Tag: memoir

Blackout by Yann Chateigné Tytelman

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Blackout by Yann Chateigné Tytelmann

Belgian memoir

Translator – Clem Clement

Source – Subscription book

I have a lot of book subscriptions.  Living in a small town in Derbyshire, I know the only way to make sure I can read the books I want is to take one out for Les Fugitives.  I reviewed a number of the early books but have lost track of them, so when I saw they had a subscription, I was interested.  They also let me pick three of the books.  Naturally, I went for the ones that appealed to me as a reader, and of the three I got, this book was the one I was most excited about, as it is one of those books that, in many ways, flies above my head as a reader.  I am not a huge expert on art or on people like John Cage; the reference points in Yann’s world are different to mine.  But it was the nature of the book, a letter of sorts to a father lost after his death, those unsaid moments, that space, that silence, and all that is in this book.  I know that space, that silence, when my own mother died.

In Old French, the verb silencer means to reduce to silence. This word resonates with my own silence.

I imagined that it could have another meaning: to make everything silent, to make yourself silent, to become transparent, and to watch the world turning around you. To create a space, a retreat. My world existed at that precise point, in the dissonance of the space between those two definitions. It is not silence itself which interests me, but its incarnations, its powers – the way it acts in our lives, gaining in strength without our ever being able to grasp it, like a black hole.

The book has a lot about silence but more than just silence!

The book is one of those books that you can tell is a mind wandering, a mind thinking of his father’s death, and this all happens in the middle of the COVID lockdown, so it starts about that, about his father; this is to his father, but then wanders into what is happening: silence, the silence of music from John Cage to Ambient music.  I have listened to some of the ambient music he talks about; Eno.  The art from the wave pictures of Vija Celmins, I of course looked at these pictures still pictures of the ocean, but not the foaming sea of the likes of Turner; this is a still ocean of shimmering waters.  Through the white paintings of Rauschenberg, I did know that the texture of the paint is the main thing.  I know it’s white, but the width isn’t even; it’s textured. Then the one piece of art he mentioned I’d love to see was Charles Ray Inkbox, a huge open-top black box filled with ink that looks like a box except it has no top, so the ink is on top and the ink has a life of its own.  One would imagine that, in the various rooms it has been in, the ink would be different.  I was reminded of the Beuys pieces I have seen over the years.

In 1968, Vija Celmins began drawing oceans. In a multitude of hues on the spectrum from black to white, taking in every shade of grey, these works reproduce close-up views of the wave-ruffled surface of the sea. This series, which is still in progress, unfolds in minuscule variations with constant similarities and differences, centred on a single idea, on the same image. I imagine this series to be infinite.

The waves painting I’d also love see closer up to get the scale of them.

I loved this.  I do like books that will have me thinking for years after and want to reread, and this is one of those books.  It has grief, loss, a father who was very different from his son- or was he a labourer, but he also was a painter?  A son with his own young son in lockdown, thinking about all this, and with his life in art and music, he uses them to think about the past and the present, about what it means to him and the world he is in.  I said this is above my head.  I like art and music, but I am not.  I am a fan of both, but it was eye-opening to learn, see, and listen, too. This is a book that can be read in an evening, even with a lot of googling of the references within it. One for ART fans: if you like the book Fireflies by Luis Sagasti, you will like this book as well.  Do you have a favourite book that has art at its heart?

War Diary by Ingeborg Bachmann

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War diary by Ingeborg Bachmann

German memoir

Original title – Krieg Tagebuch

Translator -Mike Mitchell

Source – Personal copy

I move from Crime fiction to Memoir —here it is: Memoir or just a snippet of history? I haven’t read any Ingeborg Bachmann, but I know she is an essential writer in German postwar writing. This comes from the end of the Second World War. After the war, she often questioned the role of the writer in post-war Germany. She wrote radio plays, librettos, short stories and her single novel Maluina. She also left some unfinished novels, and after her death, her work was published at the end of the war in Vienna, including a relationship she had with a British soldier stationed there and his letters when he fist was relocated to Italy and then Palestine

My mind’s still in a whirl. Jack Hamesh was here, this time he came in a jeep. Naturally, everyone in the village stared and Frau S. came over the stream twice to have a look in the garden. I took him into the garden because Mummy’s in bed upstairs. We sat on the bench and at first I was all of a tremble so that he must have thought I’m mad or have a bad conscience or God knows what. And I’ve no idea why. I can’t remember what we talked about at first but all at once we were on to books, to Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig and Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal. I was so happy, he knows everything and he told me he never thought he’d find a young girl in Austria who’d read all that despite her Nazi upbringing. And suddenly everything was quite different and I told him everything about the books. He told me he was taken to England in a kindertransport with other Jewish children in ’38, he was actually eighteen then but an uncle managed to arrange it, his parents were already dead.

He was from Vienna and connect over there love of books

This is a complex piece to describe, as it is a very slim book —100 pages, forty of which are an afterword —and the first two sections are snippets from Bachman’s diary in the dying embers of World War II. She is afraid that, as the Russians are nearly there, she is scared of them capturing her. Her and her friend Wilma, those initial post-war events, and having to think about how her world has changed again—the war is over. Then, when the British arrive, she meets a young officer that she connects with over books, and they wander around swapping books and talking. All this happens in about twenty pages. What follows is Jack’s letter when he is sent away, and how being sent to Israel upsets his worldview, leaving him feeling rootless. He was Jewish from Vienna but had moved to Britain. The return to Palestine hit him hard after the initial time in Naples, after he first left Vienna. The tone of his letters changes over time when writing back to Inge. I wish we had her letters so we could see what she wrote to him. He says that her vision of her world is beyond her years.

Now almost a month has passed and I still haven’t managed to pull myself together. I’ve had to fight my way through some pretty difficult times during my life but it seems to me that nothing in my previous experiences can compare with the last few days and weeks.

