'Sworn Virgin' by Elvira Dones (Review)

Part of the motivation for Women in Translation Month is redressing the gender inequality in the world of translated fiction.  However, as we all know, literature isn't the only area where the numbers don't quite add up.  Today's book, instead of pushing for equality of the sexes, takes a rather different approach to the issue, though - it seems like a good example of the old saying "if you can't beat them, join them"...

*****
Elvira Dones' Sworn Virgin (translated by Clarissa Botsford, e-copy courtesy of And Other Stories) begins on an aeroplane headed for the USA as Mark Duda, a prospective immigrant from Albania, prepares to land, looking forward to starting a new life in the states.  Cousins are there to welcome Mark to the new country, and the welcomes are warm, greeting the new addition to the expatriate community.

Once back at the home of Lila, Mark's cousin, things get a little more serious.  It's time to make a start on an ambitious project, one which has brought the Albanian from the mountains to the outskirts of the American capital.  You see, Mark's real name is actually Hana - and it's time for the self-sufficient mountain man to blossom into the young woman who has been trapped inside for so long...

Sworn Virgin isn't a transgender tale in the usual sense.  Instead, it's a thought-provoking story based on a real-life phenomenon, that of the sworn virgins of the mountainous northern regions of Albania.  A woman who, for whatever reason, decides not to accept the subservient life of a woman, can legally become a man, taking on the responsibilities (and privileges) of the gender.  While this involves guns, cigarettes and lots of raki, there's also one major sacrifice to be made.  Taking this step is also tantamount to making a vow of chastity.

The story jumps back and forth between Albania and the States, exploring the reasons for Hana's decision to become Mark and the long, arduous process of shedding her male persona:

"I've been a man for fourteen years."  Lila tries to drown her gaze in the oily dregs of the coffee.  "It's not going to be easy," she says finally.  "Not for any of us."
(And Other Stories, 2014)

Hana isn't the only one who's going to struggle with the change.  For example, Shtjefën, her brother-in-law, has seen Hana as a man all his life...

To understand why Hana became Mark, we need to see the background, where the young student is caught between two worlds.  While the communist era pledges equality, things are very different in the deeply conservative mountain regions.  With a sick uncle to care for (her parents having died many years earlier), there's a need for Hana to observe tradition, and (as a fellow student remarks) freedom of action is fairly thin on the ground:

"Free from what, Hana?" he mutters, while she pulls away from him.  "Free from where?  We're just like horses, going round and round in circles."

This is as true for the people in Tirana, under a communist regime, as it is for those in the mountains.  

Once in America, Hana adapts well in some ways to life as a woman in a new country.  She's used to solitude, and she's a hard worker with good language skills.  However, in others she struggles somewhat - she's not really one for dresses, make-up and talking about her feelings.  The final challenge is the most daunting, though, as her goal is to have a real relationship (the 'sworn virgin' is exactly that).  As she begins to meet men, will she be able to alter her mindset and let someone in?

The focus of the book is, naturally, Hana, but Dones also spends time looking at the problems of some of the other characters.  While Hana's niece, Jonida, has thrived in the States, her parents aren't quite as happy.  Shtjefën is working like a dog to make a living, and Lila is, in many ways, more trapped by her gender role than Hana.  A housewife, a cleaner, a fading beauty - her dreams are buried beneath her family responsibilities:

"Because I'd have to go back to school for years and I have a home to run and a daughter to take care of.  I can't afford to pay for another course.  It's too late now."

Despite her attempt to mould Hana in her own image, life as a woman in America isn't as wonderful as Lila would have her cousin believe...

Sworn Virgin works very well, and Dones is especially good at showing the struggles Hana faces in dropping the Mark persona, with Hana having to deal with much more than just superficial, cosmetic changes:

"On the outside she looks almost like a woman.  What's missing is her vision, the point of view from which she is supposed to read the world."

A vital part of her transformation is adopting a female philosophy, a different way of seeing the world - which is not to say that her thinking is completely masculine.  In fact, she often gets caught between two modes of thought.  Despite this, one criticism I'd make of Sworn Virgin is that the novel focuses too much on Hana, and Mark doesn't get a look in.  We see a lot of what caused the change, and a lot of the difficulties of changing back.  It would have been great to see more of how Mark fitted into his community and the practicalities of life as a 'man'.

It's still a great story though, one in which, as Ismail Kadare notes in his (brief) introduction, while it may seem that Hana is gaining something by becoming Mark, in fact, she's losing a lot more.  Hers is a life of many sacrifices, not all of which are willingly made - you see, becoming a man isn't all it's cracked up to be...

'Paradises' by Iosi Havilio (Review)

Over the last couple of years, I've discovered many great books and writers, mainly in translation, but it's always nice to return to old favourites.  However, in some cases, these discoveries have quickly become old favourites, with sequels appearing within a decent space of time.  Good examples of this are Jon Kalman Stefansson with his Icelandic sagas, Karl Ove Knausgaard and his very public midlife crisis and (of course) Elena Ferrante's bitter, twisted and compelling tales of two women in Naples :)

Let's see if today's post, my first for this year's Spanish Lit Month, can add another name to that worthy list...

