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Too Great a sky by Lilana Corobca

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Too Great a sky by Liliana Corobca

Moldovan fiction

Original title – Capătul drumului

Translator – Monica Cure

Source – Personal copy

I have been meaning to get to the seven-story releases in the UK. There have been a number of books they have brought out in the last few years that have caught my eye, especially two by this writer, Lilana Corobca, as she is put down as a Moldovan writer and sometimes as a Romanian, but for this post, I am putting her as Moldovan, as it is my first book from that country. She studied in Moldova and has since been heavily involved in a project on Soviet censorship and has written several books on it. She has also written several novels.  She previously published a novel in English, The Censor’s Notebook, which won the Oxford Weidenfeld Prize.  She has also had her books translated into a number of other languages.

The train sometimes slowed down and barely, barely kept going, like a cart being pulled by tired nags, and sometimes sped up, quickly, quickly, and flew like a rocket. Dazed by the perpetual movement of the wheels that continually rattled us, we were surprised that we didn’t become completely tongue-tied. When the train would stop close to human dwellings, the people would come out, theyd cross themselves at the sight of us and they’d bring us something out of the little they had. Usually they’d bring us water, well water, not river water. When we stopped next to a pond, we rushed out toward it, though we weren’t steady on our feet. We stuck our heads in the water, guzzled it, as if we were cattle. We couldn’t get enough, we splashed ourselves, washed ourselves, and cooled off, because who knew when wed have water again and how much longer it would be until the end of the road.

On the train ride to Kazakhstan

The book is told in three sections that cover an event in Romanian history during World War II in which the Soviets ordered thousands of Romanians to board trains and take a three-week journey across Russia to Kazakhstan. The book is seen through the eyes of eleven-year-old Ana as she and her family are loaded into an old boxcar in their village of Bucovina and then spend the next three weeks fighting off hunger, lack of facilities, and people dying. The dead are thrown off the train every time they stop. The desperation is met with stories and poems filling the air, keeping the horrors out of minds, but it also shows the community coming together in this collective horror through Her Young’s eyes.  The middle section captures the harsh world the group of incomers end up in a remote Kazakh country where the Romanians have no real belongings, so not only did it cost lives to get there, but then there is a harsh winter yet to face. The last part is told from an equally spirited young member of an ana family, her great granddaughter has been tasked with persuading the no old Ana to move to a nursing home, seeing the sight of her life looking back on those war years.

After my mother died, I went to my aunt so we could search for our Zenovie together. There were other mothers searching as we were, they’d all help each other, they’d exchange information, Sancira, finally, found the orphanage, she had been able to trace where the truck had gone, but finding a child then was harder than finding a needle in a haystack. On the lists and in the children’s documents, there wasn’t a single Bucovinian, everyone being divided into two nationalities: those with narrow eyes, Kazakhs; the others, Russians. All the boys were Ivanov or Petrov, with first names like Ivan, Kosta, Gena, Grisha, given at random, because no one cared what they were called back home, and the little children themselves couldn’t say what their names were, because they didn’t speak a word of Russian and, in any case, no one cared.

Their ages weren’t written down correctly either, just made up.

Many were skinny and seemed younger. When Sancira saw this, she was determined to look at all of them, so she could recognize her child’s face on her own. She went child by child, but she didn’t find hers.

Later on in the book recounting those events in the present day !

What Liliana Corobca has done is capture a small, unknown episode of the war. Taken it, and with Ana as the main character, she has caught a world I knew nothing about. But through Anas’ eyes, the three-week train ride is brutal, but in that way a child views the world. The events are seen, but the sheer horror of them isn’t there if that makes sense. It’s viewed by her young eyes as people disappear, thrown off along the way, then the horror of landing in a place where the locals hate you and then to be hit with the harshness of the winter, it’s just added to everything. It is later on in the book when she is at the end of her l,ife the events are brought into the full sight sas she recalls them for her great graddaughter. The book was inspired by the testimonies of those who rode the trains at the time. The book, in parts, also captures the power of faith and how they all still believed in god after all this had happened to them. Have you read any of her books or any other writers from Moldova ?

Outsider Everywhere by Mercedes Halfon

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Outsider Everywhere by Mercedes Halfon

Argentine Non-Fiction

Original title – Extranjero en todas partes: Los días argentinos de Witold Gombrowicz

Translator – Rahul Bery

Source – Subscription book

I have the fitrzcarradlo subscription, and one of the reasons I have it is the white books, their essays, and non-fiction works together. I love the breadth of the books they pick, but also the occasional odd little book like this, a book about a writer that is maybe not as well known as he should be a writer thaat spent a lot of his life in exile, a writer that maybe isn’t as well known in the english speaking worlkd but in both Poland and Latin America he is considered a important writer.  That writer is Witold Gombrowicz.  The Polish writer who escaped Nazi rule by heading to Buenos Aires in 1939, but unlike many exiles, he then spent more than twenty years in his adopted homeland.

On 21 August 1939, La Nación newspaper publishes an item with the title ‘New ship arrives bearing Polish flag’.

In it, the Argentinian journalist Pizarro Lastra interviews the three writers who came on board the luxury transatlantic liner. He writes: ‘Among the travellers who came on the Chrobry was … Witold Gombrowicz, a modern humourist, a man of great learning. He has just had a resounding success with a potboiler entitled Ferdydurke.’ Other pieces were published about the ship’s arrival, but this is the only one Gombrowicz mentions in Kronos.

He sees it as a first defeat. They call him a ‘humour-ist’, his novel a ‘potboiler’. Gombrowicz was already Gombrowicz when he arrived in Argentina. But over here in Argentina no one knew that.

His arrival in Argentine

The book opens with Gombrowicz arriving in August 1939, escaping the war. A group of Polish people has arrived in Argentina, including the young Witold Gombrowicz. He is a writer; his first novel, Ferdydurke, came out to much acclaim in Poland. What follows is how he tries to keep his head above the water in Argentina, he always struggles with the language but is drawn into the literary circles of the country, but as a gay man he is often an outsider as the title says. He gets little pieces of work from Europe. The book draws from those who knew him and his epic diary of the years he spent there.I did read and review his diary here when it came out in 2012. What is cpatured is the lit scene in Buenos Aires and how they viewed Gombrowicz, a writer who was full of opinions and also was a true one off and even this is seen by those that knew him; some like Piglia considered him an Argentine writer, he knew Borges, Piglia, and Pla, and many more of the leading figures in the Boom era. Burt, it also captures how he lived hand to mouth, with help from the very small Polish community there.

If Gombrowicz liked anything even more than he liked arguing, it was playing chess, which is a kind of argument through other means. During his time in Argentina, his main café was the Rex, which had a big salon and chess club on the first floor. Every afternoon, religiously, Gombrowicz shows up at this location between Avenida Corrientes and Calle Emeralda, less than 200 metres from the Obelisk, and stays until night. Emblematic moments of his life in Buenos Aires will take place there.

