Tag: eastern european

Captivity by György Spiró

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Captivity by György Spiró

Hungarian fiction

Original title – Fogság

Translator – Tim Wilkinson

Source – Personal copy

I said to myself this year, I need to read more epic books. In recent years, there have been a lot of epic novels coming out, and I have been buying them or noting them down and never reading them. This has been on my radar since either just before or when it came out in English a few years ago. Hungarian fiction seems to produce a lot of epics, and this one had a description that made it feel like one of those old Hollywood romantic epics. But a book that also captured three places, really Rome, Egypt and Jerusalem, as we follow Uri, the main character in the book. The book is a mid-career work by the writer Gyory Spiro; he started in radio. His radio drama style has been called avant-garde. On the whole his novels have been historical in theme, and he has returned to his historic background of being Jewish, like he does in this book

URI DID NOT DARE SLEEP. HE WAS AFRAID HE WOULD NOT WAKE IN TIME, but he must have dropped off anyway, because his father shook him awake.His first thought was the tessera, which he must not forget to hand over to his father, since it could be transferred, but his father muttered that he had already passed it on the previous evening. Uri clutched at his neck: the tessera was not there. Then a memory drifted back of those hours before he had gone to bed: he had handed over the lead token as if he were making a last will and testament.As he tugged on his loincloth under his tunic in the dark, the thought running through his head was that the tessera was worth more without him than with him.His father draped his gown over him. Uri protested, but his father squeezed his shoulder. It was a seamless, rectangular outer garment of cloth with a blue braided tassel dangling in approved fashion at each of the four corners. Uri had not owned a gown before; Joseph would get another for himself. If he could spare the money.

His father and him had issues

This book captures that time when going from place to place could take months, and the world people lived in was much larger in that way so when Uri,a sort of Nerdy lad who has issues with his parents, his grandfather was a slave, and he is very good at languages, is required to go to Judae mainly because of his language skill and also being.  Roman Jew. So, as the years pass, he heads first to Judea, where he is locked up for a time with a man from Nazareth; he thinks little of this happening at the time. This is around the time Jesus died, and the book ends many years later, as Christianity is beginning to take hold. So when Uri is free and then heads to Egypt and to Alexandria this is another ex empire but also the early seedlings and emebers of the Change that was going to take place in the roman Empire this is all shown as he meets many firgures from the time likje Claudis and Nero he struggles to accept that the man he meet in a cell all those years ago with two theives with him is this Martyr and new messiah figure. What I liked was the moment of capturing a new religion, starting a world in flux. I also felt undercurrents to the present in Modern Israeli at times.

Countless leather bottles of water, along with dried figs, salted raw fish, smoked fish, and dried fish had been stocked for the crew and passengers, along with several hundred pounds of unleavened bread, baked in thicker portions than matzos generally were. Uri grew tired of the monotonous diet by the first evening; they were taking water to sea, taking fish to sea. It seemed the Creation had not been devised to absolute perfection.

With a favorable northwesterly wind to fill the sails, they forged eastward and later northeastward. The captain said that in the spring it was always better going from Syracusa to Caesarea than the reverse. The slaves, who rowed on the lower level of the bireme, the upper level left empty, were being given a break.

Uri looked down on them. They were lying, chained to each other, naked in the gloom of the ship’s belly. Light and air they got from above, from where they could be reached by clambering down a ladder, except that the ladder was pulled up right then. It was only let down when the armed slave drivers took victuals down to them, with the ladders being pulled up after them once they’d scrambled up with the vessels of excrement. One of the slave drivers was always down there with them to control the rhythm of the rowing; he was now resting alongside them-that being his occupation right then. Slave drivers were relieved, not so the slaves.

As Uri sails off

I don’t read many Epic historical novels, and I have had Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on my radar for years. I want to get the nice Everyman editions of this book. But yes, from what I know of this history, he captures it well, and Uri seems to be there as things are happening and changing. I can’t help but also think of the Life of Brian with the meeting of Jesus in the cell, it is a brief moment, and the aftermath of this one man is captured in the years that follow. But to Uri, he was just a chap he met in a cell, and he couldn’t put the man he met with what at the time would have been viewed as a cult. I found that very interesting concept. Those events captured through one man’s eyes. As I said, it also feels like a commentary on maybe Israeli Judaism and also maybe even his own country’s post-war years. But it is an epic book and a book that captures empires and times shifting, as I said, it reminded me of those epic Roman dramas Hollywood used to make, but through many lifetimes.. Have you read this or his plays, which seem to have been translated as well?

The Cut Line by Caroline Pihelgas

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The cut line by Carolina Pihelgas

Estonian fiction

Original title – Lõikejoon

Translator – Darcy Hurford

Source – Review copy

I was pleased to receive this from World Editions, as the two books I have previously reviewed from Estonia have been by male writers, so it is great to have a female voice.  Carolina Pihelgas is also a poet and is considered one of the best prose writers by Estonian Literary magazine Sirp, according to Estonian critic Piret Põldver.  Her previous novel had focused on three mother-daughter relationships.  Prior to that, she was a well-known poet.  This book marked a change in her writng style, as it focuses on the main character, Liine, who has moved to the countryside to escape and recover from the end of her 14-year toxic relationship.  This is her first book to be translated into English.

A large fly waddles across the outhouse wall, drowsy and content. I am the large fly’s antagonist. I take a chair outside but only sit there for a moment as I can’t keep still. I grab my gardening gloves and begin pulling the weeds out from around the flowering quince.

I haven’t done any weeding for years, but I discover that nettles are the nicest; pulling them out by the roots feels so agreeable. Dandelions are annoying, whereas ground elder is easy to pull out. Perhaps you only let me go without much of a fight because you don’t believe I’ll stay here longer than just a weekend.

