Tag: TRANSLATIONS

The Duke by Matteo Melchiorre

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The Duke by Matteo Melchiorre

Italian fiction

Original title – Il Duca

Translator – Antonella Lettieri

Source – Subscription book

When the Booker longlist came out, I was pleased to see this on it, as I have been a fan of Foundry Press since it first appeared a couple of years ago and have a subscription with them, so I had this book on my TBR.  Matteo Mmelchiorre is a director of the library and museum Cstelfranco Vento, which is where the book is set in Northern Italy.  He studies the Middle Ages. He has also written about the region’s mountains and forests.  It is good to see how this book has been inspired by the world he lives in and the history he is interested in.

There were perhaps ten crows. Clattering. Cawing. Careening. Blind with fury. They were whirling in a frantic fray, striking each other again and again. Then, all of a sudden, they scattered, darting in opposite directions and, in the newly cleared sky, only a knot of wings remained, an entangled tussle which twisted and swirled and eventu-ally, as if struck by shot, plummeted through the air.

But as soon as the tangle hit the ground, right in the courtyard of the house, I discerned a buzzard instead: open beak, frightful eyes, low wings. The buzzard was pinning a young black crow to the ground, trapping it with its talons, and the crow was flapping its wings, and twisting its head, and wriggling, searching for some prospect of salvation.

The opening of the book and the Buzzard and Crow

The book, he said in the Booker interview, had many inspirations, but the fight he saw between a crow and a buzzard was one of them. I have seen a similar thing in the peaks near her birds of prey, where crows have tackled them. Maybe the scene itself is in part of the book, the buzzard, a solitary bird, a regal bird, and the crow live in groups, a common bird scavening its way. The book follows the duke, who is actually a count, a man stuck in his villa like his family has been for centuries.  What happens when he finds the big man from the village is taking his timber?  That is the kernel of the book, like the birds’ two classes coming together, and it is about the duke, an odd man, quirky solo figure, the last of a line of his family, in a way, maybe a sign of years of inbreeding, then the community around him suffers due to him having the land.  Then there are little pieces about the nature and the natural world they are in. This is the old feudal world of the past, and a village wanting to move into the modern world.

So, by calling me The Duke, the villagers were either implying that I was as eccentric as my grandfather, though inevitably of a quite different sort of eccentricity, or they were mocking the decline of my lineage. A decline which, after all, was most evident, and by virtue of which they could finally enjoy the sight of a Cimamonte with no servants and no tenants and with scratched-up hands and hardened nails.

In any case, I did not care what the village said or thought about me. I was certain that I was already living out the best fate I could possibly desire. Nothing important ever happened during the course my days. Nothing complex ever perplexed my gaze. No exception to my routine. No decision blocking my way. I lived in the best condition to which a man of my nature could aspire – the perfect, ideal condition.

But now, on an afternoon like any other, Nelso Tabióna had come to rap on my windowpane to tell me that, up in the Mountain, in my woods, I had been had.

The duke is actually a count aqqnd the nature is here in the passage I picked

For me, this is a clever book; if it had an NYRB cover, you would be forgiven for thinking it was a rediscovered classic, given the scope and twists of the story. But for me, the one book I thought of a lot was actually Gormenghast. Both books are set in remote settings, and both deal with a crumbling royal family. Both tackle modern subjects, but also set the books in an unknown time frame. Nature is big in both as well. I think I may be the only person who thinks this. There is a mention of ECO in reviews and 19th-century classics. The Foundry, in a recent Instagram post, pointed readers to Trollope and Hardy, whom the writer said inspired him. Of course, The Leopard is another book that has been mentioned as it also deals with a family line crumbling. The writer has also mentioned another Italian book, Deliver us by Luigi Meneghelli, as his bible while writing this book, a book set in a village that explores the writer’s relationship with the land.  This is maybe the most unusual book on the longlist. It is a modern book that reads like a classic novel, with some contemporary ideas about nature and society. It took the translator a while to get the duke’s voice right, she said, as it is very hard to capture the exact Italian nature of his voice. Have you read this book?

 

 

The Witch by Marie Ndiaye

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The Witch by Marie Ndiaye

French fiction

Original title – La Sorcière

Translator  – Jordan Stump

Source – Review copy

I was pleased to see Marie Ndiaye’s name on the longlist when it came out, as I have reviewed three of her other books over the years. She won the Prix Goncourt for her book Three Strong Women in 2009, but it was published 13 years earlier, in 1996.  I’m pleased to see her older books have been coming out. I have a few of hers to catch up on, but this is a book that shows how good a writer she was before the Goncourt win, a book about small-town life with a clever twist.  This is one of two books on the longlist with a witch theme.  This is set in a version of the near past where magic is still alive but hidden.

When we first came to this little city, two years before, I made the mistake of telling Isabelle about my powers, optimistically thinking I might try to initiate her, since after all nothing forbade passing the gift on to women who weren’t my daughters, and because Isabelle seemed a person of some importance who, I thought at the time, 1 wanted on my side. She reigned uncontested over our little sub-division, her authority not founded in any store of objective virtues, for Isabelle was neither pretty nor intelligent, nor hardworking nor thoughtful, nor even subtly and perversely magnetic, but rather (that authority imposed as a historical fact, duly imparted from neighbor to neighbor.

Isabelle and her husband were the first to build here; from that arrival on the still-virgin land at the gates of the city she’d drawn the need to serve in some sense as the memory of us all, we who were appearing from all over the region, and even the country. It was from Isabelle that we learned what had to be known of this or that neighbor’s ways to keep from upsetting the general entente of the neighbor-hood, and should anyone attempt to break off with Isabelle so she wouldn’t come barging in several afternoons a week she made it clear that she would turn the entire subdivision against them with her unscrupulous gift for gossip.

Her powers were small but she told the town gossip

This is a book about family secrets and small towns. It happens that the witch’s nature in the book adds a clever twist. It is about being a mother and a wife in a loveless marriage.  At the heart iof the story is the split between the parents, Lucie and Pierot.  He is very controlling of Lucie. They have twin daughters, Maud and Lise, who are just at the cusp of becoming Teens.  Their mother, Lucie, is from a line of witches, and at this age the girls must discover whether they possess the clairvoyant powers passed down through the family’s female line. Will they bleed tears of blood, a sign you have the power, and will they have it more than their mother, who can only see things in the present moment, not inj the future?  What happens when their powers initially seemed like their mothers’ but over time grow, and the tears come? What happens is a story about secrets, the family’s past, other family members, as their gifts grow over time , and a mother trying to keep it all together. As real life and the surreal world of magic blend into one.

