Without Waking Up by Carolina Schutti

Without Waking Up by  Carolina Schutti

Austrian fiction

Original title –Einmal muss ich über weiches Gras gelaufen sein

Translator Deidre McMahon

Source – Review copy

I love it when new publishers reach out for me to review books in translation and it is great when they are outside the uk like Bullion Press the Irish-based press. Asked me to review this Austrian novel from the writer Carolina Schutti I said yes it had won the EU literature prize, a prize from which I have read a few books over the year. This book’s German title also grabbed me it is in English I must have walked on soft grass once. I love the enigmatic nature of that Schutti got a doctorate on b the work of Elias Canetti and has written a number of novels and poetry works. This is her first book to be translated into English.

There are various Babushkas. Some resemble each other down to the finest details and some have different pictures on their fronts. A different picture on every front and you know immediately which story belongs to it. And the big Babushka holds all the stories together like the cover of a book of fairy tales. You need to study the smallest picture especially carefully because if you are lucky, even this tiny surface has a background showing a forest or a stream or flowers. I was lucky. My Babushka was particularly beautiful. I can remember every picture and I still know the stories that went with the pictures; they translated themselves without me noticing.

Marek often asked me to tell him these stories. I thought that maybe they reminded him of the stories of his childhood, because they were similar, but perhaps he only wanted to prevent them fading from my memory.

The various woman through her life she had called that name.

The book focuses on a little girl Maja over a number of years we get fragments of her life. She is now living in Austria having come there from Belarus. Hence when the book opens she refers to a distant Austrian aunt by the Russian term Babushka. But that is also a hint at the book nature as it is about a woman that Maja had called through the years it is a doll-in-doll nature to the book as we go further in Maja’s life. this is a woman looking back at the fragmented memories of her youth a broken youth that maybe is reflected in her present her only childhood connection to a Polish man Marek and maybe in his life stories is that shared sense of loss of place that she feels and how her loss of identity when she lost her mother tongue. The past is a lost country is the opening line of the go-between another story of youth and jagged memories and the past is post definitely another country and life.

She can remember every bird and every stray thread of that tablecloth. But Marek’s face. The birthmark on his chin, the grey hair that was always a little too long on his neck, his dark incisor-tooth, the light-brown spots in his eyes, the face on the photograph she took out of the envelope. Fifty-fifty, the letters in white touch-up pen raised off the paper. Maja sees the face in the photo, she only ever sees that photograph face, as if she had never known any other.

I’m always amazed at what we remember in the past I remember photos of the past and they differ from my memory

 

I love books with fragment memories of how the mind plays with our thoughts of the past and it has always made for great literature from Proust biting into that Madelaine or the first line of L P Harley’s go between this is a book about Maja trying to piece those remembered fragments of the Babushka’s she had seen. I was reminded of last year at Marianbad where the idea of a past was now distorted and faded and forgotten that is the case her heritage is fragments of a lost connection to a Polish man her aunt didn’t like as I said the original title has a certain enigmatic nature to it and this novel does it is a series of memories stacked like the Russian dolls on the cover of the book but maybe like peeling the layer of an onion back the tears are here to be seen and the sorrow of that past but maybe also the ripples in Maja’s present life and situation/ This would be the sort of book you’d like if you have enjoyed the early books from Peirene press it would have sat with them well. I’ll end with another quote and this is one of my favourite Counting Crows songs but this book is like this too.”If dreams are like movies, the memories are films about ghosts.

Winston’s score – I am a sucker for fragments of a life in a novella so

this gets an +A from me

Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap

Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap

Austrian fiction

Original title – Engel Des Vergessens

Translator – Tess Lewis

Source – Personal Copy

I start this Woman in Translation month off with a book from the Austrian writer Maja Haderlap. She was born into a family from a part of Austria where hr family where historically Slovenian and they were the only people to Stand up to Hitler in Austria this book is a family history of one such family living there and how this standing up to the nazis has effect the ethnic Slovenians that live there. It was a prize-winning book when it came out in German winning one of the biggest book prizes the Ingeborg Bachmann prize. Her own grandmother was in a concentration camp and her father was tortured by Nazis and was in the Partisans during the WAR. he hated the way even post war he and other ethnic Slovenians had been treated post-war.

