Tag: seagull books

The Parasite by Ferenc Barnás

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The Parasite by Ferenc Barnás

Hungarian fiction

Original title – Az élősködő

Translator – Paul Olchvary

Source – Personal copy

I started off the Hungarian lit month with this book; it caught my eye from the Seagull list of books from Hungary because it had a quote from Laszlo Krasznahorkai, ” Ferenc Barnás is a legend among those who know him,” now, when you get that from the most recent Nobel winner as a recommendation. Barnás seems to have won many of the major book prizes in his own country, and this was his debut novel, which came out in 1997 in Hungarian. I feel we get caught up in place-based trends when translating these days, and a powerhouse of literature like Hungary, with one of the strongest and most interesting literary scenes, is forgotten. Barnás has taught at times and, at other times, been a full-time writer. There are a couple of his other books out or due to be released by Seagull Books.

One of the men in the ward resembled a friend of mine who’d escaped from an occupational therapy clinic in the provinces. I always did like that ever-smiling wino. After absconding from that teetotalling institution, he took to hanging out at a train station, where his fellow imbibers would sometimes help him towards the public restroom to keep him from wetting his pants even more than he already had. One time I noticed him grinning knowingly at his half-witted chums, who, having been summoned to the train cars for a bit of hard labour to earn their bread or wine, were busily carrying dreadfully heavy sacks full of who-knows-what back and forth for some no doubt noble purpose. No, he wasn’t such a fool atter all. While the others toiled away, he went about not so discreetly sampling fruit brandy he’d acquired for a modest sum from someone’s illicit distillery.

His viewing other people in the hospital as a child

The narrator of this book is unknown. We follow him from late childhood to adulthood. He is a strange character; he thrives on illness and a sort of Munchausen youth, though his body suffers from this constant need to be ill. But he feels safe as a patient; you feel it is almost his safety blanket against the world, a strange boy feeding on symptoms. But as the world is, boys become men, and he grows up and starts to be a man, having relationships, he also starts masturbating greatly. At some point, you are not sure if the encounters he claims to have are real or maybe a fever dream, sexual imagery for him to come tooo? , but even then, he has quirks; he has one-night stands, but then he gets haunted and wracked with dreams of what the previous night’s women are now doing.  But when he ends up with an older woman simply called L, but the initial silence of the dreams and nightmares that haunt his sex life ends, but then come back in a darker way.

Perhaps I should have placed an ad in the classifieds: ‘Seeking someone to beat sordidness of unknown origin out of me, every last bit of it. Perverts need not reply!’ Who knows, perhaps I would have happened upon a psychotic prison guard who specialized in exactly my sort of case! Why shouldn’t there be people out there who know not only torture inside-out but also psychology? | yearned for an applicant who could discern the nature of my imagination through my body’s agony. I would have been able to determine even from his mistakes whether he was really suited to the task. Even as I smiled at this childish escape fantasy of mine, I was virtually certain that people must have once lived who knew just how to go about exorcizing demons.

Seeking out people to suit his particular sexual needs

I loved this book. It had a little bit of Thomas Bernhard in it. The sheer sorrowful life of our narrator is very Bernhardian. But the voice comes across as very quirky at times, a tone and feel to the narrative I haven’t read in anything else, which makes it very interesting. But for me, Bartis, another Hungarian writer, his book Tranquillity is about a young man set in roughly the same time, although in many ways different; both are ways of looking at the child-parent relationship growing up in Socialist Hungary.  Another feeling for me was that our narrator grew up, his one-night stands were either real or just fever dreams from his sexual mind, and guilt of being the way he was, and that is why initially his relationship with L is so different.  This is what I love about much of the Hungarian fiction I have read: it is deep-thinking, and it requires readers to reflect on the characters. I will be in the historic Roman times in the next book for Hungarian lit month in a few days’ time. Have you read any books by Ferenc Barnás?

 

War Primer by Alexander Kluge

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War Primer by Alexander Kluge

German fiction

Original title – Kreigsfibel

Translator – Alexander Booth

Source – Personal copy

I am moving slowly this German lit month, and here is another gem of a book. If you have followed this blog for any amount of time, you will know I am a massive fan of the German writer, filmmaker, and Social critic. I have reviewed six other Kluge books over the last five or so years. In fact, this book, written in his nineties, connects to different books, as he is someone who saw the end of the Second World War and has witnessed the recent war in Ukraine. This book takes its title from a play by the playwright Bertolt Brecht, published around the Second World War. This is a companion piece to that book that ties Kluge’s own family life to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

In the early days of the Ukrainian war, there was a report of a certain number of villagers, including young people and children, holding up a Russian tank. After a period of hesitation, the tank driver put it in reverse and rolled back out of the village.

This is an urban legend. It was already making the rounds during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. During the 1991 coup in Moscow, the scene actually occurred several times and led to several tank divisions withdrawing from the city. In Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, however, the same kind of confrontation ended in a massacre.

The report in the case of Ukraine emphasized the bravery of the civilians who opposed the tank. But it takes two to tango, as it were, for an encounter to end happily: the determination of the residents, but also that of the young tank driver, perhaps all of 18, who put the tank in reverse.

The echoes of previous conflicts

 

The first thing you know if you read `Kluge is that his books are not linear or even have a plot. No, he uses a montage technique of writing short vignettes and fragments. For me, this is the filmmaker in him; those snippets stuck together may work as a cinema of writing. This book covers his recollections of the end of World War II. Those images of tanks echo both from the history he saw as a child and from what he knew in later life, tanks again crossing the Russian plains. The images of villagers in Ukraine stopping tanks in the early days remind him of Hungary and China, with both ends harsh. He has also included a lot more film in this book, available via a series of QR codes, to lend his words greater power and bring to life the anecdotes and tales he is retelling and reliving. The story of his hometown.

