'The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith' by Thomas Keneally (Review)

Today's post looks at the second of my review copies from Harper Collins Australia taken from the Angus & Robertson Australian Classics range.  The first, Eleanor Dark's The Timeless Land, looked at race relations after the arrival of the first fleet in 1788.  This one is set a century later, but as you'll see, little has changed...

*****
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith is one of Thomas (or Tom) Keneally's best-known works here in Australia, and it's fairly easy to see why.  It's the story of a half-caste Aborigine who wants to get on in the world, having lost faith, and patience, with the lifestyle of his family and tribe.  With some gentle encouragement from the Methodist minister on the settlement he is attached to, Jimmie decides that he needs to make an effort to succeed in life, an effort which involves leaving the traditional past behind and embracing a white future.

This is 1899 though, and while Australian federation is just around the corner, the birth of a new country does not mean a new era for race relations.  Racism is common, casual and accepted.  Aborigines are still... well, I was going to say second-class citizens, but that would be a lie.  They weren't even counted on the census until the second half of the twentieth century...

Nonetheless, Jimmie knows what he wants, and the best way to get it:

"Possession was a holy state and he had embarked upon it with the Nevilles' shovel.  The Nevilles had succeeded so well as to make Jimmie a snob.  In the mind of the true snob there are certain limited criteria to denote the value of a human existence.  Jimmie's criteria were: home, hearth, wife, land.  Those who possessed these had beatitude unchallengeable.  Other men had accidental, random life.  Nothing better."
pp.16/7 (Angus and Robertson Classics, 2013)

Unfortunately though, Jimmie is never likely to achieve his dreams, and even his marriage to a poor, young white girl is unlikely to help when his bosses continue to despise, cheat and laugh at him.  One day, Jimmie snaps - and the consequences are horrific and legendary...

While Keneally himself claims in a foreword that this is not one of his better books, it's one that has captured the imagination of readers since its publication in 1972.  The key to the story is that Jimmie, unlike his brother Mort (another of the main characters), is the product of a relationship between a white man and a native woman.  He is different both in appearance and mindset to his kin, but unable to completely escape his tribal upbringing and his responsibilities to his extended family.  Caught between two worlds, he is destined to fall into a deep void.

Of course, he is pushed towards his fate by the white men who employ him (while always looking to exploit and cheat him).  Each time Jimmie works hard, his employers' cruelty or meanness forces him to move on, an action which reinforces the stereotype of the lazy 'blackfella' who ups and leaves when he pleases.  Even his time as a police tracker is cut short by a savage, cruel event.

Even so, when we come to the turning point, and Jimmie finally takes his revenge, we are stunned.  The cover of the book makes no secret of the fact that he snaps and commits murder, but we are perhaps conditioned into finding excuses and expect his actions to be almost understandable.  They are nothing of the kind, and the book is all the better for it.  Once Jimmie has time to look back on the event, he expects to feel remorse:

"Jimmie himself still waited for the slump of spirits which could be expected after merciless Friday night.  It failed to come.  He was still in a viable balance between belief and non-belief in the dismembering he had done.  At the same time, the thorough nature of the punishment he had dealt out continued to soothe and flatter him.  Because he had been effective.  He had actually manufactured death and howling dark for people who had such pretensions of permanence.  He had cut down obelisks to white virtue." (p.101)

Instead of regretting his actions, he feels a sense of vindication...

As the great event of Federation draws ever closer though, you sense that Jimmie's time is running out along with that of the old six colonies.  His punishment will be less a noose or a bullet, than a feeling of failure and remorse for the mess he's made of other people's lives.  After spending time on the run with Jimmie and his friends, will we feel more sympathy for the murderer?  I suspect that will depend on the individual reader...

While The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith is a great read, it does start slowly, and the first half can be a little predictable in its lament of a poor Aborigine cheated by the nasty white man (the dated racist jibes at the English wore a little thin too...).  However, once we reach the pivotal point of the story, it turns into something more, a subtle, complex exploration of what it means to be caught between cultures in a society which is, literally, black and white.  There were no shades of grey (or light-brown) in the eyes of nineteenth-century Australians...

Oh, one last thing (and it's probably something I should have mentioned earlier).  This novel is based on a true story, and while some of the names and dates have been changed, the basic plot is the same.  There really was a Jimmie (Governor, not Blacksmith) living at the end of the nineteenth century, who married a white woman and went on a killing spree, ending up the same way as his fictional namesake.  Perhaps that makes the story even more powerful than it already is...

'A Handful of Sand' by Marinko Koščec (Review)

As you may have noticed, I'm always keen to try translated fiction from new sources, and today's review is of a book from a previously untried publisher.  Istros Books specialises in works from South-East Europe, especially the Balkans, and my first taste of their work comes from Croatia.  At first glance, it's a typical love story, a novel describing how two people find each other.  However, it doesn't quite end that way...

*****
Marinko Koščec's A Handful of Sand (translated by Will Firth, e-copy from publisher) is a novel written in two alternating monologues.  One is from the perspective of a man while the other tells a story from a woman's point of view.  While there are no names to give you any clues, the sections are handily printed in different fonts.  The man lives in Canada, the woman in Zagreb, but we sense from the start that there must be a connection between them - one we'll have to wait for.

