Month: September 2026

Mending bodies by Hon Lai Chu

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Mending Bodies by Hon Lai Chu

Hong Kong literature

Original title – 縫身

Translator – Jacqueline Leung

Source – Personal copy

Hon Lai Chu is a prize-winning Chinese writer who has written several best-selling novels and has won the Hong Kong Book Prize. She attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has since written this book, originally published in English.Her writing style has been likened to Kafka’s, with its dystopian nature. She has also written for a number of magazines, saying she attempts to retain some “freedom of choice” for herself and her work.  She was also on Asympote’s list of 2o sinophone writers under forty. This is a book that, like a number I have read in recent years, has the city being nameless, and the narrator is as well. I know some people hate this, but I feel it gives the narrative a universal feel.

In Half: Our Conjoined Future, Martin Stewart writes, “In every person’s heart is a dark place that even they cannot reach. There, a mirror reflects their entire consciousness, which is but a piece of the puzzle. By gathering all these little pieces, we get to envision the world.” These academics believe that everything in the

world exists first and foremost in the human mind-like myths, sprung from the imagination of the ancient Greeks-before it becomes tangible. If disasters and blessings can be derived from the same origin, then, in an abstract sense, they are also conjoined. Fear has a primordial place in our equanimous lives, and that is the purpose conjoined people exist to fulfill.

How the surgery came about

As I said, the book is set in an unnamed city. A student is sitting down to write a thesis about a government scheme that allows people to be conjoined in.  Thus they are able to find a job and a place to live. The thesis shows her looking back on the history of how the first conjoined twins were born, and how they later discovered they could be separated. This operation is a sort of reverse version of that, where strangers are joined together. We also see how they get jobs, how the two connected people live, and how their lives run. But a relative of the student shows what happened when the joining doesn’t work, and the pair have to get separated, and her aunt lost the use of her arm. The book shows how this new government scheme has swept in and how people view it. I was reminded of the one-child policy in China. The book makes you question what the future might look like.

Lok’s body was a cold, disused pipe, where time was still This was a thought exercise from The Conjoinment Manual, in the section “Notes for Reborns, for people who had undergone conjoinment surgery less than three months ago. According to the manual, thought exercises were just as important as the physiotherapy sessions we were to attend three times a week.

In the first stage of postoperative recovery, many patients fall into a state of body confusion from the conjoinment of foreign flesh to their own. Early symptoms include an inability to identify with the body with which one is connected even perceiving that mass to be no different than cold, large rock and a tendency to instigate conflict. In more severe cases, Reborns may feel that their own existence is threatened. It is advisable to do thought exercises at least once a day to prevent these complications.

How they have to go about being conjoined!

The book has many different ideas in it: loneliness, for example, the modern disease as we are all online or more solo living, so when connected you have someone there all the time, but they may also always be in your thoughts !.Then there is the way they get on because they are conjoined; this question, the shrink world resources, we have seen this approached in various ways in both film and fiction, from eating humans in Soylent Green to having to die very young in Logan’s Run. Or The Wanting Seed with sterilisation and limiting children. Then there is the whole of Hong Kong in the last thirty years and how it has changed since China took it back. I think Hong Kong and Taiwan have produced some of the best dystopian fiction in recent years. I was reminded of how the recent story collection by Dorothy Tse I read also had similar themes: a nameless city and a society that has changed, and how, in one of the stories, food is now fake, and resources are shrinking as well. Have you read any great modern dystopian works recently?

Helping Verbs of the Heart by Péter Esterházy

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Helping Verbs of the Heart by Péter Esterházy

Hungarian fiction

Original title

Source: Personal copy

I recently mentioned that Péter Nadas had passed away; he was one of my favourite Hungarian writers. But while talking about him online, I found out one of his last books was about his relationship and connection with three other Hungarian writers; one of those writers was Péter Esterházy, a writer I have known for a long time.  I have his best-known book, Celestial Harmonies, on my TBR an epic book but it made me wonder what else was out there from him, and I found this secondhand. I have always loved the old Quartet edition books, so it seemed a perfect pick. It is also known for its unusual typography and having black edges arou nd the edge of the book, like you used to see on traditional mourning stationery in the Victorian period

Mother’s doctor watched us from the door. We couldn’t tell a thing from his face. He was a friend of my brother’s.

