Category: books from

The old man and his sons by Heòin Brú

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The Old man and his sons by Heoin Bru

Faraoese fiction

Original title – Feðgar á ferð

Translator – John F West

Source – Personal copy

I find it harder to find vbooks from countries I haven’t read but I do have a srtsh of books to read every know and then and last month I ended the year with two new countries this rthe first is a book written by Heoin Bru which was the pen name of Hans Jacon Jaocbsen a faroese writer this boook came out in 1942 and was first translted into Danish in the sixties. Then, in 1970, the first novel from the Faroe Islands was translated into English. The book captures one of my favourite subjects in fiction: the clash between generations, and between old and new worlds.  The book follows parents and their children as the world around them becomes more expensive; the book, although written 80 years ago, still rings true.

His wife came in. She too was aghast and baffled. The doctor and his wife had both arrived in the country only recently, from Denmark, so that Faroese ways were strange to them. She had no idea that this thing was a whale’s kidney.

To her it was just something with blood oozing from it, that reminded her of recent and violent death. She did not doubt that Ketil was a human being, but he was not the usual kind she was accustomed to. And it cannot be denied that he did differ a little from the average Copenhagen businessman. He stood there in his home-made skin shoes, his loose breeches and long jacket. His blood-flecked beard hung down towards his belt, and on this hung a double sheath with a pair of white-handled knives, one above the other. And he was extending his earthy hands – holding up that bloody thing.

Whale meat after the hunt is shocking to some

The Partriachs of this book are Ketil and his wife live in a small village with there last son at home Kalvur a lad that has maybe a learning disablitie but is seen as unable to leave hios parents the other children have all left the small village the parentas still living a simple life and when after a whale drive a Faroe tradtion of hunting whales and then selling the meat of to alll those around in an auction means that when Ketil buys a larger than usual amount of meat he is left struggling to get by in a world where the tradtional way of living has unkown to him move to modern marketforce so this simple living man and his wife are now struggling in the world and there kids don’t help as they constantly need the parents help this is a world in flux a man caugfht out by the movement of time and how money is now king in his island home.

He went into the kitchen and squatted down on a low chair right by the door, and looked about him. Here there was brassware and linoleum, curtains, crocheted and embroidered drapery – everything you could think of, and every scrap of wood was painted. Still, he thought, if they can afford it, and like to have things this way, who are we to criticise?

‘Is the lad in?’ the old man asked as his daughter-in-law

appeared.

‘He’s in the dining-room. Carry on in, Father?

The old man hesitated a little before he went, because he knew his daughter-in-law did not really care for him, but he plucked up courage. ‘Maybe I do smell of the peat fire and the cow byre, he thought, ‘but I pay my own way, and nobody can drive me out of house and home. So he stuffed his hat into his jacket pocket and went in.

‘Fine weather we re having, Ketil began.

His son looked up. ‘Yes, good weather, he replied absently.

‘Extraordinarily good weather’ He sat at the table, fingering through a great heap of papers.

Kentil is caught up with money he hasn’t got

The book unfolds in vignettes as we see how the whale drive leads to the debt Ketil incurs and how the world he lives in is changing, though he hasn’t really noticed it.I was reminded of the west coast of Ireland, I remember visiting in the late 70s  a place that to my child eyes seemed to have been stuck in time and this is the feel of this the village and world of Ketil has missed the way the island as a whole has shofted and they are left hunting for driftwood for ther fire (This reminded me of tales of miners during the miners strike hunting sea coal on the beaches of Northumberland to keep there house warm). For me this is what i love about ficitoon at thimes is when we can make our own connections to a story that happened 80 years ago but the world is constanly in flux and there is many a Kentil from the peat cutters of Donegal to the miners of the pits of places like Shilbottle points where you and your job world is ending but no one has told you is a universal story.

Marshlands by Otohiko Kaga

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Marshlands by Otohiko Kaga

Japanese fiction

Original title – 『湿原』朝日新聞社

Translator -Albert Novich

Source – Personal copy

I think when I said I want to review 200 books this year, I may have put a number, not an idea, to this year. 200 would be great, but one of the aims for this year is to read several longer books. I think in yesterday’s post I spoke about my attention getting less. Another way I have seen this is not reading epic books anymore, even though I buy a lot. This had been on my radar for a long time, when it was mentioned on a podcast. I think it was one of the last, if not the last, books that John O’Brien signed off for Dalkey Archive. The writer Otohiko was both a writer and a psychologist. A number of the books he wrote were set in France, where he studied and worked in the late fifties. This book was published in 1985. He won a number of big book prizes in his time. He also continued visiting some of his patients well into his 80s, long after he had retired. This is the second book from a writer who has written many books and is well respected in Japan!

“And now how do you feel?” asked Atsuo, leaning back a bit to avoid Yu-kichis fists, which he had begun brandishing to punctuate his recitation. “Do you feel like smashing something right now?

“Yeah, I do, he said, slamming the table hard enough to raise the proprietor’s eyebrows and elicit a restraining “Hey!” from him.

“What on earth do you want to smash?”

“Dunno.”

“Listen to me, said Atsuo. “There’s nothing you need to smash now.”

“If there isn’t anything, then I’ll fnd something” Yukichi said with an exag gerated wave of his arm, clearly drunk, his voice unnecessarily loud.

“Uncle, theres no fun in just breaking things. It’s no good if you don’t have an explosion. See? If you want to get an explosion, there’s got to be some kind of strong resistance. Yeah, that’s it. That’s what they’re up to,” he said, pointing to the television. “First they get the riot police mad, see? Set up the resistance for the big bang!”

talking about making a bomb early on in the. book will come back later

 

This book is an epic book. It slices into the heart of post-war Japan, and I love the use of the main character, Atuso Yukimori, who at the start of the book seems a simple mechanic who works near the university. It is because of this that he starts a romance with a girl from the university, Wakako, who is about half his age. The book is pivoted on the events of the summer of 1968, when the world burned in student protests.(When I saw he had been in France, this is the time of the French riots as well!) SO when a bomb goes off, the police home in on these two. The book serves as part prison journey, part look at one man’s post-war journey in Atuso. He was in a special unit during the war and after the war he feel on very hard times and into a world of crime. But his life is on the straight and narrow, even if his lack of knowledge of how the newer car works tickles his colleagues. He shows what a great mechanic he is with old engines.  The book focuses on the investigation into the crime, the time spent in prison, looking back on the past, and even on his childhood in the marshlands. It descends into a drama of who is innocent, but also how the past affects the present, and whether we can ever escape what we have done.

