Despite the best worst combined efforts of Royal Mail and Australia Post, I recently received some more reading fare from the wonderful Hispabooks. The first of the three is by a writer who was included in Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists issue, a man whose sentences flow smoothly and whose stories entertain and intrigue. So, without further ado, let's take a trip to Spain...
*****
Andrés Barba's Rain Over Madrid (translated by Lisa Dillman) is a collection of four novellas running to just over two-hundred pages. Each takes place in the Spanish capital, and the stories are mostly about people coming to terms with love and family - fairly commonplace topics, but handled nicely.
The first piece, 'Fatherhood' sees a semi-successful musician becoming a father when his rich girlfriend unexpectedly falls pregnant. While the relationship with the mother is fairly shortlived, he realises that fatherhood is something that lasts forever:
"It seemed then, for the first time, that a sort of transference took place; he didn't know how else to explain it - a boundless well of emotion, and also pain at the fact that intimacy and natural behaviour were not possible between them. Until that moment, he'd only ever sensed it in the vaguest of ways, but now it seemed undeniable."
'Fatherhood', p.33 (Hispabooks, 2014)
The story extends over several years, with Barba chronicling the man's attempt to stay close to the boy he rarely sees. Will he ever be able to break through the barrier of politeness separating them?
The other stories then move on to see matters through the eyes of women. In 'Guilt', a married woman is forced to act as the focal point for her family, with matters coming to a head when she is forced to look for (yet another) live-in home help for her ageing, cantankerous mother. The main character of 'Fidelity', by contrast, is a teenage girl discovering sex for the first time and generally having a wonderful time. However, her summer in the sun turns a little sour when she finds out that she's not the only one in her family having some fun.
The final piece, 'Shopping', follows a woman approaching middle age and her glamorous mother, Nelly. This is no maternal figure, rather a whirlwind in Prada, and her idea of being 'natural' is not what the daughter would hope for:
"Not so for Nelly. Nelly is natural like a typhoon is natural, like all self-centered egotists, like a disaster, like the Grand Canyon, like a luxury item ensconced in an absurdly minimalist display case in a glittery shop window."
'Shopping', p.171
As they go shopping in the snow for Christmas presents, the daughter sees chinks in her mother's armour for the first time, making it easier for her to make allowances for Nelly's bossy behaviour. After all, everyone gets old...
Rain Over Madrid is an enjoyable read with four excellent stories. Despite the extended time span of the first two stories, it almost seems as if the book is divided into seasons, as we move from the eternal spring of 'Fatherhood', to the winter streetscape of 'Shopping'. Each story looks at a moment of realisation, a time when a life changes direction. Not all of the turning points are dramatic, but they're all important in their own way.
The protagonists (mostly written in the first person) struggle with relationships, and each must deal with big personalities in their lives, whether they be lovers, sisters, fathers or mothers. Introverts for the most part, yet desiring emotion and human contact, the central characters are confronted by people who are completely self-absorbed and self-obsessed. In order to get what they want from their relationships, Barba's creations must make an effort to assert themselves, even though it may seem easier at times to just go with the flow.
The stories are written in an excellent style, calm, casual and very easy to read. I enjoyed Dillman's work with the translation as the stories flow nicely. There are no jarring tones, and the dialogue and description are seamlessly integrated, making for an excellent read. There are a few obvious Americanisms, but you can't have everything, especially when the translator comes from the States ;)
Rain Over Madrid is another enjoyable work from Hispabooks, and it's definitely a book many will enjoy. The four stories are interesting, very accessible and easy to read in a single setting, despite their length - hopefully this bodes well for getting more from Barba into English soon :)
Some of you will have seen the recent posts on my visit to the Melbourne Writers Festival, and as I said in the first of those posts, the main reason I went was to catch up with Spanish writer Nicolás Casariego to hear what he had to say about his first novel in English. Casariego turned out to be a nice, happy sort of man, which was good to see - especially as his creation is anything but...
*****
Antón Mallick Wants to Be Happy (translated by Thomas Bunstead, review copy courtesy of Hispabooks) is written in the form of the diary in which a thirty-two-year-old Spanish lawyer decides that the time has come for him to set depression and pessimism to one side:
"Enough is enough. I don't want to be a pessimist, or a victim, any more. I reject the status of black hole. This notebook, which I address and dedicate to Vidor Mallick, inveterate gambler and amateur loan shark, is proof of my will to optimism, that is, my great desire to become a man with a sunny disposition, happy, normal, one of those guys who springs out of bed every morning and has answers for pretty much every single one of life's many questions."
p.11 (Hispabooks, 2014)
A noble ambition indeed, but what can Antón do to achieve this goal? And, more importantly, why does he feel the need for this radical step?
