Tag: WIT MONTH 23

A Bookshop in Algiers by Kaouther Adimi

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A Bookshop in Algiers by Kaouther Adimi

Algerian fiction

Original title Nos Richesses

Translator – Chris Andrews

Source – Personal copy

I brought this in this year’s Waterstones sale. It caught my eye as it is about a famous bookshop in Algeria. Kaouther moved to France with her family when she was eight. One of her incredible memories is of her father taking her to the library every week( I used to love my library trips as a kid and actually still do, although I don’t use my library as much as I should these last few weeks have been great getting books for the woman in translation month). She took up writing after doing well in a short story contest while at university. This book is set in her homeland; she did go back to the mid-90s to report on what was happening in the country at that time. The book uses the shop as a prism to all that has happened in Alegria in the 20th century.

But you will follow the alleys that lie open to the sun, won’t you?You’ll come at last to Rue Hamani, formerly known as Rue Charras.You’ll look for b: it won’t be easy, because some of the numbers have disappeared. You’ll stand there facing a sign in a window: One who reads is worth two who don’t. Facing History, with a capital H, which changed this world utterly, but also the small-h history of a man, Edmond Charlot, who, in 1936, at the age of twenty-one, opened a lending library called Les Vraies Richesses.

In the present its ghost lives on in the library on the same site.

The book drifts from the present, where the shop’s site is now a lending library, so the spirit it had is still living in a way. Then back in time to the glory years of this shop that was opened by Edmond Charlot a free thinker if there ever was one, he imagined Les Varies Richesses as a melting pot of literature, art and friendship a meeting place for those in love with books, not only did he open a shop he also published books from that shop as well. It had been where Camus first saw fame with his first book launched at the shop. It was also used in the war to publish FREE French propaganda. A book is in a number of forms, all different the present is in Alegeria with its problems and Post-independence as we see Ryad clearing the book to sell but is the shop just a shop? What is it soul? We have Charlot’s own journal that sees how he got books out there from Camus and Giono, how the shop managed to just get through the war, and then in the years after the war, we see how Alegeria is moving towards independence so many countries started to after world war two.

May 5, 1936

This will be a library, a bookstore, a publishing house, but above all a place for friends who love the litterature of the Mediterranean. As soon as I took possession, I was overjoyed. I’m starting to meet the neighbors, the storekeepers, the waiters. These new characters in nmy new world. REVOLT IN asturias is on sale. People are saying that e.c stads for EDITIONS camus. They’ll see through the ruse soon enough, but we’re in no hurry to set the record straight, the main thing is, the play is Selling

Camus the man he first publuished and a man thart would sit outside the shop and smoke from timt to time.

This book is clever as its main character is the shop but not the shop. More of the dream of what the shop could be, a place for ideas. The shop and its history is a lens on the country around it as history happened to like those involved in the wars of the period took damage, so did the shop. But its spirit is still there in some way. I loved the parts of Charlot’s journal that harks back to an era when dreamers and free thinkers could have almost changed the world when a bookshop can be so much more a publisher, a melting pot of ideas, a place for thinkers to chat and talk over the world this is a book that reminds you of the power books can have and the freedom even in the present there is the chance to get a book and break free in those words of your present. This is one of those odd books that walks the line between fact and fiction and leads us to a small shop and a man with dreams and one of the greatest writers in the 20th century in Camus, that loved the shop. Have you read this book?

Winston’s score = +B, A tale of a long-gone shop and a place I would have enjoyed, I think !!

 

Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza

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Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza

Argentine fiction

Original title – El Nervio óptico

Translator – Thomas Bunstead

Source – Library copy

I took a break over the weekend I had originally intended to blog every day of the Woman in Translation month but I had a busy weekend with Amanda my Father visited my house, and we had a meal then we had a day in the peaks Sunday and a roast which we hadn’t had for a few weeks with all the trips to Scotland anyway I am back and back to the woman in translation month reviews and this a writer I have had on my list to get to and so when I saw this on the shelf at the library I felt it was time. Maira Gainza is a well-known art critic and writer for a number of papers in Argentina. She also writes for the Magazine Artforum, which is, of course, the title of a novella by her fellow Argentina writer Cesar Aira. This was her debut novel. This book is about art a woman that loves art but what also connects us to art.

