Tag: eastern european

Summer of Caprice by Vladislav Vančura

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Summer of Caprice by Vladislav Vančura

Czech Lit

Original title – Rozmarné léto

Translator – Mark Corner

Source – Personal copy

I move on to the third book for Czech Lit Month and to one of the best-known writers from the first half of the 20th Century, Vladislav Vančura. He was firstly a doctor, then started writing short stories in the twenties and then a novel and several novels. He also wrote plays and film scripts. He is best known for his novel Marketa Lazarova, a book I hope to review this month as well. His fourth novel was made into a film in the sixties by the same director who closely observed trains. I have tried to find it online, but it seems to be on a dvd collection from a number of years ago. Have you watched the film? He sadly lost his life at the hands of the Nazis in the second world war.

OF MATTERS CONTEMPORARY AND A PRIEST
At this moment Canon Gruntley, who held the moral life in higher esteem than any other man, appeared on the embankment bordering the other side of the river. While he was reciting some poem or prayer appropriate to the hour of day, time granted him the opportunity to peek in all directions. In this particular location it was not difficult to set eyes upon the master of bathing ceremonies, Antony Hussey, his tongue protruding from his lips and his moist eyes fastened upon a small glass.

The cannon lives by the river near where Anthony works as a pool superviser by the pool near the river.

This a short book that seems to capture a small town in the Czech hinterlands is told in vignettes that follow a group of characters in Little  Karlsbad when one June, a mysterious Magician and his assistant girlfriend upset the daily c=going on in this sleepy village. Anthony Hussey looks after the pool near the river, and his wife, the cannon, and a Major are all in this sleepy village as we see them going around their everyday lives when Ernest and Anna turn up. They perform, and odd things Happen: Anthony and  Anna are caught together. The Cannon wants to talk to the Magician about his act. The events are left open and we have to fill in gaps between the vignettes of what has happened. This is a clever little book, as it seems epic in its own small scale. One of those books that take time to digest and seem so much more than the mere seventy pages this is.

 

“I’ve been all over the place,” replied the magician with a touch of uncertainty, “but if there’s a lot of talk about someone, it probably isn’t about me! I turned up at nine o’clock with our waggon. We have established ourselves in the square. From there, having spent a few moments in the office of a gentleman who acts as police constable, I came to this riverside resort. However, if there is some swindler here passing himself off as a magician, then I will have no alternative but to leave, without arranging any performance and without taking the waters.”
“There’s no need for impatience,” responded the lady.
“Who’s been saying such things? You are with us now and this is where you will be staying.

When they meet Ernest they have some quqestions about who he is is he a magician.

People turning up out of the blue is a clever framing device. I think of Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance, which sees a circus turn up and upset a village. Here, it is more subtle. This is a sleepy village with underlying issues between the main characters as we see the inner workings of the three characters and their families. But if you read between the lines of what you are told.in the vignettes. The village initially reminds me of the sort of village Agatha Christie would describe as the peace of the interwar years. This is a subtle tale of three characters as we see their world shift when a couple arrive. This is a story told in fifty clips. The little polaroids of what happens let you, the reader, try and fill the gaps in that way; it is hard to think this book is nearly 100 years old and, in many ways, is very cutting edge in style. If Laszlo Kraznahorkai would write a twee village novel, this would be it. It is a hard book as it has little action. But there is also some village humour at times as we see a sleepy village where these caught may know this is it for them.  It is glimpses glances at the village over the three days in June as an outsider appears to them. Have you read this book?

Winston score – A – An unusual book from one of the great Czech writers.

The Golden Age by Michal Ajvaz

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The Golden Age by Michal Ajvaz

Czech Literature

Original title –Zlatý věk

Translator – Andrew Oakland

Source – Personal copy

Well, I’m back after my holiday refreshed and on to the second book for Czech Lit month and it is another from the Dalkey Archive Czech lit series. This is from the Czech Magic realist writer Michal Ajvaz, who is from a family of Russian exiles he has won a number of major prizes in his homeland. He has written essays on Derrida a book-length meditation on Borges and a study on the art of seeing these in ways that can all be seen in this novel of a mystical island a travelogue from a man who ended up on the island and came back.

There is no money on the island, a fact which in the 1960s provoked a French writer of the Left to produce an article which makes a point of describing the island’s society as a prototype for selfless brotherhoods of the future. The fallacy at the centre of his thesis is quite laughable: the islanders had not the remotest interest in philanthropy and humanism; indeed, their language possessed no words to give expression to these concepts. While the islanders absolute lack of appreciation for the accumulation of money was estimable and did much to clarify their behaviour, it was also connected with features of their character which were more difficult to take and by which I was often exasperated. Money is nothing but a pile of memory and anticipation by which we unchain ourselves from our given circumstances; the accumulation of money is a form of asceticism which holds back forces so that these may later form new shapes and deeds.

The ideal of the island had gripped others over time.

Our narrator tells of this unnamed island in the middle of the Atlantic. The city Built on the island has a European feel but the island is a community that has grown up to be something else it has its own ways customs and language he describes this and the first part of the book is him recalling g the island in that way like a travelogue but as he moves on his mind wanders and the prose becomes meandering as he becomes more involved in the island the royal family and the way the islanders are the way this world had grown up with a placid laid back way of life it appears on the surface a utopia a magical island but as the book goes on it shows that what at first seems very perfect to our narrator’s eyes the reality of the place settles in as he digresses into the island life opens up and he hears other tales of how they end up on the island.

 

Perhaps, dear reader, you think that as I write my mind is filled with visions of the island, that nothing is important to me except the efforts to fish out of memory clearly-drawn pictures of the landscape of the island.Perhaps you think I consider you a remote figure, unreal or bothersome, a figure that disturbs my dreams and at whose behest I have to demean and exert myself by transferring glowing images into dark, clumsy words, to bind in the manacles of grammar and syntax the free, light motions of the waves, sands, and winds that linger in my memory. Perhaps you think that because of this I hate you, that I consider you the agent of my misfortune, that I sit at my computer keyboard-whose gentle tapping beneath my fingers is transformed into the sounds of gravel underfoot on the scorched paths of the island’s rocks- hatching plans which do you harm, which use language to ensnare.

