July 23 The month that was !!

1. Karios by Jenny Erpenbeck
2. The Dear Ones by Berta Dávila 
3. Ada’s realm by Sharon Dodua Otoo
4. Riambel by Priya Hein
5. Fox8 by George Saunders 
6. Heartland by Wilson Harris 
7. Impossible by Erri De Luca 
8. Pharricide by Vincent De Swarte 
9. Tranquility by Attila Bartis 

I reviewed 9 books this month, given that we had spent 6 days in Scotland helping my dad sort my late aunt’s house and her funeral, and a week later, we went up again to bring her car, which she had wanted me to have. To get nine books reviewed was good any way my journey started with a relationship in old east Germany looked at again then we had a powerful tale of a mother and a decision she makes. Then a novel about race, gender and place with women all called Ada through the centuries. Then a young girl growing up in the slums of Madagascar looks at the rich folk and her life, and a mix of food history in the form of recipes is a potent mix. Then a fox shows us his home that is now a Mawl, as he calls the Mall they built there!. Then a man goes mad in the Guyana heartland as several ghosts appear from the jungle. Then a cat-and-mouse interview of death in the mountains unfolds in front of us. Then madness again with a man going mad in a lighthouse, and finally we have a man looking back after his mother’s funeral at how she controlled his life really in a book that has a slice of Bernhard chucked in it. We visited 8 countries this month and had a couple of new publishers on the reviews to the Blog. I also added Guyana to the blog. A very successful month which will make it hard to choose a book of the month this month.

Book of the month

I choose Wilson Harris’s book as it is maybe the most experimental book I read this month from a writer that should be better known than he is and someone I will be reading again soon. It was hard as this month there wasn’t a single bad book, infact, any book could have been a book of the month.

Non book events-

Firstly we were drawn into the four-part BBC drama The sixth commandment that followed the murder of Peter Farquhar by an ex-student a compelling drama of a man that was motivated by greed to kill older people well acted drama. Then I caught the  Dylan Biopic” I’m Not There” which I have on DVD but it was on Mubi so I watched it again I loved the album that came with this film I like how they used each actor to reflect a different side of Bob over the years is a clever touch for a singer that has had many faces over the decades. Still, with Music, I got one reissue on vinyl the Suede debut which had a parallel with My Aunt passing as many years ago on a visit to her house I brought the debut single from Suede in a shop in Kirkcaldy in May 1992 many years ago so to listen to the Debut brought memories of that holiday and time spent with her. The other release was Blur’s new album which has a melancholy  to it and echoes their earlier works with being completely new in itself

Next month –

Well, it is Woman in Translation month, and I am planning for every book next month to be from a female writer I have an ambitious idea, but as I tend to fail when I pin my flag to the pole, I wait to see how far I get with my plan for the month. before I mention too much. Anyway, there will be a number of female writers reviewed next month. What are your plans for next Month ?

Tranquility by Attila Bartis

Tranquility by Attila Bartis

Hungarian fiction

Original title – A nyugalom

Translator – Irme Goldstein

Source – Personal copy

I have had this on my shelves since it won the best-translated book prize in 2008. It is a book I got and then just kept pushing back sometimes I find myself worrying that books are above me well not above me but the way IO process and talk about the books this is less than it was years ago as now I don’t really care what other people think as I feel now I have carved my own niche in the blogging world. So when this was mentioned in the recent Mookse podcast and there was a new book coming out after 14 years I thought I might pull this book down from the shelves. So when I saw Attila Bartis had been compared to Thomas Bernhard on the back cover I thought why had to wait Sio long in the time it had sat on the shelves it had also been made into a film he had written another novel the one that is coming out later this year he is also a photograph and playwright. Have you ever had books you think are above you then get to and think why did I wait so long.

There was no need for an obituary because for a decade and a half, she had had no acquaintances, and I didn’t want anybody, except Eszter, to come to the cemetery. I hate death notices; there were about thirty of them in Mother’s desk drawer. They forgot to remove her name from a few mailing lists and the mailman brought one even the year before last, which she kept reading for days,”Poor little Winkler, how cleverly he portrayedHarpagon; isn’t life just awful, even to great actors like him, and there are no exceptions? Terrible. Simply terrible. Don’t forget Son, today Winkler, tomorrow you. In this, there are no exceptions.”

A sign if how long his mother had been his Burden most of his adult life.

