The Nights are Quiet In Tehran by Shida Bazyar

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The Nights are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar

German fiction

Original title – Nacht ist es leise in Tehran

Translator – Ruth Martin

Source – personal copy

It was odd that there were two novels connected to Iran on the Booker longlist, and all this before the recent war had started there.  Life is often stranger than fiction. And the two books have different takes on the country: one from the perspective of women living in Modern Iran, and the other about what happens when you leave after the 1979 revolution and your family grows up in Exile in Germany. How do your kids deal with returning to Tehran? This book is inspired by her parents’ life in Exile in a small German town. It tackles the parents’ life in Iran firstly, then the life in exile, the daughter returning to Iran years later, and then the son’s perspective on events in Germany in 2009, each event happening a decade apart

The Revolution is a month old, and Dayeh is making stuffed vine leaves. They’re all sitting on the floor, my mother, my sisters, my cousins, my aunts. The wives of my older brothers.

They have laid the sofrehs out on the living-room floor and are sitting around them with bowls full of rice and minced meat, herbs, lentils, and they are folding vine leaves, one after another, and laying them in a pot and talking and laughing and talking and laughing.

There were just as many women when we were little, though they were different women. Our dayeh would send my sisters and me outside; we weren’t supposed to hear the women’s conversation, to interrupt the neighbourhood gossip. You mustn’t bother people while they’re cooking, we were told, or the food will take longer to make, and we went outside, where we played marbles or pretended to shoot down the murderer of the great and oh-so-honourable Imam Hossein.

After the inital coup the world slowly changes post Shah

The book opens in the last days of the Shah’s regime with the hope from the younger people living there, like Behzad a young communist hopeful, as the Shah falls this is a new dawn for the country, but at the opening section moves on the dream he had of a new Iran starts to fade and the religous voice start to run the country.  They are left questioning whether they can stay or go into Exile. So we jump forward, and the next chapter is from the point of view of his lovely wife, Nahid, struggling to settle into life in Germany, trying to be themselves in a new country, and wondering if things will change in Iran. Nahid misses the ebb and flow of the poems, the songs, and the way of life she has left.  This is a tale of the first generation of exiles, those who have come but remain tied to the homeland.  Then, ten years later, the baton passed to the daughter, Laleh (or maybe Shida, really), who goes with her mother to return to a window of relative peace in Tehran.  They head back; the mother finds a place where the ghosts of her past and present don’t match; and the daughter finds it hard to be a German-Iranian in Iran.  Seeing family that stated there are two further chapters, but this is a family tale set over the last forty years of being neither Iranian nor German and growing up a child of exiles.

Sometimes I imagine 1 am Ulla or Walter, seeing this Behzad for the first time after years of being surrounded by no one but Ullas and Walters. I try to hear him with ears that are used to different television, different radio, used to Helmut Kohls and Helmut Schmidts, ears that understand Nazi speeches, understand Goethe. But I can’t do it. I look at Behzad, stare at him, hear him talking, and try to defamiliarise his words, his whole self. Then I can’t help thinking of him ten years younger — ten years younger, badly shaved and with huge sideburns, thick black hair, and a deep, loud voice.

But then you can be caught between being Iranian and being German

As I said, the two books are so different. This book is made up of the voice of one family over the space of forty years and how the initial dream of the Post Shah years fell apart, and the regime became what it became, and people like Bhzad and Nahid had the choice to stay and change or leave and this shows the story from the perspective of leaving, but when they return, the world they left has gone, and the world they lkeft has m oved on. This is a tale of never fully fitting in place when you become an exile, the limbo of that life, but the effect on the kids’ lives being German Iranians with parents from Iran in modern Germany. It is a family story where the secrets of the past and the decisions one makes come back years later, and where a dream of a new Iran never happens. I think both the books about Iran are very different books, but also deal with firstly the post-Shah years, the change in the country after this, but also the view from inside the country for the five women in the other books, to the women in this book living and growing up outside Iran in the West!  Have you read this book?

 

The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje

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The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje

Dutch Fiction

Original title – De herinnerde soldaat

Translator – David Mckay

Source – Personal Copy

I have long been a fan of Dutch literature; for a small country, it has a unique voice in much of its literature. Cees Nooteboom said this when I asked him about Dutch literature.

The Dutch are a rather special tribe, like the english, but smaller. On the other hand,Holland is not an island. It has taken the world a long time to recognize that there are some interesting writers out there, like Hermans, Mulisch, Claus, Mortier, van Dis, Grunberg, and many others. And of course it does not help that we know much more about English writers

This is a perfect example as it is a book that came out on a small regional publisher and had almost slipped under the radar until an NRC review and further coverage gave the book legs, so to speak, and it won a number of awards in Holland. Then also a number of prizes in the US, including the Republic of Consciousness Prize, which it won this week. Anjet had written a number of novels before this had such success, and her next book has already been lined up for Translation.

On the train he sits opposite her on the hard wooden bench, their knees not quite touching, and the locomotive labors noisily across the quiet green Flemish countryside with a din that drowns out anything they might say to each other and even his thoughts, and he looks outside, it’s a dizzyingly beautiful world, all those colors and spreading waves of grass and floating white cities of cloud, and if this was around him all that time, unfathom-able and infinitely vast, how is it possible there existed a life such as his, imprisoned within the asylum’s cramped walls, as if in one mighty sweep he’s been erased, that’s how he feels, and he tries not to think about it, he must not under any circumstances have another attack like the one on the platform, and he knows she is thinking about the same thing, because from time to time he catches her looking distrustfully in his direction.

that last line as they head home caught me !

The book is really a two-hander story.  It stars Asylum, as they have a man in 1922, a number of years after the war has ended, who still has no memory of who he is, and no one has come forward to claim him. So they put his picture in the newspaper, hoping to find his family.  There are a number of women who come and go who view Noon Merckem as the man, who is called after the time and place he was found. But no one claims him, then Juliennecomes and says he is her husband, Amand, a photographer with kids. She takes him home and this is where the story begins he is in a room in the studio sleeping as they get to know each pother but this room is used as the studio and has a war scene in the room so as he sleeps every night and relives the horror he has seen you do wonder why Julieene is letting this Amand has no memories of there life and as s=they try to connect you do wonder if he is Amand or what happened. He agrees to pose with widows as their lost loves as part of the photograph business ..As they grow close, is this the real Amand that Julienne is painting to him or a new version of the man? The two of them try to find Amand again and, over time, grow closer, but is it all it seems?

