Tag: Foundry Editions

Repatriation by Ève Guerra

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Repatriation by Ève Guerra

French fiction

Original title –  Rapatriement

Translator – Clodagh Kinsella

Source – Subscription book

If you have been around the blog the last year or so, you will know. I am a huge fan of the books that Foundry Press have been bringing out; well, this is one of their recent books.  This book is a debut novel by Eve Guerra, a writer of Italian Congolese origin who had to flee Congo when the civil war happened when she was nine and grew up in France after she got her degree. She has taught Latin, Ancient Greek, and French.  She also has a regular column in Lire.  She has also written poetry.  This is her debut novel. It won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman, which is the prize from the Goncourt for the best debut novel in a given year. It is fair to say Eve seems to have drawn from her own life a little in this book, as the main character has a similar Congolese, Franco-Italian background to the writer herself, who also lives in Lyon.

Even as a child I dreamed about leaving. I made up my

mind when I was eight, one afternoon in April 1998.

It was the dry season. We lived in Congo-Brazzaville, somewhere in the bush where the light no longer enters.

When people ask me what village I’m from, I say the bush. A house, a birthplace, the bush again, the bush full of sapele trees on the banks of the river where snakes slither.

I’m not scared of them: I am one.

They say the Congo River is a giant python turned to water. It was Dieudieu, the village pygmy, who told me this. He said there was no need to fear those snakes, that they only attacked to defend themselves or feed, and I was already too big for those little things that drag themselves along the ground.

Thinking of her childhood and even then escaping

The book starts when Annabella, a 23-year-old woman trying to get by as a poet in Lyon, struggles to get by; actually, her world is shattered when she gets a letter saying her father has died in Cameroon.  Her father, a man she hadn’t spoken to in two years.  Had brought Annabella up after she was seven. Her father’s violent temper and wanting to have total control over his wife led to her mother running away, and Annabella spending the rest of her childhood growing up with her misogynistic father, a white man in Africa with money and all that brought him.  Annabella heads to Cameroon and is faced with the task iof finding 20000 francs to bring her father’s body home.  The book sees her wrestling with this as she also confronts the ghost of her own past and how she had fallen into books and learning, but this event also makes her think of one of the books she had read, Molloy, and she finally sees what the book is about.  We see how her father has tainted her relationship with her mother, where she treats her mother in the same violent way her father did.  Will she be able to sort it all out?

We divided up the tasks that evening. My aunt Alda had to call back one of my father’s colleagues, jot down numbers in her notebook, and make an appointment with the undertakers, ask for a quote. I had to contact the embassy and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to find a repatriation solution.

I spent the morning transcribing a list of phone num-bers, first the French embassy in Douala, who knew where the body was being kept. I waited for Clémence and Antoni to leave before I rang.

“I’m calling because my father is dead. The death took place on Monday, 29 April. And I was asked to get in touch with you. My name is Annabella Morelli.”

“Mademoiselle Morelli, I’ll put you through to the colleague handling the file.”

“Mademoiselle Morelli… Mademoiselle?”

Trying to find out how to bring her father’s body back home

Now it seems, after seeing an interview with the writer online, that the kernel of the book is an actual event that happened to her.  Her father too had died in Africa, and she was left with the same problem Annabella had, and that was finding the money to bring the body home.  Like Annabella, Eve is also someone who loves her literature; there are various books and allusions to classical texts in the book. She also, like Annabella, is closer to her literature than she is to her own family at times.  The book also looks at a father who used his ability to financially control the women around him, a colonial male, a violent man who wants his wife to toe the line he made completely.  The book is fragmented; it is like the past and present are blending at times as we see Annabella facing the ghost of her past and the effect her parents’ actions had on her as a person.  If you are a fan of post-colonial fiction with its effect on one family,  this is a book for you 1 Have you a favourite book about a father-daughter relationship?

