Tag: Spanish lit

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.

Un Amor by Sara Mesa

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Un Amor by Sara Mesa

Spanish fiction

Original title – Un Amor

Translator – Katie Whittemore

Source – subscription

I haven’t reviewed as many of the recent books from Peirene Press as I used to the older ones, but this came from a subscription to them, and I had seen them picture it on social media. I was pleased to have the chance to review another book from Sara Mesa, as I had reviewed Scar from her a few years ago when it came out from Dalkey Archive. She has also had open-letter publisher books in the past. She is known for how she can put her characters into uncomfortable and unusual situations. Thus, she gives them depth as we see how they cope emotionally with the conditions. So, this story of a woman escaping past mistakes to only face a whole load of new challenges appealed to me.

Country people, he sighs. Nobody keeps track of these things. They’re stupid and stubborn, and often cruel to the point of savagery. He was brought a greyhound the other day. The animal was torn to bits. Nothing he could do to save it. She simply cannot imagine how hard it is to work in a place like Petacas. Like running into a brick wall, he says, day after day. Nat listens wordlessly. Her problem now is an economic one. Chipping and deworming Sieso, plus buying good dog food, is going to cost a lot more than she’d bargained for. And still, she fears, there’s the question of his shots. But even with the money she’ll spend, the blow to her budget, the most unpleasant part of the process, the most costly, will be interacting with the landlord

Here is a great observation about those left in the village

Nat has left her past in the city, where she had some problems that led her to move to the rural village of La Escapa. She has found a small house she feels is okay, miles away from her past, and is settled. She and the dog got a gift from the landlord, but the dog isn’t a fan of its new owner. She starts with an idyllic life in her new home, but even a feeling of more is in the background. But she soon. Little things begin to happen around her, like the house having a few things that are not right, then the strange bunch of locals. This is a twist on the. Village life where things are weird, she isn’t local, and this shows. Then a intense relationship with a man known as the German he had come to help fix the roof. The village is a holiday place as many houses are empty. Maybe this is part of the reason those left have become such an odd bunch of characters. The book gets darker as it goes on after she accepts a strange request, and things turn sour for her.

‘I left my job,’ she says at last. I couldn’t take any more.’

*What did you do?’

Nat pulls back. She doesn’t want to go into detail. It was an office job, she says. Commercial translations, correspondence with foreign clients, stuff like that. Not badly paid work, but definitely a far cry from her interests. Piter lights a cigarette, squints with the first drag.

Well, you’re brave.’

‘Why?’

‘Because no one quits their job these days.’

Her past is hinted at her and there in the book like this about leaving her old job

This is a slow burner of a book, a woman with scattered fragments of why she ended up in the village. She and the dog make an odd couple, but things start sour. it is like the sepia glasses she had the first few days have gone, and we see that you can’t outrun problems as you may have left them behind. But there is always a new problem and new set of issues to deal with, and this is what Mesa does so well in her books; I have found how people deal with those twists and turns and the slow-burning tale of one woman escaping from the city, fast love affairs, and the outcome of both. Unsettling ideas and plot lines leave you unsettled as you read. This book would make a great series as it slowly burns, and like all the great Peirene books, it feels much larger than its mere 150 pages. A book that takes you into one woman’s journey and eventual escape back to the city. It shows there are problems no matter where, but also how vulnerable a single woman can be in certain situations. One wonders if the title of the village is twofold: an escape to go to and escape from? Have you read this book?

Winston score – A reminds me of what I loved about the early Peirene books: As an escape into another world for a couple of hours.

A Luminous Republic by Andrés Barba

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A luminous republic by Andrés Barba

Spanish fiction

Original title – República luminosa

Translator – Lisa DIllman

Source – personal copy

I move to Spain for the third book of the year and to a writer I have featured once before Andrés Barba he was one of the Grant list of the best young Spanish writers featured 10 years ago when you look back on that list it has produced many great reviews for this blog over the last ten years. Barba has had four books translated into English, I reviewed Such small hands by him which like this book had very otherworldy themes to it. He been nominated for the Premio Herralde a sort Spanish booker prize and has written 14 books and has translated books into Spanish as well.

The Day I arrived in San Christobel, twenty years ago now, I was a young civil servant with the department od Social Affairs in Estepi who’d just been promoted. IN the space of a few years I’d gone from being a skinny kid with a law degree to a recently married man whose happiness gave him a slightly more attractive air than he no doubt would otherwise havve had. Life struck me as a simple series of advertises, relatively easy to overcome, which led to a death that was perhaps not as simply but was inevitable  and thus didn’t merit thinking about.

