Tag: BOOKS THAT DEFINED ME

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.

Out of Mind by J Bernlef

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Out of Mind by J Bernlef

Dutch fiction

Original title – Hersenschimmen

Translator Adrienne Dixon

Source – Personal copy

Am I the only person that has a list of books you have seen on the list that you know are out of print, so you want to keep an eye out for them. This is the case with this book, well, a couple of books of the same list, and that was a list of the ten best Dutch novels that came out that was the NRC Best Dutch novels, of which this was the fourth best novel of a public vote. The list also had The Evening by Gerald Reve, a book I have read several times and just didn’t connect with it that wasn’t translated when the list came out. This was bt was out of print. So this won the m find book of the Year when it came out. Bernlef was a name taken by the writer Hendrik Jan Marsman. Bernlef was a blind 8th-century poet who started off as a poet writing novels later in his career, and this was very well received when it came out as it deals with dementia from an elderly couple as one of them slowly loses them self to dementia.

Philip scratches his ginger chin-strap beard, apologizes that there is no hot coffee left, and then asks how I liked The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene.

The question takes me aback. I am not attuned to it. It also seems as if I only half understand it. Like an incomplete sentence. You can guess at the rest, but there are more possibilities.

‘Haven’t got round to it yet, I say, and in order to please him I select another book by the same author from one of the shelves. Our Man in Havana.

‘I saw the movie once,’ I explain, ‘with Alec Guinness! He nods but I can tell from his face that he doesn’t know the movie. I pay. He accompanies me to the door and holds it open for me.

The Greene early on in the book Maartens remembers more

The book follows a Dutch couple that escaped the nazis and settled in Glouster, Mass., where they escaped when the Nazis took over. Maarten was a quiet man and a secretary in an NGO. He lives with his wife Vera. As the books open, he seems fluid, talking about the book he is reading by Graham Greene. This is a recurring thread in the book is Greene novels and films.  We see this quiet man as his mind starts to fail and how Vera copes with this as it is just simple things like bringing in the firewood, something he has done for years. He is in his mid-seventies, and those small things creep in, but as I say, the recurring talk around Graham Green each time, he remembers less and less about him and the book. This is being in the face of the storm as a man loses himself and how it affects his relationship with his wife.

Philip sends his regards to you – Philip, the bookseller, says the man, putting a notebook into his inside pocket.

‘Oh, him. I haven’t seen him for ages.’

“You went there only the other day. You bought Our Man in Havana from him. A very good Graham Greene. Made into a movie as well. Who played the main part again?’ I shrug my shoulders. Then Vera whispers a name. ‘Alec Guinness.’ Damn, she’s right. This fellow does look like Alec Guinness. Let’s hope he didn’t hear her, because it may not be much of a compliment. Same jowls and broad rims to his ears. I have to make an effort not to start chuckling.

Later on the same book and he remembers less about it and hos language is less !

I wondered how I would like this, as I had mixed feelings about The Evenings, another great Dutch novel. But no this is a book I think should be better known it captures a man as his mind falls apart so well. I was reminded of two works I have seen or read in the last decade that deal with this. The first was the memoir of the art critic  Tom Lubbock, which I read several years ago and was so touched by it but never reviewed it probably as I felt I couldn’t do a fragile, beautiful book like that justice. Bernlef has caught in the same way here how some lose words and memories as the day-to-day events slip bit by bit as the person loses themselves. The other is the film The Father, in which Anthony Hopkins plays a father struggling with dementia and how his world constantly seems different as his mind adjusts to the gentle loss of memories and place and time. Both of them showed, like this novella does, how one can fall apart and what we slowly fall off us as people. This is a hard-hitting little book that slowly moves like dementia does as we follow Maartens as he is struck down by dementia. Have you a favourite book dealing with Dementia?

Do you have a list of books you have seen on list of best books from places , times or just in the paper ?

May’s reading Journal

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  1. The observable universe by Heather McCalden
  2. Simpatia by Rodrigo Blanco Calderon 
  3. White Nights by Urszula Hineek
  4. And the stones cry out by Clara Dupont-Monod 
  5. Why did you come back every summer by Belén López Peiró
  6. Clara reads Proust by Stephane Carlier 
  7. Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro 
  8. The book of Emma Reyes by Emma Reyes
  9. What is Mine by Jose Henrique Bortoluci
  10. Two for the road by Roddy Doyle 
  11. The book of all love by Agustin Fernandez Mallo 
  12. January by Sara Gallardo
  13. Birthday by César Aira 
  14. The following Story by Cees Nootebom
  15. The Wounded age by Ferit Edgu

