Category: #translationthurs

The remains by Margo Glantz

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The remains by Margo Glantz

Mexican fiction

Original title – EL rastro

Translator – Ellen Jones

Source – Personal copy

I brought this in my recent trip to Fife I have been a huge fan of Church Press which seems to get its as readers the cream of  Latin American literature. SO I always look for them when I am in a shop I know will have some books from them Like Toppings in Saint Andrews does. I brought it forward fro this month as it was on my trolley with all the possible books for this month. I had seen a review mention Sebald and Ducks Newberryport, both books I loved, and also the mention of Glenn Gould, of course, made me think of Thomas Bernhard. Now Margo Glantz is a perfect fit for Church Press given what they had done for Claudia Pinerio. Glantz is in her nineties and has had a couple of books translated into English yet is huge in Mexico and Spain but she has never really set the English-speaking world on FIRE. I WAIT THE DAY A Lesser known writer in English wins the Nobel like MODIANO ( I struggled to get anything before his win I did and reviewed it|) Glantz maybe isn’t up in the Nobel ranks I don’t know enough to know if she would be any way I was captivated to read a book from a writer virtually unknown in English.

My name is Nora Garcia.It’s been years since I last came to the village: I park my car, then go shyly, warily, up to the front door and into the house. I barely recognise it, it’s changed, and not for the better, the garden’s overgrown, the plants are dry, the grass is yellowing, there are patches of bare earth where before there were flowering shrubs. Down in the ravine – flame trees, trees with wide canopies. The place is full and I almost lose my nerve, my heart shrinking: there are a few people I know, no one I’m especially fond of, and perhaps others I’ve forgotten: it’s been a long time.

The opening as she returns to nhis childhood village

The book has a stream-of-consciousness style. We follow a widow at a wake a celebration of his life for her Husband. Juan, he was a pianist-composer and a bit of a lad. The narrative follows his wife, Nora, as she talks to those that knew him and she drifts between the present and their long life together as in Proust moments that send her back to little snippets of her and Juans life. She is back there in her and Juan’s life. From the mildew smell around his coffin that reminds her of him. To talk to his friends about remembering him.The interactions they all had, the music they all lovcd etc. Then there are mentions of Glenn Gould with a classical pianist. It is hard to not mention him and how he played discussions around his performances and records. His heart surgery mixes as the friends and people they knew to remember Juan and her relationships.

I’m murmuring to myself (like Glenn Gould while he recorded the Goldberg Variations in the CBC studios), I cannot, cannot shake off that flowery scent, but mainly the smell of mildew: it surrounds me like a halo, like the halos around the heads of saints in paintings and statues.

I’ve listened to so much music the last few days, these terrible last days of the year, and I’ve cried so many painful, bitter tears, (black tears),I’ve cried so much while listening to music that I can’t listen any more, I can’t bearit, I’m full to the brim with it

Music can touch and make us rememebr a moment a look , a touch , a feeling !

 

This book is about grief but also about what we remember when that person is gone. Those Proustian things smell a tune, a place are the hooks we hang memories on. This is our closet of life the many coats a person wears over their lives together. This is a book that remembers a loved one. I love the bit that mentions Thomas Bernhard’s book about Glenn Gould, which they didn’t really get on with i, I loved that book, but as a musician, I could see why. This is about the essence of a person I think back on a book like Edouard Leve’s books that were about what made him at its heart, the art and likes. This is a book about what makes us look back. Another book I was reminded of was Naja Marie Aidt’s book about her son’s sudden death, which also looked at how we deal with Greif I loved this book it was an afternoon in Nora’s life but a lifetime in her and Juan’s world. Have you read this book?

Winston’s score – A – This is a writer I’d love to read more from!

 

The Taiga syndrome by Christina Rivera Garza

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The Taiga Syndrome by Christina Rivera Garza

Mexican fiction

Original title – El Mal de la Tagia

Translators – Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana

Source – library

I went to the library just to get a few more books for a woman in translation month also maybe find a few that I had wanted to read and this is one such I remember reading about this and think that sounds odd and just up my street. When I saw Jonathan Lethem had called her Mexico’s GREATEST  living writer I was drawn to read this book first from my Library pile. Then I remembered after I had finished this book, I had actually read her book the lilac crest several years ago so this is the second book by her I will have read.

So, is she Hansel or Gretel?” I asked, truly curious, still staring at the images.
“Gretel, I suppose.” The man hesitated, taken aback.
“Maybe she is the woodsman or the witch or the woman who wants to get rid of the children in order to have enough to eat,” I said more to myself than to the man who had begun to smile, stupefied.
“This is not a fairy tale, detective,” he said, interrupting me again. “This is a story about being in love.”
“Or being out of love,” I corrected him.

when the detective first mentions Hansen and Gretel the client is taken aback.

I loved the detached nature of this story. It is just a bit bizarre a retired detective is hired by a husband whose wife has decided to run away and has seemingly gone to somewhere called Taiga with her lover. So he passes the man a fit on all he knows about his wife and her location, and then the detective says this is a bit like Hansen and Gretel in the woods. The man says no, but the detective takes the job and seems to have his own fairy-tale way of looking at this case and what it entails. To find the runaways ( or are they or have they just left to find their own love’). As the detective hits their trail, it takes him to Taiga a wacky place of kids on the loose like the wild ones almost and other characters that had just stepped. out of fairy tales This is a world were fact and fantasy blend. But maybe the old world of Grimm’s fairy tales forms a cautionary narrative on the modern world. Will he find them?

That lumberjacks can be cautious I knew, or sensed: either way it doesn’t matter. Their proximity to sharp-toothed heavy tools must have something to do with it.
Occupational hazards. Their close relationship, so para-doxical, almost organic, with the forest they kill and that sustains them. Do these thoughts pass through the mind of a lumberjack as he saws and cleaves and hacks at the tree bark? During those days, I asked myself that question frequently. And I answered: They think all this and more. Or they would.
It was the lumberjacks who walked along the edge of the cabin carrying him. It was they who led him – “dragged him” would be more accurate -to the central market where just the day before the translator and I had found salt, a little black tea, sugar, three or four potatoes. Some utensils. A pewter plate. Two cups.

