Tag: Les fugitives

The Child Who by Jeanne Benameur

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The Child Who by Jeanne Benameur

French fiction

Original title – L’Enfant qui,

Translator  Bill Johnson

Source – personal copy

I picked this up earlier in the year when I went to Cambridge for a holiday. I picked it up because Le Fugitives has been one of my favourite publishers over the last few years; they have been bringing out some excellent female writing, initially from French authors, but I know they are now also bringing out English writers. Jeanne Benameur was a French professor before becoming a full-time writer. She has written both for adults and children. She also runs writing workshops in prisons, as her father was also involved in the prison service. She also works with children in distress, and that has fueled her literature. I obtained a lot of this information from her French Wikipedia page, which connects with the book, which is about a small boy who has lost his mother, father, and grandmother.

You’re running. You’re running. So no eyes should have the time to see you, so your face should not be captured by anyone’s gaze. How long has it been since your mother’s eyes last rested on you?

How long since there’s been no mother?

The calendar counts in days in months in years. But you, you don’t know. You live with only darker moments and brighter moments. In your head, time finds room for itself where it can, the way that space threads its way among the trees in the woods.

Sometimes you lose your mother’s face. You haven’t yet learned to find it in a faraway icon, near a blue blue sea, looking up tenderly in a painting of the Italian Renaissance. You’re thrown into a panic. I hear your breathing. It bumps up against something hard in your chest. You run you struggle against the hard thing in there, a rock. Between your ribs the air is constricted, it whistles. At such times you feel you’re still alive. From the pain.

In the woods away from the pain

This is a book that looks in on these characters and how they deal, or in the most part don’t deal, with the loss of a daughter, a wife and a mother. IT is mainly about the small boy, there are a few names and little place names or the time when the events are happening, but for me, that means it can be any time, and makes it feel like a tale for all. The small boy likes to wander off to the woods, and he walks with a dog. Is it a dog or an imaginary friend he has made? Maybe it is his mother, my Amanda always says robins are my mum visiting me when we see them ,checking in on me. A father who has moved on, the mother was a sort of ghost in their lives. The way she is described evokes the kind of things that evoke a person’s past, as well as a place, a time, etc. The mother is never fully present, but her spirit is. The boy struggles. I loved him early on as he was off, and his grandmother turned, expecting him to be just by her elbow, but he was gone. I think this is a book that touches the silence of death and tries to bring words to it.

The dog is trotting next to you. No one aside from you can see it, this dog.But you don’t know that. Its presence by your side sets my mind at ease. It’s strong, and can smell things that you can’t see.You can push ahead with your journey. Your woollen top always hangs down on one side, you’ve buttoned Monday with Tuesday, your grandmother says.You don’t entirely understand what that means. It’s just that the days no longer know how to follow one another.You’re a child who leans. The dog restores the balance.

At times a burst of joy moves through you. You don’t know where it comes from.It’s the morning lark that finds its rising flight in you. From your feet to your head and much higher than your head, an irrepressible surge lifts you up. There’s no reason for the joy. It carries you. And you move forwards.

In the wooods with the dog but it captures as I said silence in this world

I can see how the things she has done around her writing in prisons with distressed children have given her a real insight into how to make silence fly off the pages in words, something that is hard to grasp. But she also captures how we may remember someone who was never fully present; that spirit of the mother is still with me. I wonder if the dog was hers or just a way for the boy to be in silence and not always feel alone, if that makes sense. This book brings me to book 179 in my review of 200 French books, and it’s from one of the publishers that I feel has brought some of the strongest female voices to us from France. Do you have a favourite book from French? Favourite publisher that has brought out French books?

Eastbound by Maylis De Kerangal

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Eastbound by Maylis De Keranngal

French fiction

Orignal title – Tangente ver L’est

Translator Jessica Moore

Source – Personal copy

This was a buy from Alnwick when I went to Barter Books. It had been on my radar since coming out. It is published in the UK by Les Fugitives, but in the US, one of my all-time favourite publishers brought it out, Archipelago Books. But her other books in the UK have been published by Maclehose Press, and I have reviewed two of them and read her short story collection. Maylis De Keranagal is a writer who is great at moments, people and how they interact. What drew me to this it was around a Russian soldier defecting and a French woman with her own story.

Aliocha locks himself in the first toilet cubicle that’s free, washes the blood from his face with plenty of water, examines the marks, makes himself a compress by tearing a length of toilet paper from the huge roll attached to the wall and soaks it in ice-cold water before pressing it to his red profile, his swollen nose. And then, ignoring the insults shouted by people waiting outside, their kicks against the door, he takes his time checking the mirror to make sure his face is slowly regaining its colour and volume.

