Category: shadow bookerinternational 2025

The book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem

~ winstonsdad ~ Leave a comment

The book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem

Paslenstenian  fiction

Original title -سفر الاختفاء

Translator Sinan Antoon

Source – Subscription edition

The translator of this book was a finalist for the old IFFP prize many years ago, before it became the Booker International Prize. I think we all want some novels that capture why events are happening in Palestine and Israel. This book, in some way, captures that by doing something so out of the blue, it leaves a void. What happens when the whole country, all of Palestine’s citizens, just aren’t there one morning? How will the Israelis react? That is the premise of the book. It is set in the Jaffa region. As I said in the last post, I’m drawn to speculative fiction, and this concept, as a way to describe the whole situation, grabbed me.

He went out barefoot and ran down to the third floor.

He rang the bell, confident that Alaa would open the door in no time, if he wasn’t at work. Taking time to open the door doesn’t mean anything necessarily. Alaa’s usually late.

Ariel rang the bell several times and then started banging on the door and calling out, “Alaa, Alaa, ata bu?”

When he went back up Zohar was getting ready to leave.

“He’s not answering.”

“You mean he disappeared with the others.”

“I don’t want to get into an argument, but I don’t think he’s disappeared. Maybe he’s wiped out and wasn’t able to go to work. We drank a bottle of wine last night and he was tired.

His phone is off and he only turns it off when he’s asleep.”

“You still don’t get what’s happening. Listen to your voicemail. Listen to the news. This is the nonchalant attitude that ruined our relationship. I’m going.”

He thinks his friend will still be there but isn’t

So what we see is the tale of what happened just before and then after, when all the Palestinians went through two friends on either side of the divide. Alaa is Palestinian. She is haunted by the events many years before, which were recounted to her by her grandmother about when she was thrown out of Jaffa and forcibly moved by the Israelis. Where our neighbour is now, Ariel, is a liberal Zionist. So when he wakes up the very next day, Alaa and all the Palestinians have gone, with no clue where or even how they just disappeared. Night. Add to this, we get Alaa’s notebooks that recount the event her grandmother had told her. The more significant part of the book focuses on how the authorities and Ariel react to the disappearance, and how their reactions are explained, which is at the centre of the whole book. This is one of those ‘what-if’ moments imagined.

Press offices have refused to give any special entry permits during the coming forty-eight hours. Going there would be of no use anyway, he thought as he took a sip of the coffee, which scorched his tongue. He called the IDF press office and the Tel Aviv municipality to check if it was necessary to get a special permit to go to Jaffa, or any other Arab area. He got the same answer. No permits are being given and he should call the following day.

How the goverment scrambles to cope twith what has happened!

As I said, I like certain speculative fiction, and this is one of those books that appealed to me before the prize. I think we all want to know a little bit more about this whole situation in Israel and Palestine. One must remember we have a massive part in the past history of this conflict, as we were at the heart of the discussions and plans to start Israel. The other thing about this book I’m talking about is that it was written over a decade ago, and maybe that’s why it could have been written at any time in the last few decades, which is a scary thought. I was reminded of what Dasa Drndic said about the tear-away section in her book, in Italy, with all the names of the dead Italian Jews. When they are taken out of the book, the book and the country fall apart in a way. What happens when your enemy disappears? This is what fuels the book, the questions of how, why, the aftermath and what happens with that void? But also it in someway for me as a reader left a few unanswered questions, I m not sure if I am dsoemtimes a read that likes to have everything tied up at times and in a way this book isn’t abkiut that it is about that void and the questions it gives those who are left but also how people react to that happening. It’s an interesting perspective on the whole situation and a fresh take on it. I wonder if they had read books by Saramago or something like ‘The Day of the Triffids, ‘ which deals with a sudden change. This is something like what Wyndham might have written about this situation.I like the idea of this book in part, it works, but for. Me there was a part that was missing at times if that makes sense a sort ofwhy and how to the events but maybe they were left vague for a reason!

