The little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg

The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg

Italian Memoir

Original title – Le piccole virtù

Translator – Dick Davis

Source – Personal copy

One of the writers I saw mentioned in the book Not to read by Alejandro Zambra was Natalia Ginzburg. Ginzburg was a writer when Zambra discovered he couldn’t decide whether to shout out about or keep just for themselves.But he let it slip very soon about him. Natalia Ginzburg. He first novel was published under a pseudonym in 1942 as she was Jewish.After that, she worked for the Italian publisher Einaudi that published books by the likes of Primo Levi, Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino.Then in the fifties, this is the most productive period for Ginzburg as a writer she wrote most of the pieces in that period of time.

My shoes are worn out , and the friend I live with at the moment also has worn out shoes. When we are together we often talk about shoes. When we are together we often talk about shoes. If I talk about the time when I shall be an old, famous  writers, she immediately ask me” What shoes will you wear ?” Then I say i shall have shoes made or green sude with a big gold buckle on one side.

Worn out shoes is about her war time experiences using her shoes as a metaphor about the war and its experinces on the public.

There is twelve piece in Little Virtues. From the first piece about the winters in her home region of  Abruzzi where she says they only really have Winter and Summer with her saying the spring is like winter, she describes how the region deals with the conditions and how many of the workers come home from the summer work for Christmas. Then a wonderful piece written about her war experiences called worn out shoes about how she managed to cope with just a  single pair of Shoes and how her friends also have to. It ends with lines about having to learn to walk in worn out shoes. Then my favorite piece is called England a Eulogy and lament. is a witty piece about how she found England when she visited not the most flattering view of our country but funny and I was reminded of the Black and white films of the late forties with the grey smog filled country she describes the English stations as the place where England is most openly gloomy. Then she talks in the later piece about types of silence and her relationships

England also expresses its sense of fantasy in its cafes and restaurants. They often give them tfoerign names to make them more attractive- “Pustaza”, “Chez Nous”,”Rome”,”Le Alpi”. When you look through the windows you see wispy climbing plants, Chinese lanterns, shap oeaks of rock, the blue of glaciers. Or you see skulls and crossbones black walls , black carpets, funeral candles – and because these place are oftendeserted a mournful silences reigns.

Enland through her eyes is a strange and and odd place.

Natalia Ginzburg is due to have a revival with this recent reissue of this book and a couple of others in recent years like me a new generation of readers can discover this great female Italian voice. The pieces in this collection started in the world war two Italy to post-war England and glimpse into her personal life. Her style is conversational at times you are drawn into her essays and feel as she is describing her world as thou you are next to her. There is subtle wit at times behind her writing especially her times in England, which has a wonderful dry view of drab post-war Britain. I want to try one of her novels next. It is great to see more non-fiction in translation.

The day before Happiness by Erri De Luca

 

 

The day before Happiness by Erri De Luca

Italian fiction

Original title – Il giorno prima della felicità

Translator – Jill Foulston

Source – personal copy

Another of the books I recently brought on holiday. There was something about this cover the cheekiness of the boy on the cover and it is a coming of age story. Which I really enjoy. Erri De Luca is a well-known writer in Italy but not in English so far.  He has been writing since his twenties but wasn’t till later in life he got his first book published. Since then he has published over seventy books, had them translated into a number of languages. He has also translated a number of books into Italian from Hebrew as a self-taught translator. He is also a keen climber and has been active in the opposition to a rail line between Turin and Lyon. He grew up in Naples.

I went to the school. My adoptive mother enrolled me, but I never saw her. The porter, Don Gaetano, looked after me. In the evenings , he’d bring me a hot meal, and in the morning before scholol, I’d take back the clean plate while he warmed me a mug of milk. I lived in a little room, the Sstanzino, by myself Don Gaetano hardly spoke at all. He’d grown up as an orphan too, but in an orphanage, unlike me. I was free t come and go in our building and around the city

Intially Don Gaetano says little but as the book goes pon he opens up to the young boy.

