January 11, 2015 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Stone in a Landslide by Maria Barbal, tr. from Catalan by Laura McGloughlin and Paul Mitchell

This is the second in the Female Voices: Inner Realities series from Peirene Press.

Publisher, Mieke Ziervogel introduces each of their books with one or two sentences in extra-large font on the second page and it’s a page that you find yourself looking forward to whenever you pick up one of their books.

She shares what attracted the team to selecting that title as one of the Peirene books to translate into English and share with readers.

For Stone in a Landslide, she had this to say:

“I fell in love with Conxa’s narrative voice, its stoic calmness and the complete lack of anger and bitterness. It’s a timeless voice, down to earth and full of human contradictory nuances. It’s the expression of someone who searches for understanding in a changing world but senses that ultimately there may be no such thing.”

We meet Conxa as a 13-year-old girl living in the Catalan Pyrenees, Spain at the beginning of the last century, though she narrates the story from the other end of her life, reflecting back on her journey as an old woman.

One of six children, the opening lines tell us how she came to live with her childless aunt and uncle, leaving her family, home, village and mountain behind at such a tender age.

“Anyone could see that there were a lot of us at home. Someone had to go. I was the fifth of six children – Mother used to say I was there because God had wanted me to be there and you have to take what He sends you. The eldest was Maria, she, more than Mother, ran the house. Josep was the son and heir and Joan was going into the church. We three youngest were told a hundred times that we were more of a burden than a blessing….So it was decided that I, who was level-headed and even-tempered, would be sent to help my mother’s sister, Tia.”

She remembers going to school and how fortunate she was to be able to, on account of having older sisters who stayed home to do the work. Three winters she went to school, until she joined the family of her aunt and uncle and then had to help them with the outdoor work.

In short chapters of around two pages, we observe the change in Conxa’s life, her new duties, how people perceive her initially as an outsider and how that perception begins to change, she has become an heir to land thus her marriage prospects have increased. She suffers silently from being separated from her family, but in time accepts her new role and life.

“Time passed and no one spoke of home. Of my family. In five years I had seen Mother and Maria only once, when they came for the Festa Major during my first year at Pallarès….My aunt and uncle said nothing about going back and I didn’t dare mention it. Was I happy there? I had no idea. I’d lived with my heart in my mouth a bit, worried about what they might throw back in my face. Maybe the poverty of my family…But I’d got used to them and their way of doing things. And it’s true, the thought of leaving Pallarès to return to Ermita became stranger every day.”

We learn through Conxa’s experiences how people were perceived, eldest sons were destined to be the heir, a second son may have had to learn a trade and were therefore seen as lesser prospects. Ownership of land accrued status, men who earned a wage were less desirable.

“They knew him to be hard-working and quick-witted but, because of the nature of his work, he appeared to be a drifter and freer than most men, who only looked at the ground to work it or the sky to figure out what the weather will bring. I realised that they saw him as an outsider, someone who’d managed to earn himself a living, but this had more or less divided him from his family.”

Falling in love with a tradesman is about as rebellious as Conxa gets, her aunt and uncle soon realise that Jaume is a good match, and as with her life as the adopted daughter Conxa becomes as accepting of her new circumstances in her life with Jaume, who must by necessity travel a lot for his work. He is more outspoken and for this Conxa will experience hardship as the Spanish Civil War impacts even the quietest villages.

Stone in a Landslide is such an apt metaphor for Conxa and yet she was not like the others. She doesn’t complain, she loves genuinely, she accepts her circumstances and only at the end when she is physically removed from her natural surrounding does she come close to realising how much a part of that landscape she is as a person. She coped with many changes, from daughter to adopted daughter, lover, mother within her natural environment, but the final move puts her somewhere beyond reach, beyond comprehension of how to be who she really is.

“Perhaps I had turned into a living stone, or it was just that I had never known how to rebel…. I felt that I was going to need to be strong, but I had no idea why.”

Another excellent addition to the collection and discovery of another wonderful writer.

Maria Barbal, born in 1949, is considered the most influential living Catalan author. The clarity with which she presents human relations and the passage of time has earned her critical acclaim and a wide readership. She lives in Barcelona.

Next Up: Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Deluis.

January 8, 2015 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Beside the Sea by Véronique Olmi, tr. by Adriana Hunter (French)

A single mother of two boys wants to take them on a little holiday near the sea. That might sound simple enough, but for this mother, it is a major life event and a challenge, as she suffers from some kind of mental affliction that normally requires her to take daily medication.

This trip is out of the ordinary and we experience it from inside the mind of the mother, the stream of consciousness narrative is so effective here, it gets inside our mind as we read. We feel her sense of anxiety acutely and become almost as sensitive as she is to the threatening hostility of the outside world, that place from which she wishes to protect her children.

She wants them to experience the wonder of the seaside, she takes them for hot chocolate and they visit a funfair, all of which present certain challenges. She observes and reflects on aspects of their characters with a poetic clarity that all mothers will relate to.

