The White city by Karolina Ramqvist

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The White city by Karolina Ramqvist

Swedish fiction

Original title – Den Vita Staden

Translator – Saskia Vogel

Source – review copy

I end this woman in translation month with another great  Nordic novel from a female writer this time the Swedish writer Karolina Ramqvist. Most of the best female writer I have enjoyed the last few years have been Nordic Lena Anderson and Therese Bohman both Swedish writers as well spring to mind. This book won the Per Olov Enquist lit prize in Sweden. Karolina Ramqvist has written novels short stories and essays. She has also been the editor in Chief of Dagens Nyheter. Her books have translated into many languages this is her debut in English.

He’d been the one who’d wanted to have kids. He had whispered his wishes in her ear. Suggesting a new direction for them, an opportunity. Word after Word, long decriptions of how he loved her and what it would be like to have another her, wh was also one of him .

For him, the idea of a child was a window opening; for her it was one closing. She thought of all the women she’d seen stand before their men, holding out their children and pleading for them to change rheir ways.

Dream was more his idea than her Idea.

 

This is a modern tale in a way, one of greed but what happens when greed leads to Crime. This is the story of one woman after that happen, Karin, She married to John. A man who gave her social status with his money. But it turns out he was on the wrong side of the law and now she is alone in her huge home. That isn’t going to be her home much long as the vultures are circling her life of high spending is over. She has very little time to sort out the future for her, but she also has her baby Dream one they had planned together. But she has now left Holding the baby as John is gone. She is trying to reach out to friends and family to stop losing everything to the government. 

She lay on the sofa with Dream. The sky was heavy and the air was too; it felt as thick as fog. She didn’t know how man days had gone sice she’d last gone outside.

She pushed the blanket and robe to one side and positioned herself so he r nipple nudged dreams round cheek. Eyes closed, she opened wide and turned her head, taking the breast in her mounth and pressing her tiny hand against it so it would empty more quickly.

Dream and her alone in the house for days on end

 

This is the tale of what happens when the good times go and the wife is holding the baby as her world a. she knows is crumbling around her. This like the other Nordic novel I have read by Swedish female writers. It is about strong female voices even thou her world is falling apart and her baby is still being breast fed. she is managing to keep it all together. A tale of what you do when those nearest have betrayed you and left you hanging and you were oblivious to it all going on around you. A woman her baby and the bad weather drawing in and trying to keep her warm and feed. Whilst the cold draws in the large house, even down to stealing the neighbour’s wi-fi. Ramqvist makes the weather feel cold as winter draws in around the former family home that she has little time left in. 

 

The exiled by Kati Hiekkapelto

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Exiled by Kati Hiekkapelto

Finnish fiction

Original title – Tumma

Translator – David Hackston

Source – review copy

When I went to the London book fair earlier this year one of the people I finally got to meet after many years of chat on twitter was Karen who runs Orenda books a publisher of mainly crime fiction and a number of them in translation.So this Finnish novel is also one for Woman in translation month. This is the second book by Kati Hiekkapelto the Finnish writer lives on an island and is also a singer in a Punk band and  I have reviewed the first was defenseless this book also features the same detective but this time we follow Anne Fekete back home to the Balkan village of her birth. S

Just then Anne felt a violent shove at her back. She was buffeted against the table – so hard that Tibor’s wine glass toppled over.Golden yellow Furmint trickled over the edge of the table on to the ground and splashed on Anna’s trousers. Tobor leapt to his feer and shouted something, and it was then that Anna noticed her handbag had disappeared from the chair next to her.

“My handbag” she shouted. “Someone’s taken my handbag”

Tibor and Erno dashed into the crowd of people

Drink with people that knew her dad, he bag is taken by a thief .

