Stu the readers 10 for 2025

~ winstonsdad ~ 7 Comments

I have picked ten books that have stuck with me as we near the end of the year. I won’t be doing another review, a mix of old and new titles in no particular order.

Gifted by Suzumi Suzuki

Image

A look at the darker side of Japanese life through the crystal of a mother-daughter relationship was part of my Japanese reading in January, and I felt this would been on the Booker international list. I like the autofiction feel mof it and to get a female perspectibve of the same streets Murakami used to write about.

2 Solenoid Mircea Cǎrtǎescu

Image

This Labyrinth of a novel, with its twists and turns, the grim reality of communist-era Romania, and often surreal side stories, is a book I put off reviewing, not feeling worthy of it, and still don’t. But I like a challenging book, this is one I look forward to reading, Blinding at some point. if you are a fan of Pynchon or Nadas, you should try this

3. Celebration by Damir Karakaš

Image

Now, there were two books I read from the Balkans that hit me hard, this interlocking collection of stories from Croatia from the 1920s through to the end of World War II, following one man’s Journey into Fascism. This is one for fans of short fiction that hit the reader like a tequila shot

4. The Palm Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola

Image

The oldest book on this list reminds me I need to read more Books from around the various countries in Africa. This classic mix of tribal myths with a man’s hunt for a new person to make his palm wine. This appeals to people wanting to read one of the first writers to be published from Nigeria, and people who like slightly surreal stories

5. In Late Summer by Magdalena Blažević

Image

I said two books from the Balkans had hit me hard this year. This Bosnian book follows a little girl from her peaceful Valley and a rural existence, to the horror of war, and memories of the summer mix with the violence that unfolds. I remember the Balkan war and working alongside a Couple of people who had escaped the violence. If you like a story that mixes rural beauty and the horror of war, this is for you

6. The river by  Laura Vinogradova

Image

Open letter did a tryptich of books from Latvia; all of them could have been on this list, but it was this tale of a daughter finding out about a father she didn’t know, who had stuck with me. If you are a fan of books that slowly unfurl as the daughter learns more about her father, whom she never knew, then you will love this.

7. Attila by Javier Serena

Image

Another from Open Letter Books: this is a pair of books released under the same title. This book is called Attilia and is about the man who wrote the other book of the same title, Alioscha Coll, that captures this man’s life as he quits being a doctor to write and descends into his own world of books and literature in Paris. This is the sort of Anti of Human Bondage, another write, ar century apart, but both struggling to write and on the edge of madness one falls down the hole the other doesn’t |!

8. Just a little dinner by CécileTlili

Image

I haven’t put any of the Booker International books on this list. But for me, this book is betterthan one of the longlist books. Perfection, for me, captures the ins and outs of the modern world and life so well in a dinner party and in its fallout. An Abigails party of the 21st century in Paris

9. The Splendor of Portugal by António Lobo Antunes

Image

I think I have had an Antunes in my end-of-year list when I have read a book by him. This one, like his other books, deals with the dark colonial past of his Homeland in Africa, and, more than the others I have read by him, it also looks at the wider conflicts of the era in southern Africa through the prism of one family. If you like Faulkner, you will like Atunes.

10. Sad tiger by Neige Sinno

Image

This brutal piece of auto fiction covers the years she spent with her stepfather, who sexually abused her, but the man himsellf remind me of my stepfather, a brooding man like this man that casts a shadow over a family. For fans of Annie Ernaux or Édouard Louis

Bonus book: The Ship by Hans Henny Jahn

Image

A difficult book about a couple who are on the girlfriend’s father’s ships as they sail with a mysterious cargo, and the boat is almost a living thing in this quirky, unusual piece of German fiction of a vessel that seems to grow over time and a constant feeling of unease as you read the book. Fans of weird fantasy that should be better known

 

 

Loooking forward a state of the blog and 2026 Plans

~ winstonsdad ~ 20 Comments

I have decided to draw a line under the reviews for this year. I just ran out of steam the last month. Part of me is thinking I am actually so excited about next year on the blog and just wanting to say fuck off to 2025, as the queen once said it has been my Annus Horribilis with Amandas heartattack and the changes that have brought to our lives. But I have also felt lost as a reader over the last six months. I think there is so much noise these days that I have felt like I have been doomscrolling for the last while, and my concentration is a lot less than it used to be, and this has impacted my love of reading, I feel. Simon Savidge talks a lot about what he reads. I never used to get it, but now I do. The noise of the book world is louder, but also, for me, feels like a massive cave now where I interact very little with folks. One-to-many pointing out grammatical errors makes me question every tweet these days, so I end up making more errors. (I SPOT my own mistakes so often, but i am used to them, so just forget them )I do wonder how these folks who, over the years, would cope with grammar in my brain, which is full of noise and constant overthinking, and just a lack of self-belief. This has even started to impact me, as I think about why this noise is constantly in my head. So this last month I have turned to Chat gpt to firstly try and work out a few thiunbgs like a weekly routine to blog too which from the new year i will be doing I used to do my weekly planner religously as I need to know how my week looks or it ends up being me just sat watch old crimefilms and you tube and ragin at the state of the country Mr Trump and just so many other things.The impact of what happened to my beloved has had a ripple effect and made me want to kick-start the blog and celebrate my love of reading

