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Things That Fall From the Sky by Selja Ahava – EUPL

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The team behind the European Prize for Literature (EUPL) got in touch to ask if I’d highlight some of the winners of the prize over the past few years, and I was really interested in exploring the list of winners from across Europe. Even better, I got to choose which ones I covered – and one of the first that caught my eye was Things That Fall From the Sky by Finnish writer Selja Ahava. It was published in 2015 and was one of the winners of the EUPL in 2016 – I should note that the prize judges all books in their original language, though I am reading the edition translated by Emily and Fleur Jeremiah. It’s original title is Taivaalta Tippuvat Asiat, which Google translate tells me means much the same thing.

I’ll explain a bit more about the EUPL at the bottom of this post – but, first, my thoughts on Things That Fall From the Sky. Well, my instinctive choice worked because this is a really brilliant novel. Here’s the opening:

“What’s on your mind back there?” Dad asks, glancing in the rear-view mirror.

Our eyes meet.

“Nothing,” I reply.

We turn off at the petrol station. You go right here for Extra Great Manor, left for Sawdust House. These days we mostly turn right.

Adults are always asking what children are thinking. But they’d be worried if they got a straight answer. If you’re three and it’s a windy day, it’s not a good idea to stare at the horizon and say, ‘I’m just wondering where wind comes from.’ You’re better off claiming you’re pretending to be a helicopter. And when you’re five, don’t ask too many questions about death or fossils, because grown-ups don’t want to think about dying, or characters in fairy tales getting old, or how Jesus died on the cross. When I was little, I thought Mum’s grandma was a fossil, because she died a long time ago. But these days I know you can get fossils with ferns, snails or dinosaurs in them, but not grandma ones. Or human ones, for that matter.

Saara narrates the first section of the novel. She is a young girl whose mother has died – as we learn, through a freak accident. A block of ice fell from the sky, crashed through their roof, and crushed Saara’s mother. It sounds like a fate one might find in a fairy tale, but it has had a real and disastrous effect on Saara’s life – and she is scrabbling to make sure she remembers what her mother was like. Her chapters often end with a simple description – what her mother’s fingernails looked like, or her morning routine, or how she liked to garden. Saara is making an inventory of recollections.

Saara has been compared to the little girl in Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, and I think they have more in common than being Finnish. She sees the world with a vivid child’s eye – which has clear vision, but also has yet to form rigid expectations of reality. The details she picks up are a little surreal, like the sawdust that fills their home from all the building work, but she is matter-of-fact too. Ahava has captured a wonderful voice, and it’s that commitment to her voice that lets the reader accommodate the strangeness of the premise.

Saara’s mum isn’t the only woman in the family who has had something very unusual happen to her – Saara’s aunt has won millions on the lottery. This is a far happier piece of chance, of course, but its impact is no less confusing for the people involved. In the middle section, the aunt – Annu – writes to a Scottish man who has been struck by lightning four times, finding a kindred spirit in anyone who has experienced the statistically very improbable. These letters also reminded me of Tove Jansson, in Letters to Klara, and they are a delight that also has significant philosophical undertones.

The final section is narrated by Saara’s new step-mother, some time later. I think she is perhaps the least compelling of the three women who accompany us through the three sections, though this may be because she is the last. She has her own very unusual circumstances, but I won’t spoil them.

At the heart of Things That Fall From The Sky is how people deal with the bizarre – how their worldview can expand to give room for the extraordinary. And the prose and characters that Ahava has created seem both dreamlike and vividly real – I don’t really understand how that combination is achieved, but it is done with astonishing consistency and assurance. I loved spending time in this world, and the way Ahava balances genuine pathos with a fairytalesque surreality is truly wonderful. I was certainly moved by the novel.

I’ve got a couple other EUPL winners to read, and if they’re all as good as Ahava’s novel then I’m very excited for what I have ahead of me.

The European Prize for Literature (EUPL) is an annual prize that awards emerging authors from across 41 countries in Europe – see the video above for a bit about how it works.

My Phantom Husband by Marie Darrieussecq

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A lot of the books I’m reading this year are ones I bought in 2011 – and I’m remembering that I bought a lot of books that year, because I only bought 24 in 2010 and I was making up for last time. One of those was My Phantom Husband by Marie Darrieussecq, published in 1998 and translated from French by Helen Stevenson in 1999. I thought it would be good to pick up now, because August is ‘women in translation month’ in book blogging land.

