Invernale by Dario Voltolini

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Invernale by Dario Voltolini

Italian fiction

Original title – Invernale

Translator -Brian Shannon

Source – Review copy

I keep saying what a bright time it is for books in Translation in the UK at the moment. I’ve been around for nearly two decades, and we haven’t had as many choices or as many great small new presses as we do now. So getting sent this, the second book from New Cross Press, was a real privilege, as I am just a small book blogger, all said and done.  Anyway, Dario Voltolini has been a blogger with the lit Blog Nazione Indiana, then a spin-off magazine; he has written many books, and this is his first to be translated into English. He also plays football for the Italian writers’’ football team (let’s hope they’re better than the current national team  ).In fact, football crops up in a couple of places in the book

Crack the lamb’s head, it seems to be staring at you through unseeing pupils; strike it dead centre; bones, tongue emerge.

With a few short blows, cleave it along the usual groove. The anatomy of the head comes into view, the nasal passages, the brain’s casing, the vertebra’s connection to the skull. Hastily reach for bunches of rosemary and bay – some sage, if there is any – savour the aroma of the food in the customer’s home, whet your appetite and guess how they might cook it. Imagine, for an instant, their house, conjure up this evening’s dinner guests; then snap back to the present moment, hand over the change, ask whoever’s next, “What’ll it be?” Catch the order amidst the clamour: a leg, a shoulder. Grab the leg and carve it in the sliver of time the block is free, not a second to waste; hack down hard between the beast’s shoulder blades, into the muscle until the bone it encloses breaks.

the viseral buthcery at the start of the book

This book focuses on a real event in the writer’s life: the death of his father. A butcher, and the turning point in this book comes when his father, Gino, a master of the skill of Butchery, who works in the Turin meat market, unfortunately, one day, while cleaving a piece of meat and just as he is going down with his knife, someone is going by, and this makes his hand move a little to the left and his thumb is gone.  He has the thumb reconnect, but this is th start of what the title of the book refers to: the long winter. Gino’s death returns to work, but the thumb isn’t healing, as the blade was covered with lots of blood and other things around the wound.  So when Gino isn’t getting well, in fact, worse, we see the downfall and struggle of a man first lost in his life and trade, but then in his own life.  Alongside this is, at times, a visceral work from the scenes iof chopping meat to the cigarettes Gino smokes. Even things like the snippets of matches one mentions Rossi, as in Paolo Rossi, which sets the book in the late 70s, as the match against Argentina seems to be a famous encounter from that year. We see Gino facing life as he is told the worst.

What’s still astonishing is a word he says as Antognoni is about to play the ball to Bettega. He says: “Goal.” Then there’s the pass to Bettega – whose family lived in the same building where he lived with his – Bettega flicks it on to Rossi and darts forward; Rossi with one touch closes off the triangle and plays it back to Bettega (the Argentine defence split wide open) who, with one strike, sends it towards the far post, and, sure enough — goal.

The match I think it is one from 1979 am I right

I loved this. Voltolini is compared to Raymond Carver i can see that this book has choppy chapters the propel the prose forward it mixes a lot of viseral images from the meart to smoking a cigarette to the matches on the tv alongside Gino’s jounrnety his Long winter. I was also reminded of his fellow Turin writer Alessandro Baricco in the way they both use very precise ways of describing things. The book is a glimpse of a father in pieces: those moments of his father, the meat market , the cigarettes and the football. A visceral image: the smell, the feel of the meats being prepared. How to prepare the meat. A look at a silent man from a son now putting him together. I liked the connection to football; it is a universal language that, with Rossi, lives on in Italy and connects both father and son. It is a book about a father and a son a quiet book, a subtle look at a life in those glimpses that, years later, are like crumbs left on a plate or the trail of blood in the case left from a piece of meat prepared, that flicker of the TV of a match in the past you vaguely remember; I was reminded of the European Cup final for Liverpool many years ago when I was about ten.  This is a great novella. A book that lingers long after the last page! Do you have a book that reminds you of memories

 

Peter Camezind by Herman Hesse

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Peter Camenzind by Hermann Hesse

German Literature

Original title: Peter Camenzind

Translator:  W J Strachan

Source – Personal copy

I’m on to the second book for German Lit Month, and I’m surprised I haven’t reviewed a book by Hesse in all the time I have been blogging. I read a lot of his books in my teens; I think the time is best to read books like Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and the one I always remember from that time: The Glass Bead Game.  Which of those three books was my favourite? So when it came to the second book for this month, I thought I might just start with Hesse’s debut novella I have most of his novels, but it made sense to start with this, his debut novella, a book published in 1904.  It is, like a number of books, what is called a bildungsroman: a book that features a person growing up; in this case, it is the title Character.

My father’s hut bordered on a tiny, fenced garden where there grew bitter lettuces, carrots and cabbages.
In addition, my mother had prepared a touchingly small flower-bed in which a couple of china roses, a dahlia and a handful of mignonette languished hopelessly and miserably. Next to our garden was a still smaller gravel-led patch which stretched as far as the lake. There stood two damaged barrels, some boards and fence-stakes, and moored in the water below was our punt, which in those days was repaired and caulked every few years. The days on which these operations were carried out are still firmly fixed in my memory. They were warm, early summer afternoons; over the garden the brimstones fluttered in the sunlight, the lake was as smooth as oil, blue and motionless, softly iridescent, the mountain tops were thinly veiled in mist and the little gravelled patch smelt strongly of tar and paint. Even afterwards, the boat smelt strongly of tar throughout the summer.
Many years later, whenever by the sea I came upon this peculiar smell, of tar and water, I would at once see our little gravelled landing-place and my father

His small village and his hut growing up

Peter Camezind is a boy who grows up to become a man in a small rural village in the Swiss mountains.  We follow him as he escapes after doing well in school; first, he heads to Zurich and is initially blown away by how big the city is and how out of place he is as a country boy.  But soon fits in and discovers two thing Drink and Woman he has a relationship and as he finishes his eductaion we see him travel and this is where we get a sort of man seeing the world around him and having his eyes open to losing love and how tough the world can be as he heads getting first chance to learn more then jobs around tboth France and Italy but as he mioves around he can see the impact of the modern age on the world especially the world he rew up in  so when two things happen he makes friends with a man Boppui that is disabled the two form a close bond that is almost a love affair and this opens Peters eyes to the world and the suffering of those in it and the beauty of nature but also how the relgion is seen by him after all this.

