Women in Translation

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Women in Translation month #WITMonth

Every novel I’ve read in translation this month has been exceptional. I do love August for seeing what others are reading in this category to ensure I have a future supply of excellent reads originating from elsewhere, coming from other languages.

Here’s what I hope to read this month and I’d love to hear your favourites, what you’ve read and loved or are looking forward to during WIT Month or any time!

Translation Opens World Views

Covers of books ftom the shelf of novels by women in translation

I find it such an immense privilege to have the opportunity to read a novel that was originally conceived and written in another language, that can naturally dive into perspectives from other cultures that might be completely different or universally connected.

I loved norms being challenged and insights shared, new words, cultural references, all those opportunities to expand one’s awareness.

So I gathered what I had on my shelf to read for August to share here and I am very grateful to Daniela at Europa Editions UK who sent me three excellent new publications published by Europa in 2025, which arrived just as the month started, two of which I have devoured already.

Read Around the World

The books I have chosen are by women from Mexico (translated from Spanish), Rome and Abruzzo in Italy, Barcelona (Catalan), France (French), Iran (living as a political refugee in Australia, translated from Farsi), Russia living in Berlin (translated from German) and Debrecen, Hungary.

Mexico

I started the month with Guadalupe Nettel’s (Mexico) excellent autobiographical novel The Body Where I Was Born (reviewed here) translated by J.T. Lichtenstein, a book that reads like a memoir of childhood and adolescence, but from the perspective of looking at how those various experiences she had, might have moulded her character.

The real surprise was when she and her brother join her mother to come and live here in Aix en Provence while she’s working towards a PhD. Very insightful and for me, utterly riveting. You can also read Still Born (reviewed here) shortlisted in 2023 for the International Booker, hers is a voice and style I adore.

Italy

I’ve definitely been in a phase of reading Italian women writers from the 30’s and 40’s, so of course there is more Natalia Ginzburg and Alba de Céspedes in my pile for this month.

I’ve already finished There’s No Turning Back (reviewed here) translated by Ann Goldstein, a novel of eight women entering adulthood and potential independence in the face of a society that wants women to stay traditional, and I’m looking forward to Ginzburg’s novel All Our Yesterdays about a pregnant 16 year old who marries an older family friend to save her reputation.

I recently read an excellent article about Italy’s feminist history and literature by Margarita Diaz, who after reading Elena Ferrante’s essay collection In the Margins, sought out a women’s bookstore collective, the Libreria delle Donne di Milano, whose work had been a source of inspiration for her Neapolitan novels. The bookstore occupies a unique place in the history of the Italian women’s movement, having established “an alternative genealogy of culture,” a perspective quite different to that of English speaking cultural feminism. I would love to visit this bookshop.

The Libreria delle Donne di Milano (The Milan Women’s Bookstore), on Via Pietro Calvi in the Zona Risorgimento, houses more than 7,500 carefully curated works, mostly in Italian, by 3,700 female writers from all around the world. Works by icons of Italian literature like Sibilla Aleramo, Grazia DeLedda, and Elena Ferrante sit next to translated copies of works by anglophone writers like Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen. It is a refreshing, unapologetic, women-only space, where female voices are celebrated and encouraged. 

My third Italian read, more contemporary, with a flashback to events of the 90’s is the Strega Prize 2024 winning novel The Brittle Age by Donatella Di Pietrantonio (reviewed here), also translated by Ann Goldstein.

Her novels are excellent. A Girl Returned was exceptional, and I was riveted reading this latest. Historical true crime inspired and a psychological exploration of the effect of traumatic events on the individual and community and the small actions that help heal – just brilliant.

Doesn’t that mountain look like our local Mount Saint Victoire, with the cross at the summit?

France

It being a busy and hot working summer, I was also looking for lighter reads that would be captivating and so I chose Virginie Grimaldi’s second novel All That Remains (my review here) translated by Hildegarde Serle, a story of three people whose paths cross when each is at a significant turning point. Jeanne (74) is widowed and is overwhelmed, Iris (33) has made a near-escape and is in hiding, and Théo (18) working in a boulangerie (bakery) is starting out having left a boy’s home.

I was particularly interested in this after having seen French a news item about inter generational living arrangements, where young people move in with the elderly, enabling them to stay in their own homes. This was a page turner, totally feel good, brilliant and uplifting, a perfect all year round read!

Catalan, Spain

In February, visiting Barcelona, I found my way to the BackStory Bookshop where I discovered works in Catalan translated into English. The Song of Youth (reviewed here) by Montserrat Roig (1946-1991) translated by Tiago Miller is a collection of eight stories, which I have already started and I am pencil scribbling all over, they are so, so good.

Looking back at that lower bookshelf in the bookstore, from where I obtained this volume, I wish I had bought Time of the Cherries as well, one I’ve seen reviewed by Jacqui and more recently, Goodbye, Ramona. The latter, wasn’t in the store, but I have recently found and ordered a copy. Those Fum de Stampa Press editions are gorgeous but not easy to find!

Iran

Delighted to see a new bold chunkster translated from Farsi by Shokoofeh Azar, The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen (reviewed here). This one, spanning fifty years in the history of modern Iran, is described as a lush, layered story embracing politics and family, revolution and reconstruction, loss and love amid the colourful stories of twelve children, each told against the backdrop of cultural and political change.

Having loved her earlier novel, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree shortlisted for the International Booker (2020) and The Stella Prize, I’m saving this 500 page epic for holiday week at the end of August.

Russia

The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine was the second novel written by Alina Bronsky, a German novelist born in the Ural mountain area of Russia, a dark, funny novel that stars Rosalinda, the irrepressible tyrant babushka who’ll stop at nothing to keep her family from emigrating without her as the Soviet Union falls apart. She’s brutal and cunning but also induces sympathy and amusement. This has been on my shelf too long and reading this NYT interview has pushed me to want to read it.

“Sometimes I do readings and people can’t stop laughing, but I’m reading about pretty tragic things,” Bronsky says. “I think Soviet humor is a desperate humor, rather typical of very different nations, of Jewish people, Ukrainians, and of course Russians. It’s despair — just keep laughing, until you are dead.”

Hungary

Lastly another that’s been waiting a while to be picked up is Magda Szabo’s Iza’s Ballad translated by George Szirtes, about a woman whose daughter insists she leaves her countryside home after her husband’s death to move to the city of Budapest. Uprooted from her community she must make a place and a life for herself anew.

I read her novel The Door some years ago and enjoyed it, so I’m looking forward to visiting Budapest and the countryside she left for it.

Recommendations

That’s my pile of potential reads for August, let us know in the comments below if you have read any of these or what you are looking forward to.

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There’s No Turning Back by Alba de Céspedes tr. Ann Goldstein (2025)

Every novel I’ve read by Alba de Céspedes has been excellent and this controversial debut (at the time of its original publication in Italy, 1938) brims with the seeds of what was to come from her work, starting with this excellent, collective coming-of-age, of eight, twenty-something year old women in pre-war Rome.

I pre-ordered this novel, as she is a favourite author, of whose work I want to read everything, sharing now for WIT Month (Women in Translation).

Literature and Morality

Feminism Journal writing Womens Rights Italian Literature

In the informative translator’s note at the beginning of the book, Ann Goldstein shares some of the historical context within which the book became an immediate and immensely popular bestseller, despite the authorities finding the novel’s breaking of female stereotypes and suggestion of other possible pathways for women offensive.

“By the time the novel was published the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini had been in power for more than a decade. His government promoted the idea that the proper place for women was to be at home and to bear children; sposa e madre esemplare (exemplary wife and mother). While there is no overt mention of Mussolini or fascism in the novel, none of the young women conform to this female ideal. In fact, in their different ways they are challenging it, even if not intentionally or even consciously.”