I couldn’t help but think ofmmonty python here it made me smile

This is a very short novella, less than a hundred pages, that mixes the real and fantasy but also sees how the old tales can be transposed onto the modern capitalist world. As it is just as cruel as the medieval time when these stories were set and our detective uses them as the cornerstones of his investigation. Children people get lost in the modern world even more than in the Grimm’s time. I loved the first couple of series of Grimm tv show where they imagined those characters from Grimm’s world as humans living in the modern world but with the same traits and characteristics as they used to have, and this is the same the old tales and yes a couple seem tempted to a far off place like Hansen and Gretel is as modern a tale now as it was then. It is a clever book that draws you into this fable-like world that seems like our own but isn’t quite. IF Grimm and Chandler had lived and written a book together, Their world in a book would be a hard-boiled fairy tale detective novel like this is !!. A world-weary detective transported to Grimm’s fairy tale world. Have you read this book or any other book that mixes the modern world with Fairy tales well?

Winston’s score – B a clever take on the modern world using old fables as a guide!

Rombo by Esther Kinsky

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Rombo by Esther Kisky

German fiction

Original title – Rombo

Translator- Caroline Schimdt

Source – review copy

There is a few writers that I really really love, and Kinsky is one of them. She is one of those writers I think I love her shopping list because, you know, with her, it wouldn’t just be a shopping list. She is cut from the same writing style as Seabed and Kluge another two writers I adore. Ester Kinky lived in London for many years. She was married to the late German translator Martin Chalmers. The last book I read by her saw how she dealt with that grief. She is also a translator from English, Polish and Russian into German. She is the German translator of Olga Tokarczuk ( This has a feel of flights at times). She now lives in Berlin.

Among the boulders, pebbles and shards of glass washed milky and smooth are variously sized concrete fragments that stand tilted, defying the water in a different way than the leftover solid and stony things which gradually submit to the currents and learn to want to reach the sea. The concrete fragments are rigid and in-flexible, positioning themselves against any current.

They distinguish themselves from the meticulously smooth stones with implicit drawings and lines and veins of a different nature, and seek the edges, the banks, the coves set apart from the current, where they come into their own as wreckage, maintain their fragmented nature and remain witness: earthquake breakage, remains of house and farm and charge, things carted away that do not submit to anything new. A young addition to the old river: the earthquake rubble.

The way the enviroment his hit as hard as those that live there !

What she does here is take a slice and event the world-changing earthquakes 0f 1976 in the Friuli area of Northeast Italy. She takes apart the events through one village and seven of the people that lived in that village and she how their lives were ripped apart after the earthquake in May 1976 as we hear the memories of that event from seven people and how each of their worlds was ripped apart and how it affected their families and changed there lives alongside this there is how the earthquake had changed the world around the people and also a collection of found items photos of those who were just lost in the events the two earthquakes months apart left nearly a thousand dead but also changed the course of so many lives like the seven Silvia on holidays Toni remembering their car. Mara thought of how many kids her mother had given birth to. Lina remembered a neighbour’s laughs as out hit each recalls over the course of the book the events and the aftermath of it on them.

MARA
My mother gave birth to nine children. Three died, three went abroad and never returned. At first they wrote occasionally, or sent a photograph, but eventually even that stopped. My mother began forgetting early on. She forgot the soup on the stove and the goats in the shed and her basket on the field. But if one of us became sick, without a word she walked to a spot where some herb grew, to remedy the illness. And she always knew where to find her favourite flowers. Sometimes she sat outside on the bench and rocked back and forth, speaking with her children dead and disappeared. She was still able to remember their names, but not ours. Had she forgotten us? I’m not sure. Although I cared for her, I was no one to her – she called me and my remaining siblings by random names, never by our own. And later, when I had to lock her in her room, she would hit and scratch me. But her children who had disappeared, who had left – they were still with her. What does it mean to remember, what does it mean to forget?

Mara thinking  of her mother and her siblings

Kinsky is a writer in the vein of Seabald. More so, Alexander  Kluge, I’d say, as his work uses a patchwork of vignettes of memories of events. to recall and describe what happens, voices and facts mix together. These make books that have no straightforward linear narrative to them, but the work is more like a giant portrait of the event given 3d and even a fourth dimension of time, as a whole, does not form a picture of the events and as you move out from the reading you see the possibilities of those earthquakes but also the aftermath which is something you don’t often see mentioned is how people cope after the event and how it changes there lives. As the book firmly ties those seven lives to the environment they live in, and the environment of those remote mountains themselves are a character twisted and changed as much as those that live on them. A combination of the life of those seven before, during and after is drawn into the pattern of words that form her style. Have you read any books by Ester kinsky or Alexander Kluge using this vignette style?

Winstons score – `+ A  – Every book by her I have read is in the top books of the year and this is just the same.

Voices of the lost by Hoda Barakat

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Voices of the lost by Hoda Barakat

Lebanese fiction

Original title – Bareed al layl

Translator -Marilyn Booth

Source – Personal copy

Now I  move on to a prize-winning Arabic novel this won the ARABAIC booker prize a number of years ago. I am wanting to cover as many places as I can with this woman in translation. month so the next stop is a Leabanon and a writer that has won a lot of prizes for her writing she lived in Lebanon as her studying to her PHD which she did in Paris. She then took the brave design to move back to Lebanon and work initially as a teacher translator and journalist and then in the mood 80s she began to write. She finally left Lebanon to live  Paris in 1989. She has lifted there since other than when taking posts to work at colleges teaching. She has published six novels all in a way deal with her homeland of Lebanon. But the beauty of this book it is in an unnamed place and gives a sense of being anywhere.

The letter I found inside the hotel directory perplexed me. It worried me, actually. It talks about a young man, the letter writer himself. He wrote it in a cheaply rented furnished room in a street nearby, a rather run-down one, it seems. So how did the letter get here? Plus, it comes to an abrupt stop: it doesn’t really end. All in all, because of this letter, I’m feeling very uneasy about the writer. It’s not hard to imagine that he’s in prison, for instance. The letter has it that he was full of terrible imaginings about the secret police from his country of origin mounting surveillance on him. So it looks like he went to talk to their man,

The first letter a man that had run-in with the secret police

The book is formed of a chorus of unnamed voices of people as they each write a letter to someone close to them as they are on their way as a refugee on an unknown journey with an unknown destiny this means they open up in each of these letters to their family or a lost lover. As each letter tells the individual stories of secret police being watched, the horror of war. we aren’t told anything of the person just see the current person reading the letter they have found whether in a magazine or left on a seat or in the trash the stories of lost loves, children left behind those dreams broken by a war or just having to escape the situation you are in. A series of broken dreams lost hopes a chain of woe and hope at the same time.