“I stopped on the sea wall, my two kids holding my hands, I wondered how to do it, how to say hello to the sea. It was making a hellish noise, really angry, and the children cowered. I stayed there, not moving a muscle, watching it…I’d been waiting for it such a long time!”

It is an incredible novella and I appreciated it all the more, ironically, after following recent discussion on Vishy’s review of Nabakov’s Lolita . They discuss that dilemma many readers have when they recognise an exceptional prose style but feel uncomfortable with the subject or the perceptions of the protagonist. It makes it hard to share an opinion and it takes time to understand our reactions. We observe them first and then try to understand them.

What I found most interesting in those subsequent comments actually came from the more experienced readers, those who had read it more than once and they describe what changed in terms of their own perceptions with subsequent readings. In the first read we react more to the story and character, in subsequent readings it seems the reader has greater insight into the intentions of the writer/artist, beyond surface character and plot.

Those comments made me think more about Beside The Sea and wonder if I might appreciate it more coming to it for a second time. I was in admiration of the style but uncomfortable with the journey. I would recommend it to the curious, thinking reader who isn’t quick to judge and it’s not one to read when you’re feeling fragile.

The author does an incredible job in making the reader empathise with the mother, even though I didn’t particularly enjoy going into that state and arriving at its inevitable conclusion.

I also couldn’t help thinking about these kind of stories in the media, the short versions which usually focus on the result and not what leads people to where they end up. I don’t want to spoil the read, so you’ll just have to read it to find out what I mean by that. I think the enjoyment of this book will also be dependent on where one is on the ‘potential for empathy’ scale.

It is an interesting challenge, that an author would choose to travel inside the mind of someone like this and write in the stream-of-consciousness form. I am sure this was one of the works that the publisher and writer Mieke Ziervogel read as background research in writing her own debut novella ‘Magda‘.

Poignant and thought-provoking given the issues that lie beneath its surface, this is the story that is almost never told and rarely understood by the public, who often only see that end result favoured by the media and judge it far too easily.

This is the first book in the Peirene Press Female Voices: Inner Realities series, all of which I am reading in January 2015.

Next Up : Stone in a Landslide by Maria Barbal (translated from Catalan)

December 30, 2014 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Outstanding Read of the Year 2014

Prayers For The Stolen by Jennifer Clement

This book had a huge impact on me at the time of reading, a fictional account of a girl named Ladydi growing up in a part of Mexico where it is dangerous to be a girl, so the mother’s disguise them as boys, from the moment of their birth.

An insightful read, about a tragic issue, told with empathy and humour and helping to raise awareness of the plight of so many women and girls unable to speak out for themselves. A must read.

And in no particular order, My Top Reads for 2014!

Top Fiction

1.Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin (translated from Russian by James E. Falen)

The epic book length poem Eugene Onegin was my surprise read of the year and pure delight. I avoided reading it for years and years thinking it would be inaccessible. It was hilarious and a riveting read.

I read it two chapters at a time in a read along and was thoroughly entertained by that cad Eugene Onegin and bemused by that reader of far too many romantic novels Tatiana, and broken-hearted at the fate of the poet. Absolutely brilliant and I would quite like to read another translation after some of the comparisons other readers made as we read, what turns out to be not quite the same version. More Pushkin definitely.

2. Nada by Carmen Laforet (translated from Spanish by Edith Grossman)

Nada was being passed around friends all exclaiming its wonder, a book written by the author when she was 23 years old and based on her own similar experience as a young woman moving to Barcelona to study. It takes place in the shadowy aftermath of a traumatic civil war, its effect hanging over her family. Andrea, now an orphan, arrives to stay with relatives, however her stay is not as she’d imagined it, the family are full of eccentricities and Andrea finds more refuge in the gloomy streets and with her new friends than in the oppressive atmosphere of the apartment among her strange relatives. A feverish, coming of age classic.

3. We That Are Left by Juliet Greenwood

A title I was waiting for, having loved Eden’s Garden and this promised to be just as good, set in World War One and featuring a cast of women characters who are changed by the war in ways that will continue long after.

From Cornwall to Wales to France, we follow Elin as her husband leaves for the war and she must assume responsibility for the family estate and is propelled into a dangerous mission to rescue her friend in the thick of fighting. It concerns the changes thrust upon women during the war and their refusal to go back to the more submissive role that was expected of them before the war. They prove they are just as capable of handling a crisis and if necessary will manage on their own. Brilliant, thrilling and unputdownable.

4.The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson (translated from Swedish by Thomas Teal)

The True Deceiver is the first novel I have read by Tove Jansson, having read three collections of her short stories (The Summer Book, A Winter Book and Art in Nature) all of which I enjoyed, so this was an interesting departure to stay with the same characters throughout and it is quite a thrilling read, clearly inspired in part by her own experience, facing up to the artist struggle.

It is the perfect winter read, set in the snow bound winter months, while they await the thaw. Anna is an aging artist who lives alone and is content for it to be that way, her contact with the outside world through the many letters from her fans. But someone in the village has other plans and slowly makes herself indispensable to the older woman, preying on her vulnerabilities. And the true deceiver? That is the question that reading the novel reveals.

4. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein)

If you haven’t yet succumbed to #FerranteFever keep an eye out for this book and the two that follow it, The Story of a New Name and Those Who Leave & Those Who Stay. They narrate a friendship between Elena and Lila, set in an impoverished neighbourhood of Naples, one tries to escape her place in society via a university education and a marriage that will elevate her status while the other uses her intelligence in a relentless, fearless and often ruthless quest to survive. The books are compelling and may be semi-autobiographical, however the author remains an enigma, using a pseudonym and not ready to own up to his/her identity – believing that if a book has any merit, it will find its audience.

5. The Dead Lake by Hamid Ismialov (translated from Russian by Andrew Bromfield)

This is why I wait until the end of the year before creating my list, because who knows what special book gems we might discover before the final curtain call. The Dead Lake is part of the Peirene Press coming-of-age series published in 2014 and tells the story of Yerzhan, a boy growing up at a remote railway siding in Kazakhstan, an area where atomic weapon testing is carried out.

There are only two communities where he lives and he adores the neighbour’s daughter and it is to impress her that he walks into that lake at 12-years-old and stops growing. It is a stunning and unforgettable novella and an insightful glimpse into a nomadic culture, that we are privileged to be able to read thanks to the passionate endeavours of our friends at Peirene Press.

6. The Bees by Laline Paull

The Bees is an extraordinary feat of the imagination, narrated from the point of view of Flora 717 a sanitation worker bee. It is about life in an orchard hive and the threats both internal and external to the hive. Totally convincing, the Hive is like a cult and each bee knows its place, its role and responds by instinct and receives energy from the Hive Mind, the Queen and the collective conscience of the Hive. Flora is different and as we discover why, we begin to fear for her life. A stunning, original work, I was enthralled but the story and love that the author was inspired by a Bronze Age Minoan palace in translating a real beehive into a fictional landscape.

Top Non-Fiction

1. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman

This was the very first book of the year I read and a special read for booklovers. It contains 18 bookish essays from the bibliophile Anne Fadiman, written over a period of four years, in which she talks about how she became so book obsessed and shares many often hilarious anecdotes. It was also recommended and gifted to me by the talented blogger and world-wide reader VishyThe Knight.

2. Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez

First published in 1986 and winner of the National Book Award for non-fiction in the US, Artic Dreams is a compilation of poetic nature essays written by a compassionate, scientific, nature loving mind, as he observes those creatures whose natural habitat is the arctic, whether they are polar bears, seals or Arctic people. Some of my best recommendations, as was the case with this book, come from Valorie at Books Can Save a Life.

3. Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain

I planned to read this right from the beginning of 2014 when it was republished as an anniversary edition to commemorate the beginning of World War one. Vera Brittain was an intellect and despite it being seen as a waster of time by many ion the provinces where she came from she set of for Oxford to compete with the boys, whom most of her friends were.

One by one, her friends, her brother, her fiance went off to fight and not able to concentrate on something that seemed meaningless in the face of war, she volunteered as a nurse. Testament of Youth is taken from her journals and is an insightful, at times heartbreaking insight into a lost youth, and an attempt to understand humanity and to prevent us from repeating the same mistakes. A brilliant book, about to be released as a feature film.

4. H is for Hawk by Wendy Macdonald

There haven’t been so many non fiction titles that called out to me this year, but this one did immediately and I pushed it to the top of the pile to read and was riveted by Helen Macdonald’s grief stricken, obsessive encounter with Mebel, he Goshawk she raises, spurning human company and comfort in the aftermath of her father’s death. Great to see it then win the Samuel Johnson prize.

5. Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

What a delightful memoir in free verse from a well-known children’s writer, writing of her childhood spent between South Carolina and Brooklyn, NY tales of family members, a new brother, her passion for words, being Jehovah Witness and making a great friend. Reminds me of the equally talented Margarita Engle and her collection of novels in verse.

Voila!

So what was your outstanding read(s) for 2014?

December 29, 2014 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Under the Tripoli Sky by Kamal Ben Hameda tr. by Adriana Hunter

We are in the city of Tripoli, bordering the Mediterranean in the 1960’s, though this is no seaside idyll.

The narrative follows in the footsteps and the mind of a boy named Hadachinou who prefers the company of his mother, her friends, great-aunt’s and escorting girls sent on errands who are not yet kept indoors, bound by the shackles of marriage, in a society where a river of seething discontent courses through the veins of many, where the sexes barely tolerate each other and anyone who seems to have escaped the marriage trap is resented their so-called freedoms.

Hadachinou is privy to the thoughts, gossip and attitudes of women, a witness to their interior lives, he listens to their stories and absorbs their repressed desires as his own begin to awaken.

The tea ceremony was the only part of the day when my mother and her friends could live their lives in real times and tell their own stories. At last they could talk about dreams, longings and anxieties , all in the same breath and their bodies were at peace.

I sometimes wondered how these women who were all so different were able to spend hours at a time, each talking about her own god, her own people and thoughts, free to be wildly outspoken but without provoking any true conflict. It was because they had no power to preserve and no possessions to watch over. That was for the people on the other side of the wall: the men, the sheikhs, the governors and their hunting dogs! Scheming and calculating, diplomacy and power struggles were their domain.