 

Solenoid by Mircea Cǎrtǎresecu

~ winstonsdad ~ 4 Comments

Solenoid by Mircea Cǎrtǎescu

Romanian fiction

Original title – Solenoid

Translator – Sean Cotter

Source – Personal copy

Now this is one of those books that over the time I have been blogging goes in an aerc in my Head, I remember first hearing about this labrythine book and how it was surreal and gritty and just one of those books that when described I think in my head oh this is so much above my head as a reader. I also hate it when a book is everywhere and everyone just focus on one book at the cost of other books this happens a a lot in the translated world I find there is usually a couple of books every year that p-eople seem to get hyped thus in my eyes become I book I don’t want to review. I always feel my voice isn’t much in the cacophony of praise for a book. I am not a critical thinker,I am maybe not the most profound reader at times. So when it came up on the long list for the Booker International part of me thought it could be the one book I miss this year as I did;t want to rreread it as I hadn’t review it two years ago.

I am, thus, a Romanian teacher at School 86 in Bucharest. I live alone in an old house, “the boat-shaped house” I have already mentioned, on the street called Maica Domnului, in the Tei Lake neighborhood. Like any other teacher in my field, I dreamed of becoming a writer, just the same way that, inside the café fiddler playing from table to table, a cramped and degenerate Efimov still lives who once thought himself a great violinist. Why it didn’t happen— why I didn’t have enough self-confidence to overcome, with a superior smile, that evening at the workshop, why I didn’t have the maniacal conviction in my beliefs in spite of everyone else, when the myth of the misunderstood writer is so powerful, even with its concomitant measure of kitsch, why I didn’t believe in my poem more than I did the reality of the world—I have searched for an answer to all these questions every day of my life. Starting in the depths of that damp autumn night when I walked home, blinded by headlights, in a state of paranoia I had never felt before. I couldn’t breathe for rage and humiliation.

My parents, who opened the door for me as always, were left speechless.

His day job as a teacher

ANnyway the book is set in the 80s and has a main character that isn’t named but in some ways can be taken as a sort of Cartaescu if he hadn’t had the success he had with his writing this is a teacher in Bucharest teaching and tlivin g in that city at the time it comes across as a grim city. I was reminded that this must have been how the industrial towns of England must have been fifty years earlier. As our main character talks about his life, we follow his day-to-day life, as if he is about to read an epic poem. This is based on actual events in the writer’s life. Now this is the straightforward part of the book. But then we have a surreal other-world touch from the life of a mite or lice. In fact, at times, this reminds me of Hrabal, another writer obsessed with dirt and the sort of dirtier side of the world in his writing. So we go from the micro to the macro in these sorts of dream-like sequences (dream or even maybe Nightmare )in the book. ADD to this, he seems to be obsessed with his body and its inner workings as someone who has a tendency to have health anxiety and can see a fellow person that maybe other thinks their health. Add to that side stories around his reading of the book The Gladfly,  written by Ethel Voynich, whose husband, a book dealer, was the man who discovered the famous Voynich manuscript. If this had been lost for a thousand years, would the book itself be treated in the future as some sort of wondrous work whose actual text is unknown, like the Manuscript is?

The mantis turned around in Virgils palm, as he spoke in a monotone, as though reciting a text he knew by heart, and then it shot up in flight, suddenly an enormous locust, over the dew-pearly garden. It disappeared over the fence woven with Jericho roses.

Caty nodded at every phrase, as though her frivolous being, made of pre-tentions and silk, had only then awoken, had at that moment escaped from the Neckermann with its perfect men and perfect women, and had entered the dictionary of skin diseases, the forensic treatises, the anatomy of melan-choly, the history of infernos with their sinister illustrations of the crushed, burned, amputated, oligophrenic, hanged, starving, and paralyzed people emerging triumphant from pits of horror, showing their green lunatic faces and their eyeballs slung into the backs of their heads like broken dolls. From that morning on, the sweet, multicolored woman with her sparrowlike mind led a double life, one I heard of for the first time sitting in front of her in the deserted office where the last ficus tree rotted away. By day she was still the chemistry teacher, envied by all her colleagues for her clothes and shoes and purses, her house with 156 panes of glass, and her ministry husband, but by night, two or three times a week, dressed in black without makeup or per-fume, in a headscarf and shoes the janitors wore, with tears dancing in her eyes and dark hatred over her face like a dead god of love,