I had wanted to do a book a day in May, but I didn’t; this challenge pushed me to 15 reviews this month and made me see I could fit more reviews in here and there. We started with a memoir about a daughter’s quest to connect her loss of her parents to Aids, and her mother’s love of crime drama and computer viruses make up this memoir in vignettes. Then, a man opens a dog home on the orders of his ex-father-in-law in Venezuela. Then we are in Rual Poland with a series of interconnecting stories. Then we have a sister coping with a disabled sibling. Then, a woman seeks justice for a sexual attack. We move to Paris, and a woman discovers Proust as a writer.Then, we have a female captain who lets her saviour swim in the sea, and the book takes a strange turn. In the letters over twenty years, Emma Reyes recounts her poor childhood. Then we have a son recalling the conversations and life of his truck-driving father in the later part of the 20th century as Brazil changed and had a dictatorship rule. Then a pair of dubliners discuss the days news over a pint  Then a trio of stories in Mallo’s new novel. A young woman next in Argentina struggles to hide a pregnancy and how she became pregnant. Then, a man turns fifty as he sits and writes. A man then awakes in Lisbon and falls asleep in Amsterdam. Is he alive? Finally, a pair of novellas see Turks heading to the Kurdish part of Turkey and having their eyes open. I covered 13 countries this month. One new publisher is MTO, publisher of the White Nights.

Book of the month

This was a hard choice, so many great books this month, but the one scene in this book where the narrator of the first book has a dream of an old man fishing and fishing up dead bodies of women and children in his net is a haunting image.

Non book things this month

After Record Store Day, I only picked a couple of records up. This was one of them: Beth Gibbons’s new album. I have loved her voice since she was in Portishead many years ago, and she has done a few collaborations since then, but this is her first new work in a long time. On the TV front, we watched last night a light thriller about oil getting infected with a virus and the chaos that would follow that. The series The responder we have started watching the series The Veil but haven’t finished yet.

The month ahead

I am currently reading the first Hungarian book from Istros Books, and I will then move on to a mix of review books and books I have brought or borrowed from the library. I will also be reviewing the latest Arab lit quarterly, which is around Gaza and has several writings from inside Gaza.

How was your month ?

January by Sara Gallardo

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January by Sara Gallardo

Argentine fiction

Original title – Enero

Translators -Frances Riddle and Maureen Shaughnessy

Source – personal copy

I have long been a fan the American publisher Archipelago books there books are works of art the titles they choose are always interesting like this one which go even the wave of Argentine female writers we have had the last few years. It was about time someone published an earlier female writer from Argentina. Because this debut novel from the writer Sara Gallardo is required reading in some schools in Argentine the writer was from an Upper-class family that had farming interest one could imagine one of the farms or farmworkers the family had was the inspiration for the main character intro book which in a way is a vary forward thinking book for one that came out in 1958. But it also fits in with other books around the world by female writers of the time.

She carries the package in front of her on the sheepskin where it crinkles with every step the horse takes. She passes countless hoof prints on the road that the wind erases like a huge hand wiping them away. The ears of the dapple-gray horse twitch at the sound of an automobile that kicks up a trail of dust as an arm waves out the win-dow. Luisa, Nefer thinks, on her way to buy cigarettes… and she watches as her horse’s hooves speed up in agitation along the road.

She dismounts when she reaches the gate: held shut by a rough branch that has been rubbed smooth by wire. She pulls it open and sidesteps the mud churned up in the night by the cows from the milking yard. In the yellow-green field the lapwings shriek and flutter and the pond gleams in the sun, prickly with reeds.

Her world around her.

The book flows 16 year old Nefer who lives in a small farming community in the countryside. She is pregnant, but we are never quite told how and why this happened it is eluded to that it was after the rape and the community she is in is a powerful Catholic community the book explains how this young girl deals with the pregnancy and is trying to find a way to explain to herself the events that lead to the pregnancy she looks at a certain boy and says it be ok isa he was the father. But he wasn’t the father. As she searches for the answer to what happened to her how did she end up like this. She is also wrestling with how to avoid anyone seeing the changes in her , whilst trying to work out the next move for her and what happens next but we have a feeling this is maybe a catch-22 situation and no matter what happens her life is fatally changed by this one event.

She kicks and takes off at a gallop, steering toward the thick grass that will absorb the footfalls. She doesn’t want to think about the end of her journey, about the old lady she’s never seen but with whom all her hope now lies. Her eyes pick out objects one at a time, attributing an exaggerated importance to each. Thistle, she thinks, thistle, par-tridge, dung, anthill, heat; and then she hears – one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four – as the hooves hit the ground. Slowly, sweat begins to appear behind the horse’s ears and runs in dark strands down his neck where the reins chafe against his coat, churning up dirty foam. Little voices, little voices speak to Nefer, but she continues her journey, indifferent to them. Cow, she thinks, a Holstein, and another and another. That one’s overheated. Lapwings. Two lapwings and their chick. Those piercing shrieks!

She follows leads to find a woman who may help her get rid of the baby for her

One of the first books from Archipelago was a new-to-English classic book, Wonder by Hugo Claus, one of my all-time favourite books. They have a real eye for a book that stands the test of time even though it is over 60 years old. It captures the world of NEFER SO WELL. it is like so many great writers around this time that were capturing female lives so well. Like Francoise Sagan and another WORK I felt really connected to this is ‘A test of Honey” by Shelagh Delany, which in a way mirrors events in this bookman unwanted pregnancy but due to the race of the baby, this is because of a rape. But both were written in 1958 and show women all around the world dealing with the same topics of birth this is the years after World War Two and pre-the pill when women want more for their lives but sometimes didn’t have control of the pill in later years. I loved the way we observe Nefer coping with what on the outside seems nothing but a downward spiral of her life after was raped and how she hasn’t an obvious out of the sad situation. Have you a favourite book that is a rediscovery like this book or others that have come out in recent years

WINSTONS SCORE – -A solid look at a hopeless situation for the main character Nefer.

