EUPL

Violeta Among the Stars by Dulce Maria Caroso – #EUPL

StuckinaBook All , , 8 Comments

I’m glad I’ve finished Violeta Among the Stars (2005) by Dulce Maria Cardoso in time to include it in Women in Translation month – it’s also one of the European Union Prize for Literature winners in the batch that I’m reviewing. It won the best part of 20 years ago, but it was only last year that it was translated from Portuguese by Ángel Gurría-Quintana.

The most noticeable thing about this 400-page novel is that it is all one sentence. It’s not the first novel I’ve read like that, but it is perhaps the one where it works most fluidly. In between paragraphs of text are occasional indented lines, slipping in the middle of phrases – these indents are dialogue, though plenty of dialogue also appears in the massed paragraphs of phrases separated by commas, rather than full stops.

There is some logic to this style. Violeta has been driving along a road on an appointment to sell hair-removal wax – she sees all unwanted hair follicles as her personal nemeses. Alone, on a wet road, she has a horrific car accident – and Violeta Among the Stars almost all takes place in the moments afterwards as her life flashes before her eyes. As such, there are occasional reminders of where she literally is – noticing the broken glass everywhere, say – but it is mostly a rhapsodic swirl of memory.

We start by learning about her habit of going to lorry parks to get sex – not as a prostitute, but simply to find an unquestioning partner who won’t want any commitment. As the novel progresses, we meet her daughter Dora. She is the person most capable of causing Violeta pain, but also her proudest achievement and her deepest disappointment. The background of her family tree slowly fills in the gaps. Her strained relationship with her mother; her uncertain closeness with her father that is threatened by a secret; her curious relationship with Dora’s father Ângelo.

I don’t want to be trapped in the past, neither by revenge like Ângelo, nor by love like Dora, the past will use anything to keep us trapped, memory is the worst form of torture, memory won’t let me rest even when I can no longer feel my body, hanging by the seatbelt, that night I got drunk in Ângelo’s two miserable basement rooms, or perhaps it was another night when I went to visit him, I frequently got drunk when I visited him, perhaps to be able to laugh sincerely at his lame jokes, when I was drunk I saw my father in that house with his lover and their bastard, fulfilled like I never saw him in this house, maybe this house also hurt him, the walls also closed in to suffocate him, the ceilings came down to crush him, this house also hurt my father, I used to get drunk and instead of laughing at the jokes I would start shouting at Ângelo,

I was a bit unsure about going into Violeta Among the Stars. The single-sentence conceit could have been frustrating or unnecessary – but I think Caroso uses it so cleverly. The story comes look a flood of water, ebbing and flowing in simple thoughts (expertly translated) so that there is something about the simplicity and directness of Violeta’s presentation of her self that works really well alongside the lack of full stops. Conventional and unconventional storytelling combine very effectively.

And Violeta is a fascinating character, so deeply delineated and detailed. Because there are so few significant characters in this long-ish novel, we get to know them all thoroughly. Violeta certainly isn’t all good; she is probably more bad than good. But we know so much about her by the end that she is sympathetic. I worried at first that her obesity would be her most salient characteristic, and Caroso certainly writes a great deal about it, but it ends up being more significant in the way that people respond to it, rather than anything inherent.

After Kokoschka’s Doll, this is another really interesting and original winner of the EUPL. I look forward to discovering another couple from this batch.

Do head over to the European Union Prize for Literature website to find out more about this year’s prize, and all previous winners.

Kokoschka’s Doll by Afonso Cruz – #EUPL

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Kokoschka's Doll by Afonso Cruz | Hachette UKYou might remember that, last year, I read and reviewed a few of the books that had won the European Union Prize for Literature, also known as the EUPL. Among them was Selja Ahava’s Things That Fall From the Sky, one of my favourite reads of 2021. Well, I’ve been kindly asked to do the same again – and got to choose from a list of all the previous winners. Or at least those that have been translated into English. While the prize isn’t a translation prize, and the books are judged in their original language, I can only read English – so I am grateful Rahul Bery for translating Afonso Cruz’s Kokoschka’s Doll (2010) from Portuguese. What a strange and engaging book. Here are its curious and inviting opening lines:

At the age of forty-two, or, to be precise, two days after his birthday that year, Bonifaz Vogel began to hear a voice. Initially, he thought it was the mice. Then he thought about calling someone to deal with the woodworm, but something stopped him. Perhaps it was the way the voice had given him orders, with the authority of those voices that live deep inside us.

The novel is set (at least at first) in Dresden during the Second World War. Rather than a voice living inside Bonifaz Vogel, the voice belongs  to a young Jewish boy called Isaac Dresner – who is living under the floor of Vogel’s bird shop. Yes, ‘Vogel’ means ‘bird’ in Germans. It’s that sort of novel, constantly playful, sometimes in an obvious way and sometimes in a way that cannot possibly be unravelled. Anyway, Isaac is in hiding after a Nazi soldier murdered his friend. Vogel doesn’t particularly question this. Once he realises that the voice is quite wise, he turns to it in every discussion. The voice helps him when people are haggling in the shop. It helps him feel connection.

This alone would be a quirky and interesting novel but, oh boy, it’s only the tip of the iceberg. Along the way a young female painter called Tsilia joins them but, again, Cruz is only getting started. Somehow they get onto the trail of Mathias Popa – an author who apparently found a lost manuscript by Thomas Mann and passed it off as his own. And it failed horribly. He is working on a new book, though… called Kokoschka’s Doll.

You might be wondering when that title was going to come into play. The middle section of the novel (printed on slightly greyed pages in my edition by MacLehose Press, and possibly in every edition) is the novel Kokoschka’s Doll. It includes the story of a man hired to write a book alluding to all sorts of other books, none of which exist – until the same man is hired to write all of those books too. Keeping up?

And – so, so briefly – we eventually get to the story of Kokoschka’s doll. For a handful of pages, while we’re most of the way through the book. This is the bit that is based on a true story, so you might know it already. Oskar Kokoschka (curiously referred to as Oscar Kokoschka in this translation of Cruz’s novel – deliberate or mistake? Hard to tell in this sort of book) was a painter who commissioned a life-sized doll of Alma Mahler, after the end of a two-year relationship with her. He later destroyed the doll during a party.

After the end of ‘Popa’s’ book, we are introduced to a whole range of characters we haven’t met before, almost as though we should know who they are. And they do eventually link back to the cast we already know, but it is quite disconcerting.

I came to the conclusion that Cruz loves to unsettle the reader. There is so much allusion and confusion in Kokoschka’s Doll, so you can never predict what is happening next, or even be entirely certain about what has happened before. Cleverly, this is contrasted with simplicity in the writing and in the characters. They are simple people – believable, but easily comprehendible. The writing is spare and enjoyable, and often pages only have a short paragraph or two on them. It makes you feel like you are reading something akin to children’s literature – but the loops you are taken in are experimental.

I think the combination worked really well, and I can see why the EUPL judges wanted to reward Cruz. Apparently he is prodigious and prestigious in his native Portugal and Kokoschka’s Doll is certainly the work of an assured author. I don’t fully know or understand what I read, but I really enjoyed reading it.

Do head over to the European Union Prize for Literature website to find out more about this year’s prize, and all previous winners.