This is a story of a childhood in Naples told through the eyes of young Orphan. He is living with his adoptive family. But as it is said early on they are rarely there for him and he is mainly looked after by Don Gaetano he is the elderly caretaker of the blog of flats where the young boy lives. He starts of trying to fit in by first rescuing a ball and trying to join in with a game of football with the older boys but he never fits in. But he catches a glimpse of pretty girl via reflections in the window this is a sign of an early sexual awakening in the boy. later he meets an older woman. He also discovers books reading a book a day during the summer holidays he borrows from a shop. He also learns the city via the older man telling him of the Naples he knew during and before the war also how he hid a jew during the war.

Don Gaetano missed nature as he’d known it in Argentina. On the plains where herds grazed freely, lighting struck to the rhythm of the tarantella, and the earth was the sky’s dance fllor.”It was normal to be an orphan there. Everyone was, animals and men alike kn the plains ias vast as the ocean. Theives defrocked priests, anarchists, the Irish.. Argentina lifted the wieght off your heart and gave you back all the spaceyou could ever want.

The old man spent time in Argentina and opens the boys eyes with tales he tells him making him see beyond the city at times.

This is a short novella it is just over a hundred pages and like most great novellas it seems so much more. This is the story of a boy growing but without his parents, Don Gaetano does his best to help the boy. The relationship between the two brought to mind to me the relationship between Salvatore and Alfredo in Cinema Paradiso. Like that film, there is also so a large character of the Place her in this book it is Naples that city of the Southern Italy that at one point the narrator says is more like a Spanish city. This book came out of course after the success of the Neopolitan novels of Elena Ferrante. Erri De Luca has been around longer than Ferrante but it is good to see as a knock on of the \Ferrante novels other books set in Naples have been published.

Not to read by Alejandro Zambra

Not to read by Alejandro Zambra

Chilean essays

Original title  – No Leer

Translator – Megan McDowell

Source – personal copy

I was talking last week on twitter on #Translationthurs about what books people are reading. Jeff a fellow translation fan said he was in the middle of this book the latest by Zambra to be translated into English and also the first non-fiction to be translated into English.I have reviewed his novel ways of going home and his short story collection My documents. Which like this collection came out on Fitzcarraldo editions. I loved his short story collection so was looking forward to this as it was a collection of short essays.

The Mexican Josefina Vicens preferred the slippery simplicity of natrual phrases, even if she had to spend years searching for them. In one of the few interviews she granted. She tells of that time Julio Rulfo asked her why she was taking so long to publish another novel. The joke made sense, since in the end of Vicen’s oeuvre turned out to be even smaller than Rulfo’s: her two novels were recently published together in a volume that could fit in a shirt pocket.

Her most well known work El libro Vacio (the empty book), from 1958 which took eight years to write and which depicts the process of a man fighting against a blank page

A novel about writers block , I hope this books gets reissued at some point.

This is a collection of short piece where we discover what drives Zambra as a reader. From the first piece Obligatory reading about those books that we tackle in school. He talks about what he feels of the choice of Madame Bovary, where he learns for the first time movie adaptions can be a little liberal with the story. Then we have a piece about the great Argentina writer Julio Cortazar. He talks about how good the writer is and how he is a fond memory from school. The essays are like discovering little gems,  as the essays go on we see times he read photocopies of great books passed around when he was studying. He  mentions writer after writer, people like Josefina Vicens  and Nicanor Parra the first a great Mexican writer, I looked up but only one book translated and it wasn’t available at a sensible price then we have the great Chilean poet Parra who passed earlier this year, a number of his poems can be found online he is was called the alpha male of Chilean letters. Later he visits the hometown of Cesare Pavese, now one of his books is due out this summer from Penguin and Peter Owen have also published a number. Zambra talks about how he was searching for the settings of the books as he wandered around where he lived.

Only now do I fully take in the landscape. A tranquil green lingers in the eyes and it seems I can take everything in with just one long look: te valley , the hill. the church, the ruins of a medieval tower. I search for the setting of the moon and the bonfire . I adjust the image to position the Belbo river and the road to Caneli, which is the novels vanishing point, the corner where the worlds begin.

Zambra visiting the home town of Pavase and trying to find the setting for one of his great novels.