Our narrator who got married and then ended up in the town.

The book is the story of a number of children with a language all of their own that Turn up in the town of San Christobel. A small Argentinean town on the edge of the jungle that is starting to go places the story is told from the point of view of a young civil servant when he had arrived with his wife twenty years earlier who has to cope when one by one these children appear. Lawless begging. Then vandalism as they grow in their numbers from a few to 32 unkempt, uncared and like wild animals where are their parents that isn’t really asked as they start to become a real nuisance. As this goes on the locals want something done but when an adult is murdered by them things start to turn against them and the locals start to want something done about the children. But is the reaction of the locals too much? A sort of flipped childhood viewed from the Adult’s side turns children into demons and almost like stray dogs to this small town.

Still, the events laid out by the cheif of police were far from invented; a couple of officers had approached a goup of kids who’d been hanging out in Plaza 16 de diciembre for several days and had robbed several pedestrians. According to one of the officers, the children repled to their questions in “An incomprehensible language” and attacked them when they tired to take the younger of the two – who was about twelve, he claimed to the police station. In the first account the officer maintained that one of the kids had snatched his gun and “fired wildly”, but later the testimony of the witness forced to admit hat the struggle had in fact caused the officer himself to fire accidently/ The bullet hit his parner, Officer Wilfredo Argaz, penetrating the man’s groin, and he’d died several minutres later, opposite the medical facility

The police man intially lied about what had happened with the children to great more fear !!

a lot of people mention lord of the flies in their reviews of this book. But I was more reminded of the feral child in the film Mad max. I view them as like those children having never being civilized the lord of the flies see children descend into Violence but this is more a group of people acting like a pack of apes or the feral child in Mad max films where civilization has lost its boundaries. Like his other book I have, it has children and strange children at its heart the narrator shows the view of them from the outside what happens when they become demoi=nised it is more about what happens when a group is turned on by society rather than asking how and why they got like the way they are? it is a short book but one that leaves you with questions and disturbing by what you have read and in thought about what you would do which is a good thing in a book I always feel.

The treasure of the Spanish civil war by Serge Pey

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The treasure of the Spanish civil war by Serge Pey

Franco- Spanish fiction

Original title – Le Trésor de la guerre d’Espagne

Translator – Donald Nicholson Smith

Source – review copy

I have gone for my first read for Spanish lit month with a French novel. Well, this is a French writer that grew up in one of the concentration camps that was home for those who escape Franco regime. Serge Pey is a child of Spanish civil war refugees. He is well known as an artist and performance artist. So yes my first book is a Spanish sounding writer that is French but this is a book that could only be written in French a piece of history that has n’t been written about much or mentioned much.

The boy watched an eagle wheeling in the sky. As though harnessed to an invisible noria, the majestic bird drew all the sunshine towards the two of them where they stood amidst shadows. The boy would remember this. The man kept silent for a long while, observing the eagle as it turned towards the mountain, perhaps to check its worl and draw the sun to another valley. At last the manturned and spokje to the boy.

“Give me you knife”

The man gutted the piglet and wrapped it in leaves, then dug a hole and lit a fire with dry wood. When he had glowing embers he placed the animal’s spread eagled carcass on them and cover it with soil.

A boy sees an eagle as they eat the pig they cooked on the run

The stories here were published in France as a novel of interlinking stories. They are all set around the fifties and the camp were Serge himself grew up. The stories all can stand alone a couple of characters reappear. The first story follows a boy as he tries to escape some guards with his father a couple of interesting images an eagle wheeling overhead like a Spanish water wheel as the guards’ circle in the boy finds a snail then he ends up snail-like in a hole hiding away. Then later on how they learned french watching the dub films in the cinema in the camp. Then how the guards used many of the kids when they arrived to teach them to torture the other kids in the camp in the story a piece of wood. A boy buying horse meat meant only for a dog is that hungry he is tempted to eat it but then thinks of another young child that ate it and end up ill. These are tales that Serge must have heard and seen around the camp the lives of these lost souls retold. The harsh world they lived in.

The boy waited for the butcher’s van. He had spent three days longing to  buy meat for dogs. He chose the moment when the butcher was packing up to ask the man for dog meat. The man tossed him some horsemat wrapped in newspaper, telling him that the dog would have a feast and assuring him that the meat was fresh.