GRANDMOTHER has her own understanding with nature She believes the fields and forests must be propitiated, not adorned with verses. A poem means nothing to nature, she says, we must always be humble before it. In the attic, she has gathered willow branches that she pulls from the palm bundles blessed in church every year on Palm Sunday. She makes small crosses from the willow branches, crosses we bring out to the fields in spring and stick in the ploughed earth to keep the potato fields fertile and the wheat plentiful. When a thunderstorm is brewing, she places pieces of willow on glowing embers and carries them through the house in a cast iron skillet. The bitter smoke is meant to clear the air and appease the atmospheric forces. You must carry your belief in God in your heart, Grandmother says, it’s not enough to put it on show in church. You can’t rely on the Church, according to her, the Church cannot be trusted.

I loved her grandmother she just jumped of the page

It is hard not to see this as part of this novel as auto fiction as the little girl the main narrator of the book who is growing up in post-war 60s and 70S Austria is about the age the writer would have been at the time. The grandmother and Mother are linked back to the dark day of the war years and the suffering these pheasant Slovene farmers had suffered for standing up and still do it shows how the shadow of the dark past is still there in everyday life . The way the Austrians talk around the ETHNIC Slovenians. But it is also a book about growing up on a farm and the connection a young girl can have to the creatures around her from a cow she loved that lost a calf to the horses. Her father is a man we see smoking but a man that has been broken by what happened to him in the war. The past and the inner conflicts that cause within the family the grandmother’s hours during the war Father’s sorrow and grief add to that a  mother who is often missing in the little girl’s eyes. This is a young girl; trying to make her way and seeing how her family had suffered and still are the way others talk about them as a group this is a picturesque forest and farming area but behind the natural beauty, there is some real evil still there.

When I arrive, Father is usually sitting at the end of the kitchen table with a bottle of beer in his hand. And presides near the stove on which she keeps her children’s dinner warm. As soon as I enter the kitchen, I start to examine her face and hands for scars. She was able to hide behind the stove, And says, but her little brother, who was in her arms, was shot.
On the front of the house is a marble plaque with the names of the children, the parents, and grandparents, engraved and gold-plated.
Father says he could never live in a house where he’d be reminded of the dead every day, several times a day, every time he went in or out.

I was so touched by her father and the ghost of the past here

This is one of those books that walk the line between Memoir and fiction yes it is easy to see them as her family but they are any family in those villages in the Carthinia region of Austria that were Ethnically Slovenian. This is also a universal story from the Marsh Arabs in Iraq to the Kosovian Albanians. I was reminded so much of a good friend I had working in a factory in Germany he was an Albanian from Kosovo who at the time was part of Serbias and like the girl they were classed as some sort of second-class citizens because of who they were and this is the same here the scar of the war is running deep in the locals and what they had done in standing up and the way they as a people are discussed is still the same as in the war the shadow of those acts are still there even twenty years after.I can see why this win a couple of prizes it shines a torch on a subject that few people other than those growing hip there and maybe those in Austria know about. The child narrator mixes growing up under this shadow but also the beauty of the land and the animals around them on the farm. Heidi mixed with a classic slice of war history. Have you read this book or any books on a similar theme ?

Wonderful, Wonderful Times by Elfriede Jelinek

 

Wonderful, Wonderful Times by Elfriede Jelinek

Austrian fiction

Original title – Die Ausgesperrten

Translator – Michael Hulse

Source – Personal copy

I had read this for GermaN Lit Month but I just didn’t get to it in time. This is the second book I had read from the Austrian Nobel lit winner Elfriede Jelinek she is one of those Nobel winners that over time has fade that said I had partly read a non-fiction work the Fitzcarraldo had brought out earlier this year I will finish that at some point. When describing her win the Nobel committee said of her writing. “musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power. This is certainly a book that deals with the cliches of society. It first came out in 1980 and is of that time the period in the post war years it is set in the fifties.

