translation

All Men Are Liars by Alberto Manguel

StuckinaBook All , , , , 12 Comments

I see quite a few people write about Alberto Manguel’s non-fiction, about reading and libraries, but not so often his novels. I picked up All Men Are Liars (2008, translated from Spanish by Miranda France) in Washington D.C. in 2013, off the back of enjoying that non-fiction, and it’s interesting to see how the kind-hearted wisdom that characterises his non-fiction does or doesn’t transfer here. I was also drawn by Jason Booher’s excellent cover design.

The title is a quote from (some translations of) Psalm 116 – but this isn’t a biblical book, or even the feminist polemic you might expect from that title. In context, the phrase is really about the way different accounts of the same instance will contradict.

The instance, or at least the person, is a writer called Alejandro Bevilacqua. He has died in suspicious circumstances, falling from his balcony the day before his masterpiece was published, and the various characters of the novel take it in turn to narrate their history with him – and what they know of his death. Amusingly, the first of these men is an author called Alberto Manguel…

While at times it feels like they are under police inquiry, they are actually speaking to a journalist called Terradillos, who is piecing together the truth about Bevilacqua’s life, or is at least trying to. Each account is as much about the speaker as it is Bevilacqua, and we quickly get a sense of their character.

He had something of the provincial gentleman, Alejandro Bevilacqua, an unruffled air and an absence of guile which meant that one toned down jokes in his presence and tried to be accurate about anecdotes. It’s not that the man lacked imagination, but rather that he had no talent for fantasy. Like St Thomas, the Apostle, he needed to touch what he saw before he could believe it was real.

That is why I was so surprised the night he turned up at my house and said he’d seen a ghost.

Each person has their frames of reference, their own go-tos for metaphor, and their own placing in the geopolitics that is the true heart of All Men Are Liars. Because almost everyone involved is an Argentinian ex-pat whose lives were forever changed by the brutal politics of the period. Bevilacqua was imprisoned and tortured for reasons that were unclear to him, and other speakers in the novel have experienced similar ordeals.

There are central questions in the novel – who truly wrote Bevilacqua’s masterpiece, which his lover found amongst his belongings and got published without his involvement; what machinations led to Bevilacqua’s torments and death – but above all it’s an experiment in perspective. What even is lying, if people can tell untruths without realising? Where is the line between deceit and subjectivity?

All Men Are Liars is an interesting and pretty captivating novel, though I did feel a bit at sea by my poor knowledge of mid/late-century Argentina. Manguel is a delightful companion even when he’s writing about dark topics, and there were continual chinks of light coming through the miseries and antagonisms he describes.

I think I’d still start with his non-fiction and treasure books about reading above this sort of fiction, but there is probably more urgency to All Men Are Liars than anything else I’ve read by Manguel. And I think that’s the truth?

Two frenetic novellas #ABookADayInMay – Days 15+16

StuckinaBook All , , , , , , , 9 Comments

The past couple of days, I’ve read two quite strange novellas. I don’t think they have anything in common except strangeness, so let’s dive in.

The Following Story

The Following Story (1991) by Cees Nooteboom

I hadn’t heard of The Following Story (translated from Dutch by Ina Rilke) until Karen reviewed it the other day, and the premise instantly grabbed me. Herman Mussert wakes up in a hotel room in Portugal – but he doesn’t remember how he got there, and he’s pretty sure he was in Amsterdam the day before.

I had woken up with the ridiculous feeling that I might be dead but whether I was actually dead, or had been dead or vice versa, I could not ascertain. Death, I had learned, was nothingness and if tat was the state you were in, as I had also learned, all deliberation ceased. So that was not the state I was in, since I was still full of musings, thoughts and memories.

As he explores what’s going on in the first-person narrative, we are piecing together who he is. Herman used to teach classics, though now writes travel guides under a pseudonym, and the worlds of Greek and Roman mythology are almost as real to him as his own life. They are rather more real now, in fact. A particular pupil from his teaching days becomes significant, and the timeline dives and weaves between past and present. At one point Herman merges with the myth he is recounting, and the schoolroom past and Lisbon present are equally intermingled. It’s all rather dizzying. Nooteboom never gives us any sure footing or easy conclusions. We are trying to establish Herman’s identity, but he is doing the same thing himself.

But this is also, in a way, a morality tale. The hotel room is a place he once, decades earlier, slept with a married woman. What bearing does that have on the story? I was strongly reminded of a very different writer – May Sinclair’s brilliant short story ‘Where Their Fire Is Not Quench’d’, where a woman keeps running but always ends up in the hotel room where she had an affair.

I really enjoyed the first half of this novella. Nooteboom isn’t trying to give the reader any stability, but the writing is mesmerising and elegant. You can more or less work out what’s going on, even if you’re always a step or two behind, deducing what’s happening a moment or two after it has. I struggled a bit more in the second half… suddenly Herman is on a ship with a wide cast of strange people, going goodness knows where. In Karen’s review, she talked about a ‘gut-punching ending’, but I have to admit I am very hazy on what actually happened in the second half. It all got a bit too frenetic and confusing for me. I think I know what happened to at least one of the main characters, but I’d have liked a little more clarity to have the full emotional impact.

