Tag: 2024

The ways of Paradise by Peter Cornell

~ winstonsdad ~ 3 Comments

The ways of Paradise by Peter Cornell

Swedish memoir

Original title – Paradisets vägar

Translator – Saskia Vogel

Source – Subscription book

I had some money come and I decided I wanted to get the Fitzcarraldo subscription and paid for the 20-book subscription as I knew that it would have some great books I had heard about this book earlier this year, and out of the new and upcoming books from them it was easily one I knew I would read the second unit hit the floor through the letterbox, something that maybe doesn’t happen as much as it used to for me as a reader. When I heard Peter Cornell had put together the pieces left behind by an unknown academic researcher  who for thirty years, had spent the previous three decades working on something, what was found is her within this book. Fare to say it is no Pessoa or Bolano trunk full;l of papers or a hard drive of many nearly finished novels. This was just a hundred or so pages of writing. But this was 1987, an age before Google thought this was a man connecting the world, and like the knots in Rushkin’s pieces, he talks about tightening knots around his prose, and this is what is left is like an espresso shot a brutal hit of Knowledge and connections. He links those brilliant minds of the last 2000 years here, there, and everywhere!!

  1. Leonardo da Vinci’s and Dürer’s labyrinthine ‘knots’ without beginning or end can be seen as maps of the universe. They are, along with a few late drawings, the kind of hieroglyphs that may have been stimulated by Leonardo’s well-known exercises around the imaginative eye – to lose one’s self in the damp patches on a wall or other fragmentary forms. ‘One gets the impression that the Leonardo] drawings held at Windsor Castle, which symbolically represent the world at once in its birth and its final cataclysm, stem from similar visions.’ See Gustav René Hocke, Die Welt als Labyrinth, 1957; Ananda K.

Coomaraswamy, ‘The Iconography of Dürer’s “Knots” and Leonardo’s “Concatenation”, in Art Quarterly,1944

Knots and labyrinths a a recurring theme in the book

The three pieces in the book run over and interconnect with one another. They all seem to revolve around labyrinths or the complex nature of the world and how one thing can connect to another. The Greek history of the minotaur and labyrinth through Rushkins integrate knot drawing and then ending with the chaos of Jackson Pollock, but the feeling of a connection through how the pieces connect.. Almost like a knight tour of a chess board, the text moves forward but never quite the way you think it will. You can see the mind of those thirty years crossing and reconnecting these pieces like a giant Meccano set of his mind. This just has to be read !!

  1. Various types of fantastical tales, ‘contes fantastiques autour des contes originaires. Jurgis Baltrusaitis, La quête d’ Isis: Essai sur la légende d’un mythe, 1985.
  2. Ibid.
  3. ‘The centre of the world’, the heart of the world’. This concept recurs in all cultures even as their geographic and topographical situations may vary: country, cave, mountain, tower, temple or city. These imagined places arise from fantasies of a holy land, described as follows by René Guénon: ‘This “holy land”, above all others, it is the finest of lands per the meaning of the Sanskrit word Paradesha, which among the Chaldeans took the form of Pardes and Paradise in the Western world; in other words it refers to the “earthly paradise” that constitutes the point of departure in each religious tradition. Here was the or-igin, here was spoken the first, creative Word. See ‘Les gardiens de la Terre sainte’ (1929), in Symboles fondamen-taux de la Science sacrée, 1962.
  4. Possibly in André Breton’s object Souvenir du paradis terrestre from 1953, a rugged rock, 11.5 x 9.5 x 5 cm, its title inscribed into the rock.
  5. ‘Paradise, from Old Persian pairidaeza, meaning ‘en-closed garden,park

The first five little vignettes of info

I am just a huge fan of digersive books of the way some writers let their minds wander and connect the dots a certain way. More accessible, maybe now, in this age with Google, this book predates Google and such; thus, the work that went into it being the way it was must have been years of refining the prose. This is A scholar caught in a Borgesian library where, like Borges, a writer who could never write a novel, his writing is like that espresso shot perfect complex and just enough of a hit. This prose is like this. I imagine a huger work pruned over those thirty years, but as you do that, the mind connects other things, and the whole thing becomes like an Escher painting or a Mobius loop where there is a point that it seems like it is an endless connection with the world and that is what happens here. It is a man caught in an Escher world, a labyrinth of his mind slowly closing as those prose-like knots grow shorter and shorter. Oh my god, I am just off on my own tangent now. Let’s just say this will quickly be the book of the year for me. I can’t see anything coming near it apart from my next read, a similar, if longer, book from Fitzcarraldo by a great German writer. Have you a favourite digressive work of literature ?

Twenty two days or Half a lifetime by Franz Fühmann

~ winstonsdad ~ 6 Comments

Twenty two day or Half a lifetime by Franz Fühmann

German Fiction

Original title -Zweiundzwanzig Tage oder Die Hälfte des Lebens

Translator – Lelia Vennewitz

Source – Personal copy

For my second book for German Lit Month, I moved off the Guide Crime novel and picked a book I had decided on earlier this year. Joe at Rough Ghost had put up a picture on social media of a book by Fühmann, but I’m not sure if it was this one or another. U had read The jew car by him a couple of years ago and hadn’t known he had some other books coming out years earlier, so I found a cheap copy of this book which is on a subject that he talked and wrote about a lot in his later life, and that is Germany’s past he hAD BEEN IN THE nazi party during the wart but lived in East Germany after the war and was a staunch socialist. This book, written later in his writing life, is part memoir, part travelogue. It follows a three-year period he spent in Budapest in 1972.