The soldiers in the Russian tank battalions are very young. In the evening, after a disappointing conclusion to battle, the leadership cannot stop them from looting. They lug furniture, carpets and valuables of all kinds into the trailers of their vehicles. Manage to pack the stuff into large, mailable parcels. Then the loot is tied up and transported to Belarus on trucks. From there, the goods are sent by post to the soldiers’ homes. When we investigate such shipments, we learn the names, home addresses and places of recruitment, and thus the origin of the predatory units. Once we have the names of the perpetrators and their superiors, we feed our information cannons with what makes the news relevant in terms of jus in bello, that is, justifiable conduct in war: the precise attribution of offences, simultaneously to single offenders and to military units. As I’ve always said: information is a more effective explosive projectile than any artillery ammunition.

The young russians sent to the front to die but also some looted

 

I always struggle to put over how much Kluge means to me as a reader. For me, this chap is maybe my own secret writer, no one really talks about. He is like Sebald if you cut out the fat of his books and just leave the meat, those little insights, those interconnecting vignettes, those images, repeating echoes of the past, echoes of war, repeating conflict after conflict. I love the montage he builds in his books. This is a man who is not only a writer but also one of the leading voices in German New Wave cinema. It is this that makes his bookls so different it is that viisual mind mioxed with the literary mind a rare type of writer. All this from a man in his 90s !! I’ll end with this excerpt from Laurence Binyon’s poem For the Fallen, which captures war in a few lines so well.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them!

 

War Diary by Ingeborg Bachmann

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War diary by Ingeborg Bachmann

German memoir

Original title – Krieg Tagebuch

Translator -Mike Mitchell

Source – Personal copy

I move from Crime fiction to Memoir —here it is: Memoir or just a snippet of history? I haven’t read any Ingeborg Bachmann, but I know she is an essential writer in German postwar writing. This comes from the end of the Second World War. After the war, she often questioned the role of the writer in post-war Germany. She wrote radio plays, librettos, short stories and her single novel Maluina. She also left some unfinished novels, and after her death, her work was published at the end of the war in Vienna, including a relationship she had with a British soldier stationed there and his letters when he fist was relocated to Italy and then Palestine

My mind’s still in a whirl. Jack Hamesh was here, this time he came in a jeep. Naturally, everyone in the village stared and Frau S. came over the stream twice to have a look in the garden. I took him into the garden because Mummy’s in bed upstairs. We sat on the bench and at first I was all of a tremble so that he must have thought I’m mad or have a bad conscience or God knows what. And I’ve no idea why. I can’t remember what we talked about at first but all at once we were on to books, to Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig and Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal. I was so happy, he knows everything and he told me he never thought he’d find a young girl in Austria who’d read all that despite her Nazi upbringing. And suddenly everything was quite different and I told him everything about the books. He told me he was taken to England in a kindertransport with other Jewish children in ’38, he was actually eighteen then but an uncle managed to arrange it, his parents were already dead.

He was from Vienna and connect over there love of books

This is a complex piece to describe, as it is a very slim book —100 pages, forty of which are an afterword —and the first two sections are snippets from Bachman’s diary in the dying embers of World War II. She is afraid that, as the Russians are nearly there, she is scared of them capturing her. Her and her friend Wilma, those initial post-war events, and having to think about how her world has changed again—the war is over. Then, when the British arrive, she meets a young officer that she connects with over books, and they wander around swapping books and talking. All this happens in about twenty pages. What follows is Jack’s letter when he is sent away, and how being sent to Israel upsets his worldview, leaving him feeling rootless. He was Jewish from Vienna but had moved to Britain. The return to Palestine hit him hard after the initial time in Naples, after he first left Vienna. The tone of his letters changes over time when writing back to Inge. I wish we had her letters so we could see what she wrote to him. He says that her vision of her world is beyond her years.

Now almost a month has passed and I still haven’t managed to pull myself together. I’ve had to fight my way through some pretty difficult times during my life but it seems to me that nothing in my previous experiences can compare with the last few days and weeks.

Completely uprooted, with nothing to hold on to, something I’ve never been through before, these last few weeks have been the most terrible time I’ve had to go through. Do forgive me, dear, kind Inge, for writing things like this, I’d love to have something happy to tell you but every line I add brings new pain and new suffering. I can’t describe my true situation to you, I feel as if I’ve sunk incredibly low, a disaster which I perhaps alone sense, for I alone experience it, experience it all on my own, as alone as I’ve never been before, I wasn’t even as devastated by the death of my mother as I have been by this last month.

Jack letter shows how he feels rootless due to his past

This is one of those odd little books that I love to find a little piece of a writer’s life, a glimpse into Ingeborg Bachmann before she became the outstanding figure in German literature. I haven’t read Malina, so I thought this would be a great intro to her. Although her actual written part of the book is twenty pages of diary entries. Jack is actually more of a character in this collection a man lost in the world because of the war and his own past. There is a feeling that the time with Ingeborg in Vienna is a small piece in his life and in his companionship with the young Inge, and that the time he spent with her and her family touched him. But then he is blown away by what he sees in Palestine, connects to it, and the memories of a summer romance are captured here. I love the book itself. Seagull does such nice books. I hope to get to Bachmann’s novel and other writing at some point. Have you read Bachmann or heard her radio plays ?