Through these rambling monologues, we gradually learn about their lives.  The two are of a similar age and grew up in a country which exploded into pieces, leaving them resident in the new (old) country of Croatia.  Both have difficulties to overcome, involving a missing parent, finding love and working out what it is they want to do with their lives.  Then they meet...

A Handful of Sand is an intriguing 'he says, she says' story about a relationship decades in the making, but one which may not last much beyond the initial spark.  It also provides a brief insight into the last few decades of Croatian history, but don't worry - this is not another war novel.  The conflict is distant, and the mentions of it are fleeting.  For the writer, his characters' personal growth is far more important.

Nevertheless, it is far from being a sunny, happy book.  Both of our narrators struggle through their youth, with the man in particular obsessed from an early age with the darker side of life.  He describes how a friend used to talk about death:

"He could discuss death endlessly.  These were actually dialogues with himself, because I had nothing to say on the topic.  Death is something certain and eternal, everywhere and at all times; it's damn hard to forget that but even today I don't have anything to add.  Maybe he came to me with his endless monologues because no one else took him seriously; but how can you dismiss someone when they show so much passion, when they only seem really alive when talking about death?"
p.23 (Istros Books, 2013)

He may claim that he has little to say on the subject, but it's one which is never far from the surface.

The woman is an artist (we later learn that she's become a fairly successful one too), but her life has had its own ups and downs.  From the death of her mother to her struggle to gain acceptance for her work, she tries to balance her desires with the needs of her possibly crippled, possibly hypochondriac, father.  She's also looking for someone to share her life, but she just can't find the right person...

Of course, from the start, the whole book is heading towards the inevitable meeting:

"You were standing next to one of the originals effectively hung on the walls, with your arms folded, supporting your chin in the palm of your hand, and with a cigarette between your fingers.  All at once I was standing on a narrow sliver of ground, everything else fell into an indefinite, mute whiteness, except for that figure, seemingly just a few steps away, which stepped forth from a gracious heavenly hand and switched off the world around her." (p.168)

The two fall headlong into a passionate affair, one with sizzling chemistry.  This is no fairy tale, though - the story doesn't stop at that point and make claims for happily-ever-after.  The real story is what happens afterwards, a look at the consequences when two damaged people collide...

There's a lot of good writing in A Handful of Sand, and there is also some very funny, dark humour in parts.  The man is a literary editor, and his description of the chaotic life of a Zagreb publisher is both insightful and amusing (the anecdote about the doomed visit of an alcoholic Finnish writer is a highlight here).  The woman also has her moments, at one point making a living by pumping out bulk Mediterranean landscapes for ignorant tourists.  However, on the whole, it's a dark and foreboding novel, and the last fifty pages proves those premonitions correct.  The final part of the book is compelling, disturbing and slightly surreal.  Even after going back and having a second look, I'm not completely sure exactly what happened - or whether it actually took place at all...

If I were to criticise the book, I'd probably say that it was a little slow at the start.  It takes a long time to get to the meeting, and as we're pretty sure it's coming, the time drags a little.  Also, as well as being unsettling and confusing, some scenes towards the end of the book are actually a little upsetting - consider yourself warned ;)

Overall, though, A Handful of Sand is an interesting story of how a relationship is seen differently through two sets of eyes.  The moral, if there is one, is that of making time count, with several images throughout the novel of sand slipping through fingers.  When you find the right person, you need to act fast - every grain counts...

'Distant Star' by Roberto Bolaño (Review)

After enjoying The Savage Detectives recently, I was keen to try more of Roberto Bolaño's work (preferably something a little shorter, to begin with).  Of course, my wonderful library was able to come to my aid, presenting me with several choices.  In the end though, one stood out - mainly because of its connection with Bolaño's longer novel...

*****
Distant Star (translated by Chris Andrews) is an early Bolaño novella, but one that immediately evokes tones of The Savage Detectives.  The story begins in Chile in the early seventies, where our young narrator (Arturo B., whom many of you will recognise as Arturo Belano, the shadowy figure at the centre of The Savage Detectives) attends poetry workshops with his wonderfully-named friend, Bibiano O'Ryan.  At one of these gatherings, they first encounter Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an enigmatic, handsome poet, who makes an impression on the few beautiful women in attendance.

However, Alberto is not what he seems.  Turbulent times are ahead for Chile, and Alberto (or his alter-ego, Carlos Wieder) will be in the thick of them.  A military coup ousts the government, and anyone considered a leftist dissident, including many of Belano's poet friends, is in big trouble.  Years later, Belano and O'Ryan still think of Wieder and their lost friends, but they're not the only ones.  That's right - it's another hunt for a lost poet...

Already, after reading just two works from Bolaño's back catalogue, it's clear that this is a writer whose books form a whole oeuvre, an interconnected series of writings which need to read as a whole, rather than individually.  While The Savage Detectives looked at Belano's life in Mexico, and the events that unfolded as a consequence, Distant Star takes you back to his home country to show us the poet-wanderer's beginnings.  When he talks, later in the book, about his time in Paris and Barcelona, it brings back flashes of scenes from The Savage Detectives, adding to the richness of the story.

