Tag: NOBEL LIT

The Thief and The dog by Naguib Mahfouz

~ winstonsdad ~ 5 Comments

The Thief and the Dog by Maguib Mahfouz

Egyptian fiction

Original title – اللص والكلاب; al-liṣ wal-kilāb

Translators – Trevor Le Gassick and M. M. Badawi (Revised by John Rodenbeck)

Source – Personal copy

I went from a nearly Nobel winner to the only Egyptian writer to win the Nobel prize, Naguib Mahfouz. I have reviewed three books from him over thwe year s and I am on the quest to read all his books over time I do have gthe Cairo trilogy in a nice hardback edition to read but have that as the last book I will read from him so every time he crops up on the club year I read him this one was the book he brought out in 1961. AS ever, it captures an Egypt and Cairo that is changing just after. A revolution has happened, and we are seeing this new world through the eyes of Said, a thief who has just come out of prison to see the world he knew has changed. He now wants to win his wife back and get the people who put him in Jail

Ilish went to fetch the girl. At the sound of returning footsteps Said’s heart began to beat almost pain-fully, and as he stared at the door, he bit the inside of his lips, anticipation and tenderness stifling all his rage.

After what seemed a thousand years, the girl ap-peared. She looked surprised. She was wearing a smart white frock and white open slippers that showed henna-dyed toes. She gazed at him, her face dark, her black hair flowing over her forehead, while his soul devoured her. Bewildered, she looked around at all the other faces, then particularly at his, which was staring so intently. He was unable to take his eyes off her. As she felt herself being pushed toward him, she planted her feet on the carpet and leaned backward away from him. And suddenly he felt crushed by a sense of total loss.

The man that sold him out and is now with his wife!

The book follows what happens after Said is released from prison. The book is in a stream-of-consciousness style as we follow what happens to him when his estranged wife, Nabawiyya, ends up with the man who put him in jail, his former friend Llish. Add to this that his friend and former mentor, Rauf, is now a journalist and has moved on with his life as well. It sees what happens when a man like Said, a thief, but he also wanted to be part of the revolution, has missed all this, even his own daughter, Sana, is scared of him now. The only people who will help him are a prostitute and a shady cafe owner. This is a man who, in his head, was like a Robin Hood-like figure of the revolution, but now nothing is going his way.  Will he have his revenge? As ever, the book has Cairo as a backdrop. The cafe owner reminds me of the book Coffeehouse, but, like the character in that book, it shows how a city and a world that is constantly changing, like Egypt, had been through during the 20th century, can catch some people out and make others successful, no matter how shady their past was.

He walked on until he reached the Zahra offices in Maarif Square, an enormous building, where his first thought was that it would be very dithcult to break into. The rows of cars surrounding it were like guards around a prison; the rumble of printing presses behind the grilles of the basement windows was like the low hum of men sleeping in a dormitory. He joined the stream of people entering the building, presented himself at the information desk, and asked in his deep

“public” voice for Mr. Rauf Ilwan. Staring back with some displeasure at the bold, almost impudent look in his eyes, the reception clerk snapped, “Fourth floor.” Said made for the elevator at once, joining people among whom he looked rather out of place in his blue suit and gym shoes, the oddness emphasized by the glaring eyes on either side of his long aquiline nose.

A girl caught his eye, which made him curse his ex-wife and her lover under his breath, promising them destruction.

Even his mentor and friend that pushed him to do what he did has moved on

I love Mahfouz’s writing; he is Cairo, he is the man he writes about. He knew people like Said, Rauf, Llish, and the cafe owner (of course, Mahfouz loved cafes and watching people ). This is told in a stream-of-consciousness style to make you feel like Said, as he is caught up in a world that has moved on without him. Revenge is the heart of the book but also for me a sorrow of a man lost to time there must have been many men like Said dropped in it and then left by the people around him when he needed them most. I feel there must be a character like Said, whom he met one day in a cafe, heard his tale, and whose story this book is the result of.  Mahfouz loved sitting in Cafes watching and talking. I said before that Cario is always in his books, like Dublin is in Joyce, Dickens’ London, or Proust’s France.

 

 

Diary of a mad old man by Junichirō Tanizaki

~ winstonsdad ~ 4 Comments

Diary of a Mad Old Man by Junichirō Tanizaki

Japanese fiction

Original title – 瘋癲老人日記 Fūten rōjin nikki

Translator – Howard Hibbert

Source – Personal Copy

Anyone who has been around the blog over the last few years knows the other event in the blogosphere, apart from the Year’s Shadow Jury, is the biannual Year Clubs that Simon and Karn have run for the last decade or so. In fact, I love these so much. It is mainly finding the books for the blog for each year they have chosen. I go with the year the book came out in its original Language. So it means I cover the rest of the world for the years they pick. First, this week we have a man who just missed out on the Nobel Prize. He was on the shortlist of people in the year he died. It will be the fifth book over the years I have covered by Tanizaki a writer I have grown to like over the years and this wry book of old age is a fun book written by a writer in his later life himself.

This afternoon I asked Satsuko to take me out for a drive around the Meiji Shrine. I thought I had escaped, but my nurse saw us leaving and said she’d come along. The whole thing was spoiled. We were home in less than an hour.

July 2

For the last few days I’ve felt that my blood pressure is rising again. This morning it was up to 18.

Pulse 100. At the nurse’s urging, I took two tablets of Serpasil and three of Adalin. The pain and chilling in my hand is acute too. Although it seldom keeps me awake, last night it woke me up and I had Miss Sasaki give me an injection of Nobulon. I find that Nobulon works for me, as far as that goes, but it has unpleasant aftereffects.

“The collar and sliding bed are here. Would you like to try them?”

I’m not very eager, yet the way I feel makes me willing to give them a trial.