I loved the way he broke the fourth wall here in the way he is overcome with visions of the island.

This is a book that captures the myth of Atlantis For example there is many an island as a utopia throughout literature around the world perfect place and this is an example pot this but is also a magic realist work so is it a Utopia or just our narrators fever dream a island mirage ?. This is a place that may appear to be perfect. this is a book that drifts initially it is like a travel guide but then we see our narrator start to drift in his writing as he goes from one side story to the next later in the book. Is utopia where they have nothing to do but observe the world around them or is it maybe that makes it more the book is one that is written as thou the writer has lost himself in the book it seems which to me is a huge nod towards Borges a man that loved books labyrinths it is also about how we see the world around us. Have you read this or any of his other books?

Winstons score – =+ Mystery Island is it utopia or a fever dream?

 

Case Closed by Patrik Ouredník

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Case Closed by Patrik Ouredník

Czech  fiction

Original title -Ad acta

Translator – Alex Zucker

Source – Personal copy

I decided to do Czech Lit Month partly because of this and a few other books that I have purchased over the last few years from Czech writers but have yet to get to. Patrik Ourenik has written about 20 books. He has also translated many books from Czech to French and the other way around. He emigrated to France initially as a chess consultant and then as an editor and literature head of l’autre Europe He is known for his use of various genres, literary forms and wordplay, and this book is a perfect example of that as it plays with the crime genre and uses a lot of wordplay as we go to Post Communist Prague. A cat and Mouse that maybe is more about the appearance of things than things happening. She could have lifted her skirt, mused Dyk. Just for a second, what harm would it have done her? There was no one else around.

She could have shown me her pussy and I would have told her how to get to the Academy. Maybe she wasn’t wearing panties either.
What harm would it have done her? Third right. Serves her right.
Not that Dyk had anything against beetles. At one point, in the depths of the last century, he had even had a collection of them and gone to the park every Sunday with a pair of tweezers, a pincushion with various sizes of safety pins, and a bottle of ink with a screw-on top. Most of his collection consisted of ground beetles and pine sawyers.

Dyks thoughts after he’d been ask directions worrying but does it meean more!

The book opens with annotations of a chess match, then we meet Viktor Dyk as he is sitting on a bench as is asked for directions from a tourist or a student, but then there are a few unsettling comments after that, and that is how we are launched into this odd crime book well, is it a crime book the other main character is an inspector Lebeda in fact this is like a game of chess as we move on Dyk we find has never really grown close to his son. What we get is a chess game of a crime novel, or is it a crime novel. With a rape of a student, she is a  tourist on her way to an exhibition of Warhol pictures, then a band of gipsies. Also, some graffiti appears on walls with a political nature to them, a mix of satire of the time the book was written just after Czech gained its freedom, two men in a chess-like chase who is who and what is the truth.

.Vilém Lebeda walked down Old Post Office Street and headed for a vegetable stand to buy some tomatoes. A few days earlier, he had decided to take a stab at making his own tomato juice. The rotten tomatoes were carefully tucked away underneath the good ones, an effect of the last revolution; under the old regime they didn’t bother with such formalities. Lebeda bought two kilos of tomatoes from a grumpy man with dirty nails and then went on his way. Two- and four-legged beasts, dubious creatures of various genders and faiths, moved sluggishly through the sunbaked streets. The retirees’ club resided on the ground floor of a nondescript prewar apartment building on Halek Street.

The other main character this passage made me smile the making tomato juice bit.

This is a clever book that plays with the form of a book. You get this as its writer has translated a lot of leading French experimental writers to Czech Queneau, Simon, Beckett and also a number of experimental Czech writers into French. This is a chess match of a book. Each chapter is like a square of prose itself a little gem that, like a game of chess, you never quite see how it is going to end is it even a crime novel yes there is evidence of a crime, but is it there to be solved or is it just about the post soviet period and what happened. All is revealed but is it I loved this it is a playful book that makes you, as the reader, think about thevents as we get other stories and other characters in the short choppy chapters. This is a mix of Noir, hardboiled crime comedy and Prague if Kingsley Amis and Agathe Christie had a bastard love child that had been abandoned at a platform on the Orient Express like Prague, he’d written this book weaned on a diet of chess and his parent’s novels they’d spat this book out. A gem from the Dalkey Archive

Winston score – +A fun and playful book in post-Soviet Prague as a twisted crime novel with two main characters

Tranquility by Attila Bartis

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Tranquility by Attila Bartis

Hungarian fiction

Original title – A nyugalom

Translator – Irme Goldstein

Source – Personal copy

I have had this on my shelves since it won the best-translated book prize in 2008. It is a book I got and then just kept pushing back sometimes I find myself worrying that books are above me well not above me but the way IO process and talk about the books this is less than it was years ago as now I don’t really care what other people think as I feel now I have carved my own niche in the blogging world. So when this was mentioned in the recent Mookse podcast and there was a new book coming out after 14 years I thought I might pull this book down from the shelves. So when I saw Attila Bartis had been compared to Thomas Bernhard on the back cover I thought why had to wait Sio long in the time it had sat on the shelves it had also been made into a film he had written another novel the one that is coming out later this year he is also a photograph and playwright. Have you ever had books you think are above you then get to and think why did I wait so long.

There was no need for an obituary because for a decade and a half, she had had no acquaintances, and I didn’t want anybody, except Eszter, to come to the cemetery. I hate death notices; there were about thirty of them in Mother’s desk drawer. They forgot to remove her name from a few mailing lists and the mailman brought one even the year before last, which she kept reading for days,”Poor little Winkler, how cleverly he portrayedHarpagon; isn’t life just awful, even to great actors like him, and there are no exceptions? Terrible. Simply terrible. Don’t forget Son, today Winkler, tomorrow you. In this, there are no exceptions.”