The Three Rimbauds by Dominioue Noguez

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The Three Rimbauds by Dominique Noguez

French Literary criticism

Original title – Les TROIS rIMBAUDS

Translator – Seth Whidden

Source – Personal copy

I looked when Seagull Books had a recent sale, and of the many great books they have, I couldn’t get them all, which, believe me, if I had the chance, I would. This title grabbed me as I was like many young men a Fan of Rimbaud when I was younger. The guy people like Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan said they loved to read. Of course, in a rock and roll way, he died at 39. He had just returned from Africa. The French Lit Critic and film Professor Dominique used this as a launch pad for the book. He had read a piece by Paul Claudel in. the 1912 edition of Rimabud’s complete works. We missed so much of what Rimbaud could have written had he lived.

When Arthur Rimbaud was inducted into the Académie française on 16 January 1930, no one seemed to remember the ‘man with the soles of wind’, the diabolical cherub from ‘Nina’s Replies’ and ‘The Seated Man’, or the Seer thug who had dominated the headlines in the little world of French poetry in 1872. Curiously enough, Paul Valéry, whose speech officially welcomed the new academician and who was known for being more meticulous (in his foreword to La Fontaine or Mallarmé, for example), made quick work of Rimbaud’s early works and dispatched them in three quick sentences:

The opning paragrapgh about the imagined 1930 academy speech

The book centres on another event that happened but was set a year earlier. We imagine Rimbaud has been given a seat in the French Academy. The speech Paul Valery gives teeth to the years we missed of what could have been Rimbaud’s life in 1930.(He gave an actual speech the year after when Marshal Pétain got seat 18 in the Academy). As I say, the speech follows his Life, which Rimbaud had written as solo novel on his return to France and wrote a story called African Nights. This book, and that very French idea, seems to be a piece of Autofiction of his time in Africa. It is imagined that he also married the sister of Paul Claudel. Claudel was a Catholic, and this saw Rimbaud become a Catholic. We see bits of letters to the like of Breton Cocteau, the great writers in France, in the years that followed his death, weaving his imagined life around actual events and people that show a poet that calmed and in the end, his verse became more serious and straightforward. One quote hit me, and this is so true. What would have happened if Gide had died after The Fruits of the Earth or James Joyce after Dubliners ? The question is, what if, like so many other poets, died to you ng, would Wilfred Owen be so well known or loved had he died young?

(It makes for a small literary game, not without interest and worth practicing on others: How would we view Gide if he had died after The Fruits of the Earth; Aragon after the Treatise on Style or Joyce after Dubliners?.. ). No. We will agree, how-ever, that this way of rewriting history has the advantage of revealing, in an ingeniously metaphorical way, that one Rimbaud dies in 1891 to give birth to another.

The thought of what if other writers had diedat a young age like Rimbaud

This is a short book of 60 pages, a homage to a great poet, a little play on what might have been. I was struck by the question of how far we are from the AI works of an Older Rimbaud or Kurt Kobain’s imagined works in this age of AI, an album of what might have been Tracks. I like this idea of what might have been for Rimbaud. He is one of those writers who died on the cusp of his wave. He could have been even more significant, or could he have been? We will never know. I like how he patched the Claudel quote to the speech many years later from someone Rimbaud knew for an Academy seat. The footnotes show how Noguez weaved his web around these and other events to make the imagined latter years of Rimbaud. Of course, this moves into an area that someone like Borges used to write about: reimagining the history of great figures. This is mentioned in the intro.I also thought of a couple of books I read ago by Peter Ackroyd, one about Milton and the other about Oscar Wilde, that imagined part of their lives. In this part, we see the Rimbaud, and no one ever saw the man tinged by North Africa. An event that profoundly affected Rimbaud from what is alluded to in the book. Do you have a favourite fictional or reimagined life of a writer?

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.

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.

The Blue Soda Siphon by Urs Widmer

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The Blue Soda Siphon

Swiss fiction

Original title – Der blaue Siphon

Translator – Donal McLaughlin

Source – Personal copy

I am a little late to starting this year’s German lit month in fact, I m not as organised as in other years, but I feel I will just post a couple of books this year as I’ve other books to read so this has been on my shelves for a couple of years. I am a massive fan of the publisher Seagull Books. They seem to plough their own furrow and have these lists of books from certain countries or places; this is from their Swiss list. Widmer grew up with literature. A frequent visitor to his house growing up was Heinrich Böll. He was an editor and then a freelance writer. He was known for his exciting plot twists, often surreal parodies using classic book ideas and spinning them into something new. He may feel like one of those writers who should been better known in English. He has several books on Seagulls list I have another apart from this, which is a short novella that twists on the time travel genre.

In the evening that day, a Friday, I went to the cinema, a city-centre cinema showing a film of which I knew only the name and that it had been praised in the morning paper or evening news. I’d confused it with something else, presumably, as the film was peculiar – more than just odd – not my taste. I was also completely alone in the cinema.Maybe it was a Monday. As ever I sat at the front, in the very first row, as I like to drown in films.Those widescreen films are already a thing of the past now, those CinemaScope worlds I could plunge into so deeply, I could never see everything, only parts, like in real life. For example, only when I saw Doctor Zhivago on TV much later -a moveable postage stamp, in comparison – did I realize that I’d seen but part of the action, on the right of the screen or the left.

The first visit to the cinema after which he goes back fifty years.

