Tag: and other stories press

Sweet Days Of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy

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Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy

Swiss fiction

Original title – I beati anni del castig0

Translator – Tim Parks

Source – Personal Copy

Have you ever thought you had read a book by a writer, but after you have read it by them, discover you hadn’t thought you had at some point?  Well, that has just happened. After reading so many books over the years, it was bound to happen, and And Other Stories is a publisher. I have read a lot of books over the years. Hence, I naturally thought I had read this writer. Several of her books from And Other Stories have come out in the UK in the last few years. I have brought a couple over that time, so I thought I had read one. But no, this is her first book I have read. Jaeggy lived in Rome, where she became friends with Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, and met her later husband, the editor and writer Roberto Calasso . She speaks French, German and Italian

Frédérique was beginning to look at me. I felt the weight of her eyes on my body. It was like a punch in the beck sometimes, and I would turn. Sometimes, at table, I sensed her gaze on me, and then I held myself straighter and ate with the most refined manners, so that I hardly ate at all. But at breakfast, even if she was watching me, I helped myself to two or three slices of bread and butter and marmalade. And I have to admit that I thought of nothing but breakfast. When I dunked my bread in my coffee that time it was out of sheer greed, without thinking. I seem to remember Frédérique smiled, out of indulgence I suppose. Now she was asking me to spend time with her, and she kept her eye on me from a disctance

Her instona connection with the new gir;

The book opens with the narrator, a 14-year-old currently at a boarding school, talking about the fact that nearby is where Robert Walser used to walk and eventually die in the snow. This is one of those books that did not. A lot of plot, more framing of this girl, and the fact that a new Girl  Frédérique, whom our narrator becomes obsessed with from trying to be like her in many ways, writes like her. The story evolves around a schoolmistress and some other girls in her year. But what happens when suddenly she has to depart, as something has happened to her father? Then out of the blue, another New pupil, Micheline. This fills the void, but when summer arrives, her mother tries to send her to what sounds like a finishing school. Our narrator rebels, which means she has two more encounters with Frédérique. The book ends with a strange echoing of the opening and a madness in her friend that sometimes mirrors Walsers’ madness.

She attached a value to her poverty, the way others might to their extravagance. She was truly possessed by her indigent state, all she had was herself, but it was more than enough, since the aromas of servitude bubbled up from her constantly, a natural predisposition. How small and slippery her feet were when she went quick as quick up and down the corridor, and how well she knew how to disappear when the reverend mother called her, barely whispering her name. Reverend mothers always speak very softly. And how she would genuflect sideways in the chapel! Her big eyes were well suited to contemplating the crucifix. If she hadn’t been an informer, we would have believed, generously, in her magnanimous devotion and obedience.

I picked this it shows how great her writng is !

This is a book that is wonderfully well written and is so captivating. I connected with the narrator as I had friends I wanted to be like when I was younger. I struggled with who I am most of my teen years, never quite getting my own identity. It wasn’t till later in life that I became comfortable with myself. I also connected with the part where our narrator would be sent to what sounded like a finishing school. My late stepmother went to finishing school growing up, and I remember her talking about that time, which would maybe be a similar time to the book being set, which is the sixties, I think it is never mentioned. Anyway, it is a book that is not a lot that happens it is a few months in her life,  a sort of view of being young and impressionable. Some social attitudes towards some of the characters show an underlying issue, the daughter of an African leader, and how she is viewed. But it captures a girl in Frederique that is brilliant, but as it turns out, also flawed and unstable, it isn’t too late that she sees this. I loved this book. Have you read any books by her?

 

The book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem

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The book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem

Paslenstenian  fiction

Original title -سفر الاختفاء

Translator Sinan Antoon

Source – Subscription edition

The translator of this book was a finalist for the old IFFP prize many years ago, before it became the Booker International Prize. I think we all want some novels that capture why events are happening in Palestine and Israel. This book, in some way, captures that by doing something so out of the blue, it leaves a void. What happens when the whole country, all of Palestine’s citizens, just aren’t there one morning? How will the Israelis react? That is the premise of the book. It is set in the Jaffa region. As I said in the last post, I’m drawn to speculative fiction, and this concept, as a way to describe the whole situation, grabbed me.

He went out barefoot and ran down to the third floor.

He rang the bell, confident that Alaa would open the door in no time, if he wasn’t at work. Taking time to open the door doesn’t mean anything necessarily. Alaa’s usually late.

Ariel rang the bell several times and then started banging on the door and calling out, “Alaa, Alaa, ata bu?”

When he went back up Zohar was getting ready to leave.

“He’s not answering.”

“You mean he disappeared with the others.”

“I don’t want to get into an argument, but I don’t think he’s disappeared. Maybe he’s wiped out and wasn’t able to go to work. We drank a bottle of wine last night and he was tired.

His phone is off and he only turns it off when he’s asleep.”

“You still don’t get what’s happening. Listen to your voicemail. Listen to the news. This is the nonchalant attitude that ruined our relationship. I’m going.”

