Month: March 2026

Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāngzi

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Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāngzi

Taiwanese fiction

Original title – 臺灣漫遊錄

Translator – Lin King

Source – Review copy

I finished the last of the Booker International books for this year’s longlist yesterday. This was one of the last three I read. I won’t get them all reviewed till the end of the week. But I was pleased to have finished before the shortlist came out. This was a book that, like a couple of others, had been on a lot of people’s guesses for the longlist. I won the National Book Award for Translated Literature last year. It also won a prize in Taiwan.  The writer was raised in a rural village and identified as Chinese, but after university, she became involved in the Wild Strawberries Movement.  Against the visit of the Chinese politician to Taiwan. She studied Chinese Literature and has since also taken a degree in Taiwanese Literature.. This is her first book

CHAPTER I

Kue-Tsí / Roasted Seeds

“Hold on. What’s going on here?”

I couldn’t help but voice the thought out loud.

For, in that moment, I seemed to have been transported back

into the midst of Shökyokusai Tenkatsu’s Magic Troupe.’

Id crossed paths with Tenkatsu’s troupe long ago, before ra started high school. They had been on tour, and on the day they arrived in Nagasaki, my aunt Kikuko and I happened upon the opening parade.

The procession comprised a majestic formation of rick-shaws, rows and rows of them with no end in sightenough to rival an army regiment. The band rode at the frontmost rick-shaws, performing with remarkable gusto; after them came the women magicians, beaming and waving at the crowd in exquisite maquillage; they were followed by the male magicians in top hats. Other troupe members went on foot, encircling the rickshaws and ushering them along. They held up long poles with brightly colored flags-streaks of crimson, white, violet, and azure that were no less commanding than the band’s spirited music.

My chest thrummed and lifted, as though something had been strung from my navel all the way up into the sky

Each chapter was a dish along the way

The book is a clever little memoir of a Japanese writer in the late 1930s who heads out to Taiwan, then under Japanese rule.  This is the story of the year she spent in the island as we follow Aoyama Chizuko and her translator Chizuro as they go around on her lecture tour f the country she also samples a lot of the local dishes along the way this is a story that sees the two woman at first distant grow closer but also there is a lot about being under rule from anuother country that resentment that can simmer. in the background as they head around the country. The book is framed as her pieces from the year-long tour and presented as a book that has been found. This means we also get a lot of footnotes along the way as we see how different fictional translators dealt with the text.  There are also endnotes from the fictional family of the two women.  Added to that, we also have the food that is almost. Character in itself sets the taste buds racing.

Before that, I broke fast with white rice, pickled vegetables, seaweed, a raw egg, and grilled fish, along with miso soup with tofu and fish—the type of meal I would have had back on the Mainland. This dampened my spirits somewhat, and I did not fill my stomach, which in turn filled my head with thoughts of sweets as lunchtime approached. Fried bread sprinkled with sugar, cream cookies, yokan jelly, red bean buns-those delicacies were appetizing, but all were things that I could have eaten in Nagasaki. Taiwan, with its heat that brought torrents of sweat down my back, called for some more hydrating desserts. Cold o-gio, hún-kué, hún-înn, tshenn-tsháu-à tea, and tropical fruits teeming with juice-how I longed to try them!

More oof the food to mae your mouth water !

I think when the longlist came out, this was maybe the book I knew least about. I wish I had known more about it; it is a little gem of a book with a clever framing device of the memoir as a novel, but it is also a look back at Japan’s colonial rule over Taiwan. But also a nod and warning toward China, threatening to do the same.. It is also about how we view books, how they were altered across various versions, and how different translators tackled the book, showing how translation can be used as a weapon of propaganda in some ways. It is also an ode to Taiwan’s food. It is a book that makes your mouth water. I hope to try a few of the dishes along the way. Others may not have been to my taste. Have you read the book? Did it make your mouth water?

Erased by Miha Mazzini

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Erased by Miha Mazzini

Slovenian fiction

Original title – Izbrisana

Translator – Gregor Timothy Čeh

Source – Review Copy

It is always great after a long time to catch up with a writer whose previous books you have enjoyed; that is the case with Miha Mazzini. I had reviewed two of his earlier books twelve years ago. I loved both of them, so when I was offered his latest book to review, of course, I said yes. This book is a bout a piece of Slovenian history I didn’t know anything about, and that is what happened not long after they became a country in itself, which was when a number of people, 25,671, were erased from the state records, and this is the story of one of them, Zala. Miha heard the story of the erased, he said, and had expected many other writers to write about it, but when they didn’t, he did!

Ljubljana had been thoroughly cleansed by the rain that Sunday morning. The inhabitants had left for their weekend houses and dachas, half towards the coast, half into the mountains. The tourists had not yet arrived; the war was still raging on in the neighbouring states of the former Yugoslavia (translated into only a fingerprint’s distance on the map) and it scared visitors away.

