Tag: prize winners

Too Great a sky by Lilana Corobca

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Too Great a sky by Liliana Corobca

Moldovan fiction

Original title – Capătul drumului

Translator – Monica Cure

Source – Personal copy

I have been meaning to get to the seven-story releases in the UK. There have been a number of books they have brought out in the last few years that have caught my eye, especially two by this writer, Lilana Corobca, as she is put down as a Moldovan writer and sometimes as a Romanian, but for this post, I am putting her as Moldovan, as it is my first book from that country. She studied in Moldova and has since been heavily involved in a project on Soviet censorship and has written several books on it. She has also written several novels.  She previously published a novel in English, The Censor’s Notebook, which won the Oxford Weidenfeld Prize.  She has also had her books translated into a number of other languages.

The train sometimes slowed down and barely, barely kept going, like a cart being pulled by tired nags, and sometimes sped up, quickly, quickly, and flew like a rocket. Dazed by the perpetual movement of the wheels that continually rattled us, we were surprised that we didn’t become completely tongue-tied. When the train would stop close to human dwellings, the people would come out, theyd cross themselves at the sight of us and they’d bring us something out of the little they had. Usually they’d bring us water, well water, not river water. When we stopped next to a pond, we rushed out toward it, though we weren’t steady on our feet. We stuck our heads in the water, guzzled it, as if we were cattle. We couldn’t get enough, we splashed ourselves, washed ourselves, and cooled off, because who knew when wed have water again and how much longer it would be until the end of the road.

On the train ride to Kazakhstan

The book is told in three sections that cover an event in Romanian history during World War II in which the Soviets ordered thousands of Romanians to board trains and take a three-week journey across Russia to Kazakhstan. The book is seen through the eyes of eleven-year-old Ana as she and her family are loaded into an old boxcar in their village of Bucovina and then spend the next three weeks fighting off hunger, lack of facilities, and people dying. The dead are thrown off the train every time they stop. The desperation is met with stories and poems filling the air, keeping the horrors out of minds, but it also shows the community coming together in this collective horror through Her Young’s eyes.  The middle section captures the harsh world the group of incomers end up in a remote Kazakh country where the Romanians have no real belongings, so not only did it cost lives to get there, but then there is a harsh winter yet to face. The last part is told from an equally spirited young member of an ana family, her great granddaughter has been tasked with persuading the no old Ana to move to a nursing home, seeing the sight of her life looking back on those war years.

After my mother died, I went to my aunt so we could search for our Zenovie together. There were other mothers searching as we were, they’d all help each other, they’d exchange information, Sancira, finally, found the orphanage, she had been able to trace where the truck had gone, but finding a child then was harder than finding a needle in a haystack. On the lists and in the children’s documents, there wasn’t a single Bucovinian, everyone being divided into two nationalities: those with narrow eyes, Kazakhs; the others, Russians. All the boys were Ivanov or Petrov, with first names like Ivan, Kosta, Gena, Grisha, given at random, because no one cared what they were called back home, and the little children themselves couldn’t say what their names were, because they didn’t speak a word of Russian and, in any case, no one cared.

Their ages weren’t written down correctly either, just made up.

Many were skinny and seemed younger. When Sancira saw this, she was determined to look at all of them, so she could recognize her child’s face on her own. She went child by child, but she didn’t find hers.

Later on in the book recounting those events in the present day !

What Liliana Corobca has done is capture a small, unknown episode of the war. Taken it, and with Ana as the main character, she has caught a world I knew nothing about. But through Anas’ eyes, the three-week train ride is brutal, but in that way a child views the world. The events are seen, but the sheer horror of them isn’t there if that makes sense. It’s viewed by her young eyes as people disappear, thrown off along the way, then the horror of landing in a place where the locals hate you and then to be hit with the harshness of the winter, it’s just added to everything. It is later on in the book when she is at the end of her l,ife the events are brought into the full sight sas she recalls them for her great graddaughter. The book was inspired by the testimonies of those who rode the trains at the time. The book, in parts, also captures the power of faith and how they all still believed in god after all this had happened to them. Have you read any of her books or any other writers from Moldova ?

Bound to Violence by Yambo Ouologuem

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Bound to Violence by Yambo Ouologuem

Mailian fiction

Orignal title – Le devoir de violence

Translator Ralph Manheim

Source – Personal copy

Where to start, this is another book that is a cornerstone of African fiction from the Francophone world.  This book was a book that sparked so controversy when it came out, as there is certain passages that had come from a book by Graham Greene and another piece from the French writer Andre Schwarz-Bart but somewhere in the editing of the book it seems the quotation of these passages had disappeared this meant the book jhad vanished for almost fifty years infact it was another prize winning book this book had won the Prix Renadout when it came out. It was the Goncourt Prize winner, The most secret memory of men, a fictional version of what happened to Ouloguem after the plagiarism claim against his book and how he was treated, led to the republishing of the book as a Penguin Classic a book that captured 700 years of Malian history, but also the way Ouloguem felt his country men had become servility that had become engrained in the local pouplation after years of french rule.

Under these conditions an adulteress incurred pitiless pun-ishment: the very least that could happen to her was to be stripped bare, exposed with shackled ankles in the royal court-yard, and given a douche of pepper water to which – wallahi! -ants had been added. In certain cases (if the guilty woman was pregnant or had been delivered of a stillborn child) another punishment devised by Saif was administered. She was held with spread legs over a wood fire which singed her pubic hair.

On the other hand, a woman whose husband had been unfaithful could do nothing but take note of the fact, seek out her rival, and, having found her -hee-hee-hee! – insult her and thrash her.

The violence of the country under the Saifs

The book is a small epic: the first part deals with the Dogon region of Mali, but instead of Mali, it uses the fictional country of Nakem-Zuiko. What Ouologuem tries to show is Mali’s 700-year past through the various rises and falls of tribes, the Saifs’ rise, the initial encounters with white incomers and slave traders, and how brutal and twisted this history could be.  This is all a lead-up to the last section of the book, which follows the figure of Raymond Spartacus Kassoumi.  He is from a family of ex slaves, but has risen with an education, much studying and ended up going to France to Paris to study and serve in the war, and returns to his homeland, but then sees his future as nothing more than a puppet of the white leaders and French rule and way of running the country.