He thinks his friend will still be there but isn’t

So what we see is the tale of what happened just before and then after, when all the Palestinians went through two friends on either side of the divide. Alaa is Palestinian. She is haunted by the events many years before, which were recounted to her by her grandmother about when she was thrown out of Jaffa and forcibly moved by the Israelis. Where our neighbour is now, Ariel, is a liberal Zionist. So when he wakes up the very next day, Alaa and all the Palestinians have gone, with no clue where or even how they just disappeared. Night. Add to this, we get Alaa’s notebooks that recount the event her grandmother had told her. The more significant part of the book focuses on how the authorities and Ariel react to the disappearance, and how their reactions are explained, which is at the centre of the whole book. This is one of those ‘what-if’ moments imagined.

Press offices have refused to give any special entry permits during the coming forty-eight hours. Going there would be of no use anyway, he thought as he took a sip of the coffee, which scorched his tongue. He called the IDF press office and the Tel Aviv municipality to check if it was necessary to get a special permit to go to Jaffa, or any other Arab area. He got the same answer. No permits are being given and he should call the following day.

How the goverment scrambles to cope twith what has happened!

As I said, I like certain speculative fiction, and this is one of those books that appealed to me before the prize. I think we all want to know a little bit more about this whole situation in Israel and Palestine. One must remember we have a massive part in the past history of this conflict, as we were at the heart of the discussions and plans to start Israel. The other thing about this book I’m talking about is that it was written over a decade ago, and maybe that’s why it could have been written at any time in the last few decades, which is a scary thought. I was reminded of what Dasa Drndic said about the tear-away section in her book, in Italy, with all the names of the dead Italian Jews. When they are taken out of the book, the book and the country fall apart in a way. What happens when your enemy disappears? This is what fuels the book, the questions of how, why, the aftermath and what happens with that void? But also it in someway for me as a reader left a few unanswered questions, I m not sure if I am dsoemtimes a read that likes to have everything tied up at times and in a way this book isn’t abkiut that it is about that void and the questions it gives those who are left but also how people react to that happening. It’s an interesting perspective on the whole situation and a fresh take on it. I wonder if they had read books by Saramago or something like ‘The Day of the Triffids, ‘ which deals with a sudden change. This is something like what Wyndham might have written about this situation.I like the idea of this book in part, it works, but for. Me there was a part that was missing at times if that makes sense a sort ofwhy and how to the events but maybe they were left vague for a reason!

 

Stay with me by Hanne Ørstavik

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Stay with Me by Hanne Ørstavik

Danish fiction

Original title – Bli hos meg

Translator – Martin Aitken

Source – subscription edition

I am a huge fan of Hanne’s earlier books. I have reviewed Love and The Blue Room by her before. I had a strange thing when I picked this up the other day. It was as though other books in my TBR pile had dripped down into this book a violent father I had come across a few weeks ago in My Favourite and then a woman in her fifties like the main character in the last book I had read had read a point in her life where she is going be alone this is a widow that then takes a younger lover.

They never touched each other, caresses, there was no tenderness between them. Mamma thought Pappa was senti-mental, pathetic, pitiful, and at the same time she was afraid of him, afraid to death, there’d been that business with the axe out in the fields in the snow, in the middle of the night, Pappa had been drinking home-made vodka (so Mamma said, he went mad, ran wild and jumped over the stone wall, I can see it in my mind’s eye, over the wall in one leap, in the snow, so young and strong and lithe he must have been then, Pappa, younger than M is now, thirty-three or thirty-four, but now Pappa tells me it wasn’t like that at all, he hadn’t touched a drop, and he hadn’t gone mad either, the axe part had been misunderstood, he hadn’t been going for anyone but had taken the axe with him to use as a gavel, like in court, to emphasise something, a standpoint

The memory of her father and the axe

We live in the age of the unnamed narrator. We meet a Norweigan writer in Italy just as she has lost her husband a year before, and then she sets out on the dating scene again and falls for a man who is seventeen years younger than her. This is one of those c connections that is explosive; the connection is intense. It is like the pull of a powerful magnet, and what happens when you try to pull apart a magnet for the attraction? There has to be a counter effect to that, and this is when her younger lover a plumber by trade has an other side appears a darker side that then in a way awakens a memory of her own past He Papa a violent drunkard of a man. A memory of him with an axe and the outcome of that. Our narrators is also writing a story of a Norweigan designer living in The us and with her husband so when n the street, mistrust and horror that follows the violence she had seen when younger and again with her younger lover it questions what love is like Orstavik has done in her other books.

The days that follow – he’s so quiet. You’re so quiet, I say, and he musters a smile, as if he’s pleased and ever so slightly proud that I’ve asked, about him, the person he is, doesn’t he know I’m always interested in the person he is, only now I’m asking in order to draw him out towards me, towards us. You don’t know me yet, he says, the person I am, my caratteraccio, and he looks at me. His bad temper, okay, but I’m not really listening, and imagine anyway that his softness will come out stronger, its the softness that’s most important, truest, it’s what we are, we’re the nakedness at our core,fragile

When you see a little of his temper maybe a ripple to the past is awakened

What happens when there is a moment when the dream romance turns sour and you see the real face of your younger lover, and it is the same face you saw as a young child in your father. Does history repeat itself? Had the younger man part of what her mother maybe saw in her father? Does fear fall down through generations? Hanne captures the feeling of love crumbling into fear and something much darker, as well as the echoes of one’s past. I was reminded of the rages I saw of my stepfather, a man with many issues who was extremely violent to his own kids. That fear never leaves you and also makes you wary. I question how the same mistakes can fall down through time. But also, what is love? Is it passion because the passion at the star is passion, but is that love? I feel our narrator had love. When you lose it, how hard is it to find it again? At fifty years old, setting sail again on the sea of love can be a really choppy trip when you meet a man who turns out to be a Tempest for her. Have you read any of her books over the years ?