You probably don’t believe I have any right to break up with you. I’m just like a part of your body you feel incomplete without. But what do I feel? Right now simply panic, I guess. Id known for a long time that I needed to get away, but also that you wouldn’t let me go that easily, that it was the departure that scared me the most, the anger and rage that would start building up inside you, swelling and swelling and then exploding and pushing their nasty roots inside me. I’m afraid that when I turn on my phone the day after tomorrow to connect my laptop to the internet-be-cause it’ll be Monday and I’ll need to start answering work emails-that there’ll be messages from you

The sense of disconnect initally from the toxic past

We follow as Liine heads to a remote cottage to escape the relationship she has just got out of after fourteen years. What follows is a woman recovering from Trauma. But also have to struggle in the present as there is a sense of the current situation in the Baltic states, as the Miliitary are around the sense of the horrific past of the country itself, the soviet damage of this land is still there what we get is a poetic look at a women sloly rebuilding her life in Nature but also as she does we get small glimpse into the poast of those fourteen years how her relationship became toxic.  The book depicts a grieving, cleansing process in her world as she lives a rural life far removed from her city life. She has escaped to this rural wilderness, but as she does, the tension in the country is heightened by constant troop movements and exercises. As we see her dealing with anger, then recovery, as the world around her darkens.

It comes from deep within, an anger I’ve never dared to feel before. It’s a wild feeling of injustice that I’ve been treated like an inferior kind of being that doesn’t deserve respect. Like someone who can be pushed about, who can be manipulated, who can be reproached, humiliated, and who won’t fight back.

Why didn’t I fight back? Why did I put up with it all?

I’m mad at myself as well. No, hold on a moment.

That’s another thing that’s been planted in me: blame yourself, descend into an endless labyrinth where you find nothing but your own faults. Analyze only what you did wrong. Consider what you did to deserve it. And anyway, if it was so bad, why didn’t you leave sooner? Stop.

The anger that comes later when the past becomes clearer

This book, for me, captured trauma, but also the death of a relationship, the grief and anger, the way we all deal with moving on.  There is a fragmentary nature to the past as we see glimpses of memories, the snapshots of fourteen years in little bursts of how a relationship soured and became so toxic over the years. It is done in the way you feel the writer herself has gon through or knows someone close who has gone through this process. The anger, the loss, and the realisation of what has happened fully hit her. The way the past creeps up when the stillness and slowing down of her life and the routines of nature capture her. I was reminded of Thoreau in his cabin; by escaping the world, he saw how life is, and here we see Liine slowly seeing life in full again. In parts, I was also reminded of The River by Laure Vinogrodova, the Latvian novel I read last year. Both see female characters travelling to the countryside and seeing the world differently; they also deal with environmental issues in their respective countries. But what Crolina also does so well is capture the current tension of the Russian threat, which has grown much closer since the start of the Ukrainian war, and Putin could turn his attention to the Baltic states; this is shown by the NATO troops in the book. Have you read this or any other books from Estoniaxxsssssss

?

The Parasite by Ferenc Barnás

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The Parasite by Ferenc Barnás

Hungarian fiction

Original title – Az élősködő

Translator – Paul Olchvary

Source – Personal copy

I started off the Hungarian lit month with this book; it caught my eye from the Seagull list of books from Hungary because it had a quote from Laszlo Krasznahorkai, ” Ferenc Barnás is a legend among those who know him,” now, when you get that from the most recent Nobel winner as a recommendation. Barnás seems to have won many of the major book prizes in his own country, and this was his debut novel, which came out in 1997 in Hungarian. I feel we get caught up in place-based trends when translating these days, and a powerhouse of literature like Hungary, with one of the strongest and most interesting literary scenes, is forgotten. Barnás has taught at times and, at other times, been a full-time writer. There are a couple of his other books out or due to be released by Seagull Books.

One of the men in the ward resembled a friend of mine who’d escaped from an occupational therapy clinic in the provinces. I always did like that ever-smiling wino. After absconding from that teetotalling institution, he took to hanging out at a train station, where his fellow imbibers would sometimes help him towards the public restroom to keep him from wetting his pants even more than he already had. One time I noticed him grinning knowingly at his half-witted chums, who, having been summoned to the train cars for a bit of hard labour to earn their bread or wine, were busily carrying dreadfully heavy sacks full of who-knows-what back and forth for some no doubt noble purpose. No, he wasn’t such a fool atter all. While the others toiled away, he went about not so discreetly sampling fruit brandy he’d acquired for a modest sum from someone’s illicit distillery.

His viewing other people in the hospital as a child

The narrator of this book is unknown. We follow him from late childhood to adulthood. He is a strange character; he thrives on illness and a sort of Munchausen youth, though his body suffers from this constant need to be ill. But he feels safe as a patient; you feel it is almost his safety blanket against the world, a strange boy feeding on symptoms. But as the world is, boys become men, and he grows up and starts to be a man, having relationships, he also starts masturbating greatly. At some point, you are not sure if the encounters he claims to have are real or maybe a fever dream, sexual imagery for him to come tooo? , but even then, he has quirks; he has one-night stands, but then he gets haunted and wracked with dreams of what the previous night’s women are now doing.  But when he ends up with an older woman simply called L, but the initial silence of the dreams and nightmares that haunt his sex life ends, but then come back in a darker way.

Perhaps I should have placed an ad in the classifieds: ‘Seeking someone to beat sordidness of unknown origin out of me, every last bit of it. Perverts need not reply!’ Who knows, perhaps I would have happened upon a psychotic prison guard who specialized in exactly my sort of case! Why shouldn’t there be people out there who know not only torture inside-out but also psychology? | yearned for an applicant who could discern the nature of my imagination through my body’s agony. I would have been able to determine even from his mistakes whether he was really suited to the task. Even as I smiled at this childish escape fantasy of mine, I was virtually certain that people must have once lived who knew just how to go about exorcizing demons.

