Month: February 2026

Temptation by Jânos Székely

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Temptation by Jânos Szêkely

Hungarian fiction

Original title –  Kísértés

Translator -Mark Baczoni

Source – Personal copy

I rounded off this year’s Hungarian month with another long book from Hungary.  This took me a lot longer to get through than I had hoped, but it was written in 1949.  When Janos was living in America and had been a very successful screenwriter, first in the twenties in Berlin, he then headed to the US after being offered a screenwriting job by Ernst Lubitsch in Hollywood. He spent time there till he was caught up in the McCarthy trials and headed to Mexico. Then he returned to Hungary and East Berlin. The book follows a young boy through the interwar years.  The book is partly based on the writer’s own life. It was initially published under the pen name John Pen.

But first I have a confession to make. I was not in the way that grown-ups tend to think about these things, strictly speaking

faithful to Sárika.

I say in the way that grown-ups think about these things, because I in no way considered what I got up to with a maid called Borcsa while I was hopelessly in love with Sárika to be infidelity in any way. I, like most other children, considered physical and emotional love to be two completely separate things. I’d never felt any kind of physical desire or curiosity with Sárika, though I was much concerned with the mystery of those things at the time.

I lived among servant girls and worked alongside them all day long, and they were mostly young, lively peasant girls who, being unacquainted with the gems of the Hungarian film industry of the time, had no idea what a decent, socially respectable Hungarian peasant girl was meant to be like. They simply were Hungarian peasant girls, who said what they thought, and what they actually thought why deny it? didn’t tend to appear much in the aforementioned cinematic masterpieces.

The girls treated me like a newborn kitten whose eyes have not yet opened. They talked freely in front of me, especially of things supremely suited to unsettling a prepubescent boy.

As he grews up this changes

I think one of the literary styles that Middle Europe is best at producing is the Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age tale. Bela, a young Orphan abandon by his mother. So when raised in absolute poverty by his guardians. He struggles and then turns to stealing. This happens not long after his mother returned. So she takes Bela to Budapest, where she has a job in a laundry. Bela ius is a bit of a wide boy; he leaps off the page, a sort of cheeky lad that people either love or hate. He gets jobs in the hotel, a grand place, and he sees the world of grandeur at close quarters, but all this is happening at the same time as Fascism is rising all around him and in Europe. We see a young boy growing into a man, discovering a woman, and all this as the country heads toward what would be World War II.  The book’s style is a series of small episodes from Bela’s life.

I sneaked into the gymnasium, decorated for the festive occasion, like a beggar afraid of getting barked at by the dogs. Primped-up ladies and gentlemen sat all around the speaker’s dais, and even the children had made an effort. When anyone glanced at me, I immediately blushed, because I thought they were looking at my ragged clothes. When the reed organ piped up for the prayers, I almost burst into tears. What use all those outstandings, I thought, when the notary’s son still has the finest clothes, though it was only out of pity that the Schoolmaster didn’t fail him.

The reed organ fell silent, and the speakers piped up instead. Speech followed sermon, sermon followed speech. The words spattered like autumn rain. I wasn’t listening. I wanted to cry.

This ut sounded very Dicken’s Me

It is hard, in the latter part of the book, not to imagine Bela working at the Grand Budapest Hotel.  The description of the grandeur he sees is similar to the film. But there is also a darker side to this book, the shadow of Fascism. In fact, the book is maybe more relevant at the moment, especially when you see how, through Bela’s eyes, how easy ot can be to nearly get caught by the fascist parties. Then there is a large dollop of Dickent he first part of the book could have been a dicken a orpahn boy poverty a cruel guardian a lost mother all tropes in Dickens work but that is where the comparison ends for Bela is a grey character not a dicken character no he is a more modern chartacter with his faults and problems we follow him through them in a world that is changing around him what will he do in the end ? I had hoped to read a couple more books this Hungarian lit month, but I have some left, so I will be running it again next February. Have you read this book? or ay other book that captures those late 1920s, early 1930s years of the rise of Fascism

Rosa Mistika by Euphrase Kezilahabi

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Rosa Mistika by Euphrase Kezilahabi

Tanzanian fiction

Original title – Rosa Mistika

Translator – Jay Boss Rubin

Source – Personal Copy

For me, as a reader, my reading journey is about reading as widely as possible, and one of the things I had in mind for this year was forst to add a few new countries, which I did last month. But then to also to read from areas of the world aI had missed the last few years and I have read a lot from Africa but I feel I need to build picture of each country over time and each place literature so whehn I saw this Swahili classic that was banned when it first came out was available in English for the first time I had to read it. Euphare Kezilahabi was a professor of African languages and had given several talks, including one on the concept of the hero in African fiction. Which tickled me, as this book has at its heart a female voice: that of Rosa. Like Euphrase, she lives on the island of Ukerewe on Lake Victoria.

