Tag: NEW VOICES

May the Tigris grieve for you by Emilienne Malfatto

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May the Tigris grieve for you by Emilienne Malfatto

French fiction

Original title – Que sur toi se lamente le Tigre

Translator – Lorna Scott Fox

Source – personal copy

This is one that had been on my radar since it came out in April last year, so when I saw a copy, I grabbed it and was so pleased I did. Emilienne is a photojournalist and writer. This was her debut novel, and it won the Goncourt Prize for a debut novel when it came out. She is known for her work around social, feminist and post-conflict areas. She has also worked in the Middle East a lot. She has also worked with NGOs and Doctors without Borders. This is a story of one girl’s life falling in as she is unwed and pregnant in Rural Iraq. A book that mixes family and the myth of Gilgamesh and the Tigris.

And then my periods stopped coming. The first month I hardly noticed, it sometimes happened. The following months I thought it was because of grief. I thought Mohammed’s death had dried me up. When Father died I didn’t bleed either, not for months. It’s because of sadness, the doctor said when Mother finally took me to see him. He looked at me kindly, intently, while she was talking about the worry of having an abnormal’ daughter. It was already shame enough to be seeing the doctor about that, may the neighbours never find out, how could they find out, but that was one of my mother’s great dreads. The doctor reassured her, called her Ma’am and said the bleeding would return when my grief had subsided. He had seen several such cases since the war began.’Psychosomatic,’ he said, but we didn’t know that word in Arabic.

She had to go and be sure at the doctors but that set the ball rolling of events later

The book is divided into small chapters as we. We meet a girl who has got up and struggled to do so with black drops on the floor. When she goes up, she goes with her mother to the father’s grave. Then, a doctor. At this point, the girl knows she is pregnant, but when they see the Doctor, the girl knows what this means. They are in the rural area of Iraq. As the country is under the grip of Islamic state fever her life is danger. She is in a village near the river Tigris; the text is interspersed with pieces around the river and the great myth tied up with this region. As Gilgamesh is of the land and memories of those that have lived there as the Tigris follows through the land he lived and she lived. Her boyfriend had died in a friendly fire incident, but that was too late. Now the wheels of what is to happen are set in motion. We hear from her brother and others as we see how a young girl’s life is about to end due to her other half dying before they married.

I am the brother and the dealer of death.I am the man of the family, the eldest, the repository of male authority – the only authority that matters, that has ever mattered.I am the brother who shouldered the father’s mantle. I reign over the women.

I am the killer. Soon I will kill, but I don’t know that yet. What would I do if I knew?Would I turn on my heel in the dusty alleyway? Soon I will kill, believing that I had no choice. Her life or our honour.It is not I who will kill, but the street, the neighbourhood, the town. This whole country.

The brother is faced with a tough decision about his sister and what he has to do

This is a little gem of a book it is under 80 pages and can easily be read in an evening. It is told firstly from the girl’s point of view, then we have other people’s voices as we find out what happened to her. It is an insight into the horrors that have occurred under an Islamic state. In her photojournalist job, you can see how the writer has connected with the world she is describing. The prose’s simple style manages to convey a powerful message and show how females were treated under the Islamic state. As you see ow, a family deals with the horror of losing a daughter and a son killing her, and a mother dealing with these both. A bleak look into Femicide and family pride in the islamic state. The book is made up of short chapters, most less than two pages long, and is one of those books that seem much longer than it is.

Winston score: A powerful look into the Islamic State in Iraq from one girl’s point of view when she feels pregnant out of wedlock and the aftermath no matter the reason why.

 

 

Nothing Belongs to You by Nathacha Appanah

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Nothing belongs to you by Nathacha Appanah

Mauritian fiction

Original title – Rien ne t’appartient

Translator Jeffrey Zuckerman

Source – Review copy

It took years between her first book I read and her the last Brother, which I reviewed on this blog. The Last Brother 13 years ago, I’ve read another of the two books that have come out since by her,, but this is her latest and is with a new translator. Jeffrey Zuckerman has taken over for this book, the last but one novel to come out in French. Like her other books, she is very good at mixing childhood with the present. Also, a theme I have seen in the other novels I have read from Mauritius is a class divide, and the main character in this book is someone who has seen both sides of the divide as a kid and then as an adult. We meet Tara in the present but see how her life has twists and turns.

My heart aches again. I should start by clearing the sofa, arranging the cushions, tossing a tartan rug over it, that’ll be the first thing Eli sees, sentimental man that he is, inclined to believe that belongings gain a mysterious, almost human, aura in how they enter our possession, over the years or in connection to some particular moment. He’s attached to things, a dried leaf, a pebble, an old toy, a yellowing book, a faded T-shirt, a broken wooden necklace that belonged to his mother, this sofa. It was on this sofa that his father died three months ago, and I can still smell it there, his scent, trapped in the cushions fibres. It’s not really the scent he had when he was alive but something that remains of him, that tugs at my heart, that brings me back to his absence and everything that’s fallen apart since his death. Notes of vetiver, a touch of lemon, but also a trace of something powdery, slightly rancid.

Her flat is in disarray

The book follows our Narrator, Tara. She is at a low point in her life. Her husband Emmanuel has died, and her world has fallen apart. Her Parisian Is she going mad? Is she losing it? Her kids are worried about her. She is raising a small boy, and this, as she sees him around the house and area, unlocks the past for her. She had a different name. She was called Vijaya and had a privileged childhood with her parents. They were outspoken, and when disaster struck them, she left the young girl in an orphanage and faced a different future than the one she was expecting. The young girl became the woman Tara, and the past is a way for her to change the present. Like most of her books, she deals with death, class, and also memories so well. Also, the dark past of her country shadowed the life of these two characters, who are the same girl/woman. The lost dream of her youth when her parents and now the loss of her husband bring back the past and her struggle after her parent’s death.

When we went into the village, my father didn’t let go of my hand. All eyes followed us, the rich atheists from the huge house, the girl who danced but didn’t go to school, the man who went on the radio and even IV to say that all this coun try’s inhabitants were the same, that every soul should have the freedom to pray to the god he wanted to or not to believe in just one god, that the leaders were idiots, the man who spoke several languages in the same sentence, the husband of the sorceress. Those glares became a swell behind our back.

As the years went by and the swell grew, I had the feeling that it was hissing at us, berating us. At those moments I couldn’t get back to the house soon enough to find my mother, Aya, the school in the alcove, the evenings listening to music and playing cards. I started wishing I wouldn’t grow up, wouldn’t understand, would stay as I was: Vijaya in the grown-ups shadow.

Remembering  her parents and when she wasn’t called Tara but Vijaya a rich girl.

