Paradise of the Blind by Duong Thu Huong

~ winstonsdad ~ 2 Comments

Image

Paradise of the Blind by Duong Thu Huong

Vietnamese fiction

Original title – Những thiên đường mù

TranslatorsPhan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson

Source – personal copy

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

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

“What’s the matter, my child?”

“I’m scared.”

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

As a young girl her nerves

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

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

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

Her parents past causes issues in the present for her

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

 

The Cut Line by Caroline Pihelgas

~ winstonsdad ~ 6 Comments

Image

The cut line by Carolina Pihelgas

Estonian fiction

Original title – Lõikejoon

Translator – Darcy Hurford

Source – Review copy

I was pleased to receive this from World Editions, as the two books I have previously reviewed from Estonia have been by male writers, so it is great to have a female voice.  Carolina Pihelgas is also a poet and is considered one of the best prose writers by Estonian Literary magazine Sirp, according to Estonian critic Piret Põldver.  Her previous novel had focused on three mother-daughter relationships.  Prior to that, she was a well-known poet.  This book marked a change in her writng style, as it focuses on the main character, Liine, who has moved to the countryside to escape and recover from the end of her 14-year toxic relationship.  This is her first book to be translated into English.

A large fly waddles across the outhouse wall, drowsy and content. I am the large fly’s antagonist. I take a chair outside but only sit there for a moment as I can’t keep still. I grab my gardening gloves and begin pulling the weeds out from around the flowering quince.

I haven’t done any weeding for years, but I discover that nettles are the nicest; pulling them out by the roots feels so agreeable. Dandelions are annoying, whereas ground elder is easy to pull out. Perhaps you only let me go without much of a fight because you don’t believe I’ll stay here longer than just a weekend.

You probably don’t believe I have any right to break up with you. I’m just like a part of your body you feel incomplete without. But what do I feel? Right now simply panic, I guess. Id known for a long time that I needed to get away, but also that you wouldn’t let me go that easily, that it was the departure that scared me the most, the anger and rage that would start building up inside you, swelling and swelling and then exploding and pushing their nasty roots inside me. I’m afraid that when I turn on my phone the day after tomorrow to connect my laptop to the internet-be-cause it’ll be Monday and I’ll need to start answering work emails-that there’ll be messages from you

The sense of disconnect initally from the toxic past

We follow as Liine heads to a remote cottage to escape the relationship she has just got out of after fourteen years. What follows is a woman recovering from Trauma. But also have to struggle in the present as there is a sense of the current situation in the Baltic states, as the Miliitary are around the sense of the horrific past of the country itself, the soviet damage of this land is still there what we get is a poetic look at a women sloly rebuilding her life in Nature but also as she does we get small glimpse into the poast of those fourteen years how her relationship became toxic.  The book depicts a grieving, cleansing process in her world as she lives a rural life far removed from her city life. She has escaped to this rural wilderness, but as she does, the tension in the country is heightened by constant troop movements and exercises. As we see her dealing with anger, then recovery, as the world around her darkens.

It comes from deep within, an anger I’ve never dared to feel before. It’s a wild feeling of injustice that I’ve been treated like an inferior kind of being that doesn’t deserve respect. Like someone who can be pushed about, who can be manipulated, who can be reproached, humiliated, and who won’t fight back.

Why didn’t I fight back? Why did I put up with it all?

I’m mad at myself as well. No, hold on a moment.

That’s another thing that’s been planted in me: blame yourself, descend into an endless labyrinth where you find nothing but your own faults. Analyze only what you did wrong. Consider what you did to deserve it. And anyway, if it was so bad, why didn’t you leave sooner? Stop.

The anger that comes later when the past becomes clearer

This book, for me, captured trauma, but also the death of a relationship, the grief and anger, the way we all deal with moving on.  There is a fragmentary nature to the past as we see glimpses of memories, the snapshots of fourteen years in little bursts of how a relationship soured and became so toxic over the years. It is done in the way you feel the writer herself has gon through or knows someone close who has gone through this process. The anger, the loss, and the realisation of what has happened fully hit her. The way the past creeps up when the stillness and slowing down of her life and the routines of nature capture her. I was reminded of Thoreau in his cabin; by escaping the world, he saw how life is, and here we see Liine slowly seeing life in full again. In parts, I was also reminded of The River by Laure Vinogrodova, the Latvian novel I read last year. Both see female characters travelling to the countryside and seeing the world differently; they also deal with environmental issues in their respective countries. But what Crolina also does so well is capture the current tension of the Russian threat, which has grown much closer since the start of the Ukrainian war, and Putin could turn his attention to the Baltic states; this is shown by the NATO troops in the book. Have you read this or any other books from Estoniaxxsssssss

?

The Parasite by Ferenc Barnás

~ winstonsdad ~ 1 Comment

Image

The Parasite by Ferenc Barnás

Hungarian fiction

Original title – Az élősködő

Translator – Paul Olchvary

Source – Personal copy

I started off the Hungarian lit month with this book; it caught my eye from the Seagull list of books from Hungary because it had a quote from Laszlo Krasznahorkai, ” Ferenc Barnás is a legend among those who know him,” now, when you get that from the most recent Nobel winner as a recommendation. Barnás seems to have won many of the major book prizes in his own country, and this was his debut novel, which came out in 1997 in Hungarian. I feel we get caught up in place-based trends when translating these days, and a powerhouse of literature like Hungary, with one of the strongest and most interesting literary scenes, is forgotten. Barnás has taught at times and, at other times, been a full-time writer. There are a couple of his other books out or due to be released by Seagull Books.

One of the men in the ward resembled a friend of mine who’d escaped from an occupational therapy clinic in the provinces. I always did like that ever-smiling wino. After absconding from that teetotalling institution, he took to hanging out at a train station, where his fellow imbibers would sometimes help him towards the public restroom to keep him from wetting his pants even more than he already had. One time I noticed him grinning knowingly at his half-witted chums, who, having been summoned to the train cars for a bit of hard labour to earn their bread or wine, were busily carrying dreadfully heavy sacks full of who-knows-what back and forth for some no doubt noble purpose. No, he wasn’t such a fool atter all. While the others toiled away, he went about not so discreetly sampling fruit brandy he’d acquired for a modest sum from someone’s illicit distillery.