The book is clever as it has two chapters and two time travellers. I feel it is the same person, but it is not fully clear.. The first a man in his fifties goes to the cinema to watch a film and then when he leaves the cinema. He finds himself going back fifty years to his old house with his parents and to his own past it is looking at events that happened then as an adult that happened when he was a child. It is the day he has disappeared as a three-year-old for a single day. This mirrors the events in the book’s second half, as he can not remember them. He sees how his parents react. Now, in the second part of the book, a three-year-old goes to the cinema, and he leaves and is flung into the presence of the Narrator in the first book and is guided by a force to the house he now lives in. There is also a dog that seems to follow him into the future.

The dog shot out of the kitchen, raced yelping towards me and, licking me enthusias-tically, jumped at me. Hardly able to fend him off, I laughed and tried to save my face from his tongue. My mother appeared with a kitchen knife in her hand. She was wearing a bright summer dress and had a dish towel tucked into a narrow leather belt. She looked at us, the amorous dog and me, fighting back and giggling, and shouted,

“Jimmy! heel!’ And to me,’Couldn’t you have rung the doorbell?’

The dog he knows more than the others !!

This short book is almost an adult fairy tale. I was reminded of the opening of Quantum Leap, where it was said Sam, the main character, travelled within his own lifetime, and this is the case here. The title comes from a bottle his father has on his shelf. Whilst in the past, he saw his wife as a child and his parents it is the end of the war years, and there are references to this, and in the present when the book is set, it is around the time of the Iraqim war this is a sort of nod to the two wars. He uses movies as a way to time travel, the one about a lost Indian boy  the other films all seem to link to the book’s narrative. I like how he also changed the language from the Adult narrator, and the child narrator’s view of the world is very well done. This is a Swiss version of Quantum Leap but with the same character jumping as an adult and a kid to see the war over two different times. A playful, unusual book from a writer I would like to read more from. Have you read Urs Widmer?

Winston’s score – A – solid adult fairy tale of time travel.

A cage in search of a bird by Florence Noiville

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A cage in Search of a bird by Florence Noiville

French fiction

Original title – L’Illusion délirante d’être aimé

Translator – Teresa lavender Fagan

Source – Personal copy

I return to a writer that I had reviewed a while ago her non fiction work Literary miniatures a collection of her reviews and piece she had written for Le Monde where for a number of years she had been in charge of the foreign writers section of the paper she had interviewed most of the leading writers for the last twenty years. She has written four novel and a number of non fiction works. I picked this book as it just grabbed me as it deals with Mental Health as someone who works with people with mental health issues so this description of some one with De clerambault syndrome(he De clerambault was one of the first to look at mental illness in a new Wayne of his students was Lacan !!) a condition that sees some one try to become another person that usually ends in a bad way for one of the two people involved.

Wouldn’t it be best simply to talk directly with C? I screw up my courage and leave her a message. Why don’t we talk things over seriously? In the day rather than at night? Ten minutes later C calls back. She says she agrees, ‘of course she agrees’. We set a meeting for the next day, at a cafe near the Trocadéro. That evening I dive back into de Clérambault. *

Can she talk to her ?what will happen if she does ?she will find out reading about the syndrome

The book follows Laura she is living her best life as we would call it these days. She is in Paris(I love a visit to Paris )she is working in TV as a journalist and is on the up she has a bright future. So when she meets a old school friend who is just referred to through out the book as C she gets her a job at the TV she just feel she is helping her out but as she starts to try and get into Laura life and at first  it is first subtle then we sheC  e mail and becoming more and more obsessive around her as the syndrome takes its toll on C and so on Laura. As C makes her self part of her circle of friends and at every turn there is C, as she starts to almost want to Be Laura as she starts to worry we see her try and find out what is happening to Her and C. As things are turning against her as C starts to make her look bad and it is seen the Laura is the one getting Bullied by Laura then even when she is falling out with her partner. She finds a Psychiatrist and try and find out what this De Clerambult syndrome was that C has and is shocked with what she finds basically C is trying to be her and basically it will end up with either her of C in a really bad way. the book sees the tale unfurl as the tense and horror of events is clearer.

‘Do you remember my first wife, Ulrica?’ my friend Vincent asks me. ‘It was right after she was hired as a professor at the Sorbonne. Every day a guy came to talk to her after her classes, then followed her in the street. She found notes rolled up and stuffed in the keyhole at home. One day she read an anti-Semitic allusion on one of them. She finally spoke to me about it, and I picked up my phone and called the guy. I told him that if he continued I would call the police. Two days later I saw an announcement of his death in Le Monde— suicide.’

How she is so intrusive and paranoia is evident here

I liked the way this book was paced as we see C slowly become more and more like Laura and how Laura copes with this Woman,an trying to take over her life and position it feels like when you see someone trying to be you. the book has a thriller feel in its pacing as we see what is C love for Laura but also what happens when she tries to avoid it this is now called Erotomania the film Nurse Betty is also about the same condition and over time there has been a number of celebrities that have had people with the condition come into there lives and they have done things or stalked the celeb.This is a book that highlights an illness not to well known or mentioned. If you like books that have a thriller feel with out being a thriller that deal with Mental health this would be one for you. Have you read any similar book dealing with mental health issues ?

Winstons score B – a interesting tale of two woman when one wants to be the other with obsession and mental health issues.

