Tag: BOOKS THAT DEFINED ME

The old man and his sons by Heòin Brú

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The Old man and his sons by Heoin Bru

Faraoese fiction

Original title – Feðgar á ferð

Translator – John F West

Source – Personal copy

I find it harder to find vbooks from countries I haven’t read but I do have a srtsh of books to read every know and then and last month I ended the year with two new countries this rthe first is a book written by Heoin Bru which was the pen name of Hans Jacon Jaocbsen a faroese writer this boook came out in 1942 and was first translted into Danish in the sixties. Then, in 1970, the first novel from the Faroe Islands was translated into English. The book captures one of my favourite subjects in fiction: the clash between generations, and between old and new worlds.  The book follows parents and their children as the world around them becomes more expensive; the book, although written 80 years ago, still rings true.

His wife came in. She too was aghast and baffled. The doctor and his wife had both arrived in the country only recently, from Denmark, so that Faroese ways were strange to them. She had no idea that this thing was a whale’s kidney.

To her it was just something with blood oozing from it, that reminded her of recent and violent death. She did not doubt that Ketil was a human being, but he was not the usual kind she was accustomed to. And it cannot be denied that he did differ a little from the average Copenhagen businessman. He stood there in his home-made skin shoes, his loose breeches and long jacket. His blood-flecked beard hung down towards his belt, and on this hung a double sheath with a pair of white-handled knives, one above the other. And he was extending his earthy hands – holding up that bloody thing.

Whale meat after the hunt is shocking to some

The Partriachs of this book are Ketil and his wife live in a small village with there last son at home Kalvur a lad that has maybe a learning disablitie but is seen as unable to leave hios parents the other children have all left the small village the parentas still living a simple life and when after a whale drive a Faroe tradtion of hunting whales and then selling the meat of to alll those around in an auction means that when Ketil buys a larger than usual amount of meat he is left struggling to get by in a world where the tradtional way of living has unkown to him move to modern marketforce so this simple living man and his wife are now struggling in the world and there kids don’t help as they constantly need the parents help this is a world in flux a man caugfht out by the movement of time and how money is now king in his island home.

He went into the kitchen and squatted down on a low chair right by the door, and looked about him. Here there was brassware and linoleum, curtains, crocheted and embroidered drapery – everything you could think of, and every scrap of wood was painted. Still, he thought, if they can afford it, and like to have things this way, who are we to criticise?

‘Is the lad in?’ the old man asked as his daughter-in-law

appeared.

‘He’s in the dining-room. Carry on in, Father?

The old man hesitated a little before he went, because he knew his daughter-in-law did not really care for him, but he plucked up courage. ‘Maybe I do smell of the peat fire and the cow byre, he thought, ‘but I pay my own way, and nobody can drive me out of house and home. So he stuffed his hat into his jacket pocket and went in.

‘Fine weather we re having, Ketil began.

His son looked up. ‘Yes, good weather, he replied absently.

‘Extraordinarily good weather’ He sat at the table, fingering through a great heap of papers.

Kentil is caught up with money he hasn’t got

The book unfolds in vignettes as we see how the whale drive leads to the debt Ketil incurs and how the world he lives in is changing, though he hasn’t really noticed it.I was reminded of the west coast of Ireland, I remember visiting in the late 70s  a place that to my child eyes seemed to have been stuck in time and this is the feel of this the village and world of Ketil has missed the way the island as a whole has shofted and they are left hunting for driftwood for ther fire (This reminded me of tales of miners during the miners strike hunting sea coal on the beaches of Northumberland to keep there house warm). For me this is what i love about ficitoon at thimes is when we can make our own connections to a story that happened 80 years ago but the world is constanly in flux and there is many a Kentil from the peat cutters of Donegal to the miners of the pits of places like Shilbottle points where you and your job world is ending but no one has told you is a universal story.

Brian by Jeremy Cooper

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Brian by Jeremy Coper

British fiction

Source – Library books

One thing I do is let my Fitzcarraldo subscription lapse from time to time. They may be best getting a reminder sent to folks like me. One of the main things I have from my dyspraxia is forgetting everyday stuff, like a subscription. I didn’t email them one last time when I remembered the subscription I had may be running low. So that was a way to say this was a book I had missed between renewals. I think Jacqui was one of the first reviewers I saw of this book, and a recent mention in a YouTube video made me just get a copy from the library. I had been waiting to either buy it new or secondhand. Jeremy Cooper, an art historian, has appeared on the Antiques Roadshow and on Radio 4. I read the Guardian interview where he had been in love with the BFI cinema and the various films and how many you could see in one day, and Brian came from that seeing a regular group in the foyer.

One of Brian’s favourite film moments – from a cast of dozens, admittedly – was in Wim Wenders’s Kings of the Road, the scene where a vehicle drew up in a deserted landscape somewhere near the East German border and Rüdiger Vogler walked off twenty yards from the road to take a shit. The camera focused low down to film from behind a long dark sausage turd drop slowly from a pale arse.

In black and white.

Brian admired the shot and always wondered if it was Vogler’s bum or a stunt man’s.

At what time of day was it filmed?

One of the early films from Wim one of his road movies

I think what grabbed me most about Brian is how I connect to him as a person, a quiet man with a simple, solitary life, a small world of lunch in the same cafe, and nights at his small flat in Kentish Town. But what happens when he goes to see a Clint Eastwood film at the BFI? He is drawn into a world of films and becomes one of those figures who meet in the foyer, as we see him make friends with Jack and the other BFI regulars . Added to this is his childhood in Northern Ireland and how that impacted his adult life. As My father is from Northern Ireland and my grandparents are I can see how this world made Brainthe man he is. Then there are the films along the way for me now. I, of course, loved the mention of Wim Wenders, but also the talk of a documentary of Einsturzende Neubauten, the German industrial band I have loved since finding out their singer was Nick Cave’s guitarist over 35 years ago. Then films like Tokyo Story, the late films of Derek Jarman, and this is a book about one man falling in love with the world of cinema.