It is hard not to compare this to Bernard as Andor our main character in their book. He lives in a cramped apartment at the constant beck and call of his mother Rebecca a former stage actress who has now become a shut in living the world via her children this is Andor’s other problem he has a sister Judit who had managed to escape her mother and is a hugely successful musician on the Violin and had managed to escape Hu nary and lived in exile. Leaving Andor in her shadow as he tries to live his life. the book is formed of vignettes almost that jump in time the book opens as he is burying his mother/ He the recounts their lives together and how when he finally found a girl how hard to was for him to try and introduce her to his Mother and how Mother was going to react to ESTER this is a story full l of dark humour and characters ion the edge a woman stuck in a house for to extended living on her glamorous past. A man trapped between his mother and lover adds to a cleverly timed and darkly comic work.

The barmaid has grown used to my sitting in the corner for hours, often without ordering anything. Occasionally she’d empty the ashtray, and once she brought me some peanuts.

“What’s up, the wife kicked you out?” she asked.

“I have no wife,” I said.

“But you look exactly as if she did,” she said and went back behind the counter.

Andor I had a real picture of him here I’ve seen many a loner like him in the pub over the years.

I get the Bernhard comparison Andor is a writer and has a level of bile in his life that is similar to Bernard’s characters. He is also a writer which is another nod to Bernhard’s characters. But for me, I kept thinking of Andor as a sort of Hungarian Ronnie Barkers Timothy for people to young or not familiar with this character from the sitcom Sorry in the UK he lived with an overbearing mother who at every turn tried to scupper Timothy Devolping as a person, especially in his love life. This is the same with Andor and his mother it is a very stifling relationship for him he isn’t trapped in the flat but trapped in a vicious cycle of being her son and carer. This is a compelling read I hate putting it down I just want to read on every time I was dropped into his world. I can’t wait for the next book and I tell you it will take less than 14 years to read and be on the blog. Have you read this or have a favourite Hungarian writer?

Winstons score – +A if you love Bernhard and Sorry you will love this book !!

 

Pharricide by Vincent De Swarte

Pharricide by Vincent De Swarte

French fiction

Original title – Pharricide

Translator – Nicholas Royle

Source- Personal copy

I was recently in Scotland for my aunt’s funeral, and we had a couple of hours free over the time we were there and we visited St Andrews, where I called in  Toppings, but it also has a couple of good charity shops that sell books as well this is where I found this book. Vincent De Swarte was a writer for children and Adults. He won a prize for this book, and in one of his other books, his life was cut short due to Cancer he died in his mid-forties. This is the first book by him to be translated into English. The book follows the six months a man spends on a lighthouse in what he thinks is initially solitude isn’t for long as his mind and the world encroach on the time he is spending there.

3 October

My mother called me Geoffroy, like my elder brother, stillborn a year before me. (My father entered a monastery a month before I was born and has not been heard from since.) I’ve always been frightened of my Christian name, the very sound of it, and have never liked to hear it combined with my surname, Lefayen.

At school, people called me His Lordship, despite the fact my mother kept chickens on the wasteland surrounding our dilapidated 1960s house on the outskirts of Saint-Brieuc. Later, when I was working, I became known as the Egyptian (a reference to my being disinclined to conversation, a trait not particularly unusual, however, among deep-sea fishermen).With hindsight, the nickname was appropriate. Itwas an omen

Even early on there is a sense of something Dark about Geoffroy

The story is formed from the diary of the man who has decided to take six months in the oldest Lighthouse in France, The Coudouan at the mouth of the Gironde estuary is going be Geoffroy Lefayen home for the next six months. We are introduced to this man. He seems a loveable oddball, a significant oaf of a man that had been bullied as a young man and like many people that are bullied, he has a hobby that, in a way, is suited to being alone he is a taxidermist. We look back on his early years but then, like in the Studio Ghibli film, we have darkness lurking in the corner of the world he recalls. But this tale of a lighthouse keeper shows that, it shines light around, but often they are dark inside, and as time goes by, we see a man starting to go mad. So what happens when he has already stated he has brought his knives out of retirement as they saved him, and an Engineer is sent to fix something? What will Geoffroy do to him? Then when a woman turns up at the door, a stunning red-haired woman called Lise, a fan of his taxidermist art, it all goes downhill and the dark of the inside of the lighthouse and the madness of being alone and the repressed nature of this man that we initially see as a sort of clumsy large dog isn’t what we thought he was !!

