Tag: TRANSLATIONS

On Earth as it is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia

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On Earth as it is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia

Brazilian fiction

Original title – Assim na Terra como embaixo da Terra

Translator – PAdma Viswanathan

Source – personal copy

I have a subscription to Charco Press, but to be honest, I have had the books arriving and thinking I’ll get to that one a few days down the line, and not getting to them. So, as I needed a very short book while waiting, I picked this up as it was 100 pages long and finished it in two sittings. I just got drawn into this dark tale. Ana Paula Maira is both a novelist and a screenwriter. I think you can feel the cinematic nature of the book, and the way the characters interact would make for a great film. She has been said to be a fan of Quentin Tartatino and Sergio Leone. Both of which I could see in this book af a remote Brazilian prison colony gone rogue.

Taborda separates the hide from the bone and hangs the skin from a tree branch. He cleans out the boar’s head, skilled at the job. The stench around him means only flies come near the bloody scraps. With a small knife, he scrapes off any flesh still sticking to the bone, drying sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. It pleases him to see a pile of shredded flesh beside his leg. Getting up, he takes the skull and a shovel and heads towards the anthill behind the central pavilion. Hundreds of ants emerge as he deftly digs a hole in the earth and places the boar’s skull inside. He shovels earth back on top of it and hurries away, shaking his legs and stomping his feet.

In two months, the ants, eating day and night, will have stripped the skull entirely of any flesh not removed by hand. He picks up the hide from where it hung on the tree branch and takes it to an abandoned room, used in the past for hay storage, to cure it with rock salt.

One of the animals hunted and how they kill and prepare it

The book is set in the remote wilderness, where indians used to live, in a colony prison, far away from everywhere. As we are there, it seems it has been completely forgotten. We see the cruelty of the prison a mad Melquiades is the warden, a man in love with Hunting. It is just the local animals he wants to hunt, as once a year, he hunts the prisoners, as he lets them try to capture them, echoes of the hunting of slaves in Africa when they escaped. Then we have the inmates, most nameless, but there are some of those who have been there for years and have served the wardens’ moonlight hunts many a time. Valdenio, A man who for years was beaten and broken and walks with a limp for the years it took him to get used to prison life. Then, Bronco Gil, a hitman who turned on the people who hired him to kill a mayor, was the only one who ended up in jail, a killer who has killed since then and lives through the brutal prison on his wits. A novella of a cruel world where death is just around the corner, and the guards are ruthless, the environment is brutal, and the fellow prisoners are brutal. A glimpse of humanity is slim here. But this is a dark tale of being hunted, historical darkness that is the history of death from the indians that lived there through slavery.

Bronco Gil’s killed various kinds of men and women, but he’s only serving time for one crime: the murder of a small-town mayor. It was good money, but he ended up getting caught. The guy who hired him didn’t give Bronco the protection he should have. Anyway, Bronco squealed, told them everything he knew. He took five other people down with him.

‘So what about you, Indian, what are you in for?’

asked the prisoner at the end of his own story.

‘Killing a mayor, he replied, terse.

‘Oof, killing a mayor is complicated. Pain in the ass?

‘Sure is.’

“Was it a hit?’

“Yep.’

Bronco Gil one of the prisoners

I loved this book; it is brutal and feels like a film when you read it well. It did for me. The mad warden and his guards could have come from a Tarantino film, and the prisoners were the jungle version of Leone desperados battered by their environment.  Another book I kept thinking of is Lord of the Flies it has that same place gone slightly mad if it were adults and not kids left to go feral. I think it also has a lot of nods to the place it has set the ghost of the jungle, be it Indian or Slaves that all died there as well, are echoes in the violence of the present, the way they are hunted by the warden in the moonlight hunts like the slaves hunted down when they had escaped in the previous century. Do you have a favourite book set in a prison ?

 

The Collection by Nina Leger

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The Collection by Nina Leger

French fiction

Original title – Mise en Pièces

Translator – Laura Francis

Source – Library

I was planning to review another book today, but I picked this up last night and read it in an evening. At the start of this year, Women in Translation month, I visited the library and found a few books that I had maybe missed over the last while, and this was one of them. I think I may have seen this when it came out about six years ago, but it was one I never got to iut was the second novel by the writer, and it won the Anaïs Nin prize.In an interview, I read an interview with her, and she said she had written the book to subvert the male gaze to a female gaze of the geography of Paris. We follow Jeanne and her quests around Paris. She has taught novel writing as well.

Drowsiness, tender and shadowy folds, abandonment to torpor. Dilation, rising, elastic rigidity, too narrow in form to contain the new mass, compressed, veins protruding.

Jeanne maintains utmost concentration.

Her gestures are slow, diligent. She passes the penis between her fingers, into her mouth, presses it against her face. She examines it, occasionally putting it to her ear to listen to the blood beating, follows the curve of the head with her thumb, feels for the slit which drinks up her saliva.

She isolates the penis between her two cupped hands, excludes the body, and fixates upon the mobility of the organ that gradually fills the space. The furniture dimin-ishes, the details blanch out. She remains alone with the penis which she has made her own. Even her own body has lost substance.

One of the numerous meets this early on in the book

Now Jeannequest is a woman who likes men, and the book follows her with her numerous encounters with men. But also her view of the various men’s penis and the way they make love. I don’t know Paris well enough to grasp the travelling around, but she seems to make arrangements to meet and just have sex with these men, and the book is complete with how she positions her body in the sexual conquests. She is a woman who seems to rule over the men, and as we drift from the various hotel rooms, they end up in or even more or less discrete situations. Even on a trip abroad, she has sex. Burt, with her added commentary on the various men’s parts and the multiple shapes and sizes they come in. I laughed as the cover art is mushrooms of various size and shapes a sort of sneaky wink to the penises within the book!

It is in hotels that Jeanne finds the necessary elements to furnish her palace. She appropriated a doormat and some candlesticks from the Hôtel Saint-Pierre, net curtains from Timhotel, bedspreads from the Hôtel du Delta and the Hôtel Cambrai, some obsolete ashtrays and two bedside lamps from the Hôtel de Nice. The palace is an exquisite cadaver of the Parisian hotel trade.