Surreal imagery at times like here

Now that is it, of course, this is just the barest description of a book that is one of those works of postmodern fiction that none will always struggle to describe. It is a book you must wade into and hope you get to the other side. As I said, it made me think of the dark satanic mills of the industrial age. The city he describes seems like that. I was reminded in the talk about getting lice, this might surprise you bu tit remind me of my love of kitchen sink novels those grim working class classic of the 50’s and 60’s. At other times, it was like a Romanian Joyce and a sort of nightmarish ode to a place and time gone, if he had been in 80s Bucharest and a failed writer, this might have been his take on the world. Other parts remind me of William Burroughs. I know it was written in a single draft, but there is a feeling of the surreal worlds that Burroughs always did so well. Anyway, this is my take on this book.I love it, but think the hype somewhat has made it a book overshadowing other books, if that makes sense. I wouldn’t be surprised if it won the Booker. In my head, it is the winner, and I haven’t felt that for a book on the longlist for a few years. I’m unsure what this will add to the discussion on the book. But don’t be scared of it. What are your thoughts on this book?

On the calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle

~ winstonsdad ~ 3 Comments

On the calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle

Danish fiction

Original title – Om udregning af rumfang

Translator – Barbara J Haveland

Source – Review copy

This book wasn’t out when the long list came out, so I managed to get a review copy of it. It is the first of a series of five books that the writer initially self-published. But it has since gained ground and has been translated into many languages. Solvej Balle had an earlier book translated into English in the nineties and also wrote radio dramas. She was heard as one of the new female writers in the nineties from Nordic countries with a modernist writing style. But this book sees her taking a turn with the style of this book, which is the first in a series of seven books that follow people like the main character in this book, Tara, as she is caught in a loop of time reliving the same day. Now Balle says she had the idea for this book years before Groundhog Day, which is a film with a similar idea. But the time loop was in science fiction before Heinlein wrote a short story in the late fifties around time travel (I used to like his books and short stories as a kid)

I have moved back to the table by the window and before long I hear Thomas’s feet on the stairs and the passage again.

I hear him in the kitchen and the hall. I hear him open the door facing the road and go out to fetch a leek from the garden and some onions from the shed. I can hear him pulling on the pair of wellingtons by the door. I can hear him walking down the side of the house, and then nothing until he returns with his vegetables. I hear him chopping vegetables for soup.

Hear the rattle of the pot on the stove and, once the soup is ready, the scrape of chair legs on the kitchen floor. A little later I hear the gush of water through the pipes as Thomas washes his plate in the kitchen sink, then I hear him putting the plate back in the cupboard before going through to the living room. He spends his evening reading Jocelyn Miron’s Lucid Investigations and it’s almost midnight before he switches off the hall light and goes upstairs, but that is a while off yet, the evening is just beginning. Thomas is getting changed in the bedroom above and I am remembering a long succession of November days that have begun to run together in my mind.There are 121 days to remember. If 1 can.

The opening as she starts tio record the days in a journal

SO the framing devices of this book are that Tara and her husband Thomas are antique book sellers and are in Paris  for one night on the way to attend an auction and buy books. But we meet Tara as she wakes on her 121st, 18th November. One day she got stuck in. The lop of this day, but for her, she has just settled for this as her life, and what we see is what happens when you accept b43eing in the same day, how those subtle little changes occur every time she relives the day, change the day slightly this is a nuanced book about little changes. The only actual event in the whole day was meeting an old friend and his girlfriend for a meal, in which her hand was burnt and thus held in cold water. The title is a nod to this moment, and it is a way to calculate volume from the displaced water. Paret me things, this book has a huge nod to the French Oulipo group. The circumstance of this book is that the character is stuck on 18th November for a year, as the book carries on . But how do you take that as a way to write ?

Our love has always been microscopic. It is something in the cells, some molecules, some compounds outside of our con-trol, which collide in the air around us, sound waves that form unique harmonies when we speak, it happens at the atomic level or that of even smaller particles. There are no precipices or distances in our relationship. It is something else, a sort of cellular vertigo, a sort of electricity or magnetism, or maybe it’s a chemical reaction, I don’t know. It is something that occurs in the air between us, a feeling that is heightened when we are in each other’s company. Maybe we are a weather system – condensation and evaporation: we are together, we look at one another, we touch one another, we condense, we come together, we make love, we fall asleep, we wake and revert to our strange bond, a quiet weather system with no natural disasters. Or a weather system which, until the eighteenth of November saw no disasters.

