'Contemporary Brazilian Short Stories' by Word Awareness (ed.) (Review)

While I've mostly been occupied with the IFFP longlist recently, I have had a few other works waiting to be read and reviewed.  One of these is a book I was asked to review a while back, something a little different.  So, how's your Portuguese?

*****
Contemporary Brazilian Short Stories is a collection which comes from the web-site of the same name.  Word Awareness (run by translator Rafa Lombardino) invited writers from Brazil to submit short pieces of fiction which would be translated into English and published on the web-site.  It's a project which hopes to give young Brazilian writers more exposure to an international audience - and perhaps more success too :)

The collection contains twenty-two stories, the majority of which are fairly short (some coming in at a little over a page) with only a few stretching to more than five pages.  Almost all of the stories are translated by Lombardino, but for those of you who do know a little Portuguese, there's an added bonus.  Just as at the site, you can also read the stories in the original version...

But what is it actually like?  Well, as you can imagine in an anthology of this sort, there is a variety of moods and styles.  While the majority would fall under the umbrella of literary fiction, there are a few stories which you could label as genre fiction.  Kariny Aciole's 'Return to Shantra' is a fantasy tale, with a hint of erotica thrown in for good measure, while Elisabeth Maranhão's 'Glass and Porcelain in the Garden', a story about a woman uncovering her husband's affair, could (possibly!) be considered chick lit.

There are also some rather short, poetic pieces, stories which need to be reread several times to get the idea behind the words.  Ludmila Barbosa is described in her blurb as a poet, so it is no surprise that her 'Notes on Dreaming' reads a little like a poem.  I also enjoyed Lorena Leandro's short work 'Relationship', in which a woman's unconditional love is shown to have a rather unusual object...

A few of the stories have an aspect of Brazilian culture as their focus, and some of these were perhaps among the more successful stories in the collection.  Roberto Denser's 'The Chick Who Read Clarice Lispector Too Much' is a clever story set at a bus stop, in which the dangers of being a book snob are on display for all to see.  'Eternally Lying in a Splendid Cradle' by Simone Campos, the longest story in the collection, is an intriguing look at Brazilian culture seen through the eyes of a foreigner.  As for Gui Nascimento's 'I Love São Paulo', well that's just a few pages of two friends talking drug-influenced nonsense about the great city ;)

For me though, the best stories here are also fairly simple and universal ones.  José Geraldo Gouvêa's 'The Girl Who Liked Listening to Stories' is a tale which will resonate with anyone who remembers discovering the beauty of words.  My favourite story in the collection though is the very last one, by Paulo Carvalho.  A man thinks back to the day he discovered love, a story of riding bikes down hills and finding new feelings for a girl.  The title? 'Simple'...

The book is available on Amazon (in both paperback and Kindle format), but the stories are also available for browsing on the CBSS web-site.  Two new stories are published each month (on the 1st and 15th), and there's a wide range of stories to explore.  Anyone interested in what's coming out of Brazil (which may well become the next big thing in translated fiction) should definitely check it out :)

*****
One last thing I'd like to comment on is the translation, as it's rare that I have both the original and the translation in front of me at the same time.  While my Portuguese is fairly poor (just a year of wasting time while at university...), having studied most Romance languages, I can get a feel for the original from the translation.  There was a distinct difference in style between the two versions, one which came across in many of the stories I compared.

One story I'd like to focus on is Wilson Gorj's ' The Black Mulberry' ('Amora negra'), and I'll just give you one paragraph from each version:

"Deliciosa, porém pequenas.  Havia, sim, uma bem grande, mas esta amora pendia na ponte de um dos galhos estendidos sobre a agua." (pp.121/2)

"They were delicious, but too small.  There was a very big juicy mulberry hanging from one of the branches right above the water." (p.23)

With a bit of luck, you'll be able to see the differences in style between the two versions.  The English gets across the content of the original, but I'm not sure that the rhythm and style of the Portuguese is captured, and that means that the story comes across as a little prosaic in English, where the Portuguese (to my untutored ears) seems more melodic.  If it had been translated like this, would the meaning have been lost?

'Delicious, but small.  There was, it's true, a very big one, but this mulberry hung from the end of one of the branches extending over the water."

The word 'delicious' was mentioned in the previous sentence, so I don't feel the need to add the pronoun 'they'.  I also think that there is no need to alter the Portuguese sentence structure in the second sentence...

You can tell that I'm a frustrated translator, but I think that perhaps content wins out over style occasionally in this collection, especially in the simplification of sentences.  English is less tolerant of long, rambling, comma-filled sentences than the Romance languages (except, of course, when I'm on a roll in my blog posts!), but I enjoy reading this style of writing.  I hope Rafa takes this as a comment on, and not a criticism of her translation style :)

'Trieste' by Daša Drndić (Review - IFFP 2013, Number 10)

We're back to WW2 fare today, this time along Italy's Adriatic Coast.  However, the book we'll be examining looks at things from a slightly different angle from usual.  So, where are we exactly?  Well...

*****
Trieste by Daša Drndić (translated by Ellen Elias Bursać - review copy from MacLehose Press)
What's it all about?
In 2006, Haya Tedeschi, an elderly lady, sits at home in Gorizia, near Trieste, surrounded by piles of papers and newspaper clippings.  The mounds of paper scattered on the floor all have to do with the events of the war, stories of atrocities and biographies of some of the heroes and villains of the era.  It may seem to be history to many people, but for Haya the war is still very real.