I love her writing it always uses childhood and memories so well. Also, the past is another theme in her books and also her homeland and its highs and lows, the slums, and the high-class world that lives alongside one another.It is one woman’s painful life at the two lowest points in it and how the heart can be broken and rebuilt but at what cost. Loss of parents then the loss of her opartner but the small boy makes he rember how she got past the pain in the past . But also she has held bqack all the sorrow over time and that is shown at the start of the book. Where we see a woman faling apart after the loss of Emmanuel she has stop caring and her flat is in total disarry as her son tries in vain to help her out f the maze of grief it takes a boy and memories to see her change. Like her other novels she seems to pack a lot into a small book this is under two hundred [ages and is one of those books that feels like an epic novel after you have read it.

Winstons score -A One of the best french language writers around.

 

 

 

Summer Fishing in Lapland by Juhani Karila

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Summer fishing in Lapland by Juhani Karila

Finnish fiction

Original title – Pienen hauen pyydystys

Translator – Lola Rogers

Source – Via Translator

I was contacted by Lola as, over the years, I have reviewed several books that she has translated from Finnish, and this had passed me by. Still, when I read the blurb of this book, I loved the idea it seemed to do the thing that Finnish fiction does very well, and that is genre-bending literature. Some of the recent books I have read are like this mix of murder and magical realism, and here, Juhani has used the myths and creatures of Lapland to tell a story of a fishing trip and a chase and the myths the writer obviously grew up listening to.  The other characters in this book are the nature and views of Lapland and the remote places they go fishing.

Elina got to the pond before the clouds did. She unhooked the black nine-centimeter Rapala lure from the rod line guide, pressed the reel release, and swung the rod back, ready to cast.

Then, on the other side of the pond, the knacky surfaced.It rose up out of the water slowly, like an ancient statue uncovered by a receding tide. It was as beautiful as a Greek god. Elina knew that it could look like a man or a woman or an androgyne, depending on the person it was trying to entice.

Anyone who made the mistake of looking into its eyes would get lost in them. Some people fell in love with the knacky, and some were so love-struck that they walked straight into the water and drowned.

She sess the Knacky on the opther side of the pond

The story follows an annual pilgrimage made by Elinas from the small village she grew up in east Lapland, and every year, she returns to take this pilgrimage to a lake to try and do battle again with the PIke of the lake. But this is also how she has reset herself yearly on those three days at the pond. But this time it is different as a spirit from the water appears, and they appear other creatures appear around her.  She sets of to fish, but the pike is a clever fish and is as elusive as ever as the Knacky spirit from the water appears. Then there is a side story of a detective, Janatuinen, who thinks Elina has committed a murder. He sets off immediately after his partner ensures he can’t make the trip north. He follows behind her, visiting the same bait shop, but he is an outsider, and the world he sees differs from Elina’s. The story drifts from the two main characters back into the youth of Elina as we see the two stories twist and turn, and we have a sprinkling of odd creatures, a sort of Finnish bigfoot, a hairy man-like creature, but he is a little dum,. Elsewhere, a farm hand is fighting off his own death but, at the same time, starts sprouting branches and leaves. This a quirky nove. Will he catch Elina? will she get her fish?

Janatuinen used Gunnarsson’s belt to make a tourniquet for his leg, then she drove him to the hospital entrance, waited for the nurses to get him and his suitcase out of the back seat, asked them to close the car door, and drove off without a glance in the rearview mirror.

It was a two-hour drive from Oulu to the border. One hour in, Janatuinen sat in a service-station café, eating breakfast and looking out the window. The wind was dying down. Birch branches tapped wearily against the glass, as if knocking to get in.The border came into view at nine a.m. The guard booth had a broken window. The window frame had been taken out and leaned against the wall of the booth. The barricade boom was broken, too, and had been carried behind the booth in two pieces. In its place was a green Suzuki jeep, parked in the middle of the road. A boy in a billed cap sat in the driver’s seat asleep, his head resting on the steering wheel.

His partner breaks his leg just as he is about to go nmorth to follow her

I loved how he has mashed up a murder, fishing, rural lapland and myths so well. I was reminded of the book from Olga Tokarczuk’s book Drive Your Plough a book that is set in the countryside and has a feel of myth and reality mixed at times. In an interview, he mentions an Estonian Novel, Old Barn by Andrus kivirähk. I looked this book up it hasn’t been translated into English another book has been translated, though.  I think I may have that one somewhere the cover looks familiar, so I may look and see if I brought it with me when we moved.  Andrej Sapkoski is another writer; he says he mixes myth and place well. A number of his books have been translated. This book has a real sense of place. The, swamps and world of Elinja’s youth jump off the page. Also the myths that come to life seem so real he has made it seem like a piece of magic realism rather than a work of fantasy. Have you a favourite Quirky novel from Finland?

Winston score – A -I love the quirkiness of Finnish fiction at times, they seem to mix genres so well

Conversation of Three wayfarers by Peter Weiss

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Conversation of the three wayfarers

German fiction

Original title – Das Gespräch der drei Gehenden

Translator –  E B Garside

Source – Personal copy

A big dig into the books that came out in 1962, and I found this it is a writer I had heard a little about but hadn’t gotten to, and this book seemed perfect it is just 90 pages long. Peter Weiss was a member of the post-war gruppe 47 Writers in Germany, but he left Germany in 1939 and lived in Sweden with his family he was one of the most avant-garde writers of his generation he wrote for the stage and novels. He is maybe one of the writers in his generation who should have been better known to the English-speaking world.In the post-war years, he was a critical voice in a lot of the events of the sixties, Cuba and Vietnam being two of them. He is a writer that was hard to pigeonhole. He had been compared at times to Roman Noveau writers and absurdist writers like Beckett.

That ring res big did nothing bus ily walk

leather caps and long raincoats, they called themselves Abel, Babel and Cabel, and while they walked they talked to each other. They walked and looked around and saw what there was to see, and they talked about it and about other things that had happened. When one was talking the two others kept still and listened or looked around and listened to something else, and when one of them had finished saying what he had to say, the second one spoke up, and then the third, and the others listened or thought about something else.

They had stout boots for walking, but they carried only as much with them as would fit into the pockets of their clothes, as much as they could quickly lay their hands on and put away again. Since they looked alike they were taken for brothers by passersby, but they were not brothers at all, they were only men who walked walked walked, having met each other by chance, Abel and Babel, and then Abel, Babel and Cabel. Abel and Babel had met each other on the bridge,

The opening lines of the book and you see how the brothers merge into one at times.