Jeanne passes through her domain in the evening, at bedtime, in the morning, upon waking; she roams around it between appointments, in the midst of loud dinners where conversations stream out without spilling a drop onto her, in the crystalline sharpness of the beauty counters in department stores, under the halogen bulbs of waiting rooms.

Sometimes, she interacts at length with a particular penis. Attentive to the fidelity of the memory, she approaches, observes, drinks in the details. Hours pass in slow meanderings and interminable pauses until she leaves the room, reluctantly, careful not to disturb the stillness of the forms.

Some of the hotel next I am in Paris I will see these hotels and think of this book

I think this is an excellent book as it is a very positive view of a female that would otherwise be looked down on by a male writer or made to seem a real man if she were a male bed jumping. She has changed the sort of sexual dynamic, and the men she is sleeping with get described like I have seen many a woman years ago when I used to read people like Roth, etc. But this has that French sort of normality to the numerous sexual acts. This is what would happen if Anne Eernaux were sex mad and sleeping with lots of men. Add to that the way she captures the male penis in it, in many strange and different styles, and how each one in her own way makes Jeanne approach in a certain way, it is like a guide of how she tackled these men and the style and techniques she used. The various rooms and types of men she met all this as she criss-crossed Paris to meet in various Hotels. Have you read any of her books?

Dark heart of the Night by Leonora Miano

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Dark Heart of the Night by Leonora Miano

Cameroonian fiction

Original title – L’Intérieur de la nuit

Translator – Tamsin Black

Source – Personal copy

I moved to Cameroon in Africa with another book that has a lot to say about female lives within that country. This is my next stop on this year’s Women in Translation Month. Leona Miano has lived in France since the early 90s. This was her debut novel and won some prizes, including the Prix Goncourt’s award for books that appeal to Teenage readers. That book saw a woman going back to Cameroon after three years away a return to the dark heart of Africa and her small village. The book looks at colonialism the violence that has been seen in a lot of different African countries as the colonial powers withdraw, leaving a vacuum of power and mistakes made in the years after. This book tells the story of a girl returning to her village after she had seen the wider world and is a different girl than the one who left her small town a few years earlier.

As for the girls, they stayed put, turning over and over soil that yielded only what was forcibly rooted out. No one had ever had the odd idea of sending them to school. In normal times during the day, only mature women, unmarried girls, and young children were to be found in the clearing. Most of the men lived in towns far away or in other countries, and they came home only now and then. In these distant places, they seldom made a fortune. The life they led there gobbled up everything they were supposed to save to keep the promises they had made to themselves and the clan. When they called in to the village, it was only to drop off a few leftovers and boom out instructions, which they would not be able to see carried out. Then, they went away. And the women stayed, with the world on their shoulders. Women with sons were quick to make them bear some of this weight. They packed them off to work as they might have deposited money in an account. The sons took wives then lived as their fathers had lived before them.

The tradtional nature of the village is shown her.

Ayane has decided to go home, and when she arrives back in her remote village of Eku. But this has been caused by her mother dying, and when she returns, her former friends and villagers view her as different. This woman is now differently educated. Is she a witch? As this happens. The village is caught in a storm as a militia arrives and bloody violence descends on them all. This is all viewed by Ayane as she hides and observes how the villagers react to all this.; The militia are the sort of pan-African forces that cropped up in the post-colonial times of Africa as countries tried to forge a new identity. But this is viewed as a given by the villagers, as this is maybe their resignation to the events and bloody violence, death and heartache, as Isilo, the leader of the Militia, tells the young woman and men what to do. The story shifts between the villagers, Ayane and her mother.

Ayané was a frail child with pale skin. Pale, they said, because her skin was not the coal-black color of the local people, cooked over and again by the sun since time immemorial. But she was in fact as dark as cocoa beans. Of course, the women said she was bewitched, probably a witch returned from the dead. And even though none of them had managed to find a mark on her skin to prove it, they told their children not to go near her. Never had the local children screamed so loudly in the evening at the beatings they received, sometimes with a pestle, for having ventured into a forbidden house. Girls and boys alike all ran after her to play with the toys her father made her and tell her the gossip their mothers whispered to them about her parents. Sometimes, the village women, who had no dealings with Aama, were obliged to talk to her. The fact was, their kids were often in her hut or in her garden. For she had a garden with non-edible plants, which she grew for no other reason than to admire the beauty of their flowers and smell their fragrance. The garden, too, made the women talk:

Ayane was a plae girl but is now a woman her mother stayed inthe village

This is a book that has blurred lines in the story, no real plot, it is about he event in the village and that as a wider view of post-colonial Africa. The use of the woman returning having seen the world beyond Eku, beyond their past and traditions, as the wider world outsider, their village is changing, and this is shown in a way by Ayane, her education and wider view having to return for the funeral makes her an observer on the violence that follows. But also the Militia is a sign of pan-African ideas, the struggle post-colonially to find identity for their country. Then the village and the locals have an almost death-like fatalism as they seem to be so far detached from the world that has been and the world that is coming. Their village is lost in time. In that the violence is almost the death of their way of life, as the modern world comes crashing in on their world! I liked this book; it isn’t a straightforward read, but I’d like to read more from her . Mainly because her later books deal with Afropean matters.

 

Women without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur

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Women without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur

Iranian fiction

Original title – زنان بدون مردان (داستانک)

Translator – Faridoun Farrokh

Source – Personal copy

I decided to head to the Middle East for my next stop on this year’s Women’s in Translation Month. This has been in my TBR for a good while. It was banned in Iran and is considered a modern classic from that country, even though it is forbidden. This is a writer who has spent time in prison. She spent nearly five years locked up; she has written about those years in another book. She has been a voice for the way females are treated in her country. This book is an example of her writing about the female experience in Iran, and in this book, she has captured a breadth of female voices. She has spent many years living in Exile after she left Iran.

AFTER SEVERAL DAYS OF DOUBT and hesitation Fa’iza made up her mind at four in the afternoon on August 5,

1953. Silence was no longer feasible. If she waited any longer everything would collapse. She’d better stand up in her own defense. Even so, despite the fact that she felt empowered by the decision, it took her well over an hour to get dressed. Slowly and deliberately she put on her stockings, a blouse, and a lightweight cotton skirt. During the process she paused to think, what if Amir Khan is there. The thought sent a rush of heat through her body.

With him around, she wouldn’t be able to say what she wanted, or say anything at all. She would have to hold back and endlessly revise what she was going to say.

