Month: July 2026

Blackout by Yann Chateigné Tytelman

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Blackout by Yann Chateigné Tytelmann

Belgian memoir

Translator – Clem Clement

Source – Subscription book

I have a lot of book subscriptions.  Living in a small town in Derbyshire, I know the only way to make sure I can read the books I want is to take one out for Les Fugitives.  I reviewed a number of the early books but have lost track of them, so when I saw they had a subscription, I was interested.  They also let me pick three of the books.  Naturally, I went for the ones that appealed to me as a reader, and of the three I got, this book was the one I was most excited about, as it is one of those books that, in many ways, flies above my head as a reader.  I am not a huge expert on art or on people like John Cage; the reference points in Yann’s world are different to mine.  But it was the nature of the book, a letter of sorts to a father lost after his death, those unsaid moments, that space, that silence, and all that is in this book.  I know that space, that silence, when my own mother died.

In Old French, the verb silencer means to reduce to silence. This word resonates with my own silence.

I imagined that it could have another meaning: to make everything silent, to make yourself silent, to become transparent, and to watch the world turning around you. To create a space, a retreat. My world existed at that precise point, in the dissonance of the space between those two definitions. It is not silence itself which interests me, but its incarnations, its powers – the way it acts in our lives, gaining in strength without our ever being able to grasp it, like a black hole.

The book has a lot about silence but more than just silence!

The book is one of those books that you can tell is a mind wandering, a mind thinking of his father’s death, and this all happens in the middle of the COVID lockdown, so it starts about that, about his father; this is to his father, but then wanders into what is happening: silence, the silence of music from John Cage to Ambient music.  I have listened to some of the ambient music he talks about; Eno.  The art from the wave pictures of Vija Celmins, I of course looked at these pictures still pictures of the ocean, but not the foaming sea of the likes of Turner; this is a still ocean of shimmering waters.  Through the white paintings of Rauschenberg, I did know that the texture of the paint is the main thing.  I know it’s white, but the width isn’t even; it’s textured. Then the one piece of art he mentioned I’d love to see was Charles Ray Inkbox, a huge open-top black box filled with ink that looks like a box except it has no top, so the ink is on top and the ink has a life of its own.  One would imagine that, in the various rooms it has been in, the ink would be different.  I was reminded of the Beuys pieces I have seen over the years.

In 1968, Vija Celmins began drawing oceans. In a multitude of hues on the spectrum from black to white, taking in every shade of grey, these works reproduce close-up views of the wave-ruffled surface of the sea. This series, which is still in progress, unfolds in minuscule variations with constant similarities and differences, centred on a single idea, on the same image. I imagine this series to be infinite.

The waves painting I’d also love see closer up to get the scale of them.

I loved this.  I do like books that will have me thinking for years after and want to reread, and this is one of those books.  It has grief, loss, a father who was very different from his son- or was he a labourer, but he also was a painter?  A son with his own young son in lockdown, thinking about all this, and with his life in art and music, he uses them to think about the past and the present, about what it means to him and the world he is in.  I said this is above my head.  I like art and music, but I am not.  I am a fan of both, but it was eye-opening to learn, see, and listen, too. This is a book that can be read in an evening, even with a lot of googling of the references within it. One for ART fans: if you like the book Fireflies by Luis Sagasti, you will like this book as well.  Do you have a favourite book that has art at its heart?

The Assault by Harry Mulisch

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The Assault by Harry Mulisch

Dutch ficition

Original title – De Aanslag

Translator – Claire Nicolas White

Source – Personal copy

In the last year, I found two old books by Harry Mulisch. A writer who has been on my list of writers to get to at some point. I tried to read his best-known book a few years ago when Iris on Books did a read-along of Discovery of Heaven, but I just couldn’t get into it at the time. That book was also in 2007 named as the best dutch book of all time. So it is a book I want to read at some point. But in the years in between I had found three other books by him and felt it was time to read him. He was one of what the Dutch call the big three post war writers in Holland . This book was his best known until he wrote Discovery of Heaven, as it was made into a very successful film.

