Month: May 2025

May 25 A great month of reading

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  1. Poundemonium by Julian Rios
  2. Spadework for a Palace by Laszlo Krasznahorkai
  3. Journeys and Flowers by Merce Rodoredaa
  4. The sweet indifference of the world by Peter Stamm
  5. Sweet days of discipline by Fleur Jaeggy
  6. The english Path by Kim Taplin
  7. Blue Postcards by Douglas Bruton
  8. In late Summer by Magdalena Blažević
  9. Río Muerto by Ricardo Silva Romero
  10. Winter Mythologies and Abbots by Pierre Michon
  11. My kingdom is dying by Evald Filsar
  12. The Possession by Annie Ernaux 
  13. Voracious by  Malgorzata Lebda 

I feel this is one of the best months of reading I have had for a while it started with me half trying the book a day in May. But I knew as last year with my shift pattern, it is very hard to try and do I have a pattern of two 11 1/2 shifts, then two days off, rolling on my rota, so some days after leaving home just after seven and coming back at half eight, it is hard to focus on a book. However, this month was a real journey; the first book of the month saw three Spaniards in London learn of Ezra Pound’s passing and follow his footsteps in London. Then Innew york a librarian became obsessed with Melville and an outlandish architect.. Then we visit villages and flowers in a wonderfully unique collection of short stories from Spain. A writer meets a woman, hears her story, but is it his story? Is this life a loop, meeting at different points? Next, we see a girl at a private school fighting to be herself. Then we learn about paths and how they used to be the pipeline in England many years ago. Blue postcards in a book obsessed with Blue. In late summer, a young girl recalled that the Balkan war hit a small village. Then a man sees his wife fight for justice, as he was killed for seeing something. Then we had a lot of historical fiction about Abbots. A writer has writer’s block and then goes to a retreat with the cream of writers in this fever dream of a book. Then another slice of Ernaux, and this time she is obsessed with who her ex is seeing.Lately, a granddaughter has taken care of her ailing grandmother in a small rural village. One new publisher, Linden Editions, with two books. No new countries.

Books of the month

I picked these two as they are both from the Balkans, one of the most well-known writers in Evald Fislar, and his tale of a writer’s block and a fever dream of how he overcame it. Then, in Magadalen Blažević, we have a new voice and her story of one girl’s last summer before the walk hits their remote village.

Non-book events

I watched The Game, the new series with Jason Watkins and Robson Green, which has a serial killer move in next to the detective who nearly caught him! A great short series. Music-wise, there were a couple of female singers who had new albums out on 4AD, a label I love. First was Lustre by Irish singer Maria Somervile, where you can just drift away. Jenny Hval’s album Iris Silver Mist is a little more experimental, and finally, Robert Forster has recorded an 8-track album in Oslo called Strawberries. It is just wonderful to see a singer like him having a great later career in his singing.

Next month

Well I recently commented on Mookse and gripes’ discord about their episode around reading goals and said I tend to not have them as I never keep to them, apart from the Booker International and the Years Club, Simon and Karen do. so, after reading many books early on last month, I think I will do the same this month. I’ve a few books on the go that I hope to finish in the next few days. I also have a couple of crime novels in translation that I hope to get too. Other than that I will see where my reading takes me as ever. What are your plans for next month ?

Voracious by Malgorzata Lebda

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Voracious by Malgorzata Lebda

Polish Fiction

Orignal title –Łakome

Translator – Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Source review copy

I come to the second book I was sent kindly by the new press, Linden Editions. This book is from a Polish Poet. Malgorzata , is a poet and Actvist. She has written several volumes of Poetry. This was her first novel, and she won a prize for the best debut novel in Poland and was also on the list for the Nine prize, which is like the Polish Booker prize. She is well known for a piece of work in which she ran the course of a river to highlight problems with the Vistula River through her poetry. This book is set in the mountains of southern Poland, in a small village near the Beskid Mountains, as a Granddaughter has returned to help her grandparents. As her grandmother is dying, the book follows them over the course of a year.

The moment Grandma saw a grasshopper in the scythed wheat, he says, shed drop the work she was doing and pick it up. She’d cup her hands around the insect’s body to construct a sealed home for it and carry it to the boundary strip. And there she’d talk to that living thing and set it down on a wild strawberry leaf, a wild garlic leaf, or some tiny yellow pimpernel leaves. And chase it away into the forest. Shoo, shed cry after the insect, anything to keep it far from the harvest blades.

Then I’d follow her onto the boundary strip, watchfully, as if suspecting a holy rite was happening there. Grandma herself was a saint to me. In those days I’d give her all sorts of names. Like:

Saint Grandma Róza talking to insects.

Saint Grandma Róza the tender.

Saint Grandma Róza the just.

Saint Grandma Róza the compassionate.

Saint Grandma Róza the merciful.

Saint Grandma Róza who is.

The naturual world and how her grandparents know it

 

The book is told in small vignettes, some less than a page long, others a few pages long, as we see these three family members trying to make the best of it.As the Grandfather in the Male way has set himself on making a new room for his wife. His granddaughter is tending to his failing wife. As the season unfurls, the natural world around them, from the wolves to the birds, marks the coming and going of seasons. As the local slaughterhouse is a noise in the background. But then it is also threatened when a landslide is nearby. A grandfather burning his head over his wife’s illness, a granddaughter trying to be the glue to them all, and the grandmother trying to live on. This is a poetic book that shows us how close we are to nature as they try to live on the farm, navigating the everyday life and death cycle of the farming world, with another death looming in the background.

Look, the earth is hungry over there too, says Grandpa, it’s been moving.

He’s on the veranda, leaning against the balustrade. He’s

smoking a Klub. And gazing ahead.

Moving? Where? I ask.

Over there, he says, pointing at the hill opposite.

The sound of church bells rings out.

It has started, look, he says.

Just above the parish chairwoman’s boundary strip the earth is splitting. From our veranda it looks as if the bluff has parted its lips, it looks like a wrinkling human face.

This village, I think to myself, must have been founded on a large slippery boulder.

I’m off, says Grandpa.

