'Three Strong Women' by Marie NDiaye (Review)

Today's post features a book I've been meaning to get to for a while now.  The writer was nominated for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize, and this particular work won the Goncourt Prize 2009 (although it seems to have passed the IFFP judges by...).  What's more, it's a great read - which is, of course, the main thing :)

*****
Marie NDiaye's Three Strong Women (translated by John Fletcher, review copy courtesy of MacLehose Press) consists of three novella-length stories, tales which are very loosely connected (blink, and you'll miss the few connecting details).  Each tells of the fate of a woman either born in Africa, or with an African parent, and the stories look at the uneasy balance the women have to strike to make a success of their lives.

The centre of the first story is Norah, a successful French lawyer, who visits her father (against her better judgement) after his repeated pleas.  However, the 'strong' woman has trouble preventing a return to her role of the submissive daughter when she sees her father again.  Despite the success she has made of her life, her father still believes he can order her around and leave her in the dark about his real reasons for summoning her to Africa.

Norah's struggles with her father are mirrored by those in her relationship with Jakob, a rugged German freeloader she has fallen for.  Her desire for order, a defence against the chaos of her early life, is in danger of being swept away by her handsome lover's charm:

"Not that there was anything that could objectively be considered dangerous in leaving the girls in Jakob's care, but she was concerned that the values of discipline, frugality and lofty morality which, it seemed to her, she had established in her little flat and which were meant to represent and adorn her own life and form the basis of Lucie's upbringing, were being demolished in her absence with cold, methodical jubilation by a man."
pp.20/1 (MacLehose Press, 2013)

Regretting her decision to answer her father's call, she wants to return to her Parisian world, but is forced to stay when she finds out exactly why she has been summoned - to help her brother, Sony...

In the second story, our strong woman is Fanta, a former teacher from Senegal, now living in France.  However, the action is narrated by her husband Rudy, a most messed-up individual.  In the longest of the three stories, NDiaye uses the flawed husband to speak for the wife and gives us a psychological insight into the thoughts of a mediocre nonentity:

"He hung up, downcast, exhausted and feeling stunned, as if - emerging from a long, melancholy, agonising dream - he had to adjust his consciousness to the ambient reality, a reality which for him, he thought, was frequently just an interminable, unchanging, cold nightmare; it seemed to him that he moved from one dream to another without ever finding the exit, an awakening which he modestly saw as putting in order, as organising rationally, the scattered elements of his existence." (p.108)

Poor Rudy, haunted by his failures at work, and the fear of losing his wife, is sleepwalking through his days, unable to turn his life around.

Gradually, we learn why he is the way he is, and (naturally) it all began in Africa.  The seeds for the disintegration of his relationship with his wife, and the strangely unloving bond he has with his son, were sown in one incident back in Senegal; the story here is merely the culmination of the consequences set in motion by that event.  This middle story is a book in its own right, a powerful novella with an open, ambiguous ending.

The third story is, in some ways, more straight-forward, but it is infinitely more harrowing.  Khady, a young woman living with her dead husband's family, is kicked out after the in-laws' limited patience finally wears thin.  She's taken on a journey, but she has no idea where she's going or why.  She has little interest in her fate, following her guide, comfortably numb - but that only gets you so far...

It's a story of an uneducated, disadvantaged woman, one in which she struggles to adapt and learn from (bad) experiences.  Through theft, deceit and worse, Khady learns - the hard way - that you can't trust anyone.  It showcases the plight of women in the third world, and in many ways it's an horrific story, one in which the sympathetic reader will feel for poor Khady.  However, paradoxically, it's also a story of a 'strong' woman, where Khady takes charge of, and responsibility for, her own life...

One of the main attractions of Three Strong Women is NDiaye's style, the book consisting mainly of elegant, complex, monologues.  While the stories generally stand alone, there are a few themes which run through all three, one of which is a fascination with birds.  In Norah's story, it's her father, perched in a flame tree like an over-sized bird; in the second story, it's a buzzard which follows Rudy around, an incarnation of his guilty conscience (and Fanta's anger); in the final story, Khady is hit by the similarity of her guide to another type of bird:

"...she could tell from the absence of vibration, from a certain stagnant quality of the air around her, that the man - shepherd or jailer or protector or secret caster of evil spells - was the only one fidgeting, pacing feverishly up and down the sandy, uneven pavement, bouncing and hopping about involuntarily in his green trainers exactly like (Khady thought) the black and white crows nearby, black crows with broad white collars, whose brother he perhaps was, subtly changed into a man in order to steal Khady." (p.236)

I'll let you decide what NDiaye is trying to say with all that...