In pursuit of optimism and happiness, Antón decides to begin the search in books, and his family is happy to help out: elder brother Zoltan provides an armful of self-help tomes while younger sister Bela points him in the direction of the classic philosophers. However, with family disputes and a major contract to work on, finding enlightenment isn't going to be easy. And then, of course, there's the small matter of a woman who claims to be the mother of his unborn child...
Right from the start, Antón Mallick... was a book that just clicked with me, and I greatly enjoyed the time I spent in the world of the confused Spaniard. What Casariego offers the reader is a picture of a man who understands that he isn't happy and has decided to do something about it. First, though, he has to understand what exactly this elusive ideal he's chasing is, and he quickly realises that happiness is far easier to talk about than to identify:
"...happiness can be everywhere, except right here, the one place in which you and I find ourselves. It is therefore, an invention, an imaginary refuge, a mirage in the middle of the desert, and it vanishes the moment you get close." (p.190)
As Antón progresses in his search for happiness, both in his reading and (mis)adventures outside his apartment, the reader feels sympathy for his hopeless cause.
As mentioned above, Antón isn't completely alone in his quest as his brother and sister are keen to offer bibliographic support; however, Zoltan and Bela aren't exactly models of happiness themselves. The brother is a psychologist, one whose professional exterior hides a slightly disturbing character, while Antón's intelligent, charming sister is trapped in a stifling relationship with a lazy American 'writer'. In fact, the only happy member of the family seems to be the Vidor Mallick Antón mentions in his diary entry. It's a shame, then, that Vidor, supposed author of the book Confessions of a Once-Hungarian Spaniard, has been dead for well over a century...
Part of the success of the book is the way in which Casariego constructs his novel, using Antón's diary entries to both inform and deceive the reader. It's a sort of therapy, and it's very easy to fall into the trap of trusting Señor Mallick and taking his assertions at face value. However, in reality (as Casariego mentioned during his talk at the festival), the diary format allows Antón (and the writer) to be a little economical with the truth. The careful reader will see contradictions and sense certain omissions, some (but not all) of which will make sense later in the novel.
The diary format in itself could get a little old very quickly, but the writer mixes things up by including several other text types. In addition to Antón's thoughts on the books he's reading (sometimes considered, occasionally flippant and insulting), we see copies of e-mails, transcriptions of conversations on Skype and an unusual take on the life story of a Soviet satellites expert. It does make sense, I promise. Sort of...
Tony Messenger, over at the Messengers Booker blog, recently posted on this book and was a lot less enamoured with it, not even managing to get half-way through the novel. However, while I can see why he didn't like it (it was around this point in the story that I had a few doubts myself), I think a lot of the flaws he pointed out were actually deliberate. Antón is meant to be an unreliable narrator, and many of the more absurd plot developments are mere distractions, taking both the narrator and reader further away from the true centre of the book, the reason why Antón needs to go on this journey of discovery in the first place. For me, at least, it does all eventually come together.
Which is not to say that all the threads are neatly gathered up. It's true that the mystery of the woman-with-child is solved, and that the family manages to come together (and we do eventually find out why Antón Mallick isn't happy), but I wouldn't say that the end of the novel brings the closure I'd expected. Which is why my question to Casariego at the festival session was about whether he'd ever considered writing a sequel (he hadn't, but I'll take the credit if he changes his mind...). After all, the search for happiness is a rather long-term project, and I doubt that Antón will be reaching his goal any time soon...
Time for my second contribution to Spanish-Language Literature Month, and today's offering is from a publisher who deserve to be highlighted this month. Hispabooks is a fairly recent addition to the ranks of publishers who focus on literature in translation, with their speciality being... well, Spanish literature :) I've already reviewed a couple of their titles, and this book is one which comes very highly recommended indeed - an intense story made (mostly) in Madrid...
*****
Marcos Giralt Torrente's Paris (translated by Margaret Jull Costa, review copy courtesy of the publisher) is an excellent, psychological novel, a book which looks at the weakness of memory and the dangers of reliance on a single person in your life. It's written in the form of a monologue told by a middle-aged man looking back to his childhood and, in particular, events surrounding his ne'er-do-well father and his enigmatic, saintly mother.