Here with the women, my guardian angels, there were just words, spoken openly and easily, flitting and whirling about, a life force in themselves. Without these moments of trusting abandon, they would have dried up with sorrow. Or imploded as they toiled over their cooking pots.

Taynal Mosque Source: wikipedia

While the men are at work, or at the mosque or in the coffee houses, the women finish their work and make time to see each other.

Here, great-aunt Nafissa has had enough of the women bad mouthing his mother’s childhood friend Jamila, words they only speak when his mother leaves the room, venomous remarks spiralling into bitterness about what they perceive as her secret life; flushed with rage, aunt Nafissa rails against them:

‘Leave Jamila alone,’ she cried. ‘Let her live her life. Its only because you’re jealous that you see evil in everything. She and her friends allow themselves freedoms you don’t have, freedoms you envy because your husbands keep you on a tight leash. What would you have her do? Stay at home like you, sitting on cushions and sucking on loukoums while you wait for men who never come home? You think those women are living bad lives? You make me laugh! But you don’t know when to hold your tongues, that’s for sure, and you’re full of spite. And, anyway, it’s not as if any of this has ever stopped you taking their money!’ she added, always ready to speak out against injustice.

Old Tripoli Source: wikipedia

It is not easy to read about a repressed patriarchal society without much glimmer of hope, a slice of life narrative set in a pre-Gaddafi society on the verge of change.

I found it a sombre read, left wondering if this boy will be changed by virtue of his proximity to the women folk, or whether that might become a reason for his need to escape, lest he not fit in.

Looking out to sea, I remembered what Hadja Kimya had said: ‘Hadachinou, keep yourself busy doing simple things that delight you. Give yourself a goal. The soul of life is the little things, the minor events no one notices… That’s where life is, the pleasure of being alive, otherwise there’s just this vast blueness casting its shadow over us. Go on, keep yourself busy, do something, and then you might find yourself one day.’

This is cultural insight beyond the normal bounds of the English language, thanks to the translation of Adriana Hunter and the passion of Peirene Press in bringing these kinds of stories into the mainstream.

December 28, 2014 by Claire 'Word by Word'

The Dead Lake by Hamid Ismailov, tr. Andrew Bromfield

An astonishing tale tinged with sadness, as recounted by the protagonist Yerzhan to a stranger on a train journey across the steppes of Soviet Kazakhstan, that in part continues to be imagined by the listener as from time to time, the young narrator sleeps.

The story begins when the boy enters the carriage playing Brahms on his violin in a manner that causes everyone to stop and look at him, not believing it possible that a boy who looks about ten to twelve-years-old could play to such perfection and with such awe-inspiring panache.

“Then, just as he had the entire carriage gaping after him open-mouthed, he broke off in mid-note. He slung the violin back over his shoulder like a rifle.

‘Wholesome local beverage – entirely organic!’ he exclaimed in a thick, adult voice. He swung a canvas sack down off his other shoulder and pulled out an immense plastic bottle of a yoghurt drink, either ayran or kumis. I approached him, without even knowing why.”

Yerzhan grows up at a remote railway siding in a part of the country where atomic weapons are tested. Two families live near each other, their lives more intertwined than appears on the surface.

Yerzhan and the neighbour’s daughter Aisulu travel many miles by donkey to go to school and many more miles to see the strange but talented bachelor, Petko, a Bulgarian violin teacher.

Every so often the ground shakes, another sun rises and everything is still. Then there is the Zone, that area where it is so silent, his ears ring.

“And the thing that loomed over him like a visceral fear could happen in the middle of the sweltering summer, when sheep suddenly started bleating as if they were under the knife and went dashing in all directions, cows dug their horns into the ground and the donkey squealed and rolled around in the dust…

And a slight rumble would run through the ground, Yerzhan’s legs would start trembling, and then his whole body, and the fear would rise up from his shaking knees to his stomach and freeze there in a heavy ache, until the sky cracked over his head and shattered into pieces, crushing him completely, reducing him to dust, to sand, to scraps of grass and wool. And the black whirlwind hurtled past above him with a wild howl.”

A boy plays the dombra

His friend Aisulu’s Granny tells him a story of his conception and birth, intertwined with local legend; not knowing who his father is, he often replays the story in his mind, trying to understand it, and who he is.

“Granny Ulbarsyn’s story wasn’t the only thing that had sunk deep into Yerzhan’s heart. Grandad’s dombra playing stayed with him too. When no one was looking the boy took the instrument down from its nail high up on the wall. And while his grandfather tapped with the hammer on railway carriages, Yerzhan strummed the dombra secretly, imitating the old man’s knitted brows and hoarse voice. It didn’t take long before he picked out a few familiar melodies and then, with the keen eye he used to keep watch on Uncle Kapek’s behaviour, he followed and memorised his granddad’s finger movements.”

Yerzhan learns the dombra and violin and is bright, but the real light in his life is Aisulu, a light that gradually fades upon his reaching the age of 12, when he walks into the forbidden, radioactive Dead Lake to impress her and from that day on stops growing, destined to watch her pass him by.

