translation

Violeta Among the Stars by Dulce Maria Caroso – #EUPL

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I’m glad I’ve finished Violeta Among the Stars (2005) by Dulce Maria Cardoso in time to include it in Women in Translation month – it’s also one of the European Union Prize for Literature winners in the batch that I’m reviewing. It won the best part of 20 years ago, but it was only last year that it was translated from Portuguese by Ángel Gurría-Quintana.

The most noticeable thing about this 400-page novel is that it is all one sentence. It’s not the first novel I’ve read like that, but it is perhaps the one where it works most fluidly. In between paragraphs of text are occasional indented lines, slipping in the middle of phrases – these indents are dialogue, though plenty of dialogue also appears in the massed paragraphs of phrases separated by commas, rather than full stops.

There is some logic to this style. Violeta has been driving along a road on an appointment to sell hair-removal wax – she sees all unwanted hair follicles as her personal nemeses. Alone, on a wet road, she has a horrific car accident – and Violeta Among the Stars almost all takes place in the moments afterwards as her life flashes before her eyes. As such, there are occasional reminders of where she literally is – noticing the broken glass everywhere, say – but it is mostly a rhapsodic swirl of memory.

We start by learning about her habit of going to lorry parks to get sex – not as a prostitute, but simply to find an unquestioning partner who won’t want any commitment. As the novel progresses, we meet her daughter Dora. She is the person most capable of causing Violeta pain, but also her proudest achievement and her deepest disappointment. The background of her family tree slowly fills in the gaps. Her strained relationship with her mother; her uncertain closeness with her father that is threatened by a secret; her curious relationship with Dora’s father Ângelo.

I don’t want to be trapped in the past, neither by revenge like Ângelo, nor by love like Dora, the past will use anything to keep us trapped, memory is the worst form of torture, memory won’t let me rest even when I can no longer feel my body, hanging by the seatbelt, that night I got drunk in Ângelo’s two miserable basement rooms, or perhaps it was another night when I went to visit him, I frequently got drunk when I visited him, perhaps to be able to laugh sincerely at his lame jokes, when I was drunk I saw my father in that house with his lover and their bastard, fulfilled like I never saw him in this house, maybe this house also hurt him, the walls also closed in to suffocate him, the ceilings came down to crush him, this house also hurt my father, I used to get drunk and instead of laughing at the jokes I would start shouting at Ângelo,

I was a bit unsure about going into Violeta Among the Stars. The single-sentence conceit could have been frustrating or unnecessary – but I think Caroso uses it so cleverly. The story comes look a flood of water, ebbing and flowing in simple thoughts (expertly translated) so that there is something about the simplicity and directness of Violeta’s presentation of her self that works really well alongside the lack of full stops. Conventional and unconventional storytelling combine very effectively.

And Violeta is a fascinating character, so deeply delineated and detailed. Because there are so few significant characters in this long-ish novel, we get to know them all thoroughly. Violeta certainly isn’t all good; she is probably more bad than good. But we know so much about her by the end that she is sympathetic. I worried at first that her obesity would be her most salient characteristic, and Caroso certainly writes a great deal about it, but it ends up being more significant in the way that people respond to it, rather than anything inherent.

After Kokoschka’s Doll, this is another really interesting and original winner of the EUPL. I look forward to discovering another couple from this batch.

Do head over to the European Union Prize for Literature website to find out more about this year’s prize, and all previous winners.

Kokoschka’s Doll by Afonso Cruz – #EUPL

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Kokoschka's Doll by Afonso Cruz | Hachette UKYou might remember that, last year, I read and reviewed a few of the books that had won the European Union Prize for Literature, also known as the EUPL. Among them was Selja Ahava’s Things That Fall From the Sky, one of my favourite reads of 2021. Well, I’ve been kindly asked to do the same again – and got to choose from a list of all the previous winners. Or at least those that have been translated into English. While the prize isn’t a translation prize, and the books are judged in their original language, I can only read English – so I am grateful Rahul Bery for translating Afonso Cruz’s Kokoschka’s Doll (2010) from Portuguese. What a strange and engaging book. Here are its curious and inviting opening lines:

At the age of forty-two, or, to be precise, two days after his birthday that year, Bonifaz Vogel began to hear a voice. Initially, he thought it was the mice. Then he thought about calling someone to deal with the woodworm, but something stopped him. Perhaps it was the way the voice had given him orders, with the authority of those voices that live deep inside us.