My dear brother

I have been thinking about writing to you, now that you have learned what you call the truth?. You’re right to call it that, up to a point. But the pure, unadulterated truth is something other than what you believe it to be. Everyone has secrets, and you must help me with a secret of mine, because it is in both our interests. I don’t have much time.

We are waiting for a plane to land; it’s still in the air because the plane at this gate that was supposed to make way for it was delayed. They pulled a passenger off that departing flight. The plane had already taken off but they made it turn around and come back to the airport. I know why security took him away in handcuffs because I have a letter in my pocket that this man wrote to his mother.

another handover of letters.

 

The beauty of removing place is it makes it a universal tale of trying to escape where you can be trapped this reminds me of the opposite side of the Bushra Al Marqui book what have you left behind a series of witness statements of the Deaths and Losses in the Yemeni war personal reflections of their own worlds collapsing. Well this is the flip side of that story of what happens when you finally decide to leave behind community family, love children a million things and head on that uncertain refugee trail where the end is not known or even thought about just the wanting to get away from that place. as it has been retitling the voices of the lost and that is what it is a series of voices unknown people snapshots of the last thing they think but also the horror they have witnessed that lead them to leave their homeland.AS  they head into the world on an unknown trip the use of the letter is a great device it makes them seem more personal because are they even meant to be read or just the act of writing them is helping them on their way ! Have you read any good books dealing with being a refugee?

Winstons score – B a strong collection of lost letters that make a compelling novel .

 

Wound by Osaka Vasyakina

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Wound by Oksana Vasyakina

Russian FIction

Original title -Рана

Translator – Elina Alter

Source – Review copy

Well, on to the second book for this year’s Woman in Translation month, and we are with a debut novel in ENGLISH FROM THE Russian poetess and curator Osaka Vasyakina with one of the first Lesbian novels in Russian. The book won the NOS prize in Russia when it came out. Osakana lives in Moscow, where she teaches writing and feminist literature. This book is the first of three she has written about her family. This one follows the death of her mother. The other two books are about her father, that died of Aids and her aunt Rose. The book is formed of the journey she took with her mother’s ashes to the small working-class town she grew up Siberia.

The cousin didn’t know that I was a lesbian. But I wanted to say to him that he knew nothing about gay people. Why do you have this fixation on anal penetration? Why do you want to insert an automatic rifle lubed with lard into the German’s anus? I wanted to ask. But I didn’t bother. And after all, condoms don’t hurt anyone, rather they help save lives. While what’s a rifle for? A rifle exists to kill people.

It was stuffy from the heat and the stink of the little pine tree air freshener. What misery, I thought. And said nothing.

She kept her sexuality secret from ost of her family.

The book opens as Oskana’s mother is on her deathbed. We see her talking and interacting with the nursing staff as she nears the end of her battle with Breast cancer in a hospice. Then as she passes, she thinks about her own position, and at that moment, she is dealing with an accusation of sexual assault. This leads her to feel about her partners and the consent of those partners and her current situation. So over time, this happens as she lays her mother’s ashes in her home town in distant Siberia. So she gets her mother’s ashes as she heads on a mammoth train journey into her own past her mother’s past as the train mothers closer to her mothers home town we see a woman dealing with her mother’s death as grief-stricken but also how her mother dealt with her sexuality and how that affects her life. This shows how hard it is to be a lesbian under Putin’s regime. It also has a poet’s soul in it. The middle section, an ode to her mother, is a powerful piece of writing.

And also love. Though love is more complex than death.In death only one person is involved, but love is a space of cooperation. I tried to weld love and death together inside myself. I didn’t want vulgarity; I wanted life, a daily practice, labour. And then I wrote a poem. Love brought me pain, and death brought me pain. But love brought the pain of being, while death brought the pain of non-being. And that was where they met, through pain.

women young women are becoming sand
beautiful slim in nylon glitter are becoming sand
I’m reading you Inna Lisnyanskaya’s poems from her book
In the Suburbs of Sodom
and in one poem she compares her stomach her old worn-out stomach.                                                         to waves of sands

She writes poetry around her mothers death on the train ride.

This is a powerful book from a strong female voice. In fact, this is maybe the perfect book for women in translation month. I works like this are what it is all about, those voices that should be heard worldwide. Oksana Vasyakina is a brave writer. She has written here the first openly lesbian novel written in Russian, although it is just one part of the story of her life and the life with her mother. But current events in her life, with the accusations and such, show how hard it is to be Homosexual in Russia. But most of all, this book mediates a mother-daughter relationship and the ghosts of that relationship now that her mother has passed. As she heads on the train, we see the lacework of her mind piece together the past and their relationship as we head to her mother’s cold and working-class history of the village her mother is from. The book I recalled Maria Stepnova’s book in memory of a Memory, another Russian book dealing with memories and death, the ghost we all have in our past and what happens when we open our minds and let those ghosts and memories free to walk on the page and her they have such heartfelt words. Have you read this book? What are your woman in translation plans?

Winston’s score – = A powerful book around the loss of a mother from the daughter’s perspective.

Heartland by Wilson Harris

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Heartland by WIlson Harris

Guyanese fiction

Source – personal copy

I have been listening to the 99 novels section of the Anthony Burgess podcast which covers the 99 books that Burgess had chosen as his favourite post world war 2 novels, and this is one of the books he had picked for that list from the Guyanese writer Sir Wilson Harris a writer that really should be better known as he is one of the most modern and experimental writers to have come out of the Caribbean 9 I do question is it Caribbean or actually a Latin American country maybe as it is the only English speaking country in Latin America. Anyway, Wilson Haris trained as a surveyed and had spent much time in the Heartland of Guyana, which comprises dense jungles and massive wide rivers. This scenery is at the heart of this book. Harris wrote many books about his homeland, and some of the characters in this book appeared in his other books.