Hunting scenes were quite common in Dreux’s day, evocations of a sport that had been a class marker since the Middle Ages, when the hunt became an elite pastime and often the only means of preparing men for war. An unintended by-product was that it gave the nobility a way of measuring itself – though only against itself. The first ever enclosures of forests and common land came about to enable exclusive access to big game. Commoners had to make do with birds and rabbits; bears, wolves and deer became the landowner’s right.

The hunting scenes in the opening chapter remind me of those I seen in a country houses over the years.

We meet our narrator as she is showing rich people around the art sights of Buenos Aires. This is one of those books that hasn’t any plot other than her describing her interactions with art and how others connect to the art she loves. this is one of those books you need your phone nearby to google the art she is talking about I hadn’t heard of Dreux a painter of wildlife scenes hunting scenes with Deer in the sport that many years ago we saw in most country inns. the `Candido Lopez, so the book goes on as she mixes art and literature in that way I WISH i could I have a visual memory I can recall most of the art I have seen and place in find=e detail, but when it comes to quotes IMy mind is a sea of jumble words with islands of pictures so I envied her as a narrator. The one artist I did know a little around is Mark Rothko an abstract painter that art you can fall into. So when she sees  A rothko on a hospital wall(an odd choice for hospital art imho), she makes a connection as her other half is ill.

The years of his greatest success, from 1949 to 1964, coincided with Rothko’s life unravelling: his marriage fell apart, his friends got as far away from him as they could, he drank just about anything he could get his hands on and became racked with hatred. He was on his way down, the spiral tight-ening. One stormy night, as he went to leave his apartment building, the porter told him to take care in the foul weather. To this Rothko said: ‘There’s only one thing I need to take car of : stopping the Black from swallowing the red”

How tru Rothko art is alway one I felt can overwhelm when  you see them!!

I loved this book it reminds me how much I miss art shows we used to have on tv I don’t go as often as I should to see the latest art shows not as much as I did a couple of decades ago when the art world was more covered, and I knew the artist names more then. I miss those days. This reminds me how much one can connect with great art and the power it can well up in a great writer here like Maira Gainza I know she has been compared to some English language writers Oliva Laing and Rachel cusk both of whom I have to read, although I recently brought a CUSK.  So for me as a blogger and reader, I can only reference a couple of her fellow Argentine writers. Firstly is Luis Sagasti, another book that deals with how we experience and deal with art, another book where the feeling and connections are more than the plot. Then we have the great Cesar Aira I wonder if they know each over give his book around his obbbsession with the magax=zine Art Forum which I think in his book is more an imagined concept of a magazine but he has a love of art as one of the other books deals with a famous painter.

Have you read this book or have you a favourite novel that blends art and literature

The Missing word by Concita De Gregorio

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The Missing Word by Concita De Gregorio

Italian Fiction

Original title -Mi sa che fuori è primavera

Translator – Clarissa Botsford

Source – Library

I love it when I go to the library and find a gem like this that had passed me by I even get sent the Europa Catalogue and I nit sure how this had passed me by when I looked at it in the library I was grabbed by the mention of Truman Capote’s in cold blood a book I think is maybe the best true crime book as it is the original in many ways. Also by the story behind the book. Concita De Gregorio is a successful Journalist and editor she has hosted an arts and culture show on tv as well. The book is based on the real-life disappearance of twins and she worked with her mother to write this novel of the mother’s story and the loss of her twins.

Dearest Nonna, I’m leaving for Patagonia with Luis next Sunday. We’re going whale watching. Trekking, climbing to the top of the mountains, walking deep into the woods, sitting at the ocean shore all make me feel happy. Minuscule and at peace. Luis makes me feel happy.I’ll introduce him to you one day, I’d love to. You’ll like him. He has eves that laugh and big hands. He can create silence when it’s needed, and then he chooses his words, picks them out, and stitches them together like embroidery. Did I tell you his job is to make cartoons for kids? They’re magical. Did I tell you what he did when I rejected him at first? He gave me an incredible gift, something straight out of a film. I need to look into your sky-blue eyes to tell you, though: I want to see your shy smile while I describe the scene. It’ll be wonderful.

