#1970Club: 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

17th October 2024 / / 7 Comments

Twice a year, Kaggsy and Simon host themed ‘club’ weeks dedicated to books from a particular year. Joining in has long been on my to-do list, and this week finally I’ve managed it, with the 1970 Club. 

84, Charing Cross Road was the address of a London second-hand bookshop, Marks and Company. The book of the same name is a collection of correspondence between the shop and Helene Hanff, a writer who lived in New York. The letters begin prosaically enough in 1949, with a note from Hanff accompanying an order, and a formal reply from the manager, Frank Doel. But, over the years, this blossoms into far more. 

Hanff’s voice in her letters is often spiky and forthright, and I can imagine the British bookshop staff finding it disconcerting. For example, here Hanff writes in 1950, wondering where her books are:

you leave me sitting here writing long margin notes in library books that don’t belong to me, some day they’ll find out i did it and take my library card away. 

I have made arrangements with the Easter bunny to bring you an Egg, he will get over there and find you have died of Inertia. 

As that second sentence suggests, though, Hanff was also often generous, sending the shop parcels of food and other supplies at a time when rationing was still on in Britain. Hanff’s evident warmth gains a response in kind: Frank’s letters become less formal, and Helene also hears from other shop staff, and even Frank’s family. 

Hanff’s correspondence with Marks and Co. lasts for twenty years, until Frank Doel’s sudden death. Reading the book now feels to me like a glimpse into an older way of selling and relating to books that, for better or worse, has now gone. There was one line of Hanff’s from 1950, though, which struck me as an unexpected echo of the future:

Why should I run all the way down to 17th St. to buy dirty, badly made books when I can buy clean, beautiful ones from you without leaving the typewriter?

I don’t know if Helene Hanff could have imagined how we’d be buying books fifty or more years in the future, but there’s a familiar impulse behind that comment all the same.

A Han Kang retrospective

11th October 2024 / / 2 Comments

I was really pleased to learn that Han Kang had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature yesterday. She has become one of my favourite writers that I’ve discovered during the lifetime of this blog. Indeed, she was the author of my ‘book of the year’ twice in a row. Her writing has a way of getting under my skin like few other authors’.

It also happens that I’ve reviewed all of Han’s books that have appeared in English translation to date, so this seems a good time to look back on what I thought of them. Here, then, are the links to my posts on Han Kang’s work:

  • The Vegetarian (2007, tr. Deborah Smith 2015) – reviewed for Shiny New Books.
  • Human Acts (2014, tr. Deborah Smith 2016) – reviewed on the blog.
  • From 2016, a few thoughts on Han Kang, Lionel Shriver, and a writer’s relationship to their material.
  • The White Book (2016, tr. Deborah Smith 2017) – reviewed on the blog.
  • Greek Lessons (2011, tr. Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won 2023) – reviewed for Shiny New Books.

A Challenge of Empathy: Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata (tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori)

29th August 2024 / / 0 Comments

This review was first published at Splice in October 2018.

***

Meet Keiko Furukura. She has always found it difficult to conform to what her family and wider society consider “normal”. She once stopped a fight between a group of boys at primary school by hitting one of them over the head with a spade. She couldn’t understand what was wrong with this: “Everyone was saying to stop them, so that’s what I did,” she told her teachers. Throughout the rest of her childhood, Keiko kept her head down, saying no more than she had to — and the adults around her didn’t think that was normal, either. It wasn’t until she got a job at the Hiiromachi Station Smile Mart in 1998, whilst at university, that she felt she had finally found her place in the world. Eighteen years later, she’s still there.

Convenience Store Woman is Sayaka Murata’s tenth novel, but the first to appear in English (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori). The title may appear prosaic, but it points towards the essence of Keiko’s situation by combining place and person to suggest something greater than the sum of both. Keiko really does live and breathe her job. The store’s sounds reverberate through her head as she falls asleep at night, and she imagines the cells of her body energised at the prospect of being there. Those cells are also made up of food from the convenience store because that’s all Keiko eats, and the thought of this makes her “feel like I’m as much a part of the store as the magazine racks or the coffee machine.”

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Women in Translation Month: Jellyfish Have No Ears by Adèle Rosenfeld (tr. Jeffrey Zuckerman)

14th August 2024 / / 0 Comments

Meet Louise: she has used a hearing aid since childhood, but her ability to hear has now deteriorated so much that she faces the choice of whether to have a cochlear implant. The issue for her is that, if she does, she’ll lose what ‘natural’ hearing she already has, and the sound she hears will be mediated entirely through an electronic device. Louise wonders if that will change her as a person. Adèle Rosenfeld’s debut novel explores how Louise confronts the different possibilities.