 

Mammoth by Eva Baltasar

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Mammoth by Eva Baltasar

Spanish fiction

Original title – Mamut

Translator – Julia Sanches

Source – personal copy

I think this will be the big translated book of the summer. It’s no shock that her two other books in the loose trilogy have succeeded, with Boulder on the Booker longlist. Eva Baltasar started as a poet, and she won the Miquel de Palol prize when it came out. She then turned to novel writing with this trilogy of books about relationships and how motherhood or the wanting of children can affect a relationship; here we have another unnamed narrator, is it me or are these unnamed narrators a bit of a trope these days? For me it seems like every other book I  have read recently seems to have an unnamed narrator in it. I also saw this could be a companion book to Sara Mesa Un Amor as it has a similar starting point for the story of a young female heading into the hinterlands and a small village.

I have a used car. A rusty old Peugeot the size of an egg carton. I bought it from a stranger for two thousand euros because I wasn’t about to leave Barcelona with my belongings piled on a bicycle or take a train only to wind up stranded at a rural station in the back of beyond. The Peugeot is red, and while the doors may not close prop-erly, the paperwork is in order and it runs like a dream, which is all that really matters. I spend my first week at the inn driving from towns to villages and visiting real estate agencies. Most of the agencies are actually small accounting firms where farmers and cattle ranchers drop off their paperwork, although they tend to keep a list of cottages and farmhouses that are for sale or rent. The real estate market here is insane: the cost of renting a refurbished house is astronomical, and all I can afford are ruins, with the caveat of having to renovate the place myself

Her reasons for leaving  like many yoiung people the cost of housing

As I said, our narrator, a 24-year-old lesbian, has been wanting to have a baby and had slept with a number of men in the city to try and conceive a child. She has a daytime job as a researcher, interviewing a lot of old people in old people’s homes about their lives. But when this ends, and the job turns to Excel spreadsheets, she loses interest in the job, and thus, this helps her leave the job and set off in her small Pegeuot car to find. A rural idyll, she ends up in the mountains with a simple life and finds a job in a nearby village as a waitress. She also has an older man, a shepherd, who is her nearest neighbour. She also does battle with the stray cats is it me or are stray cats just a thing in certain parts of the world I remember a band otf stray cats when I was younger in an apartment in Portugal. Our narrator also decides to help the shepherd by becoming his cleaner. This is a lonely time, and these two unlikely lonely souls find themselves slowly drawn together. What will happen? Will she end up with a child?

The shepherd’s a good man. He must have noticed that times are tough because he asked if I could come by twice a week to clean his house, at my convenience. Naturally, I said yes. What I make waiting tables barely covers the rent.

He’s always home in the mornings, tending to his sheep.

Basically, moving shit from one place to another: sweeping out the pens, loading dung and soiled bedding into a wheel-barrow, and dumping it in the manure pile where it’s left to ferment in the sun. He makes a minimum of ten or twelve trips a day and the entire house reeks of shit. At first, it made my stomach turn, but a few days in I stopped noticing

The nearest neighbour is the shepherd

As I said, this had a similar start to Un Amor, a narrator leaving the city for the call of rural life. In this case, it is actually a totally alone place. This is a place with no real near neighbours. This is the wilderness and the closest person is the Shepherd to her, she heads to the village to work the cafe. The difference here is when they arrive, she starts to settle in, and in the relationship with the shepherd, we see one of those unlikely relationships build between the two. I loved the narrator as a voice, I was saying this book followed so well in Sanches translation. The mix of wilderness stray cats, the quirky shepherds, and being in the middle of nowhere all jump off the page. It is great to read this I haven;t read permanfrost and also see she has written a new novel this year. I think she may make the booker list again, but we will have to wait and see. It has a lot of modern issues, loneliness, wanting to escape the present you live in, WAnting a child as a lesbian, how to make this happen, and The rural dream. All of these are touched on in this book. Have you read any of this series of books by Eva Baltasar?

Winstons score ++A close to the best book I have read this year so far.

 

 

Birthday by César Aira

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Birthday by Cesar Aira

Argentinean fiction

Original title – Cumpleaños

Translator – Chris Andrews

Source – Personal copy

I am back in Argentina this evening and a writer I came late to I think I did first review AIra in 2010. But then left it till two years ago, and I think it was the frequent mentions on the Mookse and the Gripes podcast about him they did a special episode about him. It reminds me that I need to read more from him. He has written over a hundred books, and they are all fairly short, and a lot of them are focused on Pringles, which is where he grew up as a youngster. His book also features autobiographical details like this, set around the time the writer turned fifty and is about the writer returning to his hometown.