Two days later Jack called by, looking drastically out of place in the sterile white ward, tiptoeing in his battered trainers gingerly across the polished green linoleum to the side of his friend’s bed. Brian was thrilled to see him and to be filled in on the best of the movies he had missed. Jack had been totally taken, he said, by a documentary on the experimental rock group Einstürzende Neubauten and their leader Blixa Bargeld, ace manipulator of the jackhammer in motorway under-passes. Brian laughed in pleasure at the band’s name and the titles of their songs, admitting that he had never heard of them before. At which Jack came out with one of those definitive phrases for which he was celebrated amongst his fellow buffs: ‘After Einstürzende Neubauten everything is silence.’

The singer’s actual name, Jack said, was Christian Emmerich, branding himself Blixa Bargeld when he left his parents’ home in West Berlin to make music, blixa a make of blue felt-tip pen and bargeld a German street term for cash

Einstruzende Neubauten a band i love

I read reviews of this, and it seems people either love it or hate it. For me, I loved it. Part of it sang to a lost part of me. I love world cinema, but I have seen myself watch less and less over the last few years. I’m not sure if this is, in part, a loss of attention span due to smartphone use. But this is the one thing I loved in this book. Brian’s passion reminded me of the first decade of this blog, when I felt confident in my opinions before the world’s noise became too loud. Obsession is a great way to discover things. Part of me thinks Brian is neurodivergent, I would’t say just autistic, just the traits for deep diving and one passion I know I have. But there is also a lament in me for the time I would record whatever channel four would show late at night, small town life meant that was my window into world cinema, that the film show and long lost shows like the late show, when arts were taken seriously to have Ekow Eshun and Tom Paulin talk arts is something much missed. Anyway, you love film? This novel is for you if you’ve seen the documentary Cinemania. This is a refined English version of that obsession with film, but also the small group of people in that world, a dying world. It could be model aircraft, model railways, stamp collecting, and so on. Jeremy Cooper is capturing a man in a world that will, maybe, in twenty years seem alien! I have made a promise to try to watch a few more films from around the world this year. I have a Sight and Sound subscription and got the Bela Tarr box set for Christmas. Two places to start.

 

Wedding Worries by Stig Dagerman

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Wedding Worries by Stig Dagerman

Swedish fiction

Original title –Bröllopsbesvär

Translators -Paul Norlen and Lo Dagerman

Source – Personal

I think we all have a canon of writers we have yet to read and review any reader worth anything or like me should I say spends a lot of times down rabbitholes absorbing the writers of the world some I forget a few days after I have read about them but others are on that list that little black book of writers you know for sure youy will get to one day something about them clicks that light in the room of your head where you have the library lof those writers you love well Dagerman has been that list for a long tiome I wait sometimes for years to I see the book in the wild and then when I see a book on a shelf I am like a hawk fast and confident i have found my prey sorry book I mean. Well, Dagerman is often mentioned alongside the likes of Joyce and Faulkner, a difficult writer, a modernist, the sort of writer I love to challenge myself as a reader. Now it is easy to see the comparison in this, his last novel, which is set over the course of one day. At a country wedding in the swedish village of  Älvkarleby

But when he comes back to the bridal bed, there has been no change. Siri is sitting like before, crying. And a fly is hovering in the corner. Then he notices that something has indeed changed: Frida is back hanging on her place on the wall. Holding herself firmly in the chair. Holding her place on the wall. Heat rises to Westlund’s head, a little fire-devil.

He grabs hold of his daughter by her slender shoulders, one in each large hand, and lifts her up toward his anger. But he encounters a fire no smaller than his. A bigger fire, actually.

He looks into a pair of eyes, a pair of eyes that he knows. That he usually closes his own eyes to. The eyes have a voice, and the voice is saying: Thus says the law, Westlund. If you had been living then they would have beheaded you. And that’s how it is with the dead, you cant look into their eyes. Just close your own.

Over the day we learn all sorts from the family members

The first thing I loved about this book was the list of characters. Now, as someone who is neurodivergent, I sometimes lose track of characters, and having a list to refer back to at the start of the book helps me greatly. The book is set on a wedding day as Hildur, the youngest daughter of the Palm family, is due to marry the local, much older Village Butcher, Hilmer. Now we get to see the day and the events that have led up to this young girl marrying a man twice her age and an alcoholic, but when she is with child and the farm hand that got her pregnant, a drunk is more appealing than being like her unwed sister who has a child. As the day goes on, secret affairs are being found out. The farm Hand Martin reappears as the day sways between a normal, nervy wedding day and heading to the abyss and oblivion, at times, where will it all be at the end when the feast happens?

“Since you’re getting married tomorrow maybe you’re in need of some trinkets, I say. Straight from the jeweler in Gävle, I say. Trinket me here and trinket me there, says West-Lund, but bring the case on over here so we can take a look.

Til be a monkey’s uncle, Westlund says looking. This here is fancy. He takes a brooch and places it on the plate. Oh my, now I know a bride who’ll be happy. Give me four, and I’ll be done, he says. One for Hildur and one for Siri. That will be six crowns even, I say. Best to take out my pouch then, Westlund says.”

All the village is caught up in the wedding and trying to be part of it

I loved this book; it had so many boxes for me as a reader. I love. Village anypone that has spent any time reading this blog know I am a huge fan of books set in villages, the microcosm of life hapopoens and this book is a perfect example as the day unfolds, we hear from a multitude of voices this remined me of the cacophony of voices we get in Faulkners AsI lay dting this is more as I head to a wedding or do I !. Secrets is another trope I love in fiction. A good secret can make a book and break a plot up into many pieces, like it does here. Love, hate, passion, and desire are all here as well. Truth and lies as well. Also that time frame one day 24 hours so much can happen I think of Ulysess but even of somehting like the Ron Howard fil where over the course of one day a story changes like this one does leaving you the reader not quite knowning how it will all end. Man, I so wish he hadn’t died. This was his final novel, written when he was 30. God, this is a masterpiece. What would he have done next?

Have you read Dagerman ?

