Category: CATALAN

Journeys and Flowers by Merce Rodoreda

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Journeys and Flowers by Merce Rodoreda

Catalan Fiction

Original title – Viatges i flors

Translators – Gala Sicart Olavide and Nick Caistor

Source – Library book

I read Death in Spring a few years ago by Merce Rodoreda and was pleased to see this on the shelf at the library. I was grabbed by the fact it was vignettes of villages and flowers but with an undercurrent going back years before the book was written which was 1980s but hark back to the war years in which she had first escaped the Spanish civil war heading to France but then when the Nazis took over France she had to move again. She was regarded as one of the leading voices of Catalan fiction had won all the big prizes for Catalan fiction on her wiki page there was this prologue from one of her books I think it capture whart she does in this book so well. “I write because I like to write. If it didn’t seem like an exaggeration, I would say that I write to please myself. If others like what I write, the better. Perhaps it is deeper. Perhaps I write to affirm myself. To feel that I am … And it’s over. I have spoken of myself and essential things in my life, with a certain lack of measure. And excess has always scared me”That last line struck me this is a short but hard hitting book

I suggest you go to the village down there, can you see it? The view is blocked by the trees, but it’s right behind them, come on! Can’t you see it, obscured by the foliage?’ This is what an ageless woman said to me, dressed all in black, her ample skirts gathered at the waist. Her round face framed by a scarf neatly tied under her chin. ‘You’ll fall in love with it. And she gave a half smile.

The day was ending by the time I reached the village, a village more or less the same as any other, with low one-storey houses, two-storey at most; streets, some narrow, some wide; a square with arcades; a watering-trough; an inn; all kinds of shops and an undertaker. I strolled round the village, went everywhere in it, and thought the woman’s idealised view of this completely boring village must stem from nostalgic childhood memories. I left it slowly, my thoughts lingering on the people living there. They looked like normal people yet something in their eyes was disturbing.

The thoughts of those that were there struck me !

An unnamed narrator is wandering from village to village, where the town has no real names but is the village of warriors, well-bred rats, the two roses, and glass. Each village is told in a fable-like way, so reality and the surreal drift into one. The violence of war haunts the background of these places, women wrapped in cocoons, men playing at being knights. It is not as it seems, and is at the same time. I like this, it reminds me of what Calvino did well, using slightly surreal things to convey things. The second part is odes to flowers, which are mainly made up of flowers and the meaning and thoughts behind them. Blue flowers, desperate flowers, to Dead flowers. Again, they are thoughts about the war years and the meaning of flowers at times.

Ballerina Flower

She is yellow and very dishevelled. Four tendrils emerge from her stem. She opens in mid-summer, at dawn with the sun. Her slender round petals are born in tiny pushes, and hang down. She gives off a perfume which combines the smell of woods – that is, dry – and mown grass – that is, damp. Once she has unfurled all her splendour, the tendrils spread, wrap round the nearest branches: they become as taut as wires. Captive, the flower begins the exhausting work of freeing herself. She slowly folds in on herself with little shakes, right and left. Forwards, back-wards. She tries, but when after a great deal of patience and grief she has only managed to become more entangled, she abandons her efforts.

This had such hidden thoughts to me

 

I liked this collection if I see it second hand i”ll pick tit u;a s I think it will need a few more readings to fully grasp the beauty of her words and ideas. It is something that you will see something more every time you reread them, I think. There is something about the cut down nature of these short tales that leaves so much to be filled in by the reader and thought about if that makes sense.It goes back to the earlier quote about excess in her life and her writing, it seems. It also mixes the beauty of her homeland with the horrors, violence, and divisive nature of the Spanish Civil War, which bleeds through these pages as you read these little gems. Have you read any of her books in English?

Beloved by Empar Moliner

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Beloved by Empar Moliner

Spanish (Catalan) fiction

Original title – Benvolguda

Translator -Laura Mcgloughlin

Source – review copy

I was sent this by the lovely folks at three-time Rebel Press. I have reviewed several of their books, as they are trying to give voice to the minority languages around Europe and female writers in those languages. This is a more recent novel from the writer. She has won many prizes in Spain for her fiction, including the Joseph Pla prize. She also writes for Newspapers, television, and radio. I need to mention that part of the profits from this book is going to cancer research as the illustrator of the covers for 3TIMESREBEL. Anna Pont has sadly passed away from Cancer. Her covers for this publisher have all been eye-catching and, I know, thought-provoking as well. So sadly, this is her last cover, and as ever, the image captures a little of the book as we follow Remei, an illustrator in her fifties.

She’s a violinist. The girl sitting in my place (who he will fall in love with) is his new desk-partner at the orchestra where he’s had a permanent post for the last ten years. She’s the stand-in violinist (a friend of the conductor’s friend’s daughter, it seems) who is coming home to rehearse. Danger indeed. All female musicians are sexy. All men have drooled one time or another over imaginary double bass players (always barefoot) playing pieces with sweet vigour.

They sit in pairs when a concert is performed. One music stand for every two musicians. It so happens that the desk-partner who’s sat with him until now has lung cancer.

My man is happy about having a substitute. He doesn’t like his partner at all; he says he stinks, doesn’t study, is very neurotic. He wishes him dead, half in jest.

