Month: August 2026

The Sleep Thief by Ibtisam Azem

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The Sleep Thief by Ibitisam Azem

Palestine Fiction

Original title – سارق النوم: غريب حيفاوي (Sariq al-Nawm: Gharib Haifawi)

Translator – Sinan Antoon

Source – Subscription book

I know I’m moving back to Palestine as we enter the last leg of this year’s Women in Translation Month. I also picked this to follow on from City like water, as it has a similar storytelling style, using vignettes.  But this is much more a book about the real events and how life is in modern Palestine.  Told from the perspective of one man and his life that is caught in this book. One young man’s life may be a symbol of how the madness of what is happening needs to be told to a wider audience.  Ibtisam Azem has written two novels; this was her debut, but her second is to be published in English.  She lives in New York.

*Sleep thief is what the interrogator called me. I’ll never forget that. I would steal a few seconds of sleep so I could remain steadfast before them. The name stuck; I even dreamt about it, the same dream, night after night. I would wake up not knowing what to do and drenched in sweat.
I cried until my eyes became so puffy they outgrew my face and enveloped it entirely. At night the gods came down to comfort me and wipe away my tears. But nothing relieved me. I cried so much my eyelids swelled over my eyes. I could barely see. I asked the gods to give me back my yesterday; they refused, except for one, the kindest among them. Upon me he bestowed the gift of stealing sleep so I could dream. The dream, he said, was the seed of a long path still ahead.

The opening lines of the book

The book is, as I said, told in Vignettes and coils back on itself. The start is almost the end of the book; it is about one man and his life. The sleep thief of the title; this name is cruelly given by those interrogating him, as he captures brief seconds of sleep as they try to draw a confession out of him.  That is the opening of the book; what follows is a number of vignettes of his life, the life of Gharib Haifawi, from his birth and how his parents met, how they came up with his name.  Hamsa, a girl he was close to, their time by the Haifa Shore.  Being a teen for him and how he was as a teen.  Shahin was a young boy who was trying to sell pencils around the cafes he used to go to, and he connected with him, as he had also tried to sell stuff at that age to make a little money.  This vignette hit me hardest and may have been a turning point in the narrator’s life.  As we see him study, maybe more than he should.

Shahin and I met every week by unspoken agreement.

I would worry if he didn’t show up. I became a permanent customer. His pencils were stacking up on the desk in my room. I moved them to an empty shelf, which quickly filled up too. The rubber bands wrapped the bundles and kept them fixed and stacked. They couldn’t be easily moved. The questions I had about Shahin and his life piled up too, week on week; but he didn’t like to answer. I only heard him say my name once, when he first asked me about it.

‘Gharib. Gharib!’

Did he think it strange that I had such a name, or was he just repeating it to help himself remember? The first seemed normal enough; it was the second that expressed surprise.

But I didn’t ask about it. Why would I?

It seemed that I was going to just keep buying pencils, though if I did carry on, there would be no space left in my room for my own feet.

This vignette hit me hard when I read it about the young vendor Shanin

I read the book of Disappearance, and this is another hard-hitting look at the nature of her homeland, what it is to live in modern Palestine.  But also the sheer horrors that become part of everyday life, the destruction and death that can be faced every day.  But also how a man just wanting to be himself and be something different dreams of a new future for his homeland.A man born when the Six-Day War was happening- what we get is a slice of the years since then, from traditional family life, being a lover, studying, making friends, all whilst trying to themselves.  Seeing a young boy’s life ended echoes his own life.  This is a book made up of various styles of writing that trace what led to the sleep thief being where he is and also show what life is like for someone growing up over those years.  A place that has been ripped apart, a place where death is just around the corner, and so is trouble at times.  Do you have a favourite book from Palestine?

