Category: #translationthurs

March 2026 Booker Month 26

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  1. She who remains by Rene Karabash
  2. The Deserters by Mathias Enard 
  3. We are Green and Trembling by Gabriel Cabezón Camára
  4. The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje 
  5. The Nights are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar
  6. The Witch by Marie Ndiaye
  7. The director by Daniel Kehlmann
  8. Erased by Miha Mazzini
  9. Taiwan travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ

It is always the same at this time of year: before the Booker, there was the old IFFP prize. I always start by reading the longlist of prizes. I was very pleased when this year’s longlist came out, as it had books I had planned to read. It was a journey that started in Bulgaria, with a second story I read about the Sworn Virgins. Then to France and an old favourite, Mathias Enard, and a tale about a father, war, and a deserter. Then we are in South America, and a pioneering woman living as a man. Then a man who has lost his memories of post-World War I is claimed by his wife, or is she?  Then, families escape post-Shah Iran, and it follows them in Germany and back to Iran, where a woman is a witch in a small village where her daughters are. Then, a memoir of a director who got caught in Nazi Germany and still made films about making films under the Nazis Regime. Then, a break, and a stunning tale of a woman who lost her identity in a government glitch and struggles to keep her Baby. Then a pair of women, one Japanese, one Taiwanese, travel Taiwan on a year-long tour and eat their way around.

Book of the month

I will pick this, it is a great gem of a book. I want to avoid pinning a Booker as we are in the middle of our shadow jury debates. This book was written when Miha Mazzini saw a report about the 20,000-plus people removed from Slovenian government records. A tale of a pregnant woman finds she has vanished from government records, and they may take her newborn.

Non-book events

Watching-wise, I am in the middle of a binge of the cosy crime series Shakespeare and Hathaway.With Mark Benton as an ex-police officer, now a PI and his new partner played by jo Joyner. I love the way they play off one another, and Benton has a great world-worn feel about his acting style.Then, at the end of the month, I am trying to add a film or two. I watched a 90s film called The Outpost, a Kafka-esque tale of a woman promoted, or is she sent to a remote outpost in Hungary, in a trip that takes many days to get there. Then I brought a few albums: Black Country New Road, Geese 3D Country, and a collection of Daniel Johnson’s works on vinyl.

Next month

I will review the final two Booker longlist books.  Then it is Karen and Simon’s club 1961. For which I have already bought several books.I am starting them soon.  Then I have a couple of new books, and the EBRD  literature prize shortlist came out today; I hope to read a few from it. before the winner is announced, but it does have the epic Polish novel Ice on it . What are your plans for the next month ?

 

The Director by Daniel Kehlmann

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The Director by Daniel Kehlmann

German fiction

Original Title – Lichtspiel

Translator – Ross Benjamin

Source – Personal Copy

There were a number of books on people’s guesses before the Booker International Longlist came out, and this is one I had seen on a number of longlist predictions.  Kehlmann had been on the Booker longlist and the old IFFP before that, and his books have been bestsellers in Germany over the years. So this was a book I had intended to read at some point. I know very little about the director at the heart of the story, other than he was the best-known German-language director in the Weimar Republic and had made films in the US just before World War II broke out.

The first compartment passes by, followed by a second. I suppose I have to step into the third, I’m frightened, it passes by too. Come on, I tell myself, you ve experienced worse. As the fourth compartment rises in front of me, I close my eyes and stagger forward. I make it in-side, but would have fallen down if he hadn’t held me by the shoulder.

It’s a good thing he reacted so quickly.

“Let go of me,” I say sharply.

Getting out is even harder, of course. But he sees it coming, places his hand on my back, and gives me a little push. I stagger out, he holds me steady again, thank God.

“Stop that!” I say.

It smells of plastic; from somewhere comes the hum of large machines. We walk down a corridor with signed photos of grinning people hanging to the left and right. A few of them I recognize: Paul Hörbiger, Maxi Böhm, Johanna Matz, and there’s Peter Alexander, who for some reason has scrawled With great thanks to my dear, dear audience under his signature.

from one of the opening chapters

The book follows the course of Pabst’s life, a man caught up in time. I think, for me, this is a perfect example of Javier Cercas’s Blind Spot.  The book is about Pabst and the Nazis, the blind spot being the truth of what really happened and why. It also has a turning point when his mother falls ill, just as the war in Europe is starting to spread, he is back in Austria and is caught having initially managed to get his family to the US in the early thirties, and now is faced with having to make films.  The book is told from the point of view of his fictional assistant as he struggles with making films and not being seen as a Nazis at the same time.  We see a man walking a tightrope in history; the German title Lichtspiel, light spiel, light game, is maybe more than an old word for cinema, but maybe for walking the line between light and dark. The book finishes after the war and discusses how he was viewed for making a number of films during the war.

She had kept him waiting for forty-five minutes not because she had been busy, but because she treated every visitor that way. The whole time she had stood by the window, watching the colorful birds as they stalked and strutted back and forth. The gardener had once listed the names of all the species for her, but her memory had never been good; usually while filming, someone stood next to the camera holding a card with her lines written in large letters. That was why she had developed a certain restlessly searching gaze, which appeared very mysterious on-screen.

