Tag: NEW VOICES

Love by Péter Nádas

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Love by Péter Nádas

Hungarian fiction

Original title: Love

Translator: Imre Goldstein

Source – Personal copy

I was sad to hear of the passing of Péter Nádas late last month. I first became aware of him when I was offered the chance to review his Magnum opus, Parallel Stories, a book that covered post-war Hungary in a labyrinthine, dark way. I have since reviewed another of his books and have a few on my TBR.  So I decided to pick this, a shorter book by him, and an earlier book in his canon.  He still has a couple of books he has written and i was talking online about this and found one had been brought and another was still awaiting a publisher if anyone would consider that be great it is his account of his relatiohnship with three other hungarian writers including Peter Esterhazy whom I will be reviewing later this month.

oh my, your body is full of little bits of

compressed air! oh my, my body is full oh boy got it made

I’ve

got it made

I’m dropping and rising to the rhythm of her voice,

up and down; it’s sliding, like the sled, in and out; when it’s out, it brings on the desire to penetrate; when it’s in, the desire to get out; up and down; rising and falling, like the elevator; but now I know what I’ve seen, it was me, the symbol of my own movements in the sled and the elevator; and that means 1 am inside her body. But then I should be feeling it! In the rhythm of my movements I hear her approaching voice oh boy

I’ve got itmade

The book is typeset with gaps almost like he is thinking or drifting at times

As I said, Love is so different from the other two books I have read by him; the main character is going to visit his girlfriend to break up with her. But when he rolls a joint, the book becomes like a fever dream, a trip where the narrator questions his existence, that of his girlfriend and what love is the book has an almost recurring feel at time of that state of being stoned of being slightly paranoid in a place where there is just him and the girlfriend the state isn’t there but the paranoia is still there.  We feel an almost slow-motion at times, where things take pages and pages to happen, almost as though we are in the state of being stoned, as the reader with him, a man in a relationship he wants to be out of but can’t get out of. You almost get the sickly grass-smoke scent of the pages as you read.

I can see. I can see her face, too. She is

looking. Looking at something. If she is above me, then she must be bending over me. If she is bending over me, then I must be lying here in bed. The place where I lay down, on my back. Then the pillow must be under my head.

“Don’t you feel

well? Are you unwell, dear?”

I can see the soft movements of

the mouth, I can hear what I see, and what I see and hear are wrapped around me as a palpable body, though it’s not palpable, it’s only something I see and hear

“I should be doing some-

thing, I must feel!”

“Are you unwell? Don’t you feel well,

dear?”

unwell? from her voice, from the look in her eyes I can feel that something has happened to me, and whatever it is, it makes her worry. But I don’t know why, after all I feel very good.

“Are you feeling bad, dear?”

The recurrent thoughts at times like her as he looks unwell to her at times

 

Nadas said he was trying to get in those spaces where the state couldn’t; he did something similar with a lot of the sexual scenes in Parallel stories.  He was trying to break the realist, communist-approved style of writing with this book.  It captures how it feels to be stoned well.  I was reminded of the way Cărtărescu used a similar style, if a little more surreal, in Solenoid to almost break the state censorship of writing and get into those spaces the state can’t be. For me, it reminds me of those hazy days of my late teens, where I would be sat with friends listening to Pink Floyd whilst stoned; there is a sense of the paranoia you can have, but also the way time bends in those moments where seconds seem like hours, which he captures very well in this book.  It captures a broken relationship in a broken country at the time, as the narrator hunts for purpose in life and love in a broader sense.  Have you read Nádas, or do you have a favourite Hungarian writer?

 

Lili is crying by Hélène Bessette

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Lili is crying by Hélène Bessette

French fiction

Original title – Lili pleure

Translator – Kate Briggs

Source – Personal copy

I wish Fitzcarraldo would add the classic list to their subscription service as I keep missing ones that grab my eye. I am not someone that keeps up with publisher list as much as i did ten years agowhen I would knoiw which books were coming out hiere and there but no in the last few years life has got in the way I still pre order a certain number of books and have subscitpiuons with publishers I like such as Fitzcarraldo I may not read every book but I know the quality of there editors and trust them.  So Helene Bessette is one of those French writers that, in some ways, slip under the radar in the English-speaking world. She was caught in a fight between French publishers when her first book came out, and she was championed and signed by Gallimard, where Raymond Queneau loved her writing.  This book came out in 1953

— Hell damnation, cruelty, lies, deceit, betrayal, tears, sever-ances, assassination, calumny, perfidy, misery and death, says the shepherd.

