Month: May 2026

Monique Esacapes by Édouard Louis

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Monique Escapes by Édouard Louis

French Auto fiction

Original title – Monique s’évade

Translator John Lambert

Source –  Personal Copy

I think one of the writers whose books I have enjoyed, if that is the right word. But connected to him is Edouard Louis, whose books about his life are shocking yet also show how life can move on over time. I have read three of the five books translated into English so far, so when I was in Macclesfield last weekend, I happened to see this book on the shelf in Waterstones. I decided to get it because another thing about Louis’s books so far is that they are slim novellas that can easily be read in an evening. This is what I did with this book. I will hold my hand up, and this book had me crying it is a very long time since i did that. I’m not sure.  If the visit to Macclesfield, where my mother’s ashes are scattered, had raked up some memories about my relationship with my mum and my strained relationship with my stepfather.

The day after her escape, at eleven in the morning. I’d just woken up. I drank a couple of coffees and called her:

‘How are you today?

She looked like she was out of breath, as if she’d been running.

I’m still tired, but I’m okay. I slept a lot. I’m glad I left?

That reassured me; I’d started to worry again that she’d regret her escape and go back.

That had worried Didier too: ‘Now that she’s got the hardest part behind her, she needs to hang in there and not go back to that man. It takes so much energy to escape and break free that often, right when you’ve almost made it, you give up and go back.’

The hardest was leaving him, and it’s now a day later !

The book opens, and Edouard is on a writer’s residency in Athens when he gets a call from his mum. His mum has basically repeated the mistake of her past relationship with Edouard’s father and fallen in with a man who is a drinker but now is starting to abuse her and control her. She left her home to move in with the guy. Edouard knows this, so the book follows how, at a distance, he helps his mum get herself together, and he then helps her plan a way out of this situation. He connects to his sister, it turns out she didn’t like his book about their father, and they hadn’t spoken for years, but when he rang, they joined to help their mother.  We saw him return to Paris later in the book, and how it had empowered his mother; she was still friends with the man, but now on her own terms. The most touching section was when he invited his mother to see the staging of his book in Germany. His mother had never flown and was so proud of her son this evening.

The day of the performance and our trip approaches. She talks about it a lot and as we talk I become fully aware of all the dimensions of our imminent departure for Ger-many: my mother has never crossed a border in her life, she’s never seen a country other than her own, apart from one afternoon on a boat off the coast of England with her school, just a few kilometres from the port town in the north of France where she grew up, she’s never walked down a street and heard a language other than her own, she’s never been in contact with another culture, another civilisation, she’s fifty-seven years old and she’s never taken a plane in her life, she’s never seen the sky from the inside and the earth from the sky, she’s never slept in a hotel room, she’s never been to the theatre, except to see a few school plays when she was around ten or twelve, she’s never seen a real performance directed by a real director, of course, she’s never seen a show in which she’s the main protagonist, she’s never been invited to travel by an institution the way artists or politicians can be.

His mother did so many firsts on the trip with Édouard.

I think Louis is maybe one of the best writers at capturing the horror life can bring. Whether in the past his relationship with his Father or in this case the horror of the repetition of the past in his mother’s life. He shows how people can escape violence, and over the course of the book, we see Louis’ mother grow in confidence. This was the first time in her whole life she had lived by herself. The freedom to just do nothing and live her life on her terms shows a woman growing. As I say, I connected with this book on a personal level. The things I  should have said to my mother when she was alive about her world that haunts me still. If you liked his other books or books from the likes of Annie Ernaux, this is a male writer who voices his life like hers. Have you read anything by Édouard Louis ?

 

Tree by Aya Koda

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Tree by Aya Koda

Japanese Non-fiction

Original title – 『木』 新潮社

Translator – Charlotte Goff

Source – Review copy

I was so excited when I saw this was available to review. The main reason is the connection to the film Perfect Days by Wim Wenders, which is set in Tokyo, and the main character Hirayama is shown as a reader, and when he one day visits the book shop, the book he picks up is this book. The shopkeeper says Aya Koda she deserves more recognition, she uses the same words we do, yet there’s something so special. What more could you want as an introduction to a writer? Aya Koda had been married and divorced before she ever wrote a book. In her forties, she wrote several books about her relationship with her father, Rohan Koda, a well-known Japanese writer, and also wrote novels. Also books in this style Zuihitsu a japanese style meaning follow the brush a way of piecing together memoirs in a stream of conciousness style this is a book made up of her reaction to trees.