ONE NIGHT AT the end of the fifties an assault is committed in the Vienna municipal park. The following persons all grab hold of one solitary man out walking.

Rainer Maria Witkowski and his twin sister Anna Witkowski, Sophie Pachhofen (formerly von Pachhofen), and Hans Sepp. Rainer Maria Witkowski was named after Rainer Maria Rilke. All of them are about eighteen, Hans Sepp is a year or so older than the others, though he too is without a trace of maturity. Of the two girls, Anna is the more ferocious, which can be seen in the fact that she pays most attention to the face of the subject. Particular courage is required if you are to scratch a man’s face while he is looking full in your own (though he cannot see much since it is dark) or indeed try to scratch his eyes out. For the eyes are the mirror of the soul and ought to remain unscathed if at all possible. Otherwise, people will suppose the soul is done for.

The opening lines open with them grabbing a man

The book happens to deal with the dark side of Austrian society at the time the undercurrents of the post war era. it is the late fifties when a group of four teens attack a man. The four teens are Rainer and Anne who are twins. Their father was in the SS during the war and is now disabled. Hans whose mother is a communist and Sophie an athletic girl(maybe a symbol in some way of Aryanism ?). The book shows the inner working of these teens. Who are just vile and very violent commit crimes? These angst teens are all that happened in Austria before they were born. Now they have been chewed up by the country they are in and have been spat out that they are the dark side of teens. This is a bleak work of teen violence ce lust sex and the past blended together and spat out on the page. Dark kids have a weird connection and love between them. The kids are maybe a symbol for the violence of the past they are like a champagne bottle shaken constantly after the war that undercurrent of the war, nazism, regrets, teen lust and hormones all shaken in the bottle to that single act.

The twins’ unhappiness makes them superior because they have shaken off the shackles and do what they want. Rainer says: people’s lives are predetermined in some way or other, but not mine, I’m superior to them on account of my Will. On the other hand, the individual is free if he wants to be. Rainer avails himself of that freedom, graciously: here he is, being awarded his accreditation certificate. There is a certain heroism in him. In this lonely youth. Lonely in the sense that no one sees him, which halves the value of even the prettiest heroism. Still, at least Rainer can look himself in the face when he’s alone with his mirror.

The twins are the heart off the book here you see the way they look at the world.

There is something about those writers of the post-war era of Austria Bernhard and her with Jelinek. They dived in and tore out the dark heart of the post-war and the past that lingered underneath th country and here it is kids of the rail this is like Holden Caulfield if he had grown up in Germany in love with his sister. This book is dark and complex I saw it describe as Molasses there is something about just the thick rich nature of her writing dark and vile in it tones but wonderfully written. I recently read High Wind in Jamaica another book about kids going off the rails as a group like here it shows how kids can be seen as violent for no reason. Then book like The dinner by Herman Kick another book about  kids and violence shows the after math of the act of violence this is a book that connect the two a sort of inner working of the kids caught in the violent acts they are doing. I wish it hadn’t been so long between reading Jelinek’s books she is a unique writer. Have you read any books by Jelinek ?

Winstons score – A the post war embers still burn in the kids of a SS officer.

Blue Jewellery by Katharina Winkler

Blue Jewellery by Katharina Winkler

Austrian fiction

Original title – blauschmuck

Translator – Laura Wagner

Source – Personal copy

It is that time of year again when it is German Lit month and this is the first book I read this year it is. I choose one of the books from Seagull books. This one is by the  Austrian writer Katharina Winkler this was her debut novel and won a number of prizes when it came out and has been translated into a number of languages.I picked it as my first read as it is based on a true story but is also one of those stories that need to be repeated it is a universal subject of abuse no matter where it is the result is the same as in the book. She has since published another novel.

