Tag: Reviews

Fish Soup – Margarita García Robayo

31st August 2018 / / 5 Comments

Here’s one last book for Spanish and Portuguese Literature Months and Women in Translation Month. It’s the English-language debut of Colombian writer Margarita García Robayo: a compendium of short fiction translated by Charlotte Coombe and published by Edinburgh-based Charco Press, who specialise in Latin American literature. It’s a wonderfully sardonic set of stories.

Fish Soup is bookended by two novellas. In the first, Waiting for a Hurricane, a young woman longs to leave her home by the sea for… well, something more (“you realise nothing’s going to arrive and you’ll have to go looking for it instead,” she reflects). The narrator embarks on a series of relationships which she hopes will facilitate an escape (for example, she takes a job as an air hostess, then becomes involved with the Captain), but doesn’t appreciate what impact all this is having on her family, her lovers, and herself.

The closing Sexual Education is previously unpublished. It’s narrated by a student at a Catholic school who is part of a group taking a new abstinence class in place of standard sex education. However, what she’s being taught in class is rather different from what’s going on among her social group. For example, one girl is being persuaded by an older boy that a certain sexual position is not sinful, but actually allowed by the catechism. The narrator isn’t fooled:

The darkest mysteries – the Holy Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, the Holy Grail – all became much clearer after being doctored by some con man who wanted something in return: a bag of coins, divine grace, Karina’s ass. It was all the same.

As so often in García Robayo’s stories, this bitter humour sits alongside something much darker. If Waiting for the Hurricane is the story of someone who refuses to see what she’s doing to herself and the world around her, the protagonist of Sexual Education is forced to question herself deeply.

Between the two novellas in Fish Soup is a collection of seven short stories with the overall title Worse Things. These pieces frequently feature protagonists who are distanced from life in some way; the stories then often lead to a point of change (or at least reflection). So, for example, in ‘You Are Here’, news of an accident at the airport and an awkward conversation with a young woman at his hotel give a businessman cause to face up to the emptiness in his life. In ‘Better Than Me’, an academic tries to persuade his estranged daughter to let him visit her; it’s a case of closely examining his life to find what might enable him to speak to her. In ‘Like a Pariah’, a woman with cancer has retreated to an old country house to convalesce, but her relationships with others may prove as difficult to handle (if not more so) than any illness.

There’s a lot to like in Fish Soup, and a distinctive voice to explore. I’m already looking forward to re-reading it.

Book details

Fish Soup (2012-6) by Margarita García Robayo, tr. Charlotte Coombe (2018), Charco Press, 212 pages, paperback (source: personal copy).

The Last Children of Tokyo – Yoko Tawada

24th August 2018 / / 4 Comments

Yoko Tawada is a Japanese writer living in Germany, who writes in both German and (as is the case with this book) Japanese. The Last Children of Tokyo is set some time after a catastrophe has ruined at least part of the world. Japan has isolated itself, with even foreign words largely banned. Children are weak and sickly, while the old may yet live on and on: someone in their seventies is merely ‘young-elderly’. Yoshiro is a hundred years old, but there is no sense that he may be reaching the end of his road:

The years are recorded in rings inside the trunk of a tree, but how was time recorded in his own body? Time didn’t spread out gradually, ring after ring, nor was it lined up neatly in a row; could it just be a disorderly pile, like the inside of a drawer no one ever bothers to straighten?

(translation by Margaret Mitsutani)

Yoshiro’s main concern in life is to care for his great-grandson Mumei, a boy who loves his Illustrated Guide to Animals, even though he’ll never see many of the creatures depicted in it (that’s if they’re still around). Though Yoshiro would like to look after Mumei’s health, the information on child health changes so fast these days that he feels it’s hardly worth keeping up: “Unable to foresee what sort of fate awaited Mumei in the future, Yoshiro kept his eyes open, taking each day as it came, hoping the present wouldn’t crumble under his feet.” The Last Children of Tokyo is in large part a portrait of Yoshiro skating along on the surface of that fragile present (not just with Mumei, but also with the two generations of his family between).

The world of Tawada’s novel is strange and striking: giant mutant dandelions grow rampant, and certain words have been replaced with more palatable expressions (orphans, for example, are now referred to as “independent children”). This world exists at a point where the reader’s ability to rationalise what may have happened between now and then is balanced finely against the characters’ fading knowledge. It leaves the reader in the same precarious position as Yoshiro: we can’t envision the edges of Tawada’s world, and therefore can’t be certain of where its story will lead. Things are indeed grim, but there may be hope… if you know where to look.