Then there was a boisterous fair-haired boy in our class who was extremely versatile-musican, mimic, and clown. I won his friendship though not without effort, and my cheerful little contemporary always adopted a slightly superior attitude towards me. All the same, I now had a friend. I sought him out in his small study, read a few books with him, did his Greek exercises, and in return I enlisted his help for my mathematics. We also went on many walks together and must indeed have looked an ill assorted couple. He did all the talking, gay, witty and completely at ease; and I listened and laughed, happy to have such a light-hearted companion.

When he starts studying

Now, these themes and the whole story are themes Hesse had used in his other books, using Bildungsroman as his values and views change throughout his life. This reflects much of what happened in his life.  Going from a small village town to the big city.Growing up in a strict Christian background and then seeing the wider world.  Suffering and escape are themes he often uses. I saw the village he leaves, and later in the book, when his father is near the end of his life, similar to the village in Arno Camenisch’s book, rural idyllic life from the outside.  I like a bildungsroman, and this is a great example for me; I’d rather have this than, say, Stoner, as the two main characters have similar paths in life from small rural places to academia.  They also have similar relationships that don’t fully work out.  But what HESSE DOES IN BRING Peter and Boppi together is change the story into one of questioning life more and what the world is about, and about the choices we all make, which is something he returned to in his other books; spiritual paths and how we live our lives are always themes in his books.  I will be reading him again in less than 17 years!

 

The god of that summer by Ralf Rothmann

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The god of that summer by Ralf Rothmann

German fiction

Original title – Der Gott jenes Sommers

Translator: Shaun Whiteside

Source – Personal copy

I am late starting German lit month this year. I have never been the best at it, as I’ve been fitting what I read into the plans put up for the month, but I’ll post the German lit I read over the month anyway, in order, as ever. I started with this book, which I hadn’t written a review of the other day; it would have been the 1600 review, but it just missed out. I read one other book by Ralf Rothmann, Fire Doesn’t Burn, seven years ago. As I said in the last review, this is another writer who has a few books in English but is a major figure in German literature, as he mixes real-life insight into the Ruhr Valley he has lived in and also looks back at Germany’s past in World War II; this is the case in this book. He has also been outspoken around book prizes, in fact withdrawing his book from the German book prizes in the past. German book critics have called this the Frankfurt Hunger Games; maybe, as we end the Booker season, one can see that!!

Her sister, red-haired like herself and with the same curly hair, had, unlike her, dark eyes – a brown in which she seldom saw more than brown – and not nearly as many freckles. She flicked her cigarette ash on the floorẠOh, we’re gradually getting used to that, plenty of experience by now. Of everything going up, I mean. But I think you’re our guardian angel, even if you haven’t got a halo. By the way, does the old man know what you’re doing here? I remember that he doesn’t like refugees in the stables.. ‘ Luisa threw her scarf over her shoulder, stepped into the corridor and closed the gate. ‘Why? After all, you’re here too,’ she replied. ‘And besides, we’re not refugees.

We’re from Kiel!’

They move to escape the war !

This book is part of a loose trilogy Rothmann has written about World War II and its aftermath in Germany.  This is the second book and follows a young girl, Luisa, as she flees with her mother and older sister, Billie, to the relative safety of Kiel in northern Germany. As they are escaping the Russians are winning out in the east, and they are on their brother-in-law’s dairy farm. All this is in the summer of 1945 as the brother-in-law, an SS officer, turns his eys to Billie as the bombing draws ever near to their world. The world is viewed through Luisa’s eyes, so those men in striped uniforms are from the concentration camp; it shows how blind some people were to the horrors, but the book shows the conduct of the brother-in-law and the violence that followed the SS.  Alongside this is the bombing and the influx of more and more people escaping to the western side of Germany. It captures a country falling apart through the eyes of a young girl and its effects on those around her as the war is drawing to a close.

More and more refugees were coming to the farm. They were installing rows of makeshift beds in almost every outhouse and even in the byre. Although it was still freezing at night, the horses, including Breeze, had to go to the paddock in the park, and Luisa got hold of an old woollen blanket and tied it around the horse’s neck and the base of its tail. Admittedly it was barely putting on any weight, but its hooves seemed to be getting better; already it wasn’t walking as hesitantly as before, and the others tolerated it in their midst. Particularly after sunset they stood crammed together, and when Luisa read in her room she could hear the animals coughing in the darkness.

The war gets closer as more try to escape to the west !

The book deserves to sit alongside works by Grass and Böll about the war. I was reminded of other child narrators, from The Book Thief to the violence of Flyora in Come and See, the russian film.  This is between them, from the bully of the SS brother-in-law to the fact that the violence and upset of the war is never really that far away. The book reads like a collection of reflections from the time it was written, told in short chapters that give it a pace that mirrors what it must have felt like, with the undercurrent that the war wasn’t going the way Germany wanted. It does capture how a child would view this, not quite seeing what we see, like when one of her sisters vanishes in the city, is more than it seems to our narrator. This is the first book for this year’s German lit month, with a few more to come. Have you read any books from Rothmann?

The investigator by Dragan Velikić review 1600

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The Investigator by Dragan Velikić

Serbian fiction

Original title: Islednik

Translator Christina Pribchevich-Zoric

Source – PERSONAL COPY

Now I had to pick a book as the 1600th review for the blog. I had been weighing up a number of books for this review, but only a day or so ago did I finally pick this one. From the moment I started the book, it has so many things I love in books: Central Europe, the Balkans, and the war of the 90s; history, family, and memory.  In the time I have been blogging, these threads or plots in books have been the ones I, as a reader, gravitate toward. It also shows how a book about a mother in Serbia can connect with a reader in the UK.  This book was the winner of the NIN prize in serbia it is like there version of the booker prize. A few of which I have read over the years. This is always a good place to look for new books from a country to go to their big prizes.For a list of writers, you will find a number of great writers here, a few of whom I have reviewed on the blog with other books.  This is the second time Dragan Velkić has won the prize.  I do have his other prize-winning book. HE IS. writer who should be better known in English, but I don’t know how many times I have said that over the last 1600 reviews.