Completely uprooted, with nothing to hold on to, something I’ve never been through before, these last few weeks have been the most terrible time I’ve had to go through. Do forgive me, dear, kind Inge, for writing things like this, I’d love to have something happy to tell you but every line I add brings new pain and new suffering. I can’t describe my true situation to you, I feel as if I’ve sunk incredibly low, a disaster which I perhaps alone sense, for I alone experience it, experience it all on my own, as alone as I’ve never been before, I wasn’t even as devastated by the death of my mother as I have been by this last month.

Jack letter shows how he feels rootless due to his past

This is one of those odd little books that I love to find a little piece of a writer’s life, a glimpse into Ingeborg Bachmann before she became the outstanding figure in German literature. I haven’t read Malina, so I thought this would be a great intro to her. Although her actual written part of the book is twenty pages of diary entries. Jack is actually more of a character in this collection a man lost in the world because of the war and his own past. There is a feeling that the time with Ingeborg in Vienna is a small piece in his life and in his companionship with the young Inge, and that the time he spent with her and her family touched him. But then he is blown away by what he sees in Palestine, connects to it, and the memories of a summer romance are captured here. I love the book itself. Seagull does such nice books. I hope to get to Bachmann’s novel and other writing at some point. Have you read Bachmann or heard her radio plays ?

A month in Siena bt Hisham Matar

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A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar

Art memoir

Source – Personal copy

I not sure quite when I heard about this book, I think I had seen it mentioned here and there, and then either a podcast or such mentioned a bit more about it, and I just knew this would be a book that I would love, as it mixes both Memoir and art in one. It was a book I just had to get one day, and that rarely happens, especially when it wasn’t a book in translation. However, it shows Hisham Matar travelling to Siena and how, when he was much younger, he had connected with a series of paintings from the Sienese school of painting as a 19-year-old, after discovering that his father had been kidnapped. He had found solace over the following year after his father’s kidnapping. So when he gets the chance to visit Siena himself for a month, he has the opportunity to write this as a meditation on art, love, life, and grief.

That first night in Siena I had a dream that I was directing a feature film in a city by the sea. I had gathered the crew by the main promenade at the edge of the unknown city to shoot an important scene. I could feel the presence of the big metropolis behind me. The sea was deep and voluminous, its surface rippled. There was nothing interrupting its horizon. I thought of taking a swim and the next moment I found myself undressing. No one seemed to mind. I climbed on to the short wall and dived. As soon as 1 was under water I regretted my action. I had not even checked if there were steps out. What if I cannot find a way to get back on dry land? When I rose to the surface and looked back, I saw that I had drifted far out to sea. The city was now the horizon. My rapid heartbeat was not only in my ears but seemed to run all the way down into the depths and fill them. I felt as if I were wasting away, leaking into the water.

His first night of the month

The book is one of those books that is hard to pigeonhole, as it isn’t just about art, it isn’t just travel, and it isn’t just a memoir. The book is a little bit of all these when Hisham takes the chance to have a month in Siena and remembers the years before, when he spent a lot of time in London looking at the paintings from the Sienese school. He is also there, writing the memoir of the events around his father’s disappearance during the Gaddafi regime. The book captures him as he discovers Siena, a walled city that resembles a maze, as he wanders the streets and meets people over time. He connects the past, recalling his loss of his father, the comfort, and the pictures he saw all those years ago, and is now reconnecting to the art as he talks about several paintings, which are illustrated in full colour in the book. He also has Italian classes whilst in the city. He connects his everyday life to the historic paintings of the town. As I say, this is a book that needs to be read.

I continued walking towards the new end, or the end I now could see. When I reached there I could touch the olive trees on the other side of the low wall. They were young and silver in the light. I could have easily climbed over and stood among them, but for some reason I did not. I imagined bringing friends here. I pictured not telling them where we were heading, engaging them instead in a conversation about a completely different topic so as to have them stumble upon the cemetery very much as I just did, not out of the wish to unsettle them, but rather to share with them the same sense of discovery. Then I thought what a terrible idea that was.

His Daily walk around the city

How do we deal with loss and grief? We all have our own ways. For me, I enter what I call my autopilot setting. When anything happens, I have a life that is a little routine-led, and so I just carry on. I wish I were like Hisham and could find solace in art or even in. Music, this is his journey into his own past, many years later, as he looks again at these medieval pictures. Seeing echoes of when he looked before, but also connecting them to now and to his present as he walks the town every day, the other person in the book is this city, Siena, the twists and turns, the people he meets going about their daily lives, like the shop owner and his Italian teacher. But above all, it is about the loss of his father and the way these paintings had been his way out all those years ago. I’m pleased I heard about this book, as it was one of those books that  I feel most people will get something from.

 

 

The Book of Emma Reyes by Emma Reyes

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The book of Emma Reyesa memoir in correspondence by Emma Reyes

Columbian Memoir

Original title – Memorias por correspondencia

Translator – Daniel Alarćon

Source – personal copy

Well, I will now review a couple of Latin American memoirs. This is the first from the Columbian artist Emma Reyes, who was known as the godmother of Latin American art. Her art ranges from simple child like sketches to vibrant painting. One of her fans was her fellow Columbian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who had encouraged he to write down her life story. She struggled to put down her thoughts until she happened upon the letter form, and hence, the letter she wrote over a few decades described her early years. She had a hard childhood, and when she grew up, she became a citizen of the world and mixed with leading artists and writers of the time. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, in particular, The book has 23 letters that give an insight into what happened til she escaped a convent at 19 and started her life.

The house we lived in consisted of just one very small room with no windows, and a door that faced the street. This room was located on Carrera Sép-tima in a working-class neighborhood in Bogotá called San Cristóbal. The tram passed directly in front of our house and stopped a few meters ahead at a beer factory called Leona Pura and Leona Oscura.

In that room lived my sister, Helena, another child whose name I didn’t know whom we called Piojo, and a woman I remember only as an enormous tangle of black hair; it covered her completely, and when it was down I’d scream with fright and hide under the bed.

