translation

Silence in October by Jens Christian Grøndahl

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I bought Silence in October by Jens Christian Grøndahl in 2011, and have been intending to read it pretty much every October since. Finally I managed to schedule it in! It needn’t be read in October, of course, but it felt too apposite to miss.

The novel was published in Danish in 1996, and translated by Anne Born four years later. Grøndahl has a long and prolific career in Holland, but only a handful of his novels have been translated into English – including the excellent Virginia, which I read not long before I bought Silence in October. That slim novel is all about regret caused by a childhood decision in wartime. Silence in October is rather a different kettle of fish.

As the novel opens, the narrator’s wife, Astrid, has just left him. He doesn’t know exactly where she is, but can trace where she has been by the credit card receipts that trail behind her. They’ve been together for more than eighteen years – ever since he was her taxi driver, as she fled her abusive husband with their young son.

This premise is almost all the action that happens in the novel. For almost 300 pages, what we witness is the unnamed (I think!) narrator’s thoughts, recollections, philosophising. We move back and forth in time, often with little warning – but equally often the memories are not dramatic, but lend a layer to the profundities that the narrator is compiling. Whether you find them profound or not may depend a lot on the mood you’re in while you read it.

It’s difficult to write about Silence in October, because it really did depend on my mood. The writing is beautiful, and Born translates in such a way that no awkwardness is ever apparent. It deserves – it requires – slow and patient reading, letting the unusual images and stumbling thoughts wash over the reader. Grøndahl is excellent at the minutiae, and bringing small moments and reflections to new, vivid life. To pick something at random from early in the book, here is when Astrid says she is leaving:

She had announced her decision in such a run-of-the-mill and offhand way in front of the mirror, as if it had been a matter of going to the cinema or visiting a woman friend, and I had allowed myself to be seduced by the naturalness of her tone. And later, in bed, when I thought she was asleep,there had been a distance in her voice as if she had already gone and was calling from a town on the other side of the world.

So, yes, I read much of Silence in October in patient appreciation, recognising Grøndahl’s ability as a prose stylist. And then there were other times – when, sensibly, I usually put the book down and picked something else up – where I had less patience. I don’t need a book to have a lot of action, but this amount of introspection is a little low in momentum. Pacy, it was not. Also – my tolerance for the self-absorption of the middle-aged, middle-class, white, male narrator wore thin at times. He is obsessed with his own thoughts, awarding them significance, whatever they are. His mindset is a bit like one you see on Twitter a great deal. I rolled my eyes when we got to the inevitable women-don’t-realise-they’re-prettier-without-make-up moment. He writes about women’s bodies a lot.

Could I really not meet a woman who thought and talked on the same frequency as myself without immediately getting ideas from the sight of her thighs just because they were lovely, and because she unwittingly exposed them to my ferocious gaze?

Of course, the author need not be the narrator. Indeed, I know from Virginia that Grøndahl can take his writing talents to a far worthier topic than the self-importance of an adulterous art critic.

I always say that the writing is more important than what is being written about. There are exceptions, of course – and you know that I will read more or less any novel about people opening a cafe – but Silence in October is a good instance where I enjoyed it despite its premise and its ‘plot’. Grøndahl is a fine writer and Born is clearly a very good translator. I look forward to read more of his novels, and hope that they’re about people I’m readier to spend time with.

25 Books in 25 Days: #24 The Misunderstanding

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(So close to the end!) I think I got a review copy of The Misunderstanding (1926) by Irene Nemirovsky in about 2012, when it was published in English for perhaps the first time, by Sandra Smith. I’ve certainly bought or been given quite a few Nemirovsky novels, but have only read Suite Française and one other. While looking around my shelves, I thought… why not?