Anne is back with her family in the Balkans on holiday when her bag get stolen one day. But when the thief is found dead by the river. Her passport and credit card had gone so when the local police take the death of the man who is a Romany, Anne natural instincts take over when the robbery happened she happened to see a young girl with the now dead man. But as she starts to investigate the crime, she is drawn into a bigger picture of refugees and how the Romani community is treated with in Serbia. Also into past crimes that someone wants to keep from Anne and also maybe involves Anne’s own family her own father was a local policeman. This book shows the growing intolerance to refugees and other ethnic groups that do not just fit in with the locals as the past and present collide and Anne finds more out about herself and her family.

“Wouldn’t it make sense to be sure this is the same man who stole my handbag? I think I’m the only reliable witness. Admittedly, I only saw him from behind. But I noted his size and what clothes he was wearing.

“He was found lying next to your bag” said the chief of police

“And if h’d been found next to a boat, would that automatically make him a fisherman? Or if he was near a church would you assume he was a priest ? or behind a hospital…”

Anne gets the push off by the police that makes her want to dig deeper into the crime .

This works well as it can be read as a standalone read, the problem with crime series novels is sometimes you need to read them in the series but with these books, I find you don’t .But what we do learn her is more of the mysterious Anne Fekete past, how a girl from the Balkans ended up as a Finnish police detective. Can Nordic noir work with out the ice and snow and dark night yes? This book is a multi layered book of murder, family, refugees, and secrets.  But this is more than a crime novel it is a look at modern society in Europe from the Balkans to Finland we could easily say the rise of hate of other is growing and a death like this has probably been overlooked in every country by the local police

An Animal called Mist by Ledicia Costas

 

An Animal Called Mist by Ledicia Costas

Spanish (Galician) fiction

Original title  FF

Translator – Jonathan Dunne

Source – Personal copy

Well it is near the end of the second month of Spanish lit month and the end of woman in translation month so I decide to combine both with this review another from the small publisher Small station who have been brought out the brightest voices from Galician in the last few year I have reviewed a number of their books this is another and a new writer to this blog. Ledicia Costas has mainly written for YA and has won prizes for her books including the Galicia prize from Children’s literature. She has also written for TV working in documentaries in particular (according to Wiki).

There’s one part however, that not only impresses him, it bores a hole into his chest: the monlogue by Captain Quint a survivor of the world war II USS indianapolis disaster, relating thr sinking of the ship that carried the uranium and partd of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima to the Mariana Islands. Three minutes abd Forty-seven seconds during which Hunter remains on the alert his fist clenched, his senses fixed on the television screen in a kind of paranormal connection woth Captain Qunint .

Whilst watching JAws Hunter learns of what happen to the Uss idianapolis but wants to know more.

This is a collection of six stories all focus on the second world war. From the opening tale in Leningrad following how the people of the city coped with the famous siege. Then one of those strange things happened that when we are reading books the second story in the collection recounts events on the Uss Indianapolis from the point of view  of someone trying to find out about the ship Hunter Scott  heads to the library the ship was sunk near the end of the war by two torpedos and was the single greatest loss of life for a single ship in the war. This strangely I was reading this last week when the team funded by Paul Allen found the ship itself on the sea floor. THe next story follows the events before and after Enola Gay drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the plane following the pilot, student at school an engineer on the train. The two other stories in the collection one follow Italian Partisans and the other uses the actual dialogue of the trials of three Nazi post war including the trial of Goring.

On the morning of 6 August, Aiko, a pupil at the femine school in Hiroshima, had gone out with her friends to do some outdoor acivites. They walked in the vicinty of the river Ota, obvious to the world, in search of flowers to make garlands. It was only a few days until the Floral offering, a festival of colour that celebrated the gifts of nature

The morning waqs a mirror of calm in the surroundings of the river.This was a special place foor Aiko.

On the day the bomb was dropped on the city a girl collects flowers by the river.

This is a collection of voices and stories from the war that don’t read like history but actual events although she seems to squeeze the story around the events, I like the way she choose the every man to show the nature of the human condition and a child  trying to discover about the Indianapolis as they don’t believe it actually happened and this is maybe what can be said about this collection it shows that Truth is often stranger than fiction. We see the fragility of life at times those souls on the ground before the bombs arrive and then the other side of nature the brutal side with those voices from the Nazi trials. This shows what is called Great prose elsewhere those tales that walk the fine line between fiction and non-fiction.

