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Yellowface by R. F. Kuang

Yellowface is a satirical novel about the publishing industry and cultural appropriation, by the New York Times bestselling author R.F. Kuang who wrote the equally popular, ambitious novel about the British Empire Babel.

Being so popular, I had seen it pop up in many bookish places, but what made me get a copy and find out for myself was listening to writer and journalist Afua Hirsch’s one minute description of it here. Her commentary is so interesting, I share part of it below.

Afua Hirsch created the podcast We Need to Talk About the British Empire where she talked to six different people about their family history and education, in the context of the British Empire and colonisation.

Literary Opportunity or Cultural Theft

Yellowface is a fascinating look into the game of being a published writer, the universe of social media, the dangers of cultural appropriation, cancel culture, revenge and who can get away with things and who can not.

Two women, June Hayward and Athena Liu, who knew each other while at university, who may or may not have been close, are now launched into their adult lives as newly published writers, one a rising star, the other fast becoming a nobody.

It is a kind of psychological thriller, as June capitalises on the death of her friend, rebranding herself to take advantage of what she is planning to do. To steal her friend’s unpublished work. But can someone who has none of the life experience of their protagonist or witness to the testimony of people interviewed, get away with convincing readers of the authenticity of their work?

“Quirky, aloof and erudite” is Athena’s brand. “Commercial, and compulsively readable yet still exquisitely literary,” I’ve decided, will be mine.

Authorial Projection or Authentic Voice

Ironically, the one thing that doesn’t ring true is the main protagonist, a white girl appropriating her Asian friend’s work and passing it off as her own. Kuang writes from this perspective, a role she is required to step into, and perhaps because we can see she is not that, it felt a little like acting. Therein lies the point, that the only way to be authentic is to be authentic.

Of course, I have my detractors. The more popular a book becomes, the more popular it becomes to hate on said book, which is why revulsion for Rupi Kaur’s poetry has become a millennial personality trait. The majority of my reviews on Goodreads are five stars, but the one-star reviews are vitriolic. Uninspired colonizer trash, one reads. Another iteration of the white woman exploitation sob story formula: copy, paste, change the names, and voila, bestseller, reads another.

A riveting read, if you’re prepared to follow the paranoid delusions of a writer playing a risky game, but along the way we learn all about the world that certain writers aspire to, that of traditional publishing and the very capitalist desire to overcome all obstacles in pursuit of profit, with little regard for the exploitation of other cultures, the dead and vulnerable.

Have you read Babel or Yellowface?

Further Reading

The Guardian: Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang – a wickedly funny publishing thriller

New York Times: Yellowface review: Her Novel Became a Bestseller. The Trouble: She Didn’t Write It.

Author, R. F. Kuang

Rebecca F. Kuang is the #1 New York Times and #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy, Babel: An Arcane History, Yellowface, and Katabasis (forthcoming). Her work has won the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, and British Book Awards.

A Marshall Scholar, she has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford. She is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale, where she studies Sinophone literature and Asian American literature.

Afua Hirsch on Reading Yellowface

It is the story of two young women, one of Chinese heritage, the other white, who become intertwined in a complicated way, and it’s really about, in my opinion, the reality of what happens when someone who does not have the lived experience of a character they are writing about, attempts to tell a story in that person’s world, but lacks the complexity, the perspective and the humility to know that there is an integrity to that experience that they don’t share and the result is something problematic, no matter how much research that person has done. 

I relate to that and I think that my position on cultural appropriation is that we shouldn’t police the stories we can tell, but if you are going to tell the story of somebody whose life and perspective and truth is very different to yours, you better be prepared to acknowledge what you don’t know and ask yourself hard questions about whether you can do justice to that story. 

The character in this book doesn’t and it is a great morality tale of what happens when somebody who doesn’t have that credibility insists on taking up space.

I also think this book is a metaphor for something deeper about western cultures and how they have been predatory for centuries, not just the land and the resources of other people, which we talk about a lot in the history of colonisation, but the intellectual property, the ideas, the art, the genius, the innovation of other cultures. Afua Hirsch

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Sagittarius by Natalia Ginzburg (1957) tr. Avril Bardoni

After just finishing Domenico Starnone’s The House on Via Gemito (my review here) featuring a domineering father, it felt appropriate to read another Italian author Natalia Ginzburg and her fictional account of a domineering mother.

The Interfering Parent

However, Ginzburg’s parent in the novella Sagittarius might be considered timid compared to Starnone’s Federico. While she is over invested in the lives of her two daughters, they seem able to pursue their own desires in spite of her interference.

Fed up with life in a small town she moves to the suburb of a city to be closer to her sisters, who run a china shop and her student daughter (who narrates the story), then demands that her second daughter and husband move with her, she has promised to give him money to set up a practice.

What he needed was a practice of his own in a good central location. My mother had promised to give him the money for this as soon as she had won a certain lawsuit against the local council in Dronero, concerning a property dispute; she had made the promise lightly, finding it easy to part with money that was so far away and so unlikely ever to be hers; the litigation had already dragged on for more than three years, and Cousin Teresa’s husband, a solicitor, had told us that our chances of winning were nil.

Photo by Ylanite Koppens on Pexels.com

We learn she disapproves of the husband Chaim, a Jewish Polish Doctor with only one brother left in his family, having lost his family in wartime. She was initially distraught over the one that got away, – a rich, blond, young man her daughter met on holiday, until she became ill and her mother arrived – not realising that her overbearing parental behaviour might have had something to do with it. She had done everything to ensure her daughter would marry well.

Every time she thought about the boy with the blond crew cut my mother became enraged. Not one spark of generosity had he shown! No crumb of comfort had he offered! And to think he had disappeared without even saying goodbye! Without a single word of any kind: The very memory of the blond crew cut and of the afternoon spent with is family now filled her with disgust.

There were days when my mother was almost as bored in town as she had been in Dronero. She already knew the central shopping district like the back of her hand, having walked the length and breadth of it looking for suitable premises, small but attractive, for her art gallery; but the rents were all extremely high and, besides; another problem was beginning to occur to her, that of finding painters willing to show in her gallery. She knew nobody.

Making Friends in the City

Finding it more lonely and isolating than she imagined, she is happy when she meets Pricilla (call me Scilla), a woman who (eventually) listens to her dreams and desires and seems in tune with them and even willing to partner with her on her project to open an art gallery.

My mother was now anxious to talk about her gallery project but was unable to get a word in edgeways because Signora Fontana never stopped chattering for an instant.

In her dogged pursuit of ambition, and desperate desire for a true friend, she overlooks important signs that perhaps all is not as it should be and naively keeps her plans to herself, avoiding criticism or advice from any of her family members that might have lead her to question her association – though probably not.

A Greek Mythology Warning

Photo by Damir on Pexels.com

It is no coincidence that Ginzburg names her character Scilla, that name immediately conjured up for me the creature Scylla lurking in the sea that enticed ships onto the rocks. She is adept at luring men into a perilous and rocky waterway, thus as I read, every person that Scilla was connected to, became for me, a potential villain or obstacle in her path, some perhaps by accident, others by design.

Scilla convinces her friend to wait on the art gallery project and invites her in on another shop idea. They will decide on a name, Scilla’s zodiac sign, Sagittarius, one that could easily be transferred to an art gallery.

Ultimately she will be confronted with her own poor judgement, both those she put her trust in that she should not have and those who she neglected and would be there for her in her downfall.

This novella is often read with the excellent Valentino which I read earlier in the year and loved. Sagittarius is a little more predictable, whereas for me, Valentino was exceptional, my favourite of the two, but I highly recommend them both and look forward to reading more Ginzburg this year.