This is just a small glimpse at the writers mentioned in the book. As with his novels and short stories, Zambra is the master of the small. He is almost like a Bonsai master his piece are so neatly trimmed that they are almost like a gallery of his trees the root of his writing is that of him as a reader for to be a great writer one must also be a great reader. Here we see those roots of him as a reader but also why he reads this book over another book a sort of system of choice he makes. Also what he finds in writers from the Julio Riberyio a fellow Chilean, who is very shy or as he say when Mario Vargas Llosa called him “the shyest man he has ever met ” and that from the least shy writer from Peru as Zambra puts it. A great collection and a wonderful journey with a reader around the world lit and in particular Latin American fiction, I have added a few writers to my list of writers to read

After the winter by Guadalupe Nettel

After the winter by Guadalupe Nettel

Mexican fiction

Original title – Después del invierno

Translator – Rosalind Harvey

Source – personnel copy

I move on to Mexico today and a rising star of Mexican fiction. I had reviewed an earlier novel by Guadalupe Nettel The body where I was born a couple of years ago.This book won the Preimo Herralde one of the leading prizes for Spanish language fiction. Her books have been translated into ten languages. She also featured in the group of writers picked for Bogota 39 for the best Latin American writers under 39 in 2007.

I became Ruth’s lover convinced that in terms of love I was handicapped. At first, my attraction to her was minimal. I was seduced in large part to her elegance, her expensize shoes and perfume. I met her one evening at my friends Beatriz’s house, a swedish woman who had emigrated to New York at the same timeas I had, and who shows in a couple of SoHo galeries. Betriz has a loft decorated with funiture from the 70’s she has collectedfrom garage sales she often goes to.

Claudio on how he meet his older woman Ruth.

The story focus on two people first we have Claudio a young Cuban living in New York. Her has a rather small flat that opens out in to a wall. But it is the location of the flat that is the bonus Manhatten then he is in a relationship with an older woman Ruth. He has a strange relationship with her where he is in control of there relationship. He is a man of rigid habits he is a book editor, A man above overs in his ways sometimes. We meet Cecilla a young Mexican woman who has come to Paris to study literature. This young woman is drawn to the great graveyard of Pere-Lachaise. He flat overlooks this graveyard. she spends time wandering looking at the famous grave Chopin being one of them. I am always amazed how often Chopin crops up in books. he leads such an interesting life thou and such a young death as it is noted in the book. Now Cecilla notices her neighbor is also drawn to the graveyard they chat. But this is a short relationship. The book follows these two each t=chapter told by one of the other as we see how Claudio by chance ends up in Paris.

“Is there something wrong?” I said defensively as I opened the door. I was wearing my own annoyed expression.

“The radio” He replied, like someone giving a password.

I was silent for a few seconds, trying to understand what he was refereing to, but it was useless.

“It’s been on in your room for more than five days and you haven’t eveb got the decency to turn the volume down at night.”

His reply surprised me. By that point, the presence of the radio had become a background noise I never thought about.

“If it annoys you that much I can turn it off” I said, to put an end to the matter.

Cecilla meets her neighbour Tom for the first time after this the two are drawn closer for a time.

The other novel I reviewed by Nettel saw a woman growing up.  Here we see a shy woman experiences Paris and has a small chance when she meets her neighbour but he isn’t so well and just as things seems to be going one way he has to leave to the country. Then we see Claudio a man living his in his world that he has drawn so many lines he is a man tied by not want to let himself free. His vanity at times is huge. So we have two people each with there own quirks and on different continents but like Chaos theory there is that one chance like a butterfly wing flapping causing something larger this is a book that follows two characters ripples in the world and wonders what happens when they collide. I love Cecilla as she wanders this graveyard looking at the names of those there.

 

The Harafish by Naguib Mahfouz

The Harafish by Naguib Mahfouz

Egyptian fiction

Original title –  ملحمة الحرافيش

Translator – Catherine Cobham

Source – personal copy

I was looking for a number of books to do for the 1977 club and this was another that cropped up as coming out in Arabic that year. Mahfouz was a Nobel winner. He was regarded as the first truly modern writer in Egypt and his books have been described as Existentialist in their style. He is maybe best known for his Cario Trilogy. A man that spoke out for what he believed in most of his books were banned in the Arab world to his Nobel win. It also gives me a chance to fill a gap in the writers that should be on this blog.

