White Nights by Urszula Honek

White nights by Urszula Honek

Polish fiction

Original title – Biale Noce

Translator – Kate Webster

Source – Personal copy

This was the book that jumped off the longlist for the booker. Firstly, this is the one book that I hadn’t heard of off the list. Secondly, when I read the description of a debut novel from a poet, which always catches my eye, the setting in a rural village ticked another box for me. Then it mentioned that the stories tackle life and death. I was lucky as all that meant it was the first book I ordered seconds after the longlist. Came up online. I have held back reviewing it as it is maybe one of the better books I read on this year’s longlist, and it has made our shortlist, so it could be near our winner, maybe. I also like that it was a completely new publisher to me which is always great to find. Were you aware of this book or publisher before the longlist came out?

A house like a chicken coop, so that if you leaned on it or kicked at it, all the planks would fall to the ground, and some would break in half, everything rotten. How it didn’t collapse on their heads over the years, I don’t know. Maybe they walked on tiptoe and didn’t cry out when they fucked, or when they had bust-ups, otherwise I don’t get it. Plus the house sits on the very edge of the hill, right next to the turnoff to Roznowice. If you drove past in a lorry, you could high-five Pilot as he leaned out of the window. Everything inside must have been shaking when they were eating or sleeping, I wouldn’t have coped with it for that long, but what can you do if you’ve got no choice? And there was just the one main room, plus a kitchen and the crapper outside, and twelve mouths to feed – well, eleven and a half, cos Pilot only counted as half. Did I use to go there?

The rural homes here is Pilots

The book is set in southern Poland in the Beskid Niski region. This mountainous region is very sparsely populated, with a wide range of nature and fauna. But for those who live and work there, it is a place where, on the whole, they are isolated and tend to be the sort of people who never go far from their home village. The stories are scattered in a way the events in the stories aren’t in a straight timeline, so characters come and go. The stories are centred around a group of friends. The first one we meet is Pilot, a name because he always seems to be looking in the air.The book opens with the author deciding to grow carp in a pond in his garden; of course, this is a regular Christmas meal in Poland. Andrej has lived with Pilot in a huge communal dwelling with other men, and this guy is haunted in many ways by his life. These are men with little education. They are just getting by in the world around them. Then add a butcher sister and families. This is a tale of a village of old lovers. What happens when one of this close group dies? How do the others take that death?

It was a beautiful day like this, summer, you could walk around in just your underpants, no one was ashamed of anyone here, because there was nothing to hide. At the last judgment, everyone will be standing side by side, not a fig leaf in sight, just as they were born, which is to say in the body they died in, but naked, that’s what I mean. Saturdays in the summer meant a trip to the Ropa river, which can be fast and deep, but that’s what rivers are, right? Not splashing around in the shallows, but going in up to your neck, up to your head, disappearing under the water. You have to feel its weight, that sometimes it will bash you about a bit, and other times it will embrace you like love, and it grows pleasant, light, and then you can die. Otherwise there’s no point. This is my carliest memory – my father and I are going to the river, we’re making our way through the big butterbur leaves, I hold his hand tight and wish I could never let go, and then I go into the water, I lose my balance and fall beneath the surface,

From the tale The cliff where the baker something happens to her

This is a harsh world. I was reminded of the pit villages near me and those in Northumberland. I used to pick people up from the rural setting and small villages where some people ended up trapped in this village. A death of a baker did she die from a fall or was she pushed. Sisters that walk in line the stories are little c=glimpsesd into this rural world that one imagines aren’t set to survive. This world is where smartphones and the wider world seem distant in their bubble. For me, it ticked the box of rural drama. I love tales that take us away from city life into those little places where everyone knows one another, and like in these stories, there is history and pasts that have sculptured their lives. I hope we get more from this poet-turned-writer . Have you read this collection? Which of the longlisted book jumped out when it came out?

Winston’s score is a rural tale of those living on the edge of Poland, living on the edge of their own lives.