He knew Garbo having cast her before fame

 

As I say, this book is about a blind spot, that place where we question what the truth is, what happened, and what happens when a parental illness leaves Pabst at a turning point in his life.  The man who lived with Louise Brooks and didn’t want to be like Leni Riefenstahl seems like a puppet of the Nazi regime. Art in the time of war is always hard to make, and this shows one man’s struggle to do so. We see a director as almost an actor in his own film of his life.  Our perspective is seeing how he reacts to all that faces him and how that will affect him after the war. I wish I had a better awareness of his films. He was a name I didn’t know a lot about. But I hope to maybe watch a few of his films over time, just to fill in some of the gaps around the man.  How do you make films and not be seen as a nazis wehen making films for the Nazis must have been a hard task, but what else could he have done? That is the question: what would have happened had he said no? Have you read this or any of his books?

 

 

Killing the Nerve by Anna Pazos

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Killing the Nerve by Anne Pazos

Catalan Non-fiction

Original title – Matar El Nervi

Translators -Laura McGloughlin and Charlotte Coombe

Source – Subscription edition

I have said before that one of my favourite publishers that have appeared in recent years is Foundry editions of all the books that they have published I haven’t disliked a single one I have read, and this is a piece of Auto Journalism from  Catalan writer Anna Pavos, it follows her twentiers where she did what a lot of young peiople did and take on the digiatl nomads world of working around the world. How people run away to escape their own world is something I can relate to. I also worked abroad in my youth. But not as many places as Anna does. Anna Pazos captures several moments and also what it is like to feel rootless at times.

For a while I was one of those people who talked about Thessaloniki with that fanatical glint. I defended and praised the city as if it were a lost Arcadia. In my case, the deception was particularly perverse because I knew deep down that I’d been unhappy there, with an overwhelming, rootless misery like I’d never known. But my urge to be the kind of person who enjoys and reveres Thessaloniki was more powerful than the memory of my failure. The reasons for the defeat were concrete and shameful, and they had to be masked by an objective knowledge of the history and particular circumstances of the city. I tried, unsuccessfully, to protect myself with a biblio-graphie shield to deal with my failure, as we so often do in life.

Her time in Greece

The book begins when she has the chance to study in Thessaloniki as an Erasmus student. AS the book opens, she recounts that this was the last time she had a fever years before the pandemic in a cheap room she rented. What comes across is a typical late teen experience of drinking, trying to avoid falling pregnant, as she mixed with the other students. Through them, she has her eyes open as they come from around Europe. The n because she can write, she ends up in Israel, where she views the conflict and gains insight, but, like many, finds the whole thing maybe too much at times. She then wanders Europe for a while. She then gets a boat to America and arrives just as the MeToo movement is gaining momentum. Eventually end back home viewing her home of Barcelona differently than she did as Covid is about to hit. All this, and she looks back at her family life along the way.

Rumour has it that Roiphe is writing an incendiary essay for Harper’s Magazine. In it, she not only questions the strange energy taking over the #MeToo era, she also reveals the name of the woman who created a spreadsheet for female workers in the media world to anonymously report their male co-workers.

The spreadsheet, which has been circulating for a while now, gathers details of various types of aggression, from a disagreeable encounter over drinks to inappropriate touching at work or sexual harassment. Once the accused’s name is added to the list, his offence is on the same level as all the others. It’s all now perceived as part of a continuum, outpourings of the same unbridled misogyny we’ve agreed to call “rape culture”

Anna was there when the Metoo movement broke

There is a reason we want to run. That is at the heart of Outrun and books like Wild. Part of this is explained in the book why Anna feels trapped in Barcelona. I get it, I had family problems and a drive to escape where I was from, and when that door opened, I took it and lived in Germany for a few years. But she also captures the nomadic nature of a lot of young lives. There is a way that many young people can have access to more places and opportunities to see them than before. That is what she has caught the new digital nomad world from Greece, partly through Israel and the US, and back home. I’m not sure why this has been seen less than the other Foundry books. For me, this is the other side of some of the fiction books I have reviewed in the last year. Perfection or a Little Dinner both deal with the modern world of the 21st century, and this is a 21st-century account of one woman’s travels and views. Have you read this book? Or a non-fiction work that captures the digital nomad life of travelling here and there!

 

 

Loooking forward a state of the blog and 2026 Plans

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I have decided to draw a line under the reviews for this year. I just ran out of steam the last month. Part of me is thinking I am actually so excited about next year on the blog and just wanting to say fuck off to 2025, as the queen once said it has been my Annus Horribilis with Amandas heartattack and the changes that have brought to our lives. But I have also felt lost as a reader over the last six months. I think there is so much noise these days that I have felt like I have been doomscrolling for the last while, and my concentration is a lot less than it used to be, and this has impacted my love of reading, I feel. Simon Savidge talks a lot about what he reads. I never used to get it, but now I do. The noise of the book world is louder, but also, for me, feels like a massive cave now where I interact very little with folks. One-to-many pointing out grammatical errors makes me question every tweet these days, so I end up making more errors. (I SPOT my own mistakes so often, but i am used to them, so just forget them )I do wonder how these folks who, over the years, would cope with grammar in my brain, which is full of noise and constant overthinking, and just a lack of self-belief. This has even started to impact me, as I think about why this noise is constantly in my head. So this last month I have turned to Chat gpt to firstly try and work out a few thiunbgs like a weekly routine to blog too which from the new year i will be doing I used to do my weekly planner religously as I need to know how my week looks or it ends up being me just sat watch old crimefilms and you tube and ragin at the state of the country Mr Trump and just so many other things.The impact of what happened to my beloved has had a ripple effect and made me want to kick-start the blog and celebrate my love of reading

