Tag: BOOKS THAT DEFINED ME

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Nikolai Leskov

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Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Nikolai Leskov

Russian fiction

Original title – Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo uyezda

Translator – Robert Chandler

Source – Personal copy

One of the aims of this year was to get more familiar with Russian Classics. I read War and Peace early on in the blog, and she and there have read a number of other books that have come from the likes of Pushkin Press when they have brought out a new collection of stories by a writer or a new Translation. However, this writer may not be as well-known as other writers on the same page. He was well-regarded among his fellow Russian writers but was never taken in the English-speaking world. This book is better known for being the basis of Shostakovich’s Opera, which is based around the book, and a few years ago, there was a film made of the novella as well. Leskov had a Harder upbringing than some of his fellow Russian writers. He worked as a clerk in the criminal court. He climbed and eventually was able to get a transfer to Kyiv. He ultimately went to work for a private company and got drawn into journalism and then to literary writing. He is known for his wordplay. There is an excellent LRB podcast about this book with Robert Chandler, the book’s translator.

Katerina Lvovna was not exactly a beauty, but there was something pleasing about her nevertheless. She was only in her twenty-fourth year; she was short but shapely, with a neck that could have been sculpted from marble; she had graceful shoulders and a firm bosom; her nose was straight and fine, her eyes black and lively, and she had a high white forehead and black, almost blue-black hair. Herself from Tuskar in the province of Kursk, she had been given in marriage to a local merchant by the name of Izmailov; she did not, however, love him or feel any attraction towards him – it was simply that he had asked for her hand and she, being poor, could not afford to be choosy. The Izmailov family was of no small importance in our town: they traded in white flour, rented a large mill in the district, and owned profitable orchards on the outskirts of town as well as a fine town house. In short, they were well-to-do. Moreover, they were not a large family: there was only the father-in-law, Boris Timofeyevich Izmailov, a man of nearly eighty who had long been a widower; Katerina Lvovna’s husband, Zinovy Borisovich, who was a little over fifty; and Katerina Lvovna herself. That was all. Although Katerina Lvovna and Zinovy Borisovich had been married for five years, they still had no children.

The children or lack of is mentioned by her father in Law

This book is one of those books that, when you finish it, you go through all that happened in so few Pages. The book follows Katerina Lvovna, a wife of a much older man. By marriage, he is away working after the book’s opening, and we see how her husband’s father, Boris, wants children. He tells her how Zinovy has already been through a wife and is pushing his young wife for a child. But when a dam breaks on one of his properties, Katerina is left home alone. She has the house to herself, and as she is alone, she eventually starts a relationship with the Steward who has Left Sergei. She flirts with him, But she is told he is a womaniser. But when she is caught with Sergei in the bed with him by her father-in-law Boris. This one event sets her on a path of killing people and a series of events that change the whole course of her life and her connection over the years that follow. Sergei it shows a one-sided affair with a man who is more interested in Women than romance. But the knock-on effect on the woman that loves him. A Lady Macbeth indeed.

‘I know very well, master, where I’ve just been, and I advise you, Boris Timofeyevich, to listen to me and mark my words: what’s done can’t be undone, and it’s best not to bring shame on one’s own house. What do you want of me? What satistaction do you require?”

‘I want, you viper, to give you five hundred strokes of the lash, said Boris Timofeyevich.

I’m the culprit, you’re the judge. Tell me where I’m to go – and do as you wish. Drink the blood from my veins.’ Boris Timofeyevich led Sergei down to his stone storeroom and lashed him with a whip until the strength gave out in his arm. Sergei didn’t even let out a groan, though he chewed through half of his shirtsleeve.

When they get caught by Boris

I haven’t seen the opera or film of this book. I will be watching the film at some point. I have found it online. The title shows how rare it is for a woman to kill like Lady Macbeth, and here we see Katerina do it. We see a woman driven by the desire for both desire and freedom. But then the unravelling after what happens when they are caught by Boris, both her decision to kill him and also the long-term relationship between Katerina and Sergei. It shows how females struggle to break free of marriage when trapped in one. How by her father in law she is viewed as a baby-making machine. Then there is her relationship with Sergei, a womaniser, but she never quite sees it. She is blind to him until the end of the book!! I would be interested to see if Robert Chandler has done any more books by him. I like the other translations he has read over the years. Have you read Leskov?