 

 

 

 

The Duke by Matteo Melchiorre

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The Duke by Matteo Melchiorre

Italian fiction

Original title – Il Duca

Translator – Antonella Lettieri

Source – Subscription book

When the Booker longlist came out, I was pleased to see this on it, as I have been a fan of Foundry Press since it first appeared a couple of years ago and have a subscription with them, so I had this book on my TBR.  Matteo Mmelchiorre is a director of the library and museum Cstelfranco Vento, which is where the book is set in Northern Italy.  He studies the Middle Ages. He has also written about the region’s mountains and forests.  It is good to see how this book has been inspired by the world he lives in and the history he is interested in.

There were perhaps ten crows. Clattering. Cawing. Careening. Blind with fury. They were whirling in a frantic fray, striking each other again and again. Then, all of a sudden, they scattered, darting in opposite directions and, in the newly cleared sky, only a knot of wings remained, an entangled tussle which twisted and swirled and eventu-ally, as if struck by shot, plummeted through the air.

But as soon as the tangle hit the ground, right in the courtyard of the house, I discerned a buzzard instead: open beak, frightful eyes, low wings. The buzzard was pinning a young black crow to the ground, trapping it with its talons, and the crow was flapping its wings, and twisting its head, and wriggling, searching for some prospect of salvation.

The opening of the book and the Buzzard and Crow

The book, he said in the Booker interview, had many inspirations, but the fight he saw between a crow and a buzzard was one of them. I have seen a similar thing in the peaks near her birds of prey, where crows have tackled them. Maybe the scene itself is in part of the book, the buzzard, a solitary bird, a regal bird, and the crow live in groups, a common bird scavening its way. The book follows the duke, who is actually a count, a man stuck in his villa like his family has been for centuries.  What happens when he finds the big man from the village is taking his timber?  That is the kernel of the book, like the birds’ two classes coming together, and it is about the duke, an odd man, quirky solo figure, the last of a line of his family, in a way, maybe a sign of years of inbreeding, then the community around him suffers due to him having the land.  Then there are little pieces about the nature and the natural world they are in. This is the old feudal world of the past, and a village wanting to move into the modern world.

So, by calling me The Duke, the villagers were either implying that I was as eccentric as my grandfather, though inevitably of a quite different sort of eccentricity, or they were mocking the decline of my lineage. A decline which, after all, was most evident, and by virtue of which they could finally enjoy the sight of a Cimamonte with no servants and no tenants and with scratched-up hands and hardened nails.

In any case, I did not care what the village said or thought about me. I was certain that I was already living out the best fate I could possibly desire. Nothing important ever happened during the course my days. Nothing complex ever perplexed my gaze. No exception to my routine. No decision blocking my way. I lived in the best condition to which a man of my nature could aspire – the perfect, ideal condition.

But now, on an afternoon like any other, Nelso Tabióna had come to rap on my windowpane to tell me that, up in the Mountain, in my woods, I had been had.

The duke is actually a count aqqnd the nature is here in the passage I picked

For me, this is a clever book; if it had an NYRB cover, you would be forgiven for thinking it was a rediscovered classic, given the scope and twists of the story. But for me, the one book I thought of a lot was actually Gormenghast. Both books are set in remote settings, and both deal with a crumbling royal family. Both tackle modern subjects, but also set the books in an unknown time frame. Nature is big in both as well. I think I may be the only person who thinks this. There is a mention of ECO in reviews and 19th-century classics. The Foundry, in a recent Instagram post, pointed readers to Trollope and Hardy, whom the writer said inspired him. Of course, The Leopard is another book that has been mentioned as it also deals with a family line crumbling. The writer has also mentioned another Italian book, Deliver us by Luigi Meneghelli, as his bible while writing this book, a book set in a village that explores the writer’s relationship with the land.  This is maybe the most unusual book on the longlist. It is a modern book that reads like a classic novel, with some contemporary ideas about nature and society. It took the translator a while to get the duke’s voice right, she said, as it is very hard to capture the exact Italian nature of his voice. Have you read this book?