A good number of his most loyal friends come from that intellectual training ground, including fellow Pole and internationally renowned chess master Paulino Frydman, who founded the salon in 1941. Interestingly, he had come to Buenos Aires at the same time as Gombrowicz but on a different ship. They became very good friends.

HIs group is a mix of lit types , posh polish women and men

Now, to be honest, I read the diary many years ago and intend to read more by Gombrowicz.  But in the following 14 years, I have yet to return to him. I have two other books by him to read. I would also like to reread the diary, especially since I feel I will know more about the writer and the world he was talking about. The diary forms the backbone of this book. But there have also been several other projects related to Gombrowicz’s time in Argentina. Halfon also draws on other writers’ accounts of their interactions with Gombrowicz, which gives us an account of a man who is now, in a way, considered between the canons of Poland and Argentina as a great writer in both. even a modern writer like Cesar AIRA later on is quote about his love of Gombrowicz books talking about rereading all his books.  There was something called the Gombrowicz marathon in Buenos Aires, where great modern-day writers like Neumann and Kohan read a minute of his works. I love this type of book it reminded me of a writer i should know better in Gombrowicz. Have you read anything by Witold Gombrowicz

Bound to Violence by Yambo Ouologuem

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Bound to Violence by Yambo Ouologuem

Mailian fiction

Orignal title – Le devoir de violence

Translator Ralph Manheim

Source – Personal copy

Where to start, this is another book that is a cornerstone of African fiction from the Francophone world.  This book was a book that sparked so controversy when it came out, as there is certain passages that had come from a book by Graham Greene and another piece from the French writer Andre Schwarz-Bart but somewhere in the editing of the book it seems the quotation of these passages had disappeared this meant the book jhad vanished for almost fifty years infact it was another prize winning book this book had won the Prix Renadout when it came out. It was the Goncourt Prize winner, The most secret memory of men, a fictional version of what happened to Ouloguem after the plagiarism claim against his book and how he was treated, led to the republishing of the book as a Penguin Classic a book that captured 700 years of Malian history, but also the way Ouloguem felt his country men had become servility that had become engrained in the local pouplation after years of french rule.

Under these conditions an adulteress incurred pitiless pun-ishment: the very least that could happen to her was to be stripped bare, exposed with shackled ankles in the royal court-yard, and given a douche of pepper water to which – wallahi! -ants had been added. In certain cases (if the guilty woman was pregnant or had been delivered of a stillborn child) another punishment devised by Saif was administered. She was held with spread legs over a wood fire which singed her pubic hair.

On the other hand, a woman whose husband had been unfaithful could do nothing but take note of the fact, seek out her rival, and, having found her -hee-hee-hee! – insult her and thrash her.

The violence of the country under the Saifs

The book is a small epic: the first part deals with the Dogon region of Mali, but instead of Mali, it uses the fictional country of Nakem-Zuiko. What Ouologuem tries to show is Mali’s 700-year past through the various rises and falls of tribes, the Saifs’ rise, the initial encounters with white incomers and slave traders, and how brutal and twisted this history could be.  This is all a lead-up to the last section of the book, which follows the figure of Raymond Spartacus Kassoumi.  He is from a family of ex slaves, but has risen with an education, much studying and ended up going to France to Paris to study and serve in the war, and returns to his homeland, but then sees his future as nothing more than a puppet of the white leaders and French rule and way of running the country.

But it was too soon and too late. Smitten by Europe, a second shadow of himself, Raymond had already known Saif’s fevers.

The white man had crept into him and this white presence determined even the moves that he, a child of violence, would make against it. Despising Africa, he took giant strides to diminish the gulf that separated him from the splendours of white civilization. But a simultaneous grasp of twenty centuries of history, or of their residue, was still beyond his reach: where he should have discovered – may the Evil One be banished! – he accepted

Raymond is caught in between the french rulers and the Saifs

The book is a slicing open of the heart of Mali through the centires a sort of open heart surgery ion his country a warts and all tlook at the history the various ways people got by the violence and way he saw many olf his country men had just got used to tipping there hat of being part of the wider system and this is what we get with raymond with his french name but also his other name of Spartagus the leader of the slave uprising a man that seems like he could break the mould but then goes to France and becomes part of the cogs of the french regime on his return a man caught between those saifs that ruled the country and the french rulers of now neither is appealing this is part of his tryingt o break the vision of his countries past as an idylic place but more a world that has always struggled with the saifs and the tribes before the french rule a country of blood and violence from trafding slaves with the arabic world to then the french world it captures a warts and all pictue of the past. A powerful work that needed to be republished, thanks to Sarr’s book highlighting how long it had been out of print! Have you read this or the most secret memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr I reviewed it here 

Things Fall apart by Chinua Achebe

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Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Nigerian fiction

Source – Personal copy

I don’t know about you, but sometimes as a reader, you see a post on Instagram, it makes you change the reading plans you had for the coming month. That happened when I saw there was an African reading challenge this month. I do hate that sometimes African literature is lumped together. We don’t say, ” let’s have a European lit month or an asian month we tend to break it down to a single country. But that aside, it gave me a nudge to read a couple more books than I have been. I used to read a lot more literature from around Africa when the blog started, and i just think the last few years I haven’t read as much as I used to. In fact, talking about this month reminds me of Kinna and her wonderful blog and her love of the Ghanaian literature scene and the wider African lit scene, a much-missed corner of the blogging world. Anyway, my first book this month is a reread, and I picked it because I have the other books in Chinua Achebe’s African trilogy, but it seemed silly reading book two, which I hadn’t yet read, so I reread Things Fall Apart, one of the cornerstones of the first wave of African novels in post-colonial times.

Okonkwo did not have the start in life which many young men usually had. He did not inherit a barn from his father. There was no barn to inherit. The story was told in Umuofia of how his father, Unoka, had gone to consult the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves to find out why he always had a miserable harvest.

The Oracle was called Agbala, and people came from far and near to consult it. They came when misfortune dogged their steps or when they had a dispute with their neighbors. They came to discover what the future held for them or to consult the spirits of their departed fathers.

A world of Oracles and mystic views of the future a tradtional IGBO way of life

In fact, if any book captures the post-colonial struggles, it is this book it is from the tales Achebe was told as a child by his parents as part of the Igbo oral tradition of storytelling that led to the seed of this book, a story of one man and the struggle of the traditional Igbo world and the coming of Christianity in the country.  Okonkow is the leader of his clan a man that is a larger than life figure a champion wrestler a sort of African Muhamded ali I had in y my mind both times I read the book. But he becomes a man haunted by events that happened in his life around a child he treated like a son, and then his gun blows up, and they are exiled.  This then leads him to a clash with the church, as the time he has spent in exile after his gun blew up and killed the son of a rival leader, leading to the exile.  This has seen the village change as the missionaries have started to make inroads, leading to more conflict as his world is changing and falling apart.