Don’t get me started on book creators and having to pay to join folks’ book clubs. So the first part of next year will be building the routine back up. I have a new hourly planner. Then I have set up a Discord, which, if folks want to join, is a place to chat about books, similar to how we did back in the Twitter days. NBo book club, no paying for this and that. I have a blog that has reviewed over 120 countries. I have a depth of reviews I feel is a real achievement. But as I have heard say, there is no standing still; time moves on constantly. I have flirted with the idea of YouTube for the last couple of years,s but I  can’t see myself ever doing it. The blog is where my passion lies: improving as a writer and reader, constantly moving forward, discovering new countries, and continuously adding depth to the places I have read from, building the ultimate world canon. Still, to do this, I need to try and read a little more, get back to a blogging routine, and figure out how to do that well. One of my all-time favourite books about reading is Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, where Nina Sankovich read a book a day after the death of her sister. I know point blank I can’t read a book a day, just beyond me. I averaged 120 books a year and reviewed between 90 and 100 on average. So my plan is to read between 180 and 200 books next year to get off doomscrolling and kick-start my blogging.I said that before but I think it is a loss of routine and the noise of the world these days I love turn the clock back ten year or so but I can’t

I want to play with review styles over the year, try longer posts, shorter posts, different ways of putting over many voices, which I feel I have not so much held back but lost confidence in. Maybe I thought I met people. I am very overenthusiastic about books. In hindsight, this is my neurodivergent mind, which is also the reason I lack confidence in my voice at times, as I am from a generation where being neurodivergent wasn’t picked up on as much. So if you want the Discord, let me know. Another thing I will be doing is trying to tie the blog in with my Instagram and use both more in sync. I will be doing the Japanese literature challenge, then my Hungarian Lit month in February, which I am really looking forward to. I am also swapping the image of Winston slowly to me well a ai painted image of me on the blog and elsewhere and using the name Stu the reader just in case you have seen me and think it is someone else

I am being ambitious next year, but I just want a routine back to the blog when I post what I read and get them in sync, and also be a better member of the blogging community. A lot, but as I said, I have been using the last few weeks as planning for next year and setting things up with plans and also getting things like books for next month, sort of, the new planner, a new guide for how I want to review, sorting a Discord. The latest image on the avitars all building for 2026 and project 200. What are your plans for 2026 ?

Sorry I’m taking things slow

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As ever I press on a post saying I’ll stop blogging and within mins I remember the things I love be honest I just need to slow down a bit and get back into enjoying reading again as I’m a bit out of love with it at the moment

The other girl by Annie Ernaux

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The Other Girl by Annie Ernaux

French memoir

Original title – L’Autre Fille

Translator – Alison L. Strayer

Source – Personal copy

I always talk about how it is like returning to a piece of gossip or a great story from an old friend, reading a book by Annie Ernaux. This will be the eighth book I have reviewed on the blog. The first was in 2014, back before Fitzcarraldo and before the Nobel win. Anyway, when this fell onto the doormat at Winston Towers, it was short enough for me to just read it that day, which I did, in fact, read twice over two days. As ever, she opens up about her life. In fact, this isn’t just her life; it is a corner of her parents’ life and a secret they thought she had never known about the other girl, the earlier daughter they had before her.

It is a sepia photo, oval-shaped, glued inside a yellowed cardboard folder, showing a baby posed in three-quarter profile on a heap of scalloped cushions. The infant wears an embroidered nightdress with a single, wide strap to which a large bow is attached, just behind the shoulder, like a big flower or the wings of a giant butterfly. The body is long and not very fleshy. The legs are parted and stretch out towards the edge of the table. Under the brown hair, swept up in a big curl over the protuberant forehead, the eyes are wide and staring with an almost devouring inten-sity. The arms, open like those of a baby doll, seem to be flailing, as if the child were about to leap from the table.

Below the photo, the signature of the photographer (M.

Ridel, Lillebonne), whose intertwined initials also appear in the upper left-hand corner of the front cover, which is heavily soiled and coming unglued.

When I was little, I believed – I must have been told –

that the baby was me. It isn’t me, it’s you.

There was another photo, taken by the same photogra-pher, of me on the same table with my brown hair pulled up in the same sort of roll, but I appear to be plump, with deep-set eyes in a round chubby face, my hand between my thighs. I don’t remember ever being puzzled by the – obvious – differences between the two photos.