“Your mother, she’s got death in her innards.” That’s what he said. I didn’t like his tone. A man shouldn’t side with death, put himself on a par with it. Even if he’s a doctor—in other words, even if he knows a trick or two, if he sometimes sees the emperor has no clothes. “Your mother might hurry her death along,” he said, nodding, and when I glared at him, he added theatrically, “No need to be shocked. I’m a Voltairian.” “I see,” I nodded back, offended. “Neither death nor its master, God, takes us seriously. There is only one response worthy of man. Not to take them seriously.” I was afraid of him.

When I looked at him, which I tried desperately not to do, I felt I’d known him for a thousand years, and I had a disagreeable thought: Death is something you have to want.

This is a short novella from Esterházy that is far more complex than many longer books.

The book is unusual in the way it is set out and is about how a family is coping with the death of the mother of the family.  The father has called the children to the mother’s dying bedside in the hospital; it has the story of the mother drifting in and out of life in the hospital, her point of view on how she is being treated and how the family is around her.  Then there is the interaction between the siblings called to the mother’s bedside, and then a third narrative around what seem to be snippets of text, remembered passages. I’m not sure if this is Esterhazy remembering verses as he sat by his own mother’s bed as she died, or the mother remembering the passages. The book is about how we see our parents, how sibling relationships can simmer on for years, and also about how bloody awful and just dreadful dying can be when drawn out by someone’s bedside. I looked back at those last few hours of my own mothers life as I watched her drift away from me.

GOLD-DUST MANE STEPS OUT OF A LEAFY BOWER. TERRIFIED, PIERROT TOSSES THE REST OF HIS FLOWERS TO THE WINDS AND TRIES TO FLEE, BUT JUMPING A BARRIER HE GETS STUCK LIKE A HALF-OPEN PENKNIFE AND HIS TROUSERS BURST WITH AN INDECENT BANG IN AT LEAST A HUNDRED PLACES. THE HERALDIC LION, LOOKING ON WITH AN IRONIC SMILE, DAINTILY REMOVES ITS GLOVES AND PROCEEDS TO VIOLATE THE HELPLESSLY DANGLING PIER-ROT….
THE PUBLIC IS AMAZED AT THE BOLDNESS OF IT ALL.

There is two narratives the family and these other snippets.

This book reminded me how much great Hungarian fiction I still have to read. I feel another Hungarian lit month coming on sometime!

The book seems to be drawn in part from Esterházy’s own life and the death of his mother, but with extra characters thrown in, like siblings. I see the third lot of text has been connected by a number of Hungarian readers to, in fact, the other writers that Nadas wrote about in his book My Dead Friends. This book captures how we deal with death, both the good and =bad parts of it; how it can be like open-heart surgery for the family and how it can spew up the past of those connected to those dying and then you add in the third section of the passages snippets of writers from Hungary, it makes this a complex book that maybe needs multiple readings and a Deeper knowledge of the writer but also the time he lived in.  Then also a wider knowledge of the writers’ passages he includes in the book? Esterhazy is a writer I need to read more from; his best-known book also seems to deal with his own family’s past and their place within Hungarian society. Have you read any other of his books?  Would you take part in another Hungarian Lit month?

 

 

The revolt of the animals by Wladyslaw Reymont

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The revolt of the animals by Wladslaw Reymont

Polish Fiction

Original title – Bunt

Translator – Charles S Kraszewski

Source – Review copy

I was sent this ages ago, and it wasn’t til just before I went away that I had read the book by Laxness. I wanted to try another old Nobel winner I remembered I had been sent this: the last book by the Polish writer Wladyslaw Reymont. A writer from a down-at-heel noble family, trained as a tailor, but then drifting through work as a gatekeeper and actor. This variety led him to try his hand at writing: he began with short stories, then moved to longer works of social realism, where he saw how disadvantaged the poor classes were. This is his final novel, often compared to Orwell’s Animal Farm, although he wrote it before that book.

 

She was roaring so, as was the boy, screaming his head off in a vain attempt to free himself from her iron claws.