Ogbuefi Ezeudu, who was the oldest man in the village, was telling two other men who came to visit him that the punishment for breaking the Peace of Ani had become very mild in their clan.

‘It has not always been so,’ he said. ‘My father told me that he had been told that in the past a man who broke the peace was dragged on the ground through the village until he died. But after a while this custom was stopped because it spoiled the peace which it was meant to preserve.’

‘Somebody told me yesterday,’ said one of the younger men, ‘that in some clans it is an abomination for a man to die during the Week of Peace.’ It is indeed true,

, said Ogbuefi Ezeudu. “They have that custom in Obodoani. If a man dies at this time he is not buried but cast into the Evil Forest. It is a bad custom which these people observe because they lack understanding. They throw away large numbers of men and women without burial. And what is the result? Their clan is full of the evil spirits of these unburied dead, hungry to do harm to the living.’

Before the church  crept in to his world the way of life was different

I loved this book when I read it. It captures the IGBO tribe as it was when he grew up, a tribe that, like many, saw changes with the white man’s arrival. It also had for me a great character in Okokow a man that is larger than life a figure that jumps of the pages of this book. You sense he is part of a lot of the stories the young Achebe heard from his parents, but then fleshed out to make him not just a strong leader but also a flawed man with his own demons and ghosts, as you read how his world is changed as he is there, but after he comes back from exile. I said this is one of the cornerstones of early post-colonial Nigerian fiction. Achebe was a champion and editor of the African Writer Series, as well. For me, it is books like this, the African Writer Series, that did so well, bringing to a wider world voices like Achebe. I wish I had read more of his books over the years, but I will now read the other books in this trilogy and the couple of other books I have by him. Have you read this book? How did it affect you?

 

 

Ilaria or the Conquest of Disobedience by Gabriella Zalapi

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Ilaria or the Conquest of Disobedience by Gabriella Zalapi

Swiss Fiction

Original title – Ilaria ou la conquête de la désobéissance

Translator – Adrianna Hunter

Source – Subscription book

I must admit, Linden Editions brought out one of my favourite books last year, In Late Summer, which, like this book, was, in a way, a child’s view of the world.  This book is by the Swiss-Italian Visual Artist. Her artwork is a mix of images and Family memories, it says. I can see this in the book. This is her second novel and is set in a time long gone, really, as it is set in the 80s in Italy, and what happens in the book would be much harder to do now. But it is also a book that captures divorce well from the child’s point of View. I am from a family where my parents divorced.  In fact, I was maybe a year or so older than Ilaria when this happened to me.

Dad and I play a game: inventing our home and decorating it. First of all, it’s gonna be big. There’ll be loads of windows. And a big yard with a pond full of fish. Me and Ana will have separate bedrooms. Mine will be green and I’ll have the space to lay out my collection of rocks. Dad, promise you’ll make me a beautiful set of shelves. And I’ll put up a big poster of Nadia Comăneci, okay? Okay.

There’ll be masses of cupboards in the kitchen and Mom can put all her food processors in them. Dad’s making shelves for her too. She never has enough room for her recipe books. We’ll buy a beautiful gas stove. And there’ll be an attic too. Yes. We’ll put all the old furniture there.

It takes up too much room, don’t you think? You’re right.

And the walls of the living room will be really, really big.

Mom will be able to hang all her pictures. I’1l make the holes with my drill, I promise. And Ana can finally have the tortoise she’s always wanted.

Early on they have fun but it turns over time

This book sees what happens when Ilaria’s father picks her up from school one day, which he does most days, and he usually drops the young girl off with her mother, Ana. But the parents are in the middle of a divorce and her father is desperate man trying to patch things up and his plan is well is there a plan I often wondered the book is told from Ilaria pouint of view so she is both slighttly unreliable as the narrator but also has that childlike way of seeing her fasther as her father not a man that has taken her on the run and that is what he has done he picked her up in Switzerland and then head not to drop her off but toward Turin and tells her to tell her when she ses a phone box this is a reccurring event in the book the father calling the mother trying to win =her back as he has taken their daughter. There is a sense even through Ilaria’s eyes that this may be something he had done on the spur of the moment, and as we drift through a collection of friends and people they meet along the way.  We see her father telling her what her mother has supposedly said, as what really is going on slowly dawns on his daughter over the coming days, from the sofa to hotels, from car to car across Italy.

He’s jumpy

He’s angry

He’s going to get nasty.

In the last few weeks Dad’s been getting wound up over the tiniest things. He says he can’t stand winter, he can’t stand the lack oflight. Sometimes he’s so angry that I can imagine pétanque balls being thrown around my head. I shudder.

And block my ears.

The other day he called me Mom’s name, Antonia.

I take my time before I open my mouth now. I start my sen-tence, watch him, and, if I see the least sign of irritation, I stop.

Answer me when I’m talking to you.

I dither.

Her Observations of her father before he took her

This is a book that has a thriller, like running to the narrative as we view this happening through the eyes of eight-year-old Ilaria, sitting next to her father as he heads across Italy on the side roads, trying to win his wife back and not get caught for taking his daughter at the same time. From call to call as they head place to place as her father tells her what her mother is supposedly saying, she sees her mother, Ana and father in her mind and slowly sees something isn’t right with her father. I loved the way we see all this through her eyes as a reader. I kept filling in the gaps of her observations of the situation from an outsider’s view. But then I know how hard divorce is on kids and parents. I remember how my mother and father were about my brother and me. I also think this is an event that might not happen as easily nowadays. If you like unreliable child narrators and road movies, this is the book for you. It is a hell of a ride alongside young Ilaria and her father. I must admit this is my book of the year so far.

One Hand clapping by Anthony Burgess

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One Hand Clapping by Anthony Burgess

English fiction

Source – Personal copy

I’m back after my short break, and one of the books I had read for the 1961 club. I had only decided late on reading this, since I had planned to review it here at some point. I love Burgess’s work and think he should be better known not just for Clockwork Orange .  bookAs is writing has such a wide range.  This is a book he published as Joseph Kell between 1959 and 1960. Burgess wrote five and a half books after being warned he might die, to leave both a legacy and security for his family.  Hence, he used another name when the book came out, as he had brought out so many in a short time. Another thing about the book is that it uses fewer than 1000 words. It was his view on the decline of intelligence in the UK and on how American views and TV style were taking over.  It is an American style with people like Hughie Green presenting quiz shows.

HoWARD celebrated Myrtle coming to stay with us for a bit by putting on a really big sort of midnight matinee which scared the daylights out of Myrtle and made her take sleeping tablets. At about five past twelve by the luminous alarm-clock Howard woke me up by laughing very loud and nudging me hard as though we were watching something which he thought very funny at the pictures.

