Ramifications – Daniel Saldaña Paris (2018)

Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney

As Spanish lit month begins to draw to a close (I’m actually not sure when it ends) and my attention shifts to #Witmonth, I’m squeaking in with my review of Mexican novel Ramifications. My second book from Charco press this month – and I’m so glad I made time for it. I had seen a couple of reviews of this one, so was fairly sure I would like it, but it actually exceeded my expectations.

“The memories we return to most frequently are the most inaccurate, the least faithful to reality.”

I do love a coming of age type narrative – and in this novel the narrator looks back at his childhood – specifically the time around the disappearance of his mother Teresa when he was ten. It is also a novel of memory, and how our memories can torment us as well as comfort us. In the present, he is a thirty-two year old man, unable to leave his bed, trapped by the past, overwhelmed still by the single most defining moment of his life.

The story is told in two time periods. The first 1994, in the days and weeks after Teresa’s disappearance – a disappearance that has such a traumatic effect on her son. The second, more than twenty years later – when the adult narrator has retreated so far from the world he struggles to leave his bed, and his sister has been forced to send a regular cleaner to his apartment. What has led this man to retreat from the world so recently, more than two decades after his mother left, and two years after his father’s death?

In the Educación neighbourhood of Mexico City, in the summer of 1994, our unnamed narrator and his older teenage sister are on summer holidays from school, when their mother Teresa walks out of the family home. She goes to join the Zapatista uprising, and never returns. She leaves behind a letter for her husband which her young son longs to get a look at – hoping it will tell him when she is coming home or where she is.

“It’s commonly said that denial is the first phase of mourning, but for me, at the age of ten, it wasn’t just the first but, for a long time, the only phase. Through a process of highly complex mental gymnastics, I managed to convince myself that not only was Teresa still alive, but that she was more attentive to what was happening in my life than she’d ever been in the past. During the first two or three years, I used to imagine her reaction to anything I did. I could almost hear her robotic voice explaining why I didn’t need a certain toy, or why memorising dates was not the best way to study for my history class, why my sister’s life would be more difficult than mine because she was a woman.”

The woman he remembers and who remains a shadowy presence throughout the novel he describes as speaking in a flat monotone, an unemotional woman who leaves behind her just a handful of memories for her son to cling on to. In the wake of her disappearance the boy is left to make sense of this new world with his distant father, and teenage sister Mariana – who is naturally more interested in her teenage pursuits than her younger sibling.

For some time, the boy has been trying to teach himself the art of origami – with little success – but it becomes one of a number of obsessions, folding and refolding squares of paper, folding and refolding leaves into perfect halves – just as he will continue to unfold and refold the memories of that summer in 1994. He is a lonely, imaginative boy. Left alone in the house while his father is at work and his sister out with her friends, he builds himself a ‘zero luminosity capsule’ in his wardrobe to protect himself from the bogeyman, spending hours hidden inside – it quickly becomes a refuge. As the summer progresses he introduces more strange rituals into his days, favouring the left hand side of his body. He isolates himself from his peers, and falls out with his best friend at school.

With the encouragement of Rat – a teenage gang leader who’s been dating his sister, he undertakes a twelve hour journey by himself in search of Teresa. Inspired by the Choose Your Own Adventure stories he has been reading, he imagines a future reconciliation, his quest a need to put everything back the way it was. A journey on which he meets frightening cruelty and unexpected kindness.

“Nowadays, I rarely remember my dreams. Although I spend many hours in bed, my waking and sleeping lives have turned their backs on one another. Nothing of what happens while I sleep filters into my waking existence, except for a sense of angst that seems to issue from that dark place to which I escape every so often on an unfixed schedule.”

What the author does so well here – and why I so enjoy these coming of age type narratives – is to recreate that confused, uncertainty that is a child’s view of a very adult situation.

This is such an impressive novel – it is easy to see why Daniel Saldaña Paris is such a highly regarded writer in Mexico.

Read Full Post »

Holiday Heart – Margarita Garcia Robayo (2017) & Nada – Carmen Laforet (1944)

Two reviews today both of which are for Spanish lit month. The first, a modern novel from a Colombian writer published by Charco Press, the second, a novel from 1940s Spain.

Holiday Heart

Translated by Charlotte Coombe

In Holiday Heart we have the story of the disintegration of a marriage. Robayo shows us that distance that opens up between people who know each other well, but now are almost like strangers.

Pablo and Lucia are Colombian immigrants living in the US, they are both writers – and Pablo teaches at a high school. They have six year old twins, Tomas and Rosá born after Lucia underwent fertility treatment. Conflicts that started after the twins were born have intensified, and as the novel opens Lucia has taken the children to her parents’ apartment in a hotel in Miami, while Pablo remains at home. It begins to look increasingly, that their marriage has reached its conclusion.

Before setting off for Miami, Lucia had been made aware of her husband’s infidelity, and some trouble at the school where he works has resulted in a warning letter. Pablo has also been diagnosed with a syndrome called Holiday Heart – the result of too much drinking and drug use. Lucia therefore has decided that she needs time away from her husband, a chance to reflect on their relationship.

“The strange thing is not the infidelities, thinks Lucia. The really bizarre thing is to look at the other person and wonder who they are, what they’re doing there next to you, when it was that their facial features changed so much. The accumulation of time makes strangers of us; nobody can say precisely when the seed is planted.”

