|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
3
| 
| 1910695238
| 9781910695234
| 3.81
| 1,840
| Aug 19, 2015
| Mar 22, 2017
|
really liked it
|
Now on the outstanding longlist for the 2017 Republic of Consciousness Prize for 'gorgeous prose and hardcore literary fiction' from small, independen
Now on the outstanding longlist for the 2017 Republic of Consciousness Prize for 'gorgeous prose and hardcore literary fiction' from small, independent presses. In Germany they impose the Scriptures on you in the back of the bedside table drawer, in Muslim countries they stick a little compass for you into the wood of the bed, or they draw a wind rose marking the direction of Mecca on the desk, compass and wind rose that can indeed serve to locate the Arabian Penisula, but also, if you're so inclined, Rome, Vienna or Moscow: you're never lost in these lands. I even saw some prayer rugs with a little compass woven into them, carpets you immediately wanted to set flying, since they were so prepared for aerial navigation. Matthias Enard's Compass, translated, like his wonderful novel Zone, by the highly accomplished Charlotte Mendel, is a novel dedicated to, inter alia, "The Circle of Melancholy Orientalists" and the Syrian people. The book consists of the recollections and stream of associations, during one insomnia filled night in Vienna, by Frank Ritter, a musicologist specialising in the influence of the oriental on Western Music. I've shown that the revolution in music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries owed everything to the Orient, that it was not a matter of 'exotic procedures' as thought before, this exoticism had a meaning, that it made external elements, alterity, enter, it was a large movement and gathered together, among others, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, Berlioz, Bizet, Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy, Bartok, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Szymanowski,, hundreds of composers throughout all of Europe, all over Europe the wind of alterity blows, all these great men use what comes to them from the Other to modify the Self, to barstardize it, for genius wants barstardy, the use of external procedures to undermine the dictatorship of church chant and harmony, why am I getting worked up all alone on my pillow now, probably because I'm a poor academic with a revolutionary thesis no one cares about. No one is interested any more in Felicien David who became extraordinarily famous on 8 December 1844 after the premiere of Le Desert. Franz has just received an, albeit unconfirmed, diagnosis that he is suffering from a (unspecified in the novel) degenerative and ultimately fatal condition, prompting his night of reflection, particularly on his unconsummated relationship with Sarah, whose PhD thesis kicks off his memories and thoughts. It began: There are certain wounds in life that, like leprosy, eat away at the soul and diminish it," writes the Iranian Sadegh Hedayat at the beginning of his novel The Blind Owl; the little man with round glasses knew this better than anyone. And he reflects: Today as I reread the beginning of this text, I must admit there was something strong and innovative in these four hundred pages on the images and representations of the Orient, non-places, utopias, ideological fantasies in which many who wanted to travel had got lost: the bodies of artists, poets and travellers who have tried to explore them were pushed little by little towards destruction; illusion as Hedayat said, ate away at the soul in solitude - what had long been called madness, melancholy, depression was often the result of friction, a loss of self in creation, in contact with alterity. This concept of alterity is crucial to the novel. Franz's thoughts take us widely through the history of music, literature, archaeology and those Westerners who embraced the East. But he is equally aware that one can only really become the other if one erases oneself: When Chateaubriand invented travel literature with his Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem in 1811, long before Stendhal and his Memoirs of an Egotist, more or less the same time as the publication of Goethe's Italian journey, Chateaubriand was spying for the sake of art; he was certainly no longer the explorer who spied for science or for the army: he spied mainly for literature. Art has its spies, just as history or the natural sciences have theirs. Archaeology is a form of espionage, botany, poetry as well; ethnomusicologists are spies of music. Spies are travellers, travellers are spies. 'Don't trust the stories of travellers,' says Saadi in The Gulistan. They see nothing. They think they see, but they observe only reflections. We are prisoners of images, of representations, Sarah would say, and only those who, like her or the peddler, choose to rid themselves of their lives (if such a thing is possible) can reach the other. A contemporary note is sounded by the his contrasting his own experience in Syria to what he sees in the news today, as the country is caught between the forces of the Syrian state and the Islamic State for example reflecting on a visit on the 1990s to the Baron Hotel in Aleppo: In the evening as the day faded the bar filled up not only with hotel clients, but also with tourists staying elsewhere coming to soak in the nostalgia, drinking a beer or an arak whose smell of anise, mixed with that of peanuts and cigarettes, was the only Oriental touch on the decor. [...] This Baron Hotel that still reeked of nostalgia and decadence, just as today it reeks of bombs and death. [...] Impossible at that time, at the bar of the Baron Hotel, to foresee the civil war that was about to seize hold of Syria, even if the violence of dictatorship was omnipresent, so present that you'd rather forget it, for there was a certain comfort that foreigners found in police regimes, a muffled, silent peace from Deraa to Qamisilhi, from Kassab to Quneytra, a peace humming with suppressed hatred and fates bending under a yoke to which all the foreign scholars willingly accommodated, the archaeologists, the linguists, the historians, the geographers, the political scientists, they all enjoyed the leaden calm of Damascus or Aleppo, and we did too, Sarah and I, reading the letters from Annemarie Schwarzenbach the inconsolable Angeline in the bar of the Baron Hotel, eating white-coated pumpkin seeds and long, narrow, pistachios with light brown shells, we were enjoying the calm of the Syria of Hafez-el-Hassad, the father of the nation. This is a novel full of what the publishers blurb describes, accurately, as "generous erudition." This isn't research gleaned from Wikipedia or indeed a book that requires frequent use of Wikipedia to follow it, although the reader, should he or she so choose, can follow up on the many fascinating references to novels, music and fascinating characters such as Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Annemarie Schwarzenbach and Marga d'Andurian. I couldn't help but draw the contrast to last year's deeply unimpressive Man Booker winner and this is the very type of novel that makes me prefer the Man Booker International variant. One for the shortlist and a contender for the overall prize. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
none
|
1
|
not set
|
Apr 2017
|
Mar 15, 2017
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||
2
| 
| 0451493974
| 9780451493972
| 3.53
| 11,500
| Aug 2014
| Feb 21, 2017
|
really liked it
|
Update: a very worthy winner of the 2017 MBIP What sort of obligation do I have towards someone who I went to private tutoring sessions with forty-some Update: a very worthy winner of the 2017 MBIP What sort of obligation do I have towards someone who I went to private tutoring sessions with forty-something years ago? I'm giving him five more minutes, on the dot, and if there isn't any kind of plot twist, I'm leaving. Book 12 from 13 of the Man Booker International longlist and I certainly saved one of the best till last. Israeli author David Grossman is perhaps best known in English for his To the End of the Land, translated by Jessica Cohen (a 3 star review from me), a long and emotionally resonant account of a mother who takes refuge in a long walk across the Galilean countryside when her son is called up to military service: this ensures the army officials can’t find her to notify her if anything happens to her son, and her effective belief is that this ensures his safety – if they can’t tell her then it can’t happen. The novel was given added poignancy by Grossman’s own son’s death in military service in Lebanon while he was completing the novel. A Horse Walks Into a Bar, which has been longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International is very different in tone, although the re are some similarities in the underlying literary conceit and the comedy on the surface of this novel conceals tragedy and emotional depth underneath, as Grossman explained in a CBC radio interview. It takes some time after a trauma to start to be able to make fun of it...and yet it has a kind of a healing aspect to it, the fact that people are able to laugh again.Dovaleh G (G for Greenstein) is a 57-year stand-up comedian, and the novel consists of an account of a routine he performs one night in the city of Netanya. 'I should be explaining how I'm just so into being here with you on a Thursday evening in your charming industrial zone, and not just that but in a basement, practically touching the magnificent radon deposits while I pull a string of jokes out of my pass for your listening pleasure - correct?' 'Correct' the audience yells back. 'Incorrect,' the man asserts and rubs his hands together gleefully. 'It'a all a crook, except the pass bit, because I gotta be honest with you, I can't stand your city. I get creeped out by this Netanya dump. Every other person on the street looks like he's in the witness protection programme, and every other other person has the first person rolled up in a plastic plastic bag inside the trunk of his car. And believe me if I didn't have to pay alimony to three lovely women and child support for one-two-three-four-five kids.....' The story is narrated by Avishai Lazar a senior judge: ’District, not Supreme. And anyway I'm retired.’ he retorts when Dovaleh G singles him out in the audience. He knew Dovaleh over 40 years ago, when they spend a summer in the same private maths tutorial class, but had not spoken to him since, until he receives a call out of the blue asking him to attend the gig: ’I want you to see me, really see my and then afterwards tell me.’ ‘Tell you what? ‘What you saw’ As Dovaleh's act unfolds, we are party to Avishai's observations on the audience's reaction, his own thoughts, his emerging recollections of his friend from 40+ years ago, and his own personal issues. From the outset Dovaleh’s act sways uneasily between traditional stand-up – improvised abuse of the audience and their city interspersed with hackneyed gags – and personal confession. When he drops into the latter, he tells the audience: ’Just pretend you know what I'm talking about, okay? Nice city, Netanyahu, nice city’ so often, it becomes a catchphrase that they join in with. He walks a tightrope between the two, trying to keep the audience with him while airing the personal confession he wants to make: The crowd laughs heartily and relaxes a little, sensing that somewhere out there a dangerous wrong turn has been righted. Over the next 2 hours of the show and 200 pages of the novel, Dovaleh G's unspools his life in front of Avishai, the audience and the reader. The audience waver between being repulsed, bored, amused and intrigued, but it is the latter emotion that dominates for the reader. Comedy is typically regarded as being more difficult to translate than poetry and that this novel works so well in English is testimony to the wonderful translation from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen. She explains some of the issues she faced - including the very first line of the novel - in an in-depth interview in the literary journal Asymptote. In conclusion, I cannot resist quoting a wonderful line from Neil's review: Last year's Man Booker winner was criticised by some because they felt it was a stand-up comedy show masquerading as a novel. This book is a novel masquerading as a stand-up comedy show.I was one of those who said this of last year's Man Booker winner, and Grossman's novel is a far superior work of literature. Definitely one for my shortlist, indeed I would be happy to see it win. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
