Category: #translationthurs

Booker international Longlist 2025 Stu is shadowing again !!!

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The longlist has just come out, Initially I was shocked as I hadn’t a lot of the books, and also, a number weren’t out. of the list, I have just finished The Book of Disappearance and had read Solenoid last year but had wanted to reread it before reviewing it and never got to it. So, I will be starting that today. I have the Heart of the Lamp on my TBR and have ordered all the other books I don’t own. I will just be doing it myself for this long. I will have a review for the book of the disappearance up in the next couple of days and hope to finish at least another book by the end of the week when they come tomorrow. Have you read any what are your thoughts on this years Longlist

 

  • The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem, translated from Arabic by Sinan Antoon)

  • On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara J Haveland

  • There’s a Monster Behind the Door by Gaëlle Bélem, translated from French by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert

  • Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated from Romanian by Sean Cotter

  • Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda, translated from Spanish by Heather Cleary and Julia Sanches

  • Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson

  • Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, translated from Japanese by Polly Barton

  • Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda

  • Eurotrash by Christian Kracht, translated from German by Daniel Bowles

  • Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes

  • Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi

  • On a Woman’s Madness by Astrid Roemer, translated from Dutch by Lucy Scott

  • A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson

Night Flight by Antoine De Saint -Exupéry

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Night Flight by Antoine De Saint -Exupéry

French fiction

Original title – Vol de Nuit

Translator – David Carter

Now, there is a writer you read when young and never really went back to reading when older. For me, it would be Saint-Exupery. I think a lot of kids of my generation, the Little Price was a book we all reread and loved. Still, I was always more of a fan when, in my teens of those books he wrote taken from his flying, I found an old penguin edition of Southern Mail. I discovered that he had written several books about his time flying the mail to various places worldwide. This was when the flight was just taking off, unlike now, which went from place to place. This was a time of smaller propeller planes that would struggle in certain weather conditions. We see how he captures those brave fliers and those around them.

AND SO THE THREE MAIL PLANES, trom Patagonia, Chile and Paraguay, returned from the south, the west and the north towards Buenos Aires. Their cargoes were awaited there in order for the Europe plane to leave around midnight.

Three pilots, each of them behind a hood which was as heavy as a barge, and lost in the night, were meditating on their flights and coming down slowly towards the enormous city from their stormy or peaceful sky, like strange peasants coming down from their mountains.

Rivière, who was responsible for the whole network, was walking to and fro on the airfield at Buenos Aires.

He remained silent, for until the three airplanes had arrived it would continue to be a day of dread for him.

With every passing minute, as the telegrams reached him, Rivière was conscious of being able to snatch something from fate, of reducing the sum of what was unknown and of dragging his crews out of the night and ont the shore.

The way he has set up his buisness

 

The book follows a time when De Saint-Exupéry was a postal flyer in Argentina. In the novel, he follows the setting up of the services through the eyes of the man who runs the services. Rivière has decided it may help improve the service if the flyers do night flights. The book follows one night when Fabian, one of his pilots, is heading to [atagonika to deliver and collect mail, which will later be sent to Paris and then on a flight to Europe. But when Fabian said the weather was changing for the worse, we started questioning Rivière’s actions around the flight as we jumped between the Base in Buenos Aires and Fabian in his plane until he is finally caught in a cyclone and radio contact is cut. This hits home later when Fabian’s wife looks to discover what happened to her husband. Meanwhile, the other two night flights with Mail made it back to the base, and he set the flight with nMail to Paris.

THE SECRETARIES WERE DOZING in the Buenos Aires offices when Rivière went in. He had kept his coat and hat on and looked, as always, like an eternal traveller.

He passed through almost unnoticed, so little space did his small figure take up, and so well did his grey hair and anonymous clothes blend into every setting. And yet the men became animated with enthusiasm. The secretaries showed concern, the office manager went through the recent documents with a sense of urgency and the typewriters clattered.

The telephone operator was pushing his plugs into the switchboard and noting down the telegrams in a thick book.

Rivière sat down and read them.

I was struck how different things would be now with modern tech.