Winstonsdads dozen for 24

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I’ve decided to draw a line under the year review-wise and do a round-up of my favourite books and then one of the other things I  like: Film, TV shows and Music. Then, a post looking forward to 2025 and a year of classics; although I will have a few from this year to review or am not yet not quite sure what to do, just leave them unreviewed and do all classics from pre-1972 next year. So, I managed 103 books that were reviewed in 24 countries. I need keep a better track of starts like that next year. Anyway, I am picking 12 favourites from the year, in no particular order, just 12 books I have loved over the last 12 months. I am not swayed by anyone else view on these books or tastes. So as ever, I hope to bring a fresh list of 12 books

1, Ædnan an Epic by Linea Axelsson

First up is a verse epic of the Sami community, I was just thinking of this earlier today as I watched someone ride the Inlandsbanan an old rail line through Sami lands to the south of Sweden

2 Star 111 by Lutz Seiler

This epic book should have had a wider readership for me as it captured those post-war years in Germany when we followed the path of Carl and his parents!  A wild ride of a book from one of the great German writers.

3. What is Mine by Jose Henrique Bortoluci

A son recalls his father’s years as a truck driver around Brazil in those turbulent years of the 80s. It reminds me of how great nonfiction in translation can be.

4. A Terrace in Rome by Pascal Quingard

The story of one man’s life, Geoffrey Meaume, an engraver, is scarred early on in the book when acid is thrown at him. We see the effect of that on him and his art. A writer I have been meaning to get to for many a year.

5.Engagement by Ciler Ilhan

I read two excellent novels with similar themes from Turkey this year, but this, although less well-known, captures the brutal aftermath of a falling out between two villages as well, if not better than the other Turkish book I read this year.

6.Out of Mind by J Bernlef

A book lost to time, which is a shame. It captures his descent into Dementia so well as we see him struggling with a clever recurring thread around a book by Graham Greene, considered one of the best Dutch books of all time.

7.Götz and Meyer by Daivd Albahari

One, I have the Mookse and gripes podcast as they mentioned it in an episode a while ago, and since then, it was just a matter of finding a copy, which I did this year and then read straight away and wasn’t disappointed a man connects to the lose of his family in the world war in the holocaust by the name of two drivers that drove his family to their deaths.

8.Brandy Sour by Constantia Soteriou

One of the greatest discoveries of the year was Foundry Editions, with this first book that had a history of Cyprus tied into the characters of a hotel and the drinks they all drink. It was a very clever little book that made me want to make some of the drinks mentioned.

9.My favourite by Sarah Jollien-Fardel

This powerful book follows a daughter from a small village ith an abusive father and how all in the village turned a blind eye to what he did a compelling book

10.Dendrites by Kallia Papdaki

A Greek novel sent in the US follows the collapse of industrial America through the Greek families that moved to New Jersey to work in the factories. If Springsteen had been Greek, this would be his family’s story !!

11.Beloved by Empar Moliner

Another favourite press three-time rebel and sadly the last of their iconic cover art as the artist who did them passed away to cancer. All monies from this book went to charity. A woman sees a flicker between her husband and a violinist in the orchestra he is in, and before he knows it she knows he will leave her.

12. Your Little Matter by Maria Grazia Calandrone

A second book from Foundry Press is probably my book of the year. It blew me away a heart-wrenching story of a woman looking into her own past as an abandoned baby and the mother she never knew who abandoned her as a baby. It is just a look at how hard it would be for a woman in a small village to escape a broken marriage and find love.

Honourable mentions

Night of the Crow by Abel Tomé

The Fire by Daniela Krien

Caesaria by Hanna Nordenhök

In the last few years, I have been drawn more to great female writers in translation. Seven of the twelve are females, and eight are from small presses.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Sea in the Radio by Jürgen Becker

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The Sea in the Radio by Jürgen Becker

German fiction

Original title – Im Radio Das Meer

Translator = Alexander Booth

Source – Personal copy

Now I start with a far better review of this book by Joe at Roughghost. Not to put myself down, I don’t really know how to get into these experimental novels like this. I ordered this after seeing he had died earlier this month. The name was one I had seen on the list of writers connected with the post-war group of German Writer Gruppe 47, I have long been a fan of this loose collective of writers shaping post-war German writers. I, like many, feel this from reading Böll and Grass, which may be the two best-known names. When I read them, they were, and in recent years, I have read some others from the groups, especially Alexander Kluge, a writer I hold in the upper echelons of my personal pantheon of writers. Now, as for this, this is a collection of snippet sentences around a village. For me, it is like he has taken the world he sees down to the bare minimum. I saw this in Helmut Heißenbüttel’s work texts , which I reviewed a few years ago. He was another member of the group.