Trembling the boy thrust the paclage under his shirt. He wentround the back of the house to find the dog, which was in the kennel, In the ditch by the fig tree he opened up the blood-soaked newspaper. And then, without consultation between boy and dog, the two fell upon the meat

A boy buy horse meat uncoocked that is meant just for dogs or else you fall ill

This is a collection of vignettes there is a sense of stories the writer had heard when young he was a child when the stories are set this is the world he grew up in his parents, friends, and families in this collection there is a sense of a world where the extreme has become the normal his translator said it is like magic realism or surreal all thou he hated the terms this is a world where things are different. Yes he has some great imagery in his prose that sometimes are too poetic more than prose driven but how else can you face this horrific world. The violent harsh reality in the world often seen through a child’s eye. this isn’t a large collection just over 130 pages and it is a small archipelago book as well.A world not written much about these lost voices of Franco’s exiles need to be heard as it is a remind of the horror of war but also the fate that fell them when they reached the camps in France !

Lord of all the dead by Javier Cercas

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Lord of All the Dead

Lord of all the dead by Javier Cercas

Spanish fiction

Original title –  El monarca de las sombras

Translator – Anne McLean

Source review copy

I have reviewed five books by Javier Cercas before four novels and a work of non-fiction he is one of my favorite writers so I am always excited when new work has been translated into English by him. For me, he has a unique talent at telling an individuals story and using that one person’s tale as a wider view of his homeland from that of the storming of parliament in 1982 and the story Lt Col Telero or the tale of one mans lies in the imposter.  This is his latest book and a personal story of a family legend for Cercas last name is Mena and this is the story of Manuel Mena a favorite uncle of his mother that fought on the Republican side during the Spanish civil war.

Manuel Mena was born on April 25,1919. Back then Ibahernando was a remote, isolated and miserable village in Extremadure, a remote, isolated and miserable region of Spain, over towards the border with Portugal, The name of the place contraction of Viva Hernando; Hernando was a Christian Knight who in the thirteenth century contributed to conquering the moors from the city of Trujillo and incorporating it into the possessions of the king of Castil, who presented his vassel with adjoining lands as payment for services rendered to the crown,Manuel Mena was born there, his whole family was born there including his niece, Blanco Mena,including Blanco Mena son Javier Cercas.

A hundred years tomorrow was the birth of Manuel it seemed fitting to publish this review in time for this .

This was a story that Cercas had longed to tell about his own family hero. But in doing so he would have to accept his families past and the fact his father fought for the Franco side in the civil war. Manuel Mena has a lot of similarities to the young character in his book soldier of Salamis where the young man in that saves a leaders life and is a hero what here made Manuel Mena the family hero he was and this is what  Javier sets out to find out paint his early life in remote isolated town how he came from young boy to the man who in two short years left the village and died from wounds before his turned nineteen. Cercas finds that a man in a famous family photo of Manuel and his fellow soldiers. he interviews this man and finds out more how his uncle was injured and died in the largest battle of the war. Then another photo was taken as he posed with his cap to one side and looking relaxed before he went to the front. Cercas compares his uncle’s wartime service to That of Drogo in Dino Buzzatis work The Tartar Steppe or of a character in a work by Kis. He discovers a man caught in time and maybe we all have a family Hero.

The top two buttons of the jacket are left undone, as is the right brest pocket : this delibrate carelessness allows a better view of the white shirt and black tie , both similarely spotless. It is striking how thin he is; in fact, his body seems unable to fill out his uniform: it is the body of a child in the clothing of an adult.The position pf his right arm is also striking, with his forearm crossed in front of hisabdomen and his hand clutching the inside of his elbow, in that gesture does not seem natural but diocated by the photographer (we might also imagine the photographer suggesting the jaunty angle of the peaked cap, which cast a shadow over Manuel Mena’s right eyebrow) But what is most striking is his face, it is unmistakeably, a childish face, or at most adolescent

Manuel Mena in a photo is still a child in the army.

