'Antón Mallick Wants to Be Happy' by Nicolás Casariego (Review)

Some of you will have seen the recent posts on my visit to the Melbourne Writers Festival, and as I said in the first of those posts, the main reason I went was to catch up with Spanish writer Nicolás Casariego to hear what he had to say about his first novel in English.  Casariego turned out to be a nice, happy sort of man, which was good to see - especially as his creation is anything but...

*****
Antón Mallick Wants to Be Happy (translated by Thomas Bunstead, review copy courtesy of Hispabooks) is written in the form of the diary in which a thirty-two-year-old Spanish lawyer decides that the time has come for him to set depression and pessimism to one side:

"Enough is enough.  I don't want to be a pessimist, or a victim, any more.  I reject the status of black hole.  This notebook, which I address and dedicate to Vidor Mallick, inveterate gambler and amateur loan shark, is proof of my will to optimism, that is, my great desire to become a man with a sunny disposition, happy, normal, one of those guys who springs out of bed every morning and has answers for pretty much every single one of life's many questions."
p.11 (Hispabooks, 2014)

A noble ambition indeed, but what can Antón do to achieve this goal?  And, more importantly, why does he feel the need for this radical step?

In pursuit of optimism and happiness, Antón decides to begin the search in books, and his family is happy to help out: elder brother Zoltan provides an armful of self-help tomes while younger sister Bela points him in the direction of the classic philosophers.  However, with family disputes and a major contract to work on, finding enlightenment isn't going to be easy.  And then, of course, there's the small matter of a woman who claims to be the mother of his unborn child...

Right from the start, Antón Mallick... was a book that just clicked with me, and I greatly enjoyed the time I spent in the world of the confused Spaniard.  What Casariego offers the reader is a picture of a man who understands that he isn't happy and has decided to do something about it.  First, though, he has to understand what exactly this elusive ideal he's chasing is, and he quickly realises that happiness is far easier to talk about than to identify:

"...happiness can be everywhere, except right here, the one place in which you and I find ourselves.  It is therefore, an invention, an imaginary refuge, a mirage in the middle of the desert, and it vanishes the moment you get close." (p.190)

As Antón progresses in his search for happiness, both in his reading and (mis)adventures outside his apartment, the reader feels sympathy for his hopeless cause.

As mentioned above, Antón isn't completely alone in his quest as his brother and sister are keen to offer bibliographic support; however, Zoltan and Bela aren't exactly models of happiness themselves.  The brother is a psychologist, one whose professional exterior hides a slightly disturbing character, while Antón's intelligent, charming sister is trapped in a stifling relationship with a lazy American 'writer'.  In fact, the only happy member of the family seems to be the Vidor Mallick Antón mentions in his diary entry.  It's a shame, then, that Vidor, supposed author of the book Confessions of a Once-Hungarian Spaniard, has been dead for well over a century...

Part of the success of the book is the way in which Casariego constructs his novel, using Antón's diary entries to both inform and deceive the reader.  It's a sort of therapy, and it's very easy to fall into the trap of trusting Señor Mallick and taking his assertions at face value.  However, in reality (as Casariego mentioned during his talk at the festival), the diary format allows Antón (and the writer) to be a little economical with the truth.  The careful reader will see contradictions and sense certain omissions, some (but not all) of which will make sense later in the novel.

The diary format in itself could get a little old very quickly, but the writer mixes things up by including several other text types.  In addition to Antón's thoughts on the books he's reading (sometimes considered, occasionally flippant and insulting), we see copies of e-mails, transcriptions of conversations on Skype and an unusual take on the life story of a Soviet satellites expert.  It does make sense, I promise.  Sort of...

Tony Messenger, over at the Messengers Booker blog, recently posted on this book and was a lot less enamoured with it, not even managing to get half-way through the novel.  However, while I can see why he didn't like it (it was around this point in the story that I had a few doubts myself), I think a lot of the flaws he pointed out were actually deliberate.  Antón is meant to be an unreliable narrator, and many of the more absurd plot developments are mere distractions, taking both the narrator and reader further away from the true centre of the book, the reason why Antón needs to go on this journey of discovery in the first place.  For me, at least, it does all eventually come together.

Which is not to say that all the threads are neatly gathered up.  It's true that the mystery of the woman-with-child is solved, and that the family manages to come together (and we do eventually find out why Antón Mallick isn't happy), but I wouldn't say that the end of the novel brings the closure I'd expected.  Which is why my question to Casariego at the festival session was about whether he'd ever considered writing a sequel (he hadn't, but I'll take the credit if he changes his mind...).  After all, the search for happiness is a rather long-term project, and I doubt that Antón will be reaching his goal any time soon...

August 2014 Wrap-Up - Women in Translation Month

August saw the first edition of what will hopefully become an annual event, Women in Translation Month.  Hosted by Meytal of the Biblibio blog (who revealed her name during the month!), the event focused on the paucity of work by female writers in translation and attempted to turn a little more of the spotlight onto these authors.

It's hard to know how much of a success it was in the wider world, but it certainly generated a lot of interest in some quarters.  It was nice to see some publishers getting involved too (special mentions go to And Other Stories for their Tumblr series - here and here - and MacLehose Press for some suggestions on their site - here and here).  And, of course, every review on my blog in August (starting, in fact, on the 31st of July) was for the event :)

So, stats first - then my dozen reviews for Women in Translation Month :)

*****
Total Books Read: 11
Year-to-Date: 86

New: 11

Rereads: 0

From the Shelves: 3
Review Copies: 6

From the Library: 2

On the Kindle: 2 (2 review copies)

Novels: 7

Novellas: 2
Short Stories: 1
Non-Fiction: 1 

Non-English Language: 10 (3 Spanish, 2 Italian, Korean, French, Japanese, Norwegian, German)

In Original Language: 2 (French and German)

Aussie Author Challenge: 1 (1/3)
Japanese Literature Challenge 8: 1 (4/1)