28 November
I had a nice surprise when welcoming the engineer this morning. It’s not the bloke I spoke to on the radio, but a woman. A beautiful woman of about forty, red-head, like Steeven but more so.
For the twenty-five metres that separated the launch from the beach, one of the men carried her in his arms.
On the beach, she removed her heels and put on a pair of boots. She looked at her watch and the launch moved away.
Once at the lighthouse she took off her boots and put her heels back on. She has lovely legs and fine ankles, almost too fine. I noticed a little plaster above the heel, under her tights.

Lise appears just after the engineer does

This book sends shivers down you as you read it, the world you are flung into as we see Geoffroy’s world. But a man with a dark shadow, a man that has cut up animals and carefully removed the hides that take time, and a man that has been bullied and has a lot of darkness locked up in him. I thought of the recent film The Lighthouse, which showed the film’s case of two men descending a dark hole that was alone even when. There are two of you for an extended period of time madness is there and paranoia.  This book captures what happens when a man with Pandora’s box at his heart is left alone long enough for that box to open. We see the macabre outcome of that happening when he finally meets people again, from murder to a bizarre marriage, as he said Cordouan saved my knives from retirement. This is a gem of a book I’m so pleased I found.

Winstons score – A  One man descends into a dark place and madness takes over

 

Impossible by Erri De Luca

Impossible by Erri De Luca

Italian fiction

Original title – Impossible

Translator – N S Thompson

Source – Library book

This is the second book from the Italian De Luca. A writer that was called the writer of the decade by Corriere Della Sera. He had been, in his earlier life a left-wing activist, even after he had been very vocal about a particular train line that had been built and was sued for his comments around it. He has been writing since he was 20, when he published his first book. He has published nearly a book a year since then and is now in his seventies. He has had a few books translated into English. The other book I read by him was The Day before happiness around a Child, which shows a versatile writer. This latest book links to his own left-wing activism. A love of the mountains.

Q: Let’s start again from the beginning of that day, shall we? You don’t recognise the person in the photograph
I’ve shown you?
A: No, I don’t recognise him. I’m not good at faces and with good reason after so many years. I can only repeat what I’ve already said.
Q: Perhaps, but possibly you could add something you haven’t said before?
A: Perhaps, but this isn’t a friendly chat between passengers on a train. I’m being questioned by an examining magistrate in a pre-trial investigation. It’s your decision what to ask, mine to decide if I want to talk about a memory or not.

The opening lines of this book

The book works as a two-hander with a few side characters. An old man, a former left-wing activist, has been held after he and another man had set off to hike in the Dolomites. They weren’t together, but when one man returns, and the other dies, so the older man is held. We have the scenario for the book, a series of interviews between this man. A young up-and-coming magistrate sees this older man as the murderer of the other man initially; the story is told as thou the two men weren’t connected as the man is kept in solitary confinement. The first chat hadn’t the solicitor, but he is there for the rest. The novel is mainly in the form of questions and answers as the two men lock swords and the lawyer is in the background. As they set off that day for a walk in the hills, the two men appeared unconnected on their own hikes for that day. But they had been comrades many years ago. But we are getting the mountains as a character as the man talks around that day and the relationship and the falling out many years earlier between the two men. This is the basis of the younger magistrate thinking he is a killer. We also see the old man talking to his wife, adding a perspective on where he thinks he will get off. but as time goes on, his hope changes.

Sweetheart, I’m thinking of that photo you sent me at Christmas of you as a child. That rascal face of yours looking directly into the lens, decisive, sarcastic, triumphantly defiant. I started to smile and the smile wouldn’t leave my face. You were seven years old.
I don’t know when you’ll read this letter. For now I’m writing it to keep myself company with thoughts of the two of us being together.
The cell holding me for twenty-three hours a day is for solitary confinement, but I’m not isolating myself at all from you and what matters to me. I’ve lived in worse places. I have paper, a pen and time. I do gymnastics and go over everything i know by heart: songs, poems, proverbs

The old man talking to his wife about his time in jail initally

This is a powerful little book that reminds me of the best two-handers by, say  Harold Pinter plays, where throughout the novel, the initial tale changes and evolves as the two men that set out on that hike that day past connection is revealed. This is a story of Italy’s dark past, those violent years of the seventies when the two men were connected. This is also a nod to De Luca’s own left-wing past. It also shows how people view people involved in that time. It is also an ode to the mountains, which, given he had a protest around a rail line that went through this area, you can tell De Luca loves. I love the way he unfolds the interaction of the two characters during the interviews like a classic noir film interview as bit by bit it becomes clear it is a wholly   Have you read any books by him? I was also reminded of Lawrence’s poem The Mountain Lion for some reason a poem I have loved since my teens  ( It is published by Mountain lion press)

Winston’s score – B he seems the master of short books. Both books I have read have been Novellas, and lets hope we see more. He has a huge backlist.