I have to cut the wedding cake, and after that they will lead me to the bedroom. I stare at the icing on the cake and the white rose made from marzipan, the music stops and finally Yunus is standing beside me, and Yunus’ mother, who is now my mother, places a knife in Yunus’ hand and my hand on top of Yunus’ hand, and together we cut ourselves towards my virgin. Dessert plates with cake and marzipan roses on them are drifting all across the room, hands that end in people are stuck to their underside. Men, women and children with laughing mouths, who take their parties as they come, and who don’t mind my virgin. A plate is pushed into my hands.

The start of Filiz Horrors begins not long after her wedding day

The book is based on the true story of a Kurdish woman and the inner life of her marriage. The two meet in their early teens Filiz is swayed by the beauty of Yunus. The pair marry against her family, but the sense is this can lead them to freedom from the small village in the Anatolia mountains and head to the west. The book sees the young Yunus see other women with what she calls Blue Jewellery is hidden away. The marriage soon takes a turn as FILIZ s sees the true nature of Yunus when he starts to abuse and attack he giving her her own Blue Jewellery this cycle continues as the pair dream of leaving but each time she is attacked she becomes more to his beatings and hiding the marks of it as they have children. Yunus becomes closed to the world of their home veiled and at the mercy of Yunus and her world shrinks around her.  They do eventually head to Austria via Istanbul with their young family Will fillip and her children Halil, Selin and Seda escape? what will happen? How far will the cycle of violence go?

When the girls from the Neighbourhood come and the giggles flow into the courtyard, I cannot remain a silent shadow. The giggles reach up  to my knee, and my heart beats.

I am a child , wife that I am

I join the giggles and hug the girls, and I laugh and show my open mouth.

Younus is beating me

He has to beat the child out of my bones

The girl put of my guts

He has to beat the wife into my bones

These lines so haunted me when I read them

What this captured so well is how often Abuse can be viewed as normal and how can a young girl’s life change so quickly at one point she said he beat the girl out of me and the wife into me struck me as so sad this is what she had as a marriage and accepted it. The start of the book almost made the abuse seem part of everyday life. I was reminded of some of the scenes in. Call the midwife this is a society caught out of time where the male role and role model have been skewed. The fact this is based on a real story is even more horrifying. As I said this is a universal story though it isn’t just a Kurdish story abuse happens everywhere and that is the important side of the story to highlight to make sure people know it’s wrong.The book has a sparse poetic nature to it. So if you like stories of village life a marriage doomed and a tough woman at the heart of it this should appeal to you as a reader if you like books like this.

Winston’s score – A – I wish I had read this last year a powerful insight into an abusive marriage

The Great Homecoming by Anna Kim

The Great Homecoming by Anna Kim

Austrian Fiction

Original title – Die große Heimkehr

Translator – Jamie Lee Searle

Source – copy via translator

I left this a bit as it was a book from I writer who I read a few years ago and didn’t review so this time around it deserved a great review. Anna Kim grew up initially in Germany then moved to Vienna she has been writing since 1999 and was sent by project mitSsprach gehts  to Greenland that visit formed two of her earlier novels which included the one I read a few years ago. She has one the European literature prize. This was her latest novel it came out in 2017 and saw her look back at her own Korean Heritage, This is what excited me about this book as it was interesting that a writer that had lived outside Korea looked at the history of her homeland. Plus one of my best friends, when I lived in Germany, was from Korea as well.  

No, I was drawn south, not North, I packed up the few things I owned and left Nosan, went wherever the wind blew me and the waves propelled me; on days when it rained, I would study the color of the rain from beneath the shelter of a tree, trying to memorize it, on other days I followed the traces of light until it disappeared in a valley. I traveled on foot, hiking cross-country, sleeping in caves,cornfields  and under bridges. My new friends were homeless like me, children, teenagers, refugees from the North, refugees from the south, people without ages or names who had become arbitary, transparent, during the search for their famlies. We shared the little foot we managed to beg, shared the warmth of our caves, we shared everything we owned, and yet we lost one another.

I was reminded here a bit of grave of fireflies with setsuko in a cave with her fireflies.

