The Fatal Eggs by Mikhail Bulgakov

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The Fatal Eggs by Mikhail Bulgakov

Russian fiction

0riginal title –  Роковые яйца

Translator – Hugh Aplin

Source – Personal copy

I added this last minute to the 1925 club as I had the book and it wasn’t among the four books I had picked, but with finishing one book quicker than expected, I managed to read this book. It was actually the cover that caught my eye initially. I also hadn’t yet reviewed a book by Bulgakov on the blog. I thought I had, but looking back, I mustn’t have reviewed one a few years ago. I haver a few of his books on my tbr. He is best known for The Master and Margarita, which he wrote after this book. He actually had a sprint of writing, as he had three books available for 1925, written but not published til this year. This book was finished in 1924 but came out fully in 1925, and is hard to pigeonhole. It has sci-fi elements, satire, commentary, and critique of the early years of Soviet rule.

The start of the horrifying catastrophe must be considered as having been made specifically on that ill-starred evening, just as the first cause of that catastrophe should be considered to be specifically Vladimir Ipatyevich Persikov.

He was exactly fifty-eight years old. He had a remarkable head, pestle-like, bald, with tufts of yellowish hair sticking out along the sides. He had a clean-shaven face, the lower lip poking forward. Because of this, Persikov’s face eternally bore a rather capricious stamp. On a red nose were small old-fashioned glasses in a silver frame, he had brilliant little eyes, was tall, rather stooped. He spoke in a thin, squeaking, croaking voice and had, among other oddities, this one: when he was saying anything weightily and confidently, he turned the index finger of his right hand into a hook and narrowed his little eyes. And as he always spoke confidently, since his erudition in his field was absolutely phenomenal, the hook appeared very frequently before the eyes of Professor Persikov’s interlocutors. Whereas outside his field, i.e. zoology, embryo-logy, anatomy, botany and geography, Professor Persikov said almost nothing.

The events follow after his wife had left him

The book focuses on a scientist, Professor Presikov, who studies Amphibians. I laughed at the early pages when there was a note left by his wife, saying how unhappy she’d be remembering the frogs he kept.I was reminded of the UK comedy series League of Gentlemen, which had a man who kept toads as pets. Anyway, after his wife left, he lost rooms in his house under the new soviet system, then fell out of favour, then back into favour. Still, one day, he was gone, his quality Ziess lens microscope. He finds that some of the red light from it, left in the sun, has triggered a reaction during binary fission. This is the early days of discoveries like X-rays and early nuclear ideas, so when the amphibians produce lots of spawn, it leads to a frenzy of press, and other agencies want to use this discovery for their own ends. So when they want the ray tried on different farm animals, it has unexpected consequences, and then some eggs are done, and it goes from bad to worse. This is a book that captures every nugget of the time and some of its ideals.

On the second evening the professor, looking pinched and pale, without food, keeping himself going only with fat roll-ups, studied the new generation of amoebae, while on the third day he moved on to the primary source, that is to the red ray.

The gas hissed quietly in the burner, again the traffic shuffled along the street, and the professor, poisoned by the hundredth cigarette, half closing his eyes, leant onto the back of his revolving armchair.

“Yes, it’s all clear now. They were brought to life by the ray.

It’s a new ray, studied by nobody, discovered by nobody. The first thing that will have to be cleared up is whether it results only from electricity, or from the sun as well,’ Persikov muttered to himself.

the ray is an accident really .

This book has already been translated four times. This is the third translation; a newer one came out a few years ago. He read the book out when it came out, and it was well received, with parts of it giving nods to specific policies in the soviet union at the time. It also captures that early sci-fi of unknown rays. What is the red ray he has found? Ideas about science and improving or increasing food production. It is comic in places when things go wrong. He did worry that this satire might have gone too far with its nods to specific Soviet policies of the time and the way the characters might be thinly veiled reflections of actual people of the time. I felt this would go well after cement, as this is the sort of book the Soviets would have hated; they loved the social realism fiction, not Sci-fi satire like this. Have you read any of his books this year ?

Cement by Fyodor Vasilievich Gladkov

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Cement by Fyodor Vasilievich Gladkov

Russian fiction

Original title – Цемент

Translator – A S Arthur and C Ashleigh

Source – Personal copy

I am on to the second book for the 1925 club. This jumped out at me as I had planned to read a lot more classics in translation. This was the sort of book I had in mind when doing that. This is a writer, a little lesser known now and this is a book that, when it came out, was well received and considered the first piece of socialist realist fiction. He had fought in the Red Army during the Russian Revolution and was expelled from the communist party. After this book came out, he was taken back in, and this was held up as an example of what soviet literature should be. He was the secretary of the journal Novy Mir and later became the director of the Maxim Gorky Institute. This is one of the two of his books that seemed to have been translated.

