Tag: Portuguese lit

The Splendor of Portugal by António Lobo Antunes

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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!

 

 

The implacable order of things by José Luis Peixoto

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The implacable order of things by José Luis Peixoto

Portuguese fiction

Original title – Nenhum Olar

translator – Richard Zenith

Source – Personal copy

I hate it when the UK and US have different titles. I started to read this book, which I thought was another book by the Portuguese writer José Luis Peixoto that I had missed. I have a copy of Piano Cemetery somewhere; I hope it got misplaced in the move. I read Blank Gaze 13 years ago and had meant to read another book by him. He was at the time he wrote Blank Gaze, the youngest winner of the Jose Saramago book prize. But I hadn’t checked that this was a different book, so when I was about halfway through the book, I thought some of this sounded familiar, and then I found out it was Blank Gaze, the book I had read several years ago. But the US title is different anyway, so I continued to see if it was a book I still liked. And to review it 13 years later.

TO THE RIGHT OF OLD GABRIEL sat the two brothers with their parallel gazes, fixed on abstract, unfocused points. Their gazes were equal but didn’t see the same thing. They were the same gaze, seeing two different things. During the months when the oil press was idle, it was the brothers who looked after it. Always together, always at each other’s side, they had aged simultane-ously: they had the same curve in the back, the same halting gait, and, although they didn’t know it, the very same number of white hairs on their heads. Many more than seventy years had passed since the clear August morning when together they emerged from their mother’s womb, ripping her up inside. Old people told the story, which they’d heard from their parents, of how the mother, as soon as the umbilical cords were cut, looked and saw that they were Siamese twins. She died, without a word, a few minutes later. It was considered to be a terrible tragedy

The twins are born

The book, like yesterday’s book, is set in a village. This time, we move to the southern tip of Portugal to an unnamed town, and some of the locals, as we follow a few decades in this village, all come into contact with the devil. Firstly, a shepherd, Jose, works on the estate of the Mount of Olives, attending to the sheep. His wife is sleeping with a giant that is bullying Jose, all this is told to him by the devil. The book has an episodic feel and is filled with its share of odd characters, conjoined twins, inseparable but only connected at the tip of a finger. Fall in love with a cook who talks via her food, which she makes into art. This is an odd world. Add to that a blind prostitute to the mix a shop called Judas, and there is a religious overtones in this world of the village.

The sun of late September was almost as hot as the sun of August, but the season for sitting in the doorway at night had passed, and Moisés and the cook stopped seeing each other. But Moisés was the kind of man who won’t give up, and one day he thought: it has to be. The next day he again thought: it has to be.
The day after that he again thought: it has to be. And two weeks later he contrived to meet the cook at the door to the grocer’s.
They got married on a Saturday, the date of which they forgot.
Since the cook’s house was larger, it was the two brothers who moved. They loaded three wagons with chests and junk. They rented out their place for not very much money, but it helped pay expenses.

About the twin and the lover the cook.

I am not a bigger rereader, but this was a book I loved the first time around. It was one I loved in the early years of this blog. It stood up, and I liked how I noticed more of the religious overtones in the book.It has an episodic feel that shows the village around the Mount of Olives is a place that feels it is drifting on the edge of the Abyss with the devil causing trouble. This is a sunnier cousin to Satantango. This has nods to religious world names shared with figures from the bible. The devil tempts folks and tells folks home truths. I found it poetic again but this time it seemed a little darker than the first read. There is a menacing feeling behind this world. They are stuck in a sort of world that is dying but don’t know it as we see how, over time, things are changing as we watch it over a couple of generations. Have you ever read a book as the title differs from the UK edition especially after 13 years. I will get to Piano Cemetery, his other book in English. This has been wonderfully translated by Richard Zenith. Have you read any books by Peixoto ?

Winstons score – -A dark world on the abyss and the devil is hanging around ?

