July-September 2020: Travelling the TBR Road 2.0

Welcome to the Q3 2020 Theme Read!

We last did a Travelling the TBR Road theme in 2018, and it gave us a chance to catch up on all sorts of things we'd put aside for earlier theme reads but never got around to. Why are we doing it again? Well, mostly because we were a bit short of nominations for new topics at the end of last year, but a breathing-space and an opportunity for a dignified free-for-all is always a good thing.

In theory, since we did this quite recently, we won't have much left to read this time, but we all know that's not true! I listed 48 unread books relevant to the theme when we started out last time and read about ten of them, plus a few new ones...

Rules:
1. There are no rules
2. If you like, you can limit this to books that fit into one or more previous theme read categories. Or into categories we should have had but haven't.
3. You could read unread books you already have, or books on your Wishlist, or books you read for the theme and wanted to read again...
4. Some of the things you read may be inspired by — or still missing from — the Classics in their own countries threads (see the links on the Group home page)
5. Tell us about why you were going to read this book and why you didn't until now!

My current, but probably non-exhaustive, list of "possibles". 54 "global" books unread as of 1/7/2020:

Vallende ouders by Van der Heijden, A.F.Th on the tbr since 23/6/2011 2017 Q1 Benelux
De gevarendriehoek by Van der Heijden, A.F.Th on the tbr since 23/6/2011 2017 Q1 Benelux
Ein Lesebuch by Bernhard, Thomas on the tbr since 9/2/2012 2019 Q4 Mitteleuropa
Uit talloos veel miljoenen roman by Hermans, Willem Frederik on the tbr since 14/2/2012 2017 Q1 Benelux
De ingewijden by Haasse, Hella S. on the tbr since 18/4/2012 2017 Q1 Benelux
Verzameld werk 2 : Poëzie by Van Ostaijen, Paul on the tbr since 5/8/2013 2017 Q1 Benelux
El caballero del jubón amarillo by Pérez-Reverte, Arturo on the tbr since 11/2/2014 2015 Q2 The Iberian Peninsula
La colmena by Cela, Camilo José on the tbr since 11/3/2014 2015 Q2 The Iberian Peninsula / 2015 Q3 Nobelists
Malena es un nombre de tango by Grandes, Almudena on the tbr since 28/3/2014 2015 Q2 The Iberian Peninsula
El laberinto de la soledad by Paz, Octavio on the tbr since 2/5/2014 2014 Q3 Mexico
Die Verteidigung der Kindheit : Roman by Walser, Martin on the tbr since 11/5/2014 2014 Q4 Germany
The Cross by Undset, Sigrid on the tbr since 19/8/2015 2017 Q4 Nordic
L'espace d'un cillement by Alexis, Jacques Stéphen on the tbr since 21/1/2016 2016 Q1 Caribbean
Gesammelte Gedichte by Bernhard, Thomas on the tbr since 9/2/2016 2019 Q4 Mitteleuropa
Il ‰gioco della mosca by Camilleri, Andrea on the tbr since 9/2/2016 2019 Q1 Mediterranean
La bolla di componenda by Camilleri, Andrea on the tbr since 9/2/2016 2019 Q1 Mediterranean
Aux fruits de la passion by Pennac, Daniel on the tbr since 8/3/2016
Yo el Supremo by Roa Bastos, Augusto on the tbr since 11/10/2016 2013 Q4 South America
Mein Vaterland war ein Apfelkern ein Gespräch mit Angelika Klammer by Müller, Herta on the tbr since 12/11/2016 2019 Q4 Mitteleuropa
De thuiskomst roman by Enquist, Anna on the tbr since 6/12/2016 2017 Q1 Benelux
Ravages by Leduc, Violette on the tbr since 22/12/2016
L'automne a Pékin by Vian, Boris on the tbr since 6/4/2017
Roland Barthes, par Roland Barthes by Barthes, Roland on the tbr since 23/5/2017
Ansichten eines Clowns : Roman by Böll, Heinrich on the tbr since 13/6/2017 2014 Q4 Germany
Suite française by Némirovsky, Irène on the tbr since 15/6/2017
Monsieur Malaussène by Pennac, Daniel on the tbr since 15/6/2017
Blauwe maandagen by Grunberg, Arnon on the tbr since 15/6/2017 2017 Q1 Benelux
Hijo de hombre by Roa Bastos, Augusto on the tbr since 15/6/2017 2013 Q4 South America
El maestro de esgrima by Pérez-Reverte, Arturo on the tbr since 11/7/2017 2015 Q2 The Iberian Peninsula
L'Herbe rouge : les lurettes fourrées by Vian, Boris on the tbr since 11/7/2017
Pélagie-la-Charrette : roman by Maillet, Antonine on the tbr since 11/7/2017 2013 Q3 Francophonie
101 Reykjavik by Hallgrímur Helgason, on the tbr since 9/1/2018 2017 Q4 Nordic
De vriendschap by Palmen, Connie on the tbr since 15/3/2018 2017 Q1 Benelux
The temple of the golden pavilion by Mishima, Yukio on the tbr since 29/5/2018 2018 Q2 Korea/Japan
Korrektur: Roman by Bernhard, Thomas on the tbr since 11/9/2018 2019 Q4 Mitteleuropa
L'événement by Ernaux, Annie on the tbr since 29/10/2018
La muerte de Artemio Cruz by Fuentes, Carlos on the tbr since 5/3/2019 2014 Q3 Mexico
Reivindicación del Conde don Julián by Goytisolo, Juan on the tbr since 6/3/2019 2015 Q2 The Iberian Peninsula
Rue des voleurs: roman by Énard, Mathias on the tbr since 2/5/2019 2019 Q1 Mediterranean
Confieso que he vivido : memorias by Neruda, Pablo on the tbr since 2/5/2019 2013 Q4 South America
Kleiner Mann - was nun? : Roman by Fallada, Hans on the tbr since 4/5/2019 2014 Q4 Germany
Le hussard sur le toit by Giono, Jean on the tbr since 5/8/2019 2019 Q1 Mediterranean
Le procès-verbal by Le Clézio, Jean-Marie Gustave on the tbr since 5/8/2019 2019 Q1 Mediterranean
Tevye the dairyman : and Motl the cantor's son by Sholem Aleichem, on the tbr since 14/8/2019 2019 Q4 Mitteleuropa
La Hollande pittoresque: les frontières menacées: voyage dans les provinces de Frise, Groningue, Drenthe, Overyssel, Gueldre et Limbourg by Havard, Henry on the tbr since 5/9/2019 2017 Q1 Benelux
La Hollande pittoresque: le coeur du pays: voyage dans la Hollande méridionale, la Zélande et le Brabant by Havard, Henry on the tbr since 5/9/2019 2017 Q1 Benelux
Menschenwerk by Han Kang on the tbr since 25/12/2019 2018 Q2 Korea/Japan
Una Vez Argentina by Andrés, Neuman, on the tbr since 21/10/2019 2013 Q4 South America
LA VENTA DE MIRAMBEL by Baroja, Pío on the tbr since 21/10/2019 2015 Q2 The Iberian Peninsula
In der Bibliothek Erzählungen by Szerb, Antal on the tbr since 4/12/2019 2019 Q4 Mitteleuropa
Een schot in de lucht by Koolhaas, Anton on the tbr since 18/1/2020 2017 Q1 Benelux
Eens ging de zee hier tekeer: het verhaal van de Zuiderzee en haar kustbewoners by Vriend, Eva on the tbr since 7/3/2020 2017 Q1 Benelux / 2011 Q3 The sea
Serowe : village of the rain wind by Head, Bessie on the tbr since 29/5/2020 2020 Q2 Southern Africa
Die Aula : Roman by Kant, Hermann on the tbr since 10/6/2020 2014 Q4 Germany
Spur der Steine : Roman by Neutsch, Erik on the tbr since 16/6/2020 2014 Q4 Germany

>2 thorold:

You have only 54 unread books? *blanches* woweee.. my "tbr" (how we do joke in calling it that) is almost 10K.

That said, I've wanted to get to that Némirovsky for ages now, it's even somewhere visible every time I need to step into the kitchen.

Although I'm still due several fascism books and about a dozen Southern African.

>3 LolaWalser: only 54 unread books?

More like twice that, I filtered out all the "English-speaking world" stuff. If you count everything in the city library I haven't read and want to, it goes up a bit further... But 10k unread is impressive. Even Prof. Eco would allow that as a respectable library.

>4 thorold:

I could hug you for saying that. :)

My near & dear all think of it in terms of "ballast". To be fair, they are the ones who'll have to deal with it should I kick the bucket suddenly...

The Goytisolo is another I've been contemplating recently but then I discovered it's part of a "trilogy" (I do have all three), and of course I can't locate the first book.

>4 thorold:

Even if joy double it... I bought more books this month than that - I blame Amazon (they have this sale on kindle books where non fiction that usually goes for $17-30 comes to under 5 so I could not resist (you buy a book, they refund a big chunk of it. Rinse and repeat) but the newly arrived books on my table are also more than one per day so yeah. I don’t think I have 10K around the house (and I need to count them) but 108? :) I guess that way you can actually hope to ever see the bottom of your TBR.

>5 LolaWalser:

You know, you have enough books to hit them on the heads until they stop calling them ballast. More seriously though - 10K is impressive. I hope you get the chance to read them all. :)

>5 LolaWalser: Look for the Goytisolo! — I've only read the first one so far, but it was quite something.

>6 AnnieMod: I've just worked out that I bought 48 physical books in the last three months and read 54 from the pile, so it is shrinking slowly. No doubt that will change when I start borrowing library books again. But I find that I'm much less likely to go off shopping and come home with a backpack full of random books than I used to be. I remind myself that when I'm ready to read it, I'll almost certainly be able to find that book in the library, download it onto my Kobo, or order it from a secondhand dealer. I've even been known to go out for a tour around promising little free libraries and come home with fewer books than I had when I left home!

>2 thorold: Interesting looking at TBRs by RG category.

Does the preponderance of one region mean a) that it is a favourite (which I suspect is the case here), or
b) that there were good intentions when the book was acquired but somehow it never managed to get read?

I see nothing from South America - all read?!

I should try this exercise myself and see what it tells me.

>5 LolaWalser: We all need "ballast". I think of the TBR as psychological ballast, the way others might regard a hefty bank account.

>8 SassyLassy: Does the preponderance of one region mean a) that it is a favourite, or b) that there were good intentions when the book was acquired...?

Good question, I think it's probably a complex mix of both. I read a lot of books from "around here", so there is always plenty of traffic of Dutch, French and German books, and what's there is mostly a random scattering of particular books that got stranded, coming to about half the total. "Africa" was cleaned up fairly thoroughly in the last TBR campaign and the Southern Africa theme. I've been allowing books in Spanish to rest a little in anticipation of this theme, so there are quite a few "difficult" ones hanging about (yes, there are a few South Americans there, I forgot to tag them last night: Roa Bastos, Neuman, and Neruda's memoirs).

It strikes me that there's nothing from Russia or Asia (apart from two survivors from the JP/KR theme). Odd, I used to read a lot of Indian subcontinent stuff, but there hasn't been any at all lately. A whole continent seems to have drifted off my reading radar...

>6 AnnieMod:

Aw, thanks--that translates to a fantastic birthday wish. But do I want to live to be 130!

>8 SassyLassy:

Truth be told, I think I'm more like Linus with his blankie. :)

Anyway, for this thread... let's say I'll try to read four more on the "Mitteleuropa" theme.

>6 AnnieMod: >10 LolaWalser: The main thing is that there will still be 10k left to read when you've finished the 10k you have now!

A little quickie to start with: I'd forgotten this was there until I made the list above. I usually have one or two of the free books from the Dutch book promotion week (Boekenweek) on my TBR — quite apart from recent ones that I've got in the normal way by buying books during the promotion week, the older ones frequently turn up in little free libraries. Because they are only about 100 pages long, they're great for quick in-between reads, and as a way of finding out about interesting Dutch writers. This is the 1962 gift, by Anton Koolhaas, a well-known journalist and reviewer who produced many collections of animal stories in his time:

Een schot in de lucht (1962) by Anton Koolhaas (Netherlands, 1912-1992); illustrations by Metten Koornstra, Annemieke van Ogtrop, Lotte Ruting, Theo Blom and Peter Vos

  

This turns out to be a form I've never come across before: a picaresque novella! A series of otherwise unrelated scenes are linked by the presence of a randomly-wandering dog, as it abandons the country-house where it is well looked after but not loved, visits a farm, wanders into town, witnesses a road accident, spends some time hanging about a station, and ends up with a depressed and lonely railwayman in his signal-box.

We catch glimpses of complex human and animal stories as the dog passes by, but the dog has always moved on before we get a chance to examine them in detail and see how they are going to end. Both from the animal and the human points of view, the view of life is a fairly bleak one, and definitely meant for adult readers: more Richard Adams than Beatrix Potter, but always with an ironic twist. The animals behave in naturalistic ways, but they have a kind of anthropomorphised consciousness that the narrator can see into. Not the sort of thing I often read, but interesting, and quite nicely done.

Fun, too, to be back in the world of 1962, with lever-frame signal boxes in the middle of nowhere with telegraph bells and buzzers, coal trains, and a station buffet with revolving doors...

In keeping with the picaresque plot, the committee commissioned no fewer than five artists to illustrate a chapter each with line-drawings. Lots of variety in style, as you would expect, and also in form: four of the drawings are double-page spreads, others are little sketches of dogs, birds and flies that pepper the margins. Fun!

My project for the first half of this year was to finish reading my way around the European Union before my country hypothetically gave up our membership on 1 July 2020 and I succeeded so my TBR pile diminished significantly (especially with no access to libraries during our local pandemic lockdown). I still have three "global" TBRs but I'm only aiming to read two of them:

1. How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Saša Stanišic, fiction set in Bosnia and Germany by an author I haven't read before.

2. Passport to Here and There by Grace Nichols, poetry set in Guyana and the UK. I especially love this author's poetry book Startling the Flying Fish but she also writes fiction.

3. The Listener by Tove Jansson, short stories by the famous Swedish-Finnish author. I read most of Tove Jansson's work translated into English a few years ago but, apart from The Summer Book, the adult fiction is often somewhere between downbeat and grim so I stalled before this collection.

Of course, reading this thread might expand my TBR pile again.... :D

(This is my first time posting here so please let me know if I'm doing it wrong.)

>12 spiralsheep: Good to see a new face popping up!

I read Herkunft and really enjoyed it a few months ago, and I definitely want to get to Saša Stanišic‘s other books soon. And I don’t see how anyone can go wrong with Tove Jansson or Grace Nichols!

Good to meet you all!

I looked at Herkunft and also Vor dem Fest and they both seemed tempting.

I'm also trying to resist buying the newly translated No-Signal Area by Robert Perišić as I enjoyed his novel Our Man in Iraq very much.

>11 thorold: That sounds fascinating!! Any chance its translated in English?

>12 spiralsheep: Welcome! and you are doing just fine. Ive read How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Saša Stanišic, loved it. I think he also wrote History of Tractors in the Ukraine or something like that, which I also loved ETA nope A short history of the tractor in the ukraine

I always feel so out of place here, thinking I havent read that many global authors. Then I look at the list. Love Arturo Perez Reverte, read Fencing Master but never read Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet read Tevye the Dairyman and so many others by Aleichem,
read Kristen Lavendatter, Love Suite Francais and went on to read everything else by Nemirovsky (including a very interesting biography that came our after the book was found) Love anything by Magda Svobzaand Sandor Marai Read lots of Neruda and would like to read his memoirs. Ken Liu And think I fit in just fine.... :)

Haven't read Arturo Perez Reverte in ages, and have since learned more about Spain at that time, think I may just pull them all out and reread. and since I seem to have lots of time on my hands might just have to read Neruda

As for number of TBRs - I tend to go through my books frequently and have traded away many that I just never got to. And then of course, brought home something else so you see its a loop, no more like a mobia strip.......

BTW do travel books count if the authors are global?

I think Marina Lewycka wrote A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian, which I haven't read. I did recently read The Lubetkin Legacy by the same author and it was well-written and funny.

I keep feeling that I haven't properly sampled Spanish popular fiction without Arturo Perez Reverte or Carlos Ruiz Zafon. My local library has some of their novels so, as I'll probably only read them once, I'm waiting until everything reopens here. I'll look up some of your other recs too.

I read a lot of poetry and that can raise your country count quickly if you count each author in an anthology such as My Voice: A Decade of Poems From the Poetry Translation Centre .... ;-)

As for travel writing, isn't most of that fiction anyway? :D

As I lost track of the group in the last few years, it seems like quite a lot of my books will fit in one category or another that had been covered before so I'll probably be here a lot (after I figure out what fits where).

Procedural question - if you read something from an older period, do you post just here or also in the relevant thread?

