Tag: eastern european

House of Day , House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk

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House of Day, House of Night

Polish fiction

Original title – Dom dzienny, dom nocny

Translator – Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Source = Subscription book

Well, with the Nobel due tomorrow. I happened to read this book recently; it is an earlier book from the Polish Nobel winner Olga Tokarczuk. Fitzcarraldo recently reissued it. I have had a mixed relationship with her books. I was looking forward to The Book of Jacob, but I struggled to get through it and felt it would take a rereading to fully understand. I loved Flights when I read it, and I also loved Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead. For me, this novel, which came before both of those books, is a little bit style-wise like Flights, as Olga calls her constellation novels, which is a similar style she uses for Flights, but it also feels familiar in place to the setting of Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead.

Between twelve and one a nice woman’s voice reads a serialized novel. It’s impossible not to listen to it; we all have to listen to every single novel because it’s on when we’re preparing dinner, when we’re peeling potatoes or making pierogi. Throughout April it was Anna Karenina.

He loves another woman, that is clearer still,” she said to herself as she entered her own room. “I want love, and it is lacking. So everything is finished! And it must be finished. But how?” she asked herself, and sat down in the armchair before the looking glass.’

Sometimes Marta comes over at noon and automatically starts helping with something, such as dicing the carrots.

She listens quietly and solemnly, but she never says anything – about Anna Karenina or any other novel we’ve heard read on the radio.

I loved the thought of local radio reading Tolstoy

I said this is like Drive Your Plough, as it is set in the remote Polish countryside; this time it is a village, and those who do live there form a chorus of voices telling the village’s story. We see the place Olga actually lives in: a village at the crossroads of Poland, Czechia, and Germany. The book sees all these nationalities in the village. Our narrator carries the narrative; she has just moved to the village of Nowa Ruda in the Silesia area of Poland. Her neighbour Marta is one of the women who have shaped the village, and through her we hear the village’s stories retold.  From the local drunk to folktales about deaths from mushrooms, to a dead boy straddling the border. A cacophony of tales builds a rich place scarred by the various countries that have ruled the village over the centuries.

THE GERMANS

Early this summer the Germans began to appear in the meadows. Their grizzled heads came floating by on a sea of grass, and their wire-rimmed glasses glittered gaily in the sunshine. So-and-So said that you can recognize Germans by their shoes, which are clean and white.

We don’t take care of our shoes, we don’t respect them, they’re clunky and always made of dark leather, or else we wear gumboots, rubber farm boots, into which Stasek Bachleda flicks the ash from his cigarette. Our shoes are made of PVC, garish black-and-white counterfeits of popular brands. They’re permanently muddy because of the sodden red earth, and misshapen from being repeatedly frozen and dried out again.

I smiled at her description of the Germans

As I said, as one of her earliest novels, this may show what followed in her other novels.  The constellation style of novel, as she calls it, shows how she used it in Flights to Much Effect.  Then the village setting.  She used it in Drive You Plough.  Anyone who has read this blog for any time knows I love a book set in a village; it has the whole world in a small place.  From death to birth.  From saints to Transvestite monks, all the world is here. I was reminded of stones in a landslide; as many of you know, one of my all-time favourites: the variety you can see in a small village, but also, at points, the way the voices were almost a chorus reminded me of the Irish novel Cré na cille, the way it captures the voices of the villagers, live and dead. I’m not sure if she had read or was aware of these other books, but it may show how villages can be similar; whether in the mountains of Spain or the middle of Ireland, there are stories, secrets, and all of life there with those living there.  Maybe this is the best place to start with Tokarczuk if you’re new to her, since it foreshadows her later work; especially, you can see the draw of the history that must have fueled her to write The Book of Jacob. Have you read this book, and who do you think will win the Nobel Prize in Literature tomorrow?

 

Helping Verbs of the Heart by Péter Esterházy

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Helping Verbs of the Heart by Péter Esterházy

Hungarian fiction

Original title

Source: Personal copy

I recently mentioned that Péter Nadas had passed away; he was one of my favourite Hungarian writers. But while talking about him online, I found out one of his last books was about his relationship and connection with three other Hungarian writers; one of those writers was Péter Esterházy, a writer I have known for a long time.  I have his best-known book, Celestial Harmonies, on my TBR an epic book but it made me wonder what else was out there from him, and I found this secondhand. I have always loved the old Quartet edition books, so it seemed a perfect pick. It is also known for its unusual typography and having black edges arou nd the edge of the book, like you used to see on traditional mourning stationery in the Victorian period

Mother’s doctor watched us from the door. We couldn’t tell a thing from his face. He was a friend of my brother’s.