He is driving his sheep down the stony footpath that edges the garden beneath the ruined towet set high on the parched, barren hillside, bleached white in the Provençale sun.

– Hell damnation, cruelty, lies, deceit, betrayal, tears, sever-ances, assassination, calumny, perfidy, misery and death.

The mistral is up.

Pale blades of wheat sweep the length of the dusty track. The serried sheep press forward and behind them, the shepherd.

Invisible rain, warm and soft, sinks into the dust.

And the mistral to carry it away.

The open tower a silhouette against the low cloud hanging through it.

A wind swirls. A block of wall crumbles.

The opening page and this made me think of Beckett

This book is a heart-wrenching tale of the lengths a mother will go to stop her daughter from finding happiness with her lover, and instead devote her life to her, as she had always wanted. But it is how we get this; it is like the prose has been edited by Samuel Beckett. It is a book of sharp statements of Lilli, a woman broken by her mother’s actions. Charlotte, the mother, runs a school, and there is something of Jean Brodie around her the way in the book she makes her daughter think and act with a combination of praise and scorn classic controlling behaviour.  It is a story of a fragile girl’s heart breaking as the romance she is trying to have is broken.  A chorus of those surrounding the two is also woven into the story.

Hello!

With my zip-up bag.

Hello, Maman.

– Here is my daughter, returned to me, says the mother Charlotte.

My lost daughter.

My found daughter.

My daughter who runs away with her zip-up bag.

Here is my deceiving daughter.

My cheating daughter.

Who has no qualms about telling me silly stories and lies.

— She left me, says the mother Charlotte.

She’d left me.

She was gone.

And what in heaven’s name did I do to deserve being abandoned by my own daughter?

Did I merit such punishment?

If only my arms could stretch up to the blue sky and shake those clouds.

For Iloved her so much (my daughter).

She has let me down.

I have been disappointed in love. And what a love!

I still love her, naturally, Ilove her just as much as I ever did.

Only now there’s a fresh scent of disappointment to add to the burden of that love.

She was everything to me.

My life, I lived it through her.

I feel this captured the manipulative and Brodie-like nature of the mother Charlotte

When a writer was championed by Queneau, you know it isn’t going to be a writer that is challenging to the reader; this book is it: she cut everything she could get away with, so all that remains on the page is pure emotion, bile, dark humour, and a twisted relationship.  I was reminded of how, like Jean Brodie, the mother struck me that mix of praise and disdain Brodie had with her girls, the way she manipulated them. It is a story we’ve seen many times before: the domineering mother controlling their child is a classic storyline, really. WHat gives this legs is the style of the book it is hard not to think of eckett the clipped and brutal at times of the prose is very luike him this would make a great stage show it is so powerful and it is all in the way she controlled the tone and style of the vpices in the prose and how wonderful it has been brought to us in English by Kate Briggs. Although Barbara’s work was missed, both Bray and Wright were French-translated writers, and both were in similar circles to Bessette, particularly Barbara Wright, who translated Queneau around this time as well. The sad fact is Bessette died in poverty and largely forgotten, even in France.  We are lucky there are 13 novels she wrote out there for us to hopefully discover when translated into English! This book means I have 10 books left before I hit 200 French novels under review on the blog! Also a great pick for Woman in Translation month; I’ve not seen anyone mention the book much on social media.

Claxton by Mark Cocker

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Claxton by Mark Cocker

British Nature writing

Source – Personal copy

I have a thing where, whenever I go to Macclesfield, where my Mum’s Ashes are spread. I always like to try to buy a book of nature writing because my mum loved nature. Her dad, my grandfather, for many years paid for my membership of the YOC, the youth arm of the RSPB, so I picked this book for a couple of reasons: it is set in Norfolk and Amanda and I have recently spent to great holidays around the Norfolk-Suffolk border and this book is mainly around Mark Cocker and the observations he has made of the nature of his small village of Claxton which is just outside Norwich.  I also like that it wasn’t just about one part of nature, say birds; his writings are around all the wildlife he encounters, from the smallest flies to badgers around their setts.

MONSAL DALE, DERBYSHIRE

Whenever I think of ash trees I think of their deep generosity.

This is not just special pleading for the logs that have supplied our burner and kept the living room cosy all winter. It’s the way that their small saw-toothed pinnate leaves – cotton soft when fresh in May – permit sunlight to pierce down to the ground and allow the flowers to grow at their feet. I also love their rich gift of place names – Ashbourne, Ashford, Monyash, Ashwood – to the folk of Derbyshire.