*****
Books reviewed in August were:

0) Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli
1) My Son's Girlfriend by Jung Mi-kyung
2) The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon
3) The Life of Rebecca Jones by Angharad Price
4) The Blue Room by Hanne Ørstavik
5) Spirit on the Wind (and other Stories) by O Chong-hui
6) Sworn Virgin by Elvira Dones
7) Numéro Six by Véronique Olmi
8) There a Petal Silently Falls by Ch'oe Yun
9) Aller Tage Abend (The End of Days) by Jenny Erpenbeck
10) Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante
11) Sidewalks by Valeria Luiselli

Tony's Turkey for August is: Nothing

Christmas is looking very bare this year - looks like I'll be having toast instead of turkey ;)

Tony's Recommendation for August is:
Ch'oe Yun's There a Petal Silently Falls

Some great reads here, and it was a very close-run race.  The gallant runners-up this month were definitely Hanne Ørstavik's great story of psychological repression and Jenny Erpenbeck's time-twisting tale.  However, my choice goes to Ch'oe Yun's excellent selection of three long stories, a wonderful set of different writing styles and topics :)

*****
With Women in Translation Month duties over for now, September will (hopefully) be a little more relaxing.  Then again, I do have a very big pile of ARCs looking over my shoulder...

'Boyhood Island' by Karl Ove Knausgaard (Review)

After a month of female writers, it was inevitable that I'd be getting through a few more testosterone-filled books in September, and who better for that than the king of confessional male writing?  Time for another slice of the life of a certain Mr. Karl Ove Knausgaard - and this one takes us right back to the start of it all...

*****
Boyhood Island (translated by Don Bartlett) is the third in the series of Knausgaard's six My Struggle tomes, the latest to make it into English so far.  The book starts off with his parents' move to the small island of Tromøy, with little baby Karl Ove in tow.  What follows in the next 490 pages is the story of a boy growing up, with the book ending (for now) with his departure from the island at the age of twelve.

Much of the story follows young Knausi as he roams free through the landscape of both Tromøy and his youth.  He runs wild, spending sunny days in the fields and at sea, enjoying a free-range, sepia-tinted childhood, with football, sweets, music and girls as his main distractions.  It's a wonderful life, but there is one, inescapable, shadow hanging over his otherwise perfect days - his father....

I'd heard some less flattering things about Volume Three of the series, and many reviews and comments felt it was weak compared to the first two books in the series.  According to Wikipedia, Volumes Three to Five were written during the initial My Struggle uproar in Norway, and the writing of these parts was supposedly a little rushed.  Initially, I agreed with that view.  The book was great to read, and I zipped through the whole thing in no time, but the first half, in particular, felt at times a bit like Topsy and Tim go to Norway...

There's a lot more to Boyhood Island than that, though.  The simple tone is deliberate, with Knausgaard's style mirroring the simplicity of the child's thoughts, the adult writer keeping out of the child's head as much as possible.  In fact, as the story progresses, and Karl Ove grows up, the style does gradually become a little more complex, and it's a wonderful description of a boy emerging from childhood.

Knausgaard is only five years or so older than me, and there's a lot here that reminds me of my own childhood.  Quite apart from the physical escapades, his weaknesses bring back painful childhood memories.  He has irrational fears, terrified by the sounds the pipes make in his house; he's unable to swim a few yards over the deep water, even though his father is right there; he's deeply affected by childish teasing (there are lots of tears...).  And, of course, then there's the complexity of relations with the opposite sex...

As he grows up, Karl Ove becomes more self aware, getting over many of his earlier behaviours.  He also gradually realises his flaws, or at least the character traits which are seen as such by his classmates at school.  To an outsider, he's a geeky, bookish, slightly effeminate cry-baby.  Still, it takes him a while to realise why he's not really as popular as he'd thought (and hoped).

This was, of course, a very different time, and the young Knausi was able to roam free, pretty much at will.  He disappears for hours at a time, only coming back for food, a young boy enjoying climbing, skiing, swimming, boating:

"That was everything.  That was the world.
 But what a world!"
p.15 (Harvill Secker, 2014)

One of the biggest realisations I had while reading Boyhood Island is how different Karl Ove's childhood (which, as noted, was fairly similar to mine) is from that of the current generation who, for many reasons, are not given half as much freedom to explore the outside world.  My daughter is seven and I'm not sure if she's ever actually left the house alone...

What makes the book, though, is not the portrayal of an idyllic outdoor lifestyle, but the portrait of Knausgaard's father.  Calling him the shadow over Karl Ove's childhood is a fair understatement:

"The sole really unpredictable factor in this life, from autumn to winter, spring to summer, from one school year to the next, was dad.  I was so frightened of him that even with the greatest effort of will I am unable to re-create the fear; the feelings I had for him I have never felt since, nor indeed anything close." (p.287)

The father is an irrational power which Karl Ove can do nothing about - as a young boy, he is absolutely powerless and at the mercy of his father's moods and whims.  And if those moods are usually bad ones...

Unfortunately for Karl Ove, the father is a tyrant who cannot be gainsaid.  He's a school-teacher of the old-school variety, a strict task-master who brooks no opposition, handing out unfair punishments, devoid of any sympathy.  The poor son is frequently punished for events beyond his control:

"What are you doing?" dad said.  "Are you completely stupid?  You don't stack wood like that!"
 He bent down and scattered the logs with his big hands.  I watched him with tears in my eyes.
 "You lay them lengthwise!" he said.  "Have you never seen a woodpile before?"
 He looked at me.
"Don't stand there weeping like a girl, Karl Ove.  Can't you do anything right?" (p.145)

It's an amazing, sobering picture of the helplessness of a child in the face of adult antagonism, one for all parents to think very closely about.  While it may seem like a harmless release of frustration, it's actually a highly damaging attack on a fragile soul.

The scary part of Boyhood Island is, as I keep saying, how similar it is to my own childhood.  Like Karl Ove, I spent a lot of my time running free, playing football and setting fires (I've matured - a bit- since then), and I, too, was an indiscriminate and voracious reader, a boy without many friends.  A Man in Love having also struck a chord, in these books Knausgaard seems to be showing me my past and present - and as he's five years older than me, I have a nasty feeling that I've also seen some of my future...