The house she was born into as a child with her older sister

It is easy to say Reyes had one of the toughest childhoods with her older sister. She was born in a room with no windows in a working-class area. Her mother was troubled, and they had a tough childhood. Emma’s earliest memories are of emptying the family bedpan on the garbage heap in the morning. She and her sister follow their mother around various rooms in Bogota and are looked after by various community members who take care of the girls. They also try to avoid being seen when left alone by their mother. But all this ends when she leaves them at the gate of a convent for an orphans where her and her sister 6 and 7 at the time spend the rest of their childhood a tough Christians upbringing as they are viewed as being born in sin. They live with a variety of nuns, from the strict to an aged Italian nun with poor Spanish, but all are hard on the sister as she seeks to use her mind to escape the world she finds herself in. Parts of this feel like a nod to Marquez at times. A hard few years in the convent where all they earn is by attending masses for this and that; I loved the list of how many they had attended.

My dear Germán:

There were no girls in that convent. It was a convent where they made nuns. There were some very young ones, but they were all novitiates, and we weren’t allowed to be with them. We weren’t allowed beyond the first courtyard, where the entrance and the visitors’ rooms were. Next to the entrance were two rooms, one where the doorkeeper slept, a very old, pigeon-toed lady who talked to herself all day; in the second room, full of furniture and packages, they arranged a bed for the two of us, because Helena didn’t want me to sleep alone. In the doorkeeper’s room was a large table, where food was left for us whenever the nuns brought food for the doorkeeper.

When they were left at the convent door

I brought this up after seeing it had made some end-of-year list a few years ago, and the quote from Diana Athill she said, “No other book I’ve read has left me so deeply involved with the author” This is so true, I think hitting on the letter as the form to tell her story draws you in as a reader the little snippets love the years the letters are from thirty years she wrote them from mainly Paris you sense how she must have tried to remember every detail, but she also captured the childlike feeling of being in these horrific situations living hand to mouth with her mother., then the brutality of the convent life. I think this should be better known. It is a wonderful insight into poverty, sisters , a mother that abandons you and the horrific nature of growing up in a covenant. Have you read this book?

Winston’s score – B solid memoir of the early years of one of the leading Latin American artists of the 20th century.

Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck

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Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck

American Memoir

Source – Personal copy

When I read the list of books I could read for the club 1962, I looked at one book that leapt of the page to read, and that was this one another reread. Unlike Kerouac, this is a road trip like his books are but this is from one of my all-time favourite writers, Steinbeck he just stood for so much his books we social commentaries on time and covered the tougher side of life. He captured an America that is now gone, and in this book he tries to do that. I do think he picks his tales here and it is, in a way, a modern tale. I love the idea of van Life is something that appeals to me the ability to go here and there every day, and this is what he did he took out his camper he’d called Rocinante after Quixotes horse. Now the companion for his trip was his blue French poodle Charley as he turns sixty, Steinbeck wants to see the small villages and towns of America before they go.

We didn’t give George any trouble because for two nights we stayed in Rocinante, but I am told that when guests sleep in the house George goes into the pine woods and watches from afar, grumbling his dissatisfaction and pouring out his dis-like. Miss Brace admits that for the purposes of a cat, whatever they are, George is worthless. He isn’t good company, he is not sympathetic, and he has little aesthetic value.

“Perhaps he catches mice and rats,” I suggested helpfully.

“Never,” said Miss Brace. “Wouldn’t think of it.

And do you want to know something? George is a girl.”

I had to restrain Charley because the unseen presence of George was everywhere. In a more enlightened day when witches and familiars were better understood, George would have found his, or rather her, end in a bonfire, because if ever there was a familiar, an envoy of the devil, a consorter with evil spirits, George is it.

George the Cat from his friends at Deer Island

The book starts with him explaining why he decided to make this trip a last chance to capture a world slowly going in fact, at the time, it maybe was nearly gone when he did the trip. He shows how he got Rocinate ready. His family wanted to go, but ultimately, he chose the dog as his companion and set off around the States. Nearly losing the camper and his boat in a storm on the eve of the trip, he sets off. He says he is just a guy, not Steinbeck, the famous writer but some ordinary Joe on a road trip with his dog. he notes how he uses the dinners and radio to get the feel of the places in Maine as he drives through this has one of my favourite parts of the book he visit someone he knows on Deer island that is the owner of a grey cat that is the least cat like cat he has ever meet harte people and dogs and make any guest at the house feel unwelcome even when he isn’t in the room. He meets migrant workers from Canada and compares how they pack the farm up to what English families did in Kent every summer when they went hop-picking. He likes to blend with the common man at truckstops, nearly getting shot, then having a coffee with a game warden on an estate. s he winds around the country, retreading ground in his old home of  Salinas, lamenting the changing country and the way it has become upper class no more fish guts on the beach from the canneries; he also laments the way this is the way the country ad a whole is changing as the freeways disconnect towns and everything becomes the same like the way people speak till he gets to  Texas where he notes how separate all Texans still are and how individual they can be. He laments what has gone from the America of his youth.

“I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion. And this is true to the extent that people either passionately love Texas or passionately hate it and, as in other religions, few people dare to inspect it for fear of losing their bearings in mystery or paradox. But I think there will be little quarrel with my feeling that Texas is one thing. For all its enormous range of space, climate, and physical appearance, and for all the internal squabbles, contentions, and strivings, Texas has a tight cohesiveness perhaps stronger than any other section of America. Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans.”

His thoughts on Texas.