It opens as she sees photos of Ginette

I can see why it took this long to write this well, 14 years ago, as it means most ot the people in her family that may have been upset about her writing about this were gone. The book sees her looking back at the other girl, the other siste,r the ghost sister that she never knew about, Ginette, the sister who had died many years before Annie was born it was one day in the shop her parents’ old shop, that she caught a brief conversation between her mother and a regular customer about the other girl and how she was nicer than her what other girl. Over the years, she gets a little bit more of other family members; nothing more of her parents, but later she finds pictures of Ginette years before she was born. This is one sister trying to find out about the other girl, the sister who died of Diphtheria many years before she was born. Something she should have had if they had known. An epitaph for a girl she never knew, but has maybe haunted her, and what her mother said about her being nicer than the other girl.

I cannot put an exact date to that summer Sunday, but I’ve always thought it was in August. Twenty-five years ago, while reading the journal of Cesare Pavese, I discovered he’d committed suicide in a hotel room in Turin on

27 August 1950. I immediately checked – it was a Sunday.

Since then, I’ve imagined it was the same Sunday.

It grows more distant every year – but that is an illu-sion. There is no time between you and me. There are words that have never changed.

Nice. I think I already knew that the word could not be applied to me, judging from the terms my parents used each day to describe me, according to my behaviour: bold, scruffy little madam, greedy, Miss Know-It-All, nasty girl, you’ve got the devil in you. But their reproaches rolled off my back, so sure was I of being loved by them, the proof of which I saw in their constant concern for little me, in addition to their gifts. I was an only child and spoiled on that account, always at the top of my class without making any effort, and in short, I felt I had the right to be what I was.

When she heard what her Mother had said in passing

This is what she does so well, or as the Nobel committee said, for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory. She looks and takes apart her own past. A ghost of a sister in these forty pages is there. She never knew her. These are the breadcrumbs, the watermarks, the dust of a child that died, and maybe had she not, would Annie have been Annie? They always say life is stranger than fiction, and time,e and time again, Ernaux shows us this in her writng. Her art is the art of self, of family, of the secrets every family carries in its background. This is a short book, not even fifty pages, but it hits hard and is one I will be rereading for many a year.

in the uk you can buy this book via this link 

 

 

The Yellow Sofa by Eça de Queirós

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The Yellow sofa by Eça de Queirós

Portuguese fiction

Original title – Alves & C.a

Translator – John Vetch

Source – Personal copy

As you all know, or if you don’t, two of my favourite weeks of the blogging year are Simon and Karen’s year club, and this is the tenth year of them running it, and most, if not all, of them I have taken part in, so as soon as the year was mentioned, which is 1925, 100 years ago. I looked at the list of books. I pick books that may have come out in 1925 in their original language most of the time. I saw this on the list of possible books. I had to take a double glance as I knew Eça de Queirós was a Victorian age Portuguese writer. He is one of those writers I have been meaning to get to for a few years, so this slim novella is maybe the perfect into. It has a different title in the US and the UK. I had missed this, and I ordered the US book. He is considered to be one of the leading writers in Europe from his generation. I am pleased that 1925 club finally gave me the push to read this writer.

ON THAT FATEFUL DAY, GODOFREDO DA CONCEI-çao Alves, stifled by the heat and out of breath through rushing from Black Horse Square, pushed open the green baize door of his office in Gilders Street, precisely when the wall clockover the bookkeeper’s desk wasstrikingtwo, in that deep tone to which the low entrance ceiling imparted a mournful sonority. He paused, checked his own watch, hanging on a horsehair fob on his white waistcoat, and he did not conceal a gesture ofannoyance at having had his morning wasted at the offices of the Ministry of Marine. It was always the same whenever his overseas commission business took him there. Despite the Director-General’s being a cousin of his, andalthough he had regularly slipped a silvercoin into the hand of the commissionaire, and had discounted letters of credit for two minor officials, there was always the same boring wait to see the Minister, endlessturning over of papers, hold-ups, delays, all the irregular creaking and disjointed working of an old machine, half falling to pieces.

The start of the day and its events that changed his future

The book follows Godofredo Alves, a businessman, the Alves of Alves and CO. The Co is his business partner, Machado, and his friend. This man is a lover and seems to his friend Godofredo a sort of wild lover. SO when he goes into their office one day and he finds his partner not there, Godofredo thinks of Machado having a liaison with one of his lovers. At this point Godofredo remembers that it is his wedding anniversary and decides to go grab a gift and surprise his wife whilst his friend is off again having a lover. SSO when he arrives home and finds his wife, Ludovina, sitting on their yellow sofa of the title of the book. She is in the arms of his business partner. The rest of the book follows the aftermath of this event in a time when honour means the world, and men still had duels!! What will he do? How will it all end?

Hearing her there, he turned, peeped in… And what he saw-good God!-left him petrified, breathless. The blood rushed to his head and so sharp was the pain at his heart that it almost threw him to the ground. On the yellow damask sofa, fronting a little table on which there stood a bottle of port, Lulu in a white negligee, was leaning in abandon on the shoulder of a man whose arm was around her waist, and smiling as she gazed languorously at him.

The man was Machado!

When he finds his friend and buisness partner with his wife!!