The time she sees her husband and other violinist

Remei sees herself as an attractive, happy fifty-year-old. This is until she is heading out with her younger husband. He is a violinist in an orchestra, and as she is in the car, she sees a flicker of something between him and the person sitting next to him in the front of the car, a fellow violinist from the orchestra; she knows what she has seen even thou her husband denies this is the case. What follows is a look at Remei’s life and how she has battled to get where she is today, but this one evening has brought it all tumbling down, and now the horror of being in her fifties and maybe her younger husband will fall for the younger violinist sat next to him. She has done all the sports she can. Remei Duran has tried to stay an attractive woman of a certain age. But This is a view of heartbreak happening because of the way age can sap sexual energy.

All of a sudden I start coughing a lot too. Of course you never realise the exact moment it appears, but I do because for the first time in my life with this very dry cough, I fully understand ads for incontinence pads.

This is it. It’s been years since I coughed and I didn’t know, it hadn’t even occurred to me, what happens to a woman of my age (who runs and has given birth) when you cough this way. They told me about laughing, but not this.

All of a sudden it’s happening to me. All of a sudden. Not little by little, as it should have, to have time to get used to it and sign up for hypopressive gymnastics and buy a box of vaginal tablets. A quaver of trumpet and timpani. And those ads I’ve always found humiliating seem so friendly now. I’m the same person I was a day ago. Yesterday, in a jeans outlet shop (cheap because they’re the ones worn by mannequins tried on a pair in size 8, because they were lovely and because I wanted to debut a pair

Remei trying to keep a hold of the past

This is one of those book that is hard to capture. It is about that moment in the book when she sees her world shatter about being a woman of a certain age, no matter how much you have battled to where. What happens when menopause has taken over your life, and your husband now has this younger model sitting next to him? They don’t know what will happen, but she sees it just a little moment in the back of that car, little things that make her know what will happen. We also see how hard she has tried to stay the way she is. As always, this is what I like about the books from 3timesrebel Press. They publish those books you’d not see otherwise. This is a powerful account of how menopause can break a woman but also make her stronger, from heartbreak to hope. Have you read any of the books from 3timesrebel ?

Winstons score – A one-womans tale has a universal ring to it

 

The time of Cherries by Montserrat Roig

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The time of Cherries by Monrserrat Roig

Catalan fiction

Original title – El temps de les cireres

Translator – Julia Sanches

Source – Review copy

I have been somewhat remiss with my Spanish lit month reviews. I will have to do one next week, but this is a book I had seen around, and when I got the chance to be sent it from Daunt Books, I had to say yes. I have read several beautiful books in Catalan by female writers, so this appealed, and I have always had a fancy for the Franco years and after in Spain. She had taught in the UK and was a socialist and strong advocate of the Catalan world she has written books about Those from Catalan who suffered under the Nazis in the war. The story is of a woman in her forties returning to Barcelona after several years away.

Patrícia’s flat hadn’t changed. Though she wished she could have updated the kitchen, laid down ceramic tiles and put in new cupboards. Esteve left me nothing but problems, she said. I can’t raise the rent either – the tenants have been with us for years! I was lucky to get an offer for the down-stairs. The sale went through when Esteve was still alive, and he left me a lifetime annuity. The enclosed balcony was still the same; on one wall, the painting Francisco Ventura had given them – the watercolours that Francisco, of the Mundetas, God rest his soul, painted in the style of Modest Urgell – the two rocking chairs, one with a hole in the seat- what do I have to do to get it fixed? – the brazier table, the sewing box…

Her aunt she is close to and the way she looks at the world in tthe book

Natalia has returned to her home town of Barcelona after 12 years away, living around Europe part of that time like the writer herself spent in the UK where she had an affair with Jimmy. They lived together, and we found out he had moved on, and she had now come home to face the ghost of her past. Her family, her mother and her didn’t get on due to the fact her mother put most of her effort into looking after their brother Pere AND judit her mother has never quite been able to rebuild her relationship with her other children in fact, for Natalia it is her aunt is maybe a more of a mother figure added to that her other brother and his wife that she finds a little boring and not to her taste as we see this world through Natalia’s eyes and she describes everything in the home and world around her from the Tupperware to the food. The book is a ripping apart of a family and seeing what has brought it to a certain point as a family. her siblings =marriage her parents and Aunt patrica wh had a poet for a husband after he heard she was wealthy. Then Natalia’s past may be inspired by Roig’s, and support for causes makes her seem like she is partly from Roig’s own life. The places she loved are now ghosts a tree and pond aren’t there any more. This is a look back and edging towards a brighter future post-Franco world.

Now Patrícia says she drinks to drown her sorrows. She knows it isn’t a sin: Jesus turned water into wine during the wedding at Cana; Jesus spoke a great deal about wineries and winemakers; Jesus made the wine his blood at the Last Supper. Patrícia had read it in the Bible: ‘No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse.

Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskin , and bot are preserved .

More of her aunt but looking at how her world has changed over the years

You know I love Catalan fiction. This is a perfect example of why she has brought us to the heart of a family and a world in change. She arrives just as Puig Antich was killed after a robbery where a policeman was shot. He was a figure head of that Catalan cause a cause celebre in his time many felt Franco would cancel the killing but this was the dying years of his regime. He was one of the last killed by Franco, and a name many people remember, so she comes just after this happens. The tension of this is in the background as she does an autopsy on the family, and we see how they all end up where they are. The relationships, fallingouts, jealousy, and the outcome of a mother’s love for just one son are all laid bare in this book. s well as the political scene at the time. The city itself is almost a character in the book at times. You feel its presence throughout the book. Have you read this book ?

