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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.

Ignorance by Milan Kundera – #NovNov Day 21

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For those keeping track, I didn’t blog yesterday but I DID finish a book. I didn’t write about it because it’s a future British Library Women Writers title and I’m not sure I’m meant to mention it here yet.

ANYWAY onto Day 21, and what I think is my seventh Kundera novel(la) – Ignorance, published in French in 2002 and translated by Linda Asher. I love Kundera’s writing and unique approach to the novel, especially when I’m in the right frame of mind to embrace his zig-zaggy, philosophical, quirky style.

The book opens with Irena speaking to her friend Sylvie. Irena’s long-term relationship with Gustaf (albeit as his mistress) has just ended, and she is being quizzed on why she is staying France. Sylvie moved from Prague years earlier, and now considers Paris her home – wiping out her Czech past, in many ways. This is the jumping off point for Kundera to think about the concept of nostalgia – how it is phrased in different languages, how we both remember and forget our pasts, what the idea of returning does to a person. Sylvie has a recurring dream that she is living again in Prague – but the dream is haunting, claustrophobic, and unwelcome.

These dream-nightmares seemed to her all the more mysterious in that she was afflicted simultaneously with an uncontrollable nostalgia and another, completely opposite, experience: landscapes from her country kept appearing to her by day. No, this was not daydreaming, lengthy and conscious, willed; it was something else entirely: visions of landscapes would blink on in her head unexpectedly, abruptly, swiftly, and go out instantly. She would be talking to her boss and all at once, like a flash of lightning, she’d see a path through a field. She would be jostled on the Metro and suddenly, a narrow lane in some leafy Prague neighborhood would rise
up before her for a split second. All day long these fleeting images would visit her to assuage the longing for her lost Bohemia.

The same moviemaker of the subconscious who, by day, was sending her bits of the home landscape as images of happiness, by night would set up terrifying returns to that same land. The day was lit with the beauty of the land forsaken, the night by the horror of returning to it. The day would show her the paradise she had lost; the night, the hell she had fled.

Ultimately, Sylvie does make a visit back to Prague. Along the way, the narrative passes like a baton among different people in the book – to Gustaf (which takes us to the past of their relationship), and particularly to Josef. Josef is a man from Sylvie’s past, whom she bumps into in Prague airport. Like her, he has been living abroad – in Denmark. He hasn’t been back for more than a decade, and both of them are being reintroduced to families, friends and places that seem both unchanged and, simultaneously, to have weathered an enormous amount of change. More or less everything I know about the Czech Republic’s history (under its various names) comes from other Kundera novels I’ve read – and it is woven in here too, with all the turmoil the country faced over the 20th century. And particularly the impact of Communism on its émigrés Sylvie and Josef.

Like most of Kundera’s novels, the plot is a simple thread through the centre of the book – but what makes the book so wonderful are the tangents, the reflections, the aleatory connections between fictional characters and moments in time. The two main elements that Kundera returns to are The Odyssey and the German composer Arnold Schoenberg. Sure, why not! My first Kundera novel was Immortality, which includes Goethe, Hemingway, Marx, Napoleon, Beethoven etc, so I was well prepared. Not as characters, you understand, but as sidenotes by the narrator – telling a story that only meets tangentially with the main plot, but those meetings illuminate the story and make it so much more.

Here, for instance, is a moment about The Odyssey that – without Kundera drawing the comparison overtly – tells us much more about Sylvie:

During the twenty years of Odysseus’ absence, the people of Ithaca retained many recollections of him but never felt nostalgia for him. Whereas Odysseus did suffer nostalgia, and remembered almost nothing.

We can comprehend this curious contradiction if we realize that for memory to function well, it needs constant practice: if recollections are not evoked again and again, in conversations with friends, they go. Emigres gathered together in compatriot colonies keep retelling to the point of nausea the same stories, which thereby become unforgettable. But people who do not spend time with their compatriots, like Irena or Odysseus, are inevitably stricken with amnesia. The stronger their nostalgia, the emptier of recollections it becomes. The more Odysseus languished, the more he forgot. For nostalgia does not heighten memory’s activity, it does not awaken recollections; it suffices unto itself, unto its own feelings, so fully absorbed is it by its suffering and nothing else.

My Novellas in November project is going so well. I keep writing very positive reviews, and they are genuinely effusive – so far, it has brought many brilliant books off my shelves. This is right up there with the best Kundera books I’ve read, and that makes it one of the best books I’ve read this year.

