Tag: NOBEL LIT

Yell,Sam, If you still can by Maylis Besserie

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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.

The Land at The End of the World by Antonio Lobo Antunes

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The Land at the End of The World by Antonio Lobo Antunes

Portuguese fiction

Original title – Os Cús de Judas

Translator – Margaret Jull Costa

Source – Personal copy

I was talking earlier on Twitter about Antunes, and I a quote from him when he found out Saramago had won the Nobel prize; he said it had gone to the wrong Portuguese writer. It was a comment about Saramago and how his books are good but not ones that you think about for weeks after finishing them. For me, that is what Anutnes has. He has the richness of Faulkner, like someone else, like Ernaux. He mines his own and his own country’s dark past. he is one of those writers that once you have read, you will continue reading his book linger in your mind for weeks after you put them down. I have Frank Wynne to thank. He suggested in the early years of this blog that he should be a writer and I should try. Antunes, like the character in this book, spent time in the 70s as a doctor during the war in Angola. This is drawn from what he saw when he was there.

No. im no in any pain, athough my head does ache a lite butit’s nothing, a feeling, a touch of dizziness. The monotonous buzz of talk, the mingled smells, the way faces shift and rearrange themselves in the act of speaking, make me giddy: I don’t know anyone here, I rarely frequent these exotic temples where people no longer sacrifice the entrails of animals but their own livers, these modern catacombs given a kind of sacrilegious religious feel by the votive lamps of strange lights and the prayerful murmur of conversation, and where the barman is the golden calf, motionless behind the high altar of the bars, surrounded by the deacons or habitués, who raise a ritual glass of black velvet in his honor. Thymol crosses stand in for crucifixes, we fast at Easter in order to lower our cholesterol levels, on Sundays our Holy Communion wafers take the form of detox vitamins, we confess our infidelities to our group analyst, and our penance is his monthly bill: as you se, nothing has changed, except that now we consider ourselves to be atheists because, instead of beating our breast, the doctor does this for us with the end of his stethoscope.

One of his conversations rich and about the church over there

The book’s original title, as we are told in the Intro by the Translator Jull Costa, is a Portuguese term that means back and beyond, or as many of you may know, I love the word hinterland for this. It follows a doctor, and you are his interlocutor, his sounding board for what he sees whilst he is surviving the horrors of the war as he meets a woman in a bar. What we get is a snippet-like view of those war years it like e has little bits he is slowly letting out as he talks to her but the horror of the things he saw. In the field hospital, going and find young men blown up by mines and such the conditions they had to great the men in these are long sentences that draw you into his world of blood and war. This is one man’s account of a brutal and eye-opening war to him and everyone involved.

I got married, you see, four months before I left for Angola, it was on a sunny August afternoon, and my memory of the occasion is confused but intense, the sound of the organ, the flowers on the altar, and the family’s tears lent an improbably gentle Buñuelesque touch, and after a few brief weekend encounters, during which we made urgent love, inventing a kind of desperate tenderness full of the anxiety of imminent separation, we said good-bye in the rain, at the dockside, not crying but clinging to each other like orphans.And now, six thousand miles away, my daughter, the fruit of my sperm, whose slow subterranean growth beneath the skin of her mother’s belly I did not witness, suddenly burst into the communications hut, among newspaper cuttings and calendars bearing pictures of naked actresses

His marriage like many on there way to war

This is hard to describe as it is just a man talking about his time it drifts it has a rich, dark nature to his prose it has a little bit of someone like Laszlo Krasznahorkai or Bernhard, a bitterness to his words for someone from Portugal there involvement in Angola is like the US in Vietnam a war that was always doomed for all involved so this is like if Bela Tarr had done a cross between Mash and Apocplaypse now but in Angola, it has the blood and gutters the doctors see but also the pointlessness of what they are doing in that way it also has a nod towards the like of Beckett. One man trip into the hell of war and the aftermath on him as he sits at a bar with a woman and spills his guts as he tells about the blood and guts he had seen and the pointless nature of a war run by those who never take part in the actual war himself. I was reminded at points of the pointless nature of the war we see in the fourth series of Blackadder and the figures behind the lines directing the bloodshed. Have you read any of his books or this book for me this is maybe the best of his books I have read so far. There are three books by him on the blog, and I have several others to read. Hope you discovered him this month. For me, his is a potential Nobel winner

Winston score – A Doctor’s Horrors of war retold in a bar

 

 

Manual of Painting and Calligraphy by Jose Saramago

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Manual of Painting and Calligraphy by Jose Saramago

Portuguese fiction

Original title –  Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia

Translator – Giovanni Ponteiro

Source – Library edition

I’m having a slow Spanish / Portuguese  Lit month this year, but I aim to review mainly books from Portugal, which is the second from Portugal. This is also from the best-know Writer from Portugal, the late Jose Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize. I picked this from the library because it was an earlier book I have reviewed a later novel and the earlier novel by him Skylight that came out a few years ago in English for the first time. It also came not long after the fall of the fascist regime in Portugal that had reigned the country for many years. The book looks at the later part of the Salazar regime and the use of the Painter and Industrialist as the book ends those hit by the government.

It was not until fifteen days later that S. explained why he wanted this portrait, so much at variance with his nature and outlook as a man of his time. I never ask my clients in this blunt manner why they decided to have their portrait painted. Were I to do so, I should give the impression of having little esteem for the work which provides me with a living. I must proceed (as I have always done) as if a portrait in oils were the confirmation of a life, its culmination and moment of triumph, and therefore accept the inevitable fact that success is the prerogative of the chosen few. To ask would be to question the right of these chosen souls to have their portrait painted, when this privilege is clearly theirs by right and because of the large sum of money they are paying and the sumptuous surroundings in which they display the finished work, which they alone appreciate according to how they value themselves.

