EBRD Finalist 2024

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is delighted to announce the three EBRD Literature Prize 2024 finalists. In alphabetical order by author they are:

• The End by Attila Bartis, translated from the Hungarian by Judith Sollosy and published by Archipelago Books

• The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales by Ferit Edgü, translated from the Turkish by Aron Aji and published by the New York Review of Books

• Barcode by Krisztina Tóth, translated from the Hungarian by Peter Sherwood and published by Jantar Publishing.

The finalists were chosen by this year’s independent panel of judges: award-winning writer and critic, Maya Jaggi (chair); novelist and translator, Maureen Freely; and author and professor of international law, Philippe Sands.

I mentioned a while ago that I would change from the International Booker Prize next year to the EBRD prize. I would have read the longlist book this, but I just hadn’t funds after getting the Booker books. But when thew shortlist was announced today, I decided I would get the finalist well I had The End so I ordered the other two and as the winner isn’t ut to June I will read these three. Have you read any of these books ?

The House on Via Gemito by Domeico Starnone

The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone

Italian Fiction

Original title – Via Gemito

Translator – Oonagh Stransky

Source – Review copy

When the longlist was announced for the Booker International this year, I wished I HAD FINISHED THIS BOOK. I am a reader who sometimes struggles with books over 400 pages these days as I haven’t always had the patience to get through a long book. So I had asked for this as Starnone from the lovely publicist at Europa as it appealed to me. He is often thought as a possible name for that question that crops up an lot who is Elena Ferrante, as he lives and has spent most of his life in Naples. But his wife is also considered another writer who could be her. So this is one OI had wanted to read. But when I started reading this book last year, it wasn’t grabbing me. I just maybe wasn’t in the mood for it, even when. In reading it this time, it may need a closer, slower reading. But I liked the world he painted of Fwedrfi and his dreams of being a painter

Because, although he was a railroader, he thought about nothing but the exhibition he was preparing. And indeed, when he was good and ready, he came home, shut himself in, told the station that he had rheumatic fever, gastritis, or any number of other ailments, and spent his time painting line signals, junc-tions, sidetracks, cattle cars, railyards, depots, and railheads. I remember each and every one of his paintings: my grandmother, brothers, and I slept in the same room where he painted, the dining room, where his monumental easel stood surrounded by his paintbox and canvases. I used to fall asleep staring at those visions, they seemed beautiful to me; I wish I could find them.

The apartment and his dads world

The t tile refers to the small APartment in which Fedri is a railway clerk. But he is also a dreamer who dreams. He is the lost artist just waiting to be discovered. A man sat at times driven to get his dream, but along with this, this is the violence and effect of a man set on the dream of being a painter. The book’s first part is told from the point of view of his son Mimi and the -pressure of living with a man whose dream will never happen you feel. What we also get along in the family saga is the city itself. In his Porse, Starnoine paints the town if only his character was as good with his brush as his prose. He is a man who is trying, alongside his painting, to climb the ladder of being a rail worker. This is a man drawn to drink but also a man that had a lost dream and we see that it is at heart the story of a father and son and the Naples of the post world war two era. Fathers and sons do not want to be their fathers. This story is partly based on the writer’s own life. But Mimi hopes for his father to be seen and gain his dreams to make him happier than the drinking bully he is.

My days in Naples flew by. At night I scribbled down a mess of notes and kept saying to myself, tomorrow I’ll go look for The Drinkers. But then the following morning I’d wake up and change my mind: today I want to go back to Via Gemito, to see that railroad-owned building where we lived, and the window that my father looked out of while he painted.

The metro station was less than a hundred meters from my brother’s house. It was easy: all I had to do was descend into the abyss, with its pleasant grey walls and yellow handrails, its red bricks and the smooth black rubber pavement that smelled new, like everything down there, get on the first train, and get off at Piazza Medaglie d’Oro. From there, one morning, I strolled idly to Piazza Antignano, and observed the dilapidated old buildings,loitered aroun the market, no difference after all these years, and slowly made my way to Via Gemito