 

Heartland by Wilson Harris

Heartland by WIlson Harris

Guyanese fiction

Source – personal copy

I have been listening to the 99 novels section of the Anthony Burgess podcast which covers the 99 books that Burgess had chosen as his favourite post world war 2 novels, and this is one of the books he had picked for that list from the Guyanese writer Sir Wilson Harris a writer that really should be better known as he is one of the most modern and experimental writers to have come out of the Caribbean 9 I do question is it Caribbean or actually a Latin American country maybe as it is the only English speaking country in Latin America. Anyway, Wilson Haris trained as a surveyed and had spent much time in the Heartland of Guyana, which comprises dense jungles and massive wide rivers. This scenery is at the heart of this book. Harris wrote many books about his homeland, and some of the characters in this book appeared in his other books.

Stevenson’s speculative frontiers collapsed with a rude shout from Kaiser and he turned abruptly. The man was here at last. Stevenson could never stop being curious every time he saw Kaiser, as if he wanted to confirm that this must be the strangest, most haunting or haunted creation of all things and beings he visualized. It was not merely the blackness of Kaiser’s skin, within whose flesh appeared incandescent eyes lit as from the density of coal.
It was the ghostly ash of the garments he wore; a breath of wind would surely have dispersed them, the most attenuated vest and shorts Stevenson had ever seen, pluckedin the nick of time, he was inclineds to swear, from some ancient fire.

One of the characters that seem ghost leike at times

We meet a prominent figure from Guyana’s life Zechariah Stevenson who is in disgrace as he is accused of defrauding people. But this son of a wealthy family as ever with people of money has been sent here into the Heartland of Guyana where the vast jungle and to watch over there, his family gets the money from the timber the forest in the jungle. The people he meets in the dense jungle just appear. Like Kasier, a shopkeeper and then Da Silva, he is a pork knocker, as they call gold prospectors here.  We often wonder if are they real, especially when he comes across the dead Da Silva, a long-dead body. This is a place where the present, future and past all seem to drift, and a man is thrown into this untamed world as his grip on the world around him starts to slip as he is caught in the fever dreams of the jungle and the vast rivers of Guyana as they drift through time.

Stevenson scrambled out of the river and grabbed his towel, holding it against his body as if he felt alien eyes upon his nakedness. The head of the morning sun had risen above a fist of trees across the river. And the events of yesterday seemed almost indistinguishable from a watchful dream in the past night. Nevertheless, they possessed enduring substance for him since on his return to the clearing on the river bank at Upper Kamaria – after recovering Kaiser’s line – he had opened the depot and counted three or four boxes labelled DaSilva. Kaiser had not been indulging in an idle trick or fanciful token after all.

Later on as he drifts between the resal and unreal at times

This is a hard book to describe plot-wise as it is more about place and atmosphere, that feeling of being caught in the dense unrelenting jungle and how it can affect from Heart of Darkness onwards we have seen the madness of being alone in the jungle can bring on someone. Even Stevenson’s name is a nod towards the great Robert Louis Stephenson, another man tainted and, in the end, died in a jungle environment. This is a land Harris knew well. He had worked in the Heartlands to look at the viability of taming the rivers to make Hydroelectricity of them `(my Dad has worked at these hydro plants from around Niagara, where the US side uses some machines still from the 50s ). For me, this book has more connections to the Latin American cannon with its use of magical realism (well, MAGIC HORROR REALISM ) , fever dreams, ghosts and also the use of the jungle as almost another character to the book reminds me of the great number of books I have read in recent years from Latin American writers like Samanta Schweblin or Mariana Enriquez. I wonder what Harris’s standing is like in Latin America ? is it just the influence of place, or is he well-known there? Have you Read Harris?

Winston’s score – A – one of the greatest writers can’t believe I’ve just discovered him will be reading him again !

Fox 8 by George Saunders

Fox8 by George Saunders

American fiction

Source – Library

I wanted to throw a few contemporary writers in English into the mix, so I started with George Saunders I saw this at the Library, and I have always loved books with an animal narrator as a kid from Watership Down, wind in the Willows, for example.  I often wonder why so few books are written for adults with Animals as the narrator. So when I saw this in the library, I had intended to read his Booker-winning Lincoln in the Bardo as I heard many people describe Saunders as a clever writer and a clever use of language, and I had wanted to read him for that reason.