The Misunderstanding was Nemirovsky’s first novel, and it is a love story of sorts. As Sandra Smith points out in her translator’s note, the original title Le Malentendu can be translated as ‘the person who is misunderstood’ and ‘incompatibility’ as well as the title the novel was given in English, and it is the last of these that perhaps gets the biggest focus – as we watch disaffected Yves start a relationship with the bored wife of an old friend. They are passionate but uncertain, and we follow something of a strange trajectory, as each miscommunicates what they feel about each other – dashing through 1920s French seaside and Paris. One of the biggest obstacles to their agreed happiness is – he is poor, and she is rich, and all the awkwardness and pride that comes with that.

It was already very hot; it was the beginning of a beautiful summer’s day; women’s faces peered over the balconies; street sellers passed by with their little carts full of flowers, shouting: “Roses! Who wants some beautiful roses!”; tiny fountains of water from hosepipes sprayed from one side of the pavement to the other, glistening like liquid rainbows; young children went past on their bicycles, chasing each other and singing loudly; they had wicker baskets on their backs and their smocks fluttered in the win. Yves tried hard to notice every last detail in the street, just as a sick man desperately tries to concentrate on the countless little things in his bedroom.

I’m not always particularly interested in stories about love affairs, but I did find the way Nemirovsky wrote about Paris – and about people, about their flaws and lack of self-knowledge – rather poignant and lyrical. If it leans a little on the histrionic, we can blame that on the author’s youth – I’ve certainly read books with less emotional restraint by writers who should know better.

25 Books in 25 Days: #16 The Murderess

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My friend Malie bought me The Murderess (1903) by Alexandros Papadiamantis a couple of years ago – by which I mean, she told me to buy some books I wanted for my birthday, and this was one of the books I chose. I found it surprisingly hard to find out when it was originally published, as my copy doesn’t say and Wikipedia is keeping coy about it, but some other review I read says 1903. My edition is translated from the (you guessed it) Greek by Peter Levi.

The murderess in question is a grandmother who decides to smother/strangle her infant grandchild – and then goes on a bit of a spree of drowning and otherwise killing young girls. If that sounds like the sort of modern crime novel I have zero interest in, then it’s not really. It’s more of a philosophy-meets-chase, where Hadoula decides that the world is such a cruel place for women that it would be a kindness to kill these young girls before they find out (and we see, in flashback, how her son has spoiled her own life).

It’s an intriguing concept, and Papadiamantis is subtle enough about her motive (or motives) to make it more intriguing still – is Hadoula really just thrilled by power, for instance. Then she goes on the run, and it all gets a bit bizarre.

It was interesting to read in Levi’s introduction that he found the translation very difficult, particularly to match the leisurely pace and regional language of Papadiamantis. I don’t speak any Greek, but the translation did feel a little obstructive or false at times – I don’t quite know how to explain that feeling, but perhaps you’re familiar with it. Not my favourite book I’ve read this 25 Books, but I’m glad I read it.

Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras

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People often say that the best thing about book groups is getting to read things you wouldn’t usually pick up. To be honest, I’m not often looking for new things to pick up – I’m in a book group so that I get to talk about books with people and, more often than not, I’m not particularly bowled over by the book choice. Which is why it was a lovely surprised that I enjoyed Kamchatka by Marcelo Figeuras so much. Published in Spanish in 2003, and translated into English by Frank Wynne in 2010, this didn’t sound at all like something I’d like – but I really did. (A thank you to Annabel for giving me her copy!)

The novel concerns the political crises in Argentina, specifically the coup d’etat, in the 1970s. Now, you’ve quite possibly either thought “Oo, sounds intriguing” or “Um, no ta” right off the bat – but the latter group of you should keep reading. I knew almost nothing about Argentina in the 1970s, or any other period, and had rather conflated Evita with the disappearances. But this puts me rather in the same place as the young boy who is at the forefront of Kamchatka (in a narrative that is simultaneously from his young perspective and from that of a his adult self, looking back on events – a dual perspective that is handled extremely deftly). He also doesn’t really know what’s going on around him, and is swept up in events that control his life without being comprehensible.