Grandpa knows the land so well and how it moves around him

I am so pleased to have been sent the first two books from this publisher as they have been just amazing. Last summer and this book both capture a rural world long gone in the UK. This village setting is situated on the edge of the last genuinely wild woods in Europe, where wolves roam freely and the natural world still holds sway over those who live within it. This is a book that draws you into that world. I was reminded of the place of the world of Drive Your Plough over the Bones of the Dead by Tokarczuk, another novel set in the Polish wilderness the bog difference is this is a novel about the countryside with out any magic realism in fact it is set in the crime realism of every day life and death the cycle of life from a young granddaughter trying to help or even hold back death the old man just burying his head around the fact his wife is dying all this set to the ebb and flow of the seasons and nature around them. Do you have a favourite rural work where nature is part of the book and the world you have read about?

The Possession by Annie Ernaux

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The Possession by Annie Ernaux

French Fiction

Original title –  L’Occupation

Translator – Anna Moschovakis

Source – Subscription edition

This is the seventh book from Ernaux I have reviewed over the years the first 11 years ago in 2014 and by now her books to me have become like a letter from an old friend telling another snippet of there life over the years like a glimpse into her world every few months over the last 11 years. I plan to read all the other books I haven’t read over the years. But each is another picture of her fictional real life. Another view into her interesting personal life. Her personal life always seems a lot more colourful than my settled-down routine life, much the same as most people’s. She is that friend we all had with a life that looks pretty different from ours. I have never quite gone as far down the path of jealousy as she has in this book, which is a very slim novella, which sometimes has the feel of a detective novel without a crime, as she pieces together the picture of this unknown woman.

And yet I was the one who had left W, several months earlier, after six years together – as much out of boredom as from an inability to give up my freedom, reclaimed after eighteen years of marriage, for the shared life he so strongly desired from the start. We continued to talk on the phone; we saw each other from time to time. He called me one evening, told me he was moving out of his stu-dio, he was going to be living with a woman. From then on there would be rules about calling each other (only on his mobile phone) and about seeing each other (no nights or weekends). I was gripped by a sense of disaster, out of which something else emerged. At that moment, the existence of this other woman took hold of me. All of my thoughts passed through her.

She had ended the relationship

SO, a few months before the story opened, she had finished with a man she had seen for six years, merely called W. The two seemed like they were at different points in their respective lives when they met. Ernaux was shortly out of her 18-year marriage, and W was a man who wanted to settle down with her it seems like they had grown used to one another after these six years, and she described their relationship as boring. So they remain friends, frequently talking and meeting. So when a new woman appears in W’s life. He tells her very few details; the rest of the book is haunted at times, but also, like I said at the start, this book has the feel of a detective novel. As she wants to know more about this new wom an in his bed does she grab his cock the way she did. What is her Job? How old his she? All these breadcrumbs fall off the plate as she builds a picture of her. Is she near when she walks near where she lives? Is that here with similar hair on the metro she sees? The book sees how regret, obsession, jealousy, and wanting to know who had replaced her position in W’s affection.

When for some reason I had to go into the Latin Quarter – the part of Paris, other than the avenue Rapp, where I ran the highest risk of running into him in the company of the other woman – I had the uncanny feeling that I was in a hostile environment, being watched from all sides. It was as if, in this neighbourhood which I had filled with the other woman’s existence, there was no room left for my own. I felt like a fraud – to walk down the boulevard Saint Michel or the rue Saint Jacques, even when I had good reason to, was to expose my desire to run into them. With its vast, accusatory gaze bearing down on me, all of Paris punished me for this desire.

As she views the places in Paris she could be and live!

I loved this slim book;, it is a perfect slice of her life. The book’s kernel is the story of this obsession with wanting to know who this woman is. But the way it is written grips you as a reader; you wonder what she will do next and how far this obsession with this woman will take her! I know it is easy to find out who it is, but for me, the beauty of this is the lack of who they are; the more they are a pen picture of an ex-lover or his new lover, the other woman. What happens when she end the relationship sand soon after this woman now has access to his cock not her like she once did this forty year old woman with her long hair becomes a faceless ghost in the book for us as the reader but also for Ernaux as she flesh out a woman she never really want to met maybe the writing of this book was her way of cleansing her soul of it all! I think this is one of my favourites. Books from her it is just perfect, a little insight, a small gem of a book. Do you have a favourite book by her?

My Kingdom is dying by Evald Filsar

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My kingdom is dying by Evald Filsar

Slovenian fiction

Original title – Moje kraljestvo umira

Translator – David Limon

Source – review copy

You ever have that situation where you have had a run of great book then have a reading slump straight after that well this was the last book in a good run of books since e I finished it five days ago I haven’t finished a book in fact last night and this morning is the first time I got back into a book. This is a book that could be called a pandemic book. Evald Filsar is maybe the best-known and most well-travelled Slovenian writer. This book came out in 2020 it is perhaps a fever dream of a literary man stuck at home, imagining various writers and situations. I am not sure of this, but given that it came out in 2020, the book’s first part is about the writers’ conference in Kolkata, then it moves on around the world,d various famous encounters along the way.

I never dreamed that I would find myself among the crème de la crème of the world’s short prose writers. The congress was attended by John Updike, Susan Sontag, John O’Hara, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel García Márquez, José J.

Veiga, Joyce Carol Oates, Chang Tien, Jasar Kemal and I could go on. A dwarfish participant whispered to me that, in spite of the general conviction that he would not, even Jorge Luis Borges had turned up. I pushed my way to the front.

And it was true, at a table by the wall sat the blind Argentine of whom André Maurois wrote that he “composed only little essays or short narratives, yet they suffice for us to call him great because of their wonderful intelligence, their wealth of invention, and their tight, almost mathematical style.”

The guest at the conference

The book follows a writer who suffers from writer’s block at a conference in India. This was years earlier, and Borges opened the conference. He is. Recurring character in the story, where he spends time with several great writers, there is a theme of East European writing and various themes. Then, he is sent by his publisher to a Swiss clinic due to his writer’s block. He meets a collection of writers who also suffer from writer’s block. These are the crème de la crème of the writers from Filsar and my generation, Graham Greene, Amis senior and junior, and Borges, all there as they all talk about their writing and try to help our writers by telling their stories. I loved that he includes Infante here, a writer who should be better known. He then talks about being a Booker judge in a year that was very famous for a speech by Fay Weldon. Then he wins the Nobel. I love how he drifts and mixes real characters around his narrator and writer’s block. But also mixes past and present.

