Tag: NEW VOICES

Surgical ward 9 by Peyami Safa

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Surgical Ward 9 by Peyami Safa

Turkish fiction

Original title – Dokuzuncu Hariciye Koğuşu

Translator – Ralph Hubbell

Source review copy

I was sent a number of the first books from the English arm of a Turkish publisher, Thousand Horsemen Press, in this country.  They have published four books, and this slim volume is considered a classic in Turkey.  This book is perhaps one of the fifteen novels Peyami Safa wrote, his most personal and best-known work, as it is a reflection on his own childhood, during which he also had bone tuberculosis in his right arm.  His book has been taught in schools in Turkey and made into films. He had a close working relationship with his fellow writer, Nazim Hikmet . He also translated a number of books from French and had a good knowledge of Arabic. A writer who should be better known in English.  This is the first translation of this book into English.

I too was one of them, and there was no one older than me. I was the only patient there suffering from an idiopathic disease, which I had had since I was eight.

I had spent years waiting outside that examination room, and others just like it. Never once accompanied by a grown-up, I would walk alone through the hospital’s wrought iron gate and make my way towards the ninth

‘surgical ward, envious of the very health of the grounds’ sturdy trees. The strange bright glare of the entrance’s windows would then strike my eyes and churn my stomach with fear, I would enter the passageway and sit off to the side alone, barely stirring, staying quiet, waiting, petrified to the point where I could feel the colour draining from my face.

from a section called troubles of a solitary child

captures the despair of sitting waiting

The book follows our narrator, who is 15 and is stuck in the hospital as he has bone tuberculosis in his right leg. The problem is that the doctors don’t know really what to do; some are nice, others are not. This is a boy stuck with a lot of pain, and the book is told in episodic parts. What happens is he sees a girl, Nüzhet, in the hospital. Seh shines for this boy; she is something different for him.  This girl awakens a dying boy.  This is what happens when you are dying, but then a wonderful light enters your life. The way he describes her, you feel this may have happened to the writer himself. Of course, his narrator in the book has a much worse case than the writer himself did, but there is a sense of time spent in the hospital.  He is well-read for a young man of fifteen. At times, the way he talks with his doctors shows that.  He has few options, will he leave the hospital?

Naturally, a girl wants to be happy.

I keep trying to tell myself this very basic fact. Even in my daydreams, my faltering logic comes to the same con-clusion, but then I begin to reason against it again as if I still need to be convinced.

Suddenly, the unbelievable: I hear something. The sound of someone knocking on the door. I do not believe it at first, but I listen carefully. It’s true.

“Who is it?” I said.

A low voice: “It’s me. Are you asleep? Can I come in?” Nüzhet! Nüzhet in the middle of the night! I could

only mouth the word, “Yes.”

“Can I come in?” she asked again.

Amazed, I sat upright in my bed:

“Yes!” I said.

She opened the door.

She wore a shawl draped over her nightshirt. Her feet,

inside her slippers, were bare.

She walked boldly over to the bed, an act so daring it caused me to feel the intensity of her fright. She looked at me and laughed.

Nuzhet as he views her !

This is a book that can be read in a single evening. I read it in two sittings, as I was so caught up in what was happening to the narrator and in how this girl lit up his world.  She may not be the best person, but there is a sense that this one figure is his hope at this one time. A boy discovering himself . A country struggling in the middle of a war and a sick boy stuck in a hospital jump off the page; you sense this is more auto-fiction, a legacy instead of an arm, some of the options the narrator has to face feel like those the writer may have faced. Did he have a Nuzhet light up his world ? I felt this book salos had a nod towards modernism the way we our in our narrators thoughts called Mrs Dalloway and maybe even something like Hunger by Knut Hamsum it captures a psychological feel to the narrative that the book shares with both the books I have mentioned also he translated french fiction so Proust for the ilness side of the book may have been an inspiration for his writing. It is a gem of a book that has also been made into a film. Maybe the best line is this from his friend Nãzim Hiket “I’ve read Peyami’s latest novel three times, I can read thirty more, I definitely will” High praise!

The Nights are Quiet In Tehran by Shida Bazyar

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The Nights are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar

German fiction

Original title – Nacht ist es leise in Tehran

Translator – Ruth Martin

Source – personal copy

It was odd that there were two novels connected to Iran on the Booker longlist, and all this before the recent war had started there.  Life is often stranger than fiction. And the two books have different takes on the country: one from the perspective of women living in Modern Iran, and the other about what happens when you leave after the 1979 revolution and your family grows up in Exile in Germany. How do your kids deal with returning to Tehran? This book is inspired by her parents’ life in Exile in a small German town. It tackles the parents’ life in Iran firstly, then the life in exile, the daughter returning to Iran years later, and then the son’s perspective on events in Germany in 2009, each event happening a decade apart

The Revolution is a month old, and Dayeh is making stuffed vine leaves. They’re all sitting on the floor, my mother, my sisters, my cousins, my aunts. The wives of my older brothers.

They have laid the sofrehs out on the living-room floor and are sitting around them with bowls full of rice and minced meat, herbs, lentils, and they are folding vine leaves, one after another, and laying them in a pot and talking and laughing and talking and laughing.