My father opened his big arms wide, and Maud and Lise, delighted by this display, rushed gigglingly toward him. I was surprised to see the gray streaks I knew so well dyed a bluish black that contrasted with his brown hair.

And on top of that he was tanner, thinner, he now had a certain dandyish, youthful elegance, but when, with overplayed enthusiasm, he ordered Maud and Lise to gallop through the rooms—and they launched off with a sound of furious hoofbeatsI saw that he seemed worried and jittery. He grabbed me by the shoulder and, in the tone he probably used to talk business in his Rue de Rivoli of-fice, he beseeched me to return, as quickly as possible, the 120,000 francs hed recently given me on the occasion of his promotion. Then he dropped onto his new couch, red leather, sueded, and added, avoiding my eye:

They Lucie parents as they discover more about the girls powers

I love Ndiaye’s writing style. She has twisty sentences that draw you in as a reader. This is a tale that blends the everyday with the fantastic in a small-town setting. A mother who struggles when her daughters have more power than she does is both a common tale of mothers wanting daughters nearby and a story about daughters having the chance to go further than their mother has because of their powers. It sees what happens when the daughter’s eyes are opened to the full scale of the powers and how it can change their lives, and what about their selfish Father in all this?  I was pleased when this arrived it was the last book I needed when it arrived and the one I most want to read when the short list came out as I am a fan of Ndiaye this is a book from a writer growing not a polished as the other books I have read but they are twenty years older this was her early on in her writing career and great to see a book that mix the everyday and a pinch of magirc realism all that and a tale of a family at a crossroads due to the twins powers and what it means for their mothe Lucie and them themselves!

The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje

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The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje

Dutch Fiction

Original title – De herinnerde soldaat

Translator – David Mckay

Source – Personal Copy

I have long been a fan of Dutch literature; for a small country, it has a unique voice in much of its literature. Cees Nooteboom said this when I asked him about Dutch literature.

The Dutch are a rather special tribe, like the english, but smaller. On the other hand,Holland is not an island. It has taken the world a long time to recognize that there are some interesting writers out there, like Hermans, Mulisch, Claus, Mortier, van Dis, Grunberg, and many others. And of course it does not help that we know much more about English writers

This is a perfect example as it is a book that came out on a small regional publisher and had almost slipped under the radar until an NRC review and further coverage gave the book legs, so to speak, and it won a number of awards in Holland. Then also a number of prizes in the US, including the Republic of Consciousness Prize, which it won this week. Anjet had written a number of novels before this had such success, and her next book has already been lined up for Translation.

On the train he sits opposite her on the hard wooden bench, their knees not quite touching, and the locomotive labors noisily across the quiet green Flemish countryside with a din that drowns out anything they might say to each other and even his thoughts, and he looks outside, it’s a dizzyingly beautiful world, all those colors and spreading waves of grass and floating white cities of cloud, and if this was around him all that time, unfathom-able and infinitely vast, how is it possible there existed a life such as his, imprisoned within the asylum’s cramped walls, as if in one mighty sweep he’s been erased, that’s how he feels, and he tries not to think about it, he must not under any circumstances have another attack like the one on the platform, and he knows she is thinking about the same thing, because from time to time he catches her looking distrustfully in his direction.

that last line as they head home caught me !

The book is really a two-hander story.  It stars Asylum, as they have a man in 1922, a number of years after the war has ended, who still has no memory of who he is, and no one has come forward to claim him. So they put his picture in the newspaper, hoping to find his family.  There are a number of women who come and go who view Noon Merckem as the man, who is called after the time and place he was found. But no one claims him, then Juliennecomes and says he is her husband, Amand, a photographer with kids. She takes him home and this is where the story begins he is in a room in the studio sleeping as they get to know each pother but this room is used as the studio and has a war scene in the room so as he sleeps every night and relives the horror he has seen you do wonder why Julieene is letting this Amand has no memories of there life and as s=they try to connect you do wonder if he is Amand or what happened. He agrees to pose with widows as their lost loves as part of the photograph business ..As they grow close, is this the real Amand that Julienne is painting to him or a new version of the man? The two of them try to find Amand again and, over time, grow closer, but is it all it seems?

And he sits down and lights the gaslight, and the world leaps back into place, chillingly real, as if it had been lurking by the wayside, and his panic does not die down, he no longer dares to go back to sleep and lies waiting in silence until first light, in the distance he hears a train pass, another, another, and a faraway church bell strikes five, the first cart in the street, hooves on the paving blocks, and then more carts and footsteps and voices, and the half-light of early morning creeps comfortingly across the backyard and into the studio. And when the church bell strikes half past five he gets dressed, but the house is still deep in sleep, and six o’clock, and still no one is up, and at quarter past six the church bells ring in the distance for early Mass, a familiar sound, and she, the children, Felice, everyone sleeps on, not until seven does he hear the steps creak and a door open, and then the toilet flushing, and when he recognizes her voice and Rose’s he goes upstairs, and on the stairs he runs into Gus coming down with the coal scuttle, and Amand says good morning and offers to carry the coal for him, but Gus squeezes past without a word.

At home with the family amd the Studio

I was so pleased when this made the Booker longlist. It had been a personal Christmas gift I had brought with Money I was given at Christmas, and it was high on my list to get this year. It is a book a bout war, which I always enjoy. The aftermath of World War I has been covered by other writers like Pat Barker and Rebecca West, both of whom deal with the Trauma and mental aftermath of War. None deal directly with anaemia, though, and this was inspired in part by actual events.  There were people photographed in the papers and claimed by people, particularly the case of the Frenchman, Anthelme Mangin, who had two people fighting over him. This story inspired two novels. For me, the way the family was photographed was interesting as images can be altered and changed, and is this story a life being retouched or a life being altered? Is he Amand, is he the Amand he was, or the one his wife has invented? The book makes you wonder what is real, what is made up, and how far people will go.

We are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

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We are Geen and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

Argentinian fiction

Original title – Las niñas del naranjal

Translator – Robin Myers

Source – Personal copy

I have read the two other books to have come out in English from this writer, and I was.  A fan of Slum Virgins, which was her Debut book.  But this had been on my radar, not least because both the UK and US editions of the book have very eye-catching cover art, so I would have got to see that she is part of this wonderful crop of strong female voices from Latin America.  I often say that, over the 16-plus years I have been around the blogosphere, the nature of Latin American fiction has shifted from very Male-heavy to fairly even these days.  Gabriella is a creative writing teacher, so she will no doubt be setting forth the next generation of great Argentine writers for us all to read.  This book, like the other book, features a woman in a male world, this time living as a man in the New World.  Antonio is writing back to her home and the priory where her aunt, the Prioress of the Basque Priory, lives.