Talking about the painting

The book follows an artist called H, who is commissioned to do a portrait of an Industrialist called just S. There is a fun line early on in the book when he passes comments on the art and how S looks in real life. While doing this, he also beds the great man, the secretary of S, while doing the painting. All this is told by H a man in the Bourgeois world of the regime just keeping in there by his art, which isn’t the best, but he dreams of being like the great artists of the world as he talks about their paintings, this saw a lot of looking up art like the man with grey eyes.All this is because he is having his fling with Olga. Alongside this, a close friend of his is arrested by the secret police and is in prison. He meets and has another fling with his friend’s sister. He talks about the pictures he has seen as he works on this second portrait of the great S. Another interesting was a list late on of great Portuguese novels and then trying to find them in English and discovering there were only a couple available to us in English.

In the presence of the couple from Lapa (reminiscent of certain characters in Portuguese novels: Os Fidalgos da Casa Mourisca by Júlio Dinis, A Morgadinha de Val-flor by Pinheiro Chagas, Os Teles de Albergaria by Carlos Malheiro Dias, As Donas dos Tempos Idos by Caetano Beirão, O Barão de Lavos by Arnaldo Gama, Os Maias by Eça de Queiroz and O Senhordo Paço de Ninães by Camilo Castelo Branco) the chameleon did not change its skin.

Boring but this was the liost of portuguese novels with just a few availlable in English

I like this book steeped in art. I think this is Saramago making a personal voyage around the art that has touched him as a writer. It is a very visual book but a book full of relationships that are passionate in nature but brief, firey sex and games. He fleshes out H as an artist with this. He is a man who has that artistic charisma, if not maybe the talent that always goes with it. It also has the backdrop of a secret police coming and taking artists and intellectuals.The latter bitter and of the Salazar regimes is burning in the background. the creative process seen through H eyes but also a man struggling with the desire to be like those great portrait artist he has seen over the years. Have you a favourite book by Saramago? Where next do I want to leave his big ones to review last. Have you a favourite book by him,

Winston score – B exciting look at an artist and what inspires him in the later years of the Salazar regime?sa

The Following Story by Cees Nooteboom

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The Following Story by Cees Nooteboom

Dutch fiction

Original title – Het volgende verhaal

Translator – Ina Rilke

Source – Personal copy

I saw this book on Both Karen’s and Simon’s blog recently. I had brought this copy a couple years ago second-hand. I have long been a fan of Cees, he did an interview many years ago for the blog. Over the time of the blog, I have reviewed five other books by Cees over the years. He is ne of my favourite writers a man that mix classics, his love of travel and places and most of all being Dutch into his fiction. I have read an earlier book by him that was brought out by Machlehose a few years ago in the Dutch mountains. But this book that came out thirty years ago brought him to a wider speaking audience.In fact, maybe this book is best summed up by what he said when I asked him about Dutch literature. He said Dutch literature may be an acquired taste; we are a metropolitan country, very densely populated, forced by size, inclination and the necessity of trade to be international, though lately rather inward looking. There is not enough land to serve as a counterweight to the cities. That makes for a rather special society. The language is spoken by 21 million sometimes conceited citizens, with opinions about practically everything, in an eternal dialogue with each other.

I had woken up with the ridiculous feeling that I might be dead, but whether I was actually dead, or had been dead, or vice versa, I could not ascertain. Death, I had learned, was nothingness, and if that was the state you were in, as I had also learned, all deliberation ceased. So that was not the state I was in, since I was still full of musings, thoughts, memories. And evidently I was still somewhere: pretty soon it would also become apparent that I could walk, look around, eat (the sweetish mother’s-milk-and-honey taste of those little buns the Portuguese have for breakfast lingered in my mouth for hours). And I was able to pay with real money. This last, as far as I was concerned, was the most convincing evidence of all. You wake up in a room in which you did not go to bed, but your wallet is lying as it should on a chair beside your bed. That I was in Portugal I already knew, though I had gone to bed in Amsterdam as usual

The clue to the book is here in the opening to the book.

This book focuses on one Dutchman, a classic teacher of Latin and Greek. Herman Mussert. But what happens is that he falls asleep in Amsterdam. Still, then a few seconds later, he is awake at the end of Europe in Lisbon; when he awakes in a room many years earlier, he had an affair with a fellow teacher’s wife, a knock-on effect in his life that led to him losing his job and taking a career in later life as a travel writer. As Mussert drifts through Lisbon he rcalls the events of his life. As he does, he bumps into a form student. At this point, he starts to resound the following story, which is the story Cees has told us, so we have a book that is Mobius loop end where it started or ending where it started, so to speak.

I must get out of this room! Which room? This one here, this room in Lisbon. Socrates is scared, Di Strabo doesn’t dare show his face, Herman Mussert doesn’t know whether he has been registered at the reception.

“Who’s that funny-looking guy?” “Which room is he in?” “Have you entered his name?”

Nothing of the sort happens. I gather up my green Michelin, my map of Lisbon. Everything was to hand, naturally. Travellers’ cheques, escudos in my wallet, someone loves me, ipsa sibi virtus praemium.* And the fear was unfounded, for the radiant nymph to whom I give my key envelops me with the brilliance of her eyes and says : “Bom dia, Doctor Mussert.” August, the imperial month. The pale blue remnants of the wisteria, the shaded patio, the stone steps descending, the same doorman stewed in twenty years of slowly passing time.

As he awakes and finds his away around Lisbon.

This is a masterpiece of two seconds of a man’s life as this story is the last moments glimpsed in a dying man’s eye, and in Cee’s style, it has his love of travel of the classical world of romance and is very Dutch as well. What I loved about this book is that it has so many ideas and strands in it as we follow those last moments of the life of this classic teacher and his life and events. And things that were important and memorable in his life, from that affair to his subjects to the travel writing. This is all squeezed into an espresso-like shot of a book that, like a coil, starts as it ends, and we follow those last moments. I was reminded of the film Pulp Fiction, as this is how my neurodiverse mind works. Hold on with me on this one, as that film ends with John Travolta still alive as, in reality, he is dead, and this book is like that. The hints Herman is dead and this is just a blink of an eye in a dying man. Have you read this book or any other by Cees?  I always think he would make a good Nobel winner.

Winston’s score – a little gem of a book that ciils and twists as a story but in your mind after you have read it.