City like Water by Dorothy Tse

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City like Water by Dorothy Tse

Chinese fiction

Original title – 《 逝水流城》 (pronounced Shi Shui Liu Cheng)

Translator – Natascha Bruce

Source – Subscription book

I didn’t get to read the debut novel from the Hong Kong writer Dorothy Tse.  It was one of those books that was everywhere when it came out, as Fitzcarraldo books often are, especially the novellas like this and Owlish. Tse has been the editor of the magazine Fleur des lettres and has said she is a fan of writers such as Lewis Carroll, Kafka, Orwell, Hoffmann, and Carter. I can see all of these in this book; there is a mix of the real and surreal in her writing.  There is also a sense of lost places, lost times, and lost family in the book. The book is also about her home, without ever mentioning it, since the place is now gone.

Waving her steaming root like a sword, my mum marched out of our building towards the wet market.
She wanted justice from the offending vegetable vendor. But which of them would have dared deceive such a customer? The rules of the wet market were strict.
Strict yet invisible to the untrained eye; the opposite of the piles of gleaming melons that had been carefully laid out for the whole world to see. The Department of Health had organized a clean-up of the formerly unruly street hawkers, rearranging them inside a purpose-built, mustard yellow municipal services building, but this orderly appearance did nothing to change the relationship between the vendors and their customers. Spotlights were adjusted, and water spritzed onto withering vegetables to plump them up and make them seem more alive, while the best produce was held back, reserved in the shadows behind the stands for discerning shoppers like my mum – an old hand at the market game, respected by all the other housewives.

The fake Lotus root being sold and how her mother protests about it

The book is made up of a number of vignettes that are like an ode to both past and present, the memories and the surreal nature of now and the past.  From a place that isn’t there, there is a sense you are drifting into the back streets that are now gone, into family properties, as we see a mother arrested, as there is a shock at fake Lotus roots being sold as real.  A father that has been given a huge TV by the state and is now more absorbed in watching that than in his own family.  Teachers suddenly gone.  Protesters turned into statues.  This is a dark vision of a world that has changed, a place that seems almost moving as the book goes on, a place where rights are gone.

My dad kept to the same routine as always. He spent long hours every day glued to soap operas on the television. He was always in bed before ten o’clock and up again at dawn, when he would go to our pathetically small neighbourhood park and stand in the shade of its only tree, a large banyan, where he would open his arms wide and move through a tai chi sequence. My mum’s disappearance had revealed meteoric craters in our lives, and my dad seemed to be silently and systematically attempting to fill them. I was angry that there were no more leaks in our apartment. When had all the holes been stopped up? Every evening, the dining table unfolded at the same time as always. The difference was that now my dad was trying to recreate dishes from memory, and his food had a plastic taste that I found impossible to swallow.

The father caught up in the tv all the time

I said I could see a lot of the writers she had referenced in this book; Kafka, for example.  There is a sense of being lost in a system at times, a government that changes from day to day.  The book is made up of lots of short vignettes. Lewis Carroll: there is a surreal nature to this: people turning to statues, places changing. Orwell: there is a sense of Big Brother in this book, although it is never mentioned as Hong Kong; it is a veiled critic on her counrty. But since she wrote the book, could this not be Portland or any city in the US where ICE and rights and regime influence on people is rife?  If you like short books that will have you thinking for days afterwards that tackle current issues, housing, the right to voice opinions, the right to real food, all of these are events that are still happening.  Loss, as well as loss of place and life, is always there, like the ghost of the past she once knew, just behind the prose at times. I must admit, this has climbed high on my list of favourite books from China. I hope she writes something longer at some point.  I still want an epic that captures the madness of everyday life in these epic Chinese cities.

Lili is crying by Hélène Bessette

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Lili is crying by Hélène Bessette

French fiction

Original title – Lili pleure

Translator – Kate Briggs

Source – Personal copy

I wish Fitzcarraldo would add the classic list to their subscription service as I keep missing ones that grab my eye. I am not someone that keeps up with publisher list as much as i did ten years agowhen I would knoiw which books were coming out hiere and there but no in the last few years life has got in the way I still pre order a certain number of books and have subscitpiuons with publishers I like such as Fitzcarraldo I may not read every book but I know the quality of there editors and trust them.  So Helene Bessette is one of those French writers that, in some ways, slip under the radar in the English-speaking world. She was caught in a fight between French publishers when her first book came out, and she was championed and signed by Gallimard, where Raymond Queneau loved her writing.  This book came out in 1953

— Hell damnation, cruelty, lies, deceit, betrayal, tears, sever-ances, assassination, calumny, perfidy, misery and death, says the shepherd.