But it was too soon and too late. Smitten by Europe, a second shadow of himself, Raymond had already known Saif’s fevers.

The white man had crept into him and this white presence determined even the moves that he, a child of violence, would make against it. Despising Africa, he took giant strides to diminish the gulf that separated him from the splendours of white civilization. But a simultaneous grasp of twenty centuries of history, or of their residue, was still beyond his reach: where he should have discovered – may the Evil One be banished! – he accepted

Raymond is caught in between the french rulers and the Saifs

The book is a slicing open of the heart of Mali through the centires a sort of open heart surgery ion his country a warts and all tlook at the history the various ways people got by the violence and way he saw many olf his country men had just got used to tipping there hat of being part of the wider system and this is what we get with raymond with his french name but also his other name of Spartagus the leader of the slave uprising a man that seems like he could break the mould but then goes to France and becomes part of the cogs of the french regime on his return a man caught between those saifs that ruled the country and the french rulers of now neither is appealing this is part of his tryingt o break the vision of his countries past as an idylic place but more a world that has always struggled with the saifs and the tribes before the french rule a country of blood and violence from trafding slaves with the arabic world to then the french world it captures a warts and all pictue of the past. A powerful work that needed to be republished, thanks to Sarr’s book highlighting how long it had been out of print! Have you read this or the most secret memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr I reviewed it here 

Dark heart of the Night by Leonora Miano

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Dark Heart of the Night by Leonora Miano

Cameroonian fiction

Original title – L’Intérieur de la nuit

Translator – Tamsin Black

Source – Personal copy

I moved to Cameroon in Africa with another book that has a lot to say about female lives within that country. This is my next stop on this year’s Women in Translation Month. Leona Miano has lived in France since the early 90s. This was her debut novel and won some prizes, including the Prix Goncourt’s award for books that appeal to Teenage readers. That book saw a woman going back to Cameroon after three years away a return to the dark heart of Africa and her small village. The book looks at colonialism the violence that has been seen in a lot of different African countries as the colonial powers withdraw, leaving a vacuum of power and mistakes made in the years after. This book tells the story of a girl returning to her village after she had seen the wider world and is a different girl than the one who left her small town a few years earlier.

As for the girls, they stayed put, turning over and over soil that yielded only what was forcibly rooted out. No one had ever had the odd idea of sending them to school. In normal times during the day, only mature women, unmarried girls, and young children were to be found in the clearing. Most of the men lived in towns far away or in other countries, and they came home only now and then. In these distant places, they seldom made a fortune. The life they led there gobbled up everything they were supposed to save to keep the promises they had made to themselves and the clan. When they called in to the village, it was only to drop off a few leftovers and boom out instructions, which they would not be able to see carried out. Then, they went away. And the women stayed, with the world on their shoulders. Women with sons were quick to make them bear some of this weight. They packed them off to work as they might have deposited money in an account. The sons took wives then lived as their fathers had lived before them.

The tradtional nature of the village is shown her.

Ayane has decided to go home, and when she arrives back in her remote village of Eku. But this has been caused by her mother dying, and when she returns, her former friends and villagers view her as different. This woman is now differently educated. Is she a witch? As this happens. The village is caught in a storm as a militia arrives and bloody violence descends on them all. This is all viewed by Ayane as she hides and observes how the villagers react to all this.; The militia are the sort of pan-African forces that cropped up in the post-colonial times of Africa as countries tried to forge a new identity. But this is viewed as a given by the villagers, as this is maybe their resignation to the events and bloody violence, death and heartache, as Isilo, the leader of the Militia, tells the young woman and men what to do. The story shifts between the villagers, Ayane and her mother.

Ayané was a frail child with pale skin. Pale, they said, because her skin was not the coal-black color of the local people, cooked over and again by the sun since time immemorial. But she was in fact as dark as cocoa beans. Of course, the women said she was bewitched, probably a witch returned from the dead. And even though none of them had managed to find a mark on her skin to prove it, they told their children not to go near her. Never had the local children screamed so loudly in the evening at the beatings they received, sometimes with a pestle, for having ventured into a forbidden house. Girls and boys alike all ran after her to play with the toys her father made her and tell her the gossip their mothers whispered to them about her parents. Sometimes, the village women, who had no dealings with Aama, were obliged to talk to her. The fact was, their kids were often in her hut or in her garden. For she had a garden with non-edible plants, which she grew for no other reason than to admire the beauty of their flowers and smell their fragrance. The garden, too, made the women talk:

Ayane was a plae girl but is now a woman her mother stayed inthe village

This is a book that has blurred lines in the story, no real plot, it is about he event in the village and that as a wider view of post-colonial Africa. The use of the woman returning having seen the world beyond Eku, beyond their past and traditions, as the wider world outsider, their village is changing, and this is shown in a way by Ayane, her education and wider view having to return for the funeral makes her an observer on the violence that follows. But also the Militia is a sign of pan-African ideas, the struggle post-colonially to find identity for their country. Then the village and the locals have an almost death-like fatalism as they seem to be so far detached from the world that has been and the world that is coming. Their village is lost in time. In that the violence is almost the death of their way of life, as the modern world comes crashing in on their world! I liked this book; it isn’t a straightforward read, but I’d like to read more from her . Mainly because her later books deal with Afropean matters.

 

The accidental garden by Richard Mabey

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The accidental garden by Richard Mabey

Nature writing

Source – Library

I mentioned just before I left that I had obtained a number of the Wainwright longlist books for nature writing. So far, I have read this, and one of the initial books that jumped out at me. I think it was purely because I had a Little Toller classic from Mabey; he is one of the greats of nature writing in recent years. He hasn’t won the Wainwright prize but has won several other awards. This was also set in Norfolk, and since our holiday was in Suffolk, a book about the local nature appealed to me. Mabey is known for his writing, particularly around foraging for food, so this tale of his garden shows how man and nature can work together.