 

 

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn

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The Wax Child by Olga Ravn

Danish fiction

Original title – Voksbarnet

Translator – Martin Aitken

Source -Personal copy

The blog has shrunk so much it means I buy a lot more books than I used to in fact in a way. I hated asking for books and only got sent books from people who just sent them to me or asked me. I always hated asking and rarely do now. Hebnce in recent time a lot of the books I read are books i buy which means on the whole they are books I want to read or books I want give the writer another chance the larter is the case with this I think when we read the employees for theshadow booker international a few years ago . I was’t the biggest fan of employees. I like some of the prose style and the way you could capture even in the translationwho seemed to be human and who was artifical in fact in the few years since the book it is maybe more apt as a story with the jump in ai or thou I still find the use of the word AI isn’t right it is still just complex algorthims and compiled information worked together is that thought I think not but that is just me anyway I am drifting. The reason this appealed to me is the fact that I love old witch tales from the witch trials in the US, to women buried under stones on beaches in Scotland, through things like the Pendle witches. There was something mad about this time in the world. So when  I found out Olga Ravn had looked into the case of Christenze Ktuckow and came up with this novel

Whenever a woman nearby was about to give birth, a messenger would make haste to the midwife and whoever else the pregnant woman had asked to help.

All let go then of whatever was in their hands, and came as quickly as they could. Some in the night, others in the frost of morning; with fleetness of foot they came, and barely inside the door would take upon them the housekeeping. They would introduce a new and temporary regime, which meant that those who normally frequented the house would have to find new places to stay. I saw these women form a ring around the one in labour and lead her to the bath house. I saw them douse the burning-hot rocks with water; I saw the steam and the scalding herbs. They undressed the birthing woman, and the naked one was Anne Bille, the young mistress of Nakkebølle. And by the stone wall of the bath house they had placed me in the ground, and I lay and listened there as Anne Bille gave birth to the first of her children.

because she didn’t want a child she was considered dangerous

The novel has a narrator that isn’t human, a lump of beeswax in the form of a human child. That Chistenze had made and carried around. Add to that she seemed to have no interest in the local men or settling down, and married, this was enough in the 17th century for her to be considered a witch. What this is about is fear and prejudice, as Christenze and her friends are seen as outsiders for their views. Added to this, about the time she makes the doll, A lot of strange shit happens. We have what always happens. She tries to escape to the city, but this makes things worse. But it is also about a woman in love with other women at a time that was a totally unthinkable idea. But this could be set to any modern situation, being Trans, being an immigrant, just not fitting in. What she has done is wonderful: she has made a tale set in the past that shows us now what is so wrong. It is also told in a broken style of crumbs and fragments, often with very visceral words.

I saw in the night cats leave the church in droves, I saw them conduct themselves with swine in the street, and I saw the gravedigger in the churchyard puff on a cabbage pipe; I saw in a single vision the town’s fleas in all their thousands, I saw blood in small and large quantities, I saw barley porridge and the insipid salt herring. I saw funeral pyres and body parts displayed on the square as a deterrent. I saw money change hands and land be par-celled out, I saw humans bought and sold, lace underneath a skirt. I saw brother turn against brother, and mother against daughter. I saw hearts thirst for revenge and hands that craved for violence. This was not Nakke-bølle, it was not even Funen; shudders ran even through my hardy wax, this was Aalborg, 1616, city of hate.

there is just a beauty in her writing style here and Aitkens translation of it

This is a book remarkable for this time of year, a sort of neo horror with a lot of folklore and fear dropped in. It has a very fragmentary structure to it. But it also has a dark ending of what happens to these women. This is an accurate tale. This happened, and this is what grabbed me: one of my favourite albums is Giles Gorey, a farmer who was killed in Salem, famous for his last word More weight as he was crushed between two boards. What these tales show that then it was being a witch that got people killed. Being Gay would get you killed through time. Now, just wanting to find a better life will get you killed. We live in a time where witch hunts still happen, but we don’t call them witch hunts. Group Panic and fear, we think the dark ages have gone, we are heading headlong back into them !!! Anyway, if you want a thought-provoking and different book about one woman’s life told from a wax doll she made herself, this is the book for you. Safe say I am now more of a fan of Ravn;’s books. Have you read this ?

 

 

 

Ten for ten years of the club years

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I had wanted to post this yesterday, but last week was the tenth year of Karen’s and Simon’s club year. Last week, they picked their ten favourite reads over the last decade of club reads. Well, I am throwing my hat into the ring. As you may know, I pick books by the year of their publication in their original language, not the year of translation.I have picked ten book in no order here we go

The Rebels by Sándor Márai

Four youths in a small village at the end of the second world war have a world free of male influences a lesser known book from this writer.a pick for 1930

Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte

I then move to 1944, and this Italian novel of an Italian writer sent to the eastern front in the dying embers of World War II. Autofiction from a writer with a questionable past but a fascinating slice of the start of the Nazis falling apart in the war.

Palm wine Drunkard by Amos Tutuola

A classic of African fiction, next he mixed  his native Yoruba folklore with a man on a journey to find a new person to make his palm wine . This is a perfect example of what I love about the club years this had been on my list of books to read and I just needed the nudge to get to it this was for 1952.

Wayward Hero by Haildór Laxness

Still, in 1952 another example of what I love is books like this we all know Laxness’ better-known books, but in recent years, we have been getting some of the gaps in his back catalogue filled in, like this book which saw his modern take on Icelandic Sagas.

Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck

I love Steinbeck; he is one of America’s, if not the world’s, greatest writers. I said in this post that I raced through many of his books in my twenties, then slowed down to read one every few years. Anyway, this was one I loved —my all-time favourite novel by Steinbeck is Cannery Row. This is a follow-up, and Doc returns post-World War II to Cannery Row, finding it changed.

Cinversation with Three Wayfarers by Peter Weiss

I love discovering German writers I am unaware of, and Weiss should be better known. He is one of those experimental post-war German writers. Here is a tale of three brothers that cross over, and you are never quite sure who is who.this was for 1962

The Boat in the evening by Tarjei Vesaas

This was the first book I read by Vesaas and all thanks to the 1968 club year this book captures the remote rural Norway he lived in so well.