Zala stood by the window and looked out. She missed being active, missed her usual morning walk after the May Day holidays through the empty town, across Tivoli Park to the forest and toward Rožnik Hill. Evidence of the previous night’s traditional celebrations was littered everywhere, empty bottles and patches of drying vomit. At the top of the hill were the remnants of a bonfire, a thick circle of blackened ash; when once she had stuck her fingers into it, she had been burnt. Binmen climbed slowly out of small trucks, stretched themselves and looked despondently at the mess they were called to clear up before the hung-over population began to wake

As she heads to the hopsital

The book opens with Zala having a baby and heading to the hospital to give birth. This is where her troubles start.  As she arrives, there is a problem; they can’t find her on the computer.  By this time, she is deep in labour, they take her and let her have her baby, but what follows is a number of days where she is told that her baby could be taken from her. her because neither of them has papers or is in the computer system. This leads to a Kafkaesque journey through bureaucracy that isn’t helping her, from the Hospital directors to the local authorites don’t have an answer and the doors seem to be closing for her from aproaching the media and other things to highlght her plight and what is going happen to her son will she be able to be a mother to him will she be a slovenian again who will sort this all out?

The Director raised her head calmly and said, “I have been expecting you,” as if the door had not almost fallen off its hinges.

Zala was still holding firmly onto the handle, the grounding of her rage.

“Sit down!”

“What is wrong with my baby?”

“Look…” the woman supported her chin with her hand, “we are not just experts here, each in our own field, but we are also people. We need to make sure that everything will be all right with the child. Do you not agree?”

“But what is wrong?”

“Nothing. My husband is..”

Her lips began to wrinkle, as if juggling a rotten pip and Zala realised that what bonded the Director and the Doctor as a couple was her need to subdue and his childish acceptance.

Nonstop work composed of tiny victories and escapes, life transtormed into continual coexistence, both at home and at work

She is told she isn’t in the system

Miha has a real talent for pacing in his book.  This is like a thriller, a real page turner as we find out how she is trying to firstly get her citizenship back and thus be a mother to her son or lose him and lose herself as she is caught in a lot of red tape and to go back to the old “That’s life title of Jobsworth’s bureaucrats going by the book. It is like a real-life Kaka story, Z caught up in a maze of small officialdom.  What would you do ? It also says in the book that this has happened for a number of people around the world, and there are still people in Slovenia trying to sort their identity out.  I found this article by Miha about the Erased.  is also a screenwriter and has made a film of the book. I hope to watch this at some. If you like Kafka-like thrillers with many twists and turns set over a few days, this is the one for you. What would you do if you were the one erased?

 

The Director by Daniel Kehlmann

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The Director by Daniel Kehlmann

German fiction

Original Title – Lichtspiel

Translator – Ross Benjamin

Source – Personal Copy

There were a number of books on people’s guesses before the Booker International Longlist came out, and this is one I had seen on a number of longlist predictions.  Kehlmann had been on the Booker longlist and the old IFFP before that, and his books have been bestsellers in Germany over the years. So this was a book I had intended to read at some point. I know very little about the director at the heart of the story, other than he was the best-known German-language director in the Weimar Republic and had made films in the US just before World War II broke out.

The first compartment passes by, followed by a second. I suppose I have to step into the third, I’m frightened, it passes by too. Come on, I tell myself, you ve experienced worse. As the fourth compartment rises in front of me, I close my eyes and stagger forward. I make it in-side, but would have fallen down if he hadn’t held me by the shoulder.

It’s a good thing he reacted so quickly.

“Let go of me,” I say sharply.

Getting out is even harder, of course. But he sees it coming, places his hand on my back, and gives me a little push. I stagger out, he holds me steady again, thank God.

“Stop that!” I say.

It smells of plastic; from somewhere comes the hum of large machines. We walk down a corridor with signed photos of grinning people hanging to the left and right. A few of them I recognize: Paul Hörbiger, Maxi Böhm, Johanna Matz, and there’s Peter Alexander, who for some reason has scrawled With great thanks to my dear, dear audience under his signature.

from one of the opening chapters

The book follows the course of Pabst’s life, a man caught up in time. I think, for me, this is a perfect example of Javier Cercas’s Blind Spot.  The book is about Pabst and the Nazis, the blind spot being the truth of what really happened and why. It also has a turning point when his mother falls ill, just as the war in Europe is starting to spread, he is back in Austria and is caught having initially managed to get his family to the US in the early thirties, and now is faced with having to make films.  The book is told from the point of view of his fictional assistant as he struggles with making films and not being seen as a Nazis at the same time.  We see a man walking a tightrope in history; the German title Lichtspiel, light spiel, light game, is maybe more than an old word for cinema, but maybe for walking the line between light and dark. The book finishes after the war and discusses how he was viewed for making a number of films during the war.

She had kept him waiting for forty-five minutes not because she had been busy, but because she treated every visitor that way. The whole time she had stood by the window, watching the colorful birds as they stalked and strutted back and forth. The gardener had once listed the names of all the species for her, but her memory had never been good; usually while filming, someone stood next to the camera holding a card with her lines written in large letters. That was why she had developed a certain restlessly searching gaze, which appeared very mysterious on-screen.

He knew Garbo having cast her before fame

 

As I say, this book is about a blind spot, that place where we question what the truth is, what happened, and what happens when a parental illness leaves Pabst at a turning point in his life.  The man who lived with Louise Brooks and didn’t want to be like Leni Riefenstahl seems like a puppet of the Nazi regime. Art in the time of war is always hard to make, and this shows one man’s struggle to do so. We see a director as almost an actor in his own film of his life.  Our perspective is seeing how he reacts to all that faces him and how that will affect him after the war. I wish I had a better awareness of his films. He was a name I didn’t know a lot about. But I hope to maybe watch a few of his films over time, just to fill in some of the gaps around the man.  How do you make films and not be seen as a nazis wehen making films for the Nazis must have been a hard task, but what else could he have done? That is the question: what would have happened had he said no? Have you read this or any of his books?

