BERJAYA

The Disappearing Act by Maria Stepanova translated by Sasha Dugdale.

Posted on March 21, 2026 by mandywight

This short novel by Maria Stepanova opens with the novelist M travelling on a train to a book-reading somewhere in Europe. We’re told she’s left her country of birth which is currently waging war against a neighbouring country and has sometimes killed its own inhabitants. As Maria Stepanova is Russian—and the author of the acclaimed In Memory of Memory—we can’t help but think that M is based on the writer herself, the country she has left being Russia, currently waging war on Ukraine.

As the interior monologue progresses along with the train journey, we learn more about the effect this war is having on M’s mental state. She refers to her country as the beast, saying when people ask her about it, they do so with a look of anxious compassion, as if she had been bitten, even half-swallowed. Later on, she wonders if despite her hatred and revulsion for the beast, she too might have a monstrous nature, having lived with it for as long as she could remember. Though she’s appearing at a book festival, she says early on she’s no longer really a novelist: she’s not writing anything and has no plans to do so. She’s finding it difficult to organise herself, to complete tasks. It’s as if the jigsaw puzzle remained unsolved, the smashed blue china cup could not be glued together.

Ordinary activities serve as constant reminders of the war. When she’s hanging out in a cafe in G, thinking she’ll look at her socials, she doesn’t, knowing what she’ll find there: photographs of people and dogs immersed in dirty bubbling water, making desperate attempts to save themselves. This, after a hydroelectric dam was blown up and water breached the dam, flooding the country all around. Then, when she checks into her chain hotel in the town of F, she sees the neatly ordered room as a drawer, a piece of furniture contrasting with what was outside: yawning holes and gaps, the terrible wrenching of matter, of horror and trembling, shame and guilt, death and destruction.

These recurrent associations extend to her language itself, which she rarely actually names as Russian. When an idiom for a crowded station—nowhere for an apple to fall—comes to mind, she realises she no longer trusts her flexing, twisting, nearly all-powerful language, spoken by her compatriots, perhaps right then engaged in the act of killing. When she comes across Grand Hotel Petukh as a possible sight to visit, she thinks of the Russian word petukh, used to designate the lowest caste of prisoner in Russia’s prisons, those subjected to the worst form of bullying and torture. And she avoids speaking Russian, relieved to speak English at first to the two circus performers, that neutral, mercifully hygienic language.

The two circus performers are part of the Peter Cohn circus, which M comes across while in F. (By this time her phone has run out of charge, she’s no longer in contact with the book festival, and that reading just isn’t going to happen). She overhears them saying they need someone to perform with them on their last Saturday, and she volunteers her help. When they ask her to be measured up for the very particular sarcophagus integral to their act, we sort of get the picture of what the act involves. M is then invited to that night’s show and there’s a fabulous account of the performance—that mixture of glamour and danger as the beautiful blonde rider juggles with flaming torches, the lion tamer puts his head into the open jaws of the mightiest beast. For once, M is taken out of herself, into a delightful new world. But then afterwards she remembers a French children’s book—is it a Madeline story?—where two children are left behind on a trip and end up joining a circus. They do come home in the end, but M reflects on the warning that homecomings often involve returning to an empty space where your home once stood. Or that those who welcome you turn into strange spirits at night and consume your sleeping figure.

On the very first train journey, M notices a tall, good-looking younger man, his blond hair held back in a pony tail with several hair clips. He reappears in one or two places but more importantly in the latter half of the novel, when he befriends M and takes her to an Escape Room, where they are both a little dumbfounded by the entertainment. It’s a little unclear what role he plays in the novel, but it turns out he’d recognised M as the novelist she is, and knows she is living in B ( Berlin?) with a group of other artists and writers. He offers to accompany her back home, and to me comes over as a friend, gently guiding her back from the fantastical—and possibly dangerous—world of the circus, back to reality.

I’ve been wondering how Russians are dealing with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine since it began four years ago now. This short novel gives us a glimpse of how that feels for Maria Stepanova—or her fictional character. I also enjoyed the sections about the circus, that fulcrum of glamour and risk that seemed such a lure in stories from my own childhood. Running away to join the circus was quite a thing in stories back then. A fantasy of disappearance to enjoy from a safe place perhaps. But though we feel M has been brought back from the brink of disappearance, the last line suggests that caravan may still be just round the corner.

Posted in Books in Translation | Tagged Fitzcarraldo Editions, Maria Stepanova, Sasha Dugdale, The Disappearing Act | 1 Comment

#ReadingWales26 : Selected Stories by Rhys Davies-Library of Wales

Posted on March 11, 2026 by mandywight

Rhys Davies (1901- 1978) was born in the Rhondda, and though he lived most of his adult life in London, his novels and short stories are set mostly in the pit villages and surrounding countryside of South Wales. Tomos Owen, in his helpful introduction to this collection, tells us Rhys Davies was the fourth child of a grocer’s family, so he was well placed to observe the lives and relationships in the Valleys in the 1920s and 30s.

The personal lives and family relationships in the mining villages are the subject of most stories here, and it’s the separate spheres inhabited by men and women which often provide the narrative focus. In Nightgown the unnamed protagonist has cooked, cleaned and slaved away for her husband and five big sons all her married life. They are noisy, coarse and dominating as they clatter into the house for their four o’clock meal, eating huge quantities of bacon, potatoes, fruit tarts and pineapple before bathing in front of the fire and, spruced up in their serge-blue suits, leave at six to their various entertainments. She’s become so submerged in the maleness of the household that she’s even started wearing a man’s cap and her son’s shoes, socks and muffler as she goes about the village with her jaw jutting out. That is, until one day she sees on a mannequin in the draper’s window a wonderful white silk nightgown, flowing down over the legs most richly and trimmed with lace at bosom and cuffs. She hasn’t always been rough. We’re told that as a girl, she had once been to the seaside in a buff straw hat ringed with daisies. She determines to buy the nightgown, though we are shocked and saddened when we learn what she wants it for.

In The Last Struggle, it’s a marriage of only two years that’s in trouble. When courting, Megan thought her husband Sam Two Fingers liked her company. But once married he’s out every night to the dogs. After all, the valley was a man’s valley, with pubs, clubs, dog tracks and football grounds. Megan wanted to be taken about by her husband, she wanted clothes and train journeys, so when the colliery manager informs her Sam’s been buried in a pit accident, who can blame her if she’s straight off to Weston-Super-Mare on the strength of the insurance money that will surely come to her? In A Spot of Bother it’s the football that does for the marriage of Mary Ann to Ormond. They have a very raw shindy when he tells her he’s off to Cardiff for the match—Mary Ann has had enough of the whippet racing, gambling and other anti-home pursuits of the various male clubs—and she tells him she’s leaving to go to her aunty’s. But when Ormond’s misdeeds in Cardiff catch up with him, Mary Ann stands by him. She gets her own back later by clobbering him over the head with a stocking filled with haricot beans. Given that Bylau men are not much addicted to domestic jobs, is there a hint of contrition, a vague aspect of compliant reformation about him, as he starts sweeping up the spilled beans?

