My rivers by Faruk Šehić

My rivers by Faruk Šehić

Bosnian poetry

Original title – Moje rijeke

Translator – S D Curtis

Source -Review copy

I struggled to review this as I do read poetry not as much as I did in my late teens and early twenties, when I read a lot of poetry. But that was mainly English Poetry and not a lot in translation. But this is a collection form a Bosnian writer whose fiction I have really enjoyed. The translator is a poet herself and also the owner of Istros books. So I feel the wieght to review this poetry collection in a way but I also love how he connects events in his life to rivers this harked me back to Esther Kinsky in her book Am Fluss (river) where she connected her life to rivers asnd event that had happened but also the fluid nature of memories and rivers or Alice Oswald with Dart another poem about a river.This poetry collection won the biggest poetry prize in the Balkans.

Here the Americans and British disembarked in two world wars

Here in the bay the HMS Lancaster sunk in 1940, with the loss of 4000 souls

Fraternal flags flutter proudly on masts (two of the few that I can stomach)

Respect is the only thing I can feel imagining American warships in the centre of Saint Nazaire

The menacing grey of steel determined to defend the world from Nazism

Here was the USS Saratoga, whose name Iloved as a child, the river waters softening the smell of the ocean

The second verse of the poem liberation day

 

 

My Rivers is a poetry collection in Four cycles: From France and the Loire, Germany and the Spree River then the Great Balkan River the Drna and a final cycle beyond the river. The collection opens in Paris and the Loire and Faruk hear his name in the wind and the spirits of the world wars echo in this poem and I was so touched by the end line of this poem, Liberation Day as the sea makes us whole again it seemed so poignant and have so many means. Then as an Emigre in Berlin, he talks about being able to Podst himself there and how it feels to wander the Postdamer Platz, drink milky coffees and see exotic food served. Then, Berlin’s problematic history, but he felt it was a city for him. In the poem, Emigre’s soul opens the Spree cycle. Then a powerful and brutal imagery in a return to the Garden of Eden in the Drna cycle messages from the dead signs only he sees grubby kids Sarajevo. That smell of meat at the butcher. The pile of excuses, this is a stomach-thumping poem about a return to a place. In Beyond the River: The Last Cycle, he talks about the Revolution as an Odyssey ghost, lost books, lost texts, a tear in a spider web, and revolution like pigs eating all in front of them all ends with the lines, there is no other way but the cross on your back and the road up ahead what a powerful image.

I’m hooked on the odour of the Berlin underground promising speed and good times

I must post myself to Berlin touch the Brandenburg Gate

caress the stone buttocks of Greek goddesses the colour of milky coffee sipped in Potsdamer Platz serenaded by sparrows, those feathery balls navigating the glass domes of arcades strung with sails or what seem now like sails, now like neckties made for giants

Those sparrows surround me as I drink in the late sun, they’ll wait for crumbs while I sit in the garden of an exotic restaurant (serving crocodile steak and koala fillet)

A section from the poem Emigre’s soul

I said I struggled with how to review this. I am no poet I  struggle to convey how powerful this felt to me it is stunning in its soul, a man’s soul like the intestines he talks about in one poem laid out for all to see the innermost soul of a man the ghost of the war but then how do you move past that and that is the river in a way he is like a stone thrown roughly with edges and other time those barbs of a man and a war are heading to the sea smoothing slowly forming something else water always finds a way and this is like a soul finding a way in words. I love that Susan did this, as she is a wonderful poet in her own right she wrote a heartwrenching poem about her own life that is worth reading. As Nick Cave said in his poem Crooked River “O sullen river, wide +weary, what are you running to? to a watery grave, o doomed sailor, to the grave I’m taking you. ” The river drags your soul in with it at times. Have you a favourite poetry collection in Translation ?

Winston score – +A Heart wrenching at times. I just wish I was better placed to review and give it the just review it needs.

Lets go home ,son by Ivica Prtenjača

Let’s go home, Son by Ivica Prtenjača

Croatian fiction

Original title -Sine, idemo kući

Translator – David Williams

Source review copy

I move on to a prize-winning novel from Croatia and one of the first novels I have read dealing with COVID-19 and living through the lockdown. I think this will be a literature theme for years to come, whether it is about the pandemic or uses it is a starting point for a novel. Ivica Prtenjača is a well-known figure in Croatian literature both as a writer himself, where he has one of the biggest book prizes in Croatia twice, first for his novel The Hill and then for this novel. He has also tirelessly promoted Croatian literature and is a radio host in Croatia (I love that a well-known novelist is a radio host, not some Z-list celeb like here ). He is also a prize-winning Poet.