The Bloater: The brilliantly original rediscovered classic comedy of manners

The Bloater (1968) by Rosemary Tonks

Any listener to the Backlisted podcast will doubtless be familiar with Rosemary Tonks – and I think they’re pretty much responsible for this strange, good novella coming back into print. It’s about a BBC sound engineer called Min and her various friendships, dalliances, and (most interestingly to me) profession.

We don’t get a huge anount of the profession, actually, but the novella’s best scenes are those that take us behind the scenes of a BBC audio programme – discussed, as everything in the book is, with jagged, slightly disjointed, often amusing back-and-forth dialogue. Min is nothing if not frank. Though married to a kind, negligible man (he is ‘always on the way to or from the British Museum’), she is preoccupied with possible romances. She and her female friends discuss these things openly, and with a sharp narrative verve that never goes in quite the direction you’d anticipate.

“Yes, but I’ve seen his chest. And I want him dreadfully.”

“Pooh! What’s a chest?”

“This one’s absolutely smooth, with thick rounded shoulders. And it shudders when it’s near me.”

I reflect that you really can’t ask much more than that. So I say disgustedly:

“This is all very objective, Jenny. But what sort of person is he, for G-d’s sake?”

“Quick as a flash, very pop Cambridge, I told you, success and plastic high living. He’d flit through any kind of situation without turning a hair.”

“He sounds genuinely nasty.”

Speaking of nasty, let’s discuss the Bloater of the title. Actual name Carlos, and her lodger, he is a constant presence in Min’s life – and here is how he is introduced:

This huge, tame, exotic man was reading a book as though he was sitting in an airport lounge, with no more regard for me than one has for the factotum in tinted nylon uniform-pyjamas who brings a cup of coffee and wipes over the simulated marble formica with a morsel of rubber skin. Not content with ignoring me, this loafer, this self-regarding bloater – smells. Oh yes, he does. I, personally, can smell him from the kitchen door.

Min seems disgusted and fascinated by the Bloater in equal measures. She invents elaborate excuses to try and avoid him, but then seems quite keen to sleep with him. It’s all very odd and quite unsettling, and you can’t help wondering why she doesn’t spend more time with her poor husband. I’m not sure why the novel is named after the Bloater, rather than (say) Min herself, but perhaps it is representative of the uncertainty at the heart of Min’s character. She doesn’t know what she really wants, but she’ll self-destruct in an effort to get it.

I enjoyed The Bloater mostly for its curious writing style. I’m always drawn to dialogue-heavy books (if they use speech marks!) and the off-kilter way the book chops between sparse sentences reminded me of other, similar mid-century writers like Muriel Spark and Beryl Bainbridge. In her strangeness and slight nastiness, Tonks belongs with those significant names. I’d be interested to see what she can do on longer scale, if any more of her books ever get reprinted.

Mind, Body, Forest, French: 3 non-fiction reads for #ABookADayInMay

StuckinaBook All , , , , , 12 Comments

I’ve been getting my reading done for A Book A Day in May, but not very good at fitting in writing about the books – so today we have a triple whammy. And the last three books I’ve read have all been non-fiction (and all books I’d started before the days in question).

The Immune Mind

The Immune Mind (2024) by Dr Monty Lyman

Monty is a friend of mine, and I always make sure I read a friend’s first book – but he is also a brilliant writer, which is why this is his third and I’m still pre-ordering copies. The first two were on skin and pain, and the third is on the links between the mind and the body in health – specifically between the brain, the immune system, and microbes in the gut.

This is one of those areas which feels like less of a surprise the less you know? I know basically nothing about medical science (or any science), and would have merrily assumed that the mind and body were closely interlinked in health. We all know that being ill makes us feel sad and cross, and we know that feeling low is a time when you always seem to get ill – we use terms like ‘being run down’ to cover both. But apparently this sort of casual chat was not transferred to science – until recently.

The reality is that there is no mental disorder that is not also physical, and most physical diseases have some mental element to them. We have been trained to pigeonhole disease into either one or the other, even to the extent that we visit one hospital for the body and another for the mind. I know from my experience as a doctor that there are both implicit and explicit pressures to force patients down the grooves of either ‘physical’ or ‘mental’, evem when it is clear that neither is a perfect fit.

As Monty Lyman makes clear, this is an exciting area of medical science where things are starting to change. People are beginning to challenge long-held separations between mind and body, and increasing research is being conducted into the ways our mental health and our immune system affect each other. As one snapshot, a woman with severe allergies was shown a plastic flower – and not only responded badly in my mind, but also in her physical symptoms: the brain’s expectations affect the body’s defence mechanisms.

The first part of this book explores in depth what lies behind the immune system and behind the brain’s defences, and starts to look at how these crossover. Monty Lyman explains everything very well – I don’t know if it’s just because we’re friends, but it feels like he is cheerfully encouraging me along through the more densely scientific bits. It’s more challenging that skin and pain, because I instinctively understand what those are, even if I wouldn’t have a clue how to describe or define them. The immune system? That’s further from my grasp.

As The Immune Mind continues, I enjoyed myself more and more – the case studies are really helpful for illuminating Monty’s arguments. And you can’t say he isn’t game in his research. At one point he makes himself deliberating ill, and another time takes something that causes depression. He’s immersed! As with his other books, there is a compassion and empathy to his writing that makes it feel so much more than a scientific treatise. Again, I don’t think it’s just because I know he’s a good, kind man – it is evident there on the page. Particularly when he discusses people with long-term illnesses, there is great care as well as knowledge.