We then move back in time to the start of the twentieth century and are introduced to the Tedeschi family and the region around Trieste.  It is a European crossroads, a city on the borders of Empires, a multilingual cultural melting pot - great for music and literature, very bad when the great European powers decide to go to war...

The writer takes us carefully through the first part of the 20th century until we reach the main focus of the novel, the Second World War.  It is here that Haya meets SS officer Kurt Frank and has a secret affair.  The result of the relationship is a son, Antonio Tedeschi - a boy who one day goes missing, leaving his mother with a sixty-two year wait for his return.

Trieste is a heavy book on a weighty subject.  Drndić uses the novel to discuss what happened during the war in and around the title city, an area many people would know little about.  We learn about the death camps in the region and the men who ran them (and what happened to them after the war...).  We read about the post-war trials and how some of them were conducted in the absence of the accused, empty procedures which had no consequences.  In short, we are reminded of the past, a past which the writer wants to make sure is not forgotten.

Eventually, the focus shifts to the Lebensborn project, a Nazi plan to ensure the dominance of their Aryan super race.  Homes were opened all over the German Reich, where suitable women gave birth to children who were then to be brought up in a manner deemed fit for the heirs of the master race.  When Himmler realised that the numbers weren't impressive enough, he decided to order the removal of suitable children born to inferior races in the region (including little Antonio Tedeschi...).

The final section of the book is devoted to Hans Traube, a man who knows that his name and upbringing is a lie, and his quest to uncover the truth.  Like his birth mother, Hans has been searching through documents in the vain hope of finding his true identity, in the process finding out much more about his possible biological father than he would like to know.  The Lebensborn children are doomed to live with uncertainty, hoping they might some day uncover their true origins, but also scared of what they might find:

"Then, when I least expected it, the Past jumped out at me in a flash, Hop! like a carcass, like some rotten corpse it draped itself around my neck, plunged its claws into my artery and it still isn't letting go. I'd like to shake it off, this Past, but it won't let me, it swings on me as I walk, it lies on me while I sleep, it looks me in the eye and leers, See, I'm still with you."
p.339 (MacLehose Press, 2013)

Of course, it's not just the Lebensborn children who have to worry about the burden of the past.  Drndić contrasts their fate with that of the children of the SS officers, the men and women responsible for crimes against humanity.  They also struggle to live with the legacy of the past...

Trieste is minutely researched, comprising a dizzying collage of fact and fiction, stories and interviews.  In its inclusion of photographs and original documentation (and even forty pages of the names of Italian holocaust victims), with a narrative frequently shoved aside in favour of a tangent, there is something almost Sebaldian in its structure.  We are taken on a tour of WW2, from Aushwitz and Treblinka to Reinhard Heydrich at the Salon Kitty brothel in Berlin (for the second time in a week...), with anecdotes about concentration camp guards shooting prisoners for fun, and convoys of the doomed through Switzerland, where locals think they are helping by providing blankets and warm soup...

What comes through very clearly though is the mass slaughter, the senseless, deliberate waste of human life on a grand scale.  One of the more interesting features of the novel is the occasional Q & A with both holocaust victims and their captors, giving insights into what happened - and how.  As one guard says:

"When I was on a trip once, years later in Brazil, my train stopped next to a slaughterhouse.  The cattle grazing in the pens trotted up to the fence and stared at our train.  They were very close to my window, one jostling the other, looking at me through that fence.  I thought then, This reminds me of Poland.  That's how the people looked at me there: trustingly, just before they went into the... I couldn't eat tinned meat for a long time after that.  Those big cows' eyes staring at me, those animals who had no idea that in no time they'd all be slaughtered...

So you didn't feel the camp inmates were people?

Cargo.  They were cargo." (p.206)

Trieste is certainly an ambitious, expansive work, but if I had a criticism to make, it would be that it is a little over-ambitious at times.  The main story, what little of it there is, is frequently pushed into the background, seemingly only there to serve as an excuse to write about the history.  As with HHhH, the reader is left wondering what the actual focus of the work is, and whether it might have been better left as non-fiction...

Do you think it deserves to make the shortlist?
Possibly not.  It's a worthy book on an important subject, but it wanders a little (OK, a lot), and I was never quite sure what the focus was meant to be.  The last section, centred on Hans Traube and his search for the truth, is excellent, and I would personally have preferred a much narrower focus on the Lebensborn project.

Will it make the shortlist?
Despite what I said above, I think it has a good chance.  I don't think I'm the best judge of literature dealing with the Holocaust, and other readers seem to appreciate books like HHhH and Trieste a lot more than I do.  I suspect that one of those two will make the cut, and this one is much weightier and better written. 

*****
Moving on, and we're (finally) lightening the mood a little; it's time to head off to Paris for some drinking, dancing and writing in the park.  Whatever you do, make sure you dress for the occasion - suit up, everyone ;)

'The Iraqi Christ' by Hassan Blasim (Review)

A new Comma Press publication of translated fiction is always exciting, and another collection has just been released.  It is a second group of stories from Iraqi-in-exile Hassan Blasim, whose first collection (The Madman of Freedom Square) was longlisted for the 2010 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (and, apparently, banned in Jordan...).  It will be interesting to see how this one goes - both critically and politically...

