Month: June 2026

Night Train by Xu Zechen

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Night Train by Xu Zechen

Chinese fiction

Original title – 《夜火车》Night Train

Translator – Jeremy Tiang

Source – Review copy

One of the publishers i first learnt about when I started this blog was Two lines press they are based in US they started in 2013 which is a few years after I started this blog and they are a press I have got books from when I found them as they have mainly published in the US but they are now publishing some of the books in the Uk as well which is great I was lucky to have been sent a few ttitles they have brought out in the Uk this is the first one I decided to read as it appealed .I am always searching for a Chinese novel that captures modern China, the China of huge megacities and a country that in some ways is very tech-savvy. Now this isn’t that book but Xu Zechen is a highly regarded writer and has been writing for twenty years. This book was his third novel, published in 2008; he is also the editor of the People Literature magazine and was on a list of the best writers under 41 a few years ago.

Having puked, Munian feels perfectly sober again.

Xiaoyi is an open book: Jin Xiaoyi, male, Han Chinese, thirty-five, unmarried, four previous live-in girlfriends though the good times never lasted long. Hasn’t had sex in more than a year and he’s pretty much forgotten what it feels like. Painter, mostly in oils. Taught at an art institute in Nanjing, where he staged a performance piece that irretrievably upset his bosses; a year ago, he voluntarily accepted a job teaching third-rate students in this small town. He stands by his performance piece, it was very meaningful, very humanist. He’d felt unattractive women were discriminated against at the university, so he rented the student rec center and threw a party. At the door, he charged the pretty girls while the less attractive ones got a blooming rose and free admission. For one night the tables were turned. Unfortunately, that’s not how the school saw it. He was told hed mortified the less-beautiful female comrades, and the party was shut down early.

A neighbour i did wonder if this artist was based on someone ?

The book is about Munian, a man from a poor family, who has worked as a gardener at the university and, over time, has studied and worked to the point where he can become a graduate and then pursue postgraduate studies. But he has set his mind on travelling out of his small city by train and, in particular, a night train. The night train is a Motif through out the book it is almost as thou they lead to.  Brighter Future, or do they? But when his father refuses to give him the money for this short trip, he comes up with a plan, and this is the point that pivots the novel. He then pretends he is on the run from killing someone; he goes and tells his father. He knows his father has some money that could be used for the trip his father had previously said no to, but when faced with the possibility that his son could be arrested, he gives him the money. But the pivot happens when he returns, and his father told the police what he said he did . What happens when you say you killed someone and you didn’t? It has a domino effect on his life and his studies; his life pivots from this one idea. It shows how one event can change a life, the perception of that person by others, and maybe even lead to the thought that he said he did?

On Friday, Munian gets off work early and goes to the library. Nothing to do with classical literature this time, just trains. During work, he mentioned the freight train launch to Fossil Xu, who didn’t seem surprised. “This ought to have happened long ago,” he said. “If this town had been connected to a rail line ten years ago, the whole place would be completely different. Trains are what allow economies to grow and talent to flow.” Munian has never really thought about this-to him, trains are just a manifestation of his wanderlust. “Think about it,” said Fossil Xu. “You have to see the overall picture.”This made sense to Munian, so here he is in the library.

I say trains and tain trips are a recurring them in the book

I enjoyed the way the story pivoted on that one moment, but what I found interesting was that, yes, Munian suffered for it, yet he still had a job through one of his professors. It captures a life in Limbo what happens when people lose trust. Added to this is the mix of characters we get, from the chaotic people in his dorm. There is a sense of them all being caught in a trap of studies, their world of studying; hence, when he has the train to escape this, it appeals even for a few days. Then to those he meets as he starts to fall through the cracks in society. It captures a man trying to get ahead in his life, caught by a single lie and the knock-on effect of that, but also captures the hamster wheel of studying; maybe the train is the only escape in this world a train to the day!  Do you have a favourite Modern Chinese novel ?

 

 

The Paper House by Carlos Maria Dominguez

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The Paper House by Carlos Maria Dominguez

Argentine fiction

Original Title – La casa de papel

Translator -Nick Caistor

Source – Review copy

I was pleased to see this fun novella reissued by Thousand Horsemen. As it was the second book I reviewed from Argentina back in 2010, it will now be the 58th book and the first reread I have done for Argentina, in fact only the second reread I have done for Argentina, over the years. But this is one of those novellas that, firstly, can be read in an evening. But it is also an ode to books themselves, as a single book is the main character in the book itself, and that is an old copy of Conrad’s The Shadow Line that was sent to a man who has since died.  Since I first reviewed the book, Carlos is still living in Uruguay; he is more of a critic than a novelist.  He writes for two papers in Uruguay as well as El Pais; he has also written a biography of Juan Carlos Onetti. Nick Caistor is still translating many wonderful books.