Book details

The Last Children of Tokyo (2014) by Yoko Tawada, tr. Margaret Mitsutani (2017), Portobello Books, 140 pages, paperback (source: review copy).

The US edition of this book is titled The Emissary and published by New Directions.

El Hacho – Luis Carrasco

16th August 2018 / / 0 Comments

Today’s book is a debut in two senses: the first novel by Gloucestershire-based writer Luis Carrasco, and the first title from publisher Époque Press. For both of them, it’s a fine start.

El Hacho – “the beacon” – is the Andalusian mountain on whose slopes Curro has spent his life farming olives. But times are tough: a prolonged drought threatens to ruin the current crop. Curro’s brother Jose-Marie is in favour of selling off El Hacho for its stone to be quarried – but he’s never been involved in the family farm, doesn’t understand the soul of the place. As Curro says to his brother:

You might say I lack ambition but that land is an extension of my own body. I could no more leave it than tear the tongue from my mouth. When I work it I stir the memory of our people into the fragile dust and every drop of sweat, every callous on my hand and groan in my joints is theirs as well as mine. To abandon it would be to abandon myself and that I cannot do.

El Hacho, then, is in part a tale of tradition versus modernity, but it does not come across as sentimental. Carrasco is clear on what the personal costs to Curro of selling the mountain would be, but also on the price he pays for staying. The story of El Hacho’s drought also becomes the personal story of Curro’s wish for life to go on as it has.

There is a certain timeless quality to El Hacho: it’s not completely out of time, but there’s not much to place it in a specific period. The story reads pretty much as though it could take place at any point over (say) the last sixty years. So, as well as being the tale of one particular farmer, El Hacho feels emblematic of a story that could play out over and over again, in many different times or places.

Book details

El Hacho (2018) by Luis Carrasco, Époque Press, 116 pages, paperback (source: review copy).

The Lady Killer – Masako Togawa

10th August 2018 / / 2 Comments

Next up for Women in Translation Month, some classic Japanese crime fiction. Masako Togawa (1931-2016) sounds a fascinating character: according to this article on the publisher’s website, she was a singer, actress, nightclub owner, LGBT icon – and, of course, a writer. The Lady Killer, published in 1963, was Togawa’s second novel, recently republished by Pushkin Vertigo.

By day, Ichiro Honda works as a computer specialist in Tokyo. At weekends, he visits his wife in Osaka. However, on weekday evenings, he lives a secret life seducing women in Tokyo’s bars and clubs. He keeps a record of his exploits in a notebook he calls “The Huntsman’s Log”, and uses “shot her dead” as a chilling euphemism:

To him, women were no more than tinplate targets at a shooting gallery in a fair. The man pulls the trigger, the woman falls, but after all they are made of tinplate and will rise again. So he could go on shooting to his heart’s content.

Until such time as the target turned out not to be tin and blood would be shed…

(translation by Simon Grove)

Ichiro thinks he’s untouchable, but then things start to go wrong. One after another, three of his victims are found dead, apparently murdered, and the evidence points to him. But the reader knows something that Ichiro doesn’t: a year ago, another of his victims killed herself, and her sister has been asking questions about him. It seems that she is out to frame him.

The Lady Killer is interestingly structured: the first half deals with Ichiro and the circumstances leading to his arrest; the second half focuses on the lawyers representing him in his appeal against the conviction. So we get a 360° view of the whole affair: the unfolding of the trap, and then the attempt to take it apart. Best of all is that, even when you think you know just where the book is headed… you don’t.

There’s a wonderful atmosphere to The Lady Killer, which comes less from particular descriptions than the suppleness with which Togawa moves her novel through its world. There is a sense of living, breathing places beyond the immediate action. And the tension in reading The Lady Killer is increased by the ambiguous nature of Ichiro Honda: he has been wronged, but he’s also a predator, so it’s up to individual readers to decide whether they wish him to be exonerated. Either way, Togawa’s book is thoroughly enjoyable.

Elsewhere

An insightful review of The Lady Killer by James Kidd in the South China Morning Post Magazine.

Book details

The Lady Killer (1963) by Masako Togawa, tr. Simon Grove (1985), Pushkin Vertigo, 222 pages, paperback (source: review copy).