 

 

Just a little dinner by Cecile Tlili

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Just a little dinner by CécileTlili

French fiction

Orignal title – Un simple Dîner

Translator – Katherine Gregor

Source – Subscription copy

If you haven’t been following the blog for a while, you may not know that I am a keen fan of the new publisher, Foundry editions that have been bringing us a great selection of books from around the med and they all have a blue cover design with a motif in the design linked to the place the book is set this time it is Paris. This was the writer’s Debut novel and was shortlisted for the Goncourt Prize in the section for Debut novels. There was a review of this book in The Times, which is great to see a small publisher getting coverage in a significant newspaper rather than the same few books that every paper, reviewer, and so on, has to discuss. But the reviewer mentions a connection between friends for them and this book. Well, for me, the mention of a dinner party brings back one memory, and that is the closed room drama that is Abigail’s party. Well, this isn’t quite as brutal as that, but as the reflection of Britain in the seventies, one could say this dinner party and its guests reflect the Paris of their day.

Johar walks in the twilight. She asked her driver to drop her off a few blocks away from Étienne’s building. She needs some air before getting cooped up for the evening. She walks slowly, in no rush to arrive at this dinner party she wasn’t expecting and is already finding annoying. She takes her time to inhale the heavy scent of this summer evening.

The avenues here are wide. There are windows with striped awnings swaying gently in the breeze. The rustling of the trees accompanies her footsteps and their canopy forms a protective arch above her head.

Here she is already on Boulevard Raspail, outside Étienne’s building. She sits on a bench and takes a deep breath. A few swathes of grey have appeared in the sky.

Gusts of wind toy with the dry leaves, warm blasts of air hitting her in the face. A thunderstorm is badly needed to break this late-August mugginess at last and wash away the day’s sweat and weariness.

As Johar heads to the dinner this sticky evening how will it end !

The dinner brings together two couples: Claudia, the hostess of the party, a timid young woman who is very nervous about the evening, and her partner. She is a physiotherapist. She has settled into a way of life, the way it is and isn’t ambitious. Her husband, Etienne, has invited Johar, a woman in the business world, driven and fast-rising, who is soon to be the big boss of the company where he works. In turn, Johar has brought her husband, Remi. But as they gather around the table, the course of the evening will see the two women reevaluate their lives as they all have secrets about what the evening is all about, with Johar turning a blind eye to her home life in a way. Is Claudia pregnant? How will the evening end? The tension is there as we see how each person has a reason for the evening being there or not wanting to be their, daydreaming about another woman.

Étienne won’t stop talking about pottery. Johar was hoping that her interest in the pomegranates would create a diver-sion, but he has gleefully grabbed this opportunity to describe his tastes, his travels, and his encounters. As usual, Étienne talks about himself. He briefly goes into the dining room, but before Johar can enjoy a minute of peace, he returns, carrying a vase with a delicate blue pattern.

“Here, look. Hold it. Does it remind you of anything?”

“No. I don’t know. Did it use to be on this mantelpiece?”

“No, no – I mean the pattern. Surely you recognise it?” Johar mechanically runs her fingers over the vase, following the geometrical outline of the turquoise stars. Étienne can’t contain himself any longer. “Nabeul. It’s pottery from Nabeul.”

Think we’ve all had a situation where we get drawn into talking about something else !!

This is a book about how we sometimes fail to express ourselves enough until it is too late, and how modern relationships have evolved. As I mentioned, this is a portrayal of 21st-century Paris and urban life through the lives of these four characters. Just as Abigail’s party captured the spirit of the seventies dinner party, it also explores how men and women interacted in the seventies. Each time I read a dinner party from the formal affairs in Waugh’s books to the post-war dinner parties of writers like Updike and Bellow in the US of those boom years. Through Abigail’s PART Y AND THINGS LIKE friends to a 21st century Paris, and four people with different agendas for the evening, and what is going to happen. This is a tight work that builds well into the evening, reflecting each character’s actions, feelings, and motivations, as well as what they are trying to achieve or hide. Ultimately, it is Etienne who brings the two couples together. It captures this generation’s view of dinner parties and how they interact, as well as their lives. Do you have a favourite book with a dinner party?