 

My style is irregular: scatter-brained, spasmodic, jokey – necessarily jokey because I have to justify the unjustifiable by saying that I didn’t mean it seriously.But if necessity intervenes, it’s no joke. I wasn’t really joking when I made that stupid quip about the moon.And of course it didn’t fool anyone. The gaps go on being gaps forever, unless some wildly improbable circumstance happens to correct me. If they were only gaps in knowledge, I wouldn’t be so worried; but there are gaps in experience too, and again they can only be  plugged by serendipty.The numbers in this game of chance are so enormus that just thinking about them make me dizzy . Whahcan I hope for , realistically. IF all the pbjective conditions required for such an event  line up once in a million years.

I wonder if that what he means about his own writing ?

He opened up about what it is like to turn fifty. This was, for me, a nightmare mare; I just felt it was a huge turning point in my life in the book, a writer is in his home town of Pringles. But this is what happens after his birthday: a series of small events. A walk with his wife leads him to talk about the moon and a childhood idea that he has kept thinking about. Then there is a section where he visits a shop, and the is a 17-year-old female shop assistant who knows he is a writer, but as she asks him what it is like to be a writer, he actually finds more about her than he even reveals, to her about his life and being a writer. As with other books art creeps up its a book that has ten short chapters and drifts from here to there like the other books i have read by Aira over the last few years.

For the same reason, my mind is in continuous move ment, flittering restlessly. Making a note of everything is beyond the bounds of human possibility. One thing I have idly fantasised about is inventing a notepad capable of capturing the hyperactivity of the brain.That must be the source of my fetishistic attachment to stationery and pens. I really should use some kind of shorthand, but I manage more or less with normal writing. In the end, all these daydreams about being the designer of one’s own peculiarities are futile because they are just metaphors for what ends up happening anyway: I became a writer and my little novels fulfil the roles of mystic writing pad and shorthand.

Again about the writing process maybe for Aira Himself.

I will hold my hand up and say I am late to Aira as a reader I wish I had followed up the first book I  read in 2012 and come back quicker to him.I have seven books by him. But there is a lot more out there, and I feel for me to get him more, I need to line up several books by him. I like the mix of memoir and surrealism at times. In this book, he seems to be a writer that can jump from the everyday to the surreal in such a small book, and it all seems to flow. I like the discussion with the shop assistant that felt like something he may have done I know writers often get asked about the writing process and must often like this hear more about her[person than explaining how it is to be a writer. I struggle with this as it is different from the first one I had read by him but is set around the same place as Artforum this is a writer whom I need to discover more as a reader to build his world and style in my mind. Have you read Aira? If so, which would you recommend buying? I may try and read a run of his books later in the year as they are all short.

Winston’s score: B. I need to read more of his work to discover him more as a writer.

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.

Star 111 by Lutz Seiler

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Star 111 by Lutz Seiler

German fiction

Original title -Stern 111

Translator – Tess lewis

Source – Library copy

I remember this was shown a lot around Twitter or whatever it is called now(I hate calling it x wtf does that mean, really ). Anyway, rant over. So it was all over as it was one of the first two books from and other stories to have their new design, which is very eye-catching and unique. I had intended to read Lutz Seiler a few years ago when Kruso came out, but a mishap and the proof I was sent to my old address, and I never got a replacement but when I read this, and it took me back to the time in the early 90s in Germany, it seemed a perfect read for me and also I felt it maybe would be a booker book it is a while since I finished it and now I think it may actually be more of an IFFP book but it does capture that time just after the Berlin wall fell so well. Anyway I would still like see it on the longlist myself.

A man stepped out onto the street heading toward the city center and raised his arm. It was three o’clock in the morning. Without a word of thanks, he got in the car and leaned back in the seat.

They drove for a time without engaging in conversation. “Stop just up ahead,” the man ordered and stuck a bill rolled into a cylinder the size of a cigarette between the heating vent louvers on the dashboard. Carl had heard about illegal cabs, but never imagined it would be so easy.

Just before Alexanderplatz, he turned onto a street that seemed suitable at first glance. It was called Linien Strasse.Only two streetlamps were working in the first hundred meters, and Carl parked the Zhiguli somewhere in the half-light between them.

Carl as he heads in to Berlin and thos names and places that we have seen so often in books and films about Berlin.

Star11 follows the outcome of the wall falling through the prism of one family. When the wall falls what happens when the parents want to go west and seek a life in the West and the son here wants to stay in. the east.. What follows is wjhat happens when Inge and Walter end up leaving the son Carl behind in East GermanyThey call him baxck from his studies to his home town of Thüringham where they tell him they are going west. His father kleaves behin=d his Car a russian Zhiguli or as we knew them Lada’s bck in the day. Carl ends up as a bit iof a Jack the Lad; he is eventually drawn to Berlin and the anarchy scene there he ends up as a Squatter and becomes friends with his fellow squatters. Carl who was a bricklayer. Starts to run an illegal taxi service. His life is interspersed with snippets of his parents and how they fair in the West. as they go from place to place. Their son is drawn by a different world of poetry and life in East Berlin as the wall falls and the corner is turned and many people flow into East berlin drawn by the cheap and vacant properties left behind by those heading west.

The first letter seemed to have been written in a state of great agitation and confusion. It contained a fragmented description of her first stops in the West, a muddled sequence of places, which Carl later tried to untangle in a sketch. What emerged was the image of a large circular movement over hundreds of kilometers, first northwards to the Dutch border, then back southwards along the Rhine, “our emigration”” as his mother had begun calling it. Carl pinned the page with his topographical sketch above his workbench, next to the flute player: “The Way of My Parents.”