My husband’s disappeared. He got in from work, propped his briefcase against the wall and asked me if I’d bought any bread. It must have been around half past seven.

Did my husband disappear because that evening, after years of neglect on my part, irritated and tired at the end of a hard day’s work, he was suddenly incensed at having to go back down five flights of stairs in search of bread?

This is the opening paragraph of this short novel. I’m normally not at all drawn to books about people disappearing, because it seems such an overdone genre – but this is not a gritty crime novel. We don’t learn a great deal about the woman’s husband, as a person, nor about how the investigation is proceeding. Rather, we spend the 153 pages of this story in the mind of the unnamed narrator as she tries to understand the new world she is in. And as her perceptions start to splinter.

Darrieussecq’s writing, in Stevenson’s translation, is an impressive mixture of the spare and the poetic. Every sentence is beautiful and not at all showy. Whether it’s the narrator being momentarily distracted from her emotional turmoil by a sunset, or things on a kitchen counter, or reflections on what she misses most about her husband’s presence, Darrieussecq brings the perfect amount of weight and beauty to each observation. The writing becomes more fluid as the novel goes on, and felt positively Woolfean at times.

The same subtlety is seen in the way the novel progresses. The first sign of things not being quite ordinary are the horror tropes that recur. The narrator thinks about being stabbed in the shower, about being buried alive. Sometimes these thoughts are fears and sometimes they are warped comforts. And somehow this bleeds into her thinking about the nature of existence. She begins to wonder if her husband has somehow dematerialised.

I paced round the room, resigned. My husband had to be somewhere, maybe in form of a gas at the very outer edge of the universe, but he still had to be somewhere, leaning over the edge (what we have to image as its edge) and watching me now; like the dead, whom the living know are still present, stuck in the mist or under the table or behind the door, out in the barn rapping with their knuckles, in the kitchen bending the spoons, in the corridor rattling their chains and, for the more subtle among them, rippling the curtains when there’s no wind outside. My husband, in imitation of the dead, would send me a sign and bring me back to life.

As the days pass and she begins to hallucinate, it is not always clear what is happening and what is not. Being all in her voice, there is an evenness to it all – because she never questions her sanity, even as we see her confusion and unhappiness turn her mind.

The whole thing is mesmerically beautiful and quietly unsettling. The reader is always on shifting sand, and Darrieussecq is too clever a writer to let us stand firm even at the end.

The Desert and the Drum by Mbarek Ould Beyrouk

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I can now claim to have read all the novels from Mauritania that have been translated into English – because it is one: The Desert and the Drum by Mbarek Ould Beyrouk, originally published in French in 2015 and translated by Rachael McGill in 2018.

The novel is narrated by Rayhana, a young woman who is only recently an adult – she is on the run from her Bedouin tribe, though we don’t yet know why. Not only has she run from her community, she has stolen the ceremonial drum that is the most prized object belonging to her tribe – and she is heading across the desert to safety and a new life.

It was time to detach myself from the old ways: I was no longer from here. I was from nowhere, and I was going faraway. Straight ahead.

The Desert and the Drum takes place in several timelines – one shows her escape to a city, which is quite insignificant as cities go, but feels enormous and crowded to her. Alongside, we see her life in the tribe and the events that lead to her wanting to escape. I shan’t spoil any of them, but Beyrouk is very clever in the way he tells us things in increments that are just satisfying enough to keep the mystery going.

Rayhana only knows her tribe. Her father left years ago, but she is from one of the more important families of the community. Only desperation can take her from the safety of this communal lifestyle, and the confusion she faces in a city is done very well. That confusion leads quickly to distaste for the ways of life that are acceptable, and the way that city-dwellers have forgotten their past:

I began to feel disdain for the town and everyone in it. People seemed to have forgotten what they’d been only yesterday, what their fathers and their fathers’ fathers had been. They were content to no longer be nomadic, to no longer feel the sun on their heads. They were happy to eat new dishes made not with their own wheat or barley, or with the meat or milk of their own animals. They were proud of all that; they thought it meant they could look down on those of us who had stayed as we were, who hadn’t succumbed to the temptations of the new.