A photograph of the bridge on the Rjecina, once the border between the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Italy, taken from Sušak (Photo B. Fučić, 1947), one of the few pictures to survive the burglary of the train carriage in Vinkovci. It accidentally wound up in the small collection of family snapshots that I brought with me when I left Belgrade at dawn on the 24th of March 1999. In the early afternoon of that same day, a few hours before the first NATO bombs fell on my city, I stepped off the train at Budapest’s Keleti station; stretching out before me was the unending Fiumei ut – the Rijeka Road that passes by the Kerepesi cemetery. But people had started fleeing into exile well before that. The roads they had to take were traced long ago.

One of the photos that leads of to the tales in the story.

The book is a piece of autofiction, in a way, but in that very Balkan way of telling a story. This story is of Dragan, a man, a son, and his mother. His mother has recently died. This is the framing for the book as we see him look through a box of photos. As we do so, we see him as a young child and the local hotel; his mother loved hotels in Pula, where they grew up. This moves us forward and back in time, with Dragan talking about his mother’s childhood, then his own. We see both World War II and the Balkan conflict, and how they affected his mother, then him as a child. Then we also have Dragan meeting some of his fellow writers, like Aleksander Tisma, a fellow Nin Prize winner, and later on, he reads Dasa Drndric, one of the books we have yet to see in English. A son in grief as memories and history mix.

In the spring of 2012, he started working on the case of the woman employed at the Northern Adriatic Port Directorate and came upon Daša Drndić’s book “April in Berlin”. The part that mentions Raša made him think of the trumpet-player with two names. In the meantime, Marijan Milevoj had become the guardian angel of his town, a reliable chronicler.

His books could be found on the internet. He didn’t live in Raša anymore, he now lived in nearby Labin where his son ran a bookshop. He decided to look him up at the first opportunity. That was a quarter of a century ago. Meanwhile, the country where they lived was gone, like the Raša mine.

The mention of a yet unpublished Dasa book !!

For me, this is one of those books with a fluid timeline; it is like an ocean coming in and out on the tide as we go back and forth. I was reminded of something like The English Patient; this is like the part of that book where we see the ephemera of that character’s life. These pictures are Dragan’s ephemera: his Madeleine, his family memories. It is also a book about place and how that place has changed hands, names, borders, and even the people who live there over the last century. It is also a story about a son diving into his mother’s past, building a picture of her and then their relationship. This for me is what I liove in books that make you think of your life I looked back at some of my old pictures after putting this book down. The other reason I picked this book is that Istros, the publisher, has been a favourite and champion of my blog over the last 17 years, and that means the world to me. Do you have a favourite book like this one?

 

October round up

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  1. House of day , House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk 
  2. Surface by Olivier Norek
  3. The Mating Season by P. G. Wodehouse
  4. The Hatter’s Ghost by Georges Simenon
  5. Time of Hope C P Snow
  6. The Besieged City by Clarice Lispector
  7. Perfecting the Shot by Mathias Enard
  8. Vaim Hotel by Jon Fosse

I feel like the blog got back on track last month after a lean summer of reviews. Strange, as I am back at work, and it seems like the blog’s normal routine is back; anyway, I managed eight reviews last month. From six countries. No new publishers or countries this month. This month, the blog went from Poland, a small village. Then. A detective out of water, solving a long-dead crime. Then some Wodehouse. A serial killer is unmasked in a small French village. Then part of C. P. Snow’s multi-work Strange and Brothers. A woman sees the village she lived in become a city and struggles.Then a sniper falls for a teen girl looking after his mother. Then a man appears at a hotel and it all goes weird.

Book of the month

Just a nose ahead of the ENard was the second part of Jon Fosse’s latest trilogy. He is a master of the twisted tales. A story that seems to start as it ends again, like the first volume of the series did. I can’t wait for Vaim Weekly.

 

Non-book events

We head to Frome for a couple of nightS. We head through the Cotswolds there and forgot how busy these little villages are, picturesque but so busy. We then had a day in Bath to see the sights. Toppings, Persephone books and a lovely meal in a country pub. Then we headed back via the Cotswolds, this time visiting the famous Daylesford Farm Shop. But for me, I prefer our small Chatsworth Farm Shop. Pricey and busy again.

Music-wise, I picked up the live album from Geese; lead singer Cameron Winter is one of. my favourite new singers. Then also got the reissue of the shoegaze band Swervedriver’s album Raise. I had seen them back in the 90s.

Next Month

It is German Lit month by Tony and Caroline  I will be reading a couple of books for that. I have also been given a heads-up on Novella November by Lisa at Anzlitlovers . I will have a good few for this even as well. Other than that, I am not quite sure, as ever; I can change what I read because my mood and new arrivals can shift my reading journey. What are your plans for November? I will also be doing the 1600 review next on the blog!!

Vaim Hotel by Jon Fosse

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Vaim Hotel by Jon Fosse

Norwegian fiction

Original title: Vaim Hotel

Translator: Damion Searls

Source: Subscription book

There is often a feeling that when a writer wins the Nobel, they struggle to write after they win. They struggle with their next book. Well this is now the second part of Fosse latest trilogy. I had reviewed Vaim earlier this year; in fact, it is one of my favourite books so far this year. So when this arrived the other day, I had to read it straight away. I wasn’t sure whether it continued the story or was a different one. Well, it is a bit of both; the book is set in a small Norwegian village of Vaim. But it has the same setting but a new cast of characters.