Notes From An Island by Tove Jansson – #NovNov Day 11

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What a lovely book. My brother got me Notes From An Island (1996, translated 2021) by Tove Jansson for my birthday – knowing my love of Jansson – and I couldn’t wait to dive in and enjoy this beautifully produced tale of an island where Jansson lived with her partner Tuulikki Pietilä, known as Tooti, who created the lovely copperplate etchings and wash drawings of the island that are reproduced in this edition. You can see some atmospheric examples on the Granta website.

The island is Klovharun, and Notes From An Island is a short book following the couple from their early decision to move to this fairly unwelcoming island – until they realise they have leave it behind. They had previously lived on a much more idyllic island – but this skerry, though it seems unprepossessing and sparse, turns into an idyll of their own making. Readers of the novella Fair Play will be familiar with their life there.

An intriguing additional voice to the notes in this volume is Brunström’s – a man whose gifts were in constructing Jansson and Pietila’s house (evading authorities and their regulations where possible), and not in poetic writing. The contrast between his plebeian descriptions and Jansson’s beautiful diary entries are brought out wonderfully in Thomas Teal’s translations. Thank goodness he is on hand to translate again, as he has done for Jansson for decades.

Jansson is incapable of writing a bad or unevocative sentence. I loved her snapshots of life on this island – of companionship with Tooti, of battling the elements, of never quite knowing what nature will do – whether flora, fauna, or the unpredictable sea. Here is a small moment that I loved:

Every summer there was the same wait for swallows. Brunström had told us that they nest only in houses where people are happy, but not if the house is painted with Valtti or Pinotex. The swallows came and, as expected, put on a great show, ripping through the air like shrieking knives, around the cabin again and again, to our admiration – and then, presto, they were gone, leaving no promises behind. If only we could be like that come back only when people no longer expect us! That would be so elegant.

Oh, I love Jansson’s writing so much. And I loved this addition to Jansson’s oeuvre in English. It is short, but it is not a minor work. It is perfect.

Dry Season by Gabriela Babnik

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I’m slipping into the final hours of Women in Translation Month with Dry Season (2015) by Gabriela Babnik – originally in Slovenian, and translated by Rawley Grau. It won the European Union Prize for Literature, and is the final of the EUPL books I requested when I was asked by them to review some current and previous winners. As usual, more info at the bottom of this post.

I chose this one largely because one of my close friends in Slovenian and I’ve always intended to try some literature from her homeland – though Babnik’s novel is actually set in Burkina Faso, where a 62-year-old Slovenian woman called Ana is being a tourist. Early in the novel, she meets a young man from Burkina Faso called Ismael – though ‘meets’ is perhaps the wrong word, since he first sees her as somebody he might be able to mug.

Their motivations aren’t clear at first. When Ismael rejects his partner in crime’s suggestion that he grabs Ana’s bright yellow bag, it initially looks like he has decided to play the long con. Ana initially seems like a bit of a fool – exposing herself to dangers on the streets of Burkina Faso, without taking any precautions over her possessions or potentially her life. She is there to escape something – perhaps simply to escape her humdrum life, though the more we learn about her background the more we realise that dark secrets linger there.

And dark secrets linger similarly in Ismael’s past – not least what happened to his young brother. The present day scenes of the novel are interspersed with both of them thinking back to the past – we are jolted to the unsavoury activities under a lone bridge, or inadequate parents, or long forgotten antagonisms resurfacing. As Dry Season continues, the reader realises that these two characters have a lot more in common than it first appears.

This is driven home by the fact that all the novel is told in the first person, but we are given no warning when we shift between Ana and Ismael. Often it takes a while for us to realise who is speaking, or which period we are in. Dividing lines blur and fade continually. This section was one of the most disconcerting, because it describes something graphic and we don’t know who the victim is (content warning of sexual assault):

It happened so fast I had no time to think. He lay down next to me, took off my trousers and, with an adult hand, touched my thighs. I froze; everything in me froze. If I had been awake and the man had approached me in broad daylight, I would have said it did not happen. But his hand travelled up to my most intimate part and there was no way that it did not happen.

