Tag: spain

What remains by Brais Lamela

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What remains by Brais Lamela

Spanish Galician fiction

Original title – Ninguén queda

Translator – Jacob Rogers

Source – Personal Copy

I have read a few books from Galicia over the years, one of the regions of Spain that has a distinct identity and history. The book is written by one of the region’s rising stars, Brais Lamela. He is considered one of the best writers under 40 and has won a prize for being one of the best writers under 40; this book, his debut novel, was also on EL País’ books of the year when it came out. The book sort of mirrors the writer’s own life, as the narrator is a man studying in New York and from Galicia himself, like Brais, who is studying at Yale. The book is set around a piece of history that involved Franco trying to modernise the country, and this involved relocating a group of Farmers from the remote valleys that Franco had ordered to be filled and made into Dams, so they were forced to move to the Terra Cha, the farming land in the Galicia region, but as incomers torn from their homes.

It’s not the first time I’ve found a reference to a trip of the sort. When I first started researching the U.S. government’s aid to the Franco dictatorship, I stumbled upon the story of some hydraulic engineers from the University of California, Berkeley, who had developed a new system for pumping underground water in the desert flats of Southern California, and travelled to a few colonial settlements in southern Spain to install it.

Thanks to their help, the dictatorship’s engineers were able to penetrate the depths of the earth and extend their control to the world of underground channels. I hadn’t found much about their trip, but I’d been left with an idea that those connections might be the most useful material for my thesis, revealing the inconspicuous flow of information between American capitalist institutions and Franco’s dictatorship, like synapses of a vast and terrible nervous system.

The narrator discovers the past

The novel is framed as the student in New York trying to look back at the events of the Franco era; when he comes across this mass relocation from the hills to the plains of grassland in Galicia, as they are now expect to be dairy farmers, the story is further framed when the narrator finmds the story of a woman that had disappeared around the time all this had happened. The second half of the book sees our narrator revisiting the places he had looked at in the first half as he recounts what happened to those who stayed in the mountains; now the remains of the village are a hippie commune. To the dairylands of the TERRA CHA, how the people lived on from those still living, and how it was all for show at times. It captures one man’s look into the past, how it touches the present, and how often history repeats.

I stop the recording, realizing that the story I was looking for had been there all along. It hadn’t caught my attention at the time, one more story in the litany of tragedies the colonists had faced. I’d been distracted by the anecdote about Franco (which I’d heard in other recordings, though some mentioned a different government figure). Now everything seems to make sense, and the anonymous figures acquire names: the important visitors’ were almost certainly Tannenbaum and his team, and the expelled woman was the ill-fated Leonita, who in a matter of days found herself not just widowed but homeless.

Talking to thiose that were there and How they made it look different when Franco appeared

This is one of those books that is hard to pigeonhole; it is a novel but also a memoir a thesis about the times, a look at the Franco Regime and the dark past it meant for those forcibly exiled due to him wanting Dams built for Hydro power as I said in the last passage It is also a sign of how history can repaet how many more Dams have been built around the world by regimes. I was reading this and thinking of all the people who were relocated when China built the Three Gorges Dam; over a million people were displaced to make way for the dam.  This book is a clever twist on a piece of history with the framing of looking through the archives this is part of Brais Lamela own studies is into archives one can see how pieces of history being the seed for this clever story of exiles and one woman who dosappeared it has it all the sense of belonging, getting lost on the turbulance of all this the aftermath years later when our narrator returns to the places in the first half of the book! I think this is one of those gems that has gone under the radar. A must for fans of writers like Sebald or Luiselli in particular, as they both live in New York, and this being a book that captures both the old and the new world, another book I was most reminded of was Bilbao- New York- Bilbao, another multi-layered novel of diaries, memories, place, folklore and time ab Basque work that covered bith sides of the atlantic as well ! Do you have a favourite book from Galicia?

 

Journeys and Flowers by Merce Rodoreda

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Journeys and Flowers by Merce Rodoreda

Catalan Fiction

Original title – Viatges i flors

Translators – Gala Sicart Olavide and Nick Caistor

Source – Library book

I read Death in Spring a few years ago by Merce Rodoreda and was pleased to see this on the shelf at the library. I was grabbed by the fact it was vignettes of villages and flowers but with an undercurrent going back years before the book was written which was 1980s but hark back to the war years in which she had first escaped the Spanish civil war heading to France but then when the Nazis took over France she had to move again. She was regarded as one of the leading voices of Catalan fiction had won all the big prizes for Catalan fiction on her wiki page there was this prologue from one of her books I think it capture whart she does in this book so well. “I write because I like to write. If it didn’t seem like an exaggeration, I would say that I write to please myself. If others like what I write, the better. Perhaps it is deeper. Perhaps I write to affirm myself. To feel that I am … And it’s over. I have spoken of myself and essential things in my life, with a certain lack of measure. And excess has always scared me”That last line struck me this is a short but hard hitting book

I suggest you go to the village down there, can you see it? The view is blocked by the trees, but it’s right behind them, come on! Can’t you see it, obscured by the foliage?’ This is what an ageless woman said to me, dressed all in black, her ample skirts gathered at the waist. Her round face framed by a scarf neatly tied under her chin. ‘You’ll fall in love with it. And she gave a half smile.

The day was ending by the time I reached the village, a village more or less the same as any other, with low one-storey houses, two-storey at most; streets, some narrow, some wide; a square with arcades; a watering-trough; an inn; all kinds of shops and an undertaker. I strolled round the village, went everywhere in it, and thought the woman’s idealised view of this completely boring village must stem from nostalgic childhood memories. I left it slowly, my thoughts lingering on the people living there. They looked like normal people yet something in their eyes was disturbing.

The thoughts of those that were there struck me !

An unnamed narrator is wandering from village to village, where the town has no real names but is the village of warriors, well-bred rats, the two roses, and glass. Each village is told in a fable-like way, so reality and the surreal drift into one. The violence of war haunts the background of these places, women wrapped in cocoons, men playing at being knights. It is not as it seems, and is at the same time. I like this, it reminds me of what Calvino did well, using slightly surreal things to convey things. The second part is odes to flowers, which are mainly made up of flowers and the meaning and thoughts behind them. Blue flowers, desperate flowers, to Dead flowers. Again, they are thoughts about the war years and the meaning of flowers at times.