*****
Iosi Havilio's Open Door was a novel I enjoyed a few years back, and Paradises (translated by Beth Fowler, e-copy courtesy of And Other Stories) is a follow-up book, featuring the same protagonist.  It picks up several years after the events of the first book, with our nameless heroine still living on the old farm in the country.  However, right from the start, Paradises shows us that things will be a little different this time around - her partner, Jaime, has just been killed in a hit-and-run incident, and our friend decides that it's time to head back to the big bad city.

However, things are a little different this time around.  First, she lands a job at a zoo, mainly thanks to Iris, a Romanian migrant who lives at the same lodging house.  Then, Eloisa, her oversexed friend from the country, manages to track her down.  Oh, there's one other thing - did I forget to mention her four-year-old son, Simon?

While the story and setting are different from those of Open Door, the style is very much the same.  It's just as detached, just as world weary - and just as lacking in sentiment:

"In this new Jaime, the final Jaime, who I'll only see this once, in addition to his stillness, the smell of alcohol or formaldehyde, I'm not sure, I suddenly discover an oddity that bears little relation to death.  Instead of his lips being sealed, as was his habit, somewhere between resignation and embarrassment, I catch sight of a small opening at the right-hand corner of his mouth, a sarcastic, sly smile, as if death had caught Jaime mocking something."
(And Other Stories, 2013)

We don't waste too much time grieving poor Jaime.  Instead, his departure merely marks the start of a new stage in his widow's life.

She moves on, then, just as she arrived, without leaving a trace, and with all contacts left behind.  Simon is one addition to her baggage, but he too is quiet and unassuming, not a boy to overcomplicate her life.  However, for the first time in years, she has to find a job, entering the world of work once more.  From the country to the city, you might think it's back to reality - the truth is that none of it seems real...

In fact, Paradises is pervaded by a dreamlike, grotesque quality at times, and when she moves into an old tower block, it's almost like a journey into a twisted fairy tale.  Not that you'd find much like this in a kids' book:

"But the thing that keeps me from sleep more than anything, adding to the insomnia of recent days, is not the noise from the street or the music or conversations, but those strange murmurs produced in the bowels of the building and which at times I think might be in my head.  Metallic sounds, wind-like, flushes, hums, sputters, like the secretions of a decomposing organism."

What awaits her there does remind the reader of certain of Grimm's Tales, though.  There's Tosca, the gigantic, cancer-ridden, morphine-addict matriarch of the building, watching over the goings on with the help of her mentally handicapped son.  Together, they sit at the top of a society of drug dealers, drag queens and other assorted human jettsam in a squat with unreliable power and water...

It's inevitable that Eloisa, the most memorable character from the first novel, crashes back into the life of the main character.  The younger woman is as mad as ever, but slightly different in this new environment, and this actually sums Paradises up nicely - it's very similar to Open Door, yet very different at the same time (if that makes sense...).  While the older woman is happy to see Eloisa again, she's never quite sure whether to go along with her stunts or cut her off.  There's some excellent interplay here, and for readers who remember the first book, the sexual tension between the two is skilfully drawn out.

Havilio's style is simple, but hypnotic.  While the plot is quite ordinary, the author's handling of it makes it seem as if it's happening a world away.  It can all seem hidden behind a veil of fog - you see, the main character just isn't quite on our wavelength:

"Simon has taken advantage of those seconds of distraction to escape from my sight.  He's hiding or being hidden by the landscape.  One of the two is using the other.  I'm not going to shout, I wouldn't know how.  I wait, to see if he appears, surely he'll appear, but he doesn't appear.  I stand up and walk without alarm, accommodating my flip-flops between the holes and the stones."

She seems incapable of strong emotions, no matter what life throws at her, and her inability to really get upset adds to the dreamlike feel of the novel.

While I'm not quite sure Havilio is up with the writers I mentioned at the start of the post, Paradises is very enjoyable and well written with a good translation (one with a noticeably British-English feel).  In truth, it's not really about the story, it's all about the 'vibe' - it's a mellow book, with occasional (deliberate) jarring tones of swearing and drugs, just enough to keep the reader on their toes.  Enough of my thoughts though - I'll leave the last words to our anonymous friend, words which sum up her style perfectly:

"I offer no opinion, nor do I contradict her.  I prefer to let things follow their natural course, then I'll see."

And that pretty much sums her (and the book) up ;)

'Captain of the Steppe' by Oleg Pavlov (Review)

I like Russian literature, and I'm pretty keen on small publisher And Other Stories too - it's a surprise then that it took me so long to get around to today's book.  Still, I got there in the end, so let's head off to the Kazakh steppe, to spend some time in the company of a certain army officer with a liking for potatoes.

No, really...