Meanwhile, change also came to the Bedouin tribe’s encampment a while earlier – what turned out to be workers on a government contract, drilling for resources.

Monsters of iron and steel appeared one day from nowhere. no one had warned us thy were coming. First we heard an enormous roar. Some people thought it was thunder, but the sky remained an unblemished blue. Others turned their eyes towards the mountains; the faraway summits stood steadfast and serene. The earth began to tremble beneath our feet. We listened, worried, and strained our eyes towards the horizon. In the distance, a cloud of ochre dust rose towards the sky. We remained immobile, gaping at this sight for which we had no name. When we realised the rumbling and the storm were coming towards us, panic spread like wildfire: people ran to hide behind dunes or collect livestock, men went to get their guns, women grabbed their children and ran inside tents. The tribal drum sounded to summon those who were away from the camp. We watched, stunned and powerless, as the terrible unknown thing approached.

I said at the beginning that this novel was ‘from Mauritania’ – it’s by a Mauritanian, about Mauritania, but I note in a comment from the translator on A Year of Reading the World that it was initially published in Tunisia. And the book certainly expects the reader to be unfamiliar with the mores of Bedouin people. It’s a difficult balance to strike: maintaining a first-person narrative of someone who has group up in her tribe and to whom customs obviously aren’t a surprise, while also making them accessible to the reader who knows nothing. Beyrouk finds this balance brilliantly, explaining from the inside – writing for the outsider, but without ever dropping the intimacy of Rayhana’s lived experience. This is particularly notable when he is writing about traditions surrounding weddings – Rayhana says what they are, but in sentences about how the individual acts are affecting her. They are gently introduced and explained, but in a way that would also make sense in the context of a conversation with somebody who knew them all already. It must have taken some doing, and it works very well. He finds the emotions of the moment, not an anthropological thesis.

That is true throughout. While the author is a man with far more education that Rayhana has at this time, there is a feeling of authenticity and immediacy throughout the novel. I certainly felt that I understood a great deal more about one way of life than I had before – and about clashing ways of life in a Mauritania where traditions and modernisation can collide, without either being ‘better’ than the other, just jarringly different to someone like Rayhana trying to make the leap between them.

I suppose the marker of an excellent translator is that you don’t notice their work, and I certainly never found the translation an obstacle to the excitement and insight of the novel. I really liked it, and I’m hoping that his other two novels might also get translated…

A Chess Story by Stefan Zweig

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Stefan Zweig is rather brilliant, isn’t he? A Chess Story [also published as Chess and A Royal Game], from 1941, is the third Zweig novella I’ve read and the best so far – a really astonishing achievement in so few pages. Translated by Alexander Starritt, I should say – someone at my book group had a very different translation, based on our comparison of the first few lines, but it hurts my head to think too much about the variations that are possible with different translators at work.

I didn’t know anything about A Chess Story when I started it, and I was very glad about that. It made the whole experience so much more surprising and revelatory – so part of me wants to tell you to stop reading this review and just get a copy. Preferably the gorgeous Pushkin Press edition I have. But I’ll keep going anyway.

The large steamship leaving New York for Buenos Aires at midnight was caught up in the usual bustle and commotion of the hour before sailing. Visitors from shore pressed past one another to take leave of their friends, telegraph boys in skew-whiff caps shot names through the lounges, cases and flowers were brought and inquisitive children ran up and down flights of stairs while the orchestra played imperturbably on deck. I was standing in conversation with a friend on the promenade deck, slightly apart from this turmoil, when flash-bulbs popped starkly two or three times beside us – it seemed that a few reporters had managed to hastily interview and photograph some celebrity just before our departure.

The narrator is an interested and friendly man, but we don’t learn all that much more about him. Rather, he is there to introduce us to other people – to be the intrigued onlooker, always ready to give backstory when necessary. Zweig breaks all sorts of narrative ‘best practice’ rules, or what we would now consider rules, and somehow gets away with it. For example, he jumps from this present moment into a full history of the celebrity in question: Mirko Czentovic, chess prodigy.

We learn that Czentovic came from poverty and was considered unusually stupid. He barely communicates, and doesn’t seem to take an interest in anything. Except one day he reveals himself to have a preternatural ability for chess. One thing leads to another – Zweig tells it very well – and Czentovic is now a big deal. He’s also a mercenary, and will only play chess if it’s monetarily worth his while.