Winston’s score – rich prose of a family, city and time not long gone.

I’ll Do Anything you want by Iolanda Batallé

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I’ll Do Anything You Want by Iolanda Batalle

Catalan fiction

Original title – Faré tot el que tu vulguis

Translators- Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent

Source –  Review copy

I was so pleased I was able to get a copy of this sent by 3 times rebel press as I had been a huge fan of the first two books the I had read last year they are a small publisher that has decided to publish working-class female voices from around the world in minority languages. This tie it is from the Catalan writer Iolanda Batallé. She is a teacher and writer. But she has also set up a number of publishing Imprints and raised international awareness in Cultural projects in her country. She also runs a bookshop called Ona in her Home town(one for the bookshop bucket list ) an emblematic bookshop a house of culture and a house of literature(sounds simply wonderful) . She has written four books.

THE COST OF LIVING KEEPS RISING, AND YET HUMANKIND HAS recently gone down in value. Nora strode along the jetway without looking back. She knew he was watching. His gaze held a deep nostalgia, a feeling so tangible, so solid she could almost knead it, the way she did when she had baked with her grandmother. Nacho watched her, her black skirt just above the knee, her blazer, her swaying hips. He noted with amusement that the men desired her and even the women were looking at her. He’d always wanted to know what had happened to his mother, but he’d never found a single clue.

His mother had turned blue after being with a man who was not his father. Dead. He’d witnessed it by chance, he was supposed to be at school. Mother’s turned blue! There’s nothing that can be done. That’s when he decided to become a shark. Seven years later he heard the song king of painter the first time.

I loved the clever use of this song as she has the affair and sees her sexual awakening in an S&M world

 

This book follows one’s sexual awakening Journey we meet Nora she is a housewife bored of her life in many ways. So when she starts an affair that then leads her into a world of High-class prostitution. Her world starts to come alive as she dives into a world of S&M . But in Nora’s head this is almost a dream-like feeling for her but as we the reader are an avatar on her journey we maybe see the slim lines of darkness and the danger as she drifts further into this world. As she as a woman is sexually awakened to the new level of desire these meets bring to her body, we see how she and her husband drifted apart over the 25 years of their marriage. This is a woman’s journey into her own body and what lust and sex can awaken in a woman. But there is always a feeling of what might happen in the background of her thought the sexual looking-glass journey. As we follow a sexual Alice as she eats and licks things and other things that make her body and desire grow!

SOMETIMES SHE FELT LIKE SHE DIDN’T KNOW WHERE SHE WAS.She wondered if it was all really happening. But there was no evidence to indicate it wasn’t. She’d avoided phoning Júlia for days, because when she did everything became all too real. Júlia had told her to break it off, she’d said it wasn’t right … that wasn’t what she’d meant when she spoke of infidelity. Ah, so now, to top things off, I need to be unfaithful the way you want me to be! Nora had yelled before hanging up on her. She needed to tell someone about what she was going through, but there was no one. The people who would have listened without judging were dead, and Robert obviously wasn’t an option. Teresa, her therapist, had passed away.

The dream like feeling of her journey is described her

This is a wonderfully poetic book that sees our narrator on her journey. The nod to Alice is mentioned on the cover and there is a feeling of someone dreaming through a world that isn’t dreamlike and that yes is giving her a lot of power in herself and her own desire but then on there other hand is dangerous like putting a hand through a flame you’re going get burnt eventually. This reminds me of the rabbit holes you went down in books William S  Burroughs wrote about sexual awakening his were around sex and drugs but this is driven by a woman who wants to break free of her boring world and feels that is something Burroughs also did well they want to break free and feel something else!! Or Anais Noin those first waves of writers that tackled what are taboo subjects in their books. This has led to writers like Iolanda that can now enter a sexual world of high-class sex for money a woman that is navigating that world as a woman empowered for now.!! The over thing I loved was the use of music in this book it used piece of music as a sort of tag for the sexual events as a way of remember the nights of passion. This is another gem from a press that is publishing hard-hitting books.

Have you a favourite book that deals with sexual desires?

Boulder by Eva Baltasar

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Boulder by Eva Baltasar

Catalan fiction

Original title – Boulder

Translator – Julia Sanches

Source – Personal copy

I had seen this doing the rounds before the Booker longlist came out, and I had read Permafrost but had to have it back at the library before I could review it. So I knew when this made the longlist it was a book I would like as I had intended to read it at some point. Because I love poets that become novelists, they usually have such remarkable visuals and imagery in their language. I have also enjoyed many of the recent books I have read that have come from Catalan in recent years. Eva Baltsazr is, as I said a poet. She released ten volumes of poetry and she has won several literary prizes this book and the other book I read form a triptych of books about three different women. She lives in the mountains with her wife and two children.

She doesn’t like my name, and gives me a new one. She says I’m like those large, solitary rocks in southern Patagonia, pieces of world left over after creation, isolated and exposed to every element. No one knows where they came from. Not even they understand how they’re still standing and why they never break down. I tell her I’ve seen rocks like those in the middle of the ocean. The ships skirt them in silence, as though some mythological creature could awaken and attack them. They’re not always by themselves. Sometimes there are more just a short distance away. Sometimes they form labyrinths you would be wise to avoid. Samsa lets her hair down and tickles my forehead, my eyelashes, my neck.She calls me Boulder and I don’t know why we laugh. Maybe love is unfurling above us like an enormous branch that bends and touches all the most sensitive, reticent parts of us.