Selected to win the prestigious Viareggio Literary Prize in 1939, a government order stopped it and attempted to block further editions from being published, claiming it went against ‘fascist morality’. As Margarita Diaz points out in a recent article ‘An Immoral Endeavour‘:

Vague accusations of ‘immorality’ have been, and continue to be, used by dominant institutions, governments and autocratic regimes to stifle free expression and to censor legions of books and artworks. 

Women at a Turning Point

Alba de Cespedes debut novel Theres No Rurning Back translated by Ann Goldstein from Italian

Set in Rome 1936-1938, the novel focuses on eight young women in higher education, most studying at university, who live together in convent boarding house in Rome. They have greater freedoms than school girls, with restrictions deemed appropriate for unmarried single women.

From different backgrounds they have different issues, desires and ideas about life, which they share with each other as they progress through the year and one by one prepare to leave the premises.

On the cusp of “no turning back”, concluding their theses, each must make a decision about what to do next and none of them are thinking, acting or passively accepting the route that tradition has dictated.

The mere consideration of other life avenues and the outward expression of those thoughts, the girls’ discussions with each other, in this safe and open, female community, demonstrate an important processing step in their being better informed, while equally often challenged by their peers, at this formative moment in their lives.

“In all her novels de Céspedes investigates women’s attempts to both deconstruct and construct their lives and gain a sense of themselves, as she investigated her own life.”

A Year In the Life

Photo by cottonbro studio Pexels.com

Throughout that year, the girls will learn more than just the subject of their thesis as they share and navigate the issues that arise, including their reactions to things some have kept secret. They attend mass and adhere to the curfew, then gather after lights out to talk about everything deemed pressing.

Their conversations and reflections often lead to scenes from the past, as the reader gains insight into each of the circumstances that lead each young woman to this place.

Xenia is the first to present her thesis and to leave and she does so under cover of night, severing her connection with the girls, choosing the least conventional path, allowing an older businessman to arrange a job for her and accommodation, introducing her to a different circle of associates. Her desires are revealed in one of the early exchanges with the girls:

“Some nights a kind of yearning grips me: I can’t close my eyes and I get worn out thinking how I’m caged in this cloister of nuns, while outside life is flowing, fortune passing by – who knows? – and I can’t take advantage of it. You have to jump into life head-long, grab it by the throat. I won’t ever go back to Veroli, anyway.”

No Two Paths

If Xenia’s failure and disappearance shakes the girls up, the fate of quiet Milly, who writes letters in braille to a blind organist rocks their world even more.

As soon as Papa found out about our meetings, he made me come to Rome. But I’m not unhappy here: I can play the harmonium and write to him with that device there, which is all holes, in the braille alphabet, made just for blind people. By now I can write well, and he reads my letters by running his fingers over them, like this, see?

Silvia is a high performing literature student, a favourite of the Professor, who asks her to do research on his behalf, which he presents to great acclaim, telling her she will go far.

Silvia had on her face the expression of servile gratitude typical of those who are accustomed to submission from birth. Who were her parents, after all? Scarcely more than peasants. Someone had always taken possession of their work without even saying “Thank you, well done.” Confused by that praise, Silvia would have liked to promise : “I won’t take my eyes off the books professor, I’ll even work at night”; but at that moment Belluzzi’s wife came in, carrying a cup of tea.

Mirroring and Reflecting

a woman holds a mirror a reflection
Photo by Tasha Kamrowski on Pexels.com

Emanuela has told everyone her parents are travelling in America, disappearing every Sunday to visit her five year old daughter she has told no-one about, just like her father had written to the Mother Superior of the boarding school she attends, saying his daughter was abroad.

Though she does not study, she is drawn into the literature group, who appreciate her vigilant, intuitive faculty:

which revealed and illuminated, in those who approached her, only the aspect of the self capable of inspiring a mutual sympathy. So each saw her own image reflected, as in a mirror; and although the mirror had many faces, it projected only the one that it animated. And this game of reflections was a continuous revelation for Emanuela, too, who saw rising from the depths of herself, and appearing on the surface, constantly new and until then unknown aspects of her personality. Illuminated from the outside, exposed by the contact with others, her true physiognomy emerged gradually, and in a surprising way, from the shadows.

Women as Masters of Themselves

Debut novel by Italian author Alba de Cespedes Theres No Turning Back, banned by Mussolini challenged female stereotypes in 1938 Italy

Augusta is enrolled in classes but doesn’t plan to sit the exams. She stays up late writing novels and sending them out. When Emanuela asks her how long she plans to stay, she replies:

Until I’ve done something. I go back to Sardinia only for a month or two, in summer. By now, one can’t go home anymore. Our parents shouldn’t send us to the city; afterward, even if we return, we’re bad daughters, bad wives. Who can forget being master of herself? And in our villages a woman who’s lived alone in the city is a fallen woman. Those who remained, who passed from the father’s authority to the husband’s, can’t forgive us for having had the key to our own room, going out and coming in when we want. And men can’t forgive us for having studied, for knowing as much as they do.

Vinca is from Spain and during her time with the girls, she learns from the newspaper that Spain is at war and that the young man she has been seeing will go and join the fight. These and subsequent events change her trajectory.

One by one, they have their experiences and they make their own decisions, no two the same, yet all of them having been through the process of living together and sharing their developing ideas, strengthening their positions and coming to some kind of resolution about how they will live their lives.

It’s another brilliant read by this fabulous author and one can just imagine how this book would have been devoured by many women in the era it was published, providing them insight and a form of company to their own thoughts, or provoking them in their solitude as they lived out those traditional paths and dreamed of something else.

Highly Recommended.

“Emanuela took her head in her hands. “I think that at a certain point you have to stop searching and accept yourself. Find the courage not to count on others anymore, to separate from childhood even at the cost of solitude;”
“It’s all a matter of courage, in life. If you have it, you do well to leave,” Augusta murmured, tapping the ashes from her cigarette.”

Further Reading

Cleveland Review of Books: An Immoral Endeavor: On Alba de Céspede’s “There’s No Turning Back” by Margarita Diaz, August 7, 2025

The Guardian: Resistance fighter, novelist – and Sartre’s favourite agony aunt: rediscovering Alba Céspedes by Lara Fiegel, Mar 2023

My reviews of Alba de Céspedes Forbidden Notebook and Her Side of The Story

Author, Alba de Céspedes

Alba de Céspedes (1911-97) was a bestselling Italian-Cuban novelist, poet and screenwriter.

The granddaughter of the first President of Cuba, de Céspedes was raised in Rome. Married at 15 and a mother by 16, she began her writing career after her divorce at the age of 20. She worked as a journalist throughout the 1930s while also taking an active part in the Italian partisan struggle, and was twice jailed for her anti-fascist activities.

After the fall of fascism, she founded the literary journal Mercurio and went on to become one of Italy’s most successful and most widely translated authors.

After the war, she accompanied her husband, a diplomat to the United States and the Soviet Union. She would later move to Paris, where she would publish her last two books in French and where she spent the rest of her life. She died in 1997.

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The Body Where I Was Born by Guadalupe Nettel tr. J.T.Lichtenstein #WITMonth

Feeling a little uninspired by recent reads, I decided to check my shelves for what I had in translation, August is WIT Month and my shelves are looking a little depleted in that regard!

I spotted Guadalupe Nettel’s novel The Body Where I Was Born and remembered how much I adored Still Born (my review here) in 2023, a book that was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023. It’s a compelling exploration by two women into the question of whether or not to have children and how their ideas can change as life happens and circumstances arise that can awaken feelings not born of the mind.