Beards Roman Woman by Anthony Burgess

Now, when push comes to shove, and I have to pick my all-time favourite writer, sadly, it isn’t a writer in translation; it is Burgess, so underrated still, and he wrote more than just Clockwork Orange. This sees a writer rather like Burgess himself who spent many years in Italy, here we see Beard and his liaisons as he is trying to write a screenplay, this was from 1976.

The end of the family story by Peter Nadas

Nadas for me writers about the soul of post-war Hungary, and here again is a tale of how a family coped post World War II in the country, told from the perspective of the grandson looking back on the year of his grandparents and parents. This was for the 1977club.Nadas, sadly missed out on the Nobel to Laszlo Krasznahorkai, I felt.

The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky

This fell just right. I had just joined a streaming service featuring Eastern European films, and this was one of them, and it was also a choice for Club 1970. A detective gets stuck at a remote inn as the snow cuts them off, people start dying, and strange things begin to happen. The film is worth watching as it has a seventies vibe and decor, and its setting

What ave been your favourite books over the last ten years of the club

Life slowly getting back I’ll be back soon

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

July I wandered in what to read next this month but a tiny book shone a light on what to do

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  1. The proof by Cesar Aira 
  2. Supporting act by Agnes Lidbeck 
  3. People from Oetimu by Felix Nesi 
  4. The accidental garden by Richard Mabey 
  5. The child who by Jeanne Benameur 
  6. The Ship by Hans Henny Jahnn 
  7. La Belle Roumaine by Dumitru Tspeneag

It was an odd month. I took time off at the start of the month, and I have felt lost in my reading, maybe since the International Booker has finished. I got the waiwright longlist books, but I tried a couple and they didn’t grab me, so I reviewed accidental garden, which I enjoyed. I read an AIra, which was great, especially the nod to the band The Cure. Then a book about Timor was very well written, linking the island of three periods of time, and also as the World Cup was taking place in 1998. Then a family with the mother gone and the son wandering the woods with an imaginary dog. Then, a lost modern classic of German fiction, the ship sees a stowaway in love with the captain’s daughter on a mysterious vessel that seems to change as they sail, and strange things happen. Then a woman in a European city catches a man’s eye, but who is she ?

Book of the month

This odd novel is unlike anything I have ever read. It feels like a horror book, but it is that subtle horror, brooding like a Nick Cave song, dark and never quite sure when he would break into something profound and unknown back in the day. I think this is a lost gem, and I also hope someone takes a chance and translates the rest of this trilogy.

Non-book things this month

I brought the latest Swans album, an album of noise and long tracks and Michael Gira’s obsessions. This meant it would be the last of his cumbersome records. But we will see. Then on TV I watched Mix Tape, a love affair cut short when a young couple split just as they were falling deeply in love. Years later, she wrote a book. He is in a marriage that he feels trapped in, and it turns out his ex is as well. The mini series sees them first re, remember the past, confront what happened, then eventually reconnect. I like the music in this; the setting was meant to be Sheffield, but it was mainly filmed in Dublin. A bit annoying, the record shop in it was in Dublin, not a local Sheffield shop I would know.

Being lost and what I am doing next month

I have said I felt lost for a lot of the last few months. I think I need to stop watching a lot of booktube and maybe remember what is dear to me as a reader . I love nature writing and ordered the Wainwright longlist. Luckily, most of the books were available in the library, but I read one and got two-thirds through another book, and then felt this wasn’t for me. I just feel I’m lost in what to read next sometimes. I have been letting x, y, and z folks on YouTube, mainly, but elsewhere as well. I’m not usually like this, but it led me to think I want to read the Booker longlist, even order a few books, which I have opted to return, as I was thinking about it while driving today. My dad’s to meet old family friends that I had not seen for many a year. I needed a book, and as the booker books were all hardback, I picked up a book I had ordered a while ago that had arrived yesterday. A very me book, I may say, A summer with Montaigne had been on my radar since it came out, and I finally decided to get it, so pleased I did it. The book follows a summer teaching the French Essayist Montaigne. It shows what he liked to write about, but what made him a reader and a man. It reminded me of the things I hold dear, learning about the world, but also world lit. I think I’ve been overthinking the post-booker international reading slump, not so a slump as I am reading a little slower it may need me to stop overthinking looking to this and that rather than just getting on with world lit I love and just look at my tbr books like the ship or Lebelle Roumaine and as the summer with Montaigne has shown we just need to think about what we love a little closer. Hope this makes sense, I am a chronic overthinker and can be a little impulsive when I see a prize list or talk about a prize list. I am a huge list fan as it is a list of favourite books, albums, films, etc. So my plans for next month are reading books for Women in Translation Month 2and adding a few more classics to my list. What about you does list tempt you or others’ enthusiasm for books? Take you, off course?

 

Oh to be sweet sixteen , winstonsdad turns 16 today

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Another year has passed, and they fly past so quickly these days. I find it hard to believe that it only seems like yesterday. I was inspired by the folks I had met on Twitter and started this blog. Now, 16 years later, with 2460 posts, nearly 1500 reviews, and well, twenty short of that total. The book bloggers who inspired me have long since passed away. The blogs I first followed, barring one or two, have since gone. But for me, if anything, the desire to blog is more now than it has ever been.I wish I had more comments, but I am not great at commenting and replying. I will admit that it is something I struggle with, but I am thankful for those who do comment and wish I were better at commenting back. But I am me anyway. Over the last year, I have gone on to my own website as I was running out of space and moving forward. I will be putting affiliate links for the books I review when I set this up. Adding some Ko-Fi or such, just by doing it on my own website via WordPress and now trying to get all my SEO stuff sorted, costs me a little money. I just want to recoup the cost over the year. The blog has lots of reviews, ok, they aren’t the best, but they aren’t the worst. I have reviewed books from many countries and hope to eventually reach the complete global count of countries. But I am also looking to add books to countries I have already read. So here’s to the next 16 years, reaching 1,500 reviews, then 2,000, and so on. I am basically saying this blog isn’t going anywhere everI felt like a fraud for years, not clever enough, not well-read enough, not popular. But actually these days I couldn’t give a shit is there any other bogs with sommany reviews from so many countries around well. Not many. I feature many small presses, championing them, most of which I support by actually buying their books. I have been part of the shadow jury for the Booker and the IFFP for a long time, which I started. I started the Translation Thurs hashtag. I feel I have done quite a lot over the years. I am so proud of my blog and what it has brought me. I am well read and will always feel unread, but shouldn’t we all !!! There is so many great writers out there in translation and still waiting to be translated!! The scenery has changed in those 16 years. When I started, there were fewer books we are in a golden age of books in translation. Let’s bask in the glow of it all and let’s make sure we keep getting more. Thanks to everyone who has read a post, commented, invited me to a place, sent me a book, and helped me on the first 16 years of carrying this journey into the next 16 years!