Further Reading

My reviews of other Natalia Ginzburg works: Family Lexicon (memoir), The Dry Heart (debut novel), Valentino (novella)

JacquiWine’s Journal reviews Valentino and Sagittarius

Author, Natalia Ginzburg

Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) was born in Palermo, Sicily. She wrote dozens of essays, plays, short stories and novels, including Voices in the Evening, All Our Yesterdays and Family Lexicon, for which she was awarded the prestigious Strega Prize in 1963.

Her work explored family relationships, politics and philosophy during and after the Fascist years, World War II. Modest and intensely reserved, Ginzburg never shied away from the traumas of history, whether writing about the Turin of her childhood, the Abruzzi countryside or contemporary Rome—approaching those traumas indirectly, through the mundane details and catastrophes of personal life.

She was involved in political activism throughout her life and served in the Italian parliament between 1983 to 1987. Animated by a profound sense of justice, she engaged with passion in various humanitarian issues, such as the lowering of the price of bread, support for Palestinian children, legal assistance for rape victims and reform of adoption laws. 

She died in Rome in 1991 at the age of seventy-five.

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Why Did You Come Back Every Summer by Belén López Peiró (Argentina) tr. Maureen Shaughnessy

It’s been a good couple of weeks for Charco Press, with Not a River by Selva Almada (translated by Annie McDermott) on the shortlist for the International Booker Prize 2024 and Of Cattle and Men by Ana Paula Maia (translated by Zoë Perry) winning the Republic Of Consciousness Prize 2024.

An Unforgettable Summer

social legal justice #metoo voices silenced

This week I picked up Why Did You Come Back Every Summer from the 2024 Bundle, originally published in Spanish in 2018 as Por qué volvias cada verano and published in English for the first time in April 2024.

What a book.

A young woman experiences sexual abuse by a family member when she is a teenager. Some years later she reveals what happened. And there are all kinds of responses, reactions, accusations, procedures and legal processes.

Testimony or Treason

In this lucid text, a chorus of voices speak. Often they are speaking to her, only we do not hear her voice. We hear one side of conversations. We hear what they have all said. We see what they are all doing. We understand the selfish human inclination to protect one’s own. We become witness to observing a victim in need of love and support being hung out to dry.

In between the commentaries, are the affidavits. Short, streamlined, neutral texts presented in old fashioned type that all begin and end the same way, with their two or three salient points contained within.

Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

The voices that speak are presented on the right hand page, the left hand page remains blank. It gives the text momentum, the pages pass quickly. The voices say so much more, they incriminate.

The legal texts are more dense, no white space between paragraphs and they cover consecutive pages. There is no space for reflection or consideration, as we read we can hear the sound of the keys typewriter striking the ribbon.

#MeToo Movement and the Sharing of Stories

The process for pursuing justice, rather than protect or bring about resolution, too often results in making the lives of women even worse. To pursue justice threatens exposure, judgement, scorn, rift, ostracism, it brings shame. It reached a tipping point in 2017 with the #MeToo movement. Frustrated, women began to share their stories, it was the only thing left to do and when it was done as a collective, it created community and support, if not justice. Long buried trauma rose to the surface, if not for justice, to begin to heal a wound of womanhood.

Reading Why Did You Come Back Every Summer reminded me of the recent documentary You Are Not Alone: Fighting the Wolf Pack, a Spanish feature film about a young woman seeking justice after a terrifying ideal at Spain’s iconic ‘running of the bulls’. Produced in secret, the film is told through the words of the victim survivors and recounts the mass protests the case sparked on account of the injustice experienced.

More than a million women and girls took to the streets chanting “Sister, I do believe you” and broke their silence on social media with #Cuéntalo (“Tell Your Story”).

There are many ways to share a story and Belén López Peiró has created a work of art that honours an experience that changed a young girls life forever, putting it into a form that has already become a literary, social and political phenomenon in her country and beyond.

It is a justice-seeking oeuvre narrated through a cacophony of voices that gives power to the unsaid, that allows the quiet to echo resoundingly, that shines a light on yet another shadow of humanity.

Highly Recommended.

Author, Bélen López Peiró

Belén López Peiró studied journalism and communication sciences in Buenos Aires University and has recently completed an MA in Creative Writing at the Barcelona’s Pompeu Fabra University. She currently coordinates non-fiction writing workshops with a gender perspective. 

Why Did You Come Back Every Summer is her debut novel. In 2021 she published her second book Donde no hago pie (Nowhere to Stand) which narrates the legal process the author went through to bring her abuser to justice.

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Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses 2024

Now in its 8th year, The Republic of Consciousness Prize is an annual literary prize aimed to support small and independent presses in the UK and Ireland. The organisation supports and recognises the work of those presses considered vital to the United Kingdom’s literary culture.

They state their purpose as:

“To advance for the public benefit literary fiction of the highest merit from small presses in the UK and Ireland through a range of reading, speaking and event initiatives, and by providing grants and assistance to practitioners and producers of literary fiction.”

Ground Breaking Experimental Works of Fiction

By their very nature, they are more likely to be ground-breaking experimental works that mainstream publishers consider commercially risky, although when one of these novels takes off, they are often ready to step in.

It is where we are likely to come across innovative forms of writing, therefore you either have to be a brave and adventurous reader, or practice a certain level of discernment, in order to find those titles that might appeal if you are less of a risk taker in reading.

Reading Outside the Comfort Zone

I like to see what titles the prize is considering, though they are generally a little too avant-garde for me. This year, I discovered I had read one title that was on the longlist and then it made the shortlist, so of course I was hoping it would win!

No doubt if you follow me here, you will have guessed which press it was – Yes, it was a Charco Press title. Charco Press publish outstanding works of mostly Latin American contemporary fiction in translation and you can support them by subscribing to their annual 2024 bundle. You won’t regret it!

Another Winner From Charco Press

Yesterday, from a shortlist of five books, the winner was announced, which the judges described as:

“A stunning thriller of sorts. So understated. So powerful. So heartbreaking. Worked for me completely on both the level of a human story and as a warning parable for our times.“

Of Cattle and Men by Ana Paula Maia (Brazil) translated by Zoë Perry (Portuguese)

I read Of Cattle and Men (link to my review here) in May 2023 and it was one I could not put down until I finished. Deeply evocative of slaughterhouse communities and institutions, it opens a channel to consideration of the consciousness of bovines and depicts man in his basest form, driven to paranoia by what he can not understand or control and therefore seeks to destroy.

The writing is compelling and thought provoking, it is suggestive in a way that provokes the reader’s imagination, without being explicit about what might be being suggested. I thought it was excellent. And a year later, it has stayed with me.

When night falls, the residents of Ruminant Valley tend to shut their doors and windows tight. They believe that everything that seems improbable during the day can overcome the darkness. It’s when thoughts that were once impossible become possible; when hushed whispers swell, and above all, when that layer of darkness cloaks anything suspicious. The figures, the voids, the long shadows, all of it brought on by the night, which is immense, and its reaches infinite.

Highly Recommended.

Warning: Not for the squeamish.

Further Reading

Granta: Read an extract from Of Cattle and Men

Guardian: Charco Press wins Republic of Consciousness prize for ‘gut-punch’ novel by Ella Creamer

Human Ecology Research Paper: A Social History of the Slaughterhouse: From Inception to Contemporary Implications (2010) by Amy J.Fitzgerald, Depart of Sociology & Anthropology, University of Windsor, Canada

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The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone (Italy) tr. Oonagh Stransky

That was quite an experience.