 

The little I knew by Chiara Valerio

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The Little I Knew by Chiara Valerio

Italian fiction

Original title Chi Dice E chi Tace

Translator – Alisa Wood

Source – subscription book

I have banged on a lot about how much I had enjoyed the books from last year from Foundry editions, which have published several of my favourite books from last year. I must admit this is the first from their books this year that I have read. I was grabbed by Chiara Valerio’s bio as she is an editor, writer and a lit blogger, many years ago, and she has published a lot of books. it sis always great when you find a new writer with many books already out for you to read. This book was on the shortlist for the Premio Strega prize and was inspired in part by. The writer is reading one of Georges Simenon’s novels, his Roman Durs, which inspired her.

And so Vittoria was the first woman to own a boat space at the dock, an exclusively male club. Every year the film Around the World in 80 Days would be on TV, with David Niven as Phileas Fogg, the man who has bet all his money and has to complete a trip around the world and return, by a specific day and time, to London, to the Reform Club, an exclusive men-only club where he is a member. And he manages it, but he brings a woman with him, the Indian princess he has fallen in love with. After Vittoria bought the boat, the dock started to seem like the Reform Club with neon lights, and Vittoria’s face had a hint of something Indian and, at heart, regal.

She was a strong female figure in the town with her boat etc!

As I said, this was inspired by Simenon; it is a mystery in a way he did his mystery in his roman durs, more about the flaws in the human condition and places. So this is more an insight into the small seaside town of Scauri. Those living there there interactions with her, but also the relationships and thoughts of her. Then we need to know how this dead woman ended up in the town all those years ago!  The seaside town is set in the middle between Rome and Naples, at the remote end of the seaside towns of the area. So when Vittoria, the local chemist, herbalist and all-around woman that everyone knows in this small town, is found dead, drowned in her bath. Lea, the local lawyer, sets about finding out about this woman. She had been in the village for nearly thirty years, but was one of those women everyone turned to. She listened as others poured their hearts out to her. She lived in a villa with Maras, making her herbal recipes, helping people make amazing recoveries from various illnesses over the years. How could a woman who swam every day and was an expert with her boat drown in a bath? Who was this woman? Will Lea learn more after chatting to all the locals about her? Why does she want to know more about her?

Vittoria might have become one of those healers you find in little towns who apparently have no skill or purpose but live alongside nature, and not just humans. Despite everyone always asking her all sorts of things, and her real intuition for diagnosis, she had never wanted to be one. She seemed to live a quiet life, staying in the pharmacy for the hours she had to, then spending the rest of her time walking, swimming, reading botanical books, and tending the garden. She liked having people around the house and playing cards. I’m interested in both earthly and heavenly plants, she would say, laughing.

But she was much more than that to this town!

This is one of those books that feels like a crime novel but without a detective. It is about small towns and how unsettling a death out of the blue can be, and how someone can fit into a town without anyone ever really knowing who she was! WEho was Vittoria whart had brought her from Rome all those years earlier it focus on those little bonds and tyies that weave together a small town but also how at the heart there could be a black hole of a person that seems to be at the heart of it all but is actually more invisible to those around her for the fact she only listen to those and on the surface was the woman everyone. She was known for her job and her ability to heal people, but what was her past? I get how this was inspired by Simenon; he was great with the ambiguity of human nature, those grey characters in life never black or white. This is about small town relationships and passions, and also that never quite trusting the incomer, even thirty years later! Do you have a favourite novel that is a crime novel, but isn’t, if that makes sense like this?

Far by Rosa Ribas

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Far by Rosa Ribas

Spanish Fiction

Orignal title – Lejos

Translator – Charlotte Coombes

Source – Personal copy

you are probably fed up of hearing me blow the trumpet for Foundry editions I actually have no connection to this publisher it is just they have brought out such great books in their first year, and this is the last of them Far from a writer considered the queen of Spanish Noir and the two trilogy of books she has brought out in the most have been well received in Spain. She has written a series set in 1950s Spain. This book saw a change of direction as it is set in La Mancha in a building site of an estate that was never finished. It captures the life of those caught when the real estate bubble burst in Spain. It appears this is the first book of hers that she translated. The book she wrote with Sabine Hofmann also seems to have been translated into English.