Ballerina Flower

She is yellow and very dishevelled. Four tendrils emerge from her stem. She opens in mid-summer, at dawn with the sun. Her slender round petals are born in tiny pushes, and hang down. She gives off a perfume which combines the smell of woods – that is, dry – and mown grass – that is, damp. Once she has unfurled all her splendour, the tendrils spread, wrap round the nearest branches: they become as taut as wires. Captive, the flower begins the exhausting work of freeing herself. She slowly folds in on herself with little shakes, right and left. Forwards, back-wards. She tries, but when after a great deal of patience and grief she has only managed to become more entangled, she abandons her efforts.

This had such hidden thoughts to me

 

I liked this collection if I see it second hand i”ll pick tit u;a s I think it will need a few more readings to fully grasp the beauty of her words and ideas. It is something that you will see something more every time you reread them, I think. There is something about the cut down nature of these short tales that leaves so much to be filled in by the reader and thought about if that makes sense.It goes back to the earlier quote about excess in her life and her writing, it seems. It also mixes the beauty of her homeland with the horrors, violence, and divisive nature of the Spanish Civil War, which bleeds through these pages as you read these little gems. Have you read any of her books in English?

Far by Rosa Ribas

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Far by Rosa Ribas

Spanish Fiction

Orignal title – Lejos

Translator – Charlotte Coombes

Source – Personal copy

you are probably fed up of hearing me blow the trumpet for Foundry editions I actually have no connection to this publisher it is just they have brought out such great books in their first year, and this is the last of them Far from a writer considered the queen of Spanish Noir and the two trilogy of books she has brought out in the most have been well received in Spain. She has written a series set in 1950s Spain. This book saw a change of direction as it is set in La Mancha in a building site of an estate that was never finished. It captures the life of those caught when the real estate bubble burst in Spain. It appears this is the first book of hers that she translated. The book she wrote with Sabine Hofmann also seems to have been translated into English.

First, she zigzagged her way through the area of terraced houses where she lived. Then into the part where the large villas were. Each one was a different colour, so nobody got their houses mixed up. Luxurious two-storey villas, with double garages, terraces, balconies, gabled roofs, and dor-mers; with extensive gardens, with ponds and flower beds; with loungers in dark wood and cast-iron tables and chairs, covered with custom-made cushions for sitting and drinking beers or lemonade in summer. All built nice and far apart.She carried on through the streets of apartment blocks.

The first phase boasted full occupancy. There were gaps in the following blocks, but only a few. The ratio increased into Phase 2, then went down again in Phase 3, with its most recent buildings barely occupied. Phase 4 was filled with unfinished buildings and surrounded by a metal fence.

The fence that sperates these two worlds

The book came about when the writer was taken to a small town in Spain where a sort of wonderous luxury estate of buildings in Seensa was due to be built. Still, when the building bubble burst, the place was half-finished and half-filled. Some people live there with Jobs and try to get on like our narrator. She has a hu=]house built and a job but is just trying to get a new start in her life after being separated. The other half of the estate has not attracted those wanting a roof over their heads in the half-finished apartments. This is the framing for this book: a woman who is sinking more into drink and depression than a man trying to get by but is caught up in the darkness of his fellow incomers to the vacant flats. The book sees the two main characters draw together, but there is also the underlying r=tension of those who were brought into a dream of swimming pools and green lawns in the middle of the dry, arid Spanish central area. This is the land of LA Mancha that Don Quixote travelled as a fiesta draws close. Will this poowe=der keg of two different classes of people finally blow up?

Finally it was dark. He waited a few more hours, however, before going out to do a recce of the site to check if it was safe.

He toyed with the idea of having a drink. There was a drinks cabinet: one of those old-fashioned ones with a folding door and a mirrored interior that multiplied the bottles and glasses to infinity. He picked up a bottle of vodka but immediately put it down. Dust clung to that too. He wiped his hands on his trousers. He would not drink. On his first outing he needed to have a clear head. Bumping into someone could be fatal. They might alert the police to the fact that an intruder was living there. Then maybe the others would connect the dots.

His side of the fence a darker world at times

It is a common thread in Spanish literature: the unnamed narrators in there books. I know some people hate it, but for me, it makes the characters seem universal. I am hard-pressed to think of an Equivalent of this for the UK, maybe one of those dying UK seaside towns where there once hoped, and it has now gone, and the flotsam and jetson of human existence has drifted in. Maybe one of those new Scottish towns full of dreams and hope that never quite got off the ground would be the nearest. What it captures is tow worlds:s those who were brought into a dream because the bubble had burst in them are trapped as much as those who came to escape and just find shelter, a sort of drifting underclass that is never that far behind the scenes in everywhere if you know how to look at the broken capitalist world we have. This is a book that captures that clash of classes so well. You can tell she writes Noir. The Guardian review mentioned Claudia Pinerio, and I can see that myself. It has that creeping slowness and building tension she does well. It also mentions J G Ballar, the master of buildings and stories. Yeah, this has a nod to a book, maybe like Super Cannes: A Broken Utopia, a Broken Dream of a Place, the darker side of broken dreams when classes and what that brings, like uncertainty and worry about what an underclass can do. The book builds the tension of this well. Alongside the drawing closer of our two narrators at the same time! Have you read any of the Foundry edition titles?

 

Spanish Beauty by Esther Garcia Llovet

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Spanish Beauty by Esther Garcia Llovet

Spanish fiction

Original title – Spanish Beauty

Translated – Richard Village

Source – Subscription

I am so pleased Foundry have gone the subscription route as last year the books I read from them were both in my books of the year. So when this the first book of this year fell through my letterbox, I put aside everything else and read it in a couple of sitting . Esther Garcia Llovet qualified in clinical psychology, but she also studied screenwriting and became a documentary scriptwriter. She has cited Bolano as an influence on her writing. Also; the work of Raymond Carver is a Noir Novella, the first of a trilogy. This is set in the least Spanish city of Benidorm and has a world-weary detective that walks the line of the law on both sides. But this detective is a female with a British father in the most British place outside the UK.