So being as realistic as we could, we decided to divide our responsibilities, though it it was hardly a fair appor-tionment. Polly, the energetic one, wise in the cultivation of things, would attend to the more organised parts of the garden, raising vegetables and making the best of the herbaceous border we’d inherited. I’d take on the wood and the pond and the rough grassland between. A soft touch, I admit, but philosophical pondering takes it out of you, too. I’ve always been foxed by vegetable gardening, bewildered by the refusal of these pampered plants to follow any botanical rules.

Polly set to work almost immediately in what became her very personalised style. She created strange-shaped beds, edged with stones or transplanted wildflowers – poppies, cornflowers, feverfew. She hung up switches of thyme as insect deterrents using bindweed as string. Soon a galaxy of other wildings made a bid to be the vegetables ornaments: tutsan, thornapple (whose seeds must have been dormant in the soil), foxgloves and felt-leaved mul-leins. It was about as wild and Wicca as it could be within the discipline of raising a crop.

It is about the plants and the rewilding in parts of the garden as a soft obrder to the surrounding nature \1

Mabey talks about his garden, a boundary between his home and the wild world beyond his garden, a place full of wildflowers As he wanders around his place in Norfolk, he talks about various writers and poets, and this is mirrored about how he talks about juis garden the way we look at gardens they can be so much more than lawns. This shows how Richard, over the course of twenty years, had worked his garden to be part of the surrounding environment, rather than just a garden. If that makes sense, he was championing what is rewilding, those little bits of land left to go back to how they were, to allow nature to creep back in!

But I can hear my old philosophy tutor, John Simo-polous, reprimanding me. ‘Richard, you know very well what people mean when they say “reconnecting with nature”: Oxford philosophy in the 1960s had a strong interest in ‘ordinary language use’. John once set me an essay on ‘is a broken promise a lie?’, and he would have urged me to respect this usage as signifying a conscious engagement with the natural world, and more ordinarily of a time spent outdoors with forms and systems of life that aren’t entirely determined by humans.

Yet such a casual attitude towards the language we use to describe our relations with the rest of creation is now counterproductive. It’s creating gross generalisations, false chains of cause and effect and dangerous hierarchies of organisms. The ‘tree’ trumps all other plants; ‘pests’ include any organism that someone, somewhere finds irritating. As for ‘nature’, I’ve collected a few of the more extreme uses of the idea over the years. Pride of place must go to the Tree Council’s declaration during the great storm of 1987 that ‘Trees are at great danger from nature’ – thus placing the republic of trees entirely within the kinedom of man

Trees are the life blood of our nation its shame we have lost so many

I like Mabey’s style of writing, where the natural and literary worlds are hand in hand in his words, as we follow the years spent gently working his garden, intertwined with the local nature and the world he lives in. The writers he reads, like John Clare, amaze me with how their poetry rings through the centuries. This is a book that captures our gardens and what they can be, a little of letting wildflowers in, and maybe being a little free with how our garden looks. But he also captures how the Englishman’s garden is so much more than he says: the seas of grass, we can have so much more in it. How the lines between nature and gardens can blur over time.I loved this book I will read his earlier book at a later date Have you read this or any of the longlist books for this years Wainwright Prize ?

 

The little I knew by Chiara Valerio

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The Little I Knew by Chiara Valerio

Italian fiction

Original title Chi Dice E chi Tace

Translator – Alisa Wood

Source – subscription book

I have banged on a lot about how much I had enjoyed the books from last year from Foundry editions, which have published several of my favourite books from last year. I must admit this is the first from their books this year that I have read. I was grabbed by Chiara Valerio’s bio as she is an editor, writer and a lit blogger, many years ago, and she has published a lot of books. it sis always great when you find a new writer with many books already out for you to read. This book was on the shortlist for the Premio Strega prize and was inspired in part by. The writer is reading one of Georges Simenon’s novels, his Roman Durs, which inspired her.

And so Vittoria was the first woman to own a boat space at the dock, an exclusively male club. Every year the film Around the World in 80 Days would be on TV, with David Niven as Phileas Fogg, the man who has bet all his money and has to complete a trip around the world and return, by a specific day and time, to London, to the Reform Club, an exclusive men-only club where he is a member. And he manages it, but he brings a woman with him, the Indian princess he has fallen in love with. After Vittoria bought the boat, the dock started to seem like the Reform Club with neon lights, and Vittoria’s face had a hint of something Indian and, at heart, regal.

She was a strong female figure in the town with her boat etc!

As I said, this was inspired by Simenon; it is a mystery in a way he did his mystery in his roman durs, more about the flaws in the human condition and places. So this is more an insight into the small seaside town of Scauri. Those living there there interactions with her, but also the relationships and thoughts of her. Then we need to know how this dead woman ended up in the town all those years ago!  The seaside town is set in the middle between Rome and Naples, at the remote end of the seaside towns of the area. So when Vittoria, the local chemist, herbalist and all-around woman that everyone knows in this small town, is found dead, drowned in her bath. Lea, the local lawyer, sets about finding out about this woman. She had been in the village for nearly thirty years, but was one of those women everyone turned to. She listened as others poured their hearts out to her. She lived in a villa with Maras, making her herbal recipes, helping people make amazing recoveries from various illnesses over the years. How could a woman who swam every day and was an expert with her boat drown in a bath? Who was this woman? Will Lea learn more after chatting to all the locals about her? Why does she want to know more about her?

Vittoria might have become one of those healers you find in little towns who apparently have no skill or purpose but live alongside nature, and not just humans. Despite everyone always asking her all sorts of things, and her real intuition for diagnosis, she had never wanted to be one. She seemed to live a quiet life, staying in the pharmacy for the hours she had to, then spending the rest of her time walking, swimming, reading botanical books, and tending the garden. She liked having people around the house and playing cards. I’m interested in both earthly and heavenly plants, she would say, laughing.

But she was much more than that to this town!

This is one of those books that feels like a crime novel but without a detective. It is about small towns and how unsettling a death out of the blue can be, and how someone can fit into a town without anyone ever really knowing who she was! WEho was Vittoria whart had brought her from Rome all those years earlier it focus on those little bonds and tyies that weave together a small town but also how at the heart there could be a black hole of a person that seems to be at the heart of it all but is actually more invisible to those around her for the fact she only listen to those and on the surface was the woman everyone. She was known for her job and her ability to heal people, but what was her past? I get how this was inspired by Simenon; he was great with the ambiguity of human nature, those grey characters in life never black or white. This is about small town relationships and passions, and also that never quite trusting the incomer, even thirty years later! Do you have a favourite novel that is a crime novel, but isn’t, if that makes sense like this?

Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa

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Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa

Japanese fiction

Orignal title – ハンチバック

Translator Polly Barton

Source – Personal copy

This was another book from the longlist i was vaguely aware of , I remember reading when the writer had won the Akutagawa prize a couple of years ago as she was the first disabled writer to win such a big prize in Japan; in fact, in any big book prize worldwide, let’s face it there are not many disabled voices out there in the books we read. So I had this on my radar to read; given the nature of my job, anything that deals with disability and is written from that point of view captured my attention as a reader. As I feel it is a world underrepresented by readers. In some ways, this book is a thinly veiled tale of the writer’s own life, but maybe in HD, can I get away with saying that this is her world turned up to fully steamy!!

Meanwhile, S was leaning up against the tinted glass while the trader sucked on her E-cup tits. The black turtleneck hoisted up around her mouth muffled her moans so they sounded super horny. Her enormous white breasts were glistening and bouncy like ripe Japanese pears. You had to hand it to 2I-year-old college students! Huge but still pert, they really were a flawless set of tits.

No wonder 26-year-old Y was hanging her head, her cheeks reddened by the humiliation of defeat. Although, if I’m being totally honest, I’m not that into big-breasted women. Y’s regular-sized, slightly saggy tits were actually way more up my alley. Yeah, she was really turning me on. I stuck a hand into her panties to find she was already dripping wet. ‘Can 1 fuck you?’ I groaned into her ear. ‘Sure &’! she replied. I grabbed one of the condom packets that had come pirouetting down from the ceiling at just the right moment, and so began

The tale of hers that opens the book

The book opens with our narrator writing one of the erotic stories that she has been publishing under a pseudonym on erotic websites. In her stories, she explores the experiences of sex as a disabled woman and reflects on how it would feel. She lives in a nursing home, a place her parents chose for her, where she tweets and writes. One day, her new male carer suggests that he knows about her secret life as a writer. This revelation adds a twist to the narrative as the fantasy worlds she creates spill into reality. Because of her circumstances, she finds she can prompt this man to act out some of the scenarios she wishes to explore. Her own sexual journey with this young man. It is a tale of power in a way being switched to the way this may happen otherwise.It also shows a subject until recent times, a taboo, and that is the desire of people like our narrator and the writer herself. Trapped in their own way, seeking freedom of their desires!

In American universities, in accordance with the stipulations of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, not only are digital educational teaching resources the norm, but it’s also compulsory for textbooks to be accessible to the visually impaired through a reader. Japan, on the other hand, works on the understanding that disabled people don’t exist within society, so there are no such proactive considerations made. Able-bodied Japanese people have likely never even imagined a hunchbacked monster struggling to read a physical book. Here was 1, feeling my spine being crushed a little more with every book that 1 read, while all those e-book-hating able-bodied people who went on and on about how they loved the smell of physical books, or the feel of the turning pages beneath their fingers, persisted in their state of happy oblivion.

A remindee of her own personal challenges and how society deals with them!

 

 

The story addresses the theme of feeling trapped in your body; how can she be free while confined to a chair and reliant on oxygen? It delves into the desire to be seen as something other than society’s perception. It highlights the unspoken desires of disabled people, a subject that is only just beginning to gain attention in our society. Something people are only just starting to talk about, so a book like this with is cader and frankness and a straightforward way of dealing with other erotic desires is eye-opening and also refreshing. I think the writer of this book must have a wickedly playful mind if this book is a reflection of her as a person. One of the books that has so far raised its head above the others, and also like some of the other book,s this is the sort of book I hope to see on lists like this books that open up new dimensions for us as readers but also give voice to underrepresented writers as well.

Like a sky Inside by Jakuta Alikavazovic

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Like a sky inside by Jakuta Alikavazovic

French fiction/ essay

Original title – Comme un ciel en nous.

Translator Daniel Levin Becker

Source – Personal copy

Is there ever a time when you see little bits about a book and you just know it will be one of those books that will be with you forever? There aren’t many books like that. They come along once in a blue moon, the ones. that touch you. I had an idea that this book might be one of those books. Firstly, it has a writer of Balkan heritage writing in French, and me, they are my two favourite places to read books, so I knew this book from the daughter of Yugoslavian parents born in Paris. Her parents were from Bosnia and Montenegro. She has also worked as a translator on books by David Foster Wallace and Ben Lerner, which means she also has great taste in literature.

The Louvre was the first French city where I felt at home, my father used to say. The official story: he came to Paris in 1971, for the love of my poetess mother. He stayed for the Louvre. He was twenty years old and the twenty years that followed – covering, in part, my childhood – would unfold as though in a dream.

His joie de vivre. His appetite for the world. His opti-mism, and the limits thereof. He had no money and still believed it made no difference, because he had enough to act like he did. To pretend.

Of course, his head must have spun. To imagine the City of Light, to dream of it, is one thing; to discover it, to be a body, a twenty-year-old body wandering its daytime and nighttime streets, is another. All forms of difficulty

– loneliness, poverty, the roundly accepted fact that the slightest cough, the slightest cold, is far graver in a foreign language — all forms of difficulty have disappeared from his official story. Among them, his reasons for emigrat-ing: Paris, certainly. My mother, of course. The Louvre, naturally. But it would take me years to learn that he did it the way he did to escape military service in Yugosla-via, his country of origin, which today no longer exists.

Her parents Home Yugoslavia imploded and split

The book has the premise that she spends an overnight stay in the Louvre Gallery, where her young son is at Over. Over the evening, we see how art, family, memories, and how you could steal the Mona Lisa all drift by. This is a book that is one of those you sink into as a reader. It shows us how art and memories can connect from a piece that remembers her heading to New York against her father’s wishes when she was younger. The satyr she saw has a fellow sculpture now in New York that she had seen on the trip her father didn’t want her to do, as it drifts in her mind. Like the star in the sky, it follows her life’s path and her relationship with her father, alongside her evident love of art and how she connects with art. A night that sees her move far out of the bounds of the walls of the Gallery and the sense of time and place.

