translation

Seven Cats I Have Loved by Anat Levit #ReadingTheMeow2023

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When I saw that Mallika was inaugurating a week devoted to books about cats, you know I had to join in. Books! Cats! Basically my two favourite things, as anyone who follows my Instagram will attest. Then I had to read Barbara Trapido for book club, but now I’m getting onto the cat books.

I had a few on my shelves, and the first one I finished is this little memoir, Seven Cats I Have Loved (2022) translated from Hebrew by Yardenne Greenspan. It turns out all three of the books I was eyeing up for this week are in translation – do people write more about cats in other languages, or is there sufficient faith in a market for them that cat books are disproportionately translated?

Levit is an Israeli poet and author who has won various prizes, though I note she doesn’t have a Wikipedia page (in English, at least). So this isn’t a book by an unknown person who happens to love cats – rather it’s a look into a fascination of an author people already love. And it does what it says. The book is about seven cats that Levit has lived with and loved devotedly.

Five of these cats come quite quickly. After not really intending to ever get a cat, she is persuaded to do so by her two young daughters when her life faces a bit of a crisis. She falls so fast and so hard for Shelly that she almost immediately goes and adopts four more kittens. Each is a purebreed who is kept indoors and treated like royalty. All cats should be treated like royalty, of course, but I will have to prevent Hargreaves from reading Seven Cats I Have Loved because he will consider himself terribly hard-done-by in comparison. They get an elaborate ‘buffet’ of different types of expensive cat food, with much of it being thrown away uneaten. As a result, one of them is unhealthily overweight.

I always knew it was impossible to deny my cats food. The buffet served all the cats, and there was no way of preventing access to one of them without making his or her life miserable, which I was incapable of doing. Closing the buffet, and diminishing the lifestyle the cats had grown accustomed to, was also not an option.

I’m certainly not going to judge another cat owner for how they look after their cats – let’s just say that many things in Seven Cats I Have Loved show that Levit does things differently to the way I would/do. But she also loves them very, very much. In philosophical interludes, she talks about the love between cat and human (sometimes wandering into over-optimism, to my mind, in relation to the love she gets back from them); she even compares the love she has for cats and for her daughters, and the ways in which the former is greater – or at least simpler.

The final two cats to come are Cleo, a male Siamese whom she impetuously buys from a neighbour – and perhaps my favourite, Mishely, because she is a stray. She seems to live in a box at the bottom of the stairs, and only occasionally creep into the house for rare treats. But I’m not a purebreed-cat kinda guy, so the stray moggy has my heart. All of them have my heart.

I had read (and commented on) Rebecca’s review of this book not long before my friend Lorna gave me my copy, but I had forgotten her warning that ‘Unfortunately, I felt the most attention is paid to the cats’ various illnesses and vet visits, and especially the periods of decline leading to each one’s death.’ And this is certainly true. Each decline is detailed laboriously, and movingly. Levit seems to choose never to euthanise her cats, so they live out every last minute before finally dying. She has very strong opinions on some health issues (she won’t take them to the vet hospital when they are dying) and curiously lax on others (they all get matted fur, and she believes clipping this away is torture to them).

So, this was hard to read. Like Levit, I find I can’t help being very alert to any sign of cat illness – particularly since I don’t know how old Hargreaves is. She tends to rush them to a vet; I tend to fret to myself while Hargreaves continues cheerily along. (And never mention anything online, because people love to try and make cat owners anxious with their own horror stories and warnings.) So I found I Levit a very empathetic memoirist, and even if we don’t treat our cats the same, we certainly both love them deeply. I would have liked more little reflections on the nature of cats, like this one of discovering missing Jesse:

Finally, I found the cat stuck behind the fridge. He’d made it in but couldn’t make it out. I quickly pushed the fridge away from the wall, picked up Jesse in my arms, and kissed him, trying to reassure both of us. I had no idea if he’d only slipped behind the fridge that morning or if, God forbid, he’d spent the entire night back there. I knew I would never be able to answer that questions, and took solace in the notion that perhaps cats knew how to skip from one event to the next without carrying the burden of human memory, which accumulated unhappy experiences.

Indeed, a few minutes later, Jesse returned to prowling the apartment with his usual ease, as if no serious trauma had befallen him.