After the twins were born, Pablo had felt excluded from Lucia’s life with the twins. It has always been Lucia who directed this area of family life – making all the decisions around the children. That isn’t the only conflict that has arisen in their marriage, however. The couple have always had rather different attitudes to their homeland – Pablo seeing the past and the place they grew up with more nostalgia and patriotism than Lucia. Pablo has been writing an epic novel about his beloved homeland when he isn’t teaching, it’s a piece of work he seems bogged down by and completley consumed by. Lucia has made a name for herself writing a feminist magazine column, a vehicle she has used to express her general dissatisfaction.

In Miami while the children play on the beach and soak up the sun, Lucia has a lot of reflecting to do. Her parents American maid Cindy – who also helps to look after the children is a bubbly, friendly presence, but her friendliness feels inappropriate to Lucia who wants to maintain a distance while needing her to look after the children sometimes. Lucia floats around somewhat listlessly, flirting with a celebrity football player – ending skype calls with her husband abruptly and watching her children jealously as they get closer to Cindy.

The story of a disintegrating marriage is hardly a new one – but here Robayo weaves this familiar story around the story of privileged immigrants. Showing that there is a degree of racism and snobbery present within their own communities which is perhaps not often spoken about or acknowledged.

Nada

Translated by Edith Grossman

A modern classic of Spanish literature Nada was first published in 1944 the debut novel of the then twenty-three year old author. Set just after the Spanish Civil war, we must see this novel as being in some part autobiographical as this was also the period when the author herself left her home to study in Barcelona.

The novel’s opening is wonderfully memorable, eighteen year old Andrea arrives very late at night in Barcelona. Here she is to stay with her relations while she attends the university. Her late arrival obliges her to knock up the inhabitants of the house on Calle de Aribau where she will be staying – both her and our first impressions of the apartment and its inhabitants are vivid indeed.

“I hesitated for a while before I gave the bell a timid ring that no one responded to. My heart began to beat faster, and I rang the bell again. I heard a quavering voice: ‘Coming! Coming!’ Shuffling feet and clumsy hands sliding bolts open. Then it all seemed like a nightmare. In front of me was a foyer illuminated by a single weak light bulb in one of the arms of the magnificent lamp, dirty with cobwebs, that hung from the ceiling. A dark background of articles of furniture piled one on top of the other as if the household were in the middle of moving. And in the foreground the black-white blotch of a decrepit little old woman in a nightgown, a shawl thrown around her shoulders.”

This is the home of her grandmother, an aunt, and uncles. Standing around her and emerging from the shadows are a group of people she doesn’t know it is not an auspicious start. The atmosphere surrounding this house and its inhabitants is not a comfortable one, there is a feeling of tension, conflict never seems very far away. There are definite signs of poverty and she soon sees that anger and violence simmer beneath the surface of this claustrophobic household. It is a rude awakening for Andrea who had had such dreams of what the city would be like, ready as was to embark on a new chapter in her young life. She will be sharing her new home with her grandmother, her aunt Angustias, her uncle Juan, his brother Román, Juan’s wife Gloria and their baby, and the sinister seeming housemaid Antonia and her dog.

There are secrets to be revealed within this family, in which Andrea’s uncle Juan is given to sudden and violent rages, his beautiful mysterious wife slips out at night to gamble, and Román is a gifted musician and the religious Angustias can be rather overbearing.

“The memory of nights on Calle de Aribau comes to me now. Those nights that ran like a black river beneath the bridges of the days, nights when stagnant odours gave off the breath of ghosts.”

Running counterpoint to the family on the Calle de Aribau are the new experiences Andrea has through her time at the university. The people she meets open up new ideas to her and she finds friendship with the sophisticated Ena. Later Ena’s apparent fascination with Andrea’s Uncle Román puzzles and upsets Andrea – and she constantly has the feeling there are things she either doesn’t know or understand.

Nada is a beautifully written little novel; it capture the mood of a time and place perfectly. Aspects that are dark and disturbing increase the feeling of suffocation – things left unsaid, left over from the war, all seem to play a part in shaping the people who reside in the house on the Calle de Aribau.

Read Full Post »

The Winterlings – Cristina Sánchez-Andrade (2014)

Translated from the Spanish by Samuel Rutter

My first review for this year’s Spanish lit month is of The Winterlings by Cristina Sánchez-Andrade. The writer was a completley new name to me when I added this one to my tbr about two years ago – but I see she is described on the cover as ‘one of the most powerful female voices in Spanish literature.’

In a sense perhaps, this is not my usual kind of novel – and yet I find myself, increasingly stepping away from my comfort zone when reading things in translation. I think that can be a good thing. I certainly enjoyed this one very much. This is a slightly unusual book, it is beautifully written, the language is very lyrical, touched with an odd, quirky humour. There is a slight gothic, fairy-tale element to the narrative in places, with larger than life characters who appear almost like the human exhibits in a peculiar fair ground side show. There’s the obese, donkey riding priest, the cross dressing dentist who steals the teeth of the dead, Meis’ Widow, now married again, but still known by the name of her first husband, and the ancient old woman up the mountain who can’t seem to die.

The Winterlings of the title (I never did understand why they were called that) are two sisters. In the 1950s they return to the small village of Tierra de Chá in Galicia after an absence of very many years. They have come back to the former home of their grandfather, from where they fled during the Spanish Civil war when they were children.

“They came past one morning like the thrumming of a hornet, swifter than an instant.