She opened a wooden door. It was a little bar, consisting of a single counter that was filled to capacity with customers. “Well, well, come right in!” The bar’s proprietress gave them a professionally effusive greeting. “Unfortunately, she continued with a gesture at the full counter, “all I can offer is a place in the back.”

“That’s fine,” said Wakako. “This is Mr. Yukimori. He was one of my teachers in high school.” The bar’s “mama” gave a reverential bow.”Welcome, Mr. Yuki-mori. Very glad to have you.”

The space in the back was a tiny tatami alcove whose three walls were occupied by shelves of dishes. They each pulled up a zabuton, barely managing to squeeze in on either side of the foot-high table.

“TIl bring you something in a jify, Mr. Yukimori. Wakako sprang up and busied herself behind the counter. She helped Mama serve customers – whom she seemed to know — with a practiced hand. Finally, she returned with a bottle of whiskey, water, and dishes of meat-and-potatoes, oden, and cuttlefish. They had a toast with whiskey and water.

“Come here often?”

As the couple start heading out he is much older than her

I had waited ages to get to this, and I wish I had read it the day it dropped through the door. It is one of those epic novels that captures the fallout of a moment, the bomb, but not just what happened after, what led up to that point. The class of pre-war and post-war Japan, the speed at which life moved forward in the sixties. One mans past and how do we escpae it was almost div=ckensian at times when they talked about the marshlands I thought all we need it a chained Atsuo running across it for it to echo Magwich. But there is also a nod to Kafka in the way the trial and case unfold, and the two get caught up in it all. I recently saw a YouTube essay about how art exists around the world and why, in Japan, it is seen as a whole. At times, those epic scenes, like the noise of a Japanese web screen full of information, are viewed as a whole. This book is like that, viewing the whole post-war years and the effect of the war, but also the huge changes of the period. The late sixties led to the tension, the bombing, and the violence as two generations rage against one another. This book does so on an epic scale, following two people caught up in the events and the bombing. It is also about the past, and can we escape our past? Again, a nod maybe to time in France, Atsuo is modern Jean Valjean, parallels are there, younger women in his life, a police officer who becomes obsessed with him, and never quite being able to escape one’s past? Do you have a favourite epic Japanese book?

 

 

Brian by Jeremy Cooper

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Brian by Jeremy Coper

British fiction

Source – Library books

One thing I do is let my Fitzcarraldo subscription lapse from time to time. They may be best getting a reminder sent to folks like me. One of the main things I have from my dyspraxia is forgetting everyday stuff, like a subscription. I didn’t email them one last time when I remembered the subscription I had may be running low. So that was a way to say this was a book I had missed between renewals. I think Jacqui was one of the first reviewers I saw of this book, and a recent mention in a YouTube video made me just get a copy from the library. I had been waiting to either buy it new or secondhand. Jeremy Cooper, an art historian, has appeared on the Antiques Roadshow and on Radio 4. I read the Guardian interview where he had been in love with the BFI cinema and the various films and how many you could see in one day, and Brian came from that seeing a regular group in the foyer.

One of Brian’s favourite film moments – from a cast of dozens, admittedly – was in Wim Wenders’s Kings of the Road, the scene where a vehicle drew up in a deserted landscape somewhere near the East German border and Rüdiger Vogler walked off twenty yards from the road to take a shit. The camera focused low down to film from behind a long dark sausage turd drop slowly from a pale arse.

In black and white.

Brian admired the shot and always wondered if it was Vogler’s bum or a stunt man’s.

At what time of day was it filmed?

One of the early films from Wim one of his road movies

I think what grabbed me most about Brian is how I connect to him as a person, a quiet man with a simple, solitary life, a small world of lunch in the same cafe, and nights at his small flat in Kentish Town. But what happens when he goes to see a Clint Eastwood film at the BFI? He is drawn into a world of films and becomes one of those figures who meet in the foyer, as we see him make friends with Jack and the other BFI regulars . Added to this is his childhood in Northern Ireland and how that impacted his adult life. As My father is from Northern Ireland and my grandparents are I can see how this world made Brainthe man he is. Then there are the films along the way for me now. I, of course, loved the mention of Wim Wenders, but also the talk of a documentary of Einsturzende Neubauten, the German industrial band I have loved since finding out their singer was Nick Cave’s guitarist over 35 years ago. Then films like Tokyo Story, the late films of Derek Jarman, and this is a book about one man falling in love with the world of cinema.

Two days later Jack called by, looking drastically out of place in the sterile white ward, tiptoeing in his battered trainers gingerly across the polished green linoleum to the side of his friend’s bed. Brian was thrilled to see him and to be filled in on the best of the movies he had missed. Jack had been totally taken, he said, by a documentary on the experimental rock group Einstürzende Neubauten and their leader Blixa Bargeld, ace manipulator of the jackhammer in motorway under-passes. Brian laughed in pleasure at the band’s name and the titles of their songs, admitting that he had never heard of them before. At which Jack came out with one of those definitive phrases for which he was celebrated amongst his fellow buffs: ‘After Einstürzende Neubauten everything is silence.’

The singer’s actual name, Jack said, was Christian Emmerich, branding himself Blixa Bargeld when he left his parents’ home in West Berlin to make music, blixa a make of blue felt-tip pen and bargeld a German street term for cash

Einstruzende Neubauten a band i love

I read reviews of this, and it seems people either love it or hate it. For me, I loved it. Part of it sang to a lost part of me. I love world cinema, but I have seen myself watch less and less over the last few years. I’m not sure if this is, in part, a loss of attention span due to smartphone use. But this is the one thing I loved in this book. Brian’s passion reminded me of the first decade of this blog, when I felt confident in my opinions before the world’s noise became too loud. Obsession is a great way to discover things. Part of me thinks Brian is neurodivergent, I would’t say just autistic, just the traits for deep diving and one passion I know I have. But there is also a lament in me for the time I would record whatever channel four would show late at night, small town life meant that was my window into world cinema, that the film show and long lost shows like the late show, when arts were taken seriously to have Ekow Eshun and Tom Paulin talk arts is something much missed. Anyway, you love film? This novel is for you if you’ve seen the documentary Cinemania. This is a refined English version of that obsession with film, but also the small group of people in that world, a dying world. It could be model aircraft, model railways, stamp collecting, and so on. Jeremy Cooper is capturing a man in a world that will, maybe, in twenty years seem alien! I have made a promise to try to watch a few more films from around the world this year. I have a Sight and Sound subscription and got the Bela Tarr box set for Christmas. Two places to start.