Don’t get me started on book creators and having to pay to join folks’ book clubs. So the first part of next year will be building the routine back up. I have a new hourly planner. Then I have set up a Discord, which, if folks want to join, is a place to chat about books, similar to how we did back in the Twitter days. NBo book club, no paying for this and that. I have a blog that has reviewed over 120 countries. I have a depth of reviews I feel is a real achievement. But as I have heard say, there is no standing still; time moves on constantly. I have flirted with the idea of YouTube for the last couple of years,s but I  can’t see myself ever doing it. The blog is where my passion lies: improving as a writer and reader, constantly moving forward, discovering new countries, and continuously adding depth to the places I have read from, building the ultimate world canon. Still, to do this, I need to try and read a little more, get back to a blogging routine, and figure out how to do that well. One of my all-time favourite books about reading is Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, where Nina Sankovich read a book a day after the death of her sister. I know point blank I can’t read a book a day, just beyond me. I averaged 120 books a year and reviewed between 90 and 100 on average. So my plan is to read between 180 and 200 books next year to get off doomscrolling and kick-start my blogging.I said that before but I think it is a loss of routine and the noise of the world these days I love turn the clock back ten year or so but I can’t

I want to play with review styles over the year, try longer posts, shorter posts, different ways of putting over many voices, which I feel I have not so much held back but lost confidence in. Maybe I thought I met people. I am very overenthusiastic about books. In hindsight, this is my neurodivergent mind, which is also the reason I lack confidence in my voice at times, as I am from a generation where being neurodivergent wasn’t picked up on as much. So if you want the Discord, let me know. Another thing I will be doing is trying to tie the blog in with my Instagram and use both more in sync. I will be doing the Japanese literature challenge, then my Hungarian Lit month in February, which I am really looking forward to. I am also swapping the image of Winston slowly to me well a ai painted image of me on the blog and elsewhere and using the name Stu the reader just in case you have seen me and think it is someone else

Image

I am being ambitious next year, but I just want a routine back to the blog when I post what I read and get them in sync, and also be a better member of the blogging community. A lot, but as I said, I have been using the last few weeks as planning for next year and setting things up with plans and also getting things like books for next month, sort of, the new planner, a new guide for how I want to review, sorting a Discord. The latest image on the avitars all building for 2026 and project 200. What are your plans for 2026 ?

The Shipyard by Juan Carlos Onetti

~ winstonsdad ~ 10 Comments

Image

The Shipyard by Juan Carlos Onetti

Uruguayan fiction

Original title –El astillero

Translator – Nick Caistor

Source – Personal copy

I haven’t focused this year much on Latin American fiction as I have in other years. But I had read this book a few months ago. I have wanted to read Onetti for a while, a high school dropout who worked for a newspaper after he published his first novel. He was a friend of the Argentine writer Robert Arlt, a writer I need to get to next year. Onetti was also imprisoned for six months, but a campaign was held by a number of the leading Latin American writers of the day, Marquez, Lhosa and Benedetti. After this, he relocated and spent the rest of his life in Spain.

Larsen again gauged the hostility and mockery on the immobile faces of the two waiting men. To challenge and repay hatred might give his life a meaning, a habit, some pleasure; almost anything would be better than this roof with its leaky sheet iron, these dusty, lopsided desks, the heaps of files and folders stacked against the walls, the thorny vines winding themselves round the iron bars of the gaping window, the exasperating, hysterical farce of work, enterprise, and prosperity that the furniture spoke of (though now it was vanquished by use and moths, rushing towards its destiny as firewood); the documents made filthy by rain, sun and footprints, the rolls of blueprints stacked in pyramids all torn and tattered on the walls.

Further on the despaier is there a little more

The book is set in the fictional town of Santa Maria, a setting where Onetti set much of his fiction. The book follows a man returning to the city after five years in Exile, brought back to try and get the failing shipyard back into action. The man, Larsen, heads into the yard full of ideas. Still, as he works through the yard and the blueprints of old ships and past glories, there is a deep sense of how this is a place that has gone beyond the point of no return. The decay of an industrial place can be as fast as the lack of work and bleakness is caught in the various other people we glimpse in the book.As we see how this all hits Larsen

So Larsen was already under the spell, his fate decided, when he went into Belgrano’s the next day to have lunch with Galvez and Kunz. It was never entirely clear whether he chose to head the monthly wages list with five or six thousand pesos. In fact, his choice of one or the other figure could only have mattered to Galvez, who typed out several copies on the 25th of each month, stopping every now and then to furiously rub his bald patch. Every 25th of the month, he once again discovered, was forced to recognise, the repeated, permanent absurdity he was in the grip of. This realisation made him break off, stand up, and pace about the huge deserted office, hands behind his back, his brown scarf wrapped round his neck, pausing at the drawing board where Kunz was always ready with his hollow, silent, exasperated laugh.