Why exactly I came to Vaim and checked into The Vaim Hotel, no, I don’t know, I just took my leather shoulder bag, put my two suitcases in the boot of the car, a brown estate car I’d bought only the day before, and drove off, I didn’t know where I was going, but something would work out, I thought as I drove along and let the road take me wherever it wanted to take me, and after I’d driven for a few hours, when I saw the sign for Vaim at the side of the road, it felt like I’d driven long enough and I decided to stop there, or take a break from driving there anyway, because Vaim, yes, well, I had heard of it, but I’d never been to Vaim as far as I could remember, and if there was a hotel in Vaim then, yes, I wanted to check in there, I thought and when I saw the sign for The Vaim General Store on the wall of a building I turned off the road down by the shop, and I saw a quay in front of me, and there, on the left, yes, there was a whitewashed building with Vaim Hotel painted on it in black letters, so if the hotel was still open and running I could get a room for the night there, but chances were that the hotel was probably closed, there were lots of old hotels like this one around the countryside here and there that had had their day and were now closed,

The opening as he arrives not quite sure why

An unnamed narrator arrives with his shoulder bag and two cases.He isn’t quite sure why he’s done this, but when he passes the small village of Vaim, he decides to stop at the whitewashed Hotel. He isn’t sure, as he says many of these hotels are now closed. But when the door opens, the story starts. The owner greets him in a weird way, almost as though she knew him .But he has never been to Vaim or met anyone from Vaim. But he has a past incident many years ago; was this the event she was referring to? So, when in a hotel that seems empty, he is given room 407 on the fourth floor . He is bewildered, and when the woman Britta appears and tells him a small thing she has already told him, he starts to feel odd. Then, when he goes for a walk, another local, a sailor, talks to him. He is again left with a strange feeling.Then he goes to the shop, and the shopkeeper makes him buy a fishing set. Then he goes to the restaurant owned by Britta, where the sailor he met earlier is drinking. Over the course of the evening, he has more weird things happen. The sailor tells him a secret about the shopkeeper and Britta. The book ends with Britta talking about the man.

We called him The Guest, I never found out what his real name was, but the reason he stayed at Vaim Hotel was that he couldn’t pay his bill, for the simple reason that he couldn’t find his wallet, and he never found it again and to tell the truth I often thought it was a good thing he never found his wallet, because since he couldn’t pay his bill, yes, well, he had to work, it was good, yes, good for both him and me, and he was very useful to have around, because I really needed a helper, he wasn’t exactly especially handy, but of course he was much better than no one, the first thing I had him do was change the bulbs in the ceiling lights of all the rooms and when he was done I counted how many bulbs there were in the used light bulb bag, and the number was right, there were forty light bulbs in there, but I didn’t understand why the new light bulbs he put in burned out so quickly, the only explanation I could think of was that he just put the new light bulbs in the bag meant for the old ones instead of screwing the new ones in so that it would look like he’d changed all the bulbs the way I’d asked him to, but of course I can’t be sure of that,

Britta talks about him disappearing as a new guest arrives !

Again, he has written a book that coils in on itself; the story ends as it started, like Vaim did. The sailor is maybe Jatgeir from the first book. The boat he owns is called the Eline!! Is it the same shopkeeper that ripped him off as well? The story has a Pinteresque feel of never quite feeling safe, as the narrator does. Britta is an odd character; what does she know? Why does the narrator have a room on the top floor? I love some of the humour around a fishing set that appears and disappears, and whose is it?  The sailor told him this about how the village works. So in the last bit of the book, a new guest replaces the old guest who had vanished out of the blue. The Mobius coil of the narrative is similar to Vaim; the feeling that the book is starting a new guest again gives the sense of de ja vu, and then there are the unanswered questions about the guest and what has. happened? Have you read Fosse? This is review 1599 so bring on 1600!

 

Perfecting the shot by Mathias Enard

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Perfecting the Shot by Mathias Enard

French fiction

Original title – La Perfection du tir

Translator: Charlotte Mandell

Source – Subscription edition

I’m back, and I’m back with one of my favourite writers from my blogging days: Mathias Enard. I was very lucky to have been sent Zone when it first came out, and it’s hard to believe how time has flown. But even then, I think I may have noted somewhere that it wasn’t his debut novel.  One thing we have in English is that we tend to get a lot of writers’ canon out of sync, usually when they win a big prize or have a book that has caught the zeitgeist; they reach us in English, and sometimes that’s the third or fourth novel.  This was the case with Enard: we first got his fourth novel in Zone, and now we get his debut. I like how you could see parts of his later works in his debut.

At first I didn’t know what to think, because if a fifteen-year-old girl took charge of my mother and came to live at my place, the neighbourhood would talk. But at the same time, they were all afraid of me because they knew I was a fighter. First, I set aside the business of Myrna, more out of laziness than anything else. I’d go to the house two or three times a day to see how my mother was doing, and that was it. I didn’t know how to get her to eat. She was getting visibly thinner. And she was refusing to talk to me.

She didn’t quite remember who I was, I think. It should be said that I was always dressed in khaki, at the time. With the cartridge belt and everything. For weapons I carried just an automatic and a knife. It was better to be armed all the time, you never knew what could happen. And also it was like a uniform: if you carried a prominently displayed gun, then you were a soldier. Most of the fighters had a Kalashnikov, but I didn’t. First of all because it shoots poorly and second because a handgun makes you look important. Like an officer, in a way. The problem with my rifle is that with the stand, the scope, the binoculars, it’s all so cumbersome.

Myrna arrives to help his mother !!

Perfecting the Shot follows our narrator, an unnamed sniper in his teens.  His mother is ill, and the locals send a young woman, Myrna, a 15-year-old, to look after her. The book is framed that way. The boy sniper tells us how he does his job with a stunning detachment from the people he is killing.  How they have made themselves visible and how easy it is for him to kill them. It is just a job to him; the more he kills, the less he is bothered by the people he kills.  There is the home where the young girl is looking after the mother, and in the evening, when the young boy first sees the body against the light of Myrna, the young man is struck and falls head over heels for the young woman caring for his mother. But she doesn’t feel the same. What happens when she leaves, creeped out by him?  What will this killer do?  What actions will he take?  Will he get her back?

That’s why I always prefer shooting, not out of cow-ardice, but out of a sense of efficiency. The rest is a waste that’s at best inevitable. The one in charge of my sector agreed with me, too, and we’d organized our positions based heavily on snipers and machine-gunners. We were aware that before you gained ground, you had to be sure not to lose any. And by keeping the tallest buildings, we could harass the enemy all day: there’s nothing more demoralizing than seeing your comrade hit right in the head by a bullet that seems to have come straight from nowhere. Or to want to leave your home and be forced to stay there because a bullet has just struck the wall ten cen-timetres away from you – entire neighbourhoods were being transformed into deserts and simple avenues were becoming uncrossable no-man’s-lands. Obviously they copied our methods, because ours were the best. Once you understand it’s war, you have to get organized.

