The book of all loves by Agustin Fernández Mallo

The book of all loves by  Agustin Fernandez Mall

Spanish fiction

Original title – El libro de todos los amores,

Translator – Thomas Bunstead

Source – subscription

I took out a small subscription to Fitzcarradlo as I had fallen behind with their books over recent years. They bring out a lot more than they first did. I ewas pleased this was one of the books from them I was snet as I have been a huge fan of Mallo’s Nocilla trilogy . He is a writer who likes to play with what a novel is and test the bounds of fiction. So his latest book to be translated into English is about love, but as ever, it is also about the world ending simultaneously. Only Mallo could work both these ideas into a novel. Maybe we have a future Nobel winner from the Nobel stable of Fitzcarraldo are gathering.

It is animals, not us, who live in the prison-house of language, because they are not able to leave and stand outside it and think about it. This is only because it is impossible for them to access the ideas that surround words.A dog never crosses a road, because it does not know what a road is. This, among other things, is why dogs get run over. It isn’t that the dog fails to look both ways before crossing, it’s that it does not possess the idea of a road.Its gaze is another gaze, its crossing is another crossing.Hence the fact that an animal cannot give or receive love either. It’s not that it doesn’t love, it’s that its love is other.

(Language love)

One of the love aphorisms

 

The book has several different streams to it. There is a series of aphorisms around love, such as independence, parcel, and language love, to name a few, as it runs through the book. Maybe love is all that is left, one wonders, as maybe that connects to the other story around something called the great Blackout, an apocalyptic event on earth with a single couple left. This is where we get the third stream of the husband of the couple and an earlier visit to Venice he had made. This is a mix of thoughts about love and what makes love. A past love of a place and visit to Venice, an Alexa machine while there all have the traits of Mallo’s other works, he likes recurrent themes like love, tech, and place and adds to that a couple surviving the end of the world you have a book that breaks the bounds of what fiction is. A book that need to be read to be captured fully

VENICE (1)

Month of June, first foor of a palazzo whose foundations stand below the waterline of Venice’s Misericordia Canal. There is a room, and a high window with views across the domes of St Mark’s Basilica and across a sea that will shift in colour throughout the day. There is also a woman – a writer — who, were she to look up, would be able to see all of this, but keeps her eyes down instead, tapping at the keys of a typewriter. Her typing produces slight movements in a small snow globe containing a miniature version of Venice to her right on the desk, raising a layer of snow up inside the globe, where it swirls before falling across the plastic city, and the writer goes on typing, and on, while outside, in the real Venice, the Venice of tourists and water and stone, the June humidity ushers in an early summer storm. Now, as the sequence she is working on grows in intensity, the table turns quivering fingerboard and the snow rises in the globe, and again it rises, once more hitting the tiny glass vault and falling on empty palazzos and waterless canals. The books and papers strewn across the desk, all of them on one single subject – love – receive these blows without so much as a flinch. Inside the globe, a snowflake has just landed on St Mark’s Square,

A long passage and the first remembering a trip by the husband to Venice

Mallo is a physicist I am always drawn to C P Snow and what he said about the two cultures of Humanties and Sccience he himself crossed these two cultures as he was a fellow scientist come writer. But what Malo has done is not only cross the lines between the two cultures, he has dragged the theory of Snow and thrown it in a blender by adding Calvino, Twitter, modern tech and scientific mind, also throwing in a touch of post-end of the worldness in for good measure and produced a book that only some like him could.I feel he is breaking the barriers of what fiction its and making us as readers work through this myriad of versions of love as we also witness the aftermath of the great blackout whilst also trying to remember a distant holiday with a few unusual things happening it like a waking dream of a wim wenders film it is like what he tried to do in Until the end of the world capture so much in such a small space. Have you read Mallo?

Winston score – A may be the first of next year Booker international books ?

 

What is mine by Jose Henrique Bortoluci

What is Mine by Jose Henrique Bortoluci

Brazilian memoir

Original title – O que é Meu

Translator – Rahul Bery

Source – subscription copy

I said yesterday I was staying in Latin America and a second work of nonfiction. This time, we move to Brazil and Jose Henrique Borotoluci’s account of his father’s life as a working-class trucker in Brazil from the 1960s onwards.I was drawn to this after reading the back cover, where He said he had been influenced by Annie Ernaux and Svetlana Alexievich. He has caught his father’s words in some interviews he had done over time since Cancer had taken its toll on his father’s life. This is the sort of book that Fitzcarraldo has been doing so well, and they managed to get such great non-fiction works.