His viewing other people in the hospital as a child

The narrator of this book is unknown. We follow him from late childhood to adulthood. He is a strange character; he thrives on illness and a sort of Munchausen youth, though his body suffers from this constant need to be ill. But he feels safe as a patient; you feel it is almost his safety blanket against the world, a strange boy feeding on symptoms. But as the world is, boys become men, and he grows up and starts to be a man, having relationships, he also starts masturbating greatly. At some point, you are not sure if the encounters he claims to have are real or maybe a fever dream, sexual imagery for him to come tooo? , but even then, he has quirks; he has one-night stands, but then he gets haunted and wracked with dreams of what the previous night’s women are now doing.  But when he ends up with an older woman simply called L, but the initial silence of the dreams and nightmares that haunt his sex life ends, but then come back in a darker way.

Perhaps I should have placed an ad in the classifieds: ‘Seeking someone to beat sordidness of unknown origin out of me, every last bit of it. Perverts need not reply!’ Who knows, perhaps I would have happened upon a psychotic prison guard who specialized in exactly my sort of case! Why shouldn’t there be people out there who know not only torture inside-out but also psychology? | yearned for an applicant who could discern the nature of my imagination through my body’s agony. I would have been able to determine even from his mistakes whether he was really suited to the task. Even as I smiled at this childish escape fantasy of mine, I was virtually certain that people must have once lived who knew just how to go about exorcizing demons.

Seeking out people to suit his particular sexual needs

I loved this book. It had a little bit of Thomas Bernhard in it. The sheer sorrowful life of our narrator is very Bernhardian. But the voice comes across as very quirky at times, a tone and feel to the narrative I haven’t read in anything else, which makes it very interesting. But for me, Bartis, another Hungarian writer, his book Tranquillity is about a young man set in roughly the same time, although in many ways different; both are ways of looking at the child-parent relationship growing up in Socialist Hungary.  Another feeling for me was that our narrator grew up, his one-night stands were either real or just fever dreams from his sexual mind, and guilt of being the way he was, and that is why initially his relationship with L is so different.  This is what I love about much of the Hungarian fiction I have read: it is deep-thinking, and it requires readers to reflect on the characters. I will be in the historic Roman times in the next book for Hungarian lit month in a few days’ time. Have you read any books by Ferenc Barnás?

Image

 

The Bridges by Tarjei Vesaas

~ winstonsdad ~ 3 Comments

Image

The Bridges by Tarjei Vesass

Norweigan fiction

Original title – Bruene

Translator – Elizabeth Rokkan

Source – Personal copy

I said in my look back at last month at feeling under read, well I always feel under read to me I feel you need real depth in writers you like and place you like to read from to build a huge canon as a read so for me as a reader I feel I maybe on the lwer reaches of the everest of what for me it is to be a reade yet to get to base camp.  Even after over 1500 books for me, I feel it needs to be ten times that amount to have the real breadth of knowledge. Anyway, back to this book and a favourite writer of mine, Tarjei Vesaas, this will be the fourth book on the blog from him. I still have to read The Birds, his maybe best-known book nowadays, alongside Ice Palace.  So this is a lesser-known work, but for me it’s one I feel Jon Fosse might have liked as a reader.  I see echoes of this book in Fosse’s works.  The book follows two teenage friends

Standing on the bridge, remembering.

Even though it was summer and holiday-time and there was swimming and lazing about, and much traffic over the bridge, they still kept to themselves. Other companions seemed so distant that they had no need of them, even those who did not live far away. Aud and Torvil’s friendship was such that they were afraid of anyone disturbing

It was a confident friendship most of the time, but not always. He remembered clearly how he had touched Aud one warm, lightly clad day. They had often clutched each other wildly when fighting, but this nervous hand was light as a leaf, so that Aud had started in surprise.

He did not say anything, not even her name. Just that hand.

She had started in surprise. “What is it?” Her face was burning.

Nothing,’ he said.

‘Don’t do it, then?

‘All right?

‘Or-?’

‘All right, I said.”

Both their faces were burning.

Then they had been bewildered sixteen-year-olds.

Looking back at the two friends that live at the twin houses by the bridge

The book is set around a small village that is split by a bridge. The bridge in this book is more than the actual bridge as the book unfolds. The book follows two teenagers, Torvil and Aud, who have been friends for a very long time and are just turning 18. Then, they are in the woods, and Torvil sees something is wrong with Aud and her manner towards him.  He manages to find out what has made Aud act so oddly. When she shows him a shocking discovery: a dead snake and a newborn baby hidden under some twigs, and just left there. There is no indication whose the babe is, but the rest of the book follows the two on the aftermath of finding this dead child and the effect on them psychologically in the aftermath, the fallout from this event,t but also what it is like being 18 and growing up the bridge from youth to adulthood is a recurring theme in the book.

A few yards is no distance at all. There stood the twin houses. They were not built by twins; they were called that because, from the outside, they looked identical. Two good friends had decided to build them like this in their younger days when they both married at the same time and needed a house. They wanted to live close to one another, so they each bought building land here by the bridge. And here they had Aud and Torvil at about the same time. They had the same kind of work too, at the same school.

Two trim houses, wall to wall on a flat piece of land by the river.

Torvil went into Aud’s house. Outside the late summer dusk had just begun to fall, and from indoors the lamplight filtered cosily through the curtains. The glow was welcoming. This is where a nice girl lives, and her mother who I like so much.