How he feels about shooting

One thing I have always liked about Enard’s books is how he sets his tales in nameless places; so is this the Balkans, the Middle East, or Africa? It could be anywhere. That gives the prose a universal feel, like he did in The Zone.  Enard also uses the nature of violence and how it affects people in his book. This is a study of a boy detached from the world by his violence. I was reminded of Jude Law’s character in the film Enemy at the Gate.  Also, the serial killer in the film Man Bites Dog shows how violence can become almost a natural part of someone’s life; killing is almost a matter of fact.  But then there is also how this boy sniper is still a boy when it comes to the sexual attraction to Myrna; he feels it and can’t cope with it the way he deals with killing those he sees through his sight.But the main connection I felt whilst reading the book is to the fiction of another French writer, Jean Paul Manchette; his book, Prone giunman, is another tale of a sniper on his job. I looked up, and Enard said he is a fan of Manchette’s writing. It is a pacy book that can easily be rad in an evening i did as I just couldn’t put it down to I’m done with the book. Have you read Enard?

 

The Besieged City by Clarice Lispector

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The Besieged City by Clarice Lispector

Brazilan fiction

Original title – A Cidade Sitiada

Translator – Johnny Lorenz

Source – Personal copy

I’ve read three Lispector books and have reviewed two of them over the years. I’m not in a rush to read all her books; most of them are on my TBR. So when this one was a book, I could read it for this week’s 1949 club. I picked it up; she wrote it not long after she got married, in Europe, in Bern, where Lispector struggled with the city and the change from the cities in Brazil. Also, she suffered from depression and isolation at this time and struggled to write this book. She later said it was the hardest book she had ever written. The style is different from the other books by her I have read.

The late night would find them motionless in the dark. Stable and weightless. There they were, invisible, breathing. Waiting with brief intelligence. Below, in the sleeping township, a rooster was flying and perching on the ledge of a window. The hens were watching. Beyond the railroad a rat ready to flee.

Then the dapple-gray stomped its foot. Nobody had a mouth to speak with but one would give a small signal that would sound off from space to space in the darkness. They were peering out. Those animals that had one eye for seeing on each side—nothing was seen straight on, and that was the night of Sao Geraldo, the flanks of a horse quivering in a quick contraction. In the first silences a mare would open wide her eyes as if surrounded by eternity. The most restless colt was still raising its mane in a deaf neigh. Finally silence would reign.

The horses and the small place that Sao Geraldo started as !

The book follows two characters: Lucrécia Neves, a girl in her twenties who loves horses but is at an age when people think she should settle down. The book follows her and the men in her life: three men pursuing her, Felipe, a soldier; Perseu, a quiet student and a sensitive soul. Then she finally settles down with Doctor Matheus. Because each of the three men is a different kind of man. The book shows how they try to get her attention. Lucrécia is not a beauty, but she has these three men, each in their own way, drawn to her. This may be her working through her own love. Life, as I said, has two characters. The second character is São Gerardo, which, when the book opens, is a small township with horses wandering around, and as the book moves on, it becomes a boom city. This is how the book works: the two affect each other; as the city grows, we see how it almost hollows out Lucrécia’s soul. As the modern world creeps in on them.  She has many struggles living in Europe; I feel the city becomes a trap for her.

Soon she was veering off a bit, dreaming of walking alone with a dog and being seen on the hill: like the postcard of a city. Lucrécia Neves needed countless things: a checkered skirt and a little hat of the same material; for a long time now shed been needing to feel how others would see her in a checkered skirt and hat, a belt right on her hips and a flower in the belt: dressed like that shed look at the township and it would be transformed. With a dog. That’s how you composed a vision.

The girl didn’t have any imagination but a watchful reality of things that was making her almost sleepwalk; she was needing things in order for them to exist.

She is an odd character in many ways !

I must admit I often struggle with the imagery in her novels. I will go back when I have read them all and reread them. But for me, this is a woman dying on the inside after maybe making the wrong choice in a man.  This came not long after her own marriage; is she reflecting on her own life? Then there is the place: São Gerardo; like many places in this century, a small township, a rural place almost becoming a city; there is imagery of the horse once running wild, now gone. She hated the clean style of the Swiss cities compared to the wildness of her home. This book falls between the other two I have read from the debut’s stream of consciousness; it is a harsh, stark book about a place growing, and, as it does, a woman’s insides falling out of a woman who becomes empty really . Whereas the later book has a more internal narrator’s voice. Have you read Lispector ? Do you have a favourite book by her? Have you read this book did you struggle with it ?

 

Time of Hope by C P Snow

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Time of Hope by C. P. Snow

Engish fiction

Source  – Personal copy

I mentioned that I was reading a book by a writer who isn’t that well known these days.  Lord Snow was well regarded in his day, with his main body of fiction being the eleven-book Stranger and Brothers series. This book was the third in the series to be published, but in the series’s later reading order, it is the first to read.  The series was adapted into a BBC TV show in the early 1980s, and he was longlisted for the Booker. But he is a writer who is in that void between being forgotten and rediscovered. Part of me feels he may be rediscovered at some point, as his book Two Cultures grappled with the breakdown between Science and the humanities, and he had a foot in both camps as a writer and, by day, a chemist. This is my third book for this week’s 1949 club !

Aunt Milly even spared my mother any exhortation when she agreed to find my fees. She saved that for me an hour or two later. She was never worried about repeating herself, and so she gave me the same warning as on the afternoon of my father’s bankruptcy, three years before. I was not to expect success. It was likely that I should have a most undistinguished career at this new school.