Simpatia by Rodrigo Blanco Calderon

Simpatia by Rodrigo Blanco Calderon

Venezuelan  fiction

Original title – Simpatía

Translator Noel Hermandez Gonzales and Daniel Hahn

Source = personal copy

I move on to another from the Booker international longlist. I have a couple more after this to review over the month. This was one of the books from this year’s longlist that I knew very little about although I do have a copy of Bogota 39, which had Rodrigo in it is a long while since I read that book, but it is always great to see another writer from that list of the best Latin American writers under 39 that came out in 2007 he was one of two writers from Venezuela that made the list. The book deals with a time when all the people with money and talent were leaving the country. This is the story of one who was left behind when his wife left him. We see Ulise’s Kan world.

Only now did he register the book that was directly in his line of vision. Its thick white spine stood out among the dark blue row of other volumes. He took it out and looked closely at the cover. He climbed off the chair, sat down, and read the title again: Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim. He checked the index and found the title that Martín had mentioned: All the Dogs of My Life. He knew enough English to understand the title at least. Perhaps Nadine could read it. He took the book with him, returned to the bathroom, and stored it away on a shelf under the sink. He came out again and headed for the bedroom. Nadine and Martin turned to see him come in, then went on talking.

One of the little Easter eggs early on in the book welll I felt they were easter eggs

This was when there was a drain of those who could leave Venezuela during the Maduro government. Ulise’s wife has decided to escape the struggling country. So when his father-in-law dies, Ulises is shocked when he is challenged by his father-in-law in the will to get HIS mansion, Los Argonauts and to have it up and running as. Dogs home with a set amount of time. This is a tale of those left behind, and when all the owners have left, there are a lot of stray dogs out there for him to rehome at the dog home with a couple the General had chosen alongside Ulises to set up the foundation for the dogs home. If he doesn’t complete the task within a set time, he will lose it all, including his own flat to his ex-wife and be homeless himself. But he is helped by the fact his father-in-law was high up in the army, so he sets out on his quest to find and rehome the strays and left behind dogs from the exodus of Venezuela.

General Ayala left specific instructions on where to set up: the clinic; the food, cleaning, and medical storage facilities; the administrative and accounting offices; Jesús and Mariela’s permanent bedroom; and many details more. Despite all this, the description of the project still did not account for all the available space at Los Argonautas. The one thing General Ayala didn’t leave a single word about was the garden. Should they install the dog kennels inside the house or in the garden? If the garden, they would need to build a roof. Should they use all the land or just part of it? And what would happen to Sonny, Fredo, and Michael if they used the whole garden?

His will set out what he wanted them to do!

This is a book that I wanted to love, but it maybe has a lot of ideas and maybe should been longer or less thrown into it . I loved the nod to the Ulysess myth with the name, a modern-day quest to save the dogs. It’s about family ties how. Even though his daughter and his son-in-law have split, he is still more connected to his son-in-law, who stayed, than his own daughter, who fled the country so which gives Ulises a chance to have a better life and gives use to the mansion after his death. This is about the system that caused so many to flee. That is the problem. It is a very heartfelt book, but I felt he just wanted to do so much in the book it maybe fell short due to that. I loved using dogs as what was left behind when everyone went. There are also a few that, if they were in a film, would be easter eggs like Bovilar Dog, books about dogs from famous writers we meet along the way. i hope to try another book by him at some point as there was a few bits of this I liked it just needed something a little not quite sure what but thats just a feeling I had. Have you read this or ay other books from Venezula?

Winston’s score is B. It just needs to be a little less or a little longer, but I loved some bits of it.

