Tag: Man international booker prize

Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda

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Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda

Mexican fiction

Original title – Perras de reserva

Translators – Heather Cleary and Julia Sanches

Source = Personal copy

Now, when the longlist came out for the booker international, this was one of the books I was vaguely looking at getting myself. It has a rather eye-catching cover with shocking Pink, and the choice of Font on the cover catches the eye. I have read a lot of great female writers from Mexico in the last few years in the time I have been blogging it is amazing how many writers have become available to us in English, and this writer is an activist for females in Mexico to have abortions, which is something I strongly support so I know ew this collection would be for me it is a colle action of short stories with a loose connection between them all. Now, I have to say the collection actually tale ends with the two best stories as the first and last for me, but the others all deal with the everyday horrors and violence for females in Mexico these days.Have you a favourite recent Mexican writer ?

Okay, I made that up … There is no Gerardo. I just wanted to add some romance to the story. I got pregnant from a one-night stand. I didn’t know the guy’s name and had zero interest in finding out. His performance was underwhelming. Yup, I got knocked up by a terrible lay.

I’m the kind of girl who gets used as an argument against abortion. The kind who hooks up with the first guy who sweet-talks her on a night out. The kind who should be on birth control, get her tubes tied, or keep her legs closed. I let total strangers grope me. I like parties, getting wasted, making a drunken ass of myself.

The opening story trying to find a way to lose her baby

The book opens with a girl wanting an abortion, and instead like in the not-so-distant [past in the UK, her only route is an old wives tale or a sort of back street treatment we used to see in the UK. This is an eye-opening, horrific look at one girl’s journey to lose an unwanted birth. The other stories see us meeting women and girls trying to keep one step ahead of the violent world they find themselves in, whether that is as a teen feeling a gang is the closest to family to others when you are a mother alone or not the world this is the harsh reality faced by many women in Mexico in a way it becomes like a recurring nightmare the stories blend at times bleed into one another as violence becomes almost the norm to us as the reader. Til the final tale, whix=ch is like all the rest but with added urgency to remind you once again of the horrors facing women in this violent world. Memories bleed onto the page here and on Facebook in the story itself.

At seven in the morning, I stumbled across a news story that broke me. They’d found a body in the river. It was in a black plastic bag, in an advanced state of decomposition. The water had kept the bag hidden, but when it receded, two feet appeared. Your feet. A few kids passing by noticed the smell of decay and called the police. The corpse was naked.

It’s hard for me to say your corpse. Women’s clothing was found nearby. A denim skirt. A black T-shirt. One sneaker. It was you.

No one is ever ready for the death of someone they love. But this wasn’t death. It was theft. You were stolen, violently ripped from my side. I broke down. I’d never cried like that before because I’d never felt like that before. Rage and sadness, all at once. When I remember that moment, I still feel the knot in my throat. It was terrible. I can’t write about it. It ripped me apart. An unidentified woman. You were one more body in this genocide. Another nameless woman adding to the death count. Another pink cross.

The end story more death as we see them mark with crosses!!

Now I have spent ages since I read this book how to best describe it bu then reading the above, it misses the dark humour that you also get in this type of world, gallows humour, the black humour you have to have to get by because otherwise, this book is the equivalent of a sort of literary waterboarding for the read quick breaths bother the violence. All that entails happens in this world. This book, I feel, would stand out for the judges as it is edgy, vile, funny, dark, and full of the violent side of the world. As I said in the middle of the book, this is normal to you as the reader reading reoccurring horrors in the tales I will never know other than in these pages, so if you want a ride into a world that will make you feel uncomfortable, read this, for me, this is what the booker is there for to highlight those books that are different that stand out like this book. Have you read this book?

A leopard skin Hat by Anne Serre

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A Leopard skin hat by Anne Serre

French fiction

Orignal title – Un chapeau léopard

Translator Mark Hutchinson

Source – Personal copy

Now of all the books that came out on the longlistt this year this writer is on my list of french writers to get to I had want to get the couple of earlier books that came out from another press by her but hadn’t got around to it so she her on this list is good as she is a writer that maybe needs a high profiler in English. There is a great LRB bookshop interview with her when this book came out. It makes you want to read her other books and see what an inventive writer she is. She is well known for her excellent choice of first lines. She also mentioned that the narrator in this book has cropped up in other books she has written. The book is in part about her sister.