I was reminded in this novel of  my own family hero story of my own grandfather that served in the Africa and Italy during ww2 but told a story of a first aid box he constantly had during the war after getting in trouble for leaving it behind once the one story he told of his war really but he was on the cover of the telegraph liberating an Italian village with his fellow tank drivers . What Cercas does  is remind us how important these single stories of are the war every family has a Manuel Mena in there past and that is what reminds us how horrific a war is the loss of this pone boy barely an adult in his jaunty hat in the biggest battle of the civil war has a ripple effect that leads to this book to his mother grief at the loss of this beloved uncle she briefly knew. That ends with Cercas finding the battleground where his great uncle passed. I discussed this earlier on twitter and was told it was a favorite of a Spanish translator I said for me it was great but I still loved the Anatomy of a moment.

Nocilla Lab by Agustin Fernandez Mallo

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Nocilla Lab  by Agustin Fernandez Mallo

Spanish fiction

Original title – Nocilla Lab

Translator – Thomas Bunstead

Source – review copy

There are two books that finish a series of novels that could be in the Man Booker longlist when it comes out in a few day and thet are The end by Karl Ove Knausgaard, I read but never got around to reviewing this epic book and the end of his cycle of books. Here we have another the last in the Nocilla trilogy by the Physicist turned writer Agustin Fernandez Mallo. This is the last of his series that was herald as a new style of writing in Spain when the books came out and lead to him become part of the Nocilla generation.

True story, very significant too, a man returns to the deserted city of Pripyat, near chernobyl, a place he and the reat of the poulace fled following the nuclear reactor disaster 5 years before, walks the empty streets, which, like the perfectly preserved buildings, take him back to his life in the city, his efforts as a construction worker here in the 1970’s were not for nothing, comes to his own street, scans the tower block for the windows of his former flat, surveying the exterior for a couple of seconds, 7 seconds,15 seconds, 1 minute, before turning the camera around so that his face is in the shot and saying, not sure, not sure this is where my flat was, the gazes up at the forest of windows again and says , not to the camera.

The odd opening of the first story has a rrapid feel to the writer writing it as we read it.

This book differs from its previous two books as it is less jumpy in its style what we have in this is three tales two novellas and a graphic novella if there is such a thing. What the first story is about a couple who are on a trip around the world the story is made up of little stories about their travels and the places they have been around the world until when they are in Thailand and the boyfriend crashes this is where we get this recounting of there travels mixed with books he has read especially Music of hance by Paul Auster where the main character Juliet spends a year traveling in her Saab but gets to pick up a man who leads her life down a different path and this is maybe what Mallo is trying to capture the book is a single eighty page sentence that captures the travels in the now although they were in the past and gave the writer time to write his trilogy the title of the collection is Automatic search engine which is maybe how Mallo’s mind works at time a series of jumps that rabbit hole of googling discovery and if you are sat recalling a trip the net would add the dimension it does here a sort of padding to the story . the next story follows a couple around Sardinia this tale is simpler as it is more on the mundane side of life those little everyday events. as the travels follow the project is this the same couple? The last part is a graphic novel where the writer himself is the main character.

10.

In the days that followed, without straying far from the area we’d been exploring, we returned the car and hired another, a slightly larger Lancia. I can’t remember the model.

The weather stayed stormy, and once or rtwice we got caught on beaches.

The second story as tyou see with this brief extract has a very different feel to the first story a simple mundane tale in a way.

It is another interesting book from Mallo he has really tried to break the mold of what fiction is in a way he is like his science background experimenting with how stories work first here with a stream of words a Beckett like babble that comes together as a man tries to outpour what has happened to him I was reminded of the Beckett piece, not I, I have the sense it would work in the same way when reading at a speaking speed.  The second is almost testing if you tried to make a story as mundane as possible with just every day a sort of modern take on the kitchen sink drama of the sixties where a trip to Sardina comes down to the everyday events of life. The last is an autofiction take on the graphic novel. This book isn’t as adventurous as the earlier two but in a way is maybe the most accessible of the series for that. I hope it makes the longlist for me this is the sort of fiction we should be championing the ones that make the reader work at times.

 

The Impostor by Javier Cercas

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The Impostor by Javier Cercas

Spanish Non-Fiction

Original title – El Impostor

Translator – Frank Wynne

Source – review copy

Well, a change from German lit month for a book from one of my favourite Spanish writers of recent years. Javier Cercas has featured on the blog three times before. This is his latest book to be translated. He has won the Iffp prize in the past.Also has been the Impac Dublin book prize longlist a couple of times. This book is rather like his earlier book Anatomy of a moment as it uses an actual historical event as the start of the book. This is a look at one man Enric Marco. He was thought to be a champion of the Unions with a history of fighting fascism a survivor of the Nazi death camps and opposed Franco.