He immediately recognised two of them. The old woman was the wife of Loshak the mechanic; the laughing one was the wife of Gromada, another mechanic. The third was a stranger whom he had never seen before.

As he approached them on the narrow pathway he stood aside in the high grass and gave them a military salute.

“Good morning, Comrades! “

They looked at him askance as though he were a tramp and stepped past him. Only the last one, the laughing one, gave a screeching laugh like a scared hen: “Get on with you!

There’s enough scamps like you about. Must one say ‘ Good-day to everybody? “

” What’s the matter with you, wenches? Don’t you recog-

nise me? “

Loshak’s wife looked morosely at Gleb-just as an old witch would do—then murmured to herself in her deep voice:

“Why, this is Gleb. He has risen from the dead, the rascal !” And went on her way, silent and sullen.

The first day or so as he returns Gleb

Cement depicts the main character in the book, Gleb, as a soldier who fought in the Russian Revolution for the Red Army. He has returned to his hometown and to take up his job in the Cement factory, only to find that since he has been at war, the way the factory is run has changed, as it is now part of the soviet machine. Added to that, his wife Dasha has, since he left, become the head of the women’s section of the communist Party in the factory. She is the new woman of those soviet posters. Added to this is Polya, another strong woman, but she is more drawn to Gleb as the returning hero from the war. She has sacrificed having a husband to fight for the party and is drawn when Gleb returns to this man especially as Gleb and his wife seems to have grown apart Added to this there is Kleist a man that sold out Galeb during the war sold him out to the white guard Gleb has to accept he is been taking back in and the fact that he is a scientist. The book sees how Gleb adjusts to the return to civilian life and the soviet era.

In the morning, Gleb, still asleep, felt that the room was not a room but an empty hole. A breeze was blowing between the window and door, whirling in gusts, redolent of spring. He opened his eyes. It was true; the sun was blazing through the window. Dasha was standing at the table, adjusting her flaming headscarf. She glanced at him and laughed. An amber light shone in her eyes.

“We don’t sleep as late as this here, Gleb. The sun is beating down like a drum. I’ve already worked out a report for the Women’s Section on the children’s crêches and the estimate for the linen and furniture. I’ve got it worked out, but where’s the money coming from? We’re so beggarly poor.

Our Party Committee should be given a jolt, so they’ll squeeze something out of the bourgeois. I’m going to kick up a row about it from now on. And you, remember you haven’t seen Nurka yet. Do you want to go with me to the Children’s Home? It’s close by.”

The party runs everything he finds out !

This has it all, really: a hero returning to a post-war landscape of Soviet-era Russia to find a different world. The fact that his wife has changed is significant. I was reminded of the books and films I have seen about the post-World War II era, when women had to return to domestic life. This is the other side where they didn’t have the conflict between the scientist Kleist, a white guard man who had sold out Gleb, but now back in the factory, adding to Gleb’s woes, then the two women, his wife, who has changed without him, and the two of them adjusting to his return. Then Polya, a woman who had given up a relationship, is drawn to the returning hero. Add to this the party line on everything as we see one man trying to find his place in soviet era in the cement factory, trying to find his place and be part of the whole maybe the choice of the Cement factory was a good metaphor for what they wanted a bond workforce  Post the revolution of men and women working along side enemies alongside one another. I enjoyed this. I have read a couple of other soviet realist novels, but if you know of any others, let me know!

The Yellow Sofa by Eça de Queirós

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The Yellow sofa by Eça de Queirós

Portuguese fiction

Original title – Alves & C.a

Translator – John Vetch

Source – Personal copy

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

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

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

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

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

The man was Machado!

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

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

 

The Silence by Don DeLillo

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The Silence by Don DeLillo

American fiction

Source – Library book

I have been trying ot pop to the local library a little more, get a few books out not always to read, but to just have them there, as I always look for books that have passed me by or I haven’t heard of when looking down the stacks at the library. I am lucky that Chesterfield has a reasonable library with a good selection of fiction so when I spotted this book by DeLillo, which I hadn’t seen mentioned much when it came out, I had reviewed another book by him on the blog, and when Underworld came out in paperback which would be about 1998 I read it for me that is alongside Mason and Dixon is the greatesrt american novel I had read. But I know Delillo has written some novellas. I  read Falling Man a few years ago. So I picked up his last novella to come out.

Words, sentences, numbers, distance to destination.

The man touched the button and his seat moved from its upright position. He found himself staring up at the nearest of the small screens located just below the overhead bin, words and numbers changing with the progress of the flight. Altitude, air temperature, speed, time of arrival. He wanted to sleep but kept on looking.

Heure à Paris. Heure à London.

“Look,” he said, and the woman nodded faintly but kept on writing in a little blue notebook.