*****
The Iraqi Christ (translated by Jonathan Wright, review copy courtesy of the publisher) is a series of tales set both in Iraq and overseas.  It is a collection set against the chaos of life in a country where normal rules seldom apply and people get on with matters as best they can - easier said than done when money, jobs, electricity and water are in short supply.  A mixture of realistic and slightly-more fantastic tales allows Blasim to paint a vivid picture of his mother country.

From the very start, we know we are in dangerous territory:

"People were waiting in queues to tell their stories.  The police intervened to marshal the crowd and the main street opposite the radio station was closed to traffic.  Pickpockets and itinerant cigarette vendors circulated among them.  People were terrified a terrorist would infiltrate the crowd and turn all these stories into a pulp of flesh and fire."
p.1, 'The Song of the Goats' (2013, Comma Press)

It is a stunning start to the collection, one which sets the scene for much of what is to follow in later stories.

This start to the collection introduces two concepts which the writer will expand upon throughout the book: the importance of stories and the constant presence of death.  The first story, 'The Song of the Goats', has a radio station set up a competition to tell the best story about life in the war-torn country (hence the long queues...).  This is closely followed by 'The Fifth-Floor Window', in which a group of sick men tell stories to pass the time as they see the chaos unfolding from the window of their room.

From here, the stories increase in intensity, with the writer painting images of violence and madness, with the crudeness of the language at times matching the events depicted.  Many of the stories abound in sex, drinking and (very) black humour, whatever it takes to make the pain go away.  In 'The Killers and the Compass', a psychopath roams the suburbs of what could be described as post-apocalyptic Iraq.  There is certainly more than a hint of Mad Max here (this is a man who is definitely dangerous to know).  'The Iraqi Christ', the title story of the collection, then introduces us to an ex-soldier with a sixth sense for danger - on the very day his luck is about to run out...
 
There is more to The Iraqi Christ than news from Iraq though.  Blasim, who now lives in Finland, also looks at what happens to people who leave their homeland behind.  'Dear Beto' chronicles a tale of depression in Finland, narrated by an emigrant (albeit a rather unusual one...) while 'Why Don't You Write a Novel, Instead of Talking About All These Characters?' is centred on refugees in Hungary and the ordeals they face in getting to their new home.  It also features a certain writer, who appears to be travelling under a pseudonym...

...and in fact this slice of meta-fiction is just one of a series of excursions out of realism and into something more akin to Magical Realism.  Many of the stories are slightly more fantastical than you would imagine, again perhaps an attempt to escape the disappointments of everyday life.  In 'The Hole', a soldier falls down a hole and makes the acquaintance of a 'Djinni' (not something that occurs on a daily basis, even in Baghdad), and 'A Wolf' is a tall tale about cruising bars for sex, Jehovah's witnesses, mosquitoes... oh, and a wolf ;)  For fans of Kafka or Murakami (like yours truly), these stories are actually some of the most entertaining in the collection.

The Iraqi Christ then is a mix of different styles of stories, all trying to make sense of a chaotic society where the past has been thrown out of the window and where the future is uncertain, a world of madness and constant noise:

"Applause at the Peace Prize award ceremony at a time when new wars are breaking out in new hotspots,the sound of cars crashing, car bombs exploding, the cars of thieves, an ambulance, a bank truck loaded with bundles of banknotes, a fire engine.  The sounds of mosques and churches, of Friday sermons and homilies, of group sex and glass breaking, sounds coming in the right ear and sounds going out the left ear."
p.73, 'Dear Beto'

What can you do in the face of a reality like this except drink, sleep around, surrender to the madness - and tell stories...

March 2013 Wrap-Up

March is coming to an end, and a busy month it's been round these parts.  I've been frantically racing through the books on the IFFP longlist, hoping to get through the twelve I hadn't previously read before the shortlist is announced.  I think I might just about make it - but it'll be close ;)

Anyhow, all this means that the numbers are well up this month on my fairly slow start to the year - shall we?

*****
Total Books Read: 12
Year-to-Date: 26

New: 12

Rereads: 0

From the Shelves: 1
Review Copies: 3

From the Library: 8

On the Kindle: 0

Novels: 12
Novellas: 0

Short Stories: 0

Non-English Language: 12 (2 Arabic, 2 French, Spanish, Norwegian, Dutch, Turkish, Croatian, Afrikaans, Albanian, Italian)

In Original Language:1 (1 French)

Aussie Author Challenge: 0 (0/3)

IFFP 2013 Longlist: 11 (15/16)

*****
Books reviewed in March were:

1) The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope

2) Stone in a Landslide by Maria Barbal

3) The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

4) White Masks by Elias Khoury
5) A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard
6) The Detour by Gerbrand Bakker
7) HHhH by Laurent Binet
8) Silent House by Orhan Pamuk

Tony's Turkey for March is: nothing

While HHhH didn't really grab me, it was far from being a turkey - and that's as close as it got this month :)

Tony's Recommendation for March is:
Gerbrand Bakker's The Detour

Bakker's slight novel was easily my favourite of the five IFFP longlisted books, but the other books I posted on in March were all good too.  I was tempted to give the prize to Trollope's magnus opus, and Khoury's and Barbal's books gave me pause for thought.  However, I couldn't really go past The Detour, an excellent example of why we read these longlists - to discover great books and great authors :)

*****
A couple more from the IFFP and then the pace is off (thankfully).  Well, as far as the reading goes anyway - there'll be plenty of IFFP reviews for you all to enjoy in April :)

'Silent House' by Orhan Pamuk (Review - IFFP 2013, Number 9)

Our next leg of the IFFP magical mystery tour takes us off to Turkey to consider a work by a very familiar name.   It's no surprise that a Nobel-Prize winner finds himself on the longlist - it is surprising that it's taking this long though.  Today's choice was originally published three decades ago...