On the whole, I loved this little memoir when it was talking about the foibles, behaviours, and eccentric demands of the cats. I wish there had been a lot more about their lives than their deaths, and that it would have felt a more joyful book. It’s not as good or as sharply observant as a similar book I’ve read, Doris Lessing’s Particularly Cats, but I enjoyed it nonetheless and will happily keep it on my cat shelf.

Sagittarius by Natalia Ginzburg #ABookADayInMay No.28

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After a few days of feeling a bit lukewarm, or worse, about the books I’ve been reading, it was great today to read a really brilliant little novella. Sagittarius (1957) is my first Natalia Ginzburg, though I do have Family Lexicon on my shelves – and I also have Valentino, because Daunt Books have just republished Sagittarius and Valentino and sent me copies. Thank you!

This novella, translated by Avril Bardoni, is only 122 pages but manages to get so much into that short space. Here’s how it opens:

My mother had bought a house in the suburbs of the city. It was a modest house on two floors, surrounded by a soggy, unkempt garden. Beyond the garden there was a cabbage patch, and beyond the cabbage patch a railway line. It was October when she moved, and the garden lay beneath a carpet of wet leaves.

The house had narrow wrought-iron balconies and a short flight of steps down to the garden. There were four rooms downstairs and six upstairs, and my mother had furnished them with the few belongings that she had brought with her from Dronero: the high iron bedsteads, shaky and rattly, with coverlets of heavy flowered silk; the little stuffed chairs with muslin frills; the piano; the tiger skin; a marble hand resting on a cushion.

Like a curiously high number of narrators of my Books in May, this one is unnamed – as is, as far as I can tell, her mother. The narrator’s sister does get a name – Giulia – and much of the first half of this story is about the dynamics between the three women in their new home. The mother is domineering, determined, and relentless in her disparagement of her daughters – while simultaneously trying to praise them to others, and secure them husbands. The narrator is resentful and equally determined herself, though more often in what she refuses to be than what she actually does. Indeed, she is quite a passive character – an obstacle, rather than a catalyst.

In not many words, Ginzburg manages to show a complex, detailed, and wholly believable family group. Her little moments of seering observation are brilliant, and tell us so much about a person – for instance, the narrator comments on her mother that ‘when things were going badly for someone else, she always felt a little thrill of pleasure disguised behind an urgent desire for action’. There is love but little affection between the female characters.

The mother is ambitious for herself, as well as her daughters’ marriages, though in this case it is an ambition paired with inertia. She speaks a lot about her big plans for her future – opening an art gallery, say – but does little but talk. She relies on financial help from relatives, including her sisters who run a shop which she, the mother, believes she could run much more efficiently – though her brief stint there is unsuccessful.

Into their lives comes Signora Fontana and her curious coterie of hangers-on. She has connections to the great and the good (and, importantly, the rich) and Signora Fontana and the mother quickly encourage each other into an excitable friendship.

When we went back to the sitting room, my mother and Signora Fontana were already on first name terms. They had certainly had a good talk ranging over a multitude of subjects and had decided that the art gallery as projected by my mother should become a joint venture for the two of them; and it was going to be wonderful and exciting, a true intellectual centre in a city which had, up to now, catered so inadequately for the arts. They were sitting together on the divan like old friends, with an ashtray brimful of cigarette butts and mandarin peel beside them. Menelao was sitting on my mother’s knee, and as soon as we appeared she said that cats were better than dogs and Giulia’s puppy had tried her patience to the limit. Seeing the three of us enter together, Signora Fontana cried that she simply had to do a group portrait of us. My mother, agreeing, said that I should have to be decently dressed, however: she couldn’t bear that dreadful jumper, it made me look like a Russian factory worker.

As the novella continues, Signora Fontana and the mother are forever going for coffee together and making plans, but all the rich friends are busy all the time and the art gallery – or shop, named Sagittarius, hence the title – remains a discussion topic rather than an actuality. The reader has to wait and see whether dreams will become reality, or if there are reasons why it keeps being put off into the distance.

The plot is entirely unpredictable, but what elevates Sagittarius is Ginzburg’s clear-eyed understanding of human relationships. And particularly the lies we tell, and the lies we choose to believe. It all comes from the daughter’s perspective, and she is an interesting and well-constructed mixture of dispassionate and occasionally frustrated. Her passivity means we can go several pages where she seems objective, and then a flare up of resentment or confusion or pathos will remind us that we are reading a very personal view of the situation.