But his bruises mark him out now as a victim, he knows it, and once he’s out of the toilet he seeks out the shadows, the darkness, and reaches his train carriage by slinking along the walls.

As he tries to find a way out of his military service in the train.

The story follows the Trans Siberian Express as it heads across Russia. On board is a young man, Aliocha, barely out of his teens, who is a conscript with his fellow conscripts on this train to spend time in the military in some far-flung hinterland in Siberia. He has tried to get out of it every way he can.So he is trying to find a way to escape of the train and hopefully find freedom. AS he initially hides in a toilet, he sees a woman unlike any he has seen before. This French woman has an air different to anyone else that he has seen. So he follows her and as he feels the fact he could be found he goes in her compartment and gets her to change her clothes so he can seem different she initially is hesitant but lets this young man and as the train g=cross the land we see Helene’s tale and that like Aliocha is on the run from her own problems a love affair with a man called Anton, the passionate affair started in Paris but as time goes on it has gone wrong hence she is escaping on the train as well. This is a tale of two lost souls, each with a reason to want to be as far away from their own lives as possible, colliding on this train.

THE DOORS slide open behind him. Someone has come into the compartment.

Aliocha turns: the woman who got on in Krasnoyarsk, the foreigner, it’s her. In one hand she holds a glass encased in silver mesh, and in the other, a lit cigarette. She stands in profile at a side window; she, too, is rummaging around in the night, the night that never closes completely here, but stays ambiguous, charged with an electric luminosity that always makes you think day is about to break. Aliocha observes her surrepti-tiously, swivelling his eyes in their sockets without moving his body: she’s smoking, very calm, her face faintly shining. He’s never seen women like her, awake at this time of night and alone on trains transporting troops, women in men’s shirts and big boots, not in Moscow;

Helene catches his eye she is so different than other on the Train

I had heard Mookse’s podcast about Hotel novels. I think this is maybe the next subject they may do about books set in a place as a train journey is such a great setting for a novel as it is always a cross-section of people, and this is so much the case here. How else would a young 20-year Russian conscript want to run away ever meet an attractive middle-aged French woman herself also wanting to escape an event in her life? The parallel in the stories is something she has touched on in other books,. The moment is a turning point in the book Mend the Living and the tale of two people connected by a single heart. This has a turning point of a disaster, whether it is death or her trying to escape her world. Then there is the pace of the book. It has that feeling of the train, and when you are on a long trip on a train, but the near you get to the end, the faster the world seems to go, and this is the case here. We find out the two of them stories and when they meet and he hides the book moves on from that point like an intercity 125 on course as the two of them are  Eastbound on the Trans Siberian Express, but maybe both wanting to be Westbound will the find Aliocha and will Helene escape the boredom of her life with Anton back to the city she loves Paris. Have you read any of her books?

Winstons score – +A a great novella from one of the leading French writers

May the Tigris grieve for you by Emilienne Malfatto

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May the Tigris grieve for you by Emilienne Malfatto

French fiction

Original title – Que sur toi se lamente le Tigre

Translator – Lorna Scott Fox

Source – personal copy

This is one that had been on my radar since it came out in April last year, so when I saw a copy, I grabbed it and was so pleased I did. Emilienne is a photojournalist and writer. This was her debut novel, and it won the Goncourt Prize for a debut novel when it came out. She is known for her work around social, feminist and post-conflict areas. She has also worked in the Middle East a lot. She has also worked with NGOs and Doctors without Borders. This is a story of one girl’s life falling in as she is unwed and pregnant in Rural Iraq. A book that mixes family and the myth of Gilgamesh and the Tigris.

And then my periods stopped coming. The first month I hardly noticed, it sometimes happened. The following months I thought it was because of grief. I thought Mohammed’s death had dried me up. When Father died I didn’t bleed either, not for months. It’s because of sadness, the doctor said when Mother finally took me to see him. He looked at me kindly, intently, while she was talking about the worry of having an abnormal’ daughter. It was already shame enough to be seeing the doctor about that, may the neighbours never find out, how could they find out, but that was one of my mother’s great dreads. The doctor reassured her, called her Ma’am and said the bleeding would return when my grief had subsided. He had seen several such cases since the war began.’Psychosomatic,’ he said, but we didn’t know that word in Arabic.

