Tag: NEW BOOKS

Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāngzi

~ winstonsdad ~ 6 Comments

Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāngzi

Taiwanese fiction

Original title – 臺灣漫遊錄

Translator – Lin King

Source – Review copy

I finished the last of the Booker International books for this year’s longlist yesterday. This was one of the last three I read. I won’t get them all reviewed till the end of the week. But I was pleased to have finished before the shortlist came out. This was a book that, like a couple of others, had been on a lot of people’s guesses for the longlist. I won the National Book Award for Translated Literature last year. It also won a prize in Taiwan.  The writer was raised in a rural village and identified as Chinese, but after university, she became involved in the Wild Strawberries Movement.  Against the visit of the Chinese politician to Taiwan. She studied Chinese Literature and has since also taken a degree in Taiwanese Literature.. This is her first book

CHAPTER I

Kue-Tsí / Roasted Seeds

“Hold on. What’s going on here?”

I couldn’t help but voice the thought out loud.

For, in that moment, I seemed to have been transported back

into the midst of Shökyokusai Tenkatsu’s Magic Troupe.’

Id crossed paths with Tenkatsu’s troupe long ago, before ra started high school. They had been on tour, and on the day they arrived in Nagasaki, my aunt Kikuko and I happened upon the opening parade.

The procession comprised a majestic formation of rick-shaws, rows and rows of them with no end in sightenough to rival an army regiment. The band rode at the frontmost rick-shaws, performing with remarkable gusto; after them came the women magicians, beaming and waving at the crowd in exquisite maquillage; they were followed by the male magicians in top hats. Other troupe members went on foot, encircling the rickshaws and ushering them along. They held up long poles with brightly colored flags-streaks of crimson, white, violet, and azure that were no less commanding than the band’s spirited music.

My chest thrummed and lifted, as though something had been strung from my navel all the way up into the sky

Each chapter was a dish along the way

The book is a clever little memoir of a Japanese writer in the late 1930s who heads out to Taiwan, then under Japanese rule.  This is the story of the year she spent in the island as we follow Aoyama Chizuko and her translator Chizuro as they go around on her lecture tour f the country she also samples a lot of the local dishes along the way this is a story that sees the two woman at first distant grow closer but also there is a lot about being under rule from anuother country that resentment that can simmer. in the background as they head around the country. The book is framed as her pieces from the year-long tour and presented as a book that has been found. This means we also get a lot of footnotes along the way as we see how different fictional translators dealt with the text.  There are also endnotes from the fictional family of the two women.  Added to that, we also have the food that is almost. Character in itself sets the taste buds racing.

Before that, I broke fast with white rice, pickled vegetables, seaweed, a raw egg, and grilled fish, along with miso soup with tofu and fish—the type of meal I would have had back on the Mainland. This dampened my spirits somewhat, and I did not fill my stomach, which in turn filled my head with thoughts of sweets as lunchtime approached. Fried bread sprinkled with sugar, cream cookies, yokan jelly, red bean buns-those delicacies were appetizing, but all were things that I could have eaten in Nagasaki. Taiwan, with its heat that brought torrents of sweat down my back, called for some more hydrating desserts. Cold o-gio, hún-kué, hún-înn, tshenn-tsháu-à tea, and tropical fruits teeming with juice-how I longed to try them!

More oof the food to mae your mouth water !

I think when the longlist came out, this was maybe the book I knew least about. I wish I had known more about it; it is a little gem of a book with a clever framing device of the memoir as a novel, but it is also a look back at Japan’s colonial rule over Taiwan. But also a nod and warning toward China, threatening to do the same.. It is also about how we view books, how they were altered across various versions, and how different translators tackled the book, showing how translation can be used as a weapon of propaganda in some ways. It is also an ode to Taiwan’s food. It is a book that makes your mouth water. I hope to try a few of the dishes along the way. Others may not have been to my taste. Have you read the book? Did it make your mouth water?

Sad Tiger by Niege Sinno

~ winstonsdad ~ 1 Comment

Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno

French Memoir

Original title –Triste Tigre

Translator – Natasha Lehrer

Source – Personal copy

I’m not sure why I hadn’t got to this book sooner. I usually keep an eye out for books that have won the major book prizes across Europe as a guide to those that, at some point, we may see in English. Winning one of the various prizes associated with the Prix Goncourt usually means the book will reach us in English, so this book has won not just the Goncourt for books read by high school pupils; it still amazes me what great books have won that prize, and it also won a woman’s book prize in France. The book uses the writer’s own experiences from the age of 7 to 14, when she was repeatedly raped by her stepfather.

You like that? Yes, yes you do, you really like it.

The title is Lolita but Lolita herself is almost entirely absent. You see her through the filter of her predator’s gaze, and she almost never exists as herself; she is the perfect fantasy figure, the nymphet incarnate. At last, at the end of the book, Humbert the dreamer recognizes this. As he sits in the car he has deliberately driven off the road, waiting for the police to pick him up, he has a final epiphany. He recalls the morning when he was driving around the country trying to find the teenage runaway. Lost on a mountain road, he stopped the car. Looking down from the hill to a small town below, sounds floated up toward him like a choir: I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolitas absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.