When I think about my father, I often think of those strange and beautiful images of wild animals, great and mighty deer, descending upon cities, wandering through streets. What they are experiencing is also an exile -quite solitary, like my father’s, quite majestic.They seem immediately at home, and their presence breathes a new enchantment into what we thought we knew: the sidewalks, the intersections, the asphalt under our feet. Nonetheless, an exile. They come driven by hunger. Or curiosity. Which for some, such as my father, such as me, is more or less the same thing. Yes, there is something deerlike in the familiarity I feel for him; a hint of wildness, of the unknown, forever inaccessible to my words but not to my heart. My heart, of which it is one of the centers. One of the places most intimate to me and, in spite or because of this, one of the most foreign.

I loved this observation of her father

This is a book I read as it was on the Republic of Consciousness longlist. But when I put a picture up and people like Anthony at times flow stemmed said they loved this book, I knew it would be one I would like. I love books that deal with Art, travel, memory and that bond between father and Daughter. It captures how your mind can drift from it, and it is with my dad’s engineering or castles that is our connection. Edinburgh castles or a dam make me think of my father and his past his life. I connected with this work as I said, there are just some books you know before you turn over the first p[ages you hope and think will be with you for the rest of your life. This is one of those books like Panorama by Dusan Sarotar or Fireflies by Luis Sagasti or back even further for me the Encyclopedia of Snow by Sarah Emily Miano. Those books that just touch you in a way you can’t say other than it’s about a connection on an emotional level with the writer at that moment of reading that will last forever after you put the book down. Have you ever had that feeling about a book and that connection that makes you drift into your own life as a reader and son of a daughter, in this case!

 

The Sea in the Radio by Jürgen Becker

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The Sea in the Radio by Jürgen Becker

German fiction

Original title – Im Radio Das Meer

Translator = Alexander Booth

Source – Personal copy

Now I start with a far better review of this book by Joe at Roughghost. Not to put myself down, I don’t really know how to get into these experimental novels like this. I ordered this after seeing he had died earlier this month. The name was one I had seen on the list of writers connected with the post-war group of German Writer Gruppe 47, I have long been a fan of this loose collective of writers shaping post-war German writers. I, like many, feel this from reading Böll and Grass, which may be the two best-known names. When I read them, they were, and in recent years, I have read some others from the groups, especially Alexander Kluge, a writer I hold in the upper echelons of my personal pantheon of writers. Now, as for this, this is a collection of snippet sentences around a village. For me, it is like he has taken the world he sees down to the bare minimum. I saw this in Helmut Heißenbüttel’s work texts , which I reviewed a few years ago. He was another member of the group.

Where were you last night?

The small yellow plane is back, somewhat further away, somewhat higher.

At night you could hear trains. Nights you would always hear trains.

The first tractor out on the fields. Still. Then it begins to make large circles.

Now the bumblebee buzzes out the open door.

Glancing at the clock. One’s startled. Or one’s not.

The filling-station attendant says, You don’t see the fuel, but it’s there.

A bit slower getting up the stairs today.

We’ll have one more little one, but then we’ve got to get going.

When Charlie was still here, the neighbour says, Evenings I’d always be entertained. But she doesn’t want a new cat.

Preparations for a trip one doesn’t want to take at all.

The morning begins cloudless. At midday a few. Cloudless again in the evening.

An example of the style of writing

The novel is not really. It is maybe more like a redacted journal if you removed all personal details from it and dates and places, so what you have is like snippets one after another. If you took Under Milkwood and removed the characters and names from it there is, for me a connection to that. I find this is like a radio of images and thoughts going around the dial, I was reminded at times how, as A kid, I used to marvel in bed at night, slowly moving the dial on my short wave radio and moving over the stations from around the world. This is the effect here. We grasp just a bare thought, a tiny observation of nameless characters. What we have is the space in between these sentences. These aphorisms are ours to fill or not fill. That is the beauty. Like John Cage’s 4′ 33”, the silence is individual and just yours to saviour so it is heard with the gaps in. The sentence’s voids to fall in or steeping stones sometimes when the thoughts suddenly loop back to an early idea.

At night the man would sleep in his tent, hidden in the woods; during the day he’d go eat soup and pick up his mail.

Before flying off, the woodpecker lets himself drop.

It is hot and damp, and out in the garden there are snails.

The day hasn’t ended yet, and you don’t know what’s still to come.

Flags hanging from the windows. That hasn’t happened in a long time, and he almost got scared. Not all windows have flags. But some of them do.

The filling-station attendant says, Air doesn’t cost a thing, air is priceless.

Cloudless the night. You should be able to see the stars. If you can’t see any stars, the night isn’t cloudless.

The boy had come along to the station and waved after the train. He didn’t realize how soon he would be sitting on the same train himself.

It’s the same house, but the people living there today don’t know it.

After that, he began to count the days. At some point, it became too much, so he began to count the months instead.years

Another snippet from the book

So you get the idea. If you want a better idea, look to Joe. This is through my limited prism of the world and my limited knowledge of the language. But in a slight nod to Joe. The other piece of media, well, two, but the first links to Joe and the fact they live in Canada, I love the Guy Maddin film My Winnipeg: A Glimpse of his Childhood in That City, but the film was made up of little snippets like this another film directors work I felt connected to this was  Jonas Mekas the avant grade filmmaker his films flash from place to place and through time in a way maybe its all the effect of the world war on these figures. I can see Kluge in this as well it is the way the war is always a prism for the events and way a writer filmmaker looks at the world. An experimental poetic collection of journal sentences that left me wanting more from this writer. I think this may be his only book in English so far. Another book for German lit month. Before anyone says I admire Joe, and yes, his reviews are a million times better than mine, I aim to hit his hits one day, but I now find myself in my own orbit of reviewing books.