Seeking out people to suit his particular sexual needs

I loved this book. It had a little bit of Thomas Bernhard in it. The sheer sorrowful life of our narrator is very Bernhardian. But the voice comes across as very quirky at times, a tone and feel to the narrative I haven’t read in anything else, which makes it very interesting. But for me, Bartis, another Hungarian writer, his book Tranquillity is about a young man set in roughly the same time, although in many ways different; both are ways of looking at the child-parent relationship growing up in Socialist Hungary.  Another feeling for me was that our narrator grew up, his one-night stands were either real or just fever dreams from his sexual mind, and guilt of being the way he was, and that is why initially his relationship with L is so different.  This is what I love about much of the Hungarian fiction I have read: it is deep-thinking, and it requires readers to reflect on the characters. I will be in the historic Roman times in the next book for Hungarian lit month in a few days’ time. Have you read any books by Ferenc Barnás?

 

Nobel 2025 is going to László Krasznahorkai

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The Nobel prize for Literature has just been announced and the winner is László Krasznahorkai. The Hungarian writer had been near the top of the betting for the last ten years. His best known book is Satantango, a slowly unwinding book in a backwater village as horror unfurls as a man comes to the town. I have reviewed the book and several other works by László Krasznahorkai over the past year. He is a complex writer whose work encompasses a multitude of ideas and threads, set across various parts of the world. The Nobel Committee said in the quote he was given it for

“for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”.

He has also made several films with Bela Tarr, based on his book Satantango, including one of them. His last book was Herscht 07769, which I have yet to review.

Sofia Petrova by Lydia Chukovskaya

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Sofia Petrova by Lydia Chukovskaya

Russian fiction

Original title –Софья Петровна

Translator – Aline Werth

Source – Personal copy

One of the few things I have liked and really got into since I’ve been blogging is the publisher Persephone Books. When I first started blogging, there was a phone book week. Sadly, one of the first weeks I joined in, their books were all English and American books that had fallen out of print. However, they have since brought a few books in translation out, and this is their latest. Lydia Chukovskaya was known for her advocacy for the great Russian writers who were banned under the Soviet. Her husband worked for a publisher that was shut down for being too bourgeois by Stalin. She would have been arrested had she not been at home when the arrests were made. After that, she spent many years wandering. Directly after this incident, she wrote this book, not long after losing her husband. It captures a woman discovering how Stalin’s Russia suppressed people’s thoughts.

The typists were a bit afraid of her, and called her the school-marm behind her back. But they obeyed her. And she set out to be strict, but fair. In the lunch hour, she chatted in a friendly way with those who did their work well and con-scientiously, talked about how difficult it was to make out the director’s writing, and how lipstick didn’t suit everyone by any means. But with those who were capable of writing things like rehersal’ or ‘collictive’ she adopted a haughty manner.

There was one typist, Erna Semyonovna, who really got on Sofia Petrovna’s nerves. She made a mistake in almost every word, and smoked and chattered impudently all the time she was working. She reminded Sofia Petrovna vaguely of a cheeky housemaid they had once had in the old days, whose name was Fanny, and who had been rude to Sofia Petrovna and had flirted with Fyodor Ivanovich …

What was the point of keeping on anyone like that!

Her working in her typing job !!

Sofia Petrovna loses her husband a well known doctor leaving her to have to find a job. She takes a lesson and find out she is actually good at typing and gets a job at a large publishing house, where after a short time she becomes the head typist as she is better than some of the other women in the office there is some great observation of her typing colleagues’ woman more into the ment hat there jobs. Sofia lives in her apartment with her son, who is just coming to the end of his school career, so when Kolya starts a job with a new friend and suddenly finds a way to improve his craftsman job, he is in the paper. Meanwhile, some of her dead husband’s friends have been arrested, and then suddenly her son is arrested. She is told by Alik, the friend her son worked with. Then he writes to her. This book captures how the writer herself must have felt caught up in the madness of the purges.

Suddenly there was a ring at the door, and a second ring.

Sofia Petrovna went to open the door. Two rings – that was for her. Who could it be, so late?

There on the threshold stood Alik Finkelstein.

Alik there alone, without Kolya – it was unnatural…

‘Kolya?!’ Sofia Petrovna grabbed Alik by the dangling end

of his scarf. ‘Is it typhoid?’

Alik, without looking at her, slowly took off his galoshes.

‘Shhh!’ he said at last. ‘Let’s go into your room.’ And he tiptoed along the corridor.

Sofia Petrovna, beside herself with anxiety, followed him.

‘Don’t be alarmed, for heaven’s sake, Sofia Petrovna,’ he began, when she had closed the door behind her, ‘calm down, Sofia Petrovna, please do. There’s nothing to be frightened about. It’s nothing terrible. The day before the day before yesterday… or when was it? the day before the last day off, anyway . .. Kolya was arrested.’

He sat down on the divan, tore off his scarf, threw it down on the floor and burst into tears.

When she finds lut what has happened to her son?

I’m pleased I saw this for this year’s Women in Translation Month. It is a publisher I like and one that hasn’t put out many books in translation. It is always fun when they do. This book captures the paranoia and sheer fear family members had at this time, the madness and sheer unexpected arrest and moves during the Purges. The book was banned for many years in Russia. It first came out in France in Russian. She was a champion of the dissident Soviet writers and a respected voice for the dissident writers. Conversations she had over these years have been published and are meant to give a great insight into what it was like to be caught up in the Stalin Purges, as she was when she lost her husband. The book was, of course, passed around in Samizdat in Soviet era Russia; those handwritten pages show how the regime made people bring more people into their crimes as they were seen. Have you read this or any other book that covers the Stalin Purges? If you want a book that maybe captures the madness THAT orwell tried to show in his novels around that time, this is a perfect example of how it was to be in Stalin’s Russia!!