Three Strong Women features women suffocated by the love of the men around them, be they partners, sons or fathers, and in many ways, we are left wondering whether the title is meant to be serious or mocking.  The original French title was Trois femmes puissantes, which literally translated means 'three powerful women' - a title which seems even more misguided given the powerlessness of at least two of the characters.

While the title may be a little misleading, classifying the book as a novel might be even more of a struggle.  In truth, it's a collection of three novellas, connected by the theme of the struggle women face in a masculine society.  NDiaye leaves us in no doubt that, for all our progress, it's still very much a man's world.

Still, leaving aside the questions of the title and what kind of work it actually is, Three Strong Women is a very good book.  Stu had this down as one for this year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist, and given that even the judges were clamouring for more works by female writers, I'm not quite sure how this missed out (I hope it was submitted...).  With many more books likely to come out in English though, I'm sure that NDiaye's name will pop up on that list at some point over the next few years :)

'animalinside' and 'Diplomat, Actor, Translator, Spy' (Review)

One of the perks of blogging is that sometimes people send you stuff unexpectedly, and that's especially good when it's books in your area of interest.  Recently, Daniel Medin, from the Center for Writers & Translators at the American University of Paris was kind enough to send me a few titles from The Cahiers Series, coffee-table books for those interested in translation and translated fiction.  The books are short, elegant and visually pleasing  - and (as you'll see) the content's not bad either ;)

*****
First today is Diplomat, Actor, Translator, Spy, a fascinating little pamphlet by French translator Bernard Turle (translated into English by Dan Gunn).  In this short work, Turle talks about his life as a translator in twenty-six short chapters, one for each letter of the alphabet.  The cahier is accompanied by photos from Gunn's childhood (which, while sounding a strange idea, works well), making for a real bilingual collaboration.

It's a fascinating insight into the day-to-day life of a translator, and the changes brought about in this field by technology.  Turle explains how the spread of the Internet has allowed for a new relationship between translator and 'translated' and discusses his growing relationship with the English language.  It's one he first describes as exciting (an escape from the realities of French) and later intrusive (an imperialistic tongue...).  He also talks about how translation can sometimes be confronting as you can't always choose what you need to translate (there's some horrible, gut-wrenching stuff out there which some poor soul has to convert from one language to another...).

For me, the best part was the fact that a French insert  of the original text was also provided, allowing me to compare (and criticise!), which just goes to show that translation is an art, one that can be discussed until the cows come home.  In fact, this is even reflected in the choice of title.  While the original title is Le traducteur-orchestre, the English title has echoes of a John Le Carré novel (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), perhaps playing on a comment Turle makes in section E (for 'Espion' or 'Espionnage'):

"Le traducteur est un espion à la solde de l'écrivain." (p.5)
"A translator is a spy whose paymaster is a writer."
 p.12 (Sylph Editions, 2013)

Now that's not a description I'd heard before...

*****
The second of today's choices will be of particular interest to many of my readers (well, those who have a passion for fiction in translation, anyway).  animalinside (words by László Krasznahorkai, images by Max Neumann, translation by Ottilie Mulzet) is a short collaboration where the Hungarian writer reacted to the German artist's surreal pictures of a dog-like figure (as seen on the cover).  There are fourteen pictures, and for each there is one chapter, around two pages in length.

While it may sound short and trivial, it's anything but.  From the very beginning, Krasznahorkai fans will feel themselves to be in very familiar territory.  The text consists of long sentences, flowing powerful prose (that feels more like poetry).  There's a constant, dark feel to the monologues - menacing, threatening, and at the same time claustrophobic.

The focus is on a shadowy 'I', an entity which at times is trapped, constrained and frustrated:

"Every space is too tight for me.  I move around, I jump, I fling myself and yet I'm still inside that one space which is too tight for me, unbearably small, although at times it is only exactly just a bit too tight, and it is exactly then, when it is exactly just a bit too tight, that it is the most unbearable..."
Part IV, p.14 (Sylph Editions, 2012)

These ideas occur over and over again, and the repetition adds to the sense of restriction.

At other times though, the 'I' is a frightening, omnipotent force, greater than the cosmos, a being that threatens to rip you apart:

"...if one day I set out, no matter what you do it is completely hopeless, in vain do you try to resist, it will be of no use because you don't know who I am, and you don't know me, and your not knowing me protects me from your preparations, I am an invisible enemy, and you shall know very soon what invisible means, and chiefly, you will know what enemy means, because I am not just any kind of enemy, not even an enemy, but a blow that smites, that strikes down then and there and onto those exactly when, where, and onto whom it wants to..." (Part VI, p.19)

It's tempting to try and pin down just exactly who 'I' is.  Is it Death, fate, cancer, ruin?  Speculation is fun, but it's easier just to enjoy the rage and anger...