A mix of the visit by the daughter in law and his medical state

The book is the diary of a man recovering from a stroke. Utsugoi is in hios late seventies and has lost the use of one hand due to the stroke and this diary follows the few months that follow the stroke it is made up of the actual recovery, but also the visit he has from his daughter-in-law, Satsuko a former dancier with her own daerk past secrets thios forms the other dynamin=c in hte book as she lets the old man kiss her legs and feet as this is all his libido will let himk do this is about power nad desire and what happens when the mind is still active but eh body has given up the ghpost. a look at the dynamics between the father and daughter-in-law, the sort of twisted power trip she lets him lick her body as he buys her gifts and says he wants her feet as part of his gravestone. This is all a mix of sexual tension and black humour of a man on his way out, but still, after fulfilling his fetishes.

August 8

From 1 to z p.m. I had my nap, and then stayed in bed waiting for Dr. Suzuki. Meanwhile I heard a knock on the bathroom door, and Satsuko calling.

“Father, I’m going to lock this!”

“He’s coming, is he?”

“Yes.” She stuck her head out for a moment, but promptly banged the door shut and locked it.

Though I had only a glimpse of her I noticed a cold, sulky look on her face. Evidently she had already taken a shower; water was dripping from her vinyl cap.

More of him in the hospital and Satsuko being around

This is one of those books that makes you think about growing old, but also about desire and what happens when you have it but no way to show it! This is what could happen. It is about a woman willing to make money from a man she is a daughter-in-law to, a man driven by his desires and what they entail. It’s like a weird Japanese take on a Carry On film, a sort of Carry On Old Man in the hospital.  The main character is like a posher version of Sid James with Money, and Satsuko could be any of the female characters from the films, in a way. It is a book around desire and the male libido, with a comic look at growing old and still feeling Horny and what happens when your dancer daughter-in-law takes advantage of that. The book has been made into a couple of films. I can see it makes a good film, just it mixes a black humour and a man not quite ready to die yet. It also has a medical side throughout the book and ends with the reports of the nurse and doctor who treated him. Have you read this book ?

 

Vaim by Jon Fosse

~ winstonsdad ~ 1 Comment

Vaim by Jon Fosse

Norwegian fiction

Original title – Vaim

Translator – Damion Searls

Source – Subscription edition

It is always fun to get a new book from Jon Fosse. He is one of those writers in recent years whom I have come to love. His books are beautifully written, with recurring themes like duality, mirrors, existential themes, and motifs. This is his first book since he won the Nobel, and one always feels that one of two things can happen when a writer wins a prize as big as the Nobel. That’s why they struggle to match up to the earlier books, or they carry on, and I wondered which way Fosse would go. I don’t know why I was worried; this is another slice of what we have all come to like about his books, and the first in a new trilogy.

I can’t remember how many years, and of course it was a stupid idea to name the boat after Eline, but I’d probably heard that a boat should have a female name, and since the name Eline was the one that was constantly spinning around in my head, yes, the boat got named Eline, Eline the person had already been on my mind for several years, often to the point where it was hard to stop thinking about her, yes, and so that’s how the boat got named Eline, and there was a lot of talk going around about that name, yes, that’s what Elias told me, yes, apparently it was so bad that some people called me Eline instead of Jatgeir, there’s Eline, they said when they saw me, and when Elias told me that yes well I didn’t ask any more questions, that was just the way it was going to be on that subject, there was nothing I could do about it anyway, that’s how it was, and well it was nice that Elias dropped by to see me every now and then, he was the only person who did, and he was the only person I ever dropped by and visited either and now I can already see the bay there at Sund,

Elias and how Jatgeir called his boat after the girl he loved at a distance

This book is divided into three parts the first is about an older man Jatgeir we not told how old he is other than he has no family and his beard is greying and he has a boat called the Eline after a girl he had loved all his life and now in what from the way he talks is his lster life he has gone on a yearly trip to a city Bjorgvin from his small fishing village of Vaim. He has no real reason other than to fetch a spool of black thread and a needle to fix a button back on a shirt. When he ends up getting stung by the shopkeeper and her son over the thread, he goes back to his boat, then, after paying 250 krona for the thread, he heads out. This is where the story starts to get strange. He tells of the only other person to use the boat with him, Elias, and that he is now heading to Sund and to a smaller port for the night. He again visits the shop, purchases a second needle and thread, and is shocked to pay the same price. So that night, he hears a voice, and it is Eline, the girl he likes but never told, talking to him, and they elope as she has missed Vaim, his home, and where she grew up. Then, in part, we hear from Jatgeir’s friend Elais after Jatgeir has come back with Eline, and the two friends who often spent time together have not been together for a year and a day. This is a phrase Eline uses in the first part of the story. Then he is visited by a ghost, but who is the ghost? The third story loops back to Frank Eline’s husband on Sund and his story, but as ever, there are loops of names and phrases and boats with similar names in this tale, and it is very strange in the end

She called me Frank, from the first time we met she called me Frank – hi Frank, nice to see you, she said to me, or something like that, it was in Bjørgvin, it was at the restaurant called The Fowl where I’d gone with the two guys I fished with on the Elinor, the three of us did all kinds of fishing on that ship back then, and then it would sometimes happen that if we’d had a good catch and got a good price for the fish that we’d take a little trip to Bjørgvin, dock at one of the quays on The Wharf, spend a night there usually, getting in sometime in the afternoon and leaving at dawn or sometime the next morning

Frank or Olaf as he is meeting Eline for the first time in the third part of the book

This book is like a Möbius loop, as you have the feeling ELine is going around and around with these two men, like a moon orbiting two planets: as one pulls, she goes from Jatgeir to Frank, or is it Olaf who was Frank? Is he Olaf? Add to this: boats with similar names; both men have boats called Eline, and the other boat has a similar-sounding name as well. Then we have the recurrent mention of a year and a day in the book; it keeps cropping up, but at other times, time is fluid, and the events seem to have happened over a year, while in other passages, it is this year and a day that is said. Friendship love moen that are very quiet and a woman that likes to get her own way lead to a novella that twists in on itself and at times seems to repeat events and places in the first and last story, like the two men are ghosts that could have met at some point . This is a classic piece of Fosse, and I can’t wait to see where he takes this story, how many more twists and turns we get from the folk on Vaim.This is the best books I have read this year so far.