Nothing like this had ever happened in the alley. The police only came near it in extreme emergencies. The clan chief’s numerous crimes were usually unattributed, thanks to the testimony of false witness. was inspector Faud Abd al-Tawwab going to do what nobody had done before him of Mohammed Anwar’s body was discovered on the path or under the archway? How had Muhammad had the insolence to go to the police for help, and why had the inspector been ready to challenge Nuh in this underhand way?

The police were rare visitors to the Alley here because someone went outside the alley world.

The harafish is a family saga told over ten chapters as we follow the family living in an alley from Ashur Al Nagi whom is the chief of the family in the first tale through the years and generations til the last story Ashur crops up again the chapters are told in small vignettes. I liked the style it was almost like reading or listening to gossip on the street among the Harafish as the people of the alley are called. Exist is hard at times I remember a line on page 301 where someone says “you’d preserve your youth forever ” this shows the toughness of this world. The cycles of the alley violence trying to get to the top is repeated over the chapters the characters are different sons or daughters of earlier characters. I loved the part in one chapter, when the police appeared which was considered an outrage as they liked to run there own little world.

The emotions of the Nagi family and the harafish were set in turmoil by the unexpected return and sudden disappearence of Samah. His sons were probably the least affected of anybody because he came and went while they were asleep and anyway, as far as they were concerned, he was no longer much more than a faint memory, like their mother in Bulaq. His story was told far and wide, and became a legend and a cautionary tale.

The opening of the fifth chapter and already past battles become like a myth or legend.

This is a clever book as you think it is cardio and feel as though you know the timeframe of the novel. But nothing is ever said about the timeframe of the novel or the location of the book all we know is that the families live in an alley where the characters all live. A true family saga covering the years of a place. Mahfouz was a fan of Zola and Balzacs works and there is a feeling of their worlds here a tough look at life realist but also at the same time without time and place it could be another place even if you change the names and in that regard for me it is a true work of Existentialism of the question why are we here why are they there what makes their world. A great second choice for 1977club and for me another piece in the canon of books and writers I have covered on the blog. I hope at some point to bring the Cario trilogy to the blog.

 

Maigret’s Secret by Georges Simenon

 

Maigret’s secret by Georges Simenon

Belgian fiction

Original title –  Une confidence de Maigret

Translator – David watson

Source – personal copy

It has been ten months since I reviewed a Maigret on the blog so when a search for a holiday read, I choose the latest of the series of books that Penguin has been bringing out over the last few years. This is one of the later books. This is slightly different to the other books I have read as Maigret himself is retelling the events of the case many years after the event. There is still a number of Maigret books to come I will be dipping in over the years to come I am sure not in order unfortunately but as they appeal to me.

A longer silence. He emptied his pipe and took another one from his pocket, which he slowly filled, seeming to caress the briar.

I remember one case, not so long ago .. Did you follow the josset affair ?

“The name rings a bell”

“There was a lot in the papers about it, but the true story insofar as there is a true story was never told”

It was very unnusual for him to talk about a case he had been involved in. Occasionally, at Quai des Orfevres, among colleagues, some famous case or some difficult investigation might be mentioned, but it was always a passing allusion.

Magriet starts talking about Josset and his case with him a rare event.

Maigret is at a dinner party one evening when he starts telling his fellow guests a story of an old case that since it happened had troubled him.The case is that of one Adrien Josset. He is a man that came from a modest background. But thanks to his wives wealth gets a position which gives him a good standard of living. He is also having an affair with his secretary Annette a much younger woman than his wife. So when after a night out with his mistress where he bumps into Annette’s father and somehow says he will marry her. So when he returns and later his wife turns up dead he is, of course, the number one suspect. But over the interviews with Josset  Maigret feels this man is innocent and believes his story. But the problem is the case is quickly seized upon by the press and when events outside the case lead to a backlash against Josset and puts him in the frame in the publics Eye what is Maigret to do, this is what he expains over the course of two evening to his friends at a dinner party.