Stevenson’s speculative frontiers collapsed with a rude shout from Kaiser and he turned abruptly. The man was here at last. Stevenson could never stop being curious every time he saw Kaiser, as if he wanted to confirm that this must be the strangest, most haunting or haunted creation of all things and beings he visualized. It was not merely the blackness of Kaiser’s skin, within whose flesh appeared incandescent eyes lit as from the density of coal.
It was the ghostly ash of the garments he wore; a breath of wind would surely have dispersed them, the most attenuated vest and shorts Stevenson had ever seen, pluckedin the nick of time, he was inclineds to swear, from some ancient fire.

One of the characters that seem ghost leike at times

We meet a prominent figure from Guyana’s life Zechariah Stevenson who is in disgrace as he is accused of defrauding people. But this son of a wealthy family as ever with people of money has been sent here into the Heartland of Guyana where the vast jungle and to watch over there, his family gets the money from the timber the forest in the jungle. The people he meets in the dense jungle just appear. Like Kasier, a shopkeeper and then Da Silva, he is a pork knocker, as they call gold prospectors here.  We often wonder if are they real, especially when he comes across the dead Da Silva, a long-dead body. This is a place where the present, future and past all seem to drift, and a man is thrown into this untamed world as his grip on the world around him starts to slip as he is caught in the fever dreams of the jungle and the vast rivers of Guyana as they drift through time.

Stevenson scrambled out of the river and grabbed his towel, holding it against his body as if he felt alien eyes upon his nakedness. The head of the morning sun had risen above a fist of trees across the river. And the events of yesterday seemed almost indistinguishable from a watchful dream in the past night. Nevertheless, they possessed enduring substance for him since on his return to the clearing on the river bank at Upper Kamaria – after recovering Kaiser’s line – he had opened the depot and counted three or four boxes labelled DaSilva. Kaiser had not been indulging in an idle trick or fanciful token after all.

Later on as he drifts between the resal and unreal at times

This is a hard book to describe plot-wise as it is more about place and atmosphere, that feeling of being caught in the dense unrelenting jungle and how it can affect from Heart of Darkness onwards we have seen the madness of being alone in the jungle can bring on someone. Even Stevenson’s name is a nod towards the great Robert Louis Stephenson, another man tainted and, in the end, died in a jungle environment. This is a land Harris knew well. He had worked in the Heartlands to look at the viability of taming the rivers to make Hydroelectricity of them `(my Dad has worked at these hydro plants from around Niagara, where the US side uses some machines still from the 50s ). For me, this book has more connections to the Latin American cannon with its use of magical realism (well, MAGIC HORROR REALISM ) , fever dreams, ghosts and also the use of the jungle as almost another character to the book reminds me of the great number of books I have read in recent years from Latin American writers like Samanta Schweblin or Mariana Enriquez. I wonder what Harris’s standing is like in Latin America ? is it just the influence of place, or is he well-known there? Have you Read Harris?

Winston’s score – A – one of the greatest writers can’t believe I’ve just discovered him will be reading him again !

The Dear ones by Berta Dávila

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The Dear ones by Berta Dávila

Galician fiction

Original title -Os seres queridos

Translator – Jacob Rogers

Source – Review copy

I have been championing the three times rebel [ress since they started bring books out they have a great ethos of working-class female voices in the minority languages. This time we stay in Spain but move to Galicia To a novelist and poet that is regarded as one of the leading voices of Galician literature, having won prizes both for her poetry and fiction. This novel won the Xerais Novel Award. She is also a well-known editorShe directs the independent publishing house Rodolfo e Priscila and is the director of the Rúa do Lagarto collection. This is the first book to be translated into English from her.

The book was about a mother who loses her son in a traffic accident. She was a radio show host for a local station and lived alone. A few months after the accident, still grieving, she moved in with her grandmother, an elderly woman who had some sort of dementia and wasn’t very mobile but was the only family the mother had left. Lucia asks if the grandmother resembles my grandmother Maria. I say probably, I’m sure she does, and detail some of my grandmother’s behaviours over the past few months. For example, she almost always recognises me the moment I come into the room, but often forgets recent news or what year it is; she asks me about grades and exams, as if I’m still an under-graduate, or about the father of my son, as if Miguel and I had never split up.

The book she was writing about a mother losing a son

This is a hard book to grasp as the events in the book seem so odd, but then again, life is odd and this is one bone journey I feel there will be many more women like our narrator here that have the feeling and guilt and trauma she has after birth and in motherhood. The book is about when is a mother ready to be a mother? What happens when your role as a mother doesn’t fit you? That is the heart of this story a woman struggling with that exact dilemma as she struggles to connect with her son so she tries to write a novel about losing a son at five years old. She had seen motherhood as something else, but the depression she has felt since the birth of her son, and the loss of self that comes with that is hard to deal with for her. So what will she do when she falls pregnant for a second time? How will she react, and how will the world around her react as she decides she may take a decision that will shock people near her. But she proves she still has choices to make around her life and her body. This is a hard-hitting story of one woman’s journey into motherhood and what happens when you maybe opt out of the role of being a mother.

THE BOY WAKES UP EARLY, CONTENTEDLY, ON THE FIRST DAY of winter and asks me how long it is until the school Christmas play and the day he can finally open up the presents under the tree. I tell him there won’t be a tree at Grandma Mara’s house-at most there’ll be a porcelain Baby Jesus shrouded by a wreath-and that it’s only four more sleeps. He’s a bit disappointed about the tree, but I try to convince him it will be a festive day: we’ll see my parents and my uncles, we’ll sing songs, and he’ll be able to help my sister prepare the tray of desserts and sweets. The boy asked for a stuffed doll, a picture book with two bears that are friends, and a bike. He repeats his list of presents and counts off on his fingers the nights he has to wait for them.