Advent by Gunnar Gunnarsson

~ winstonsdad ~ 9 Comments

Advent by Gunnar Gunnarsson

Icelandic fiction

Original title – Advent

Translator – Philip Roughton

Source – Personal copy

I saw this on a YouTube video a while ago. It was mentioned it was a novella, and with the Christmas theme, it seemed great as it is Advent time. The book is by an Icelandic writer who wrote more in Danish than Icelandic. Back then, when he was writing, this meant his writing had spread to the Nordic countries and Germany. He was up for the Nobel Prize many times. In fact, when Haldor Laxness won, there was a brief time it was considered that Gunnarsson could have shared the prize with him. So it is great to see a new translation of a book that was first published in English in the 40s.It also had an afterword by the great Jon Kalman Stefansson, one of my favourite all-time writers.

Benedikt sniffed the hay, lifted the sack: You thought more about Eitill’s belly than my old back when you filled this!

The farmer chuckled, and as they went in, he pinched the candle’s wick between two fingers. It’s most merciful to a candle not to allow it to languish uselessly, but rather, to revive it on occasion to a life of service – and this, of course, is most thrifty as well.

They went to the family room and there met the housewife and group of children, and the Benedikt who was a guest in the house had food set for him on a table leaf under the gable window: smoked meat straight out of the pot with potatoes in white sauce – good food for cold days, real Christmas food.

As he sets off getting ready

Advent takes us to the dark, cold winters of Iceland and a yearly activity that is done by a shepherd, Benedikt, for the last 27 years, he has headed up to the distant fields with the sheep. Had fed on during the summer to fetch back the last few that have got stranded and cut off there. He does this with his trust dog Leo and a ram called Etill (which made me smile, it brought back memories of a story of a family friend in Ireland that adopted a lamb that grew and thought it was a house pet, like a dog). This was how I imagined the ram part of the sheepdog. What we follow is this journey he has done many a year with his backpack supplies as they head from bothy to bothy in search of those last sheep. That is it, but the beauty is in the atmosphere.

Now the stray sheep in the mountains would surely be buried in snow, covered over by a snowy winter blanket before he could find them and bring them home. Because you really couldn’t hope that they would have the sense to seek the heights – the heights, where the wind blew hardest, but which were their only salvation when earth and sky stand as one. When wildness rages, you hardly dare hope.

And if they had indeed headed to the heights, they may just as well have frozen to death! But now he wanted to sleep. Or just lie there alone. A person shouldn’t share his anxieties with others. Everyone has enough of their own.

And now they slept in the farmhouse’s small family room, where heath and mountains met.

And outside, the storm raged, raged and razed; many a storm raged around the world, many things happened. For this was just a small recess of the world. Here, practically only the sky raged;

winter is hitting hard will he find the sheep !

I don’t have an adult Christmas book. One of the reasons I picked this is to add to the few things I like this time of year. I love the box of delights, I will flick through and every. A few years ago, I read through this Christmas kids’ book. Another go to is Conna Doyles tale The Blue Carbuncle A holmes story. Now I will be adding this to my winter reads, a tale that brings you to this yearly Advent adventure of fetching the lost sheep. It isn’t the journey so much as the way Gunnarsson builds the atmosphere; the three face the biting winds, snow, and the depths of the Icelandic winter. The country and weather is almost the fourth character in the book.  The snow almost falls off the page; you nearly need mittens to hold the pages as you read !! It is about existence and nature and so ,uch more as we see in Steffansson after word.If you have read him, you’ll like this short novella, and if you haven’t read him yet, what great writers have you yet to discover! Do you have a favourite Christmas tale?

The Splendor of Portugal by António Lobo Antunes

~ winstonsdad ~ 3 Comments

The Splendor of Portugal by António Lobo Antunes

Portuguese literature

Original title – O Esplendor de Portugal

Translator Rhett McNeil

Source – Personal copy

As I said in the last post, the run-up to the Nobel usually sees me reading a few Nobel hopefuls. With all that happened, I’m a little late reviewing them. I had thought it might be Atune’s year to win. He is the soul of his country’s past, a man who experienced much of what he writes about as a doctor who served in the Portuguese colonies in Africa. Having spent time in Angola in the seventies, this book looks back at that period, but as he does, he also observes the fall of other colonies in southern Africa, such as the Belgians in Congo. But what struck me as I read this is the parallel with events and feelings in Vietnam and the American experience in that war.

There’s something terrible in me. Sometimes at night the rustling of the sunflowers wakes me and, in the darkness of the bedroom, I feel my womb growing bigger with something that is neither a child, nor swelling, nor a tumor, nor illness, it’s some sort of scream that, instead of coming out of your mouth, comes out of your entire body and fills up the fields like the howling of dogs, and then I stop breathing, grab the headboard hard and a thousand stems of silence slowly float inside the mirrors, awaiting the dreadful clarity of morning. At such times I think I’m dead, surrounded by workers’ huts and cotton, my mother already dead, my husband already dead, their places at the table faded away, and now I live in mere rooms, empty rooms whose lights I turn on at dusk to disguise their absence. As a child, before we came back to Angola, I watched the lynching of the town lunatic in Nisa. Kids on the street were afraid of him, dogs ran away from him if he happened to pass by, he stole tanger-ines, eggs, flour, would install himself in front of the high altar and insult the Virgin, one day he flayed the belly of a calf from its neck to its groin, the animal walked into the town square tripping over its own entrails, the farmers from the nearby farm grabbed the lunatic

This long passaage of the mother about the things she had seen caught me !