Starnone writes a work of fiction about the man his father was (we can assume it is autobiographical since his father’s name was Federico and he painted an artwork titled ‘The Drinkers’ which is in part featured on the cover). It is an attempt to tell the story of a man he spent his childhood in fear of and his adulthood trying not to be like.

Reconstructing a Life, Walking the Streets

In the novel, the narrator is the eldest son Mimi, who lives in Rome but has returned to Naples some time after the death of his father and is reconstructing memories, by walking the streets where they lived, visiting certain places to evoke other memories, like the hospital where his mother was when her husband could no longer deny her illness; the church where he made his first communion; the council offices, where he hopes to find some of his father’s paintings, including ‘The Drinkers’. Every location existed in service to his father’s existence and memories.

He was certain that both great and small events had a common thread: the mystery of his destiny. And he constantly tried to prove it to himself, his relatives, his friends, and to us children by weaving a vibrant pattern in which the only events that were true were the ones vitally connected to him. Consequently, all the names of cities and buildings and roads, all of geography, served merely to create a map of his needs, and this was how they were to be remembered.

Though the novel is about the man, the title refers to a street where they lived for a while and the use of street names rather than diary entries or even artworks, inscribes the neighbourhood into history, creating a different kind of legacy, one that will last longer than any man or work of art. A diary would be too intimate, a street map a kind of canvas.

Portrait of a Narcissist Father Via His Eldest Son

It is also about his own boyhood, however the character of the father overshadows the son, his wife, his wife’s family, in fact anyone in proximity to him. This is because he considers himself superior. According to himself. He makes it one of his main purposes in life to remind everyone around him of that fact. He can not be taken down or made to think he is anything less than how he perceives himself.

It’s true, he was lazy. He was arrogant. He was blowhard. He was all those things, and the first to admit it. He felt he had the right to be lazy, arrogant, and a blowhard – to anyone who busted his balls. He was born to be a painter, not a railroader.

The son walks familiar streets of Naples, streets he never strolled with his father – but knew intimately from his adolescence – as a way to navigate anecdotes about the way his father lived his life, the things he said (mostly insults about everyone else), the things he did (working for the railroad as a clerk, beating his wife, painting artworks) and his opinions about various matters. He walks and remembers. He walks and imagines anew.

A Determined Artist Perseveres

historical fiction Paris 1939 Domenico Starnone House on via gemito
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Federi is passionate about art and believes he possesses great artistic talent, but the art world is full of shit people who nominate their friends for prizes, then their friends create prizes and nominate those friends, therefore keeping him out of these circles. He blames everyone for his lack of success that he continues to strive for. Beginning with his own father who refused to educate him, in fact his parents abandoned him at a young age and sent him to live with his grandmother.

He becomes a working class man, who sees the most beautiful woman who he takes for a wife, raises four sons and a daughter and spends his free time at home painting or pursuing opportunities to advance his art.

A Literary Triptych

The book is in three sections. The first section ‘The Peacock’ introduces the character and is the part of the book where you might abandon, because it isn’t yet clear why it might benefit any reader to be subject to this psychological demonstration of one of the most extreme versions of the societal system of domination at work. The patriarchy thrives under this system, as Riane Eisler showed in her work The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future and Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future and the portrait this novel creates shows how someone who lives according to this conditioning impacts those in his proximity. Cycles of trauma, neglect and narcissism eroding relationships in pursuit of validation, not love.

A Masterpiece Created at All Cost

Much of the source material is inspired by journals his father kept, which trigger memories and dates of events he participated in. The artworks themselves are a kind of journal, a record of themes in his life. Part Two ‘The Boy Pouring Water’ is the most compelling and significant section, it documents the process of creating the largest, most significant art work he would do. ‘The Drinkers’ required the son to pose as the boy pouring water, other members of the family sat for him and the local fruit and vegetable seller.

The anxiety the young son would feel when he realises that there is a problem in the image, between the character holding out the glass and where he is pouring from will cause contortions of magnitude in him, to try and avoid the disaster he sees coming. His father never sees it and we think for a moment that the drama has been averted, alas no – disaster arrives at the height of his short-lived pleasure.

So why do we want to read a novel about an egomaniac? And one that was originally published just over 20 years ago.

It is both a psychological example of the effect a man with no empathy and worse, a need to belittle, insult and induce fear in people, can have on a family. It is set against a backdrop of 1960’s Naples, post WWII, a place where allegiances often changed, both in the halls of power and on the street, depending on how ‘enemies or allies’ treated the people.

It is the historical context and the journey of a working class man trying to break into the establishment of artists, who despite his unruly personality, perseveres and participates as much as is possible for someone who won’t allow himself to be intimidated. Everything is a struggle, he will fight to the end. Art ‘wasn’t fun, it was war’.

Fortunately as the years passed, I developed a strategy for blocking out his words. Using this technique, which I perfected as a teenager, the angrier he grew when telling the stories of his life and the reasons for his actions, the thicker the fog grew in my head, allowing me to think about other things. It helped establish a distance between us. It curbed the desire to kill him.

Fatherhood in Another Era, Produce, Punish, Protect

In the final part ‘The Dancer’ the humiliation of the son comes full circle as he enters adolescence and tries to impress a girl Nunzia and his father gives him terrible advice about what to do with women. As if things couldn’t get any worse, we learn that young girl has been abused by an Uncle and the son lies waiting for his fathers verdict.

The book ends with a scene that makes the reader pause to reflect on how reliable the narrator is, like the father, he too has the ability to exaggerate, to curate anecdotes and perspective.

Once I got into this, which didn’t take very long, I found it both shocking and compelling to read, the dedication by a son to honoring the passage of a man who made his boyhood hell. Thus he provides a kind of validation beyond the grave, but doesn’t hold back from focusing on the many flaws alongside the talent. It is the many layers that make it something of a classic, the psychological profile and repeat patterns of the man, the making of an artist and the impact on family and the social history of a city.

Highly Recommended.

‘The House on Via Gemito is a marvellous novel of Naples and its environs during and after the Second World War. The prism for this exploration is the relationship between the narrator and his railway worker / artist father – an impossible man, filled with cowardice and boastfulness. His son’s attempt to understand and forgive him is compelling; we are held through the minutiae of each argument and explosion, each hope and almost-success.’ International Booker Judges

Further Reading

New York Times Review June 2023: My Father The Frustrated Artist

A Reading Guide – The House on Via Gemito, International Booker Prize 2024

Read An Extract from the Opening Chapter here

To see the artwork of Federico Starnone visit https://starnone.it/gallery2/

Author, Domenico Starnone

About the author

Domenico Starnone is an Italian writer, screenwriter and journalist. He was born in Naples and lives in Rome

He is the author of 13 works of fiction, including First Execution, Ties, a New York Times Editors Pick and Notable Book of the Year, and a Sunday Times and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year, Trick, a Finalist for the 2018 National Book Award and the 2019 PEN Translation Prize, and Trust. 

The House on Via Gemito won Italy’s most prestigious literary prize, the Strega in 2001 and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024.

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Not a River by Selva Almada (Argentina) tr. Annie McDermott

Not a River has just been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024.

Opening Lines and Book Covers

International Booker Prize longlist 2024 Argentinian literature Spanish translation

I read the opening line and let it tell me as much as possible about the story I am about to read.

“Enero Ray, standing firm on the boat, stocky and beardless, swollen-bellied, legs astride, stares hard at the surface of the river and waits, revolver in hand.”

It’s a Charco Press title, so there is always a thought provoking abstract image on the cover, that never fails to contribute to the understanding of what the book has to say. This one shows twin rivers, fed by tributaries, running red.