My father studied until he was nine, worked on the family’s small farm from the age of seven, moved with them to the city at fifteen. He was only twenty-two when he became a truck driver. I was young, but I was as brave as a lion. He started driving trucks in 1965 and retired in

2015. The country that he traversed and helped to build was very different then from how it is now, but in recent years there has been a sense of familiarity: a country seized by frontier logic, the principle of expansion at any cost, the ‘colonization’ of new territories, environmental vandalism, the slow and clumsy construction of an ever more unequal consumer society. Roads and trucks occupy a key position in this fantasy of a developed nation in which forests and rivers give way to highways, prospect-ing, pasture and factories.

His father had to take work up early.

Didi Jose’s father had been a truck driver all his life, and we have his personal recollections of the time from the sixties onwards as he worked on some of the mega projects in Brazil, like the trans-amazonian highway. He says earlier on, his father never wanted to talk about the military dictatorship years but he will talk about his fellow drivers and the route he took. He says he always spoke about giant muddles where he got in the back and beyond. His fellow drivers, Like Nestor a driver showed him that if they tied meat to the outside of the exhaust in a certain place, he would have barbecued meat by lunch to eat.  The places they stopped deep in the jiungle. The protesters had dived or disappeared over the years. Another driver friend of his dad’s had died of Aids. All this as his father is fighting cancer about how the fight is going. He has taken recording and this is where the book comes from the recollections of the years spent in his wagon. For me, one of the hardest scenes is where he talks about his dad asking him about money and how he sees the gulf between his father’s life and his own as his father had to watch every penny growing up. There is a reference to movies about being a trucker that had been made in the seventies.

It was Nestor who taught me about exhaust barbecue. Above the truck’s exhaust there’s a plate that gets red bot. This is inside the engine, not the pipe where the smoke comes out. It’s a part that’s attached to the engine, welded metal, concave, big enough for one or two kilos of meat. You’d tie a piece of meat there in the morning and when you stopped at midday the barbecue would be ready. It was delicious, so good. Or you’d make the food at lunch and fill a pot with food for dinner, but at night you didn’t need to light a fire, just open the truck’s bon-net, put the pot there, leave it on top of the exhaust which bad been beating up all day. Then you could shower at the petrol station, have a few drinks, come back to get the pot and it was piping hot. That was life.

Didi talking about the tricks Nestor had taught him.

This is a personal look at a turbulent time in the country’s history but how one man and his family had made their way through the world. Didi’s story reminds me of when he talked about cooking on the truck. I remembered an episode of Home Improvement with some truckers talking about the ways they could cock on the trucks. Then the talk of trucking movies took me back to my own childhood and the movies of the seventies that were about truckers. There is a quote from Joao Guimaráes Rosa: ” My father always away and his absence always with me. And the river, perpetually renewing itself” hit the nail on the head. This is full of love of his father and the sacrifice he and many more of his generation made in the country. We can see the nods to Alexievich and Ernaux in how he worked around his father’s memories of his trucking life. Have you a favourite book about being working class?

Winstons score – A This is what we love Fitzcarraldo for these gems from around the world they find

The observable universe by Heather McCalden

The observable universe by Heather McCalden

American Memoir

Source – subscription edition

I took a small subscription out for Fitzcarraldo and this was one of the first books to arrive. I have always found there choices of white books interesting and refreshing ansd this one by the multi discplinary artist Heather McCalden where she wants to find out about Aids as it had killed both her parents when she was young . Tis book is the sort of book I love it is made up of lots little vignettes that form a book that looks not only at AIDS the rise of tech and her broken memories of her mother.This fragment series of wrting is from an artistic mind as she layers one piece over another in the book. like her other art which ses photos this is a book that could have only be written by a visual artist.

ORIGIN

I was born in Los Angeles in 1982. In June of 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention observed the emergence of a new cellular-immune dysfunction passed via sexual contact. The findings, published in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, cited an unusual cluster of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) cases as the evidence for this new condition. The cluster, located in Los Angeles, was formed of five men aged between twenty-nine and thirty-six, all described as ‘active homosexuals’ with no ‘clinically apparent underlying immunodefi-ciency.’ This was the first official account of what would become known as AIDS. During the early nineties my parents died of ‘AIDS-related complications.’

The orgins of Aids when it was first mentioned .

This is one off those books when you turn and read the first page it is likely yoiu could be sat for the next so many hours working your way through it what seems random thinks the sound of seashell then the mention of her mother doing the LA Marthon many years ago . slowly start to become like little mosaic pieces in the hunt for answers from how Aids start and was discovered the hysteria and homophobia at the stat of the Aids crisis. Then we have a paralell narratives around computers and how virus became part of the computer world. from the first networks how the us goverment built there network of computers. Then as it becomes world wide the computers. The piece I love are about her mom and the loves she had of crime dramas maybe  it is the fact I love nothing more than some escapism in a crime drama. There is a wonderful mix of facts and littel stories in thiss book.