What this book does so well is capture the whole effect of the fall of Angola through the prism of one family and their servants. The Alemida Family is led really by the Mother Isilda, a strong woman who is like a lot of people of her generation, proud of their settler life in Angola and what they have as a  life. This is set over two times in the late seventies as Angola starts to fall. How the family copes with this from Father Amadeu, who seems to have just accepted the fall and has sunk into the bottle. The children from the Oldest Carlos is he really Amadeu’s son, is something he feels, looking as though he may be mixed-race. Rui, the middle child, we see later on, is broken and in an institution after all that had happened, and he saw it when he was a child. Then, the youngest of the three children, Clarisse, is a wild, angry woman who uses her lovers to seek revenge on her family in a way. The book also sees them many years later, after the events in 1978 in Lisboa, as they gather in 1995 for a Christmas meal. The chapters alternate, and we see the events from all angles of the family.

for the most part, his epilepsy an earthworm gnawing holes in his head, my mother used to take him to the doctor in Malanje, when she returned home with him, even though shed bought a handkerchief for herself, you could tell shed been crying, she left Rui in the kitchen went upstairs and took ages to come down to the dinner table, her eyes swollen and her voice worn-out, piercing everything with her stare but not noticing anything at all, refusing to eat the soup, refusing to eat the fish, lying on her bed at night, you could hear her sobbing mixed with the thousands of other noises without origin or cause that inhabit the silence, I shook Clarisse and Clarisse

I liked the desciption of Rui epilepsy being like an earthworm through his brain !

I was reminded of this as I watched the film Apocalypse Now, which had similar themes to this book, especially in the new redux version, during the part where they spent time with the French plantation owner. Because in a way, this is Portugal’s Vietnam and the horrors that happened at the time, but also the way it has affected the country since. This is what I love about Atunes’s writing: it is dark but captures the horror of it all, and how it affected each member of the family. I have seen him described as Faulkner-like in his writing. For me, this has echoes of the polyphonic voices Faulkner had in something like As I Lay Dying. The same dark gothic feel. I was surprised by how they didn’t admit defeat until the troops were at the next plantation to theirs. It captures the dying embers of colonialism and the effects on this one family all those years later. Each member has reacted and coped in their own way with the horrors and the loss of that time. I always feel he has seen this firsthand in the seventies, as he was a doctor during the Angolan war. Have you read any books that make you feel the horrors and pain as though you were there? As for the Nobel, I hope he does win one day, but hell, he is in his mid-80s, get around to it, guys!

 

 

What’s left of the Night by Ersi Sotiropoulos

~ winstonsdad ~ 3 Comments

What’s left of the night by Ersi Sotiropoulos

Greek fiction

Original title – Ti ménei apó ti nýchta

Translator – Karen Emmerich

Source – Personal copy

I had hoped to do this review a few weeks ago, but life has got in the way as you all know. It was one of those books I try to read every year before the Nobel prize comes out, and you look down the list of favourites for the award, and there are always a couple of gaps, and Ersi Sotiropoulos is one she has been high up in the betting the last few years. She was made a favourite by the media in Greece the year Han Kang won, so if it comes down to male and female winners, she may be a favourite for next year. Anyway this had grabbed my attention as it is set in Paris a city I have yet to visit other than in fiction. I tend to travel so much in my reading, but I am someone who hasn’t had much in my own life. It also uses the poet C.P. Cavafy when he himself visited Paris at the end of a European tour before he became the great poet and was still young and discovering his sexuality, he had a rather mad three days in Paris.

His efforts to mend the breach kept them talking late into the night, and hed been the one to suggest that his brother rewrite an old poem and change its setting to the fire at the Bazar de la Charité, from which Paris was still reeling. The occasion for the earlier version had been a snippet of conversation a friend of John’s overheard at an art opening in Alexandria. A Greek society lady, the wife of a successful merchant-the friend hadn’t given her name-was gazing at a painting of a setting sun smeared with purples and reds, and leaned on the shoulder of the man beside her, a well-known figure in the Greek community, likewise married—the friend hadn’t given his name, either-and whispered with a heavy sigh: “‘d prefer to set in your arms.” He had found it insipid, the metaphor or allegory, whatever it was, but John laughed and jotted it down. He later wrote a poem about the bombing of Alexandria in 1882 and the conflagration that followed. In the poem, the genteel lady’s words served as an ironic counterpoint to the catastrophe and the vandalism that subsequently swept the city

He spent his life mainly in Alexandria he is ion Durrell book Alendria quartet

I haven’t read a lot of Cavafy;, he has been on my radar for years, so this made me want to learn more about him. We meet Cavafy, his brother John (Ionas), as they spend what in a way is a standard few days wandering around as most tourists do, visiting the sites and some of the grubby sites of Paris, from high art galleries to low-life Brothels, we see the pair, the carefree Cavafy and his slightly more sensible brother. What we have is a man wrestling with the life events around him, both in Paris and in his own country. A boy becoming a man, almost a man becoming a poet, a man discovering his sexual appetite. This is a tale of a man struggling to break free from the conformity of the world he lives in and move to a more modern world. There are some moments of sexual awakening with Cavafy discovering his desires that remind me of the way Joyce described some of his sexual scenes, those little moments of desire.

What time was it now? The conversation tired him. The armchair with the slit was diagonally across from him. How he would have liked to see that wavy hair tumbling down its back, slipping over the brocade fab-ric, to see those eyes, those lips again. But he really needed to get to the point, so he spoke of Moréass library, which while large had seemed to him rather lacking in depth, and about the book by that young writer, Marcel Proust, Anatole France’s protégé, which hed sought in vain, and hearing his voice sound more and more shallow and macabre, he stepped like a sleepwalker into Moréas’s office and approached the gallows of the desk, in the alcove illuminated by a single gas lamp, whose sloped ceiling made it look like a lair. Or perhaps a refuge, though the light was raw and cold … He went closer, then closer still.