“Your mother, she’s got death in her innards.” That’s what he said. I didn’t like his tone. A man shouldn’t side with death, put himself on a par with it. Even if he’s a doctor—in other words, even if he knows a trick or two, if he sometimes sees the emperor has no clothes. “Your mother might hurry her death along,” he said, nodding, and when I glared at him, he added theatrically, “No need to be shocked. I’m a Voltairian.” “I see,” I nodded back, offended. “Neither death nor its master, God, takes us seriously. There is only one response worthy of man. Not to take them seriously.” I was afraid of him.

When I looked at him, which I tried desperately not to do, I felt I’d known him for a thousand years, and I had a disagreeable thought: Death is something you have to want.

This is a short novella from Esterházy that is far more complex than many longer books.

The book is unusual in the way it is set out and is about how a family is coping with the death of the mother of the family.  The father has called the children to the mother’s dying bedside in the hospital; it has the story of the mother drifting in and out of life in the hospital, her point of view on how she is being treated and how the family is around her.  Then there is the interaction between the siblings called to the mother’s bedside, and then a third narrative around what seem to be snippets of text, remembered passages. I’m not sure if this is Esterhazy remembering verses as he sat by his own mother’s bed as she died, or the mother remembering the passages. The book is about how we see our parents, how sibling relationships can simmer on for years, and also about how bloody awful and just dreadful dying can be when drawn out by someone’s bedside. I looked back at those last few hours of my own mothers life as I watched her drift away from me.

GOLD-DUST MANE STEPS OUT OF A LEAFY BOWER. TERRIFIED, PIERROT TOSSES THE REST OF HIS FLOWERS TO THE WINDS AND TRIES TO FLEE, BUT JUMPING A BARRIER HE GETS STUCK LIKE A HALF-OPEN PENKNIFE AND HIS TROUSERS BURST WITH AN INDECENT BANG IN AT LEAST A HUNDRED PLACES. THE HERALDIC LION, LOOKING ON WITH AN IRONIC SMILE, DAINTILY REMOVES ITS GLOVES AND PROCEEDS TO VIOLATE THE HELPLESSLY DANGLING PIER-ROT….
THE PUBLIC IS AMAZED AT THE BOLDNESS OF IT ALL.

There is two narratives the family and these other snippets.

This book reminded me how much great Hungarian fiction I still have to read. I feel another Hungarian lit month coming on sometime!

The book seems to be drawn in part from Esterházy’s own life and the death of his mother, but with extra characters thrown in, like siblings. I see the third lot of text has been connected by a number of Hungarian readers to, in fact, the other writers that Nadas wrote about in his book My Dead Friends. This book captures how we deal with death, both the good and =bad parts of it; how it can be like open-heart surgery for the family and how it can spew up the past of those connected to those dying and then you add in the third section of the passages snippets of writers from Hungary, it makes this a complex book that maybe needs multiple readings and a Deeper knowledge of the writer but also the time he lived in.  Then also a wider knowledge of the writers’ passages he includes in the book? Esterhazy is a writer I need to read more from; his best-known book also seems to deal with his own family’s past and their place within Hungarian society. Have you read any other of his books?  Would you take part in another Hungarian Lit month?

 

 

The revolt of the animals by Wladyslaw Reymont

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The revolt of the animals by Wladslaw Reymont

Polish Fiction

Original title – Bunt

Translator – Charles S Kraszewski

Source – Review copy

I was sent this ages ago, and it wasn’t til just before I went away that I had read the book by Laxness. I wanted to try another old Nobel winner I remembered I had been sent this: the last book by the Polish writer Wladyslaw Reymont. A writer from a down-at-heel noble family, trained as a tailor, but then drifting through work as a gatekeeper and actor. This variety led him to try his hand at writing: he began with short stories, then moved to longer works of social realism, where he saw how disadvantaged the poor classes were. This is his final novel, often compared to Orwell’s Animal Farm, although he wrote it before that book.

 

She was roaring so, as was the boy, screaming his head off in a vain attempt to free himself from her iron claws.

It was such a furious to-do that the whole manor grounds erupted in a chaos of terror. The dogs began to yank at their chains and howl. A riot of terrified clucking shook the hen-houses.  With a screech, all the guinea fowl flapped up to the roof, and the pigeons took cover in the trees near the well. The tom turkeys, wattles and tails ruffled, gobbled like mad, hopping in place from foot to foot, menacingly. The peacocks rushed near from beneath the porch, throwing a fit with their contemptuous cries. The lady of the manor herself emerged from her rooms; the young master ran up with a flintlock; the little misses too, clutching their dolls, and two ruddy dachshunds, squirming like snakes.