none
|
1
|
Apr 13, 2017
|
Apr 15, 2017
|
Mar 15, 2017
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||
1
| 
| 0399184597
| 9780399184598
| 3.74
| 20,293
| Oct 02, 2014
| Jan 10, 2017
|
it was amazing
|
Each thing she tells you is going to be worse. Book 5 from the MBI shortlist - and the first that I can see as a very strong contender to take the ove Each thing she tells you is going to be worse. Book 5 from the MBI shortlist - and the first that I can see as a very strong contender to take the overall crown. I need to re-read and reflect on this when it makes the shortlist, but for its immediate effect, it is a rare 5 stars from me. Powerful and unsettling doesn't do this justice - I'm glad I read it in the morning rather than before I went to sleep. The story is ostensibly of Amanda, on holiday with her young daughter Nina in the countryside, and her encounter with Carla, a neighbour to the vacation home they have rented, and her young son David. But the story is told in a conversation between David and Amanda, sick in a clinic and apparently (at least David tells her) dying, with David getting Amanda to recount the events that led her there in an attempt to make her understand what has happened. Although the story she wants to tell isn't always the one he wants to hear - a typical exchange (all David's words in the novel are in italics) That is not important.The layers of recollection and reported speech - David guiding Amanda's memory to recount conversations she had with his mother - David's imposition of his own interpretation or her memories, her ability to "recall" events that happened after she was hospitalised and she can not have witnessed, even the possibility that this is all a "fever dream" given Amanda's medical state, provide a wonderful "constructive ambiguity" (Kissinger's phrase) as to what Amanda is experiencing. In my review of the 2016 Booker longlisted The Many, I commented on how it didn't quite manage to achieve what the literary critic Todorov calls "the fantastic". An author can choose between a rational explanation for supernatural events - what Todorov calls "the uncanny" - and a supernatural explanation - what he calls the "marvellous" (and most would call fantasy). Todorov focuses on the difficult to occupy middle ground : “The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighbouring genre, the uncanny or the marvellous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.”Unlike The Many, Samanta Schweblin, aided by Megan McDowell's stunning translation, successfully manages to balance on this literary tightrope, while cranking up the narrative tension towards a conclusion that isn't a resolution at all, but leads the reader to explore their own views. One clear theme to the novel is the effects of the agricultural industry, as also discussed in this revealing interview with the author (http://lithub.com/samanta-schweblin-o...) "What was it that poisoned him?"But to me the novel spoke more powerfully about parental anxiety. The title of the Spanish-language original “Distancia de Rescate” translates as Rescue Distance, a concept that, in her recalled conversation, Amanda explains early on to Carla: I always imagine the worse case scenario. Right now, for instance, I'm calculating how long it would take me to jump out of the car and reach Nina if she suddenly ran and leapt into the pool. I call it the "rescue distance": that's what I've named the variable distance separating me from my daughter, and I spend half the day calculating it, though I always risk more than I should.And later as the recollected story reaches the crucial moment towards which David is trying to guide her: My mother always said something bad would happen. My mother was sure that sooner or later something bad would happen, and now I can see it with total clarity, I can feel it coming towards us like a tangible fate, irreversible. Now there's also no rescue distance, the rope is so short that I can barely move in the room.But there is another, even more disturbing element, to the tale: the elemental fear that a parent can have of rather than for its own child, that the child is somehow an other, a doppelganger, that their real son or daughter is somewhere, or someone, else ... ...more |
Notes are private!
|
none
|
1
|
not set
|
Mar 17, 2017
|
Mar 15, 2017
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||
13
| 
| B01N6J06BV
| 3.24
| 2,178
| Feb 02, 2016
| Feb 23, 2017
|
it was ok
|
With the job Sonja has, that’s something she knows quite well: language is powerful, almost magic, and the smallest alteration can elevate a sentence
With the job Sonja has, that’s something she knows quite well: language is powerful, almost magic, and the smallest alteration can elevate a sentence or be its undoing. Book 4 from the 2017 Man Booker International longlist. Dorthe Nors was better known (to me at least) in English as a writer of very-short-stories, notably for the collection Karate Chop, and novellas (Minna Needs Rehearsal Space), but she is also a novel writer and "Spejl, Skulder, Blink" originally published in 2016, has been translated into English by Misha Hoekstra. The protagonist of Mirror, Shoulder, Signal is the forty-something Sonja, and the novel opens with her about to begin a driving lesson (hence the title). Her teacher, initially, is the abrasive Jyffe who keeps seizing the initiative and taking control of the car, meaning 6 months in Sonja is still incapable of properly changing gear. Sonja also struggles with inherited otolithic (Benign Paroxysmal Positional) vertigo, which, amongst other effects, causes issues when she looks over her shoulder to check her blind spot. By profession Sonja is a literary translator, having failed to become an author, and makes a living rendering into Danish the novel of the (fictional) Gösta Svensson, a best-selling Swedish writer of Steig-Larrsonesque violent crime thrillers (a crossword puzzle in sperm and maggots). Nors rather neatly skewers this too-easy target: his novels are based in the Sweden where weapons manufacturers lie and simmer beneath it all, and at a seminar for his translators Svensson tells them not only how to translate but also how to write crime fiction: “The Crime Commissioner ought to have a kwørk(*), an idiosyncratic penchant for chewing matchsticks or collecting toy cars,” as well as drink and family problems “preferably with a daughter.”. (* his mangled pronunciation of “quirk”) Sonja is originally from rural Jutland but now living in urban Copenhagen, but seemingly not at home in either (She’s standing on a side street in a capital city that won’t have anything to do with her, yet she’s also far away in the landscape.) She is single, un-married with a rather unsuccessful romantic history, her one serious partner, a German-Danish translator, having left her for a much younger and more pliable woman, and still in search of meaning in her life. (This article by Nors was useful in reading the novel: http://lithub.com/on-the-invisibility...). As Sonja reflects: A narrow margin of uncertainty about the true nature of everything can create all manner of anxiety The story follows her cack-handed attempts to learn to drive, as she switches from Jyffe to the driving-school head Folke, only to find that she has gone from an aggressive younger woman to a middle-aged man who, albeit married, hopes for companionship from the lessons: “I just want to learn to drive!” Sonja exclaims irascibly after one incident when he takes her on a scenic detour. She also interacts with Ellen, her masseuse who wants to blur the line between physiotherapy and psychology and analyse the root cause of the knots in her muscles, her friend Molly who came with her to Copenhagen but seems to have found a more settled life, and her sister Kate who has remained in Jutland and who now, when Sonja rings, either gets her husband to answer the phone or pretends she is busy ('I’m just at the garden centre' is her favourite excuse). Reflecting on their relationship Sonja wonders: When did their break start to show on the surface? A few years with separate lives and then a microscopic crazing in the enamel. Sonja’s success as a translator is not duplicated in her own writing – she tried but failed to become an author – or in her written communication with her family. Her bin is full of letters screwed up and not sent: the things she cannot find the language to say and the people she most wants to say them to. Indeed the novel is full of, to me rather clumsy, metaphors for Sonja’s life – Sonja’s role as a translator, her inability to select the correct gear, her vertigo and difficulty in checking her blind spot, Jodie Foster movies (Contact and The Accused), and Sonja’s fixation with migratory birds particularly whooper swans and also with helicopters (which speak to Sonja of yearnings and buoyancy). Overall, a worthwhile read but one that for me failed to soar like Sonja’s swans and helicopters, although whether this is due to the translation or the original I cannot say. I wouldn’t expect to see this on the shortlist. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
none
|
1
|
Mar 26, 2017
|
Mar 27, 2017
|
Mar 15, 2017
|
Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||
9
| 
| 191069519X
| 9781910695197
| 3.23
| 181
| Aug 16, 2013
| Oct 17, 2016
|
liked it
|