There is a coldness in this description of her son

 

This has a feel of auto fiction in its town I was reminded of how well Anne Ernaux speaks around her world with a flourish or over-elaboration at times, and this is the same it hasn’t to much luggage to the story it is narrative of her journey told as that no sidetrack or detours and it is so much more potent for that case as it shows how mental illness a post-birth can ravage that connection between mother and child but also what might happen after that when you have to face going through pregnancy again. It is a candid insight into post-natal depression but also how, even after that, women can still be strong and stand up. I am a big fan of three times rebel as they bring us voices that may have gone under the radar otherwise. This is a hard-hitting book for the reader, Have you read any books that deal with post-natal depression and Motherhood?

Winston’s score – +A Sparsh, stunning prose of one woman’s journey

Azúcar by Nic Ayikwei Parkes

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Azúcar by Nic Ayikwei Parkes

British Ghanian fiction

Source – Review copy

As you all know it is rare for me to review a review copy that isn’t a book in translation but this is one of those that fit the books that aren’t in translation I will review they are books that appeal to me from small publishers, books from either Africa or the Caribbean and lastly a book from a writer I have read and love well this is a rare occasion of a book that ticks every box for me. I reviewed his debut novel very early on in the blog and so when the chance to get to read his second novel as Nii Ayikwei Parkes is one of those writers that writes in any form, he has published a number of volumes of poetry and written children’s books in the 14 years since his debut Tail of the bluebird which I Reviewed very early on in the blog and was one of my favourites the year I read it . I managed to Cath his interview on open books about this and why he choose to set it in an imagined Spanish Caribbean island to move it away from the place and make it about the situation and the characters.

His name was not Yunior; it was Oswald Kole Osabutey Jar.

When the Spanish tutor first asked for his name, he had said it clearly, but Profesor Hernandez had forgotten, and the next time he called Oswald to conjugate a verb, instead of pointing and asking what his name was, as he did with some of the other students – mainly boys from Angola, Southern Sudan, Cape Verde and a sprinkling of girls – Profesor Hernandez snapped his fingers and blurted out, «Yunior.”

Overwhelmed by the newness of everything – the fertile green of our vegetation he could see clearly from his seat by the open window, the weight of concentration it took to follow what he was being taught, the thickness of our Cs and dip of our double Ls, Oswald Kole Osabutey ]nr. opted for the safest utterance – “Si,” he responded.

As a young boy wide eyed at the place and overwhelm the young Yuinor

Fumaz the imagery country at the heart of this book, could, in fact, be any island in the Caribbean in the Guardian review they said it was Cuba but I felt a bit of Haiti init when I read the book follows a number of characters Yunior a young boy from Ghana a boy that has come to study music and has two loves music and plants so when he gets the chance to study on the island of Fumaz that is famed for its very sweet rice crop. He later decides against it. music and follows his heart and studies to become a scientist on plants which is how the two later on meet in the book. Then we have Emelina Santos her grandfather started the whole sweetened rice for the island to grow and made a fortune with it so she is from the upper class of the island her time is split between the island and the US growing up. She sees the young boy in a band Yunior and we follow her life and find out how her family came to make so much money. But the two collide later in adult life as the rice sweetened by sugar is failing and the one man that may help is the boy now a man Junior. As they try to save the island.

His name is Juan Soñada Santos. She already knows this, but he tells her anyway. His family own a chain of shops on the Sun Coast, but their wealth derives mainly from sales of sweet rice grown on their family farm in Fumaz. When he speaks, she notes the gentle movements of his hands. His African ancestry is not obvious, but she traces it in the undertone of his skin, the kinks in his hairline, the tremulant bass of his laugh

Emelina’s forefathers started the sweetened rice craze that the island is so well known for.

This is a book that feels like a 1000-page novel squeezed into a novella but without feeling cheated rich in imagery of leaving home, lost dreams, island life, a storytelling tradition. You feel the island come to life through the two main characters’ eyes that of coming and trying to make your way and then someone that has come from a family that made it as we view their rise over the years. It is a book rich you can tell Parkes is a poet but also his love of music shines through I did in parts imagine the Buena Vista social club those beats that mixture of music that can only come from the Caribbean a melting pot of the US, Latin America and Africa. You could also say the book has the same mix of voices  Marquez the vibrant world he brought to life, a writer like Toni Morrison for family tales of the hard world we can live in and then a writer like Asare Konadu an early writer from Ghana whom I compared to his debut novel a number of years ago. This is a book that follows two people but also is a history of an island and those that left Africa to try and get a better life in the Caribbean. Another thread is an ecological warning about plants and crops and why we want to grow crops a certain way, all packed into less than 180 pages. Have you read this or his debut novel? Azúcar by Nii Ayikwei Parkes is published by Peepal Tree Press the UK’s leading publisher of Caribbean and Black writing, available in paperback from Amazon and Waterstones.

Winstons score – A- a stunning epic in miniature,  let’s hope I don’t have to wait 14 years for his third novel !!

The Boarding House by Piotr Paziński

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The Boarding House by Piotr Paziński

Polish fiction

Original tilte Pensjonat

Translator – Tusia Dąbrowska

Source – Personal copy

I’m going to start to work through some of the many Dalkey Archive books I have brought over the last few years, just a drop in the ocean of what they have published. According to Chad Post, there is well over 1000 title that has come out over the many years the press has run. He is currently putting together that list, and in the meantime, I will cover what I. have. This one jumped out for two reasons it was a European Union book prize winner, an odd book prize that has had several books over the years I have read. The other fact was that Piotr Paziński is a Joyce fan. He has written two books around James Joyce, one a cultural map of Joyce’s Dublin. The other fact os he is editor-in-chief of the Jewish magazine Midrash. This was his debut novel. He has written another since both have been translated into English and are set in the Polish Jewish world. Here we find a grandson heading home to where his grandmother used to live.

IN THE BEGINNING, there were train tracks. In the greenery, between heaven and earth. With stations, like beads on a string, placed so close together that even before the train managed to accelerate, it had to slow down in preparation for the following stop. Platforms made of concrete, narrow and shaky, equipped with ladders and steep steps, grew straight out of sand, as though built on dunes. The stations’ pavilions resembled old-fashioned kiosks: elongated, bent awnings, and azure letters on both ends, which appeared to float on air,

I’ve always enjoyed peering at them, beginning with the first station outside the strict limits of the city, when the crowded urban architecture quickly thins out and the world expands to an uncanny size.