Clean by Alia Trabucco Zeran

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Clean by Alia Trabucco Zeran

Chilean fiction

Original title – Limpia

Translator – Sophie Hughes

Source – Library book

I had read her earlier book, Remainder but it was the year I stepped back from doing so much of the Booker international longlist, and it was one of the books that year I didn’t get to. There always seems to be one I just never review in the rush to review them all, which I usually want to do before the shortlist is announced. Anyway, when I saw this was out, I decided to wait and see if it would turn up in my local library to order in, and it did, so I ordered it in. I had wanted to read her nonfiction book that came out around female killers. I will do so when I see a copy that is cheap enough to buy. Anyway, this is her second novel to be translated. The previous one made the booker shortlist, and this tale of a nanny is as good as the earlier book, if not better. I really was drawn into the narrative here.

I didn’t see the señora the next morning. She left for work without saying goodbye and called me at around three.

Estela, make a note of this, she said.

Educated, hard-working, a discreet maid.

I was to defrost the chicken breasts and stuff them with spinach and toasted almonds. I should also make roast potatoes and prepare a round of dry pisco sours.

Nothing like a homemade pisco sour, she said, as if she were talking to someone else.

The señora wanted to know if I knew the measures. I told her I did, but she repeated them to me anyway. Three times she warned me not to overdo it on the sugar.

Nothing worse than a sweet pisco sour, she said.

After that she asked me if I could go to the supermarket.

Estelita, she said, can you get angostura bitters, lemons and organic eggs?

One of the very precise shopping lists she has to deal with

Estelle is a nanny. As the book opens, we discover she has been locked in a room by the couple she has been working for. What follows is her telling us of the events that lead up to her getting the job and what happened whilst she was working for the couple. What we see is a woman broken by this couple and the events that lead to the death of the daughter. Julia dies after she has been many for seven years, but it is how, over time, Estelle has lost herself as she falls foul of how this couple treated her over those seven years. It is a gaslight of a young woman by the couple, a class tale of power and who has it. But this is also mirrored by events away from the house. But it is those unseen souls in a home, those working for those with money, and how they get treated is at the heart of this story, and what happens when it all goes wrong like it does here.

By now you’re probably wondering why I stayed. It’s a good question, one of those important questions. Do you feel sad? Are you happy? You know the sort of thing. My answer is the following: Why do you stay in your jobs? In your poky offices, in the factories, in the shops on the other side of this wall?

I never stopped believing I would leave that house, but routine is treacherous; the repetition of the same rituals – open your eyes, close them, chew, swallow, brush your hair, brush your teeth – each one an attempt to gain mastery over time. A month, a week, the length and breadth of a life.

The señora deducted the cost of the blender from my pay, then got over the impasse. That’s what she said, ‘Estela, I’m over that impasse?

This is a question you do ask as you read about what is going on in the book

This is a gradual book. Things at the start seem ok tyes. She struggles to fit in, but then it turns and twists; the couple have sex, and she captures them. She looks at Senora’s dress; each little thing that happens makes them treat her hard. This is a story of a young woman who is powerless over time. In those seven years, we see her get more and more under the thumb of this couple. All this happens as we see the power struggle happening outside the house, and she is on the opposite side of it, those powerless, those unseen. There is a great line in Gosford Park where one of the detectives basically dismisses the servants as not having any involvement in anything as they are just there doing a job and aren’t important. What I loved so much is how our Narrator, Estelle, draws us into her world as we see how she ends up locked in a room. You think I’d done this, but would you do it if you were her? There is almost a Fait acompli about her story. We hear about couples doing this every few years, taking young women, and then they go from Nanny or Maid to slave or prisoner of the couple. This is one of the first books I have read since the booker prize this year. I think, oh that it should be on the longlist. Have you read any of her earlier books?

Winston’s score = +A is One of the year’s books so far for me .

What Darkness was by Inka Parei

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What Darkness was by Inka Parei

German fiction

Original title – Was Dunkelhiet war

Translator – Katy Derbyshire

Source – personal copy\

I move over to Germany with my latest book for Woman in Translation month. This book won the Ingeborg Bachmann prize and is the second book I have reviewed from the writer Inka Parei. Having studied sociology, political science and sinology as a student. I love the phrase on the English translation of her Wiki pages, which describes her as a writer with the ethos of quality over quantity in her writing. So far, she has published three novels. This is the second I have reviewed Cold Centre by her, and her debut is called Shaow Boxer. They have all been published by Seagull Books. I picked this for today because it was one of those occasions when you read books within a short time and talk to each other, and this is the case. This book, like yesterday’s reviews for Yell, if you still can, also has a man nearing his death, and, like that book, it sees him looking back on his life.

The old man lowered his binoculars, his hands trembling. He had rough, sturdy hands covered in age spots and white patches devoid of pigment, the veins raised visibly beneath the skin. He had the furrowed hands of a man who does physical work even though he had never really done hard labour; he’d worked at the post office.

He could almost hear the hissing sound the leather of the belt made as it slid out of the loops. The younger of the two girls risked a glance outside, which suddenly grew long, hesitant, as if she had seen him. Then she turned away and ran to the door and someone extinguished the light.

This piece remind me of my grandfather he would watch comings and goings when he was alive

We meet an unnamed narrator who has collapsed in bed, and what follows is him thinking over what had just happened. He saw a stranger on the stairs, a series of odd doors fitted by one of his neighbours. This is September 1977, a period in West German history where the past of the country and the future were on fire. This is the time of the Badder Meinhof, kidnappings and general unrest and uncertainty. As he takes to his bed he also thinks back to the war years and how he end up in this city and with this house. Past and present mix as he tries to find out who the stranger on the stairs is. A man dying with this last puzzle and the question of his own dark past.A book that covers those twenty-odd post-war years that led to the events of that year. One man’s thoughts as he is near death. Who is the stranger? What is happening?

It took him a moment to notice the stranger. The old man was standing on the second step, lost in thought and annoyed at himself, and looking distractedly down at where the end of the stairs vanished into the darkness of a small reception room. A few patches of light from the lamp in the yard fell through the door. There was a zinc pail against one wall, next to it a scrubbing brush.

A deaning cloth had been spread out over the pail and had dried into shape draped over the edge. Someone had knocked it off and now it lay inverted, pointlessly mimicking the opening of the bucket, on the doormat.

He saw the tips of two shoes and knees swathed in grey flannel, and it was not until then that he recognized the rest, the whole of the man sitting against the wall with his legs drawn up, apparently unconscious or asleep.