Megan has bought herself a splendid new red dress in Weston-Super- Mare, but she’s wary of putting it on when she returns because of the gossip that will ensue. Gossip, and observation of others, is a recurrent theme in the stories, and usually it’s women watching other women. In The Fashion Plate, Mrs. Mitchell, the wife of the slaughterhouse manager dresses up in her fancy high-heeled shoes, the brilliantly elegant dresses in summer, the tweeds and the swirl of furs for the bitter days and parades up and down the high street twice a day. Curtains twitch, front doors open a crack, as the other women watch her, tutting at this picture of indolence, yet admiring her grace and panache at the same time. They are less forgiving with the eponymous Catherine Fuchsias, suspected of having an affair with a married man. Wanting to get away, she writes to her cousin in Aberystwyth, suggesting they go into partnership there, but when she goes to the Post Office for a stamp, she’s snubbed by other customers and the postmistress almost refuses to serve her. There’s a sense that once the gossips have got it in for you, there’s no escape: the postmistress tells her maliciously that she has a cousin in Aber, married to the minister, who knows everyone there—she too will write a letter to Aber.

Some of the stories feature outsiders, characters who live some distance from the sharp eyes and tongues of the pit villagers. Catherine Fuchsias is one such character, her cottage standing concealed on a bushy slope outside the village, surrounded by her wonderful fuchsias, which Mr. Lewis admires every Sunday after chapel. Another is the vegetable seller Pugh Jibbons in Bronwen. Swarthy and thick-set, with rounded, powerful limbs and strong dark tufts of hair everywhere, he lives up the mountainside, and exudes a kind of animal sexuality that puts Bronwen’s fiancé, pale Oswald, in the shade.

My favourite story of them all, I Will Keep Her Company takes place in the countryside, and here the isolation plays a role. We meet John Evans coming downstairs into his kitchen in a lonely valley cottage. There’s been an unprecedented snowfall in recent days, and when he opens his door there’s a wall of pure white facing him. It’s extremely cold, and no imprints to be seen of the robins and tits that regularly come to the window for titbits. John is stiff and dazed with the cold, his mind wanders over previous cold snaps, and his beloved damson trees, as he looks out over the mountains, they too somehow defeated by the snow, Savage guardians of interior Wales, even their lowering black clouds and whipping rains were vanquished today. They looked innocent in their unbroken white. We’re aware that someone is due to come, but only when the tone changes from the intensity of John’s inner monologue to chatty Nurse Baldock heroically toiling up to the cottage in the snow plough with the vicar and young driver do we understand what’s happened to John and his wife.

These are powerful stories that will stay with the reader for a while: Rhys Davies writes not only of the material hardship in the valleys, but also conveys the emotional gap between men and women of that time. There’s humour in some of stories, often carried in the viewpoint of a child, but often nastiness and malice in there too. I loved this collection and hope to read more Rhys Davies very soon.

Posted in Books in English, Welsh Voices, Working Class Voices | Tagged Library of Wales, Rhys Davies, Selected Stories | Leave a comment

Returning to New Caledonia- Frapper l’epopee by Alice Zeniter

Posted on March 7, 2026 by mandywight

I really enjoyed Alice Zeniter’s prize-winning novel The Art of Losing, so I’ve been looking forward to reading her next book, Frapper l’épopée. All the more so, as it’s set in the French overseas territory of La Nouvelle Caledonie, an archipelago in the Pacific some 750 kilometres from Australia, a place I know little about, but about which I’d like to know more. It’s the story of a return, as protagonist Tass returns to her home country on the break- up of a relationship, after some years in metropolitan France. But, as in The Art of Losing, themes of ancestry, identity and belonging are also explored, in this novel emerging slowly to take centre stage towards the end of the book.

As Tass reconnects with her mother and family friend, Sylviane, we learn a little about island life and Tass’ past. She’s studied and worked in France and initially sees the capital Nouméa through French eyes as she thinks about Thomas, her ex, and his refusal to consider a life in New Caledonia—about how the French arrive, thinking they’ll flâner dans le centre, stroll through the town centre, little realising there’s no town centre to speak of, just a grid of parallel streets and one central square with administrative buildings where people go to pay their bills, little more. Tass is lent a flat by Sylviane, bought originally for her son, now working in France, and unlikely to return. It’s Tass’ own space, but regularly invaded by cockroaches and geckos, an aspect of island life she has to endure, along with the debilitating tropical humidity, which has her sweating profusely before she’s even started her teaching day.

Parallel to the narrative of Tass reintegrating with island life runs the story of three islanders called Le Ruisseau, NEP and FidR—these names are explained. They are indigenous Kanak people, though don’t have a traditional relationship with their clan, for reasons that become clear later in the book. What binds them together is their political/ philosophical belief in empathie violente, violent empathy. They carry out actions that aim to give white people:

un sentiment de dépossession, troubler l’évidence de chez-soi, limer la confiance qu’ils ont dans leur statut de propriétaire,… the feeling of being dispossessed , of upsetting their belief of being at home, of undermining the confidence they have in their status as property owners.

We’re given a rather wonderful and ingenious example of this. One of their number, a masseuse, would put on the shoes of the client lying on the massage table and wear them during the massage. Noticing this, the client would think Hang on, aren’t those my shoes she’s wearing? Does she realise they’re mine? How can I ask her? In this way the client would be given just an inkling of that feeling of dispossession felt by the indigenous people on the arrival of the French colonists.

These two narratives run in alternating chapters, slow-burn rather than plot-driven, as we learn more about life and society in the islands through Tass’ observations and experiences. The two strands come together in the story of Célestin and Pénélope, twin students in Tass’ final grade class who disappear shortly before the end of the school year. Tass had noticed Pénélope’s rounded tummy before she left and was concerned she might be pregnant. She’s one of the few adults who seem to care—their rough uncle in the squalid flat where they’ve been living couldn’t care less. And the only other people who care are the police, having heard a report of twins hanging around a posh house in a gated community and wondering if they’ve joined up with that strange anarchist group who break in to people’s houses and disrupt, leaving their mark MPATHY.

In the meantime, Tass takes advantage of the long summer break to visit an area called Bourail, where she lived with her parents and brother Ju as small children. This brings back memories of her father, now dead, telling her about the unique trees, flowers and bird life of the islands—and yes, this section does feel a little didactic. She also finds herself visiting the Muslim cemetery at Bourail and remembered that the island had a significant Muslim population, brought here as convicts in the mid 19^th century, when the island was a prison.