*****
Oleg Pavlov's Captain of the Steppe (translated by Ian Appleby, electronic review copy courtesy of the publisher) takes place in the final years of the Soviet Union, out in the vast, open wilds of the steppe.  We join Captain Ivan Yakovlevich Khabarov, a man who has somehow ended up as a lifetime soldier:

Ivan Yakovlevich Khabarov had wound up in government service neither through calculation nor through coercion; mind you, his own free will hadn't played much part either.  So they had shaved his head and taken him as a soldier, as they did everyone.  He served out his time.  But when his term as a conscript was up, they persuaded him to stay on as a sergeant major.  'Stay put, Ivan, carry on serving.  This is the right place for you.  You're not one of them civvy bastards, are you?'
(And Other Stories, 2013)

Having decided, then, to stay in the army, Khaborov rises slowly through the ranks, ending up in charge of his very own prison camp.  However, if you think that Khaborov is a success, you're sadly mistaken.  For a man of his advanced years, only having reached the rank of Captain is a bit of an embarrassment, and the camp he is in charge of, a shambles of a place in the middle of nowhere, is the ideal location to bury a man nobody really cares much for.

Still, it's his responsibility to look after the camp, and his men, a task made harder by the lack of food sent on the trucks from the main barracks.  Fearing another winter on starvation rations, Khaborov takes a brave decision, one which causes dissension in the ranks - and makes waves all the way back to headquarters...

The concept of Captain of the Steppe initially had me thinking of something along the lines of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; however, at times it's more like a Russian version of Hogan's Heroes (although the prisoners are conspicuous only by their absence...).  The soldiers are men stranded in the middle of nowhere, robbed of part of their wages, and consequently unwilling to do their duty properly.  Of course, the officers then use this as an excuse for reducing their wages further.

Trapped in the vastness of the Steppe, the reader sympathises with the soldiers - it's big, remote and depressing, and surviving on starvation rations doesn't exactly help matters.  Thus, Khabarov's simple idea, planting some of the potato rations, causes an uproar.  The men are horrified, but the captain, determined to do something to break up the tedium, stubbornly pushes through.

This is the Soviet Union though, and (inevitably) bureaucracy intervenes:

"One boring morning, dull as the reflection in a puddle of rainwater, a regimental lorry scraped along the full length of the clumsy gate and wobbled its way into the barrack square, where it stood snarling or belching, one of the two."

In its noisy belly, this lorry contains a secret service man, Skripitsyn.  He has come to tear strips off Khaborov for his temerity - how dare he think for himself?

What follows is a confused, farcical story which moves back and forth between the camp and HQ.  There's miscommunication, intrigue and betrayal (with the odd fire too) as the little Khaborov is caught in the middle of office politics, suffering as a result of other people's jealousy.  He's not the only one who suffers though:

"Suddenly, the lorry began rumbling mournfully in the steppe, scaring away the deathly hush.  It was then that the captain broke down.  It looked for all the world as though the man had reached complete collapse, and he fell prostrate.  It hit him in the side, at first; he crumpled, although without a single groan, then sank to his knees and planted himself in the ground."

Even the poor potatoes get swept up in the bad will pervading the Steppe...

The novel is an interesting look at what was happening over in the East during the Cold War - for these men, caught in the Kazakh winter, it was very cold indeed.  Over the course of the story, Khabarov develops into a minor hero, standing up to the mindless authorities, pushed to the point of breaking, but refusing to bend.  It's humour of the gallows variety, but it can be surprisingly effective (and funny).

The humour is mixed with a more serious side though, and to be honest, I'm not really sure that it always works.  I missed a consistency of tone throughout the book, and I was never quite lost in the story.  I also felt that the frequent switch of location was a little distracting (I would have preferred more from the camp and less from the petty squabbles at HQ).

Still, there's enough here to interest most readers, and this is an early Pavlov book.  And Other Stories are releasing a (loose) sequel in English later this year, The Matiushin Case, and I'll be interested to see what else Pavlov has to say about the period, and whether his later work is better.  Of course, in literature as in most areas, timing is everything - in the current political climate, Captain of the Steppe is actually acquiring even more of an edge...

'All Dogs Are Blue' by Rodrigo de Souza Leão

It's been a long time between drinks, but today I've finally got around to reviewing another book from great indie publishers And Other Stories.  It's another of their South American finds, this time from Brazil, and like Down the Rabbit Hole, it's a fairly short read.  It seems even shorter because of its compulsive nature - this is one you race through in a blur...

*****
All Dogs Are Blue by Rodrigo de Souza Leão (translated by Zoë Perry and Stefan Tobler, e-copy courtesy of the publisher) is a semi-autobiographical tale of time spent inside a mental institute.  An overweight schizophrenic is locked up after trashing his parents' house, and in a confusing stream-of-consciousness monologue, we learn a little about how he's ended up there and a lot about what happens within the asylum's walls.

From the very first paragraph, the reader is shown what to expect from Souza Leão's madness:

"I swallowed a chip yesterday.  I forced myself to talk about the system that surrounds me. There was an electrode on my forehead.  I don't know if I swallowed the electrode with the chip.  The horses were galloping.  Except for the seahorse, who was swimming around in the aquarium."
(And Other Stories, 2013)

Our friend is a little bit paranoid and obsessed by the idea that he swallowed a chip (which may have developed from the cricket he swallowed when he was a child).  There's a lot more to his madness than that though.