This made me think of where I lived at the time which was five miles from the DAutch border and not far from the Rhine

This is a classic come of age in fact it has a nod to Gunter Grass I felt in the style of the writing. He is one of the voices of the Wende generation that grew up when the wall fell. Like Clemens Meyer he uses hius own life he was a bricklayer and he went ot East Berlin and his won parent took that trek through the west to settle and find there new home. This is from the era of films like Goodbye lenin, the Follow up to Wings of Desire wherwe see Berlin after the Wall has fallen the madness of the place chaotic and full of possiblites and we see this in  Carls world. In an interview, he says you must invent to tell a true story using authentic start points to retell the times. He mixes his own life with the world he lives and sees. I felt this captured a time that is now part of history wreally fresh in my own mind was the wall falling and spending time in Germany not long after the wall fell. I feel he captures a time that has long gone well a different world. Have you read Lutz Seiler ?

Winstons score – A one of two books I held back to review and want see on the longlist most.

The Taiga syndrome by Christina Rivera Garza

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The Taiga Syndrome by Christina Rivera Garza

Mexican fiction

Original title – El Mal de la Tagia

Translators – Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana

Source – library

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boulder by Eva Baltasar

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Boulder by Eva Baltasar

Catalan fiction

Original title – Boulder

Translator – Julia Sanches

Source – Personal copy

I had seen this doing the rounds before the Booker longlist came out, and I had read Permafrost but had to have it back at the library before I could review it. So I knew when this made the longlist it was a book I would like as I had intended to read it at some point. Because I love poets that become novelists, they usually have such remarkable visuals and imagery in their language. I have also enjoyed many of the recent books I have read that have come from Catalan in recent years. Eva Baltsazr is, as I said a poet. She released ten volumes of poetry and she has won several literary prizes this book and the other book I read form a triptych of books about three different women. She lives in the mountains with her wife and two children.

She doesn’t like my name, and gives me a new one. She says I’m like those large, solitary rocks in southern Patagonia, pieces of world left over after creation, isolated and exposed to every element. No one knows where they came from. Not even they understand how they’re still standing and why they never break down. I tell her I’ve seen rocks like those in the middle of the ocean. The ships skirt them in silence, as though some mythological creature could awaken and attack them. They’re not always by themselves. Sometimes there are more just a short distance away. Sometimes they form labyrinths you would be wise to avoid. Samsa lets her hair down and tickles my forehead, my eyelashes, my neck.She calls me Boulder and I don’t know why we laugh. Maybe love is unfurling above us like an enormous branch that bends and touches all the most sensitive, reticent parts of us.

How Boulder became Boulder.

This is a complex book about relationships, desire, lust and also motherhood. it is the story of two women; the title character Boulder is as she says early on in the book that she is a self-taught cook on a merchant ship sail around the world, but what happens when this lonely woman a loner, is maybe on the ship because she loves being herself and in a constant movement around the world. She is hit sideways when one night in a bar, she meets an older woman Samsa. They have a fierce, passionate night of passion as we see Boulder fall for Samas and decide to change the course of her life when she finds Samsa has taken a job in Iceland. They settle down and the years drift by and we see the two drift apart slowly Samsa rises up the career ladder and we see Boulder drift like an unanchored ship from job to job as this happens, Samsa decides she is getting no younger and wants to be a mother. Not as keen, Boulder agrees, and they have a child, but this sees the relationship dynamics change, and Boulder starts to feel outside the trio. What will happen? Will they weather the storm of motherhood?

Ragnar insists we have to celebrate. Here I was thinking we were friends. I tell him all I have to celebrate is the fact that Ive reached new heights of stupidity, that I can’t bring myself to hurt or leave Samsa, to understand the magnitude of her desire and say no. He tells me he felt the same when he had his first kid but that everything changes after the second or the third; they come out of their moms and grow up all on their own, all you have to do is feed them. He makes some dig that I can’t remember about the food truck and slaps my back so hard i choke.

After years in iceland Boulder never settles but tries to stay with Samsa

This follows a usual path of a relationship with a burning passion that draws us together, then the settling period and then what happens next it uses a queer relationship to follow this path. I loved the imagery Baltsar used at times; the passion of the relationship jumped off the page. I felt the could be a little more character-building, but I felt I knew these women. The Boulder character reminded me of a few people I knew years ago in Germany. So even thou they are mere pen sketches of characters, you feel as thou you know them. It captures that first flame of passion as the two make love, but it also manages to do what next, which I haven’t seen much in books because life isn’t happy ever after it is warts and all. Then throw in Motherhood and what happens when the relationship balance has changed and one of the couples feels pushed out by the baby. It is a great slice of relationship literature. It touches on some of the same subjects: Still life motherhood and not wanting children but this is more about the effect of motherhood on the relationship dynamics and the passion that started that relationship.

Winstons score – B A little novella that packs a punch.