The entry about Derbyshire’s connection to the Ash tree

The book follows a year but is made up of parts from various years from the time Mark has lived in Claxton, the first part of the book. January is a lot around Claxton: watching plovers, observing the wintering waterbirds at a local bird reserve. In February, he has an entry near me that talks about Ash trees on Monsal Dale and in that area. The Monsal Trail near there is a great walk along a disused railway.  This is about ten miles from me. In March, he discusses Jackdaw, the smaller member of the crow family, with their cap-like markings on their head.  They are known to be sociable birds and often connect with humans. Again, he is in Derbyshire, on the other side of the Peaks, to me, in Buxton, but any mention of a blackbird makes me smile, as if you don’t know, Amanda and I live on Blackbird Drive. The book is fiull of his observations like watching Badgers in Lognor another small peak district village this time in Staffs one My younger brother and I have driven through over the years as we head back from where my mum lived in Cheshire via Leek and the staffs area of the peaks both Leek and this area through to Longnor a small village in the middle of nowhere are lesser known gems of the peak district.

LONGNOR, STAFFORDSHIRE

When it appeared it looked like an inverted white triangle, which had rather incongruously materialised at the mouth of the hole. However, through the binoculars we could tell instantly that it was an animal’s head and that it was bisected by those two black stripes to form the most distinctive pattern on any British mammal. It was a badger emerging from its sett.

It pushed its snout towards the evening sky and sampled the air and its accompanying atmosphere: a blend of rabbit scuts in the half-light, blackbirds chinking wildly from their. roost in the lime trees above, a shovelful of blinking stars overhead and a cold night wind sweeping across the hillside.

Badgers may have a remarkable sense of smell and acute hearing but their vision is poor. None of the five animals that eventually emerged spotted us on the hillside opposite.

There were seven of us, of three Cocker generations, lying in silence among a few hawthorns and completely mesmerised by the unfolding vision.

The badgers he sees in this small Staffs village

I needed a break last week, as I just had one of those times when I needed a change from my usual diet of translated fiction. I think this month, with it being Women in Translation Month, there is just a glut of posts around books people want to read, or lists people are making now.  Don’t get me wrong, they are great, but when you have read most of the books and after so many years of reading books in translation I just wanted a break from this noise so this is the other reason I buy these nature books that is they are my putting an anchor down in the storm of reading translated fiction and settling down and reading the year drift by in marks wonderfully descriptive entires of the world of nature he has seen over a number of years I also loved at the end lof a book is a list of all the plants.  trees, insects, birds, reptiles, etc that have been seen in the parish of Claxton, showing what a rich part of the country he lives in.  This is a must-read for any fans of British nature and those who love to see a year of nature go by. This for me is a break from my usual fare and reminds me to open my eyes and look out for what is around me, which I do a lot anyway!

Where the wind calls home by Samar Yazbek

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Where the Wind Calls Home by Samar Yazbek

Syrian fiction

Original title – مـقـام الـريـح، روايـة

TRansltor Leri Price

Source – Personal copy

I recently purchased some books directly from World Editions as they have a new bookstore on the website.  I picked this as Samar Yazbek has been on a list of writers I want to read for a while. I do have Planet of Clay somewhere, and she also recently published a book of interviews she conducted with survivors from Gaza.  Samar Yazbek was also in the collection of writers from around the Arabic world that came out in 2010, Beirut 39, with writers born after 1970 in the collection that at that time were under 39.  was the second of three such books Hay Festival has done around writers from around the world.  These books are worth looking up, even if it’s just the wiki page, as it is a rich list of the best of modern Arabic literature for the last ten years. I will always point people to The Arabist web page, the Arab lit blog site, their magazine, the Arablit Quarterly, and their podcast, Bulaq.

Just a small leaf. He couldn’t see it through his tangled lashes, beneath the midday sun.

A leaf, nothing more. Lobed and green, it appeared in front of his eyes like a curtain each time he slowly and laboriously moved his eyelids. A leaf brushing his long, mud-spattered lashes. A leaf only vaguely visible through the soft grains of soil swimming in the water of his eyes, chafing and burning.

If he opened his eyelids again, the leaf would fall into his left eye. That leaf was the entire world. No sound, no smell. He couldn’t feel his other eye. Was he still alive? Did he have a body? If so, where was it?