This was the manner in which Rosa was brought up; this was the manner in which she was cared for; this was the manner in which she was watched over by her father. After the beating, Rosa ceased talking to boys altogether. When Zakaria learned of this, he was very happy. He boasted-especially when he’d had a little to drink-that he knew how to raise his daughters. But Zakaria didn’t understand that Rosa was at a difficult age, and that strictness was not appro-priate; he didn’t understand that daughters require a certain independence from their fathers; he didn’t understand that by beating his daughter, he was exercising an authority he didn’t rightfully possess, and that when it came to opinions on marriage, his were practically worthless. He didn’t understand that Rosa needed to get to know boys. And so, as a result of her upbringing, Rosa began to see boys as people she need not associate with, or even speak to. She began to think that she needed to be self-sufficient. Rosa grew more remote by the day.

Rosa and her father clash here

Rosa is turning thirteen as the book opens, and she is growing aware of how her father is abusing her mother. But her father will not let a boy near her, and he is now starting to turn on her. So when she gets the chance to go to a school on the mainland, she has to make it happen, to escape her father, a man who drinks, a man who seems to want to escape his life.  He is a failed teacher. It seems his daughter has maybe got the same type of mind.  So when she manages to get to school, no thanks to her father, who is unwilling to pay, but her mother and sisters help her scrape the money together to go, she vows to be unlike the other girls around her, who are all obsessed with Boys and dancing. But she puts her head down and does well for the first few years. But this marks her out with the other girls. So when she finally goes to a dance, she meets the wrong man and like many a girl sheltered from the world falls for him what follows is how she then goes to teacher traing college but she wants to remain a virgin and when an event happens that changes all this with a man it has a horrific ending this is a book about escaping domestic abuse but how a woman like Rosa will always be failed by the fact she is living in 1970s Tanzania!

Rosary, the all-girls school where Rosa was headed, was built along a road hemmed in by mountains. The mountains were dotted with large black boulders and caves that sheltered hyenas. At night, you could hear them cackling, but during the daytime they were nowhere to be found.Five other schools were tucked into the same mountains-all boys’ schools. Despite this discrepancy, one girls’ school was enough to make the mountains an interesting place to study. From one side, delicate feminine voices could be heard; they were answered from the other side by the sturdy sounds of boys. Only rarely were these voices heard interacting directly-during a discussion or debate, or maybe at a dance. This was the environment Rosa entered: a joyful set-ting, albeit one in which girls were incredibly scarce. If a girl didn’t have a boyfriend, it was no one’s fault but her own.

Srosa didn’t want a boyfriend then!

It is an interesting voice for the time it was written about a daughter escaping a violent father. But, also doomed by those around her, she tries but eventually wears down in the world. A book of double standards in 1970s Tanzania was banned when it came out. Rosa’s voice was considered radical for the time; even though it was written by a male writer, it is strong. A woman beaten down by her world, she tries but fails, then has a shocking event that ends the whole story. I like the spare nature of his narrative at times; he leads the reader to think, which I appreciate. It is a book that captures those post-colonial years and also the male-dominated world Rosa lives in. The book was banned after an outcry by the catholic church when it came out with its abortion storyline, which was the first time this subject had been tackled in a Swahili book.  This is the first translation from Swahili that translator Jay Boss Rubin has done. I hope it isn’t the last, as I think we don’t have enough books from Swahili translated into English.

Captivity by György Spiró

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Captivity by György Spiró

Hungarian fiction

Original title – Fogság

Translator – Tim Wilkinson

Source – Personal copy

I said to myself this year, I need to read more epic books. In recent years, there have been a lot of epic novels coming out, and I have been buying them or noting them down and never reading them. This has been on my radar since either just before or when it came out in English a few years ago. Hungarian fiction seems to produce a lot of epics, and this one had a description that made it feel like one of those old Hollywood romantic epics. But a book that also captured three places, really Rome, Egypt and Jerusalem, as we follow Uri, the main character in the book. The book is a mid-career work by the writer Gyory Spiro; he started in radio. His radio drama style has been called avant-garde. On the whole his novels have been historical in theme, and he has returned to his historic background of being Jewish, like he does in this book

URI DID NOT DARE SLEEP. HE WAS AFRAID HE WOULD NOT WAKE IN TIME, but he must have dropped off anyway, because his father shook him awake.His first thought was the tessera, which he must not forget to hand over to his father, since it could be transferred, but his father muttered that he had already passed it on the previous evening. Uri clutched at his neck: the tessera was not there. Then a memory drifted back of those hours before he had gone to bed: he had handed over the lead token as if he were making a last will and testament.As he tugged on his loincloth under his tunic in the dark, the thought running through his head was that the tessera was worth more without him than with him.His father draped his gown over him. Uri protested, but his father squeezed his shoulder. It was a seamless, rectangular outer garment of cloth with a blue braided tassel dangling in approved fashion at each of the four corners. Uri had not owned a gown before; Joseph would get another for himself. If he could spare the money.

His father and him had issues

This book captures that time when going from place to place could take months, and the world people lived in was much larger in that way so when Uri,a sort of Nerdy lad who has issues with his parents, his grandfather was a slave, and he is very good at languages, is required to go to Judae mainly because of his language skill and also being.  Roman Jew. So, as the years pass, he heads first to Judea, where he is locked up for a time with a man from Nazareth; he thinks little of this happening at the time. This is around the time Jesus died, and the book ends many years later, as Christianity is beginning to take hold. So when Uri is free and then heads to Egypt and to Alexandria this is another ex empire but also the early seedlings and emebers of the Change that was going to take place in the roman Empire this is all shown as he meets many firgures from the time likje Claudis and Nero he struggles to accept that the man he meet in a cell all those years ago with two theives with him is this Martyr and new messiah figure. What I liked was the moment of capturing a new religion, starting a world in flux. I also felt undercurrents to the present in Modern Israeli at times.