There were just as many women when we were little, though they were different women. Our dayeh would send my sisters and me outside; we weren’t supposed to hear the women’s conversation, to interrupt the neighbourhood gossip. You mustn’t bother people while they’re cooking, we were told, or the food will take longer to make, and we went outside, where we played marbles or pretended to shoot down the murderer of the great and oh-so-honourable Imam Hossein.

After the inital coup the world slowly changes post Shah

The book opens in the last days of the Shah’s regime with the hope from the younger people living there, like Behzad a young communist hopeful, as the Shah falls this is a new dawn for the country, but at the opening section moves on the dream he had of a new Iran starts to fade and the religous voice start to run the country.  They are left questioning whether they can stay or go into Exile. So we jump forward, and the next chapter is from the point of view of his lovely wife, Nahid, struggling to settle into life in Germany, trying to be themselves in a new country, and wondering if things will change in Iran. Nahid misses the ebb and flow of the poems, the songs, and the way of life she has left.  This is a tale of the first generation of exiles, those who have come but remain tied to the homeland.  Then, ten years later, the baton passed to the daughter, Laleh (or maybe Shida, really), who goes with her mother to return to a window of relative peace in Tehran.  They head back; the mother finds a place where the ghosts of her past and present don’t match; and the daughter finds it hard to be a German-Iranian in Iran.  Seeing family that stated there are two further chapters, but this is a family tale set over the last forty years of being neither Iranian nor German and growing up a child of exiles.

Sometimes I imagine 1 am Ulla or Walter, seeing this Behzad for the first time after years of being surrounded by no one but Ullas and Walters. I try to hear him with ears that are used to different television, different radio, used to Helmut Kohls and Helmut Schmidts, ears that understand Nazi speeches, understand Goethe. But I can’t do it. I look at Behzad, stare at him, hear him talking, and try to defamiliarise his words, his whole self. Then I can’t help thinking of him ten years younger — ten years younger, badly shaved and with huge sideburns, thick black hair, and a deep, loud voice.

But then you can be caught between being Iranian and being German

As I said, the two books are so different. This book is made up of the voice of one family over the space of forty years and how the initial dream of the Post Shah years fell apart, and the regime became what it became, and people like Bhzad and Nahid had the choice to stay and change or leave and this shows the story from the perspective of leaving, but when they return, the world they left has gone, and the world they lkeft has m oved on. This is a tale of never fully fitting in place when you become an exile, the limbo of that life, but the effect on the kids’ lives being German Iranians with parents from Iran in modern Germany. It is a family story where the secrets of the past and the decisions one makes come back years later, and where a dream of a new Iran never happens. I think both the books about Iran are very different books, but also deal with firstly the post-Shah years, the change in the country after this, but also the view from inside the country for the five women in the other books, to the women in this book living and growing up outside Iran in the West!  Have you read this book?

 

Paradise of the Blind by Duong Thu Huong

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Paradise of the Blind by Duong Thu Huong

Vietnamese fiction

Original title – Những thiên đường mù

TranslatorsPhan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson

Source – personal copy

I picked this up as it said it was the first Vietnamese novel to be published in the US. The writer grew up in the North of Vietnam and fought for the communists in the Vietnam War, spending time in the maze of tunnels they had built in the jungle. As she entertained the troops, she was one of the few people who survived in her group.  She was also on the frontline when China tried to invade Vietnam.  She has since become outspoken about the corruption she has seen in her homeland and is a dissenting writer.  This book also shows how hard it was for women in Vietnam at the time it was written, the late 1980s.  When Vietnam still had many ties to the Soviet Union. I have decided this year to try to add at least one new country to the blog each month, but I was wrong. This is the second book I have read from Vietnam, although I have some classic Vietnamese literature and a book about the Vietnam War and I have to read another book for one new country this month

One afternoon, when I was just a girl, I stood in that house, inhaling the dank, musty smell of the walls. It was the first time I had ever even seen the house and the village where my mother had been born and raised…. The eyes of the ghoulish sculptures carved into the wooden transoms above the doors riveted me with their mysterious gaze. A spider’s web hung from the vaulted ceiling. Light flickered through cracks in the chipped, rotting tiles, flashing at me like the phosphorescent bursts that haunt cemeteries. Terrified, I rushed out into the courtyard where my mother sat chatting and sipping green tea with the other women.

“What’s the matter, my child?”

“I’m scared.”

“My silly chicken. Afraid in broad daylight?” she laughed, scolding me. When she smiled, I always noticed the sparkling whiteness of her teeth, aligned in perfect rows, and it made me sad. This was the last trace of her beauty, her youth, of a whole life lived for nothing, for no one.

As a young girl her nerves

The book looks at Vietnam through the stories of Hang, a young girl on the verge of womanhood, her mother, and a street vendor who lives near them. All three offer perspectives on women’s lives and on the role of men in society at the time. But it is also a tale of forbidden love as the mother had a lover that her brother Hang’s uncle forbade her to see. This has haunted her mother, so when she escaped to Hanoi to raise Hang and her brother, he reappeared and now wants Hang to work in a factory in Russia, where he now lives. As he begins to affect Hang’s life, she sees other people around her leading lives very different from hers. This is a story of family ties and how tight they can be in Vietnam,m but also about a world that is on the brink of change. There are many nods to the blind in the book, and being blind to the truth about the past, etc., may be a theme.