That’s not true, shouted a fat lady from Italy. What about Chekhov, what about Katherine Mansfield and other impressionists, whose stories are often merely extended expositions, emotional locks that are only unlocked in the last sentence? And Moravia, whose stories are notes on the mental state of a handful of characters, often just one?

And Borges, whose stories are, at least on the surface, naked formalistic games, mathematical experiments? (We all looked round the auditorium, but Borges was not present.) Wasn’t it clear, she continued, that there were as many stories as authors? That some were not better than others because of a different creative approach, but because of a better connection between intention and effect? In short, some stories achieve their goal, while others, exhausted and distorted from excessive effort, fall by the wayside.

and so on

The swiss clinc and the writer with short story writers.

I can see this being framed by a writer who loves talking about books and travelling, like Filsar, who has been the head of PEN in his country. This is maybe him escaping his own writer’s block, or a book written in the early. Months of the pandemic. I’m not sure it is an ode to the generation of writers he grew up with, Amis, Borges, Greene, Infante, and all of them are writers I grew up with, but some of them are mentioned less than they were, Bellow, for example. Graham Greene is another writer who was huge maybe twenty years ago, but I rarely see people singing his praises now. This is a must-read for anyone who is a fan of these writers or what it is like to be a writer, the chances they have, like the conference to be a prize judge. It is an excellent book from a writer who loves writers of his generation so much it drips off the pages. Do you have a favourite book about writers?

Winter Mythologies and Abbots by Pierre Michon

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Winter Mythologies and Abbots by Pierre Michon

French fiction

Orignal title – mythologies d’hiver  and Abbés

Trans;lator Ann Jefferson

Source – Personal copy

I read a number of years ago The Eleven by Michon. He is considered one of the leading writers in the French literary scene. His book Small Lives is regarded as a masterpiece. He is known for his short style of vignettes. This collection consists of two of his French books that have been put together. He has been compared to Borges and is one of those writers who should be better known. He has had many of his books translated into English, but he isn’t one of those names you see when people talk about great French writers. I loved these two books. You can see his love of history, but also how he reframes it through his own prose style.

They take communion in their white robes. Leary is there, wavering. He has combed his beard and donned his fur-lined cloak. They kneel, Patrick stands very tall above them, they receive the body of the Bridegroom from his hand. They are now in His presence, although He remains hidden. They have closed their eyes. Opening them, Brigid sees only the impassive face of the king. It is over. They step out into the May sunlight, and in the sunshine, one after the other, they fall to the ground: one on the steps, one on the path, and Brigid beside the rose-bush. One has her head in her arm, one in the dust of the track, Brigid is turned toward the sky, her eyes wide open. They are impeccably dead. They are contemplating the face of God.

The last lines of the first story Brigid’s Fervor

The first collection has the first three stories about Irish Christian history retold. The first tale is  Brigid Fervor. The first story is the tale of one of the tribal leaders in early Christian times converting to Christianity. AS there is much violence, he wants to see the god of Brigid face to face. I was reminded of when I was young at my grand house, there was a book of Irish mythology. They were all a little like these three tales, the second is connected to St. Columbkill, a saint who was one of the early figures in Irish Christianity and was buried in Iona and connected to Donegal, where I spent a number of childhood holidays. The second collection, Abbots, is the tale of three monasteries and the head abbots and the history of these monasteries told; he has made these men of religion all the more human with their many flaws and sins in the tales.

All winter long on horseback he raises his warriors, forty decades of young men in Drumlane, twelve decades in Kells, thirty in Derry. At the feasts of alliance, when he is drunk and weary, he pictures the incalculable blue that seems to rise from David’s harp. He is happy; he sings to himself the refrains from the psalms. In the spring all the O’Neills are under arms. He hurries to Moville with long day-marches and six hundred horse. Diarmait is waiting for him with a thousand horse in the bog of Culdreihmne beneath a clearing sky. Columbkill kneels down: he prays for Faustus, who is in heaven, the blue place which awaits us and favors us. He wants to laugh. He gets to his feet; they draw their swords. On the dark and slippery way they merge and set about each other; many young men are laid in the byre of death. At noon Diarmait lies in the marsh with a thousand horses, you cannot see them because it’s raining much harder now, but you can hear them dying and you can hear the crows cawing with delight. Covered in blood and mire, laughing and drunk, Columbkill takes forty horses and gallops flat-out to Moville

I connect with this tale most as my family has a history going back to the 16th Century connected to Derry

I loved the first three tales in this book. I sometimes struggle with historical fiction where I don’t know much about the history. Unfortunately, with trying to read several books from my TBR this month, I didn’t have time to look into all the history in the tales set in France, which I may later go back and learn more about. I loved the Irish stories at the start as they were bits of history I vaguely knew or had read similar tales over time, or had been to some of the old sites around Ireland when I was younger. He has a great way of telling historical events and gripping modern readers. I have two more books from Michon on my shelves to read, including his master piece Small Lives. He is a writer I want to read more from, so I won’t wait as long between his books this time. Have you read Michon?

Río Muerto by Ricardo Silva Romero

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Río Muerto by Ricardo Silva Romero

Columbian fiction

Original title – Rio Muerto

Translator – Victor Meadowcroft

Source – Review copy

I have been sent most of the books over time. World Editions has been doing some great books recently that may have gone under the radar; this is another example from them. This is from a prolific Colombian writer, Ricardo Silva Romero, one of the writers in the Hay festival collection, Bogota 39, which came out about fifteen years ago. He is a prolific writer, journalist and film critic. This is his first book to be published in English. Her has written 198 novels and a book about Woody Allen, which takes us back to a dark [=ast in his own country, the early 1990’s a time in which Columbia was very violent country to live in and this is told through the death of a mute called Salomón Palacois and the aftermath of this.

