Month: August 2025

Summers end August 2025

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  1. Cold Night of Childhood by Tezer Özlü
  2. Letter from a Seducer by Hild Hilst
  3. Set my heart on fire by Izumi Suzuki 
  4. Sofia Petrovna by Lydia Chukovskaya 
  5. Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Rania Mamoun
  6. Women without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur
  7. On Earth as it is beneath by Ana Paula Maia
  8. Dark heart of the night by Leonora Milano 
  9. The Bridge of Beyond by Simone Schwarz-Bart
  10. The collection Nina Leger 
  11. Yellow Street by Veza Canetti

I think I had a really good Women in Translation month this year. I managed to read 11 books. I wanted a couple more, but with work and family time, etc., 11 is a good month for me. I also reviewed books from eleven countries this month, managing to obtain books from Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe, so it was a truly global experience. Also, a mix of old and new writers, this is, for me, my best month of reading this year.

Book of the Month

It actually is a month where most of the. Books I could pick as the book of the month, this just gets the nod, as I feel it is an essential book. When it was written it was one of the few books written in Russia that dealt with the Purges Stalin did, and a lot of the book is based on what actually happened to the writer in her own life.

Non book things this Month

I spent a bit at the recent Tallbird sale at my local record shop, as there haven’t been many new albums to grab me last month.

So I brought the Ratso Album Larry Sloman has been around for years, a musician who had worked with both Dylan and John Cale, I had seen this and I got it mainly as Nick Cave is on one of the songs with Him! Then the Levellers lockdown sessions have a few of their albums, like a few of their songs, and most of them are on this album.  The Idles’ Brutalism is something I hadn’t encountered in any form, and I have most of their other albums on vinyl. As one of my favourite bands of recent years, their lyrics are more critical now than ever. Finally, Jsson Isbell is one of the best singer-songwriters around at the moment. TV-wise, a couple of new series have started, including Alien Earth, which nods to the original film and other moments in the film series, and is very good. I also began watching the series about the Amanda Knox case. I am in two minds about it at the moment, so I’m not sure if I will finish it., I’m going to watch the next episode, then weigh it up. I also caught the Thursday Murder Club film, a fun piece of cosy crime with a good cast, including four main stars, and a stunning setting for the nursing home. Let’s hope they keep that cast as it is and do his other books. I can’t wait for Slow Horse next month I think that it is by far my favourite tv series of recent times.

Next Month

Off to a bang with a Book by a writer who was up for the Nobel till he died a month before it was awarded, an early novella that has been made into a film several times and is coming out this week. I will be reviewing it this week. Other than that, I have no real plans or a TBR of books ready to read for a change. I know that over the next couple of months, there are things I do every year, so this will be a nice month for reading by whim, as Simon Savidge always says. How has your month been have you any plans for next month? Oh and the blog will also pass 1500 reviews this month !!!!!!

Yellow Street by Veza Canetti

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Yellow Street by Veza Canetti

Austrian fiction

Original title  – Die gelbe Straße

Translator Ian Mitchell

Source – Personal copy

I have moved to Austria on my tour around the world for this year’s Women in Translation Month, and I am a writer whose husband was more famous than her. Veza Canetti is the wife of the Nobel winner Elias Canetti, a writer whose books I have loved. She had published the odd story here and there in her lifetime with pseudonyms as he stories were considered left-wing and satirical at the time. She had also translated Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys, a writer I want to read. I have that book by him on my TBR. What this collection of tales by her did was capture the street she grew up on in Vienna, a working-class Jewish street. In a way, this is a testament to a place that, shortly after she wrote the stories, was no longer there.In post-war Vienna, we head down the darker and less known side of the city in the thirties!

One day, as Runkel was being pushed across the street in her perambulator, she was overcome by such despair over her wretched life that she wanted nothing more than for a heavy lorry, a cattle truck, a thousand-kilo road-roller or a tram with three trailers to run over her horrible body and crush it. So she gave the maid Rosa, who for years had looked after her, nursed her, carried her from her pram into her flat, from the flat to the pram, quite meaningless signals, distracted, nervous signals, as to how she was to cross the street, she confused her with angry interjections to such an extent that there was indeed a collision, with a motor-cycle that came racing past.

Only, this motor-cycle mangled not Runkel but the serving-maid Rosa, for, at literally the last moment of her life, this loyal soul pushed the pram containing the cripple abruptly forward, shielded it with her own body and so brought about her own death. Runkel, however, lay on the ground, with both her arms broken, for the twelfth time in her life she had suffered broken limbs, usually it was her legs. which hung down short and lifeless like those of a jumping jack.

The opening story

The book is a collection of five stories that are all set around the people who live and work in Yellow Street, a jews street full of poverty, the working-class disabled and people down on their luck for various reasons. So we have the disabled Frau Runkel in a wheelchair with her arms broken, a broken woman, a vision of absolute despair, wishing for the end of her life, which has a tragic twist involving Rosa, a Maid. The Herr Vik, a tobacconist who has an almost autistic routine in his life, a feeling of OCD in his tale of a man drawn by routines. He is the last story; these two people bookend a series of stories of a poor Jewish neighbourhood in the 1930s in Vienna.

Herr Vik, his jaws working busily, hurries along Yellow Street, getting very agitated over the bales of leather being unloaded and the crowds of people that are in his way today; Herr Vik can no longer go out without his walking stick, so filthy has the street been made by dogs, and Herr Vik is busy shoving just such a yellow mess out of his path when up runs Hedi with a yellow book and a collecting-tin.

Hedi knows Herr Vik, because her mother does the cleaning for him. Herr Vik rushes past her, but Hedi is not going to be easily deterred. ‘Herr Vik! Herr VIk!’ she calls and holds out her little book to him. With a jolt, Herr VIk stops, takes the yellow book, reads it very carefully, gives it back to Hedi and rushes off again.