Why Did I Do It, Doctor?

women in translation an autobiographical novel set in Mexico and Aix en Provence

It was the compelling style that made me want to read something else by Nettel and as I began to read The Body Where I Was Born I realised it is semi-autobiographical.

The novel is narrated from the psychotherapist’s chair and so occasionally there will an interruption where the narrator asks a question having recounted yet another episode of their childhood.

The novel is written in five parts, segmenting different parts of childhood and it is effectively a form of coming-of-age, albeit recounted to a therapist.

A Marked Childhood

As with her previous novel and writing style, I was immediately drawn into the narrative, which begins with the author recounting the consequence of having been born with a birthmark covering part of her eye.

The only advice the doctors could give my parents was to wait: by the time their daughter finished growing, medicine would surely have advanced enough to offer the solution they now lacked. In the meantime, they advised subjecting me to a series of annoying exercises to develop, as much as possible, the defective eye.

As a result, school became even more of an inhospitable environment and those measures marking her out for unwanted attention.

Condition and Correct, A Parental Institution

But sight was not my family’s only obsession. My parents seemed to think of childhood as the preparatory phase in which they had to correct all the manufacturing defects one enters the world with, and they took this job very seriously.

Our narrator ponders the harm of parental regimes and how we perpetuate onto the next generation the neuroses of our forebears, wounds we continue to inflict on ourselves.

In addition to these corrections, her parents were keen to adopt some of the prevailing ideas of the time (the seventies) about education, a Montessori school in Mexico City and a sexual education free of taboos and encouraging candid conversations.

Rather than clarifying things, this policy often made things more confusing and distressing for the children and was likely the cause of the rupture of the adults when they adopted a practice much in fashion at the time, the then-famous ‘open-relationship’.

During all the preparatory conversations I had worn the mask of the understanding daughter who reasons instead of reacts, and who would cut off a finger before aggravating her already aggravated parents. Why did I do it, Doctor? Explain it to me? Why didn’t I tell them what I was really feeling?

Separation and Abandonment

After the marriage separation their mother is interested for a while in community living, subjecting the children to another experiment, and later still sinks into a deep depression that affects them all.

Finally, in a burst of desperate willpower, she decided to exile herself. Hers was not political, but an exile of love. The pretext was getting a doctorate in urban and regional planning in the south of France.

But before they were sent to France, there was a period where their maternal grandmother – who much favoured her brother- came to live with and look after them. Full of questions about why their parents left them in this situation, the grandmother gave her usual cryptic response:

‘Since when do ducks shoot rifles?’ she’d say, meaning that children should not demand accountability from adults.

Heightened Observations, Humorous Occasions

Part II narrates the period with grandmother in charge, made all the more challenging for being in their own home, one that had held so many previously fond memories.

Reading was frowned upon, but the discovery of Gabriel Marcia Marquez’s The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and her Heartless Grandmother cheered her up and provided a kind of solace.

Doctor, this discovery, as exaggerated as it sounds, was like meeting a guardian angel, or at least a friend I could trust, which was, in those days, equally unlikely. The book understood me better than anyone else in the world and, if that was not enough, made it possible for me to speak about things that were hard to admit to myself, like the undeniable urge to kill someone in my family.

From Mexico City to Aix-en-Provence

As I began part III, I was surprised to find the two young children following their mother to the south of France, to the Jas de Bouffan quartier of Aix en Provence near the musée Vasarely.

If I was already engaged in the novel, now I was riveted. I know the quartier well and the schools she and her brother are sent to, it awakened my own memories of being an outsider at the school gate, waiting for children to exit from the well regulated school environment.

Vasarely Musée, Aix en Provence

I have no doubt that my mother sought in Aix the institution that most resembled our school in Mexico. The percentage of atypical beings was equal, or maybe even higher. But still… everything there seemed strange to me.

From From the public Freinet education at La Mareschalé to the local middle school, Collège au Jas de Bouffan, a mix of children from multiple origins, North African, Indian, Asian, Caribbean and French.

To survive in this climate, I had to adapt my vocabulary to the local argot – a mix of Arabic and Southern French – that was spoken around me, and my mannerisms to those of the lords of the cantine.

Photo by Fernando G Pexels.com

In Part IV there is a visit back to Mexico, before Part V where they are sent off to a the infamous French institution, the colonie de vacances; supervised holiday camps organised according to interests or specialities, full of young people employed as ‘camp animateurs‘ an idealised form of first employment, being paid to be on holiday, looking after tweens and emerging teens.

The French experience is so well depicted, and gives an insight into the child’s perspective of being an uncommon foreigner among a population of more common second or third generation immigrants. When it ends back in Mexico City, I find myself wishing there were a follow up novel, to find out more about a life that started in this unusual way and had all these experiences in their formative years.

The novel is so engaging, a fascinating insight into a life that delves beneath the surface of events and happenings in a family that is culturally fascinating, as it moves between Mexico City and Aix en Provence, traversing childhood and adolescence, the relationships between a girl, her peers at different ages, her parents and her grandmother.

And then there are the layers of literary references, including the reference to the title, but those I leave the prospective reader to discover for themselves.

I loved it! Highly Recommended.

Author, Guadalupe Nettel

Guadalupe Nettel (born 1973) is a Mexican writer. She was born in Mexico City and obtained a PhD in linguistics from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She has published in several genres, both fiction and non-fiction.

The New York Times described Nettel’s acclaimed English-language debut, Natural Histories as “five flawless stories”. A Bogota 39 author and Granta “Best Untranslated Writer” The Body Where I Was Born was her first novel to appear in English. Her work has since been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for theatre and film. Still Born, her most recent novel, was shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize and her latest collection of short stories The Accidentals tr. Rosalind Harvey was published in April 2025.

She has edited cultural and literary magazines such as Número Cero and Revista de la Universidad de México. She lives in Paris as a writer in residence at the Columbia University Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

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Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri

Cerebral Distractions or Healing Attractions

Whereabouts indeed. I have been absent this space and reading less, as I pursued another passion, the great jigsaw puzzle of building a family tree, which started out as an exercise in tracing my female lineage looking for a particular pattern, I felt called to heal and ended up as a series of unfinished mysteries seeking to be resolved. And it is so much fun, imagining and reclaiming these lives!

Well, all of that is another story, but interesting enough to have pulled me away from my regular habit of sharing my reading here. I miss this space, and the interactions, so here we are, sharing a few recent reads.

I picked up the reading again as the temperatures here rocketed into full summer heat and my brain asked, “Can’t we just read a book today?”, instead of spending my free time working like the dedicated closet researcher I had become.

A day at the beach with a Jhumpa Lahiri novel turned the tide.

A Gifted Book Returns Unread

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri translated from Italian by the author

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri is a novel that came back to me, one I gifted a friend from abroad who has a love affair with the city of Rome. Back in Europe to visit the city again, she brought this book I gave her halfway round the world, pulled it out of the suitcase and said:

‘I haven’t read it yet. I’m going to read it in Rome. Here. You have got two weeks to read it before I go. We can talk about it when I get back from Ireland.’

Challenge accepted and quietly delighted; I really wanted to read it too.

Now I have.

I loved it.

It felt like I was reading a work of creative non-fiction. In disguise. Autofiction perhaps?

Jhumpa Lahiri is a British-American author of Bengali parents, whose earlier novels have highlighted the immigrant experience. For some years now she has lived in Italy, learned the language and her last two books were written and published in Italian before being translated into English.

Whereabouts is a collection of short vignettes of one woman’s highly observational, contentedly solitary, existence in Rome. The epigram, a quote from Italo Svevo provides a clue to what follows.

‘Every time my surroundings change I feel enormous sadness.It’s not greater when I leave a place tied to memories, grief, or happiness. It’s the change itself that unsettles me, just as liquid in a jar turns cloudy when you shake it.’

