translation

Autocorrect by Etgar Keret

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A few years ago, one of my favourite reads was Suddenly, A Knock on the Door by Israeli short story writer Etgar Keret – so when I saw that a new collection had been published, I was keen to get a copy. Autocorrect (2024; English translation 2025) was sent as a review copy, and I loved getting back into Keret’s strange mind. The stories in here were published in various places over the past few years, translated from Hebrew by Sondra Silverston and Jessica Cohen. (Only one was written after the 7 October attacks in Israel, and the subsequent extreme violence upon citizens in Gaza, and this story does look at the aftermath of the October attacks in a fairly oblique way. He is not the sort of writer you’d expect to write un-obliquely about it.)

What I love about Keret is his matter-of-fact surreality. The first story ‘A World Without Selfie Sticks’, for instance, opens like this:

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have yelled at Not-Debbie. Debbie herself always said that yelling doesn’t solve anything. But what is a person supposed to do when, a week after saying a tearful goodbye at the airport to his girlfriend, who was flying to Australia to do her doctorate, he bumps into her at an East Village Starbucks?

From here, things just get weirder. We quickly learn that Not-Debbie is from a parallel universe. She is taking part in a gameshow where five contestants are ‘sent to a universe that contains everything they have in their own world, except for one thing’ and their goal is to figure it out. (The last episode was the one with selfie sticks – the solution to this particular iteration is in the final line of the story.)

I don’t think anybody would describe Keret as sci-fi, but there are elements he borrows from that world. Another story, for instance, is about overcorrection when trying to make robot boyfriends have the right level of sensitivity. The title story, ‘Autocorrect’, is about somebody continually restarting their day to make subtle changes, hoping to evade her father’s death. In all of these odd scenarios, what makes Keret so good is how little time he spends on world-building. He gives us a couple of sentences about what’s going on, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, and we are thrust into the plot for a handful of pages that are disorienting in the best possible way.

He’s very good at opening lines. The example above is a good’un. ‘Gravity’ starts “Three days after they moved into their new apartment, the woman who lived upstairs jumped out of her window.” How could you not want to read on? But he is not all stark sentences – ‘Present perfect’ opens rather more philosophically, with rather a striking image:

It’s about time we acknowledge it: people are not very good at remembering things the way they really happened. If an experience is an article of clothing, then memory is the garment after it’s been washed, not according to the instructions, over and over again: the colours fade, the size shrinks, the original, nostalgic scent has long since become the artifical orchid smell of fabric softener.

There were some stories I thought less successful than others. Quite a few are extremely short – three pages, say – and that feels too abrupt to try and do something that leans into the unusual as much as Keret does. Others have pay-off with a comment on faith or politics that feels trite and undergraduate-y – can he really think he’s being profound in these moments? For those reasons, I still prefer Suddenly, a Knock on the Door. But it’s also true that our first encounter with a striking, new-to-us authorial voice can be the one that we retain the greatest fondness for, with the glow of discovery.

That voice is sparse and conversational, which makes the strangeness work. I’m glad to reacquaint myself with him, and glad to know there are others I’ve yet to read.

Follow Your Heart by Susanna Tamaro

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Follow Your Heart by Susanna Tamaro cover

I wanted to join in Women in Translation month, so was looking around my shelves for possible candidates – and chose Follow Your Heart (1994) by Susanna Tamaro, translated from Italian by Avril Bardoni. I picked it up in a nearby charity shop a couple of years ago without knowing anything about her – I was attracted by the slimness of the book first and foremost, but the description also intrigued me: a grandmother writing a long letter/diary/confession to her estranged granddaughter. And, wow, it didn’t disappoint.

Apparently this was a huge international bestseller in the mid 90s, so possibly everyone knows about it already – I was only nine years old when it was first translated into English, so it passed me by. I’m always slightly suspicious of bestsellers (can they truly be good when that many people are reading it?) but I was blown away by the way Tamaro captures the voice in this novella.