The following week, he left with the traveling salesman, descending the river on a wooden raft. From his birthplace in the village to the city, he followed my mother’s traces to her tiny back-alley home on the outskirts of Hanoi.

My mother was still young and beautiful, but she looked at no one, smiled at no one. Like ashes rising under the caress of a slight wind, their love rose again, melting the years of separation, the yearning, the emptiness, the hatred, the humiliation of an entire lifetime of bitterness, of two lives almost snuffed out, buffeted by a series of absurd, incomprehensible events. All this, fused in the space of an instant, quivering through every pore of their bodies, transported them. All this, here, under the leaky roof of this pathetic hovel, in this place where my parents had lived and loved each other, where I had come into the world.

Her parents past causes issues in the present for her

I enjoyed this. I felt it captured maybe how different Vietnamese life is, but also the culture and the way the book was written, like a series of pictures of Hang’s life and those around her as she grows up. Like little glimpses of her world. But also the timeframe she has grown up in the war and post-war era. The title is maybe a nod to the way the post-war period was meant to be Paradise, but only if you are blind to what is around you!  A female-centred family saga about an uncle who has an axe to grind with a past love, and a mother and daughter caught up in all this, offers compelling insight into Vietnam and the connection between the country and the Soviet Union, with workers employed by the Russians in factories. Have you read any fiction from Vietnam?

 

Sad Tiger by Niege Sinno

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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 ?

Cement by Fyodor Vasilievich Gladkov

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Cement by Fyodor Vasilievich Gladkov

Russian fiction

Original title – Цемент

Translator – A S Arthur and C Ashleigh

Source – Personal copy

I am on to the second book for the 1925 club. This jumped out at me as I had planned to read a lot more classics in translation. This was the sort of book I had in mind when doing that. This is a writer, a little lesser known now and this is a book that, when it came out, was well received and considered the first piece of socialist realist fiction. He had fought in the Red Army during the Russian Revolution and was expelled from the communist party. After this book came out, he was taken back in, and this was held up as an example of what soviet literature should be. He was the secretary of the journal Novy Mir and later became the director of the Maxim Gorky Institute. This is one of the two of his books that seemed to have been translated.

He immediately recognised two of them. The old woman was the wife of Loshak the mechanic; the laughing one was the wife of Gromada, another mechanic. The third was a stranger whom he had never seen before.

As he approached them on the narrow pathway he stood aside in the high grass and gave them a military salute.

“Good morning, Comrades! “

They looked at him askance as though he were a tramp and stepped past him. Only the last one, the laughing one, gave a screeching laugh like a scared hen: “Get on with you!

There’s enough scamps like you about. Must one say ‘ Good-day to everybody? “

” What’s the matter with you, wenches? Don’t you recog-

nise me? “

Loshak’s wife looked morosely at Gleb-just as an old witch would do—then murmured to herself in her deep voice:

“Why, this is Gleb. He has risen from the dead, the rascal !” And went on her way, silent and sullen.

The first day or so as he returns Gleb

Cement depicts the main character in the book, Gleb, as a soldier who fought in the Russian Revolution for the Red Army. He has returned to his hometown and to take up his job in the Cement factory, only to find that since he has been at war, the way the factory is run has changed, as it is now part of the soviet machine. Added to that, his wife Dasha has, since he left, become the head of the women’s section of the communist Party in the factory. She is the new woman of those soviet posters. Added to this is Polya, another strong woman, but she is more drawn to Gleb as the returning hero from the war. She has sacrificed having a husband to fight for the party and is drawn when Gleb returns to this man especially as Gleb and his wife seems to have grown apart Added to this there is Kleist a man that sold out Galeb during the war sold him out to the white guard Gleb has to accept he is been taking back in and the fact that he is a scientist. The book sees how Gleb adjusts to the return to civilian life and the soviet era.

In the morning, Gleb, still asleep, felt that the room was not a room but an empty hole. A breeze was blowing between the window and door, whirling in gusts, redolent of spring. He opened his eyes. It was true; the sun was blazing through the window. Dasha was standing at the table, adjusting her flaming headscarf. She glanced at him and laughed. An amber light shone in her eyes.

“We don’t sleep as late as this here, Gleb. The sun is beating down like a drum. I’ve already worked out a report for the Women’s Section on the children’s crêches and the estimate for the linen and furniture. I’ve got it worked out, but where’s the money coming from? We’re so beggarly poor.

Our Party Committee should be given a jolt, so they’ll squeeze something out of the bourgeois. I’m going to kick up a row about it from now on. And you, remember you haven’t seen Nurka yet. Do you want to go with me to the Children’s Home? It’s close by.”

The party runs everything he finds out !