They have been next door to each other all their life to this happens

I said the slow style and tense psychological feel of this book reminds me of Fosse. Fosse has said he sees Vesaas as one of the writers he has modelled his writing on, and for me, of the four books from Vesaas I have read, this is maybe the nearest to what Fosse does, the sense of slowly seeing a world fall apart, with the same useof simple, terse language.  But also, they both evoke a place in their books.  Here again, Vesas make the house and bridge come to life, but also the metaphor the bridge means in the lives of the two main characters, the crossing of it for so many as the two grow up, but also deal with the dark discovery they made and the aftermath of the dead baby under the twigs haunts the events after they find it.  Have you read this book? Do you see a connection between Vesaas and Fosse? (I used a old cover as mine is a plain black print on demand of this book )

January 2026 I hit the ground running round up post

~ winstonsdad ~ 8 Comments
  1. Mr Bowling buys a Newspaper by Donald Henderson
  2. My Annihilation by Fuminori Nakamura
  3. Library for the War Wounded by Monika Helfer
  4. Killing the Nerve by Anna Pazos
  5. Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami
  6. The Coffee House by Naguib Mahfouz
  7. The Christmas Clue by Nicola Upson
  8. Vaim by Jon Fosse
  9. Mysterious setting by Kazushige Abe
  10. wedding worries by Stig Dagermann 
  11. Brian by Jeremy Cooper
  12. Marshlands by Otohiko Kaga
  13. The old man and his sons by Heoin Bru
  14. The lights on the hill by Gareth st Omer

Well, I had intended to get on top of what books I have read and reviewed this month. I have nearly cleared a backlog of some books from last year and reviewed a mix of what I had unreviewed from the back end of last year. So we had a couple of English crime novels: one from World War I and a modern book looking back on the making of a famous game. Then four Japanese books, two epic crime novels, a modern retelling of a classic story, and a work of non-fiction by Murakami were my contributions to the various Japanese challenges this time of year. Then a couple of books from Fotzcarraldo, the latest Fose, and BRIAN WHICH I had on my Radar for a while. Then two modern classic writers, Mahfouz and Dagerman, reminded me how woefully under-read I am as a reader. Which is why I often moan at creators who position themselves as well-read and aren’t, in the broader sense, readers.  Finally, two new countries for the blog, the Faroe Islands, well, it’s not a country, but a Danish island miles from anywhere,e and then to StLucia in the Caribbean. One of the best months on this blog in recent times.  Also, a new two new publishers in the Caribbean writers list and the Verba Mundi series as well

Book of the month

Image

It has been a tough choice, but this book is one I will want to reread over the years. The book’s passion for cinema reminded me of the films I have yet to see. I know there is another book coming out that focuses more on classical music, which I hope will spark a little more interest in it in my life.

Non Book events

I am one for trying to spend less time on my phone these days, so Amanda and I caught the series Girl Taken with Alfie Allen, about a teacher who kidnaps and rapes and makes a twin live in a cellar, a twin from his school, he wanted the other sister, but had kidnapped the wrong one. The series was well-paced. The only thing I hated was the film in Spain in the Basque Country, and it is so obviously not the UK, but they make it out to be, which lets it down for me. I mentioned Brian. I was trying to watch a few more films. One I really enjoyed last month was Genius, which was about the writer Tomas Wolfe and his editor, who was the man who had found F. Scott Fitzgerald. Wolfe was a writer who was one of a kind, it seemed, and was one who lived fast and died young. This book captured his life. It also made me want to read Wolfe later this year if anyone else is interested in reading him alongside me? Music-wise, it has been a quiet start to the year. I only picked up Dry Cleaning’s third album, their debut, and this one appealed to me, and I also got Sleaford Mods. This group has a unique sound and is very political in its lyrics, which capture the underbelly of England. They are maybe the heirs to Mark E. Smith’s The Fall for the modern age. I will also point to the songs from Bruce Springsteen and Billy Bragg after the horror of people getting shot by gun-happy so-called law enforcement officers, as America seems to be descending into a fascist state along the lines of the early years of Hitler, where the state starts to wipe out the opposition to their voice. Horrific scenes and a leader that seems more interested in grabbing resources around the world than actual diplomacy, anyway, I have held back saying anything about this situation too long. If reading world literature teaches you anything, suffering and terror are the same and have the same roots, and the same sort of people run these regimes, no matter where and when, the outcome is always scary.

Next Month

Back to Books, and it is Hungarian lit month. I have a couple of books to read and will get to them later this week. Other than that, we see the Booker International Longlist on the last day of this month, and yes, there will be another year of shadowing the prize for me. Now, I think it is more about being with the same group of people for so many years. The community we have every year for this prize is actually a highlight in my blogging year. I will also say that I welcome people to join us. I think there will be a post about it in a couple of weeks, as we see Ten years of the International Booker, and this will be the 15th year of shadowing, as we did the old IFFP prize before its current incarnation as the International Booker. It means that every year there are 12 or 13 books. We are getting near 200 books, and we will have reviewed for the shadow jury, with at least 5 or 6 reviews of each book, which means the shadow jury will have put out over 1000 reviews in its time!

The. lights on the hill Gareth St Omer

~ winstonsdad ~ 2 Comments

Image

The Lights on the Hill by Gareth St Omer

St lucian fiction

Source – Personal copy

I have longed to read more fiction from the Caribbean, as the books I have read over the years have always been unusual, and for me it is one of the few areas of the world where I hear very little discussion about fiction. I saw this in a charity shop, not knowing there was also a series of Caribbean writers from Heinemann, like their African writers series. I see on Goodreads that there were 35 books in this series. I have a couple in other editions, but if you have read any of them, I’d love to know which and how you found them, please. Gareth St Omer was part of a group of writers that emerged in the 60s from St Lucia, with Derek Walcott being the best known of them. Gareth Stomer taught in the us most of his career, and a lot of his novels have been republished by Peepal Tree Press (They are doing a great job bringing writers like this back in print )

“What are you thinking of?” Thea asked him.

“Nothing,” he answered.

“I knew it. One would think I should have learnt by now. Yet every time I ask the same question.”

“And every time I give the same answer?”

“Yes, every time. How many times have I asked that question in two years I wonder?”

He did not answer.

“Do you think you could tell me?”

“How should I know?”

“Of course. You wouldn’t. You don’t even hear me sometimes.”

“Now. You mustn’t exaggerate.”

“You must keep your secrets very well.”

“I have no secrets.”

His back was on the ground and his hands were under his head. The stars moved quickly, in formation, against the sky. He looked again and the illusion was gone. It was the clouds that moved briskly under the stars fixed above them. Below the clouds, in the distance, far away, clusters of dancing lights clung to the mountain top.

Tonight, because of the moon, they were less bright.

“Of course you have secrets. Everyone has secrets.”