Benidorm. Cheap culture. Beach culture. People who speak three languages without ever studying, corner shops, Belgians, watered-down gin and tonics, gays. Second-hand Tom Clancy novels, swollen with damp, crunchy with sand, sand on your pillow, sand in your paella, in your G-string, in the shower, all-day fry-ups, all-day Thai massage, cicadas at night. Piles of sick, pissing against walls, and Tom Jones songs. Melanomas, cystitis, diarrhoea all round. ChlamydiaAnd the sea. Like the desert of the Levant, of the West, of Las Vegas, shadows of skyscrapers on the beach, reaching higher and higher, shadows that go on for miles, stretching over the surface of the lukewarm sea at ten at night whilst families eat fried chicken on the shore, Mediterranean steel Godzillas on the cold dawn sand.

This opening capture some of what I said about eindorm as a place

Michela McKay is maybe the best way to describe her is rather like DI Burnside from The Bill; she is one of those [police officers with a dodgy reputation about her. We see her trawling through Beindorm in a twin quest. At first, she heard that a famous Dunhill lighter that was once owned by Reggie Kray and last time it came about, had been sold to a Russian Mafia figure is in her City. The other hunt is that of her Absent British father. It captures the dark side of a seaside town the seediness that often in the place of pleasure is just below the surface. This is like a modern take of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock in Modern Spain. She sees the gangsters, lowlifes, and ex-pats among those everyday holidaymakers. It is a ride through the darker side of a place of sun, sea and sex.

“I want to have a laugh with the Russians. We have to have a laugh with the Russians, right, because the Russians know all bout laughs. Vodka, polonium-210, and a stray dog in space. Who can top that? They never go brown, so they come here, to Spain, to our bottled flamenco sun, and we can’t get our heads round why. To buy flats, apartment blocks on the beach, the biggest mansion on the whole Costa de la Luz, a villa with acres of land around it, a Mediterranean pine forest and a golf course with a president chucked in.We see them, all these Russians, in the clubs, in cars, in the restaurants in packs of six or seven. The French and the English, sometimes you see a lone one on the loose, but never a Russian. You only ever see lone Russians lurking around the doorways of five-star hotels, neither in nor out, as if they can’t make up their minds, but they know exactly what they want. They want Spanish hedonism. Dionysian hedonism that only the tourists and the travel agents get to see, because the reality here is that we’re always really pissed off, and really burnt, not just by the sun. The Russians want the hedonism we don’t get to enjoy, they want the prices we can’t afford, they want the siesta we can’t even take. And they want music, music all night long, Benidorm! Fiesta!”

The russians behind the scenes

I liked this. I can see she is a Bolano fan. I read a review that mentioned this book as having a fragmented nature, and it reminds me so much of those early Bolano books, like Skating Rink. Which had a similar feel of being told in little snippets at times. It also felt like a detective novel, but it never was, and this is the same. It is a crime novel but more about the hunt and the people Michela meets. It also has a feeling of being. Made to be filmed . So when I heard it had already been sold and was being made into a film, I wasn’t surprised it had that feel of a book that would work well. The range of characters would suit many British and other character actors .As we trawl the darker side of Benidorm. A place where dreams are made and broken like most Flash seaside towns, it has a darker side. Blackpool in the sun, as it is called, is a place where, just a few corners away from the front, you can be caught up in a darker world than you can imagine. Place full of lost souls, souls on the run. And broken dreams make the world of Beindorm Michela Mckay work through a darker place than many see on holiday. Do you have a favourite book set in a seaside town?

 

Hungry for What by Maria Bastarós

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Hungry for What by Maria Bastarós

Spanish short stories

Original title  – No era esto a lo que veniamos

Translator – Kevin Gerry Dunn

Source – re4view copy

I was reminded that I had yet to review this when to was picked as one of the Guardian translated books of the year. In recent years, Daunt has brought some great books out in translation. This book fits in well with several Latin American and Spanish books I have read from female writers in the last few years. Maria Bastarós is an art historian and writer. She has previously written historical novels and worked as a screenwriter and creative writing teacher. Both of which you can see in these stories here; they have a scenic quality to them and feature lost, lonely children and women. These are voices you don’t often here, and darker undertones and sister macabre things.

As she waits, she reviews the table: theres wine, there’s foie gras, there are baby eels. All the things her father and mother used to eat when they sent her to bed early so that they could have dinner alone. She can hear shouting and crying from the babysitter’s movie. A woman is screaming, her voice shrill, punctuated by the occasional help or please don’t. The girl knows this sort of cry means the babysitter’s movie is almost over. And when the babysitter’s movie is almost over, it means her mother and the new boyfriend are almost back.

Tonight, in fact, they come back a little earlier than usual.

The girl’s face sharpens like a cat’s when she hears the key in the lock. She hears her mother shuffling around, then the door gliding over the parquet and swooshing like a broom. The babysitter hurries to turn off the TV, but she’s too slow. The new boyfriend’s deep voice wends its way into the kitchen:

The meal prepared like she had seen

There are thirteen stories in the collection, and I will only mention the couple I really connect with. The first one I really got was a small girl from divorced parents, and you get the sense that I did when I was young. She is treated by the teacher, and then when she gets home, and her mother doesn’t give her a gift, the lies start. This grabbed me the way she did, and you can. I did as a kid, those innocent lies your parents told you from one parent to the other for the birthday celebrations. One line made me laugh. Her father says something as they drive and passes something, and she says this is where the lies start! Heartbreaking but true. Added to this, her birthday wish and whether it will come true to add a dark overtone to the story.  The opening story sees another small girl making her first grown-up meal. Using a triangle of cheese instead of brie and other child-like replacements for a romantic meal between her later father and mother, one glimpsed by her. but the mother misreads the situation, thinking the meal is for her and her new partner. But no, it is the girl’s way of trying to cling to the hope of her parents reuniting. When that is impossible! The last story I will briefly mention is Girls Don’t, a tale of a group of girls. Gone Rogue is a story of a group of girls with boxes of spiders and scorpions making people look and have them on their arms. It is a very clever twist on what would maybe fifty years ago have been a group of boys doing similar things.