The Rainbow By Yasunari Kawabata

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The Rainbow By Yasunari Kawabata

Japanese literature

Original title- 虹いくたび (Niji ikutabi)

Translated by Haydn Trowell

Source -personal copy

In January, I read far more Japanese novels than I could review. This is a new translation from the Nobel prize-winning writer Yasunari Kawabata. He was the first writer from Japan to win the Nobel prize. He was given the prize for his narrative mastery, and his great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind. Is what the Nobel committee said about him as a writer. I have only reviewed one other book by him, and that was Snow Country. So when I saw this new translation of one of his works coming out from Penguin, I made sure I got a copy when I saw one. The tale of the two sisters in this book, having the same father and different mothers in postwar Japan, appealed to me.

Momoko hesitated, afraid of accidentally revealing the secret behind her new hairstyle. With her sister at home, it had become suddenly difficult for her to leave for her rendezvous.

Her emotions getting the better of her, Momoko’s voice turned brash. “Asako. Now that you’re back from Kyoto, there’s something you want to ask Father, isn’t there?” she asked, turning around. “I know. There’s no need to hide it.

It was a lie, wasn’t it, when you said you were going to see a newly married friend?”

“It wasn’t a lie.”

“Oh? So it wasn’t a lie. You went to see your friend, but that wasn’t your main reason for going, was it?”

Asako hung her head.

“Why don’t you tell me?” Momoko paused, softening her tone. “And did you find this younger sister of ours in Kyoto?” Asako stared back, taken by surprise.

The two sisters and the mention of the third out there

The book focuses on the two half-sisters living with the widow’s father. Momoko had lost her mother to suicide, and her m, mother never married after her father got her pregnant. Then n her half-sister Asako had lost her to illness. So, the pair both ended up with the architect’s father. But when Asako gathers from her father, there may even be a third sister, the daughter of a Gheisa in Koyto. In a way, the three of them are reflections of the world they are in post-war Japan. The struggles with Tradition and the future are creeping in as the traditional buildings are overshadowed by the modern city. The quest for this third sister in a way is the thread that runs through this book. The book captures the same world we see in OZus films. In some ways, the sisters could be from a film by the master himself. The two sister clash as Momoko has a boyfriend in many ways she is the most modern and this is a story of family secrets and sibling relationships.Also, how the world they have all known is moving on so quickly.

Since the end of the war, countless villas in the resort town of Atami—the properties of former princes, of former nobles, and of former industrialists—had been transformed into inns and hotels.

The Camellia House was one such villa, having belonged to a former prince who had held the honorary title of Fleet Admiral.

Asako’s father, Mizuhara Tsuneo, pointed out the window of the car as they passed by the entrance. “Do you see those two villas? They don’t really look like inns, do they? That one belonged to a prince, and the one over there belonged to a marquis. The marquis was descended from royalty, but I heard he was wounded during the war. His leg, you see.

Now they say he’s been sentenced to forced labor as a war criminal.”

The world ios changing as the villas change and become other things

I was a fan of Snow Country, and I connected with this book as well. I am a massive fan of post-war novels, wherever they may be, but especially in Japan, which in many ways saw the most significant shift in its world. This is from the same time as Tokyo’s story is set in a way. In fact, the way they all talk is similar to Momoko, who, in a way, reminds me of the son in Tokyo story caught up in the fast-moving modern world as the others are all trailing behind her and all lament the world they have seen gone more. In a way we see how Kawabata feared how quick his country was moving on this was serialised in 1950/52 a year before Tokyo story but his fear is the same as in the fear of the traditional Japan that the younger sister seems so far away from. I like his sparse still, and the world he described that is now gone, you feel. Have you read his books? Where would you go next in his book?

Winston’s score – +B Solid look at post-war Japan through two sisters and their father.

A girl’s story by Annie Earnaux

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A Girl’s Story by Annie Ernaux

French non-fiction

Original title – Mémoire de fille

Translator – Alison L Strayer

Source – Library book

I intend to work through all of Ernaux’s books over time this is the 5th book by her I will have reviewed on the blog. Which is just a fraction of her works with a number to still be translated I can see me reviewing her books for the next few years. She won the Nobel and it was deserved she is a great advocate of auto-fiction memoir, few writers have taken apart their lives like she has over time. I last saw her go back over an affair in her late middle age and now we find her as a young girl in the fifties becoming a woman a summer at a summer camp and those years we all had when we find who we are sexually as people. But also how fragile we can be in those years.

She is disconcerted by the mingling of the sexes, unprepared for simple camaraderie between boys and girls employed to do the same job. The situation is unfamiliar.Basically, she only knows how to talk to boys with the kind of verbal sparring, at once enticing and derisive, that girls use when a group of boys follows them in the streets – defending themselves while leading them on.At the meeting that is held before the children’s arrival, she glances around at the fifteen-odd boys and finds that none correspond to her dream of falling passionately in love.

A different time but they do mingle later on

This is a book that seems she could have only written years later it takes her own life back to one summer as a young girl on the verge of sexual awakening as she spent a summer at summer camping Normandy. But she also tackles her own problems she had at that time with her own Body image, which led to her having Bulima as it is called now this is a looking back at things and how we maybe understand more of events 60 years later than we did at the time. How other events that summer other encounters scared her for life and affected her life more than she knew at the time this a writer looking back after the Me Too movement at events many years ago in a new light. I love how she does this, she also teases us with gems about the books she was reading at the time I will be going back at some point and looking at the books she mentions. I have a couple I think she mentions Sagan and Gide both of whom I have books from. She captures the difference between males and females at a certain age back then and desire and how it sometimes went too far and how the other half viewed her and other women last the time.

The place, too, is real. In my memory, it has gradually metamorphosed into a kind of castle, a cross between Les Sablonnières in Le Grand Meaulnes and the palace in Last Year at Marienbad. I tried to find it again in the autumn of 1995 while driving home from Saint-Malo, without success. I was forced to park in the high street of Sand ask a tobacconist how to get to the sanatorium, and when she gazed back at me blankly, as if she had never heard of it, I added, ‘The old medico-educational institute, I believe.’ I only discovered today on the Internet that the place was once an abbey, founded in the Middle Ages. Demolished, rebuilt, and transformed over the centuries. Cannot be visited except on national heritage days.