It is clear that will be blood, death, perhaps menace and/or violence – and more than one episode. Just as the water of the smaller channels has no choice but to flow into the main river, so too the intent of a man standing firm, awaiting his prey. But who/what else will the river claim?

To Understand Any Story We Circle Back

Not a River tells a story, not in a linear way, but in a circular fashion, beginning with two men El Negro and Enero and a boy Tilo, on a fishing trip; circling back to a previous trip when Eusubio was with them, slowly revealing the memory that is acting on both men and what happened to their friend. The fishing trip is further disturbed by a visit from ‘a local’ whose questions unsettle the trio.

The second tributary/narrative follows Siomara and her two daughters Lucy and Mariela. The girls are entering womanhood, the mother is becoming more protective.

Photo V. Bagacian Pexels.com

Siomara was in one of those phases she sometimes went through, when she was grouchier than usual. Saying no to everything and dealing out punishments and bans for no reason. All because she could see how the two girls were growing, how little by little they were slipping away, how sooner or later they were going to leave her as well.

She lights fires as a way to deal with her emotions, she has done so since she was a girl. She seems to be lighting them a lot recently.

Sometimes she thinks the fire talks to her. Not like a person does, not with words. But there’s something in the crackle, the soft sound of the flames, as if she could almost hear the air burning away, yes, something, right there, that speaks to her alone…
Come on, you know you want to.
It says.

Again the story turns on itself, something has happened here too, sometimes the mother is living in the past, the present too much for her. The girls hear about a dance and plan to go.

Lucy wants to be a hairdresser. She wants to give other woman those moments of peace her mother seems to feel when she is doing her hair.

The narrative moves back and forth like the tide, people in the community are connected and affected by events that occur at the river. Paths cross, fates intertwine. It is necessary to let go of needing to know whether we are in the past or the present. If certain events happened before or after others. We accept each part of the story’s mosaic, see how they fit together, until all the pieces have been laid.

A summer like this one. Twenty years back, a summer like this one. The same island or the next one along or the one after that. In the memory it’s all just the island, with no name or exact coordinates.

The longer the men stay in the forest, the more uneasy they feel about what they have done, what has happened in the past and how unwelcome and out of place they feel. Invited to a dance, they leave their campsite for the evening.

Dreams and a Queue for the Healer

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Enero has a disturbing dream, twice.

Eusubio looked at him and thought for a moment.
We need to go see my godfather. He knows about this stuff.
He said.

Mariela also has a dream, she tells her sister Lucy about it.

And what happened in the dream?
I don’t know, like I say I just had a kind of flashback. It was weird, there were lights and sirens.

There is a sense of the repetitive cycles of the generations, girls hide from their families, they grow up to become a mother who can’t help but try and prevent their child from repeating the same mistakes. To keep them safe.

She pretends not to hear. Still just about strong enough to resist. But for how much longer.
One day, she knows she will answer the fires’s call.

In less than 100 pages, Not a River depicts disparate elements of a broken community, marginalised families, their efforts to bond, heal, escape, punish, revel and cope with the aftermath of it all.

Selva Almada’s paragraphs are like brushstrokes on a canvas, each one contributes to the story and is necessary in order to see beyond it.

The characters in my novel, men and women who live on what the river can provide, are a reflection of what the neo-liberalism of the 1990s has done to Argentina: impoverishing it, condemning a significant part of its citizens to poverty and marginalization.

Selva Almada

Highly Recommended for fans of thought provoking literary fiction.

Further Reading

Tony’s Reading list – review of Not a River

Booker Prize Website: Q & A with Author & Translator

My review of The Wind that Lays Waste

Selva Almada, Author

Selva Almada is considered one of the most powerful voices of contemporary Argentinian and Latin American literature and one of the most influential feminist intellectuals of the region.

Compared to Carson McCullers, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Sara Gallardo and Juan Carlos Onetti, Almada has published several novels, a book of short stories and a book of journalistic fiction. She has also published a film diary, written on the set of Lucrecia Martel’s film Zama, based on Antonio di Benedetto’s novel.

She has been a finalist for the Medifé Prize, the Rodolfo Walsh Award and of the Tigre Juan Award. Her work has been translated into French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Swedish and Turkish. 

Not a River (shortlisted for the Vargas Llosa Prize for Novels) is her fourth book to appear in English after The Wind that Lays Waste (Winner of the EIBF First Book Award 2019), Dead Girls (2020), and Brickmakers (2021).

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International Booker Prize shortlist 2024

The shortlist for the International Booker Prize 2024 has been decided. It features novels from six countries, (Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Netherlands, South Korea and Sweden), translated from Dutch, German, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish.

Chair of judges Eleanor Wachtel said:

‘Our shortlist, while implicitly optimistic, engages with current realities of racism and oppression, global violence and ecological disaster’

Prize Administrator Fiammetta Rocco added:

‘The books cast a forensic eye on divided families and divided societies, revisiting pasts both recent and distant to help make sense of the present’ 

Read Around the World, Other Perspectives

The International Booker Prize introduces readers to the best novels and short story collections from around the globe that have been translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland. Recognising the vital work of translators, the £50,000 prize money is divided equally: £25,000 for the author and £25,000 for the translator(s).

The shortlist was chosen from a longlist of 13 titles announced in March, which was selected from 149 books published in the UK and/or Ireland between May 1, 2023 and April 30, 2024, submitted to the prize by publishers. 

I have read one from the shortlist and it was excellent; Selva Almada’s Not a River (link to my review), the second of her novella’s I have read. Not having read any others on this list, I can’t really comment, but I would love to know what you thought if you have read any of these, or intend to. Brief summaries below.

The Shortlist

Not a River by Selva Almada (Argentina) tr. by Annie McDermott

International Booker Prize longlist 2024 Argentinian literature Spanish translation

Selva Almada’s novel is the finest expression yet of her compelling style and singular vision of rural Argentina.

Three men go out fishing, returning to a favourite spot on the river despite their memories of a terrible accident there years earlier. As a long, sultry day passes, they drink and cook and talk and dance, and try to overcome the ghosts of their past. But they are outsiders, and this intimate, peculiar moment also puts them at odds with the inhabitants of this watery universe, both human and otherwise. The forest presses close, and violence seems inevitable, but can another tragedy be avoided?

Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong (Korea) tr. Sora Kim-Russell, Youngjae Josephine Bae

An epic, multi-generational tale that threads together a century of Korean history. 

Centred on three generations of a family of rail workers and a laid-off factory worker staging a high-altitude sit-in, Mater 2-10 vividly depicts the lives of ordinary working Koreans, starting from the Japanese colonial era, continuing through Liberation, and right up to the twenty-first century. 

What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthum (Netherlands) tr. Sarah Timmer Harvey

A deeply moving exploration of grief, told in brief, precise vignettes and full of gentle melancholy and surprising humour.

What if one half of a pair of twins no longer wants to live? What if the other can’t live without them? This question lies at the heart of Jente Posthuma’s deceptively simple What I’d Rather Not Think About. The narrator is a twin whose brother has recently taken his own life. She looks back on their childhood, and tells of their adult lives: how her brother tried to find happiness, but lost himself in various men and the Bhagwan movement, though never completely. 

Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior (Brazil) tr. Johnny Lorenz

A fascinating and gripping story about the lives of subsistence farmers in Brazil’s poorest region.

Deep in Brazil’s neglected Bahia hinterland, two sisters find an ancient knife beneath their grandmother’s bed and, momentarily mystified by its power, decide to taste its metal. The shuddering violence that follows marks their lives and binds them together forever.