*****
Silent House by Orhan Pamuk (translated by Robert Finn - from Hamish Hamilton)
What's it all about?
The year is 1980, the location Cennethisar, a coastal village fifty kilometres from Istanbul.  Three siblings have come to visit their grandmother, making their annual pilgrimage to pay their respects, visit their parents' graves and have some fun in the sun while they're at it.  This year, though, is destined to be different - turbulent times are just around the corner, and the family is about to be caught up in the fever sweeping the country.

Pamuk's novel is set at a time of great upheaval in Turkey.  According to Wikipedia, the overall death toll in the country in the 1970s from violence is estimated at 5,000, with nearly ten assassinations per day.  Just a month after the events of this novel, there was a coup d'état, after which the military ruled for three years.  Even in the sleepy town of Cennethisar, rival gangs of 'Communists' and 'Fascists' are roaming the streets, extorting protection money and attacking the enemy.  This summer is unlikely to end well...

Silent House is narrated by five voices, each of which is distinct and well written: Fatma, the grandmother; Faruk and Metin (Fatma's two grandsons); Recep, her servant; and Hasan, a character whose relationship to the family is a lot more complicated than it first appears.  The five voices provide a continuous narrative, one taking up the story where another breaks off, and because of this, the novel is a little slow to get into gear (as many reviews have remarked).  During the first half of the novel, there is little plot to speak of, and when bookish Faruk talks about his literary plans, it's hard to avoid drawing parallels with the book in hand:

"Someone reading my book from cover to cover will during those weeks and months end up able to glimpse that cloudlike mass of events that I managed to perceive while working here, and like me he'll murmur excitedly: This is history, this is history and life..."
p.165 (Hamish Hamilton, 2013)

Like Pamuk, Faruk is more concerned with depicting life than fascinating the reader with his narrative.

Gradually though, the family squabbles and parties give way to more serious issues.  We see hints of potential trouble as Hasan and his friends start to throw their weight around.  The right-wing gangs frown upon the flesh the holidaymakers show on the beach and the alcohol the rich kids swig back each night.  As they grow in confidence, the gang members begin to throw their weight around more and more, which spells trouble for anyone caught reading a Communist newspaper - like Fatma's grand-daughter, Nilgün...

What eventually develops from the pages of Silent House is a picture of two cultures clashing, a national challenge mirroring the global struggles of the Cold War.  The two sides feel themselves locked in a fight where there can be only one winner.  It's a fight between the new ways and the old, Communism versus Fascism, secular life against the appeal of Islam - and it provides young men with a taste for violence with an outlet for their rage, justified or otherwise.  Hasan (who has a lot to be angry about) certainly has no intention of leading a quiet life:

"I know that the day they see I've grown used to it, they'll be so pleased, and they'll declare with satisfaction, He's finally learned how it goes in life, but I'm not signing up for your life, gentlemen, I'll get a gun and teach you how it goes." (p.154)

Over the course of the novel, it is Hasan's development which mirrors the events starting to happen in the country, and his fate which Turkey shares.

Silent House is a slow-moving, but ultimately fascinating slice of life.  It's a collection of personal stories set against the backdrop of a time of national importance, and I felt it worked really well.  Now imagine how it might have read when it was first published - only three years after the event ;)

Do you think it deserves to make the shortlist?
Yes.  I enjoyed it, despite the slow start.  After a hundred pages, like many people (some of whom never got to the end...), I had my doubts, but it eventually draws you in.  Oh, and it makes a nice change from the Second World War too.  This could well be one of my top six when I finally get to the end of my reading.

Will it make the shortlist?
No.  I'm not sure that the judges will see enough here to get it over the line.  In a weaker year (in need of star power), it'd make it.  This year's longlist is fairly strong, and the shortlist won't need a Nobel Prize Winner to give it extra appeal :)

*****
Onwards and upwards - it's just a short hop from Turkey up to Italy's Adriatic coast.  Trieste is supposed to be lovely at this time of year...

'HHhH' by Laurent Binet (Review - IFFP 2013, Number 8)

If there's one thing that's inevitable about a European-dominated IFFP longlist, it's that you'll come across a few World War Two books sooner or later.  Today we're on a trip to Prague for the first of this year's batch, a story about a man whose ambition may have outstripped his abilities.

And that's just the writer...

*****
HHhH by Laurent Binet (translated by Sam Taylor - from Harvill Secker)
What's it all about?
A French writer obsessed with the Czech Republic decides to produce a novel about the events of a WW2 assassination attempt.  Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler's right-hand man, has turned Prague into his own private police state, a model for other German 'provinces'.  Needing to show the British that they are pulling their weight, the Czech government-in-exile in London decides to strike a blow and sends in two parachutists (Slovak Jozef Gabčik and Czech Jan Kubiš) to bring down the 'Blond Beast'.

The subject matter is fascinating, and the story (on the periphery of major WW2 events) is an enthralling one.  In addition to the depiction of a major villain I'd never even heard of, HHhH explains the background of the German march into Central Europe, including the animosity between the Czechs and Slovaks which may have made it possible in the first place.  If you are going to write about the war, looking at a relatively unknown aspect of it is a good way to go about it.