My Kingdom is dying by Evald Filsar

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My kingdom is dying by Evald Filsar

Slovenian fiction

Original title – Moje kraljestvo umira

Translator – David Limon

Source – review copy

You ever have that situation where you have had a run of great book then have a reading slump straight after that well this was the last book in a good run of books since e I finished it five days ago I haven’t finished a book in fact last night and this morning is the first time I got back into a book. This is a book that could be called a pandemic book. Evald Filsar is maybe the best-known and most well-travelled Slovenian writer. This book came out in 2020 it is perhaps a fever dream of a literary man stuck at home, imagining various writers and situations. I am not sure of this, but given that it came out in 2020, the book’s first part is about the writers’ conference in Kolkata, then it moves on around the world,d various famous encounters along the way.

I never dreamed that I would find myself among the crème de la crème of the world’s short prose writers. The congress was attended by John Updike, Susan Sontag, John O’Hara, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel García Márquez, José J.

Veiga, Joyce Carol Oates, Chang Tien, Jasar Kemal and I could go on. A dwarfish participant whispered to me that, in spite of the general conviction that he would not, even Jorge Luis Borges had turned up. I pushed my way to the front.

And it was true, at a table by the wall sat the blind Argentine of whom André Maurois wrote that he “composed only little essays or short narratives, yet they suffice for us to call him great because of their wonderful intelligence, their wealth of invention, and their tight, almost mathematical style.”

The guest at the conference

The book follows a writer who suffers from writer’s block at a conference in India. This was years earlier, and Borges opened the conference. He is. Recurring character in the story, where he spends time with several great writers, there is a theme of East European writing and various themes. Then, he is sent by his publisher to a Swiss clinic due to his writer’s block. He meets a collection of writers who also suffer from writer’s block. These are the crème de la crème of the writers from Filsar and my generation, Graham Greene, Amis senior and junior, and Borges, all there as they all talk about their writing and try to help our writers by telling their stories. I loved that he includes Infante here, a writer who should be better known. He then talks about being a Booker judge in a year that was very famous for a speech by Fay Weldon. Then he wins the Nobel. I love how he drifts and mixes real characters around his narrator and writer’s block. But also mixes past and present.

That’s not true, shouted a fat lady from Italy. What about Chekhov, what about Katherine Mansfield and other impressionists, whose stories are often merely extended expositions, emotional locks that are only unlocked in the last sentence? And Moravia, whose stories are notes on the mental state of a handful of characters, often just one?

And Borges, whose stories are, at least on the surface, naked formalistic games, mathematical experiments? (We all looked round the auditorium, but Borges was not present.) Wasn’t it clear, she continued, that there were as many stories as authors? That some were not better than others because of a different creative approach, but because of a better connection between intention and effect? In short, some stories achieve their goal, while others, exhausted and distorted from excessive effort, fall by the wayside.

and so on

The swiss clinc and the writer with short story writers.

I can see this being framed by a writer who loves talking about books and travelling, like Filsar, who has been the head of PEN in his country. This is maybe him escaping his own writer’s block, or a book written in the early. Months of the pandemic. I’m not sure it is an ode to the generation of writers he grew up with, Amis, Borges, Greene, Infante, and all of them are writers I grew up with, but some of them are mentioned less than they were, Bellow, for example. Graham Greene is another writer who was huge maybe twenty years ago, but I rarely see people singing his praises now. This is a must-read for anyone who is a fan of these writers or what it is like to be a writer, the chances they have, like the conference to be a prize judge. It is an excellent book from a writer who loves writers of his generation so much it drips off the pages. Do you have a favourite book about writers?

Spark of Life by Erich Maria Remarque

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Spark if Life by Erich Maria Remarque

German fiction

Original title – Der Funke Leben

Translator – James Stern

Source – Library book

I now reach the fifth and last book of this round of Simon’s and Karen’s year club. Last but not least is a powerful work from the German writer Erich Maria Remarque, He is best known for his book All Quiet on the Western Front, seen as one of the best books to capture the horror and utter madness of war. He fell victim to the Nazis when they came to power in Germany as they tried to smear his name and make out the events in All quiet fdidn’t happen and that he had fought in the war. Anyway, he left Germany and lived first in Switzerland and later in the US, where he became a citizen after Germany revoked his citizenship and banned his books. He in turn, changed the spelling of his surname from Remark to the French spelling Remarque. This book was dedicated to his sister, who had stayed in Germany and was killed for being a traitor by the Nazis Regime.

509 stared absent-mindedly at the wall. Silber, the Pole, while still lying in the barrack with bleeding intestines, had called it the Wailing Wall. He had also known most of the names by heart and in the beginning had even made bets as to which of them the spot of sun would reach first. Soon afterwards Silber had died; but on bright days the names had continued to wake to a ghostly life and then disappeared again into the dark. In summer when the sun stood higher others, scratched in lower down, became visible, and in winter the square moved higher up. But there were many more-Russian, Polish, Yiddish-which remained forever invisible because the light never reached them. The barrack had been put up so fast that the SS had not bothered to have the walls planed.

The inmates bothered even less, least of all about the inscriptions on the dark sections of the walls. These no one even attempted to decipher. Nobody was foolish enough to sacrifice a precious match simply to grow more desperate.