I could picture this place so well from this one small passage .

I think this is a book she had to wait to write it is filled with looks back at that summer and that time. I imagine it seems very different than it did at the time and how much values have changed but also the dynamics between men and women this is a world just after the war and just at the start lof teenagers being free in a way that hadn’t been for years. As I say seems to be part of the ME TOO movement it came out in 2016 just as people started to reveal things that had happened and like Annie as she recounts events from that summer and sees them in a new light how male violence is always there and how it can affect a lifetime from the first sexual encounter but also other events sexually that summer with an older man but this is a French trade on those events in a way an Annie look at those events many years ago, How much she hated herself now as she was then is eye-opening. She doesn’t have to go to confession because she writes them and we can read them !! Have you read this book by Ernaux ?

Winstons score – B solid piece of her childhood years growing up in a different time to now.

 

The River Between

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The River Between by Ngūgī wa Thiong’o

Kenyan fiction

Source – Personal Copy

I keep thinking every year would be Thiong’o’s year to win the Nobel Literature Prize, but as the years go by, you think time is running short for him to win the prize. So I decided it was time to review another of his books. I recently bought a Penguin edition of another of his books, so it seemed time to get to this one. It has been on my shelves for years and is one from the African writer series, and it felt time to review it. I know Lisa had reviewed it years ago. It is a timely novel I think whenever you read it the themes within the book are still present not just in Africa but elsewhere in the world where modernity and tradition class and history and the present class This is the tale of kids turning into adults and the rituals around them but is also a tale of the modern and ancient traditions clashing

Soon Waiyaki joined again in the daily rhythm of life in the village. He went out to look after cattle; organized raids, went out hunting. He joined in the dances for the young boys and felt happy. Days came and went; and still it was the same life.

His yes retained a strong and resolute look. Some people said that there was something evil in their glitter. But his father must have had the same sort of eyes; in a body becoming distorted with wrinkles, his eyes remained alive and youthful.

One evening, a few wecks after his second birth, Waiyaki was called by his father, who liked holding talks in his thingira, the man’s hut. Waiyaki entered very quietly, because he was always uneasy in the presence of his father.

Wayaki soon became his father favourite

The plot follows two villages and the different paths they take, but it is a more complex and twisted story than That at the heart of it is three sons who are sent by the father to study at the local school it soon becomes clear the youngest of these sons Waiyaki is not just a great student but a natural at s]keeping the peace and sorting out fights there Father sees himself as the saviour his boys learn at the Christian school. In the next village, there is a young girl coming of age, and in line with Tradition, she is due to undergo Female circumcision or FGM (Female Genital Mutilation), a come act in many tribes, and the title alludes to some of the tales a river and hills etc the traditional tales used to make this barbaric act seem part of a tradition. But as this Girl dies as the procedure goes wrong, it sets ripples through their villages and pits past and presents modern ideas against Ancient traditions. Add to this, an exlict love affair that Waiyaki gets involved in, and we have a melting pot of Christian tribal history and how to move a tribe into the modern world and two ideas of what is the best way as those on both sides split and the Gikuyu’s tribe future is at stake.

The sacrifices went hand in hand with preparations for the coming circumcision. Everywhere candidates for the initiation were gathering. They went from house to house, singing and dancing the ritual songs, the same that had been sung from the old times, when Demi were on the land.

Waiyaki was one of the candidates. He was now a young man with strong, straight limbs. He did not like the dances very much, mainly because he could not do them as well as his fellow candidates, who had been practising them for years.After all, it was soon after his second birth that he had gone to Siriana, and he had lived there for all those years, although he normally came home during the holidays. Waiyaki was often surprised at his father, who in some ways seemed to defy age.His voice, however, thin and tremulous, betrayed him. Waiyaki often remembered why he was sent to Siriana.

He is due to be circumcisied as well but he also knows the teaching from his school

This, for me is when Thiong’o is at his best as a writer, when he talks about the world of he knows the tribe he is part of. This is the time when the world he lived in was in Flux as the past traditions changed as the Western world and Christianity crept into the world he knows this is written in the mid-60s not long after Kenya gained independence and the struggle in the book is the struggle in the country how to keep tradition and move forward. It also tackles FGM, a practice that has been banned for just a decade in Kenya. It tackles, like many books of the time, the struggle to hold on to the past and move forward into the Modern world. I like this as it seemed like a book written from the perspective of someone who had seen the struggles and the coming-of-age ceremonies within the tribe. Have you read any books from Thiong’o? do you think he will win the Nobel ?

Winston score – B solid book about the turmoil and changes in Kenya in the mid 60s

Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux

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Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux

French literature

Original title – Se perdre

Translator Alison L. Strayer

Source – Review copy

I read this last year and never got around to reviewing it, so I am a recent convert to Audiobooks. I have been signed up to audible for a few months so when I saw this was on there, I decided to list, and I was so pleased I did I’m not sure who the narrator is without going back (Tavia Gilbert, it is ) her voice just suit the book and will forever be th3e voice I will have in my head for Annie Ernaux. The book follows an affair she had with an official from the Russian Embassy. This is the diary of the time. She had also written about it in another book at the time, and this is much later, and she decides it is time to let her innermost thoughts at the time be published.

The outside world is almost totally absent from these pages. To this day, I continue to feel it was more important to record daily thoughts and actions, the things which constitute the novel oflife that a love affair is (details from the socks he did not remove while making love to his desire to die at the wheel of his car), rather than the current events of the period, which can always be checked in archives.

The world for that year is just her and him in this book

There affair starts when she is sent on her first trip to Russia this is the age of Gorbachov, she meets on of the Russian Officials on the trip she calls him S, and that is how she refers to him throughout the book. She says he is 36, but he looks like he is 30, slim and tall and makes her feel petite when she is next to him they sleep on one of the last nights of the trip. He then tells her he is going to France to be part of the Russian Embassy in Paris and thus begins a full-flung affair. Early on, he tells her that he is only there for about a year, and the initial period they meet is before his wife has come to Paris to be with him afternoons of passion with S, but as they grow closer, she remembers her previous affairs and relationship and how drawn, she is to S, and then she has so many doubts about him. Why hasn’t he rung as the year goes on, these doubts grow. She meets the wife and sees them together as she is often invited to the embassy for this event. As that day when he is gone grows nearer, her thoughts of him does he love her is this just passion for the things they have done? She has let him do things no one else had ever done. This is the innermost workings of the affair, being that woman waiting for the call waiting for the afternoon of passion here and there.