 

Mister Blue by Jacques Poulin

Mister Blue by Jacques Poulin

Quebec fiction

Original title –  le Vieux Chagrin

Translator – Shelia Fischman

Source – Personal copy

Well, I have read a number of books recently but this one has jumped straight to the top I read it in one sitting on Friday. Jacques Poulin is considered one of the best writers of his generation of French Canadian writers, he has won numerous writing prizes during his career and has published fourteen books. I have to say I love the cat on the cover of this book from Archipelago books.

Dear Marika,

Welcome, Old Mr blue and I hope your visit here will be a pleasent one, as much as out inhospitable shores allow. Try not to let the cold and the damp bother you much. Walk on the beach and the sandbar as much as you want: that’s an excellent way to shake off your worries, as I’ve often discovered myself.

I have lived alon for a long time and solitude is propitous for my work, but it warns my heart to know that you’re at the other end of  the bay. Now that you’re there, everything seems possible, even the wildest, most secret dreams, the ones we never talk about, those that lurk beneath the surface of ourselves, I cannot help thinking that your presence is kind of invitation to begin everything again, to start from scratch.

Thought I don’t yet know your face, you already live in my heart.

Jim writes a note to the unkown woman owner of the book his one human connection.

This is a tale of a writer, Jim he is trying to write a great love story. this is hard for a man that lives by himself in an isolated part of Quebec in his cottage. Jim has withdrawn from life, he was a professor teaching Hemingway to his students, but something we never told what made him end up trying to write about love. He admits he has never been in love and to add to this he finds some footprints on the beach near the house and follows them into a cave and in this cave on a rock shelf above the tideline he finds a copy of 1001 Arabian nights, the book has a name on it Marika.He then starts writing notes to this imaginary woman. Then we find out there is a refuge for woman near by and a spirit soul of a woman Jim calls La Petite appears at the house and talks with Jim at times, this is where we find out about Jim’s past. The only real thing we meet is his Cat Mister Blue and he is maybe the one thing that Jim really loves, as we see when he panics when the cat disappears and Jim Panics.

I waited all week for Marika to come and visit. But in vain. Ten times a day I leaned out of the attic window , hoping to see the women I’d invited,  the womanwho was creating such a strange turmoil in me, on whom I was counting to bring my story back to life.

When she doesn’t come he starts to panic, is she real or just a fragment of jims past that has reappeared!

This is a gentle book about solitude Jim imagines so much it is hard to see what apart from Mister Blue is real in his world at times the Writer’s Block as he is trying to write a love story. Love is there in this world imagined love the notes to this woman Marika are playful and flirty, La petite a parental love in a way and Mister Blue the love we have for our pets. A view of a man that obviously has a secret in his past but like his hero, hemingway Jim is a man’s man so he doesn’t dwell on it but the sense is of a forgotten past at times. A book for lovers of subtle stories of being alone and the tricks it can play on one’s mind.

Fado Alexandrino by António Lobo Antunes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fado Alexandrino by António Lobo Antunes

Portuguese literature

Original title – Fado Alexabdrino

Translator – Gregory Rabassa

Source – Personal copy

When I choose to expand out Spanish lit month to include literature from Portuguese, one of the  writers I had in mind was another book by Antunes, I read knowledge of hell a couple of years ago and after that brought a number of his books to read in recent years he has been on the list of possible Nobel prize winners. This book is considered his best book. Antunes like the men in this book served in the military in Africa, he also worked as a doctor with men after the wars in Africa as a Psychiatrist.

“I was married and had a daughter this high “the second lieutenant said, smiling at the spoons the waiter was serving the mear with. “I was living on the Rue da Mae d’Agua, below the fountain, and after intimacies, even with the light off, I could see the round ball of the paper lamp, looking like an enormus moon, sowing Japanese ghosts in the darkness.(The breathing of his wife beside him and of his daughter in the otger room flooded the floor with a murmur of sounds that rose and sank like the soft flutter of a dress.