While Belano narrates this story though, the main focus is on Carlos Wieder, a very nasty piece of work.  By hanging out in the leftist poet scene, he discovers who the big names are, and when the coup comes, he decides to act (possibly without authority).  He then disappears, only to reemerge as a poet with a difference - one who (as shown on the cover of the book) writes his poems, and manifesto, across the sky:

"This time it wrote only one word, in larger letters, over what must have been the center of the city: LEARN.  Then, for a moment, it seemed to hesitate and lose altitude, as if it were about to plummet into the roof of a building, as if the pilot had switched off the motor and were giving us a practical demonstration, a first example from which to learn.  But only for a moment, the time it took for night and wind to blur the letters of the last word.  Then the plane vanished."
p.29 (New Directions, 2004)

Feted by the military and the common people alike, Wieder gets bolder and bolder, using his popularity to experiment with his flying and his art.  One day, however, he overreaches, and people get to see his true face.  He produces a small photographic exhibition, one which is too much even for the unscrupulous regime he works for:

"Less than a minute after going in, Tatiana von Beck emerged from the room.  She was pale and shaken - everyone noticed.  She stared at Wieder as if she were going to say something to him but couldn't find the word.  Then she tried to get to the bathroom, unsuccessfully.  After vomiting in the passage, Miss von Beck staggered to the front door with the help of an officer who gallantly offered to take her home, although she kept saying she would prefer to go alone." (pp.86/7)

What was in the room?  Something rather... unpleasant.  Still, it'll take a lot to bring a man like this to justice...

Distant Star is a quick and easy read, another dazzling display of meta-fiction and reality-blurring quasi-biographical writing.  Again, the Borgesian inheritance is palpable, with hosts of poets and publications - some real, some invented - littering the pages.  To add another layer to the meta-fictional qualities, Distant Star is actually an expansion (and rewriting) of the final twenty pages of an earlier work, Nazi Literature in the Americas.  In fact, the first page of Distant Star has Bolaño explaining how Belano (his alter-ego) was unsatisfied with the first, brief attempt, and insisted on dictating the real story to the author.  Got that?

As interesting as it is to learn more about Belano though, the book is more about the events in his homeland, and the way in which monsters like Wieder were able to take advantage of political events to satisfy their lusts and desires.  Early in the book, O'Ryan looks at Wieder's name, analysing the etymology and coming up with variants involving 'wieder' (again) and the related word 'wider' (against).  One he doesn't mention is the one which is most apt, 'widerlich'.  It's a word which can mean (amongst other things) obnoxious, repellent, disgusting and gross.  While the flying poet may appear suave and noble, his soul is most definitely widerlich...

Distant Star is not a patch on The Savage Detectives, but that's not really the point.  It's a great, quick read and a story which shades in more of Bolaño's fictional canvas, showing the elusive Belano in a new light.  I'll certainly be going back for more - I suppose I should really check out Nazi Literature in the Americas and see how the story originally looked.  I suspect that I'll find the signpost to the next choice there as well ;)

'Snakes and Earrings' by Hitomi Kanehara (Review)

I was hoping to have time for one more J-Lit post before leaving the first month of JLC7 - only just though, so it'll have to be a quick one. didn't quite make it ;)  Luckily (once again!), I just happened to have the perfect book hanging around on the shelves.  I have to say though that it's not one for the faint-hearted...

*****
Snakes and Earrings (translated by David James Karashima) is the debut work of Hitomi Kanehara, one which won her the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 2004, at the age of just nineteen.  Like many Akutagawa-Prize winning works, it's a fairly short piece, clocking in at a rather spaced-out 118 pages, and it's one that seems designed to be sped through.

It's the story of Lui, a nineteen-year-old woman enjoying life on the Tokyo night scene.  Her life changes when she gets together with Ama, a man with a slightly unusual appearance.  It's not his red hair, his tattoos or his piercings which attract Lui though - it's the fact that his tongue has been split in two, like a snake's...

Initially hesitant to commit to Ama's world, Lui quickly gives in to her curiosity, and soon she is on her own path to a snake's tongue.  Shiba-san, the owner of the tattoo parlour where she gets her initial studs, also talks her into getting a tattoo on her back, and it isn't long before she senses that the tattoo artist has his eye on her as well.  Can Lui cope in this new world?  And just who has the forked tongue around here?

Snakes and Earrings is an interesting look at a sub-culture which, to put it mildly, I'm unlikely to ever get close to in real life.  Lui acts as the reader's introduction into a world which, behind its facade, is actually fairly ordinary.  Our initial view of Ama as a bit of a weirdo is softened by our repeated views of his domestic life, his appearance hiding the fact that he's just a normal bloke:

"He wasn't bad-looking.  I mean, all right, his eyes do have a kind of constant menacing stare that can be uncomfortable, but in general I'd still say he falls into the good-looking category.  Still, with the tattoo and a face full of piercings, I guess it was difficult to really tell if he looked good or bad."
p.49 (Vintage Originals, 2005)

In fact, Ama is a tricky character to pin down.  At times, he definitely lives up to the image his cosmetic alterations suggest...

The theme of not judging a book by its cover is an important one in Snakes and Earrings.  Every character we meet has their flaws, and it is up to the reader to give them enough time to discover whether those flaws are skin deep, or whether they go closer to the core.  This is as true for Lui as it is for the men she hangs around.  A bored freeter, one of the new generation who won't commit to a restrictive work life, Lui spends her days drinking, waiting for Ama to get home from work, and her nights having sex or doing the odd spot of casual entertaining.