He is driving his sheep down the stony footpath that edges the garden beneath the ruined towet set high on the parched, barren hillside, bleached white in the Provençale sun.

– Hell damnation, cruelty, lies, deceit, betrayal, tears, sever-ances, assassination, calumny, perfidy, misery and death.

The mistral is up.

Pale blades of wheat sweep the length of the dusty track. The serried sheep press forward and behind them, the shepherd.

Invisible rain, warm and soft, sinks into the dust.

And the mistral to carry it away.

The open tower a silhouette against the low cloud hanging through it.

A wind swirls. A block of wall crumbles.

The opening page and this made me think of Beckett

This book is a heart-wrenching tale of the lengths a mother will go to stop her daughter from finding happiness with her lover, and instead devote her life to her, as she had always wanted. But it is how we get this; it is like the prose has been edited by Samuel Beckett. It is a book of sharp statements of Lilli, a woman broken by her mother’s actions. Charlotte, the mother, runs a school, and there is something of Jean Brodie around her the way in the book she makes her daughter think and act with a combination of praise and scorn classic controlling behaviour.  It is a story of a fragile girl’s heart breaking as the romance she is trying to have is broken.  A chorus of those surrounding the two is also woven into the story.

Hello!

With my zip-up bag.

Hello, Maman.

– Here is my daughter, returned to me, says the mother Charlotte.

My lost daughter.

My found daughter.

My daughter who runs away with her zip-up bag.

Here is my deceiving daughter.

My cheating daughter.

Who has no qualms about telling me silly stories and lies.

— She left me, says the mother Charlotte.

She’d left me.

She was gone.

And what in heaven’s name did I do to deserve being abandoned by my own daughter?

Did I merit such punishment?

If only my arms could stretch up to the blue sky and shake those clouds.

For Iloved her so much (my daughter).

She has let me down.

I have been disappointed in love. And what a love!

I still love her, naturally, Ilove her just as much as I ever did.

Only now there’s a fresh scent of disappointment to add to the burden of that love.

She was everything to me.

My life, I lived it through her.

I feel this captured the manipulative and Brodie-like nature of the mother Charlotte

When a writer was championed by Queneau, you know it isn’t going to be a writer that is challenging to the reader; this book is it: she cut everything she could get away with, so all that remains on the page is pure emotion, bile, dark humour, and a twisted relationship.  I was reminded of how, like Jean Brodie, the mother struck me that mix of praise and disdain Brodie had with her girls, the way she manipulated them. It is a story we’ve seen many times before: the domineering mother controlling their child is a classic storyline, really. WHat gives this legs is the style of the book it is hard not to think of eckett the clipped and brutal at times of the prose is very luike him this would make a great stage show it is so powerful and it is all in the way she controlled the tone and style of the vpices in the prose and how wonderful it has been brought to us in English by Kate Briggs. Although Barbara’s work was missed, both Bray and Wright were French-translated writers, and both were in similar circles to Bessette, particularly Barbara Wright, who translated Queneau around this time as well. The sad fact is Bessette died in poverty and largely forgotten, even in France.  We are lucky there are 13 novels she wrote out there for us to hopefully discover when translated into English! This book means I have 10 books left before I hit 200 French novels under review on the blog! Also a great pick for Woman in Translation month; I’ve not seen anyone mention the book much on social media.