Faiza had a choice to make Amir crops up in other stories !

 

The book has a framing device of a garden, and there is a sense that this garden floats between the real world and a safe haven for each of the women within the book. The tales of the five women in the book are told in intertwining vignettes. From A worrying schoolteacher that is trying to escape society Mahdokht.Then Munis, who is killed by her brother after she disobeyed him. Farrokhlaga, from the upper class of Iran, is mistreated by her men, even in her own world. She is pushed by her husband to kill her husband. This shows even someone like her can break when pushed then at the other side of the coin is Zarrinkolah a prostitute Abused and used by Men she isn’;’t seen as a person by them and this pushes her to take her own life but then she reappears in the garden after that the garden and the male gardener are an oassis a different place to the world thaey all know the fifth woman to me Faizeh is maybe the youngest of all these woman is trying to cling to being a girl but also on the cusop of woman hood and looking for love. This is a tale that has it all, lots of commentary about Iran and being a female in Iran, but also on class, religion and life and death.

AT FIRST MUNIS WAS DEAD. Or at least she thought she was. For the longest time she lay on the pavement, her eyes wide open. Gradually the blue of the sky darkened and tears began to flow down her face. She pressed on her eyes with her right hand and slowly rose to her feet. Her body felt sore and very weak.

Farther down the alley a man had fallen into a ditch with his legs sticking out. Uncontrollably Munis moved in his direction. The man’s face was also turned skyward, his eyes open.

“Are you all right?” Munis asked.

“I’m dead,” the man answered

“Can I help you in any way?”

Is Munis dead or has she come back this is part of the magic realism in the book

I think this is a book that should be better known. It’s short, but in these five women, the author captures so much of life for a female at the time the book was written in Iran, a very patriarchal society. From class, how even the highest and lowest women in this country struggle. Family and how the woman in the family has to obey their family or else !. To be a prostitute, a woman is viewed as a piece of meat, really, and how that broke her and drove her to kill herself, it holds no punches in this book. The garden as a framing device worked as their paths cross but also as a sort of safe haven, almost a mythical place. The book has some magical realist touches. Women are practically given a second chance in the garden, a way to escape their world, but also a sort of utopia for those women, or maybe not to repeat mistakes. Have you read any other female writers from Iran?

Sofia Petrova by Lydia Chukovskaya

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Sofia Petrova by Lydia Chukovskaya

Russian fiction

Original title –Софья Петровна

Translator – Aline Werth

Source – Personal copy

One of the few things I have liked and really got into since I’ve been blogging is the publisher Persephone Books. When I first started blogging, there was a phone book week. Sadly, one of the first weeks I joined in, their books were all English and American books that had fallen out of print. However, they have since brought a few books in translation out, and this is their latest. Lydia Chukovskaya was known for her advocacy for the great Russian writers who were banned under the Soviet. Her husband worked for a publisher that was shut down for being too bourgeois by Stalin. She would have been arrested had she not been at home when the arrests were made. After that, she spent many years wandering. Directly after this incident, she wrote this book, not long after losing her husband. It captures a woman discovering how Stalin’s Russia suppressed people’s thoughts.

The typists were a bit afraid of her, and called her the school-marm behind her back. But they obeyed her. And she set out to be strict, but fair. In the lunch hour, she chatted in a friendly way with those who did their work well and con-scientiously, talked about how difficult it was to make out the director’s writing, and how lipstick didn’t suit everyone by any means. But with those who were capable of writing things like rehersal’ or ‘collictive’ she adopted a haughty manner.

There was one typist, Erna Semyonovna, who really got on Sofia Petrovna’s nerves. She made a mistake in almost every word, and smoked and chattered impudently all the time she was working. She reminded Sofia Petrovna vaguely of a cheeky housemaid they had once had in the old days, whose name was Fanny, and who had been rude to Sofia Petrovna and had flirted with Fyodor Ivanovich …

What was the point of keeping on anyone like that!

Her working in her typing job !!

Sofia Petrovna loses her husband a well known doctor leaving her to have to find a job. She takes a lesson and find out she is actually good at typing and gets a job at a large publishing house, where after a short time she becomes the head typist as she is better than some of the other women in the office there is some great observation of her typing colleagues’ woman more into the ment hat there jobs. Sofia lives in her apartment with her son, who is just coming to the end of his school career, so when Kolya starts a job with a new friend and suddenly finds a way to improve his craftsman job, he is in the paper. Meanwhile, some of her dead husband’s friends have been arrested, and then suddenly her son is arrested. She is told by Alik, the friend her son worked with. Then he writes to her. This book captures how the writer herself must have felt caught up in the madness of the purges.

Suddenly there was a ring at the door, and a second ring.

Sofia Petrovna went to open the door. Two rings – that was for her. Who could it be, so late?

There on the threshold stood Alik Finkelstein.

Alik there alone, without Kolya – it was unnatural…

‘Kolya?!’ Sofia Petrovna grabbed Alik by the dangling end

of his scarf. ‘Is it typhoid?’

Alik, without looking at her, slowly took off his galoshes.

‘Shhh!’ he said at last. ‘Let’s go into your room.’ And he tiptoed along the corridor.

Sofia Petrovna, beside herself with anxiety, followed him.

‘Don’t be alarmed, for heaven’s sake, Sofia Petrovna,’ he began, when she had closed the door behind her, ‘calm down, Sofia Petrovna, please do. There’s nothing to be frightened about. It’s nothing terrible. The day before the day before yesterday… or when was it? the day before the last day off, anyway . .. Kolya was arrested.’

He sat down on the divan, tore off his scarf, threw it down on the floor and burst into tears.

When she finds lut what has happened to her son?

I’m pleased I saw this for this year’s Women in Translation Month. It is a publisher I like and one that hasn’t put out many books in translation. It is always fun when they do. This book captures the paranoia and sheer fear family members had at this time, the madness and sheer unexpected arrest and moves during the Purges. The book was banned for many years in Russia. It first came out in France in Russian. She was a champion of the dissident Soviet writers and a respected voice for the dissident writers. Conversations she had over these years have been published and are meant to give a great insight into what it was like to be caught up in the Stalin Purges, as she was when she lost her husband. The book was, of course, passed around in Samizdat in Soviet era Russia; those handwritten pages show how the regime made people bring more people into their crimes as they were seen. Have you read this or any other book that covers the Stalin Purges? If you want a book that maybe captures the madness THAT orwell tried to show in his novels around that time, this is a perfect example of how it was to be in Stalin’s Russia!!