I loved to think of a time when Proust was the hip writer on the scene

I liked this book; it is a dreamy tale of a few days in Paris with no real plot in it, more of an overview of a man discovering himself. Maybe a sort of superpowered Bildungsroman in a weekend, what happens when your eyes are open. When you get the chance to be more than you are, the chance to discover through art and experiences new ways of thinking and erotic thoughts. The transition from the Victorian age to the new century, and all that it would mean. This is that time before the dark clouds of World War I, the middle of the Belle Epoque in France, as he discovers this. I enjoyed this book. I feel that if I were more aware of his poetry, I would like to go back and re-read it. Which of her books should I read next? Have you read any others by her?

 

Nobel 2025 is going to László Krasznahorkai

~ winstonsdad ~ 2 Comments

The Nobel prize for Literature has just been announced and the winner is László Krasznahorkai. The Hungarian writer had been near the top of the betting for the last ten years. His best known book is Satantango, a slowly unwinding book in a backwater village as horror unfurls as a man comes to the town. I have reviewed the book and several other works by László Krasznahorkai over the past year. He is a complex writer whose work encompasses a multitude of ideas and threads, set across various parts of the world. The Nobel Committee said in the quote he was given it for

“for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”.

He has also made several films with Bela Tarr, based on his book Satantango, including one of them. His last book was Herscht 07769, which I have yet to review.

Nobel Literaure 2025

~ winstonsdad ~ 8 Comments

It is that time of year when we all think about who is going to win the Nobel Literature Prize. There is a feeling that in the last few years the prize has alternated between a female and a Male. This has been the case for the last dozen years. Now we can look at the place where winners have come from in rec net years if you count Abdulrzak Gurnah as an African writer. For me there is three options of where the winner could come from –

Latin America

Cesar Aira

The writer from Argentina writes short novellas, mostly set around his hometown. However, they encompass a diverse range of styles and topics. There are reviews on the blog of his books

Juan Gabriel Vasquez

He writes a mix of historical and literary fiction, mainly looking at Colombia’s

dark past. I have also reviewed some books from Vasquez 

Wildcard

Andres Neumann

I think it is a bit soon for Andres, but I loved Traveller of the Century by him and the other books I have read, he will be a winner one day

Spain

Enrique Vila Matas

A huge fan of Joyce, a clever writer who has written several novels. I have reviewed a number of his books. My personal favourite is Dublinesque an ode to Dublin, and Joyce uses Bloomsday as a framing device.

Javier Cercas

His non-fiction novel, The Anatomy of a Moment, of the attempted coup in Spain in the 80s, is a great read . His other books have history as a hook there are five books on the blog from him.

Manuel Rivas

A writer who should be better known, The carpenter’s pencil by him was a wonderful account of the Spanish Civil War.

Bernardo Axtaga

Another gem of a writer Obabakok, is an excellent insight into a village that has several books by him on the blog

Portugal

Antonio Lobo Antunes

If Angola is Portugals Vietnam, he has written a lot about the war there and the knock-on effect on his homeland and Angola itself. I have reviewed four of his books

So that is for the places

Then there is the tug of war between two writers from Hungary

Laszlo Krasznahorkai and Peter Nadas

Both have written epic books, Satantango and Parallel Stories.

Laszlo is maybe better known in the last few years.

Nadas for me is maybe the deserving winner, his books tackle his country’s past, and his huge memoir I have on my TBR

But I have reviewed books from both writers.

Wildcards

Ersi Sotiropoulos – I had hope to get to my review of her What’s left of the night.

Amitav Ghosh – He is high on one of the betting sites. I had read The Glass Palace 25 years ago, but I had not read anything else. Any thoughts on him

Fernando Arrabal, an actual wild card, is a much older Spanish writer, mostly of plays, but also 14 novels. I picked him as I have one of his novels and a writer that has maybe been lost over the last few years. Winning would be a shock. I’ll point to Ulrich Holbein, a writer who ran in the betting a decade ago or Bothos Strauss, two German writers.

What are your thoughts ?

What are your thoughts on a winners ?

The Class Reunion by Franz Werfel

~ winstonsdad ~ Leave a comment

The Class Reunion by Franz Werfel

Austrian fiction

Original title – Der Abituriententag

Translator Bernhard Rest

Source – Review copy

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

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

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

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

At his reunion

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

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

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

Weeks passed.

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

When talking about Adler at the reunion

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

 

Strait is the Gate by Andre Gide

~ winstonsdad ~ 5 Comments

Strait at the Gate by Andre Gide

French Fiction

Original title -La Porte Étroite

Translator Dorothy Bussy

Source – Personal Copy

I pondered where to start this year, and I looked. Among those writers, I have the most books from is Andre Gide, but it had been too long since I picked him up and read a book by him . Then I thought I hadn’t seen his books around as much as you would twenty years ago. He seemed the perfect first choice for this year of reading classics and modern classics.  Gide won the Nobel in 1947 and was a hugely influential writer. When he wrote openly gay, he challenged the religious view of the timehe was brought up in. a strict religious background and a lot of his writing is him kicking against this view this book is an example of that.

My whole life was decided by that moment: even to this day I cannot recall it without a pang of anguish. Doubtless I understood very imperfectly the cause of Alissa’s wretchedness, but I felt intensely that that wretchedness was far too strong for her little quivering soul, for her fragile body, shaken with sobs.

I remained standing beside her, while she remained on her knees. I could express nothing of the unfamiliar transport of my breast, but I pressed her head against my heart, and I pressed my lips to her forehead, while my whole soul came flooding through them. Drunken with love, with pity, with an indistinguishable mixture of enthusiasm, of self-sacrifice, of virtue, Iappealed to God with all my strength – I offered myself up to Him, unable to conceive that existence could have any other object than to shelter this child from fear, from evil, from life.

I knelt down at last, my whole being full of prayer. I gathered her to me; vaguely I heard her say:

“Jerome! They didn’t see you, did they? Oh! go away quickly. They mustn’t see you.’