Empty Words by Mario Levrero

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Empty Words by Mario Levrero

Uruguayan fiction

Original title – El discurso vacío

Translator – Annie McDermott

Source – personal copy

I am back with another for my Spanish lit month and this time I am heading down to Latin America and one of the countries that I really should have read more books from over the year and that Is Uruguay and her we have a book from the late writer Mario Levrero a writer that as the translator said in the intro he is hard to put in a Genre. I liked in his Wiki page that it said he had left school due to a Heart murmur. Then he had spent his time listening to tango music and reading. He spent the latter part of his life trying to finish his novel The Luminous novel which he had spent a number of years working on he had been influenced by Franz Kafka and Lewis Carroll. This is the first book I have read by him and it was like going down a rabbit hole.

My graphological self-therapy begins today. This method (suggested a while ago by a crazy friend) stems from the notion – which is central to graphology – that there’s a profound connection between a person’s handwriting and his or her character, and from the behaviourist tenet that changes in behaviour can lead to changes on a psychological level. The idea, then, is that by changing the behaviour observed in a person’s handwriting, it may be possible to
change other things about that person.

My aims at this stage of the therapeutic endeavour are fairly modest. To begin with, I’m going to practise writing by hand. I won’t be attempting calligraphy, but I’ll at least try to manage a script that anyone could read – myself included, because these days my writing’s often so bad
that not even I can decipher it.

What he is trying to do is explained .

What happens when you get some writer’s block. Well, our narrator unnamed has been told by a friend to just write with a pen and paper every day ( this is something you see a lot these days in self-help videos and how to become creative). What we have here is his jotting the life his outpouring and over time you see how Levrero has let his narrator pour out his life and his life is one that is seeing him wanting to go up the ladder at work he writes crosswords and his mother is now showing her age. His stepson is distant so most of his time is spent Wirth his dog Pongo. But what we see is a man trying to write trying to expand from tales of his dog and the cat next door. This is one of those books that is just great but is hard to describe I’ve seen it compared to Bernhard in a way especially as he had Also written about trying to work through writer’s block.

4 October
A bad day for calligraphical exercises, and for lots of other things too. It’s raining (which I enjoy, though it makes me even more inclined than usual to sleep and do nothing). Yesterday (today) I went to bed after five in the morning; at ten thirty I was woken up by a truck with loudspeak-
ers attached, which stopped right outside our house and held forth about some stupid raffle, at great length and appalling volume. Then, without having got back to sleep properly – I’d been dozing, but that was it – at twelve thirty I was woken up once and for all by Juan Ignacio and his
grandmother, who were shouting for the dog in a deafening chorus. Because of all this, my eyes are burning and I don’t feel like doing anything. I notice, however, that except for the odd slip-up, my writing is large and clear.

A few days later and we see how he is getting on with his daily task of writing.

 

Another review said that Uruguay is known as the place of the strange ones when it comes to writers. I think that this would be one I struggle at times it is one of those books that hasn’t any real plot other than we know he is writing every day to free his writing up. this is an overweight guy with heart issues ( this is another nod to Bernhard in a way how often his characters have a sort of spite to their own world !!). It is maybe a writer trying to write about a writer trying to escape writer’s block whilst the writer himself is trying to escape the writer’s block he is suffering. His other book the luminous novel is also like this about trying to escape writer’s block. He likes to take the reader down rabbit holes of a writer struggling in his life there is a sense of the absurd nature of the world around us at times. The writers mentioned by his translator are evident Kafka there is a sense behind our narrator there are more mentions of having to live away from his home in Uruguay.An interesting book for this year’s Spanish lit month I will be getting his other book. Have you read this or any other writers from Uruguay? this is a Spanish Kafka trying to get out of writers block by imaging he is Thomas Bernhard whilst following his dog into a rabbit hole.

Winstons score – B a solid intro to a writer I liked to read more from a book that is unusual and challenging but the sort I love as a reader.

 

Phenotypes by Paulo Scott

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Phenotypes by Paulo Scott

Brazilian fiction

Original title – Marrom e Amarelo

Translator – Daniel Hahn

Source – personal copy

Now I am back on the long listed books for the Booker international. This time it is a book from Brazilian writer Paulo Scott. I thought I had reviewed his earlier book nowhere people but I hadn’t when I looked back so this is the first book I have reviewed by him he studied public law and taught it for a number of years, he was also involved in student politics and was involved in the re-democratisation of Brazil. He has now written six novel and seven collections of poetry. This book use the tale of two brother to put under the spotlight the question of race in Brazil which is something I hadn’t know a lot about or thought much about.

I was an important researcher into the so-called hierarchy of skin colours on pigmentocracy and its logic in Brazil, on the perversity of colourism, on compensatory policies and their lack of understanding among Brazilian elites, that I’d advised NGO’s in Brazil, in Latin America and the rest of the world, that I’d consulted for Adidas, oh yes that’s right , Adidas the famous German-founded company making High performance sportswear, the man was foolish enough to emphasise, as if that were the high point of my biography, and did consider interrupting him, saying like hell did I ever consult for Adidas, That I’d merely acted as intermediary for an agency that did advertising for them

This was how he was introduced but also shows how facts can be twisted and rewritten so easily.