Countless leather bottles of water, along with dried figs, salted raw fish, smoked fish, and dried fish had been stocked for the crew and passengers, along with several hundred pounds of unleavened bread, baked in thicker portions than matzos generally were. Uri grew tired of the monotonous diet by the first evening; they were taking water to sea, taking fish to sea. It seemed the Creation had not been devised to absolute perfection.

With a favorable northwesterly wind to fill the sails, they forged eastward and later northeastward. The captain said that in the spring it was always better going from Syracusa to Caesarea than the reverse. The slaves, who rowed on the lower level of the bireme, the upper level left empty, were being given a break.

Uri looked down on them. They were lying, chained to each other, naked in the gloom of the ship’s belly. Light and air they got from above, from where they could be reached by clambering down a ladder, except that the ladder was pulled up right then. It was only let down when the armed slave drivers took victuals down to them, with the ladders being pulled up after them once they’d scrambled up with the vessels of excrement. One of the slave drivers was always down there with them to control the rhythm of the rowing; he was now resting alongside them-that being his occupation right then. Slave drivers were relieved, not so the slaves.

As Uri sails off

I don’t read many Epic historical novels, and I have had Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on my radar for years. I want to get the nice Everyman editions of this book. But yes, from what I know of this history, he captures it well, and Uri seems to be there as things are happening and changing. I can’t help but also think of the Life of Brian with the meeting of Jesus in the cell, it is a brief moment, and the aftermath of this one man is captured in the years that follow. But to Uri, he was just a chap he met in a cell, and he couldn’t put the man he met with what at the time would have been viewed as a cult. I found that very interesting concept. Those events captured through one man’s eyes. As I said, it also feels like a commentary on maybe Israeli Judaism and also maybe even his own country’s post-war years. But it is an epic book and a book that captures empires and times shifting, as I said, it reminded me of those epic Roman dramas Hollywood used to make, but through many lifetimes.. Have you read this or his plays, which seem to have been translated as well?

Analogue A sunday Musing Post

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I am trying a slightly different type of post this year I said and one of the posts I want to do is more a discussion piece arpound a subject or topic that has caught my attention now this can be book or slightly book related this I fell is slightly related but on the whole is about a whole thing that has been growing in the last year or two. That is the Analogue moment, whether it is a bag of stuff to stop people doomscrolling, taking photos with a film camera or buying vinyl and CDs. I think this is a big moment this year: from small coffee roasters to small bookshops and record shops, there has been a move away from large chains and online shopping. Now, for me, I lived before computers and smartphones. In fact, I was in my twenties when I first got online, around the time Twitter started. I loved those early years, but in recent years, I have noticeably moved back from being online as much. But I do doomscroll, I watch way too much YouTube for my liking. I never got TikTok, and I find Instagram just full of people trying to take pretty pictures of books and trying to sell their book clubs, which people have to pay for. aI llo hold off as i am heading to a topic for another post here. Anyway. Analogue, I’m sure you have seen it crop up in your feed at some point. For me, it is a younger generation that has only known the likes of Spotify, YouTube, TikTok, infinite scroll, and Your Every Move, and thought that adding to a growing algorithm was the norm. A situation of too many choices, but then that choice is being dictated by an algorithm that feeds people addiction to infinite scrolling, their music, taste in films, news, in fact, everything online. We for a few year Amanda and I online food shop until I said one day we decided to order virtually the same shop as last month as the shop gives you previous buys first we had got so used to clicking oin them we had lost that scaning the super market aisles for the last producto or offer or just that ingrident you hadn’t brought for a while. Now we could look harder online, but we haven’t had an online shop for about seven or eight years. It is the same for me in a lot of ways I have a huge cd and viynl collection I have spotify but as for what decides my taste, I still listen to a few radio shows, buy a couple of monthly music magazines, and have done this for the last 30 years my only ever algorthim was maybe John Peel when I was younger for music. Now I read only paper books. I have a Kindle, but I just have never got used to using an ereader. I love the feel of books. I love the discovery of second-hand books. As for being on an algorithm, I do buy a few books online. I would very rarely be the target of a bookstore’s online recommendations. I do lament the loss of newspaper book coverage and its steady shrinkage over the years. I remember the first time I came across Cormac McCarthy and Denis Johnson in the papers in the mid-90s. I still buy two papers every Saturday and Sunday, a habit that harks back to my dad, who had three or four papers most weekends. I stopped buying so much in the week, but this is another thing that I have avoided: the news hole people fall into these days online. I rarely get my news from any sources other than newspaper sites, BBC News online, or Radio 4. I get the analogy: people want the world we once had, which is sadly gone.  The world we most small towns had a couple of good newsagents for magazines, a stationery shop for pens, paper, etc., an art shop for art supplies, and even a toy shop for things like board games. These are gone, or just chain shops in most town centres these days. A world where the discovery of music books happens every time you visit a new bookshop, record shop, or listen to the radio in small, bite-sized pieces. The world wasn’t all there to overwhelm us or an algorithm, a simple time when we got bored, but then found things to do, and that wasn’t scrolling. I hold my hand up in writing this post. I have thought about how much YouTube I have watched over the last few years, and maybe I need to step back from it. I think the younger genrartion just want a bit of what I had when I was younger I grew up taking pictures doing little art bits writing list discovering records and books in the wild taking chances not worrying if a book or record was cool but I have never want to be cool part of a scene or thought of as cutting edge i have always followed my own path as many of you will know from my taste in music my books of the year i am maybe still mostly analogue in my life..not sure wha thte point of this was other than I keep seeing the word Analogue here and there and just to say I get it and welcome to life before big tech toook over. What are your thoughts? I thought the pic of my macbook with my vistorian wriitng slope was the perfect mix of digital and analogue worlds