This is a book of manners, really a book of its time. It seems from what i have read that adultery, especially female adultery, is a recurring theme in several books by Queiros. The scenes of the events after the discovery of his wife in the arms of his friend and business partner. See a man struggle to control those around him after he banishes his wife back to her family, as he struggles to get the domestic staff to look after him like they did when his wife was there. This is a sort of upstairs-downstairs mixed with PG Wodehouse. It has humour, class, manners, honour lost, and honour all in i slim work that seems a lot more than its mere hundred and so pages when i read it. I enjoyed this as an intro to Queiros, for whom I know there are nine other books available on the Dedalus Books website. To read, including the Maias, his most famous book. So an interesting book for the first book of 1925, a book that came out 25 years after the writer had died. Found by his son. Have you read any of his books?

 

Nobel Literaure 2025

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It is that time of year when we all think about who is going to win the Nobel Literature Prize. There is a feeling that in the last few years the prize has alternated between a female and a Male. This has been the case for the last dozen years. Now we can look at the place where winners have come from in rec net years if you count Abdulrzak Gurnah as an African writer. For me there is three options of where the winner could come from –

Latin America

Cesar Aira

The writer from Argentina writes short novellas, mostly set around his hometown. However, they encompass a diverse range of styles and topics. There are reviews on the blog of his books

Juan Gabriel Vasquez

He writes a mix of historical and literary fiction, mainly looking at Colombia’s

dark past. I have also reviewed some books from Vasquez 

Wildcard

Andres Neumann

I think it is a bit soon for Andres, but I loved Traveller of the Century by him and the other books I have read, he will be a winner one day

Spain

Enrique Vila Matas

A huge fan of Joyce, a clever writer who has written several novels. I have reviewed a number of his books. My personal favourite is Dublinesque an ode to Dublin, and Joyce uses Bloomsday as a framing device.

Javier Cercas

His non-fiction novel, The Anatomy of a Moment, of the attempted coup in Spain in the 80s, is a great read . His other books have history as a hook there are five books on the blog from him.

Manuel Rivas

A writer who should be better known, The carpenter’s pencil by him was a wonderful account of the Spanish Civil War.

Bernardo Axtaga

Another gem of a writer Obabakok, is an excellent insight into a village that has several books by him on the blog

Portugal

Antonio Lobo Antunes

If Angola is Portugals Vietnam, he has written a lot about the war there and the knock-on effect on his homeland and Angola itself. I have reviewed four of his books

So that is for the places

Then there is the tug of war between two writers from Hungary

Laszlo Krasznahorkai and Peter Nadas

Both have written epic books, Satantango and Parallel Stories.

Laszlo is maybe better known in the last few years.

Nadas for me is maybe the deserving winner, his books tackle his country’s past, and his huge memoir I have on my TBR

But I have reviewed books from both writers.

Wildcards

Ersi Sotiropoulos – I had hope to get to my review of her What’s left of the night.

Amitav Ghosh – He is high on one of the betting sites. I had read The Glass Palace 25 years ago, but I had not read anything else. Any thoughts on him

Fernando Arrabal, an actual wild card, is a much older Spanish writer, mostly of plays, but also 14 novels. I picked him as I have one of his novels and a writer that has maybe been lost over the last few years. Winning would be a shock. I’ll point to Ulrich Holbein, a writer who ran in the betting a decade ago or Bothos Strauss, two German writers.

What are your thoughts ?

What are your thoughts on a winners ?

Time out after a shock

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This just a really short post saying I’ll be away for a while as my beloved Amanda had a heart attack yesterday she thankfully survived but obviously reading and the blog are the last things on my mind in the next few days at least .Thankfully I was at home when it happen and we got straight to Sheffield and she had wonderful treatment there so it’s a reminder to keep those you love close as you never know what is around the corner in life.

Letters from a Seducer by Hilda Hilst

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Letters from a seducer by Hild Hilst

Brazilian fiction

Original title – Cartas de um sedutor

Translator John Keene

Source – Personal copy

I picked this up last month on my trip to Suffolk from the excellent Aldebrough books. If you ever get a chance, pop into an excellent shop with a wide selection of books. I was drawn to the cover art, it reminds me of those folio-shaped flower photographs that Robert Mapplethorpe did. In a way , this book is like some of his other photos. Like yesterday’s book, this is another slim novella from a country that, years ago, had few female writers translated. It shows that this writer died in her late seventies, and it isn’t until the last few years that we have got her books in English. A writer who liked to challenge in her time, Hilda Hilst was known for her challenging writing that would tackle sensitive political and, in this case, sexual subjects. This book is a set of letters from Karl, a libertine, to his sister. This book has a nod to the European writers she likes, such as Joyce and De sade. I also felt she must have been a fan of Casanova because this man is perhaps a Brazilian version of the great lover.

I tiptoed out and still could hear Franz’s guffaws and Frau Lotte’s sobs-giggles-farts. Listen, Cordélia, seriously: you told me in your last letter that Albert’s balls and cock and little asshole are of no concern to you. That you’re not interested any more by all this filthy sex stuff. I feel you’re lying. But anyway, you said “filth.” And then you talked about “feelings.” But please, dear irmanita, you never had them! Are you calling

 

‘feeling’ what you were exuding for father? Hanging around the room’s terrace, behind that B. Giorgi sculpture, massaging your pussy while papa played doubles, are you calling that a feeling? I had reached my lovely 14 years, you your 24, I was lifting your satin nightgown and standing up screwing you in the ass right there behind the statue (the sculpture there before), while you were masturbating yourself moaning, babbling childish things that always ended in Ohs, Ahs, and you were squatting, crouching down, finishing all sprawled out atop my harmonica, howling, howling, and that never stopped.Later still I licked you, you lying beside the stone vases, and the ferns concealed your view of father on the court, and you propped yourself up on your elbows to see him better, then you saw him… and you would jump up (I still with the tongue hanging out) roaring: bravo papa! bravo!