It might not be quite as good as the first two in the series, but Boyhood Island is a book that definitely grew on me.  While initially fun, but a little plain, the dark side of the story involving Karl Ove's father saves it from being a dull read.  Again, though, as was the case with A Man in Love, I'd have to wonder whether it's a boy thing: will women connect with his childhood as much?  Part of the beauty of the series so far is how much the books speak to me, but do they speak to everyone?  Will Karl Ove's clumsy, distant views of girls ring as true with female readers as they do with men?

Do let me know if you have any answers to these questions;)

'Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage' by Haruki Murakami (Review)

After almost six years of blogging, I'm fairly used to getting books in the post, but I was still rather excited when an unexpected parcel arrived a few weeks back with a big embargo sticker on it  (it actually arrived half an hour after the embargo had been lifted, but still...).  Inside was the beautiful book you see in the photo, and I was sorely tempted to fling everything to one side and get straight into it.

However, a new Haruki Murakami book is always a big event around these parts, and I (just about) managed to restrain myself and finish the book I was on.  Then it was time to get started: one quick read, a two-week gap, then a leisurely reread before scribbling my random thoughts down in a semi-coherent fashion - and here's what I thought about it...

*****
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (translated by Philip Gabriel, review copy courtesy of Random House Australia) is the story of thirty-six-year-old train station designer Tsukuru Tazaki, a native of Nagoya who moved to Tokyo for study and work and has stayed there ever since.  At the start of the novel, he has recently begun a tentative relationship with the beautiful Sara Kimoto, one he's hoping will grow into something stronger.  He's rich, good looking and successful in his job, so you'd expect him to be happy - sadly, that's not the case.

His problems go back to his younger days, when Tsukuru was part of a group of five inseparable high-school kids, each of whom (with the exception of Tsukuru) had a name which contained a colour.  Suddenly, without warning, the other four cut him adrift, and this rejection by his friends sent him spiralling into depression:

"All around him, for as far as he could see, lay a rough land strewn with rocks, with not a drop of water, nor a blade of grass.  Colorless, with no light to speak of.  No sun, no moon or stars.  No sense of direction, either.  At a set time, a mysterious twilight and a bottomless darkness merely exchanged places.  A remote border on the edges of consciousness."
p.33 (Harvill Secker, 2014)

The following months are a time of great suffering, and while Tsukuru eventually manages to pull himself out of the abyss, the events of the time have left a deep impression on his life.

Despite the importance of the relationship with his friends he never dared to ask why they cut him off, but sixteen years later, at Sara's prompting, Tsukuru Tazaki decides that it's time to confront the past.  Why was he ostracised by his closest friends for reasons he can't even begin to understand?  And, more importantly, why can't he move on with his life?

***** 
Early reviews of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki... have been positive, and I'm not going to argue - while I liked 1Q84 more than most, this still feels like a return to form.  It's the story of a man nostalgic for his carefree youth, desperately missing something he once had, but can never reclaim:

"But you can't go back now?  To that orderly, harmonious, intimate place?"
 He thought about this, though there was no need to.  "That place doesn't exist anymore," he said quietly.
It was in the summer of his sophomore year in college when that place vanished forever." (p.23)

It's one of the more 'normal' Murakami books, but there are still plenty of the slightly off-kilter elements the reader would expect from his writing.  We're treated to dreams, strange characters, fascinating and secretive women, stories within stories and, of course, an unresolved ending.

When the title first became known in English, many people thought that it might be changed for the translation (it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue...).  However, it's actually an important reflection of the content and themes of the novel, giving several clues as to what lies ahead.  Quite apart from the colour aspect, there's the significance of the name 'Tsukuru' (the Japanese verb for 'make' or 'construct'), an apt name for a man destined to go out into the world to build train stations.  The name was chosen, after considerable deliberation, by Tsukuru's father, and it's hard to avoid thinking that rather than Tsukuru choosing his path in life, his name - colourless as it is - decided that path for him.

The second part of the title is just as important, as the years of pilgrimage that it refers to are not just those Tsukuru spends searching for the truth. Liszt's set of piano suites, Années de pèlerinage (which, in turn, takes its title from Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre), features heavily in the novel, and one haunting piece, 'Le mal du pays', acts as a kind of leitmotif, recurring throughout the book.   Shiro ('white'), one of Tsukuru's group of friends, played the piece constantly, and a later friend Haida (whose name contains the character for 'grey'...) leaves the record of the suites at Tsukuru's apartment.  If Lazar Berman's interpretation of Liszt's work goes rocketing up the classical music charts, you'll know why...

The two-part title is also reminiscent, though, of Murakami's own Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and while the earlier book seems rather different, there are several similarities.  Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki... also has a double strand, with the two lives happening to two very different people (Murakami emphasises this by having the trauma of the rejection by his friends alter Tsukuru physically, in terms of both his face and his body).  There's also the small matter of dreams and the subconscious, always a feature of Murakami's work, and despite the 'real' nature of this novel, there's always a sense that some things can't quite be explained, that Tsukuru's dreams (sexual or otherwise) threaten to bleed into the real world.  As Kuro ('black') comments:

"But I do think that sometimes, a certain kind of dream can be even stronger than reality..." (p.238)

If you add to that the ambiguous ending and the feeling that Tsukuru is racing against time to save his relationship with Sara, the comparison between the books doesn't seem quite so absurd ;)

***** 
While in one sense the idea of colours is a bit of a red (!) herring (it's got nothing to do with why he was rejected by his friends), it does play an important role throughout the novel.  Part of Tsukuru's problem is that deep down he really does believe that he is colourless:

"There must be something in him, something fundamental that disenchanted people.  'Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki,' he said aloud.  I basically have nothing to offer to others.  If you think about it, I don't even have anything to offer myself." (pp.100/1)

At the beginning, the reader is fooled into seeing things the way Tsukuru does, but once we meet his former friends, we begin to realise that Tsukuru has a lot going for himself.  His friends emphasise his good looks, his likeable nature, the way he acted as a glue to hold the group together - he just can't see it himself.  This is as true in real life as it is in the novel; it's all too easy to think of others as 'colourful' and much brighter than ourselves...