On May 11 2005, the truth was discovered: Enric Mrco was an impostor. For the previous twenty-seven years Marco had claimed to be prisoner No. 6448 from German conce/ntration camp Flossenburg: He had lived this lie and had to made it live: for almost three decades, Marco gave hundreds of talks about his experiences of the Nazi regime, he was president of the Amical de Mauthausen, the association of Spanish survivors of Nazi camps, he was awarded notable honours and medals and on January 27 2005, he moved many members of both houses of the Spanish parliment to tears ..

He spoke so well on what wasn’t his life but anothers .

The book begins at the point when in 2005 He was unmasked as a fake.Cercas met him four years after that but it wasn’t until a few years later he decides to try and find the truth behind the man and his story. Marco is an enigma as the first part of the story shows called Onion skins like Gunter Grass whose biography is called Peeling the onion. We peel the layers away from the man and his story. The time Marco choose to invent his history is about write a time when people could still make up a past if they wanted. He is a man that wanted to be more than he was. He wanted to be a hero also a champion of the underdog. But as he rose in the public eye the lies he had told became harder to hide.He had been in a German Prison. He went to Germany as a worker not a prisoner from the republic. when he was in the civil war he went to France and was arrested as a criminal, not to a death camp.He rose to be the leader of the Spanish organisation for prisoners of the death camps and their families. it was just as they were to celebrate sixty years as the story of his deception broke he wasn’t in the camp he said he was and his story starts to unfold.

Marco was born in an asylum ; his mother was insane.Is he mad too? is this his secret, the condrum that explains his personality? is this why he always sided with the majority ? Does this explain everything, or does it at least explain the essentials ? And if Marco truly is mad, what is thhe nature of his madness.

Now, this is a great piece of narrative non-fiction like his earlier book Anatomy of a moment. Cercas has chosen a historic event to explore his own countries past, but this through one man’s journey.This book is around maybe at just  the right time. We are so interested in real life tales with the podcast like S town and serial. There is a saying that truth is often stranger than fiction and Enric Marco is an example. He was bigger than Billy Liar. His story held up longer than the fake 9/11 victim that like Marco wanted to be held up as a hero and also fight for the victims. This is a study of what makes a man lie! Then the snowball effect of those lies, how when the ball is rolling it was hard to turn back time and stop it. Till like in Marcos case it is a final event that explodes his world open. As ever frank has brought a poetic tone to Cercas words. This is a tale of a man’s twisted journey he did good but is that enough for the lies? Marco is an enigma even after this I still not sure what to make of him.

Such small hands by Andres Barba

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Image of Such Small Hands

Such small hands by Andres Barba

Spanish fiction

Original title – Las Manos pequeñas

Translator – Lisa Dillman

Source – personal copy

Here we have Another of the writers that were on the Granta list of the best 22 Spanish writers. Andres Barba has had another book translated into English. This is the first book by him, I have read. He has written ten novels.He has a number of prizes for his books. He also works as a translator doing the works of Joesph Conrad and Alice in Wonderland being among them.

One day she said , “We have the same name: Marina.”

And what if , like her , Marina started to have fewer memories, hardly any memories,no mermories at all ?

“we have the same name ”

Because dolly was the only one who didn’t lie . She was the only  one calm, as if halfway through a long life. and she looked different from everyone else, Time passed over her, and she remained ever alert, like a visionary, astonished, lashless eyes(broken; now even when you laid her down, they wouldn’t lose)

The doll is the only one she trusted as others lied.

This is a very short novella clocking in at just 86 pages. It only arrived today and I took it with me when I went with Amanda to an appointment and read it whilst she was with the doctor in about an hour. It is the tale of Marina an orphan that has lost her mum and dad in a car crash,  or as she keeps putting it .””My father died instantly and my mother in Hospital. The book opens as she is pulled from the crash. Awaking with a scar on her tum. Also, a number people talking to her trying to get her to open up. One way is to give her a doll. The doll she also gives the name Marina. She is then passed fit to leave the hospital and travel to the Orphanage.This is where the story moves into two narratives her the first Marina,  then a collective voice of the fellow Orphans,  as they greet Marina. The orphanage is a strange world to her all them in bright dresses and the same black shoes. The Orphans aren’t kind to her and we see Marina through their eyes as well as hers in a frightening look at being young and lost in a world of fellow lost souls.Also, the violent and horrific way kids can treat each other.