The women.

The Winterlings.

The men bent over the earth straightened up to watch. The women stilled their brooms. The children stopped playing; two women with big, tired bones, as though worn down by life, were crossing the town square.”

Their return seems to open up a lot of old wounds, for them, and for the people in this small community. In Tierra de Chá time has moved on naturally, and yet many things have stayed the same. Many of the people the sisters remembered from childhood are still around – the same traditions and superstitions remain – and everyone has their memories of the past. The village retains the secret of what happened to their grandfather after he had told his granddaughters to run – and the sisters themselves have a few secrets of their own. After all they have been away a long time, sent as refugees to England as children, they later retuned to Spain together. Dolores is the attractive sister who once, very briefly married, Saladina is the plain sister. They seem totally reliant on one another while squabbling almost constantly.

Bit by bit the sisters begin to venture out into this community – they are objects of interest and gossip, with people wondering why they have come. The priest Don Manuel persuades them to accompany him on a visit to the old woman up the mountain. It seems the old woman is unable to die, because of an agreement she entered into with their grandfather Don Reinaldo many years earlier.

“And then the old lady spoke at length about the piece of paper she had signed for their grandfather, Don Reinaldo, which was now the only thing holding her back from dying. One day, when she was sweeping the doorway to the hut, Don Reinaldo came past on the way back from visiting a neighbour. ‘Good day, old lady, how are we?’ he said ‘Terrible’ I answered. ‘How so?’ he asked. ‘I’m so hungry I can’t even think,’ I told him. And then he kept on staring at me, and finally he said: ‘Well, you do have a brain, old maid’ And skipping around, first behind me, then in front of me to get a better look at it, he said ‘You’ve got a brain like the Cathedral of Santiago.’ But of course I didn’t understand him. ‘How would you like to leave hunger behind?’ he asked suddenly. ‘That wouldn’t be bad,’ I answered. And then he made me an offer that I happily accepted: he wanted to buy my brain to study it. He would pay me, in advance, and I just had to give it over when I died.”

In time it transpires that most of the village signed similar agreements and now everyone wants these old contracts found – bizarre, it certainly is. What with contracts for the sale of brains and the dental treatment Saladina undergoes at the hands of Mr Tenderlove in hopes of improving her appearance – Cristina Sánchez-Andrade’s storytelling is richly imaginative and just a little macabre.

Then news arrives that the famous actress Ava Gardner will be coming to Spain to make a film and that lookalikes are wanted. The sisters had learned to love the movies while they were in England – and now they have a chance to make their dreams come true.

Of course, secrets can’t stay secrets for long – and in such a small community the past starts to catch up.

An odd novel, but a very enjoyable one – and a great start for me to Spanish lit month.

Read Full Post »

The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine – Alina Bronsky (2010)

Translated from German by Tim Mohr

A few months ago, I read My Grandmother’s Braid by Alina Bronsky, and thoroughly enjoyed it. So much so in fact that I went in search of other books by the same author. I downloaded The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine to my kindle and it ended up being one of four books that kept me relatively sane recently while I was in hospital.

Rosa Achmetown is our outrageous narrator, thoroughly unpleasant, vain, manipulative, even abusive. Those who dislike unlikeable, unreliable narrators look away now. The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine is a family saga, mainly focussing on a grandmother (Rosa) daughter and granddaughter. Rosa considers herself still young (she’s only in her forties) and beautiful but has virtually nothing good to say about her own daughter Sulfia. When Sulfia becomes pregnant at just seventeen by goodness knows who, an outraged Rosa does everything she can to rid her daughter of the pregnancy, including employing some rather horrible folkloric abortion methods. However, nine months later, despite all her efforts she finds herself a grandmother, and is surprised to find her granddaughter is beautiful, with the look of her Tartar ancestors. The baby is called Aminat – and Rosa becomes obsessed by her.

“The child, a little girl, seven pounds, twenty inches long, was born one cold December night in 1978 at Birthing Center Number 134. I had a feeling even then that she would become the type of kid who could survive anything without batting an eye. She was an unusual child and screamed very loudly from day one.”

From here on Rosa enters into an epic struggle to wrestle the baby away from her daughter – who she considers useless and ill equipped – so she can bring up Aminat herself. Sulfia is little match for her mother – totally unequal to her in every way – but she does occasionally fight back and Rosa doesn’t have it all her own way. When Sulfia gets a new man in her life, finds an apartment, and gets married, Rosa finds her daughter has taken Aminat away from her and is furious. This is just one of many battles that take place over the years. Rosa’s influence over Aminat is huge – her control far more powerful, though the child’s love and loyalty to her mother never waivers.

“I had tried to teach her that nobody should be able to see when you were scared. That nobody should be able to tell when you were uncertain. That you shouldn’t show it when you loved someone. And that you smiled with particular affection at someone you hated.”

Meanwhile Roas’s husband Kalganow is more shadowy presence in Roas’s life – disappearing to the park to feed the pigeons he appears at the table in their apartment ready for food to be placed in front of him. Eventually, he leaves to set up home with another woman, and Rosa seems only marginally put out. Soon she gets used to not having him around anymore. 