The men recall better days at times but always with a sense of loss in the words the say.

Fado Alexandro is a book in three parts that follow five men through the periods of their lives. Thye five men although four tell the story the fifth the captain of the men is in the background, the men are all in the military a soldier, a Lieutenant Colonel, a communication officer and a second lieutenant. The book opens in the years before the Revolution in Portugal and the war in Mozambique they all take apart, in fact, not all came back. Then there is the fall of the regime in the Carnation revolution, it is part of what happens there that cause the rest of their lives to go on the paths they did. Both lieutenants marriages fail and they take up with the different woman as one wife was upper class and a large amount is remembered of how hard it was for them to get together. Then there is buying a young girl in Africa. A death and the communication officer’s daughter tells her father story in the later section. The book follows the four as they all are scarred by war and their relationships with woman.

“Four of these lady friends plus the four  of us make eight hot whores ,” the lieutenant colonel told the second lieutenant , still suspious of the champagne , massaging his stomach. “What will your neighbours say when they see us ?”

Me, for example, I’m my mother, he thought , a ridiculous old woman who wore gauze, rings perfume, makeup and creams , her artifical nylon eyelashes fluttering like insect winhs, clumsily attempting to seduce the grocer in hop of a little discount on a jug of wine, because I started drinking towards the end of my life,

THe view of woman isn’t the best at times

This is a complex book about the time that followed the fall of Estado Novo regime following a coup by the military. The many wars in Africa as the Estado Novo tried to keep the old Portuguese colonies under their rule, in this case, Mozambique, Antunes spent time in Angola but both wars were very brutal in what happened there. Through the five men we see the brutal nature of the war is recounted in the stream of consciousness of the men’s lives and relationships, in particular, the  wives, woman they fuck and women the don’t fuck these are very nasty men in their natures All this book like Ulysses happens over one night as the four remaining men meet for a meal and get very drunk and recount their stories as record in the novel. So there is a sense at times of lines of the men and their stories blending that thing you get as men with a shared experience and recounting it the who, what, why and how can get blurred sometimes.  A powerful of men and war from a European version of what happened to American Vietnam in Africa.

The painter of birds by Lidia Jorge

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The painter of birds by Lidia Jorge

Portuguese literature

Original title – O Vale da Paixão

Translator – Margaret Jull Costa

Source – personal copy

Well, I managed to return after a busy while, my first lot of nights in my new job and a course and two long days meant the days off I had in between all this I hadn’t much chance to blog. But as I said last month I choose, to add some literature from Portugal, I looked up on Wiki a number of writers from the region and decided to choose those that were available second hand. Lidia Jorge is considered one of the leading voices of the new wave of writers that came after the Salazar regime. She spent time in Africa married to a military man then she lived with a well-known Journalist. This book won a number of prizes when it came out.THis book also covers woman in translation month.

For that reason,  on the night Walter Dias visited her, the bullets and the revolver were out of sight, and he wanted to take the gun away from her on that rainy night , he wanted to take the gun with him, but she realized that if he took it, when walter did disappearm he might disappear entirely. He even said to her “Don’t be silly!”But she couldn’t give him back the weapon. Giving it back would be like handing over the fragile link that bound his existance to hers.

They meet but she doesn’t want to let him go and break that bond that links them .

The painter of birds is the story when a young woman the narrator of the books starts to look back other her absent father’s life. SHe has a strained relationship with him and in the family farmhouse where she is just inland from the Algarve where Jorge grew up is salt worn from the sea. He painted pictures in his letter home from his many travels as she read through these letters and she sees the father she never really knew. There is no strong time line in the book so there is a real sense of the present and past drifting together as she reads and the world and place he went to coming alive.As the bits she knows the pictures family tales bring Walter Dias a man she only twice met in her younger years.A rogue of a man who left the nearest neighbours daughter her mother with child and started to travel the world with the army fighting in the various wars from the 30s onwards.