 

Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü

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Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü

Turkish fiction

Original title – Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri

Translator Maureen F’reely

Source – Personal copy

I kick off this year’s Women in Translation Month with a slim gem of a novella from Turkey. I feel that in the sixteen years I’ve been blogging, the landscape for books in translation has changed. I can think of very few, if any, female Turkish writers who were available in English 16 years ago. This is one of the beauties of things like women in Translation. Months have helped along, and small presses like Serpent Tail are willing to take a chance on books like this. This novel was written forty years before it was finally translated into English. It captures a writer who, like the character in her book, had spent time travelling in Europe but also in institutions and had undergone electroshock therapy like the character in her novel. This debut novel was written in Turkish, but her later works were written in German; she also worked as a translator between the languages.

Sunday is bath day. We take it in turns. On cold days, a large copper basin is placed next to the stove. We bend over the basin to wash our hair. Then we sit in the basin and wash our bodies with what little water sits inside it. Bunni oversees all this. She pours the dirty water into a bucket, returning with a bucket full of clean water. Bunni never gets tired. Bunni devotes her life to overseeing baths, sweeping up ashes and cleaning away filth. For as long as I can remember, that’s what she’s been doing. She can even hold fire between her fingers.

When she isn’t doing laundry, washing dishes, praying, fasting, she’s at argamba Market. No one offers her more than this. If they did, she wouldn’t listen. When she pours the last drops of water over our heads, she blesses us with prayers in Arabic.

And we protest:

—God does not exist!

The first bit of this quote reminded me of how the uk used be weekly baths seem distant and the last line of god not existing would have been shocking then for her to say

The woman in the book, unnamed, is rather like the writer of the book. This free-spirited woman wants to be herself but is caught in a world where it is very patriarchal, and thus she keeps getting into institutions and having shock therapy. I was thinking how outdated that is these days, still used in very extreme cases of mental health issues, but much more tightly done than at this time. I think that maybe also adds to the structure of the book a jumble of thoughts, memories spilling onto the page childhood memories of rural Turkey, next thing in smokey cafes in Paris sexual awakening encounters this is the tale of a young woman maybe thirty year before her time a spirit unbound but caught in a world where things are changing the late seventies were turbulant yeas in Turkey.

Past the two double-sided sales counters by the entrance of Baylan Patisserie, there’s a large and dimly lit salon. This is where my brother and his friends gather every day towards evening.And so do we, to observe their legendary goings-on. In the begin-ning, they don’t invite us to join them. We sit at a nearby table, Günk and I, keeping a close eye on them while chatting. The genial, fatherly Greek waiters create an atmosphere that is possibly the most welcoming we have ever experienced. Istanbul too small in those days to fit my brother and his friends. They’re all university students. But they’re more interested in things like writing, drama and art. They have a shared obsession, too: Paris.The city of art, they say. Freedom’s beacon. They believe themselves to be living as artists do, moving from café to café and meyhane to meyhane in strict rotation. The Green Rooster and Lefter’s. Tosun’s Place and Club 47. (Most of these continue to be traditional locales frequented by artists and writers.) Our new friend Hayalet Oguz introduces Günk and me to Beyoglu by night.

This feeling of the Istanbul be to small for the minds of her and her brothers in a way trhere way of thinking is to much for the homeland in a way!

This is one of those novellas that flies by. It’s a great summer evening read that leaves you thinking for days after and feeling for a woman caught in a world that, even though in my lifetime, looks pretty distant. The treatment she has is rarely used well in the UK these days. I am not sure elsewhere, but the book may capture the chaotic, free-wheeling nature of the writer herself, a woman, and that in a male world would have seemed dangerous or as in her case, in need of treatment 50 years ago. I think this is the perfect start for this woman in translation month as it captures a world gone by in her own country’s history that saw them move forward in some ways after the revolution in 1980. If you haven’t read any female writers from Turkey, this is a great place to start, but the blog also has four other female writers from Turkey who followed Özlü. Have you read this or any other female writers from Turkey?

 

 

People from Oetimu by Felix Nesi

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People from Oetimu by Feix Nesi

Indonesian fiction

Original title – Orang-Orang Oetimu

Translator – Lara Norgaard

Source – Personal copy

I moved to Asia and the third book I have reviewed from Indonesia. This time, it is published by one of my favourite publishers, Archieplago Books. Their books are just lovely. So, when I saw this a while ago, it was one I had to buy from them. Felix Nesi is from West Timor. The book looks back at the dark history of his part of Indonesia, and he has conducted research on this period, particularly focusing on slavery in the past. He is also a writer from the Iowa Writing Programme. He also has a bookshop, library and runs a book festival. I always love it when writers give back to their community by encouraging reading and writing.

The armed men kept their distance as they walked behind her, fortifying their courage with the few fragments of prayers to their ancestors they’d managed to memorize. Women and children hesitantly trailed behind the men, curious and afraid. Since the stranger lurched forward without so much as a glance to her surroundings, more and more town residents joined the crowd. Some men were still unsure of themselves and would rebuke the others for getting too close, wary of the possibility that the creature might radiate witchcraft. When the throngs reached a storefront – one of the few thatched buildings in town that proudly displayed its slogan, “Stay Steadfast and Prosper” – the appalling woman collapsed to the ground. The moment her bottom hit the rough, broken pavement, she started to cry intense, loud sobs; she reached both arms to the sky and then punched her bloated stomach. It was the first time Laura had cried since her mother and father were killed, and it had been a very long time since she’d made any sound at all. Nothing could hold back her thundering wail.

The violence is hard to read at time

The book moves between periods of time from the Jaopanese invasion of the island the independence movement against Portugal in the seventies. But the book opens with a locals in village gathering in  the local police station to watch the 1998 World cup . The locals are all wanting the Brazilians to win against the french. This is a game I remember watching back in the day this is something I love connecting with a book over and event. Then we see how the independence movement was handed over from the Portuguese government. The book drifts through he years This shows both the brutal time of the seventies, but then also sees how the Japanese treated the locals back in the forties. It is a book that is dark and captures the brutal history of his homeland, but also contains a glimpse of human life, especially in the story of the 90s, which revolves around football. Additionally, there is a sense of uneasy nature to the locals and their world. It captures the brutal nature of the country’s history over the years through the story of one village and its locals.