Well, I could go on I love this writer and this book so much. I think he has rose-coloured glasses in a way and has picked maybe the best tales of this trip, but he has also caught what has gone the lament of the loss of language accents and identity between towns is all something we see more and more, and since his day every town is the same with the same shops and restaurants etc. What he also captures is migrant workers from those from Quebec to those he used to know in Monterey who have now moved on from when he wrote Cannery row (my favourite novel by him) . I must try Geert Mak’s book, where a few years ago he retraced this trip and saw how the country was now. This captured America before Vietnam, but post-Korea, that golden glow of the post-war years is fading. This is like a Norman Rockwell painting of a book, but you can see just at the edges of the images he paints the world he loved, and we get corporate America. I even forgot to mention the visits to the vet well that is for you to find out. Have you read this?

Winstons score A I love steinbeck and lament the loss of his world even if it is a bit overly romantic.

Among the Almond trees by Hussein Barghouthi

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Among the Almond trees by Hussein Barghouthi

Palestinian Memoir

Original title – Sa’ akin bayn al-Lawz

Source – personal copy

I wanted to add a lot more arabic literature this year but have failed so far I looked at a list from Arablit where they had some books coming out this year and this was one that was mentioned although I had to wait ages for it to arrive as the publication got pushed back of I had to wait for a reprint maybe. What had caught my eye about this book was the description which remind me of one of my fav orate books from year ago I saw Ramallah from Mourid Borghouti which was one of my favourite books and now years later sticks with me with the images of a man returning to his home of Ramallah after many years away. This has a similar premise we see Hussein come home to the countryside around Ramallah where he grew up. But this is a man that is near the end of his life coping with terminal cancer. He had Taught in Europe mainly in Hungary and was the found of the House of Poets in Palestine and also worked on a number of literary magazines. he passed away twenty years ago.

After an absence of thirty years I have returned to live in the countryside near Ramallah – “returned to the beauty that had been betrayed” I had exiled myself from my beginnings and chosen to live as an expatriate. I am one who has perfected “Beginnings” but not” endings”. My return therefore is an imperfect ending

The opening paragraph I was so touched with the ending comment to face death is so hard

As the translator says h=in his intro this is a man struggling with lymphoma and it is his thoughts of life and art but also how he is going to die and ascending into heaven. He has returned to a place that he left thirty years earlier he is near the end of his life and as we follow him as he walks out in the countryside around Ramallah the past and present and future all blend as he walks in the shadows of those almond trees in the day ion the night as he looks back and forward. The book is a poets looking and gathering the final curtain of his life the people he knew his wife and young child his parents. The mountains as memories of his youth flood in as we see a memory of place open up. as we see what was more wilderness in his day now changed but he still finds the wild parts of the area and the Monastery which look large in the story. He talks about people having country and cities of there names as he sees his city in the book.

Among my friends would be Ali Baba and Enkidu, and all those who were born and loved and lived in stories, Stories are the windows of the Spirit and the imagination. When, for example, quaddura spreads his abs on the roof of the monastery and sang and played his rabbi, looking out moonlit wadis, on orchards ploughed planted, on wide obscure distances, he opened a window for his voice in the moonlight space and his voice occupied an eternal domain. His song would then become the city of his name

Where are you from ?

I’m from the country of windows

Stories is often how people are remembered when they pass !

This is a short memoir of a man who has come home to far e the ghost of his past a poet a writer this book is a man looking at a police he once knew and reliving the past as he faces the end and trying to remember the past the translator mentions this as a work as a memory of place the ghosts of our past. I am someone that remembers most events in my life and the places they happen I am haunted and often relive them like Hussein does when he returns after all the years away from his homeland. It remind me of Sebald at time the way he used place to link to the past. This is one of two works he wrote near the end of his life they are both coming out from seagull book the other book Blue light is a flip of this book as it is set around his journey from Seattle with a homeless madman. This book is different to I saw Ramallah as  this is a lot more personal and lot more around the view of the end of your life. But it has the same feeling of loss in the past and returning to find the world you once knew gone or just there as ghosts in your memory. This is a powerful work of memoir of a man facing death. Do you have a favourite book set in Palestine ?

Winstons score – +A touching and sad memoir from a poet

But you did not come back by Marceline Loridan-Ivens

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But you did not come back by Marceline Loridan-Ivens

French Memoir

Original title Et tu n’es pas revenu

Translator – Sandra Smith

Source – Personal copy

I found this slim memoir in a charity shop and was gripped by the description the book is a memoir of the life of the writer Marceline Rozenberg she was born to Polish parents as the family moved to France after world war one, she thought in the french resistance. Along with her father, she was deported to the concentration camp at Auschwitz – Birkenau on the same train as Simone Veil. when she arrived she was separated from her father this is the kernel that gave the book its title. After the war, she married twice hence her double-barrelled name her second husband was the Documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens she was a communist and made films in China but fell foul of the regime.

I wa quite a cheerful person, you know, in spite of what happened to us. We were happy in our own way, as a revenge against sadness , so we could still laugh. People liked about me . But I’m canging. It isn’t bitterness, I’m not bitter, it’s just as if I were already gone. I listen to the radio, to the news, so I’m often afraid because I know what’s happening. I don’t belong here anymore. Perhaps it’s an acceptance of dearth, or a lack of will I’m slowing down.

And so I thin about you.I can picture the note you managed to get to me back there , a stained little scrap of paper almost rectangulas, torn on one end. I can see you writing, slanted to the right, anxd four or five sentences that I can no longer remember.I ‘m sure of one line the first  ” My Darking Girl”

The words have gone but she remembers the piece of paper so well after all this time.

The book talks about how she ended up in the camp and that she had been split from her father. Later on, she gets a note from him this is the last she hears from her father. This short note was passed on by an Electrician an act of kindness in the madness. That haunts her and the fact that time has washed away the words. The book is about the loss of a void in her life. as she passes her father’s life in France that undercurrent of antisemitism that had been there before that I have read in other books set in Provincial France at the time. and then later her own as a testament to surviving the horror of the camp this is a short book but powerful an unflinching look at the horrors told without sugar to sweeten it to us as a reader the camp is brought to life and the effect like others that were there it spurred her on but also at times it made life after war horrific as the past haunted the present after the war but she also gives a voice to herself and her father.