And he sits down and lights the gaslight, and the world leaps back into place, chillingly real, as if it had been lurking by the wayside, and his panic does not die down, he no longer dares to go back to sleep and lies waiting in silence until first light, in the distance he hears a train pass, another, another, and a faraway church bell strikes five, the first cart in the street, hooves on the paving blocks, and then more carts and footsteps and voices, and the half-light of early morning creeps comfortingly across the backyard and into the studio. And when the church bell strikes half past five he gets dressed, but the house is still deep in sleep, and six o’clock, and still no one is up, and at quarter past six the church bells ring in the distance for early Mass, a familiar sound, and she, the children, Felice, everyone sleeps on, not until seven does he hear the steps creak and a door open, and then the toilet flushing, and when he recognizes her voice and Rose’s he goes upstairs, and on the stairs he runs into Gus coming down with the coal scuttle, and Amand says good morning and offers to carry the coal for him, but Gus squeezes past without a word.

At home with the family amd the Studio

I was so pleased when this made the Booker longlist. It had been a personal Christmas gift I had brought with Money I was given at Christmas, and it was high on my list to get this year. It is a book a bout war, which I always enjoy. The aftermath of World War I has been covered by other writers like Pat Barker and Rebecca West, both of whom deal with the Trauma and mental aftermath of War. None deal directly with anaemia, though, and this was inspired in part by actual events.  There were people photographed in the papers and claimed by people, particularly the case of the Frenchman, Anthelme Mangin, who had two people fighting over him. This story inspired two novels. For me, the way the family was photographed was interesting as images can be altered and changed, and is this story a life being retouched or a life being altered? Is he Amand, is he the Amand he was, or the one his wife has invented? The book makes you wonder what is real, what is made up, and how far people will go.

What type are reader are we all ?

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I have been racing through the Booker International longlist this year. I think the fact I like most of the books on the list is that they are ones I would read at some point. I think we all, as readers, have this list of books. If I see if I find, if I have time, the last being the main problem, too many books, too little time. I think of the years I have never quite got what motivates my reading, but this year it has changed, and the change is coming because I have decided that one of the things I need to do this year is fill the gaps. I always read a number of Japanese books in January as there are events then.  We go to March, and it’s the Booker International longlist.  Then we have the bi-annual Year clubs Simon and Karen run, which are maybe my favourite online blog event all year.  Then there are things I have dived in an out of in recent year the EBRD prize which i think has a great selection of literature every year but it is so near the booker I end up burnt out on the prize list and then I have like the Wainwright prize for nature writing but maybe need to just focus on either the shortlist or the books that jump out on me. So the idea this year is to have more of these little projects, read a new book from a new country every month, is one such idea, and I have gone and brought a lot of books for that project for this year.  Then I had looked at Mookse doing the NYRB books and Muriel Spark, but I am not a joiner in person; I like to either have an idea for myself or a couple of people on board. So what other project has he up his sleeve? Well, I had thought of Spark and liked Beryl Bainbridge to read their books in order. But then I remember Kim doing a number of Iris Murdoch last year, and I had read The Sea, The Sea a long time ago, and her back catalogue is huge; she had multiple Booker nominations over the years.  include a win for The Sea, The Sea. So, as I always say, I fell under read. I know in a lot of ways I am not, but I feel I need to read a few more English writers, and this is the start. I will be reading all her novels in publication order, hopefully. This is the first of two writers I am thinking of; I’m thinking of flipping between them, but at the moment, I’m not quite decided who. I think C P Snow, maybe, or Anthony Powell; I have circled both their multiple-novel collections and have nearly all of them on TBR. But I haven’t yet decicded as I may pick an older writer say Dicken or Trollope or maybe some one else the idea is ovber time to cross of names so I read the complete ouvre of a female and male writer and this to be a constantly rolling idea with Murdoch having twenty plus novel that is a few years reading so the Male may have less books. I will let you know who I pick in a few weeks. Then in the summer, I will do my book-a-day idea with Novellas. I can’t do a month, but I will try for one month to read as many as I can, with my shifts being 12-hour days. I lose a few days each week to this, so I struggle to blog on those days. But I like the idea of summer days and short books outside in coffee shops, etc. I will be doing Hungarian lit month, and at some point Spanish and Portuguese lit month and of course some reading on the run up to the Nobel, with a lot of recent deaths of people that have been near the top of thebetting lists in recent years, there is maybe a name or two out there to come to the surface. I am trying to be a lot more proactive in my reading, so those periods of not having a little or large project are less, and thus, meaning I always have rabbit holes to find books, learn about the writers and countries, and what books are available and waiting to be read. I love my sail boat idea of reading but now I  am mor eof a cruise and trying to have a little newsletter of upcoming event like you do on a cruise ship (not that I have ever been on a cruise ) I love watch you tube videos of cruises and love the idea of a daily news letter I am so 20th century with my list of books piles of books and just liking the printed word. How do you plan your reading? Are you ad hoc, like plans, like ideas, book clubs, etc., or a solo traveller in the world of books?

We are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

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We are Geen and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

Argentinian fiction

Original title – Las niñas del naranjal

Translator – Robin Myers

Source – Personal copy

I have read the two other books to have come out in English from this writer, and I was.  A fan of Slum Virgins, which was her Debut book.  But this had been on my radar, not least because both the UK and US editions of the book have very eye-catching cover art, so I would have got to see that she is part of this wonderful crop of strong female voices from Latin America.  I often say that, over the 16-plus years I have been around the blogosphere, the nature of Latin American fiction has shifted from very Male-heavy to fairly even these days.  Gabriella is a creative writing teacher, so she will no doubt be setting forth the next generation of great Argentine writers for us all to read.  This book, like the other book, features a woman in a male world, this time living as a man in the New World.  Antonio is writing back to her home and the priory where her aunt, the Prioress of the Basque Priory, lives.