Averse to Change, Loves Movement

Disliking change, but always on the move, her days capture aspects of the surroundings she has grown attached to, taking us right there. The chapter titles nearly all begin with the prepositions: On, In or At.

On the Sidewalk, In the Street, At the Trattoria, In the Piazza, At the Bookstore, On the Couch, On the Balcony, At the Beautician, In the Sun, At my House, In Bed, On the Phone.

Jhumpa Lahiri autofiction Whereabouts set in Rome Italy

Near the end, as I began to notice this pattern and list of locations, I asked myself, “What is this ‘Whereabouts?’ and I flicked back to the contents page and read through the list of destinations. I then turned the page and the only chapter that doesn’t start with a preposition, Nowhere, seemed to be speaking to me, responding to my question.

It began by saying:

‘Because when all is said and done the setting doesn’t matter: the space, the walls, the light. It makes no difference whether I’m under a clear blue sky or caught in the rain or swimming in the transparent sea in summer.’

This has come just after Up Ahead, a sign of change, something our protagonist does not like and spends the entire short chapter of In Spring pondering. A chapter I sent to another friend, one who shares the protagonist’s dislike of that season.

Transition, Change and Things that Stay the Same

In Spring, a chapter from Jhumpa Lahiri's novel of vignettes Whereabouts

Now, she contemplates a transition; both of the day, and of a life, observing the peripheral characters to this solitary existence she has created, people in movement, marking the end of a day.

‘They’ll keep walking along these sidewalks. They’re permanent fixtures in my mind, knotted up in the fabric of my neighbourhood just like the buildings, the trees, the marble woman. These are the faces that have kept me company for years, and I still don’t know the people they belong to. There’s no point saying goodbye to them, or adding, we’ll meet again, even though right now I’m overflowing with affection for them.’

Overall, it’s a reflective relatively smooth paced novel in which not much happens and yet you feel as though you have visited and lived for a short time in a city apartment in one of the squares of this major European city of Rome, a part of it not populated by tourists, but where the everyday life continues to unfold week after week, year upon year, following the same rhythms, with small changes a natural part of its existence.

‘Is there any place we’re not moving through? Disoriented, lost, at sea, at odds, astray, adrift, bewildered, confused, uprooted, turned around. I’m related to these related terms. These words are my abode, my only foothold.’

Brilliantly crafted. Could not put it down, read it in a day.

Highly Recommended.

Have you read Whereabouts? Do you have a favourite by Jhumpa Lahiri? Tell us in the comments below.

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Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami tr. by Sam Bett & David Boyd

I haven’t read much Japanese literature so when I saw Mieko Kawakami’s novel Breasts and Eggs at a booksale I picked it up, recalling it had caused much interest among readers at the time of its translation into English. It caused a significant reaction in Japan when originally published, a bestseller spurned by traditionalists.

It was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and one of TIME’s Best 10 Books of 2020 and established the author as something of a feminist icon, exploring the inner lives of women through the ages.

A Woman’s Lot

Japanese literature in translation women navigating life work motherhood societal expectations and desire

Breasts and Eggs is set in two time periods eight years apart and centres around 30 year old woman Natsuko, a writer living in Tokyo and those two themes, Breasts and Eggs; or Appearance and Mothering.

I’m still in the same apartment with the slanted, peeling walls and the same overbearing afternoon sun, surviving off the same minimum wage job, working full time for not a whole lot more than 100,000 yen a month, and still writing and writing, with no idea whether it’s ever going to get me anywhere. My life was like a dusty shelf in an old book store, where every volume was exactly where it had been for ages, the only discernable change being that my body has aged another ten years.

Silence Speaks Volumes

In the first part of the book her sister Makiko comes to visit with her 12 year old daughter Midoriko, who has stopped speaking to her mother. She writes her responses, we read her perspective through a few journal entries, which has become the place where she has conversations she is missing elsewhere.

Unspoken Job Requirements

Makiko is an ageing hostess whose occupation demands certain expectations of looks and she has become obsessed with breast augmentation surgery to the neglect of all else. It has been the topic of conversation with her sister for the last three months. Natsuko realises she doesn’t want her advice, just a sounding board. Their mother died when the girls were teenagers from breast cancer.

…after all these years, at thirty-nine, she still works at a bar five nights a week, living pretty much the same life as our mum. Another single mother, working herself to death.

While her sister goes for a consultation Natsuko spends time with her niece and ponders women’s bodies, pains, expectations, grievances, self-judgments, societal judgments, obsessions. During the visit, the three women confront their issues, desires and frustrations, building to resolution.

When Time Is Running Out and All is On the Table

In Part Two, eight years have passed and now it is Natsuko who arrives at an age of obsession, only her focus is on eggs, or the desire to have a child and the dilemma of not being in a relationship when the age of becoming eggless is in sight.

A Making Children Medical Procedure

She begins to research alternative ways of conceiving, finding ways to learn more and to meet people she might be able to discuss her desire. In doing so she discovers there is more to the subject than just a woman’s desire, there are moral considerations she hasn’t considered, that might affect her decision.

“Neither the medical community, not the parents who undergo this type of treatment, have adequately considered how the children – and this is about the children – will eventually see themselves,” Aizawa said, in summary. “As for donors, most of them haven’t given much thought to these issues, either. For them, it’s something akin to giving blood. Legal reform has a long, long way to go, but recent attention to the child’s right to know had led more and more hospitals to suspend treatment entirely…”

The Child Who Grows Up Not Knowing Shares As an Adult

Her interest leads her to new connections that increase the depth of her understanding and options available to her. By the time she makes her decision, she will be significantly more informed and understand the situation from multiple perspectives.

I thought about what I had said, but couldn’t explain what I meant. What made me want to know this person? What did I think it meant to have me as a mother? Who, or what, exactly, was I expecting? I knew I wasn’t making any sense, but I was doing all I could to string the words together and convey that meeting this person, whoever they may wind up being, was absolutely crucial to me.

It is an interesting, thought-provoking look at the lives of women trying to find fulfillment while navigating the challenges of single motherhood, health, womanhood, reproductive rights and familial relationships in non-nuclear families.

Further Reading

Article: Mieko Kawakami’s books: a complete guide, Naomi Frisby on literary sensation Mieko Kawakami Nov 2024

Guardian Interview: Mieko Kawakami: ‘Women are no longer content to shut up’ David McNeil, 18 Aug 2020

“I try to write from the child’s perspective – how they see the world,” says Kawakami. “Coming to the realisation that you’re alive is such a shock. One day, we’re thrown into life with no warning. And at some point, every one of us will die. It’s very hard to comprehend.”

Author, Mieko Kawakami

Born in Osaka, Japan Kawakami made her literary debut as a poet in 2006 and in 2007 published her first novella My Ego, My Teeth, And the World. Heaven, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize.

Known for their poetic qualities, their insights into the female body and their preoccupation with ethics and the modern society, her books have been translated into over twenty languages. Her most recent novel that has been translated into English is All the Lovers in the Night.

Kawakami’s literary awards include the Akutagawa Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, and the Murasaki Shikibu Prize. She lives in Tokyo, Japan.

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Her Side of the Story by Alba de Céspedes tr. Jill Foulston

Stunning.

I thought The Forbidden Notebook which I read in 2023 was excellent, but this novel is in a category of its own. This is probably the title in 2024 I was looking forward to the most and it exceeded my expectations.

Originally published in Italian in 1949 as Dalla parte de lei, this captivating new English translation by Jill Foulston was published by Pushkin Press in 2024.