How Boulder became Boulder.

This is a complex book about relationships, desire, lust and also motherhood. it is the story of two women; the title character Boulder is as she says early on in the book that she is a self-taught cook on a merchant ship sail around the world, but what happens when this lonely woman a loner, is maybe on the ship because she loves being herself and in a constant movement around the world. She is hit sideways when one night in a bar, she meets an older woman Samsa. They have a fierce, passionate night of passion as we see Boulder fall for Samas and decide to change the course of her life when she finds Samsa has taken a job in Iceland. They settle down and the years drift by and we see the two drift apart slowly Samsa rises up the career ladder and we see Boulder drift like an unanchored ship from job to job as this happens, Samsa decides she is getting no younger and wants to be a mother. Not as keen, Boulder agrees, and they have a child, but this sees the relationship dynamics change, and Boulder starts to feel outside the trio. What will happen? Will they weather the storm of motherhood?

Ragnar insists we have to celebrate. Here I was thinking we were friends. I tell him all I have to celebrate is the fact that Ive reached new heights of stupidity, that I can’t bring myself to hurt or leave Samsa, to understand the magnitude of her desire and say no. He tells me he felt the same when he had his first kid but that everything changes after the second or the third; they come out of their moms and grow up all on their own, all you have to do is feed them. He makes some dig that I can’t remember about the food truck and slaps my back so hard i choke.

After years in iceland Boulder never settles but tries to stay with Samsa

This follows a usual path of a relationship with a burning passion that draws us together, then the settling period and then what happens next it uses a queer relationship to follow this path. I loved the imagery Baltsar used at times; the passion of the relationship jumped off the page. I felt the could be a little more character-building, but I felt I knew these women. The Boulder character reminded me of a few people I knew years ago in Germany. So even thou they are mere pen sketches of characters, you feel as thou you know them. It captures that first flame of passion as the two make love, but it also manages to do what next, which I haven’t seen much in books because life isn’t happy ever after it is warts and all. Then throw in Motherhood and what happens when the relationship balance has changed and one of the couples feels pushed out by the baby. It is a great slice of relationship literature. It touches on some of the same subjects: Still life motherhood and not wanting children but this is more about the effect of motherhood on the relationship dynamics and the passion that started that relationship.

Winstons score – B A little novella that packs a punch.

Dead Lands by Núria Bendicho

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Dead lands by Núria Brendicho

Catalan Fiction

Original title – Terres mortes

Translators – Maruxa  Relaño & Matha Tennent

Source – Personel copy

I have had my foot of the pedal when it comes to new publisher and translations around. So when I first saw the new publisher 3Timesrebel. There is a motto in the book ‘I am grateful to fate for three gifts to have been born a woman, from the working class and an oppressed nation. And the turbid azure of being three times a rebel by Maria-Mercè Marçal so they have taken that motto to publish books from languages less published and from working-class females they have three books out I have brought two by them. The afterword Núria talks about her own reading journey from Catalan literature than into Spanish realism and then French Naturalism then by chance she happened on the works of William Faulkner and saw something in his writing she thanks all these writers. You can see the connection to Faulkner. It had been years since I read him but I happen to read as I lay dying last year.

THINK IT OVER, HE HAD SAID. IN A FEW YEARS, IF WELL-TENDED, all those lands, those fields and paths that came out of no-where, traversed the forests, encircled Roca Negra and extended further still, they could bring in good money, and they could be mine, have my name on the deed. It was simple. All I had to do was marry. A wife isn’t that much work, my father said in a hoarse tone, as if the comment just happened to slip out and he hadn’t been thinking about it for hours. It’s an opportunity.

The opening of Jon;’s father’s story.

I happen to mention the Faulkner I read as I have seen in other reviews other works by him mention but this dark story with its cast of characters it follows the event before and after Jon is killed when he has shot in the back in the remote village the family live the book is made up of the 13 stories from those that knew Jon and the dead man himself for me this rang with the style of as I lay dying as it has a cast of characters talking about one person. The narrators start with a couple of his siblings the youngest just called the boy and then Maria who is with the child herself but who is the father. Then Jon’s father as the story goes on we piece together the events and why was Jon shoot in the back who shot him and why. Then others outside the family a whorehouse own the priest as we head to the man himself his story is the last but one story. The last character is looking back as she is caring for a character in a hospice Tomas one of Jon’s brothers as he reveals things that happened when Jon died to his carer. This is a dark book and reflects a hard place. I was reminded of the attitude I used to see in the small pit villages around the northeast and some of the characters remind me of some of the people I met years ago.

FIRST CAME THE SHOT AND THEN DEATH. OR FIRST THE SHOT and then the suffering that led to my death. But above all, death. In the early days there was confusion, not only because it seemed even the living didn’t know who killed me, but because I didn’t remember it either. It was as if my non-body had forgotten what I had experienced because my mind was too preoccupied debating whether to leave non-death and enter non-life. I still had ears when I was buried, heard the specks of earth coming down on me, dusting my mouth, then someone weeping, and later the weight of oblivion interring me.

I chose the opening of Jon story as it hit me hard.