A PLOT OF ATMOSPHERIC IMPRESSIONS

The stories of noir fiction are bleak in vibe with plots that never quite materialize. The reader is so embedded within the detective’s subjective experience of a case that a plot will only ever appear as a series of atmospheric impres-sions, which is a lot like how a city first appears when you drive through it at night, at age sixteen, not knowing what to do with yourself. The style and the glamour and the horror and the promise all streak through your peripheral vision, but none of it solidifies, becomes anything of import. It just remains a landscape to pass through, to pass the time away.

A thred of crime and noir fiction and shows thagt connect to her mother also LA was in a lot of Noir.

The world is connected in so many ways and this is one of those bokoks that has you thinking about the rise of tech and the internet and alongside that the Aids crisis that was happening at the same time as the internet firt blew up add to this a daughter seeking answers and as she does reliving memories you have a book that is a work of art itself . I was remind fo Alexander Kluge and Sebald at times. But also female writer like Olga Tokarczuk Flights or Ester kinsky grove which was about the lost of her husband in that book. I love this sort of book i feel it is like an art work the little mosaic tiles of the vignettes build a bigger picture when you move back from the book and  form a greater work.  A book that is part history , part memoir and part those little tales that aren’t quite history but are remember long after they happened. alongside images of LA . I’d missed this if I hadn’t got the subscription and I like it in many ways it is possible the best book I have read this year. Have you read this book or seen any of the Art she has made ?

Winstons score – A a book of little pieces that takes you from Lal to how aids was discopver and her mothers favourite crime shows thrown in for good measure.

A girl’s story by Annie Earnaux

A Girl’s Story by Annie Ernaux

French non-fiction

Original title – Mémoire de fille

Translator – Alison L Strayer

Source – Library book

I intend to work through all of Ernaux’s books over time this is the 5th book by her I will have reviewed on the blog. Which is just a fraction of her works with a number to still be translated I can see me reviewing her books for the next few years. She won the Nobel and it was deserved she is a great advocate of auto-fiction memoir, few writers have taken apart their lives like she has over time. I last saw her go back over an affair in her late middle age and now we find her as a young girl in the fifties becoming a woman a summer at a summer camp and those years we all had when we find who we are sexually as people. But also how fragile we can be in those years.

She is disconcerted by the mingling of the sexes, unprepared for simple camaraderie between boys and girls employed to do the same job. The situation is unfamiliar.Basically, she only knows how to talk to boys with the kind of verbal sparring, at once enticing and derisive, that girls use when a group of boys follows them in the streets – defending themselves while leading them on.At the meeting that is held before the children’s arrival, she glances around at the fifteen-odd boys and finds that none correspond to her dream of falling passionately in love.

A different time but they do mingle later on

This is a book that seems she could have only written years later it takes her own life back to one summer as a young girl on the verge of sexual awakening as she spent a summer at summer camping Normandy. But she also tackles her own problems she had at that time with her own Body image, which led to her having Bulima as it is called now this is a looking back at things and how we maybe understand more of events 60 years later than we did at the time. How other events that summer other encounters scared her for life and affected her life more than she knew at the time this a writer looking back after the Me Too movement at events many years ago in a new light. I love how she does this, she also teases us with gems about the books she was reading at the time I will be going back at some point and looking at the books she mentions. I have a couple I think she mentions Sagan and Gide both of whom I have books from. She captures the difference between males and females at a certain age back then and desire and how it sometimes went too far and how the other half viewed her and other women last the time.

The place, too, is real. In my memory, it has gradually metamorphosed into a kind of castle, a cross between Les Sablonnières in Le Grand Meaulnes and the palace in Last Year at Marienbad. I tried to find it again in the autumn of 1995 while driving home from Saint-Malo, without success. I was forced to park in the high street of Sand ask a tobacconist how to get to the sanatorium, and when she gazed back at me blankly, as if she had never heard of it, I added, ‘The old medico-educational institute, I believe.’ I only discovered today on the Internet that the place was once an abbey, founded in the Middle Ages. Demolished, rebuilt, and transformed over the centuries. Cannot be visited except on national heritage days.

I could picture this place so well from this one small passage .