His sense of existence extended no further than the narrow strip of faint light hidden behind these black lines—he didn’t care whether they were his eyelashes or his nightmares, in any case the darkness would soon settle within once more. He was slowly falling into some deep and unknown place.

His gravity was negated and he could feel his head swinging—perhaps he was falling into a grave. Was this his funeral? Was this his head?

The opening as Ali is in a srt of fever dream as his lif ebbs away

The book is a sort of fever dream set in a small mountain village, as we see a young soldier, Ali, who has been hit by his own side in a crossfire as a bomb was dropped by him.  He has fallen into a crater and there is a tree the tree sparks memories as we see him fighting out to grab the tree a tree he has known all his life in the present and also at the same time we see events from his life and the village he has grown up in. from hte death of one of his brothers seeing how that impacted his mother and family and how maybe his own death will do the same.  From a time he got involved with a wealthy local and saw the contrast wealth can bring to people’s lives, and the poverty of his own home life and his parents’ struggle. The book is like a fever dream of a man dying in a way; is this just seconds or minutes of Ali and his life we are glimpsing in these vignettes?

His mother collapsed, then stood up again, gazing all the while at the coffin being carried on the shoulders of the village’s youth. She pleaded desperately for a final look at her son to bid him goodbye but the men, aghast, merely uttered, “Astaghfirullah,” shook their heads, and ignored her. As for the women, they patted her shoulder as they let out their ulula-tions and wails. His sister, the widow, who had walked the same path for her husband a month earlier and was not yet twenty-five years old, held a picture of her brother in one hand and her baby in the other. She walked with a firm, deliberate tread beside her younger sister. The family had congregated among the people behind the bier of the oldest brother and, upon finding themselves lost to each other within the crowd, began turning around in fear-Ali too. For an instant he forgot he was watching his brother’s coffin, he utterly forgot his surroundings. He forgot his brother’s face and the weeping eyes all around

His brother had died as well he remembers this as he struggles

I loved the way this book was probably originally written and translated with a third-person voice, or most Ali watching, or even a ghost watching the young man grapple with his life to the tree he knew so well from hiding in it as a child.  The book captures a world of poverty and people struggling to get by, and the mindlessness of the war he is caught up in.  Samar is well known for her championing of human rights within her own country and in the wider Arab world, having walked the length of Europe as part of a protest about the situation in her homeland.  Ali is a boy caught up in the times he lives in, the child of parents who had already lost a child.  A boy who grew up hiding in the tree he will probably die in.  If you want a book that drags you into the violent world of Syria a few years ago, this is it: a country ripping itself apart with civil wars, widespread poverty, and a sheer loss of hope that comes through in the book at times. Where do you discover new writers or uncover new gems to read?

 

Too Darn hot July wrapped up 2026

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  1. Deepfake by Makis Malafekas
  2. Ambivalence by Brian Dillon
  3. Dying in Toronto or  Our Lady of Czestochowa is still shedding tears by Daša Drndič
  4.  The Assault by Harry Mulisch
  5. Blackout by Yann Chateigné Tytelman
  6. The Sharks by Jens Bjørneboe

I’ve decided to end the month today. Partly as it is another red-hot day here in the UK.  The hot weather has hit my reading, and the fact I have just had a lot of stress this last month or so. Anyway, the month is nearly over. I managed six reviews.  Starting off in Greece and a man going undercover in a right-wing group. Then a tale of a man growing up in Dublin ijn the 80s. Then being Eiled in Toronto in the 90s by one of my all time favourite writers. Then the los of parents and what happened in they years after that in Holland for the solo survior of a family. Then a man ijn lockdown tries to write to his dad but gets caught up with art as he does so. Then a ship in the cusp of the 20th century is shipwrecked after a mutiny.A good month as they were all great books.