At this time, Grate Leeder grew kwite sad. It was like he grew too sad to leed. And wud sit for hours staring into spase. It woslike Grate Leeder blamed himself that we had lost are Forest in which we had always lived since time in memorial. But we did not feel it was his fawlt. It hapened so fast, who cud have been grate enough to stop it? (I for sure did not know how to stop it. Once I snuk into the bak of a Truk and stole there hamer with my mouth. I know it is not gud to steel but I was so mad! But me steeling that hamer did not even slow them down. They must have had other hamers?!

Anexamplw of Fox 8 chatting to the Grate leader and how Saunders uses language.

So Fox 8 is narrated by Fox 8. As he says, he is a fox that has learned to speak Yuman from sitting outside a window as a mother reads to her kids. This a view of the Human world from that of a Fox and how they view us humans or, as he calls us, Yumans as a species. It is also a commentary on ecosystems and how we are ruining the foxes’ homes, and we see Fox 8 talk about his own home. This large wood had its heart cut in half as they develop a grand estate with a Mall or Mawl as he finds out when it is up from a Dog he chats to and tells him it is a Mawl as we see fox 8 wander through the Mall looking at how the Humans shop etc. he chats to the Grater leader around the events and the estate and the Human and its effects on the foxes.

Just then, a very Yung Yuman, a meer Todler, todled past with a smile of possibly thinking we are Dogs. There in her hand, we noted: some fud! It looked gud and smelled grate. It is a Bun! All of the suden, we desided to enter into a Fare Deel with her, whereby we wud share her Bun, by us taking it.

But then, quik as the wink, she is intaken into the Mawl, with one hand in the hand of her Mother and, in the other hand, our Bun!

And before we knew it, we too, lerd by her fud, had been intaken into FoxViewCommons, rite threw their Dore!

As he looks to see what the Mawl is all about I loved the use of langauge and his voice

This is a clever short story. It took me about an hour to read. I love how he gives Fox 8 a voice and uses language, and we know what happens through his eyes and the Yumans he sees in his world. I was primarily reminded of the great STUDIO ghibli film Pom Poko which used Magical Racoons instead of Foxes as through their eyes, we see how the Urban sprawl of Tokyo ripped apart their homes and natural habit, and this is the same type of narrative a world of Malls and estates replaces there familiar woods I said in the intro I wonder why we see so few animal narrators in adult fiction as we are seeing the natural world devastate around our treatment of the land and constant expansion and urbanisation;. Saunders has been very playful with the voice of Fox8. It hits the right key. You have him as a laid-back sort of drifter of a fox. He is a dreamer of a fox. This is a clever fable about the loss of habit told through their eyes. Have you read this or any other books by George Saunders?

Winstons score – B – A solid little story around the environment and our effect on it told from nature’s  perspective

 

Riambel by Priya Hein

Riambel by Priya Hein

Mauritian fiction

Source – Personal copy

The times now I buy a new book that isn’t translated because I have heard about it on social media is slim really. But this book I saw mentioned on Youtube, and after I got it, a few other people mentioned it, I love a slow word-of-mouth book, and this is what I think it is from Indigo Press, a new name to me. Apart from the word of mouth when I saw on the cover, it had a blurb from LE Clézio and her fellow Mauritian writer Anada Devi a writer whose book I loved when I read it because, like this book, it seemed to capture a significant slice of this tropical island but not the lovely beaches from those on the edge of the beauty getting by. Priya Hein had written a number of children’s books and short stories before this her debut novel. She has also won a number of awards, and she now splits her time between Mauritius and Germany.

We live in a cite,or Kon krool( which is how we like to refer to our shanty town). It’s also known as Africa Town – a slum where the poor and the undesirables are dumped together in hastily constructed barracks. Like tins of sardines placed next to each other in a higgledy-piggledy way. Whatever’s found in the trash somehow ends up in our cité, which is nothing but the waste of Riambel discarded in a heap that slowly rots away. A trash-strewn ghetto where everything is starving and fighting to survive – even the dogs.

Her home a shanty called Riambel everything is hard there.