…that is a story I will tell you in time, dear aunt. Let me tell you now about the fragrances of the forest, which are strong as the spirits soldiers drink, as village rotgut, and about the other flowers, mammoth and fleshy and carnivorous, nearly beasts, for bere in the jungle the animals bloom and the plants bite, and I believe I have even seen them walking, I swear this to you, and leaping, for vines do leap; all things seethe bere, whereas the forest rustles, as well you know; I remember your attention to the presence of the fox, with its faint rustle of leaves in your forest, and to the bear, with its beavy rustle of trunks and branches; the forest rustles, but not the jungle, the jungle seethes, full of eyes; life surges inside it as lava surges in volcanoes, as if the lava were trees and birds and musbrooms and monkeys and coatis and coconuts and snakes and ferns and caimans and tigers and trumpet trees and fish and vipers and palms and rivers and fronds, and all other things within it were amalgams of these primary ones.

Writing to the Aunt about the world she is in the New World

The book is a mix of these letters home.  Narrative it tells the tale of Antonio in her adventures in the New World or Cayalina as she was known has seen it all the violence of the old world hanging death of native culture as the conquestordors move opn the the country as they are trying to conquer the New world and this is how He Antoino has ended up with a ragtag bunch around him two Two Gurani girls he saved from a life of slavery a couple of monkeys hand horse in this Jugle where the world becomes a mix of dreams and nightmares as she recounts the vents she had seen to get where she had been with her jounrey to the new world from singing on a ship to the various other jobs he had along the way ad s the book goes on the Jungle itself is almost a character as the bunch try to escape can the find a place this is a book that has a lot of layers for such a short book.

He hears the rattle. A snake. He’s lucky to have his sword within reach. A bit blunted but better than nothing. He stands, armed, and stamps the earth with his feet. He listens. Silence, save the growls of the dog slowly calming. The horses wander back. He wants to keep writing. He needs to leave the girls somewhere safe. The tree. He wraps them in his cape. Michi is so weak that he supports her head by pulling the cloth taut.

He puts the monkeys in, too, binding them to his back, and climbs. He lays them down in a nest-like gathering of boughs and ties the cape to the strongest branch. He sits with them.

An African once told him tales of enormous serpents. One had swallowed an elephant. It looked like a hat, said the man. His troops wouldn’t need an enormous one to devour them. Any old serpent could gobble the girls and the monkeys for breakfast.

In the jungle it is alive at times

I think this is a book that maybe could have done with being a little longer.  There are a lot of ideas, the church, religion, the new world, woman in a man’s world, so many, it is like it has been stuffed into a box and is fit to burst.  I feel that maybe means the book suffers at times; it is a great book.  I still like SLum virgin best of her books, but that may just be me being a reader who finds books set near my own time much easier to connect with.  The main character is based on a real figure from the time, a woman who lived as a man in the New World.  I kept going back to the Filmsof Werner Herzog set in the New World and imagining if Klaus Kinski’s character Aguiree had been had been a trans character in the Jungle, it would be like this book a man tinged by the violence of the world they are in another film that cmae to mind around the two girls was Apocalypto the shere violence that is seen at times.  I believe the writer herself has highlighted Studio Ghibli as an influence on her writing.  I just felt it would have been a better five-hundred-page book than the 200 it is, and I rarely think that it is a book jam-packed with ideas and history, and a character at the heart of the book that should have been better known as a trailblazer for their time.  Have you read this or any of her other books ?

The Deserters by Mathias Enard

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The Deserters Mathias Enard

French fiction

Original title – Déserter

Translator – Charlotte Mandell

Source – Subscription edition

One of the benefits of having a Fitzcarradlo subscription in recent years has been knowing I may have a couple of books that make the International Booker longlist and are in with a chance at least.  They publish so many great books in Translation.  So when this made the longlist, I was happy as I hadn’t got round to finishing his last novel after reviewing a number of his books.  It was nice to step back into his world, which is uniquely his. Enard has a writing style that is all his own. His books all vary.  Still, they are all well-written in various styles,s and this is an odd little gem.  It turns out this book was being written as the Ukrainian war started, and that led to the second narrative in the book, which follows a deserter from the war.

Angel, my holy guardian, protector of my body and soul, forgive me for all the sins committed on this day and deliver me from the works of the enemy, despite the warmth of the prayer the night remains a beast fed on anguish, a beast with breath of blood, cities in ruins full of mothers brandishing the mutilated corpses of their children faced with scruffy hyenas that will torture them, then leave them naked, dirty, their nipples torn with teeth under the eyes of their brothers raped in turn with trun-cheons, terror stretched over the country, plague, hatred, and darkness, this darkness that always envelops you and urges you towards cowardice and treason. Flight and desertion. How much time is there left to walk? The border is a few days from here, beyond the mountains that will soon become hills of red earth, planted with olive trees. It will be difficult to hide. Many villages, towns, farmers, soldiers, you know the region, you are home here,

no one will help a deserter,

you’ll reach the house in the mountain tomorrow, the cabin, the hovel, you’ll take refuge there for a little while,

There is a poetic touch to the Deserters story

As i said the book has two story lines they are seperate maybe at some point you could say the characters in each book have been in the same place the first story uses a point in history to look back in time that is 9/11 and instead of being inj America it follows an event that is happeniong on that day on a boat in Berlin there is a conferecnce i=on a Mathmatematician Paul Heudeber, One of the think I found is was this a real person it wasn’t but a mix of various figures that had walked a similar path and that was breinbg looked up for being against the  Nazis   Still, with his mind, he was in Buchenwald and opted to head to the east after the war.  We are learning about his life alongside his daughter, who is trying to find out more about her father: he was a mathematician and a poet. She didn’t know himmeanwhile the other story follows an unnamed man that has ruin off from war a deserrter as he finds a woman and a donkey in a hinterland of scrubland the beauty oif this mis the lack of place and time was it a event that has happened ort is going to happen as I say there isn’t much that runs in between the stories just the aftermath of war in different times and places and how it lays bare peoples lifes.

I have to go back over what happened over twenty years ago, on 11 September 2001, near Potsdam on the Havel, on board the cruise boat, a little river liner christened with the fine pompous name Beethoven.