I remember Dad trying to plaster the ceiling of our bungalow. He mixed some runny concrete and tossed it in the air with a trowel, hoping it would stick. He stood on an upturned tin drum, while I filled the concrete bucket down below.I was twelve years old, and I remember that winter morning because before we settled into our work, I’d watched Kubrick’s A Space Odyssey for the first time, wonder-struck, and in near ecstasy at what I’d seen and barely understood.Dad couldn’t get the hang of the hand movement, the secret angle you needed to toss the runny mix in the air, spread it out, and have it stick to the ceiling. He tossed it up vertically.And vertically it fell back down on his head, getting in his eyes. Not wanting to hide, I remained at my father’s side, sharing his torment, so it fell on me too. He tossed two full buckets up, and when it all fell down, I’d faithfully pick it up, add a bit of water, and dump the lot back in the bucket. He eventually got down, lit a cigarette, and parked himself up on a concrete block, staring at his watch.

He watch his father make the home and there is some humlour along the way like here

What happens when your father is seriously ill and you know the only hospital that can treat him is in Zagreb, where there is a slim chance he can get better. But this means you, his son and your mother all making the trip to be with your father away from your Dalmatian home by the coast. A baker has suffered after years of breathing flour has left him ill. But whilst this is happening to you and your family, the world is seeing the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, you end up living in Zagreb under the lockdown, unable to return to the coastal home. This is all made worse when the treatment for your father starts to falter. As your father is recounting with you all the past the meeting, how they meet a recounting of love and marriage and having a son as he does this, he is all the more driven to want to be at his home by the coast. What to do? This is a bond between father and son. What would you do for your father? How far will a son go to help his dying parent|?

On a small plastic table, the photographer set out a bunch of retouched photos, children, old folk, children, even a few group photos where he’d used a ballpoint pen to draw outlines around everyone’s eyes and coated their faces in sepia, to increase the contrast. The pictures looked like they’d been taken in a circus. Posing for God knows who, these poor people had become dead clowns, playthings in the hands of a provincial hawker, who reckoned that he’d breathed new life into them. When my grandad saw the people in the pictures, he almost shuddered.

His fathers memories are brought back by the pictures of their lives together

This is a personal novel, almost auto-fiction. It seems the heart of the novel came from Ivica’s own experience of losing his father, a baker, and this also happened around the pandemic. It is a pandemic, but more so a novel of death and life and the bond between father and son. The sorrow and love in this book drips off the page. What happens when death is near and all you want is to be in the home you built with those you have loved and lived with? Bugger, the pandemic he needed to get home the call of the home and the sea that special place is at the heart of the book. We all have those places so intertwined in our lives that they live as spirits in us a house a view, a smell and this is at the heart of this. His home is that to his father a place he built but also a place that is so close to him he is almost part of the home. Subtle work of a man dying a son greaving and trying to help his father. This is one of those quiet books that linger in your mind and for anyone who has lost some close but also has a place close to the family’s heart like this is! Do you have a favourite book about a father-and-son relationship?

That was the month that Was May 23

1. 533 A Book of Days by Cees Nooteboom
2. I’ll do anything you want by Iolanda Batallé
3. I served the king of England by Bohumil Hrabal 
4. Liminal by Roland Schimmelpfennig
5. Balkan Bombshells Female writing from Serbia and Montenegro 
6. The Most Precious of Cargoes by Jean-Claude Grumberg 
7. All the devils are Here by David Seabrook

Well, the month started with a series of vignettes from the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom. Then we headed to Spain, and a woman’s a sexual awakening as she discovered her sexual side. Then a waiter climbs the ladder in the inter-war years but the dark shadows of world war two are already there. Then a failed detective finds out why a dead woman in a wedding dress drifts past some clubbers. Then Istros book has collected together the cream of Balkan female voices in a new collection. Then a fable-like tale of a child saved from the horrors of the Holocaust and finally the dark side of the some Kent seaside town. I read books from seven countries this month. There is no new publishers this month.

Book of the month

I had to pick Balakn Bombshells. This is a month that has been strong on the blog I can’t remember a month with so many great books reviewed. But this captures the voices of the top writers in Serbia. The dark years of the break of Yugoslavia are there, but also a sense of writers breaking free of that of women writing about being woman female issues/

Non-book events

I had a post around my favourite podcast this month, which I have been listening podcast a lot more recently.I think this will show as I aim to head into the world of Marias a bit more. I also caught Peter Davison Campion again, which I had not seen for years, and I had mistaken a crime journalist that had worn a Campion tie thinking it was a Kames Joyce tie many years ago at a crime writing meal I got invited to. Amanda and I have watched a couple of series; ten pound poms followed a group of people that followed the Aussie dream for various reasons, a sort of call the midwife in the Sun, almost that Sunday night sort of show, but it was fun. We are now halfway through Small Light which uses Mieps Gies the woman that helps hide the Franks during world war two it is a new take on the story that shows their world of being Dutch and under Nazis rules the different attitudes to the events. Music wise I’ve been on a retro kick a lot of Fury in the Slaughterhouse, Pet shop boys, Depeche Mode, and the month finished off with a new album from Califone, a band that I have loved for years, and this is maybe their best album.