…that is a story I will tell you in time, dear aunt. Let me tell you now about the fragrances of the forest, which are strong as the spirits soldiers drink, as village rotgut, and about the other flowers, mammoth and fleshy and carnivorous, nearly beasts, for bere in the jungle the animals bloom and the plants bite, and I believe I have even seen them walking, I swear this to you, and leaping, for vines do leap; all things seethe bere, whereas the forest rustles, as well you know; I remember your attention to the presence of the fox, with its faint rustle of leaves in your forest, and to the bear, with its beavy rustle of trunks and branches; the forest rustles, but not the jungle, the jungle seethes, full of eyes; life surges inside it as lava surges in volcanoes, as if the lava were trees and birds and musbrooms and monkeys and coatis and coconuts and snakes and ferns and caimans and tigers and trumpet trees and fish and vipers and palms and rivers and fronds, and all other things within it were amalgams of these primary ones.

Writing to the Aunt about the world she is in the New World

The book is a mix of these letters home.  Narrative it tells the tale of Antonio in her adventures in the New World or Cayalina as she was known has seen it all the violence of the old world hanging death of native culture as the conquestordors move opn the the country as they are trying to conquer the New world and this is how He Antoino has ended up with a ragtag bunch around him two Two Gurani girls he saved from a life of slavery a couple of monkeys hand horse in this Jugle where the world becomes a mix of dreams and nightmares as she recounts the vents she had seen to get where she had been with her jounrey to the new world from singing on a ship to the various other jobs he had along the way ad s the book goes on the Jungle itself is almost a character as the bunch try to escape can the find a place this is a book that has a lot of layers for such a short book.

He hears the rattle. A snake. He’s lucky to have his sword within reach. A bit blunted but better than nothing. He stands, armed, and stamps the earth with his feet. He listens. Silence, save the growls of the dog slowly calming. The horses wander back. He wants to keep writing. He needs to leave the girls somewhere safe. The tree. He wraps them in his cape. Michi is so weak that he supports her head by pulling the cloth taut.

He puts the monkeys in, too, binding them to his back, and climbs. He lays them down in a nest-like gathering of boughs and ties the cape to the strongest branch. He sits with them.

An African once told him tales of enormous serpents. One had swallowed an elephant. It looked like a hat, said the man. His troops wouldn’t need an enormous one to devour them. Any old serpent could gobble the girls and the monkeys for breakfast.

In the jungle it is alive at times

I think this is a book that maybe could have done with being a little longer.  There are a lot of ideas, the church, religion, the new world, woman in a man’s world, so many, it is like it has been stuffed into a box and is fit to burst.  I feel that maybe means the book suffers at times; it is a great book.  I still like SLum virgin best of her books, but that may just be me being a reader who finds books set near my own time much easier to connect with.  The main character is based on a real figure from the time, a woman who lived as a man in the New World.  I kept going back to the Filmsof Werner Herzog set in the New World and imagining if Klaus Kinski’s character Aguiree had been had been a trans character in the Jungle, it would be like this book a man tinged by the violence of the world they are in another film that cmae to mind around the two girls was Apocalypto the shere violence that is seen at times.  I believe the writer herself has highlighted Studio Ghibli as an influence on her writing.  I just felt it would have been a better five-hundred-page book than the 200 it is, and I rarely think that it is a book jam-packed with ideas and history, and a character at the heart of the book that should have been better known as a trailblazer for their time.  Have you read this or any of her other books ?

The Deserters by Mathias Enard

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The Deserters Mathias Enard

French fiction

Original title – Déserter

Translator – Charlotte Mandell

Source – Subscription edition

One of the benefits of having a Fitzcarradlo subscription in recent years has been knowing I may have a couple of books that make the International Booker longlist and are in with a chance at least.  They publish so many great books in Translation.  So when this made the longlist, I was happy as I hadn’t got round to finishing his last novel after reviewing a number of his books.  It was nice to step back into his world, which is uniquely his. Enard has a writing style that is all his own. His books all vary.  Still, they are all well-written in various styles,s and this is an odd little gem.  It turns out this book was being written as the Ukrainian war started, and that led to the second narrative in the book, which follows a deserter from the war.

Angel, my holy guardian, protector of my body and soul, forgive me for all the sins committed on this day and deliver me from the works of the enemy, despite the warmth of the prayer the night remains a beast fed on anguish, a beast with breath of blood, cities in ruins full of mothers brandishing the mutilated corpses of their children faced with scruffy hyenas that will torture them, then leave them naked, dirty, their nipples torn with teeth under the eyes of their brothers raped in turn with trun-cheons, terror stretched over the country, plague, hatred, and darkness, this darkness that always envelops you and urges you towards cowardice and treason. Flight and desertion. How much time is there left to walk? The border is a few days from here, beyond the mountains that will soon become hills of red earth, planted with olive trees. It will be difficult to hide. Many villages, towns, farmers, soldiers, you know the region, you are home here,

no one will help a deserter,

you’ll reach the house in the mountain tomorrow, the cabin, the hovel, you’ll take refuge there for a little while,

There is a poetic touch to the Deserters story

As i said the book has two story lines they are seperate maybe at some point you could say the characters in each book have been in the same place the first story uses a point in history to look back in time that is 9/11 and instead of being inj America it follows an event that is happeniong on that day on a boat in Berlin there is a conferecnce i=on a Mathmatematician Paul Heudeber, One of the think I found is was this a real person it wasn’t but a mix of various figures that had walked a similar path and that was breinbg looked up for being against the  Nazis   Still, with his mind, he was in Buchenwald and opted to head to the east after the war.  We are learning about his life alongside his daughter, who is trying to find out more about her father: he was a mathematician and a poet. She didn’t know himmeanwhile the other story follows an unnamed man that has ruin off from war a deserrter as he finds a woman and a donkey in a hinterland of scrubland the beauty oif this mis the lack of place and time was it a event that has happened ort is going to happen as I say there isn’t much that runs in between the stories just the aftermath of war in different times and places and how it lays bare peoples lifes.