The moment he saw the stranger that he questions through the book.

I love her writing, and Katy Translation Ikna Parei is a sparse writer who gets to the soul and haunting past of her country. She has a nod or maybe is from the same style of writing as Herta Müller. That feeling of mystery is strong in this book. Unanswered questions, dark pasts, we never quite see it all, and that is okay because this is one man’s vision of those years and what was happening in the late summer of 1977. This is one of the reasons I love Seagull books they bring us voices we would never see this is a delicate book well written a gem of a read that can be easily read in an evening that captures the country at that time and what had brought it there in some ways. Have you read this or any other books from Seagulls book’s German list? They have brought some great books out.

Winstonsdad scored A. I just need to get ahold of her debut novel, Shadow Boxer; as this writer, I enjoy reading.

Clara reads Proust by Stéphane Carlier

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Clara reads Proust by Stéphane Carlier

French fiction

Original title – Clara lit Proust

Translator – Polly Mackintosh

Source – Personal copy

I’ve long been a fan of Gallic books, but it has been a break since I reviewed one of them. But yesterday I was in Sheffield we had gone for a morning out, and I happened on this that hadn’t long come out from them it jumped out as the next few weeks I’m after relatively short books to try and get some more reviews done .it was a reminder to me that I still have to get past swans way in Proust myself but like a lot of projects i needed to get a move on with  this is the tale of a hairdresser discovering a copy of swans way and finding a connection in the modern day to Proust. Stephane has spent time abroad working for the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs. He spent a decade in the US. This is his eighth novel but the first to be translated into English.

That same evening, Clara will pick the book up and put it in the bookcase in the corridor, on the same shelf as L’Appel de l’ange and La Fille de papier by Guillaume Musso, Ma médecine naturelle by Dr Fabrice Visson, Glacé by Bernard Minier, I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovidby Zlaran Ibrahimovie, The Secret by Rhonda Byrne (a gift from Anais, Clara’s childhood friend), The 30 Most Beautiful Hiking Routes in Burgundy (a gift from her father), Trois baisers by Katherine Pancol, Bélier: Daily Horoscopes, the 2011,2013, 2015, 2016 and 2018 editions, as well as a dozen Akira Toriyama mangas, which JB loves. The book will stay there for precisely five months, twenty-nine days, two hours and forty-seven minutes.

The other books she has brought back the cindy Coiffeur

Clara describes the clientele at the quiet hair salon she works, those that come in regularly and how they like their hair on of them decide out of the blue to go Blonde.  Then he colleagues within the hair salon like her tan mad boss . The daily to and fro of a small hair salon in France, she has over time found several books, so when she finds a copy of Swannn’s Way left behind in the salon, she thinks nothing of it till she then falls into Proust world as she is drawn in more than any of the other books she has read over the years. There is a list of the books she has taken from the salon, a footballer biography, horoscopes in books, and a couple from the best-selling French writer Guillaume Musso. But this book captures her with that lightbulb moment when you move from the occasional reader to a fan of books and literature that we all have. So much so that she decided to attend a festival and read the piece of Proust that she loved on the street.

It began with the thought that Nolwenn’s mannerisms were similar to those of Françoise from In Search of Lost Time. Then it was Madame Habib who seemed like a character from the book, with her fits of snobbery, her physical and verbal tics, and her mournful, frog-like eyes. Clara eventually realised that the book is so vast and encompasses so many topics that it is virtually impossible not to see the world through its lens while you are reading it. Even the smallest things become Proustian. A cluster of wisteria, the violet colour of its flowers against its green leaves.Dust suspended in a shaft of light in an otherwise dark room. And Annick, her mother, who always turns her head slightly and half opens her mouth when she is photographed, as if there is someone calling her at the exact same moment. That is Proustian, truly Proustian.

She compares those around her with the porust characters later on

I have loved This sort of book from Gallic Books over the years. They do these great fun reads, light and perfect for a summer evening, and can be read in a couple of hours. It also reminds all of us readers why we love books and reading that moment we all have when we connect with a writer. I’m sure being in France and knowing where he talks about Helps with cracking  Proust a writer. I have read Swann’s way several times but not got into him as much as Clara does here. That is what this is about the power of books to inspire people and how, even over a hundred years later, you can still connect with Proust. I like the little description of the shop and how she fell in with Swann and his story. Have you a favourite book about someone getting inspired by reading?

Winston score -A: This is what Gallic does best. This type of French lit is very French fun, inspiring and like a palate cleanser.

And the stones cry out by Clara Dupont-Monod

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And the stones cry out by Clara Dupont-Monod

French fiction

Original title – s’adapter

Translator – Ben Faccini

Source – review copy

I love it when you are sent a book from a writer you have reviewed before, and the book you have been sent is completely different from the one you had reviewed. This is the case with this book from the French writer Clara Dupont-Monod. Her previous book I had also reviewed from Maclehose Press, was a historic novel that was about the son of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Here this is a book set in the present. But actually, some details are sparse. It is about three siblings dealing with a disabled brother. This has a little connection to the writer’s own life. She grew up with a disabled brother. She had already been up for some of the top prizes in France, but this won two, the Prix Femina and GoncourtDes Lyceensa; it became a bestseller in France.

Three months went by before anyone noticed the boy didn’t babble. He remained silent most of the time, apart from the odd cry. Sometimes a smile appeared, or a frown, or a sigh after he finished a bottle of milk.
Occasionally, he got startled when a door slammed. That was it: a few cries and smiles, a frown, the odd sigh or a twitch. Nothing else. He didn’t wriggle. He stayed calm.
He was “inert”, his parents thought without admitting it out loud. The baby showed no interest in faces, in dangling mobiles or rattles. Above all, his shadowy eyes didn’t settle on anything. They seemed to rove from side to side, while his pupils reeled and turned, as if following the dance of an invisible insect, latching onto nothing in particular. The boy couldn’t see the bridge, the two houses, or the courtyard separated from the road by an old wall of reddish stones.

