Mild Vertigo – Mieko Kanai (1997)

Translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton

I wasn’t sure whether I would be joining in with #JanuaryinJapan this year, as I was only reminded of it at the start of the month. However, I did have several Japanese novels on my tbr, most of them on my Kindle – but in the end I chose one of the physical books I had. Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai was one of two books sent to me during Women in Translation month by Marina. Kanai was a new author to me – I had been tempted to read a novel by a writer I was already familiar with – but is well known in Japan as a writer and literary critic who has been publishing since the 1970s. 

Natsumi is a housewife living in a pleasant Tokyo apartment with her husband and two small sons. She has become somewhat overwhelmed by the tedium of daily tasks, the never ending nothingness of her existence. The novel is a kind of inner monologue, a stream of consciousness, written in very long run on sentences – the first sentence in the book is something like three pages long. I found this much easier to read than it perhaps sounds, there is an intimacy I think between the reader and Natsumi because we are so much inside her head – I rather enjoyed her company. 

Perhaps the title Mild Vertigo is particularly apt because this narrative can have a kind of dizzying effect on the reader. Polly Barton’s translation must be applauded here for producing this effect in the narrative – as a monolingual person, with no aptitude for languages I find literary translation extraordinarily impressive and fascinating. 

“. . . it’s as she’s rinsing off the soap under the tap that she finds herself there, a plate held in her hand, staring fixedly at the running water. The rays of morning light pouring in through the window make the rope of water streaming from the tap twinkle and sparkle, and the water sends spray spattering about the sink as it’s sucked down into the drain, flowing continuously, ceaselessly, not exactly noisily but creating a slight reverberation as the water and the air echo through the pipes, and the water spills over the rim of the plastic tub, making a faint trickling noise.”

Divided into eight chapters – the novel has the feel of a series of snapshots or vignettes in this woman’s life. This is not a novel in which very much happens – there is a lot of gossip between the residents of the apartment block. A local woman who feeds the neighbourhood stray cats has caused some consternation. Natsumi wonders about her neighbours, she is constantly comparing herself to others, to the women who live in the other apartments, or to her female friends, who seem to dress better than she does and have better social lives. Natsumi seems unable to make changes to her life that might make a difference to her – at one point she muses on getting a job, and then it’s not mentioned again. 

After ten years of marriage, Natsumi often observes her husband with some irritation. She only half listens when he is talking to her, observes he is starting to develop a bit of middle age spread, considers his dirt, when sharing bath water – and realises she washes his clothes separately to hers and the children’s. Everything is so routine and never changing, she is horrified at the discovery of an old shopping list that is almost identical to the one she has just written. 

Natsumi does begin to experience a kind of vertigo herself as she spends more and more time ruminating on her life, her neighbourhood and the people around her. 

“When she sat down on the sofa, the bleak view of the suburban residential landscape—a whole forest of apartments and commercial buildings in mismatched gray and beige that went on uninterrupted for as far as the eye could see aside from a few spots of green here and there where trees were growing—which you saw from the window when standing up would disappear, and what lay stretched out beyond the open window was the summer sky, dazzling in its blueness—the kind of sky that seemed like it could suck you right in—and she felt her head growing hazy, despite lying down she began to feel quite dizzy, and it was hard to say whether it was her whole body or just her field of vision, but whichever it was, she began reeling from side to side, so she closed her eyes, and when she looked away from the sky there were orange disks on the back of her eyelids as if they’d been branded there, and on the backrest of the sofa, she saw two or three of her husband’s thin, black hairs with a brownish sheen, together with a single gray one, stuck to the raised gray acrylic fabric as if slicing into it, glowing into the light.”

The prose throughout the novel is lovely, poetic, vivid and frequently humorous. It was an excellent introduction for me to this writer. 

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Breasts and Eggs – Mieko Kawakami (2019)

Translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd. 

I have read some really good Japanese novels over the last few years. In fact I have read seven novels this year translated into English from Japanese and three more set in Japan. So it is perhaps not surprising that I would pick a Japanese novel as part of my Witmonth reading. My very first book of 2023 was Heaven by Mieko Kawakami. I was quite blown away by it and was determined to read something else by Kawakami soon. Breasts and Eggs is a much longer novel than other Japanese fiction I have read recently, at well over 400 pages – though as I was reading on my Kindle I kept forgetting it was that sort of length.

This is a novel about contemporary womanhood and body autonomy. It portrays ordinary working class women, trying against the odds to carve out the best life they can for themselves. 

“Think about how great everything would be if none of us were ever born. No happiness, no sadness. Nothing could ever happen to us then. It’s not our fault that we have eggs and sperm, but we can definitely try harder to keep them from meeting.”

The novel opens with three related women coming together in Tokyo. Thirty-year old Natsuko is visited by her older sister Makiko and her teenage niece Midoriko. They have arrived from Osaka, to spend a couple of rare days with Natsuko – a trip rare as it is generally unaffordable, work can’t just be ignored. Makiko is an ageing hostess – concerned that her looks are gone, she spends her time thinking about and researching breast augmentation surgery. The two sisters have a difficult life growing up, living with their mother and grandmother in Osaka, when their mother died it was up to Makiko to keep their little household together. 