I have to go back over what happened over twenty years ago, on 11 September 2001, near Potsdam on the Havel, on board the cruise boat, a little river liner christened with the fine pompous name Beethoven.

Summer seemed to be wavering. The willows were still green, the days still warm, but a freezing fog would rise from the river before dawn and immense clouds seemed to be gliding over us, from the distant Baltic.

Our floating hotel had left Köpenick east of Berlin very early in the morning, on Monday. Maja was always alert, spry. She would go up to the top deck to walk, a stroll between showers, deck chairs and deck games. The green domes and golden spire of the Berlin cathedral captivated her, from afar, when we arrived. She was imagining, she said, all the little gilt angels leaving their stone prison to fly off into a cloud of acanthus leaves blown by the sun.

The water of the Spree was sometimes a dull, dark blue, sometimes a glowing green. During the preceding weeks, all of Germany had been rocked by storms; their aftermaths swelled the Havel and the Spree, which usually were quite low at summer’s end

We navigated through the swirling water.

the conference on the boat

I am a huge fan of Enarrd.  This book is an odd tale.  It is easy to see, with a panel of judges that includes two Mathematicians, that a book featuring a fictional Mathematician would make the longlist.  But the second narrative inspired by the Ukraine war shows the horror of war on the mind, the need to escape war, the way it affects not just the Soldier but also the woman and her donkey.  People may dislike the lack of detail in the story; in fact, they may think it is l lazyStill, forr me it is a brilliant touch of not placing that narrative in a place or time and thus making the story work now, in fact, with the Iran war, how many men and women are wandering out of the scrublands of Iran, lebabanon or the Gulf states it is weird how a book is maybe more relevant than when the longlist was announced a clever mix of family, war, the horrors of war lose and all this brought together by one of the best living writers Enard. Do you have a favourite book by Enard?

She who remians by Rene Karabash

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She who remains by Rene Karabash

Bulgarian fiction

Original title – Остайница

Translator – Izidora Angel

Source – personal copy

When the longlist was announced for the Booker International Prize, I was very lucky that I had a number of subscriptions for various publishers, but the first subscription I ever got was for Peirene, the publisher of this mbook a press I have reviewed a lot of books from and one that has brought some extraordinary novellas to the English-speaking world. I had intended to readthis as it isn’t the first book I have read about Sworn virgins I read Sworn Virgins by Elvira Dones twelve years ago she also made a film follow twelve sworn virgins that had left the Balkans this is not just a Albanian traditioon it is followed in other Balkan countries a traditon that has a lot to do with old traditions around inheirtence, family line, blood feuds and like in this book the Kanun a sort of law of the region about this happening and how Women come to live as men.

Matija, Bekija according to my passport, thirty-three years old, yes, one brother, Sále, father, Murash, murdered, mother dead shortly after, there’s only Nura the cow and my father’s pigeons, favourite colour blue, afraid only of snow, the big snow, loneliness is another thing altogether, no, here love is forbidden, love is death, I don’t go to the doctor, I plug up my wounds with tobacco, if anything happens I smoke, television doesn’t exist, I don’t need it, the radio is enough, Albanian songs and occasionally an American one, I can’t sing, no, and I don’t want to, this one here is of me, my father, my brother Sále and my mother, it was taken before, yes, that’s enough for today, Nura is hungry and the pigeons need to be shut in for the night

the violence that surrounds her past

The book follows the life of Bekija, a woman who had an arranged marriage, and the only way she can escape it is via the law of Kanun, which says that because she turned down the marriage, she has to live as a sworn virgin, as a male, so Bekija becomes Matija the firsgt part of the book is the aftermath of `all this in the remote villages they live this has a knock on effect for the whole family with the blood feud it causes. So when later in the book we see letters from the brother and a journalist turns up at the village and wants to interview Matija about why theyn are a sworn virgin and what she has lost of r this at first Matija does’t see this but as the two talk her life unfurls and the past comes to haunt the present and tshe heads off to find the brother that had escaped to Sofia.

Hello, Bekija,

I very much hope this letter reaches you. I know the houses in our village don’t exactly have numbers on them, and I’m aware how impossible corresponding through letters and telegrams can be. I’ve been meaning to write to you for a long time. Every day since 1 ran away… You must understand why I had to do what I did. Why I ran. That I did it because of the enormous, irreparable mistake you made. You do understand it’s completely within the bounds of one’s survival instincts to want to save oneself, right? My leaving was the smartest thing a sane and sober-minded man could do, someone unafflicted with the delirium of the laws of the Kanun. I can’t apologize for it, it is who I am.

The start of the first letter from her brother Sale

 

As i say, I had experience of this not just from the book Sworn virgin I did work alongside a Kosovian Albanian in a factory in Germany many years ago and learnt a little back then of Albanian culture from this chap and his wife she was studying Albanian literature before thy had to escape due to the Balakans conflict so I have always had an interest in the Blakans and rememebr the conversations about the way in the countryside there were still these tradtions that and his love of english football especially Glenn Hoddle.  Anyway, that is enough of my journey down memory lane. It turned out the writer spent two years researching the sworn virgin culture and the Kanun, using Ismail Kadare’s book Broken April, which I have yet to read. But what she wanted to do was capture a female living as a male in a patriarchal society like this one, with its violence,  ancient laws, and blood feuds.  Using Bekija’s Journey as the catalyst for describing this culture.  The book is told in a stream-of-consciousness style, with an episodic narrative, and also includes interviews and letters. It is, as ever, a book that feels much bigger than its parts, which is what Peirene are known for.  Have you read this or any books about the Kanun laws that govern that part of the Balkans? It was a hit for me because it had a number of things that I love in fiction: a village setting, books from the Balkans and books that look at human nature

 

Febuary 26 round up and a quick booker international reaction

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  1. The Bridges by Tarjei Vesaas
  2. The Parasite by Ferenc Barnás 
  3. The cut line by Carolina Pihelgas
  4. Paradise of the blind by Duong Thu Huong 
  5. In Farthest Seas  by Lalla Romano 
  6. Captivity by Gyory Spiro
  7. Rosa Mistika by Euphrase Kezilahabi
  8. Temptation by Janos Szekely 

I eased a bit this month, mainly just a little tired and fed up with the weather the last month has left me feeling drained. I managed just three books for the first Hungarian Lit Month. But I will be doing it again next year for sure. I also read a Norwegian minor classic, the first English translation in the US from Vietnam. A tale of a husband passing and the years-earlier meeting him, the romance, and then a woman escaping her family in Tanzania. I managed one new country. I am trying to get at least one a month throughout this year. I recently picked up a number of Books from Around Africa. Anyway, it was a good month, just a little slow. I think we are all wishing for a number of sunny days in a row in the UK.