They soon took control of everything. A year before his execution-“They’ve killed Salomón the mute!” – there had occurred on the banks of the clear, gentle Río Chamí-which would then become known to all as the Río Muerto, the dead river-that “massacre of the collaborators,” or “culling of the hands,” in which the strongest black and white men in the settlement were tortured and shot, and the left hands of their wives and children lopped off and tossed into the current, for having continued to support the guerril-leros, in secret. Later, in the Plaza del Pan—the main square always referred to as the “Bread Square,” since it contains nothing but three bakeries, the enormous Pentecostal temple, and the five abarco trees that still haven’t been cut down-the now infamous Public Notice 00001 was circulated, leaving no room for doubt:

BLOQUE FÉNIX

CLEANUP CREW INFORMS:

The leader of the local gang that has killed Salomon

The title of this book in English is actually Dead River, and this is about a town, Belen del Chami, that is one of those small towns that isn’t on a map, and because of that, is a place where the local politicians and paramilitaries carry on as they want that is until they Kill Salomón and this makes his widow a string woman with a sharp tongue Hipólita is wanting to make sure that those that killed her man and widowed her and left her two sons with out a farther will finally be brought to justice. It is a tale of how a man who was a mute who only communicates via his yellow notebook with his nearest and dearest, is said by the local Paramilitary leader to be a snitch! Why was he really killed? This follows the town where the dead river runs through it soon after the death of her husband another man in the town is found dead in. the river this is a book about the corruption, murders and violence of this time in these town off the mmap where the rukle of law isn’t there but what happens when one woman faces up and tries to get justice.

Salomón pretended not to hear, because ignoring a friend’s nonsense is the brotherly thing to do. He noticed in the rearview mirror that a gang of snot-nosed kids was watching them. He heard a funereal song- an alabao-coming from the window of the house next door. An old man was yelling at a boy, “You’ll get yourself killed if you keep poking your snout where it don’t belong.” And then he set off, starting up the truck and taking the steep, green, uneven road to San Isidro, Antiquia, with that stubbornness of his, that pig-headedness, which led him to make the mistakes he made in his life but kept him calm the rest of the time. His friend, his pacha, would be safe in that settlement where the guerilla had entrenched itself. Get yourself to San Isido and see how you get on.

Is this what cause his death a mute being called a snitch seems madness

It is hard to believe it has taken so long for this writer to arrive in English. I think he was on the Bogota 39 list of fellow writers from his homeland, Juan Gabriel Vasquez, another writer who has written historical books and has had several books written. But now we have him in English for the first time, so let’s hope we get others. His latest is called Alp d’Huez, which, of course, is a famous place for being a stage on the Tour de France. Anyway, this book captures the world of the early 90s, a violent time in the framing of this village and the death of a mute man who was meant to be telling secrets about a gang. Add to this a cast of characters from corrupt police, vicars, gang members, and former lovers helping in her husband’s death, you see the wall that she has to break through and maybe make the death river be renamed! I loved this, it is a book that is told from the dead man’s point of view, and sees his lover fight for him. Do you have a favourite book from Latin America

 

In late Summer by Magdalena Blažević

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In late Summer by Magdalena Blažević

Bosnian fiction

Original title – U kasno ljeto

Translator – Andelka Raguž

Source – Review copy

I was lucky to be sent two new releases from the new publisher, the Linden editions. If you have followed this blog for any time, you will know I am a huge champion of new publishers. For me, they are the lifeline as a reader of books in translations, as they can translate books that otherwise wouldn’t see the light of day. This book, in particular, really grabbed me as it is from the Balkans, a region I feel should be better known for its writing and variety. I have long championed this region on the blog. However, this book is set in a village during the Balkan War. It was always going to be a book I wanted to read. Magdalean is from Bosnia, and this book won the Best Croatian book award. This is her debut novel and captures the horrors of war through an innocent girl’s eyes.

The windows in the cellar are low, fixed to the road, and you can’t see the sky or the forest through them, just the road and the feet of passers-by. I recognise Mother’s. She walks slowly, the hem of her flowery dress swinging to and fro. You can push a finger into the scars on her leg. A bucket of overripe tomatoes sways in her hand. Clods of damp earth fall off her rubber galoshes. They disappear behind our house. I put my hands on the cold pane.

My name is Ivana. I lived for fourteen summers, and this is the story of my last.

The haunting last line of the first chapter draws you in as a reader !

The book is an ode to the countryside and the country life that was there before the war, and about a family and what happens when their 14-year-old daughter is caught up in a massacre in Bosnia. It is told by Ivana, the fourteen-year-old, and the title is mentioned by her early on as she says This is my story. I have lived fourteen summers, and this is my last summer. The summer is told from her point of view from time spent with her grandmother in =what at that point seems a rural idyllic place, a pace of life I think we would all like, a bygone world of simple living and a trouble-free world. But the war is always there in the background. Till the day the soldiers appear, they aren’t named as being from one side or the other. The family flee to a nearby village that has already been abandoned. Still, they are caught, and this is where the narrative switches from a sort of pastoral scene of countryside and village life to the aftermath of losing loved ones in the mindless violence that had seemed so far away. Is now so real and has hit the family.

She’s standing beside Grandfather in the photo studio; they’re to be married in a couple of days. Ducats borrowed from the village jingle around her neck; a white blouse rustles under her fingertips. Grandfather’s shirt is cut low on the chest and singed, with sharp blades of grass poking out. He’s a lot taller than her. It seems to her that the top of his head is a canopy, and that it’s breaking through the ceiling. Grandmother doesn’t lift her gaze. Green eyes prey on her from beneath steep awnings; a wide jaw and shiny, sharp teeth threaten.

The grandmother is the heart of this family

I have read several great novels about the Balkan conflict. But this is the first to have a child as its main narrator and to tell the whole story from her point of view, as the war is initially so far away, and the world they are living in with the family, especially the grandparents, seems perfect and a rural existence that has maybe now gone after the conflict the family seem part of the land they live in. One of the beauties of this book is it doesn’t label who is who, which side is which; it is just about the act of war and its effect on everybody. Till it is shattered, the book is a book of two halves. Her last summer and the aftermath of it were her final summer. The main character’s voice reminded me of the Voice in the American novel, The Lovely Bones. She has captured how it hit people like Ivana and her family in those small villages, and her narration has the same detached nature; the things that happen are just told, if that makes sense. It shows the brutality of war on one village, on one family, on one daughter and granddaughter. This is one of my favourite books of recent years. It will be near the top of the books of the year for sure. Do you have a book you think captures the Balkan conflict well?