Now longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Award, two years after its longlisting for the 2017 Man Booker International. The markets and marketpl Now longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Award, two years after its longlisting for the 2017 Man Booker International. The markets and marketplaces are becoming more and more linked, steel and concrete town halls, the meat markets expanding, the bricks and mortar, sticks and stones, the rock growing, in a red-lit circle where everything’s linked, the rubbish truck, the fat woman, the Coke, the Viagras, the blockers, uppers and downers, lost cats, the right to sexual self-determination, scraps of memory like old police badges, the Angels on their motorbikes, peat mosses, flyovers, sixty-six municipal brothels in 1865, trade chronicles, he burrows in the old files, real estate on silver strings leading all the way to Italy, and the fall of the real-estate boss Silvio Lübbke, three bullets, boom, boom, Dead Peepers Alley, houses for pocket money, clues, clues, the country air so clean and pure, soon they’ll be building here but we’ll stop the diggers, the question is, who brings three bodies out to this mire, this swamped puddle, where everyone knows they won’t decompose, when you can dig holes in the sandy ground of the heath or drive out to forest lakes like the ‘Blue Eye’, and there must be anglers there who discover the remotest of lakes, the woods arching around the north-eastern belt of the suburbs and incorporated villages to the south, all of it flat as a pancake. Clement Meyer's Im Stein has been translated into English by Katy Derbyshire, who in addition to being an accomplished translator has an excellent blog on translation and German literature. The novel's English title Bricks and Mortar is slightly different to the German and Derbyshire explains her choice here: http://blog.fitzcarraldoeditions.com/.... While I am not convinced of her argument, the explanation is helpful and highlights the issues and choices faced by translators. In the blog love German books she describes this as "the best book I’ve translated, so far", and and as a playful, ambitious, neo-modernist, Marxism-tinged exploration of the development of the east German prostitution market, from next to nothing in 1989 to full decriminalization and diversification in the present day. Not everybody’s cup of tea.That is a fair summary, including the last sentence as while this perhaps has a shot at the overall prize, it just wasn't to my personal taste. Derbyshire's reading list to aid the translation also gives a rather good feel for the novel: The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes Let's Sing Together The Penguin Rhyming Dictionary It's all part of the job. Deutsch für die Polizei A Dictionary of Marxist Thought Karl Marx: Capital Alfred Döblin: Berlin Alexanderplatz Bobby Cummines: I Am Not a Gangster - Fixer. Armed robber. Hitman. OBE William T. Vollmann: Whores for Gloria Rachel Aimee, Eliyanna Kaiser, Audacia Ray (eds.): $pread. The best of the magazine that illuminated the sex industry and started a media revolution Wolfgang Hilbig, I (trans. Isabel Cole) David Peace: Tokyo Year Zero Skip the Games: Escort terms, sex definitions and abbreviations in escort ads Meyer’s story features multiple perspectives and different voices, told in a non-linear fashion. But Meyer deliberately adds layers of complexity. We’re not always clear who the narrator is and even within a given narrative points of view and times shift. Characters “reminisce” about the future (later someone got shot there, but I had nothing to do with that. I can't know about that yet.) and drop seamlessly into the past, we’re often clear if the events described are happening or imagined, even at time if the characters are alive or dead, or indeed dead but now alive again. The issue I has is that there are two ways to read this type of book. Either read it very carefully, cross-referencing back to piece together the story, or let the polyphonic voices wash over you. The problem either way the book is 400+ pages too long – my interest level was waning after 200 pages. The comparison to Hilbig and Peace is well made but the novel shares many of the flaws of the latter, and doesn’t, for me, approach close to the heights of the latter (see my review of Sleep of the Righteous https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Overall - 3 stars - an average of 5 for the literary merit and the brilliance of the translation and 1 for my personal reading experience. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
none
|
1
|
Apr 16, 2017
|
Apr 19, 2017
|
Mar 15, 2017
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||
12
| 
| 162097293X
| 9781620972939
| 3.42
| 1,445
| Aug 20, 2015
| Jun 06, 2017
|
it was ok
|
It all began when I was a teenager, and came to wonder about the name I' d been given by Papa Moupelo, the priest at the orphanage in Loango: Tokumisa
It all began when I was a teenager, and came to wonder about the name I' d been given by Papa Moupelo, the priest at the orphanage in Loango: Tokumisa Nzambe po Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko. A long name, which in Lingala means: 'Thanks be to God, the black Moses is born on the earth of our ancestors' as it still inscribed on my birth certificate today. Book 11 of 13 for me from the 2017 Man Booker International longlist. Alain Mabanckou was a finalist in the previous author (rather than individual book) version of the Man Booker International in 2015. Following that I read perhaps his best known novel, his Rabelaisian 2005 book Verre Cassé (Broken Glass) – see my review - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show..., a novel consciously influenced also by the classic The Palm-Wine Drinkard. My review concluded “At face value a rather simple and crude bar-room tale, but there is a lot of literary merit going on underneath, not all obvious to the reader, particularly in translation.” Now his 2015 novel Petit Piment (literally: Little Pepper) has been translated, as Black Moses [*], also by Helen Stevenson, and has been longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International. [* pet rant – the title character has two main nicknames in the novel – Moses, which he dislikes and, later, he adopts the name Little Pepper – the original title uses the latter so the English translator/publisher has chosen to use the former] The translation reads very smoothly – perhaps overly so. I noted in my review of Broken Glass that what Mabanckou describes as language that stretches French grammar to the limit (https://www.theguardian.com/books/aud...) didn’t come across like that in English. That said Mabanckou has praised Stevenson and said “In English, if you’re missing something it’s maybe just…10%” (http://publishingperspectives.com/201...) so perhaps my view is unfair. Stevenson’s own perspective on the challenges of translating his writing was: “Alain's literary voice is so strong, so rhythmic, the words he uses carry it entirely; I find that simply translating them honestly, without strain, with facility, is enough. It’s an attempt to let the writer speak, just in my language.” (https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...) Black Moses is set, as with Mabanckou’s other novels, in and around Point-Noire the Republic of the Congo / Congo-Brazzaville (NB the former French colony – not the larger Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Belgian, in which Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is based). Moses is aged 13 when the novel starts, living in an orphanage, where he was left at birth by his unknown parents. The orphanage was originally founded by European Christians, but as the novel opens at the end of the 1960s, the country has just been self-proclaimed as the Marxist-Leninist People's Republic of the Congo. The feared Director of the orphanage, Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako, takes advantage of the political situation to ban the eagerly-anticipated weekly visits to the orphans of the priest Papa Moupelo, and to fully embrace the new regime, turning his room into the centre of the National Movement of Pioneers of the Socialist Revolution of Congo, praising the new regime in the orphanage's weekly newsletter, and promoting his own family members to senior positions. As Sabine Niangui, a long-serving helper at the orphanage who goes out of her way to look after Moses, tells him, now 'orphanages are considered laboratories of the revolution.' For his first 13 years at the orphanage Moses' closest friend is Bonaventure, who arrived at the orphanage at the same time, and who is convinced his biological father will one day land in a plane and take him away. But latterly Moses becomes, almost accidentally, allied to the fearsome twins Songi-Songi and Tala-Tala (what was the use of telling them apart when they were constantly together and wore the same clothes) who rule amongst the boys and even intimidate the wardens, after he laces their food with hot pepper in relation for them terrorising Bonaventure. Far from taking revenge the twins come to respect him and adopt him as their right-hand man, rechristening him: We're calling him Little Pepper because he proved his worth with pepper. As the political pressure on the orphanage increases, the three escape to Point-Noire where they set up a street gang, displacing the previous top-dog who fancied himself as a Robin-Hood type figure. Later Little Pepper becomes friendly with a Zairian brother owner, Madame Fiat 500, and her girls. But when the political changes in the country impact first the street gangs and then Madame Fiat, Little Pepper's world disintegrates: I was at my wit's end, I'd lost all sense of time, and it was probably around then that I started to feel gaping holes in my head, hearing noises, like all those people running around inside it, echoes of voices from empty houses, voices not unlike those of Papa Moupelo and Sabine Niangui, the twins, but most of all Madame Fiat 500 and her ten girls. After that, I remembered nothing, not even who I was. To recover his sanity, Little Pepper visits first a French-trained psychiatrist and, when that fails, a traditional healer who gave me cricket's piss to drink, and green mamba blood, toad's spit, elephant hair mixed with kaolin and sparrow's turds and ends the book having come neatly full circle. While this was an enjoyable read it was also ultimately unsatisfying and one of the weaker books on the MBI longlist in my view. As Neil's review (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) notes the narrative is rather unbalanced. The orphanage story takes up half the book but doesn't really get anywhere. Another quarter is taken with the stronger part, Little Pepper's adventures in Point Noire, but this is too rushed for it to get close to the character-depth, lyrical-heights and literary-references of Broken Glass. And the story of his mental disintegration isn't an at-all convincing first person account of mental difficulties (for that see e.g. the excellent The Storyteller by Kate Armstrong). If I took anything at all from the novel it was personal nuggets entirely unrelated to the main story. This line on the twins ran true to my own experience as a twin: what was the use of telling them apart when they were constantly together and wore the same clothes, and while I obviously knew that the name of my favourite food Marmite is taken from a French cooking pot (pictured on the label) I hadn't realised that the etymology of the French word came from an old term for hypocrite (the lid on the pot meaning it hides its contents while cooking): [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
none
|
1
|
Apr 12, 2017
|
Apr 12, 2017
|
Mar 15, 2017
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||
7
| 
| 1784740489
| 9781784740481
| 3.60
| 326
| Sep 01, 2013
| Mar 02, 2017
|
liked it
|