Olga is an 80-year-old who has raised her granddaughter (I think unnamed?) almost single-handedly, since Olga’s daughter died in a car crash when her daughter was only a few years old. She describes moments of beautiful synergy, as they experience and love the magic of the natural world together – and how she naively hoped this would last forever. But the granddaughter is now newly an adult and has decided to study abroad – splintering an already fragile relationship.

I remember the day you left. What a state we were in! You wouldn’t let me come with you to the airport, and every time I reminded you to pack something or other you told me, ‘I’m going to America, not the desert!’ As you walked through the door, I shouted in my odiously shrill voice, ‘Look after yourself,’ and you, without even turning round, left me with the words, ‘Look after Buck and the rose.’

At the time, I must confess, your words left me with a deep sense of frustration. Sentimental old woman that I am, I had expected something more banal: a kiss or a word or two of affection. Only later that night, when I had given up trying to sleep and was wandering round the empty house in my dressing gown, did I understand that looking after Buck and the rose meant looking after the part of you that still lives with me – the happy part.

The first section of the novella is really just Olga walking around her home, remembering, thinking, reflecting. It is in the form of a letter to her granddaughter, but in the same way that Gilead by Marilynne Robinson is a letter to John’s son (and, indeed, Gilead is the book I was most reminded of – a very big compliment from me, of course). That is to say, Olga’s granddaughter is the one being continually addressed, but we have no idea if this letter will ever be sent – it’s really a way for Olga to frame her thoughts. And it’s beautiful. She is painfully honest with herself, not allowing the refuge of any comforting lies – whether about her own behaviour, the future of this relationship, or even about the lifespan of the birds and beasts she delights in seeing.

Tamaro’s (and Bardoni’s) major achievement is that capturing of voice. That’s what carries you through a book like this, and there is a rich gentleness throughout.

As the novella progresses, there is more plot – specifically about a past lie that Olga told, and an affair she had. We learn more about her marriage, about the man she had an affair with, and about the long shadow of implications this had on her relationships with her husband, daughter, and granddaughter. I think I preferred Follow Your Heart when it was less tethered to specific incidents, but Tamaro manages to get plot in without losing the strength of the novel – that voice. And, like anybody coming towards the final years of their life writing to a much-loved, younger person, she wants to share wisdom.

I kept thinking that Follow Your Heart is the sort of novel that people claim The Alchemist is. I wrote in my review of The Alchemist that ‘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’. Despite Tamaro having chosen exactly a ‘follow your heart’ title – well, in fact, the original Italian translates as Go Where Your Heart Takes You – there is so much more profundity and depth in her novel. In isolation, it may not show all of that depth – but, in context, it was beautiful. But I’m going to isolate it, nonetheless…

Little by little the music faded into silence, and with it went the profound sense of joy that had been with me in my first years. The loss of joy, I must say, is the thing I have mourned more than any other. Later, indeed, I felt happiness, but happiness is to joy as an electric light-bulb is to the sun. Happiness is always caused by something; you are happy about something, it is a feeling that comes from the outside. Joy, on the other hand, is not caused by anything. It possesses you for no apparent reason; it is essentially rather like the sun, which gives off heat thanks to the combustion of its own core.

Over the years I abandoned my self, the deepest part of me, to become another person, the person my parents wanted me to be. I exchanged my personality for a character. Character, as you will find out for yourself, is valued much more highly than personality.

From the opening pages, I fell in love with Follow Your Heart. As I say, it reminded me a lot of Gilead, and I’m always looking for books that have that exceptional creation of character – and especially ones that manage to be gentle without being saccharine. Tamaro has written a lot, though only a few of her books seem to have been translated into English – I’ll certainly be looking out for more.

People in the Room by Norah Lange – #ABookADayInMay Day 1

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It’s May, and that means it’s A Book A Day in May time! I’m delighted to see that Madame Bibi is back at the challenge too, and I thank her for inspiring me every year to take it up. It’s always quite chaotic, trying to read and review 31 books over the course of a month, but also always enjoyable.