Book of the month

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It has been a hard month to pick a great book, since they were all good reads. But I love it when you read a book and go, “That’s different.” This was that sort of book that left me wanting to read another by him, which I know Seagull have brought out. A book that captures a strange boy growing into an odder man, all around his need to be ill or to deal with people who are ill, an unusual book.

Non-Book events

Well, I started to watch the second series of Hijack with Amanda. I feel Apple make the best short series. This follows Idris Elba as he hijacks a Berlin U-Bahn train, but, as with the first series, there are a number of unseen twists and turns along the way. I then spent a lot of time watching old crime series, CSI, Monk, sort of comfort TV for the dull weather.

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Then music-wise I brought two newish albums, Dry Cleaning a band that has a unique singer and style I had their first album, and I heard a couple of tracks of this new album and decided to get it. Then I got Heavy Metal, which had come back in stock, and I love Geese, who Cameron Winter is the lead singer of Geese, but this is more personal and heart-wrenching in places.

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Then my Local shop had a sale on Tallbird records, which has a great selection, so I got Seasick Steve, whom I’ve been a fan of since his Jools Holland appearance years ago. I had a lot of his albums, but lent them to someone and never got them back. Anyway, nice tohear him again. Then Jason Isbell is a singer that is growing on me over time, and it’s nice to find a bargain, then I saw Pinegrove mention a few years ago, so I thought I’d give them a whirl.

Next month and Booker reaction

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The International Booker longlist came out last week, and I am again part of the shadow Jury. I love doing this; it is a highlight of my year. I look forward to seeing my fellow jurors’ views on the books. My initial reaction was a little shocked; not one of the Akoya books had made the list. I felt sure Helle Helle or Liliana Colanzi, two writers whom I have featured on the blog with earlier books. SO to the longlist, I had read three books

On Earth as it is beneath by Ana Paula Maia 

Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur 

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn 

Then I had on my tbr

The Duke by Matteo Melchorrie

She Who Remains by Rene Karabush

The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje

The Deserters by Mathias Enard

So they would have been read by me in the meantime; I have read She who remains, and I have read them in the last few days. I hadn’t made a prediction list, but I would picked from books I won or had read, so these may have been on the list

I have brought all the other books on the list and am awaiting a few, but have another three of the rest of the books I had: Taiwan travelogue and The Director Down to be brought and read at some point. The one book I wasn’t very familiar with was The Nights are Quiet in Tehran.  Elsewhere, I have read other books by Marie Ndiaye. Overall, I am happy with the longlist; it is maybe the best in the last couple of years. It sees ten years of the Booker, and it is 15 years of Shadow Juries with us doing the old IFFP prize in a number of years before the Booker took over. I will be posting my first couple of reviews next week, and most of the month will be reading the longlist. I hope to throw in a couple of other books, but I will have to see how it goes.  What did you make of the Booker longlist ? Will you be reading the books?  Which books did you want on the list?

 

Temptation by Jânos Székely

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Temptation by Jânos Szêkely

Hungarian fiction

Original title –  Kísértés

Translator -Mark Baczoni

Source – Personal copy

I rounded off this year’s Hungarian month with another long book from Hungary.  This took me a lot longer to get through than I had hoped, but it was written in 1949.  When Janos was living in America and had been a very successful screenwriter, first in the twenties in Berlin, he then headed to the US after being offered a screenwriting job by Ernst Lubitsch in Hollywood. He spent time there till he was caught up in the McCarthy trials and headed to Mexico. Then he returned to Hungary and East Berlin. The book follows a young boy through the interwar years.  The book is partly based on the writer’s own life. It was initially published under the pen name John Pen.

But first I have a confession to make. I was not in the way that grown-ups tend to think about these things, strictly speaking

faithful to Sárika.

I say in the way that grown-ups think about these things, because I in no way considered what I got up to with a maid called Borcsa while I was hopelessly in love with Sárika to be infidelity in any way. I, like most other children, considered physical and emotional love to be two completely separate things. I’d never felt any kind of physical desire or curiosity with Sárika, though I was much concerned with the mystery of those things at the time.

I lived among servant girls and worked alongside them all day long, and they were mostly young, lively peasant girls who, being unacquainted with the gems of the Hungarian film industry of the time, had no idea what a decent, socially respectable Hungarian peasant girl was meant to be like. They simply were Hungarian peasant girls, who said what they thought, and what they actually thought why deny it? didn’t tend to appear much in the aforementioned cinematic masterpieces.

The girls treated me like a newborn kitten whose eyes have not yet opened. They talked freely in front of me, especially of things supremely suited to unsettling a prepubescent boy.

As he grews up this changes

I think one of the literary styles that Middle Europe is best at producing is the Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age tale. Bela, a young Orphan abandon by his mother. So when raised in absolute poverty by his guardians. He struggles and then turns to stealing. This happens not long after his mother returned. So she takes Bela to Budapest, where she has a job in a laundry. Bela ius is a bit of a wide boy; he leaps off the page, a sort of cheeky lad that people either love or hate. He gets jobs in the hotel, a grand place, and he sees the world of grandeur at close quarters, but all this is happening at the same time as Fascism is rising all around him and in Europe. We see a young boy growing into a man, discovering a woman, and all this as the country heads toward what would be World War II.  The book’s style is a series of small episodes from Bela’s life.

I sneaked into the gymnasium, decorated for the festive occasion, like a beggar afraid of getting barked at by the dogs. Primped-up ladies and gentlemen sat all around the speaker’s dais, and even the children had made an effort. When anyone glanced at me, I immediately blushed, because I thought they were looking at my ragged clothes. When the reed organ piped up for the prayers, I almost burst into tears. What use all those outstandings, I thought, when the notary’s son still has the finest clothes, though it was only out of pity that the Schoolmaster didn’t fail him.