Next month Book wise

I have a backlog of 16 books to review, as I have just read the 50th book of the year and have reviewed 34 this year. This includes the last of the bookers to review. We announced the Shadow winner this month. I also have a couple of classics. Then a couple of new books. Mostly from Europe, but I need to catch up, so I hope to do so this month. I’m of the mind to read a couple of really long books this month. I fancy Shira by SY Agnon, and maybe another to help catch up on the review backlog, and summer nights are great for reading longer books. What are your plans for the next month?

Balkan Bombshell women’s writing from Serbia and Montenegro

Balkan Bombshells Contemporary Women’s writing from Serbia and Montenegro

Serbian and Montenegro fiction

Translator (also compiled by )

Source – review copy

I am late to review this book I had half-read it before the move and fell in love with the collection of writers Will had chosen to assemble in this collection of  17  contemporary writers from the Balakns. As many of you may know, I have long been a fan of  Istros books for several years and have kindly been sent most of the books over the years to review here on the blog. So there were a few of the writers in this collection I had come across as they had been brought out before from ISTROS and also in the Peter Owen Istros collection that came out a few years ago. But most of the writers were new to me and showed me the strength and breadth of Balkan writing. So I finally picked it up this week and started the book again and worked through the collection I will only mention a few stories; I always loved to leave most of a collection like this to be discovered by other readers.

The man in question had chosen the biggest piglet on the farm, paid a good price for it and then sat down in the yard to taste Budimir’s rakija. ‘Nenad, he said, shaking Marijana’s hand and smiling to reveal a few bad teeth. Ma-riiana didn’t dare to speak while Nenad talked about his house in the forest, far from the village and the neighbours.

‘It’s peaceful and quiet where I am, he said and looked at Marijana. ‘Do you also like peace and quiet?’

Marijana meets the Forester that wants her hand in Marrige will it work out

The opening story is of a girl unmarried Marijana, a poor girl; it seems as if the first thing we are told is everything she could own would fit in a blue Bag a friend had brought her back from Macedonia. Her brother like Bikes, but she loves to bake. The locals are always asking when she will get married and are told when the right man comes along. So when a forester comes and asks for her hand in marriage, she is off to the hills is he the one she has waited for ? Bojana Babic’s story is simple but has an undercurrent to it. Next is a fever dream of a story. We meet Bambi as she enter a grey house, but as she does, it seems to move around her she bumps into people. Something is happening next. She is on the toilet, and has she had an abortion? This unnerving story from Zvanka Gazivoda reminds me of those great Argentina writers of recent years. The last story I will discuss is about someone returning to Belgrade after spending a long time in Canada due to the war. But as she arrives in Serbia, it is precisely the same time as Slobodan Milošević has died so how those she knew before have changed over the years she has been away? The people she knew had either gone and fought elsewhere, shrunk as people or died. The story is first the account of her trip, then the second part is a written letter as an email that arrives simultaneously.

There’s one now who wasn’t there a moment ago. Shorter than Bambi. He comes towards her and Bambi holds out her hand, but he just grabs her upper arm and wants to drag her away. She resists half-heartedly and looks around in wonder, but her friends are busy with themselves – fixing their hair, brushing their sleeves or buttoning up – and now they go for a walk around the house. Skull remains, for-tunately, but he goes to the window opening and lights a cigarette. It’s as if smoking is prohibited inside, so he won’t break the rules. He looks out and doesn’t turn round.

Rain is pouring steadily.

The fever dream of this story it drags you in to Bambi and what is really happening ?

 

I choose three stories as it leaves so many others, and some are great. I like some like the ‘The Title”  as a Mother and Daughter fight over her play’s provocative title. Then folk lore creeps into other stories like young pioneers where old cures can be used to help out. THIS IS A collection that works I often find short story collections can be a little bloated as they try to fit too much into the collection. These work as they are a collection of Amuse Bouche stories sort shot over in a few minutes but leave a lingering taste in your reader’s mouth. This collection shows how strong Balakn’s writing is and also the connections the Translator and Compiler Will has gone around the Balkans to find these solid female voices. Have you a favourite female writer from the Balkans?