“If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had. Don’t ask what was in their fridge or in their closet. The number of windows says it all. It says everything. If they had none, or maybe one or two, that’s all you need to know.”

One of her days in Tokyo will be to have a consultation for the expensive surgery she has been saving for. Midoriko, at twelve is overwhelmed by the changes about to take place in her own body and the changes her mother is considering,unable to voice the rage and confusion inside her she has lapsed into silence. Communicating only through brief notes, she has also been writing a journal. Natsuko,meanwhile, is already feeling the passage of time after a decade in Tokyo and dreams of being a writer but receiving little encouragement. 

“My life was like a dusty shelf in an old bookstore, where every volume was exactly where it had been for ages, the only discernible change being that my body has aged another ten years.”

The tension rises in Natsuko’s rundown apartment in this poor district of Tokyo during a couple of hot summer days as all three of these women grapple with those things they are most concerned with. 

Eight years later Natsuko is a couple of years off forty, her sister in Osaka is still working as a hostess, but Natsuko is finally making her living as a writer, able to send money home to her sister and niece. One  book that was a surprising hit, has led Natsuko to writing magazine articles each week – while she works on the problematic second novel. Now Natsuko, who is single and determined to remain so, is struggling with her own childlessness. She begins to research sperm donation – research that leads her to speak to people on both sides of the debate – continually raising as many questions as it answers. It seems to be a thorny subject that violently divides opinion in Japan. 

Breasts and Eggs is a thought-provoking compelling read addressing many issues that face both men and women in the complex world that is the twenty-first century. A great contender for book groups I would say, it was recently suggested to my own book group, but we went for another Japanese novel instead. 

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A Little Luck – Claudia Piñeiro (2015)

Translated from Spanish by Frances Riddle 

My first read for this year’s Women in translation month is a novel that has been much anticipated by readers of translated fiction. Claudia  Piñeiro’s previous novel Elena Knows, also published by Charco press, was a big hit with readers and reviewers and made it onto my books of the year list last year. I was therefore looking forward to reading A Little Luck, and I wasn’t disappointed. It is every bit as good as Elena Knows – perhaps even better. It was a breathless, brilliant read, and I loved every word. Heartbreakingly poignant, Piñeiro’s description of the tragic incident that is at the heart of this novel is superbly done. 

“language – like a treacherous route you try to avoid – can be a slippery slope leading down into the places that hurt the most.”

After twenty years a woman is returning from Boston to the suburb in Buenos Aires, Argentina that she fled following a terrible incident. Her name is Mary Logan, at least that is her name now. Her name used to be María Pujol, known as Marilé – and it’s not just her name that has changed. She’s lost weight, cut her hair quite severely, changed her eye colour with the help of contact lenses, with the aid of twenty years, she feels she must look quite different. Even Mary’s voice has changed – more husky, brought on by the stress of what happened twenty years earlier, American sounding following two decades in Boston. Yet she knows deep down that it’s only a matter of time before someone recognises her. Most of the staff at the school will have joined in the twenty years since Mary left the area, but she wonders if anyone from that time will still be there – and what about other members of the community? Will people really have forgotten her? 

Her return is work related – she works for an educational institution – and she will be visiting Saint Peter’s School, a place caught up in all that happened to her. The school is seeking accreditation by the institution founded by Mary’s former partner Robert, who has recently died. An institution he had been passionate about and which gave Mary a job as a Spanish teacher when she first arrived in the US. In flashback we see something of Mary’s life in Boston, after she first left Argentina – how broken she was, how instrumental Robert was in helping her heal herself, finding a purpose and a new way of living. 

The reader doesn’t know exactly what has happened in Mary’s past – the blurb of the book gives a few clues, but I am avoiding spoilers. These things are only gradually revealed – giving pace to this thoroughly absorbing novel. 

“I’ve erased so much of those years. In an effort to forget what caused me so much pain, I forgot the everyday yet inoffensive details as well, street names, businesses, friends, relatives. But it didn’t do any good. Even though I’ve stripped myself of so many memories, the pain is still there, starker and more brutal on its empty stage with all the spotlights focused on it.”

Mary begins the process of interviewing staff at the school – part of the institute’s accreditation process. Everything starts well. The first few interviews pass off without incident. She’s staying in an apartment not too far away, there’s a slight issue with bats but Mary isn’t too worried – and  then a shop keeper reacts oddly to Mary – sending her spiralling again.  

“‘You remind me of someone,’ she says. My legs go weak. I can’t speak, I wait. I’m scared but also relieved that someone has recognized me, despite the weight loss, the red hair. ‘But no,’ she says, ‘no offence, but if you knew who you remind me of…’ ‘Who?’ I mumble, barely more than a whisper. I ask again without raising my voice: ‘Who?’ She won’t say who, just: ‘Best to forget about her. A horrible woman, never mind, I’m sorry…’”

Then it’s time for the history teacher to have his interview – and Mary is floored by who walks in. 

This meeting – prompts Mary to write down her story – to set down exactly what happened then and since, how she felt, how she was treated by others, what that did to her. 

This is a wonderful novel – a book very hard to do justice to without spoilers. Those who loved Elena Knows, will I’m sure find much to love here too.