Later in the book her view of it all in a way

That is the question she has taken a different route to than Groundhog Day. What happens when the person stuck in the time loop just accepts it instead of making use of it like in Groundhog Day? What happens when the changes over the day after day are ever so subtle and gradual? This is what she has captured. If Knausgaard wrote sci-fi, this would be the subtle little things that happen in the days as they unfold. As I say, it reminds me of the sort of challenge Oulipo writers set themselves in their writing. A sort of waiting for Godot, but this is a woman just waiting for the 19th of November, stuck in the 18th, like Beckett’s characters stuck waiting for the elusive Godot. I love to see how she will carry this on in the following six books. I have been told there are other characters in the other books! Have you read this? What are your thoughts?

on a woman’s madness by Astrid Roemer

~ winstonsdad ~ Leave a comment

On a woman’s madness by Astrid Roemer

Suriname fiction

Original title – Over de gekte van een vrouw

Translator – Lucy Scott

Source – subscription book

I did have a few of the books when the Booker international longlist came out as I have several subscriptions from different publishers one of the first I signed up for was the publisher of this book Tilted Axis as over the time they have been publishing they have push boundaries and brought new voice to English in there books and this is a p[perfect example of there books. Why we had to wait forty years for this book I wonder why it has taken so long. But this book would have been a lot more hard-hitting forty years ago. I feel. Now, Astrid Roemer reminds me of Wilson Harris. They come from countries very close to one another in Latin America. I have looked and can’t see a connection other than they were writing simultaneously. So we follow Noenka story a woman that has chosen to escape her marriage after just nine days.

My marriage lasted exactly nine days, making waves in our tiny riverine country and setting me adrift for the rest of my life.

It started with my extended family, when I knocked on my

parents’ door that ninth night to wake them.

It was raining, heavy and overbearing, and as the roof of our home was fairly flat, the sound of my knuckles rapping on the wood didn’t travel inside: it was, instead, immersed in the beat of the falling rainwater. Dead silence filled the house.

My hands hurt, more than my head and my stomach, and I was soaked through. And scared, not only of the ominous graveyard nearby that the lightning transformed into an even more nightmarish setting, but also of the city’s overall bleakness when asleep – this city that let itself be vanquished by water.

Scared of my mother and father’s house, which was refusing to let me inside on my flight to the odors of talcum powder and brass polish, tobacco and old newspapers, which would get rid of the smell of blood hanging around me.

The opening of the first chapter

We follow Noenka as she bravely tries to escape her marriage. After just nine days of marriage, she knows it was a mistake. But this small town in Suriname is going back 40 years, even then, so the answer is no. She has to escape to the biggest city in the country, Paramaribo. This is the tale of her life there from her escape, hiding in orchids. Flowers are a recurring theme in the book. But also the violent nature of trying to escape marriage in a world that isnt’ queer freeindly we see a woman on her own journey of discovery and her attraction to woman and all that this entails. As well as being black in this world of hers. A society with a very male-dominated view of the world. This is a struggle to be herself, but also a look into how brutal and how much violence was aimed at her. Showing how hard it was to be a lesbian in society at the time.

When I was five, I lived the dream at the lady’s house. Floors that gleamed like the mirrors in brass frames, furniture in dark wood with scroll legs, and colorful satin upholstery, cushions that smelled of flowers. Heavy portraits on the walls, a candelabra full of white candles, and scores of porcelain figurines, sadly locked away in glass display cases.

And there was Ramses. Dressed like a crowned prince from a Western fairy tale: white shirt, bow tie, slim trousers in dark velvet, pristine white socks, and black patent leather shoes, roaming the house when his mother wasn’t looking – playing the organ or reading from an English picture book under her watch. I doted on him with my eyes, my ears pricked up whenever he spoke, and I dreamed that he became a bird and flew away with me and his flock of parakeets.

I like the idea of being a flock of Parakeets

This book leaves you as a reader thinking how much the world has changed. But also for those other Noenkes still worldwide struggling in their own violent macho worlds. This tale is about trying to break free, never quite getting the dream, but it is about trying to be oneself in a complex world. I said Wilson Haris came to kind it is in the richness of Roemer world, and the way the world around Noenke sometimes drifts towards nightmares reminds me of the fever dreams in Harris’ writing. The heat and Humidity of their shared world must draw this writing style. I liked this book; it is a complex and complicated book to follow. One of my fellow Jurors wondered if she had done this after the book was written, but no, it was written in the fragmented style, which, as it was an early novel, makes you wonder what her other novels are like. As I said, this would have been even hard hitting had it come out in English then. But it still rings true and makes you think of other women worldwide struggling to be themselves. Have you read this book?