Some kabuki costumes are uncommonly thick, such as Matsumaru’s in the tale of the three brothers Matsu-maru, Umemaru and Sakuramaru – named after pine, plum and cherry trees respectively. I have never touched Matsumaru’s costume, and have only ever glimpsed it from a far-away seat, so I suppose I can’t say for sure how thick it is, but whenever I look at the bark of an old pine tree, I remember Matsumaru’s kimono. Pines wear a heavy kimono. Or they wear them heavily, is perhaps more accurate. Their skin is covered in rough, dry fissures forming tortoiseshell-like patterns, the thickness of their bark clear to see from the depth of these cracks. Matsumaru’s costume features pine trees with snow-laden branches against a charcoal back-ground, creating a cool, clear colour scheme of black, white and blue; the kimono worn by real pines has a dirty kind of colour, its hexagonal fissures lending it an imposing quality. Incidentally, Matsumaru’s hair is incredibly thick, and pine trees will also often be blessed With a luscious head of needles.

 

 

Their rare fifteen pieces in this collection range from personal insights like a sapling she had from her father. To visit an island where the trees are covered in volcanic ash.  For me, I picked three pieces that show her drifting style. The first is the tree kimono around the way bark on some trees looks, and the history of trees and the kimono in fashion see unusual trees in a forest all stitched together. Then we have a chapter around a pair of brothers and their relationship to the woods and trees as master carpenters, their view of when trees are living and when they need to be felled. The sort of knowledge built over a lifetime is evident in the way she watches them treat the trees and wood around them. Then a story about the Sugi Cedar that starts with her looking at a concrete tetrapod and ends with the shape and symbolic nature of the Sugi tree. In Japanese culture, the tree is believed to be among the oldest living trees in the world on certain islands.

Back when I lived in Nara I was lucky enough to hear a number of stories from the Nishioka brothers, both of whom were master carpenters, but the lesson that left the deepest impression on me – which they emphasized in all of their tales, at every possible opportunity – was the living nature of wood.

The wood the Nishioka brothers were referring to was not the kind in trees still standing, but rather wood as a material. These carpenters believed that, just as trees have their way of living, wood has its own life, too. They suggested that we call the period while the tree is standing its first life, and its time as a material its second. Imagining that timber is simply dead tree, they told me, betrays a lack of understanding. Theirs was truly a craftsman’s way of looking at things. I remember, once, I was speaking to the younger brother, and he told me not to focus purely on the life of wood, either, but to also think about, as he called it, ‘wood which has died “

The chapter Trees standing up , trees lying down

 

Now this is one of those books I love. If you are a fan of Wenders films, you will love this. It is a perfect book for his drifting, road-movie-style filmmaking. I can see why it may have been chosen as the book brought in the film. If you are a fan of nature writing, it will appeal, as it captures a distinctly Japanese view of trees and their connection not just to the writer but to Japanese society as a whole. Also, I think it will appeal to Sebald fans. I just loved her passion for the natural world, seeing how trees have impacted her life, and the trees she has seen throughout her life.  The book was published after her death. I will now need to find her novels.  Has anyone read any of them?

 

 

On the edge by Markus werner

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On the Edge by Markus Werner

Swiss fiction

Original title – Am Hang

Translator – Robert E Goodwin

Source – Personal copy

I don’t know about you, but you buy books over the years and think you have read one of the books from a writer to find out you hadn’t, so when you do finally get to them, you go, ” Why did it take so long to get to them. That is the case with Markus Werner. I brought Zundel’s exit in 2018. I was buying as many old DALKEY archive books as I could. I thought I had read this book back in 2018. I must have read 20 or so pages when it came, and thought I would get to it. But not so when the other day, when I happened to need a short book to read, I also had On the Edge by him, oh, and Cold Shoulder, and the recent frog in the throat that NYRB had brought out.  Werner was one of those who came to writing late.  He had been a teacher and was a huge fan of his fellow Swiss writer Max Frisch, but he didn’t get his first novel published till he was 40. He then wrote seven novels, all of which had won prizes.  This was his last Novel before he died.

Loos drank. I was amazed how much he could handle. He spoke with self-control, hardly ever raised the glass in toast, and sat like a rock.