October I9

Budapest: perhaps even more mini-skirts than in Berlin, in any case shorter ones, sometimes ending above the top of the stocking, usually cheap materials with an inverted pleat back and front and the skimpiest ones covering the ungainliest thighs

The intersection outside the Astoria is a No Stopping zone, a taxi stops, the customer has trouble with his money, the driver explains, the customer searches, cars block the inter-section, the cars blow their horns, the cars make a racket, the customer negotiates, the driver shows the figure on his fingers, the cars are now jammed up beyond the intersec-tion, the customer doesn’t understand, the cars roar, the driver of the car behind the taxi jumps out, cursing as he thumps the rear end of the taxi, the driver waves him off, the curser flings up his arms, and the cars way at the back reverse or turn and look for another route.

I liked this observation about skirts very of its time !

Fühmann finds himself in Budapest as a 50-year-old on a trip to a writer’s conference.(I’m always amazed how much more in  Eastern European states’ Literature is taken)  We see him talking with his fellow writers and his own poetic piece a few times in the book as he wanders around Budapest, talking about the city but also looking back at his own past and those war and post-war years. As the ghost of the Warsaw apcts invasion of Budapest some fouyr years before this book a book that start like a travelogue about the place thew writers become a darker book a writer thinking about his writing and also the past isn ever good as he wanders dark street drinks with his fellow writers. Talking about their works and place, it is a world caught in Amber.

Among pillars, in niches, under arcades: four pools, three large, one smaller, one shell-shaped, one shaped like a stadium, the water rising in temperature from the smallest to the largest pool each time by four degrees, from twenty-eight to forty degrees Centigrade, and on the water in the circle of the talking heads, bibs floating like lotus blossoms

Thirteen Leopold Blooms: what a metamorphosis

In the sauna: the old men have left, and now above the common people an athlete sits on the arm of a chair, wringing himself out. Doggedly, as stubbornly solemn as an athlete who has come in eleventh at the regional champion-ship, he squeezes the water out of his tissues, pore by pore, and every time he lifts his elbow he ripples the muscles of his arm, and no one pays any attention, wise nation! For fifteen minutes he works the section between collarbone and the top of his left breast, I might have been curious to see whether he kept up this pace, but the heat drives me out

Had pick this bit with its nod to Joyce

This is one of those lost gems that maybe would be great reissued a man wandering post-68 Budapest, a writer remembering his past draft into war by the Nazis and then those post-war socialist years, a time when the world he knew seemed perfect. But as he wanders around Budapest, you can see how that changes, and he talks to other writers. This has a bit of everything in his poetry, fiction, travelogue, and memoir. In the days when reading of a place was how to feel it before the age of celeb travels, he makes us feel the town, the Acacia trees, and the writers he meets. The city itself wound but still getting by. I hope it gets a new publication. My book is over thirty years old. I know Seagull Books has brought a few of his other books out. Described as one of the most sensitive books in East Germany. It captures those two extreme views of German life from the mid-thirties to when the book was written in 1972. Have you a favourite East german writer ?

Brightly Shining by Ingvild Rishøi

~ winstonsdad ~ 6 Comments

                                                                                                                                                    Brightly Shining by Igvild Rishøi

Norweigan fiction

Orignal title – Stargate – en julefortelling

Translator – Caroline Waight

Source – Review copy

There is nothing better than an unexpected review copy that actually matches something upcoming, and this literally fell on the doorstep a few days after I had mentioned her new month, Norway in November, by Meredith (Dolce Bellezza Blog), one of the fellow judges on the Shadow Booker panel. So, as I often think, the is a synchronicity to book blogging. So this is the first novel from a talented short story and children’s writer appeared with its wintery theme around a family in the run-up to Christmas. She has previously won the Norwegian book critic prizes. It is a perfect first book for Norway in November. The book is about a family in which two daughters decide to help their father, who is out of work. So when they find a job at the Christmas tree lot is available.

And Monday came and Tuesday and Wednesday, and he talked about the cabin we would buy if he could just get a regular job. Thursday came and Fri-day, and he talked about the path and the fence and how we’d sit out on the doorstep and look up at the Big Dipper, and then it was Saturday, and there was a knock at the door.

Dad let go of my hair and stood up off the bed. But ours wasn’t really a flat where people came knocking.

Only Aronsen came knocking round our flat, I’m calling the police, he’d say, but he never called the police. But before, when I was little, I thought he would. He’d be standing there in his dressing gown and I’d be clutching Dad’s legs and crying, don’t call, don’t call, until Aronsen looked down and said, hush now, I’m not calling anybody, I’m just trying to get this into your dad’s head.

Dad is a violent drunk at times

Ronja, the ten-year-old daughter, first sees the job on the Christmas tree lot and initially thinks her father will be perfect for the `Job. He does take it, but then he is drawn back to the pub, so the cupboards start to go bare again at this point, the older sister Melissa steps in and takes her father’s job selling Christmas tres a world as she observes isn’t as cheerful as it may seem to sell the tres is a hard job and those doing it aren’t that full of the Christmas spirit. But she puts her head down as her sister dodges the Drunken father, a neighbour dying to report the father and his daughters to social services. We see a family on the deg a world of getting by day to day and the bond between to sisters. But there is also some great characters they meet at the tree lot. This is a book that will break your heart and then see the hope of the two sisters.

“Melissa,” Tommy yelled. “Come here.”

Melissa was sitting on the ground, midway through righting a fir. She looked up from underneath the branches and crawled out. She looked scared.

“Relax,” Tommy said, “It was me who went and got her.”

He walked over to the shed and opened the door.

“Take a seat,” he said. “Have a ginger biscuit.” There was warmth inside, and a radio, and the floor brown with dirt. Some children singing “O Holy Night.” I sat down on one camping stool, Tommy sat on the other. Melissa stayed standing in the doorway. A thrill of hope, sang the children.