The book is formed around the story of a young girl. She has to finish her school life and join other family members in the big house of The De Grandbourg family. They live in the Riambel, the slum of the city. Noemi is faced with no choice around this change. Still, we see the world through her eyes, those rich people on the other side of the road in the world, but it also mixes the history of the island but with a female twist to that and also has a beautiful idea of using recipes local to the island as well those sort of recipes passed on mother to daughter even the way they were written I had a sense of a card box like my mum had with those precious recipes passed down through the years. But as you read them, there is a sense of how the Western world has crept in on these island recipes over the years as they have been rewritten or verbally passed on. The book is also intersected with poetry from the island that evokes the spirit of the island and its struggles. As we see a young girl wrestling with a life of servitude and recounting how little can change, there is a glimpse of hope. A woman that came on a holiday and stayed seems interested in her. This shows the tension simmering under the island, an island with affluent ex french families still owning land and running things.

Make sure that your prawns are fresh by checking they colour. They should look transparent and smell of the sea Give them a quick rinse in cold water. Pull off their head, tails and legs before removing the shells and the black veins, Once this is done, rinse the prawns again under cold water.Using a ros kari or a stone mortar, crush some garlic cloves together with a small finger of fresh ginger. Pour a little oil in a pan and fry the paste over a medium fire. Add one chopped onion and continue to fry until golden. Throw in your prawns and cook for a couple of minutes. Add one or two chopped tomatoes and one sliced chilli and stir.Throw in some masala and a few curry leaves. Don’t make it too spicy for the whites, otherwise they’ll complain about their delicate stomachs. Stir well until it thickens. Add a little sea salt, but not too much, as the prawns are already salty. Pour in a dash of water if needed. Sprinkle with fresh coriander and serve with pickled vegtables – enn ti zasar legin – and freshly cooked rice

one of the recipes her for a prawn curry I liked the sound of this one.

I think I am amazed by the book as it is a debut novel. It is so well crafted. I love the ways she weaves Noemi’s voice, the island’s poets, and the island’s recipes. It is a personal history of an island, whereas Noemi says the history they learn isn’t there’s. It has the simmering below the surface of a Mauritius, something you felt in Devi’s novel, a sense of a powder keg that never entirely blows. A sense of things not changing. This is an island out of time with other places. Slavery is gone but only in name, and this shows how little hope there is in a slum-like Riambel, no matter how Noemi sees it as having a double meaning. And it is really Rive en belle Beautiful Shore (I love this thought. It captures her as a girl of a certain age). I also loved the usage of the recipes as a way of talking about the island with food as a way of showing changing tastes and how Western ideas drifted in. I hope this has been seen by someone near the Booker. It reminds me of the gems you used to find years ago on the Booker lists. Have you read this book?

Winstons score – ++++++A best book of the year so far !!

Ada’s Realm by Sharon Doudua Otoo

Ada’s Realm by Sharon Dodua Otoo

German fiction

Original title – Ada’s Raun

Translator – Jon Cho-Polizzi

Source – Review copy

I am a fan of writers that have a story in the bio, and Sharon seems to be one of those writers. Born in London to Ghanaian parents in London she, like I did decided she would live in  Germany, unlike me who returned after a couple of years she stayed on and made her home in Berlin. She has been a poet and writer all that time initially, her first two novellas were published in English, and then she chose to start writing in German, so her first novel is in her new language. She had already won one of the biggest German literature prizes for a short story she had written. This book covers centuries and uses a number of women sharing the same first name over those years.

Totope, March 1459

During the longest night of the year, blood clung to my forehead and my baby died. Finally. He had whimpered in his final moments, and Naa Lamiley had caressed his cheek. How lovely, I had thought, that this would be his final memory. She lay just beside him, the child between us, and her head resting next to mine. Naa Lamiley’s eyes shimmered as she assured me it would not be much longer now, “God willing”. She whispered because all of our mothers were sleeping on the other side of the room, but Naa Lamiley’s voice would have given out at any moment anyway. Together, we had cried and prayed at my baby’s side the last three nights. I could barely hear her, and 1 understood her even less.

The book oopens with Ada losing another baby in Birth!

From the first Ada is in africa when we meet her she has lost a child and is geiving in 15th century Ghana as she loses anpother child just after birth . This is a book about shared sorrow and can you hold the past of someone with the same name it is a richly weaved novel that sees uis next in Victorian London and Ada Lovelace (Stranger this is the second novel this year she has cropped up in as a character in Thread Ripper) with nan imagined relationship; with Dickens then we are in another Ada a Polish woman now but is it the same soul and she is trying to get by in a Nazi death camp.what would this Ada do to get by !! the story seems to circle in on itself and we have a Ghanian Ada in modern day Berlin on the hunt for a roof over her head. The four womans stories twist and turn through out the book so we have a book like a escher painting as we go across the centuries and coninents to see each ada in there time and how it has a ripple effect on each other!