Hardest of all for her friend the Narrator was Fanny’s astonishment – a perpetual, dumbstruck amazement, littered with question marks – at the lack of response that was her lot. That was why, on the rare occasions when she did fight back and flew into a terrible rage – even with the Narrator sometimes – he always felt relieved. There you are, there was life, there was frenzy, the desire to do battle! It was a sign she was rallying her forces, was about to march on the enemy and slay him perhaps – perhaps even slash him to ribbons, since the violence of these sudden outbursts seemed to know no bounds. They could last for days, weeks even. He can still see her, teeth clenched, seated beneath the trees in a park reading, glancing up to find her old friend there, happening by, and the look in her eyes, the language she had used to shoo him away. Had Fanny been armed she would probably have killed him that day. But sadly she had a loyal heart and would sit in judgment on herself.

Fanny could be very dangerous at times

The book is a two-hander about two friends. The book’s narrator is a man in his mid-forties who has been friends with Fanny for many years. Fanny is a woman that has some apparent issues The title of the book comes from when she steals a leopard skin hat and is so proud of stealing an item that no one really wears these days, She is the sort of person that has no idea of what to wear for the season is very unpredictable in how she interacts with people and seems to be the sort of friend that follows the others around her in the career paths. There is hints at some sort of mental illness or even neurodiverget condition but also a little of both. The book is formed of glimpses of the pair through the years, a life that, although bright, is very flawed and like a moth to likely to fly into the flame as Fanny does in her own way.

FANNY AND THE NARRATOR had been close friends since childhood, but within that friendship roles that would normally shift about and change had been frozen for years now, and that wasn’t good. Nor did it bode well. The Narrator was stuck in the role of the watchful friend, steadfast and reliable, Fanny of the one who strays, is forever losing things – possessions, lodgings, friends – and only with the greatest difficulty manages to maintain a semblance of stability. He would have liked to have broken out of this box, not because he wished to fall apart in turn, but so that his friend could play the role of the steadfast, reliable one for a change.They could manage this for a minute or two, but not much more. For though Fanny liked to poke fun, and cruelly at times, at the Narrator’s chronic good health, she couldn’t stand him being weak. It would have been too much of an upheaval in the order of things.

The narrator and Fanny have been very close over the years

It is strange that I chose this as the second book for this year as it has little in common with the first book. Both are takes on AUto fiction without being strict auto fiction. Both have a relative with a mental illness and flawed relationships. This is a story of a woman that has an obvious opinion. It is never quite pinpointed, and given that it was written nearly twenty years ago, it is excellent as to how we view mental illness, which has moved on so much in the last decade or two. What we get is a friendship down the years told in snippets as we see how Fanny copes with the world but also can be wild and free in many ways. The book is an ode to a sister. Like Fanny, the narrator is a man, but the book also has a thinly veiled version of the writer herself coping with her own past.  Serre has described writing each book as a chess game where each game takes its won course, and her books take their won course. Have you read any of her other books? If so, which would you tell me to get next? I hadn’t heard of the translator, but he had been a close friend of Serre for forty years and knows her well.

 

Eurotrash by Christain Kracht

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Eurotrash by Christain Kracht

Swiss fiction

The original title is Eurotrash

Translator – Daniel Bowles

Source – personal copy

I’m a bit slow off the block with my Booker international reviews. But life sometimes just catches up with me. I have read a number of the books in fact tonight I hope finish the fourst of the list anyway this was the first I read, I had seen this pop up a couple of times before the longlist and I had vaguely heard the writers name, maybe because it was shortlisted when it came out for both the German and Swiss book prize both of which I look at most years, hoping at some point to maybe read one fo those shortlists in there original language. Christian Kracht is both a novelist and journalist; he is known to consistently perform as a writer. He has said some things to maybe provoke a reaction. This book is a follow-up to his debut novel, but 35 years later, as a writer, he takes his elderly mother on a road trip.

I had once inquired: the University of Montana held no records of his ever having studied there, let alone grad-uated. Neither the alumni association nor the university archives found a Christian Kracht. There were also photos that showed him at his fake job at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Then he’d returned to Germany, into the benevolent clutches of Eduard Rhein and British Major George Clare, whose parents had been murdered in Auschwitz and who worked in the denazification bureau in Hamburg as liaison officer to the newly emergent, democratic German press and who committed Axel Springer to eternal friendship with Israel, an effort that so repulsed many SS alumni that they went off to Rudolf Augstein’s Der Spiegel magazine instead.

My father and Augstein often sat together in their favorite restaurant, Mühlenkamper Fährhaus. Each only ever ordered the Schlemmerschnitte-caviar and steak tartare on thickly buttered black bread-which, Augstein claimed, Hans Albers had always eaten there before the war. To accompany it Augstein drank ice-cold glasses of Linie aquavit, my father mineral water.