Winstons score – A A whistle-stop tour of the best female writers in the Balkans

Like a Prisoner by Fatos Lubonja

Like a Prisoner by Fatos Lubonja

Albanian shots stories

Original title -Jetë Burgu

Translator – John Hodgson

Source – Review Copy

Well, I move on to Albania today and the second book I have read from Istros books by this writer. Fatos Lubjona’s father was a close ally in the sixties to the leader Hoxha but when he started to distance the country from the soviets and Fatos’s father questioned the regime and was arrested as was Fatos who in his diaries whilst he was a student had questions, Hoxha. He was sentenced to more than 20 years he then spent 13 years in hard labour and was released after 17 years, during this time he kept a diary and there world he won is the world of this short story collection. He is also a critic of the leaders on both sides of the political divide in his homeland.

In the daily life of the camp, Eqerem was very reserved by nature, and apart from his epileptic fits and his rooftop dance, his presence disturbed nobody. None of his family came to see him, and he was therefore ‘without support.

He kept a large bowl that he filled with a mush of bread and soup from the cauldron. He ate everything and never scrounged off anybody. He never argued with the guards, and they generally left him in peace.

Pandi was the only person to call to him in the name of Suzi. Everyone was astonished how he had managed to induce Eqerem to take part in such a game. If anybody else tried to call ‘Suzi’ to him or make the vagina sign, he would give them a furious look and make threatening gestures.

The story Eqerem a man worn down by the camp

these thirteen stories paint a picture of the horrors and inner life of the hard labour camps. The character studies the people around the prison camp like Eqerem. Our narrator notices him after a few days in the camp he had a head that stuck out in the crowd of the camp where they all have shaved heads. he was there for a short time his hair grew just before his release but he then a few years later he came back but was then caught up in events in the prison and ended up in solitary when he came out that had had marks and a few days later he died. A life contained in a story.  The story that hit me hardest was Çuçi the story of Çavo the cleaner prisoner on the wing and his cat he fed it scraps and pieces but this cat wander the camp and was friends with over prisoners. This cat was a free spirit in a world of lost souls trap it caught rabbits and lived both in and out of the camp. The cat kept Çavo on the straight and narrow. So how will he react when the cat disappears and is eventually found dead? The following story follows John Smith’s it says one of the few prisoners that calms not to be Albanian he claimed his father had taken him from Australia to Albania away from his Australian mother well that is the tale he tells. Will the Australians help him ?

In the camps, most of the prisoners who kept cats did not keep them close to themselves. The cats wandered through the yards, ran off, mated wherever they wanted, and were in a much wilder state than Cuci. But she too was free to make love to the tom-cats of Burrel prison, and once had given birth to two kittens. They had not lived, and it’s said that kittens from a first pregnancy never survive. But Çuci also spent hours on end in the cell with us, even during the night. Almost every evening, she came back to the cell after wandering through the yards and hidden corners of the prison. She squeezed in through the observation window in the door, an opening fifteen centimetres square at the level of the human eye, which the guards always left open.

The cats of the camp are free spirits in a world of trapped souls.

I have tried to cover the bare minimum amount of stories as this is one of the collections that need reading there isn’t much out there of first-hand experience of the world of Hoxha and his hard labour camps. This weaves the world of Spaç and those prisoners into the hope and horrors of the camp and its prisoners. I think that is what hit me hard about the cat story one little animal had hope tied to it but also maybe made them forget the horrors of their daily life. As we see how each prisoner our narrator sees how to get by in their camps and what each one does to survive the horror of the numbing world they are all caught up in. This is one of the most grabbing collections of life in a prison camp from the writer’s own first-hand experience of it. If you like books like a day in the life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Have you a favourite book about being a prisoner in a labour camp?

Winstons score – +A  the world of Hoxha’s camps brought to life in this collection

Canzone di Guerra by Daša Drndić

Canzone di Guerra

Croatian fiction

Original title – Canzone di Guerra

Translator – Celia Hawkesworth

Source – Review copy

When I heard that Susie had decided to publish some of Dasa back catalogue those books that had come out before her success with Trieste. I was very excited as many of you may know I did meet dad at the old IFFP award when she was shortlisted in 2013 this brief meeting we spoke maybe for half an hour maybe a bit more I was shocked she had read the blog but she was one of these people that this blog had given me chance to meet people I would never come across in my every day life in fact when ever I have doubts about this endeavour to cover world literature and books in translations, which is quite often it is those moments like meeting dad that spur me on. she was a writer that need to be read she saw what was over the Horizon even when we meet she saw the tide of the right was over in the distance and as she had done in her books she has always used the past as a way of highlighting the future. Her we have a woman tracing her own families past but also that of the culture she is from.