Among the Almond trees by Hussein Barghouthi

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Among the Almond trees by Hussein Barghouthi

Palestinian Memoir

Original title – Sa’ akin bayn al-Lawz

Source – personal copy

I wanted to add a lot more arabic literature this year but have failed so far I looked at a list from Arablit where they had some books coming out this year and this was one that was mentioned although I had to wait ages for it to arrive as the publication got pushed back of I had to wait for a reprint maybe. What had caught my eye about this book was the description which remind me of one of my fav orate books from year ago I saw Ramallah from Mourid Borghouti which was one of my favourite books and now years later sticks with me with the images of a man returning to his home of Ramallah after many years away. This has a similar premise we see Hussein come home to the countryside around Ramallah where he grew up. But this is a man that is near the end of his life coping with terminal cancer. He had Taught in Europe mainly in Hungary and was the found of the House of Poets in Palestine and also worked on a number of literary magazines. he passed away twenty years ago.

After an absence of thirty years I have returned to live in the countryside near Ramallah – “returned to the beauty that had been betrayed” I had exiled myself from my beginnings and chosen to live as an expatriate. I am one who has perfected “Beginnings” but not” endings”. My return therefore is an imperfect ending

The opening paragraph I was so touched with the ending comment to face death is so hard

As the translator says h=in his intro this is a man struggling with lymphoma and it is his thoughts of life and art but also how he is going to die and ascending into heaven. He has returned to a place that he left thirty years earlier he is near the end of his life and as we follow him as he walks out in the countryside around Ramallah the past and present and future all blend as he walks in the shadows of those almond trees in the day ion the night as he looks back and forward. The book is a poets looking and gathering the final curtain of his life the people he knew his wife and young child his parents. The mountains as memories of his youth flood in as we see a memory of place open up. as we see what was more wilderness in his day now changed but he still finds the wild parts of the area and the Monastery which look large in the story. He talks about people having country and cities of there names as he sees his city in the book.

Among my friends would be Ali Baba and Enkidu, and all those who were born and loved and lived in stories, Stories are the windows of the Spirit and the imagination. When, for example, quaddura spreads his abs on the roof of the monastery and sang and played his rabbi, looking out moonlit wadis, on orchards ploughed planted, on wide obscure distances, he opened a window for his voice in the moonlight space and his voice occupied an eternal domain. His song would then become the city of his name

Where are you from ?

I’m from the country of windows

Stories is often how people are remembered when they pass !

This is a short memoir of a man who has come home to far e the ghost of his past a poet a writer this book is a man looking at a police he once knew and reliving the past as he faces the end and trying to remember the past the translator mentions this as a work as a memory of place the ghosts of our past. I am someone that remembers most events in my life and the places they happen I am haunted and often relive them like Hussein does when he returns after all the years away from his homeland. It remind me of Sebald at time the way he used place to link to the past. This is one of two works he wrote near the end of his life they are both coming out from seagull book the other book Blue light is a flip of this book as it is set around his journey from Seattle with a homeless madman. This book is different to I saw Ramallah as  this is a lot more personal and lot more around the view of the end of your life. But it has the same feeling of loss in the past and returning to find the world you once knew gone or just there as ghosts in your memory. This is a powerful work of memoir of a man facing death. Do you have a favourite book set in Palestine ?

Winstons score – +A touching and sad memoir from a poet

Stu’s year of Books winstonsdad best of 2021

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I am late to the mark here with my best-of list basically I’ve been reading other Blog and Vlogs best-of list for the last year and completely missed that I had not done my own hitting the ground review and reading-wise it isn’t till now I have decided to go back over the last year and pick those books that have stuck with me. Now this may be a different set of books from highlights I have pick of the months of last year as I feel books change after we read them some grow some just stay others just wilt away. So I am not a huge stats person to now I am moving forward using Goodreads a lot more as a way to track my reading and also gain some end of year stats. I reviewed 91 books from 30 countries. I had want to read more African books last year I had read a few more but there is room for a couple more this year. I read books from North and south America, Africa , Europe and Asia but missed books from Oceania and the Pacific which I need to fix this year.any way here are my books of the year I am doing them in the order I read them in the year.

At night all blood is black by David Diop

This tale of two African soldiers in the trenches a story that hasn’t been talked about a lot it follows what happens when your best friend is shot and the enemy is there and you have to get revenge.

30th April 1945 by Alexangder Kluge

Anyone that has followed this blog in the last couple of years will know a writer I am championing and absolutely love is Alexander Kluge here with have vignettes fact and fiction that circle the world on the day that is near the end of world war two.  His books are rabbitholes for the mind it is hard not to pick the other book by him I read but I will resist anyway go out pick him up !!

Tower by Bae Myung- Hoon

I read a hell of a lot more Korean books this year than I have previously and this was one that really stuck with me a futuristic tower building a dystopic world of interlinking stories that in place are funny.

A musical Offering by Luis Sagasti

I’m seeing a theme her of interlinking stories in the book here is another collection that has music at its heart and a diving board for the tales with like Kluge a mix of fact and fiction I loved his previous book I think he is my favourite Latin American writer at the moment

In memory of memory by Maria Steponova

Oh well, another book that drifts as she goes through her grand flat she looks back on her own families history and her homelands at the same time a book that is in that grey area between fiction and non-fiction in a way.

Elegy for Joseph Cornell by Maria Negroni

Oh another collection here of prose and poetry piece that area a bio and tribute to the artist Joesph Cornell a lost gem from Dalkey a man that like to wander his home city of New york

The cheap eaters by Thomas Bernhard

A new translation of one of his lesser-known books a man is drawn onto a group of men that eat the cheapest meals every day in a government-run restaurant in Vienna. I am a long time Bernhard fan and it is always great to add another title to the list of books I have reviewed by him.