Women’s Partisan Struggle in 1930’s -1940’s Italy

Alba de Céspedes (1911-1997) was a bestselling Italian-Cuban novelist, poet and screenwriter who worked as a journalist throughout the 1930’s while also taking an active part in the Italian partisan struggle and was twice jailed for her anti-fascist activities.

After the fall of fascism – Rome, considered the heart of fascism under Mussolini, was liberated in June 1944 and many felt the country had lost its basic values after 20 years of fascist government – Alba de Céspedes founded a literary journal called Mercurio, publishing many great names of Italian literature and politics, as well as Katherine Mansfield, Jean-Paul Satre, Ernest Hemingway.

Due to a lack of funding it would close in 1948, and in its final issue she published an essay by Natalia Ginzburg entitled ‘On Woman’, alongside a letter she was inspired to write in response to it. Certainly, she would have been working on the novel Her Side of The Story, at the time this essay (discussed below), was published.

Women Writing From the ‘Well’

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Ginzburg had written of an affliction unique to women – at a time when they were often confined to the home and not considered equal under the law – that she described as “a continuous falling down a deep dark well“, a terrible melancholy typical of feminine disposition that likely originated from the age-long tradition of subjection and subjugation.

In her open letter, de Céspedes confesses that she also writes from the ‘well’ Ginzburg theorises. Despite that, de Céspedes believed women’s freedom consisted of being able to go down those emotional and psychological wells, which were for her a strength, rather than a curse. ‘Every time we fall down a well’, de Céspedes wrote, ‘we descend to the deepest roots of our being human; when we come back to the surface, we carry such experiences with us that enable us to understand everything men never will — since they never fall into any well’.

In the same issue of Mercurio, de Céspedes published La donna magistrato’ (‘The Woman Magistrate’), an essay by Maria Bassino, one of the most important criminal defense lawyers at the time, addressing women’s rights to become magistrates. In her letter to Ginzburg, de Céspedes explained that those two essays were published together to denounce the injustice done to women when they were tried by magistrates who cannot understand women’s reasons to ‘kill, steal, and commit other humiliating actions’; referring to men who never experienced the depth of wells.

If we are not sure of the depth and character of the mid twentieth century well, then by the time we finish reading Her Side of The Story, we most certainly have a greater understanding of it.

The Review: Her Side of the Story

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An expansive coming of age tale of love and resistance, this feminist, social novel explores a young woman’s attempt to break free from society’s expectations and live life on her own terms. Amid great storytelling, it is a fearless condemnation of patriarchy and rejection of fascist ideals in a society on the cusp of witnessing social change for women.

Alessandra grows up in a bustling apartment block in 1930’s Rome with a shared courtyard, where everyone knows everyone, spending most of her time alone in the apartment in the care of Sista, while her father is at his office and her mother is out teaching piano lessons. She adores her quiet, delicate mother, who keeps to herself and treats her daughter like a friend, while despising a father she believes doesn’t deserve an elegant, cultured woman like her mother.

The women felt at ease in the courtyard, with the familiarity that unites people in a boarding school or a prison. That sort of confidence, however, sprang not so much from living under a common roof as from shared knowledge of the harsh lives they lived: though unaware of it, they felt bound by an affectionate tolerance born of difficulty, deprivation, and habit. Away from the male gaze, they were able to demonstrate who they really were, with no need to play out some tedious farce.

Alessandra looks back and recounts her childhood, adolescence and marriage, describing her experience of them all, her inner world view and how it was shaped by what she observed happening around her, everything she thought and how she responded to it all.

Though she spends much time alone, she rarely keeps her thoughts to herself, allowing the deepest parts of herself to be exposed, challenging what she does not agree with, determined to take charge of her life and live it according to her own desire, against convention.

A Rare and Faultless Admiration of Mother

The first section is focused on the mother-daughter relationship, on Alessandra’s blind faith in everything her mother is and does, including her obsession with the Pierce family, their friendship with Lydia and her daughter Fulvia upstairs and sessions with the medium Ottavia who visits the apartment block on Fridays. Invited to play at a private concert with the Pierce son Hervey joining on violin, the celebratory event witnessed by her husband, becomes a turning point.

The depictions of life in the apartments, the details of the women’s lives, the absent husbands, the affairs, the way daughter’s follow mother’s examples, the witnessing of each other’s lives, the door porter who sees and knows all, the desire for privacy and impossibility of it are all brilliantly depicted. Alessandra’s mother is a romantic with dignity, she is not interested in an affair, but is vulnerable to kind attention.

After a near expulsion from school for hitting a boy for his psychological cruelty towards another girl, she confesses what happened to her mother and worries about her father’s response.

“We can’t tell him everything. Men don’t understand these things Sandi. They don’t weigh every word or gesture; they look for concrete facts. And women are always in the wrong when they come up against concrete facts. It’s not their fault. We’re on two different planets; and each one rotates on its own axis – inevitably. There are a few brief encounters – seconds, perhaps – after which each person returns to shut him- or herself away in solitude.”

Alessandra spends a lot of time reflecting, examining the depths of her thoughts, actions and observations and how they may have come about. From her parents certainly, but she recognises something restless in herself, that seeks retribution.

I could reproach her for having subjected me to that climate of perpetual exaltation, which, above all, made me completely devoted to the myth of the Great Love and thus unintentionally led to the painful situation I find myself in today. I could reproach her, perhaps, if she hadn’t already paid for her ambitions. And now that I am forced to write about her and look into the most intimate and dramatic moments of our life together, it’s not really to accuse her of having made me what I am but to explain those of my actions which would otherwise be clear only to me.

Allesandra, sono io, I am Alessandra

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It is Sandi’s story but it is also the story of many ordinary lives of girls and women, growing up in discordant families, with the weight of expectations, the allure and (false) promise of love, the desire to be educated, to participate in something greater than ‘the home‘, to be heard, respected and taken seriously.

“…Alba de Céspedes intended to act as the defender of women. Like Flaubert, she could say of her protagonist: Alessandra, sono io, I am Alessandra.

Rural Idealism Enforced by The Matriarch

In the second section, Alessandra is sent to live on a farm with her paternal grandmother Nonna, a grand matriarch of a traditional, religious family who surround her with examples of duties expected of her and demonstrate how they will act to facilitate them. She enjoys the natural environment and complies to a certain point, but insists on her right to further her studies, rejecting the suggestion of a well aligned matrimony.

Though this section was originally cut from the first English translation (1952) of the novel, it is restored here. The rural setting represents tradition and a connection to the land, the roots of family, hard work and lineage. Mussolini’s regime focused on rural regions to uphold goals of self-sufficiency, free Italy from “the slavery of foreign bread” and control the agricultural sector. Propaganda praised this lifestyle, much of it targeted at women and upheld by women. Nonna exemplifies and encourages the virtues of sacrifice for the greater good and giving up one’s selfish desires.

Bewildered, I observed these grave, taciturn people who had been strangers to me a few hours before, but who now embraced me within a mechanism so robust I sensed it could easily overwhelm a person.

War breaks out, she returns to Rome, to her studies, to employment, to living again with her father and meeting Francesco, the man she would truly love and believe she could have a different kind of life with. And it might be said that that is where her troubles really begin.

Love, Marriage, War – the struggle

There is so much that could be said about Alessandra’s wartime and matrimonial experience, that is better left for the reader to discover.

There is no stone left unturned in her dissection of the relationship she has with the older anti-fascist Professor, a charismatic man with a sense of justice who stands up for his beliefs, the only man she will ever truly love and her attempts to talk to him about the things that unsettle her, that she feels could be easily resolved, if only he took the time to listen. Once married, he is barely aware of or able to respond to her feelings, while she continues to try to make him understand, slowly unravelling in her persistent attempt.