She had to go and be sure at the doctors but that set the ball rolling of events later

The book is divided into small chapters as we. We meet a girl who has got up and struggled to do so with black drops on the floor. When she goes up, she goes with her mother to the father’s grave. Then, a doctor. At this point, the girl knows she is pregnant, but when they see the Doctor, the girl knows what this means. They are in the rural area of Iraq. As the country is under the grip of Islamic state fever her life is danger. She is in a village near the river Tigris; the text is interspersed with pieces around the river and the great myth tied up with this region. As Gilgamesh is of the land and memories of those that have lived there as the Tigris follows through the land he lived and she lived. Her boyfriend had died in a friendly fire incident, but that was too late. Now the wheels of what is to happen are set in motion. We hear from her brother and others as we see how a young girl’s life is about to end due to her other half dying before they married.

I am the brother and the dealer of death.I am the man of the family, the eldest, the repository of male authority – the only authority that matters, that has ever mattered.I am the brother who shouldered the father’s mantle. I reign over the women.

I am the killer. Soon I will kill, but I don’t know that yet. What would I do if I knew?Would I turn on my heel in the dusty alleyway? Soon I will kill, believing that I had no choice. Her life or our honour.It is not I who will kill, but the street, the neighbourhood, the town. This whole country.

The brother is faced with a tough decision about his sister and what he has to do

This is a little gem of a book it is under 80 pages and can easily be read in an evening. It is told firstly from the girl’s point of view, then we have other people’s voices as we find out what happened to her. It is an insight into the horrors that have occurred under an Islamic state. In her photojournalist job, you can see how the writer has connected with the world she is describing. The prose’s simple style manages to convey a powerful message and show how females were treated under the Islamic state. As you see ow, a family deals with the horror of losing a daughter and a son killing her, and a mother dealing with these both. A bleak look into Femicide and family pride in the islamic state. The book is made up of short chapters, most less than two pages long, and is one of those books that seem much longer than it is.

Winston score: A powerful look into the Islamic State in Iraq from one girl’s point of view when she feels pregnant out of wedlock and the aftermath no matter the reason why.

 

 

The white dress by Nathalie Léger

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The White Dress by Nathalie Léger

French fiction

Original title – La Robe blanche

Translator – Natascha Lehrer

Source – personal copy

When it comes towards the end of the year I look at end of the year list for translated fiction and try and find a few books that have passed me by in the last year this is one such book I have read other titles from the published Les Fugitives a publisher that has been publishing interesting books by female writers from France over the last couple of years. This is the latest book written by Nathalie Leger. this the last in three books she had written about women she had discovered in her work as a curator of various exhibitions. This novel is based on a true story about the last few weeks in the life of Italian Performance Artist Pippa Bacca.

One of Guiseppina’s most important creations was called Eva Adamovich. Certain days, as her friends and relativesdecribed at the inquest, Pippa became Eva, and as Eva, whom Guiseppina had invented from head to foot, as Eva she had all the desirable assests : vivacity, daring , a tounch of cruelty – though it was all an act, her friends insisted. Dressed up as Eva, inhabiting Eva,she strode briskly throug the streets of milan in twelve centimetre heels, a tiny pair of shorts, a greem lame sweater and a boa, calling everyone “love” or “sweetheart”, like she was tough as nails letting it be nderstood that she knew all about mrn, that she didn’t trust them.

This was one of the roles she performed over the years.

This is a strange mix of real-life and a personal memoir and the writer thinking about the events that lead up to the last few weeks of the life of Italian performance artist Pippa Back. As we find the events that lead Pippa to run in a white wedding dress from Milan to Jeruselum in the wedding dress as a walk for peace and to do performance using people she knew along the way as the trip was a video for a later date. This sparks an inner journey that is taken by the writer on a journey through her own parent’s divorce and the bitter affair that she viewed from her mother’s side and the fact that she was abandoned when her father ran off with another woman. Meanwhile, we see events in Pippa’s life like when she played Eva Adamovich a role she played. in high heels and short shorts. Also a thread about performance art over the years. Pippa makes it to Turkey. When her sister doesn’t hear from her this leads to a search and the sad end to her walk for peace.

The artis, her name is Jana Sterbak, wove wire into a long, straight dress with open arms, long sleeves and a round neckline that stands on the floor some say like a shelter, other like a cage, and belted at the waistby an electrified filament made of nickel chrome that makes the dress light up when someone approaches. The dress stands errectg, possessive and threatening, welcoming qand repelling, it is called I want you t feel the way I do ..(The Dress)

Another dress sparked by the wearing of the dress by Pippa bacca in her walk for peace.