Two for the road by Roddy Doyle

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Two for the road by Roddy Doyle

Irish literature

Source – library book

I am going to try to review it. Book a day in May, and I felt I needed a top-up from the library of short books to read. This was one of those books I remember people saying he had caught a type of guy that sits in a pub so well. I had read several Roddy Doyles books when he won the booker with Paddy Clarke ha ha. I read The Van and several others as well over the years and always loved the films made of his book. For me, he captures the funny side of Dublin life and the special characters that make that city rich, especially like this pair in a pub.
  • See Joe Cocker died.
  • What a fuckin’ voice.
  • Ah, man— But the best thing about him – he taught me tha’ Beatles were shite.
  • Hang on – wha’?
  • Me brother – he’s three years older than me – he brought home Sergeant Pepper’s. An’ everyone in the house loved it. Me ma sang ‘When I’m 64’ and she always cried at ‘She’s Leavin’ Home’, and me sister said, ‘Don’t worry, Ma, I’ll never run away like tha’? But she did – to fuckin’ London. She even met a cunt from the motor trade. But that’s a different story. Anyway—
  • What’s this got to with Joe Cocker?
  • I’m gettin’ there – calm down. They all loved ‘A Little Help from My Friends’ – in the house, like. Even me granny – an’ she hated fuckin’ everythin’. An’ I just thought somethin’ wasn’t right. But then he – me brother, like – he brings home Joe Cocker’s version. The single.
  • Brilliant.
  • No question. An’ me da shouts, five seconds in –

‘Turn tha’ shite down!’ An’ I knew it – in me heart. That’s the way it should be. If the oul’ lad reacts tha’ way, it’s good. If he hums along, it’s shite.

I pick this as I remember the cocker song being the theme to Wonder Years

Two for the Road captures those characters you find in a pub anywhere. Those people you meet for a brief moment or here every afternoon, this is a pair on the way home via the pub, a dying breed in the modern age, chatting about what has been in the news, the latest dead star, whether an actor or singer or a digression about a footballer I loved these as most of the players I knew or an event from the news. He really captured the voices. The use of language and words made these a pair of working-class guys. Some great insights into songs from the dead singers and the memories attached to them, like when Leonard Cohen died, they joked it was because he was a fan of women as a singer, and that had made Trump want him dead. Some classic football chats about great Irish players discussed which was the best. The last piece I laughed at was one of the books by Doyle that had been made into a film, The Snapper.
  • See Trump killed Leonard Cohen.
  • Saw tha’.
  • He doesn’t only hate women. He hates the men tha’ women love. ‘Specially older women.
  • Fuckin’ Clooney’s gone into hidin’.
  • Fuck him an’ his Nespresso.
  • And the Pope.
  • Fuck the Pope?
  • No. Women – they love him. Mine does, an’ anyway.
  • Poor oul’ Leonard. He was good, but. Wasn’t he?
  • Ah, he was. You should hear me grandkids singin’ Hallelujah’.
  • Good, yeah?
  • Fuckin’ hilarious.
  • The wife loved him.
  • Leonard?
  • She even became a Buddhist cos o’ Leonard.
  • Is tha’ righ’?
  • For a few weeks, just. Then she saw me eatin’ a quarter pounder an’ she said, ‘Fuck the Eightfold Path?

But she’s always on at me to wear a hat like Leonard Cohen’s.

Then I laughed at this about the passing of Leonard cohen

Doyle is the chronicler of Dublin’s working class and has a real ear for the way people of the city talk. He has an ear for his home town and how males, in particular, chat. When you speak this out loud, it seems perfect to me. He gives the two guys a true voice, and they seem real. There is a world-weariness in the way. They are speaking. I felt they are maybe in their 60s, with grown-up kids nearing the end of their working life. One imagines Doyle has chatted or observed pairs like this all his life. You have a sense he has an ear for a conversation overheard. These are like those. Each chapter is a day the two chaps meet over the course of five years. The book ends in 2019, a full year before COVID-19, and one wonders if these two would make it through the pandemic?  This book can be read over a beer or two easily. Have you read any books by Doyle? What is your favourite?
Winston Score – A a fun novella with a quirky pair chatting over their world

Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior

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Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior

Brazilian fiction

Original title – Torto Arado

Translator – Johnny Lorenz

Source – Personal copy

One does wonder with this year’s longlist as I am now writing this post with about 300 pages left of the last book. I wonder which of the titles from this year’s longlist I would have picked up without them being on the longlist. I looked at the books when they came out of them all. There were a few I had probably intended to get, the Wiener and the Kadare, as I had read books from them before and enjoyed them. This fell into a category called Published. In recent years, we have published exciting books, which has been the case with Verso. They always pick left-field books, which is a little joke, given I know they are a left-wing publisher. But their recent fiction choices always seem great, so this from the Brazilian writer Itamar Vieira Junior had been on my radar. He studied geography, getting a scholarship for people from poor Black backgrounds in Brazil. He got a doctorate in African and Ethnic studies. He works for the Brazilian state agency dealing with land reform. This was his debut novel. Before that, he had two collections of short stories.