Summer seemed to be wavering. The willows were still green, the days still warm, but a freezing fog would rise from the river before dawn and immense clouds seemed to be gliding over us, from the distant Baltic.

Our floating hotel had left Köpenick east of Berlin very early in the morning, on Monday. Maja was always alert, spry. She would go up to the top deck to walk, a stroll between showers, deck chairs and deck games. The green domes and golden spire of the Berlin cathedral captivated her, from afar, when we arrived. She was imagining, she said, all the little gilt angels leaving their stone prison to fly off into a cloud of acanthus leaves blown by the sun.

The water of the Spree was sometimes a dull, dark blue, sometimes a glowing green. During the preceding weeks, all of Germany had been rocked by storms; their aftermaths swelled the Havel and the Spree, which usually were quite low at summer’s end

We navigated through the swirling water.

the conference on the boat

I am a huge fan of Enarrd.  This book is an odd tale.  It is easy to see, with a panel of judges that includes two Mathematicians, that a book featuring a fictional Mathematician would make the longlist.  But the second narrative inspired by the Ukraine war shows the horror of war on the mind, the need to escape war, the way it affects not just the Soldier but also the woman and her donkey.  People may dislike the lack of detail in the story; in fact, they may think it is l lazyStill, forr me it is a brilliant touch of not placing that narrative in a place or time and thus making the story work now, in fact, with the Iran war, how many men and women are wandering out of the scrublands of Iran, lebabanon or the Gulf states it is weird how a book is maybe more relevant than when the longlist was announced a clever mix of family, war, the horrors of war lose and all this brought together by one of the best living writers Enard. Do you have a favourite book by Enard?

Paradise of the Blind by Duong Thu Huong

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Paradise of the Blind by Duong Thu Huong

Vietnamese fiction

Original title – Những thiên đường mù

TranslatorsPhan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson

Source – personal copy

I picked this up as it said it was the first Vietnamese novel to be published in the US. The writer grew up in the North of Vietnam and fought for the communists in the Vietnam War, spending time in the maze of tunnels they had built in the jungle. As she entertained the troops, she was one of the few people who survived in her group.  She was also on the frontline when China tried to invade Vietnam.  She has since become outspoken about the corruption she has seen in her homeland and is a dissenting writer.  This book also shows how hard it was for women in Vietnam at the time it was written, the late 1980s.  When Vietnam still had many ties to the Soviet Union. I have decided this year to try to add at least one new country to the blog each month, but I was wrong. This is the second book I have read from Vietnam, although I have some classic Vietnamese literature and a book about the Vietnam War and I have to read another book for one new country this month

One afternoon, when I was just a girl, I stood in that house, inhaling the dank, musty smell of the walls. It was the first time I had ever even seen the house and the village where my mother had been born and raised…. The eyes of the ghoulish sculptures carved into the wooden transoms above the doors riveted me with their mysterious gaze. A spider’s web hung from the vaulted ceiling. Light flickered through cracks in the chipped, rotting tiles, flashing at me like the phosphorescent bursts that haunt cemeteries. Terrified, I rushed out into the courtyard where my mother sat chatting and sipping green tea with the other women.

“What’s the matter, my child?”

“I’m scared.”

“My silly chicken. Afraid in broad daylight?” she laughed, scolding me. When she smiled, I always noticed the sparkling whiteness of her teeth, aligned in perfect rows, and it made me sad. This was the last trace of her beauty, her youth, of a whole life lived for nothing, for no one.

As a young girl her nerves

The book looks at Vietnam through the stories of Hang, a young girl on the verge of womanhood, her mother, and a street vendor who lives near them. All three offer perspectives on women’s lives and on the role of men in society at the time. But it is also a tale of forbidden love as the mother had a lover that her brother Hang’s uncle forbade her to see. This has haunted her mother, so when she escaped to Hanoi to raise Hang and her brother, he reappeared and now wants Hang to work in a factory in Russia, where he now lives. As he begins to affect Hang’s life, she sees other people around her leading lives very different from hers. This is a story of family ties and how tight they can be in Vietnam,m but also about a world that is on the brink of change. There are many nods to the blind in the book, and being blind to the truth about the past, etc., may be a theme.

The following week, he left with the traveling salesman, descending the river on a wooden raft. From his birthplace in the village to the city, he followed my mother’s traces to her tiny back-alley home on the outskirts of Hanoi.

My mother was still young and beautiful, but she looked at no one, smiled at no one. Like ashes rising under the caress of a slight wind, their love rose again, melting the years of separation, the yearning, the emptiness, the hatred, the humiliation of an entire lifetime of bitterness, of two lives almost snuffed out, buffeted by a series of absurd, incomprehensible events. All this, fused in the space of an instant, quivering through every pore of their bodies, transported them. All this, here, under the leaky roof of this pathetic hovel, in this place where my parents had lived and loved each other, where I had come into the world.

Her parents past causes issues in the present for her

I enjoyed this. I felt it captured maybe how different Vietnamese life is, but also the culture and the way the book was written, like a series of pictures of Hang’s life and those around her as she grows up. Like little glimpses of her world. But also the timeframe she has grown up in the war and post-war era. The title is maybe a nod to the way the post-war period was meant to be Paradise, but only if you are blind to what is around you!  A female-centred family saga about an uncle who has an axe to grind with a past love, and a mother and daughter caught up in all this, offers compelling insight into Vietnam and the connection between the country and the Soviet Union, with workers employed by the Russians in factories. Have you read any fiction from Vietnam?

 

The old man and his sons by Heòin Brú

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The Old man and his sons by Heoin Bru

Faraoese fiction

Original title – Feðgar á ferð

Translator – John F West

Source – Personal copy

I find it harder to find vbooks from countries I haven’t read but I do have a srtsh of books to read every know and then and last month I ended the year with two new countries this rthe first is a book written by Heoin Bru which was the pen name of Hans Jacon Jaocbsen a faroese writer this boook came out in 1942 and was first translted into Danish in the sixties. Then, in 1970, the first novel from the Faroe Islands was translated into English. The book captures one of my favourite subjects in fiction: the clash between generations, and between old and new worlds.  The book follows parents and their children as the world around them becomes more expensive; the book, although written 80 years ago, still rings true.

His wife came in. She too was aghast and baffled. The doctor and his wife had both arrived in the country only recently, from Denmark, so that Faroese ways were strange to them. She had no idea that this thing was a whale’s kidney.