A competitive man on board the ship, and the narrator, manage to get together a group who are willing to put together the price. And it looks like the hubris of the amateur and the arrogance of the professional will be the story here. It would have been a good story. But, in the middle of the second match, someone joins the crowd of spectators. And, diffidently, he calls through an instruction. It quickly becomes clear that he is brilliant at chess himself – but once the match is over, he doesn’t want to play again.

Dr B is his name – and the second half of the novella becomes about something completely different. I won’t say what, though it’s easy enough to discover online if you want to. It’s about how he became so talented at chess – and why he doesn’t want to play again. Frankly, it’s astonishing.

All the more astonishing is how vividly Zweig creates two worlds – the ship and this other world that I won’t say too much about – in only a hundred or so pages. He could have made it a novel of three times the length, but there is a great power in his brevity. It says more about its time than novels ten times as long; I suspect it will stay in my mind for a long time. I’ve seldom read a better portrayal of mental illness, and the final chess match in A Chess Story is one of only two times that a sport has held any interest for me – the other being the cricket match in The Go Between.

If you’ve never read Zweig before, this is a great place to start. And I’m keen to get as many more as I can.

The Quest for Christa T. by Christa Wolf

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For quite a few years, I’ve spotted too late that German Literature Month was happening in November – run by Lizzy’s Literary Life. And this year I also spotted it pretty late in the day, but I didn’t have any emergency reading to finish for book group etc., so decided to see what I had on my shelves. Even better if it qualified for Project Names. So I was very pleased to dig out The Quest for Christa T by Christa Wolf, originally published in 1968 and translated into English shortly afterwards by Christopher Middleton.

It’s a short novel in which the main character is Christa T, but her life is told entirely in retrospect. Her friend is the narrator, although we don’t learn much about her – instead, she gives us a fractured portrait of Christa as she knew her [pronouns are going to be tricky in this post!].

We know from the outset that Christa died young, and we keep waiting for further hints that might explain how. And since we start in Hitler’s Germany, there is the constant threat of Nazis being the answer to that question. Especially since Christa is alarmed by the rampant nationalism she sees around her – the placards and the shouting.

But this is not what kills her. We move on into post-war Germany, as Christa meets various suitors, and tries her hand at teaching. Hers is an ordinary life in extraordinary times. An ordinary and not very ambitious life, that becomes exceptional because of Wolf’s way of writing this strange novella. It resists every norm of writing the usual Bildungsroman – it is, as the title suggests, a quest. Christa might be dead, and she cannot be physically sought, but the narrator is on a quest to compile an understanding of her – for letters, papers, and memories.

She wasn’t aware of the effect she had, I know. I’ve seen her later, walking through other towns, with the same stride, the same amazed look in her eyes. It always seemed that she’d taken it upon herself to be at home everywhere and a stranger everywhere, at home and a stranger in the same instant; and as if from time to time it dawned on her what she was paying for and with.

The writing is so unusual. Fragments of recollections are spread on the page, interspersed with guesswork and extrapolations. She is piecing together a life from what she knows and what she imagines – and the reader is always chasing a little to keep up. It’s like an impressionist painting, but where nothing quite coheres. The Quest for Christa T reminded me a lot of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, but where that exercise in piecing together a life flows in beautiful, poetic sentences, like the coming in and going out of tides, there is no similar beauty in Wolf’s writing. It is beautiful, but in a different way – a stark, disjointed, abstract way. Each sentence is set at slightly the wrong angle to the next one. So, even when the words are profound or lovely, they don’t quite settle before we see Christa from a different vantage. We are putting together an impression of a life at one remove, with jigsaw pieces that don’t quite align.

As such, it isn’t an easy or quick read. I found I really had to concentrate as I read it. But it definitely rewards the effort. It’s not the sort of novella that I think I’ll remember in terms of the details – but I’ll certainly remember an impression of Wolf’s novel, and what it felt like to read it.