“Other people noticed it too and wanted to help. Granny Ulbarsyn fed him with the livers of new born spring lambs, Grandad Daulet ordered carrots from the city through his friend Tolegen, and Uncle Shaken brought disgusting fish oil back from his shift. But that only produced a foul-smelling burp! Yerzhan ate it all. But he had stopped growing.”

Another of Peirene Press’s excellent novella’s, this really is an afternoon read, but so rich in the telling, it is a pleasure to go back and reread passages with the familiarity of having read the story. It is a tale tinged with inevitable sadness as people live with the invisible terrors that are an environmental legacy of the Cold War.

If you want to read more contemporary European literature outside the English language, you can do no better than take out a fabulous subscription with Peirene Press. Three novellas a year and the kind you’ll rarely find in most bookshops.

Note: The author Hamid Ismailov was born in Kyrgyzstan and moved to Uzbekistan as a young man. He writes in both Russian and Uzbek and his novels have been translated into many European languages. Sadly his work is banned in Uzbekistan today and he has had to flee the country due to his ‘unacceptable democratic tendencies’.

December 22, 2014 by Claire 'Word by Word'

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque translated by A.W.Wheen

Vera Brittain gave us her Testament of Youth, an account of a generation of youth lost whether they lost their lives or survived World War One, for those who lived, something of the essence of youth was lost to them forever and none who were part of it were unaffected or not changed by it.

Earlier in the year Juliet Greenwood gave us a fictional account of woman during World War One in We That Are Left, a novel that highlights the significant changes in the lives of women during that period, to the point of not going back to the way things were.

More recently Richard Flanagan’s Testament of Horrors, which for this reader was more than was possible to absorb, despite the later redeeming passages I may have missed, so visceral were his descriptions.

And now, I add the German Literature classic All Quiet on the Western Front to that tome of war literature that shares something of the experience and its effect, the novel by Erich Maria Remarque telling the story of Paul Baumer, a 20 year old German soldier.

He and his friends are pressured by their schoolmaster to join up early, an action that won’t be forgotten and which will be repaid when they meet again under different circumstances.

“For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress – to the future. We often made fun of them and played jokes on them, but in our hearts we trusted them. The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom. But the first death we saw shattered this belief. We had to recognise that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs. They surpassed us only in phrases and in cleverness. The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces. ”

He narrates his journey, their comradeship, their fear, their daily survival. Their small joys often centred around food, their occasional escape, a mild wound or a leave pass and thoughts of how they might ever continue a life other than this if ever there is a peacetime. It is something few can imagine and most don’t want to, it isn’t relevant.

On one of his infrequent visits home, Baumer tries to understand what has changed.

“They talk too much for me. They have worries, aims, desires, that I cannot comprehend. I often sit with one of them in the little beer garden and try to explain to him that this is really the only thing: just to sit quietly, like this. They understand of course, they agree, they may even feel it so too, but only with words, yes that is it – they feel it, but always with only half of themselves, the rest of their being is taken up with other things, they are so divided in themselves that none feels it with his whole essence; I cannot even say myself exactly what I mean.”

The longer war rages, the further away from their past the young men become, they find solace in each other and even begin to miss the front when they are on leave, as they are no longer the youth they were and those that know them now are not here.

The author was himself a German solider who survived the war, became a teacher and a writer, but when in 1933, his works were banned and publicly burned on the initiative of the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels he and his wife left Germany to live in Switzerland. All Quiet on the Western Front had been published at a similar time to Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the two narratives were polar apart. The moment Germany elected Hitler to power, he went after Remarque. Sadly, it was his sister who paid the price, convicted of undermining morality as her brother was beyond reach. She was beheaded in 1943.

1st edition in English

I read this on Armistice Day, 11 November, the day that an armistice was signed in France between the Allies and the Germans in 1918, commemorating the end of hostilities in WW1.

Although it is fiction, it reads like a true account. It is a remarkable book, sharing both the physical and mental aspects of youth at war and their slow realisation of its personal consequences.

It is tragic, sad and true and there is an element of hopelessness, that even though we can come to understand what will happen to those affected by war, there is little to be done to prevent it, we as humanity continue to choose it as a method of punishment disguised as a weapon of peace.

December 21, 2014 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Sidewalks – Essays by Valeria Luiselli translated by Christina MacSweeney

Valeria Luiselli is a philosophical meanderer whose roving thoughts bring her to a cemetery in Venice in search of Russian poet, Joesph Brodsky’s tomb and wandering that alluring city’s streets so late at night she is locked out of the one room she managed to find in a convent.

She ponders the map with the slow-moving icon of a plane on the screen as she flies home and thinks about the layout of the land beneath and later will find a connection between a photo of cartographers in the Mexican Map Library and Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.

Sidewalks sees her leaving the four walls of her apartment late at night for a last cigarette outside the front door, seeking escape and encountering the advice and wisdom of a doorman who shares his own long life views on how one best comes to know thyself.