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (Germany) tr. Michael Hofmann

An intimate and devastating story of the path of two lovers through the ruins of a relationship, set against the backdrop of a seismic period in European history.

Berlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgive her and a dangerous crack forms between them, opening up a space for cruelty, punishment and the exertion of power. And the world around them is changing too: as the GDR begins to crumble, so too do all the old certainties and the old loyalties, ushering in a new era whose great gains also involve profound loss. 

The Details by Ia Genberg (Sweden) tr. Kira Josefsson

In exhilarating, provocative prose, Ia Genberg reveals an intimate and powerful celebration of what it means to be human.

A famous broadcaster writes a forgotten love letter; a friend abruptly disappears; a lover leaves something unexpected behind; a traumatised woman is consumed by her own anxiety. In the throes of a high fever, a woman lies bedridden. Suddenly, she is struck with an urge to revisit a particular novel from her past. Inside the book is an inscription: a message from an ex-girlfriend. Pages from her past begin to flip, full of things she cannot forget and people who cannot be forgotten. Johanna, that same ex-girlfriend, now a famous TV host. Niki, the friend who disappeared all those years ago. Alejandro, who appears like a storm in precisely the right moment. And Birgitte, whose elusive qualities shield a painful secret. Who is the real subject of a portrait, the person being painted or the one holding the brush?

The Winner

The International Booker Prize 2024 ceremony will take place from 7pm BST on Tuesday, 21 May. It is being held for the first time in the Turbine Hall at London’s Tate Modern.

Highlights from the event, including the announcement of the winning book for 2024, will be livestreamed on the Booker Prizes’ channels, presented by Jack Edwards. 

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Penelope Unbound by Mary Morrissy (2023)

I bought this in anticipation of learning more about the life of Norah Barnacle, the wife of James Joyce, having already enjoyed the experience that Nuala O’Connor created in her wonderful novel Nora: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce. O’Connor succeeds in creating a well rounded character and depicts the precarious situation this young couple endure, trying to survive on meagre freelance writings living as expats in a tumultuous Europe.

I knew that this would be different, because Mary Morrissy takes a significant turning point in their relationship and changes everything that happens to them beyond that day. After they have left/eloped from Dublin, been to Paris and now arriving in Trieste, Italy to begin their lives anew. This reimagined period in their lives covers a mere ten years, from their arrival in Trieste on 20 October, 1904 to their return to Dublin on 15 June 1915.

A Sliding Doors Moment

Norah Barnacle James Joyce Irish literature

Norah has enough experience to know what she doesn’t want and had already given Jim (the way she refers to James) a few ultimatums, one of them is not to leave her stranded, having been stood up before. So how long will a young woman wait, suitcase in hand, in a foreign country before deciding that she has been left?

This is the point where the author diverges from historical fact and after more than 9 hours waiting at the station, allows Nora to depart with someone other than the man she refers to as her husband Jim.

She’d thought of telling him how she waited for Jim, ten whole hours outside the railway station in Trieste, like a fool, the darkness falling and she weak from hunger, and still no sign of him. And not a farthing on her. Abandoned.

The novel begins four years later, in June 1916, back in Dublin; a day when we learn she is the owner of a boarding house and she leaves to go and wait outside a concert hall. We learn that the day before a man has come calling for her. Before the details of what this is about or who it is that visited – was it Jim or was it a foreign man she is clearly no longer with? It takes 40 pages, with many, many flashbacks – for her to descend the stairs to learn who is/was waiting for her, a clue to why she was waiting outside the concert hall. Snippets of the present, long swathes of memory.

She was Mrs Norah Smith now – that’s how she’d signed the contracts of sale, with the H back in her name that Jim Joyce had made her drop. She was Norah, after Hanorah, her grand-aunt. And she wasn’t going to let anyone from her past put her down.

Train approaching station tracks red light
Photo by Jerry Wang on Pexels.com

The novel then goes back 10 years to the train station in Trieste and the intervening story unfolds. Despite having not waited for him, Jim is never far from her thoughts and much about her new life causes her to relive episodes of their short time together.

Penelope ‘Unbound‘ did create an expectation that she might therefore create a life where she acquired some independence, perhaps some may perceive that she did. She remains bound to a household, perhaps even more so, due to her inability to speak the language and never entirely accepted by its inhabitants, apart from the one who rescued her.

Empowerment or Good Fortune?

The fact that it takes that many pages for the reader to learn what happens to Norah is the reason I don’t go into detail here, because that is the mystery at the centre of the story and the only true departure from historical fact. That realisation is for the prospective reader to wonder about and to discover themselves.

Her predicament in being tied to one person and household, dependent on him for everything, will ultimately provide her her liberty, because he will have created an unsustainable predicament for himself. But did Norah take charge of her destiny, or was she left with no choice?

She doesn’t know why but she finds her temper flaring. These men and their principles. With the Other Fella, it was marriage and how he couldn’t put a ring on her finger because of Mother Church, for crying out loud. But it was less of the church and more of the mother, if you asked Norah. His own poor ma was afflicted by that wastrel she married, and Jim said he had the same streak in him, and he’d only do the same to her. And why couldn’t you just stop yourself, she asked him, but she got no reply.

A Season or a Lifetime

The Paris Wife Norah Barnacle James Joyce

For me, the most significant decision she would make, was at the moment the second man abandons her, leaving her with some means. What she decides to do from that moment forward, is the true moment of ‘Penelope Unbound’, however it marks the end of the novel, not the beginning of her story.

As too often happens (I remember a similar feeling reading Hadley Richardson’s story in The Paris Wife), when the significant other (the famous writer, the man) exits the narrative, the story ends. Is the story more interesting learning how she came to obtain her independence, or what she might do, once she gets it?

And after all those years apart, we will wonder, do soulmates always find each in the end, even when they can not be together?

Further Reading

Guardian Review: Penelope Unbound by Mary Morrissy, masterly alternative life of Norah Barnacle by John Banville

My review of Mother of Pearl by Mary Morrissy

Author, Mary Morrissy

Dublin born Mary Morrissy is the author of three novels, Mother of Pearl, The Pretender and The Rising of Bella Casey, and two collections of stories, Lazy Eye and Prosperity Drive. Her short fiction has been anthologized widely and two of her novels have been nominated for the Dublin Literary Award. Her debut, Mother of Pearl was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award and she is the recipient of a Hennessy Literary Award.

She is a journalist, a teacher of creative writing and a literary mentor. She blogs on art, fiction and history at marymorrissy.com

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Girl in the Tunnel: My Story of Love and Loss as a Survivor of the Magdalene Laundries by Maureen Sullivan (2023)

This excellent memoir for me, was the anti-dote to the shortcomings I had with Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These.

My Story of Love and Loss as a Survivor of the Magdalene Laundries

Keegan’s novel does everything except go inside the establishment to find out who is in there, why and how they are being treated. Instead it focuses on one man who is portrayed as kindly and empathetic. That man will make a righteous action, whereas the author commits the sin of omission, maintaining a societal silence that continues to bind, in neglecting to shift the narrative gaze towards anything related to those unjustly incarcerated inside. Like standing to one side at the scene of a car accident, choosing to gaze at the sheep in the fields opposite.

Girl in the Tunnel is a memoir of childhood. Of a girl from a large blended family, who is removed from abuse and sent to one of Ireland’s notorious Magdalene laundries. Maureen Sullivan’s second paragraph of her Author’s Note in the front of the book speaks volumes.

It might surprise you, or it might not, to know that there are people still pushing me to stay silent. There are people who want this book kept from your hands. People who say to me in the street, ‘Would you not get over it?’ People who tell me to shut up about it – they defend men and they defend the Catholic Church.
But this is my story to tell and this is how I remember it.