His parents are evidently on the wrong side of the new ruling power, and they must go into hiding – though at first his mother maintains her work as a scientist (I love that this was her role), and they don’t travel too far. They do assume new names, though. The unnamed narrator becomes Harry, after his idol Harry Houdini. His funny, wild younger brother (known as ‘Midget’, which wasn’t very comfortable to read) chooses Simon – hurrah! And an older boy, on the cusp of adulthood, also joins the family. He says he is called Lucas, and Harry and Simon shift from an initial distrust of him to a really beautiful love for him.

And why is the novel called Kamchatka, when that is nowhere near Argentina? You (like me) might know the placename only from its appearance on the Risk board – the board game where your figures battle each other to achieve world domination. But it’s also the word that Harry uses for his mental escape – his imaginary refuge – and thus what he labels the strange place they’ve gone.

I loved how well Figueras built the story from a collage of what Harry would have found important – Houdini, Risk, his family – and from the stuffed toys, school uniforms, and other everyday objects that created his world. We never quite see what the dangers are, or hear about what has happened to those who vanish – but we see enough to feel his fear, or his shame when his old best friend can no longer see him. In short, short chapters – often no more than two or three pages – we enter his world.

And another thing Figueras does well is combine narrative and philosophy. We’ve probably all seen this done badly enough times to know how difficult it is to achieve. But Figueras will move from the general to the specific, or draw out the essential human truths of a situation, masterfully – and without making it feel as though we have lost touch of the narrator’s striking voice and unusual angle on things. Here’s an example that I found affecting, even with an abiding dislike of geography:

Sometimes I think that everything you need to know about life can be found in geography books. The result of centuries of research, they tell us how the Earth was formed, how the incandescent ball of energy of those first days finally cooled into its present, stable form. They tell us about how successive geological strata of the planet were laid down, one on top of the other, creating a model which applies to everything in life. (In a sense, we too are made up of successive layers. Our current incarnation is laid down over a previous one, but sometimes it cracks and eruptions bring to the surface elements we thought long buried.)

Geography books teach us where we live in a way that makes it possible to see beyond the ends of our noses. Our city is part of a country, our country part of a continent, our continent lies on a hemispheres, that hemisphere is bounded by certain oceans and these oceans are a vital part of the whole planet: one cannot exist without the other. Contour maps reveal what political maps conceal: that all land is land, all water is water. Some lands are higher, some lower, some arid, some humid, but all land is land. There are warmer waters and cooler waters, some waters are shallow, some deep, but all water is water. In this context all artificial divisions, such as those on political maps, smack of violence.

A word should also be said for Wynne, the translator, of course – who manages to keep not only the poetry and vividness of Figeuras’s writing, but also coped with all the wordplay that recurs in the novel. Well done, Wynne!

So, yes, something rather out of my comfort zone, but a real success – I very much recommend it.

Letters from Klara by Tove Jansson

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Letters From KlaraWhen I saw that Thomas Teal had translated another set of Tove Jansson stories, I knew that the collection would be one of the books I bought for Project 24 – and, while I bought it two months ago, I was waiting to feel exactly in the mood to read it. That’s partly because I have to be in the right mood for any collection of short stories, but also because I’m savouring what little Jansson there is left to translate. I think the only remaining book is a 1984 novel which is Field of Stones in English. Why hasn’t it been translated yet, one wonders?

Letters from Klara was originally published in 1991 and was one of the final books Jansson wrote. I have to be honest from the outset – it’s probably the least good of the books I’ve read by her. I say ‘least good’ rather than ‘worst’, because it is still good – but I’ve come to have such high expectations of her work that it still came as a bit of a disappointment.