Then he started burbling a lot of nonsense words, then he seemed to settle down again to sleep and I said Thank God’ to myself. But I said it a lot too soon, because almost right away Howard was at it again, but this time not laughing, just the opposite, howling out loud, though it wasn’t real crying. From her room next door Myrtle called in a frightened voice:

One of the other things in the books is Mrytle and herr relationship to Howard

The book follows a few weeks in the life of Howard and Shirlety, a young couple at the start, as they go about their normal lives. When Howard, who had been a used car salesman at the start of the book, always had this photographic memory. So when he decides to appear on a TV show with a prize of 1000, which was a lot of money in 1960, the Bank of England inflation calculator says it is about 20000 these days, so a lot of money. He joins in and goes to London after the first show, which he does very well alongside another contestant. HE RETURNS TO manchester now famous, it is around this time we also find out he is clairvoyant and bets and sees the future. But as the book goes on, he sees a darker event for him and Shirley. As he gets further into the quiz, he loses his job, and people begin to gather around them. He wins after a near miss, which saw him give an answer that seemed wrong, but wasn’t . Will Shirley escape his dark ideas? What will happen to the money? What will it do to their lives?

“Elizabethan drama. Who wrote The Shoemaker’s Holi-day, Bartholomew Fair and A New Way to Pay Old Debts? ” And Howard said:”Henry James; Edward Morgan Forster; Ford Madox Hueffer.” Then there was deathly silence, because Laddie didn’t say, as he’d always said so far, “And you’re right.” Instead he sort of puzzled over his bit of paper and seemed to tremble a bit. He said, “I’m terribly sorry, Howard, I’m really dreadfully sorry, because it’s such a tiny mistake you’ve made ” The audience went ” Awwwww,” very loud. “Such a tiny mistake,” said Laddie, louder. ” What I’ve got written down here is not Ford Madox Hueffer but Ford Madox Ford.” “Henry James; Edward Morgan Forster; Ford Madox Hueffer.” Then there was deathly silence, because Laddie didn’t say, as he’d always said so far, “And you’re right.” Instead he sort of puzzled over his bit of paper and seemed to tremble a bit. He said, “I’m terribly sorry, Howard, I’m really dreadfully sorry, because it’s such a tiny mistake you’ve made ” The audience went ” Awwwww,” very loud. “Such a tiny mistake,” said Laddie, louder. ” What I’ve got written down here is not Ford Madox Hueffer but Ford Madox Ford.”

The questions and here the answer Howard gave was right but one I wouldn’t known Ford Madox Ford wasn’t the writers given name as I say could you answer these question

The book is told from Shirley’s point of view as she sees Howard use his skills to win the quiz show. What tickled me about the contestations on the quiz show, with a host who was a nod and a tongue-in-cheek reference to Hugie Green, the most famous quiz show host at the time, as we see Howard and the ladies head closer to the jackpot.  But what tickled me was the questions he used in the quiz all about literature, and I think they struggle to answer even University challenges these days. It showed that, as they got the money, there was an early start to consumerism, as the couple faced the money and what to do with it. As the book shows, Howard’s witnessing the world’s end changes his relationship with Shirley. She is the narrator of the book, and Burgess’s use of fewer than a thousand words shows her as just a simple girl, in a way, while Howard is an average man with an amazing memory. The book is maybe one of Burgess’s least known books, but it is a glimpse of a time just as TV was starting, and maybe if the answers to the questions here were known, more people would know.  Have you read any of Burgess ‘ lesser-known books? This has just been brought back into print, so it is now easier to get hold of. The title is a nod to the Zen question: What is the sound of one hand clapping? and also it seems a Malay proverb as well this came just after Burgess had been in Malay.

Betty by Georges Simenon

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Betty by Georges Simenon

Belgian fiction

Original title -Betty

Translator – Ros Schwarz

Source – Library book

I mentioned the other day, in a post from Karen, that there is a group of writers you can nearly always rely on for the club year: Agatha Christie, P. G. Wodehouse, and Georges Simenon. In Simenon’s case, there are often two or three books every year.  That was the case for 1961, and I had a quick look at the library system and saw they had Betty. I am more a fan of his Roman Durs, his hard novels, as they are called. I love Maigret, but the psychological depth of these harder novels and their characters often jump off the page. So picked this as my 1961 choice for Simenon.  Betty is an unusual tale; it is about how life sometimes takes odd twists and turns.

It wasn’t her drinking that was causing offence. The proof was that the owner himself had called Joseph the first time, and others were drinking as much if not more than her. A young woman with mousey hair on the corner of a banquette was deathly pale, her head lolling back, and her companion, who was holding her hand romantically, did not appear to be paying any attention to her.

What would happen if Betty began to shout? She was tempted to do so, to find out, to stir things up, so that someone would take notice of her, not just stare at her.

Betty is fallen into a bottle early on in the film

Betty is a woman on a bender. She has divorced her husband, who was a na from. another class when they married, and her daughters as well. She is on the verge of oblivion, falling into the bottle and not finding her way back out. But then she is saved by a mysterious woman named Laure and taken to a small hotel in the countryside. She manages to recover, and as we start to discover more about Betty’s life.  She was a working-class girl who met a man from an upper-class French family, and they married. But as we find out more, Betty is a drinker and takes lovers, so her husband and his family make her sign a divorce and lose rights to her daughters. Laure, a drinker as well, had escaped a marriage to her surgeon-husband and has a lover, Mario, who owns a restaurant. But what happens when she discovers that Betty isn’t the woman she first thought she was? This explains the million francs she had in her purse and why she is now looking at Mario.  This is about class, drinking, and females being more promiscuous.  This was the start of the seventies. It is also about how things can seem very different; Betty and Laure’s views have changed over the course of the book.

The room she was in hadn’t been aired for several days and it smelled fusty. Not the bland fustiness of a town, but the damp-hay smell of the countryside. When, a little earlier, the concierge and the porter had wanted to turn the lights on, the dark-haired woman had said:

‘No! She mustn’t have too much light. Leave me alone with her. Just open the communicating door into my room.” The men’s footsteps had faded away. Betty was lying on a bed, on top of the covers. The woman had gone off into the adjoining room where, from the noises she made, it sounded as if she was making herself comfortable. Was she afraid that Betty might throw up over her dress or tear it, clutching on to her?