Naples a;ways in the bacground of the story

There has been an undercurrent of Autofiction in this year’s longlist. This book loosely uses part of Starnone’s childhood. His father was a mildly successful painter. One of his paintings was called The Drinkers, like a painting in the book. This is a son looking back and rewriting his childhood. His working-class father was a tough man who had boxed and was harsh on his son. This is also full of the same city we love from Ferrante. Naples is a place that seems to have a culture of its own whenever I read about it! This made our shortlist but hadn’t gone further in the Booker longlist. Which is a shame I maybe marked it Harshly in our own shortlist scoring round, I just have a feeling I have read it nearly twice I was about halfway through last year and have read it all this year and still it hasn’t grabbed me as I hoped. But if you like a working-class male take on the same city as Ferrante and her characters live in, this is the book for you! Do you ever as a reader have this feeling when you have read a book? I will try his books again. I have a couple on my shelves to read. Have you liked any of his other books ?

Winston’s score – B great in parts, but it just didn’t fully connect with this book

Letters from Iceland by W.H.Auden and Louis MacNeice

Letters from Iceland by W.H.Auden and Louis MacNeice

English travel writing /poetry

Source Library book.

I said I had looked at the list of books on GoodReads for this year, and I had planned another book rather than this one. I had intended to try and read World Light by Halldor Laxness. But I felt I would be pushing to finish it by today. So last Sunday, I looked at the list of books, and my eyes fell on this. I just hoped my library had a copy they did, and it had arrived on Tuesday to be picked up. The book follows the two poets Auden I know slightly better than Macneice although I feel I should know more from Macneice as he came from Northern Ireland like my family does. The book also saw them going to Iceland, which is very different to the modern country, with a much smaller population than now. Also, it is not so easy to get to. They have to take a boat from Hull to get there. Anyway, this is my final choice for this week, Club 1937, waiting to find out what year we will pull up Next year. We need to read later this year

Food

In the larger hotels in Reykjavik you will of course get ordinary European food, but in the farms you will only get what there is, which is on the whole rather peculiar.

Breakfast: (9.0 a.m.). If you stay in a farm this will be brought to you in bed. Coffee, bread and cheese, and small cakes. Coffee, which is drunk all through the day – I must have drunk about 1,500 cups in three months – is generally good.

There is white bread, brown bread, rock-hard but quite edible, and unleavened rye bread like cake. The ordinary cheese is like a strong Dutch and good. There is also a brown sweet cheese, like the Norwegian. I don’t like cakes so I never ate any, but other people say they are good.

Lunch and Dinner: (12 noon and 7 p.m.). If you are staying anywhere, lunch is the chief meal, but farmers are always willing to give you a chief meal at any time of the day or night that you care. (I once had supper at II p.m.)

I love the very english descriptions of the meals they could get.

The book follows the two poets’ travels and a summer trip to Iceland. They have been hired to write a travel guide to Iceland. We get a mix of Poetry, letters, porse pieces and insight into other travellers to Iceland. Alongside this is a darker underbelly that, when it was written, maybe didn’t seem as dark, but they meet some Germans that describe the Iceland locals as perfect Germans, an undercurrent of the Aryan race that would follow in the war years. Anyway, Auden’s main piece is a five-part letter to Byron that is in the style of Byron that takes snippets to the trip and other things. I had to check Byron never went to Iceland but did write a lot of Travel Poetry. Alongside this are some prose pieces around a trip on horseback they made into the countryside with some young woman, around the hotel and the food served there. Also, The last poems from Macneice are in the spirit of the time and about the world they have been to but also the country they have left behind, and are called W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice: Their Last Will and Testament”. I have said I was less aware of MacNeice. I read a vol of his poetry maybe thirty years ago, as he is mentioned on an album by the Blue Aeroplanes.

The book belongs to a German lady who married an Icelander, solely, as far as I can see, in order to have a child, as she left him immediately after, and now won’t go back to Germany. She had a magazine from the Race Bureau of the N.S.D.P. which was very funny. Boy-scout young Aryans striding along with arms swinging past fairy-story negroes and Jews.

In the afternoon we rode over the lake to Brekka, where the local doctor lives, and had tea. A romantic evening sky over the lake but unfortunately no romance.