 

 

The Witch by Marie Ndiaye

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The Witch by Marie Ndiaye

French fiction

Original title – La Sorcière

Translator  – Jordan Stump

Source – Review copy

I was pleased to see Marie Ndiaye’s name on the longlist when it came out, as I have reviewed three of her other books over the years. She won the Prix Goncourt for her book Three Strong Women in 2009, but it was published 13 years earlier, in 1996.  I’m pleased to see her older books have been coming out. I have a few of hers to catch up on, but this is a book that shows how good a writer she was before the Goncourt win, a book about small-town life with a clever twist.  This is one of two books on the longlist with a witch theme.  This is set in a version of the near past where magic is still alive but hidden.

When we first came to this little city, two years before, I made the mistake of telling Isabelle about my powers, optimistically thinking I might try to initiate her, since after all nothing forbade passing the gift on to women who weren’t my daughters, and because Isabelle seemed a person of some importance who, I thought at the time, 1 wanted on my side. She reigned uncontested over our little sub-division, her authority not founded in any store of objective virtues, for Isabelle was neither pretty nor intelligent, nor hardworking nor thoughtful, nor even subtly and perversely magnetic, but rather (that authority imposed as a historical fact, duly imparted from neighbor to neighbor.

Isabelle and her husband were the first to build here; from that arrival on the still-virgin land at the gates of the city she’d drawn the need to serve in some sense as the memory of us all, we who were appearing from all over the region, and even the country. It was from Isabelle that we learned what had to be known of this or that neighbor’s ways to keep from upsetting the general entente of the neighbor-hood, and should anyone attempt to break off with Isabelle so she wouldn’t come barging in several afternoons a week she made it clear that she would turn the entire subdivision against them with her unscrupulous gift for gossip.

Her powers were small but she told the town gossip

This is a book about family secrets and small towns. It happens that the witch’s nature in the book adds a clever twist. It is about being a mother and a wife in a loveless marriage.  At the heart iof the story is the split between the parents, Lucie and Pierot.  He is very controlling of Lucie. They have twin daughters, Maud and Lise, who are just at the cusp of becoming Teens.  Their mother, Lucie, is from a line of witches, and at this age the girls must discover whether they possess the clairvoyant powers passed down through the family’s female line. Will they bleed tears of blood, a sign you have the power, and will they have it more than their mother, who can only see things in the present moment, not inj the future?  What happens when their powers initially seemed like their mothers’ but over time grow, and the tears come? What happens is a story about secrets, the family’s past, other family members, as their gifts grow over time , and a mother trying to keep it all together. As real life and the surreal world of magic blend into one.

My father opened his big arms wide, and Maud and Lise, delighted by this display, rushed gigglingly toward him. I was surprised to see the gray streaks I knew so well dyed a bluish black that contrasted with his brown hair.

And on top of that he was tanner, thinner, he now had a certain dandyish, youthful elegance, but when, with overplayed enthusiasm, he ordered Maud and Lise to gallop through the rooms—and they launched off with a sound of furious hoofbeatsI saw that he seemed worried and jittery. He grabbed me by the shoulder and, in the tone he probably used to talk business in his Rue de Rivoli of-fice, he beseeched me to return, as quickly as possible, the 120,000 francs hed recently given me on the occasion of his promotion. Then he dropped onto his new couch, red leather, sueded, and added, avoiding my eye:

They Lucie parents as they discover more about the girls powers

I love Ndiaye’s writing style. She has twisty sentences that draw you in as a reader. This is a tale that blends the everyday with the fantastic in a small-town setting. A mother who struggles when her daughters have more power than she does is both a common tale of mothers wanting daughters nearby and a story about daughters having the chance to go further than their mother has because of their powers. It sees what happens when the daughter’s eyes are opened to the full scale of the powers and how it can change their lives, and what about their selfish Father in all this?  I was pleased when this arrived it was the last book I needed when it arrived and the one I most want to read when the short list came out as I am a fan of Ndiaye this is a book from a writer growing not a polished as the other books I have read but they are twenty years older this was her early on in her writing career and great to see a book that mix the everyday and a pinch of magirc realism all that and a tale of a family at a crossroads due to the twins powers and what it means for their mothe Lucie and them themselves!

The Nights are Quiet In Tehran by Shida Bazyar

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The Nights are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar

German fiction

Original title – Nacht ist es leise in Tehran

Translator – Ruth Martin

Source – personal copy

It was odd that there were two novels connected to Iran on the Booker longlist, and all this before the recent war had started there.  Life is often stranger than fiction. And the two books have different takes on the country: one from the perspective of women living in Modern Iran, and the other about what happens when you leave after the 1979 revolution and your family grows up in Exile in Germany. How do your kids deal with returning to Tehran? This book is inspired by her parents’ life in Exile in a small German town. It tackles the parents’ life in Iran firstly, then the life in exile, the daughter returning to Iran years later, and then the son’s perspective on events in Germany in 2009, each event happening a decade apart

The Revolution is a month old, and Dayeh is making stuffed vine leaves. They’re all sitting on the floor, my mother, my sisters, my cousins, my aunts. The wives of my older brothers.

They have laid the sofrehs out on the living-room floor and are sitting around them with bowls full of rice and minced meat, herbs, lentils, and they are folding vine leaves, one after another, and laying them in a pot and talking and laughing and talking and laughing.