Lolita and her own life shows the darker side of that book

But in writing this book, she wanted it to be more than a book about the rapes. That’s when she was just seven and carried on until her mid-teens, all in a cottage that the family were doing up in the Basque Country.  But what we get is a book that shows the impact of these events on her from her youth through her life. The abuse suffered over those years from her stepfather, a man who loved the music of French rock star  Hailday and played it loudly. I could picture this hippy rocker it brought chills of my own stepfather a man that still had a fifties style rocker hair and would even as I write this sends a shiver down my spine not that I was sexually abused but over the years after my mum has died, I see the sheer mental and trauma he has caused both me my brother and in a lot of ways my mother by his personality and ability to gaskight us all anyway. I was connected to her life and to those men who slowly or violently tear apart lives . How lives get put back together and how books connect us to both our past and to think about how it is a prism to view the past, and here we see the rapes as a child and the impact on her. The book is part literary criticism, part cleansing, part sheer horror.

I remember places. The first place, a bedroom in dark-ness. I am woken by hands on me. Then his voice, when I open my eyes he is speaking in a low voice, he doesn’t stop talking. I don’t want to wake my sister asleep in bed beside me. I was seven when we lived in that apartment. I didn’t understand what was happening, but from the first moment, I sensed it was something serious and terrible. He was talking like a tamer speaks to a gentle but wild horse, one that needs to be held to keep it from getting away. He was talking as if nothing in all this should scare me, and if I was scared it was fine, he was there, he would help me get over my fear. But he, too, was afraid, and the fear enveloped us like a layer of night.

Virginia Woolf, who was abused by her two half-brothers, describes the bizarre experience of those first pawing caresses in an autobiographical piece in which she is trying to find a relationship between her old memories and the way her still-developing personality was being formed: … as I sat there, he began to explore my body. I can remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes; going firmly steadily lower and lower. I remember how I hoped that he would stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand touched my private parts.

THE first time he touched her  and how similar events effect Virginia Woolf

I read this book in nearly one sitting. The book has an almost-thriller feel and a non-linear way of describing her life, but it is so compelling that you hang on. Every word on the way she talks about the events but also the way she wants this book to be more than just that, as i say it is about the books she loves the title is a nod to the poem of William Blake elsewhere, Lolita is mention her mothers grief for a lost boyfriend that in some way blind her to the events that happened. THE book has other little events though her life, like how she got her name and how unusual it was at the time when most names had tpo be from an approved list of names in France. The book will appeal to fans of the autofiction of Ernaux and Louis. Still, for me, it has something more in common with writers like Kluge and Ester Kinsky, especially in its non-linear, polyphonic narrative style at times. Plus, it is a book I guarantee you won’t want to put down, which sounds so wrong given the subject matter, but it is so well written !!

Have you had a book that has hit you for six, so to speak ?

The Class Reunion by Franz Werfel

~ winstonsdad ~ Leave a comment

The Class Reunion by Franz Werfel

Austrian fiction

Original title – Der Abituriententag

Translator Bernhard Rest

Source – Review copy

I was kindly sent this book by Eglantyne Books, a small publisher located in the same building as Istros Books. When I was asked if I wanted a copy of this early novella by the Austrian writer Franz Werfel, I said yes. I said yes as he is one of those writers who has been on my too-read list for a long time, in fact, going back to the early days of the blog when I interviewed Peter Stephan Jungk, who had written a biography of Werfel. I was lucky to find an old edition of Songs of Berndette a few years ago, and Penguin has also brought one of his books back into print in recent years. He was on the short list to win the novel prize in 1945, but he unfortunately had a heart attack and died two months before the prize was announced, so he was withdrawn from the list. He, in his time, was good friends with a lot of the outstanding writers of the late 20s and early 30s, Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Robert Musil and the critic Karl Krauxse was a fan of his at the time. The class reunion has been made into a film on a few occasions in both Germany and the Czech Republic. The story follows a weekend in the life of two men.

When Sebastian entered the private room in the Adria Cellar, most of the gentlemen who had resolved upon celebrating the reunion were already present.

A group photo was being passed around, in which an obtuse pyramid of a symmetrically arranged assemblage of youths could be seen. The caption claimed that these young people, who were crouching, sitting and standing in three layers, were the graduates of class Nineteen-Hundred-and-Two of the Imperial-Royal State Gymnasium of Saint Nicholas.

The passage of time had conferred something ridiculous on all the characters in this faded photograph. They either sprouted out of their clothes in long stalks, or they inhabited the outsized suits that housed them like certain cakes that had failed to rise. The most audacious headgear enlivened the rows: rustic hats, sports caps, mariners’ berets. One enterprising head even donned a stiff bowler hat. The indentations that had spoiled the smoothness of that hat in that forgotten hour, made by fingers some twenty-five years ago, could be seen to this day.

At his reunion

The two men at the heart of this book are Judge Ernst Sebastian in the town of Saint Nikolaus, but it is really a thinly veiled version of Prague. Nikolas is the patron saint of the city. He has had a man brought before him for killing several Prostitutes. The two men are left alone as Ernst tries to find out what has happened. But in that instance, he is struck. This man, Franz Adler, was a classmate of his at the private school they went to. The other man, Franz, is beaten down by his life, and it seems to have escaped notice that Earnst is his old school friend. So he cuts the meeting short to continue on Monday. But strangely enough, that weekend he is due to have a school reunion, he talks about Alder with his classmates, but as the evening goes on, we find out more about the Judge’s past. So when he returns on Monday, we will know more of his past, and is this the same Alder he knew?