The opening lines and yes Stephenson has a few secrets

The lights on the hill was originally part of a longer novel by Gareth St Omer, buit was brought out as a Standalone novella. The book follows a man named Stephenson, in his thirties, who is slowly struggling to reach the light on the hill of his life. He has had many failures in his life, both at work and in his personal life, and this book seems to show him experiencing an existential crisis. But the book also shows how the colonial past of the country he lives in shapes it, and how the church exerts its influence on a small island that is maybe known as very inward-looking and can trap a man like Stephenson.he is trying as he is now an adult student at university and has a girldfriend but will he escape his past of family he didn’t know and make a sucsess of himself. As we foolow a man trying to make good but caught up in his past and present holding back his future

“Those youngsters,” he used to say to Stephenson speaking of the four young men, fresh from school, who had come with Stephenson to teach on the island.

Stephenson, too, had found their antics trying most of the time. He would have been very much alone if Ronald had not befriended him. Ronald took him to his home. That first year Laura had not yet gone back to their own island. While Ronald and Stephenson drank Gordon’s Gin with orange, Laura sat and sewed or knitted, talking only infrequently. Mantovani was playing the Classics on a record. Laura was part white and part South American Indian. She was very beautiful and her speech was not always grammatically correct.

And it was through Ronald that he had met Rosa.

we learn more about what has happen to him over time

When this book came out, it was called one of the most daring and accomplished works of fiction by a writer who ranks among the best of the 20th century. This is what i love about my reading life is discoveries like this lost writers that were fifty years ago considered cutting edge and some how like I say Caribbean fiction seems out of fashion maybe but not sure why we are always seing existentalist fiction from the like of Kafka, Statre Etc on reels and instagram pictures because lets face it its easy to pick up what every one else like but for me this ranks up with those books as a piece of existenalist fiction but also it is a piece of post colnional fiction that world he is trapped in is because of the colonial past. Have you heard of or read St Omer, or any other writer from St lucia?

The old man and his sons by Heòin Brú

~ winstonsdad ~ 1 Comment

Image

The Old man and his sons by Heoin Bru

Faraoese fiction

Original title – Feðgar á ferð

Translator – John F West

Source – Personal copy

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

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

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

Whale meat after the hunt is shocking to some

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

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

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

appeared.

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

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

‘Fine weather we re having, Ketil began.

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

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

Kentil is caught up with money he hasn’t got

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

Marshlands by Otohiko Kaga

~ winstonsdad ~ 2 Comments

Image

Marshlands by Otohiko Kaga

Japanese fiction

Original title – 『湿原』朝日新聞社

Translator -Albert Novich

Source – Personal copy

I think when I said I want to review 200 books this year, I may have put a number, not an idea, to this year. 200 would be great, but one of the aims for this year is to read several longer books. I think in yesterday’s post I spoke about my attention getting less. Another way I have seen this is not reading epic books anymore, even though I buy a lot. This had been on my radar for a long time, when it was mentioned on a podcast. I think it was one of the last, if not the last, books that John O’Brien signed off for Dalkey Archive. The writer Otohiko was both a writer and a psychologist. A number of the books he wrote were set in France, where he studied and worked in the late fifties. This book was published in 1985. He won a number of big book prizes in his time. He also continued visiting some of his patients well into his 80s, long after he had retired. This is the second book from a writer who has written many books and is well respected in Japan!

“And now how do you feel?” asked Atsuo, leaning back a bit to avoid Yu-kichis fists, which he had begun brandishing to punctuate his recitation. “Do you feel like smashing something right now?

“Yeah, I do, he said, slamming the table hard enough to raise the proprietor’s eyebrows and elicit a restraining “Hey!” from him.

“What on earth do you want to smash?”

“Dunno.”

“Listen to me, said Atsuo. “There’s nothing you need to smash now.”

“If there isn’t anything, then I’ll fnd something” Yukichi said with an exag gerated wave of his arm, clearly drunk, his voice unnecessarily loud.

“Uncle, theres no fun in just breaking things. It’s no good if you don’t have an explosion. See? If you want to get an explosion, there’s got to be some kind of strong resistance. Yeah, that’s it. That’s what they’re up to,” he said, pointing to the television. “First they get the riot police mad, see? Set up the resistance for the big bang!”

talking about making a bomb early on in the. book will come back later

 

This book is an epic book. It slices into the heart of post-war Japan, and I love the use of the main character, Atuso Yukimori, who at the start of the book seems a simple mechanic who works near the university. It is because of this that he starts a romance with a girl from the university, Wakako, who is about half his age. The book is pivoted on the events of the summer of 1968, when the world burned in student protests.(When I saw he had been in France, this is the time of the French riots as well!) SO when a bomb goes off, the police home in on these two. The book serves as part prison journey, part look at one man’s post-war journey in Atuso. He was in a special unit during the war and after the war he feel on very hard times and into a world of crime. But his life is on the straight and narrow, even if his lack of knowledge of how the newer car works tickles his colleagues. He shows what a great mechanic he is with old engines.  The book focuses on the investigation into the crime, the time spent in prison, looking back on the past, and even on his childhood in the marshlands. It descends into a drama of who is innocent, but also how the past affects the present, and whether we can ever escape what we have done.

She opened a wooden door. It was a little bar, consisting of a single counter that was filled to capacity with customers. “Well, well, come right in!” The bar’s proprietress gave them a professionally effusive greeting. “Unfortunately, she continued with a gesture at the full counter, “all I can offer is a place in the back.”

“That’s fine,” said Wakako. “This is Mr. Yukimori. He was one of my teachers in high school.” The bar’s “mama” gave a reverential bow.”Welcome, Mr. Yuki-mori. Very glad to have you.”

The space in the back was a tiny tatami alcove whose three walls were occupied by shelves of dishes. They each pulled up a zabuton, barely managing to squeeze in on either side of the foot-high table.

“TIl bring you something in a jify, Mr. Yukimori. Wakako sprang up and busied herself behind the counter. She helped Mama serve customers – whom she seemed to know — with a practiced hand. Finally, she returned with a bottle of whiskey, water, and dishes of meat-and-potatoes, oden, and cuttlefish. They had a toast with whiskey and water.

“Come here often?”