What isn’t to love in this book it captures Man’s struggles against Nature, so we see the young flyer Fabian struggle with a treacherous flight to the very southern part of Argentina Patagonia. We see how quickly the weather could change a night without modern equipment to see the cyclone coming which he ends up crashing because he hadn’t seen it coming.. It also captures the nature of those early years of Commercial flying and how Riviere has to make decisions that affect what happens to Fabian and his other pilots as he tries to make the service work quicker using the night flights. Which seems harsh, but it is also the nature of the business at that time. This was when the routes they were flying were new and untested at night. So that is something else that captures the pioneering spirit of these pilots; of course, this is taken from Saint-Expuery’s own experiences at the time. He flew these routes as a pilot. A book that captures a man who himself died flying in the war. Have you read any books he wrote about the early years of commercial flying?

 

Day in York and blogging moving forward

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I visit York on sunday it was raining and wasn’t the best day to go as I have since got a horrendous cold. But I want to see a collection of ghost around york from wire that will be gone by the beginning of next month. so aMnada and I went to see them

I also visited Waterstones and got as couple of books. But this isn’t a book haul post. I have had a lot of time of work this last six months. We had a huger change around at work, lots new staff at my level. I hadn’t cope with this well. Added to that, Amanda had been in constant pain with a back problem and pain in both her wrists. This means she has been getting up and down a lot during the night for the last twelve months. Which has an impact on my sleep, and I take her to work, which means I wake up between 5-6 every morning. I work three or four longs a week at my job. Anyway, with this, I have just been for the last twelve months getting tired and tired. I need to loss weight but this is hard. When I’m constantly exhausted. So I have to cut back somewhere. I can’t afford any more time of sick. Amanda health isn’t going suddenly get better. We are slowly trying to get a second bed, etc, but we need to get wardrobes built in our room, which we will have done next month. So I have to find some space and the only thing I can do is cut back on my reading and blogging. The two go hand in hand. I have pushed myself to keep up with the postings I did many years ago. However, with my stats not being that high, I get 140 views a day on average, which is up this year. But seemingly a lot lower than other bloggers. So i am going to put the blog on the back burner this winter I will post a post here and there. But this will take me off the feeling of having to read for content, which is what it has felt like for the last few years. I need to take a breath relax. Sink into a book slower than I have been and just come back here probably every 7-10 days I hope to post a review. I hope that maybe in the new year, we will have a few things sorted. Hopefully, Amanda will be driving and not need me to take her to work. I can get a better sleep pattern and hopefully get my room sorted out to blog in as it is a little chaotic since we moved, and I need to sort a new book and my records in order, I want to get a new iMac to blog from. But none of this is possible when I am constantly fatigued, as I am at the moment. I hope less reading time will also help me get fit as I need to go back to the gym. Hopefully, in new year I’ll be back to blogging as I have but for now see you in a week or so

Count Julian by Juan Goytisolo

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Count Julian by Juan Goytisolo

Spanish fiction

Original title –  Reivindicación del conde don Julián

Translator – Helen Lane

Source – Personal copy

One of the events I love is Simon and Karen’s twice-yearly clubs, where we are all encouraged to read books published in a certain year. I always buy too many books each year, and this is the case this time, but I will not mention unread books. But this was the first of the books I read for this round of the club 1970. This jumped out of the list of books as I had reviewed Marks of Identity several years ago, which is the first book of this trilogy. I had also found a copy of Juan the Landless, the last book, so when the chance came up to review this and thus, at some point, get to Juan the Landless, I couldn’t say no. As I was reading this last week, I was brought back to the blog’s early years when Juan Goytisolo was a regular name mentioned around the Nobel, which was announced last week. Still, as I am writing this, it is tomorrow. He ended up on the list of writers alongside his brother of writers that should have won. Nobel, that alternate list of writers. I would love to make a list of those writers one time. So, as I listen to the Door play Spanish Caravan, we have a book like many of his books written in Exile, but as much as that is about the heart of his homeland, he so wants to see change.

the life of an émigré of your stripe is made up of a discontinuous series of events that are very difficult to assemble into a coherent whole: though it no longer enjoys its former prestigious international status, the city is still a melting pot for all sorts of exiles, and its inhabitants appear to be living in an uncertain present that is very enjoyable and full of material riches for certain people and a time of hardship and austerity for the rest: a test tube for complicated chemical experiments involving elements of the most disparate origins and background: cautious bourgeois, nobles mournfully remembering the past, suspect petty tradesmen, dishonest speculators, examples of all the infinite gradations and subtle shadings within the very complex, multicolored, prodigious family of sexual flora: ingredients that are juxtaposed but never mingle: like geological strata formed by centuries

The Narrator like Goytisolo himself was is in Exile in North Africa

 

