Tag: Croatian fiction

Every time we say Goodbye by Ivana Sajko

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Everytime we say goodbye by Uvan Sajko

Croatian fiction

Original title – Male smrti

Translator – Mima Simic

source – Review copy

I was kindly sent this to review. It is the second novel to be published in English translation by the Croatian Novelist and Playwright Ivana Sajko. She is much better known for her plays that highlight female voices and social issues, and use inventive narrative styles. Her previous novel won a German translation prize. This book has a male character as its lead, but, like her other works, has a breadth to the subject it covers, which, inj many ways, is one man’s experience of various events and situations within the second half of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st century.One man’s view of the Balkan war and what came after.

I start writing on the train, on my journey from point A to point B, from that small coastal town to Berlin, I stare out the window at the remnants of the city, the unfinished houses in the suburbs, the warehouses in the industrial zone and the stunted trees along the river, torn plastic bags hanging from their branches like bats, it’s hard for me to be in this compartment, hard to be in this skin, in the role of a traveller, I have forgotten how to travel, how to surrender myself to the mercy of the road, how to say good-bye, I have forgotten how long you actually stand there looking back at point A as it rapidly disappears, and then how long you just keep standing there, just standing and standing, staring into nothingness, about to cry, so I open my notebook but I have no answer, I write ‘On the journey from point A to point B, from that small coastal town to Berlin, I stare out the window at the remnants of the city, the unfinished houses in the suburbs, the warehouses in the industrial zone and the stunted trees along the river…

As he starts off on the train journey

 

The book follows a man who has left an unnamed Balkan seaside town to head on a train journey to Berlin, as he says to lose himself in the crowds of Berlin to just become a stranger in the crowd as the train heads from the Balkans into Berlin, we see him sat reflecting not only on his own past but also on his brother who fell in with the wrong crowd and end uop dead, to his drunken father and mother that put up with all this. He sees the Balkan war when he is younger, he is a journalist and activist, this leads him to conflicts over borders, shipwrecks as he tries to shine a light on those suffering but there is a sense of this man is broken as we get these memories following as the train move closer nad he has rthe chance to just walk lout of the station into the crowd and be a face in a crowd.

What do you do when you sink into an image you saw on the news, in the papers, an image you thought you knew well, only to be suddenly confronted with someone’s wound or burn, the kind that can’t heal or be eased by compassion, and one day this might be me, for another’s death holds the possibility of my own just as another’s death is the undeniable proof of my life, which, as I viscerally marvel at these fundamental contrasts, now separates me from death, but I’m not the one who’s dying at this mo-ment, by incident or design, as a calculated collateral casu-alty, not yet; I am lying in bed pulling up reports by Aris Messinis from Mosul, then Shah Marai from Kabul, then Abdulmonam Eassa from Ghouta; as Russian planes launch an airstrike on the eastern part of the city on behalf of the Assad regime, Eassa hops into an ambulance heading to the site of a strike, where a father and son lie in flames by an overturned motorcycle in the middle of the street, and Eassa helps the Civil Defence put out the fire consuming their bodies, ‘It’s very, very hard, he says,

‘I take pictures, but it hurts, some photos are blacked out

The strain and stress of photographing and reporting on the violence in the world

This is one of those books I call a small epic; it is 120-something pages long, but it feels epic as we see glimpses into the unnamed man’s life through his family dynamics and the effect they have on him. But also the Balkan conflict and the person who made him the Journalist he became after the war, a champion of those without a voice, but there is a toll to pay for this, and this is why he is on this train heading to oblivion. For me, you can tell Ivana Sajko is known for her narrative style in her plays. This felt at times as if the book drifts the way your mind does on a train, that sort of remembrance of the past, maybe the wanting to escape is making him replay these events, but it also shows the effect of the last decades on one man. I was reminded of the poems of Faruk Šehić, the Bosnian poet, who also has people from the Balkan conflict wash up in Berlin. A city to get lost in to be a face in a crowd to see out your ghosts. Have you read this book ?