At last she let him go, giving way to the flood of tears

and protests.

Rex watches this

The book is often compared to Orwell’s Animal Farm, even though this was written before that book

The book was written shortly after the events in Russia with the Bolshevik revolution. He uses a dog called Rex that, when the book opens, is attacked by his masters and is cast out of the manor where he has lived as he recovers in the wild from his injuries, we see him decide the humans are the problem for the animal world.  As he talks to his fellow animals, a plan, an idea, slowly forms for him to lead.  Well, he isn’t initially keen to lead them, but when he does, he becomes the leader of the animals, both those in the manor he knew and those wild animals. But as with the actual events in Russian and later in Animal Farm, things turn dark after they take over. It is a study on how power holds and changes people or a dog called Rex

 

The days that followed were hard ones, and Rex hovered between life and death. His wounds bit inward at him, the sun gnawed at him mercilessly, the flies gave him no peace

– but neither did the fatal sorrow he felt at his abandonment.

Only the nights brought the sacred grace of cool and relief. Dummy would run up with food and water, passing long hours weeping over their common wretchedness. For he had learned that they were on the hunt for Rex, to kill him, and he too was to be driven away from the manor.

Tll just go off to the ponds. What do I care?’ the boy decided. But I feel bad for you, you orphan. You’ve got to go off into the wide world — what’ll you do?’ he said in despair.

“Let me just get well again, Rex moaned, licking the boy out of gratitude

Rex is the main character in this book and could easily be compared with Napoleon, though he starts off like Boxer in Orwell’s book.

I did go down a rabbit hole when I read this to see whether Orwell had read or known of this book when he wrote Animal Farm, some twenty years after the book came out.  But there is no evidence he owned or read the book; there is a question of whether he heard of it through Polish friends, but no evidence to back that up.  But the two books are different.  This book is more like the first section of Animal Farm, The Uprising, but it also shows how power and leadership can corrupt those in power. It doesn’t have a third act in it. Then there are the different classes of the two writers: Reymont is from the nobility, and that may shine a light on his take on how revolution goes, as it may show it is just a change of leader, not always how people or animals are treated.  This is also near Eastern European fables and traditions in the way it is written.  It also captures the events of 1917 soon after they happened, from someone closer to the events than Orwell was.  That said, the book was banned for many years by the communists. A lesser-known Nobel winner, and thankfully we have a recent new edition of his best-known work, The Peasants, from Penguin in the last couple of years. Have you read any of hisd works?

Love by Péter Nádas

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Love by Péter Nádas

Hungarian fiction

Original title: Love

Translator: Imre Goldstein

Source – Personal copy

I was sad to hear of the passing of Péter Nádas late last month. I first became aware of him when I was offered the chance to review his Magnum opus, Parallel Stories, a book that covered post-war Hungary in a labyrinthine, dark way. I have since reviewed another of his books and have a few on my TBR.  So I decided to pick this, a shorter book by him, and an earlier book in his canon.  He still has a couple of books he has written and i was talking online about this and found one had been brought and another was still awaiting a publisher if anyone would consider that be great it is his account of his relatiohnship with three other hungarian writers including Peter Esterhazy whom I will be reviewing later this month.

oh my, your body is full of little bits of

compressed air! oh my, my body is full oh boy got it made

I’ve

got it made

I’m dropping and rising to the rhythm of her voice,

up and down; it’s sliding, like the sled, in and out; when it’s out, it brings on the desire to penetrate; when it’s in, the desire to get out; up and down; rising and falling, like the elevator; but now I know what I’ve seen, it was me, the symbol of my own movements in the sled and the elevator; and that means 1 am inside her body. But then I should be feeling it! In the rhythm of my movements I hear her approaching voice oh boy

I’ve got itmade

The book is typeset with gaps almost like he is thinking or drifting at times

As I said, Love is so different from the other two books I have read by him; the main character is going to visit his girlfriend to break up with her. But when he rolls a joint, the book becomes like a fever dream, a trip where the narrator questions his existence, that of his girlfriend and what love is the book has an almost recurring feel at time of that state of being stoned of being slightly paranoid in a place where there is just him and the girlfriend the state isn’t there but the paranoia is still there.  We feel an almost slow-motion at times, where things take pages and pages to happen, almost as though we are in the state of being stoned, as the reader with him, a man in a relationship he wants to be out of but can’t get out of. You almost get the sickly grass-smoke scent of the pages as you read.

I can see. I can see her face, too. She is

looking. Looking at something. If she is above me, then she must be bending over me. If she is bending over me, then I must be lying here in bed. The place where I lay down, on my back. Then the pillow must be under my head.