The brother and the house they all live in with the stones that are refered to in the title

The book is about a disabled child and his siblings. The book is told from three points of view of the brother and sister who are around when the brother is alive. There is a very detached nature book. The children are just older brothers and sisters. There are just thoughts of connection, like the older brother getting his face next to his brother and just being there with the child, described as having large black eyes that drift in and out of focus. A plump child with translucent skin and blue vein legs. It made me think of one young man I looked after many years ago who was in a wheelchair but had a child-like appearance. The sister she is distant I really felt her part having spent years working with people with Learning disablities I had seen many sisters and relatives like the sister it is hard having a brother with a disability you can resent the time they suck up from your parents and this is caught well here. Then there is the brother that comes after the disabled brother has passed the child to fill the void, but also you are touched when they said they checked to see everything was okay when he was born, but he has his own issues living in the shadow of what had come before. I loved how she took emotion and names and made the time fluid. It made it feel universal and connect with everyone who grows up with a disabled sibling.

SHE RESENTED THE BOY FROM THE MOMENT HE WAS born. Or rather from the moment her mother waved an orange in front of his eyes and realised he couldn’t see.
The sister’s bedroom window looked straight out on to the courtyard. So she’d seen the bright stain of the fruit’s colour, her mother crouched down, and heard the faintness of her tender, sing-song voice before it fell silent. She remembered the raging chorus of the cicadas, the tumbling roar of the river, the guffawing of the trees shaken by the wind. Yet nothing remained of that summer sound. There was only

The sisters story and how she feels about her brother .

Now I can see why this caught the mood in France. They love a piece of autofiction. But is does capture so well the dynamics of growing up with a disabled brother . The way many siblings go from the devoted sibling to the older brother, he has a wonderfully symbiotic relationship. He knows what every noise and twitch means. I remember a mother that used bring her son for repite that was like this that new her non verbal son so well. Then we have the sister that feels as if she is second best. I have seen this and have not seen it. The sibling mentions that she is never there. The relation, you know, feels like this. After thirty years of supporting various patients and families, these are all observations I have seen. Then, the replacement brother is well written. It captures how maybe the curious incident did capture the autistic view of the world well. It seemed a view at the time. This captures the  inner working of a family with a disabled son when he is there, the void that is left when they die and how it can touch and affect each sibling. This is a gem of a novel that should be better known. Have you read a writer who can write such different books as a historical novel and a heartfelt story of a disabled brother?

Winstons score – A gem of a novella

 

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.

 

My rivers by Faruk Šehić

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My rivers by Faruk Šehić

Bosnian poetry

Original title – Moje rijeke

Translator – S D Curtis

Source -Review copy

I struggled to review this as I do read poetry not as much as I did in my late teens and early twenties, when I read a lot of poetry. But that was mainly English Poetry and not a lot in translation. But this is a collection form a Bosnian writer whose fiction I have really enjoyed. The translator is a poet herself and also the owner of Istros books. So I feel the wieght to review this poetry collection in a way but I also love how he connects events in his life to rivers this harked me back to Esther Kinsky in her book Am Fluss (river) where she connected her life to rivers asnd event that had happened but also the fluid nature of memories and rivers or Alice Oswald with Dart another poem about a river.This poetry collection won the biggest poetry prize in the Balkans.

Here the Americans and British disembarked in two world wars

Here in the bay the HMS Lancaster sunk in 1940, with the loss of 4000 souls

Fraternal flags flutter proudly on masts (two of the few that I can stomach)

Respect is the only thing I can feel imagining American warships in the centre of Saint Nazaire

The menacing grey of steel determined to defend the world from Nazism

Here was the USS Saratoga, whose name Iloved as a child, the river waters softening the smell of the ocean

The second verse of the poem liberation day

 

 

My Rivers is a poetry collection in Four cycles: From France and the Loire, Germany and the Spree River then the Great Balkan River the Drna and a final cycle beyond the river. The collection opens in Paris and the Loire and Faruk hear his name in the wind and the spirits of the world wars echo in this poem and I was so touched by the end line of this poem, Liberation Day as the sea makes us whole again it seemed so poignant and have so many means. Then as an Emigre in Berlin, he talks about being able to Podst himself there and how it feels to wander the Postdamer Platz, drink milky coffees and see exotic food served. Then, Berlin’s problematic history, but he felt it was a city for him. In the poem, Emigre’s soul opens the Spree cycle. Then a powerful and brutal imagery in a return to the Garden of Eden in the Drna cycle messages from the dead signs only he sees grubby kids Sarajevo. That smell of meat at the butcher. The pile of excuses, this is a stomach-thumping poem about a return to a place. In Beyond the River: The Last Cycle, he talks about the Revolution as an Odyssey ghost, lost books, lost texts, a tear in a spider web, and revolution like pigs eating all in front of them all ends with the lines, there is no other way but the cross on your back and the road up ahead what a powerful image.

I’m hooked on the odour of the Berlin underground promising speed and good times

I must post myself to Berlin touch the Brandenburg Gate

caress the stone buttocks of Greek goddesses the colour of milky coffee sipped in Potsdamer Platz serenaded by sparrows, those feathery balls navigating the glass domes of arcades strung with sails or what seem now like sails, now like neckties made for giants

Those sparrows surround me as I drink in the late sun, they’ll wait for crumbs while I sit in the garden of an exotic restaurant (serving crocodile steak and koala fillet)

A section from the poem Emigre’s soul

I said I struggled with how to review this. I am no poet I  struggle to convey how powerful this felt to me it is stunning in its soul, a man’s soul like the intestines he talks about in one poem laid out for all to see the innermost soul of a man the ghost of the war but then how do you move past that and that is the river in a way he is like a stone thrown roughly with edges and other time those barbs of a man and a war are heading to the sea smoothing slowly forming something else water always finds a way and this is like a soul finding a way in words. I love that Susan did this, as she is a wonderful poet in her own right she wrote a heartwrenching poem about her own life that is worth reading. As Nick Cave said in his poem Crooked River “O sullen river, wide +weary, what are you running to? to a watery grave, o doomed sailor, to the grave I’m taking you. ” The river drags your soul in with it at times. Have you a favourite poetry collection in Translation ?

Winston score – +A Heart wrenching at times. I just wish I was better placed to review and give it the just review it needs.