I am leaving the end of the book and the last section where the writer views those events that end the walk this is a book about the writer as much as Pippa Bacca. What I Like is the way little events in the life of Pippa make Nathalie think of her own life. This is a mix of c=fiction biography but also a creative enquiring mind. It is about those mind journeys that we all take when we read about or discover some new fact or life story that is what we have here the sparks of a mind those journeys the two take through the book and how Pippa walk although cut short inspired a personal introspection of the writer I will read the two earlier books in this loose trilogy. them two both inspired by the work she has worked on over the years. Have you read this book did it inspire you? This is why we read books in translation those books that break the mould in the Form.

 

This Tilting world by Colette Fellous

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Tilting_38.jpgThis Tilting World by Colette Fellous

French fiction

Original title – Pièces détachées

Translator – Sophie Lewis

Source – review copy

The small publisher Les Fugitives has brought some interesting and challenging reads out from Female french writers they have brought us some great titles this last few years and here we have the French Tunisian writer and radio producer for French Culture, Colette Fellous has written over twenty novels she was mentored in her early career by the great Roland Barthes. This is an ode to her exile from her homeland but also that feeling of being between places and times that exiles feel this is a tribute to the Tunisian Jewish community that has left its homeland on the whole now.

It all happened in the same peroid, over a few short months. In Paris, the Charlie Hebdo massacres and the one at porte-de-Vincennes Kosher supermarket in January. The Bardo in March. Alain two weeks ago, and yesterday the beach at Sousse. Always on a Wednesday or a Friday. Of course Alain’s death should not be on the list, it has nothing ot do with the otherm his was an accidental death, a heart attack, most likely. The others were murde3rs, premeditated crimes, attacks. But these collectivd shocks, these blows to our bodies and our personal lives, have become interleaved with Alain’s death,woth the shock of that death, in the heat of the day, down in the village streets. He died on his sailing boat, in mid-ocean, in the space of a few minutes.

The attaxcks her friends sudden death all topple down one after another.

This book is triggered by a number of events firstly the terrorist attack that happened in Sousse in June 2015. Our main character is nearby on a beach she sits starring at the sea. Gathering the horror of the Attack but also she had also just lost her father and a close friend. This leads to a fragmented work where she tries to piece together then and now. Her time between Tunisia and France growing up in both worlds but never really feeling part of them. Then Her Father a quiet man who left Tunisia to live in France late on in his life. She tries to bring his world alive him from those little things smells music literature builds this quiet man up. Then she at times she digresses from Maupassant’s work of the turn of the century his view of Tunisia and then Proust buying a small diary that was the trigger for his great work from a shop in Paris. All this mixes with memories of Tunisia but also the Med a loss of a close friend the sea. But as she said at one point the faces objects crowd each other and dazzle me. A novel in parts to home, exile, terror, family , friends and also those little bits of everyday.

Tomorrow, yes, I will leave this house, I”ll abandon the village and the life here, all the faces rthat I love will leave.The friends, the objects, the doors, the pavement slabs, the tall eucalyptus and the wild olive trees, the orange groes, the roads , the markets,the music, the fruit, the dancing, my window of blue. I’ll leave it all, no strength left. I don’t know how I’ll get to slepp .Just now changed my bed around to try it out: with your head to the north you’ll sleep better, souad told me, you don’t take enopugh care with your sleep, you don’t take enough time for yourself.

Leaving her home is hard.

 

This is one of those novels in which there is no real plot no real action just fragments like a lot of flotsam and jetson collected and made into something Beautiful the everyday things memories places and smells. I read a french interview which this is mention and her mentor Barthes –

You cannot read Spare Parts without thinking of your master Roland Barthes, who claimed sweetness, words, words, smells, all the little everyday things that need to be sublimated.
That is true. Roland Barthes has always led this fight. In my training, he replaced my parents and gave me protection and sensuality. Barthes had this fabulous power to decipher the world with words. This is all that makes this book. If the small room is not there, nothing works. I gathered all these small parts which constitute me and that night I managed to operate this love machine but I sought, sought, wrote… I invoked my life, the other life in Normandy where I met all these villagers who had never moved, people who brought me back to my nomadic reality and who also reminded me that I had to stay that way. from https://www.lorientlitteraire.com/  
The French title is Spare Parts here is a tribute and a lament to a world gone almost like the attack at the start of the book its heart has been pulled out a community of Jews there now gone a father gone a dream of the place blown apart. it is an ode to a world gone she is equal Bartes and Ernaux in the way she talks about literature and music here. Another contender for tomorrow’s longlist.