First, she zigzagged her way through the area of terraced houses where she lived. Then into the part where the large villas were. Each one was a different colour, so nobody got their houses mixed up. Luxurious two-storey villas, with double garages, terraces, balconies, gabled roofs, and dor-mers; with extensive gardens, with ponds and flower beds; with loungers in dark wood and cast-iron tables and chairs, covered with custom-made cushions for sitting and drinking beers or lemonade in summer. All built nice and far apart.She carried on through the streets of apartment blocks.

The first phase boasted full occupancy. There were gaps in the following blocks, but only a few. The ratio increased into Phase 2, then went down again in Phase 3, with its most recent buildings barely occupied. Phase 4 was filled with unfinished buildings and surrounded by a metal fence.

The fence that sperates these two worlds

The book came about when the writer was taken to a small town in Spain where a sort of wonderous luxury estate of buildings in Seensa was due to be built. Still, when the building bubble burst, the place was half-finished and half-filled. Some people live there with Jobs and try to get on like our narrator. She has a hu=]house built and a job but is just trying to get a new start in her life after being separated. The other half of the estate has not attracted those wanting a roof over their heads in the half-finished apartments. This is the framing for this book: a woman who is sinking more into drink and depression than a man trying to get by but is caught up in the darkness of his fellow incomers to the vacant flats. The book sees the two main characters draw together, but there is also the underlying r=tension of those who were brought into a dream of swimming pools and green lawns in the middle of the dry, arid Spanish central area. This is the land of LA Mancha that Don Quixote travelled as a fiesta draws close. Will this poowe=der keg of two different classes of people finally blow up?

Finally it was dark. He waited a few more hours, however, before going out to do a recce of the site to check if it was safe.

He toyed with the idea of having a drink. There was a drinks cabinet: one of those old-fashioned ones with a folding door and a mirrored interior that multiplied the bottles and glasses to infinity. He picked up a bottle of vodka but immediately put it down. Dust clung to that too. He wiped his hands on his trousers. He would not drink. On his first outing he needed to have a clear head. Bumping into someone could be fatal. They might alert the police to the fact that an intruder was living there. Then maybe the others would connect the dots.

His side of the fence a darker world at times

It is a common thread in Spanish literature: the unnamed narrators in there books. I know some people hate it, but for me, it makes the characters seem universal. I am hard-pressed to think of an Equivalent of this for the UK, maybe one of those dying UK seaside towns where there once hoped, and it has now gone, and the flotsam and jetson of human existence has drifted in. Maybe one of those new Scottish towns full of dreams and hope that never quite got off the ground would be the nearest. What it captures is tow worlds:s those who were brought into a dream because the bubble had burst in them are trapped as much as those who came to escape and just find shelter, a sort of drifting underclass that is never that far behind the scenes in everywhere if you know how to look at the broken capitalist world we have. This is a book that captures that clash of classes so well. You can tell she writes Noir. The Guardian review mentioned Claudia Pinerio, and I can see that myself. It has that creeping slowness and building tension she does well. It also mentions J G Ballar, the master of buildings and stories. Yeah, this has a nod to a book, maybe like Super Cannes: A Broken Utopia, a Broken Dream of a Place, the darker side of broken dreams when classes and what that brings, like uncertainty and worry about what an underclass can do. The book builds the tension of this well. Alongside the drawing closer of our two narrators at the same time! Have you read any of the Foundry edition titles?