The novel focuses on Federico and his brother Lourenco. They have a father who is black and mother that is white.The brother  have a huge difference in the skin tones and are different Federico is much light in his skin tone than his brother he could pass as white as the book opens we see him in his late forties as he is the last member of a government appointment committee that is dealing with quotas in High education as he is introduced in the opening lines we see how much he has done but also maybe a bit up himself as he complains how they talk about him getting his name wrong a small project with Adidas that they seemed to think more important but as the project he is involved with grows he starts to question what is happening he grew up in Porto Alegre and hadn’t much been touched by race mainly due to his light skin tone and the fact he hadn’t been touch  by racism as much. But when events from within his own family and the fact that som thing that happens with his brothers family makes him question the nature of race but also how absurd some of the solutions to this problem can be and how maybe a software program isn’t the answer. This is a novel that asks to question the hard question of race and also look under the skin of a nation.

It isn’t a gremlin match day, but it’s the eve of the eleventh, the last day on which let December the Gremio team won the Intercontinental cup, the Toyora cup, the day on which, every month the Gremistas, en masse, go around in the club shirts to commemorate the historic victory. As it’s Friday, it’s not surprising to see a group of friends won’t be able to meet up in the Saturday marking the occasion in advance at domestic barbecues, in restaurants, in bars, on the streets

1983 was there greatest moment the home team of Porto Alegre not much to do with the story but I am a huge football fan so I like this celebration of that moment even after decades.

I enjoyed parts of this novel and in places not many I didn’t it felt as thou the message was more than the story at times.  I didn’t connect with, but the story it was telling is an important one and maybe in the use of a family it tackled it the best way as we see how the tone of the skin of each member of the family and also how they are viewed this is the question at the start does race effect the chance but then how do you deal with it the is a section where the program is mention then a fellow member of the group talks about skin tone as thought it was like the myriad of paint tones. What he is trying to do is lift the lid on the question of race in Brazil as Daniel explains in his after word this is hard to convey from one language to the next as it is a lot about the language used and maybe this is what is missed but I am not sure I like it in parts and others it wasn’t grabbing me. This is one I may reread at a later date and see if I connect more with it but in parts this is great the opening draws you in `and things like the discussion of the software has a touch of the comic at times. Then the family events around Federico niece grabbed me. race is a hard subject to tackle and for me a white male a hard subject to write from my perspective but I can see how hard this subject and how to make the system fairer is hard to tackle as it is so complex and this is an interesting insight into it. Have you read any books that try to tackle this subject.Have you a favourite novel around race ?

Winstons- score B a brave book about race

Shadow Booker Shortlist 2021

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Well we have read all the books between us in the shadow jury and had a successful first-ever zoom chat to discuss the books and it was clear there we had only a few titles of this year’s longlist that we all really loved and for a change they were the same books we all seemed to champion and like this list, this year has a scope but the books although diverse in the style of writing from memoir, verse, vignettes, short stories, nonfiction fiction, sci-fi, historic, autofiction and a novel for a novel prize!

So what are our choices here they are-

David Diop (France) & Anna Moschovakis
– At Night All Blood is Black (Pushkin Press)

Benjamin Labatut (Chile) & Adrian Nathan West
– When We Cease to Understand the World (Pushkin Press)

Olga Ravn (Denmark) & Martin Aitken
– The Employees (Lolli Editions)

Adania Shibli (Palestine) & Elizabeth Jaquette
– Minor Detail (Fitzcarraldo Editions)

Maria Stepanova (Russia) & Sasha Dugdale
– In Memory of Memory (Fitzcarraldo Editions)

Andrzej Tichý (Sweden) & Nicola Smalley
– Wretchedness (And Other Stories)

Our journey of books takes us from a Sudan soldier in world war I. Then a  book about science and those odd little tales of how things come about. Then a crew of a spaceship both human and android is interviewed about what makes us what we are. A footnote in history that saw a girl’s life change is recalled then and now. A flat clearing turns into an epic about a family but also about art during the 20th century. Then there is a story of breaking free of our roots or is it! Three of the publishers here have supported this blog with books over the years. the other was new to me at the start of this years prize we will be rereading discussing and deciding our winner watch this space guys !!!

Wretchedness by Andrzej Tichý

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Wretchedness by Andrzej Tichý

Swedish fiction

Original title – Eländet

Translator – Nichola Smalley

Source – sent from the translator

I swapped a couple of books from and other stories for a copy of the TLS  I had that included a review of this book in I have met Nochola the translator of this book via her work at And other stories a couple of times, so it is a shame it has taken me a while to get to a review of books she has translated. looking up about the writer I came across this quote which seemed to sum him up as a writer. “Andrzej Tichý is a writer who, time and time again, with a language that sings, says something important about the Swedish contemporary. Read him”. He has lived in Sweden since 1981 born in Prague to a Polish mother and Czech father there is a sense of the great Mittel European writers in his work. 

The way the wax plant flowers moved, those small movements, that trembling, that gentle vibrating, like an echo of the moving trings, combined with the low-frequency tone, the rumble – all that lingered in my consciousness as I saw the newly built tower block and the figures on its roof, with the railway tracks and rail yard in the background, all while I tried to say something to the guitarist and the composer about scelsi and my microtonal worl. We walked toward the central station to take the the train to Copenhagen, to Vor Frue Kirke and the moosmann concert.