This is a hard gothic work that takes apart what happened it is a look at the moment I was reminded of a book like the anatomy of a Moment another book from Spain that takes a round view of the attempted coup in the 80’s in Spain. There is a nod to Faulkner that dark world and chorus of voices he had used so well in his books it reminds me I have a number of his books to read. Then a Peirene Press novel from Denmark they brought out a few years ago. The murder of Halland like this book it followed a murder and it was also more about why it happened the ones who don’t here get clues to the reasons but it is more what lead up to even the aftermath. This is a harsh world and like in another book from Peirene stones in a landslide. Like this is set in a remote mountain village where the locals are in their own world reality of their own with tough rules and consequences. so if your are after a gothic village novel about a murder this is for you and is stunning to think it is the writer’s Debut novel. Have you read any of these new books from 3Timesrebel ?

Winstons score – ++++A The dark side of the world of  Stones in a landslide (and you all know that is one of my all-time favourite books)

The Others by Raül Garrigasait

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The Others by Raül Garrigasait

Spanish (Catalan) fiction

Original title – Els estranys

Translator – Tiago Miller

Source – review copy

I end this year’s Spanish lit month with another book from the publisher of Catalan fiction Fum D’Estampa press.This interesting take on a historic novel has an interesting angle and style to it. This was the prize-winning novel from the Translator and writer Raül Garrigasait he has translated a number of books from both Greek and German into Catalan.Plato, Goethe, Alexandros Papadiamandis, Joseph Roth, and Peter Sloterdijk are all writers he has translated he is involved with a project to translate a number of classics into Catalan. The other is his debut novel and won a couple of big [rizes when it came out in Spain.

Wieldemann wandered through the grounds of the sanctuary.Next to an entrance both of old, dark stone, the roofless pillars and arches held themselves aloft among the nettlesx and weeds, surrounded by an assortment of discarded rocks. It was nothing more than half finished, abandonedbuilding but there was something apocalypitic about it. He went into the empty church; all the pews had been removed all the way up to the Baroque altarpiece where golden figures ornaments shone in one gleaming glorious mess

Erarly on as he heads to the war but does he he finds an abandon building .

The others are set mainly in the late 1830s as the Carlist war is being thought in Spain. We view the war we viewed through the adventures of a young Prussian that has come to fight in the war.  Rudolf Van Wielemann is a young man trying to prove himself. He believes in the war and has high hopes to be in the forefront of the action but when he ends up in a small town he is struggling to get on with the odd set of locals he is a true outsider no language skills the comrades he wants think at times he is |Russian that is how he ends up at the hospital with a doctor in the small town as he is fish out of the water. The only real connection he makes is with a doctor who when they talk we see how the war has touched them both. as they have a shared love of music.  We follow his adventures on the edge of the war as he tries to find out who he is what to do when the war isn’t at his door. it tackles the absurd nature of the war and the absurd nature of it. The book has another dimension which sees Rudolf and his time being looked up by the writer as a number of chapters do a clever piece of autofiction as the fourth wall is broken and the writer becomes a character in the book and how he came up with the idea for the book with a character he found that was there at the time.

Between the pages on Wielemann, responisibility dictates I must translate, at least a bit

When it came to writing ,Prince Lichnowsky had no time for verbose or ornate prose, trather making his words fall in with the style of a competent commander, sure , efficent, exact. Given his importance he placed on calling things by their name, his book it as free from lyrical outpouring as his life was. Nevertheless, on the few occasions he did feel inclined to poetry he drew less on his military resolve, always knowing where to draw the line.

One of the chapters about the writer writing ther book, her finds a prussian charcater from the time.

I enjoyed this book it takes that over the approach to war we that of not being in the frontline so we have a chance to see the boring side of a conflict where we can sometimes gleam the absurd nature of war but also young men can discover themselves at the same time as not fighting a war.I also liked the way he moved to his writing of the book by breaking the fourth wall narrative about researching the book and how he came up with the idea of a Prussian character. There are touches of books like The good soldier Schwelk and The tartar steppes the latter where we see a young man guarding a similar distant outpost of the war. There is a mix of absurd nature and pathos of wart also of not quite getting to the front.An interesting mix of war and coming of age in a way Rudolf set of to find himself and prove something to his family but winds up not doing so but maybe finds out more about himself. Have you a favourite novel that is set in a war but not at the front line ?

Winstons score – +B An interesting take on the historic novel with a clever second narrative in the present.

The Madness by Narcis Oller

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The Madness by Narcis Oller

Catalan fiction

Original title – La bogeria

Translator – Douglas Shuttle

Source – review copy

You ever think you reviewed a book and then discover you haven’t well this is a case in point I can remember writing about this book but I must have deleted it or part wrote and left it but anyway I return today with a classic of Catalan fiction from Narcis Oller. He translated books by Tolstoy and Dumas into Catalan also his french edition of one of his books was given a forward by Emila Zola. So he is in that vein of naturalism and realism of writers like Zola and Dicken. He wrote a number of well-received books. Here he captures through two men who meet over a period of time the political strife that would lead towards the civil war. This is from a new press Fum D’estampa specializing in Catalan

fiction

Daniel Serrallonga was older than us and must have then been around twenty-five years old. But his pale, hollow face, thick, unfuly beard and short, auburn hair made him look a lot older. Hiseyes, round and grey and hardly visible through the thick glass of his gold rimmed Prince-nez, ever balanced on the bridge of his hoked twisted nose, added years to him or , at least , provided him with an air of being of a somewhat undefinable age due to his clear lack of youth and the veil of sadness that they conferred on him.

He paints an interesting potrait of Daniel a sort of firey man by this description.