He did, however, sweat a lot and wiped his gleaming scalp with a handkerchief from time to time. ‘You despise the world, don’t you?’ I asked. ‘With all my heart, he replied, without the least hesitation. Tm relieved, then, I said, which ruffled his composure a bit. He scratched his neck and searched all his pockets for the lighter which lay in front of him on the table. ‘You know, I said, ‘someone recently explained to me that hatred was the precondition of love. Loos turned red, and just as I was beginning to worry that he would reach for the cheese knife again, he gave a short burst of laughter followed by a fit of giggling that he had to fight to control. His laughter lightened my mood and released the cramped tension his stony earnestness had made me feel. I felt I could risk treading a little more boldly. I asked him whether he might not be one of those failed idealists, so notorious in his generation, who resent the world for ignoring their dreams. Wasn’t it perhaps easier to despise reality than to revise the wishful ideas he had of it as a youth

The two drink over the evening and the talk grabs you

This book is a great two-hander. The book is a series of meals over the Pentecost weekend in the Swiss Alps, as two men meet in a hotel. Clarin is the main character, and we are reading his account of this weekend. He is a divorce lawyer and has spent this weekend finishing a piece he has been working on for a long time about the ins and outs of divorce laws across the various cantons in Switzerland. So when he is met by an older, outspoken man who ends up spending a couple of evenings with him, Loos, this man is a widower, and the conversation shows how poles apart the two men are in their views. Loos a man that o loved his wife, loved being a husband and Clarin a single man that has had affairs over the years but due to his job views the world of marriage with much distain. ADD TO THIS loos smokes and is struggling with the modern world cell phones, cycling shorts and how the world is going. He is a man with many opinions, but who is he? Is he someone Clarins may have crossed before? Loos isn’t his real name it seems ?

Drops of rain were falling, but Loos seemed not to notice. He did pause, but I saw that he still had more to say. ‘Well, I said. ‘Well, he said, if we now add to the new form of overburdening that we ve already mentioned the even newer form, which consists first in our vain and panting efforts to slow the stormy tempo of development in science and technology and second in our ashen-faced realisation that all the knowledge and understanding we have acquired today will be yesterday’s snow tomorrow – then, I think, my claim of a psychological malaise of unprecedented proportions is not too outlandish. How will it proceed? Dare we hope for a revolution of the snails? What do you think? ‘I think it’s raining, I said, ‘and that we should move? “It is indeed raining, he said.

Later on the next night

I loved this so much, it reminds me of Pinter in a way, the two-handed way the book was told, these two men sat eating, drinking, and talking at opposite ends of the spectrum, about their views and values around not just marriage, but also love, women and the world in general. It is one of those books you just get drawn into, and wish would never end.  Who is Loo’s ? I do wonder if he was partly based on Frisch. I think he is the same type of character I have seen in Frisch’s fiction. with his more classical view of the world and old-fashioned yearns for a world now gone. This is a book about the male view of marriage, about two men with very different ideas, and about love and how you move through the world. It is one of those deep philosophical novels that leave the reader thinking long after finishing the book. It is sure to feature high on my books of the year list; it is the best book I have read in the first half of this year. Have you read Markus Werner at all ?

 

 

 

 

Shadow blog Internartional booker winner 2026

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Our shortlist

It is just before and for the tenth time since the old IFFP prize became part of the booker we have read and voted on the long list of books and came up with our own shortlist as we have for the last ten plus years. So we decided by a mix of voting and a quick chat this week about our winner this year and our as ever honourable mention books. After what with the old IFFP prize shadowing has been 15 years of shadowing reading the long list for each of those years. We feel this is our last with the booker international for a while we will be carrying on as a shadow jury but for a different prize we will announce that at a later date thou.

The shadow blog winner of the International booker 2026

We had a close run race but this was the vote favourite by a nose. In our discussion we felt it was the best written book on the shortlist showing the versatility of Olga Raven as a writer for me the sheer atmosphere of the book and the writing was stunning haunting and it captured the feel of the time.

Honourable mention

Now I must say for me this was my favourite just by a nose but we are a team and we felt that The wax child was the better written book. This book does leave you thinking what is real and what isn’t and is he the husband at the end of it.

My thoughts on this year

I feel this year long list was the most even book wise for a few years. No real gem of a stand out book unfortunately Schattenfroh which was that sort of book isn’t eligible for this year. It was a year of fair reads the few stand out books made our shortlist there wasn’t a book we all hated like there has been a few times. But I feel after 15 years I started the old IFFP shadow and have been involved for all bar one year and that year I did read the long list so that is well over 160 book over the last 15 years. The time is right for a change we love our conversations about books and the time is right for the group of us to change to a new prize from next year!! Just a short post from me I’m sure some of my fellow jurors will write longer post till next year !