 

Wedding Worries by Stig Dagerman

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Wedding Worries by Stig Dagerman

Swedish fiction

Original title –Bröllopsbesvär

Translators -Paul Norlen and Lo Dagerman

Source – Personal

I think we all have a canon of writers we have yet to read and review any reader worth anything or like me should I say spends a lot of times down rabbitholes absorbing the writers of the world some I forget a few days after I have read about them but others are on that list that little black book of writers you know for sure youy will get to one day something about them clicks that light in the room of your head where you have the library lof those writers you love well Dagerman has been that list for a long tiome I wait sometimes for years to I see the book in the wild and then when I see a book on a shelf I am like a hawk fast and confident i have found my prey sorry book I mean. Well, Dagerman is often mentioned alongside the likes of Joyce and Faulkner, a difficult writer, a modernist, the sort of writer I love to challenge myself as a reader. Now it is easy to see the comparison in this, his last novel, which is set over the course of one day. At a country wedding in the swedish village of  Älvkarleby

But when he comes back to the bridal bed, there has been no change. Siri is sitting like before, crying. And a fly is hovering in the corner. Then he notices that something has indeed changed: Frida is back hanging on her place on the wall. Holding herself firmly in the chair. Holding her place on the wall. Heat rises to Westlund’s head, a little fire-devil.

He grabs hold of his daughter by her slender shoulders, one in each large hand, and lifts her up toward his anger. But he encounters a fire no smaller than his. A bigger fire, actually.

He looks into a pair of eyes, a pair of eyes that he knows. That he usually closes his own eyes to. The eyes have a voice, and the voice is saying: Thus says the law, Westlund. If you had been living then they would have beheaded you. And that’s how it is with the dead, you cant look into their eyes. Just close your own.

Over the day we learn all sorts from the family members

The first thing I loved about this book was the list of characters. Now, as someone who is neurodivergent, I sometimes lose track of characters, and having a list to refer back to at the start of the book helps me greatly. The book is set on a wedding day as Hildur, the youngest daughter of the Palm family, is due to marry the local, much older Village Butcher, Hilmer. Now we get to see the day and the events that have led up to this young girl marrying a man twice her age and an alcoholic, but when she is with child and the farm hand that got her pregnant, a drunk is more appealing than being like her unwed sister who has a child. As the day goes on, secret affairs are being found out. The farm Hand Martin reappears as the day sways between a normal, nervy wedding day and heading to the abyss and oblivion, at times, where will it all be at the end when the feast happens?

“Since you’re getting married tomorrow maybe you’re in need of some trinkets, I say. Straight from the jeweler in Gävle, I say. Trinket me here and trinket me there, says West-Lund, but bring the case on over here so we can take a look.

Til be a monkey’s uncle, Westlund says looking. This here is fancy. He takes a brooch and places it on the plate. Oh my, now I know a bride who’ll be happy. Give me four, and I’ll be done, he says. One for Hildur and one for Siri. That will be six crowns even, I say. Best to take out my pouch then, Westlund says.”

All the village is caught up in the wedding and trying to be part of it

I loved this book; it had so many boxes for me as a reader. I love. Village anypone that has spent any time reading this blog know I am a huge fan of books set in villages, the microcosm of life hapopoens and this book is a perfect example as the day unfolds, we hear from a multitude of voices this remined me of the cacophony of voices we get in Faulkners AsI lay dting this is more as I head to a wedding or do I !. Secrets is another trope I love in fiction. A good secret can make a book and break a plot up into many pieces, like it does here. Love, hate, passion, and desire are all here as well. Truth and lies as well. Also that time frame one day 24 hours so much can happen I think of Ulysess but even of somehting like the Ron Howard fil where over the course of one day a story changes like this one does leaving you the reader not quite knowning how it will all end. Man, I so wish he hadn’t died. This was his final novel, written when he was 30. God, this is a masterpiece. What would he have done next?

Have you read Dagerman ?

 

 

Mysterious setting by Kazushige Abe

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Mysterious Saetting by Kazushige Abe

Japanese fiction

Original title – Misuteriasu Settingu  -ミステリアス・セッティング

Translator Muchel Emmerich

Source – Personal copy

I’m back I had a week where life caught up with book reviewing and so I add another book for the Jpaanese Literature challenge and one from the many books that Pushkin Press have brought out in there Novella se4ries of novels from japan with there bright covers and often eye catching cover art they highlight some of the best writing from recent years in Japan this iss one of two books they have published from Kazushige Abe. A writer who started off studying film and wanted to be a film director, and then, whilst studying film, friends introduced him to writers like Kenzaburo Oe, Richard Bach, William Burroughs and Philip K Dixck, and he decided he wanted to be a writer. He has won several major writing prizes in Japan. This book, published in 2006, is a retelling of the Little Match Girl story set in contemporary Japan.

Nozomi asked why, if she was prepared to share her

poems, she didn’t write them down.

This was a good question, and Shiori was unsure how to

answer. She didn’t know why.

Nozomi was merciless at moments like this.

“Things just spin further out of control when you try to cover up one lie with another, Shiori. Why not admit you can’t write poetry? You’d like to be a poet, but you aren’t one, and, if you ask me, the odds you’ll succeed in becoming a troubadour’ seem pretty slim. They say everyone has the right to dream, but inflicting a ‘right’like that on people seems cruel to me. Just look at you, shooting off lies so transparent even I can see through them, acting like this dumb dream’ of yours is your greatest treasure and you’ll never let it go.

I’ve never heard anything so stupid in my life.”

Her sister is her harshest critic

I love the way this story starts off as something normal. We meet Shirori, a teenager with a singular dream, but the only problem is that she is tone-deaf. She is often reminded of this fact, very harshly, by her sister. But she has read off the old-fashioned Troubadours that used to travel telling tales in songs, and is caught up in this dream. But in the latter part of the book, the girl meets the world as she heads to Tokyo to follow her dream and study music. But like many girls like her with dreams and no real sense of how the world works ., she falls foul of those underclass of people that take people’s dreams and twist them so she meets people online that take on her and this seems to be the way the book is heading then we get something that changes her whole future out of leftfield and the book is dark and comic at the same time.

Suzuki-kun was seized with righteous indignation when he heard about all this. He told Shiori he would talk to Nozomi, make her stop. But Shiori defended her sister.

Nozomi had been angry, it was a sort of fit, she told him.

You shouldn’t blame her—it was really my fault for breaking my promise. Besides, Nozomi had said she was sorry at breakfast, so everything was OK now. In reality, Nozomi had never apologized for anything in her life, but in this case a little white lie seemed appropriate.

Shiori was so overjoyed to see Suzuki-kun this con-cerned-he was angry on her behalf!-that she wouldn’t have traded the experience for anything. At the same time, she didn’t want him butting into a matter that was really between her and her sister.

More about her and the sister !

