Fitzcarraldo Editions

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.6

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Brian – Jeremy Cooper (2023) 180 pages

Brian by Jeremy Cooper is a book which I knew I would absolutely love. I’m always in the market for tales of loners finding their tribe and building tentative friendships, and Brian had the added bonus of being largely set at the British Film Institute (BFI) cinema on the South Bank. I’m not sure how long I’ve been a member of the BFI but I think it’s about 25 years. Like Brian, when I joined it was called the National Film Theatre (NFT) and it’s a place that has brought much joy over the years.

Brian works at Camden Council, enjoying the predictability of his self-devised filing system and trying to avoid socialising with his colleagues. He lunches every day at the same place with its friendly but unobtrusive manager Lorenzo, and heads home to his flat. He just about keeps his anxiety at bay, most of the time.

“Keep watchful. Stick to routine. Protect against surprise.”

We later learn of Brian’s early childhood trauma that has contributed to his way of living, without him being overly pathologized.

“Learn quick as lightning from your mistakes or die, his mother melodramatically threatened him as a boy. And meant it, he had come to understand.”

He changes his routine one day to attend a revival of a film he’d missed the first time round, Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales. This outing changes his life, as he finds the joy of the BFI programmes and how to not be in his flat, or entirely in his own company, in a way which isn’t overwhelming.

“Brian made the vital discovery that night that something he needed to be true proved to be so: that a nakedly emotional film on themes and feelings close to his own story did not necessarily shake alive his stifled memories of the past.

He was safe. The narratives of others were not his.”

In the foyer he notices a group of regulars chatting:

“Participation in the gathering of buffs appeared to be unconditional – the fact that they were all white males, no women, was more a matter of endemic social habit than the individual prejudice of the buffs, Brian felt, in recognition of his own narrow conventions.”

Cooper’s creation of the buffs is carefully balanced. They are enthusiasts, who welcome other enthusiasts. There is no gate-keeping of film, no declarations of what is a ‘good’ film. Any snobbery is side-stepped. As Brian discovers and develops an abiding love of mid-twentieth century Japanese film, he does so with feeling, without having to intellectualise it, although he always reflects and makes notes afterwards.

“Brian tended to experience film in the moment of watching, for what it meant to him right then, regardless of when it was made or set or how accurate in pretension it might or might not be.”

Time passes, and the BFI becomes another of Brian’s routines, but with the new contained within it: all the films to experience and explore. Alongside this, his relationships with the other buffs develop, albeit at snail’s pace:

“To Brian the most extraordinary occurrence during the first decade of his every-evening visit to the BFI was the incremental formation of what he had come to accept as friendship.”

Brian definitely had an extra resonance for me, describing a London I recognised, journeys I’ve undertaken and a particular place which has a special place in my heart. There were so many echoes, from grieving the closure of the Museum of the Moving Image to Brian being an inpatient at UCLH the same time as I worked there. But I hope my response won’t alienate anyone reading this post. It has such wide-ranging appeal beyond the specifics.

Brian is a beautifully tender novel about community, friendship, and passion. It shows the deep value of a life well-lived, when outwardly that life seems unremarkable, because it is quiet and deliberately demands so little of others. It is a novel about the value of art in our lives and the value of people in our lives, accepted on their own terms.

“Brian recognised for that his entire pre-BFI life he had been a mouse, a termite, shut in dark tunnels of his own creation. Not that he had now become a lion, of course not. More of a squirrel.”

There’s a lovely interview with Jeremy Cooper about writing Brian on the BFI website here.

“Words burst forth, recognised at last, while underneath other silences start to form.” (Annie Ernaux, The Years)

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#ReadIndies is running all month hosted by Kaggsy and Lizzy and it has meant I’ve finally got to a book that I’ve been meaning to read for ages: The Years by Annie Ernaux (2008, transl. Alison L. Strayer 2018) published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

A further incentive was that I really want to see the theatre adaptation which is currently running, and now I’ve read the book I have bought my ticket 😊

The Years is a book which deliberately avoids categorisation. Told in chronological order from 1941 to 2006 but in a fragmentary style, it is a memoir/autobiography/autofiction where Ernaux never uses the first person. She refers to ‘she’ for the more personal memories triggered by photographic images, and ‘we’ for considerations of the society and cultural influences experienced by ‘she’ at the time.

Growing up, she is aware of the poverty of her family, and dreams of escape. Ernaux captures so well the confusion of trying to find an authentic escape, trying to determine what she truly wants, alongside what advertising tells her she wants:

“Meanwhile, as we waited to be old enough to wear Rouge Baiser lipstick and perfume by Bourjois with a j as in joy, we collected plastic animals hidden in bags of coffee, and from Menier chocolate wrappers, Fables of La Fontaine stamps that we swapped with friends at break time.”

