Tag: linden editions

Ilaria or the Conquest of Disobedience by Gabriella Zalapi

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Ilaria or the Conquest of Disobedience by Gabriella Zalapi

Swiss Fiction

Original title – Ilaria ou la conquête de la désobéissance

Translator – Adrianna Hunter

Source – Subscription book

I must admit, Linden Editions brought out one of my favourite books last year, In Late Summer, which, like this book, was, in a way, a child’s view of the world.  This book is by the Swiss-Italian Visual Artist. Her artwork is a mix of images and Family memories, it says. I can see this in the book. This is her second novel and is set in a time long gone, really, as it is set in the 80s in Italy, and what happens in the book would be much harder to do now. But it is also a book that captures divorce well from the child’s point of View. I am from a family where my parents divorced.  In fact, I was maybe a year or so older than Ilaria when this happened to me.

Dad and I play a game: inventing our home and decorating it. First of all, it’s gonna be big. There’ll be loads of windows. And a big yard with a pond full of fish. Me and Ana will have separate bedrooms. Mine will be green and I’ll have the space to lay out my collection of rocks. Dad, promise you’ll make me a beautiful set of shelves. And I’ll put up a big poster of Nadia Comăneci, okay? Okay.

There’ll be masses of cupboards in the kitchen and Mom can put all her food processors in them. Dad’s making shelves for her too. She never has enough room for her recipe books. We’ll buy a beautiful gas stove. And there’ll be an attic too. Yes. We’ll put all the old furniture there.

It takes up too much room, don’t you think? You’re right.

And the walls of the living room will be really, really big.

Mom will be able to hang all her pictures. I’1l make the holes with my drill, I promise. And Ana can finally have the tortoise she’s always wanted.

Early on they have fun but it turns over time

This book sees what happens when Ilaria’s father picks her up from school one day, which he does most days, and he usually drops the young girl off with her mother, Ana. But the parents are in the middle of a divorce and her father is desperate man trying to patch things up and his plan is well is there a plan I often wondered the book is told from Ilaria pouint of view so she is both slighttly unreliable as the narrator but also has that childlike way of seeing her fasther as her father not a man that has taken her on the run and that is what he has done he picked her up in Switzerland and then head not to drop her off but toward Turin and tells her to tell her when she ses a phone box this is a reccurring event in the book the father calling the mother trying to win =her back as he has taken their daughter. There is a sense even through Ilaria’s eyes that this may be something he had done on the spur of the moment, and as we drift through a collection of friends and people they meet along the way.  We see her father telling her what her mother has supposedly said, as what really is going on slowly dawns on his daughter over the coming days, from the sofa to hotels, from car to car across Italy.

He’s jumpy

He’s angry

He’s going to get nasty.

In the last few weeks Dad’s been getting wound up over the tiniest things. He says he can’t stand winter, he can’t stand the lack oflight. Sometimes he’s so angry that I can imagine pétanque balls being thrown around my head. I shudder.

And block my ears.

The other day he called me Mom’s name, Antonia.

I take my time before I open my mouth now. I start my sen-tence, watch him, and, if I see the least sign of irritation, I stop.

Answer me when I’m talking to you.

I dither.

Her Observations of her father before he took her

This is a book that has a thriller, like running to the narrative as we view this happening through the eyes of eight-year-old Ilaria, sitting next to her father as he heads across Italy on the side roads, trying to win his wife back and not get caught for taking his daughter at the same time. From call to call as they head place to place as her father tells her what her mother is supposedly saying, she sees her mother, Ana and father in her mind and slowly sees something isn’t right with her father. I loved the way we see all this through her eyes as a reader. I kept filling in the gaps of her observations of the situation from an outsider’s view. But then I know how hard divorce is on kids and parents. I remember how my mother and father were about my brother and me. I also think this is an event that might not happen as easily nowadays. If you like unreliable child narrators and road movies, this is the book for you. It is a hell of a ride alongside young Ilaria and her father. I must admit this is my book of the year so far.

Voracious by Malgorzata Lebda

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Voracious by Malgorzata Lebda

Polish Fiction

Orignal title –Łakome

Translator – Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Source review copy

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

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

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

Saint Grandma Róza talking to insects.