 

Blue postcards by Douglas Bruton

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Blue postcards by Douglas Bruton

Scottish fiction

Source – Library book

I’m unsure if it was this book or another from the Fairlight modern series I first saw on BookTube. I was captured by the cover and shape of the books. They have a distinct look across the series and are also great pocket-sized books. But it was one of my favourite Vloggers, Shaun from Shaun Breathes Books. He loved this book, and he went on to talk to the writer about it.I had it down on my list of books to keep an eye out for so when I saw it at my local library before anywhere else, I had to get it to read. I don’t read many non-translated books, but Shaun is someone I trust to highlight a book enough to at least get hold of a copy to have and try. He didn’t disappoint with this. I then read up about Douglas and saw he was from the Scottish Borders, I m not sure where. Still, one of my favourite bookshops is in that area, the excellent Mainstreet Trading company in St Boswells near Melrose is a gem of a bookshop, and the Cafe also has a great deli.

It is not easy to escape the drag and pull of time; its laws are pretty specific. And in the end a life lived is soon forgotten. My father, for example: all that’s left of him now are stories I tell to my children, and telling them over and over they shift, a little each time, so I am not sure how much they are true. And when I say, Now the street has a different name and there is a tailor there,’ what does that ‘now’ signify, for he is not there as I write this but was there once, a long time ago, before I was born even. I was born on 14 May 1957. It is a small coincidence that the date of my birth is the date stamped on the reverse side of the blue postcard and it is not that fact that made me purchase the card

When he brought the card

This book, told in short paragraphs, five hundred in all, captures two people and the connection, one could almost say the thread between them, which would be blue. The first is Henri, the last of a generation of tailors who lived on the French equivalent of London’s Savile Row. A man that every day uses Blue tailors’ chalk in his job but also has always left a blue Thekhelet thread in every one of his suits .so when one day the French conceptial artist Yves Klein heads into his shop for a suit the connection ios made between the two men Klein a man who mainly worked in Blue so much he had a shade of blue named after him. Also, our narrator buys a blue postcard from a girl; he is a collector of all things blue. The story is an ode to blue but also to lost worlds, lost hopes, and memories.

II2. There is a distance that comes between the paint when it is just pigment and how it appears on the canvas when the medium has dried.

It is like something has been lost somewhere between the powdered blue and the finished painting – and not just the blue. This was a trouble to Yves Klein.

II3. Not just with powdered blue, but rose and red and yellow pigments also. Indeed all colours can suffer this loss of intensity. It perhaps explains why artists seek to compensate for that something lost by putting complementary colours next to each other in an effort to replace the loss with a different intensity.

How Yves came up with his famous shade of Blue

This is a book that is unique in a way that it is hard to say what it is other than an ode to Blue and the fans of Blue from the tailor who, every day, uses his blue chalk and his little trademark th Yves Klein I vaguely was aware of but he was a n that lived n[blue as well. Then our narrator is a collector of all things blue. He reads Klein’s postcard in blue, of course, and the three stories are woven like a blue cloth, like a selection of memories faded like that blueish light in the early morning you sometimes get. I loved the book, it is a start book if that makes sense. I love books that go above form. I love books that use art. I love blue as well. I even listened to The Blue Nile, a Scottish band with a melancholy Sound. I think this is a book most people would find something in and love. It is a short read, and it can be read in an evening or a day or two if you get sidetracked by Klein’s art and think about blue along the way, which isn’t such a bad thing. Have you read this book or any others from the Fairlight series? Looking to know where to try next in the series of books?

The English path by Kim Taplin

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The English path by Kim Taplin

Nature writing

Personal copy

I have brought several books from the Little Toller nature classic series over the last few years. I love the design of the books; they are also a way to build a collection of the great natural writers of the past. I had wanted a nature writing read since watching the Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady the other week. This is one of the more recent releases from the Nature classic series. It was by the Poet and Nature writer Kim Taplin this book won an award when it came out in 1984 and was her first collection of nature writing she also published a book later on that follow Jerrome K Jerome trip up the thames except it was three women in the boat (That siiounds interesting I like book s that retrace famous trips ).

Our present footpath network contains some tracks which go back to prehistoric times, and others from every period in history right down to the few, the very few, that are created today. Most paths are more than a hundred years old. To appreciate what these paths have meant to country people, from the simplest, like Richard Jefferies’ cottagers, who only knew that ‘there always wur a path athwert thuck mead in the ould volk’s time’, to the most educated, like Andrew Young, who knew that:

Foot of Briton, formal Roman Saxon and Dane and Sussex yeoman

had hollowed the lane before him, we need to realise that the paths which connected people with their neighbours also connected them with their forefathers.

The opening lines of the book

The book is divided into chapters, each with a theme around English country paths and how they came about over time. From the early routes from village to village that predate the 20th century, most people used them daily. She uses a lot of references to great writers to illustrate how various paths around the countryside were made and used in the past. Unlike in the present, where it was mainly for leisure and enjoyment, many old paths served purposes such as routes from A to B, ways to get to certain places. This is all connected with lots of poetic and prose quotes from some of the great writers of the English countryside, from Thomas Hardy’s Dorset to the Glastonbury and surrounding area of John Cowper Powys and his brother Llewelyn, as well. To the great Poet John Clare, the history of paths and the writers who wrote about them over time builds up. Powys is a writer whose books I have picked up recently, and Clare is a poet I have loved since I read many of his poems in the Penguin Book of Bird Poetry many years ago.

Whether Mrs Susannah wounded the unhappy Samuel intentionally will never be known. But in the eighteenth-century it probably took more than ankles to do it. Not so in Dickens’ time:

Mr Pickwick was joking with the young ladies who wouldn’t come over the stile while he looked, or who, having pretty feet and unexceptionable ankles, preferred standing on the top-rail for five minutes or so, and declaring that they were too frightened to move … Mr Snodgrass offered Emily far more assistance than the absolute terrors of the stile (although it was full three feet high, and had only a couple of stepping stones) would seem to require; while one black-eyed young lady in a very nice little pair of boots with fur round the top, was observed to scream very loudly, when Mr Winkle offered to help her over.

Stiles, gates, stepping stones and rough or wet places all give opportunities for flirtation, and stiles as well as kissing gates often commanded a toll.

Clare understood the rules of the flirtation game, and the gallantry and coquetry involved. At first, the lover is humble:

I had to pick a Dicken quote and I have always loved Mr Pickwick

This is one of those books. When you read it, you must go back and underline and mark quotes to remember them. Then, get a little notebook and list all the books and writers mentioned to form a list of future books to Buy. I was reminded of writers like Robert McFarland and WG Sebald, both of whom capture Nature and the way nature is captured by other writers so well in their own writing. It reminds you that although a lot of the English countryside is wonderfully serene, for walking and wandering, there was a time when it was full of work and people doing jobs, and paths were just for their work or to get to work, etc. This is a book that will leave you with a vast list of books to read after it, all the books she quotes from, and there were a few I wasn’t aware of, I will be looking out for.Have you read this or any of the other books in the Little Toller nature classic series?