He hurries along, and the farther he runs, the greater becomes his annoyance, for more and more people get in his way; the whole street is mad today, they’re all mad today, but they won’t get anywhere with him, nobody’s going to deprive him of his freedom. And he forces his way through, laying about him, so that people move aside in alarm. Outside the Café Planet he comes to a halt, then bolts inside.

Herr Vik made an impression on me

This book captures the underbellyof Vienna we rarely see , I think these are the same characters many yer later Thomas Bernhard woukd write about in his book the cheap eater those just getting by or not getting by at all like the disable Frau Rinkel in the first story the cloud of wehat happens in the thirties althopugh never really mention seeps into the tales and the down oan out folks the flotsam and Jetsom of the city we never really seen in other books. She captures the streets she grew up on and also moved away from those she left behind, as shown in these five short stories. She has a compassionate look at these individuals, and one feels these were people she would have seen. I felt this especially with Herr Vik a man who then would seem odd with his quirks and routines, but now would be maybe seen as neurodivergent. I am pleased someone chose to publish her work as she would just have been known as his Elias’s wife and occasional translator, not a writer with a sharp eye for the human condition and capturing a world that is sadly gone now. Have you read her book or any of the husbands or wives of other writers?

The Bridge of Beyond by Simone Schwarz-Bart

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The Bridge of Beyond by Simone Schwarz-Bart

Guadelope fiction

Original title – Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle

Translator – Barbara Bray

Source – Personal copy

I had a search for books to read this month, and I picked this because I had read it before but hadn’t reviewed it, so I quickly reread it. I love the Caribbean literature as it is a rich mix of styles of writing and often focuses on families or villages like this book does. Simone Schwarz and her husband had always highlighted political issues, especially around black females. They wrote a six-volume encyclopedia of black heroines that had been missed from history. I loved this. I doubt we will ever see that book, but it reminds me of the recent exhibition I went to in Cambridge, which highlights the experiences of black slaves and leaders in the abolition movement. Rise up. It was a deeply touching exhibition.

It was the first time I’d been away from home, but I wasn’t at all upset. On the contrary, I felt a kind of excite-ment, going along the white chalky road bordered with filaos with a grandmother whose earthly existence I’d thought was over. We walked in silence, slowly, my grandmother so as to save her breath and I so as not to break the spell. Toward the middle of the day we left the little white road to its struggle against the sun, and turned off into a beaten track all red and cracked with drought. Then we came to a floating bridge over a strange river where huge locust trees grew along the banks, plunging everything into an eternal blue semidarkness.

My grandmother, bending over her small charge, breathed contentment: “Keep it up, my little poppet, we’re at the Bridge of Beyond.” And taking me by one hand and holding on with the other to the rusty cable, she led me slowly across that deathtrap of disintegrating planks with the river boiling below. And suddenly we were on the other bank, Beyond: the landscape of Fond-Zombi unfolded before my eyes, a fantastic plain with bluff after bluff, field after field stretching into the distance, up to the gash in the sky that was the mountain itself, Balata Bel Bois.

Little houses could be seen scattered about, either huddled

I picked this long qutoes as it captures the village

The book is narrated by the Elderly Telumée Lougandor as she recounts her life in Guadeloupe with her grandmother, Toussine, who raised her after she had been abandoned by her parents. Through her two marriages, first to Elie, where she experienced marital violence at his hands, and he is a volatile person, once they are married. It is only years later that she meets Ambroise, a man who is the complete opposite of her first husband, the sort of perfect man. Her life is a mix of everything from just getting by, to loss, to love, to being part of a community of strong women with the distant scars of slavery still running deep in the community. Add to this the village set in the remote mountains of the island and the island itself, with its lush nature and flora, which is almost a character in itself. A book complete with oral tradition in the way the story unfolds, and a slight touch of magical realism, A tale of a strong woman getting by in a harsh world over many generations.

I thought of lying there on the pebbles for Elie to stretch out at full length over me, but instead of that, lost Negress that I was, I took to my heels and ran away by the river while he called after me: “But what did I say? What did I say?” But I kept running, and his voice got fainter and fainter, and soon all I could hear was the breeze among the cassias beside the path, and, somewhere, people laugh-ing, people singing. I was back in Fond-Zombi.

In her first violent marriage to Elie

I loved this book. It is a rich telling of one woman’s life, spanning many generations of her family, from those who were enslaved during the slave days, the first to experience freedom, to the post-colonial years. As I said, the village of Fond-Zombi is in a backwater of the island, so is a place where time itself moves much more slowly, as the island moves forwar,d it seeps gradually into the village a place where just beyond is the mountains the flora and faun and as I said the town itself is almost a character in itself. Nearly touches of magical realism here and there, this is practically a female version of 100 Years of Solitude, both deal with post-colonial worlds and with multi-generational tales. I loved the style of this book as we follow Telumée from childhood into her adulthood to the present. Do you have a favourite book from the Caribbean?

 

On Earth as it is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia

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On Earth as it is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia

Brazilian fiction

Original title – Assim na Terra como embaixo da Terra

Translator – PAdma Viswanathan

Source – personal copy

I have a subscription to Charco Press, but to be honest, I have had the books arriving and thinking I’ll get to that one a few days down the line, and not getting to them. So, as I needed a very short book while waiting, I picked this up as it was 100 pages long and finished it in two sittings. I just got drawn into this dark tale. Ana Paula Maira is both a novelist and a screenwriter. I think you can feel the cinematic nature of the book, and the way the characters interact would make for a great film. She has been said to be a fan of Quentin Tartatino and Sergio Leone. Both of which I could see in this book af a remote Brazilian prison colony gone rogue.