Saint Grandma Róza the tender.

Saint Grandma Róza the just.

Saint Grandma Róza the compassionate.

Saint Grandma Róza the merciful.

Saint Grandma Róza who is.

The naturual world and how her grandparents know it

 

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

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

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

smoking a Klub. And gazing ahead.

Moving? Where? I ask.

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

The sound of church bells rings out.

It has started, look, he says.

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

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

I’m off, says Grandpa.

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

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

In late Summer by Magdalena Blažević

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In late Summer by Magdalena Blažević

Bosnian fiction

Original title – U kasno ljeto

Translator – Andelka Raguž

Source – Review copy

I was lucky to be sent two new releases from the new publisher, the Linden editions. If you have followed this blog for any time, you will know I am a huge champion of new publishers. For me, they are the lifeline as a reader of books in translations, as they can translate books that otherwise wouldn’t see the light of day. This book, in particular, really grabbed me as it is from the Balkans, a region I feel should be better known for its writing and variety. I have long championed this region on the blog. However, this book is set in a village during the Balkan War. It was always going to be a book I wanted to read. Magdalean is from Bosnia, and this book won the Best Croatian book award. This is her debut novel and captures the horrors of war through an innocent girl’s eyes.

The windows in the cellar are low, fixed to the road, and you can’t see the sky or the forest through them, just the road and the feet of passers-by. I recognise Mother’s. She walks slowly, the hem of her flowery dress swinging to and fro. You can push a finger into the scars on her leg. A bucket of overripe tomatoes sways in her hand. Clods of damp earth fall off her rubber galoshes. They disappear behind our house. I put my hands on the cold pane.

My name is Ivana. I lived for fourteen summers, and this is the story of my last.

The haunting last line of the first chapter draws you in as a reader !

The book is an ode to the countryside and the country life that was there before the war, and about a family and what happens when their 14-year-old daughter is caught up in a massacre in Bosnia. It is told by Ivana, the fourteen-year-old, and the title is mentioned by her early on as she says This is my story. I have lived fourteen summers, and this is my last summer. The summer is told from her point of view from time spent with her grandmother in =what at that point seems a rural idyllic place, a pace of life I think we would all like, a bygone world of simple living and a trouble-free world. But the war is always there in the background. Till the day the soldiers appear, they aren’t named as being from one side or the other. The family flee to a nearby village that has already been abandoned. Still, they are caught, and this is where the narrative switches from a sort of pastoral scene of countryside and village life to the aftermath of losing loved ones in the mindless violence that had seemed so far away. Is now so real and has hit the family.

She’s standing beside Grandfather in the photo studio; they’re to be married in a couple of days. Ducats borrowed from the village jingle around her neck; a white blouse rustles under her fingertips. Grandfather’s shirt is cut low on the chest and singed, with sharp blades of grass poking out. He’s a lot taller than her. It seems to her that the top of his head is a canopy, and that it’s breaking through the ceiling. Grandmother doesn’t lift her gaze. Green eyes prey on her from beneath steep awnings; a wide jaw and shiny, sharp teeth threaten.

The grandmother is the heart of this family

I have read several great novels about the Balkan conflict. But this is the first to have a child as its main narrator and to tell the whole story from her point of view, as the war is initially so far away, and the world they are living in with the family, especially the grandparents, seems perfect and a rural existence that has maybe now gone after the conflict the family seem part of the land they live in. One of the beauties of this book is it doesn’t label who is who, which side is which; it is just about the act of war and its effect on everybody. Till it is shattered, the book is a book of two halves. Her last summer and the aftermath of it were her final summer. The main character’s voice reminded me of the Voice in the American novel, The Lovely Bones. She has captured how it hit people like Ivana and her family in those small villages, and her narration has the same detached nature; the things that happen are just told, if that makes sense. It shows the brutality of war on one village, on one family, on one daughter and granddaughter. This is one of my favourite books of recent years. It will be near the top of the books of the year for sure. Do you have a book you think captures the Balkan conflict well?