Sweet Days Of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy

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Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy

Swiss fiction

Original title – I beati anni del castig0

Translator – Tim Parks

Source – Personal Copy

Have you ever thought you had read a book by a writer, but after you have read it by them, discover you hadn’t thought you had at some point?  Well, that has just happened. After reading so many books over the years, it was bound to happen, and And Other Stories is a publisher. I have read a lot of books over the years. Hence, I naturally thought I had read this writer. Several of her books from And Other Stories have come out in the UK in the last few years. I have brought a couple over that time, so I thought I had read one. But no, this is her first book I have read. Jaeggy lived in Rome, where she became friends with Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, and met her later husband, the editor and writer Roberto Calasso . She speaks French, German and Italian

Frédérique was beginning to look at me. I felt the weight of her eyes on my body. It was like a punch in the beck sometimes, and I would turn. Sometimes, at table, I sensed her gaze on me, and then I held myself straighter and ate with the most refined manners, so that I hardly ate at all. But at breakfast, even if she was watching me, I helped myself to two or three slices of bread and butter and marmalade. And I have to admit that I thought of nothing but breakfast. When I dunked my bread in my coffee that time it was out of sheer greed, without thinking. I seem to remember Frédérique smiled, out of indulgence I suppose. Now she was asking me to spend time with her, and she kept her eye on me from a disctance

Her instona connection with the new gir;

The book opens with the narrator, a 14-year-old currently at a boarding school, talking about the fact that nearby is where Robert Walser used to walk and eventually die in the snow. This is one of those books that did not. A lot of plot, more framing of this girl, and the fact that a new Girl  Frédérique, whom our narrator becomes obsessed with from trying to be like her in many ways, writes like her. The story evolves around a schoolmistress and some other girls in her year. But what happens when suddenly she has to depart, as something has happened to her father? Then out of the blue, another New pupil, Micheline. This fills the void, but when summer arrives, her mother tries to send her to what sounds like a finishing school. Our narrator rebels, which means she has two more encounters with Frédérique. The book ends with a strange echoing of the opening and a madness in her friend that sometimes mirrors Walsers’ madness.

She attached a value to her poverty, the way others might to their extravagance. She was truly possessed by her indigent state, all she had was herself, but it was more than enough, since the aromas of servitude bubbled up from her constantly, a natural predisposition. How small and slippery her feet were when she went quick as quick up and down the corridor, and how well she knew how to disappear when the reverend mother called her, barely whispering her name. Reverend mothers always speak very softly. And how she would genuflect sideways in the chapel! Her big eyes were well suited to contemplating the crucifix. If she hadn’t been an informer, we would have believed, generously, in her magnanimous devotion and obedience.

I picked this it shows how great her writng is !

This is a book that is wonderfully well written and is so captivating. I connected with the narrator as I had friends I wanted to be like when I was younger. I struggled with who I am most of my teen years, never quite getting my own identity. It wasn’t till later in life that I became comfortable with myself. I also connected with the part where our narrator would be sent to what sounded like a finishing school. My late stepmother went to finishing school growing up, and I remember her talking about that time, which would maybe be a similar time to the book being set, which is the sixties, I think it is never mentioned. Anyway, it is a book that is not a lot that happens it is a few months in her life,  a sort of view of being young and impressionable. Some social attitudes towards some of the characters show an underlying issue, the daughter of an African leader, and how she is viewed. But it captures a girl in Frederique that is brilliant, but as it turns out, also flawed and unstable, it isn’t too late that she sees this. I loved this book. Have you read any books by her?

 

The sweet indifference of the world by Peter Stamm

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The sweet Indiffernece of the world by Peter Stamm

Swiss fiction

Original title – Die sanfte Gleichgültigkeit der Welt,

Translator – Michael Hofmann

Source – Library book

I put this down as a library book, but I think I might have been sent it a couple of years ago by the US publisher. I had read it then but hadn’t reviewed it, and as I read it the other day, it came to mind, I’m sure this book reminds me of something. I went to log it on my reading apps and saw I had read it two years ago. I am a massive fan of Stamm’s work his book always seem to be ones you remember after you have read them the ideas in the linger like this had, He has won most of the major prizes in the German speaking world and maybe shoiuld be a little better known to English readers for me he is in those list of writers that is in line for a Nobel or on the list of writers that could for me anyway..

She visits me often, usually at night. She stands by my bed, looking down at me, and says, You’ve aged. She doesn’t say it in a nasty way, though, her voice sounds affectionate, almost merry. She sits down on the side of the bed. But then your hair, she says, tousling it with her hand, it’s as thick as it ever was. Only it’s gone white.

You’re not getting any older though, I say to her. I’m not sure if that’s a happy thought for me or not. We never talk much, after all, what is there to say. The time goes by. We look at each other and smile.

The opening lines of the book

This book has a twist, but we are never fully told if it is the twist we think it is, just a hint, if that makes sense. Christopher, a writer in later middle age, recalls a story to a young actress named Lena. The story is remembered as the woman he is telling about has the same name as her, except he calls the woman in his story Magdalena, the full version of her name, as the relationship from his post, which was also an actress. To make it even odder, Lena is in a relationship with a writer called Chris. As the story unfolds from Christopher, the lines between his past and her present blur, and what is happening is never quite told, but hinted at. Is this what is happening, or is it just a weird connection between them all having the same jobs and names? Never quite told why this has happened, but it is just one of those stories that seem to twist and turn in on themselves as you read along.

My novel, though, was a hit with booksellers and readers; even the reviewers seemed to sit up. This debut promised all sorts of things for the future, wrote one woman. And in fact I did believe in some sort of future, for the first time in a while. After living from hand to mouth for several years, the success of my book secured not a lavish but a respectable income; but above all I had something to show for myself that justified all my en-deavors. The years of failed writing already felt like a long-distant time, in which I was caught up in labyrinthine plots, and driven by exaggerated ambitions.

I never admitted how much my story was about me.