>15 cindydavid4: Looks as though there aren't many English translations of Koolhaas at all: the Letterenfonds database lists one story that appeared in an international anthology in the sixties and one in a magazine in the nineties. Looks as though there's also one in the Dedalus book of Dutch fantasy not listed there. If you can read Danish or German you have more choice: http://www.letterenfonds.nl/en/book/830/animal-stories

Yes, global travel definitely counts, we even had a theme read for it in 2017: https://www.librarything.com/topic/254046rel=%22

>18 AnnieMod: Up to you: I think I would post in full here and just put a short note in the other thread, but I don't think we need be dogmatic about it.

>19 thorold:

OK then - just did not want to spam everywhere if it was frowned upon just when I finally found the group again :)

>17 spiralsheep: have you read any travel writing?

and btw you are right on the author, I edited my post will have to look for the other book.

>19 thorold: That is fascinating site, thanks!

I've been lurking here, mostly. I joined with plans to read for the "Turning the tables on the colonizers" but then fell off the wagon. And most of this year I just haven't had the concentration. However, this looks like a heaven-sent opportunity to catch up. Can't make up my mind yet whether it's to be Mitteleuropa or Latin America...

Do you (or anyone else) have favourite travel writers who fit this group?

I don't read much travel writing now. Excluding my recent EU reading project, I think the last was A Negro Explorer at the North Pole by Matthew Henson, 1912, several years ago.

But when I was a moody teen who couldn't wait to leave home I read almost nothing but travel, science fiction and fantasy. Dervla Murphy was my fave for her adventurousness and her Irish attitude, which always felt different to the more famous white male English or American travel writers of that time. I can admire the descriptive prose of a writer like Lawrence Durrell but am very aware of his skewed perspectives. This morning's post brought me a book by the old-but-new-to-me author Honor Tracy but I don't think that will count for this group.

I also enjoy the literature of immigration/emigration and it's fun to read views from the subsection of students and economic migrants visiting my own country who plan to go "home" to elsewhere eventually and whose writing therefore reads as traditional travel writing. The UK has been blessed with many distinguished literary visitors from the Empire / Commonwealth and I'll never manage to read them all.

>23 spiralsheep: There are some great suggestions in southernbooklady 's intro posts to the 2017 "non-western travellers" thread I linked to in >19 thorold:

Something else to think about might be "going back" books by writers from immigrant communities in Europe/North America, Michael Ondaatje's books about his family in Sri Lanka, for instance. One I enjoyed some years ago was Amryl Johnson's book about exploring her roots on Trinidad, Sequins for a ragged hem.

I read Dervla Murphy's South Africa book a few weeks ago: she's definitely one of the greats.

Yes, I looked at that list when you linked it before. And considered Amryl Johnson's book. All the previous threads in this group have too many temptations! :-)

>23 spiralsheep: ok guess you answered my question. Most of my travel books and reads mix history with travel....My shelves include :

In an Antique Land Amitav Ghosh

Falling off the Map and many others Pico Iyer

Journey to Portugal Jose Saramago

Day of Honey Annia Ciezadlo

Eleni Nicholas Gage

Wild Swans Jung Chang

I know Ive read more....many of them would fit with the immigrant returning home meme! Need to do some searching trhough my reading journals

and can I ask what name you wrote under? Love to read some!

>19 thorold: If you can read Danish or German you have more choice:

sigh, I wish..... I am horrible with languages, I have smatterings of several from different classes and times in my life, but unfortunately they don't stick But thanks for looking!

and omg, that list! How am I supposed to walk away without adding dozens of new reads to my already swamped TBR list? yikes!

The ones Ive read:

A Small Place

Travels of Ibn Batutah

Istanbul: Memories of a City

Open City

And not travel, but loved Life of Pi

Greetings, all! I'll look forward to following along this quarter, as I always do with the group's quarterly reads. My reading doesn't often coincide with the quarterly themes, but I do enjoy learning from everybody's posts, here.

As for TBR reads, generally I post those on my thread in the 2020 Root Challenge group. 'Root" stands for "Reading our own tomes," which is a little cutesy for my tastes (I preferred it when it was just called the "Books off the Shelf" group, but the people in the group of very nice, so I go with the flow). Anyway, my thread is here:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/315100.

The next book in my rotation that I would consider a TBR book (one not recently purchased) will be City of Soldiers: A Year of Life, Death and Survival in Afghanistan by Kate Fearon. According to the back cover, Fearon was "the Governance Advisor on rule of law issues to the Helmand Provincial Reconstruction Team in 2009 and 2010" and is "currently Head of the Mitrovica Office for the International Civilian Representative in Kosovo." It's a memoir which I would think could be considered "travel," so I'll look forward to writing about it here when I've read it. I have a book and a third worth of reading to go first, though. Cheers!

>28 rocketjk: I must have dropped out of the ROOT group somewhere along the way, but I notice I had this next one, bought in February 2012, tagged as "2012 ROOT candidate"!

Another Dutch novel, which I picked up somewhere after reading a couple of other novels by Hermans. He counts as one of the alpha-males of postwar Dutch literature, with Harry Mulisch and Gerard Reve (not that the three of them had much in common!). Hermans taught geography at Groningen University, hence his most famous novel, the geography-field-trip-from-hell Nooit meer slapen (Beyond Sleep). That and his war novel The darkroom of Damocles are fairly easy to find in English; this one doesn't seem to have been translated:

Uit talloos veel miljoenen (1981) by Willem Frederik Hermans (Netherlands, 1921-1995)

  

Hermans is known for bleak, philosophical novels, so it's a little unexpected to find yourself here in what looks like a satirical campus farce, in a late-seventies register somewhere between The history man and Abigail's party. But with a hint of Stoner too! Clemens is a sociology lecturer in Groningen, middle-aged and despairing of ever making it to full professor, rapidly losing his faith in the professional advantages of sticking to Marx and Marcuse. His wife, Sita, knows that the other faculty-wives look down on her: they are all students who married their professors; she was serving in a snack-bar when she met Clemens. She has hopes of publishing a successful children's book, like her neighbour Alies, but things seem to keep going wrong with the project, roughly in proportion to the rate at which the level of sherry goes down in the "vinegar" bottle in the kitchen. Meanwhile, her beautiful daughter, Parel, also seems to be heading full-tilt down some kind of slippery slope.

There's a lot of play with academic one-upmanship, and with the L-shaped living-rooms and sofas of suburban life (and the green letterboxes that keep getting pinched from suburban front gardens), and there are plenty of the kind of painfully embarrassing coincidences that belong to that kind of farce. But it gradually becomes obvious that there's also something darker going on. Sita's little book, "Beertje Bombazijn" (which Hermans wrote and actually published, under Sita's name) has its surreal side: one of the bears plays the tambourine and keeps a gypsy on a chain to collect the money for him. And actual bears, dream-bears and teddy-bears keep popping up in the novel in bizarre ways. There are suggestions of medieval allegory in many of the character names, and a strong hint — in a gratuitous walk-on appearance by the Professor of Middle English — that we should be looking for parallels with the poem "The Pearl".

Funny, in a warped way, and with some very acute bits of social observation. But maybe a bit more heavily-layered with meaning than it absolutely needs to be.

ETA: The touchstones for the new books I listed are now all live. /ETA

Every year the Ledbury Poetry Festival publishes chapbooks by visiting poets from other "European" countries as part of the Versopolis project. Due to the current pandemic, four 2020 pamphlets are available online showing the original poetry, in Icelandic, Georgian, Italian, and Flemish, and an English translation:

https://www.poetry-festival.co.uk/versopolis/

I enjoyed cold-shiver-oil : þorskalýsi by Icelandic poet Sigurbjörg Þrastardóttir but my personal favourite this year was Schizo Poems : შიზოგადოება by Georgian poet Paata Shamugia / პაატა შამუგია . I liked this pamphlet so much that I immediately bought Schizo-National Anthems, the only book with a selection of further English translations of Shamugia's work (with the added advantage that Georgian is such an aesthetically pleasing script to look at). There have been several attempts, by political and religious conservatives, to ban and anathematise this poet and his work because of his ironic references to traditional Georgian culture.

Please remember to read these poems vertically, to leave room for swallows' nests.

Interrogate the text: "სიტყვა “პატარა” უფრო დიდია ვიდრე სიტყვა “დიდი”
The word LITTLE is bigger than the word BIG,"

Accept an occasional punch in the guts: "ეს ლექსი კი იქნება პასუხისთვის განწირული,
ისევე, როგორც ყველა ლექსი,
რომელიც სანდოა, როგორც ნაფიცი მოწმე:
ვფიცავ, რომ ვიტყვი პოეზიას,
მხოლოდ პოეზიას და არაფერს პოეზიის გარდა. მეკითხებიან: რატომ წერ?
და ამ კითხვასა და ჩემს სხეულს შორის აღმართულ პუნქტუაციის კუზიან უფსკრულს
შიშით ჩავყურებ.

And this poem will be damned to answer,
As all the other poems,
As trustworthy as the grand witness:

And I swear, I will speak the poetry
The whole poetry, and nothing but the poetry.
And when I am asked: Why do you write?
I look into the hunchbacked gap between my body and the very question
In horrible fear."

In the end, "What can we do?": "ვინ დაგვიცავს სიყვარულისგან?
სიკეთისგან?
დანასავით მოქნეული კეთილგანწყობისგან?

Who will protect us from love?
From so frequent kindness?
From the favour
Swung against us like a knife?"

The Listener by Tove Jansson. 18 short stories. Translator Thomas Teal. My edition has the original Tove Jansson cover illustration as frontispiece but in a tiny 5.5 x 9cm size.

Had a strong sense of deja vu while reading some of these, although as far as I know the only story in this collection that I've read before is The Squirrel (also published in A Winter Book). I suspect the author would be pleased with that sensation though, because her stories are mostly deliberately written in a spare style apparently intended more to evoke reactions from the subconscious than for intellectual stimulation. This also makes them a slow read for me because, especially with very short fiction, trying to evoke more than two widely differing reactions in a row from me results in diminishing returns. I'm tempted to claim that this is one of the reasons why many people prefer novels to short stories but, of course, I'm entirely able to switch between different reactions when reading a book of short poems so that claim wouldn't hold up to close scrutiny. Maybe it's more to do with how much work each author is supplying as a ratio to how much they expect from their readers, with comparatively minimalist writing asking more effort to fill in the gaps than, for example, sentimental romanticism.

My favourite story was The Listener, about a nervous breakdown and self-administered art therapy (sort of...). My second favourite was A Love Story, which is a recipe for true love indeed. I also found In Spring particularly evocative. But none of the stories with effects reliant on breaking out of middle-class comfort zones work on me, which is probably why the positive tales resonate more for me than those intended to be unsettling or horrifying.

3/5 for me (but I can easily understand other people having different reactions to these stories).

>30 spiralsheep: That Georgian script does look wonderful!

Carrying on with my exploration of East German classics of the sixties, this is one that's only been on the TBR for about a month, but I'm counting it for the "Germany" theme of 2014:

Die Aula (1965) by Hermann Kant (DDR, Germany, 1926-2016)

  

Hermann Kant, president of the writers' union, member of parliament and of the Central Committee, defender of censorship and tireless fighter agains the evils of the capitalist West, featured as the public face of repressive authority in just about all the unedifying conflicts of the East German government with his fellow-writers. Volker Weidermann describes him as "the most-unloved, most-hated writer of the Wende period". It's almost disappointing to discover that he was actually quite a good writer in his early days...

Die Aula was one of the bestselling East German books of its time, becoming a firm fixture on school reading-lists, and also doing very well internationally (although I can't find any trace of an English translation). The central character, Robert, has a very similar background to Kant: he trained as an electrician, was called up for military service shortly before the end of the war, became a PoW in Poland, and followed antifascist training there (one of Kant's mentors in Warsaw was Anna Seghers, whom he later succeeded as president of the writers' union). Returning to Germany on his release in 1949, Robert gets a place in one of the new "Workers' and Peasants' Faculties" (ABFs) at a university in Pomerania, an intensive pre-university course for people who didn't get the chance to finish high-school. The novel centres on Robert's memories of his experiences at the ABF and the group of friends he made there, as recalled thirteen years later when — now a well-known journalist — he is invited to give a speech (in the great hall of the university, the Aula) to mark the ABF's last graduation ceremony before it is wound down.

So it's essentially an edifying story of keen young carpenters, seamstresses and agricultural workers who work hard to become doctors, senior civil servants, professors of Sinology, and so on, absolutely soaked in the atmosphere of the early days of the Workers' and Peasants' State, and of course permitting no doubt — in the mind of any reader Kant could imagine — that socialism is good, capitalism is bad, and the Federal Republic is worst of all. Propaganda, inevitably, but it's told with wit, irony, self-mockery, and huge amounts of energy. The characters are complicated, funny, and original, the dialogue is sharp and down-to-earth. Self-importance is never allowed to go unpunished, whether it comes from the pompous old academics who suddenly find themselves teaching students from a completely different section of society, party officials, or the students themselves. And, as we gradually discover, there is also a real personal conflict going on inside Robert: he has unfinished business with at least two of his student friends, which he is hoping to resolve through his journey into the past.

It's a very enjoyable, readable book, full of memorable anecdotes and period atmosphere and never overtly preachy, but it's a bit of a shaggy mess, and it sometimes feels as though the author has got into it but isn't quite sure how he's ever going to get out again. The ending, when it does come, feels a bit heavy-handed compared to the rest of the book. A flawed book in many ways, but one that deserves to go on being read.

Georgian calligraphy is gorgeous.

I'm glad there isn't more pro-DDR literature available in English because it sounds exactly like the sort of thing I'd feel compelled to read (for one reason or another).

Passport to Here and There is the most recent collection of poems by Guyanese-British poet Grace Nichols, with a scattering of black and white photos by Compton Davis of the old wooden buildings of Georgetown the capital city of Guyana.

Preface: "One of the things we do as poets, is to try to preserve experiences, people, places important to us, in an effort to save them from time's erasure."

And those are the themes of this collection: childhood in Guyana; home in Sussex; revisiting Georgetown but with no ghosts to lay to rest; and praise poems for friends. Nichols appears to have reached a comfortable point in her life and the lack of tension in most of these poems reflects her achievement, but some of the people she's written praise-poems for are no longer among the living, and the river delta land of Guyana is under threat from climate change with some of the Dutch-colonial city of Georgetown built on reclaimed land as much as eight feet below sea level (the old buildings in the accompanying photos all conspicuously have their main living rooms above ground level). The author knows development of recently discovered offshore oil resources could change Guyana beyond recognition.

There is also the music of this accomplished poet's carefully chosen forms, with a sonnet sequence that worked especially well for me, and some outstanding images: "shooting stars of black tadpoles" being both literal pollywogs and symbols of the children who grew and changed and moved away.

If you appreciate Grace Nichols' work then you'll like this but I wouldn't say it's the best place to meet her for the first time. 4/5

>33 spiralsheep: There is a lot of interesting DDR stuff that has been translated, but most of it is considerably more nuanced and critical than Kant. You wouldn't want to come to him before you've heard the other side of the story! Christa Wolf's Divided heaven would be a good place to start, for example.

>34 spiralsheep: That makes me realise I haven't read anything Nichols has written since about 1989. Oops!

I lived in West Germany for a while, back before the wall came down, but for obvious reasons nobody was pressing Herman Kant's work on me (actually the book I had pressed on me most often by German friends was Mists of Avalon but lets not go there, lol). I hope I already have enough cultural background to make a book such as Die Aula an interesting read.

If anyone wants a quick expo of Grace Nichols' published work for adults then:

The novel about a girl growing up in Guyana, set during the transition between British colonial rule and independence, complete with Marxist revolutionaries and CIA plots in the background: Whole of a Morning Sky.

Selected Poems, 2010: I Have Crossed an Ocean.

Most Guyanan / Caribbean poem sequence, 2005: Startling the Flying Fish.

Most carnival influenced, 1996 (won the Guyana Poetry Prize): Sunris.

The poems that get studied in schools, 1983 (won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize): I is a Long Memoried Woman.

Probably her most populist/popular poems, 1984: The Fat Black Woman's Poems. And 1989: Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman.

At the more "literary" end of her oeuvre, 2009: Picasso, I Want my Face Back. And 2017: The Insomnia Poems.

A taster with Jackie Kay (Scotland) and Merle Collins (Grenada), 1996: Jackie Kay, Merle Collins, Grace Nichols.

>33 spiralsheep: I think it depends what you mean by "pro-DDR" literature. It wasn't a black-and-white choice of being either a propagandist or a dissident and nothing in between. Many East German writers believed in the socialist project but were critical of the state. It was a balancing act, and authors negotiated this ambivalence in various ways.

As Mark notes, there's actually a fair amount of East German literature that has been translated. I can make some suggestions, but it depends somewhat on what you're interested in. Workers' narratives? Urban-intellectual circles? Divided Berlin? Humor/satire? Growing up socialist?

That's a very kind offer spiphany, but I probably shouldn't expand my European TBR pile at the moment.