Taborda separates the hide from the bone and hangs the skin from a tree branch. He cleans out the boar’s head, skilled at the job. The stench around him means only flies come near the bloody scraps. With a small knife, he scrapes off any flesh still sticking to the bone, drying sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. It pleases him to see a pile of shredded flesh beside his leg. Getting up, he takes the skull and a shovel and heads towards the anthill behind the central pavilion. Hundreds of ants emerge as he deftly digs a hole in the earth and places the boar’s skull inside. He shovels earth back on top of it and hurries away, shaking his legs and stomping his feet.

In two months, the ants, eating day and night, will have stripped the skull entirely of any flesh not removed by hand. He picks up the hide from where it hung on the tree branch and takes it to an abandoned room, used in the past for hay storage, to cure it with rock salt.

One of the animals hunted and how they kill and prepare it

The book is set in the remote wilderness, where indians used to live, in a colony prison, far away from everywhere. As we are there, it seems it has been completely forgotten. We see the cruelty of the prison a mad Melquiades is the warden, a man in love with Hunting. It is just the local animals he wants to hunt, as once a year, he hunts the prisoners, as he lets them try to capture them, echoes of the hunting of slaves in Africa when they escaped. Then we have the inmates, most nameless, but there are some of those who have been there for years and have served the wardens’ moonlight hunts many a time. Valdenio, A man who for years was beaten and broken and walks with a limp for the years it took him to get used to prison life. Then, Bronco Gil, a hitman who turned on the people who hired him to kill a mayor, was the only one who ended up in jail, a killer who has killed since then and lives through the brutal prison on his wits. A novella of a cruel world where death is just around the corner, and the guards are ruthless, the environment is brutal, and the fellow prisoners are brutal. A glimpse of humanity is slim here. But this is a dark tale of being hunted, historical darkness that is the history of death from the indians that lived there through slavery.

Bronco Gil’s killed various kinds of men and women, but he’s only serving time for one crime: the murder of a small-town mayor. It was good money, but he ended up getting caught. The guy who hired him didn’t give Bronco the protection he should have. Anyway, Bronco squealed, told them everything he knew. He took five other people down with him.

‘So what about you, Indian, what are you in for?’

asked the prisoner at the end of his own story.

‘Killing a mayor, he replied, terse.

‘Oof, killing a mayor is complicated. Pain in the ass?

‘Sure is.’

“Was it a hit?’

“Yep.’

Bronco Gil one of the prisoners

I loved this book; it is brutal and feels like a film when you read it well. It did for me. The mad warden and his guards could have come from a Tarantino film, and the prisoners were the jungle version of Leone desperados battered by their environment.  Another book I kept thinking of is Lord of the Flies it has that same place gone slightly mad if it were adults and not kids left to go feral. I think it also has a lot of nods to the place it has set the ghost of the jungle, be it Indian or Slaves that all died there as well, are echoes in the violence of the present, the way they are hunted by the warden in the moonlight hunts like the slaves hunted down when they had escaped in the previous century. Do you have a favourite book set in a prison ?

 

The Collection by Nina Leger

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The Collection by Nina Leger

French fiction

Original title – Mise en Pièces

Translator – Laura Francis

Source – Library

I was planning to review another book today, but I picked this up last night and read it in an evening. At the start of this year, Women in Translation month, I visited the library and found a few books that I had maybe missed over the last while, and this was one of them. I think I may have seen this when it came out about six years ago, but it was one I never got to iut was the second novel by the writer, and it won the Anaïs Nin prize.In an interview, I read an interview with her, and she said she had written the book to subvert the male gaze to a female gaze of the geography of Paris. We follow Jeanne and her quests around Paris. She has taught novel writing as well.

Drowsiness, tender and shadowy folds, abandonment to torpor. Dilation, rising, elastic rigidity, too narrow in form to contain the new mass, compressed, veins protruding.

Jeanne maintains utmost concentration.

Her gestures are slow, diligent. She passes the penis between her fingers, into her mouth, presses it against her face. She examines it, occasionally putting it to her ear to listen to the blood beating, follows the curve of the head with her thumb, feels for the slit which drinks up her saliva.

She isolates the penis between her two cupped hands, excludes the body, and fixates upon the mobility of the organ that gradually fills the space. The furniture dimin-ishes, the details blanch out. She remains alone with the penis which she has made her own. Even her own body has lost substance.

One of the numerous meets this early on in the book

Now Jeannequest is a woman who likes men, and the book follows her with her numerous encounters with men. But also her view of the various men’s penis and the way they make love. I don’t know Paris well enough to grasp the travelling around, but she seems to make arrangements to meet and just have sex with these men, and the book is complete with how she positions her body in the sexual conquests. She is a woman who seems to rule over the men, and as we drift from the various hotel rooms, they end up in or even more or less discrete situations. Even on a trip abroad, she has sex. Burt, with her added commentary on the various men’s parts and the multiple shapes and sizes they come in. I laughed as the cover art is mushrooms of various size and shapes a sort of sneaky wink to the penises within the book!

It is in hotels that Jeanne finds the necessary elements to furnish her palace. She appropriated a doormat and some candlesticks from the Hôtel Saint-Pierre, net curtains from Timhotel, bedspreads from the Hôtel du Delta and the Hôtel Cambrai, some obsolete ashtrays and two bedside lamps from the Hôtel de Nice. The palace is an exquisite cadaver of the Parisian hotel trade.

Jeanne passes through her domain in the evening, at bedtime, in the morning, upon waking; she roams around it between appointments, in the midst of loud dinners where conversations stream out without spilling a drop onto her, in the crystalline sharpness of the beauty counters in department stores, under the halogen bulbs of waiting rooms.