In Farthest Seas by Lalla Romano

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In Farthest Seas by Lalla Romano

Italian Fiction

Original title – Nei mari estremi

Translator Brian Robert Moore

Source – Personal copy

I have a habit of buying a book when it comes out and then putting it on The side and not getting to it till a few months has passed, and this is one such book I think itr was a YouTube video of forthcoming books I had first seen the book mentioned, and I had earlier read a Silenced Shared from her when it came out a couple of years ago, but never got around to reviewing it at the time. Bugt I knew I liked her writing style and a furthewr dicve into her life said she was firstly a fan of painting and i can see that in this book is is almost a collection of sketches from her life.  She also studied alongside the great Italian writer Cesare Pavese, who also got her to translate some books later on. This book focuses on her late husband and imagines the events that led up to their meeting and the last few months of his life.

Our first conversation was in Boves, on what was referred to as the road of the Madonna, because it led to the church Madonna dei Boschi. Silvia walked in front of us with Detto, who was courting her a bit; he had come to accompany Detto, his friend at the time. They had gone to Venice together for the Biennale, and they showed us photos in which a girl appeared. I was always annoyed when other girls were referenced in my presence, and this time, too, their trip immediately lost all interest for me.

So, walking after dinner on that road, he spoke of Modigliani.

Everyone talked about him in those days, and everyone the foolish ones, which is to say almost everyone) acted outraged: the long necks, the flat colours, etcetera. I loved Modigliani deeply then; but he couldn’t have known this, he didn’t know anything about me. I mean that the topic wasn’t aimed at pleasing me.

He spoke of Modigliani with admiration, in a grave, serious tone: and he didn’t know that ‘admiring Modigliani’ (what that meant) was truly what mattered in life, for me.

Maybe this first real exchange was somewhat similar to that other fateful one with Giovanni. But Modigliani was much more important to me than Kant had been then.

The first conversations around art

The book, as I said, is told in vignettes as she looks back on the first four years: the beginning of the marriage, how they met whilst hiking with his family, his job, their first few meetings, and a shared interest in art, which was the initial spark. It is those little unseen bits of their relationship she remembers how he was staring whilst hiking, a small gesture when he looked at a watch. I say it is like a collection of unfinished sketches or polaroids, the sort that maybe are blurred and maybe the head is missing, but the event, the feel of the day, is still there in the memory. That is what this is, not a memoir, more beefing out iof those little moments that make life. At the end, she sees Monti, her husband, facing it like he had the rest of his life, straight on. He reminds me of the classic image of the British male: upright and someone who will never talk or accept the fate facing them, if that makes sense?

The bank, that mother, I never loved her, before; I didn’t hate her either: it was work, nothing more. I used to like repeating the joke ‘What’s worse than robbing a bank? et cetera; but he, who loved Brecht, never laughed at this line. It’s also true that I never managed to grasp the concept (of a bank). Only in Singapore, when I saw the fantastic building for Mao’s bank, did I surrender: to the universal, and therefore to the necessary.

I have to list the bank among his maladies: only, obviously, as a very probable cause, given the concurrences which even he reluctantly, silently acknowledged. He never complained about those painful spells; arising in his dry and healthy body, they had something unreal about them. I heard him say, as years passed, that he’d look at the enormous wheels of trucks and feel like sticking his head under. I saw him, at night, blindly wandering around the house, his head in his hands. I felt horror for that torment, and I would have liked to share in it; but I couldn’t hold out for long, would plunge back into sleep. I’d remember Eugenia, who slept during Adolfo’s asthma attacks at Tetto Murato: it helped me absolve myself. Behind his suffering, I glimpse the spectre of my own inattention, perhaps my flight from pain.