I think this is one of those books from Japan that has a nod toward traditional stories like the Little Match Girl, but it was also first released as a novel on the phone when it came out. There is a sense of many little things happening that draw the story forward. But then there is also the leftfield turns we get here and there throughout the book. That was a nod to figures like Burroughs and Dick, writers he likes, the urban jungle and cityscapes, both common in their works, and to surreal turns, a thing Burroughs was known for. Dick’s often from the few books I read years ago, like playing with identity and setting, like in Blade Runner, which is, of course, set in a modern city but has light, dark, and comedy at times, and also shifts in reality. But at the heart of this book is isolation inj the big city, one girl’s dream, but also those that will prey on that, all tied up in the book, which is also about Tokyo and going there for a dream like many a teen does in Japan and always will. Nut, maybe not as surreal as this darkly comic book does.

Have you any books that take a surreal turn at times like this book ?

Vaim by Jon Fosse

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Vaim by Jon Fosse

Norwegian fiction

Original title – Vaim

Translator – Damion Searls

Source – Subscription edition

It is always fun to get a new book from Jon Fosse. He is one of those writers in recent years whom I have come to love. His books are beautifully written, with recurring themes like duality, mirrors, existential themes, and motifs. This is his first book since he won the Nobel, and one always feels that one of two things can happen when a writer wins a prize as big as the Nobel. That’s why they struggle to match up to the earlier books, or they carry on, and I wondered which way Fosse would go. I don’t know why I was worried; this is another slice of what we have all come to like about his books, and the first in a new trilogy.

I can’t remember how many years, and of course it was a stupid idea to name the boat after Eline, but I’d probably heard that a boat should have a female name, and since the name Eline was the one that was constantly spinning around in my head, yes, the boat got named Eline, Eline the person had already been on my mind for several years, often to the point where it was hard to stop thinking about her, yes, and so that’s how the boat got named Eline, and there was a lot of talk going around about that name, yes, that’s what Elias told me, yes, apparently it was so bad that some people called me Eline instead of Jatgeir, there’s Eline, they said when they saw me, and when Elias told me that yes well I didn’t ask any more questions, that was just the way it was going to be on that subject, there was nothing I could do about it anyway, that’s how it was, and well it was nice that Elias dropped by to see me every now and then, he was the only person who did, and he was the only person I ever dropped by and visited either and now I can already see the bay there at Sund,

Elias and how Jatgeir called his boat after the girl he loved at a distance

This book is divided into three parts the first is about an older man Jatgeir we not told how old he is other than he has no family and his beard is greying and he has a boat called the Eline after a girl he had loved all his life and now in what from the way he talks is his lster life he has gone on a yearly trip to a city Bjorgvin from his small fishing village of Vaim. He has no real reason other than to fetch a spool of black thread and a needle to fix a button back on a shirt. When he ends up getting stung by the shopkeeper and her son over the thread, he goes back to his boat, then, after paying 250 krona for the thread, he heads out. This is where the story starts to get strange. He tells of the only other person to use the boat with him, Elias, and that he is now heading to Sund and to a smaller port for the night. He again visits the shop, purchases a second needle and thread, and is shocked to pay the same price. So that night, he hears a voice, and it is Eline, the girl he likes but never told, talking to him, and they elope as she has missed Vaim, his home, and where she grew up. Then, in part, we hear from Jatgeir’s friend Elais after Jatgeir has come back with Eline, and the two friends who often spent time together have not been together for a year and a day. This is a phrase Eline uses in the first part of the story. Then he is visited by a ghost, but who is the ghost? The third story loops back to Frank Eline’s husband on Sund and his story, but as ever, there are loops of names and phrases and boats with similar names in this tale, and it is very strange in the end

She called me Frank, from the first time we met she called me Frank – hi Frank, nice to see you, she said to me, or something like that, it was in Bjørgvin, it was at the restaurant called The Fowl where I’d gone with the two guys I fished with on the Elinor, the three of us did all kinds of fishing on that ship back then, and then it would sometimes happen that if we’d had a good catch and got a good price for the fish that we’d take a little trip to Bjørgvin, dock at one of the quays on The Wharf, spend a night there usually, getting in sometime in the afternoon and leaving at dawn or sometime the next morning

Frank or Olaf as he is meeting Eline for the first time in the third part of the book

This book is like a Möbius loop, as you have the feeling ELine is going around and around with these two men, like a moon orbiting two planets: as one pulls, she goes from Jatgeir to Frank, or is it Olaf who was Frank? Is he Olaf? Add to this: boats with similar names; both men have boats called Eline, and the other boat has a similar-sounding name as well. Then we have the recurrent mention of a year and a day in the book; it keeps cropping up, but at other times, time is fluid, and the events seem to have happened over a year, while in other passages, it is this year and a day that is said. Friendship love moen that are very quiet and a woman that likes to get her own way lead to a novella that twists in on itself and at times seems to repeat events and places in the first and last story, like the two men are ghosts that could have met at some point . This is a classic piece of Fosse, and I can’t wait to see where he takes this story, how many more twists and turns we get from the folk on Vaim.This is the best books I have read this year so far.

The Christmas Clue by Nicola Upson

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The Christmas Clue by Nicola Upson

English Fiction

Source – Personal copy

I brought this in the run-up to Christmas. I feel I’m starting a new reading tradition for myself: finishing the year off with a couple of crime books. I think what grabbed me about this book is the fact that it uses the couple that invented the board game Cluedo, which is written by Nicola Upson whom I have seen talking a lot about golden age of crime writing and this book is set in the time well middle of world war two when people had to make there own entertainment the coupole at the heart of the boo comes up with the game. But what Nicola Upson imagines is that the pair had run a murder game in the house they eventually used as the template for the Cluedo board.

They pressed on, passing through familiar villages in good time and picking up the Rottingdean road just as the light was beginning to fade. It’s hard to believe that we’re almost at the coast, Elva said, peering through the windscreen at the pretty cottages and village greens that were synonymous with rural England. ‘You’d never know that all the drama of the sea was barely a mile away. I think that’s what I love most about this place. You get the best of both worlds, so you never tire of either of them?

‘Murder at the Vicarage and Rebecca all rolled into one?Anthony said, and laughed as she raised her eyes to the heavens.Dean Court Road is the next turning on the left?She nodded but didn’t slow down, and Anthony repeated the direction. ‘Well, it was the next left, he said, staring back over his shoulder. Now you’ll have to go round the pond and come back?