Oh, how endless and how rich are our boyhood days!

During these endless and rich boyhood days I thought I had forgotten the grave insult that Adler had inflicted on me. That is to say, I no longer thought of it. But deep within my temper, the arrogant words kept on hammering away and grew into a hideous power that longed to be unleashed. This would happen unexpectedly. To this day, it is the same with me: I bear grudges without knowing it. Something that might have been festering in the gloom of my soul for perhaps years will erupt suddenly, surprising myself. And, if I were not a resentful man, would I carry a grudge against myself after all these years?

Weeks passed.

As I already mentioned, when we lined up in our sports lessons I used to stand next to Adler. Already in Vienna I had gained a reputation as a fairly decent gymnast. Here, at Saint Nicholas, which was full of intellectuals and bookworms, I was in a league of my own.

When talking about Adler at the reunion

This book has it all, really. Secrets both in the present and in the past. Identity is the people they seem to be. The memory, how reliable is it at times like this! I can see why it has been made into a film and a tv series in the past. It has a plot that twists here and there, a few things you didn’t expect, as we see behind the mask of those in the upper class and those who have fallen from that class as well. It is also about how we can forget the past until we have a sort of Madeleine moment, when the two men are first left alone, which has a knock-on effect. I was also reminded of an episode of the Tales of the Unexpected Galloping Foxley about a man who sees a man he keeps thinking is his old school Bully Foxley. There is also an air of last year in Marianbad to me, as real events are forgotten or changed in the past, if that makes sense. Anyway, it is a great book to see back in print from a writer who was huge in his day. Have you heard of Werfel or read him ?

 

June So hot The month on winstonsdad

~ winstonsdad ~ 3 Comments
  1. Wildcat Dome by Yuko Tsushima
  2. Migrations by Milos Crnjanski 
  3. The city and the world by Gregor Hens 
  4. Berlin Andris Kupriss
  5. The little I knew by Chiara Valerio 
  6. Mrs Dalloway by Virgina Woolf                                                                    
  7. Attilia by Javier Serena 
  8. The river by Laura Vinogradova 
  9. Just a little dinner by Cecile Tlili

I reviewed nine books on the blog last month. I would have done more, but over the previous few days, I have been too hot to sit and write well. But this month I started in Jpaana with a story connecting the nuclear disaster of recent years with the falling of the bombs at the end of the war. Then the tale of two brothers and the wife and lover that connects them is a classic of Serbian Literature. Then a journey through what =cities mean and how they grow and are in a way, a living thing. Then tales in Berlin from a Latavian point of view. Mr Dalloway to tie in with it coming out 100 years ago. Then the story of a Spanish writer in Paris writing a book with the same title as this book about him writing that book. Then a woman discovers that her father wasn’t the man she thought he was after inheriting his country home, as she writes to her long-lost sister. Then we finished on a warm evening in Paris, rather like the weather we are having at the moment, and two couples each have their own reason for being there. After this night, nothing will be the same !!

Book of the month

 

I chose these two books because they both remind me of the early Peirene books, can be read in a single sitting, and feel much more than they appear to be. Just a little dinner captures two couples, each person at the dinner table with something on their mind and something to tell and figure out. Then the river sees a woman hurt after the loss of her sister many years ago, rediscovering a father she never knew as a different man than her mother had told her.

 

Non book events

Well, I started two new TV series this month and watched all the episodes of another. First, the comedy we binge-watch is The Power of Parker, a comedy set in Stockport written by Sian Gibson, who worked with Peter Kay on Car Share. The humour is very northern. And it is a little surreal in place but a great early 90s soundtrack and lots of references to that time made Amanda and me watch it in a few weeks. Then there is Countdown, a series on Prime following a team brought together to find out who killed a cop, and the series seems to stumble onto more than just the drugs angle to the death. Then, Smoke on Apple TV, which I have been looking forward to, follows two arson investigators as they solve a series of arson cases involving arsonists on the rampage. It boasts Apple’s usual high production value and is slow-paced so far. Then, music-wise, I got the latest Half Man Half Biscuit album, which has an excellent track record. Store Day is a tongue-in-cheek pop song about the record store day and how much things cost. I also picked up the new Pulp Lp. But my main buy was the fantastic collection of lost Springsteen albums, the Lost Albums tracks 2 collection. I’ve loved the La Garage LP so far, which falls between Nebraska, my favourite Springsteen album, and Born in the USA. Also, some great Western-style tracks for a film that never saw the light of day. The seven albums demonstrate his exceptional talent; this is the material he had previously withheld. It is as good as anything he released at the time.

Month ahead

Well, I’m thinking I’m on holiday, so I plan to read more non-translated books than translated books this month. I have a British crime novel that I picked up a few weeks ago, which I thought I would like, set in the North of England in a large house. Later this week, we also get the Wainwright prize for the Nature writing longlist. A prize that I have read several books from the longlist over the last few years. So, I will do the same again when that comes out, as I love nature writing. Other than that, I have a few books I have brought with summer reading in mind. What are your plans for July?