This has it all, really: a hero returning to a post-war landscape of Soviet-era Russia to find a different world. The fact that his wife has changed is significant. I was reminded of the books and films I have seen about the post-World War II era, when women had to return to domestic life. This is the other side where they didn’t have the conflict between the scientist Kleist, a white guard man who had sold out Gleb, but now back in the factory, adding to Gleb’s woes, then the two women, his wife, who has changed without him, and the two of them adjusting to his return. Then Polya, a woman who had given up a relationship, is drawn to the returning hero. Add to this the party line on everything as we see one man trying to find his place in soviet era in the cement factory, trying to find his place and be part of the whole maybe the choice of the Cement factory was a good metaphor for what they wanted a bond workforce  Post the revolution of men and women working along side enemies alongside one another. I enjoyed this. I have read a couple of other soviet realist novels, but if you know of any others, let me know!

Set my heart on fire by Izumi Suzuki

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Set my heart on fire by Izumi Suzuki

Japanese fiction

Original title – ハートに火をつけて! だれが消す

Translator – Helen O’Horan

Source – Library book

Well, on to the third of this month’s Women in Translation Month, I move to Japan and a writer whose other books in English so far have been a short story collection, and the novel by Izumi Suzuki is her first to be translated into English. Izumi died young and, like the women in her book, lived at night in Tokyo, where she moved as a hostess, nude model and actress. When she was young, she had a brief marriage to an avant-garde saxophonist, the sort of chap who played in one of the jazz clubs in her book.I had read the short story collection by her and not really connected, but this felt more real-life than her stories did to me. I may reread her short story collection after reading this.

I’m more of a Gibson man myself. I mean, the Green Glass guitarist used an SG. I guess different Fenders sound different, too. You’ve got Telecasters, Stratocasters … The Tele’s nice and tight. Stratocaster’s more bluesy?

He took out a Hope cigarette and a little sleeve of cardboard matches.’God, what should I do!’ I lay back and writhed about on the bed.You just never think ahead? He plucked off a match and lit his cigarette. ‘Oh no, I just set my Hope on fire!’ Look, if it works out in the end, it’s all good to me. I take it as it comes.’

This reminded me of friends I had when young into guitars and how they sounded !

 

The main character in the book a woman in her twenties living her best well a life at night on the back streets of Tokyo is a thinly veiled version of the writer herself it captures a wom an stuck in the night time world of Tokyo of the mid 1970 bars full of yoi8ung men like the wooman in the book just trying to escape there world wether through playing music, drinking having affairs of  r drugs these are the dark side of Tokyo nights. Obviously culled from her own short marriage, and then shortly after her husband divorced, they lived together. He died of an overdose. This world is full of mirror images of him and many of the men she must have met during those years. It is a doomed life of men and a woman making three wrong choices. all to a backdrop of seventies rock, jazz, and Japanese psychedelic bands of this time. I felt it needed a Spotify playlist of the bands.

I thought he’d have left long ago.

We’d arranged to meet at eleven o’clock by the Honmoku bus stop. Thanks to the mental retardation I retained from my childhood, I’d taken the Tokaido Line instead of the Toyoko Line and gone to Yokohama Station, and then the train was delayed. By the time I arrived it was past twelve-thirty.

Joel was standing there, serene. Looking like he’d walked straight out of the photos on that album sleeve. Slender and tall like a tree without leaves, not moving an inch.

I wondered whether he might be an idiot. I quickly parked my own blunder and looked down on him incredulously.

What man waits nearly two hours for a woman whose face he’s never seen? If it was in a café, perhaps – I suppose he’d have found ways to amuse himself, but even then he’d have to be a guy with nothing much going for him.

In the club and a man she had seen lioved the descrition of how he looked

I like this book; it is almost auto-fiction. i read it is a nod the the tradtional I novel a japanese form of bildsroman. IT captures what must have been the young Izumi Suzuki years in the jazz bars and her marriage to one of those men that played in a band in those bars at the time, a doomed relationship rather like her own life, which was far too short 1. Still, It also captures the world of the early Murakami novels but from a female point of view as she drifted through the Japanese Jazz bar, and this is a world where the women would eat the men in Haruki Murakami’s novels alive. There is no evidence she knew Murakami, but this is the same nightlife he portrayed in his early novels. In particular, this could almost be a third novel alongside his first two novels, which are both set in the Tokyo nightlife and Jazz bars, but it is a darker version of that. She actually lived those nights of men drunk, drugged, cheating on their wives as they shared her bed and moments of passion. Have you read any of her collection, or this novel?

Do you have a favourite book set mainly at night ?

 

 

June So hot The month on winstonsdad

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  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?

 

 

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Attila by Javier Serena

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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

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Voracious by Malgorzata Lebda

Polish Fiction

Orignal title –Łakome

Translator – Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Source review copy

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

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

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

Saint Grandma Róza talking to insects.

Saint Grandma Róza the tender.

Saint Grandma Róza the just.

Saint Grandma Róza the compassionate.

Saint Grandma Róza the merciful.

Saint Grandma Róza who is.

The naturual world and how her grandparents know it

 

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

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

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

smoking a Klub. And gazing ahead.

Moving? Where? I ask.

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

The sound of church bells rings out.

It has started, look, he says.

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

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

I’m off, says Grandpa.