I don’t know how much time passed between those two moments, those two estures, the last between us.Several months, I think. Perhaps less. You remembered my block number. The first in the rw closet to the crematorium, and you had the message brought to me. You didn’t ign it “PApa” but your first name, in Yiddish, “Sholime” ghat became Solomon in Fance you had returned to the land where you were born, which hadn’t waited for the nazis to persecute the jews; you surely needed toi affirm your identity, your Jewishness, in this universe where we were nothing more than Stucke:things.Perhaps you even found some relatives again in the camp, cousins in Poland who alway called you Shilome still today, whenever I hear the word “Papa”, I’m startled, even seventy five years later

Her father polish used his originl Yiddish name in the note.

I loved this it is a perfect evening read it is what  Meike would call a movie in a book it took as long as an average movie to read. There is a place for Holocaust literature there can never have enough to remember what happened this is a highly personal almost letter from marceline to a father to make up for the fact she had seen the note but time had made those words dissolve of the page. There is a filmmaker’s eye to the words and images here. Marceline’s second husband was Joris Ivens the Dutch filmmaker and a man that made movies alongside Chris Maker at times had a style of documentary filmmaking that we see here in her words a clarity that is no holds barred in the world she saw and lived in. Another powerful voice in the gallery of Holocaust literature. Have you read this powerful little book ?

Winstons score – Just read it any work from  Holocaust survivors is worth reading to remember what happened!!

M Train by Patti Smith

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M Train by Patti Smith

American Memoir

Source – personal copy

A change today I’ve been down a bit so when I read a bit about this book by the singer poet Patti Smith a week or so a go I went head and ordered it. I’ve listened to her music over the years and had seen that she had published a number of books that had been well received in the music magazines I read. But it was just a fancy for a change in my reading and it was a welcome surprise how much I enjoyed it. It follows Patti in recent years after the death of her husband Fred smith from MC5 it is also littered with her own polaroids.

Cafe ino didn’t exist back then. I would sit by a low window in Caffee Dante that looked out into the corner of a small alley, reading Mrabet’s The Beach cafe. A young fish-seller named Driss meets a reclusive, uncongenial codger who has a so called cafe with only one table and one chair on a rocky stretch of shore near Tangier. The slow-moving atomshere surrounding the cafe so captivated me that I desired nothing more thn to dwell withinit. Like Driss, I dreamed of opening a place of my own. I thought aboutit so much I could enterit : the cafe Nerval, a small haven where poets and travelers might find the simplicity of asylum.

Her she dreams of various cafes she has visited and read about.

The book opens and Patti drinks a black coffee at her favorite cafe where she is shocked when Zak her favorite waiter and maker of coffee is due to leave and open a beach cafe this reminds her of the beach cafe she read about in a book translated by Paul Bowles, we find out how she meet Bowles in Tangiers as she spoke in a conference about Beat writers she was friends with Wiliam Boroughs since her early twenties. This is a wonderful reflection on a reader and her love of books from Beat writer Jean genet whose grave she visits then takes a visit to Berlin and her love of Bulgakov on her last visit a sideline about various angels made me smile as it mentions that ode to Berlin wings of desire. Then another trip is Japan and Murakami a writer she said like Bolano and Bulgakov she got fully drawn into. Then she mentions the master of Japanese cinema Ozu and Akira Kurosawa via one of the few filmmakers to work with them both. Then a visit to Zak  Beach cafe a meeting with an old friend this is a warm book tinged with the memories she had with Fred as she revisits places for the first time alone.

MY BERLIN HOTEL was in a renovated Bauhaus structure in the Mitte district of former East Berlin. It had everything I needed and was in close proximity to the Pasternak cafe, which I discoverd on a walk during a previous visit , at the hieght of an obsession with Mikhail Bulgakov’s The master and the Margarita. I dropped my bags in my room  and went directly to the cafe. The proprietress greeted me warmly and I sat at the same table beneath the photograph of Bulgakov. As I was taken by pPasternak’s old wolrd charms. The faded blue walls were dressed in photographsof beloved Russian Poets Anna Akhmatova and Vladmir Mayakovsky.

Another city, another cafe this time Berlin.

A change but when you read smiths taste in books it is very much a reader I would share a lot in common and it also has influenced Smith writing style there is a touch of Sebald here for me it is full of her own experiences around the world as she visits various graves and thinks of Fred there is a sense of her love of books and life but also the sense of her own mortality which really touched me. Then there is smiths love of Itv 3 as a fellow crime drama fan I so agree wh=ith the way she just falls into watching them. Smith has a great chance to do all this as she is well Patti Smith a true one-off and has the chance to go place and see things that we don’t so it is a glance into a world that is unique. I loved her polaroids as well they speak so much from Bolanos chair to Frida Khalo crutches. Have you read any of Smiths other books

Tazmamart by Aziz Binebine

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Tazmamart by Aziz Binebine

Moroccan Memoir

Original title – Tazmamart

Translator LuLu Norman

Source – review copy

When this arrived I decided it was a good time to read a few other books from Morroco alongside this one and I found I had two others both of which had a connection to this book. Aziz was a young officer when by chance he was caught up in the attempted coup on King Hassan 2nd. His brother is a prize-winning Moroccan writer Mahl Binebine. The story of his time in Tazmamart prison which he told his fellow Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun which he used as the bases of his novel this blinding absence of light.

By evening,everything was ready. The drill had been rehearsed a few minths earlier, but with different actors, this time, the finger of fate pointed to us. After a hard day’s work, we gathered for supper in the officers mess, in combat uniform of course, with guns and ammo.as he entered the mess, ithe school’s doctor, a young Feench Lieutenant doing his military service, exclaimed “My god, you look like you’re planning a coup!” A burst of laughter greeted his remark, but a seed of doubt had been sown.

The night before the coup that was meant be an exercise but could be seen as a coup!!