Francisco Dias used to talk about Walter too.

It was clear to him that black cloud hung over his youngest son. He would say so to anyone who would listen when he had free times on Sundays, before dozing off, though never speaking directly to Walter’s niece, but then he never spoke to her anywayy. He did not, however, conceal from her the difference between Walter and his other sons, should she care to hear, if she could hear.She walked among them as if she were deaf, and didn’t care whether she heard him or not.Francisco Dias put it all down to school, the place where, in his opinion, the life of a man was not only shaped but also summarized and foretold.THis is how he explained it.

Her grandfather had a very different view of his wayward son .

I like the narrative flow of this book it had a crime like pace but with a sense of  piecing  the past together piece by piece but also a sense of not seeing it all as Walter is a rogue but also does these wonderful bird pictures, but then there is the past of Walter from her  family tell her of him a man that ran out on her and her mother and briefly appeared in her she wants to love him, this will appeal to the fans of books like English patient as both share a sense of piecing  the past together from fragments and piece of gossip and side stories.

 

Seeing red by Lina Meruane

 

Seeing red by Lina Meruane

Chilean fiction

Original title –Sangre en el ojo

Translator – Megan Mcdowell

Source – review copy

This is another book that deep Vellum brought out but I never got to the e-book, so I was pleased when I was sent a copy from Atlantic books.It shows the talent that is coming from Latin America also the talented female writers. This ticks two boxes one from Spanish lit month and the other for  Woman translation month. As I say there seems to be a number of great Latin American writers and like most of them Lina Meruane is based in New York where she got a degree in Latin American literature, which she now teaches. She has written four novels this is her first to be translated into English.

But no , it was no fire i was seeing, it was blood spilling outminside my eye. The most shockingly beautiful blood I have ever seen.The most outrageous.The most terrifying.The blood gushed, but only I could see it.With absolute clarityI watched as it thickened, I saw rhe pressure rise, I watched as I got dizzy, I saw my stomach turn, saw that I was starting to retch, and even s.I didn’t straighten up or move an inch, didn’t even try to breathe while I watched the show. Because that was the last thing I would see, that night though that eye: a deep, black blood

As the Haemorrage is happening described by Lucina.

This is a novel that is partly based on the writers own experience. Like Lucina in the book Lina has also experienced what it is like to lose her sight. The book follows Lucina a young Chilean writer, who has come to New York like many writers from Latin America, the early part follows her when knows she has a condition that means some point, she may lose her sight. So when it happens it is still a shock to her. But also to her boyfriend who becomes her eyes Ignacio becomes her eyes as we see her become  familiar with using her other senses more as the world one familiar become very alien to her and even her most personal relationship has to readjust to make way for her blindness, but also the change it has made for Lucina as a person. Someone more connected to her emotions than she was before with more feeling and in a strange way seeing the world more without sight than she ever did with sight.

Ignacio is still in the airport, a disconcerted frown on his face. Ignacio standing under the glowing screen. Bepatures.Arrivals.His glasses glint over his now-empty eyes.Its an aged and ruined Ignacio. An Ignacio cracked like an old statue on the verge of collapse. His shirt with sleeves rolled up and his linen pants utterly tattered and his dull bronze shoes fixed to the floor. Centuroieshave passed I think, and there he remains covered by ash or dust of my depature,clutching the anxious kiss I blew to him.

A man broken in a way by caring and seeing her slipping away in a way .

Now blindness has been tackled at various times in Literature, Saramago Blindness where everyone goes blind, but it maybe captures the anger we feel her in Meruane words. The Day of the triffids shows the sheer panic one can feel when one lose the sight. But this is also a story of how a person adapts completely. Having worked many years ago with Older blind people, I get the stoic nature of Lucina, but also the underlying anger at times. A wonderfully observed book of snatch dreams and new turns in a life that has been part of the writer’s own story shows the current power of female writers from Latin America or as Bolano said of her one of the one or two greats on the new generation of  Chilean writers who promise to have it all. Great words about her.