Betty as she is taken to the Hotel by Laure

I was thinking as I read this book it would make a great film as it feels like a film script, almost it has a pacing that would suit a film as things slowly become clearer over the course of book as the views of the two female characrters shifgt as we discover more about Betty a woman that seems feted she say but is she or more a victiim of her own problems that at first seem in the book. It was made into a film in 1992 by Claude Chabrol, a director whose films I have seen over the years I had a quick look, and it doesn’t seem to be on a streaming service but has been on a dvd box set at one time so maybe if there is a new box set or I see the old one I may watch the film. It is a book about the little things that happen over time. It is a slow-burning account of Betty’s life told in pieces, and as we learn more, the situation between the two women changes. I’m pleased I picked this as I may not have got to it quickly, as I tend to pick Simenon books as I see them at the moment, second hand or when there are a few for a year like this. Do you have a favourite Roman Durs by Him?

 

 

The Thief and The dog by Naguib Mahfouz

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The Thief and the Dog by Maguib Mahfouz

Egyptian fiction

Original title – اللص والكلاب; al-liṣ wal-kilāb

Translators – Trevor Le Gassick and M. M. Badawi (Revised by John Rodenbeck)

Source – Personal copy

I went from a nearly Nobel winner to the only Egyptian writer to win the Nobel prize, Naguib Mahfouz. I have reviewed three books from him over thwe year s and I am on the quest to read all his books over time I do have gthe Cairo trilogy in a nice hardback edition to read but have that as the last book I will read from him so every time he crops up on the club year I read him this one was the book he brought out in 1961. AS ever, it captures an Egypt and Cairo that is changing just after. A revolution has happened, and we are seeing this new world through the eyes of Said, a thief who has just come out of prison to see the world he knew has changed. He now wants to win his wife back and get the people who put him in Jail

Ilish went to fetch the girl. At the sound of returning footsteps Said’s heart began to beat almost pain-fully, and as he stared at the door, he bit the inside of his lips, anticipation and tenderness stifling all his rage.

After what seemed a thousand years, the girl ap-peared. She looked surprised. She was wearing a smart white frock and white open slippers that showed henna-dyed toes. She gazed at him, her face dark, her black hair flowing over her forehead, while his soul devoured her. Bewildered, she looked around at all the other faces, then particularly at his, which was staring so intently. He was unable to take his eyes off her. As she felt herself being pushed toward him, she planted her feet on the carpet and leaned backward away from him. And suddenly he felt crushed by a sense of total loss.

The man that sold him out and is now with his wife!

The book follows what happens after Said is released from prison. The book is in a stream-of-consciousness style as we follow what happens to him when his estranged wife, Nabawiyya, ends up with the man who put him in jail, his former friend Llish. Add to this that his friend and former mentor, Rauf, is now a journalist and has moved on with his life as well. It sees what happens when a man like Said, a thief, but he also wanted to be part of the revolution, has missed all this, even his own daughter, Sana, is scared of him now. The only people who will help him are a prostitute and a shady cafe owner. This is a man who, in his head, was like a Robin Hood-like figure of the revolution, but now nothing is going his way.  Will he have his revenge? As ever, the book has Cairo as a backdrop. The cafe owner reminds me of the book Coffeehouse, but, like the character in that book, it shows how a city and a world that is constantly changing, like Egypt, had been through during the 20th century, can catch some people out and make others successful, no matter how shady their past was.

He walked on until he reached the Zahra offices in Maarif Square, an enormous building, where his first thought was that it would be very dithcult to break into. The rows of cars surrounding it were like guards around a prison; the rumble of printing presses behind the grilles of the basement windows was like the low hum of men sleeping in a dormitory. He joined the stream of people entering the building, presented himself at the information desk, and asked in his deep

“public” voice for Mr. Rauf Ilwan. Staring back with some displeasure at the bold, almost impudent look in his eyes, the reception clerk snapped, “Fourth floor.” Said made for the elevator at once, joining people among whom he looked rather out of place in his blue suit and gym shoes, the oddness emphasized by the glaring eyes on either side of his long aquiline nose.

A girl caught his eye, which made him curse his ex-wife and her lover under his breath, promising them destruction.

Even his mentor and friend that pushed him to do what he did has moved on

I love Mahfouz’s writing; he is Cairo, he is the man he writes about. He knew people like Said, Rauf, Llish, and the cafe owner (of course, Mahfouz loved cafes and watching people ). This is told in a stream-of-consciousness style to make you feel like Said, as he is caught up in a world that has moved on without him. Revenge is the heart of the book but also for me a sorrow of a man lost to time there must have been many men like Said dropped in it and then left by the people around him when he needed them most. I feel there must be a character like Said, whom he met one day in a cafe, heard his tale, and whose story this book is the result of.  Mahfouz loved sitting in Cafes watching and talking. I said before that Cario is always in his books, like Dublin is in Joyce, Dickens’ London, or Proust’s France.

 

 

Diary of a mad old man by Junichirō Tanizaki

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Diary of a Mad Old Man by Junichirō Tanizaki

Japanese fiction

Original title – 瘋癲老人日記 Fūten rōjin nikki

Translator – Howard Hibbert

Source – Personal Copy

Anyone who has been around the blog over the last few years knows the other event in the blogosphere, apart from the Year’s Shadow Jury, is the biannual Year Clubs that Simon and Karn have run for the last decade or so. In fact, I love these so much. It is mainly finding the books for the blog for each year they have chosen. I go with the year the book came out in its original Language. So it means I cover the rest of the world for the years they pick. First, this week we have a man who just missed out on the Nobel Prize. He was on the shortlist of people in the year he died. It will be the fifth book over the years I have covered by Tanizaki a writer I have grown to like over the years and this wry book of old age is a fun book written by a writer in his later life himself.

This afternoon I asked Satsuko to take me out for a drive around the Meiji Shrine. I thought I had escaped, but my nurse saw us leaving and said she’d come along. The whole thing was spoiled. We were home in less than an hour.

July 2

For the last few days I’ve felt that my blood pressure is rising again. This morning it was up to 18.

Pulse 100. At the nurse’s urging, I took two tablets of Serpasil and three of Adalin. The pain and chilling in my hand is acute too. Although it seldom keeps me awake, last night it woke me up and I had Miss Sasaki give me an injection of Nobulon. I find that Nobulon works for me, as far as that goes, but it has unpleasant aftereffects.

“The collar and sliding bed are here. Would you like to try them?”

I’m not very eager, yet the way I feel makes me willing to give them a trial.

A mix of the visit by the daughter in law and his medical state

The book is the diary of a man recovering from a stroke. Utsugoi is in hios late seventies and has lost the use of one hand due to the stroke and this diary follows the few months that follow the stroke it is made up of the actual recovery, but also the visit he has from his daughter-in-law, Satsuko a former dancier with her own daerk past secrets thios forms the other dynamin=c in hte book as she lets the old man kiss her legs and feet as this is all his libido will let himk do this is about power nad desire and what happens when the mind is still active but eh body has given up the ghpost. a look at the dynamics between the father and daughter-in-law, the sort of twisted power trip she lets him lick her body as he buys her gifts and says he wants her feet as part of his gravestone. This is all a mix of sexual tension and black humour of a man on his way out, but still, after fulfilling his fetishes.