The dark undercurrent of Nazis being there as well

I am not a poetry reviewer; I don’t know much about meter and context, but the Byron letter looks and feels in a tone similar to the pieces from Byrion I have read in his complete works, which I own. Macneice is a poet I would like to know and read more from over time. The book is a book of its time; it captures a far more rural and less touristic Iceland than it is now. I loved the way they described the food. Most hotels had European food, which was good as the description of the local food sounded as though neither poet was keen on it . There is also more adventure than was said when riding with the girls. The locals are captured in prose, and in pictures, the book has a selection of pictures from the trip. This is a gem of a book it is what I love about the club year I may have never picked this up. Not that I dislike POoetry I have a small collection of poetry books and often feel I should read a little more from bu[=oth the UK and around the world. Have you read this book or have a favourite book that isn’t just poetry written by a poet?

 

 

Winstons score – A little gem of travel writing poetry and Prose.

Weights and Measures by Joseph Roth

Weights and Measures by Joesph Roth

Austrian fiction

Original title – Das falsche Gewicht 

Translator – David Le Vay

Source – Personal copy

I looked at the Goodreads list of books for 1937. I’m unsure if I missed this or if it wasn’t on the list of books for the year. I looked on my shelves to see if any writers I liked had missed the list, and I found this one. I am a fan of Joseph Roth, who is most well-known for The Radetzky March. In a way, all his books are around the Austro-Hungarian empire. Here is a perfect example of that: we follow a marriage falling apart, and in that, it seemed an ideal bookend to the last book I reviewed, The Start of a Marriage Going Wrong by another short lived writer. Because Roth, like Szerb, died in World War Two, he was a more problematic drinker and had just heard of the death of Ernst Toller when he died a few days later.

Once upon a time in the District of Zlotogrod there lived an Inspector of Weights and Measures whose name was Anselm Eibenschütz. His duty consisted of checking the weights and measures of the tradesmen in the entire district. So, at specified intervals, Eibenschütz went from shop to shop and investigated the yardsticks and the scales and the weights. He was accompanied by a sergeant of gendarmerie in full panoply. Thus the State made manifest its intention to use arms, if necessary, to punish cheats, in accordance with the commandment proclaimed in the Holy Scrip-tures, which considers a cheat to be the same as a thief…

The introduction to the weights and measure officer of the title in the first page.

The book follows an Artillery officer, Anselm Elbenshchutz. He has taken a job in a small town near the Russian border, working for the government as a weights and measures officer, checking that everyone is doing it right.. But what happens when this man, a gentleman and officer with his principles, tries to lay the line of the law in this place where all he sees is people bending the rules and those near him taking bribes. He makes enemies, but when his wife, who made him move, has an affair with one of his clerks and becomes pregnant, he is drawn to a beautiful, mysterious Gypsy, Euphemia. She lives with one of the men he has most upset, Jadlowker, a profiteer. He tries to make money here and there. And as his world falls apart, we see how a good man ends up in a border area as people escape Russia. His wife then gets Caught up in the cholera outbreak in the area and dies with the Baby she has conceived with Anselm’s clerk. We see the spirit of the man broken. A motif and character that Roth has done well in the other books I have read over the years by Roth.

Eibenschütz looked at her constantly. He tried to catch her eye at least once, but he did not succeed. Her eyes were wandering somewhere in the distance. God alone knew what she was thinking about!

They resumed their game and Eibenschütz won a number of hands. He was a little shamefaced as he pocketed the money. And still Euphemia sat at the table, a silent flower. She glowed and remained silent.

All around there was the usual noise, caused by the deserters.

They crouched on the floor and played cards and threw dice. As soon as they had gambled everything away they began to sing. As usual, they sang the song Ja lubyl tibia’, out of tune and with croaking voices.

The Russian deserters that come across the border to his area and the Gpysy girl he falls for

Anselm, as a person who took the weights and measures job, was what would have at one time in the UK been called a Jobsworth. He’d been on the TV show That’s Life as someone who followed the line of the law to the point. But what follows is what happens to be hidden closed doors, those little bribes that, if unchecked, like here, where he lives, grow over time and what, when he arrives, seems an easy job. It isn’t, and as his world falls apart, as I say, this is a character Robert wrote well the fallen man as a character wife having an affair enemies everywhere. A love that is with his enemies this is a man in freefall as we see all around him turn bad and his world falls apart. All this is a short novella, a lesser-known book by Roth. The place he evokes is like an Austrian Cornwall of those smugglers and people trying to make a living on the other side of the law. Borders often have this dark side, even if a few things are cheaper over the border or the world seems better over the border. Well this is my third book for club1937 and a book that isn’t as well known as his other books. Have you read Roth?