There is a Lot of literature about pigs, there is almost no genre of the written word into which pigs have not worked their way. They are found in science(Veterinary, biological, medical) in literature (essays, poetry, belles-lettres), not to mention film and painting. As far as life is concerned, here too, in our everyday life, pigs are all around us, and their destiny in the development of civilisation and technology is increasingly bizarre. The bizarre destiny of pigs is our reality

Even an intro on the section about pigs makes you as a reader think (for me I was remind of the film A private function set in the aftermath of the war in England that had a big at the heart of its story)

This book is made up of a collection of factual and fictional stories that at it heart sees the main character in the book Tea Radan a single mother who many years earlier had relocated to Canada to Toronopte as she tries to look at the emigrant life and those in the country around her. (Dasa had some interesting thought on Canada in the after word there is her description of Canada not the most favourable and full of what I remember of her when I met her that mind) She blends things like Pigs as animals to keep and how they effect society from how we keep them how they were Kept in Tito’s Yugoslavia. What we make of the pigs.This leads Tea to her grandfather a man that like to write to Tito ( I always interested with how Tito’s influence over those post – war years loom large but what at the heart of this book is the two events at the start of Tito reign which is the aftermath of the holocaust and we she in typical Dasa style as she shows how those that we involved with the events. of the holocaust escaped the war an we see how they came to Canada (It is hard to accept the dream of free Canada and then we see events like those that on a ship in 1939 that went from place to place as those on board lost hope) I love this as hot is so much of Dasa the person it is about what makes us tick but also she shows us about what has been and what is to come. It is about being lost in your own life and but also lose of identity.

In the course of the last four years, Sara and I have undergone three migrations. A lot of books have been written about migrations about leaving one’s country, about exile, some very stupid, propaganda, some very intelligent. But all those books state clearly that migration is both dying and being born, that it is a very complex phenomenon, hard to comprehend for anyone who has not experienced it.Our arrival in Rijeka from Belgrade, where I had spent forty years of my life and Sara almost all nine of hers, did not fundamentally from our arrival in Toronto.

The truth of being in Exile described so many times in literature !!

I as always find it hard to describe this as it isn’t a liner novel,  is a documentary novel ( a book of lives shown in pieces a mosaic of a world and lives) in the style of writers like Kluge (I could have said Sebald, but for me it is nearer Alexander  Kluge in the way she like to keep hitting at the spot and that is the spot of a warning this book is over 25 years old but in a way is more relevant now with a new wave of refugees from Ukraine we see how previous  waves of those trying to escape war have suffered in what is the real treatment of refugees and the way we portray how we treat refugees this gap is what is at the heart of the book.Those people caught ion those situation from those involved and trying to escape the holocaust and the aftermath of World War Two to those in the 90s trying to escape the horrors of the Yugoslav wars. At the heart of this is Tea ( a thinly veiled dasa) her family that were effected by both these events and the question of what makes us and what is our story. I mention Kluge as he brilliant in his use if  vigenettes and sometimes footnotes like this book does . In his book 30th April 1945 a book about that day when Hitler shot himself and what was going on around the world at that exact moment. Well this takes that moment the tatters of the war and west the aftermath this is that event taken out in one thread from before the event the horror of world war two to the present which now is 25 years ago ( or is it !!!!) because as we see here those events recalled in the past look so much like the future and that is what made Dasa one of the most important writers of her generation as she never turned to be popular or to be linear or to be easy no she told the truth, she saw what was coming as she had seen it so many times before but unlike others hadn’t a sort of cultural amnesia of the past or even a rose coloured glove of the past no this is the truth this is a written like Hogarth in his depiction of the world she lived in  or Goya in his disasters of war Dasa showed us a world warts and all one we want to look away from but one we should really look straight on at !! Have you a favourite book from Dasa ?

Winstons score – ++++A On of my all time favourite books already along with her other books

Stu’s year of Books winstonsdad best of 2021

I am late to the mark here with my best-of list basically I’ve been reading other Blog and Vlogs best-of list for the last year and completely missed that I had not done my own hitting the ground review and reading-wise it isn’t till now I have decided to go back over the last year and pick those books that have stuck with me. Now this may be a different set of books from highlights I have pick of the months of last year as I feel books change after we read them some grow some just stay others just wilt away. So I am not a huge stats person to now I am moving forward using Goodreads a lot more as a way to track my reading and also gain some end of year stats. I reviewed 91 books from 30 countries. I had want to read more African books last year I had read a few more but there is room for a couple more this year. I read books from North and south America, Africa , Europe and Asia but missed books from Oceania and the Pacific which I need to fix this year.any way here are my books of the year I am doing them in the order I read them in the year.

At night all blood is black by David Diop

This tale of two African soldiers in the trenches a story that hasn’t been talked about a lot it follows what happens when your best friend is shot and the enemy is there and you have to get revenge.

30th April 1945 by Alexangder Kluge

Anyone that has followed this blog in the last couple of years will know a writer I am championing and absolutely love is Alexander Kluge here with have vignettes fact and fiction that circle the world on the day that is near the end of world war two.  His books are rabbitholes for the mind it is hard not to pick the other book by him I read but I will resist anyway go out pick him up !!