August 8

From 1 to z p.m. I had my nap, and then stayed in bed waiting for Dr. Suzuki. Meanwhile I heard a knock on the bathroom door, and Satsuko calling.

“Father, I’m going to lock this!”

“He’s coming, is he?”

“Yes.” She stuck her head out for a moment, but promptly banged the door shut and locked it.

Though I had only a glimpse of her I noticed a cold, sulky look on her face. Evidently she had already taken a shower; water was dripping from her vinyl cap.

More of him in the hospital and Satsuko being around

This is one of those books that makes you think about growing old, but also about desire and what happens when you have it but no way to show it! This is what could happen. It is about a woman willing to make money from a man she is a daughter-in-law to, a man driven by his desires and what they entail. It’s like a weird Japanese take on a Carry On film, a sort of Carry On Old Man in the hospital.  The main character is like a posher version of Sid James with Money, and Satsuko could be any of the female characters from the films, in a way. It is a book around desire and the male libido, with a comic look at growing old and still feeling Horny and what happens when your dancer daughter-in-law takes advantage of that. The book has been made into a couple of films. I can see it makes a good film, just it mixes a black humour and a man not quite ready to die yet. It also has a medical side throughout the book and ends with the reports of the nurse and doctor who treated him. Have you read this book ?

 

Every Day I read by Hwabg Bo-Reum

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Every Day I read by Hwang Bo-Reum

Korean Non-fiction

Original title  -매일 읽겠습니다  Maeil ilgkesseumnida

Translator by Shanna Tan

Source – Personal copy

I think, as a reader and compulsive book buyer, this is one of those books I hadn’t heard of. I heard of the writer’s novel, I think I may have.  brought it, but haven’t found it if I did.  There have been a lot of similar title books, bookshops, etc., in the last few years. But I happened on this collection of essays by her by chance I was looking for the Han Kang Collection of essays that came out earlier this year but couldn’t find it in my local waterstones.  But this caught my eye, and when I saw it was a collection of essays around books and reading, I picked it up. It consists of 53 essays on books and reading.

Last year, my friends and I had a simple year-end gathering.

The most extroverted person among us suggested that we do a gift exchange with a twist. Let’s each bring something from home that we don’t use, but that’s still good to be given as a present.

For an entire week, I mulled over what to bring.

Something in good condition and makes for a meaningful gift? I could only think of one thing: books.

Then came the harder question, which one? Because we planned to do a random draw, I had no idea who would get my present and what the person might enjoy.

Thinking that Id better avoid something overly niche, I ended up picking a 600-page art history book. It’d be interesting, I was sure, but then again, it was 600 pages.

All my friends had busy careers. Would they find the gift ridiculous? Or worse, think that I was ridiculous? Who would have the time for a thick book like that?

From the essay on big boks made me laugh it could been Bottoms dream as the book !

This is one of those books that is a mix of different things, part biography, it follows the writer’s life as a reader and also as a writer over the 53 essays. But it also shows how we, as readers, make a journey from what we do to what we start to read. Well, as she says, in the most part, the Best sellers are those books that most people read, those holiday books, or in a wider sense, I’d say 8-% of the books you see on the internet, most content creators or circle around the most popular books. As I never consider myself a content creator, I can say this. Then how do we read where, when an essay about train reading on her journey home after doing insane Korean working Hours. A book on the train.  Tacking Big books, something I still struggle with over time.  The subjects are all ones, as a reader, we know keeping lists, classics, Bookshops, and difficult books. It follows her Arc as a reader alongside her own life.

The other day, I was talking to a friend who had just finished reading Hermann Hesses Demian.

‘I think authors who come after Hesses time are incred-ible, she said.

‘Oh, why so?’ I asked.

‘After reading this masterpiece, how can anyone think of writing their own book? Demian already tells us everything about life!’

Talk about being a fan. I first read Demian many years ago, but when I turned thirty sometime back, I decided to reread it. I loved it even more, so that I went around urging everyone to read it.

Italo Calvino, in his book Why Read the Classics?,

says this:

The classics are those books about which you usually hear

People saying : “I’m rereading …, never T’m reading…?!”

I think Classics is my one weakness as a reader !!

I read reviews of this book, and I agree with some of the things people say. It is a book for maybe a newer reader, not a person like me, someone soaked in books and reading. But that isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it. I loved it, and I saw a few Korean and other books mentioned that I will be keeping an eye out for. For me, this is the perfect gift for the young reader, probably into Korean fiction, everyone seems to be reading these days. It is a sort of book that would inspire someone that age to discover books. I think the world of books is so much easier to access these days.  There are so many post-reading books from around the world on social media platforms; people seem to read so much faster than I do.  But yes, this is perfect for the 20-something reader or anyone like me who will happily spend an evening devouring a book about books and reading, as it is that sort of book. Once you start, you need to finish in a sitting. Well, I felt that.  Have you read this fun book?

They by Helle Helle

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They by Helle Helle

Danish Fiction

Original title –  de

Tranlstor Maritn Aitken

Source – Review copy

I was kinbdl sent this as I felt for sure it would be on the Boolker longlist as it was on a lot of peoples guess and I had reviewed her earlier books This should be written in the presenrt when it came out in translation in 2015 and I loved that book so it was great to see another book from her being translated all these years later.  Helle Helle has been nominated for the Nordic Council Prize four times, one of the biggest book prizes in the Scandinavian region.  This book won a couple of Book prizes.  She is known for her Merasured, realstic voices and themes her danish wiki page says and i can agree with that.

On the third of April her mother says:

I must have swallowed a stone?

They go for a walk by the playing fields, the anemones are out. Some small boys are playing football, shrieks and shouts, one of them’s crying up against the goalpost. Her mother’s in her winter coat. They’re having beefburgers, hence the walk. She’s wearing an Icelandie sweater herself, it’s still too early yet, the wind cuts through the wool.

‘A stone stone?’ she says, her mother nods.

‘A heavy one. Here.”

She pauses a second and puts a hand to her coat, below the chest. They carry on then towards the pond.

The shrubberies are dotted with crocuses, they don’t care for crocuses.

Early on in the book this capoture the nature of her prose thou

This is a simple book about a mother and daughter in a small Danish backwater town of Rødby. They live in a small flat above the hairdresser’s, a cut above in the town. It follows a few months in their lives, it starts off as just the normal life of a single mother and a teen daughter, and the tensions that can bring. The duagher and her friend Tove are like most girls their age, going to parties, discovering boys, and drinking. Also, the usual teen trauma of ” Am I pretty? “, ” Does he like me? Am I popular?  The usual everyday things we all had at that age. But then what happens when the mother’s throat issues are more serious than she first thought, changing the rhythm and way of their lives as she is given a terminal diagnosis.  How does this change the course of the books from hospital stays to the way the daughter now becomes the mother in a way, looking after an ailing parent? What it does is capture the changing of the roles and how the teen’s life is changed, those moments we all have at this time, caught piece by piece.