Rosa always has an eye for the main chance – and quick to react to any given situation. When she wants something – she goes all out to get it – and no one would bet against her. She certainly isn’t above bribing Aminat’s teachers, after all this is the last days of the communist era in the old USSR – and bribery oils the wheels of many things. When Sulfia’s marriage fails – Rosa insists she must find another husband – a foreigner – someone who can get them out of Russia. The lengths that Rosa is prepared to go to however are extraordinary.

Sulfia – who is now working in a hospital – meets a German man who is researching Tartar cuisine. Naturally, Sulfia introduces him to Rosa a fiercely proud Tartar – whose knowledge of Tartar cuisine is shaky. In Dieter Rosa sees their chance to get to the west. The fact that Rosa can see what poor Sulfia can’t and that sleazy, predatory Dieter is rather more interested in spiky teenage Aminat than in her mother is by the by – and soon Rosa, Sulfia and Aminat are on a plane to Germany – where they will be living in Dieter’s apartment.

However, once they have achieved the dream of living in the west, the ties that so loosely bind this fractured threesome together begin to stretch and fray, Aminat is growing up and Rosa’s hold over her is not what is was.  

Rosa is quite the creation – larger than life with the most outrageous behaviour – of course she always thinks she is doing right – and she has little time for those she considers fools.

“I was the prettiest patient in the intensive care unit—and the loudest. It bored me to lie in bed with tubes sticking in me. The treatment seemed exaggerated. I had to go to the toilet and rang for one of the nurses in purple smocks. She brought me a bedpan. I screamed at her—I wasn’t potty training! She looked at me totally shocked. Nobody ever screamed in the intensive care unit. At most maybe the occasional death rattle. I knew, I had worked at a hospital.”

I love Alina Bronksy’s unique, quirky storytelling – she has a matter of fact, straight forward style. Here she has given us an unforgettable narrator – who we may even begin to pity – just a little towards the end of the book.

Read Full Post »

In the Company of Men – Véronique Tadjo (2017)

Translated by the author in collaboration with John Cullen

In the Company of Men was definitely a book that I wouldn’t have read without my Asymptote book club subscription. I received it in February and reading it after the year and a bit we have all been living through, was sobering.

It is a narrative about the ravages of the West African Ebola outbreak. Weaving the human stories with those of the natural world, showing movingly the absolute inter-connectedness of everything. It is very much a novel for our times, it doesn’t always make for easy reading despite the delicacy of the prose which prevents the novel from being as harrowing as I had feared it could be. Nonetheless, I was grateful the book ran to less than 150 pages.

I fear that in reviewing a novel about Ebola, I might be losing my audience a bit. However, Véronique Tadjo has produced a narrative that is in fact very readable – a sensitive and compassionate reminder of the cycle of life and the important role the natural world has to play in it.

“We were here to last. We were here to spread our shade over the remotest lands. We were here so our foliage would murmur the secrets of the four corners of the world. But human beings have destroyed our hopes. No matter where in the world they are, they wage war on the forest. Our trunks crash to the ground with a sound like thunder. Our naked roots mourn the end of our dreams. You cannot destroy the forest without spilling blood. Humans today think they can do whatever they like. They fancy themselves as masters, as architects of nature.”

The author: a poet and author from the Côte d’Ivoire uses fictionalised testimonials, legend and poetry to create a portrait of an unimaginable disaster – giving voice to the people left traumatised in its wake. Although termed a novel In the Company of Men is a series of snapshots – showing the extent of the epidemic through the eyes of the people affected.

Two boys leave their village to hunt in the nearby forest, they shoot down bats which they later cook over an open fire. Soon they are dead, their bodies ravaged by a dreadful disease that the local medical man is unable to help with. The family of the boys are told by experts not to touch their bodies – compounding their grief – but ultimately all warnings come too late and the virus spreads rapidly. The father quickly sends his eldest daughter away to the city, hoping her escape may give her chance of survival.

We meet a doctor working tirelessly to treat patients in a sweltering tent with just a plastic suit to protect him.

“I’m a trespasser in the Kingdom of Death. This is his private domain, his empire, where he rules with absolute power. I feel like an astronaut floating in space, a thousand miles from earth. The slightest tear in his spacesuit and he’s lost. The slightest tear in mine, just like him, I’m lost too.”

A student volunteers as a gravedigger while the university is closed, completley overwhelmed by the number of bodies. A grandmother agrees to take in an orphaned boy who was cast out of his village in fear. We hear from a foreign NGO volunteer who became infected with the virus, and a prefect in charge of one of the outreach teams – taking information to the people all over the country.

Watching over everyone and everything is the Baobab tree – a wise and ancient presence in mourning for the natural world, and yet also providing hope for the future. I particularly loved the way the author brought the natural world into the centre of the story it is a very powerful reminder of how connected to nature we human beings are – and how terrible are the consequences when the normal cycle of things is interrupted.

“As a bat, somewhere midway between a mammal and a bird, with my foxy-looking fangs and snout and my translucent wings, I harbor but one regret: having let Ebola escape from my belly. It was dormant in me until Man came and wreaked the splendour of the forest.”

The West African Ebola outbreak was one of the worst epidemics of our age – what Véronique Tadjo has done in this novel is to humanize it. For those of us unaffected by it, who live on the other side of the planet – Ebola is something that we glance away from on news reports, it doesn’t actually touch us. However, in this novel we hear some of those voices, we recognise the fear and the anguish and feel that helplessness. Those feelings heightened no doubt as we continue to live through a global pandemic, as terrible as Covid is – it isn’t Ebola.