In fact, Lui comes to be the character we feel most sympathy for.  Although she doesn't really have any problems, neither does she have anything to live for.  It's going to take something special to snap her out of her downward spiral, a wake-up call.  We're just not sure what that wake-up call will be...

Snakes and Earrings is a smooth, polished, quick read, and David James Karashima's translation is a good one (certainly, nothing really stood out at all - which is always a good sign!).  Despite this though, it's a book I liked, rather than loved.  It all seems a bit like a tame attempt to shock, as if the mere mention of split tongues and giant tattoos is enough to warrant being given the Akutagawa Prize.  In fact, when you hear that Kanehara was one of two winners on that occasion, the other being Risa Wataya, another nineteen-year-old, you begin to suspect that the judges were focusing just as much on the writer as on the story (some cruel souls - including me - have speculated that the caricature Fuka-Eri in Murakami's 1Q84 is a hybrid of Kanehara and Wataya...).

Still, it's an enjoyable read with a twist in the tale and slightly more to recommend it than may appear at first glance.  And if you do like it, Autofiction, Kaneharas' only other work to have been translated into English, is even better.  It's just as messed up though :)

June 2013 Wrap-Up

June has been a busy month on the reading month.  I've read more this month than in any other month so far this year, and (surprisingly) I've been keeping up with the reviews too - so expect a lot of posts over the next month or so.  For now though, just enjoy the usual monthly round-up of what's been going on :)

*****
Total Books Read: 16
Year-to-Date: 62

New: 16

Rereads: 0

From the Shelves: 2
Review Copies: 10

From the Library:4

On the Kindle: 2 (both review copies)

Novels: 8
Novellas:4

Short Stories: 2
Non-Fiction: 2

Non-English Language: 15 (4 Spanish, 3 Japanese, 2 Dutch, 2 French, Polish, Italian, Croatian, Hungarian)

In Original Language: 1 (French)

Aussie Author Challenge: 1 (3/3)

*****
Books reviewed in June were:

1) American Stories by Nagai Kafu
2) The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
3) Sixty-Nine by Ryu Murakami
4) Blindness by José Saramago
5) Stone upon Stone by Wiesław Myśliwski
6) We, the Children of Cats by Tomoyuki Hoshino
7) The Infatuations by Javier Marías
8) The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker
9) Milky Way Railroad by Kenji Miyazawa
10) My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

Tony's Turkey for June is: Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat

More because of thwarted expectations than the fact that it's a bad book, but still...  I was expecting quality literature from a Nobel Prize winner - instead, what I got was a fairly standard piece of historical fiction.  I'll be giving Vargas Llosa's work another try, but this one is being plucked and prepared for Christmas dinner ;)

Tony's Recommendation for June is:
Wiesław Myśliwski's Stone upon Stone

For the second month in a row, this was a very tough decision.  While I didn't have quite as many to choose from as was the case last month, there were three very strong contenders, and it took me far too long to make the decision.  In the end though, Myśliwski's long, rambling monologue just inched out Saramago's tale of a world gone blind and Hoshino's magical stories.  Only just though ;)

*****
Time to look forward to July then.  I don't really have major plans for next month, but that pile of review copies on my shelves just keeps getting higher and higher...  There'll be a few more Spanish-language reads, courtesy of my wonderful local library, and you never know - I might even get around to reading a few of my own books too :)

'My Brilliant Friend' by Elena Ferrante (Review)

While the photo to the left may suggest that I'm at the cutting edge of translated fiction, those with keen eyes may judge that the opposite is the case.  You see, while Europa Editions were kind enough to send me a copy of today's book, the only reason I got an uncorrected proof is that there were no reading copies left - because the book was published last year.  Yep, I've got my finger on the pulse all right ;)

Still, better late than never - and the book was definitely worth waiting for...

*****
Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend (translated by Ann Goldstein) is a wonderful novel, one I enjoyed from start to finish.  It tells the story of two girls growing up in 1950s Naples and is actually the first part of a trilogy.  The story is narrated by Elena, a bookish girl you suspect is an alter-ego of the writer, but the central figure of the novel is her best friend Lila, a character who defies description, both for the reader and Elena herself.

Lila is a young woman who can't be pinned down.  A poor girl with a fierce intelligence and an undeniable charisma, she chooses Elena as a friend at a young age, and while Elena is never able to rid herself of the feeling of coming off second-best in every possible way (looks, intelligence, sexual allure, success), she feels proud that Lila has singled her out as the only person in her neighbourhood worthy of being her confidante.

The neighbourhood is itself a focus of My Brilliant Friend.  The two girls are growing up in a poor area of a poor city in the poorer part of Italy, and Elena acquaints the reader with a suburb used to violence:

"I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence.  Every sort of thing happened, at home and outside, every day, but I don't recall having ever thought that the life we had there was particularly bad.  Life was like that, that's all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us."
p.37 (Europa Editions, 2012)

Violence, actual or imminent, pervades the novel: husbands and wives brawl; fathers and sons injure each other in senseless quarrels; and on the streets, knives and guns are more common than you would expect...