I loved the style of this book. I was reminded of the Hilbig books. Similar to his book, there is a sense of a place on the edge of decay, a man with a hopeless task, which brought back memories of the main character in Dino Buzzati’s Tartar Steppe. On a personal front, I was reminded of a friend of my father who was in charge of a shipyard in the Tyne, which, like here, was in steep decline. How hard ot can be to turn back an operation like a shipyard when the decay is already there. What remains all these weeks after is how futile Larsen’s job is and the despair that it can bring to one man. Have you read this book or any others by Onetti? If so, which one to try next?

For Fans of –

Wolfgang Hilbig, I have reviewed two books by him

Also, The Tartar Steppes by Dino Buzzati

 

Sad Tiger by Niege Sinno

~ winstonsdad ~ 1 Comment

Image

Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno

French Memoir

Original title –Triste Tigre

Translator – Natasha Lehrer

Source – Personal copy

I’m not sure why I hadn’t got to this book sooner. I usually keep an eye out for books that have won the major book prizes across Europe as a guide to those that, at some point, we may see in English. Winning one of the various prizes associated with the Prix Goncourt usually means the book will reach us in English, so this book has won not just the Goncourt for books read by high school pupils; it still amazes me what great books have won that prize, and it also won a woman’s book prize in France. The book uses the writer’s own experiences from the age of 7 to 14, when she was repeatedly raped by her stepfather.

You like that? Yes, yes you do, you really like it.

The title is Lolita but Lolita herself is almost entirely absent. You see her through the filter of her predator’s gaze, and she almost never exists as herself; she is the perfect fantasy figure, the nymphet incarnate. At last, at the end of the book, Humbert the dreamer recognizes this. As he sits in the car he has deliberately driven off the road, waiting for the police to pick him up, he has a final epiphany. He recalls the morning when he was driving around the country trying to find the teenage runaway. Lost on a mountain road, he stopped the car. Looking down from the hill to a small town below, sounds floated up toward him like a choir: I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolitas absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.

Lolita and her own life shows the darker side of that book

But in writing this book, she wanted it to be more than a book about the rapes. That’s when she was just seven and carried on until her mid-teens, all in a cottage that the family were doing up in the Basque Country.  But what we get is a book that shows the impact of these events on her from her youth through her life. The abuse suffered over those years from her stepfather, a man who loved the music of French rock star  Hailday and played it loudly. I could picture this hippy rocker it brought chills of my own stepfather a man that still had a fifties style rocker hair and would even as I write this sends a shiver down my spine not that I was sexually abused but over the years after my mum has died, I see the sheer mental and trauma he has caused both me my brother and in a lot of ways my mother by his personality and ability to gaskight us all anyway. I was connected to her life and to those men who slowly or violently tear apart lives . How lives get put back together and how books connect us to both our past and to think about how it is a prism to view the past, and here we see the rapes as a child and the impact on her. The book is part literary criticism, part cleansing, part sheer horror.

I remember places. The first place, a bedroom in dark-ness. I am woken by hands on me. Then his voice, when I open my eyes he is speaking in a low voice, he doesn’t stop talking. I don’t want to wake my sister asleep in bed beside me. I was seven when we lived in that apartment. I didn’t understand what was happening, but from the first moment, I sensed it was something serious and terrible. He was talking like a tamer speaks to a gentle but wild horse, one that needs to be held to keep it from getting away. He was talking as if nothing in all this should scare me, and if I was scared it was fine, he was there, he would help me get over my fear. But he, too, was afraid, and the fear enveloped us like a layer of night.

Virginia Woolf, who was abused by her two half-brothers, describes the bizarre experience of those first pawing caresses in an autobiographical piece in which she is trying to find a relationship between her old memories and the way her still-developing personality was being formed: … as I sat there, he began to explore my body. I can remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes; going firmly steadily lower and lower. I remember how I hoped that he would stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand touched my private parts.

THE first time he touched her  and how similar events effect Virginia Woolf

I read this book in nearly one sitting. The book has an almost-thriller feel and a non-linear way of describing her life, but it is so compelling that you hang on. Every word on the way she talks about the events but also the way she wants this book to be more than just that, as i say it is about the books she loves the title is a nod to the poem of William Blake elsewhere, Lolita is mention her mothers grief for a lost boyfriend that in some way blind her to the events that happened. THE book has other little events though her life, like how she got her name and how unusual it was at the time when most names had tpo be from an approved list of names in France. The book will appeal to fans of the autofiction of Ernaux and Louis. Still, for me, it has something more in common with writers like Kluge and Ester Kinsky, especially in its non-linear, polyphonic narrative style at times. Plus, it is a book I guarantee you won’t want to put down, which sounds so wrong given the subject matter, but it is so well written !!

Have you had a book that has hit you for six, so to speak ?