Certain details of the case were etched more sharply than others in Maigret’s memory. Even years later he could recall the particular taste and smell of the rain shower in the Rue Caulaincourt as keenly as a childhood memory.

It was six thirty in the evening, and when the rain started it did not obscure the sun, already red above the rooftops. The sky remained ablaze, the window shimmering with the reflected light, and only a siingle pearl grey clud, slightly darker at the centre and glowing at its edges, floated over the streets, as light as a ballon.

Maigret recalls visitng a scene involved in the crime and remembers it years later.

This is different to the over  Maigret as it shows the foibles of the man. But it maybe is quite a modern story as it shows the power of the press in forming public opinion. This happens more so now than it used to I can think of a number of cases over the last few years where the press has driven public opinon in the case. This is shown to great effect in the book. Maigret is shown as a fair man like he is in the other books but one that can also dwell on events that have happened. This is also a classic what might have ben in a way one of those case that seems open and shut when it starts.

The end of A family story by Peter Nadas

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The end of a family story by Peter Nadas

Hungarian fiction

Original title – Egy családregény vége

Translator – Imre Goldstein

Source – Personel copy

Well, I pleased that this cycle of the year club Simon and Karen run is on 1977. As when I looked up books that had been published in the original language that year.One of the books I found was the debut novel by Peter Nadas, I reviewed his Magnus opus Parallel stories a few years ago. Nadas is one of the most regarded European writers. He own story reads like a novel he lost his mother at 13 and his father when he was 16 leaving Nadas and orphan. When his father committed suicide he was the head of a ministry that had been accused of various things.

When Grandpa died, grandmama filled the largest pot with water and put it on the stove. She poured two handfuls of salt into it and some black powder and then kept stirring . In the boiling brew she cooked her brown, gray , and dark-blue dresses untill they were black it was bad about the gray one, I liked that dress, especially when she wore it with the gold butterfly broch.Only her satin dress with the big flowers she didn’t cook, she left it the way it was – black flowers on a white background.

Death is a recurrent theme but like this passage I was remind of how Victorians mourned at times.

Like parallel stories, this is a novel set in the heart of Communist Hungry.This is a first thread and how they were able to break families But also it has a second and third part. The second line is a family saga. Simon the grandson of a family is in sent to an institution where everyone lives in silence. He keeps himself going with remembering over time his family story from his grandmother and grandfather at home the grandfather whom at times seem half dead. Had been one of these men that loved telling stories and tales these are what heartens the boy in a silent world. They also lead to the third thread in the book which is stories and thoughts around religion and communism. Both Catholic church and the Jews histories are told to the boy from his grandfather bring threads of their lives to Rome and the other way to Jerusalem. as a young boy becomes a man as he has also in this time lost his father and mother and being drawn into the adult world much earlier than he should have been Simon only solaces is remembering those tales and trying to draw some heart out of them.

One day up in the attic Grandpapa was telling me about our ancestors. Grandmama had brought fish from the market. She was very glad to have got one because Grandpapa loved fish. She stood in line for two hours, but she couldn’t go to the church with the fish.When she got wind of something being available she’d take me along, too. I didn’t like that because people would yell at her.” Look at her shoving and pushing!” “Don’t they know where the end of the line is ? Back there!” “Must be deaf””Where are you bulldozing your way to now ?”

Simon was used to help fetch bits from the market in those hard communist days of waiting being a sport this is later in the book showing the shifting feel of time at times in the book.

Like in parallel stories Nadas paints bleak times with a brush that makes his words float off the pages and through Simon and his world show even in the worst of times there is a glimmer of light to lead the way. It is a book that drifts through time this is also something he did in Parallel stories. Then there is Death and one must feel the fact that both Nadas himself and Simon had lost their parents the feelings of loss must be Nadas own and death is a recurrent theme in his books, lives being cut short. But also a sense of how the communist world of the 1950’s when the book is set would strangle those who did fit in and break the others who tried to be themselves.

Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda

Death in Spring by  Mercè Rodoreda

Spanish Catalan fiction

Original title –  La mort i la primavera

Translator – Martha Tennet

Source – personnel copy

Well, I read the first of my post-holiday reads in a day. This book came out a few years ago in the US and earlier this year here as part of a new penguin series into European voices. Merce Rodoreda was considered one of the leading novelist of her time. her novel The time of the doves has been considered the greatest Catalan novel. She lived most of her life in Exile in France and Switzerland away from the Franco regime only returning later on in her life to Spain towards the end of the Franco years.

I craned my head out of the water. The light was stronger now, and I swam slowly, wanting to take my time before leaving the river. The water embraced me. It would have seized ,e if I had let it , and – pushed forward and sucked under- I would have ended up in the place where nothing is comprehended.Reeds grew in the river; the current bent them, and they let themselves be rocked by the water that was carrying the force of the sky, earth and smow.

The opening lines have that feel of nature cling to the people of the village .

Now I said this was a novella I wanted to read as I saw it as a male version of the book Stones in a landslide.Which was one of my favourite novels of all time. But this is a very different coming of age novel. This is a visceral novel of a boy becoming a man in a remote village that still clings to the past. There is like the scenery around the book vines and forest of death as it is called there is a sense of a world. Being caught out of time and maybe for our narrator, there is no way out of it. Nature captures people, like the dead body in the river. returned to the river.The bridges that never seem to be used a dense forest give the Narrators world a closed in feel. The other characters his father dying, his stepmother the Blacksmith and his odd son all give this a sense of the beauty and horror of nature. A boy becomes a man in a strange world a wonderful narrated world of mountain villages.

When they pulled the boy from the river, he was dead, the returned him to the river. Those who died in the water were returned to the water. The river carried them away and nothing was ever known of them again.But at night, at the spot where the bodies were thrown into the water, a shadow could be seen.Not every night. Not today or tomorrow, but on certain nights a shadow trembled,They said the shadow of the dead returned to the place where the man was born.They said that to die was to merge with the shadow.

I was so remind of Marquez with this lines and the river which in his books is a powerful prescense as well.

This is a novella that like many great shorter books seems much more than its parts. It is full of descriptions of the world around them at times this is maybe a metaphor for how Franco strangled the country. There is also for me an echo of the works of Marquez the village her is a Spanish cousin of Marquez’s Macondo village. The same sense of a place cling to its customs and superstitions of the outside world this is a world the character is trapped in like those vines and even if he escapes there is moss to slip on, bridges to cross and rivers to survive. Hope is always there but like a dim light in the valley below the village.

Holiday books a Mexican death and some great new books

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Well, I failed in reading Middlemarch, I didn’t actually read much on this holiday as I wanted to spend time with Amanda my in-laws and their foster baby who bless her she is only nine months old. It was a joy to see her experience, so much for the first time. It was also the first time since our Honeymoon eleven years ago. Amanda and I had returned to Torquay. Unfortunately, the restaurant where we had our meal on honeymoon in. We had hoped to return but it had gone in the years in between Which was a shame. But we did manage to take a steam train ride and a tour of a replica of the golden hind.Lots of nice meals and I couldn’t resist a few books along the way. When I decide after fifty pages of Middlemarch this maybe wasn’t the holiday read for me.But here are my book buys

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Waterstones in Torquay was the first bookshop. I found these two from not a great selection of translation. Well for someone that read as much as me there is not many that I hadn’t read but there was a few Georges Simenon and this the latest Maigret was one that was most interesting as the great man is looking back on a case he may have got wrong. The I have read nearly all my current Modiano books. This is the one I next wanted as I know Frank the translator really wanted to translate this book. It is his first three novels all link by being set during the occupation of France or the effects of that on people.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then We visited Totnes and they have a great independent bookshop. In which I found these three gems. The day before happiness by Erri de Luca an orphan boy coming of age and his relationship with the guardian. It is also an ode the city of Naples where the book is set.Then I am really keen on this one Death in spring another coming of age novel of a teenage boy in the Catalan mountains. It reminded me of the great book Stones in the landslide which is also a coming of age tale. But a young woman in the Catalan mountains. Then A book by Arto Paasilinna, I loved his year of the Hare so hope this one is as interesting.It follows a man called Gunnar restoring a MIll in a small village but  Gunnar isn’t all he seems.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now I find an Oxfam shop hard to resist when I see one like the one in Totnes and here I found two old Penguin modern classic. Boris Pasternak’s Last summer came out long before Doctor Zhivago and heralds the last summer before world war on and the Russian revolution. Then a lesser know Faulkner work he is a writer I loved when younger but haven’t read for years and have been adding to my copies of his lesser known books. The Tove jansson this is her only novel and seems to have similar themes to her other adult books. The Noght wood a classic modernist novel that I have heard is quite a challenge to read. 