It was indeed a book, but not of the kind I had been expecting. No sooner had I opened the package than I felt an instinctive nervousness. I went to the office door, closed it, and returned to the broken-spined old copy of The Shadow-Line. I was aware of the thesis Bluma was writing on Joseph Conrad. But the extraordinary thing was that there was a filthy crust on its front and back covers. There was a film of cement particles on the page edges that left a fine dust on the surface of the polished desk.

I took out a handkerchief and to my astonishment picked up a small piece of grit. There was no doubt it was Portland cement, the remains of a mortar that must have been stuck more firmly to the book before someone had made a determined attempt to remove it.

The rather battered Shadow line in the parcel !

Now our book is narrated by the person who has taken over Bluma Lennon’s job as a professor of Literature, after she was struck by a car whilst reading Dickson. The discovery of a parcel from Uruguay containing a rather battered copy of Joseph Conrad’s Shadow Line.  This sends our narrator on a trip to Uruguay.  To find Carlos Bruna, the man that had sent the book. to the now dead Bluma. This leads our narrator to find a man who has disappeared as well, but who was a mad book collector in the process of building his own huge library in a remote part of Uruguay.  Leads our narrator into a world of bibliophiles, books, and the histories of the books they have and their readers. It is a sort of mystery, a love of books, and an obvious love of Uruguay.

He smiled a conspiratorial smile I willingly shared.
‘But unfortunately,’ he went on, ‘how many hours a day can I devote to reading? At most four or five. I work from eight o’clock to five in a position of some responsi-bility. But all the time I’m longing to be back here. In my cave, if you’ll pardon the expression, where I can spend a few happy hours until ten o’clock, when I usually go upstairs for supper.
I’m not interested in first editions. What I want is to have the book within reach in the best possible condition, otherwise I become anxious. These cases you can see are made from lapacho, a wood that has no cracks that insects can penetrate; I ordered the shelves especially: they are ten hardwood boards stuck together with an insect-repel-lent glue, and I put glass fronts on them because books obviously accumulate dust. From time to time, though, I have them fumigated just in case, because you can never be too sure. Silverfish drove Brauer mad.’
‘Did he keep his books in glass cases?’ I asked,

One of the many book collectors they meet trying to find out who carlos Brauer was

I see some people find this book annoying but a think it is a book that is sparse nature of the book with the gaps in the book are maybe meant be there they are alomost like gaps for the reader to fill. I said it was fable-like in my first review; I still think that it is a clever twist on the detective tale, centred on a dead woman, a missing man, and a book that connects them, but also about what books bring to us and how obsession works. I hadn’t reread Shadow Line when I first reviewed the book, but this time I got my edition and am slowly reading it, and it may have just a connection of the line between being a boy and a man; maybe the shadow line here is between being a book lover and a complete bibliophile obsessive. It is a book about books, readers, bibliophiles, and what happens when that goes over the edge: a woman killed reading Emily Dickinson rather than watching the road and a man who had built a mad library that has disappeared as well. I loved this more the second time around. I think reading 1500 books over the years has made me connect more with the characters. Do you have a favourite book that has books as part of the story in it?

What remains by Brais Lamela

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What remains by Brais Lamela

Spanish Galician fiction

Original title – Ninguén queda

Translator – Jacob Rogers

Source – Personal Copy

I have read a few books from Galicia over the years, one of the regions of Spain that has a distinct identity and history. The book is written by one of the region’s rising stars, Brais Lamela. He is considered one of the best writers under 40 and has won a prize for being one of the best writers under 40; this book, his debut novel, was also on EL País’ books of the year when it came out. The book sort of mirrors the writer’s own life, as the narrator is a man studying in New York and from Galicia himself, like Brais, who is studying at Yale. The book is set around a piece of history that involved Franco trying to modernise the country, and this involved relocating a group of Farmers from the remote valleys that Franco had ordered to be filled and made into Dams, so they were forced to move to the Terra Cha, the farming land in the Galicia region, but as incomers torn from their homes.

It’s not the first time I’ve found a reference to a trip of the sort. When I first started researching the U.S. government’s aid to the Franco dictatorship, I stumbled upon the story of some hydraulic engineers from the University of California, Berkeley, who had developed a new system for pumping underground water in the desert flats of Southern California, and travelled to a few colonial settlements in southern Spain to install it.