Joesph Walser’s machine by Gonçalo M. Tavares

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Joesph Walser’s machine by Gonçalo M Tavares

Portuguese Literature

Orignal title -A Máquina de Joseph Walser

Translator – Rhett McNeil

Source – personal copy

I am going to try and focus mainly on Portuguese writing this Spanish/Portuguese lit month. As for me, I felt it has been a country in Europe that, as a blog, I haven’t focused on or reviewed enough books from over the time I have blogged. But also, it is a country that isn’t mentioned much. I got a couple of novels from Gonçalo M Tavares. When I first came across him, I read Jerusalem, another book from this series of books he called his Kingdom series. They are all set in an unnamed country of vaguely Germanic country. His fellow Portuguese writer Jose Saramago said he would win the Nobel prize. His books have inspired plays art, videos and operas. I didn’t get around to reviewing Jerusalem, but I will get it reviewed at some point, as his other books are hard to get hold of now.

“No one wears shoes like that anymore.”

How many times had Joseph Walser heard that phrase in the last two weeks? What was going on? He had worn these shoes, or similar ones, for years. No one had ever bothered him about them before. No one had ever before cared about his shoes in the least, neither their color nor shape. Why now?

“I don’t care about your shoes or your ideas, do you understand, my dear Walser? What I told you yesterday isn’t important to me, but it is extremely important to you. Can you see the difference?

Can you see the difference that exists between the two of us?

Between my shoes and your shoes, between my ideas and your ideas? I’m not interested in your shoes and I’m not interested in your ideas. But you’re interested in my ideas; that’s the difference between us, you see

His shoes this made me smile as for me they always say oh your laces is loose as it is alway undone

The book opens with the lines that he was a strange man. That strange man was the lead character of the novel Joseph Walser a man living in an unnamed city. He is a man of routine and habits. But also the style of Joesph’s shoes, which are an older style. He is a man that stands out in a crowd. But what happens when the city he lives in is suddenly invaded? How will this man of routine be? As the world around him dissolves and the people and world he knows to start to change, he just wants to follow the routine of working on his machine and then, in the evening, play a game with people he knows. The chapters see little by little how he copes as one more thing is thrown in his way and in the way of his routine. What happens when a character stepping out of a lowry is stuck in a war?

Joseph Walser went out every Saturday night to Fluzst M.s house, where he played dice for low-stakes bets with three other work-mates. The five men all worked at the same factory. They were all low-level employees and made average wages. Over the years their passion for games of chance had brought them together. There was no exceptional friendship among them, but they rarely missed a Saturday. The amounts being bet in the game could be considered small, when compared with other underground games around the city, but in proportion to their wages the amounts were large. All five men were married; for the players, their wives were the most difficult thing about their gambling. There wasn’t a single wife who didn’t complain about her husband losing a certain amount of money in the game.

More of his routiune life here

Now, I have read this through my eyes. I am going through the process of a late diagnosis of Autism, having done several tests and scored high in them. So autism is in my mind at the moment, and when I read about Joesph Walser, it was like, yes, this guy is so autistic his life is led by a routine, but it seeing how he copes, which he does, but you can always see he may be on the verge of melting down as the world he knows collapse around him. This is a nod to how that war machine interferes with a man-machine in Joseph’s daily routine. Add to that his collection the hyperfocus a lot of autistic people have. Outside as ever, I connect with the book I am reading. This is just how I read. Connections over the distance between different worlds and lives give me the greatest pleasure. Still, that thread that runs between the fictional world and mine really connects me with literature in translation, which is, of course, my area of hyperfocus.I imagined Waslser as a lowry-like matchstick man marching through his city to his machine every day, and how would that connect to the horror of an invasion happening? Have you read any books from Tavares?

Winston’s Score B is a vital book with an exciting but mundane character’s reaction when his routine world is smashed and changed. Need to read more of this series.

Spanish Portuguese lit month the 2024 Edition

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JULY 2024 

Well, I hadn’t intended to do a Spanish Portuguese lit month this year. I started it with Richard of the much-missed blog Caravana de recuerdos .We started it as Spanish lit month in 2010 on and off, a few years after it was expanded to include literature translated from Portuguese.So when Jacqui asked if I was I took a few seconds and a look at the TBR and said yes it would be great to do it again this July. I know it is short notice, and I am thinking of two things: review a book from Charco Press as they have brought out so many great books translated from Spanish and Portuguese from around Latin America. Then, the last week of July, I would love people to review a book by the Portuguese writer Antonio Lobo Antunes.

Here is the list of his books from Wiki; most of them have been translated to English. His name is often on the list of potential Nobel winners. He looks at the heart of his country’s history and dark past, warts and all.