The return of Caravels by Antonio Lobo Antunes

Like Bernhard Antunes is a writer I love and this a bok that mix the past and those seafarers returning to Modern Lisbon much to there horror a writer that always deals with his own countries past so well and openly.

To see out the night by David Clerson

A writer whose novel I loved returns with a collection of short stories, I said in the review I am not a short story fan well going through this years choice I think I am a bigger fan than I think anyway QC have been brought use some great books from Quebec her we have people turning to great apes and secret cities under cities.

Special Needs by Lada Vukic

As many of you may know I work on a ward caring and helping get better people with Learning disabilities that are in crisis so I was wary of this book as it is hard to capture that voice of someone with learning disabilities without it seeming wrong but for me this is the best such voice I have read it is such a voice of someone with Autisms view of the world.

 

3 Minutes and 53 Seconds by Branko Prlja

A series of vignettes form a bildungsroman using the writers love of music and the songs for each year I like this as a lot of the songs I knew some I loved other I didn’t but it was a great way to show the upheaval in the  Balkans in his teen years having to move to a new city and his use of music to convey that another underrated gem from Dalkey

Three Bedrooms in Manhatten by Georges Simenon

I have been working through the Penguin books as they have brought out a lot of his books in New translations here is a book from his time in the US capturing those dark post-war years before the shining fifties to lost souls in a big city.

Well there they are my twelve books of the year as ever I feel I am on my own journey in books I love books that have interlink stories of vignettes around themes and also champing small presses and writers I have loved for a long time. What were your books of the year where did your journey take you last year did our paths cross?

 

Literary Miniatures by Florence Noiville

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Literary Miniatures by Florence Noiville

French Literary criticism

collected from Le Monde des livres

Translator – Tersea Lavender Fagan

Source – Personal copy

I eread the descrption of this book and the faxct that Florence Noiville had been in charge of foreign literature for the French newspaper Le monde and had doe a regular column that interviewed the worlds great writers this is a selection of those interviews. Initally she started in the fiance world before becoming a literary critic in  1994 she has since also written two biographies one about the Nobel winning writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, also a number of novels and a number of works for younger readers around Myths.

Liscano admits this from the start – he wanted to write this book in the spirit of Buzzati. In honour of the author who had “saved” him. And because, he says, Like Picasso painted the MEninas to have a dialogue with Velazquez, every novelist writes to converse with his predecessors.”What do they talk about?” Alination, in the strict snse, that is everything that makes an individual becomes “other”- Buzzati speak of the army, but his allegory could be applied to poltiical parties, religions corporitions .. self – awareness is also lost in midst of society. Everything depends on where one places cursor between freedom and security

Carlos Liscano (who was translated in early 200s I have now found !)

The book is formed up of 29 interviews and encounters she has had with a number of the greatest writers. I knew about 80% of the writers had read most of those there is a few I hadn’t heard of as they appear to have not been translated into english yet. The book opens with the Late Aharon Appelfeld a writer I once briefly meet when he won the IFFP prize a Holocaust survivor he described himself as  “A Jew writing in Israel” about how he learned to read the bible. don Deillo interviewed around tjhe time he brought out a point omega and how at theat time following the deaths of MAiler and Bellow he was on the cuspo of being America great writer. Nadine Gordimer a writer that was at odds with the country she grew up in. I was remind of a Chinese writer I had read many years ago and I think I will be reading some time son Yu Hua. I read his chronicle of a blood merchant. Now fpr a writer I hadn’t heard of Carlos Liscano a writer that I think hasn’t been translated or very little has been translaqted into english a poltical prisoner he had read and connected wioth the writing of Irtalian writer Dino Buzzati a writer I have reviewed a couple of times on the blog. Then a firm favouriteof this blog Cees Nooteboom is interviewed and Florence is amazed as his language as he drifts from french(that he learned after not being able to insult a man after he trod on his foot) Then whilst being interviewed he slips to Flemish with his wife and then German and english all this on a spanish island Menorca he loves as shown in one of the books I have reviewed from him.

Nooteboom greets you in French, speaks to his wife in Flemish, answers the phone in Spanish, then German, finshes a sentence in ENglish and uses latin to talk about species – planted by his own hands – in his garden that is his pride and joy. Hibiscous, euphoirbia. plantago.. “the garden is a personal creation, he says looking at the tops of the trees. “THEre is a photo of me with Hugo Claus: palm trees are up to out knees. The Japanese say that a garden is the portrait of a soul. Mine must be rocky because thereare a loit here, like my poetry” -he regrests that this important part of his work has not been translated into french. “I’ve noticed that either you like stones or you don’t. The minorcans think they store the heat and posseses secret healing powers.”Like poems?”

The Great Cees Nootboom interviewed his great ability with Language.

I like this I love pen pictures of writers Although I had read a lot of the writers , A writer like Carlos Liscano is one I will be watching out for. Elsewhere it remind me of the craft of William Trevor as she describe him as a writer that chips away to make his stories a nod towards his previous career as a wood craver. I wish we had a section like this in one of our papers a small glimpse nto great writers but also a portal of discovery for readers the beuty is finding new voices Florence style pof interview draws you to the writer and want to discover more or rerread them. A great choice from seagull books as it a wonderful collection of pen pictures of the later part of the 20th and early part of the 21st century writers a good place to start on the cannon of great wrtiers of this time.

Winstons score – + A I love little gems like this another wonderful discovery from Seagull books !!

All the Land by Jo Lendle

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All the Land by Jo Lendle

German fiction

original title – Alles Land.