 

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

~ winstonsdad ~ 5 Comments

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

Italian fiction

Original title – Le Perfezoni

Translator – Sophie Hughes

Source – Subscription copy

Now one thing we can always count on is a book from Faaitzcarraldo =being on the booker longlist, Well you hope there is asa they are bring out the cutting edge of fiction from around the world and yes they have a clever knack of having published future noble winners and may continue with that lets see, So this maybe wasn’t the book from there recent books that people had picked for the longlist. But for me, it is a perfect book for the way the Booker Prize is moving, it is the tale of some millennials, social media, and life in general. It captures how the world has shrunk and, in many ways, is a very similar world we all live in now.

The kitchen is fitted out with glossy white subway tiles, a chunky wooden worktop, a double butler’s sink.

Open shelves are lined with blue and white enamel dishes and mason jars filled with rice, grains, coffee, spices. Cast-iron pans and olive wood ladles hang from a wall-mounted steel bar. Out on display on the worktop are a brushed steel kettle, a Japanese teapot and a bright red blender. The windowsill is filled with herbs growing in terracotta pots: basil, mint, chives, but also marjoram, winter savory, coriander, dill. Pushed against one wall is an antique marble-top pastry table and salvaged school chairs

This made me laugh as it remind me of some many oictures coffee shops etc I have seen with a similar vibe and style

The book follows Anne and Tom as they live out that expat dream of living in Berlin (I, for one, had shared this dream as well; I had lived in Germany but would have loved to have been in the post-wall era Berlin). What is captured in the modern world, a new take at the start of the book, is a nod to a book by George Perec in the sixties, when the first explosion of consumerism happened, when things price-wise became within the grasp of many people. Well, this is maybe the 2020s version of how social media has taken over the world. Instagram, Pinterest, etc. So we all have plant-filled apartments with similar posters and art, with Gooseneck kettles and V60  with filters to make the perfect pour over. The local coffee roasters. But this world is also ideal, and as they see those around them come and go, they start to lose the love of this world, and what to replace it with. They start to do something which too few people do these days, and become political and try slowly, but over time, become more radical in the steps they take to make the world around them more real. This is about the modern dream, those filtered pictures. Those idolised lives.

And it is a happy life, or so it seems from the pictures in the post advertising the apartment for short-term rental at one hundred and eighteen euros a day, plus the fee to cover the Ukrainian cleaner, paid through a French gig economy company that files its taxes in Ireland; plus the commission for the online hosting platform, with offices in California but tax-registered in the Netherlands; plus another cut for the online payments system, which has its headquarters in Seattle but runs its European subsidiary out of Luxembourg; plus the city tax imposed by Berlin.

I’ve looked on Air BnB to see how long a mon ths rent here and there would cost.If I had the time and money !

I am old enough to be from the pre-social media generation. Social media waves have come and go in the last couple of decades. Like Fury in the slaughterhouse said in the song, every generation has its disease or in this case, social media. This is the Instagram world of perfect clips and how it affects one couple, but also shows the hollow nature of these dreams and worlds. Berlin was the ideal choice, it is a hipster place to live, always has been. For Nick Cave or even Lou Reed before him. Through to a singer like Lloyd Cole, who also wrote a song about how hip Berlin was back in the day. Anne and Tom could be any couple on social media. But the main thing around this book is that the writer is George Orwell’s Italian Translator, and this is a sort of Orwellian tale of the modern world and how all that shines isn’t what it seems. A great picture has a story behind it every time! I am someone who spends a lot less time on social media than I did a decade ago. I know the feeling of losing who you are somewhat. But for me, social media also opened doors. What is your take on this novella? It is one of the most interesting books on the longlist so far !

Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa

~ winstonsdad ~ 3 Comments

Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa

Japanese fiction

Orignal title – ハンチバック

Translator Polly Barton

Source – Personal copy

This was another book from the longlist i was vaguely aware of , I remember reading when the writer had won the Akutagawa prize a couple of years ago as she was the first disabled writer to win such a big prize in Japan; in fact, in any big book prize worldwide, let’s face it there are not many disabled voices out there in the books we read. So I had this on my radar to read; given the nature of my job, anything that deals with disability and is written from that point of view captured my attention as a reader. As I feel it is a world underrepresented by readers. In some ways, this book is a thinly veiled tale of the writer’s own life, but maybe in HD, can I get away with saying that this is her world turned up to fully steamy!!