In the final section, The Immune Mind has advice for how to foster good microbial health, good mental health, and good non-inflammatory health. Monty Lyman is clear that this isn’t a work of self-help – but I appreciate that he doesn’t want to leave something with such potential, personal impact as theory alone. (I’m making a list of the number of different plants I eat this week – will I make it to the target of 30? I was surprised to find that I’m on 18 after three days, so fingers crossed.)

It’s a fascinating book, beautifully written – and I believe Brits can hear some it excerpted on Radio 4 this week, fyi.

Book summary: Consolations of the Forest by Sylvain Tesson - Live Wildly

Consolations of the Forest (2011) by Sylvain Tesson

There’s some nominative determinism for you! Consolations of the Forest by Sylvain Tesson – translated from French by Linda Coverdale – is subtitled ‘alone in a cabin in the Middle Taiga’. If, like me, you don’t know where Middle Taiga is – it’s in Siberia. This isn’t a balmy woodland retreat: Tesson went to spend six months in temperatures a long way below freezing, with ever-present dangers including bears. Why? The opening paragraph dryly suggests that it is to get away from the capitalist indulgence of a supermarket shelf having fifteen types of ketchup. Later on, he gives a list:

Reasons why I’m living alone in a cabin

I talked too much
I wanted silence
Too behind with my mail and too many people to see
I was jealous of Crusoe
It’s better heated than my place in Paris
Tired of running errands
So I can scream and live naked
Because I hate the telephone and traffic noise

Consolations of the Forest takes the form of diary entries over the time he is ‘alone’. I was surprised by how very many visitors he had. There were people in similar cabins about four or five hours’ walk in two different directions, there to deter poachers or similar, and he would sometimes trudge off to see them – but there are any number of Russians passing by who pop in to drink vodka and make crude jokes. At one point there’s even an American tourist. I felt sometimes like I am more alone in my flat than Tesson was in his cabin.

There are beautiful descriptions of unabashed wilderness in this book, and some people would find his account very interesting. I’ll admit that I did find it a bit hard to warm to the book. I think of similar ventures like Nell Stevens’ in Bleaker House (on Bleaker in the Falkland Islands) which I absolutely loved – and I think that was because she was freer with her foibles, more willing to reveal her practical and emotional struggles. Tesson leans more into philosophy. He is – how else to say it? – very French.

Our fellow men confirm the reality of the world. If you close your eyes in the city, what a relief it is that reality doesn’t erase itself: others can still perceive it! The hermit is alone in the face of nature. As the sole consciousness contemplating reality, he bears the burden of the representation of the world, its revelation before the human gaze.

I was quite happy to keep reading Consolations of the Forest through to the end, but some slight spark was missing in it for me. Interesting, but not quite up my street.

When in French: Love in a Second Language [Book]

When in French (2016) by Lauren Collins

Speaking of French – here’s a book I started ages ago, and somehow forgot to continue, all about French. Specifically, it is about Lauren’s experience being married to a Frenchman, Olivier. They met in England (she is American), and moved to Geneva, a French-speaking part of Switzerland. It is essentially asks the question: what is it like to love across a language barrier?

I was nervous, the usual anxieties a person has about whether or not her boyfriend’s family will like her overlaid with uncertainty as to whether, in the fog of language, they’d even be able to make out the right person to like or not.

In amidst that question is a huge amount of other research – are people different in their second languages? Can you be your true self when you are learning a language? Can goats have regional accents? (Yes, it turns out.) It’s an ambitious amount to cover in a book that is also a more straightforward memoir of living abroad, struggling to acclimatise, losing some of yourself, finding triumphs and humour in the everyday.

We spoke to each other in endearments. My darling, my love, mon amour, ma chérie, poussin, mouton, bébé. This was new to me, not characteristic. The word baby, applied to anyone over two, had always seemed like the adult diaper of endearments.

“Mon amour,” he’d say. “Pass me the salt?”

I’d yell across a store, trying to get his attention: “Bébé! Over here, in dairy products.”

People we knew, I think, made fun of us. What they didn’t know was that we couldn’t say each other’s names.

There are two very real people at the heart of the book, in Lauren and Olivier. Olivier is admittedly harder to read, and I’m not sure he comes across quite as Lauren sees him. As I’ve already mentioned this month, I love non-fiction where memoir and autobiography intermingle. I think I’d have preferred the balance in When in French to lean slightly more towards memoir, but that’s perhaps because the worlds of language and identity are so vast that you can only really scrape the surface on an objective level. The subjective is slightly easier to package.

I’d definitely recommend the book – and feel some personal triumph that my Duolingo French lessons have enabled me to translate most of the (easy) French she peppers into the story. It’s fun, thoughtful and honest.

Valentino by Natalia Ginzburg #ABookADayInMay Day 2

StuckinaBook All , , , , 11 Comments

Happily, day two of A Book A Day in May was much more successful – and, somehow, even shorter. Only 62 pages! And yet Ginzburg gets a whole world into Valentino (1957), translated by Avril Bardoni. It contains a great deal, both in terms of character and plot, and yet doesn’t feel like it should have been any longer. It’s a miracle of concision.