Dry Season is an intriguing mix of tones. On the one hand, the haziness and rejection of solid boundaries feels almost fairy-talesque, and there are moments of magical realism that seem to link to Burkina Faso folk tales. On the other hand, the whole novel feels quite sordid. Sex permeates the book, and both characters often think the phrase ‘he put it in me’ or ‘I put it in her’ as the sole description of the act, usually sans affection. Dirt – literal dirt – recurs, as the infant Ismael used to eat handfuls of it. Nothing is sanitised here, and when I finally landed on the word ‘sordid’, it did tie together a lot of the novel for me. It was an interesting, rather than a pleasant, read. I should add, I felt pretty uncomfortable about the racism in the novel – often from the perspective of characters, or received by Ismael, but I’m not sure there’s any excuse in 2015 for a white author to be using the n-word in her writing. Perhaps it doesn’t carry the same weight in whatever the Slovenian word is.

Ana and Ismael are intriguing characters, well-drawn with many layers, and Dry Season is an ambitious and complex novel. Not a cosy read by any means, but an accomplished one.

Sun City by Tove Jansson – #WITMonth

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I bought Sun City by Tove Jansson in 2007, at which point there wasn’t that much of Jansson’s work available in English. This was one of two novels that had been translated in the ‘70s, and then she had languished – until Sort Of Books started their noble work of publishing translations by Thomas Teal. Teal was also the translator back in the day, and did Sun City – so I knew I was in good hands with him when I finally took this off the shelf. To be honest, I couldn’t quite cope with the idea of running out of Jansson things to read – but if not for Women in Translation month, then when?

The setting of Sun City sets it apart from Jansson’s other books, and perhaps helps explain why it was picked for translating into English first. Rather than her usual Finnish islands or towns, we are in St Petersburg, Florida – at an old people’s home called the Berkeley Arms. The residents are mostly American, and it’s a world away from where Jansson spent her life. (I’ve read two biographies of Jansson and I still can’t remember if she visited America, but I’m almost certain she wasn’t there for any extended period.)

While Sun City was only Jansson’s second novel, she was already 60 by the time it was published (1974) – not old, but also not looking at this retirement home through the callous eyes of youth. The newest resident is Elizabeth Morris, intelligent and reserved and a little unsure about her new community, and it looks at one point like she might be the protagonist – but this becomes very much an ensemble piece. Much of the ‘action’ takes place in the rocking chairs outside, which are strictly assigned to individual residents, in practice if not in theory (‘To move your rocking chair is an unforgivable insult in St Petersburg […] Only death could move the rocking chairs in St Petersburg’).

Mrs Elizabeth Morris of Great Island, Nebraska, seventy-seven years old, had the second rocking chair from the railing by the big magnolia. Next to the magnolia was Mr Thompson, who pretended to be deaf, and on the other side was Miss Peabody, who was very shy. So Mrs Morris could sit and think in peace. She had come to St Petersburg several weeks earlier, alone, with a sore throat, and once at the Berkeley Arms her voice disappeared completely. On a page from a notebook Mrs Morris had supplied information about her name, her condition, and some antique furniture that was to arrive later. Silence protected her from the reckless need to confide in other people that can be so dangerous at the end of a long, lonely journey.

If you’re familiar with Jansson’s writing, you’ll recognise her tone – certainly in sentences like that last one. I like that the long, lonely journey could either be the one that has brought her from Nebraska to Florida, or could simply describe her life. It feels like familiar Jansson territory in the writing, if not the setting.

Sun City continues in an episodic way. An estranged spouse of one of the residents turns up; a couple of residents die; there is a trip away from the Berkeley Arms. There is also drama among the people working there, particularly one in a relationship with an eccentric young man who believes Jesus will soon return and is waiting to be collected by a fringe Christian organisation.

A lot of Jansson’s writing is episodic. There’s certainly a discussion to be had about whether her most famous work for adults, The Summer Book, is a novel or a series of interlinking short stories. Sun City is definitely a novel, but what makes it feel a bit different from her other work, and perhaps a little less successful, is that the moments that happen are all a little overly dramatic. It feels like, in transferring her canvas to America, Jansson has taken on board the idea that everything in America is bigger: the events are bigger, the reactions are bigger, the potentials for change are bigger. I have to be honest, I missed the gentleness of her Scandinavian backdrop, where lives are no less full but somehow the stakes seem to be lower.

If this were my first novel by Jansson, I’ve no doubt I’d have wanted to read more. Her sentences are still beautiful and insightful, and the partnership with Teal is reliably great – but the good news for people looking to explore Jansson is that the best stuff is already in print, in translation. This is an enjoyable coda, but Jansson is at her finest on her Finnish island.