The opening as he is on the Train

The book opens as he is on a train, that echo of earlier trains but also his childhood as he starts to count down the stops as he heads back in Journeys through Poland people had made as he sees the stops he had many years earlier also gone past to visit his grandmother at the Pesjonat (boarding house for the old). He is visiting for one last time to see the ghost of the Boarding house but living and dead; as he gets there, he meets two women he vaguely remembers. One talks to him, but the other her mind is gone as they talk about his grandmother and her time in the house. They are all Holocaust survivors like his Grandmother, but age has caught up on them. Even the house itself is caught up in time. He wakes and looks at the stained ceiling of the house. He meets those who remain the doctor, the director. As he drifts back and forth through time as he tries to remember his late grandmother those summers, they also draw him back into those pre-war and war years, and being Jewish is a sort of last call of these memories to pass them on to the next generation.

“Do you see? And how can you talk to her? She’s lost it completely! Do you understand? This is impossible!” She held me under my arm.

“She knew your grandmother, you know?” she didn’t stop talking. She dug into my arm and told me to turn around as if she wanted to go back to the house already. “She remembers everything very well, but right now she isn’t doing so well. She’s lost her mind a little.”

She stopped to size me up properly.

“Why did you come? For the company? Almost no one is left here, each week they’re taking someone. I also don’t know how long I will stick around. And the young ones aren’t eager to come, so what will you do here? It’s boring to be around old people. Come, you will walk me upstairs now.”

We tottered down the path. The doors were open.

Meeting people that knew his grandmother well but are dying out or forgeting her.

This book tackles being Jewish now in Poland, a smaller community but one heavily tied to the past, but this is the point the guard is changing those last survivors are dying, and the world they grew up in and that past is in a generation now gone. I remember meeting Aharon Appelfeld the Romania – Israeli Jewish writer he was at the IFFP the year he won the prize to briefly chat and hear him talk was an opportunity that is rare these days as so few survivors left. I was also reminded of the words of Dasa Drndric forget this happening, and you open the door to it happening again! But the main thing in this book is a personal feeling. This may be Piotr’s journey on the train, a relative living in the country, or as he said to his translator, the Borsch belt that made me smile. These houses are typical in the middle European countryside, and as it says, this community of survivors’ stories needs protection. A book that has a whiff of folk tales to it as we see a man drift through time. My only complaint is that it could have been a bit more beefed out.

Winstons score -A solid book would have loved a little more!

In the Belly of the Queen by Karosh Taha

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In the Belly of the Queen by Karosh Taha

German Fiction

Original title -Im Bauch der Königin

Translator Grashina Gabelmann

Source – Review copy

I was sent this unusual book from V&Q by the Kurdish-German writer Karosh Taha; she came to Germany with her parents when she was just ten. Her family settled in Duisburg, which isn’t to far from the part of Germany in Kleve in the Ruhr area. She had trained as an English teacher and worked teaching English initially as her writing career took off. This is her second novel. Both are set and deal with close-knit Kurdish communities living in Germany in high-rise buildings. This book tells the same story from two different angles and can be read in two ways female first, then a male story or the opposite. Way around. The book uses a fight Amal has with her young classmate Younes and the book is told from her perspective and Younes’s best friend Rafiq’s perspective.

I tell Younes my father never wore jeans, and he nods, he knows that, and he smokes like my father did. Younes remembers my father better than his own. For Younes, his father means waiting and enduring, enduring the wait.
I tell Younes he only ever wore black trousers with his shirt loosely tucked in, he was lanky, that’s why the shirt fluttered around the sides of his torso – his clothes seemed too large for his body, yet just right. His only accessory was nonchalance, and I wonder how he dresses now, whether he still wears clothes from his time as a student.

Amal remembering her father and the way he was.

As I said, the book is really two novellas that follow the same events over the same time frame from Amal the young female and the main character of the book. As she hits the young Younes, her father jumps to protect his daughter, but he abruptly leaves her, and she ends up. Living with the boy she hit and his mother, as they like her, have been pushed outside. Her father defended her, but at what cost to himself and what knock-on effect does this have on her life after this, even in this close-knit community as Younes is an outsider due to his mother Shahira, a free spirit, a woman that lives by her own rule. This world of Younes. We see through the eyes of his best friend Rafiq, a young boy initially drawn to his mate’s mum but then repulsed by her free spirit as he sees his Kurdish culture come through. But he ends up in a relationship with the equally free-spirited Aal. What does he want thou, Rafiq? This is the sound of the two cultures clashing the tight-knit and relatively similar to their homeland Kurdish community. They live in the high rise tight-knit choking on its way, or can they escape to live as Germans? All these floats around the three youngsters as they grow up. This book has layers to it it follows the aftermath of one event and the tug of war growing up in this situation. This is maybe closer to English books like Brick Lane or the early books from Hanif Kureishi than most German books.

I want Shahira  to lick her spoon; I want to see her tongue wan. But she never does, and she’s always pleased to see me tion. burn in, Raffig: She saunters barefoot into the kitchen She’s wearing leggings like the girls in our year, with her shir just covering her butt. Every curve’s still visible. When she’s nor wearing heels, she’s the same height as Amal, and I could easily put my arm around her. Her dark hair falls in waves over her breasts and shoulders. Sometimes she puts her hair up – then you can see her neck, which is browner than the rest of her body.I don’t know what her belly looks like or the folds underneath her arse. Amal’s are white because she goes to the tanning studio.Shahira sometimes tans in the afternoon sun, but not often – it gives you ugly wrinkles and spots, she says. She used to sit on her balcony wearing a summer dress and let the sun shine on herglistening legs for half an hour

Rafiq sexual awakening are muddled here

This is another book that reminds me of my time in Germany. I worked alongside a number of refugees some from Iraq and others from Former Yugoslavia. Some people in this book could have quickly been working in the Jugendwerkstatt I worked at. The wonder of this story is how it shows the gender divide in the community she grew up in and how people can view one event and the aftermath differently over time. It follows a girl that goes on to be a very strong woman in Amal. But it also shows the outfall of war and having to move on children when thrust into a different society with different rules. As I said, this book is maybe nearer to some books like Bribk Lane or A book like Interpreter of Maldives, both books that follow second-generation immigrants, those kids growing up on that divide between family past and the present and the country they live in. I loved the use of two narrations for the same event it is like what Durrel did with Alexandra Quartet as the same timeframe is told two ways the unreliable nature of the youngster’s narrative comes to the fore, and also how swayed they can be by gender and their own culture. Have you read this unusual book ?