He began to recite the words and numbers aloud

because it made no sense, it had no effect, if he simply noted the changing details only to lose

Jim and his wife are in the plane as all this starts

The premise of this book is framed around a group of people who are due to meet for the Super Bowl for a meal and to watch the match. The story starts in Paris with a set of Guests due that evening. Then the action shows the guest in the apartment waiting for a sudden blackout. A moment that causes absolute chaos, and what we get is the thoughts of the five guests, Jim and his wife are on the flight that is due to take them to the evening. Max, the host for the night, is a man who struggles when his access to the screen he is used to stops. Then we have Diane Max’s wife, who is a calming influence on the night’s events. Martin, a student obsessed with Einstein and the Epitaph of the book, is a nod to this, a quote about World War III from Einstein about how that war would be on tech. That is, the five people are viewed in what would happen if all of the sound tech were wiped out. Our depedency on tech these days.

Let the impulse dictate the logic.

This was the gambler’s creed, his formal

statement of belief.

They sat waiting in front of the superscreen

TV. Diane Lucas and Max Stenner. The man had a history of big bets on sporting events and this was the final game of the football season, American football, two teams, eleven players each team, rectangular field one hundred yards long, goal lines and goal posts at either end, the national anthem sung by a semi-celebrity, six U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds streaking over the stadium.

The superbowl is about to start as all this happens  anbd we see how the guerst react.

I enjoyed this; it is one of those what-if moment books, like Javier Cercas’s in his book Blind spot, the unseen action, like her, what is the unseen when there is a cyberattack that wipes out the tech. We have silence, this is what this book deals with, he has taken the Einstein thought on what world war three may be and thought what would happen in those initial seconds after an event like this. I have seen this idea expanded on in the TV drama Zero Day with Robert De Niro, which follows a cyberattack. So one has the events in the apartment when what Delillo calls the silence happens. I liked the use of the Super Bowl, as it is a time when a lot of American families and friends would gather for an event like this. But also in these days of tech, we would have the tv , the phone, a laptop, social media, all going whilst doing this, what happens when all that suddenly is just a blank screen? I liked the way he saw how the different characters all act in one way or another. But the horror outside is yet to be seen! I enjoyed this book, it reminded me I need to go back and read his earlier novels at some date. Have you read any of his early books? Have you read any other book that looks at an event like this happening?

 

The Splendor of Portugal by António Lobo Antunes

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The Splendor of Portugal by António Lobo Antunes

Portuguese literature

Original title – O Esplendor de Portugal

Translator Rhett McNeil

Source – Personal copy

As I said in the last post, the run-up to the Nobel usually sees me reading a few Nobel hopefuls. With all that happened, I’m a little late reviewing them. I had thought it might be Atune’s year to win. He is the soul of his country’s past, a man who experienced much of what he writes about as a doctor who served in the Portuguese colonies in Africa. Having spent time in Angola in the seventies, this book looks back at that period, but as he does, he also observes the fall of other colonies in southern Africa, such as the Belgians in Congo. But what struck me as I read this is the parallel with events and feelings in Vietnam and the American experience in that war.

There’s something terrible in me. Sometimes at night the rustling of the sunflowers wakes me and, in the darkness of the bedroom, I feel my womb growing bigger with something that is neither a child, nor swelling, nor a tumor, nor illness, it’s some sort of scream that, instead of coming out of your mouth, comes out of your entire body and fills up the fields like the howling of dogs, and then I stop breathing, grab the headboard hard and a thousand stems of silence slowly float inside the mirrors, awaiting the dreadful clarity of morning. At such times I think I’m dead, surrounded by workers’ huts and cotton, my mother already dead, my husband already dead, their places at the table faded away, and now I live in mere rooms, empty rooms whose lights I turn on at dusk to disguise their absence. As a child, before we came back to Angola, I watched the lynching of the town lunatic in Nisa. Kids on the street were afraid of him, dogs ran away from him if he happened to pass by, he stole tanger-ines, eggs, flour, would install himself in front of the high altar and insult the Virgin, one day he flayed the belly of a calf from its neck to its groin, the animal walked into the town square tripping over its own entrails, the farmers from the nearby farm grabbed the lunatic

This long passaage of the mother about the things she had seen caught me !