 

The Spectre of Alexander Wolf by Gaito Gazdanov

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I was staying in Edinburgh when I came across the Pushkin Press edition of The Spectre of Alexander Wolf by Gaito Gazdanov, published in 1948 in Russian and translated by Bryan Karetnyk. I’m always drawn to these lovely little editions, but what got this book from the shelf and into my bag – having, naturally, paid – was this blurb on the inside flap:

A man comes across a short story which recounts in minute detail his killing of a soldier, long ago – from the victim’s point of view. It’s a story that should not exist, and whose author can only be a dead man.

Intriguing, no? And then we have this opening line…

Of all my memories, of all my life’s innumerable sensations, the most onerous was that of the single murder I had committed.

I’ve kind of given the game away on that line – because, yes, the murder was committed during the Russian Civil War. The unnamed narrator was shot at and his horse killed, and fired in return at his assailant – leaning over him to make the final shot. And then, hearing more people from the opposing side in the distance, took the dead man’s horse and fled. He was only sixteen, and the event has haunted him since.

Many years later, he picks up a collection of three short stories – two of which are well written tales of love and mischance, but the third unmistakably relates the events that happened to him. He decides he must track down the author, Alexander Wolf, and discover how this Englishman knows anything about what happened.

I shan’t give away any plot details, but it is a brilliant premise that is handled well – largely because Gazdanov is so good at maintaining the emotional and character-led responses to the ultimate explanation, rather than because it is necessarily the most believable in terms of plot. The psychological intensity and reality of the novel is unwavering, and the narrator is such a well realised character, with the same shifting and nuanced morality that actual people have.

The only complaint I have about the structure is that it dives away from the central mystery into a seemingly irrelevant plot about boxing and a budding romance that the narrator explores. I don’t really mind the inevitable coincidence that links it back to the main plot, but the sudden shift to introduce it – during which the narrator apparently forgets the drive he initially had to unearth Wolf – doesn’t quite make sense.

I’ve read very few Russian authors, being largely put off by the evident length of the books and the probable misery within them. This one is fewer than 200 pages (hurrah!) and emotionally complex. It’s a brilliant idea that is sustained and manipulated in a sophisticated way.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

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It always feels slightly different to read a book that is a worldwide bestseller. I’d obviously heard of The Alchemist (1988) by Paulo Coelho, but I couldn’t tell you a lot about it. Except that I’ve always got it mixed up with Perfume by Patrick Suskind, which I also hadn’t read.

Well, my book group chose this book and I borrowed a copy from my brother Colin, who hadn’t been enthusiastic in his mini review of it. This edition is translated from the Portuguese by Alan Clarke – I don’t know if there are mutliple translations out there. I was certainly intrigued by the atmosphere of the opening paragraph:

The boy’s name was Santiago. Dusk was falling as the boy arrived with his herd at an abandoned church. … an enormous sycamore had grown on the spot where the sacristy had once stood.

In case there are others who didn’t know the plot – it’s about this boy called Santiago who lives in Andalusia, where he is a shepherd. But he dreams of more from life, and can’t stop thinking about a fortune he received from a fortune teller – that he should travel to Egypt to discover treasure.

Off he goes to Africa but not, he quickly learns, materially nearer Egypt than he was when he started. I can’t remember if it’s spelled out, but I’m pretty sure he’s in Morocco – where his money gets stolen by a conman, and he must work for a crystal merchant. He is still determined to raise the money to find this supposed treasure.

Rather late in the day, he does get to Egypt and meet the alchemist – who seems more minor a character than I’d have anticipated from the title. And then it all becomes a mixture of magic realism and an Aesopian fable.

So, what did I think? Well, I really enjoyed the first third of the novel. Santiago is a wonderful character – an interesting mix of determination, hope, uncertainty, and naivety. All of the stuff in Morocco was a delight, and I would happily have read a novel of his experience in the crystal shop – becoming something of a surrogate child to the crystal seller. I’ve never been to Morocco, but I felt rather like I had when I was reading this.

But as the novel moves forward, and Coelho loses any sense of being tethered to the ground, then I lost my affection for The Alchemist. And it’s not even my documented reluctance for magical realism. It’s because the novel tries to become extremely profound, and succeeds in sounding rather silly. There’s an awful lot about following your heart and the truth being in all of us etc. etc., and it began to feel a bit like a thought-a-day desk calendar. It’s everything I kind of suspect the most run-of-the-mill self help books might be. I felt like Coelho’s sensitive eye for character was rather wasted in a series of philosophical truisms.