Advent by Gunnar Gunnarsson

~ winstonsdad ~ 9 Comments

Image

Advent by Gunnar Gunnarsson

Icelandic fiction

Original title – Advent

Translator – Philip Roughton

Source – Personal copy

I saw this on a YouTube video a while ago. It was mentioned it was a novella, and with the Christmas theme, it seemed great as it is Advent time. The book is by an Icelandic writer who wrote more in Danish than Icelandic. Back then, when he was writing, this meant his writing had spread to the Nordic countries and Germany. He was up for the Nobel Prize many times. In fact, when Haldor Laxness won, there was a brief time it was considered that Gunnarsson could have shared the prize with him. So it is great to see a new translation of a book that was first published in English in the 40s.It also had an afterword by the great Jon Kalman Stefansson, one of my favourite all-time writers.

Benedikt sniffed the hay, lifted the sack: You thought more about Eitill’s belly than my old back when you filled this!

The farmer chuckled, and as they went in, he pinched the candle’s wick between two fingers. It’s most merciful to a candle not to allow it to languish uselessly, but rather, to revive it on occasion to a life of service – and this, of course, is most thrifty as well.

They went to the family room and there met the housewife and group of children, and the Benedikt who was a guest in the house had food set for him on a table leaf under the gable window: smoked meat straight out of the pot with potatoes in white sauce – good food for cold days, real Christmas food.

As he sets off getting ready

Advent takes us to the dark, cold winters of Iceland and a yearly activity that is done by a shepherd, Benedikt, for the last 27 years, he has headed up to the distant fields with the sheep. Had fed on during the summer to fetch back the last few that have got stranded and cut off there. He does this with his trust dog Leo and a ram called Etill (which made me smile, it brought back memories of a story of a family friend in Ireland that adopted a lamb that grew and thought it was a house pet, like a dog). This was how I imagined the ram part of the sheepdog. What we follow is this journey he has done many a year with his backpack supplies as they head from bothy to bothy in search of those last sheep. That is it, but the beauty is in the atmosphere.

Now the stray sheep in the mountains would surely be buried in snow, covered over by a snowy winter blanket before he could find them and bring them home. Because you really couldn’t hope that they would have the sense to seek the heights – the heights, where the wind blew hardest, but which were their only salvation when earth and sky stand as one. When wildness rages, you hardly dare hope.

And if they had indeed headed to the heights, they may just as well have frozen to death! But now he wanted to sleep. Or just lie there alone. A person shouldn’t share his anxieties with others. Everyone has enough of their own.

And now they slept in the farmhouse’s small family room, where heath and mountains met.

And outside, the storm raged, raged and razed; many a storm raged around the world, many things happened. For this was just a small recess of the world. Here, practically only the sky raged;

winter is hitting hard will he find the sheep !

I don’t have an adult Christmas book. One of the reasons I picked this is to add to the few things I like this time of year. I love the box of delights, I will flick through and every. A few years ago, I read through this Christmas kids’ book. Another go to is Conna Doyles tale The Blue Carbuncle A holmes story. Now I will be adding this to my winter reads, a tale that brings you to this yearly Advent adventure of fetching the lost sheep. It isn’t the journey so much as the way Gunnarsson builds the atmosphere; the three face the biting winds, snow, and the depths of the Icelandic winter. The country and weather is almost the fourth character in the book.  The snow almost falls off the page; you nearly need mittens to hold the pages as you read !! It is about existence and nature and so ,uch more as we see in Steffansson after word.If you have read him, you’ll like this short novella, and if you haven’t read him yet, what great writers have you yet to discover! Do you have a favourite Christmas tale?

Nearly the end of 2025 the November round up

~ winstonsdad ~ 3 Comments
  1. Blue Night by Simone Buchholz
  2. War Diary by Ingeborg Bachmann
  3. war primer by Alexander Kluge
  4. The cafe with no name by Robert Seethaler 
  5. The other girl by Annie Ernaux
  6. Everytime we say goodbye by Ivana Sajko
  7. Lotte in Weimar by Thomas Mann 
  8. Headbirths or The Germans are Dying Out by Gunter Grass
  9. The Wax Child by Olga Ravn 

I managed nine reviews last month. The first three books saw me revisiting a Detective in Hamburg, then a slim work around the war from a great writer at the start of his career. Then a work from a writer around another war at the end of a very long Career. See a trio of German writers. Then we headed to Austria for a Cafe in the corner of a market in Vienna. A book about a gfhost sister from a Nobel winner. A man on a train tries to forget all he has seen and just drifts off into Berlin. Then a famous Character from Goethe reconnects with him many years later, after their lives went in different directions. Günter Grass has a look at his homeland via a couple in Asia in the late 1970s. Then a wax doll narrates a witch hunt in 17th-century Denmark.

Book of the month

Image

The Other girl by Annie Ernaux

I read this on a hard day, and it reminded me what an escape a book can be and what a great writer Annie Eernaux as she again takes apart her own families past in a short book about a sister she never knew.