What this book does so well is capture the whole effect of the fall of Angola through the prism of one family and their servants. The Alemida Family is led really by the Mother Isilda, a strong woman who is like a lot of people of her generation, proud of their settler life in Angola and what they have as a  life. This is set over two times in the late seventies as Angola starts to fall. How the family copes with this from Father Amadeu, who seems to have just accepted the fall and has sunk into the bottle. The children from the Oldest Carlos is he really Amadeu’s son, is something he feels, looking as though he may be mixed-race. Rui, the middle child, we see later on, is broken and in an institution after all that had happened, and he saw it when he was a child. Then, the youngest of the three children, Clarisse, is a wild, angry woman who uses her lovers to seek revenge on her family in a way. The book also sees them many years later, after the events in 1978 in Lisboa, as they gather in 1995 for a Christmas meal. The chapters alternate, and we see the events from all angles of the family.

for the most part, his epilepsy an earthworm gnawing holes in his head, my mother used to take him to the doctor in Malanje, when she returned home with him, even though shed bought a handkerchief for herself, you could tell shed been crying, she left Rui in the kitchen went upstairs and took ages to come down to the dinner table, her eyes swollen and her voice worn-out, piercing everything with her stare but not noticing anything at all, refusing to eat the soup, refusing to eat the fish, lying on her bed at night, you could hear her sobbing mixed with the thousands of other noises without origin or cause that inhabit the silence, I shook Clarisse and Clarisse

I liked the desciption of Rui epilepsy being like an earthworm through his brain !

I was reminded of this as I watched the film Apocalypse Now, which had similar themes to this book, especially in the new redux version, during the part where they spent time with the French plantation owner. Because in a way, this is Portugal’s Vietnam and the horrors that happened at the time, but also the way it has affected the country since. This is what I love about Atunes’s writing: it is dark but captures the horror of it all, and how it affected each member of the family. I have seen him described as Faulkner-like in his writing. For me, this has echoes of the polyphonic voices Faulkner had in something like As I Lay Dying. The same dark gothic feel. I was surprised by how they didn’t admit defeat until the troops were at the next plantation to theirs. It captures the dying embers of colonialism and the effects on this one family all those years later. Each member has reacted and coped in their own way with the horrors and the loss of that time. I always feel he has seen this firsthand in the seventies, as he was a doctor during the Angolan war. Have you read any books that make you feel the horrors and pain as though you were there? As for the Nobel, I hope he does win one day, but hell, he is in his mid-80s, get around to it, guys!

 

 

What’s left of the Night by Ersi Sotiropoulos

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What’s left of the night by Ersi Sotiropoulos

Greek fiction

Original title – Ti ménei apó ti nýchta

Translator – Karen Emmerich

Source – Personal copy

I had hoped to do this review a few weeks ago, but life has got in the way as you all know. It was one of those books I try to read every year before the Nobel prize comes out, and you look down the list of favourites for the award, and there are always a couple of gaps, and Ersi Sotiropoulos is one she has been high up in the betting the last few years. She was made a favourite by the media in Greece the year Han Kang won, so if it comes down to male and female winners, she may be a favourite for next year. Anyway this had grabbed my attention as it is set in Paris a city I have yet to visit other than in fiction. I tend to travel so much in my reading, but I am someone who hasn’t had much in my own life. It also uses the poet C.P. Cavafy when he himself visited Paris at the end of a European tour before he became the great poet and was still young and discovering his sexuality, he had a rather mad three days in Paris.

His efforts to mend the breach kept them talking late into the night, and hed been the one to suggest that his brother rewrite an old poem and change its setting to the fire at the Bazar de la Charité, from which Paris was still reeling. The occasion for the earlier version had been a snippet of conversation a friend of John’s overheard at an art opening in Alexandria. A Greek society lady, the wife of a successful merchant-the friend hadn’t given her name-was gazing at a painting of a setting sun smeared with purples and reds, and leaned on the shoulder of the man beside her, a well-known figure in the Greek community, likewise married—the friend hadn’t given his name, either-and whispered with a heavy sigh: “‘d prefer to set in your arms.” He had found it insipid, the metaphor or allegory, whatever it was, but John laughed and jotted it down. He later wrote a poem about the bombing of Alexandria in 1882 and the conflagration that followed. In the poem, the genteel lady’s words served as an ironic counterpoint to the catastrophe and the vandalism that subsequently swept the city

He spent his life mainly in Alexandria he is ion Durrell book Alendria quartet

I haven’t read a lot of Cavafy;, he has been on my radar for years, so this made me want to learn more about him. We meet Cavafy, his brother John (Ionas), as they spend what in a way is a standard few days wandering around as most tourists do, visiting the sites and some of the grubby sites of Paris, from high art galleries to low-life Brothels, we see the pair, the carefree Cavafy and his slightly more sensible brother. What we have is a man wrestling with the life events around him, both in Paris and in his own country. A boy becoming a man, almost a man becoming a poet, a man discovering his sexual appetite. This is a tale of a man struggling to break free from the conformity of the world he lives in and move to a more modern world. There are some moments of sexual awakening with Cavafy discovering his desires that remind me of the way Joyce described some of his sexual scenes, those little moments of desire.