When I was asked about that after readings, I dismissed the idea, and insisted on the separation between author and narrator.

Christopher is a succesful writer in his time !

I wish I had reviewed this a couple of years ago. Still, strangely, in the two years since I read it, I have thought of it a few times every time I heard the name Magdalena, I had come back to this book and the strange tale of a man from the future telling his fiance a story in the past or is it just a weird sort of Mobius loop of Two couples with the same names and jobs meeting at a point in one relation ship has started and the other has ended and is so distant it is a memory being told in the present/ I loved this it is a tale that has again left me thinking about it all and how in life there are just moments that seem as thou they have been planned or relived or even just beyond what is typically we all have those small deja vu memories. Even people we assume that we know but don’t, dopplegangers, etc. Very Stamm book, he does so well on the psychological level as a writer! He keeps you, as the reader thinking of his stories long after you have read them. Have you read any of his book ?

Journeys and Flowers by Merce Rodoreda

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Journeys and Flowers by Merce Rodoreda

Catalan Fiction

Original title – Viatges i flors

Translators – Gala Sicart Olavide and Nick Caistor

Source – Library book

I read Death in Spring a few years ago by Merce Rodoreda and was pleased to see this on the shelf at the library. I was grabbed by the fact it was vignettes of villages and flowers but with an undercurrent going back years before the book was written which was 1980s but hark back to the war years in which she had first escaped the Spanish civil war heading to France but then when the Nazis took over France she had to move again. She was regarded as one of the leading voices of Catalan fiction had won all the big prizes for Catalan fiction on her wiki page there was this prologue from one of her books I think it capture whart she does in this book so well. “I write because I like to write. If it didn’t seem like an exaggeration, I would say that I write to please myself. If others like what I write, the better. Perhaps it is deeper. Perhaps I write to affirm myself. To feel that I am … And it’s over. I have spoken of myself and essential things in my life, with a certain lack of measure. And excess has always scared me”That last line struck me this is a short but hard hitting book

I suggest you go to the village down there, can you see it? The view is blocked by the trees, but it’s right behind them, come on! Can’t you see it, obscured by the foliage?’ This is what an ageless woman said to me, dressed all in black, her ample skirts gathered at the waist. Her round face framed by a scarf neatly tied under her chin. ‘You’ll fall in love with it. And she gave a half smile.

The day was ending by the time I reached the village, a village more or less the same as any other, with low one-storey houses, two-storey at most; streets, some narrow, some wide; a square with arcades; a watering-trough; an inn; all kinds of shops and an undertaker. I strolled round the village, went everywhere in it, and thought the woman’s idealised view of this completely boring village must stem from nostalgic childhood memories. I left it slowly, my thoughts lingering on the people living there. They looked like normal people yet something in their eyes was disturbing.

The thoughts of those that were there struck me !

An unnamed narrator is wandering from village to village, where the town has no real names but is the village of warriors, well-bred rats, the two roses, and glass. Each village is told in a fable-like way, so reality and the surreal drift into one. The violence of war haunts the background of these places, women wrapped in cocoons, men playing at being knights. It is not as it seems, and is at the same time. I like this, it reminds me of what Calvino did well, using slightly surreal things to convey things. The second part is odes to flowers, which are mainly made up of flowers and the meaning and thoughts behind them. Blue flowers, desperate flowers, to Dead flowers. Again, they are thoughts about the war years and the meaning of flowers at times.

Ballerina Flower

She is yellow and very dishevelled. Four tendrils emerge from her stem. She opens in mid-summer, at dawn with the sun. Her slender round petals are born in tiny pushes, and hang down. She gives off a perfume which combines the smell of woods – that is, dry – and mown grass – that is, damp. Once she has unfurled all her splendour, the tendrils spread, wrap round the nearest branches: they become as taut as wires. Captive, the flower begins the exhausting work of freeing herself. She slowly folds in on herself with little shakes, right and left. Forwards, back-wards. She tries, but when after a great deal of patience and grief she has only managed to become more entangled, she abandons her efforts.

This had such hidden thoughts to me

 

I liked this collection if I see it second hand i”ll pick tit u;a s I think it will need a few more readings to fully grasp the beauty of her words and ideas. It is something that you will see something more every time you reread them, I think. There is something about the cut down nature of these short tales that leaves so much to be filled in by the reader and thought about if that makes sense.It goes back to the earlier quote about excess in her life and her writing, it seems. It also mixes the beauty of her homeland with the horrors, violence, and divisive nature of the Spanish Civil War, which bleeds through these pages as you read these little gems. Have you read any of her books in English?

Spadework for a Palace by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

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Spadework for a Palace by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

Hungarian fiction

Original title – Aprómunka egy palotaér

Translator – John Batki

Source – Personal copy

A few years ago, the American publisher released a series of small hardbacks, called the Storybook series, which featured a collection of novellas with eye-catching covers. I had, at the time, hoped to get my hands on a couple from the series, but finances allowed for just one, and since Laszlo Krasznahorkai is a writer, I need to read more over time. I have found each of his books challenging, but also different, so this one, set in New York, appealed to me. I’ve never been to New York; I’ve always wandered through it in the company of writers I like, such as Krasznahorkai, who also features a couple of other writers in the book itself.

I started to look into the routes that-already a failed author—he used when he commuted daily to the Customs House, walking out of his residence, and taking a horse-drawn omnibus down Broadway to 13th Street, and walking from there west to his “office,” and yes, for the sake of veracity let us right away enclose that office in quotation marks, because in truth it was a shack that he walked to, six days a week for four dollars a day, to manage paperwork amid all the commotion, yes, and that “office” shack was located approximately on today’s Bethune Street, though that doesn’t really matter, since back in his time, as I found out, the entire customs district along the banks of the Hudson as well as down by the present-day Staten Island ferry terminal and all the lower Manhattan sides of the East River constituted one big chaotic turmoil, as Melville had himself described it several times, granted, it was mostly in connection with the magic attraction of water, of the sea, there it is right at the outset of Moby-Dick, out on the water, sailing ships and steamships, barques, brigs and schooners, and on the land longshoremen, sailors, car-ters, loafers, pickpockets, dogs and cats and wharf rats as well as, yes, even though he makes no mention of them, customs inspectors, such as Melville,

It always hard to pick a quote out his books but this was about the route he found