‘Make a wish!’ the teacher says.

This troubles the girl: there wasn’t enough time to think of what she wanted, and now a whole panful of wishes is ricocheting around her head like popcorn. She reflects for a moment before choosing one. Maybe this? Or that? No, this! That’s it. That’s what she’ll wish for. Definitely.

‘Will it come true?’ she asks.

Will the dark wishes come true ?

I chose three stories, and they all had child narrators or characters for me, they captured, particularly in the first two, the feeling of being a child of divorced parents. For context, my parents divorced when I was ten and the feelings and way the children viewed the world hit home on fact too much. The birthday girl reminded me of my parents and those little white lies and also the bitterness in a broken marriage that lies just underneath the lies. Elsewhere, we have violent acts, a woman on a psychiatric hospital ward.It is to compare with Fernanda Melchor. Both capture the dark side of the ordinary world at times. I also thought of Roald Dahl, a master of stories like this that, in many ways, have two layers on one surface and can seem a slice of everyday life, but with a hefty dose of the dark and sister we don’t often see is captured. A meal that is both a sweet act and heart-wrenching and maybe a statement from a girl missing her father. Wishes that can be dark as well as light, etc. Anyway, this will be near the top of my books for the year! Have you read this collection?

Living Things by Munir Hachemi

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Living Thing by Munir Hachemi

Spanish fiction

0riginal title – Cosas vivas

Translator – Julie Sanches

Source – personal copy

I have missed several fitzcarradlo books over the last few years. So I decided to cancel a subscription and try to get some of the books I missed from their backlist. This is another writer from one of those Granta lists. Munir was on the 2021 list of the best Spanish language writers. His story of vital signs was part of that collection. The first book of Spanish writers produced so many great writers like Rodrigo Hasbun, Pola Ooixarac and Andres Neumann, to name a few. There have been a couple from the second collection that came out. I reviewed another book by the writer Martin Felipe Castagnet. Munir Hachemi’s father is from Algeria. He studied Spanish and has a master’s degree in Spanish. This was his debut novel. It is part auto-fiction, part dialogue on industrial farming.

Sunday, 14 July

I read Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory from start to finish. An unexpected surprise. It’s a social novel where the main character – a guy – takes us through the ins and outs of the artistic field; there is no anecdote outside the field of cultural production (exactly!). The book was recommended by my ex-girlfriend Mónica, now a close friend. Her current boyfriend recommended it to her. I consider ringing her but don’t actually want to; besides, it’d be expensive and I’m not sure she’s read the book yet.

Instead I call Marta, my current girlfriend, and realize I don’t have a lot to share. I say things are all right; I have no idea if she can tell it isn’t true. My mission to obtain experience, as I referred to it, has been a failure. I have a new understanding of Piglia’s famous question: how to narrate the horror of real events?

We’re running out of food.

A mixof reading and the slow way the trip falls apart as the food goes and the still drink

The book follows what happens when four friends from university decide to head to France with the initial idea of joining the grape harvest.( I did something similar in Germany many years ago, working in a vineyard for a week. ) Munir, G, Ernesto and Alex head in a Suzuki Swift. Our Narrator, Munir, is full of ideas about being a writer. In the book’s first part, he describes how different writers describe being and how to start writing as they head for this summer of what they feel will be fun grape picking. But then, when they get there, they are told there isn’t any work in the vineyard to harvest grapes for four Spanish students. This shatters their plans, so they take what turns out to be a dark turn and find a chop in an industrial chicken factory where the four start to work and have their eyes open to the horrors of industrial-scale factory farming and the effect of this on the four of them. The co-workers’ menace and the place turn this from what would have been a fun summer working trip into something darker. As they drink, they become a little wild and don’t fit in on the family campsite they are living on, as the madness and horrific nature of the day job leads to wild nights. We see all this through Munir’s journal, but as he says earlier in the book, this is the writer; this is another Munir.

Today work has shown me the true nature of animal ex-ploitation. The site reminded me of the end of the world: a massive, modular, bleach-white industrial unit in the middle of a scorched wheat field. In the background the sun rose, wanting to drown the world in the blistering co-lours of dawn but finding everything in that narrow space to be yellow or white, and nothing else. Access to the complex was through a pavilion-like annexe. We got in a queue, and a veterinarian handed each of us a soft plastic suit that looked like a giant, shiny white potato sack, and a headpiece made of the same material with a see-through window for the eyes. Then he sprayed us with some sort of disinfectant hose. The scene reminded me of Holocaust documentaries, except we weren’t so much naked as overdressed. They informed us we wouldn’t be able to leave until our (lunch) break at eleven-thirty. At first I was alarmed because I had to pee, but it took me less than an hour to sweat every last drop of water from my body. Even though I bore it out, I’d go so far as to say it was unbearable.

The descripition of where they end up working in the factory farm.

This is only 114 pages, but as you see, it has a lot more to it. The writer discovers his voice in the book by describing the books he loves and the four having a wild summer. Part criticism of the other nature and brutality of factory farming and its effect on the four of them. As we follow Munir’s journal of the summer. This had echoes of Bolano in many ways. The description of writers he loved reminds me of the love of poetry and poets in the first part of Savage Detectives. But then it vias into environmental and green issues around factory farming and the horrors he sees he compares at time to the way we looked at the holocaust pictures. This is a powerful debut from a writer who seems to love playing with the nature of his writing and the genre he is writing. This has auto-fiction, thriller, Bolano-like prose, and green themes all thrown into a hard-hitting short novella. Have you read any of the writers from the second collection of Spanish writers from Granta?

Winston’s score is a B. It is a solid debut novella that is fast-paced and can be read in a few hours.