The concept that drives the story along is that this is a place, and a life, to escape from, and while the two friends start off with the same idea, studying hard in the hope of some day becoming rich enough to escape, they eventually drift onto different paths.  While Lila is the genius, it is Elena who manages to stay on the academic straight-and-narrow, striving to be top of the class each term despite having no clear idea of what advantages might arise from her efforts.  Lila, on the other hand, decides that a long-delayed possible future success is not for her - instead, she thinks that marriage may well be the way to escape her fate.  Towards the end of the novel, flaws begin to appear in Lila's perfection though, and we begin to wonder which of the pair the 'brilliant friend' actually is...

There's a lot to like about My Brilliant Friend.  In its depiction of an unequal friendship, narrated by the less confident of the two friends, it reminds me of classic novels like Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes and Günter Grass' Cat and Mouse, and as in those novels, it becomes increasingly clear that the lot of the 'superior' friend is not always the happier one.  As a child, Lila is streets ahead of everyone else, but even she cannot extract herself completely from the social ties binding her, slowly pulling her down into the traditional fate reserved for Neapolitan women.  It appears that she has made her choices freely, but how free can she be in a man's world?

The book is also a stark, at times brutal, look at class differences, and the way your future can often be ordained at birth.  Most of the action takes place in Elena and Lila's neighbourhood, but the girls do venture further afield at times.  When they do, it can come as bit of a wake-up call, as is the case when they walk into a richer area of Naples:

"It was like crossing a border.  I remember a dense crowd and a sort of humiliating difference.  I looked not at the boys, but at the girls, the women: they were absolutely different from us.  They seemed to have breathed another air, to have eaten other food, to have dressed on some other planet, to have learned to walk on wisps of wind." (p.192)

The group of friends from the poor suburbs feel out of place among the well off.  The choice they have is to retreat to their part of town, or adapt and fit in.

This class difference is also shown linguistically.  The native language for most of the characters is dialect, and the switches between dialect and Italian usually represent class differences between characters and situations.  The more educated Elena becomes, the more she uses Italian, even if she still retains mastery of her first language.  It's tricky to balance these two sides of her character though - some areas (such as the mysteries of the Holy Trinity...) just can't seem to be discussed in dialect...

My Brilliant Friend is a book which makes for compelling, compulsive reading, one I sped through in a couple of days, and it's also a novel which makes you reflect long after the last page has been read.  While we are living the story through Elena, and following her slow progress towards an education, maturity and (possibly) future prosperity, we are also witness to the alternative path taken by Lila, wondering if she has miscalculated in her plan to escape a life of poverty and drudgery.

The book ends dramatically, and not in the way you expect.  Even if I hadn't known My Brilliant Friend was the first part of a trilogy, I would have been expecting a sequel - there are too many questions here left unanswered.  Luckily, we won't have to wait long, as Europa are publishing the second part, The Story of a New Name, in September.  Rest assured, I won't be leaving it as long to get around to Ferrante's work the second time around ;)

'Milky Way Railroad' by Kenji Miyazawa (Review)

Bellezza's theme for June in the Japanese Literature Challenge 7 was children's literature - and it's one which is not exactly my preferred genre (to say the least).  However, as luck would have it, I did happen to have a Japanese children's classic hanging around on my J-Lit shelves, one which will be very familiar to any Japanese readers out there - and it all takes place up in the Milky Way...

*****
Kenji Miyazawa's Milky Way Railroad (translated by Joseph Sigrist and D.M. Stroud, published by Stone Bridge Press) was originally written around 1927, and it's a fantasy tale about a boy and a rather unusual train.  One night, on the Japanese celebration of Tanabata, Giovanni walks down to the village in search of the milk which was not delivered that day.  Forced to wait, he wanders up to the top of the hill, when suddenly:

"Giovanni heard a strange voice calling, "Milky Way Station!  Milky Way Station!"  All at once everything before his eyes was illuminated, as if a billion fireflies had been fixed in one perpetual flash and inlaid in the sky."
pp.47/8 (2009, Stone Bridge Press)

The next thing Giovanni knows, he is seated in a train, speeding through the night with his best friend, Campanella.  This is no ordinary train though - instead of riding the rails, the two boys are actually traversing the Milky Way...  How is this possible?  And why has Campanella suddenly appeared to join in Giovanni's journey?  All will be revealed in good time...

First things first.  Milky Way Railroad is a children's book, and if you don't approach it as such, you will be sorely disappointed.  Although my copy is 143-pages long, I read the whole thing in about half an hour, and I suspect most readers would be able to do the same.  The language is fairly simple, and the story is a straight-forward narrative in which the two friends ride the train until it is time for one of them to get off.  Anyone expecting the brilliance of Kawabata or Oe is both misguided and likely to be disappointed ;)

Which is not to say that there isn't more to the story than first meets the eye.  Miyazawa was a schoolteacher (hence the children's fiction), but he was also deeply interested in religion, particularly Buddhism and Christianity, and Milky Way Railroad is, in part, an attempt to reconcile different belief structures.  The travellers actually visit Heaven (well, Northern Cross Station which apparently services it!), and the Italian names given to the two main characters contrast nicely with the Japanese names borne by the obviously western children who get on the train at a later stop.