What time was it now? The conversation tired him. The armchair with the slit was diagonally across from him. How he would have liked to see that wavy hair tumbling down its back, slipping over the brocade fab-ric, to see those eyes, those lips again. But he really needed to get to the point, so he spoke of Moréass library, which while large had seemed to him rather lacking in depth, and about the book by that young writer, Marcel Proust, Anatole France’s protégé, which hed sought in vain, and hearing his voice sound more and more shallow and macabre, he stepped like a sleepwalker into Moréas’s office and approached the gallows of the desk, in the alcove illuminated by a single gas lamp, whose sloped ceiling made it look like a lair. Or perhaps a refuge, though the light was raw and cold … He went closer, then closer still.

I loved to think of a time when Proust was the hip writer on the scene

I liked this book; it is a dreamy tale of a few days in Paris with no real plot in it, more of an overview of a man discovering himself. Maybe a sort of superpowered Bildungsroman in a weekend, what happens when your eyes are open. When you get the chance to be more than you are, the chance to discover through art and experiences new ways of thinking and erotic thoughts. The transition from the Victorian age to the new century, and all that it would mean. This is that time before the dark clouds of World War I, the middle of the Belle Epoque in France, as he discovers this. I enjoyed this book. I feel that if I were more aware of his poetry, I would like to go back and re-read it. Which of her books should I read next? Have you read any others by her?

 

Nobel 2025 is going to László Krasznahorkai

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The Nobel prize for Literature has just been announced and the winner is László Krasznahorkai. The Hungarian writer had been near the top of the betting for the last ten years. His best known book is Satantango, a slowly unwinding book in a backwater village as horror unfurls as a man comes to the town. I have reviewed the book and several other works by László Krasznahorkai over the past year. He is a complex writer whose work encompasses a multitude of ideas and threads, set across various parts of the world. The Nobel Committee said in the quote he was given it for

“for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”.

He has also made several films with Bela Tarr, based on his book Satantango, including one of them. His last book was Herscht 07769, which I have yet to review.

Nobel Literaure 2025

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

Latin America

Cesar Aira

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

Juan Gabriel Vasquez

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

dark past. I have also reviewed some books from Vasquez 

Wildcard

Andres Neumann

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

Spain

Enrique Vila Matas

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

Javier Cercas

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

Manuel Rivas

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

Bernardo Axtaga

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

Portugal

Antonio Lobo Antunes

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

So that is for the places

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

Laszlo Krasznahorkai and Peter Nadas

Both have written epic books, Satantango and Parallel Stories.

Laszlo is maybe better known in the last few years.

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

But I have reviewed books from both writers.

Wildcards

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

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

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

What are your thoughts ?

What are your thoughts on a winners ?

A month in Siena bt Hisham Matar

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A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar

Art memoir

Source – Personal copy

I not sure quite when I heard about this book, I think I had seen it mentioned here and there, and then either a podcast or such mentioned a bit more about it, and I just knew this would be a book that I would love, as it mixes both Memoir and art in one. It was a book I just had to get one day, and that rarely happens, especially when it wasn’t a book in translation. However, it shows Hisham Matar travelling to Siena and how, when he was much younger, he had connected with a series of paintings from the Sienese school of painting as a 19-year-old, after discovering that his father had been kidnapped. He had found solace over the following year after his father’s kidnapping. So when he gets the chance to visit Siena himself for a month, he has the opportunity to write this as a meditation on art, love, life, and grief.

That first night in Siena I had a dream that I was directing a feature film in a city by the sea. I had gathered the crew by the main promenade at the edge of the unknown city to shoot an important scene. I could feel the presence of the big metropolis behind me. The sea was deep and voluminous, its surface rippled. There was nothing interrupting its horizon. I thought of taking a swim and the next moment I found myself undressing. No one seemed to mind. I climbed on to the short wall and dived. As soon as 1 was under water I regretted my action. I had not even checked if there were steps out. What if I cannot find a way to get back on dry land? When I rose to the surface and looked back, I saw that I had drifted far out to sea. The city was now the horizon. My rapid heartbeat was not only in my ears but seemed to run all the way down into the depths and fill them. I felt as if I were wasting away, leaking into the water.

His first night of the month

The book is one of those books that is hard to pigeonhole, as it isn’t just about art, it isn’t just travel, and it isn’t just a memoir. The book is a little bit of all these when Hisham takes the chance to have a month in Siena and remembers the years before, when he spent a lot of time in London looking at the paintings from the Sienese school. He is also there, writing the memoir of the events around his father’s disappearance during the Gaddafi regime. The book captures him as he discovers Siena, a walled city that resembles a maze, as he wanders the streets and meets people over time. He connects the past, recalling his loss of his father, the comfort, and the pictures he saw all those years ago, and is now reconnecting to the art as he talks about several paintings, which are illustrated in full colour in the book. He also has Italian classes whilst in the city. He connects his everyday life to the historic paintings of the town. As I say, this is a book that needs to be read.