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

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

A carnival of Attrocities by Natalia Garcia Freire

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A carnival of atrocities by Natalia Garcia Freire

Ecuadorian fiction

Original title -Trajiste contigo el viento

Translator – Victor Meadowcroft

Source – Review copy

I took this away with me as I just needed a break from prize-listed books and something different from what I had been reading in the last few weeks. Plus, when I saw it was actually the first book from Ecuador I had read, I was even keener. Natalia Garcia Freire has a master’s degree and teaches creative writing in Madrid. It is noted in Hay-on-Wye’s biography that she also has a cat and a garden. This is her second novel to be translated into English. As I say, it is also the first book from Ecuador on this blog9i have a collection of short fiction from there, I thought. I had reviewed, but I hadn’t. This caught my eye as it is set in one of those far-from-anything villages, as it says, nestled between the Jungle and the Andes.

The whole of Cocuán continued to sing, but other voices, the voices of a man, woman and child said:

Mildred.

Sweet and powerful Mildred.

Those who live in fear will become savages.

Look at them, they said. And the voices swelled like the high tide, the waves crashing into my ears. Look at them in their Sunday finest, huddled so close together.

Look at them, Mildred, deaf to the wind and blind like corrupted animals. With the wills of slaves. Look at the men and women created by the Word, molded from the dust of dead stars. Look at their body, which is the body of Christ, and look at their disoriented eyes, their old bones on the brink of snapping. Look upon the town of God that has abandoned you. Look upon the town of God that you have cursed.

This is an example early on in the book how she is viewed

The book uses a chorus of voices from the same village, Cocuan, as they all recount incidents and events surrounding a young girl who, many years earlier, had been taken from the town when her parents had both passed away after a series of strange events. What I loved about this book is that we have nine different people talking about the Girl Mildred and how she was, and it shows what can grow into a void left when someone leaves a small village under a cloud. So is this girl the witch, as some of those retellings remember their view of the events, and as they do, the lines between what is real and what is a dream world blur. Some strange events around the time Mildred and her parents died are recalled. A priest cut off his ear. The woman dies, and as her husband is there, someone attacks her body. A man goes to desperate ends to settle a debt. Did Midlred really see future events, and why did certain things? Locals want her to join them? This is a tale of a young girl who has had a bad life, then maybe sees things that might happen, and thus gets caught up in a whirlwind. With what happened with her mother dying and her father running off, it is one of those situations where myths are born.

Death is just like a pirate,

It eats tough meat and drinks salt water.

Death is just like a pirate,

It bares its ass, then goes for the slaughter.

This is what we sang on the way to the waterfall where Victor believed the old man might have gone, because several times before we had found him teetering there, with his eyes closed, covered by the water, and been forced to drag him back to the house like a stuffed dummy I would have liked to watch burn on an enormous bonfire fed with ragweed and rue to chase away the old man’s evil spirit, the fleas and the flies. But no one wanted to hear my dirty plans, least of all Víctor, who loved the old man with a stupid love. So that’s where we were headed, once again, to look for him.

Things get connected like an old man vanishing

I love how this looked at Mildred through the nine characters as they cross into other stories, but each has a different take on her and the events. It also has a large chunk of the mysticism, folklore, and magic realism that make up the world Mildred and the locals are from, where simple events unconnected get drawn together and at the heart of it all is this girl now gone. I loved the mix of dream magic realism and just the way things like this can happen, a sort of super Chinese whispers around this one girl. Yes, she was a little odd, and maybe events tied with things she said, but that happens sometimes.It is just by accident, or perhaps she has that sort of second sight that D will occur because A and B have happened. I was reminded of the film The Big Fish if it had been made by David Lynch, as this is one of those tales that is about a place, the town itself, which is between the savage jungle and the barren, endless Andes, a sort of place where events happen. I was reminded in Big Fish that the events seem surreal, but there is always a little bit of truth in what you are being told. From tiny acorns mighty oaks grow, and this is the case here. Events have grown in the people’s minds.

\

 

Overstaying by Ariane Koch

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Overstaying by Aeriane Koch

Swiss fiction

Original title – Die Aufdrängung

Translator – Damion Searls

Source – Personal copy

I said yesterday I was tempted by the translated titles from the US Republic of Consciousness prize longlist. This was already on my radar after hearing it on the One Bright Book podcast it is the debut novel from the writer and had won several book prizes when it came out. I think this is one of those books that is hard to say what it is as it isn’t sci fi sci-fi horror it is lots of bits put together. It’s one of those books that seems to have come from nowhere. The writer is a performance artist on the side; you can see it in the book. I will try and do what they did on One Bright Book and try to add context to this mad book.

My reputation seems to have improved since the visitor has been occupying my house and my time. For example, there are neighbor children who never used to even glance at me, who now constantly kick soccer balls into my yard, supposedly by accident, so that they can knock on my front door and gawk at the visitor.

Every time this happens the visitor jumps up to offer them candy, and I don’t prevent him. It’s all the same to me whether or not he’s planning to poison the neighbor children. They’re all right, because they’re small, but then again they’re not that small; now that I think about it, they have chubby thighs.

The neighbor children suck on their exotic candies, still gawking, but they don’t move from the front door.

I contemplate availing myself of the broom, or the herd of spooky vacuum cleaner nozzles. The visitor beats me to it, though, by laughing and trying to hold the children’s hands, at which they run back outside, shrieking.