Translator – Katy Derbyshire

Source – Personal copy

I’m on another of this year’s german lit choices. l I am now in Greenland partly for this book based on an actual person Alfred Wenger the son of the Minister for Berlin in the early thirties he was an explorer and scientist for the next book for my German Lit month books. A novel from Jo Lendle the Publisher of Hanser Verlag, he is the editor of the lit Magazine Akzente. He has lectured on German literature been involved in German pen. He has also translated a number of books including books by Jachym Topol. He has published a number of novels this is the first book by him I have read.

Alfred Wegener had more siblings than one would wish upon a person. They stood around him and stared at him, elbowing each other and pointing at him, some even grabbing over the woven edge of the willow cradle to pinch him , out of love.

It cost his mother some effort to hold the children back. The birth had taken twenty-four hours, a whole day . It Hard to unsettle a woman like Anna Wegener, but attempting to restrain this horde had her at her wit’s end

his Birth and the Orphans gather round see his birth

I hadn’t heard of Alfred Wegener when I read this book I read his Wiki page and got the sense he was like many of the British explorers of the time. What we see here is him in 1930 as he is stuck trying to survive in the middle of Greenland one of the most remote places in the world on the mid -ice as it is called and also one of the coldest on the planet as he and his team have set off to see if they can get by and to study the weather and survive the conditions this was his fourth trip to Greenland the first was around the time he had to meet his with Else. The book sees his attempts to be both a successful family man.  He was brought up by his parents in an Orphanage so he want to be a real father and husband. The fact he was called into to fight in world one means that the years away from his wife they have drifted apart. We see the romance and his earliest years growing up. He tried his best he thinks but as he looks back we see that wasn’t always so. this is what he is most famous for in a way his studies of weather and things like continental drift. This is a tale of one of those men that like his British counter parts tried to push back the barriers of what men can do endure and see. the furthest the coldest etc.

Early in 1906, he read in the newspaper about a plan for a Danish expedition to north-eastern Greenland, which was to spend two summers charting the coastline. Under the writer Mylius Erichsen’s command , they would attempt to cross the ice of the greenland sea to ereach the spot where the Germania expedtion had been forced to turn back in 1870, and set up a base from there, they hoped to explore the unknown section to cape bridgeman,

A base station in the ice. All that could be studied there! Wegener closed his eyes. It required some effort to gather his wishes.

The  report that maybe inspired him to do his expeditions to Greenland, a few years later.

This is the second novel based on this last expedition on his Wiki page for Alfred Wegener it said this last expedition had inspired John Buchan to write his novel A Prince of captivity three years after the events. What we have here is an in-depth novel about his life that mixes the actual facts with what Lendle feels must have been Wegener’s thoughts of his own life as they sit in freezing weather and looks back over his life. I loved the flow of the book I ‘ve always been a fan of stories around the pole regions things like the worst journey in the world which in parts this reminds me of or a film like Scott of the antarctic the is a part where they cut back on what they are carrying you can see where the story will end it reminds me in parts of Scoots story or more so the Shakleton Television series that followed his life as the relationship of husband and wife when they spent time apart was similar. Have you read any books by Lendle or have a favorite book set in the Polar regions. So if you like a tale of a man how tried his best in everything and in many ways was very human this is a book that you should enjoy. As he is a flawed character but aren’t we all !!

Winstons score – B+ A well-written novel about a man that we should know more about!

Dispatches from moments of calm by Alexander kluge and Gerhard Richter

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Dispatches from moents of calm by Alexander Kluge and Gerhard Richter

German fiction

Original title – Nachricht von ruhigen Momenten

Translator – Nathaniel Mcbride

Source – personal copy

This book was written by Kluge when he took the set of pictures that the artist Gerhard Richter had used in the edition of the German Newspaper Die welt on 5 October 2012. Where all the photos on the paper had been replaced by Richter pictures which he had called moments of calm. He intends them to distract and be the opposite of the death and horror of the stories in the paper itself. After this paper, the writer Alexander Kluge took the picture and wrote vignettes to each of the pictures and what followed is this book that puts the pictures from Richter with the stories for them the Kluge wrote. They had worked together on an earlier book in December. Kluge as I have seen in his other books likes to connect with other writers and artists. this is my second book for this year’s German Lit month !

During an Argument in the smokers corner of a dance hall in Straubling on New Year’s Eve, a stranger pressed a burning cigarette intomthe eye of a 20 year old man and left without anyone trying to stop him. Did ot matterr to the people there they called an ambluance or that they persue the attacker? What, in pratical terms, could the others have done to prevent the attack? Everyone in the group was shocked and frightened by the stranger’s attack? Everyone in the group was shocked and frightened by the stranger’s aggression. The young smoker did not regain his sight in the eye that had been attacked. The police opened a criminal investigation.

The attack in a dance hall that was then followed by a piece on Rudolf steiner and sense of chance !!

As with Kluge’s other works, this is a set of unconnected vignettes that each takes one of the pictures as a springboard for a story or an anecdote. what we get is a look at everyday life from two great artists. the book has five sections and the are more stories than pictures as some pictures have two stories. In the usual Kluge style, he mixes fiction and fact as we see his reactions to the pictures. reactions that from sublime like he was to young for the digger as we have a picture of a small boy and a toy truck. A picture of dancers has a tale of a man losing sight in one of his eyes after leaving a dance hall and then Rudolf Steiner of the sense of chance. another story was on John Cage performing his works in frankfurt so when a fire breaks out and forces him out of the Opera house as it rages he grabs microphones probably to record the sound of the fire! as it is burnt to the ground. A woman clings to her child in a shipwreck sparked from a picture of a baby..Marx lost text reappearing is another story that appears.