I continued walking towards the new end, or the end I now could see. When I reached there I could touch the olive trees on the other side of the low wall. They were young and silver in the light. I could have easily climbed over and stood among them, but for some reason I did not. I imagined bringing friends here. I pictured not telling them where we were heading, engaging them instead in a conversation about a completely different topic so as to have them stumble upon the cemetery very much as I just did, not out of the wish to unsettle them, but rather to share with them the same sense of discovery. Then I thought what a terrible idea that was.

His Daily walk around the city

How do we deal with loss and grief? We all have our own ways. For me, I enter what I call my autopilot setting. When anything happens, I have a life that is a little routine-led, and so I just carry on. I wish I were like Hisham and could find solace in art or even in. Music, this is his journey into his own past, many years later, as he looks again at these medieval pictures. Seeing echoes of when he looked before, but also connecting them to now and to his present as he walks the town every day, the other person in the book is this city, Siena, the twists and turns, the people he meets going about their daily lives, like the shop owner and his Italian teacher. But above all, it is about the loss of his father and the way these paintings had been his way out all those years ago. I’m pleased I heard about this book, as it was one of those books that  I feel most people will get something from.

 

 

Nothing to be rescued by Ásta Sigurdardóttir

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Nothing to be rescued by Ásta Sigurdardóttir

Icelandic short stories

Original title – Sunnudagskvöld til mánudagsmorguns

Translator Meg Matich

Source – Review copy

I had held this back with this post in mind I love celebrating milestones on the blog, and this is a milestone, although I had hoped to reach it a few weeks ago. However, this book is the 1,500th book I have reviewed since the blog began. I chose this for several reasons. Nordisk Books is a small publisher and has always sent me their books to review. Plus this is the type of writer I like to review those lost gems. Asta Sigurdottir lived in the wilds of Iceland until she was 14. With no formal schooling to complete, she earned her diploma and a teaching qualification. She also stood out by styling herself like the Hollywood idols she loved, and she lived a bohemian life, which at the time was very challenging. She had a drinking problem, which ended her life early, and paid for her life via Nude modelling for art students.

The oystercatcher is black with red feet. Its call is a strange plip-plip. The redshank is grey and has a loud twang. The ring-necked plover is small, its plumage is striking, and it can sprint faster than all the other birds.

There’s a lot for poor little children to see in the heath

and at the sea.

There are shells, pretty stones, and mussels. And many strange things, too: profuse barnacles on seaside boulders, snails and tiny shrimp under pebbles.

And though most things are off-limits to a miserable four-year-old girl without parents, curiosity and the pursuit of truth run stronger in her than any fear or terror.

She set off, determined.

I said I loved this descriptions of birds they saw by the beach !

The collection consists of ten short stories, and in a way, it captures both her early life in the countryside and her later years. Reykjavik as an adult. We have a story like Lambing season set in the countryside, the harshness of nature’s Hardship, whether rural or in the city, is a recurring theme in the stories. In fact, nature is always in the stories in one ose the later stories. As the story unfolds, there is talk about the birds seen on the beach. Then there is stories set in the city. Like the street in the rain about a woman that seems to be a thinly veiled version of the writer herself, a nude model drunk at night falling around the street drunk.Just a glimpse into her own problems. This captures a world going from the isolated Iceland to the country we know now, but also the post-World War II struggles that partly affected females in the country as they were shielded from US servicemen. This is the dark female view of these years, what it was like to have an abortion, as in another of the stories, to be drunk, to lose a home. This is a walk on the darker side of the country.

…and then the big, big animal runs and runs, chasing the little animal, harder and harder, but it isn’t scared and it isn’t tired like the little animal because the game is such great fun. It’s like a cat tormenting a little mouse before killing it. It’s such great, great fun!

The man paused to catch his breath. He’d gotten himself excited. It was even better than the cinema. There, it’s dark and you can only hear the audience’s horror, but in this child’s pale and gaunt face, he could read the terror.

Her grubby little hands gripped her armrest like a vice and she sat pigeon-toed, her feet glued to the polished floor.

She looked like an animal that’s scared half to death.

He admired his own creative genius, his ability to play so with the child’s imagination. Of course, scaring a six, seven year-old child is no great feat, you could argue. After all, she was small for her age and immature; anybody could manage it. But that wasn’t the case here.