 

A quick glance back at Sept to July for Woman in Translation

I have not made many plans for the woman in translation month. I feel as I review just books in translation these days I review as many woman writers as I come across or I am sent. So I decide like Tony have a look back over the last twelve months and a list of woman reviewed here.

Two green otters by Bucket Uzuner – a tale of one woman’s life struggling through 80’s turkey.

Trysting by Emmanuelle Pagano – unnamed voices of lovers talking about love and sex

Woman as lovers by Elfriede Jelinek – two factory girls love lives told through the years.

The Empress and the Cake by Linda Stift – A woman drawn into a bizarre old world of Austria

 

None like her by Jela  Krečič- a macho man searches for some one to replace his great love.

The boy by Wytske Versteeg – a Dutch couple adopt a boy but is he all he seems.

Swallowing mercury by Wioletta Greg – childhood memories of childhood in Poland .

Cockroaches by Sholastique Mukasonga glimpse of growing up in Rwanda before the troubles.

Breathing into Marble by Laura Sintija Cerniauskaite- another family adopt a child as their son is ill.

 

The Attempt by Magdalena Platzova- A historian follows a famous anarchist she is writing about.

Our lady of the Nile by  Scolastique Mukasonga – the second book by her now her school years.

Fever dream by Samanta Schweblin – a woman remembers a past as she has a fever in a bed beside a child.

Mirror shoulder signal by Dorthe Nors – a woman learns to drive but all is not as it seems.

Hair everywhere by Tea Tulic – a mosaic of a family life with the mother dying.

Belladonna by  Daša Drndić– academic looks back on his life and history of the 20th century.

 

The children by Carolina Sanin– a woman ends up with a strange boy and tries to find his family.

Eve out of her ruins by Ananda Devi– a young girl growing up in Mauritius.

Our Dead World by Liliana Colanzi– Short stories from Bolivia.

Nona’s room by Cristina Fernandez Cubas– a collection of stories the title about a sister that has a special sister.

Before by Carmen Boullosa- a young girl talking about growing up in Mexico.

twenty books in all. out of 88 books read in the last eleven months.

Inventing Love by Jose Ovejero

 

Inventing Love by Jose Ovejero

Spanish fiction

Original title – La invención del amor

Translators Simon Deerholts and Kathryn Phillips-Miles

Source – Review copy

Well, I reach the last of the Peter Owen World series of books for Spain the second in a series they are doing three books twice a year from one country. I have now reviewed all six of the books. Simon Smith from Peter Owen was interviewed about the series recently on LARB  about the books so far and what is to come in the series. Jose Ovejero is a prize winning Spanish writer, he has written seven novels so far and this is his second book to be translated into English. This book Inventing love won the Premio Alfagura de Novela prize in Spain one of the biggest prizes there.

“What’s up?”

“I’m sorry Samuel, I’m really sorry,”

“I think you have got the wrong number “, I say , but my conviction falters when I realize that he’s calling me by my name .

“It’s about Clara.This evenong .Not long ago.Fuck ,I’m sorry.”

“Clara”, I say and I rack my brains, thinkinh that I don’t want him to hang up yet .Before I go to sleep I need to hear this story which is not my story, precisely so that it can become mine, too just as we read a novel in order to add storie to our lives, stories which , however dramatic they may be, are acctually innocuous, we think, because they can’t really affect us

Samuel drawn in straight away to the story of Clara like a Novel he thinks .

This book is based on what happens when a man Samuel in his forties gets a call out of the blue telling him a woman called Clara, the assumption that Samuel was her secret lover. He wasn’t but then decides to find out how the mistake happened and go to the Funeral and decides to invent the past these two had but never had. He meets at the funeral Carina the sister of Clara and she gives him a lift home.He feels bad for lying to her when she drops him off and the sense of closeness he has got to Carina, As the two are drawn together the imagine the past becomes too real at times and maybe stands in the way of moving forward. What happens when you Invent Love ? does Real love survive it?