 

 

‘

Attila by Javier Serena

~ winstonsdad ~ 1 Comment

Attila by Javier Serena

Spanish ifction

Original title – Atila. Un eseritor indescifrable

Translator Katie Whittemore

Source – personal copy

I also recently ordered these, as I want to support Open Letter, which had lost some grant funds, by purchasing a few books from them that had caught my eye over the last few months. Open letter brought out two books with the same title, Attila. This is the one written by Javier Serena, a Spanish writer, whose other book examined the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. In this book, he features his fellow Spanish writer Alioscha Coll, who is the author of another book titled Attila, which he  wrote . He died shortly after this book was published, and it is now considered a masterpiece. Serena himself has spent time in Paris, which is where the book is set and where Alioscha Coll spent most of his adult life as a writer in Paris after he had left his studies as a doctor. What is captured is the time he spent writing his book and himself as a person.

This seemed to be his only aim: to finish the book as soon as possible, working around the clock, refusing to feel sorry for himself over Camille’s jilting, taking refuge in his idiosyncratic endeavor to string together words and thereby not confront the absolute isolation in which he was immersed. He clearly avoided the subject of his reclusion as we looked for the exit from the park, for as we climbed stairs and left ponds and leaf-strewn dirt paths behind us, Alioscha wanted only to talk about his recent reading and certain technical aspects of his book, making no mention of the despair I knew the young university student must have caused him. Nor did he confide in me when, having left the bounds of the park, we ran out of literary topics to discuss. As we moved farther from where I had found him, I remained uncertain whether Camille’s departure was a temporary, mutual decision, or if she had unilaterally resolved never to sleep in my friend’s company again.

Regardless of what Alioscha did or did not tell me, he certainly showed obvious signs of having gone too long with no one to talk to: it was partly the nervous way he had of speaking, his expressions more clipped and abundant than usual, along with the worsening of his physical appearance, evidenced by long greasy hair and obvious pallor.

He has a on/ off relatonship with his girlfriend

The book is divided into three parts, all of which revolve around the writing of his historical novel Attila. The book is told from the point of view of a friend of Coll, a fellow writer who talks about a hit man who may be caught out of time. From him not reading any modern novel. We see him later on diving into a bin of discarded books, hoping to find a lost gem of a book. He is described as a man who could sit and read a three-hundred-page novel in a single sitting, coming from a relatively well-off family with a number of his relatives having fame as well. This is a writer on the edge like a modern day figure from a Somerst Muagham novel, living in a one of those numerous small parish flats writers and arritst inhabit when trying to be famous and struggling to get by that was Coll he was a volatile man that had an up and down relationship with his girlfriend. But also struggles to be a writer in the modern age. He is drawn to history, and this current book he is writing, which is other book that Open Letter has published in this pair of books

This seemed to be his only aim: to finish the book as soon as possible, working around the clock, refusing to feel sony for himself over Camille’s jilting, taking refuge in his idiosyncratic endeavor to string together words and thereby not confront the absolute isolation in which he was immersed. He clearly avoided the subject of his reclusion as we looked for the exit from the park, for as we climbed stairs and left ponds and leaf-strewn dirt paths behind us, Alioscha wanted only to talk about his recent reading and certain technical aspects of his book, making no mention of the despair I knew the young university student must have caused him. Nor did he confide in me when, having left the bounds of the park, we ran out of literary topics to discuss. As we moved farther from where I had found him, I remained uncertain whether Camille’s departure was a temporary, mutual decision, or if she had unilaterally resolved never to sleep in my friend’s company again.

Regardless of what Alioscha did or did not tell me, he certainly showed obvious signs of having gone too long with no one to talk to: it was partly the nervous way he had of speaking, his expressions more clipped and abundant than usual,

As a character he capture Alioscha well .

 

I loved this. I picked this way around to read this fictional account of the writer. I’m not sure how much is the writer himself and how much is what Serena has imagined. But the bones of the story are the actual fact that he was writing this novel at the time the book was written, and he had struggled with his mental health. I do wonder how much is his and how much is Serena’s own experience as being a lone writer in Paris. However, the book captures a writer on the edge trying to be distinctive, as evident when he states in the book that he avoids modern writers of his age. This is a view of a soul trying to get his final book on paper, a book he knows is essential, but as he does this, his whole world is falling apart, and other things are happening./ An interesting mix of books to publish the book of the writer and the book from the said writer is an interesting idea. I will review the other Attila novel at a later date. Have you read either book?

 

 

Voracious by Malgorzata Lebda

~ winstonsdad ~ 1 Comment

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?

The Possession by Annie Ernaux

~ winstonsdad ~ 4 Comments

The Possession by Annie Ernaux

French Fiction

Original title –  L’Occupation

Translator – Anna Moschovakis

Source – Subscription edition

This is the seventh book from Ernaux I have reviewed over the years the first 11 years ago in 2014 and by now her books to me have become like a letter from an old friend telling another snippet of there life over the years like a glimpse into her world every few months over the last 11 years. I plan to read all the other books I haven’t read over the years. But each is another picture of her fictional real life. Another view into her interesting personal life. Her personal life always seems a lot more colourful than my settled-down routine life, much the same as most people’s. She is that friend we all had with a life that looks pretty different from ours. I have never quite gone as far down the path of jealousy as she has in this book, which is a very slim novella, which sometimes has the feel of a detective novel without a crime, as she pieces together the picture of this unknown woman.

And yet I was the one who had left W, several months earlier, after six years together – as much out of boredom as from an inability to give up my freedom, reclaimed after eighteen years of marriage, for the shared life he so strongly desired from the start. We continued to talk on the phone; we saw each other from time to time. He called me one evening, told me he was moving out of his stu-dio, he was going to be living with a woman. From then on there would be rules about calling each other (only on his mobile phone) and about seeing each other (no nights or weekends). I was gripped by a sense of disaster, out of which something else emerged. At that moment, the existence of this other woman took hold of me. All of my thoughts passed through her.