She is strongest in the longer stories. ‘The Pictures’ looks at the difficult relationship between a young painter and his father, when the painter leaves home with a scholarship. It has Jansson’s trademark subtlety in showing how two people who care deeply for each other can’t properly communicate; she is wonderful at showing the strain of silence in these relationships, where others might go too far in showing awkwardness. The final words of it show Jansson at her spare best:

The train stopped out on the moor, as inexplicably as before, and stood still for several minutes. It started moving again and Victor saw his father on the platform. They approached one another. Very slowly.

The other story that struck me as truly excellent is also the other long story: the haunting ‘Emmelina’. Emmelina is an old lady’s companion who inherits everything when the old lady dies, and who is one of Jansson’s enigmas. David – through whose eyes we see her, albeit still in the third person – falls in love, but cannot understand her, or where she disappears to. Emmelina has the sharp commonsense of many of Jansson’s characters, but also feels almost spectral. The story has no twists or conclusions, but it simply a wonderful example of how to keep a reader guessing, without quite knowing what the question is.

Elsewhere, some of the stories feel too short, too sparse. Jansson seems to have been experimenting with cutting down her prose further and further. Usually her spareness is a great quality, but in some of these stories we lost too much. An emotional logic was missing; the structure didn’t allow her usual character development. In ‘Party Games’, for instance, a school reunion is supposed to reveal hidden rivalries and resentments, but it doesn’t quite work – and female rivalries is a topic Jansson has addressed with startling insight in other collections, perhaps most notable in ‘The Woman Who Borrowed Memories’.

None of the stories in this collection are bad, but some feel like they just missed the mark – or never quite got going. The title story is a series of letters to different people that develop a character, but don’t cohere into a story. Other stories are good but belong in different collections – ‘Pirate Rum’ feels exactly like a chapter missing from Fair Play, being about two older women on a remote island (and presumably as autobiographical as Fair Play was).

So, I’m still thrilled that this book is available to read, and glad I read it, but I certainly wouldn’t recommend it as a good place to start. Jansson has done much better. But thank goodness for any of her words finding their way into English – and thank you to Thomas Teal for all he does in translating her.

Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig

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Burning SecretBurning Secret (1913) by Stefan Zweig – translated by Anthea Bell and published in a lovely edition by Pushkin Press – was one of the books my friend Malie gave me for my birthday last year. Being honest, she gave me a voucher and I picked it – but I filled her in on my choices! It matches the Confusion edition I reviewed last year and now, of course, I want all of Pushkin’s Zweig series…

It’s another short and powerful novel – this one takes place in a hotel where the Baron is on holiday. He is bored and, for want of a better word, horny. I think that’s the first time I’ve used that word on this blog, but it’s the most apt.

He was welcome everywhere he went, and was well aware of his inability to tolerate solitude. He felt no inclination to be alone and avoided it as far as possible; he didn’t really want to become any better acquainted with himself. He knew that, if he was to show his talents to best advantage, he needed to strike sparks off other people to fan the flames of warmth and exuberance in his heart. On his own he was frosty, no use to himself at all, like a match left lying in its box.

He casts his eye around the hotel for the most desirable woman to have a brief affair with, and lands upon a woman staying there with her young son, Edgar. He is 12, but this is the 1910s – so he seems very young and innocent to modern readers. The Baron decides that the best way to approach the woman is via her son – so he sets up a jovial friendship with Edgar – ‘Edi’ – in order to get closer to his mother; without this ‘in’, he couldn’t be introduced.

His ploy works. Edgar is flattered and entranced by this friendship with an adult – having been lonely through the stay so far – and his mother is quickly beguiled into an adulterous affair with the Baron. Once his goal is achieved, the Baron no longer puts any effort into charming the child – and Edgar is hurt, abandoned, angry. He knows something is going on between his mother and the Baron – but no idea what; only that they have a ‘burning secret’.