Belonísia pulled the blade from her mouth, too, then brought her other hand up, as if trying to hold something in.Her lips reddened, and I wasn’t sure if it was from the excitement of tasting the silver blade or from wounding herself, for she was also bleeding. I swallowed as much blood as I could. My sister was wiping her mouth frantically with her hand, her eyes squinting with tears as she tried to stand the pain. I heard my grandmother’s slow steps approach, then she called out to me, to Zezé, Domingas, and Belonísia.”Bibiana, can’t you see the potatoes are burning?” I became aware of a smell of burnt potatoes mingling with the smell of metal and the blood wetting our dresses.

As the twins cut there tongues in the opening pages .

Now set in the hinterlands of Brazil, this book has one of the most exciting openings I have ever seen. Two sisters are at their Grandmother’s house, and they find a knife under a bed. Then, they decide to play and cut one another’s tongue. As a result of this, one of them ends up mute. The sisters Bibana and Belonsia are the book’s narrators, but it isn’t clear which lost their tongue and is mute for most of the book. Their father is a renowned healer as we follow them through their lives. In a way, it is clear as one sister excels at school and the other struggles with her studies  The book sometimes is a little magic realist in places, but in others, you can see this is from the work the writer has done himself with land reform, and this is shown later in the books as the sisters start to see how their world is that being an Indian in the hinterlands and this is shown as the modern threats that threaten this world in modern Brazil show there faces in last part of this book as this part feels very much about the corruption violence and struggles of many poor families in the hinterlands of Brazil.

Years after the accident that had left one of his daughters mute, my father, with Sutério’s encouragement, invited my mother’s brother to join us at Água Negra. Sutério, the manager, wanted to bring in folks who “would put their shoulder to the wheel,” who, as my father explained,”weren’t afraid of hard work and would pour their sweat into the fields.” They could build houses of mud, but not brick, nothing enduring to mark how long a family had been on the land. They could cultivate a small plot of squashes, beans, and okra, but nothing that would distract them fromthe owner’s crops because, after all, working for him was what enabled them to live on this land.

It is kept quiet which sister is the mute for peroid of the book!

I can see why this is such a hit in Brazil, but in a way, that is what serves against it so much asi felt the writer has crammed so much into this book in a way it felt like three books the start book the middle part and the end part would all be served better filled out and made into longer parts novels in themselves.. I said I love Verso books, and this is why Vieira Juniors is one of a new wave of Brazilian writers tackling the dark racist past and slave history, land corruption, etc, in Brazil’s past. We must hear his voice. He is also an heir to Jorge Amado, who wrote about the hinterlands in his early writing life, but this is a fresh take from an Afro-Brazilian writer. For me, this had part of writers like Wilson Harris, who did so well capturing the remote parts of his homeland, or Marquez with His Columbia oif the time. It has a small dash of magic realism. But also a large dash of the past and how that affects modern Brazil. In that regard, he reminds me of someone like Juan Gabriel Vasquez, who, in historical books, tackles the past as a prism to the present. Have you read this book? or have another favourite book from Brazil, if not there are 18 other books under review on the blog!

Winstons score

February 2024 what did I read and do

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  1. About Uncle by Rebecca Gisler 
  2. Ædnan by Linnea Axelsson
  3. The Rainbow by Yasunari Kawabata
  4. Erasure by Percival Everett
  5. What You Need From The Night by Laurent Petitmangin
  6. Three Summers by Margarita Liberaki
  7. A little luck by Claudia Piñerio 

I started with a Swiss book about an uncle who is looked after by his relatives. Then we have an epic prose poem about the Sai people through a few people. We trace the history of this indigenous tribe through the 20th century. Two half-sisters discover they may have a half-brother as they live with their father. Then we have a writer who becomes a star, writing a book in a ghetto style, and how he copes with his newfound fame, which is now the film American Fiction. Then, a father is shocked when his son is drawn into the right wing in North Eastern France; then we have three summers as we follow three sisters in Greece in the inter-war years. Then a woman returns after twenty years to return to her old life and discover what happened to those she had left behind. So i read books from  7 different countries from seven publishers. Not a bad month

Book of the month

I chose About Uncle. I loved this and it remind me of what i have loved about Peirene. Then they got the right book that hit the spot, and this was one of those short books about an uncle, a veteran who has mishaps like trying to escape down the toilet. This book has humour and sadness, family love and hate in equal measure.

Neon book events

I covered a bit this month. I have brought some records. The most recent is another from the Tom Waits reissues, his Blue Valentine, still in his jazz-style era, had always been a favourite and was the first album I got on tape when I was younger in my twenties. TV-wise, we are in the middle of watching The Jury, which shows two juries viewing the same murder trial taken from an actual case and seeing how each tackles their verdicts. Again, I have been mining YouTube for old TV or movies. I am currently watching the early 70s series Doom, an environmental show about a government agency tackling things that are affecting the environment.