She had ended the relationship

SO, a few months before the story opened, she had finished with a man she had seen for six years, merely called W. The two seemed like they were at different points in their respective lives when they met. Ernaux was shortly out of her 18-year marriage, and W was a man who wanted to settle down with her it seems like they had grown used to one another after these six years, and she described their relationship as boring. So they remain friends, frequently talking and meeting. So when a new woman appears in W’s life. He tells her very few details; the rest of the book is haunted at times, but also, like I said at the start, this book has the feel of a detective novel. As she wants to know more about this new wom an in his bed does she grab his cock the way she did. What is her Job? How old his she? All these breadcrumbs fall off the plate as she builds a picture of her. Is she near when she walks near where she lives? Is that here with similar hair on the metro she sees? The book sees how regret, obsession, jealousy, and wanting to know who had replaced her position in W’s affection.

When for some reason I had to go into the Latin Quarter – the part of Paris, other than the avenue Rapp, where I ran the highest risk of running into him in the company of the other woman – I had the uncanny feeling that I was in a hostile environment, being watched from all sides. It was as if, in this neighbourhood which I had filled with the other woman’s existence, there was no room left for my own. I felt like a fraud – to walk down the boulevard Saint Michel or the rue Saint Jacques, even when I had good reason to, was to expose my desire to run into them. With its vast, accusatory gaze bearing down on me, all of Paris punished me for this desire.

As she views the places in Paris she could be and live!

I loved this slim book;, it is a perfect slice of her life. The book’s kernel is the story of this obsession with wanting to know who this woman is. But the way it is written grips you as a reader; you wonder what she will do next and how far this obsession with this woman will take her! I know it is easy to find out who it is, but for me, the beauty of this is the lack of who they are; the more they are a pen picture of an ex-lover or his new lover, the other woman. What happens when she end the relationship sand soon after this woman now has access to his cock not her like she once did this forty year old woman with her long hair becomes a faceless ghost in the book for us as the reader but also for Ernaux as she flesh out a woman she never really want to met maybe the writing of this book was her way of cleansing her soul of it all! I think this is one of my favourites. Books from her it is just perfect, a little insight, a small gem of a book. Do you have a favourite book by her?

The sweet indifference of the world by Peter Stamm

~ winstonsdad ~ 4 Comments

The sweet Indiffernece of the world by Peter Stamm

Swiss fiction

Original title – Die sanfte Gleichgültigkeit der Welt,

Translator – Michael Hofmann

Source – Library book

I put this down as a library book, but I think I might have been sent it a couple of years ago by the US publisher. I had read it then but hadn’t reviewed it, and as I read it the other day, it came to mind, I’m sure this book reminds me of something. I went to log it on my reading apps and saw I had read it two years ago. I am a massive fan of Stamm’s work his book always seem to be ones you remember after you have read them the ideas in the linger like this had, He has won most of the major prizes in the German speaking world and maybe shoiuld be a little better known to English readers for me he is in those list of writers that is in line for a Nobel or on the list of writers that could for me anyway..

She visits me often, usually at night. She stands by my bed, looking down at me, and says, You’ve aged. She doesn’t say it in a nasty way, though, her voice sounds affectionate, almost merry. She sits down on the side of the bed. But then your hair, she says, tousling it with her hand, it’s as thick as it ever was. Only it’s gone white.

You’re not getting any older though, I say to her. I’m not sure if that’s a happy thought for me or not. We never talk much, after all, what is there to say. The time goes by. We look at each other and smile.

The opening lines of the book

This book has a twist, but we are never fully told if it is the twist we think it is, just a hint, if that makes sense. Christopher, a writer in later middle age, recalls a story to a young actress named Lena. The story is remembered as the woman he is telling about has the same name as her, except he calls the woman in his story Magdalena, the full version of her name, as the relationship from his post, which was also an actress. To make it even odder, Lena is in a relationship with a writer called Chris. As the story unfolds from Christopher, the lines between his past and her present blur, and what is happening is never quite told, but hinted at. Is this what is happening, or is it just a weird connection between them all having the same jobs and names? Never quite told why this has happened, but it is just one of those stories that seem to twist and turn in on themselves as you read along.

My novel, though, was a hit with booksellers and readers; even the reviewers seemed to sit up. This debut promised all sorts of things for the future, wrote one woman. And in fact I did believe in some sort of future, for the first time in a while. After living from hand to mouth for several years, the success of my book secured not a lavish but a respectable income; but above all I had something to show for myself that justified all my en-deavors. The years of failed writing already felt like a long-distant time, in which I was caught up in labyrinthine plots, and driven by exaggerated ambitions.

I never admitted how much my story was about me.

When I was asked about that after readings, I dismissed the idea, and insisted on the separation between author and narrator.

Christopher is a succesful writer in his time !