At the heart, if this story is a triangle of friendship two old friends Yunho and Johnny how are meeting after the conflict Yunho has been cut off from his family so heads to the hustle and bustle of Seoul, and his best friend this is where we meet the third main character in this Book Eve a little older than the two school friends she is the start of the book as well as the much older Yunho receives notice of her death as she has died in the US hence the book is his flashback through two turbulent years and the political events but also there is Yunho past this takes us back to the Japanese occupation of Korea a horrific time for the country, There is a lot of history but this for me fills out evens as the trio head as Junho also falls for his friend, lover but when a tragic event and a dead body cause a rift which side of the divide will they all end up on. This is all in a time when the city is full of spies refugees and chancers. A story of three lives in the post-war chaos of the two Koreas.

My rendezvous with eve were as clandestine as my conspiracy with sangok, Mihee and Jang, but it was this secret that proved fateful: whereever the needle goes, the thread must follow.

I don’t know whether she felt the same way; But I was happy, and as I zigzagged my way through the narrowest alleys and darkest corners of nocturnal seuol, which in my mind were part of Eve- for I cpuldn’t have envisaged her in any other place in the world, Eve the Korean woman withthe American name – it seemed a miricale to me that I was ableto find her, that I couldfool the blackness of the night.

The mysterious Eve is she more than they know.

This is a clever book it has another subplot of a Korean German writer returning to Korea to discover there past and the main story of the trio of friends. This is a mix of spy story love story post-war story and also a chunk of modern Korean history thrown in the mix. A European Epic take on post-war Korea. This is one of the best novels on the time I have read it uses the friendship and the way the characters move through the north and south which isn’t like it is today with its closed border but there is a sense that is growing closer as we see Yunho facing turning to the north and leaving Seoul to head to Pyongyang which at the time seem to be prosperous. Then Add Eve moon she is a dancer but she could have walked out of an Ian Fleming novel for being a character she is more than she seems to the boys. Jamie sent me this as she felt it was one of those books that flew under the Radar as it came out during COVID.Which is a shame it is a book that I was going to read at some point as it had been well received in Germany and was on my radar

The day my Grandfather was a hero by Paulus Hochgatterer

The day my Grandfather was a hero by Paulus Hochgatterer

Austrian fiction

Original title – Der Tag, an dem mein Großvater ein Held war

Translator – Jamie Bulloch

Source – review copy

We will skip of from Spain and move to world war two set novella from Austria. I had read the crime Novel that Paulus Hochgatterer is best known for back in 2012 but it slipped under the review guide but I seem to remember I enjoyed it so when this slim volume fell through the door I had to have a double-take to see if it was the same writer but it was which for me was great I love seeing writers trying different styles of books over there writing career.

They say my name is Nelli. Sometimes I believe them. sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I think my name is Elisabeth or Katharina. Or Isolde, like the young sales assistant in the hat shop. She’s the reason I go into town from time to time. When I stand outisde the shop and peer through tje window, I see Isolde’s torso floating around inside, nack and forth along the shelves. The head with its auburn plait floats in top. I can’t see anything from the waist down. I imagine her lower half having sat itself down somewhere. Perhaps all the toing and froing has become to exhausting. Perhaps it doesn’t like the plait or the way in wjich the upper half says .How may I help you ? But I don’t gell anyone these sort of things

The fragile sense of Nelli here shaken by her past and not sure of herself.

The book is set in the latter part of world war two in 1945 and our narrator is a young girl she has been sent to live with family in the farmlands of Lower Austria. There is a blur to how she got there almost a sense of a girl that had maybe seen too much of the war at home. Nelli was involved with the bombing at Nibelungen tank factories, she had stopped speaking so when the family takes in a fellow victim of the war an Emaciated Russian soldier all he seems to have is a rolled-up canvas that is his most precious object this above all he has chosen to keep safe. There is an illusion in the book that this picture could be a famous lost piece of art from the war The tower of Horse by Franz Marc the picture now lost may have been Mikhail’s picture they decide to hide him and keep him safe passing him off as a fellow Swabian like Nelli. But what happens when the Wehrmacht turns up with a feeling he may be there what will they Do?