He’s continued writing ever since, but I haven’t heard of any of the other books. I’d love to try something else by him if he’s written anything that is less queasy. And I can do no better than quoting a line from Col’s thoughts: “A life-changing book, the blurb claims, but I suspect mostly for people who believe horoscopes.”

 

 

Tove Jansson: Work and Love by Tuula Karjalainen

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I read a second book for Women in Translation month, but didn’t get around to reviewing it. But here are some quick thoughts about Tove Jansson: Work and Love by Tuula Karjalainen (2013), translated by David McDuff.

I read Boel Westin’s excellent biography of Tove Jansson when it was translated a few years ago. It was one of those times like buses, where you wait ages for a biography to come out and then two come at once. I’m not sure why I leaned towards the Westin – maybe it came out first? It was also the authorised biography, I believe, though I’m not sure I knew that at the time.

Karjalainen certainly didn’t go rogue with her lack-of-authorisation and spread all sorts of salacious rumours. Instead, she takes us on a journey through the work and love of the title. And it’s a steady, methodical journey.

I really enjoyed reading this book, but here is where we come across the main reason that I think Westin’s biography is better. Karjalainen compartmentalises Jansson’s life so thoroughly that it’s as though she were living four or five parallel lives, without overlap. She writes at length and sensitively about Jansson’s relationships with men and women, but at such length that for a while her career disappears completely. The Moomins are cautiously not addressed for half the book, except for an accidental stray mention that doesn’t make sense since she’s given no context. I can understand that this sort of makes sense, but it means jumping back and forth in time, and pretending that Jansson’s love life was completely unrelated to her career, or that her success as a strip cartoonist had little bearing on her painting. And so on and so forth. Then again, when I reviewed Westin’s book, I complained about repetition… maybe there’s no way to deal with the complexity and overlaps of Jansson’s life and career within the confines of a conventional biography.

I will add, in each of her compartmentalised areas Karjalainen writes interestingly – though leaning perhaps a little too much towards the ‘Jansson must have felt…’ school of biography. As with Westin’s, there isn’t as much about the adult books I love so much, but I suppose that’s inevitable. And thankfully, as with Westin’s book, there are lots of beautifully reproduced examples of the paintings being talked about – even if Karjalainen evidently didn’t know which would be there when she was writing it, as the composition of some paintings are described in unnecessary length when we can just looked at them on the page opposite.

Oh, and the book itself – beautiful! I love the design and the solidity of it. Surely one of the nicest-looking and -feeling books I have on my shelves.

Overall – yes, I’d forgotten enough about Jansson’s life since I read Westin’s biography that I enjoyed learning it all again. But for my money, if you only read one biography of Tove Jansson, this should be your second choice.

Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill by Dimitri Verhulst

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Earlier in the year, I experimented with different book recommendation websites – you can read my exploits here. My favourite was Which Book, and I had great fun playing with the different sliders to determine what sort of book would match my mood. The results aren’t the usual fare, and they include a lot of translated fiction. I definitely recommend having a go.

I don’t remember which sliders I used to get the result of Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill (2006) by Dimitri Verhulst, though I’m pretty sure ‘short’ was among them. This novella is only 145 pages and there’s with a big font. Definitely up my street! I think it might also be the first Dutch novel I’ve ever read – with thanks to the translator, David Comer. [A commenter has told me that it’s actually translated from Flemish – be more precise, publisher!]

Madame Verona lives in an isolated house on top of a hill, on the outskirts of a small village. ‘As far as anyone knew, it had always been inhabited by outsiders, people from elsewhere, who came here with a romantic view of isolation and paid for it later with large chunks of their mind.’ But there is no sense that Madame V has particularly suffered from her isolation, even though her husband has been dead for more than twenty years. She has the gift of dogs loving her, as the first chapter dwells upon. They have been a constant, and a dog is accompanying her as she comes down the hill.

In terms of plot in the ‘present day’ section of the novella, the title pretty much sums it up. Snow is thick on the ground, and Madame Verona has slowly made her way down the steep hill. And she knows that she won’t make it back to the top. She is too old and too tired. She has, in essence, come down the hill to die.