The narrative then goes, truth be told, a little magic realist. Tass falls into a hole in the dense tropical forest where water pools at the bottom, and starts seeing her ancestors and their stories parading before her in the water, as if on a cinema screen. Purists may find this section a little odd in an otherwise realist novel, though, to be fair, the weirdness is signalled a little by this section being separate, and entitled Avant, Before. Personally, I was gripped by the story of Tass’ ancestor, Arezki Areski who came from Algeria. In 1866 he was sentenced to 8 years’ imprisonment on New Caledonia for stealing from his French boss who hadn’t paid him. We learn not only his story, but that of many other prisoners, the hardships they endured in prison, the hierarchy amongst them which determined how they got on when they’d served their sentence. For most, there was no question of returning home, but rather of the size of land plot they might be granted and whether they’d be entitled to a wife from among the small group of female convicts who also ended up there.

There’s a little more to the plot which I won’t go into here—because with this novel it’s not really about the plot. The writer has used the return of Tass to tell us, occasionally with her teacher hat a little too evident, about New Caledonia: its mix of indigenous and European people, its incredible trees and flowers, its landscape, its birds, its humidity, its fragility, too, with the ever present threat of cyclones. But she’s a great creator of character too, and draws us into the lives and minds of her characters with her focus on small detail, often physical. So we’re immediately drawn to Tass in the first pages, trying to manoeuvre her U-shaped head cushion to a position she can sleep in on the long flight home, wondering how she can creep round the bulky body of her neighbour to get to the loo. We’re there with FidR, prepared for the whole range of behaviours in her work as a carer from les mots dures, hard words…to les mains qui cherchent une des siennes pour les serrer fort, the hands which reach out for one of hers in order to squeeze it tight. I was moved, too, by the account of the supplies of cotton gauze in the prison being used up so quickly. The prisoners kept it in order to press it to their faces, to feel the softness of it, to remind themselves that they were still alive.

So this longish novel (400 pages) won’t appeal to those who want a fast or complex plot. But there’s a wealth of information here about New Caledonia as a background to Tass’ story, and a range of fascinating characters. Let’s hope we see it in English translation soon.

Posted in Books in French, Uncategorized | Tagged Alice Zeniter, Frapper l'epopee, Novels set in New Caledonia | Leave a comment

The Rarest Fruit by Gaёlle Bélem translated by Karen Fleetwood and Laetitia Saint-Loubert, published by Bullaun Press.

Posted on February 24, 2026 by mandywight

I’ve got a faible for Bullaun Press, an Irish independent press publishing literature in translation. I’ve reviewed several of their books here on Peak Reads (Forgottenness, Without Waking Up, What Remains), including There’s a Monster Behind The Door by Gaёlle Bélem, which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025 and won the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses in 2025. So I’ve been keen to read Gaёlle Bélem’s second novel published by Bullaun, The Rarest Fruit. It’s a fictional biography of Edmond Albius, who discovered how to pollinate vanilla on the island of La Réunion, or Bourbon as it was then called, in the mid 19^th century. A discovery which was monumental for the economy of La Réunion at the time, but highly controversial too, as Edmond was a 12 year old black slave who could neither read nor write.

The narrative starts with Edmond, orphaned as a baby, being brought to the home of Ferréol Bellier-Beaumont, a childless widower by his sister, Elvire. He rather falls for this fifty-centimetre babe-in-arms, takes him in, and brings him up almost as his own. That is to say, he shares his love of gardening and plants with the boy, who shows a keen interest in botany, but refuses to let him go to school, for after all, he is the child of slaves. When Edmond says he wants to be a botanist, like his adopted father, Ferréol can’t countenance it, and puts him onto gardening instead. Nevertheless, Edmond soon memorises not only the local names for the lush, exotic plants in the garden, but the Latin names too. And his attention to the details and mechanisms for pollination mean that he works out how to pollinate the vanilla plant growing in Ferréol’s garden, which up till now has failed to produce fruit. Edmond is 12 years old, a black slave, and the fact that it’s him that makes this discovery provokes incredulity, envy and astonishment in the world around him.

Edmond’s story is told in neat chapters, helpfully dated, but interleaved with chapters relating to the earlier history of the vanilla plant and the colonisation of La Réunion, all swiftly sketched out and beautifully told with Gaёlle Bélem’s witty and sensual language. I loved this account of Mexican Emperor Moctezuma serving cocoa flavoured with vanilla to Hernan Cortés: a warm and sugary hint of caramel and cocoa that reminds him of summer, of walks in the woods along the banks of the Guadalquivir, of the languorous kisses of Doña Marina. Then, when the vanilla plant is brought to Europe, The strange new aroma pervades everything. Invisible notes of oriental spices and tobacco with a strong hint of ambergris delight every nostril in Seville. There’s more detail about how the plant was grown in the Tuileries and Versailles, and a cutting sent by Louis XV111 to La Réunion, where the plant flourished, but didn’t produce a single pod.

Alongside the history of the vanilla plant, there’s some interesting background to the social milieu of La Réunion, which contextualises the world in which Edmond grew up. It wasn’t just made up of the landowning haute bourgeoisie on the one hand and their slaves on the other. There were also the Petits Blancs, the Poor Whites, who had to work their fingers to the bone, have eyes in the backs of their heads and one finger on the trigger …to make it to the ranks of the moderately wealthy moyenne bourgeoisie . There’s an interesting account too of the emancipation of slaves on the island. We learn first of the breeze of modernity blowing across the islands in the mid 19^th century, represented in the new suspension bridge……. sugar mills, roads and bridges opening everywhere. The Colonial Council at first rejects any proposal to abolish slavery, but during the 1840s individual slaves are emancipated, though it’s only in 1848 that Ferréol brings Edmond his certificate of emancipation. For Edmond, this is emancipation, but it’s also leaving the home he knows, and the sympathetic people who’ve brought him up. We learn what happens to him next, which includes a spell in prison, and through this, learn of the hard lives and limited options available to former slaves. Many of them become indentured workers, working in conditions little better than before.

There’s some impressive scholarship gone into the writing of this book—as well as considerable skill in weaving the history succinctly and imaginatively into Edmond’s story—and I’ve been wondering why the writer chose to fictionalise his life rather than write a straight biography? She’s a writer of sensuous language of course, and evokes so well the lushness of the island as well as the intoxicating aroma of vanilla. But I was also moved by the relationship between Ferréol and Edmond: the tenderness felt by Ferréol for baby Edmond, the mixture of jealousy and pride he felt for the boy when he discovered the secret of vanilla, his contrition at their falling out and their later reconciliation. None of this obvious in historical documents, I guess, and so open to imagination and interpretation by writers of subsequent generations.

This is a rich and immensely enjoyable book which will appeal to botanists, Francophiles, historians and those who simply like a good story. Thanks to Gaёlle Bélem, translators Karen Fleetwood and Laёtitia Saint-Loubert, and to Bullaun Press for another great book.