Sagittarius has made me keen to get to more Ginzburg. I was reminded of Stefan Zweig’s brilliant ability to sum up entire relationship dynamics through a crucial, feverish short period. And I thought of Sybille Bedford’s excellence at mother/daughter relationships. Both great authors to be reminded of, while being also very much her own writer.

Making Love by Jean-Philippe Toussaint #ABookADayInMay No.15

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I bought Making Love (2002) by the Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint back in 2014, in an edition translated by Linda Coverdale – unusually, and pleasingly, her name even makes the cover. It’s a slim novella at only 114 pages, and I found it beguilingly beautiful… with some reservations. I’ve just learned, from the author’s Wikipedia page, that it’s the first in the ‘cycle of Marie’, of which there are four books so far.

Marie is one of the two main characters in Making Love, the other being our narrator – another unnamed narrator, which has cropped up a few times in May. It is set over the course of a few days in Japan, in Tokyo and Kyoto, and we are told from the outset that this trip is the end of their relationship. It hasn’t been planned as a final trip to say farewell to their love – and it is something the narrator slowly realises, with the sense of something inevitable.

That point comes at the end of this paragraph, though the reason I wanted to quote it is as example of Toussaint’s beautiful, beautiful writing. So much of Making Love is suffused with this sort of gorgeous, strangely elegiac writing. Whether the weather, the glowing lights of Tokyo, or simply the sight of a hotel room, Toussaint (and Coverdale) write prose like poetry – but very readable poetry, that doesn’t obstruct the sense:

From where we sat in the restaurant, the wooden window frame presented only a fragmented and incoherent street scene, giving onto a shadowy building with mysterious electric wires and a column of light made up of seven or eight superimposed illuminated signs rising vertically along the façade to announce the presence of bars on every floor. I watched the snow falling silently in the street, light and impalpable, clinging to neon signs, the contours of paper lanterns, car roofs, and the glass eyelets anchoring the wires of telephone poles. When the flakes crossed the bright zone of a street lamp, they whirled an instant in the light like a cloud of powdered sugar puffed aloft by an invisible divine breath, and that snow seemed to me an image of the passage of time, and then, in the immense helplessness I felt at being unable to keep time from passing, I had the presentiment that the end of the night would mean the end of our love.

Those reservations I mentioned earlier? I think the only thing holding me back from relishing every page of Making Love is clued in the title – there is a seamy side to the novella. Along the way, even as they approach the end of the relationship, the couple make love on several occasions – and I don’t object to that being in the novella. But the words and sentences used to describe those moments lose all gentleness. They tone becomes quite sordid and, dare I say, anatomical. It is at odds with the feel of the rest of the prose, in a way that doesn’t feel effective so much as inelegant.

I was more intrigued by the suspenseful subplot of Making Love – the little vial of acid that the narrator has packed with him on this trip, keeping it hidden in his washbag. He returns to it often throughout, whether in action or thought, and the reader can’t help thinking of it as a Chekhov’s gun – why has he brought it, and what will happen with it, if anything? Interestingly, this additional element to the story doesn’t feel at all jarring, even though it could have done. This part Toussaint managed to incorporate elegantly.

So, I was impressed enough by the writing that I will probably seek out more by Toussaint – and if the Marie cycle is chronological, it will be interesting to see what happens after the end of this relationship.

The Portrait by Willem Jan Otten #ABookADayInMay No.3

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I bought The Portrait (2005) by Willem Jan Otten because of that beautiful cover, which is blending in well with my throw. I also fancied reading something translated from Dutch – in this instance, by David Colmer. And it’s a strange, rather good little book.

I’m coming to a tragic end; that seems almost certain now. The sliding doors are open. I can hear fire raging; it crackles. The wind is blowing directly from the north and into the studio. Sparks shoot towards me, turn to ash, and drift in like flakes of snow. I am on the easel and can only expect the worst.

That’s the opening paragraph. By the end of it we realise who are narrator is – it is the portrait of the title. It’ll take a while before we discover who the portrait is of…

First, the narrator thinks back to a time they can’t really recall – just part of a long roll of canvas, buried somewhere in the middle. Life really begins when an artist comes to the shop and buys a stretch of material to turn into a specific canvas.