The novel is set (at least at first) in Dresden during the Second World War. Rather than a voice living inside Bonifaz Vogel, the voice belongs  to a young Jewish boy called Isaac Dresner – who is living under the floor of Vogel’s bird shop. Yes, ‘Vogel’ means ‘bird’ in Germans. It’s that sort of novel, constantly playful, sometimes in an obvious way and sometimes in a way that cannot possibly be unravelled. Anyway, Isaac is in hiding after a Nazi soldier murdered his friend. Vogel doesn’t particularly question this. Once he realises that the voice is quite wise, he turns to it in every discussion. The voice helps him when people are haggling in the shop. It helps him feel connection.

This alone would be a quirky and interesting novel but, oh boy, it’s only the tip of the iceberg. Along the way a young female painter called Tsilia joins them but, again, Cruz is only getting started. Somehow they get onto the trail of Mathias Popa – an author who apparently found a lost manuscript by Thomas Mann and passed it off as his own. And it failed horribly. He is working on a new book, though… called Kokoschka’s Doll.

You might be wondering when that title was going to come into play. The middle section of the novel (printed on slightly greyed pages in my edition by MacLehose Press, and possibly in every edition) is the novel Kokoschka’s Doll. It includes the story of a man hired to write a book alluding to all sorts of other books, none of which exist – until the same man is hired to write all of those books too. Keeping up?

And – so, so briefly – we eventually get to the story of Kokoschka’s doll. For a handful of pages, while we’re most of the way through the book. This is the bit that is based on a true story, so you might know it already. Oskar Kokoschka (curiously referred to as Oscar Kokoschka in this translation of Cruz’s novel – deliberate or mistake? Hard to tell in this sort of book) was a painter who commissioned a life-sized doll of Alma Mahler, after the end of a two-year relationship with her. He later destroyed the doll during a party.

After the end of ‘Popa’s’ book, we are introduced to a whole range of characters we haven’t met before, almost as though we should know who they are. And they do eventually link back to the cast we already know, but it is quite disconcerting.

I came to the conclusion that Cruz loves to unsettle the reader. There is so much allusion and confusion in Kokoschka’s Doll, so you can never predict what is happening next, or even be entirely certain about what has happened before. Cleverly, this is contrasted with simplicity in the writing and in the characters. They are simple people – believable, but easily comprehendible. The writing is spare and enjoyable, and often pages only have a short paragraph or two on them. It makes you feel like you are reading something akin to children’s literature – but the loops you are taken in are experimental.

I think the combination worked really well, and I can see why the EUPL judges wanted to reward Cruz. Apparently he is prodigious and prestigious in his native Portugal and Kokoschka’s Doll is certainly the work of an assured author. I don’t fully know or understand what I read, but I really enjoyed reading it.

Do head over to the European Union Prize for Literature website to find out more about this year’s prize, and all previous winners.

Suddenly, A Knock on the Door by Etgar Keret

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Embers by Sándor Márai

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Novella a Day in May: Days 28 and 29

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Day 28: Sleepless Nights (1979) by Elizabeth Hardwick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But he does have one illicit pastime:

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

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

Under clear water
the newborn baby
swims like a playful otter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You know your father’s ill?”

“He always has been.”

There was no pity, no emotion in her voice.

“He’s in bed.”

“Very likely.”

“Your brother’s disappeared.”

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

“That doesn’t surprise you?”

“Nothing surprises me.”

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

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

“Have you a light?”

He lit a match for her.

“I’m waiting.”

“How old are you?”

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

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

Novella a Day in May: Days 20 and 21

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There’s a bit of a theme to the two novellas I’ve read in the past two days… or at least their titles.

Year of the Hare, The: Amazon.co.uk: Paasilinna, Arto: 9780720612776: BooksDay 20: The Year of the Hare (1995) by Arto Paasilinna

This novella, translated from Finnish by Herbert Lomas, starts with a journalist and a photographer hitting a hare in their care. The journalist (who is called Vatanen, we later learn) gets out to see if it’s ok.

The journalist picked the leveret up and held it in his arms. It was terrified. He snapped off a piece of twig and splinted its hind leg with strips torn from his handkerchief. The hare nestled its head between its little forepaws, ears trembling with the thumping of its heartbeat.

Tired of waiting, the photographer leaves the journalist in the forest – assuming that he’ll catch up to their hotel. But he doesn’t. Instead, he decides to abscond. He doesn’t like his wife anymore, he doesn’t much like his life, and he sees the opportunity to go off wandering through Finland – with the hare.