The reed organ fell silent, and the speakers piped up instead. Speech followed sermon, sermon followed speech. The words spattered like autumn rain. I wasn’t listening. I wanted to cry.

This ut sounded very Dicken’s Me

It is hard, in the latter part of the book, not to imagine Bela working at the Grand Budapest Hotel.  The description of the grandeur he sees is similar to the film. But there is also a darker side to this book, the shadow of Fascism. In fact, the book is maybe more relevant at the moment, especially when you see how, through Bela’s eyes, how easy ot can be to nearly get caught by the fascist parties. Then there is a large dollop of Dickent he first part of the book could have been a dicken a orpahn boy poverty a cruel guardian a lost mother all tropes in Dickens work but that is where the comparison ends for Bela is a grey character not a dicken character no he is a more modern chartacter with his faults and problems we follow him through them in a world that is changing around him what will he do in the end ? I had hoped to read a couple more books this Hungarian lit month, but I have some left, so I will be running it again next February. Have you read this book? or ay other book that captures those late 1920s, early 1930s years of the rise of Fascism

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Rosa Mistika by Euphrase Kezilahabi

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Rosa Mistika by Euphrase Kezilahabi

Tanzanian fiction

Original title – Rosa Mistika

Translator – Jay Boss Rubin

Source – Personal Copy

For me, as a reader, my reading journey is about reading as widely as possible, and one of the things I had in mind for this year was forst to add a few new countries, which I did last month. But then to also to read from areas of the world aI had missed the last few years and I have read a lot from Africa but I feel I need to build picture of each country over time and each place literature so whehn I saw this Swahili classic that was banned when it first came out was available in English for the first time I had to read it. Euphare Kezilahabi was a professor of African languages and had given several talks, including one on the concept of the hero in African fiction. Which tickled me, as this book has at its heart a female voice: that of Rosa. Like Euphrase, she lives on the island of Ukerewe on Lake Victoria.

This was the manner in which Rosa was brought up; this was the manner in which she was cared for; this was the manner in which she was watched over by her father. After the beating, Rosa ceased talking to boys altogether. When Zakaria learned of this, he was very happy. He boasted-especially when he’d had a little to drink-that he knew how to raise his daughters. But Zakaria didn’t understand that Rosa was at a difficult age, and that strictness was not appro-priate; he didn’t understand that daughters require a certain independence from their fathers; he didn’t understand that by beating his daughter, he was exercising an authority he didn’t rightfully possess, and that when it came to opinions on marriage, his were practically worthless. He didn’t understand that Rosa needed to get to know boys. And so, as a result of her upbringing, Rosa began to see boys as people she need not associate with, or even speak to. She began to think that she needed to be self-sufficient. Rosa grew more remote by the day.

Rosa and her father clash here

Rosa is turning thirteen as the book opens, and she is growing aware of how her father is abusing her mother. But her father will not let a boy near her, and he is now starting to turn on her. So when she gets the chance to go to a school on the mainland, she has to make it happen, to escape her father, a man who drinks, a man who seems to want to escape his life.  He is a failed teacher. It seems his daughter has maybe got the same type of mind.  So when she manages to get to school, no thanks to her father, who is unwilling to pay, but her mother and sisters help her scrape the money together to go, she vows to be unlike the other girls around her, who are all obsessed with Boys and dancing. But she puts her head down and does well for the first few years. But this marks her out with the other girls. So when she finally goes to a dance, she meets the wrong man and like many a girl sheltered from the world falls for him what follows is how she then goes to teacher traing college but she wants to remain a virgin and when an event happens that changes all this with a man it has a horrific ending this is a book about escaping domestic abuse but how a woman like Rosa will always be failed by the fact she is living in 1970s Tanzania!

Rosary, the all-girls school where Rosa was headed, was built along a road hemmed in by mountains. The mountains were dotted with large black boulders and caves that sheltered hyenas. At night, you could hear them cackling, but during the daytime they were nowhere to be found.Five other schools were tucked into the same mountains-all boys’ schools. Despite this discrepancy, one girls’ school was enough to make the mountains an interesting place to study. From one side, delicate feminine voices could be heard; they were answered from the other side by the sturdy sounds of boys. Only rarely were these voices heard interacting directly-during a discussion or debate, or maybe at a dance. This was the environment Rosa entered: a joyful set-ting, albeit one in which girls were incredibly scarce. If a girl didn’t have a boyfriend, it was no one’s fault but her own.

Srosa didn’t want a boyfriend then!

It is an interesting voice for the time it was written about a daughter escaping a violent father. But, also doomed by those around her, she tries but eventually wears down in the world. A book of double standards in 1970s Tanzania was banned when it came out. Rosa’s voice was considered radical for the time; even though it was written by a male writer, it is strong. A woman beaten down by her world, she tries but fails, then has a shocking event that ends the whole story. I like the spare nature of his narrative at times; he leads the reader to think, which I appreciate. It is a book that captures those post-colonial years and also the male-dominated world Rosa lives in. The book was banned after an outcry by the catholic church when it came out with its abortion storyline, which was the first time this subject had been tackled in a Swahili book.  This is the first translation from Swahili that translator Jay Boss Rubin has done. I hope it isn’t the last, as I think we don’t have enough books from Swahili translated into English.