To her it was just something with blood oozing from it, that reminded her of recent and violent death. She did not doubt that Ketil was a human being, but he was not the usual kind she was accustomed to. And it cannot be denied that he did differ a little from the average Copenhagen businessman. He stood there in his home-made skin shoes, his loose breeches and long jacket. His blood-flecked beard hung down towards his belt, and on this hung a double sheath with a pair of white-handled knives, one above the other. And he was extending his earthy hands – holding up that bloody thing.

Whale meat after the hunt is shocking to some

The Partriachs of this book are Ketil and his wife live in a small village with there last son at home Kalvur a lad that has maybe a learning disablitie but is seen as unable to leave hios parents the other children have all left the small village the parentas still living a simple life and when after a whale drive a Faroe tradtion of hunting whales and then selling the meat of to alll those around in an auction means that when Ketil buys a larger than usual amount of meat he is left struggling to get by in a world where the tradtional way of living has unkown to him move to modern marketforce so this simple living man and his wife are now struggling in the world and there kids don’t help as they constantly need the parents help this is a world in flux a man caugfht out by the movement of time and how money is now king in his island home.

He went into the kitchen and squatted down on a low chair right by the door, and looked about him. Here there was brassware and linoleum, curtains, crocheted and embroidered drapery – everything you could think of, and every scrap of wood was painted. Still, he thought, if they can afford it, and like to have things this way, who are we to criticise?

‘Is the lad in?’ the old man asked as his daughter-in-law

appeared.

‘He’s in the dining-room. Carry on in, Father?

The old man hesitated a little before he went, because he knew his daughter-in-law did not really care for him, but he plucked up courage. ‘Maybe I do smell of the peat fire and the cow byre, he thought, ‘but I pay my own way, and nobody can drive me out of house and home. So he stuffed his hat into his jacket pocket and went in.

‘Fine weather we re having, Ketil began.

His son looked up. ‘Yes, good weather, he replied absently.

‘Extraordinarily good weather’ He sat at the table, fingering through a great heap of papers.

Kentil is caught up with money he hasn’t got

The book unfolds in vignettes as we see how the whale drive leads to the debt Ketil incurs and how the world he lives in is changing, though he hasn’t really noticed it.I was reminded of the west coast of Ireland, I remember visiting in the late 70s  a place that to my child eyes seemed to have been stuck in time and this is the feel of this the village and world of Ketil has missed the way the island as a whole has shofted and they are left hunting for driftwood for ther fire (This reminded me of tales of miners during the miners strike hunting sea coal on the beaches of Northumberland to keep there house warm). For me this is what i love about ficitoon at thimes is when we can make our own connections to a story that happened 80 years ago but the world is constanly in flux and there is many a Kentil from the peat cutters of Donegal to the miners of the pits of places like Shilbottle points where you and your job world is ending but no one has told you is a universal story.

Library for the war wounded by Monika Helfer

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Library for the War Wounded by Monika Helfer

Austrian Fiction

Original title – Vati

Translator Gillian Davidson

Source – Library book

I brought this from the library for German lit month, read it, but didn’t review it, which I should have. I loved this book, it is by the Austrian writer Monika Helfer and is a piece of autofiction around her own father. The book itself was shortlisted for the German Book Prize, which is the German equivalent of the Booker Prize. What we get in this is a daughter piecing together the fragments of a father she never really knew. I love the English title, but wonder why Father is the Austrian title. .

We called her Mutti, not Mama. Our father wanted it that way. Because he thought it sounded modern.

Modern our mother was not. She came from the remotest backwoods, her brothers were a wild bunch.

When their parents died, the oldest, Uncle Heinrich, was just seventeen or eighteen. The children had to fend for themselves. No one helped them. They didn’t have faith in the Church nor in Hitler. Well, Aunt Irma did have faith in Hitler. For her, he was modern.

Uncle Lorenz said she shouldn’t put her hopes in him. She never had anyway, she said after the war.

Our father was convinced that people living in such circumstances were better somehow, deep down.

Like him. He also came from a sort of down-and-out family. He used to quote Rilke: ‘For poverty is a great glow from within?

Vati and Muti are names used for parents.

The book focuses on a character in the present trying to piece together her father’s life. Josef lived a man born in relative poverty and only learnt to read when the local gentry wanted to help him. When the Nazis take over, he is sent to the Eastern Front and loses his leg. From this point is where she remembers her father. He is given the job in the mountains at a home for the war-wounded. As they have a massive collection of books, this is where the title comes from. He loves to read books and has shown signs of developing from his love of reading. Still, when he start to make changes oiut how the recovery centre is run the bosses appear he rushes to bury the books these are all fragments she piece together of what Josef was like a man she never really know and in a way he is maybe a litle like Godot in a way as he isn’t front and centre in the book but more a ghost a person remembered.

I am tired. I close my laptop, stretch, it is only early afternoon. It is not the writing that makes me tired, nor is it the remembering. I want to be tired. I use tiredness as a professional tool. I need to get closer to the dreams, not quite asleep but no longer totally awake, remembering comes more easily this way, that’s my experience, I want to make use of this phenomenon. I am conjuring. What a lovely expres-sion! I conjure up the sound of our mother coming up the stairs, taking off her dress and giving her skin a scratch. I used to love hearing that, then I knew: now she’s putting on her fresh white nightshirt, which has been carefully pressed, and before she goes into the main bedroom, she’ll cuddle up with us girls for a quarter of an hour. Did we even know the phrase

‘cuddle up?

In the present as she looks into the past

I have chosen a short review for this book, it is one of those books that is great to read and lingers with you, this ghost of a man, a father, but one of those that always seems distant. I think this is common with mid century parents they worked kids where kids in their world, and the two rarely crossed, so Josef remained an enigma to the writer of the book his daughter as I say he is there but spoken about and not front stage in the book we what he does often vthrough others a patchwork of memories and those tales that drift dowwn through the years.If you are a fan of Robert Seethaler’s work, this is the same world of the Austrian Alps and family. I also see a bit of Ian McEwan in this book, Secrets in the Past. Have you read this or her other book?

Headbirths or The Germans are Dying Out by Gunter Grass

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Headbirths or The Germans are Dying Out by Gunter Grass

German fiction

Original title – Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus

Translator – Ralph Manheim

Source – Personal Copy

I am a great believer in Fate and Books. I don’t know what it is, but I often seem to find the right book for the right occasion out of the blue. That was the Case with this book I think it is safe to say that Grass’s less well-known Novel came out in 1980, and maybe it is a book very much of its time, and also a book that fits well with the books I have reviewed over the years from Grass, as it is right in the middle of the books I have reviewed. I feel given the politics of the time in Germany, especially a couple of event,s led to the book. Grass himself was working on a script and travelled in Asia at the same time the book was set, and there is a lot of tension at the time after the CDU chancellor had called left-wing intellectuals like Grass Rats and blowflies.