You can buy the two books mentioned in the Uk via my bookshop.org link for

Everytime we say good bye by Ivana Sajko 

My Rivers by Faruk Šehić

 

 

 

 

Celebration by Damir Karakaš

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Celebration by Damir Karakaš

Croatian fiction

Orignal title -Proslava

Translator – Ellen Elias-Bursać

Source – Personal copy

I covered the epic Solenoid yesterday. I stay in Eastern Europe and now move to the Balkans, and what may be the shortest book I will read this year. But also one of those small epics of a book that will long sit in my mind. I have long been a fan of Croat literature I haver reviewed 15 novels from Croatia over the years. Now this is a book written by a writer that was when he was youinger a war reporter. He also spent many a year in the region of Croat where the book is set. He also made a living for many yeart in France playing his accordian this bok was Laud by the critics in Croatia when it came out a few years ago. It ids a book that looks into the past but maybe is alo a warning from Croatias own past about events in the present. The book is four stories that cover a peroid from the late 20s to the end of world war two andf are four episodes in the life of Mijo a soldier in the Ustasa force(the right wing Nazi Miltia that comitted genocide in Croat during the second world war).

He lay on the blanket that had over the last days soaked up the smell of rotten leaves and damp earth: under his thick brows he spent most of his time watching the village, then the mixed canopy above his head, noticing all the while how the colors were fading. Sometimes out of the corner of his eye he’d peek at the gleaming orb of the sun, gauging the time of day; never had time passed more slowly: he kept lying there in that one spot, sensing in his nose the sharp odor of melting resin, and all that was moving around him began to bother him: the sun, the wind, the birds that often flew low with their winged sounds over the forest.

Mijo laid hiding , I love the flow of this translation

The book opens as Mijo is on the run at the end of the war. He is near home can see his family and kids but aas they are now round up the member of his ,miltia he has to hide. Set in Lika regfion of Croatia an mounatin area and liike many of these remotre areas this is a rural isolated communoity in itself. This is the thing he does brillantly in this book the place it self is almosat another character. The second story follows the kiling of Dogs in the valley. TRhius is a brutsl story . But is maybe also a nod to the brutal nature iof the woirld and how easy it is to go from killing dogs to people maybe. Then we see his early years meeting his wife just as all the madenss of the war he has got drawn into as the couple not yet married head into antother village with a brother as a chaperon they fall behind and thew mountains and there loive almost become one. I will leave the last tale for you to discover.

Drenka looked over at Mijo and, as she walked, said, “You’ve got a patch of fungus on your neck.” He touched his neck.

“Where?” and then, confused, he shrugged. At a slightly slower pace she said, “When we get back, I have some salve made from rabbit lard I can put on it.” Then they picked up their pace to catch up with Rude and the distance shrank, but if they exchanged glances, it grew; by now they had come out onto a sunlit meadow full of blossoms. Mijo leaned over while walking and stealthily snapped off the crown of a flower in full bloom. First he thought to give it to her, but at the last minute he tucked it into his own hair. When the flower fell out both of them chuckled over it.

The couple head out before they are married again the Lika Countryside is a character in the narrative

This for me is one of those novellas when you read iotI think how did Peiren mis this one , they did small epics like this so wel. I was remind of aStonbes in a landslide another book set in a remote mountainous region. But I was also remind of the chat I had with Dasa Drndic around the growing face of Facism in Europe. I think in hindsight I think she could see the coming storm of Fcism on the horizon. This is a tale of how ordinary people like Mijo get caught up in the madness and violence of the war. This is one of those books that is  soarse in its prose style there isn’t a word to many in the writing . but even so the rivchness of the Lika mountains and even things like Mijo running his hand over the back of a dog jump of the page. and will long live in Memore and the dog kiling scene is another thagty i wouldn’t want to live again but also had that right mix of emmotions in it. This is the first oof the shortlist of booiks for this years EBRD literature prize I am reding. Have you a favourite work from a Balkan writer ?

 

Canzone di Guerra by Daša Drndić

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Canzone di Guerra

Croatian fiction

Original title – Canzone di Guerra

Translator – Celia Hawkesworth

Source – Review copy

When I heard that Susie had decided to publish some of Dasa back catalogue those books that had come out before her success with Trieste. I was very excited as many of you may know I did meet dad at the old IFFP award when she was shortlisted in 2013 this brief meeting we spoke maybe for half an hour maybe a bit more I was shocked she had read the blog but she was one of these people that this blog had given me chance to meet people I would never come across in my every day life in fact when ever I have doubts about this endeavour to cover world literature and books in translations, which is quite often it is those moments like meeting dad that spur me on. she was a writer that need to be read she saw what was over the Horizon even when we meet she saw the tide of the right was over in the distance and as she had done in her books she has always used the past as a way of highlighting the future. Her we have a woman tracing her own families past but also that of the culture she is from.