I Didn’t Talk – Beatriz Bracher

7th August 2018 / / 0 Comments

“Stories are the shape we give things to pass the time on the bus, in line at the bank, at the bakery counter,” says Gustavo, the protagonist of I Didn’t Talk (the first novel by Brazilian writer Beatriz Bracher to appear in English translation, and the latest selection from the Asymptote Book Club). Gustavo would like to tell his story, if it could exist as a thought without word, without shape. He is a professor of education, sorting through his papers as he prepares to retire. In 1970, he was arrested and tortured under the military dictatorship, along with his brother-in-law Armando, who was killed. Gustavo is adamant that he did not give Armando up: he didn’t talk.

But he’s talking now. He has been introduced to a young woman, Cecília, who is writing a novel set at the time of the dictatorship, and would like to interview him as part of her research. Gustavo reflects on the nature of that research:

After these interviews she’ll know more about the period than the people who lived through it. But, as under torture, they each will tell her only what doesn’t threaten, what doesn’t weigh on their present. And so, perhaps it’s not possible to have a collective return to what happened, only an individual one.

(translation by Adam Morris)

So, any story that Cecília tells about that time will necessarily be a composite put together from fragments. There are also other kinds of shifting, partial stories surrounding Gustavo, such as the unpublished autobiographical novel by his brother José, which deviates from his own recollections. Furthermore, Gustavo’s story as he tells it is itself a composite, switching back and forth (seemingly as whim takes him) between personal memories, accounts of the present, and commentary on language and education.

By novel’s end, Gustavo has told a story of himself, shapeless as it might seem to him. In the process, he examines what it is to have lived through his experiences, and confronts the implications of seeking not to rock the boat in life subsequently. It feels a little glib to end on a pun and say that I Didn’t Talk speaks eloquently, but… that’s what the book does. This is a strong English-language debut from Bracher; I hope there is more to come.

Book details

I Didn’t Talk (2004) by Beatriz Bracher, tr. Adam Morris (2018), New Directions, 149 pages, paperback (source: personal copy).

The White Book – Han Kang

1st August 2018 / / 3 Comments

August is Women in Translation Month (established by Meytal from Biblibio), and I have a few books lined up to read (some of which will also fit into Spanish and Portuguese Lit Months). We’ll see what I can get through, anyway. I thought I would start with a book that I didn’t manage to review during this year’s Man Booker International Prize shadowing.

Han Kang has swiftly become one of my favourite writers (she topped my “books of the year” list two years running, after all). The White Book is a little different from The Vegetarian and Human Acts, more abstract. It’s structured as a series of vignettes on white things, from swaddling bands to salt, frost to light and paper. There are images of a white city, destroyed during the Second World War and then rebuilt (though not named, this city is Warsaw, where Han spent time on a writer’s residency).

There is also a certain figure haunting this novel: Han’s narrator (a version of the author herself) describes how her mother’s first child, a girl, died only a couple of hours after being born:

Person who begins only now to breathe, a first filling-up of the lungs. Person who does not know who they are, where they are, what has just begun.

(translation by Deborah Smith)

The narrator begins to think of this dead sister as she walks the white city. She imagines a life for her, which is what fills the longest section of the book:

There are times when the crisp white of freshly laundered bed linen can seem to speak. When the pure-cotton fabric grazes her bare flesh, just there, it seems to tell her something. You are a noble person. Your sleep is clean, and the fact of your living is nothing to be ashamed of.

Throughout the book, there is an undercurrent – which sometimes, as here, bubbles to the surface – focused on the question of what it means for the narrator to have brought this “she” into (imagined) being. The implications of this are powerful.

As I always find with Han Kang’s writing (with Deborah Smith’s translation, too), there are moments when The White Book just slips straight in and cuts like glass. This, perhaps above all, is why I read fiction: that deep reaction to writing, which electrifies the nerve endings and makes living more intense.

Book details

The White Book (2016) by Han Kang, tr. Deborah Smith (2017), Portobello Books, 162 pages, hardback (source: personal copy).

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).

The Last Day – Jaroslavas Melnikas

25th July 2018 / / 0 Comments

From my point of view, it’s been a good year for new story collections. Now, admittedly, I’ve only read three, but all have been superb. First, there was Mothers by Chris Power, then, more recently, Lucy Wood’s The Sing of the Shore. My third collection is the latest Lithuanian title from Noir Press, and the English-language debut by Ukrainian-Lithuanian writer Jaroslavas Melnikas.