Sometimes, she interacts at length with a particular penis. Attentive to the fidelity of the memory, she approaches, observes, drinks in the details. Hours pass in slow meanderings and interminable pauses until she leaves the room, reluctantly, careful not to disturb the stillness of the forms.

Some of the hotel next I am in Paris I will see these hotels and think of this book

I think this is an excellent book as it is a very positive view of a female that would otherwise be looked down on by a male writer or made to seem a real man if she were a male bed jumping. She has changed the sort of sexual dynamic, and the men she is sleeping with get described like I have seen many a woman years ago when I used to read people like Roth, etc. But this has that French sort of normality to the numerous sexual acts. This is what would happen if Anne Eernaux were sex mad and sleeping with lots of men. Add to that the way she captures the male penis in it, in many strange and different styles, and how each one in her own way makes Jeanne approach in a certain way, it is like a guide of how she tackled these men and the style and techniques she used. The various rooms and types of men she met all this as she criss-crossed Paris to meet in various Hotels. Have you read any of her books?

Dark heart of the Night by Leonora Miano

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Dark Heart of the Night by Leonora Miano

Cameroonian fiction

Original title – L’Intérieur de la nuit

Translator – Tamsin Black

Source – Personal copy

I moved to Cameroon in Africa with another book that has a lot to say about female lives within that country. This is my next stop on this year’s Women in Translation Month. Leona Miano has lived in France since the early 90s. This was her debut novel and won some prizes, including the Prix Goncourt’s award for books that appeal to Teenage readers. That book saw a woman going back to Cameroon after three years away a return to the dark heart of Africa and her small village. The book looks at colonialism the violence that has been seen in a lot of different African countries as the colonial powers withdraw, leaving a vacuum of power and mistakes made in the years after. This book tells the story of a girl returning to her village after she had seen the wider world and is a different girl than the one who left her small town a few years earlier.

As for the girls, they stayed put, turning over and over soil that yielded only what was forcibly rooted out. No one had ever had the odd idea of sending them to school. In normal times during the day, only mature women, unmarried girls, and young children were to be found in the clearing. Most of the men lived in towns far away or in other countries, and they came home only now and then. In these distant places, they seldom made a fortune. The life they led there gobbled up everything they were supposed to save to keep the promises they had made to themselves and the clan. When they called in to the village, it was only to drop off a few leftovers and boom out instructions, which they would not be able to see carried out. Then, they went away. And the women stayed, with the world on their shoulders. Women with sons were quick to make them bear some of this weight. They packed them off to work as they might have deposited money in an account. The sons took wives then lived as their fathers had lived before them.

The tradtional nature of the village is shown her.

Ayane has decided to go home, and when she arrives back in her remote village of Eku. But this has been caused by her mother dying, and when she returns, her former friends and villagers view her as different. This woman is now differently educated. Is she a witch? As this happens. The village is caught in a storm as a militia arrives and bloody violence descends on them all. This is all viewed by Ayane as she hides and observes how the villagers react to all this.; The militia are the sort of pan-African forces that cropped up in the post-colonial times of Africa as countries tried to forge a new identity. But this is viewed as a given by the villagers, as this is maybe their resignation to the events and bloody violence, death and heartache, as Isilo, the leader of the Militia, tells the young woman and men what to do. The story shifts between the villagers, Ayane and her mother.

Ayané was a frail child with pale skin. Pale, they said, because her skin was not the coal-black color of the local people, cooked over and again by the sun since time immemorial. But she was in fact as dark as cocoa beans. Of course, the women said she was bewitched, probably a witch returned from the dead. And even though none of them had managed to find a mark on her skin to prove it, they told their children not to go near her. Never had the local children screamed so loudly in the evening at the beatings they received, sometimes with a pestle, for having ventured into a forbidden house. Girls and boys alike all ran after her to play with the toys her father made her and tell her the gossip their mothers whispered to them about her parents. Sometimes, the village women, who had no dealings with Aama, were obliged to talk to her. The fact was, their kids were often in her hut or in her garden. For she had a garden with non-edible plants, which she grew for no other reason than to admire the beauty of their flowers and smell their fragrance. The garden, too, made the women talk:

Ayane was a plae girl but is now a woman her mother stayed inthe village

This is a book that has blurred lines in the story, no real plot, it is about he event in the village and that as a wider view of post-colonial Africa. The use of the woman returning having seen the world beyond Eku, beyond their past and traditions, as the wider world outsider, their village is changing, and this is shown in a way by Ayane, her education and wider view having to return for the funeral makes her an observer on the violence that follows. But also the Militia is a sign of pan-African ideas, the struggle post-colonially to find identity for their country. Then the village and the locals have an almost death-like fatalism as they seem to be so far detached from the world that has been and the world that is coming. Their village is lost in time. In that the violence is almost the death of their way of life, as the modern world comes crashing in on their world! I liked this book; it isn’t a straightforward read, but I’d like to read more from her . Mainly because her later books deal with Afropean matters.

 

Women without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur

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Women without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur

Iranian fiction

Original title – زنان بدون مردان (داستانک)

Translator – Faridoun Farrokh

Source – Personal copy

I decided to head to the Middle East for my next stop on this year’s Women’s in Translation Month. This has been in my TBR for a good while. It was banned in Iran and is considered a modern classic from that country, even though it is forbidden. This is a writer who has spent time in prison. She spent nearly five years locked up; she has written about those years in another book. She has been a voice for the way females are treated in her country. This book is an example of her writing about the female experience in Iran, and in this book, she has captured a breadth of female voices. She has spent many years living in Exile after she left Iran.