As the couple start heading out he is much older than her

I had waited ages to get to this, and I wish I had read it the day it dropped through the door. It is one of those epic novels that captures the fallout of a moment, the bomb, but not just what happened after, what led up to that point. The class of pre-war and post-war Japan, the speed at which life moved forward in the sixties. One mans past and how do we escpae it was almost div=ckensian at times when they talked about the marshlands I thought all we need it a chained Atsuo running across it for it to echo Magwich. But there is also a nod to Kafka in the way the trial and case unfold, and the two get caught up in it all. I recently saw a YouTube essay about how art exists around the world and why, in Japan, it is seen as a whole. At times, those epic scenes, like the noise of a Japanese web screen full of information, are viewed as a whole. This book is like that, viewing the whole post-war years and the effect of the war, but also the huge changes of the period. The late sixties led to the tension, the bombing, and the violence as two generations rage against one another. This book does so on an epic scale, following two people caught up in the events and the bombing. It is also about the past, and can we escape our past? Again, a nod maybe to time in France, Atsuo is modern Jean Valjean, parallels are there, younger women in his life, a police officer who becomes obsessed with him, and never quite being able to escape one’s past? Do you have a favourite epic Japanese book?

 

 

Brian by Jeremy Cooper

~ winstonsdad ~ 9 Comments

Image

Brian by Jeremy Coper

British fiction

Source – Library books

One thing I do is let my Fitzcarraldo subscription lapse from time to time. They may be best getting a reminder sent to folks like me. One of the main things I have from my dyspraxia is forgetting everyday stuff, like a subscription. I didn’t email them one last time when I remembered the subscription I had may be running low. So that was a way to say this was a book I had missed between renewals. I think Jacqui was one of the first reviewers I saw of this book, and a recent mention in a YouTube video made me just get a copy from the library. I had been waiting to either buy it new or secondhand. Jeremy Cooper, an art historian, has appeared on the Antiques Roadshow and on Radio 4. I read the Guardian interview where he had been in love with the BFI cinema and the various films and how many you could see in one day, and Brian came from that seeing a regular group in the foyer.

One of Brian’s favourite film moments – from a cast of dozens, admittedly – was in Wim Wenders’s Kings of the Road, the scene where a vehicle drew up in a deserted landscape somewhere near the East German border and Rüdiger Vogler walked off twenty yards from the road to take a shit. The camera focused low down to film from behind a long dark sausage turd drop slowly from a pale arse.

In black and white.

Brian admired the shot and always wondered if it was Vogler’s bum or a stunt man’s.

At what time of day was it filmed?

One of the early films from Wim one of his road movies

I think what grabbed me most about Brian is how I connect to him as a person, a quiet man with a simple, solitary life, a small world of lunch in the same cafe, and nights at his small flat in Kentish Town. But what happens when he goes to see a Clint Eastwood film at the BFI? He is drawn into a world of films and becomes one of those figures who meet in the foyer, as we see him make friends with Jack and the other BFI regulars . Added to this is his childhood in Northern Ireland and how that impacted his adult life. As My father is from Northern Ireland and my grandparents are I can see how this world made Brainthe man he is. Then there are the films along the way for me now. I, of course, loved the mention of Wim Wenders, but also the talk of a documentary of Einsturzende Neubauten, the German industrial band I have loved since finding out their singer was Nick Cave’s guitarist over 35 years ago. Then films like Tokyo Story, the late films of Derek Jarman, and this is a book about one man falling in love with the world of cinema.

Two days later Jack called by, looking drastically out of place in the sterile white ward, tiptoeing in his battered trainers gingerly across the polished green linoleum to the side of his friend’s bed. Brian was thrilled to see him and to be filled in on the best of the movies he had missed. Jack had been totally taken, he said, by a documentary on the experimental rock group Einstürzende Neubauten and their leader Blixa Bargeld, ace manipulator of the jackhammer in motorway under-passes. Brian laughed in pleasure at the band’s name and the titles of their songs, admitting that he had never heard of them before. At which Jack came out with one of those definitive phrases for which he was celebrated amongst his fellow buffs: ‘After Einstürzende Neubauten everything is silence.’

The singer’s actual name, Jack said, was Christian Emmerich, branding himself Blixa Bargeld when he left his parents’ home in West Berlin to make music, blixa a make of blue felt-tip pen and bargeld a German street term for cash

Einstruzende Neubauten a band i love

I read reviews of this, and it seems people either love it or hate it. For me, I loved it. Part of it sang to a lost part of me. I love world cinema, but I have seen myself watch less and less over the last few years. I’m not sure if this is, in part, a loss of attention span due to smartphone use. But this is the one thing I loved in this book. Brian’s passion reminded me of the first decade of this blog, when I felt confident in my opinions before the world’s noise became too loud. Obsession is a great way to discover things. Part of me thinks Brian is neurodivergent, I would’t say just autistic, just the traits for deep diving and one passion I know I have. But there is also a lament in me for the time I would record whatever channel four would show late at night, small town life meant that was my window into world cinema, that the film show and long lost shows like the late show, when arts were taken seriously to have Ekow Eshun and Tom Paulin talk arts is something much missed. Anyway, you love film? This novel is for you if you’ve seen the documentary Cinemania. This is a refined English version of that obsession with film, but also the small group of people in that world, a dying world. It could be model aircraft, model railways, stamp collecting, and so on. Jeremy Cooper is capturing a man in a world that will, maybe, in twenty years seem alien! I have made a promise to try to watch a few more films from around the world this year. I have a Sight and Sound subscription and got the Bela Tarr box set for Christmas. Two places to start.

 

Wedding Worries by Stig Dagerman

~ winstonsdad ~ 2 Comments

Image

Wedding Worries by Stig Dagerman

Swedish fiction

Original title –Bröllopsbesvär

Translators -Paul Norlen and Lo Dagerman

Source – Personal

I think we all have a canon of writers we have yet to read and review any reader worth anything or like me should I say spends a lot of times down rabbitholes absorbing the writers of the world some I forget a few days after I have read about them but others are on that list that little black book of writers you know for sure youy will get to one day something about them clicks that light in the room of your head where you have the library lof those writers you love well Dagerman has been that list for a long tiome I wait sometimes for years to I see the book in the wild and then when I see a book on a shelf I am like a hawk fast and confident i have found my prey sorry book I mean. Well, Dagerman is often mentioned alongside the likes of Joyce and Faulkner, a difficult writer, a modernist, the sort of writer I love to challenge myself as a reader. Now it is easy to see the comparison in this, his last novel, which is set over the course of one day. At a country wedding in the swedish village of  Älvkarleby

But when he comes back to the bridal bed, there has been no change. Siri is sitting like before, crying. And a fly is hovering in the corner. Then he notices that something has indeed changed: Frida is back hanging on her place on the wall. Holding herself firmly in the chair. Holding her place on the wall. Heat rises to Westlund’s head, a little fire-devil.