After an initial stint in solitary confinement, he wanders around the asylum accompanied by his (imaginary) friends.  Baudelaire is a calm fellow, but (unfortunately) he's not always around.  Rimbaud, on the other hand, can usually be relied upon to provide the writer with some company, even if he is a tad more aggressive than his fellow French poet.  An interesting point here for non-French speakers - Rimbaud is pronounced in English as 'Rambo' ;)

We occasionally get to see the effect of the illness on the speaker's family, especially his mum and dad.  While they seem to want the best for their son, he certainly feels a little betrayed by their decision to have him committed:

"He says I'll get out when I'm better.  I move towards him and kiss him on the face.  Is it the kiss of Judas?  Will I betray my father in my madness?  And what if two men came now and crucified me upside down.  Could the cross bear the weight of this lard-arse?"

However, in rare, lucid, moments, he is able to put his delusions aside and recognise the truth, accepting that there was something very wrong with his life:

"I cried because I was thirty-seven years old and living like a teenager."

One frequent theme of All Dogs are Blue is religion, with several mentions of beliefs, of both Christian and less orthodox varieties.  It's seen as something that keeps the people happy, even if it messes with their heads at times:

"Religion nowadays just fucks with people.  I think they knew there were a lot of alcoholics in here.  Religion isn't just the opium of the people.  But it's what keeps the people happy.  It's a sad thing when a nation needs religion to lean on.  It's worse than a lunatic who's been cured, but who will always need the support of another person to be happy.  Better to be an incurable lunatic."

In view of later events, this is an interesting viewpoint.  You see, when he eventually leaves the institute, he decides to immerse himself in religion - but not as you might expect.  Our lunatic decides that those who think that a bit of religion, football and music make everything alright in the world are the real crazy ones...

All Dogs are Blue, as mentioned in my introduction, is a work you race through, a real one-sitting book.  It's a story which gives you a flavour of Brazil, albeit in small glimpses through the bars on the institute's windows, but it's also a slightly unsettling glimpse into the writer's own problems.  It fits in very well with the rest of And Other Stories' back catalogue - edgy and ever-so-slightly bizarre. 

A nice addition is an introduction by Deborah Levy (the publisher's success story of the last couple of years) in which she explores some of the book's central themes.  She describes Souza Leão's blue dog as a rare breed of the more common black dog of depression, but it is also used as a link back to his 'normal' life, his childhood, before things went wrong.  Sadly, the writer never got to enjoy his success - he took his life the year All Dogs are Blue was published...

Islands of Despair

April 2012 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the start of the Falklands War, a conflict between the UK and Argentina for ownership of a group of islands in the South Atlantic.  I was seven years old at the time but, for many reasons, the conflict is a clear memory from my childhood.  For most Britons, the war is history, over, leaving us to move on with our lives.  In Argentina however, if my latest book is anything to go by, the scars run a little deeper...

*****  

Carlos Gamerro's The Islands (translated by Ian Barnett) was written in 1998, but set in 1992, ten years after the war.  It follows Felipe Félix, a veteran of the conflict, as he moves around Buenos Aires in search of information.  Felipe is a hacker, an expert in the early days of computers, and he has been hired by a wealthy businessman to find witnesses to a murder.  Not because he wishes to solve the murder, but rather because he wishes to cover it up...

With a permanent reminder of the war in the shape of a fragment of his helmet permanently lodged in his skull, it's a tough task for Felipe to forget the war entirely.  However, the path to the names his employer requires leads Felipe back to old friends and enemies, forcing his overwrought mind to confront memories he'd much rather forget.  No matter how much he twists and turns, the road always leads back to the place a part of him never really left - las Malvinas...

The Islands, the latest in And Other Stories' wonderful selection of literature in translation, is a slightly confronting book for an Englishman.  As mentioned above, I still have vivid, if somewhat confused, memories of the war, and to see it re-imagined through Argentinian eyes can be a little unnerving.  An early chapter in which Felipe creates a computer game rewriting the outcome of the war, with British ships sunk at will and soldiers slaughtered on the cold, unforgiving expanses of Goose Green, is positively disturbing.  The reality, of course, is that this is just what Felipe wishes had happened...

This quickly passes though, and the further Felipe delves into the case he has been given, the less the story becomes about the wider events of the war and more about the lasting effect it has had on the unfortunate veterans.  Like all the old soldiers, Felipe is damaged, desperate to seek refuge in cyberspace, drug-fuelled dreams or sexual encounters - unfortunately, he is still unable to escape the pull of the Islands, which have become a piece of him.  Looking back on his time in uniform, he says:

"How could those simple girls from the neighbourhood or school, sometimes barely groped at a dance or beneath a burnt-out lamp post, compete with the Islands?  As the letters arrived - or didn't - from the mainland, or when we were defeated by the effort of reconstructing a face and body in that jealous and ruthless land, we gradually realised we were surrendering them in return for a greater love."