Yan Lianke's The Four Books, originally published in 2009, was, in its English translation,long- and ultimately short-listed for the 2016 Man Booker I
Yan Lianke's The Four Books, originally published in 2009, was, in its English translation,long- and ultimately short-listed for the 2016 Man Booker International prize. I had read it before the prize list and although I saw its merits and was pleased to see it on the longboat, it wouldn't have made by personal shortlist. In particular the narrative device of the story, apparently told from excerpts from four different books was innovative but the author didn't quite bring it off. And the fantastical nature of the story for me rather diminished the terrible impact of the real-life events underlying the story. See my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... Now this novel, originally published in 2014, and translated into English again by Carlos Rojas, as The Explosion Chronicles, has made the longlist for the 2017 Man Booker International. Whereas The Four Books focused on The Great Leap Forward, and the resulting famine, this focuses on a more contemporary topic, China's 21st century explosive economic growth. The same techniques are used. In this case the narrative form is modelled on the Chinese form of "local gazetteers, regional histories compiled by officials and local gentry" (from the translators helpful introduction), themselves based on the twenty-four official dynastic histories that began in the first century BCE with Sima Qian's Records of the Historian. And the story, as with The Four Books, is told in a manner that blends the realistic with the fantastic and exaggerated, history with allegory, logic with illogicality. In an illuminating afterword, the author explains his technique. He highlights two key variations in literary history on the realist novel, absurdity, which he attributes to Kafka (who makes no attempt to explain how Gregor Samsa turned into an insect) and magic realism, pioneered by Gabriela Garcia Marquez (where effects have causes but not necessarily realistic ones) but he argues that the exceptional situation of modern China demands a new third type of literature which he labels Mythorealism. "While realism rigorously accords with a set of logical causal correlations, absurdity discards this causality, and magical realism rediscovers reality's underlying causality - though this is not precisely the same causality we find in real life. Mythorealism, meanwhile, captures a hidden internal logic contained within China's reality. It explodes reality, such that contemporary China's absurdity, chaos and disorder - together with non-realism and illogicality - all become easily comprehensible. In the cohoes of today's China, once novels succeed in grasping the wild roots growing under the soil of reality, the significance of reality itself pales in comparison."The Explosion Chronicles tells the story of the rapid transformation over just ten years of the small (a few hundred people) and insignificant Explosion Village into a 20+ million population megalopolis to rival Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo or New York. And the story of the three main clans in the original village, the four sons of Kong Dongde, in particular his second son Kong Mingliang who leads the transformation, Zhu Yong daughter of the village chief he deposed, who marries Kong Mingliang but plots revenge for her father, and Cheng Qing, daughter of the Cheng family, who becomes Kong Mingliang's right hand woman and lover and Zhu Yong's bitter rival. The economic activity on which the villagers initially achieve their wealth is entirely parasitic. Kong Mingliang encourages them to first simply steal and resell items from the goods trains that travel through the area, while, under Zhu Yong's rival, and equally successful, plan the girls of the town go to work as prostitutes in the neighbouring city, before becoming themselves in charge of "women's vocational training." Later as the village is first redesignated merely as a town, one of the more successful businesses is a "newspaper processing plant" which simply copies stories from newspapers in the north of China, slightly rewrites them and submits them to newspapers in the south, and vice versa. And the very pollution caused by the rapid economic development itself fuels more growth: In the end everyone in Explosion stopped farming, though no one was left idle. The various industries and factories made this new own bustle like a pot of boiling water. Every day, the sky was filled with black smoke from the factories' smokestacks, producing a burning stench that you could smell in the air and taste in the water. But everyone in Explosion quickly grew accustomed to this door, so much so that when it was washed away by a rainstorm, the fresh air would leave everyone with a cold. As a result, the hospitals became extremely busy, having more sick patients than the schools had students. With this sudden increase in patients, the town needed its own pharmaceutical factories and medicinal packaging plants, and with this increase in packaging plants there also developed an increased need for tax collection and sanitation services. With the rise in tax collection, the town was even busier than before, and virtually every day there was a ribbon-cutting ceremony celebrating the opening of a new industry. Later, when Kong Mingliang recalled the initial period of Explosion's growth and development, he told me: 'Those were good times, when you could open a newspaper processing plant with nothing more than some glue and a pair of scissors. I'm afraid China will never see times like those again.' And indeed as Explosion's size and Kong Mingliang's ambitions grow, the hurdles become higher, the achievements more fantastical, and the sacrifices demanded of the people and of the environment greater. And the line between the history of the area and the present, the real and the fake, becomes blurred: The entirety of Explosion's past consisted of reality, history, and people's memories. On account of this tension between history and reality, Explosion's old streets and the new city became divided into two distinct worlds. [...] The real pigeons were just like fake ones, and the fake ones were just like real ones, but he found this mixing of reality and imitation to be completely unremarkable. Ultimately this worked better for me than The Four Books. The framing device was more successful and less interfering (albeit perhaps, the opposite, too understated), and I appreciated more here what Lianke was doing with his Mythorealism, which also seemed more suited to the subject matter (albeit I am not convinced that this is a new development in literature to rank alongside the innovations of Kafka and Garcia Marquez). And the story of the rivalry between the four brothers and the three clans successfully maintains the narrative tension of the story to the end. For me on the cusp of 3 to 4 stars, and on the cusp of being shortlist worthy - but ultimately not quite making either. One signature motif in the novel is how nature mirrors the economic developments and moods of the characters, with flowers spontaneously blooming or dying, and fruit trees producing crops in record time. And the novel ends: Meanwhile, along the bloody path that the Kong family had left behind on their way to the cemetery, there were not only flowers but also all different kinds of trees. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
none
|
1
|
Apr 2017
|
Apr 06, 2017
|
Mar 15, 2017
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||
6
| 
| 3.74
| 615
| 1978
| Jan 19, 2017
|
really liked it
|
Just as they say that new heavenly bodies are fashioned from old cosmic dust, so the new world of Albania was to be formed from the dust of the old Ot
Just as they say that new heavenly bodies are fashioned from old cosmic dust, so the new world of Albania was to be formed from the dust of the old Ottoman universe, from that constellation of terrors and crimes, postprandial poisonings, night-time assassinations, monks holding lanterns in the rain, dervishes with knives and messages hidden in their hair, from that profusion of rebellious pashas, bureaux with thousands of files, informers, outlawed viziers and ‘black’ pashas with a price on their heads who swarmed like ghosts before or after their death – all the rotting debris of empire. Book 8 of 13 for me from the Man Booker International longlist 2017. Ismail Kadare’s Kamarja e turpit was published in 1978 but has only recently been translated into English, as The Traitor’s Niche, by John Hodgson, who has previously translated The Accident, The Fall of the Stone City, A Girl in Exile and The Three-Arched Bridge. The book reads very well in Hodgson’s translation which, unlike those done by some other Kadare translators (e.g. David Bellos and Barbara Bray) was taken from the Albanian original rather than a retranslation from the French. Hodgson has some interesting comments on Kadare’s language and how it has evolved in this interview https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/on.... This book is set in the 1820s in the Ottoman Empire. The Traitor’s Niche of the title refers to a place in a public square in Istanbul (referred to throughout as the Centre) where the severed heads of disgraced viziers and rebel pashas are preserved and put on display to the public. The remote province of Albania – known locally as Shqipëria a kind of convocation of eagles, with blood-stained feathers, that falls from the air, swooping through the storms - is in revolt, led by Ali Pasha Tepelena (now known as “Black Ali”). And as the book opens the head on display is that of the vizier Bugrahan Pasha, who failed in his attempt to supress Ali Pasha’s rebellion and was decapitated as punishment. The more senior Hurshid Pasha has now been sent to accomplish what Bugrahan couldn’t, but on the same pain of failure: “The niche now waited again, indifferently, for either Black Ali or the glorious Hurshid, the sultan’s favourite”. The story, although narrated in the 3rd person, is told from the perspective of a number of different characters in the Centre and Albania; Abdulla, the then current Keeper of the Traitor's Niche; Hurshid Pasha; Tundra Hata, the Royal Messenger, responsible for delivering death sentences out from the Centre and then transporting back taking the severed heads, which he calls cabbages (the blade of destiny had harvested its crop, and there it was on the table, this white cabbage from the gardens of hell).; the rebellious Albanian ruler Ali Tepelena and his young wife Vasiliqia; and members of the Caw-caw unit (see below). The tales of the severed heads take up much of the novel, particularly the early parts, and the narration is rife with black humour. Tundra Hata makes money on the side by showing off the heads to isolated villagers on his journey, the separation of head from body is twice used to illustrate husbands unable to perform their conjugal duties (Abdulla has so far been unable to consummate his new marriage, and Vasiliqia reflects that she had few physical encounters with her 80 year-old husband), and Tundra Hata and Abdulla both wrestle with the practical difficulties of preserving heads, particularly when the system is policed by a Kafkesque bureaucracy: They tried to find some pretext to accuse the doctor and