Non-book things life in general

I had a tough time when Amanda had her stents done at the start of the month. I always struggle when the clocks. Go back. I love long summer night. So, with that, and a bad cold for me in the last week as the weather turned a little colder, which always seems to spark a sore throat and runny nose. But that has passed, and I have taken a few days and will not post a review until Monday now. Other than that, my TV watching has been what I would call comfort food, as I have watched the Aurora Teagarden Mysteries; in fact, I still have a few to watch. These hallmark mysteries are easy to watch and have helped me chill recently. I returned to work in the middle of the month, as I had been off since Amanda’s heart attack, so life is slowly getting there. I now take our days one day at a time. Thankful to have my darling wife still there. A bright spot today was the Record Store Day releases. I treated myself to some records

Image

 

First off, a 10-inch from The Nationals, Mett Berninger, with four tracks from his last Album, live. I have his Album as well as most of The Nationals’ records. The second is a collection of tracks by Wilco and Jeff Tweedy from the last 15 years, all released on dBpm. A collection of rarties.I am a huge Wilco fan and Tweedy as well I recently got his new triple album.

Image

Next, some very early Talking Heads sessions. I was late to Talking Heads, maybe getting into them in the mid-90s, but they made some outstanding records, and it’s interesting to hear how different this early stuff was. Then a live set from 1994 by Carter USM, a pop-punk band that had a great turn in its lyrics, with a lot of clever wordplay and good social commentary at the time. In fact, they could do with coming back. I wonder what titles they come up with for their songs now.

Next month

I needed to clear a backlog of books read, awaiting review, which currently stands at 7 books. I am slowly working through Tom’s Crossing, and I am in no hurry to finish this book, so don’t expect a review until next year. To supplement that, I have several shorter books I want to read before the end of the year, but I have no list or order for them. They are on my trolley downstairs, and a few are here in my reading room, so we will see what I get too. What are your plans to round off 2025?

Sorry I’m taking things slow

~ winstonsdad ~ 6 Comments

As ever I press on a post saying I’ll stop blogging and within mins I remember the things I love be honest I just need to slow down a bit and get back into enjoying reading again as I’m a bit out of love with it at the moment

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn

~ winstonsdad ~ 4 Comments

Image

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn

Danish fiction

Original title – Voksbarnet

Translator – Martin Aitken

Source -Personal copy

The blog has shrunk so much it means I buy a lot more books than I used to in fact in a way. I hated asking for books and only got sent books from people who just sent them to me or asked me. I always hated asking and rarely do now. Hebnce in recent time a lot of the books I read are books i buy which means on the whole they are books I want to read or books I want give the writer another chance the larter is the case with this I think when we read the employees for theshadow booker international a few years ago . I was’t the biggest fan of employees. I like some of the prose style and the way you could capture even in the translationwho seemed to be human and who was artifical in fact in the few years since the book it is maybe more apt as a story with the jump in ai or thou I still find the use of the word AI isn’t right it is still just complex algorthims and compiled information worked together is that thought I think not but that is just me anyway I am drifting. The reason this appealed to me is the fact that I love old witch tales from the witch trials in the US, to women buried under stones on beaches in Scotland, through things like the Pendle witches. There was something mad about this time in the world. So when  I found out Olga Ravn had looked into the case of Christenze Ktuckow and came up with this novel

Whenever a woman nearby was about to give birth, a messenger would make haste to the midwife and whoever else the pregnant woman had asked to help.

All let go then of whatever was in their hands, and came as quickly as they could. Some in the night, others in the frost of morning; with fleetness of foot they came, and barely inside the door would take upon them the housekeeping. They would introduce a new and temporary regime, which meant that those who normally frequented the house would have to find new places to stay. I saw these women form a ring around the one in labour and lead her to the bath house. I saw them douse the burning-hot rocks with water; I saw the steam and the scalding herbs. They undressed the birthing woman, and the naked one was Anne Bille, the young mistress of Nakkebølle. And by the stone wall of the bath house they had placed me in the ground, and I lay and listened there as Anne Bille gave birth to the first of her children.

because she didn’t want a child she was considered dangerous

The novel has a narrator that isn’t human, a lump of beeswax in the form of a human child. That Chistenze had made and carried around. Add to that she seemed to have no interest in the local men or settling down, and married, this was enough in the 17th century for her to be considered a witch. What this is about is fear and prejudice, as Christenze and her friends are seen as outsiders for their views. Added to this, about the time she makes the doll, A lot of strange shit happens. We have what always happens. She tries to escape to the city, but this makes things worse. But it is also about a woman in love with other women at a time that was a totally unthinkable idea. But this could be set to any modern situation, being Trans, being an immigrant, just not fitting in. What she has done is wonderful: she has made a tale set in the past that shows us now what is so wrong. It is also told in a broken style of crumbs and fragments, often with very visceral words.