Winstons score –A solid little novella from one of the great Austrian writers

Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb

Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb

Hungarian fiction

Original title –Utas és holdvilág

Translator – Peter V. Czipott

Source – Personal copy

I thought I had reviewed this book. I had read it a few years ago, well, 12 years ago, and Hadn’t reviewed it. That was the Len Rix translation that was from Pushkin Press. This new translation came out a few years ago from ALMA CLASSICS. This is one that caught the zeitgeist back in the day. After a review from  Nicholas Lezard, he said he finished and restarted. I think I didn’t review it as it felt like one that everyone loved, and this review maybe couldn’t tackle it. I know, but now is a different matter. Antal Szerb was a writer, scholar, and literary historian. He was well received in this day, but due to being a Jew, he ended up in a concentration camp and died only in his mid-forties. One of the best voices of his generation was lost.

The letter really got under Mihaly’s skin. He was revolted by Pataki’s unmanly “goodness”, which in any case was not even goodness, just lack of masculinity; but would hardly have been more praiseworthy if it had been goodness, since Mihaly didn’t have a very high opinion of goodness. And all that obsequiousness! In spite of it all, Pataki remained a mere shop assistant, no matter how rich he’d become.

But all this was Zoltán Pataki’s business, and it was his problem if he was still in love with Erzsi, who had behaved truly scandalously towards him. That wasn’t what upset Mihaly, but the parts of the letter referring to him and Erzsi.

A letter he gets from her first Husband gets under his skin just before they end up losing one another.

 

This is what Evelyn Waugh would have written had he been Hungarian. This is a pair of Bright your things. But two different people. Mihaly is on his honeymoon with his wife, Erzi. But as they are heading to Italy . Mihaly is haunted by his own ghost of a broken relationship from his teen years. He eventually tells his new wife about the events and loses love from his teen years and a tragedy. As they are heading on the train. He talks about all the little places they could visit, but his wife just wants to move on and get to Austria and forget his revelations. But when he says I’m going jump off at this station, grab something to eat, and come back, she says ok happy for a break from him. But when he comes back and sees a train going, he thinks it is his train, but it isn’t and is on an express to Perugia  So the rest of the narrative follows both of them as we find out more about his wife. As she heads to Paris and looks at her own ghosts, they both meet ghosts from their past. He gets the chance to go back and be like he was in his teens as he makes his way across Europe. Will they get back together?

When he’d got hold of the cheque and his passport that night, he thought – of course, not entirely seriously – that happenstance might separate them during the journey. When he got off in Terontola, it again crossed his mind that he might leave Erzsi to travel on with the train. But now that it had indeed happened, he was surprised and at a loss. But in any case – it had happened!

“And what will you do now?” the Italian pressed him.

“I’ll get off at the next station.”

“But this is an express. It won’t stop until Perugia.”

“Well then, I’ll get off at Perugia.”

“See, I told you right away that you’re travelling to Perugia. Don’t worry: it’s worth it. A very ancient city. And take a look at the surrounding area too.”

When Mihaly gets on the wrong Train

I said this reminds me of Waugh. At times, there is the feeling of Charles Ryder or Tony Last in Mihaly as a character with wanderlust, and the sense of never feeling quite part of your world is strong. Also, the places they visit are places where. Waugh wrote about the paths of the bright young things of the 30s just before the war changed the world for them. This novel has it all love, loss, death, and regrets, all in beautiful places and on trains evoking a bygone era of travel and life when getting to a place led to chat and often people’s minds wandering as they travelled. This is also a couple haunted both in their ways around their pasts. As they head around Europe, they meet those ghosts as friends or memories of those now gone. I loved this. I have read it again. Unlike Lezard, it has had a gap of 12 years and a different Translation. Unfortunately. I can’t see my copy of the Rix Translation either I sold it when I moved as I had to get rid of a lot of books as I downsized shelf space, or it is hidden at the back of some other books and I just missed it when I had a good look earlier this week. Anyway, this is my second stop for this week’s 1937 club. What stops have you picked this week? I have a couple more to review at the weekend.

Winston score – A Love, Marriage, Regrets Secrets and Italy in the 30s. What more could you ask for?