 

La Belle Roumaine by Dumitru Tspeneag

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La Belle Roumaine by Dumitru Tspeneag

Romanian fiction

Original title – La Belle Roumaine

Translator – Alistair Ian Blyth

Source – Personal copy

One of the things I did early on in this blog was buy as many Dalkey Archive books as I could. I have a good number, but I’ve held them on the shelves for a while. However, I am slowly going to start reading them as Dalkey has brought out literature from all around the world, and when I started the blog, they really grabbed me. I have a few books by Tspeneag. He was a founder member of the Onric group of writers, of which Cartescu was a later member. Tspeneag had spent a lot of time in Exile when he disagreed with the communist regime in Romania. He went to France and has lived there since. But he fell out with other exiles as he held very left-wing views, even in exile. This book is partly set in Paris, where he made his home for many years.

SHE ALWAYS SAT DOWN at the same table. Hard to say how she found it vacant every time. Especially in the beginning or, to be more exact, on the first three days: nobody else occupied the table before she arrived. It was, let us say, mere chance. On the following days, however, it was no longer down to chance, but to Jean-Jacques, the proprietor, who made sure the table remained vacant, so convinced was he that the beautiful blond would continue to come. Conviction, or rather desire: the two came together in his mind and led him to behave in such a way that he ran the risk of looking odd in the eyes of his regular customers. But since he also performed the job of barman, he could hardly have been expected not to keep a watch over the more or less aleatory movements of his customers; he could hardly have been expected, on occasion, not to intervene:

The opening linbes as she is seen in the cafe

The book is about a Romanian woman who wanders around Paris. Her name is Ana, she starts going to a cafe with her paper, which is a note, early on, isn’t LE monde but the Paris Turf. She captures the eye of the cafe owner, Jean-Jacques, who is also an exiled Russian. The two men like her, the owner makes sure her table is always free when she gets there, but as the book moves on, she seems to be liquid in who she is; her name changes in others’ eyes. Her story of a father who was at Auschwitz, a Jewish surname. Who is the strange young woman? IS she an exile or something else? What I love is we are never quite told the full story of her, but it adds to the oddness and also the comedy as those around her look at her.As we follow her life and affairs with various men.

 

I enjoyed this book; it has a clever twist of us never quite knowing who the woman was. She was a nurse, a lover, a spy .Is she Romanian, German, or even French for some? She is a modern-day Irene Adler to me (A character from Sherlock Holmes, another woman who isn’t all she seems and like Ana, makes men swoon for her ). This book is all about being out of place and exile, but also trying to fit in, and the little things that can give you away over time. It is a book that leaves the reader with questions of why this and that happened, but also has a lot of humour in it that sort of black humour from being in exile. I feel the woman is someone that Tsepeneag will have seen in a cafe, a passing glance, or a woman he has seen for a few days. I love this and won’t be waiting a long time to reread it. Have you read any books by him or have a favourite writer from the Dalkey Archive group of writers ?

 

Her gestures had become increasingly precise. True, they were the same gestures she’d made so many times before. She rid herself of her handbag and then her trench coat, which she hung up on the peg. This time, she was wearing a short, tight skirt. She no longer concealed her legs. On the contrary. And quite rightly so, since she had splendid legs: they were far from being slender, but nor were they too thick; the round, well-honed knees betokened long but generous, welcoming thighs.

She sat down. She took a deep breath and looked around her, smiling. From her handbag she took a handkerchief, wiped her brow, lips, nose. Then she took out a book, a different one than last time, and on the cover Jean-Jacques thought to glimpse the famous bridge between the Louvre and the Académie. He was almost sure of it

she gets notice more and by the men is she a honey trap ?

Voracious by Malgorzata Lebda

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Voracious by Malgorzata Lebda

Polish Fiction

Orignal title –Łakome

Translator – Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Source review copy

I come to the second book I was sent kindly by the new press, Linden Editions. This book is from a Polish Poet. Malgorzata , is a poet and Actvist. She has written several volumes of Poetry. This was her first novel, and she won a prize for the best debut novel in Poland and was also on the list for the Nine prize, which is like the Polish Booker prize. She is well known for a piece of work in which she ran the course of a river to highlight problems with the Vistula River through her poetry. This book is set in the mountains of southern Poland, in a small village near the Beskid Mountains, as a Granddaughter has returned to help her grandparents. As her grandmother is dying, the book follows them over the course of a year.

The moment Grandma saw a grasshopper in the scythed wheat, he says, shed drop the work she was doing and pick it up. She’d cup her hands around the insect’s body to construct a sealed home for it and carry it to the boundary strip. And there she’d talk to that living thing and set it down on a wild strawberry leaf, a wild garlic leaf, or some tiny yellow pimpernel leaves. And chase it away into the forest. Shoo, shed cry after the insect, anything to keep it far from the harvest blades.

Then I’d follow her onto the boundary strip, watchfully, as if suspecting a holy rite was happening there. Grandma herself was a saint to me. In those days I’d give her all sorts of names. Like:

Saint Grandma Róza talking to insects.

Saint Grandma Róza the tender.

Saint Grandma Róza the just.

Saint Grandma Róza the compassionate.

Saint Grandma Róza the merciful.

Saint Grandma Róza who is.

The naturual world and how her grandparents know it

 

The book is told in small vignettes, some less than a page long, others a few pages long, as we see these three family members trying to make the best of it.As the Grandfather in the Male way has set himself on making a new room for his wife. His granddaughter is tending to his failing wife. As the season unfurls, the natural world around them, from the wolves to the birds, marks the coming and going of seasons. As the local slaughterhouse is a noise in the background. But then it is also threatened when a landslide is nearby. A grandfather burning his head over his wife’s illness, a granddaughter trying to be the glue to them all, and the grandmother trying to live on. This is a poetic book that shows us how close we are to nature as they try to live on the farm, navigating the everyday life and death cycle of the farming world, with another death looming in the background.