There were just as many women when we were little, though they were different women. Our dayeh would send my sisters and me outside; we weren’t supposed to hear the women’s conversation, to interrupt the neighbourhood gossip. You mustn’t bother people while they’re cooking, we were told, or the food will take longer to make, and we went outside, where we played marbles or pretended to shoot down the murderer of the great and oh-so-honourable Imam Hossein.

After the inital coup the world slowly changes post Shah

The book opens in the last days of the Shah’s regime with the hope from the younger people living there, like Behzad a young communist hopeful, as the Shah falls this is a new dawn for the country, but at the opening section moves on the dream he had of a new Iran starts to fade and the religous voice start to run the country.  They are left questioning whether they can stay or go into Exile. So we jump forward, and the next chapter is from the point of view of his lovely wife, Nahid, struggling to settle into life in Germany, trying to be themselves in a new country, and wondering if things will change in Iran. Nahid misses the ebb and flow of the poems, the songs, and the way of life she has left.  This is a tale of the first generation of exiles, those who have come but remain tied to the homeland.  Then, ten years later, the baton passed to the daughter, Laleh (or maybe Shida, really), who goes with her mother to return to a window of relative peace in Tehran.  They head back; the mother finds a place where the ghosts of her past and present don’t match; and the daughter finds it hard to be a German-Iranian in Iran.  Seeing family that stated there are two further chapters, but this is a family tale set over the last forty years of being neither Iranian nor German and growing up a child of exiles.

Sometimes I imagine 1 am Ulla or Walter, seeing this Behzad for the first time after years of being surrounded by no one but Ullas and Walters. I try to hear him with ears that are used to different television, different radio, used to Helmut Kohls and Helmut Schmidts, ears that understand Nazi speeches, understand Goethe. But I can’t do it. I look at Behzad, stare at him, hear him talking, and try to defamiliarise his words, his whole self. Then I can’t help thinking of him ten years younger — ten years younger, badly shaved and with huge sideburns, thick black hair, and a deep, loud voice.

But then you can be caught between being Iranian and being German

As I said, the two books are so different. This book is made up of the voice of one family over the space of forty years and how the initial dream of the Post Shah years fell apart, and the regime became what it became, and people like Bhzad and Nahid had the choice to stay and change or leave and this shows the story from the perspective of leaving, but when they return, the world they left has gone, and the world they lkeft has m oved on. This is a tale of never fully fitting in place when you become an exile, the limbo of that life, but the effect on the kids’ lives being German Iranians with parents from Iran in modern Germany. It is a family story where the secrets of the past and the decisions one makes come back years later, and where a dream of a new Iran never happens. I think both the books about Iran are very different books, but also deal with firstly the post-Shah years, the change in the country after this, but also the view from inside the country for the five women in the other books, to the women in this book living and growing up outside Iran in the West!  Have you read this book?

 

The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje

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The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje

Dutch Fiction

Original title – De herinnerde soldaat

Translator – David Mckay

Source – Personal Copy

I have long been a fan of Dutch literature; for a small country, it has a unique voice in much of its literature. Cees Nooteboom said this when I asked him about Dutch literature.

The Dutch are a rather special tribe, like the english, but smaller. On the other hand,Holland is not an island. It has taken the world a long time to recognize that there are some interesting writers out there, like Hermans, Mulisch, Claus, Mortier, van Dis, Grunberg, and many others. And of course it does not help that we know much more about English writers

This is a perfect example as it is a book that came out on a small regional publisher and had almost slipped under the radar until an NRC review and further coverage gave the book legs, so to speak, and it won a number of awards in Holland. Then also a number of prizes in the US, including the Republic of Consciousness Prize, which it won this week. Anjet had written a number of novels before this had such success, and her next book has already been lined up for Translation.

On the train he sits opposite her on the hard wooden bench, their knees not quite touching, and the locomotive labors noisily across the quiet green Flemish countryside with a din that drowns out anything they might say to each other and even his thoughts, and he looks outside, it’s a dizzyingly beautiful world, all those colors and spreading waves of grass and floating white cities of cloud, and if this was around him all that time, unfathom-able and infinitely vast, how is it possible there existed a life such as his, imprisoned within the asylum’s cramped walls, as if in one mighty sweep he’s been erased, that’s how he feels, and he tries not to think about it, he must not under any circumstances have another attack like the one on the platform, and he knows she is thinking about the same thing, because from time to time he catches her looking distrustfully in his direction.

that last line as they head home caught me !

The book is really a two-hander story.  It stars Asylum, as they have a man in 1922, a number of years after the war has ended, who still has no memory of who he is, and no one has come forward to claim him. So they put his picture in the newspaper, hoping to find his family.  There are a number of women who come and go who view Noon Merckem as the man, who is called after the time and place he was found. But no one claims him, then Juliennecomes and says he is her husband, Amand, a photographer with kids. She takes him home and this is where the story begins he is in a room in the studio sleeping as they get to know each pother but this room is used as the studio and has a war scene in the room so as he sleeps every night and relives the horror he has seen you do wonder why Julieene is letting this Amand has no memories of there life and as s=they try to connect you do wonder if he is Amand or what happened. He agrees to pose with widows as their lost loves as part of the photograph business ..As they grow close, is this the real Amand that Julienne is painting to him or a new version of the man? The two of them try to find Amand again and, over time, grow closer, but is it all it seems?