The book of all loves by Agustin Fernández Mallo

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The book of all loves by  Agustin Fernandez Mall

Spanish fiction

Original title – El libro de todos los amores,

Translator – Thomas Bunstead

Source – subscription

I took out a small subscription to Fitzcarradlo as I had fallen behind with their books over recent years. They bring out a lot more than they first did. I ewas pleased this was one of the books from them I was snet as I have been a huge fan of Mallo’s Nocilla trilogy . He is a writer who likes to play with what a novel is and test the bounds of fiction. So his latest book to be translated into English is about love, but as ever, it is also about the world ending simultaneously. Only Mallo could work both these ideas into a novel. Maybe we have a future Nobel winner from the Nobel stable of Fitzcarraldo are gathering.

It is animals, not us, who live in the prison-house of language, because they are not able to leave and stand outside it and think about it. This is only because it is impossible for them to access the ideas that surround words.A dog never crosses a road, because it does not know what a road is. This, among other things, is why dogs get run over. It isn’t that the dog fails to look both ways before crossing, it’s that it does not possess the idea of a road.Its gaze is another gaze, its crossing is another crossing.Hence the fact that an animal cannot give or receive love either. It’s not that it doesn’t love, it’s that its love is other.

(Language love)

One of the love aphorisms

 

The book has several different streams to it. There is a series of aphorisms around love, such as independence, parcel, and language love, to name a few, as it runs through the book. Maybe love is all that is left, one wonders, as maybe that connects to the other story around something called the great Blackout, an apocalyptic event on earth with a single couple left. This is where we get the third stream of the husband of the couple and an earlier visit to Venice he had made. This is a mix of thoughts about love and what makes love. A past love of a place and visit to Venice, an Alexa machine while there all have the traits of Mallo’s other works, he likes recurrent themes like love, tech, and place and adds to that a couple surviving the end of the world you have a book that breaks the bounds of what fiction is. A book that need to be read to be captured fully

VENICE (1)

Month of June, first foor of a palazzo whose foundations stand below the waterline of Venice’s Misericordia Canal. There is a room, and a high window with views across the domes of St Mark’s Basilica and across a sea that will shift in colour throughout the day. There is also a woman – a writer — who, were she to look up, would be able to see all of this, but keeps her eyes down instead, tapping at the keys of a typewriter. Her typing produces slight movements in a small snow globe containing a miniature version of Venice to her right on the desk, raising a layer of snow up inside the globe, where it swirls before falling across the plastic city, and the writer goes on typing, and on, while outside, in the real Venice, the Venice of tourists and water and stone, the June humidity ushers in an early summer storm. Now, as the sequence she is working on grows in intensity, the table turns quivering fingerboard and the snow rises in the globe, and again it rises, once more hitting the tiny glass vault and falling on empty palazzos and waterless canals. The books and papers strewn across the desk, all of them on one single subject – love – receive these blows without so much as a flinch. Inside the globe, a snowflake has just landed on St Mark’s Square,

A long passage and the first remembering a trip by the husband to Venice

Mallo is a physicist I am always drawn to C P Snow and what he said about the two cultures of Humanties and Sccience he himself crossed these two cultures as he was a fellow scientist come writer. But what Malo has done is not only cross the lines between the two cultures, he has dragged the theory of Snow and thrown it in a blender by adding Calvino, Twitter, modern tech and scientific mind, also throwing in a touch of post-end of the worldness in for good measure and produced a book that only some like him could.I feel he is breaking the barriers of what fiction its and making us as readers work through this myriad of versions of love as we also witness the aftermath of the great blackout whilst also trying to remember a distant holiday with a few unusual things happening it like a waking dream of a wim wenders film it is like what he tried to do in Until the end of the world capture so much in such a small space. Have you read Mallo?

Winston score – A may be the first of next year Booker international books ?

 

The Dear ones by Berta Dávila

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The Dear ones by Berta Dávila

Galician fiction

Original title -Os seres queridos

Translator – Jacob Rogers

Source – Review copy

I have been championing the three times rebel [ress since they started bring books out they have a great ethos of working-class female voices in the minority languages. This time we stay in Spain but move to Galicia To a novelist and poet that is regarded as one of the leading voices of Galician literature, having won prizes both for her poetry and fiction. This novel won the Xerais Novel Award. She is also a well-known editorShe directs the independent publishing house Rodolfo e Priscila and is the director of the Rúa do Lagarto collection. This is the first book to be translated into English from her.

The book was about a mother who loses her son in a traffic accident. She was a radio show host for a local station and lived alone. A few months after the accident, still grieving, she moved in with her grandmother, an elderly woman who had some sort of dementia and wasn’t very mobile but was the only family the mother had left. Lucia asks if the grandmother resembles my grandmother Maria. I say probably, I’m sure she does, and detail some of my grandmother’s behaviours over the past few months. For example, she almost always recognises me the moment I come into the room, but often forgets recent news or what year it is; she asks me about grades and exams, as if I’m still an under-graduate, or about the father of my son, as if Miguel and I had never split up.

The book she was writing about a mother losing a son

This is a hard book to grasp as the events in the book seem so odd, but then again, life is odd and this is one bone journey I feel there will be many more women like our narrator here that have the feeling and guilt and trauma she has after birth and in motherhood. The book is about when is a mother ready to be a mother? What happens when your role as a mother doesn’t fit you? That is the heart of this story a woman struggling with that exact dilemma as she struggles to connect with her son so she tries to write a novel about losing a son at five years old. She had seen motherhood as something else, but the depression she has felt since the birth of her son, and the loss of self that comes with that is hard to deal with for her. So what will she do when she falls pregnant for a second time? How will she react, and how will the world around her react as she decides she may take a decision that will shock people near her. But she proves she still has choices to make around her life and her body. This is a hard-hitting story of one woman’s journey into motherhood and what happens when you maybe opt out of the role of being a mother.