Tower by Bae Myung- Hoon

I read a hell of a lot more Korean books this year than I have previously and this was one that really stuck with me a futuristic tower building a dystopic world of interlinking stories that in place are funny.

A musical Offering by Luis Sagasti

I’m seeing a theme her of interlinking stories in the book here is another collection that has music at its heart and a diving board for the tales with like Kluge a mix of fact and fiction I loved his previous book I think he is my favourite Latin American writer at the moment

In memory of memory by Maria Steponova

Oh well, another book that drifts as she goes through her grand flat she looks back on her own families history and her homelands at the same time a book that is in that grey area between fiction and non-fiction in a way.

Elegy for Joseph Cornell by Maria Negroni

Oh another collection here of prose and poetry piece that area a bio and tribute to the artist Joesph Cornell a lost gem from Dalkey a man that like to wander his home city of New york

The cheap eaters by Thomas Bernhard

A new translation of one of his lesser-known books a man is drawn onto a group of men that eat the cheapest meals every day in a government-run restaurant in Vienna. I am a long time Bernhard fan and it is always great to add another title to the list of books I have reviewed by him.

The return of Caravels by Antonio Lobo Antunes

Like Bernhard Antunes is a writer I love and this a bok that mix the past and those seafarers returning to Modern Lisbon much to there horror a writer that always deals with his own countries past so well and openly.

To see out the night by David Clerson

A writer whose novel I loved returns with a collection of short stories, I said in the review I am not a short story fan well going through this years choice I think I am a bigger fan than I think anyway QC have been brought use some great books from Quebec her we have people turning to great apes and secret cities under cities.

Special Needs by Lada Vukic

As many of you may know I work on a ward caring and helping get better people with Learning disabilities that are in crisis so I was wary of this book as it is hard to capture that voice of someone with learning disabilities without it seeming wrong but for me this is the best such voice I have read it is such a voice of someone with Autisms view of the world.

 

3 Minutes and 53 Seconds by Branko Prlja

A series of vignettes form a bildungsroman using the writers love of music and the songs for each year I like this as a lot of the songs I knew some I loved other I didn’t but it was a great way to show the upheaval in the  Balkans in his teen years having to move to a new city and his use of music to convey that another underrated gem from Dalkey

Three Bedrooms in Manhatten by Georges Simenon

I have been working through the Penguin books as they have brought out a lot of his books in New translations here is a book from his time in the US capturing those dark post-war years before the shining fifties to lost souls in a big city.

Well there they are my twelve books of the year as ever I feel I am on my own journey in books I love books that have interlink stories of vignettes around themes and also champing small presses and writers I have loved for a long time. What were your books of the year where did your journey take you last year did our paths cross?

 

Special needs by Lada Vukić

Special needs by Lada Vukić

Croatian fiction

Original title – Specijalna potreba

Translator – Christina Pribichevich- Zoric

Source – review copy

I looked forward to this as it had a child with a disability as its main character as I  feel there aren’t enough narratives with people with disablities and when I read Emil the lead character was an elective mute,  although his view of the world around him to me would put him on the autistic spectrum. many years ago I worked with a man similar to Emil a mute he has a great sense of humour and reading this reminded me of him and he like Emil maybe had great hearing as he loved music. This is the first book by Lada to be translated into English. She published short stories around the web and in magazines and won a number of prizes for her work this book her debut novel won a prize as the best-unpublished work in 2016.

My name is Emil and I’m ten years old. The same as the number of fingers I have when I count them one by one, hiding my hand under my school desk and counting. I don’t know what will happen when I reach eleven. I don’t mean fingers. I mean eleven years of age. How will I count then? The teachersays that fingers have nothing to do with counting. Yopu think with your head, not with your fingers. But that’s the only way I know how to count, I do know how to describe the number eleven, though. It’s two ones stnding next to each other. Like two of Emil’s drooping hjeads. Like most of my low scores in assestments.

The opening and Emil says who he can only get to rten becasue of his fingers.