Look, the earth is hungry over there too, says Grandpa, it’s been moving.

He’s on the veranda, leaning against the balustrade. He’s

smoking a Klub. And gazing ahead.

Moving? Where? I ask.

Over there, he says, pointing at the hill opposite.

The sound of church bells rings out.

It has started, look, he says.

Just above the parish chairwoman’s boundary strip the earth is splitting. From our veranda it looks as if the bluff has parted its lips, it looks like a wrinkling human face.

This village, I think to myself, must have been founded on a large slippery boulder.

I’m off, says Grandpa.

Grandpa knows the land so well and how it moves around him

I am so pleased to have been sent the first two books from this publisher as they have been just amazing. Last summer and this book both capture a rural world long gone in the UK. This village setting is situated on the edge of the last genuinely wild woods in Europe, where wolves roam freely and the natural world still holds sway over those who live within it. This is a book that draws you into that world. I was reminded of the place of the world of Drive Your Plough over the Bones of the Dead by Tokarczuk, another novel set in the Polish wilderness the bog difference is this is a novel about the countryside with out any magic realism in fact it is set in the crime realism of every day life and death the cycle of life from a young granddaughter trying to help or even hold back death the old man just burying his head around the fact his wife is dying all this set to the ebb and flow of the seasons and nature around them. Do you have a favourite rural work where nature is part of the book and the world you have read about?

Spadework for a Palace by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

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Spadework for a Palace by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

Hungarian fiction

Original title – Aprómunka egy palotaér

Translator – John Batki

Source – Personal copy

A few years ago, the American publisher released a series of small hardbacks, called the Storybook series, which featured a collection of novellas with eye-catching covers. I had, at the time, hoped to get my hands on a couple from the series, but finances allowed for just one, and since Laszlo Krasznahorkai is a writer, I need to read more over time. I have found each of his books challenging, but also different, so this one, set in New York, appealed to me. I’ve never been to New York; I’ve always wandered through it in the company of writers I like, such as Krasznahorkai, who also features a couple of other writers in the book itself.

I started to look into the routes that-already a failed author—he used when he commuted daily to the Customs House, walking out of his residence, and taking a horse-drawn omnibus down Broadway to 13th Street, and walking from there west to his “office,” and yes, for the sake of veracity let us right away enclose that office in quotation marks, because in truth it was a shack that he walked to, six days a week for four dollars a day, to manage paperwork amid all the commotion, yes, and that “office” shack was located approximately on today’s Bethune Street, though that doesn’t really matter, since back in his time, as I found out, the entire customs district along the banks of the Hudson as well as down by the present-day Staten Island ferry terminal and all the lower Manhattan sides of the East River constituted one big chaotic turmoil, as Melville had himself described it several times, granted, it was mostly in connection with the magic attraction of water, of the sea, there it is right at the outset of Moby-Dick, out on the water, sailing ships and steamships, barques, brigs and schooners, and on the land longshoremen, sailors, car-ters, loafers, pickpockets, dogs and cats and wharf rats as well as, yes, even though he makes no mention of them, customs inspectors, such as Melville,

It always hard to pick a quote out his books but this was about the route he found

The book is, as ever with Krasznahorkai, a single paragraph; one wonders if the tab is broken on his laptop, only joking. The story centres on a librarian called Herman Melvill a librarian that has a love and obsession with the his namesake the Meville wth an e that wrote Moby dick a man that also spent time in Manhatten. He is also a fan of Malcolm Lowry, not so much for his most famous book, Under the Volcano, but rather for the book Lunar Caustic and its character, Bill Plantagenet, another hard-drinking man who has lost his band. He is a jazz fan. He is also on the edge of madness. Then he discovers the art and architecture of Lebbeus Woods a man whose idea and designs were both surreal and cutting edge.So, we have a man who hates the Public library and has set his mind on opening a library in the famous skyscraper in New York that AT&T once owned, which has no windows. We have a man on the edge talking about making a library and these writers in his town. The book originated when Krasznahorkai was a writer-in-residence in New York. He also hates the public library in New York like Mevill does.

whose materials could never be read by anyone, not that I am saying that any reader would want to read personal notes of this sort, instead of Dante and Shakespeare and Homer and Plato and Newton and Buddha and so forth, no-o-o, of course not, I too would much rather read Dante and Plato and Homer and so forth, since not even I attach any great significance more precisely and in fact none whatsoever-to what I have so far written down, nor to what is to follow, except that this is all I am able to contribute, so I will still write it down, I am not sure if I’m being clear, but that’s all I intend to say about this, and now, after all this back and forth, I’ll resume, and return to the afternoon when I had first set out downtown on my Melville Ramble, heading for Gansevoort Street,

Again other writers an places as he folow the ramble

This is one of those books that made us want to reread Melville.  have read three books from Meville including Moby dick. I also thought of the recent Argentine novel by Rodrigo Fresán, which told us that at one time the Mevill name was spelt the same way as our hero’s. This is a book for fans of Krasznahorkai and Bernhard. The character is almost a Bernhard-like character, in the way he views the world and his disappointment with it. It’s also a nod to the things Krasznahorkai found when in New York; Lebbus Woods is one of his building ideas. Then, Lowry, I read ‘Under the Volcano’ a long time ago, but I hadn’t tried any of his other works. I see that Lunar Caustic is out of print and not cheap to buy, so it’s on the list of books to look out for in charity shops. This is one of those books that is an ode to a place, Manhattan, and draws you into the city, while also exploring the history of some of its locations, much like yesterday’s book, in a way. Have you read any of the ND storybooks ?

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 ?