Where were you last night?

The small yellow plane is back, somewhat further away, somewhat higher.

At night you could hear trains. Nights you would always hear trains.

The first tractor out on the fields. Still. Then it begins to make large circles.

Now the bumblebee buzzes out the open door.

Glancing at the clock. One’s startled. Or one’s not.

The filling-station attendant says, You don’t see the fuel, but it’s there.

A bit slower getting up the stairs today.

We’ll have one more little one, but then we’ve got to get going.

When Charlie was still here, the neighbour says, Evenings I’d always be entertained. But she doesn’t want a new cat.

Preparations for a trip one doesn’t want to take at all.

The morning begins cloudless. At midday a few. Cloudless again in the evening.

An example of the style of writing

The novel is not really. It is maybe more like a redacted journal if you removed all personal details from it and dates and places, so what you have is like snippets one after another. If you took Under Milkwood and removed the characters and names from it there is, for me a connection to that. I find this is like a radio of images and thoughts going around the dial, I was reminded at times how, as A kid, I used to marvel in bed at night, slowly moving the dial on my short wave radio and moving over the stations from around the world. This is the effect here. We grasp just a bare thought, a tiny observation of nameless characters. What we have is the space in between these sentences. These aphorisms are ours to fill or not fill. That is the beauty. Like John Cage’s 4′ 33”, the silence is individual and just yours to saviour so it is heard with the gaps in. The sentence’s voids to fall in or steeping stones sometimes when the thoughts suddenly loop back to an early idea.

At night the man would sleep in his tent, hidden in the woods; during the day he’d go eat soup and pick up his mail.

Before flying off, the woodpecker lets himself drop.

It is hot and damp, and out in the garden there are snails.

The day hasn’t ended yet, and you don’t know what’s still to come.

Flags hanging from the windows. That hasn’t happened in a long time, and he almost got scared. Not all windows have flags. But some of them do.

The filling-station attendant says, Air doesn’t cost a thing, air is priceless.

Cloudless the night. You should be able to see the stars. If you can’t see any stars, the night isn’t cloudless.

The boy had come along to the station and waved after the train. He didn’t realize how soon he would be sitting on the same train himself.

It’s the same house, but the people living there today don’t know it.

After that, he began to count the days. At some point, it became too much, so he began to count the months instead.years

Another snippet from the book

So you get the idea. If you want a better idea, look to Joe. This is through my limited prism of the world and my limited knowledge of the language. But in a slight nod to Joe. The other piece of media, well, two, but the first links to Joe and the fact they live in Canada, I love the Guy Maddin film My Winnipeg: A Glimpse of his Childhood in That City, but the film was made up of little snippets like this another film directors work I felt connected to this was  Jonas Mekas the avant grade filmmaker his films flash from place to place and through time in a way maybe its all the effect of the world war on these figures. I can see Kluge in this as well it is the way the war is always a prism for the events and way a writer filmmaker looks at the world. An experimental poetic collection of journal sentences that left me wanting more from this writer. I think this may be his only book in English so far. Another book for German lit month. Before anyone says I admire Joe, and yes, his reviews are a million times better than mine, I aim to hit his hits one day, but I now find myself in my own orbit of reviewing books.

The book against Death by Elias Canetti

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The Book Against Death by Elias Canetti

Bulgarian literature

Original title – Das Buch gegen den Tod

Translator – Peter Filkins

Source – Subscription book

I should have got to Canetti sooner than this. I have Aut de Fe, his best-known novel, on my shelf and his non-fiction writing from his time in the blitz in London. Born in Bulgaria, he spent his first few years in Manchester. His mother then moved him back to central Europe. They eventually settled in Vienna. He spoke many languages and was the perfect example of the Jewish intellect in central Europe in those pre-war years. He escaped and was in London in the war. He wrote in German he started this book in the war years. A book that has years of him raging against death was abridged from over 20000 pages of notes he had on the subject and other thoughts he had collected together with the idea of the book against death. This came out after his death and was distilled to a few hundred pages.

15 June 1942

Five years ago today my mother died. Since then my world has turned inside out. To me it is as if it happened just yesterday. Have I really lived five years, and she knows nothing of it? I want to undo each screw of her coffin’s lid with my lips and haul her out. I know that she is dead. I know that she has rotted away. But I can never accept it as true. I want to bring her to life again. Where do I find parts of her? Mostly in my brothers and me. But that is not enough. I need to find every person whom she knew. I need to retrieve every word she ever said. I need to walk in her steps and smell the flowers she smelled, the great-grandchild of every blossom that she held up to her powerful nostrils. I need to piece back together the mirrors that once reflected her image. I want to know every syllable she could have possibly said in any language.