The vacumm cleaners that had risen up it seems alla bit weird!

 

The book is set in what seems to be a sort of near future where there aren’t many people, and there are visitors. We glimpse the visitor who, hat, lives with our Narrator. Then we have odd little pieces like the Hooovers, who seem to have come to life and tried to take over. We have the narrator, the daughter and granddaughter of a family that has lived in this village for many years. She seems to have a past hinted at throughout the book. The Visitor is never described. We have things mentioned like him having a sort of relationship with the hoovers and brush fingers. There is a sense our narrators are drawing close to each other. The book is odd erie at times and overs like a typical everyday story. It is one of those that you need to read. It is surreal in a different way. The book seems to drift as well at times, it seems like time has stopped, if that makes sense, this could have been days, weeks or even years in the book

The visitor refuses to accept that the earth turns, that the sun alternatingly rises and sets. He takes every day like the first ever, gets out of his bed, puts on a blinded face, and waddles across the balcony, squinting at the surrounding panoramic vista – he knows no name for anything, has no memory at all of yesterday when I identified each individual mountain peak for him by means of a short lecture.

His morning rituals are a mystery to me. He twirls his hair with his fingers, slurps milky liquids from giant bowls, wears fake fur draped around his shoulders. The visitor is one big tackiness, an insult to the aesthetic eye. I feel sympathy for him, for he imitates a hippie or a woolly mammoth or some other extinct species, which doesn’t much help him understand the present. He stays lost in his own thoughts while work is being done, while money is being shoveled into accounts, while the day is being given a certain rhythm.

He, on the other hand, moves through time in circles.

At times is he a post war cave man I wondered as well !

I said I try to capture this book well. If a Swiss post-apocalyptic soap opera was set in a small village directed by David Lynch, it would be this. But then I recently rewatched the early Whose Line is it anyway? The recent death of Tony Slattery made me think this could be a sketch of the setting of a soap opera, the characters from an alien encounter film in the style of slow-burning romance as the world falls apart.  I feel this is one of those books that you just can’t say it’s like this book or that book I’ve read as it is just a little surreal in that what she has done is captured that ordinary story but with a few surreal pieces. Another image I had was Dysons marching around like the hammers did in the film The Wall, but that is just me. Have you read this book or have a favourite work that is a little surreal?

The Sea in the Radio by Jürgen Becker

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The Sea in the Radio by Jürgen Becker

German fiction

Original title – Im Radio Das Meer

Translator = Alexander Booth

Source – Personal copy

Now I start with a far better review of this book by Joe at Roughghost. Not to put myself down, I don’t really know how to get into these experimental novels like this. I ordered this after seeing he had died earlier this month. The name was one I had seen on the list of writers connected with the post-war group of German Writer Gruppe 47, I have long been a fan of this loose collective of writers shaping post-war German writers. I, like many, feel this from reading Böll and Grass, which may be the two best-known names. When I read them, they were, and in recent years, I have read some others from the groups, especially Alexander Kluge, a writer I hold in the upper echelons of my personal pantheon of writers. Now, as for this, this is a collection of snippet sentences around a village. For me, it is like he has taken the world he sees down to the bare minimum. I saw this in Helmut Heißenbüttel’s work texts , which I reviewed a few years ago. He was another member of the group.

Where were you last night?

The small yellow plane is back, somewhat further away, somewhat higher.

At night you could hear trains. Nights you would always hear trains.

The first tractor out on the fields. Still. Then it begins to make large circles.

Now the bumblebee buzzes out the open door.

Glancing at the clock. One’s startled. Or one’s not.

The filling-station attendant says, You don’t see the fuel, but it’s there.

A bit slower getting up the stairs today.

We’ll have one more little one, but then we’ve got to get going.

When Charlie was still here, the neighbour says, Evenings I’d always be entertained. But she doesn’t want a new cat.

Preparations for a trip one doesn’t want to take at all.

The morning begins cloudless. At midday a few. Cloudless again in the evening.

An example of the style of writing

The novel is not really. It is maybe more like a redacted journal if you removed all personal details from it and dates and places, so what you have is like snippets one after another. If you took Under Milkwood and removed the characters and names from it there is, for me a connection to that. I find this is like a radio of images and thoughts going around the dial, I was reminded at times how, as A kid, I used to marvel in bed at night, slowly moving the dial on my short wave radio and moving over the stations from around the world. This is the effect here. We grasp just a bare thought, a tiny observation of nameless characters. What we have is the space in between these sentences. These aphorisms are ours to fill or not fill. That is the beauty. Like John Cage’s 4′ 33”, the silence is individual and just yours to saviour so it is heard with the gaps in. The sentence’s voids to fall in or steeping stones sometimes when the thoughts suddenly loop back to an early idea.

At night the man would sleep in his tent, hidden in the woods; during the day he’d go eat soup and pick up his mail.

Before flying off, the woodpecker lets himself drop.

It is hot and damp, and out in the garden there are snails.

The day hasn’t ended yet, and you don’t know what’s still to come.

Flags hanging from the windows. That hasn’t happened in a long time, and he almost got scared. Not all windows have flags. But some of them do.

