Why it didn’t happen— why I didn’t have enough self-confidence to overcome, with a superior smile, that evening at the workshop, why I didn’t have the maniacal conviction in my beliefs in spite of everyone else, when the myth of the misunderstood writer is so powerful, even with its concomitant measure of kitsch, why I didn’t believe in my poem more than I did the reality of the world—I have searched for an answer to all these questions every day of my life. Starting in the depths of that damp autumn night when I walked home, blinded by headlights, in a state of paranoia I had never felt before. I couldn’t breathe for rage and humiliation.

My parents, who opened the door for me as always, were left speechless.

His day job as a teacher

ANnyway the book is set in the 80s and has a main character that isn’t named but in some ways can be taken as a sort of Cartaescu if he hadn’t had the success he had with his writing this is a teacher in Bucharest teaching and tlivin g in that city at the time it comes across as a grim city. I was reminded that this must have been how the industrial towns of England must have been fifty years earlier. As our main character talks about his life, we follow his day-to-day life, as if he is about to read an epic poem. This is based on actual events in the writer’s life. Now this is the straightforward part of the book. But then we have a surreal other-world touch from the life of a mite or lice. In fact, at times, this reminds me of Hrabal, another writer obsessed with dirt and the sort of dirtier side of the world in his writing. So we go from the micro to the macro in these sorts of dream-like sequences (dream or even maybe Nightmare )in the book. ADD to this, he seems to be obsessed with his body and its inner workings as someone who has a tendency to have health anxiety and can see a fellow person that maybe other thinks their health. Add to that side stories around his reading of the book The Gladfly,  written by Ethel Voynich, whose husband, a book dealer, was the man who discovered the famous Voynich manuscript. If this had been lost for a thousand years, would the book itself be treated in the future as some sort of wondrous work whose actual text is unknown, like the Manuscript is?

The mantis turned around in Virgils palm, as he spoke in a monotone, as though reciting a text he knew by heart, and then it shot up in flight, suddenly an enormous locust, over the dew-pearly garden. It disappeared over the fence woven with Jericho roses.

Caty nodded at every phrase, as though her frivolous being, made of pre-tentions and silk, had only then awoken, had at that moment escaped from the Neckermann with its perfect men and perfect women, and had entered the dictionary of skin diseases, the forensic treatises, the anatomy of melan-choly, the history of infernos with their sinister illustrations of the crushed, burned, amputated, oligophrenic, hanged, starving, and paralyzed people emerging triumphant from pits of horror, showing their green lunatic faces and their eyeballs slung into the backs of their heads like broken dolls. From that morning on, the sweet, multicolored woman with her sparrowlike mind led a double life, one I heard of for the first time sitting in front of her in the deserted office where the last ficus tree rotted away. By day she was still the chemistry teacher, envied by all her colleagues for her clothes and shoes and purses, her house with 156 panes of glass, and her ministry husband, but by night, two or three times a week, dressed in black without makeup or per-fume, in a headscarf and shoes the janitors wore, with tears dancing in her eyes and dark hatred over her face like a dead god of love,

Surreal imagery at times like here

Now that is it, of course, this is just the barest description of a book that is one of those works of postmodern fiction that none will always struggle to describe. It is a book you must wade into and hope you get to the other side. As I said, it made me think of the dark satanic mills of the industrial age. The city he describes seems like that. I was reminded in the talk about getting lice, this might surprise you bu tit remind me of my love of kitchen sink novels those grim working class classic of the 50’s and 60’s. At other times, it was like a Romanian Joyce and a sort of nightmarish ode to a place and time gone, if he had been in 80s Bucharest and a failed writer, this might have been his take on the world. Other parts remind me of William Burroughs. I know it was written in a single draft, but there is a feeling of the surreal worlds that Burroughs always did so well. Anyway, this is my take on this book.I love it, but think the hype somewhat has made it a book overshadowing other books, if that makes sense. I wouldn’t be surprised if it won the Booker. In my head, it is the winner, and I haven’t felt that for a book on the longlist for a few years. I’m unsure what this will add to the discussion on the book. But don’t be scared of it. What are your thoughts on this book?