Tag: 3timesrebel

Beloved by Empar Moliner

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Beloved by Empar Moliner

Spanish (Catalan) fiction

Original title – Benvolguda

Translator -Laura Mcgloughlin

Source – review copy

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

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

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

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

The time she sees her husband and other violinist

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

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

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

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

Remei trying to keep a hold of the past

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

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

 

Winstonsdad annual Guesses at the BOOKER INTERNATIONAL LONGLIST 2024 edition

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Its that time of year when all us bloggers that love books in translation look into our Crystal ball well in my case what I have read in the whole 9 of the 12 books I have picked will be ones I have read  and 3 are books that I hope to read.

I start with The end of August by Yu Muri the tales of a century of Japanese Korean history told through a pair of marathon runners grandfather and granddaughter in Morgan Giles stunning Tranlstion. This is one of the two I really hope make the longlist.

Star 111 by Lutz Seiler Translator Tess Lewis is the other book I have longed to see on the longlist. It is set during the Berlin War and partly based on the writer’s own life at the time and also his parents’ life at the time, as he stayed in the East and they headed west.

Next up are two choices from Machlehose Press. First is Vengance is Mine by Marie NDiaye. is bout a middle-aged lawyer who is hired by someone she used to know to try a case, and as she does, the past becomes clearer. Translated by Jordan Stump Then we have Wound by Oksana Vasyakina. It is the tale of a daughter taking her mother’s ashes back to her mother’s village in Siberia. As she is doing so, she looks back on her life. It is one of the first openly lesbian novels in Russian. Translated by Eliner Alter

Next and Epic prose novel from Sweden Ǎdnan by Linnea Axelsson Translator Saskia Vogel is the tale of two Sami Famlies through the 20th century shows how there world has changed. Also be a great to see and indigenous writer on the longlist.It has the feel of a epic told in verse could be told around the campfire.

Off to Italy its been a while since an Italian book has been on the longlist and I loved this novelisation of a true life event The city of the Living by Nicola Lagioia translatror Ann Goldstein pulled apart the events that lead to the death of Luca Varni was killed by two men similar age to him in a planned murder that looks at the darker side of masculinity and being male in Modern Italy.

I love to support small presses, and one of my favourites in the last couple of years is Three Times Rebel Press. They have been bringing out thought-provoking books for the last couple of years. The Dear Ones by Berta Davila. This is a powerful little novel about motherhood and struggling with motherhood when you have a child but then have an abortion. Translated by Jacob Rogers

The most secret memory of men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr translator Lara Vergnaud this is part road novel part look at being an African writer in France also use a real novel that was accused of plagrism and has also just come out as a starting point when a writer reads the imagined novel that was withdrawn and goes on the hunt for the writer. I hope this makes the longlist ine I really connected with as a reader.

About uncle by Rebecca Gisler  Translator Jordan Stump. This has been my favourite Peirene for a long while and follows a family looking after an odd war veteran and his odd habits about family and what happens when one member need all the other to look after him.

Now my three I haven’t read with a quick explanation why

The annual Banquet of the Gravediggers Guild by Mathias Enard translator Frank Wynne

Just about to start this hard say why I haven’t got to it as it is translated by one of my favourite translators Frank Wynne and Enard ois a writer I love to read.

Anomaly by Andrej Niokladis Translator Will Firth  Lets hope this is out from Peirene a new publisher for his works he is a writer I have long championed and have met he has also done a piece for this blog. He is one of the best writers from Central Europe at the moment

Lasstly is a Nobel winner The children of the dead by Elfriede Jelinek Translator Gitta Honegger is meant to be her greatest book I have read a couple by her so am looking forward to this one.

The Dear ones by Berta Dávila

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The Dear ones by Berta Dávila

Galician fiction

Original title -Os seres queridos

Translator – Jacob Rogers

Source – Review copy

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

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

The book she was writing about a mother losing a son

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

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

There is a coldness in this description of her son

 

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

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

I’ll Do Anything you want by Iolanda Batallé

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I’ll Do Anything You Want by Iolanda Batalle

Catalan fiction

Original title – Faré tot el que tu vulguis

Translators- Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent

Source –  Review copy

I was so pleased I was able to get a copy of this sent by 3 times rebel press as I had been a huge fan of the first two books the I had read last year they are a small publisher that has decided to publish working-class female voices from around the world in minority languages. This tie it is from the Catalan writer Iolanda Batallé. She is a teacher and writer. But she has also set up a number of publishing Imprints and raised international awareness in Cultural projects in her country. She also runs a bookshop called Ona in her Home town(one for the bookshop bucket list ) an emblematic bookshop a house of culture and a house of literature(sounds simply wonderful) . She has written four books.

THE COST OF LIVING KEEPS RISING, AND YET HUMANKIND HAS recently gone down in value. Nora strode along the jetway without looking back. She knew he was watching. His gaze held a deep nostalgia, a feeling so tangible, so solid she could almost knead it, the way she did when she had baked with her grandmother. Nacho watched her, her black skirt just above the knee, her blazer, her swaying hips. He noted with amusement that the men desired her and even the women were looking at her. He’d always wanted to know what had happened to his mother, but he’d never found a single clue.