I read the name on the card – Carina Alvarez – and suddenly I feel uncomfortable. I get the sensation that i’ve gone too far, althoug I also feel relieved that I ‘ve managed to get out of a tight spot rather well.For the sake of something to do, I take a card from my wallet as well and hand it to her, as if we ewere in a buisness meeting meeting , except the only thing written on my card is mynname, telephone  number and email.I’ve never liked buisness cards.She takes it reads it and leaves it on the dashboard.

“I’m pleased to have met you at last, even if the ocasion …Im mean …what a mess”

Samuel firstr meetinmg Clara sister at the fueral, where he likes Carina …

What I loved about this book is that it isn’t a straightforward love story. The real story is of  Samuel and Carina but then there is an imagined love story and the real sense of this almost being a pulp thriller at times as the story unfolds and Samuel discovers more about Clara and Carina he has to move like a detective and adjust his present and also his imagined past.This is one of those stories that happens from those moments that can happen by accident would we do what Samuel did in his position ? that is the question can the lie be kept alive through out and not be caught out.

Winter Quarters by Osvaldo Soriano

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Winter Quarters by Osvaldo Soriano

Argentinian fiction

Original title –  Cuarteles de invierno

Translator – Nick caistor

Source – Personal copy

Another Latin American novel for Spanish lit month.This time I revisit a writer from the past , Osvaldo Soriano. He died in 1997. He started his writing life as a journalist. But as he was considered left wing. There was a period of six months where he had none of his articles being published. So he wrote a novel about Stan Laurel with Philip Marlow as character. He later placed this book at Laurel’s grave. This was his third novel and his second book to be translated into English, his book dirty  A funny Little war was the first which I reviewed here   . This is a follow on to that book set in the same small village in A funny dirty little war.

The two men waiting on the platform looked bored. The one who seemed to be the station master wore a shiny black suit. A cigarette dangled from his lips. The other , a fatmman in blue overalls was waving qa dim lantern in the direction of the train driver. I picked up my case and started down the aisle .The compartment was almost empty ; the other passengers were sprawled out asleep .I jumped down onto the platform and looked around .

The opening and a low key greeting for Andres Galvan arrivial in Colonia Vela

This book follows two characters that have washed up in the small village of  Colonia Vela three years after the original book. Rocha a down on his heels boxer, but to coin the old boxing phrase, he was a contender at one point having won a big fight earlier in his career. He has been brought here as an opponent. To fight the up and coming local champion who also happens to be the Army’s champion. Rocha meets Anders Galvin a clever but also like Rocha that has also seen his best day he is a Tango singer. Both are there for the same event.We see the boxer fall for the Mayor’s daughter as they are there to be the losers on the night and there are no two ways about that. A tale of two losers drawn together in a small town.

“Come nd visit ,” Rocha said to me .”If you decide to stay and want to see me before the fight, I’ve already forgiven you fior what you said, so ..”

“Thanks ” I replied. “I’ll come and see you tomorrow. And take care, they reckon the local kid is hot stuff..”

He straightrened my tie with his good hand “I’ll dump him in the third” He took out a large banknote and stuck it into my top pocket with a flourish.”Pay for the room and let me have the change later”

The two meet and Rocha doesn’t see the full picture  of the fight !

Now I read up about Soriano life for the first part and discovered he was a fan of Philip Marlowe,  so much that he was a character in his first novel. This is a homage to those sort of streets that Chandler wrote about in his books. Rocha and Anders are, like Marlowe more complex characters than they appear, Rocha, the boxer is not the cleverest person but wants to fall in love and settle down and escape the past in a way.Andres is the clever one her a tango singer that wants to a help his friend ending up as a pulp due to the fight. This is a classic buddy story but also set to the backdrop and politics of the country at the time. When the country was run by the military, this was also just after the defeat in the Falklands