A further metaphor for this idea is offered by Midorikawa ('green river'...) a wandering pianist who appears in a story Haida tells Tsukuru about his father.  The man claims to be able to see people's auras, a window into their character, and later in the novel Tsukuru begins to wonder whether Haida was actually telling him about his own aura.  We could also consider Tsukuru's dreams in which black and white suddenly turn grey - but I think I'll leave that one for someone more qualified to examine ;)

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki... is primarily a voyage of discovery for the title figure, but in many ways it's the character of Sara which is the most intriguing.  Many will see her as a simple catalyst, another of Murakami's stock female creations, but I'm not sure she can be dismissed quite so easily.  She seems far too eager to get involved in unravelling the secrets of Tsukuru's past for someone who isn't really in a proper relationship with him yet, and I was a little confused when Kuro mentioned having heard about her (a brand-new semi-girlfriend), despite not having talked to Tsukuru in sixteen years...

Were I to go out on a limb, I'd be tempted to say that the whole thing is actually in his head (the relationship, not the whole story - although...).  Perhaps the whole search for closure comes about because Tsukuru wants to get closer to Sara and realises that he's not going to get anywhere until he resolves his issues.  This would also explain what he saw when sitting in a café before flying off to meet Kuro.  Or, then again, perhaps I'm just making this all up, and the whole thing's in *my* head (that's the trouble with Murakami - you really can read whatever you want into his stories a lot of the time...).

*****
While I saw many ties to Hard-Boiled Wonderland..., most will compare Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki... to Norwegian Wood.  Stylistically, the two books are fairly similar, and both are about a thirty-something man looking back at a pivotal year of his life.  The difference is that where Toru Watanabe is focused on the then, Tsukuru Tazaki is functioning in the now.  There are also parallels between the women in the books, with the dark and light of Shiro and Kuro complementing the earlier couple of Naoko and Midori - whose name means 'green' (my head is starting to hurt).

Recently, at the Edinburgh Festival, Murakami said that he wasn't overly keen on the third-person point of view as it tends to create an air of detachment, but he does that here to great effect, lending the story a wonderfully melancholy air.  Digging down to the sentence level, though, it's not quite as good.  Murakami's sentences can often be clumsy and repetitive, especially in dialogue, and there are frequent examples of sentences I'm glad I didn't write:

"He stared fixedly at the image of of his naked body for the longest time, like someone unable to stop watching a TV news report of a huge earthquake or terrible flood in a faraway land." (p.36)

A translation issue, perhaps?  I doubt it.  Philip Gabriel is a fairly big-name translator, and with a book like this, I suspect that a lot of care would have gone into examining the text.  The truth is that Murakami's books are a good example of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, where simple, clunky, sentences cohere into a mesmerising piece of writing.  I suspect that not everyone will agree with that assessment, though...

With Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki... being a return to form, and I'm pretty confident that it is, the inevitable talk of his Nobel Prize chances will crank up again, but I'm not convinced that it'll ever happen.  There are much better stylists out there, and it only takes one or two grumpy old Swedes who are convinced that his work fails to transcend pop fiction to ensure it will never go his way.  However, he does have a fairly impressive body of work now (I have sixteen of his books on my shelves), and he has developed an importance as a gateway writer, not just for Japanese literature, but also for translated fiction in general.  He's a figurehead for non-Anglophone writers, a genuine literary superstar, and while there are other writers who I'd rate above him, I wouldn't begrudge him the honour if it came his way :)

*****
So, having written far too much (and said far too little), how to sum up my thoughts on the book?  Well, I actually did it a few weeks ago on finishing the first read-through.  I dashed off a quick tweet which basically said:

"Really enjoyed this, a great book - the lovers will love it, and the haters will hate it.".

And that pretty much sums it up (I could have saved myself the trouble of writing the review, really).

Oh, in case you're wondering, I'm most definitely on the side of the lovers ;)

'Sidewalks' by Valeria Luiselli (Review)

It's the last day of August, and that means that we've reached the end of the official proceedings for Women In Translation Month (although you're free, of course, to carry on reading as many works of translated fiction by women as you like).  My reviewing month started off (a day early...) with my post on Valeria Luiselli's Faces in the Crowd, so with a liking for symmetry, I decided it would be nice to come full circle to finish the project off.  Let's all go for a cycle through the streets of Mexico City ;)

*****
Sidewalks (translated by Christina MacSweeney), a collection of short essays about life, death, language and pushbikes, was Luiselli's debut work in Spanish, but it appeared in English at the same time as her novel.  This was probably a wise move - it's unlikely that the general reading public would have had a lot of interest in a series of musings from an unknown female Mexican writer, a book that barely scrapes past a hundred pages...

...and that, of course, would have been a shame because Sidewalks is a lovely little find, a book which takes very little time to read, but is one you'd like to dip back into at a later date.  The structure of the essays is deceptively simple, with each chopped up into shorter sections, often a matter of a paragraph or two, and they often start off talking about one topic before flitting off on a tangent to look at another - and then circling back to where we began.

A good example is 'Alternative Routes', in which an early-evening bike ride, ostensibly in search of a Portuguese dictionary, turns into a discussion of the word saudade and its possible equivalents in other languages.  This turns into a lengthy digression on the idea of melancholy, including the origins of the word, and the way in which old notions have become new illnesses, treatable with pills:

"Bastard daughter of melancholy, the term nostalgia inherited the characteristics of black bile but never achieved its former divine status.  The magic humours of mother melancholy evaporated in the three dry syllables of her aseptic daughter: nos-tal-gia."
'Alternative Routes', p.44 (Granta Books, 2013)

A bit of melancholy, a touch of nostalgia - and then the ride is over, and we arrive back where we started, in search of the dictionary :)

This isn't the only piece which has Mexico City at its heart.  One of the most impressive sections is titled 'Relingos', which, as Luiselli explains, refers to the empty spaces left at the heart of a city by bad planning or good fortune.  As the writer thinks about these voids at the heart of her home town, she also compares the idea of relingos to the work of a writer.  What else is writing if not creating words and ideas in the vain attempt to fill a void...