When class was over we liked to play. We’d sing as the jump rope hit the sand with a dull crack. To get in the circle you had to pay attention, had to calculate the jump rope’s arc, its speed, adapt your rhythm to the chorus. Once you were in you felt exposed, tense, as if each time the rope cracked down, it hit your mouth, or your stomach. with each thump you went around the world.

There is a brutal nature to this play rather like in Lord of the flies which this part remind me of

Another of the current crop of books, I have read from Spanish in recent years.  That has a creepy surreal edge to the narrative two that spring to mind is The children and fever dream. Which both feature children and like this walk a line between real and surrealness. The Orphanage is where this story starts to turn a strange way.  Although the way MArina talks at the time has a vacant feel about it as though her heart has been ripped out of her. The black and whiteness of the statement about her parents hang in the air when she says it. This in Lit terms is an Amuse Buche of a book. A book that sets you as a reader minds racing far beyond it mere 86 pages. Also have to say the cover is rather creepy to this book as well.

Spanish Lit month 2017

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Grant ask Richard and I if we were going to do another Spanish lit month and we said yes rather late the next two months will give everyone chance to take a few Spanish language translations off their TBR piles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here are my choice first a book I have read but isn’t due out yet This Mexican novel follows Lucina a young Mexican writer, like most of her fellow writers she has come to New York. But a genetic condition means her eyes haemorrhage return home her life takes a turn.

 

 

Next up is the three Spanish novels from Peter Owen as part of the world series Nona’s room is a collection of short stories, with a female perspective.Inventing love follows a man that receives a call when a lover has died, but he didn’t know the lover but decides to see where going to her home and funeral leads him. Wold moon follows four Republican rebels on the run during the civil war in the land they grew up in trying to stay alive.

 

Then I have these three books, Camilo Jose Cela, I have read before, the hive is his most famous books and is a snapshot of the end of the civil war told through three hundred voices. Rafael Dieste tales and inventions of Felix Muriel is a collection of quirky short stories about Felix growing up and those around him. Then it is amung strange victims by another talented Mexican writer Daniel Saldana Paris a novel set i the Mexican Capital. I have a few other books on my TBR pile to add to the five I have to read here.

 

 

 

 

 

So what books are you choosing for Spanish Lit month ?

The sky over Lima by Juan Gómez Bárcena

~ winstonsdad ~ 13 Comments

The sky over Lima by Juan Gómez Bárcena

Spanish fiction

Original title – Cielo de Lima

Translator Andrea Rosenberg

Source – review copy

Well I kick of this Spanish lit month with a new name to most English readers Juan Gomez Barcena. This was his debut novel it won the Ojo critico prize and was shortlisted for another major prize in Spain. He studied comparative literature , philosophy and History. He was also on a list of the best Spanish writer under thirty in Spain.

At first it’s just a letter drafted many times: dearest friend, respected poet, most esteemed sir, a different opening for every sheet or paper that ends up in a crumpled ball under the desk, glory of Spanish literature, most distinguished Ramon Jimenez, peerless bard, comrade. The next day the mulatta servant will sweep up the wads of paper scattered across the floor, thinking they’re the poems of the young master of the house, carlos rodriguez.

The opening as they try as themselves to write to Jimenez before making up Georgina to write to him .

This is one of those books that tells a real event in a novel form. The event surrounds the writing of letters to the Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jimenez from two fellow poets in Peru well in Lima. The two poets Jose and Carlos decide on a plan to get the latest work from Jimenez which has yet to reach the book shops of lima they write to him as a Peruvian lady called Georgina. what follows in the book is a series of letter between the two (well three in reality) as Jimenez falls for Gerogina and the world that is described Peru in 1904 a town changing through the eyes of a young woman makes Jimenez fall for the place and woman. A tale of love across the sea that inspired the poet to write some love poems about this woman.We see the two poets abandon their own poems to grab on to the coat tails of Jimenez and his poems.

So he has to write about love. But what does he know about that?It could be that Carlos is more apprehensive about this than he initially seemed and we must attribute to him a second fear: the terror that the story of Juan Ramon and Georgina will ultimately reveal nothing more than how little his own life is worth.becasue all good fiction is rooted in genuine emotion, as the professor put it, which means that to write about love a novelist must look to his experiences, make use of everything he’s learned in a woman’s arms.