As the head off to set up there murder weekend in high spirits

The book follows Anthony and Elva Pratt, a couple who, in 1943, arranged for a small hotel in the village of Rottingdean to host a murder-mystery weekend. They have the fake weapons for the murder weekend and have chosen the Tudor house as the setting for the weekend. Anthony had played the piano at the hotel before the war.  But when they arrive and call at a local shop and find the shopkeeper dead, their murder mystery weekend becomes all too real, especially when it turns out the sister of the dead woman happens to work at the Tudor house hotel. What follows is that the death is connected tpo the collection of guests in the hotel, and the dean sets out to solve the actual crime. But the hotel guests are, in a way, the templates for the Cluedo game: a single woman, a military man, the hotel manager, and the sister. Miss Silver, the cook, may know more about why the shopkeeper has died.

‘My money would be on last-minute chocolates for his wife? Elva pulled into the space that the other car had just vacated, a neat dark rectangle amid the covering of white.

‘At least Miss Silver’s not staying open just for us?

The shop was one of a terrace of small cottages, identical to its neighbours except for the colourful array of sweets and novelties in the window and a discreet sign above the door: Miss E. Silver, Tobacconist and Confec-tioner, est. 1929. ‘You could trace my whole childhood in those jars, Anthony said, looking wistfully at the gob-stoppers, humbugs and sugar mice. ‘It must be a lovely thing to own a sweet shop, don’t you think? You’d only ever have happy customers?

They visit the shop but get more than chocolates there !

I loved how she worked the real life inventors of Cluedo intpo a classic slice of Golden age criome in a way the classic country house or in the case hotel a collection of people gathered together sterotypes like in the game but also in a lot of christie novels the characters all fit a type a single woman a vixen of sort a mitltary man, stasff and a couple of mysterious figures. We have all here, plus nods to the classic game they invented based on this hotel, a cast of characters, and, like in the car, a lot of ways to kill someone on hand. Then to set it all at Christmas is just so clever. I can see this being a Christmas read for years for fans of classic golden-age crime fiction, as well as books that take real-life people on a Journey. I also think it has a TV drama written all over it as well!

 

 

The Coffee House by Naguib Mahfouz

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The Coffee House by Naguib Mahfouz

Egyptian Fiction

Original title – قشتمر (رواية)

Translator – Raymond Stock

Source – Personal copy

I have read a few other books by Mahfouz over the years. He is a writer whose books are widely available in English and are also widely translated. He is best known for the Cairo trilogy, which I intend to read early in 2027 if anyone is interested in joining me in reading the epic novel that earned him the Nobel Prize. With Mookse and Gripes doing an episode on him in 2027, I have time try and read as many as I can. This is a book from later in his career. It was his last novel, but not the last book he wrote. So far, from the other books I have read by him, he always captures the vibe of his country so well, and he has great insight into relationships. Also, here, I felt this is a microcosm of the country for the five young boys who grow to be men in this book.

Sadiq Safwan lived in a house blessed with love, harmony, and a stable marital life. As an only child, he was favored with every sort of care but his adolescent awakening was considered a secret that must be avoided. At puberty, with neither a teacher nor a helper, he abandoned his piety.

“Marriage is the only cure for this,” he once told us. “But

when will that come?”

Sadiq loved his parents he was not afraid of them: Tahir Ubayd was like him in this. Safwan Effendi al-Nadi began to escort his son to Friday prayers at the Sidi al-Kurdi mosque.

“Didn’t your father’s mustache poke those praying on either side of him in the eye?” Tahir teased Sadiq after we’d waited for his return.

Sadig’s father never stopped pushing him to work hard and settle into the right position, for only that would save him from a future of poverty.

Sadig gets out of his poor background

The title refers to a local coffee house near where the five main characters in the book all went to school. They all came to the school from different places in Cairo. So when they grow up, they are, in ways, on opposite sides at times, but still have regular meetups at the coffee house. Ismel is very clever and, maybe in a way, a disappointment in his life, but devout and works in publishing. Opposite to this is Tahir, a man from a low-class background, but not religious, who loves poetry.  Hamada is a lawyer when he grows up. Sadig is a middle-of-the-road person who runs a factory and is married. Then there is our narrator, and we have very few clues about him. For me, he was maybe Mahfouz himself; he spent time in coffee houses. What happens is the events of the middle years of the twentieth century, from World War II to the rise of the muslim brotherhood. I loved how it showed how these five boys who met as seven-year-olds and managed to stick together through adulthood, each having their own paths and views.

Ismail Qadri was more or less our leader. That was his right due to his academic excellence, an undeniable distinction. He had a special status among the teachers, not to mention an air of excitement due to his sexual caprices. Since his reaching puberty, his mother had kept a special watch on him, so he lost the opportunities that the roof terrace had offered. Thus he transferred his instinct to the forest of fig trees, into which he lured the daughters of street vendors. Nonetheless, he persisted in his piety like Sadig Safwan, stuffing his storehouse of information with many things he learned from his mother on the afterlife and the torture of the grave. He sustained his fervor by picturing the image of God.

Ismail is the most well written character i felt he must been some Mahfouz knew well

I was so happy when I found this last year, as I had read a Mahfouz last year and had only a couple on my TBR pile, so this is his final novel for me, and it’s a personal book. I see the narrator as Mahfouz and the other characters as people he has known. I am not quite sure if each character is one person or various friends from the many traditional coffee houses he used to go to.One in particular is the model for the cafe in the book, and it is still kept as it was in Mahfouz’s time for people to visit. He has also shown how turbulent the years have been for Egypt and how the locals have coped with it. Have you read any books by Mahfouz? If so, do you have a favourite? If you are after a Proust-like book about Cairo in the mid century, this is the book for you

Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami

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Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami

Japanese Non-Fiction

Original title – 職業としての小説家, Shokugyō to shite no Shōsetsuka

Translators – Phillip Gabriel and Ted Goossen

Source – Personal copy

I move on to Haruki Murakami for my second book for the Japanese Literature Challenge 26. This is the eighth book I have reviewed since the blog began; it has been three years since I last reviewed a book by him. I had this on the shelves for a while and was looking forward to it because I’m a fan of what I talk about when I talk about running, and this collection about him as a writer appealed to me. I always admire how writers work, and I’m curious about how their lives as writers have come about, and maybe Murakami’s generation of writers is the last to be able to live as full-time writers. The first half of the collection was published in parts in a Japanese magazine.

WRITING NOVELS IS, to my way of thinking, basically a very uncool enterprise. I see hardly anything chic or stylish about it. Novelists sit cloistered in their rooms, intently fiddling with words, batting around one possibility after another. They may scratch their heads an entire day to improve the quality of a single line by a tiny bit. No one applauds, or says “Well done,” or pats them on the back. Sitting there alone, they look over what they’ve accomplished and quietly nod to themselves. It may be that later, when the novel comes out, not a single reader will notice the improvement they made that day. That is what novel writing is really all about. It is time-consuming, tedious work.