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The Housekeeper and the Professor – Yoko Ogawa (2003)

Translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder

Finally I am sitting down to write about this lovely little novel that I read a couple of weeks ago. I have been meaning to write about it all week – but as so often I haven’t managed to get going until now. Three years ago I read The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa  – and had meant to explore more of her work before now. Recently I discovered I had this buried in the depths of my Kindle  and what a heartwarming, unforgettable find it was. The Housekeeper and the Professor was first published twenty years ago in Japanese, this English translation became available in 2008. 

Tenderly written, The Housekeeper and the Professor is gorgeously heartwarming – it is a book about friendship and love, maths, baseball and memory – and I absolutely loved it. 

A housekeeper is sent by the agency she works for, to the home of a brilliant maths professor. The professor has an unusual problem however, following an accident years earlier, the professor’s short term memory lasts for only eighty minutes – before completely resetting. The housekeeper is met by the professor’s sister-in-law who lives in her own house next door to the professor. She explains the problem, and makes it very clear she doesn’t want to be bothered by the housekeeper – or otherwise interrupted, the housekeeper is to come each day, do her job and leave. 

“And yet, the room was filled by a kind of stillness. Not simply an absence of noise, but an accumulation of layers of silence, untouched by fallen hair or mold, silence that the Professor left behind as he wandered through the numbers, silence like a clear lake hidden in the depths of the forest.”

The housekeeper begins her new job nervously, the professor has gone through a lot of housekeepers so far. Each day the professor greets her in the same way, asking her questions with a mathematical answer – when was she born? what is her shoe size? – the professor just loves numbers. The professor’s jacket is covered with little handwritten notes to help aid him in his confusion – he adds a little drawing of the housekeeper to the notes. None of this stops his memory resetting every 80 minutes – although his memories of the time before the mid 1970s is crystal clear. The housekeeper is drawn instinctively to this vulnerable old man, she learns quickly how to manage his difficult situation, a trip to the shops she must return from within eighty minutes, she avoids any conversation that reveals that he isn’t still living in the 1970s. In return the professor opens her mind to the world of maths that he loves – the puzzles and special numbers that have always given him joy. The housekeeper begins to study some of the things he teaches her in her own time. 

“Solving a problem for which you know there’s an answer is like climbing a mountain with a guide, along a trail someone else has laid. In mathematics, the truth is somewhere out there in a place no one knows, beyond all the beaten paths. And it’s not always at the top of the mountain. It might be in a crack on the smoothest cliff or somewhere deep in the valley.”

When the housekeeper reveals one day that she has a ten year old son, the professor insists that she allow her son to come to his home every day rather than stay at home alone after school. The professor nicknames the boy Root – as he thinks his head is the same shape as the square root sign. Each day she tells him about her son, he always reacts the same, greets the boy with an enthusiastic hug and settles down to talk to him about maths, help him with his homework and challenges him to think beyond what his teachers are teaching him at school. Root and his mother are baseball fans and so is the professor – he talks a lot about his favourite player – who in reality retired many, many years earlier. The professor loves having Root around, and for Root the professor is like the grandfather he doesn’t have. 

The housekeeper begins to go beyond the duties she is employed to carry out – she takes the professor to the barbers, she and Root take him to a baseball game, they begin to make excited plans for Root’s birthday. It is these activities which will get her into trouble – and threaten to separate her from the professor for good. 

This lovely book has really whetted my appetite for Women in Translation Month – I may not just read #Witmonth books but I will definitely be joining in. I have a small pile of books at the ready: 

The Inseparables by Simone de Beauvoir (translated from French)

Concerning my Daughter by Kim Hye-Jin (translated from Korean)

The Trio by Johanna Hedman (translated from Swedish)

Em by Kim Thuy (translated from French)

The Phone Box at the Edge of the World (translated from Italian) 

There are several more titles on my Kindle including books by Colette, Mieko Kawakami and Hanne Orstavik. 

I’m hoping August will be a good month for reading Women in Translation.

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Siblings – Brigitte Reimann (1963)

Translated from the German by Lucy Jones

I am sitting down to write about a novel in translation I read several weeks ago – I had intended to write this post a week ago, but the best laid plans, and all that… For anyone looking for titles to read during Women in Translation month, which is suddenly not that far away, this would be a good one. 

Siblings by Brigitte Reimann was first published in German in 1963. This new translation has been made available by Penguin Classics, in a very smart edition, with a lovely striking cover. It is I understand, the first of Reimann’s novels to be published in English. I would certainly be interested in reading more. As happens so often I heard about this novel from Jacqui of Jacquiwine’s journal – her review prompting me to add it to my list. At a little over 130 pages it is a spare, compelling novella portraying the internal drama of a family caught up in the political divisions of Germany after the Second World War. 

“I had unwittingly given him the cue, and now his thoughts were circling the same topic, stubbornly, like stiff staring horses on a merry-go-round whirling around their barrel organ.

‘It’s like being pricked with needles every day.’ he said ‘which is worse than being stabbed by a dagger…’” 

I frequently find myself surprised by what I find fascinating in literature. I have realised though it has a lot to do with when I grew up. I was a child in the seventies and eighties, a time of various political and social upheavals – the cold war, the Irish troubles etc. It is those things I love reading about – oddly, the background to my childhood, the things my sister and I would ask our dad to explain to us. I can remember on TV dramas in the early 1980s, there was always someone defecting from somewhere – East Germany was a mystery to me, I was an adult before I really understood what that was all about. So the subject matter of this novel really appealed to me. 