Louise is depicted as effectively living between two worlds: not able to get by easily in hearing society, but also unable to embrace Deaf culture. The way she hears is also on a continuum, sometimes straightforwardly intelligible, but more often a fluid experience of sound that leans towards the abstract:

At the supermarket, the voices blurred into a single echo. An epidemic of sorts had spread across all sound: the jam jars that the stock boy was shelving chattered; the product codes’ beeps at the checkout seeped into the women’s stressed syllables like fantastical outbursts; the deli-counter machine let out a hoarse cough. At the checkout, I overheard “bulgur” or maybe “burer”. To a “you” – static – “there,” I answered yes twice without understanding, replied no three times without understanding, and finally declared “I don’t know,” still without understanding. 

Translated from French by Jeffrey Zuckerman

This experience extends to how Louise relates to other people. The other characters tend to feel as though they’re at arm’s length, even those closest to Louise, because she has to stretch to reach them. She imagines some characters, such as a soldier whose story springs forth from the words in an auditory test – and they become no less (or more) important to Louise’s experience of the world than ‘real’ people (if the reader can be sure which characters are real, that is).

For me, Louise’s dilemma is perhaps best summed up in the person of Thomas, her lover. On the one hand, he’s willing – more so than any other character – to accommodate Louise’s needs and desires; for example, he adjusts a music recording to make it more accessible to her hearing profile. On the other hand, Thomas is much more enthusiastic about the idea of a cochlear implant than she is. So, would Louise rather engage with the world from here, or step over there into the unknown? Either way, her journey is absorbing.

Jellyfish Have No Ears is published by MacLehose Press in the UK and Graywolf Press in the US.

Scratch Books: The Unreliable Nature Writer by Claire Carroll

29th July 2024 / / 0 Comments

The protagonist of Claire Carroll’s story ‘Paddling Pool’ doesn’t really need to buy a paddling pool. But there’s nothing stopping that person from doing so – besides, it’s hot, and there’s the gentle voice of the narrator reassuring the protagonist that their choices are fine in the moment, even if the long-term consequences might be severe:

You might, years later, starving, dragging yourself along the beach in the unbearable heat, you might discover a fish, partially dried out on the orange sand. Peeling away at its skin, you might find microscopic parts of your paddling pool inside. But there’s no way you’ll ever be able to tell if it’s the same one, so don’t worry about that now.

That quotation was a powerful moment for me among a set of striking tales in The Unreliable Nature Writer (which is the first single-author collection from Scratch Books). Broadly, Carroll’s main theme is the relationship between humanity and nature, examined from a variety of angles. 

Some of the stories give form to a (perceived) distance between the human world and the natural, and look at what may fill the gap. For example, the narrator of ‘There Or Not There’ works on an advertising installation that places indoor objects among a patch of real woodland. Their work is supposed to be environmentally friendly, but it might have killed some nesting birds. The narrator’s doubts and self-reassurances give this piece its sharp edge. 

‘Re: Wreck Event’ creates uncertainty by giving two different versions of what happened on the day a couple split up. One partner writes an account which the other one annotates with footnotes, undermining most of the key details. The dead and dying birds on the ground that day become just another piece of this contested reality.

Carroll also ventures into the future (or sideways in reality) in some of her stories. ‘Dream Reading: On Higher Ground’ depicts extreme bureaucracy as housing applicants are chosen according to how well they describe their dreams – but also a raw euphoria at being in touch with nature. ‘The Sheer Delight of What You May Become’ juxtaposes a formal process for land to be acquired and returned to nature with the reality of what happens to the people displaced from that land. The interests of humans and nature are held in tension – which is what so often animates Carroll’s stories. 

Galley Beggar Press: Mary and the Rabbit Dream by Noémi Kiss-Deáki

25th July 2024 / / 0 Comments

Noémi Kiss-Deáki is a writer from Åland who writes fiction in English. Galley Beggar Press have recently published her debut novel, which is inspired by the story of Mary Toft, a poor eighteenth-century Englishwoman who (for a time) was believed to have given birth to rabbits. It’s a gem of a book.

Godalming, 1726: the cloth trade is in decline as more and more pasture land is given over to rabbit farming, benefiting the rich (who can afford to eat rabbit) over poor people who rely on the sale of cloth. In the midst of this, one Ann Toft devises a plan: using the parts of a dead rabbit, she will create the charade that her daughter-in-law Mary can give birth to the animals. Ann’s thinking is that this will be a new source of power – if a poor person has such access to a commodity so valued by the rich, then the rich will have to take notice.