Meanwhile, S was leaning up against the tinted glass while the trader sucked on her E-cup tits. The black turtleneck hoisted up around her mouth muffled her moans so they sounded super horny. Her enormous white breasts were glistening and bouncy like ripe Japanese pears. You had to hand it to 2I-year-old college students! Huge but still pert, they really were a flawless set of tits.

No wonder 26-year-old Y was hanging her head, her cheeks reddened by the humiliation of defeat. Although, if I’m being totally honest, I’m not that into big-breasted women. Y’s regular-sized, slightly saggy tits were actually way more up my alley. Yeah, she was really turning me on. I stuck a hand into her panties to find she was already dripping wet. ‘Can 1 fuck you?’ I groaned into her ear. ‘Sure &’! she replied. I grabbed one of the condom packets that had come pirouetting down from the ceiling at just the right moment, and so began

The tale of hers that opens the book

The book opens with our narrator writing one of the erotic stories that she has been publishing under a pseudonym on erotic websites. In her stories, she explores the experiences of sex as a disabled woman and reflects on how it would feel. She lives in a nursing home, a place her parents chose for her, where she tweets and writes. One day, her new male carer suggests that he knows about her secret life as a writer. This revelation adds a twist to the narrative as the fantasy worlds she creates spill into reality. Because of her circumstances, she finds she can prompt this man to act out some of the scenarios she wishes to explore. Her own sexual journey with this young man. It is a tale of power in a way being switched to the way this may happen otherwise.It also shows a subject until recent times, a taboo, and that is the desire of people like our narrator and the writer herself. Trapped in their own way, seeking freedom of their desires!

In American universities, in accordance with the stipulations of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, not only are digital educational teaching resources the norm, but it’s also compulsory for textbooks to be accessible to the visually impaired through a reader. Japan, on the other hand, works on the understanding that disabled people don’t exist within society, so there are no such proactive considerations made. Able-bodied Japanese people have likely never even imagined a hunchbacked monster struggling to read a physical book. Here was 1, feeling my spine being crushed a little more with every book that 1 read, while all those e-book-hating able-bodied people who went on and on about how they loved the smell of physical books, or the feel of the turning pages beneath their fingers, persisted in their state of happy oblivion.

A remindee of her own personal challenges and how society deals with them!

 

 

The story addresses the theme of feeling trapped in your body; how can she be free while confined to a chair and reliant on oxygen? It delves into the desire to be seen as something other than society’s perception. It highlights the unspoken desires of disabled people, a subject that is only just beginning to gain attention in our society. Something people are only just starting to talk about, so a book like this with is cader and frankness and a straightforward way of dealing with other erotic desires is eye-opening and also refreshing. I think the writer of this book must have a wickedly playful mind if this book is a reflection of her as a person. One of the books that has so far raised its head above the others, and also like some of the other book,s this is the sort of book I hope to see on lists like this books that open up new dimensions for us as readers but also give voice to underrepresented writers as well.

Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda

~ winstonsdad ~ 3 Comments

Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda

Mexican fiction

Original title – Perras de reserva

Translators – Heather Cleary and Julia Sanches

Source = Personal copy

Now, when the longlist came out for the booker international, this was one of the books I was vaguely looking at getting myself. It has a rather eye-catching cover with shocking Pink, and the choice of Font on the cover catches the eye. I have read a lot of great female writers from Mexico in the last few years in the time I have been blogging it is amazing how many writers have become available to us in English, and this writer is an activist for females in Mexico to have abortions, which is something I strongly support so I know ew this collection would be for me it is a colle action of short stories with a loose connection between them all. Now, I have to say the collection actually tale ends with the two best stories as the first and last for me, but the others all deal with the everyday horrors and violence for females in Mexico these days.Have you a favourite recent Mexican writer ?

Okay, I made that up … There is no Gerardo. I just wanted to add some romance to the story. I got pregnant from a one-night stand. I didn’t know the guy’s name and had zero interest in finding out. His performance was underwhelming. Yup, I got knocked up by a terrible lay.