The lonely life of a writer

I suppose the best essay for me was the second one, about how it is almost by accident that we have Murakami. He had written his first book, Hear the Wind Sing, whilst working in a Jazz bar, and sent it to a Literary magazine competition, not expecting anything, then won the prize. Of course, the rest is history. He also talked in that bit about Agota Kristof and how she had written her novels. Elsewhere, he gives speeches in schools about how to be a writer. There is another essay in which he discusses his later books. It starts by discussing how he has come across the characters in his book and how he used to admire Somerset Maugham’s use of them. Then he moves on to later works of his, which I have wondered about. I have struggled with some of his later novels. I may go back after reading this and look at them again later. He also talks about prizes, where he is coy and uses other writers’ words on the Nobel prize winning, of course, he has been on the list as a potential winner for years.

Hear the wind sing is a short novel, less than two hundred manuscript pages long. Yet it took many months and much effort to complete. Part of the reason, of course, was the limited time I had to work on it, but the real problem was that I hadn’t a clue how to write a novel. To tell the truth, although I had been absorbed in reading all kinds of stuff my favorites being translations of Russian novels and English-language paperbacks-1 had never read modern Japanese novels (of the “serious” variety) in any concerted way. Thus I had no idea what kind of Japanese literature was being read at the time or how I should write fiction in the Japanese language.

Hear the wind sing is one of my favourite books by him

I enjoyed this collection less than What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I feel I may have grown out of Murakami as a reader in recent years. Looking back, it was in 2014 that I last reviewed a novel by him. Perhaps it is the fact I hadn’t connect with his later books and loved some of his earlier books but also in hindsight wonder if they would still be as good as they were when I read them twenty years ago. I still have a hope he may write that Magnus opus that he hasn’t quite written, if that makes sense. He wrote great books, but not one super book. If you are a fan, it is an insight into his mind as a writer, his views on character prizes and other things. But for me, I loved the humour and the more personal insights he shared in the book. What I talk about is a more personal memoir; this is more about his craft as a writer and the writer’s world than Murakami the man. Of course, the piece on Literary prizes. Will he be republished if he wins the Nobel Prize in the coming years? Have you read this book?

Library for the war wounded by Monika Helfer

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Library for the War Wounded by Monika Helfer

Austrian Fiction

Original title – Vati

Translator Gillian Davidson

Source – Library book

I brought this from the library for German lit month, read it, but didn’t review it, which I should have. I loved this book, it is by the Austrian writer Monika Helfer and is a piece of autofiction around her own father. The book itself was shortlisted for the German Book Prize, which is the German equivalent of the Booker Prize. What we get in this is a daughter piecing together the fragments of a father she never really knew. I love the English title, but wonder why Father is the Austrian title. .

We called her Mutti, not Mama. Our father wanted it that way. Because he thought it sounded modern.

Modern our mother was not. She came from the remotest backwoods, her brothers were a wild bunch.

When their parents died, the oldest, Uncle Heinrich, was just seventeen or eighteen. The children had to fend for themselves. No one helped them. They didn’t have faith in the Church nor in Hitler. Well, Aunt Irma did have faith in Hitler. For her, he was modern.

Uncle Lorenz said she shouldn’t put her hopes in him. She never had anyway, she said after the war.

Our father was convinced that people living in such circumstances were better somehow, deep down.

Like him. He also came from a sort of down-and-out family. He used to quote Rilke: ‘For poverty is a great glow from within?

Vati and Muti are names used for parents.

The book focuses on a character in the present trying to piece together her father’s life. Josef lived a man born in relative poverty and only learnt to read when the local gentry wanted to help him. When the Nazis take over, he is sent to the Eastern Front and loses his leg. From this point is where she remembers her father. He is given the job in the mountains at a home for the war-wounded. As they have a massive collection of books, this is where the title comes from. He loves to read books and has shown signs of developing from his love of reading. Still, when he start to make changes oiut how the recovery centre is run the bosses appear he rushes to bury the books these are all fragments she piece together of what Josef was like a man she never really know and in a way he is maybe a litle like Godot in a way as he isn’t front and centre in the book but more a ghost a person remembered.

I am tired. I close my laptop, stretch, it is only early afternoon. It is not the writing that makes me tired, nor is it the remembering. I want to be tired. I use tiredness as a professional tool. I need to get closer to the dreams, not quite asleep but no longer totally awake, remembering comes more easily this way, that’s my experience, I want to make use of this phenomenon. I am conjuring. What a lovely expres-sion! I conjure up the sound of our mother coming up the stairs, taking off her dress and giving her skin a scratch. I used to love hearing that, then I knew: now she’s putting on her fresh white nightshirt, which has been carefully pressed, and before she goes into the main bedroom, she’ll cuddle up with us girls for a quarter of an hour. Did we even know the phrase

‘cuddle up?

In the present as she looks into the past

I have chosen a short review for this book, it is one of those books that is great to read and lingers with you, this ghost of a man, a father, but one of those that always seems distant. I think this is common with mid century parents they worked kids where kids in their world, and the two rarely crossed, so Josef remained an enigma to the writer of the book his daughter as I say he is there but spoken about and not front stage in the book we what he does often vthrough others a patchwork of memories and those tales that drift dowwn through the years.If you are a fan of Robert Seethaler’s work, this is the same world of the Austrian Alps and family. I also see a bit of Ian McEwan in this book, Secrets in the Past. Have you read this or her other book?

My Annihilation by Fuminori Nakamura

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My Annihilation by Fuminori Nakamura

Japanese crime fiction

Original title – Watashi no Shōmetsu (私の消滅)

Translator – Samm Bett

Source – Review copy

I am a terrible reviewer of my review copies. I sometimes just get in my own groove, and books get put aside and forgotten. I am such a mood reader and always want to be me as a reader. I have been sent books and have not got to them, but with this being Japanese challenge month, I found this and remembered I really enjoyed Cult X by the same writer when I reviewed it. Nakamura is one of those crime writers who is as much a literary writer as a crime writer. In Japan, this is reflected in the fact that he has won a couple of major book prizes for his earlier works, and some of his books have also been made into films. His books defy genre, really, and this book is one such book.

I guess it started with the tuneral.

A girl who lived nearby was kidnapped and discovered dead. The younger sister of one of my

classmates. People sweating through their black funeral clothes milled awkwardly about. I was in the third grade, and watched these strangers dressed in black surround my classmate. His parents stood nearby, holding a portrait of the lost girl.

They had apprehended an unemployed man in his thirties, who went on to testity to having lured the girl into his car and murdered her when she began to kick and scream. The

man had a hulky build and wore ratty basketball shoes. I had seen him wandering around

town several times, leaning a little forward as he walked.