I think this is a book she had to wait to write it is filled with looks back at that summer and that time. I imagine it seems very different than it did at the time and how much values have changed but also the dynamics between men and women this is a world just after the war and just at the start lof teenagers being free in a way that hadn’t been for years. As I say seems to be part of the ME TOO movement it came out in 2016 just as people started to reveal things that had happened and like Annie as she recounts events from that summer and sees them in a new light how male violence is always there and how it can affect a lifetime from the first sexual encounter but also other events sexually that summer with an older man but this is a French trade on those events in a way an Annie look at those events many years ago, How much she hated herself now as she was then is eye-opening. She doesn’t have to go to confession because she writes them and we can read them !! Have you read this book by Ernaux ?

Winstons score – B solid piece of her childhood years growing up in a different time to now.

 

Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux

Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux

French literature

Original title – Se perdre

Translator Alison L. Strayer

Source – Review copy

I read this last year and never got around to reviewing it, so I am a recent convert to Audiobooks. I have been signed up to audible for a few months so when I saw this was on there, I decided to list, and I was so pleased I did I’m not sure who the narrator is without going back (Tavia Gilbert, it is ) her voice just suit the book and will forever be th3e voice I will have in my head for Annie Ernaux. The book follows an affair she had with an official from the Russian Embassy. This is the diary of the time. She had also written about it in another book at the time, and this is much later, and she decides it is time to let her innermost thoughts at the time be published.

The outside world is almost totally absent from these pages. To this day, I continue to feel it was more important to record daily thoughts and actions, the things which constitute the novel oflife that a love affair is (details from the socks he did not remove while making love to his desire to die at the wheel of his car), rather than the current events of the period, which can always be checked in archives.

The world for that year is just her and him in this book

There affair starts when she is sent on her first trip to Russia this is the age of Gorbachov, she meets on of the Russian Officials on the trip she calls him S, and that is how she refers to him throughout the book. She says he is 36, but he looks like he is 30, slim and tall and makes her feel petite when she is next to him they sleep on one of the last nights of the trip. He then tells her he is going to France to be part of the Russian Embassy in Paris and thus begins a full-flung affair. Early on, he tells her that he is only there for about a year, and the initial period they meet is before his wife has come to Paris to be with him afternoons of passion with S, but as they grow closer, she remembers her previous affairs and relationship and how drawn, she is to S, and then she has so many doubts about him. Why hasn’t he rung as the year goes on, these doubts grow. She meets the wife and sees them together as she is often invited to the embassy for this event. As that day when he is gone grows nearer, her thoughts of him does he love her is this just passion for the things they have done? She has let him do things no one else had ever done. This is the innermost workings of the affair, being that woman waiting for the call waiting for the afternoon of passion here and there.

 Song by Edith Piaf : Mon dieu , laissez le-moi , encore un peu, un jour, deux jours, un mois, le temps de sadorer et de souffrir…(Oh god, leave him with me,just a little longer, one day,two days,a month…give us time to worship each other and to suffer)

The longer I live, the more I abandon myself to love. The illness and death of my mother revealed the strength of my need for the other. When I say, ‘Ilove you to S, lam amused to hear him reply, ‘Thank you!’ which is not so very far from ‘Thank you, think nothing ofit! And he says to me with happiness and pride, You’ll see my wife! As for me, I’m the writer, the foreigner, the whore the free woman too. I’m not the ‘good woman, whom one possesses and displays, the one who gives consolation. I can’t console anyone.

I loved the Edith Piaf translation the longing in those lyrics

I said I had read this, but it wasn’t till I got the voice I was so drawn into her worries and fears I just got them that thing of an affair or relationship at a distance. It connected me to my long-distance relationship with a German girl I had many years ago, the counting of days and the thoughts that can intrude on your mind when you have time apart and when the mind thinks about the past and what the other person is doing she captures that so well in her thoughts and the openness about her sexual acts with S and how he made her feel just jump off the page. I am so pleased I left this and went back when I finally got the voice of the writer it just made her prose jump off the page so much I have ordered another two of her books from the library. Do you find it easier to get the writer’s voice when reading?I often struggle to get the voice and find when I have the voice of a particular writer I fly through their books.

Winston score – A – a year of passion and worry and the feeling it will end so heartfelt in her words.

The Shining by Jon Fosse

The Shining by Jon Fosse

Norweigan fiction

Original title – Kvitleik

Translator – Damion Searls

Source – Personal copy on kindle

Well, this is the first book after Fosse won the Nobel. I did a short post on the day he won the prize. I had reviewed three books from him before the Prize, the first of his septology, Aliss in the Fire and Scenes from a childhoood. I had read the other two parts of Septology and as I often do, hadn’t got to review them. As I said in my last post, my dreams of blogging more often fall short, but I am getting there, so this isn’t me moaning it is just a fact of life I read more than I can possibly ever review, but yes, this is my sixth book by Jon Fosse and to be truthful, I loved this it is a short book 48 pages in the paperback so in comparison to his other books this is actually probably the favourite I have read from him. Although at some point, I will go back and read septology in a single bite. Anyway, I was going to wait for this, and then I listened to the Mookse and the Gripes podcast with the translator about Jon Fosse, and I just had to get it so for quickness, I got it on the Kindle as it is about the length I can read on kindle.