His fellow prisoners and how the ss came in

The book is set in the dying embers of World War II as the Allies and Russia are slowly putting a stranglehold on Germany. We join 509, he is a German political prisoner in a Concentration camp, they haven’t been lined up to be killed but just worked to the bone, he has been there for ten years. So when they get news that the war is coming to an end. There are snippets throughout the book, like the Bridge at Remagen, which had been taken, meaning they can cross into Germany. These men, the veterans of the time, started doing things that maybe a while ago would have got them killed, pushing the lines, hiding from fellow prisoners, as the feeling of the war got near, with the local towns now being regularly bombed. Can 5009 and his friends make it through the war? What will happen when the SS take over the running of the camp? There are some moment when they see one man talk about the washroom and how at another camp it had been a way to kill people and how when one soldier would come it measnmt one thing and then another soldier later on starts freeing some of his fellow prisoners this is the look at those german held in the death camps not killed but worked to they are virtually dead on the whole these are all educate menmiddle class souls broken by the camp

The roll call had already lasted more than an hour, but it still didn’t tally. It was due to the bombing. The labor gangs which worked in the copper foundry had suffered losses. One bomb had fallen into their division and a number of men had been killed and wounded. On top of this, after the first shock, the supervising SS-men had started firing on the prisoners who sought cover; they had feared they might escape. Thus a further half-dozen had perished.

After the bombing the prisoners had dragged out their dead from under the rubble and wreckage-or rather what was left of them. It was important for the roll call. Little as the life of a prisoner was valued and indifferent as the SS were to it, dead or alive the numbers at the roll call had to tally. Bureaucracy did not stop short at corpses.

This made me smile german effiency failing as madness starts to descend

I read All Quiet on the Western Front, and over the years, I’ve picked a few of his other books to read; they are still on my TBR. But when I looked up the books for this week, I saw what had happened to his sister and how it had led him to talk to some of the famous German survivors of these camps. He came up with 509, and this novel serves as a tribute to her. Unfortunately, when he published it in Germany, he initially removed the tribute to his sisters, as she was still viewed by many Germans as a traitor for what she had done. With recent events around the world, it may be worth reading this about what happens when a country turns against its own citizens with hate and lies! This is one of the reasons I love the club years is unearthign gems like this book. Have you read any of his other books besides All Quiet on the Western Front?

The Palm wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola

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The Palm Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola

Nigerian fiction

Source – Library book

I have been on the lookout for a second-hand version of this book on one of those lists that readers of many books keep, noting and thinking critically acclaimed or essential in a canon when they were written, and still do today. This is one such book, the debut novel by Amos Tutuola, which was considered one of the first modern African novels in English when it was published in the 1950s. Tutola was born to his father’s third wife and was from the Egba people, which is why he knows the traditional ways. AS THEY follow the Yoruba religion, and also he will have grown up with the Yoruba folktales, which this book is a retelling of. The book was described by T.S. Eliot as a creepy, crawly imagination. Another early champion of the book was Dylan Thomas (I can see this in the palm wine drinking, and also the sense of community and place was strong in Thomas’ work, like it is in Tutuola’s)

I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age. I had no other work more than to drink palm-wine in my life. In those days we did not know other money, except COWRIES, so that everything was very cheap, and my father was the richest man in our town.

My father got eight children and I was the eldest among them, all of the rest were hard workers, but I myself was an expert palm-wine drinkard. I was drinking palm-wine from morning till night and from night

till morning. By that time I could not drink ordinary water at all except palm-wine.

But when my father noticed that I could not do any work more than to drink, he engaged an expert palm-wine tapster for me; he had no other work more than to tap palm-wine every day.

the opening and shows how much he drinks !!

The book is told by the narrator a son of a wealthy man, who said Palm wine drtnkard of the title of the book, as his wealth means he has the money to be able to afford a Palm wine tapist who are those that can tap the Palm tree and make the Palm wine for him to drink. But when this tapist falls to his death, he loses his supply of Palm wine, and the book becomes a sort of Quest novel as he hunts for a new tapist. Along the way, he meets an old man, a kind of sage, in a way that tells him things. But as the quest heads in, he faces obstacles and changes as he fights beasts and saves people, and the narrator changes. This is a richly told book that is steeped in the local folklore of his people. In a way, you feel that the places and world Tutola has described of wealthy tribal sons and their servants are long gone.

THE DESCRIPTION OF THE CURIOUS CREATURE:-

He was a beautiful “complete” gentleman, he dressed with the finest and most costly clothes, all the parts of his body were completed, he was a tall man but stout.

As this gentleman came to the market on that day, if he had been an article or animal for sale, he would be sold at least for £2000 (two thousand pounds). As this complete gentleman came to the market on that day, and at the same time that this lady saw him in the mar-ket, she did nothing more than to ask him where he was living, but this fine gentleman did not answer her or approach her at all. But when she noticed that the fine or complete gentleman did not listen to her, she left her articles and began to watch the movements of the complete gentleman about in the market and left her articles unsold.

the adventure along the way have chapter heading like this

Over the years, I have run this blog, I have tried to cover a lot of fiction from all the different countries in Africa, thus making the fiction not just African, but this is a book from the Egba people of Nigeria and uses the Yoruba folktales,, just as in the last pos,t Laxness has used Icelandic sgas. To talk about his world, well, this was written just after World War II, and he saw Tutola, who had been in the RAF. But he had struggled when he was demobbed to find work, as everyone else had, and he ended up writing this book from his folklore past. It is considered a classic of the first Books from Nigeria to come out in English and lead the way for many of the great writers from his country that followed him. The book was also the first on the Jubilee list to come from books published in the Commonwealth during the Queen’s reign. I hope to read his second novel sometime. Have you read any other books by him?

 

 

Like a sky Inside by Jakuta Alikavazovic

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Like a sky inside by Jakuta Alikavazovic

French fiction/ essay

Original title – Comme un ciel en nous.