AFTER SEVERAL DAYS OF DOUBT and hesitation Fa’iza made up her mind at four in the afternoon on August 5,

1953. Silence was no longer feasible. If she waited any longer everything would collapse. She’d better stand up in her own defense. Even so, despite the fact that she felt empowered by the decision, it took her well over an hour to get dressed. Slowly and deliberately she put on her stockings, a blouse, and a lightweight cotton skirt. During the process she paused to think, what if Amir Khan is there. The thought sent a rush of heat through her body.

With him around, she wouldn’t be able to say what she wanted, or say anything at all. She would have to hold back and endlessly revise what she was going to say.

Faiza had a choice to make Amir crops up in other stories !

 

The book has a framing device of a garden, and there is a sense that this garden floats between the real world and a safe haven for each of the women within the book. The tales of the five women in the book are told in intertwining vignettes. From A worrying schoolteacher that is trying to escape society Mahdokht.Then Munis, who is killed by her brother after she disobeyed him. Farrokhlaga, from the upper class of Iran, is mistreated by her men, even in her own world. She is pushed by her husband to kill her husband. This shows even someone like her can break when pushed then at the other side of the coin is Zarrinkolah a prostitute Abused and used by Men she isn’;’t seen as a person by them and this pushes her to take her own life but then she reappears in the garden after that the garden and the male gardener are an oassis a different place to the world thaey all know the fifth woman to me Faizeh is maybe the youngest of all these woman is trying to cling to being a girl but also on the cusop of woman hood and looking for love. This is a tale that has it all, lots of commentary about Iran and being a female in Iran, but also on class, religion and life and death.

AT FIRST MUNIS WAS DEAD. Or at least she thought she was. For the longest time she lay on the pavement, her eyes wide open. Gradually the blue of the sky darkened and tears began to flow down her face. She pressed on her eyes with her right hand and slowly rose to her feet. Her body felt sore and very weak.

Farther down the alley a man had fallen into a ditch with his legs sticking out. Uncontrollably Munis moved in his direction. The man’s face was also turned skyward, his eyes open.

“Are you all right?” Munis asked.

“I’m dead,” the man answered

“Can I help you in any way?”

Is Munis dead or has she come back this is part of the magic realism in the book

I think this is a book that should be better known. It’s short, but in these five women, the author captures so much of life for a female at the time the book was written in Iran, a very patriarchal society. From class, how even the highest and lowest women in this country struggle. Family and how the woman in the family has to obey their family or else !. To be a prostitute, a woman is viewed as a piece of meat, really, and how that broke her and drove her to kill herself, it holds no punches in this book. The garden as a framing device worked as their paths cross but also as a sort of safe haven, almost a mythical place. The book has some magical realist touches. Women are practically given a second chance in the garden, a way to escape their world, but also a sort of utopia for those women, or maybe not to repeat mistakes. Have you read any other female writers from Iran?

Thirteen months of Sunrise by Rania Mamoun

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Thirteen months of sunrise by Rania Manoun

Sudanese fiction

Original title – ثلاثة عشر شهرًا من شروق الشمس

Translator – Elisabeth Jaquette

Source – Personal copy

Rania Mamoun is a very well-known figure in Sudanese literature she started out as a journalist contributing to the cultural pages of a Sudanese paper. She has also written for a quarterly magazine.. She has also worked in television. Her works have been translated into various languages. She has written a few novels. A couple of short story collections. She was given a grant by the arab fund for Art and Culture. That has led to workshops, and she also did a list of the ten best books from Sudan. Her last book was on  BRITTLE PAPERS, 100 best AFRICAN BOOKS, two years ago.I think it is an excellent choice for this year’s Women in Translation. Comma Press has been bringing lots of excellent translations out in several city collections, and some books like this, a collection of short stories from a single writer. They have championed many Arabic and writers from smaller countries less well known.

THIRTEEN IS NOT A SUPERSTITIOUS or unlucky number, it’s the number of months in a year in Ethiopia.

But that’s another story.

I was very frustrated by the time he arrived. The computer in front of me had frozen and a customer needed help. It was morning and I was still half-asleep.

I assumed he was Sudanese when I saw him, or, more accurately, I didn’t assume anything. It wouldn’t have been unusual to meet a Sudanese man in my country.

Isn’t it normal for Sudanese people to live in Sudan? I don’t know why I didn’t ask myself where he was from when he spoke to me in English. Maybe my mind was elsewhere.

I fixed the problem with the computer and was in a better mood. I overheard him grumbling about a floppy disk.

The opening of Thirteen months of sunrise the title short story of the collection

Thirteen months of Sunrise is the very first collection from Sudan to be published.. The collection explores the Ethiopian calendar, an Ethiopian man in Sudan who is a student collecting data for his master’s thesis, which sees the two cultures together, as he studies around the Nile, which is about being Ethiopian in Sudan and getting by. I will focus on two other stories of the ten Pssing, which I think is the strongest story in the collection it is about a daughter thinking back on her dead father and the memories she has of her past, and when her homeland and homelife were a lot smoother. I finish with the shortest story in the book about one week of a love. I laughed, I read the title, and I thought this is an Arabic take on how Craig David would be but this is from the point of view of the female being met by a man who, after a week, is gone? (he wrote a song about a one-week love). The stories capture the modern female voice in Sudan.

Day One

WE MET UP AS PEOPLE DO. He didn’t make an impression.

Day Two

We sat side by side, he edged closer. I felt his gaze engulf me. I smiled to myself. He had beautiful eyes.

Day Three

He asked me whether I was seeing anyone.

I responded with silence. Maybe silence was malice

on my part.

Day Four

He told me: I love you, I’ve never had feelings like this before? And I felt myself falling for him; in my heart I accepted his love.