Too Great a sky by Lilana Corobca

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Too Great a sky by Liliana Corobca

Moldovan fiction

Original title – Capătul drumului

Translator – Monica Cure

Source – Personal copy

I have been meaning to get to the seven-story releases in the UK. There have been a number of books they have brought out in the last few years that have caught my eye, especially two by this writer, Lilana Corobca, as she is put down as a Moldovan writer and sometimes as a Romanian, but for this post, I am putting her as Moldovan, as it is my first book from that country. She studied in Moldova and has since been heavily involved in a project on Soviet censorship and has written several books on it. She has also written several novels.  She previously published a novel in English, The Censor’s Notebook, which won the Oxford Weidenfeld Prize.  She has also had her books translated into a number of other languages.

The train sometimes slowed down and barely, barely kept going, like a cart being pulled by tired nags, and sometimes sped up, quickly, quickly, and flew like a rocket. Dazed by the perpetual movement of the wheels that continually rattled us, we were surprised that we didn’t become completely tongue-tied. When the train would stop close to human dwellings, the people would come out, theyd cross themselves at the sight of us and they’d bring us something out of the little they had. Usually they’d bring us water, well water, not river water. When we stopped next to a pond, we rushed out toward it, though we weren’t steady on our feet. We stuck our heads in the water, guzzled it, as if we were cattle. We couldn’t get enough, we splashed ourselves, washed ourselves, and cooled off, because who knew when wed have water again and how much longer it would be until the end of the road.

On the train ride to Kazakhstan

The book is told in three sections that cover an event in Romanian history during World War II in which the Soviets ordered thousands of Romanians to board trains and take a three-week journey across Russia to Kazakhstan. The book is seen through the eyes of eleven-year-old Ana as she and her family are loaded into an old boxcar in their village of Bucovina and then spend the next three weeks fighting off hunger, lack of facilities, and people dying. The dead are thrown off the train every time they stop. The desperation is met with stories and poems filling the air, keeping the horrors out of minds, but it also shows the community coming together in this collective horror through Her Young’s eyes.  The middle section captures the harsh world the group of incomers end up in a remote Kazakh country where the Romanians have no real belongings, so not only did it cost lives to get there, but then there is a harsh winter yet to face. The last part is told from an equally spirited young member of an ana family, her great granddaughter has been tasked with persuading the no old Ana to move to a nursing home, seeing the sight of her life looking back on those war years.

After my mother died, I went to my aunt so we could search for our Zenovie together. There were other mothers searching as we were, they’d all help each other, they’d exchange information, Sancira, finally, found the orphanage, she had been able to trace where the truck had gone, but finding a child then was harder than finding a needle in a haystack. On the lists and in the children’s documents, there wasn’t a single Bucovinian, everyone being divided into two nationalities: those with narrow eyes, Kazakhs; the others, Russians. All the boys were Ivanov or Petrov, with first names like Ivan, Kosta, Gena, Grisha, given at random, because no one cared what they were called back home, and the little children themselves couldn’t say what their names were, because they didn’t speak a word of Russian and, in any case, no one cared.

Their ages weren’t written down correctly either, just made up.

Many were skinny and seemed younger. When Sancira saw this, she was determined to look at all of them, so she could recognize her child’s face on her own. She went child by child, but she didn’t find hers.

Later on in the book recounting those events in the present day !

What Liliana Corobca has done is capture a small, unknown episode of the war. Taken it, and with Ana as the main character, she has caught a world I knew nothing about. But through Anas’ eyes, the three-week train ride is brutal, but in that way a child views the world. The events are seen, but the sheer horror of them isn’t there if that makes sense. It’s viewed by her young eyes as people disappear, thrown off along the way, then the horror of landing in a place where the locals hate you and then to be hit with the harshness of the winter, it’s just added to everything. It is later on in the book when she is at the end of her l,ife the events are brought into the full sight sas she recalls them for her great graddaughter. The book was inspired by the testimonies of those who rode the trains at the time. The book, in parts, also captures the power of faith and how they all still believed in god after all this had happened to them. Have you read any of her books or any other writers from Moldova ?