 

Spanish Beauty by Esther Garcia Llovet

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Spanish Beauty by Esther Garcia Llovet

Spanish fiction

Original title – Spanish Beauty

Translated – Richard Village

Source – Subscription

I am so pleased Foundry have gone the subscription route as last year the books I read from them were both in my books of the year. So when this the first book of this year fell through my letterbox, I put aside everything else and read it in a couple of sitting . Esther Garcia Llovet qualified in clinical psychology, but she also studied screenwriting and became a documentary scriptwriter. She has cited Bolano as an influence on her writing. Also; the work of Raymond Carver is a Noir Novella, the first of a trilogy. This is set in the least Spanish city of Benidorm and has a world-weary detective that walks the line of the law on both sides. But this detective is a female with a British father in the most British place outside the UK.

Benidorm. Cheap culture. Beach culture. People who speak three languages without ever studying, corner shops, Belgians, watered-down gin and tonics, gays. Second-hand Tom Clancy novels, swollen with damp, crunchy with sand, sand on your pillow, sand in your paella, in your G-string, in the shower, all-day fry-ups, all-day Thai massage, cicadas at night. Piles of sick, pissing against walls, and Tom Jones songs. Melanomas, cystitis, diarrhoea all round. ChlamydiaAnd the sea. Like the desert of the Levant, of the West, of Las Vegas, shadows of skyscrapers on the beach, reaching higher and higher, shadows that go on for miles, stretching over the surface of the lukewarm sea at ten at night whilst families eat fried chicken on the shore, Mediterranean steel Godzillas on the cold dawn sand.

This opening capture some of what I said about eindorm as a place

Michela McKay is maybe the best way to describe her is rather like DI Burnside from The Bill; she is one of those [police officers with a dodgy reputation about her. We see her trawling through Beindorm in a twin quest. At first, she heard that a famous Dunhill lighter that was once owned by Reggie Kray and last time it came about, had been sold to a Russian Mafia figure is in her City. The other hunt is that of her Absent British father. It captures the dark side of a seaside town the seediness that often in the place of pleasure is just below the surface. This is like a modern take of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock in Modern Spain. She sees the gangsters, lowlifes, and ex-pats among those everyday holidaymakers. It is a ride through the darker side of a place of sun, sea and sex.

“I want to have a laugh with the Russians. We have to have a laugh with the Russians, right, because the Russians know all bout laughs. Vodka, polonium-210, and a stray dog in space. Who can top that? They never go brown, so they come here, to Spain, to our bottled flamenco sun, and we can’t get our heads round why. To buy flats, apartment blocks on the beach, the biggest mansion on the whole Costa de la Luz, a villa with acres of land around it, a Mediterranean pine forest and a golf course with a president chucked in.We see them, all these Russians, in the clubs, in cars, in the restaurants in packs of six or seven. The French and the English, sometimes you see a lone one on the loose, but never a Russian. You only ever see lone Russians lurking around the doorways of five-star hotels, neither in nor out, as if they can’t make up their minds, but they know exactly what they want. They want Spanish hedonism. Dionysian hedonism that only the tourists and the travel agents get to see, because the reality here is that we’re always really pissed off, and really burnt, not just by the sun. The Russians want the hedonism we don’t get to enjoy, they want the prices we can’t afford, they want the siesta we can’t even take. And they want music, music all night long, Benidorm! Fiesta!”

The russians behind the scenes

I liked this. I can see she is a Bolano fan. I read a review that mentioned this book as having a fragmented nature, and it reminds me so much of those early Bolano books, like Skating Rink. Which had a similar feel of being told in little snippets at times. It also felt like a detective novel, but it never was, and this is the same. It is a crime novel but more about the hunt and the people Michela meets. It also has a feeling of being. Made to be filmed . So when I heard it had already been sold and was being made into a film, I wasn’t surprised it had that feel of a book that would work well. The range of characters would suit many British and other character actors .As we trawl the darker side of Benidorm. A place where dreams are made and broken like most Flash seaside towns, it has a darker side. Blackpool in the sun, as it is called, is a place where, just a few corners away from the front, you can be caught up in a darker world than you can imagine. Place full of lost souls, souls on the run. And broken dreams make the world of Beindorm Michela Mckay work through a darker place than many see on holiday. Do you have a favourite book set in a seaside town?