If I had the gift of speech, I would now describe what it feels like to finally be a canvas, a canvas with dimensions, a piece of linen that has been measured out, cut with the most razorish Stanley knife and irrevocably stretched tight around a sturdy frame with six-centimetre stretchers no less than three-point-six thick, with wedges and a cross at the back.

A kite that is being flown for the first time might feel more majestic, a kettledrum about to start its premiere performance of Beethoven’s Fifth might feel mightier, a newly raised mainsail filling with wind while its ship heels beneath it might feel more ecstatic – but we, the unpainted, silent and as white as chalk, enter a world that promises us more than kite, drum, or sail. Who could be more on edge with curiosity? More willing? More receptive?

The artist is Felix Vincent, usually referred to as Creator by the narrator. At first he clearly doesn’t know what to do with the canvas, and it (he?) lies against the wall. It is larger and better quality than most of the other canvases in the room, and can’t be thrown away on just any commission. Vincent is a portrait painter of growing renown, though still has to fulfil commissions from people who are willing to pay him. From the narrator’s admittedly inexperienced point of view, Vincent seems to be waiting for something more special, personal for this canvas. He is waiting for his masterpiece.

And the opportunity finally comes when Valery Specht comes to the studio.

Your work is fascinating, Specht continued. You have a rare skill. You can bring someone to life.

(Yes, the novella doesn’t have speech marks – it just about worked, partly because there is very little dialogue and partly because it is, after all, from the point of view of a painting.) Specht, it turns out, wants Vincent to paint Specht’s son. And his son is dead.

I shan’t spoil more about the plot, but it’s impressive how many surprises and turns Willem Jan Otten can get into 185 pages. And I found it quite beautiful and intriguing, though one of the most memorable moments feels a bit at odds with the tone of the rest of The Portrait.

And that narrator? Once you get past the curiosity, it works well. It’s really a fly-on-the-wall point of view, I suppose, with a few novelties – like describing the feeling of a fine paintbrush across one’s surface. I also enjoyed that it can ‘see’ everyone else but not itself. It’s best not to demand too much logic from the choice (why does the portrait understand the news on the radio without context but has never seen a ‘thumbs up’ before?) but just to enjoy the strange depth of reality created by having a painting narrate a book about a painting.

And novella length is perfect for this sort of conceit, so the novelty doesn’t outstay its welcome. I really enjoyed the simple beauty of Otten’s writing (in Colmer’s translation) and spreading out the horizons of my European reading a little more.

Violeta Among the Stars by Dulce Maria Caroso – #EUPL

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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.

Suddenly, A Knock on the Door by Etgar Keret

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Suddenly, a Knock on the Door: Amazon.co.uk: Etgar Keret: 9780701186678: BooksI think I got sent Suddenly, a Knock on the Door (2010) as a review copy in 2012, when it was translated from Hebrew into English – by Miriam Shlesinger, Sondra Silverston and Nathan Englander. It’s a collection of short stories, which is perhaps why there are three translators. I certainly couldn’t detect which story was translated by whom, which suggests that they all did a good job of letting Keret’s distinctive approach come through.

2012 was probably the heyday of review books arriving chez moi, and quite a lot of them ended up at charity shops because I couldn’t keep up – but something about Suddenly, a Knock on the Door made me keep it on the shelf. And I’m so glad I did, because it is really rather brilliant – and has made me keen to seek out more by Keret.

The stories are mostly set in Israel, where Keret is among the most prominent modern writers, though a lot of them are in a slightly surreal version of Israel. Sometimes that means an element of the bizarre is incorporated, in a magical realist way that means the characters aren’t surprised by this disruption of the normal. In ‘Unzipping’, for instance, Ella is cut on her lip when kissing Tsiki.

They didn’t kiss for a few days after that, because of her cut. Lips are a very sensitive part of the body. And later when they could, they had to be very careful. She could tell he was hiding something. And sure enough, one night, taking advantage of the fact that he slept with his mouth open, she gently slipper her finger under his tongue—and found it. It was a zip. A teensy zip. But when she pulled at it, her whole Tsiki opened up like an oyster, and inside was Jurgen. Unlike Tsiki, Jurgen had a goatee, meticulously shaped sideburns and an uncircumcised penis. Ella watched him in his sleep. Very, very quietly she folded up the Tsiki wrapping and hid it in the kitchen cupboard behind the rubbish bin, where they kept the bin bags.