Outsider Everywhere by Mercedes Halfon

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Outsider Everywhere by Mercedes Halfon

Argentine Non-Fiction

Original title – Extranjero en todas partes: Los días argentinos de Witold Gombrowicz

Translator – Rahul Bery

Source – Subscription book

I have the fitrzcarradlo subscription, and one of the reasons I have it is the white books, their essays, and non-fiction works together. I love the breadth of the books they pick, but also the occasional odd little book like this, a book about a writer that is maybe not as well known as he should be a writer thaat spent a lot of his life in exile, a writer that maybe isn’t as well known in the english speaking worlkd but in both Poland and Latin America he is considered a important writer.  That writer is Witold Gombrowicz.  The Polish writer who escaped Nazi rule by heading to Buenos Aires in 1939, but unlike many exiles, he then spent more than twenty years in his adopted homeland.

On 21 August 1939, La Nación newspaper publishes an item with the title ‘New ship arrives bearing Polish flag’.

In it, the Argentinian journalist Pizarro Lastra interviews the three writers who came on board the luxury transatlantic liner. He writes: ‘Among the travellers who came on the Chrobry was … Witold Gombrowicz, a modern humourist, a man of great learning. He has just had a resounding success with a potboiler entitled Ferdydurke.’ Other pieces were published about the ship’s arrival, but this is the only one Gombrowicz mentions in Kronos.

He sees it as a first defeat. They call him a ‘humour-ist’, his novel a ‘potboiler’. Gombrowicz was already Gombrowicz when he arrived in Argentina. But over here in Argentina no one knew that.

His arrival in Argentine

The book opens with Gombrowicz arriving in August 1939, escaping the war. A group of Polish people has arrived in Argentina, including the young Witold Gombrowicz. He is a writer; his first novel, Ferdydurke, came out to much acclaim in Poland. What follows is how he tries to keep his head above the water in Argentina, he always struggles with the language but is drawn into the literary circles of the country, but as a gay man he is often an outsider as the title says. He gets little pieces of work from Europe. The book draws from those who knew him and his epic diary of the years he spent there.I did read and review his diary here when it came out in 2012. What is cpatured is the lit scene in Buenos Aires and how they viewed Gombrowicz, a writer who was full of opinions and also was a true one off and even this is seen by those that knew him; some like Piglia considered him an Argentine writer, he knew Borges, Piglia, and Pla, and many more of the leading figures in the Boom era. Burt, it also captures how he lived hand to mouth, with help from the very small Polish community there.

If Gombrowicz liked anything even more than he liked arguing, it was playing chess, which is a kind of argument through other means. During his time in Argentina, his main café was the Rex, which had a big salon and chess club on the first floor. Every afternoon, religiously, Gombrowicz shows up at this location between Avenida Corrientes and Calle Emeralda, less than 200 metres from the Obelisk, and stays until night. Emblematic moments of his life in Buenos Aires will take place there.

A good number of his most loyal friends come from that intellectual training ground, including fellow Pole and internationally renowned chess master Paulino Frydman, who founded the salon in 1941. Interestingly, he had come to Buenos Aires at the same time as Gombrowicz but on a different ship. They became very good friends.

HIs group is a mix of lit types , posh polish women and men

Now, to be honest, I read the diary many years ago and intend to read more by Gombrowicz.  But in the following 14 years, I have yet to return to him. I have two other books by him to read. I would also like to reread the diary, especially since I feel I will know more about the writer and the world he was talking about. The diary forms the backbone of this book. But there have also been several other projects related to Gombrowicz’s time in Argentina. Halfon also draws on other writers’ accounts of their interactions with Gombrowicz, which gives us an account of a man who is now, in a way, considered between the canons of Poland and Argentina as a great writer in both. even a modern writer like Cesar AIRA later on is quote about his love of Gombrowicz books talking about rereading all his books.  There was something called the Gombrowicz marathon in Buenos Aires, where great modern-day writers like Neumann and Kohan read a minute of his works. I love this type of book it reminded me of a writer i should know better in Gombrowicz. Have you read anything by Witold Gombrowicz

Bound to Violence by Yambo Ouologuem

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Bound to Violence by Yambo Ouologuem

Mailian fiction

Orignal title – Le devoir de violence

Translator Ralph Manheim

Source – Personal copy

Where to start, this is another book that is a cornerstone of African fiction from the Francophone world.  This book was a book that sparked so controversy when it came out, as there is certain passages that had come from a book by Graham Greene and another piece from the French writer Andre Schwarz-Bart but somewhere in the editing of the book it seems the quotation of these passages had disappeared this meant the book jhad vanished for almost fifty years infact it was another prize winning book this book had won the Prix Renadout when it came out. It was the Goncourt Prize winner, The most secret memory of men, a fictional version of what happened to Ouloguem after the plagiarism claim against his book and how he was treated, led to the republishing of the book as a Penguin Classic a book that captured 700 years of Malian history, but also the way Ouloguem felt his country men had become servility that had become engrained in the local pouplation after years of french rule.