The filling-station attendant says, Air doesn’t cost a thing, air is priceless.

Cloudless the night. You should be able to see the stars. If you can’t see any stars, the night isn’t cloudless.

The boy had come along to the station and waved after the train. He didn’t realize how soon he would be sitting on the same train himself.

It’s the same house, but the people living there today don’t know it.

After that, he began to count the days. At some point, it became too much, so he began to count the months instead.years

Another snippet from the book

So you get the idea. If you want a better idea, look to Joe. This is through my limited prism of the world and my limited knowledge of the language. But in a slight nod to Joe. The other piece of media, well, two, but the first links to Joe and the fact they live in Canada, I love the Guy Maddin film My Winnipeg: A Glimpse of his Childhood in That City, but the film was made up of little snippets like this another film directors work I felt connected to this was  Jonas Mekas the avant grade filmmaker his films flash from place to place and through time in a way maybe its all the effect of the world war on these figures. I can see Kluge in this as well it is the way the war is always a prism for the events and way a writer filmmaker looks at the world. An experimental poetic collection of journal sentences that left me wanting more from this writer. I think this may be his only book in English so far. Another book for German lit month. Before anyone says I admire Joe, and yes, his reviews are a million times better than mine, I aim to hit his hits one day, but I now find myself in my own orbit of reviewing books.

The ways of Paradise by Peter Cornell

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The ways of Paradise by Peter Cornell

Swedish memoir

Original title – Paradisets vägar

Translator – Saskia Vogel

Source – Subscription book

I had some money come and I decided I wanted to get the Fitzcarraldo subscription and paid for the 20-book subscription as I knew that it would have some great books I had heard about this book earlier this year, and out of the new and upcoming books from them it was easily one I knew I would read the second unit hit the floor through the letterbox, something that maybe doesn’t happen as much as it used to for me as a reader. When I heard Peter Cornell had put together the pieces left behind by an unknown academic researcher  who for thirty years, had spent the previous three decades working on something, what was found is her within this book. Fare to say it is no Pessoa or Bolano trunk full;l of papers or a hard drive of many nearly finished novels. This was just a hundred or so pages of writing. But this was 1987, an age before Google thought this was a man connecting the world, and like the knots in Rushkin’s pieces, he talks about tightening knots around his prose, and this is what is left is like an espresso shot a brutal hit of Knowledge and connections. He links those brilliant minds of the last 2000 years here, there, and everywhere!!

  1. Leonardo da Vinci’s and Dürer’s labyrinthine ‘knots’ without beginning or end can be seen as maps of the universe. They are, along with a few late drawings, the kind of hieroglyphs that may have been stimulated by Leonardo’s well-known exercises around the imaginative eye – to lose one’s self in the damp patches on a wall or other fragmentary forms. ‘One gets the impression that the Leonardo] drawings held at Windsor Castle, which symbolically represent the world at once in its birth and its final cataclysm, stem from similar visions.’ See Gustav René Hocke, Die Welt als Labyrinth, 1957; Ananda K.

Coomaraswamy, ‘The Iconography of Dürer’s “Knots” and Leonardo’s “Concatenation”, in Art Quarterly,1944

Knots and labyrinths a a recurring theme in the book

The three pieces in the book run over and interconnect with one another. They all seem to revolve around labyrinths or the complex nature of the world and how one thing can connect to another. The Greek history of the minotaur and labyrinth through Rushkins integrate knot drawing and then ending with the chaos of Jackson Pollock, but the feeling of a connection through how the pieces connect.. Almost like a knight tour of a chess board, the text moves forward but never quite the way you think it will. You can see the mind of those thirty years crossing and reconnecting these pieces like a giant Meccano set of his mind. This just has to be read !!

  1. Various types of fantastical tales, ‘contes fantastiques autour des contes originaires. Jurgis Baltrusaitis, La quête d’ Isis: Essai sur la légende d’un mythe, 1985.
  2. Ibid.
  3. ‘The centre of the world’, the heart of the world’. This concept recurs in all cultures even as their geographic and topographical situations may vary: country, cave, mountain, tower, temple or city. These imagined places arise from fantasies of a holy land, described as follows by René Guénon: ‘This “holy land”, above all others, it is the finest of lands per the meaning of the Sanskrit word Paradesha, which among the Chaldeans took the form of Pardes and Paradise in the Western world; in other words it refers to the “earthly paradise” that constitutes the point of departure in each religious tradition. Here was the or-igin, here was spoken the first, creative Word. See ‘Les gardiens de la Terre sainte’ (1929), in Symboles fondamen-taux de la Science sacrée, 1962.
  4. Possibly in André Breton’s object Souvenir du paradis terrestre from 1953, a rugged rock, 11.5 x 9.5 x 5 cm, its title inscribed into the rock.
  5. ‘Paradise, from Old Persian pairidaeza, meaning ‘en-closed garden,park

The first five little vignettes of info

I am just a huge fan of digersive books of the way some writers let their minds wander and connect the dots a certain way. More accessible, maybe now, in this age with Google, this book predates Google and such; thus, the work that went into it being the way it was must have been years of refining the prose. This is A scholar caught in a Borgesian library where, like Borges, a writer who could never write a novel, his writing is like that espresso shot perfect complex and just enough of a hit. This prose is like this. I imagine a huger work pruned over those thirty years, but as you do that, the mind connects other things, and the whole thing becomes like an Escher painting or a Mobius loop where there is a point that it seems like it is an endless connection with the world and that is what happens here. It is a man caught in an Escher world, a labyrinth of his mind slowly closing as those prose-like knots grow shorter and shorter. Oh my god, I am just off on my own tangent now. Let’s just say this will quickly be the book of the year for me. I can’t see anything coming near it apart from my next read, a similar, if longer, book from Fitzcarraldo by a great German writer. Have you a favourite digressive work of literature ?