 Song by Edith Piaf : Mon dieu , laissez le-moi , encore un peu, un jour, deux jours, un mois, le temps de sadorer et de souffrir…(Oh god, leave him with me,just a little longer, one day,two days,a month…give us time to worship each other and to suffer)

The longer I live, the more I abandon myself to love. The illness and death of my mother revealed the strength of my need for the other. When I say, ‘Ilove you to S, lam amused to hear him reply, ‘Thank you!’ which is not so very far from ‘Thank you, think nothing ofit! And he says to me with happiness and pride, You’ll see my wife! As for me, I’m the writer, the foreigner, the whore the free woman too. I’m not the ‘good woman, whom one possesses and displays, the one who gives consolation. I can’t console anyone.

I loved the Edith Piaf translation the longing in those lyrics

I said I had read this, but it wasn’t till I got the voice I was so drawn into her worries and fears I just got them that thing of an affair or relationship at a distance. It connected me to my long-distance relationship with a German girl I had many years ago, the counting of days and the thoughts that can intrude on your mind when you have time apart and when the mind thinks about the past and what the other person is doing she captures that so well in her thoughts and the openness about her sexual acts with S and how he made her feel just jump off the page. I am so pleased I left this and went back when I finally got the voice of the writer it just made her prose jump off the page so much I have ordered another two of her books from the library. Do you find it easier to get the writer’s voice when reading?I often struggle to get the voice and find when I have the voice of a particular writer I fly through their books.

Winston score – A – a year of passion and worry and the feeling it will end so heartfelt in her words.

The Shining by Jon Fosse

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The Shining by Jon Fosse

Norweigan fiction

Original title – Kvitleik

Translator – Damion Searls

Source – Personal copy on kindle

Well, this is the first book after Fosse won the Nobel. I did a short post on the day he won the prize. I had reviewed three books from him before the Prize, the first of his septology, Aliss in the Fire and Scenes from a childhoood. I had read the other two parts of Septology and as I often do, hadn’t got to review them. As I said in my last post, my dreams of blogging more often fall short, but I am getting there, so this isn’t me moaning it is just a fact of life I read more than I can possibly ever review, but yes, this is my sixth book by Jon Fosse and to be truthful, I loved this it is a short book 48 pages in the paperback so in comparison to his other books this is actually probably the favourite I have read from him. Although at some point, I will go back and read septology in a single bite. Anyway, I was going to wait for this, and then I listened to the Mookse and the Gripes podcast with the translator about Jon Fosse, and I just had to get it so for quickness, I got it on the Kindle as it is about the length I can read on kindle.

What am I talking about, I thought. There’s the forest in front of me, it’s just a forest, I thought. All right then, this sudden urge to drive off somewhere had brought me to a for-est. And there was another way of talking, according to which something, something or an-other, led, whatever that might mean, to something else, yes, something else. I peered into the forest in front of me. Forest. Yes.Trees right next to one another, pines, pine trees.

He questions his action heading down the path

The book is in the mind of a man who has, for some reason, headed down a forest track, turning off the main road. He is in his car, and then he gets stuck on the path. As he does, he thinks about the points he could have turned back. Then he initially stays in the car warm and just waits for someone to come. Then he decides to head into the forest it is turning to night but he feels to drawn into the forest. He then starts to see a glow in the distance. What is it as he is drawn to the light, the light seems to come closer and closer. But what are these lights?He seems drawn to the lights and maybe is in a moment of his life is he alive, or is this his soul drifting you are never quite sure if this is real or imagined. Then it moves on when he reaches the lights, but that would spoil a 48-page book to say more it is wonderfully evocative.

No reason at all. And so why did I drive onto the forest road then. It was purely by accident, maybe. Pure chance.Yes,you probably couldn’t call it anything else.

But chance, what’s that anyway.No, I can’t start in with that kind of silly thinking. It never goes anywhere. And what I have to do now is get my car free, yes, just that. And then I have to try to turn it around. But that.Yes it’s because I didn’t pass anywhere I could turn the car around, if I had then of course I would’ve turned around, a long time ago, because the forest road is pretty much the most boring road to drive on that you can imagine.

He is maybe in a altered state I wondered at times or has something alse happened to him ?

I loved the short nature of this after the septology it is like a  palate cleanser in a meal, it is full of Fosse but intense and just a mouthful of him. I love the otherworldly ness of the lights, and the events after the lights appear in the forest. The forest has long been a place for things happening but also the mind to wander from the tropical Jungle of Wilson Harris and the way spirits and the forest can talk to you. Through things like Twin Peaks which is what I thought of her I had to wonder if a log lady would turnup there is also a sense of the spiritual of been between worlds what has happened to draw him down the forest road and why did the car break down? Why wander off these are all questions unanswered about our narrators actions. Have you read this the first of his books to come out after his Nobel win this year.

Winstons score – A an Espresso shot of Fosse

Autumn Quail by Naguib Mahfouz

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Autumn Quail by Naguib Mahfouz

Egyptian literature

Original title –  السمان والخريف

Translator – Roger Allen and revised by John Rodenbeck

Source – personal copy

When I looked at the list of books that came out in 1962, I did a deep dive and this is one that caught my eye as I’ve had the Cario trilogy sitting on my shelves for years, and I have reviewed another book by the Nobel winning Mahfouz a few years ago for the 1077 club. It also reminds me I have the Cario trilogy sitting there to read at some point. Mahfouz was the voice of his nation he wrote about the changes in his country over the 20th century. He rarely talks about his private life, marrying late in middle age, and he rarely travelled this book harks back to the Nasser regime and to 1952 written ten years after that. Even the main character in the book, ISA is an early casualty of the new regime.

But what was going on in Cairo?