Under these conditions an adulteress incurred pitiless pun-ishment: the very least that could happen to her was to be stripped bare, exposed with shackled ankles in the royal court-yard, and given a douche of pepper water to which – wallahi! -ants had been added. In certain cases (if the guilty woman was pregnant or had been delivered of a stillborn child) another punishment devised by Saif was administered. She was held with spread legs over a wood fire which singed her pubic hair.

On the other hand, a woman whose husband had been unfaithful could do nothing but take note of the fact, seek out her rival, and, having found her -hee-hee-hee! – insult her and thrash her.

The violence of the country under the Saifs

The book is a small epic: the first part deals with the Dogon region of Mali, but instead of Mali, it uses the fictional country of Nakem-Zuiko. What Ouologuem tries to show is Mali’s 700-year past through the various rises and falls of tribes, the Saifs’ rise, the initial encounters with white incomers and slave traders, and how brutal and twisted this history could be.  This is all a lead-up to the last section of the book, which follows the figure of Raymond Spartacus Kassoumi.  He is from a family of ex slaves, but has risen with an education, much studying and ended up going to France to Paris to study and serve in the war, and returns to his homeland, but then sees his future as nothing more than a puppet of the white leaders and French rule and way of running the country.

But it was too soon and too late. Smitten by Europe, a second shadow of himself, Raymond had already known Saif’s fevers.

The white man had crept into him and this white presence determined even the moves that he, a child of violence, would make against it. Despising Africa, he took giant strides to diminish the gulf that separated him from the splendours of white civilization. But a simultaneous grasp of twenty centuries of history, or of their residue, was still beyond his reach: where he should have discovered – may the Evil One be banished! – he accepted

Raymond is caught in between the french rulers and the Saifs

The book is a slicing open of the heart of Mali through the centires a sort of open heart surgery ion his country a warts and all tlook at the history the various ways people got by the violence and way he saw many olf his country men had just got used to tipping there hat of being part of the wider system and this is what we get with raymond with his french name but also his other name of Spartagus the leader of the slave uprising a man that seems like he could break the mould but then goes to France and becomes part of the cogs of the french regime on his return a man caught between those saifs that ruled the country and the french rulers of now neither is appealing this is part of his tryingt o break the vision of his countries past as an idylic place but more a world that has always struggled with the saifs and the tribes before the french rule a country of blood and violence from trafding slaves with the arabic world to then the french world it captures a warts and all pictue of the past. A powerful work that needed to be republished, thanks to Sarr’s book highlighting how long it had been out of print! Have you read this or the most secret memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr I reviewed it here 

Things Fall apart by Chinua Achebe

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Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Nigerian fiction

Source – Personal copy

I don’t know about you, but sometimes as a reader, you see a post on Instagram, it makes you change the reading plans you had for the coming month. That happened when I saw there was an African reading challenge this month. I do hate that sometimes African literature is lumped together. We don’t say, ” let’s have a European lit month or an asian month we tend to break it down to a single country. But that aside, it gave me a nudge to read a couple more books than I have been. I used to read a lot more literature from around Africa when the blog started, and i just think the last few years I haven’t read as much as I used to. In fact, talking about this month reminds me of Kinna and her wonderful blog and her love of the Ghanaian literature scene and the wider African lit scene, a much-missed corner of the blogging world. Anyway, my first book this month is a reread, and I picked it because I have the other books in Chinua Achebe’s African trilogy, but it seemed silly reading book two, which I hadn’t yet read, so I reread Things Fall Apart, one of the cornerstones of the first wave of African novels in post-colonial times.

Okonkwo did not have the start in life which many young men usually had. He did not inherit a barn from his father. There was no barn to inherit. The story was told in Umuofia of how his father, Unoka, had gone to consult the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves to find out why he always had a miserable harvest.

The Oracle was called Agbala, and people came from far and near to consult it. They came when misfortune dogged their steps or when they had a dispute with their neighbors. They came to discover what the future held for them or to consult the spirits of their departed fathers.