There is a Lot of literature about pigs, there is almost no genre of the written word into which pigs have not worked their way. They are found in science(Veterinary, biological, medical) in literature (essays, poetry, belles-lettres), not to mention film and painting. As far as life is concerned, here too, in our everyday life, pigs are all around us, and their destiny in the development of civilisation and technology is increasingly bizarre. The bizarre destiny of pigs is our reality

Even an intro on the section about pigs makes you as a reader think (for me I was remind of the film A private function set in the aftermath of the war in England that had a big at the heart of its story)

This book is made up of a collection of factual and fictional stories that at it heart sees the main character in the book Tea Radan a single mother who many years earlier had relocated to Canada to Toronopte as she tries to look at the emigrant life and those in the country around her. (Dasa had some interesting thought on Canada in the after word there is her description of Canada not the most favourable and full of what I remember of her when I met her that mind) She blends things like Pigs as animals to keep and how they effect society from how we keep them how they were Kept in Tito’s Yugoslavia. What we make of the pigs.This leads Tea to her grandfather a man that like to write to Tito ( I always interested with how Tito’s influence over those post – war years loom large but what at the heart of this book is the two events at the start of Tito reign which is the aftermath of the holocaust and we she in typical Dasa style as she shows how those that we involved with the events. of the holocaust escaped the war an we see how they came to Canada (It is hard to accept the dream of free Canada and then we see events like those that on a ship in 1939 that went from place to place as those on board lost hope) I love this as hot is so much of Dasa the person it is about what makes us tick but also she shows us about what has been and what is to come. It is about being lost in your own life and but also lose of identity.

In the course of the last four years, Sara and I have undergone three migrations. A lot of books have been written about migrations about leaving one’s country, about exile, some very stupid, propaganda, some very intelligent. But all those books state clearly that migration is both dying and being born, that it is a very complex phenomenon, hard to comprehend for anyone who has not experienced it.Our arrival in Rijeka from Belgrade, where I had spent forty years of my life and Sara almost all nine of hers, did not fundamentally from our arrival in Toronto.

The truth of being in Exile described so many times in literature !!

I as always find it hard to describe this as it isn’t a liner novel,  is a documentary novel ( a book of lives shown in pieces a mosaic of a world and lives) in the style of writers like Kluge (I could have said Sebald, but for me it is nearer Alexander  Kluge in the way she like to keep hitting at the spot and that is the spot of a warning this book is over 25 years old but in a way is more relevant now with a new wave of refugees from Ukraine we see how previous  waves of those trying to escape war have suffered in what is the real treatment of refugees and the way we portray how we treat refugees this gap is what is at the heart of the book.Those people caught ion those situation from those involved and trying to escape the holocaust and the aftermath of World War Two to those in the 90s trying to escape the horrors of the Yugoslav wars. At the heart of this is Tea ( a thinly veiled dasa) her family that were effected by both these events and the question of what makes us and what is our story. I mention Kluge as he brilliant in his use if  vigenettes and sometimes footnotes like this book does . In his book 30th April 1945 a book about that day when Hitler shot himself and what was going on around the world at that exact moment. Well this takes that moment the tatters of the war and west the aftermath this is that event taken out in one thread from before the event the horror of world war two to the present which now is 25 years ago ( or is it !!!!) because as we see here those events recalled in the past look so much like the future and that is what made Dasa one of the most important writers of her generation as she never turned to be popular or to be linear or to be easy no she told the truth, she saw what was coming as she had seen it so many times before but unlike others hadn’t a sort of cultural amnesia of the past or even a rose coloured glove of the past no this is the truth this is a written like Hogarth in his depiction of the world she lived in  or Goya in his disasters of war Dasa showed us a world warts and all one we want to look away from but one we should really look straight on at !! Have you a favourite book from Dasa ?

Winstons score – ++++A On of my all time favourite books already along with her other books

Special needs by Lada Vukić

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Special needs by Lada Vukić

Croatian fiction

Original title – Specijalna potreba

Translator – Christina Pribichevich- Zoric

Source – review copy

I looked forward to this as it had a child with a disability as its main character as I  feel there aren’t enough narratives with people with disablities and when I read Emil the lead character was an elective mute,  although his view of the world around him to me would put him on the autistic spectrum. many years ago I worked with a man similar to Emil a mute he has a great sense of humour and reading this reminded me of him and he like Emil maybe had great hearing as he loved music. This is the first book by Lada to be translated into English. She published short stories around the web and in magazines and won a number of prizes for her work this book her debut novel won a prize as the best-unpublished work in 2016.