The book is a strange one it is about three brothers called Abel, Babel and Cabel. We spend time as they tell tales of the wanderings. But we never quite know who is talking to us and that we seem to drift in time over the years. As three men recount events. We see a bridge, but even before the bridge is there, the brothers are talking to the Ferryman about his son, his life and the world he lives in. Then a tale of crossing to marry his bride he got pregnant. Then other odd tales of men wandering with just a slipper to fix something. These are odd snippets of everyday life told in a way that makes you, as a reader drawn into the book. The book has no real plot it has sections narrated by different narrators, be we never know which of the brothers it is telling the tale.

Once, in the summertime, a party of guests came running down to the shore, many threw off their clothes, others jumped into the water with their clothes on, and some of them swam out, one of them coming toward him. The ferryman sat still in his boat and saw how the head in the water was drawing nearer, with the mouth making soft blowing sounds. The swimmer came up to the side of the boat, the ferryman already could see the whites of his eyes shining, and the swimmer’s hands stretched out, and the body came after them, and Jym was standing in the boat, bolt upright, naked, dripping.

He stood there for some seconds, or minutes, the ferryman did not tell me just how long, then he again dived into the water, headfirst, swam back to the shore.

The Ferryman one of the main characters in the tales they tell.

This is a book that needs to be short as it makes your mind spin the way it drifts, but it all seems to flow and not jar, which is a wonderful job of the writer and the translator to keep it feeling like that. I was imagining the time traveller in H G Wellls Time traveller as he drifts through time and things appear and disappear. I loved the passage with the ferryman, a job long gone, a man who saw people across a river daily. We see his world and his sons, who he feels will follow him to be ferrymen. But then there is a bridge that is new than old. Time flows forward and back in the book. He also has a clever way of seeing little details like the sound of the ferry, those little trinkets we can all recount that noise and smell we remember of a mundane event. This is a flat book but with these little gems scattered through it. An odd book and a little gem Have you read Peter Weiss.

Winston’s score – A He should be better known a writer who is unique in his style.

 

The Most secret memory of men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

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The Most secret memory of men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

Senegalese fiction

Original title –  La plus secrète mémoire des hommes

Translator – Lara Vergnaud

Source – Review copy

I was lucky to have been sent this by Other press all the way from the US, which I am thankful as they have been bringing some great books in translation out the last couple of years, and this is one I had wanted to read I have toyed with the idea of Prix Goincourt project of some sort, but when I looked at the winners and availability in English for a lot of the older winners it fell apart I’m still after a project that has a lot of older books in translation in it. Anyway, I brought Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s first book, brotherhood a couple of years ago as he was on a list of up-and-coming African writers I had read a few years ago and when he won the Prix Goncourt with this his second book, I decided when offer this book I read this as he is the first francophile writer from Sub Saharan Africa to win the prize.

She entered the elevator, a terrible smile on her lips. As we rose to the thirteenth floor, I plunged, toward utter ruin.

Siga D.’s body had known, done, tried everything. What could I offer her? Where could I take her? What could I think up? Who did I think I was? Those philosophers who extol the inexhaustible virtues of erotic inventiveness never had to deal with a Siga D., whose mere presence wiped away my sexual history. How should I go about it? The fourth floor already. She won’t feel anything, she won’t even feel you enter, your body will liquefy against hers, it will trickle down and be absorbed by the sheets, by the mattress. Seventh. You won’t just drown inside of her, you’ll disappear, disintegrate, crumble, she’s going to obliterate you, and the pieces that are left will drift into the clinamen of the ancient materialists, Leucippus, Democritus of Abdera

His meeting Siga D and her power over him

The book is a novel, but at its heart is a true story it is like one of those dramas where some of the names and facts have been changed. The book focuses on a book and a writer in the novel. The book is called The Labyrinth of Inhumanity and the writer is from Senegal called T C Elimane a man in his day called the BLACK Rimbaud heralded as the voice of Africa, won the Fench literary prize Prix Renaudot but in the novel this happens in 1938 before the war. But the real tale this is partly drawn from is the 1968 winner by the Malian writer Yamboi Oulologuem. His book Bound to Violence had a claim of plagiarism against it . But in his case the editor had removed his credit that the passages are from a couple of books he had used, and that book is due out as a penguin classic soon (I will be getting that when it comes out ). So when Diegan, the main narrator of the book gets hold of this fabled book from a Senegalese writer, Siga D, the two sleep together even though she is a lot older than home, but she has a presence, and as the story unfolds as he hunts for more information about the book and the writer. That Siga D is related to the writer. Our narrator is like a book detective trying to find out what happened after T c Elimane was called a plagiarist and disappeared from sight and was never seen again he follows the years after this happened, and this takes him after the war years to South America, where he had met and mixed with the cream of Latim=n American fiction but also the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz at a point I kept thinking I can’t remember him mention in Gombrowicz Diary which I read many years ago and in one of those odd bookish eclipse moments it happened to be reading this as the new translation of Gombrowicz Possesed came out a book I had in its first translation, be interested to read and compare at some point. The book is a tale of being an African writer and how those writers are viewed, but is also a great road trip novel as we follow the trail left by Elimane.

My roommate, who refused to frequent our writers coterie (he found our mentality too bourgeois), finally read The Labyrinth of Inhumanity. His verdict was terse: “hard to translate,” which by his criteria amounted to the highest praise.

He asked me questions about the book and the author. I told him what I knew. The story intrigued him, and he told me I should visit the press archives. If I was able to gain access to certain newspapers from 1938, I might, he thought, be able to find out something. I told him that when I came to Paris eight years earlier, I had already tried to access old newspapers in search of traces of The Labyrinth of Inhu-manity. In particular, I had been hoping to read the investigation by Bollème (Brigitte) mentioned by the Reader’s Guide in its T.C. Elimane entry. All my attempts had ended in failure. Though I had discovered, in regard to Brigitte Bollème, that after a long career as a literary journalist for Revue des deux modes and publishing a few monographs, she had sat on the jury for the Prix Femina, over which she presided from 1973 to her death in 1985.

He starting down the rabbit hole of this writer and his story

Wow!!!, that is the simplest word for this book. I was blown away by it I had to keep pinching myself to remind myself that the actual book doesn’t exist as I so want to join Diegane in his journey alongside ass he finds the editors and those involved in the book he is like a New Yorker fact checker running down. I Love tracking down writers. There are many a rabbit hole I get drawn down and many a half projects on my shelves, unlike here, where he has got down and dug up the labyrinth around the book, he has answered what happened after that in a case like this is not often known the real writer didn’t quite disappear as much as Elimane does in the book . It made me want to read Yambo’s actual book. Sarr has captured the love of books readers had thrown in a road trip to the mix and just some wonderful characters along the way. I am reminded how many great Francophile and English books from Africa are forgotten or never widely known. He shows how hard it can be to break through as an African writer in the way they are discussed in part of the book in Paris. I think my love for this book should be clear I am on a golden run of books now. Have you read this or any great new voices from Senegal or elsewhere in francophile Africa?