 

ALI and Nino by Kurban Said

Ali and Nino by Kurban Said

Azerbaijan fiction

Original title -Ali un Nino

Translator Jenia Gaman

Source – Personal copy

I love it when Simon and Karen announce the year of the club every six months. For me, it is an excuse to go down a rabbit hole and find interesting and exciting books to read for the year. Anyway thuis was the first choice for 1937. It has a great story. First, Kurban said it was a Non de plume. But over time, who it was isn’t known for sure. There is a whole wiki page about this on my edition that points towards Lev Nussimbaum, a writer who escaped Azerbaijan and a friend of someone else, the Austrian countess Elfriede nEherfenfels, also thought to be the writer of this book at some point. Another writer put forward by his son is Yusif Mirbaba oghlu Vazirov, a writer also connected to Baku, where the book is mainly set. The book came out i n1937 uin Austria given its timing would been contirversal. The book saw the light of day for a second time when it was found and translated into English by the translator in the fifties. Since then, it has been translated into thirty languages. It is a classic take on the forbidden love story.

My father went for advice to the Mullah at the mosque, who declared that all this Latin was just vain delusion.

So my father put on all his Turkish, Persian and Russian decorations, went to see the headmaster, donated some chemical equipment or other and I passed. A notice had been put up in the school stating that pupils were strictly forbidden to enter school premises with loaded revolvers, telephones were installed in town, and Nino Kipiani was still the most beautiful girl in the world.

His view on his girlfriend Nino the most Beautiful girl in the world.

The story follows a couple of the titles from when. They are at a Western school in Baku as kids. The struggle this leads to as Ali, although he goes to the school, is from an Azerbaijani family of Persian descent and is Muslim. Where as Nino is from a Georgian family and is Christian. So what follows is their love and wanting to marry. Getting first his family and then her family to agree to the wedding. All this is against the backdrop of the Cosmopolitan Baku of the time. It was full of Oil money, and many different people lived together there then, but the oil meant it was eyed by the Soviets to the north. The book is told from Ali’s perspective and what I loved is how he captured the feel of the city at that time. The twenties near the world is destined for war, but in this desert city, this leads to the people wanting their own freedom to escape the fear of the hammer and sickle to the North and the Soviet forces. Add to this the families want the best for their sons and daughters. Ali’s family is well known, and her family are royal in their way, as some call her a princess. What price is happiness as they have to escape their world of wealth? This is a story of deep love between two people and how it can win out.

When the first excitement was over I sneaked to the tele-phone. I had not spoken to Nino for two weeks. A wise rule demands that a man should keep away from women when he stands at life’s crossroads. Now I lifted the grip of the unwieldy apparatus, turned the bell and shouted into the mouth-piece: ‘3381!’ Nino’s voice replied: ‘Passed, Ali?’

‘Yes, Nino.’

“Congratulations, Ali!’

‘When and where, Nino?’

‘Five o’clock at the lake in the Governor’s Garden, Ali.’ I could not go on talking. Behind my back lurked the curious ears of my relations, servants and eunuchs. Behind Nino’s— her aristocratic mother. Better to stop. Anyway, a bodiless voice is so strange that one cannot really enjoy

I love the way the love affair goes so old fashioned to these days.

This has it all an exotic setting a world on the bring of madness of the war. A pair torn by family, religion and race, he is Asian and Muslim, and she is European and Christian, but at the heart of this all is the love between them. One mind turns to incredible stories of love, Romeo and Juliet, or something like The English Patient, with its exotic setting, a cosmopolitan time in Baku before the Soviets took over the country. Or even Florentino and Fernina come to mind in Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera of how love sees through everything. I also loved the place, the Baku of the time, which reminded me of how someone like Pamuk Captures Istanbul in his fiction. There is an eye for the details of daily life that makes the prose in this book leap off the page. It also reminds me why I always read books for the club year week, and that is the voyage of discovery of books like this that would have passed me by. Have you read this book or any other book from Azerbaijan?

Winston’s score – A – the hidden gem of a book about a love affair, the power of love, set in the wonderfully cosmopolitan Baku before Soviet rule.

