Category: Catalan

Three new reviews: White, Mayo, Voetmann

29th April 2023 / / 0 Comments

Today’s post is rounding up a few reviews I’ve had published elsewhere. First off is an Irish novel from Tramp Press, Where I End by Sophie White, which I’ve reviewed here for Strange Horizons. This is the tale of Aoileann, who lives an isolated existence looking after her bedridden mother. It’s not until an artist and her baby son visit Aoileann’s island that she realises what she’s been missing in terms of human connection. What particularly struck me about White’s novel is the way it creates its own little fairytale horror world without ever invoking the supernatural. Aoileann becomes both a source and victim of horror in an intimate piece of work.

The European Literature Network has recently launched The Spanish Riveter, the latest issue of its occasional magazine on European writing. This one has almost 300 pages of articles, extracts and reviews of translated literature from Spain – including a review of mine. I’m looking at a Catalan novel from 3TimesRebel Press: The Carnivorous Plant by Andrea Mayo (tr. Laura McGloughlin). It tells of an abusive relationship, and challenges the reader to understand what it was like for the protagonist, and why she stayed in that situation. The Spanish Riveter is available as a PDF here; you’ll find my review on page 91.

My last stop is Denmark, and Awake by Harald Voetmann (tr. Joanne Sorgenfri Ottosen, pub. Lolli Editions). This is a novel about Pliny the Elder, and his attempt to catalogue the world and its knowledge in his Naturalis Historia. Voetmann brings Pliny’s world to life, and explores the limits of what he could achieve. I’ve reviewed this one for European Literature Network in their regular review section here.

#InternationalBooker2023: Boulder by Eva Baltasar (tr. Julia Sanches)

11th April 2023 / / 1 Comment

Another new language for the International Booker: this is the first nominee translated from Catalan. It’s short and intense, which are both things I like. Baltasar’s narrator is an itinerant cook. She’s not one for settling down, and pours her energy into her work.

Things change when she finds on a merchant ship and meets Samsa, a geologist who nicknames her Boulder. Samsa gets a job in Iceland and the pair’s relationship moves beyond the physical. But Samsa is looking for the kind of orderly life which is ultimately anathema to the narrator. Then Samsa announces that she wants to have a baby, subsequently giving birth to Tinna. At each stage, Boulder finds herself considering what she really wants and how to relate to Samsa (and Tinna).

Baltasar’s novel is dense with imagery, which brings you close to the narrator:

My hands are knives, basting brushes, squeezers. I use them to manipulate food and also plunge them inside my head, where they braise the desire that occupies and perishes me. Desire cannot be killed, it can only be fermented and rocked to sleep. I cook to save myself. I cook ceaselessly. Tinna’s laughter mixes like foam into peaks of sugar and egg whites. She plays hide-and-seek and shrieks with excitement when Samsa pretends that she can’t find her and calls me over. Her voice trickles along the kitchen living-room floors, like a vinegar that can bleach me and break me up.

Translation from Catalan by Julia Sanches

Boulder finds her way in time, though it may not be quite where she anticipated. To be with her on the journey is quite something.

Published by And Other Stories.

Click here to read my other posts on the 2023 International Booker Prize.

Death in Spring – Mercè Rodoreda

30th July 2018 / / 1 Comment

Mercè Rodoreda (1908-83) was a new name to me, but more or less everything I’ve read about her says that she’s widely considered to be the foremost Catalan writer of the 20th century. Death in Spring was originally published posthumously, in 1986. Martha Tennent’s English translation was published in the US by Open Letter Books, and now it has been issued by Penguin in the UK as first in a series called Penguin European Writers.

Our narrator is a boy living in a mountain village with a number of strange, sometimes brutal customs: every year, a man is chosen to swim under the village in order to check that it will not be washed away by melting snow; this may result in disfigurement or death if the man is dashed against the rocks. Pregnant women are blindfolded from fear that their unborn children will take on the appearance of any men the women may see. When a villager nears death, they are sealed inside a tree with cement poured down their throat; this happens to the narrator’s father towards the start of the book.

Images of death, decay and decline run through Rodoreda’s novel, along with a vivid sense of the natural world, all written in calm and measured prose. Here, for example, is a description of autumn arriving in the village:

The sickly stems that had held the leaves all summer were now devoid of water, and they thudded to the ground as well. The leaves were blown down and swept away. We waited for the last to drop so we could rake them into piles and set fire to them. The fire made them scream. They screamed in a low voice, whistled even lower, and rose in columns of blue smoke. The smell of burnt leaves pervaded houses and air. The air was filled with the cessation of being.

The cover blurb notes that Death in Spring can be read as an “allegory for life under dictatorship”, and I can absolutely see that: those ritualistic customs, for example, have a damaging hold over the village, and the only person who seems to understand this (or simply to be willing to speak against them) is a prisoner. Equally, though, the novel is a powerful portrait of an individual trying to find his way through life in a place where there’s excessive direction and little guidance.

Book details

Death in Spring (1986) by Mercè Rodoreda, tr. Martha Tennent (2009), Penguin, 150 pages, paperback (source: personal copy).

From the Archives: Spanish Lit

3rd July 2016 / / 0 Comments

Today, for Spanish Lit Month, a look back through my archives. This is a list of all my reviews of books translated from the languages of Spain, in reverse order of posting. It’s not a huge number (in the early years of this blog, I didn’t read many translations), but I wanted to link to everything in one place. So – positive or negative, short or long – it’s all here. Just to clarify a few things: all books are translated from Spanish unless otherwise indicated; some links go to external websites; and anything labelled ‘note’ is a few lineswithin a longer round-up post.

Maria Barbal, Stone in a Landslide (1985/2010)

28th July 2010 / / 6 Comments

“I feel like a stone after a landslide. If someone or something stirs it, I’ll come tumbling down with the others. If nothing comes near, I’ll be here, still, for days and days…” (89)

Maria Barbal’s Stone in a Landslide (first published in Catalan in 1985, and now available in English for the first time, thanks to Peirene Press) is the life story of Conxa, who is sent away as a child, in the early years of the twentieth century, to live with and work for her aunt and uncle. The years pass, she falls in love with a young man named Jaume, they marry and have children – and then their lives are disrupted by the Spanish Civil War. But, of course, life continues beyond even this.

Like Laura McGloughlin’s and Paul Mitchell’s translation (which has the kind of precise simplicity that deflects attention away from it), Conxa’s life both is and isn’t as ordinary as it appears, in the sense that all lives can be – and are, in their own way – extraordinary at times, just as a simple stone can be part of an extraordinary landslide. Conxa’s life is one lived largely for, and in relation to, other people: right at the start, she is sent away from home because there isn’t enough room for her in the house; when she falls in love with Jaume, she becomes a different person and defines herself by him (“Now I could only be Jaume’s Conxa” [42]); growing old comes almost as a surprise to Conxa, because she has been so used to seeing her children grow, and suddenly they’re adults.

What I find most striking about Stone in a Landslide is the way that key historical events are experienced (or not, as the case may be) through the domesticity of Conxa’s existence; Jaume is political, but Conxa has no knowledge or interest, and it’s a rude awakening for her when history finally intrudes on her life.

Stone in a Landslide is a quiet study of a life, a life whose treasures vanish all too soon, before the woman living it fully grasped what they were. But the book remains, and its treasures are plain to see.

Elsewhere
Some other reviews of Stone in a Landslide: Winstonsdad; Novel Insights; A Common Reader.
Peirene Press

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