THE BOY WAKES UP EARLY, CONTENTEDLY, ON THE FIRST DAY of winter and asks me how long it is until the school Christmas play and the day he can finally open up the presents under the tree. I tell him there won’t be a tree at Grandma Mara’s house-at most there’ll be a porcelain Baby Jesus shrouded by a wreath-and that it’s only four more sleeps. He’s a bit disappointed about the tree, but I try to convince him it will be a festive day: we’ll see my parents and my uncles, we’ll sing songs, and he’ll be able to help my sister prepare the tray of desserts and sweets. The boy asked for a stuffed doll, a picture book with two bears that are friends, and a bike. He repeats his list of presents and counts off on his fingers the nights he has to wait for them.

There is a coldness in this description of her son

 

This has a feel of auto fiction in its town I was reminded of how well Anne Ernaux speaks around her world with a flourish or over-elaboration at times, and this is the same it hasn’t to much luggage to the story it is narrative of her journey told as that no sidetrack or detours and it is so much more potent for that case as it shows how mental illness a post-birth can ravage that connection between mother and child but also what might happen after that when you have to face going through pregnancy again. It is a candid insight into post-natal depression but also how, even after that, women can still be strong and stand up. I am a big fan of three times rebel as they bring us voices that may have gone under the radar otherwise. This is a hard-hitting book for the reader, Have you read any books that deal with post-natal depression and Motherhood?

Winston’s score – +A Sparsh, stunning prose of one woman’s journey

The Strangers by Jon Bilbao

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The Strangers by Jon Bilbao

Spanish fiction

Originl title- los extraños

Translator – Katie Whittlemore

Source – Personal copy

I often talk about publishers I like and one of them the is Dalkey Archive in the last few years they have brought a few great books from Spain so when I was browsing for a new book to buy and saw this had just come out from them I chose it as it is a perfect read in a day book as it clocks in at just over 120 pages. Plus, the blurb sounds to me like it could have been an old episode of X Files a family move to a town where there have been UFO sightings, and there have been so many great books from Spanish in recent years that have Erie or another feeling to the narrative, and I felt this may be like those books.

The estuary curves around the base of Monte Corbero and discharges into the sea at one end of the beach. It courses, piguant, after all the rain. The beach looks very different from the image it projects in the summer, when she and Jon typically come to spend a few days and his parents are home and take care of everything and insist that Katharina and Jon go have a swim and relax as much as they can. Now, dark bands of marine litter and plastic debris cut across the sand.Jon’s parents winter in the Canary Islands.

The arrival at the winter home seaside at winter always an odd place.

The book sees a couple Jon and Katherine take a trip to the Cantabrian coast to overwinter there they have got sort of jobs which means they can now work remotely after living for years in the city.There is a sense this is maybe a chance to come together again as a couple. So They are stay overwinter in a family members house at the coast. but as the time goes by they drift apart this is the first off the three parts of the book the couple settling in and then coloured lights appear at night and the winter retreat becomes home to some more family when another couple claiming to be cousins appear said to have been raised by grandparents in Latin America.Markel and Virgine appear and initially Jon is wary of them but his wife persuade him to let the couple habng around. BUut are they connected to the lights. There is also a growing amount of UFO watcher and a feeling of something other than them being around them.

There’s a dog in the foreground at one edge of the frame. Only the back half of it is visible, out of focus. Definitely a German Shepherd. It walked in front of the camera just as the photo was taken.

The boys are looking at it with identical expressions: mouth opened in an “O” of surprise and smiling eyes. The dog has turned them into twins.

“I thought you two had never seen each other before,”

‘ says Katharina.

“That’s what I thought,” Jon replies.

“Me too,” Markel agrees.

“Where is this?” Katharina asks, peering closely at the picture.

Have the cousins meet before ?

This is a short book that has three parts to it the  couple settling in the lights appearing and the second part the cousins or supposed cousins of Jon he has no memory of them but some families can be like that we have second cousins I ‘ve met maybe twice in my life from my father generation . Then the last part is what the other is in a way . This has a wry feel to it remind me of a mix up of xfiles episodes there is the comic ones there is a sense of humour in this book but also that sense of creepiness the sense of the other being there something that I have seen so well done in recent years in Argentina fiction fever dream or the danger of smoking in bed. Its as if the xfiles had a latin American writer the main couple have a feel of any modern couple trying to escape the rat race but the grass insn’t green and that is just where they were at when the lights appeared adding a turning point of the story the other couple could have walked of a x files episode they have that feeling of holding secrets and not quite seeming what they are how many of these type of people are their in the x file episodes. As you can tell I was a huge X file fans so anything with a ufo theme is going drawme back into the world of mulder and scully bnut this has a distinctive Spanish twist. Have you read this book ?

Winstons score – A – tightly told tale in three parts of a couple trying to escape and rebuild but then buzzed by UFO’S

The Others by Raül Garrigasait

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The Others by Raül Garrigasait

Spanish (Catalan) fiction

Original title – Els estranys

Translator – Tiago Miller

Source – review copy

I end this year’s Spanish lit month with another book from the publisher of Catalan fiction Fum D’Estampa press.This interesting take on a historic novel has an interesting angle and style to it. This was the prize-winning novel from the Translator and writer Raül Garrigasait he has translated a number of books from both Greek and German into Catalan.Plato, Goethe, Alexandros Papadiamandis, Joseph Roth, and Peter Sloterdijk are all writers he has translated he is involved with a project to translate a number of classics into Catalan. The other is his debut novel and won a couple of big [rizes when it came out in Spain.

Wieldemann wandered through the grounds of the sanctuary.Next to an entrance both of old, dark stone, the roofless pillars and arches held themselves aloft among the nettlesx and weeds, surrounded by an assortment of discarded rocks. It was nothing more than half finished, abandonedbuilding but there was something apocalypitic about it. He went into the empty church; all the pews had been removed all the way up to the Baroque altarpiece where golden figures ornaments shone in one gleaming glorious mess

Erarly on as he heads to the war but does he he finds an abandon building .