Captivity by György Spiró

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Captivity by György Spiró

Hungarian fiction

Original title – Fogság

Translator – Tim Wilkinson

Source – Personal copy

I said to myself this year, I need to read more epic books. In recent years, there have been a lot of epic novels coming out, and I have been buying them or noting them down and never reading them. This has been on my radar since either just before or when it came out in English a few years ago. Hungarian fiction seems to produce a lot of epics, and this one had a description that made it feel like one of those old Hollywood romantic epics. But a book that also captured three places, really Rome, Egypt and Jerusalem, as we follow Uri, the main character in the book. The book is a mid-career work by the writer Gyory Spiro; he started in radio. His radio drama style has been called avant-garde. On the whole his novels have been historical in theme, and he has returned to his historic background of being Jewish, like he does in this book

URI DID NOT DARE SLEEP. HE WAS AFRAID HE WOULD NOT WAKE IN TIME, but he must have dropped off anyway, because his father shook him awake.His first thought was the tessera, which he must not forget to hand over to his father, since it could be transferred, but his father muttered that he had already passed it on the previous evening. Uri clutched at his neck: the tessera was not there. Then a memory drifted back of those hours before he had gone to bed: he had handed over the lead token as if he were making a last will and testament.As he tugged on his loincloth under his tunic in the dark, the thought running through his head was that the tessera was worth more without him than with him.His father draped his gown over him. Uri protested, but his father squeezed his shoulder. It was a seamless, rectangular outer garment of cloth with a blue braided tassel dangling in approved fashion at each of the four corners. Uri had not owned a gown before; Joseph would get another for himself. If he could spare the money.

His father and him had issues

This book captures that time when going from place to place could take months, and the world people lived in was much larger in that way so when Uri,a sort of Nerdy lad who has issues with his parents, his grandfather was a slave, and he is very good at languages, is required to go to Judae mainly because of his language skill and also being.  Roman Jew. So, as the years pass, he heads first to Judea, where he is locked up for a time with a man from Nazareth; he thinks little of this happening at the time. This is around the time Jesus died, and the book ends many years later, as Christianity is beginning to take hold. So when Uri is free and then heads to Egypt and to Alexandria this is another ex empire but also the early seedlings and emebers of the Change that was going to take place in the roman Empire this is all shown as he meets many firgures from the time likje Claudis and Nero he struggles to accept that the man he meet in a cell all those years ago with two theives with him is this Martyr and new messiah figure. What I liked was the moment of capturing a new religion, starting a world in flux. I also felt undercurrents to the present in Modern Israeli at times.

Countless leather bottles of water, along with dried figs, salted raw fish, smoked fish, and dried fish had been stocked for the crew and passengers, along with several hundred pounds of unleavened bread, baked in thicker portions than matzos generally were. Uri grew tired of the monotonous diet by the first evening; they were taking water to sea, taking fish to sea. It seemed the Creation had not been devised to absolute perfection.

With a favorable northwesterly wind to fill the sails, they forged eastward and later northeastward. The captain said that in the spring it was always better going from Syracusa to Caesarea than the reverse. The slaves, who rowed on the lower level of the bireme, the upper level left empty, were being given a break.

Uri looked down on them. They were lying, chained to each other, naked in the gloom of the ship’s belly. Light and air they got from above, from where they could be reached by clambering down a ladder, except that the ladder was pulled up right then. It was only let down when the armed slave drivers took victuals down to them, with the ladders being pulled up after them once they’d scrambled up with the vessels of excrement. One of the slave drivers was always down there with them to control the rhythm of the rowing; he was now resting alongside them-that being his occupation right then. Slave drivers were relieved, not so the slaves.

As Uri sails off

I don’t read many Epic historical novels, and I have had Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on my radar for years. I want to get the nice Everyman editions of this book. But yes, from what I know of this history, he captures it well, and Uri seems to be there as things are happening and changing. I can’t help but also think of the Life of Brian with the meeting of Jesus in the cell, it is a brief moment, and the aftermath of this one man is captured in the years that follow. But to Uri, he was just a chap he met in a cell, and he couldn’t put the man he met with what at the time would have been viewed as a cult. I found that very interesting concept. Those events captured through one man’s eyes. As I said, it also feels like a commentary on maybe Israeli Judaism and also maybe even his own country’s post-war years. But it is an epic book and a book that captures empires and times shifting, as I said, it reminded me of those epic Roman dramas Hollywood used to make, but through many lifetimes.. Have you read this or his plays, which seem to have been translated as well?

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Analogue A sunday Musing Post

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I am trying a slightly different type of post this year I said and one of the posts I want to do is more a discussion piece arpound a subject or topic that has caught my attention now this can be book or slightly book related this I fell is slightly related but on the whole is about a whole thing that has been growing in the last year or two. That is the Analogue moment, whether it is a bag of stuff to stop people doomscrolling, taking photos with a film camera or buying vinyl and CDs. I think this is a big moment this year: from small coffee roasters to small bookshops and record shops, there has been a move away from large chains and online shopping. Now, for me, I lived before computers and smartphones. In fact, I was in my twenties when I first got online, around the time Twitter started. I loved those early years, but in recent years, I have noticeably moved back from being online as much. But I do doomscroll, I watch way too much YouTube for my liking. I never got TikTok, and I find Instagram just full of people trying to take pretty pictures of books and trying to sell their book clubs, which people have to pay for. aI llo hold off as i am heading to a topic for another post here. Anyway. Analogue, I’m sure you have seen it crop up in your feed at some point. For me, it is a younger generation that has only known the likes of Spotify, YouTube, TikTok, infinite scroll, and Your Every Move, and thought that adding to a growing algorithm was the norm. A situation of too many choices, but then that choice is being dictated by an algorithm that feeds people addiction to infinite scrolling, their music, taste in films, news, in fact, everything online. We for a few year Amanda and I online food shop until I said one day we decided to order virtually the same shop as last month as the shop gives you previous buys first we had got so used to clicking oin them we had lost that scaning the super market aisles for the last producto or offer or just that ingrident you hadn’t brought for a while. Now we could look harder online, but we haven’t had an online shop for about seven or eight years. It is the same for me in a lot of ways I have a huge cd and viynl collection I have spotify but as for what decides my taste, I still listen to a few radio shows, buy a couple of monthly music magazines, and have done this for the last 30 years my only ever algorthim was maybe John Peel when I was younger for music. Now I read only paper books. I have a Kindle, but I just have never got used to using an ereader. I love the feel of books. I love the discovery of second-hand books. As for being on an algorithm, I do buy a few books online. I would very rarely be the target of a bookstore’s online recommendations. I do lament the loss of newspaper book coverage and its steady shrinkage over the years. I remember the first time I came across Cormac McCarthy and Denis Johnson in the papers in the mid-90s. I still buy two papers every Saturday and Sunday, a habit that harks back to my dad, who had three or four papers most weekends. I stopped buying so much in the week, but this is another thing that I have avoided: the news hole people fall into these days online. I rarely get my news from any sources other than newspaper sites, BBC News online, or Radio 4. I get the analogy: people want the world we once had, which is sadly gone.  The world we most small towns had a couple of good newsagents for magazines, a stationery shop for pens, paper, etc., an art shop for art supplies, and even a toy shop for things like board games. These are gone, or just chain shops in most town centres these days. A world where the discovery of music books happens every time you visit a new bookshop, record shop, or listen to the radio in small, bite-sized pieces. The world wasn’t all there to overwhelm us or an algorithm, a simple time when we got bored, but then found things to do, and that wasn’t scrolling. I hold my hand up in writing this post. I have thought about how much YouTube I have watched over the last few years, and maybe I need to step back from it. I think the younger genrartion just want a bit of what I had when I was younger I grew up taking pictures doing little art bits writing list discovering records and books in the wild taking chances not worrying if a book or record was cool but I have never want to be cool part of a scene or thought of as cutting edge i have always followed my own path as many of you will know from my taste in music my books of the year i am maybe still mostly analogue in my life..not sure wha thte point of this was other than I keep seeing the word Analogue here and there and just to say I get it and welcome to life before big tech toook over. What are your thoughts? I thought the pic of my macbook with my vistorian wriitng slope was the perfect mix of digital and analogue worlds