“If there still exists a gaze blessed with liminal wisdom, it is the gaze of night-shift doormen. They are the only true free-thinkers – generous men capable of conversing intelligently at midnight; empathetic accomplices, offering the consolation of a companionship replete with the same reprehensible vices you yourself have and defend.”

She laments the age of the individual computer, the window inside the window that has all but eliminated household drama and made high-rise voyeurism unexciting if not nonexistent.

“It is clear that the personal computer is the great modern attack on good old-fashioned voyeurism. From the moment these machines were installed in our homes, the irreversible process of the degeneration of character began and ruled out the possibility of anyone doing anything interesting for the delight of their voyeuristic neighbour.”

Original Spanish version

She is interested in spaces, voids, the edge of things, she tries to make sense of her home town in Mexico, a city whose first plan was allegedly scratched into sand and has continued to sprawl out of any recognisable or logical shape ever since.

Her essays reference other essayists as things she observes in her meandering bring back lines once read and remembered, passages of long dead authors become an old-fashioned, enjoyable distraction for a young woman, those words from the past arising unbidden while out walking sidewalks, no electronic media in sight.

In an essay on the river Spree, in Berlin, Fabio Morabito writes:

“A river tends to contain the city it crosses and to curb its ambitions, reminding it of its face; without a river, that is, without a face, a city is abandoned to itself and can become, like Mexico city, a blot.”

It is a slim volume and many of the essays are split into titled paragraphs, the first essay littered with the names and dates of the dead inhabiting the same resting place as Brodsky, although it wasn’t clear to me whether there was a link between the content and the named.

It feels as though there could well be much more to this collection than is picked up on first reading, especially given the original work was written in Spanish and many of the named places are foreign.

Intelligent, introspective essays that delight in being out and about and an appreciative and noteworthy introduction by the Dutch author and translator Cees Nooteboom. An author to watch out for.

Joseph Brodsky & Valeria Luiselli

November 30, 2014 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante tr. Ann Goldstein #FerranteFever

This is the third book in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan tetralogy about two friends Elena and Lila, growing up in an impoverished neighbourhood of Naples.

It follows on from Book One, My Brilliant Friend and Book Two, The Story of a New Name (click on the titles to read earlier reviews).

Lila has married, had a child, reformed her husband’s business, strayed and finally separated from her husband and moved to another area outside the neighbourhood to live with Enzo, a childhood friend. She gets a job in a sausage factory, working under oppressive conditions that attract the interest of social activists and harsh threats from the ‘fascists’.

“Can you imagine what it means to go in and out of refrigerated rooms at twenty degrees below zero, and get ten lire more an hour – ten lire – for cold compensation? If you imagine this, what do you think you can learn from people who are forced to live like that?”

In Pisa, Elena has remoulded herself, no longer referring or comparing herself to Lila. She observes how people from her type of neighbourhood and class are perceived outside it, among the bourgeois, those raised within the milieu of intellectuals and achievers, those with access to money, social connections, many of whom are gifted with a presence she can only dream of. Elena finishes her university studies and becomes engaged to Pietro, who was raised within that other world; coming from a well-known academic family, he too will become a university professor, teaching and writing academic works like his father.

As she is concluding her studies, Elena writes a fictional story drawn from aspects of her past, though never admitting it is anything but fiction. She gifts the story to Pietro on an impulse, hoping he will read it. He passes the manuscript to his well-connected mother Adele, thus Elena treads the path laid in front of her, towards becoming an author. Adele introduces her to contacts that will result in her first book being published, establishing her career as a writer.

“I spoke of the necessity of recounting frankly every human experience, including – I said emphatically – what seems unsayable and what we do not speak of even to ourselves.”

Though Elena does her best to avoid it, Pietro finally meets her family and though he insists on a civil ceremony for their marriage, a decision that stuns and terribly disappoints her mother, he wishes to do the traditional thing by asking her father for her hand. Her father is calm and accepting, however her mother’s thoughts insist on an airing and she lectures the young professor unabashedly.

“When at last she was silent, he said that he knew very well how precious I was and that he was grateful to her for having brought me up as I was.”

Through marriage, Elena succeeds in elevating herself above her roots, though finds herself stranded in not quite belonging to either her future role or her past. They are like roles she assumes outside herself, taking care not to stand out when she returns to the neighbourhood and paying attention to how she should behave in her new role as the wife of a professor.

“As soon as I got off the train, I moved cautiously in the places where I had grown up, always careful to speak in dialect, as if to indicate I am one of yours, don’t hurt me.”

However, marrying the young professor, writing the story that turns into a successful novel, moving to Florence and becoming a mother leave her little time to play any other role than that of housewife.

Lila leaves the neighbourhood, escaping her marriage and taking on a job in a sausage factory owned by a friend of Nino Sarratore, whom the girls met one summer. Her job leaves her little time to spend with her son. Unwillingly, she becomes connected with worker’s rights activists and discovers the dirty arm of the neighbourhood loan sharks who are leaning on her employer, while continuing to try to lure her back into their realm.