Carlos wonders what the letters will be made of when it turns to love letters .

An interesting and strange work to open this spanish lit month. It takes a corner of history and opens it up back to a time when a written word meant more letters were the way to keep in contact and people could fall in love over the written word . This is one for the fans of Bolano or Vila-Matas poets in a wild town of lima in the day remind me of Bolano world of poets in Mexico and the fact this was a true story some what Jimenez had exchange letters with a woman from Peru.Brought back memories of the way Vila-Matas uses places and the writers associated with them to place his stories in context.A fun debut novel that shows the power of the written word over men and the power books can have over other men as that is how the story started. A wonderful opening gambit for this Spanish lit month.

What have you planned for Spanish lit month ?

 

7 years bloganniversary let’s go to Spain

~ winstonsdad ~ 20 Comments

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The wordpress app told me at weekend it was seven years since winstonsdad started its trip around the world of Literature. In that time I have managed to review 635 books from 103 countries a real tour of the world . I miss the old days of blogging when it seemed new and fun but the recent move and a new library have spurred this old blogger on to carry on so we start off with the next spanish lit month which is next month. I have five books I plan to read one is reread.

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First up is two books due out from Harvil secker The first from a new star of Spanish Literature DIvorce is in the air by Gonzalo Torne one for the fans of Ferrante and Knausgaard says Harvil . Next is On the edge by Rafael Chirbes one of the great writers of recent times from Spain he won two of the biggest prizes in Spanish literature.

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Nocilla dream is the reread of the pile a wonderful odd collection of short snippets like a trail of photos with stories made up about them. I enjoyed it on the first read but felt a second reading would be worth it for this collection .

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Next up is Loquela by Carlos Labbe the chilean writer is compared to Borges and this is a warped love story and detective novel in one . One of those books that challenges the reader.

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Lasr but not least is the won derfully witty Sky over lima which sees two writers in Chile write and start a love affair in letter with the famous Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jimenz .In what started as a plan to get his latest book early turns it a love in letters .

Have you any plans for Spanish lit month ?

How do you keep your blogging fresh after a number of years ?

The boy whole Stole Attila’s horse by Iván Repila

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theboywhostoleattilashorse

The boy who stole Attila’s horse by Iván Repila

Spanish fiction

Original title El niño que robó el caballo de Atila

Translator – Sophie Hughes

Source personnel copy

I was looking at some of the books that came out last year that may be on the man booker radar and this one I remember when it appeared last year seemed to get a number of good reviews in the papers and around the web so when I was in Sheffield earlier this week I decide to buy myself a copy to read. This is Ivan Repila second book in Spanish but his first to be translated to English. I can see why it may have been chosen as the first by him to be translated into english it has a certain universal nature to the story. A book that remind me so much of a Japanese film.

It looks impossible to get out, he says. And also: “But we’ll get out.”

To the north, the forest borders the mountain range and is surrounded by lakes so big they look like oceans. In the centre of the forest is a well. The well is roughly seven metres deep and its uneven walls are a bank of damp earth and roots, which tapers at the mouth and widens at the base like and empty pyramid with no tip.

The impossible to get out of well they are in, these are the opening lines of the book .

The book is the story of two brother Small and Big. They are stuck in the bottom of a well, we are given no idea how the pair arrived there. What follows in this short novel is the struggle to survive and the slow madness that comes to them both as they are stuck down this hole. Repila has a way of the horrific days and months of there being stuck there seem poetic in a brutal nature. As the bigger brother starts to try to keep small alive. This seen remind me of the Grave of the fireflies an early Studio Ghibli film that like this film follows siblings in that case a brother and sister , but we see the same brutal and sad demise as the two retreat to a small cave by a river and feed on the insects around them . (this is the one film I won’t watch again it is so sad be warned this one rather like this book can rip your heart out )

Small is so hungry that he can no longer control his body. He baulks, puts out his hand, into which Big places a colossal maggot, as juicy as a ripe apple.

“Abuser. Nasty pig. I hate you”

Finally he eats. He chews the gelatinous fibre of the maggot a dozen times and the bitter juice that oozes from it dances on his tongue. He drools like a hungry dog. It doesn’t taste of chicken: It’s better than chicken he bursts into tears like the little boy that he was.

“You’re the best. I love you. I love you.”

The feast goes on all night.

This scene and a few others reming me of the film The grave of the fireflies, I also like the chicken line here!