Selfies by Sylvie Weil

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Selfies.jpg

Selfie by Sylvie Weil

French fiction

Original title – Selfies

Translator – Ros Schwartz

Source – review copy

Sylvie Weil is the daughter of the well-known Mathematician Andre Weil and niece of Philosopher Simone. She studied Classics and French literature at the Sorbonne then taught in France and after a few years became a professor of French literature in the US. Then decided to become a writer she has written a number of YA novels and novels as well as Plays and Short stories. This is the latest book from the small publisher Les Fugitives bring the best of Modern French Literature to us in English.

The elderly teacher would often remind me that you must play each bar with one eye already on the next, so as not to be caught unawares. It was when he was speaking on this subject that I heard him laugh – the one and only time ever. He recalled one of his pupils, a very pious english spinster, who had replied: Oh! monsieur, god alone can see the future. I didn’t see him laugh because I never looked at him, but I definitely heard him laugh, as he sat beside ,me

The otgan reminded of the picture of someone 400 years earlier playing a clavichord sparks a memory of an old teacher.

This is a clever use of selfies the modern craze that isn’t so modern as we see here Sylvie uses a mix of paintings and photos from the 16th century onwards. Then uses these to tell vignettes of her own life, From the opening Vignette Sofonsiba Angussiola a picture of her at a Clavichord that reminds her when she visited a crypt in 1978 learning the organ being taught by an elderly teach proud to be teaching Simone’s niece. The Gwen John painting self-portrait with a letter reminds Sylvie of a postcard a lover called Gary the piece set in cafes smells of tobacco and honey and their meetings will he ask her to marry him something never answered. Later on, Frida Kahlo self-portrait reminds Sylvie of a couple she knew that had a dog, she isn’t a fan of dogs but when this dog that was a huge bouncy dog that greeted her bounding over every time passes she sees the gap and why they loved him so much. Near the end, Vivian Maier sparks the remembrance of a trip to Israel and what happened after as she is questioned about the trip.

When I met his owners, Ted and Elizabeth, they were no longer young. They’d married late. They had a huge dog called Winston, who would jump up excitedly when you mentioned the name of a certain dog biscuit, a bland rusk in the shape of a little bone. He’d snatch the biscuitm crunch it and then wag his tail enthusiastically, asis fitting for a well trained dog. It goes without saying that he never tired of running to retrive the ball or the sticks his owners threw as far as they could, knowning that he enjoyedthis game. An uncomplicated dog in other words. He was Elizabeth’s dog, from before her marriage. She liked to say that it was thank him that she’d learned to live with a fellow creature. Winston had taught her to share , to trust, Otherwise she’d never have married, she’d assert with a smile.

Well not hard to know why I connect to this particular vignette we all need a huge dog called Winston in our lives at some point !!!

This is a clever framing device using the paintings as a starting point for the vignettes she writes each a personal and emotional experience from her life. This is a literary trip on the selfie an attempt to capture in a few pages more than what is a picture but also what makes a picture the moment but also the moments leading to the snapshot a self is just a millisecond but this shows what isn’t caught yes a dog is a dog but when the dog isn’t there the gap is more than a gap. Playing a keyboard is about learning but also the experience of learning and the place. I was remind of Wim Wenders talking about how unreal phone selfies are not a photo just a image as how often do we print them of even then this shows that it is more than a moment we maybe need but the whole sensation of  what happened from Proust biting his Madeleine or Sebald falling down the various rabbit holes in rings of Saturn it is about the image, place or  taste leading the writer somewhere ! Another interesting piece of French Literature this touched me as much as Anne Ernaux Years did earlier this year.

Now,Now, Louison by Jean Fremon

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Published on 24 September 2018, paperback original with flaps, 180x120, 115 pages

Now, Now, Louison by Jean Fremon

French Fiction

Original title – Calme toi

Translator -Cole Svensen

Source -personal copy

Jean Fremon is a French gallerist famous for promoting a number of the best-known artists of the 20th century including the subject of this book Lousie Bourgeois also the likes of David Hockney and Franci bacon are just a few that have been through his Leong gallery over the years. His writing is described as cross-genre and a mix of art history essays and fiction he has written a couple of long books like this based around the artists lives the book is a mix of his years of knowing Bourgeois for more than thirty letters and personal accounts of her.

But you, you love spiders. They’re beautiful, they’re clean, and they manage to simultaneously both quick and calm.They wait, motionless, in corners, never flustered, never obsessive, never hysterical; they’re serenebeings, holding themselves apart. With an animal patience. And they destroy various things that make life unbearable, such as flies and mosquitoes. Ah! the mosquitoes in Easton! how we could have used a good herd of spiders ! and it must be said the take good care of their young. Ypu watch them, in the garden , in the attic, on the stairway, in the basement.