My name is Emil and I’m ten years old. The same as the number of fingers I have when I count them one by one, hiding my hand under my school desk and counting. I don’t know what will happen when I reach eleven. I don’t mean fingers. I mean eleven years of age. How will I count then? The teachersays that fingers have nothing to do with counting. Yopu think with your head, not with your fingers. But that’s the only way I know how to count, I do know how to describe the number eleven, though. It’s two ones stnding next to each other. Like two of Emil’s drooping hjeads. Like most of my low scores in assestments.

The opening and Emil says who he can only get to rten becasue of his fingers.

Emil and his mother  Marina. live together in a small flat in an unnamed city.  He is mute and also has bad legs which mean he has to wear special shoes. All this and the fact all he is able to do in school is count to ten on his fingers. This seems to be trapped by his lack of speech but we view his world which sees him hearing all around him which means he knows what his teachers really think of him as they struggle with fitting him into the class. A touch event is when he hears his teacher has a baby but is yet unaware of her baby. He also has problems connecting with the other kids at the school who just don’t want to get to know him. This leaves him vulnerable to others in a way as he just wants to fit in.  so when someone does show interest in him a local boy that is also a drug dealer he only uses him because he is mute and seems to hear better than others. The other main relationship in the book is mother and son which also sees his uncle put his point of view forward. I love his internal voice it seems to capture someone like Emil so well that unique view of the world of autistic people that filters so much out. add to that a blind professor we have a story that is

You’re so silent, so let me tell you this as well: most people walk through the world unaware of what ies behind the visible and tangibile. I know that, given your incredible hearing, you realize this yourself. You see, these things re like sheet music. In order to know what they say, you have to decipher them. Use the right key. In music we use the treble clef and the bass clef. You don’t read the notes in one key the same way you do another, The rules are dfifferent. And it’s the ame with the world. It lies here before us like a sheet of paoper with a hiddeen melody on it, but not everyone is capable of decipheroing it

Emil’s view is unfiltered ut also he hasn’t ;earnt how to hear yet really.

This is a glimpse into Emil’s world that reminds me of two books that were big hits years ago. They also had special needs children as the narrator. the curious incident in the night which has a similar feel to how Emil looks at the world the fact that emotions and sometimes how the world links together get missed. The other is extremely loud and incredibly close which also like this had a character that had a talent like Emil with his hearing. But this works better having worked with a mute I saw how Emil felt and how others react to the lack of speech some of the events of the book to me right back. I also like his relationship with his mother which also seemed so well drawn. If you like both of those books and books like to kill a mockingbird this is a book that has a glimpse into a world of being mute and how people react to that and sometimes abuse it. Have you a favorite book about someone with a disability?

Belladonna by Daša Drndić

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Belladonna by  Daša Drndić

Croatian fiction

Original title Belladonna

Translator Celia Hawkesworth

Source – Review copy

As I said in yesterday’s post , I’d be back in Croatia today with one of my favourite writers Dasa is someone I was lucky enough to have met when her first book in English was shortlisted for the old IFFP . Ispent a good hour talking books and lit with her so this book is no surprise as one of the things we talked about is how important books can be at highlighting the darker side of the world we live in and this is something she felt English novels miss somewhat. Dasa is a writer in various ways radio plays , short piece for Croatian magazines like work , savremenik and literary word.

His name is Andreas Ban

He is a psychologist who does not psycholoise any more

A writer who no longer writes.

He is a tourist guide who no longer guides anyone anywhere.

A swimmer who has not swum for a long time.

He has other occupations that no-one any longer needs , he least of all

He is sixty- five , he looks pretty good, like fifty

Andreas is treading water in his life when the end of his career comes.