As her husband had done before her, she drew back from the freezing silence. Nothing stirred. There was the garden, and beyond it the barren, snow-covered lots. Anton too stood motionless. Everything was still-and yet time went by. It was as if everything grew radiant with the passage of time, like pebbles at the bottom of a brook. Peter had disappeared, a corpse lay in front of the door, and all about them the armed men remained motionless. Anton had the feeling that by doing something which was within his power but which he could not quite think of, he could undo everything and return to the way they had been before, sitting around the table playing a game. It was as if he had forgotten a name remembered a hundred times before and now on the tip of his tongue, but the harder he tried to recall it, the more elusive it became. Or it was like the time when he had suddenly realised that he was breathing in and out continuously and must make sure to keep doing it or else suffocate- and at that moment he almost did suffocate.

On that fateful night his parents died

The book centres on Anton Steenwijk. When his whole family is killed, he is the sole survivor.  This is a repercussion when a Pro-Nazi collaborator, Fake Ploeg, was found dead. His parents and siblings were among 29 people killed by the Nazis that night after one of their neighbours moved the dead man’s body in front of Anton’s parents’ house. The book is told over the next thirty-plus years, starting with the events of that evening. To Anton getting to live with his relatives after the deaths..We see how he copes with those event. Anton doesn’t want to face those events of the night, and it is many years before he returns to his old home in Haarlem.  The events of that night have a memorial to what happened. But over the years, as he ends up as a medic, he is an anesthesiologist doing well at school.  But it is in his home life you can see the damage of the night when he has two marriages and kids .  It isn’t until his kids have kids of their own that he finally faces his own ghost and past.

He finished the gymnasium as a fair to middling student and went on to medical school. By then a lot had been published about the Occupation, but he didn’t bother to read any of it, or any of the novels and stories about those days.

Nor did he go to the State Institute for War Information, where he might have found out all that was known about the death of Fake Ploeg, and exactly how Peter had met his death. The family of which he had been a member had been exterminated once and for all; it was enough to be aware of this. All he knew was that the assault had never been brought to trial, for in that case he would have been questioned.

He does well at school after all this happend

I really liked this book.  I enjoyed books that take slices of people’s lives; it’s like looking at the rings of a tree: the good years and bad years. Here, there is also how people confronted the past in Holland after the war, where the population was divided so much by those that resisted the Nazis and those that collaborated.  But over the years, we get crumbs of the events of that evening, and Anton’s own memories of that night slowly piece together. This is a thriller in a way, a book that shows how time and memory can twist and turn over time, and how one person’s memory of a night may differ from the whole course of events that night. I hope to root out the film of this at some point; it is a book that would make a great film. Have you read this book or any other books by Harry Mulisch?

Sunday round up confidence wows letterbox and The waterboys

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Its been an odd few weeks. I have struggled with writing notes at work recently, which has impacted my confidence writing here. I’m not sure why, but part of the problem is that my blog voice is the one I tend to write my work notes in, which isn’t the best way for work.I think the fact that I had to rewrite notes at work affected how much I wanted to blog, so I haven’t blogged as much for maybe a couple of months.  But I have had a week of work to sort my head out, as I seemed to have lost confidence in myself recently. But I think I’ve hopefully kicked this into touch and need to get back to a routine around the blog.  So I can clear the backlog of books I need to write about. On a bright note, I am trying to watch one film a day when possible to keep me away from YouTube and endless scrolling, where I end up wasting time on pointless videos. I spoke about this in a recent post about trying to be more analogue; well, this is part of it: less scrolling, more reading, watching, and listening moving forward.  So the films I am writng very short reviews on are the films I am watching on Letterboxd, A mix of world cinema, Hallmark mysteries and anything that crops up that catches my eye. Feel free to follow me on Letterboxd. I am trying to use it more. Anyway, other recent events: we went to Loughborough this weekend.  I brought a number of books, including the recent book by Vasily Grossman. I have started Stalingrad by him and plan to clear the books by him I have over the next few weeks.  We like the centre of Loughborough, a mix of small shops, a market and some chain stores. We have also planned a road trip around Scotland in September, up to the Highlands and Skye for a day. I’ve been listening to a lot of the Waterboys recently.

I have this from them earlier this year when I found a cheap copy of this collection of songs from Room to Roam and Fisherman Blues. I have always enjoyed Mike Scott’s music, so I’m always happy to get some more.  So when I saw there was yet more from The Fisherman Blues Sessions (I have the six-CD box set of The Fisherman Blues as well). A lost collection of tapes from that time was coming out, I had to get it, so hopefully this is all the stuff recorded at this time when the band was in a real creative place, it seems.  So I’ve listened to Atlantic Rain this weekend.