  • Memória de Elefante (1979). Elephant’s Memory
  • Os Cus de Judas (1979). Translated by Elizabeth Lowe as South of Nowhere (1983); and later by Margaret Jull Costa as The Land at the End of the World (2011).
  • Conhecimento do Inferno (1980). Knowledge of Hell, trans. Clifford E. Landers (2008).
  • Explicação dos Pássaros (1981). An Explanation of the Birds, trans. Richard Zenith (1991).
  • Fado Alexandrino (1983). Fado Alexandrino, trans. Gregory Rabassa (1990).
  • Auto dos Danados (1985). Act of the Damned, trans. Richard Zenith (1993).
  • As Naus (1988). The Return of the Caravels, trans. Gregory Rabassa (2003).
  • Tratado das Paixões da Alma (1990). Treatise on the Passions of the Heart, first section translated by Richard Zenith (1994).
  • A Ordem Natural das Coisas (1992). The Natural Order of Things, trans. Richard Zenith (2001).
  • A Morte de Carlos Gardel (1994). The Death of Carlos Gardel
  • O Manual dos Inquisidores (1996). The Inquisitors’ Manual, trans. Richard Zenith (2004).
  • O Esplendor de Portugal (1997). The Splendor of Portugal, trans. Rhett McNeil (2011).
  • Exortação aos Crocodilos (1999). Warning to the Crocodiles, trans. Karen Sotelino (2021).
  • Não Entres Tão Depressa Nessa Noite Escura (2000). Don’t Enter That Dark Night So Fast
  • Que Farei Quando Tudo Arde? (2001). What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire?, trans. Gregory Rabassa (2008).
  • Boa Tarde às Coisas Aqui em Baixo (2003). Good Evening to the Things From Here Below
  • Eu Hei-de Amar uma Pedra (2004). I Shall Love a Stone
  • Ontem Não te vi em Babilónia (2006). Didn’t See You in Babylon Yesterday
  • O Meu Nome é Legião (2007). My Name Is Legion
  • O Arquipélago da Insónia (2008). Archipelago of Insomnia
  • Que Cavalos São Aqueles Que Fazem Sombra no Mar? (2009). What Horses Are Those That Make Shade On The Sea?
  • Sôbolos Rios Que Vão (2010). By the Rivers of Babylon, trans. Margaret Jull Costa (2023).
  • Comissão das Lágrimas (2011). Commission of Tears, trans. Elizabeth Lowe (2024).
  • Não é Meia-Noite quem quer (2012).
  • Caminha Como Numa Casa em Chamas (2014).
  • Da Natureza dos Deuses (2015).
  • Para Aquela que Está Sentada no Escuro à Minha Espera (2016).
  • Até Que as Pedras Se Tornem Mais Leves Que a Água (2016). Until Stones Become Lighter Than Water, trans. Jeffe Love (2019).

I have reviewed three of his novels and have several others on my TBR . I will try to review another book from Portugal to take my total of reviews from there to 10, which seems poor. I look forward to seeing what books from around the world everyone reads I have done a few images for the month the one at the top and the two below.

Edited in Prisma app with Watercolor
Edited in Prisma app with Watercolor

The return of the Caravels by Antonio lobo Antunes

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The Return of the Caravels by Antonio Lobo Antunes

Portuguese fiction

Original title – As Naus

Translator – Gregory Rabassa

Source – Personal copy

There is a name that has for most of the time I have been blogging that has been on the list of potential Nobel winner Antonio Lobo Antunes is always on the list of potential winners. The former doctor served in the Portuguese army in a number of conflicts in the 60s and 70s they feature in a number of his book they have been in the two books I have previously read from Him. Here also there is a feel of the aftermath of those conflicts. He has written a bi-weekly column for a Newspaper he has written over twenty novels he is influenced by William Faulkner in his style which is dense and modernist.

He’d passed through Lixbon eighteen or twenty years earlier on the way to Angloa and what he remembered best were his parents rooms in the boarding house on Conde redondo where they were staying in the midst of a clatter of pots and womans exsoerated grumbling. He recalled the communal bathroom, a washbasn with a set of baroque faucets inimtation of fish that vomited out sobs of brownish water through there open gils, and the time he came upon a man on in years smiling on the the toilets with his pants down around his knees . At night the window would be open and he’d see the illuminated Chinese restuarents, the sleepwalking glaciers of electrical appliances stores in the shadows, and blond heads of hair above the paving stones of the sidewalks.