 

The hero of this book is Andreas Ban , a writer , psychologisvt and what one would say is a intellctual in every sense of the word. But he is now in that last third of his life facing retirement and this is his life from them . Looking back on the past and trying to see what brought him to the point he is at.Now the title of this book has a varied meaning in part it is best shown in the croat cover where the cover has an eye with a drop , which is what Belladonna is used for to help open the eye but also on the cover Belladonna is written in red the colour of bloood and also in Braile below. I feel this gives the really meaning of the book it is a look back on the blood of his home land  both in a fictional sense and also in the sense of real history in the use of  history again like in her earlier work Dasa use list of names to amplify the lost sense of history . I know this is something Dasa is passionate about using the horrors of the past to shine a light on the way Europe seems to be going blind into a new right-wing world . Any way we see this through Andres Ban eyes a man who has become a piece in a machine an email tells him he has left his job then he becomes ill and feels like a piece in a machine in this ever quickening world .Maybe the answer is in the title for what Andreas has to do !

For a year and a half , the angel of death (Mengele) keep his seven dwarves in a human zoo and examines their insides.

The worst were the gynecological experiments.They would tie us to a table and the systematic torture could begin. We got shots into our womb, they took blood from us, samples of our flesh and fluid from our spinal cords, they pierced and cut us, pulled out our hair, examined our brain , our nose , our mouth, our legs and arms, they dug around and drilled through us in the name of those who will come .I am Elizabeth

A passage about past hours that reminds us of the dark not so distant past we had .

 

 

It is hard not to sing the praises of Dasa , after you meet her she is articulate passionate and one of those writers you meet and know you will love all their books. I also feel the same feeling she does the growing right-wing nature of the world we live in is one we are slowly going into and with out books like this to remind us of what is around us .Like in here earlier books she blends fiction and non fiction and the use of list of names is as powerful as when she used it in Trieste as she said to me when you remove these names from the book it becomes unstable and unbalanced and that is what happens in the world when these people are killed for no reason. Dasa is one of the great writer one that needs to be more widely read !!

 

Leica Format by Daše Drndić

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Leica Format

Leica Format by Daše Drndić

Croatian fiction

Translator – Celia Hawkesworth

Original title – Leica Format

Source review copy

Sixteen years
Sixteen banners united over the field
Where the good shepherd grieves
Desperate men, desperate women divided
Spreading their wings ‘neath falling leaves.

Fortune calls
I stepped forth from the shadows to the marketplace
Merchants and thieves, hungry for power, my last deal gone down
She’s smelling sweet like the meadows where she was born
On midsummer’s eve near the tower.

The cold-blooded moon
The captain waits above the celebration
Sending his thoughts to a beloved maid
Whose ebony face is beyond communication
The captain is down but still believing that his love will be repaid.

Dylans changing of the guard is about his journey as this book is a journey for a place

Well I promised you all a second Croatian novel this week and another from a female Croatian writer , that I have met . I was lucky met and spoke quite a bit too Dasa at the IFFP when he first book in english was up for the prize  .She is quite a character and had a lot to say about lit around europe . So when the chance has come to read a second book by her . I am excited as she is considered one of the leading lights of modern Croatian fiction a real heavyweight writer .This is her second title she has written more than 11 books so we have a lot more to come .

This town has many constricted parts , lots of small organs  , it has an appendix .

When I think about this town , that is , about life in this town , my stomach begins to churn , my jaws clicks like a padlock , it closes up , I turn my eyes away although they never rest on anything  anymore , I shake my head , I don’t yet rock backwards or forwards , I don’t sway , cowering in the corner of my empty white room like people in films , not yet . I don’t yet hum , that’s the current situation

I love Dasa passages like this that drift off

I wondered where the title for this came from so I translated a number of interviews with Dasa from the net using Google translate . I knew Leica is a camera and format is the prefered style of picture for documentary photographers .Dasa has described this book as in the style of documentary photos snapshots of a city . The book is a story in fragments we dive in and out of people’s lives it is the story of the city from those newly arrived to those who have lived in the city for years . It is a story of secrets people not being whom they seem a woman on a train told she isn’t who she thought she was ? Dark secrets leak out like the drains in the cities .The book unfolds as a history fo all the dark deeds of the 20th century .How this once proud city has become insular and smaller over the century .The city reflects the whole region in a way .

Don’t trust your memory , your memory is a net full of holes , the past and the present slip through it everything slips through your memory , your memory is a hole .

How true is this passage .

I loved the style of this book one of the interviews I translated compared it too Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin , the great german novel that capture that city so well and yes it has a bit of that , one could also compare this book to  something like Italo  Calvino’s   book invisible cities . This is a book of parts a mosaic so to speak that mix style of story and narrative like say John Dos Passos had used in his epic book USA .Of course Dasa has captured her homeland that has seen so much of what happened in the 20th century from the start of world war one , being involved in world war two Tito and then the break up of Yugoslavia .This is one of those books you need to read to know about it is so full of ideas strings and characters .