Catch the Rabbit by Lana Bastašić

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I’m continuing my read through winners of the European Union Prize for Literature (as ever, a video at the bottom explaining the prize), which has been a really interesting and varied experience even after only three books. Catch the Rabbit is one of the most recent winners – from 2020, by Bosnian author Lana Bastašić, who also translated it into English.

Sara is the narrator of the novel. She grew up in what was then Yugoslavia, and now lives in Dublin with her boyfriend Michael. In many ways, she has put that world behind her – fully immersed in an entirely different world, and without many connections to the country she left behind, but which is deep in her bones. The conflict, the tension that led to it, and its aftermath have all helped form who she is. And nobody has helped form her more than Lejla, the childhood best friend who hasn’t spoken to her in twelve years.

Until, out of the blue, Lejla calls and tells her to come to Bosnia. Because she thinks that her brother, Armin, is alive and living in Vienna. Armin hasn’t been heard of since he disappeared twenty years earlier, as the Bosnian War began. Despite some misgivings, Sara gets on a plane. Not least because she was once in love with Armin herself.

Armin’s possible reappearance might be the catalyst for the novel, but the real story of Catch the Rabbit is the friendship between Sara and Lejla. The novel jumps between present and future, and in both time periods it is a volatile and unpredictable friendship. Lejla – or Lela, as she rechristened herself after the war – is herself volatile and unpredictable. She shows no gratitude at Sara answering her unexpected cry, nor even much emotion at their reunion. Rather, she jumps straight back into the hold she has over Sara – perhaps not an intentionally malevolent one, but with the power of the more forceful personality. And Bastašić writes with extraordinary precision and insight into the detailed depths of an intense friendship.

Obsessive. One of her words. Back then, before college started, when I thought I was pregnant. ‘Don’t be obsessive, Sara.’ We’re sitting in some kafana toilet, waiting for the sign to appear on the stick. No, before that, before the stick, when we were studying for the chemistry test. I was angry because she couldn’t sit still and study. ‘Don’t be obsessive,’ she told me. Or perhaps even before, much before? Perhaps to her I had always been obsessive. And then I moved to Dublin, met Michael, and started speaking her language. ‘Don’t be obsessive,’ I’d tell him without blinking, at the same time feeling as if I had stolen something, something I didn’t think I needed. I had brought pieces of Lejla on me, tiny insects that had crawled into my bag, my pockets, under my pants, and yet they would hide their real nature before Michael. Our first date: an Icelandic movie we both pretended to have understood. ‘So what, you’re like an artist or something?’ I asked. I twisted my foot on the sidewalk and looked at him condescendingly. And he loved it, the Lejla in me, though her never met her. She got to have him, too.

There is a richness and beauty to Bastašić’s writing that doesn’t ever let the reader settle. Everything in the novel is set in the real world, but something in the way it was written always made me feel like it was on the precipice of magical realism. Perhaps it is the constant uncertainty – what is the importance of the rabbit they buried; what happened on the island that damaged their friendship so severely; where is Armin and why haven’t they heard from him for so long.

And, of course, the author was also the translator – and seems equally skilled at that. A good translation is one you don’t notice, and so I assume Bastašić’s was very good. The only awkward scene is where one character is speaking in Bosnian and the other in English – I assume in the original version, these were indeed in two languages. It doesn’t quite work when everything is in English!

Bastašić does seem to anticipate a little more knowledge about the history of the area than I have. This passage, for instance, I really liked – but, if I’m honest, I don’t know what happened in or before the Bosnian War except in the broadest of outlines. I was only 6 or 7 when it started, so perhaps readers a bit older than me – and certainly readers in Bosnia – will know and understand all the hinted-at bits that aren’t quite mentioned.

The dark spread around as if some mean kid had spilled it over us. Townspeople suddenly got new faces. Some had frowned just once and stayed that way forever. Others were gone for good, left without much noise. I would lie to foreigners later on. I was too little, I would say, I wasn’t even aware of what was going on. But that’s not true. We knew, you and I. We knew it had started, that they had started it. We knew it would last. Soon it was a constant, like an extra chemical element in the air. It was easy to say its name, roll it over the tongue like good morning or good night. It was everywhere: in the linden tree behind the school, in kids’ drawing in the school toilet, in the teachers who suddenly used the Cyrillic alphabet only. It was in you, in your new name, merged with Armin’s disappearance.