It is difficult to describe this book. In part, it is about a man in North Africa, Tangiers, looking back at how he ended up there. But as the back cover describes, this book is like Finnegan’s Wake of the South! So we have a book that is rich in words in culture, in ideas shot through with a trace of bitterness and longing for me; this is a book about what the Portuguese call Saudade. That yearning and longing is what is at the heart of this book. Goytisolo picks Count Julian as the figure like Franco, who was at the crossroads of his country’s history. Added to that a rfage at what his country is this is a book of extremes from Seneca to queens there is very few people that s[=don’t get filled with his bile and wanting for a land he wanted. As he tore apart the fascist state, his country had become piece by piece and dreamt of a new world.

Seneca? yes, Seneca

that is to say, his portrait in the Prado Museum

if not a gypsy’s head, then that at any rate of a retired torero, standing on the threshold of old age listening

it used to be said of the famous Lagartijol that he talked like Seneca, and Nietzsche called Seneca the toreador of virtue: as for Manolete, his life and his art, his entire career, his philosophy so eloquently summed up in the proverb what’s bred in the bone will come out in the flesh, are fed by the eternal springs of the Senecan tradition at its purest: the family line of Seneca, resembling a river at times disappearing underground like the Guadiana, at times meandering across the land at surface level, at times swelling to a mighty, majestic stream, has never died out in Spain: the stoic acceptance of the fate of the nation is 1 A celebrated matador of the beginning of the century.—-It.

He picks various Spanish figures to talk about.

This is one of those books that is virtually impossible to review as it is more a piece of art than a prose piece a man looking at despair at the land he loves and now hates so much. I said Saudade in other parts, it is a sort of Saudade. It is a man wrestling with being in exile, those tortured ideas and dreams broken. I love his words pl, and it cover over my head. Helen Lane has done an excellent job of bringing what must have been a complex book into a readable state in English. As he dives from here to there back and forth in history from Myth to fact. All this as he is in Tangiers and all that involves.

 

Han Kang wins the Nobel

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Han Kang is a South Korean author known for her poignant and thought-provoking works that explore themes of identity, trauma, and the human condition. Born on November 27, 1970, in Gwangju, South Korea, she gained international acclaim with her novel “The Vegetarian,” which won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016.

Her writing often blends elements of the surreal with deeply personal narratives, reflecting the complexities of life in contemporary Korea. Other notable works include “Human Acts,” which delves into the Gwangju Uprising, and “The White Book,” a meditation on loss and memory. Han Kang’s literature is characterized by its lyrical prose and emotional depth, establishing her as a significant voice in modern literature. I love this winner. This book touched me so much. She wasn’t on my radar as a winner, and it is great to see an Asian winner and a female writer win. I am also pleased for Deborah Smith her English translator, that has done so much for Asian fiction over the last few years

Beloved by Empar Moliner

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Beloved by Empar Moliner

Spanish (Catalan) fiction

Original title – Benvolguda

Translator -Laura Mcgloughlin

Source – review copy

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

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

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

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

The time she sees her husband and other violinist

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

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

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

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

Remei trying to keep a hold of the past

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

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

 

The time of Cherries by Montserrat Roig

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The time of Cherries by Monrserrat Roig

Catalan fiction

Original title – El temps de les cireres

Translator – Julia Sanches

Source – Review copy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The implacable order of things by José Luis Peixoto

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The implacable order of things by José Luis Peixoto

Portuguese fiction

Original title – Nenhum Olar

translator – Richard Zenith

Source – Personal copy

I hate it when the UK and US have different titles. I started to read this book, which I thought was another book by the Portuguese writer José Luis Peixoto that I had missed. I have a copy of Piano Cemetery somewhere; I hope it got misplaced in the move. I read Blank Gaze 13 years ago and had meant to read another book by him. He was at the time he wrote Blank Gaze, the youngest winner of the Jose Saramago book prize. But I hadn’t checked that this was a different book, so when I was about halfway through the book, I thought some of this sounded familiar, and then I found out it was Blank Gaze, the book I had read several years ago. But the US title is different anyway, so I continued to see if it was a book I still liked. And to review it 13 years later.