She escapes to South America and writes to her Gran here

Now I consider myself to know snippets of the news from around Europe not everything but have an idea what is going on here and there. So I was surprised that this case and series of events had passed me The story is of the disappearance of Alessia and Livia two twins that had been on a weekend away with their father their parents had split but still lived in the same village. He had taken his daughters away for the weekend and had travelled to Corsica and then threw himself under a train the events of the few days before he is seen with the girls texted his ex-wife. Later he sends a postcard but then when he takes his life the children are nowhere to be seen and this is where the book starts it is Irina the mother of the twins story about how she copes after and is made up of her personal thoughts and letters with her grandmother. her writing to find out of the therapist he had seen but he won’t say anything to her. Then request the girl’s school work . Her journey to find herself after this earth-shattering event. She say late on she didn’t want any more children she is a mother and will always be a mother but she then said how few languages have a word for this happening a mother that has lost there children. This is a heartbreaking tale told with real beauty in the prose.

The missing word

Parents who lose children. Who don’t murder them but lose them. What are they called, how do you say it, who is someone whose child has died? What place do they occupy in history? Missing word, missing word, missing absent. Who eliminated it? When? From all the Italian, French, German, Spanish and English dictionaries. And why?

There is words in other languages Shakol in Hebrew, but I wonder why this word doesn’t exist !!

I am a fan of true-life movies it is one of the few films Amanda and I tend to both enjoy. This book is heart-wrenching but also shows how strong Irina was after all this had happened to her. She was thrust in the spotlight after this had happened and had to escape travel to find herself and meet people that didn’t know her as the mother of the twins. I liked the mixture of styles from personal narrative, list letters. I feel it works as a novel as she has maybe changed things a little. But it still has the power of what happened Irina copes with this event that could have pushed her over the edge and even in the end is a strong voice for the charity Missing Children  Switzerland. AS I said I don’t know how this passed me by as it is such an intense tale of what is a horrific act and aftermath. Have you read this book ?

Winston’s score +a just needs to be read such a powerful work from such a sad true life event.

Rombo by Esther Kinsky

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Rombo by Esther Kisky

German fiction

Original title – Rombo

Translator- Caroline Schimdt

Source – review copy

There is a few writers that I really really love, and Kinsky is one of them. She is one of those writers I think I love her shopping list because, you know, with her, it wouldn’t just be a shopping list. She is cut from the same writing style as Seabed and Kluge another two writers I adore. Ester Kinky lived in London for many years. She was married to the late German translator Martin Chalmers. The last book I read by her saw how she dealt with that grief. She is also a translator from English, Polish and Russian into German. She is the German translator of Olga Tokarczuk ( This has a feel of flights at times). She now lives in Berlin.

Among the boulders, pebbles and shards of glass washed milky and smooth are variously sized concrete fragments that stand tilted, defying the water in a different way than the leftover solid and stony things which gradually submit to the currents and learn to want to reach the sea. The concrete fragments are rigid and in-flexible, positioning themselves against any current.

They distinguish themselves from the meticulously smooth stones with implicit drawings and lines and veins of a different nature, and seek the edges, the banks, the coves set apart from the current, where they come into their own as wreckage, maintain their fragmented nature and remain witness: earthquake breakage, remains of house and farm and charge, things carted away that do not submit to anything new. A young addition to the old river: the earthquake rubble.

The way the enviroment his hit as hard as those that live there !

What she does here is take a slice and event the world-changing earthquakes 0f 1976 in the Friuli area of Northeast Italy. She takes apart the events through one village and seven of the people that lived in that village and she how their lives were ripped apart after the earthquake in May 1976 as we hear the memories of that event from seven people and how each of their worlds was ripped apart and how it affected their families and changed there lives alongside this there is how the earthquake had changed the world around the people and also a collection of found items photos of those who were just lost in the events the two earthquakes months apart left nearly a thousand dead but also changed the course of so many lives like the seven Silvia on holidays Toni remembering their car. Mara thought of how many kids her mother had given birth to. Lina remembered a neighbour’s laughs as out hit each recalls over the course of the book the events and the aftermath of it on them.