But factual history is only the backdrop for the unsettling revival of this friendship – disconcerting and joyful to Sara at the same time, thrown back into a world she has left behind with hardly any acknowledgement from Lejla that the reunion is anything out of the ordinary. This dissection of friendship is the novel I was hoping My Brilliant Friend would be. In my opinion, Catch the Rabbit is much the better book.

Thankfully it has been many years since I had a friendship this unpredictable and liable to damage – not since high school – but Bastašić expertly conveys what it feels like to be in the midst of it. All the more unsettling as any adult – and too complex to be dismissed as a bad friendship, because there is also so much richness and depth there. It’s such a nuanced portrait.

As the ending comes near, the reading experience starts to feel more and more unhinged – perhaps, as the cover quote suggests, like two Alices in Wonderland. It’s a tour de force and will stay with me.

The Boarding House by Piotr Paziński

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BoardingHouseIn March, I posted my first of four reviews of books that have won the European Prize for Literature (EUPL) – the amazing Things That Fall From the Sky by Selja Ahava, which it one of the best books I’ve read this year. The EUPL is an annual prize that awards emerging authors from across 41 countries in Europe – the video at the bottom of this post explains a bit more. The prize is judged on the original language rather than the translation, but I don’t read Polish so I read The Boarding House in a translation by Tusia Dabrowska (or MJ Dabrowska, on over covers I’ve seen). The novel was an EUPL winner in 2012, though was originally published in 2009.

In the beginning, there were train tracks. In the greenery, between heaven and earth. With stations, like beads on a string, placed so close together that even before the train managed to accelerate, it had to slow down in preparation for the following stop. Platforms made of concrete, narrow and shaky, equipped with ladders and steep steps, grew straight out of sand, as though built on dunes. The station’s pavilions resembled old-fashioned kiosks: elongated, bent awnings, and azure letters on both ends, which appeared to float on air.

I’ve always enjoyed peering at them, beginning with the first station outside the strict limits of the city, when the crowded urban architecture quickly thins out and the world expands to an uncanny size.

Luckily, the tracks remained as I’d left them. They run straight ahead, in a decisive gesture, to melt with the horizon, from here barely visible, hidden behind nature, or, to the contrary – to disappear in a hidden tunnel hollowed out in the sky and then begin running again on the other side, in a completely different and unknown world.

The opening paragraphs of The Boarding House start with the opening words of the Bible – or, more aptly for this novel, the Torah. The narrator is Jewish, and the train he is taking is out to a distant Polish boarding house, which once doubled as a sanatorium. He has been there before as a child, when he spent his summers with a grandmother. The people who live there now – like his grandmother before them – are survivors of the Shoah, or Holocaust.

There is a dream-like quality to much of the novel. The narrator listens to the stories of those who live in the boarding house, many of whom seem to live half in the past and half in the present. This is echoed in the way the prose will wind back and forth, and you often find yourselves finishing a scene in a different time and place to where you started. The edges of sections are blurred.

The narrator is himself between times too – recalling his childhood, the inherited stories of the Holocaust, the current need that he taken him back to this place. It’s a novel filled with palimpsests – though also humour, and there is the usual mix of cantankerous characters, gossipy characters, pessimists and optimists stuck in a lengthy dialogue, held together in this boarding house in the middle of nowhere.

It’s an interesting novel, and it interestingly reveals a lot about the legacy of the appalling treatment of Jewish people during the 1930s and ’40s. The dreamlike quality of The Boarding House is both an asset and a drawback, depending on what mood you’re in – it’s hard to grasp anything concrete, or feel like you’re on steady ground as a reader at any point.

And I don’t know if Dabrowska’s translation accurately conveys this quality in the original novel, or if there are places where it isn’t quite working as a translation. As I say, I don’t read or speak Polish – but there were many places where the writing jarred a little for me. ‘This didn’t come across very cleverly’, for instance – that use of ‘cleverly’ doesn’t quite make sense. The narrator refers to a ‘freestanding closet’, rather than a wardrobe. I didn’t quite understand this sentence, even on several attempts: ‘The door creaked, so fearing that it might cause even more of a ruckus that would wake up the entire boarding house, I sneaked through the smallest crack possible.’ That’s a handful of minor instances, but there were several on every page. Perhaps it is there in the original, and is intended to disconcert the reader. I don’t know.

It’s a difficult one. I didn’t love this novel, and I never felt on solid ground reading it. But perhaps that is the point?

Things That Fall From the Sky by Selja Ahava – EUPL

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

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

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

Our eyes meet.

“Nothing,” I reply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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