That said, it’s not as though every officer took such delight in beating people up. There were other soldiers stationed on the southern edge of town; they also wore uniforms and went into the center of Otimu to buy cigarettes and razors at Prosperity General Store. These men were muscular and always seemed to be smiling, since they had slightly buck teeth (as was often the case with people from Java). If they passed by the mototaxi stop, they’d share a pack of cigarettes with the boys and ask if anyone knew of girls they could sleep with. Other than Neeta, that is, since she was a little crazy. She had a very big mouth and was famously good at sucking cock, but she also got a kick out of gossiping about how small Javanese soldiers’ dicks were compared to those of the Timorese militia, which made the men uncomfortable. Since the moto-taxi stop was right in front of Oetimu High School, the boys promised that the soldiers would be the first to know if there was ever a young girl who decided to become a prostitute.

The military and how it effects the locals

I feel this captured the brutal world of Timor, a country which, iunntile maybe the last twenty years, had seen so much violence from the Japanese invasion to the cruel end of the Portuguese rule and the first government of the country, and then the wanting of East Timor to be its own country. It connects the timelines well through the characters we meet in the book, but also it use the folk history of the place to weave into the brutal tales. I think this is a nod to people Marquez and the other Indonesian writer I have read Eka Kurniawan. It captures the post-colonial struggle in Timor, a place that was torn apart during this time. IT faces the past and doesn’t dwell on the violent aspects. Have you read any books from Indonesia?

The Proof by César Aira

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The Proof by César Aira

Argentine fiction

Original title – La prueba

Translator – Nick Caistor

Source – Personal copy

I always pick up one of Aira’s books when I see them in the wild, so to speak. He is a prolific writer, having written over a hundred books, with several translated into English so far. However, it means we have a lot more to translate in the years to come. He is one of those writers whose every book is a new revelation of his writing and a different one, set around his home, but this one features females as its main characters, which, in the books I have read so far, is a first. But I also loved the nod to a few bands I love in the text.  This book is about girls and sexual awakening, but also being wild and free. For more on Aira, I would try the Mookse and Girpes podcast episode on him.

The two punks looked at her with neutral, serious expressions. That expression, which expressed noth-ing, was one of pure violence. They were violence.

There was no escaping the fact. She wasn’t going to emerge scot-free from her audience with the punks, as she had absent-mindedly assumed. This was not the same as any other strange specimen in society, which could be dealt with by finding the proper setting in which to examine it. Because they themselves were the setting. She resigned herself to it: she had never set foot in this Pumper before, and had no problem in never coming back if they were thrown out.

But the so-called Mao had an idea, and didn’t keep

it to herself:

‘Do you want something, Marcia? A Coke, a beer?’ This had its funny side. She was asking her if she

‘could buy her a drink’, and that was one of the classic chat-up lines.

Marcia meeting the two girls

The proof is a three-hand book it is a about a lonely girl Marcia who is wandering around her hometown when she passes a group of punks, as she thinks are, but next thing she hears one f them talking to her not quite what they said they start to speak The girl asked her if she “WANNAFUCK”  Marcia is startled by what they said to her. The girls introduce themselves. Lenin and Mao describe them selfs as Goths. This leads to a chat about the band The Cure, which they are fans of, and they talk about how they are drawn to Marcia. Saying they love her, but how can this love be proven, and what must the three of them do to get this proof? This draws the three girls into action, and their lives will change after this. All this happens at a lightning pace as the girls whirl Marica into their odd world.

‘Are you saying that because I’m … overweight? asked Marcia, who was hurt and whose eyes showed it despite herself.

Lenin seemed almost about to smile: ‘Quite the

opposite…

‘Quite the opposite,’ Mao repeated fervently. ‘How

can you not see it?’

She paused for an instant, and Marcia’s astonish-

ment floated in the air.

“You were right, Lenin said finally to her friend.

‘She’s incredibly stupid.

Marcia ate a spoonful of ice cream. She felt excused

to try another topic.

‘What do you mean you’re not punks?’ The only response was a click of the tongue from Mao. ‘For example, don’t you like The Cure?’

Like two sphinxes.

Lenin deigned to ask: ‘What’s that?’

‘The English group, the musicians. I like them.

Robert Smith is a genius.’

‘Never heard them.’

They chat and they tell her of their love of The Cure

I loved this; it was a very fast-paced book of one of the oddest encounters someone could have it is about love, sex, politics, power and also being a teen and having all these lines blurred, and what is right and wrong being hard to follow the right line but is also about those crazy moments we all have in our lives those turning points. I remember a few drunk nights in my early twenties joining about taking Alnwick castle back with a Scottish friend who had a royal Scottish standard and putting it onver the castle of course this never went further now the old pully escape system in another friends flat we did try going down from a third flow window in this harness that lowered you. So I could relate to the waiting of the proof that the girls, Lenin and Mao, have one of those unhealthy, twisted relationships. I was also reminded of the film Ghost World. And their relationship reminds me of this pair somewhat. It also is a pair that have extreme things happen in the relationship. Have you read this Aira?

 

 

Berlin by Andris Kuprišs

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Berlin by Andre Kuprišs

Latvian fiction

Original title – Berlin

Translator – Ian Gwin

Source – Personal copy

I brought this trio of books from. Open letter books just after I read about the withdrawal of the funding for so many great publishers in Translation. I had some other books preordered from different publishers. However, I had been keeping an eye on this collection before the announcement. I had this down if I was going by one of the three books that Open Letter calls a translator’s choice for a country. It reminds me of the Peter Owen series of books, which they released several years ago, featuring three books from each country per year. I think someone could run with this as a long-term project to build a collection of world literature, with the opportunity to acquire a selection of books from each country. I noticed after reading the collection that Andris Kuprišs holds a master’s degree in photography. I can tell the very short stories are like a wonderfully framed photo, a glimpse at a life, a moment.

He put his hand on her stomach, sliding it lower. With his fingers he found her hip bones and felt them. He brushed her left leg, his fingers sliding down to her shin, then back up, his fingertips resting just above her knees.