Where is her shadow? Where is her fury? I will loan her my breath. She should walk on my own two legs.

I fear living historians. If they’re dead, I read them gladly.

I ;loved the last line about historians

He talks early on in the book about how the book came to him five years after his mother’s death. He seemed to have lost both his parents when he was at a young age. In addition to the war, it is easy to see why young Elias raged so much against death. He deals with death from mass deaths he mentions Saddam Hussein a lot in this regard. Then, To The Death of Saints, which discusses how writers have tackled death, is a book that goes from here to there. What comes across is a humanist view of the battle against death and how he tackled it in his life. He talks about a fellow writer I love, Thomas Bernhard, and yes, he likes him as a writer, but isn’t he obsessed with death? This is a man wandering in his thoughts, getting snippets of his fellow writers as he tries to learn what dearth is by raging against it. He is very much the character Dylan Thomas had in mind when he said rage against the night!

Everyone asks me about Thomas Bernhard, everyone wants to know what I think of him. I praise him and explain what he’s about, I try to help others better understand him. I elevate him to my disciple, and naturally he is, and in a much deeper sense than someone like Iris Murdoch, who is always so pleasant and light, while underneath it all she has become a brilliant and amusing popular writer. She is not really a disciple of mine, because she is so obsessed with gender. However, Thomas Bernhard is obsessed with death.

On the other hand, in recent years he has come under the influence of another, which conceals my own, namely that of Beckett. Bernhard’s hypochondria makes him susceptible to Beckett. Like him he gives in to death, rather than opposing it. He sees it everywhere and passively damns all to it.

Therefore I think that now, because of his empowerment through Beckett, Bernhard is somewhat overrated, but overrated by the higher-ups: the Germans have found their own Beckett in him.

The entanglement of my influence on Bernhard with that of Beckett is curious and obvious. It’s a little too simple to really please me. So, I declare here, for myself, that I have defended him too much out of generosity. I am not entirely sure if it serves him.

His thought around Thomas Bernhard

I know that post-war, he struggled to write another novel. One wonders if all this collection and raging against dearth was his way of dealing with the horror of the war years and the wiping out of his central European Jewish world. This is maybe his momento mori. He never quite finished. Part of me would happily love to have seen the total 2000 pages that made up his vision of the project even if he never got to thin it down I imagine there are some real gems to be uncovered from one of Europe’s leading thinkers of the time. I hope to get Auto de Fe read next year. I like this. I had hoped for something, maybe a little more digression and drifting, as this is collected in the years from 1942 until his death. One wonders how he would collect them if he had got around to it? But this is an exciting view of one man’s fifty-year struggle to deal with death. Have you a favourite book about death?

 

The ways of Paradise by Peter Cornell

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The ways of Paradise by Peter Cornell

Swedish memoir

Original title – Paradisets vägar

Translator – Saskia Vogel

Source – Subscription book

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

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

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

Knots and labyrinths a a recurring theme in the book

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

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

The first five little vignettes of info

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

Day in York and blogging moving forward

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

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

Eden,Eden,Eden by Pierre Guyotat

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Eden ,Eden,Eden by Pierre Guyotat

French fiction

Original title- Éden,Éden,Éden

Translator – Graham Fox

Source – Personal copy

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

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

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

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

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

simmering bodies, naked, half-naked,

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

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

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

Count Julian by Juan Goytisolo

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Count Julian by Juan Goytisolo

Spanish fiction

Original title –  Reivindicación del conde don Julián

Translator – Helen Lane

Source – Personal copy

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

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

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

 

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

Seneca? yes, Seneca

that is to say, his portrait in the Prado Museum

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

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

He picks various Spanish figures to talk about.

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

 

Your Little Matter by Maria Grazia Calandrione

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Your Little Matter by Maria Grazia Calandrone

Italian Memoir

Original title –  Dove Non Mi Hai Portata

Translator- Antonella Lettieri

Source – Personal copy

I saw Foundry editions online and ordered their first three books as they appealed to me. They are doing books from around the Mediterranean as reflected in each of the cover designs for each book reflects some from each country’s culture. This book is from the Italian writer Maria Grazia Calandrone. An Italian poet, journalist and tv host. She also works with prisoners and schoolchildren doing poetry workshops. This is her fist book to be translated to English, The book was a huge hit when it came out in Italuy and won prizes and spent weeks on the bestseller lists. In a way this is a book about those poor woman in Italy that haven’t ever had a voice people like Maria own Birth mother this is her story and how as a baby at 8 months she was abandon at the Vila Borghese by her mother. She was adopted and has written another book about her adoptive mother, but this is the story of Lucia and what brought her to abandon and then take her own life.