Not long after he arricves this connection happens

What happens when cousins live under the same roof when they are just at that age when we notice the other sex? This is what happens in the book we see Aiissa and Jerome. When Jerome comes to live with Alissa and her family on the northern coast of France. These events mirrored some events in Gides’s life when he was this age and drawn to a family member. They are drawn to each other, but at the same time, Alissa’s mother is having an affair. Add to this, ALissa is being brought up in a strict religious education. It all becomes too much for other young girls, and she seeks to escape from human connection and the world through religion and turns towards being without love. The book follows the years after this and the fact that Alissa’s sister is actually in love with Jerome, but he never notices it until much later. She carries his torch for him. Life takes twists and turns, most told through letters and meetings over time.

Was I alone to feel the spur of emulation? I do not think that Alissa was touched by it, or that she did anything for my sake or for me, though all my efforts were only for her. Everything in her unaffected and artless soul was of the most natural beauty. Her virtue seemed like relaxation, so much there was in it of ease and grace. The gravity of her look was made charming by her childlike smile; I recall that gently and tenderly inquiring look, as she raised her eyes, and can understand how my uncle, in his distress, sought support and counsel and comfort from his elder daughter. In the summer that followed I often saw him talking to her. His grief had greatly aged him; he spoke little at meals, or sometimes displayed a kind of forced gaiety which was more painful than his silence.

He remained smoking in his study until the hour of the evening when Alissa would go to fetch him.

the aftermath of her mothers affair have a knock on effect

What I found odd about this when I read it was that it mirrored Evelyn Waugh’s religious guilt of unrequited love traits in his books. I also thought of those triangles of connections in Brideshead, with love drifting between family members over the years or unseen. I wonder if Waugh had read this book?  It captures those years when you can see a connection with distant family members or classmates just before you hit high school. Those first sowings of love can often run deep or, like here, cause a knock-on effect. He is showing the effect religion can have on people, the leprosy of it all. I can also see how Waugh and Gide are at different ends of the spectrum. Unrequited love and religion can give writers at opposite sides of the divide a lot to write about. I did look to see if they were connected and found Waugh hated Giude. Still, for me, the parallels within a family can be seen, especially the other sister’s love for Jerome echos the scenes in Brideshead where Charles and Julia are drawn close, but then the other sister turns to religion but also seems to have a flame for Charles. This shows how my mind can connect two books together in a way. What do you think? I think I will return to Gide and may have a call with Waugh before the year is out !!

The book against Death by Elias Canetti

~ winstonsdad ~ 2 Comments

The Book Against Death by Elias Canetti

Bulgarian literature

Original title – Das Buch gegen den Tod

Translator – Peter Filkins

Source – Subscription book

I should have got to Canetti sooner than this. I have Aut de Fe, his best-known novel, on my shelf and his non-fiction writing from his time in the blitz in London. Born in Bulgaria, he spent his first few years in Manchester. His mother then moved him back to central Europe. They eventually settled in Vienna. He spoke many languages and was the perfect example of the Jewish intellect in central Europe in those pre-war years. He escaped and was in London in the war. He wrote in German he started this book in the war years. A book that has years of him raging against death was abridged from over 20000 pages of notes he had on the subject and other thoughts he had collected together with the idea of the book against death. This came out after his death and was distilled to a few hundred pages.

15 June 1942

Five years ago today my mother died. Since then my world has turned inside out. To me it is as if it happened just yesterday. Have I really lived five years, and she knows nothing of it? I want to undo each screw of her coffin’s lid with my lips and haul her out. I know that she is dead. I know that she has rotted away. But I can never accept it as true. I want to bring her to life again. Where do I find parts of her? Mostly in my brothers and me. But that is not enough. I need to find every person whom she knew. I need to retrieve every word she ever said. I need to walk in her steps and smell the flowers she smelled, the great-grandchild of every blossom that she held up to her powerful nostrils. I need to piece back together the mirrors that once reflected her image. I want to know every syllable she could have possibly said in any language.

Where is her shadow? Where is her fury? I will loan her my breath. She should walk on my own two legs.

I fear living historians. If they’re dead, I read them gladly.

I ;loved the last line about historians

He talks early on in the book about how the book came to him five years after his mother’s death. He seemed to have lost both his parents when he was at a young age. In addition to the war, it is easy to see why young Elias raged so much against death. He deals with death from mass deaths he mentions Saddam Hussein a lot in this regard. Then, To The Death of Saints, which discusses how writers have tackled death, is a book that goes from here to there. What comes across is a humanist view of the battle against death and how he tackled it in his life. He talks about a fellow writer I love, Thomas Bernhard, and yes, he likes him as a writer, but isn’t he obsessed with death? This is a man wandering in his thoughts, getting snippets of his fellow writers as he tries to learn what dearth is by raging against it. He is very much the character Dylan Thomas had in mind when he said rage against the night!

Everyone asks me about Thomas Bernhard, everyone wants to know what I think of him. I praise him and explain what he’s about, I try to help others better understand him. I elevate him to my disciple, and naturally he is, and in a much deeper sense than someone like Iris Murdoch, who is always so pleasant and light, while underneath it all she has become a brilliant and amusing popular writer. She is not really a disciple of mine, because she is so obsessed with gender. However, Thomas Bernhard is obsessed with death.

On the other hand, in recent years he has come under the influence of another, which conceals my own, namely that of Beckett. Bernhard’s hypochondria makes him susceptible to Beckett. Like him he gives in to death, rather than opposing it. He sees it everywhere and passively damns all to it.

Therefore I think that now, because of his empowerment through Beckett, Bernhard is somewhat overrated, but overrated by the higher-ups: the Germans have found their own Beckett in him.

The entanglement of my influence on Bernhard with that of Beckett is curious and obvious. It’s a little too simple to really please me. So, I declare here, for myself, that I have defended him too much out of generosity. I am not entirely sure if it serves him.