MARA
My mother gave birth to nine children. Three died, three went abroad and never returned. At first they wrote occasionally, or sent a photograph, but eventually even that stopped. My mother began forgetting early on. She forgot the soup on the stove and the goats in the shed and her basket on the field. But if one of us became sick, without a word she walked to a spot where some herb grew, to remedy the illness. And she always knew where to find her favourite flowers. Sometimes she sat outside on the bench and rocked back and forth, speaking with her children dead and disappeared. She was still able to remember their names, but not ours. Had she forgotten us? I’m not sure. Although I cared for her, I was no one to her – she called me and my remaining siblings by random names, never by our own. And later, when I had to lock her in her room, she would hit and scratch me. But her children who had disappeared, who had left – they were still with her. What does it mean to remember, what does it mean to forget?

Mara thinking  of her mother and her siblings

Kinsky is a writer in the vein of Seabald. More so, Alexander  Kluge, I’d say, as his work uses a patchwork of vignettes of memories of events. to recall and describe what happens, voices and facts mix together. These make books that have no straightforward linear narrative to them, but the work is more like a giant portrait of the event given 3d and even a fourth dimension of time, as a whole, does not form a picture of the events and as you move out from the reading you see the possibilities of those earthquakes but also the aftermath which is something you don’t often see mentioned is how people cope after the event and how it changes there lives. As the book firmly ties those seven lives to the environment they live in, and the environment of those remote mountains themselves are a character twisted and changed as much as those that live on them. A combination of the life of those seven before, during and after is drawn into the pattern of words that form her style. Have you read any books by Ester kinsky or Alexander Kluge using this vignette style?

Winstons score – `+ A  – Every book by her I have read is in the top books of the year and this is just the same.

The performance by Claudia Petrucci

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The Performance by Claudia Petrucci

Italian fiction

Original title – l’esercito

Source – Review copy

MY fourth book for this women in translation month sees us with another triangle like yesterday but this is a love triangle, Claudia Petrucci studied in Milan and then went to live in Perth in  Australia. Her short fiction and reportage have ranged from being realistic to experimental to science fiction. She has been published in a number of publications and has won a prize for being one of the best Italian writers under 30. This is her debut novel. Now this is a book I started last year then I put it on the side and never got back to it even thou I was enjoying it. I do love a great love triangle in a novel but this book has a darker edge to it.

Giorgia and I say goodbye to each other at the door and our last day branches off in separate directions.She lingers in the bathroom, and under the hot jet of the shower, stares at the little boy’s silhouette that appears in shadow beyond the glass. He is unusually quiet but always close by, and doesn’t leave her side; He clings to the sleeve of her bathrobe while she dries her hair. They go out together, there’s no seat on the tram, He sits on her lap.

Empty theaters carry the promise of infinite space.When the lights are off and the seats unoccupied, the dark rear depths dissolve, creating the illusion that they continue on. Giorgia likes to think that, if she wanted to, she could explore the theater for eternity, settle among the orchestra seats awaiting no one. Only when vacant, deprived of its function, does the theater show itself for what it really is an escape, an imaginary realm-and yet here, only here and nowhere else are they able to exist.

There is even her early in the book a sense of something !

The book has a usual story of a woman that had been close with one man and they had parted when she was young and she had settled down with another man and as she has done this her dreams and career had taken a back burner. So the woman in question Giorgia happens one day to bump into Mauro a man that had a flame for her and was in the theatre world she used to be in before she had settled down with her current lover Flippo and given up on her stage career. So when Mauro tries not to get her to come back on the stage and fans the flames of her hidden desire to get back on the stage we feel the book is going one way but when Gigia has some sort of mental health breakdown and is section and ends up in a clinic the two men life course is changed and now they have to try and help the woman they both love in the ways get back into the world after this massive breakdown. But as the two lovers try to help her get back into the world the lines between their love and controlling this fragile soul as it becomes about winning her back not but not her as a person

Mauro subjects me to a strict discipline. We enter the month of December with the days of the week organized by activities: he’s established a program that allows very few deviations. At set times- from seven to eight, Monday to Thursday, eleven to one on Saturdays I have to write. I start writing under his supervision, at his house, with him urging me on when I think I can’t do it. The first pages are full of just adjectives, some have scrawls that I myself can’t make out.