As I say, Edgar’s innocent naivety doesn’t quite translate to 2017 – but age him down a few years and it would. We don’t quite get prose from his perspective, it remains in the third person, but Zweig does enough to put us in the Baron’s mind and in Edgar’s mind in turn. Zweig is expert at bringing strong, painful, awkward emotions to the fore – and he masterfully interweaves Edgar’s fierce and confused anger through the narrative.

The story is simple, and short – 117 pages – but it is such a brilliant depiction of how unthinking unkindness can affect somebody, and how emotions that aren’t quite understood by the child experiencing them can reverberate and have their impact. Like Confusion, this is an excellent novella about the power of recognisable conflicts in recognisable places. I can see I’m going to have to buy more Zweigs…

The Gourmet by Muriel Barbery

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The GourmetThis is one of those rare, rare occasions where I’ve actually joined in with a reading week/month etc. at the right time, and with the book I intended to read! I’m sneaking into the end of August to celebrate Women in Translation Month, hosted by Meytal/Biblibio.

One of my favourite writers is a woman in translation (in translation when I read her, at least): Tove Jansson. I could have re-read one of hers, or explored the Moomins more, but I decided to kill two birds with one stone and read a book with food as a theme – which is on my Book Bingo scorecard. And, embarrassingly, I’ve had The Gourmet by Muriel Barbery on my shelf since 2010, when I was given it as a review copy by Gallic Books. It was originally published in French in 2000, and translated by Alison Anderson for this 2009 edition.

Perhaps one of the reasons it had stayed on mount tbr for so long was that I hadn’t been entirely enamoured by the Barbery that everyone has read: The Elegance of the Hedgehog. I thought it was rather overwritten (either by author or translator, or both) and couldn’t quite see why it was so praised. I was rather snarky about it. So, how would I fare with this one?

First things first: the concept. It’s an intriguing idea. A celebrated food critic is dying, and longs to capture a taste from his past. It was the most delicious food he’d ever eaten, but – since it came before the days of his knowledge and fame – he can’t remember what it was. Around him, his adoring but poorly-treated wife, his rightfully resentful children, and his fantastic cat, wait for the end to come…

Pierre Arthens is a monstrous character. Monstrously selfish, monstrously uncaring (he doesn’t feel any guilt at not loving his children), and monstrously single-minded in pursuit of food. All this makes him a fascinating character, and easily the most interesting one in the book. Barbery made the decision to give alternate chapters from his point of view, while the other alternate chapters come from a wide variety of characters, most of whom only get heard from once. That was rather a flaw, I thought; it’s just not interesting to hear the in-depth thoughts of a person whose not been heard of before or since. I ended up skimming the non-Pierre chapters, and waiting to hear more about his culinary (and other) experiences throughout his life. It’s mostly musings, rather than plot, but it works well from his self-obsessed persona.

And the writing? I still found it a little overwritten at times. Again, I don’t know whether it’s Barbery or Anderson (I assume Anderson conveyed the sort of writing Barbery chose), but there’s no excuse for sections like this:

The cave of treasures: this was it, the perfect rhythm, the shimmering harmony between portions, each one exquisite unto itself, but verging on the sublime by virtue of strict, ritual succession. The meatballs, grilled with the utmost respect for their firmness, had lost none of their succulence during their passage through fire, and filled  my professionally carnivorous mouth with a thick, warm, spicy, juicy wave of masticatory pleasure.

Shudder. But, for the most part, I could cope with the overblown rhetoric – it worked for the character. In fact, if I hadn’t read The Elegance of the Hedgehog, I might not have noticed it as much.

I don’t think I embraced all aspects of Arthens’ culinary memories as much as I have done, but that’s because most of the luscious descriptions are about meat and fish, which don’t appeal to this vegetarian. The odd moments when, say, asparagus took his fancy, I could enjoy it rather more.

So, has this Woman in Translation become a firm favourite? No, but I enjoyed reading the book, and certainly like Muriel Barbery more now than I did before.

Have you joined in Woman in Translation month? If not… it’s not too late!