The narrator is Caterina, writing with love and yet some detachment about her brother, Valentino. He is a young, selfish man who has been brought up to believe that he will become an exceptional man. He has been given an expensive education and most whims have been answered by his parents – even while Caterina and Clara, his sisters, have been expected to get by on scraps. Caterina sets off to a distant market early every morning, to get marginally cheaper vegetables, while Valentino takes exams in a half-hearted way and obsesses with his appearance. As the novel opens, Valentino is doing something he apparently does often: bringing a fiancée to meet the family:

Many times he had become engaged and then broken it off and my mother had had to clean the dining room specially and dress for the occasion. It had happened so often already that when he announced he was getting married within the month nobody believed him, and my mother cleaned the dining room wearily and put on the grey silk dress reserved for her pupils’ examinations at the Conservatory and for meeting Valentino’s prospective brides.

But Maddelena is different from the line of pretty young students that Valentino brings home. She is at least a decade older than Valentino, very wealthy, and not at all attractive. On meeting her, Valentino’s mother bursts into tears.

As the novella continues, this curious mix of characters go through months of their lives in not many lines. Ginzburg shows us Clara’s thawing resentment, Maddelena’s generosity and her subdued pride, Valentino’s much less subdued pride, the mother’s stubbornness, and the enchanting new character – a cousin of Maddelena who starts to charm Caterina. She is perhaps the only character we aren’t able to observe properly – because she is primarily the observer. The other characters are drawn with their competing emotions, while Caterina’s motives and feelings are a little less clear. She is a substitute for the reader and, being a daughter or sister to most of the characters, makes us feel fully immersed in the family dynamics.

Ginzburg is so good at families, at least in the two novellas I’ve read by her (the other being Sagittarius). And she is very funny too, with a wry humour that is exentuated by the sparseness of the prose. For example…

My father said he would go to have a talk with Valentino’s fiancée, but my mother was opposed to this, partly because my father had a weak heart and was supposed to avoid any excitement, partly because she thought his arguments would be completely ineffectual. My father never said anything sensible; perhaps what he meant to say was sensible enough, but he never managed to express what he meant, getting bogged down in empty words, digressions and childhood memories, stumbling and gesticulating. So at home he was never allowed to finish what he was saying because we were all too impatient, and he would hark back wistfully to his teaching days when he could talk as much as he wanted and nobody humiliated him.

The humour gradually ebbs from Valentino as the tone becomes more serious – and there is a development in the plot that is hardly given any space to grow, but works its way backwards through the story so that it transforms everything we’ve read.

Valentino is a brilliant little book, showing what a master of economy Ginzburg was. I’m keen to keep reading her, and glad to have at least one more book (Family Lexicon) on the shelves to try.

#ABookADayInMay is back! And I didn’t like the first one!

StuckinaBook All , , , , 10 Comments

It’s May again, and that can only mean one thing – I’m doing A Book A Day in May again! I don’t know if Madame Bibi is planning to do a novella a day in May again, as I am merely following her lead with this challenge.

To refresh memories – my aim is to finish a book every day in May. I say ‘book’ rather than ‘novella’ because it’ll almost certainly include some non-fiction, and it’s ‘finish’ rather than ‘read a full book’ because I have a whole pile of half-read books that will come into play. Besides those, I haven’t made any specific reading plans. Part of the fun is choosing the book each morning, spontaneously, matching the mood of the day. (And the number of pages I think I’ll have time to read.)

And I started with Antwerp by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño – written in 1980, finally published in 2002, and translated into English by Natasha Wimmer in 2010. I think my copy was actually a review copy in 2010, thinking about it. The cover boldly quotes Bolaño saying, “The only novel that doesn’t embarrass me is Antwerp“, which is bold for a publisher who was also issuing a bunch of his other stuff. And also because it’s not really a novel?

Antwerp: Amazon.co.uk: Roberto Bolano: 9780330510585: Books

Antwerp is a series of 56 short vignettes. I’m quite drawn to this sort of fragmented way of crafting a book, as some of my favourite reads of last year demonstrate – though In The Dream House and The Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer are both non-fiction. Antwerp is fiction, whatever else it might be, and these vignettes do paint some sort of collective picture – albeit one with such porous edges that the only really safe thing you can say about it, formally, is that it is made of words.

Actually, before we get onto the main part, there is a quick preface by the author – which starts like this:

I wrote this book for myself, and even that I can’t be sure of. For a long time these were just loose pages that I reread and maybe tinkered with, convinced I had no time. But time for what? I couldn’t say exactly. I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they’re outside of time, are the only ones with time. After the last rereading (just now), I realize that time isn’t the only thing that matters, time isn’t the only source of terror. Pleasure can be terrifying too, and so can courage.

I think that can help us know what we’re dealing with. It’s the sort of experimentalist think-speak that I had a lot more time for when I was 19 than I do now. So I entered the novel (?) proper fearing I might not know what was going on, and so it proved to be. The 55 vignettes take up less than 80 pages in my edition, and many of those pages are only half-filled. Certain characters recur, such as a nameless woman, a pornstar (?), various police officers, and Roberto Bolaño himself, or at least an author of the same name. There are clear themes: police investigation, violence, circuses, rather grubby sex. Maybe there’s even the detective of an actual crime, though I rather failed to pick up the pieces.