In addition to my lecture on “The German Literatures’ and my novel The Flounder, I took three pages of jottings on the Headbirths theme along with me on our Asian trip. In every city we stopped in I read simple chapters from The Flounder: how Amanda Woyke introduced the potato into Prussia. This eighteenth-century fairy tale is timely in present-day Asia, in regions, for instance, where attempts to complement the exclusive cultivation of rice with other crops (maize, soybeans) are frustrated by the obstinate resistance of the peasants, until a Chinese or Javanese Amanda Woyke …

I read my notes on Headbirths during the outbound flight and larded them with additions. But not until my return to the narrows of German life do my slips fall out of my portfolio: my teacher couple from Itzehoe, Dörte and Harm Peters, have survived my evasions and counter-projects. They’re still getting ready for their trip.

Grass is in the book as well I reviewed The Flounder a few years ago

This is maybe the oddest book from Grass, it has so many levels to it. First, it is a couple travelling around Asia on a tour. This sets up another line of thought, as the German couple is loosely based on Grass. He had gone to Asia at the time and, like the Harm and Dorte as they head through India China and Indonesia. Then along side this is a thread about Germany and Germ,ans in the future how will the country itself be shaped in 80 years time will there still be Germans or will they the Germans be gone? Also along side this they are thinking of making a film this adds another layer to the book as scenes are imagined as the go around various countries.

Eighty million restless Germans transformed into a billion Germans in a state of unrest. Among them the proportionate number of Saxons and Swabians. What a population explosion! An epic fare-up. A ferment. What makes them so restless? What are they looking for? God? The absolute number? The meaning behind meaning? Insurance against nothingness?

They want at last to know themselves. They ask themselves and, dangerously in need of help, ask their neighbors, who, measured against the German plethora, have shrunk to pygmy nations:

Who are we? Where are we from? What makes us Germans? And what in Cod’s name is Germany?

Since the Germans, even a billion strong, are as thorough as ever, they set up several deeply echeloned national commissions of inquiry, which work at cross purposes. Imagine the paper con-sumption, the jurisdictional disputes among the various provinces and Germanys. They’re so intent on the organizational setup that they’ve already lost sight of its purpose.

The thinking about what may fall Germany in the future

So what we have is an odd book that is very mich of its time. Even a lot of the ways things are talked about seem very outdated. Burt in other ways the thoughts around over population and identity maybe ring more true now than they did at the time this was written Grass . This is ocvershadow by the comments Franz Josef Strauss made there is a feel this is a novel polemic against those comments but also you can see how this tripo to Asia had effect grass himself.the boom in the birth rate in Asia na dht decline in the European birth rate at the time is shadowed in the title of the book itself.I can see whyt this book is less well known . But I think Grass himself over the time I have done this blog is a figure that has in the decade or so since he died maybe faded from the conversation about German Lit like his fellow writer Heiunrich Bôll for me in my fifties they were esential reading but the fall of East Germany is a distant memory now. Have any of you readthis odd little

book thyat is part novel , part essay , part polemic , part travelogue and  autobiography ?

War Primer by Alexander Kluge

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War Primer by Alexander Kluge

German fiction

Original title – Kreigsfibel

Translator – Alexander Booth

Source – Personal copy

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

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

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

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

The echoes of previous conflicts

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

Cement by Fyodor Vasilievich Gladkov

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Cement by Fyodor Vasilievich Gladkov

Russian fiction

Original title – Цемент

Translator – A S Arthur and C Ashleigh

Source – Personal copy

I am on to the second book for the 1925 club. This jumped out at me as I had planned to read a lot more classics in translation. This was the sort of book I had in mind when doing that. This is a writer, a little lesser known now and this is a book that, when it came out, was well received and considered the first piece of socialist realist fiction. He had fought in the Red Army during the Russian Revolution and was expelled from the communist party. After this book came out, he was taken back in, and this was held up as an example of what soviet literature should be. He was the secretary of the journal Novy Mir and later became the director of the Maxim Gorky Institute. This is one of the two of his books that seemed to have been translated.

He immediately recognised two of them. The old woman was the wife of Loshak the mechanic; the laughing one was the wife of Gromada, another mechanic. The third was a stranger whom he had never seen before.

As he approached them on the narrow pathway he stood aside in the high grass and gave them a military salute.

“Good morning, Comrades! “

They looked at him askance as though he were a tramp and stepped past him. Only the last one, the laughing one, gave a screeching laugh like a scared hen: “Get on with you!

There’s enough scamps like you about. Must one say ‘ Good-day to everybody? “

” What’s the matter with you, wenches? Don’t you recog-

nise me? “

Loshak’s wife looked morosely at Gleb-just as an old witch would do—then murmured to herself in her deep voice:

“Why, this is Gleb. He has risen from the dead, the rascal !” And went on her way, silent and sullen.

The first day or so as he returns Gleb

Cement depicts the main character in the book, Gleb, as a soldier who fought in the Russian Revolution for the Red Army. He has returned to his hometown and to take up his job in the Cement factory, only to find that since he has been at war, the way the factory is run has changed, as it is now part of the soviet machine. Added to that, his wife Dasha has, since he left, become the head of the women’s section of the communist Party in the factory. She is the new woman of those soviet posters. Added to this is Polya, another strong woman, but she is more drawn to Gleb as the returning hero from the war. She has sacrificed having a husband to fight for the party and is drawn when Gleb returns to this man especially as Gleb and his wife seems to have grown apart Added to this there is Kleist a man that sold out Galeb during the war sold him out to the white guard Gleb has to accept he is been taking back in and the fact that he is a scientist. The book sees how Gleb adjusts to the return to civilian life and the soviet era.

In the morning, Gleb, still asleep, felt that the room was not a room but an empty hole. A breeze was blowing between the window and door, whirling in gusts, redolent of spring. He opened his eyes. It was true; the sun was blazing through the window. Dasha was standing at the table, adjusting her flaming headscarf. She glanced at him and laughed. An amber light shone in her eyes.

“We don’t sleep as late as this here, Gleb. The sun is beating down like a drum. I’ve already worked out a report for the Women’s Section on the children’s crêches and the estimate for the linen and furniture. I’ve got it worked out, but where’s the money coming from? We’re so beggarly poor.