Half of the week of love you’ll need to read the rest to find out what happened !

 

I love that the Comma Press is trying to shine a light on countries where the writers aren’t so well known to us in English and where maybe the country is considered dangerous. I like this collection. I have read several books translated from Arabic, but not many of them have had female voices at their heart. The collection covers a wealth of subjects, really, student living in Sudan, loss of a family member, love, and then getting ghosted! How to afford your health care. It shows how similar even our lives are to those in Sudan. From loss to falling in love, I said the story about the week’s love reminds me of the song about a week in love, but this is from the female side of a similar story. All subjects on how to get by in Sudan!  I hope to read her novels at some point. This is a collection that can easily be read in an evening. The ten stories are less than 70 pages. Have you read any books from Comma Press or any great female voice translated from English to Arabic?

Sofia Petrova by Lydia Chukovskaya

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Sofia Petrova by Lydia Chukovskaya

Russian fiction

Original title –Софья Петровна

Translator – Aline Werth

Source – Personal copy

One of the few things I have liked and really got into since I’ve been blogging is the publisher Persephone Books. When I first started blogging, there was a phone book week. Sadly, one of the first weeks I joined in, their books were all English and American books that had fallen out of print. However, they have since brought a few books in translation out, and this is their latest. Lydia Chukovskaya was known for her advocacy for the great Russian writers who were banned under the Soviet. Her husband worked for a publisher that was shut down for being too bourgeois by Stalin. She would have been arrested had she not been at home when the arrests were made. After that, she spent many years wandering. Directly after this incident, she wrote this book, not long after losing her husband. It captures a woman discovering how Stalin’s Russia suppressed people’s thoughts.

The typists were a bit afraid of her, and called her the school-marm behind her back. But they obeyed her. And she set out to be strict, but fair. In the lunch hour, she chatted in a friendly way with those who did their work well and con-scientiously, talked about how difficult it was to make out the director’s writing, and how lipstick didn’t suit everyone by any means. But with those who were capable of writing things like rehersal’ or ‘collictive’ she adopted a haughty manner.

There was one typist, Erna Semyonovna, who really got on Sofia Petrovna’s nerves. She made a mistake in almost every word, and smoked and chattered impudently all the time she was working. She reminded Sofia Petrovna vaguely of a cheeky housemaid they had once had in the old days, whose name was Fanny, and who had been rude to Sofia Petrovna and had flirted with Fyodor Ivanovich …

What was the point of keeping on anyone like that!

Her working in her typing job !!

Sofia Petrovna loses her husband a well known doctor leaving her to have to find a job. She takes a lesson and find out she is actually good at typing and gets a job at a large publishing house, where after a short time she becomes the head typist as she is better than some of the other women in the office there is some great observation of her typing colleagues’ woman more into the ment hat there jobs. Sofia lives in her apartment with her son, who is just coming to the end of his school career, so when Kolya starts a job with a new friend and suddenly finds a way to improve his craftsman job, he is in the paper. Meanwhile, some of her dead husband’s friends have been arrested, and then suddenly her son is arrested. She is told by Alik, the friend her son worked with. Then he writes to her. This book captures how the writer herself must have felt caught up in the madness of the purges.

Suddenly there was a ring at the door, and a second ring.

Sofia Petrovna went to open the door. Two rings – that was for her. Who could it be, so late?

There on the threshold stood Alik Finkelstein.

Alik there alone, without Kolya – it was unnatural…

‘Kolya?!’ Sofia Petrovna grabbed Alik by the dangling end

of his scarf. ‘Is it typhoid?’

Alik, without looking at her, slowly took off his galoshes.

‘Shhh!’ he said at last. ‘Let’s go into your room.’ And he tiptoed along the corridor.

Sofia Petrovna, beside herself with anxiety, followed him.

‘Don’t be alarmed, for heaven’s sake, Sofia Petrovna,’ he began, when she had closed the door behind her, ‘calm down, Sofia Petrovna, please do. There’s nothing to be frightened about. It’s nothing terrible. The day before the day before yesterday… or when was it? the day before the last day off, anyway . .. Kolya was arrested.’

He sat down on the divan, tore off his scarf, threw it down on the floor and burst into tears.

When she finds lut what has happened to her son?

I’m pleased I saw this for this year’s Women in Translation Month. It is a publisher I like and one that hasn’t put out many books in translation. It is always fun when they do. This book captures the paranoia and sheer fear family members had at this time, the madness and sheer unexpected arrest and moves during the Purges. The book was banned for many years in Russia. It first came out in France in Russian. She was a champion of the dissident Soviet writers and a respected voice for the dissident writers. Conversations she had over these years have been published and are meant to give a great insight into what it was like to be caught up in the Stalin Purges, as she was when she lost her husband. The book was, of course, passed around in Samizdat in Soviet era Russia; those handwritten pages show how the regime made people bring more people into their crimes as they were seen. Have you read this or any other book that covers the Stalin Purges? If you want a book that maybe captures the madness THAT orwell tried to show in his novels around that time, this is a perfect example of how it was to be in Stalin’s Russia!!

 

Set my heart on fire by Izumi Suzuki

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Set my heart on fire by Izumi Suzuki

Japanese fiction

Original title – ハートに火をつけて! だれが消す

Translator – Helen O’Horan

Source – Library book

Well, on to the third of this month’s Women in Translation Month, I move to Japan and a writer whose other books in English so far have been a short story collection, and the novel by Izumi Suzuki is her first to be translated into English. Izumi died young and, like the women in her book, lived at night in Tokyo, where she moved as a hostess, nude model and actress. When she was young, she had a brief marriage to an avant-garde saxophonist, the sort of chap who played in one of the jazz clubs in her book.I had read the short story collection by her and not really connected, but this felt more real-life than her stories did to me. I may reread her short story collection after reading this.