Maureen was not even a teenager when she was taken from her school, from her family, from her loving Granny, without being told where she was going, only that she was to attend a new school and would have to live there. None of her questions were ever answered. She would be deposited at the Magdalene laundry in New Ross, County Wexford run by the Order of the Good Shepherd nuns. Stripped of her possessions including the new pencil case her mother bought her as she was leaving, she was thrown into forced labour, washing clothes, pressing linens and scrubbing floors, forbidden an education or contact with any of the children who attended the school there.

I changed most of the names in this book – my abuser, relatives, locals and the nuns – because I’m not out to hurt or for revenge. I wrote this book because I was silenced as a child when I was the victim of abuse and I was silenced by society when I left the laundry. I want people to know what happened. This is my history, but it’s also the history of this country.

Someone recently said to me that a great opening line of a book can foreshadow the entire story. When I go back and read the first line of Maureen’s memoir, I find so many of the reasons for what happened to her, there in that line.

I never knew my father, John L. Sullivan, but there was a photograph of him on the wall in my grandmother’s house.

Maureen’s mother was married, nineteen and pregnant with Maureen when her father died suddenly leaving two young sons and an unborn daughter. They lived with her Granny, her father’s mother, the only person in her life who ever spoke of the father she never knew. But her Granny was poor and her mother quickly married and created a new family with another man, Marty Murphy, who from very early on took out all his frustrations on the dead man’s children.

My brother’s and I were terrified of Marty from day one. He didn’t restrain himself and lost his temper in a second, sometimes for nothing you could place, and he would go for you, even in his boots, and his kicks would hurt for days. He really hated us. Or he hated himself, maybe, for what he couldn’t stop doing to us, but either way living with Marty was like living with the devil himself. We suffered every single day.

Photo T. Miroshnichenko Pexels.com

Maureen describes their lives in incredible and evocative detail. Being so poor and having so little, when she describes the few tender and joyous moments, they stand out in the narrative, as they clearly did in her mind as that child.

The way it is written is absolutely captivating, not because of the misery or injustices, but because of the emotional intelligence exhibited. It is so honest and evocative of the way a child would experience things, except that Maureen has grown up and is able to express the questions and thoughts she had as a child. But she does so, with an understanding of where her country and society is today and how it was then. Nevertheless, there is no excuse for the cruelty and lack of basic human rights she experienced. There is a lot that remains hidden and denied to this day.

It’s hard to imagine the reasons for people behaving as they did, given how fast Ireland has progressed, and it’s hard to imagine how my mother thought things through. I know now she had no choices – women were the property of their husbands. Their bodies belonged to the men they married, their children did too.

When Maureen responds to the kind voice of her favourite teacher at school and opens up to her questions, she believes that she is going to rescued, perhaps even go to live with her Granny. This idea of being with her Granny was so powerful, she told her everything.

So I told on him. I told on Marty. I sat there in that room with a chocolate in my mouth and an open heart and talked about it.

When her mother arrives after being called in by the school and sees Maureen sitting in the hallway, she asks her why she is not in class. And worse.

As she went by me, she turned and said, ‘Oh Maureen, what have you done?’ She knocked on the office door and disappeared through it.
What had I done?

That same day she would be removed and taken to the laundry. She would also be told that she had a new name. They all did.

For years I couldn’t figure out why our names were changed in the Magdalene laundries. What reason had they? A number would have made more sense to me if they wanted us to be nothing and nobody. But a number is a way to trace us, and it would have been unique. It would have been remembered and displayed somewhere. By changing our names they made sure, not that we struggled on the inside, but that on the outside we had no way to identify or find each other. And how could we stand as a witness to what went on there if there was nothing to say we had been there at all? We didn’t exist.

Magdalene laundries rosary factory
Photo Trac Vu on Pexels.com

Maureen describes all the work they do in the laundry by day and then the work they must do at night, in the tin boxes. It is revelatory and will not leave any reader unaffected.

Merely describing the day to day activities and routine of their lives, and who they were not – (at the time she was in New Ross none of the women there were pregnant), is captivating. A 1911 census referred to them as “inmates”, at New Ross they were referred to as penitents.

It means a person who seeks forgiveness for their sins. There were no sinners in New Ross. Just victims, victims of the patriarchy, victims of misogyny.

The tunnel was the long corridor that separated the sleeping area and the children’s school from the laundry. Every so often she would be locked in there. When the men in suits arrived.

Photo by R. Asmussen Pexels.com

Those men in suits were likely state inspectors. They were sent around to all of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland to check on conditions.

People like Maureen were not supposed to be in the laundry being used as child labour, so they were hidden.

Maureen’s story is an important record of the historical treatment of girls and young women in Ireland, and a testament to the proliferation of abuses in households and the historic risk of speaking out.

Sharing their stories can change things. Last year, one of the best books I read was another memoir Poor: Grit, courage, and the life-changing value of self-belief by Katriona O’Sullivan. That book has had and continues to have a significant impact in changing societal attitudes.

Perhaps more tellingly, as Justice for Magdalenes Research’s book notes, there were never any Magdalene laundries for men. There were no corresponding church-run rehabs for the men who abandoned their families, nor for those who put girls and women in those situations that landed them in institutions. RENÉ OSTBERG, National Catholic Reporter

Highly Recommended.

Further Reading

Book: Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries: A Campaign for Justice – the long battle for justice

Essays: A Dublin Magdalene Laundry: Donnybrook and Church-State Power in Ireland

Article: National Catholic Reporter: Book details long battle to get justice for Ireland’s Magdalene survivors by René Ostberg, April 30, 2022

Resources: Justice for Magdalene Research : A Resource for People Affected by and Interested in Ireland’s Magdalene Institutions

Resource: One In Four, Ending the Trauma of Childhood Sexual Abuse – Programs for Adult survivors

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International Booker Prize Longlist 2024

On 11 March the longlist for the International Booker Prize 2024 was announced. It was a notable celebration for Latin American fiction, with authors representing Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Venezuela on the list. 

The 13 novels cover 10 different languages, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, German, Albanian, Portuguese, Dutch, Korean, Polish and Russian. They span multiple genres and generations, as well as personal and national histories, oppressive regimes and the shadow of colonialism. Though they may seem unfamiliar, many have been bestsellers in their home countries.

Take the Quiz!

If you are not sure which of these books might be your style, you can do what I did, and take their quiz!

-> Quiz: which book from the International Booker Prize 2024 longlist should you read?

I’ll let you know which book they have recommended I read at the end of this post. If you take the quiz, let me know in the comments below which book came up for you.

The 13 Novels on the Longlist

The 13 books chosen by this year’s judges represent the best in translated fiction, published in the English language in the UK and Ireland selected from 149 books published between 1 May 2023 and 30 April 2024.

I have two on my shelf already, but not the one the quiz recommended I should read!

The titles are listed below with a description and the judges’ comment: 

Not a River by Selva Almada (Argentina), tr. Annie McDermott (Spanish) (#1 on my shelf)

– Selva Almada’s novel is the finest expression yet of her compelling style and singular vision of rural Argentina. 

Three men go out fishing, returning to a favourite spot on the river despite their memories of a terrible accident there years earlier. As a long, sultry day passes, they drink and cook and talk and dance, and try to overcome the ghosts of their past. But they are outsiders, and this intimate, peculiar moment also puts them at odds with the inhabitants of this watery universe, both human and otherwise. The forest presses close, and violence seems inevitable, but can another tragedy be avoided?