 

 

 

The House on Via Gemito by Domeico Starnone

The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone

Italian Fiction

Original title – Via Gemito

Translator – Oonagh Stransky

Source – Review copy

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

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

The apartment and his dads world

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

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

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

Naples a;ways in the bacground of the story

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

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

Booker international shortlist my reaction

Here is the Shortlisted books

Not a River

Written by Selva Almada

Translated by Annie McDermott

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

Mater 2-10

Written by Hwang Sok-yong

Translated by Sora Kim-RussellYoungjae Josephine Bae

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

What I’d Rather Not Think About

Written by Jente Posthuma

Translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey

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

Crooked Plow

Written by Itamar Vieira Junior

Translated by Johnny Lorenz

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

 

Kairos

Written by Jenny Erpenbeck

Translated by Michael Hofmann

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

The Details

Written by Ia Genberg

Translated by Kira Josefsson

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

Well I had picked

Karios

Not a river

Undiscovered

Lost on me

white nights

A dictator calls

The house on Via Gemito

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

 

Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior

Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior

Brazilian fiction

Original title – Torto Arado

Translator – Johnny Lorenz

Source – Personal copy

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

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

As the twins cut there tongues in the opening pages .

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

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

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

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

Winstons score

Lost on me by Veronica Raimo

Lost on me by Veronica Raimo

Italian fiction

Original title –Niente di vero

Translator – Leah Janeczko

Source – Personal copy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Details by Ia Genberg

The details by IA Genberg

Swedish fiction

Original title -Detailjerna

Translator – Kira Josefsson

Source – personnel copy

Now I wasn’t aware of much of this book. But I wasn’t shocked when I saw it on the longlist as it is one of those books I had seen on Instagram and mentioned in a few year-end lists. I felt from its cover it was maybe a work of contemporary fiction. But when I read the blurb on the booker longlist, it seemed interesting enough: a woman is in bed with a fever and has fever dreams about her life. This may be a work of auto-fiction it is alluded to. Ia Genberg started as a Journalist before publishing her first novel in 2012, and since then, she has written a further novel and a collection of short stories, making this her third novel. It was a big seller in Sweden when it came. This seems to be her first book to be translated to English.

Literature was our favourite game. Johanna and I introduced each other to authors and themes, to eras and regions and singular works, to older books and contemporary books and books of different genres.

We had similar tastes but opinions divergent enough to make our discussions interesting. There were certain things we didn’t agree on (Oates, Bukowski, others that left us both unmoved (Gordimer, fantasy), and some we both loved (Klas Östergren, Eyvind Johnson’s Krilon trilogy, Lessing). I could tell how she felt about a book based on how fast she worked her way through it. If she was reading fast (Kundera, all crime fiction), I knew she was bored and rushing to be done, and if she was going too slow (The TinDrum, all sci-fi), she was equally bored but had to struggle to reach the last page

I loved the discucssion of books and sharing a love of literature something i rarely do in person.

 

Whilst in bed with a fever. She starts looking at a novel she got many years ago from an old girlfriend, which sparks a look into four of her old friends and connections over the years. We have a subtle book; the writer calls it a quiet novel. It is about all those tiny little events in one’s life; the book itself is described by the writer as a quiet novel. It captures those little things from a signature in a book like a Prosutian moment. The book she is reading is New york trilogy by Paul auster another writer that deals well at times with those littloe moments. She remembers how she and Johanna introduced each other to writers (I must admit in a way I was a little jealous of this as Amanda and I rarely talk books and she loves true life books and isn’t a quick reader like me that’s aside ) so yes this is her connection with Joanna as she drifts she is then drawn to three other connections over time the book hasn’t a; linear narrative, and that adds to the sense lof fever dream. But it also felt very personal at times.

Johanna became a person of my past, one of many, and had she not turned into a public figure I’d probably have been more successful in forgetting her. Her memory would have been allowed to fade and only rear its head again during fevers like this one, or during bouts of self-pity and nostalgia; it would have waned and withered until, like a badly restored painting, only a few incoherent fragments remained.Maybe I’d have walked by Fyra Knop and caught a scent linked to a voice. I might have dedicated a little thought to her every time I passed by the coffee shop on Linnégatan, or paused at an article about the laborious making of The Sorrow Gondola after Tomas Tranströmer’s passing. Like most people who’ve been abandoned I held the simple hope of never having to see her again;

I held it there as this little passage remind me of the last lines of Stand by me when the adult Geordie talks how two of his friends became faces in the crowd over time.