Next month

I am finishing the latest BorasChung as I write this I may finish it this evening or tomorrow then I will move on the Mathias Enard’s The annual banquet of the Gravediggers Guild. Then I have Out of Earth on my tbr . These three have all been mentioned as potential Booker international books, and I am yet again doing the Shadow Jury this year, which is our 12th year. Well, for the original few, it is hard to believe the shadow jury  itself will be turning into a teen next time. So after March 11 it will be the books I haven’t read from the longlist which is handy as I  have a few days off just after it is announced. I intend to do my own guess list soon and hope cover a few more hopefuls in the time beofre it is announced.

About Uncle by Rebecca Gisler

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About Uncle by Rebecca Gisler

Swiss Fiction

Original title – D’oncle

Translator – Jordan Stump

Source – Subscription

I have been remiss on Peirene books the last couple of years I had reviewed virtually every one in their first few years. But over the last few years, I haven’t gotten to their books, even though I am now a subscriber to their books. It isn’t that their recent books haven’t appealed. They always do. They usually come and recently have drifted down the TBR. But this when it arrived intrigued me. It won the Swiss literature prize but it was the description of the book being something different. I was reminded of that Early peirene, especially the mention of a seaside town as that was in the first year’s books. It also reminds me of why I love books in translation sometimes, which is absurd. Odd little books like this are subtle and, in many ways, have little happening. I feel this is the sort of book that would struggle to get put out here.

Uncle’s house is in a little hamlet looking onto the ocean, and it’s a white house with pale blue shutters lashed by the salty wind from the bay, a house whose walls are being eaten away by the ivy we used to pull down every summer as a family activity, knowing there was no point, knowing the ivy would be back the next year, covering the walls with shadows and indelible stars, and of course we should have dealt with it earlier, should have kept an eye on that destructive greenery’s growth, but in those days we were only holidaymakers, transients, part-tim-ers, and we couldn’t expect Uncle to see to that job, because Uncle likes ivy, he thinks it makes the house look like a haunted house,

The uncles house by the sea where they look after him.

We hear from the nice Uncle. Mainly, she explains the world they live in but also how they got there along the way. We open with the said uncle trying to escape down the toilet. He is an injured veteran. He is a shut-in in barring his occasional visits on a moped to the local bar. He is also a drinker, hoarder and injured using crutches also. Whenever he gets away from his family, he causes trouble. This is the tale of the family, the history of how the grandparents, then their own mother, all over time came to look after her uncle, and now she and her brother are stuck in this house with this drunk veteran. He is a terror, but there is also a sense of love and duty in how she talks about him at times; he is absurd as a character larger than life, and in the predicaments, he gets himself a little mad at times. I loved this. It is one of those books poetic about the hardness of supporting a person who has spent most of their life as a shut-in and how, in a way, that had made his niece and nephew the same as they had to be there even before they became his carers.

Ever since their father died my mother and Uncle have remembered him with a sort of reverence, and they made a kind of funerary scarecrow that’s supposed to be him, and what it is is a bolster pillow dressed in a kaftan and a sailor’s cap that presides over the attic, and actually I suspect it was my uncle who initiated the project of the paternal effigy, because the handyman spirit was passed down from father to son, along with a fondness for practical jokes, and I’m not sure Uncle is capable of changing a lightbulb but I know he likes doing little repairs and renovations, for example he regularly restuffs the armchairs with newspaper, or when the sole of his old tennis shoe starts to come away he sticks it back on with super glue.

I loved this full of love and also questioning him at the same time.

I think this has a film written all other it is one of those quirky French films that is comic, absurd, and sad all at the same time. I imagine Bruno Dumonth tackling this with his love of quirky characters. Uncle has a little of what I loved about the characters in Father Ted. He is like a French father, Jack. How they describe him escaping or going on the moped reminds me of some of the storylines in Father Jack, that sort of rural absurd nature of life sometimes. This is a book about Family but also how if one person in that family falls or, like an uncle in this case, has maybe some sort of PTSD characteristics in his life and world, the habits may point to that. I think this reminded me of what I loved in the early Peirene. Have you a favourite book from Peirene.

Winstons score – A a quirky tale of a shut in uncle and his family that care for him and his mad world

A childhood by Jona Oberski

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A Childhood by Jona Oberski

Dutch autobiography

Original title – Kinderjaren.

Translator – Ralph Manheim

Source – Library book

I have over the last few years always try and put a book up for Holocaust Day . I had found this in the Library I do have a couple more on my shelves but there is always a feeling over time that there are fewer books about the Holocaust being talked about. I have Primo Levi on my shelves but he isn’t spoken as much as he once was. Anyway, this is a memoir about a Dutch boy. Jona Oberski was that Dutch boy who grew up with a new family after he lost his parents through the Holocaust. Anyway, he grew up to be a Nuclear Physicist. But in the mid-70s he attends a poetry writing class with the Dutch poet Judith Herzberg where he started to recount the events he saw as a child when he lost his family in the Holocaust.

“Aren’t you going to unwrap your presents?”

I looked at my father. The colours of the things on the table were reflected in his eyes. I gave him a kiss on the nose. That made him laugh.