Mary herself doesn’t have much say in the matter, being so far down the ladder even in her community of women:

One might imagine that such a community of women, where one is never alone, where one shares in all the work and always can rely on an extra pair of hands, could perhaps be cosy and intimate.

It is not cosy and intimate.

Instead, the community of women is fraught and permeated with tensions and hierarchies and privileges, tightly guarded.

Mary Toft has no privileges.

Ann Toft has all the privileges, even in such a household, a household in the town quarters inhabited by the poorest of the poorest.

Kiss-Deáki’s prose is full of rhythm and repetition like this, which has the effect of foregrounding the narrative frame that holds her characters. This reflects the way they’re held in position by society: Mary, for example, is caught in the ebb and flow of Ann and the other women around her. The same is true for others, because there’s always someone else further up the social hierarchy. Ann persuades local doctor John Howard to visit, in order to add credence to her claims for Mary. But he soon takes charge of matters to pursue his own agenda – and loses control in turn when three London medical men get involved. Even they don’t have ultimate authority, though, as Kiss-Deáki’s narrator comments on how much the characters don’t yet know.

Still, it all comes back to Mary Toft, who is the centre of the novel even as she’s at the bottom of its society. Things happen to her for most of the book, but Kiss-Deáki shows how Mary eventually gains her voice – in a way that shakes the story to the ground, while at the same time leaving the broader structures undisturbed.

Peirene Press: Un Amor by Sara Mesa (tr. Katie Whittemore)

11th July 2024 / / 2 Comments

There’s a Spanish novel in the spotlight today, for Stu’s Spanish and Portuguese Lit Month. Un Amor is by the same author (and translator) as Four by Four, which I reviewed for European Literature Network a few years ago.

Our narrator, Nat, is a translator who has left the city for a small village named La Escapa (it remains to be seen how much of an escape this actually is). It’s the kind of place where everyone knows everyone else, though to Nat, its reality still feels uncertain:

La Escapa’s borders are blurry, and even though there is a relatively compact cluster of small houses – right where hers is – other buildings are scattered further away, some inhabited and others not. From the outside, Nat can’t tell whether they are homes or barns, if there are people inside or just livestock.

Translated from Spanish by Katie Whittemore

Nat’s landlord is antagonistic, to the point that she would rather not involve him when any repairs are needed. So, when her roof leaks, Nat finds herself turning to one of her neighbours, known locally as “the German”. He has offered to repair her roof “if you let me inside you for a little while”. 

At first, this is easy to refuse, but eventually Nat talks herself into it as a straightforward transaction. What follows is an escalation of Nat’s relationship with the German, with Nat questioning herself and finding that maybe she doesn’t know herself as well as she thought:

Nat would like to ask what she means to him. She would like to say that, if everything started by chance – a chance as petty, as trivial, as a leaky roof – then she doesn’t get why they keep seeing each other, since their agreement was fulfilled. She knows it’s ridiculous but, deep down, she would like to be the chosen one, to have been seduced after careful planning.

The blurriness of place that Nat perceived on moving to La Escapa manifests again as uncertainty over the cause of her own actions. Mesa raises the stakes as her novel progresses, with Nat searching further in herself as the village takes more notice, leading to a crescendo… and to say any more than that would be telling. 

Un Amor is published by Peirene Press.

all this here, now by Anna Stern (tr. Damion Searls): a map of friendship

12th June 2024 / / 0 Comments

It begins with a stark two-line paragraph: “ananke dies on a winter monday, in the afternoon, between four and five o’clock.”

The ramifications of this event spiral out across the rest of the novel, in a series of vignettes from the lives of ananke, the narrator, and their friends: present and future on the left-hand pages, past on the right. We get a sense of how close these people are, how exhilarating their lives together could be:

fred and ananke are already on the street waiting for you when you ride your bikes across the yard and down the driveway, and along the way vienna and cato join too: a gang, your gang. you get goosebumps racing down the hill towards the harbour: it’s early, it’s cold though the day is going to be hot: the first summery day after a grey, wet spring. 

Translated from German by Damion Searls

There are no capital letters in this novel, no gender pronouns attached to the main characters – and the names we know them by are, it is implied, names given among the group. The effect of these together is that the characters recede as individuals in the reader’s view, and the precise detail of their relationship to each other is not always apparent. At the same time, the sense of being in fabric of the gang grows – what matters is the moment. 