Book of the month

Book cover for Dasa Drndić's 'Dying in Toronto' with abstract blue-purple artwork and istrosbooks logo at the bottom

It had to be this book, Daša Drndiċ’s account of the years she spent in Exile in Canada. A mix of insight into Canada from an outsider’s perspective. From the customs and just general life. To feeling apart from home and what you do to soet that when you are in Exile. I do hope we get to read all her writing over time she is a unique voice

Non book events

I made a real effort to record my films this month on Letterboxd after seeing a video where someone had seen a film every day for 1000 days.  I don’t think I can do this, but I’m trying to watch a few more films, and it has been working.  So far, a couple of highlights: Tatsui, the animated life of one of Japan’s most well-known manga writers. Oslo August 31st sees a man on a day out from recovery struggle to get back to his own life.  But the best so far is the heart-wrenching The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, a tale of a trans family living in the Chilean Desert in a mining village at the time AIDS is just starting to take people’s lives.  Music-wise, I brought a number of the reissued Mojave 3 CDs; the band were a spin-off from the Shoegaze group Slowdive but with a mellow acoustic take on their music.  Then I just heard today of the Sad loss of Glen Hansard. The actor/singer was in the movies The Commitments and Once.  The bands The Frames and The Swell Season of course, the latter named after a Czech novel were his band with his co-star and ex-wife, Markéta Irglova. I was just saying to my best friend that we know the most famous people that day at our age, but not those of a similar age to us; Glen was a sad loss for a man who was both a heartfelt singer and actor.

Next month

I hope to come roaring back.  I have felt a little better the last few days, barring the heat, and have held back a number of books. I have a good selection of books to read from the TBR I have been posting as a few options on Instagram, but I also have other books in my bookcases.  I look forward to seeing what other people read next month for Women in Translation Month. How was your July? Are you a summer reader, or, like me, do you prefer reading on cold winter nights?

The Sharks by Jens Bjørneboe

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The Sharks by Jens Bjørneboe

Norwegian fiction

Original title – Haiene

Translator – Esther Greenleaf Mürer

Source – Personal copy

I have been a fan of ship-based books over the years.  I’ve recently been looking at some of Joseph Conrad’s ship novels to read but then remembered I had this book by a writer I have been meaning to read for a number of years.  Jens Bjørneboe is one of those writers whose own life story sounds like an epic novel. Childhood spent in bed, then fleeing to Sweden in World War II to avoid forced labour camp.  Falling for a Jewish German woman gave him a huge love of German Culture.  Add to this drinking and depression, and we have a man who died too young. This was his last novel and maybe his best-known work.  But he has a trilogy as well about the evil inherent in the human race called The History of Bestiality that like this book, has been published by  Norvik press this is one of those small presses that should be better known they have brought out a lot of Selma Lagerlöf books The first woman to win the Nobel Literature prize and maybe a great pick for Woman in Translation month Next Month.

The Greeks called him Poseidon, and in very ancient times also Psyche, who only later became a goddess – the human soul, the higher, unearthly love, énere ennobled – I could almost say: Holy Venus. (It occurs to me that Sancta Venere has been forced to lend her name to those diseases which medical science calls ‘venereal”, which in shipping offices the world over are referred to as ‘self-inflicted’ — and which were unfortunately not unknown on board our own lovely white bark.) But it’s not Psyche or the sublimated Venus we shall discuss here; it is the violent, brutal, and mighty Neptune, lord of abysses and deeps, author of the passions.

We shall look a bit more closely at how mythology, the clear childhood dreams of humanity, describes him. Who says that our reason sees further into the abyss?

The sea is all around them, or as it is called poseidon

 

The Sharks is a book that captures a world that, when the book is set, maybe was dying.  Sailing around the world on a ship, the book follows the voyage of the Neptune from Manila Via Marseille to Rio De Janeiro.  The book is told by one of the ship’s crew, Peder Jensen, the second officer, as they sail in 1899, with a new century dawning and the crew splitting before the narrator’s eyes. The book is told through episodic perspectives of various members of the crew, from the Mate to the carpenter to the symbolic sharks that always follow the ship.  A crew member whose brother was killed by the captain, a chinaman the cook who likes and loves his knives maybe too much. A cannibal.  This all adds to the pressure pot that is a ship too old for its time, maybe, so when there is a mutiny, and they end up shipwrecked, it has all been simmering through Peder’s eyes.

All seamen who have sailed in tropical waters hate and despise and curse the lovely brutes. Lovely? — Yes. Seen from above or from the side they are unsurpassed in their beauty. It is only from the front that the shark is ugly; but then it’s as hideous as all hell’s devils together – with its stupid, idiotic little pig eyes and its loathsome gape of a vastness almost contrary to nature, crammed with the sharp, serrate teeth which grow and grow and fall out and are continually renewed from within. All its life the shark endlessly produces new teeth, over and over again, in a few hours — as if the whole meaning of existence were to bring forth teeth, which in time will be spat out and sink to the bottom. Where it has been possible to explore the sea bed in shark-rich waters, the banks have proved to consist in great part of such worn-out sharks’ teeth.