“Don’t you feel

well? Are you unwell, dear?”

I can see the soft movements of

the mouth, I can hear what I see, and what I see and hear are wrapped around me as a palpable body, though it’s not palpable, it’s only something I see and hear

“I should be doing some-

thing, I must feel!”

“Are you unwell? Don’t you feel well,

dear?”

unwell? from her voice, from the look in her eyes I can feel that something has happened to me, and whatever it is, it makes her worry. But I don’t know why, after all I feel very good.

“Are you feeling bad, dear?”

The recurrent thoughts at times like her as he looks unwell to her at times

 

Nadas said he was trying to get in those spaces where the state couldn’t; he did something similar with a lot of the sexual scenes in Parallel stories.  He was trying to break the realist, communist-approved style of writing with this book.  It captures how it feels to be stoned well.  I was reminded of the way Cărtărescu used a similar style, if a little more surreal, in Solenoid to almost break the state censorship of writing and get into those spaces the state can’t be. For me, it reminds me of those hazy days of my late teens, where I would be sat with friends listening to Pink Floyd whilst stoned; there is a sense of the paranoia you can have, but also the way time bends in those moments where seconds seem like hours, which he captures very well in this book.  It captures a broken relationship in a broken country at the time, as the narrator hunts for purpose in life and love in a broader sense.  Have you read Nádas, or do you have a favourite Hungarian writer?

 

Dying in Toronto by Daša Drndič

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Dying in Toronto or  Our Lady of Czestochowa is still shedding tears by Daša Drndič

Croatian Memoir

Original title – Marija Częstohowska još uvijek roni suze ili Umiranje u Torontu

Translator – Celia Hawkesworth

Source – Review copy

I have long been a fan of Drdric’s books and of her as a person after meeting her many years ago. I was so pleased that we are getting some more of her work in English; she was a writer who arrived maybe too late to us in English, with her book Trieste being the one that finally brought her to the English-speaking world.  This book follows a couple of years she lived in Exile in Canada. The longer title refers to an Icon in the city of Czestochowa that is said to look down on the Balkans; it is venerated by both the Catholic and Orthodox churches. This book is set during the Serb/Croat war years.

TV NEWS ITEM

A Canadian, M. B., has patented a white wine ice-cream on a little stick from a vine, covered in chocolate. White wine ice-cream on a little stick from a vine, covered in chocolate, has become a mega hit. In some restaurants, that ice-cream is now licked on a massive scale. Glasses are used for water.

This news item made me smile some of them were funny others captures moments in time

The book follows Dasa and her daughter as they end up in Toronto.  The book is a clever mix of social observation as an outsider in Canada and of how the country first views itself as part of the New World, with insights only someone from outside the country can make.  How Dasa and he daughter settle.  The cost of exile: that longing for home in a foreign place.  Then a mix of news items as we follow her over the course of a year, first making connections, finding connections to home: paper groups of fellow exiles, news from home, to food.  Being in this new city with its own way of life, she is a great observer of people and how the country tries to help them blend in. Then a scattering of news items from near and far, rather like what Uwe Johnson did in his diaries using a clip from the New York Times every day.

Then, bookshops. The World’s Biggest Bookstore has seventeen miles of shelves and more than a million volumes, classified in fifty sections. There are smaller bookshops that are huge, there are children’s bookshops, technical, medical, art bookshops. Everything here is huge (perhaps because of the huge consumption). There are huge jars of mayonnaise (two litres), boxes of ice-cream (five), baking powder (a kilo-gram), pizzas (the size of Turkish cheese pie tins), children’s strollers (for six babies), and some people (men and women) are gigantic, with waists measuring three metres. Both fruit and vegetables are huge, but they’re bought infrequently, because they’re expensive. All this food lasts a long time and doesn’t spoil, it’s well preserved, so you only need to buy fresh supplies once or twice a month.

I love the sound of the worlds biggest bookshop

 

I will now share my take on the book and how I connected with it. I have never lived in Exile exactly, but I did live in Germany from 1992-1994 not exile, but I could connect with the loss of things you love, from food to the newspaper.  I used German papers for the English football scores, and I have always bought papers at the weekend.  But during this time, I was also working at the Jugendwerkstatt, which is how I ended up in Germany.  I worked with Dalibor, a Bosnian Croat refugee in exile.  We worked well; he spoke English better than my German and Croat.  We worked on making an air pipeline and talked about being away from family in a new place.  Then I worked in a factory and again fell in with someone from the Balkans, this time Avni.  He was a man who had worked in Kosovo on their TV football show, and we loved chatting about English footballers. He also talked about football in Kosovo.  So Dasa’s insights hit home.  I was reminded of another book I read a number of years ago, Globetrotting, that saw the Serbian in Banff observing Canada and the area from a Balkan perspective.  This was one of two books she wrote whilst there, the other being Canzone di guerra, I think this is a book that captures being an exile so well from the many ways it happens to effect you lose of place of those little things you know lose of community and then being an outsider in a totlay new place and al l this with a daughter that is becoming a teen at the same time  I have now reviewed both books here. I do hope we get to see the other books from Dasa that are still to be translated at some point!!