Die Aula sounded especially interesting to me because the issue of who is and isn't allowed tertiary education has become a hot subject again in many "developed" economies. Here in the UK the third most successful national political party disappeared for an entire election cycle after they changed their policy on the issue. In the US the current widespread political discontent is partly fuelled by individual educational debt. In China we recently saw how their ability to train specialist healthcare workers very efficiently saved many lives in a pandemic (while in Russia expensively-educated doctors seem to have suddenly become statistically more likely to "fall" out of high windows). And there are more examples. So reading about a different set of educational choices, as fictionalised by someone who appears to have thought it was worth supporting the DDR partly because of those choices, seemed interesting. And I have probably read a disproportionate amount of fiction about UK higher education because there has been a skew towards that subject, for obvious literate / literacy reasons, by writers / publishers / librarians / readers.

I hope we can set aside the "propaganda" label for everything and anything coming from an anti-capitalist tradition, as it's not only inaccurate, but belittling and dismissive in advance. Worst of all is the risible implication that writers in so-called liberal democracies produce somehow "pure literature", ideologically "untainted".

In short, there's nothing that can't be interpreted--and used--as "propaganda" if one so wishes.

>39 LolaWalser: You're right, it's far too easy a word to throw around, and there was no real need for it in the review of Die Aula — the kind of bias in the book is exactly what any informed reader would expect from someone in Kant's position at that moment in history.

You made me worried: I went off and did a search of my earlier reviews!
I probably do use it a bit too often — 32 reviews, or about 2%. There are only about five or six of those where I directly express an opinion that something is propaganda, and they seem to be quite fairly divided between writers of left, right, and evangelical Christian views. But I do seem to have a recurrent tendency to accuse books of "not" or "not just" being propaganda. That looks like lazy writing: I'll have to look out for it in future.

i love this website. no one being defensive or angry under gentle correcting, rather apologizing and saying they do better. in todays scial media its such a breath of fresh air!

>41 cindydavid4: On to a book full of fresh air!

I wrote about this at rather excessive length in my CR thread (https://www.librarything.com/topic/321969#7215427); since it's another Dutch book unlikely to be translated and of rather local interest I'll summarise here:

Eens ging de zee hier tekeer: het verhaal van de Zuiderzee en haar kustbewoners (2020) by Eva Vriend (Netherlands, 1973- )

  

This is a book that came out of an oral history project sponsored by the Zuiderzeemuseum: Vriend discusses the social history of the fishing communities around the former Zuiderzee over the last 150 years or so, weaving in the personal stories of four fishing families, from Volendam, Wieringen, Urk, and Spakenburg respectively.

She looks at the cliché image we have of the Dutch fishing village, with its quaint local costumes, tough fishermen and even tougher church elders, inbreeding, large families in small houses, etc., and the way this perception was reflected in the "social engineering through civil engineering" of the closing-off of the Zuiderzee (1932) and construction of new polders, with all that implied for the fishing trade. And at how the people of those fishing communities dealt with that and found new ways to earn their livings. Very interesting.

---

Picture of children from the Zuiderzee island of Marken in a 1930s British book, The Children's Everything Within:

>40 thorold:

I share your fear of clichés and yet commit them often. What can we do but try!

Incidentally, not to start some huge discussion about propaganda, but I can't resist linking this wonderful, unique, impossible-to-see-movie because I just finished it and it will be taken off the site tomorrow on July 15 at 20:30 (France)--and it illustrates beautifully something about that whole problematic (propaganda vs. "art"; creating under constraints etc.) although I haven't ordered my thoughts on this yet.

Un jour, le Nil (1964) dir. Youssef Chahine

(A slew of gorgeous young dudes in it--yes I am not above pandering to the masses :))

The soundtrack is Arabic and Russian with occasional English and the subs are only French, unfortunately. The movie was a USSR-Egyptian coproduction made around the construction of the dam in Assouan and features sequences in Leningrad and Nubia, the region that got flooded when the dam was built. Apparently it was Chahine's candour in showing the distress of the Nubian villagers at losing their ancestral lands (5000 years of history, says one) that got his movie banned in both Egypt and the USSR.

I was interested to see it because my dad was a hydrotech engineer and had been to Assouan (he worked in Africa and the Middle East). I expected the standard po-faced rah-rah "electrification & mechanisation" soc-real fare. But Chahine made a gem, a real movie with living breathing people--so of course it was banned, and restored only last year. Chahine was even forced to remake it, with different actors and--presumably--to a different story, but he had always disowned that version.

And, of course the context has changed after all these decades, but examples like these show, to my mind, if proof is necessary, that "even communists" could make "real" art; the problems came up with presenting it. This is not to imply that all "real" art was banned, or that censorship is automatically proof of quality--that would be, as Mark says, lazy, and that's exactly what's frustrating about the label "propaganda". Oh no, there I go mentioning it again--but I just worked this out in my head, sorry. :)

Basically, if we agree that Forman is a "real" artist, then he's no less a "real" artist when making movies that found official approval in socialist Czechoslovakia than when making movies for commercial interests in Hollywood.

I think this can be expanded more interestingly into a general theme of politics influencing art, but I'm tired and enough of this post anyway. :)

This is marginally off topic for this group but I think it illustrates LolaWalser's point that propaganda can also be art.

The only book I have tagged as propaganda is Lawrence Durrell's travel memoir Bitter Lemons of Cyprus because Durrell was a paid propagandist, aka Press Officer, for the British government in colonial Cyprus at the time when he wrote the book. The fact that he was deliberately wrapping overt lies up in disingenuous presentation doesn't lessen his skills as an observer and literary author, or alter the fact that he loved the Greek Islands, and some of the descriptive passages are beautiful. In fact he could only be an effective propagandist because of his experience of and insight into Greek culture and Mediterranean island history. Unfortunately his book remains effective propaganda today because many people who read it don't fully understand that he was also right-wing, pro-colonial, pro-militarisation of the Mediterranean, and a paid government propagandist whose work erases knowledge of the existence of a decisive island-wide democratic vote against British rule, and because the type of reader who gravitates towards Durrell is much more likely to be wary of "communist", i.e. pro-Soviet, propaganda than the equally extreme propaganda they grew up with in (post-)Cold War anglophone countries.

And, let's be honest, the most effective propaganda moves its victims not only intellectually but also emotionally, and art is one of the best ways to achieve that movement at a subconscious level.

>43 LolaWalser: Thanks for that, I caught it with a few hours to go! A gem indeed. And not just for the gorgeous young dudes...

Your comment about Forman reminds me that I've still got With Eisenstein in Hollywood sitting on the shelf.

>44 spiralsheep:

Ten thumbs up to this post, and I'll come back to it--just to say thanks for that invaluable background, I didn't even notice my entrenched image of him was of a casual eternal tourist.

the most effective propaganda moves its victims not only intellectually but also emotionally, and art is one of the best ways to achieve that movement at a subconscious level.

Yes--which makes me again wary about straight equivalencies because art can be described more or less always as some "thing", while propaganda is above all a "function". I would prefer this dynamic definition of propaganda because the usual mechanical identification of propaganda with some "thing" obviously runs the danger (and let's face it, this happens all the time) of anything with a political message (real or imagined/interpreted) being stamped "propaganda" and dealt with accordingly.

>45 thorold:

I'm ridiculously delighted you watched because omg do I need a second opinion on the all the gorgeous young dudeness! It passed through my mind how very gay/homoerotic it all was but it was only on rewatching, when I was making captures, that this aspect sank in fully and all the wows and kudos to master Chahine. Then I went to his Wikipedia and it turns out he was of born in Alexandria of Greeky descent (Catholic background) and what more need be said :)--well, this, that apparently it's a well known thing that he loved gay/bisexual themes, he even made a movie about an Egyptian going to England for cancer treatment and having an affair with a taxi driver. In 1982.

And then there are the women, yet another wow! chapter--but I will stop now here and post about the movie properly somewhere else, with pictures and all. So many layers and themes to this!

>46 LolaWalser: Yes, difficult not to read it as homoerotic, and very camp in parts. No straight person would object to travelling via Antwerp on the sole grounds that it's Till Eulenspiegel's city, surely? (And that scene with Barak and the prostitute...) Glorious blue-eyed Russians and stunning young Africans in the same film, can't be a coincidence.

Really nice, beautifully and very cleverly shot, and full of unexpected, memorable images. I'll have to look out for more of his films — I see this one only gets a very passing mention on Wikipedia, obviously not many people have had a chance to see it before.

From one of the 1930s "engineering for boys" books I was looking at in connection with the Afsluitdijk (>42 thorold:): "It is a remarkable thing that an intelligent people, such as the ancient Egyptians proved themselves to be, had wasted enormous energy in building pyramids and other colossal monuments, when the labour might have been so much better employed in attempting to control the flood waters of the Nile." I don't think the author would have approved of Chahine!

Heh, he wasn't objecting to Antwerp, he joked about it being the chief thing because Till Eulenspiegel was a huge hero in socialist countries, as the symbol of folk resistance against the overlords. :)

The subs pared down both Arabic and Russian and the Arabic changed the Russian in places (not that I'm able to catch all such instances, just here and there where my dim Arabic makes it), for example, when Nikolai first meets Varya (ETA: and not Zoya) in the plant he addresses her with something I'd translate as "hey, good-lookin'" (keeping in mind Nikolai's breezy personality--красавица is more precisely "a beautiful girl/woman", a "beauty"), but the Arabic and the French turn it into a "you up there".

I didn't detect camp but there's loads of humour, a lot of it quite wonderful (more about that by-and-by).

difficult not to read it as homoerotic

Indeed--I'd say more than that, I think there are two whole gay "love stories", one quite blatant--as I'll show 'n' tell with pictures.

full of unexpected, memorable images

Yes! I melt over the scenery, the dusty construction sites, the machinery. The title credits are a delight to this commie baby. Wooo, electric grids, power towers--stuck in sand dunes and with a caravan of camels passing in front!

Anyway, apologies to the good people of Reading Globally for this digression, and let's continue discussing the film here:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/322367

This isn't strictly-speaking from the TBR, but it is a follow-up to the Mitteleuropa theme from last year, when I read a number of books by Hungarian writers, including Katalin Street. When I saw that another of Magda Szabó's books had come out in English, I suggested it for our book-club:

Abigail (1970; English 2020) by Magda Szabó (Hungary, 1917-2007), translated by Len Rix

  

This book turns out to be set in 1943-44, in between Stalingrad and the German occupation of Hungary, i.e. during a period when Hungary was still fighting on the German side against Russia, but when there was a lot of anti-war feeling in the country and the Horthy government were putting out secret feelers to the Allies. So, although it's just a boarding-school story on the surface, it's one with a lot of political undertones.

Gina, teenage daughter of a widowed senior army officer, finds herself suddenly whisked off from the cosmopolitan, quasi-adult life she's used to in Budapest to the isolation of a strict, religious boarding-school in a remote provincial town. Needless to say, she isn't happy about being locked up, deprived of her nice clothes and cosmetics, and generally treated like a little girl. She reacts by being as stroppy as she can, only to find that she's added to her troubles by alienating her classmates as well as the school authorities. And her father has important work to do, and needs to be sure that she's safe and hidden away, so it's no good trying to get the school to expel her. Fortunately, the school has a secret-helper-in-residence, who communicates with girls in trouble via a statue — universally known as Abigail — in the garden.

This is all built on the classic children's fiction plot device of children getting involved in an adult story with the best of intentions but with a completely mistaken idea of what the adult story is all about, as used dozens of times (for example) by Erich Kästner. However, unlike a Kästner story, there's nothing particularly funny about the misconception in this case, nor do we have much hope that everything is somehow going to turn out all right in the end. Szabó does give us a vivid picture of how the overconfident and rather unpleasant socialite of the opening chapter turns into a scared little girl, on her own and not knowing whom she can trust, or even which side she is supposed to be on, and finally does learn to accept the right sort of help, but it's all rather uncomfortable — too childish really to work as an adult novel, but without the sort of comfortable protecting framework we look for in a children's story.

Difficult to imagine that this was written by the same person as The door and Katalin Street. But writers have to find ways to sell books as well, I suppose, even in socialist countries...

>43 LolaWalser: etc. Shame I missed it (well, I caught the first 10 minutes, then answered a phone call, then it was too late...) It would have been my seconde Chahine film this month! He seems to be back in the zeitgeist: I came across Djamila l'Algérienne (also on YouTube), his film about independence fighter Djamila Bouhired, recently.

>49 thorold: Horses for courses: I really liked the way Szabó used children's lit tropes in a serious novel !

Ok now I am wanting to see that movie!! (but it appears not to be with english subtitles)

>49 thorold: I do love her writinng and need to seek that one out. Just occured to me how much her writing is like Irene Nemirovsky same time period, same themes.

>49 thorold: I started a different one of Szabó's books in German translation (Eine altmodische Geschichte) for the same Mitteleuropa theme and had a similar reaction: I found The Door incredibly evocative and haunting, and this felt so utterly unlike it in every way that mattered.
In this case, I wondered whether it had to do with the subject matter, since it is the story of Szabó's mother and reconstructing family history doesn't necessarily make for great literature unless the author is able to distance themself sufficiently from the real-life people and stories. In any case, I wasn't in the mood for an exercise in memory work and gave it up after less then 50 pages. Possibly it gets better, and possibly it would be more interesting for someone who likes this genre more than I do.

>50 Dilara86:

Aw, what a pity, I think you'd have found the character of Nadia (young Egyptian woman) and how she's presented particularly interesting. I hope the movie becomes more widely available.

Thanks very much for that link, I too want to see more of Chahine's work now--and as it happens, I saw recently several Algerian and related works on the CF site. I remember reading about Djamila Bouhired especially in Simone de Beauvoir, the contemporary campaign to free her and everything around that...

>53 LolaWalser: Incidently, I looked up Djamila L'Algérienne because it was mentioned in a podcast I listen to called Tarab about the cultures of the North-African diaspora in France (https://www.binge.audio/femmes-et-feminismes-des-histoires-en-tout-genres/)

>54 Dilara86:

Looks great, I'll check it out, thanks.

I jokingly told my friends that I had nearly finished all my non-English books so they posted more through my door, some set in non-English places and some translated into non-English languages, including two Japanese comics translated into French and German so....

All My Darling Daughters (translated into French), by Fumi Yoshinaga. A "josei" manga (comic for adult women), containing five interlinked short stories in six chapters, by a respected mangaka (manga creator). I was given the translation into French and, although mon français est mauvais, and reading right to left didn't make it any easier for me, I managed to understand these slice of life tales about relationships with the characters and plots revealed mostly through the art, which in typical manga style combines realism, idealisation, and expressive caricature. The themes are being a daughter, being a mother, being unlovingly sexual, being lovingly humanitarian, being a good friend to your (female) peers, and being a daughter revisited. Longer review on the book's main page. (4/5)

Fumi Yoshinaga: "I want to show the people who didn't win, whose dreams didn't come true. It is not possible for everybody to get first prize. I want my readers to understand the happiness that people can get from trying hard, going through the process, and getting frustrated."

>56 spiralsheep: I jokingly told my friends that I had nearly finished all my non-English books so they posted more through my door

...I've got friends like that as well! We should be pleased that they think of us, I suppose. :-)

Here's one intended for the 2015 Iberia thread, though I could also have read it for the Nobel thread the same year. It has been on my TBR since March 2014:

La colmena (1951; The hive) by Camilo José Cela (Spain, 1916-2002)

  

Like Ulysses and Berlin Alexanderplatz, this is one of those modernist books that tries to find a way for the novel to engage with the complexity of the twentieth century city, in this case Madrid in the winter of 1942. Instead of invading the consciousness of a single protagonist or showing us the shifting relationships of a small group of characters, Cela takes 160 "main characters" and shows us brief scenes from their lives over the space of a few days, rapidly cutting back and forth between different characters and also shifting backwards and forwards in time unpredictably. Some of the characters have scenes that cross-over several different storylines, others just seem to pass through without any important interactions, just providing an ironic contrast to what has gone before.

Cela doesn't want to hide anything under a veil of respectability here, which obviously accounts for the difficulty he had getting the book past the Spanish censor (it eventually had to be published in Buenos Aires). Middle-class businessmen and their wives cross paths with whores, con-men, child-abusers, voyeurs, cops, impecunious poets, and worse. There is the murder of an old woman, treated with as much attention as the ejection of a non-paying customer from Doña Rosa's café; there is a lover concealed in a laundry-hamper; several people are clearly dying of TB; there are gypsies and shanty-town dwellers and all the poverty and squalor and unemployment of the Posguerra. So there's a lot of misery, but there's also a surprising amount of dry humour around. If people are in trouble, Cela is interested in how they got there: a couple of times he breaks off to tell us what has happened to all someone's children and grandchildren for no obvious reason except that he wants us to know how that kind of family develops.

Fascinating and complicated: this is one of those books where you end up letting it all wash over you the first time through, intending to come back and read it more carefully, paying full attention to who is who. But perhaps the washing-over is the point: there's a scene where Cela talks about the way we look at our fellow-passengers in the tram and imagine their stories, and that seems to be a good illustration of what this book is trying to reproduce.