As he reads the diary in the opening chapter and a death

My Annihilation is a book made of one man’s diary, in part, as we meet a man in a remote mountain lodge as he reads this diary of a serial killer, Royadi Kozuka, the man who has written this dark diary of the events and killings he may have committed. But this book is one of those that folds on itself as the man who is reading ther diary is trying to be the man in the diary and as we get further into the book he is held at a mental institution as th pyschatrist try to untangle to identity of the man and the writer of the dirasy and how these all fit together wutha woman that has died called Yukari and we see her desperate past life. AS the multiple threads unfold, the story and tale are revealed, but there are also gaps in the narrative, with black pages between the chapters. As I said, this is a writer who loves to play with the style of writing but also the way a story is told.

He was a quiet kid, easy to miss. The adult couples in his family were at odds with one another, and sometimes his grandfather beat his grandmother and his father beat his mother.

Because his parents were both busy working, he was looked after by a man named Taka, who had

an emotional disorder and was unable to use both his legs. After Taka went away and Miyazaki’s grandfather died, a noticeable change came over him. He began inflicting violence on his parents and on animals while obsessively collecting anime and manga.

Children can become unstable with thedeath of a parent or close relative, but by the time his grandfather had died Miyazaki was already twenty-five years old and inordinately distraught. When he saw a little girl on her own, he told himself “I’m gonna catch that kid” and said something to her. Of particular interest was his perception of himself during that moment.

What makes a kiler ?

 

I wish I had got to this earlier, as it is not only one of the most inventive crime books I have read, with many layers like peeling an onion back, even to the tears of the horrific crimes we see along the way. But the use of past, present, and identity all collide at times. Who is who, why has x and y happened all unfold, but not always as you think they will, the truth always seems to shine through. This has the darkness, at times, you find in a writer like Bolano, that feeling of not quite knowing what is going on, that you draw from Kafka’s works. But also the brutal nature of mental health treatment that brought me back at times to one flew over the cuckoo’s nest with its mention of electrotherapy, etc. I was also reminded of Pamuk’s crime books by another clever writer. I could see this making a great mini series, with the various threads, since it would suit a mini-series format, since we know each part slowly comes together like a complex jigsaw puzzle. One for Kafka fans, fans of clever crime books that keep you thinking about who is who and about identity and revenge! I’m sure I have said this before, but Soho Press does some of the most inventive book covers. Have you read any books by Fuminori Nakamura?

Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper by Donald Henderson

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Mr Bowling Buys  a Newspaper by Donald Henderson

English Crime Fiction

Source – Library

Don’t Panic, what I’ve started the year off with a book that isn’t a translation. Well, this book was on Jacquiwines’ end-of-year book list, and I wanted a couple of crime-like books to round off the year’s reading. I was amazed that my library had an edition which I collected just before Christmas. What grabbed me in Jacqui’s description was the feeling that the book was in the same world of back streets, and those down on their luck as Patrick Hamilton’s are, with a crime thrown in for free. Plus, the book is set during the Second World War, and at the back end of last year I watched the Foyle’s War series again, which also drew me as a reader to the book.

‘My dear, she laughed, ‘you just don’t know him! He’s as honest and open as the day. According to his lights! Which is more than one can say for some—I don’t mean you, you old pencil! She often called him an old pencil, because of his work at the M.O.I. She teased him about being a pencil and a bit of paper. “Try and be nice to him, won’t you, darling. He’s had a tough break. Married too young. No cash. This time he must try and marry a bit of money, it’s the only thing for a man of his temperament. There’s no shame in it, it’s logic, and he’s got music in him?

‘He’s not very good looking, is he?

‘Hark at him! And nor are you! You old pencil!?

I mean, he always looks as it… as if he’s acting a part. As if he’s out of his sphere?

He is out of sphere. The poor lamb. He ought to live on his country estate. Or somebody ought to leave him some dough and a title. He’d probably do wonders for charity and write a symphony or something?

This captures the problem in his life somewhat

 

The book follows a serial killer called Mr Bowling, who kills people, and he likes to buy a paper tpo see if the crime has been reported. This is all because he doesn’t want to live. The book opens with why this is he has failed in a lot he has done in hism life and has seemed like someone that maybe has had to settle for second best this includes his annoying wife, He is a failed musician making ends met selling insurances so when he kills the wife Ivy during a bombing raid thius gives him two opportunities the first is to have money as it is assumed she died due to the bombing and the other is the abuility to carry out more killings. He isn’t the cleverest killer; he wants to be caught in a way. He sees this as a release from a life that along the way. Has had so many bad moments. He can’t bring himself to kill himself, but can kill others, for someone to kill him in the end, that is the final idea.

Mr Bowling said Winthrop often came in for a chat, and had actually been in only yesterday morning to invite him to bridge on the Thursday next, and he’d accepted.

When the copper went off to question somebody else, Joan slipped in again with some ridiculous talk about wondering if the police thought she’d murdered Mr Winthrop.

“You? he said.

She was scared and she said:

Well, they think it’s murder. Personally, I should think it was a housebreaker or someone. I can’t imagine Mr Gunter doing it, or anyone else here? And Alice says they think he was killed last night about eleven or so, that was just when I came into your room and you were… or I thought you were having a bath? She stared vacantly. “Where were you?”

He can be quite funny at times there is a dark satire under riding the book

I said this was a crime novel; it’s really more of a thriller, and it’s about human psychology, more like those great dramas we had in the eighties from Ruth Rendell’s thrillers. A book about one man’s life and drive, or lack of it, is a bad luck story. I get the Hamilton connection. This is a man who has had everything go wrong in his life. It’s killing him, instead of falling into the bottle in a way. It also pokes at the rigid class system of the country at the time. How Bowling is trapped in a way by this, but for me it is also a piece of existentialist fiction, is Bowling not from the samew cut of cloth as Giovanni Drogo, a man stuck in a place and time alone in a desert, then Bowling alone in himself in a city of millions as bombs fall all around. If you are a fan of the inverted crime genre and psychological books by the likes of Rendell, Highsmith, or Du Maurier, but with the urban grit of Patrick Hamilton, dark wartime London streets, as we follow a killer trying to get caught, what will the paper say when he next buys it?

The Shipyard by Juan Carlos Onetti

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The Shipyard by Juan Carlos Onetti

Uruguayan fiction

Original title –El astillero

Translator – Nick Caistor

Source – Personal copy

I haven’t focused this year much on Latin American fiction as I have in other years. But I had read this book a few months ago. I have wanted to read Onetti for a while, a high school dropout who worked for a newspaper after he published his first novel. He was a friend of the Argentine writer Robert Arlt, a writer I need to get to next year. Onetti was also imprisoned for six months, but a campaign was held by a number of the leading Latin American writers of the day, Marquez, Lhosa and Benedetti. After this, he relocated and spent the rest of his life in Spain.