From here is a quite episodic novella, featuring all kinds of over the top acts – from bear hunting to dangerous fires, threats of pagan sacrifice and more. I’m going to be honest… it all left me a bit cold. The blurb and puff quotes all talk about how funny it is, but I didn’t really understand the wit. I found it all a little drab – big events but very little to make the reader invest in them. Even the hare is curiously characterless. I suppose it’s a sort of deadpan humour that I have enjoyed in other contexts, but for some reason this one didn’t move me.

Juan Pablo Villalobos's “Down the Rabbit Hole” - Words Without Borders

Day 21: Down the Rabbit Hole (2010) by Juan Pablo Villalobos

Translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey, Down the Rabbit Hole comes in around 70 pages – all about a drug gang in Mexico. If I’d known that, I might never have bought it, because I really hate reading about gangs or the Mafia or anything like that. And I’d have missed out on a really brilliant little novella.

It’s told from the perspective of Tochtli, the eight-year-old son of a druglord. This is how it opens…

Some people say say I’m precocious. They say it mainly because they think I know difficult words for a little boy. Some of the difficult words I know are: sordid, disastrous, immaculate, pathetic and devastating. There aren’t really that many people who say I’m precocious. The problem is I don’t know that many people. I know maybe thirteen or fourteen people, and four of them say I’m precocious.

He is indeed pretty precocious, and he does return to those words a lot – particularly sordid and pathetic, which he uses to dismiss a lot of people. (He also uses the f-word a lot, which I rather wish hadn’t been included in this translation.)

Tochtli isn’t shielded from the things happening around them, but he sees them with a child’s incomplete understanding and lack of empathy. He knows that people become corpses at their compound, but is more interested in how many bullets are needed for different parts of the body than thinking about any morality. He is amoral; the people around him are immoral. He is more interested in his various obsessions – Japanese samurai films, a collection of hats, and getting a pygmy hippopotamus from Liberia.

Tochtli’s voice is brilliantly realised in this novella, and Villalobos has created a wholly convincing viewpoint on this horrible world.

Novella a Day in May: Days 16 and 17

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Day 16: Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes (1987) by Per Petterson

TAshes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes: Amazon.co.uk: Petterson, Per, Bartlett, Don: 9781846553707: Bookshis 1987 book was translated from Norwegian by Don Bartlett in 2013, which is when I think I got it as a review copy. Well, here I am, almost a decade later I’ve read all 118 pages of it. There seems to be some disagreement about whether this is a novella or a series of short stories – it’s kind of both, in the way that Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book is. Arvid Jansen is an eight-year-old boy in the 1960s, living with his family on the outskirts of Oslo, with a scathing older sister, a worrying mother, and a father who never stops speaking about ‘before the war’. There is also a grandfather, who dies in one of the first chapters/stories – a brilliant portrait of a young child’s mingled grief and indifference, scared of things changing but not really in mourning, and trying with inadequate words to convey all he is experiencing but not really comprehending.

Petterson is very good at giving the child’s point of view – it has that matter-of-factness, and at the same time building an understanding of the world. Here is Arvid thinking about his mother, and about ageing:

She’d looked the way she always had for as far back as he could remember, and she still did right up until the day he happened to see a photograph of her from before he was born, and the difference floored him. He tried to work out what could have happened to her, and then he realised it was time that had happened and it was happening to him too, every second of the day. He held his hands to his face as if to keep his skin in place and for many nights he lay clutching his body, feeling time sweeping through it like little explosions. The palms of his hands were quivering and he tried to resist time and hold it back. But nothing helped, and with every pop he felt himself getting older.

Some of the dangers in Jansen’s world are philosophical and abstract, like this. But there is also malice in his world. There are bullies, there is the animosity between his father and his uncle, and his father’s drunken sadness. Petterson combines the contemplative with the unsettling.

Apparently Arvid Jansen appears in quite a few Petterson works, usually rather older than this boy. I haven’t read any of those, but now I’ve met Arvid as a child, I’d be intrigued to encounter him as an adult.

Day 17: The Girl from the Candle-Lit Bath (1978) by Dodie Smith

the girl from the candle-lit bath dodie smith 1978 001This was Dodie Smith’s last novel, written when she was in her 80s, and it is quite a departure from her earlier work. While I Capture the Castle might feature the heroine in a bath when she first encounters the hero, nobody would describe Smith’s most famous work as a thriller. And that is what The Girl from the Candle-Lit Bath is at least trying to be.

Nan is fairly recently married to an MP, and is worried that he is having an affair – she has spotted him handing a parcel to a shadowy stranger, and he is being coy about where he’s been. We never really get to know him, and even Nan doesn’t seem to particularly like him, but such is the start of the plot. In the first few pages she meets a taxi driver, after twisting her ankle and needing a lift, and he begins to talk to her about the possibility that her husband is hiding something even more significant.