How he is viewing dying in a way

I thgink of the last couple of decades of me reading books in translation and the last 16 odd years of this blog, is books like thi,s the discovery or rediscovery of writers like Romano Ginsburg, those strong mid-century female writers from Europe, when I first got into blogging writers like Muriel Spark, Barbara Pym and Maragret Drabble those storng female voice from the mid century in Enlgish were so held up but it seemed at the time there was no european writers like this I feel this is maybe the sign of how male dominated the translated fiction world used to be.  Now we have these writers, and like a piece of a bigger jigsaw puzzle of 20th-century literature across Europe, they fit together. You see little piece of the writers i have mentioned in her work, Ginsburg and even Pavese some what but also you can see how in another country, strong female voices were writing at the same time. I think this is maybe the tip of the iceberg for us as readers, where is the German Pym, the French Drabble, etc.? I think Pushkin is doing a great job finding a voice like this, but there has to be more out there for us as readers to discover or rediscover! Do you have a favourite writer in translation who only really appeared years after their death?

 

 

 

Paradise of the Blind by Duong Thu Huong

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Paradise of the Blind by Duong Thu Huong

Vietnamese fiction

Original title – Những thiên đường mù

TranslatorsPhan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson

Source – personal copy

I picked this up as it said it was the first Vietnamese novel to be published in the US. The writer grew up in the North of Vietnam and fought for the communists in the Vietnam War, spending time in the maze of tunnels they had built in the jungle. As she entertained the troops, she was one of the few people who survived in her group.  She was also on the frontline when China tried to invade Vietnam.  She has since become outspoken about the corruption she has seen in her homeland and is a dissenting writer.  This book also shows how hard it was for women in Vietnam at the time it was written, the late 1980s.  When Vietnam still had many ties to the Soviet Union. I have decided this year to try to add at least one new country to the blog each month, but I was wrong. This is the second book I have read from Vietnam, although I have some classic Vietnamese literature and a book about the Vietnam War and I have to read another book for one new country this month

One afternoon, when I was just a girl, I stood in that house, inhaling the dank, musty smell of the walls. It was the first time I had ever even seen the house and the village where my mother had been born and raised…. The eyes of the ghoulish sculptures carved into the wooden transoms above the doors riveted me with their mysterious gaze. A spider’s web hung from the vaulted ceiling. Light flickered through cracks in the chipped, rotting tiles, flashing at me like the phosphorescent bursts that haunt cemeteries. Terrified, I rushed out into the courtyard where my mother sat chatting and sipping green tea with the other women.

“What’s the matter, my child?”

“I’m scared.”

“My silly chicken. Afraid in broad daylight?” she laughed, scolding me. When she smiled, I always noticed the sparkling whiteness of her teeth, aligned in perfect rows, and it made me sad. This was the last trace of her beauty, her youth, of a whole life lived for nothing, for no one.

As a young girl her nerves

The book looks at Vietnam through the stories of Hang, a young girl on the verge of womanhood, her mother, and a street vendor who lives near them. All three offer perspectives on women’s lives and on the role of men in society at the time. But it is also a tale of forbidden love as the mother had a lover that her brother Hang’s uncle forbade her to see. This has haunted her mother, so when she escaped to Hanoi to raise Hang and her brother, he reappeared and now wants Hang to work in a factory in Russia, where he now lives. As he begins to affect Hang’s life, she sees other people around her leading lives very different from hers. This is a story of family ties and how tight they can be in Vietnam,m but also about a world that is on the brink of change. There are many nods to the blind in the book, and being blind to the truth about the past, etc., may be a theme.

The following week, he left with the traveling salesman, descending the river on a wooden raft. From his birthplace in the village to the city, he followed my mother’s traces to her tiny back-alley home on the outskirts of Hanoi.

My mother was still young and beautiful, but she looked at no one, smiled at no one. Like ashes rising under the caress of a slight wind, their love rose again, melting the years of separation, the yearning, the emptiness, the hatred, the humiliation of an entire lifetime of bitterness, of two lives almost snuffed out, buffeted by a series of absurd, incomprehensible events. All this, fused in the space of an instant, quivering through every pore of their bodies, transported them. All this, here, under the leaky roof of this pathetic hovel, in this place where my parents had lived and loved each other, where I had come into the world.

Her parents past causes issues in the present for her

I enjoyed this. I felt it captured maybe how different Vietnamese life is, but also the culture and the way the book was written, like a series of pictures of Hang’s life and those around her as she grows up. Like little glimpses of her world. But also the timeframe she has grown up in the war and post-war era. The title is maybe a nod to the way the post-war period was meant to be Paradise, but only if you are blind to what is around you!  A female-centred family saga about an uncle who has an axe to grind with a past love, and a mother and daughter caught up in all this, offers compelling insight into Vietnam and the connection between the country and the Soviet Union, with workers employed by the Russians in factories. Have you read any fiction from Vietnam?

 

The Cut Line by Caroline Pihelgas

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The cut line by Carolina Pihelgas

Estonian fiction

Original title – Lõikejoon

Translator – Darcy Hurford

Source – Review copy

I was pleased to receive this from World Editions, as the two books I have previously reviewed from Estonia have been by male writers, so it is great to have a female voice.  Carolina Pihelgas is also a poet and is considered one of the best prose writers by Estonian Literary magazine Sirp, according to Estonian critic Piret Põldver.  Her previous novel had focused on three mother-daughter relationships.  Prior to that, she was a well-known poet.  This book marked a change in her writng style, as it focuses on the main character, Liine, who has moved to the countryside to escape and recover from the end of her 14-year toxic relationship.  This is her first book to be translated into English.