‘Not A River moves like water, in currents of dream and overlaps of time which shape the stories and memories of its protagonists. Enero and El Negro have brought their young friend and protégé Tilo on a fishing trip along the Paraná River in Argentina. The island where they set up camp pulses with its own desires and angers, tensions equal to those of the men who have come together on its shores. Alongside the story of these grief-marred characters, the author offers those of the women of the town – and what luck to root for or mourn them: the mother whose ever-growing fires engulf us, her two flirtatious, youth-glowed daughters, and the almost-mythical manta ray who becomes one of the guardians and ghosts of this throbbing, feverish novel.’ 

Simpatía by Rodrigo Blanco Calderon (Venezuela), tr. Noel Hernández González & Daniel Hahn (Spanish)

– A suspenseful novel with unexpected twists and turns about the agony of Venezuela and the collapse of Chavismo. 

Set in the Venezuela of Nicolas Maduro amid a mass exodus of the intellectual class who have been leaving their pets behind. Ulises Kan, the protagonist and a movie buff, receives a text message from his wife, Paulina, saying she is leaving the country (and him). Ulises is not heartbroken, but liberated by Paulina’s departure. As two other events end up disrupting his life even further, Ulises discovers that he has been entrusted with a mission – to transform Los Argonautas, the great family home, into a shelter for abandoned dogs. If he manages to do it in time, he will inherit the luxurious apartment that he had shared with Paulina.

‘In this realistic allegory set in Caracas during Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship, we meet Ulises, a former orphan who is desperate for a sense of purpose and belonging. His wife has just announced by text message that she is leaving him and his father-in-law has willed him Los Argonautas, a house of accumulating secrets and mythologies. Much like that of Jason of the Argonauts, Ulises’ inheritance is contingent on the completion of a task: to transform the house into a veterinary clinic and kennel for the stray dogs left behind by the elites who have fled the city. Within the madness and austerity of political corruption and historical revisioning, Ulises devotes himself to one of the saner choices left to him: complete the task by saving the dogs, with the help of his Medea-like lover, Nadine, and the leftover animal rescue and house staff. In doing so he simultaneously creates a chosen family and a practice of care that is a stronger balm for the heart than sympathy.’

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (Germany), tr. Michael Hofmann

– An intimate and devastating story of the path of two lovers through the ruins of a relationship, set against the backdrop of a seismic period in European history. 

Berlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgive her and a dangerous crack forms between them, opening up a space for cruelty, punishment and the exertion of power. And the world around them is changing too: as the GDR begins to crumble, so too do all the old certainties and the old loyalties, ushering in a new era whose great gains also involve profound loss. 

‘An expertly braided novel about the entanglement of personal and national transformations, set amid the tumult of 1980s Berlin. Kairos unfolds around a chaotic affair between Katharina, a 19-year-old woman, and Hans, a 53-year-old writer in East Berlin. Erpenbeck’s narrative prowess lies in her ability to show how momentous personal and historical turning points intersect, presented through exquisite prose that marries depth with clarity. She masterfully refracts generation-defining political developments through the lens of a devastating relationship, thus questioning the nature of destiny and agency. Kairos is a bracing philosophical inquiry into time, choice, and the forces of history.’ 

What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma (Netherlands), tr. Sarah Timmer Harvey (Dutch)

– A deeply moving exploration of grief, told in brief, precise vignettes and full of gentle melancholy and surprising humour. 

What if one half of a pair of twins no longer wants to live? What if the other can’t live without them? This question lies at the heart of Jente Posthuma’s deceptively simple What I’d Rather Not Think About. The narrator is a twin whose brother has recently taken his own life. She looks back on their childhood, and tells of their adult lives: how her brother tried to find happiness, but lost himself in various men and the Bhagwan movement, though never completely. 

‘A deeply moving exploration of grief and identity through the lives of twins, one of whom dies by suicide. Posthuma delves into the surviving twin’s efforts to understand and come to terms with the loss of her brother, examining the profound complexities of familial bonds. Posthuma navigates delicate themes with sensitivity and formal inventiveness, portraying the nuances of the twins’ relationship and the individual struggles they face. The author skilfully inflects tragedy with unexpected humour and provides a multifaceted look at the search for meaning in the aftermath of suicide. What I’d Rather Not Think About stands out for its empathetic portrayal of love, loss, and resilience.’  

Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo (Italy), tr. Leah Janeczko

– Narrated in a voice as wryly ironic as it is warm and affectionate, Lost on Me seductively explores the slippery relationship between deceitfulness and creativity.

Vero has grown up in Rome with her eccentric family: an omnipresent mother who is devoted to her own anxiety, a father ruled by hygienic and architectural obsessions, and a precocious genius brother at the centre of their attention. As she becomes an adult, Vero’s need to strike out on her own leads her into bizarre and comical situations. As she continues to plot escapades and her mother’s relentless tracking methods and guilt-tripping mastery thwart her at every turn, it is no wonder that Vero becomes a writer – and a liar – inventing stories in a bid for her own sanity.

‘A funny, sharp, wonderfully readable novel in which a fresh, playful voice takes us to the heart of an obsessive, unpredictable family. This engaging book tells the story of a young writer finding her special place where the “most fragile, tender, and comical parts” of herself come dazzlingly to life in wild escapades and moments of unexpected reflection.’ 

The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone (Italy), tr. Oonagh Stransky (#2 on my shelf)

– Narrated against the vivid backdrop of Naples in the 1960s, The House on Via Gemito has established itself as a masterpiece of contemporary Italian literature.

The modest apartment in Via Gemito smells of paint and white spirit. The living room furniture is pushed up against the wall to create a make-shift studio, and drying canvases must be moved off the beds each night. Federí, the father, a railway clerk, is convinced of possessing great artistic talent. If he didn’t have a family to feed, he’d be a world-famous painter. Ambitious and frustrated, genuinely talented but full of arrogance and resentment, his life is marked by bitter disappointment. His long-suffering wife and their four sons bear the brunt. It’s his first-born who, years later, will sift the lies from the truth to tell the story of a man he spent his whole life trying not to resemble.

‘The House on Via Gemito is a marvellous novel of Naples and its environs during and after the Second World War. The prism for this exploration is the relationship between the narrator and his railway worker / artist father – an impossible man filled with cowardice and boastfulness. His son’s attempt to understand and forgive his father is compelling; we are held through the minutiae of each argument and explosion, each hope and almost-success.’ 

Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior (Brazil), tr. Johnny Lorenz (Portuguese)

– A fascinating and gripping story about the lives of subsistence farmers in Brazil’s poorest region.

Deep in Brazil’s neglected Bahia hinterland, two sisters find an ancient knife beneath their grandmother’s bed and, momentarily mystified by its power, decide to taste its metal. The shuddering violence that follows marks their lives and binds them together forever. 

‘Bibiana and Belonisía are two sisters whose inheritance arrives in the form of a grandmother’s mysterious knife, which they discover while playing, then unwrap from its rags and taste. The mouth of one sister is cut badly and the tongue of the other is severed, injuries that bind them together like scar tissue, though they bear the traces in different ways. Set in the Bahia region of Brazil, where approximately one third of all enslaved Africans were sent during the height of the slave trade, the novel invites us into the deep-rooted relationships of Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous peoples to their lands and waters – including the ways these communities demand love, gods, song, and dream – despite brutal colonial disruptions. An aching yet tender story of our origins of violence, of how we spend our lives trying to bloom love and care from them, and of the language and silence we need to fuel our tending.’  