While the pair have long since parted, there was a strange attraction between the two, one which even the father's spell in prison failed to break, and this forms one of the central issues the narrator attempts to get to the bottom of. However, he's also fascinated by something which he will never be able to learn the whole truth about (his mother, the only one with full knowledge, is suffering from dementia and has no memory of earlier events). He believes that the key to the final breakdown of his parents' relationship lies in the time his mother spent in Paris, a time which could reveal several secrets - but it's possible that there are other, darker truths out there, just waiting to be brought into the light...
Paris is intense and powerful, and the combination of great writing and an intriguing secret makes for an excellent novel. It was the unanimous winner of the 1999 Premio Herralde de Novela (a Spanish prize for debut novels), beating Andrés Neuman's Bariloche into second place. For a first novel, it's a surprisingly complex and developed piece of writing. However, the flip side of that is that it should come with a warning - you'll need a lot of concentration to stick to the task at hand.
The novel centres on the figure of the mother, a portrait of the mother as a martyr to her family. She's a woman who's very good at keeping secrets, holding her true feelings deep within:
"Talking about herself would have meant allowing her "self" to surface, and that was something she simply could not allow. What she felt and how she really was had to be covered up, concealed beneath hundreds of protective veils - either learned or innate - that established a distance between her and the suffering or hopes that were watching and waiting inside her."
p.40 (Hispabooks, 2014)
The author develops his picture of the mother with a slow, steady build up of details. A controlled, measured woman who knows her man will disappoint her, she wants to believe in him, despite knowing full well that he will never change. Which rather begs the question - why does she stay with him for so long? And, more intriguingly, does she have a few more secrets of her own?
As much as the novel is about the mother, though, there's also a lot to discover about the narrator, a man searching for truth among the rubble of half-remembered events. He's never really sure of the events he discusses, constantly talking around the facts, either because he can't remember them or because he never knew them in the first place (in several places he explains that he was never privy to the whole truth). In fact, the same is true for the poor reader as we are strung along a little, never really knowing what, or whom, to believe.
While calling him an unreliable narrator might be a touch extreme, it's true that caution is called for when trying to get to the bottom of the story. His mother's loss of memory fuels his obsession with the past:
"I can no longer
separate what she told me from what I know now, from what she gradually
confided to me in later, lonelier years, and from what I've since found
out for myself, what I dared to think, or what I made up." (p.64)
Much of what he tells us is 'pieced together later', the product of his imagination, although he is the first to admit the problematic nature of his conclusions. The language used reflects this; it's incredibly tentative and halting, full of conditionals and modals. The text abounds with phrases such as 'must have been', 'may have said' and 'I will never know if...'. Still, that doesn't mean he isn't playing with us...
Paris is also about subjectivity, and Giralt Torrente discusses at length the way in which we can confuse facts and feelings:
"Things happen, and later on you might recount them to someone else with more or less exactitude, and the image you convey will not be so very different from the original events. What you were feeling, though, what was going on inside you while those things were happening, is more a matter of silences. We can get quite close in our description of events, but we will never be able to describe their very essence, an essence tinged with despair, or joy, or with both at once." (p.37)
Which doesn't stop the writer, and narrator, from trying to pin down the essence of those distant events. We are drawn into this game too, tempted to judge the characters - the mother, the father, the narrator, his Aunt Delphina. The problem is that with only a few of the facts, we can never be completely sure that we're right.
The writing is excellent, with a style reminiscent of Saramago and Marías (there are definite shades of A Heart So White here). Paris consists for the most part of long, precise sentences, full of complex clauses, constantly folding back on, and contradicting, themselves. Of course, this is all aided by the choice of translator - Jull Costa, as always, does a wonderful job, meaning that the book never reads like a translation.
Paris is a very good book, and for those who like his style, there's more out there from Giralt Torrente in translation. His story collection The End of Love is already available, and Father and Son (which, as Tiempo de Vida, won the Premio Nacional de Narrativa in 2011) will appear in English in September. So is he the next big thing in Spanish? Well, there's certainly a lot to like. Paris is a fascinating, complex novel - even the cover, while initially plain, reveals something about the plot. It's definitely not an easy read, but it's certainly a rewarding one :)
*****
Before I finish, there is one little issue I want to address here. This is my third Hispabooks work, and all three have had British translators (Rosalind Harvey, Jonathan Dunne and Margaret Jull Costa). While the translations definitely feel very British, for some reason, the books use American spelling conventions, plus the occasional, jarring Americanism. It's a trend I'd already picked up in the first two books, and reading Paris merely confirmed it.