Living Things by Munir Hachemi

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Living Thing by Munir Hachemi

Spanish fiction

0riginal title – Cosas vivas

Translator – Julie Sanches

Source – personal copy

I have missed several fitzcarradlo books over the last few years. So I decided to cancel a subscription and try to get some of the books I missed from their backlist. This is another writer from one of those Granta lists. Munir was on the 2021 list of the best Spanish language writers. His story of vital signs was part of that collection. The first book of Spanish writers produced so many great writers like Rodrigo Hasbun, Pola Ooixarac and Andres Neumann, to name a few. There have been a couple from the second collection that came out. I reviewed another book by the writer Martin Felipe Castagnet. Munir Hachemi’s father is from Algeria. He studied Spanish and has a master’s degree in Spanish. This was his debut novel. It is part auto-fiction, part dialogue on industrial farming.

Sunday, 14 July

I read Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory from start to finish. An unexpected surprise. It’s a social novel where the main character – a guy – takes us through the ins and outs of the artistic field; there is no anecdote outside the field of cultural production (exactly!). The book was recommended by my ex-girlfriend Mónica, now a close friend. Her current boyfriend recommended it to her. I consider ringing her but don’t actually want to; besides, it’d be expensive and I’m not sure she’s read the book yet.

Instead I call Marta, my current girlfriend, and realize I don’t have a lot to share. I say things are all right; I have no idea if she can tell it isn’t true. My mission to obtain experience, as I referred to it, has been a failure. I have a new understanding of Piglia’s famous question: how to narrate the horror of real events?

We’re running out of food.

A mixof reading and the slow way the trip falls apart as the food goes and the still drink

The book follows what happens when four friends from university decide to head to France with the initial idea of joining the grape harvest.( I did something similar in Germany many years ago, working in a vineyard for a week. ) Munir, G, Ernesto and Alex head in a Suzuki Swift. Our Narrator, Munir, is full of ideas about being a writer. In the book’s first part, he describes how different writers describe being and how to start writing as they head for this summer of what they feel will be fun grape picking. But then, when they get there, they are told there isn’t any work in the vineyard to harvest grapes for four Spanish students. This shatters their plans, so they take what turns out to be a dark turn and find a chop in an industrial chicken factory where the four start to work and have their eyes open to the horrors of industrial-scale factory farming and the effect of this on the four of them. The co-workers’ menace and the place turn this from what would have been a fun summer working trip into something darker. As they drink, they become a little wild and don’t fit in on the family campsite they are living on, as the madness and horrific nature of the day job leads to wild nights. We see all this through Munir’s journal, but as he says earlier in the book, this is the writer; this is another Munir.

Today work has shown me the true nature of animal ex-ploitation. The site reminded me of the end of the world: a massive, modular, bleach-white industrial unit in the middle of a scorched wheat field. In the background the sun rose, wanting to drown the world in the blistering co-lours of dawn but finding everything in that narrow space to be yellow or white, and nothing else. Access to the complex was through a pavilion-like annexe. We got in a queue, and a veterinarian handed each of us a soft plastic suit that looked like a giant, shiny white potato sack, and a headpiece made of the same material with a see-through window for the eyes. Then he sprayed us with some sort of disinfectant hose. The scene reminded me of Holocaust documentaries, except we weren’t so much naked as overdressed. They informed us we wouldn’t be able to leave until our (lunch) break at eleven-thirty. At first I was alarmed because I had to pee, but it took me less than an hour to sweat every last drop of water from my body. Even though I bore it out, I’d go so far as to say it was unbearable.

The descripition of where they end up working in the factory farm.

This is only 114 pages, but as you see, it has a lot more to it. The writer discovers his voice in the book by describing the books he loves and the four having a wild summer. Part criticism of the other nature and brutality of factory farming and its effect on the four of them. As we follow Munir’s journal of the summer. This had echoes of Bolano in many ways. The description of writers he loved reminds me of the love of poetry and poets in the first part of Savage Detectives. But then it vias into environmental and green issues around factory farming and the horrors he sees he compares at time to the way we looked at the holocaust pictures. This is a powerful debut from a writer who seems to love playing with the nature of his writing and the genre he is writing. This has auto-fiction, thriller, Bolano-like prose, and green themes all thrown into a hard-hitting short novella. Have you read any of the writers from the second collection of Spanish writers from Granta?

Winston’s score is a B. It is a solid debut novella that is fast-paced and can be read in a few hours.