I started treating each vignette as a tiny short story, without trying too hard to connect it with what went before and after. And considering they’re things like this, you can perhaps see why:

10. THERE WAS NOTHING

There are no police stations, no hospitals, nothing. At least there’s nothing money can buy. “We act on instantaneous impulses” … “This is the kind of thing that destroys the unconscious, and then we’ll be left hanging” … “Remember that joke about the bullfighter who steps out into the ring and then there’s no bull, no ring, nothing?” … The policeman drank anarchic breezes. Someone started to clap.

But there were some parts that I loved and went back and re-read, like a poem. I noted down this opening to a vignette:

Silence hovers in the yards, leaving no pages with writing on them, that thing we’ll later call the work. Silence reads letters sitting on a balcony. Birds like a a rasp in the throat, like women with deep voices. I no longer ask for all the loneliness of love or the tranquility of love or for the mirrors. Silence glimmers in the empty hallways, on the radios no one listens to anymore. Silence is love just as your raspy voice is a bird. And no work could justify the slowness of movements and obstacles.

I keep using the word ‘vignette’, though I have no idea if Bolaño would like it. I got to the end having really appreciated some of the writing, and not at all knowing what the point of Antwerp was. (The city is mentioned, finally, in the 49th of the 55 vignettes – with an anecdote about a man in Antwerp being killed when his car was run over by a truck full of pigs.)

It’s probably the sort of book that would reward a year’s careful studying. Each line could be debated and played with and appreciated. Certainly Bolaño has his admirers. I don’t think I’m likely to become one of them.

The novel that turned into All Of Us Strangers

StuckinaBook All , , , , 7 Comments

Strangers (Paperback)

I loved Andrew Haigh’s film All of Us Strangers and think it’s criminal that Andrew Scott and Jamie Bell haven’t won every award under the sun (and Paul Mescal and Claire Foy can have some too). It sent me off to read the novel on which it was loosely based – Strangers (1987) by Taichi Yamada, translated from Japanese by Wayne Lammers. Interestingly, the original Japanese title translates as ‘Summer of the Strange People’, so it’s had a few metamorphoses.

There’s nothing more irritating that somebody comparing a novel to an adaptation if you haven’t seen it, so I’ll just say that Haigh made plenty of changes to his screenplay for All of Us Strangers – though probably not as many as you might imagine by his slightly disingenuous remarks that he ‘doesn’t remember’ what happens in the original novel.

I listened to the audiobook, so won’t be able to quote from the novel – but here’s the premise. Hideo Harada lives alone in a big apartment block which is in fact mostly offices, and hardly anybody else lives in the building. He is recovering from divorcing from his wife, not mourning the relationship so much (the divorce was his decision) as he mourns the life it gave him. Hideo is a middle-aged TV scriptwriter who only really seems to have one close friend – a TV producer with whom he has worked, and who reveals he is planning to ask Hideo’s ex-wife to marry him. It is the death knell to their friendship and (the producer insists) to their professional relationship. The only other person in his life is his adult son, whom he doesn’t see very often. 

Despite these sadnesses, Hideo is not a very emotional man. He wishes some circumstances were different, but he doesn’t seem to rail against them particularly. He is a man used to tragedy: his parents died in an accident when he was a teenager. And when connection is offered to him, he doesn’t take it up. A beautiful young woman, Kei, is the only other person in the apartment block one evening. She comes to his flat, hoping she can join him for a drink. He turns her away.

Not long later, Hideo bumps into Kei by the lifts. One thing leads to another, and they start a friendship that quickly becomes a sexual relationship. So quickly that it’s hard to tell exactly what is propelling it, besides our repeated assurances that Kei is beautiful.

The far more interesting relationship is happening simultaneously. On a whim, Hideo goes back to the neighbourhood where he grew up. He goes to a show, and Yamada has some fun at the expense of a mediocre comedian in a sort of variety show. From the back, Hideo hears a man call out, and thinks he recognises the voice – but he can’t see the man. After the show finishes, though, this man beckons Hideo to go with him. He doesn’t seem at all surprised to see Hideo, nor does he think Hideo will object to going. And Hideo follows, dumbstruck.

I’m going to say why, though do skip if you’d like to go into Strangers entirely without spoilers.

The man looks and sounds exactly like… Hideo’s father. Despite the fact that Hideo’s father died more than 30 years ago. This man hasn’t aged since that date – he is, in fact, rather younger than Hideo himself. Hideo follows him back to his humble home… and finds the doppelganger of his mother there too. He hasn’t time travelled, because all the modern conveniences are present. So what’s going on? They both speak to him affectionately and without reserve. I was struck by how some of the nuances of Strangers were lost by being in translation: my understanding (from context clues in the novel, and from reading Polly Barton’s Fifty Sounds about the Japanese language) is that there are many different grammatical impacts that depend on the register used. For instance, a parent speaking to a child would use different verb endings (maybe?) to a friend speaking to a friend, or a stranger speaking to a stranger. I imagine Yamada makes most of this function of Japanese, in the maelstrom of confusion and trying to establish precisely what is going on and what relationships are at stake.

Strangers is a short novel, so the emotional impact of this encounter is dealt with efficiently. There is plenty of plot and we aren’t given much time to linger in these emotions – which gives the book a feeling of spareness, reluctant to let the reader or the characters get bogged down in the full implications. I think it works, though it could have worked equally well if a longer work had been dedicated entirely to this surreal relationship.