Set in East Germany in 1960, the border between east and west Germany has closed – though it will be a year or so before the wall is built. The narrative concerns two siblings, Elisabeth and Uli, who are in their early twenties and live in an apartment with their parents. Elisabeth is a young painter, for her the GDR is a glorious opportunity for her generation to rebuild their nation, offering a wonderful egalitarian, socialist future. However for her brother Uli, it has become a place of oppression and unacceptable strictures – the widening party line stands between them. Uli feels the fear and frustration of this. Having fallen out of favour following his association with a radical university professor Uli is only able to get a job as a draughtsman rather than in an engineering post for which he is more qualified. 

“When we’d argued in the past, he’d thrown shoes at me and once even a vase, another time, when I’d locked him out on the balcony, he’d pummelled the windowpane with his fists. Back then, long ago, he was very hot tempered, and sometimes I was afraid of him. But at that moment I would have preferred his temper to this cold dry calm.”

The narrative is framed by an ongoing conversation between Elisabeth, Uli and Joachim – Elisabeth’s party worker boyfriend, an argument really, as Elizabeth and Joachim try to dissuade Uli from leaving for the west. From here the narrative moves back and forth in time showing how Elisabeth and Uli have arrived at this point. As Elisabeth sits in another room, listening to the argument between Uli and Joachim, she has time to reflect on her own challenges with the party at the factory where she works and produces her art. 

This is a novel of divisions, for Elisabeth the west is a place synonymous with corruption very much bound up with the memory of National Socialism, and the horrors that led to. She and Uli were children during the Second World War, their older brother Konrad had been in the Hitler Youth. Now Konrad is in the west, having defected a couple of years earlier. Elisabeth fears losing the brother she is so close to, feeling she must save him from the corrupt taint of the west. 

I found this novella quite thought provoking. I wondered, had I been in my early twenties in the GDR at this time, how would I have seen the promises that were made by the party. As a young, disillusioned person, how easy would it be to think it provided answers, that it didn’t. I too could have been manipulated by that promise – it is a sobering thought.

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In the Belly of the Queen – Karosh Taha (2020)

Translated from the German by Grashina Gabelmann

With thanks to the publisher for my copy of the book

In the Belly of the Queen by Karosh Taha will be published on April 1st by V&Q books. I actually read it in February – far too keen to get reading after it arrived on my book pile. 

(My review appearing now due to the erratic nature of my blogging at the moment.) 

In one of the essays that accompany this well written, intelligent novel, Karosh Taha discusses how readers are conditioned to the way to read a book, from the beginning to the end. That seems reasonable, but Taha wanted to challenge that conditioning, allowing her story to be told in either direction. Therefore the reader can start at either end of the book – it is a brilliant, physical reminder that there are always two sides to every story.  

The novel takes us to a Kurdish community in Germany, a community in which Amal, Younes and Raffiq grow up in a neighbourhood where everyone seems to know what everyone else is doing, and judge accordingly. 

One perspective of the story is that of Amal. While still very young, Amal shocks this neighbourhood by beating up Younes, a classmate. Confusing them and her own mother with her insistence on short hair and volatile behaviour. She is encouraged to be herself, to be assertive, by her father, but this doesn’t make her popular at school. Suddenly her father leaves – Amal, her mother and a much younger brother left behind to the curiosity of others. Amal can’t understand this leaving, and needing some kind of explanation, she eventually, and surprisingly finds herself more and more at home in the company of Younes and his mother Shahira, both of whom are outsiders in this community too. 

“Shahira’s not a neighbour, she’s not a woman, she’s not a person – she’s an idea, and everyone in the neighbourhood sees Shahira, everyone creates their own stories about Shahira when she walks past.” 

Younes’s father also left, Amal sees him sitting on the side of the road, waiting, waiting for his father’s return. Shahira is at the heart of this novel – she defies expectations, she is subject to the many judgements and gossip of others – it seems everyone thinks they know who or what she is. When Amal, Younes and gang leader Raffiq are in their late teens, relationships become more charged as conflicts with Raffiq and his gang threaten to erupt. Amal decides she wants to go to Kurdistan to see her father, where she will meet his second family, who he appears to have replaced her with. 

The other side of the story is told from the perspective of Raffiq. Having reached the brink of adulthood, the battles of primary school are in the past. Raffiq is seeing Amal, his best friend is Younes. Now they are older no one wants to fight Younes, he has grown into a mountain, a boxer who is less and less happy in this place where they live. Raffiq sees that Younes is the centre of the neighbourhood, whether he wants to be or not, thanks to his mother. Shahira breaks all the rules, she’s a free spirit and Raffiq thinks about her all the time. Initially, Raffiq is completely repulsed by her, but also fascinated. Raffiq believes Younes is who his mother is. However, he is unable to ignore Shahira. 

“Shahira spreads in my mouth like oil. When I think of her as Shahira, I have to pull myself together. I can only talk about her when I think of her as Younes’ mother.”

The situation is getting to Younes more and more and now he knows where his father is – living in another part of Germany, he plans to go and see him, leaving behind his mother and the neighbourhood where he grew up. With Amal also talking of leaving – Raffiq’s world begins to fall apart – what is it after all he actually wants?