Despite the inherent interest of the story though, Binet is just as interested in telling us about his story, the writing of HHhH.  The novel is written in a detached manner, with the writer constantly interrupting, and commenting on, the action he is attempting to describe.  The novel is written in over 250 short chapters, many lasting less than a page, and it comes across as less a novel than an experiment in historical fiction, one which (as the writer seems to feel) is always doomed to failure.

The story is told with liberal doses of sarcasm and black humour, which works fairly well.  Some of the information given is so bleak that perhaps this humour is the only possible way of dealing with it:

"The first convoy left for Riga on January 9, 1942: a thousand people, of whom 105 would survive.  The second convoy, a week later, also went to Riga: a thousand people, 16 survivors.  The third, in March: a thousand people, 7 survivors.  The fourth: a thousand people, 3 survivors.  There is nothing unusual in this dreadful numerical progression towards 100 percent.  It is just another sign of the Germans' famous efficiency."
Section 123 (Harvill Secker, 2012)

The writer also frequently reminds us that Heydrich (like Hitler before him) could never be accused of deception.  He gave everyone fair warning and told them exactly what he was going to do...

Having said that though, I did find myself questioning Binet's slant.  This is meta-fiction at its most intrusive (and annoying), and it made it difficult to really get into the book.  The lack of page numbers seemed simply gimmicky, and the writer deliberately plays with the reader, constantly contradicting and correcting himself.  In fact, he often makes up information he doesn't know:

Natacha reads the chapter I've just written.  When she reaches the second sentence, she exclaims: "What do you mean, 'The blood rises to his cheeks and he feels his brain swell inside his skull'?  You're making it up!" 
(Section 107)

When he (the writer narrator) is obviously making things up, how can we trust him?  And why should we?

HHhH is an interesting book, but for me the interest is mainly due to the events Binet is describing, not his literary messings around.  At times, the digressions and musings are simply frustrating, preventing the reader from making a connection with the story.  Ironically, once we get to the main action of the novel, the one point where the story takes over, it is all a bit of a let down.  I suspect that the earlier messing around was disguising the fact that there's nothing particularly appealing about Binet's writing.

The narrator has a habit of namedropping, and (amongst others) Flaubert, Borges and Kundera are mentioned in the text.  Kundera actually appears on the very first page:

" In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera implies that he feels a bit ashamed at having to name his characters.  And although this shame is hardly perceptible in his novels, which are full of Tomášes, Tominas, and Terezas, we can intuit the obvious meaning: what could be more vulgar than to arbitrarily give - from a childish desire for verisimilitude or, at best, mere convenience - an invented name to an invented character?  In my opinion, Kundera should have gone further: what could be more vulgar than an invented character?" (Section 1)

As well as hinting at what direction HHhH will take, the writer appears to be introducing the kind of company he would like to be placed in.  He's talking the talk, but I'm not sure that he's walking the walk...

A little explanation of the title to finish.  HHhH stands for 'Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich' ('Himmler's brain is called Heydrich'), and I always struggled to think of how to actually say it.  Until, that is, I realised that if the abbreviation comes from German, it should be pronounced in the German fashion...

...Ha, Ha, ha, Ha.  The joke's on Binet ;)

Do you think it deserves to make the shortlist?
What do you think?

Seriously, I'm not saying that this is bad - it's an interesting read, and Binet does get it right in places.  It's just that a lot of the interest comes from the subject matter and not the way the writer handles it.  Of the ten longlisted works I've read so far, this one is my least favourite.  It's not bad, just not good enough.

Will it make the shortlist?
Possibly.  There are lots of conflicting opinions on this one, but it's a big-name book that has its champions.  I haven't read the other WW2-era books yet (Trieste, The Fall of the Stone City), but I suspect that at least one of them will make the shortlist.  I doubt HHhH will win the prize, but it's another book which will look good on paper for the shortlist...

*****
Leaving Prague behind, we head off to Turkey next - for a book three decades in the translating.  See you there ;)

'The Detour' by Gerbrand Bakker (Review - IFFP 2013, Number 7)

You wouldn't expect many novels on translation prize longlists to be set in Wales (especially when the writer isn't even Welsh), but that's the case with my latest choice from the IFFP longlist.  Today's story takes us to North Wales, in the shadow of Snowdon.  There's a dog, a herd of cows - oh, and some geese...

*****
The Detour by Gerbrand Bakker (translated by David Colmer - from Harvill Secker, US title is Ten Wild Geese)
What's it all about?
The story begins with a figure in an isolated house in North Wales.  A Dutch woman who enjoys her solitude, she appears to be a refugee, a runaway - but from what exactly?  From the start there are hints of sexual misadventures in her former life; more importantly, there are worrying signs of health issues:

"That night she stared at the fire just as she had stared at the water.  She had lit candles and put them on the window sill.  Nagging pain in her back.  Before getting into the bath, she had eaten some bread with cheese and a sweet onion.  Hot meals were too much trouble.  Fruit and vegetables were healthy but, of course, things like that only applied to people who were healthy."
pp.70/1 (Scribe, 2012)

Whatever her troubles, the woman is very clear in her desire to face them by herself, leaving her home country, family and friends, and marooning herself in the middle of nowhere.

It is into this backdrop of solitude then that Bradwen enters her life one day.  He is a young hiker attempting to map out a walking trail across the countryside, and after the woman offers him shelter for the night, he decides to stay on, helping out around the house and running errands for his reclusive host.  It seems that despite her decision to live alone, she does feel a need for male company.
 