At first Mauro is satisfied, then he imposes a more methodical form on me, he makes me work at his computer. When I have moments of disillusionment, he tells me to focus on the exercise, he assures me that soon it will become an automatic action- from some point on, he says, the characters will begin to move independently, and in my case it will be a matter of choosing where to have Giorgia move, which memory to have her inhabit:

The way they treat her is just wrong out love but wrong.

It is hard to find books that deal with mental health breakdown and this is one such at its heart is a woman strong and loved but under all that is fragile should of a person with some obvious issues that maybe meant she was great at acting as it masked her own issues in the past but the thought of returning to the mask of the stage and the added pressure it brought was just enough to flick that switch we all have!! I deal with people in crisis as a job we help keep them in mind community ok may patients have learning disabilities but mental health challenges and when people breakdown it is always the same I loved the insight into her breakdown but also how the two men tried to mend her but they weren’t they wanted her to be what she was and that will never happen a powerful debut novel from a writer that is willing to look at the darker side of relationships after an event like this. Have you read any books that deal with mental breakdowns?

Winston’s score – A  – This book is a stunning insight into a love triangle collapsing and then the lines being redrawn.

Misunderstanding in Moscow by Simone de Beauvoir

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Misunderstanding in Moscow by Simone de Beauvoir

French lit

Original title Malentendu à Moscou

Translator – Terry Keefe

Source – personal copy

I was looking in my local Waterstones for a book for this month I have a lot at home but was trying to get some other choices and I saw this I had recently brought her lost novel that came out last year and the French writer and  Simone de Beauvoir is some I had only e=read second sex in my late teens so not is time to read some more of her writing and this rediscover novella that came out a decade ago in France did catch my eye especially as I had read a couple of Gorges Simone works that were set in the Soviet Union from around this time . I know there is a strong connection between France and Russia as many Russian went to live in France. de Beauvoir herself spent time in the USSR during the sixties.

‘Your nationalism won’t be easily dislodged,’ he con-tinued, as they came out of the church. ‘The gist of what you have just explained is that you are no longer a revolutionary country and that that’s fine

‘Not at all. We have had the revolution and it is not in question. But in France you don’t know what war is. We do. We don’t want it.”

Macha had spoken angrily and André, too, felt annoyed.

‘No one wants it. What I’m saying is that if you give America a free hand, if you don’t stop the escalation, that’s when America is to be feared. Munich prevented nothing at all.’

One of the many discussions I loved these.

This is the story of three people: a retired couple Nicole and Andre are heading to Moscow f0or their summer holidays  as they are seeing Andres’s first daughter from his first marriage Macha who is living in Moscow. I loved a quip they made they could tell she is in Moscow because of her very tight perm this felt like a very French observation of Macha. The three are looking forward to the time to gather but this is a couple that are set in their ways like a pair of old slippers the spark has gone so this leads them into long discussions of the world lot about the two worlds easy and west. Talked about in what are often described in the book as a dull place of grey rooms and boring hotels. As they talk like they are on the left bank discussing in that loud way one almost pictures DE Beauvoir and Satre not Nicole and Andre as they discuss the Soviet world and how it impacts the West ad to this is the three-way relationship between father and daughter and that with stepmother love but at times there are cracks.

André found the hotel that they stayed at in Leningrad charming. Long corridors and pearl-grey doors opening onto them, with oval panes at the top framed by old-fashioned festoons and hung with silk curtains, which were pink, green or blue according to which floor you were on.

In their room there was an alcove, hidden by a curtain, and endearing old furniture: a heavy desk of false marble, a black leather sofa, a table covered by a tablecloth with fringes. Chandeliers with crystal pendants lit up the dining room, where a young, semi-naked woman in marble was adjusting her dress with a naughty smile – or was she taking it off?

There is a dullness to the hotel very unappealing how it is described here.

This was unfinished in her lifetime and there is a sense of it being a little unpolished, The Moscow she describes is the one we had imagined great building but the modern life for the everyday muscovites as grey almost murky at times. This is story of family, politics and life in general and these are subjects de Beauvoir always wrote about for me the beauty of this coming out is to imagine that it in part of her and Satre as the couple the way they discuss the world and being a fly on the wall almost. it is a couple at that age where the spark has gone and you can see that but a deep love and connection is still there  As a reader, I sit on the fence with post-HUMOUS WORKS. I think if like this they still have merit in the writer’s canon which I feel this does it comes from her own experience in the Soviet Union of the time. It is 110 pages and is what one would call a film book as it can be read in a couple of hours. Have you read any books by Simone de Beauvoir or this one , what are your thoughts on post homes publishing of unfinished for nearly finished works ?