His mother had turned blue after being with a man who was not his father. Dead. He’d witnessed it by chance, he was supposed to be at school. Mother’s turned blue! There’s nothing that can be done. That’s when he decided to become a shark. Seven years later he heard the song king of painter the first time.

I loved the clever use of this song as she has the affair and sees her sexual awakening in an S&M world

 

This book follows one’s sexual awakening Journey we meet Nora she is a housewife bored of her life in many ways. So when she starts an affair that then leads her into a world of High-class prostitution. Her world starts to come alive as she dives into a world of S&M . But in Nora’s head this is almost a dream-like feeling for her but as we the reader are an avatar on her journey we maybe see the slim lines of darkness and the danger as she drifts further into this world. As she as a woman is sexually awakened to the new level of desire these meets bring to her body, we see how she and her husband drifted apart over the 25 years of their marriage. This is a woman’s journey into her own body and what lust and sex can awaken in a woman. But there is always a feeling of what might happen in the background of her thought the sexual looking-glass journey. As we follow a sexual Alice as she eats and licks things and other things that make her body and desire grow!

SOMETIMES SHE FELT LIKE SHE DIDN’T KNOW WHERE SHE WAS.She wondered if it was all really happening. But there was no evidence to indicate it wasn’t. She’d avoided phoning Júlia for days, because when she did everything became all too real. Júlia had told her to break it off, she’d said it wasn’t right … that wasn’t what she’d meant when she spoke of infidelity. Ah, so now, to top things off, I need to be unfaithful the way you want me to be! Nora had yelled before hanging up on her. She needed to tell someone about what she was going through, but there was no one. The people who would have listened without judging were dead, and Robert obviously wasn’t an option. Teresa, her therapist, had passed away.

The dream like feeling of her journey is described her

This is a wonderfully poetic book that sees our narrator on her journey. The nod to Alice is mentioned on the cover and there is a feeling of someone dreaming through a world that isn’t dreamlike and that yes is giving her a lot of power in herself and her own desire but then on there other hand is dangerous like putting a hand through a flame you’re going get burnt eventually. This reminds me of the rabbit holes you went down in books William S  Burroughs wrote about sexual awakening his were around sex and drugs but this is driven by a woman who wants to break free of her boring world and feels that is something Burroughs also did well they want to break free and feel something else!! Or Anais Noin those first waves of writers that tackled what are taboo subjects in their books. This has led to writers like Iolanda that can now enter a sexual world of high-class sex for money a woman that is navigating that world as a woman empowered for now.!! The over thing I loved was the use of music in this book it used piece of music as a sort of tag for the sexual events as a way of remember the nights of passion. This is another gem from a press that is publishing hard-hitting books.

Have you a favourite book that deals with sexual desires?

Mothers Don’t by Katixa Aguirre

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Mothers Don’t go by Katixa Agirre

Basque fiction

Original tite – Amek ez dute

Translator Kristin Addis

Source – personal copy

I picked the other book from 3 times rebel press as one of my books of the year. So I knew this book would be another one I would connect with. Enjoy, but this is a thought-provoking novel tinged with sadness. It is the first book to be translated by the writer Katixa Aguirre. This book had already been translated from the translated Spanish edition. But Katxoia Agirre, as she says in the afterword, is a writer like many from the Basque region who can write in Spanish or in Basque. She chose her native tongue and, like many of the other writers I have read from the Basque region. It is a distinct voice.

IT HAPPENED IN THE MIDDLE OF SUMMER.

On a Thursday afternoon.

That day, the nanny walked through the gates of the house in Armentia as if she were opening the doors to hell: cheeks red and reluctantly. As usual, she felt that her time off, four hours on Thursday afternoons, had gone by quickly, too quickly. The girl’s name was Mélanie, and she had been in Gasteiz for nine months, learning Spanish and trying to decide what her next step in life should be. She locked her bike in the back garden, tried to brush the mud off her sandals, and entered the house uneasily. She didn’t hear a sound. She peeked cautiously into the kitchen, the living room, and the room that the lady of the house used as a studio. She was thinking about the boy she had met that day, who had invited her on a bike ride through Salburua Park.

He wasn’t too bad.

The opening lines

The book is a tale of two mothers and has one of those points that is the start of how the two stories in the book interconnect, and that is that our narrator, a writer and Journalist, knew a woman who had killed her twins at ten months old. What draws her in is two-fold she is a new mother herself, and the woman that has killed her children is someone she had crossed paths with many years earlier when the woman, then known as Jade, had been at university at the same time. We see our narrator try and undo what the woman, now calling herself Alices, had done this act had brought to kill the twins and why. Visiting the scene where she killed her twins. Then she finds her friends and tries to piece together events whilst her trial continues. We never get that definitive answer. It is like going into a labyrinth of a mind about why she did the act she did with its twists and turns; the truth and reality are lost.

Lindy Chamberlain’s case was real, nor that it was (and still is) one of the most famous darker cases in Australia’s legal history. However, it clearly left its mark on me as I can still remember it today, and since the word dingo, which sounds cheerful enough on its own, still haunts my dreams.