Winston score +++++++A Gone a Little John Peel with my score as one of the best books I have read in many a year.

Fox 8 by George Saunders

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Fox8 by George Saunders

American fiction

Source – Library

I wanted to throw a few contemporary writers in English into the mix, so I started with George Saunders I saw this at the Library, and I have always loved books with an animal narrator as a kid from Watership Down, wind in the Willows, for example.  I often wonder why so few books are written for adults with Animals as the narrator. So when I saw this in the library, I had intended to read his Booker-winning Lincoln in the Bardo as I heard many people describe Saunders as a clever writer and a clever use of language, and I had wanted to read him for that reason.

At this time, Grate Leeder grew kwite sad. It was like he grew too sad to leed. And wud sit for hours staring into spase. It woslike Grate Leeder blamed himself that we had lost are Forest in which we had always lived since time in memorial. But we did not feel it was his fawlt. It hapened so fast, who cud have been grate enough to stop it? (I for sure did not know how to stop it. Once I snuk into the bak of a Truk and stole there hamer with my mouth. I know it is not gud to steel but I was so mad! But me steeling that hamer did not even slow them down. They must have had other hamers?!

Anexamplw of Fox 8 chatting to the Grate leader and how Saunders uses language.

So Fox 8 is narrated by Fox 8. As he says, he is a fox that has learned to speak Yuman from sitting outside a window as a mother reads to her kids. This a view of the Human world from that of a Fox and how they view us humans or, as he calls us, Yumans as a species. It is also a commentary on ecosystems and how we are ruining the foxes’ homes, and we see Fox 8 talk about his own home. This large wood had its heart cut in half as they develop a grand estate with a Mall or Mawl as he finds out when it is up from a Dog he chats to and tells him it is a Mawl as we see fox 8 wander through the Mall looking at how the Humans shop etc. he chats to the Grater leader around the events and the estate and the Human and its effects on the foxes.

Just then, a very Yung Yuman, a meer Todler, todled past with a smile of possibly thinking we are Dogs. There in her hand, we noted: some fud! It looked gud and smelled grate. It is a Bun! All of the suden, we desided to enter into a Fare Deel with her, whereby we wud share her Bun, by us taking it.

But then, quik as the wink, she is intaken into the Mawl, with one hand in the hand of her Mother and, in the other hand, our Bun!

And before we knew it, we too, lerd by her fud, had been intaken into FoxViewCommons, rite threw their Dore!

As he looks to see what the Mawl is all about I loved the use of langauge and his voice

This is a clever short story. It took me about an hour to read. I love how he gives Fox 8 a voice and uses language, and we know what happens through his eyes and the Yumans he sees in his world. I was primarily reminded of the great STUDIO ghibli film Pom Poko which used Magical Racoons instead of Foxes as through their eyes, we see how the Urban sprawl of Tokyo ripped apart their homes and natural habit, and this is the same type of narrative a world of Malls and estates replaces there familiar woods I said in the intro I wonder why we see so few animal narrators in adult fiction as we are seeing the natural world devastate around our treatment of the land and constant expansion and urbanisation;. Saunders has been very playful with the voice of Fox8. It hits the right key. You have him as a laid-back sort of drifter of a fox. He is a dreamer of a fox. This is a clever fable about the loss of habit told through their eyes. Have you read this or any other books by George Saunders?

Winstons score – B – A solid little story around the environment and our effect on it told from nature’s  perspective

 

Riambel by Priya Hein

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Riambel by Priya Hein

Mauritian fiction

Source – Personal copy

The times now I buy a new book that isn’t translated because I have heard about it on social media is slim really. But this book I saw mentioned on Youtube, and after I got it, a few other people mentioned it, I love a slow word-of-mouth book, and this is what I think it is from Indigo Press, a new name to me. Apart from the word of mouth when I saw on the cover, it had a blurb from LE Clézio and her fellow Mauritian writer Anada Devi a writer whose book I loved when I read it because, like this book, it seemed to capture a significant slice of this tropical island but not the lovely beaches from those on the edge of the beauty getting by. Priya Hein had written a number of children’s books and short stories before this her debut novel. She has also won a number of awards, and she now splits her time between Mauritius and Germany.

We live in a cite,or Kon krool( which is how we like to refer to our shanty town). It’s also known as Africa Town – a slum where the poor and the undesirables are dumped together in hastily constructed barracks. Like tins of sardines placed next to each other in a higgledy-piggledy way. Whatever’s found in the trash somehow ends up in our cité, which is nothing but the waste of Riambel discarded in a heap that slowly rots away. A trash-strewn ghetto where everything is starving and fighting to survive – even the dogs.

Her home a shanty called Riambel everything is hard there.

The book is formed around the story of a young girl. She has to finish her school life and join other family members in the big house of The De Grandbourg family. They live in the Riambel, the slum of the city. Noemi is faced with no choice around this change. Still, we see the world through her eyes, those rich people on the other side of the road in the world, but it also mixes the history of the island but with a female twist to that and also has a beautiful idea of using recipes local to the island as well those sort of recipes passed on mother to daughter even the way they were written I had a sense of a card box like my mum had with those precious recipes passed down through the years. But as you read them, there is a sense of how the Western world has crept in on these island recipes over the years as they have been rewritten or verbally passed on. The book is also intersected with poetry from the island that evokes the spirit of the island and its struggles. As we see a young girl wrestling with a life of servitude and recounting how little can change, there is a glimpse of hope. A woman that came on a holiday and stayed seems interested in her. This shows the tension simmering under the island, an island with affluent ex french families still owning land and running things.

Make sure that your prawns are fresh by checking they colour. They should look transparent and smell of the sea Give them a quick rinse in cold water. Pull off their head, tails and legs before removing the shells and the black veins, Once this is done, rinse the prawns again under cold water.Using a ros kari or a stone mortar, crush some garlic cloves together with a small finger of fresh ginger. Pour a little oil in a pan and fry the paste over a medium fire. Add one chopped onion and continue to fry until golden. Throw in your prawns and cook for a couple of minutes. Add one or two chopped tomatoes and one sliced chilli and stir.Throw in some masala and a few curry leaves. Don’t make it too spicy for the whites, otherwise they’ll complain about their delicate stomachs. Stir well until it thickens. Add a little sea salt, but not too much, as the prawns are already salty. Pour in a dash of water if needed. Sprinkle with fresh coriander and serve with pickled vegtables – enn ti zasar legin – and freshly cooked rice

one of the recipes her for a prawn curry I liked the sound of this one.