 

Solenoid by Mircea Cǎrtǎresecu

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Solenoid by Mircea Cǎrtǎescu

Romanian fiction

Original title – Solenoid

Translator – Sean Cotter

Source – Personal copy

Now this is one of those books that over the time I have been blogging goes in an aerc in my Head, I remember first hearing about this labrythine book and how it was surreal and gritty and just one of those books that when described I think in my head oh this is so much above my head as a reader. I also hate it when a book is everywhere and everyone just focus on one book at the cost of other books this happens a a lot in the translated world I find there is usually a couple of books every year that p-eople seem to get hyped thus in my eyes become I book I don’t want to review. I always feel my voice isn’t much in the cacophony of praise for a book. I am not a critical thinker,I am maybe not the most profound reader at times. So when it came up on the long list for the Booker International part of me thought it could be the one book I miss this year as I did;t want to rreread it as I hadn’t review it two years ago.

I am, thus, a Romanian teacher at School 86 in Bucharest. I live alone in an old house, “the boat-shaped house” I have already mentioned, on the street called Maica Domnului, in the Tei Lake neighborhood. Like any other teacher in my field, I dreamed of becoming a writer, just the same way that, inside the café fiddler playing from table to table, a cramped and degenerate Efimov still lives who once thought himself a great violinist. Why it didn’t happen— why I didn’t have enough self-confidence to overcome, with a superior smile, that evening at the workshop, why I didn’t have the maniacal conviction in my beliefs in spite of everyone else, when the myth of the misunderstood writer is so powerful, even with its concomitant measure of kitsch, why I didn’t believe in my poem more than I did the reality of the world—I have searched for an answer to all these questions every day of my life. Starting in the depths of that damp autumn night when I walked home, blinded by headlights, in a state of paranoia I had never felt before. I couldn’t breathe for rage and humiliation.

My parents, who opened the door for me as always, were left speechless.

His day job as a teacher

ANnyway the book is set in the 80s and has a main character that isn’t named but in some ways can be taken as a sort of Cartaescu if he hadn’t had the success he had with his writing this is a teacher in Bucharest teaching and tlivin g in that city at the time it comes across as a grim city. I was reminded that this must have been how the industrial towns of England must have been fifty years earlier. As our main character talks about his life, we follow his day-to-day life, as if he is about to read an epic poem. This is based on actual events in the writer’s life. Now this is the straightforward part of the book. But then we have a surreal other-world touch from the life of a mite or lice. In fact, at times, this reminds me of Hrabal, another writer obsessed with dirt and the sort of dirtier side of the world in his writing. So we go from the micro to the macro in these sorts of dream-like sequences (dream or even maybe Nightmare )in the book. ADD to this, he seems to be obsessed with his body and its inner workings as someone who has a tendency to have health anxiety and can see a fellow person that maybe other thinks their health. Add to that side stories around his reading of the book The Gladfly,  written by Ethel Voynich, whose husband, a book dealer, was the man who discovered the famous Voynich manuscript. If this had been lost for a thousand years, would the book itself be treated in the future as some sort of wondrous work whose actual text is unknown, like the Manuscript is?

The mantis turned around in Virgils palm, as he spoke in a monotone, as though reciting a text he knew by heart, and then it shot up in flight, suddenly an enormous locust, over the dew-pearly garden. It disappeared over the fence woven with Jericho roses.

Caty nodded at every phrase, as though her frivolous being, made of pre-tentions and silk, had only then awoken, had at that moment escaped from the Neckermann with its perfect men and perfect women, and had entered the dictionary of skin diseases, the forensic treatises, the anatomy of melan-choly, the history of infernos with their sinister illustrations of the crushed, burned, amputated, oligophrenic, hanged, starving, and paralyzed people emerging triumphant from pits of horror, showing their green lunatic faces and their eyeballs slung into the backs of their heads like broken dolls. From that morning on, the sweet, multicolored woman with her sparrowlike mind led a double life, one I heard of for the first time sitting in front of her in the deserted office where the last ficus tree rotted away. By day she was still the chemistry teacher, envied by all her colleagues for her clothes and shoes and purses, her house with 156 panes of glass, and her ministry husband, but by night, two or three times a week, dressed in black without makeup or per-fume, in a headscarf and shoes the janitors wore, with tears dancing in her eyes and dark hatred over her face like a dead god of love,

Surreal imagery at times like here

Now that is it, of course, this is just the barest description of a book that is one of those works of postmodern fiction that none will always struggle to describe. It is a book you must wade into and hope you get to the other side. As I said, it made me think of the dark satanic mills of the industrial age. The city he describes seems like that. I was reminded in the talk about getting lice, this might surprise you bu tit remind me of my love of kitchen sink novels those grim working class classic of the 50’s and 60’s. At other times, it was like a Romanian Joyce and a sort of nightmarish ode to a place and time gone, if he had been in 80s Bucharest and a failed writer, this might have been his take on the world. Other parts remind me of William Burroughs. I know it was written in a single draft, but there is a feeling of the surreal worlds that Burroughs always did so well. Anyway, this is my take on this book.I love it, but think the hype somewhat has made it a book overshadowing other books, if that makes sense. I wouldn’t be surprised if it won the Booker. In my head, it is the winner, and I haven’t felt that for a book on the longlist for a few years. I’m unsure what this will add to the discussion on the book. But don’t be scared of it. What are your thoughts on this book?

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?

The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky

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The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky

Russian fiction

Original title – Отель «У Погибшего Альпиниста»

Translator – Josh Billings

Source – Personal copy

As I have seen then, I brought some books from this Melville house, the Neversink library series. So when this turned up on the list of books that had been published in 1970. In one of those strange connections that seem to happen when you read many books, maybe. I signed up a few weeks ago to Klassiki, a streaming service focused on Eastern European and Central Asian films/ So. Last week, they had a series of new films on this book in its film form, which was one of the films they had added. The Brother’s books have served well for film. They were the leading lights of the Soviet Science fiction scene. But their books have also made some great films. The best-known is Roadside Picnic, which was made into the cult film Stalker. I have that on my shelves to read at some point and always welcome a chance to rewatch Stalker.