Posted in Books in Translation, Uncategorized | Tagged Bullaun Press, Gaelle Belem, Karen Fleetwood, Laetitia Saint-Loubert, The Rarest Fruit | 1 Comment

Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev by Maxim Gorky, translated from the Russian by Bryan Karetnyk

Posted on February 21, 2026 by mandywight

It was the name Tolstoy that drew my attention to this title. I read War and Peace as a young person and it’s one of the great works of world literature that I often think about rereading. This edition from Fitzcarraldo Editions is an absolute gem—it not only gives us biographical notes on the great man, as well as great men Chekhov and Andreyev, but there’s a cogent and informative introduction on the writer of those notes, Maxim Gorky, by J. M. Coetzee.

Knowing nothing about Gorky, I was intrigued to discover he ran away from his family and a series of uninspiring apprenticeships as a boy, and got a job on a Volga steamer as a cook’s helper. The cook happened to be an avid reader, and by the age of thirteen Gorky was deep into the Russian pantheon: Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky. Because of his lack of elementary education, he was unable to enter university, but hung around with students in the city of Kazan, leading the footloose life of a bosiak, a vagrant. Therewere many bosiaks wandering over Russia at this time, due to rapid urbanization and the pull of the city. An autodidact, Gorky was published, became well known, and stood up for writers who fell foul of the new Soviet regime between 1918 and 1921, saving many from persecution and penury. Coming from the artisan class, he was keen to distance himself from the peasantry and village life, which he found gloomy and monotonous. Yet his social class was far removed from that of nobleman Leo Tolstoy, whose interest in Gorky is described by Coetzee as ethnographic.

Gorky first met Tolstoy in Moscow around 1899, then on several occasions in the winter of 1901-1902, when they were staying on neighbouring estates in Crimea. He paints a vivid portrait of the physicality of the man: he has remarkable hands—unsightly, gnarled by varicose veins, and yet imbued with a special expressiveness and creative power….Sometimes, while talking, he will move his fingers, gradually closing them into a fist, and then, suddenly opening it, utter some fine, weighty word. His appearance is at times almost comical. Gorky comes across him on the estate riding a docile little Tatar nag, Grey-haired, shaggy, wearing a lightweight, mushroom-shaped hat made of white felt, he looked like a gnome.

Yet their conversations were anything but comical, Tolstoy holding forth often on God and the worthiness of the great writers of the day—Balzac, Dickens, Dostoyevsky. He was an atheist, but still concerned with God, his ambiguous relationship with God seen by Gorky as that of two bears in the same den. Tolstoy was preoccupied with the peasants, referring often to the characteristics of the peasant class—their cunning, how they cling to life—and himself using the coarse language of the peasants at times, especially when talking about women. However, the nobleman was just below the surface. Gorky relates a wonderful scene when visitors, recognising him by the peasant garb he chose to wear, responded with just too much gush: Then, suddenly from under the peasant beard, from under the democratically rumpled blouse, would emerge the old Russian nobleman, the grand aristocrat—and in an instant the noses of these visitors, be they plainspoken or educated or whatever else, would turn blue from the unbearable chill in the room.

One feature of these Reminiscences I enjoyed is that of the two-way interaction between Gorky and the three writers. He doesn’t just write about the great men, but records his own feelings and reactions to the conversations, to the ups and downs of the relationships he has with them. In the latter part of the section on Tolstoy, Gorky finds him despotic, says that he doesn’t listen, and fundamentally disagrees with Tolstoy’s philosophy of passivism, seeing this as representative of all the faults of our nation. He was uncomfortable with Tolstoy’s coarse attitude to women, which emerges when Tolstoy criticises the girl in his work Twenty-Six Men and a Girl, hurting Gorky with a litany of indecent words. When Gorky notes Tolstoy’s awareness to any infelicity of speech he hears around him, we see an acknowledgement of that acute ear of the writer. Yet is there a little faint praise there too, when Gorky calls this awareness….. morbidly keen? It’s as if he’s saying come on, just give it a break.

Gorky’s attitude to Chekhov is less ambivalent. We meet him in the village of Kuchuk-Koy where Chekhov has a small, white, two-storeyed house and explains to Gorky his dream of creating a sanatorium for poorly village school masters. The fundamental goodness of the man illuminates this account of their meeting, and Gorky finds that his sweet, gentle smile never failed to endear him to people. Unlike many fellow Russians, Chekhov was preoccupied with the banality of life, the dreary striving for food and for peace and quiet. Yet beneath this banality, he shows us in his plays many cruel and hateful things.The great dramas and tragedies were hidden for him under a thick layer of the ordinary. Gorky also sees Chekhov as differing from fellow Russians in his ability to work, and his vision of labour as the foundation of culture, whether this was cultivating his own garden, or admiring the workmanship in some beautiful possession. His cough is a feature of every meeting described, and Gorky’s only negative comment is that Chekhov became misanthropic when ill—surely forgivable when he died of T.B. at the age of 44.

Andreyev is probably the least known of the three writers to an English-speaking readership. Gorky struck up a friendship with him after admiring his short story Bargamot and Garaska published in The Moscow Courier in 1898. There’s a compelling description of this handsome young man at their first meeting dressed in an antediluvian sheepskin coat with matching sheepskin hat worn at a jaunty angle…in his dark eyes with their unwavering gaze, there was a glimmer of that same smile that radiated so well from his stories and feuilletons. So though I’d found myself primarily interested in Tolstoy and Chekhov, I was drawn in to the story of charismatic Andreyev by the power of Gorky’s vivid description. Gorky too, was bedazzled at first by the keenness of Andreyev’s fancy, the power of his intuition, the fertility of his imagination. As time went on, though, he became frustrated and disappointed at Andreyev’s reluctance to get down to actually writing, while being nevertheless convinced he was some sort of genius. In this section we learn about the ups and downs of their friendship which ended with political differences in 1916.

So this is a rich and fascinating book, the personalities of these three Russian writers so beautifully evoked through Maxim Gorky’s vivid reminiscences. I’d like to praise too Bryan Karetnyk’s translation which communicates the thoughts, feelings and ideas shared between these four writers over one hundred years ago so accessibly for a contemporary readership. Many thanks Fitzcarraldo for this wonderful project.

Posted in Books in Translation, European Literature, Memoir, Non-fiction | Tagged Bryan Karetnyk, Fitzcarraldo Editions, Maxim Gorky, Reminiscences of Tolstoy Chekhov and Andreyev | 2 Comments

The Hunger of Women by Marosia Castaldi translated from the Italian by Jamie Richards

Posted on February 16, 2026 by mandywight

Rosa, the protagonist of this novel, likes to cook. At the start of this first person narrative she makes simple (by Italian standards) meals for her daughter, and neighbour, Tina. We learn she’s recently lost her husband after a car accident, and that her grown up daughter is about to go off to the south of France. Her mind darts occasionally to a gun in the drawer, and she sees loneliness and absence everywhere. In short, she’s fifty and at a vulnerable point in her life.