While Felipe understands that to move on he needs to get away from his past, his friends prefer to live there.  Whether meeting to prepare for the next invasion or constructing a scale model of the Islands in a cellar, they refuse to move on, threatening to pull Felipe back into his time in the army.  This glorification of the conflict sickens Felipe:

"...however hard I tried, I couldn't forgive them for always talking about the war as some longer, more exciting version of a school-leavers' trip..."

Gradually we learn the reality of what happened from Felipe's dreams, the descriptions of the hellish battles and the mind-numbing waiting.  Counting minutes to get through the day, soaked, freezing, not caring about the war, just wanting to go home...

The first half of the book didn't convince me totally.  Things took a good while to get moving, and the two strands didn't really seem to connect much for the first two hundred pages.  The scenes in Tamerlán's tower (including some rather unusual forms of father-son discipline...) seem over the top, shocking for the sake of being shocking.  There is also a section where Felipe searches for the people on the list, a meandering journey around the city which had me skim-reading and yawning a little.

However, once we get deeper into the book, and the two strands start to come together, it becomes a lot more interesting.  In fact, the more we ignore what is happening in the outside world and retreat inside Felipe's head, the better The Islands becomes.  Gamerro treats us to wonderful swirling passages of cocaine rushes and flashbacks, blurring the lines between past and present, memory and reality (if there are any such lines...).  Felipe's return to the mental institution he was once imprisoned in, simply turning up and not having the energy to leave again, is one of a number of excellent pieces of writing in the second half of the book.

Great credit must also go to the translator, Ian Barnett, for the job he's done on The Islands.  The original uses a mix of Spanish and English at times, making a clear translation imperative.  There are also several passages where one of Felipe's comrades spouts non-stop gibberish, sounds corrupted from the original language, but close enough to enable a listener to reconstruct the real text.  Translating this nonsense into English while leaving it close enough to something that makes sense must have been a mighty task :)

Gamerro's language games don't stop there though.  Fausto Tamerlán, the superhuman villain, has obvious connections to Goethe's soul-selling character, and also to the famous Muslim leader Tamerlane - a mighty king whose love for the arts is only matched by his willingness to slaughter.  And only a cynic would name his hero Felipe Félix - there's nothing lucky about this poor soldier...

...and that's what it all boils down to.  While Felipe came back, it would be hard to call him a survivor.  For the defeated, the war is an open wound - nobody came back whole.

"It isn't true there were survivors.  There are two bites torn out of the hearts of every one of us, and they're the exact shape of the Islands."

For the losers, the war is never really over...

Is Everybody Happy?

It seems that I just can't get away from translated fiction these days.  Not content to plough through the longlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, I have also been taking a look at some newer appearances on the market, and today's offering is a new story from an old friend.  I have already reviewed several books from the wonderful And Other Stories stable, and today they are taking us to Russia for a brief look at life in modern Moscow.  I do hope you like Vodka...

*****
Oleg Zaionchkovsky's Happiness is Possible* (translated by Andrew Bromfield) is a collection of short reflections on contemporary Russian life, told by an unnamed writer, presumably an alter-ego of Zaionchkovsky himself.  Our friend lives in a small flat in the Russian capital, reflecting on the nature of his adopted hometown, mostly failing to get any writing done and constantly negotiating with his dog, Phil, as to the frequency and direction of their walks.  The writer gradually tells us more about his life, including his mediocre career, his visits to his hometown (just outside Moscow) and his complex relationship with ex-wife Tamara (or Toma).  The more we learn about the man and his dog, the more we are able to reflect on the statement the writer gives us to consider: is happiness possible?

While the main idea running through the book is the writer's personal life, it is contrasted with another important concept, the city of Moscow itself.  In fact, Happiness is Possible is just as much a portrait of modern life in the Russian metropolis as it is a personal journal.  As the writer says:

"If we acknowledge that a city is a living organism, we must acknowledge its place in creation.  And in so doing, we shall be obliged to cede our priority and accept that it is not we human beings who are the crown of creation, but the city."

This is exactly the view he takes, placing Moscow at the heart of the novel and describing the efforts of the ant-like people living there to adjust to - and cope with - life in the big city.  His creations (and they are often creations of both Zaionchkovsky and his narrator) struggle to make a foothold for themselves in the capital, with both residential permits and love in short supply.

Zaionchkovsky's style is laid-back and informal, the prose soaked in a dry humour which takes a while to get used to, but which suits the meandering style of the book.  In a way it reminded me of the classic Victorian novel Three Men in a Boat, both for the inclusion of the dog and for the laid-back, idling lifestyle the writer describes.  When our friend spends a day at his dacha (small country house), he writes:

"The day passes in the way that a summer day at the dacha should: in glorious idleness.  So that it will be remembered for nothing but this state of drowsy, delightful drifting."

You can almost imagine the gentle ripple of the Thames, and ducks sailing serenely past in the background...