Her mother’s head looks very small on the pillow. She props herself up the moment she sees them in the doorway.

“Now there’s a welcome sight, she says with a smile, her cheeks are round and red. A strand of hair hangs down in front of her eye:

Would you look at me,’ she says and blows it away, reaches out to them both, after which she picks up a hairpin from the bedside cabinet.

Palle folds his duffle coat over the footboard. They sit on either side of her, she on the edge of the bed.

Her mother smooths the back of her hand, her hand is warm and dry.

‘Do you want a peppermint?’ she says.

‘No, you keep them, says Palle.

A forceful cough builds and erupts behind a curtain, her mother lifts her eyebrows. In a pause between two phlegmy expulsions her mother puts a finger to her lips and whispers:

“She’s a pain in the neck.’ Then, immediately, in a clearer voice:

‘So, would you like some coffee?

‘Do they have coffee? Palle says, her mother nods:

“They must have?

This line hit me about her m,other head on the pillow it took me back to my pown mother dying in a hospital and me thinking something similar

I bet you now thinking this is a sads book but no it is one of those books that draws you in as a reader and the normality and direct style of Helle Helles writing makes it not soppy more just how it is when caught up in a ilness a terminal diagnossis those little momnets of interaction of how the vbook sees the mother and daughter change over the book is beautiful at times tender not over written as it could be no sparse hard at times I felt there is no punches held back in her prose no iot is all the more realstic for that . That was the main thing I remember from her earlier book: how her writing is perfect in its tone and not over the top, just enough like a master chef, she knows what puts together a great read. Have you read this or her earlier book?

 

The Duke by Matteo Melchiorre

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The Duke by Matteo Melchiorre

Italian fiction

Original title – Il Duca

Translator – Antonella Lettieri

Source – Subscription book

When the Booker longlist came out, I was pleased to see this on it, as I have been a fan of Foundry Press since it first appeared a couple of years ago and have a subscription with them, so I had this book on my TBR.  Matteo Mmelchiorre is a director of the library and museum Cstelfranco Vento, which is where the book is set in Northern Italy.  He studies the Middle Ages. He has also written about the region’s mountains and forests.  It is good to see how this book has been inspired by the world he lives in and the history he is interested in.

There were perhaps ten crows. Clattering. Cawing. Careening. Blind with fury. They were whirling in a frantic fray, striking each other again and again. Then, all of a sudden, they scattered, darting in opposite directions and, in the newly cleared sky, only a knot of wings remained, an entangled tussle which twisted and swirled and eventu-ally, as if struck by shot, plummeted through the air.

But as soon as the tangle hit the ground, right in the courtyard of the house, I discerned a buzzard instead: open beak, frightful eyes, low wings. The buzzard was pinning a young black crow to the ground, trapping it with its talons, and the crow was flapping its wings, and twisting its head, and wriggling, searching for some prospect of salvation.

The opening of the book and the Buzzard and Crow

The book, he said in the Booker interview, had many inspirations, but the fight he saw between a crow and a buzzard was one of them. I have seen a similar thing in the peaks near her birds of prey, where crows have tackled them. Maybe the scene itself is in part of the book, the buzzard, a solitary bird, a regal bird, and the crow live in groups, a common bird scavening its way. The book follows the duke, who is actually a count, a man stuck in his villa like his family has been for centuries.  What happens when he finds the big man from the village is taking his timber?  That is the kernel of the book, like the birds’ two classes coming together, and it is about the duke, an odd man, quirky solo figure, the last of a line of his family, in a way, maybe a sign of years of inbreeding, then the community around him suffers due to him having the land.  Then there are little pieces about the nature and the natural world they are in. This is the old feudal world of the past, and a village wanting to move into the modern world.

So, by calling me The Duke, the villagers were either implying that I was as eccentric as my grandfather, though inevitably of a quite different sort of eccentricity, or they were mocking the decline of my lineage. A decline which, after all, was most evident, and by virtue of which they could finally enjoy the sight of a Cimamonte with no servants and no tenants and with scratched-up hands and hardened nails.

In any case, I did not care what the village said or thought about me. I was certain that I was already living out the best fate I could possibly desire. Nothing important ever happened during the course my days. Nothing complex ever perplexed my gaze. No exception to my routine. No decision blocking my way. I lived in the best condition to which a man of my nature could aspire – the perfect, ideal condition.

But now, on an afternoon like any other, Nelso Tabióna had come to rap on my windowpane to tell me that, up in the Mountain, in my woods, I had been had.

The duke is actually a count aqqnd the nature is here in the passage I picked

For me, this is a clever book; if it had an NYRB cover, you would be forgiven for thinking it was a rediscovered classic, given the scope and twists of the story. But for me, the one book I thought of a lot was actually Gormenghast. Both books are set in remote settings, and both deal with a crumbling royal family. Both tackle modern subjects, but also set the books in an unknown time frame. Nature is big in both as well. I think I may be the only person who thinks this. There is a mention of ECO in reviews and 19th-century classics. The Foundry, in a recent Instagram post, pointed readers to Trollope and Hardy, whom the writer said inspired him. Of course, The Leopard is another book that has been mentioned as it also deals with a family line crumbling. The writer has also mentioned another Italian book, Deliver us by Luigi Meneghelli, as his bible while writing this book, a book set in a village that explores the writer’s relationship with the land.  This is maybe the most unusual book on the longlist. It is a modern book that reads like a classic novel, with some contemporary ideas about nature and society. It took the translator a while to get the duke’s voice right, she said, as it is very hard to capture the exact Italian nature of his voice. Have you read this book?

 

 

Surgical ward 9 by Peyami Safa

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Surgical Ward 9 by Peyami Safa

Turkish fiction

Original title – Dokuzuncu Hariciye Koğuşu

Translator – Ralph Hubbell

Source review copy

I was sent a number of the first books from the English arm of a Turkish publisher, Thousand Horsemen Press, in this country.  They have published four books, and this slim volume is considered a classic in Turkey.  This book is perhaps one of the fifteen novels Peyami Safa wrote, his most personal and best-known work, as it is a reflection on his own childhood, during which he also had bone tuberculosis in his right arm.  His book has been taught in schools in Turkey and made into films. He had a close working relationship with his fellow writer, Nazim Hikmet . He also translated a number of books from French and had a good knowledge of Arabic. A writer who should be better known in English.  This is the first translation of this book into English.

I too was one of them, and there was no one older than me. I was the only patient there suffering from an idiopathic disease, which I had had since I was eight.