the keeper of not complying with the Regulations for the Care of Heads, and asked devious questions about the unnaturally yellow tinge of the vizier’s face and the lack of eye colour. Abdulla had been struck speechless, but the doctor courageously defended himself, and said that the vizier’s complexion, even in life, had been sallow, as is typical of men with rebellion and treason in their blood. As for the lack of colour in the eyes (which had in fact obviously begun to decompose), the doctor quoted the old saying that the eyes are a window to the soul: it would be useless to look for colour in the eyes of a man who had never had a soul. The doctor’s explanations were hardly convincing, not to say vacuous, but for this very reason they were hard to argue with. The inspectors were obliged to withdraw their remarks and the matter concluded with a mere reprimand and a warning of dismissal for Abdulla. The book’s events are based on real history – Hurshid Pasha (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurshid...) and Black Ali really existed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Pas...) - although Kadare has altered facts to suit his purpose. The novel formed part of a linked trilogy of novels starting with the 1978 Ura me tri harqe (The Three-arched Bridge) (1978) and ending in 1981 with Pallati i ëndrrave (The Palace of Dreams), all written under the censorship of the Stalinist Enver Hoxha regime. The Independent explains how “by setting about Albanian nationalism at the heart of a state bureaucracy, Kadare was able to promote national pride while condemning political dictatorship”, although The Palace of Dreams proved a novel too far, being banned in Albania and ultimately leading to Kadare’s political exile in Paris in 1990. And to me the most striking part of the book wasn’t the severed heads, but Kadare’s concept of the Caw-caw unit, part of the Ottoman bureaucracy and secret police (alongside the Palace of Dreams and the Department of Psst-Psst, who sweep up rumours and muttered asides): The partial or full erasure of the national identity of peoples, which was the main task of the Central Archive, was carried out according to the old secret doctrine of Caw-caw and passed through five principal stages: first, the physical crushing of rebellion; second, the extirpation of any idea of rebellion; third, the destruction of culture, art and tradition; fourth, the eradication or impoverishment of the language; and fifth, the extinction or enfeeblement of the national memory. Neil's review discusses this topic in more detail and says everything I would want to say https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... Kadare won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005 it its previous incarnation recognising an author’s work rather than individual novels, and his books have also been previously twice shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, so it seems fitting that this belatedly translated work features on the 2017 Man Booker International which merges the two previous prizes. Overall - a powerful and fascinating story, my favourite of the 4 Kadare novels I have read to date, and while not for me one for overall MBI victory, this may well feature on my personal shortlist. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
none
|
1
|
Apr 07, 2017
|
Apr 07, 2017
|
Mar 15, 2017
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
5
| 
| 0857053418
| 9780857053411
| 4.06
| 4,683
| 2013
| Aug 25, 2016
|
really liked it
|
Winter begins with a storm. They call it the First Winter Storm. There have been earlier storms, in August and September, for example, bringing sudden
Winter begins with a storm. They call it the First Winter Storm. There have been earlier storms, in August and September, for example, bringing sudden and merciless changes to their lives. The First Winter Storm, on the other hand, is quite a different matter. It is violent every single time and makes its entrance with a vengeance, they have never experienced anything like it, even though it happened last year. This is the origin of the phrase "in living memory", they have simply forgotten how it was, since they have no choice but to ride the storm, the hell on earth, as best they can, and erase it from their memories as soon as possible. [..] The sight of her father is the worst. Had Ingrid not known better she would have thought he was afraid, and he never is. Islanders are never afraid, if they were they wouldn't be able to live here, they would have to pack their goods and chattels and move and be like everyone else in the forest and valleys, it would be a catastrophe, islanders have a dark disposition, they are beset not with fear but solemnity. The Unseen by Roy Jacobsen is set in the first half of the 20th Century (although there is little to date the novel), on the fictional Barrøy island off the coast of Norway in the Helgelandskysten area. It is a little under one kilometre from north to south, and half a kilometre from east to west, it has lots of crags and small grassy hollows and sells, deep coves cut into its coast and there are long rugged headlands and three white beaches. And even though on a normal day they can stand in the yard and keep an eye on the sheep, they are not so easy to spot when they are lying down in he long grass, the same goes for people, even an island has its secrets. The fisherman-cum-farmer Hans Barrøy [is] the island's rightful owner and head of its sole family, comprising his strong-willed wife Maria, born on a neighbouring island, Hans's widowed father Martin, no longer head of the family which he represents, his much younger sister Barbro, a hard worker but rather backwards, and his young daughter Ingrid, three when the novel opens but already troubling her father with wisdom beyond her years, and who he anxiously watches for signs of the one-child-in-a-generation affliction from which he aunt suffers: "Tha laughs at ev'rythin' nu," he says, reflecting that she knows the difference between play and earnest, she seldom cries, doesn't disobey or show defiance, is never ill, and she learns what she needs to, this disquiet he will have to drive from his mind. Life on the island is elemental and hard. Hans has to leave his family for several months each year to join a fishing boat, in which he proudly has a full share of the proceeds, as well as (unbeknowest) to his family drawing on bank loans, in order to finance the costs of maintaining the island and, in particular, his own ambitious plans to extend their house and build a proper pier. Much of the building material still comes from flotsam, jetsam and driftwood: Whatever is washed up on an island belongs to the finder and the islanders find a lot. In those days there was no oil-wealth funded Nordic model providing support to the islanders: As the terrain is so open and exposed someone might well up with the bright idea of clothing the coast in evergreen, spruce or pines for example, and establish idealistic nurseries around Norway and start to ship out large quantities of tiny spruce trees, donating them free of charge to the inhabitants of smaller and bigger islands alike, while telling them that if you plant these trees on your land and let them grow, succeeding generations will have fuel and timber too. The wind will stop blowing the soil into the sea, and both man and beast will enjoy shelter and peace where hitherto they had the wind in their hair day and night; but then the islands would no longer look like floating temples on the horizon, they would resemble neglected wastelands of sedge grass and northern dock. No, no one would think of doing this, of destroying a horizon. The horizon is probably the most important resource they have out here, the quivering optic nerve in a dream although they barely notice it, let alone attempt to articulate its significance. No, nobody would even consider doing this until the country attains such wealth that it is in the process of going to wrack and ruin. Hans expects to live out his life on the island but Barbro wants to find a role in service on the mainland. Nobody can leave an island. An island is a cosmos in a nutshell, where the stars slumber in the grass beneath the snow. But occasionally someone tries. (in the original: Ingen kan forlade en ø, en ø er et kosmos i en nøddeskal med stjernerne sovende i græsset under sneen.") Concerned at her being mistreated and abused - her first putative employer manages to refer to her as "the imbecile" three times as she shows them the room Hans's sister is to share with the other maid - Hans keeps insisting Barbro returns to the island until she takes matters, and the oars of the family boat, into her own hands, but even then she eventually finds her way back. Hans Barrøy had three dreams: he dreamed about a boat with a motor, about a bigger island and a different life. He mentioned the first two dreams readily and often, and to all and sundry, the last he never talked about, not even to himself. Maria had three dreams too: more children, a smaller island and - a different life. Unlike her husband she often thought about the last of these, and her yearning grew and grew as the first two paled and withered. But it is Ingrid, still biologically a child, who, as the seasons turn and the cycle of life progresses, has to take on the island and their dreams. The novel has been translated by the deservedly renowed Don Bartlett, translator of the excellent Karl Ove Knausgård, Per Petterson and Lars Saabye Christensen as well as the best-selling Jo Nesbø and Jostein Gaarder. Although this, as well as Jacobsen's previous novels and novels by Erlend Loe, has been co-translated by Don Shaw. The translation generally lives up to Bartlett's very high standards, although the attempt to render the dialect of the locals into English fell a little flat for me, with lines such as "My word, hvur bitty it is. A can scarce see th' houses" and "By Jove, A can see th' rectory too" Norwegian literature is perhaps my favourite in Europe - with authors such as Dag Solstad and Jan Kjærstad, as well of course as Hamsun, to add to the aforementioned Karl Ove Knausgård, Per Petterson and Lars Saabye Christensen - and this novel adds another name to that impressive list. I would hope to see this on the MBI shortlist. It is always the person who has been away who gains the greatest pleasure from knowing time stands still. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
none
|
1
|
Mar 24, 2017
|
Mar 25, 2017
|
Mar 15, 2017
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||
11
| 
| 9781925240207
| 3.91
| 8,631
| Sep 02, 2013
| Jul 18, 2016
|
it was ok
|