I picked this as it is totally shocking but like most of the book also in a way!

The book is in three parts. It has an introduction of letters from Karl to his sister Cordelie about his sexual acts and the acts they had when he lived at home. This is very eye-opening. You can see how Hilst, as a writer, likes to push the boundaries in her writing. The book then moves as Karl discovers the works of a lost poet whose letters he finds in the trash. The last two sections see these other letters intertwining with the conquest of her brother, as we see a very. Male sexual view of the times the other man the lost Poet Stamatius is from the pother enbd of the social class a dpown and out man just getting by and having lioots of sex like Karl as well this is a book that questions class, sex and also is the poet really just Karl in a way if that makes sense this is a book that gives a nid towards the modernist writers she liked.

I do have a lover but she’s married, that I’m afraid to pick up women out there, all this AIDS-related stuff alarms me and because of that I always have to masturbate. I cited several men illustrious defenders of masturbation, John C. Powys, Havelock Ellis, Theodore Schroeder etc. But I spoke with much brilliance, with much elegance, slightly agitated, occasionally passing my hand on his thigh like a very manly man, sympathetic, relaxed. I described wonderful moments of getting it in and when I detailed an uncommon position (do you want to know, irmanita? She with legs open at the edge of the bed, me licking her and under the bed another woman sucking my pod) he laughed with pleasure, made nervous movements with his leg, and I glanced at him and visualized the dick stuffed inside his pants. I asked abruptly: you never masturbated with your friends?

I laughed when he tried justify himself by using some well known writer about there sex lives

This is a book that isn’t for those who get easily offended by a lot of sexual chat and discussion of acts that are maybe taboo even when the book is set but this is a man obsessed with sex and telling people about that but maybe imagining himself as the down and otut opoet and his poems and conquests as well this is if Cssanova had been latin american he would been karl sending these dispatches of his sexual acts and conquests in Brazil rather than in Venice. This is a book designed to provoke the reader. I was reminded of the splurge of sexual references in Pierre Guyotat’s book. I tried to find a connection between these two writers, but all I saw was a shared attempt to shock their readers. As I said, the Mapplethorpe-like cover, phallic in its appearance, is apt for the book. Have you read any of her books that have been translated into English?

Oh to be sweet sixteen , winstonsdad turns 16 today

~ winstonsdad ~ 12 Comments

Another year has passed, and they fly past so quickly these days. I find it hard to believe that it only seems like yesterday. I was inspired by the folks I had met on Twitter and started this blog. Now, 16 years later, with 2460 posts, nearly 1500 reviews, and well, twenty short of that total. The book bloggers who inspired me have long since passed away. The blogs I first followed, barring one or two, have since gone. But for me, if anything, the desire to blog is more now than it has ever been.I wish I had more comments, but I am not great at commenting and replying. I will admit that it is something I struggle with, but I am thankful for those who do comment and wish I were better at commenting back. But I am me anyway. Over the last year, I have gone on to my own website as I was running out of space and moving forward. I will be putting affiliate links for the books I review when I set this up. Adding some Ko-Fi or such, just by doing it on my own website via WordPress and now trying to get all my SEO stuff sorted, costs me a little money. I just want to recoup the cost over the year. The blog has lots of reviews, ok, they aren’t the best, but they aren’t the worst. I have reviewed books from many countries and hope to eventually reach the complete global count of countries. But I am also looking to add books to countries I have already read. So here’s to the next 16 years, reaching 1,500 reviews, then 2,000, and so on. I am basically saying this blog isn’t going anywhere everI felt like a fraud for years, not clever enough, not well-read enough, not popular. But actually these days I couldn’t give a shit is there any other bogs with sommany reviews from so many countries around well. Not many. I feature many small presses, championing them, most of which I support by actually buying their books. I have been part of the shadow jury for the Booker and the IFFP for a long time, which I started. I started the Translation Thurs hashtag. I feel I have done quite a lot over the years. I am so proud of my blog and what it has brought me. I am well read and will always feel unread, but shouldn’t we all !!! There is so many great writers out there in translation and still waiting to be translated!! The scenery has changed in those 16 years. When I started, there were fewer books we are in a golden age of books in translation. Let’s bask in the glow of it all and let’s make sure we keep getting more. Thanks to everyone who has read a post, commented, invited me to a place, sent me a book, and helped me on the first 16 years of carrying this journey into the next 16 years!