It was such a furious to-do that the whole manor grounds erupted in a chaos of terror. The dogs began to yank at their chains and howl. A riot of terrified clucking shook the hen-houses.  With a screech, all the guinea fowl flapped up to the roof, and the pigeons took cover in the trees near the well. The tom turkeys, wattles and tails ruffled, gobbled like mad, hopping in place from foot to foot, menacingly. The peacocks rushed near from beneath the porch, throwing a fit with their contemptuous cries. The lady of the manor herself emerged from her rooms; the young master ran up with a flintlock; the little misses too, clutching their dolls, and two ruddy dachshunds, squirming like snakes.

At last she let him go, giving way to the flood of tears

and protests.

Rex watches this

The book is often compared to Orwell’s Animal Farm, even though this was written before that book

The book was written shortly after the events in Russia with the Bolshevik revolution. He uses a dog called Rex that, when the book opens, is attacked by his masters and is cast out of the manor where he has lived as he recovers in the wild from his injuries, we see him decide the humans are the problem for the animal world.  As he talks to his fellow animals, a plan, an idea, slowly forms for him to lead.  Well, he isn’t initially keen to lead them, but when he does, he becomes the leader of the animals, both those in the manor he knew and those wild animals. But as with the actual events in Russian and later in Animal Farm, things turn dark after they take over. It is a study on how power holds and changes people or a dog called Rex

 

The days that followed were hard ones, and Rex hovered between life and death. His wounds bit inward at him, the sun gnawed at him mercilessly, the flies gave him no peace

– but neither did the fatal sorrow he felt at his abandonment.

Only the nights brought the sacred grace of cool and relief. Dummy would run up with food and water, passing long hours weeping over their common wretchedness. For he had learned that they were on the hunt for Rex, to kill him, and he too was to be driven away from the manor.

Tll just go off to the ponds. What do I care?’ the boy decided. But I feel bad for you, you orphan. You’ve got to go off into the wide world — what’ll you do?’ he said in despair.

“Let me just get well again, Rex moaned, licking the boy out of gratitude

Rex is the main character in this book and could easily be compared with Napoleon, though he starts off like Boxer in Orwell’s book.

I did go down a rabbit hole when I read this to see whether Orwell had read or known of this book when he wrote Animal Farm, some twenty years after the book came out.  But there is no evidence he owned or read the book; there is a question of whether he heard of it through Polish friends, but no evidence to back that up.  But the two books are different.  This book is more like the first section of Animal Farm, The Uprising, but it also shows how power and leadership can corrupt those in power. It doesn’t have a third act in it. Then there are the different classes of the two writers: Reymont is from the nobility, and that may shine a light on his take on how revolution goes, as it may show it is just a change of leader, not always how people or animals are treated.  This is also near Eastern European fables and traditions in the way it is written.  It also captures the events of 1917 soon after they happened, from someone closer to the events than Orwell was.  That said, the book was banned for many years by the communists. A lesser-known Nobel winner, and thankfully we have a recent new edition of his best-known work, The Peasants, from Penguin in the last couple of years. Have you read any of hisd works?

A Parish Chronicle by Halldór Laxness

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A Parish Chronicle by Halldór Laxness

Icelandic Fiction

Original title: Innansveitarkronika

Translator: Philip Roughton

Source – Personal copy

I have three other books by Halldór Laxness from the years he was a writer. I like him because he had a long career, and his books feature a variety of styles and examine various aspects of Icelandic culture, past and present, at the time he wrote.  This is one of the last books he wrote, and so far the last to be translated into English; there is one more book, A Narration of God’s Gift, yet to be translated into English.  What I missed in this edition, I hadn’t noted either: I got the UK Penguin edition, and it doesn’t have Salvatore Scibona’s foreword, which is in the US Archipelago Books edition.  I was looking forward to that, as I love Scibona’s debut novel from many years ago.  I knew he was a huge fan of Laxness; this is set in the area where Laxness grew up.  He, as ever, looks into Iceland’s relationship with its past and the Sagas. I would love to do a Nobel project one day with this, and another recent Nobel winner reading reminds me of how many more winners I need to read

At the end of the Middle Ages, after the land had been gnawed down to its roots and defaced by every available means of destruction, as is currently being done in Vietnam, and soil erosion left entire districts barren, people began living again like Robinson Crusoe. They contented themselves with rowing out to sea and hauling in “those damned four” instead of growing grain and brewing ale. And thus did they plod through the cen-turies, even forgetting to bathe for seven hundred years, despite having more hot water than any other nation on earth.