In another story, a character finds himself in ‘Lieland’, peopled by all the lies he has made up as alibis to excuse lateness or forgotten homework. In one of my favourite stories, ‘What, of this Goldfish, Would You Wish?’, a low-budget filmmaker is going door-to-door to ask people what they’d ask for if a goldfish granted them wishes – and stumbles across a man who has such a goldfish, with unexpected results.

Many, perhaps most, of the stories don’t have anything supernatural in them – but there is still a surreal element, offset by the plain and matter-of-fact way in which the stories are written. In the title story, a man is held at gunpoint and told to make up a story. In ‘Healthy Start’, a lonely man pretends to be any stranger that someone is expecting to meet in a café. A very short story called ‘Joseph’ is tangentially about a suicide bomber, but in such a quiet way that it seems incidental.

Keret’s mind is clearly overflowing with creativity. Most of the stories are very short – the exception is ‘Surprise Party’, about a man who goes missing on the day that his partner has invited everyone in his phone contacts to a surprise party, and only three turn up. Because they stories are so short, there are an awful lot of curious and clever ideas needed for a collection. None of the ideas are given time to burn out, though Keret often deploys the anti-climax or gentle petering out of a story in a way that is more effective than a denouement. He has so many ideas that ‘Creative Writing’ even flings out some gems that would make fascinating novels, just as throwaway examples:

The first story Maya wrote was about a world in which people split themselves in two instead of reproducing. In that world, every person could, at any given moment, turn into two beings, each one half his/her age. Some chose to do this when they were young; for instance, an eighteen-year-old might split into two nine-year-olds. Others would wait until they’d established themselves professionally and financially and go for it only in middle age.

The heroine of Maya’s story was splitless. She had reached the age of eighty and, despite constant social pressure, insisted on not splitting. At the end of the story, she died.

I’m so glad I kept this collection on my shelves. The sort of topics and ideas Keret uses could so easily have become self-consciously quirky, but there is something in the subdued naturalism with which they’re told that balances out the wackiness, and makes them piercing insights into human relationships. Suddenly, a Knock at the Door is excellent and quite unlike anything else I’ve read before – or, rather, a much better version of the sort of thing I’ve seen attempted a number of times.

And now, of course, I face the age-old dilemma – clearing one book off the shelf, only to now want to seek out as much of Keret’s backlist as I can.

Embers by Sándor Márai

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I picked up Embers (1942) by Sándor Márai in a London bookshop a little while before the pandemic, drawn by the striking cover design and intrigued by the premise. Not many books are primarily about friendship, and the small sample I read in the shop seemed beautifully written. And so it came home with me – and I really loved my experience of writing it.

Sándor Márai wrote Embers in Hungarian as A gyertyák csonkig égnek, which means ‘candles burn until the end’, and is presumably a Hungarian phrase that we don’t have in English. Embers also works very well as a title, and it was the title of the German translation (Die Glut) which was then translated in English by Carol Brown Janeway. I’m not sure why they didn’t get someone to translate straight from the Hungarian, but there we are.

The novel opens with an old General in his palatial home, which he shares only with servants and an ex-nurse Nini, who is in her 90s and a wise, all-knowing companion. He never leaves the place – he keeps only to a handful of its many rooms. And he receives a message that an old friend, Konrad, will be visiting for the first time in more than four decades.

Normally this is a conceit that puts me off a novel: a scene in the present day that then zips back to a long, chronological sequence of the past. It usually makes everything that follows feel anticlimactic. Here I think it worked – because the General’s present day is so stultified. He doesn’t even seem to live in memories most of the time, just in a protracted period of apathy.

Before Konrad arrives, Embers takes us back to the friendship between Henrik (the General in his youth) and Konrad. As young children they were inseparable, and this bond never wavered. Through school and beyond, they were as close as it is possible for two people to be – as close as twins in the womb, the novel says.

Nothing is so rare in the young as a disinterested bond that demands neither aid nor sacrifice. Boys always expect a sacrifice from those who are the standard-bearers of their hopes. The two friends felt that they were living in a miraculous and unnamable state of grace.