Have you  favourite female writer from the Balkans ?

 

Farewell , Cowboy by Olja Savičević

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Farewell , cowboy by  Olja Savičević

Croatian fiction

Original title – Adio  kauboju

Translator – Celia Hawkesworth

Source review copy

 

I seem to recognize your face
haunting, familiar, yet i can’t seem to place it
cannot find the candle of thought to light your name
lifetimes are catching up with me
all these changes taking place, i wish i’d seen the place
but no one’s ever taken me
hearts and thoughts they fade, fade away…
hearts and thoughts they fade, fade away…
i swear i recognize your breath
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising
me, you wouldn’t recall, for i’m not my former
it’s hard when, you’re stuck upon the shelf
i changed by not changing at all, small town predicts my fate
perhaps that’s what no one wants to see
i just want to scream…hello…Now

I think the lyrics in this old pearl Jam song elderly woman behind echo Dada return to the town .

 

I have met both the writer and translator of this book earlier this year at London book fair and had intend to blog about it then as things are and rather like this book family happens and things go astray .Olja Savičević is an award-winning poet and novelist , she has six collection of poetry this was her debut novel and was a huge hit in Croatia already been made into a stage play over there . A part of this was used in the Dalkey archive best of european fiction collection in 2014 .

This business with the cowboys was my father’s doing . He started it , and somehow it was his story . Everyone else in Yugoslavia liked Indians best , apparently because our most popular TV series , which had Winnetou , the indian boy as the hero . It was only much later that cowboys came into their own .

Why everyone liked Indians in the Old Yugoslavia

 

Farewell , cowboy is the story of a brother and sister Dada and Daniel . Dada has returned to her hometown to find out what has happened to her beloved brother .This small seaside town in post war Croatia is seeing the first signs of  people from outside the country starting to buy property in this town , add to this a film crew is making a western Dada needs to find out why her brother killed himself by throwing himself under a train . She meets a band of eccentric characters as she starts to piece together her brothers last few months  whilst seeing the broken town see grew up in and mixing her memories with the broken and changing childhood town so badly scared by the war .

Daniel , my brother , died in his eighteenth year , by jumping from a concrete bridge over the railway under a speeding Osijek -Zagreb – Split intercity train .

He hadn’t appeared at school that morning , he had turned off towards the highway , beside the dry stream , then under it through the secret tunnel beneath the road and along the well know gravel path to the railway . I can imagine it clearly

Dada recalls how Daniel lost his life .

Lost men is a theme in this book the siblings own father has disappeared many years ago , he was a fan of Cowboys when a strange thing in Croatia most people who watch western films connected with the Indians in the films not the Cowboys . Of course the film industry paid a huge part in pre civil war Yugoslavia with TITO attracting and encouraging  film crews many of the great western films of the sixties and seventies were filmed in Yugoslavia .I would recommend the film Cineman Komunisto , which Susan from Istros books suggest I watch , so I did it shows how Tito used films  control people but also the great filmmakers from Yugoslavia that appeared  . Anyway back to the book Daniel seems to be in some ways an everyman for the lost innocence of a generation that was involved with the war and the way many men where missing from this generation brother fathers and husbands .Dada is like an old fashion private investigator trying to find out the clues to her brother’s death , in fact in some ways I was reminded of Twin peaks with some of the odd characters she meets along the way . A novel about a country on the cusp of what is to come just after the last bombs and deaths , the new money just coming and old wounds waiting to heal Olja captures what it is like to be a Woman in a country where the men have gone .

Have you a favourite Croatian Novel ?

 

 

Hello London , Bok london LBF here I come

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I write this as I am waiting for my taxi to take me to station to get a train to bring me into London around 10 this morning . I have luckily been given the chance to go to the London book fair and meet the  writer Olja Savičević at the launch of her first book in English Farewell cowboy at the Croatian writer union stand and the publisher Istros books .I’m excited as this is the place a lot of translation deals are made so I hope to see if only at a distance how this works . Mexico is the country of note this year .I have 9 Novels from Mexico under review at winstonsdad . I may do a few short blogs today if I get chance to give the atmosphere of London book fair .