A large fly waddles across the outhouse wall, drowsy and content. I am the large fly’s antagonist. I take a chair outside but only sit there for a moment as I can’t keep still. I grab my gardening gloves and begin pulling the weeds out from around the flowering quince.

I haven’t done any weeding for years, but I discover that nettles are the nicest; pulling them out by the roots feels so agreeable. Dandelions are annoying, whereas ground elder is easy to pull out. Perhaps you only let me go without much of a fight because you don’t believe I’ll stay here longer than just a weekend.

You probably don’t believe I have any right to break up with you. I’m just like a part of your body you feel incomplete without. But what do I feel? Right now simply panic, I guess. Id known for a long time that I needed to get away, but also that you wouldn’t let me go that easily, that it was the departure that scared me the most, the anger and rage that would start building up inside you, swelling and swelling and then exploding and pushing their nasty roots inside me. I’m afraid that when I turn on my phone the day after tomorrow to connect my laptop to the internet-be-cause it’ll be Monday and I’ll need to start answering work emails-that there’ll be messages from you

The sense of disconnect initally from the toxic past

We follow as Liine heads to a remote cottage to escape the relationship she has just got out of after fourteen years. What follows is a woman recovering from Trauma. But also have to struggle in the present as there is a sense of the current situation in the Baltic states, as the Miliitary are around the sense of the horrific past of the country itself, the soviet damage of this land is still there what we get is a poetic look at a women sloly rebuilding her life in Nature but also as she does we get small glimpse into the poast of those fourteen years how her relationship became toxic.  The book depicts a grieving, cleansing process in her world as she lives a rural life far removed from her city life. She has escaped to this rural wilderness, but as she does, the tension in the country is heightened by constant troop movements and exercises. As we see her dealing with anger, then recovery, as the world around her darkens.

It comes from deep within, an anger I’ve never dared to feel before. It’s a wild feeling of injustice that I’ve been treated like an inferior kind of being that doesn’t deserve respect. Like someone who can be pushed about, who can be manipulated, who can be reproached, humiliated, and who won’t fight back.

Why didn’t I fight back? Why did I put up with it all?

I’m mad at myself as well. No, hold on a moment.

That’s another thing that’s been planted in me: blame yourself, descend into an endless labyrinth where you find nothing but your own faults. Analyze only what you did wrong. Consider what you did to deserve it. And anyway, if it was so bad, why didn’t you leave sooner? Stop.

The anger that comes later when the past becomes clearer

This book, for me, captured trauma, but also the death of a relationship, the grief and anger, the way we all deal with moving on.  There is a fragmentary nature to the past as we see glimpses of memories, the snapshots of fourteen years in little bursts of how a relationship soured and became so toxic over the years. It is done in the way you feel the writer herself has gon through or knows someone close who has gone through this process. The anger, the loss, and the realisation of what has happened fully hit her. The way the past creeps up when the stillness and slowing down of her life and the routines of nature capture her. I was reminded of Thoreau in his cabin; by escaping the world, he saw how life is, and here we see Liine slowly seeing life in full again. In parts, I was also reminded of The River by Laure Vinogrodova, the Latvian novel I read last year. Both see female characters travelling to the countryside and seeing the world differently; they also deal with environmental issues in their respective countries. But what Crolina also does so well is capture the current tension of the Russian threat, which has grown much closer since the start of the Ukrainian war, and Putin could turn his attention to the Baltic states; this is shown by the NATO troops in the book. Have you read this or any other books from Estoniaxxsssssss

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The Parasite by Ferenc Barnás

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The Parasite by Ferenc Barnás

Hungarian fiction

Original title – Az élősködő

Translator – Paul Olchvary

Source – Personal copy

I started off the Hungarian lit month with this book; it caught my eye from the Seagull list of books from Hungary because it had a quote from Laszlo Krasznahorkai, ” Ferenc Barnás is a legend among those who know him,” now, when you get that from the most recent Nobel winner as a recommendation. Barnás seems to have won many of the major book prizes in his own country, and this was his debut novel, which came out in 1997 in Hungarian. I feel we get caught up in place-based trends when translating these days, and a powerhouse of literature like Hungary, with one of the strongest and most interesting literary scenes, is forgotten. Barnás has taught at times and, at other times, been a full-time writer. There are a couple of his other books out or due to be released by Seagull Books.

One of the men in the ward resembled a friend of mine who’d escaped from an occupational therapy clinic in the provinces. I always did like that ever-smiling wino. After absconding from that teetotalling institution, he took to hanging out at a train station, where his fellow imbibers would sometimes help him towards the public restroom to keep him from wetting his pants even more than he already had. One time I noticed him grinning knowingly at his half-witted chums, who, having been summoned to the train cars for a bit of hard labour to earn their bread or wine, were busily carrying dreadfully heavy sacks full of who-knows-what back and forth for some no doubt noble purpose. No, he wasn’t such a fool atter all. While the others toiled away, he went about not so discreetly sampling fruit brandy he’d acquired for a modest sum from someone’s illicit distillery.