I’m on the wall with this. I love her taste in books describing Auster as a writer; he was a writer many years ago. I loved it when I first got really back into reading, which would be about 20 years ago. The New York Trilogy was one of my favourite books. also, I fell in love with the film scripts he made for two films, Smoke and Blue in the Face, which, like this book, deal with those quiet little moments of life caught from a signature or in smoke around a camera and pictures. This is maybe a book aimed at a reader twenty years younger than me. In fact, this is one of my feelings about the longlist as a whole. It is a very Gen Z list book. So this book worked but, in a way, didn’t grab me as I wanted it to. Maybe it needs to be Knausgaard in length for me as a reader if that makes sense?

Winston score – B love bits and others didn’t fully connect with me

A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare

A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare

Albanian fiction

Original title -Kur sunduesit grinden. Rreth misterit të telefonimit Stalin-Pasternak

Translator – John Hodgson

Source – Personal copy

I initially shook my head when I saw this book on the longlist of the book it is just I think his books had bene on the longlist over the years and he is a writer  I have read several books from the year. In fact, he is a writer I liked reading over the years, but it was just that initial disappointment with this longlist.I think we all on the shadow jury felt this just the sheer number of books we had to read. This one in case is a book I’d call a shelf book it is one I wouldn’t have got but would have firstly borrowed from the library or got second-hand with the intention of reading at some point. Kadare is a writer. I’d love to read all his books over time as he is one of the few voices to break through from Albania, I know in recent years we have got a few more voices, in fact, I have two other writers under review from Albania and five books from Kadare reviewed over the years. He is near the top of the list of writers for the Nobel prizes, as he has won every other prize. He won the earlier version of the Booker International Booker, awarded for a body of work rather than an individual one. He had been on the longlist twice in the old IFFP days and once before since the prize became the booker international.

The telephone call had to do with a mystery that we all share in. The poet entered the stage not of his own free will but because the laws of tragedy demanded it.So, there were three: Pasternak, Stalin and Mandelstam. Two poets and the tyrant between them.The first thought was an exciting prospect: the two poets could unite to bring down the tyrant.

Both secretly despised this tyrant. Mandelstam had called him the Kremlin mountaineer. Pasternak was said to have described him as a dwarf with the body of a fourteen-year-old and the face of an old man. Now they had him in their grip, two against one, and could destroy him with all the cruelty that poets know how to use.

From Part two of the book and the event is explained

This is an odd book; if anything, it is more experimental than the other books I have read over the years from Ismail Kadare. But in other ways, he has much in common with his other books, a look at dictators, which he does in his other books, mainly Hoxha. But he had spent time in the USSR, and in 1960, he was called back to Albania. This book deals with an actual supposed event, a terse call between Josef Stalin and Boris Pasternak when a fellow Soviet writer and Poet Osip Mandelstam had been arrested. Of course, this was before Pasternak got in trouble with the regime. He tries to reconstruct the events of that call from fellow writers who may have been there in the day. As we see each retelling of the story, we know how each person’s view of the call is affected by their own position and thoughts. It is also an exciting twist of literature and politics and how they occasionally try to create artwork together and against one another.

The mystery surrounding Samoylov grew after the Pasternak scandal, when there was so much talk of the three-minute conversation with Stalin. Stul-pans said to me one day, half joking, that I was the best person to provide accurate information about that phone call. It took me a while to work out that what he meant was information that might come from Samoylov, who had been involved in the same circle as Pasternak and Akhmatova, including Lydia Chukovskaya, Zamyatin and perhaps Mandelstam himself.

I said I didn’t believe they were close enough friends to talk about such delicate matters.