“It seems to her that education is more than just a way to escape poverty. It is a weapon of choice against stagnation in a kind of feminine condition that arouses her pity, the tendency to lose oneself in a man.”

There are strong feminist themes running throughout The Years, as she grows up on the brink of societal change. At the start:

“Nothing, not intelligence, education, or beauty mattered as much as a girl’s sexual reputation, that is, her value on the marriage market, which mothers scrupulously monitored as their mothers had done before them.”

Yet the 1960s are on their way… Ernaux pulls no punches in detailing the tyranny of menstrual cycles, and of “kitchen table abortions” before the contraceptive pill arrives and pregnancy terminations are legalised.

“Between the freedom of Bardot, the taunting of boys who claimed that virginity was bad for the health, and the dictates of Church and parents, we were left with no choices at all.”

The Years is lightened by humour too, such as this wry observation regarding her young feminist:

“Two future goals coexist inside her: (1) to be thin and blonde, (2) to be free, autonomous, and useful to the world. She dreams of herself as Mylène Demongeot and Simone de Beauvoir.”

The Years is a powerful evocation of a woman’s life at a specific time. Ernaux demonstrates so clearly how lives are bound up with the culture and the wider political forces in which they take place. It is impossible to consider the life in The Years without considering France in the same period. Yet this is an observation which occurs as she looks back, not at the time:

“Between what happens in the world and what happens to her, there is no point of convergence. They are two parallel series: one abstract, all information no sooner received them forgotten, the other all static shots.”

But as she grows older:

“What is most changed in her is the perception of time and her own location within it.”

And yet,plus ca change plus c’est la même chose, as Ernaux notes consumerism and its false promises endure:

“More than a sense of possession it was this feeling people sought on the shelves of Zara and H&M, instantly granted upon acquiring things, a supplement of being.”

The fragmentary style in The Years is perfect example of an experimental style being grounded by the story it wishes to tell, rather than being employed just for the sake of being different or to demonstrate the author’s cleverness. It conveys the experience of memory as well as the memories themselves. As a reader you are drawn into the layering of images, feelings and experiences in such a direct and immersive way, with all the intimacy of a first-person narrative despite the fact that Ernaux never articulates ‘I’.

“Everything will be erased in a second. The dictionary of words amassed between cradle and death bed, eliminated. All there will be is silence and no words to say it. Nothing will come out of the open mouth, neither I nor me. Language will continue to put the world into words. In conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.”

“Walk on by.” (Dionne Warwick)

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This my second contribution- just in time!-  to the wonderful ReadIndies event which has been running all month, hosted by Karen and Lizzy.

Initially I planned for this post to be two novellas published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, in honour of the event’s origins as Fitzcarraldo Fortnight. However, the second novella I read was so unrelentingly brutal and grubby – though expertly written and translated – that ultimately I couldn’t recommend it that much. So instead this post covers the initial Fitzcarraldo novella which I loved, and the independently published novel I read after the second novella in order to recover!

Firstly, The Fallen by Carlos Manuel Álvarez (2018 trans. Frank Wynne 2019) which forms a stop on my Around the Word in 80 Books challenge as it’s set in Cuba. The story follows one family over a short period, each member narrating a chapter at a time.

The mother, Mariana, is experiencing black-outs and fits, attributed to the treatment she had for womb cancer. Her husband Armando is a manager in a state-owned tourist hotel, committed to the communist ideals of the past even as the world moves on around him. His daughter María works with him and helps care for Mariana:

“I didn’t want to contradict her, I simply stood and watched. Just then, she hunched over and the strangest thing happened. Her face drained away, seemed to contract, like when you clench a fist, as though everything was drawing back around her nose. Her eyes fell, her forehead and mouth shrivelled and her cheeks began to wither. Then she burst into tears and collapsed.”

Meanwhile her brother Diego is completing his military service, devoid of any commitment to the cause:  

“Armando, indefatigable, continued inoculating me with his positive energy, his moral code, his inexhaustible optimism, injecting me with a radioactive material that, on contact with the real world, simply exploded like acid in a burst battery and was transformed into frustration. I’m eighteen years old but I feel like an old man.”

All the characters are flawed in their different ways but all are recognisably human and sympathetic. I felt most for poor Armando, surrounded by corruption that nobody cared about but him:

“The truth is, they were firing him because he refused to accept others stealing, but since they couldn’t tell him that, they told him they were dismissing him for stealing,”

The contrast between Armando and his children effectively  demonstrates the tension between the ideals of the past and the reality of the present. However, this is never done at the expense of characterisation the individual relationships. The tension within a family, vulnerable to disintegration as the health of its matriarch deteriorates, felt very real.