A world of Oracles and mystic views of the future a tradtional IGBO way of life

In fact, if any book captures the post-colonial struggles, it is this book it is from the tales Achebe was told as a child by his parents as part of the Igbo oral tradition of storytelling that led to the seed of this book, a story of one man and the struggle of the traditional Igbo world and the coming of Christianity in the country.  Okonkow is the leader of his clan a man that is a larger than life figure a champion wrestler a sort of African Muhamded ali I had in y my mind both times I read the book. But he becomes a man haunted by events that happened in his life around a child he treated like a son, and then his gun blows up, and they are exiled.  This then leads him to a clash with the church, as the time he has spent in exile after his gun blew up and killed the son of a rival leader, leading to the exile.  This has seen the village change as the missionaries have started to make inroads, leading to more conflict as his world is changing and falling apart.

Ogbuefi Ezeudu, who was the oldest man in the village, was telling two other men who came to visit him that the punishment for breaking the Peace of Ani had become very mild in their clan.

‘It has not always been so,’ he said. ‘My father told me that he had been told that in the past a man who broke the peace was dragged on the ground through the village until he died. But after a while this custom was stopped because it spoiled the peace which it was meant to preserve.’

‘Somebody told me yesterday,’ said one of the younger men, ‘that in some clans it is an abomination for a man to die during the Week of Peace.’ It is indeed true,

, said Ogbuefi Ezeudu. “They have that custom in Obodoani. If a man dies at this time he is not buried but cast into the Evil Forest. It is a bad custom which these people observe because they lack understanding. They throw away large numbers of men and women without burial. And what is the result? Their clan is full of the evil spirits of these unburied dead, hungry to do harm to the living.’

Before the church  crept in to his world the way of life was different

I loved this book when I read it. It captures the IGBO tribe as it was when he grew up, a tribe that, like many, saw changes with the white man’s arrival. It also had for me a great character in Okokow a man that is larger than life a figure that jumps of the pages of this book. You sense he is part of a lot of the stories the young Achebe heard from his parents, but then fleshed out to make him not just a strong leader but also a flawed man with his own demons and ghosts, as you read how his world is changed as he is there, but after he comes back from exile. I said this is one of the cornerstones of early post-colonial Nigerian fiction. Achebe was a champion and editor of the African Writer Series, as well. For me, it is books like this, the African Writer Series, that did so well, bringing to a wider world voices like Achebe. I wish I had read more of his books over the years, but I will now read the other books in this trilogy and the couple of other books I have by him. Have you read this book? How did it affect you?

 

 

Ilaria or the Conquest of Disobedience by Gabriella Zalapi

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Ilaria or the Conquest of Disobedience by Gabriella Zalapi

Swiss Fiction

Original title – Ilaria ou la conquête de la désobéissance

Translator – Adrianna Hunter

Source – Subscription book

I must admit, Linden Editions brought out one of my favourite books last year, In Late Summer, which, like this book, was, in a way, a child’s view of the world.  This book is by the Swiss-Italian Visual Artist. Her artwork is a mix of images and Family memories, it says. I can see this in the book. This is her second novel and is set in a time long gone, really, as it is set in the 80s in Italy, and what happens in the book would be much harder to do now. But it is also a book that captures divorce well from the child’s point of View. I am from a family where my parents divorced.  In fact, I was maybe a year or so older than Ilaria when this happened to me.

Dad and I play a game: inventing our home and decorating it. First of all, it’s gonna be big. There’ll be loads of windows. And a big yard with a pond full of fish. Me and Ana will have separate bedrooms. Mine will be green and I’ll have the space to lay out my collection of rocks. Dad, promise you’ll make me a beautiful set of shelves. And I’ll put up a big poster of Nadia Comăneci, okay? Okay.

There’ll be masses of cupboards in the kitchen and Mom can put all her food processors in them. Dad’s making shelves for her too. She never has enough room for her recipe books. We’ll buy a beautiful gas stove. And there’ll be an attic too. Yes. We’ll put all the old furniture there.

It takes up too much room, don’t you think? You’re right.

And the walls of the living room will be really, really big.

Mom will be able to hang all her pictures. I’1l make the holes with my drill, I promise. And Ana can finally have the tortoise she’s always wanted.