The opening lines show how the past and opresent mix together.

Inside the Jeronimos Monastery In Lisbon, there is the copper insignia that were on the ships from Portugal those Caracvels those ships the Portuguese used when they conquered their empire. Well, this book mixes those figures famous for the discovery and conquering those lands have returned to a mix of Modern well it is the mid-seventies after the falling apart of the Salazar regime and the decision to leave their empire so when figures like Vasco  De Gama the king, smaller figures like Luis as they all return and see what has happened the journey of their empire has gone full circle as the past and present crash and the figures of the past drift into the present as they see what has happened over the past three hundred years of history as the fate of their empire and its downfall is shown in full color this isn’t a plot-driven book it is more a revision and view of the past and present at once it is about the Portuguese empire and its downfall. the darker side of all is shown like in his other works he doesn’t hold back.

When Vasco da Gama arrived in Vila franca de Xira by van, with the poker deck in his pocket, ain=ming to find work at the cobbler’s trade, instead of the trees and houses and streets he’d remembered at night in Africa with meticulous precision of longing, he found a land that had extended beyond the rooftops and the pagoda of the bandstand submerged in the vast spread of the halted waters of the Tagus, drowning farms,cows and walls abd driven by November rains. Famlies clinging to the tops of poplar trees saw passing by, adrift in the whirlpools of mud, the bloated bodies of bereaus mules and dogs, double basses lost their clefs forever, woman with their figers motionless in sewing gestures, and their mugs thatr said souvenir of Loule.

Vasco De Gama one of those figures to return to the present

This is a tough book about a tough period in his countries history. What he does is mix those great names of the past and the underbelly of what has happened since. It looks at what the likes of Da Gama Legacy mean for them. Style-wise this is a book that owes a lot to the writers he likes Faulkner springs to mind it is a work about thoughts and ideas more than a plot about the legacy good and bad about the Portuguese empire with warts and all that has happened there are little side stories like Luis who comes to Lisbon on a ship and his father’s coffin. The mix of past and present in the world that sees the modern and the [ast as one is an interesting insight into the heart of the Portugal of the time. It is like a mixtape of Portuguese history with rifts on top of rifts as he samples the past and presents working them in together to produce something unique a seem less mixing of both that has been beautifully translated by Gregory Rabassa who for me has always been one of the best translators around.

Winstons score – + A stunning like a rich dessert it is intense and full of flavors of Portuguese history!!

Death at Intervals by Jose Saramago

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Death at Intervals by Jose Saramago

Portuguese Literature

Original title – As Intermitências da Morte 

Translator – Margaret Jull Costa

Source – personal copy

I have had a real bout of readers block and reviewing block as well in recent weeks. I thought I had reviewed a Saramago early on in the blog but I hadn’t I just read a couple just before I started the blog. I decided to choose this as it had a lot of themes that Saramago used. The strange change of events here people stop dying. death it’s self a theme in other books I have read by him also it has the same style of the narrative he used in other books a stream of consciousness style and it was a later book in his writing career I always like seeing how writers wrote after the fame and Nobel win. It is over ten years since he died and Well maybe we need to read more of this great writer’s books.

THE FOLLOWING DAY ,NO ONE DIES, THIS FACT< BEING ABSOLUTELY contray to life’s rules, provoked enormous and, in the circumstances, perfectly justifiable anxiety in people’s ,ind, for we have ony to consider that in the enitire forty volumes of universal history there is no mention, not even one exemplarycase, such a phenomen ever having occurred, for a whole day  to go by, woth its genrous ever having occured for a whole day to go by, with its generous allowance of twenty-four hours, diurnal and nocturnal, matutinal and vesoertine, without one death from an illness , a fatal fall or a successful suicide, not one, not a single one

The opening lines of the book on the 1 January  everything changes.