The book is, as ever with Krasznahorkai, a single paragraph; one wonders if the tab is broken on his laptop, only joking. The story centres on a librarian called Herman Melvill a librarian that has a love and obsession with the his namesake the Meville wth an e that wrote Moby dick a man that also spent time in Manhatten. He is also a fan of Malcolm Lowry, not so much for his most famous book, Under the Volcano, but rather for the book Lunar Caustic and its character, Bill Plantagenet, another hard-drinking man who has lost his band. He is a jazz fan. He is also on the edge of madness. Then he discovers the art and architecture of Lebbeus Woods a man whose idea and designs were both surreal and cutting edge.So, we have a man who hates the Public library and has set his mind on opening a library in the famous skyscraper in New York that AT&T once owned, which has no windows. We have a man on the edge talking about making a library and these writers in his town. The book originated when Krasznahorkai was a writer-in-residence in New York. He also hates the public library in New York like Mevill does.

whose materials could never be read by anyone, not that I am saying that any reader would want to read personal notes of this sort, instead of Dante and Shakespeare and Homer and Plato and Newton and Buddha and so forth, no-o-o, of course not, I too would much rather read Dante and Plato and Homer and so forth, since not even I attach any great significance more precisely and in fact none whatsoever-to what I have so far written down, nor to what is to follow, except that this is all I am able to contribute, so I will still write it down, I am not sure if I’m being clear, but that’s all I intend to say about this, and now, after all this back and forth, I’ll resume, and return to the afternoon when I had first set out downtown on my Melville Ramble, heading for Gansevoort Street,

Again other writers an places as he folow the ramble

This is one of those books that made us want to reread Melville.  have read three books from Meville including Moby dick. I also thought of the recent Argentine novel by Rodrigo Fresán, which told us that at one time the Mevill name was spelt the same way as our hero’s. This is a book for fans of Krasznahorkai and Bernhard. The character is almost a Bernhard-like character, in the way he views the world and his disappointment with it. It’s also a nod to the things Krasznahorkai found when in New York; Lebbus Woods is one of his building ideas. Then, Lowry, I read ‘Under the Volcano’ a long time ago, but I hadn’t tried any of his other works. I see that Lunar Caustic is out of print and not cheap to buy, so it’s on the list of books to look out for in charity shops. This is one of those books that is an ode to a place, Manhattan, and draws you into the city, while also exploring the history of some of its locations, much like yesterday’s book, in a way. Have you read any of the ND storybooks ?

Poundemonium by Julian Rios

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Poudemonium by Julian Rios

Spanish fiction

Original title – Poundemonium

Translator – Richard Alan Francis with Rios himself

Source – Personal copy

I start this month with an experimental piece of postmodern fiction from Julian Ríos. This is the second book I have read by him. I read House of Ulysses a  few years ago. He was called by Carlos Fuentes the most avant-garde writer in Spanish. The previous book was, in a way, an homage to James Joyce. He is a huge Joyce fan. One would imagine that being a Joyce fan led him to Ezra Pound, as Pound was an early champion of Joyce’s works. I will hold my hand up; I have a real problem with Pound’s political views, which is why I haven’t read him. We all have the choice to read who we want but for me I have no time for facists like my view with Mr Morrisey I just take the view to miss the material he makes and I am somewhat the same with Pound I see where he fits in the canon and that for me is all I need to know. This book is about fans discovering he had died in Venice and then retracing his life in London.

On repeating it uneasily, death’s ironies, brr waggishly, Luz! dully t-t-t-temptingly here nude at such an early hour,* ye gods! they stole the light bulbs again! in this high dark tiled bathroom, such an odor of lye, or semen….

Gotta condense or revive in a luminous point, a lifelight, the flame’ [soflame] of the funeral wake from a Night of All Souls from which by the end there are barely remains.

The mention of a wake is maybe a nod to Joyce as well

The book is full of wordplay and allusions to Pound’s work, but, as I said, having not read him, I am unaware of how much the prose here and his works are connected. The book follows three Bohemian spanmsih guys that discover mid way ion the book that Pound has died in Venice and what follows is them thinking of him but also the place he had been whilst in London a sort of psychgeography biography of the man short vignettes is later back up with pictures of the places mentioned in the book. Thus is all there remembrance of Pound, a man who had a huge influence on literature in the early years of the 20th century, but then, post World War II, is always connected to his fascist activities in the war.

A hoarse voice, she said, gruff. Vociferous luz, light of lights?’ or perhaps nothing more than incomprehensible stutter, Lux … Lux?4 …as he makes his surprise appear-

ance against the tennis court fence, nervously indicating with his head, or was it a nervous tic? in the direction of Luxembourg Gardens… And she, babelic interpreter, still sitting on the bench, despite the deathfright he gave her, could see clearly that his eyes-iceblue—were filled with tears. There’s nothing more sad, she said, than seeing an old man weep. [Beati que lugents

… Babelle de nuit dixit,

so early in the day, on leaving her sad moist dream, her cheeks shiny from crying, good mourning! Bon jour tristesse! I’ve met you so very late, très tard!6… That nightmare turned you into a crybaby, the Burlador of Sexville teased her, but she’ll probably keep reviewing her dream: there, lost in the room, there were you are, the old man with the blanket, freezing to death, teeth chattering k-k-k-k, and he never stopped scratching the backs of his bony hands. [Rashly?]

some word play here

If you are a Pound fan, you’ll love this if you are a Dalkey Archive fan this is a book for you. I like Rios’ writing style again; this is a book for you. I struggle with Pound. On the one hand, I can’t say I want to see certain politicians just disappear, and the rise of the right in the current day fade away, so we can see the sheer nastiness behind many of these policies. I don’t just mean in the US. There are countries, such as Hungary and Italy, and now even New Zealand, to name a few, pushing people’s freedoms back. So if you want to see where he went in London, this does capture a London in the pictures, I feel, is now gone. Sorry, I enjoyed this as a fun piece about three guys wandering around London, but the Ezra Pound thing is something I will always struggle with. I have Rios Larva, which is actually the first book in a series. I hadn’t known that, but I think they can be read separately. The book has lots of word play, and one can see the translator would have had to work with Rios to work some of the word play or other places where it is explained that the Spanish word for writer can be an anagram around Christ! That’s on my TBR for a later date. Have you read Ríos or Pound?