The weary world rejoices.

“Melissa,” said Tommy. “Your sister can’t spend all day sitting out there on a box when it’s below freezing out.”

The sister freezing but trying to get by the best they can

I must admit I am a fan of the sad Christmas story from Dickens with Scrooge, a story tinged with Sadness, then films like A Boy’s Christmas and, of course, It’s a Wonderful Life. But you know what? One of my all-time favourite Christmas stories is from the Late Paul Auster, his Auggie Wrens Christmas story, which was filmed by Wayne Wang as part of the film Smoke when Auggie tells William Hurt’s character who had been asked to write a Christmas story for New york times and tells of a boy that dropped a wallet whilst stealing and how Auggie went found a blind woman who thought he was the grandson who had stolen from his store and they have dinner and he steals a camera from a pile he finds in a room at the woman’s house but has in the meantime had Christmas lunch with her act as the grandson Hope and love in denial at the same time just perfect like this. It has hope that comes and goes with love and fear. I was going to say about how it would be ideal. Book to be made into a film like Auggie Wren’s story was, only to google the original title of the book and find it is being made into a movie (let’s hope it isn’t then ruined by a Hollywood take on it ). This is prime Ken Roach material if it is to be made into English. The heartbreak of drunken father-daughters getting by would suit his style of filmmaking so well. This book is perfect for a winter evening in the build-up to Christmas as we follow Melissa and Ronja. One sister sells trees, and the other tries to avoid social services and just get by. Do you have a favourite Christmas story or film?

 

Hotel Cartagena by Simone Buchholz

~ winstonsdad ~ 2 Comments

Hotel Cartagena by Simone Buchholz

German crime fiction

Original title – Hotel Cartagena

Translator Rachel ward

Source – Personal copy

I had read this last year when it was shortlisted for the translated crime prizes, but. I never got around to reviewing it. So when the first week of this year, GHerman lit month is m, meant to be a crime, I rarely follow Lizzy and Caroline’s prompts, but I will join in for once. This is part of a series of novels about a Prosecutor in Hamburg. But the novels seem to all be able to be read as stand-alone other than maybe knowing some of the characters a little more than if this is the book you start with, it works as a stand-alone read. We find out when the Prosecutor, Chastity Riley, the star of the series of books, is caught up when twenty heavily armed men storm into the hotel bar where she is at a birthday party.

He looked at the water and watched the ships leaving, the warm wind tickled the back of his neck, he had his hands in his trouser pockets, he was hungry. He still had a little change on him, but it wasn’t even enough for a fish roll.

He had spent all his money on the girl.

Elisabeth or whatever her name was.

Hed met her in the Markthalle, at the Black Flag concert he’d been looking forward to for weeks. When she’d given him a kind of sideways smile, he’d had a few seconds when he didn’t know who he had a bigger crush on, Henry Rollins or her. Then they danced, she was wild and laughed, and that flooded his bloodstream with happiness; after the concert, with all the loud music in his bones, he invited her back to St Pauli; she was kind of scared to come at first, but he talked her three friends round and they all went off to the Kiez to-gether.

The book takes us back to 84 had pick this as i love Henry Rollins

The hotel is owned by Konrad Hoogsmart, and it is him the heavily armed men have come to deal with as they have been sent by people he has in the past destroyed their lives. This is a book that has a clever style as each chapter is a little story in itself as we move through time and place to piece together the slow picture of the event that led to the hostage-taking over the years and around the world from the eighties when a young man now one of the hostages take left Hamburg to head to Columbia and then is now back seeking Hoogsmart whose hotel is named the Cartagena where the events of years ago had these two men following different paths that lead to the evening and the party that Chastity and her friends find themselves in as views but also hostages what will happen to them all what brought this all about ?

They ate dinner together in one of the expensive restaurants in the old town. Henning, José and this man, whose name was Esteban. He was a good head and shoulders taller than all the other Colombians Henning knew, those little men with hearty laughter in their faces. Esteban didn’t actually look like a Colombian at all, more like someone from Madrid. He looked like a torero. Long and slim and knife-sharp. His hands were something like a fan of scissors.

But he was very polite.

He wanted to know how Henning liked it in Cartagena, why hed left his home, what he liked to do in his spare time. And he was very interested in Hamburg and in the people there.

Lots of artists?

Musicians?

Jet set?

People with money?

Years later in Colubia the seeds of the hostage taking are sown.

I loved her style of writing. It is great for a backstory, which, in a way, is the central part of the book. The events that lead to the present are often missed in Crime fiction. In a way, this could have been an even bigger book than it was. It has a clever mix of humour, darkness, and menace. It also captures how one man’s life led him to be the hostage taker and take a face to the faceless. I think this is something modern crime is doing well I know a couple of recent tv series have taken the thieves as the main characters, I think the Sopranos and The wire were forerunners of this as the made the criminals as well as the detectives both as characters and there lives are shared. This is what we have here in the book: the past of the Hostage taker’s life from Hamburg through Columbia, then hiding in Curacao to the return, and the present, about Chastity and the other hostages at the birthday party. I think Rachel has captured this book so well in its tone in English. It is an exciting book by a writer, along with many other books in the series.  Have you read any books from Simone Buchholz or Orenda ?