In the Company of Men is a parable – a gut wrenching narrative of the human cost of this most terrible epidemic. Not always an easy read, it is worth the effort.

Read Full Post »

Swallowing Mercury – Wioletta Greg (2014)

Translated from the Polish by Eliza Marciniak 

Some books come into our lives unexpectedly, acquired suddenly on a whim, I know I’m not the only one who does that! I saw someone talking about this slim little novel on Twitter just as I was wondering what book to read next. It sounded so good, that I downloaded it to my kindle and started reading it later that day. It was a lovely little book, quirky and richly poetic in its descriptions. I found out later that Wioletta Greg is particularly known as a poet – and I wasn’t surprised I think that comes across beautifully in the imagery she weaves through her narrative and the brevity of her delicate prose.

Longlisted for the 2017 International Booker Prize Swallowing Mercury is a thin novel at about 140 pages, a coming of age novel told in a series of vignettes or short interlinked stories. These stories or chapters depict the life of a young girl growing up in an agricultural community in rural Poland during the communist era. Set during the 1980s, various political events and a visit to the area by Pope John Paul root us to a period which in the author’s hands feels oddly timeless and could be almost any time in the last hundred years.

Wiola is the narrator of the story, and we see the world through her eyes, a gaze which alters as she grows up. Wiola’s voice is very matter of fact she tells her stories with a kind of naivety that both conceals and reveals a good deal. While the novel isn’t a distressing one – it certainly isn’t all roses round the door either. The adult world begins to gradually encroach on Wiola as it must for all of us as we get older.

Wiola is a good Catholic girl living with her parents, as the novel opens she has a black cat called Blacky that she is very attached to. While nothing terrible happens to the animal that we see – the animal disappears and Wiola is sad – her pet lingers in her mind for a while.

“I spent the whole summer roaming the fields with Blacky. He showed me a different kind of geometry of the world, where boundaries are not marked by field margins overgrown with thistles and goosefoot, by cobbled roads, fences or tracks trodden by humans, but instead by light, sound and the elements. With Blacky, I learned to climb haystacks, apple and cherry trees, piles of breeze blocks; I learned to keep away from limestone pits hidden by blackberry bushes, from hornets’ nests, quagmires and snares set in the grain fields.”

In the background, something understood but only occasionally referred to is the knowledge that her father was a deserter. It’s a shadow, nothing more, it doesn’t affect Wiola – but it gives us a sense of the difficulties this family must have faced. The family live in a traditional rural community, where the women gather together to tear up feathers for stuffing or make cakes. Wiola goes to the market with her grandmother to sell sour cherries, there are church rituals, weddings and stories of the past.

“In the same year that a rumour spread through Hektary that the Pope would drive past our village, my father took over the running of the farm and, to my grandmother’s dismay, began to introduce reforms, gradually turning our homestead into an unruly and exuberant zoo. It wasn’t just beehives and cages with goldfinches, canaries and rabbits, or a dovecote in the attic, where clumsy nestlings hatched out of delicate eggs that looked like table-tennis balls. In the middle of February, right after my birthday, wanting to cheer me up after the loss of Blacky, Dad pulled out of his jacket a little soggy, squeaking ball of fluff, which by the warmth of the stove gradually began to turn into a several-weeks-old Tatra sheepdog. We called him Bear.”

Wiola is a child with a keen intelligent imagination, sometimes we see as her mind takes off – spiralling off into sudden and odd little fantasies, often weaving myth, and Polish folklore with reality. These little glimpses into Wiola’s imagination are handled gently by the author – never going too far or becoming too strange or unbelievable. Wiola’s mother tells her that killing spiders brings on storms, and she is absolutely forbidden to enter the secret room at the seamstress’s house. Here is a world rich in superstition and tradition.

“In May 1984, I set out for church carrying a bundle of sweet flag, which I had picked that morning by the pond and adorned with ribbons. Water dripped from the bouquet onto my Sunday shoes. The church was filled with the smell of sweet flag leaves and silt, like a drying bog. My head started to spin. When the parish priest began to read a passage about the Descent of the Holy Spirit, the boat-shaped pulpit sailed off with him into the unknown. I slid from the bench down to the floor. They carried me outside. A woman drew a cross on my forehead with her spit. ‘We must tie a red ribbon in her hair and break the spell,’ she said, turning to the gawkers.”

Following the incident in the church described above – Wiola is taken to the doctor where she is subjected to an unpleasant experience by the creepy, rather predatory doctor. It’s one of the darker stories in the book, one which matters greatly to Wiola, though typically referred to lightly, and never brought up again. Wiola collects matchbook covers – an occupation which begins to get a little obsessional.

Childhood’s end is heralded by a family bereavement and Wiola’s certainty in her place in the world and even her place at home is severely shaken.

Swallowing Mercury was a really enjoyable novel – definitely an author I shall look out for again.

Read Full Post »

The Peacock – Isabel Bogdan (2016)

Translated from the German by Annie Rutherford

I was delighted recently to win a copy of The Peacock from V&Q books thanks to a giveaway hosted by Lizzy of Lizzy’s Literary Life. It seemed to be just what I was in the mood for at that time so I began reading it the day after it arrived. I absolutely loved it, quirky and light-hearted it is often difficult to believe that this was originally written in German. So often the humour seems very British. Who wouldn’t want to read a peacock whodunnit?