The sharks following them in the water have a double meaning

Bjørneboe had a real thing, it seems, about good and evil in his books, so there are a lot of things here, like the sharks and the various origins of the characters, that also have a lot to do with the perception of good and evil. There are also nods to classic books like Moby-Dick; a couple of the characters, like the captain, share traits with Melville’s characters. But there are also nods to other ship tales like the Bounty: a crew pushed to the edge, a mutiny.  It also bridges some of the gaps in Conrad’s early years with tales like The Children of the Sea (I won’t use the old title!) or the autobiographical Shadow Line, both set on sailing boats like this, but earlier.  In his Typhoon, set a few years after this on a steamship, the book is not just a boat but a boat on the cusp of a new century, a new world, a new way of sailing, even.  A great intro to a writer I’d like to get to know a little better.  Have you read this book or any other by Jens Bjørneboe, or a favourite ship-based book?

Deepfake by Makis Malafekas

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Deepfake by Makis Malafekas

Greek Fiction

Original title – Deepfake

Translator – Jenny Steel

Source – Subscription book

I must admit it is great to see Foundry Editions bringing out a book from Greece.  Over the years, I have often felt it is a country underrepresented for its size in what we get to read in English.  This is the eighth GREEK NOVEL i have read over the time of the blog. I do have an older book I’ve been hunting for over the year, Drifting Cities, if anyone wants a reprint so I could get a cheap copy; I’d be happy. Anyway, this is the sixth book and the third noir novel by the Greek writer Makis Malafekas. He has studied art history and social anthropology, has taught comics at the Sorbonne, and has written extensively about Athens nightlife.  He set this book with the Johnny Depp trial in 2022 as a backdrop to the events in the book.

The guy next to me was likely a travel agent, with his doom-themed monologues and particular obsession with “the Gypsies”. He said we should send them to Afghanistan where they’d have the time of their lives, in fact he said we should send them “back” to Afghanistan. But when for the third time he slurped noisily at the dregs of his frappé, with the end of the straw down in the foam and ice, and said somewhat sadly, “The ice is melting in Norway, as well, fuck it…” I allowed him back into my world, and let him take his place next to me, with me, because in the end it was all my choice.

Because that’s somehow where we found ourselves. Me, and everyone else. In Norway, with the ice melting and running down our backs, all washed up in a bar somewhere in Afghanistan with expensive undrinkable coffee and a broken air conditioner by the door, having the time of our lives.  With no rhythm, no flow, no style.

Somone spouting from the news he probably read

This book is a great slice of modern noir lit fiction it appears this is the third instalment of a series around the main character in this book Michalis Krokos and he is such a typical noir character: a washed up writer a man of the Athens night that has spent a lot of time in the city and this is how he is asked by a prosecutor to help out Rebecca a trans sex worker he had known a few years earlier as she has been targeted by a right wing news site in a case of Blackmail. This leads to Krokos going undercover at the NHIT news site, a far-right group spouting out their right-wing hatred. This brings him face to face with Tsechlentidis, the boss of this news site.  They are both Athens Native and in a way this makes Michalis fit in as he also dislikes the way his city is now a tourist trap but that is all they share all this is happening as he had got caught up in the Depp trial as he has dark drives with what seems like dark ends in an athens night as we see insidce the beast of the ALT right news machines and those involved with them.

Presented with the nineties Ibiza she laughed and asked if it was one of those silent electric models or if it operated by mind power. Going up Syggrou Avenue she explained why it was that Vikings: Valhalla was crap in comparison with the original Vikings, just phoney, and I should never see it. On the way up Asklipiou Street she told me that her name was Lora, at the entrance to the building that the downtown area was intolerable and how could I put up with it in general, in the elevator that she would like to live downtown for a certain time for the experience, and in the living room she got excited that I had the Depp trial on 24/7 and said she did too, and that woman was definitely crazy and had been a disaster for him but okay, he wasn’t exactly normal either. I set out two glasses. Amber was still testifying. Johnny was talking things over with his lawyer and not giving her as much as a glance.