TO THE RIGHT OF OLD GABRIEL sat the two brothers with their parallel gazes, fixed on abstract, unfocused points. Their gazes were equal but didn’t see the same thing. They were the same gaze, seeing two different things. During the months when the oil press was idle, it was the brothers who looked after it. Always together, always at each other’s side, they had aged simultane-ously: they had the same curve in the back, the same halting gait, and, although they didn’t know it, the very same number of white hairs on their heads. Many more than seventy years had passed since the clear August morning when together they emerged from their mother’s womb, ripping her up inside. Old people told the story, which they’d heard from their parents, of how the mother, as soon as the umbilical cords were cut, looked and saw that they were Siamese twins. She died, without a word, a few minutes later. It was considered to be a terrible tragedy

The twins are born

The book, like yesterday’s book, is set in a village. This time, we move to the southern tip of Portugal to an unnamed town, and some of the locals, as we follow a few decades in this village, all come into contact with the devil. Firstly, a shepherd, Jose, works on the estate of the Mount of Olives, attending to the sheep. His wife is sleeping with a giant that is bullying Jose, all this is told to him by the devil. The book has an episodic feel and is filled with its share of odd characters, conjoined twins, inseparable but only connected at the tip of a finger. Fall in love with a cook who talks via her food, which she makes into art. This is an odd world. Add to that a blind prostitute to the mix a shop called Judas, and there is a religious overtones in this world of the village.

The sun of late September was almost as hot as the sun of August, but the season for sitting in the doorway at night had passed, and Moisés and the cook stopped seeing each other. But Moisés was the kind of man who won’t give up, and one day he thought: it has to be. The next day he again thought: it has to be.
The day after that he again thought: it has to be. And two weeks later he contrived to meet the cook at the door to the grocer’s.
They got married on a Saturday, the date of which they forgot.
Since the cook’s house was larger, it was the two brothers who moved. They loaded three wagons with chests and junk. They rented out their place for not very much money, but it helped pay expenses.

About the twin and the lover the cook.

I am not a bigger rereader, but this was a book I loved the first time around. It was one I loved in the early years of this blog. It stood up, and I liked how I noticed more of the religious overtones in the book.It has an episodic feel that shows the village around the Mount of Olives is a place that feels it is drifting on the edge of the Abyss with the devil causing trouble. This is a sunnier cousin to Satantango. This has nods to religious world names shared with figures from the bible. The devil tempts folks and tells folks home truths. I found it poetic again but this time it seemed a little darker than the first read. There is a menacing feeling behind this world. They are stuck in a sort of world that is dying but don’t know it as we see how, over time, things are changing as we watch it over a couple of generations. Have you ever read a book as the title differs from the UK edition especially after 13 years. I will get to Piano Cemetery, his other book in English. This has been wonderfully translated by Richard Zenith. Have you read any books by Peixoto ?

Winstons score – -A dark world on the abyss and the devil is hanging around ?

That was the month of June 2024

~ winstonsdad ~ 5 Comments
  1. A Terrace in Rome by Pascal Quingard
  2. Elly by Maike Wetzel 
  3. Eastbound by Maylis De Kerangal 
  4. Engagement by Ciler Ilhan 
  5. Out of Mind by J Bernlef
  6. The hairdressers son by Gerbrand Bakker 
  7. French windows by Antoine Laurain 
  8. Götz and Meyer by David Albahari 
  9. Family and Borghesia by Natalia Ginzburg

I managed to review nine books this month. Our journey started with an engraver injured for his love of a woman and the aftermath of that. Then a missing girl comes back, or does she? Then, two souls meet and connect on a train eastbound to Siberia. Each has their reason for wanting to escape where they are at that moment. Then there is a massacre told piece by piece by those killed on the evening it happened; then, a man is slowly losing his mind as dementia takes hold. Then a man goes to Spain to find out what really happened to his dad and what is the truth about the past. Then a woman may have seen a murder writes a story around her fellow occupants in the apartment building she lives in. Then we see a pair of truck drivers as the only link to a Jewish family in Belgrade as a relative imagines these two drivers’ day-to-day working. Then I finish with a great pair of Italian novellas from a great Italian writer.

Book of the month

To be honest, this was the hardest month in a long time. There wasn’t a bad book this month, reading-wise. But this lost gem—well, I say lost—is considered one of the best Dutch novels of all time. I think this book deserves a reissue. It captures how someone’s mind falls away from them due to Dementia.

Non book events .

Well, I have been watching the new Star Wars series. It’s not the best series, but it could get better as it goes on. Music wise I brought three albums this month

I brought two albums at my local shop as part of an offer they have the first is this John Grant Album I have two other albums by him and a couple of CDs so I was pleased to add another to the collection.