The story revolves around two men Daniel Serrallonga who has moved to the country and are narrator we don’t get told much about our narrator just he is a lawyer who has another friend Armengol whom he first met the young man daniel at a coffee house. As they meet our narrator observes who the young man challenges the local police officer who was booed by the other in the coffee house as he takes things to far our narrator sees this as an odd action. Daniel ends up in prison. Where he starts to write political pieces, but when he is released he discovers that his articles never saw the light of day as they were just destroyed by his friends that  he had trusted to put them out there for him. what follows is over the years the three men’s paths cross the narrator’s friend Armengol swaps careers and becomes a doctor later in his life as we see daniel fall out with his family or an inheritance becomes involved with various theories to the assassination of General Prim a would-be prime minister it is either this or his family woes with his sister that lead to Daniels downfall.IS he Mad ? what drove him there.

Four years passed without me hearing anything aqbout Daniel, and had it not been for bumping into Armengol in a bar in Barcelona, it woukld have been even longer.

“Hello, hello” grinned Armengol “What are you doing here ? Its great to see you!

“You too! What a concidence!”

I’m just back from Madrid. Oh, and you can take your hat to me,I am now offically a gradute doctor. I arrived atthis morning because of some carlist stopping the train at Calaf. And You

Later it is through Armengol who sees daniel in the medical sense more in the latter stages of the book.

I enjoyed this as many of you know I work with Learning disability patients we have a number that also has mental health issues which we usually see as they are in crisis when they arrive at our ward. So I am always interested in literature that involves mental health we see daniel fall apart throughout the book this is a time before understand of what is mental health with his theories etc and the swings in his behavior he has some sort of psychosis. The novel shows the background of the time the fragile state assassinations police corruption then through Daniels family we see what happens when the family falls out. This is a sad tale of one man’s descent into the well of misery. This is seen through two sides a look back at events from the present and then the events told as they happen. This shows Oller view of the times from the three main characters point of view

Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda

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Death in Spring by  Mercè Rodoreda

Spanish Catalan fiction

Original title –  La mort i la primavera

Translator – Martha Tennet

Source – personnel copy

Well, I read the first of my post-holiday reads in a day. This book came out a few years ago in the US and earlier this year here as part of a new penguin series into European voices. Merce Rodoreda was considered one of the leading novelist of her time. her novel The time of the doves has been considered the greatest Catalan novel. She lived most of her life in Exile in France and Switzerland away from the Franco regime only returning later on in her life to Spain towards the end of the Franco years.

I craned my head out of the water. The light was stronger now, and I swam slowly, wanting to take my time before leaving the river. The water embraced me. It would have seized ,e if I had let it , and – pushed forward and sucked under- I would have ended up in the place where nothing is comprehended.Reeds grew in the river; the current bent them, and they let themselves be rocked by the water that was carrying the force of the sky, earth and smow.

The opening lines have that feel of nature cling to the people of the village .

Now I said this was a novella I wanted to read as I saw it as a male version of the book Stones in a landslide.Which was one of my favourite novels of all time. But this is a very different coming of age novel. This is a visceral novel of a boy becoming a man in a remote village that still clings to the past. There is like the scenery around the book vines and forest of death as it is called there is a sense of a world. Being caught out of time and maybe for our narrator, there is no way out of it. Nature captures people, like the dead body in the river. returned to the river.The bridges that never seem to be used a dense forest give the Narrators world a closed in feel. The other characters his father dying, his stepmother the Blacksmith and his odd son all give this a sense of the beauty and horror of nature. A boy becomes a man in a strange world a wonderful narrated world of mountain villages.

When they pulled the boy from the river, he was dead, the returned him to the river. Those who died in the water were returned to the water. The river carried them away and nothing was ever known of them again.But at night, at the spot where the bodies were thrown into the water, a shadow could be seen.Not every night. Not today or tomorrow, but on certain nights a shadow trembled,They said the shadow of the dead returned to the place where the man was born.They said that to die was to merge with the shadow.

I was so remind of Marquez with this lines and the river which in his books is a powerful prescense as well.

This is a novella that like many great shorter books seems much more than its parts. It is full of descriptions of the world around them at times this is maybe a metaphor for how Franco strangled the country. There is also for me an echo of the works of Marquez the village her is a Spanish cousin of Marquez’s Macondo village. The same sense of a place cling to its customs and superstitions of the outside world this is a world the character is trapped in like those vines and even if he escapes there is moss to slip on, bridges to cross and rivers to survive. Hope is always there but like a dim light in the valley below the village.

Stones in a landslide by Maria Barbal

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stones in a landslide

Stones in a landslide by Maria Barbel

Catalan fiction

Original title – Pedra de Tarera

Translator – Laura McGloughkin and Paul Mitchell

Source – Review copy

Bored yet busy with my hands
Cargill you’ll have me round the bend
Cargill you’re pulling all the strands
Of my heartstrings entangled in your net

My luck’s turned thrawn
Always the quayside chores
A sister on each arm
Strong of shoulder weak at the knees
Cargill I’m the finest catch that you’ll land

Cargill do not presume to understand
The dread of counting home the fleet
The sudden thrill of seeing you’re safely back
Your catch has fallen at your feet

King Cresote Lyrics for Cargil from his recent album seemed perfect he comes from a small village near my Aunties house in fife .