His viewing other people in the hospital as a child

The narrator of this book is unknown. We follow him from late childhood to adulthood. He is a strange character; he thrives on illness and a sort of Munchausen youth, though his body suffers from this constant need to be ill. But he feels safe as a patient; you feel it is almost his safety blanket against the world, a strange boy feeding on symptoms. But as the world is, boys become men, and he grows up and starts to be a man, having relationships, he also starts masturbating greatly. At some point, you are not sure if the encounters he claims to have are real or maybe a fever dream, sexual imagery for him to come tooo? , but even then, he has quirks; he has one-night stands, but then he gets haunted and wracked with dreams of what the previous night’s women are now doing.  But when he ends up with an older woman simply called L, but the initial silence of the dreams and nightmares that haunt his sex life ends, but then come back in a darker way.

Perhaps I should have placed an ad in the classifieds: ‘Seeking someone to beat sordidness of unknown origin out of me, every last bit of it. Perverts need not reply!’ Who knows, perhaps I would have happened upon a psychotic prison guard who specialized in exactly my sort of case! Why shouldn’t there be people out there who know not only torture inside-out but also psychology? | yearned for an applicant who could discern the nature of my imagination through my body’s agony. I would have been able to determine even from his mistakes whether he was really suited to the task. Even as I smiled at this childish escape fantasy of mine, I was virtually certain that people must have once lived who knew just how to go about exorcizing demons.

Seeking out people to suit his particular sexual needs

I loved this book. It had a little bit of Thomas Bernhard in it. The sheer sorrowful life of our narrator is very Bernhardian. But the voice comes across as very quirky at times, a tone and feel to the narrative I haven’t read in anything else, which makes it very interesting. But for me, Bartis, another Hungarian writer, his book Tranquillity is about a young man set in roughly the same time, although in many ways different; both are ways of looking at the child-parent relationship growing up in Socialist Hungary.  Another feeling for me was that our narrator grew up, his one-night stands were either real or just fever dreams from his sexual mind, and guilt of being the way he was, and that is why initially his relationship with L is so different.  This is what I love about much of the Hungarian fiction I have read: it is deep-thinking, and it requires readers to reflect on the characters. I will be in the historic Roman times in the next book for Hungarian lit month in a few days’ time. Have you read any books by Ferenc Barnás?

 

The Bridges by Tarjei Vesaas

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The Bridges by Tarjei Vesass

Norweigan fiction

Original title – Bruene

Translator – Elizabeth Rokkan

Source – Personal copy

I said in my look back at last month at feeling under read, well I always feel under read to me I feel you need real depth in writers you like and place you like to read from to build a huge canon as a read so for me as a reader I feel I maybe on the lwer reaches of the everest of what for me it is to be a reade yet to get to base camp.  Even after over 1500 books for me, I feel it needs to be ten times that amount to have the real breadth of knowledge. Anyway, back to this book and a favourite writer of mine, Tarjei Vesaas, this will be the fourth book on the blog from him. I still have to read The Birds, his maybe best-known book nowadays, alongside Ice Palace.  So this is a lesser-known work, but for me it’s one I feel Jon Fosse might have liked as a reader.  I see echoes of this book in Fosse’s works.  The book follows two teenage friends

Standing on the bridge, remembering.

Even though it was summer and holiday-time and there was swimming and lazing about, and much traffic over the bridge, they still kept to themselves. Other companions seemed so distant that they had no need of them, even those who did not live far away. Aud and Torvil’s friendship was such that they were afraid of anyone disturbing

It was a confident friendship most of the time, but not always. He remembered clearly how he had touched Aud one warm, lightly clad day. They had often clutched each other wildly when fighting, but this nervous hand was light as a leaf, so that Aud had started in surprise.

He did not say anything, not even her name. Just that hand.

She had started in surprise. “What is it?” Her face was burning.

Nothing,’ he said.

‘Don’t do it, then?

‘All right?

‘Or-?’

‘All right, I said.”

Both their faces were burning.

Then they had been bewildered sixteen-year-olds.

Looking back at the two friends that live at the twin houses by the bridge

The book is set around a small village that is split by a bridge. The bridge in this book is more than the actual bridge as the book unfolds. The book follows two teenagers, Torvil and Aud, who have been friends for a very long time and are just turning 18. Then, they are in the woods, and Torvil sees something is wrong with Aud and her manner towards him.  He manages to find out what has made Aud act so oddly. When she shows him a shocking discovery: a dead snake and a newborn baby hidden under some twigs, and just left there. There is no indication whose the babe is, but the rest of the book follows the two on the aftermath of finding this dead child and the effect on them psychologically in the aftermath, the fallout from this event,t but also what it is like being 18 and growing up the bridge from youth to adulthood is a recurring theme in the book.

A few yards is no distance at all. There stood the twin houses. They were not built by twins; they were called that because, from the outside, they looked identical. Two good friends had decided to build them like this in their younger days when they both married at the same time and needed a house. They wanted to live close to one another, so they each bought building land here by the bridge. And here they had Aud and Torvil at about the same time. They had the same kind of work too, at the same school.

Two trim houses, wall to wall on a flat piece of land by the river.

Torvil went into Aud’s house. Outside the late summer dusk had just begun to fall, and from indoors the lamplight filtered cosily through the curtains. The glow was welcoming. This is where a nice girl lives, and her mother who I like so much.