The setting is a dilapidated stately home in the Scottish Highlands in November. The estate is owned by Lord and Lady McIntosh – who hire out parts of the estate to holiday makers and corporate clients looking for some kind of country retreat. Aside from the dogs the laird and his wife own the grounds are home to a troublesome goose, and several peacocks – no one is quite sure how many.

“One of the peacocks had gone mad. Or maybe he just couldn’t see very well. At any rate, he suddenly regarded anything blue and shiny as competition on the marriage market.”

Thankfully, there are very few blue and shiny things in the Scottish Highlands so the only real worry are the cars that sometimes come on to the estate, it’s always a relief if they aren’t blue. Just as Lady Fiona has dispensed with one set of very satisfied guests – she must prepare for the arrival of the next. A group of London bankers will be spending three nights on a team building trip in the West Wing of the house – and her housekeeper Aileen is busy helping to get everything ship shape when she has an accident involving a Henry hoover and a step ladder. Poor Aileen comes back from hospital with her arm in plaster – and unable to resume her usual duties – in fact, it falls to Lady Fiona and Lord Hamish to look after her.

The investment department of a London bank are due to arrive – the head of the department, and her four colleagues travelling with a talented cook and a psychologist. The McIntoshes had sensed from the outset that this head of department was going to be a little difficult – but she was bringing a decent amount of money. Unfortunately, she also arrives in a brand-new metallic blue sports car. The head of department is Liz – and with her in the car is her Irish setter Mervyn. So, it’s not the most auspicious of starts when Liz steps out of the car and into some goose muck and stumbles over a rather disgustingly chewed up soft toy carried around by the McIntoshes dog Albert. The other bankers, the cook and the psychologist can only look on awkwardly.

Worried by the appearance of a very shiny blue car in the vicinity of his demented peacock, the laird instructs his groundsman Ryszard (on whom Aileen has rather a crush) to try and draw the peacocks away from the house with food. Of course, this is only partly successful.

One of the things I really enjoyed is that the reader is in on everything. A certain peacock goes missing, and later its remains are found. We know exactly what has gone on and why – but the majority of the characters don’t, which leads to lots of confusion, worry and covering up. Amidst all the worry over a dead peacock – which becomes just as much trouble dead as it ever was alive – the team building gets underway.

However, the team building doesn’t get off to the best of starts. The West Wing is not quite as luxurious as it was in its heyday, the shower is hot but only produces a trickle of water – the rooms are all quite chilly. To add insult to injury everyone but the boss Liz has to share. When it come to the team building activities designed by Rachel the psychologist it all becomes instantly awkward – the boss is there – which doesn’t really allow any of the others to relax.

“Rachel welcomed the participants to their first session and wrote three questions on a flipchart: what is important to me, what am I proud of, what do I wish for? They were to write down their answers to the questions, please, and then share them with the group. However, their answers couldn’t have anything to do with work or family.

For a moment, silence reigned. Jim took out his pen and started writing. David went pale, Andrew said quietly no. Rachel looked at him in surprise, then Bernard too said that surely she wasn’t serious, there was no way he’d do that. The boss agreed matter-of-factly with the two men – that really would be too intimate, they were here to talk about their work after all, their private lives were not a matter for discussion. The boss had a particular knack for making her opinion extremely clear.”

Rachel feels her boss has rather thrown her under the bus with this particular assignment – which is clearly going to be tricky. Bernard is almost permanently grumpy; he is sharing a bunk bed with David – who Bernard catches smirking whenever he has to get himself off the hated upper bunk. Andrew is missing his wife – Jim less so – he is taking full advantage of the fabulous food served up by their personal cook Helen. Only Helen is really content, flexing her culinary muscles and keeping everyone happy with food. She would love nothing more than to be really allowed to show off her talents. Jim simply refuses to take part in the den building exercise, head of department Liz comes down with a severe cold – and then the snow arrives – lots of it.

The portrayal of these London bankers forced together in artificial circumstances is one of the great joys of this novel. It is all uncomfortably believable and very funny. Added to which almost everyone is concerned with a dead peacock – who did what, knew what etc – a real comedy of errors. Apparently this novel was a big hit in Germany selling 500,000 copies – I can see why.

Read Full Post »

My Grandmother’s Braid – Alina Bronsky (2019)

Translated from the German by Tim Mohr

Another of the books that I read for Read indies month in February which I am trying to squeeze in before the new deadline – unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll get the final one reviewed before then.

My Grandmother’s Braid by Alina Bronsky is published by Europa Editions, and was the second book I received as part of my renewed subscription to the Asymptote book club. It was a book I loved so much I instantly bought another by the author. This is a novel about a dysfunctional family and the weakness of the human spirit, written with biting humour, fabulous dialogue and a good deal of heart. A slim novel that has the power to surprise us when we’re least expecting it.

Max is a child who lives with his grandparents in a refugee residence in Germany. The family have recently come to Germany from Russia taking up residence alongside families in similar circumstances. Max’s grandmother, a former ballerina, has some vague Jewish ancestry which allowed the family to get out of Russia and come to Germany as refugees, but she is nonetheless terribly antisemitic, she also hates the Germans – which considering she is living among mainly Jewish families in Germany makes things rather difficult. The move was all her idea, and Max and his grandfather followed meekly in her wake.