A sign if how long his mother had been his Burden most of his adult life.

It is hard not to compare this to Bernard as Andor our main character in their book. He lives in a cramped apartment at the constant beck and call of his mother Rebecca a former stage actress who has now become a shut in living the world via her children this is Andor’s other problem he has a sister Judit who had managed to escape her mother and is a hugely successful musician on the Violin and had managed to escape Hu nary and lived in exile. Leaving Andor in her shadow as he tries to live his life. the book is formed of vignettes almost that jump in time the book opens as he is burying his mother/ He the recounts their lives together and how when he finally found a girl how hard to was for him to try and introduce her to his Mother and how Mother was going to react to ESTER this is a story full l of dark humour and characters ion the edge a woman stuck in a house for to extended living on her glamorous past. A man trapped between his mother and lover adds to a cleverly timed and darkly comic work.

The barmaid has grown used to my sitting in the corner for hours, often without ordering anything. Occasionally she’d empty the ashtray, and once she brought me some peanuts.

“What’s up, the wife kicked you out?” she asked.

“I have no wife,” I said.

“But you look exactly as if she did,” she said and went back behind the counter.

Andor I had a real picture of him here I’ve seen many a loner like him in the pub over the years.

I get the Bernhard comparison Andor is a writer and has a level of bile in his life that is similar to Bernard’s characters. He is also a writer which is another nod to Bernhard’s characters. But for me, I kept thinking of Andor as a sort of Hungarian Ronnie Barkers Timothy for people to young or not familiar with this character from the sitcom Sorry in the UK he lived with an overbearing mother who at every turn tried to scupper Timothy Devolping as a person, especially in his love life. This is the same with Andor and his mother it is a very stifling relationship for him he isn’t trapped in the flat but trapped in a vicious cycle of being her son and carer. This is a compelling read I hate putting it down I just want to read on every time I was dropped into his world. I can’t wait for the next book and I tell you it will take less than 14 years to read and be on the blog. Have you read this or have a favourite Hungarian writer?

Winstons score – +A if you love Bernhard and Sorry you will love this book !!

 

Czech Lit Month September 2023

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I have opted to miss Spanish lit month for a couple years Richard, my co-host, isn’t blogging these days and I like a new Challenge so How did I come about Czech Lit Month. This will show how lateral my mind can be I have been thinking of an autumn project for a while a replacement for Spanish lit month, but I hadn’t intended to do another country month I had wanted something else, but then I was listening to some music and the song from THE film Once the duo of Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová a Czech singer and I remembered there was a couple of albums and they were called the Swell season after Glenn’s favourite book by the Czech writer Josef Škvorecký a writer whose books I loved and that lead to a rabbit hole of Czech Literature. Capek, Hašek, Klima, Hrabal, and Kundera, but there is so many older writers in translation and some great new writers from publishers like  Jantar Books publishing some new voices. Then there is Twisted Spoon have brought out the best of 20th-century avant-grade Czech writing. There is also the best of Modern Czech classic series I have a few from this series. I will be posting updates. I plan a read-along book which I have yet to pick. I also plan to watch a few Czech films over this period as well. Have you a favourite Czech writer or publisher that brings Czech books that I haven’t mentioned. Also, love someone to co-host this with me.

The Boarding House by Piotr Paziński

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The Boarding House by Piotr Paziński

Polish fiction

Original tilte Pensjonat

Translator – Tusia Dąbrowska

Source – Personal copy

I’m going to start to work through some of the many Dalkey Archive books I have brought over the last few years, just a drop in the ocean of what they have published. According to Chad Post, there is well over 1000 title that has come out over the many years the press has run. He is currently putting together that list, and in the meantime, I will cover what I. have. This one jumped out for two reasons it was a European Union book prize winner, an odd book prize that has had several books over the years I have read. The other fact was that Piotr Paziński is a Joyce fan. He has written two books around James Joyce, one a cultural map of Joyce’s Dublin. The other fact os he is editor-in-chief of the Jewish magazine Midrash. This was his debut novel. He has written another since both have been translated into English and are set in the Polish Jewish world. Here we find a grandson heading home to where his grandmother used to live.

IN THE BEGINNING, there were train tracks. In the greenery, between heaven and earth. With stations, like beads on a string, placed so close together that even before the train managed to accelerate, it had to slow down in preparation for the following stop. Platforms made of concrete, narrow and shaky, equipped with ladders and steep steps, grew straight out of sand, as though built on dunes. The stations’ pavilions resembled old-fashioned kiosks: elongated, bent awnings, and azure letters on both ends, which appeared to float on air,

I’ve always enjoyed peering at them, beginning with the first station outside the strict limits of the city, when the crowded urban architecture quickly thins out and the world expands to an uncanny size.

The opening as he is on the Train

The book opens as he is on a train, that echo of earlier trains but also his childhood as he starts to count down the stops as he heads back in Journeys through Poland people had made as he sees the stops he had many years earlier also gone past to visit his grandmother at the Pesjonat (boarding house for the old). He is visiting for one last time to see the ghost of the Boarding house but living and dead; as he gets there, he meets two women he vaguely remembers. One talks to him, but the other her mind is gone as they talk about his grandmother and her time in the house. They are all Holocaust survivors like his Grandmother, but age has caught up on them. Even the house itself is caught up in time. He wakes and looks at the stained ceiling of the house. He meets those who remain the doctor, the director. As he drifts back and forth through time as he tries to remember his late grandmother those summers, they also draw him back into those pre-war and war years, and being Jewish is a sort of last call of these memories to pass them on to the next generation.

“Do you see? And how can you talk to her? She’s lost it completely! Do you understand? This is impossible!” She held me under my arm.