Winston’s score – A – This is a look at growing up in two cultures in this case in Germany but it is a universal story of two cultures clashing

That was the month that Was May 23

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  1. 533 A Book of Days by Cees Nooteboom
  2. I’ll do anything you want by Iolanda Batallé
  3. I served the king of England by Bohumil Hrabal 
  4. Liminal by Roland Schimmelpfennig
  5. Balkan Bombshells Female writing from Serbia and Montenegro 
  6. The Most Precious of Cargoes by Jean-Claude Grumberg 
  7. All the devils are Here by David Seabrook

Well, the month started with a series of vignettes from the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom. Then we headed to Spain, and a woman’s a sexual awakening as she discovered her sexual side. Then a waiter climbs the ladder in the inter-war years but the dark shadows of world war two are already there. Then a failed detective finds out why a dead woman in a wedding dress drifts past some clubbers. Then Istros book has collected together the cream of Balkan female voices in a new collection. Then a fable-like tale of a child saved from the horrors of the Holocaust and finally the dark side of the some Kent seaside town. I read books from seven countries this month. There is no new publishers this month.

Book of the month

I had to pick Balakn Bombshells. This is a month that has been strong on the blog I can’t remember a month with so many great books reviewed. But this captures the voices of the top writers in Serbia. The dark years of the break of Yugoslavia are there, but also a sense of writers breaking free of that of women writing about being woman female issues/

Non-book events

I had a post around my favourite podcast this month, which I have been listening podcast a lot more recently.I think this will show as I aim to head into the world of Marias a bit more. I also caught Peter Davison Campion again, which I had not seen for years, and I had mistaken a crime journalist that had worn a Campion tie thinking it was a Kames Joyce tie many years ago at a crime writing meal I got invited to. Amanda and I have watched a couple of series; ten pound poms followed a group of people that followed the Aussie dream for various reasons, a sort of call the midwife in the Sun, almost that Sunday night sort of show, but it was fun. We are now halfway through Small Light which uses Mieps Gies the woman that helps hide the Franks during world war two it is a new take on the story that shows their world of being Dutch and under Nazis rules the different attitudes to the events. Music wise I’ve been on a retro kick a lot of Fury in the Slaughterhouse, Pet shop boys, Depeche Mode, and the month finished off with a new album from Califone, a band that I have loved for years, and this is maybe their best album.

Next month Book wise

I have a backlog of 16 books to review, as I have just read the 50th book of the year and have reviewed 34 this year. This includes the last of the bookers to review. We announced the Shadow winner this month. I also have a couple of classics. Then a couple of new books. Mostly from Europe, but I need to catch up, so I hope to do so this month. I’m of the mind to read a couple of really long books this month. I fancy Shira by SY Agnon, and maybe another to help catch up on the review backlog, and summer nights are great for reading longer books. What are your plans for the next month?

Weekend away and some books brought

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Amanda and I have just had a weekend away. We do this every year with Amanda’s parents, sister and Aunt and Uncle. This year we chose a country hotel between Ashbourne and Leek on the edge of the peak district. We arrived Friday and wandered around Ashbourne, but as it was late, things were closing, but we had something to eat and planned to visit in the morning. We headed out in the morning, had coffee in Ashbourne, and then headed to the Oxfam bookshop. I had been a few years ago and often find Oxfam bookshops about the best charity shops to look around for books, and this was the case again.I found three books in there. We had a look around the antique shops. I am searching for a Victorian writing slope for my library come office to finish it off but to no avail. Anyway, here are the books.

The three books are Beckett’s essay on Proust and three dialogues. I don’t know a lot about this, but I Have enjoyed the Beckett I have read over the years. Then from Joesph Roth’s The String of Pearls, another book a Writer i have read but hadn’t heard the title of before, I have reviewed two other books from him over the years of the blog. The last is a former Prix Goncourt winner, Fields of Glory; I have in my head either a run-through former Goncourt winner or Nobel winner as a long-term project or both not quite decided yet. It is something I have been thinking over for a couple of years to do.

We then headed to Leek, a town I had often driven through as it is on the way back from my childhood home of Congleton to Chesterfield, but on all those trips through, I had rarely stopped, and we were surprised it was bigger than I remember it had a flea come antique market. I was nearly tempted as there were two writing slopes, but one had no lock, although I could replace it with the other lock, and the other was a tad too large, and neither had a secret compartment a must in my eyes the search will carry on. We visited the Oxfam in Leek, just a shop, and I found two books.

Murakami’s Birthday Stories a collection of short stories he chose a number of years ago with one of his own stories. I looked at this over the years and felt I should get it. Then Shakespeare by Anthony Burgess. I am a huge Burgess fan, and having all bar one of his novels, I am now on to the non-fiction titles, and this cover matches in part the copy of Dead Man in Deptford by Burgess I have. Then as is the case, I felt the need for a coffee and some cake. We stopped at a cafe called Kiek just off the marketplace, and it was the best Dairy free Brownie I have ever eaten. So tasty. Then we headed to the bookshop in Leek on two levels, which reminded me of Scriveners in Buxton. I brought some more books there

First of all, is Nature writing by Little Toller called Snow, One of my favourite books of all time is Encyclopedia of Snow by Sarah Emily Miano (A book worthy of being on the Backlisted podcast, a real lost gem, a book that is more Sebald than Sebald!) anyway this is another book around snow. Then there is Jean Cocteau’s debut novel, a short book from Zola, a nice weekend, and some unusual books that are less well-known by great writers. Have you had a good weekend?

 

The return of Stu’s Favourite Podcasts

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It seemed a while since I had done a post around the bookish and a couple non-books podcasts I have been listening to in the last while I did a post many years ago, but some of the podcasts have gone others had evolved over the years. SO lets get into it

First is The Mookse and Gripes. Trevor as a blogger has been as around as long as I can remember being on the net which is about the time I started this blog. He has done the podcast for a number of years firstly with his brother and now with Paul. This version for me really works there is an excellent connection as they chat over books it is a mix of deep dives into writers and publishers and a list of books around a set topic. Of course, it has a lot of books in Translation mentioned.