I’m the kind of girl who gets used as an argument against abortion. The kind who hooks up with the first guy who sweet-talks her on a night out. The kind who should be on birth control, get her tubes tied, or keep her legs closed. I let total strangers grope me. I like parties, getting wasted, making a drunken ass of myself.

The opening story trying to find a way to lose her baby

The book opens with a girl wanting an abortion, and instead like in the not-so-distant [past in the UK, her only route is an old wives tale or a sort of back street treatment we used to see in the UK. This is an eye-opening, horrific look at one girl’s journey to lose an unwanted birth. The other stories see us meeting women and girls trying to keep one step ahead of the violent world they find themselves in, whether that is as a teen feeling a gang is the closest to family to others when you are a mother alone or not the world this is the harsh reality faced by many women in Mexico in a way it becomes like a recurring nightmare the stories blend at times bleed into one another as violence becomes almost the norm to us as the reader. Til the final tale, whix=ch is like all the rest but with added urgency to remind you once again of the horrors facing women in this violent world. Memories bleed onto the page here and on Facebook in the story itself.

At seven in the morning, I stumbled across a news story that broke me. They’d found a body in the river. It was in a black plastic bag, in an advanced state of decomposition. The water had kept the bag hidden, but when it receded, two feet appeared. Your feet. A few kids passing by noticed the smell of decay and called the police. The corpse was naked.

It’s hard for me to say your corpse. Women’s clothing was found nearby. A denim skirt. A black T-shirt. One sneaker. It was you.

No one is ever ready for the death of someone they love. But this wasn’t death. It was theft. You were stolen, violently ripped from my side. I broke down. I’d never cried like that before because I’d never felt like that before. Rage and sadness, all at once. When I remember that moment, I still feel the knot in my throat. It was terrible. I can’t write about it. It ripped me apart. An unidentified woman. You were one more body in this genocide. Another nameless woman adding to the death count. Another pink cross.

The end story more death as we see them mark with crosses!!

Now I have spent ages since I read this book how to best describe it bu then reading the above, it misses the dark humour that you also get in this type of world, gallows humour, the black humour you have to have to get by because otherwise, this book is the equivalent of a sort of literary waterboarding for the read quick breaths bother the violence. All that entails happens in this world. This book, I feel, would stand out for the judges as it is edgy, vile, funny, dark, and full of the violent side of the world. As I said in the middle of the book, this is normal to you as the reader reading reoccurring horrors in the tales I will never know other than in these pages, so if you want a ride into a world that will make you feel uncomfortable, read this, for me, this is what the booker is there for to highlight those books that are different that stand out like this book. Have you read this book?

Stu’s International booker Five for 25

~ winstonsdad ~ 2 Comments

I had initially opted to miss doing the shadow Jury, but after saying I was;’t going to do it I got a touch of nostalgia, I loved doing the shadow jury ok last year, but the books were maybe not to my taste, but it is about the people I do the jury with year after year it the only time I ever really talk about books , if anyone wants to chat about books regularly I am always free to chat !! other than this post I do. Anyway, in the last year, I may haven’t read as many books as I usually would for a long time. I have thus chosen five books I have read and reviewed that I’d like to see on the longlist this year.

Brandy Sour by Constantia Soteriou

A short novella that use the drinks people order to tell this history of one of the most famous Hotels on the Island and the island’s history and how the split came about. One of the most refreshing ideas for a book I have read in a long time

Un Amor by Sara Mesa

I like this tale of a woman heading to a small village in the Spanish hinterland is one of my favourite settings for a book and this had a number of twists and turns.

Clean by Alia Trabucco Zeran

We find a woman held against her will and the story of her and the family she had been a nanny to slowly unfolds.

My favourite by Sarah Jollien-Fardel

Now, if Un AMor was a woman going to a village to escape, this is the opposite: a woman escaping her abusive father from a small Swiss village to head to a bigger town and start a life of her own away from the village.

Stay with Me by Hanne Ørstavik

Now, a Danish woman in Italy falls for a younger man but experiences echoes of her childhood. This is the latest from one of the best writers around in recent years.

Now I have read the book The Disappearance by Ibisam Azem, We Do Not Part by Han Kang, and On the Greenwich Line; I would like to see them on the longlist, but time is running out. I hope to review them in the next few days. But time is short.

What would you pick?