We flit to and from this present day, but the novella is really a mixture of memories and reflections – sometimes clearly Madame Verona’s thoughts, and sometimes a broader and more philosophical narrator’s voice. These aspects go together well. We see the specifics of the village and of Madame Verona’s marriage – and we hear more general considerations of time and community and particularly age. Here’s a rather lovely passage I noted down:

Silence is often more intense after its return. When a tree accepts its defeat, creaks and capsizes, all life flies up and off. There’s crowing and cawing, branches crack, it rains feathers and down, rabbits flee to their underground shelters. All things considered, the titan’s contact with the actual ground is quiet; people generally expect it to be louder. It’s mainly the rest of the forest that kicks up a fuss and makes a racket. And once the creatures have assessed the damage, silence comes back. Eyes and leaves turn to the light that has never shone so brightly here. A place has come free, the struggle can begin, because the space will be occupied, by something or someone. It’s like that for trees, it’s like that for people.

I might have appreciated a little more about Madame Verona in the present day, because it is a bit sparse there, but this is a very enjoyable little book. It has aspects of melancholy, but Verhulst’s thoughtful exploration of little facets of life mean it doesn’t feel bleak – helped by the beautiful descriptions of the landscape. There is a lovely tone to it that comes through the translation. That translation can be a little clunky (‘She wasn’t brave enough to go downstairs herself. And what if she did, and found herself eye to eye with a person of bad will, how would that lead to a better outcome?’) but that is the exception rather than the rule.

Thanks, Which Book, my first read based on your recommendations certainly went well!

Reeds in the Wind by Grazia Deledda

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Women in translation month! I usually intend to join in and then don’t manage it, but have managed a bit better this year – in that I’d finished one and I’m halfway through another. First up, Reeds in the Wind (1913), translated by Martha King from Italian – though I think perhaps Italian with Sardinian dialect thrown in there?

My friend Phoebe lent this to me a few years ago, and I’ve been meaning to pick it up ever since, so WIT month was a great excuse. I think she’s been to the area where it’s set, which I absolutely haven’t done. I wonder how much of rural Sardinia looks the same a century later? Deledda was quite a noted author, and certainly an extremely prolific one. Even a glance at her Wikipedia page is quite exhausting. But Reeds in the Wind is one of her most famous, apparently.

The protagonist is Efix – a man who has served the Pintor family for many years. He is a loyal servant, placing the dignity and happiness of the family above his own – and, indeed, above almost anything. And the family is no longer the dominant force in the area that they once were. Three unmarried sisters make up the current crop – Ester, Noemi, and Ruth. There was a fourth sister – but she disgraced the family by running away with a man and having a baby. And then dying.

It’s years later, and that man has grown up. News reaches the sisters (and Efix) that Giacinto intends to come and meet his aunts – and perhaps stay with them. He brings with him a youthful recklessness that threatens the life that the Pintor sisters have made for themselves. And Efix is determined not to let him do that.

I really enjoyed reading this novel. The supporting characters all rather blurred, and even the three sisters didn’t have the most distinct personalities, but the chaos caused by a cuckoo in the nest is handled so well. As life becomes upturned, we see family secrets coming to life, and the community around them being outraged and enjoying the outrage. There’s a section where Efix is forced to live away from the community that is perhaps less strong, and feels rather out of Deledda’s range of experience and observation – but anything in the small Sardinian landscape is captivating.

I’m not usually one for landscape descriptions, and I don’t remember any specifics, but Deledda certainly conveys the atmosphere of the environment really well. And you can feel how essential the land and its produce were to the self-sufficient community. There is a benevolent claustrophobia to it all, that can lose its benevolence as soon as something shifts in the ecosystem, or your standing slips in the social rankings. It’s vivid, and Martha King manages to keep that vividness in the translation – that has the added difficulty of being translated more than eighty years after the original was written. It never feels jarring in period or tone.

Equally interestingly laced through the narrative is the folklore and faith of the community – the superstitions that guided their understanding of the world, thrown lightly into sentences. There is no complex theology here, or even a faith that would be recognised by outsiders, but the sort of daily fears and hopes that have been passed down through generations, unimpeded by outside influences – and that would disappear in the next few decades. I think Deledda is better at communities than individuals, but perhaps that was more important in this novel. It’s a fascinating snapshot.