Max is the narrator of this delightful novel, who grows from a child not yet attending school to a young teen over the course of the narrative. Max’s grandmother Margarita controls everything in his life – she insists that he is sickly and not very bright – happy to talk about him in such a way right in front of him. Max isn’t allowed to play outside, he isn’t allowed sweets or cakes of any kind, even on his birthday he blows out the candle only to watch others eat his birthday cake. His grandmother parades Max around a series of doctors trying to find someone who will agree with her assessment of the child – and she has a thick file of medical notes at home to back up her claims.

“I’d always thought of women whenever I felt a cold claw gripping my heart. Grandmother had started to prepare me for my demise very early. The notion that time was trickling away gave me a sensation like goose bumps, and I wanted to soak up as much beauty as possible. I loved everything about women. The thin ones were lithe and fragile like daddy longlegs. The sturdier ones radiated warmth and plushness. If women were big I admired their strength, and if they were small I regretted the fact that I couldn’t protect them. That my grandmother was also a woman never crossed my mind.”

When Max does start school – and much to Max’s own shame – his grandmother tags along – right into the classroom, refusing to leave and setting herself down beside Max. Though with her lack of German (Max is already having to translate for her) this thankfully doesn’t last long, as it seems that it is Margarita that can’t keep up with the pace of learning, not Max.

In less assured hands Max’s grandmother could have become so monstrous she would be difficult to read about. Yet, Alina Bronsky has written the character of Max’s grandmother so faithfully and with a delightful mixture of comedy and pathos that while we may be outraged by her – we don’t really ever find her behaviour as upsetting as we might otherwise. In time we come to understand something deeper about Margarita – her anger comes from a place of loss – and a fear of ageing.

Meanwhile Tschingis; Max’s grandfather is a quiet, gentle man going about his work with little fuss. He generally lets his wife have her own way – and so he happily consents to taking Max to his piano lesson at a neighbour’s apartment. Nina – a woman Margarita actually approves of when they first meet – has a young daughter who goes to school with Max and has agreed to give Max piano lessons.

“The piano lessons felt like a short trip to a world I wasn’t allowed to live in. After the lessons Nina sent me to the kitchen where there were cookies and tea on the table. Grandfather smoked on the balcony and she went out and stood with him for a while every time. From behind the fluttering curtain the contours of their shoulders seemed to blend together, one entity with two heads with smoke hovering above.”

Max is actually a very bright child he is observant and he notices immediately why his grandfather is so happy to take him along to the piano lessons. Max understands with the simple uncomplicated clarity of childhood that his grandfather has fallen in love with Nina. The reader, along with Max wait with baited breath to find out what will happen if and when his grandmother finds out the truth of what’s been going on. When months later Nina gives birth to a child who bears an uncanny resemblance to Tschingis, the two families are forced to live with this new and unexpected world that has been created.

For all Margarita’s faults – and they are quite numerous – we come to see that she is capable of great love – although perhaps on her own terms. There are reasons why she is like she is, and while we may not wholly forgive her, we come to some understanding. As Max gets older he starts to find ways of loosening those ties that bind just a little – and in time finds a new place in the world that is just for him.

Thank you Asymptote for another fabulous book choice, and the introduction to an author I will read more of soon.

Read Full Post »

Dissipatio H.G. – Guido Morselli (1977)

Translated from the Italian by Frederika Randall

Dissipatio H.G. was the first book I received after the renewal of my Asymptote book club subscription. It is I admit, a novel I would never have read without this subscription – which for me has been the point of getting it again – forcing me out of my comfort zone, introducing me to all sorts of new voices. This is a new edition from NYRB though the novel was first published in 1977 – four years after the author’s death.

“The world has never been so alive as it is since a certain breed of bipeds disappeared. It’s never been so clean, so sparkling, so good-humoured.”

Guido Morselli’s story is in itself a sad one. Having previously had several novels rejected by publishers, the rejection of this one was to prove the final straw. That evening after receipt of the rejection letter he shot himself. A year after his death, an Italian publishing house began to publish all his novels one by one – to some critical acclaim.

This is one of those times when my reading material impacted rather on my mood. While I certainly didn’t dislike this book, I was affected by the extraordinary isolation of the novel’s natator. Perhaps reading a novel like this whilst shielding, during a global pandemic lends it an extra resonance – that sense of real aloneness is almost suffocating.

“And the silence of human absence, I understand, is a silence that doesn’t flow. It accumulates.”

The author’s sadness and his own isolation pervades this novel – which considering the premise is perhaps not surprising. Dissipatio H.G. is a postapocalyptic novel in which the narrator – who it appears to be not unlike the author himself – is the last man on earth. The novel opens with a contemplation and attempt of suicide – which ultimately fails.

The narrator who has been living in isolation in a remote mountain village in an unnamed country – has survived the great vanishing. There was no gradual fading out of the humani generis – the H.G of the title – but a sudden and complete vanishing.

“These people left, I say to myself. They didn’t melt. Lower down in the valley, someone will have seen them go by, someone will know something, will explain this to me. So I must follow the road. There’s only one, it continues north toward the plain. A means of transport must be found.”

He drives to the capital Chrysopolis to see if there is anyone else living – but finds no one – no bodies, no people anywhere. Cars stopped suddenly, buildings lie open and empty. This is a city of fifty-six banks and as many churches, a metropolis which symbolises everything this man has come to despise. The man left this hated city, separating himself from his fellow humans and their daily struggles and ambitions. Yet, to find everyone gone – all human beings disappeared is rather more than he can get his head around at first. He attempts to test the theory that there must be people somewhere else – even if not in Chrysopolis – going to the airport to see people arriving, phoning foreign countries to hear a live voice.  Soon though he is left in no doubt – he is the last man on earth.