They have been next door to each other all their life to this happens

I said the slow style and tense psychological feel of this book reminds me of Fosse. Fosse has said he sees Vesaas as one of the writers he has modelled his writing on, and for me, of the four books from Vesaas I have read, this is maybe the nearest to what Fosse does, the sense of slowly seeing a world fall apart, with the same useof simple, terse language.  But also, they both evoke a place in their books.  Here again, Vesas make the house and bridge come to life, but also the metaphor the bridge means in the lives of the two main characters, the crossing of it for so many as the two grow up, but also deal with the dark discovery they made and the aftermath of the dead baby under the twigs haunts the events after they find it.  Have you read this book? Do you see a connection between Vesaas and Fosse? (I used a old cover as mine is a plain black print on demand of this book )

January 2026 I hit the ground running round up post

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  1. Mr Bowling buys a Newspaper by Donald Henderson
  2. My Annihilation by Fuminori Nakamura
  3. Library for the War Wounded by Monika Helfer
  4. Killing the Nerve by Anna Pazos
  5. Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami
  6. The Coffee House by Naguib Mahfouz
  7. The Christmas Clue by Nicola Upson
  8. Vaim by Jon Fosse
  9. Mysterious setting by Kazushige Abe
  10. wedding worries by Stig Dagermann 
  11. Brian by Jeremy Cooper
  12. Marshlands by Otohiko Kaga
  13. The old man and his sons by Heoin Bru
  14. The lights on the hill by Gareth st Omer

Well, I had intended to get on top of what books I have read and reviewed this month. I have nearly cleared a backlog of some books from last year and reviewed a mix of what I had unreviewed from the back end of last year. So we had a couple of English crime novels: one from World War I and a modern book looking back on the making of a famous game. Then four Japanese books, two epic crime novels, a modern retelling of a classic story, and a work of non-fiction by Murakami were my contributions to the various Japanese challenges this time of year. Then a couple of books from Fotzcarraldo, the latest Fose, and BRIAN WHICH I had on my Radar for a while. Then two modern classic writers, Mahfouz and Dagerman, reminded me how woefully under-read I am as a reader. Which is why I often moan at creators who position themselves as well-read and aren’t, in the broader sense, readers.  Finally, two new countries for the blog, the Faroe Islands, well, it’s not a country, but a Danish island miles from anywhere,e and then to StLucia in the Caribbean. One of the best months on this blog in recent times.  Also, a new two new publishers in the Caribbean writers list and the Verba Mundi series as well

Book of the month

It has been a tough choice, but this book is one I will want to reread over the years. The book’s passion for cinema reminded me of the films I have yet to see. I know there is another book coming out that focuses more on classical music, which I hope will spark a little more interest in it in my life.

Non Book events

I am one for trying to spend less time on my phone these days, so Amanda and I caught the series Girl Taken with Alfie Allen, about a teacher who kidnaps and rapes and makes a twin live in a cellar, a twin from his school, he wanted the other sister, but had kidnapped the wrong one. The series was well-paced. The only thing I hated was the film in Spain in the Basque Country, and it is so obviously not the UK, but they make it out to be, which lets it down for me. I mentioned Brian. I was trying to watch a few more films. One I really enjoyed last month was Genius, which was about the writer Tomas Wolfe and his editor, who was the man who had found F. Scott Fitzgerald. Wolfe was a writer who was one of a kind, it seemed, and was one who lived fast and died young. This book captured his life. It also made me want to read Wolfe later this year if anyone else is interested in reading him alongside me? Music-wise, it has been a quiet start to the year. I only picked up Dry Cleaning’s third album, their debut, and this one appealed to me, and I also got Sleaford Mods. This group has a unique sound and is very political in its lyrics, which capture the underbelly of England. They are maybe the heirs to Mark E. Smith’s The Fall for the modern age. I will also point to the songs from Bruce Springsteen and Billy Bragg after the horror of people getting shot by gun-happy so-called law enforcement officers, as America seems to be descending into a fascist state along the lines of the early years of Hitler, where the state starts to wipe out the opposition to their voice. Horrific scenes and a leader that seems more interested in grabbing resources around the world than actual diplomacy, anyway, I have held back saying anything about this situation too long. If reading world literature teaches you anything, suffering and terror are the same and have the same roots, and the same sort of people run these regimes, no matter where and when, the outcome is always scary.

Next Month

Back to Books, and it is Hungarian lit month. I have a couple of books to read and will get to them later this week. Other than that, we see the Booker International Longlist on the last day of this month, and yes, there will be another year of shadowing the prize for me. Now, I think it is more about being with the same group of people for so many years. The community we have every year for this prize is actually a highlight in my blogging year. I will also say that I welcome people to join us. I think there will be a post about it in a couple of weeks, as we see Ten years of the International Booker, and this will be the 15th year of shadowing, as we did the old IFFP prize before its current incarnation as the International Booker. It means that every year there are 12 or 13 books. We are getting near 200 books, and we will have reviewed for the shadow jury, with at least 5 or 6 reviews of each book, which means the shadow jury will have put out over 1000 reviews in its time!