Translator Daniel Levin Becker

Source – Personal copy

Is there ever a time when you see little bits about a book and you just know it will be one of those books that will be with you forever? There aren’t many books like that. They come along once in a blue moon, the ones. that touch you. I had an idea that this book might be one of those books. Firstly, it has a writer of Balkan heritage writing in French, and me, they are my two favourite places to read books, so I knew this book from the daughter of Yugoslavian parents born in Paris. Her parents were from Bosnia and Montenegro. She has also worked as a translator on books by David Foster Wallace and Ben Lerner, which means she also has great taste in literature.

The Louvre was the first French city where I felt at home, my father used to say. The official story: he came to Paris in 1971, for the love of my poetess mother. He stayed for the Louvre. He was twenty years old and the twenty years that followed – covering, in part, my childhood – would unfold as though in a dream.

His joie de vivre. His appetite for the world. His opti-mism, and the limits thereof. He had no money and still believed it made no difference, because he had enough to act like he did. To pretend.

Of course, his head must have spun. To imagine the City of Light, to dream of it, is one thing; to discover it, to be a body, a twenty-year-old body wandering its daytime and nighttime streets, is another. All forms of difficulty

– loneliness, poverty, the roundly accepted fact that the slightest cough, the slightest cold, is far graver in a foreign language — all forms of difficulty have disappeared from his official story. Among them, his reasons for emigrat-ing: Paris, certainly. My mother, of course. The Louvre, naturally. But it would take me years to learn that he did it the way he did to escape military service in Yugosla-via, his country of origin, which today no longer exists.

Her parents Home Yugoslavia imploded and split

The book has the premise that she spends an overnight stay in the Louvre Gallery, where her young son is at Over. Over the evening, we see how art, family, memories, and how you could steal the Mona Lisa all drift by. This is a book that is one of those you sink into as a reader. It shows us how art and memories can connect from a piece that remembers her heading to New York against her father’s wishes when she was younger. The satyr she saw has a fellow sculpture now in New York that she had seen on the trip her father didn’t want her to do, as it drifts in her mind. Like the star in the sky, it follows her life’s path and her relationship with her father, alongside her evident love of art and how she connects with art. A night that sees her move far out of the bounds of the walls of the Gallery and the sense of time and place.

When I think about my father, I often think of those strange and beautiful images of wild animals, great and mighty deer, descending upon cities, wandering through streets. What they are experiencing is also an exile -quite solitary, like my father’s, quite majestic.They seem immediately at home, and their presence breathes a new enchantment into what we thought we knew: the sidewalks, the intersections, the asphalt under our feet. Nonetheless, an exile. They come driven by hunger. Or curiosity. Which for some, such as my father, such as me, is more or less the same thing. Yes, there is something deerlike in the familiarity I feel for him; a hint of wildness, of the unknown, forever inaccessible to my words but not to my heart. My heart, of which it is one of the centers. One of the places most intimate to me and, in spite or because of this, one of the most foreign.

I loved this observation of her father

This is a book I read as it was on the Republic of Consciousness longlist. But when I put a picture up and people like Anthony at times flow stemmed said they loved this book, I knew it would be one I would like. I love books that deal with Art, travel, memory and that bond between father and Daughter. It captures how your mind can drift from it, and it is with my dad’s engineering or castles that is our connection. Edinburgh castles or a dam make me think of my father and his past his life. I connected with this work as I said, there are just some books you know before you turn over the first p[ages you hope and think will be with you for the rest of your life. This is one of those books like Panorama by Dusan Sarotar or Fireflies by Luis Sagasti or back even further for me the Encyclopedia of Snow by Sarah Emily Miano. Those books that just touch you in a way you can’t say other than it’s about a connection on an emotional level with the writer at that moment of reading that will last forever after you put the book down. Have you ever had that feeling about a book and that connection that makes you drift into your own life as a reader and son of a daughter, in this case!

 

Far by Rosa Ribas

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Far by Rosa Ribas

Spanish Fiction

Orignal title – Lejos

Translator – Charlotte Coombes

Source – Personal copy

you are probably fed up of hearing me blow the trumpet for Foundry editions I actually have no connection to this publisher it is just they have brought out such great books in their first year, and this is the last of them Far from a writer considered the queen of Spanish Noir and the two trilogy of books she has brought out in the most have been well received in Spain. She has written a series set in 1950s Spain. This book saw a change of direction as it is set in La Mancha in a building site of an estate that was never finished. It captures the life of those caught when the real estate bubble burst in Spain. It appears this is the first book of hers that she translated. The book she wrote with Sabine Hofmann also seems to have been translated into English.

First, she zigzagged her way through the area of terraced houses where she lived. Then into the part where the large villas were. Each one was a different colour, so nobody got their houses mixed up. Luxurious two-storey villas, with double garages, terraces, balconies, gabled roofs, and dor-mers; with extensive gardens, with ponds and flower beds; with loungers in dark wood and cast-iron tables and chairs, covered with custom-made cushions for sitting and drinking beers or lemonade in summer. All built nice and far apart.She carried on through the streets of apartment blocks.

The first phase boasted full occupancy. There were gaps in the following blocks, but only a few. The ratio increased into Phase 2, then went down again in Phase 3, with its most recent buildings barely occupied. Phase 4 was filled with unfinished buildings and surrounded by a metal fence.

The fence that sperates these two worlds

The book came about when the writer was taken to a small town in Spain where a sort of wonderous luxury estate of buildings in Seensa was due to be built. Still, when the building bubble burst, the place was half-finished and half-filled. Some people live there with Jobs and try to get on like our narrator. She has a hu=]house built and a job but is just trying to get a new start in her life after being separated. The other half of the estate has not attracted those wanting a roof over their heads in the half-finished apartments. This is the framing for this book: a woman who is sinking more into drink and depression than a man trying to get by but is caught up in the darkness of his fellow incomers to the vacant flats. The book sees the two main characters draw together, but there is also the underlying r=tension of those who were brought into a dream of swimming pools and green lawns in the middle of the dry, arid Spanish central area. This is the land of LA Mancha that Don Quixote travelled as a fiesta draws close. Will this poowe=der keg of two different classes of people finally blow up?