“Don’t you want to see your presents?” He wanted to put me on the floor, but I was so comfortable just as I was. I had one arm round his neck and I held him tight.

“All this is for you.” My mother smiled at me and pointed at the table and kissed me. She picked up a red package, began to open it, and asked me to help her. While she held the package, I tried to get the paper off with one hand. It tore.

There is a real tension underneath this piece of his birthday, I was reminded of the last birthday in Anne Franks’s diary.

We see the events of the Holocaust through a very young boy’s eyes.  How it affected the young Jona in a series of snapshots. The power of this book is how he captured the voice of the child. Those few memories we all have have captured her the events before the view of the family life in Amsterdam as a Jewish Family as the world around them is heading towards madness. He has a birthday but the way he describes it and the sense his parents know this is the last proper birthday they may all have together. When he hears his parents crying. Then when they finally head to the camps he and his mother are split from his father. But she is a resourceful woman and manages to find a way for the three of them to end up together for what would be the last time. He is in Bergen Belsen seeing the horrors but a chance event meant he luckily was able to live and write his own story.

My father was gone a long time. Somebody closed one of the wagon doors. My mother got up and stumbled to the door. She leaned out and yelled my father’s name. She yelled that the door had to be left open. She pointed and sang out: “There he comes.” She pulled my father in and other people helped. They all fell in a heap. They shut the other door. It was dark. I asked if they were coming over to me. My mother said:

“We’ll come as soon as we get used to the darkness.” Light came in through the cracks. Somebody tugged at the sliding doors but he couldn’t get them open. My mother sat back down on the bundle.

One of the last times he saw his father when the got to the Camp.

I missed bits f this book as it is a short book touching with a tine that has that child-like view of the world I am a fan of when writers get that childlike view of the world right and this is the case here a young boy seeing the horrors unfold but not knowing why. The parents cry but he isn’t quite sure why. It’s about the way they get treated as their world is changing.  His father’s world changing. Then on the camps and how he is just with his Mother, she shields him as best she can. That last time they are all together. This is a short book but powerful There is a quote from Alan Sillitoe called this the book of the century. I wouldn’t go so far but I am always in the belief that Holocaust literature should be read in schools. Also, it is worth going to Beth Shalom The national Holocaust Museum and centre which is near Newark I have a couple of times. A place of remembrance. Have you a book from a Holocaust survivor you Like? I won’t score this book, I never do this type of book the are just so important and need to be promoted and read. Our candle

Winstonsdads books of the year a dozen or so

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I have picked 13 books I loved from the last 12 months. I am putting them down in no particular order. These are the cream of what I read in the last 12 months. All but one are books in translation. I avoid the Booker international books as they have had lots of attention due to being on the. longlist and shortlist, etc, and it gave me a chance to shine the spotlight on books that maybe others haven’t mentioned in the last year.

Black box by Shiori Ito translator Alison Markin Powell

A powerful work of nonfiction from an up-and-coming tv journalist that was sexual assault by an older renowned presenter, a powerful look at how sex attacks in the workplace are dealt with and how rape around the world is dealt with. After I read this, the writer finally saw justice for what had happened to her.

Balkan Bombshells various writers and translators

a collection of female writing from the Balkans showing the wide range of voices, from a woman with all she owned in a single blue bag to a woman in Belgrade and the leader died. Then elsewhere. There were creepy supernatural tales, an insight into Eastern European writing at its best.

The most secret memory of men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr translator Lara Vergnaud

I haven’t shut up about this since I a wonderful mix of being an African writer then and now a novel that was withdrawn that parallels a real-life event and then a writer falling down a rabbit hole to find the lost writer of that book and find out what really happened makes it part road trip fiction as well.

My rivers by Faruk Šehić. translator S D Curtis

I think this will be the first time I have featured poetry in my end-of-year books, but in this cycle of poems, three of them are set around the great rivers of Europe from Berlin, then back to the Balkans and beyond. In the last cycle, he sees a man escaping the horrors of war and looking for peace and hope.

Black foam by Haji Jabir translators – Sawad Hussain and Marcia Lynx Qualey

this is a twist on the other stories IO have read of people trying to find a new life on the migrant trail it follows a man called various names Dawood, David among them a man trying to reach Israeli as a Falasha Jew but is he it shows you how fluid nationality can be and how we can change it to get by and survive.

All devils are here by David Seabrook

I blame an old Backlisted episode they replayed over the summer that just grabbed me with the description of the book, a series of essays around Rochester, the late home of Dickens, but also the artist Richard Dadd. Who was a killer in his time.  Did he inspire Dickens? This is a look at the darker side of those old seaside towns.

Karios by Jenny Erpenbeck translator Michael Hoffmann

I am on the fence with hr as a writer I am not as much of a fan as some of my fellow bloggers have been over the years but this story of a relationship that had failed was interesting enough and used some clever tricks in the book.

Wound by Oksana Vasyakina

This mixes a personal journey of a daughter taking her mother’s ashes to her home village in Siberia, but also a look at her own relationship as a lesbian in modern Russia. This is one of the first openly lesbian novels written in Russia. It is a powerful look at love, loss and memories.