Then, a live album by Joy Division strangely ties into yesterday when I went with Amanda to where my mum’s ashes are scattered, and in the same graveyard is the stone that is the memorial to Ian Curtis, who was from Macclesfield. I didn’t visit the stone, but I know where it is. I find the pilgrimage there bizarre, but each to their own. I knew his connection to Macclesfield and my own connection, so this was a live set I hadn’t heard before.

Then we went to Bakewell the other day it is a nice place for a coffee and there is a record shop and I had decided to complete all the Nick Cave albums on VInyl I have all the older albums on cd and have brought a number of of already this was one of the few I hadn’t got and captured the rockier darker Nick Cave when he was younger and living in Berlin

Next month

Thigs will all be Spanish or Portuguese in Nature as it is Spanish and Portuguese lit month 2024. I did make badges for all those who want to join in

Edited in Prisma app with Watercolor
Edited in Prisma app with Watercolor
Edited in Prisma app with Watercolor

The three badges look forward to your reviews. Thanks in advance for joining this month again or for the first time . I look forward to all the upcoming reviews.

What are your plans?

How was your reading month ?

 

 

 

15 Years of reading the world winstonsdad is 15

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Well, the blog itself told me a couple of days ago that it has been going on for 15 years. Amazing. This started just as I found other bloggers on Twitter, and my reading had grown over the few years before that. I started with a challenge of reading 52 over the first year of the blog well, which has now grown to 130 countries. I now tend to trickle through new countries a few a year I will get to every country in the world at some point I hope but for me it is about the breadth of books read so I want to read everything basically. Sadly, many blogs I love have gone over the years. I have carried on. I have reviewed, on average 92 books a year over the last 15 years not bad stats. Of them, 1200 are books in translation . I have written 2330 posts over the last 15 years. I have started the shadow jury, which I love doing. The hashtag #Translationthurs I started. With Richard, Spanish Lit Month has since become Spanish and Portuguese Lit Month. I wish I could make a little money from this blog as I feel the time and effort I have spent in the last fifteen years be nice to see a little reward for that. I love interacting with other bloggers. I’m always open to ideas I feel I do struggle to comment but I always try to catch up from time to time. I have loved the experiences and people I have met over the years of the blog. Her is to the next 15 years !! As you follow me as I read books from around the world.

Elly by Maike Wetzel

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Elly by Maike Wetzel

German fiction

Original title –  Elly

Translator – Lyn Marven

Source – Library

I saw this at the library on a recent visit and thought it was the perfect size for an evening read I still love the idea of a book being like a movie you can sit and read in a couple of hours. It was on a list of the best books in translation to read from the Guardian. It was also on the list for the Dagger Prize for books in Translation. Maike Wetzel studied in the UK and is also a screenwriter and novelist. She also had a short story collection translated into English. This novella caught my eye as it seems like it may have a twist around a child going missing and the outcome of this on the family.

The doctor hooks me up to the drip and puts me on the list for an operation. He wants to remove my appendix. My mother says again: Your colleague already took it out. The doctor prods my rigid belly. My mother stops fighting. She gives my name, our health insurance details. She called me Almut because of the north.

Because of the stiff breeze on the island of Sylt, where she has never been; because of the tall blond boy that she never kissed, because she doesn’t like tall blonds; because of the seagulls, whose cries make her melan-choly; and because of the seaweed and the salt which no longer cling to her legs: now it’s dark stretchy jeans with all their poisonous dyes instead. I’m also called Almut because it contains the German for courage, Mut, and my mother believed the name would give me

I just picked this as I had my appendix out as a kid

The book follows the effect on the family when the 11-year-old daughter, Elly, disappears. She was cycling home from a judo class. This follows when the daughter disappears. The family is gripped by grief and follows the police investigation. We see how Judith and Hamid Elly’s parents cope with this and how her older sister Ines struggles with the loss of her younger sister. So, after four long years, hope appears lost,, as time goes on, the hope of finding her alive drifts, and the hole that is left is still there, but the family, including her sister, move on with their lives. But then, after four years, Elly reappears, and the family is back whole again. However, as the family starts to heal, there are doubts about this girl who has returned as their daughter. Ines questions her about things they did as kids. Her grandmother has even bigger doubts. How has she come back? Is she Elly or ?