In my most distant memory of my grandfather, he is on the beach at Ostend [...] What he sees is something like a James Ensor painting set in motion, alt In my most distant memory of my grandfather, he is on the beach at Ostend [...] What he sees is something like a James Ensor painting set in motion, although he despises true work of that Ostend blasphemer with the English name. Ensor is a 'dauber', and along with 'toss-pot' and 'riff-raff', 'dauber' is the worst accusation he can make. They're all daubers today painters; they've completely lost touch with the classical tradition, the subtle, novel craft of the old masters. They muddle along with no respect for the laws of anatomy, don't even know how to glaze, never mix their own paint, use turpentine like water, and are ignorant of the secrets of grinding your own pigments, of fine linseed oil and the blowing of siccatives - no wonder there are no more great painters. An Ensor painting of Ostend beach: [image] Book 9 from 13 on the 2017 Man Booker International, and (while certainly not the worst book) the biggest disappointment so far, at least versus my high expectations of it based on reviews I had read and also its status as the only book also on the 2017 Best Translated Book Award shortlist. War and Turpentine is based on the real-life story of Hertmans grandfather, Urbain Martien, a retired veteran from World War 1. Indeed it is arguable whether this is a fictional novel at all, since it is is more reconstructed biography. Martien was born in 1891 into relative poverty, as his father Franciscus worked as a poorly remunerated painter and restorer of church murals. Urbain completed 4 years of military training before WW1 and served in the Belgian army with distinction during the war, surviving three serious injuries. Franciscus had no desire to pass his vocation on to his son, but he did inherit his father's love of and skills in painting. Urbain wrote his life story, at least up till the end of the war, in three notebooks that he bequeathed to his grandson Stefan, who was at a loss what to do with them, until the approach of 2014 made him realise: the hundredth anniversary of the cataclysm would release a flood of books – a new barrage alongside the almost unscaleable mountain of existing historical material, books as innumerable as the sandbags on the Yser front, thoroughly documented, historically accurate, made-up novels and stories - while I held the privilege of his memoirs but was too scared to open them, didn't dare to open the first page, in the knowledge that this story would be a farewell to a piece of my childhood; this story, which, if I didn't hurry, would be published just when readers turned away with a yawn from yet another book on the First World War. Hertmans also discovered some further family secrets in his grandfather's papers, during this time, the clues to which were buried in some of his grandfather's paintings, such as a reproduction of Velazquez's Rokeby Venus, but with a different face on the reclining nude, as well as some of his grandfather's anecdotes where memories of the War seemed to bleed into his tales of famous geniuses of the Romantic period: The things he wished to forget kept coming back, in shards of stories or absurd details, and whether heaven or hell was the subject, shards and details like these were the puzzle pieces I had to fit together before I could begin to understand what had gone on inside him all his life: the battle between the transcendent, which he yearned for, and the memory of death and destruction, which held him in its clutches. Hertmans explains his approach in this radio interview: http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcas... The result was this book, in three sections. The first explaining Hertman's quest and providing an imaginative reconstruction of his grandfather's family history and pre-life war based on the notebooks; the second an account of Urbain's first world war written in the first person (presumably lifted mostly direct from the notebooks, with authorial editing) and a third section that wraps up the story, with the first and third sections illustrated with family photos, scenes from the places described and paintings both famous and, increasingly, Urbain's own. This is a very creative and literary approach to the subject matter. So why my disappointment? Ultimately Hertmans been hoist by his own epigraphs. If you are going to write a novel whose first section is ostensibly fiction, but with elements of fact, history and travelogue, all illustrated with occasional black and white photos, then if you quote W.G. Sebald you are setting yourself a high standard, and it is one of which Hertmans falls well short. Dušan Šarotar's Panorama, which was also eligible for the 2017 MBI did the whole Sebald tribute thing, including more evocative descriptions of Belgium, so much better. And if your second section is a detailed personal account of the 1st world war, and you reference Erich Maria Remarque, you have the same issue. The here was relatively mundane (albeit the terrible events described need no embellishment). And while the story is obviously true, it did still seem a tad Hollywood, with Urbain surviving miraculously unscathed despite heroically flinging himself into dangerous situations, with all about him falling dead. There is also an interesting undercurrent of Walloon-Flemish tension is this part, with the French-speaking officers disdaining the Flemish NCOs, but this waried a little with repetition, particularly Urbain's repeated insistence that his name is pronounced the Flemish way (closer to Maarten, not Marshen) - which even forms the last line of the book as an admonition to St Peter at Heaven's gates. It's a cheap shot I know but when Urbain's account acknowledged my story is growing monotonous, just as the war grew monotonous, death grew monotonous, our hatred of the Huns monotonous, just as life itself grew monotonous and finally began to turn our stomachs, I couldn't help but agree. To be fair, the 3rd section, which pieces together some of the clues and provides some interesting revelations, explaining details of my own world that never offered up their historical secrets until I read his memoirs from the 1st section. But even here, there was too much sentimentality for my taste: ultimately family biography tends to be of disproportionate interest to those in the family. Ultimately, I realise I have been far too harsh on this book. I would actually be surprised if the judges don't put it through to the MBI and BTBA shortlists. But it wasn't for me. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
none
|
1
|
Apr 07, 2017
|
Apr 09, 2017
|
Mar 15, 2017
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
10
| 
| 1846276071
| 9781846276071
| 3.80
| 1,428
| Feb 11, 2014
| Jan 05, 2017
|
liked it
|
Book 2 from the Man Booker International list for me, and in a way this is what I think of as a typical IFFP/MBI novel: short, almost a novella, with
Book 2 from the Man Booker International list for me, and in a way this is what I think of as a typical IFFP/MBI novel: short, almost a novella, with beautiful but straightforward prose, and the main innovation for the English reader being the unfamiliar setting rather than anything in the writing. Wioletta Greg, who lives in the UK, is a primarily a poet and this shows in the often exquisite prose, sensitively translated by Eliza Marciniak. Overall, an enjoyable read but I would hope that there are more ambitious books longlisted and that these will be the ones that form the shortlist. Swallowing Mercury is a coming-of-age tale set in rural Poland narrated by a young girl Wiola who goes through puberty as her country itself goes through fundamental change. The novel is set mainly during the 1980s, when political events in Poland often dominated the headlines - the Solidarity movement, the imposition of martial law, Glasnost and Perestroika in the Soviet Union and the eventual collapse of the Communist regime. But such developments, as well as the lingering shadow of World War 2, are merely in the background, and the passing of time mainly noted by passing references to events such as the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Lech Wałęsa in 1983 and the Papal Visit of 1987. Occasionally one is reminded of the shadow of the prevailing ideology. Wiola's best subject is art and she often enters regional competitions. An innocently intended picture of a real life incident on the family farm, a potato beetle climbing out of an empty Coca-Cola bottle, wins a prize form the authorities as it 'portrayed, in a deeply metaphorical manner, the crusade of the imperialist beetle'. But an accidentally smudged picture of Moscow entered into another brings the ideological police out to her school to investigate the teachers. But in practice, life in the (fictional) rural town of Hektary largely carries on unaffected, and with a slow pace that, were it not for the historical references, might have seemed to have set the novel some decades earlier. In June, we went to the parish fair at St Anthony's Basilica. The procession began. The priest came out of the church, followed by embroiders banners and women dressed up as princesses carrying plaited lambs and wreaths. Girls who had recently received First Communion scattered lupin flowers under their feet. I was mesmerised, and when Mum started searching thorough her bag for coins for the collection tray, I let go of her hand and ran after the procession as if it were a royal entourage. I didn't stop until I reached a market stall with a blown-up silver whale. The whale wasn't able to float off towards the clouds. The sun caught it in red and purple rings and blinded me, burning my cheeks. Gilt figures kept disappearing between the cars and the britchkas, leaving elongated shadows on a wall. A balding llama was standing drooling under a tree. The novel consists of 23 episodic vignettes, typically just 5 pages long and with little connection between them other than the recurrence of the characters and the sense of progression in Wiola's life, in particular her burgeoning sexuality, noticed by other characters before herself (at one family gathering an aunt asks Wiola's mother if "Aunt Flo has come to visit Wiola yet ... you know her blood relation...".) Poland at that time was torn between the powerful forces of Communism and Catholicism. Wiola's family are strongly religious and rumours that the Pope's motorcade will pass through the town lead to a frenzied making and erection of elaborate bunting, only for another equally fevered group of locals to systemically tear it all down again during the night. And Wiola's mother's religious beliefs contain an odd mixture of biblical faith and superstition: Spiders are sacred creatures and it's forbidden to kill them. They saved Our Lady. When the Holy Family was fleeing Jerusalem, spiders wove such a thick web around the road that the swords of Herod's soldiers couldn't pierce it. The title, Swallowing Mercury, is taken from an incident in one of the stories, but the original Polish title was Guguly which Eliza Marciniak has translated the two times it appears as unripe fruit. The first occasion is in the one story which is narrated by a character other than Wiola, as a story told to her on a train, about a boy who, teased by his classmates due to a birthmark, eats guguly to make himself sick to avoid school. However, given that school was due to start on 4th September 1939, he turns out not to need that excuse. The 2nd comes from an incident at the novel's end after Wiola's father has died and she imagines scenes from his life. She recalls one incident which serves as a metaphor for Wiola's own development and that of her country: 'What a strange world this is' he said to me suddenly when the bus turned into Pulaski Street. 'Before I've even had time to blink, they're already calling me old, when inside I'm like an unripe fruit.' ...more |
Notes are private!