The opening story a father tells stories at night

I think this is perhaps the closest you can get to an Icelandic kitchen sink drama. Her female leads could have stepped off a page of Shelagh Delaney’s play;, these are the Nordic cousins of Jo from A Taste of Honey. Or a connection to the Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen, another writer whom we as English readers have only recently discovered. She would have been familiar with her works, I think, but they are often compared to one another. She was also around at the same time as the Atom Poets, a term for a group of modernist poets coined by Halldor Laxness, who were around the same cafes, bars, and places that Asta hung out and in the same magazines she published in as well. So if you are after a slice of what it was like to be poor, a drinker and struggling in Iceland in the fifties, this is the collection for you, a powerful little collection of a writer that should have been better known and a fiction book to be the 1500th book I have reviewed on the blog.

Do you have a favourite lesser-known writer in translation should be known to a wider audience?

The Image of Her by Simone de Beauvoir

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The Image of Her by Simone de Beauvoir

French Fiction

Original title – Les Belles Images

Translator – Lauren Elikin

Source – Personal copy

I’m finally back. This may be a shorter blog than usual, as I read this over a month ago and had intended to review it sooner. However, with all that has happened, it’s just lovely to sit back behind the laptop and write a review of a book. This is the second book from de Beauvoir I have reviewed in recent years. This novel is from later in her writing life. It is hard to capture her life in what is usually my brief introduction to the writer. I have read she had such an impact on both French literature and philosophy, and in that very French way, is also tinged with scandal. I think my next book will be from. Her book will be one of the non-fiction books. Have you read her books or this book, even?

Laurence thinks of the king who turned all he touched to gold, even his daughter, who became a resplendent metal doll. Everything she touches turns into an image. Wood panelling: where urban chic meets the poetry of the forest. Through the leaves she glimpses the water, blackly lapping; a boat passes by, searching the banks with its white gaze. Its light splashes on the windows, brutally illuminating the lovers walking arm in arm, a flash of the past for me, just as I am now the tender image of their future, with the children they might guess are asleep in the bedrooms at the back of the flat. Children will feel as though they’ve climbed into a hollow tree, in their delightful bedroom with natural wood panelling.

An idea worth considering.

Lawrence thinking early on in the book a perfect life !

What I loved about this book, even though it was written in the late sixties, is that the narrative and themes of the book are maybe more relevant now than they were when the book was written. The book focuses on Lawrence, a high-flying female ad executive. From the outside, she seems to have it all. Her architect husband, Jean Charles, is perhaps the most modern and shallow, prioritising style over everything. She also has two children. The book has a turning point, and that is when her ten-year-old daughter, Catherine, points out how unfair she feels their world is to others. This then leads Lawrence to question her life and the choices she has made.  Consumerism, climbing the ladder to the perfect life, often comes at the expense of family time and other priorities. As 2e all know, de Beauvoir was a well-known Feminist. This is a book about what it means to be a woman, a mother, successful, and all that entails.

The merciless gaze of children who refuse to play the

game.

  • I help Papa support us. Thanks to me, you can go to school and cure the sick.
  • And Papa?
  • He builds houses for people who need them. That’s also a way of helping them, you see?

(Horrible lie. But what truth can she tell?) Catherine remained bewildered. Why don’t we give everyone food?

Laurence had again asked questions and Catherine ended up talking about the poster. Because it was the most important thing or to hide something else?

Maybe the poster was the real explanation, after all: the power of the image. Two thirds of the world go hungry, and the face of the little boy, so beautiful, with big, big eyes and some terrible secret behind his closed lips. For me it’s a sign: the sign that the struggle against hunger continues. But Catherine sees a little boy of about her age who is hungry.

When Catherine questions her parents world !

 

As I read this book, one of the things that came to mind most was the book “Perfection” I read earlier this year, which featured a couple living the perfect Instagram life in the 1960s, wanting to be on the pages of the French interior magazine that was the vogue at the time. What difference do children make to this ideal picture, and also when, like Her daughter Catherine, they ask about the world as they question the unfairness in it? Especially now, as the divide in our society continues to grow year after year. We need books like this to be read, reminding us of the class divide at that time. However, this is also a feminist book about the female role in society, and that has significantly changed since the book was written. A high-flying woman like Lawrence would have been rare to know, but it is now much more common. Any, this is a book about the early years of consumerism and can still be read as a question about the perfect life. As I say, it had parallels to Perfection in that regard, but actually followed a different way of looking at breaking the cycle of the ideal life. Have you read either book?

 

Life slowly getting back I’ll be back soon

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Thanks for the lovely comments. Life is slowly getting back to normal here. Amanda will need a further op and is on a slow road to recovery. We had booked a trip away, which we still did, but had to take it easy and came home early. It was just lovely to spend some time together after all that happened. We were in Northumberland, a place we both love, and, of course, we made a small visit to Barter Books, where I picked up a few books that I will add here at a later date. I hadn’t read much the few days after Amanda had her Heart attack, as my mind was a whirl of emotions and just wasn’t in the mood to read. I have since read a few books, including the recent book about Erik Satie and Hisham Matar’s book. A month in Sienna, which had been on my TBR a while. I am currently on a Latin American kick with The Shipyard by Juan Carlos Onetti and A Question of Belonging by Hebe Uhart, one of the most unique voices in Latin American writing. This is a collection of memories from the writer’s life. Anyway, this is just a quick check to thank everyone. I’m intending to return to reviews by the end of next week. I return to work this week, so I will be posting reviews at the end of the week. Hope everyoneios well and has been reading loads recently.

