Tag: v and q books

Every time we say Goodbye by Ivana Sajko

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Everytime we say goodbye by Uvan Sajko

Croatian fiction

Original title – Male smrti

Translator – Mima Simic

source – Review copy

I was kindly sent this to review. It is the second novel to be published in English translation by the Croatian Novelist and Playwright Ivana Sajko. She is much better known for her plays that highlight female voices and social issues, and use inventive narrative styles. Her previous novel won a German translation prize. This book has a male character as its lead, but, like her other works, has a breadth to the subject it covers, which, inj many ways, is one man’s experience of various events and situations within the second half of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st century.One man’s view of the Balkan war and what came after.

I start writing on the train, on my journey from point A to point B, from that small coastal town to Berlin, I stare out the window at the remnants of the city, the unfinished houses in the suburbs, the warehouses in the industrial zone and the stunted trees along the river, torn plastic bags hanging from their branches like bats, it’s hard for me to be in this compartment, hard to be in this skin, in the role of a traveller, I have forgotten how to travel, how to surrender myself to the mercy of the road, how to say good-bye, I have forgotten how long you actually stand there looking back at point A as it rapidly disappears, and then how long you just keep standing there, just standing and standing, staring into nothingness, about to cry, so I open my notebook but I have no answer, I write ‘On the journey from point A to point B, from that small coastal town to Berlin, I stare out the window at the remnants of the city, the unfinished houses in the suburbs, the warehouses in the industrial zone and the stunted trees along the river…

As he starts off on the train journey

 

The book follows a man who has left an unnamed Balkan seaside town to head on a train journey to Berlin, as he says to lose himself in the crowds of Berlin to just become a stranger in the crowd as the train heads from the Balkans into Berlin, we see him sat reflecting not only on his own past but also on his brother who fell in with the wrong crowd and end uop dead, to his drunken father and mother that put up with all this. He sees the Balkan war when he is younger, he is a journalist and activist, this leads him to conflicts over borders, shipwrecks as he tries to shine a light on those suffering but there is a sense of this man is broken as we get these memories following as the train move closer nad he has rthe chance to just walk lout of the station into the crowd and be a face in a crowd.

What do you do when you sink into an image you saw on the news, in the papers, an image you thought you knew well, only to be suddenly confronted with someone’s wound or burn, the kind that can’t heal or be eased by compassion, and one day this might be me, for another’s death holds the possibility of my own just as another’s death is the undeniable proof of my life, which, as I viscerally marvel at these fundamental contrasts, now separates me from death, but I’m not the one who’s dying at this mo-ment, by incident or design, as a calculated collateral casu-alty, not yet; I am lying in bed pulling up reports by Aris Messinis from Mosul, then Shah Marai from Kabul, then Abdulmonam Eassa from Ghouta; as Russian planes launch an airstrike on the eastern part of the city on behalf of the Assad regime, Eassa hops into an ambulance heading to the site of a strike, where a father and son lie in flames by an overturned motorcycle in the middle of the street, and Eassa helps the Civil Defence put out the fire consuming their bodies, ‘It’s very, very hard, he says,

‘I take pictures, but it hurts, some photos are blacked out

The strain and stress of photographing and reporting on the violence in the world

This is one of those books I call a small epic; it is 120-something pages long, but it feels epic as we see glimpses into the unnamed man’s life through his family dynamics and the effect they have on him. But also the Balkan conflict and the person who made him the Journalist he became after the war, a champion of those without a voice, but there is a toll to pay for this, and this is why he is on this train heading to oblivion. For me, you can tell Ivana Sajko is known for her narrative style in her plays. This felt at times as if the book drifts the way your mind does on a train, that sort of remembrance of the past, maybe the wanting to escape is making him replay these events, but it also shows the effect of the last decades on one man. I was reminded of the poems of Faruk Šehić, the Bosnian poet, who also has people from the Balkan conflict wash up in Berlin. A city to get lost in to be a face in a crowd to see out your ghosts. Have you read this book ?

You can buy the two books mentioned in the Uk via my bookshop.org link for

Everytime we say good bye by Ivana Sajko 

My Rivers by Faruk Šehić

 

 

 

 

The Blacksmiths Daughter by Selim Özdoğan

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The Blacksmith’s Daughter by Selim Özdoğan

German fiction

Orignal title – Die Tochter des Schmieds

Translator – Ayça Türkoğlu and Katy Derbyshire

Source – review copy

I’m a bit late reviewing this book from the German/Turkish writer Selim Özdoğan the book was a cult hit when it came out in Germany as it seemed to capture the experience of a lot of the Turkish families that came to be foreign workers in Germany. This is the first part of a trilogy around the life of one girl in Anatolia Turkey. the first part is her childhood in the ’50s a story of many that came to Germany at the time. This is the German equivalent to me of Windrush literature in the Uk as a lot of Turkish people came to do those jobs that Germans wouldn’t do.