In late Summer by Magdalena Blažević

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In late Summer by Magdalena Blažević

Bosnian fiction

Original title – U kasno ljeto

Translator – Andelka Raguž

Source – Review copy

I was lucky to be sent two new releases from the new publisher, the Linden editions. If you have followed this blog for any time, you will know I am a huge champion of new publishers. For me, they are the lifeline as a reader of books in translations, as they can translate books that otherwise wouldn’t see the light of day. This book, in particular, really grabbed me as it is from the Balkans, a region I feel should be better known for its writing and variety. I have long championed this region on the blog. However, this book is set in a village during the Balkan War. It was always going to be a book I wanted to read. Magdalean is from Bosnia, and this book won the Best Croatian book award. This is her debut novel and captures the horrors of war through an innocent girl’s eyes.

The windows in the cellar are low, fixed to the road, and you can’t see the sky or the forest through them, just the road and the feet of passers-by. I recognise Mother’s. She walks slowly, the hem of her flowery dress swinging to and fro. You can push a finger into the scars on her leg. A bucket of overripe tomatoes sways in her hand. Clods of damp earth fall off her rubber galoshes. They disappear behind our house. I put my hands on the cold pane.

My name is Ivana. I lived for fourteen summers, and this is the story of my last.

The haunting last line of the first chapter draws you in as a reader !

The book is an ode to the countryside and the country life that was there before the war, and about a family and what happens when their 14-year-old daughter is caught up in a massacre in Bosnia. It is told by Ivana, the fourteen-year-old, and the title is mentioned by her early on as she says This is my story. I have lived fourteen summers, and this is my last summer. The summer is told from her point of view from time spent with her grandmother in =what at that point seems a rural idyllic place, a pace of life I think we would all like, a bygone world of simple living and a trouble-free world. But the war is always there in the background. Till the day the soldiers appear, they aren’t named as being from one side or the other. The family flee to a nearby village that has already been abandoned. Still, they are caught, and this is where the narrative switches from a sort of pastoral scene of countryside and village life to the aftermath of losing loved ones in the mindless violence that had seemed so far away. Is now so real and has hit the family.

She’s standing beside Grandfather in the photo studio; they’re to be married in a couple of days. Ducats borrowed from the village jingle around her neck; a white blouse rustles under her fingertips. Grandfather’s shirt is cut low on the chest and singed, with sharp blades of grass poking out. He’s a lot taller than her. It seems to her that the top of his head is a canopy, and that it’s breaking through the ceiling. Grandmother doesn’t lift her gaze. Green eyes prey on her from beneath steep awnings; a wide jaw and shiny, sharp teeth threaten.

The grandmother is the heart of this family

I have read several great novels about the Balkan conflict. But this is the first to have a child as its main narrator and to tell the whole story from her point of view, as the war is initially so far away, and the world they are living in with the family, especially the grandparents, seems perfect and a rural existence that has maybe now gone after the conflict the family seem part of the land they live in. One of the beauties of this book is it doesn’t label who is who, which side is which; it is just about the act of war and its effect on everybody. Till it is shattered, the book is a book of two halves. Her last summer and the aftermath of it were her final summer. The main character’s voice reminded me of the Voice in the American novel, The Lovely Bones. She has captured how it hit people like Ivana and her family in those small villages, and her narration has the same detached nature; the things that happen are just told, if that makes sense. It shows the brutality of war on one village, on one family, on one daughter and granddaughter. This is one of my favourite books of recent years. It will be near the top of the books of the year for sure. Do you have a book you think captures the Balkan conflict well?

 

The Sailor from Gibraltar by Marguerite Duras

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The Sailor from Gibraltar by Marguerite Duras

French fiction

Original title – Le Marin de Gibraltar

Translator – Barbara Bray

Source – Personal copy

This was another book that fell off the list from 1952. It took a while to browse the list of books from that year and find this, which is an early work by Marguerite Duras. She is best known for her book “The Lover,” but also wrote many other books during her time. A number of them were also translated into English by Barbara Bray, a champion of French literature who supported many writers in the 1950s and 1960s. She also worked very closely with Beckett!I have reviewed three other books by Duras since starting the blog. She is a writer whose books are different from each other, but love lost, desire and the lack of desire, as well as the places she writes about, all feature in the books I have read!

The first day I went from our hotel to the cafeteria. I intended to have an iced coffee and then go for a walk round the town. I stopped there the whole morning-Jacqueline found me there at midday, drinking my sixth beer. She was furious. What was the point of being in Florence for the first time in your life and spending the whole morning in a café? “This afternoon,” I said, “I’ll try this afternoon.” It was understood that we’d each go about on our own and just meet for meals. So after lunch she went off again. I went back to the cafete-ria, which was near the restaurant. The time went quickly. At seven o’clock in the evening I was still there. Jacqueline found me drinking a crème de menthe this time. She was furious again. “If I move it’ll kill me,” I told her. I was sure of it, but I thought it would be better the next day.

His visit to florence where he meets Anne

This book is again like yesterday’s, a sort of quest in a way. The book is told by a disillusioned French official who has spent the last eight years of his life in a job that merely rubber-stamps forms. He is also caught up with a mistress whom he has slowly grown to hate. So when the chance comes to work on a boat called the Giubraltor as they leave Florence. The ship is captained by the beautiful but lonely young American, Anne. She is haunted by the memory of a young sailor whom she has since fallen in love with So they are now endlessly sailing for what is now just known as the “Sailor from Gibraltar|”The story has a thriller feel to it as it seems to twist as we find out from are charac ter more about Anne and the man she is hunting for! The tale unfolds as we find lose , love and murder along the way

“Tell me about the ship,” I said. “About the Gibraltar.”