I’m more of a Gibson man myself. I mean, the Green Glass guitarist used an SG. I guess different Fenders sound different, too. You’ve got Telecasters, Stratocasters … The Tele’s nice and tight. Stratocaster’s more bluesy?

He took out a Hope cigarette and a little sleeve of cardboard matches.’God, what should I do!’ I lay back and writhed about on the bed.You just never think ahead? He plucked off a match and lit his cigarette. ‘Oh no, I just set my Hope on fire!’ Look, if it works out in the end, it’s all good to me. I take it as it comes.’

This reminded me of friends I had when young into guitars and how they sounded !

 

The main character in the book a woman in her twenties living her best well a life at night on the back streets of Tokyo is a thinly veiled version of the writer herself it captures a wom an stuck in the night time world of Tokyo of the mid 1970 bars full of yoi8ung men like the wooman in the book just trying to escape there world wether through playing music, drinking having affairs of  r drugs these are the dark side of Tokyo nights. Obviously culled from her own short marriage, and then shortly after her husband divorced, they lived together. He died of an overdose. This world is full of mirror images of him and many of the men she must have met during those years. It is a doomed life of men and a woman making three wrong choices. all to a backdrop of seventies rock, jazz, and Japanese psychedelic bands of this time. I felt it needed a Spotify playlist of the bands.

I thought he’d have left long ago.

We’d arranged to meet at eleven o’clock by the Honmoku bus stop. Thanks to the mental retardation I retained from my childhood, I’d taken the Tokaido Line instead of the Toyoko Line and gone to Yokohama Station, and then the train was delayed. By the time I arrived it was past twelve-thirty.

Joel was standing there, serene. Looking like he’d walked straight out of the photos on that album sleeve. Slender and tall like a tree without leaves, not moving an inch.

I wondered whether he might be an idiot. I quickly parked my own blunder and looked down on him incredulously.

What man waits nearly two hours for a woman whose face he’s never seen? If it was in a café, perhaps – I suppose he’d have found ways to amuse himself, but even then he’d have to be a guy with nothing much going for him.

In the club and a man she had seen lioved the descrition of how he looked

I like this book; it is almost auto-fiction. i read it is a nod the the tradtional I novel a japanese form of bildsroman. IT captures what must have been the young Izumi Suzuki years in the jazz bars and her marriage to one of those men that played in a band in those bars at the time, a doomed relationship rather like her own life, which was far too short 1. Still, It also captures the world of the early Murakami novels but from a female point of view as she drifted through the Japanese Jazz bar, and this is a world where the women would eat the men in Haruki Murakami’s novels alive. There is no evidence she knew Murakami, but this is the same nightlife he portrayed in his early novels. In particular, this could almost be a third novel alongside his first two novels, which are both set in the Tokyo nightlife and Jazz bars, but it is a darker version of that. She actually lived those nights of men drunk, drugged, cheating on their wives as they shared her bed and moments of passion. Have you read any of her collection, or this novel?

Do you have a favourite book set mainly at night ?

 

 

Letters from a Seducer by Hilda Hilst

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Letters from a seducer by Hild Hilst

Brazilian fiction

Original title – Cartas de um sedutor

Translator John Keene

Source – Personal copy

I picked this up last month on my trip to Suffolk from the excellent Aldebrough books. If you ever get a chance, pop into an excellent shop with a wide selection of books. I was drawn to the cover art, it reminds me of those folio-shaped flower photographs that Robert Mapplethorpe did. In a way , this book is like some of his other photos. Like yesterday’s book, this is another slim novella from a country that, years ago, had few female writers translated. It shows that this writer died in her late seventies, and it isn’t until the last few years that we have got her books in English. A writer who liked to challenge in her time, Hilda Hilst was known for her challenging writing that would tackle sensitive political and, in this case, sexual subjects. This book is a set of letters from Karl, a libertine, to his sister. This book has a nod to the European writers she likes, such as Joyce and De sade. I also felt she must have been a fan of Casanova because this man is perhaps a Brazilian version of the great lover.

I tiptoed out and still could hear Franz’s guffaws and Frau Lotte’s sobs-giggles-farts. Listen, Cordélia, seriously: you told me in your last letter that Albert’s balls and cock and little asshole are of no concern to you. That you’re not interested any more by all this filthy sex stuff. I feel you’re lying. But anyway, you said “filth.” And then you talked about “feelings.” But please, dear irmanita, you never had them! Are you calling

 

‘feeling’ what you were exuding for father? Hanging around the room’s terrace, behind that B. Giorgi sculpture, massaging your pussy while papa played doubles, are you calling that a feeling? I had reached my lovely 14 years, you your 24, I was lifting your satin nightgown and standing up screwing you in the ass right there behind the statue (the sculpture there before), while you were masturbating yourself moaning, babbling childish things that always ended in Ohs, Ahs, and you were squatting, crouching down, finishing all sprawled out atop my harmonica, howling, howling, and that never stopped.Later still I licked you, you lying beside the stone vases, and the ferns concealed your view of father on the court, and you propped yourself up on your elbows to see him better, then you saw him… and you would jump up (I still with the tongue hanging out) roaring: bravo papa! bravo!

I picked this as it is totally shocking but like most of the book also in a way!

The book is in three parts. It has an introduction of letters from Karl to his sister Cordelie about his sexual acts and the acts they had when he lived at home. This is very eye-opening. You can see how Hilst, as a writer, likes to push the boundaries in her writing. The book then moves as Karl discovers the works of a lost poet whose letters he finds in the trash. The last two sections see these other letters intertwining with the conquest of her brother, as we see a very. Male sexual view of the times the other man the lost Poet Stamatius is from the pother enbd of the social class a dpown and out man just getting by and having lioots of sex like Karl as well this is a book that questions class, sex and also is the poet really just Karl in a way if that makes sense this is a book that gives a nid towards the modernist writers she liked.