The others are set mainly in the late 1830s as the Carlist war is being thought in Spain. We view the war we viewed through the adventures of a young Prussian that has come to fight in the war.  Rudolf Van Wielemann is a young man trying to prove himself. He believes in the war and has high hopes to be in the forefront of the action but when he ends up in a small town he is struggling to get on with the odd set of locals he is a true outsider no language skills the comrades he wants think at times he is |Russian that is how he ends up at the hospital with a doctor in the small town as he is fish out of the water. The only real connection he makes is with a doctor who when they talk we see how the war has touched them both. as they have a shared love of music.  We follow his adventures on the edge of the war as he tries to find out who he is what to do when the war isn’t at his door. it tackles the absurd nature of the war and the absurd nature of it. The book has another dimension which sees Rudolf and his time being looked up by the writer as a number of chapters do a clever piece of autofiction as the fourth wall is broken and the writer becomes a character in the book and how he came up with the idea for the book with a character he found that was there at the time.

Between the pages on Wielemann, responisibility dictates I must translate, at least a bit

When it came to writing ,Prince Lichnowsky had no time for verbose or ornate prose, trather making his words fall in with the style of a competent commander, sure , efficent, exact. Given his importance he placed on calling things by their name, his book it as free from lyrical outpouring as his life was. Nevertheless, on the few occasions he did feel inclined to poetry he drew less on his military resolve, always knowing where to draw the line.

One of the chapters about the writer writing ther book, her finds a prussian charcater from the time.

I enjoyed this book it takes that over the approach to war we that of not being in the frontline so we have a chance to see the boring side of a conflict where we can sometimes gleam the absurd nature of war but also young men can discover themselves at the same time as not fighting a war.I also liked the way he moved to his writing of the book by breaking the fourth wall narrative about researching the book and how he came up with the idea of a Prussian character. There are touches of books like The good soldier Schwelk and The tartar steppes the latter where we see a young man guarding a similar distant outpost of the war. There is a mix of absurd nature and pathos of wart also of not quite getting to the front.An interesting mix of war and coming of age in a way Rudolf set of to find himself and prove something to his family but winds up not doing so but maybe finds out more about himself. Have you a favourite novel that is set in a war but not at the front line ?

Winstons score – +B An interesting take on the historic novel with a clever second narrative in the present.

None So Blind by J A Gonzalez Sainz

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None So Blind by J A Gonzalez

Spanish fiction

Original title – Ojos que no ven

Translator -Harold Augenbraum and Cecilla Ross

Source – personal copy

I reviewed a couple of books from Hispabooks that published a number of Spanish writers and their books into English based in Spain they broke through a number of the recent writers I have loved Navarro and Barba being two of note that they published first over here. This is the first book by the Spanish writer Jose Angel Gonzalez Sainz to be translated into English he has written a number of novels. He won the Herralde prize one of the big book prizes in Spain. He was the founder and editor of the magazine Archipelago He has also translated a number of works from Italian to English including the works of Claudio Magris with whom he is a good friend. Nine so blind is the first of his books to be translated into English.

Diaz carrion, Felipe Diaz Carrion, knew from an early age, from the first times his father , may he rest in peace, took him along on the road to the field, that Egyptian Vultures were the first vultures to arrive on the scen wherever there was carrion, Genrally they are quiet and quick, his father told him, impressing him to the point of awe, quieter and quicker than anypne else, and despite their large size they don’t make type of dramatic commotion other vultures do, so sometimes they go unnoticed even thpugh they’re always there from the beginning, going about their buisness.

Maybe felipe is like the vulture unnoticed at times a quiet man and his world

The book focuses on the life of Felipe Diaz Carrion a printer that has always work in print shops what we follow is his life the three generations his relationship with his father. His time with his wife. The book follows him leaving his g=hometown and the fields that his family had worked and lived in for many years there is a recurring image of a Vulture and Egyptian vulture that is white and as is point out at a distance looks like a stork at times a motif of life and death this is a story of a quiet man a no one but when he moves North when his wife suggested that they will have a better life and his work life will be better in the Basque region he works at a print shop but is always the outside and the sense of tension there is at the Basque of the time the book is set the height of the recent troubles seems to simmer all around them as things turn for the worse he has a son but they chose to not take the family name of Felipe so we have the third generation of the family with Juan Jose or  Juanjo as he is known growing up in the height of the Basque regions as the famoly start to get involved with the world around them and Felipe often turns a blind eye or maybe doesn’t want to see what is happening around him. This is a story of one man’s life a man with morals in a world of fewer morals a man that tries to do the right thing but is often at odds with those around him.

But the years, now marked by the rhythm of that commute, which had gradually become as familar as his old road to the field, were passing comfortably. Asun, his wife, after a difficult adjustment period seemed to be feeling more and more at home as time went on, and their son- their elder son, because a year after they moved there, they’d had another one, and withthis one he had insited, perhaps for reason of nostalgia, on naming him Felipe – was well into his teenage years and had began not only to go out with his posee of friends but to be out with them at what might call every waking hour, in fact. To him, there was nothing more important at his pose, and no household routine or opinon, or, in any case, not his fathers, held the least valuefor him compared to those his friend would spout.

Caught between tradition and the real world at times

There is a dark shadow over this book with the Basque ETA situation it adds to the world they come to when they move to the Basque region this is a man that seems to lose every way he turns a quiet man that leaves all he knows to move to for a dream. But the reality sinks in the recurring theme of the Vulture is hoovering over is like the death of a family in a way death of a tradition. For me, I was reminded of the undercurrent that I felt visiting Northern Ireland in my youth at the height of troubles the constant sense of undercurrent that was there the normal world that isn’t normal. There is also the ease one can get caught up in the passion and fury that is in that world.

Winstons score – B – an insight into one mans life.

Working Woman by Elvira Navarro

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Working Woman by Elvira Navarro

Spanish fiction

Original title –La trabajadora,

Translator – Christina Macsweeney

Source – personal copy

Another of the writers that were on the first Granta best Spanish writer list(note there is a new edition out if it is half as good as the first as there have been so many great writers from the first list) . Elvira Navarro studied philosophy at university and has written six novels and a number of collected stories. She has won many prizes for her writing. She is known for her innovative writing making her one of the leading writers of her generation most of her novels have been translated into English. This is the first book I had read from her.