 

Your Little Matter by Maria Grazia Calandrione

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Your Little Matter by Maria Grazia Calandrone

Italian Memoir

Original title –  Dove Non Mi Hai Portata

Translator- Antonella Lettieri

Source – Personal copy

I saw Foundry editions online and ordered their first three books as they appealed to me. They are doing books from around the Mediterranean as reflected in each of the cover designs for each book reflects some from each country’s culture. This book is from the Italian writer Maria Grazia Calandrone. An Italian poet, journalist and tv host. She also works with prisoners and schoolchildren doing poetry workshops. This is her fist book to be translated to English, The book was a huge hit when it came out in Italuy and won prizes and spent weeks on the bestseller lists. In a way this is a book about those poor woman in Italy that haven’t ever had a voice people like Maria own Birth mother this is her story and how as a baby at 8 months she was abandon at the Vila Borghese by her mother. She was adopted and has written another book about her adoptive mother, but this is the story of Lucia and what brought her to abandon and then take her own life.

Of my mother, I only have two black and white photo-graphs.

Apart, of course, from my own life and some biological memories that I’m not sure I can tell apart from suggestion and myth.

I am writing this book so that my mother might become real.

I am writing this book to tear my mother’s smell from the earth. I am exploring a method for those who have lost their origins, a mathematical system of feeling and thought – so complete as to revive a body, as hot as the earth in summer and as firm.

I am starting from what I have, the two photographs that portray her, in the order in which they appeared in my life.

The first

was taken on her wedding day, Saturday, 17 January

1959. Lucia is twenty-two, she is dressed all in white and she is not smiling.

The starting point is two old b&w pictures of her Mother

Maria sets about trying to find out more about her mother and her birth father to piece together the bits. What she does is build up a tale in little vignettes of how Lucia, her mother. A woman did something not many women did in those years as it was illegal. Divorce was illegal. Even leaving the marital home would have meant she was sent to Jasil, so she left her parents-in-law when she did all this. Her marital bed was separated from the in-laws bed by a white cotton sheet. This is a hard rural side of Italy, where the world hadn’t changed, and Lucia had left and fallen for an older married man. Although imperfect, everything is broken when this Builder, Guiseppe, has to go to Africa as Il Duce fought for his piece of Africa. So she finds her self on the run with a child a partner hundreds of m, miles away. She tried to defy all around them by setting up a home together, but with him gone, the world around her fell apart. It is almost as if Maria looked at her mother and those times. The doors were all closed as her world dropped into despair. Shwe uncovers the fallen woman’s story of the country that hid or, just like this, let these women suffer and die.

When they betroth her, Lucia runs away. Luigi, her fiancé, is the village buffoon; they call him Gino or Centolire: like the emigrant in that old song, he too is infected with a childish American dream, even though he is a thirty-one-year-old bachelor lost in his inner world. Who knows what kind of elsewhere Luigi dreams of, what kind of life inconceivable here… He certainly has no interest in women, he is the laughing stock of the village children:

“You’re not a real man!”

However, he owns the piece of land next to the Galantes.

Tall and lanky to the point that, when he rides his donkey, his feet drag on the ground, he is a handsome man with sharp features and a chiselled jaw. Gino went to school until the end of third year and rumour has it that he is completely henpecked by his mother and sister

Her Husband Luigi and his family were to much for her

I absolutely loved this book; it is heartwrenching and opening and follows Maria’s journey to discover their mother. She never knew her Father and didn’t know how they met her mother’s life in the village. It is also an account of other women like her mother who have no one to tell their stories of being marginalized in a country where divorce is banned and even living separate lives isn’t allowed. This is a perfect example of why I like small presses. Yes, this was a best seller in Italy, but it had not been picked up by a relatable story. We heard of many an abandoned baby many years ago. This fills in what happened after but also what can lead a parent to do that act. Then take their own life, she drowns; Maria seven finds out how she’d looked after this and how the body blows up with gas in the water. I like the vignette style of the book as she pieced the stories of her family bit by bit over time, and everyone she met told her a little more from the pictures in the book as well. Have you ever read a book about an abandoned baby or their mother?