This is such an excellent novel, Taha explores ideas of class, race, gender and the role of the outsider within a community in this novel. Having read a few other novels published by V&Q books I continue to be impressed by the variety and quality of the voices they are giving us.

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Tales from my reading chair – mini reviews and new books.

Oh dear! Coming on for two weeks into March and I haven’t written a blog post since my February round up. I hadn’t even realised it had been that long. I had hoped to write in some detail about a few of the brilliant books I read in February, that is clearly not going to happen. I do have one book from February still to write about – I’m a little anxious that I will forget all about it before I get around to doing it, it was a review copy, I read quickly before realising it wasn’t out until toward the end of April. All these years of blogging and suddenly I’m not managing it very well. I have thought about stopping altogether, but I don’t seem quite ready to make that decision, and so for now, I will continue to post erratically, lots of mini reviews and monthly round ups I’m afraid.  

I haven’t been feeling brilliant, but books can be a comfort – although neither of the first two books of March were what I could call comfort reads. They were excellent though.  

The Fawn (1959) by Magda Szabó translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix.  

This was a recent purchase, a pre-order in fact, a new English translation of an author I have enjoyed so much in the past was an exciting prospect.    

The Fawn is a complex piece, narrated by Eszter Encsy an acclaimed actress. Throughout the novel Eszter is speaking to her lover, explaining her past, seeking forgiveness, reliving key moments, and it’s only bit by bit that the reader begins to understand who who is, and what is going on. A helpful character list in the front of this edition was referred to several times. Eszter appears to be in her thirties and the present is the 1950s in communist Hungry, but Eszter is often talking about the past, an earlier time around the 1930s, when she was a child.  

Eszter was the only child of a music teacher and a non-practising lawyer, despite having aristocratic relatives the family live in terrible poverty, and all her life Eszter feels this poverty, and it fuels a terrible resentment and a hatred of a neighbour and classmate Angéla. Angéla grows up in a very different household, everything in her life appears to Eszter to be beautiful, gracious and rich – and when Angéla is given a fawn to care for – Eszter’s resentment boils over and leads her to do a terrible thing. Angéla has no idea of Eszter’s true feelings towards her – feelings carried through to adult life when Eszter is a successful actress and Angéla is married to the man who will become Eszter’s lover.  Even when Eszter hears of Angéla working as a nurse during the war, she views it with a snarky kind of spite that the author reproduces brilliantly.  

“Poor little Angéla with her little hands, her little first-aid kit, her lovely little feet — what delightful little bandages she must have made with lint and tape! Everybody had always been polite to Angéla all her life; I bet even the dying, the wounded, collapsed with some sort of internal haemorrhage so that she wouldn’t dirty her little hand.” 

The Fawn is a bleak story, it’s written very coldly which suits the narrative perfectly, but definitely doesn’t make for an easy read.  

Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman (2022) by Lucy Worsely  

I know I sometimes struggle with big hardbacks, but I specifically asked Liz for this book for Christmas when we were doing that ‘what do you want for Christmas?’ thing. I have been reading Agatha Christie since I was about eleven, when I borrowed them from my local library, and having visited her Devon holiday home Greenway several times, find her altogether fascinating. I was very much looking forward to reading this, and while I don’t think of biographies as comfort reads – this was wonderfully compelling.  

Lucy Worsely writes in a very accessible way; dare I suggest she writes non-fiction for those who don’t read much non-fiction (that is definitely me). It is certainly not too light, it’s thorough and well researched, but Worsely allows herself to be chattily familiar and informal at times – on one occasion she refers to Archie Christie as being ‘hot!’ I suspect some serious readers of non-fiction dislike that – I really don’t mind it at all. Worsely had access to a great number of personal letters and journals and uses these to help us to get a glimpse of a woman who was very private and who as the title to the book suggests, remains a little elusive.  

A must for Agatha Christie fans I suspect, this is a very readable biography, Agatha lived a long and remarkable life. Here Worsely details her childhood, her relationship with her mother, her daughter and both her husbands. We see Agatha buying up houses, volunteering during the war, and donating money to help her second husband’s archaeological digs, on which she happily accompanied him.  

One of the most compelling sections of the book is the section about that infamous year of 1926, when Agatha went missing for eleven days, before being unearthed in an hotel in Harrogate. I really had trouble putting it down during that section, it seems that still, we are all fascinated by that strange event in the life of this most famous mystery writer.  

 Naturally, we also see Agatha the writer – she appears to have had a great need to just keep on, producing the books that she did. She wrote when travelling and she wrote when she was ill. Spoilers abound, Worsely doesn’t shy aware from big plot spoilers when talking about the books, and I assume she thought that was the only way she could write about them honestly.  

Neither does Worsely shy aware of confronting some uncomfortable truths. While she doesn’t dwell on them at all, she does refer to those cultural references in Christie novels that jar terribly today, and she addresses her antisemitism, which apparently Agatha Christie persisted in seeing nothing wrong with, even after the Second World War. Worsley even acknowledges that some of her later novels aren’t really that good – there appears to have been a feeling in some quarters that Agatha should have stopped writing earlier than she did.  

Overall, this was a fascinating read that really kept me reading late into the night a couple of times.  