Lila and Elena’s worlds drift further apart and although they are aware of the need to share with the other, they each possess the instinct to soldier on without admitting their struggle or need for support or encouragement. Elena will receive both her mother-in-law and her mother at different times so that she can write and Lila will return to the neighbourhood to ease her difficulties. Both have opportunities within their reach, yet both are susceptible to self-destruction.

“Too many bad things, and some terrible, had happened over the years, and to regain our old intimacy we would have had to speak our secret thoughts, but I didn’t have the strength to find the words and she, who perhaps had the strength didn’t have the desire, didn’t see the use.”

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is a compelling story of the lives of two women and those around them, and a penetrative observation on the creation and consequence of decisions women make, how they live with those decisions and the often destructive way they bring about change. It narrates a journey of moving away from one’s origins and the sacrifice the attainment of that desire requires.

Elena leaves her past and a life she didn’t want, behind her, however in attaining a new life, she loses sight of who she really is and what drives her. She is just coming to the point of realising that when her world spins out of control. And thankfully for us all the fourth book is being translated. I expect the wheel may come full circle.

Italian Screenwriter Francesco Piccolo

Note: It has been announced that My Brilliant Friend will be made into a television series in Italy. The author/screenwriter Francesco Piccolo, winner of the esteemed Italian literary Strega Prize 2014 (with his bittersweet memoir of life on the Italian Left, ‘Il desiderio di essere come tutti’ (The Desire To Be Like Everyone) will work on the screenplay.

Next Book in the Series: The Story of the Lost Child

November 8, 2014 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Literary Blog Hop Winner of My Brilliant Friend

Thank you to everyone who participated in and entered the Literary Blog Hop to win this excellent book, My Brilliant Friend, originally written in Italian by Elena Ferrante.

And thank you for all the wonderful comments and book recommendations of your favourite translation or book written in a language other than English. As you can see, my TBR is growing!

And the winner of the draw is…..

Michelle Willms

Congratulations Michelle! I’ll send you an email to ask you for your address details. Please answer this by Sunday 9th November.

Thanks again to everyone who commented and participated and shared such wonderful book recommendations.

Happy Reading All!

November 4, 2014 by Claire 'Word by Word'

“All Paths Lead to Rome” – The Vatican Cellars by André Gide tr. by Julian Evans

Originally published in the summer of 1914, this year is the 100^th anniversary of André Gide’s Les Caves du Vatican otherwise known as The Vatican Cellars and sometimes as Lafcadio’s Adventures in English.

André Gide had quite a reputation and was adored and detested in equal measure in the French literary community during his time. He was a provocative writer, not sensationalist by today’s standards, but he rocked the foundations of robust entities in the early 1900’s and tested some of his friendships with his provocative, satirical works, that challenged the solemnity of the novelistic form and bourgeois attitudes of the time.

He declared the book not to be a novel, but a sotie, a medieval farce in which the players freely mock the powers that be, more often than not, the Church.

“Even in the authentic soties of the Middle Ages there was the attempt to demonstrate the madness of the real world by showing it capsized and lead by fools.” Wallace Fowlie, Andre Gide: His Life and Art

He did this to stand apart from that tradition of European fiction, characterised by its extreme seriousness. Many chose to judge it at face value, or to apply an interpretation that wasn’t his own and cause him to be ostracized by some.

A Young Gide
Source: Center for Gidean Studies
andregide.org

He wasn’t looking for recognition or accolades, but he was a writer who wasn’t afraid to take on a subject and look at it through a symbolic, metaphorical lens even if it did court contempt in some quarters. Though still highly controversial in France, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947, he died in 1951 and a year later his works were placed on the Vatican’s list of banned books.

That act was certainly provocative and no doubt helped to heighten the author’s popularity as negative publicity tends to do. So when this book arrived unsolicited in my mailbox, I was curious to find out more, not just about the story, but André Gide, a writer previously unknown to me. In a strange coincidence, this week I see that Papal controversy – or is it just rumour, continue, when I read this headline in The Independent.

God isn’t a magician with a magic wand according to the pope and there are non-believing vicars

The basic premise of The Vatican Cellars centres around the members of one family, whose connections are slowly revealed, whether by blood or marriage, the first three books (more like parts as the book is only 300 pages) are portrayed from each of the main characters point of view and running throughout the narrative is the effect of a rumoured plot that a gang has kidnapped the Pope and placed him in the Vatican cellars, an imposter installed in his place. The fourth book introduces us to the gang, referred to as The Millipede and the final book is dedicated to the young man Lafcadio and brings all the characters to Rome.

Book One introduces us to Anthime Armand-Dubois, a crippled freemason devoted to scientific research, an atheist who leaves France to settle in Rome to be near a specialist in rheumatic diseases. His departure causes his brother-in-law Julius De Baraglioul great sorrow and his wife Véronique small joy.

“As one of those people who fill their flat disappointed lives with countless small devotions, in her sterility she offered up to the Lord every attention that a baby would have demanded from her. Sadly she entertained almost no hope of leading her Anthime back to Him. She had known for a long time how much stubbornness that broad brow, knitted in perpetual denial, was capable of. Father Flons had warned her.”