There is nothing to equal the delicacy of such a relationship. Everything that life has to offer later, sentimental yearnings or raw desire, intense feelings and eventually the bonds of passion, will all be coarser, more barbaric.

Henrik is usually referred to as ‘the son of the Officer of the Guards’ in the narrative, when dealing with his younger days, and we can never forget his privileged and prestigious position. By contrast, Konrad is from poverty – and refuses any financial help. His pride is so frustrating to read about. Not least because he determines he must still move in the same milieu as his friend – must have the right coat, the right gloves, the same tipping of servants, however difficult it is to find money for this. The friendship persists because Konrad doesn’t owe Henrik anything – but this disparity is always present.

I loved the way Márai writes about friendship. He recognises its value, not relegating it to a distant cousin of romantic love. He also sees how it can be as troubled as any romance – and the reader is continually trying to piece together why there has been a gap of 41 years in this friendship that started so boldly and deeply.

The reasons are unfolded at their reunion – again, Márai breaks novelistic rules and gives the General enormous amounts of dialogue for more or less the whole second half of the novel, revealing why the friendship broke off. But, again, somehow it works. Possibly because Márai’s writing is beautiful and his building of character so brilliant.

There are no neat conclusions in Embers, and yet I came away totally satisfied. An exceptionally good short novel, moving and dramatic, and addressing deep emotions and relationships that are usually disregarded in literature.

Novella a Day in May: Days 28 and 29

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Day 28: Sleepless Nights (1979) by Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick is one of those authors who has been published both as Virago Modern Classic and a NYRB Classic, and there can few greater accolades (other than being a British Library Women Writers author, am I right??) I bought Sleepless Nights back in 2009, and have a couple other books by Hardwick on my shelf, but have yet to read any.

In this novella, a woman looks back on her life – a jumble of recollections and reflections.

It is June. This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading now. Every morning the blue clock and the crocheted bedspread with its pink and blue and gray squares and diamonds. How nice it is – this production of a broken old woman in a squalid nursing home. The niceness and the squalor and sorrow in an apathetic battle – that is what I see. More beautiful is the table with the telephone, the books and magazines, the Times at the door, the birdsong of rough, grinding trucks in the street.

That is the opening paragraph, and gives an indication of Hardwick’s striking, rather brilliant prose. And I don’t have a lot to say about Sleepless Nights, because my experience of it was finding her writing absolutely sumptuous and wonderful, and seldom having any idea what was going on. Names would recur, but I was unable to attach much by way of character to them. There is a lovely few pages on Billie Holiday, who is the only name I can remember, a day after reading the novella.

But, nevertheless, I enjoyed reading it. Because each sentence is a little masterpiece. It was like relishing a series of beautiful brushstrokes, but seeing them as abstract mini-artworks, rather than cohering into a single portrait. I daresay that is partly that ‘transformed and even distorted memory’, but mainly because of me. I find I am less and less able to put together a novel told in this abstract way, where beauty is prioritised over clarity. But, as I say, that didn’t stop me enjoying and admiring it. Just probably not quite the way that was intended.

To finish on Hardwick, here’s another quote I noted down:

“Shame is inventive,” Nietzsche said. And that is scarcely the half of it. From shame I have paid attention to clothes, shoes, rings, watches, accents, teeth, points of deportment, turns of speech. The men on the train are wearing clothes which, made for no season, are therefore always unseasonable and contradictory. They are harsh and flimsy, loud and yet lightweight, fashioned with the inappropriateness that is the ruling idea of the year-round. pastels blue as the sea and green as the land; jackets lined with paisley and plaid; seams outlined with wide stitches of another color; revers and pockets outsize; predominance of chilly blue and two-tones; nylon and Dacron in the as-smooth-as-glass finish of the permanently pressed.

Day 29: The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman (2005) by Denis Thériault

What a perfect little novella The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman is. Translated from French by Liedewy Hawke, Thériault’s book is a perfect use of the form – using the slim space to somehow make something with a beauty that depends on delicacy and brevity.

Bilodo is a postman in his late-20s, and perfectly happy. ‘He wouldn’t have wanted to swap places with anyone in the world. Except perhaps with another postman.’ He doesn’t have a girlfriend and doesn’t have many close friends. When he is not delivering letters up and down the many, many steps of the tall buildings on rue des Hêtres, he mostly spends his time in his small apartment, playing videogames and ignoring the attempts of a colleague to find him a girl.