 

 

 

October 2024 Round up

~ winstonsdad ~ 3 Comments
  1. Stay with me by Hanne Ørstavik
  2. A simple intervention by Yael Inakai
  3. Your Little Matter by Maria Grazia Calandrone
  4. Night of the Crow by Abel Tomé
  5. Count Julian by Juan Goytisolo
  6. The dead Mountaineer’s inn by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky
  7. Last summer in the city by Gianfranco Calligarich
  8. The Lime Works by Thomas Bernhard 
  9. Eden,Eden,Eden by Pierre Guyotat
  10. The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie 

I managed 10 reviews last month. I said a week or so ago that I may ease off a bit, but let’s see. This month I went from A danish novel set in Italy. Then, a Swiss novella is set in a creepy hospital doing a miracle op on a woman, which we see from one of the nurses’ points of view as she falls for a fellow nurse. Then, a woman traced her mother, who abandoned her, one of the most influential books I have read in recent years. Then a detective goes to solve a crime with his team on an island stuck in the past with two families running it. Then we stepped back for a collection of books first published in 1970. Count Julian sees a man look back on his beloved Spain with a bitter eye from North Africa. Then, a detective heads to a remote inn set in the mountains for nothing, it seems, but then something happens overnight. Then, a young man gets his heart broken in Rome. A man buys a lime factory and tries to write a great opus but never entirely does. Then kills his wife. Thedr a endless stream of sex and violence in a book banned in France. To end the month an affair in photographs from Nobel winner Anne Ernaux.

Book of the month

Your Little Matter is one of those books I read in translation for those gems worldwide. It is a tale of an abandoned child tracing her mother to work out why she was abandoned and to know a Woman she never fully knew ! A new publisher is the third book from Foundry Editions, which is a publisher worth trying.

Non book matter

Here is where I chatted about non-bookish things over the last month. There was a few rec0rds I got. I visited the local record fair and it was National albmu day. So I had an Idlewild and Prefab sprout album from the National Album Day selections. I got albums from the record fair over the month by Songs Ohio, Destroyer, Dead Can Dance. The Until the End of the World soundtrack (I had this on tape years ago and also a CD, but it is one of the best film soundtracks ) , Simon Raymonde’s Solo works and Mercury prize-winning English teacher. I also brought a new Paul Heaton Album and book for Amanda and me to see him next year in Sheffield. Then I also got the Wolfgang Press new album (More 4AD bands ) and then to be a bit with the hip kids Geordie Creeps’ debut solo album, the former Black Midi lead singer. A rather lot of records, more than normal, but I hit one record fair on a good day and brought more than usual. Series wise Amanda and I watch Queens Gambit both loved this not sure why it took us to now to watch it and are working through Maid on Netflix a series based on a new york times best seller of how hard it is to get by in the US with no money. We had a nice day in York, although it may have given me a cold looking at the ghost, and just two days ago, My wonderful Wife passed her driving test for the first time. I am so pleased for her, and it also means I haven’t to drive her to work and pick her up, which means I will have a chance to lie in and thus should be able to blog with the time and not get up early every day. How was your month outside books?

Next month

Well, it is German Lit Month, but there is also the New Month from Bellezza, Norway in November. I hope to review a couple of books. For each, I have read one book already. Let’s see what else I can find to read. I hope to read Robert Walser at some point, a writer missing from the writers I have read. I also have a great Book from a prize-winning writer, their latest novel, I’m reading, AND a Yiddish novel to read. What plans have you for next month ?

 

The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie

~ winstonsdad ~ 7 Comments

The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie

French memoir

Original title – L’usage  de la photo

Translator – Alison L Strayer

Source- personal copy

I heard Ernaux and Modiano the two most recent winners of the Nobel prize s, work described as a whole piece like a greater universe. Each book is almost a part of great work in the same universe like a Star Wars universe or Marvel universe. These writers’ books populate a world of there now each piece a little bit of a great worker in Enraux world is her life she mines. Still, here she is helped by the photographs of her affair (she is very french with all these affairs, isn’t she just ). The pictures are by the French photographer and writer Marc Marie, with whom she had an affair more than twenty years ago. There is a sense this is the time photos cross from an object maybe to something. We all have phones full of pictures at this time and dig cameras with great storage, so when she starts to take photos of the aftermath of their meeting, the crumpled clothes, it is like a moment caught in Amber.

Clothing and shoes are scattered all the way down an entrance hallway with big pale tiles. In the foreground, on the right, is a red jumper or shirt and black tank top that appear to have been torn off and turned inside out in the same movement, resembling a low-cut bust with the arms cut off. A white label is clearly visible on the tank top. Further on is a pair of curled-up jeans with a black belt attached. To the left of the jeans, the red lining of a red jacket is spread out like a cloth for cleaning the floor.

On top of that, a pair of blue-chequered boxer shorts and a white bra, one of whose straps is stretching out towards the jeans. Behind, a men’s boot lies on its side next to a rumpled blue sock. Standing far apart and perpendicular to each other are two black high-heeled pumps. Even further away, protruding from under the radiator, is the black splotch of a jumper or skirt.

There first meet with a photgraph

 

Annie was just recovering from chemo and had lost hair so this affair, with its burning passion, serves in the photos as she is recovering. The pictures capture the affair and recovery both in a way , capturing that passion in the crumbled discarded clothes between them on the floor as she recounts each encounter with Marc when he found out she was doing this she had said he had thought of taking pictures it is like an animal marking it territory or a bird building a nest these clothes the symbol of the previous night’s passion of sex between the pair. The lingering heap of clothes. Capture how an affair burned brightly and is remembered in her usual open style.

A black beast with a huge head and an atrophied body ending in a heart-shaped appendage seems to be tumbling down a yellow wall, along with an object bent into a V shape, a boot twisted into a V, and a large desert rose, made of stone. Underneath is another boot, folded over on itself, which has landed on a pale floor. There is no perspective in this tableau, in which the yellow wall and white floor are extensions of each other. Everything appears flat, weightless, immaterial, caught in a long slow descent, like Don Juan as played by Michel Piccoli in the Marcel Bluwal film, whirling towards hell to the music of Mozart’s Requiem.