Our narrator is a man who seems to understand the impact on the natural world of that modern, frantic existence that he turned his back on. Now, he starts to see how nature is already, in these early days, beginning to flourish.

“Without seeking it, I’ve found proof that the Event is not an illusion, not just my own invention. A family of Chamois goats is walking along the tracks. Two females, a male, and kids. They’ve come down from the mountains, something that has never happened before in human memory. For that matter I’ve seen other good omens too: the birds are making an unholy racket, and their numbers have grown. Especially the nocturnal species that have come back in droves, which pleases me because I’ve always appreciated their musical talents.”

Now, as he wanders the empty streets and buildings helping himself to provisions, breaking into his ex-girlfriend’s house to lie between her deserted sheets – he is continually asking himself a number of complex philosophical questions. His memories turn frequently to the man he saw as his one real friend; Karpinsky, a psychiatrist who once treated him.  His thoughts wander and are at times hard to follow – he is naturally self-absorbed – a clever man trying to make sense of where he finds himself.

This is a powerful little novel at times complex and thought provoking. Already my next Asymptote book has arrived – and it is very different to this one. I continue to be impressed with the quality of the choices made by Asymptote.

Read Full Post »

A Girl Returned – Donatella Di Pietrantonio (2017)

Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein

This week is the novellas in translation week of novellas in November and A Girl Returned is a novel by an author I have read before during Novellas in November – I believe this is the third of her books to be translated into English.

So many of the books in my house have been bought because I have seen other people online talking about how good they are. This novel is one of them, a novella I saw Claire from Word by Word talking about on Twitter, and as I had read two books by the same author previously I knew I wanted it immediately. I bought it in October so that I could read it during Novellas in November – it slips in just under the 200 page limit at 170 pages – and manages to be both heart-rending and brilliantly compelling at the same time. It is a novel about mothers and daughters, family secrets and the nature of belonging.

“There was no longer any reason to exist in the world. I softly repeated the word mamma a hundred times, until it lost all meaning and was only an exercise of the lips. I was an orphan with two living mothers. One had given me up with her milk still on my tongue, the other had given me back at the age of thirteen. I was a child of separations, false or unspoken kinships, distances. I no longer knew who I came from. In my heart I don’t know even now.”

As the novel opens a girl drags a large suitcase up the stairs to an apartment she has never been to before – the door is opened by her younger sister – the two girls have never met before. With no warning, and virtually no explanation a thirteen year old girl is taken from the people she has always believed to be her parents and sent to live with strangers. This is her birth family, mother, father, and siblings of whom she had no previous knowledge. They turn out to be relatives of her adoptive father – an arrangement had been made between the two families when she was a baby. Now she is thrust into a totally new world, where they even speak differently, in a town a long bus ride away from the coastal city where she had previously grown up, gone to school, and made friends. The woman she thinks of still as her mother having retreated from her in the weeks before her departure – had become something of a shadowy figure spending more and more time in bed. The girl numbed by shock hopes that when her mother is well, she will ask for her to go home.

“I was the Arminuta, the one who’d returned. I spoke another language and I no longer knew who I belonged to. I envied my classmates in the town, and even Adriana, for the certainty of their mothers.”

The household the girl arrives in is one utterly different to the one she left behind – where she was an only child growing up in sight of the beach, with her own room. Here there are a number of noisy, squabbling siblings, Adriana is a few years younger than her, they connect almost immediately – though the girl is shocked that she must share a bed with her sister – while her older, teenage brothers occupy the other side of the bedroom. Not all the siblings are kind and welcoming. Adriana wets the bed constantly – there is an awful lot to get used to straight away. There is a kind of loneliness here that is terrible, I’m sure most of us could imagine ourselves thrust into an unfamiliar environment like this – and know how destabilising that would feel.

She thinks of the woman who bore her as ‘the mother’ – unable to call her that by name – she finds ways around ever using the word. She stands out in the family, a curiosity to people from outside the family – and treated differently by those within it. Her eldest brother Vincenzo is drawn to her in a way that’s not altogether appropriate – all in all it is a time of readjustment and confusion. She doesn’t feel like someone who was wanted – she feels her return was forced upon this family who are clearly struggling financially.

“I wasn’t acquainted with hunger and I lived like a foreigner among the hungry. The privilege I bore from my earlier life distinguished me, isolated me in the family.”

She also stands out by virtue of her scholastic abilities – soon marked out by the teacher as someone who should go on to high school in the city she has just left. This possibility a beacon of hope on a shaky horizon – though as Adriana comes to rely on her new older sister’s presence, clinging to her and reacting with jealousy to anything she thinks might take her sister away, the girl has a new responsibility to consider for the first time. Adriana’s fierce love for her sister is one of the few joys for the girl – and while it has the potential to be a little destructive – the narrator is clearly looking back on it from a distance of years with a lot of affection.

As time goes on, the girl’s assumptions about the reason for her return are shaken – it is something she is keen to get to the bottom of.  Her sense of self having been so severely rocked is gradually re-built amid the tension and conflict of a new family.

Of the three novellas by Donatella Di Pietrantonio I have read to date, this is undoubtedly my favourite.

Read Full Post »