And he sits down and lights the gaslight, and the world leaps back into place, chillingly real, as if it had been lurking by the wayside, and his panic does not die down, he no longer dares to go back to sleep and lies waiting in silence until first light, in the distance he hears a train pass, another, another, and a faraway church bell strikes five, the first cart in the street, hooves on the paving blocks, and then more carts and footsteps and voices, and the half-light of early morning creeps comfortingly across the backyard and into the studio. And when the church bell strikes half past five he gets dressed, but the house is still deep in sleep, and six o’clock, and still no one is up, and at quarter past six the church bells ring in the distance for early Mass, a familiar sound, and she, the children, Felice, everyone sleeps on, not until seven does he hear the steps creak and a door open, and then the toilet flushing, and when he recognizes her voice and Rose’s he goes upstairs, and on the stairs he runs into Gus coming down with the coal scuttle, and Amand says good morning and offers to carry the coal for him, but Gus squeezes past without a word.

At home with the family amd the Studio

I was so pleased when this made the Booker longlist. It had been a personal Christmas gift I had brought with Money I was given at Christmas, and it was high on my list to get this year. It is a book a bout war, which I always enjoy. The aftermath of World War I has been covered by other writers like Pat Barker and Rebecca West, both of whom deal with the Trauma and mental aftermath of War. None deal directly with anaemia, though, and this was inspired in part by actual events.  There were people photographed in the papers and claimed by people, particularly the case of the Frenchman, Anthelme Mangin, who had two people fighting over him. This story inspired two novels. For me, the way the family was photographed was interesting as images can be altered and changed, and is this story a life being retouched or a life being altered? Is he Amand, is he the Amand he was, or the one his wife has invented? The book makes you wonder what is real, what is made up, and how far people will go.

What type are reader are we all ?

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I have been racing through the Booker International longlist this year. I think the fact I like most of the books on the list is that they are ones I would read at some point. I think we all, as readers, have this list of books. If I see if I find, if I have time, the last being the main problem, too many books, too little time. I think of the years I have never quite got what motivates my reading, but this year it has changed, and the change is coming because I have decided that one of the things I need to do this year is fill the gaps. I always read a number of Japanese books in January as there are events then.  We go to March, and it’s the Booker International longlist.  Then we have the bi-annual Year clubs Simon and Karen run, which are maybe my favourite online blog event all year.  Then there are things I have dived in an out of in recent year the EBRD prize which i think has a great selection of literature every year but it is so near the booker I end up burnt out on the prize list and then I have like the Wainwright prize for nature writing but maybe need to just focus on either the shortlist or the books that jump out on me. So the idea this year is to have more of these little projects, read a new book from a new country every month, is one such idea, and I have gone and brought a lot of books for that project for this year.  Then I had looked at Mookse doing the NYRB books and Muriel Spark, but I am not a joiner in person; I like to either have an idea for myself or a couple of people on board. So what other project has he up his sleeve? Well, I had thought of Spark and liked Beryl Bainbridge to read their books in order. But then I remember Kim doing a number of Iris Murdoch last year, and I had read The Sea, The Sea a long time ago, and her back catalogue is huge; she had multiple Booker nominations over the years.  include a win for The Sea, The Sea. So, as I always say, I fell under read. I know in a lot of ways I am not, but I feel I need to read a few more English writers, and this is the start. I will be reading all her novels in publication order, hopefully. This is the first of two writers I am thinking of; I’m thinking of flipping between them, but at the moment, I’m not quite decided who. I think C P Snow, maybe, or Anthony Powell; I have circled both their multiple-novel collections and have nearly all of them on TBR. But I haven’t yet decicded as I may pick an older writer say Dicken or Trollope or maybe some one else the idea is ovber time to cross of names so I read the complete ouvre of a female and male writer and this to be a constantly rolling idea with Murdoch having twenty plus novel that is a few years reading so the Male may have less books. I will let you know who I pick in a few weeks. Then in the summer, I will do my book-a-day idea with Novellas. I can’t do a month, but I will try for one month to read as many as I can, with my shifts being 12-hour days. I lose a few days each week to this, so I struggle to blog on those days. But I like the idea of summer days and short books outside in coffee shops, etc. I will be doing Hungarian lit month, and at some point Spanish and Portuguese lit month and of course some reading on the run up to the Nobel, with a lot of recent deaths of people that have been near the top of thebetting lists in recent years, there is maybe a name or two out there to come to the surface. I am trying to be a lot more proactive in my reading, so those periods of not having a little or large project are less, and thus, meaning I always have rabbit holes to find books, learn about the writers and countries, and what books are available and waiting to be read. I love my sail boat idea of reading but now I  am mor eof a cruise and trying to have a little newsletter of upcoming event like you do on a cruise ship (not that I have ever been on a cruise ) I love watch you tube videos of cruises and love the idea of a daily news letter I am so 20th century with my list of books piles of books and just liking the printed word. How do you plan your reading? Are you ad hoc, like plans, like ideas, book clubs, etc., or a solo traveller in the world of books?