Claxton by Mark Cocker

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Claxton by Mark Cocker

British Nature writing

Source – Personal copy

I have a thing where, whenever I go to Macclesfield, where my Mum’s Ashes are spread. I always like to try to buy a book of nature writing because my mum loved nature. Her dad, my grandfather, for many years paid for my membership of the YOC, the youth arm of the RSPB, so I picked this book for a couple of reasons: it is set in Norfolk and Amanda and I have recently spent to great holidays around the Norfolk-Suffolk border and this book is mainly around Mark Cocker and the observations he has made of the nature of his small village of Claxton which is just outside Norwich.  I also like that it wasn’t just about one part of nature, say birds; his writings are around all the wildlife he encounters, from the smallest flies to badgers around their setts.

MONSAL DALE, DERBYSHIRE

Whenever I think of ash trees I think of their deep generosity.

This is not just special pleading for the logs that have supplied our burner and kept the living room cosy all winter. It’s the way that their small saw-toothed pinnate leaves – cotton soft when fresh in May – permit sunlight to pierce down to the ground and allow the flowers to grow at their feet. I also love their rich gift of place names – Ashbourne, Ashford, Monyash, Ashwood – to the folk of Derbyshire.

The entry about Derbyshire’s connection to the Ash tree

The book follows a year but is made up of parts from various years from the time Mark has lived in Claxton, the first part of the book. January is a lot around Claxton: watching plovers, observing the wintering waterbirds at a local bird reserve. In February, he has an entry near me that talks about Ash trees on Monsal Dale and in that area. The Monsal Trail near there is a great walk along a disused railway.  This is about ten miles from me. In March, he discusses Jackdaw, the smaller member of the crow family, with their cap-like markings on their head.  They are known to be sociable birds and often connect with humans. Again, he is in Derbyshire, on the other side of the Peaks, to me, in Buxton, but any mention of a blackbird makes me smile, as if you don’t know, Amanda and I live on Blackbird Drive. The book is fiull of his observations like watching Badgers in Lognor another small peak district village this time in Staffs one My younger brother and I have driven through over the years as we head back from where my mum lived in Cheshire via Leek and the staffs area of the peaks both Leek and this area through to Longnor a small village in the middle of nowhere are lesser known gems of the peak district.

LONGNOR, STAFFORDSHIRE

When it appeared it looked like an inverted white triangle, which had rather incongruously materialised at the mouth of the hole. However, through the binoculars we could tell instantly that it was an animal’s head and that it was bisected by those two black stripes to form the most distinctive pattern on any British mammal. It was a badger emerging from its sett.

It pushed its snout towards the evening sky and sampled the air and its accompanying atmosphere: a blend of rabbit scuts in the half-light, blackbirds chinking wildly from their. roost in the lime trees above, a shovelful of blinking stars overhead and a cold night wind sweeping across the hillside.

Badgers may have a remarkable sense of smell and acute hearing but their vision is poor. None of the five animals that eventually emerged spotted us on the hillside opposite.

There were seven of us, of three Cocker generations, lying in silence among a few hawthorns and completely mesmerised by the unfolding vision.

The badgers he sees in this small Staffs village

I needed a break last week, as I just had one of those times when I needed a change from my usual diet of translated fiction. I think this month, with it being Women in Translation Month, there is just a glut of posts around books people want to read, or lists people are making now.  Don’t get me wrong, they are great, but when you have read most of the books and after so many years of reading books in translation I just wanted a break from this noise so this is the other reason I buy these nature books that is they are my putting an anchor down in the storm of reading translated fiction and settling down and reading the year drift by in marks wonderfully descriptive entires of the world of nature he has seen over a number of years I also loved at the end lof a book is a list of all the plants.  trees, insects, birds, reptiles, etc that have been seen in the parish of Claxton, showing what a rich part of the country he lives in.  This is a must-read for any fans of British nature and those who love to see a year of nature go by. This for me is a break from my usual fare and reminds me to open my eyes and look out for what is around me, which I do a lot anyway!