However, Happiness is Possible is more similar to another of Jerome K. Jerome's works, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, in its structure of short, loosely connected musings on life.  Zaionchkovsky often begins his stories with an event from the life of his character, but then drifts off at an angle to explore the nature of different aspects of Muscovite life.  Through the writer's tangential tales of people both real and imaginary (there's a lot of meta-fictional byplay going on here!), we get to learn about the hierarchy of supermarkets and who can afford them; the difficulties for career women in finding a suitable partner; the explosion of possibilities for those looking to make their fortune in real estate; and, of course, the changes brought about by the move from a Communist to capitalist system.

Understandably though, our writer often turns his sardonic eye on the literary scene, contrasting the Russian adoration of their cultural icons with the relative lack of interest in their contemporary equivalents.  The protagonist is apparently fairly unsuccessful, despite being relatively well known (when a couple of dozen people turn up to one of his readings, the surprised organisers put it down to a cancellation elsewhere by a famous foreign writer!), and his struggle to scrape together enough money for a decent meal is ironically played out against a backdrop of museums for minor classic writers...

Part of the problem is that Moscow is now a modern city (in parts at least), moving at the pace of the industrialised world, and the writer has not quite acclimatised to that change.  In a world of professional publishers and gleaming boardrooms, he is decidedly out of place, as shown by a meeting he attends after being persuaded to write a book for a company:

"While the sugar was still dissolving in my cup, I managed to make the acquaintance of a lady designer and a lady marketologist (both shorn to match their boss's cropped style), a young culturologist, an old gastrologist and a representative of a PR agency on friendly terms with Griddle (a middle-aged man with manicured nails).  Noticing that they had all come to the meeting with folders, I felt guilty because I hadn't brought anything apart from my indigestion tablets."

It is little surprise that he is unable to come to terms with the idea of literature as product...

While the writer talks a lot about the city around him, there is one personal undercurrent to the collection.  In the very first story we hear about Tamara, and it gradually becomes clear that despite the apparent friendship the writer has with his successor, Dmitry Pavlovich, and the nonchalance with which the Muscovites chalk up their failed marriages, the loss of Tamara has affected him more deeply than he will openly admit.  It is this feeling of hurt, a sore spot which occasionally reemerges from under the dry humour the writer uses to cover it up, which adds a depth to the book it may have otherwise lacked.

Happiness is Possible isn't a perfect read.  The collection of vaguely-connected tales can pall after a while, and I occasionally found it a little repetitive.  I probably read it a little quickly though, and I think it's a book which should be read slowly, the reader dipping in for a chapter or two every now and then, rather than racing through it in a couple of days.  The little pieces are made to be read and reflected on, as there's probably a lot more there than first meets the eye.  In some ways, the book is more like a short-story collection - I would certainly hesitate to call it a novel...

Returning then to the the bold statement the title makes, Zaionchkovsky's little slices of Moscow life do seem to back up the idea that despite the problems living in a modern society brings, happiness is indeed possible.  But while this is true in general, is it true for our poor love-lorn writer friend?  To find that out, I'm afraid you'll just have to read the book ;)

*****

* I received an electronic review copy of Happiness is Possible from the publisher.

Childhood Corrupted

As a father myself, I'm a big believer in childhood as an age of innocence, a time to explore and discover the world from beneath the shade of a sheltering environment.  Sadly, this is not always the case, and literature frequently throws up examples of less-than-perfect childhoods, ones which make you hope you're not doing the same to your kids.  So, while you ponder today's offerings, I'm off to play with my daughters :)

***** 
And Other Stories is another of my favourite little indie publishers, purveyors of fine translated fiction, and one of their most popular books so far is Juan Pablo Villalobos' Down the Rabbit Hole, translated by Rosalind Harvey.  This very slim volume (which I received as an electronic review copy!) is a three-part story told through the eyes of Tochtli, a young Mexican boy.  Our friend has the usual issues faced by kids - spending as much time on computer games as he can, avoiding his lessons wherever possible, and trying to convince his dad to get him a pygmy hippopotamus.

Wait a minute...

Unlike most kids, Tochtli's dad happens to be a Mexican drug dealer, which (as well as making the hippo thing a real possibility) means that the young boy is witness to a lot more things than most kids will ever have to see.  The further we slip down Villalobos' titular rabbit hole (an apt expression seeing as Tochtli actually means 'rabbit'), the more we find out about Tochtli and his father - and the more disturbing it becomes.  Is it possible to grow up normally in such an unusual environment?

Down the Rabbit Hole is wonderfully narrated by the macho little boy, a character who uses a style of language which is one part arrogance to three parts naivety.  His first words - "Some people say I'm precocious" - tell us that he is living in a cocoon, kept away from the real world.  In some ways, his statement is true, as his casual acceptance of certain unpalatable experiences shows.  For a young boy, he is certainly at ease around guns and corpses...

In other ways though, he is just a boy.  His vocabulary is limited, and he constantly repeats the same four or five adjectives to describe anything from tasty food to third-world hotels.  He is also oblivious to certain activities happening under his nose, such as the reason for the frequent visits of attractive women - and their long disappearances into his father's room.  While he is aware of certain aspects of life, he doesn't really understand them, and the fortress-like environment he is raised in by his paranoid father is not the best one for setting him straight on them.