I think I am amazed by the book as it is a debut novel. It is so well crafted. I love the ways she weaves Noemi’s voice, the island’s poets, and the island’s recipes. It is a personal history of an island, whereas Noemi says the history they learn isn’t there’s. It has the simmering below the surface of a Mauritius, something you felt in Devi’s novel, a sense of a powder keg that never entirely blows. A sense of things not changing. This is an island out of time with other places. Slavery is gone but only in name, and this shows how little hope there is in a slum-like Riambel, no matter how Noemi sees it as having a double meaning. And it is really Rive en belle Beautiful Shore (I love this thought. It captures her as a girl of a certain age). I also loved the usage of the recipes as a way of talking about the island with food as a way of showing changing tastes and how Western ideas drifted in. I hope this has been seen by someone near the Booker. It reminds me of the gems you used to find years ago on the Booker lists. Have you read this book?

Winstons score – ++++++A best book of the year so far !!

The Dear ones by Berta Dávila

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The Dear ones by Berta Dávila

Galician fiction

Original title -Os seres queridos

Translator – Jacob Rogers

Source – Review copy

I have been championing the three times rebel [ress since they started bring books out they have a great ethos of working-class female voices in the minority languages. This time we stay in Spain but move to Galicia To a novelist and poet that is regarded as one of the leading voices of Galician literature, having won prizes both for her poetry and fiction. This novel won the Xerais Novel Award. She is also a well-known editorShe directs the independent publishing house Rodolfo e Priscila and is the director of the Rúa do Lagarto collection. This is the first book to be translated into English from her.

The book was about a mother who loses her son in a traffic accident. She was a radio show host for a local station and lived alone. A few months after the accident, still grieving, she moved in with her grandmother, an elderly woman who had some sort of dementia and wasn’t very mobile but was the only family the mother had left. Lucia asks if the grandmother resembles my grandmother Maria. I say probably, I’m sure she does, and detail some of my grandmother’s behaviours over the past few months. For example, she almost always recognises me the moment I come into the room, but often forgets recent news or what year it is; she asks me about grades and exams, as if I’m still an under-graduate, or about the father of my son, as if Miguel and I had never split up.

The book she was writing about a mother losing a son

This is a hard book to grasp as the events in the book seem so odd, but then again, life is odd and this is one bone journey I feel there will be many more women like our narrator here that have the feeling and guilt and trauma she has after birth and in motherhood. The book is about when is a mother ready to be a mother? What happens when your role as a mother doesn’t fit you? That is the heart of this story a woman struggling with that exact dilemma as she struggles to connect with her son so she tries to write a novel about losing a son at five years old. She had seen motherhood as something else, but the depression she has felt since the birth of her son, and the loss of self that comes with that is hard to deal with for her. So what will she do when she falls pregnant for a second time? How will she react, and how will the world around her react as she decides she may take a decision that will shock people near her. But she proves she still has choices to make around her life and her body. This is a hard-hitting story of one woman’s journey into motherhood and what happens when you maybe opt out of the role of being a mother.

THE BOY WAKES UP EARLY, CONTENTEDLY, ON THE FIRST DAY of winter and asks me how long it is until the school Christmas play and the day he can finally open up the presents under the tree. I tell him there won’t be a tree at Grandma Mara’s house-at most there’ll be a porcelain Baby Jesus shrouded by a wreath-and that it’s only four more sleeps. He’s a bit disappointed about the tree, but I try to convince him it will be a festive day: we’ll see my parents and my uncles, we’ll sing songs, and he’ll be able to help my sister prepare the tray of desserts and sweets. The boy asked for a stuffed doll, a picture book with two bears that are friends, and a bike. He repeats his list of presents and counts off on his fingers the nights he has to wait for them.

There is a coldness in this description of her son

 

This has a feel of auto fiction in its town I was reminded of how well Anne Ernaux speaks around her world with a flourish or over-elaboration at times, and this is the same it hasn’t to much luggage to the story it is narrative of her journey told as that no sidetrack or detours and it is so much more potent for that case as it shows how mental illness a post-birth can ravage that connection between mother and child but also what might happen after that when you have to face going through pregnancy again. It is a candid insight into post-natal depression but also how, even after that, women can still be strong and stand up. I am a big fan of three times rebel as they bring us voices that may have gone under the radar otherwise. This is a hard-hitting book for the reader, Have you read any books that deal with post-natal depression and Motherhood?

Winston’s score – +A Sparsh, stunning prose of one woman’s journey

The Boarding House by Piotr Paziński

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The Boarding House by Piotr Paziński

Polish fiction

Original tilte Pensjonat

Translator – Tusia Dąbrowska

Source – Personal copy

I’m going to start to work through some of the many Dalkey Archive books I have brought over the last few years, just a drop in the ocean of what they have published. According to Chad Post, there is well over 1000 title that has come out over the many years the press has run. He is currently putting together that list, and in the meantime, I will cover what I. have. This one jumped out for two reasons it was a European Union book prize winner, an odd book prize that has had several books over the years I have read. The other fact was that Piotr Paziński is a Joyce fan. He has written two books around James Joyce, one a cultural map of Joyce’s Dublin. The other fact os he is editor-in-chief of the Jewish magazine Midrash. This was his debut novel. He has written another since both have been translated into English and are set in the Polish Jewish world. Here we find a grandson heading home to where his grandmother used to live.

IN THE BEGINNING, there were train tracks. In the greenery, between heaven and earth. With stations, like beads on a string, placed so close together that even before the train managed to accelerate, it had to slow down in preparation for the following stop. Platforms made of concrete, narrow and shaky, equipped with ladders and steep steps, grew straight out of sand, as though built on dunes. The stations’ pavilions resembled old-fashioned kiosks: elongated, bent awnings, and azure letters on both ends, which appeared to float on air,

I’ve always enjoyed peering at them, beginning with the first station outside the strict limits of the city, when the crowded urban architecture quickly thins out and the world expands to an uncanny size.

The opening as he is on the Train

The book opens as he is on a train, that echo of earlier trains but also his childhood as he starts to count down the stops as he heads back in Journeys through Poland people had made as he sees the stops he had many years earlier also gone past to visit his grandmother at the Pesjonat (boarding house for the old). He is visiting for one last time to see the ghost of the Boarding house but living and dead; as he gets there, he meets two women he vaguely remembers. One talks to him, but the other her mind is gone as they talk about his grandmother and her time in the house. They are all Holocaust survivors like his Grandmother, but age has caught up on them. Even the house itself is caught up in time. He wakes and looks at the stained ceiling of the house. He meets those who remain the doctor, the director. As he drifts back and forth through time as he tries to remember his late grandmother those summers, they also draw him back into those pre-war and war years, and being Jewish is a sort of last call of these memories to pass them on to the next generation.

“Do you see? And how can you talk to her? She’s lost it completely! Do you understand? This is impossible!” She held me under my arm.