Time out after a shock

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

The Class Reunion by Franz Werfel

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The Class Reunion by Franz Werfel

Austrian fiction

Original title – Der Abituriententag

Translator Bernhard Rest

Source – Review copy

I was kindly sent this book by Eglantyne Books, a small publisher located in the same building as Istros Books. When I was asked if I wanted a copy of this early novella by the Austrian writer Franz Werfel, I said yes. I said yes as he is one of those writers who has been on my too-read list for a long time, in fact, going back to the early days of the blog when I interviewed Peter Stephan Jungk, who had written a biography of Werfel. I was lucky to find an old edition of Songs of Berndette a few years ago, and Penguin has also brought one of his books back into print in recent years. He was on the short list to win the novel prize in 1945, but he unfortunately had a heart attack and died two months before the prize was announced, so he was withdrawn from the list. He, in his time, was good friends with a lot of the outstanding writers of the late 20s and early 30s, Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Robert Musil and the critic Karl Krauxse was a fan of his at the time. The class reunion has been made into a film on a few occasions in both Germany and the Czech Republic. The story follows a weekend in the life of two men.

When Sebastian entered the private room in the Adria Cellar, most of the gentlemen who had resolved upon celebrating the reunion were already present.

A group photo was being passed around, in which an obtuse pyramid of a symmetrically arranged assemblage of youths could be seen. The caption claimed that these young people, who were crouching, sitting and standing in three layers, were the graduates of class Nineteen-Hundred-and-Two of the Imperial-Royal State Gymnasium of Saint Nicholas.

The passage of time had conferred something ridiculous on all the characters in this faded photograph. They either sprouted out of their clothes in long stalks, or they inhabited the outsized suits that housed them like certain cakes that had failed to rise. The most audacious headgear enlivened the rows: rustic hats, sports caps, mariners’ berets. One enterprising head even donned a stiff bowler hat. The indentations that had spoiled the smoothness of that hat in that forgotten hour, made by fingers some twenty-five years ago, could be seen to this day.

At his reunion

The two men at the heart of this book are Judge Ernst Sebastian in the town of Saint Nikolaus, but it is really a thinly veiled version of Prague. Nikolas is the patron saint of the city. He has had a man brought before him for killing several Prostitutes. The two men are left alone as Ernst tries to find out what has happened. But in that instance, he is struck. This man, Franz Adler, was a classmate of his at the private school they went to. The other man, Franz, is beaten down by his life, and it seems to have escaped notice that Earnst is his old school friend. So he cuts the meeting short to continue on Monday. But strangely enough, that weekend he is due to have a school reunion, he talks about Alder with his classmates, but as the evening goes on, we find out more about the Judge’s past. So when he returns on Monday, we will know more of his past, and is this the same Alder he knew?

Oh, how endless and how rich are our boyhood days!

During these endless and rich boyhood days I thought I had forgotten the grave insult that Adler had inflicted on me. That is to say, I no longer thought of it. But deep within my temper, the arrogant words kept on hammering away and grew into a hideous power that longed to be unleashed. This would happen unexpectedly. To this day, it is the same with me: I bear grudges without knowing it. Something that might have been festering in the gloom of my soul for perhaps years will erupt suddenly, surprising myself. And, if I were not a resentful man, would I carry a grudge against myself after all these years?

Weeks passed.

As I already mentioned, when we lined up in our sports lessons I used to stand next to Adler. Already in Vienna I had gained a reputation as a fairly decent gymnast. Here, at Saint Nicholas, which was full of intellectuals and bookworms, I was in a league of my own.

When talking about Adler at the reunion

This book has it all, really. Secrets both in the present and in the past. Identity is the people they seem to be. The memory, how reliable is it at times like this! I can see why it has been made into a film and a tv series in the past. It has a plot that twists here and there, a few things you didn’t expect, as we see behind the mask of those in the upper class and those who have fallen from that class as well. It is also about how we can forget the past until we have a sort of Madeleine moment, when the two men are first left alone, which has a knock-on effect. I was also reminded of an episode of the Tales of the Unexpected Galloping Foxley about a man who sees a man he keeps thinking is his old school Bully Foxley. There is also an air of last year in Marianbad to me, as real events are forgotten or changed in the past, if that makes sense. Anyway, it is a great book to see back in print from a writer who was huge in his day. Have you heard of Werfel or read him ?