I wish I had reviewed this a couple of years ago. Still, strangely, in the two years since I read it, I have thought of it a few times every time I heard the name Magdalena, I had come back to this book and the strange tale of a man from the future telling his fiance a story in the past or is it just a weird sort of Mobius loop of Two couples with the same names and jobs meeting at a point in one relation ship has started and the other has ended and is so distant it is a memory being told in the present/ I loved this it is a tale that has again left me thinking about it all and how in life there are just moments that seem as thou they have been planned or relived or even just beyond what is typically we all have those small deja vu memories. Even people we assume that we know but don’t, dopplegangers, etc. Very Stamm book, he does so well on the psychological level as a writer! He keeps you, as the reader thinking of his stories long after you have read them. Have you read any of his book ?

Stu’s International booker Five for 25

~ winstonsdad ~ 2 Comments

I had initially opted to miss doing the shadow Jury, but after saying I was;’t going to do it I got a touch of nostalgia, I loved doing the shadow jury ok last year, but the books were maybe not to my taste, but it is about the people I do the jury with year after year it the only time I ever really talk about books , if anyone wants to chat about books regularly I am always free to chat !! other than this post I do. Anyway, in the last year, I may haven’t read as many books as I usually would for a long time. I have thus chosen five books I have read and reviewed that I’d like to see on the longlist this year.

Brandy Sour by Constantia Soteriou

A short novella that use the drinks people order to tell this history of one of the most famous Hotels on the Island and the island’s history and how the split came about. One of the most refreshing ideas for a book I have read in a long time

Un Amor by Sara Mesa

I like this tale of a woman heading to a small village in the Spanish hinterland is one of my favourite settings for a book and this had a number of twists and turns.

Clean by Alia Trabucco Zeran

We find a woman held against her will and the story of her and the family she had been a nanny to slowly unfolds.

My favourite by Sarah Jollien-Fardel

Now, if Un AMor was a woman going to a village to escape, this is the opposite: a woman escaping her abusive father from a small Swiss village to head to a bigger town and start a life of her own away from the village.

Stay with Me by Hanne Ørstavik

Now, a Danish woman in Italy falls for a younger man but experiences echoes of her childhood. This is the latest from one of the best writers around in recent years.

Now I have read the book The Disappearance by Ibisam Azem, We Do Not Part by Han Kang, and On the Greenwich Line; I would like to see them on the longlist, but time is running out. I hope to review them in the next few days. But time is short.

What would you pick?

An oxfam trip

~ winstonsdad ~ 2 Comments

I love to visit our Oxfam. I may go twice a week, but unfortunately, we don’t have a bookshop, just a regular store, but it can turn up some real gems. So when Amanda and I headed to town, I wasn’t sure what would turn up as I had only been a few days earlier, so when I found four great books today, it was a real turn-up for the books as I had only been in a few days earlier. But the book gods had looked down and said you need these gems on your shelves, I found two and Amanda saw two for me.

Now, the two I found would be ones on my long, long list of books to get. The first is Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow, a tale of a mother and daughter who wander around Tokyo looking at art and talking weather horoscopes and clothes as one would in Tokyo, a city on my list of places I want to go most in the world who knows one day Amanda. I may get there/ Then Another book on my trip around the works of Cesar Aira. The proof was one of the books from him I hadn’t got. There is a number I need to get, and when I see them over time, I will be getting them as I want to read all his books over the coming year. I feel that the more you read from him, the clearer the picture of the bigger view of the world he has as a writer. I had hoped for a few more gems as they were on the first part of the shelf, but I had no such luck. There is nothing else in the fiction. Now Amanda loves a little bit of true life and was looking through the biography section, she will look at books she thinks I may like as she says usually an unusual name will be the ones she may show me the book and today she found two gems. For me

Amanda showed me the Pamuk, which has been on my list of books to find at some point, and his memoir of Istanbul and his books around the city he lives in are always an ode to the chaos and world that is Istanbul, I had this down significantly as the collection of his illustrated journals has just come out. I first saw these on a BBC tv show he did a few years ago, and you saw him painting and writing in his journal. And I remember thinking at the time, I wondered if we would ever get to see these in English, and we have, so I will be getting a copy of them at some point. I can’t wait to read this. Next to that was Tove Jansson’s collected letters. I have read most of her adult works and thought her letters would be insightful and excellent books to dip in and out of over the years. A great selection of books from three writers I have read before and one I really wanted to read,

 

 

Brandy Sour by Constantia Soteriou

~ winstonsdad ~ 3 Comments

Brandy Sour by Constantia Soteriou

Cypriot fiction

Original title – Brandy Sour

Translator – Lina Protopara

Source – Personal copy

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

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

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

The opening of the first story the title story Brandy Sour

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Mammoth by Eva Baltasar

~ winstonsdad ~ 4 Comments

Mammoth by Eva Baltasar

Spanish fiction

Original title – Mamut

Translator – Julia Sanches

Source – personal copy

I think this will be the big translated book of the summer. It’s no shock that her two other books in the loose trilogy have succeeded, with Boulder on the Booker longlist. Eva Baltasar started as a poet, and she won the Miquel de Palol prize when it came out. She then turned to novel writing with this trilogy of books about relationships and how motherhood or the wanting of children can affect a relationship; here we have another unnamed narrator, is it me or are these unnamed narrators a bit of a trope these days? For me it seems like every other book I  have read recently seems to have an unnamed narrator in it. I also saw this could be a companion book to Sara Mesa Un Amor as it has a similar starting point for the story of a young female heading into the hinterlands and a small village.