The past and of course the wealth does show through at times

SO what wee have Kracht discusses his family history and how his family made a lot of money of the Nazis and this book is how him and his mother in her 80s deal with that she has just be released from a mental institution. As the two follow a road south through Switzerland through the places he grew up, his mother also knows they had planned to give away some of the fortune made from the family to clear their shoulds. The book isn’t overly plot heavy and more a group of meeting along the way that see them trying to get rid of the money and condf=fronting other horrors from there past now the mother running of prescription drugs and Booze. Her son is full of the ghosts of his own past, overbearing family members, sexual abuse and the dark history of the making of the family fortune. This makes for a black comedy of a book about two people trying to reconnect and put things right, but along the way making some falls.

Often, when old people who have lost touch would like to suggest elegance, they resort to Bulgari. In my youth, there had been a Bulgari glass case with Bulgari jewelry in the dreadful discotheque Club Rotes Kliff on Sylt, in Kampen.

And in the dreadful luxury hotels in Marbella and Venice and Positano there were always Bulgari grooming products lying around in the bathrooms. Dreadful places like Qatar and Dubai were serviced by dreadful luxury airlines who likewise offered Bulgari products in their in-flight shower stalls.

Over the years my mother had internalized the idea that Bul-gari must embody something elegant, something desirable, while in reality these products and this name only triggered depression and thoughts of suicide. In which wardrobe were her cashmere sweaters, please, I called down the stairs.

His mother is a unique character in this book

I am aware this writer has been compared to Brett Easton Ellis, and I can see that it is a couple of decades ago that I read Less Than Zero by Ellis. I also see a come thread in German literature the Past ghost of family being Nazis haunting the present. It is also a road trip , a family drama with a large chunk of black humour. This book would make a great movie The mother would suit a German Maggie Smith if there is such a thing one of those great character actors that can capture a sort of upper class aserbicness like a Nazi Violet Crawley mixed with the queen mother in a jaunt thri=ough her and her sons past. The Father was working for the German Rupert Murdoch, and the book is a mix of a journey and a memoir of his life. It’s a book about money facing your own family’s past and how to cope with that in the present. Have any of you read his debut novel, Fraserland, which I think hadn’t yet been translated to English, which is a shame, well, according to the Wiki page.

Man Booker international what will be there ?

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I ‘ve been busy reading a few books I think may been on the longlist in March hence lack of blog reviews i’m trying to get a few more books read before the longlist comes out on March the 14 . I just finished The great swindle maybe a hidden gem from last year a slow building story of three con men post world war one, I have White hunger to reread early next week the Patrick Modiano from Bloomsbury on its way from the library. The new marias and knausgaard on order from the library when they come out . I have a couple others to reread and review so a busy few weeks in prep for the longlist due on March 10th . I will be doing a longlist prediction post on books I have read just before the longlist and we have our shadow jury ready. But what I want to know what have you read last year in translation or know is due out in the next month or so that may be on the longlist ? I for one was very caught out with last years longlist leaving me the most books to read in the 4 years we have had a shadow jury so this is maybe a quick what have I missed and can you help me with a few suggestions ?

 

Shadow IFFP Bye, Hi “Shadow MANBIP ” the new tranaslation prize

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There was an announcement today about a change in two big prizes in the world of translated fiction ,in a way become one the merging of Independent foreign fiction prize with the Man Booker international prize . Sees the prize move forward similar to the current IFFP , with Boyd Tonkin Chairing the new Man book international prize in its first year . A new yearly prize with a much bigger prize in terms of money than either prize had but for a single book not a  body of work like the current IFFP is . I am sad to lose the old version of the man prize which saw the writer listed for a body of work . It is just a shame people never really got this , maybe we could done a shadow for it but that has pasted . Now talikg shadowing I will continue to shadow this prize like I had the old Independent foreign fiction prize over the last four years  . I hope to be more involved in shadowing than this . I think in long run this is a sign of how translated fiction has grown in the last few years . It would be nice for two prize , but for me the renaming and connection to the booker prize if promoted right could be a great turn for PR . The IFFP connection to one english paper maybe lead to less coverage in other papers .I’d love more prize thou this is a step forward and if it works maybe could be a platform for smaller awards like the French book prize  the Goncourt has done over the last few years . Say  a prize for best small published book , best retranslation and maybe one for body of work like a judges prize . So we in the UK get a big prize for translated fiction let’s get behind it and promote it !!! I will be with the first shadow man booker international prize next year .