During the final rehearsals for his Europeras 1 e32 at the Frankfurt operan house in the autumn of 1987, John cage was staying at the Hotel Frankfurter Hof. This meant that when he recieved the disturbing news that the opera house was on fire, he didn’t have to far to hurry to the scene. He took a tape recorder with him, and he had filled the pockets of his winter overcoat with various different kinds of special microphones, The city’s fire brigade had several of its units ready for an assauly on the stage house, the centre of the fire. In meantime, a firestorm had already devolped in this part of the opera house. It was simply too dangerous too send in the fire teams against it. They would have to let the fire burn.

In usual Kluge style it is a rabbit hole of vignettes how often when you read him you have to find out what is really true,  like the Cage story and what he has made up he weaves fact and fiction so well, what he does so well here is take each image as a springboard for either something directly connect to the picture or as a kernel for something very inventive style of writing and kluge knack of making the everyday burst to life is a talent as an evocative and thought-provoking writer. The book came by chance as Kluge was asked and came up straight away with the idea of stories to which Richter suggested another joint work. One odd connection is these two great German figures were only born five days apart in February 1932. I am fast becoming a huge fan of Kluge this will be the fourth book by him I will have reviewed I have another and will be getting others when I see them at a price I can afford. Have you read Kluge or are aware of Gerhard Richter’s artworks?

Winstons score – +A I just love Kluge’s style of literature so much

Drilling Through Hard Boards by Alexander Kluge

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Drilling Through Hard Boards by Alexander Kluge

German Political fiction

Original title – Das Bohren Harter Bretter

Translator – Wieland Hoban

Source – personal copy

This is the third book by the German writer Alexander Kluge I have read he is fast becoming one of my favorite writers this collection caught my eye as it is slightly different it was a collection of 133 political stories. This is including a couple stories from his fellow German writer Reinhard Jirgl as Kluge says telling stories is a very social activity. Kluge is one of those writers that isn’t easy to pigeonhole, he has so many talents he is both a member of the group 47 writers but is also a leading light of the New German cinema. Kluge has also written a lot of things for television. He is a truly unique talented individual and should be better known over here!

 A number of tourists arrive at the Federal chancellery steamboat jett. They do not want to visit the Federal chancellery but, rather, the HOUSE OF THE CULTURES OF THE WORLD. In front of this heritage protected building, two stalls offer Baked potatoes and Bratwurst respectively, accompanied by beerr. A band is rehearsing loudly for the evening on the roof of the building. They already knew how to use the loudspeakers before they start rehearsing. The rehersal serves to mark there territory in the culturual garden.

Maybe a sly look at how peoples nedds and views have changed in recent years

The book is divided into five rough categories of stories like in his other books he uses a style that is all his own he creates a sort of mosaic with his stories. They stretch from the mundane things like the description of the steamboat jetty near the Federal Chancellory one of the small vignettes that create bigger pictures through Il Duce intelligence. Obama this is Kluge he jumps from place to place each short piece. What he dies is mix the real and fake together. There is pieces from Jirgl which imagine the events around the  Keneady Krushchev meeting and what happened. Funny tales like the highest mountain taking a comment from Gorky and then explain that there was first Lenin peak then there had been a higher Stalin peak found. he moves from the mundane German politicians through Russian Politics and the events like Glasnost then minor observances like the Big wheel at Chernobyl set up at the time for the annual Mayday that stayed for years after. He also looks at how we view politics and those who serve us. The title comes from an observance from Max Weber described politics as ” a strong, slow drilling through hard boards with both passion and judgment “. this is what spurred Kluge to write this collection that makes the reader think like his other books.

The same organizational power that kept all sections of the USSr going was responsible for the annual preparations for LABOUR DAY, 1May, as well as the pouros planning (carelessness, techinical concentrates and disruption of responsibilties) that led to the ACCIDENT IN BLOCK 4 at Chernobyl on 26 pril 1986. The town had already been evacuated. But the leisure facilities for the 1 May celebrations, no longer noticed by anyone, were still set up. Towering above them was a striking big wheel that stayed there for another two years because no one dared take own this contaminated device. It stood there rigidly waiting for te rust in the coming winter. The mute witness to a memorieal day and the scenic ruin, covered by invisible lava, of the technological district: TWO POLTICALLY OPPOSING SIGNS OF HUMN LABOUR.

A nugget of information a small footnote in history the MAY day wheeel left after the disaster in Chernobyl

Kluge is a hummingbird of a writer he likes to fly from flower to flower he has a mind that seems to never rest. The book is one of those that like his fellow German writer Sebald that defies pigeonholes and like Sbebald he loves to mix fiction, non-fiction biography, and photos the images help build with the stories and vignettes. it becomes like a web of knowledge an interconnection tube map of stops that lead us one way and then back and then cross over. All in all,  It makes us all think about what is politics what does it serves and also lifts the lid on the post-war german years. Also the philosophy of politics and the history of politics. this is what I have come to expect from Kluge his books have left me as a reader feeling like I have been to a buffet or like a cosmos where there is a bit of everything you are full the food is rich and the here his ideas small large the vignettes from a few lines to a few pages each can lead you one a different tangent of thought. Have you ever read Kluge? if so which shall I try next.

Winston score – B thought-provoking work from a writer that needs to be better known in the UK