Instead, Strangers hovers on the edge of horror. I didn’t find it particularly scary, which I was nervous about, but it certainly incorporates ideas of fear rather than simply nostalgia or love. Chilling is perhaps the word, though in a way that is interesting rather than challenging. The fear doesn’t come from the encounter with his parents, or parent-like people – rather, it is his own deepening illness. People keep remarking how unwell he looks – how gaunt, like he has the sudden weight-loss of aggressive cancer. But when he looks in the mirror, he seems perfectly fine. What is going on, and is it connected to his visits to his ‘home’?

I thought Strangers was unusual and very good. It’s trying to do things in a genre that I don’t fully understand, and I’ve read so few Japanese novels that I don’t know how much of an outlier it is. Plot-wise it has a lot of similarities with the All of Us Strangers film. Tonally, it is often worlds apart. Both are experiences I can firmly recommend.

 

The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino

StuckinaBook All , , , , 7 Comments

The Baron in the Trees (1957) is my first novel by Italo Calvino – and the description of it is a real tussle between something that really appeals to me and something that really doesn’t. On the one hand, it’s historical fiction – starting very precisely on 15 June 1767 – and that tends to deter me. On the other hand, it’s a novel about a baron who decides to live entirely in the trees. That very tethered version of surreality is exactly up my street. And it comes recommended by people like Karen/Kaggsy, so that was enough to push me in the direction of giving it a go – in an English translation by someone with the excellent name Archibald Colquhoun.

Cosimo is a young baron who, like many other teenagers, has an argument with his parents over the meal table. To escape them, he petulantly climbs into one of the trees in the garden. The event, like the whole novel, is narrated by Cosimo’s younger brother Biagio.

I have mentioned that we used to spend hours and hours on the trees, and not for ulterior motives as most boys, who go up only in search of fruit or birds’ nests, but for the pleasure of get­ting over difficult parts of the trunks and forks, reaching as high as we could, and finding a good perch on which to pause and look down at the world below, to call and joke at those passing by. So I found it quite natural that Cosimo’s first thought, at that unjust attack on him, was to climb up the holm oak, to us a familiar tree spreading its branches to the height of the dining­-room windows through which he could show his proud offended air to the whole family.

Little did Biagio suspect at the time – he will never encounter his brother on the ground again. Cosimo decides he won’t come down that night, sleeping in the dampness with little protection except the foolhardiness of youth and stubbornness. Everyone expects that he will come down the next day, but… he doesn’t. He never comes down again.

It’s a bizarre premise for a novel, but it works brilliantly. It’s such a simple conceit, and Calvino does interesting things with it. On the one hand, we see some of Cosimo’s exploits – meeting ruffians, courting a beautiful young woman, getting involved with some of the most significant personages of 18th-century Italy. He doesn’t skirt around the practicalities either – we gradually learn how he shelters himself, how he gets about great distances, and even (rather coyly) how he deals with bodily functions. It has some of the plotting of a ‘rattling good yarn’, and occasionally the cadence of it. But I found the novel rather more beautiful than adventurous. And I think that’s partly because we see things from the perspective of the left-behind brother, telling the story of his brother ‘sneaking around the edges of our lives from up on the trees’. For example, how lovely is this from Biagio, early in Cosimo’s exploits?

The moon rose late and shone above the branches. In their nests slept the titmice, huddled up like him. The night, the open, the silence of the park were broken by rustling of leaves and distant sounds, and the wind sweeping through the trees. At times there was a far-off murmur – the sea. From my window I listened to the scattered whispering and tried to imagine it heard without the protection of the familiar background of the house, from which he was only a few yards. Alone with the night around him, clinging to the only friendly object: the rough bark of a tree, scored with innumerable little tunnels where the larvae slept.

There is (presumably deliberate) self-consciousness to the way that any of Cosimo’s further-off adventures are described secondhand by Biagio. He hasn’t been present, and it’s not the most elegant way of portraying these things, but it feels part and parcel of Calvino’s satire of 18th-century literature. And thankfully the satire is largely in terms of plot and presentation, rather than style. The reason I didn’t mind the historical fiction element of it is that Calvino doesn’t try to make it feel at all historical. The dialogue doesn’t ape the 18th-century, and there is a vitality to the novel that comes largely because it would be improbable in any time period – its setting in the past adds to the oddness, in an excellent way.

My favourite parts of The Baron in the Trees were the beautiful descriptions or the sections about how his escape affects the family. The more bombastic bits were enjoyable but not, for me, the heart of the novel. And it is a novel that has such heart, despite its unconventionality.

I’ve finally started my Calvino journey, and better late than never.

Cobalt Blue by Sachin Kundalkar

StuckinaBook All , , , 3 Comments

I wanted to write about Cobalt Blue by Sachin Kundalkar (translated by Jerry Pinto) before the end of Novellas in November – hosted by Rebecca and Cathy. It’s only as I sit down to review it that I discover my edition is 228 pages, and thus rather over the suggested novella page limit – but it has big margins and a massive font, and I did some quick sums that suggest it’s under 50,000 words. So… maybe I can count it? I can easily see Cobalt Blue being printed as a 150pp book in a more usual font size.

Enough justification – let’s chat about Cobalt Blue (2006). I came across it because I watched the 2022 film – directed by the multi-talented author. Curiously, the film was in Hindi but the book was written in Marathi. I love watching Indian cinema, and really appreciated Cobalt Blue, which is shot beautifully and sensuously, with a gentle, philosophical feel to it. I was interested to see how the book would compare.