“You were away when it happened. He was already drunk when he got here, the door was unlocked that night. At first I wanted to tell him to leave, but he insisted he had something important to tell me. He asked me to pour him a drink, so I let him have the last of the whiskey from my birthday. We satin the kitchen until I finally said something, that it was time for him to get going, but he just sat there, listening and slowly drinking. I said he had to hurry up because you were coming home soon, and he said I had nothing to worry about because he knew that night you weren’t.”

He had stopped caressing her and was sweating again.

A woman recounts something thagt happened in the story The Rape

The collection now comprises 19 short stories and a novella titled Berlin. I will leave Berlin to you, a reader, to say that it captures the expat experience in that city. If you are from the Baltic states, the rest of the collection is also set there. So, the rest of the book is composed of a collection of short stories and what may be flash fiction. A couple are in bed as the woman tells the man about what had happened whilst he was away. A friend, drunk at the time, came into the flat when she invited him in, she tells her partner. Then she says she couldn’t get away after she had let him in. This is a theme that runs in some of the stories, unease another sees a young boy fearful of answering a ringing phone. The short pieces are like little gems. How do we view someone in two ways? Why are his hands cold?

The first way in which the following situation differs from an-other, similar situation, is that I met him—a person I respect and regard quite highly—here, where I figured I would never have met him at all.

The second way, no less important to this situation, but perhaps far more important than the first, is that just as I went to shake his hand and ask him what he was doing here, he took me by the hair and forced me down. I fell to my knees, my face nearly touching the ground, him angrily saying almost shouting-“Learn humility!”

From the story two way in. which the following situation differs

Again a play with duality of life here in this flash fiction piece

There is a pervasive sense of sorrow and melancholy throughout this collection. It is a series of stories about the darker side or the underside of life. Being maybe an outsider in a town, and how that affects you moving forward. I also said this is like a collection of black-and-white photos. I wonder if that was his medium in photography, where the world is very black and white, with shadows and a feeling of gloom over the world we visit. He also plays with two characters interacting at the heart of some of the stories, which is that interplay and the way power and mood can shift between them. Whether it is a teacher and student, parents and their children, lovers in bed, or a man awakens in a bed and the man next to him thinks he is Jesus (I remembered the NYRB book about The Three Jesuses of Ypsilanti). Do you have a favourite book from the Baltic states?

 

The City and The World by Gregor Hens

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The City and the World by Gregor Hens

German non-fiction

Original title – Die Stadt und der Erdkreis

Translator Jen Calleja

Source – Personal Copy

One of the first prose works from Fitzcarraldo, I fell in love with an earlier work by Gregor Hens, Nicotine. I had not long stopped smoking when the book came out ten years ago. Gregor had also been stopped a couple of years, and yes, ten years later, I am still stopped smoking, so when I saw this was coming out, I knew I would love it. Apart from that, he has also translated Will Self’s recent books into German. The book is one of those that is hard to pigeonhole. Still, the main thread of the book is our relationship with the city now, and also how we navigate the modern cityscape, in a way, revealing the similarities between many cities.

In January 1976, a year and a few months after Pere’s experiment, Peter Handke made his own observations in Paris; he carried out a far more spiritual kind of walk-ing, standing, sitting. His gaze is not that of a stationary camera mounted on the tripod of a café table, but that of the angel Damiel, who in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire is trying to get closer to people, the city dwellers, and not least the patrons of the reading room in which I am writing these lines, than his nature allows.

Handke sees the passers-by in the square ‘in a flickering winter atmosphere, notices a woman’s fake fur flying in the wind and notes: They are living before the catastrophe.’ Which one? What catastrophe has Paris been spared so far? What catastrophe are we (my mother, my brother, and I) facing? Handke was right, he had to be right, because we are all always living on the verge of catastrophe. One or another.

The mention of Wim Wenders and his film

Now, the book is a rambling look at his view of the city he has visited, but also about those writers, thinkers, and architects who have shaped those cities, both in the way they are laid out and within our minds. He takes us from Latin America and Buenos Aires and its connection to post war Nazi activities and then through China. Even flying cities and that writer on cities. Here, of course, he mentions Self, a great fan of psychogeography and people like Guy Debord, who, of course, coined the term and his map of the little islands of Paris. I loved the other parts, a mention of Berlin and Wim Wenders filming his masterpiece, The Wings of Desire ( I am such a fan of this film, I have watched it tens of times ). Another vague connection is a tale around the lead singer of Einsturzende Neubauten, Blixa Bargeld, which made me smile as I had recently just bought a couple of the band’s CDs. Another writer he mentions is Alexander Kluge, and his book Air Raid, which recounts the destruction of the small city where he grew up during World War II. I have reviewed this book.

Alexander Kluge recognizes that the air raid ordered by Harris on his hometown of Halberstadt in April 1945 is a hyperobject, an elusive, temporally and spatially diffuse entity. The dimensionality of the situation can only be represented in a literary montage that links the strategy from above with the strategy from below. In his book on the events, Kluge uses everything from eyewitness reports and interviews with pilots to maps and graphics, everything that could shed a light on the complex system of space and time, because the bombing does not begin with the air raid siren, with the development of weapons, nor does it end with residents scratching around for the remains of their relatives and friends in cellars that have become ovens in the firestorm because of the adjoining coal stores. If it ever ended at all, it was probably with Kluge’s final report written in 1970, which can, however, only ever be a temporary one.

I ;liked this last line of this piece about Kluge’s Air raid

It is fair to say I would love this book, it fits nicely next to the likes of Kluge, Sebald and Ester Kinsky, all of which are mentioned in the book at some point. It is one of those drifting books, a one-person quest to answer how we came to the cities we have. Also, if you’re a fan of Psychogeography and films like Robinson in space/ It is a book that I will return to over time it has so many little vignettes and titbits of information it needs to be read and read over time it is a book that will leave you wanting to look at a big city differently next time you visit. A perfect example of what the white Fitzcarraldo books are is thought pieces that make you, as a reader, think and question. A shadowplay of what a city is, as Ian Curtis said in his song Shadowplay, “to the centre of the city, where all roads are waiting for you ” they will be after you have read this book !!!