New books 

Another comfort I find is buying books – books I really have no need for right now! The joy of a parcel arriving – it cheers a day up. I have a list of books I must buy soon on my phone, it’s more than just a wish list – and I assume everyone has a list like that. Every now and then I buy a couple (or four) books off that list – and every now and then a few more books get added to the list. So last week I bought:  

Manifesto: On Never Giving Up by Bernadine Evaristo  

A Single Rose by Muriel Barbery  

If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin 

Old Babes in the Wood by Margaret Atwood, her new collection of short stories.  

They are now happily settled on the book trolley by my reading chair alongside these two that arrived from The British Library – so thank you to them for:  

The Black Spectacles by John Dickson Carr – a British Library Crime Classic and 

The Home by Penelope Mortimer from the British Library women writers series.  

On a slightly more personal note – I am pretty much officially retired (on ill health grounds – I am only 54) since Friday – just some pension stuff to sort. This week I will be away with my mum, we’re off for a few days in a hotel by the sea, being waited on, reading our books while we order another tray of tea and gazing at the sea from the windows of our sea front hotel.  

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February in review

It’s the last day of the month and I won’t finish another book before midnight. It’s been a good month of reading for me, and despite not being very well, I wanted to share it with you all. February has been #ReadIndies month, hosted again by Lizzie and Karen, it’s a month that seems to perfectly suit my kind of reading, and I have really enjoyed this month’s books. #ReadIndies has become one of my favourite reading events. Honestly, where would we be without these brilliant, independent publishers?  

Unfortunately, I just won’t get around to writing about everything, hopefully I will write in more detail about a couple more of these in the coming days or weeks. One of the review copies I received is actually not out until April, so that gives me plenty of time to write a proper review of it. Three of these have been reviewed previously.  

My first read of the month was a collection of stories Other Worlds (edited 2021) by Teffi (NYRB Classics) translated from Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler & others. Focussing on other worldly themes, the collection comes from across a forty-year period in Teffi’s life.  

Maud Martha (1953) by Gwendolyn Brooks (Faber) is a book I only heard about from other bloggers. The only novel by the celebrated poet and first Black author to ever win a Pulitzer Prize. Told in a series of poetic vignettes, this is the story of Maud Martha Brown who grew up on the South Side of 1940s Chicago.  

Cold Enough for Snow (2021) by Jessica Au (Fitzcarraldo Editions) a tender, delicate little novella about a mother and daughter visiting Japan together. This was my first of two visits to Japan in my February reading. The two meet in Tokyo, share meals in restaurants, walk around the city, visit galleries and talk. It’s an exploration of their pasts, memory and their understanding of each other.  

Bird of Paradise (1914) by Ada Leverson (Michael Walmer) a wonderfully bright, witty novel, that gently satirises a society in which love, and money go hand in hand.  

Appius and Virginia (1932) by Gertrude Trevelyan (Abandoned Bookshop) I was so looking forward to reading this, Gertrude Trevelyan’s first novel. I wasn’t disappointed – though it often made me sad and a little angry. It tells the story of Virginia Hutton who embarks on an experiment – to raise a new-born Orang-utan as a human child. She names him Appius and buries herself in a cottage with no servants and over the course of about a decade goes about the business of teaching Appius how to talk, read, play and daily become more and more like a real boy. There are one or two uncomfortable comparisons between Appius and people Virginia considers inferior – which for me went hand in hand with the character’s attitudes. Throughout the novel there is a conflict between nature and nurture, and what happens when Appius becomes aware of his true origins. A fascinating, thought-provoking novel, in which the reader is firmly on the side of Appius. 

Latchkey Ladies (1921) by Marjorie Grant (Handheld Press) set around the end of WW1 this is the kind of novel I love, a novel about women, living and working independently at a time when that was less usual.  

A Summer with Kim Novak (1998) by Håkan Nesser (World Editions) translated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel. Nesser is a very successful, well-known Swedish crime writer, who I hadn’t heard of. I read about this novel on another blog and wanted to read it. Although there is a crime in this novel – generally referred to by the narrator as the incident – it is in fact much more of a coming-of-age novel – and that’s what initially appealed to me most. Fourteen-year-old Erik and his friend Edmund spend the summer of 1962 by a Swedish lake, swimming, riding their bikes and daydreaming about a young schoolteacher called Ewa who looks just like Kim Novak. When Ewa’s boyfriend is found dead, Erik’s older brother is initially the prime suspect. Many years later, Erik looks back on what happened that summer. 

How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart (2023) by Florentyna Leow (Emma Press) is a collection of essays about the author’s time living in Kyoto. Florentyna takes up the offer of a house share in the hills of Kyoto. She starts a new job as a tour guide, falls in love with Kyoto, becomes a regular at a tiny, jazz bar. Meanwhile her relationship with her house mate becomes intense, and eventually begins to break down. This collection is a meditation on place, and the loss of friendship.  

In the Belly of the Queen (2023) Karosh Taha (V&Q books) translated from the German by Grashina Gabelmann. A novel about class, race and gender this novel is told in two parts. One runs from front to back – the other part (turn the book over) runs back to front – like Ali Smith’s How to be Both apparently. You can read which ever part you like first – I started with the slightly longer section first. As this novel – which I really enjoyed – isn’t out until April I will save my thoughts for nearer the time.  