‘You’ve got too good an opinion of yourself, said Aunt Milly firmly and enthusiastically, with her usual lack of facial expression. ‘I don’t blame you for it altogether. It’s your mother’s fault for letting you think you’re something out of the or-dinary. No wonder you’re getting too big for your boots’

Another great Aunt from the 1920s

This book is the first in the stranger and brother series where as the other book I had read from the series was abpout a group of people in a woirk place this book is about one man. Lewis Elliot; he is from the lower middle class. The book shows what happens when the fortune the mother feels they may be getting is suddenly wiped out by the father going bankrupt, and how they have to fall back into a more frugal lifestyle, and how this affects the young Lewis, but as he meets George Passant, a solicitor, he sets his sights on the law. He gets a windfall from the death of his Aunt Milly. I liked her after just reading Wodehouse; here was another aunt who liked to put her fingers in her family’s pies and had opinions. But she left the young man enough to get on in the law, and he aims to be a barrister; this takes him from his West Midlands home to London . Along the way, he meets a young woman, Sheila. Now she is a character that, in a way, seems more modern than the time it was written: a girl with mood swings, and one that is maybe is Lewis looks at more closely, is more trouble for him, but he can’t see that, and she helps him as he studies. This relationship is odd; she isn’t that in love with him, but he wants to settle down and marry her. This is the intro to Lewis, and he appears in the rest of the series.

Autumn came, and I was restless, full of ex-pectation. The School reopened. In the bright September nights I walked down the Newarke to George Passant’s classes, full of a kind of new-year elation and resolve. Going back to my lodgings under the misty autumn moon, I wondered about the group that Passant was collecting round him. They were all students at the School, some of whom I knew by name; young women who attended an occasional class, one or two youths who were studying full-time for an external London degree. They gathered round him at the end of the evening, and moved noisily back into the town.

The toehr main figure in the book series George Passant AND lei=wis paths cross in this book!

This and the second book in the series set up the two main characters: Lewis Elliot and George Passant.  What follows is their post-studies life. The book ends with Lewis getting married and starting his career. But already, choosing the moody, unstable Shelia is holding him back. We also learn a bit about George, the main character in the second book in the series; the rest of the book follows them through their careers. The book was the third, but many readers see it as the first to read in the series, as it fills in Lewis’s childhood and coming-of-age. It shows how hope and work can change things. The book offers a realistic look at one man’s path to the bar and marriage; later books show how this has a knock-on effect. Have you heard of C. P. Snow or this series? This series deserves rediscovery, as it captures the period from post-World War I through World War II and into the 1950s through a group of people in the upper echelons of English politics and business.

The Hatter’s Ghost by Georges Simenon

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The Hatter’s Ghost by Georges Simenon

Belgian fiction

Original title: Les fantômes du chapelier

Translator: Howard Curtis

Source: Personal copy

Yesterday I said there are a number of writers like Wodehouse, you know, who may have written a book each year; another is Georges Simenon, since he wrote so many books. I think I once said I heard his publisher in Belgium isn’t sure, since he wrote so many books under different names and with different publishers.  He was prolific this year; for example, I could have picked three Maigret novels and three of his Roman D’ur, and this is one, so you could have spent nearly a whole week with his books in 1949.  For me, this is perfect, since it is another book set in a small town. A lot of his Roman Durs seem to be set in small towns or suburbs.

He had waded through puddles and his feet were wet, his features hardened by the cold. He was again walking like a normal person. He passed Rue du Minage, his own street.
He was almost at his destination. He couldn’t hear any footsteps, but he knew all the same that someone was walking behind him, catching up with him. He still didn’t dare run or stop. A taller, broader figure than he was loomed up on his left and fell into step with him, and a strangely calm voice said:
‘You’d be making a big mistake, Kachoudas.’ He didn’t turn to look at his companion. He didn’t say anything in reply. He didn’t immediately change direction.
He was alone. He could see the red lantern, a policeman coming out of the station and getting on his bicycle.
He turned. Ignoring him now, Monsieur Labbé had done an about-turn and was walking, with his hands in his pockets and his coat collar raised, in the direction of Rue du Minage, their street.

The rain filled town and our narrator

The narrator is the local hatter in the small town of Rochelle Monsieur Labbe. We find that over the last few weeks there has been the killing of five elderly women in the town, and since then it has been raining, adding to the sense of dark foreboding among the locals. We see small-town life focusing on a group of men who meet, chat, and play cards.  One of them is the murderer. Another has almost, by mistake, put the pieces together, and a chance moment means that the local tailor, Kachouda, a quiet, unassuming fellow, has found out who the killer is.  The book follows what happens next and how it starts to fray the killer’s edges. As a cat-and-mouse story, it comes out in the rain before there are more killings or the tailor is killed himself.  Two men, very different in character, and the one that should be the killer, the quiet, unassuming one, isn’t

As for him, they had probably forgotten he was a mus-ician. He hadn’t played for at least twenty years, and the cello itself was in the attic. To get to the attic, you had to leave the house, enter the dead-end alley and take the stairs to the second floor. That was what he had done: he hadn’t been so incautious as to buy a cello string from the instrument maker in Rue du Palais. Especially as that was the only one in the town. And the hatter hadn’t been outside La Rochelle in fifteen years, not even to go to Rochefort, fifteen years during which he hadn’t once slept anywhere but in his own bed.

A little more of the backstory to our narrator

I love Simenon Roman Durs’ books; they offer a great examination of the human soul and the morals of nations and individuals.  Here we have two men and a secret that comes out: one of them is the killer.  What I love is how Simenon twists who the killer is: not the quiet, unassuming character it often seems to be; no, it is the outgoing, well-liked one. I was reminded of the French film Le Boucher, where the local butcher, a well-liked man, is the killer. In fact, I checked, and the director of that film, Claude Chabrol, also made a film adaptation of this very book a number of years later. He also shows how the two men who run shops next to each other are viewed, and how the story twists as one discovers the other is the serial killer, all from the killer’s perspective. It’s a mind-unwinding that reminded me of books like Blaugast, where we see a man’s mind fall apart as we read. If you like a dark, twisty book from a killer’s perspective, this is the book for you.  Do you have a favourite from Simenon’s Roman Durs, his hard novels?