I saw in the night cats leave the church in droves, I saw them conduct themselves with swine in the street, and I saw the gravedigger in the churchyard puff on a cabbage pipe; I saw in a single vision the town’s fleas in all their thousands, I saw blood in small and large quantities, I saw barley porridge and the insipid salt herring. I saw funeral pyres and body parts displayed on the square as a deterrent. I saw money change hands and land be par-celled out, I saw humans bought and sold, lace underneath a skirt. I saw brother turn against brother, and mother against daughter. I saw hearts thirst for revenge and hands that craved for violence. This was not Nakke-bølle, it was not even Funen; shudders ran even through my hardy wax, this was Aalborg, 1616, city of hate.

there is just a beauty in her writing style here and Aitkens translation of it

This is a book remarkable for this time of year, a sort of neo horror with a lot of folklore and fear dropped in. It has a very fragmentary structure to it. But it also has a dark ending of what happens to these women. This is an accurate tale. This happened, and this is what grabbed me: one of my favourite albums is Giles Gorey, a farmer who was killed in Salem, famous for his last word More weight as he was crushed between two boards. What these tales show that then it was being a witch that got people killed. Being Gay would get you killed through time. Now, just wanting to find a better life will get you killed. We live in a time where witch hunts still happen, but we don’t call them witch hunts. Group Panic and fear, we think the dark ages have gone, we are heading headlong back into them !!! Anyway, if you want a thought-provoking and different book about one woman’s life told from a wax doll she made herself, this is the book for you. Safe say I am now more of a fan of Ravn;’s books. Have you read this ?

 

 

 

Headbirths or The Germans are Dying Out by Gunter Grass

~ winstonsdad ~ 5 Comments

Image

Headbirths or The Germans are Dying Out by Gunter Grass

German fiction

Original title – Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus

Translator – Ralph Manheim

Source – Personal Copy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The thinking about what may fall Germany in the future

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

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

Make a note in Your Diary for Hungarian Lit month Feb 2026

~ winstonsdad ~ 17 Comments

Image

A couple of years ago, I did a Czech Lit month that was a success. I had thought of doing that again next year, but with the recent Nobel Prize win by László Krasznahorkai, I realised I hadn’t read enough books from Hungary this year; a mere 17 is a poor showing. Especially when I had a look at the list of Hungarian writers on Wikipedia. To find the depth of books that have come from Hungary over the years. I have the recent Peter Nadas memoir, Shimmering, on my TBR, along with two books by Andrea Tompa, Home and Omerta, plus a few books from Krasznahorakai to read and review. A real resource for this month is the Hungarian literature online. There are two good publishers bringing books out from Hungary, the first is Seagull Books, which has a Hungarian list edited by Krasznahorkai translator Ottilie Mulzet . Then, a publisher that has brought some lost gems to light is Contra Mundum Press. But there are also books from the likes of Pushkin Press, NYRB, and gems scattered through other publishers. I am planning to read shimmering details and the two Tompa books, and I hope to get a few other books from Seagull and Contra Mundum books I have my eye on the two vols of Prae. Do you have a favourite book from Hungary or a writer?

Image

Image

Lotte in Weimar by Thomas Mann

~ winstonsdad ~ 4 Comments

Image

Lotte in Weimar by Thomas Mann

German Fiction

Original title – Lotte in Weimar

Translator H T Lowe-Poter

Source – Library book

I move into the week of doing work from Thomas Mann, and I have only read a few books from Mann over the years, and this is the first one I will have on the blog. I am awaiting the two new translations of Magic Mountain due out next year. So I checked the library system and found two books. As I say, I know very little about Man and other than he spoke out about the Nazis, and he won the Nobel prize. I did read the book by Britta Bôhler about when Thomas Mann made his decision to denounce the Nazis regime a book worth reading. I am planning to read the two new translations of The Magic Mountain later next year. It is rare to get two new translations of such a great book in a couple of years.

Never in all my life, I confess it, has it been my privilege to perform a service so near to my heart as today’s, so worthy to be set down and enshrined in the tables of my memory. I knew, indeed, without knowing, as a man will, that the admired female, the original of that immortally lovely creature, still dwelt amongst us – in the city of Hannover, to be precise. Ah, yes, I knew, but only now am I aware that I knew. For my knowledge had no reality here-tofore; never would it have entered my head that I might one day stand in her sacred presence, face to face. Never could I have dreamt of such a thing. When this morning – but a few short hours since – I awoke, it was in the conviction that today was like a hundred others, to be filled with the wonted activities of my calling: waiting at table, keeping my eye over the house. My wife – for I am married, Frau Councillor, my life-partner occupies a superior post in the kitchens of the establishment – my wife would tell you that I had no presen-timent of anything out of the ordinary.

She comes from Hanover to see him

 

Any, he pays homage, it’s Homage I’m not sure, but he goes back to the remarkable life of the German writer Goethe and imagines the inspiration for one of his main characters in the Sorrows of Young Werther. Charlotte Keshtner, the woman who had a relationship with Goethe forty years earlier, is returning to Weimar to meet him, now an admired man. She is of course now the lotte of the story and this is what drives the book the reunion of ther two and how those around Weimar in his circle take to her returing to confront him a little avbout how she had come off in the book. The sparks that fly when old loves meet after forty years. How time makes people different. This is a book that has a lot of the chatting between the two, how they have changed over time, and how he is viewed as a figure in Weimar at the time.