The narrator emphasises that, for them, these bonds of shared experience count for more than the circumstances of one’s birth:

family is not blood, not genes. family is memories, it’s tears blending together on tired cheeks; family is what you make of it. what you let be family.

In its final section, Stern’s novel takes a turn, as the vignettes give way to a forward narrative, when the characters decide to retrieve ananke’s ashes. This is where the group’s friendship is tested as never before, because this plan may be too much for the unspoken consensus that has existed between them – and yet discussing any difference of opinion might fracture their relationship beyond repair. all this here, now maps the contours of this group’s friendship, and how the landscape is changed by ananke’s loss. 

all this here, now is published by Lolli Editions.

Leonard Cohen, a Novel by Jeffrey Lewis: haunted by possibility

30th May 2024 / / 0 Comments

No, it’s not that Leonard Cohen. This Leonard Cohen is an aspiring songwriter in the 1960s, or maybe he’s the butt of a joke before he has even drawn breath. His ambition is to write a song as good as one by his namesake – or maybe just to step out of the shadow of the ‘other’ Leonard Cohen.

Leonard’s story unfolds in third-person chapters and first-person letters written directly to the more famous Cohen. In 1968, Leonard travels with a group of friends to an anonymous Greek island, where he falls in love with a local girl named Daphne. This is depicted as sudden, mysterious, and all-consuming:

Then some part of him touched some part of her, his hip or hers, his hand, her shoulder, so that he could feel the restless warmth that in the morning had sweated through her clothes. Neither of them could have said who turned first. They kissed because they were there or for a hundred other reasons. You can always come up with reasons, he thought, or she thought. 

Leonard’s relationship with Daphne comes to define his life, but so does the uncertainty running through that quotation. His friends are keen to leave the island, but Daphne wants him to stay. Leonard leaves for a time, and when he returns, he finds that Daphne has apparently died, with a laurel tree (as in the myth of Apollo and Daphne) now growing on ‘their’ cliff. Leonard imagines that he hears Daphne’s voice coming from the tree, but who is to say that it’s not just the breeze?

Time moves on, with Leonard returning to the US, becoming a lawyer, marrying, bringing up two children, and growing old… He lives an entire life, but still ultimately finds himself drawn back to that island, and the laurel tree.

What really animates Jeffrey Lewis’s novel for me is the constant sense of some other version of life being just over there, beyond reach. There’s the knowledge that the ‘other’ Leonard Cohen is out there living his own life, unaware of ‘our’ Leonard. What might it be like to live without other people having a famous reference point as soon as you give your name? What if Daphne had lived, what if she still lives, what if she became that tree? What if it all happened to her instead of Leonard? 

This novel is not a kaleidoscope of possible worlds. In the end, as in life, there is just the one world, for better or worse. But it is a novel – a life, a reading – haunted by possibility. “After Daphne,” Leonard writes to Cohen, “the only stories I came to believe were the ones that could go one way or the other.”

Leonard Cohen is published by Haus Publishing.

MacLehose Press: A Perfect Day to Be Alone by Nanae Aoyama (tr. Jesse Kirkwood)

28th May 2024 / / 0 Comments

Twenty-year-old Chizu is feeling disaffected enough when her mother leaves for a job in China. She becomes even more so when she finds out who she’s been sent to live with: seventy-year-old Ginko, a distant relative who might as well be a stranger. “She looks like she’s barely got a week to live,” thinks Chizu. 

Nanae Aoyama’s short novel (originally published in Japanese in 2007) unfolds over the course of a year. It’s divided into sections according to the seasons, giving the impression of a cycle rather than relentless forward momentum – a period of slow change and renewal. 

Chizu is unsure how she wants to be in life, which leads her to put emotional distance between herself and others:

I’d have liked to stay young, to lead a quiet life sheltered from all the drama of the world. But it seemed that wasn’t an option. I was braced for my fair share of hardship. I wanted to try being an ordinary person, living an ordinary life. I wanted to become as thick-skinned as possible, to turn myself into someone who could survive anything.

Translated from Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood

During the novel’s year, Chizu drifts in and out of relationships and jobs. She seems surprised to discover that Ginko has a life, even love, of her own. But living with Ginko changes Chizu. It’s not so much that the two become close, more that seeing Ginko live her life opens space for Chizu to view her own life differently. When the year turns, there is finally a sense that Chizu can move forward positively. 

Published by MacLehose Press.

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