Of my mother, I only have two black and white photo-graphs.

Apart, of course, from my own life and some biological memories that I’m not sure I can tell apart from suggestion and myth.

I am writing this book so that my mother might become real.

I am writing this book to tear my mother’s smell from the earth. I am exploring a method for those who have lost their origins, a mathematical system of feeling and thought – so complete as to revive a body, as hot as the earth in summer and as firm.

I am starting from what I have, the two photographs that portray her, in the order in which they appeared in my life.

The first

was taken on her wedding day, Saturday, 17 January

1959. Lucia is twenty-two, she is dressed all in white and she is not smiling.

The starting point is two old b&w pictures of her Mother

Maria sets about trying to find out more about her mother and her birth father to piece together the bits. What she does is build up a tale in little vignettes of how Lucia, her mother. A woman did something not many women did in those years as it was illegal. Divorce was illegal. Even leaving the marital home would have meant she was sent to Jasil, so she left her parents-in-law when she did all this. Her marital bed was separated from the in-laws bed by a white cotton sheet. This is a hard rural side of Italy, where the world hadn’t changed, and Lucia had left and fallen for an older married man. Although imperfect, everything is broken when this Builder, Guiseppe, has to go to Africa as Il Duce fought for his piece of Africa. So she finds her self on the run with a child a partner hundreds of m, miles away. She tried to defy all around them by setting up a home together, but with him gone, the world around her fell apart. It is almost as if Maria looked at her mother and those times. The doors were all closed as her world dropped into despair. Shwe uncovers the fallen woman’s story of the country that hid or, just like this, let these women suffer and die.

When they betroth her, Lucia runs away. Luigi, her fiancé, is the village buffoon; they call him Gino or Centolire: like the emigrant in that old song, he too is infected with a childish American dream, even though he is a thirty-one-year-old bachelor lost in his inner world. Who knows what kind of elsewhere Luigi dreams of, what kind of life inconceivable here… He certainly has no interest in women, he is the laughing stock of the village children:

“You’re not a real man!”

However, he owns the piece of land next to the Galantes.

Tall and lanky to the point that, when he rides his donkey, his feet drag on the ground, he is a handsome man with sharp features and a chiselled jaw. Gino went to school until the end of third year and rumour has it that he is completely henpecked by his mother and sister

Her Husband Luigi and his family were to much for her

I absolutely loved this book; it is heartwrenching and opening and follows Maria’s journey to discover their mother. She never knew her Father and didn’t know how they met her mother’s life in the village. It is also an account of other women like her mother who have no one to tell their stories of being marginalized in a country where divorce is banned and even living separate lives isn’t allowed. This is a perfect example of why I like small presses. Yes, this was a best seller in Italy, but it had not been picked up by a relatable story. We heard of many an abandoned baby many years ago. This fills in what happened after but also what can lead a parent to do that act. Then take their own life, she drowns; Maria seven finds out how she’d looked after this and how the body blows up with gas in the water. I like the vignette style of the book as she pieced the stories of her family bit by bit over time, and everyone she met told her a little more from the pictures in the book as well. Have you ever read a book about an abandoned baby or their mother?

Dendrites by Kallia Papadaki

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Dendrites by Kallia Papdaki

Greek Fiction

Original title – Δενδρίτες

Translator – Karen Emmerich

Source – review copy

I don’t read many books based in the US just because I didn’t read my US writers many years ago. I did. Growing up, I was a fan of Bellow, Mailer, Roth, etc and the beats. But in recent years, I have maybe read one or two books a year from the US, and occasionally, I like this book set in the US by writers. Outside the US, or like Kallia Papadaki, who grew up in Thessaloniki in Greece, then studied in the US at Bard, and Brandeis, the former in New York, isn’t that far from the setting of this book in Camden, New Jersey. The book follows the events in the 1980S, but it also follows the family history and how the town fell apart around the families. Kallia has since returned to Greece to study film studies, and this was shortlisted for the EU Prize for literature.