If you're suspicious of how much I seem to have got from flicking through a kids' book about magic trains, you're right to be.  Most of my insights come from the excellent introduction which D.M. Stroud, who updated Joseph Sigrist's original translation, wrote for this edition.  The translator does a great job of explaining the background of the Tanabata festival and the author's religious and scientific beliefs - in fact, were it not for major plot twists being discussed, this would be very helpful to read before starting the book itself :)

If Milky Way Railroad sounds like something you (or your kid!) would enjoy, then I'd recommend it - just remember that it is a book for children.  Even so, there is a lot to like about it - and plenty of wise words to remember:

"And everyone is Campanella.  Everyone you meet Giovanni - every time you ride on a train -  everyone you ride with and eat apples with.  So it's just as you were thinking before.  Take every opportunity to look for the greatest happiness of all people, and quickly join them on their way." (p.129)

Life is a journey, and you'll meet plenty of people along the way.  Most of them will get on and off at different stations to you; the important thing is to laugh and have fun while you're riding the rails together...

'The Twin' by Gerbrand Bakker (Review)

I'm very keen to take part in blog events for translated fiction, so I was always going to find something for Dutch Lit Fortnight, hosted by Iris on Books.  Surprisingly though, the matter of what to read was also taken out of my hands.  I recently received a copy of The Twin from a kind Twitter follower (@OpShopReading) who had just finished it (thank you!), so when Iris announced that this would be one of the readalong choices, the only thing to do was start reading it ;)

*****
The Twin (translated by David Colmer) was writer Gerbrand Bakker's first novel for adults, and as you can see on the sticker in the picture, it won the IMPAC Dublin Prize in 2010.  It's set in the Dutch countryside, where Helmer, a fifty-something farmer, lives in his family's big, old house, with only his aged father for company.  With his mother and his twin brother, Henk, both long dead, you would think that Helmer would be more friendly to his last remaining family member.  In fact, he appears to harbour deep-seated resentment towards his father, keeping the frail old man locked up in an upstairs bedroom.

The days go by without much change in Helmer's life, despite the changing demands of the seasons - that is, until the farmer begins to suspect that someone is trying to contact him.  A shadow glimpsed outside the house; a ring on the doorbell at night; a phone call where nobody speaks...  Eventually, the stranger announces herself.  The woman trying to summon up the courage to talk to Helmer is Riet - his dead brother's fiancée...

Anyone who has read The Detour, Bakker's IFFP-winning novel, will be on familiar ground with The Twin.  The setting is very similar (if much less hilly), and the central premise of a life interrupted by a chance visitor is too.  However, The Twin is a slower, less urgent book than The Detour, and Helmer is a very different character to Emilie.  This is a man who never really wanted to take over the family farm, and only tragic circumstances have forced him to stay.  Now, he spends his time feeding the cows, checking on the sheep and making polite conversation with the neighbour's wife when she drops by.  There is little evidence of anything else in his life.

Of course, Helmer does have a past, and it is one of missed opportunities, one life cut short and another twisted to take its place.  Part of his resentment towards his father stems from this insistence that Helmer stay on the farm.  The son's dreams of escape, studying literature in the big city and creating a life that doesn't involve cow shit, dissolve in the harsh reality of his brother's death.  It's little wonder that he feels bitter.

Still, the father is not the only one in Helmer's bad books.  Riet, a woman he hasn't seen for decades, is also partly responsible for his situation (as the reader soon finds out).  Quite what her motivation is to send her son, coincidentally called Henk, to work as a hand on Helmer's farm, I'm not really sure.  In any case, in agreeing to take the young man on, Helmer further disturbs his tranquil existence.  After all, Henk is almost family:

"Henk is actually a kind of nephew, I think when I close the door to the stairs and see him standing there.  He is pulling on his overalls, the ones with the crotch that rides up, the sleeves that are too short and the tear in one armpit.  A half-nephew, a could-have-been-nephew, a nephew-in-law."
p.192 (Scribe, 2011)

Just as Bradwen interrupts Emilie's solitude in The Detour, Henk the younger makes Helmer reflect on his life and his relationship with his father.  Perhaps it's time for a change - if only it isn't too late...

The Twin is an interesting book, and with its stripped-back style, it's an easy read too.  I'd have to say though that, contrary to what I've read elsewhere, it doesn't really reach the heights of The Detour.  I much preferred the poetry of that book, the majestic peaks of the Welsh countryside and the hidden depths of the main character.  By contrast, Helmer (and the setting) can come across a bit flat...

However, while The Twin is fairly slow-moving, that's not to say that there's nothing going on beneath the surface.  The story is nicely book-ended by the fleeting visits of canoeists paddling past the farm, and while the image the canoeists have is of an unchanging part of the scenery, the reader is aware that a lot has happened in those few months.  Some people have died, others have moved on, and Helmer's life has been changed for good - and perhaps for the better.

*****
On finishing the book, I had a good think about what else was hidden between the pages, and one theme that kept coming to mind, one I haven't seen mentioned much elsewhere, is Helmer's sexuality.  While it would be jumping to conclusions to pigeon-hole a single middle-aged man as gay (or to assume that studying literature in Amsterdam was code for coming out...), there's enough here to make you wonder.  A lot is made of his sleeping naked in the same bed as his brother (and then the other Henk), and his relationship with the farmhand Jaap also has a slight sense of sexual tension (swimming naked, kisses on the lips).