A few of the pieces also touch on the experiences the writer has when moving around from country to country (as she has done all her life).  'Flying Home' starts with an air journey back to Mexico City, with thoughts of home interspersed with musings about the Mexican capital's (lack of) urban planning, stories of disappearing canals and old maps jostling gently with the frustration of the aeroplane inching slowly across the screen in front of her seat.

Then, in 'Return Ticket', we look in on the writer unpacking at a new flat, moving her personal library to its new home.  Even when thumbing through old books, though, Luiselli is still thinking about cities:

"Going back to a book is like returning to the cities we believe to be our own, but which, in reality, we've forgotten and been forgotten by.  In a city - in a book - we vainly revisit passages, looking for nostalgias that no longer belong to us.  Impossible to return to a place and find it as you left it - impossible to discover in a book exactly what you first read between its lines.  We find, at best, fragments of objects among the debris, in comprehensible marginal notes that we have to decipher to make our own again."
'Return Ticket', p.85

Once again, we return to the nostalgia that we saw mentioned earlier.  Having spent her childhood overseas (and her adult life shuttling between Mexico City and New York), perhaps Luiselli is looking for something that can never be found - or wasn't really there in the first place...

Sidewalks is a beautiful little book, a wonderful way to while away an hour or so, and it's one of those rare works where you're constantly stopping to jot down an observation or copy an interesting line.  The writing is witty and laconic, cleverly looping around on itself, and the foreword by Cees Nooteboom is rather apt as Luiselli has a similar style and eye for detail to the (much older) Dutch writer.

It is a very short book, though, even shorter than the 110 pages it officially runs to (there are several blank pages between the pieces), and with Faces in the Crowd also a fairly brief novel, those wanting to immerse themselves in Luiselli's writing don't really have a lot to choose from.  However, if you are interested in learning more about the writer, I do have a few suggestions...

Firstly, I recently came across this video interview (in Spanish, with English subtitles) in which Luiselli talks about her upbringing.  Also, for those whose Spanish is passable, the writer has a monthly column for the El País newspaper, a series of short observations on life in New York.  Finally, if your language skills are really good, her third book is already out - La Historia de mis Dientes is available in Spanish now (the rest of us will have to wait until the end of 2015...).

Off you go, then ;)

'Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay' by Elena Ferrante (Review)

While Women in Translation Month is all about highlighting the overlooked, it's also nice to celebrate those female writers who have already managed to become well known in the Anglosphere.  Of course, if you're looking for big-name female writers in translation, nobody quite seems to have captured attention over the past year or so like Elena Ferrante, the elusive, reclusive Italian writer whose Neapolitan Novels have impressed so many readers.

With the third in the series about to be released, Ferrante's reputation seems set to keep rising, but does the latest instalment measure up to her earlier books?  Well, I'll let you know very soon, but be warned -  it's impossible to discuss this book without giving away details from My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name.  If you'd prefer not to know, please look away now...

*****
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (translated by Ann Goldstein, e-copy supplied by Europa Editions) continues seamlessly from The Story of a New Name, with Lenù introducing her new novel at a bookshop.  When a middle-aged man is less than complimentary about her work, she's taken aback, so it's fortunate that a white knight appears to defend her - none other than Nino Sarratore, her childhood friend (and crush...).

While Nino disappears again soon after, his work as a university lecturer means that he's in the same field as Lenù's fiancé, Pietro, and it's inevitable that they will catch up again.  Lila, however, is back in Naples, and with little contact between the two old friends, it seems as if their friendship has finally run its course.  Little does Lenù know, though, that she's fated to return to her hometown again and again - it's not quite as easy to turn her back on Naples as she'd like...

Those Who leave..., the third book in the Neapolitan Novels series (the series was originally meant to be a trilogy, but it will now extend to four books), looks at the friends' adult years, with a focus on marriage, kids and work, as well as a generational shift.  The spotlight, though, is on Lenù, as we are shown her life in Florence after marriage.  Initially, she is overjoyed by her success as a writer, but this soon passes and her liking for her new family also turns sour:

"...what am I to the Airotas, a jewel in the crown of their broad-mindedness?.." 
p.50 (Europa Editions, 2014)

With the inevitable, premature addition of kids, the intelligent writer soon gets bogged down in the minutiae of domestic life, her plans of a glittering career slowly fading beneath a pile of nappies.  It's a bit of a dull life...

Outside Lenù's apartment, though, things are a little less sedate.  This is the late sixties, a time of unrest throughout Europe, and students are rioting in the hope of creating a new world order.  In these tempestuous times, especially in the universities, there is a real sense of danger, from which Pietro is certainly not exempt (he's not exactly a man of the new era...).  While her next book is a bit of a struggle, Lenù is able to dabble in journalism, tempted into becoming a voice of the people.

While her friend plays with theory in Florence, Lila is living the practice down south.  Nothing seems to get on top of her, and even in a exploitative factory, her intelligence shines through.  She soon becomes a focus for action against the management, and as the pressure builds, matters are always going to come to a head.  You see, in terms of violence, whatever the rest of Italy can do, Naples can always do better...

Those Who Leave... is an entertaining book, but, in truth, I don't quite rate it as highly as I did the first two; there's a sense of its being a bridging book, a continuation of The Story of a New Name and a set up for the final part of the series.  Part of the beauty of the first two books was the electric relationship between the two women, a tie which, while never broken, was often stretched or tangled:

"I simply listened, overwhelmed.  With her, there was no way to feel that things were settled; every fixed point of our relationship sooner or later turned out to be provisional; something shifted in her head that unbalanced her and unbalanced me." (p.222)

This is largely absent here as the two women go about their separate lives, and even when they do meet, it's usually in the presence of others, and the expected confrontation is avoided.  Several times the tension builds to what we think will be a dramatic scene, only for the emotions to ebb away without ever coming to the boil.