I do have a lover but she’s married, that I’m afraid to pick up women out there, all this AIDS-related stuff alarms me and because of that I always have to masturbate. I cited several men illustrious defenders of masturbation, John C. Powys, Havelock Ellis, Theodore Schroeder etc. But I spoke with much brilliance, with much elegance, slightly agitated, occasionally passing my hand on his thigh like a very manly man, sympathetic, relaxed. I described wonderful moments of getting it in and when I detailed an uncommon position (do you want to know, irmanita? She with legs open at the edge of the bed, me licking her and under the bed another woman sucking my pod) he laughed with pleasure, made nervous movements with his leg, and I glanced at him and visualized the dick stuffed inside his pants. I asked abruptly: you never masturbated with your friends?

I laughed when he tried justify himself by using some well known writer about there sex lives

This is a book that isn’t for those who get easily offended by a lot of sexual chat and discussion of acts that are maybe taboo even when the book is set but this is a man obsessed with sex and telling people about that but maybe imagining himself as the down and otut opoet and his poems and conquests as well this is if Cssanova had been latin american he would been karl sending these dispatches of his sexual acts and conquests in Brazil rather than in Venice. This is a book designed to provoke the reader. I was reminded of the splurge of sexual references in Pierre Guyotat’s book. I tried to find a connection between these two writers, but all I saw was a shared attempt to shock their readers. As I said, the Mapplethorpe-like cover, phallic in its appearance, is apt for the book. Have you read any of her books that have been translated into English?

Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü

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Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü

Turkish fiction

Original title – Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri

Translator Maureen F’reely

Source – Personal copy

I kick off this year’s Women in Translation Month with a slim gem of a novella from Turkey. I feel that in the sixteen years I’ve been blogging, the landscape for books in translation has changed. I can think of very few, if any, female Turkish writers who were available in English 16 years ago. This is one of the beauties of things like women in Translation. Months have helped along, and small presses like Serpent Tail are willing to take a chance on books like this. This novel was written forty years before it was finally translated into English. It captures a writer who, like the character in her book, had spent time travelling in Europe but also in institutions and had undergone electroshock therapy like the character in her novel. This debut novel was written in Turkish, but her later works were written in German; she also worked as a translator between the languages.

Sunday is bath day. We take it in turns. On cold days, a large copper basin is placed next to the stove. We bend over the basin to wash our hair. Then we sit in the basin and wash our bodies with what little water sits inside it. Bunni oversees all this. She pours the dirty water into a bucket, returning with a bucket full of clean water. Bunni never gets tired. Bunni devotes her life to overseeing baths, sweeping up ashes and cleaning away filth. For as long as I can remember, that’s what she’s been doing. She can even hold fire between her fingers.

When she isn’t doing laundry, washing dishes, praying, fasting, she’s at argamba Market. No one offers her more than this. If they did, she wouldn’t listen. When she pours the last drops of water over our heads, she blesses us with prayers in Arabic.

And we protest:

—God does not exist!

The first bit of this quote reminded me of how the uk used be weekly baths seem distant and the last line of god not existing would have been shocking then for her to say

The woman in the book, unnamed, is rather like the writer of the book. This free-spirited woman wants to be herself but is caught in a world where it is very patriarchal, and thus she keeps getting into institutions and having shock therapy. I was thinking how outdated that is these days, still used in very extreme cases of mental health issues, but much more tightly done than at this time. I think that maybe also adds to the structure of the book a jumble of thoughts, memories spilling onto the page childhood memories of rural Turkey, next thing in smokey cafes in Paris sexual awakening encounters this is the tale of a young woman maybe thirty year before her time a spirit unbound but caught in a world where things are changing the late seventies were turbulant yeas in Turkey.

Past the two double-sided sales counters by the entrance of Baylan Patisserie, there’s a large and dimly lit salon. This is where my brother and his friends gather every day towards evening.And so do we, to observe their legendary goings-on. In the begin-ning, they don’t invite us to join them. We sit at a nearby table, Günk and I, keeping a close eye on them while chatting. The genial, fatherly Greek waiters create an atmosphere that is possibly the most welcoming we have ever experienced. Istanbul too small in those days to fit my brother and his friends. They’re all university students. But they’re more interested in things like writing, drama and art. They have a shared obsession, too: Paris.The city of art, they say. Freedom’s beacon. They believe themselves to be living as artists do, moving from café to café and meyhane to meyhane in strict rotation. The Green Rooster and Lefter’s. Tosun’s Place and Club 47. (Most of these continue to be traditional locales frequented by artists and writers.) Our new friend Hayalet Oguz introduces Günk and me to Beyoglu by night.

This feeling of the Istanbul be to small for the minds of her and her brothers in a way trhere way of thinking is to much for the homeland in a way!

This is one of those novellas that flies by. It’s a great summer evening read that leaves you thinking for days after and feeling for a woman caught in a world that, even though in my lifetime, looks pretty distant. The treatment she has is rarely used well in the UK these days. I am not sure elsewhere, but the book may capture the chaotic, free-wheeling nature of the writer herself, a woman, and that in a male world would have seemed dangerous or as in her case, in need of treatment 50 years ago. I think this is the perfect start for this woman in translation month as it captures a world gone by in her own country’s history that saw them move forward in some ways after the revolution in 1980. If you haven’t read any female writers from Turkey, this is a great place to start, but the blog also has four other female writers from Turkey who followed Özlü. Have you read this or any other female writers from Turkey?