Perhaps animalinside is a work which reflects on our dull human existence, with people trapped in imaginary cages of our own making.  The 'I' comes from inside our own bodies - the seeds of our destruction are already inside us...

...and, apparently, it looks like a dog with no fore-legs ;)

*****
The cahiers may only be forty-pages long each, but they are wonderful little books.  As well as being interesting in their own right, the texts are complemented by the images chosen, providing a wonderful reading experience.  They're well worth a look, and I'm grateful to have had the chance to check them out -  merci, Monsieur Medin ;)

'Rituals' by Cees Nooteboom (Review)

While I've made a couple of efforts for Iris' Dutch Literature events, I can't say I've read a lot from the Netherlands.  However, one writer I have tried a couple of times (with fair results) is Cees Nooteboom.  I was very happy then to get home from work one day to discover a pile of books from MacLehose Press waiting for me, three of which were by Nooteboom.

A few hours later, I only had two left to read ;)

*****
Rituals (translated by Adrienne Dixon) was Nooteboom's first big success, and it's definitely a book which shows an accomplished writer.  The central figure is Inni Wintrop, a man about town who floats through life, sleeping around and making money through shares and art sales.  When his wife leaves him in 1963, he decides (on a whim) to hang himself - that he fails in his half-hearted suicide attempt is, as the reader will discover, strangely unsurprising.

Nooteboom then takes Inni (and the reader) ten years back in time to meet Arnold Taads, a one-eyed former Dutch downhill-skiing champion, before the story jumps to 1973, where Inni encounters Philip Taads, Arnold's son.  Despite the fact that both struggle with giving meaning to life, there isn't a lot that connects the two Taadses - except that they will both take their own lives too...

Rituals, as the name suggests, is a book about the habits and routines we develop to enable us to get through our daily life.  The writer, in his dry, idiosyncratic manner, shows us several ways of coping with our natural existential angst, perhaps posing a question as to which is the best.  We begin with Inni, and our initial stance is that his woes are wholly due to his pointless, pleasure-seeking ways:

"If he had ever had any ambition, he would have been prepared to call himself a failure, but he had none.  He regarded life as a rather odd club of which he had accidentally become a member and from which one could be expelled without reasons having to be supplied.  He had already decided to leave the club if the meetings should become all too boring."
p.19 (MacLehose Press, 2013)

However, Nooteboom is to spend the rest of the novel showing us that Inni isn't the only one struggling to make sense of it all.

The two Taadses are very different people, and despite knowing Arnold for many years, Inni never even suspects the existence of Philip until they meet.  However, their attempts to deal with life are fairly similar.  While Arnold subjugates daily life to the artificial strictures of time, allowing nothing and no one to interrupt his minutely-detailed schedule, Philip retreats into an invented world of Japanese asceticism, his interest in the culture completely divorced from its present reality.  Both believe that they can cope with life by retreating inside a bubble of their own making - both are mistaken...

Nooteboom is far from judgemental though; he is merely using his puppets to look at the different ways we while away our hours in the mortal realm.  It's easy to criticise Inni and his refusal to commit to making a lasting impression on the world, but his existence of occasional hedonism and random encounters is not the worst of the choices here.  Religion, whether Eastern or Western, doesn't appear to help any of the characters, and money, far from being a help just seems to make it more difficult to motivate yourself...

I loved the style of Rituals.  Nooteboom has a sardonic, occasionally dark, voice, one which seems to know that everything is pointless, but enjoys smirking at the futile efforts people make to convince themselves otherwise.  The sentences are very different to the elegant ones of, say, Javier Marías - they're full of jerky, confronting clauses with little flow (a very Germanic style).  The writer enjoys playing with images too, such as the idea of the sacred chalice, a kind of Holy Grail theme, one which has some rather unexpectedly gruesome consequences.  I also enjoyed his rather unusual view of a lunchtime spread:

"My God, how many ways there are to mess about with the corpses of animals.  Smoked, boiled, roasted, in aspic, blood red, black and white checkered, fatty pink, murky white, marbled, pressed, ground, sliced.  Thus death lay displayed on the blue-patterned Meissen.  Not even a whole school could have eaten all that." (p.99)

I think I'll just have some toast instead ;)

Rituals, then, is an admirable book, a seemingly slight story which makes the reader think a little harder than they might have expected to.  While it's easy to look down on Inni, and laugh at the odd habits of Arnold and Philip Taads, the truth is that we all have our rituals, and we're all just filling our time as best we can in an effort to make our stay on Earth worthwhile.  It's a book which will make each reader reflect: how do you live your life?  And (perhaps more importantly) how should you...

'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...