The novella is told through a series of ‘tapes’, as Nan decides to record herself speaking, as a way to think things through. It’s an interesting device that felt a bit like a 1970s update of the 18th- or 19th-century heroine who had to commit all her thoughts to letters, no matter how precarious the situation.

And the title? Nan is famed from a TV advert, before she later made a success in television.

It began with something quite idiotic. I did a very well-paid commercial, advertising a soap first made back in the eighteen-nineties. They copied a wonderful bathroom in some old country house, with a marble bath, gleaming silver plumbing and all sorts of elaborate details, and they lit it only by candle-light. I came on in an exquisite negligée, took it off and stepped into the bath, but owing to the dim lighting, clever cutting and various tricks, I was never seen quite nude, even though the bath water was clear and not a bubble bath. Again and again I was almost seen but always something – usually the soap, in a silver soap dish – got in the way. The commercial was a great success and I became known as ‘The Girl in the Candle-lit Bath’ and got quite a large fan mail.

Her husband allows (!) her to start acting again, and the part of this novella I most enjoyed were her experiences re-entering the theatre as an understudy. At the same time this novella was published, Smith published the second volume of her memoirs – which, if memory serves, looked at the period of her own life when she was trying to make it as an actress. Smith is clearly at home in this world.

Where she is less at home is the thriller – the story suddenly takes a leap for the more dramatic, after a relatively promising start, and we are lost in a sea of chases and espionage and peril. It’s not at all convincing, and mostly feels very silly. I’d read Barb’s and Jane’s very unflattering reviews, and at least forewarned is forearmed. I quite enjoyed the first half, which have elements of Smith’s delicious humour (“Anyway, they hated the idea of the public tramping over beautiful old houses, which should be private, part of their owners’ private lives. If the Slepes ever acquire a private life they’ll be bitterly disappointed”) but the second half is too absurd and unsuccessful to make this a book worth seeking out.

The City of Belgium by Brecht Evens

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The City of Belgium: Amazon.co.uk: Brecht Evens: 9781770463424: Books

You might know that I’m a fan of the graphic novelist Brecht Evens. The City of Belgium (2021) is his fourth or fifth book and I’ve read and enjoyed all the others to differing extents – from deeply loving to being deeply disturbed, but still recognising his brilliance. The City of Belgium was translated by Evens himself – it was originally published as Les Rigoles, which Google translate tells me means ‘the channels’, but is a venue in Paris. I thought it was originally written in Flemish, so this all gets a bit confusing. Suffice to say, I was delighted to get a review copy of this from the publisher, and I think The City of Belgium is a brilliant title.

The book follows three people on a night – three separate nights out for Jona, Rodolphe, and Victoria, and the various people they meet, interact with, love and loathe. We interweave between them all, with a colour-coding indicating which world we’re in.

Being Evens, these are not quiet, happy nights. His work often includes menace, unhappiness, warped eroticism, and the surreal. But it also includes moments of joy, unexpected connections, and hope. The balance of these elements is what makes an Evens’ book a favourite or not, in my eyes. The Panther went a bit too far into warped territory for me; The Making Of hit the sweet spot.

I think The City of Belgium is perhaps a little to the right of the sweet spot – perhaps not quite enough hope to balance out the despair. We see violence, loneliness, arguments. But then there are pages like this one, showing the humour that Evens threads through any situation.

 

The story is one thing, but what always draws me back to Evens again and again is his stunning use of colour and form, and his astonishing imagination. Some pages are spare, like the one above – or even more so, even disappearing in a mist. Others are a riot of colour and action, beautifully balanced and judged perfectly. The cover is one example, but sometimes a whole world is going on. You can see more examples in this excellent article, which includes interviews with Evens. The stereotype of graphic novels is still that they look like superhero cartoons – and, while there is a world beyond that, I’ve browsed through a graphic novel shop for hours without finding anyone who uses colour so gently and sensuously as Evens’ watercolours. The meeting of subject matter and technique is particularly striking.

You’ll leave an Evens graphic novel feeling both unsettled and satisfied. Perhaps that isn’t always the combination you’re looking for from a book – but it is a profound mix, and sometimes feels exactly right.

A couple of recent audiobooks

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I go back and forth with my Audible subscription. I’m currently back in – and have discovered the Audible Plus catalogue, where you can download free audiobooks that have been added to that collection. There are thousands of the things, with no clear criteria why they’re in – some classics, some look to be self-published with audiobook covers designed in Paint. It takes some scrolling through, but I have managed to find some books of interest. (Any recommendations?)