 

 

A perfect day to be alone by Nanae Aoyama

A Perfect day to be Alone by Nanae Aoyama

Japanese fiction

Original title – Hitori biyori (ひとり日和,

translator – Jesse Kirkwood

Source – Review copy

I take a side step from Booker International with today’s post. I look at a book from Jpan as one of the big missing things from this year’s list was the lack of a Japanese novel. Here we have a book from 2007 from one of the rising stars of Japan. Well, as this is the first Adult novel from this writer to be translated into English, it also won the Akutagawa prize when it came out in 2007. The writer has cited Francoise Sagan and Kazuo Ishiguro as influences on her writing. This book sees a young woman sent to live with a relative as she has just turned 20, and her mother has had to take a job in China, leaving Chizu living with the 71-year-old Ginko and the two cats that live in the ramshackle Tokyo home she has been sent to live at.

When I got back to the house, Ginko was sitting under the kotatsu blanket, doing some embroidery. The blanket’s unusual thickness was explained by the fact that it was actually a series of different blankets: a heavily pilled beige one followed by a brown one, and on top of that a red feather quilt.

“I’m back.”

“Oh, hello again, replied Ginko, pushing the reading glasses that had slipped down her nose into place. Trying to block out the memory of my pathetic exchange with Yohei, I flashed her a good-natured smile as I slipped my jacket onto a hanger.

“Fancy some yokan?”

“Oh, yes please.”

 

The two are in different worlds in a way

The book I read at the same time I saw Perfect Days, the recent Wim Wenders film, not that they have a lot in common, but the main character’s apartment in the film maybe felt like the sort of area the Chizu is sent to live. The book follows the young woman over four seasons as she takes lots of pointless jobs and she collects items from people, but at the heart of the book is a lonely woman making her way through a busy city living with an elderly relative and her cat pictures and her embroidery is a world away from where the young girl wants to be as we see her glimpse others lives, but her own life is lonely and that sort of weightlessness ine feels at that age not knowing where life will go but want it to go somewhere she does the mindless jobs but hasn’t found her path going home to a flat that rumbles as the trains go by. A female coming of age in a modern city.

Today’s event started at seven in the evening. That meant I had to be at the company’s office in Chofu by half five, where I’d get changed, do my makeup, attend a briefing, and then go and get the banquet hall ready.

I hadn’t told Ginko I worked as a hostess. I figured she wouldn’t even understand the concept, so I’d just told her I was washing dishes at a banquet hall. If I’d really talked her through everything the job entailed, shed probably conclude it was some sleazy operation. I didn’t want to have to defend my choices, and in any case I was planning on moving out as soon as I had some cash saved up.

In the meantime, I just wanted to enjoy myself and avoid rocking the boat too much.

Then she takes a job that maybe risky

This is the flip side to a story like Please Look After Mother of Ozu’s Tokyo story, about a younger person lost in the city. There is often talk about loneliness in this modern age with everyone so absorbed in ther smartphones and the world seemingly quicker than it was a few decades ago. What she has captured is the world just as this is happening, the first ripple of what is ahead it is 2007 so smartphones are just taking oiff this is the year iPhone appeared. We have a hint of a case for many a young woman or man in any modern city: loneliness. In fact, the title in Japanese is being alone. I mentioned the film Perfect Days. This is like the niece in that film, a girl lost in her world. Maybe we have a sharp comic, at times, looking at the world. Some great clashes iof generations between Ginko and Chizu. But as the year goes on, we see the character grow till, in the end,, we see a different girl, well a young woman really. I am reviewing this early as it is one of those books that I feel will be popular when it comes out. Have you a favourite tale of loneliness ?

Winstons score – A tokyo story for a modern age a girl lost in the city and lost in herself most of the time.

Booker international shortlist my reaction

Here is the Shortlisted books

Not a River

Written by Selva Almada

Translated by Annie McDermott

I think this is one of my favourites to win it tackles being male in a tough world but also secrets and  set in the hinterlands,make it a wild ride.

Mater 2-10

Written by Hwang Sok-yong

Translated by Sora Kim-RussellYoungjae Josephine Bae

I have yet to review this, but I have read it as an insight into the political past of Korea through the lens of strikers in a rail strike. My review is to come shortly. He got the idea for the story from someone that he meet.

What I’d Rather Not Think About

Written by Jente Posthuma

Translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey

A sister looks back on her and her twin brother’s life as she tries to get to the heart of why he has taken his life and what brought him there and left her as the only twin.