Julius, his wife (Véronique’s sister) and their 9-year-old daughter Julie visit, during which Anthime experiences an apparition of the Virgin Mary and the miraculous healing of his affliction. He converts, but loses his freemason and lucrative research contacts and must move to Milan to await compensation promised by the Vatican.

André Gide
Source: Centre for Gidean Studies
andregide.org

Book Two is Julius De Baraglioul, a novelist who arriving back in Paris receives a letter from his father, who is on his deathbed and wishes him to anonymously make the acquaintance of a certain Lafcadio Wluiki to check out his ambitions and character. Julius visits the Lafcadio’s lodgings, meets Carola Venitequa and snoops around his things reading a private notebook since the room is unlocked and uninhabited. He eventually meets him and gives him a copy of his latest novel, one that has been panned by critics. Recognising the book is based on the author’s father, Lafcadio eyes the dying man as a potential new “Uncle” and goes to see him.

In Book Three we meet Amédée Fleurissoire, debated by some to be the true hero of this story; within these pages the entire plot to kidnap the Pope is unveiled. A priest calls on the widow Countess de Guy de Saint-Prix, Julius’s younger sister just after her return from her father’s funeral in Paris and regales her with the extraordinary tale of the Pope’s demise. And here there is an author interjection, a sidestep of the story plot to tell of the factual plot, as the story was inspired by real events that occurred in 1893 by a gang of fraudsters, taking advantage of the Pope’s sympathies toward the French Revolution.

“Whether God’s representative on earth could have been abducted from the Holy See and, by the intervention of the Quirinal, stolen from all of Christendom as it were, is an excessively thorny problem which I do not have the temerity to raise in these pages. But it is a historical fact that, around the end of 1893, rumours were circulating to that effect. It goes without saying that numerous devoted souls became deeply agitated. A pamphlet on the subject appeared in Saint-Malo and was suppressed. …There is no doubt that countless pious souls made financial sacrifices, but it was dubious whether all those who received donations were genuine campaigners, or whether some were perhaps fraudsters.”

The priest wishes the Countess to make a significant donation, so she rushes off to see Madame Fleurissoire, the younger sister of Véronique and Marguerite and wife of our genuine hero Monsieur Amédée Fleurissoire. Hearing about all the fuss Fleurissoire decides he must leave Pau and travel to Rome himself to see what can be done.

Book Four is The Millipede (the centipede) which continues to follow the travels of Amédée, the presence of the gang undetected. He is intercepted at the station and brought to slovenly rooms, where we again meet Carola and he is taken on a bit of a wild goose chase to Naples and back, bumping into Julius who has also appeared in Rome.

Then Book Five brings us back to Lafcadio, raised by his mother and five uncles, across different European countries, he is at home everywhere, but belongs nowhere. After his encounter with Julius’s dying father, he too decides to take the train south, but he is heading for adventure, his destination Borneo. He is the anti-hero, the free spirit, parentless, he lives without obligation or restraint, he can do as he pleases, provided he has the means. His charm takes care of that.

And what happens when they all find themselves in Rome? For that you’ll need to read the book.

As the literary critic Albert Guerard said:

“Perhaps only the maligned casual reader sees that les Caves du Vatican is above all a very funny book.”

It is a book that Gide had in the back of his mind for 20 years before writing it and many of the scenes were inspired from aspects of his own life or those close to him. For example, Anthime’s conversion is said to be based on Emile Zola’s Freemason cousin, who abjured his atheism in a public ceremony at a church in Rome.

The Vatican Cellars is an entertaining, easy read and can be intellectually stimulating if you are interested to analyse it further. I enjoyed it very much and all the more for having read around it, dipping into some of the published literary essays to understand the intentions of the author and the responses of the critics.

He was a humble author with a fascinating intellect who refused to accept literary prizes and acknowledgement at home, until it came to the Nobel, which he felt would have gone to Paul Valéry, if not for his untimely death and accepted it without reserve, though he was too ill to receive it in person.

In an open letter to several leading Swedish newspapers which had sought interviews, Gide confessed that he had received the Nobel Prize:

“with deep emotion, with tears in my eyes, like a schoolboy who has won a prize.”

I leave you with this very funny anecdote that I picked up from an essay by the critic George D.Painter.

“On 7 January 1930 Gide was returning by train from Toulon to Paris with Jacques de Lacretelle. At the opposite table, which was covered with flowers, sat a honeymoon couple, the husband engrossed in The Vatican Swindle. It was the first time Gide had ever seen a stranger reading himself. ‘Here’s your chance,’ said Lacretelle, ‘Tell him who you are – write him a dedication!’ But to do this, Gide would have had to feel sure that the unknown liked the book. Suddenly the young man pulled out a penknife. Good heavens, was he about, like Lafcadio, to plunge it in his thigh? But no, worse still, he seemed to intend to cut the book itself in pieces, and Lacretelle was seized with a fou rire. With great care the bridegroom cut the threads of the binding, detached the part he had read, handed it to his young wife; and both buried themselves in their reading.”

Note: Thank you most kindly to Gallic Books for sending me a copy of the book.

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