 

My sister disappears on a slightly overcast afternoon in June. I imagine how it happens. I see Elly wheeling her bike out of the garage. Her outline is clear and sharp, the background out of focus. She fixes her sports bag to the luggage rack. In it is her judo suit with the green belt. My sister is younger than me. I am thirteen at the time, she is just eleven. We live in a small town. Elly’s club meets in a sports hall in the nearest big town. She cycles there on her own across the fields. The wind sweeps through the wheat. From above, it looks like waves on water. Elly stands on the motorway bridge and looks down at the field. The wind ruffles her dark, almost black hair.

Ines talking About her sister disappering

This book is a wonderful mix of literary fiction and thriller in the way it is paced. The action slowly unwinds in the history of Elly disappearing, and its effect is told from all the family points of view, but the action turns around when the girl returns who is meant to be Elly. The book is an up-and-down ride. I was reminded of the early Peirene books that had the same quality as they did, and that is cinematic books that, like this book, take you as a reader on a journey. You can see that Maike is a screenwriter. This has the feel of a book that could easily be made into a film. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this being made into a film at some point I hope it does so I could watch it. It has a turning point of Elly returning and the doubts about her make this turn from a sad story of a lost daughter to something else. Do you have a favourite evening book, one you read in an evening like watching a great film? Do you like literary novels that have a feel of a thriller in the pace you can read them at?

Winstons score- A

A book strike me as perfect to be made into a film

April 2024 what happened on the blog

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  1. Lost on me by Veronica Raimo
  2. Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior
  3. A Perfect day to be Alone by Nanae Aoyama
  4. ALi and Nino by Kurban Said 
  5. Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb
  6. Weight and measures by Joseph Roth
  7. Letters from Iceland by W.HAuden and Louis MacNeice 
  8. The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone
  9. Through the Forest by Laura Alcoba

Well, this month, I managed to review 9 books, this month I was surprised at as I also did 16 posts for the global literature in libraries initiative I posted 16 posts for them. On here my reading journey , I went from Italy and a young woman in her growing years. Then the twins cut their tongues one talks the over is mute after that.Then we had club 1937. We started with a novel from Azerbaijan about a couple one Western and the other more Eastern about how they get together. Then a marriage just begin as they honeymoon in Italy and eventually end up going there own ways when the husband misses a train and takes the wrong train. Then a solide becomes a goverment offical as his wife wanders and his life falls apart. Then two poets go to pre war Iceland and writer a number of poems and prose pieces. Then back to italy and an overbearing father that wants to be a well known painter. Then a look at what made a wife drown her two sons and what effect has it one those  involved in the events thirty years later.

Book of the month

A young woman moves in with a family friend as her mother has gone away to China to Teach not quite sure her daughter is old enough to live fully alone she sends her to live with an elderley relative in Tokyo with there cats. It is a tale of being new and alone in a big city

Non book events last month

Its been a month of watching tv shows form Amanda dn I we started with RED eye a slightly over the top tale of a doctor caught up with spies as he flies back to China people start dying. Then we moved onto Baby r reinderr a dark drama about a manthat ends up with a stalker based on the writers own experience. Funny and dark in places you were left with a thinking of who were the people really. Then we have just finished the second series of Them set in the ninties it follows a hunt for a serial killer and becomes supernatrual in places as the officer sees the killer target her family.Then we had record store day this years gems were

Fleet foxes live A Collection of the best known songs.

 

Chris Isaak a collection of recording he did at sun city of classic rock and roll songs

Scott  walker Tilt a remaster of one of his best albums

Talking heads live in 77 therm live just as they were starting off as a group.

This year record store list hadn’t an absloute must record  get like other years but all these are bands and artist I hvae records from . But I maybe getting a little old for waiting from early morning I may get a chair next year as I was sore a couple days after being stood three hours in the cold waiting.

Next month

Well I m in the last third of the first of three from the EBRD finalist I hope to finish the other two by the end monht other than that I have the new book from Elfriede Jelinek the children of the dead . I also have Kafka diares to work through. and the last of the booker international books to be reviewed. I hope to make use of the fact I blogged a lot more last month doing my blog and another blog and hopefully get back on track to get to my target of 100 reviews this year. How has your month been ?

 

EBRD Finalist 2024

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The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is delighted to announce the three EBRD Literature Prize 2024 finalists. In alphabetical order by author they are:

  • The End by Attila Bartis, translated from the Hungarian by Judith Sollosy and published by Archipelago Books

  • Barcode by Krisztina Tóth, translated from the Hungarian by Peter Sherwood and published by Jantar Publishing.