He grabs hold of his daughter by her slender shoulders, one in each large hand, and lifts her up toward his anger. But he encounters a fire no smaller than his. A bigger fire, actually.

He looks into a pair of eyes, a pair of eyes that he knows. That he usually closes his own eyes to. The eyes have a voice, and the voice is saying: Thus says the law, Westlund. If you had been living then they would have beheaded you. And that’s how it is with the dead, you cant look into their eyes. Just close your own.

Over the day we learn all sorts from the family members

The first thing I loved about this book was the list of characters. Now, as someone who is neurodivergent, I sometimes lose track of characters, and having a list to refer back to at the start of the book helps me greatly. The book is set on a wedding day as Hildur, the youngest daughter of the Palm family, is due to marry the local, much older Village Butcher, Hilmer. Now we get to see the day and the events that have led up to this young girl marrying a man twice her age and an alcoholic, but when she is with child and the farm hand that got her pregnant, a drunk is more appealing than being like her unwed sister who has a child. As the day goes on, secret affairs are being found out. The farm Hand Martin reappears as the day sways between a normal, nervy wedding day and heading to the abyss and oblivion, at times, where will it all be at the end when the feast happens?

“Since you’re getting married tomorrow maybe you’re in need of some trinkets, I say. Straight from the jeweler in Gävle, I say. Trinket me here and trinket me there, says West-Lund, but bring the case on over here so we can take a look.

Til be a monkey’s uncle, Westlund says looking. This here is fancy. He takes a brooch and places it on the plate. Oh my, now I know a bride who’ll be happy. Give me four, and I’ll be done, he says. One for Hildur and one for Siri. That will be six crowns even, I say. Best to take out my pouch then, Westlund says.”

All the village is caught up in the wedding and trying to be part of it

I loved this book; it had so many boxes for me as a reader. I love. Village anypone that has spent any time reading this blog know I am a huge fan of books set in villages, the microcosm of life hapopoens and this book is a perfect example as the day unfolds, we hear from a multitude of voices this remined me of the cacophony of voices we get in Faulkners AsI lay dting this is more as I head to a wedding or do I !. Secrets is another trope I love in fiction. A good secret can make a book and break a plot up into many pieces, like it does here. Love, hate, passion, and desire are all here as well. Truth and lies as well. Also that time frame one day 24 hours so much can happen I think of Ulysess but even of somehting like the Ron Howard fil where over the course of one day a story changes like this one does leaving you the reader not quite knowning how it will all end. Man, I so wish he hadn’t died. This was his final novel, written when he was 30. God, this is a masterpiece. What would he have done next?

Have you read Dagerman ?

 

 

Mysterious setting by Kazushige Abe

~ winstonsdad ~ Leave a comment

Image

Mysterious Saetting by Kazushige Abe

Japanese fiction

Original title – Misuteriasu Settingu  -ミステリアス・セッティング

Translator Muchel Emmerich

Source – Personal copy

I’m back I had a week where life caught up with book reviewing and so I add another book for the Jpaanese Literature challenge and one from the many books that Pushkin Press have brought out in there Novella se4ries of novels from japan with there bright covers and often eye catching cover art they highlight some of the best writing from recent years in Japan this iss one of two books they have published from Kazushige Abe. A writer who started off studying film and wanted to be a film director, and then, whilst studying film, friends introduced him to writers like Kenzaburo Oe, Richard Bach, William Burroughs and Philip K Dixck, and he decided he wanted to be a writer. He has won several major writing prizes in Japan. This book, published in 2006, is a retelling of the Little Match Girl story set in contemporary Japan.

Nozomi asked why, if she was prepared to share her

poems, she didn’t write them down.

This was a good question, and Shiori was unsure how to

answer. She didn’t know why.

Nozomi was merciless at moments like this.

“Things just spin further out of control when you try to cover up one lie with another, Shiori. Why not admit you can’t write poetry? You’d like to be a poet, but you aren’t one, and, if you ask me, the odds you’ll succeed in becoming a troubadour’ seem pretty slim. They say everyone has the right to dream, but inflicting a ‘right’like that on people seems cruel to me. Just look at you, shooting off lies so transparent even I can see through them, acting like this dumb dream’ of yours is your greatest treasure and you’ll never let it go.

I’ve never heard anything so stupid in my life.”

Her sister is her harshest critic

I love the way this story starts off as something normal. We meet Shirori, a teenager with a singular dream, but the only problem is that she is tone-deaf. She is often reminded of this fact, very harshly, by her sister. But she has read off the old-fashioned Troubadours that used to travel telling tales in songs, and is caught up in this dream. But in the latter part of the book, the girl meets the world as she heads to Tokyo to follow her dream and study music. But like many girls like her with dreams and no real sense of how the world works ., she falls foul of those underclass of people that take people’s dreams and twist them so she meets people online that take on her and this seems to be the way the book is heading then we get something that changes her whole future out of leftfield and the book is dark and comic at the same time.

Suzuki-kun was seized with righteous indignation when he heard about all this. He told Shiori he would talk to Nozomi, make her stop. But Shiori defended her sister.

Nozomi had been angry, it was a sort of fit, she told him.

You shouldn’t blame her—it was really my fault for breaking my promise. Besides, Nozomi had said she was sorry at breakfast, so everything was OK now. In reality, Nozomi had never apologized for anything in her life, but in this case a little white lie seemed appropriate.

Shiori was so overjoyed to see Suzuki-kun this con-cerned-he was angry on her behalf!-that she wouldn’t have traded the experience for anything. At the same time, she didn’t want him butting into a matter that was really between her and her sister.