Across these eight stories, Melnikas’ protagonists will typically be nondescript individuals to whom something extraordinary happens, and they’ll have cause to reflect on what this means for their life. For example, the narrator of ‘On the Road’ receives a call from someone telling him to go to a certain place. When he arrives, there’s someone with directions to another place, where our man receives further directions, and so on, and so on. Food and lodgings are provided wherever the protagonist goes, by strangers who have been asked (by persons unknown) to help him. This guy may not know where he’s going or why, but he likes it:

Though my life is no longer my own, I feel I’m doing something important here. Everything that happens is important. And to be honest, it’s none of my business what it’s all about. I can sense the importance of it. Something inside me has lit up.

(translation by Marija Marcinkute)

The narrator has left his wife and daughter to go on his strange odyssey, and the story examines what it is to step away from one’s existing life. In the case of this character, he has effectively moved into a parallel world – but there are consequences for both him and those left behind, which he will have to confront eventually.

In ‘It Never Ends’, the long story that closes the book, Volodia also steps away from his everyday life, though in a rather different way. He finds an old cinema showing a strangely compelling film about a woman called Liz. This film runs constantly, 24 hours a day, but Volodia can’t find out anything about it, nor about who runs the cinema. Still, he’ll go there all hours to find out what’s happening to Liz; and he notices other regulars, particularly a young woman referred to only as “the scarecrow”, with whom he embarks on an ambiguous relationship, bonding over their mutual obsession with Liz’s story.‘It Never Ends’ twists the magic of the movies into something more sinister:

Ordinary life, which was easy to understand with its decent laws, seemed suddenly banal. I’m not saying it was entirely comfortable, in that poorly-lit auditorium, standing next to the little scarecrow who kept pulling on her already too-long nose. It was far from comfortable. Everything was opaque, strange, and my nerves were as tense as a string. I no longer understood who I was or what, to be honest, I was doing there.

I must admit I’m uncomfortable with the characterisation of the scarecrow in this story: both she and Volodia clearly have deep holes in their lives, but it feels as though she’s only really there to help him heal. Even so, ‘It Never Ends’ left me with the dizzying feeling of having my imagination cast into new shapes.

Although many of Melnikas’ stories touch on the fantastical, ‘Would You Forgive Me?’ applies his typical approach to a more down-to-earth situation. The narrator of this piece shoots a man who climbs through his bedroom window one night, and the intruder dies. The protagonist’s wife, Liuba, immediately brands her husband a murderer; the story is his attempt to come to terms with what has happened: “What kind of person was I? What was I supposed to have done then?” Melnikas traces how, over time, the event changes meaning for Liuba and the narrator.

The tales in The Last Day tend to focus on individuals or small groups of characters, but the title story has implications for the whole world. Books are published listing everyone’s time and date of death, with apparently complete accuracy. So, what does it mean for life if you know exactly when you and your loved ones will die? Melnikas offers a number of thoughts on what people broadly might choose to do – such as grand ‘leaving parties’, or children getting picked on because they’re going to die young. But his main focus is on one family, and their changing experiences of life and death:

The most interesting thing was that we never spoke about the topic again, and nothing changed, nothing at all; we even had quarrels about trifles, like before. Only, occasionally, I would remember that if we trusted that damn Book of Fates, time was ticking… It was a nightmare; you knew the hour of your death exactly and couldn’t do anything about it.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Last Day; its combination of reflection and light unreality was right up my street. If that’s also your kind of thing, take a look at this book.

Book details

The Last Day (2004) by Jaroslavas Melnikas, tr. Marija Marcinkute (2018), Noir Press, 175 pages, paperback (source: review copy).

Reading Borges: Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote

21st July 2018 / / 2 Comments

This story takes the form of an article about one Pierre Menard, a novelist who sought to re-create Don Quixote word for word – not by merely copying the text, but by getting himself into such a state of mind as to write the Quixote exactly as Cervantes would have written it. Menard succeeded, and Borges’ anonymous narrator has great praise for his Quixote, in comparison to Cervantes’ original. In one of my favourite parts of ‘Pierre Menard’, the narrator compares (identical) passages from the two Quixote texts, finding a depth and richness in Menard’s rendition absent from Cervantes’, thanks to the different contexts of their composition.