How this call grew over time

This is one of those books that is hard to put down as it is basically 13 retellings of the same event from a slightly different angle and person each time. In our shadow chat, I felt that is why they’d gone for this a little in English, as it is a small nod to J B Priestley, an inspector call which uses the retelling of a life from different points of view. One of our group also pointed out the connection to Javier Cercas’ theory of a blind spot in a book, which is the turning point of a story that happens outside the book and turns the events of the book. Another thing that I felt about this book and the style it was written in is that two of his old translators, Babara Bray and David Bellios, are known for their work with the Oulipo writers. Kadare has lived in France for thirty years. He is sure to have read Oulipo’s works, and the constraint of just retelling the same event in so many ways struck me as Oulipo in style, a sort of Albanian homage to Oulipo? Anyway that is my thought on this odd book. So far, one of the better books from this year’s list. Have you read KADARE?

Winston score:  A -It’s interesting to see such an experienced writer trying something a little different with his writing.

Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener

Undiscovered by Gariela Wiener

Peruvian fiction

Original title – Huaco Retrabo

Translator – Julia Sanches

Source – Personal copy

when the Booker International longlist came out, one of the names I recognised straight away was the Peruvian writer Gabriela Wiener,. I reviewed her book Nine Moons around her pregnancy a few years ago. She is one of the many talented female writers from Latin America, although she has lived in Spain for several years. She writes columns regularly for a Peruvian paper and magazine and occasionally for El Pais. She has also worked as an editor. She is related to the Austrian French explorer Charles Wiener. This fact is what makes the starting point of this book. A look into her own family history.

My family doesn’t have a single photograph of María Rodriguez. We’ll never know what she looked like.The woman who inaugurated the Wiener lineage inPeru, who carried a pregnancy to term by herself and breastfed a half-orphaned boy, has been swallowed by the earth. Much like traces of an ancient world that vanish beneath the sand for years. There’s a science to gathering materials scattered across a region and salvaging whatever time hasn’t corroded in order to piece together a fleeting image of the past. Huaquear, on the other hand, is opening, penetrating, extracting, stealing, flee-ing, forgetting. Yet in that rift, something was implanted inside her and germinated far from the tree.

They know who Charles had slept with but there is no photo of her great great grandmother around.

 

The book starts while she is in Paris; she visits an exhibition of Columbian artefacts, plunder from a time before Europeans had been to Latin America. Some of the female statues she starts to look at she sees herself in them., But then is shocked when she sees these statues were brought back to Europe by her own great -great grandfather, Charles Wiener. She then goes down a rabbit hole of her own personal history but also her own family’s background as half Peruvian and European, a deep look into race and place. I loved a remark that was sent to her about her having a Peruvian face. A off the cuff but racist remark or a statement of fact not sure but it in a way is at the heart f her journey to find out about Charles, but also about the plunder and violence of that time for the natives in Peru. As Charles took the portrait vase, she looked back to Europe, and they ended up in Paris. He also left a son and the family line that led to Gabriela and her family line.

SINCE MOVING TO SPAIN, I REGULARLY MEET PEOPLE WHO tell me I have a “Peruvian face.” What is a Peruvian face, anyway?The face of those women you see in the metro. The face in the pages of National Geographic. The face of María who saw Charles.My face looks a lot like a huaco portrait. Every time someone tells me this, I picture Charles brushing dust off my eyelids as he tries to determine when I was made. Huacos are handmade pieces of delicately painted ceramics. Pre-Columbian, they come in a variety of forms and styles, tending to be either decorative or part of a ritual or funerary offering. They’re called hua-cos because they were found buried next to important people insacred temples known as huacas. But out of all the huacos, the huaco portrait is the most interesting. A huaco portrait is a pre-Columbian photo ID. Its depiction of an Indigenous face is so realistic that when I look at one up close, it feels as if I’m gazing into a cracked mirror of bygone centuries.

The comment she gets about her faces and her view on it

I really liked her other book. I think she is in the tradition of auto fiction writers. This is the problem here. For me, this is more a work of nonfiction than a novel. But it is an interesting insight into the dark secrets a lot of families can have in their background. What is at the heart of this book is the bloody past of Latin America when people like Wiener came and took so much history back to Europe. Most of the artefacts he got are from the area around Machu Picchu, although he never got there as it was years after the Europeans first found the city he was in Peru and was near the city so the pieces he brought is from Peru and the family history means that the pots in the Museum had a historical resemblance to her when she looked at them but then this unusual family connection and this brought to the fore the history and what it is like to be colonised and coloniser. A great piece of autofiction and goes down a rabbit hole of our family history. If you like annernaux ora book around personal family history, this is one for you also about growing up between being a native and being a coloniser. Have you read any of her other books ?  she has another around the sex industry.