What am I talking about, I thought. There’s the forest in front of me, it’s just a forest, I thought. All right then, this sudden urge to drive off somewhere had brought me to a for-est. And there was another way of talking, according to which something, something or an-other, led, whatever that might mean, to something else, yes, something else. I peered into the forest in front of me. Forest. Yes.Trees right next to one another, pines, pine trees.

He questions his action heading down the path

The book is in the mind of a man who has, for some reason, headed down a forest track, turning off the main road. He is in his car, and then he gets stuck on the path. As he does, he thinks about the points he could have turned back. Then he initially stays in the car warm and just waits for someone to come. Then he decides to head into the forest it is turning to night but he feels to drawn into the forest. He then starts to see a glow in the distance. What is it as he is drawn to the light, the light seems to come closer and closer. But what are these lights?He seems drawn to the lights and maybe is in a moment of his life is he alive, or is this his soul drifting you are never quite sure if this is real or imagined. Then it moves on when he reaches the lights, but that would spoil a 48-page book to say more it is wonderfully evocative.

No reason at all. And so why did I drive onto the forest road then. It was purely by accident, maybe. Pure chance.Yes,you probably couldn’t call it anything else.

But chance, what’s that anyway.No, I can’t start in with that kind of silly thinking. It never goes anywhere. And what I have to do now is get my car free, yes, just that. And then I have to try to turn it around. But that.Yes it’s because I didn’t pass anywhere I could turn the car around, if I had then of course I would’ve turned around, a long time ago, because the forest road is pretty much the most boring road to drive on that you can imagine.

He is maybe in a altered state I wondered at times or has something alse happened to him ?

I loved the short nature of this after the septology it is like a  palate cleanser in a meal, it is full of Fosse but intense and just a mouthful of him. I love the otherworldly ness of the lights, and the events after the lights appear in the forest. The forest has long been a place for things happening but also the mind to wander from the tropical Jungle of Wilson Harris and the way spirits and the forest can talk to you. Through things like Twin Peaks which is what I thought of her I had to wonder if a log lady would turnup there is also a sense of the spiritual of been between worlds what has happened to draw him down the forest road and why did the car break down? Why wander off these are all questions unanswered about our narrators actions. Have you read this the first of his books to come out after his Nobel win this year.

Winstons score – A an Espresso shot of Fosse

Rombo by Esther Kinsky

Rombo by Esther Kisky

German fiction

Original title – Rombo

Translator- Caroline Schimdt

Source – review copy

There is a few writers that I really really love, and Kinsky is one of them. She is one of those writers I think I love her shopping list because, you know, with her, it wouldn’t just be a shopping list. She is cut from the same writing style as Seabed and Kluge another two writers I adore. Ester Kinky lived in London for many years. She was married to the late German translator Martin Chalmers. The last book I read by her saw how she dealt with that grief. She is also a translator from English, Polish and Russian into German. She is the German translator of Olga Tokarczuk ( This has a feel of flights at times). She now lives in Berlin.

Among the boulders, pebbles and shards of glass washed milky and smooth are variously sized concrete fragments that stand tilted, defying the water in a different way than the leftover solid and stony things which gradually submit to the currents and learn to want to reach the sea. The concrete fragments are rigid and in-flexible, positioning themselves against any current.

They distinguish themselves from the meticulously smooth stones with implicit drawings and lines and veins of a different nature, and seek the edges, the banks, the coves set apart from the current, where they come into their own as wreckage, maintain their fragmented nature and remain witness: earthquake breakage, remains of house and farm and charge, things carted away that do not submit to anything new. A young addition to the old river: the earthquake rubble.

The way the enviroment his hit as hard as those that live there !

What she does here is take a slice and event the world-changing earthquakes 0f 1976 in the Friuli area of Northeast Italy. She takes apart the events through one village and seven of the people that lived in that village and she how their lives were ripped apart after the earthquake in May 1976 as we hear the memories of that event from seven people and how each of their worlds was ripped apart and how it affected their families and changed there lives alongside this there is how the earthquake had changed the world around the people and also a collection of found items photos of those who were just lost in the events the two earthquakes months apart left nearly a thousand dead but also changed the course of so many lives like the seven Silvia on holidays Toni remembering their car. Mara thought of how many kids her mother had given birth to. Lina remembered a neighbour’s laughs as out hit each recalls over the course of the book the events and the aftermath of it on them.