The last meeting has a darkness and sorrow in the opening her

Discussing her books is hard as we know what we are getting from her life. It is a chronicle of her life. Her open look at her life captures her so well. Photos, I remember an interview with Wim Wenders, a prolific photographer. He said,”I see a young man who impulsively took photos. I still recognise the impulses, and seeing that some have remained the same is a pleasure. Some, of course, got into my body, so I sometimes wonder who took those pictures. Was it my body – my thumbs and hands, my eyes – or was it a conscious act”

I thought of this when I read this book. He is a man who has taken thousands of pictures and is like Ernaux, someone whose whole life seems to be a project. His films all have a theme of the journey of life. I ve drift and now going drift again into another favourite artist of mine is, Robert Smith. Of course, with the new Cure album due, I’ve been thinking back on his lyrics as I read this book and, of course, the opening of his song Picture of You. “I’ve been looking so long at these pictures of you
That I almost believe that they’re real
I’ve been living so long with my pictures of you
That I almost believe that the pictures are all I can feel”

Maybe that is the feeling of the affair in the pictures—that ripping of clothes, that brief fling captured in the crumbled discarded clothes of the evening before the flotsam and jetsam of passion on the morning shore, so to speak. I hope you don’t mind. I’m trying to be a little more fluid in my reviews and digressive, so belt up, and let’s see where in my mind the reads I am reading take me!

Have you a view on Ernaux?

 

 

Day in York and blogging moving forward

~ winstonsdad ~ 6 Comments

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

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

Eden,Eden,Eden by Pierre Guyotat

~ winstonsdad ~ 3 Comments

Eden ,Eden,Eden by Pierre Guyotat

French fiction

Original title- Éden,Éden,Éden

Translator – Graham Fox

Source – Personal copy

I saw this on the list of books published in 1970, I bought it up a couple of years ago just as it had Michel Leris’s quote on the back, and I knew he was a leading intellect in France around this time. Well, when I looked a little more into this book, I found out it is much more than that it was Banned in France for sale to minors. This caused figures like Pasplinl, Satre, Beuys and Genet, to name a few, to sign a protest to that happening. It also led to the Nobel-winning writer Claude Simon resigning from the Prix Medicis when it lost out on the prize by a single vote. This book is of its time in many ways , of the style of writing and the events of the time, It is also hard to describe as a work. Given the sheer power of the way he set out the book to the reader, it is an assault on you, and it is just so full of words and events just happening constantly told in a single breath.

Khamssieh moaning: nauseated by workers’ jism mixed, bland, with saliva in mouth; wrinkled penis retracting into pubic fleece / ; date-picker’s other hand grabbing, squashing Wazzag’s hardening member against belly, palm hollowing pubis, orgasm – thread of blood-scented jism streaming, without spasms, out of glans – shining and crying through whole body of date-picker; youth rolling, fastened to whore, over strip of floor along counter, pulling member from between Wazzag’s buttocks, standing up, bare legs spread planted on one side, other side of rump of whore sprawling on belly, toes delving into hairs, under armpits; slow, stroking, with dusty heel, shoulder, neck, greasy curls over sticky nape, palpating balls against jism-spattered thigh; toes closing eyelids of whore against wood:

One of the pasages much the same all the way through just relentless at times

How to describe this book well, the book is set in a hinterland of Algeria in what may now be a sort of apocalyptic future at a whorehouse, as the war is all around them. The book is a massive nod to writers like Beckett, Joyce, and Burroughs. It is a single breathless splattering of words in fact when IO put a picture of it up a fellow book lover described it as like a machine gun of words as bodies, sex, violence and the world they are in blur into just a stream of words are never ending no gaps no real breath in the text itself as the sex of the whore house and the violence of the Algerian war which he had seen for himself.

Hamza, running back to camp, crossing through bunk-house packed with

simmering bodies, naked, half-naked,

sprawled out away from scorching partitions, opening bag, taking out vapotizer of Eau de Cologne, stuffing bottle into pocket, running back in long strides, running back towards cirque: nomad, lizard devoured, wiping lips with strip of veil spread over shepherd’s chest; shepherd seated between thighs of nomad, crunching scales of lizard’s tail, claws, tongue of youth protruding, thick, between teeth, to lick greasy fingers of nomad; Hamza crouching down, breathless, vaporizing, between thighs of shepherd, rag sheathing sexual cluster; nomad wrenching vaporizer from Hamza’s fist, caressing blue bottle, grey bulb, vaporizing skull of shepherd huddled against chest, placing lips bridled by veil onto perfumed skull; beneath rag, shepherd’s member twitching, stiffening; nomad laying hand over shepherd’s sexual cluster: abscesses bursting with hardening of flesh:

Again just a barage of words and images actions for the read to work through

As you see with the quotes, it is hard to capture what is happening. It is more a mass of emotions, sex,horror, violence, body parts and bodily fluids drifting over you as you read the book. This isn’t a read for the faint heart and is very much a book of its time in many ways. I think it is a cousin to Penolpe from Ulysses, where we see Molly Bloom sexually outbursting in one breathless cascade of words like this book. Beckett’s play Not I, which is after this book, has a similar feel of that breathless torrent of words of images of prevents in a way this would be served performed like Not I is that mouth and those torrent of words. But for me, the work it hit most was the Burroughs Red Night Trilogy, a book that came out after this, but I wonder if Burroughs had read this book or if it was just the fact he had spent time in North Africa and in the desert. I can see its part in the books of the time as I said at the start. It isn’t a book for everyone, but more for those who like a challenge and love stream of consciousness as a writing style. This is it at its most abstract, though. The other image I had when I finished the book was what if the cinema Pardiso had been a bookshop, not a cinema and the priest had cut out the violence and sex and the bookshop owner pieced those cutouts together, like in the film, had put them all together well this is that book it is like the worst piece of the most sexual and violent books you have read thrown into one book! Have you read this book? my final read for this weeks Club 1970