Winston’s score – B solid book, well written, but is it a novel?

What I’D Rather not think about by Jente Posthuma

What I’d rather not think about by Jente Posthuma

Dutch fiction

Original title  Wear Ik Liver aniet aan denk

Translator Sarah Timmer Harvey

Source – personal copy

When the Booker International longlist came out I looked at the books, most I had a vague awareness of . But I read the small blurb on each and then set out on which order I’d read the longlist in part of this was decided by the arrival of the books on the longlist. This was one that I felt I’d get on with I love works told in Vignettes for they can work like a patchwork slowly building the picture of the book as a whole. Jente Posthuma’s first novel People Without Charisma was well-received and was up for several prizes in Holland when it came out. This is her second novel and deals with twins and the aftermath of when the older twin kills himself from his sister’s point of view.

MY Brother called himself one and Me two because he had been born forty-five minutes earlier than I was on a sweltering day in August. He treated me like his little sister, was longer and heavier than me at birth, and had taken up almost all the space in my mother’s belly. I’d been stuck behind him with my left leg thrown over my shoulder, or so the story goes. This was why it took a little extra time for me to emerge. Our actual due date had been a month later but my brother had gone ahead, and I wasn’t about to be left behind.

The fact that we weren’t identical was something I’d long considered a handicap, a consequence of our premature birth, even once I understood the difference between identical and fraternal twins. We could have grown even closer in that ninth month.

The names they used no identical but so close.

As many of you may know my own wife had to deal with the loss of a sibling to suicide it is one of the most heartbreaking things that can happen to a family and this is what ai had hoped to find here. But in a way I not sure if number two as we come to know her as the younger of the twins by some 45 minutes. There is a nod in a way here too the Twin Towers she says he was taller than me and always on the side like the Twin Towers. I felt this is written just after her brother has gone it jumps from their childhood, the discovery of each other sexuality. During those early relationships then her brother settles with a man and has a pair of dogs or as he calls them three and four. Things aren’t what they seem and in her brother’s case there always seems to be that dark spectre over his life. She maybe shows this at times with a lack of emotion I felt but that is maybe from my own personal experience of someone dealing for years with this grief.

The first sweater I bought with my own money was nice and warm and made of Icelandic wool. It wasn’t as soft as some of the sweaters I’d buy once I started working at the vintage shop, when one of my bedroom walls would gradually disappear behind a mountain of wool. I hung shelves from the floor to the ceiling and filled them with piles of sweaters, which, just like my father’s biscuit tins, were sorted according to colour. By my twenty-seventh birthday, I owned 142 sweaters, and it was high time I saw a therapist. What will you do with them all, my friends would say.It’s a collection, I’d tell them. I didn’t have any pets, so I stroked my sweaters whenever I had nothing else to do.

Two has her own issues as you see here.

I said I like vignettes as a style of telling stories and it does work here . I felt sometimes the fact it wasn’t from a real-life experience showed. There is a certain way of remembering and thinking of that event and then not happening the way when you are left after a suicide you always question the reasons motivation and what you as a sibling could have done differently. For me that is what was missing here maybe it is meant be just after he has died two thinking before the full horror or of the tidal wave of grief hits the sibling. I felt it had captured some of this but was maybe not realistic enough for me as someone who has been up in the night after night with my own darling wife as she had nightmares and questions about her own brother’s death. [art of the reason I read this early on is I wanted it to be read and gone as a book if that made sense well it does to me as the reader. Have you a subject you’d prefer not to read books around? or something that has effect your life and you find is never quite captured, right in fiction ?

Winstons score – B Well written but I just quite didn’t get it as a subject for me