People in the Room: Shortlisted for the 2019 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation: Amazon.co.uk: Norah Lange: 9781911508229: Books

My first choice is People in the Room by Norah Lange, published in 1950 and translated from Spanish by Charlotte Whittle in 2018. A synopsis of this book can do nothing to convey the experience of reading it – for what is the synopsis? A 17-year-old girl starts watching three women living in the house opposite, who never close their shutters.

They were sitting in the drawing room, one of them slightly removed from the others. This detail always struck me. Whenever I saw them, two of them sat close together, the third at a slight distance. I could make out only the dark contours of their dresses, the light blurs of their faces and their hands. The one sitting farthest away was smoking, or at least so it seemed to me, since her hand rose and fell monotonously. The other two remained still, as if deep in thought, before turning their faces in the direction of her voice. Then I managed to make out, beside one of them, the small flare of a match being struck. I longed to meet them. 

She fabricates what their dynamic might be – and gradually becomes involved in their lives. She does indeed meet them, and becomes a frequent visitor. They never go out, and so she is welcomed whenever she wishes. But she keeps it secret from her family (about whom we learn little). Neither she nor the reader learns the names of the three sisters, nor do we know the narrator’s own name. There is very little dialogue between them when they do meet, and I’d be hard pressed to tell you much about these mysterious women. There are a couple of apparently significant moments – an encounter in the post office; the delivery of a telegram; the instalation of a telephone – but these are few and far between, and seem much less significant in the scheme of things than the silent everyday.

And yet – and yet! What a mesmerising experience reading People in the Room is. In his introduction, César Aira says (of Lange’s work in general): “Lange withholds the subject at the beginning of a narrative, so the reader cannot know whom she is describing; the action therefore becomes central, and is isolated from those performing it. One side effect of this tendency is that characters become ghostly figures, subordinate to and almost hidden from the action.” It’s a very perceptive comment. Because we don’t know really what’s going on, or the motives behind it, and yet we are transfixed by the relationship between these women about whom we know so little.

The unnamed 17-year-old is constantly analysing their dynamic, even while revealing so little. The position of portraits in the room, the choice of chairs, the awkwardness whenever a specific home is referenced – these things are turned over and over in her narrative. But, more than that, she is fixated on what her observations tell her about herself. Why is she interested? Why does she never ask their names? Why does she orchestrate curious situations – lying about a trip; making a telephone call and saying nothing – and what are they to achieve? It’s interesting that telegrams and telephones play roles, because People in the Room has so little genuine communication in it – it is a novel about the silences between people that cannot be traversed, and yet the connections that can exist even when there isn’t any communication.

Another key thread is death. At times, perhaps simply as a way of codifying something in their relationship, the narrator hopes the women will die. At other times, she fears it. Most often, she seems to expect it – despite guessing that the three women are around 30 years old. Death winds tendrils through all her reflections, as though it were the inevitable companion of observation.

What makes People in the Room work is Lange’s writing (and Whittle’s translation). A novel where atmosphere is all demands a style that fits. Lange writes long, langurous sentences, filled with commas and clauses that pile up and seem to get longer as the novel progresses. Here is one single sentence:

I thought I should go home, and that for once, it didn’t matter whether they could see my anguish, my altered demeanor in the black dress, because I felt strong, and was happy to be leaving, since they were happy to have met me, still smoking, watching me as they moved their wine glasses in different ways, still having the same thoughts, keeping things to themselves, setting them aside, but happy all along to have met me even though I’d read the telegram and heard the voice in the gloom of the carriage, for, as indifferent as they were, I’d come to possess their three mysterious, placid faces, and—I swear—I never expected anything from them in return, and all that could be remembered, that was lasting, that no one else knew, was already mine, and could transform my life more than the fire, more than their own deaths, because they were happy to have met me and said nothing about my hands—even though they must have noticed everything—or my dress; and I loved them even though they were guilty.