A carnival of Attrocities by Natalia Garcia Freire

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A carnival of atrocities by Natalia Garcia Freire

Ecuadorian fiction

Original title -Trajiste contigo el viento

Translator – Victor Meadowcroft

Source – Review copy

I took this away with me as I just needed a break from prize-listed books and something different from what I had been reading in the last few weeks. Plus, when I saw it was actually the first book from Ecuador I had read, I was even keener. Natalia Garcia Freire has a master’s degree and teaches creative writing in Madrid. It is noted in Hay-on-Wye’s biography that she also has a cat and a garden. This is her second novel to be translated into English. As I say, it is also the first book from Ecuador on this blog9i have a collection of short fiction from there, I thought. I had reviewed, but I hadn’t. This caught my eye as it is set in one of those far-from-anything villages, as it says, nestled between the Jungle and the Andes.

The whole of Cocuán continued to sing, but other voices, the voices of a man, woman and child said:

Mildred.

Sweet and powerful Mildred.

Those who live in fear will become savages.

Look at them, they said. And the voices swelled like the high tide, the waves crashing into my ears. Look at them in their Sunday finest, huddled so close together.

Look at them, Mildred, deaf to the wind and blind like corrupted animals. With the wills of slaves. Look at the men and women created by the Word, molded from the dust of dead stars. Look at their body, which is the body of Christ, and look at their disoriented eyes, their old bones on the brink of snapping. Look upon the town of God that has abandoned you. Look upon the town of God that you have cursed.

This is an example early on in the book how she is viewed

The book uses a chorus of voices from the same village, Cocuan, as they all recount incidents and events surrounding a young girl who, many years earlier, had been taken from the town when her parents had both passed away after a series of strange events. What I loved about this book is that we have nine different people talking about the Girl Mildred and how she was, and it shows what can grow into a void left when someone leaves a small village under a cloud. So is this girl the witch, as some of those retellings remember their view of the events, and as they do, the lines between what is real and what is a dream world blur. Some strange events around the time Mildred and her parents died are recalled. A priest cut off his ear. The woman dies, and as her husband is there, someone attacks her body. A man goes to desperate ends to settle a debt. Did Midlred really see future events, and why did certain things? Locals want her to join them? This is a tale of a young girl who has had a bad life, then maybe sees things that might happen, and thus gets caught up in a whirlwind. With what happened with her mother dying and her father running off, it is one of those situations where myths are born.

Death is just like a pirate,

It eats tough meat and drinks salt water.

Death is just like a pirate,

It bares its ass, then goes for the slaughter.

This is what we sang on the way to the waterfall where Victor believed the old man might have gone, because several times before we had found him teetering there, with his eyes closed, covered by the water, and been forced to drag him back to the house like a stuffed dummy I would have liked to watch burn on an enormous bonfire fed with ragweed and rue to chase away the old man’s evil spirit, the fleas and the flies. But no one wanted to hear my dirty plans, least of all Víctor, who loved the old man with a stupid love. So that’s where we were headed, once again, to look for him.

Things get connected like an old man vanishing

I love how this looked at Mildred through the nine characters as they cross into other stories, but each has a different take on her and the events. It also has a large chunk of the mysticism, folklore, and magic realism that make up the world Mildred and the locals are from, where simple events unconnected get drawn together and at the heart of it all is this girl now gone. I loved the mix of dream magic realism and just the way things like this can happen, a sort of super Chinese whispers around this one girl. Yes, she was a little odd, and maybe events tied with things she said, but that happens sometimes.It is just by accident, or perhaps she has that sort of second sight that D will occur because A and B have happened. I was reminded of the film The Big Fish if it had been made by David Lynch, as this is one of those tales that is about a place, the town itself, which is between the savage jungle and the barren, endless Andes, a sort of place where events happen. I was reminded in Big Fish that the events seem surreal, but there is always a little bit of truth in what you are being told. From tiny acorns mighty oaks grow, and this is the case here. Events have grown in the people’s minds.

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Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

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Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

Italian fiction

Original title – Le Perfezoni

Translator – Sophie Hughes

Source – Subscription copy

Now one thing we can always count on is a book from Faaitzcarraldo =being on the booker longlist, Well you hope there is asa they are bring out the cutting edge of fiction from around the world and yes they have a clever knack of having published future noble winners and may continue with that lets see, So this maybe wasn’t the book from there recent books that people had picked for the longlist. But for me, it is a perfect book for the way the Booker Prize is moving, it is the tale of some millennials, social media, and life in general. It captures how the world has shrunk and, in many ways, is a very similar world we all live in now.

The kitchen is fitted out with glossy white subway tiles, a chunky wooden worktop, a double butler’s sink.

Open shelves are lined with blue and white enamel dishes and mason jars filled with rice, grains, coffee, spices. Cast-iron pans and olive wood ladles hang from a wall-mounted steel bar. Out on display on the worktop are a brushed steel kettle, a Japanese teapot and a bright red blender. The windowsill is filled with herbs growing in terracotta pots: basil, mint, chives, but also marjoram, winter savory, coriander, dill. Pushed against one wall is an antique marble-top pastry table and salvaged school chairs

This made me laugh as it remind me of some many oictures coffee shops etc I have seen with a similar vibe and style

The book follows Anne and Tom as they live out that expat dream of living in Berlin (I, for one, had shared this dream as well; I had lived in Germany but would have loved to have been in the post-wall era Berlin). What is captured in the modern world, a new take at the start of the book, is a nod to a book by George Perec in the sixties, when the first explosion of consumerism happened, when things price-wise became within the grasp of many people. Well, this is maybe the 2020s version of how social media has taken over the world. Instagram, Pinterest, etc. So we all have plant-filled apartments with similar posters and art, with Gooseneck kettles and V60  with filters to make the perfect pour over. The local coffee roasters. But this world is also ideal, and as they see those around them come and go, they start to lose the love of this world, and what to replace it with. They start to do something which too few people do these days, and become political and try slowly, but over time, become more radical in the steps they take to make the world around them more real. This is about the modern dream, those filtered pictures. Those idolised lives.

And it is a happy life, or so it seems from the pictures in the post advertising the apartment for short-term rental at one hundred and eighteen euros a day, plus the fee to cover the Ukrainian cleaner, paid through a French gig economy company that files its taxes in Ireland; plus the commission for the online hosting platform, with offices in California but tax-registered in the Netherlands; plus another cut for the online payments system, which has its headquarters in Seattle but runs its European subsidiary out of Luxembourg; plus the city tax imposed by Berlin.