The Unknown Soldier by Väinö Linna



Considered a classic of Finnish literature, The Unknown Soldier tells the story of Finnish soldiers fighting in the Continuation War (as it's known in Finland) between Finland and Russia from 1941 through 1944. The novel presents a gritty depiction of the experiences of the soldiers of one Finnish company.

A bit of historical background. The first fighting between Finland and Russia during this period took place in what is known as the Winter War (December 1939 through mid-March 1940). Russia had demanded a large piece of territory in Karelia that they thought they needed to defend Leningrad from the German army in the invasion they were sure was coming sooner or later. When the Finns refused, the Russians attacked to take the territory by force. Expecting a walkover, the Russians evidently did not send their best troops in and were shocked by a series of early defeats by the outnumbered but tougher Finnish forces who were in addition fighting to defend their own homes. Eventually, however, the Russians sent in more seasoned troops and the Finns were worn down and defeated. The armistice terms saw the Russians gaining control of essentially the exact territory they'd originally demanded.

In The Unknown Soldier, Linna deals with this defeat thusly, on Page 1:

"Finland's Winter War had been fought--that war which had been the best to date, for in it both sides had won. The Finns, though, had won slightly less than the Russians in that they had had to cede territory to their enemies and withdraw behind a new frontier. . . . In warm spring weather the veterans departed, wearing their fur caps, tattered sheepskin coats, knitted jerseys and felt boots. For them where were no 'difficulties of readjustment.' Finnish fashion, they got dead drunk, sobered and then went too work. Had the nation's sacrifices been in vain? That was a question for those who had no spring planting to attend to."

A year later, the Finnish government made ill-advised and regrettable common cause with Nazi Germany. While Russia was still retreating before the initial German invasion, Finland attacked in the north with the announced goal of getting their ceded territory back. This is the war known as the Continuation War. Things went well at first, as the Russians were reeling before the German attack. The Finnish army took back their lost ground and continued into Russian territory. Eventually, though, greater Russian numbers and resources took their toll and in bitter fighting the Finns were forced to retreat. Eventually, the Finns and Russians made a separate peace more or less along the same borders that had been set at the end of the Winter War, with the caveat that the Finns would be responsible for expelling the German army from Finland.

In The Unknown Soldier, Linna creates a memorable group of soldiers and follows them from the initial invasion and success, to the stalemate that develops at the point of the invasion's furthest advance, and then through the interminable retreat. Death stalks the company throughout, of course. Men die throughout the narrative in ways foolish, cowardly and brave, in attempts to accomplish specific objectives or randomly. But also, these men are portrayed as individuals, with a wide spectrum of personalities, bravery or cowardice, with a wide range of ideas about the war and what they're doing there, and a very specific attitude about the advantages or (mostly) disadvantages of the officers above them, whose success as leaders is generally tied to their willingness to forego the trappings of their rank and insistence on military discipline.

The novel, published 10 years after the war's end, became an instant success in Finland and propelled Linna to literary hero status within the country. It was, according to what I've been able to read, the first novel in Finland that portrayed the war and its soldiers in anything close to realistic, rather than idealized, fashion, and veterans of the war were evidently vocal in their praise. The novel is harrowing, to be sure, full of bitterness and, especially at the end, despair, but also full of life and humor, frailty and honor. What are human beings willing to do, and how do we stand up, principles intact (or not) in the face of deprivation and almost certain death? Linna doesn't really ask these questions, but he does provide his own answer to them.

The narrative remains quite focused on the "here and now." Linna dispels almost entirely with digressions about the backgrounds of individual soldiers. We don't travel back to childhoods or to marriages and children or businesses left behind. We are, almost wholly, with these men in this place with shells falling all around. Also, Linna, who himself fought in this war, provides gripping, horrific and seemingly very realistic combat scenes.

There is certainly, from our contemporary view, a limited world view among these soldiers. Their perspective is almost entirely bordered by the quarrels between Russia and Finland, and Germany's early successes and eventual defeats are seen only through their filters of what it all means for Finland and for their own situation.

The most consistent hero of The Unknown Soldier is Vilho Koskela, the calm, veteran lieutenant, survivor of the Winter War, caring and inspirational leader of his men. In fact, after the success of The Unknown Soldier, Linna went back and wrote his Under the North Star trilogy which begins with Koskela's grandfather breaking ground on a wilderness farm and takes the family up through Vilho's service and beyond. While on vacation in Finland with my wife several years back, I was told in a Helsinki bookstore that I should read this trilogy if I wanted to understand Finnish history and the character of the Finnish people. That trilogy provided me one of the most memorable reading experiences I've ever had. It's been a couple of years since I finished Under the North Star. I've been saving this book, but finally decided it was time to read it. When Koskela makes his appearance on page 4, I actually said to myself, "Ah, there he is!"

By the end, more than one of the characters is of course asking, as the reader will, "What was the point of all that horror?" Linna mostly leaves those questions to history, and to the reader the task of understanding the ultimate tragedy and futility of the endeavor.

I am going to join the group for this quarter as I read some translated books. I can only read English so am entirely dependent on books translated into English. So far this month I have read Red Notebook by the French author Antoine Laurain. I really like this author. He fills my need for "lighter" novels that are so satisfying. However, his work is hard to find here and I almost always have to request his books through our Inter-Library Loan program. Since the Covid-19 Crisis most of the libraries were shut down and are only now starting to reopen and offer their ILL services once again.

I counted myself lucky to find Red Notebook at a local used book store back in May. I don't think this book was ever technically on my TBR list as it never moved off of my desk until I started reading it at the end of June. This book was a very slow moving tale with a very happy ending. It did not have the sense of humor and fun that President's Hat had, but it was still a book I enjoyed reading with a more serious side than I was expecting. I have one other Antoine Laurain book in my collection and because I enjoyed reading Red Notebook so much I have moved French Rhapsody to my desktop and it will probably be read sometime this summer.

>59 benitastrnad: Thank you for reminding me about The President's Hat. Someone recommended it to me recently and I'd forgotten but now you've reminded me.

>59 benitastrnad: >60 spiralsheep: The President's hat is one I borrowed from the library at some point last year and had to return before getting around to reading it — I'd forgotten all about it as well. Back on the list it goes!

Here's another Dutch book from the long-stay section of my TBR pile. I bought it in June 2011, after reading the novella De slag om de Blauwbrug (also from 1983), which acts as a prologue to the series De tandeloze tijd. Years earlier I'd also read Weerborstels, the 1992 Boekenweek present, which I think was the first one I ever got. That counts as an intermezzo between parts 2 and 3 of the series. A F Th van der Heijden is a big name (*) in Dutch literature, and has won all the requisite prizes at some point over the last forty years or so, and taken part in enough controversies to remind us he exists. He doesn't seem to have been translated much, though, except into German. Tonio, the book about the death of his son in a road accident, looks to be the only one that's available in English.

Anyway, back to part 1:

Vallende ouders (1983) by A F Th van der Heijden (Netherlands, 1951- )

  

This novel forms the first part of van der Heijden's long and still ongoing series of (semi-)autobiographical novels De tandeloze tijd ("Toothless time"). It opens in spring, 1976, with the author's fictional alter ego Albert Egberts approaching his 26th birthday and near the end of his time as a student in Nijmegen, and moves on to take him back to his parents' house in Geldrop (outside Eindhoven) to retrace the key events of his childhood that have defined his relationship with his parents and his closest friends, and in the process dig into the mystery of how we deal with the cruelty of fate's having thrown us into this nasty, irreversible sequence of birth and death. Through consuming alcohol, mainly, it seems...

The structure of the book is frustrating to deal with, because van der Heijden likes to tell us things "in the wrong order", so that we get many unintelligible teaser-references to a character or a situation before we are actually told about it. Albert's parents, who are obviously the most important characters in the book (and not only on the strength of the title — the various accidents that happen to them give the book its key image structure) don't appear until after 150 pages or so: up to that point he might as well be an orphan, and we have to sit through egregious amounts of student drunkenness before we get to the real social and narrative content. Of course, the drunkenness isn't just there for show, it tells us important things about who Albert is and what life was like in 1976, and van der Heijden is a good raconteur, but I'm sure we could have got there in half the time with someone else...

It wasn't necessarily meant as a period novel — it came out only a few years after the foreground story — but I found that aspect of it almost the most interesting, the very particular cultural environment of that generation born in the first few years after the war, moving from working-class poverty to the new world of perpetual students and subsidised artists (that wonderfully Dutch institution, the BKR...). Of course here it also has that quite specific stamp of the Dutch provinces "below the great rivers," and of Eindhoven in the days when the whole of life there still revolved around Philips and the Catholic Church (in that order).

---

(*) Or at the very least, a complicated one that wouldn't easily fit on official forms in most countries. His English publishers seem to have persuaded him to use the slightly less intimidating form "Adri van der Heijden".

>61 thorold: I envy you your open and working local library.

How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Saša Stanišić is written in the narrative voice of an active, intelligent, imaginative boy who claims his age is a deliberate mystery between eight and fourteen. At the beginning he gave the impression an immature pre-teen. Then later a naive early teen when the Bosnian war broke out in April 1992 (the author would've been 14 in March 1992). It had the effect of immersing me as a reader in the moment as perceived by the protagonist but distanced from the more complex enveloping adult world.

Despite the apparent naivety of the protagonist, the story itself is carefully crafted to foreshadow the horrifying variety of wartime violence, so we're shown violent ethnic nationalism, animal cruelty, and misogynist violence. Then as the Croatian war kicks off to the west there's an interlude in which an elderly Jewish man, possibly a rabbi, recounts an incident of genocidal anti-semitic ethnic nationalism that happened during the Second World War. This serves as a subtle reminder of various historical massacres between all the local ethnicities, and why they're all still scared of their own neighbours, without arguing through the convoluted and disputed details of history (while also cunningly engaging the sensibilities of German readers). It's ethnic nationalism that's presented as the primary motivation for mass violence, not religion (although in reality religious rhetoric was certainly used to support ethnic nationalism, and recruit outside help, whether Orthodox Christian, Catholic Christian, or Sunni Muslim), but at a more fundamental level it's presented as "normal" human violence on a larger scale: whether someone is a serial killer or a war hero depends not on how many people they kill but on the time and place they live in. The story also makes it explicit that whether a person is or isn't safe in a particular time and place is determined by something as trivial as their name. Although, it should go without saying, even the most fanatical ethnic nationalism is never really about culture - it's about controlling who does and doesn't have access to the material resources necessary to create and maintain life (follow the money). The first half of the book ends with the protagonist settled as a refugee in Germany, while his parents and Bosniak grandmother have moved on to the US and his Serbian grandmother has returned to Višegrad in Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The second half of the book is, in effect, a series of short stories that range through the protagonist's life and link at many points with the previous, more linear, novella. These narratives also explore the various positions of "displaced persons" in situations where to survive is to flee: internal exile, emigrant refugee, or returnee whose place might no longer exist (or might have been taken by another displaced person). You can't go "home" to a place that no longer exists.

This all leaves unanswerable questions. Which is the most "normal" human behaviour: the time when murder is wrong and punished as a crime, or the time when murderers are heroes? Where is more historically "normal": the place where a government tries to protect people from death or the place where a government kills? For my parents this question was about war and peace, for me now it's about behaviour during a pandemic: will people band together to save life or choose to allow unnecessary death? Do we want "normal" human behaviour or can we be the people who do better than some historical average? Can we be the people who are abnormally good?

EDITED to add a comma (because I am that person).

I'm not sure the outcomes in history generally depend on "abnormal" human behaviour, good or bad. Whether one considers the Yugoslav civil wars, the consequences of Brexit or Trump's election, there are myriad turning points where ordinary people doing ordinary things (but this thing and not that thing etc.) brought us to where we are.

Apologies for this high-powered historiographic analysis... ;)

It's refreshing, by the way, to see a reading of a book dealing with Yugoslavia that finds universal significance to the whole sad saga, and doesn't treat it as just some fable of zoological interest about the Balkan savages.

Two things I wish more people understood: wars are always manufactured, and nobody dies for a mere idea.

>63 LWMusic: "I'm not sure the outcomes in history generally depend on "abnormal" human behaviour, good or bad. Whether one considers the Yugoslav civil wars, the consequences of Brexit or Trump's election, there are myriad turning points where ordinary people doing ordinary things (but this thing and not that thing etc.) brought us to where we are."

This is most often true, yes.

Although every time I think of various Balkan wars my respect for Tito's diplomatic skills increases (he also said no to Stalin so respect for that diplomacy too).

What I was trying to talk about was people faced with disaster who want to "return to normal", because is "normal" such a desirable goal? Any average is only somewhere in the middle between the best and the worst, after all. And, yes, "normal" and "average" are the results of many people's individual and collective small everyday choices.

And I'm too cynical about human behaviour to think this large group or that large group is exceptionally different. Balkan people are boringly European and all Europeans are boringly human.

>62 spiralsheep: I read that book ages ago, remember liking it but I missed this discussion about human behavior in general. My feeling is that, because all humans are incredibly complex beings, making choices based on a thousand different slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. And I do agree with you there are myriad turning points where ordinary people doing ordinary things (but this thing and not that thing etc.) brought us to where we are.

>62 spiralsheep:Which is the most "normal" human behaviour: the time when murder is wrong and punished as a crime, or the time when murderers are heroes? Where is more historically "normal": the place where a government tries to protect people from death or the place where a government kills? For my parents this question was about war and peace, for me now it's about behaviour during a pandemic: will people band together to save life or choose to allow unnecessary death? Do we want "normal" human behaviour or can we be the people who do better than some historical average? Can we be the people who are abnormally good?

That of course depends on your definition of good, from a moral, cultural, religious stand point. Again we are such complex beings (by that I do not mean complex in thinking, but the myraid of things that make each of us who we are) that I don't think there is a universal answer to this. Which is why I can agree with this statement: And I'm too cynical about human behaviour to think this large group or that large group is exceptionally different." but not this: Balkan people are boringly European and all Europeans are boringly human. Again, how are they boring compared to any other country or cultural inhabitants?

>64 spiralsheep: What I was trying to talk about was people faced with disaster who want to "return to normal", because is "normal" such a desirable goal? Any average is only somewhere in the middle between the best and the worst, after all. And, yes, "normal" and "average" are the results of many people's individual and collective small everyday choices.

Yeah whenever I hear ' when we get back to normal' I question what there normal is. Many teachers and parents are deparate to get back to that, but depending on your experience with schools that normal is going to be quite different from another. And I can't imagine at the end of this whenever that is, it is possible to get back wo what we had before

I think about the last 3 years, what has been done to our country, and whether the next election will make a dent in bringing us back to normal; I have my douts

>65 cindydavid4:

I think spiralsheep was just underlining the "relatability" of those people (as no less than that of others).

>64 spiralsheep:

Even without Tito there were various solutions on the table for preserving or transforming the Yugoslav federation, but those paths were not followed.

There's always some new "normal". People can't exist (for long) in some extreme situation without mastering, tempering, or coming to terms with it. Homo sapiens is a louse who never lets principles get in the way of sheer survival.

>65 cindydavid4: (Sorry for the delayed response. I walked up the hill behind my house to watch sunset. Magnificent!)

"That of course depends on your definition of good, from a moral, cultural, religious stand point. Again we are such complex beings (by that I do not mean complex in thinking, but the myraid of things that make each of us who we are) that I don't think there is a universal answer to this."

Yes, human complexity doesn't fit easily into language-based philosophy. I meant 'good' in the ethical sense but also the practical sense of being 'good at' doing something useful. Can we be 'good' individuals (whatever that means) while also being 'good at' the social behaviour that helps us survive?

> "Balkan people are boringly European and all Europeans are boringly human."
> "Again, how are they boring compared to any other country or cultural inhabitants?"

Not more boring. The same quantity and type of boring. Human individuals can be unpredictable, but large groups of humans seem more similar than different most of the time imo. (It was an agreement with LW that Balkan peoples aren't especially war-like compared to fellow Europeans and West Asians.)

> "Yeah whenever I hear 'when we get back to normal' I question what there normal is. Many teachers and parents are deparate to get back to that, but depending on your experience with schools that normal is going to be quite different from another. And I can't imagine at the end of this whenever that is, it is possible to get back wo what we had before

I think about the last 3 years, what has been done to our country, and whether the next election will make a dent in bringing us back to normal; I have my douts"

This is exactly what I meant, yes. If 'normal' has brought my country to 1 in every 1,000 people unnecessarily dead of COVID-19 then I don't want to return to that idea of 'normal'. Did ordinary Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats really want to return to the 'normal' that seems to result in massacres? Do most humans want the 'normal' that results in regular wars? And I've recently heard many of my friends around the world question 'returning to normal' when that's how we got where we are now.

>66 LolaWalser: I don't want to talk specifically about politics because I'll start ranting but, yes, more effective diplomacy and slower marching towards violence would prevent many problems, not only in the former Yugoslavia.

