Tag: restless books

Captivity by György Spiró

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Captivity by György Spiró

Hungarian fiction

Original title – Fogság

Translator – Tim Wilkinson

Source – Personal copy

I said to myself this year, I need to read more epic books. In recent years, there have been a lot of epic novels coming out, and I have been buying them or noting them down and never reading them. This has been on my radar since either just before or when it came out in English a few years ago. Hungarian fiction seems to produce a lot of epics, and this one had a description that made it feel like one of those old Hollywood romantic epics. But a book that also captured three places, really Rome, Egypt and Jerusalem, as we follow Uri, the main character in the book. The book is a mid-career work by the writer Gyory Spiro; he started in radio. His radio drama style has been called avant-garde. On the whole his novels have been historical in theme, and he has returned to his historic background of being Jewish, like he does in this book

URI DID NOT DARE SLEEP. HE WAS AFRAID HE WOULD NOT WAKE IN TIME, but he must have dropped off anyway, because his father shook him awake.His first thought was the tessera, which he must not forget to hand over to his father, since it could be transferred, but his father muttered that he had already passed it on the previous evening. Uri clutched at his neck: the tessera was not there. Then a memory drifted back of those hours before he had gone to bed: he had handed over the lead token as if he were making a last will and testament.As he tugged on his loincloth under his tunic in the dark, the thought running through his head was that the tessera was worth more without him than with him.His father draped his gown over him. Uri protested, but his father squeezed his shoulder. It was a seamless, rectangular outer garment of cloth with a blue braided tassel dangling in approved fashion at each of the four corners. Uri had not owned a gown before; Joseph would get another for himself. If he could spare the money.

His father and him had issues

This book captures that time when going from place to place could take months, and the world people lived in was much larger in that way so when Uri,a sort of Nerdy lad who has issues with his parents, his grandfather was a slave, and he is very good at languages, is required to go to Judae mainly because of his language skill and also being.  Roman Jew. So, as the years pass, he heads first to Judea, where he is locked up for a time with a man from Nazareth; he thinks little of this happening at the time. This is around the time Jesus died, and the book ends many years later, as Christianity is beginning to take hold. So when Uri is free and then heads to Egypt and to Alexandria this is another ex empire but also the early seedlings and emebers of the Change that was going to take place in the roman Empire this is all shown as he meets many firgures from the time likje Claudis and Nero he struggles to accept that the man he meet in a cell all those years ago with two theives with him is this Martyr and new messiah figure. What I liked was the moment of capturing a new religion, starting a world in flux. I also felt undercurrents to the present in Modern Israeli at times.

Countless leather bottles of water, along with dried figs, salted raw fish, smoked fish, and dried fish had been stocked for the crew and passengers, along with several hundred pounds of unleavened bread, baked in thicker portions than matzos generally were. Uri grew tired of the monotonous diet by the first evening; they were taking water to sea, taking fish to sea. It seemed the Creation had not been devised to absolute perfection.

With a favorable northwesterly wind to fill the sails, they forged eastward and later northeastward. The captain said that in the spring it was always better going from Syracusa to Caesarea than the reverse. The slaves, who rowed on the lower level of the bireme, the upper level left empty, were being given a break.

Uri looked down on them. They were lying, chained to each other, naked in the gloom of the ship’s belly. Light and air they got from above, from where they could be reached by clambering down a ladder, except that the ladder was pulled up right then. It was only let down when the armed slave drivers took victuals down to them, with the ladders being pulled up after them once they’d scrambled up with the vessels of excrement. One of the slave drivers was always down there with them to control the rhythm of the rowing; he was now resting alongside them-that being his occupation right then. Slave drivers were relieved, not so the slaves.

As Uri sails off

I don’t read many Epic historical novels, and I have had Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on my radar for years. I want to get the nice Everyman editions of this book. But yes, from what I know of this history, he captures it well, and Uri seems to be there as things are happening and changing. I can’t help but also think of the Life of Brian with the meeting of Jesus in the cell, it is a brief moment, and the aftermath of this one man is captured in the years that follow. But to Uri, he was just a chap he met in a cell, and he couldn’t put the man he met with what at the time would have been viewed as a cult. I found that very interesting concept. Those events captured through one man’s eyes. As I said, it also feels like a commentary on maybe Israeli Judaism and also maybe even his own country’s post-war years. But it is an epic book and a book that captures empires and times shifting, as I said, it reminded me of those epic Roman dramas Hollywood used to make, but through many lifetimes.. Have you read this or his plays, which seem to have been translated as well?

Nine moons by Gabriela Wiener

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Nine Moons by Gabriela Wiener

Peruvian non-fiction

Original title – Nueve Lunas

Translator – Jessica Powell

Source – Review copy

A fitting end for both Spanish lit month and Woman in translation month I am working the next two days. I was ask if I wanted to review this book and I decided I would it is a bit different to my normal reading as it follows the nine months of Peruvian writer Gabriela wiener pregnancy. She has lived in Barcelona where she has written a number of books including one about sex which had grown out of articles she wrote about the swinging community. She has lived in Spain since 2003.

To start with, it’s not juist bausea; the fundamental malaise that seizes you when you wake up in the morning is like waking up with a hangover and a guilty consience all at the same time, like waking up after a loved one’s funeral or seeng dawn break on the day after losing the love of your life. The nausea would attack me in the most inapportune places and times. I started to think that it revealed a certain psychology in my relationship with things. For example, I always got nauseated when I had to do something that I didn’t want to do like go out to buy bread very early in the morning in the middle of winter.

Morning sickness described by her i loved the bit about feeling it when she had a job she didn’t really want to do.

Gabriela and  her husband J have been trying for a baby so when they find out that not long she had surgery and she had heard her father was uffering with Cancer. She discovered she was pregnant. We have a description of how you find out you are pregnant with the gona appearing in the womans blod after six days.Then  what follows is nine months of her thinking about her mother and how she treat her as a child and how many different ways you can look after a baby. As they pregnancy moves on we she her go through morning sickness, styles of bringing up a baby, the changes in her body and the regulas check ups during the pregnency and the predjuce at times for being Pewruvian in Spain when someone in a hospital thinks she is a maid or a cleaner. The discovery of the sex and the rush neat the end finding where to live a rush painting with Her and her husbands J love of Kitsch. I loved the afterword ten years after this came out she had read the end of the book to her daughter and she had laughed.

Third and final apointment with the Spanish Public Health service, all expenses covered, for which one must be grateful, despite its downsides.This was one of the most importnt appointments because I would be registering for the first time at Barcelona Maternity , the hospital where Lena would be born. In order to do this , I had to be seen by one of the center’s midwives. I was greeted by a Latin American-looking nurse, whioI later found out was Bolivian, though she spoke some Catalan. It mademe happy to know I’d be attended by an almost compatriot. I would have liked to be able to speaj well of her, but that’s not the case. she was short and plump, with cropped black hair, and her white coat was too big for her.

I loved the description of the midwife you have a sense of her character in just a few words.

This is a page turner Gabriela has a really flowing narrative style as we walk alongside her on her pregnancy. She is a writer from the Latin american Cronicas style of writing these short piece for Newspaper that are common in papers in Latin america she had written a number of piece around the swingers scene before this.It is a mix of highly personal insight and journalstic as we follow the ups and down of her pregnancy but also being Peruvian in Spain struggling job to job getting a job at a vets via a friends. As she struggles to make ends meet in the build up to the pregnancy. This is an intresting look one woman’s journey open honest warts and all. Have you read any books by her ?