|
none
|
1
|
Mar 23, 2017
|
Mar 23, 2017
|
Mar 15, 2017
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||
4
| 
| 0544464044
| 9780544464049
| 3.86
| 6,582
| 2014
| Nov 08, 2016
|
really liked it
|
Reposting in tribute to Amos Oz, who passed away today: Anyone willing to change, Shmuel said, will always be considered a traitor by those who cannot Reposting in tribute to Amos Oz, who passed away today: Anyone willing to change, Shmuel said, will always be considered a traitor by those who cannot change and are scared to death of change and don't understand it and loathe change. Book 10 of 13 from my reading of the 2017 Man Booker International longlist. I have previously read Amos Oz’s classic A Tale of Love and Darkness, also translated by Nicholas de Lange, which was very strong. Judas isn’t quite in that league but more than worthy of its place on the MBI longlist and a thought-provoking read. Judas is a story from the winter days of the end of 1959 and the beginning of 1960 set in then still divided Jerusalem, a decade after the 1948 Arab-Israel war. Shmuel Ash is 25 years-old and studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he is working on his Master’s thesis on the “Jewish views of Jesus”. However, he is in something of a crisis: his girlfriend Yardena abruptly leaves him to marry a previous boyfriend; his entirely non-proletarian and only 6-strong “Socialist Renewal Group” undergoes a schism after the revelations about Stalin at the 20th Congress and, crucially among the four who split off were the two girls in the Group, without whom there was no longer any point; and his financial support dries up as his parents are bankrupted in a lawsuit with their business partner. Shmuel is a wonderfully sketched character – simultaneously younger and older in spirit than his age would imply (the following is a edited excerpt of the character sketch) : He would be instantly intoxicated by new ideas, provided they were wittily dressed up and involved a paradox. But he also tended to tire quickly, possibly on account of an enlarged heart and his asthma. His eyes filled easily with tears, which caused him embarrassment and even shame. He loved to lecture anyone who would listen, particularly his comrades from the Socialist Renewal Group: he loved to clarify, to state the facts, to contradict, to refute and to reinvent. He spoke at length, with enjoyment, wit and brio. But when the reply came, when it was his turn to listen to others' ideas, Shmuel was suddenly impatient, distracted, tired, until his eyes closed and his tousled head sank down onto his shaggy chest. He was kindhearted, generous, brimming with goodwill and as soft as a woollen glove, going out of his way to make himself useful, but at the same time he was muddled and impatient. He never knew where he had put his other sock, what exactly his landlord wanted from him, or who he had lent his lectures notes to. On the other hand, he was never muddled when he stood up to quote with deviating accuracy what Kropotkin had said about Nechayev after their first meeting, and what he had said two years later. Or which of Jesus' apostles was less talkative than the rest. A few days before she left him, Yardena said: 'Either you're like an excited puppy, rushing around noisily - even when you're sitting on a chair you're somehow chasing your own tail - or else you're the opposite, lying on your bed for days on end like an unaired quilt’. He rushed across but roads at an angle, hurling himself into the heart of a skirmish, his bushy, bearded head thrust forward, his body leaning with it, as if eager for the fray. His legs always seemed to be chasing after his body, which in turn was pursuing his head, as if they were afraid of being left behind when he disappeared around the next corner. Once he met Stalin In a dream. The meeting took place In a low back room in the grimy cafe where the Socialist Renewal Group convened. He failed to explain to Stalin, who was smiling under his moustache, why the Jews rejected Jesus and why they still stubbornly turned their backs on him. Stalin called him Judas. He decides to abandon his studies and return home when he spots an advert on the University noticeboard: Offered to a single humanities student with conversational skills and an interest in history, free accommodation and a modest monthly sum, in return for spending five hours per evening with a seventy-year-old invalid, an educated, widely cultured man. He is able to take care of himself and seeks company, not assistance.He takes the role, and finds himself in the quiet home, with no visitors other than the cook and cleaner, that the elderly Gershom Wald shares with the mid-40s Atalia Abranavel. Atalia is the daughter of the late Shealtiel Abranavel. In Oz’s novel the fictional Shealtiel was the lone dissenter from the Zionist Executive Committee and the Council of the Jewish Agency in the post War period who (per Wald) tried in vain to persuade Ben-Gurion in 1948, that it was still possible to reach an agreement with the Arabs about the departure of the British and and the creation of a single joint condominium of Jews and Arabs, if we only agreed to renounce the idea of a Jewish state, after which he resigns, jumped or pushed being unclear, and lived out his life in self-imposed internal exile, condemned, after the 1948 War, as a traitor by his former colleagues. Amos Oz himself is known as a long-term advocate of a two-state solution to the Palestinian question, and one expects his sympathies lie with the “Judas” Shealtiel, but through the differing views of the Zionist Wald and the secular Marxist Shmuel we get a balanced account of the issue. Shealtiel’s argument was that the Arabs feared that a Jewish state could ultimately, in decades to come, dominate the area, giving rise to the conflict, whereas Wald has the opposite view: I actually think that more than the Arabs feared the future power of Jews, they were tempted by their present weakness. and There's no one quite like Ben-Gurion,' Wald said. 'The Jewish people has never before had such a far-sighted leader as Ben-Gurion. Few understand as he does that ‘the people shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned amongst the nations’ is a curse not a blessing. The exact relationship between these characters and why they are living such an isolated life is part of the this novel-of-ideas’s relatively limited plot development (view spoiler)[Atalia is Wald’s widowed daughter-in-law. Her husband and his son, a mathematician, volunteered despite a medical issue that should have kept him from active service and then died a horrible death in the 1948 war, leaving Atalia and Wald both devastated recluses in Atalia’s father’s house, joining him in his self-imposed exile. Atalia, disillusioned with life and men (with their macho desires to take part in wars) employs students like Shmuel so she doesn’t have to keep debating events over and over with Wald, students who she usually allows to fall in love with her, giving them a night or two of her affections, before asking them to leave and seeking a replacement. (hide spoiler)] Shmuel spends his time in the house lying in his room reflecting on both his life and his thesis, verbally sparring, as he is paid to, with Wald, and gradually finding himself infatuated with Atalia who tells him. Your predecessors in the attic also began to tell me their dreams. Then they left us, each one in turn. You'll leave us soon too. This monotonous life in a dark, ageing house with only a garrulous old man and an embittered woman for company doesn't suit a young man like you. They embark on long walks together, full of unrequited feelings and unspoken thoughts on Shmuel’s side (He ought to tell Atalia. He ought to tell her now. But what should he tell her.) through the streets of and hills surrounding Jerusalem. The city itself is invoked beautifully in the text, albeit at a detailed street-by-street level that would be more meaningful to someone who knows the modern city. Atalia remains a larely closed book to both Shmuel and the reader, although the narrative sometimes drops rather anomalously into her thoughts, (she felt responsible for his injury although she could find no logical explanation for this feeling),. I wasn’t clear of the literary intent as it is almost as if Oz occasionally forgets that his third-person narration is from Shmuel’s perspective. Another striking feature is the repetition of certain signature features of the characters' appearances – Shmuel’s distinctive walk with his legs chasing after his head, his stubby fingers “thick and short, as if they each lacked a knuckle [which I don’t think masks a Donald Trump reference] and Atalia’s unusually deep furrow from her nose to her upper lip. Oz’s key theme is of betrayal but how sometimes the betrayer is the true believer. Anyone willing to change, Shmuel said, will always be considered a traitor by those who cannot change and are scared to death of change and don't understand it and loathe change. Shmuel’s thoughts and debates with Wald enable the novel to expand on this theories of the writings of Jewish scholars and polemicists