I loved this description of spiders she hit the nail on the head I don’t like spiders but they have there uses.

Fremon has tried to enter Bourgeois world and describe her life in short burst a mixture of her inner monologue glimpse of personal history and the artist she has seen or heard about. There is another thread that is called the spider book. I most remember her as the spider woman from the Tate exhibition a number of years ago where her giant spider sculptures rose in that huge space frighting visions that both scare and intrigued me as a person like a natural version of HG wells martian invaders walking the space. Family life things like her mother passing is captured when her mother was the only person she felt secure with. A mixture of art antidotes like Duchamp visiting an aviation show and the outfall of that. Her visiting controversial exhibits like Serranos works which include the work Piss Christ where he mixed bodily fluids and religious symbols like Bourgeois who had to defend the use of sexual imagery in her own work over the years. Then the spider book which has facts she finds over the years about spiders. A mix of styles of writing makes a mosaic of a great artist that lived here.

You don’t sleep. Insomnia has always been your friend, though it’s a stormy friendship, it must be said. When the children still lived with you, you would wake them up in the middle of the night. Simply because yoiu were the only one not sleeping. Now that you no longer have anyone to wake up, you ponder, you draw. In the morning, there are drawings everywhere, on the bed, on the rug … Jerry picks them up .They’re called insomnia drawings.They are cries, letters of love or of pique

One of the glimpse and the art she made when she didn’t sleep here is a glimpse at them

I knew a little about her life I saw the Tate show an interview with her at the time. Her first love was maths then art Jean Fremon builds a wonderful tone to her voice and the way he uses inner monologue the glimpse of her life on a personal and artistic level. It is a biography more an art piece itself what he has done is take her life break it into small piece and build a mosaic image that has a small glimpse of her life from her Exile in the US the loss of her parents to small everyday glimpses. slowly build a picture of this artist an impression an abstract view of her world it is an unusual style of writing compelling I read it through twice and each time found little gems in the short choppy paragraphs that range from a couple of lines to a few pages. I choose this as one of a few books I’d buy pre Man Booker as it fits my criteria of what prize-winning translations should be that is fresh, different, challenging to the reader, small press this is the sort of book we only get due to those small presses and those that run them, in this case, it is Les Fugitives which is bringing the best of French writing to use.

Blue Self-Portrait by Noémi Lefebvre

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Published 15th June 2017 / ISBN 978-0-9930093-2-7 / 160 pp / 180 x 120 / paperback / RRP: GBP 10.99 The inner monologue of a woman haunted by German composer Arnold Schoenberg’s portrait, following a complex romantic encounter with an American-German pianist-composer in Berlin. As the irresistible, impossible narrator flies home she unpicks her social failures while the pianist reaches towards a musical self-portrait with all the resonance of Schoenberg’s passionate, chilling blue. A contemporary novel of angst and high farce, Blue Self-Portrait unfolds among Berlin’s cultural institutions but is more truly located in the mid-air flux between contrary impulses to remember and to ignore. Yet music is shown to continue to work on and through us, addressing past trauma while reaching for possible futures. This book is supported by the French Institute (UK) as part of the Burgess programme, and is the recipient of a translation grant by the Centre National du Livre (CNL).

Blue Self-Portrait  by   Lefebrve

French fiction

Original title  – L’autoportrait bleu

Translator – Sophie Lewis

Source – review copy

I move a step closer to 100 books from France . With another intriguing novel from the new publisher Les Fugitives, who are trying to bring the brightest female French voice to us in English. Today we have  Noémi Lefebrve A writer who studied Music and Fench and German identity. She then became a political scientist. She has published three books since then. This is her first book to be translated into English.

Nonetheless, he hung the Blue Self-Portrait in the here and now of the Brandenburgian countryside, as if this was the only thing to do at this precise moment: bring together the living memory of Schoenberg as captured in the painting and the deathly precence of Brandenburg nature, conversely bring together still and temporary life with the natural memoryof Schoenberg captured in paint .

The description of Schoenberg famous self portrait in Blue.

I liked the first book I read from Les Fugitives Translation as Transhumance. Blue self -portrait is an internal monologue of a female, as she visits Berlin. What unfolds is an internal trip around the Cultural highlights of Berlin. Told from this woman. This is mixed with her haunting views about the works of Schoenberg. The title derives from the title of his Self-portrait in Blue that haunts her. She is getting over a failed romantic encounter with American German pianist that played was known for the way he could interpret  Schoenberg. She has also been reading Theodor W Adorno is someone, she has been reading. This, of course, this links also to Schoenberg as he played him as a trained pianist. He is also one of the leading lights in the Frankfurt school of philosophy. A female worrying about her place in the world. Her troubles with men and also her future. whilst wandering around the places to be in Berlin.A journey to the heart of a soul from her thoughts.