And here are a couple of books I’d already added to my Audible wishlist – and I was pleased to see, when I re-joined, that they were labelled as freely available to me.

The Elephants in My Backyard eBook by Rajiv Surendra | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster UKThe Elephants in My Backyard by Rajiv Surendra

If you know Rajiv Surendra’s work at all, it’s probably as the rapping mathlete Kevin G from teen classic Mean Girls. I think I read about this 2016 memoir in a Buzzfeed article – but I’m really glad I did. Perhaps against the odds of that opening description, it’s really very good.

Surendra was on the set of Mean Girls when a member of the crew recommended that he read Yann Martel’s Life of Pi – because it’s “a book about you”. Naturally intrigued, Surendra reads – and is instantly captivated. While he doesn’t live the same life as Pi, a Tamil boy in India who is shipwrecked with a tiger, there are other things the same. Surendra’s parents are Tamil and from Sri Lanka; Surendra matches the physical description of Pi. He becomes determined to play the role of Pi in a film.

At this point, there isn’t even a film in the offing. But Surendra starts planning – and even gets in touch with Martel, who proves a remarkably kind and patient correspondent over the coming years (his emails are included in the book). The determination to play the role really becomes an obsession. Over the next few years, Surendra moves for a period to India, he learns some Tamil, he learns to swim, he turns down other acting work on the off-chance that casting for Life of Pi will happen.

In the background to all of this, he naturally shares his own life. And much of that is quite desperate. An alcoholic father, prone to violent outbursts, haunts his home life. His work is mostly playing a character at an interactive historic farm. We get to know him, and he is mostly likeable and interesting – able to laugh at himself, and to convey what it’s like to be so single-minded in pursuit of a goal. (There are some regrettable body shaming moments, and some of the humour doesn’t quite land, but those are only small annoyances in the grand scheme of the book.)

Usually this sort of book is written by someone explaining how they got to where they are. But if you’ve seen Life of Pi, then you’ll know… Rajiv Surendra doesn’t get the part. In the end, despite having a good chat with the casting director, he doesn’t even get an audition. Six years of his life have been dedicated to something that didn’t work out. His lasting acting credit on iMDB is 2005. It’s fascinating to listen to a book like this from the perspective of someone who didn’t make it. There are, of course, any number of actors who commit utterly to their dream and end up not making it. Those stories are probably more valuable to hear. The ones who didn’t luck out.

And it’s a really good, interesting memoir. I’ve never read or seen Life of Pi, but I think all you need to enjoy it is an interest in people and what motivates them.

 

The Wall cover artThe Wall by Marlen Haushofer

I’ve not managed to track down who recommended this Austrian novel from 1963 (translated from German by Shaun Whiteside). I must have seen it somewhere and found the premise interesting enough to pop on my list. And that premise is: an unnamed narrator is visiting a couple friends in a remote farmhouse. They go off to a nearby town for an evening meal, leaving her behind. In the morning, they still haven’t returned.

On her wandering to see what’s happened to them, she finds something impossible. An invisible wall is stopping her going any further. Beyond it, she can see that people and animals are all frozen – clearly having died instantly.

Within the wall are acres and acres of empty land. It’s never clear quite how big it is, but she can travel for hours and find nobody and nothing – except animals. There are enough trout and deer for her to eat, and there is a dog (Lynx), a cat (Cat), and a cow (Bella). From the vantage of a couple of years on, she documents her experiences in surviving, and in developing a deep kinship with those animals.

Haushofer’s story is told quite slowly and gently, never flashing past an experience that she can detail. She is particularly good at the behaviour of animals – well, she’s very good at cats, and I assume she is good at dogs and cows. But over it all is a sense of looming dread – because the narrator has told us that the animals die, and that something bad has caused it.

I did find the end weirdly rushed and odd, after the gentle pacing of the rest of the story. I’m assuming it is a parable for something, or done with deliberate effect, but I am not at all convinced that it worked. Similarly unsuccessful (to my mind) were the occasional attempts to rationalise why she thought the wall was there, and who might be to blame – it worked better as something inexplicable.

These quibbles apart, it is a very impressive work. I do find that fine writing doesn’t work as well for me in audio as on the page. Maybe I’m more into story than prose when I’m listening? And the reader of the audiobook was a bit breathy and soft, which didn’t feel quite right. ANYWAY in summary perhaps I should have read this one as a book, but I still found it really interesting and would recommend. Not least because I want to talk to anyone and everyone about that ending, to try and understand why she did it.