When he bagan working in the Timur took up this habit from his father. He would often put sweets in Fatma’s skirt. He must have been 14 or 15 at the time, and she was 10 years younger he remembered the girl’s smile, Nobody knew anything specific about Fatma’s parents some said they’d be greek , some Aramaeans and others claimed she was the daughter of Circassians. All they could agree upon was that the  couple had arrived in the town after the confussion of the first world war.Fatma’s father died before she was born, One day he complained of a back poain, and two week later cancer had taken hold of his entire body. fatma mother began working as a  nanny to a rich family to feed herself and her daughter.When she was six months old her mother was trampled to death by horses in the marketplace

There mother had a tough life

The story follows the early years of a little girl called  Gül she and her two sisters were the daughters of the Blacksmith Timur and his first wife Fatma. They live in a small village as the girls live in this idyllic yet closed world they go to school as they see that as the only way to go beyond the village there is some great little scenes in the school like when she takes the fall for a boy who is the naughty school kid. Timur has followed his father into the blacksmith trade the life seems perfect until their rural village is hit with typhoid and their mother passes barely in the bed cold when his father takes a younger woman just a few years older than his daughter. Arza had been married to a man that hadn’t given her a baby so she marries Tuimur as she wants a baby. But whilst Fatma was dying he let his business slip add to this he had fallen out with a fellow villager that had turned on Timur so they head to a town but this is where the girls start to feel that they don’t need and the new mother would love to see them out of the scene. This sets up the second book which follows them into Germany.

“It was me,” Gul said; she had no idea whyit slipped out. Recep wan’t eben her friend.He was the son of a good friend of her mother’s and people thought the reason he was so naughty was that he didn’t have a father; the man had gone to Istanbul one day and never come back, or so they said.

The teacher turned around and looked at Gül  for a few sconds. He knew it hadn’t been her, but he called her to the front and made her stretch out her left hand, palm upwars, He had to amintain her authority.

I loved this little scene in the book

I loved the feel of this world a village life that I feel has now gone anyone that knows me and the blog knows that villages have long been a favorite setting for this blogger. This had a feel of the world I read in stones in a landslide another book that sees a girl grown then move to a new bigger place. The book is also a testament to those guest workers that went in the ’60s and ’70s to Germany their story hasn’t been told much. As Katy said in an interview this is why she used a co-translator as she wanted the book to keep some of the Turkish feels it had in the german version. Gul has guts her story as Katy says in the interview it is one that is rarely told. This is a county novel a place that is timeless but is now gone these are Pamuk’s characters before they are drawn to Istanbul or as in the case her to Germany to try and find a better life like those who came to the Uk from the Caribean in Windrush era. Have you a favorite book set in a village?

Winstons score – A . this is a gem of a book about village life in a bygone world on the cusp of change

Paula by Sandra Hoffmann

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Paula by Sandra Hoffmann

German fiction

Original title – Paula

Translator – Katy Derbyshire

Source – review copy

As I work towards 100 books from Germany I will be featuring the other two books from the new publisher of German translations V and q here is the second of three books they brought out. The writer Sandra Hoffmann was born and still lives in Munich. She teaches creative writing. She writes for radio and her first novel what he will miss when he’s dead won a prize.  As this book did this won the Hans Fallada prizes.two years ago she was the writer in residence for the summer school for the British centre for literary translation two years ago.

Like my grandmother, I enjoy sitting by the window, and like my grandmother, I enjoy looking out at nature, I enter a state of peace that mekes me me wish she also got to experience moments like these. Sometimes, at least. I hear her sayiong: Can you see the squirrel? Can you see the yellow butterfly? And :Does that farmer have to make so much noise at this time of day? I hear her speaking her language,Her Swabian dialect, in which the sentence aboutthe farmer is Muos der um dia zeit no so n’ krach macna.”

I loved this as it remind me of my grandfather trhat loved nature as well .

This novella is told in the first-person narrative of Sandra Hoffman as a young woman and the time she spent with her grandmother of her. The big secret in the family is who was her mother’s father this is something Paula a devout catholic who has filled the house with the silence of these events. What we see is Sandra looking at photos she found after her gran’s death hidden in drawers as she tries to picture the women she knew with the woman much younger in the pictures alongside this is the everyday coming and goings of her youth her memories as she says she has had talking therapy and is maybe an unreliable narrator. I loved the touches of the times the 70s. Like when she translates Simon and Garfunkel lyrics for the song Boxer or remembering watching  Bonanza which reminds me of Sundays as a young child when it was shown here in the Uk. What we have here is a grandchild remembering a singular gran that had a secret that she never revealed like many of her generations it was a scar on her life having this child te love than in her teen years the usual hormonal struggles of the generations as they distance themselves.

My grandmother works as a cleaning lady in a big pharmaceutical company, so there are some days when she’s not at home, They, are good days because my mother is relaxed. Sometimes they’re even very good days. We wtalk to each other more. My grandmother doesn’t tell us much about  her work. Nothing much to say,she says. The most important thing is that she gets out of the house,sees other peeople whose names she never mentions, goes to a job where you have to loass through airlocks in protective clothing, where you’re deliberately silent because you’re deliberatelysilent because you’re to caught up in the protective clothes and your own thoughts

The silence and influence of her grandmother over the house is obvious here.

This is a great piece of autofiction broken memories of a relationship that at its heart of it is a void of this secret who was the Father Sandra own Grandfather the silence of the grandmother just falls off the page at times having lived with a step paren that was a silent man it is hard to fill this void as it always lingering. But the other side of this is those small everyday things we remember the memories of the little things her the jam pots she collected and her own mother as she makes things every winter. Then there are the everyday life events as the two once close as she is a child but over the years she grows apart and to dislike her part of the looking back and writing this a long time after she passed away is trying to fill in the void of her gran and the pictures she left trying to imagine what they all were about what her gran was like how she became this harden woman at the time. I often use the movie night book that Meike at Peirene uses for her novellas this is a perfect example I reread it today over a couple of hours. It walks the line between fiction and autobiography as she says she is an unreliable narrator.