Too Great a sky by Lilana Corobca

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Too Great a sky by Liliana Corobca

Moldovan fiction

Original title – Capătul drumului

Translator – Monica Cure

Source – Personal copy

I have been meaning to get to the seven-story releases in the UK. There have been a number of books they have brought out in the last few years that have caught my eye, especially two by this writer, Lilana Corobca, as she is put down as a Moldovan writer and sometimes as a Romanian, but for this post, I am putting her as Moldovan, as it is my first book from that country. She studied in Moldova and has since been heavily involved in a project on Soviet censorship and has written several books on it. She has also written several novels.  She previously published a novel in English, The Censor’s Notebook, which won the Oxford Weidenfeld Prize.  She has also had her books translated into a number of other languages.

The train sometimes slowed down and barely, barely kept going, like a cart being pulled by tired nags, and sometimes sped up, quickly, quickly, and flew like a rocket. Dazed by the perpetual movement of the wheels that continually rattled us, we were surprised that we didn’t become completely tongue-tied. When the train would stop close to human dwellings, the people would come out, theyd cross themselves at the sight of us and they’d bring us something out of the little they had. Usually they’d bring us water, well water, not river water. When we stopped next to a pond, we rushed out toward it, though we weren’t steady on our feet. We stuck our heads in the water, guzzled it, as if we were cattle. We couldn’t get enough, we splashed ourselves, washed ourselves, and cooled off, because who knew when wed have water again and how much longer it would be until the end of the road.

On the train ride to Kazakhstan

The book is told in three sections that cover an event in Romanian history during World War II in which the Soviets ordered thousands of Romanians to board trains and take a three-week journey across Russia to Kazakhstan. The book is seen through the eyes of eleven-year-old Ana as she and her family are loaded into an old boxcar in their village of Bucovina and then spend the next three weeks fighting off hunger, lack of facilities, and people dying. The dead are thrown off the train every time they stop. The desperation is met with stories and poems filling the air, keeping the horrors out of minds, but it also shows the community coming together in this collective horror through Her Young’s eyes.  The middle section captures the harsh world the group of incomers end up in a remote Kazakh country where the Romanians have no real belongings, so not only did it cost lives to get there, but then there is a harsh winter yet to face. The last part is told from an equally spirited young member of an ana family, her great granddaughter has been tasked with persuading the no old Ana to move to a nursing home, seeing the sight of her life looking back on those war years.

After my mother died, I went to my aunt so we could search for our Zenovie together. There were other mothers searching as we were, they’d all help each other, they’d exchange information, Sancira, finally, found the orphanage, she had been able to trace where the truck had gone, but finding a child then was harder than finding a needle in a haystack. On the lists and in the children’s documents, there wasn’t a single Bucovinian, everyone being divided into two nationalities: those with narrow eyes, Kazakhs; the others, Russians. All the boys were Ivanov or Petrov, with first names like Ivan, Kosta, Gena, Grisha, given at random, because no one cared what they were called back home, and the little children themselves couldn’t say what their names were, because they didn’t speak a word of Russian and, in any case, no one cared.

Their ages weren’t written down correctly either, just made up.

Many were skinny and seemed younger. When Sancira saw this, she was determined to look at all of them, so she could recognize her child’s face on her own. She went child by child, but she didn’t find hers.

Later on in the book recounting those events in the present day !

What Liliana Corobca has done is capture a small, unknown episode of the war. Taken it, and with Ana as the main character, she has caught a world I knew nothing about. But through Anas’ eyes, the three-week train ride is brutal, but in that way a child views the world. The events are seen, but the sheer horror of them isn’t there if that makes sense. It’s viewed by her young eyes as people disappear, thrown off along the way, then the horror of landing in a place where the locals hate you and then to be hit with the harshness of the winter, it’s just added to everything. It is later on in the book when she is at the end of her l,ife the events are brought into the full sight sas she recalls them for her great graddaughter. The book was inspired by the testimonies of those who rode the trains at the time. The book, in parts, also captures the power of faith and how they all still believed in god after all this had happened to them. Have you read any of her books or any other writers from Moldova ?

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 ?