 

The Mating Season by P G Wodehouse

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The Mating Season by P G. Wodehouse

English comic fiction

Source – Personal copy

As many of you know, I love the biannual Year Club Simon and Karen have run on their blogs for years. It means I do something I love: look at lists of books and writers, and come up with the lists for each year. But for me, there are a few writers you can often find books from, and P. G. Wodehouse is one of them. He wrote 99 novels and story collections; this Everyman copy says they are all available from Everyman.  This novel is from his most famous creations, Jeeves and Wooster.  This was also one of the novels adapted into an episode of the TV series Jeeves and Wooster.

Well, he seemed to hint, unless I misunderstood him, that the above Haddock hadn’t, as it were, done right by our Nell.

According to Catsmeat, you and this modern Casanova were at one time holding hands, but after flitting and sipping for a while he cast you aside like a worn-out glove and attached himself to Gertrude Winkworth. Quite incorrect, probably. I expect he got the whole story muddled up?

She came clean. I suppose a girl who has been going about for some weeks as sore as a gumboil, and with the heart cracked in two places gets to feel that maidenly pride is all very well but that what eases the soul is confession. And, of course, making me her confidant was not like spilling the inside stuff to a stranger. No doubt the thought crossed her mind that we had attended the same dancing class, and it may be that a vision of the child Wooster in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit and pimples rose before her eyes.

No, he didn’t get the story muddled up. We were holding hands. But Esmond didn’t cast me aside like a worn-out glove, I cast him aside like a worn-out glove. I told him I wouldn’t have any more to do with him unless he asserted himself and stopped crawling to those aunts of his?’

The Aunts always make me smile in Wodehose

Where to start with this tale? As with any Bertie story, it starts with two threads that end up connected. His Aunt Agatha pushes Bertie to travel to Devrill Hall to meet Gertrude, a single girl she’s heard about through Gertie’s aunt. So he is expected. But when he is due to go, he meets up with his newt-loving friend Gussie Fink-Nottle, whom he is supposed to see the godmother of his fiancée, Madeline, but she has been called away. But then, after a night at the drone club, Gussie ends up in court.  Bertie volunteers to be Gussie for the weekend, and they soon discover they are due to see the same person. So when Bertie arrives as Gussie to get the nod from Dame Winkworth and Madeline’s other four aunts.HE is surprised when, a little later, Gussie appears pretending to be Bertie with Jeeves. Add to this, they found out at the Drones from another drone, Catmaca, that he wants Gussie’s hand but got a no from the chorus of aunts.  Add all this, and you get a classic series of events involving Bertie as he blunders through, and as ever, Jeeves is there to save the day.

Well, I did get there before midnight, of course, but I was dashed late, all the same. As might have been expected on a day like this, the two-seater, usually as reliable as an Arab steed, developed some sort of pox or sickness half-way through the journey, with the result that the time schedule was shot to pieces and it was getting on for eight when I turned in at the main gates. A quick burst up the drive enabled me to punch the front-door bell at about twenty to. I remember once when he and I arrived at a country house where the going threatened to be sticky, Jeeves, as we alighted, murmured in my ear the words

‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came, sir, and at the time I could make nothing of the crack. Subsequent inquiry, however, revealed that this Roland was one of those knights of the Middle Ages who spent their time wandering to and fro, and that on fetching up one evening at a dump known as the Dark Tower he had scratched the chin a bit dubiously, not liking the look of things.

Bertie arrives later and that sets it all off

I always love a few hours in the world of Jeeves and Wooster, those days of house parties, aunts controlling families, and who saw who; it captures upper-class England in the interwar years.  With its many twists and turns, disaster seems to lurk around the corner, as people keep appearing, but not as themselves. Add to that the collection of mad names we have: GUSSIE AND HIS newts, Catsmeat that actor. Gertie, as Bertie points out, if they got together, they’d be Bertie and Gertie! More aunts than normal, Agatha, as ever, hoping to see her nephew Bertie settle down once and for all. Then the chorus of aunts, five in all, at Deverill Hall. Add to this, they all have to perform whilst at the hall: who will end up with whom, when the deception will fall apart, and that they know Bertie isn’t Gussie, and Gussie isn’t BERTIE. As ever, Jeeves saves the day with his knowledge of everything going on and the various connections and loves among those involved. I always laugh at his books; they feel like a bygone age, and he always makes it work out, no matter how twisted it sounds to us, readers.  My first book for Club 1949. Do you have a favourite Wodehouse book?

 

Surface by Olivier Norek

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Surface by Olivier Norek

French crime fiction

Original title: Surface

Translator: Nick Caistor

Source – Review copy

I don’t read many crime novels, but one crime motif I like is the fish-out-of-water. I love crime TV shows but don’t read many crime novels. Oliver Norek is one of France’s biggest Crime writers. He also has an interesting backstory: he was initially a humanitarian worker in Yugoslavia before becoming a police officer, so much of the book’s police procedural comes from his time in the force. His other books have been adapted into films, and this book, published in France seven years ago, is now a TV series that will air on the BBC at some point in the UK. I’m not sure which TV stations elsewhere will be showing this show.

“What about the eye?”

“Subconjunctival haemorrhaging stemmed. She’ll have peri-orbital bruising for several weeks. A black eye filled with blood, but nothing crucial as regards visioniẠạ

“Nose?”

“Broken by the blast. Operated.”

“Jaw?”

“Fracture of the ascending ramus of right mandible. We had to screw in three steel plates. There’s no way she’ll be able to speak any time soon. Fed intravenously for eight to ten days, then blended food and iced water for three weeksẠạ

“She certainly had a lucky escape.”

“Yes. Five centimetres to the left and her whole face would have been blown off. Even so, it’s not a pretty sight. In addition to the 60 stitches to restore her right cheek, every pellet will leave its mark. Well, anyway, the surgery has been a successful

The true nature of the horrific injury she has got

This book has a number of threads; the first is the main character’s story. Noémie is one of those police officers who, at the start of the book, seems to have it all. A job in a drugs team in Paris a loving boyfriend and is on the up. Then, on the flick of a coin, one raid goes wrong, and she is shot in the face and is left with a horrendous scar. This is the book’s turning point. Weeks later, when she feels well enough to return to work, she finds she is being sidelined because of how she looks. She is being sent to Aveyron a rural area mnorth west of Paris.  She is instructed to assess the local force, as it is about to be disbanded and the area handed over to the Gendarmerie.  Show that when she arrives, she is the outsider. But when a dead body appears in a local lake, it links back to a long-dead cold case involving the building of a local dam; her colleagues may know more, one of whom is the son of the powerful local mayor. Added to this are the chats between Noémie and her therapist as she copes with both how she looks, the loss of her job at Pairs Partner that left her after the injury and all that the new job brings.