These (rare) Americanisms particularly stand out in Jull Costa's excellent translation. Examples include 'jelly' instead of 'jam', 'wash up' instead of 'wash his face'/'have a wash', 'bills' instead of 'notes' and 'Mom' instead of 'Mum'. It's not a huge thing, but it seems an odd stylistic choice to me, almost as if the publishers are hedging their bets with the variety of English. It's likely that most people wouldn't notice, but I like to think that when it comes to translations, I'm not most people ;)
Any thoughts? I'd love to hear if anyone else has noticed this trend - and what you make of it...
January's over, and it's time to put away the J-Lit and return to the wider world of translated literature. We're making a start with that today, courtesy of a novel I received for review a while back from Hispabooks. It's off to Spain then, with just a hint of the Orient too...
*****
Elvira Navarro's The Happy City (translated by Rosalind Harvey) is a book in two halves, with two related stories making up one whole novel. Both stories are tales of kids growing up in a Spanish city - two Hispanic coming-of-age tales, if you will.
The first is called Story of the Chinese Restaurant "Happy City", and it's all about Chi-Huei, a young Chinese boy who finally arrives in Spain after a couple of years living away from his family. After his time with his aunt, he has a doubly difficult task ahead. Not only does he have to adjust to a new country and language, he also has to readjust to life with his mum and dad...
The reader is shown life as a migrant, and it's not all about the delights of the modern world. While the family has a decent standard of living, it's tough, and they work all hours to keep their heads above water and feel like they're making progress. For Chi-Huei, there's also the added pressure of school, with his parents pressuring him to focus on his education (when he's not helping out at his parents' restaurant...).
As a young arrival, picking up the language isn't such a big deal, and there is an unexpected benefit when his father begins to express himself more confidently in the new tongue with his two sons. As with any nascent bilingual though, there are some issues to overcome - and this even extends to his native tongue:
"He could sense himself short-circuiting when, for example, he chatted to his aunt and then carried on using the same accent to speak to his mother, which made him feel strange and become abruptly aware, thanks to a feeling of slight embarrassment, of some sudden inappropriateness, of a subtle variation in his identity. All at once he sounded false and felt ridiculous when he changed, as if inexplicably taking off his clothes in front of everyone and then putting on new ones that didn't suit him either."
p.32 (Hispabooks, 2013)
It's all part of the challenge of adjusting to a new environment, be it cultural or linguistic.
*****
The second story, The Edge, focuses on Chi-Huei's friend Sara, and this story takes a very different approach. Sara is an only child, with very clear boundaries set by her parents, and when she one day decides to cross those boundaries, an encounter with a homeless man throws her life into turmoil:
"He is a young homeless man, sitting on the steps with his legs stretched out, his body leaning lazily backwards. Walking until I come to a halt at the edge of the sidewalk, I am horrified and fascinated; I suddenly recognize myself in the skinny body, the torn clothes, the dirty hair hanging to either side of the face ... for the vision of decay is drawing me toward something I know nothing of." (p.101)
Leaving her permitted path for the first time brings confusion and knowledge of a wider world, one which she isn't really ready to cope with.
In a sense, her decision to cross the line is a move towards the end of childhood, one which leads into a downward spiral of behaviour. She hides her actions from her parents and invents lies to cover her tracks, something which soon leads to trouble with the law. Sara is rebelling against home pressures, and she becomes determined to find the homeless man (who seems to be following her) and find out what he wants...
*****
In addition to the friendship between the characters, the main connection between the stories is the theme of relationships between parents and their kids. Chi-Huei can't see why his parents are working so much; it's not really a means to an end, he sees it as getting rich for the sake of being rich. In addition to his anger at initially being left behind in China, he gradually becomes aware of a dim future full of responsibility, a future he would rather avoid.
Sara's parents have a very different problem. Terrified of making a mistake, they're unable to decide between freedom and smothering. Sara's adventures are simply the curiosity of the unknown, but the more her parents dither, the greater the danger that she will do something stupid. Her conversations with her new friend have soured her outlook, and, like Chi-Huei, she is pessimistic about the future.
The Happy City has two interesting stories of growing up, but for me there was no real bite to the book. I felt it was missing something, and I wasn't convinced that the two stories really made a novel. It was very easy to read, perhaps a little too easy at times - in fact, I'm a little tempted to describe it as a YA novel (which might actually make many of you more interested in it...).