“She knew your grandmother, you know?” she didn’t stop talking. She dug into my arm and told me to turn around as if she wanted to go back to the house already. “She remembers everything very well, but right now she isn’t doing so well. She’s lost her mind a little.”

She stopped to size me up properly.

“Why did you come? For the company? Almost no one is left here, each week they’re taking someone. I also don’t know how long I will stick around. And the young ones aren’t eager to come, so what will you do here? It’s boring to be around old people. Come, you will walk me upstairs now.”

We tottered down the path. The doors were open.

Meeting people that knew his grandmother well but are dying out or forgeting her.

This book tackles being Jewish now in Poland, a smaller community but one heavily tied to the past, but this is the point the guard is changing those last survivors are dying, and the world they grew up in and that past is in a generation now gone. I remember meeting Aharon Appelfeld the Romania – Israeli Jewish writer he was at the IFFP the year he won the prize to briefly chat and hear him talk was an opportunity that is rare these days as so few survivors left. I was also reminded of the words of Dasa Drndric forget this happening, and you open the door to it happening again! But the main thing in this book is a personal feeling. This may be Piotr’s journey on the train, a relative living in the country, or as he said to his translator, the Borsch belt that made me smile. These houses are typical in the middle European countryside, and as it says, this community of survivors’ stories needs protection. A book that has a whiff of folk tales to it as we see a man drift through time. My only complaint is that it could have been a bit more beefed out.

Winstons score -A solid book would have loved a little more!

I’ll Do Anything you want by Iolanda Batallé

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I’ll Do Anything You Want by Iolanda Batalle

Catalan fiction

Original title – Faré tot el que tu vulguis

Translators- Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent

Source –  Review copy

I was so pleased I was able to get a copy of this sent by 3 times rebel press as I had been a huge fan of the first two books the I had read last year they are a small publisher that has decided to publish working-class female voices from around the world in minority languages. This tie it is from the Catalan writer Iolanda Batallé. She is a teacher and writer. But she has also set up a number of publishing Imprints and raised international awareness in Cultural projects in her country. She also runs a bookshop called Ona in her Home town(one for the bookshop bucket list ) an emblematic bookshop a house of culture and a house of literature(sounds simply wonderful) . She has written four books.

THE COST OF LIVING KEEPS RISING, AND YET HUMANKIND HAS recently gone down in value. Nora strode along the jetway without looking back. She knew he was watching. His gaze held a deep nostalgia, a feeling so tangible, so solid she could almost knead it, the way she did when she had baked with her grandmother. Nacho watched her, her black skirt just above the knee, her blazer, her swaying hips. He noted with amusement that the men desired her and even the women were looking at her. He’d always wanted to know what had happened to his mother, but he’d never found a single clue.

His mother had turned blue after being with a man who was not his father. Dead. He’d witnessed it by chance, he was supposed to be at school. Mother’s turned blue! There’s nothing that can be done. That’s when he decided to become a shark. Seven years later he heard the song king of painter the first time.

I loved the clever use of this song as she has the affair and sees her sexual awakening in an S&M world

 

This book follows one’s sexual awakening Journey we meet Nora she is a housewife bored of her life in many ways. So when she starts an affair that then leads her into a world of High-class prostitution. Her world starts to come alive as she dives into a world of S&M . But in Nora’s head this is almost a dream-like feeling for her but as we the reader are an avatar on her journey we maybe see the slim lines of darkness and the danger as she drifts further into this world. As she as a woman is sexually awakened to the new level of desire these meets bring to her body, we see how she and her husband drifted apart over the 25 years of their marriage. This is a woman’s journey into her own body and what lust and sex can awaken in a woman. But there is always a feeling of what might happen in the background of her thought the sexual looking-glass journey. As we follow a sexual Alice as she eats and licks things and other things that make her body and desire grow!

SOMETIMES SHE FELT LIKE SHE DIDN’T KNOW WHERE SHE WAS.She wondered if it was all really happening. But there was no evidence to indicate it wasn’t. She’d avoided phoning Júlia for days, because when she did everything became all too real. Júlia had told her to break it off, she’d said it wasn’t right … that wasn’t what she’d meant when she spoke of infidelity. Ah, so now, to top things off, I need to be unfaithful the way you want me to be! Nora had yelled before hanging up on her. She needed to tell someone about what she was going through, but there was no one. The people who would have listened without judging were dead, and Robert obviously wasn’t an option. Teresa, her therapist, had passed away.

The dream like feeling of her journey is described her

This is a wonderfully poetic book that sees our narrator on her journey. The nod to Alice is mentioned on the cover and there is a feeling of someone dreaming through a world that isn’t dreamlike and that yes is giving her a lot of power in herself and her own desire but then on there other hand is dangerous like putting a hand through a flame you’re going get burnt eventually. This reminds me of the rabbit holes you went down in books William S  Burroughs wrote about sexual awakening his were around sex and drugs but this is driven by a woman who wants to break free of her boring world and feels that is something Burroughs also did well they want to break free and feel something else!! Or Anais Noin those first waves of writers that tackled what are taboo subjects in their books. This has led to writers like Iolanda that can now enter a sexual world of high-class sex for money a woman that is navigating that world as a woman empowered for now.!! The over thing I loved was the use of music in this book it used piece of music as a sort of tag for the sexual events as a way of remember the nights of passion. This is another gem from a press that is publishing hard-hitting books.

Have you a favourite book that deals with sexual desires?

So distant from my life by Monique Ilboudo

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So distant from my life by Monique Ilboudo

Burkinabe fiction

Original title – Si Loin de ma vie

Translator – Yarri Kamara

Source – subscription edition

I have subscribed for a couple of years now to Tilted axis as they seem to be bringing out some wonderfully challenging and exciting books for us to read in English. So when they brought out their first book from Africa I was keen to see what it would be and when this was the book from Burkina writer Monique Ilboudo a writer well known in Francophile African writing. She is a writer and human right activist, She was in the documentary Femmes Aux Yeux Ouvert (woman with open eyes)where she read a poem about how men in her country are in charge of sexual relations and the effect that has on women in her country. She is currently an ambassador in the Nordic and  Baltic states for her country.

Everything went well the first few months. A carpenter friend had made a nice signboard for me: Business letters – Beautiful love letters – Debt recovery letters – All your letters – Cheap prices. I didn’t like the last line, ‘Cheap prices’, which he had added as a favour to me, but I didn’t say anything. Anything free comes with a price. My lovely signboard brought in my first customers, who, satisfied, brought in more customers.

Within a few months, my bench was never empty and Doulaye, the shopkeeper, thanked me for the customers who passedf me and went and sat on his high stools to order a coffee or tea or even an omlette or fried eggs while waiting their turn

His letter wrting business does well to start off with.