There was no car to take him anywhere. In the station square, people were walking in every direction, anger on their faces, heaping curses on the British. It was cold. The sky was hidden by ominous clouds; the wind was still and lifeless. Shops were closed as if for mourning, and thick smoke rose along on the skyline.

What was going on in Cairo?

Cautiously, he began to walk, then beckoned to a man coming toward him. “What’s going on in town?” he asked.

“The last day’s come,” was the bewildered reply.

“What do you mean? Protest demonstrations?”

“Fire and destruction,” the man yelled, moving on.

From the seonc pages as Nasser moves in on Cario

 

 

Isa was a civil servant in the old regime, and he was climbing the ladder, but how was he doing that? before Nasser took over from the monarchy in Egypt. The book opens as Cario is burning as Nasser sweeps to power  He is, as he says many times in the book he is caught between the two, looking back but knowing things had to change but not wanting to be part of that. So he loses his job as he likes to take bribes and is wiped out by the change in regime. He refuses to tow the new line and is, in a way, an outcast. Alongside this, he is losing his fiance Salwa to his cousin Hasan a man who is part of the new Nasser regime. This is also like by her family as they’d p[refer her to Marry the Man on the Rise. He marries a woman who is unable to give him a child, but they have money, and this means he can live in the past in a way that he then meets and sleeps with a prostitute and gets her pregnant. This is a busy work

Hasan Ali ad-Dabbagh came in beaming. Of medium height, well built, with a square face and deep-lined features, he had a broad chin, and his clear intelligent eyes and sharp-pointed nose were very distinctive. He kissed his aunt’s hand, shook Isa’s warmly without managing to lessen the latter’s feelings of annoyance, then sat down beside him and asked for some tea. He was almost the same age as Isa but was still in the fifth grade, whereas politics had managed to push Isa up to the second. Though he had a bachelor’s degree in com-merce, the only work he’d been able to find was with the draft board.

“How are you?” Isa’s mother asked.

“I’m fine,” Hasan replied, “and my mother and sister are well too.”

Hssan maybe he embodies the new ideals ?

I feel this is a book that is maybe the exception to what we say about books. It could have been 100 pages longer. There is so much crammed in the story of Isa, but there is also so much chatting and commentary of the events of that time and how it affected people like Isa when Nasser swept to power. There is a sense of Mahfouz wanting to say so much about those years that followed and that maybe makes the later part of the book seem to drift the plot and drive we see early on as the violence sweeps Cario has died down and the book maybe tries to do to much in a short space if that makes sense. I loved the first third of this book. It really works, but then he seems to get distracted by talking about what happened rather than mixing it up with the plot. He is best when the plot and what is being said move; the later part of this felt like him unloading his feelings in the characters. But This is one of three books he wrote about those years I must try The Others at some point. Have you read Mahfouz? This is the first of my Club1962 choices

Winston’s score – is B great start, but the later section of the book is just too much about talking about what happened in a way.

Heartland by Wilson Harris

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Heartland by WIlson Harris

Guyanese fiction

Source – personal copy

I have been listening to the 99 novels section of the Anthony Burgess podcast which covers the 99 books that Burgess had chosen as his favourite post world war 2 novels, and this is one of the books he had picked for that list from the Guyanese writer Sir Wilson Harris a writer that really should be better known as he is one of the most modern and experimental writers to have come out of the Caribbean 9 I do question is it Caribbean or actually a Latin American country maybe as it is the only English speaking country in Latin America. Anyway, Wilson Haris trained as a surveyed and had spent much time in the Heartland of Guyana, which comprises dense jungles and massive wide rivers. This scenery is at the heart of this book. Harris wrote many books about his homeland, and some of the characters in this book appeared in his other books.

Stevenson’s speculative frontiers collapsed with a rude shout from Kaiser and he turned abruptly. The man was here at last. Stevenson could never stop being curious every time he saw Kaiser, as if he wanted to confirm that this must be the strangest, most haunting or haunted creation of all things and beings he visualized. It was not merely the blackness of Kaiser’s skin, within whose flesh appeared incandescent eyes lit as from the density of coal.
It was the ghostly ash of the garments he wore; a breath of wind would surely have dispersed them, the most attenuated vest and shorts Stevenson had ever seen, pluckedin the nick of time, he was inclineds to swear, from some ancient fire.

One of the characters that seem ghost leike at times

We meet a prominent figure from Guyana’s life Zechariah Stevenson who is in disgrace as he is accused of defrauding people. But this son of a wealthy family as ever with people of money has been sent here into the Heartland of Guyana where the vast jungle and to watch over there, his family gets the money from the timber the forest in the jungle. The people he meets in the dense jungle just appear. Like Kasier, a shopkeeper and then Da Silva, he is a pork knocker, as they call gold prospectors here.  We often wonder if are they real, especially when he comes across the dead Da Silva, a long-dead body. This is a place where the present, future and past all seem to drift, and a man is thrown into this untamed world as his grip on the world around him starts to slip as he is caught in the fever dreams of the jungle and the vast rivers of Guyana as they drift through time.

Stevenson scrambled out of the river and grabbed his towel, holding it against his body as if he felt alien eyes upon his nakedness. The head of the morning sun had risen above a fist of trees across the river. And the events of yesterday seemed almost indistinguishable from a watchful dream in the past night. Nevertheless, they possessed enduring substance for him since on his return to the clearing on the river bank at Upper Kamaria – after recovering Kaiser’s line – he had opened the depot and counted three or four boxes labelled DaSilva. Kaiser had not been indulging in an idle trick or fanciful token after all.

Later on as he drifts between the resal and unreal at times

This is a hard book to describe plot-wise as it is more about place and atmosphere, that feeling of being caught in the dense unrelenting jungle and how it can affect from Heart of Darkness onwards we have seen the madness of being alone in the jungle can bring on someone. Even Stevenson’s name is a nod towards the great Robert Louis Stephenson, another man tainted and, in the end, died in a jungle environment. This is a land Harris knew well. He had worked in the Heartlands to look at the viability of taming the rivers to make Hydroelectricity of them `(my Dad has worked at these hydro plants from around Niagara, where the US side uses some machines still from the 50s ). For me, this book has more connections to the Latin American cannon with its use of magical realism (well, MAGIC HORROR REALISM ) , fever dreams, ghosts and also the use of the jungle as almost another character to the book reminds me of the great number of books I have read in recent years from Latin American writers like Samanta Schweblin or Mariana Enriquez. I wonder what Harris’s standing is like in Latin America ? is it just the influence of place, or is he well-known there? Have you Read Harris?