Sitting on the left of the corner bench is a young man. I’ve never seen beforfe. He has long blond hair and reddish blond stubble, and is so thin that he looks on the verge of starvatgion. He is wearing trousers and a coat made of filthy canvas.He has one arm around something that could be a pipe or a piece of fence post. It reaches up to his shoulder when he’s sitting, and its wrapped in green oilcloth tied with a carrying strap. The man is as still as a statue and his eyes are fixed fixed on the floor “Who is that” Annemarie ask me softly. “No idea,” I say “Someone whose house has been bombed pr a spy, and I tell her it’s because that’s what I imagine a spy to look like.

Mikhail and one first things noticed is the wrapped up paining in the Oilskin.

This is a slim book but a book that lasts with you Nelli is a narrator that has seen the horror of war so when the Family hides Mikhail and how he is hidden by her family. The narrative is hers but there is descriptions of the world she is living in that bring the world alive of the farmlands of lower Austria. Nelli comes over well as a damaged figure Hochgaterer is a Child Psychiatrist by profession so he manages the fragile mind of a young girl that had seen more horrors than over will see in a whole lifetime. This is only just a 100 pages long but captures a little everyday corner of the war so well and a tale of hiding a fellow damaged soul in Mikhail that has had the worst horrors of the war. This a mix of the Machine gunners ,  whistle down the wind and A meal in winter stuck in a blender and transported to Austria.This book was made possible by –

Concrete by Thomas Bernhard

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Concrete by Thomas Bernhard

Austrian fiction

Original title – Beton

Translator –  David McLintock

Source – personal copy

It is German lit month and it wouldn’t be right for me not to review a Bernhard I have reviewed six works by him on the time on the blog and hosted a Bernhard reading month. I was pleased when Faber brought some new editions out last year and this year as I had still a few I need to get by him and to read. It has been thirty years since he passed away hence the five reissue from Faber of Concrete, Extinction, woodcutters, The losers and Wittgenstein’s nephew I have linked to the ones I have reviewed by him.So here is the first of their two from Faber I hadn’t read I hope to get to the other Faber nook Extinction before the month runs out but let’s see how I get on.

Everybody suffers, my dear little brother, but you despise life, That’s your misfortune, That;s why you’re ill, that’s why you’re dying. And you soon will die if you don’t change, she said. I could hear it clearly now, more clearly than when the words were uttered in that cold, unfeeling manner of her. My sister the clairvoyant- absurd! she’s probably right though, that it would be a good thing to get away from Peiskam for a while but I’ve no guarntee of being able to start my work anywhere else, let alon get on with it.

His sister points out some things to Rudolf about himself.

As ever we have Rudolf our narrator at the heart of the Bernhard book as he is suffering for his art he is a writer about classical music but has had a bad bout of writer’s block. We also have another piece of Bernhard writing that is Music he has a man that is set on writing a piece about the composer he is working on a piece around Mendelssohn Bartholdy has taken him a ten ear to get the perfect tart to this work. Then he has a sister that he has let into his private world in the house he has inherited from his parents this is another mirroring of Bernhard’s own life in the book. Rudolf lives in the outreaches of Austria this is the same Area the Bernhard himself lived on his farm .near there on Ohlsdorf in Upper Austria. Rudolf’s sister was successful and a person that was at the heart of Viennese society this is, of course, a prime candidate for what is a Bernhard Alter ego to hate.  Rudolf also recounts when he takes a holiday to try and get this book finished the year earlier when he went to the same place in Mallorca and met a young widow whose husband had recently died but a year later he discovers she took her life. This reflects Bernhard’s own life that was full of losing those close to you.