More about her and the sister !

I think this is one of those books from Japan that has a nod toward traditional stories like the Little Match Girl, but it was also first released as a novel on the phone when it came out. There is a sense of many little things happening that draw the story forward. But then there is also the leftfield turns we get here and there throughout the book. That was a nod to figures like Burroughs and Dick, writers he likes, the urban jungle and cityscapes, both common in their works, and to surreal turns, a thing Burroughs was known for. Dick’s often from the few books I read years ago, like playing with identity and setting, like in Blade Runner, which is, of course, set in a modern city but has light, dark, and comedy at times, and also shifts in reality. But at the heart of this book is isolation inj the big city, one girl’s dream, but also those that will prey on that, all tied up in the book, which is also about Tokyo and going there for a dream like many a teen does in Japan and always will. Nut, maybe not as surreal as this darkly comic book does.

Have you any books that take a surreal turn at times like this book ?

Vaim by Jon Fosse

~ winstonsdad ~ 1 Comment

Image

Vaim by Jon Fosse

Norwegian fiction

Original title – Vaim

Translator – Damion Searls

Source – Subscription edition

It is always fun to get a new book from Jon Fosse. He is one of those writers in recent years whom I have come to love. His books are beautifully written, with recurring themes like duality, mirrors, existential themes, and motifs. This is his first book since he won the Nobel, and one always feels that one of two things can happen when a writer wins a prize as big as the Nobel. That’s why they struggle to match up to the earlier books, or they carry on, and I wondered which way Fosse would go. I don’t know why I was worried; this is another slice of what we have all come to like about his books, and the first in a new trilogy.

I can’t remember how many years, and of course it was a stupid idea to name the boat after Eline, but I’d probably heard that a boat should have a female name, and since the name Eline was the one that was constantly spinning around in my head, yes, the boat got named Eline, Eline the person had already been on my mind for several years, often to the point where it was hard to stop thinking about her, yes, and so that’s how the boat got named Eline, and there was a lot of talk going around about that name, yes, that’s what Elias told me, yes, apparently it was so bad that some people called me Eline instead of Jatgeir, there’s Eline, they said when they saw me, and when Elias told me that yes well I didn’t ask any more questions, that was just the way it was going to be on that subject, there was nothing I could do about it anyway, that’s how it was, and well it was nice that Elias dropped by to see me every now and then, he was the only person who did, and he was the only person I ever dropped by and visited either and now I can already see the bay there at Sund,

Elias and how Jatgeir called his boat after the girl he loved at a distance

This book is divided into three parts the first is about an older man Jatgeir we not told how old he is other than he has no family and his beard is greying and he has a boat called the Eline after a girl he had loved all his life and now in what from the way he talks is his lster life he has gone on a yearly trip to a city Bjorgvin from his small fishing village of Vaim. He has no real reason other than to fetch a spool of black thread and a needle to fix a button back on a shirt. When he ends up getting stung by the shopkeeper and her son over the thread, he goes back to his boat, then, after paying 250 krona for the thread, he heads out. This is where the story starts to get strange. He tells of the only other person to use the boat with him, Elias, and that he is now heading to Sund and to a smaller port for the night. He again visits the shop, purchases a second needle and thread, and is shocked to pay the same price. So that night, he hears a voice, and it is Eline, the girl he likes but never told, talking to him, and they elope as she has missed Vaim, his home, and where she grew up. Then, in part, we hear from Jatgeir’s friend Elais after Jatgeir has come back with Eline, and the two friends who often spent time together have not been together for a year and a day. This is a phrase Eline uses in the first part of the story. Then he is visited by a ghost, but who is the ghost? The third story loops back to Frank Eline’s husband on Sund and his story, but as ever, there are loops of names and phrases and boats with similar names in this tale, and it is very strange in the end

She called me Frank, from the first time we met she called me Frank – hi Frank, nice to see you, she said to me, or something like that, it was in Bjørgvin, it was at the restaurant called The Fowl where I’d gone with the two guys I fished with on the Elinor, the three of us did all kinds of fishing on that ship back then, and then it would sometimes happen that if we’d had a good catch and got a good price for the fish that we’d take a little trip to Bjørgvin, dock at one of the quays on The Wharf, spend a night there usually, getting in sometime in the afternoon and leaving at dawn or sometime the next morning

Frank or Olaf as he is meeting Eline for the first time in the third part of the book

This book is like a Möbius loop, as you have the feeling ELine is going around and around with these two men, like a moon orbiting two planets: as one pulls, she goes from Jatgeir to Frank, or is it Olaf who was Frank? Is he Olaf? Add to this: boats with similar names; both men have boats called Eline, and the other boat has a similar-sounding name as well. Then we have the recurrent mention of a year and a day in the book; it keeps cropping up, but at other times, time is fluid, and the events seem to have happened over a year, while in other passages, it is this year and a day that is said. Friendship love moen that are very quiet and a woman that likes to get her own way lead to a novella that twists in on itself and at times seems to repeat events and places in the first and last story, like the two men are ghosts that could have met at some point . This is a classic piece of Fosse, and I can’t wait to see where he takes this story, how many more twists and turns we get from the folk on Vaim.This is the best books I have read this year so far.

The Christmas Clue by Nicola Upson

~ winstonsdad ~ 4 Comments

Image

The Christmas Clue by Nicola Upson

English Fiction

Source – Personal copy

I brought this in the run-up to Christmas. I feel I’m starting a new reading tradition for myself: finishing the year off with a couple of crime books. I think what grabbed me about this book is the fact that it uses the couple that invented the board game Cluedo, which is written by Nicola Upson whom I have seen talking a lot about golden age of crime writing and this book is set in the time well middle of world war two when people had to make there own entertainment the coupole at the heart of the boo comes up with the game. But what Nicola Upson imagines is that the pair had run a murder game in the house they eventually used as the template for the Cluedo board.

They pressed on, passing through familiar villages in good time and picking up the Rottingdean road just as the light was beginning to fade. It’s hard to believe that we’re almost at the coast, Elva said, peering through the windscreen at the pretty cottages and village greens that were synonymous with rural England. ‘You’d never know that all the drama of the sea was barely a mile away. I think that’s what I love most about this place. You get the best of both worlds, so you never tire of either of them?