Thanks to their help, the dictatorship’s engineers were able to penetrate the depths of the earth and extend their control to the world of underground channels. I hadn’t found much about their trip, but I’d been left with an idea that those connections might be the most useful material for my thesis, revealing the inconspicuous flow of information between American capitalist institutions and Franco’s dictatorship, like synapses of a vast and terrible nervous system.

The narrator discovers the past

The novel is framed as the student in New York trying to look back at the events of the Franco era; when he comes across this mass relocation from the hills to the plains of grassland in Galicia, as they are now expect to be dairy farmers, the story is further framed when the narrator finmds the story of a woman that had disappeared around the time all this had happened. The second half of the book sees our narrator revisiting the places he had looked at in the first half as he recounts what happened to those who stayed in the mountains; now the remains of the village are a hippie commune. To the dairylands of the TERRA CHA, how the people lived on from those still living, and how it was all for show at times. It captures one man’s look into the past, how it touches the present, and how often history repeats.

I stop the recording, realizing that the story I was looking for had been there all along. It hadn’t caught my attention at the time, one more story in the litany of tragedies the colonists had faced. I’d been distracted by the anecdote about Franco (which I’d heard in other recordings, though some mentioned a different government figure). Now everything seems to make sense, and the anonymous figures acquire names: the important visitors’ were almost certainly Tannenbaum and his team, and the expelled woman was the ill-fated Leonita, who in a matter of days found herself not just widowed but homeless.

Talking to thiose that were there and How they made it look different when Franco appeared

This is one of those books that is hard to pigeonhole; it is a novel but also a memoir a thesis about the times, a look at the Franco Regime and the dark past it meant for those forcibly exiled due to him wanting Dams built for Hydro power as I said in the last passage It is also a sign of how history can repaet how many more Dams have been built around the world by regimes. I was reading this and thinking of all the people who were relocated when China built the Three Gorges Dam; over a million people were displaced to make way for the dam.  This book is a clever twist on a piece of history with the framing of looking through the archives this is part of Brais Lamela own studies is into archives one can see how pieces of history being the seed for this clever story of exiles and one woman who dosappeared it has it all the sense of belonging, getting lost on the turbulance of all this the aftermath years later when our narrator returns to the places in the first half of the book! I think this is one of those gems that has gone under the radar. A must for fans of writers like Sebald or Luiselli in particular, as they both live in New York, and this being a book that captures both the old and the new world, another book I was most reminded of was Bilbao- New York- Bilbao, another multi-layered novel of diaries, memories, place, folklore and time ab Basque work that covered bith sides of the atlantic as well ! Do you have a favourite book from Galicia?

 

Nothing Grows by Moonlight by Toborg Nedreaas

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Nothing Grows by Moonlight by Torborg Nedreaas

Norwegian fiction

Original title – Av måneskinn gror det ingenting

Translator – Bibba Lee

Source – Personal copy

There is a wave of books being published in the last few years that capture extraordinary female voices from across Europe as we try to fill in the gaps that have been overlooked, from Tore Ditlevsen to Natalia Ginzburg, to name two. I had seen this book being mentioned as coming back out; it had come out in the late 80s but was overdue for a reissue and is from a prize-winning and controversial writer when it was published, with its look at back-street abortions and how women had to go to these people to avoid children.  She was also a writer who focused on working-class voices in her literature and was a lifelong communist; she asks us to consider what we would do in the main character’s life and what options we would have.

“This must be god-awful boring to you. Well, I assume you’re telling the truth. Love, well. There should be no name for it.

Because it is… well, it’s not something you can put a name on.

Some of the murkiness that lives its bacterialike existence in a young girl’s fantasy is mixed up in it. No, I’m lying. The murkiness has more profound causes, of course. I’ll leave that to psychoanalysts to mess with. But then a man arrives, a real live man, and he’s been there the whole time. Some are stuck on movie stars during that period, some on sports idols, but those of us who are basically faithful continue to build on our childhood infatuation. Caress it maybe, nourish and cultivate and all the stuff we do to explain the facts. All right by me.

she was 15 when she started her relationship with Johannes

The book is framed by a man meeting and taking pity on a woman at a train station, then taking her home. The book is him looking back on this extraordinary evening and the nameless woman whose path he crossed that evening. The book is the story of this woman’s life. She is a working-class woman who has desires, but when she meets an older man, when she is just 15, she starts a sexual relationship with the older man. He, Johannes, is a school master; he is her lover on and off in this affair for the next twenty years, as it seems he has her at his beck and call. This also affects her everyday life, as all this happens in the small mining town they live in. So when she falls pregnant for the first time, we see her description of visiting a backstreet abortionist; as the years move on later in the book, she performs this herself. This is a tale of a woman who had sexual desire but is caught up by what now would be seen as a predatory male figure. all over the course of one evening, this life is spilt out to this man and us as the reader.