Lizzie had looked away because she was not quite sure of the answer herself. She had no idea that I was calling her. In the end, she attributed her disturbance to the fact that – despite it all – she still worried about her mistress.

Should Mr Dickens yet be present when Lord King arrived, Lizzie could not imagine that Lady Ada would get out of the ensuing confrontation unscathed.

In victorian London Ada Lovelace and DIckens meet ?

This is a wonderfully playful book with narrative and linear structure as it breaks them up as I say iot is like an Escher painting as no matter what time it is the woman seem to be in the same holwe and have the saeme issues of sex, race and postion in the world . WHat is even more impressive such a cimpolex beast has been brought out by a writer in a second languane . But part of me wonders does it work better like that written in German for Sharon as a writer. Just imagine for a moment if Toni  morrison and WG sebald had a bastard child this would be the book she would write.No doubt as  it mixes thoughts about  places and race history and also how it cvan sometimes coil on itself remember Sebalds books twisted one way and then another and Morrison alway showed how important race can be in peoples lifes. so what we have is an epic book with four woman at its heart. Showinfg even thou time has moved that one soul maybe can repeat the same things loss of a child, love, Just serving via sex and then having a home those basic human needs and rights through the ages. Have you read any of Sharons books? Or any writers that have written books in two languages ?

WEinstons score – + A – This is a writer to watch a strong voice and not afraid to take risks with her writing and brings them of in stunning style !!

The Dear ones by Berta Dávila

The Dear ones by Berta Dávila

Galician fiction

Original title -Os seres queridos

Translator – Jacob Rogers

Source – Review copy

I have been championing the three times rebel [ress since they started bring books out they have a great ethos of working-class female voices in the minority languages. This time we stay in Spain but move to Galicia To a novelist and poet that is regarded as one of the leading voices of Galician literature, having won prizes both for her poetry and fiction. This novel won the Xerais Novel Award. She is also a well-known editorShe directs the independent publishing house Rodolfo e Priscila and is the director of the Rúa do Lagarto collection. This is the first book to be translated into English from her.

The book was about a mother who loses her son in a traffic accident. She was a radio show host for a local station and lived alone. A few months after the accident, still grieving, she moved in with her grandmother, an elderly woman who had some sort of dementia and wasn’t very mobile but was the only family the mother had left. Lucia asks if the grandmother resembles my grandmother Maria. I say probably, I’m sure she does, and detail some of my grandmother’s behaviours over the past few months. For example, she almost always recognises me the moment I come into the room, but often forgets recent news or what year it is; she asks me about grades and exams, as if I’m still an under-graduate, or about the father of my son, as if Miguel and I had never split up.

The book she was writing about a mother losing a son

This is a hard book to grasp as the events in the book seem so odd, but then again, life is odd and this is one bone journey I feel there will be many more women like our narrator here that have the feeling and guilt and trauma she has after birth and in motherhood. The book is about when is a mother ready to be a mother? What happens when your role as a mother doesn’t fit you? That is the heart of this story a woman struggling with that exact dilemma as she struggles to connect with her son so she tries to write a novel about losing a son at five years old. She had seen motherhood as something else, but the depression she has felt since the birth of her son, and the loss of self that comes with that is hard to deal with for her. So what will she do when she falls pregnant for a second time? How will she react, and how will the world around her react as she decides she may take a decision that will shock people near her. But she proves she still has choices to make around her life and her body. This is a hard-hitting story of one woman’s journey into motherhood and what happens when you maybe opt out of the role of being a mother.

THE BOY WAKES UP EARLY, CONTENTEDLY, ON THE FIRST DAY of winter and asks me how long it is until the school Christmas play and the day he can finally open up the presents under the tree. I tell him there won’t be a tree at Grandma Mara’s house-at most there’ll be a porcelain Baby Jesus shrouded by a wreath-and that it’s only four more sleeps. He’s a bit disappointed about the tree, but I try to convince him it will be a festive day: we’ll see my parents and my uncles, we’ll sing songs, and he’ll be able to help my sister prepare the tray of desserts and sweets. The boy asked for a stuffed doll, a picture book with two bears that are friends, and a bike. He repeats his list of presents and counts off on his fingers the nights he has to wait for them.