>"There's always some new "normal". People can't exist (for long) in some extreme situation without mastering, tempering, or coming to terms with it. Homo sapiens is a louse who never lets principles get in the way of sheer survival."

It's true that practical survival always comes first (except when it doesn't: see climate change), but... but... but... if propaganda (sorry, that word) can move people's idea of 'normal' (see the concept of the Overton Window) then maybe our 'average' human behaviour could be better? I don't believe this, but I want to believe it.

Did ordinary Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats really want to return to the 'normal' that seems to result in massacres?

It seems I misunderstood your argument after all. Of course people wouldn't want to return so some "normal that engenders massacres". But there's a false premise there--no one in their right mind thought that sort of thing would be "normal". Massacres are no more "normal" to people in the Balkans than anywhere else.

To take up the parallel examples of Brexit and Trump, as better known, both relevant countries have a vast and deep white supremacist history and heritage, yet both these "events" seem to have shocked about half of their populations (at least) as revealing something astonishing and incredible about their environments. Something they did not--by all appearances--ever trust could come out of their "normal". And yet... here we are.

>66 LolaWalser: thanks, I sometimes take things too literaly.

>67 spiralsheep: never apologze for a good sunset or sunrise (and think my part the world has the most amazing ones, esp when the thunderstorms start coming in, but ymmv)

I meant 'good' in the ethical sense but also the practical sense of being 'good at' doing something useful. Can we be 'good' individuals (whatever that means) while also being 'good at' the social behaviour that helps us survive?

hadnt thought of tha at all; unfortunatly social behavior often has to be modeled, and we lack a lot of those models right now. But when you think of other chaotic times (black plague, refugees after wwii) people did rise to the occasion and eventually work together to cobble something together.

Thanks for making me look up a new new to me concept: Overton Window. So as I see it generally there is a spectrum of every issue, and the general public keeps the norm (for better or worse) within the range they will accept. This changes constantly but it does give me pause: if people accept certain behaviors as normal that before they thought way out of line, does that make people accept things and allow things to happen? Thinking of now, of Germany in the 30s, as the reason why good people accepted the situation (if I am misunderstanding, which is likely, please tell me!)

saw this: Perhaps the Overton window theory is best summed up by a quote from Milton Friedman in his preface to the 1982 edition of Capitalism and Freedom: "That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."

>69 LolaWalser: "Of course people wouldn't want to return so some "normal that engenders massacres". But there's a false premise there--no one in their right mind thought that sort of thing would be "normal"."

I mean, yes, we might assume that but How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone repeatedly uses 'normal' behaviour to foreshadow war crimes and wartime atrocities. The children cruelly torture a frog to death, then later the soldiers shoot a dog for sport and try to cruelly drown a horse. The implication is that those 'normal' children could grow up to become those soldiers. A 'normal' teenage boy sees his parents' failed relationship and decides violence is the best way to relate to and control his girlfriend, then later the soldiers are implied to be raping women as a form of control and torture. The implication is that a society desensitised to 'normal' domestic violence also produces the soldiers who commit mass rape. 'Normal' cultural pride becomes distorted into genocidal ethnic nationalism. The book is showing these acts as a spectrum from the 'normal' cruelty and violence of everyday life to war crimes and is implying that it's ordinary people who become torturing / raping / murdering soldiers. It is 'normal' human societies that suddenly become genocidal. Weimar Germany wasn't wildly abnormal. Britain during the worst imperial atrocities wasn't wildly abnormal. Yugoslavia wasn't wildly abnormal. The contemporary US isn't wildly abnormal. They were all relatively normal societies that have produced extreme violent behaviour en masse.

> "To take up the parallel examples of Brexit and Trump, as better known, both relevant countries have a vast and deep white supremacist history and heritage, yet both these "events" seem to have shocked about half of their populations (at least) as revealing something astonishing and incredible about their environments. Something they did not--by all appearances--ever trust could come out of their "normal". And yet... here we are."

Yes, it's 'normal' that's the problem.

So, the question remains: why do people say they want to get back to normal, and can't we do better than normal?

>71 cindydavid4: "But when you think of other chaotic times (black plague, refugees after wwii) people did rise to the occasion and eventually work together to cobble something together."

Yes! So, how do we provoke 'normal' societies into 'abnormal' good, such as increased cooperation and social cohesion during disasters? How do we prevent 'normal' societies from turning suddenly 'bad' with decreased cooperation to the point of genocide?

I don't have answers. I do like reading books like How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone which remind us to ask the questions.

> "if people accept certain behaviors as normal that before they thought way out of line, does that make people accept things and allow things to happen?"

Yes, I think it's referred to with terms such as 'normalisation', 'hypernormalisation', and 'desensitisation', but I'm not a political theorist. It's 'first they came for the socialists (or whoever) and I did not speak out' in action.

> "Perhaps the Overton window theory is best summed up by a quote from Milton Friedman in his preface to the 1982 edition of Capitalism and Freedom: "That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable." "

Yes, we need better ideas of 'normal', where 'normal' is closer to 'good'. Can't we have 'good' propaganda that's as effective as 'bad' propaganda?

For example, my idea of 'good' propaganda:

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee."

>74 spiralsheep: A piquant choice, given that the Congregation for the Propagation of the Sacred Faith (“propaganda fide”) was set up in 1622, eventually leading to the word “propaganda” getting its modern meaning, whilst Donne (one of the Protestant clerics whose work it was set up to combat) wrote those lines just two years later!

>75 thorold: What could be more subversive than a Christian priest preaching love? ;-)

I think of behaviour as shaped most importantly by the situations we find ourselves in, rather than some largely unfathomable and endlessly debatable human "nature". Therefore, I always try to call attention to what we can do about "situations".

I'm convinced that it is better, if we want people to do good, to place them in situations in which doing good is easier than doing evil. If you want people to do good, don't send them to war. If you want to prevent a war, encourage the circumstances in which not having a war will be the more likely outcome than having a war.

In short, to be good or not to be evil means to do good or not to do evil. It's the "doing" one needs to concentrate on.

>73 spiralsheep: Yes! So, how do we provoke 'normal' societies into 'abnormal' good, such as increased cooperation and social cohesion during disasters? How do we prevent 'normal' societies from turning suddenly 'bad' with decreased cooperation to the point of genocide?

Well ive been trying not to get political, but when you have bad actors in power who keep lowering the bar re behavior and values, its hard for people not to adjust their 'abnormal' to 'normal' Sorta like the old frog slowly boiling in the pot till its too late for him to save himself.

THe answer is for people not to belive the proproganda from these bad actors, and allow the abnormal to be normal. I have been feeling like that frog for the last 3 1/2 years, trying not to get complacent as we get hit weekly, then daily by actions that would have horrified to begin with, seeing people just beaten down, and let it keep coming. I know I have been tempted to stop watching the news, Ive tried but I can't not know. And so increasingly become pessimistic for our future. I am not sure if social media is helping or hurting, its certainly allowed us to become horribly divided, to the point where we only believe our proproganda. I see us trying to change peoples mind on the social media and other places, just don't know how far we have gone

The way we provoke abnormal societies into 'abnormal' good, must come from all of us; in our protests in our schooling, in our refusal to accept, demanding our representatives local or national to act for the good, and finally to the ballot box. Tho as a friend of mine reminds me, Hitler was actually elected. sigh

>74 spiralsheep: No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee."

I remember singing that song in HS. how do we fight and push back nationalism, entitlement, and every man for himself. Deep down I believe all of this, and so I keep fighting. but its just so hard.

>77 LolaWalser: This is an excellent answer: to make situations where doing good is the easiest choice.

>78 cindydavid4: LolaWalser has an excellent answer in 77: to make situations where doing good is the easiest choice for people. Not so easy to put into practice for a whole society but at least something we can encourage in our own interactions.

>"Hitler was actually elected."

Yes, another problem with 'normal' when bad faith infiltrates and subverts.

I worry for my friends in the US but I also know that many of your ancestors lived through worse.

Quick, someone, next book before we all get too depressed! :-)

Yes indeed, no man stands alone means that anything we do to make the world a better place, a kinder more joyful place, will have ripple effects that will eventually change the world. all of us working in any small way to make things happen.

to end, probably my favorite quote comes from the Talmud, that drives me to continue to work for good: "Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

and yes, another book pls!!!!

>82 cindydavid4: "Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it."

I've heard this many times, and it's still good in every sense. Thank you for reminding me.

More "world's grief" here, I'm afraid, but maybe an example of how literature can help us to cope:

(This was a present from my niece in Berlin, which is why I happened to read it in German; on the TBR since last Christmas.)

Menschenwerk (2014; 소년이 온다 ; Human acts) by Han Kang (Korea, 1970- ) translated to German by Ki-Hyang Lee

  

Han Kang uses this novel to address the most traumatic incident in recent South Korean history, the brutal suppression of protests against the military government of Chun Doo-hwan in Gwangju in May, 1980, which resulted in an estimated 2000 civilian deaths, many of them students and young people.

She takes as the focal point of her story the schoolboy Dong-Ho, who, during the brief interlude when the troops withdraw and the protesters are left in control of the city, comes to the improvised morgue the protesters have set up in a sports hall, looking for the friend who was separated from him when they got caught up in the unrest. He doesn't find him, but stays on to help the volunteers in the morgue, driven by an Antigone-like compulsion to express his humanity through respect for the dead as a way of dealing with the horror of what is going on around him.

Han builds out from Dong-Ho to the people around him, and looks at what happened to them in the aftermath and how it affected their subsequent lives, until she finally gets to herself as someone who didn't live that experience, but who became aware of Dong-Ho's story and found a need to tell it.

A harrowing and rather beautiful book, which doesn't attempt to offer a political or psychological explanation for how such large-scale acts of brutality can occur, but gives us some kind of insight into the complexity of their effects.

---

Wikipedia on the Gwangju uprising: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwangju_Uprising

This has been on my TBR pile since February 2016 — it could fit either the 2014 "Germany" theme or 2019's "Mitteleuropa":

Gesammelte Gedichte (1993) by Thomas Bernhard (Austria, 1931-1989)

  

It's hard to imagine in hindsight, but before he found his characteristic prose voice with Frost in 1963 and stopped using the carriage-return key within works, Thomas Bernhard was mainly known as a lyric poet. He published three full-scale poetry collections in the 1950s, as well as several shorter bundles of poems that appeared in magazines, and two longer poems, Die Irren     Die Häftlinge (1962) and Ave Vergil (written 1959-60, published 1981). All in all, including a few bits and pieces and some revised versions, it comes to a respectable 330 pages of poetry in this posthumous collection.

As we would expect, Bernhard's verse is uniformly pessimistic in its view of the world. I think I counted eight poems that didn't make any obvious reference to death (four of them were from an anomalous early set of sonnets about Salzburg). There are signs of his bleak sense of humour, but the jokes, if they are jokes, are less obvious than in the later work.

What I did find surprising is the way Bernhard adopts quite a different persona in his poetry from the I-narrator of most of his fiction. The lyric narrator seems to be a complete Austrian countryman, drawing most of his metaphors from cowsheds, fields, and woods. Where the real Bernhard at this time had no idea who his father was, the poet has a father who has farmed these hills for many generations and has suffered in the war (in various different ways in different poems). And in a couple of poems he even gives himself some rather unconvincing children. Of course, he doesn't adopt this Heimat-persona for patriotic reasons: he wants to force us to contrast the comfortable world of nineteenth century romantic lyrics with the real darkness of a world where recent history has blasted away any thought we might have had of taking comfort in religion, human company (something which is almost always absent in these poems), or the eternal cycles of nature.

In the collection In hora mortis (talk about a redundant title..!), he largely replaces countryside imagery with language borrowed from the Psalms, to create a sequence focussing on the failures of religion to comfort us. This is about as bleak as it gets.

Another interesting thing about the lyrics when you see a lot of them together like this is the way they seem to foreshadow the "variation form" Bernhard uses in his prose — very often, later poems in a collection will pick up images from earlier poems, twist them around in different permutations, and add some unexpected depth to something that looked straightforward the first time around.

Die Irren     Die Häftlinge is the only really obviously political work here, two long poems printed on facing pages so that we read them in parallel, the lines on the left pages celebrating the (illusory) freedom of the mad, those on the right pages showing us how we are all the prisoners of an oppressive state.

Ave Vergil is an oddity: a long poem in the style of "The Waste Land," mostly written whilst Bernhard was studying in England. In a note he added when it was published in 1981, Bernhard effectively dismisses it as juvenilia, but says he's allowing it to be published because of the way it illustrates how much he was influenced by Eliot, Pound & co. — that's certainly not something you could easily deduce from his prose work.

This is actually one that wasn't on my TBR yet when I started the thread, but it's relevant to the "Mediterranean" theme, so why not.

For complicated reasons I had a copy of Norman Glass abridged translation but mostly read the French original — freely available e.g. from Wikisource https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Voyage_en_Orient_(Nerval)

Journey to the Orient. Selected, translated ... and with an introduction by Norman Glass (1851) by Gérard de Nerval (France, 1808-1855)

  

At something of a low point in his life (he was recovering from a nervous breakdown, and Jenny Colon, the singer he had been in love with, married someone else and subsequently died), Gérard de Nerval followed the advice of his friends and went off to spend the whole of 1843 travelling around the Eastern Mediterranean. As was the custom, he turned this into a travel book when he got home, although Voyage à l'Orient took him about six years to write and came out looking more like a work of fiction than a simple record of a voyage. He rearranged his journeys to give a better sequence, tippexed out an inconvenient travelling companion, and interpolated several novella-length stories in the text, which he claims to have heard along the way but were obviously mostly his own work.

In this abridged translation, Norman Glass gives us two of the interpolated stories plus one of the more journalistic parts of the book, the story of how Nerval bought the Javanese slave Zetnaybia during his stay in Cairo. Glass tells us that in reality it was his companion, Joseph de Fonfrède (or Fonfride) who bought the girl, but in any case it's Nerval who takes the credit for this adventure, or, as far as any modern reader is concerned, the blame. The front cover tagline of the seventies paperback gives a pretty fair assessment of what we're in for "An exotic quest for women, hashish and Eastern mystery." We can't say they didn't warn us!

By 1843, even a romantic poet on the fringes of respectable society can't get away with pretending that slavery is just a quaint local custom, so the whole Zetnaybia story is hedged about with caveats and excuses: Nerval needs a woman in the house to get around the rule that unmarried foreigners in Cairo are supposed to live in hostels; Ottoman slavery is quite different from what goes on in the Americas; we're told that Zetnaybia herself is happy with the social standing it gives her, with more rights and legal protection than a "free" Ottoman woman. Nerval is careful to avoid ever saying that he's bought her in order to have sex with her, even though it's hard to imagine what else she could be doing: she has been brought up to look beautiful, and refuses to do any cooking and cleaning. And it's obvious how the situation appears to outsiders when the Greek captain of a ship they are travelling on offers to exchange his beautiful little boy for Zetnaybia for the duration of the voyage. The whole thing ends rather clumsily, mostly due to Glass's cuts, with Zetnaybia temporarily parked in a private boarding-school for young ladies in Beirut. But there's some quite unpleasant reading here, especially the descriptions of Nerval's repeated shopping expeditions to slave-dealers who never have quite the right thing in stock. And his unapologetically racist ideas of beauty. In bad taste when it was written, worse now.

The Tale of Caliph Hakem, supposedly told to Nerval by a Druze sheik imprisoned in Lebanon, is a romantic version of the life of the 11th century Fatimid ruler who is regarded by followers of the Druze religion as an incarnation of God. Nerval seems to be particularly interested in Hakem because of the way accusations of madness go together with his role as a religious martyr — in the story he is locked up in an asylum for claiming to be the Caliph, which in fact he is. And he has a Doppelgänger, in the best romantic tradition, who likes to eat hashish with the incognito Caliph...

The third part Glass translates is the tale of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, which Nerval claims to have heard in an Istanbul coffee-house. Where the Hakem story carefully sidestepped relying on supernatural elements, this includes all kinds of magic, including a full-on mythical section where Adoniram, Solomon's building contractor for the Temple project, is conducted on a tour of the earth's core by his ancestor Tubalcain. But its real charm is in the character of the Queen, who outwits Solomon repeatedly. Unfortunately, Solomon's inability to keep up with her in philosophical debate, and his poor taste in architecture and poetry seem to have more to do with Nerval's antisemitic prejudices than with any real notion of turning the Queen into a feminist hero.

Both the narratives were very entertainingly written, with all the exotic orientalist background carefully dosed not to get in the way of the action more than he needs to tease us a little. I also dipped a bit further into the parts of this very long book that Glass doesn't translate, and I had the feeling that he's doing Nerval a disservice by cutting out so much of the purely journalistic writing. There are obviously some lovely bits of description he's missing out.

>85 thorold: That's an interesting review, thank you. Also, the phrase "rather unconvincing children" (too often true) made me giggle. If I was planning to write a memoir I would now have a title: "unconvincing children".