“She knew your grandmother, you know?” she didn’t stop talking. She dug into my arm and told me to turn around as if she wanted to go back to the house already. “She remembers everything very well, but right now she isn’t doing so well. She’s lost her mind a little.”

She stopped to size me up properly.

“Why did you come? For the company? Almost no one is left here, each week they’re taking someone. I also don’t know how long I will stick around. And the young ones aren’t eager to come, so what will you do here? It’s boring to be around old people. Come, you will walk me upstairs now.”

We tottered down the path. The doors were open.

Meeting people that knew his grandmother well but are dying out or forgeting her.

This book tackles being Jewish now in Poland, a smaller community but one heavily tied to the past, but this is the point the guard is changing those last survivors are dying, and the world they grew up in and that past is in a generation now gone. I remember meeting Aharon Appelfeld the Romania – Israeli Jewish writer he was at the IFFP the year he won the prize to briefly chat and hear him talk was an opportunity that is rare these days as so few survivors left. I was also reminded of the words of Dasa Drndric forget this happening, and you open the door to it happening again! But the main thing in this book is a personal feeling. This may be Piotr’s journey on the train, a relative living in the country, or as he said to his translator, the Borsch belt that made me smile. These houses are typical in the middle European countryside, and as it says, this community of survivors’ stories needs protection. A book that has a whiff of folk tales to it as we see a man drift through time. My only complaint is that it could have been a bit more beefed out.

Winstons score -A solid book would have loved a little more!

That was the month that Was May 23

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  1. 533 A Book of Days by Cees Nooteboom
  2. I’ll do anything you want by Iolanda Batallé
  3. I served the king of England by Bohumil Hrabal 
  4. Liminal by Roland Schimmelpfennig
  5. Balkan Bombshells Female writing from Serbia and Montenegro 
  6. The Most Precious of Cargoes by Jean-Claude Grumberg 
  7. All the devils are Here by David Seabrook

Well, the month started with a series of vignettes from the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom. Then we headed to Spain, and a woman’s a sexual awakening as she discovered her sexual side. Then a waiter climbs the ladder in the inter-war years but the dark shadows of world war two are already there. Then a failed detective finds out why a dead woman in a wedding dress drifts past some clubbers. Then Istros book has collected together the cream of Balkan female voices in a new collection. Then a fable-like tale of a child saved from the horrors of the Holocaust and finally the dark side of the some Kent seaside town. I read books from seven countries this month. There is no new publishers this month.

Book of the month

I had to pick Balakn Bombshells. This is a month that has been strong on the blog I can’t remember a month with so many great books reviewed. But this captures the voices of the top writers in Serbia. The dark years of the break of Yugoslavia are there, but also a sense of writers breaking free of that of women writing about being woman female issues/

Non-book events

I had a post around my favourite podcast this month, which I have been listening podcast a lot more recently.I think this will show as I aim to head into the world of Marias a bit more. I also caught Peter Davison Campion again, which I had not seen for years, and I had mistaken a crime journalist that had worn a Campion tie thinking it was a Kames Joyce tie many years ago at a crime writing meal I got invited to. Amanda and I have watched a couple of series; ten pound poms followed a group of people that followed the Aussie dream for various reasons, a sort of call the midwife in the Sun, almost that Sunday night sort of show, but it was fun. We are now halfway through Small Light which uses Mieps Gies the woman that helps hide the Franks during world war two it is a new take on the story that shows their world of being Dutch and under Nazis rules the different attitudes to the events. Music wise I’ve been on a retro kick a lot of Fury in the Slaughterhouse, Pet shop boys, Depeche Mode, and the month finished off with a new album from Califone, a band that I have loved for years, and this is maybe their best album.

Next month Book wise

I have a backlog of 16 books to review, as I have just read the 50th book of the year and have reviewed 34 this year. This includes the last of the bookers to review. We announced the Shadow winner this month. I also have a couple of classics. Then a couple of new books. Mostly from Europe, but I need to catch up, so I hope to do so this month. I’m of the mind to read a couple of really long books this month. I fancy Shira by SY Agnon, and maybe another to help catch up on the review backlog, and summer nights are great for reading longer books. What are your plans for the next month?

Balkan Bombshell women’s writing from Serbia and Montenegro

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Balkan Bombshells Contemporary Women’s writing from Serbia and Montenegro

Serbian and Montenegro fiction

Translator (also compiled by )

Source – review copy

I am late to review this book I had half-read it before the move and fell in love with the collection of writers Will had chosen to assemble in this collection of  17  contemporary writers from the Balakns. As many of you may know, I have long been a fan of  Istros books for several years and have kindly been sent most of the books over the years to review here on the blog. So there were a few of the writers in this collection I had come across as they had been brought out before from ISTROS and also in the Peter Owen Istros collection that came out a few years ago. But most of the writers were new to me and showed me the strength and breadth of Balkan writing. So I finally picked it up this week and started the book again and worked through the collection I will only mention a few stories; I always loved to leave most of a collection like this to be discovered by other readers.

The man in question had chosen the biggest piglet on the farm, paid a good price for it and then sat down in the yard to taste Budimir’s rakija. ‘Nenad, he said, shaking Marijana’s hand and smiling to reveal a few bad teeth. Ma-riiana didn’t dare to speak while Nenad talked about his house in the forest, far from the village and the neighbours.

‘It’s peaceful and quiet where I am, he said and looked at Marijana. ‘Do you also like peace and quiet?’