The polyphonic style builds up a picture of a loving family with all it’s frustrations, secrets and things left unsaid. It also demonstrates the differing responses of people to the same situation as we hear the same events given a different meaning by the various characters. This wasn’t at all frustrating as Álvarez managed to sustain an engaging and coherent narrative.

I really loved this novella. I thought the language was beautiful without obscuring the difficulties it was exploring for the family, and the device of using one family to explore wider Cuban society and history didn’t feel at all clunky or contrived.

“The acrid smell that tickled my grandfather’s nostrils still lingers. This is a pueblo fecund with the dry bittersweet dust of horseshit and with the sea a few kilometres away, even if we turn our back on it. The last street in the pueblo, the street that leads to the train station, the street where my grandfather settled, where my father started out in life, where later I started out, is broad but deserted, with much light on the asphalt, with light that trickles down the gutters and lighting the potholes, as though light were contained in a glass and the glass had tipped over. No one comes here.”

Secondly, the delightfully titled Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney (2017) published by Daunt Books. This was a lovely escapist read – just the ticket after the second traumatic novella.

It’s New Year’s Eve in 1984, and the titular heroine is one year older than the century (although no-one knows this as she routinely lies about her age). Having moved to New York City when she started out on her career, she dons her fur coat (yuck) and her flame orange lipstick, to take a circuitous route around the city she loves – just about:

“The city I inhabit now is not the city that I moved to in 1926; It has become a mean-spirited action movie complete with repulsive plot twists and preposterous dialogue.

[…]

I love it here, this big rotten apple. I’m near my old haunts, my Sycamore trees, my trusty RH Macy’s.”

Lillian became an advertising copywriter for the famous store, the highest-paid woman in the industry in the 1930s, pioneering her own particular style:

“Nobody was funnier than I was, not for a long time, not for years. Mine was a voice that no one had heard speaking in advertisement before, and I got them to listen. To listen and then, more importantly, to act on what they’d heard.”

Lillian is based on the real person of Margaret Fishback, and the novel was written with the cooperation of Margaret’s family, with Lillian’s quoted copy actually belonging to Margaret.

Certainly Lillian’s memories of her life in New York seem authentic as she navigates a sexist working world unused to professional women. This may sound reminiscent of Mad Men, but I would say it’s not nearly as dark. It’s not totally light either – we learn Lillian had some very difficult times – but Lillian is resilient and peppy, and her voice rings out.

Like Mad Men though, Lillian Boxfish… brilliantly evokes a time and a place. You gain a wonderful sense of New York in the early decades of the twentieth century, with it’s rapid, optimistic growth, ever skywards.

“It was freshly built when Helen and I moved in, completed in 1926. The street noise then was different than now – everything was being constructed, going up, up, up. Progress is loud: riveters riveting, radios blaring.”

We hear about Lillian’s friends, her marriage to the dashing Max (contrary to all her plans) and raising her son Gian. But most of all we hear about Lillian’s relationship with herself, and it is one that has not always been easy:

“But there was no way to know, and no way to go back. I could not revise. I had been who I had been, and so I largely remained.”

Still, Lillian remains undaunted and in her ninth decade she remains interested in people. She encounters a few on her night-time perambulation, seemingly enjoying chatting about the mundane as much as she does the more dramatic encounters. Her career long behind her, she retains her pithy turn of phrase:

“Salt and pepper hair shellacked into an oceanic sweep above his leonine face. Like so many public television people, he was a former radio guide, with a voice made for broadcasting: even his name sounded like an avuncular chuckle.”

I really enjoyed my time with Lillian. Her voice was distinct, unique and entertaining. She described the love of her life – New York City – with clearsighted affection. A formidable woman, and a likable one.

“I am not going to stay off the street. Not when the street is the only thing that still consistently interests me, aside from maybe my son and my cat. The only place that feels vibrant and lively. Where things collide. Where the future comes from.”

To end, Lillian is haunted by a song she keeps hearing on the streets, a rap that she enjoys. Finally, it is identified for her:

“I am always late on principle.” (Oscar Wilde)

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After getting off to a pretty good start with my Women in Translation Month reading, I stalled badly with my final post. Although I read these two novels during August, writing about them in time for WIT Month 2021 (hosted by Meytal at Biblio) proved an insurmountable task. I still hope one day to get my blogging back on track but clearly August 2021 was not where this miracle was going to occur!

So here we are in September and I’m revisting two authors I’ve enjoyed in the past. When I decided to write on them initially I didn’t consider any connected themes, but there are some: ideas of home, otherness, what it means to live among a community, unlikely friendships, coming to terms with aging.