The Lime Works by Thomas Bernhard

~ winstonsdad ~ 8 Comments

The Lime Works by Thomas Bernhard

Austrian fiction

Original title – Das Kalkwerk

Translator – Sophie Wilkins

Source – Personal copy

When I first read the list of books for 1970, I thought I read this, but I didn’t want to get a secondhand copy as they were a little pricey. I then saw it is available as a Kindle book which I rarely use so it meant I got use it I do have a couple of Bernhard’s I haven’t read on my shelves as I still thinking of doing another Thomas Bernhard week. This was his third novel, and alongside a play he had staged that year, he won the Georg Buchner Prize in 1970. I feel this had some of the pieces from later books, most of which I have read by him. It focuses on the line works and opens with a woman dead shoot and her brains all over the floor of the Lime Works.

If only he could get his book written before he grew too old, absolutely too old and unfit to write it, he is supposed to have said to Fro and to Wieser. The minute he got to his room he went to bed. But the inner restlessness into which he was driven by the outward quiet would not let him sleep even when mortally ex-hausted, and so he wandered all over the lime works, several times all over the lime works, and spent the rest of the night lying on his bed quite unable to fall asleep. Once you have passed that boundary line between fatigue and exhaustion, it is absurd to believe that you can fall asleep, absurd to try to sleep, to force yourself to sleep; you weren’t going to fall asleep. In-stead, he got the opposite of the hoped-for re-laxation, the serenity he meant when he dreamed of finding a quiet place to work; instead of being able to relax, he only grew increasingly restless, so restless that he inevitably broke his own rest by doing something or other that brought unrest into it.

We know he never quite gets to finish his book

The lime work then works to how that happened, and we meet the husband, Konard a man who has spent several years working on his scientific opus, a book called The Sense of Hearing (Odd I thought of the Herzog film of that time, the land of silence which came out a year after this book ). We meet his wife, the woman killed at the start of the book, but this is a grim world of a man who does nothing. He has spent twenty years writing or not writing the book whilst living in the Lime Works he brought with the last of his money. Add to this the locals to the lime works, and we have a slow-moving, menacing account of a man descending into a hell that could be rather like a factory that was also a concentration camp. We know little other than the ins and outs of their life and never described much of what the pair of them are like other than the wife being wheelchair-bound. A nod to his medical issues, maybe the whole atmosphere feels like a world collapsing on the two of them.

it. People don’t instinctualize any longer, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, mankind no longer instinctualizes. Aha, so that’s the idyll the Konrad couple have moved into, they may think, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, but in reality the Konrad couple, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, moved into quite the opposite of an idyll when they moved into the lime works.

The return to an idyll, they think. Compared with the lime works, everything else is idyllic, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, London is an idyll compared with the lime works, Wuppertal is an idyll; the ugliest, the loudest, the most malodorous place is an idyll in comparison. But even the surroundings of the lime works have been deliberately falsified into an idyll. An intelligent person arriving in the area, of course, will realize at once that the place is no idyll,

I cut it ioff there as the last word the lime r=works was no idyil thou ot was meant be capture a loty of what i meant about the place as a character in the book

 

This has at its heart the character that would go on to a stock character for Bernhard in Konrad, a man full of bile and hatred. Here it is both at the way his life has gone. There is a sense of inertia in his life twenty years of writing a book that hasn’t moved on in the two decades he has tried to write it . Then, his wife echoes Bernhard’s own medical issues that, in the end, would see his life cut short. Then there is the place itself. The Lime Works is a grim-sounding place he has brought that, like the pair at the heart of the book, seems to draw out the worst of those around it, like the ghosts of those who had worked and maybe even died there are there dragging those in the present down weighting them down if that makes sense. This is a tense book of a couple falling apart a man losing his grip on the world. I still have Frost his debut to read, but this seems like a writer who has honed the Konrad character in his later books. This is like the Mark One Bernhard male character soon to be replaced by the Austrian-hating Mark Two of the later books her would write like The Correction and Woodcutters. A great fourth book for this week’s club1970! Have you read this or any books by Bernhard?

 

 

Last summer in the City by Gianfranco Calligarich

~ winstonsdad ~ 6 Comments

Last Summer in the City by Gianfranco Calligarich

Italian fiction

Original title –  L’ultima estate in città

Translator – Howard Curtis

Source – Personal copy

I am always wary of the translated book that is a summer success. A beach reads a book you see on the list of books to read and the end-of-year list. I am wary as they often seem to be more commercial fiction but I had see this and that when he wrote it one of the writers that championed his cause was Natalia Ginzburg, a writer whose books I have loved, and I thought, yes, it may be popular but it is a book about Rome in the summer what is not to like9I’ve never been to Rome, I am the original armchair traveller in my reading ). He then chose to go into Film and television screenwriting. He published short stories many years later with much acclaim. The time of this book varies I had it done as a book from 1970 and over place it mention 1073, I’m assuming he wrote it in 1970 and it maybe came out on a broader audience in 1973. I can see him being a screenwriter. This book is rich in place and character that it would easily make a film as we follow Leo.

The wind was rising by the time I got to an apartment block surrounded by a damp, rustling garden. It was only then, perhaps because of the smell of the wet earth, that it occurred to me I should have brought Viola some flowers, but it was too late now, and I was so hungry I could barely stand. So I kept on, confronting the final test, an elevator that throughout the ride up emitted a menacing drone, as if complaining about my weight. Reaching the third floor, I quickly tidied my hair and rang the doorbell. Viola appeared. She looked surprised. Before I could say anything, she let out a little hiccup and burst into irrepressible laughter. I must have looked like a flood victim to her. “Come in, Leo,” she said, taking me by the arm. “God, how happy I am to see you. How did you manage to find us?”