Marijana meets the Forester that wants her hand in Marrige will it work out

The opening story is of a girl unmarried Marijana, a poor girl; it seems as if the first thing we are told is everything she could own would fit in a blue Bag a friend had brought her back from Macedonia. Her brother like Bikes, but she loves to bake. The locals are always asking when she will get married and are told when the right man comes along. So when a forester comes and asks for her hand in marriage, she is off to the hills is he the one she has waited for ? Bojana Babic’s story is simple but has an undercurrent to it. Next is a fever dream of a story. We meet Bambi as she enter a grey house, but as she does, it seems to move around her she bumps into people. Something is happening next. She is on the toilet, and has she had an abortion? This unnerving story from Zvanka Gazivoda reminds me of those great Argentina writers of recent years. The last story I will discuss is about someone returning to Belgrade after spending a long time in Canada due to the war. But as she arrives in Serbia, it is precisely the same time as Slobodan Milošević has died so how those she knew before have changed over the years she has been away? The people she knew had either gone and fought elsewhere, shrunk as people or died. The story is first the account of her trip, then the second part is a written letter as an email that arrives simultaneously.

There’s one now who wasn’t there a moment ago. Shorter than Bambi. He comes towards her and Bambi holds out her hand, but he just grabs her upper arm and wants to drag her away. She resists half-heartedly and looks around in wonder, but her friends are busy with themselves – fixing their hair, brushing their sleeves or buttoning up – and now they go for a walk around the house. Skull remains, for-tunately, but he goes to the window opening and lights a cigarette. It’s as if smoking is prohibited inside, so he won’t break the rules. He looks out and doesn’t turn round.

Rain is pouring steadily.

The fever dream of this story it drags you in to Bambi and what is really happening ?

 

I choose three stories as it leaves so many others, and some are great. I like some like the ‘The Title”  as a Mother and Daughter fight over her play’s provocative title. Then folk lore creeps into other stories like young pioneers where old cures can be used to help out. THIS IS A collection that works I often find short story collections can be a little bloated as they try to fit too much into the collection. These work as they are a collection of Amuse Bouche stories sort shot over in a few minutes but leave a lingering taste in your reader’s mouth. This collection shows how strong Balakn’s writing is and also the connections the Translator and Compiler Will has gone around the Balkans to find these solid female voices. Have you a favourite female writer from the Balkans?

Winstons score – A A whistle-stop tour of the best female writers in the Balkans

I served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal

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I served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal

Czech Fiction

Original title – Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále

Translator – Paul Wilson

Source – Personal copy

I am not much of a royalist ut had a fun idea that this book would be perfect for today. I’ve had this on my shelves for a while I have reviewed three other books from Hrabal over the years he is a writer that used to be better known and was one of the leading if not the leading Czech writer of the 20th century. He had studied law before World War Two and qualified after the war but was a man of many jobs a man that loved to hang around pubs this led to the nature of his writing this is a man with the ear for people and the way they act. He was a fan of the book The good soldier Svejk (which I had read many years ago and the character of this book is similar to the main character in this book).

Every morning at six and again in the evening before bedtime the boss would come around, checking to make sure I’d washed my feet, and I had to be in bed by twelve.So I began to keep my ears open and not hear anything and keep my eyes open and not see anything. I saw how neat and orderly everything was, and how the boss didn’t like us to be too friendly with one another, I mean, if the checkout girl went to the movies with the waiter, they’d both be fired on the spot. I also got to know the regular customers who drank at a table in the kitchen, and every day I had to polish their glasses.

In those early years he works hard but sees all that is happening around him.

The book follows Ditie through his life. He starts off as a busboy but he sees the waiters he works in a grand-sounding hotel the Golden Prague but it is more of a small country hotel. He sees rich people having parties and bringing prostitutes for sex this is where he loses his virginity in a brothel. Then as the years go by we see him moving up the ladder as he heads to a larger hotel in the city he finally is a waiter and starts to notice money, a woman. and taking pride in himself. Aspiring to be the Head Waiter one of them leads to the title of the book he had served the King of England. Ditie is a simple man but he wants to move on and the book is a story of how he does that alongside the fact all this is taking place whilst the 30s is happening and the darkening cloud of nazi is there and he gets drawn into marrying a German woman that he does as he sees what is happening to a number of his fellow Czechs the boy flows him in the post-war years and communism a life that parallel the writers own years.

And that was how I first found it out, because when I asked the headwaiter a basic question–How do you know all this?- he answered, pulling himself up to his full height Because I served the King of England. The King? I said, clapping my hands.Do you mean you actually served the King of England? And the headwater nodded his head in satisfaction.

The scene that gave the book its title and of course the reason I reviewed it today.

Hrabal is a writer I love and was reminded of how much I did by the guys at Feeling Bookish who sent, me a message on Twitter. I had listened to their episode on this book a while ago but they remind me about it as I posted on TwitterI was reading this book and thanks to them I learnt a few facts Ditie means child in Czech a nickname he gathered along the way for his child-like looks. Hrabal also wrote this book in 18 day sprint. He captures a simple man travelling through a world but with a sort of luck, it is like a Czech Forest Gump at times if it had been written by Woody Allen.Ditie is a satire on those years but also a warning on those years . It is also a man growing up but never really becoming an adult as the child is still there and one thinks there is a lot of that in Hrabal himself.  Alongside this, we see the passage of that year the pre-war dying embers of the Austro-Hungarian empire leave the void that the Nazis filled then we see the post-war communist year as his life rides a wave itself the latter part of the book seems to have some of Hrabal own insights into life this was written when he was in the later part of his life when he wrote this book and there is a feeling of maybe it being his words mixed with the narrator’s own words. Have you read Hrabal?

Winston’s score – A From one of the masters of  European writing in the 20th century.

Conversations in Bolzano by Sàndor Màrai

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Conversations in Bolzano

Hungarian fiction

Original title – Vendégjáték Bolzanóban

Translator – George Szirtes

Source – Personal copy

When I look at the list of books from 1940, I always love to pick a translated book that came out that year. There were a few I had hoped to bring two this week, but this is the oner I will fit in and the other I will be bringing out a review on Monday. This appealed as I had read two other books by the Hungarian writer Sàndor Màrai over the years and have reviewed The Rebels here a few years ago. A writer in his day was considered one of the leading writers in Hungary described by Le Monde as Hungarian Sándor Márai was the insightful chronicler of a collapsing world well this is a book set outside his insightful books into the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire but it follows a man welll Casanova but actually in the book it is often missed it is him using his forename and maybe describing him as more of a myth than a man. Lost Love is in the book love lust friends and also a man that is larger than life.