We are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

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We are Geen and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

Argentinian fiction

Original title – Las niñas del naranjal

Translator – Robin Myers

Source – Personal copy

I have read the two other books to have come out in English from this writer, and I was.  A fan of Slum Virgins, which was her Debut book.  But this had been on my radar, not least because both the UK and US editions of the book have very eye-catching cover art, so I would have got to see that she is part of this wonderful crop of strong female voices from Latin America.  I often say that, over the 16-plus years I have been around the blogosphere, the nature of Latin American fiction has shifted from very Male-heavy to fairly even these days.  Gabriella is a creative writing teacher, so she will no doubt be setting forth the next generation of great Argentine writers for us all to read.  This book, like the other book, features a woman in a male world, this time living as a man in the New World.  Antonio is writing back to her home and the priory where her aunt, the Prioress of the Basque Priory, lives.

…that is a story I will tell you in time, dear aunt. Let me tell you now about the fragrances of the forest, which are strong as the spirits soldiers drink, as village rotgut, and about the other flowers, mammoth and fleshy and carnivorous, nearly beasts, for bere in the jungle the animals bloom and the plants bite, and I believe I have even seen them walking, I swear this to you, and leaping, for vines do leap; all things seethe bere, whereas the forest rustles, as well you know; I remember your attention to the presence of the fox, with its faint rustle of leaves in your forest, and to the bear, with its beavy rustle of trunks and branches; the forest rustles, but not the jungle, the jungle seethes, full of eyes; life surges inside it as lava surges in volcanoes, as if the lava were trees and birds and musbrooms and monkeys and coatis and coconuts and snakes and ferns and caimans and tigers and trumpet trees and fish and vipers and palms and rivers and fronds, and all other things within it were amalgams of these primary ones.

Writing to the Aunt about the world she is in the New World

The book is a mix of these letters home.  Narrative it tells the tale of Antonio in her adventures in the New World or Cayalina as she was known has seen it all the violence of the old world hanging death of native culture as the conquestordors move opn the the country as they are trying to conquer the New world and this is how He Antoino has ended up with a ragtag bunch around him two Two Gurani girls he saved from a life of slavery a couple of monkeys hand horse in this Jugle where the world becomes a mix of dreams and nightmares as she recounts the vents she had seen to get where she had been with her jounrey to the new world from singing on a ship to the various other jobs he had along the way ad s the book goes on the Jungle itself is almost a character as the bunch try to escape can the find a place this is a book that has a lot of layers for such a short book.

He hears the rattle. A snake. He’s lucky to have his sword within reach. A bit blunted but better than nothing. He stands, armed, and stamps the earth with his feet. He listens. Silence, save the growls of the dog slowly calming. The horses wander back. He wants to keep writing. He needs to leave the girls somewhere safe. The tree. He wraps them in his cape. Michi is so weak that he supports her head by pulling the cloth taut.

He puts the monkeys in, too, binding them to his back, and climbs. He lays them down in a nest-like gathering of boughs and ties the cape to the strongest branch. He sits with them.

An African once told him tales of enormous serpents. One had swallowed an elephant. It looked like a hat, said the man. His troops wouldn’t need an enormous one to devour them. Any old serpent could gobble the girls and the monkeys for breakfast.

In the jungle it is alive at times

I think this is a book that maybe could have done with being a little longer.  There are a lot of ideas, the church, religion, the new world, woman in a man’s world, so many, it is like it has been stuffed into a box and is fit to burst.  I feel that maybe means the book suffers at times; it is a great book.  I still like SLum virgin best of her books, but that may just be me being a reader who finds books set near my own time much easier to connect with.  The main character is based on a real figure from the time, a woman who lived as a man in the New World.  I kept going back to the Filmsof Werner Herzog set in the New World and imagining if Klaus Kinski’s character Aguiree had been had been a trans character in the Jungle, it would be like this book a man tinged by the violence of the world they are in another film that cmae to mind around the two girls was Apocalypto the shere violence that is seen at times.  I believe the writer herself has highlighted Studio Ghibli as an influence on her writing.  I just felt it would have been a better five-hundred-page book than the 200 it is, and I rarely think that it is a book jam-packed with ideas and history, and a character at the heart of the book that should have been better known as a trailblazer for their time.  Have you read this or any of her other books ?

The Deserters by Mathias Enard

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The Deserters Mathias Enard

French fiction

Original title – Déserter

Translator – Charlotte Mandell

Source – Subscription edition

One of the benefits of having a Fitzcarradlo subscription in recent years has been knowing I may have a couple of books that make the International Booker longlist and are in with a chance at least.  They publish so many great books in Translation.  So when this made the longlist, I was happy as I hadn’t got round to finishing his last novel after reviewing a number of his books.  It was nice to step back into his world, which is uniquely his. Enard has a writing style that is all his own. His books all vary.  Still, they are all well-written in various styles,s and this is an odd little gem.  It turns out this book was being written as the Ukrainian war started, and that led to the second narrative in the book, which follows a deserter from the war.