The most misleading virtue of marriage is the ease with which one forgets, in the morning, everything that happened the night before. Encouraged by the clear colour of the sun’s first rays and the energy and rhythm of everyday gestures, I was always the first to turn back towards Francesco.

The novel tracks the attempt to rise above expectation and the subsequent decline into acceptance, focusing on the effect of this repression, the mental deterioration of generations of women for whom the burden of that ordinary life, of a woman’s limited lot, and the inaccessibility of how (here) she imagines it might have been, become too much to bear. She wants the reader to understand this very well, effectively making you live it alongside her.

Intense, compelling and set against that backdrop of wartime Rome and Italy coming out of a long repressed fascist era, I found it utterly riveting. Her Side of the Story is a powerful, intimate and insightful exploration of the female psyche, of the desire to be, and do, more than meet long outdated representations of women in families, society and relationships. Unputdownable, one of the best of 2024 for sure. Fans of Natalia Ginzburg and Elena Ferrante will likely enjoy this. Expect to feel unsettled.

There’s No Turning Back

Delighted to learn that her debut novel There’s No Turning Back translated by Ann Goldstein will be published in February 2025.

Highly Recommended.

Further Reading

Natalia Ginzburg’s essay ‘Discorso sulle donne’ ‘On Women’ translated by Nicoletta Asciuto, The Fortnightly Review

Jacqui’s Review at JaquiWine’s Journal, April 2024

Chicago Review of Books: The Prescience of Alba De Céspedes’s “Her Side of The Story” by Margarita Diaz November 24, 2023

Author, Alba de Céspedes

Feminism Journal writing Womens Rights Italian Literature

Alba de Céspedes (1911-97) was a bestselling Italian-Cuban novelist, poet and screenwriter.

The granddaughter of the first President of Cuba, de Céspedes was raised in Rome. Married at 15 and a mother by 16, she began her writing career after her divorce at the age of 20. She worked as a journalist throughout the 1930s while also taking an active part in the Italian partisan struggle, and was twice jailed for her anti-fascist activities. After the fall of fascism, she founded the literary journal Mercurio and went on to become one of Italy’s most successful and most widely translated authors.

After the war, she accompanied her husband, a diplomat to the United States and the Soviet Union. She would later move to Paris, where she would publish her last two books in French and where she spent the rest of her life. She died in 1997.

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Fresh Dirt from the Grave by Giovanna Rivero tr. Isabel Adey

Fresh Dirt From the Grave is another Charco Press title, this time from Bolivia. It is a collection of six stories that unsettle the reader, navigating paths outside the norm, revealing aspects of characters, of circumstances and inclinations that pierce like a wound, while evoking expressions of love, justice and hope.

Described as where contemporary horrors and ancient terrors meet, these short stories by Bolivian author Giovanna Rivero are not my usual fare, however I chose to read it for #WITMonth and discover what the boundaries of Gothic really means.

There are six stories and the first few were tales of macabre revenge that reminded me of Yoko Ogawa’s excellent collection Revenge.

Overall an interesting, dark collection that brings out a quiet consideration in each of the protagonists as they grapple with their challenging situations and must either make a decision or give in to one made by an other.

blessed are the meek

A young woman is violated. Everyone around her seems to be denying the gravity of it. The family moves away, until the opportunity arrives to bury their grief, literally…

It shouldn’t have been her family that had to leave. But they were the ones who left.

fish, turtle, vulture

Photo A. Tuan on Pexels.com

A man survives 100 days at sea, the young apprentice companion with him does not.

Now he is meeting the mother of that young boy. She feeds him tortillas, asking him to repeat again what happened out there.

Atoning for his loss, he will atone for hers.

Tell me more, she says, pushing the plate of tortillas towards him as if she were paying him to tell the tale with that warm, fragrant dough.

it looks human when it rains

A Japanese widow in Bolivia teaches origami to women prisoners in a jail. She is curious about these so-called murderers, until she teaches them how to make a snake – and observes in the eyes of one woman, something terrifying.

She was surprised to find that she was not appalled by their crimes, their mistakes, their unbridled passions, the gross misjudgements that had led them there. Who was she to ponder their failings.

Her own past comes back to haunt her, a young woman lodger helps her in the garden, things that were buried resurface in her mind, in her life. A sense of injustice, a prickle of rage. The year of the snake had been the worst, the part she had tried to bury. Origami was a path, a light, because it never resorted to twists or curves to fix a form.

No one who had been so fortunate as to find themselves among the group of émigrés that embarked on the voyage to Brazil and Peru in 1957 before settling in Bolivia, in the eastern rainforest of Yapacani, had returned to Japan carrying the wilting flowers of the fiasco on their backs.

Socorro

“Those boy’s aren’t your husbands” says a deranged Aunt in the opening lines.

I didn’t know in that moment, what shook me more: the mad woman’s barbed remark or the cackle she unleashed as she spoke those words, which felt like a reprimand.

A woman, her husband and twin boys visit her mother and Aunt. She is an expert in mental health but being around her Aunt unsettles her in ways that her professional self finds hard to deal with. The moments of lucidity among the madness, reach in to her own hidden aspect and threaten to overwhelm her.

Donkey Skin

Two children orphaned overnight are sent to live with their French Aunt in Winnipeg, Canada. When they get to 17 years old, they plan an escape, and their world gets turned upside down again.

The only blood uncle we had left in Santa Cruz, Papa’s brother, said that children were always better off being raised near a female voice, and so without saying a word, he signed all the migration papers needed for Dani and me to leave Bolivia and his life for good. Being Bolivian is a mental illness, he told us in that good-humoured way of his, which made us forgive him for everything, even for handing us over like pets to Aunt Anita, who, when the time came to appear at the juvenile court, despite all those breath mints she slotted between her teeth, still couldn’t disguise the stench of whiskey.

Kindred Deer

A brown deer stands next to a dead tree Kindred Deer in Giovanna Rivero's Fresh Dirt from the grave attend a dead deer
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Intelligent but struggling financially, students sign up for medical trials that promise to cover their debts, but at what price.

The medicinal smell that rises from Joaquin’s body like an aura has taken over our bedroom. It’ll be gone in a few days, they told him.

They ignore the corpse of a dead animal outside their window, leaving it longer than they should to address. Like the strange mark on his back that shouldn’t be there, have they left that too late as well, will he pay the ultimate price?

Pay him double or I’m leaving, I say.

Author, Giovanna Rivero

Giovanna Rivero was born in the city of Montero, Santa Cruz, Bolivia in 1972 and is a writer of short stories and novels.

She holds a doctorate in Hispano-American literature. In 2004, she studied on the Iowa Writing Program and in 2006 was awarded a Fulbright scholarship, enabling her to take a masters in Latin American literature at the University of Florida. In 2014, she received her doctorate.​ In 2011, she was selected by the Guadalajara Book Fair as one of the 25 upcoming stars of Latin American literature.

She is the author of the books of short stories as well as children’s books. She has published four novels: Las camaleonas (2001), Tukzon (2008), Helena 2022 (2011) and 98 segundos sin sombra (2014). Her literary work, which moves between horror literature and science fiction, is regarded as a major contribution to the renewal of the Gothic and fantastic genres in Latin America.

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Time of the Flies by Claudia Piñeiro tr. Frances Riddle

Women in Translation Month

15 years after killing her lover Ines is released from prison. A dark, intelligent mystery with a surprise collective voice

I read Claudia Piñeiro’s latest novel for #WITMonth. It is from the Charco Bundle 2024, a subscription where they send you nine titles, the best of contemporary Latin American fiction they are publishing throughout the year. It’s one of my absolute favourite things, an annual literary gift to me, surprise books that I haven’t chosen myself. And they are so good!