Where the wind calls home by Samar Yazbek

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Where the Wind Calls Home by Samar Yazbek

Syrian fiction

Original title – مـقـام الـريـح، روايـة

TRansltor Leri Price

Source – Personal copy

I recently purchased some books directly from World Editions as they have a new bookstore on the website.  I picked this as Samar Yazbek has been on a list of writers I want to read for a while. I do have Planet of Clay somewhere, and she also recently published a book of interviews she conducted with survivors from Gaza.  Samar Yazbek was also in the collection of writers from around the Arabic world that came out in 2010, Beirut 39, with writers born after 1970 in the collection that at that time were under 39.  was the second of three such books Hay Festival has done around writers from around the world.  These books are worth looking up, even if it’s just the wiki page, as it is a rich list of the best of modern Arabic literature for the last ten years. I will always point people to The Arabist web page, the Arab lit blog site, their magazine, the Arablit Quarterly, and their podcast, Bulaq.

Just a small leaf. He couldn’t see it through his tangled lashes, beneath the midday sun.

A leaf, nothing more. Lobed and green, it appeared in front of his eyes like a curtain each time he slowly and laboriously moved his eyelids. A leaf brushing his long, mud-spattered lashes. A leaf only vaguely visible through the soft grains of soil swimming in the water of his eyes, chafing and burning.

If he opened his eyelids again, the leaf would fall into his left eye. That leaf was the entire world. No sound, no smell. He couldn’t feel his other eye. Was he still alive? Did he have a body? If so, where was it?

His sense of existence extended no further than the narrow strip of faint light hidden behind these black lines—he didn’t care whether they were his eyelashes or his nightmares, in any case the darkness would soon settle within once more. He was slowly falling into some deep and unknown place.

His gravity was negated and he could feel his head swinging—perhaps he was falling into a grave. Was this his funeral? Was this his head?

The opening as Ali is in a srt of fever dream as his lif ebbs away

The book is a sort of fever dream set in a small mountain village, as we see a young soldier, Ali, who has been hit by his own side in a crossfire as a bomb was dropped by him.  He has fallen into a crater and there is a tree the tree sparks memories as we see him fighting out to grab the tree a tree he has known all his life in the present and also at the same time we see events from his life and the village he has grown up in. from hte death of one of his brothers seeing how that impacted his mother and family and how maybe his own death will do the same.  From a time he got involved with a wealthy local and saw the contrast wealth can bring to people’s lives, and the poverty of his own home life and his parents’ struggle. The book is like a fever dream of a man dying in a way; is this just seconds or minutes of Ali and his life we are glimpsing in these vignettes?

His mother collapsed, then stood up again, gazing all the while at the coffin being carried on the shoulders of the village’s youth. She pleaded desperately for a final look at her son to bid him goodbye but the men, aghast, merely uttered, “Astaghfirullah,” shook their heads, and ignored her. As for the women, they patted her shoulder as they let out their ulula-tions and wails. His sister, the widow, who had walked the same path for her husband a month earlier and was not yet twenty-five years old, held a picture of her brother in one hand and her baby in the other. She walked with a firm, deliberate tread beside her younger sister. The family had congregated among the people behind the bier of the oldest brother and, upon finding themselves lost to each other within the crowd, began turning around in fear-Ali too. For an instant he forgot he was watching his brother’s coffin, he utterly forgot his surroundings. He forgot his brother’s face and the weeping eyes all around

His brother had died as well he remembers this as he struggles

I loved the way this book was probably originally written and translated with a third-person voice, or most Ali watching, or even a ghost watching the young man grapple with his life to the tree he knew so well from hiding in it as a child.  The book captures a world of poverty and people struggling to get by, and the mindlessness of the war he is caught up in.  Samar is well known for her championing of human rights within her own country and in the wider Arab world, having walked the length of Europe as part of a protest about the situation in her homeland.  Ali is a boy caught up in the times he lives in, the child of parents who had already lost a child.  A boy who grew up hiding in the tree he will probably die in.  If you want a book that drags you into the violent world of Syria a few years ago, this is it: a country ripping itself apart with civil wars, widespread poverty, and a sheer loss of hope that comes through in the book at times. Where do you discover new writers or uncover new gems to read?