I have a used car. A rusty old Peugeot the size of an egg carton. I bought it from a stranger for two thousand euros because I wasn’t about to leave Barcelona with my belongings piled on a bicycle or take a train only to wind up stranded at a rural station in the back of beyond. The Peugeot is red, and while the doors may not close prop-erly, the paperwork is in order and it runs like a dream, which is all that really matters. I spend my first week at the inn driving from towns to villages and visiting real estate agencies. Most of the agencies are actually small accounting firms where farmers and cattle ranchers drop off their paperwork, although they tend to keep a list of cottages and farmhouses that are for sale or rent. The real estate market here is insane: the cost of renting a refurbished house is astronomical, and all I can afford are ruins, with the caveat of having to renovate the place myself

Her reasons for leaving  like many yoiung people the cost of housing

As I said, our narrator, a 24-year-old lesbian, has been wanting to have a baby and had slept with a number of men in the city to try and conceive a child. She has a daytime job as a researcher, interviewing a lot of old people in old people’s homes about their lives. But when this ends, and the job turns to Excel spreadsheets, she loses interest in the job, and thus, this helps her leave the job and set off in her small Pegeuot car to find. A rural idyll, she ends up in the mountains with a simple life and finds a job in a nearby village as a waitress. She also has an older man, a shepherd, who is her nearest neighbour. She also does battle with the stray cats is it me or are stray cats just a thing in certain parts of the world I remember a band otf stray cats when I was younger in an apartment in Portugal. Our narrator also decides to help the shepherd by becoming his cleaner. This is a lonely time, and these two unlikely lonely souls find themselves slowly drawn together. What will happen? Will she end up with a child?

The shepherd’s a good man. He must have noticed that times are tough because he asked if I could come by twice a week to clean his house, at my convenience. Naturally, I said yes. What I make waiting tables barely covers the rent.

He’s always home in the mornings, tending to his sheep.

Basically, moving shit from one place to another: sweeping out the pens, loading dung and soiled bedding into a wheel-barrow, and dumping it in the manure pile where it’s left to ferment in the sun. He makes a minimum of ten or twelve trips a day and the entire house reeks of shit. At first, it made my stomach turn, but a few days in I stopped noticing

The nearest neighbour is the shepherd

As I said, this had a similar start to Un Amor, a narrator leaving the city for the call of rural life. In this case, it is actually a totally alone place. This is a place with no real near neighbours. This is the wilderness and the closest person is the Shepherd to her, she heads to the village to work the cafe. The difference here is when they arrive, she starts to settle in, and in the relationship with the shepherd, we see one of those unlikely relationships build between the two. I loved the narrator as a voice, I was saying this book followed so well in Sanches translation. The mix of wilderness stray cats, the quirky shepherds, and being in the middle of nowhere all jump off the page. It is great to read this I haven;t read permanfrost and also see she has written a new novel this year. I think she may make the booker list again, but we will have to wait and see. It has a lot of modern issues, loneliness, wanting to escape the present you live in, WAnting a child as a lesbian, how to make this happen, and The rural dream. All of these are touched on in this book. Have you read any of this series of books by Eva Baltasar?

Winstons score ++A close to the best book I have read this year so far.

 

 

The book of all loves by Agustin Fernández Mallo

~ winstonsdad ~ Leave a comment

The book of all loves by  Agustin Fernandez Mall

Spanish fiction

Original title – El libro de todos los amores,

Translator – Thomas Bunstead

Source – subscription

I took out a small subscription to Fitzcarradlo as I had fallen behind with their books over recent years. They bring out a lot more than they first did. I ewas pleased this was one of the books from them I was snet as I have been a huge fan of Mallo’s Nocilla trilogy . He is a writer who likes to play with what a novel is and test the bounds of fiction. So his latest book to be translated into English is about love, but as ever, it is also about the world ending simultaneously. Only Mallo could work both these ideas into a novel. Maybe we have a future Nobel winner from the Nobel stable of Fitzcarraldo are gathering.

It is animals, not us, who live in the prison-house of language, because they are not able to leave and stand outside it and think about it. This is only because it is impossible for them to access the ideas that surround words.A dog never crosses a road, because it does not know what a road is. This, among other things, is why dogs get run over. It isn’t that the dog fails to look both ways before crossing, it’s that it does not possess the idea of a road.Its gaze is another gaze, its crossing is another crossing.Hence the fact that an animal cannot give or receive love either. It’s not that it doesn’t love, it’s that its love is other.

(Language love)

One of the love aphorisms

 

The book has several different streams to it. There is a series of aphorisms around love, such as independence, parcel, and language love, to name a few, as it runs through the book. Maybe love is all that is left, one wonders, as maybe that connects to the other story around something called the great Blackout, an apocalyptic event on earth with a single couple left. This is where we get the third stream of the husband of the couple and an earlier visit to Venice he had made. This is a mix of thoughts about love and what makes love. A past love of a place and visit to Venice, an Alexa machine while there all have the traits of Mallo’s other works, he likes recurrent themes like love, tech, and place and adds to that a couple surviving the end of the world you have a book that breaks the bounds of what fiction is. A book that need to be read to be captured fully

VENICE (1)