Then one fall day, Fabio turned up. He was Mexican, thpough no would have guessed it, given his Irish looks. I had kind of an obsession with anything blond{She made a vague gesture, like a Thompson gazelle lying in wait for a camera in a wildlife documentary. I was about to say something, but..} One day my psychoanalyst said I was looking for the child I used to be all the blond men I fell in love with. A second shrink, Jungian this time came out with the idea that I worshipped the Ayran race{I looked at the floor, if susana wanted to beleive her, these ridiculous observations weren’t helping, but on the other hand, the part of me that curiously observed and envied her freedom in constructing an image of herself gave a faint signal of delight, I was accustomed to her exggarations , even to her lies

What is truth is a big part of this book who is real as well !

The book is a story of two roommates Susana and Elisa, Elisa is a copy editor and proofreader that has seen her job shrink and has had to move to a smaller place and then even couldn’t make ends meet she takes in Susana as her roommate. So she has left the center of Madrid and had to move to the outer suburbs. The book flicks between both their lives as at times we see Susana’s life through the eyes of her roommate as she writes down her roommate’s stories. What we see are to women struggling with their lives mental health is touched on the loss of dreams the struggle of life as the two are drawn Elisa is a lost soul as she wanders the town the graveyard both actual and the left behind abandon house half-built dreams in the dead of night. Susana an artist is making maps out of clippings and pieces of the local area. It is a story that sees you at the limit of what is life a woman on the edge is there even two women is Susana a sort of creation for Elisa to live out her fantasies in a way Susana is described in such a way she seems too good to be sometimes !! Is it a friendship or just a dream this is where Navarro does well to tread a line that as a reader you are never sure? Add to that all a relationship with a dwarf !!

Becoming an indepedent contractor had been the first step. Then they started getting behind with my paychecks, only making them promptly when i complained. They used to say this courtsey- meeting their obligations- was a sign of how much they valued me. When winter came around, I hadn’t been paid for two months, and I’d started without much success, testing the waters at other publishing houses.I wirker till late on galleys that left me without the slghtest desire to read to go on looking at the screen, and then I’d need to get outside , walk and have a couple of beers.

The tough publishing world has woirn her down and seen her move out of the city

When I saw on the back cover that Lina Meruane had called her disturbing and had an eye for the unusual I was drawn in and her novel seeing red I loved. This is a story of two women or is it one woman Elisa is failing in her job as she is working on editing a memoir she has a psychiatric condition which she is trying new meds is this all an illusion is Susana a character created to comfort her to inspire her with her tiny maps and her being the opposite of Elisa or is she real. Navarro has drawn the two roommates so well as at times the story goes between them and at times Susana’s story is told by Elisa. Not the easiest read it sees how easy it is for us to all fall into despair and a downward spiral. I do wonder if Navarro is a soft cell fan with the whole dwarf side story reminded me of the song of theirs from the 80s sex dwarf! Have you read her ?  which book would you recommend next?

Winstons score – -A near-perfect gem from a talented writer.

Life and Spanish lit month

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A quick post just extending Spanish lit month into August. I’ve struggled to write and a lot of the time read a book this last month or so. I feel a group of nights at work which I finished yesterday morning was on my mind for various reasons and had distracted me with a shoulder injury last month and not having a holiday for two years we had a weekend away last month but the whole Covoid situation with working through it and having Amanda at home as she was told to stay in due to her health issues for most the last year of it has all taken its toll. Now as we enter more freedom with the figures still high and I’m just worn down so instead of panicking and stressing I’m extending  Spanish lit month to August which we have done before and it will match up well with Women in translation month as there is so many great female Spanish writer and translators out there at the moment. Thanks to everyone that has taken part so far I hope to go and comment some soon. I am now back at work tomorrow for two long days. So  I will be posting a review Friday Hopefully .A great Arrival has popped through my letterbox it is the first book that Charco Press has published by Argentinean writer Claudia Piñeiro she is the third most translated writer from Argentina and has had her other books published her a lot of her books have been made into films. The book has just come out and is a great choice for this month’s or next month’s Women in Translation Month. Hope all of you are doing well and don’t let Covoid worry you too much.

Spanish Lit Month 2021 plus Portuguese lit

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Since 2012 the has been a Spanish lit month in July every year a couple of years ago Richard and I expand it to include Portuguese lit which for me was a way to try and read a few more Portuguese works which is an area I feel is weak on the blog. SO I announce this year’s Spanish lit month and I will be doing two reads this month.

The first week this year I would love people to try some modern Latin American lit there has been so much that has come out in recent years. The writers from Andres Neuman to Mariana Enriquez have shown how diverse Latin American Literature has been. I have chosen a book from a publisher that has brought us some great books from Latin America Charco Press there backlist is a good place to start with the best of the new writers from Latin America. The book from them I have chosen for a read-along in week one of July is A collection of short stories from the write Federico Falco A perfect cemetery the study obsessive love, romantic love, and how we deal with death and grief as a mayor tries to build the perfect cemetery for a dying wish.

Week two Spain no read-along just a book or two from Spain there been so much from Latin America in recent years. But maybe not as many from Spain. but it is great to read some Spanish fiction or even some nonfiction work. any suggestions welcome.

Week three classic lit. Well, modern classics really I have chosen a book by Peruvian Nobel winner Mario Vargas Llosa his best-known book which is Aunt Julia and the scriptwriter which describes Mario a thinly veiled version of Mario himself working in Peruvian radio doing the highly popular daily soap operas we follow his writing and personal life. I read this years ago and wonder if it has dated any in the time since I last read it. There was a Hollywood version of the book which I had hoped would be online or available for watching but tune in tomorrow isn’t available shame as it is a great film.

Week four is Portuguese week a mix of lit from Portugal and its ex-colonies I hope to read the madwoman of Serrano by Dina Salustio the first female writer from Cape Verde to be translated which Dedalus books brought out a while ago there has been a number of great African titles translated from Portuguese in recent years. I also hope to read a book from Portugal this week.

Will you be joining in? what books will you choose?