The Details by Ia Genberg (Sweden), tr. Kira Josefsson

– In exhilarating, provocative prose, Ia Genberg reveals an intimate and powerful celebration of what it means to be human. 

A famous broadcaster writes a forgotten love letter; a friend abruptly disappears; a lover leaves something unexpected behind; a traumatised woman is consumed by her own anxiety. In the throes of a high fever, a woman lies bedridden. Suddenly, she is struck with an urge to revisit a particular novel from her past. Inside the book is an inscription: a message from an ex-girlfriend. Pages from her past begin to flip, full of things she cannot forget and people who cannot be forgotten. Johanna, that same ex-girlfriend, now a famous TV host. Niki, the friend who disappeared all those years ago. Alejandro, who appears like a storm in precisely the right moment. And Birgitte, whose elusive qualities shield a painful secret. Who is the real subject of a portrait, the person being painted or the one holding the brush?

‘Ia Genberg writes with a remarkably sharp eye about a series of messy relationships between friends, family and lovers. Using, as she says, “details, rather than information”, she gives us not simply the “residue of life presented in a combination of letters” but an evocation of contemporary Stockholm and a moving portrait of her narrator. She has at times a melancholic eye, but her wit and liveliness constantly break through.’  

White Nights by Urszula Honek (Poland), tr. Kate Webster

– A highly artistic study of death encapsulated in moving stories set in Poland’s Beskid Mountains region.

White Nights is a series of thirteen interconnected stories concerning the various tragedies and misfortunes that befall a group of people who all grew up and live(d) in the same village in the Beskid Niski region, in southern Poland. Each story centres itself around a different character and how it is that they manage to cope, survive or merely exist, despite, and often in ignorance of, the poverty, disappointment, tragedy, despair, brutality and general sense of futility that surrounds them.

‘A haunting series of interconnected stories set in a small town in the Beskid Mountains of Poland, a place enveloped by the continuous daylight of the summer months. Through a cast of characters each facing their own existential crises, Honek crafts a narrative mosaic that explores themes of isolation, identity, death, and the longing for connection. The book’s strength lies in its ability to capture the intense, dreamlike quality of its setting, where the natural phenomenon of “white nights” serves as a backdrop for the characters’ introspective journeys. White Nights is a dark, lyrical exploration of the ways in which people seek meaning and belonging in a transient world.’ 

Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong (Korea), tr. Sora Kim-Russell & Youngjae Josephine Bae

– An epic, multi-generational tale that threads together a century of Korean history. 

Centred on three generations of a family of rail workers and a laid-off factory worker staging a high-altitude sit-in, Mater 2-10 vividly depicts the lives of ordinary working Koreans, starting from the Japanese colonial era, continuing through Liberation, and right up to the twenty-first century. 

‘A sweeping and comprehensive book about a Korea we rarely see in the West, blending the historical narrative of a nation with an individual’s quest for justice. Hwang highlights the political struggles of the working class with the story of a complicated national history of occupation and freedom, all seen through the lens of Jino, from his perch on top of a factory chimney, where he is staging a protest against being unfairly laid off.’ 

A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare (Albania), tr. John Hodgson

– A fascinating meditation on Soviet Russia, authoritarianism, power structures and a period of great writers. 

In June 1934, Joseph Stalin allegedly telephoned the famous novelist and poet Boris Pasternak to discuss the arrest of fellow Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam. In a fascinating combination of dreams and dossier facts, Ismail Kadare, winner of the inaugural International Booker Prize, reconstructs the three minutes they spoke and the aftershocks of this tense, mysterious moment in modern history. Weaving together the accounts of witnesses, reporters and writers such as Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova, Kadare tells a gripping story of power and political structures, of the relationship between writers and tyranny. 

‘The core of this brilliant exploration of power is an analysis of 13 versions of a three-minute telephone conversation between the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and the novelist Boris Pasternak in 1934. Each of these is an attempt to understand or justify Pasternak’s troubling, ambiguous response from a slightly different point of view. The book begins with what seem like autobiographical memories of Kadare’s time as a student in Moscow, setting a tone which hovers continually between fiction and non-fiction, between what is real and what is invented. Kadare explores the tension between authoritarian politicians and creative artists – it is a quest for definitive truth where none is to be found.’

The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov (Ukraine), tr. Boris Dralyuk (Russian)

– Inflected with Kurkov’s signature humour and magical realism, The Silver Bone crafts a propulsive narrative that bursts to life with rich historical detail. 

Kyiv, 1919. The Soviets control the city, but White armies menace them from the West. No man trusts his neighbour and any spark of resistance may ignite into open rebellion. When Samson Kolechko’s father is murdered, his last act is to save his son from a falling Cossack sabre. Deprived of his right ear instead of his head, Samson is left an orphan, with only his father’s collection of abacuses for company. Until, that is, his flat is requisitioned by two Red Army soldiers, whose secret plans Samson is somehow able to overhear with uncanny clarity. Eager to thwart them, he stumbles into a world of murder and intrigue that will either be the making of him – or finish what the Cossack started.

‘A surprising book from Ukrainian novelist and journalist Andrey Kurkov, The Silver Bone is a crime mystery set in 1919 Kyiv during a time of chaos, shifts of power and random violence in the aftermath of war. But amidst the brutality is Kurkov’s sense of irony and absurdism. A young engineering student sees his father cut down by Cossacks and, moments later, a sabre cuts off his own right ear. He manages to catch it and keep it in a box, where it can still hear for him, wherever he is. Inspired by real-life, post-First World War Bolshevik secret police files, Kurkov’s novel creates an atmosphere that ranges from 19th century Russian literature to the immediacy of the current war in Ukraine, though it was initially published before Putin’s invasion.’ 

Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener (Peru), tr. Julia Sanches (Spanish)

– A provocative, irreverent autobiographical novel that reckons with the legacy of colonialism through one Peruvian woman’s family ties to both colonised and coloniser. 

Alone in an ethnographic museum in Paris, Gabriela Wiener is confronted with her unusual inheritance. She is visiting an exhibition of pre-Columbian artefacts, the spoils of European colonial plunder, many of them from her home country of Peru. Peering through the glass, she sees sculptures of Indigenous faces that resemble her own – but the man responsible for pillaging them was her own great-great-grandfather, Austrian colonial explorer Charles Wiener. In the wake of her father’s death, Gabriela begins delving into all she has inherited from her paternal line. From the brutal trail of racism and theft Charles was responsible for, to revelations of her father’s infidelity, she traces a legacy of abandonment, jealousy and colonial violence, and questions its impact on her own struggles with desire, love and race in a polyamorous relationship. 

‘A compelling search for identity that explores the complicated relationship between the person you want to be and the stories of the past that might have made you. This is an exploration of colonialism’s surprising effects on a writer investigating her antecedents and ancestors starting from a display case of Peruvian artefacts in Paris and ending in a story of family, love and desire.’ 

The Shortlist

The shortlist of six books will be announced on 9 April 2024.

The winning title will be livestream announced at a ceremony on Tuesday 21 May 2024.

My Quiz Result

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When I did the quiz for the first time, it came up with the result Undiscovered by Peruvian author Gabriela Wiener.

I did it a second time and I must have changed one of my answers and it came up with Not a River by Selva Almada. I have previously read and enjoyed one of her earlier novels The Wind That Lays Waste (my review here).

The good news is that I do have Not a River on my shelf because it is part of my Charco Press 2024 bundle, so I’ll be reading it next.

Many of these authors are new to me, though I have read Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation and Domenico Starnone’s Ties.

I will be looking out for Undiscovered to see if that quiz really does have any insight into my reading preferences! What book did it tell you to read? Let me know in the comments below.