Angel, my holy guardian, protector of my body and soul, forgive me for all the sins committed on this day and deliver me from the works of the enemy, despite the warmth of the prayer the night remains a beast fed on anguish, a beast with breath of blood, cities in ruins full of mothers brandishing the mutilated corpses of their children faced with scruffy hyenas that will torture them, then leave them naked, dirty, their nipples torn with teeth under the eyes of their brothers raped in turn with trun-cheons, terror stretched over the country, plague, hatred, and darkness, this darkness that always envelops you and urges you towards cowardice and treason. Flight and desertion. How much time is there left to walk? The border is a few days from here, beyond the mountains that will soon become hills of red earth, planted with olive trees. It will be difficult to hide. Many villages, towns, farmers, soldiers, you know the region, you are home here,

no one will help a deserter,

you’ll reach the house in the mountain tomorrow, the cabin, the hovel, you’ll take refuge there for a little while,

There is a poetic touch to the Deserters story

As i said the book has two story lines they are seperate maybe at some point you could say the characters in each book have been in the same place the first story uses a point in history to look back in time that is 9/11 and instead of being inj America it follows an event that is happeniong on that day on a boat in Berlin there is a conferecnce i=on a Mathmatematician Paul Heudeber, One of the think I found is was this a real person it wasn’t but a mix of various figures that had walked a similar path and that was breinbg looked up for being against the  Nazis   Still, with his mind, he was in Buchenwald and opted to head to the east after the war.  We are learning about his life alongside his daughter, who is trying to find out more about her father: he was a mathematician and a poet. She didn’t know himmeanwhile the other story follows an unnamed man that has ruin off from war a deserrter as he finds a woman and a donkey in a hinterland of scrubland the beauty oif this mis the lack of place and time was it a event that has happened ort is going to happen as I say there isn’t much that runs in between the stories just the aftermath of war in different times and places and how it lays bare peoples lifes.

I have to go back over what happened over twenty years ago, on 11 September 2001, near Potsdam on the Havel, on board the cruise boat, a little river liner christened with the fine pompous name Beethoven.

Summer seemed to be wavering. The willows were still green, the days still warm, but a freezing fog would rise from the river before dawn and immense clouds seemed to be gliding over us, from the distant Baltic.

Our floating hotel had left Köpenick east of Berlin very early in the morning, on Monday. Maja was always alert, spry. She would go up to the top deck to walk, a stroll between showers, deck chairs and deck games. The green domes and golden spire of the Berlin cathedral captivated her, from afar, when we arrived. She was imagining, she said, all the little gilt angels leaving their stone prison to fly off into a cloud of acanthus leaves blown by the sun.

The water of the Spree was sometimes a dull, dark blue, sometimes a glowing green. During the preceding weeks, all of Germany had been rocked by storms; their aftermaths swelled the Havel and the Spree, which usually were quite low at summer’s end

We navigated through the swirling water.

the conference on the boat

I am a huge fan of Enarrd.  This book is an odd tale.  It is easy to see, with a panel of judges that includes two Mathematicians, that a book featuring a fictional Mathematician would make the longlist.  But the second narrative inspired by the Ukraine war shows the horror of war on the mind, the need to escape war, the way it affects not just the Soldier but also the woman and her donkey.  People may dislike the lack of detail in the story; in fact, they may think it is l lazyStill, forr me it is a brilliant touch of not placing that narrative in a place or time and thus making the story work now, in fact, with the Iran war, how many men and women are wandering out of the scrublands of Iran, lebabanon or the Gulf states it is weird how a book is maybe more relevant than when the longlist was announced a clever mix of family, war, the horrors of war lose and all this brought together by one of the best living writers Enard. Do you have a favourite book by Enard?

She who remians by Rene Karabash

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She who remains by Rene Karabash

Bulgarian fiction

Original title – Остайница

Translator – Izidora Angel

Source – personal copy

When the longlist was announced for the Booker International Prize, I was very lucky that I had a number of subscriptions for various publishers, but the first subscription I ever got was for Peirene, the publisher of this mbook a press I have reviewed a lot of books from and one that has brought some extraordinary novellas to the English-speaking world. I had intended to readthis as it isn’t the first book I have read about Sworn virgins I read Sworn Virgins by Elvira Dones twelve years ago she also made a film follow twelve sworn virgins that had left the Balkans this is not just a Albanian traditioon it is followed in other Balkan countries a traditon that has a lot to do with old traditions around inheirtence, family line, blood feuds and like in this book the Kanun a sort of law of the region about this happening and how Women come to live as men.

Matija, Bekija according to my passport, thirty-three years old, yes, one brother, Sále, father, Murash, murdered, mother dead shortly after, there’s only Nura the cow and my father’s pigeons, favourite colour blue, afraid only of snow, the big snow, loneliness is another thing altogether, no, here love is forbidden, love is death, I don’t go to the doctor, I plug up my wounds with tobacco, if anything happens I smoke, television doesn’t exist, I don’t need it, the radio is enough, Albanian songs and occasionally an American one, I can’t sing, no, and I don’t want to, this one here is of me, my father, my brother Sále and my mother, it was taken before, yes, that’s enough for today, Nura is hungry and the pigeons need to be shut in for the night

the violence that surrounds her past

The book follows the life of Bekija, a woman who had an arranged marriage, and the only way she can escape it is via the law of Kanun, which says that because she turned down the marriage, she has to live as a sworn virgin, as a male, so Bekija becomes Matija the firsgt part of the book is the aftermath of `all this in the remote villages they live this has a knock on effect for the whole family with the blood feud it causes. So when later in the book we see letters from the brother and a journalist turns up at the village and wants to interview Matija about why theyn are a sworn virgin and what she has lost of r this at first Matija does’t see this but as the two talk her life unfurls and the past comes to haunt the present and tshe heads off to find the brother that had escaped to Sofia.