 

Repatriation by Ève Guerra

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Repatriation by Ève Guerra

French fiction

Original title –  Rapatriement

Translator – Clodagh Kinsella

Source – Subscription book

If you have been around the blog the last year or so, you will know. I am a huge fan of the books that Foundry Press have been bringing out; well, this is one of their recent books.  This book is a debut novel by Eve Guerra, a writer of Italian Congolese origin who had to flee Congo when the civil war happened when she was nine and grew up in France after she got her degree. She has taught Latin, Ancient Greek, and French.  She also has a regular column in Lire.  She has also written poetry.  This is her debut novel. It won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman, which is the prize from the Goncourt for the best debut novel in a given year. It is fair to say Eve seems to have drawn from her own life a little in this book, as the main character has a similar Congolese, Franco-Italian background to the writer herself, who also lives in Lyon.

Even as a child I dreamed about leaving. I made up my

mind when I was eight, one afternoon in April 1998.

It was the dry season. We lived in Congo-Brazzaville, somewhere in the bush where the light no longer enters.

When people ask me what village I’m from, I say the bush. A house, a birthplace, the bush again, the bush full of sapele trees on the banks of the river where snakes slither.

I’m not scared of them: I am one.

They say the Congo River is a giant python turned to water. It was Dieudieu, the village pygmy, who told me this. He said there was no need to fear those snakes, that they only attacked to defend themselves or feed, and I was already too big for those little things that drag themselves along the ground.

Thinking of her childhood and even then escaping

The book starts when Annabella, a 23-year-old woman trying to get by as a poet in Lyon, struggles to get by; actually, her world is shattered when she gets a letter saying her father has died in Cameroon.  Her father, a man she hadn’t spoken to in two years.  Had brought Annabella up after she was seven. Her father’s violent temper and wanting to have total control over his wife led to her mother running away, and Annabella spending the rest of her childhood growing up with her misogynistic father, a white man in Africa with money and all that brought him.  Annabella heads to Cameroon and is faced with the task iof finding 20000 francs to bring her father’s body home.  The book sees her wrestling with this as she also confronts the ghost of her own past and how she had fallen into books and learning, but this event also makes her think of one of the books she had read, Molloy, and she finally sees what the book is about.  We see how her father has tainted her relationship with her mother, where she treats her mother in the same violent way her father did.  Will she be able to sort it all out?

We divided up the tasks that evening. My aunt Alda had to call back one of my father’s colleagues, jot down numbers in her notebook, and make an appointment with the undertakers, ask for a quote. I had to contact the embassy and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to find a repatriation solution.

I spent the morning transcribing a list of phone num-bers, first the French embassy in Douala, who knew where the body was being kept. I waited for Clémence and Antoni to leave before I rang.

“I’m calling because my father is dead. The death took place on Monday, 29 April. And I was asked to get in touch with you. My name is Annabella Morelli.”

“Mademoiselle Morelli, I’ll put you through to the colleague handling the file.”

“Mademoiselle Morelli… Mademoiselle?”

Trying to find out how to bring her father’s body back home

Now it seems, after seeing an interview with the writer online, that the kernel of the book is an actual event that happened to her.  Her father too had died in Africa, and she was left with the same problem Annabella had, and that was finding the money to bring the body home.  Like Annabella, Eve is also someone who loves her literature; there are various books and allusions to classical texts in the book. She also, like Annabella, is closer to her literature than she is to her own family at times.  The book also looks at a father who used his ability to financially control the women around him, a colonial male, a violent man who wants his wife to toe the line he made completely.  The book is fragmented; it is like the past and present are blending at times as we see Annabella facing the ghost of her past and the effect her parents’ actions had on her as a person.  If you are a fan of post-colonial fiction with its effect on one family,  this is a book for you 1 Have you a favourite book about a father-daughter relationship?