‘That one that says: “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.” We are here, dearest lady, once more arrived at the subject of tyranny. Not a harsh tyranny, but a natural one, probably inseparable from a certain dominating greatness; one does well to condone and respect it, while not actually yielding to its behests. He is great, and old, and little inclined to value what comes after him. But life goes on, it does not stop even at the greatest, and we are children of the new life, we Muselines and Julemuses, a new stock, not at all sentimental nanny-goats. We are independent and progressive minds, with the courage of the new times and new tastes.

Already we have found and love new gods: painters like the good Cornelius, and Overbeck – I have heard the master say he would like to fire a pistol at his pictures – and the heavenly David Caspar Friedrich, of whom Goethe says he might just as well look at his paintings upside down. “It should not be allowed!” he thunders. Real Jovian thunder, of course; we in our Muses’ Circle just let it rumble away – in all respect, of course, while we copy down Uhland’s verses in our poetry note-books and enchant ourselves with reading aloud the splendid grotesque tales of Hoffmann?

“I do not know these authors, Charlotte said soberly. “You do not mean to say that with all their grotesquerie they can rival the works of the author of Werther?

As I said there is a lot of talking about Art and Life

This is a book about art and what art does. Charlotte is forever held in the book, but her and Goethe’s lives have taken very different paths, and this reunion is what happens when your life has been captured in a book and the fallout of that. But it is also a book about how big Goethe was and how his books shaped lives and the world around him. He is a writer I need to read more of I think this maybe isn’t the best intro to Mann it is very conversationheavy book it is a thoughtful book about a wreiter and the art that surrounds a writer. But also about how lives cross at specific points and then, a year later, meet again, and how their lives can be different in so many ways. I am planning to read more of Mann over the next few years. As I always say, I need to add a lot of depth to the classic writers from around the world. Have you read Mann ?

Every time we say Goodbye by Ivana Sajko

~ winstonsdad ~ 2 Comments

Image

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 other girl by Annie Ernaux

~ winstonsdad ~ 2 Comments

Image

The Other Girl by Annie Ernaux

French memoir

Original title – L’Autre Fille

Translator – Alison L. Strayer

Source – Personal copy

I always talk about how it is like returning to a piece of gossip or a great story from an old friend, reading a book by Annie Ernaux. This will be the eighth book I have reviewed on the blog. The first was in 2014, back before Fitzcarraldo and before the Nobel win. Anyway, when this fell onto the doormat at Winston Towers, it was short enough for me to just read it that day, which I did, in fact, read twice over two days. As ever, she opens up about her life. In fact, this isn’t just her life; it is a corner of her parents’ life and a secret they thought she had never known about the other girl, the earlier daughter they had before her.

It is a sepia photo, oval-shaped, glued inside a yellowed cardboard folder, showing a baby posed in three-quarter profile on a heap of scalloped cushions. The infant wears an embroidered nightdress with a single, wide strap to which a large bow is attached, just behind the shoulder, like a big flower or the wings of a giant butterfly. The body is long and not very fleshy. The legs are parted and stretch out towards the edge of the table. Under the brown hair, swept up in a big curl over the protuberant forehead, the eyes are wide and staring with an almost devouring inten-sity. The arms, open like those of a baby doll, seem to be flailing, as if the child were about to leap from the table.

Below the photo, the signature of the photographer (M.

Ridel, Lillebonne), whose intertwined initials also appear in the upper left-hand corner of the front cover, which is heavily soiled and coming unglued.

When I was little, I believed – I must have been told –

that the baby was me. It isn’t me, it’s you.

There was another photo, taken by the same photogra-pher, of me on the same table with my brown hair pulled up in the same sort of roll, but I appear to be plump, with deep-set eyes in a round chubby face, my hand between my thighs. I don’t remember ever being puzzled by the – obvious – differences between the two photos.

It opens as she sees photos of Ginette

I can see why it took this long to write this well, 14 years ago, as it means most ot the people in her family that may have been upset about her writing about this were gone. The book sees her looking back at the other girl, the other siste,r the ghost sister that she never knew about, Ginette, the sister who had died many years before Annie was born it was one day in the shop her parents’ old shop, that she caught a brief conversation between her mother and a regular customer about the other girl and how she was nicer than her what other girl. Over the years, she gets a little bit more of other family members; nothing more of her parents, but later she finds pictures of Ginette years before she was born. This is one sister trying to find out about the other girl, the sister who died of Diphtheria many years before she was born. Something she should have had if they had known. An epitaph for a girl she never knew, but has maybe haunted her, and what her mother said about her being nicer than the other girl.

I cannot put an exact date to that summer Sunday, but I’ve always thought it was in August. Twenty-five years ago, while reading the journal of Cesare Pavese, I discovered he’d committed suicide in a hotel room in Turin on

27 August 1950. I immediately checked – it was a Sunday.

Since then, I’ve imagined it was the same Sunday.

It grows more distant every year – but that is an illu-sion. There is no time between you and me. There are words that have never changed.

