translation

The novel that turned into All Of Us Strangers

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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…

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.