After reading Schoenberg’s letter to the Reich’ culture minister, the pianist had gone back to the Blue self portrait intending to examine the portrait’s blue, had registered the blue’s chill negativity, had taken a few steps back because of the negativity, this reflex which was unfolding a scene at once musical, Nazi and fashionable.

A pianst tries to enter his mind using the pic and How schoenberg went to the US to escape the Nazi’s

This is a trip with one mind through one city. Like Walter Benjamin’s trip through the arcades of Paris. We see places, culture and characters. That are all interlink in the thoughts of one woman as she tries to work out her life. The prose has a flow similar to that of a writer like Thomas Bernhard or Proust like the later she is recounting her romantic failures at times.This is a sort of anti-sex and the city for the modern girl it is more what not to do its as if Lena Dunham had written sex and the city. The theme of loss is a recurring motif in the book,  from the repetitive views of Cow that has lost his calf, to her own lost love and lost chances in a way.  This in a way is the opposite of the short film  Torsion which saw a cow giving birth as a choir escaped war-torn Sarajevo. There is a feeling of loss within this novel of being blue not just like Arnold Schoenberg in his picture, but also Blue inside ourselves is maybe a disease of the modern age. Schoenberg liked islands and maybe this proves we are all islands drifting in the deep blue sea of life as we try to moor with one another. A wry look at the modern female world y an up and coming writer.

Translation as Transhumance by Mireille Gansel

~ winstonsdad ~ 5 Comments

Pub date: 1 November, 2017 ISBN 978-0-9930093-3-4 / Flapped paperback 190x130 / 128 pages / RRP GBP10.00 A slim half-memoir, half-philosophical treatise musing on translation's potential for humanist engagement by one of the great contemporary French translators. Hansel has lived her life as a risk-taker. Going back to her childhood in post-war France she reflects on her origins as a translator; then she evokes her encounters with banned German writers in 1960s East Berlin. During the Vietnam war, Gansel went to Hanoi to work on an anthology of Vietnamese poetry. With the city under bombardment, this section of the book is a fascinating account of wartime danger, hospitality and human kinship.  Photograph by Natasha Lehrer

 

Translation as Transhumance by Mireille Gansel

Translators memoir

Original title – Traduire comme Transhumer

Translator – Ros Schwartz

Source – review copy

I bring you today a complex memoir from a French translator Mireille Gansal from German to French. She also has translated a lot of the first books of poetry from Vietnam into French after she lived in Hanoi in the 1970’s and discovered the writers of that country. This is another from the new publisher Les Fugitives a small press wanting to bring the most interesting French female voices to English. If this is and the two of the first three books I have read My review of Eve out of the ruins is her  There will be a review of a Blue a self-portrait as well soon. They are a publisher bring us real gems.

If translation is building a bridge between tow foreign shores, I realised that night how important it is for each one of the piles to be firmly anchored .

Translation is also about taking the byways that lead to distant places. The ultimate refuge: poetry as the language of survival, of unassailable liberty.

Two short quotes fromGansel about the art of translation ?

Mirellie Gansal grew up German during the post-war years, but as we find out her family heritage is one of Hungarian with Yiddish being the main language her father spoke growing up. She tells in on passage her wonder of letters arriving from family in Hungarian and how strange those words look, or visiting an aunt who language was a mix of Hungarian , Yiddish , German as she spoke the young Miriell a girl that would grow to love language and her describing the German of writers like Appelfeld and Kerstez the german from beyond Germany .Then to her first journey into that world of the translator when hit by one word a word that can not be held by strict dictionary definition and thus opening the oyster of the translators art and that is to discover the pearls from the words they are translating into English and this is what the book describes also how she discovered the wonderful poetry which she has translated into French and discovered whilst in Hanoi.Then she tells us about Nelly Sachs the Nobel winning Swedish poet that was German escaped Nazi persecution as a German Jew and then wrote about the tragedy of the Jewish people and was also a friend of Paul Celan.

To my delight , the section of the letter my father was reading was about me . He initially translated a word used by his brother or one of his sisters as “beloved” stumbled over the next word and repeated this – actually rather ordinary- adjective once, stumbled again and then rrepeated it a second  time.That triggered something in me. I dared to interupt him. I asked : But in Hungarin, is it the same word? He replied evasively:”it means the same thing!” Undettered I pressed him : But what are the words in Hungarian ? then one by one, he enumerated, almost with embarrassment, or at least with certain reticence, as though there were something immodest about it, the four magic words which. I have never forgotten :Dragam,Kedvesem,aranyoskam,edesem.