Winstons score – b an insight into a bygone place soviet Moscow !

Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap

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Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap

Austrian fiction

Original title – Engel Des Vergessens

Translator – Tess Lewis

Source – Personal Copy

I start this Woman in Translation month off with a book from the Austrian writer Maja Haderlap. She was born into a family from a part of Austria where hr family where historically Slovenian and they were the only people to Stand up to Hitler in Austria this book is a family history of one such family living there and how this standing up to the nazis has effect the ethnic Slovenians that live there. It was a prize-winning book when it came out in German winning one of the biggest book prizes the Ingeborg Bachmann prize. Her own grandmother was in a concentration camp and her father was tortured by Nazis and was in the Partisans during the WAR. he hated the way even post war he and other ethnic Slovenians had been treated post-war.

GRANDMOTHER has her own understanding with nature She believes the fields and forests must be propitiated, not adorned with verses. A poem means nothing to nature, she says, we must always be humble before it. In the attic, she has gathered willow branches that she pulls from the palm bundles blessed in church every year on Palm Sunday. She makes small crosses from the willow branches, crosses we bring out to the fields in spring and stick in the ploughed earth to keep the potato fields fertile and the wheat plentiful. When a thunderstorm is brewing, she places pieces of willow on glowing embers and carries them through the house in a cast iron skillet. The bitter smoke is meant to clear the air and appease the atmospheric forces. You must carry your belief in God in your heart, Grandmother says, it’s not enough to put it on show in church. You can’t rely on the Church, according to her, the Church cannot be trusted.

I loved her grandmother she just jumped of the page

It is hard not to see this as part of this novel as auto fiction as the little girl the main narrator of the book who is growing up in post-war 60s and 70S Austria is about the age the writer would have been at the time. The grandmother and Mother are linked back to the dark day of the war years and the suffering these pheasant Slovene farmers had suffered for standing up and still do it shows how the shadow of the dark past is still there in everyday life . The way the Austrians talk around the ETHNIC Slovenians. But it is also a book about growing up on a farm and the connection a young girl can have to the creatures around her from a cow she loved that lost a calf to the horses. Her father is a man we see smoking but a man that has been broken by what happened to him in the war. The past and the inner conflicts that cause within the family the grandmother’s hours during the war Father’s sorrow and grief add to that a  mother who is often missing in the little girl’s eyes. This is a young girl; trying to make her way and seeing how her family had suffered and still are the way others talk about them as a group this is a picturesque forest and farming area but behind the natural beauty, there is some real evil still there.

When I arrive, Father is usually sitting at the end of the kitchen table with a bottle of beer in his hand. And presides near the stove on which she keeps her children’s dinner warm. As soon as I enter the kitchen, I start to examine her face and hands for scars. She was able to hide behind the stove, And says, but her little brother, who was in her arms, was shot.
On the front of the house is a marble plaque with the names of the children, the parents, and grandparents, engraved and gold-plated.
Father says he could never live in a house where he’d be reminded of the dead every day, several times a day, every time he went in or out.

I was so touched by her father and the ghost of the past here

This is one of those books that walk the line between Memoir and fiction yes it is easy to see them as her family but they are any family in those villages in the Carthinia region of Austria that were Ethnically Slovenian. This is also a universal story from the Marsh Arabs in Iraq to the Kosovian Albanians. I was reminded so much of a good friend I had working in a factory in Germany he was an Albanian from Kosovo who at the time was part of Serbias and like the girl they were classed as some sort of second-class citizens because of who they were and this is the same here the scar of the war is running deep in the locals and what they had done in standing up and the way they as a people are discussed is still the same as in the war the shadow of those acts are still there even twenty years after.I can see why this win a couple of prizes it shines a torch on a subject that few people other than those growing hip there and maybe those in Austria know about. The child narrator mixes growing up under this shadow but also the beauty of the land and the animals around them on the farm. Heidi mixed with a classic slice of war history. Have you read this book or any books on a similar theme ?