Lastly, I have invested in a new MacBook Pro recently to hopefully help with some better photo editing and such when I’m back in a routine blogging-wise. What you been up to recently ?

 

 

Dying in Toronto by Daša Drndič

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Dying in Toronto or  Our Lady of Czestochowa is still shedding tears by Daša Drndič

Croatian Memoir

Original title – Marija Częstohowska još uvijek roni suze ili Umiranje u Torontu

Translator – Celia Hawkesworth

Source – Review copy

I have long been a fan of Drdric’s books and of her as a person after meeting her many years ago. I was so pleased that we are getting some more of her work in English; she was a writer who arrived maybe too late to us in English, with her book Trieste being the one that finally brought her to the English-speaking world.  This book follows a couple of years she lived in Exile in Canada. The longer title refers to an Icon in the city of Czestochowa that is said to look down on the Balkans; it is venerated by both the Catholic and Orthodox churches. This book is set during the Serb/Croat war years.

TV NEWS ITEM

A Canadian, M. B., has patented a white wine ice-cream on a little stick from a vine, covered in chocolate. White wine ice-cream on a little stick from a vine, covered in chocolate, has become a mega hit. In some restaurants, that ice-cream is now licked on a massive scale. Glasses are used for water.

This news item made me smile some of them were funny others captures moments in time

The book follows Dasa and her daughter as they end up in Toronto.  The book is a clever mix of social observation as an outsider in Canada and of how the country first views itself as part of the New World, with insights only someone from outside the country can make.  How Dasa and he daughter settle.  The cost of exile: that longing for home in a foreign place.  Then a mix of news items as we follow her over the course of a year, first making connections, finding connections to home: paper groups of fellow exiles, news from home, to food.  Being in this new city with its own way of life, she is a great observer of people and how the country tries to help them blend in. Then a scattering of news items from near and far, rather like what Uwe Johnson did in his diaries using a clip from the New York Times every day.

Then, bookshops. The World’s Biggest Bookstore has seventeen miles of shelves and more than a million volumes, classified in fifty sections. There are smaller bookshops that are huge, there are children’s bookshops, technical, medical, art bookshops. Everything here is huge (perhaps because of the huge consumption). There are huge jars of mayonnaise (two litres), boxes of ice-cream (five), baking powder (a kilo-gram), pizzas (the size of Turkish cheese pie tins), children’s strollers (for six babies), and some people (men and women) are gigantic, with waists measuring three metres. Both fruit and vegetables are huge, but they’re bought infrequently, because they’re expensive. All this food lasts a long time and doesn’t spoil, it’s well preserved, so you only need to buy fresh supplies once or twice a month.

I love the sound of the worlds biggest bookshop

 

I will now share my take on the book and how I connected with it. I have never lived in Exile exactly, but I did live in Germany from 1992-1994 not exile, but I could connect with the loss of things you love, from food to the newspaper.  I used German papers for the English football scores, and I have always bought papers at the weekend.  But during this time, I was also working at the Jugendwerkstatt, which is how I ended up in Germany.  I worked with Dalibor, a Bosnian Croat refugee in exile.  We worked well; he spoke English better than my German and Croat.  We worked on making an air pipeline and talked about being away from family in a new place.  Then I worked in a factory and again fell in with someone from the Balkans, this time Avni.  He was a man who had worked in Kosovo on their TV football show, and we loved chatting about English footballers. He also talked about football in Kosovo.  So Dasa’s insights hit home.  I was reminded of another book I read a number of years ago, Globetrotting, that saw the Serbian in Banff observing Canada and the area from a Balkan perspective.  This was one of two books she wrote whilst there, the other being Canzone di guerra, I think this is a book that captures being an exile so well from the many ways it happens to effect you lose of place of those little things you know lose of community and then being an outsider in a totlay new place and al l this with a daughter that is becoming a teen at the same time  I have now reviewed both books here. I do hope we get to see the other books from Dasa that are still to be translated at some point!!