His thought around Thomas Bernhard

I know that post-war, he struggled to write another novel. One wonders if all this collection and raging against dearth was his way of dealing with the horror of the war years and the wiping out of his central European Jewish world. This is maybe his momento mori. He never quite finished. Part of me would happily love to have seen the total 2000 pages that made up his vision of the project even if he never got to thin it down I imagine there are some real gems to be uncovered from one of Europe’s leading thinkers of the time. I hope to get Auto de Fe read next year. I like this. I had hoped for something, maybe a little more digression and drifting, as this is collected in the years from 1942 until his death. One wonders how he would collect them if he had got around to it? But this is an exciting view of one man’s fifty-year struggle to deal with death. Have you a favourite book about death?

 

Little Jewel by Patrick Modiano

~ winstonsdad ~ 11 Comments

Little Jewel by Patrick Modiano

French fiction

Original title – La Petite Bijou

Translator – Penny Hueston

Source – Personal copy

I just started on to another Modiano after reviewing Sleep of Memory the other day just as we went away, and that was it I read it whilst we were away I always take a pile of books, but we get an early start to get places when away have a full day wandering and buying bit places by the time we get back we just chatted and watch a bit of tv anyway this is a later Modiano written a couple of years before he won the Nobel prize ad is a new translator to me and also is from another publisher of his books Text. As ever, it is set in Paris.

IT MUST HAVE been about twelve years since anyone had called me Little Jewel. I found myself at Châtelet metro station at peak hour. I was in the crowd heading along the endless corridor on the moving walkway. There was a woman wearing a yellow coat. The colour of the coat caught my eye and I observed her from the back on the walkway. Then she headed down the corridor marked DIRECTION CHÂTEAU DE VINCENNES. Now we were all squashedagainst each other in the middle of the staircase, waiting for the barrier to open. She was standing next to me. I saw her face. She was so like my mother that I thought it must be her.

The opening lines of the book and Therese seeing the woman in the yellow coat

What happens when you lose your mother, then one day you are on a metro and think you see her in a yellow coat and decide you want to follow this woman? This is the heart of this story as we follow Little Jewel as she says no one had called her that since she was twelve so now nineteen, Therese has broken memories of her earlier life and when she follows this woman that may be her mother, those memories come to mind as we see her follow this woman everyday life. In the hope that she can patch together her own past.As is the woman, the countess that had died years earlier? What is her life, this mystery woman as ever we see place drift, and her memories and where we follow the woman mix this is one of the things he does so well place and feelings. He is a teen viewing the world, and as we see her trying to grasp what happened in the past to answer those questions, does she need the answers?

SOMETIME BEFORE THE evening when I thought 1 recognised my mother in the metro, I had met a person called Moreau or Badmaev at the Mattei bookshop on Boulevard de Clichy. It stayed open late. I was looking for a detective novel. At midnight, we were the only customers, and he recommended a title on the Noir list. Then we talked as wewalked together along the median strip down the boulevard. Occasionally, his voice had an odd intonation that made me think he was a foreigner. Later, he explained that Badmaev was the name of his father, whom he had hardly known. A Russian. But his mother was French. At that first meeting, he wrote his address on a piece of paper, under the name Moreau-Badmaev.

I like this looking for a detective novel is maybe a summing up of his style a novel looking to be a detective novel always .

As I said in the previous post on his bookmI feel Modiano has a bag of ideas that he uses, and he also has used some truth in this book it is based on an actual news story he had read, and it turns out he had edited the book when he found out from the actual Little Jewel that her mother was still alive. He always uses his hometown of Paris as the backdrop for this book. At the point where he started the book, I was reminded of the scene in Wim Wenders’s film until the end of the world where William Hurt’s character is seen by Solveig Donmartin’s character on a platform and follows him. Then I was reminded of what happens when a parent is reunited with a child in the film Secret and Lies. Those secrets and unanswered questions may sometimes be best left unsaid. Another Modiano trait is the lost person. This time, it is a mother, not a daughter. Then, how we remember the past is another trait of his works. Those fragments we remember are often real, but what happens when the past is blurred by the present. It is fair to say I loved this again. I think he is a writer I click with as a reader. He makes me want to wander aimlessly around Paris or sit in a cafe, watch everyone go past, and imagine them in a Modiano way. Do you have a writer you click with as a reader?

Winstons score – +A Another dive

Sleep of Memory by Patrick Modiano

~ winstonsdad ~ 5 Comments

Sleep of Memory by Patrick Modiano

French fiction

Original title –Souvenirs dormants

Translator – Mark Polizzotti

Source – personal copy

Am I the only one blogging-wise that you see you’re getting to a milestone? In this case, 1400 reviews on the blog are not wrong in 15 years of blogging, especially when the first few months I did very little, so I have averaged 100 books a year for the last 14 years. I have been trying to think of which book to pick, and then, in one of those weird things that happened, I ordered a few books from World of Books as I tried to move away from Amazon for my books. One of the publishers I love is Margellos World Republic of Letters, and I looked up books from them and ordered this book. Then this week looking for a podcast to listen to one morning whilst having a coffee out I listened to an old episode backlist on Patrick Modiano’s honeymoon. I then looked back and saw it had been a while SINCE I had reviewed him. I had reviewed Dora Bruder (search warrant) as before his noble win, it was the only book readily available, so I reviewed days before he won the Nopbel and then, in a couple of years after, reviewed a few more. I really liked his books so with the first wave of books post Nobel I reviewed a number nad then since not so many, which is a shame he is a writer I love his books have similar themes and subjects but are different enough to make them interesting. So this one of his most recent books has several things we expect from Modiano: a look back at war, Parents that are useless or have caused issues to the person in the book. Mysterious women. all are here.

Geneviève Dalame was always the first to ar-rive, and when I entered the café I would see her sitting at the same table, way in back, head bowed over an open book. She’d told me she slept barely four hours a night. She worked as a secretary at Polydor Studios, a bit farther down the boulevard, which was why we would meet in that café before she went to work. I had gotten to know her in an occult bookstore on Rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire. She was very interested in the occult. I was too. Not that I wanted to submit to a doctrine or become some guru’s dis-ciple, but because I liked mystery.