Nice. I think I already knew that the word could not be applied to me, judging from the terms my parents used each day to describe me, according to my behaviour: bold, scruffy little madam, greedy, Miss Know-It-All, nasty girl, you’ve got the devil in you. But their reproaches rolled off my back, so sure was I of being loved by them, the proof of which I saw in their constant concern for little me, in addition to their gifts. I was an only child and spoiled on that account, always at the top of my class without making any effort, and in short, I felt I had the right to be what I was.

When she heard what her Mother had said in passing

This is what she does so well, or as the Nobel committee said, for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory. She looks and takes apart her own past. A ghost of a sister in these forty pages is there. She never knew her. These are the breadcrumbs, the watermarks, the dust of a child that died, and maybe had she not, would Annie have been Annie? They always say life is stranger than fiction, and time,e and time again, Ernaux shows us this in her writng. Her art is the art of self, of family, of the secrets every family carries in its background. This is a short book, not even fifty pages, but it hits hard and is one I will be rereading for many a year.

in the uk you can buy this book via this link 

 

 

The Cafe with no Name by Robert Seethaler

~ winstonsdad ~ 10 Comments

Image

The Cafe with no Name by Robert Seethaler

Austrian fiction

Original title – Das Café ohne Namen

Translator – Katy Derbyshire

Source – Personal copy

I am having a quieter German lit month this year. I am just reviewing a few books, and this is set in Vienna, where the writer is from. I have reviewed two earlier books by Robert Seethaler. I see on the book cover that this was a best-selling book for a long time. That made me wonder what makes different books and writers more and less successful around Europe and what type of books are popular with readers. I think Seethaler captures the other side of human life in his fellow Austrian writer, Thomas Bernhard. This is a group of people, but their lives are looked at; they could have come from the cheap eaters, but this is a more compassionate look at the people you may see in a market Cafe.

Robert Simon opened his café at twelve noon on the dot.

The first customer came in less than ten minutes later.

Simon knew him vaguely; he was a fruit grower from the Wachau who sometimes rented a gap between the stalls on the eastern side to sell his apricots straight out of a basket. He sat down at one of the outside tables and fixed doleful eyes on the pavement.

‘What can I get you? Simon asked, an apron tied around his waist and a pencil behind his ear. The fruit grower looked surprised.

‘I know you,’ he said. ‘You work on the market.’

‘Not any more,’ said Simon.

‘What have you got? the man asked.

‘Coffee. Lemonade. Raspberry soda, beer, and wine from Stammersdorf and Gumpoldskirchen, red or white.

To eat, there’s bread and dripping with or without onions, freshly pickled gherkins or pretzel sticks??

‘Not a lot.’

‘It’s the first day. Anyway, it’s a café, not a restaurant.?

The first day of the cafe!

The book, as I said, is set in the mid-sixties through about a decade. It follows the years, Robert Simon, a man who had just lost his job in the market, when he is pointed out a cafe that hasn’t been open in years so when he gets the lease and opens it we meet those who come and go other the years into the cafe with no name as he initially he has no name for the cafe. The book sees the struggles when he opens the Cafe shortly after this Mila, a country girl who had headed to the city for work as a seamstress hads lost her job she was never great at her old job so when she fell and was taken into the cafe by the neighbour of the cafe, The Butcher a Johanes  Luckily, Robert talks about how hard it is, and she is put forward as a waitress for him. The book follows both Robert and Mila. As trade dries up in a winter he offers punch a wrestle Rene comes ion to the cafe more. He likes Mila. ADD to that other customers like an elderly couple, a widow, a man taken on as a handyman, and over the years ,we see the comings and goings of relationships start and fail, all connected to the cafe.

Mila was robust by nature. What she lacked in skill and dexterity in comparison to the other factory girls, she made up for in tenacity and diligence. She was reliable, wouldn’t get into escapades and, above all, steered clear of trade unions. If she went on that way, the deputy engineering manager Herr Steinwender said, she might even one day get a promotion to a full seamstress or – who could say what might be possible? – head seamstress.

Six days a week, Mila took the company-owned diesel bus to Floridsdorf in the early hours, bent low all day long over her juddering Singer machine in Hall 2, Row V, and was driven back home with a stiff back and aching fingers, only to make herself supper and get an early night.

Mila wasn’t a made seamstress but works as a waitress most of the time

I mentioned Bernhards as the Cheap eaters was something I thought about whilst reading this book, another group of people hard on luck but this is a look at the highs and lows nbut without the acid nature oifBernhard no there is something about the way Seethaler found dignity and beauty in the everyday action of these cafe customers and staff in the corner of a market over the decade or so as Post war Austria of the sixties turns the corner. The seventies come in, but this is a place caught in that changing world around them. There is something extraordinary about how Seethaler deals with his world. Bad things happen, but this is like the Sunday evening drama as we used to have bad things happen, but it is how it is told with that sort of nostalgic feel to it. This is called The Midwife, but in a Viennese market cafe. A cafe owner, a waitress, and the customers make up for the nurses and patients as we view the vignettes of their lives over the years. Have you read this book or any of his other books?