>86 thorold: That's a fabulous cover, but also very 70s: somewhere between psychedelia and glam.

My tbr pile also seems to breed. This is mostly a good thing. But I can say that as I'm not a book hoarder and most of my read books leave the house again.

>87 spiralsheep: I can imagine Bernhard being rather fun as an eccentric uncle — if he was in the mood for it — but the idea of him as a parent just makes the mind boggle...

Picked up atlas of a lost world Travels in Ice Age America at a used store, looks fascinating and it will fit nicely with the prehistory theme we had a few months back

Also actually found Moorish Spain on my TBR, stuck behind other books on my travel shelves, while cleaning them. Guess I should do that more often. Great for the travel theme, and others. I don't remember reading this so I suspect this will be a nice treat.

>89 cindydavid4: I read Moorish Spain a few years back, actually right before my vacation to Andalusia, and thought it was clearly written, informative and enjoyable.

>89 cindydavid4: Moorish Spain was a fascinating culture: giant water wheels, women poets, and a flying machine!

> Not a TBR but an extension of my year of reading the EU into Greater Europe (not my concept!). I looked for a translated novel set in Albania by an Albanian woman. There's not much choice and Sworn Virgin by Elvira Dones was available to me. I know several of you have also read it.

I also, coincidentally, read Sworn Virgin back to back with Extra(Ordinary) People which is an early 1980s collection of feminist science fiction by notable lesbian feminist Joanna Russ who had a lot to say about gender, both typical of the feminist discourse of that time and radical ideas which would still get an author cancelled by the sex/gender police now.

The first aspect of Sworn Virgin that really struck me in the contemporary part of the novel, set in the US in 2001, is that although the story has a culturally specific framing with a sworn virgin protagonist it's also a common human story of a young person (usually female) who feels obliged to look after her older relatives (usually parents) at the cost of her own development and who only gets her chance at adult life long after the age we would usually allow a story to be a bildungsroman or coming of age plot. This isn't about a second chance at life, it's a first chance. Being a teenager in middle age is doubly difficult, doing so as an exile in another culture in a second/third language is triply troublesome.

The second, when the novel flashes back to Albania in 1986 is how much the characters don't say or even think to themselves. This isn't authorial understatement. The text makes it explicit that most of the characters lived in times and places where casual conversation, and even internal perspective, were tightly controlled by both traditional culture and an authoritarian society: in this case Gheg misogyny and Albanian communism, although I dare say realising you're socially unacceptable because of gendered unconventionality or an unallowable tendency to self-education are common human experiences. And it's only fantasy utopias where all forms of loving human relationship are acceptable. So, if you're a woman don't speak to any adult man you're not related to, if you're a Gheg don't have friends unless the head of your family permits it, if you're a Christian be wary of Muslims and vice versa, if you're human don't think or speak in any way the local authoritarians won't allow, or you will be punished: murdered, attacked, exiled, imprisoned, shunned. Don't say it. Don't even think it. This is authorial realism. The niece character in 2001, Jonida, has grown up in the US and if she thinks something then she expresses it freely, and encourages her aunt to express herself. The protagonist's African-Caribbean-American friend also encourages her to express herself more freely.

"In silence there was hope; in conversations there often wasn't. Sound played for the enemy side."

The denouement is set up early in the novel and is inevitable in a book called Sworn Virgin but sex isn't presented as some sort of miraculous cure for trauma. It's an ending of one phase of life and a beginning of another, as all new relationships are to some extent.

This is a good novel. It presents complex themes so straightforwardly that their complexity slides under conscious awareness so it feels like reading a simple story in plain language. An impressive achievement.

I read the beginning of the Epic of the Commander Dhat al-Himma, which is an Arabic classic including both prose and poetry, set in the Arabian Peninsula (in the area that's now Saudi Arabia) in the mid 8th century (CE), although it was probably first written down in Egypt in the 12thC. There's a good English translation with scholarly notes (that you can also ignore and just read the story) here:

https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2151&context=mff

Basically the plot is that a misogynist nobleman rejects his baby daughter for not being born male and so she grows up in a rival neighbouring tribe where she becomes a fiendish kick-ass camel-rustling warrior and cavalry commander. Then after she unknowingly defeats her dad in combat and takes him prisoner he changes his mind: "God be praised for giving me such a lioness!"

Quotes

Only nobles are people, lmao: "He had moved to this land by himself, with one thousand warriors in his service."

Epic poetics: "Fatima traveled, folding the land by length and by width ..."

Yeah, this also happens in our village when the cricket team win an away match, honest: "The people of Bani Tayy shared in the celebratory atmosphere, some spontaneously composing poetry in admiration ..."

>92 spiralsheep: I love that she becomes a fiendish kick-ass camel-rustling warrior and cavalry commander! I will be reading this!

>92 spiralsheep:

Interesting. I'm reading Fatima Mernissi's The Veil and the male elite and last chapter finished discussed the killer hadith about no one prospering who entrusts his affairs to a woman--"conveniently" remembered after the defeat of Aisha and her army at Basra... and the detail that feels particularly humiliating is that the battle is known as "the Battle of the Camel", for the camel Aisha rode, rather than to have it remembered under her name and thus associate a woman (albeit the losing side) with such a leadership role.

On a tangent, it's so depressing to hear how little is known for certain about the age of the so-called pre-Islamic poetry, what with rampant fraud and forgery.

>93 cindydavid4: It's short but perfectly formed. Read on!

>94 LolaWalser: The Qur'an is very explicit about veiling being a woman's personal choice. Cultural baggage builds up around socio-religious behaviour though....

I'm amazed there aren't more heroic age Arabic, and especially medieval Hebrew, forgeries because a good one would presumably be worth many millions! I suppose a forger wouldn't want to be identified and caught by buyers that powerful due to the likely lethal consequences.

The Qur'an is very explicit about veiling being a woman's personal choice.

Not to start an off-topic argument (I'm in the process of a long-ish read on these issues so it's hard not to comment), but in my understanding it's actually anything but explicit on the topic, so that's part of the problem. However, what most interpretations, at least the not-extremist ones, seem to agree on is that the wearing specifically of the veil (hijab) itself isn't mentioned at all--it's just one of the conclusions drawn from the vague injunction that women should avoid exposing themselves.

Another point is that the hadith are extremely important in regulating Islamic observance, so as mad as it may seem that the lives of 21st century women are still being constrained by 7th century hearsay, that's the situation.

Mernissi writes about the fake "pre-Islamic" poetry in the context of establishing personal genealogies and gaining influence, rather than amassing riches per se. (I wonder if it may not have also provided a vent for expression of the now-forbidden opinions etc.? Must explore.)

> I think we're merely defining "explicit" differently in this context. If what is supposedly the final word of the one true god doesn't make a rule about something then that is an explicit matter of personal choice, which is intended to be based on one's own relationship with the aforementioned deity.

(Explicit means "unfolding" and is also a specific word for liturgical texts in some Christian contexts.)

"as mad as it may seem that the lives of 21st century women are still being constrained by 7th century hearsay, that's the situation"

No different from any other religion or system of social control, and even older sets of rules are still in use. Of course, new fatwahs are available to young women and have been used to clarify matters of modest dress and personal choice in some conservative Muslim communities in the UK, for example (the most famous is along the lines of: a child should respect and obey parents but only if parents are respecting and obeying the Qur'an).

"Mernissi writes about the fake "pre-Islamic" poetry in the context of establishing personal genealogies and gaining influence, rather than amassing riches per se. (I wonder if it may not have also provided a vent for expression of the now-forbidden opinions etc.? Must explore.)"

Yes, I understood the context. Forgeries, as you say, have multiple potential purposes both social and political, from acquiring status to attempted shifts in belief. Archaeology, fake and real, has been used for a similar breadth of purposes. Arguing ideological territory is an intellectual version of "We own this place because our dead are buried here."

>97 spiralsheep:

If what is supposedly the final word of the one true god doesn't make a rule about something then that is an explicit matter of personal choice

Would be nice if everyone thought so, but clearly that's nowhere close to being the general consensus.

No different from any other religion or system of social control, and even older sets of rules are still in use.

Depends greatly on what one is discussing and, especially, the perspective one chooses. I'd say there are sizeable, important differences in how the major religions are practiced where by whom etc.

But I'd rather not indulge in yet another digression here. If you're interested, I've been discussing the books I've read so far here:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/318625

It's not a personal thread, I'd love to get others interested in posting on topic along with me.

>98 LolaWalser: Fatima Mernissi's The veil and the male elite is definitely on topic for Reading Globally when it's mentioned after an Arabic epic that includes personal veiling choices. Although I know this group is primarily for fiction (and poetry? I hope!) and I understand it makes sense to keep a long discussion in one place.

I'm excused from discussions about religion though because I'm a happy apatheist. :-)

>92 spiralsheep: (etc.) — Not quite the same thing, but that discussion reminded me of The delight of hearts; or what you will not find in any book, which I read for the last "travelling the TBR" thread. A 1980s selection made for a series of gay texts, taken from a 13th-century collection of Arabic erotica, most of it claiming to be from 500 years or so earlier. The result made it sound as though everyday life in the medieval Middle East was rather like Fire Island in pre-AIDS days, but I couldn't help wondering how it would have looked if a less-engaged editor had put it together.

---

Something completely different:

This hefty 750-page paperback has been looking menacingly at me from the TBR since March 2014. I think I bought it soon after I started learning Spanish, around the same time as La Colmena, with a vague idea that it would be a quick read. I've started it a couple of times since, but always put it aside again. Precisely the sort of book that was waiting for a year like this one...

Malena es un nombre de tango (1994) by Almudena Grandes (Spain, 1960- )

  

A long, complicated family saga, narrated in the first person by a woman born (like the author) in 1960, but with a lot of back-story set during the Civil War and reaching back further to colonial Peru and the Conquistadors. The central theme seems to be the way bourgeois Spanish society lays down role-models of "good" and "bad" behaviour, especially for women, and the way real people fail to fit into those role-models. And of course the trouble with that is that you risk setting up an equally-coarse set of clichés in the other direction, in which all the "domestic angels" turn out to be cynical, manipulating, selfish hypocrites and all the "whores" turn out to be open, generous and honest. Grandes doesn't quite do that, but she comes perilously close. What's more, she fails to avoid the many easy plot-temptations offered by a storyline that involves two pairs of twin sisters. So, not a very satisfying book, but it is good as an immersive, long (beach-)read, with lots of good dialogue, steamy sex-scenes, and long Madrid bar-crawls (and their attendant hangovers).

>100 thorold: The last Spanish popular novel I read was 650 pages long and I swear there was no padding. I keep looking at Shadow of the Wind but it's 560 pages, the beginning of a trilogy, and life is too short.

>101 spiralsheep: Lots of people love The shadow of the wind, I've never understood why... At least Malena was a bit less formulaic than that, but there are plenty of better things to invest your time in!

>102 thorold: I believe Shadow of the Wind is supposed to be reminiscent of the metafiction of Calvino or Borges but at a more populist reading level. I freely admit that I like highbrow poetry and non-fiction but tend to prefer middlebrow fiction and that's not as easy to find in translation as literary fiction, especially for those of us who rarely read crime or straight-up romance. I also read around the world to try to get a feel for popular culture in places I'm unlikely to visit. I enjoy illuminating elite culture but it doesn't reveal a society in the same way as populist bestsellers so I occasionally like to sample both... just not too many of the ones over 400 pages!

>101 spiralsheep: >102 thorold: >103 spiralsheep:
I read Shadow of the Wind soon after it came out and really liked it. I have read the other three in the series and will finish up with the fourth as soon as I can get my hands on it. I don't know if it is metaphysical or not, but it is a great picture of life in Barcelona from the 1920's through the end of the Franco rule. I have a copy of Marina and his other YA novels and plan on reading them soon.

>104 benitastrnad: Oh, I didn't know Carlos Ruiz Zafón also wrote YA. That's very interesting! I only knew that his adult bestsellers are popular enough for my local library to have copies. Thank you for the recommendations. I'll investigate further.

He passed away not to long ago Only 55

https://chicago.suntimes.com/2020/6/19/21297330/carlos-ruiz-zafon-dead-shadow-of...

I read the first of Henry Havard's travel books about the Netherlands last year, and decided I had to get hold of the others as well: they have only been on my TBR for about nine months.

Henry Havard was a French art-historian who was involved in the Paris Commune and had to spend most of the 1870s as a political exile in the Netherlands. He rapidly made friends and started to study Dutch culture (including writing the first serious academic study of Delft porcelain), and in 1874 he had an unexpected international success with a travel book about a journey around the "dead cities" of the Zuiderzee (cf. >42 thorold:), which gave a substantial boost to the fledgling Dutch tourist industry when it became a bestseller in several European languages. Naturally, the publishers wanted a sequel...

La Hollande pittoresque: les frontières menacées: voyage dans les provinces de Frise, Groningue, Drenthe, Overyssel, Gueldre et Limbourg (1876) by Henry Havard (France, 1838-1921)

  

In this second book, published two years after the Zuiderzee tour, Havard and his travelling companion, the aristocratic landscape painter Baron de Constant-Rebecque, make a tour of the Northern and Eastern provinces of the Netherlands, starting off in Friesland and Groningen and then heading south parallel to the German border — roughly along the line of what is now the Pieterpad long-distance walking trail — to end up in Maastricht. They stop off to look at historic cities, dolmens, country estates, prisons, fortresses, pretty girls, and other features of interest along the way, and Havard comments on what he sees, learnedly, romantically, wittily or caustically according to the case. The book is illustrated with a dozen or so etchings by Constant-Rebecque, mostly of churches or town-halls.

The hook Havard uses to hang the book on is a German school geography textbook he has come across that describes the Netherlands, together with Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and Switzerland, as Deutsche Aussenländer — states that are not currently part of the German Empire but are German in all other important respects. He's alarmed when his German academic acquaintances fail to be shocked by this, and reflects that when "thirty million squareheads" are fed this sort of thing from the cradle, they're not likely to object if their Kaiser decides to correct these little political inconsistencies. (Given his own recent experiences with the Prussian army, and the likely mood of his French readers, "squareheads" seems pretty mild...) Anyway, this gives him the idea of visiting the frontier areas and showing us how characteristically Dutch they are, and how different their history and cultural background is from Germany. At a couple of points he reminds us how recently German border regions like Bentheim, Berg and Kleve have been made to give up speaking Dutch and integrated into the Prussian education system.

But this is really only a hook, and it's integrated so loosely into the book that it can easily be cut out of the German edition. The main feeling we get from the book is the great pleasure Havard takes in discovering Dutch history and the artefacts it has left behind. He finds a lot of little things to criticise, but — except for the rare cases when they meet unfriendly innkeepers or burgemeesters — he's always careful to make it clear that these are minor blemishes and that the Netherlands is a fantastic place to explore, especially if you like architecture, painting and accounts of old sieges.

I bought this in 2018, inspired by the Japan/Korea theme read, but I got distracted by other Japanese modern classics and never reached this one:

The temple of the golden pavilion (1956) by Yukio Mishima (Japan, 1925-1970), translated by Ivan Morris

  

Mizoguchi, in his teens at the end of the war, feels he's been betrayed in just about every possible direction. By both his parents, by his religious superior, by his male friends, by women, and — of course — by the state that entered and lost the war and has left him open to humiliation at the hands of American soldiers. He stutters, he's perpetually hungry, he isn't very interested in his studies to become a Zen priest, and he's convinced that he's ugly. So, your typical happy teenage boy! By a logical process that makes complete sense to him, and apparently also to the author, he comes to the view that the only thing left for him to do is to destroy the beautiful thing that seems to be at the focal point of the values of all those lines of betrayal.

This is obviously a book that has all the elements of the postwar-adolescent-rebellion novel, and is a kind of apotheosis of the twentieth century Japanese classic (temples, voyeurism, humiliation, duckweed, tea, tatami mats, suicide, mountains, ...). It's all beautifully and very concisely executed, but it can't get round the limitation that any reader who isn't a teenager at the end of his tether is likely to see Mizoguchi's solution as both irrelevant and disproportionate to the problem he's facing.

A book that came up in discussion in the Mediterranean theme read last year — I realised Le Clézio is also a Nobelist I've never read, so it could count for the 2015 Nobelists theme as well.

Fittingly, it's set during an August heatwave.

Le procès-verbal (1963; The interrogation) by J M G Le Clézio (France, 1940- )

  

A young man, Adam Pollo, has taken over an unoccupied house by the sea in a Mediterranean beach resort. He seems to be on the run, and may be a deserter from the army and/or a fugitive from a mental hospital — we aren't quite sure, and neither is he. He stares out of the window, scribbles letters to his girlfriend Michèle in a school exercise book, and occasionally goes to the beach or into town to try to establish some kind of contact with the world, usually unsuccessfully. He follows a strange dog, teases the animals in the zoo, watches the drowned body of an unknown man being retrieved from the sea, gets drunk, goes bin-diving, preaches to a crowd, and eventually gets picked up by the police and sent off for psychiatric evaluation. A strange, disconnected, jumpy sort of novel, full of gimmicks like inserted pages from the local paper, and very much of its time, but it seems to work.