 

 

 

 

Célina by Catherine Axelrad

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Célina by Catherine Axelrad

French fiction

Original title – L’enfant d’Aurigny (L’un et l’autre)

Translator – Philip Terry

Source – Subscription book

Next stop on this month’s Women in Translation month is another of the books I recently got from my subscription to the publisher Les Fugitives. I picked this as I loved the thought of the life of a servant, one of those unknown people remembered.  Catherine Axelrad has written a number of autofiction novels. also YA novels.  Also a pastiche of Proust.  She has studied Protestant theology after she had been a teacher.  And is now a minister.  The book came from a few notes in Victor Hugo’s diaries when he was in Guernsey. The pieces mentioned a name, Célina; this is her story.

I don’t remember my father’s face, and yet I was already six years old the day he went missing, along with the father of Philomène Grut, who lived in the house at the bottom of the lane and who went to live in France with her mother the following year. They had set out before dawn, as usual, and then when he’d got back the previous day I was already asleep with all the others, apart from the little one who my mother still kept by her side. But the Sunday before that he was at home and after dinner the weather was fine, he’d settled down outside to smoke his pipe and I’d come along to snuggle round his legs so that he would lift me onto his knees. My mother had said to let him be for once so that he could get a little rest the poor man, but he’d said that children didn’t bother him, otherwise I wouldn’t have made six for you, he’d added laughing, seven with the little lad upstairs. Is it you who made us, daddy?’ Id asked, pulling his beard, and he’d laughed more than ever, but I remember that mother scolded me, she said that I always had to go and blurt

The opening lines of Célina shows her life ?

A young girl with a life that, when she is fifteen, is not long after her first period and first sexual encounter.  Having lost a number of family members to suicide and the sea . She is then offered a way out of what seems a bad life. That is how to be a maid in a writer’s house.  The writer is Victor Hugo. She has a job as a maid in Hauteville House, as Hugo is both in exile and writing and bringing his unique Gothic vibe to the house. Over the course of the book, you see Hugo and Célina embark on a sexual relationship; this is taken from his diaries. It is a time of class and social rules, and this relationship is breaking them, but Célina is liked by the household.But this isn’t Hugo’s story; this is the story of her, the hard journey that a girl like Célina faces in her life. How the loss of certain family members can bring you to the verge of oblivion. How a job a relationship can change a narritve if only slightly.

Monsieur was very upset by this news; he made me take forty-eight francs in pounds sterling for the fund for the widows and orphans of shipwreck, and he asked me to tell him how my father was lost. What affected him most was to learn that the body had never been recovered. The bodies of the Pengalley crew were only found three months later, in mid-June. It’s said they were so disfigured that they could only be identified by their shoes.

Hugo and her

I liked this book; it is one of those books where it isn’t about action, but about big ideas. No, it is about one girl, her struggle, her life, a life of someone if hadn’t been for a few crumbs in Hugo’s diaries about his sexual relationship with this one maid and later on, when her death at a young age is mentioned, it is a short period of time, the five years he was on the Channel Islands. Her view of the relationship is with a sort of distance about what is happening between them, a woman damaged by her first sexual encounter . A life on the edge, a working-class life, when we never hear about the lives of those under the stairs. A glimpse into a world we never see from Célina’s point of view. I think of well-observed French novellas like The Silence of the Sea by Vercors or A Sunday in Ville d’Avray, mixed with Downton Abbey or Upstairs Downstairs, one of the maids in the background of those shows or even the love affair in Gosford Park. Hugo is like Gambon’s character having sex with a servant. Do you have a favourite quiet novel or about a minor character from history?

Cathedrals by Claudia Piñeiro

~ winstonsdad ~ 7 Comments

Cathedrals by Claudia Piñeiro

Argentine Fiction

Original title- Catedrales

Translator – Frances Riddle

Source – Subscription book

I start this year’s Women in Translation Month with a writer who, over the last couple of decades I’ve been around blogging and talking about books, shows how a writer’s whole view in the reading public’s eye can change. Piñeiro is a writer I first came across when I was on the Bitter Lemon Press small-crime-in-translation list.  Whether it was Bitter Lemon being seen as a crime publisher.  They do mostly Detective fiction in translation.  Bitter Lemon Press released Piñeiro in 2009, and a few years later I bought All Yours by her.  So when Elena Knows earned a long listing and a shortlist for the International Booker, I said at the time that Charco Press had repositioned her as a writer more toward psychological fiction. For me, See is up there with the great psychological writers like Patrica  Highsmith.  For me, in particular, the Roman Durs of Georges Simenon come to mind.