The book starts in a country landlocked and the new year has just turned and then all of a sudden everyone in the country stops dying. This at once see as a wonderful joy among the public as a whole when it is clear there is no more deaths. But soon turns bad when an elderly royal on death’s door can’t die and she isn’t the only one. As the cycle that carries on living the whole cycle of life and death is broken by death stopping it , putting a branch in the wheel of life. So those that are involved in the whole cycle of life are worried the prime minister of this small country with its one tv channel may be his nod to the closed years of Portugal’s own past. Then Death is a  back ut in the figure of a person. After her taking a break she is a woman as in Portugal the noun of Death is female she sets up a relationship with a cellist that has to avoid her calls for her time to be over sets up an interesting match up. over what time it is best to die this is a book that asks about are our own mortality, by a writer looking back on his life.

in this country in which noonje dies not everything was a sordid as we have just described, nor,in this soceity toen between the hope of living for ever and the fear of never dying, did the voracious maphia succeed in getting its talons into every section by corrupting souls, subjagating bodies and besmirching the little that remained of the fince principles of oldm when an envelope containing something that smelled of a bribe would have been immediately returned to the sender, bearing a firm and clear response

later the reality of no deaths. Finally sinks in to everyone

The book has a lot of threads that connect to his other books the church and immortality is a theme that is very Saramago he frequently attacks the church which is a powerful shadow over Portugal grew up in there is also nods to the Salazar regime in the one tv state here an insular country. Death as a woman is refreshing for an English reader as we have death as a male from the image in Seventh seal or the spoof of that in Bill and ted, here we have a younger death a woman in a battle with a middle-aged man a cellist the lead cellist a nod to certain pieces played that deal with death. This ask the question of what would happen if we lived forever. We are all dying that is a fact of life and this is what is evident after time here as good as it seems on the outset after the first day of no deaths. when the flip side of what happens when you can’t die !! Like many of the other books by Saramago, I have read this leaves you as a reader thinking he uses a mix of magic realism fables, philosophy, and his own life to mix a truly unique vision. Have you a favorite book by him? I will be reviewing another great Portuguese writer soon.

Winstons score – A a great late-career work from a Nobel winner

 

 

Kokoschka’s doll by Alfonso Cruz

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Kokoschka’s Doll by Alfonso Cruz

Portuguese Fiction

Original title – A Boneca de Kokoschka

Translator – Rahul Bery

Source – review copy

I join a blog tour on the day this comes out. I always feel Portuguese literature is a blank area of the blog over the years. So when I got the chance to read a book by the leading light of the Portuguese literature Alfonso Cruz he has published a number of novels this is the second to be translated into English. He is a novelist, artist, illustrator, and member of a blues group called The soaked Lamb (love that band name I must try and find some of his music). This book won the European Union Prize for Literature, I shall be covering another winner in a day or two.

At the age of Forty-two, or , to be more precise, two days after his birthday that year, Bonifaz Vogel began to hear a voice. Intially he thought it was the muce, then he thought about calling someone to deal with the woodworm, but something stopped him. Perhaps ti was the way the voice had given him orders, with the authority of those voices that live deep inside us. He knew it was all in his head, but he had the strange sensation that the words were coming from the floorboars, entering him through his feet. They came from the depths, filling the bird shop. Bonifaz Vogel always wore sandals, even in winter , and hr felt the words slipping through his yellowed toenails

The opening lines just drew me in as a reader. worth noting Vogel is German for bird!!

Now, this is one of those books that you in one part love and in another absolutely hate at times just as it isn’t a linear narrative of a patchwork of little piece stuck together we have three main narratives the first sees Bonifaz Voge who is the owner of a bird shop in Dresden he hears voices from under his floorboards This is just as the bombs in the latter part of the war have fallen and in his cellar Isaac Dresner who end up thereafter he saw a jews friend shot. He starts to talk to the man Vogel who thinks the voice he hears through the floorboards. Vogel thinks it is god and Dresner becomes this man’s inner monologue.  Then we move onto the book within the book a novella called Kokoschka’s doll by Mathias pope a work about the Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka who when his Alma Mahler left him he got a life-size doll made of her. That he took out and strolled with and eventually he smashed a bottle of red wine over her head. In an interview with the writer on youtube, he said he used this as a metaphor for the book as a whole. But also the story of the Varga’s another thread of stories with chapters that are randomly numbered. The latter book is about the novella in the second part of the book and how it is received. The three parts of this novel all interlink this is collection of stories with a dash of Aphorisms and philosophy. There is no clear way to describe this book it is a gem of snippets that see you go around the world and view the same events at views.