>107 thorold: I so want a book like this that I can wave at people who whine about African nations and their border disputes because Europe has always been exactly the same.

>108 thorold: I seem to have missed out on the prevalence of duckweed in Japanese fiction, lol.

> I've been looking for Belarusian fiction in English translation that doesn't cover the same ground as readily available outstanding non-fiction. Any recs for fiction set post-Second World War or was that too thoroughly repressed? 21st century would be even better. Asking here because my private quest suddenly seems more generally relevant.

>110 spiralsheep: Based on quick internet search, Vasil Bykau is the only Belarusian novelist I could find with multiple books available in English. It sounds like most of them are set WWII or earlier, and some of the older translations (via Russian) are rather poor.

Alindarka’s Children by Alhierd Bacharevič sounds intriguing (linking to the publisher's website since only the French edition has been catalogued on LT). One of Bacharevič's other novels is available in German.

Glagoslav Publications has a couple of Belarusian novels in translation:
King Stakh's Wild Hunt by Uladzimir Karatkevich (this is the sort of thing I would love, but may not be relevant for your purposes, since it's a historical novel set in the nineteenth century -- though it's worth noting that historical fiction is one way that authors sometimes circumvent restrictions on certain topics in oppressive regimes)
Down Among the Fishes by Natalka Babina

>111 spiphany: Thank you! I'd been considering King Stakh's Wild Hunt if I couldn't find anything else. It does look fun (to specific values of fun, obviously). Alindarka's Children and Down Among the Fishes are both new to me so I'll investigate those. Thank you again.

I've read The Unwomanly Face of War and will, frankly, probably never feel a need to also read Belarusian Second World War fiction.

I should probably also note a single author book of essays (?) A Large Czesław Miłosz With a Dash of Elvis Presley from Belarus. Sample essay (?) here:

https://przekroj.pl/en/literature/winter-camp-tania-skarynkina

ETA: And Paranoia: A Novel.

106/2020. I read the novel Whole of a Morning Sky, by Grace Nichols. Set in British Guiana around the early 1960s at the point when it was transitioning into independent Guyana. The story centres on the family of a rural school headmaster who retires and moves his wife and three children to the capital city, Georgetown, and the social and political upheavals of decolonisation, an elected Marxist government, the British behaving badly, and CIA plots. Alternate chapters focus on straightforward narrative, and the child's-eye view of Gem, the family's 10 year old daughter. The prose is well-written, with each word a meaningful choice, as you'd expect from an author otherwise better known as a poet. The tone is poignantly honest, from personal and family relations, to the confusions and conflicts of wider society. The novel is written in standard English with individual dialogue adjusted according to the speaker without patronising either the Creole-speaking characters or the average anglophone reader.

On the Duke of Edinburgh's visit: "He knew that it wasn't so much the Duke as the thirst for spectacle and drama that had brought people out in the thousands."

Motto: "housework never done and I for one didn't come down to this earth to finish it."

I read Blueprint by Theresia Enzensberger (English translation by Lucy Jones), which is two inadequately pasted together novellas about a dull uninteresting girl at a higher educational institution with which she fails to engage either educationally or socially. I couldn't decide whether the author was genuinely bored by her chosen subject and characters, and was writing this to cash in on the Bauhaus anniversary celebrations, or whether this is one of those regrettable first novels that only gets published because the author has contacts in the industry.

FYI all these women are more interesting than this book....
Designer of the Frankfurt Kitchen: Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky.
First woman awarded a degree in architecture in Germany: Jovanka Bončić-Katerinić.
First woman with her own architecture practice in Germany: Emilie Winkelmann.

>115 spiralsheep: the author has contacts in the industry — That might be a candidate for understatement of the year! :-)

>116 thorold: Lol! I had no idea! Now I've googled... and all becomes clear. I should've realised as I've read Hans Magnus Enzensberger's work.

As so often, the general rule applies: If I've heard from your Dad then I don't need to hear from you.

>115 spiralsheep: Oh, that's disappointing. I've had the novel on my "books of note" list because the subject matter sounded so interesting. A pity the execution was so badly lacking. Normally I tend to assume that if a book has been translated it can't be too awful because otherwise the extra work and expense doesn't pay off (with the exception of mediocre books that have somehow become bestsellers). But I guess there are always exceptions...

As for judging an author by their parentage: I'm not sure I agree. I mean, to give a possibly not representative example, Klaus Mann is well worth reading in his own right in spite of being overshadowed by his famous father. No doubt there are some children of famous writers who try to capitalize on their parents' names and manage to get published in spite of having no talent themselves, but I imagine it's equally, if not more, common for them to struggle to find their own voice and identity as something other than the "child of x". (How many choose not to directly follow in their parents' footsteps simply because the burden of that legacy is too immense?) It's not all that unusual for clusters of writers to emerge within a single family, for the simple reason that a milieu in which people cherish reading and the written word is more likely to predispose one both to consider writing as a career possibility and to develop the necessary skills to become good at it.

>118 spiphany: I honestly wanted to like the book. A young woman at the Bauhaus seems such promising material. And there wasn't anything wrong with the pacing so the author knows how to structure a novel. She probably just needs to find a subject she's prepared to be passionate about in public.

The "If I've heard from your Dad then I don't need to hear from you" rule was originally intended for contemporary journalists and, yes, even in that field there are a few exceptions but it does seem to be true more often than not in my experience. I note that the originator of the rule also excludes Jesus, lol.

Fortunately, as I've never read Thomas Mann I can read Klaus Mann without breaking the rule. ;-)

I read Iep jāltok : poems from a Marshallese daughter by Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner which is the first full volume of poetry published by a Marshall Islands author. One of the poems namechecks fellow poet Emelihter Kihleng from Pohnpei in the Federated States of Micronesia, who was the first Micronesian poet to publish a full volume.

These poems are creative with language in an variety of thoughtfully structured forms, from concrete to free verse. They speak movingly about traditional Marshallese culture, family history, the fallout from U.S. nuclear bombing, emigration, racism, and climate change. All these experiences, including the most painful and difficult, are communicated with impressive clarity in the poet's chosen forms.

The banality of a car crash transformed into art (extract):

In the hospital a male nurse
strung stitches
through the blooming wounds in my wrists
the only remains
of the passenger window

His blue aloha shirt
reminded me of home
I wanted to tell him I wasn't from here
I wanted to tell him I missed my mom
I wanted to tell him I was scared
of dying in someone else's country

As whimpers escaped from my lips
he yanked the black thread just
a little
tighter
sealing my voice into my wrists

(Edited to correct spelling.)

>120 spiralsheep: Sounds like an interesting find!

Two Argentinian novels from my TBR pile:

This first one I bought during my trip to Spain in October last year. I knew about Neuman from his extraordinary and wonderful Schubertian historical novel El viajero del siglo, which I read in March 2018. That and one or two other of his books has been translated, this one doesn't seem to have been yet:

Una Vez Argentina (2003; revised 2014) by Andrés Neuman (Argentina, Spain, 1977- )

  

In this autobiographical novel, Neuman looks back at his childhood years in Buenos Aires and traces back his family roots to see how his ancestors — French, Creole and Galician on his mother's side; East European Jews on his father's — came to be living in Argentina, how his parents decided to migrate to Spain when he was in his early teens, and how all that ties in with 20th century Argentinian history.

It makes an interesting, lively and very varied book, full of reflections on national identity, on growing up between different languages and cultures, on the way families and social circumstances push us in certain directions (and the way some people manage to push back and go a different way), on politics and football (not so much religion, though), music, chess and ice-cream, on the box where the young Andrés kept his porn stash, on the occasional frightening collisions between settled bourgeois life and political violence, and on many other things.

It's maybe a a little bit too skittish in the way it jumps around between the serious and the trivial, and it's a little frustrating because of the way it refuses to follow any of the characters through beyond 1991. But all the same, I found it an engrossing and rewarding book.

---

The cover photo is credited to Cindy Tang/Unsplash — I've no idea what its relevance to the book is meant to be...

I found another short one on the shelf, so it's actually dos veces Argentina this morning...

I found this in a book-parcel I received a little while ago, in English, unfortunately, so I don't know what it would be like in the original:

Voltaire's calligrapher (2001; English 2010) by Pablo De Santis (Argentina, 1963- ) translated by Lisa Carter

  

A postmodern historical novel, set in Enlightenment France and full of playful reflections on philosophy, history, and aesthetics, this is the sort of thing I normally really enjoy, but somehow it never really clicked for me. Maybe it was the translation, which felt a little bit flat and lacking in linguistic bounce, maybe it was the rather over-busy plot, which seemed to be bursting out of the slim, novella-length package in all directions, not giving the characters any real chance to develop and solidify. I believe De Santis is a major figure in graphic-novel circles, and perhaps that has something do with it: the story often felt as though it would have benefited from pictures. A graphic novel format might also have fitted in better with the way the border between history and fantasy is about 90% of the way over to the fantasy side.

The general idea is that the narrator, Dalessius, trained in calligraphy and employed as a copyist by the Sage of Ferney, finds himself acting as a kind of secret agent in a power-struggle between his boss and the Dominicans, who are (of course) plotting world-domination. There are also exploding sexbots, poison-pens, time-delay inks, a program-controlled bishop, and an overnight corpse delivery service involved in the story, inter alia.

A silly quibble that disturbed me throughout was the use of the word "calligrapher" as job-description for Dalessius. This word first appeared in English in the mid-18th century in line with the rise of interest in orientalism, and it was initially only used to describe artists producing decorative versions of handwritten texts for religious or display purposes in Islamic and Far Eastern cultures. The same applies to French calligraphe — unfortunately I haven't got a historical dictionary of Spanish to hand to check the history of calígrafo, but I assume it will be similar to French. The term calligraphy goes back about a century earlier.

The main action of the book is set between the Jean Calas case in 1762 and Voltaire's death in 1778. At that time, someone like Dalessius, whose job was the old-established one of making accurate, high-quality copies of legal and business manuscripts, would have used a term like clerk, copyist (both early-renaissance), scribe or scrivener (medieval). Obviously, there's no law against using an anachronistic word in a historical novel, particularly a non-realist one, but I find it odd when a writer — who presumably knows what he's doing — puts a word like that in the centre of the foreground and doesn't trouble to tell us why he is doing so.

>121 thorold: "on politics and football (not so much religion, though)"

If I was being mischievous I'd ask if football and religion aren't the same sort of passion to many people?

"The cover photo is credited to Cindy Tang/Unsplash — I've no idea what its relevance to the book is meant to be..."

A household on the edge of potential disaster?

I read Mirror, Shoulder, Signal by Danish author Dorthe Nors. I know some of you have read her work.

The story is about a middle-aged woman without a future, because she doesn't want any of the futures that society has directed her towards, mostly presented as mother or corpse, and who is therefore obsessed with the past. But the past isn't a place so she can only go back there inside her own head, except her own memories aren't enough for her and the people from her past don't want to share the insides of their heads with her. At the end of the book she embraces a future in a place and social role, as a rural spinster, that society has told her are both undesirable.

The style of writing is descriptive. It presents and dissects without interpreting. The author explicitly separates this work from crime novels in which people are dismembered and then interpreted as clues, from the work of psychologists in which people's minds are broken down and interpreted, from the work of therapists (or shamans) in which people's emotions (or spirits) are anatomised and interpreted. The descriptive imagery is creative enough that it occasionally momentarily veers into bizarre or surreal disconnection. A typical pop-literary Man Booker International shortlist novel.

This is slightly off topic, but this group doesn't have an off topic thread for related questions so....

I've got a 500 page hard-cover-with-glossy-dustjacket book of poetry in translation by a single author who hasn't won any literary awards or received any reviews of this volume in any notable English language press (online or off). This is her second volume published by the same tiny England-based press specialising in translated books from former Soviet Eurasia. There are no financial sponsors listed on either volume. The owners of the small press aren't primarily publishers and seem to have interests in several Europe-Eurasia small businesses in tourism and other unprofitable fields. So my question is: where's the money for this expensive vanity publishing coming from? Who's likely to be funding this? What's the grift?

Have any of you encountered anything similar?

The only angle I can think of is trying to sell texts back to Eurasian educational institutions in an attempt to move money out of Eurasian government pockets and into sterling but... I can't quite work out how that would be worth it.

ETA: ££££££ I worked it out. ££££££ /naivety

I read Midnight's Children for my book club. It was a reread for me, but I found I didn't remember lots of stuff. I loved the allegorical aspect and I am a fan of magical realism, but I found it hard to get through this time. I think perhaps because I had a lot going on.

Oh I loved that book. The narrators birth on the same day as indias independence was very allegorical, and like you Im a fan of mr when its well done and thought it was here. Gosh Its been decades since I read it but remember sitting on a soft chair in the bookstore on a stormy night. Has nothing to do with the book but funny how some things connect us to what we read

I read Jaan Kaplinski's Selected Poems translated into English (sorry, but there's no touchstone for the English version).

For me, these translations have too much word salad and too much prose but when they find a sweet spot in between then they're worth reading.

This is heartbreaking, from the book Evening Brings Everything Back and available free on Jaan Kaplinski's website:

"My aunt knew them well, I know of them
only names and what other people have told me:
tinkers, haberdashers, attorneys, doctors,
Genss, Michelson, Itzkowitsch, Gulkowitsch...
Where are they now? Some of them were lucky enough
to be buried in this cemetery under a slab with Hebrew letters.
But those my aunt met on the streets of German-occupied Tartu,
with a yellow star sewn to their clothes, and to whom
she even dared to speak to the horror of her friends:
they are not here, they are scattered
into nameless graves, ditches and pits
in many places, many countries, homeless in death
as in life. Maybe some of them are hovering
in the air as a particles of ash, and have not yet
descended to earth. I've thought
that if I were a physicist I would like to study dust,
everything that is hovering in the air, dancing in sunlight,
getting into eyes and mouth, into the ice of Greenland
or between books on the shelf. Maybe one day
I would have met you,
Isaac, Mordechai, Sarah, Esther, Sulamith,
and whoever you were. Maybe even today I breathed in
something of you with this intoxicating spring air;
maybe a flake of you fell today on the white white
apple blossom in my grandfather's garden
or on my grey hair."

As my TBR goes, this isn't a particularly long lived book, dating only from December 25, 2018. However, I'm a huge Fassbinder fan and wanted to read this before watching his screen version of it with a Criterion subscription.



Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin translated from the German by Michael Hofmann (2018)
first published as Berlin Alexanderplatz in 1929

There's not much to like about Franz Biberkopf: former transport worker, housebreaker, pimp, manslaughterer. However, rather than evil personified our protagonist is a kind of Everyman after the Fall.

Berlin in 1928 was not an easy place for such as he. Fresh out of prison when first we meet him, Franz was faced with making his way in a city where no one cared about him or for him. Berlin itself is such an overpowering force in the novel that it becomes a character in its own right: seedy, pushy, never sleeping, always on edge. That's not far from what Franz must become to make his way in such an environment. Initially full of resolve to go straight, bit by bit he slipped further into the quagmire. He knew this was the fate of people like him, just not how that fate would be dealt:

We can predict what a pig will do when it reaches the sty. Only, a pig is better off than a human being, because it's put together from meat and lard and not much more can happen to it as long as it gets enough to eat: at most it might throw another litter, and at the end of its life there's the knife, which isn't particularly bad or upsetting either: before it notices anything - and what does a pig notice anyway - it's already kaput. Whereas a man, he's got eyes, and there's a lot going on inside him, and all of it mixed together: he's capable of thinking God knows what and he will think (his head is terrible) about what will happen to him.

This is an unusual novel, jumping from place to place, thought to thought, much like life itself. In his Afterword, the translator Michael Hofmann calls it jazz,

"... the real thing: weather reports, articles on nutrition, local news items, personal interest stories, letters from patients, all incorporated into the novel....The work-in-progress of the book matched the work- in- progress of the city... with its own duckboards and drillings and tunnellings and detours and demolitions and temporary closures and promised improvements.

Doblin was a psychiatrist with a working class caseload who knew Berliners well. His Berlin backdrop and its downtrodden citizens make it apparent that something must happen, that the city and by extension the country couldn't continue grinding its citizens up in the way his occasional abattoir reports reflected the fate of its four-legged animals. Franz and his friends may not have been able to articulate the political theories circulating at the time, but they knew each promised a better life. Where was it?

Berlin has another incarnation in this novel: the temptress, the great Whore of Babylon, deceiving people again and again. It would take much stronger characters than Franz's crew to resist and go straight. Yet in the end, Franz offers hope for redemption, something so many would be denied. Doblin himself knew better that to trust her, and left Berlin after the 1933 Reichstag fire.

_______________

A note on translation: Althought the back cover of this 2018 nyrb classics edition suggests this is the first translation into English ("In Michael Hofmann's extraordinary new translation, Alfred Doblin's masterpiece lives in English for the first time") there was in fact a 1931 translation by Eugene Jolas which Hofmann praises in his Afterword.