Emil and his mother  Marina. live together in a small flat in an unnamed city.  He is mute and also has bad legs which mean he has to wear special shoes. All this and the fact all he is able to do in school is count to ten on his fingers. This seems to be trapped by his lack of speech but we view his world which sees him hearing all around him which means he knows what his teachers really think of him as they struggle with fitting him into the class. A touch event is when he hears his teacher has a baby but is yet unaware of her baby. He also has problems connecting with the other kids at the school who just don’t want to get to know him. This leaves him vulnerable to others in a way as he just wants to fit in.  so when someone does show interest in him a local boy that is also a drug dealer he only uses him because he is mute and seems to hear better than others. The other main relationship in the book is mother and son which also sees his uncle put his point of view forward. I love his internal voice it seems to capture someone like Emil so well that unique view of the world of autistic people that filters so much out. add to that a blind professor we have a story that is

You’re so silent, so let me tell you this as well: most people walk through the world unaware of what ies behind the visible and tangibile. I know that, given your incredible hearing, you realize this yourself. You see, these things re like sheet music. In order to know what they say, you have to decipher them. Use the right key. In music we use the treble clef and the bass clef. You don’t read the notes in one key the same way you do another, The rules are dfifferent. And it’s the ame with the world. It lies here before us like a sheet of paoper with a hiddeen melody on it, but not everyone is capable of decipheroing it

Emil’s view is unfiltered ut also he hasn’t ;earnt how to hear yet really.

This is a glimpse into Emil’s world that reminds me of two books that were big hits years ago. They also had special needs children as the narrator. the curious incident in the night which has a similar feel to how Emil looks at the world the fact that emotions and sometimes how the world links together get missed. The other is extremely loud and incredibly close which also like this had a character that had a talent like Emil with his hearing. But this works better having worked with a mute I saw how Emil felt and how others react to the lack of speech some of the events of the book to me right back. I also like his relationship with his mother which also seemed so well drawn. If you like both of those books and books like to kill a mockingbird this is a book that has a glimpse into a world of being mute and how people react to that and sometimes abuse it. Have you a favorite book about someone with a disability?

Blind man by Mitja Čander

Blind man by  Mitja Čander

Slovenian fiction

Original title – Slepec

Translator – Rawley Grau

Source –  review copy

In a podcast, Mitja described himself as a man with three titles the first and his main one for most of his life was as an essayist and literary critic which he did to his 40s then he decides to start helping organize large cultural events such as the city of culture in Maribor and various book events. Then in his last role, he became a director of the publishing house Beletrina. He himself like the main character in his book has always had a problem with his own sight the book came out of his memoir then he decided to make it into a novel. After he got feedback from a well-known Slovenian playwright.

I handed the grocery bags to my wife, sat down at the kitchen table , and pcked up the newspaper. I glanced through the headlines.

“could you bring me something to eat, please? I’m starving, I said without looking up.

She stopped putting the foodaway in the fridge

“They gave you rotten lemos again!

“It happens”I answered calmly. “I doubt it was intentional.”

“This is the second time now. Not long ago iot was the bannas. Those ladies have good eyesight, you know.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m hungry ”

I trusted people on princilpe. I trusted them to always give me back the correct change.

The rotten lemons again this is another passaged that made me laugh

Like tMitja himself the main character is a successful book editor and critic and has been severely impaired vision since his childhood. Thou he has never been part of that blind community so when his vision starts to get worse. He is married and his wife is an editor and translator they live their lives we get some insights like when he shops for the house and returns with fruit and veg she says the people in the shop that gave him the worst produce. This is how he has lived to try to avoid his blindness but after trying to give a talk to a blind group and then is told to apply for funds for his blindness. Then when he doesn’t he appeals but this process ends up being invited into politics and to join and talk to a  party called the front this then grows and becomes the main party in Slovenia and our narrator is invited to join the government and start to organize a large event rather like the city of culture project but this is a huge concept of what will happen in future but the project is underfunded and is maybe a view of the country its self in the 30 years that followed the setting up of Slovenia as an independent country

“You get more beautiful every time I see you!”

“you say that, but you’re half-blind, you know – you don’t see wrinkles, the circles under my eyes, or the other blemishes…but thanks anyway, dear”

In my eye women with truly long hair automatically had an advantage. When we were stdying world literature at university, and even later, when we would bumpo into each other now and thenn, she had always kept her hair short, or medium length at most, Our most important lectures had been in the evening, and they were often the prelude to a long night, she had been one of the most avid oartiers I knew, and no jealous boyfriend could ever comvience her it was time to go to bed, Her boyfriends in fact, had always been somewhere far way,either studying in foreign lands or foreigners themselves, guys she had met travelling or on student exchanges.

I loved the opening of this chapter a compliment or was it !