The Depp trial caught the eye all around the world

The book was up for the European Prize for Literature last year; this prize, over the years, has provided so many great books in English as it ever has. changing selection of books around Europe.  This book is a great slice of modern noir with a large chunk of what is wrong with Greece and Athens itself, the city that is a melting pot of people and is always full of tourists these days.  Also, the choice to use the Depp /Heard trail as a backdrop alongside alt-right news feeds shows how twisted our modern way of finding news is and what even the real news is these days.  Michalis is trying to help Rebecca find out who is blackmailing her in the sweltering heat of an Athenian summer, as everything is just simmering beneath the surface in the book as it goes.  I loved Michalis; he is a classic noir character, an imperfect human being with his own baggage, part Spade, part Marlow, and a noir comic book character.  He is the classic flawed character trying to do good.  But this book also, underneath it, raises questions about Athens as a city trying to forge its own identity in the 21st century.  Then there is the alt-right news angle and how this affects those as targets of the news but also affects those reading this trash.

What remains by Brais Lamela

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What remains by Brais Lamela

Spanish Galician fiction

Original title – Ninguén queda

Translator – Jacob Rogers

Source – Personal Copy

I have read a few books from Galicia over the years, one of the regions of Spain that has a distinct identity and history. The book is written by one of the region’s rising stars, Brais Lamela. He is considered one of the best writers under 40 and has won a prize for being one of the best writers under 40; this book, his debut novel, was also on EL País’ books of the year when it came out. The book sort of mirrors the writer’s own life, as the narrator is a man studying in New York and from Galicia himself, like Brais, who is studying at Yale. The book is set around a piece of history that involved Franco trying to modernise the country, and this involved relocating a group of Farmers from the remote valleys that Franco had ordered to be filled and made into Dams, so they were forced to move to the Terra Cha, the farming land in the Galicia region, but as incomers torn from their homes.

It’s not the first time I’ve found a reference to a trip of the sort. When I first started researching the U.S. government’s aid to the Franco dictatorship, I stumbled upon the story of some hydraulic engineers from the University of California, Berkeley, who had developed a new system for pumping underground water in the desert flats of Southern California, and travelled to a few colonial settlements in southern Spain to install it.

Thanks to their help, the dictatorship’s engineers were able to penetrate the depths of the earth and extend their control to the world of underground channels. I hadn’t found much about their trip, but I’d been left with an idea that those connections might be the most useful material for my thesis, revealing the inconspicuous flow of information between American capitalist institutions and Franco’s dictatorship, like synapses of a vast and terrible nervous system.

The narrator discovers the past

The novel is framed as the student in New York trying to look back at the events of the Franco era; when he comes across this mass relocation from the hills to the plains of grassland in Galicia, as they are now expect to be dairy farmers, the story is further framed when the narrator finmds the story of a woman that had disappeared around the time all this had happened. The second half of the book sees our narrator revisiting the places he had looked at in the first half as he recounts what happened to those who stayed in the mountains; now the remains of the village are a hippie commune. To the dairylands of the TERRA CHA, how the people lived on from those still living, and how it was all for show at times. It captures one man’s look into the past, how it touches the present, and how often history repeats.

I stop the recording, realizing that the story I was looking for had been there all along. It hadn’t caught my attention at the time, one more story in the litany of tragedies the colonists had faced. I’d been distracted by the anecdote about Franco (which I’d heard in other recordings, though some mentioned a different government figure). Now everything seems to make sense, and the anonymous figures acquire names: the important visitors’ were almost certainly Tannenbaum and his team, and the expelled woman was the ill-fated Leonita, who in a matter of days found herself not just widowed but homeless.

Talking to thiose that were there and How they made it look different when Franco appeared

This is one of those books that is hard to pigeonhole; it is a novel but also a memoir a thesis about the times, a look at the Franco Regime and the dark past it meant for those forcibly exiled due to him wanting Dams built for Hydro power as I said in the last passage It is also a sign of how history can repaet how many more Dams have been built around the world by regimes. I was reading this and thinking of all the people who were relocated when China built the Three Gorges Dam; over a million people were displaced to make way for the dam.  This book is a clever twist on a piece of history with the framing of looking through the archives this is part of Brais Lamela own studies is into archives one can see how pieces of history being the seed for this clever story of exiles and one woman who dosappeared it has it all the sense of belonging, getting lost on the turbulance of all this the aftermath years later when our narrator returns to the places in the first half of the book! I think this is one of those gems that has gone under the radar. A must for fans of writers like Sebald or Luiselli in particular, as they both live in New York, and this being a book that captures both the old and the new world, another book I was most reminded of was Bilbao- New York- Bilbao, another multi-layered novel of diaries, memories, place, folklore and time ab Basque work that covered bith sides of the atlantic as well ! Do you have a favourite book from Galicia?