Her parents had met at the Campbell Soup factory, where a twenty-four-year-old Susan stacked cans on a conveyer belt eight hours a day, six days a week, and where, at twenty-eight, Basil was a manager, responsible for nearly a thousand people per shift, plus hundreds of thousands of identical cans of concentrated tomato soup. Susan had once been a student at Ohio State University, but a year before she was set to earn her degree in political science with a focus on political economy, she fell in love with the hippie son of an industrialist, dropped out, and followed him accrossthe country, all the way to Haight-Ashbury, San Fran-cisco. Their romance lasted a year and a half-one summer at a commune and two mild winters on the streets panhandling love from passersby and handing out flowers in return, until Leto and Woodstock came between them, and the harsh winters of the Northeast, which were nothing to laugh at, and so after the rain and mud of the festival they limped their separate

Susan past with the hippie and then meeting Basil

The book follows the Campanis Family from the arrival of Antoinis in a time when this part of NEW JERSEY WAS Thriving, his children find work around the Campbell soup factory, and when a daughter falls for the hippie son of the factory owner in the sixties. we see how their children in the 80s are seeing the first cracks in the town of Camden as the city is starting to change. This is a mix of all the family’s stories from the theAntoinnis arriving in the winter and making his way to the kids making their way to what happens when the American turns sour in the generation that follows. We see Minne in the eighties as an orphan. She is taken in by the hippie daughter Susan of the Campanis family, who married Bsil, her second husband, a manager at the factory. Their daughter Leto is Minie’s mate, but taking her in opens family scars, which adds to the fact that a missing child, the world they live in, and the factories close the house get boarded up. As it says at the start of the book, a town now has the highest crime rate in New Jersey.

Susan waits in the car to make sure the girl can get inside as Minnie knocks on the front door for Louisa to open, in her haste that morning she forgot her keys on the kitchen counter, but the door doesn’t open and Minnie keeps knocking with no response, so Susan locks the car, walks over to the girl and asks if there’s a back door or a window that might be open, and Minnie leads her around the side of the house, where the kitchen window looks sidelong onto the street, and Susan cups her hands and rests them against the glass to banish the glare as Minnie stands on tiptoe to peek in, only she’s too short by a good ten inches and Susan feels the chilly November wind slipping under her blouse, a wind that’s picking up, blowing down from Montreal and the distant Arctic beyond, a wind that freezes everything except time

Susan in the 80s when they take in the Orphan in to their family home

I liked this family saga, but it does jump from time to time as we build the layers of three generations of the family and how the world around them fell apart in the 80s. This is a book that the writer said she thought of after seeing a man in his nineties in New Jersey like Antoinis, who came to the US and never came back to Greece as she saw him at a Greek dinner in New Jersey. She then spent a year researching Greek Americans’ history and then two years writing it. But it is a book that could be anyone it could be an Irish American in a bar not having gone back, etc. it is also about the loss of the American dream, how those factory jobs vanished and when they did the towns built around these industries fall apart and this in the later years in this book is the aftermath of the broken American dream. This is the sort of place Springsteen used to sing about those hard streets of tough men and hard-working women and what happened when the American dream fell apart. I like how she drifts through time and stuck the time in music, places, and memories of those years. it is a book that is dark in places as it is about a place falling apart and about how those dreams that started so well fell apart, and we end up with a ninety-year-old man unable to afford the ticket home to Greece. Do you have a favourite tale in the US by a non-US writer?

Winstons score – B, solid account of the American dream falling apart over three generations.

 

Clean by Alia Trabucco Zeran

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Clean by Alia Trabucco Zeran

Chilean fiction

Original title – Limpia

Translator – Sophie Hughes

Source – Library book

I had read her earlier book, Remainder but it was the year I stepped back from doing so much of the Booker international longlist, and it was one of the books that year I didn’t get to. There always seems to be one I just never review in the rush to review them all, which I usually want to do before the shortlist is announced. Anyway, when I saw this was out, I decided to wait and see if it would turn up in my local library to order in, and it did, so I ordered it in. I had wanted to read her nonfiction book that came out around female killers. I will do so when I see a copy that is cheap enough to buy. Anyway, this is her second novel to be translated. The previous one made the booker shortlist, and this tale of a nanny is as good as the earlier book, if not better. I really was drawn into the narrative here.

I didn’t see the señora the next morning. She left for work without saying goodbye and called me at around three.

Estela, make a note of this, she said.

Educated, hard-working, a discreet maid.

I was to defrost the chicken breasts and stuff them with spinach and toasted almonds. I should also make roast potatoes and prepare a round of dry pisco sours.