As I say he capture the feel of the city well in the book

The book focuses on summer and our main character, Leo, as he has left his home in Milan and headed to Rome. He hangs out in Rome with a friend who is a drunkard but has a rich American wife . Leo has an air about him. He wants to live the high life but is failing a man who wants to be more than his parts (don’t we all, though). But Rome isn’t Milan; the summer is there, and he is struggling. He has friends who help him sell him an old ALFA, which adds to his wanting to be a specific type of man in the eyes of others. He then meets Arriane, a woman who, in the way she is described, feels a little like Italian Lucy Honeychurch. The two fall for each other, but it is that deep spark of flying love that either caries on and smoulders or dies. This is a case of the latter as we see the fall rise and ultimately the fall of Leo over one summer in Rome.

The city was caressing us. Gradually, it became less difficult to think about Arianna. Basically, nothing irreparable had happened, Nothing irreparable ever happened in this city — sad things, maybe, but not irreparable ones. And anyway, if I was going to leave town, I wanted to see her. At this hour, she must be in Eva’s store, playing solitaire.

“Let’s get the hell out of here, I said. “I know some people nearby who could offer us a drink.”

“Leftovers” he said, “nothing but leftovers.”

Graziano pulled himself to his feet and followed me up the steps until we got to Trinità dei Monti, then we took the street that went downhill, leading to Eva’s store. We climbed the front steps, holding on to the railing, then pushed the glass door. A bell rang as it opened. The humorist was there reading something aloud, along with the fashion model, Livio Stresa, and Paolo, that journalist with the special way with women, sitting next to Arianna. I was greeted as if it were the most natural thing in the world for me to be joining them.

He is so caught by the Arianna

This has the feel of a classic story from maybe years before it came out. It did for me anyway. Hence  It is compared to Catch in the Rye and Great Gatsby, but neither is near the mark. This is the flip of Ginzburg. It is a male view of those years in the late seventies in Roma, with glamour and darkness, and we see both in this book. For me, Leo has wandered of a Tom Waits song or some other ballader of those men that have broken dreams. If Waits was Italian, would he write a song called “A Letter from a Friend in Rome ?”A man who wants to be in with the crowd but never is fully in the crowd. The other character in the book is the city in the summer and how it is to be in Rome when you are just another face in the crowd. Jacqui said she found it evocative and atmospheric. It has that it captures a place and a type of man. The sort of fallen man on the edge of Wodehouse novels or a side figure in Waugh, if that makes sense. Not quite in the money but likes to think he can be, and then he finds love, but even that ends up flawed. A flawed summer of a flawed man? A nice third stop on this week’s 1970 club!

 

The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky

~ winstonsdad ~ 8 Comments

The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky

Russian fiction

Original title – Отель «У Погибшего Альпиниста»

Translator – Josh Billings

Source – Personal copy

As I have seen then, I brought some books from this Melville house, the Neversink library series. So when this turned up on the list of books that had been published in 1970. In one of those strange connections that seem to happen when you read many books, maybe. I signed up a few weeks ago to Klassiki, a streaming service focused on Eastern European and Central Asian films/ So. Last week, they had a series of new films on this book in its film form, which was one of the films they had added. The Brother’s books have served well for film. They were the leading lights of the Soviet Science fiction scene. But their books have also made some great films. The best-known is Roadside Picnic, which was made into the cult film Stalker. I have that on my shelves to read at some point and always welcome a chance to rewatch Stalker.

The owner didn’t respond. His eyes were glued to the table.

There was nothing out of the ordinary on it, except a large bronze ashtray, in which a straight-handled pipe lay. A Dun-hill, I guessed. Smoke rose from the pipe.

“Staying..” the owner said eventually. “Well, why not?” I didn’t know what to say to this, so I waited for him to go on. I couldn’t see my suitcase anywhere, but there was a checkered rucksack with a bunch of hotel-stickers on it in the corner. It wasn’t my rucksack.

“Everything has remained as he left it before his climb,” the owner went on, his voice growing stronger. “On that terrible, unforgettable day six years ago.”

I looked dubiously at the smoking pipe.

“Yes!” the owner cried. “There’s HIS pipe. That’s HIS jacket.

And that over there is HIS alpenstock. ‘Don’t forget your al-penstock, I said to him that very morning. He just smiled and shook his head. ‘You don’t want to be stuck up there forever!’ I shouted, a cold premonition passing over me. ‘Porquwapa, he said—in French. I still don’t know what it means.”

“It means ‘Why not?”” I said.

Even on his arrival it is a little odd

The book isn’t sci-fi as such for the most part, but it does. Ultimately, it is like they tried to write a crime novel but then remembered they were sci-fi writers. The book follows Inspector Peter Glebsky, who has been sent to see if a crime has happened at a remote hotel called the Dead Mountaineers Inn. He is also planning to ski and spend time there. The hotel is remote and has a cast of characters. Any Agatha Christie novel would be happy with a hypnotist, physicists, gamblers, strangers, and a huge dog. But as the day moves on and it becomes night, the inspector might have more to deal with than it seems at first, as the hotel is more than it appears on the surface, and strange things start happening. Will he be able to put it all together? The bodies tied up, what has happened to some of the gamblers, and will they all escape the hotel?

“The bottom line is that amazing things don’t just happen in our inn,” Du Barnstoker said. “One has only to recall, for example, the unidentified flying objects..”