As a portrait of what happens when a horribly-twisted nurture triumphs over nature, Down the Rabbit Hole is a disturbing masterpiece.  A translation which doesn't read like one, it's compelling, page-turning reading, a book which will only take an hour or so to read, but which will stay with you for a good while longer.  Just don't talk to me about the hippos...


*****

Leaving Mexico, we turn our attention to Japan, a tranquil country where children live happy, carefree lives and would never think about death and...  oh.

Yes kids, it's another one about psychotic minors, this time set in the land of the rising sun.  Yukio Mishima's The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea (translated by John Nathan) is a tense novel set in the Japanese port town of Yokohama, and it is centred upon an unlikely trio of protagonists: Noboru, a thirteen-year-old boy; Fusako, his widowed, but still young and beautiful, mother; and Ryuji, a sailor Fusako meets and falls for.

In the first part of the story, we see the unfolding of the relationship between Ryuji and Fusako, one which Noboru views with mixed emotions.  While unwilling to share his mother, he is fascinated by the sea and has a kind of grudging respect for the weather-worn sailor.  However, when he discovers that Ryuji is just as tedious as he and his friends consider all fathers to be, his opinion changes, and he decides that Ryuji will not do.  It's what happens next which is rather harrowing...

The key issue in The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea is the importance of a strong father figure, and the damage that can be done to a young boy's character when there is no older man around to keep him on the straight and narrow.  It's probably not a viewpoint shared by all today, but Mishima certainly believes that the absence of a father, either through death or neglect, can lead to behavioural problems.  Or, in Noboru's case, an unhealthy interest in his mother's sex life.

This is actually shown more clinically in the character of The Chief, the leader of the gang of boys Noboru hangs out with.  Intellectually advanced for his age, he has an almost pathological hatred towards adults (especially fathers), despising their weakness and their willingness to conform.  He has a strong influence on the impressionable Noboru, and Ryuji's decision to attempt to become a father figure for his lover's son sets tragic events in motion, leading to a sickening denouement...

Typically for Mishima, beautiful writing is matched with horrible, horrible characters, making this novel another of those book which are a joy to read but, at the same time, slightly disturbing.  That's bad enough, but taken together, Down the Rabbit Hole and The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea really do make you think about your role as a parent.  The two books remind us that children are very delicate creatures.  If they are to grow up happy and well adjusted, it's up to the parents to make sure they have the right environment to achieve this.

And if this means no peep-holes into their mother's bedroom and no pygmy hippopotamus for their birthday, that's just the way it will have to be...

An Illusion of Freedom

You may remember that during German Literature Month I reviewed Clemens Meyer's collection of short stories, All the Lights, published by And Other Stories, and while I enjoyed it, didn't really find it my kind of book.  However, the other book from the same publishers, the book I had actually asked to be sent, had to wait until late December, pushed down the queue by a whole host of German-language books and a certain Japanese novel you may have heard of...

Argentinian writer Iosi Havilio's Open Door (translated by Beth Fowler), the book I asked to review, is much more my kind of novel.  Set in Buenos Aires and a small country town not far from the Argentinian capital, it explores a year in the life of a person whose partner disappears one day, leaving them to start afresh in a small town.  They somehow stumble into a relationship with a taciturn macho farmer, spending long days doing housework, taking siestas and researching the history of Open Door, a local low-security mental asylum.  Gradually though, attention wanders from the farmer to a teenage girl, a young lady who makes no secret of her attraction to our narrator...

At which point you're probably noticing something unusual in the way this post is unfolding, namely the fact that I haven't actually given you much information about the central character, someone who narrates the story and keeps a lot close to their chest.  We never learn their name, and in fact it takes a long time for their gender to be explicitly revealed (even then, I had some serious doubts for a while!).  Although the disappearance, and possible suicide, of their girlfriend Aída is the catalyst for the events of the story, there is a sense that things are awry well before this.

It is probably no coincidence that when our friend drifts into the arms of the rugged Jaime, it is in the vicinity of Open Door.  After discovering an old book on the 'colony', written in French, a fascination with its workings and history arises, an interest which is more than just a hobby to occupy the time spent waiting for the man of the house to return from work.  In fact, as the novel progresses, the line between the colony and the nearby town blurs and disappears, leaving us to wonder whether there is any difference - and where we actually are...

Havilio's style virtually encourages us to indulge in such speculation, the lack of detail hinting that the truth lies somewhere below the surface, and the book our friend discovers, relating the history of the colony, could just as well be telling us about her life.  In fact, the distinction between the town and the colony seems relatively unimportant, and if you take it a step further, Havilio is suggesting that we are all, in some way, living in our own little colonies.  In the book it says:

"No walls restrict the horizon, nothing to limit the illusion of absolute liberty." p.133

While it is meant to describe the freedom of the patients at Open Door, it may actually be hinting at the illusion most people outside it have of being able to lead free lives...