‘Five,” he grumbled, and bit hard on his lower lip, wagging his head. Screwing up his eyes, he gazed into the fame, then into the deep shadows of the room, then finally into the far distance, into the past, into life itself.

And suddenly he gave a low whistle, as if he had found something he had been looking for. He pronounced the name,

“Francesca.

He thinks back on her when he her mention of the Dukes name.

I was drawn to this a Cassanova is one of those figures in History that is part man, part Myth the real and the false blend. SPO a story following his prison break from Venice and his heading to Bolzano a small village where the Duke had fought a moonlight duel for a woman much younger than both the men and lost the Fair Francesca, barely legal at just 16. They five years earlier when he had fought the duel with the 60-year old duke for this woman’s hand. He has now escaped on the run and has managed to borrow money along the way he turns up dishevelled at the hotel in the town and demands the finest suite in the Hotel. this reminds me of a scene in Withnail and I where Withnail and Cassanova are similar characters. He had scars and had been told if he returned, he be dead so why has he returned what has driven him to come back? What will the Duke do? What will Franseca make of Casanova and his drive to want her as he rhymes lyrically about his feeling for her.

He touched the scars with his fingertips, itemizing and remembering them. There was a line of three scars on his left, all three just above the heart, as if his enemies had unconsciously yet somehow deliberately, instinctively, aimed precisely at his heart. The central scar, the deepest and roughest of them, was the one he owed to His Excellency of Parma and to Francesca. He put his index finger to the now painless wound. The duel had been fought with rapiers. The Duke’s blade had made a treacherous incursion above his heart, so the surgeon had had to spend weeks draining the blood and the suppuration off the deep wound; and there had also been some internal bleeding, as a result of which the victim, after fever fits, bouts of semiconscious delirium, and stretches of screaming and groaning insensibility, finally bade farewell to adventure.

The scars of the first meeting and duel that nearly killed Cassaanova

I love Màrai writing he captures the simmering love of Cassanova so well, and also a love triangle at its most dangerous duel death threats and promise to leave all add to the book. He also shows maybe the true poetic nature of the man that was Cassanova a normal man that had that thing that, as we say made woman weak at the knee a certain air and way with words that drew people in. This is a slower-paced book than I usually like, but it had some great interplay and managed to bring to life a figure I wanted to know more about in Cassanova I suppose looking back at the events now it seems very outdated a 20-year-old woman being argued over by two men both a lot older than her. It is a sign of how times have moved. But also, there is many a Cassannova around still those men that women just can’t help but Love well in Withnail’s case, there is always a sense of the character being larger than life and maybe hiding his own sexual feelings. But there is no doubt about Cassanova feeling for the younger Francesca a muse to this man. Have you read any books by Màrai? He wrote more than 50, but we only seem to have less than ten of his books so far in English.

Winstyons score – +b A yarn may be outdated in its content but still fun.

 

Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov

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Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov

Bulgarian Fiction

Original title – Времеубежище,

Translator – Angela Rodel

Source – Personal copy

I am still in Eastern Europe. I have moved from Hungary to one of the leaders of Bulgarian writing, and his latest book to be translated into English is Time shelter. Georgi Gospodinov had several books already translated into English, one from Dalkey, another from a university press and one by Open Letter, which I do have somewhere to read. He has won several book prizes and has been on the shortlist of prizes like the Italian Stega prize. He was also a writer in Residence in Zurich a fact he mentions in the afterword of this book.

The next day I was at Heliosstrasse first thing in the morning, Mr. S. had given me the address. I found the apricot-colored building on the western shore of the lake, separated from the other houses on the hill. It was massive yet light at the same time, four stories with a fifth attic floor, a large shared terrace on the second level, and smaller balconies on the other floors. All the windows looked to the southwest, which made the afternoons endless, and the day’s final bluish glimmers nested in them until the very last moment, while the light blue wooden shutters contrasted softly with the pale apricot of the facade.

There is some wonderfully descriptive passages in the book

Like many books from Eastern Europe, it is a retrospective of those communist years, but that also makes it a prism of the present. The framing device for all this is the activity of an assistant for a Therapist called Gaustin. He has a radical treatment that involves rebuilding exact replicas of people’s past for when they have dementia. It is the assistant’s job to go out. He finds the past in the present and rebuilds the individual’s past. As he collects those small trinkets we remember from the red typewriter ( a memory I saw and mentioned how I’d loved the same typewriter back in the day) But is the problem is the past when for you, the past is as a  Holocaust survivor worth reliving ? His clinic grows, and as it does Gaustine’s ideas are more grandiose. They start to think of making countries into individual decades. This would be when that country had a particular peak or significant period of history. The problem is living in the past and what that effect has is it dangerous to dwell on or relive those moments. As the clinic has grown more people, haven’t dementia but just want to grasp their own past.

All elections up until this point had been about the future. This would be different.

TOTAL RECALL: EUROPE CHOOSES ITS PAST.

EUROPE-THE NEW UTOPIA … EUROTOPIA.

A EUROPEAN UNION OF THE COMMON PAST.

Those were the headlines in European newspapers. If nothing else, Europe was good at utopias. Yes, the Continent had been mined with a past that divided it, two world wars, hundreds of oth ers, Balkan Wars, Thirty-Year Wars, Hundred-Year Wars… But there were also enough memories of alliances, of living as neighbors, memories of empires that gathered together supposedly ungatherable groups for centuries on end. People didn’t stop to think tha in and of itself, the nation was a bawling historicalinfant masquerading as a biblical patriarch.