As a result of the prednisolone my resistance is virtualy nil. When once I’ve caughta cold it takes me weeks to throw it off. And so there’s nothing I dread so much as catching a cold. Even a slight draught is enough to make me take to my bed for weeks, and so at Peiskam I live most of the time in fear of catching cold. This fear almost verges on madness and is probably one of the reasons why I find it so hard to begin any protracted intellectual work

Bernhard himself suffered himself with a lung condition so one imagines this fear is his own fear infact it was what eventually leasd to his death.

 

Well, this is yet another Bernhard book that is full of his bile for his homeland and the upper echelons of it especially those like Rudolf’s sister that get into those her parts of Viennese society. There are even echos to other books mention of knowing Wittgenstein’s nephew at one part which is, of course, another Bernhard book. Music in the loser has a failed musician here it is a failed musicologist. All these characters are a reflection of Bernhard himself now with Handke winning the Nobel we could turn and say if Bernhard hadn’t had such bad Health would he had been the winner imagine the bile of him winning the Nobel I loved his prize-winning speeches book my prizes. So another German lit month and I am now at book seven from Thomas Bernhard I have three more on my shelves and a couple I could buy so I think I could be doing him for a couple more German lit months in fact maybe even another Thomas Bernhard week?

The two Nobel’s go too

Its that time of year and a treat today we have two Nobel Laureates one for this year and one for last year. we see if a year away has meant the academy gone in a new Nonanglophile and feminist direction that has been mention in recent years. The first winner for the last year 2018 is Olga Tokarczuk for her encyclopedic writing. I have reviewed her book Drive my plough over the bones of the dead Here is an interview with her

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

hen for this year, 2019 we have Peter Handke A favorite for many years to win although he has courted controversy in some of his view but I loved every book I have read and he has also worked with Wim Wenders on a number of films including the goalkeeper anxiety a classic film. Here is a review of slow homecoming by him and an interview IT is from a german paper but worth reading

Sometimes I lie and Sometimes I don’t by Nadja Spiegel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes I lie and Sometimes I don’t by Nadja Spiegel

Austrian short stories

Original title –  Manchmal lüge ich und Manchmal nicht

Translator Rachel McNholl

Source – personal copy

So today I move to a rising star of Austrian fiction Nadja Spiegel. She has won a number of prize for her prose, spoken word and poetry. This was her debut collection and came about when she went to Dublin for the first Irish European literature night for Austria where both the publisher and her translator discovered he flash fiction prose style. As her translator puts it her style is like that described by the Irish writer Eilis Ni Dhuibhne it is more poetic than the novel, more suggestive, dealing more in metaphor and symbolism. Ni Dhuibhne believes natural short story writers combine the sensibilities of poets with those of novelist, and I believe that this is very true of Nadja Spiegel.

She said she knew it would end. She said Lets just run away. Then she said nothing. That was on the Monday. We said nothinfor so long that I couldn’t tell where my body ended and hers begin.

She said she knew how it would end, when it would end. I have a few images of her, nothing else , just the memory of her smell:

Caedamon and seasame

I was remond of Maggie smith talking about the bed of Lentils see remembered in her romance with a grocer like Malika’s family spice shop.

there are twenty short stories in this collection some are from a mere few pages to longer other stretches to ten pages. But they are all that many call flash fiction. Where we have a quick flash into life. The narrators, on the whole, are female voices young woman that find themselves in tough places. But in others we see a narrator talk about falling for the new girl a plain girl  Malika she has a romance with a popular girl Linda the girls family own a spice shop a short romance and an ending that remind me of Alan Benett’s talking voices. Another told by a third voice about a boy younger than here Elias and another girl Lisa younger than Elias a tale of a budding romance or was it as the last line of this story is also the title of this collection sometimes I lie and sometimes I don’t. An inner view of modern Austria through female eyes. A glimpse into the lives of late teens and early twenty-year-olds worlds.

In school on Monday a girl throws her water bottle up in the air and catches it with one hand, takes a bite out of an apple and sens a squrt of juice flying. The girl is pretty, Lisa is her name, and she has a boyfriend by the name of Elias. The thing about names is : there’s one more letter in Elias, an e more than there is in Lisa, and the girl laughs and sweeps back her hair, and is Elias is the extension of Lisa and lisa is there within Elias.