MARA
My mother gave birth to nine children. Three died, three went abroad and never returned. At first they wrote occasionally, or sent a photograph, but eventually even that stopped. My mother began forgetting early on. She forgot the soup on the stove and the goats in the shed and her basket on the field. But if one of us became sick, without a word she walked to a spot where some herb grew, to remedy the illness. And she always knew where to find her favourite flowers. Sometimes she sat outside on the bench and rocked back and forth, speaking with her children dead and disappeared. She was still able to remember their names, but not ours. Had she forgotten us? I’m not sure. Although I cared for her, I was no one to her – she called me and my remaining siblings by random names, never by our own. And later, when I had to lock her in her room, she would hit and scratch me. But her children who had disappeared, who had left – they were still with her. What does it mean to remember, what does it mean to forget?

Mara thinking  of her mother and her siblings

Kinsky is a writer in the vein of Seabald. More so, Alexander  Kluge, I’d say, as his work uses a patchwork of vignettes of memories of events. to recall and describe what happens, voices and facts mix together. These make books that have no straightforward linear narrative to them, but the work is more like a giant portrait of the event given 3d and even a fourth dimension of time, as a whole, does not form a picture of the events and as you move out from the reading you see the possibilities of those earthquakes but also the aftermath which is something you don’t often see mentioned is how people cope after the event and how it changes there lives. As the book firmly ties those seven lives to the environment they live in, and the environment of those remote mountains themselves are a character twisted and changed as much as those that live on them. A combination of the life of those seven before, during and after is drawn into the pattern of words that form her style. Have you read any books by Ester kinsky or Alexander Kluge using this vignette style?

Winstons score – `+ A  – Every book by her I have read is in the top books of the year and this is just the same.

The Birthday party by Laurent Mauvignier

The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier

French fiction

Original title – Histories de la nuit

Translator -Daniel Levin Becker

Source – Personal copy

When the longlist came out there were a couple of books from Fitzcarraldo, as there is every year, it seems, and I hadn’t got them, but as they are a publisher, I have yet to read a book I have really hated (that said I rarely read bad books I have a built-in radar for books I enjoy). Mauvignier is a writer that studies art and has written several books a couple of which have been translated by other publishers over the years. This is his first book from Fitzcarraldo and was the last book by him to be published in French. The title is different from the French title. I do wonder if it is to give the books a little nod towards the Pinter play of the same title, which shares a few characteristics. He has also written for tv and film. There is a sense of that this could easily be a six-part drama series in a novel.

Well, instead of chitchatting, you’d better hurry up.

It’s true, Christine is right, he has to put up the decorations in the living room and set the table, go into town

– not exactly next door, because of the risk of traffic on the ring road – it’s Bergogne who speaks of the ring road, while Christine, incorrigible Parisienne that she is, calls it the périph, as though the name would change anything about the reality of the fifty-odd kilometres Bergogne has to travel to pick up his wife’s gift.

Early on as the night is getting underway .

The book is set over the course of one evening in Rural France as a husband comes home to sort out the 40th birthday party for his wife, Marion. Marion is due home later. She is a figure of mystery to fill out the village they live in. There is a daughter Ida and a neighbour, Christine, an artist whose star is fading. Still, she actually spends most of her time looking after Ida after school as the parents have to work hard to keep her head above water Patirce, the father and husband of the family, is working the family farm, and his wife is working to help out. So Ida spends more time with Christine than with her parents. The other house in the three-house hamlet of three lone girls is empty. So the evening begins to unfold a car appears, and there have been some letters sent that have unnerved the family, and there is a sense that there is more to Marion, the wife’s life before they meet is a blank slate as she talks little around it. So her husband is unaware of why she has this huge tattoo and why she has it. What is her real past? What happens when a person’s dark past catches up on them and the past and present collide? This is what is at the heart of the story; it is a thriller about when ones past catches you in the present and the fallout from that meeting. Who has come to three lone girls on her 40th birthday? What is her past? Why is there so much violence from her past?

For now, the only thing that really changes with Bergogne’s arrival is that one of the two men, the older one, the one who said his name was Christophe and who wanted to see the house for sale, said he’d have to go down to, he said, welcome Mister Bergogne.

That’s what he said: welcome Mister Bergogne.