I asked Ángela to show me the books he’d ordered.

She told me that only one of them was here; she’d sold the other one after so many days had gone by. She showed me the one we still had: The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins.

‘Do you remember what the other one was?’

‘Yeah, of course, Cathedral, by Carver, she replied.

Hearing that title made my stomach lurch, just like it had that afternoon when a customer came in smelling exactly like my father, If the boy shows up here again, let me know, please, 1 practically begged her.

‘Is there something I should know?’ Ángela asked,

startled.

‘Nothing important. He’s the son of someone I know

and they can’t find him.’

‘Alright, don’t worry, I’ll let you know, Lía?

Just as Mateo gets to her shop the mention of the Carver story

The book Cathedrals now resembles one of those puzzles you must assemble to see the full picture. It follows the fallout of a death in a family. The book comprises six chapters and an Epilogue. It traces the events in a family after someone kills and dismembers AnaSardá at seventeen.  The author reveals why this vicious killing occurred and what caused it. The book opens in Barcelona, with Ana’s sister Lia, who had to escape what happened and left her home in Argentina and escaped to Barcelona and is running a book shop in the great Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela only keeping touch via the occasional but the past catches up with theer when her other sister appears in her bookshop and is searching for her soon that had gone missing on a tour of Europe Cathedrals and they think Lia knows what has happened to Mateo their son.  He has grown up in a family broken by the violent death of his aunt.  He was pushed into the trip by his grandfather to see the cathedrals of Europe.  A statue struck Marcella, and the memory of Ana’s death haunts her.  Thus, the book continues with three more tales from people connected to the death.  Each tale drops a little crumb more.

Thirty years ago, the body of my aunt Ana, the youngest of the three Sardá sisters, was found burned and cut into pieces in a dump. Ana was only seventeen. Lía, nineteen.My mother, twenty-three; the same age I am now.

Lía looked to be agile and hard working. Seeing her climb up and down the steep ladder to get the book a customer had asked for, suggesting other titles, laughing in the middle of her conversation, I saw that some of her gestures were identical to my grandfather’s, and that was encouraging. When I got back to the hostel, I inspected my face in the bathroom mirror. I was looking for some similarity to Lía. I looked again at the photo of her on the internet. Maybe the hair colour, maybe the almond eyes. Even though mine are blue, like Ana’s. Any time someone says it, I get the mental image of her eyes in a head that was cut off from the body it belonged to.My mother’s eyes are blue, but different, colder, more transparent. But everyone has always told me I was the spitting image of my father. It would be a relief to find some proof that I’m not, or, at least, that I’m not only that.

Mateo talking about his mother and dead Aunt

I mentioned at the start of this post that I felt Piñerio is more than a crime writer.  I mentioned Georges Simenon as a writer I felt she was like.  Piñerio has mentioned him in interviews as a writer she liked, especially his Roman Durs.  This book also, at its heart, is a question around the Catholic religion and how it can make people into monsters, as the book slowly shows how Argentina viewed women within society and their roles within families. The book also references the short story of Raymond Carver of the same title. I read this as well, and I can see why it is mentioned: a blind man gets a sighted man to draw a cathedral for him.  The sighted man then goes a little over the top as they both see this cathedral drawn.  But it is the sense of blind faith and how we see things and how we view the world in a way that both stories share.  The ghost of a dead girl: how each sister had taken her own path after that death; one ran away and hated god. The other was drawn into religion even more. A story that lasts if you like tales that slowly burn, slowly unwind, that have how we view Morality, the church and family; this could have easily been set in de Valera Ireland. Have you read this or any other books by her? I have a few others to read !