Early on they have fun but it turns over time

This book sees what happens when Ilaria’s father picks her up from school one day, which he does most days, and he usually drops the young girl off with her mother, Ana. But the parents are in the middle of a divorce and her father is desperate man trying to patch things up and his plan is well is there a plan I often wondered the book is told from Ilaria pouint of view so she is both slighttly unreliable as the narrator but also has that childlike way of seeing her fasther as her father not a man that has taken her on the run and that is what he has done he picked her up in Switzerland and then head not to drop her off but toward Turin and tells her to tell her when she ses a phone box this is a reccurring event in the book the father calling the mother trying to win =her back as he has taken their daughter. There is a sense even through Ilaria’s eyes that this may be something he had done on the spur of the moment, and as we drift through a collection of friends and people they meet along the way.  We see her father telling her what her mother has supposedly said, as what really is going on slowly dawns on his daughter over the coming days, from the sofa to hotels, from car to car across Italy.

He’s jumpy

He’s angry

He’s going to get nasty.

In the last few weeks Dad’s been getting wound up over the tiniest things. He says he can’t stand winter, he can’t stand the lack oflight. Sometimes he’s so angry that I can imagine pétanque balls being thrown around my head. I shudder.

And block my ears.

The other day he called me Mom’s name, Antonia.

I take my time before I open my mouth now. I start my sen-tence, watch him, and, if I see the least sign of irritation, I stop.

Answer me when I’m talking to you.

I dither.

Her Observations of her father before he took her

This is a book that has a thriller, like running to the narrative as we view this happening through the eyes of eight-year-old Ilaria, sitting next to her father as he heads across Italy on the side roads, trying to win his wife back and not get caught for taking his daughter at the same time. From call to call as they head place to place as her father tells her what her mother is supposedly saying, she sees her mother, Ana and father in her mind and slowly sees something isn’t right with her father. I loved the way we see all this through her eyes as a reader. I kept filling in the gaps of her observations of the situation from an outsider’s view. But then I know how hard divorce is on kids and parents. I remember how my mother and father were about my brother and me. I also think this is an event that might not happen as easily nowadays. If you like unreliable child narrators and road movies, this is the book for you. It is a hell of a ride alongside young Ilaria and her father. I must admit this is my book of the year so far.

April showers of books the catch up

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  1. Surgical ward 9 by Peyami Safa
  2. They by Helle Helle 
  3. Every Day I read by Hwang Bo-Reum
  4. Diary of a Mad Old Man by Junichirō Tanizaki
  5. The Thief and the dog by Naguib Mahfouz
  6. Betty by Georges Simenon 
  7. One Hand Clapping by Anthony Burgess 

I slowed down last month. Had a number of days off but managed 7 reviews, two new publishers with Thousand Horsemne Press, and the classic Surgical Ward 9, which captured a young man’s life in hospital as he struggled with Bone cancer. Then, after a long gap, the second book by Helle Helle came from Akoya. In fact, this also saw a hospital as part of the story. This time, it is a daughter looking after a sick mother. Then a book about Reading from Korea, a mad old man again in the hospital for part of the book.  A man goes out for revenge after he is released from prison, tries to get revenge on those that put him there, from a Nobel winner in Naguib Mahfouz, then a twisty dark tale from Georges Simenon for Club 1961 and then a lesser-known book from Anthony Burgess about a couple winning a lot of money on a quiz show with really hard literature questions.

Books of the month

iI I picked two books this month, both dealing with ill health. The first is from the point of view of a young man in a hospital falling for a slightly older girl who captures his eye as he struggles with his condition. Then a daughter has her life turned upside down when her mother is diagnosed with cancer, and the life they had is flipped on its head. Told in HELLE helle sparse style, it’s like the Lego does what it needs to, you know what it is and needs no more than she has written.

Non-book events

Well it was Record store day another early start and a bag full of recordss but a while after two records really stand out the first is a full live show by Adrianne lenker fragile voice is at its most vunerable in this album then a record I hadn’t planned to get until the actual day Tanita Tikaram acoustic is just great her voice is still as erie and unusal as it was thirty plus year ago. We had a day in York last weekend, after Amanda had surgery this month, we needed a day out together. Yesterday we started watching the Apple series Widows Bay, a comedy-horror series with a slice of Stephen King, set on an island where the islanders think they are cursed in New England.

Month Ahead

I have seen on Instagram that there is an African reading month next month, and I will read a couple of books for this month, then I have long Admired how Simon at stuck in a book manages to review a Book a day every May, I have tried to do this a few times and failed so as my own challenge I have 14 days off this month including today I would like to publish 15-20 reviews next month I have a number of read and unreviewed books on the to be reviewed pile and a number of short books at hand to read. It is an idea for the month; it may help me get back to a blogging routine which disappeared last month. I am of the mind these days that I like the idea of doing something if I do it well and good, but it is the trying that often makes the thing worthwhile. What are your plans for Next Month?