And then there is occasional sharpness, which jolts in prose that is so fluid. I really appreciated the second of these sentences (with the first to give you some context), because it so simply pinpoints something about the way we choose words in fraught situations:

Then I turned to her and said, “I forgot to shake your hand. I was so afraid to come…” and offered her mine, thinking that if I didn’t, something terrible might happen. Then I regretted having said the word afraid, when I should have saved it for another time, for when I wasn’t afraid.

In the hands of a less capable writer, People in the Room would simply be boring. But Lange has an extraordinary gift to keep the momentum – nothing is going to happen but, like the narrator, we need to keep watching it. One of the reviews on the back describes it as having ‘the tension of a thriller’, which is an exaggeration, but there is tension nonetheless. It’s not the tension of a thriller, but the tension of sitting in a room with people whom you don’t know well, and who are not bridging the social gap. I don’t know how she does it, but People in the Room is a striking, eerie, almost poignant study in connection and disconnection.

Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera

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I was quite a way into my choice for 1969 on A Century of Books – Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall – when I decided I’d had enough. I’m sure I’ll go back and finish it and, in another mood, might even enjoy it. Drabble is a brilliant writer. But I was finding the details of a new mother’s affair with her cousin’s husband very, very tedious. I simply didn’t care.

And so it is perhaps surprising that I turned, instead, to Kundera’s short story collection Laughable Loves, translated from Czech by Suzanna Rappaport. After all, if I was finding one person’s granular exploration of an affair very uninteresting, what was I hoping to find in a book that – in my edition at least – was described as ‘seven short stories of sexual comedy’?

Well, if I picked up this book blind, it would have gone right back on the shelf. Nothing sounds less up my street than ‘stories of sexual comedy’. But luckily this isn’t my first rodeo with Kundera, and I know that he’s an absolutely brilliant writer – and, indeed, this is a pretty inaccurate description of what we’ll find inside.

I think the stories in Laughable Loves are published in different orders depending on your edition, but mine starts with a fascinating one called ‘The Hitchhiking Game’. A young couple are on a road trip together and have just stopped for petrol when they slide by silent agreement into their hitchhiking game. He pretends to be a stranger; she pretends to be a hitchhiker. There is an eroticism to it, though it isn’t just foreplay. This is a way for them to find an exciting freedom in their personalities, able to say things they wouldn’t normally, but with the solid bedrock of a stable relationship beneath it. Only, in this story, the bedrock is starting to shift.

“I wouldn’t have to think too hard about what to do with such a beautiful woman,” said the young man gallantly, and at this moment he was once again speaking far more to his own girl than to the figure of the hitchhiker.

But this flattering sentence made the girl feel as if she had caught him at something, as if she had wheedled a confession out of him with a fraudulent trick. She felt toward him a brief flash of intense hatred and said: “Aren’t you rather too sure of yourself?”

The couple bob and weave between their parallel personalities – the real and the costume – with each sentence in danger of commenting on the wrong one. It’s a beautifully crafted story, growing steadily darker, and reminded me a lot (in theme and sensibility) of Harold Pinter’s play ‘The Lover’ (1962).

If ‘The Hitchhiking Game’ is fraught and tense, then the next story is elegiac – from the title ‘Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead’ onwards. The title comes from a middle-aged, unnamed woman visiting the grave of her (rather older) husband – only to find that somebody else is now buried there.

Upset, she went to the cemetery administration. They told her that upon expiration of leases, graves were canceled. She reproached them for not having advised her that she should renew the lease, and they replied that there was little room in the cemetery and that the old dead ought to make room for the young dead. This exasperated her and she told them, holding back her tears, that they knew absolutely nothing of humaneness or respect for man. But she soon understood that the conversation was useless. Just as she could not have prevented her husband’s death, so also was she defenseless against his second death, this death of an old dead man, which no longer permitted him to exist even as a dead man.

While in this old town, she meets a young man (also unnamed) who was infatuated with her in the past. He is 15 years younger than her – about the age she was, when he last saw her – and they quickly go from reminiscences to romance. Then the story becomes about her inner conflict: should she sleep with this younger, attractive man, or would it shatter his remembrance of her beauty which would, in turn, shatter her own self-image?