Replia has chosen two strange quotes at the start of the book one from Margaret Thatcher (why anyone would quote her is beside me ) About free trade and being rich and poor . The a Brecht quote from his poem To posterity about death and uprisings. I think we are meant to read Big and small as a wider story of survival in people and stripping the two lead characters of all identity barring their size has given this a fairy tale feel a timeless nature to the story. I was reminded of another Spanish novel I read last year Out in the Open   another story of human suffering like the two boys in this book, maybe this is a modern take on a Spanish tradition that can be traced back to the books of Cela that take a look at the brutal nature of human life-like his book The family of Pascual Duarte life is brutal for some like big and small only one is destined to come through this ordeal.

Have you read this book ?

Spanish teeth for sale quote for sunday

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Mariner reading on pink background - Yiannis Tsaroychis

Teeth and books seem an odd pairing but my current Spanish lit month read is about Teeth and selling Teeeth the latest work by  Valeria Luiselli the story of teeth . So here is a Quote I enjoyed .

HYPERBOLIC LOT NO.9

Our penulitimate lot , ladies and gentlemen , exludes an air of mystical melancholy . The tooth itself is crocodilian , but its aura is almost angelic . Note the curve , it os like a wing in ascent . It’s owner , Mr. Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges , was a man of average height . His short , thin legs supported a torso , which was at once solid and svelte .His head was the size of a small coconut , and his slender , flexiable neck . He was a pantheit . His eyes used to flit from side to side , useless , impenetrable to sunlight but ready to receive the light of beautiful , good ideas . He spoke slowy , as if searching for adjectives in the darkness . How much will you bid ?

How much would you pay for Borges tooth ?

 

Spanish Lit month

~ winstonsdad ~ 15 Comments

Well I’m late announcing my Spanish Lit month announcement . Richard announced a few days ago we are doing it again this July for the third time . WE have choosen a short book as the group read . The invention of morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares a book by the great friend of Jorge Luis Borges .

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Well I ve chosen to reuse my first post for spanish lit month for this intro again  I’m excited to see what books every one has chosen but if your still struggling for a book to read for Spanish language lit month ,I ve a few tips here to help my co host richard has done two posts of book lists .the first has 200 books that have been picked on various lists  the second had a further list of 100 plus books from classic to the modern age from spain and latin america .

Right another great port of call is the complete review Michael the guy behind complete review has many more reviews of spanish fiction here  and Latin american fiction here .Mostly modern but it has best selection of Latin american fiction I ve seen .

The site for new Spanish books available to be translated is a great site to see what is happening in Spanish .Nick Caistor and Stefan Tobler advise on here two  people I know are trustworthy .

Then I ll give you five to read from my blog

1.Don Quixote –

This is the head water of all modern european fiction we may think use in the english speaking world got the ball rolling on the novel no its  this book has it all ,meta fiction ,playful story lines ,History and oh the mad don and his faithful friend .2015 I will maybe reread this next spanish lit month in 2016 as that may be the time Terry Gillam has his film of it out or nearer being made .

2 Three trapped tiger G Cabrera Infante –

The cuban Ulysses the call it but actually it is very different it has a very cuban feel you can feel a jazz beat as your read about a day in Havana just before the revolution . 2015 A lost classic this one .I have another by him on the blog both worth trying .

3 I the supreme by Augusto Roa Bastos

Another classic of latin american fiction ,the story of a 19th century dictator in latin america echos of the present in the past image ,controlling the media and writing your own history still go on in the present day .2015  One that everyone interested in the dictator fiction

4 Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras

One of my favourite books of recent years ,the dirty war seen through a young boys eyes .It is touching and entertaining  and with a believable child narrator .2015 still a hidden gem !

5 Exiled from almost everywhere by Juan Goytisolo

He is the wonderful master of spanish fiction I ve read a few but this only one since I ve blog a wonderfully wacky tale that maybe needs a wider audience  . As does Juan he may win the Nobel one day soon and if you’ve not read him you’ll kick your self .2015 more exile tales to come this year from the same writer .

Oh and needless to say Borges is a must read anything by him is going make your reading life a little brighter .

Back to 2015

Again I must start my Borges project , I have read a second Goytisolo for this year already the first of his best known  trilogy marks of identity .I have Desire for chocolate by Care Santos a prize winning Spanish novel due out in August . Also a couple of books about the Peron years in Argentina .

What books may you read next month .