Brandy Sour by Constantia Soteriou

~ winstonsdad ~ 3 Comments

Brandy Sour by Constantia Soteriou

Cypriot fiction

Original title – Brandy Sour

Translator – Lina Protopara

Source – Personal copy

When it comes to Woman in Translation month, I always try to get a new country and publisher in every year. This year, I have done both with one book. This is the first book from a new publisher that seems to be doing books from around the Med. It is from the Cypriot writer Constantia Soteriou, who has written three novels and won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2019 and the national book prize in Cyprus last year. Her earlier books have also been shortlisted for book prizes. This is her first book to be translated into English. This book is very clever as it is a novella made up of vignettes that cover the last fifty years of  Cypriot history. I love the covers of the Foundry Edition books. This cover design is inspired by a detail of a Hellenic vessel from the third century; the other books are also inspired by local designs.

They say that a barman invented the cocktail for King Farouk of Egypt in the 4os – a dark time for the king, who is already grown and in trouble, no longer the handsome, athletic boy charming Europe with his Western manners but a heavy, middle-aged man facing all kinds of political headaches in Egypt – and elsewhere, too – who has to conceal his fondness for alcohol. They say that he had come to Cyprus for a break after a trip to England; that he stayed in Platres, the island’s most cosmopolitan village; and that he lodged in the only hotel that could possibly host him, the Forest Park.

They say that he stayed in the village for a single night – just time enough to compose himself. They say that he had booked an entire floor of the hotel and had shut himself away in a room for hours and hours, eating and drinking – as he always did – and smoking too

The opening of the first story the title story Brandy Sour

Brandy Sour opens with the title story as the first story of how a barman made the first Brandy Sour for King Farouk, a drink with a connection to Cyprus, the tale of a small village and local ingredients in the drink this was in the fifties the early part of the history of the country in modern times. Each story follows how to make the e drink, and each drink has a conn section to people involved with a hotel in Cyprus, The Ledra Palace Hotel so, from Lavander tea to cocktails of Sherbert local spirits holy water, even piss in one story of a painter. We get a picture of this history from a hotel maid who remembers Yuri Gagarin drinking the iced sweet wine Commandaria. Zivania, drunk by an archbishop, brings up what happened in 1974. rose grown by the doorman, he ikes to make his rosebud tea. A soldier for the UN stopping the island from going back to war has lemonade to cool down in the heat. This collection follows the years since the hotel opened through the civil war and the aftermath.

Zivania is a favourite of the villagers up in the mountains.

They pour it into tiny shot glasses and they down it all in one go at weddings and big celebrations. They drink it when they close deals. In the cities, when people celebrate, they drink wine. When they close important deals, they pour some wine on the ground, for the soil to drink. The English drink whisky in big celebrations. They don’t like zivania – no need for their throats to burn that way. The Archbishop does not drink zivania – he despises all alcoholic beverages and he doesn’t eat any meat either and he only drinks water. Behind his back, the priests accuse him of being a little conceited. Zivania he uses only for having his back rubbed. There’s an old man in the archdiocese who’s good at cupping and bruising it

One of the local spirits, I would like to maybe try one day

I loved the framing of each person’s drink; its history connects with the drinks each person has had throughout the years. Why they were drinking it, and the little bit of history. It was an interesting and original idea to mix history and drinks. All centre and what was meant to be a bright shining beacon when it was built, the Ledra Palace hotel. I felt it would make a clever little film with each drink leading into a tale of the little piece of history dropped through the book as we see the employees, local guests, and others have the drinks through the seventy years since the hotel opened. A great first book from Cyprus for the blog. This is a great debut from a new publisher and should be better known. I think this is an inventive book if you are a fan of books told in vignettes this is a book for you. If you like a little history of the island and what people drink there, this will also appeal to you. Have you read any books from Cyprus or from Foundry Editions?

Winston score – A This is a powerful novella made of interesting vignettes.