One of the women he knew over this time and had relationship with

The book follows a writer as he looks back at his early years, his teens to early twenties, and the woman he had met and had relations with over those years. Add to this, he is the son of a couple that had issues during the war years a nod to the trouble he had with his own parents as we see the odd collection of women he had meet over those years from someone interested in the occult. A woman floats through her life in a way an older woman, and maybe it is the death he may have been involved with one of the the ladies. Like in his other book, the exact facts of these women blend and drift as he remembers the crumbs left behind of his memory of each of them in vary amounts from the family friends he met when young to an almost Mrs Robinson-like lady several years older than himself, that he says he remembers very little of, but one thinks there maybe more. It is all set on the backdrop of post-war Paris, the awakening that happened in the sixties and eventually led to the events of 1968.

My memory of Madame Hubersen is also rather vague. A brunette of about thirty with regular features and bobbed hair. She used to take us to dinner near her building, in one of those streets perpendicular to Avenue Foch-on the left side of the avenue, facing away from the Arc de Triomphe. And here I am, no longer afraid to provide topographical details. I tell myself that this is all so far in the past that it’s covered by what the law calls amnesty. We would go on foot from her house to the restaurant that winter, a winter that was as harsh as the ones before it, next to which the winters of today seem rather mild; a winter like the ones I knew in the Haute-Savoie

Mike Scott has a song from his early years of TH Waterboys about his girlfriends. This is Modiano’s take on that, Jean. The narrator, as ever, is a thinly veiled Modiano; he, unlike Ernaux, mines his life, but this isn’t auto-fiction. This is Modiano fiction. He rips apart his life almost like Burroughs did with his prose. Modiano cuts out the events of his life, adds themes, and then switches them back together so we have a mysterious collection of Exs. One feels these are maybe exs but made to seem more than they were. As always, parents and the past war years are added. Through a little mystery about death and Paris, we have a Modiano book unique a feeling of over books but unique at the same time. He is the master of the crumbs of our lives. Those polaroids of the mind we all have fade in a way, and the actual taking of the event is lost in time sometimes. I think this is a fitting book to be the 1400 book I have loved the Nopbel prize, I am a huge fan of french fiction and Modiano is a writer I want to read all his books over time to build the full picture of this man and his life. Do you have a writer from whom you want to read all the books?

Winston’s score – A – has set me back into Modiano World, a Paris of the post-war years, remembered in many ways and with many women over time.

 

Yell,Sam, If you still can by Maylis Besserie

~ winstonsdad ~ 2 Comments

Yell, Sam, If you still can by Maylis Besserie

French fiction

Original title – Le Tiers Temps

Translator – Cliona Ni Riordâin

Source – Personal copy

I am back on with another book for WOman in translation month. I picked this up in Norwich on my recent holiday it is a book I hadn’t seen mentioned. It is also from a new publisher to me, Lilliput Press, and a writer I wasn’t that aware of. She had won the Goncourt prize for a debut novel. This book is the first of a trio of novels she is writing about literary connections between France and Ireland. The second book looks at the later life of the poet W B Yeats, and then a book about Francis Bacon’s Nanny. The other two books have already been translated by the same press. This book came out two years ago. Maylis Besserie lives in Bordeaux, and she works as a producer for a French cultural radio station. His connection to Irelan is the summers she was sent to Ireland by her family as a teen to learn English.

I could have spent happy days at Guinness’s, that radiant, flourishing brewery. Happy and hoppy. Alas, the memories come flooding back now that I’m finished. Now that I no longer know how to write. That I no longer write. Almost not at all.

I used to drink with Joyce too. In gorgeous glasses. We’d drink at nightfall, when the beasts return to the byre, huge quantities of white Fendant de Sion. Joyce converted everyone to his tipple – which reminded him of the urine of an archduchess, he used to say. Joyce converted everyone. Joyce was a real archduchess.

Guiness and drinking in the past with James Joyce

The book follows the last days of the Irish writer Samuel Beckett as he is in a nursing home, Le tiers Temps in Paris as we follow his life there, it is like he has become a character in one of his plays stuck in this nursing home the book is told by Samuel as we see his day to day life in the nursing home this has breaks asw e see his nursing reports the meds he was on and how he is doing viewed by the staff. The book sees a man looking back on his life and his complex relationship with his mother, May. Then, his time typing out Joyce’s Finnegans wakes up when he works for Joyce. Then, there are nods at his day-to-day life in the nursing home and the characters in his plays. It is waiting to die and, looking back, a great writer near the end haunted by his past and those ideas that have always been in his works of fiction.

May was a nurse. I could have taken advantage of a moment’s fatigue on the way back from a night shift in the wee small hours. I could have put an end to her suffering and to mine. No, to have done things properly I would have had to have killed her before my birth. Or in childbirth, giving birth to me, why not? That would have been ideal. A lucky birth – night and day. Of course, the best solution of all would have been if my grandmother hadn’t been born either. We would all have been nipped in the bud. That would have been the simplest solution. But chronologically, I admit, it’s a fucking mess.

One pieces of Beckett thinking of his late mother May

I enjoyed this. I like a book with an inventive idea of the connection between France and Ireland with writers and thinkers. Whether it is enough to last over the three books. For me, this worked. I don’t know Beckett as well as I maybe should, but I did watch a lot of his plays years ago, as channel four in the UK did a lot of them. But it worked; it is an old man looking back on his life and remembering working alongside Joyce as they drank, and he was typing out Finnegans wake for the great man and his mother, May. She was a significant influence on who he was as a person. Then, his nursing home has some characters he could have written himself. Are they his characters, or is that how he viewed the world? The next book in the series sees Yeats returning as a ghost in Paris, where he was buried. I think the Irish translator worked as it gave an Irish feel to the English. If that makes sense, well, it felt that way to me. Have you read any of the other books or this one by this writer? If you like quirky tales of famous writers, this is for you.

Winstons’ score – B solid novel about the last days of one of the greatest writers as he sees his world in a Paris nursing home.