Aziz Binebine was an officer and from a family close to the King his father was an adviser to the king when one day he was told of an exercise the next day that they were doing. At the time he jokes it could almost be a coup so when this exercise was an actual coup the young man was caught and captured and then sentenced to ten years in prison he initially went to a normal prison but then after another coup he and 57 fellow prisoners are taken to a special underground prison the king had built so these men will be forgotten. The only escape is death in their tomb as he calls it they are fed poorly and have to live through illness and sickness they survive through keeping each other spirits up in Aziz part that is through retelling the novels he remembers over and over again. Baba Driss his fellow prisoner a man that imagines he is being attacked by snakes as he loses his grip a close friend from his academy days also loses his will to lie this is a story of Aziz but also those around him.

At midday the guards arrived, they served us a smallbread roll and a carafe of chickpeas boiled in water with a little salt. This would be eternal, unchanging menu, with a pot of pasta, again boiled in a slightly salted water

Ass the transfer had taken place in mid-augusty, we each received a khaki canvas shirt and trousers, the classic military summer uniform. The striped uniform of civilan prison were taken away, through we kept the plastic sandals we’d arrived wearing.we swapped our clothes quite cheerfully. Deep down, we were almost relived to take off that shameful apparel in favour of the more or less reputable uniforms of the army, to which – after all we still belong.

The arrival at the new prison is grim food wise for them.

Now, this sounds familiar as it was a three-hour interview he gave many years ago to Tahar Ben Jelloun that was the base of his prize-winning novel but since then he has said he had neem pressured into the interview and in an open letter denounced the book. I will be reading that book later in the month. But this is a personal account the names are the names not like in the novel where a character has been made up. This is his memory of those 18 years in Tazmamart the horror of having to do surgery on oneself to live, to remember works of literature which remind me of the recent NYRB book that captured  Józef Czapski’s lectures on Proust as he recalls retelling those great Russian writers he loved this shows the hope literature can give as I read in Albert Manugels history of reading where there is a section about books that have been read by prisoners over various times. The other thing he does is show the loss of his inmates over the 18 years half of those 58 prisoners didn’t make it to see the light of day most of them ending up going mad with the despair of their situations. Have you a favorite book from Morocco

 

 

Shadows on the Tundra by Dalia Grinkevičiūtė

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Shadows on the Tundra by Dalia Grinkevičiūtė

Lithuanian fiction

Original title –  Lietuviai prie Laptevų jūros

Translator Delija Valiukenas

Source = personal copy

I am trying to fill in the gaps for the Peirene books I haven’t read here is another.from their Home in Exile series and a work from  Dalia Grinkevičiūtė she wrote on scraps of paper after her escape and return to her homeland from a Gulag and then buried the book was discovered in a Jar four years after her death. She spent time in gulags first with her family in the war years this is the period covered in the book. Then later on in the ’50s by herself. But also became a doctor on her return to Lithuania. This book is now considered part of the national canon of Lituania.

I’m touching something. It feels like cold iron. I’m lying on my back …. How beautiful … the sunlight …and the shadow

I am aware tgat a phase of my life has come to an end, a line dran underneath it. Another i beginning, uncertain and ominous. Twenty four people lie nearby. Asleep? who knows? Each of them has their own thoughts. Each is leaving behind a life that ended yesterday. Each has a family, relatives, friends, They’re all saying goodbye t their loved ones. Suddenly the train jolts. Something falls from the upper bunk No one is asleep now. Silence I dress hurriedly- I have to say goodbye to Kaunas

The opening as she is on the train heading she doesn’t know where

The book follows Dalia her mother and her older brother as the family is wrenched out of their home in Kanuas and deported by the regime as she joins a lot of fellow Lithuanians on a train covered so no-one knows where they are going. The journey last weeks as they are spilt in to groups as they are sorted and divide. The conditions on board  are horrid on board. They have dreams they are heading to America but end up by a river and in some wooden huts trying to keep together sing national songs they get wood from the forest and try to get by but this is shortlived now on a barge they finally reach the Artic and the tundra is a  wasteland freezing as they are dressed in the clothes for a Baltic summer and now have to work building a fish processing factory. Hundreds die that first winter but Dalia manages to get through. This is very hard work as they live in simple jurt with next to no clothes as the winter draws in and those around her start to fall apart she has a overwhelm spirit of hope that shines through her words As we see the dark underbelly of the Soviet regime and how it tried to break the people from the Baltic states.

I look around and am chiled to the bone. Far and wide, tundra, naked tundra, not a sprig of vegetation, just moss as far as the eye can see. In the distance, I notice something tat looks like a small hill of crosses. We learn that these are the graves of the Finns. Two weeks ago, they were brought in from Leningrad already debilitated as a result of the blockade, starved and suffering from typhus, and now they are dying, suddenly, I’m gripped by rear. What if this becomes a “death Zavod” rather than a “fish zavod” ? I hear the steamer sound ger horn and start to move, manoeuvring our empty barges through a maze of rafts .

They arrive on the island and the horror of this world faces her the line about the crosses in just twoi weeks is chilling !!

it is great when works like this are found that pay testament to the hardship of the Soviet-era regime. It is like a Soviet Anne frank they both share that hope of spirit that gives them such hope for the future no matter how horrific their present is. The Gulag has been well documented in the work of the great Russian writers Solzhenitsyn and Kochergin A day in the life and Christened with crosses are two powerful works. I covered Midnight in the century by Victor Serge that followed another writer being in Exile. The world she wrote about is so well written the biting cold the fish factory being built the starving the being looked down on by locals on the island that view these prisoners from around the soviet states as underlings. Powerful work and so thankful it survived discovery from the KGB.