Elias is not the kind of guy who falls in love, he only loves, for instance.

Elias has fallen in love with me says Lisa, and sometimes Lisa’s right and sometime’s she’s not.

I’m happy for you both.I say

and sometimes I lie and sometimes I don’t

The story of a romance in the story Lisa Elias and me also has the colllections title as it’s last line .

The stories are vibrant short bites that left me as a reader at times wanting more the problem with flash fiction is they can be too tempting at times they are like a Thorntons selection box once you open you well I just have to have a couple at a time and this is the case here I read the collection in an evening like a voyeur of this modern Austrian lives glimpse behind the curtains of the lives from people in ruts to budding romances. All told with a bittersweet and humourist view of the world. Nadja hasn’t quite the bitter view of Bernhard of her homeland but she fits nicely with the likes of Linda Sift where she also showed how to get by in another view of modern Austria  and even Jelinek in romances starting I reviewed woman as lovers and there is a similar detached nature to the world in that book that flows in these stories as we just get the merest glimpse of there worlds. A new voice and an interesting short collection from an interesting writer. Have you a favorite European short story writer?

Confession of a murderer by Joseph Roth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Confession of a Murderer by Joesph Roth

Austrian Fiction

Original title – Beichte eines Mörder

Translator – Desmond L Vesey

Source – Personal copy

I was out the other day and called into Chesterfield Oxfam as I do most weeks just see what had come in and saw this on the shelf it caught my eye as it wasn’t a Roth Novella that I wasn’t overly aware off. I got home and looked it up and seen it was last in print in 2002. It was published first in Holland in 1936 at the time he was living in Paris and the drink had started to pay the toll on him. This is also the time covered in the novel about Roth summer before the dark .

“Well goodbye,” Said the prince to me .”Work hard.” He held out his hand . But then he drew it back and said “wait!” and walked over to the writing desk .He pulled open a drawer and took out of it a heavy gold snuffbox. “Here ,” he said, ” Take this as a memento.God be with you !” He forgot to give me his hand.I never even thanked him. I simply took the box, bowed and left the house.

The giving of the Snuff box , he also meets his half brother in this encounter as a young man.

The novella follows a man telling his life story over the course of one evening in a Paris restaurant. Golubchik the man telling his life is a Russian emigre. He tells of his early life as the son of a forester, but there was an open family secret that he was actually the son of the local Prince a man who crosses his path a few times during his life. This leads to one of the main moments in the book where as a young adult he returns to his home and visits the Prince to confront him, the prince now an old man doesn’t remember his father initially but then admits he was his illegitimate son and gives him a gold snuff box. At this point, we meet the other main character in the book Jeno Lakatos a clever devilish young man that help Golubchik sell his snuff-box but in doing so they gather the prince has a drawer full of these snuff boxes to give to people!! The two then spend war years around Europe Golubchik a writer and spy working for his half-brother the young prince Golubchik also becomes involved with women with extravagant taste whom he later sees with his now nemesis Lakatos leading to an act when he captures a man in her room.

So I arrived in Paris. I need not tell you what Paris meant to me , to Golubchik, the spy who despised himself, to the false Krapotkin, the lover of Luteta.It cost me an immense effort not  to believe that my passport was false and to forget that my vile task of watching refugees, who were a so-called menace to the state, was my own.

The end of the book sees him spying in Paris

This is an interesting story that is set all around Europe and in a way follows the fall of the Austro Hungarian empire through the narrator’s eyes. Then there is his story of the bastard son of land gentry, I loved the revelation of the drawer full of snuff boxes to give as gifts, I wondered how many Golubchiks were out there. The book has a lovely pacing as we slowly watch his story unfold over the course of the evening in this Left bank restaurant. A man trying to prove his worth and place in the world in Golubchik. Then another man he is very manipulative and them being involved with the same woman cannot be anything other than trouble.