The finalists were chosen by this year’s independent panel of judges: award-winning writer and critic, Maya Jaggi (chair); novelist and translator, Maureen Freely; and author and professor of international law, Philippe Sands.

I mentioned a while ago that I would change from the International Booker Prize next year to the EBRD prize. I would have read the longlist book this, but I just hadn’t funds after getting the Booker books. But when thew shortlist was announced today, I decided I would get the finalist well I had The End so I ordered the other two and as the winner isn’t ut to June I will read these three. Have you read any of these books ?

Weights and Measures by Joseph Roth

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Weights and Measures by Joesph Roth

Austrian fiction

Original title – Das falsche Gewicht 

Translator – David Le Vay

Source – Personal copy

I looked at the Goodreads list of books for 1937. I’m unsure if I missed this or if it wasn’t on the list of books for the year. I looked on my shelves to see if any writers I liked had missed the list, and I found this one. I am a fan of Joseph Roth, who is most well-known for The Radetzky March. In a way, all his books are around the Austro-Hungarian empire. Here is a perfect example of that: we follow a marriage falling apart, and in that, it seemed an ideal bookend to the last book I reviewed, The Start of a Marriage Going Wrong by another short lived writer. Because Roth, like Szerb, died in World War Two, he was a more problematic drinker and had just heard of the death of Ernst Toller when he died a few days later.

Once upon a time in the District of Zlotogrod there lived an Inspector of Weights and Measures whose name was Anselm Eibenschütz. His duty consisted of checking the weights and measures of the tradesmen in the entire district. So, at specified intervals, Eibenschütz went from shop to shop and investigated the yardsticks and the scales and the weights. He was accompanied by a sergeant of gendarmerie in full panoply. Thus the State made manifest its intention to use arms, if necessary, to punish cheats, in accordance with the commandment proclaimed in the Holy Scrip-tures, which considers a cheat to be the same as a thief…

The introduction to the weights and measure officer of the title in the first page.

The book follows an Artillery officer, Anselm Elbenshchutz. He has taken a job in a small town near the Russian border, working for the government as a weights and measures officer, checking that everyone is doing it right.. But what happens when this man, a gentleman and officer with his principles, tries to lay the line of the law in this place where all he sees is people bending the rules and those near him taking bribes. He makes enemies, but when his wife, who made him move, has an affair with one of his clerks and becomes pregnant, he is drawn to a beautiful, mysterious Gypsy, Euphemia. She lives with one of the men he has most upset, Jadlowker, a profiteer. He tries to make money here and there. And as his world falls apart, we see how a good man ends up in a border area as people escape Russia. His wife then gets Caught up in the cholera outbreak in the area and dies with the Baby she has conceived with Anselm’s clerk. We see the spirit of the man broken. A motif and character that Roth has done well in the other books I have read over the years by Roth.

Eibenschütz looked at her constantly. He tried to catch her eye at least once, but he did not succeed. Her eyes were wandering somewhere in the distance. God alone knew what she was thinking about!

They resumed their game and Eibenschütz won a number of hands. He was a little shamefaced as he pocketed the money. And still Euphemia sat at the table, a silent flower. She glowed and remained silent.

All around there was the usual noise, caused by the deserters.

They crouched on the floor and played cards and threw dice. As soon as they had gambled everything away they began to sing. As usual, they sang the song Ja lubyl tibia’, out of tune and with croaking voices.

The Russian deserters that come across the border to his area and the Gpysy girl he falls for

Anselm, as a person who took the weights and measures job, was what would have at one time in the UK been called a Jobsworth. He’d been on the TV show That’s Life as someone who followed the line of the law to the point. But what follows is what happens to be hidden closed doors, those little bribes that, if unchecked, like here, where he lives, grow over time and what, when he arrives, seems an easy job. It isn’t, and as his world falls apart, as I say, this is a character Robert wrote well the fallen man as a character wife having an affair enemies everywhere. A love that is with his enemies this is a man in freefall as we see all around him turn bad and his world falls apart. All this is a short novella, a lesser-known book by Roth. The place he evokes is like an Austrian Cornwall of those smugglers and people trying to make a living on the other side of the law. Borders often have this dark side, even if a few things are cheaper over the border or the world seems better over the border. Well this is my third book for club1937 and a book that isn’t as well known as his other books. Have you read Roth?

Winstons score –A solid little novella from one of the great Austrian writers