down the centuries on Jesus. The atheist Shmuel isn’t a believer in the Gospel but is attracted by Jesus’s moral teachings, which he believes could have led to a combined Jewish-Christian philosophy rather than two warring religions: It's a curious fact, Shmuel wrote to himself on a loose piece of paper, that however much these Jews engage with the supernatural stories surrounding Jesus' parentage and birth, his life and death, they studiously avoid any confrontation with the spiritual or moral content of the gospel. It is as if they are content to refute the miracles and contradict the wonders, and as if my this means the gospel itself will disappear without trace. And it is also strange that in all these writings there is no mention of Judas Iscariot. And yet, had it not been for Judas, there might not have been a crucifixion, and had there been no crucifixion there would have been no Christianity. And Shmuel is particularly occupied with the topic of Judas, the disciple that anti-Semitic Christians regard as the epitome of the treachery of the Jews, but who Shmuel regards as the first Christian. The late Christian. The only Christian. Shmuel believes that Judas engineered the crucifixion in order to prove Jesus’ divinity, including to Jesus himself, expecting him to miraculously climb down from the cross. He regards the resurrection and the Christianity that emerged as a largely Pauline invention, and his version of the gospel story has Judas hanging himself from the fig tree that Jesus cursed (Mark 11: 12-14, 20-25) as Judas realises, with hindsight, that this odd incident showed that after all, he was no more than flesh and blood like the rest of us. Greater than us, more wonderful than us, immeasurably greater than all of us, but flesh and blood. Overall certainly a thought-provoking novel although one that hangs together rather uneasily. Shmuel’s theories on Judas are rather less original than he - and I suspect possibly the author – thinks they are, although the link to the story of Shealtiel provides justification for their inclusion in the novel. Shmuel and Wald are memorable creations, but Atalia felt a little artificial and the May-to-September romance with Shmuel introduced an unnecessary element to the text. 3-4 stars and on the fringes of my personal shortlist for the MBI – although one that I suspect will stay with me longer than some of the lighter works on the list. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
none
|
1
|
Apr 09, 2017
|
Apr 11, 2017
|
Mar 15, 2017
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||
8
| 
| 0857054414
| 9780857054418
| 3.89
| 1,712
| 2013
| Aug 25, 2016
|
liked it
|
"In Keflavik there are three cardinal directions: the wind, the sea and eternity. 'Nowhere in all of Ireland do people live as close to death.'(*) The "In Keflavik there are three cardinal directions: the wind, the sea and eternity. 'Nowhere in all of Ireland do people live as close to death.'(*) The unrelenting wind seems to be able to blow from two directions at once, gusts bearing salt and sand took turns lashing us, the sky so distant that our prayers over ever made it halfway there, then dropped like dead birds or changed into hail, the drinking water as salty as the sea. This place isn't fit for habitation; everything is against it: common sense, the wind, the lava. Still, we've lived here all these years, all these centuries, stubborn as the lava, silent within history as the moss that grows over rocks and changes it into soil, someone should stuff us, pin medals on us, write a book about us." (* from the 1714 Land Register by Arni Magnusson and Pall Vidalin, commissioned by the Danish Crown) Jón Kalman Stefánsson's Heaven and Hell Trilogy, to which I was introduced by the excellent blog https://tonysreadinglist.wordpress.com, was one of my favourite fiction discoveries of the last 2 years. My reviews: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... His 2013 novel, Fiskarnir Hafa Enga Fætur has been translated, once again by the excellent Philip Roughton, as Fish Have No Feet. Tony's review is here and strongly recommended https://tonysreadinglist.wordpress.co... Fish Have No Feet is also the first part of an intended trilogy, and the second, Eitthvað á stærð við alheiminn (English working title "Around the Same Size as the Universe") has been published recently in Iceland. [Footnote - the trilogy was actually a duology and the English translation wa s published as 'About the Size of the Universe in 2018] Jón Kalman Stefánsson is a wonderful writer, and this novel contains the same stunning prose as his previous trilogy. But overall I have to say I didn't find this as distinctive or satisfying as the Heaven and Hell novels. The novel centred on the character of Ari, a now middle-aged ex-poet and publisher, and has three interwoven strands set in different times. In the present day, he is returning from self-imposed exile in Denmark, after the self-inflicted break up of his marriage, to meet the narrator in Keflavik. A second strand covers Ari and the narrator's teenage years in Keflavik in the late 1970s and 1980s, at the time when the town was the home of the US military. And a third strand reaches back much further in time to give us the story of Ari's paternal grandfather, Oddur, a fisherman, and his grandmother Margrét. The effect is to create a slightly uneasy blend of the wonderfully evocative, unique and timeless prose of the earlier books, with a more conventional tale of Nordic life in 1970/80s which takes us into territory already firmly staked out by other writers. Knausgaard is an obvious reference but I was more struck by the resemblance to Lars Saaybe Christensen. The book also suffers a little from it's nature as a trilogy combined with the non-linear nature of the story as exactly how it all pieces together is rather unclear. For example, by the time the novel finishes, Oddur and Margrét have 4 children but Ari's father and his aunt (Erin) have yet to be born. And the novel finishes on a teaser for book 2 "and tomorrow something will happen that's beyond our control." The prose at times also seemed unnecessarily repetitive. I suspect the intent was to create a poetic sense of rhythm, but it instead came across (unfairly I know) as closer to lazy writing/translation. To give an example, in just the first 20 pages there were 5 metaphorical screams: a residue of lava "at first is an old scream", there is "a cliff jutting into the unsettled sea like a giant fist or scream", "a car screamed through the night", we journey past mountain "passes shaped like screams" and, most significantly for the story and what I suspect the other occurrences are intended to echo, Ari's hand "swept like a scream across the kitchen table" ending his marriage. And the narrative device also doesn't quite work. The Heaven and Hell trilogy was narrated by, essentially, the voices of those lost at sea, enabling them to naturally interject at times with a commentary on events. Here, the narrator is ostensibly Aki's childhood friend / cousin, at times part of the story himself but at others remarkably absent from the same events. And the narrative voice at times observes Ari from the outside, at times knows things only Ari would know, and at times slips into the same style as the trilogy (e.g. "A stormy death and night are thus the beginning, the cause, the reason why we bring you this story."). Indeed the question of exactly who is the narrator - does he even exist or is this an alter-ego of Ari himself? - is never clear and became, to me, rather distracting. Perhaps another one for books 2 and 3. My favourite parts of the story were the tales of Oddur and Margrét, but those are exactly the parts that largely echo the Heaven and Hell trilogy. Although it was interesting to see how fishing life has progressed since those novels. I was struck in the earlier novels that none of the fishermen could swim, and Oddur is a pioneer in challenging that convention. Others gossip (but certainly not to his face) that Oddur is "something of a coward behind all that unbending toughness". He has learned to swim, insists his crew do as well, and "the very height of absurdity" even installed a lifeboat on his trawler: "To waste valuable space on a lifeboat – in the old days, when men where men, all they thought about was catching enough fish; they had no time for safety. If something happened – an accident, a dangerous swell, you had to deal with it as best you could, show what sort of man you were, and if it wasn’t enough, well then, your time was simply up, time to pack your belongings and leave. Things have changed, obviously there’s a clear difference between the champions of the past and the present." I have been a little critical in this review, but my benchmark is the wonderful earlier novels, and the book in it's own right is still a worthwhile read, and I trust Philip Roughton is already hard at work on translating Eitthvað á stærð við alheiminn (polishing the English working title may be his first task). ...more |
Notes are private!
|
none
|
1
|
Oct 20, 2016
|
Oct 25, 2016
|
Aug 29, 2016
|
Paperback
|
Loading...
13 of 13 loaded