Rombo by Esther Kinsky translator – Caroline Schimdt

It was a toss-up between this or the Kluge I read this year, but this collection of recollections of an earthquake in a small Italian village and how it affected seven people who were kids at the time and how it looked then and now, I love her books and this is another gem from this writer.

The Rider Tim Krabbe translator -Sam Garrett

Now if push came to show my book of the year would be this book. I loved the way he managed to get on the page about what it is like to cycle, the way you think the way he races in those big races the tactics he captured it so well no wonder he is a chess-playing cyclist and in some ways, the two share a certain amount in some cycle racing is a game of chess for the riders. one move can change the day the same as chess.

The missing word by Concita De Gregorio translator Clarissa Botsford

There is no word for a parent that have lost there children we have orphan and widower but there ins’t a word for a parent whose children have gone this follows a case where the husband takes the kids and then he is found but there is never a trace of the children he took and he won’t say hat happened to them powerful work.

Tranquillity by Attila Bartis translator – Irme Goldstein

I had this on my shelves for years and then decided to read it. I loved it, a tale of a mother and son living together as his sister got away from their mother, and he is stuck in a very Thomas Bernhard-like world. I just hope I can get his next book which came out this year but seems to have sold out and that is what spurred me to read this book.

Mothers don’t by Katixa Agirre translator – Kristin Addis

I finish with a powerful tale of two mothers one how killed her twins and the other a journalist who realises she knew this woman when they were at university together. another gem from Three Times Rebel Press.

So here are a few stats

I read 125 books this year, the longest being The End of August by Yu Muri. I just finished today. A total of 27,544 pages. I reviewed 98 books. I read 8 Japanese books this year the most from any country. I read books from 34 countries this year. I have posted 123 posts 100,000 words at an average of 812 words per a post.

How was your year ?

 

Looking Forward 2024 reading plans

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This is the first time I can think of in all the time I have been Blogging I have done a post about the year ahead and thought that far ahead in Blogging terms. But I feel like I have been reading Water for many years, happy with the figures I get, and just doing the same year in year out about 120 posts about 90-100 reviews in a year. Well, I think next year I need to shake things up and raise the bar. I will again pass 100,000 words for the year this year. The fact is, I could easily carry on and do the same next year, but I feel the need to plan the year a little more and have firmly in my mind what I am doing throughout the year.

I have been buying lots of Japanese books for January in Japan. That is always a fun meme to join and always a good start to the year. Then I am planning to read 28 translations in February; I tried something similar last year, spurred on by Simon in Suck in the Books, that have done a few years with Novellas, where he reads one a day for a month. I loved trying to do it last year it meant I got to raid the Library for choices to read. Then we head into Booker International season. I will be reading the Longlist as I have for the last 12 years before it was the Booker International and was the old IFFP. I will then be looking at reading a few long books, getting ready for summer, and bringing back Spanish lit month in its original form, just Spanish Language literature. I’ve several books from Charco Press and other presses I want to read this month. I miss Richard, who started this with me many years ago. But I will do it Binnually with Czech lit month returning in 2025.  Then I will be doing Simon and Karen years in April. They take us back to 1937 , and what I love about this is the deep dive into the year. The books came out, finding those lost gems for every year they chose. Then we have German lit month which I didnt’ plan for this year and intend to have plans in place for next year. The hope is to increase the number of reviews to be similar to what I actually read in a year with 120 books. I said I have hit 100,0oo words in the last few years, so I aim to write 125,000 words. I will try to engage a little more on social media like I did when I first started this blog. I need to chat more; I miss the chat out there. I miss that. Well, there has been a whole lot of I, but it is me behind the blog, and it is time to step up and stop being so comfortable with the blog as we need to move on to winstonsdad the middle-age years. What are your plans for next year with your blog or just with your reading?

 

Well November has gone my November 23 reading etc

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  1. Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux 
  2. The Blue Soda Siphon by Urs Widmer
  3. Let’s go home, son by Ivica Prtenjača
  4. Summer fishing in Lapland by Juhani Karila 
  5. Blueprint by Thersia Enzensberger 
  6. The Oppermanns by Lion Feutchwanger 
  7. Anyone who utters a consulting word is a traitor by Alexander Kluge

I managed seven books last month. I started with an affair in France. Through time travel in Switzerland. A family tried to make their way home during the pandemic in Croatia. Then a road trip and chase and a murde with a large dose of myths and magic realism in Lapland. Then, I will be a student at the Bauhaus during the day. Then a Jewish family in Berlin as the Nazis take over. Then, there are 48 stories in tribute to the German Jewish judge Fritz Bauer.

Book of the Month

so many great books but  The Oppermanns is a lovely book as it is from Perseohone. Still, it is also a book that should be more well known as with the work from Kluge I read this is about Germany ten years before Kluge’s work and the dark clouds are just starting to go over the Jewish family as the world they live in slowly changes as the events that would become the Holocaust starts to happen.