What she does in this short novella is capture so many young men’s lives from Africa it is a sort of universal warning and insight into the struggles and desires of young men told through one man’s world. Jeanphi is a young man who is a go-getter in a way as he sees his life outside his home this is the fictional African city of Ouabany is like many of the large cities of west Africa brimming with life and those wanting a better world away from it. He tries to make his way with the modern take on a letter-writer trade. Doing his letter writing in a cyber cafe through the net helps people connect but all the time there is a draw to that route many a man takes to North Africa to try and make the way to Europe and he tries and fails a couple of times but when he does he meets an older gay french man and connects with him and lives with him in his home back in Ouabany as he becomes his assistant will he ever get to Europe what is this relationship with this gay french man all about?

Comfort is a drug that enslaves quickly. It was just a year ago that I moved into the enchanting pink villa. Yet I had the impression that I had always slept in an air-conditioned room, in a big soft bed. Having a bank account that was never in the red seemed the most natural of things. Eating, not just to satisfy my hunger but also my whims of the day, going to the cinema, to restaurants, as I wished, living without worrying about tomorrow all quickly became habit. Above all, I had become accustomed to the respect and deference that people showed me. All that was about to collapse.

He lives the Lux life in the older man’s villa later in the book

I said this is a universal tale and I think that is why she picked a fictional city as it removed place from his story it could be Dakar, Lagos, or Ouagadougou  Jeanphi being drawn to Europe and the journey to North afirca and then the wait and see if you get the chance to get to Europe the most dangerous part of the journey. not this is one man’s journey but is actually everyman’s story of those that never even get to north Africa this is a tale of a man that does fail and tries again like many but it is also a look at the pitfalls of that journey and challenges. She also shows hope is alive in west Africa but life is hard he tries to get on but then his relationship with the older french man is maybe another darker side of the way people can get into Europe usually a female but yes men can also get caught up he isn’t gay but the man is and maybe this is a way to escape. This book uses short choppy vignette-like chapters that make it feel like a much larger fuller book than it is which is just over 100 pages. At times I felt lost but maybe that is the world of our characters! Have you read this or any other books from West Africa that talk about migrants’ journeys?

Winstons score – +A – A universal take on the migrant journey from west Africa and the pitfalls of this journey.

Leaves of Narcissus by Somaya Ramadan

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Leaves of Narcissus by Somaya Ramadan

Egyptian fiction

Original title – Awraq Al-Nargis

Translator – Marilyn Booth

Source – personal copy

I was drawn to this book when I ordered it a couple of years ago as it had the mention of Ireland in the description and would be the second Egyptian novel that had been set in Ireland I had read Temple Bar by Bahaa Abdelmegid and felt this would give a female perspective on the same experience of leaving Egypt to study abroad. Somaya Ramadan herself had spent time in Egypt studying English and then she studied in the early 1980s in Dublin she went to trinity college which I  feel maybe where she drew inspiration for this book that also follows a female student from Egypt as she heads to Ireland to study and start a new life there. she had written a couple of short story collections before this novel came out. This novel won the Naguib Mahfouz medal when it came out.

I walked in the direction of my lodging, across from the train station, and fished out my keys, ignoring the source of that invasive scream. The noise that had now subsided distilled a single, terrifying insight: that what I live is not the condition which other human beings live. That my senses and my comprehension of life are not those of anyone else, of anyone else but me. Something very alarming was beginning to weave itself together there in front of me, slowly, growing to giant proportions as it came ever nearer, a fearsome cold tidal wave edging toward me to swallow me completely to bring darkness over all to bring stillness.

The arrival in Dublin of Kimi the sense of being overwhelmed is here

The book follows Kimi a sensitive woman that has the ability to feel the emotions of those around her and she is about to head to Ireland to study. This is the start of the book and it deals with the usual clash of cultures that a move like this can bring a person to the edge as she struggles to fit in the style of the narrative of Kimi and the world is a nod to Joyce we see her inner working as she settles into her lodgings at Westland row in Dublin as she walks a tightrope as she struggles with her mental health as the move is overwhelming to her as she is a fragile soul as her world and the lit world she is studying at times almost touch and blur as she tries to fit in an exile in a country with its own selection of exiles this is a classic slice of culture clash and also a nod to classic modernist writing.

The map of exile fixed to the wall was not a yearning for the homeland. There was no exile. All there was, in that place, was another homeland, another nation. A nation inhabited by its own images, its own brands of hypocrisy, its own deliberate silences and its own pretense, that it alone existed and that anything east of London or west of Boston had no real place in the calculations of geography. These were unknown reaches, better left unknown. The only condition was silence and the pretense that here was all there was

As I say being an exile is a theme in the book as both countries have had so many over the years.

Ramadan herself is also a translator of English books into Arabic, you can see the influence of that on this as one of the writers she has translated like  Virginia Woolf into Arabic. Kimi is like a Woolf character that fragile line between being there and losing one’s mind in the world she is in. That Woolf did so well in her books. It is also a classic look at culture clash and being a fish out of water. But alongside this is the culture clash of Kimi in a new country and studying there as well. There is a nod to the common ground of Egypt and Ireland being in countries with many exiles and being an exile from your own country in that country that has a lot of exiles in. This is like a Rachel from a voyage out or later characters from the waves had stepped out of a Woolf novel and become Egyptian in Dublin this is a fragile woman in a new world and has a wonderful amount of lit quotes it is easy to see how in love the writer is with English literature with a sprinkling of quotes here and there in the book. I said this is a perfect companion piece to Temple Bar another fish out of water this has a female take on that experience. Have you read this or any other AUC(AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CARIO)  books?

Winstons score – A – A lost modern gem of Arabic writing about being an outsider in Ireland

We had to remove this post by Hanna Bervoets

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We had to remove this post by Hanna Bervoets

Dutch fiction

Original title – Was wij Zagen

Translator – Emma Rault

Source – Personal copy

Sometimes you see a book and then forget about it and then see it again and go I should got that book that was the case with this I went through a lot of the books that were in Waterstones post Christmas sale this book is one I had nearly got at the time it came out the middle of last year. As the subject matter had appealed it appealed as there aren’t many novels yet about social media that have been translated. The job of content moderator has to be a hard one this is the seventh novel from the Dutch writer Hanna Bervoets she has a wonderful website with lots of info about the awards including one for the body of work she has written so far. she has only this book translated so lets hope she has some more books translated. She lives with her girlfriends in Amsterdam.