Winston’s score – A – one of the greatest writers can’t believe I’ve just discovered him will be reading him again !

The Atom Station by Halldór Laxness

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The Atom Station by Halldór Laxness

Icelandic fiction

Original Title – Atómstöðin

Translator – Magnu Magnusson

Source – Personal copy

This is the second book by Laxness I have reviewed I had wanted to review this particular book next and it wasn’t till I moved I found it after much searching in my old room it had got at the bottom of a pile in a place I hadn’t thought it would be. So I had wanted to read this next as I had read it was a satire and had been the book that got him a large following in America as it follows the US efforts to try and get a base built in Iceland, and it was based on actual events at the time in those post-war years just before the cold war came and Russia and the US are both eyeing up Iceland as somewhere to base. The story uses a simple girl from the very north of Iceland that has come to work in Reykjavik for a Politician in his house as a maid. We see the world of the Capital through her eyes.

My trunk had already been moved in, as well as my harmo-nium. I had bought the latter that same day with all the money 1 had ever owned in my life, and it had still not been enough.My room was on the attic floor, two storeys up; I was allowed to practise whenever I had the time, except when there were visitors. My job was to keep the house clean, get the children off to school, help the cook-housekeeper and serve at table.The house was much more perfect than the sort of gilt-bordered Christmas-card Heaven which a crooked-nosed woman would sacrifice everything to attain in the next world: it was an all-electric house, with machines being plugged in and started up all day long; there was no such thing as a fire; heat came from hot springs underground, and the glowing embers in the fireplace were made of glass.

Her first night in the House

Ulgas is a simple Country girl hard-working, and she is very principal, so when she gets a job to be made in the House of a Politician, she takes it, but she initially feels out of place in their world. Her north country background means she is seen as a country girl by the other servants in the Household, but she settles then starts to want to learn to play the Organ on her days off. Alongside this, in the House, they are things afoot. The US Ambassador is trying to get the government to let them build a Nuclear base in Iceland. This shows that even in the North, there are corrupt politicians. As we see, the Prime minister has taken money to do this. Ulga unloads this with the people she meets at Organ practice, a mixture of free thinkers and communists. At the same time, she also has an affair with a constable and then with Bei, the head of the House she works at. The book sees this world of corruption and self-centredness through the eyes of a girl that grew up with the Saga as her world, a country different from the one she is now in.

“I am quite sure you will not commit any such lechery, my friend,” said the organist. “Suicide – masturbation multiplied by itself! You who are a god! No, now you must be joking.”I have seen all the pictures from Buchenwald,” said Benjamin. “It is impossible to be a poet any longer. The emotions stand still and will not heed the helm after you have studied the pictures of those emaciated bodies; and those dead gaping mouths. The love life of the trout, the rose glowing on the heath, dichterliebe, it’s all over. Fini. Slutt.

Tristram and Isolde are dead. They died in Buchenwald. And the nightingale has lost its voice because we have lost our ears, our ears are dead, our ears died in Buchenwald. And now nothing less than suicide will do any more, the square of onanism.

Sh has her eyes opening in the fre thinking chat at the Organists house

This book was sparked by actual events in the post-war era. As the two superpowers looked at Iceland, it captured how the US wanted a foothold in the Island like they had on Greenland with their Bases. There was also a way of moving the Nuclear missiles near Russia. The book was considered weak when it was written, but it was the first time he had written about Reykjavik and shows how it is becoming a more urban city than it was. The characters are thinly veiled accounts of actual politicians at the time, which made me laugh as they could have all easily been Tories the way they went on with bribes and affairs. It is a fun look at events in that era and the use of the Ulga to cover the events, but also, seeing how living in the city has changed her as a person is an exciting angle over time. This leaves me with five more books on my shelves to Review from Laxness four I have to read and Independent People, which I had read just before I started the blog. I think I will read the recent Archipelago Wayward Heros to read next, maybe later this year. Have you a favourite book from Laxness ? or Iceland?

Winston’s score -(A) it’s excellent to see politicians have always been the same corrupt types as we have now.

Wonderful, Wonderful Times by Elfriede Jelinek

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Wonderful, Wonderful Times by Elfriede Jelinek

Austrian fiction

Original title – Die Ausgesperrten

Translator – Michael Hulse

Source – Personal copy

I had read this for GermaN Lit Month but I just didn’t get to it in time. This is the second book I had read from the Austrian Nobel lit winner Elfriede Jelinek she is one of those Nobel winners that over time has fade that said I had partly read a non-fiction work the Fitzcarraldo had brought out earlier this year I will finish that at some point. When describing her win the Nobel committee said of her writing. “musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power. This is certainly a book that deals with the cliches of society. It first came out in 1980 and is of that time the period in the post war years it is set in the fifties.

ONE NIGHT AT the end of the fifties an assault is committed in the Vienna municipal park. The following persons all grab hold of one solitary man out walking.

Rainer Maria Witkowski and his twin sister Anna Witkowski, Sophie Pachhofen (formerly von Pachhofen), and Hans Sepp. Rainer Maria Witkowski was named after Rainer Maria Rilke. All of them are about eighteen, Hans Sepp is a year or so older than the others, though he too is without a trace of maturity. Of the two girls, Anna is the more ferocious, which can be seen in the fact that she pays most attention to the face of the subject. Particular courage is required if you are to scratch a man’s face while he is looking full in your own (though he cannot see much since it is dark) or indeed try to scratch his eyes out. For the eyes are the mirror of the soul and ought to remain unscathed if at all possible. Otherwise, people will suppose the soul is done for.