Right from the start, the meals are described in detail, and, unusually, followed by the recipe, I made the neighbour rice with chickpeas I slow cooked the beans without soaking them first and added rosemary garlic and oil Then I mixed them with rice and mixed pasta:maccheroni tagliatelle ziti the way this simple peasant dish is always made The length and frequency of the food descriptions really ramps up when Rosa decides to open a restaurant and prepares the food for special feast nights. Copious and elaborate courses are prepared, ingredients listed and methods described for the reader.

You may have noticed, from the above quotation, an absence of punctuation. This is not a conventional narrative, but a stream of consciousness, and the absence of full stops certainly adds to the effect of this being an outpouring. The narrator’s mind darts all over the place, sometimes seemingly triggered by a single word such as sea, which is frequently followed by finite flayed furrowed by ships carrying centuries gold millennia wines spices oils handicrafts freemen slaves (I first admired the alliteration, but was wearied after many repetitions). Sometimes there’s a syntactic variation in the repetition, such as in the description of the Po landscape, filled with fog and crime. Sometimes the repetitions are of words, phrases and ideas so abstract I just didn’t understand them, like the frequent return to thoughts of ordering, bones and chaos. And there are a lot of lists.

There’s a contrast between the matter of fact language of the recipes and the lyrical, intense language used to describe quite mundane acts such as eating: the soft sauce pooled at the edges of our mouths like rivulets of blood running from the lips of sirens who devour the bones of errant men. Some of this elevated language is rather beautiful: on youth, Rosa reflects we were young and even bodily suffering faded in the delight of conversation and imagined futures that beckoned full of promises plans dreams. I loved her memories of Naples, the low homes in whose windows appeared dark women and raggedy children and angels with golden swords in the middle of the wild infernal wood of scooters shopkeepers bottegas hawkers. But sometimes it felt like you had to wade through pages of food, repetitive paragraphs, obscure metaphysical references, to find a pearl of a sentence that might transport you to the trees heavy with oranges of Naples.

Returning to the narrative, Rosa has a brief love affair with neighbour Tina. However, Tina is cast aside when Rosa falls for the beautiful young wife of a business man who comes to one of her feast nights. She visits her in her home where she’s all but shut up in a vast dusty house and they begin a torrid affair starting with a few nights away in Vigevano. There are erotic accounts of their lovemaking which are accompanied—yes, yet again—by food. Before, during, and after the lovemaking. Readers might reflect on the power relationship between the two women—we only learn the young woman’s name, Caterina, many pages after she appears, and she only has one piece of direct speech. Then Rosa fancies another, older woman, from the south of Italy, Edda, and starts a relationship with her as well. The three women go back to Vigevano together and more lovemaking and eating ensues.

This is certainly a novel that focuses on women. As well as a cast of entirely female characters, Rosa is unequivocal about women’s subordinate status: women are laden with unearned burdens…women have been raped in wars in their homes in concentration camps…Worse and just as deadly is the stillicide (great translation!) that wears away a soul abandoned exclusively to managing and maintaining a home. In Caterina’s case she’s not so much kept in domestic servitude, as adorned and bedecked in posh clothes and jewellery by her businessman husband as a way of showing off his wealth and possessions. And Rosa’s antipathy to women as domestics is underlined, at times amusingly, by her irritation at the sound of Tina’s vacuum cleaner popping up drearily throughout the book.

What I couldn’t quite grasp, though, was the message here about food. On the one hand, there’s the simple act of cooking as giving, and the creativity that we see in Rosa’s efforts, both in her private life and at the restaurant. At the same time, there’s a growing distaste that comes across in the account of the feasts. Increasingly, the customers, including Caterina, are described as Botero-like figures (the Colombian artist who sculpted and painted rounded curvaceous characters) and their enjoyment of the food described as gluttonous, their behaviour at table increasingly vulgar and lascivious. Then there’s an unforgiving account of the rotund Botero women at the Adriatic coast, their laden bellies swollen with pain and regret. Yet it seems to me that Rosa and her two lovers do little else themselves but make love and eat.

This is a very unconventional narrative and I can’t say I enjoyed it. I found the never-ending description of meals both tedious and suffocating, making me feel like putting on some running shoes and whizzing out into the fresh air. This may be of course because I’m not much of a foodie and it could be that interested cooks would have more patience. Rosa’s metaphysical speculation often went over my head and the repetition had me glazing over. But the mother-daughter relationship at the beginning was moving and I loved the glimpses of Naples and the Po landscape and would have loved more of this. Translating such a text is an absolute tour de force. Hats off to translator Jamie Richards for her achievement and thanks to her and publishers And Other Stories for the illuminating translator’s note at the end.

Posted in Books in Translation, Books set in Italy | Tagged And Other Stories, Marosia Castaldi, The Hunger of Women | 1 Comment

The Door by Magda Szabo

Posted on February 12, 2026 by mandywight

This is the first book I’ve read by Hungarian writer Marta Szabó. First published in Hungary in 1987, the novel was translated into English by Len Rix in 2005, and published in this Vintage edition in 2020. It’s a first person narrative about the relationship between a writer and her housekeeper/ servant, Emerence, over a twenty year period, and as such is episodic in form, rather than plot driven. The novel digs deep into the power dynamics in their relationship, which ranges over a gamut of emotions—antagonism, anger, dependency and love—while giving us a little light relief and comedy in the shape of Viola, a foundling puppy that becomes part of the household.

When the writer realises she and her husband need help in the house, they approach local woman Emerence, already an older woman but with an impressive physique, tall, big-boned, powerfully built for her age, muscular rather than fat…she radiated strength like a Valkyrie. She needs this strength to be sure, as along with cleaning their house, she cleans several others, sweeps the streets, clears snow, and runs back and forth to poorly and needy neighbours with a steaming stew in a christening bowl. Along with this raw physical strength goes a deference towards her employers. She dresses in formal black for her interview, wears grey for day to day work, uses perfectly ironed linen handkerchiefs, and refers to the writer’s husband as the master. She’s never without a headscarf. Yet from the beginning, aspects of her employment are very much on her terms: she won’t do set hours, but turns up when it suits her, and decides the hours she’ll work. She gives little away about her personal circumstances. All her employers know is that she won’t let anyone into her flat. She entertains friends and family on her veranda outside, but the door remains firmly closed.

Five years later—I did say it was episodic—their relationship changes when the husband becomes seriously ill and the narrator is really on her knees with exhaustion and worry. Emerence looks after her like a mother, bringing her a special medicinal drink, and sharing the tragic story of her upbringing. This involves dreadful loss, initially in the war, and is one of the few hooks thrown across the narrative which gives us some idea of the time in which the story is set—readers more familiar with Hungarian history might pick up more clues than I did. This closer relationship is intensified further by the adoption of puppy Viola, found buried up to his neck in snow on Christmas Eve, and nursed back to health by all three members of the household. Rather quickly, it becomes clear that Emerence is Viola’s preferred mistress, and power struggles around dog care and competition for his affection—yes, it’s a male called Viola—become a feature of daily life from then on in.