Well when asked for my favourite book by Peirene , I always say this one , I sometimes thnk I may be the only person  that thinks it is their best at the time  when I read it five years ago was a perfect book .So I was a bit scared to reread this one , would it be the same now as it was then ? would I connect with it as I did five years ago ?  Well we will find out in a min , the real sad point of this story is Maria Barbal hasn’t had any more books translated and brought out in English  since this one came out  , which is a shame !

My aunts and uncle’s house was very big almost as big as my parents house ‘ at Ermita .Many years ago it must have been a house full or people and hustle and bustle because it had a ground floor and two storeys and then a loft under the roof

Amazed at the size ,but also how empty the house she has come to work is .

Stones in a landslide is the story of one woman , well woman when we first meet her she is really still a girl Conxa , who at 13 is sent from her own little village to another Village , to work for her better off aunt .This is like being torn from one world to another for the young girl , then years later she falls in love with a man .But is this to be cut short by the spanish civil war ?

They liked everything ; the chorizo and the black pudding ,the cuts of ham .They liked the bacon .Its much tastier than the stuff down their ,they would say .I enjoyed seeing how they kept helping themselves to more and the way they used their knives .

early on in new village , I choose the same quote as I did in the first review as it shows Conxa’s wonder at her new life .

Now in my first review , I marvelled in the small world of Conxa , how even the short journey from her home village to her aunts village ,in her eyes is like moving from one world to another ! .I compared it at the time to the Northumberland I heard of as a young man working in a day centre with the elderly ,when they used speak about the small villages and places in and around Alnwick struck me the same as conxa’s world and still did .But now more than five years ago ,has this world gone ? when we all spend our lives looking at glowing screens of various sizes , has the village died ? somewhat but through books like this it is kept alive .A world caught in Amber so to speak and we are the outsides looking in at it .So did it hold up to my placing it top of Peirene pile well yes it did , is it still my favourite yes it is so to go back to last part of my review and actually part of my early reviews I may bring back !

Winston’s score

mountain goat a bit mad I used compare books to things but this book is like the mountain goat symbol of the Pyrenees this book is tough and clings to the mountain of the mind !

spainsh goat ,via telegraph website

uncertain Glory by joan sales

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Uncertain Glory by Joan Sales

Catalan fiction

original title – Incerta glòria

Translator – Peter Bush

Source – review copy

‘The Cemetery Is Near’

(VI: From ‘Cancionero Y Romancero De Ausencias’)

 

The cemetery is near

where you and I are sleeping,

between blue prickly-pears,

blue agaves and children,

who scream excitedly

if the dead darken the road.

From here to the cemetery, all

is blue, golden, clear.

Four paces, and the dead.

Four paces, and the living.

Clear, blue and golden,

my son there grows remote.

The cemetery is near a poem by Miguel Hernandez ,which Pablo Neruda called the face of spain .Source 

Well this is the first of two book from catalan I’ll be reviewing  you in the next few weeks , this first is considered a classic in Catalan and also one of the definitive works on the Spanish civil war .Joan Sales was born in Barcelona and studied law just before the outbreak of the Civil war , he fought in the civil war and afterwards he lived in Exile .He first published the book in 1956 ,but revised it over the years until the definitive version of the book came out in 1971 , as the earlier version had been subject to Franco censorship of them .

8 july

We are still doing , nothing , just waiting for the recruits to arrive .We have already alloted officer to the future companies :I’ve got the 4th and my captain will be lieutenant gallart , the ex-waiter .

The village couldn’t be more dismal :It’s boxed in and you can’t see until you’re inside .It’s boundaries are extensive ,it’s mostly barren waste with the large olive trees that account for its name .

The arrival at the village with the woman of the Castilo de Olivo .

The book follows Lieutenant lluis Ruscalleda he is assigned to Aragonese front in 1937 he is a lawyer (in some ways you could say this is in some  part  Joan sales ), he arrives but start away doesn’t fir in his comrades seem to like a drink and he isn’t a drinker , but along the way he meets a woman the women of the Castilo de OLivo , she is an intriguing woman , that intrigues the lieutenant she became the lady of the house after she was a servant in the house  .Meanwhile Lluis is writing back to Trini his former lover that is a new woman and that is struggling with the war to bring up their son .The winter sees the brigade is sent to a quiet part of the line this brings even more problems , Lluis also writes to his brother and we also see Trini write to her old friend about her struggles with life .Add to this the war isn’t going their way and a strong streak of Catholic guilt and the church in the war , in the story we see the spanish civil war from a Catalan point of view from the losing side .A picture of the chaos that civil war is .

29 june

Dear juli , I received a letter from Lluis the day before yesterday after weeks without one .I was so pleased to hear you are both in the same brigade .I hadn’t heard from him so long ! The only news I had was the monthly postal order he dent me without fail .

Trini on the home front so to speak worries about Lluis at the front .

I have read a number of novels about the civil war those written in recent years ,by the likes of  Manual Rivas , that look back at the aftermath and Chaos of the war once the dust had settled so to speak  his book carpenters pencil looked at being a prisoner and returning after the war .I have also read a couple of books by English languages writers written that were involved with the Spanish civil war  one by Hemingway which isn’t like this book as his writing is full of bravado  .The other is  the novella by George Orwell Homage to Catalonia ,which is the nearest to this book as it follows Orwell’s time at the front .But this book adds more dimension to the fighting given its form , which is an epistolary novel what we are given is the full picture of the fighting , life on the front line not just the fighting but the sitting on the front line .We also see from Trini the life on the home front what is it like raising a kid in the war .The characters in the book , give a full picture of the world around them ,Sales brings lots of details to the story that make the war leap of the page .as we see how the war effects each character changing the relationships but also the view of the world around them .