The opening lines open with them grabbing a man

The book happens to deal with the dark side of Austrian society at the time the undercurrents of the post war era. it is the late fifties when a group of four teens attack a man. The four teens are Rainer and Anne who are twins. Their father was in the SS during the war and is now disabled. Hans whose mother is a communist and Sophie an athletic girl(maybe a symbol in some way of Aryanism ?). The book shows the inner working of these teens. Who are just vile and very violent commit crimes? These angst teens are all that happened in Austria before they were born. Now they have been chewed up by the country they are in and have been spat out that they are the dark side of teens. This is a bleak work of teen violence ce lust sex and the past blended together and spat out on the page. Dark kids have a weird connection and love between them. The kids are maybe a symbol for the violence of the past they are like a champagne bottle shaken constantly after the war that undercurrent of the war, nazism, regrets, teen lust and hormones all shaken in the bottle to that single act.

The twins’ unhappiness makes them superior because they have shaken off the shackles and do what they want. Rainer says: people’s lives are predetermined in some way or other, but not mine, I’m superior to them on account of my Will. On the other hand, the individual is free if he wants to be. Rainer avails himself of that freedom, graciously: here he is, being awarded his accreditation certificate. There is a certain heroism in him. In this lonely youth. Lonely in the sense that no one sees him, which halves the value of even the prettiest heroism. Still, at least Rainer can look himself in the face when he’s alone with his mirror.

The twins are the heart off the book here you see the way they look at the world.

There is something about those writers of the post-war era of Austria Bernhard and her with Jelinek. They dived in and tore out the dark heart of the post-war and the past that lingered underneath th country and here it is kids of the rail this is like Holden Caulfield if he had grown up in Germany in love with his sister. This book is dark and complex I saw it describe as Molasses there is something about just the thick rich nature of her writing dark and vile in it tones but wonderfully written. I recently read High Wind in Jamaica another book about kids going off the rails as a group like here it shows how kids can be seen as violent for no reason. Then book like The dinner by Herman Kick another book about  kids and violence shows the after math of the act of violence this is a book that connect the two a sort of inner working of the kids caught in the violent acts they are doing. I wish it hadn’t been so long between reading Jelinek’s books she is a unique writer. Have you read any books by Jelinek ?

Winstons score – A the post war embers still burn in the kids of a SS officer.

What have you left behind ? by Bushra AL-Maqtari

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What Have You Left behind ? by Bushra AL-Maqtari

Yemeni Non-fiction

Original title –

Translator Sawad Hussain

Source – Review copy

I got sent this from the folks at Fitzcarraldo a press I have loved since they started there is rarely a press that you have never read a book you didn’t like in fact more than that their books have been among my favourite reads of each year for the last few years . So when I got this and on the back cover I saw the words that it was inspired by her reading of Svetlana Alexievich. Bushra Al Maqtari is a novelist and writer she first came to the fore in 2012 with her novel behind the sun and then her writing has become more nonfiction. This book lifted the lid on the personal effect of the long-running and under-report civil war in Yemen.

My brother is still tormented, he can’t sleep, he can’t forget. He’s preoccupied with finding treatment for his injured son. I carry my brother’s sorrows on my back, I enter the house and the memories come rushing back.

I remember my brother’s children and his wife, their laughter, the noise they would make, our beautiful life together. Damn the Coalition and whoever came with them to our country, damn every side that has murdered Yemeni people. They’re all just that – murderers. Who will bring back Malak, Malakat, Mohammed and Asma to my brother? Who? Tell me who? Who?

No one. No one cares about what happened to us.

Ahmad Abdel Hameed Sayf

At 5.40 p.m. on Thursday, 26 January 2017, the Arab Coalition aeroplanes targeted Ahmad’s brother’s house, Fahmi Abdel Hameed Sayf in al-Qutay in the governorate of al-Hu-daydab. His brother’s wife Asma Abdel Qader Yassin Sharaf (30 years old) was killed, and her children: Mohammed Fahmi

The last paragraph and what happened to Ahmad and his family in the opening narrative.

In her Nobel-winning speech, Svetlana Alexievich described how Flaubert called himself a Human Pen from his writing but Alexievich described herself as a human ear. That is what we have here with Busrha’s narratives they are a polyphonic collection of voices of the outfacing of the v=civin=il war a collection of people killed by the war. The book opens with Ahmed’s account of a bomb landing on his brother’s house meaning the loss of his sister-in-law his niece and his nephews. This is how the book is formed each chapter an account and each account ends with when the attack or killing happened where and who died. under the mango tree AL Ahamad says how he dreams of those he has lost all the time. Mothers lose their children as they are targeted and killed by Militia How the loss of children changes mothers, This is a chorus of loss and the ripple effect of this the immediate damage and loss but also the long-term trauma and loss to the society.

I lived in a country where dying was taught to us from childhood. We were taught death. We were told that human beings exist in order to give everything they have, to burn out, to sacrifice themselves. We were taught to love people with weapons. Had I grown up in a different country, I couldn’t have traveled this path. Evil is cruel, you have to be inoculated against it. We grew up among executioners and victims. Even if our parents lived in fear and didn’t tell us everything – and more often than not they told us nothing – the very air of our life was poisoned. Evil kept a watchful eye on us. Svetlana Alexievich

I feel this maybe capture so well what Bushra Al-Maqtari is trying to capture in this book the horror of war is known but the personal effect isn’t the families or those we loved we have lost adds to a  more powerful narrative voice a chorus of loss. You can see the nod to a book like Chernobyl the way you grab the attention of the reader is a polyphonic collection of experiences a patchwork of the war the gaps are those doing the killing these are this effect but the killer of the forgotten war. What we see is how it we deal with the human cost of war and the loss of the fabric of society. I was reminded of how the late great Dasa Drndric had described to me that the Italian version of her book had a rip out section of the book list of list Jews oink the war in Italy she’d pass it round and have people rip out names of the knew as the did the book fell apart like society itself with the loss of all these lives and voices.  This is their civil war is tearing their world apart the how=rror and cost of the war in Yemen haven’t been reported enough it has taken a strong voice like Bushra to be an activist and voice for this war and its effect. Have you a favourite book about war that uses first hand accounts?

Winstons score – +A another home run for Fitzcarraldo