The focus here is much more on Lenù, and that isn't necessarily a good thing.  Her life in Florence, as mentioned, is a little dull, and she actually develops into a fairly unpleasant character over the course of the novel, particularly in the second half.  In My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name, she is our voice, our eyes, and she always cut a fairly sympathetic figure, especially when Lila managed to bring her down with a sarcastic comment.  Not any more - at times, she's downright obnoxious...

Why?  Well, throughout the second half of the book, she shows herself to be selfish, lazy and aggressive, in addition to being annoyingly passive when she should be doing getting things done.  The story is basically setting up Nino's return, and this means that poor Pietro is in for some pretty shoddy treatment.  I actually thought that for much of this book, a view through the husband's eyes would have been much more interesting, looking at the friends and their families with the eyes of an outsider.  Perhaps we'd see Lenù then in a very different light.

Again, I hasten to assure you all that I did enjoy the book, and I do think it's worth reading.  However, it's not a book that can really be enjoyed without having read the previous two novels first, and I still believe that it doesn't quite match up to those.  Having said that, I suspect that my doubts will be set against a tidal wave of support for the book when other reviews start coming in.  One of the key ideas of the novel is the frustration Lenù feels at being stuck at home with the children, having to put her career on hold while she sacrifices herself for her family, and I suspect that this aspect of the story will be appreciated far more by other readers.

The reality, though, is that Those Who Leave... spends a lot of its pages building up to the final book in the series.  The lack of interaction between Lila and Lenù in this third volume is slightly frustrating - surely the final book has to bring their relationship to a head:

"Too many bad things, and some terrible, had happened over the years, and to regain our old intimacy we would have had to speak our secret thoughts, but I didn't have the strength to find the words and she, who perhaps had the strength, didn't have the desire, didn't see the use." (p.19)

I have a feeling the climax to the Neapolitan Novels will be a rather stormy one.  This is a relationship which needs to be examined further, and I'm hopeful that the two friends will finally get to the core of their friendship next time.  It's definitely time for a good, long talk, one in which those 'secret thoughts' are finally revealed...

'Aller Tage Abend' ('The End of Days') by Jenny Erpenbeck (Review)

Having already tried a book in French for Women in Translation Month, it was inevitable that I was going to get to something in German as well.  In fact, I had two books to choose from, and I was planning to go for one by an author I hadn't tried before.  However, in the end I opted for the book I'm reviewing today.  Why?  Well, quite apart from the reputation of the writer, I wanted to talk about a book that the non-German speakers among you will soon have the chance to read too.  Now that I've got your attention...

*****
Jenny Erpenbeck's Aller Tage Abend (The End of Days) is an excellent novel spanning the majority of the twentieth century.  We start off in Galicia, now the Poland-Ukraine border region, but at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where a couple are mourning the death of their young daughter.  The tragic loss of the infant has a devastating effect on the whole family, with the father unable to stay and console his wife - leaving her to support herself by what we can euphemistically call 'other means'.  But what if...

...the child never died at all?  Having spun out her tale, the writer then drags us all back in time, imagining an alternate history in which the baby is saved from death.  And, of course, with the daughter still alive, the fate of the parents and other family members also changes, whether for better or for worse.  Resurrect the baby/girl/woman four times, and that's what you can expect from Erpenbeck's latest work :)

It's a fascinating book and a very clever idea, a novel built around the central concept of Was wäre wenn... ('What if...').  Aller Tage Abend consists of five different books, each set in a different period.  The five sections look at different times in the central character's life (her name is fairly unimportant and only really appears towards the end of the novel), although it's probably more accurate to say that they deal primarily with her death.  With that subject matter in mind, you can imagine that the story has some rather powerful scenes.

Between the five books are four 'Intermezzos', and it's here that time is rewound.  As the central character's grandmother notes:

"Sie weiß schon sehr lange, was ihre Tochter von heute auf morgen lernen wird: Am Ende eines Tages, an dem gestorben wurde, ist längst nicht aller tage Abend."
p.23 (BtB, 2014)

"She has known for a good while what her daughter will have to learn overnight: the end of a day where someone dies is by no means the end of all days." *** (my translation)

While the grandmother's words are more in the vein of 'life goes on', in Erpenbeck's world they are taken more literally.  We go back and see how other decisions could have been made.  One change of heart, one wrong turn, a file moved to the right instead of the left - and suddenly life really does go on.  Think of the film Sliding Doors, and you'll begin to get the idea.

While a few themes are evident, particularly the role of women in the twentieth century and the problems of European Jews, Aller Tage Abend is not really focused on any particular area, moving straight from the micro of a personal tragedy to the macro of universality.  The book seems to hinge on the fate of one person, showing how things would have been different with and without her.  However, the more we read, the more we get the feeling that individuals aren't really that important. History moves on, countries come and go; are people really that important?  Life always goes on, even if it's not yours...

The book is actually less about one woman at five different times than about five completely different people.  Erpenbeck shows that our life is not a continuum, a flowing stream of life ending in death, but a series of small, potential deaths:

"Zu vielen Zeiten ihres Lebens hat sie irgend etwas für immer zum letzten Mal gemacht, ohne zu wissen, dass es das letzte Mal sein würde.  Also war der Tod gar kein Augenblick, sondern eine Front, lebenslang?" (p.226) 

"At many times in her life, she had done something for the very last time, without actually knowing that it would be the last time.  Did that mean, then, that death wasn't a moment, but a continual, lifelong struggle?" ***

Each day, while connected to the one before, is a brand new day, another twenty-four hours of struggle against the possibility of death.