Dog lovers such as myself will hugely enjoy the scenes involving Viola. One of my favourites is The Murano Mirror, when Emerence has asked her employers if she can use their flat to entertain a very special guest. Rather intrigued as to why she can’t entertain in her own place—that impenetrable door again?—they agree. Emerence prepares an elaborate gourmet feast, but the guest just doesn’t show up. Meanwhile, Viola sneaks into the room where the meal has been laid out, and the narrator, hearing sudden shouting and screaming from Emerence, rushes into the room to find Viola sitting at the table in my mother’s chair, eating…he had grabbed a slice of roast meat and was wolfing it down….one paw planted on the place mat, the other scrabbling for a grip on the Murano mirror tray.

Emerence’s weeping and anguish on this occasion due to the no-show of her special guest—and we do discover who this special guest is later on—is just one outburst of emotion. The relationship between the narrator and Emerence seems characterised by periods of deep calm and harmony, punctuated by occasional fierce arguments and angry words. She describes Emerence as a new-found mother to us both, saying that strangers visiting for the first time thought that Emerence, pottering about in the kitchen, was my aunt or godmother. Yet Emerence is at times astonishingly rude to the narrator. Sometimes this is part of a full-scale row, as in the chapter Junk Clearance, when Emerence brings all kinds of tasteless objects thrown away by others, into the house, and is mortally offended when her employer tries to tactfully hide some of it away.

There’s also the constant and needling remarks belittling the church and churchgoers that upset the writer deeply, as well as Emerence’s anti-intellectualism. The gulf between their class and levels of education is rather brilliantly done, with Emerence’s use of the vernacular when rowing—clear off!—contrasting with the writer’s classical references, describing herself creeping around at night like Aeneas descending to the underworld in Book 6 of The Aeneid. Still, though Emerence mutters often about why people fill their heads with useless stuff, she keeps each of her employer’s books that she’s been given. Unread, but there on the shelf.

The last part of the novel is a little drawn out, but contains some deeply moving scenes with Emerence, now ill and hospitalised. For the first time, the writer sees her without her headscarf, her lightly-fragranced, freshly-washed hair, aged to a snowy white…her beauty radiant even in careworn old age. Yet the writer suffers deep anguish and guilt over her part in Emerence’s hospitalisation and last few weeks, reflected in her subsequent recurring dream. She’s standing in front of the shatterproof glass outer door to her flat, behind which she makes out the shadowy form of the paramedics, and she’s struggling to turn the key in the lock.

This is a moving account of the relationship between these two women, that door representing the barriers between them—of class, experience, and education, but also the emotional barrier, an obstacle to trust and intimacy. There’s much to discuss and think about here, relevant to our relationships today. And the ending is truly ambiguous.

Posted in Books in Translation, European Literature, Translation | Tagged Hungarian Literature, Marta Szabo, The Door, Vintage Editions | 2 Comments

Dead and Alive- Essays by Zadie Smith

Posted on February 5, 2026 by mandywight

I’ve only dipped my toe into the essay form up till now, the sum total of my essay reading being Jenny Erpenbeck’s Not a Novel, reviewed here at Peak Reads, and A Memoir of My Former Self by Hilary Mantel, a collection of journalistic pieces published posthumously. So I was delighted to be given Zadie Smith’s latest essay collection, having enjoyed her fiction since her debut novel White Teeth. Dead and Alive comprises reflections on writers and artists, dead and alive, speeches given on receiving awards, commentaries on wider societal challenges in both the US and UK—she has lived both in New York and London’s Kilburn—and the business of writing itself.

In the section Mourning, Zadie Smith pays tribute to iconic writers who’ve recently died, including Joan Didion, Toni Morrison and Philip Roth. I was especially pleased to read her piece on Martin Amis, whose career I’ve followed. Like Zadie Smith, I loved The Rachel Papers, which blew her teenage mind, and enjoyed her portrayal of Martin Amis with friends: he could be provocative to get a laugh, and that was the whole point: life and laughter. Never theoretical or academic, always fascinated by people, especially awful people. There’s humour in her account of meeting Hilary Mantel. Over lunch, the more senior writer mentions pug breeding, fondling briefly the ears of Zadie Smith’s pug peeping out of her handbag, while making it quite clear she won’t do an interview for the Paris Review, much less be drawn on aspects of her personal life.

There are several essays on the visual arts. We’re introduced to the British artist Celia Paul via an appreciation of her autobiography Self- Portrait. This essay considers the position of the artist’s muse. Like many women painters, Celia Paul sat for a male painter for some years of her life and found herself mistaken for a muse, by a man who did that a lot (Lucian Freud). In her essay on the American artist Kara Walker, What Do We Want History to Do to Us? Zadie Smith critiques one of Kara Walker’s cartoons as a prelude to a wider discussion on the absence of black history in 1980s Britain: The schools were silent; the streets deceptive. The streets were full of monuments to the glorious, imperial, wealthy past, and no explanation whatsoever of the roots and sources of that empire-building wealth.

One of Zadie Smith’s strengths as an essayist is the way she builds up her arguments, moving fluidly from one point to the next, reconsidering and revising as she goes. In Fascinated to Presume: In Defence of Fiction she recounts how, as an early reader, she totally identified with every character she read—I felt I was Jane Eyre and Celie and Mr. Biswas—and asks if this is like Walt Whitman’s feeling in his line I am large, I contain multitudes. But she goes on to say this doesn’t feel quite right because of that word containment, with its association of colonisation and the language of prison ideology. Is it maybe better to describe this identification with character in terms of Emily Dickinson’s I measure every Grief I Meet, describing the poet’s feelings of empathy with all sorts of sorrowing folk? In any event, she rejects the advice to writers to Write What you Know, seeing it as more of a threat to Stay in Your Lane. She asserts we can know enough about people unlike ourselves to write about them, that she as a writer can presume that some of the feelings of these imaginary people had some passing relation to feelings I have had or can imagine.

The political is never far away. In Ruination she details the deterioration of public services in the UK since her own upbringing in the 1980s, where free university education and excellent NHS health care were the norm. In Trump Gaza Number One she outlines Trump’s crazy plan for Gaza as some sort of holiday resort. But the people she sees as really dangerous are not the politicians, but the tech bros, because of how they mess with our heads. This theme is present in more than one essay. In The Dream of the Raised Arm she discusses a shortly to be republished book by Charlotte Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams, which collected the dreams of Germans during the 1930s. Their dreams reflect the ever-tightening grip on opinion, thought and consciousness inflicted by Nazi ideology. Zadie Smith sees a repetition of this in the power of algorithms, no one need shout at us in a shrill voice through a megaphone—we keep the communication channel permanently open in our back pocket.