Ambivalence by Brain Dillon

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Ambivalence by Brian Dillon

Irish Memoir

Source – Subscription book

I have had a Fitzcarraldo subscription for several years. I have always picked the mix of fiction and non-fiction because I see the white Fitzcarraldo as books that are culturally important and challenging, and also as books I would never normally buy, so they are there to remind me to be more daring as a reader and to read books in translation.  So I have a few other Brian Dillon books.  But the reason I picked this one up is that it follows Brian growing up in Dublin in the late eighties and early nineties, and since he is three years older than me, I knew the events in the book and the times I could relate to. Plus, I am a sucker for coming-of-age literature, whether fiction or non-fiction.

4 He is not always alone on his excursions into town.

For at least a year he has been in love with his best friend,

S: his blue eyes and his blue hair, an androgyny that was once flagrant and recently is becoming fixed into a mode of being that is more obviously gay (still secretly gay) and from which, once they have left school, he will feel himself slowly excluded. For now they keep to a near-nightly routine of long gossipy phone calls in which classmates and teachers are torn apart for their dullness, poor taste and pitiful efforts at wit. On evenings when S does not phone, or fails to return B’s calls: agonies of abandonment. Since their early teens they have shared an expanding star-chart of camp coordinates: girl groups of the 1960s; via Boy George (the singer who to their schoolfriends they insisted was not gay) the autobiography of the movie star Frances Farmer, incarcerated and abused at a psychiatric institution; the vicious-affectionate tone of TV comedians (Julian Clary, Victoria Wood) they imitate on their annual visits to the Ideal Homes Exhibition.

Boy George was a groundbreaking figure in many ways

I think I am maybe far below the likes of Dillon in my ability to talk about books and my life, but this book is about his growing up, and for me, it is hard not to compare this life to my own. I didn’t lose my parents at the age he did.  But I did have them split when I was young. I have two sides to my life: my mum and stepfather,  a man who, if still alive, would be a Reform Party voter, a vile man who, in many ways, ruined my teen years with the way he got in my head.  Then my dad and my stepmom.  My dad is a very clever man in his field, an expert. He has, ever since I can remember, had a book in his hand.  He is a leisure reader, a fan of thrillers and westerns, but between him and my grandmother, an English teacher like Brian, I grew up in a world of books.  But for me, I read the old white men of American Lit: Updike, Roth, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Bellow, and, of course, I have always loved Graham Greene and Anthony Burgess.  But for me, I never was adventurous enough to read people like Brian Read as a young man: Barthes, Benjamin, et al  .  Seeing those years in his eyes, and his journey in books, reminds me of how much I need to read, but also of how life takes us on our own paths. I say this as whenever I mention things like this it sounds as though I am putting myself down; no life is life; you can’t turn back time.  Anyway, back to the book, I really have not even spoken about it yet.  Anyway, another parallel is when Brian, as a young man, connects with Bowie, hence the title of the book and how Bowie helped people with the ambiguous nature of their gender and sexual identities at a time this was rarely touched upon. Of course, being a few years older, my Bowie was, dare I speak his name, Morrissey, a man I defended for too long, thinking that the 80s persona was the real persona of this singer. Anyway, he talked about gender roles back then.

• An idea of androgyny is the guiding principle of his aesthetics-and politics. He has never been so certain of anything as he is of the necessity of this and all related terms-ambiguity, ambivalence, equivocation, paradox, etc.—which sound weak and boring compared to the god or goddess androgyny. He tries to imagine what it would mean to translate this way of being into prose, into the texture of response to the world, into a morality to replace the one he has been taught but not believed in since the age of twelve. He believes in a kind of abstract androgyny, which would render the world somehow more subtle, less sure of itself, but also irradiated with style, an affront to settled states of being.

I remember Morrissey saying something similar back in the 80s to this sad the change anyway

Anyway, I haven’t really said much about the book; it is a great personal Bildungsroman about a man I need to read more from, which makes me want to renew my Fitzcarraldo subscription to read his other books.  Another thing I may do is go back and draw a reading list of books mentioned by Brian in the book as a small project as all us readers know there is nothing better than making a list even if it ends with the list or even if I get the books for a future date it will make me remeber this book and how life is full of books books form so much of our lives alongside family and music. from a singer to a book from a family member it all inter.  connects and then connects with us as readers, thus forming a never-ending chain of connections.  Well, that is how it feels to me, as that is the sort of reader I am a reader of memoirs, of times of music, of connections we all make. I think this is a must-read for anyone like me in love with books and being a reader.