Have you a favourite book about the spanish civil war ?

Lost Luggage by Jordi Punti

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Jordi-Punti lost luggage

Lost luggage by Jordi Punti

Spanish fiction

Original title -MALETES PERDUDES

Translator – Julie Wark

Source – review copy

Jordi Punti is one of the rising voices in Catalan literature ,born in 1967 ,he moved to Barcelona to study  philology ,then went to work for a publishing house in Barcelona ,where he has worked translating writers such as Pennac ,Nothomb and Auster .He also writes poetry and in the newspapers regularly as well as novels and short stories .Lost luggage is his first book to be translated to English.

If we’re going to make progress we Christopher’s now need to return to carrer to Napols The first time we four brothers met in Barcelona , incredulous,suspicious and still dumbfounded by the revelations . Cristòfol showed us our fathers Mezzanine flat .

They start on their quest for Gabriel .

Well lost luggage as a title has a double meaning, the first comes from the main figure in the book. Gabriel a truck driver ,he was an orphan and went into trucking with his two friends he knew growing up ,after he left the orphanage .They literally on every trip the took in the truck around Europe, lost luggage  a box  Would disappear and the three friends divide them up all this was during the reign of Franco in Spain dark days indeed .The second meaning is lost luggage is what Gabriel left behind ,this is how we are introduced to him via his first son  Cristòfol the Spanish son and until this point when contact by the police that his father has gone missing ,he hadn’t seen him in 20 years ,he doesn’t know him to well has disappeared .This leads him to met three other  men called Christof, Christophe and  Christopher ,they are his half brothers his father had whilst trucking  .And are from Great Britain , France and Germany .So they meet not til this point,they were  unaware  of one another’s existence to this point  .All the more than they only have  slim facts from  their  respective mothers told them about Gabriel so the go on a quest to find him and learn about him .Along the way they become the Christopher’s like one and did his father ever got to Italy ? all this and more we find out .

Gabriel had learned to pace his relationship with his three equidistant women and three sons and ,like a good plate spinner ,he seemed to keep his cool .Of course ,the rules of the game were in his favour :he had his base camp in Barcelona ,where he lead a bachelor’s existence and ,thanks to removal work ,went to visit his famlies from time to time .

Gabriel described as plate spinner sounds right not easy what he did .

Well this book when it arrived reads like a headline from one of those women magazine” shock horror I discover my three half brothers with the same name “

the sort of thing you think oh no. I don’t want to read that .But no this is not that it is funny ,dark and at heart of this book is about how a moment of discovery can change the course of four lives for ever .We also get to the bottom of what motivate Gabriel to have these four children and why have they all got the same name ?Why did he run away from them ? Under all is the meaning of being lost whether boxes ,sons ,father ,mothers and living under Franco .Not overtly political we sense the wrongs of Franco regime .Punti as a Catalan a language that until after Franco wasn’t taught .This book is hard tom place in the cannon of Spanish fiction I ve read I think I need to read Monzo another Catalan writer to compare him too ,Like one of my favourite Spanish writers the Basque writer Bernardo Atxaga ,Punti shows how different the writing can be in Spain Catalan is language that developed separately to Spanish and one that seems to have a strong voice in its fiction if this book is anything to go out .

Stone in a landslide by Maria Barbal

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This is Peirene no 2 and considered a catalan classic ,Maria Barbal is a teacher at secondary school ,she grew up in the Pallars region of spain stones in a landslide was her debut novel and the first to be translated into english by Laura McGloughlin and Paul Mitchell .She has since published numerous novel and plays,she is a member of the catalan writer association .

The book centers on the life of Conxa ,she live in the Pyrenees in a small village and  the book starts as she is on a journey from her village to another to work for an aunt .Her amazement is a the differences for her home village to this new village even thou the distance is very short .

They liked everything ; the chorizo and the black pudding ,the cuts of ham .They liked the bacon .Its much tastier than the stuff down their ,they would say .I enjoyed seeing how they kept helping themselves to more and the way they used there knives .

early on in new village .

Now Conxa live is hard and not much hope but then suddenly she has a glimmer a young Beau appears in the shape of Jaume a nice young man ,but this is the 30’s in spain and wart is looming even thou where Conxa lives it seems very distant Jaume thou decides to fight against Franco and goes to war thus changing Conxa’s life for ever .

Jaume wasn’t around much those days .He had been made a justice of the peace and said that now was the time to bring water to Sarri de Dalt .He had joined the republican left ,which was the party of the Gerneralitat Government .he had explained all this to me .

The war is looming .

The book  sums up a hard life but without ever drifting in to misery ,Conxa is a survivor and just gets on with it .The portrait of village life is great .It remind me of the stories I heard from people when I worked in a day centre in rural Northumberland ,the same tales of differences between villages ,tough living people the same as Conxa’s ,the scenery of pallers area is baron and tough working land and the village life revolves around the seasons ,the place is caught out of time from the modern world ,until the arrival of the war which at first seems very distant but in the ends has a larger impact on people’s lives .The book is a real page turn and wonderfully translated ,this is a prefect rainy afternoon book or one for those long summer train rides .

WINSTONS SCORE –

Spanish mountain goat seems to perfectly sum up Conxa hardy ,stoic , a born survivor