Meanwhile, back in the Netherlands, the woman's husband gradually appears on the scene.  Left bewildered by his wife's disappearance, he initially lashes out, resulting in a trip to the police station.  However, once he finds out a little more about the truth behind his wife's decision to flee, he hires a detective to track her down - so that he can follow her... 

The Detour is a fairly short novel, but it is a skilfully woven story.  We start in the middle of an informational void every bit as empty as the countryside setting.  Gradually though, the writer reveals fragments of information, allowing the reader to piece together parts of the story (even if we never uncover the whole truth).  This style of writing, released in short, terse chapters, has the effect of creating characters who are hard to read, people who have secrets that they are unlikely to divulge in a hurry.

     "Not much snow," the boy said, with his mouth full of fruit cake and his face pressed against the window.  "Maybe at the top.  We have to get off in a minute."
     She didn't say anything.  She would say very little all day.  Her suspicions had been aroused. (p.196)

I'd just like to point out that at that point I had absolutely no idea what that last sentence meant...

Bakker's main protagonist is a fascinating creation, a spiky, almost unlikeable woman.  While she gives her name as Emilie, there are reasons to doubt the veracity of the claim (just as everything she says needs to be taken with a liberal dose of salt).  Before her flight, Emilie was working on her PhD in English Literature.  The topic?  The American poet, Emily Dickinson, with whom our Emilie has a few similarities...

While this may all sound a little bleak, Bakker's novel is interspersed with dry humour, setting off the dark tone of the work nicely.  Emilie is continually mistaken for a German, something she contradicts very sharply (any Scot, Canadian or Kiwi will identify with her pain...), and she also finds it hard to convince people that the injury to her foot was caused by a badger.  You see, they're very shy creatures...

There is so much more I could write about here, more than you would think for such a thin novel.  However, it's probably best to leave you to find out the rest for yourself.  I'd definitely recommend your giving it a try - just don't read it if you're alone in a farmhouse in the middle of winter ;)

Does it deserve to make the shortlist?
Yes.  It's a most enjoyable work, one which deserves and almost demands a reread.  There's so much going on in terms of plot, style, pacing, characterisation...  I liked it :)

Will it make the shortlist?
I'm not sure - it might be a book which most will like, but few will champion.  It's easy to get enthusiastic about a book only to have other readers fail to see what the fuss is about.  Will it be able to knock off enough of the big guns to make the shortlist?  I'm not convinced...

*****
Right, time to leave Wales.  The next stop is Prague, where we have a meeting with Himmler's brain (apparently, his name is Heydrich...).  Just the first of several longlisted books set during the Second World War; hopefully, I'll have more luck with them than I did with last year's crop...

'A Death in the Family' by Karl Ove Knausgaard (Review - IFFP 2013, Number 6)

The next stop on our IFFP magical mystery tour is Norway, where we'll be looking at a book that has provoked a lot of discussion in literary circles.  It is different, a little unusual, it seems to have been very popular as well - but is it any good?  Let's find out...

*****
A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard (translated by Don Bartlett - from Harvill Secker)
What's it all about?
A Death in the Family is the first part of Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, a cathartic, six-volume, autobiographical novel.  Knausgaard is a family man, living with his second wife and their three children in Sweden.  Approaching middle age, he feels the pressure of needing to come up with a work of art and is frustrated that his family life may well be depriving him of this opportunity (so far, so creepily familiar...).  So he decides to write about his life - in great detail...

This initial volume is divided into two parts.  In the first, the focus is on Karl Ove's childhood, a rather unusual one spent shuttling between a physically-absent mother and a mentally-absent father, one who appears to be shutting himself off from the world.  The second is centred on the father's death at a young age, an alcohol-fuelled demise which turns out to be messier and more damaging than you could ever have imagined.  In a very Proustian style of writing, Knausgaard examines the aftermath of his father's death in laborious detail, exposing the reader to many things they would rather not see - in a good way, of course.

We sense that Knausgaard is using his writing to try and make sense of his life.  A repeated idea is that childhood is a golden age, where all is new and the possibilities are endless.  However, once we move into adulthood, and particular middle age, the end is nigh, visible on the horizon, and despite knowing this, we are doomed to repeat the same tedious days over and over again until the grave.  While we are supposedly individuals, in the grand scheme of things we are merely anonymous parts of the machine, interchangeable and completely replaceable.  He's a cheery soul, is Karl Ove...

The dominant figure of the novel is, of course, Knausgaard's father.  He is a strange character, a man seemingly trapped in a marriage and family he cares little for, spending as little time with his 'loved ones' as possible.  It is inevitable that he will eventually go off the rails (although only the biggest pessimist could have predicted the manner of his spectacular demise), and it is every bit as inevitable that his son will wear the scars from his relationship with his father.

You see, another Proustian connection here is that Karl Ove (just like Proust's fictionalised Marcel) is not a particularly nice person.  When you paint a complete picture, warts and all, that can hardly come as a surprise, but the writer comes across as an arrogant, selfish (expletive deleted).  He prioritises work over his family (at one point leaving his heavily-pregnant wife in bed at five in the morning to go off and do - or not do - some writing).  As he says near the start of the book:

"I have always had a great need for solitude.  I require huge swathes of loneliness, and when I do not have it, which has been the case for the past five years, my frustration can sometimes become almost panicked, or aggressive.  And when what has kept me going for the whole of my adult life, the ambition to write something exceptional one day, is threatened in this way, my one thought, which gnaws at me like a rat, is that I have to escape."
p.28 (Harvill Secker, 2012)

I suppose his success has justified his methods, but still...