Finally it was dark. He waited a few more hours, however, before going out to do a recce of the site to check if it was safe.

He toyed with the idea of having a drink. There was a drinks cabinet: one of those old-fashioned ones with a folding door and a mirrored interior that multiplied the bottles and glasses to infinity. He picked up a bottle of vodka but immediately put it down. Dust clung to that too. He wiped his hands on his trousers. He would not drink. On his first outing he needed to have a clear head. Bumping into someone could be fatal. They might alert the police to the fact that an intruder was living there. Then maybe the others would connect the dots.

His side of the fence a darker world at times

It is a common thread in Spanish literature: the unnamed narrators in there books. I know some people hate it, but for me, it makes the characters seem universal. I am hard-pressed to think of an Equivalent of this for the UK, maybe one of those dying UK seaside towns where there once hoped, and it has now gone, and the flotsam and jetson of human existence has drifted in. Maybe one of those new Scottish towns full of dreams and hope that never quite got off the ground would be the nearest. What it captures is tow worlds:s those who were brought into a dream because the bubble had burst in them are trapped as much as those who came to escape and just find shelter, a sort of drifting underclass that is never that far behind the scenes in everywhere if you know how to look at the broken capitalist world we have. This is a book that captures that clash of classes so well. You can tell she writes Noir. The Guardian review mentioned Claudia Pinerio, and I can see that myself. It has that creeping slowness and building tension she does well. It also mentions J G Ballar, the master of buildings and stories. Yeah, this has a nod to a book, maybe like Super Cannes: A Broken Utopia, a Broken Dream of a Place, the darker side of broken dreams when classes and what that brings, like uncertainty and worry about what an underclass can do. The book builds the tension of this well. Alongside the drawing closer of our two narrators at the same time! Have you read any of the Foundry edition titles?

 

The Waterfalls of Slunj by Heimito Von Doderer

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The Waterfalls of Slunj by Heimito Von Doderer

Austrian Fiction

Original title – Die Wasserfälle Von Slunj

Translators – Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser

Source – Personal copy

I’m back on with a classic, I will still be trying to read mainly classic this year. Oddly, today is the first day I have felt my usual bookish self this year. This year, I have struggled to read, blog, and use social media. So I was so happy I managed to sit earlier and read under pages in a coffee shop. Thought about the upcoming weeks. One of the books I struggled to get through this year was by Austrian writer Heimito Von Doderer. He was born into a privileged family at the time, one of the wealthiest families in Austria. I have two other books, the one that came out from NYRB a while ago and the genuinely epic two-volume The Demons, which was republished by an American publisher and has over 1000 pages. This book was meant to be a multi-volume series, but he only wrote this, and the second volume was published after he died. So we are thrown into The Tale, the end of the Austor Hungarian Empire. The book was meant to be seven books from 1880 – 1960, but only the first two were released.

However, all these rather grand houses, each standing alone at the edge of the grassy park, suffered from the same fundamental trouble. They were damp. Their basements were dank as dungeons. But just at this time, when the Claytons settled down here, a Vienna firm put on the market a drying-stove of a new design. The poster by means of which this new product was brought to the public notice was terrifying. It showed the new stove standing in the gloom of a cellar, its maw fiery; from the left and the right side of the stove there grew arms with fists uplifted; and from this monster panic-stricken toadstools and mildewy hobgoblins were fleeing, their faces contorted with mortal fear, while the wildly flickering rays of ferocious heat from the stove’s mouth pursued them in their headlong flight, decimating them. One could scarcely help feeling sorry for these doomed creatures, these little galloping fungus legs, wailing toadstools, and hurrying vapors. That poster of the stove with the threatening, whirling fists was to be seen in Vienna for many years. It was still there in the time of little Donald Clayton.

Grand House was a world the writer grew up in !

The book follows the Claytons and the English industrialist family trying to set up and move into the Austro-Hungarian with their new Office in Vienna. Along with this, the title of the book comes from the fact. Early in the book, Robert and Harriet, the parents of the two main characters, their sons Robert and Donald, spend the Honeymoon at the Hotel at the Falls, located in Croatia. This book sees the sons setting up the factory and the people working in the factory [particularly Chwostik, the deputy director of the Factory, who used to live with p[prostitutes. The factory makes agricultural machinery and, in some shadow,s actual companies working there at the time. It captures the later end of the 19th century as the world suddenly sped up. As we see how, all, this world is a lot of characters and, in a way, memories of the time. It all stems from the Claytons, the father and his sons.An epic book that also has a bit of humour at times and sees a world long gone and, as it was happening, was doomed, which I love to read.

At this point in developments a gingerly key was inserted into the lock (Münsterer always went about very quietly here, without himself knowing why; perhaps it was a sort of echo of his reverence for Chwostik that made him behave in this way).

He did of course also hear the voices that came from the room now his, for the door was open. At the same instant he realized, in retrospect, that the front door had opened when he had turned the key once; so it had only been shut, not locked. He could hear his stepmother talking. She had simply walked into his room with someone (new tenant?), and there she was talking; and he came slinking in like a dog. Now he could make out what she was saying: “… yes, that’s how it is, sir, it’s for my stepson, who lives with us, and us having no room for ourselves as it is. He wants to get married. In the post office, he is.”

But our poor Münsterer did not merely slink, he also kept his mouth shut. He was an underling of caretakerdom, the advance guard of caretakerdom, a pawn in Frau Wewerka’s sphere of influence (homo conciergificatus Wewercae

Chwostik the depty from the factory is anothher main character part from the Claytons

I think this is one of those books you drift in. It has a style that drifts like memories can drift. There is a feeling of Freud in the background of the book. It is one of those books in a notebook that is handy with the characters to keep track of them. But also, it is a world that is now gone. It uses both the personal world of the Claytons and the dying Empire like the river that follows over the fall clashing and mixing this is a book that was the start of what would have been a truly epic book I feel it captures the world before world war one. This book captures the historical and societal changes around the Claytons. Have you read any of his books?