In such a valley, there was in fact no way forward and no way back. The theory of evolution had not yet been born and the goal was to stand still, at most to resemble one’s grandfathers.

The Past is something Laxness focuses on

The book is about a church and the history of the place where it is built, where the Skull of the famous Viking warrior Egill Skallagrimsson is buried, and how, over the years, this small country church grew up on that spot as well.  The book follows when, finally, a hundred years after a decree to take down the church in the 1770s, it is ordered to be torn down and its historic past lost.  But when the local farmer in the valley, Olafur, takes it to court to stop this from happening, we get the story now in the 1880s, and it is the story of a local serving girl, Gudrun, who gets by bartering her services.  It is about family ties, as Olafur feels he is descended from Egill. What is captured is a world long gone, one that Laxness would have seen the dying embers of as a child, a world where people would barter to get by.  Where people had Honour and would go without to be seen as honest. Beauty and darkness, as ever, are at the heart of Laxness’s work.

That same morning, around the usual time that people in the district started to stir, Reverend Jóhann rode out to collect signatures in support of the unification of the churches. He and the parish council chairman, Kolbeinn of Kollafjörfur, had arranged to meet. Reverend Jóhann spoke slowly and in a somewhat dusky tone, like a voice from the deep, whereas Kolbeinn of Kollafjörfur had humorous anecdotes at his fingertips that got others laughing, all except Reverend Jóhann. Now, as is often the case when such worthies feel out their fellows, they encounter little by way of rebuttal from the other parishioners, and in fact, find most of them agreeable to the business at hand.

The local vicar is also a character

I have reviewed a number of Laxness’s works; he always deals with his own country and its past, and sometimes with the country’s absurd nature.  I feel this is a book by an old writer looking back on something he heard of as a youth; supposedly, he came up with the story whilst travelling, but the setting is where he grew up in one of the remote valleys.  He likes to look back at Iceland’s past through the use of Egil, but sees how those sagas and myths have transferred to the contemporary setting, or, as in this case, the late Victorian age.  I also found Gudrun, as a character from a long-ago age, a true old-fashioned, country-type servant.  She was called a freewoman for the way she lived. Thus, getting by on handwork to make a living.  For me, this is a gateway book to his writing, as it is so short that it can be read in a single day.  Have you read Laxness yet?

Love by Péter Nádas

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Love by Péter Nádas

Hungarian fiction

Original title: Love

Translator: Imre Goldstein

Source – Personal copy

I was sad to hear of the passing of Péter Nádas late last month. I first became aware of him when I was offered the chance to review his Magnum opus, Parallel Stories, a book that covered post-war Hungary in a labyrinthine, dark way. I have since reviewed another of his books and have a few on my TBR.  So I decided to pick this, a shorter book by him, and an earlier book in his canon.  He still has a couple of books he has written and i was talking online about this and found one had been brought and another was still awaiting a publisher if anyone would consider that be great it is his account of his relatiohnship with three other hungarian writers including Peter Esterhazy whom I will be reviewing later this month.

oh my, your body is full of little bits of

compressed air! oh my, my body is full oh boy got it made

I’ve

got it made

I’m dropping and rising to the rhythm of her voice,

up and down; it’s sliding, like the sled, in and out; when it’s out, it brings on the desire to penetrate; when it’s in, the desire to get out; up and down; rising and falling, like the elevator; but now I know what I’ve seen, it was me, the symbol of my own movements in the sled and the elevator; and that means 1 am inside her body. But then I should be feeling it! In the rhythm of my movements I hear her approaching voice oh boy

I’ve got itmade

The book is typeset with gaps almost like he is thinking or drifting at times

As I said, Love is so different from the other two books I have read by him; the main character is going to visit his girlfriend to break up with her. But when he rolls a joint, the book becomes like a fever dream, a trip where the narrator questions his existence, that of his girlfriend and what love is the book has an almost recurring feel at time of that state of being stoned of being slightly paranoid in a place where there is just him and the girlfriend the state isn’t there but the paranoia is still there.  We feel an almost slow-motion at times, where things take pages and pages to happen, almost as though we are in the state of being stoned, as the reader with him, a man in a relationship he wants to be out of but can’t get out of. You almost get the sickly grass-smoke scent of the pages as you read.