Deepfake by Makis Malafekas

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Deepfake by Makis Malafekas

Greek Fiction

Original title – Deepfake

Translator – Jenny Steel

Source – Subscription book

I must admit it is great to see Foundry Editions bringing out a book from Greece.  Over the years, I have often felt it is a country underrepresented for its size in what we get to read in English.  This is the eighth GREEK NOVEL i have read over the time of the blog. I do have an older book I’ve been hunting for over the year, Drifting Cities, if anyone wants a reprint so I could get a cheap copy; I’d be happy. Anyway, this is the sixth book and the third noir novel by the Greek writer Makis Malafekas. He has studied art history and social anthropology, has taught comics at the Sorbonne, and has written extensively about Athens nightlife.  He set this book with the Johnny Depp trial in 2022 as a backdrop to the events in the book.

The guy next to me was likely a travel agent, with his doom-themed monologues and particular obsession with “the Gypsies”. He said we should send them to Afghanistan where they’d have the time of their lives, in fact he said we should send them “back” to Afghanistan. But when for the third time he slurped noisily at the dregs of his frappé, with the end of the straw down in the foam and ice, and said somewhat sadly, “The ice is melting in Norway, as well, fuck it…” I allowed him back into my world, and let him take his place next to me, with me, because in the end it was all my choice.

Because that’s somehow where we found ourselves. Me, and everyone else. In Norway, with the ice melting and running down our backs, all washed up in a bar somewhere in Afghanistan with expensive undrinkable coffee and a broken air conditioner by the door, having the time of our lives.  With no rhythm, no flow, no style.

Somone spouting from the news he probably read

This book is a great slice of modern noir lit fiction it appears this is the third instalment of a series around the main character in this book Michalis Krokos and he is such a typical noir character: a washed up writer a man of the Athens night that has spent a lot of time in the city and this is how he is asked by a prosecutor to help out Rebecca a trans sex worker he had known a few years earlier as she has been targeted by a right wing news site in a case of Blackmail. This leads to Krokos going undercover at the NHIT news site, a far-right group spouting out their right-wing hatred. This brings him face to face with Tsechlentidis, the boss of this news site.  They are both Athens Native and in a way this makes Michalis fit in as he also dislikes the way his city is now a tourist trap but that is all they share all this is happening as he had got caught up in the Depp trial as he has dark drives with what seems like dark ends in an athens night as we see insidce the beast of the ALT right news machines and those involved with them.

Presented with the nineties Ibiza she laughed and asked if it was one of those silent electric models or if it operated by mind power. Going up Syggrou Avenue she explained why it was that Vikings: Valhalla was crap in comparison with the original Vikings, just phoney, and I should never see it. On the way up Asklipiou Street she told me that her name was Lora, at the entrance to the building that the downtown area was intolerable and how could I put up with it in general, in the elevator that she would like to live downtown for a certain time for the experience, and in the living room she got excited that I had the Depp trial on 24/7 and said she did too, and that woman was definitely crazy and had been a disaster for him but okay, he wasn’t exactly normal either. I set out two glasses. Amber was still testifying. Johnny was talking things over with his lawyer and not giving her as much as a glance.

The Depp trial caught the eye all around the world

The book was up for the European Prize for Literature last year; this prize, over the years, has provided so many great books in English as it ever has. changing selection of books around Europe.  This book is a great slice of modern noir with a large chunk of what is wrong with Greece and Athens itself, the city that is a melting pot of people and is always full of tourists these days.  Also, the choice to use the Depp /Heard trail as a backdrop alongside alt-right news feeds shows how twisted our modern way of finding news is and what even the real news is these days.  Michalis is trying to help Rebecca find out who is blackmailing her in the sweltering heat of an Athenian summer, as everything is just simmering beneath the surface in the book as it goes.  I loved Michalis; he is a classic noir character, an imperfect human being with his own baggage, part Spade, part Marlow, and a noir comic book character.  He is the classic flawed character trying to do good.  But this book also, underneath it, raises questions about Athens as a city trying to forge its own identity in the 21st century.  Then there is the alt-right news angle and how this affects those as targets of the news but also affects those reading this trash.