The observant reader will probably be connecting Aller Tage Abend with another of Erpenbeck's novels, Heimsuchung (Visitation).  Of course, the structure is similar, and the two books could almost be read as companion pieces.  In one, we see history rooted to the spot; in the other, it moves around in the form of the woman.  For me, though, Aller Tage Abend is a much more successful book.  Its five sections (plus the Intermezzos) worked much better than the dozen or so parts of Heimsuchung, and each book is very different (monologue, diary entries, narration).  Death sometimes ends the section, but occasionally begins it too.  While I wasn't a big fan of the first part's detached style, I was enthralled by what came after.

I'm very glad that I decided to choose this one out of the two I bought especially for Women in Translation Month, and (as noted in my introduction) soon you can get your hands on it too!  The English translation is out on the 1st of November, courtesy of New Directions (and Susan Bernofsky), and the English title is The End of Days.  So, get yourself a copy, and you too can enjoy another great translated novel by a female writer :)

No need to thank me, just doing my job ;)

Tony's Reading List at the 2014 Melbourne Writers Festival - Part Two

As you may have seen yesterday, the first half of my day at the Melbourne Writers Festival ended on a bit of a sour note, but after a couple of sandwiches and a walk in the unseasonal sunshine, it was time to get back into the thick of things - and luckily the next session was much more to my liking :)

*****
After a couple of low-key events in the ACMI Cube, it was upstairs to Cinema 1 for the main session of the day, an audience with well-known Australian writer Gerald Murnane.  Moderator Antoni Jach introduced Murnane with a string of superlatives, including "...our best bet for a Nobel prize in the next ten years or so...", all of which are probably true.  Of course, what he didn't say was that Murnane is the grumpy old man of Australian literature and with him you never know what you're going to get.  Happily for us in the audience, today was a good day :)

Ostensibly, the writer was there to discuss his latest novel, A Million Windows, but this was a fairly free-range session with the discussion wandering throughout his career (although the one book I have read, The Plains - review pending - wasn't mentioned).  In fact, there were several mentions of two books which haven't even been published yet - one a treatise on horse-racing (which Murnane thought was non-fiction until his publisher told him otherwise), the other (Border Districts) a book he wants to be his last (which is why it won't be published until he's sure he's done with writing).

While some interesting things were said about his approach to writing, particularly in talking of his debut work, Tamarisk Row, with his unconventional style and lengthy, overwhelming sentences, the main thing I got from the session was the way in which an accomplished writer with a distinguished background had everyone in the palm of his hand, despite the fact that he doesn't really like this kind of thing (at the end he quipped that we were lucky as we might be the last ones to ever see him do a festival session!).

Murnane is funny and irascible, prone to wandering off on tangents (Jach was well aware that his role was to allow the writer as much range as he wished) and always ready with a good yarn.  At one point he brought out an essay from his university time so that we could hear the lecturer's comments bemoaning his lack of understanding of morality in literature.  At which point he claimed that he still has no idea what she was talking about - but it never stopped him writing all his books...

He's also very good for quotations, and I wasn't the only one in the audience scribbling away furiously to get his one-liners down on paper.  For example, on being free from the early pressure to make his work 'publishable': "I'm almost in the position where I can insult readers now."  Or on being a fairly normal bloke when out in the community and not writing: "I didn't see any need to grow a beard or wear a beret - apologies to those who do."  Or on his failure to become a poet, a disarming "I gave it away", an Australianism for giving something up...

There's too much to discuss here, whether it's his liking for a sympathetic narrator in the vein of Hardy or Trollope, or his dislike of dialogue (which he says conceals more than it reveals), but I definitely came out of the session wanting to read more of his work, which can only be a good thing.  Mention was made of his appearance in the Music & Literature magazine, and that's something I'd like to have a look at - first, though, I want to try some more of his books :)

*****
Murnane was always going to be a hard act to follow, but the last session of the day was entertaining nonetheless.  It was back to the Cube for the second of the City-to-City talks, and this time Nic Low was chatting to Liliy Yulianti Farid and Ahmad Fuadi about Jakarta.  Fortunately, both are fairly fluent in English, which avoided the embarrassment of the earlier Shanghai session...

The two writers talked about the disproportionate influence the capital has on Indonesian culture (apparently 80% of national book sales are in the Jakarta region), a fact which is merely a reflection of the same trend in all walks of Indonesian life.  Where in China, for example, Beijing and Shanghai are competitors, Jakarta is in a league of its own, and people from the provinces are well aware that they have to make the move there one day if they want to become a success.

However, things are changing, and both writers talked about the role they play in making things happen.  Fuadi briefly mentioned Bali's Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, including (I think...) some visits to Australia by Indonesian writers, and after I asked the pair about the apparent lack of Indonesian fiction in translation, Farid outlined her work with the Lontar Foundation and the Inside Indonesia magazine.  Indonesia is also guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair next year, so the government is now putting a lot more energy (and money!) into getting Indonesian fiction into English and German.  Hopefully, there'll be a few new authors for us to discover over the coming years :)

*****
And that's all for 2014!  I greatly enjoyed my busy day in out of the sun at the festival, but I wouldn't say I'm completely happy with the whole event.  The City-to-City sessions weren't really what I expected, focusing more on general information than on the literary side of the cities (although the two Indonesian writers did speak about this a little more during the question time), and the Shanghai session was only saved by the humour of Ouyang Yu.

The main issue I have, though, is that as far as translated fiction goes this was pretty much it.  The whole festival runs for eleven days, but if you're looking for non-Anglophone writers, you're out of luck, and I think that for a multicultural city like Melbourne, it's a bit of a shambles really.  Here's hoping that next year the organisers decide that overseas writers can be found outside the UK and the US and that there'll be a few big names on the programme.

I'm not holding my breath, though...

Tony's Reading List at the 2014 Melbourne Writers Festival - Part One

Friday the 22nd of August was a beautiful late-winter day in Melbourne, and it also happened to be the day for my annual visit to the Melbourne Writers Festival.  I only go in for one day, but I do my best to make the most of it, and this year I managed to fit four events into about five-and-a-half hours.  And what, exactly, did I see?  Well, stick around, and you'll find out...