Then there was the sad news of the passing of Sergio Pitol. A writer who I have on my kindle after kindly been sent it by his Publisher Deep Vellum had passed so I felt as I had never got to this great man’s books. This trilogy is about his life and those writers he meets and what inspired him as a writer.I ordered these and they were here at home when I arrived home today off holiday.Also, I had three other books.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then I had these books at home Scenes from a childhood is a selection of Short stories from Jon Fosse the Norweigan writer is often cited as a future Nobel winner I reviewed him a few years ago Then Romain Gary last novel one of the great French writer and also a twice Goncourt winner the only one as he used an Alias to writer his other winner. Then last is The blind spot essay of fiction by Javier Cercas and the line between fact and fiction which is one his own books walk like a tightrope at times.

Love by Hanne Ørstavik

Love by Hanne Ørstavik

Norwegian fiction

Original title –  Kjærlighet

Translator – Martin Aitken

Source – review copy for Asymptote book club

A fellow blogger Marina of the blog finding time to write is involved with the website Asymptote. Ask me if I want to review this book to highlight there Book club they also have a page on book trail. I was happy to review this as it is the second book by this writer her first was available from Peirene in the Uk the blue room I reviewed it here. This is her latest to be translated to English Hanne Orstavik has lived in Oslo since being 16, her first novel came out in 1994 when she was 25, she has since written twelve novels this was her third novel.

She gets through three books a week, often four or five. She wishes she could read all the timer, sitting in the bed with the duvet pulled up, with coffee, lots of cigarettes, and a warm night dress on. She could habe done without the TV too, I never watch it, she tells herself, but Jon would have minded

The opening I wish I could do four orr five books a week. Most weeks I struggle to hit three books.

Love is maybe a strange title for this book as it is about love but maybe the distance in love. The story is about a mother and son. The two the Mother Vibeke has moved her and her Son Jon too a distant village as she has taken a new job as an Arts officer. A lot of her story is about what she likes books trying to find articles that have been talked about at work. There is a sense as the narrative jumps between the two of them that there is a distance in the relationship it is a matter of months since they moved there. Jon is trying to fit in we see this as he goes around selling raffle tickets for the local sports club he has joined as he tries to fit into his new home. All this is the evening before Jons ninth birthday as we see him going out alone. This is a book that shows the detachment of modern society sometimes they both seem in the own world as the evening unfolds.

Jon goes back over the road, back to the house. Stepping inside he makes sure the door behind him, there’s ice on the sill. He pulls his mittens and drops them in the little white basket in the corner. He goes downstairs to his room with his coat still on, and puts the bag down woith the raffle book and the money in it from the old man. On the his way out the man cut him a little chunk off a ried ham hanging from a hook in the vestibule. He puts it down on his desk

Jon arriving home here grabbed me as so lonely an eight year old just wanders in by himself.

This is a cold book in a way a mother and son that have grown apart. A strange dark feeling as for why she would let her eight years old out to sell the raffle tickets in the evening unsupervised. Maybe this is my oldfashioned views of the world but it just felt as thou the mother was so absorbed in her own world she hadn’t even thought of her poor sons birthday. A simmering undertone of a relationship broken by the move and a young boy drifting towards disaster. I can see why Karl Ove called this her strongest book it is bleak and dark but also a compelling read as over the even the story of the two characters unfolds. As an ever-growing sense of foreboding is given in the book. The Asymptote book club is a great idea to draw reads into world lit and this is a great choice as it leads to the current crop of the great Nordic writer’s around at the moment like Karl Ove or Helle Helle which Martin the Translator of this book has translated.