‘Up there where we live. It’s different. Maybe it’s the same other places too, but up at The Mine and in our town especially you have to be like everyone else. You can’t hurt, not any worse than others. You can’t have fun; you can’t show you’re having fun, at any rate. Yes, it’s worse than anything, showing you’re happy. And above all you must never be different than you normally are; they can’t take any surprises from anyone. Take, for example, a girl who never goes dancing, who isn’t interested in kissing the boys. A girl who gets paler and more silent and ugly and hollow-eyed every day, a girl who goes to church and cries during the singing of psalms.

‘She can’t suddenly one day go to the youth centre and start dancing, laughing, and taking a swig with the boys behind the barn the way the other girls do. There would be an earthquake at The Mine and down in town.

The small town she lives in shuns her after the affair and the way she lives her life !!

The voice of the narrator in this book captures her life as she pours out to this man, over the course of one night, twenty years of her life. Visiting a back-street abortionist reminded me of scenes from the film Vera Drake about a woman who was a back-street abortionist in the UK. I was also reminded of the kitchen-sink dramas of the sixties; here, this is a sort of anti-Taste of Honey: the woman who chose her life. It makes you question the society at the time; it shocked the country when it came out with its graphic descriptions, especially when she =uses kiniting needles to do an abortion herself. But it is meant to make you question it all; that is the point: this woman is a sort of everywoman; how many women have faced the decisions she made? nameless, but everyone in a way? What also struck me is how much, within the US, certain states are now taking back years of women’s rights to decide about their own lives; how much more poignant this book is now than even ten years ago! A powerful tale that captures human suffering and a broken woman so well .

 

 

 

Bait by Eugenia Ladra

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Bait by Eugenia Ladra

Uruguayan Fiction

Original title – Carnada

Translator – Miriam Tobin

Source – Review copy

I was lucky to have been sent this book from Daunt Books, and I was excited, as I have only read three other books from Uruguay over the years. I’m always looking to expand the scope of books from various countries on the blog, and this debut novel struck me as a perfect choice. It is always great to highlight new talent; the three previous writers I have featured from Uruguay have all been fairly well established.  This is a debut novel from a rising new writer that has been listed and won prizes elsewhere. It seems it is set in the small town the writer grew up in, a fishing village that has since become a port for huge container ships. A town full of pagan like ideas and macho idealsas a summer sun heats things up.

It was an afternoon at the beginning of that summer.

The heat started to relent and gradually Paso Chico ceased to be the deserted land it became after lunch, when the sun beat down brutally and not even the insects could rouse themselves out of their hiding places. People surfaced from their siestas, aired out their musty homes and joined the crowd that had gathered outside, partly to scope out what was going on, and also to get some air now the cool had descended, to see if they could refresh their sluggish bodies and dispel all that humidity.

A town on the point of boiling over in the heat

 

The book focuses on Marga, who is turning thirteen and becoming a young woman.  But in the small town of Paso Chico, she is shunned by those in the town.  This is one of those towns where time hasn’t quite caught up; traditions live on, from carrying a figure of the Mother Mary from house to house. It reminds me of the rural towns in Italy where things like this still happen.  Add to this that when she was born, Marga’s mother died, and the town had gone from drought to flooding, and this poor girl is one of those people who are seen but not seen, almost like a ghost to all in the village.  So, for her, when a ship arrives and a mysterious man, Recio, appears in this small town of stray dogs and sleepy bars full of men slowly getting drunk.  A place of traditional values in the heat of the summer.  This is a perfect mix for something to happen, especially when he captures the eye of this young marga. Especially as, like her, he has set the town twittering about who he is and what will happen if he stays. This in turn sets off a chain of events that blend violence, fear, and a town caught up in its own superstitions.

That same night Recio turned in early, not to follow the rules, but because he was in need of the sleep hed missed out on during his late nights at the bar. It was only at noon the next day, when Justa, Olga and Marga were having lunch as they did most days, their eyes engrossed in the soap opera, that the boy appeared. He wandered out of his room with one hand rubbing the sleep out of his eyes while the other covered his cock standing at half-mast from having just woken up. He dashed quickly to the bathroom and before disappearing behind the door, polite boy that he was, greeted the three women with a nod of his head, as if seeing them in the street at a distance.