This theme is expanded in Notes on Mediated Time. Here, she entertains us with tales of her childhood self rushing home from school to catch up with soaps on the telly. She describes the T.V. offer of the 80s, where we had Band Aid but not Bhopal, saying parents were less critical of the medium, but more worried generally about their children’s exposure to violence. She sees the Internet as a medium of a different order than the telly, because it is monetised, and because we are all in its thrall. Readers will be familiar with the elaborate and unnecessary skincare routines urged on teenage girls: Meta has assigned the ‘lifetime value’ of any one teenager at around 270 dollars a head. There’s a feeling that all of us adults have somehow let this happen to the young—this being to blur the boundaries between the public and private, as the Internet penetrates the private space of their bedrooms, while also depriving them of the commons—that communal, public, shared space experienced in teams, groups, or just simple play outdoors.

There’s a lighter touch in some essays. I burst out laughing at the depiction of Zadie Smith’s teenage self in The Fall. Her bedroom with its bowls of old food stored under my bed, and the cigarette butts (Silk Cut) put out in the old bowls of food. The loftiness towards her mother pleading with her to tidy up: You poor woman. If only you had a life of your own! What a pitiful existence is yours if the only thing you can think to do all day is worry about these petty ephemera! There’s a thrilling and gorgeous description of the truly staggering variety of physical and sartorial beauty on her beloved Kilburn High Road, the most interesting street in Europe in Kilburn My Love. And just as warm a tribute to New Yorkers and their quiet, unfussy care for one another, in Under the Banner of New York.

This collection has been an absolute pleasure to read. Zadie Smith’s writing is clear as a bell, so her warmth and humour really comes over when portraying people and places she loves. That clarity is present too in the more analytical pieces, whether critiquing art and writing, or taking down the money-making tech bros she despises—I’m just waiting now to see what she’ll say about AI. Do read these essays and gift them to a friend. It’s a truly wonderful collection.

Posted in Books in English, Essays, Non-fiction, Politics | Tagged Dead and Alive, Essays, Zadie Smith | 3 Comments

Thunderclap by Laura Cumming

Posted on January 29, 2026 by mandywight

In Thunderclap Laura Cumming explores the short life of the Dutch painter Carel Fabritius. Born in 1622, he died tragically in a gunpowder explosion in Delft in 1654. It’s also a book about her father, the painter James Cumming, his work and what he taught her. (Laura Cumming is now the chief art critic of the Observer). Though arguably two quite different stories, this accomplished writer takes them both up into her associative narrative, which encompasses a general appreciation of 17^th century Dutch art, the world which produced such wonderful art, and her very personal response to the world and art of both painters.

We’re drawn into the narrative from the very beginning by a detailed analysis of Fabritius’ painting A View of Delft with a Musical Instrument Seller’s Stall, now hanging in the National Gallery. (The paintings discussed are beautifully produced in colour right next to the relevant text, so we can really follow her account). The writer relates how she would drop into the gallery to look at this painting, when new to London, and suffering a doomed love affair. Then we have her first childhood memories of A Scene on the Ice near a Town by Hendrik Avercamp, hanging on the wall in her primary school. We have her thinking herself into, almost inhabiting, the painting and we’re there with her as she describes the scene in that Little Ice Age painting: a magpie dives, skaters sweep and twirl, fall flat on their face or tumble backwards at slapstick angles. A scarlet sledge gets stuck; a sleigh sinks perilously low. A toff in an expensive striped jacket poses with his club…Courting couples kiss.

We learn about the writer’s family doctor, a friend of her father and art lover, who gave her postcards of paintings by Vermeer and Rembrandt, and then about her father’s early career, his Hebridean period, when he lived on the islands for two years, painting Hebridean islanders and his mythical painting The Brahan Seer. She then relates how he changed tack in the 60s, influenced by the revelations of the electron microscope, which allowed us to see atomic particles, the vacuole and the chromosome, infinity in close-up, the macroverse in stupendous miniature. This new vision was all there in his largest and most jubilant work, Chromosomes 11, where arrays of vital symbols dance on translucent glazes of lemon, chrome and cadmium yellow.

My favourite part of the father’s story is the account of the trip the family took to the Netherlands when Laura was 7 and her brother 9. Her father had been given a small grant to study Dutch painting and the family stayed with his friend, the Dutch economist, Frans Winkler. I was reminded of Esther Kinsky’s memory of visting Italy and Etruscan tombs with her father as a child in her book Grove—something about confronting a new and different culture on the coattails of an enthusiastic father? There’s her memory of the strangeness of it all, the blood-red meat and redcurrants put in front of them at mealtimes, the pleasure of spending afternoons in Amsterdam’s outdoor swimming pools. Then the account of Laura and her brother being driven north from Amsterdam through the endless flat landscapes of dykes and polders in the direction of the Zuiderzee—that experience surely seared into her memory and partly explaining her love for those flat Dutch landscapes.

Throughout the book there are accounts of other Dutch Golden Age artists. Sometimes, these are connected to Fabritius’s story, as is the case with Rembrandt. The writer notes that Fabritius was always presented to her as a satellite to Rembrandt: a slide in a Rembrandt class, an understudy in a Rembrandt exhibition. Nevertheless she gives us a tantalising outline of Rembrandt himself, that master of theatricality. She includes an account of the few women artists, like Rachel Ruysch, the successful painter of flowers, apprenticed at 15 and signing her own paintings a year later. Then there’s Clara Peeters, who painted still lifes of simple comestibles, like bread, Dutch cheese, the remnants of breakfast, conveying vividly the salty smoothness of the butter and the crisp crust of the roll. From there she moves to the work of Adrien Coorte, who painted the smallest of portions, a few peaches, plums, seashells, on a stone shelf. For Laura Cumming, it’s not just about the luminosity of the objects, two peaches side-lit in deep darkness like two phases of the moon in outer space, but the grouping of the objects, a group of shells arranged along the ledge like a corps de ballet in the footlights.

In the final section of the book, Laura Cumming focuses on Delft, where Fabritius had set up a studio, along with many other artists, including, of course, Vermeer. She describes a world where paintings were everywhere—you didn’t have to be especially wealthy to have a Golden Age painting on your wall. The work of other painters is described in detail, like Pieter de Hooch’s The Courtyard of a House in Delft as well as my favourite Vermeer, View of Delft. There’s a little more detail now about Fabritius, who remarried after losing his first wife and children in his early twenties—but then the awful and unexpected event of the gunpowder explosion which kills him, imagined so vividly here. We know that he was working on his most famous painting at the time, The Goldfinch: recent X-rays show indentations of hurtling matter, broken shards, hard pellets blown scattershot… across the room, pocking its surface in an instant. Laura Cumming takes comfort from knowing the paint must have been drying at the time, that the painting was a living thing in the studio where Fabritius was dying.