The famous dingo case is mentioned a woman convicted tehn released of the murder of her daughter.

This is a hard-hitting book. As they say in the blurb, 3times rebels are bringing solid female voices from minority languages. This is no exception. This is a harrowing tale of one woman’s quest to find out why someone she met had done such a hideous act and what had driven her to that act of killing her twins. It also looks at what makes women do this and how the law has dealt with this as a crime in the past and present. The book pivots on that meeting years ago between Jade and our narrator, that is the starting point, and we follow paths similar in a way having children with a year of each other but then different outcomes. But then it is also worth noting the time she spends looking at Jade/Alice away from her child!! Few book deal with this infrequent but sad crime of infanticide. The only other book I can think of is  Beside the sea. Where the narrative is told by the woman who killed her children. In that book, the reasons and why are blurred. It is hard to capture the way in these events as it must be a point of sheer psychosis where they have no absolute control over the events for that moment. So there is no answer, just the facts of that event; like the embers of a fire, you have to rebuild the fire in your mind, which is different in every sense. The hard-hitting book lifts the lid on the taboo subject of infanticide and drags it into the light. This book looks at a horrific event like a writer like Melchor and female Latin American writers do is what I was more mind there has been mention of English writers like Spark, but I’ve not read enough of her to compare the two. Have you read this book?

Winstons score – +A stark two paths cross; years later, two babies die, one is born, and the two paths cross again!

Dead Lands by Núria Bendicho

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Dead lands by Núria Brendicho

Catalan Fiction

Original title – Terres mortes

Translators – Maruxa  Relaño & Matha Tennent

Source – Personel copy

I have had my foot of the pedal when it comes to new publisher and translations around. So when I first saw the new publisher 3Timesrebel. There is a motto in the book ‘I am grateful to fate for three gifts to have been born a woman, from the working class and an oppressed nation. And the turbid azure of being three times a rebel by Maria-Mercè Marçal so they have taken that motto to publish books from languages less published and from working-class females they have three books out I have brought two by them. The afterword Núria talks about her own reading journey from Catalan literature than into Spanish realism and then French Naturalism then by chance she happened on the works of William Faulkner and saw something in his writing she thanks all these writers. You can see the connection to Faulkner. It had been years since I read him but I happen to read as I lay dying last year.

THINK IT OVER, HE HAD SAID. IN A FEW YEARS, IF WELL-TENDED, all those lands, those fields and paths that came out of no-where, traversed the forests, encircled Roca Negra and extended further still, they could bring in good money, and they could be mine, have my name on the deed. It was simple. All I had to do was marry. A wife isn’t that much work, my father said in a hoarse tone, as if the comment just happened to slip out and he hadn’t been thinking about it for hours. It’s an opportunity.

The opening of Jon;’s father’s story.

I happen to mention the Faulkner I read as I have seen in other reviews other works by him mention but this dark story with its cast of characters it follows the event before and after Jon is killed when he has shot in the back in the remote village the family live the book is made up of the 13 stories from those that knew Jon and the dead man himself for me this rang with the style of as I lay dying as it has a cast of characters talking about one person. The narrators start with a couple of his siblings the youngest just called the boy and then Maria who is with the child herself but who is the father. Then Jon’s father as the story goes on we piece together the events and why was Jon shoot in the back who shot him and why. Then others outside the family a whorehouse own the priest as we head to the man himself his story is the last but one story. The last character is looking back as she is caring for a character in a hospice Tomas one of Jon’s brothers as he reveals things that happened when Jon died to his carer. This is a dark book and reflects a hard place. I was reminded of the attitude I used to see in the small pit villages around the northeast and some of the characters remind me of some of the people I met years ago.

FIRST CAME THE SHOT AND THEN DEATH. OR FIRST THE SHOT and then the suffering that led to my death. But above all, death. In the early days there was confusion, not only because it seemed even the living didn’t know who killed me, but because I didn’t remember it either. It was as if my non-body had forgotten what I had experienced because my mind was too preoccupied debating whether to leave non-death and enter non-life. I still had ears when I was buried, heard the specks of earth coming down on me, dusting my mouth, then someone weeping, and later the weight of oblivion interring me.

I chose the opening of Jon story as it hit me hard.

This is a hard gothic work that takes apart what happened it is a look at the moment I was reminded of a book like the anatomy of a Moment another book from Spain that takes a round view of the attempted coup in the 80’s in Spain. There is a nod to Faulkner that dark world and chorus of voices he had used so well in his books it reminds me I have a number of his books to read. Then a Peirene Press novel from Denmark they brought out a few years ago. The murder of Halland like this book it followed a murder and it was also more about why it happened the ones who don’t here get clues to the reasons but it is more what lead up to even the aftermath. This is a harsh world and like in another book from Peirene stones in a landslide. Like this is set in a remote mountain village where the locals are in their own world reality of their own with tough rules and consequences. so if your are after a gothic village novel about a murder this is for you and is stunning to think it is the writer’s Debut novel. Have you read any of these new books from 3Timesrebel ?

Winstons score – ++++A The dark side of the world of  Stones in a landslide (and you all know that is one of my all-time favourite books)