Overthought?  Perhaps?  Important?  Perhaps not.  The reason the idea keeps coming back to me though is that it helps to explain the antagonism between Helmer and his father, one which seems too strong to be put down to the decision to keep Helmer on the farm.  For me, it's an added layer to the story, one which gives Helmer a depth he'd otherwise lack.  Does anyone out there agree, or am I barking up the wrong tree here?  Comments are always welcome ;)

'The Infatuations' by Javier Marías (Review)

After the success of A Heart So White, the only question for me was which Javier Marías work to try next.  Should I look for one of his older works, or could I wait until his next one was released in a few months' time?  Which is when I discovered that the new novel was actually already out in the UK (and Australia), and that my library had a copy available...

*****
The Infatuations (translated, once again, by Margaret Jull Costa) takes place in Madrid, where we follow María Dolz, a young woman working in publishing, who comes to a cafe every morning before work to prepare herself mentally for the day ahead.  Often she sees a man and a woman there, a pair she silently dubs 'The Perfect Couple', and though she never makes contact beyond occasional nods and glances, they become part of her routine.

The couple disappear for a while, and María eventually finds out that the man, Miguel Desvern, was killed in a tragic, senseless street attack.  María sees the wife, Luisa, again one day and condoles her.  She is invited back to the house, and meets a family friend, Javier Díaz-Varela... and it all gets a little bit suspicious from here.  You see, while María is infatuated with Javier (who is happy to have some fun), he only has eyes for the fair widow - which leads the attentive reader to think a little harder about the circumstances of poor Miguel's untimely demise...

The Infatuations is the story of a death which turn out to be less straight-forward and tragic than it first appears.  It soon becomes clear that there is a lot more to the story than what was publicly reported.  However, every time the reader starts to understand (or think they understand) what happened, the writer shifts the goals, changing the question and giving us more food for thought.  While the plot could be a thriller, the way Marías handles it makes it much more.

It's another deeply written work, a novel where every word seems important, or possibly important.  The success of the book depends on the narrative voice, and it's a very good one.  María (sarcastic, hard-bitten, cynical, but loving) tells us the story, one of love, loss, death and murder.  While María is suspicious of Javier's intentions, what interests her (and the reader) is how it all happened - and why.

María's connection with the couple is an interesting one in itself.  Despite seeing them on a regular basis for years, she never gets to talk to them - modern life is busy, and we are left with no time to reflect.  After Miguel's death, she catches herself thinking about ambulances, and the way we moan at delays in traffic instead of thinking about the poor soul inside the vehicle.  Of course, we always think about the dead when it's too late... 

But no matter how much we mourn the dead, do we really want them back?  Marías gently prods at the sore spots of our conscience, suggesting that this is not always the case.  Often, the one left behind is (eventually) better off, and Luisa, in her muddled, grief-affected way, seems to recognise this:

"Like I say, it's changed my way of thinking, and it's as if I don't recognise myself any more; or, rather, it seems to me sometimes that I never knew myself in my previous life, and that Miguel didn't know me either: he couldn't have, it would have been beyond him, isn't that strange?  If the real me is this woman constantly making all these connections and associations, things that a few months ago would have seemed to me completely disparate and unrelated; if I am the person I've been since his death, that means that for him I was always someone else, and had he lived, I would have continued to be the person I'm not, indefinitely."
p.53 (Hamish Hamilton, 2013) 

More importantly, Javier is a firm believer in this philosophy, and hopes that time will heal all wounds...

As much as it is about death and loss, The Infatuations (as you'd expect from the name) also examines love and lust (with a slightly Latin slant).  The book has several overlapping couples, chains of lovers waiting to see which way to jump.  While Javier pursues Luisa, María waits patiently with another lover for distraction:

"...with a little bad luck and a few more lovers of the kind who allow themselves to be loved and neither reject nor reciprocate that love, the chain could have gone on for ever.  A series of people lined up like dominoes, all waiting for the surrender of one entirely oblivious woman, to find out who would fall next to them." (pp.125/6)

It's an endless chain of hopeful lovers waiting for one grieving widow to move on...

Another interesting aspect to the novel is the clever intertwining of stories from classic French fiction with the main story.  Balzac's Colonel Chabert (a story of a man returning from the dead, and the consequences of his return) and Dumas' The Three Musketeers (particularly the part about the origins and return of the ominous Milady) become key to Marías' story, but gradually and skillfully, so that the reader only slowly becomes aware of the significance of the books.  There is also a mention for Old Goriot and (of course!) Macbeth - I am beginning to sense that Marías is obsessed with this play ;)

There are similar themes here to those found in A Heart So White, particularly the idea of letting the past stay there, and the style is again a wonderful creation of long sentences and phrases whose significance only becomes clear later on.  However, there are also some striking differences.  María's voice gives the novel a very different slant, and the humour of the publishing world (hated writers, boring parties, delicately turning down requests to source class-A narcotics...) makes a welcome relief from some of the darker episodes.

One criticism I had is that it is a little slow at times, particularly in the conversations between Javier and María (which appear to be happening at real-life speed...).  Nevertheless, the story keeps the reader's attention to the very end, and (just as in real life) our questions are never truly answered.  After 350 pages, we're no closer to uncovering Marías' secrets than we were at the start - which can be a good thing.