The owner didn’t respond. His eyes were glued to the table.

There was nothing out of the ordinary on it, except a large bronze ashtray, in which a straight-handled pipe lay. A Dun-hill, I guessed. Smoke rose from the pipe.

“Staying..” the owner said eventually. “Well, why not?” I didn’t know what to say to this, so I waited for him to go on. I couldn’t see my suitcase anywhere, but there was a checkered rucksack with a bunch of hotel-stickers on it in the corner. It wasn’t my rucksack.

“Everything has remained as he left it before his climb,” the owner went on, his voice growing stronger. “On that terrible, unforgettable day six years ago.”

I looked dubiously at the smoking pipe.

“Yes!” the owner cried. “There’s HIS pipe. That’s HIS jacket.

And that over there is HIS alpenstock. ‘Don’t forget your al-penstock, I said to him that very morning. He just smiled and shook his head. ‘You don’t want to be stuck up there forever!’ I shouted, a cold premonition passing over me. ‘Porquwapa, he said—in French. I still don’t know what it means.”

“It means ‘Why not?”” I said.

Even on his arrival it is a little odd

The book isn’t sci-fi as such for the most part, but it does. Ultimately, it is like they tried to write a crime novel but then remembered they were sci-fi writers. The book follows Inspector Peter Glebsky, who has been sent to see if a crime has happened at a remote hotel called the Dead Mountaineers Inn. He is also planning to ski and spend time there. The hotel is remote and has a cast of characters. Any Agatha Christie novel would be happy with a hypnotist, physicists, gamblers, strangers, and a huge dog. But as the day moves on and it becomes night, the inspector might have more to deal with than it seems at first, as the hotel is more than it appears on the surface, and strange things start happening. Will he be able to put it all together? The bodies tied up, what has happened to some of the gamblers, and will they all escape the hotel?

“The bottom line is that amazing things don’t just happen in our inn,” Du Barnstoker said. “One has only to recall, for example, the unidentified flying objects..”

The kid pushed its chair back with a crash, stood up and, still munching on the apple, made its way to the exit. Well I’ll be damned-for suddenly I seemed to be watching the slender figure of a charming young woman. But as soon as my heart softened the young woman vanished, leaving behind her, in the most obscene way, a brash and impertinent teen-ager: the kind that spread their fleas over beaches and shoot drugs in public bathrooms. Was it a boy? Or, damn it, a girl?

I had no idea who to ask, and meanwhile Du Barnstoker was prattling on:

Early on he skis and then he finds maybe a clue to things l,ater on in the book?

 

I loved this book. As I said in my post the other day, I don’t like crime novels; well, that isn’t true. I like crime books that play with the genre, and this does. I t has those nods to the classic crime of the like pof Agatha christie a selection of characters gathered together. The remote hotel and the ski remind me of the Poirot story The Labours of Hercules, which saw him cut off like Glebsky in a remote ski resort. The book then has some other touches, and we see it the way they wanted us to know the book as a crime novel. But then it turns on a few things later in the book and you see the story isn’t the way you saw it in the boo. I didn’t help myself reading half the book and then seeing the film where there is some pieces cut and the story is slightly different on the film to make it work as a film. But it is a book that would;ld appeal to crime and sci fans. A great second book for this turn of the club years a book of its time 1970. The film is worth watching if you can catch it. It is no stalker, but it is still a very quirky seventies-styled piece of soviet cinema. Have you read any books by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky?

Götz and Meyer by David Albahari

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Götz and Meyer by Daivd Albahari

Serbian Fcition

Original title – Гец и Мајер

Transator – Ellen Elias – Bursac

Source – Personal copy

Do we all have that list of books you have seen reviewed a long time ago and said I’ll get that when I see it in a second-hand shop? Well, I have a long list, and I must admit this has always been near the top. Had I seen a new copy in a shop at some time, I’d probably have brought it. So when IO saw it last week I had to get I’m sure the last mention I remember of it was on the Mookse podcast and I think the first time I read about it was on the complete review Michael has introduced me to so many great writers over the last two decades I had read another book by David Albahari, set in Canada, where the writer spent the latter part of his life. But I knew he had written some books about his Jewish heritage, and he was from a Sephardic Jewish family. So he wrote this book around a writer in the present trying to find out what had happened to his Jewish Family in Blregrade during World War Two.

Götz and Meyer. Having never seen them, I can only imagine them. In twosomes like theirs, one is usually taller, the other shorter, but since bothwere SS. non-commissioned officers, it is easy to imagine that both were tall, perhaps the same height.I am assuming that the standards for acceptance into the SS were rigorous, below a certain height you most certainly would not qualify. One of the two, or so witnesses claim, came into the camp, played with the children, picked them up, even gave them chocolates.We need so little to imagine another world, don’t we?But Götz, or Meyer, then went off to his truck and got ready for another trip. The distances were not long, but Götz, or Meyer, was looking forward to the breeze that would play through the open truck window. As he walked towards the truck, the children returned, radiant, to their mothers. Götz and Meyer were probably not novices at the job

The opening lines  and he finds these two names

As our narrator is trying to pick apart what had happened to his family. The one thing he found out was that they had been put onto an SS truck. Many in the camps at that time felt these trucks were tacking them to a better life. But they were about to be gassed with fumes and buried. He only knows that the two non-commison officers driving this van around Serbia are Götz and Myer. What follows is him trying to imagine what these two unknown characters were like as people to put a face to evil, so to speak. What did they feel about their jobs? How were they looked at by those around them? What part did they play in the wider picture of the war? But he does it with a sort of darkly comic way of making these two come alive and the events they were caught up in. He often asks if Götz or Meyer did such and such, trying to weigh them up.How did the evil they did match with them as a people? They drive around Belgrade as they go about the job of taking the truck to fetch and kill people. Cogs in a killing machine or true evil? This is the question we face as readers.