The kid pushed its chair back with a crash, stood up and, still munching on the apple, made its way to the exit. Well I’ll be damned-for suddenly I seemed to be watching the slender figure of a charming young woman. But as soon as my heart softened the young woman vanished, leaving behind her, in the most obscene way, a brash and impertinent teen-ager: the kind that spread their fleas over beaches and shoot drugs in public bathrooms. Was it a boy? Or, damn it, a girl?

I had no idea who to ask, and meanwhile Du Barnstoker was prattling on:

Early on he skis and then he finds maybe a clue to things l,ater on in the book?

 

I loved this book. As I said in my post the other day, I don’t like crime novels; well, that isn’t true. I like crime books that play with the genre, and this does. I t has those nods to the classic crime of the like pof Agatha christie a selection of characters gathered together. The remote hotel and the ski remind me of the Poirot story The Labours of Hercules, which saw him cut off like Glebsky in a remote ski resort. The book then has some other touches, and we see it the way they wanted us to know the book as a crime novel. But then it turns on a few things later in the book and you see the story isn’t the way you saw it in the boo. I didn’t help myself reading half the book and then seeing the film where there is some pieces cut and the story is slightly different on the film to make it work as a film. But it is a book that would;ld appeal to crime and sci fans. A great second book for this turn of the club years a book of its time 1970. The film is worth watching if you can catch it. It is no stalker, but it is still a very quirky seventies-styled piece of soviet cinema. Have you read any books by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky?

Count Julian by Juan Goytisolo

~ winstonsdad ~ 5 Comments

Count Julian by Juan Goytisolo

Spanish fiction

Original title –  Reivindicación del conde don Julián

Translator – Helen Lane

Source – Personal copy

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

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

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

 

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

Seneca? yes, Seneca

that is to say, his portrait in the Prado Museum

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

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

He picks various Spanish figures to talk about.

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

 

Night of the Crow by Abel Tomé

~ winstonsdad ~ 3 Comments

Night of the Crow by Abel Tomé

Galician fiction

Original title – a noite do corvo

Translator – Jonathan Dunne

Source – Review copy

I have long been a fan of thePress Small stations, run by the translator Jonathan Dunne. I first came across him with the books of Manuel Rivas he had translated, which, early on in this blog, were my favourite books I read. So when he kindly sent me three of the newer titles, I was excited. This one jumped out as I don’t read many crime novels, but for me, this had some classic crime novel traits Abel Tomé is both a Journalist and a welder, it said on the rear cover ( I read that and immediately thought of the Smiley quote it is such circumstances that produces certain people) He is known for his ability to take readers to new settings and the attendant myths. This book is a perfect example of that!

“It was the night of the crow. I heard it sing and jump with the full moon on top of the thatched roof.

After that, it went away, but carried on singing.”

“Singing? Since when does a crow sing?”

Lúa looked at me. This didn’t stop the old woman picking up on the irony.

“You know what I mean, inspector. It was the night of the crow. I’m sure of it. And when the crow sings at that kind of time, it’s for only one reason. The premonition of death. That’s right, death.”

I hated all of that. Superstition. The divine. Miracles.

“Thanks be to God.” Something beyond. Beyond? Where?

What a pile of nonsense! The old woman dressed in

mourning for twenty years, talking of crows that presage death. In Galataz, people leave whatever small change they have in the church’s basket.

The island is steep in Myths and the old tradtions as well !

I said this had classic crime novel traits. Well, we have a family of four found dead on a house next to a lighthouse on an island that has two prominent families, and the island itself can be self-governing. In addition, the police have to call in to solve the crime. The police inspector called in is a man haunted by the loss of his wife. He ends up butting heads with the locals as the island has its own way of doing things. Inspector Goncalves is handed the case and gets his two assistants to meet him on Gothard Island. Pierre, a sex addict who chain smokes, and Lua, who has a father with Alzheimer’s. he is the one member of the police who has a connection through his family to the island. The crime of the death of the schoolteacher and his family lead the team into the heart of the island and the community divide y the family and also the laws like they still have the death penalty and how a trial would run shock the police. It seems Gothard is stuck in the past and hasn’t changed its legal system since the Middle Ages. This crime novel sees them dealing with everything on the island as much as solving the crime. It is more than just murder and links to events in the town they are from

Rowan Faol lived in the north of Gothard, in a kind of luxury residential development with about fifteen houses. The strange thing is some of the houses belonged to big shots from Beth. On the island, they could enjoy some privacy. They paid the chancellor to drive away those journalists who stick to famous people’s butts.

Celebrity magazines and the like. The truth is in that place there was lots of discussion about the future of the city. I always imagined them sitting at a round table, discussing ways of earning more money at the expense of Beth’s naive inhabitants. An epidemic, the threat of economic crisis, a new law…

One of the people theymeet from one of the two main famlies the Faols and the Carthaigs !

What caught my attention about this book is the setting, the Island of Gothard, which reminds me of places like the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man, where bits of the old feudal system are still around on the island. Add to that, the two main families. Then, the secrets of the island’s two main families, the three main officers, all have their own burdens, from constantly looking at the females of the islands to Lua’s own connection to the island. Then add the four dead bodies, and you have the making of what is an excellent gem of a novel. It is what made Agatha Christie’s books work well. Islands were one of her favourite settings for a novel. Then, the classic incoming police officers clashing with the locals is a common theme of great crime fiction. Then, he throws in a local leader who wants to have his fingers in the case and wants it done his way. I said I hadn’t read any crime novels, but this was the first of two I read in the last couple of weeks. Both twist the genre. Do you like crime novels that are more than just a crime novel like this?

 

 

Han Kang wins the Nobel

~ winstonsdad ~ 8 Comments

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

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