 

Nothing Grows by Moonlight by Toborg Nedreaas

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Nothing Grows by Moonlight by Torborg Nedreaas

Norwegian fiction

Original title – Av måneskinn gror det ingenting

Translator – Bibba Lee

Source – Personal copy

There is a wave of books being published in the last few years that capture extraordinary female voices from across Europe as we try to fill in the gaps that have been overlooked, from Tore Ditlevsen to Natalia Ginzburg, to name two. I had seen this book being mentioned as coming back out; it had come out in the late 80s but was overdue for a reissue and is from a prize-winning and controversial writer when it was published, with its look at back-street abortions and how women had to go to these people to avoid children.  She was also a writer who focused on working-class voices in her literature and was a lifelong communist; she asks us to consider what we would do in the main character’s life and what options we would have.

“This must be god-awful boring to you. Well, I assume you’re telling the truth. Love, well. There should be no name for it.

Because it is… well, it’s not something you can put a name on.

Some of the murkiness that lives its bacterialike existence in a young girl’s fantasy is mixed up in it. No, I’m lying. The murkiness has more profound causes, of course. I’ll leave that to psychoanalysts to mess with. But then a man arrives, a real live man, and he’s been there the whole time. Some are stuck on movie stars during that period, some on sports idols, but those of us who are basically faithful continue to build on our childhood infatuation. Caress it maybe, nourish and cultivate and all the stuff we do to explain the facts. All right by me.

she was 15 when she started her relationship with Johannes

The book is framed by a man meeting and taking pity on a woman at a train station, then taking her home. The book is him looking back on this extraordinary evening and the nameless woman whose path he crossed that evening. The book is the story of this woman’s life. She is a working-class woman who has desires, but when she meets an older man, when she is just 15, she starts a sexual relationship with the older man. He, Johannes, is a school master; he is her lover on and off in this affair for the next twenty years, as it seems he has her at his beck and call. This also affects her everyday life, as all this happens in the small mining town they live in. So when she falls pregnant for the first time, we see her description of visiting a backstreet abortionist; as the years move on later in the book, she performs this herself. This is a tale of a woman who had sexual desire but is caught up by what now would be seen as a predatory male figure. all over the course of one evening, this life is spilt out to this man and us as the reader.

‘Up there where we live. It’s different. Maybe it’s the same other places too, but up at The Mine and in our town especially you have to be like everyone else. You can’t hurt, not any worse than others. You can’t have fun; you can’t show you’re having fun, at any rate. Yes, it’s worse than anything, showing you’re happy. And above all you must never be different than you normally are; they can’t take any surprises from anyone. Take, for example, a girl who never goes dancing, who isn’t interested in kissing the boys. A girl who gets paler and more silent and ugly and hollow-eyed every day, a girl who goes to church and cries during the singing of psalms.

‘She can’t suddenly one day go to the youth centre and start dancing, laughing, and taking a swig with the boys behind the barn the way the other girls do. There would be an earthquake at The Mine and down in town.

The small town she lives in shuns her after the affair and the way she lives her life !!

The voice of the narrator in this book captures her life as she pours out to this man, over the course of one night, twenty years of her life. Visiting a back-street abortionist reminded me of scenes from the film Vera Drake about a woman who was a back-street abortionist in the UK. I was also reminded of the kitchen-sink dramas of the sixties; here, this is a sort of anti-Taste of Honey: the woman who chose her life. It makes you question the society at the time; it shocked the country when it came out with its graphic descriptions, especially when she =uses kiniting needles to do an abortion herself. But it is meant to make you question it all; that is the point: this woman is a sort of everywoman; how many women have faced the decisions she made? nameless, but everyone in a way? What also struck me is how much, within the US, certain states are now taking back years of women’s rights to decide about their own lives; how much more poignant this book is now than even ten years ago! A powerful tale that captures human suffering and a broken woman so well .

 

 

 

Ilaria or the Conquest of Disobedience by Gabriella Zalapi

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Ilaria or the Conquest of Disobedience by Gabriella Zalapi

Swiss Fiction

Original title – Ilaria ou la conquête de la désobéissance

Translator – Adrianna Hunter

Source – Subscription book

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

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

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

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

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

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

Early on they have fun but it turns over time

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

He’s jumpy

He’s angry

He’s going to get nasty.

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

And block my ears.

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

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

Answer me when I’m talking to you.

I dither.

Her Observations of her father before he took her

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

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 ?