Also, it’s August. Women in Translation month. So I’m prioritising books in that category, another of my favourite things. World travel and storytelling through literature.

Claudia Piñeiro is fast becoming one of my favourite Latin American authors. This is her third book I have read. Elena Knows was Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2022; it was intriguing, but the next one, A Little Luck was even better. More engaging emotionally, full of suspense, an immersive read.

Review

Time of the Flies has it all. The more I consider it, I find it is literary brilliance.

A past crime, a slow burning mystery, a complicated mother daughter relationship, a developing friendship between women who are used to not trusting anyone, unwanted motherhood, a dilemma that might be an opportunity or a trap. A sociological commentary on the lives, loves, wrath and resentments of women and thought provoking references to other works of literature, from classic mythology to contemporary feminism.

Female Friendships, Fumigations and Investigations

Inés, the mother of Laura ( a role she is trying now to deny) has been released from prison 15 years after killing her husband’s lover. She has set up a pest fumigation and private investigation business with fellow friend and ex inmate Manca.

FFF (flies, females and fumigations) a business run by women for women. Non-toxic pest control.

The two friends and business partners work separately but they consult each other when a case requires it, although Inés knows more about autopsies, fingerprints, and criminal profiles than Manca does about cockroaches.

A new client makes Inés an offer that might be an opportunity or a trap, she considers whether to pursue the opportunity and Manca, her friend and business partner investigates the client and becomes suspicious when she finds there is a connection between this woman and someone Inés knows.

She curses her fate and whatever recommendation or flyer that landed her at Susan Bonar’s house in the first place to be confronted by a part of her past that she does not deny but prefers to forget.

The Collective Voice, And Medea

Then there is a collective voice of feminist disharmony that enters the narrative every few chapters to opinionate on what just happened, if there is an issue that women might have an opinion on.

It’s never a consensus, it illustrates the difficulty of any collective voice that doesn’t resonate together, and demonstrates the aspects being considered on a topic. Other voices are quoted that challenge:

“There are many kinds of feminism in the world, many different political stances within the social movement and different critiques of our culture.” Marta Lamas Acoso. I don’t agree. Me neither. I do.

Each of these chapters begins with an epigram from Medea by Euripides (a Greek tragedy/play from 431 BC), that sets the tone for the theme that will be discussed. Like our protagonist Inés, Medea too, took vengeance against her philandering husband Jason, by murdering his new wife and worse, her own two sons.

This quote below precedes a discussion on the issue of one woman killing another woman, whether that is femicide. Equally interesting quotes from Rebecca Solnit and Toni Morrison are also referred to in the text.

Medea by Euripides A Greek Tragedy, Time of the Flies Claudia Pineiro Collective voice of women feminist issues

Chorus:

‘Unhappy woman, 

Feu, feu [Ah, ah] unhappy for your miseries.

Where will you turn? To what host for shelter?’

Once you realise what the collective voice is doing, it provides a pause in the narrative and allows other voices to engage with the reader. In case you missed that a significant issue had just appeared in the text you’re going to be confronted with it here. It doesn’t distract from the story (well, yes it does initially), however the chapters are only a couple of pages long. It adds depth to the narrative making this more of a literary novel, it pushes the reader to consider the issues, which some readers may not appreciate, but it is likely they will remember.

What About Those Flies

Inés sees a fly. In her eye. It comes and goes, it is a part of her. The doctor has checked it out and explained it away, but for her, it is significant. She understands the brain’s suppression mechanism that will make it disappear.

If she had to define it, she’d say it’s the feeling that there’s something fluttering around her head that she can’t catch, that there’s something right in front of her eyes that she can’t see. But it’s definitely not a fly.

Flies ascend in the narrative, they have a champion in Inés and we will even come across numerous literary references to them, some that hold them more in esteem than others. They are also that niggle that she feels, something that wants attention that she is not seeing.

Even Manca made a contribution to my literary education. IN her efforts to encourage me to write, she gave me a novel (I don’t read novels Manca); Like Flies from Afar, by one Kike Ferrari. Manca doesn’t read either, not even the instructions on how to use her appliances, but she went to the bookstore and asked for ‘one about flies’, and the bookseller said: ‘The fly as a methaphor, right? I’ll bring you one of the best crime novels of the year.’

(…)
(…)
The novel has its central mystery that is slowly unravelled, while it explores the complexity of the mother daughter relationship, the effect of abandonment and absence and the promise that a new generation can bring to old wounds.
(…)
(…)
(…)

So, Those Ellipsis’s

Though it was a slow read for me, it really got me in its grip and there was so much to consider beyond the mystery, like the collective voice, which makes the reader consider issues from different points of view.

Then there are the ellipsis’s. The pause, things left out, the reader’s imagination engaged, what are they? Pause for thought indeed. Usually present when there is dialogue, they make the reader consider why they are there. Are parts of the dialogue unimportant? Are they an invitation to imagine what was said in between? Whatever the intention of the author, the effect is to awaken the reader to their presence and make you think about the why.

By the time I finished this, I absolutely loved it, for everything. For its central storytelling, its reflective invitation, the literary references, the collective voice and its ability to keep me entertained and interested and intrigued. A quirky, enticing, novel that praises flies and finds all these intriguing literary references to them. It is a cornucopia of elements amidst great storytelling.

Further Reading

Read an Extract of Time of the Flies by Claudia Piñeiro

Actualidad Literatura: The Time of the Flies <<El tiempo de las moscas>> reviewed by Juan Ortiz

Author, Claudia Piñeiro

Born in Burzaco, Buenos Aires in 1960, Claudia Piñeiro is a best-selling author, known internationally for her crime novels.

She has won numerous national and international prizes, including the Pepe Carvalho Prize, the LiBeraturpreis for Elena Knows and the prestigious Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for Las grietas de Jara (A Crack in the Wall). Many of her novels have been adapted for the big screen, including Elena Knows (Netflix).

Piñeiro is the third most translated Argentinean author after Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar. She’s also a playwright and scriptwriter (including popular Netflix series The Kingdom). Her novel Elena Knows was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize.

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Tidal Waters by Velia Vidal (Colombia) tr. Annie McDermott

Women in Translation

Tidal Waters is my first August read for #WIT month. Reading Women in Translation.

What an original, good-hearted, open, vulnerable read. I’m not sure whether what I read was fictional or not, because much of what is described in the ‘letters to a close friend’ coincides with elements in the author bio inside the front cover of the book and the main character is Vel.

The Epistolary Novel

epistolary novel of letters, reading, literacy, poverty, Afro Colombian

An epistolary narrative, it is about the return to a place and finding new purpose, along with the motivation to pursue it and taking others with you – told through a correspondence that bears witness and though we don’t see the replies, we can tell that they encourage and support both the idea(s) and the woman pursuing it.

I don’t know if I mentioned this specifically, perhaps not in a letter, though maybe when we met up before I left to come and live here here for good, but part of what pushed me to make this radical life change was the need to feel that my existence had meaning, that I was spending each day doing something I cared about and could feel proud of at the end of my life. And that’s just what I found in being Seño Velia, the woman who has meetings with people about books, who tries to motivate children to love reading and books as much as she does, and who supports the teachers.

Finding Purpose and Motivation, In Community

The letters span 3 years from May 2015 and they track a significant change in Vel’s life as she decides to return to Choco (to the Afro-Colombian community she was raised in) to start a new venture to bring reading, literacy and a love of books to it. The correspondence exhibits the growth and expansion of her writing, the letter becomes a safe harbour and she tests it by taking her writing to another level, stretching into a more personal yet contained arena.

Tomorrow I start a diploma in reading promotion, and with it my project, Motete. We’ve chosen three areas of Quibdo where I’ll start running the workshops.