Mister Bergogne, and Christine thought just you wait to welcome Mister Bergogne’s fist to your face, pretending not to be surprised that in saying this the man had above all confessed to her that he wasn’t here by chance, that he knew the names of the hamlet’s residents; and in spite of her anger, she still can’t get over these words that seem so respectful and polite but that are really what, she won-ders, these words that beneath their polish barely hide their irony and sarcasm, Mister Bergogne,

The two home invaders are there when Patrice returns but

I said this could have been a six-part drama. The way the story unfolded reminded me of the Canadian tv series Cardinal which, like this book, is a slow burner of a series and this is that type of book slow but still page-turner novel it is hard to combine both and make it work. He does to some point aI still would have like to have seen 100 or so pages cut but is has a French feel to it reminding me of slow-moving films like le boucher where the action is slow and also set in a village has a lot of violence but also has a similar pace to this book. That is because, actually, sometimes in real life, these things are slow to develop it just is as the night happens, we see the past of his wife come to light as these men have done a home invasion and taken all of these small hamlet hostage. All of this is standard thriller territory. The home invasion, the dark past, and the social position the family find themselves in rural politics is also thrown into the mix. It is like someone has hired Thomas Bernhard to write an action thriller, and this is his take on the thriller. A book that is a take on a thriller using a more modernist in style than a page-turner may be the first thriller of the slow movement !!

Winstons score – B,I’d love see what he writes next, if this is just a one-off or if he is writing a new style of thriller !!

What have you left behind ? by Bushra AL-Maqtari

 

What Have You Left behind ? by Bushra AL-Maqtari

Yemeni Non-fiction

Original title –

Translator Sawad Hussain

Source – Review copy

I got sent this from the folks at Fitzcarraldo a press I have loved since they started there is rarely a press that you have never read a book you didn’t like in fact more than that their books have been among my favourite reads of each year for the last few years . So when I got this and on the back cover I saw the words that it was inspired by her reading of Svetlana Alexievich. Bushra Al Maqtari is a novelist and writer she first came to the fore in 2012 with her novel behind the sun and then her writing has become more nonfiction. This book lifted the lid on the personal effect of the long-running and under-report civil war in Yemen.

My brother is still tormented, he can’t sleep, he can’t forget. He’s preoccupied with finding treatment for his injured son. I carry my brother’s sorrows on my back, I enter the house and the memories come rushing back.

I remember my brother’s children and his wife, their laughter, the noise they would make, our beautiful life together. Damn the Coalition and whoever came with them to our country, damn every side that has murdered Yemeni people. They’re all just that – murderers. Who will bring back Malak, Malakat, Mohammed and Asma to my brother? Who? Tell me who? Who?

No one. No one cares about what happened to us.

Ahmad Abdel Hameed Sayf

At 5.40 p.m. on Thursday, 26 January 2017, the Arab Coalition aeroplanes targeted Ahmad’s brother’s house, Fahmi Abdel Hameed Sayf in al-Qutay in the governorate of al-Hu-daydab. His brother’s wife Asma Abdel Qader Yassin Sharaf (30 years old) was killed, and her children: Mohammed Fahmi

The last paragraph and what happened to Ahmad and his family in the opening narrative.

In her Nobel-winning speech, Svetlana Alexievich described how Flaubert called himself a Human Pen from his writing but Alexievich described herself as a human ear. That is what we have here with Busrha’s narratives they are a polyphonic collection of voices of the outfacing of the v=civin=il war a collection of people killed by the war. The book opens with Ahmed’s account of a bomb landing on his brother’s house meaning the loss of his sister-in-law his niece and his nephews. This is how the book is formed each chapter an account and each account ends with when the attack or killing happened where and who died. under the mango tree AL Ahamad says how he dreams of those he has lost all the time. Mothers lose their children as they are targeted and killed by Militia How the loss of children changes mothers, This is a chorus of loss and the ripple effect of this the immediate damage and loss but also the long-term trauma and loss to the society.

I lived in a country where dying was taught to us from childhood. We were taught death. We were told that human beings exist in order to give everything they have, to burn out, to sacrifice themselves. We were taught to love people with weapons. Had I grown up in a different country, I couldn’t have traveled this path. Evil is cruel, you have to be inoculated against it. We grew up among executioners and victims. Even if our parents lived in fear and didn’t tell us everything – and more often than not they told us nothing – the very air of our life was poisoned. Evil kept a watchful eye on us. Svetlana Alexievich

I feel this maybe capture so well what Bushra Al-Maqtari is trying to capture in this book the horror of war is known but the personal effect isn’t the families or those we loved we have lost adds to a  more powerful narrative voice a chorus of loss. You can see the nod to a book like Chernobyl the way you grab the attention of the reader is a polyphonic collection of experiences a patchwork of the war the gaps are those doing the killing these are this effect but the killer of the forgotten war. What we see is how it we deal with the human cost of war and the loss of the fabric of society. I was reminded of how the late great Dasa Drndric had described to me that the Italian version of her book had a rip out section of the book list of list Jews oink the war in Italy she’d pass it round and have people rip out names of the knew as the did the book fell apart like society itself with the loss of all these lives and voices.  This is their civil war is tearing their world apart the how=rror and cost of the war in Yemen haven’t been reported enough it has taken a strong voice like Bushra to be an activist and voice for this war and its effect. Have you a favourite book about war that uses first hand accounts?