Her early wonder at hungarian but also what is in the meaning behind words .

I loved this Gansal brings to life so well her world that of a translator, her reaching out and connecting to the writer’s reality when she translated Reiner Kunze, she hit that nail so well the way a great translator looks beyond the words to bring the writers world to life. then I also was drawn into her early life she may have been one of the last true Mittel Europeans those families that came from everywhere Germany, Austria Hungary and had wonderful stories to tell of their lives. She also shows how she discovered the new voice in Vietnam at a time when America was trying to bomb them back to the stone age she discovered wonderful poets and their works. I feel this is a must-read for any fan of translation and translators and maybe the start of a new trend in translator memoirs?

Eve out of her ruins by Ananda Devi

~ winstonsdad ~ 10 Comments

First published by Les Fugitives and CB editions in September 2016 ISBN 9780993009341 / 120x180 / paperback with flaps / 160 p / RRP: GBP10.99 Order here. With brutal honesty and poetic urgency, Ananda Devi relates the tale of four young Mauritians trapped in their country's endless cycle of fear and violence: Eve, whose body is her only weapon and source of power; Savita, Eve's best friend, the only one who loves Eve without self-interest, who has plans to leave but will not go alone; Saadiq, gifted would-be poet, inspired by Rimbaud, in love with Eve; Clelio, belligerent rebel, waiting without hope for his brother to send for him from France. Eve Out of Her Ruins is a heartbreaking look at the dark corners of the island nation of Mauritius that tourists never see, a poignant exploration of the construction of personhood at the margins of society, and a harrowing account of the violent reality of life in Devi's native country by the figurehead of Mauritian literature.

Eve out of her ruins by Ananda Devi

Mauritian fiction

Original title –  Ève de ses décombres

Translator  – Jeffrey Zuckerman

Source – personnel copy

When the american list for the best translated book came out on the three percent website this year I decide to order a few of the books from this years list , this was one of those books and since I read my last book from Mauritius the last brother  , I had been wanting to read another Ananda Devi won her first prize when she was fifteen she studied at SOAS in London and had her first works published in the late 1970’s and this was her seventh novel and won the Prix des cinq continents de la Francophonie.

He dragged me off a corner of the playground , behind a huge  Indian almond tree , he pinned me against the tree’s trunk , and he slipped his hand under my t-shirt. I was wearing a red t-shirt, with a soccer player’s name on it . I don’t remember who anymore . His hand stopped at my breasts , slowly moved up and down, just over the small black points. There hardly anything there. I heard other children shouting and playing .They seemed far away.

Eve first encounter distant like her mind and body split that day !

This is a coming of age book about four teens on the cusp of adulthood in the capital city of Mauritius Port louis , we have Eve the main character in this four voice narrative , she is a young girl that has being using her body to get attention of the boys around her and allowing them to abuse her ad in a way her body is damaged but her mind is still there . Then we have Saad as his chapters are called he shes what is happening to Eve , but wants more ,he loves Eve and has like many men his age discovered Poetry for him it is that of the young Rimbaud as he heard him read in Class  . But also is in the gang they still chase women the same . Another Gang member is the other male character in the book Clelio  he is awaiting family return from France and hopes to follow himself at some point to escape the gang and the world of Port Louis  . Eve also gets abuse at home from her father in fact the last voice in this book is her only Solace a fellow female student she seeks companionship and connection with . There is also a very sinister fifth voice weaving the book with a sinister tale.

You think about her again , as you saw her last . It’s because of him that she had this purplish tinge, this rigidity, this absolute stillness. It’s because of him that she contradicts everything she ever was ; a girl who was laughing thoughtful , warm and alive above all , alive . He was her final moment . It was this face = pasty defeated, unaware of the very meaning of the word love – that she saw at the moment she died.

You will not forgive him

THe fifth detached and chilling voice in this novel with its last words who was she !!

This is a story of growing up in the wild part of a city , I was reminded of the German novel tigermilk where the lead female character like Eve start to use their bodies for sex and a sort of instant gratification but also the hollow feeling that Eve has in her life. There is also a sense of pace Zuckerman has caught in the translation this remind  me of another book from its us publisher Deep Vellum . Tram 83 which also feature characters in what like Port louis is a town on the edge of Chaos , where like Cleio most youngsters are looking to escape to France. The uk publisher of this book is Les fugitives a new publisher putting out new female voices in french . A tough book about kids growing up in a harsh world .