The gist of the plot is that the Joshi family rent out one of their buildings to a mysterious visitor. He is friendly, artistic, ready to be welcomed – and calmly secretive about every detail of his past. I think I’m right in saying that we don’t even learn his name. But we do learn early on that both the son and daughter of the house fall in love with him.

The first half of the book is from the perspective of the son, Tanay – addressed to ‘you’, the visitor.. He’s in his early 20s, and his sexuality seems to be both unspoken and unquestioned. He is not tormented by it, but nor is he open with his parents – instead, it seems like he has entered into an almost dreamlike romance with the anonymous paying guest. Though we know from the opening line that the guest leaves Tanay, Kundalkar still suffuses this half of the novella with a feeling of fairy tale. It is not the reflections of someone embittered. It’s a reverie on a lost relationship. Tanay has a beautiful innocence, observing the world around him and himself with a curiosity that feels poetic, if a little detached.

It’s recently come to my attention that when I’m listening to someone, I cock my head. On the phone I hold the receiver between my head and my shoulder as Anuja does, playing a rhythm on the table in front of me. When I watch a film, I run my fist over my face, as Shrikrishna used to. When I shave, I bring my face close to the mirror, as Baba does. When the milk boils over, I walk to the gas range calmly, turn it off and wipe the counter down, without a word— as Aai does.

How did I acquire those habits? Perhaps that’s what happens during the forging of a relationship: if nothing else, you adopt some of the other person’s habits. It makes you feel those small adaptations, those adoptions, make him one of you.

Have you picked up some habits from me? Do you draw circles with a finger on your thali when you’ve finished eating? Do you, every once in a while, squeeze shaving cream on to your toothbrush? Do you sleep with a knee drawn up to you, the bedclothes kicked away? Do you fold the newspaper neatly and put it where you found it, when you’re done?

Yesterday, when a cobalt blue smudge of the wall ended up on my hand, I wiped it on my trousers without thinking.

Anuja, his sister, is less passive and less contented. In the second half of the novella, we see things from her side – how she and the guest leave the home together. This is scandalous in her society, of course, and is the act of someone determined and reckless. She writes in the first person, and the guest feels more like a catalyst than an end point. Kundalkar’s writing is still lovely, but if the first half is a dream then the second half is more firmly wedded to reality.

Throughout it all, we only get hazy impressions of the guest. He reveals things in the family, but keeps himself hard to pin down. There is no big reveal where we learn his motivations – why he romanced both siblings, or which one he might prefer. Cobalt Blue isn’t about him: it’s about innocence and experience, family and loyalty, hope and the reverse.

Having seen the film first, I did have it in mind – and the film is much more linear, perhaps unsurprisingly. The novella is more abstract and jumps around a lot. I really enjoyed the experience of reading it – and I’ll give the final word to the very able translator, Jerry Pinto, who writes a short afterword:

As readers we expect narratives to fall into seemly timelines. But neither Tanay nor Anuja respect the sequential. Smitten, broken, rebuilt, they tell their stories as memories spill over, as thoughts surface. They move from the present to the past and back to the present without so much as an asterisk to help you adjust. Tanay says things again and again, as if he wants to reassure himself, as if repetition will fix what has happened in his memory. Once you get used to this, you realise that this is how we grieve, how we remember, in the present tense and in the past, all at once, because the imagined future must now be abandoned.

A bunch of books I’ve read recently

StuckinaBook All , , , , , , , , 11 Comments

It’s that time again when I look at a big pile of books I’ve been intending to review, and don’t really have a full-post’s worth of things to say… so here they all are, in a round up. Hope you’re all reading something fun at the moment.

Because of Jane (1913) by J.E. Buckrose

I have a few books by the near-forgotten Buckrose and really like her writing. My hope is that one of them will elevate itself above the others and be good enough for the British Library Women Writers series – but it won’t be Because of Jane. As I’ve written previously, Buckrose is very good on puncturing egos and awkwardness and social manners. She is much more formulaic and less interesting when it comes to romance – and there is a lot of romance in Because of Jane. The central one is ‘spinster’ Beatrice who reluctantly lives with her brother and his wife and daughter, and who begins to fall for a local widower, Stephen Croft.

“They were married at a registrar’s office. That always seems to me a little like buying machine-made underclothing. Doesn’t it to you?”

“Yes – no – I don’t know,” said Beatrice.

“And so,” said Miss Thornleigh, pursuing her train of thought, “it didn’t last. It was never likely to last.”

“I cannot think that Mrs Stephen Croft died because she was married at the registrar’s,” objected Beatrice in common justice.

“Well, perhaps not,” conceded Miss Thornleigh. “But it was a bad start.”

That was one excerpt I enjoyed, but sadly Because of Jane doesn’t have that much in this tone – and a lot more in Jane’s voice. Jane is Beatrice’s seven-year-old niece and the sort of irritating novelistic child who says things with wide-eyed innocence that sum up what other are truly feeling. The book was fine, but rather worse than the other two Buckroses I’ve read.

The ABC of Cats (1960) by Beverley Nichols

Reading the Meow week was the reason I started The ABC of Cats, but I didn’t finish it. He goes through the alphabet, writing about a different aspect of cats for each letter (e.g. Y is Yawn). It’s all delightful, and Nichols does cats extremely well – he is expert on their behaviours, habits, wishes without every getting saccharine or fey. It’s one for cat lovers certainly, and enjoyable if only for his apparent belief that he has invented the cat flap.