Nothing like a homemade pisco sour, she said, as if she were talking to someone else.

The señora wanted to know if I knew the measures. I told her I did, but she repeated them to me anyway. Three times she warned me not to overdo it on the sugar.

Nothing worse than a sweet pisco sour, she said.

After that she asked me if I could go to the supermarket.

Estelita, she said, can you get angostura bitters, lemons and organic eggs?

One of the very precise shopping lists she has to deal with

Estelle is a nanny. As the book opens, we discover she has been locked in a room by the couple she has been working for. What follows is her telling us of the events that lead up to her getting the job and what happened whilst she was working for the couple. What we see is a woman broken by this couple and the events that lead to the death of the daughter. Julia dies after she has been many for seven years, but it is how, over time, Estelle has lost herself as she falls foul of how this couple treated her over those seven years. It is a gaslight of a young woman by the couple, a class tale of power and who has it. But this is also mirrored by events away from the house. But it is those unseen souls in a home, those working for those with money, and how they get treated is at the heart of this story, and what happens when it all goes wrong like it does here.

By now you’re probably wondering why I stayed. It’s a good question, one of those important questions. Do you feel sad? Are you happy? You know the sort of thing. My answer is the following: Why do you stay in your jobs? In your poky offices, in the factories, in the shops on the other side of this wall?

I never stopped believing I would leave that house, but routine is treacherous; the repetition of the same rituals – open your eyes, close them, chew, swallow, brush your hair, brush your teeth – each one an attempt to gain mastery over time. A month, a week, the length and breadth of a life.

The señora deducted the cost of the blender from my pay, then got over the impasse. That’s what she said, ‘Estela, I’m over that impasse?

This is a question you do ask as you read about what is going on in the book

This is a gradual book. Things at the start seem ok tyes. She struggles to fit in, but then it turns and twists; the couple have sex, and she captures them. She looks at Senora’s dress; each little thing that happens makes them treat her hard. This is a story of a young woman who is powerless over time. In those seven years, we see her get more and more under the thumb of this couple. All this happens as we see the power struggle happening outside the house, and she is on the opposite side of it, those powerless, those unseen. There is a great line in Gosford Park where one of the detectives basically dismisses the servants as not having any involvement in anything as they are just there doing a job and aren’t important. What I loved so much is how our Narrator, Estelle, draws us into her world as we see how she ends up locked in a room. You think I’d done this, but would you do it if you were her? There is almost a Fait acompli about her story. We hear about couples doing this every few years, taking young women, and then they go from Nanny or Maid to slave or prisoner of the couple. This is one of the first books I have read since the booker prize this year. I think, oh that it should be on the longlist. Have you read any of her earlier books?

Winston’s score = +A is One of the year’s books so far for me .

That was the month that was July 2024 plus Spanish Portuguese litl

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  1. Last date in EL Zapotal by Mateo Garcia Elizondo
  2. Joseph Walser’s machine by Gonçalo M Tavares 
  3. Manual of painting and Caligraphy by Jose Saramago 
  4. Un amor by Sara Mesa
  5. The implacable order of things by Jose Luis Peixoto
  6. The Time of Cherries by Montserrat Roig 
  7. The land at the end of the world by Antonio Lobo Antunes 

It was Spanish and Portuguese lit month, so if you want to put any post in the comment for this post, that would be great. My journey started in Mexico with a man in his last days in a Mexican town. Then, a man tries to get by with his highly routine life as his home town has been invaded. Then, a man paints rich businessmen whilst having an affair with his secretary simultaneously. Then, a woman moves to a rural village in the hinterland.of spain . In order to escape her past. But She struggles to fit in, and things get darker when the house has problems. Then a pair of conjoined twins, and the father makes a deal with the devil. Then, a woman returns to Barcelona years after she left as the Franco years are ending. Then a man scared by war as he tells a woman about his time in Angola.I visited three countries Mexico, Spain and Portugal

Book of the month

It was, again, hard, but I just think Antunes is a special writer whose books are unique in style and voice. This book follows the horrors of the Portuguese involvement in the war in Angola. As a doctor, he saw the worst of the conflict and its impact on the young soldiers and those having to treat them, drawing from his own time in Angola, a Portuguese Vietnam. I have a number of more of his books but I ration them as he is one of my alltiime favourite writers and I don’t want to have none left to read , Have you any writers like that you feel about?