*****
One of the main reasons I ended up making the trip in to the big city was the (free) event with Spanish writer Nicolás Casariego, whose novel Antón Mallick Wants to be Happy I read a few days before heading to the festival.  This was actually a late addition to the programme after the cancellation of another event, and many of the people who attended were actually unaware of this - the printed programme still had the old details...

The event was MCed by local academic and translator Lilit Thwaites, and considering that the majority of the people in the small ACMI Cube room had heard of neither the book nor the writer, it all went fairly smoothly.  Both Thwaites and Casariego read short extracts from the novel, and they then discussed the book, particularly in relation to similarities between the writer and the eponymous hero of the novel.

The book (which I will be reviewing in early September) is the diary of a man seeking happiness, and one way in which he does so is through an analysis of self-help books and classics.  Casariego said that the reading was perhaps the best part of the writing process; however, he's not a fan of self-help books himself, believing that they're rather aggressive and help to create egotistical monsters.  As for the other books he read in the search for Antón's happiness, he actually preferred some of the more pessimistic ones...

Antón Mallick... is a funny book, something which Casariego says isn't true for all of his works.  One of his biggest challenges was to temper the use of humour in the book, lest it overpower and overshadow the story (certainly, the early sections have a lot of scenes where getting a laugh is the main focus).  The style of the novel, written in the form of a diary, is also important as it allowed the writer to play with the reader.  For one thing, he was able to be a little less politically correct than is normally the case as Mallick is writing for himself, with no need for self-censorship.  However, it also allows him to be a little tricky as there's no guarantee that Antón is telling even himself the whole truth...

Never one to hold back, I asked Casariego a question at the end of the session.  You see, with so many loose ties at the end of the novel, I was wondering if the writer had ever considered a sequel to Antón's quest for happiness.  The answer was a fairly firm 'no', but now that the idea had come up... ;)  If Antón Mallick does return for a second outing, then, you know who to thank/blame :)

*****
After a thirty-minute break spent chatting to Lilit, getting my book signed by the author and cramming a sandwich down as fast as possible, it was back to the cube for the second of the day's events.  This was one of the four City-to-City events designed to give insular Australians more information about some of our Asian neighbours, and the first in the series was on Shanghai.  Author Nic Low was the moderator, and the guests were famed Sino-Australian writer Ouyang Yu (Sino-Australian in that he's lived and worked here for a good while) and two fellow Chinese academics, Gong Jing and Hongtu Wang.

In all honesty, this was by far the weakest of the four sessions I attended.  As an ESL teacher, I've spent many an hour listening to Chinese students reading a prepared script while other students struggle to understand what's being said, and this hour was like a flashback to presentation moderations of times past.  Jing, in particular, merely read a text talking about her life in Shanghai and then barely offered a word in English for the rest of the hour.  When you add to that the fact that the session actually had very little to do with literature, you can imagine how disappointed (and bored) I was for the most part...

Luckily, the third member of the panel was a far better, and more charismatic, speaker, and Yu entertained and informed the small audience with his Shanghai experiences.  From his anecdote about his introduction to Australian literature (when getting his first academic position, all he knew about it was that in Patrick White's fiction "people farted a lot"), to the poems he wrote on his return to Shanghai, about a cheap hotel room and a student who simply could not master a point of English grammar ("She wrote 'Aftering I finished the exam, I felting bad.' - I felt bad too."), Yu was a relaxed, witty speaker - I really must get around to reading one of his books...

Still, it wasn't quite enough to make this a session I would recommend to others, and I walked out hoping that the rest of the day would be better.  The good news?  It definitely was - but you'll have to wait until next time to find out why ;)

Tony's Reading List Goes Korean

It will come as no surprise to regular readers that my major focus on the blog in 2014 has been Korean literature, and it's an area which will be occupying a fair chunk of my time in the coming months too.  Today, then, I'd just like to talk about a few things related to K-Lit in the hope that a few of you out there might find the urge to check them out.

No pressure... ;)

*****
The first of my items today is the contest currently being run by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, one in which they ask you to post a video review of a Korean Short Story.  But I don't have any short stories, I hear you shout/whinge...  No worries - there are two collections of free stories for you to choose from: twenty classic K-Lit tales are available here; and fifteen twenty-first century stories can be accessed here.  See - easy :)  Just click on this link for details of how to enter, with the possibility of winning yourself a USD500 Amazon Gift card...

*****
Of course, I'd quite like to win that Gift Card for myself, so I've been working hard on the stories - so much so that this has become my new project.  Yes, I now have my own Youtube channel, and with the exception of a few V-Logs from several years back (a time when health issues made it tricky for me to post normal reviews), all my videos are of the LTI Korea stories.  To date, I've posted six videos, covering eight of the twentieth-century stories, and I'm planning to review all of the free stories on this channel.  So, if you want a laugh (and you're interested in how I look - and talk- in real life), why not drop by and have a look?  They're all fairly short, promise...

*****
Of course, I've been reading a lot more Korean literature than just the stories mentioned above.  So far in 2014, I've read and reviewed almost twenty works of Korean literature, and there are many more to come before the year is out.  Almost half of these have been from the Dalkey Archive Press Library of Korean Literature, and that would be a great place to start for anyone interested in taking their first steps into K-Lit.

However, if you've still got cold feet, and are unwilling to commit to a long work, there's still a way to get a taste for Korean literature.  Quite apart from the LTI Korea stories mentioned above, Charles Montgomery's excellent Korean Literature in Translation site has a section dedicated to bringing you free stories in English.  Just head over to the site, download one of the stories, and say thank you to Uncle Charles ;)

*****
There you have it - my summary of what's going on in K-Lit around these parts.  Hopefully, I'll have persuaded you to give it a try, whether it's from literary or mercenary reasons ;)  And if you do develop a taste for Korean writing, just stay tuned to the blog as there'll be many more Korean literature reviews to come in the last few months of 2014 :)