The relationship the narrator develops with the young Eloísa is also slightly unsettling, seeming as it does to just drift into being, from nowhere (a pattern which many of the events in Open Door follow).  An almost violently-sexual affair develops, with the (presumably) older woman fascinated by the misbehaving teenager - who frequently shows that perhaps she would not be out of place at the colony.  However, it is Eloísa, unable to understand what our friend is doing living with an old man, who says:

"It's madness.  If I didn't know you better I'd say you were wrong in the head." p.185

It's hard not to think that she is on the right track with this comment...

As much as the reader speculates though, the reality is that this is a book which defies interpretation, giving enough up to intrigue us, but nowhere near enough to allow answers to be found.  At times, it all feels a little Kafkaesque, but where the Czech writer's characters charge around in a desperate attempt to find out what on earth is going on, Havilio's creations leave the heavy thinking to the reader, preferring to drink, fornicate and enjoy their siestas while we are wondering what to make of it all.  Is it a story of post-traumatic stress?  Is it an allegory for some aspect of modern life?  Are we meant to suspect that we are all actually living inside an asylum?

Don't ask me (I never claimed to know!).  Read it for yourself, and you might find out - then again, you might not.  In any case, whether you succeed in unravelling the truth or not, you'll certainly have an interesting time :)

A Rather Masculine Set of Shorts

A while back, I sent a polite e-mail asking if I could get a review copy of Iosi Havilio's Open Door from And Other Stories, a small independent publisher over in the UK.  I got back a polite reply with a request that I accept an e-copy, one I was happy to agree to.  I was even happier when I was sent not only Open Door, but also All the Lights, a collection of short stories by a young German writer called Clemens Meyer - just in time for German Literature Month :)

*****
All the Lights, translated by Katy Derbyshire, contains fifteen stories, mostly set in the poorer Eastern states of Germany.  The protagonists are mainly men whose lives have not quite turned out as they would have expected.  Whether they are in jail, or have spent time there in the past, on the dole, working in a supermarket or living alone in an old damp flat, the protagonists of the tales (it would be a stretch to call them heroes...) have a lot to regret, and (usually) a lot of time in which to do it.

A common theme is life passing us by, or having already passed us by.  In Waiting for South America, Frank is distracted from his empty life by a series of letters from a friend who claims to have struck it lucky and gone off to chase his dreams in the Americas.  Frank's drab existence is contrasted with the glamour described in the letters he receives - although we have our doubts as to the veracity of these claims.

Fatty Loves is an excellent story, showing us an overweight, middle-aged teacher, sitting in his living room reminiscing about his earlier career, and about one student in particular.  When his thoughts start to become a little disturbing though, the reader is forced to analyse their feelings for the teacher and perhaps pass judgement on his behaviour...

The original title for this collection was Die Nacht, die Lichter (The Night, the Lights), and as childish and rhyming as that would have sounded in English, it's a very apt title.  Many of the events take place between dusk and dawn, emphasising the solitude of the characters by following them through empty streetscapes.

In Your Hair is Beautiful, a man lurks outside a woman's house in the dark, caught in an obsession which has cost him his family and his job; Carriage 29 sees a wine salesman sitting on a train at night, with no knowledge of how he got there; in I'm Still Here!, a black Dutch journeyman boxer experiences the darker side of East Germany, both inside a bar and out on the streets, after surprisingly knocking out his local opponent for an unexpected and rare win.  These are not streets you would like to be caught in...

The majority of the stories are intriguing, but I do have some reservations about All the Lights.  While there are some notable exceptions (the confusing opener Little Death and the frankly bizarre The Short Happy Life of Johannes Vettermann spring to mind), the stories did tend to blur into one another for me, and I had trouble remembering much about some of them the day after reading them.  Also, I'm a sucker for measured, flowing (florid?) prose, and Meyer's terse, sparse style didn't really do a lot for me.

Perhaps my biggest problem though was a feeling that several of the stories were one-trick ponies (the biggest, funnily enough, being Of Dogs and Horses).  There are twists, perfectly good ones, but... I'm not convinced that many of the stories would bear up to repeated reading, and that's what I'm looking for in the books I choose.

In fairness, All the Lights was slightly handicapped from the start.  I'm not a big fan of e-reading, and I felt a bit funny reading a German book in English (probably for the first time!).  I was also reading it having just completed Alois Hotschnig's Die Kinder beruhigte das nicht; I'm afraid that I found the Austrian writer's collection a much better one, and perhaps this affected my appreciation of Meyer's work.

Still, it's a pleasant collection of stories, and there are many that are well worth reading.  In the Aisles, another late-night special, set this time in a supermarket, is a well-written, poignant tale of male friendship, while the last story of the book, The Old Man Buries his Beasts, follows an old man as he takes a last look around his farm and the moribund nearby town.  These two tales are good examples of how some stories can stand up to rereading, even when the outcome is fresh in the mind.  Even if the same cannot be claimed for all the stories, All the Lights is still worth checking out.