Foster (2010) by Claire Keegan (Faber) another small novella which was lovely to read in one sitting. Set during a hot summer, a child is taken by her father to stay with relatives on a farm in rural Ireland. In the house of the Kinsellas the young girl finds an affection she has never known. Gradually in their care she begins to blossom. Only, there is something not talked about in this household, and summers have to end. A slight novel perhaps but one of absolute perfection.  

So, that was February, I don’t have any concrete plans for March – but I do hope to join in with Read Ireland month. I might read a William Trevor collection of stories and I have a couple of books I had meant to read this month that I ran out of time for. I have started reading The Fawn (1959) by Magda Szabo translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix – only fifty pages or so into it, but it seems promising so far. 

I would love to know what your highlights of February were – and what if any your plans are for March.  

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Other Worlds: peasants, pilgrims, spirits, saints – Teffi (2021)

Edited by Robert Chandler, Translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler & others.  

Despite not having reviewed many of the books I read in January, I am moving straight on to my first read for #ReadIndies month. I might go back to some of those January reads yet – but I doubt it. #ReadIndies is hosted by Karen and Lizzie and is a lovely flexible challenge – you can read anything at all as long as it comes from an independent publisher. Independent publishers are so important, giving us a range of different voices from writers all over the world, reissuing classics and producing quirky titles and interesting editions that differ to those produced by the big publishing houses. I particularly appreciate those publishers bringing out translations and backlisted titles by women.  

My first title for #ReadIndies was Other Worlds: peasants, pilgrims, spirits, saints by Teffi sent to me for Christmas by Jacquiwine, a NYRB classic. I don’t read much Russian literature these days (I had a short Russian phase in my early twenties) and I have never read Teffi – but I do enjoy short stories and so this felt like a great collection to start with. Apparently best known for her satirical sketches of pre-revolutionary Russia, this collection focus on more other worldly themes. The stories were written over a forty-year period, from the times she was writing in Moscow through to those days when she was living in Paris.  

It is difficult to review this kind of collection, though I hope I can offer a little flavour of it. These stories have themes of religion either Christian or Russian orthodox and folklore and spiritualism. The collection is organised into five parts, with each group of stories taken from one of Teffi’s collections. Here we have stories of the poor and the rich, of pilgrims travelling together sleeping in hostel type accommodation, of wolves, shapeshifters, of witches and spirits, fear and superstition.  

For example, In Confession, a young girl prepares for her first confession, she worries about a lie she told, the event looms large and fills her with anxiety. In a A Quiet Backwater a laundress discusses the name days of the flora and fauna around her. It’s a beautifully descriptive story, presenting us with a very visual scene of traditional rustic life.  

“Every sea, every great river and stormy lake has its quiet backwater. The water is clear and calm. The reeds don’t rustle, and there are no ripples on the smooth surface. Anything there is an event – the mere touch of a dragonfly’s wing, or that long-legged dancer, an evening mosquito. 

If you climb the steep bank and look down, you’ll see at once where this quiet backwater begins. A line has been drawn with a ruler.” 

(A Quiet Backwater)  

In Solovki – a group a pilgrims travel to a monastery. Two of the pilgrims are Semyon and his wife Varvara – and Semyon wastes no time in telling the story of his wife’s transgression to the other pilgrims – a story he has been repeating to everyone he can for months. It becomes clear to the reader that he doesn’t know the full story.  

Some stories concern matters that are little darker – lightly brushed with horror, they explore the deep superstitions of spirits, witches, shapeshifters and things unknown. In Witch a couple come to believe their servant is a witch, the final straw for the young wife is finding the dining chairs all turned around, facing outwards (not a superstition I have heard of before). Wild Evening is about the fear of the unknown, all the characters seem to be in a state of fear. Shapeshifters explores the various stories around shapeshifters, werewolves and shewolves. The Dog tells the story of a loyal lover, war and a legend from an old mill that a group of young people once joked about.  

“We liked Tolya’s old legend. Vanya Lebedev, however, said, ‘That’s splendid, Tolya. Only you could have told it better – it should be more scary. You should have added that the mill’s been under a spell ever since. Whoever spends one whole night there will be able, if ever he wishes, to turn himself into a dog.” 

(The Dog)

All these stories are wonderfully visual, Teffi is a very atmospheric, descriptive writer. I was at first a little perplexed by the translation of some of the dialogue in a few stories. Several stories – like that of Yavdokha, about a peasant woman who receives a letter she is unable to read – have a local dialect spoken between characters. The speech that is reproduced in some of these stories began to sound to me like the dialect of someone from Yorkshire. I was a bit discombobulated, but flipped to the explanation, written by Robert Chandler on this translation, in the back of the book. I was glad I did, his explanation is rather too long to reproduce here, but reminded me how difficult translation is and how important it was for the translator to provide differentiation between peasant characters and say middle-class people, monks or even wealthy landowners.  

This collection was a superb introduction to a legendary writer – thank you Jaqui! It really got my #ReadIndies reading off to a good start.  

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Tales from my reading chair – challenges and tribulations.

Popping up with a longish post, proof I am still around. It’s been nearly a fortnight since my last post as again I have been hit hard by RA symptoms and crippling fatigue. This is clearly going to happen a lot, so I suppose my blog posting will continue erratically at least for now.  