Non book events

Amanda and I had are holiday this month I did a post of this. I maybe taken time post holiday to get back to the blog but I am now back in the groove . We haven’t really got into many television  series this month. But I have been trying to keep my letterbox app up to date I do my goodreads and storygraph . SO I  have tried to get consistent with Lettebox for the films I’ve been seeing so there was a few films I Loved this month the fun Mrs Harris goes to Paris is a film about a cleaner want to by a Dior dress a comedy of class and being true to yourself . Then Iron claw is wrestling film of a group of brothers that wrestled but then died one by one sad and a24 at its best. The I have Jacqui from the blog Jacquiwine to thanks for watching The witch’s mirror a sort Flipped version of the film Rebecca from Mexico. I also was watching the later stages of the European championship I actually watched more matches for this championship than I ever had such a shame England fell at the last post but we had a large chunk of luck to get that far and we now await a post southgate England team.

Next month.

I will be doing books for women in Translation month. I have a few in mind I would do a pic of them but I know what I am like as the month goes on I will shift from here to there  but it will all be female writers in Translation. I have finished a couple of books one a quirky tale of the last days of Samuel Beckett will be my first review for the month. WHat are your plans ?

 

 

Sunday Musings Booktown visit , looking forward blog wise

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I’ve not done a chatty post like this for a good while. I was just saying on Twitter that I miss a lot of bookish chat; I don’t have anyone in my sphere of friends who is particularly as bookish as me. I loved Twitter, but it has died, and I am a dreadful blog commenter; I go in spits and spurts. But the thing I have found with seeking an Autism diagnosis is I struggle even online to open conversations up. If anything, this has become a real problem alongside a feeling of being the most under-read person around (I know in a way this isn’t the case, but I often feel it\). Anyway, I am just saying I am here and willing to chat. I’ve been thinking as I head towards 140 reviews, but more so, there are 1500, which I aim to get to at some point next year. I’ve been doing that gap-filling exercise in. my mind. What I have missed from around the world is a lot of classic books. I must try to get some reading over the next year. The new OUP Proust appeals, and I must read a Zola or two. Also, a few more countries from Africa and Asia would be good. I heard a chap in the recent Mookse podcast talking about when folks get excited about the next book from a place, he thinks, what about this place, another country’s, places never mentioned. I was thinking about how little Central American literature is mentioned from Mexico down to the tip of South America. Very little is mentioned, but I’m sure there are books about it.A rabbit hole for another day. I love a good rabbit hole and then a list. Even if the list is never finished, the making and finding of the list is the job. The other thing I need to try to do is change the format I review books in I have done it the same way for years but I need to break the moukld it is ease to do it to the current format as I know roughly so many words in each part makes 800 word plus quotes post. In a way, I used to be more fun about my reviews, and I miss that naive nature and not worrying about other thoughts ! One of the other things I want to do in the next 12 months is visit a booktown either Wigtown or Hy on wye . I’ve never been to either recommendation. On either. You are most welcome to suggest shops and places. As for reading, I have a few books left from this year’s Spanish Portuguese lit month to review. But move over into Women in Translation month with The Girl in the Photograph by Lygia Fagundes Telles the tale of three women in the middle of the dictatorship years in Brazil. A book from the Dalkey Archive from a few years ago. I am also slowly working through this collection of writing in Analog Sea Review, a magazine to bring you off your screens and read. This issue has a wonderful interview with Wim Wenders. Anyone else read this magazine?

15 Years of reading the world winstonsdad is 15

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Well, the blog itself told me a couple of days ago that it has been going on for 15 years. Amazing. This started just as I found other bloggers on Twitter, and my reading had grown over the few years before that. I started with a challenge of reading 52 over the first year of the blog well, which has now grown to 130 countries. I now tend to trickle through new countries a few a year I will get to every country in the world at some point I hope but for me it is about the breadth of books read so I want to read everything basically. Sadly, many blogs I love have gone over the years. I have carried on. I have reviewed, on average 92 books a year over the last 15 years not bad stats. Of them, 1200 are books in translation . I have written 2330 posts over the last 15 years. I have started the shadow jury, which I love doing. The hashtag #Translationthurs I started. With Richard, Spanish Lit Month has since become Spanish and Portuguese Lit Month. I wish I could make a little money from this blog as I feel the time and effort I have spent in the last fifteen years be nice to see a little reward for that. I love interacting with other bloggers. I’m always open to ideas I feel I do struggle to comment but I always try to catch up from time to time. I have loved the experiences and people I have met over the years of the blog. Her is to the next 15 years !! As you follow me as I read books from around the world.