Larsen again gauged the hostility and mockery on the immobile faces of the two waiting men. To challenge and repay hatred might give his life a meaning, a habit, some pleasure; almost anything would be better than this roof with its leaky sheet iron, these dusty, lopsided desks, the heaps of files and folders stacked against the walls, the thorny vines winding themselves round the iron bars of the gaping window, the exasperating, hysterical farce of work, enterprise, and prosperity that the furniture spoke of (though now it was vanquished by use and moths, rushing towards its destiny as firewood); the documents made filthy by rain, sun and footprints, the rolls of blueprints stacked in pyramids all torn and tattered on the walls.

Further on the despaier is there a little more

The book is set in the fictional town of Santa Maria, a setting where Onetti set much of his fiction. The book follows a man returning to the city after five years in Exile, brought back to try and get the failing shipyard back into action. The man, Larsen, heads into the yard full of ideas. Still, as he works through the yard and the blueprints of old ships and past glories, there is a deep sense of how this is a place that has gone beyond the point of no return. The decay of an industrial place can be as fast as the lack of work and bleakness is caught in the various other people we glimpse in the book.As we see how this all hits Larsen

So Larsen was already under the spell, his fate decided, when he went into Belgrano’s the next day to have lunch with Galvez and Kunz. It was never entirely clear whether he chose to head the monthly wages list with five or six thousand pesos. In fact, his choice of one or the other figure could only have mattered to Galvez, who typed out several copies on the 25th of each month, stopping every now and then to furiously rub his bald patch. Every 25th of the month, he once again discovered, was forced to recognise, the repeated, permanent absurdity he was in the grip of. This realisation made him break off, stand up, and pace about the huge deserted office, hands behind his back, his brown scarf wrapped round his neck, pausing at the drawing board where Kunz was always ready with his hollow, silent, exasperated laugh.

I loved the style of this book. I was reminded of the Hilbig books. Similar to his book, there is a sense of a place on the edge of decay, a man with a hopeless task, which brought back memories of the main character in Dino Buzzati’s Tartar Steppe. On a personal front, I was reminded of a friend of my father who was in charge of a shipyard in the Tyne, which, like here, was in steep decline. How hard ot can be to turn back an operation like a shipyard when the decay is already there. What remains all these weeks after is how futile Larsen’s job is and the despair that it can bring to one man. Have you read this book or any others by Onetti? If so, which one to try next?

For Fans of –

Wolfgang Hilbig, I have reviewed two books by him

Also, The Tartar Steppes by Dino Buzzati

 

Sad Tiger by Niege Sinno

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Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno

French Memoir

Original title –Triste Tigre

Translator – Natasha Lehrer

Source – Personal copy

I’m not sure why I hadn’t got to this book sooner. I usually keep an eye out for books that have won the major book prizes across Europe as a guide to those that, at some point, we may see in English. Winning one of the various prizes associated with the Prix Goncourt usually means the book will reach us in English, so this book has won not just the Goncourt for books read by high school pupils; it still amazes me what great books have won that prize, and it also won a woman’s book prize in France. The book uses the writer’s own experiences from the age of 7 to 14, when she was repeatedly raped by her stepfather.

You like that? Yes, yes you do, you really like it.

The title is Lolita but Lolita herself is almost entirely absent. You see her through the filter of her predator’s gaze, and she almost never exists as herself; she is the perfect fantasy figure, the nymphet incarnate. At last, at the end of the book, Humbert the dreamer recognizes this. As he sits in the car he has deliberately driven off the road, waiting for the police to pick him up, he has a final epiphany. He recalls the morning when he was driving around the country trying to find the teenage runaway. Lost on a mountain road, he stopped the car. Looking down from the hill to a small town below, sounds floated up toward him like a choir: I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolitas absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.

Lolita and her own life shows the darker side of that book

But in writing this book, she wanted it to be more than a book about the rapes. That’s when she was just seven and carried on until her mid-teens, all in a cottage that the family were doing up in the Basque Country.  But what we get is a book that shows the impact of these events on her from her youth through her life. The abuse suffered over those years from her stepfather, a man who loved the music of French rock star  Hailday and played it loudly. I could picture this hippy rocker it brought chills of my own stepfather a man that still had a fifties style rocker hair and would even as I write this sends a shiver down my spine not that I was sexually abused but over the years after my mum has died, I see the sheer mental and trauma he has caused both me my brother and in a lot of ways my mother by his personality and ability to gaskight us all anyway. I was connected to her life and to those men who slowly or violently tear apart lives . How lives get put back together and how books connect us to both our past and to think about how it is a prism to view the past, and here we see the rapes as a child and the impact on her. The book is part literary criticism, part cleansing, part sheer horror.

I remember places. The first place, a bedroom in dark-ness. I am woken by hands on me. Then his voice, when I open my eyes he is speaking in a low voice, he doesn’t stop talking. I don’t want to wake my sister asleep in bed beside me. I was seven when we lived in that apartment. I didn’t understand what was happening, but from the first moment, I sensed it was something serious and terrible. He was talking like a tamer speaks to a gentle but wild horse, one that needs to be held to keep it from getting away. He was talking as if nothing in all this should scare me, and if I was scared it was fine, he was there, he would help me get over my fear. But he, too, was afraid, and the fear enveloped us like a layer of night.

Virginia Woolf, who was abused by her two half-brothers, describes the bizarre experience of those first pawing caresses in an autobiographical piece in which she is trying to find a relationship between her old memories and the way her still-developing personality was being formed: … as I sat there, he began to explore my body. I can remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes; going firmly steadily lower and lower. I remember how I hoped that he would stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand touched my private parts.

THE first time he touched her  and how similar events effect Virginia Woolf

I read this book in nearly one sitting. The book has an almost-thriller feel and a non-linear way of describing her life, but it is so compelling that you hang on. Every word on the way she talks about the events but also the way she wants this book to be more than just that, as i say it is about the books she loves the title is a nod to the poem of William Blake elsewhere, Lolita is mention her mothers grief for a lost boyfriend that in some way blind her to the events that happened. THE book has other little events though her life, like how she got her name and how unusual it was at the time when most names had tpo be from an approved list of names in France. The book will appeal to fans of the autofiction of Ernaux and Louis. Still, for me, it has something more in common with writers like Kluge and Ester Kinsky, especially in its non-linear, polyphonic narrative style at times. Plus, it is a book I guarantee you won’t want to put down, which sounds so wrong given the subject matter, but it is so well written !!

Have you had a book that has hit you for six, so to speak ?