This is a wonderful book, which I had the good fortune to read while visiting art galleries in the Netherlands and seeing some of the paintings described. I enjoyed Laura Cumming’s detailed analysis of the paintings, deriving as much from her intense imagination as from her trained scholarly eye. And there’s much emotional heft here too—a deep feeling of loss hangs over the last pages, relating both to Fabritius and her father, anticipated in the epigraph from Euripides, Come back! Even as a shadow, even as a dream....There is loss, but we can be glad we still have the paintings.

Posted in Biography, Books in English, History, Memoir | Tagged Fabritius, Laura Cumming, Thunderclap | 1 Comment

Life in Spite of Everything-Tales from the Ukrainian East by Victoria Donovan.

Posted on January 9, 2026 by mandywight

Victoria Donovan first visited the Donbas area in Eastern Ukraine in 2019, and found herself going back there time and again. Originally from Cardiff, she felt some affinity to the landscape in the coal producing regions, with their conical slag heaps, known as terrykony. She was also fascinated to discover that a Welshman called Hughes set up a coal and pig-iron extraction business in Donbas in the 19^th century, one of many West European entrepreneurs at the time. As Professor of Ukrainian and East European Studies at the University of St. Andrews, she became involved in several collaborative projects with colleagues in Ukraine. But it was the anger and distress she felt at the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2024 that prompted the writing of this book: not the academic work she first had in mind, but a more collaborative book written in consultation with the many Ukrainians who knew the Donbas and its history like the back of their hands.

The book is organised thematically, in chapters with titles like Mineral Worlds, Colonial Entanglements, Cults, Bright City, though there are overlaps. Each chapter is prefaced with a text written by a Ukrainian colleague and in Mineral Worlds it’s Mykhailo Kulishov, Misha, a researcher and caver, who guides her on a visit to the gypsum mine south of Bakhmut with all its intricate subterranean passages and strange sculptural formations. She visits with him the salt mines at Artemsil’ and the coal mine at Toresk. We learn that there were three kinds of coal produced in the Donbas, coking, lean and anthracite, of a quality rarely encountered in Europe. Her writing is not only clear and precise here on the geology—I’ve never read such an accessible account of the origins of coal—but she also conveys a sense of both the grandeur and uniqueness of the landscape. Seeing the salt swamps outside Kostiantynivka, it looks as though a makeshift ice rink has been laid in the middle of a sun-scorched steppe.

In Colonial Entanglements the writer goes deeper into the history of Donbas, which she characterises as one of colonisation. Given the wealth of natural resources described in the first chapter it’s not surprising that this region, in the centre of Europe, should be coveted by many. Before industrialisation it was known as Wild Field, which suggests an empty, unpopulated steppe. In fact, there were plenty of people living there, Tatars, Nogais and Cossacks. When Catherine the Great wrested back the area from the Turks, she encouraged Europeans to settle there—German Mennonites, French, Dutch and English—rather than Russians, because they had more sophisticated farming skills. For all that she called it Novorossia, New Russia, its population was hardly Russian, belying the myth that these lands always belonged to Russia.

Colonisation continued through the 19^th century when foreign capital arrived in the Donbas, lured by cheap labour on the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, and the ease of transportation with the development of the railway network. This continued until 1917, and the Russian revolution, when foreign capital was thrown out and industries nationalised. The Soviets renamed the plants and developed the myth that Joseph Stalin was the person who industrialised this area. Victoria Donovan comes across historians, archivists and journalists who want to tell people this earlier history, traces of which she sees in Bakhmut, a centre of Ukrainian trade and industry in the 18^th and 19^th century with its wide boulevard-like streets….lined with grand red-brick buildings, built in the neoclassical and Baroque style. Of course, she adds, since the recent Russian occupation and full-scale invasion in February 2024, attempts to look at 19^th century history have again been suppressed.

One of the pleasures of this book is the writer’s keen visual eye. It’s not just the natural landscape that she portrays so vividly, but also the man-made spaces and their significance through time and political change. In 2019 she visits Sievrodonetsk in the Luhansk region, where she’s invited to a rave in a hangar, formerly part of the AZOT chemical plant. Sievrodonetsk was one of Ukraine’s best preserved monotowns, a City of Chemists, well known in Soviet times from Riga to Vladivostok, and the AZOT plant, built to produce ammonium nitrate for Soviet fertilizer. She’s shown round the city’s iconic buildings, like the Palace of Chemists, with its green and white colonnaded façade, where civic and cultural events are held, (a little like Berlin’s Palast der Republik?). Then there’s the huge Palace of Sports, an arena that held up to 7,000 people, the biggest stadium of its kind, barring Novosibirsk and Riga, when it was built in 1975. The writer notes the colourful murals that wrap round the building showing idealised scenes from Soviet sporting and cultural life. She not only describes them, but we can see them too, in one of several stunning colour photos at the centre of the book—many other black and white photos illustrate the text throughout.

One of the downsides of Sievrodonetsk was the pollution: fine dust and nitric-acid emissions from the chemical plant was linked to heart and pulmonary disease. Pollution from industry was even more of a theme in Mariupol. WhenVictoria Donovan visits in the winter of 2021 she’s hit by the pungent stench of metal-making…….. a smell which rolled regularly through the city like a noxious blanket being spread over a bed. The smell came from the two metallurgy complexes, the Azovstal and Ilych, owned by the Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, who had failed to install filtering technology in either plant. The writer points out that only after the Chornobyl disaster in 1986 was it possible to talk about environmental damage. From then, there was a growing activist scene protesting about the levels of air pollution in Mariupol, including protests in Theatre Square in 2018, the very square where in 2022 people wrote DETI—children—in huge letters on the pavement, in the hope that Russian bombers would spare the theatre. In vain. They bombed the theatre, killing 600 people, including children. The city of Mariupol and the Azovstal works were also largely destroyed.

Though she doesn’t return to the Donbas after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the writer does go to Lviv in western Ukraine in April 2023. She’s attending a workshop on public history there, and spends time with museum directors Zhenia and Olha. She learns of the complicated museum funding in Ukraine, and is aware that many museum directors from the East brought their collections to safety in the west with little support or guidance. But this is just typical of the initiative shown by many Ukrainians. The writer’s film-maker friend Sashko is now unloading transit vans bringing donations from Western Europe, an example of volunteer networks supplanting the state. And an example of the stoicism, resilience and just-getting-on-with-it spirit we’ve seen from the Ukrainian people. Life in Spite of Everything.

I hugely enjoyed this book. It had real personal resonance for me, having read Natascha Wodin’ s memoir of her mother, Sie kam aus Mariupol—I so enjoyed the description of that shallow Sea of Azov she may have bathed in as a girl. But I also feel I have now a deeper understanding of the Donbas, its history, its geology and the richness of its natural resources. Let us hope peace can come soon to this battered and beleaguered region.

Posted in Books on Ukraine, History, Non-fiction, Politics | Tagged Books about Ukraine, Daunt Books, Donbas, Life in Spite of Everything, Victoria Donovan | 5 Comments

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