Yes, there was no doubt about it: if he got her to make love, it would end in disgust—and this disgust would then tarnish not only the present moment, but also the image of the woman of long ago, an image he cherished like a jewel in his memory.

It is a curious will-they-won’t-they, with rather more psychological acuity than that premise would usually be expected to hold. Kundera was only 40 when this book was published, and of course not a woman, but it seems to me (admittedly also about 40 and not a woman) a very insightful portrayal of the many emotions that face a woman in this woman’s position.

Ok, you’re thinking, I’m beginning to see why ‘sexual comedy’ was thrown about as a term. And, yes, quite a few of the stories have some sort of sexual impetus in them – but my favourite of the book doesn’t really. ‘Nobody Will Laugh’ is one of those things-spiral-out-of-hand stories. Klima, the narrator, is a professor who gets a letter from Zaturetsky, asking him to write a review letter of his scholarship, for a journal. The amateur scholar is laughably bad, and Klima enjoys mocking the research with his girlfriend, but wants to avoid conflict and so sends a vague letter implying (but not promising) that he’ll write a review at some point.

Zaturetsky is determined, though. He starts turning up at Klima’s office, and Klima’s long-suffering secretary makes up excuses for his absence. Eventually Zaturetsky is turning up at Klima’s home, and the further lies Klima makes up to avoid writing the review end up derailing his job, his relationship, and his standing in the notoriously censorious society. It’s a brilliant and believable exploration of a lie getting out of hand that has a through-line to Kundera’s first novel about a joke getting out of hand (The Joke), albeit that was very dark and ‘Nobody Will Laugh’ is the funniest story in this collection.

I’ve written at length about the first three stories because they are the strongest in the collection. Indeed, I was anticipating Laughable Loves being a late entry on my Best Reads of 2024 list – but sadly the collection is a bit uneven. The Symposium is particularly shapeless – about various medical staff and their would-be exploits – and others lack the excellent grasp of pace and structure that mark out the brilliance of the first three. Thankfully, Laughable Loves ends on a stronger story – ‘Edward and God’ – about a man who pretends to believe in God to appease his girlfriend. Like ‘Nobody Will Laugh’, it’s a lie that begins to get out of control, and a reminder of how much Communist Eastern Europe persecuted Christians at the time – though it is also a lie that begins to become psychologically more and more important in Edwards’s life, while still resisting the pat ending of a genuine conversion.

It’s always a joy to go back to a Kundera book. I’ve read eight now, somehow without including his most famous, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. This collection isn’t as postmodern and stylistically daring as he can be, but it is a reminder of his searing understanding of human relationships – both their tragedy and their comedy, often intertwined.

I can see why Penguin called these stories of sexual comedy, and that is an area that fascinates Kundera – but I think anybody buying the book on that premise will be disappointed, and it may well deter those who’ll find in Kundera far more nuance, psychological insight, and slanted beauty than those words suggest. (This edition has an intro by Philip Roth, which I have absolutely no interest in reading.)

All Men Are Liars by Alberto Manguel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two frenetic novellas #ABookADayInMay – Days 15+16

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

The Following Story

The Following Story (1991) by Cees Nooteboom

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

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

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

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

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

The Bloater: The brilliantly original rediscovered classic comedy of manners

The Bloater (1968) by Rosemary Tonks

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

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

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

“Pooh! What’s a chest?”

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

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

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

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

“He sounds genuinely nasty.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Immune Mind

The Immune Mind (2024) by Dr Monty Lyman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consolations of the Forest (2011) by Sylvain Tesson

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

Reasons why I’m living alone in a cabin

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

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

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

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

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

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

When in French (2016) by Lauren Collins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Valentino by Natalia Ginzburg #ABookADayInMay Day 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. THERE WAS NOTHING

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

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

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

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

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

The novel that turned into All Of Us Strangers

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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.