But he does have one illicit pastime:

Among the thousands of soulless pieces of paper he delivered on his rounds, he occasionally came across a personal letter – a less and less common items in this era of email, and all the more fascinating for being so rare. When that happened, Bilodo felt as excited as a prospector spotting a gold nugget in his pan. He did not deliver that letter. Not right away. He took it home and steamed it open. That’s what kept him so busy at night in the privacy of his apartment.

And, one day, one of the envelopes he steams open only includes this:

Under clear water
the newborn baby
swims like a playful otter

He discovers that a woman in Guadalupe, Ségolène, is exchanging haikus with a man on Bilodo’s postal route, Grandpré. Of course, Bilodo can only read Ségolène’s side of the exchange – but he grows obsessed with her, with the haiku form, with this curious relationship that expresses itself solely, and slowly, through the exchange of written verse.

I don’t want to spoil more of the novella, which only comes in at 108 pages, but Bilodo gets much more involved in the correspondence. And the end of The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman is unexpected, brilliant, and curiously beautiful. I gasped, and yet it is the sort of denouement that confirms the beauty of what has gone before.

This is the second novella I’ve read this May about someone discovering a stranger’s personality through their verse, and I think does it more subtly. I’m so impressed by Hawke’s ability to translate the Haikus in a way that, I assume, keeps both their original meaning and the feel. Because the feel is the most important part. And the feel of the whole novella is lovely – precise, delicate, poignant.

Maigret’s Revolver by Georges Simenon (Novella a Day in May #25)

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Whenever Karen and I run a club year, there is a Georges Simenon – and every time I comment that I must read something by him. And as I was glancing around my shelves, I spotted that Maigret’s Revolver (1952, translated by Nigel Ryan) is really short – and why not? So I have now read my first Simenon, and finally met Inspector Maigret.

He is straight-forward man, more compassionate than he needs to be but also unlikely to fly into any sort of passion. He drinks an extraordinary amount, and finds the fact that he can’t get whisky in an English hotel before 11.30am absurd. He is determined to solve a mystery, but seem content to achieve that aim with measured and thoughtful steps.

The mystery, in this case, starts with the revolver of the title – a young man is waiting in Maigret’s study, but has gone before Maigret gets home. He discovers that his revolver is missing. The revolver itself was a gift that he has never used, but it is still fully functioning. He quickly learns that a young man matching the description of this mysterious figure (for Maigret’s wife met him, and could describe him a little) has been buying gun cartridges.

Along the way, after some fortunate policework, Maigret is led to the discovery of a body…

I really enjoyed reading this. It has a dry humour that I didn’t know would be there, and Maigret is a more interesting and likeable character than I’d realised. He is not hard-boiled or maverick – he is human and sensible, and engages with fellow professionals. Something I particularly liked in the writing was the treatment of women, who are frequently intelligent and not thrown by the strange circumstances they find themselves in. A lovely contrast to the common figure of detective novels from this era, where women fall apart in hysterics when questioned or when faced with difficult circumstances.

Here, for instance, is part of a questioning with one female character. I think it shows what I liked of Maigret’s dogged patience, and the quick-witted assuredness that Simenon gives women. In this novella, at least. I don’t know how much of an anomaly that is.

“You know your father’s ill?”

“He always has been.”

There was no pity, no emotion in her voice.

“He’s in bed.”

“Very likely.”

“Your brother’s disappeared.”

He saw that she was startled, that this piece of news took her aback more than she was willing to admit.

“That doesn’t surprise you?”

“Nothing surprises me.”

“Because I’ve seen too much. What exactly do you want from me?”

It was difficult to reply point blank to such a straight question, and she calmly took a cigarette from a case and asked:

“Have you a light?”

He lit a match for her.

“I’m waiting.”

“How old are you?”

“I presume it wasn’t just to find out my age that you took all this trouble. According to your badge, you aren’t a plain sergeant, but a Chief-Inspector. In other words, someone important.”

As for the plot itself – it’s a little flimsy as a mystery, but works well as a story. If Maigret’s Revolver is anything to go by, Simenon is more interesting as a novelist of characters than of puzzles. I’m glad I’ve finally read some Simenon, and it certainly won’t be my last. And do let me know if my conclusions based on this single book are wide of the mark or not!