Our Party Committee should be given a jolt, so they’ll squeeze something out of the bourgeois. I’m going to kick up a row about it from now on. And you, remember you haven’t seen Nurka yet. Do you want to go with me to the Children’s Home? It’s close by.”

The party runs everything he finds out !

This has it all, really: a hero returning to a post-war landscape of Soviet-era Russia to find a different world. The fact that his wife has changed is significant. I was reminded of the books and films I have seen about the post-World War II era, when women had to return to domestic life. This is the other side where they didn’t have the conflict between the scientist Kleist, a white guard man who had sold out Gleb, but now back in the factory, adding to Gleb’s woes, then the two women, his wife, who has changed without him, and the two of them adjusting to his return. Then Polya, a woman who had given up a relationship, is drawn to the returning hero. Add to this the party line on everything as we see one man trying to find his place in soviet era in the cement factory, trying to find his place and be part of the whole maybe the choice of the Cement factory was a good metaphor for what they wanted a bond workforce  Post the revolution of men and women working along side enemies alongside one another. I enjoyed this. I have read a couple of other soviet realist novels, but if you know of any others, let me know!

The Splendor of Portugal by António Lobo Antunes

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The Splendor of Portugal by António Lobo Antunes

Portuguese literature

Original title – O Esplendor de Portugal

Translator Rhett McNeil

Source – Personal copy

As I said in the last post, the run-up to the Nobel usually sees me reading a few Nobel hopefuls. With all that happened, I’m a little late reviewing them. I had thought it might be Atune’s year to win. He is the soul of his country’s past, a man who experienced much of what he writes about as a doctor who served in the Portuguese colonies in Africa. Having spent time in Angola in the seventies, this book looks back at that period, but as he does, he also observes the fall of other colonies in southern Africa, such as the Belgians in Congo. But what struck me as I read this is the parallel with events and feelings in Vietnam and the American experience in that war.

There’s something terrible in me. Sometimes at night the rustling of the sunflowers wakes me and, in the darkness of the bedroom, I feel my womb growing bigger with something that is neither a child, nor swelling, nor a tumor, nor illness, it’s some sort of scream that, instead of coming out of your mouth, comes out of your entire body and fills up the fields like the howling of dogs, and then I stop breathing, grab the headboard hard and a thousand stems of silence slowly float inside the mirrors, awaiting the dreadful clarity of morning. At such times I think I’m dead, surrounded by workers’ huts and cotton, my mother already dead, my husband already dead, their places at the table faded away, and now I live in mere rooms, empty rooms whose lights I turn on at dusk to disguise their absence. As a child, before we came back to Angola, I watched the lynching of the town lunatic in Nisa. Kids on the street were afraid of him, dogs ran away from him if he happened to pass by, he stole tanger-ines, eggs, flour, would install himself in front of the high altar and insult the Virgin, one day he flayed the belly of a calf from its neck to its groin, the animal walked into the town square tripping over its own entrails, the farmers from the nearby farm grabbed the lunatic

This long passaage of the mother about the things she had seen caught me !

What this book does so well is capture the whole effect of the fall of Angola through the prism of one family and their servants. The Alemida Family is led really by the Mother Isilda, a strong woman who is like a lot of people of her generation, proud of their settler life in Angola and what they have as a  life. This is set over two times in the late seventies as Angola starts to fall. How the family copes with this from Father Amadeu, who seems to have just accepted the fall and has sunk into the bottle. The children from the Oldest Carlos is he really Amadeu’s son, is something he feels, looking as though he may be mixed-race. Rui, the middle child, we see later on, is broken and in an institution after all that had happened, and he saw it when he was a child. Then, the youngest of the three children, Clarisse, is a wild, angry woman who uses her lovers to seek revenge on her family in a way. The book also sees them many years later, after the events in 1978 in Lisboa, as they gather in 1995 for a Christmas meal. The chapters alternate, and we see the events from all angles of the family.

for the most part, his epilepsy an earthworm gnawing holes in his head, my mother used to take him to the doctor in Malanje, when she returned home with him, even though shed bought a handkerchief for herself, you could tell shed been crying, she left Rui in the kitchen went upstairs and took ages to come down to the dinner table, her eyes swollen and her voice worn-out, piercing everything with her stare but not noticing anything at all, refusing to eat the soup, refusing to eat the fish, lying on her bed at night, you could hear her sobbing mixed with the thousands of other noises without origin or cause that inhabit the silence, I shook Clarisse and Clarisse

I liked the desciption of Rui epilepsy being like an earthworm through his brain !

I was reminded of this as I watched the film Apocalypse Now, which had similar themes to this book, especially in the new redux version, during the part where they spent time with the French plantation owner. Because in a way, this is Portugal’s Vietnam and the horrors that happened at the time, but also the way it has affected the country since. This is what I love about Atunes’s writing: it is dark but captures the horror of it all, and how it affected each member of the family. I have seen him described as Faulkner-like in his writing. For me, this has echoes of the polyphonic voices Faulkner had in something like As I Lay Dying. The same dark gothic feel. I was surprised by how they didn’t admit defeat until the troops were at the next plantation to theirs. It captures the dying embers of colonialism and the effects on this one family all those years later. Each member has reacted and coped in their own way with the horrors and the loss of that time. I always feel he has seen this firsthand in the seventies, as he was a doctor during the Angolan war. Have you read any books that make you feel the horrors and pain as though you were there? As for the Nobel, I hope he does win one day, but hell, he is in his mid-80s, get around to it, guys!

 

 

What’s left of the Night by Ersi Sotiropoulos

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What’s left of the night by Ersi Sotiropoulos

Greek fiction

Original title – Ti ménei apó ti nýchta

Translator – Karen Emmerich

Source – Personal copy

I had hoped to do this review a few weeks ago, but life has got in the way as you all know. It was one of those books I try to read every year before the Nobel prize comes out, and you look down the list of favourites for the award, and there are always a couple of gaps, and Ersi Sotiropoulos is one she has been high up in the betting the last few years. She was made a favourite by the media in Greece the year Han Kang won, so if it comes down to male and female winners, she may be a favourite for next year. Anyway this had grabbed my attention as it is set in Paris a city I have yet to visit other than in fiction. I tend to travel so much in my reading, but I am someone who hasn’t had much in my own life. It also uses the poet C.P. Cavafy when he himself visited Paris at the end of a European tour before he became the great poet and was still young and discovering his sexuality, he had a rather mad three days in Paris.