Non-book events

Vinyl finds l I managed to get the live version of Flaming Lips Yoshimi battles the pink robots that came out for Black Friday for record store day. I also got the 25th anniversary of the REM up album I brought it on cd 25 years ago but it is one of theirs I have grown to love over the years, so I was pleased to get it on vinyl. I signed up on a black Friday deal to the Paramount app so I watched nearly all of the Star Trek series Strange New World the first captain of the Enterprise, Pike is in the original series, and that is used here as he knows when he is due to die how. They also had Frasier I loved the first episode it has nods to both Frasier and Cheers. I also started the Apple TV show Monarch, a series from their Godzilla universe it has a great turn by Kurt Russell and his son Wyatt who plays the younger version of his father’s character a US officer and founder of the Monarch organisation that monitors these beasts like Godzilla. I love how it is unfolding with past and present mixing. I also watched The Velveteen Rabbit I loved this of drama of a classic book about a boy and his rabbit sad and a new favourite for Christmas. I love kids shows from this time of year, like Box of Delights, which I loved as a kid this is perfect for kids now.

Next months reading

I am on 90 reviews for the year and have read 112 books I hope to get ten reviews done to reach the 100 reviews mark. I am on the verge of 100,000 words on here for this year. I have a number of books I have been sent I want to finish the year out with from some of my favourite presses and all in Translation.

MY reading Habits

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I been inspired t write this by the recent Mookse and Gripes episode, where Trevor and Paul talked over their habits and other bits around them as a reader. I thought I would talk a bit about my reading life and world. I am not as organized as Trevor and Paul. I never will be. My dyspraxia mind is chaotic a lot of the time. But I do have some routines, and over the years, I have blogged how me as a reader work has constantly evolved. I still manage to read over 100 books every year I may not review them all, but since I started last year to track my reading more on Goodreads, I have seen that it is about 120 books a year I read, and I think I will move the stat keeping to Storuy graph as supposedly it can give you more detail even this is a struggle at times for some that constantly will forget to update things due to my dyspraxia one of the worst things I have is this lack of constancy with doing things like this. But over the last few years, I am getting a little better. When do I read well, I am a chunk reader I am not someone who puts bits in here and there. I read the morning I hope to get between 30-45 minutes most mornings  work or not. On my days off, I try to read for a couple of hours during the day. I tend to work 3 days one week and four days the week after. I read every evening for about an hour times more if I’m nearing the end of a book, so that means I tend to read 18-20 hours a week, which sometimes is less, sometimes more. I find I read more in the winter, more so this year, since I inherited my aunt’s serious read lamp. This lamp has a natural light, and I think will add a little more reading in the evening this winter.

Paper/e-book I do have a paperwhite kindle. But I have maybe read 10 e-books in the last ten years I just don’t get on with it. I love the idea the change of font size and font is all brilliant it is just an interaction with the kindle for me never quite works.,I love seeing my progress in a  paper book. I keep the Kindle mainly for Booker International reading as I sometimes need to spend a lot on books, and the books I have read in recent years have been for Booker International. I have tried to use Netgalley but never read the e-books I try to get. So yes I am a paper books man.

Audiobooks had you asked me this a year ago, I said no. I would always say I love book-based podcasts like The Mookse and the Gripes. But I finally decided to try Audible and have since then read and listened to four books so yes, for me yes I LIKE Audio books if they will add another few books to what I read or help me tackle longer books that be great. Book length I am someone that have always preferred books under 300 pages. I have more and more in recent years been avoiding longer books in fact, this was the one tip I did get from Trevor and Paul to spread longer books court over a long time, a chapter or section of pages at a time. I will be trying this more next year. Thanks guys.  I have posted about being a single book read I have a hybrid version of this these days where I’ll read multiple, but I will tend to read chunks of books like Base Camps on Everest. This is something I have done for the last few months, and it has meant I have read more books than I used to as I tend to switch if I feel my reading of a book slowing

MyTBR I have two yellow trolleys, one in my library and the other in our lounge. One is the current TBR books. The other will be when I have a project reading like Czech Lit Month or Club 1962 etc, where I will find all the books for the said project and put them in my library trolley. This is something I have seen Simon Savidge do and I thought it was a great idea to sort them once a month as they tend to also get overloaded with books. I love project reading the year clubs Simon and Karen do are highlights of my years, as is the booker international longlist reading Czech Lit Month, German Lit Month and, of course, Spanish and Portuguese Lit Month. As for me and my mind, the focus it brings gives me clarity, and I’m sure these periods are when I read most. Where I read well I have my sofa downstairs which is by my serious light and upstairs my old reading light is next to a chair from Ikea in my library. I like listening to instrumental music and can cope with some lyrics but more on the acoustic country vibe than some of the punk, new wave industrial goth music I like, which is too distracting to read. Notes I use a few book tabs on passages I love and take pictures of pages I think I will quote, and with longer books take a few notes on index cards this is something I am doing more and more every year. I think in the process of writing my post these days, they are longer I like meaty quotes that I usually mention in the review. Well that’s me, nothing new A chaotic reader who has more order than I did when I started this blog but will be the most planned and ordered reader, but this chaos I have in my mind is what drives the wanderlust in my reading and the driving passion for books in translation as I have a very obsessional mind which is what makes me constant look for those underlooked gems and the sheer solo drive in my mind is for books in translation and world lit which will never change. I am so passionate about this as any of you who have met me will agree with it.