There is a coldness in this description of her son

 

This has a feel of auto fiction in its town I was reminded of how well Anne Ernaux speaks around her world with a flourish or over-elaboration at times, and this is the same it hasn’t to much luggage to the story it is narrative of her journey told as that no sidetrack or detours and it is so much more potent for that case as it shows how mental illness a post-birth can ravage that connection between mother and child but also what might happen after that when you have to face going through pregnancy again. It is a candid insight into post-natal depression but also how, even after that, women can still be strong and stand up. I am a big fan of three times rebel as they bring us voices that may have gone under the radar otherwise. This is a hard-hitting book for the reader, Have you read any books that deal with post-natal depression and Motherhood?

Winston’s score – +A Sparsh, stunning prose of one woman’s journey

Karios by Jenny Erpenbeck

Karios by Jenny Erpenbeck

German Fiction

Original title- Karios

Translator Michael Hoffman

Source – Library

I’m back I had spent the last week in Scotland and had hoped to blog but time was against me so I return with a writer I have in the past struggled with in the past some writers I don’t connect with as much as others do and I feel this is the way with Erpenbeck. It isn’t the fact I don’t like her writing I just don’t get why so many others love it when it too me is just average any way this was in the lOcal Library sir I decided as it would be a Booker international book for next year I would read it. I want to see if this is a more personal story of a relationship that broke up being looked back on after the death pod one of the two lovers.

She has a suitcase of her own, full of letters, carbons, and souvenirs,”at product” for the most part, as the archivists like to say. Her own diaries and journals. The next day she climbs up the library steps and takes it down from the top shelf, it’s incredibly dusty inside and out. A long time ago, the papers in his boxes and those in her suitcase were speaking to each other. Now they’re both speaking to time. A suitcase like that, cardboard boxes like that, full of middles and endings and beginnings, buried under decades’ worth of dust; pages that were written to deceive alongside other pages that were striving for truth;

The past in a few boxes is picked apart

The book opens as Katherina remembers its she is asked to the funeral of Hans a much old writer she once had a relationship as she works through she has a suitcase and boxes from him as they form a casket of ghosts of this relationship as she works through those years and their relationship. They initially are perfect although he is maybe a father figure come lover for her at times he likes to show her what he knows and try and make her understand. The relationship is one of him trying to mould her and her much younger infatuation with the older man which is as we know never a good combination for relationships this has been the plot of many a book over the years. But as ever this is set in the downfall of EAST Germany from the early days when they are in a stable east to the tremors and then the downfall of the country and all the changes in the dynamics of the relationship add to that the discovery of Hans that his young lover had a one night stand this one moment serves as a turning point in their relationship as his view and treatment of Katherina changes and the story takes a darker turn all together

All fragments, fragments of endings, fragments of beginnings.Katharina leaves the two black bags, stuffed full of the life of the last six months, untouched, and a few days later takes them to her new apartment: back courtyard, old tenement building, studio room.Just a moment ago, she was working at the printshop, now her training is over, she is a qualified worker, she has successfully concluded her course in typography, and she’s writing her resignation letter:As per our spoken agreement and by mutual consent, I hereby request the termination of my contract with the Staatsverlag, Berlin, effective on July 7, 1987, the July 1 having been granted me for my move, and the days from July 2 TO 6 for my regulation Holiday. At this time, I love and do continue to love the regular freelance broadcaster and writer , Hans W

Later on and the relationship has changed

This is a wonderful insight into a relationship that is always doomed there is always an imbalance at the heart of the relationship add this to the backdrop of the wall falling and the effect that had on the two of them. I do wonder in this part of her life did Jenny have an old partner at some point it? A dark look at the heart of a relationship imploding and how someone you love can be so brutal is so well brought off here. It also shows the difference in the generations Hans is a perfect example of a man that grew up in the East and because of his job and he was happy in the East as in fact, that was all he knew. Kathrina wants to break free like many of her young peers did at the time. Well, I like her more after this book bit she seems to have opened up a bit in this book the voice of her as a writer felt stronger I do wonder if that is Hoffmann who has also brought her writing to life for me a bit more?  I think this will be a Booker international contender next year. If Gunter Von hagens wrote about relationships rather than doing autopsies this would be how he wrote.

Winstons score A -A doomed relationship in a doomed country is pulled apart after a death.