Crooked Plow

Written by Itamar Vieira Junior

Translated by Johnny Lorenz

Twins the second book with twins this time twin sisters story told after they cut there tongues which lost there tongue and how do there lives and the world around them pan out after that event.

 

Kairos

Written by Jenny Erpenbeck

Translated by Michael Hofmann

A love affair falls apart as the country they arelibving in the Old East Germany falls apart partly based on the writers own life.

The Details

Written by Ia Genberg

Translated by Kira Josefsson

A woman remembers four relationships whilst in a fever in a fever dream state

Well I had picked

Karios

Not a river

Undiscovered

Lost on me

white nights

A dictator calls

The house on Via Gemito

Well as you see I have two books on the official shortlist. I feel one of these two will win the prize but I haven’t got much right this year. I feel this years list is aim at a young readership than me but has a great selection of autofiction , rural tales father figures and poverty all make the shortlist. I finished the last book off the longlist today and will have my reviews finished in the next week or two.

 

Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior

Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior

Brazilian fiction

Original title – Torto Arado

Translator – Johnny Lorenz

Source – Personal copy

One does wonder with this year’s longlist as I am now writing this post with about 300 pages left of the last book. I wonder which of the titles from this year’s longlist I would have picked up without them being on the longlist. I looked at the books when they came out of them all. There were a few I had probably intended to get, the Wiener and the Kadare, as I had read books from them before and enjoyed them. This fell into a category called Published. In recent years, we have published exciting books, which has been the case with Verso. They always pick left-field books, which is a little joke, given I know they are a left-wing publisher. But their recent fiction choices always seem great, so this from the Brazilian writer Itamar Vieira Junior had been on my radar. He studied geography, getting a scholarship for people from poor Black backgrounds in Brazil. He got a doctorate in African and Ethnic studies. He works for the Brazilian state agency dealing with land reform. This was his debut novel. Before that, he had two collections of short stories.

Belonísia pulled the blade from her mouth, too, then brought her other hand up, as if trying to hold something in.Her lips reddened, and I wasn’t sure if it was from the excitement of tasting the silver blade or from wounding herself, for she was also bleeding. I swallowed as much blood as I could. My sister was wiping her mouth frantically with her hand, her eyes squinting with tears as she tried to stand the pain. I heard my grandmother’s slow steps approach, then she called out to me, to Zezé, Domingas, and Belonísia.”Bibiana, can’t you see the potatoes are burning?” I became aware of a smell of burnt potatoes mingling with the smell of metal and the blood wetting our dresses.

As the twins cut there tongues in the opening pages .

Now set in the hinterlands of Brazil, this book has one of the most exciting openings I have ever seen. Two sisters are at their Grandmother’s house, and they find a knife under a bed. Then, they decide to play and cut one another’s tongue. As a result of this, one of them ends up mute. The sisters Bibana and Belonsia are the book’s narrators, but it isn’t clear which lost their tongue and is mute for most of the book. Their father is a renowned healer as we follow them through their lives. In a way, it is clear as one sister excels at school and the other struggles with her studies  The book sometimes is a little magic realist in places, but in others, you can see this is from the work the writer has done himself with land reform, and this is shown later in the books as the sisters start to see how their world is that being an Indian in the hinterlands and this is shown as the modern threats that threaten this world in modern Brazil show there faces in last part of this book as this part feels very much about the corruption violence and struggles of many poor families in the hinterlands of Brazil.

Years after the accident that had left one of his daughters mute, my father, with Sutério’s encouragement, invited my mother’s brother to join us at Água Negra. Sutério, the manager, wanted to bring in folks who “would put their shoulder to the wheel,” who, as my father explained,”weren’t afraid of hard work and would pour their sweat into the fields.” They could build houses of mud, but not brick, nothing enduring to mark how long a family had been on the land. They could cultivate a small plot of squashes, beans, and okra, but nothing that would distract them fromthe owner’s crops because, after all, working for him was what enabled them to live on this land.

It is kept quiet which sister is the mute for peroid of the book!