Winstons score – +A another home run for Fitzcarraldo

Paradais by Fernanda Melchor

Paradais by Fernanda Melchor

Mexican fiction

Original title – Paradais

Translator – Sophie Hughes

Source – Personal copy

Well I am on the next stop of this years Booker International longest and to a writer that cause a buzz last Time her book. was on the longest but I was one of the readers that just didn’t connect with the book. I didn’t even review it well I was a bit wary of reading her again. But actually connected a bit better with this her second book so much so I may go back and reread the first book of hers Hurricane season again and see if it was just my connection to the book on the first reading. Paradais is her second book to be translated to English. Also is the second book to be long listed. Fernanda Melchor is a journalist and has written about literary journalism in the past her first book was a collection of essays . In her debut Novel see used a fictional version of a murder in her home tow. This time she is using a gated community to show the class divide ion Mexico but also how young men on both sides of that class can be swayed into crime and violence in a world full of it.

Polo never told Fatboy anything during their drinking sessions; he never shared what he really thought of him or his ridiculous fantasies about señora Marian, at least not in the beginning during their first meetings down the doc, when Fatboy would get hammered and spend hours telling Polo what filthy shit went through his head, sparing no details and without a hint of embarrassment: about the porn he watched and how many times a day he masturbated, or the things he do to Señora Marian when he finally got his hands on her.

Fatboy and Polo early on as the two drink and Franco(Fatboy) tells polo about his neighbour

The book is the story of a relationship it would be hard to call it a friendship as it isn’t really that it is two young men on the cusp of adulthood at that age were woman or men become central to your life and also drink and drugs. But these two men are on different side of the fence in there lives their is Polo he is a Gardner at the gated Paradais community (that also gives itself to the title of the book)He just draws of a better life like most working class men he is doing his gruelling job but dreaming of a better life I was remind at times of Arthur Seaton another working class man that dreams of just escaping into drink at the weekends. He also had a thing about Married woman but had some charm about him. Then we Have the other main character Franco although he is mainly referred in the book as Fatboy, an overweight loner from one of the rich families on the Paradais estate this fat boy dreams of engaging in carnal acts with his MILf neighbour. The two connected I never viewed this as a friendship it isn’t but they bond over want to escape there now and come up with a plan involving the attractive wife next door as they drink and draw up this plan.

That was the kind of grief Polo woke up to each day before the sun had even appeared at the window, just as the neighbour’s cockerel was clearing its throat to complete with hi mother’s phone alarm. Polo would grumble and toss and turn on the floor, on the sweat soaked petite his mouth dry, his eyes glued together with sleep and his temples throbbing with the headache that now never went away, no matter how many Alka-seltzers he drankHe would aim to get up as early as he could.

Polo world far different from fanboys as he struggles with drinking all night and working hard all day takes its toil.

This is a story of two losers really they aren’t the nicest characters they each have huge problems . But they also have a lot of what we all have growing up that is been attracted to older women at times, like a drink and just wanting to escape our now to find a better then. The only difference is the Franco and Polo are from Mexico where the world they see is so juxtaposed Fromm the village of Polo with the drugs and everyday violence that is the norm this is something that she touched on in her other book with the murder in the village! do you become use to Violence when it is all around. But then there his the gulf between Franco and Polos world which is a chasm difference . I can’t imagine being Polo having to leave his world and enter this world of Paradais everyday no Paradais for him . Then there is Franco maybe he is a product of his environment a fat loner kid from money that because of the world he is trapped in isn’t able to form a normal relationship and uses porn with a mix of his neighbour imagine a relationship. This is a brutal book about two men on the cusp of adulthood both not fitting in their own worlds that come together and as we have often see this is a classic cliche for a film the two loser getting together against the world but it always ends up going wrong as it dose with this plan and the two men that have come up with it.  I will, go back and read Hurricane season again at a later date. I found this easier to connect to and read it in a single sitting. They show a machoest side of life that has gone out of control and what happens when you see sex and violence in a certain way. Have you read this book or Hurricane season ?

Winstons score – +B a solid novella about being in a world of two extremes