‘Murder at the Vicarage and Rebecca all rolled into one?Anthony said, and laughed as she raised her eyes to the heavens.Dean Court Road is the next turning on the left?She nodded but didn’t slow down, and Anthony repeated the direction. ‘Well, it was the next left, he said, staring back over his shoulder. Now you’ll have to go round the pond and come back?

As the head off to set up there murder weekend in high spirits

The book follows Anthony and Elva Pratt, a couple who, in 1943, arranged for a small hotel in the village of Rottingdean to host a murder-mystery weekend. They have the fake weapons for the murder weekend and have chosen the Tudor house as the setting for the weekend. Anthony had played the piano at the hotel before the war.  But when they arrive and call at a local shop and find the shopkeeper dead, their murder mystery weekend becomes all too real, especially when it turns out the sister of the dead woman happens to work at the Tudor house hotel. What follows is that the death is connected tpo the collection of guests in the hotel, and the dean sets out to solve the actual crime. But the hotel guests are, in a way, the templates for the Cluedo game: a single woman, a military man, the hotel manager, and the sister. Miss Silver, the cook, may know more about why the shopkeeper has died.

‘My money would be on last-minute chocolates for his wife? Elva pulled into the space that the other car had just vacated, a neat dark rectangle amid the covering of white.

‘At least Miss Silver’s not staying open just for us?

The shop was one of a terrace of small cottages, identical to its neighbours except for the colourful array of sweets and novelties in the window and a discreet sign above the door: Miss E. Silver, Tobacconist and Confec-tioner, est. 1929. ‘You could trace my whole childhood in those jars, Anthony said, looking wistfully at the gob-stoppers, humbugs and sugar mice. ‘It must be a lovely thing to own a sweet shop, don’t you think? You’d only ever have happy customers?

They visit the shop but get more than chocolates there !

I loved how she worked the real life inventors of Cluedo intpo a classic slice of Golden age criome in a way the classic country house or in the case hotel a collection of people gathered together sterotypes like in the game but also in a lot of christie novels the characters all fit a type a single woman a vixen of sort a mitltary man, stasff and a couple of mysterious figures. We have all here, plus nods to the classic game they invented based on this hotel, a cast of characters, and, like in the car, a lot of ways to kill someone on hand. Then to set it all at Christmas is just so clever. I can see this being a Christmas read for years for fans of classic golden-age crime fiction, as well as books that take real-life people on a Journey. I also think it has a TV drama written all over it as well!

 

 

The Coffee House by Naguib Mahfouz

~ winstonsdad ~ 4 Comments

Image

The Coffee House by Naguib Mahfouz

Egyptian Fiction

Original title – قشتمر (رواية)

Translator – Raymond Stock

Source – Personal copy

I have read a few other books by Mahfouz over the years. He is a writer whose books are widely available in English and are also widely translated. He is best known for the Cairo trilogy, which I intend to read early in 2027 if anyone is interested in joining me in reading the epic novel that earned him the Nobel Prize. With Mookse and Gripes doing an episode on him in 2027, I have time try and read as many as I can. This is a book from later in his career. It was his last novel, but not the last book he wrote. So far, from the other books I have read by him, he always captures the vibe of his country so well, and he has great insight into relationships. Also, here, I felt this is a microcosm of the country for the five young boys who grow to be men in this book.

Sadiq Safwan lived in a house blessed with love, harmony, and a stable marital life. As an only child, he was favored with every sort of care but his adolescent awakening was considered a secret that must be avoided. At puberty, with neither a teacher nor a helper, he abandoned his piety.

“Marriage is the only cure for this,” he once told us. “But

when will that come?”

Sadiq loved his parents he was not afraid of them: Tahir Ubayd was like him in this. Safwan Effendi al-Nadi began to escort his son to Friday prayers at the Sidi al-Kurdi mosque.

“Didn’t your father’s mustache poke those praying on either side of him in the eye?” Tahir teased Sadiq after we’d waited for his return.

Sadig’s father never stopped pushing him to work hard and settle into the right position, for only that would save him from a future of poverty.

Sadig gets out of his poor background

The title refers to a local coffee house near where the five main characters in the book all went to school. They all came to the school from different places in Cairo. So when they grow up, they are, in ways, on opposite sides at times, but still have regular meetups at the coffee house. Ismel is very clever and, maybe in a way, a disappointment in his life, but devout and works in publishing. Opposite to this is Tahir, a man from a low-class background, but not religious, who loves poetry.  Hamada is a lawyer when he grows up. Sadig is a middle-of-the-road person who runs a factory and is married. Then there is our narrator, and we have very few clues about him. For me, he was maybe Mahfouz himself; he spent time in coffee houses. What happens is the events of the middle years of the twentieth century, from World War II to the rise of the muslim brotherhood. I loved how it showed how these five boys who met as seven-year-olds and managed to stick together through adulthood, each having their own paths and views.

Ismail Qadri was more or less our leader. That was his right due to his academic excellence, an undeniable distinction. He had a special status among the teachers, not to mention an air of excitement due to his sexual caprices. Since his reaching puberty, his mother had kept a special watch on him, so he lost the opportunities that the roof terrace had offered. Thus he transferred his instinct to the forest of fig trees, into which he lured the daughters of street vendors. Nonetheless, he persisted in his piety like Sadig Safwan, stuffing his storehouse of information with many things he learned from his mother on the afterlife and the torture of the grave. He sustained his fervor by picturing the image of God.

Ismail is the most well written character i felt he must been some Mahfouz knew well

I was so happy when I found this last year, as I had read a Mahfouz last year and had only a couple on my TBR pile, so this is his final novel for me, and it’s a personal book. I see the narrator as Mahfouz and the other characters as people he has known. I am not quite sure if each character is one person or various friends from the many traditional coffee houses he used to go to.One in particular is the model for the cafe in the book, and it is still kept as it was in Mahfouz’s time for people to visit. He has also shown how turbulent the years have been for Egypt and how the locals have coped with it. Have you read any books by Mahfouz? If so, do you have a favourite? If you are after a Proust-like book about Cairo in the mid century, this is the book for you