Next up is tea or Books. Simon and Rachel have long been a favourite for me. I love their chat I love the fact they discuss books, so out of my sphere of reading it reminds me of what is out there; the show is split into a discussion around a question around books do you like books set in a bookshop or such. Then the second part is two books that share a theme or trait and which they like best.

Next up a really new shiny podcast, Lost in Redonda is a new podcast it is also split into two parts. The first discusses a backlist title the second half is a journey into the world of The King of Redonda, Javier Marias. He is a writer. I have read but have always felt that over people love him I am hoping well it has so far it has made me want to take a deep dive into Marias at some point and discover this writer more than know already.

Next up is Frances One Bright book podcast she has been involved with the Shadow Booker international since the start. Her podcast is a discussion around a single book that they all read it is great to see how different readers that broadly have similar tastes react to the books they read.

Next is another Newish podcast. The pair are young and host this unlike the other podcasts where I have known or known the people connected to the podcast This is a podcast dedicated to NYRB classics they are going to read all the books from them (I bet Trevor from Mookse is kicking himself he has long championed them )

Then we have Biulaq a podcast focused on Arabic Literature featuring the people behind the Arablit Blog and the Arabist blog. This has given me so many books in the last year or so even in this week’s episode I had read two of the three books I will be reading the other book they mention if you want to learn about Arabic fiction in translation.

Then we have the Anthony Burgess podcast that is working through his 99 novels and also has shown around him as a writer as you may know I have a huge soft spot for him and I am enjoying the trip through the 99 best books he had chosen as the best in English.

A little different a writer podcast the poet Sally Bayley talks about writing, poetry and life on her narrowboat a mix of her life poetry and nature a sweet podcast.

Mentions for Book podcast

Backlisted -a mine of great backlisted titles

Reading McCarthy – all about Cormac McCarthy and his boooks

Vollmania – All around William T Vollman

Chatting lit I’m very new to this but seems interesting so far

Then we have

99% INVISIBLE

This design podcast has been going years it looks at design and how we often miss it one of my favourite ones was about Thomassons those piece of street furnture maintain but totally useless now this came from American Baseball payer that was useless when he played in Japan this lead to people using his name for pictures of these unused piece of street furniture.

Have you a favourite podcast ?

 

Liminal by Roland Schimmelpfennig

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Liminal by Roland Schimmelpfennig

German Fiction

Original title –Die Linie zwischen Tag und Nacht

Translator – Jamie Bulloch

Source – Review copy

I was excited when this dropped through my; letterbox as I was a massive fan of Roland’s first novel to be translated into English, which had come out several years ago and also had one of the memorable titles of recent years ‘One Clear, ice-cold January Morning at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century. I said at the time, he is actually best known as a Playwright in his homeland as his plays are amongst the best known in the German-speaking world, and he is the most performed in Germany. He initially worked as a journalist before turning to Drama. The German title is the line between day and night, and that is what the book centres on the situation of people caught between the world of the day and the dark of the night.

Two helicopters circled above Görlitzer Park, but they were flying far too close to one another; what if they touched, what if they plummeted from the sky into the dancing crowd?

But were there really two helicopters circling above us?Maybe it was just one; having been awake for more than twenty-four hours I might be seeing double.

Dancing next to me by the canal were a Colombian draughtswoman, a Croatian roofer, a Portuguese waitress, a Syrian IT guy, an Indian girl who could breathe fire, and a very tall, very thin, bearded Russian who described himself as a mystic. The Russian, Ivan, was the only one I knew.

All of them were wide awake yet deathly tired, and they all shared what they had on them: cocaine, MDMA, ketamine, speed, beer and vodka.

The nscene as the body drifted past Tommy and nthe fellow Clubbers

 

The book opens with the line she floated in her white wedding dress on the green water. A dead woman is floating past a techno club in Berlin, and no one bats an eye not sure if it is just a show or something but it is Tommy, a disgraced drugs officer, that sees that girl is dead and isn’t some sort of art piece floating by the multitudes dance a collection of Croatian roofers, Portuguese waitress a tall thin Russian this is the collection of people that have drunk and taken drugs together in the club all that night. Tommy decides to discover more about the dead girl, a journey that takes =him to the dark heart of Berlin’s nightclub scene. Drawn into the world he used to try and police. He was a great officer, but he got tainted by the drugs and drawn into the night as he drags this dead girl out of the canal, he has to face his past mistakes and try and discover who she was and also how she ended up floating dead in a wedding dress down a canal as the clubbers just carried on dancing.

I sat with Gianni in the restaurant, which was still empty.By now we were onto our fourth grappa.

We talked about Csaba. We talked about saba’s trip to Hamburg.

-That’s what he’s like, Gianni said. It’s not greed, it’s a lack of restraint.

Gianni asked me about the dead woman in the canal. I asked him how he knew about her and he said, I was there.

Half the city was there. The television cameras were there.

You’re famous, Tommy, but then again you’ve been famous for a while now.

Gianni made a gesture as if he were holding a camera.- It was nice to see you, Chef de Police à bord, he said as I made to leave. “Chef de Police à bord” is what Csaba once called me.

Tommy has to go into his own past as he tries to find out what has happened!

This isn’t a thriller or a road trip into the dark heart of the club scene and its darker side the drugs and how so many young people fall along the way.  We follow Tommy as he wades through the flotsam and jetsom that is the line between the sea of drugs and the land of the day and everyone else. Tommy knows this place well he has been caught up in his own flotsam and jetsom for far too long. This would make a great Wim Wender film s it has Berlin at is heart and Wenders Berlin, through his lens also captured that line between day and night, between drugs and trying to live in the day. This is the story that should be his next movie. I was reminded of some of the scenes in Wenders Faraway so close. So many souls in this book had drifted off in the sea of drug casualties of the night. Have you read any books by Schimmelpfenig or seen his plays ?

Winstons score – +A One of the best books from Germany I have read in recent years.