Great writing, and a good story.  If I were a betting man, I'd be putting a few bob on this to make next year's IFFP longlist (and possibly shortlist).  You heard it here first ;)

'We, the Children of Cats' by Tomoyuki Hoshino (Review)

This year was a bad one for J-Lit in the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, with no Japanese book on the longlist for 2013.  Over in the US though, one Japanese work did make it onto the (very) longlist for the Best Translated Book Award, the American equivalent of the IFFP, so with Japanese Literature Challenge 7 upon us, I thought it would be a good chance to check it out - mainly to see if the BTBA judges knew what they were doing :)

*****
Tomoyuki Hoshino's We, the Children of Cats (translated by Brian Bergstrom and Lucy Fraser, review copy from publisher PM Press) is a collection of the writer's assorted short works.  It offers us five short stories and three novellas (although one of the novellas is only 32 pages long), enough for the reader to get a good overview of Hoshino's style and themes.

The first story, 'Paper Woman', gives us an insight into Hoshino the writer, right from the very start:

"As I've continued my professional writing career, I've come to think of it as an art that wavers, like a heat shimmer, between joy at the prospect of becoming something else and despair at knowing that such a transformation is ultimately impossible.  One could say that a novel's words trace the pattern of scars left by the struggle between those two feelings.  Which is why a novel should never be seen as a simple expression of an author's self."
p.1 'Paper Woman' (PM Press, 2012)

This idea of transformations is an important one for Hoshino.  In fact, in this story, the transformation is a very unusual and literal one...

Another thing we find out about Hoshino from this collection is his fascination with all things Latin-American.  Whether it's a privileged tourist searching for something worth living for ('Chino'), a dangerous teen sent to Peru to avoid trouble with the law ('Treason Diary'), or a bizarre, tango-influenced novella in an unnamed, imaginary city ('A Milonga for the Melted Moon'), the writer returns to stories of tropical lands, with guerillas, dancing, poverty and football of the round-ball variety.  While it would be easy to ascribe Murakami influences to Hoshino's stories, in this case García Marquez is probably a more likely source.

Many of the stories look at outsiders fleeing from rigid, dull Japanese society, and a couple look at the idea of 'Japaneseness'.  The young man in 'Chino' knows that his attempts to transform into a Latino freedom fighter are doomed from the start:

"No matter how dirty I might look, I knew my travels were buoyed on that lighter-than-air aluminum one-yen coin.  A mode of travel little better than drifting and staring: never to touch down, never to make contact with other worlds, never to dive right in.  I knew my body stank of yen, and would show me up as an outsider wherever I went."
'Chino' (p.37)

On the whole though, Hoshino is more interested in minorities than bored rich kids.  'Air' takes a magical look at gender identity, describing a man and a woman who both fall somewhere in the middle of traditional binary gender descriptions.  Forced to keep their 'irregularities' secret, they eventually find each other (at a GLBT Mardi-Gras-type event), culminating in a gender-bending climax which leaves both in a new state.

Interestingly, several of the stories are based (rather loosely) on real-life incidents, with Hoshino providing an alternative take on facts.  The novella 'Sand Planet', the longest piece in the collection, uses the story of Japanese settlers in the Dominican Republic, and a mass curry poisoning at an elementary school (a news event I remember very well from my time in Japan!), to create a fabulous story of a journalist attempting to make sense of his life.  The events of 'Treason Diary' are also based in fact, as the two main characters were suggested by two teen criminals whose families spirited them out of the country...

As fascinating as the true(ish) stories are though, it is Hoshino's imagination and style which catch your attention.  From the frankly bizarre 'The No Fathers Club', a piece in which the eponymous club is suggested by a strange sport called no-ball soccer, to the mind- (and gender-) bending events of 'A Milonga for the Melted Moon', the writer creates incredible, uncanny landscapes.  The latter story is the strangest (and best) in the collection, and it is a difficult tale to follow at times, mainly because of the constant switch in perspective between the two main characters, a man and a woman who switch clothes, viewpoints and bodily fluids (and if you think you know what that means, you don't...).

It really is a question of where one person ends and the other begins, and the language used reflects this.  At times, words and sentences melt into one another, and the image created is of a slightly off-kilter world, recognisable but foreign:

"You and I both, as we walk this earth, are nothing more than shadow sculptures carved from light.  Everyone here is just light thrown by the city in the sky as it shines in the night.  This city is so filled with light the night shines like the midday sun, the silver from the sky as it falls on the surface of the river builds up and combines with the new light falling from the sky, the proof is in the way the light comes not just from the sky but from the ground beneath our feet: no shadows trouble the surfaces of this city.  Instead they hang suspended, unmoored from the ground, and eventually turn back into birds, back into people."
'A Milonga for the Melted Moon' (p.186)

The final story of the collection is fifty pages of elegant confusion and madness, and it's brilliant :)

While two translators are listed, Brian Bergstrom does most of the heavy lifting (Lucy Fraser's 'Chino' is the exception), and he also provides a wonderful thirty-page essay on the stories to complete the book.  This afterword discusses Hoshino's influences and fascination with Latin America, and also examines each of the stories in turn, teasing out common themes.  It's an addition which helps the reader to understand where Hoshino is coming from, and another example of the kind of extras which can make a great book even better (if only all publishers of translated fiction did this...).

I loved this collection, and I'm very glad I decided to check it out.  Having also received a copy of Hoshino's novel, Lonely Hearts Killer, from the publisher, he might well turn out to be my next new favourite J-Lit writer.  If you're in the market for well-written, fantastical literary fiction, this one is for you :)