I began January joyfully reading at quite a decent pace, however that has slowed down now, as I have been sleeping so much, and watching loads of TV. I had wanted to join in several of the reading challenges that are around in January, and started reading Heaven for the Japanese reading challenge as the New Year came in. So far, that is the only book I have reviewed from this month’s reading.  

Following that I sat down with The Old Boys by William Trevor for Cathy and Kim’s year of William Trevor. A marvellous novel full of excellent characterisation and sharp observation. I had hoped to move on to Cheating at Canasta, the short stories that are selected for this month too, but I haven’t even managed to buy a copy yet much less read it. (I might cheat and read it in February, as I have read both of February’s William Trevor titles before).  

I then moved back to Japan with Yūko Tsushima’s Woman Running in the Mountains – a pricey NYRB edition I bought with book tokens just after Christmas. Having so loved Territory of Light back in November I was really looking forward to this, and I wasn’t disappointed, so glad I treated myself to that particularly nice edition too.  

So, in a bid to catch up a little, forgive me for these mini reviews of two novels that are not only quite different to one another, but really deserve proper full-length pieces.  

The Old Boys – William Trevor (1964) 

The old boys of the title are a bunch of septuagenarians who were once, public schoolboys together, and now make up the Old Boys Association. High on the agenda as the novel opens is the election of the new president. Jaraby is sure of his success, this is a position he has been waiting to take up, feeling it is his proper due. He has however not reckoned on the bitter resentment of Nox – who Jaraby was particularly awful to during their schooldays, but for Jaraby that is long past and forgotten. The rest of the wonderfully named old boys are General Sanctury, Ponders, Swabey-Boynes, Turtle and Sole and Cridley. The latter two having more recently taken up residence together in a boarding house, where they get up to all kinds of mischief sending off for catalogues and getting quotes for home improvements, they have no right to request. When Jaraby’s wayward son Basil gets arrested by the police, Nox immediately sees it as a way of upsetting Jaraby’s plans for his election. His memory of the past is clear and for him it isn’t over.  

“Jaraby, who was a stickler for detail and discipline, was determined that Nox should do what was required of him; quietly contentedly, and with the minimum of nonsense.” 

Jaraby is the main character here, one of Trevor’s brilliantly drawn, though not very likeable creations. The best scenes in the book I think are those between Jaraby and his wife. She, no doubt long suffering with this fussy, pompous old bully – who is currently trying to persuade his doctor that he needs help drugging his ‘mad’ wife, to keep her quiet – lovely man! However, the worm has turned, and she is quietly, but determinedly fighting back, and Jaraby can’t work out what’s wrong with her. Two things they fight about most is Jaraby’s cat and their son Basil – who Jaraby won’t have in the house.  

Warning cat lovers, there is a very bad thing with the cat – which Trevor manages to not make very upsetting however a lot of cat lovers would really dislike it.  

The Old Boys is an excellent novel with a lot going on beneath the surface, Basil for instance, is a brilliant creation – we only latterly realise what a disturbing character he is. Trevor is good at these kinds of sinister characters, and he slips them into his writing a lot and I have to say I find them fascinating.  

Woman Running in the Mountains – Yūko Tsushima (1980) 

Translated from the Japanese by Geraldine Harcourt

This is a beautifully written novel full of atmosphere, quiet, subtle and thoroughly engaging. It is the story of Takiko who as the novel opens on a hot, midsummer morning leaves her home, her family asleep and walks to the hospital by herself to give birth to her son. Her pregnancy is the result of a brief liaison with a married man she met through work and is a cause of great shame to her parents. She has no shame about her situation, for her it is perfectly natural, she is to become a mother, a fact she can hardly believe. She would rather not have to return to her parents’ house where her child is unwanted, but she will have no choice when the hospital discharges her. Takiko thinks this baby will be hers, just hers and she longs for independence and to be able to direct her own life fully. Takiko enjoys her time in the hospital, enjoying the company of the other new mums, however the time is short and soon she accepts she will have to go home with her mother to the house with her young brother and abusive father, where there is little space and no enthusiasm for a new baby. 

Takiko’s son is called Akira and the novel follows her first year of being a mother. From those first difficult days with a newborn, living in cramped conditions in the heat of summer coping with all the associated pain and difficultly of new motherhood – through to her accessing of childcare and finding work. A series of poorly paid, unsatisfying jobs, waitressing, door to door make up sales make life difficult for Takiko as she juggles that with paying for childcare. Then she sees an advertisement for a male employee at a nursery supplying plants to businesses – knowing she can do the job as well as a man she applies and gets the job.  

Work sees her exploring new things, new neighbourhoods and finding things she can do she had never dreamed of. It also brings her closer to the mountain that has captured her imagination. Her mother grew up in the mountains and Takiko carries the images and ideas of the mountains with her, part of her longing for freedom, for a different life. Takiko meets another older, married man at work, the father of a disabled child, they are drawn together by their parenthood and the mountain.  

I am so glad I finally discovered the writing of Yūko Tsushima I found this to be every bit as good as Territory of Light. 

So, two challenges ticked off and thoroughly enjoyed – I had intended to read another Japanese book, but I seem to be running out of time in one way and another. I have watched and absolutely loved Tokyo Vice on BBC iplayer though which seemed appropriate this month.  

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