In Farthest Seas by Lalla Romano

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In Farthest Seas by Lalla Romano

Italian Fiction

Original title – Nei mari estremi

Translator Brian Robert Moore

Source – Personal copy

I have a habit of buying a book when it comes out and then putting it on The side and not getting to it till a few months has passed, and this is one such book I think itr was a YouTube video of forthcoming books I had first seen the book mentioned, and I had earlier read a Silenced Shared from her when it came out a couple of years ago, but never got around to reviewing it at the time. Bugt I knew I liked her writing style and a furthewr dicve into her life said she was firstly a fan of painting and i can see that in this book is is almost a collection of sketches from her life.  She also studied alongside the great Italian writer Cesare Pavese, who also got her to translate some books later on. This book focuses on her late husband and imagines the events that led up to their meeting and the last few months of his life.

Our first conversation was in Boves, on what was referred to as the road of the Madonna, because it led to the church Madonna dei Boschi. Silvia walked in front of us with Detto, who was courting her a bit; he had come to accompany Detto, his friend at the time. They had gone to Venice together for the Biennale, and they showed us photos in which a girl appeared. I was always annoyed when other girls were referenced in my presence, and this time, too, their trip immediately lost all interest for me.

So, walking after dinner on that road, he spoke of Modigliani.

Everyone talked about him in those days, and everyone the foolish ones, which is to say almost everyone) acted outraged: the long necks, the flat colours, etcetera. I loved Modigliani deeply then; but he couldn’t have known this, he didn’t know anything about me. I mean that the topic wasn’t aimed at pleasing me.

He spoke of Modigliani with admiration, in a grave, serious tone: and he didn’t know that ‘admiring Modigliani’ (what that meant) was truly what mattered in life, for me.

Maybe this first real exchange was somewhat similar to that other fateful one with Giovanni. But Modigliani was much more important to me than Kant had been then.

The first conversations around art

The book, as I said, is told in vignettes as she looks back on the first four years: the beginning of the marriage, how they met whilst hiking with his family, his job, their first few meetings, and a shared interest in art, which was the initial spark. It is those little unseen bits of their relationship she remembers how he was staring whilst hiking, a small gesture when he looked at a watch. I say it is like a collection of unfinished sketches or polaroids, the sort that maybe are blurred and maybe the head is missing, but the event, the feel of the day, is still there in the memory. That is what this is, not a memoir, more beefing out iof those little moments that make life. At the end, she sees Monti, her husband, facing it like he had the rest of his life, straight on. He reminds me of the classic image of the British male: upright and someone who will never talk or accept the fate facing them, if that makes sense?

The bank, that mother, I never loved her, before; I didn’t hate her either: it was work, nothing more. I used to like repeating the joke ‘What’s worse than robbing a bank? et cetera; but he, who loved Brecht, never laughed at this line. It’s also true that I never managed to grasp the concept (of a bank). Only in Singapore, when I saw the fantastic building for Mao’s bank, did I surrender: to the universal, and therefore to the necessary.

I have to list the bank among his maladies: only, obviously, as a very probable cause, given the concurrences which even he reluctantly, silently acknowledged. He never complained about those painful spells; arising in his dry and healthy body, they had something unreal about them. I heard him say, as years passed, that he’d look at the enormous wheels of trucks and feel like sticking his head under. I saw him, at night, blindly wandering around the house, his head in his hands. I felt horror for that torment, and I would have liked to share in it; but I couldn’t hold out for long, would plunge back into sleep. I’d remember Eugenia, who slept during Adolfo’s asthma attacks at Tetto Murato: it helped me absolve myself. Behind his suffering, I glimpse the spectre of my own inattention, perhaps my flight from pain.

How he is viewing dying in a way

I thgink of the last couple of decades of me reading books in translation and the last 16 odd years of this blog, is books like thi,s the discovery or rediscovery of writers like Romano Ginsburg, those strong mid-century female writers from Europe, when I first got into blogging writers like Muriel Spark, Barbara Pym and Maragret Drabble those storng female voice from the mid century in Enlgish were so held up but it seemed at the time there was no european writers like this I feel this is maybe the sign of how male dominated the translated fiction world used to be.  Now we have these writers, and like a piece of a bigger jigsaw puzzle of 20th-century literature across Europe, they fit together. You see little piece of the writers i have mentioned in her work, Ginsburg and even Pavese some what but also you can see how in another country, strong female voices were writing at the same time. I think this is maybe the tip of the iceberg for us as readers, where is the German Pym, the French Drabble, etc.? I think Pushkin is doing a great job finding a voice like this, but there has to be more out there for us as readers to discover or rediscover! Do you have a favourite writer in translation who only really appeared years after their death?

 

 

 

Paradise of the Blind by Duong Thu Huong

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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

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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

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