She is taking a risk starting a new venture, but believes in it and is surrounded by extended family and connections, which facilitate her ability to reach out even further into the community and invite everyone in, to be part of or benefit from her shared love of reading.

And so this project is coming together. This basket, this Motete, is filling up. The slogan for my project is ‘Contenidos que tejen’ – contents that weave – and every day I like it more. Every day I realise that these contents are weaving fulfillment and happiness within me…

The thing is, motetes have been used to carry food for the body: plaintains, bushmeat, fish. Our is to fill them with food for the soul: art, culture, books. And just as motetes are woven by hand, I thought these new contents would also form a fabric: the fabric of society, of community, the fabric of souls.

Letter Writing

Her unnamed friend that she writes to is someone she hasn’t known long, he occupies a space between the familiar and the unfamiliar that she claims as a freedom to express herself, to be vulnerable and open, someone who has mentored and shown her how to get funding. The range of things she will write to him of, span a wide spectrum.

We never see the replies but the continuation of her own correspondence displays her life, her dealing with health problems, the double bind of her wounding and love, of being raised by doting grandparents, while having complicated relationships with a teenage mother unable to mother her and an emotionally absent father. Her later sadness and depression, helped through therapy, tears and conversations, to ways of coping and healing. Her optimism for her venture, and the community connections she creates keep her going.

I grew a lot. I learned. But most of all I tried to weave a new way of relating to my father that hurt as little as possible.

The Sea, The Sea

One of the themes is the sea, the absence of sea, the way the river meets the sea and her relationship to it. She yearns for it when it has been absent for some time, just as she yearns for the letter writer and the relief that comes in the act of writing to him.

She describes herself in her current role as being like the sea at that place where it meets the river.

I’m like the Pacific Ocean, pressing at the river with its tides to make it flow the other way, or lapping at the land when its waters rise, when it feels like gaining inches of new ground. You need strong motivation to stick to this way of life, which isn’t exactly a fight against the world, but rather the certainty of forging your own path.

An Homage to Correspondence

I loved this slender book, it’s project and generosity, its intimate sharing and platform for expanding and learning and having the courage to venture into new areas. It made me think of an exquisite title I’d forgotten about, Leslie Marmon Silko’s slim book of correspondence The Delicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters Between Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright.

That correspondence was written when Silko was 31 years old and Wright 51. They had planned to meet in the Spring of 1980, mentioned in letters of Oct/Nov of the previous year, not knowing he would be gone before then.

They discuss her novel, his poetry, language, his travels, her adventures with animals, their speaking engagements, their mutual challenges and experiences as university professors, and soon began to share more personal feelings, as she acknowledged the tough time she was having and he shared his own experience, expressing empathy.

Velia Vidal dedicates her book:

To my recipient,
simply for being there.

and when I read about her own projects in society, her love of the sea and shared readings and efforts to help move children and young adults out of poverty, it is all the more inspirational to read these letters, understanding the difference a letter can make, to see someone take a risk and pursue something that will help others from her community, while fulfilling her own dreams and aspirations.

Highly Recommended.

Velia Vidal, Author

Velia Vidal (Bahía Solano, Colombia, 1982) is a writer who loves the sea and shared readings. In 2021 she was a fellow at Villa Josepha Ahrenshoop, in Germany.

For her book Tidal Waters she won the Afro-Colombian Authors Publication Grant awarded by Colombia’s Ministry of Culture. She is the co-author of Oír somos río (2019) and its bilingual German-Spanish edition.

She is the founder and director of the Motete Educational and Cultural Corporation and the Reading and Writing Festival (FLECHO) in Chocó, one of the most isolated, complex and neglected regions in Colombia with the highest afro-descendant population density in the country.

Vidal graduated in Afro-Latin American Studies and has a Masters in Reading Education and Children’s Literature. She is also a journalist and specialist in social management and communication. In 2022 she was included in the list of 100 most influential and inspiring women in the world by the BBC.

She writes children’s literature, fiction and non-fiction, and poetry. Her work has been translated into German, English and Portuguese.

by

January by Sara Gallardo (1958) tr. Frances Riddle, Maureen Shaughnessy (2023)

January is a slim novella, considered to be a revelatory, pioneering masterpiece about a short period in the life of a 16-year-old Argentine girl living in a rural area, whose life trajectory is radically changed in a day. Now, for the first time, translated from Spanish into English.

Breaking the Silence, Exploring the Consequence

With echoes of Edith Wharton’s Summer , this radical feminist novel broke the silence around abortion to reshape the way women’s bodies and rights were perceived in 20th-century Argentina.

A radical feminist text, January was the first Argentine novel to represent rape from the survivor’s perspective and to explore the life-threatening risks pregnancy posed, in a society where abortion was both outlawed and taboo.

They talk about the harvest but they don’t know that by then there’ll be no turning back, Nefer thinks. Everyone here and everyone else will know by then, and they won’t be able to stop talking about it. Her eyes cloud with worry; she slowly lowers her head and herds a small flock of crumbs across the worn oilcloth.

A 16 year old girl in a predicament, not of her own making discovers she is pregnant, but not by the young man she dreams of. She is the daughter of peasant farm workers and has limited options, but will pursue them all the same, in order to try and avoid the inevitable, forced outcome that awaits her once her secret becomes known.

A pregnant teenager imagines death rather than forced marriage
Photo F.Capetillo Pexels.com

She is just of an age where she begins to notice and feel something for someone around her, but her virtue is stolen by another. Instead of imagining love, she imagines death, and wonders if this might be when her will finally see her.

She no longer cares about anything besides this thing that consumes her days and nights, growing inside her like a dark mushroom, and she wonders if it shows in her eyes as they remain fixed on her worn-out espadrilles, two little gray boats on the tile floor, or in her hands crossed in her lap, or in her hair burned by the perm.

The novella follows her panic, her attempt to find resolution without support, her symptoms, her desperation to seek absolution, her confession, her realisation of the terrible consequence, the life sentence, the marriage plot.

This thought floods her with a tide of anxiety as she remembers her secret. A sense of impotence rises to her throat, as if time has become something solid and she can almost hear its unstoppable current conspiring with her own body, which has betrayed her, tossing her to the mercy of the days.

She lives in rural Argentina, a conservative catholic environment, an unruly place for a young girl.

What will happen to her in this place that reveres the cloth, that judges and shames girls regardless of their innocence?

Further Reading

The New York Review of Books: Nefer’s Mission by Lily Meyer

The New Yorker: The Abortion Plot: A newly translated novel by the Argentinean writer Sara Gallardo provides a missing link in the history of abortion literature, by S. C. Cornell

Sara Gallardo: Recently rediscovered Argentine writer by Jordana Blejmar (University of Liverpool) & Joanna Page (University of Cambridge).

it is perhaps her abiding concern for the ‘Other’ – marginalized, solitary characters, women, animals, monsters, even elements of nature – that gives Gallardo’s literature its most powerful political dimension…

Author, Sara Gallardo

Sara Gallardo was born in Argentina in 1931 to an aristocratic Catholic family. She became a journalist in 1950 and was twenty-seven years old when her powerful debut January was published in 1958.

She grew up in Buenos Aires in a family of men so famous there are streets named after them all over Argentina (all key figures in the constitution of the Argentine nation): her grandfather Ángel Gallardo was a civil engineer and politician; her great-grandfather Miguel Cané was a journalist, senator, and diplomat; and her great-great-grandfather Bartolomé Mitre was president of Argentina from 1862-1868.

By the time she died in 1988 she had published more than a dozen books, including collections of short stories and essays. Gallardo has been compared to Lucia Berlin or Shirley Jackson.

January is considered required reading across Argentina.