Month of June, first foor of a palazzo whose foundations stand below the waterline of Venice’s Misericordia Canal. There is a room, and a high window with views across the domes of St Mark’s Basilica and across a sea that will shift in colour throughout the day. There is also a woman – a writer — who, were she to look up, would be able to see all of this, but keeps her eyes down instead, tapping at the keys of a typewriter. Her typing produces slight movements in a small snow globe containing a miniature version of Venice to her right on the desk, raising a layer of snow up inside the globe, where it swirls before falling across the plastic city, and the writer goes on typing, and on, while outside, in the real Venice, the Venice of tourists and water and stone, the June humidity ushers in an early summer storm. Now, as the sequence she is working on grows in intensity, the table turns quivering fingerboard and the snow rises in the globe, and again it rises, once more hitting the tiny glass vault and falling on empty palazzos and waterless canals. The books and papers strewn across the desk, all of them on one single subject – love – receive these blows without so much as a flinch. Inside the globe, a snowflake has just landed on St Mark’s Square,

A long passage and the first remembering a trip by the husband to Venice

Mallo is a physicist I am always drawn to C P Snow and what he said about the two cultures of Humanties and Sccience he himself crossed these two cultures as he was a fellow scientist come writer. But what Malo has done is not only cross the lines between the two cultures, he has dragged the theory of Snow and thrown it in a blender by adding Calvino, Twitter, modern tech and scientific mind, also throwing in a touch of post-end of the worldness in for good measure and produced a book that only some like him could.I feel he is breaking the barriers of what fiction its and making us as readers work through this myriad of versions of love as we also witness the aftermath of the great blackout whilst also trying to remember a distant holiday with a few unusual things happening it like a waking dream of a wim wenders film it is like what he tried to do in Until the end of the world capture so much in such a small space. Have you read Mallo?

Winston score – A may be the first of next year Booker international books ?

 

What is mine by Jose Henrique Bortoluci

~ winstonsdad ~ 3 Comments

What is Mine by Jose Henrique Bortoluci

Brazilian memoir

Original title – O que é Meu

Translator – Rahul Bery

Source – subscription copy

I said yesterday I was staying in Latin America and a second work of nonfiction. This time, we move to Brazil and Jose Henrique Borotoluci’s account of his father’s life as a working-class trucker in Brazil from the 1960s onwards.I was drawn to this after reading the back cover, where He said he had been influenced by Annie Ernaux and Svetlana Alexievich. He has caught his father’s words in some interviews he had done over time since Cancer had taken its toll on his father’s life. This is the sort of book that Fitzcarraldo has been doing so well, and they managed to get such great non-fiction works.

My father studied until he was nine, worked on the family’s small farm from the age of seven, moved with them to the city at fifteen. He was only twenty-two when he became a truck driver. I was young, but I was as brave as a lion. He started driving trucks in 1965 and retired in

2015. The country that he traversed and helped to build was very different then from how it is now, but in recent years there has been a sense of familiarity: a country seized by frontier logic, the principle of expansion at any cost, the ‘colonization’ of new territories, environmental vandalism, the slow and clumsy construction of an ever more unequal consumer society. Roads and trucks occupy a key position in this fantasy of a developed nation in which forests and rivers give way to highways, prospect-ing, pasture and factories.

His father had to take work up early.

Didi Jose’s father had been a truck driver all his life, and we have his personal recollections of the time from the sixties onwards as he worked on some of the mega projects in Brazil, like the trans-amazonian highway. He says earlier on, his father never wanted to talk about the military dictatorship years but he will talk about his fellow drivers and the route he took. He says he always spoke about giant muddles where he got in the back and beyond. His fellow drivers, Like Nestor a driver showed him that if they tied meat to the outside of the exhaust in a certain place, he would have barbecued meat by lunch to eat.  The places they stopped deep in the jiungle. The protesters had dived or disappeared over the years. Another driver friend of his dad’s had died of Aids. All this as his father is fighting cancer about how the fight is going. He has taken recording and this is where the book comes from the recollections of the years spent in his wagon. For me, one of the hardest scenes is where he talks about his dad asking him about money and how he sees the gulf between his father’s life and his own as his father had to watch every penny growing up. There is a reference to movies about being a trucker that had been made in the seventies.

It was Nestor who taught me about exhaust barbecue. Above the truck’s exhaust there’s a plate that gets red bot. This is inside the engine, not the pipe where the smoke comes out. It’s a part that’s attached to the engine, welded metal, concave, big enough for one or two kilos of meat. You’d tie a piece of meat there in the morning and when you stopped at midday the barbecue would be ready. It was delicious, so good. Or you’d make the food at lunch and fill a pot with food for dinner, but at night you didn’t need to light a fire, just open the truck’s bon-net, put the pot there, leave it on top of the exhaust which bad been beating up all day. Then you could shower at the petrol station, have a few drinks, come back to get the pot and it was piping hot. That was life.

Didi talking about the tricks Nestor had taught him.

This is a personal look at a turbulent time in the country’s history but how one man and his family had made their way through the world. Didi’s story reminds me of when he talked about cooking on the truck. I remembered an episode of Home Improvement with some truckers talking about the ways they could cock on the trucks. Then the talk of trucking movies took me back to my own childhood and the movies of the seventies that were about truckers. There is a quote from Joao Guimaráes Rosa: ” My father always away and his absence always with me. And the river, perpetually renewing itself” hit the nail on the head. This is full of love of his father and the sacrifice he and many more of his generation made in the country. We can see the nods to Alexievich and Ernaux in how he worked around his father’s memories of his trucking life. Have you a favourite book about being working class?

Winstons score – A This is what we love Fitzcarraldo for these gems from around the world they find