 

The first part of the book seems to be based on Mitja own life he is blind but he has never been in the government but has been involved in the fact he had organized these large cultural events he has seen how politicians are at first hand. So this is a thinly veiled look at how Slovenia has been since they began so our narrator is impaired in his vision and many in the government has been short-sighted or impaired. There is a great use of language and humor in the book he says in the podcast he used to tell anecdotes you can see some of them grow out into the text a sense of humor and satire of his own life and the world he lives in. He also said he used short sentences in this novel. The descriptive way is described is well caught as that of a man with impaired vision ( having worked and often chatted with a man that lost his vision slowly like Mitja the veg story remind me of a story he told me of making breakfast when his wife had mistakenly put peaches in the place of tomatoes so when he ate his breakfast it was hot peaches, not tomatoes!, also the mapmaking we spent many months walking into the village where I worked till he eventually walked himself remind me of our narrator talking about his blindness in the office )so the world is seen through his prism it is a man trying to work out his place in the world the kafkaesque quest for a grant shows what makes us blind in the eyes of government what happens when you are blind but can see! What happens when those running a country get blinded by their own shining lights rather than what is in front of them a brilliant insight into Slovenia a man that strides both sighted and impaired world but also is blind running a project that is too large and underfunded from a shortsighted government !! What happens like the many chess references in the book that a country plays out and ends up in a stalemate you go back to what point did it happen! a sort of satire of Slovenia!

Winstons score -A an insight into one man’s life that is a wider commentary on the world he lives in

With an unopened umbrella in the pouring rain by Ludovic Bruckstein

With an unopened umbrella in the pouring rain by Ludovic Bruckstein

Romanian fiction

Original title – Mitriya Sgura BeGeshem

Translator – Alistair Ian Blythe

Source – review copy

This is the second work by Ludovic Bruckstein I have reviewed he was a Romanian writer who had disappeared from the Romanian cannon of writing as he left Romania to live in Israel where his brother had settled just after the second world war in the late ’40s. SO in 1970 when Ludovic Bruckstein decided to leave the communist government wiped his works from the country. Bruckstein became a writer after the second world war he grew up in the Town of Sighet where the stories in this collection are set. He was inspired to write by the story of the sonder Komando uprising in Auswitchz which formed his first work a play called Nightshift. He like the rest of his town was sent to Auswitchz in May 1944 as they all went on four trains of his family there was just Ludovic and his brother survived of the 13,000 jews of Sighet only 2000 lived.

Hersch-Leib was a porter from an early age. “I worked in transportation” he wes leter went to say.

He was always cheerful, enterprising, born into a farming family, with numerous siblings, he was never one to twiddle his thumbs waiting for his mother to put food on his plate. He went out to earn his bread.

A man tht drag himself up from the bottom upwards.

The trap was also set in Sighet what he does with these stories is keep alive the spirit of the town at that time as his son said in an interview the town was very cosmopolitan in the pre-war time a mix of people from lots of places and lots of religions. These stories start with the Sabbath and the bargemen and the blacksmith of the local town in the title story. Then in other stories we hear of Hersch Lieb the local porter who grows his business from a young age, he also appears in a later story as a businessman who regularly comes to the town with his large family opts for three stale rolls to make his penny go further Avram opts for the harder sale rolls. Then We have Chaim rives a man with no fear poor but broad-shouldered and healthy a loner of a man that never got conscripted in both wars but in May 44he took his life rather than go on the train. The stories mostly end with the sad day the jews of Sighet left on four long trains as it is put 70 in each carriage 43 carriages to each of the four trains take the town to their death. One of the different stories involves the Italian troops that came to stay in the town which at the time was a hub for the railways they sing, play their mandolins, and lighten up the town in comparison to the Hungarians and German in the town. This is just a glimpse of the tales of the town never to be the same after those trains leave.

Chaim rives was afraid of nothing, He wasx afraid of nothing hard work, nor illness, nor the bad dogs in poeople’s yard, nor dreams, nor ill omens, these was only one thing alone of which he was terribly afraid; tomorrow. He gladly endured hunger today, so long as he knew that tomorrow he would have something to eat,

This fear probably came from childhood, when he had never enough to eat. His mother was a washerwoman with large number of children and a large amound of laundry to wash. He couldn’t remember his father. Nor did his mother ever speak to him of the other children about their father: maybe she had forgotte, maybe she didn’t have the time, maybe there was no point.

From the story the fear one of my favourites in this collection.

Ludovic sin says in the interview here with Susan from Istros Books and also in a piece for Calvert Journal. That his father always told him stories of his hometown in those pre-war years. This collection reminded me of the lost world we met in Grigory kanovich book Shelti love song set in another Jewish community that isn’t there anymore.  Ghost lift of the page as you read of the character that lived in the town before may 1944 before the train left and 11000 souls lost their lives in the Auswitchz. I always say we can never have enough stories that make us remember the holocaust but also where hate can lead. The book is also illustrated by his son who has done drawing for each story. As his som said his father was a realist and unlike Wiesel who he said how could this happen ?, where has God been? Bruckstein knew Wiesel in fact they grew up and went on the same train to Auswitchz two voices of the lost town. A writer worth being rediscovered he brings this town alive with it characters that jump off the page Bruckstein gives the voice to these ghost from the highest to the lowest in the town. Have you read either of his books to be translated?