Viviez-Decazeville railway station

The Aveyron

Only two other people got off. After seven hours, Noémie finally left the local train that had taken a thousand detours to stop at villages whose names she had never heard of and which she would probably never remember. The fact is that between Laroque-Bouillac, Boisse-Penchot and Lacapelle-Marival, you needed a good memory or to have broken down there.

No more Parisian skyscrapers: now there were woods and fields dotted with farmhouses. No more wide avenues, instead winding roads sometimes turning into dirt tracks that led to isolated houses.

Straw bales, tractors, horses. Paris had definitively disappeared.

And yet the stop at Viviez-Decazeville did not have the bucolic appearance of the previous halts.

The new job is really in the stick so to speak!

I like how this book flowed.  For me, a crime book has to draw you in, and this does. But it also has layers: Noémie coping with what happened and its aftermath.  The locals’ secret, buried and three dead children, stir up the past in a rural community.  Then the sheer horror of losing everything is cpatured in the conversations between Noémie and her therapist. This also highlights how the French police is organised into two divisions: the Police and the Gendarmerie.  This is what happens here, with the local police force eventually being handed over to the Gendarmerie. As I say, I like the fish-out-of-water style of crime story, from The Big Sleep to Poirot on the Orient Express or Marple in novels like Caribean story.  To TV series like Death in Paradise. This book feels like it would work as a TV drama, with a strong main character and an interesting backstory. The locals with their secrets, then a cold case, all make for skeletons in the cupboard.Do you have a favourite type of crime novel, and have you read any other books from Norek?

 

 

Nobel literature prize winner for 2026 is Anne Carson

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We’ve just seen the Nobel Literature prize winnner is the Canadian poet, writer and translator Anne Carson. I have yet to read her I have her best known work Nox. She was running High in the betting for the prize this year. I like that a translator has won. I would love to know where to start with her works and which of her translations you’d sugggest.

Anne Patricia Carson

Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living. Her many books of poetry and translation include Antigonick, Autobiography of Red, The Beauty of the Husband, Glass, Irony and God, Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, Nox, and Wrong Norma (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry). from her New Directions bio

 

House of Day , House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk

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House of Day, House of Night

Polish fiction

Original title – Dom dzienny, dom nocny

Translator – Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Source = Subscription book

Well, with the Nobel due tomorrow. I happened to read this book recently; it is an earlier book from the Polish Nobel winner Olga Tokarczuk. Fitzcarraldo recently reissued it. I have had a mixed relationship with her books. I was looking forward to The Book of Jacob, but I struggled to get through it and felt it would take a rereading to fully understand. I loved Flights when I read it, and I also loved Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead. For me, this novel, which came before both of those books, is a little bit style-wise like Flights, as Olga calls her constellation novels, which is a similar style she uses for Flights, but it also feels familiar in place to the setting of Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead.

Between twelve and one a nice woman’s voice reads a serialized novel. It’s impossible not to listen to it; we all have to listen to every single novel because it’s on when we’re preparing dinner, when we’re peeling potatoes or making pierogi. Throughout April it was Anna Karenina.

He loves another woman, that is clearer still,” she said to herself as she entered her own room. “I want love, and it is lacking. So everything is finished! And it must be finished. But how?” she asked herself, and sat down in the armchair before the looking glass.’

Sometimes Marta comes over at noon and automatically starts helping with something, such as dicing the carrots.

She listens quietly and solemnly, but she never says anything – about Anna Karenina or any other novel we’ve heard read on the radio.

I loved the thought of local radio reading Tolstoy

I said this is like Drive Your Plough, as it is set in the remote Polish countryside; this time it is a village, and those who do live there form a chorus of voices telling the village’s story. We see the place Olga actually lives in: a village at the crossroads of Poland, Czechia, and Germany. The book sees all these nationalities in the village. Our narrator carries the narrative; she has just moved to the village of Nowa Ruda in the Silesia area of Poland. Her neighbour Marta is one of the women who have shaped the village, and through her we hear the village’s stories retold.  From the local drunk to folktales about deaths from mushrooms, to a dead boy straddling the border. A cacophony of tales builds a rich place scarred by the various countries that have ruled the village over the centuries.

THE GERMANS

Early this summer the Germans began to appear in the meadows. Their grizzled heads came floating by on a sea of grass, and their wire-rimmed glasses glittered gaily in the sunshine. So-and-So said that you can recognize Germans by their shoes, which are clean and white.

We don’t take care of our shoes, we don’t respect them, they’re clunky and always made of dark leather, or else we wear gumboots, rubber farm boots, into which Stasek Bachleda flicks the ash from his cigarette. Our shoes are made of PVC, garish black-and-white counterfeits of popular brands. They’re permanently muddy because of the sodden red earth, and misshapen from being repeatedly frozen and dried out again.

I smiled at her description of the Germans

As I said, as one of her earliest novels, this may show what followed in her other novels.  The constellation style of novel, as she calls it, shows how she used it in Flights to Much Effect.  Then the village setting.  She used it in Drive You Plough.  Anyone who has read this blog for any time knows I love a book set in a village; it has the whole world in a small place.  From death to birth.  From saints to Transvestite monks, all the world is here. I was reminded of stones in a landslide; as many of you know, one of my all-time favourites: the variety you can see in a small village, but also, at points, the way the voices were almost a chorus reminded me of the Irish novel Cré na cille, the way it captures the voices of the villagers, live and dead. I’m not sure if she had read or was aware of these other books, but it may show how villages can be similar; whether in the mountains of Spain or the middle of Ireland, there are stories, secrets, and all of life there with those living there.  Maybe this is the best place to start with Tokarczuk if you’re new to her, since it foreshadows her later work; especially, you can see the draw of the history that must have fueled her to write The Book of Jacob. Have you read this book, and who do you think will win the Nobel Prize in Literature tomorrow?