Recio and Magra are like to ends of a newtons cradle each havong a knock on effect when they see each other

 

This is one of those books that female Latin American writers are doing so well.  The simmering undercurrent of male violence in a male-dominated world is captured here.  But also that mix of almost pagan-like superstitions and that sort of strong Catholic Christian beliefs, where both have become intertwined, so a change in weather or someone appearing out of the blue is seen as a curse or a foreboding that something is going to happen. It captures the chaos this can bring to a young girl on the cusp of being a young woman. It has a mix of Graham Greene’s Power and Glory, Fernando Melchor’s  Hurricane Season, and a nod to Juan Carlos Onetti with the construction of a fictional town on the cusp of the River Plate, like his Santa Maria, a dark, brooding place alongside the river.  It is a tale of coming of age, of not being wanted, and of the dark place that can lead one to. In a town full of men, a young girl becomes a woman in a masculine world. Do you have a favourite book from Uruguay?

 

10 TBR books of Summer

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Annabel, on her blog, is doing a 20-book TBR for the summer. I would struggle to pick and stick to 20 boks over the next three months. I am just not that sort of reader, so I had a look through my endless piles of TBR books. I buy books all the time as part of my one-day super grand library; well, that’s what I tell myself. So maybe it is time to do a few TBR challenges.

My choices are –

I read this last year but didn’t review it, and I want to read more of Montaigne’s work other than the couple of essays I have read over the years. plus, it has summer in the title

A woman gets over her relationship falling apart in the summer one of the few Elena Ferrante books I haven’t read.

I don’t know much about this, but it is by Christopher Maclehose, Mountain Leopard Press. I trust his judgment on books. It is a road trip in Patagonia

From Seagull Books, Kite is a book that walks the line between fiction and memoir: a relationship spanning over twenty years between two men from the Egyptian-Lebanese group is seen as one looks east, the other looks west.

A variation on Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. I will watch Beckett and then read this; it is a short piece in a trilingual edition here with the French and German versions.Another from Seagull books

Another summer-connected title follows a teenager as he is caught up in events as his world spirals out of control on the last days of his holiday.

One of those books I was reading, put to one side and never got back to, is a spin-off of the first part of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, set in the modern day, a prose poem. Plus I spent a couple of nice summers near the Rhine when I was younger.

A relationship is caught as they never quite get there, but the tension of nearly being together from Balzac. I enjoyed the last book I read by him.

 

Pushkin’s verse novel has been on my TBR a while, and I keep thinking I need to read more russian works.

Last I thoubng to throw in a book from a new country a book from Nepa that I have had for a good while.

There is a binbgo card for this event here. I think these books could tick a few boxes.

Have you joined this challenge at all ?

 

 

 

May 26 round up

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  1. Ilaria or the Conquest of Disobedience by Gabriella Zalapi
  2. Things fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
  3. Bound to Violence by Yambo Ouologuem
  4. Outsider Everywhere  BY Mercedes Halfon
  5. Too great a sky by Lilana Corobca 
  6. On the Edge by Markus Werner
  7. Tree by Aya Koda
  8. Monique Escapes by Édouard Louis

It was a quieter month than I had wanted, but I managed 8 books. I started with a young girl on the run with her father driving through Italy, then a clash of the African tribal world and the Western world in an African classic.  Then another classic from Mali, rediscovered after it was used in part in the Prix Goncourt winner The Most Secret Memory of Men, which was inspired by Bound to Violence.  Then a look at the great Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz. Then a train journey in World War II and then living in exile. Then two men talk about marriage, love and divorce; who is the older man ? Then, a collection of stories about trees and the writer’s interactions with them. Then Edouard Louis’s mother finally escapes another abusive relationship and finds peace at last.

Book of the month

Book cover: 'On the Edge' — A Novel by Markus Werner, being held by a hand over a patterned surface

It was a hard pick; there was a dud book this month, but this book was a real favourite and one I will be thinking about for a few evenings, especially the interaction between the two main characters. It just drew me in?

Non book things

Amanda and I watched the end of the series The Last Day of Ptolemy Grey with Samuel L. Jackson as a man who has taken an experimental drug to reverse dementia for a short time; not just that, but to make him remember all his life what was the treasure he had found as a kid and who killed his nephew are the two main threads. Music-wise, I got the recent Adlous Harding Album, Train on the Island; I still love lots of what 4ad brings out on their record label.

Next month

I have a few TBR books for the TBR of summer challenge; a post later this week about that.  Other than that, I have a couple of books from Two Lines Press to read, and I can’t wait to get the latest book from Dasa Drndric in Translation.. Lots of options I am off for two weeks now so hope catch up on some reading.