I had spent years waiting outside that examination room, and others just like it. Never once accompanied by a grown-up, I would walk alone through the hospital’s wrought iron gate and make my way towards the ninth

‘surgical ward, envious of the very health of the grounds’ sturdy trees. The strange bright glare of the entrance’s windows would then strike my eyes and churn my stomach with fear, I would enter the passageway and sit off to the side alone, barely stirring, staying quiet, waiting, petrified to the point where I could feel the colour draining from my face.

from a section called troubles of a solitary child

captures the despair of sitting waiting

The book follows our narrator, who is 15 and is stuck in the hospital as he has bone tuberculosis in his right leg. The problem is that the doctors don’t know really what to do; some are nice, others are not. This is a boy stuck with a lot of pain, and the book is told in episodic parts. What happens is he sees a girl, Nüzhet, in the hospital. Seh shines for this boy; she is something different for him.  This girl awakens a dying boy.  This is what happens when you are dying, but then a wonderful light enters your life. The way he describes her, you feel this may have happened to the writer himself. Of course, his narrator in the book has a much worse case than the writer himself did, but there is a sense of time spent in the hospital.  He is well-read for a young man of fifteen. At times, the way he talks with his doctors shows that.  He has few options, will he leave the hospital?

Naturally, a girl wants to be happy.

I keep trying to tell myself this very basic fact. Even in my daydreams, my faltering logic comes to the same con-clusion, but then I begin to reason against it again as if I still need to be convinced.

Suddenly, the unbelievable: I hear something. The sound of someone knocking on the door. I do not believe it at first, but I listen carefully. It’s true.

“Who is it?” I said.

A low voice: “It’s me. Are you asleep? Can I come in?” Nüzhet! Nüzhet in the middle of the night! I could

only mouth the word, “Yes.”

“Can I come in?” she asked again.

Amazed, I sat upright in my bed:

“Yes!” I said.

She opened the door.

She wore a shawl draped over her nightshirt. Her feet,

inside her slippers, were bare.

She walked boldly over to the bed, an act so daring it caused me to feel the intensity of her fright. She looked at me and laughed.

Nuzhet as he views her !

This is a book that can be read in a single evening. I read it in two sittings, as I was so caught up in what was happening to the narrator and in how this girl lit up his world.  She may not be the best person, but there is a sense that this one figure is his hope at this one time. A boy discovering himself . A country struggling in the middle of a war and a sick boy stuck in a hospital jump off the page; you sense this is more auto-fiction, a legacy instead of an arm, some of the options the narrator has to face feel like those the writer may have faced. Did he have a Nuzhet light up his world ? I felt this book salos had a nod towards modernism the way we our in our narrators thoughts called Mrs Dalloway and maybe even something like Hunger by Knut Hamsum it captures a psychological feel to the narrative that the book shares with both the books I have mentioned also he translated french fiction so Proust for the ilness side of the book may have been an inspiration for his writing. It is a gem of a book that has also been made into a film. Maybe the best line is this from his friend Nãzim Hiket “I’ve read Peyami’s latest novel three times, I can read thirty more, I definitely will” High praise!

Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāngzi

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Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāngzi

Taiwanese fiction

Original title – 臺灣漫遊錄

Translator – Lin King

Source – Review copy

I finished the last of the Booker International books for this year’s longlist yesterday. This was one of the last three I read. I won’t get them all reviewed till the end of the week. But I was pleased to have finished before the shortlist came out. This was a book that, like a couple of others, had been on a lot of people’s guesses for the longlist. I won the National Book Award for Translated Literature last year. It also won a prize in Taiwan.  The writer was raised in a rural village and identified as Chinese, but after university, she became involved in the Wild Strawberries Movement.  Against the visit of the Chinese politician to Taiwan. She studied Chinese Literature and has since also taken a degree in Taiwanese Literature.. This is her first book

CHAPTER I

Kue-Tsí / Roasted Seeds

“Hold on. What’s going on here?”

I couldn’t help but voice the thought out loud.

For, in that moment, I seemed to have been transported back

into the midst of Shökyokusai Tenkatsu’s Magic Troupe.’

Id crossed paths with Tenkatsu’s troupe long ago, before ra started high school. They had been on tour, and on the day they arrived in Nagasaki, my aunt Kikuko and I happened upon the opening parade.

The procession comprised a majestic formation of rick-shaws, rows and rows of them with no end in sightenough to rival an army regiment. The band rode at the frontmost rick-shaws, performing with remarkable gusto; after them came the women magicians, beaming and waving at the crowd in exquisite maquillage; they were followed by the male magicians in top hats. Other troupe members went on foot, encircling the rickshaws and ushering them along. They held up long poles with brightly colored flags-streaks of crimson, white, violet, and azure that were no less commanding than the band’s spirited music.

My chest thrummed and lifted, as though something had been strung from my navel all the way up into the sky

Each chapter was a dish along the way

The book is a clever little memoir of a Japanese writer in the late 1930s who heads out to Taiwan, then under Japanese rule.  This is the story of the year she spent in the island as we follow Aoyama Chizuko and her translator Chizuro as they go around on her lecture tour f the country she also samples a lot of the local dishes along the way this is a story that sees the two woman at first distant grow closer but also there is a lot about being under rule from anuother country that resentment that can simmer. in the background as they head around the country. The book is framed as her pieces from the year-long tour and presented as a book that has been found. This means we also get a lot of footnotes along the way as we see how different fictional translators dealt with the text.  There are also endnotes from the fictional family of the two women.  Added to that, we also have the food that is almost. Character in itself sets the taste buds racing.

Before that, I broke fast with white rice, pickled vegetables, seaweed, a raw egg, and grilled fish, along with miso soup with tofu and fish—the type of meal I would have had back on the Mainland. This dampened my spirits somewhat, and I did not fill my stomach, which in turn filled my head with thoughts of sweets as lunchtime approached. Fried bread sprinkled with sugar, cream cookies, yokan jelly, red bean buns-those delicacies were appetizing, but all were things that I could have eaten in Nagasaki. Taiwan, with its heat that brought torrents of sweat down my back, called for some more hydrating desserts. Cold o-gio, hún-kué, hún-înn, tshenn-tsháu-à tea, and tropical fruits teeming with juice-how I longed to try them!

More oof the food to mae your mouth water !

I think when the longlist came out, this was maybe the book I knew least about. I wish I had known more about it; it is a little gem of a book with a clever framing device of the memoir as a novel, but it is also a look back at Japan’s colonial rule over Taiwan. But also a nod and warning toward China, threatening to do the same.. It is also about how we view books, how they were altered across various versions, and how different translators tackled the book, showing how translation can be used as a weapon of propaganda in some ways. It is also an ode to Taiwan’s food. It is a book that makes your mouth water. I hope to try a few of the dishes along the way. Others may not have been to my taste. Have you read the book? Did it make your mouth water?