When Death takes something from you give it back (Carl’s book) By Naja Marie Aidt

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When death takes something from you give it back Carl’s book By Naja Marie Aidt

Danish Memoir

Original title – Har døden taget noget fra dig så giv det tilbage

Translator – Denise Newman

Source – review copy

Books have been with me all my life and they have helped me deal with things and sometimes just escape the world around me this is a book that follows the Journey that the Danish writer Naja Marie Aidt as she tries to piece together the world after the accidental loss of her son at just twenty-five. One of the greatest writers of her generation she struggles to find a way to put down and write about what happened to her son, the aftermath and moving forward with grief. I have taken my time to get to this but I have been two years dealing with the loss of my  mother at what seemed too early and recently as my wife and myself grasp with the loss of her brother who took his own life six months ago and we are still grieving so I found some solace in Naja’s book and the journey she made.

The french poet Stéphane Mallarmé’ never wrote a book about his eight-year-old-son, Anatole, who died in 1879. He wanted to. But could not. He wrote 202 fragments or notes. He wrote:

So as not to see it anymore

except idealized

afterwards, no longer him

alive there – but

seed of his being

taken back into otself- seed allowing

to think for him

  • To see him <and to>

I DARE NOT THINK ABOUT YOU

WHEN YOU WERE ALIVE

FOR IT IS LIKE KNIVES IN 

THE FLESh

The discver of the fragments Mallarme left behind I found very touching.

A tragic accident end Carl Aidt life in 2015. What follows is how Naja piece together what happened and how she came to find a way to put it in words from early memories of Carl growing up it is the gift of a book from a friend of the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s  A tomb for Anatole an incomplete work that is a fragment poem to his dead son showed  Naja she said in an interview the way forward and that it isn’t in a whole but in pieces so the book mix the discovery of how she remembers Carl from those early days to the last few texts between them. works like C S lewis Grief observed and Time lived, Without its flow by Deinse Riley french writer Roubard book about his grief.As we see her trying to cope with death and wrestling with words.

I write in my journal

12 January 2016.

IT’S grey today, there’s a hush in the living room. Death is something we now live with every day. I have no idea how. I’ll be able to put all my energy. So much presence, concentration and energy. Beauty has abandned my language. My language walks in mournu=ing clothes. I’m completely indifferent .

Roubaud writes

To cling to death as such, to recognize it as a real hunger, has meant admitting, something over which I have no control.

I liked the line about words in mourning I have felt that experience of being unable to find words from time to time.

I am just a mere blogger,  a small writer. But I know the struggle death and grief bring to a writer it is wrestling with something so large it fills the room and yes as time pass we see around it and when that happens we maybe have words to fill the void or reading  for me it  was the discovery of Barthes mourning diary that helped me like Naja to  deal with grief. The discovery of that book was thanks to Joe from Rough Ghost who pointed me in the direction of the Barthes and this is another book about how one person has dealt with there grief and loss in Barthes case it is the loss of his mother. How we piece our lives together how we start living that point when the blackness lifts slowly and we want to remember those we have lost a remembrance and this is what this is of Carl this sits alongside the other works mention as how great writers deal with the worst thing and that is the loss of a close one. Have you ever found a book that helps you at a tough time?

Lampedusa by Pietro Bartolo and Lidia Tilotta

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Lampedusa.jpg

Lampedusa gateway to Europe by Pietro Bartolo and Lidia Tilotta

Italian Memoir

Original title –  Lacrime di sale

Translator – Chenxin Jiang

Source – review copy

Its take a while to get to this book. I did stat it when I was sent it last year but it got put to one side as I got caught with other books. Which was a shame as I was enjoying the few pages I had read? The book is written by Pietro Bartolo the doctor in the Island Clinic on Lampedusa. Where he has treated and helped many of the refugees that have arrived on the coast from North Africa. He was helped by RAI journalist Lidia Tilotta in writing this book.

One red shoe on Favaloro Pier. That one shoe and so many others like it lie there, scattered like pebbles in a trail thatleads nowhere, breaking off abruptly like the migrants”hope of coming ashore in a different world. Those shoes appear in my nightmares. So do all the little pendants, necklaces, and braclets on all the tiny bodies I examine. It is my job to unzip them, one by one, from those horrible green bags.

Pietro haunt by those dead childs bodies he has to see day after day.

The book is formed of a number of short memoir pieces as Pietro as he describes the world he lives in where he runs the clinic on Lampedusa. Where he has treated and seen most of the quarter of a million refugees that have arrived on boats to this small Italian Island over the last 25 years in a growing number. From the deaths hitting home in the second piece which talks about the one read shoe that he sees on the beach. For me, it evokes the famous words from Hemingway bay shoes for sale never worn. a single read shoe is all that is shown of a life lost at sea. Then we see his own life his father and the boats they took to sea in. Two women in another tale Faduma and Jerusalem one from Somalia and the other a younger one from Eritrea as he tells there tales Faduma 37 seems much older paralyzed struck by the emotional and mental trauma of her life. Then Jerusalem 15 thinks she may be with child but thankfully this young girl tyha\t thinks she is a woman isn’t. Each is touching brutal images a bay found attached to the mother still by the umbilical cord both buried with a teddy that Pietro had put in it. One man and his island trying there best to get the best care for these new arrivals but struggling under the sheer numbers at times.

Faduma: aged thirty-seven, Somali. Jerusalem: aged fifteen, Eritrean. The list grows longer. My USB drive fills up every day with names and faces of women, some of whom are adults, other little more than children. Mothers, daughters, wives. I catalgue their names and preserve their stories with merticulousness of an archvist.

I do this because I do not want them to be forgotten. I travel all over Europe telling their stories , and I want to give each of them the space they deserve. I do not want to leave any of them put. I hope their gripping tales will help people to understand what is happening . They have certainly helped me understand what has changed over the years, and what kinds of problems we can expect to confront.

The tale of two women and their world is what Pietro is trying to keep alive when he talks to people or here has written about them.