Maybe the past is a recurring events and

This book looks at those post-war years but also the present. It is an attack on nostalgia why it can be dangerous. In a way, why do we want to live in the past? Is it healthy at times, yes? But for others, it is a danger to relive those years. This is the book for me it has a bit of Sebald that memorialises the past of objects, especially in a book like the rings of Saturn? Then he has a chunk of Nadas as a writer I think how Wonderfully and darkly, at times, he captures his own past and Hungarian history and the brutal nature of that past. Then I was reminded of Topol’s book Devil’s workshop, which is a book that tackles how we deal with or sell the past this case, how we use the Naszi death camps. It isn’t as entertaining park as imagined in that book. It deals with how we use the past in a way as entertainment or history or is it a warning ?. This book’s title in Bulgarian is more of a term that suggests hiding in time like a bomb shelter. Have seen since the fall of communism, some countries and people have had a sort of nostalgic view of the past and the dangers of viewing it with rose colour spectacles. There have been several films around this nostalgia. Have you read any of his books or any other Bulgarian fiction?

Winston’s score – +A great book and a writer I will be watching for his next book!!

A mountain to the North, a lake to the South, Paths to the West, a river to the East by László Krasznahorkai

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A mountain to the North, a lake to the South, paths to the West, a river to the EAST by László Krasznahorkai

Hungarian fiction

Original title – Északról hegy, Délről tó, Nyugatról utak, Keletről folyó

Translator -Ottilie Mulzet

Source – Personal copy

Well, if this book doesn’t win the title with the longest title this year, I’d be shocked. I have a love-hate relationship with Laszlo’s books. He is a writer I like. I love the Bela Tarr films of his book, but sometimes it feels like walking through a lake of treacle reading him. I always feel they are above me as a reader but this one I loved it is a short book, so it gave me a chance to use my kindle, which is something I am planning to try and do a little bit more than I have in recent years. Oh well, this will be the third book by Krasznahorkai on the blog. He is always high in the Nobel betting. He is one of the greatest living writers, and I need to dive deeper into his literature as a reader. I have several of his other books on my shelves that I hope to read soon. Have you read him at all?

Higher up, near the small wooden bridge that arched across the depths, but on the other side, in the middle of a small clearing, there stood a gigantic ginkgo tree. In the scheme of tiny streets, this was practically the one single unoccupied space, and of course this plot of land was only precisely as big as was necessary for the ancient tree to exist, for it to get both air and sunlight, for it to have enough strength to spread out its roots beneath the earth.

the prose he writes can be so evocative like this passage here !

This is an odd book from Krasznahorkai. It is sometimes repetitive and stunningly descriptive and beautiful in others. The book is set in a temple in Kyoto. This monastery is now a ruin. But as we are in the company of the grandson of Prince Genji.  He seems to drift through time and place as we see the past, the place before, and after. Then we see the building of the temple and the craftsmen involved in that and their sheer skill as craftspeople. The temple is a character in this book. The place comes alive as it is brought to life from his prose about the setting and place and maybe the spirit of a place as we see the grandson drift through time and place; this is told in a series of short chapters vignettes that at times use repetition to build their feeling of place and spirit of a place.  The lost garden I think of those pictures we saw the other summer of the ghost of gardens that had been in places around the country. This is the ghost of a place, a monastery but also the wonderous garden that echos the spirit of the place. The sense of time drifts and how it affects place is recalled here.

He had read about it for the first time in the last decade of the Tokugawa, when a copy of the renowned illustrated work One Hundred Beautiful Gardens turned up accidentally in his hands, he leafed through it, immediately enchanted, and although all of the ninety-nine gardens were of extraordinary interest, it was the one hundredth garden, the so-called hidden garden, that captivated him, he read the description, he looked at the drawing, and the description and the drawing both immediately made the garden real in his imagination, and from that point onward he was never free of it ever again, from that point onward this hidden garden never let him go, he simply could not chase it from his mind, he continually saw the garden in his mind’s eye without being able to touch its existence, he saw the garden,

The spirit of the Garden haunts him and the spirt of place is there

I was shocked about how different it is from the other books I have read from Laszlo. Yes, Seiobo there below; he touched on Japan and Japanese myths and imagery below. but this is anopther side to a complex writer, a brighter side, a more hopeful side of the light, not the shadow of his written word. A poetic side, a visual side. A local at what makes us and place the wreck monastery holds the spirit not just of those who used it and those who made it but what and where it was built. Then even those materials used the connection of man and material, this book makes u think long after you put it down. Have you read this book did you find it different to his other books?

Winston’s score – + B There is still something I feel i sometimes miss something in his works.

What we leave behind by Stanislaw Łubieński

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What we leave behind by Stanislaw Łubieński

Polish Nature Writing

Original tile – Książka o śmieciach

Translator – Zosia Krasodomska-Jones

Source – review copy

As many of you know the last twelve months I have featured a lot more nature writing on the blog so when I was sent a book in translation. that was a nature book it was great to combine to the two genres I really love books in translation and Nature writing. Stanislaw has written a number of books. He contributes regularly to paper in Polish papers and magazines this is his first book to be translated into English. He won the NIKE reader prize for one of his earlier books. The birds they sing. It says on his bio he grew up watching birds with his Soviet binoculars (reminds me of the early days I used bird watch a lot with my grandad’s old military binoculars).

Let’s start with a clarification to avoid any misunderstandings: hunting ducks has no practical justification – it’s purely for sport. A display of dexterity, like shooting live clay pigeons.

But what have the ducks done to deserve to die? Pond owners sometimes complain that they eat fish food. They certainly do. According to studies from the 1980s, they eat between 2 and 7,5 per cent of distributed feed. That’s not very much.

Scientists say that the presence of many bird species at ponds brings advantages that outweigh the drawbacks. Ducks, coots, grebes and even herons prevent the surface water from becoming overgrown, they eat the larvae of predacious insects that feed on spawn and fry, and they clear sick or dead fish from the surfaces Why do we kill ducks, then? Simple: it’s tradition.

The question about the value of Duck hunting is there any these Days !!