I can see why this is such a hit in Brazil, but in a way, that is what serves against it so much asi felt the writer has crammed so much into this book in a way it felt like three books the start book the middle part and the end part would all be served better filled out and made into longer parts novels in themselves.. I said I love Verso books, and this is why Vieira Juniors is one of a new wave of Brazilian writers tackling the dark racist past and slave history, land corruption, etc, in Brazil’s past. We must hear his voice. He is also an heir to Jorge Amado, who wrote about the hinterlands in his early writing life, but this is a fresh take from an Afro-Brazilian writer. For me, this had part of writers like Wilson Harris, who did so well capturing the remote parts of his homeland, or Marquez with His Columbia oif the time. It has a small dash of magic realism. But also a large dash of the past and how that affects modern Brazil. In that regard, he reminds me of someone like Juan Gabriel Vasquez, who, in historical books, tackles the past as a prism to the present. Have you read this book? or have another favourite book from Brazil, if not there are 18 other books under review on the blog!

Winstons score

Lost on me by Veronica Raimo

Lost on me by Veronica Raimo

Italian fiction

Original title –Niente di vero

Translator – Leah Janeczko

Source – Personal copy

Veronica Raimo grew up in Rome. She studied German cinema at university and has lived in Berlin since earning her degree. She has translated books from English into Italian and also written for a number of magazines, including Rolling Stone La Repubblica and Corriere Della Sera. She has had several novels and short story collections out. This is her second book to be translated into English. Her brother is also a writer Christian, but it hasn’t yet been translated into English. This on paper when I read the blurbs around the books on the International Booker longlist appealed. I am a Fan of coming-of-age books. I like books that use vignettes as a style of writing. So I was eager to read this and had placed it on the list of books as a break from a couple I wasn’t sure about.

My short-term plan was to take the train to Fiumicino Airport so I could say goodbye to Za— the boy I was dating-who was leaving for Ireland. This was back when Ireland was all the rage and spending three weeks surrounded by drab little towns, the countryside, drizzle, dark beer, and shitty music seemed like something to experience.

It was the first real goodbye in my life. To be perfectly honest, I’d been building up to that moment in my mind since the day we started going out. In fact, I think that was exactly why I started dating him in the first place: so we could leave each other. The thought that hed be leaving the country soon ensured me a misery I could enjoy without the hassle of having to go out and find one myself.

I connected with this as a kid I hitched the length of  england a few times just trying to escape my family life.

Vero is the narrator of our story. She, like the writer herself, has grown up in Rome. The book as I said is told in Vignettes. In fact, it happens that most of the material started as part of a stand-up routine she used to do. I get that from recollections like when she was four, knowing all the Juventas players, we all had little odd things as a kid we could do. Her mother may be a typical helicopter parent constantly wanting contact with her children. Then her father remind me a bit of my stepfather, another day man, but that never quite finishes what he started. Many odd childhood events make you see this as a little tongue-in-cheek and a writer who remembers those funny moments so well. Then I loved the change from Child to adult as she headed out in the world. Like myeself she had spent time in Germany ok she was in Berlin and i was in the small town Kleve. But that first feeling of mishaps and sexual awakenings. The loss of her father reminds me of the loss of my Mum. There is a time when she is turning 40, she wants to let her know, and I have so often wanted to do this since I lost my mum’s mothers and sons and for her Father and daughters.

I love living in other peoples homes. Discovering their books, their records, their sex toys, the orgasms of their neighbors, using their shampoo, drinking espresso from their cups. That sense of alienation that makes me feel like myself. Unlike the saying about the devil and his pots, I’ve always taken “Try putting yourself in someone else’s shoes” literally. I feel good in other peoples shoes, in other people’s clothes. I open unfamiliar wardrobes and slip on whatever’s there. I look at my reflection in the mirror and recognize myself.

Don’t we all love this having a look at other shelves and flipping through their records.

I initially put this down and felt a little underwhelmed, but since I read it, I have a chuckle at this bit and that bit of the book. I realised I actually loved parts of it and the wry humour. In hidsight would be suited for a radio comedy I felt it suit that style as a book it works but this ios a wiork that needs to be spoken and read in a way to fully grab the humour underlying it at times. I get why it is  compared to Fleabag it has a similar humour that shows a rebellious young woman in a way that is a fresh character in fiction we’ve had to many young guys it makes a change to read this sort of coming of age with a female voice at the centre of the book (I’m know thinking god I sound old !) Have you read this or any other books with interesting female narrators at the heart?

Winstons score B solid fun book would like to listen to this as audio imagine the humour would come over more than in my voice if that makes sense