A Death in the Family is definitely a fascinating work, but I'm not sure it's for everyone.  While some bits are enthralling (including the infamous seventy-page section where Karl Ove and his brother attempt to erase the squalid signs of their father's last days), others are equally dull.  One part I found extremely tedious was the story of a New Year's Eve party Karl Ove attempted to attend in his teens, a good chunk of my life I won't be getting back.

Another question I have about the book is what it actually is - is it even fiction?  As far as I can tell, it's completely autobiographical and as honest as it gets, so what actually makes this fiction?  The style of writing?  A clue to the answer to my question may lie in a comment the writer makes when talking about paintings:

"Thus there was always a certain objectivity to them, by which I mean a distance between reality and the portrayal of reality, and it was doubtless in this interlying space where it 'happened', where it appeared, whatever it was I saw, when the world seemed to step forward from the world.  When you didn't just see the incomprehensible in it but came very close to it." p.199

Knausgaard's version of reality is not reality itself, but a close copy, one that allows us to see reality more clearly.  It may be art, but I'm sure it has come at a cost - Knausgaard's family reunions must be a lot of fun ;)

Do you think it deserves to make the shortlist?
I'm really not sure.  It definitely deserved to be recognised in the longlist, but it is a little patchy (inevitable for the kind of style Knausgaard attempts), and as I mentioned above, I'm not even sure if it is really a work of fiction.  I didn't recommend last year's Proustian effort (Peter Nádas' Parallel Stories) for the shortlist, and I think this one will be just outside my top six too.

Will it make the shortlist?
How could it not?  This is the book that everyone seems to have read, and I feel that there is an expectation that it will still be around when the main prize is given out.  Having been longlisted for both the IFFP and the BTBA (the American equivalent), it's a book which will give some weight and glamour to the shortlist - so it'll probably make it :)

*****
That's all from Norway.  Next time we'll be heading south and west, with a brief stop in the Netherlands before reaching our next destination - Wales.

No, really, Wales.  Honest...

'White Masks' by Elias Khoury (Review)

As you may have gathered by now, I'm currently working my way through this year's IFFP longlist, but today's review is on a book which may be a chance for next time around.  Elias Khoury is a Lebanese writer, one who has been longlisted for the prize before, and his latest work is an excellent tale of a search for truth in a city which has lost its way.  Will this be on the judge's list next year?  Let's see...

*****
White Masks (translated by Maia Tabet, review copy from MacLehose Press) starts with a body found in the streets of Beirut, covered in a pile of rubbish.  Khalid Ahmad Jaber had gone missing a few days earlier, and while people turning up dead is hardly a rarity in the Lebanese capital during the civil war, Jaber's case is a little different - mainly because no-one can understand why he would have been killed.

The main voice of the novel is a journalist (a fictionalised Khoury) who decides to investigate the case by looking at it from a variety of angles, interviewing anyone who can shed light on poor Khalid's final hours.  He talks to the man's distraught wife, his neighbours, the rubbish collector who found the body, a militia man who saw him briefly, his daughter...  Owing to the unusual nature of Khalid's death, he begins to be praised as a martyr, despite the fact that his death had nothing to do with the ongoing conflict:

"And the poor martyr, Khalil...I swear he's a martyr...I feel ashamed of myself...but I didn't know that he was the Khalil Ahmad Jaber who would be murdered and whose picture would be in all the papers.  I swear, had I known, I would've taken him in and cared for him...What can we do?  It was God's will!"
p.72 (MacLehose Press, 2013)

There is no shortage of people willing to talk to the journalist about Khalid's final days.  However, none of the witness are able to shed light on a rather puzzling case.

But from the very beginning, we suspect that White Masks is less about one man and more about life in Beirut as a whole.  By looking at one particular crime, Khoury paints a picture of a city in constant turmoil, where the extraordinary is ordinary and life is difficult to live and easy to lose.  Beirut is a city in pieces.  Nothing works, and the infrastructure has broken down.  Houses have been shelled, gangs roam the street, torture is an ever-present possibility... and the rubbish piles up uncollected.  Throughout the novel, the writer foregrounds the smells - of the city and of Khalid.  The poor man's stench is representative of a city in decay...

White Masks is divided into six statements from eye witnesses, bookended by the journalist's prologue and epilogue.  However, the witnesses' stories rarely restrict themselves to the matter in hand, and they go off on elaborate tangents, touching on their experiences with Khalid before retuning to stories about their partners, their families, or perhaps just stories they have heard in the street.  The perspective changes from third person to first at the drop of a hat (and back again).  It's all a little unusual for the Anglophone reader.

This difference of style is enhanced by the language used.  Tabet's translation is excellent, and the flavour is enhanced by the obvious Arabic slant to the writing.  In addition to the Arabic exclamations (al-hamdulillah, insh'allah, mashallah) which pepper the text, the witnesses' rhetorical style is slightly alien.  They address the reader directly, appeal to them, exaggerate, repeat themselves, their stories twisting and turning around in circles.