The book has the subtle A birdwatcher’s dispatches from the taste catastrophe. The book is formed of eight chapters a number of which take waste he had found. As you know I love correlations to my own life as a reader the journey isn’t just that of escape but sometimes reminds inklings of one’s own world and experiences. The first chapter had a collection of shotgun cartridges just left in the woods he speaks about the growing anti-hunting movements around Europe the ducks in the pond. reminded me of seeing shells often in the area I walked around Northumberland when I lived there many years ago with my dog. What Stanislaw does is mix the waste we see and the world he observes it just shows you how near we are to losing it all at times. The third chapter mentioned Gannets which as I had this some been to North Berwick home to one of the biggest Gannet colonies. He talks about the discovery of huge bands of waste drifting in the oceans discovered by sailors I remember how a container of Rubber ducks scattered in the sea. It had shown how far rubbish lost in the oceans can drift. But the worrying thing he talks about is microplastics are now getting into our food chain and the effects of that are relatively unknown long term. A book that sets you thinking and being watchful about your own impact on the world around you.

It’s more than twenty years since the sailor Charles J. Moore discovered a huge rubbish dump floating in the ocean between Hawaii and California. A mass of plastic packaging, bottles, lids and countless tons of unidentified waste. The area was named the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and its growth has been monitored apprehensively ever since. New debris accumulates rapidly, carried there on the North Equatorial Current.

The huge rubbish dump was found drifting in the oceans.

It is fair to say I loved this it was inspiring and also an insightful book and also sounds a warning shot of how waste is everywhere even in some of the most remote places he visits he is shocked to see waste there. But each piece of waste in itself is a story of where it came from. Then how it could have ended up there. Even how discarded waste at times has changed nature itself over time. The concept of the book is very entertaining and also hits topping home it combines nature but also the great environmental questions facing the world. Do you have a favourite nature book that combines the natural world but also alongside the current environmental situation? It shows you how much we have to go to sustainable resources and move away from Plastic which is happening but it needs to quicken. As one of the first books to match my two reading styles books in translation and Nature writing this was a great book and shows we should try and get more nature writing from around the world. I will be trying to get some more books from around the world. That deal with nature when I see them around.

Winstons score – A this is an insightful book into the current situation of plastic waste and its effect the natural world.

 

Like a Prisoner by Fatos Lubonja

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Like a Prisoner by Fatos Lubonja

Albanian shots stories

Original title -Jetë Burgu

Translator – John Hodgson

Source – Review Copy

Well, I move on to Albania today and the second book I have read from Istros books by this writer. Fatos Lubjona’s father was a close ally in the sixties to the leader Hoxha but when he started to distance the country from the soviets and Fatos’s father questioned the regime and was arrested as was Fatos who in his diaries whilst he was a student had questions, Hoxha. He was sentenced to more than 20 years he then spent 13 years in hard labour and was released after 17 years, during this time he kept a diary and there world he won is the world of this short story collection. He is also a critic of the leaders on both sides of the political divide in his homeland.

In the daily life of the camp, Eqerem was very reserved by nature, and apart from his epileptic fits and his rooftop dance, his presence disturbed nobody. None of his family came to see him, and he was therefore ‘without support.

He kept a large bowl that he filled with a mush of bread and soup from the cauldron. He ate everything and never scrounged off anybody. He never argued with the guards, and they generally left him in peace.

Pandi was the only person to call to him in the name of Suzi. Everyone was astonished how he had managed to induce Eqerem to take part in such a game. If anybody else tried to call ‘Suzi’ to him or make the vagina sign, he would give them a furious look and make threatening gestures.

The story Eqerem a man worn down by the camp

these thirteen stories paint a picture of the horrors and inner life of the hard labour camps. The character studies the people around the prison camp like Eqerem. Our narrator notices him after a few days in the camp he had a head that stuck out in the crowd of the camp where they all have shaved heads. he was there for a short time his hair grew just before his release but he then a few years later he came back but was then caught up in events in the prison and ended up in solitary when he came out that had had marks and a few days later he died. A life contained in a story.  The story that hit me hardest was Çuçi the story of Çavo the cleaner prisoner on the wing and his cat he fed it scraps and pieces but this cat wander the camp and was friends with over prisoners. This cat was a free spirit in a world of lost souls trap it caught rabbits and lived both in and out of the camp. The cat kept Çavo on the straight and narrow. So how will he react when the cat disappears and is eventually found dead? The following story follows John Smith’s it says one of the few prisoners that calms not to be Albanian he claimed his father had taken him from Australia to Albania away from his Australian mother well that is the tale he tells. Will the Australians help him ?

In the camps, most of the prisoners who kept cats did not keep them close to themselves. The cats wandered through the yards, ran off, mated wherever they wanted, and were in a much wilder state than Cuci. But she too was free to make love to the tom-cats of Burrel prison, and once had given birth to two kittens. They had not lived, and it’s said that kittens from a first pregnancy never survive. But Çuci also spent hours on end in the cell with us, even during the night. Almost every evening, she came back to the cell after wandering through the yards and hidden corners of the prison. She squeezed in through the observation window in the door, an opening fifteen centimetres square at the level of the human eye, which the guards always left open.

The cats of the camp are free spirits in a world of trapped souls.

I have tried to cover the bare minimum amount of stories as this is one of the collections that need reading there isn’t much out there of first-hand experience of the world of Hoxha and his hard labour camps. This weaves the world of Spaç and those prisoners into the hope and horrors of the camp and its prisoners. I think that is what hit me hard about the cat story one little animal had hope tied to it but also maybe made them forget the horrors of their daily life. As we see how each prisoner our narrator sees how to get by in their camps and what each one does to survive the horror of the numbing world they are all caught up in. This is one of the most grabbing collections of life in a prison camp from the writer’s own first-hand experience of it. If you like books like a day in the life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Have you a favourite book about being a prisoner in a labour camp?

Winstons score – +A  the world of Hoxha’s camps brought to life in this collection