I can see. I can see her face, too. She is

looking. Looking at something. If she is above me, then she must be bending over me. If she is bending over me, then I must be lying here in bed. The place where I lay down, on my back. Then the pillow must be under my head.

“Don’t you feel

well? Are you unwell, dear?”

I can see the soft movements of

the mouth, I can hear what I see, and what I see and hear are wrapped around me as a palpable body, though it’s not palpable, it’s only something I see and hear

“I should be doing some-

thing, I must feel!”

“Are you unwell? Don’t you feel well,

dear?”

unwell? from her voice, from the look in her eyes I can feel that something has happened to me, and whatever it is, it makes her worry. But I don’t know why, after all I feel very good.

“Are you feeling bad, dear?”

The recurrent thoughts at times like her as he looks unwell to her at times

 

Nadas said he was trying to get in those spaces where the state couldn’t; he did something similar with a lot of the sexual scenes in Parallel stories.  He was trying to break the realist, communist-approved style of writing with this book.  It captures how it feels to be stoned well.  I was reminded of the way Cărtărescu used a similar style, if a little more surreal, in Solenoid to almost break the state censorship of writing and get into those spaces the state can’t be. For me, it reminds me of those hazy days of my late teens, where I would be sat with friends listening to Pink Floyd whilst stoned; there is a sense of the paranoia you can have, but also the way time bends in those moments where seconds seem like hours, which he captures very well in this book.  It captures a broken relationship in a broken country at the time, as the narrator hunts for purpose in life and love in a broader sense.  Have you read Nádas, or do you have a favourite Hungarian writer?

 

Summer round up August 2026

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  1. Cathedrals by Claudia Piñerio
  2. Célina by Catherine Axelrad
  3. Repatriation by Ève Guerra
  4. Where the wind calls home by Samar Yazbek
  5. Claxton by Mark Cocker
  6. Lil is crying by Helene Bessette
  7. City like Water by Dorothy Tse
  8. The Sleep Thief by Ibtisam Azem

Well, August has come to an end, and the heatwaves may be behind us for this year. I managed 8 reviews this month, starting with a family coping years later with the death of a sister of a daughter and how the family carried on. From Claudia Pinerio (I was thinking about the Nobel the other day, and her name is one that maybe should be mentioned ). Then a tale of a maid in a writer’s house. A woman tries to bring her father home from Africa, mixing past and present. Then a man is dying in Palestine, looking back on his life. Then a year of nature, mainly in Norfolk. Then a mother controlling her daughter. A series of vignettes around a city that seems to be lost and there. Then a man in Palestine looks back on his life whilst being tortured.

Front cover of Claudia Piñeiro's Cathedrals, translated by Frances Riddle; dark cover with a colorful geometric mosaic and Charco Press logo.

I pick Cathedrals because I like how Pinerio told this tale and the way she used Carver’s story, unconnected yet connected in the way the short story unfolds and this book itself unfolds.

Non-book things

I think it has been a quiet month for music. I need to pick up Paul Heaton’s new album soon. Film. wise, it was a comfort-food month since I discovered the Great Player app, which streams a lot of Hallmark Mysteries. I’ve been watching a lot of them this month, comfort-watching on a hot day, trying to stay cool.  The other film that I really enjoyed was H for Hawk, which was about the writer training a goshawk as a way to avoid dealing with the grief over her nature-loving photographer father.

Next month

I have a number of Latin American books I want to read before the end of the year. I also have a few possible Nobel contenders to look at like Can Xue and Amitav Ghosh, both of which I have been high on the Nobel prize betting in recent years with the sad loss of Peter Nadas last month, a writer that was always on the edge of Nobel betting add to the Atunes and Nooteboom have also passed this year which, if the committee keeps as it has recent years would be a female winner means theyd had to wait to 2027 anyway but I alway look at the betting as a list of discovery so when someone I havent’t read appears I tend to try and read them I also have an Aleixs wright book and I think she should be on the list of female writers. Who are your favourites  to win this year ?