I found this story delightfully absurd, but it’s a particular pleasure to consider the multiple layers of authorship and interpretation within it: Cervantes, Menard, the narrator, then Borges (and then the reader, of course). For example, Menard may have his aspirations, but it’s the narrator who gives him legitimacy by judging Menard’s project successful. Yet, from the reader’s viewpoint (or mine, at least), there’s no difference between Menard’s Quixote and Cervantes’ so Menard comes across as somewhat of a Quixote figure himself, with delusions of grandeur. Or maybe it’s the narrator who is a Quixote figure for his opinion of Menard. Layers of interpretation…

Read my other posts on Borges’ stories.

Book details

‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ (1939) by Jorge Luis Borges, tr. James E. Irby (1962), in Labyrinths (1964 edn), Penguin Modern Classics, 288 pages, paperback (source: library copy).

The Sing of the Shore – Lucy Wood

18th July 2018 / / 4 Comments

Over the last few years, Lucy Wood has been creating her own distinctive fictional worlds of Devon and Cornwall. Although the general settings are recognisable, the places are rarely named, which to me always gives a feeling that the worlds of Wood’s stories are unbound. Each of her books has had a different focus: the stories in Diving Belles have foundations in folklore; the novel Weathering revolves around the relationship between characters and raw landscape.

Now we have Wood’s second story collection, The Sing of the Shore, which is an evocation of Cornwall off-season. An epigraph explains the book’s title: “the sing of the shore” is the varying sound of waves as they break against different surfaces (sand, pebbles, etc.), which enables experienced fishermen to tell where they are even when it’s foggy – in other words, it represents the secret soul of a place, known to locals but not to outsiders. Unlike Diving Belles, there’s only a relative tinge of the supernatural in this book – but the sense of otherworldiness running through Wood’s work is as strong as ever.

In these stories, the place gets in everything:

There’s sand everywhere around here. When you walk in the wind, grains crunch against your teeth. We’re out on the edge of town, where the cliffs start to crumble and turn to sloping dunes. The dunes are heavy and soft, like flour in a bowl. They never stay still. They slip and shift about; sometimes growing, sometimes flattening out. When the gales come, loose sand blows down the road and heaps at our front doors.

This is from the story ‘Salthouse’, which begins with teenagers Evie and Gina going to plant their Christmas trees in the sand, as most people in the area do, in order to keep the dunes in place. On the way there, Gina suggests visiting the fair, yet seems reluctant to join in with Evie. It transpires that Gina has arranged to meet a boy, and Evie’s time at the fair becomes a kinetic dismantling of the childhood she thought she still had. Except, as the ending makes clear, some things don’t change: the sand is still there, advancing and receding as ever.

‘The Dishes’ provides another example of how Wood layers character and metaphor with a lightness of touch. In this story, Jay has moved to Cornwall with his wife Lorna for three months, where she has been seconded to a satellite ground station. Jay spends his time looking after the couple’s baby; since Lorna can’t talk about her work, a lack of meaningful conversation is getting to Jay (“All he wanted was to speak to someone and not have them say forofoo, or whatever the hell it was, back”). There are mysterious comings and goings at the neighbouring house, which also make him anxious. Wood paints an elegant study of a man succumbing to paranoia, out of little more than baby talk and next door’s phone ringing.

There’s a great range of tone among the stories in The Sing of the Shore. ‘One Foot in Front of the Other’ invests a tale of a woman crossing fields and dodging cows with an atmosphere of genuine menace. ‘Way the Hell Out’ turns a conversation about a mysterious figure seen from a house into something of a shaggy dog story. ‘A Year of Buryings’ is a wry catalogue of the dead, who may persist (“Now someone’s tapping on windows. Who is it? It’s Jameson with his stick, out in the rain again, trying to remember where he used to live”); it reminded me of ‘Notes from the House Spirits‘ in Diving Belles. ‘By-the-Wind Sailors’ ends the volume on a melancholy note, with the story of a couple forced by circumstance to flit from house to house. A certain sense of transience may run through Wood’s tales in this book, but the stories themselves linger long in the mind.

Elsewhere

Watch Lucy Wood reading from the story ‘Home Scar’.

Read other reviews of The Sing of the Shore at Shiny New Books and Caught by the River.

Book details

The Sing of the Shore (2018) by Lucy Wood, 4th Estate, 230 pages, hardback (source: personal copy).

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