Where he meets the Junkie and his past falls back into his world and those year flood back

This book is told in a feverish manner at times what happened when a cellist comes face to face with a spun out Junkie for the second book in a row we have a sort of Proustian moment where this one single event leads the Ccellist into a journey through his past and the sense that he broke free of it a part of growing up in the Housing projects with a group of what in the day would be slackers this is an ode to the early nineties and the urban world he grew up in of skaters, junkies, rappers. Where there are Parties and clubs but he remembers that it was also a road to nowhere, as the memories of his past come tumbling in on him. This is all told in slang as we see his early jobs also the tension of the multi-cultural community he lives in just bubbling below the surface. He is the present is due to give a concert with two other musicians of the work Giacinto Scelsi the Italian modernist composer. This a story of breaking out but also the sense of loss of the comrade brothers he left behind in the melting post he grew up in.

THen a car pulled up. A man got out and other things. Then a car pulled. A man got out and asked if they wanted work. Employment, he said, Earn a little money, he said, they asked what they’d be doing.. Handing out flyers, he said. For his building firm. Go aroundthe wealthy neighbourhoods and stuff a few flyers through letterboxes. They asked how much they’d get five hundred. To share. Course we will, they said. That’s a lot of money, they thought. They got in the car. He drove them to the wealthy neighbourhood. They got a stack each. Took a side each and put them in the letterboxesas he drove behind them, crept along along slowly behind them

A classic ilustration of GEnration X the McJobs cash in hand jobs struggling to get by.

A lot of reviews I have seen of this book have mentioned Bernhard it hard not to avoid that as the book is told in a similar style of breathless prose, as the past comes flooding into his mind but jumbled up like a montage of his life with no real gaps as you get caught up in the cellist’s past and his thoughts of the world he grew up in. This is like a sample of his past mixtape of memories. The clash of high and low culture is shown here from his early love of street beats of the hip hop of the day over the modern music of Scelsi (I will put my hand up again her I know nothing of him just what I have read my modern classical knowledge is little) and the hip hop he likes is different to the bands I knew at the time but it reminds me of going to clubs in UK, Holland, and Germany late nights. Then time spent in cities like Manchester, Newcastle, Nimwegen, Kassel, and Dortmund at the similar time to this so the group he described remind me of my german friends although we didn’t do drugs we like a drink and clubs. This is a song about breaking free of the past. But there will always be that reminder of the past.

Winstons score – A- ( a Bernhard fan got score well with me)

 

 

A Silent Fury by Yuri Herrera

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A Silent Fury (The El Bordo Mine Fire)

Mexican Non-fiction

Original title – El Incendio de la mina El Bordo

Translator – Lisa Dillman

Source – gift

I was sent this kindly by the Pr person from And Other stories for sending her a TLS with a review of her first book in translation which she hadn’t been able to get so it gave me a book for Spanish lit month. I had reviewed his debut in English a few years ago and had meant to get back and review another book by Yuri Herrera anyway this reportage work appealed to me having lived in two areas of the Uk with strong mining connections I have heard tales of how dangerous it was here where there is a deal of Health and safety. So to read a work that dealt with a large mining disaster in another country it was appealing.

The bell never rang, the ones that were there expressly for that kind of event, even though, as the agebt from the public prosecutor office noted months later, they were indeed functioning properly

There were some who later said that they first smelled smoke at two O’clock in the morning, but it was at six that Delfino Rendon raised the cry of alarm , once he had finished cleaning the chites on level 415. He had just  extracted several loads of metal on525 when he detected an unfamilar smell and decided to go up, and then up some more , and on reaching 365 and approaching the shaft wellhead he noticed something that smelled like woodsmoke, and that the level was too hot

So four hours before they first said it fire was evident and other noticed more four hours later in accounts.

This was a personal work for the writer the El Bordo mine is in his home town of Pachuca what he wants to do was go back over all that was written and reported at the time and tease out of that the actual facts to what happened and get to the truth of this disaster the mine had many levels we are told early on each is called by the depth underground so the ten levels are named by there actual depth underground depths of 142 meters on the first floor down to the tenth level at 525 so from a handful of accounts the report into what happened and old newspapers we follow the events of that day and after the company tried to brush the facts under the carpet when the fire broke out they said there were only ten people on the level the fire was and the started to close the mine down. But in reality there was many more victims of this disaster 87 men died only seven men lived and there is no account from them just the charred remains of the fellow miners brought up and the huge injustice that caused these men to die.

A Photo published on the front page of El Univeral on March 12 shows forty-eight people (perhaps more, the image is blurry in places). Most are women wearing shawls, accompanied by boys in hats and girls in shawls, They are starring at the camera, looking very serious. None of their faces display the scenes of desperation mentioned in the story accompaning the the photo.On either side, a few men also stared at the camera while other looked at the women. The caption reads ..” Those waiting outside the mine for their loved ones to emerge”

A newspaper reported the aftermath and its affect on the wives and children of those lost in the mine !!

This book looks at what happened a century later and picks the piece of what was known but also tries to give a voice to those that hadn’t a voice at the time those 87 men died when the mine was sealed without warning as the fire raged leaving them trapped to their doom and those seven that survived six days in this underground hell as their voices or testament was never heard at the time the horror of being there must have been haunted this is a great reportage on an event we need witness piece like this to remind the future if what happened in the past this is a short book but captures the effect aftermath cover-up from the mining company involved and lasting legacy of the El Bordo mining disaster on his hometown. An interesting addition to this year’s Spanish lit month.