Things I Didn’t Throw Out (2017) by Marcin Wicha

Translated from Polish by Marta Dziurosz, this is a non-fiction reflection on Marcin’s mother’s life through the books that she left behind. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they are mostly Polish books – Emma by Jane Austen is the only one I’ve read. The book is also a lens to look at post-war Poland and how the Communist regime affected those who lived there.

I think Wicha writes really well, in sparse, curious way. But I struggle to know what to write about this book except that it’s unusual and beguiling – and probably better if you have a good knowledge of this period in Polish history and literature already, which I do not.

The First To Die at the End (2022) by Adam Silvera

I thought Silvera’s young adult novel They Both Die at the End was a brilliant premise worked out really well – it’s a world where people get a phone call from DeathCast on the day they will die, but aren’t told precisely when or how. And now he’s written The First To Die at the End, a prequel set on the first night that DeathCast is launched.

As before, there are two teenage boys who meet for the first time that day and spend it together – waiting for death (though I won’t spoil whose). It does feel a little like a repeat of the same sort of thing, done a little less compelling and with some extraneous side characters taking up some of the 550 pages. But it’s still a brilliant idea, and Silvera writes very engagingly. I didn’t remember the original book well enough to get all the references or Easter eggs, though did appreciate the two boys from that book appearing here briefly as their younger selves.

Two Japanese books about cats #ReadingTheMeow

StuckinaBook All , , , , 12 Comments

Japan truly seems to love a book about a cat, and I am here for it. Two of the other books I’ve read for the #ReadingTheMeow themed week are short Japanese novels with ‘cat’ in the title – though arguably the cats are not the main characters in either of them. (Except in the way that any mention of a cat automatically makes it the main character.)

If Cats Disappeared From the World by Genki Kawamura

I was sent this as a review copy when it was translated into English in 2018, by Eric Selland – having originally been published in Japanese in 2012. And what an intriguing title! The concept is equally interesting. The unnamed (I think) narrator has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. His life is quite narrow – his mother has died, he is estranged from his father and recently broken up from a woman he loves. The only creature in his life is a little cat called Cabbage. Reeling from this news, the narrator is visited by the Devil, who appears as his doppelgänger and informs him that he only has one day to live. But…

“There is something we could do…”

“Do? What do you mean?”

“Well, you could call it a kind of magic. But it might increase your life span.”

“Really?”

“On one condition: you’ll have to accept this one fundamental law of the universe.”

“And what is?”

“In order to gain something you have to lose something.”

“So what do I have to do exactly?”

“It’s easy… I’ll just ask you to perform a simple exchange.”

“Exchange?”

“Sure… All you have to do is remove one thing from the world, and in return, you get one more day of life.”

At first, he thinks he can simply get rid of things that don’t matter – the dust from the top of his bookcase, for instance. But he quickly learns that the devil is the one who makes suggestions, and he simply has to agree whether or not to take the bargain offered.

The first one, which he accepts, is phones.

I was a bit disappointed by this book, if I’m honest. My favourite bits were when (rather inexplicably) the cat starts speaking – there’s a lot of humour in the fact that he picked up language from period dramas and speaks very formally. But I don’t think Kawamura makes much of his premise. All the phones in the world disappear overnight, and the only problem highlighted is that the narrator finds it tricky to meet up with someone. Surely if phones stopped existing, businesses around the world would collapse, the economy would nosedive, all sorts of extraordinary things would happen. In Kawamura’s hands, it’s just as though the narrator is the only one to suffer an inconvenience – even though it is spelled out that it’s universal.

Towards the end, If Cats Disappeared From the World does take on the Alchemist-school of being basically a novelised fridge magnet. At one point, someone even says ‘Being alive doesn’t matter all that much on its own. How you live is more important.’

This could have been a really quirky, dark, strange little book – but it sort of ended up more like a Facebook inspirational quote. A shame.

 

The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa

The other one is The Cat Who Saved Books (2017), translated by Louise Heal Kawai in 2021 and given to me by my friend Lorna last year. Cats! Books! What a combo. And it’s set in a delightful old bookshop, run by a boy called Rintaro since his grandfather’s death. One day a talking cat gets him to go on various quests that mysteriously appear in the back of the shop, which expands out into unknown worlds…

There are various semi-nemeses to defeat, including this guy whose views on rereading hit a bit too close to home for me:

“The world is full of books, you agree? It’s impossible to count the number of books that have been, and are still being, written. To find the time to read the same books over again – well, it’s just inconceivable.”

And his views on book hoarding enrage Rintaro…

“But that’s how I’ve elevated my status – by collecting all these books. The more books you have, the more powerful you are. That’s how I got to where I am.”

“And is that why you’ve imprisoned them? To show them off as if their power belongs entirely to you?” Rintaro asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“You think you’re so impressive – you built this ridiculous, pretentious showroom just so that everyone can see how many books you’ve read.”

I don’t think I have masses to say about this book. It’s basically a fun little quest-narrative which some enjoyable observations about readers and reading along the way, but felt very like a young adult book. It rattled along but didn’t leave all that much of an impression on me, if I’m honest.

Fingers crossed I can manage one more book for Reading the Meow before the week ends on Sunday…