While it's not really my kind of book, there's definitely a lot there about the problems of moving into a new stage of life, and I'm sure that many people will enjoy it. Certainly, if you're looking for an international coming-of-age story, you could do worse than give Navarro's book a go :)
It's a big welcome to the blog to Hispabooks, a new publisher specialising in translations of contemporary Spanish literature. I was lucky enough to receive a couple of review copies from them recently, and today sees my review of the first - which looks at a very weighty topic...
*****
Álvaro Colomer's Uppsala Woods (translated by Jonathan Dunne) begins when Julio Garrido arrives home on his fifth wedding anniversary. He's surprised not to be met by his wife, Elena, and looks for her all over his slightly eerie, cruciform apartment without success. Until, that is, he opens his wardrobe and finds her slumped comatose in the corner.
While the drug overdose is not exactly unexpected (Elena once told Julio of an urge to jump from the balcony...), it's still a shock for the husband. His wife survives the attempt, but now Julio understands the life that faces him in the future, one of constant vigilance. It's a realisation which would try anyone, but Julio is hit particularly hard. You see, he has his own issues when it comes to death...
Right from when I read the first page of the book in a sample, the style grabbed me. It's an urgent monologue, a man in a hurry, only poor Julio's not really sure where he's heading. Uppsala Woods is actually the third book in a loose trilogy on death in modern society, with this final book focusing on suicide. It's not a long book, but even so, it propels the reader along at a fair lick, with some sections leaving you slightly breathless.
Julio is haunted by a childhood trauma, the death of a neighbour, and he has never really got over the event which was to shape his life. The incident led to severe stress and several problems at school (some fairly embarrassing), leaving him with a special fascination with death - even if he's petrified of it. On seeing a road accident:
"While others had crowded around the injured person, no doubt fascinated by the fact that death could show its face in such an ordinary place, I had gradually concealed myself behind the traffic light without being aware of my actions, and still today I am surprised that my legs could have taken me away from the scene of the tragedy without having received, directly at least, an order from my brain."
p.40 (Hispabooks, 2013)
Now that his wife seems to be moving towards the realm of death, Julio feels his own life spiralling out of control. It's a state of affairs which is unlikely to end well.
It becomes increasingly obvious as the book progresses that there were marital issues even before the suicide attempt. Colomer discusses how marriages start to crumble from the inside, showing how, little by little, walls (and padlocks) appear between two people, as Julio muses about a lack of sex, distance on the sofa in front of the television, and even a reluctance to use the bathroom together. With the marriage on rocky ground before Elena's overdose, afterwards Julio slowly begins to unravel. His initial measured tone slips, and he becomes prone to anger, shouting and fits of rage (to the point of causing himself chest pain).
The novel has a wider significance than a marriage breakup though - it's also a look at the way society copes (or doesn't) with mental illness and suicide. For fear of the 'disease' spreading, people attempt to minimise the risk by covering up the signs. In fact pain is all too common, much more prevalent than we like to think. When Julio observes the people in the streets on their way to work, he muses:
"Sometimes, when I focus on their faces, I notice a strange look in their eyes. Perhaps they are sad, or absent, possibly they don't know where they are going, I sense these emotions because I have acquired a sixth sense for grasping pain, a human being's deep, authentic, insurmountable pain, and I only need to pay attention to their pupils to realize they are gagged by frustration." (p.87)
The struggles of life are obvious wherever Julio looks...
As he begins to lose the plot, fearing he is unable to prevent Elena from trying again, the parallel story of the discovery of the tiger mosquito Julio has been looking for becomes more important. Heo attempts to immerse himself in his scientific work, even if his imminent breakthrough couldn't have come at a more inopportune time. There's an obvious handy parallel between the spread of the mosquitoes and what he sees as the increase in the number of suicides, but is his work enough to distract him from his home troubles?
Uppsala Woods is a book I really enjoyed, a gripping read and an entertaining and thought-provoking look at the effects of modern life on our will to live. The title though has a slightly older origin. Colomer explains it on the very first page, in a preface which talks of a wood in ancient Viking Europe - a place for the old and weary to dispose of themselves before they became a burden on their communities...
Of course, this is something present-day societies prefer not to discuss, but in his novel the writer forces us to confront an uncomfortable question: is the image of the old swinging from trees such a terrible one? Or is it worse to see drug-addled depressives forcing themselves to work on the train each day, just waiting for the courage to put an end to it all? I'll leave you to ponder that one...