were given two manuals that first day, one with the terms and conditions of the platform and one with the guidelines for moderators. We didn’t know at the time that those guidelines changed constantly and that the tome we received was already outdated when it was put into our hands. We weren’t allowed to take the manuals home with us, so we learned by doing. On the first day of training, a series of text-only posts appeared on our screens, and then, from day three, photos, videos, and livestreams. Each time, the question was: Is it okay to leave this up on the platform? And if not, why not? That last part was the trickiest. The platform doesn’t allow people to post things like “All Muslims are terrorists,” because Muslims are a PC, a “protected category,” just like women, gay people, and, believe it or not, Mr. Stitic, heterosexuals. “All terrorists are Muslims,” on the other hand, is allowed, because terrorists are not pc besides, Muslim isn’t an offensive term

The first day and what makes the cut and what is unacceptable according to the company

Kayleigh has taken a job at a social media company called Hexa part of a larger company she joins a team of content moderators, that view any content flagged as inappropriate or unsuitable(in the time of Musk taking over Twitter these people’s jobs are so important or else we go down a dark path) she likes her co-workers she even falls for one of them but this book is about the group here and the drip drip effect of the content and the constant pressure of what is acceptable and not and does you over time become use top this content so you let through the content you’d not thought about letting through at the start. Alongside this is a new relationship with  Babara then she falls for Yena a mismatched relationship. The coworkers take legal action with the pressure and sheer mental health issues this job causes them and also we see how each person has their own axe to grind from. Jewish coworker that gets into arguments and another coworker who is flat earth believer all add to a book that feels far more than its 130 pages.

That night we ended up kissing for the first time. After work Robert passed around another rollie, and at the bus stop we all took a swig from Souhaim’s stylish horn hip flask, so when we walked into the sports bar around seven we were still in high spirits- in fact, we were whooping as if we’d all won in the Olympics. Inside, some people were dancing. That was a rare sight in the sports bar, but Michelle must have picked up on her clientele’s mood and had cranked up the volume on the playlist all the way.One girl from our cohort was making out with a huge guy. It took me a moment to recognize him it was John, who always wore blue gingham button-downs in the office, but who was now swaying his hips in a soaking wet T-shirt, the fabric drenched with sweat even though it wasn’t very warm inside or outside.

They go out and that shared experience that leads to them falling off each other and being friends.

This captures what it is like to be on the knife edge of what makes the cut to be ok and what is demanded unacceptable to be seen this also shows how doing that as a job can be heartbreaking and heartwrenching and also cause those doing it to feel numb to the content they are viewing. There is a part she describes a sex scene and you sense how she has seen this content so often she even knows what will happen next. This is a book that did the rounds on social media given not social media content but for me, it is an age-old job of the moderator who viewed the video nasties and checked books for content. the police that watches videos. All these people have mental health from doing this job. It also shows relationships and comradeship in these jobs and how easy it is to have relationships with co-workers from the shared experience =but then there is also the side of that yes the shared experience but there is also the person as a whole that is outside that and that is what is shown in the two relationships of Kayleigh in the book. A book that captures a hard job and the outfacing of that on one person and the group she works with! Have you read any books about social Media?

Winstons score -B A great attempt to capture the social media world and its employees.

Dead Lands by Núria Bendicho

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Dead lands by Núria Brendicho

Catalan Fiction

Original title – Terres mortes

Translators – Maruxa  Relaño & Matha Tennent

Source – Personel copy

I have had my foot of the pedal when it comes to new publisher and translations around. So when I first saw the new publisher 3Timesrebel. There is a motto in the book ‘I am grateful to fate for three gifts to have been born a woman, from the working class and an oppressed nation. And the turbid azure of being three times a rebel by Maria-Mercè Marçal so they have taken that motto to publish books from languages less published and from working-class females they have three books out I have brought two by them. The afterword Núria talks about her own reading journey from Catalan literature than into Spanish realism and then French Naturalism then by chance she happened on the works of William Faulkner and saw something in his writing she thanks all these writers. You can see the connection to Faulkner. It had been years since I read him but I happen to read as I lay dying last year.

THINK IT OVER, HE HAD SAID. IN A FEW YEARS, IF WELL-TENDED, all those lands, those fields and paths that came out of no-where, traversed the forests, encircled Roca Negra and extended further still, they could bring in good money, and they could be mine, have my name on the deed. It was simple. All I had to do was marry. A wife isn’t that much work, my father said in a hoarse tone, as if the comment just happened to slip out and he hadn’t been thinking about it for hours. It’s an opportunity.

The opening of Jon;’s father’s story.

I happen to mention the Faulkner I read as I have seen in other reviews other works by him mention but this dark story with its cast of characters it follows the event before and after Jon is killed when he has shot in the back in the remote village the family live the book is made up of the 13 stories from those that knew Jon and the dead man himself for me this rang with the style of as I lay dying as it has a cast of characters talking about one person. The narrators start with a couple of his siblings the youngest just called the boy and then Maria who is with the child herself but who is the father. Then Jon’s father as the story goes on we piece together the events and why was Jon shoot in the back who shot him and why. Then others outside the family a whorehouse own the priest as we head to the man himself his story is the last but one story. The last character is looking back as she is caring for a character in a hospice Tomas one of Jon’s brothers as he reveals things that happened when Jon died to his carer. This is a dark book and reflects a hard place. I was reminded of the attitude I used to see in the small pit villages around the northeast and some of the characters remind me of some of the people I met years ago.

FIRST CAME THE SHOT AND THEN DEATH. OR FIRST THE SHOT and then the suffering that led to my death. But above all, death. In the early days there was confusion, not only because it seemed even the living didn’t know who killed me, but because I didn’t remember it either. It was as if my non-body had forgotten what I had experienced because my mind was too preoccupied debating whether to leave non-death and enter non-life. I still had ears when I was buried, heard the specks of earth coming down on me, dusting my mouth, then someone weeping, and later the weight of oblivion interring me.

I chose the opening of Jon story as it hit me hard.

This is a hard gothic work that takes apart what happened it is a look at the moment I was reminded of a book like the anatomy of a Moment another book from Spain that takes a round view of the attempted coup in the 80’s in Spain. There is a nod to Faulkner that dark world and chorus of voices he had used so well in his books it reminds me I have a number of his books to read. Then a Peirene Press novel from Denmark they brought out a few years ago. The murder of Halland like this book it followed a murder and it was also more about why it happened the ones who don’t here get clues to the reasons but it is more what lead up to even the aftermath. This is a harsh world and like in another book from Peirene stones in a landslide. Like this is set in a remote mountain village where the locals are in their own world reality of their own with tough rules and consequences. so if your are after a gothic village novel about a murder this is for you and is stunning to think it is the writer’s Debut novel. Have you read any of these new books from 3Timesrebel ?

Winstons score – ++++A The dark side of the world of  Stones in a landslide (and you all know that is one of my all-time favourite books)