Götz, or was it Meyer, the one who gave sweets to the children, clearly was not as squeamish as I am. Perhaps at home, in Germany or Austria, he had a dog, so he was used to fleas, was quick to catch them and, with a little crunch, crush them between his fingers. I never saw Götz or Meyer, so I can only imagine them, but somehow I feel certain that Götz, or Meyer, had a poodle, a small fluffy thing called Lily. If Lily had only come to the Fairgrounds camp once, what joy she would have brought those children! They would have crowded round her, touched her little nose, patted her little tail and paws, forgotten all about the chocolates. In a report dated February 6, 1942, sent by Commander Andorfer to the Municipality of Belgrade, there were I, 136 children at the camp who were under 16 years of age, and 76 children still nursing.

He oimagines one with a dog as he talks about the kids killed at the time

 

As we enter the writer’s mind, this is told in a stream-of-consciousness style. He imagines these two lowly SS officers as the last people a lot of his family would have seen in the war. He is putting the face to them at times. They sound like they fall out of a Beckett play, a darker pair to Vladais and Estragon as they wait for evil to engulf them. They are faces left, but they are on the page. Taking evil out of the dark into the light. There are nods to writers like Bernhard. He has the acid humour that Thomas Bernhard had in his writing. These never fully come alive, but the sense of the presence is in the book as you read along the war years and the part in the final solution and how it killed so many of our narrator’s family. All he has is this as a small thread to that horror, which is these two characters and their names, as he tries to fill in the gaps in the information he has . A darkly comic book at times I ‘m pleased I have got to it and hope to find more books by him to read. Have you read David Alahari ?

Winston’s score – A -a pair of SS truck drivers brought to life as someone in the present wants to uncover the horrors that happened to his family.

 

White Nights by Urszula Honek

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White nights by Urszula Honek

Polish fiction

Original title – Biale Noce

Translator – Kate Webster

Source – Personal copy

This was the book that jumped off the longlist for the booker. Firstly, this is the one book that I hadn’t heard of off the list. Secondly, when I read the description of a debut novel from a poet, which always catches my eye, the setting in a rural village ticked another box for me. Then it mentioned that the stories tackle life and death. I was lucky as all that meant it was the first book I ordered seconds after the longlist. Came up online. I have held back reviewing it as it is maybe one of the better books I read on this year’s longlist, and it has made our shortlist, so it could be near our winner, maybe. I also like that it was a completely new publisher to me which is always great to find. Were you aware of this book or publisher before the longlist came out?

A house like a chicken coop, so that if you leaned on it or kicked at it, all the planks would fall to the ground, and some would break in half, everything rotten. How it didn’t collapse on their heads over the years, I don’t know. Maybe they walked on tiptoe and didn’t cry out when they fucked, or when they had bust-ups, otherwise I don’t get it. Plus the house sits on the very edge of the hill, right next to the turnoff to Roznowice. If you drove past in a lorry, you could high-five Pilot as he leaned out of the window. Everything inside must have been shaking when they were eating or sleeping, I wouldn’t have coped with it for that long, but what can you do if you’ve got no choice? And there was just the one main room, plus a kitchen and the crapper outside, and twelve mouths to feed – well, eleven and a half, cos Pilot only counted as half. Did I use to go there?

The rural homes here is Pilots

The book is set in southern Poland in the Beskid Niski region. This mountainous region is very sparsely populated, with a wide range of nature and fauna. But for those who live and work there, it is a place where, on the whole, they are isolated and tend to be the sort of people who never go far from their home village. The stories are scattered in a way the events in the stories aren’t in a straight timeline, so characters come and go. The stories are centred around a group of friends. The first one we meet is Pilot, a name because he always seems to be looking in the air.The book opens with the author deciding to grow carp in a pond in his garden; of course, this is a regular Christmas meal in Poland. Andrej has lived with Pilot in a huge communal dwelling with other men, and this guy is haunted in many ways by his life. These are men with little education. They are just getting by in the world around them. Then add a butcher sister and families. This is a tale of a village of old lovers. What happens when one of this close group dies? How do the others take that death?

It was a beautiful day like this, summer, you could walk around in just your underpants, no one was ashamed of anyone here, because there was nothing to hide. At the last judgment, everyone will be standing side by side, not a fig leaf in sight, just as they were born, which is to say in the body they died in, but naked, that’s what I mean. Saturdays in the summer meant a trip to the Ropa river, which can be fast and deep, but that’s what rivers are, right? Not splashing around in the shallows, but going in up to your neck, up to your head, disappearing under the water. You have to feel its weight, that sometimes it will bash you about a bit, and other times it will embrace you like love, and it grows pleasant, light, and then you can die. Otherwise there’s no point. This is my carliest memory – my father and I are going to the river, we’re making our way through the big butterbur leaves, I hold his hand tight and wish I could never let go, and then I go into the water, I lose my balance and fall beneath the surface,

From the tale The cliff where the baker something happens to her

This is a harsh world. I was reminded of the pit villages near me and those in Northumberland. I used to pick people up from the rural setting and small villages where some people ended up trapped in this village. A death of a baker did she die from a fall or was she pushed. Sisters that walk in line the stories are little c=glimpsesd into this rural world that one imagines aren’t set to survive. This world is where smartphones and the wider world seem distant in their bubble. For me, it ticked the box of rural drama. I love tales that take us away from city life into those little places where everyone knows one another, and like in these stories, there is history and pasts that have sculptured their lives. I hope we get more from this poet-turned-writer . Have you read this collection? Which of the longlisted book jumped out when it came out?

Winston’s score is a rural tale of those living on the edge of Poland, living on the edge of their own lives.