Hello, Bekija,

I very much hope this letter reaches you. I know the houses in our village don’t exactly have numbers on them, and I’m aware how impossible corresponding through letters and telegrams can be. I’ve been meaning to write to you for a long time. Every day since 1 ran away… You must understand why I had to do what I did. Why I ran. That I did it because of the enormous, irreparable mistake you made. You do understand it’s completely within the bounds of one’s survival instincts to want to save oneself, right? My leaving was the smartest thing a sane and sober-minded man could do, someone unafflicted with the delirium of the laws of the Kanun. I can’t apologize for it, it is who I am.

The start of the first letter from her brother Sale

 

As i say, I had experience of this not just from the book Sworn virgin I did work alongside a Kosovian Albanian in a factory in Germany many years ago and learnt a little back then of Albanian culture from this chap and his wife she was studying Albanian literature before thy had to escape due to the Balakans conflict so I have always had an interest in the Blakans and rememebr the conversations about the way in the countryside there were still these tradtions that and his love of english football especially Glenn Hoddle.  Anyway, that is enough of my journey down memory lane. It turned out the writer spent two years researching the sworn virgin culture and the Kanun, using Ismail Kadare’s book Broken April, which I have yet to read. But what she wanted to do was capture a female living as a male in a patriarchal society like this one, with its violence,  ancient laws, and blood feuds.  Using Bekija’s Journey as the catalyst for describing this culture.  The book is told in a stream-of-consciousness style, with an episodic narrative, and also includes interviews and letters. It is, as ever, a book that feels much bigger than its parts, which is what Peirene are known for.  Have you read this or any books about the Kanun laws that govern that part of the Balkans? It was a hit for me because it had a number of things that I love in fiction: a village setting, books from the Balkans and books that look at human nature

 

Febuary 26 round up and a quick booker international reaction

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  1. The Bridges by Tarjei Vesaas
  2. The Parasite by Ferenc Barnás 
  3. The cut line by Carolina Pihelgas
  4. Paradise of the blind by Duong Thu Huong 
  5. In Farthest Seas  by Lalla Romano 
  6. Captivity by Gyory Spiro
  7. Rosa Mistika by Euphrase Kezilahabi
  8. Temptation by Janos Szekely 

I eased a bit this month, mainly just a little tired and fed up with the weather the last month has left me feeling drained. I managed just three books for the first Hungarian Lit Month. But I will be doing it again next year for sure. I also read a Norwegian minor classic, the first English translation in the US from Vietnam. A tale of a husband passing and the years-earlier meeting him, the romance, and then a woman escaping her family in Tanzania. I managed one new country. I am trying to get at least one a month throughout this year. I recently picked up a number of Books from Around Africa. Anyway, it was a good month, just a little slow. I think we are all wishing for a number of sunny days in a row in the UK.

Book of the month

It has been a hard month to pick a great book, since they were all good reads. But I love it when you read a book and go, “That’s different.” This was that sort of book that left me wanting to read another by him, which I know Seagull have brought out. A book that captures a strange boy growing into an odder man, all around his need to be ill or to deal with people who are ill, an unusual book.

Non-Book events

Well, I started to watch the second series of Hijack with Amanda. I feel Apple make the best short series. This follows Idris Elba as he hijacks a Berlin U-Bahn train, but, as with the first series, there are a number of unseen twists and turns along the way. I then spent a lot of time watching old crime series, CSI, Monk, sort of comfort TV for the dull weather.

Then music-wise I brought two newish albums, Dry Cleaning a band that has a unique singer and style I had their first album, and I heard a couple of tracks of this new album and decided to get it. Then I got Heavy Metal, which had come back in stock, and I love Geese, who Cameron Winter is the lead singer of Geese, but this is more personal and heart-wrenching in places.

Then my Local shop had a sale on Tallbird records, which has a great selection, so I got Seasick Steve, whom I’ve been a fan of since his Jools Holland appearance years ago. I had a lot of his albums, but lent them to someone and never got them back. Anyway, nice tohear him again. Then Jason Isbell is a singer that is growing on me over time, and it’s nice to find a bargain, then I saw Pinegrove mention a few years ago, so I thought I’d give them a whirl.

Next month and Booker reaction

The International Booker longlist came out last week, and I am again part of the shadow Jury. I love doing this; it is a highlight of my year. I look forward to seeing my fellow jurors’ views on the books. My initial reaction was a little shocked; not one of the Akoya books had made the list. I felt sure Helle Helle or Liliana Colanzi, two writers whom I have featured on the blog with earlier books. SO to the longlist, I had read three books

On Earth as it is beneath by Ana Paula Maia 

Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur 

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn 

Then I had on my tbr

The Duke by Matteo Melchorrie

She Who Remains by Rene Karabush

The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje

The Deserters by Mathias Enard

So they would have been read by me in the meantime; I have read She who remains, and I have read them in the last few days. I hadn’t made a prediction list, but I would picked from books I won or had read, so these may have been on the list

I have brought all the other books on the list and am awaiting a few, but have another three of the rest of the books I had: Taiwan travelogue and The Director Down to be brought and read at some point. The one book I wasn’t very familiar with was The Nights are Quiet in Tehran.  Elsewhere, I have read other books by Marie Ndiaye. Overall, I am happy with the longlist; it is maybe the best in the last couple of years. It sees ten years of the Booker, and it is 15 years of Shadow Juries with us doing the old IFFP prize in a number of years before the Booker took over. I will be posting my first couple of reviews next week, and most of the month will be reading the longlist. I hope to throw in a couple of other books, but I will have to see how it goes.  What did you make of the Booker longlist ? Will you be reading the books?  Which books did you want on the list?