I’ve looked on Air BnB to see how long a mon ths rent here and there would cost.If I had the time and money !

I am old enough to be from the pre-social media generation. Social media waves have come and go in the last couple of decades. Like Fury in the slaughterhouse said in the song, every generation has its disease or in this case, social media. This is the Instagram world of perfect clips and how it affects one couple, but also shows the hollow nature of these dreams and worlds. Berlin was the ideal choice, it is a hipster place to live, always has been. For Nick Cave or even Lou Reed before him. Through to a singer like Lloyd Cole, who also wrote a song about how hip Berlin was back in the day. Anne and Tom could be any couple on social media. But the main thing around this book is that the writer is George Orwell’s Italian Translator, and this is a sort of Orwellian tale of the modern world and how all that shines isn’t what it seems. A great picture has a story behind it every time! I am someone who spends a lot less time on social media than I did a decade ago. I know the feeling of losing who you are somewhat. But for me, social media also opened doors. What is your take on this novella? It is one of the most interesting books on the longlist so far !

Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa

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Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa

Japanese fiction

Orignal title – ハンチバック

Translator Polly Barton

Source – Personal copy

This was another book from the longlist i was vaguely aware of , I remember reading when the writer had won the Akutagawa prize a couple of years ago as she was the first disabled writer to win such a big prize in Japan; in fact, in any big book prize worldwide, let’s face it there are not many disabled voices out there in the books we read. So I had this on my radar to read; given the nature of my job, anything that deals with disability and is written from that point of view captured my attention as a reader. As I feel it is a world underrepresented by readers. In some ways, this book is a thinly veiled tale of the writer’s own life, but maybe in HD, can I get away with saying that this is her world turned up to fully steamy!!

Meanwhile, S was leaning up against the tinted glass while the trader sucked on her E-cup tits. The black turtleneck hoisted up around her mouth muffled her moans so they sounded super horny. Her enormous white breasts were glistening and bouncy like ripe Japanese pears. You had to hand it to 2I-year-old college students! Huge but still pert, they really were a flawless set of tits.

No wonder 26-year-old Y was hanging her head, her cheeks reddened by the humiliation of defeat. Although, if I’m being totally honest, I’m not that into big-breasted women. Y’s regular-sized, slightly saggy tits were actually way more up my alley. Yeah, she was really turning me on. I stuck a hand into her panties to find she was already dripping wet. ‘Can 1 fuck you?’ I groaned into her ear. ‘Sure &’! she replied. I grabbed one of the condom packets that had come pirouetting down from the ceiling at just the right moment, and so began

The tale of hers that opens the book

The book opens with our narrator writing one of the erotic stories that she has been publishing under a pseudonym on erotic websites. In her stories, she explores the experiences of sex as a disabled woman and reflects on how it would feel. She lives in a nursing home, a place her parents chose for her, where she tweets and writes. One day, her new male carer suggests that he knows about her secret life as a writer. This revelation adds a twist to the narrative as the fantasy worlds she creates spill into reality. Because of her circumstances, she finds she can prompt this man to act out some of the scenarios she wishes to explore. Her own sexual journey with this young man. It is a tale of power in a way being switched to the way this may happen otherwise.It also shows a subject until recent times, a taboo, and that is the desire of people like our narrator and the writer herself. Trapped in their own way, seeking freedom of their desires!

In American universities, in accordance with the stipulations of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, not only are digital educational teaching resources the norm, but it’s also compulsory for textbooks to be accessible to the visually impaired through a reader. Japan, on the other hand, works on the understanding that disabled people don’t exist within society, so there are no such proactive considerations made. Able-bodied Japanese people have likely never even imagined a hunchbacked monster struggling to read a physical book. Here was 1, feeling my spine being crushed a little more with every book that 1 read, while all those e-book-hating able-bodied people who went on and on about how they loved the smell of physical books, or the feel of the turning pages beneath their fingers, persisted in their state of happy oblivion.

A remindee of her own personal challenges and how society deals with them!

 

 

The story addresses the theme of feeling trapped in your body; how can she be free while confined to a chair and reliant on oxygen? It delves into the desire to be seen as something other than society’s perception. It highlights the unspoken desires of disabled people, a subject that is only just beginning to gain attention in our society. Something people are only just starting to talk about, so a book like this with is cader and frankness and a straightforward way of dealing with other erotic desires is eye-opening and also refreshing. I think the writer of this book must have a wickedly playful mind if this book is a reflection of her as a person. One of the books that has so far raised its head above the others, and also like some of the other book,s this is the sort of book I hope to see on lists like this books that open up new dimensions for us as readers but also give voice to underrepresented writers as well.

Stu’s International booker Five for 25

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I had initially opted to miss doing the shadow Jury, but after saying I was;’t going to do it I got a touch of nostalgia, I loved doing the shadow jury ok last year, but the books were maybe not to my taste, but it is about the people I do the jury with year after year it the only time I ever really talk about books , if anyone wants to chat about books regularly I am always free to chat !! other than this post I do. Anyway, in the last year, I may haven’t read as many books as I usually would for a long time. I have thus chosen five books I have read and reviewed that I’d like to see on the longlist this year.

Brandy Sour by Constantia Soteriou

A short novella that use the drinks people order to tell this history of one of the most famous Hotels on the Island and the island’s history and how the split came about. One of the most refreshing ideas for a book I have read in a long time

Un Amor by Sara Mesa

I like this tale of a woman heading to a small village in the Spanish hinterland is one of my favourite settings for a book and this had a number of twists and turns.

Clean by Alia Trabucco Zeran

We find a woman held against her will and the story of her and the family she had been a nanny to slowly unfolds.

My favourite by Sarah Jollien-Fardel

Now, if Un AMor was a woman going to a village to escape, this is the opposite: a woman escaping her abusive father from a small Swiss village to head to a bigger town and start a life of her own away from the village.

Stay with Me by Hanne Ørstavik

Now, a Danish woman in Italy falls for a younger man but experiences echoes of her childhood. This is the latest from one of the best writers around in recent years.

Now I have read the book The Disappearance by Ibisam Azem, We Do Not Part by Han Kang, and On the Greenwich Line; I would like to see them on the longlist, but time is running out. I hope to review them in the next few days. But time is short.

What would you pick?