His efforts to mend the breach kept them talking late into the night, and hed been the one to suggest that his brother rewrite an old poem and change its setting to the fire at the Bazar de la Charité, from which Paris was still reeling. The occasion for the earlier version had been a snippet of conversation a friend of John’s overheard at an art opening in Alexandria. A Greek society lady, the wife of a successful merchant-the friend hadn’t given her name-was gazing at a painting of a setting sun smeared with purples and reds, and leaned on the shoulder of the man beside her, a well-known figure in the Greek community, likewise married—the friend hadn’t given his name, either-and whispered with a heavy sigh: “‘d prefer to set in your arms.” He had found it insipid, the metaphor or allegory, whatever it was, but John laughed and jotted it down. He later wrote a poem about the bombing of Alexandria in 1882 and the conflagration that followed. In the poem, the genteel lady’s words served as an ironic counterpoint to the catastrophe and the vandalism that subsequently swept the city

He spent his life mainly in Alexandria he is ion Durrell book Alendria quartet

I haven’t read a lot of Cavafy;, he has been on my radar for years, so this made me want to learn more about him. We meet Cavafy, his brother John (Ionas), as they spend what in a way is a standard few days wandering around as most tourists do, visiting the sites and some of the grubby sites of Paris, from high art galleries to low-life Brothels, we see the pair, the carefree Cavafy and his slightly more sensible brother. What we have is a man wrestling with the life events around him, both in Paris and in his own country. A boy becoming a man, almost a man becoming a poet, a man discovering his sexual appetite. This is a tale of a man struggling to break free from the conformity of the world he lives in and move to a more modern world. There are some moments of sexual awakening with Cavafy discovering his desires that remind me of the way Joyce described some of his sexual scenes, those little moments of desire.

What time was it now? The conversation tired him. The armchair with the slit was diagonally across from him. How he would have liked to see that wavy hair tumbling down its back, slipping over the brocade fab-ric, to see those eyes, those lips again. But he really needed to get to the point, so he spoke of Moréass library, which while large had seemed to him rather lacking in depth, and about the book by that young writer, Marcel Proust, Anatole France’s protégé, which hed sought in vain, and hearing his voice sound more and more shallow and macabre, he stepped like a sleepwalker into Moréas’s office and approached the gallows of the desk, in the alcove illuminated by a single gas lamp, whose sloped ceiling made it look like a lair. Or perhaps a refuge, though the light was raw and cold … He went closer, then closer still.

I loved to think of a time when Proust was the hip writer on the scene

I liked this book; it is a dreamy tale of a few days in Paris with no real plot in it, more of an overview of a man discovering himself. Maybe a sort of superpowered Bildungsroman in a weekend, what happens when your eyes are open. When you get the chance to be more than you are, the chance to discover through art and experiences new ways of thinking and erotic thoughts. The transition from the Victorian age to the new century, and all that it would mean. This is that time before the dark clouds of World War I, the middle of the Belle Epoque in France, as he discovers this. I enjoyed this book. I feel that if I were more aware of his poetry, I would like to go back and re-read it. Which of her books should I read next? Have you read any others by her?

 

The Image of Her by Simone de Beauvoir

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The Image of Her by Simone de Beauvoir

French Fiction

Original title – Les Belles Images

Translator – Lauren Elikin

Source – Personal copy

I’m finally back. This may be a shorter blog than usual, as I read this over a month ago and had intended to review it sooner. However, with all that has happened, it’s just lovely to sit back behind the laptop and write a review of a book. This is the second book from de Beauvoir I have reviewed in recent years. This novel is from later in her writing life. It is hard to capture her life in what is usually my brief introduction to the writer. I have read she had such an impact on both French literature and philosophy, and in that very French way, is also tinged with scandal. I think my next book will be from. Her book will be one of the non-fiction books. Have you read her books or this book, even?

Laurence thinks of the king who turned all he touched to gold, even his daughter, who became a resplendent metal doll. Everything she touches turns into an image. Wood panelling: where urban chic meets the poetry of the forest. Through the leaves she glimpses the water, blackly lapping; a boat passes by, searching the banks with its white gaze. Its light splashes on the windows, brutally illuminating the lovers walking arm in arm, a flash of the past for me, just as I am now the tender image of their future, with the children they might guess are asleep in the bedrooms at the back of the flat. Children will feel as though they’ve climbed into a hollow tree, in their delightful bedroom with natural wood panelling.

An idea worth considering.

Lawrence thinking early on in the book a perfect life !

What I loved about this book, even though it was written in the late sixties, is that the narrative and themes of the book are maybe more relevant now than they were when the book was written. The book focuses on Lawrence, a high-flying female ad executive. From the outside, she seems to have it all. Her architect husband, Jean Charles, is perhaps the most modern and shallow, prioritising style over everything. She also has two children. The book has a turning point, and that is when her ten-year-old daughter, Catherine, points out how unfair she feels their world is to others. This then leads Lawrence to question her life and the choices she has made.  Consumerism, climbing the ladder to the perfect life, often comes at the expense of family time and other priorities. As 2e all know, de Beauvoir was a well-known Feminist. This is a book about what it means to be a woman, a mother, successful, and all that entails.

The merciless gaze of children who refuse to play the

game.

  • I help Papa support us. Thanks to me, you can go to school and cure the sick.
  • And Papa?
  • He builds houses for people who need them. That’s also a way of helping them, you see?

(Horrible lie. But what truth can she tell?) Catherine remained bewildered. Why don’t we give everyone food?

Laurence had again asked questions and Catherine ended up talking about the poster. Because it was the most important thing or to hide something else?

Maybe the poster was the real explanation, after all: the power of the image. Two thirds of the world go hungry, and the face of the little boy, so beautiful, with big, big eyes and some terrible secret behind his closed lips. For me it’s a sign: the sign that the struggle against hunger continues. But Catherine sees a little boy of about her age who is hungry.

When Catherine questions her parents world !

 

As I read this book, one of the things that came to mind most was the book “Perfection” I read earlier this year, which featured a couple living the perfect Instagram life in the 1960s, wanting to be on the pages of the French interior magazine that was the vogue at the time. What difference do children make to this ideal picture, and also when, like Her daughter Catherine, they ask about the world as they question the unfairness in it? Especially now, as the divide in our society continues to grow year after year. We need books like this to be read, reminding us of the class divide at that time. However, this is also a feminist book about the female role in society, and that has significantly changed since the book was written. A high-flying woman like Lawrence would have been rare to know, but it is now much more common. Any, this is a book about the early years of consumerism and can still be read as a question about the perfect life. As I say, it had parallels to Perfection in that regard, but actually followed a different way of looking at breaking the cycle of the ideal life. Have you read either book?