>129 SassyLassy: That’s an amazing book. Probably a nightmare to translate!
I like the jazz analogy. It reminded me of expressionist collages as well.

>130 thorold: Expressionist collages is a great way to think of it.

The cover, identified as Panorama, (Down with Liebknecht) 1919 by George Grosz, did suit the book

With regard to translation, Hofmann speaks of Berlin dialect and slang, saying of the slang, the common elements or tendencies were "...criminality, the self-conceit of the capital city, Yiddish, a humour both grinding and flippant, and a deliberately bad grammar, like the switching of accusative and dative". He says that Doblin, as a psychiatrist for working class patients, would have had a good ear for the language, but adds that he also used the 1925 version of Der richtige Berliner, a glossary of Berlin words and expressions. It would be something to experience it aurally, but my very basic German would be of no help whatsoever. I envy you reading it in the original.

I reread Go, Went, Gone for my book club, a very topical novel about refugees in Berlin. One of the book club members pointed to an excellent "New Yorker" article about the novel that was very insightful.

>131 SassyLassy: Just came across the silent film Berlin, die Symphonie der Grosstadt from 1927, by Walther Ruttmann, on YouTube. Lots of fantastic contemporary Berlin street footage: It’s a bit like Berlin Alexanderplatz without the Frans Biberkopf narrative. And a lot shorter than the Fassbinder.

>133 thorold: Thanks for that link. The footage is amazing and you can definitely see Fassbinder's inspiration in it. I have just finished Episode 4/13 of his opus. The cinematography has finally moved out of a brown world and introduced a bit more colour. I am impressed with how true to the book the script is. However, I am watching a dubbed version and feel that some of the humour does not come through, missing the cues in inflection and slang. I must say though, it is a great way to dredge up bits of forgotten German from school - tense and case structure are percolating up.

Are many of the buildings still there or were they bombed or later destroyed for newer one? Strange to watch something completely silent.

>134 SassyLassy: I don’t know Berlin well enough to recognise much for sure, but I’m sure the majority of buildings in the film have gone. The Anhalter Bahnhof where the train arrives in the opening scenes is just a facade now, for instance: the station was damaged by bombing, made redundant by partition, and demolished around the time the Wall was built.

Sorry, should have warned you about “completely silent” — that was the one I initially watched as well. There are a couple of other versions on YouTube that come with the original orchestral score, which is better for such noisy subject-matter.

I should watch the Fassbinder DVDs again: it’s one of those things where you’re so pleased to have got all the way through it the first time that you never dare pick it up again...

This doesn't really count here, as it was only added to my pile after the thread started. Anyway, spiphany tipped me off about a couple of semi-forgotten DDR novels of the eighties that have recently been reissued. Here's the first:

Das Windhahn-Syndrom : Roman (1983; reissued 2015) by Winfried Völlger (DDR, 1947- )

  

Winfried Völlger sounds like an interesting character: a puppeteer, children's author, and trained photographer, who gave up writing novels to become an artist and sculptor, then went back to university late in life to start again as a musician...

This novel had its genesis in a fable about a weathercock and a church mouse that Völlger wrote in 1978, which became a children's picture-book and was broadcast as a radio play. After years of hearing about the big wide world from the winds, the weathercock goes off on a journey to see for itself, and comes back astonished and rather bruised by its experiences; this inspires the mouse to pack up its belongings and set off to explore as well, and it is never seen again. In the novel, the role of the weathercock is taken by the ethnolinguist Dr Claudia M., who, after years of studying world languages from books, gets permission to go on a field-trip to the Himalayas but soon returns to East Germany, suffering from a mental illness that makes her fall into terrifying fits of helpless, uncontrollable laughter at unpredictable moments. The narrator of the book, Claudia's childhood best friend and her not-quite-boyfriend in adult life, who happens to be a junior doctor at the psychiatric clinic where she is being treated, writes an account of what he knows of Claudia's life in the hope that it will help to pin down the cause of the mysterious syndrome.

Of course, this turns out to be mostly a book about the (unnamed) narrator's own life, full of colourful anecdotes illustrating the experience of that generation of East Germans, born at the same time as the republic, who have never experienced anything outside the boundaries of their small, landlocked island in the middle of Europe. And it's a fascinating document of its time, as well as being funny and lively and touching. Völlger admires the generation who fought for socialism, as represented by the 1920s rebel and concentration camp survivor Professor Grün, but he shows us how Grün is now so trapped in the thick concrete of official orthodoxy that he shows mild surprise when students even pretend to be listening to his stupendously-dull lectures. He gives Claudia a high mark in her viva for his course because he's so impressed by the pullover she's crocheted during the lectures.

Of course, it was never going to be easy to publish a novel which — on a crude level — is about someone who can't think of the DDR without collapsing into helpless laughter, and which on a deeper level is about the the huge psychological and intellectual cost of living isolated from the real world, and which is full of satirical portraits of officials, including officials of the Ministry of State Security. The Stasi informer responsible for watching the author had already filed a negative report in 1981, before the ink on the manuscript had a chance to dry, but Völlger was obviously as experienced and cunning in his dealings with bureaucracy as his characters are, and by deploying a mix of tried and tested methods (sowing confusion, parallel approaches, going-to-the-top, and always having a plan B) he managed to circumvent the Stasi, but it took him two years. The 2015 reissue comes with an annex containing the author's own comic account of his struggle to get the book published, as well as a drier, more academic essay on the book and its place in DDR history by Kerstin Schmidt.

Since the novel was only published in 1983 and lost all topical relevance after 1989, it only had a fairly modest success — 40 000 copies sold in the DDR, almost unnoticed in the West. Which is a shame, because it's a lovely, modest, entertaining book, with a few inevitable rough edges (the satirical account of the feminist group is very 1980s), but still well worth a look.

And a first novel of a popular Dutch novelist I've never got around to. I brought this back from the charity shop in June 2017, on the recommendation of a fellow-volunteer:

Blauwe Maandagen (1994; Blue Mondays) by Arnon Grunberg (Netherlands, 1971- )

  

Most readers seem to say something like "I didn't enjoy this, but I can understand why other people like it" — I was going to say something like that as well, but I have a suspicion that the only person who really got any pleasure out of this book is Arnon Grunberg. It's clever, often witty, and written with careful attention to nuances of language, but it's about 270 pages too long(*).

It's the semi-autobiographical story of an unpleasant, self-hating teenager who grows up to have the sort of self-centered, wasteful adult life that unpleasant, self-hating teenagers fantasise about, spending his time drinking, hanging around with people who hang around in bars, and having sex with prostitutes, none of which seems to give him any pleasure at all. Maybe it's meant to be a witty illustration of how hard it is to be a rebel when nothing is really forbidden, but it felt more like a sustained whinge about how terrible life is from someone who had never bothered to try to do anything to change that.

---

(*) My copy has 271 pages of text

nvm

>137 thorold:

It's funny what different people would choose to highlight in the same texts. To me that's notable as a sardonic look at a post-Holocaust would-be "normal" Jewish Dutch life (but what does it mean, how can any Jewish life be "normal", post-Holocaust?)

The youngster (can't remember his name) is struggling with his sameness-yet-otherness, in that adolescently avoiding way in which he doesn't even want to name what sets him apart, except when he's attacking it more or less humorously (sarcastically) in other people (mother, father, other Jewish neighbours...)

I remember it as a fast read but also that I too preferred the earlier part to the later. The bit where he and a girlfriend run around the town, being "adult" in a restaurant, checking into a hotel together etc., that was still quite well done, I thought. After that it read like another story, written at a different time or something. Come to think of it, I read the German DTV edition so, hmmm, maybe it was a collection of stories/novellas...

I have so enjoyed this thread!!! Whats up for the next one?

nvm, just saw it

Russians Write Revolution I have so many of these!!

>139 LolaWalser: Yes, to be fair to Grunberg, I did enjoy the teenage part more than the "grown-up" part as well. Partly because the girlfriend Rosie seemed to be the only other really developed character apart from the narrator (he's called "Arnon Grunberg"!), and she drops out halfway through the book. If he'd stopped at that point I might almost have liked the book.

In Dutch it was presented as all one novel, and there's a lot of reference back to the teenage part in the adult part, so I don't think it was meant as stories, but it's not unlikely that he wrote it in several chunks at different times — that seems a plausible pattern for a first novel.

I take your point about doesn't even want to name what sets him apart — I hadn't thought of that while I was reading it, but it is true, he talks as though he could just as well have red hair or acne or be overweight or different in any one of the million ways that make young people feel awkward, but he makes sure we realise that he's in this anomalous situation of being the child of a Holocaust survivor, but born 25 years after the end of the war.

Ancestor Stones by Aminatta Forna was added to my TBR during Aug/Sept and I've just read it. I don't have much to say but it got 4.5 stars from me.

A collection of short stories, or a novel with five narrators, set mostly amongst the Temne in northern Sierra Leone, from 1926 to 1999, and following the lives of four women who are daughters of four of the eleven wives of a prosperous and very polygamous Muslim man. The autobiographical stories of these characters become a way of exploring Sierra Leonean history through the experiences of four differing women (although they are all born into what would be the hereditary landed gentry / upper middle class equivalent socioeconomic bracket and don't fall below home-owning middle class more than momentarily even during the civil war).

Motherhood: "She went, leaving behind everything, even her name. So I wrapped it in longing and kept it for her."

I was planning to read this back to back with My Father's Wives but I'm not very well and don't have the brain power for a literary-jazz-novel at the moment.

This one has only been on the TBR for about 18 months, but it's been sitting half-read for several weeks, so I thought it was time to finish it! I bought it after reading Inez and feeling I wanted to read something more Mexican by Fuentes. This is his most famous book, as Mexican as it gets:

La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962; The death of Artemio Cruz) by Carlos Fuentes (Mexico, 1928-2012)

  

Cruzamos el río a caballo.

The 71-year-old Artemio Cruz is on his deathbed: we look back at his life through a series of flashbacks, in some kind of arbitrary non-chronological order (and ending with the moment of his birth), each preceded by a stream-of-consciousness reflection by the old man in the sick-room, vaguely aware of what is going on around him but unable to communicate with his family and staff.

Cruz started as a minor player in the Mexican Revolution, a junior army officer from the back of beyond. By the end of his life, he has risen by a mixture of betrayal, corruption and a talent for survival to control a business empire, several key newspapers, and most of the Mexican government. Fuentes uses his career as a foundation for reflecting on the nature of revolutions in general and the Mexican one in particular, the way they are started by people with real wrongs to right on behalf of their communities, but somehow always end up being taken over by people with clear personal ambition and the will to power. He points out what he sees as weaknesses in the structure of postcolonial Mexican society that make it particularly susceptible to being exploited by people like Cruz.

But this is also an extended meditation on mortality, the way our lives seem to centre on outliving other people, but death always turns up sooner or later (Fuentes was only in his forties when he wrote this!). And it's a love-song to Mexico's landscape, culture, ethnic diversity and languages — at the very centre of the text is a long prose-poem celebrating the "Mexican verb" chingar (also the subject of a famous essay by Octavio Paz).

Like most "new novels" of the period, it's not an easy read, and it's often deliberately confusing, mixing very precisely timed and dated sections with passages where we are unsure where or when we are or who is talking. But there's a lot of very exciting, captivating language there, and it's obviously a book that will repay reading two or three times.

---

I don't usually like books with bullet-holes in the covers, but in this case it seems to make sense!

>142 spiralsheep: She went, leaving behind everything, even her name. So I wrapped it in longing and kept it for her."

Love this and now must get this book. found more quotes in the review below yours

Seeds
"I know it was after Haidera. But how long after, this I cannot tell you - a day, a month, a year; these measures of time change constantly when you are a child. Sometimes a day is longer than a year. Sometimes a month is shorter than an hour. I wish I could remember." (Mariama, "Stones")

"When a cat bites you, it's a sure sign somebody out there is trying to change your luck for the worse." (Hawa, "Fish")

"You can picture a person easily, no trouble - right up to the time when you try to remember their face. Ah, then you can sit and stare at a wall all day if you like. Until you give up. And suddenly, there they are, as clearly as if they were standing before you." (Hawa, "Fish")

Dreams
"But what is a legend if not a story so great it has survived the retelling of countless generations?" (Mariama, "Kassila the Sea God")

Secrets
"And now I look at the change in you and I feel happy. For I know what it is to forget who you are. To feel the pieces falling away. To look for yourself and see only the stares of strangers. To search for yourself in circles until you're exhausted. And I wonder if my story means something to you. If perhaps what happened to me, little by little, isn't the same you felt happening to you. The very thing that brought you back home." (Mariama, "Other Side of the Road")

"It was nothing dramatic. I let the men of the society come to me. I let it be known that I would consider relinquishing the birthright of womanhood in exchange for the liberty of a man. And in time they found me. After all, there are few women who would choose such a life. Naturally, there were those things I missed, mostly the company of other women. But I had made the life I dreamed of, and it suited me. I had taken my own path, neither right nor left." (Asana, "Mambore")

Consequences
"I know, it's the oldest story in the world. The fresh spirit who frees one that has been bottled too long." (Asana, "The Box")

"No, life isn't a straight line. It is a circle, whose slow and gentle bend we fail to spot, until we realise we are back where we started."

But i am more concerned about you not feeling well. get better soon!

>144 cindydavid4: Ancestor Stones is one of the most deeply humane books I've read for a while. The author wanted to tell us a story of (normally) fractured families in an (abnormally) fractured society but she didn't want to apportion blame, which is both too easy to do inadequately and too difficult to do usefully, so she told us about people instead, then it becomes obvious which forces are pushing people and societies to their breaking points without evoking hate against the individuals involved so we can learn from history instead of repeating it. And the well-written prose will just wash over most readers because they'll be so involved in the lives of these women. Recommended to anyone who has empathy for dysfunctional families / cultures / societies, i.e. all of us who have looked at ourselves and the world honestly.

> Thank you for the good wishes. I'm unlikely to be getting wholly well soon but I am being well looked after and won't be in debt when it's over due to my neighbours, local volunteers, and our National Health Service, so I'm very lucky. Today my 88 year old neighbour stopped me to ask if there's anything she can do, and on Friday a volunteer gave up three hours to drive me to appointments. I couldn't ask for more. And it's the best excuse to read brain candy now and then!

>145 spiralsheep: Best wishes from me too. Good that you have such thoughtful neighbours!

---

This is one I bought in May last year, it fits in with the Mediterranean theme of 2019 Q1:

Rue des voleurs (2012; Street of Thieves) by Mathias Énard‬ (France, 1972- )

  

Mathias Énard is a French novelist who teaches (taught?) Arabic and Persian literature at the university of Barcelona. I've read two of his other novels, Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d'éléphants, and the 2015 Goncourt winner Boussole. The three are all in some way about the confrontation between European and Islamic culture, but wildly different in form and style. He's also known for the one-sentence novel Zone, which I haven't read yet.

The narrator of Rue des Voleurs, Lakhdar, is a young Moroccan, disowned by his parents and trying to make his own way in the world, who finds himself on the fringes of the Arab Spring and the anti-austerity protests of the Spanish Indignados Movement. By accident of what he could buy cheaply in Tangier, he has acquired a passion for old French Polars, by preference Série noire titles by Manchette or Izzo. But he's also taught himself to appreciate Classical Arabic prose and poetry. In an ideal world, he would become one of the author's students when he gets to Barcelona; as it is, with capitalism apparently crumbling around him and Islam going mad, he finds himself living as an illegal migrant in the aptly-named Carrer Robadors, between drug-dealers and prostitutes.

Énard has fun with a complicated web of allusions to French, Spanish and American crime-stories, Ibn Battuta, Casanova, the Koran, the poems of Nizar Qabbani, the novels of Mohamed Choukri, and a great deal more — the Algeciras section seems to have some strong Joseph Conrad vibes, for instance. Énard may have a rather dark vision of the world we are living in, and it's clear from the start that it's going to end in disaster of some sort, but Lakhdar's ironic detective-story voice is always a joy to listen to, so it can't really be called a depressing book. Highly recommended.

Non-fiction but about the public images subcultures of people choose to create for themselves through clothing.

Fashion Tribes by Daniele Tamagni reads like a compilation of exhibition catalogues for his splendid photographs of street style from seven countries: dancers in South Africa, fashion models and beauty queens in Senegal, Habaneros in Cuba, cholitas and women wrestling professionals in Bolivia, stylish besuited street sapeurs from the Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville), punks in Myanmar (Burma), and metalheads in Botswana. Each section is introduced with a brief essay and then accompanied by quotes from the subjects of the photographs, who're allowed to speak for themselves, in addition to the essays written by professionals who range from informative insiders to passing journalists. The photo printing is good, the paper is thick, and both the dust jacket and the board cover underneath are printed with full colour glossy photos. Recommended.

If you want a taster of the delights in this book then use your favoured image search for cholitas or flying cholitas, and then congo sapeurs, and then acquire this book.