“The ship’s not the most important thing.”

“No, they told me it was a man. Was he from Gibraltar?”

“No. He wasn’t really from anywhere. Perhaps,” she added, “per-haps I could stay until the day after tomorrow.”

What had I been thinking? When they’re at sea, Eolo had said, she must make do with the sailors. My hand wasn’t trembling now, and I didn’t feel faint any longer at holding her in my arms.

“And you don’t live with him any more?”

“No.”

“You’ve left him?”

as he learns more about the ship and heads off with Anne on her quest

I am a massive fan of Duras; she captures a sort of longing and loss of desire very well in her work. But she has also captured a kind of thriller feel in this book, as the events involving all the characters are slowly revealed throughout. You are never quite sure as the reader which way she will take the book. This is one of the books that follows what happens when you try to capture that moment of a perfect glance and the seemingly perfect man or woman. I was thinking about what would happen if James Blunt had found that girl in the station; he was inspired to write ‘You’re Beautiful’ about her. What if Jesse and Celine in Before Sunset had tried to see each other again? This is what this book captures: those moments that are moments, but what happens when you don’t know that they’re madness, driven by a desire and told from the perspective of a man escaping his own demons.It is a surreal tale of twom people on a boat for very different reasons that can be very dark at times, I saw  A review compare the pacing and some of the setting in the book to Patrica Highsmiths The Talented Mr Ripley although this vcame out before that book it has similar feel to the book and film that never quite owning everything about ripley is echoed here somewhat! Have you read any books by Marguerite Duras?

Small Boats by Vincent Delecroix

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Small boats by Vincent Delecroix

French fiction

Original title – Naufrage

Translator – Helen Stevenson

Source – Review copy

I said yesterday I had only asked for one review copy. I had asked for two as this wasn’t out, but it came very soon after the longlist came out. it was maybe the book that caught my eye from the titles, as firstly I hadn’t heard of the book other than seeing it had been down for the Prix Goncourt a few years ago. The writer is better now as a philosopher and has also written translations of works by Kierkegaard. It is a book that tackles one of the things that causes a lot of argument,s immigration, and those trying to sail from France into the UK on these small boats. I prefer the French title, not quite as subtle as court it is the French word for Shipwreck. A nod to the book and what happens

While she was playing me the recordings, the policewoman sometimes stared hard at me, sometimes gazed out of the window at I know not what, because from my signal station all I ever saw was the sea, and given a choice I would much rather, like today, look out at a stretch of road with a building site, some workers, Africans mostly, but at least they were alive, not wet and chilled to the bone, not women, not children, so I was ok looking at all that, while they played me the recording of the voice saying Please, please and me saying Calm down, help is coming.

But hope never came and she is arrested for the deaths

The book follows one. A single boat, one small boat, of the many that every day cross one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, the English Channel. What happens to many of these boats when they run into trouble? When there are too many people on the ship. I kept thinking, especially when I knew the French title of the book, The Great French Painting, The Raft of the Medusa, that would be gripping to the raft after a boat has sunk. Well, this isn’t a piece. For French art, this happens daily instead of dead bodies hanging from trees like in Simone’s Strange Fruit. These are bodies that wash ashore on the shorelines!  So what happens when high figures in the French government try to single out a single Coast Guard official on the day when the 27 souls who died on this small boat were lost at sea? It follows who is to blame. Then, in the book’s middle part, it sees those souls as they drown in the middle of the Channel.The book is  a book that made me think and also get so angry about this whole subject.

They had to wait till nightfall to put the boat in the water, a wide, semi-rigid Zodiac, six metres long, with a flimsy deck and a spluttering outboard. They didn’t know each other, or hardly. Some had come via Turkey or the Balkans and had possibly never seen the sea, some had already made the dangerous voyage across the Mediterranean. They had squatted around Calais; most of them were Kurds, a few Africans. There were two women and a little girl. They shuffled around on the edge of the dunes without looking at each other, hardly spoke. Then the signal came and they moved forward on the beach. To their left, further down the coast, another group was creeping towards another dinghy.

Imagine the fear ebeing in. a small dingy in the dark as supertankers and container ships cross your path!!

This is a book that looks at one group of deaths but in that way captures the whole problem of who is to blame for these deaths. I often think that a blind eye is turned to this. I can’t see the problem. We may need to be a little more compassionate and look at a way to get people who want new lives to those new ones! I hate it when I hear of people spitting sand, threatening lifeboat men for saving immigrants whose boats have sunk or are sinking due to those trying to make money off those with no money chasing a dream of a better life. Even writing this post, I am getting wound up This is a subject I feel needs addressing, not just people blaming someone like a single coastguard. This is maybe the most thought provoking book on the longlist for me this is the =perfect book club book as it really shows people views when they read this as it is hard not to be moved significantly in the middle section but also about the blame that isn’t always that one persons fault as they are p[art of a system with there collective head in the sands. Do books ever affect you in this way !!