At times, the style is almost playful, linguistic gymnastics which have very little to do with what the witnesses were actually asked about.  However, the light tone only serves to put the more serious moments in starker focus.  When events turn darker, the effect is poignant:

"The blonde youth reeled, like a dancer doing a jig.  And even as his head came to rest on the ground, the hair already stiff and matted with dust, his body danced on, his feet twitching against the pavement...And then, finally, he slept..." p.91

Khoury is wonderful at striking the right balance between rowdy, rambling stories and brief, striking moments of terror, a balance which makes the book a pleasure to read.

One more theme which perhaps deserves attention is the description of gender roles in the Lebanese (Arabic) community of the time.  The men are cruel, lazy and workshy, beating and raping their wives, begging for (and stealing) money, unwilling to behave in the manner the reader would want them to.  However, the women in the novel appear to admire 'manly' men and despise those men who behave like women, leading you to wonder whether the writer is condemning, condoning or merely remarking on the husbands' behaviour... 

White Masks is a great read, a novel written in a wonderfully engaging style, and an excellent entry point into Arabic-language literature for those (like me) who are woefully under-read in this area.  The writer is more concerned with painting a picture of Beirut than finding out who killed Khalid, but in the end, does it really matter?

"No.  Even assuming the murderer was identified, and the motives of the crime were known, even if, finally, the murderer were put to death, it would not change anything.  People say that putting murderers to death serves as a deterrent to others but in reality, no-one is being deterred.  Murderers are executed and nothing changes." p.239

Defeatism, or a determination to move forward?  You be the judge.

'The Sound of Things Falling' by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Review - IFFP 2013, Number 5)

After recapping the books already finished, it's now time to get into the rest of the IFFP longlist.  The first stop on the journey takes us to Colombia - where a chance encounter proves to be life-changing for a young academic...

***** 
The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (translated by Anne McLean - from Bloomsbury)
What's it all about?
The novel begins in 2009, with law professor Antonio Yammara looking back at an event which, while innocuous at the time, turned out to be a pivotal moment in his life.  A chance meeting with Ricardo Laverde in a billiard hall eventually leads to an attack by a gunman on a motorbike, in the course of which Laverde is killed and Yammara is badly injured.

Once Antonio has recovered physically from the attack, he feels compelled to find out more about Laverde (and hopefully discover who killed him, and why).  One lead is information he obtains about the death of Laverde's estranged wife, Elaine; however, it isn't until he receives an unexpected phone call from Laverde's daughter that things slowly start to fall into place...

The Sound of Things Falling is an oblique look at the effects of the Colombian drug wars of the 1980s, not on those who were on the front line of the battle, but on the average citizen who lived their life against a background of fear.  Antonio suffers from trauma after the shooting, but his issues are much more deep-seated.  Having spent his formative years enveloped by the turmoil on the streets of Bogotá, he is unable to simply let things go - and his wife (who spent much of her youth outside Colombia) is unable to understand his pain.

His quixotic journey to confront the past is an attempt to move forward by banishing his demons, and the opportunity provided by Laverde's daughter, Maya, is irresistible.  Maya is able to fill in some of the pieces in the puzzle posed by Laverde's murder, but her appeal is just as much due to what she shares with Antonio.  She too grew up during the drug wars and has a special aversion to the capital:

"But that was seven years ago," I said.  "You haven't been back to Bogotá in all those years?"
"Well, yes.  To see the lawyers.  To look for that woman, Consuelo Sandoval.  But I've never stayed overnight in Bogotá, or even until sundown.  I can't stand it, I can't endure more than a few hours there."
p.110 (Bloomsbury, 2012)

Like Antonio, Maya is scarred by the events of her youth.  It is almost inevitable that the two traumatised souls will feel a connection...

The novel is also largely concerned with stories.  The structure is one of those Russian-doll affairs, with Antonio talking to the reader from 2009 before rapidly going back to 1995 to describe his first meeting with Laverde.  Of course, we have to take Antonio's descriptions at face value - which may not be such a good idea:

"Now that so many years have passed, now that I remember with the benefit of an understanding I didn't have then, I think of that conversation and it seems implausible that its importance didn't hit me in the face (And I tell myself at the same time that we're terrible judges of the present moment, maybe because the present doesn't actually exist: all is memory, this sentence that I just wrote is already a memory, this word is a memory that you, reader, just read.)"  p.15

When we move deeper into the novel and enter the core of Elaine's story, cobbled together from letters, diaries and Maya's stories, the reader needs to tread even more carefully.  Stories, and memories, are not always reliable.

There is a lot to like about The Sound of Things Falling.  McLean's translation reads wonderfully, keeping the hint of a Hispanic narrator while creating an excellent English text (if that is at all possible!), and the book zips along at times, the darker parts nicely counterbalanced with lighter moments (such as Elaine's letter in which she complains about a tedious book in difficult Spanish where all the characters have the same names...).  All in all, it's a quick, enjoyable read with the hint of something more...

...and I haven't even mentioned the hippopotamus ;)

Does it deserve to make the shortlist?
Despite the positive comments above, I'd have to say no.  While I liked it, I don't think it was really anything special, and one of the main issues I had was with the middle section.  Elaine's story seemed to drag, a dutiful narrative which slowed the book right down.  By the time we returned to the central question of who had killed Ricardo and why, I'd forgotten that this was the focus of the novel...

Will it make the shortlist?
Possibly.  It's definitely not a bad book, and as one of the few works from outside Europe, it provides a point of difference in a fairly homogeneous selection.  I also suspect other readers will be a lot more forgiving than me :)

*****
That's all for today :)  Next time, we're off to Norway - BYO cleaning products (I'll explain later...).