FROM OUR FLESH WE WILL MAKE A SINGLE EARTH

” I have always wondered who will bury the last man” my grandfather said to my father, “or in this case who will bury the gravedigger. You will, of courser. You are not a gravedigger, but you will bury me in the same earth as your mother, who died as you took your first breath almost three times seven years ago. Her earth will mix with mine, as it did in life, and from our flesh we will make a single earth”

When my grandfather died, my father did as he wished and they were mixed together for ever

one of the snippets from the opening part called the memoir of Isaac Dressner

I said I feel I haven’t read enough Portuguese literature and I always feel the same after reading books from there the deepness of there writers is always stunning from Pessoa who’s complete The Book of Disquiet I read when it came out the other year but haven’t had time to review I will be doing this soon it maybe would show how we get to writers like Cruz as Pessoa uses a lot of Aphorisms and the is no real linear narrative to the Book of disquiet. Then I have read more modern writers like Peixoto and Antunes both often use different strands in the narrative Peixoto had an odd collection of characters like this book does. I feel this is one for the readers of books like Sophie’s world or night train to Lisburn books that make you think and puzzle that have so much more at the heart and this is one it is about war the aftermath love and loss and life in general and will have you thinking for days after you have put it down.This book was made possible by a grant from –

Spanish and Portuguese Lit month 2019

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It is coming up soon it will be July and August and for the last few years that has been Spanish and Portuguese lit month. I usually run it with Richard from Caravana de Recuerdos   Well Richard has decided to take a back seat and won’t be co-hosting this year. I am not the most oprganised person but will try and get a links page sorted for July for people to post links here are two reminders of the countries covered by the two languages

 

 

 

Image result for spanish speaking countries

 

 

 

Here is the spanish languages countries and their flags sorry it isn’t the clearest pic best I could find and now the Portuguese countries.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am concentrating on those writers from the Latin American boom years for my months this year. Here is a guide to the writers you coukld choose some boom and a few post-boom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This map is a good starting point. You can choose whoever you want I may point you in Charco Press direction as they have been bringing some great contemporary Latin American fiction.  I have decide on a book for everyone to try and post on in the last week of August. To do a reread and a book I loved more than twenty years ago and a cornerstone of Latin American boom literature…..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yes it is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 years of solitude set in the fictional town of Macondo a place Marquez used in other works like Leaf storm before this book and is often seen in other books by him but not always as Macondo it is set on his childhood home of Aracataca. I’m sure many readers of this blog have read this book but how many of us have blogged about it?  I have covered five books by him in this blogs time but neither this or love in the time of cholera so far so in part I am putting this right. I will put a list of other books I am choosing near the time. What have you in mind to read ? will you be joining me in reading 100 years of solitude?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spanish and Portuguese summer reading months 2018

~ winstonsdad ~ 35 Comments

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I hope Richard doesn’t mind me going tonight with this but as the two countries face each other in the world cup tonight it seemed a good time to announce our fifth Spanish lit month well we do it for two months now and have expanded to include Portuguese literature as well for a second year. This years is an image of Lisbon I have change with the Prisma programme. I am looking forward to seeing the wide variety of books we get Richard usually rounds up through the month I will happily tweet any reviews on twitter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a list of the spanish speaking countries from the first Spanish lit month.

 

 

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Here is another of the Portuguese speaking world.I will be featuring more Portuguese novels this year. As the last year, I have been buying a lot of books from Portugal to try and build up this area on the blog.

 

 

 

 

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We have chosen one read along well I have I think Richard may want to choose a Portuguese novel as I choose this. Dona Barbara is considered one of the greatest Latin American novels. It is in the list of the 100 best novels from PBS  . This for me also has themes in the book are ones I love the clashing of traditional and modern ideas within a society, the clash of city and country. It has been made into a couple of films and is considered one of the best portraits of Venezuelan society at the time the book is set.  We are thinking of posts in the last week of August and discussing the book around them. We can also talk on twitter about the book.

Sorry update we running this over July and August .

Winston’s cover Eça de Queiroz

~ winstonsdad ~ 13 Comments

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Today’s cover is part of what I want do next year and that is add more Portuguese literature it is my one weak spot in Europe I haven’t read enough from here. So when I found this from what is considered the great Portuguese writer Eça de Queiroz an old edition  his books are all been published by Dedalus in English he is first in a few writers I want to try from Portugal any more suggestions welcome