There have been a few books about the situation in Lampedusa but this one is very touching from a man that has been at the heart of the crisis that is facing Lampedusa. The mix of his own past and the present flesh out him and those near him. This is a man that has sen a trickle of people from around the world tries to enter the promised land of Europe via boats some not even getting there in overcrowded boats or just being too worn down by getting to the coast of North Africa. Form Africa and places like Syria. His clinic has been a become of hope but as the local mortician, he sees everyone as he records all the people he has seen over the years to his USB. A crisis that hasn’t really been given the full coverage of the Horrors they have to endure. I remember the shock of the Vietnam boat people ok the journey was long but these short journeys are so dangerous and the dream isn’t there for most. I

Jacob’s room is full of books by Susan Hill

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Jacob's Room is Full of Books

 

Jacob’s room is full of books ( a year of reading) by Susan Hill

Lit memoir

Source – personnel copy

I think I saw a picture of this book on facebook a few weeks ago and was reminded how much I had loved her first Lit memoir Howard’s end is on the landing. Which I reviewed when it came out, a few years ago.So when I saw this followed a year of Susan’s reading. She is also a  reader that has previously Judge on the Booker prize. Susan Hill won the Somerset Maugham prize and is best known for Woman in Black and her crime series Simon Serrailler.

The hound of the Baskervilles is the best of all Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Other people might pick other stories, and it is surprising, given their lasting and worldwide popularity, how few of these there actually are, though Conan Doyle wrote plenty of other things .

Sherlock Holmes has become not just a Victorian detective in a series of short novels and stories ,he has become one of those iconic literary figures who take on a life of their own, out of context of their books.

I agree with this , i love the lines about the Lord running and his heart bursting in Hound !!

Now like the earlier book we see a year of what Susan Hill reads, I found this an interesting insight into a reader’s life. But also I discovered a reader that like me at times can go off at a tangent like reading one spy novel then three more straight after that. Also the insight into how writers drift in and out of fashion, she mentions reading C P Snow a writer who I have been collecting his strange and brother series of novels, which have dropped out of fashion. There is also insights into books like Stoner those books that grow by word of mouth. Great, she mentioned Embers an old book that was also a huge word of mouth and a bonus a translation. She also rereads a number of book. Where she shows how books change over time and we view them different every time we read them.

During the Last Man Boooker prize I judged, we had heated arguments, and the Late Ion Trewin, most loved of bookmen, had almost to wade in and separate one or two of us.But when we had decided on the shortlist, we then asked him to tell us how many novels by woman we had selected and to give us the break down on which publishers had books on the shortlist. We genuinely had no idea about either because neither had been relevant.

The  last line got me they matter of sex of the writer not being relevant is spot on it is the words .

Now this is yet another lit Memoir , but I liked ita lot.  For me as a reader these type of books are almost like a palate cleanser between books or a spa break that leaves me refreshed for new challenges and discoveries. Now I do have one little quibble with Susan’s reading that is in a year of reading about a hundred books that only six of them were Translations, it was also noted that she lists a group of writers she hasn’t read Kafka, Pamuk , Knausgaard and Svevo among them she noes a lot aren’t english, but also all were male. I could write a list of female writers I haven’t read but I felt maybe she had lost something by not trying these writers especially Pamuk and Knausgaard both great chroniclers of their times and worlds. I also agree with Lisa who noted that there maybe has been a few to many lit memoirs in recent years. But this is a vibrant look at one readers life and one that has been inside publishing and books for most of her life so know’s what she likes , just love her to try a few more translations.

 

 

Book of my mother by Albert Cohen

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BookofMyMother_cvr_1

Book of my mother by Albert Cohen

Swiss memoir

Original title –  Le Livre de ma mère

Translator – Bella Cohen

Source – personnel copy

I was flicking through amazon the other day trying to find something that had passed me by that was also cheap and this gem from Archieplago books popped up and was under three-pound for a new copy (i think this was an error but I clicked and brought it ).Albert Cohen is maybe best known for his book Belle de Seigneur one best-selling books of its time in France. He was a writer and editor in France before the second world war working for the Jewish review. Albert Cohen like a number of other Jewish artist and writers  managed to get out of France in 1940 and get to London. In this time away his mother passed away in 1943 and he met his third wife Bella the translator of this book. This book is a collection of vignettes he wrote about his mother for La France Libre he later won the a number of french book prizes .

We had our sunday outings in the summer too, when I was a small boy.We were not rich, but the  tram ride round the cliff road overlooking the sea cost only fifteen centimes. Those one-hour rides wee our summer holidays, our social life , and our hunting expeditions. There we were my mother and  I, fragile, well dressed and loving enough to outdo god. I well remember one of those Sunday outings.

The tram trip was the holidays they were that poor

 

This is one sons touching view of his later mother , her as a person , them as people , the life they lead , the loss of her on him and the loss of that world. He started these piece after his mother passed a sort of collection of memories , thoughts and outcry of pity at the loss of his mother without being there. His mother is one of those women that through his eyes seems proud in herself the way she holds her self , they have no money but she dresses her self . The trip in the tram on a coast road in the summer meant so much,  was worth more than anything for the sea air they were able to breathe. Then the later parts deal with his loss of his mother a reflection of a sons love and guilt at not being there when she passed.

Sons of mothers who are still alive, never again  forget that your mother are mortal. I shall not have written in vain if one of you, after reading my song of death is one evening gentler with his mother because of me and my mother. Be gentle with your mother each day. Show her more love than I showed my mother.Give your mother some happiness each day,that is what i say to you with the right accorded to me by regret; that is the grave message of a mourner.

I was touched by these lines it made me think of my own mother .

This is a book of love  but also guilt . That special bond mothers and sons can have Cohen brings her to life as a caring mother making the best of not being in the best position in life. The way she made him value the simple things the way he talks about the trip in the bus a simple cheap thing to do, but she made him think it meant so much more. I loved this work it brings a tear to the eye as we see Albert doing the journey of  grief not quite the five steps but in writing the way he looked at her you see him coming to terms with the world without her. This is like the works of Sebald one that leaves the reader wanting more and maybe want to call your own mother isn’t that what all good prose should do !