Firstly, Miracle on Cherry Hill by Sun-Mi Hwang (2019, trans. Chi-Young Kim 2019).  I enjoyed the simplicity of The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly and found it very moving, so I was looking forward to this. I also thought – rightly – that it shouldn’t be too traumatic, given I’m a delicate flower at the moment.  Like The Hen… this is a quick read with no great surprises, but that’s not a criticism, as it still offers a rich story with fully realised characters.

Miracle on Cherry Hill sees successful business leader Kang Dae-su move back to his childhood home town having been diagnosed with a brain tumour (named Sir Lump). He plans to hole up in a huge, fenced-off house, away from any company to see out his days.

“Cherry Hill was an outdated name. New apartment buildings had uprooted nearly every last cherry tree around it, like insects gnawing through greenery. Only one old original house remained in this neighbourhood, near the bus stop, because the woods surrounded it and the owner was stubborn. He also owned all the land surrounding the house, At least, that’s what they said – nobody had ever laid eyes on the owner.”

Things don’t go quite according to Kang’s plan. For a start, the townspeople have used his property while he has been absent. The children play hide-and-seek in the grounds, an elderly woman with dementia grows vegetables, her granddaughter Yuri exercises her puppy and collects hens eggs.

“How dare Sir Lump pity him? He heard something coasting along with the wind, something like humming. Kang remained on his back. If he concerned himself with every singing animal or person who was evidently trespassing on his property the tumour would swell and burst from sheer irritation.”

Despite Kang’s irritation, a series of comic events demonstrate it’s better to share his garden for continued use by the town. What’s more, he even invites people in, recognising troubled youngster Sanghun would benefit from being employed to mow his lawns.

As Kang begrudgingly becomes involved in the life of the town and the people who live there, he becomes reconciled to his past, and the pain from childhood he has been holding onto begins to heal.

“Each of these new discoveries left him with a refreshing sensation, as if a cold drop of water was falling into the depths of his heart. These feelings had to be carefully swallowed down.”

Miracle on Cherry Hill is a sweet tale, but not sentimental as it tackles some difficult issues. It’s fabulistic but also recognisably real. It’s poignant and playful, and as someone who loves a redemption story I found it charming.

Secondly, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (2009 trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones 2018) which was a highly anticipated read for me, having loved Flights. For some reason I didn’t count that read on my Around the World in 80 Books Reading Challenge, so Drive Your Plow… has formed my Poland visit.

This is a very different reading experience to Flights, which was fragmentary and mixed different genres. In contrast, Drive Your Plow… is more linear and plot-driven. However, it is still a complex novel that resists easy categorisation. I really loved it.

Janina Duszejko is a middle-aged woman with mysterious ailments, who hates her name and lives alone in a remote part of Poland:

“All you can see on the map is a road and a few houses. It’s always windy here, as waves of air come pouring across the mountains from west to east from the Czech Republic. In winter the wind becomes violent and shrill, howling in the chimneys. In summer it scatters amongst the leaves and rustles – it’s never quiet here.”

This harsh and isolated landscape suits Janina, as she is viewed as eccentric and regards people warily. When she engages in company, it is in her own way:

“What a lack of imagination it is to have official first names and surnames. No one ever remembers them, they’re so divorced from the Person, and so banal they don’t remind us of them at all…That’s why I try my best never to use first names or surnames, but prefer epithets that come to mind of their own accord the first time I see the Person.”

Janina is a fan of Blake and this is reflected not only in the title of he novel and the epigraphs, but also her Fondness for Capitalising for Emphasis, which I thought a nice touch and added to the sense of her unique voice.

At the start of the novel, Janina is disturbed by her neighbour Oddball, who asks her to come with him to check on another neighbour, Big Foot. He is dead, having choked on a bone. Janina doesn’t grieve for him as he was part of the local hunting club, and she much prefers animals to humans. Sadly her “Little Girls” – her two dogs – have disappeared.

As other members of the hunting club die – all local powerful men, all seemingly pretty unpleasant – Janina shares her theory with the police that animals are taking their revenge for the cruelties enacted upon them. This theory is supported by her astrological studies, and is completely ignored by the authorities:

“Once we have reached a certain age, it’s hard to be reconciled to the fact that people are always going to be impatient with us.”

The mystery of the deaths of the men isn’t the heart of the novel though. Although the blurb on mine describes it as ‘an existential thriller’ I wouldn’t even go that far.  For me the driving force of the story is the character of Janina and how she exposes attitudes to women, to aging; the power of the patriarchy, of money; and the disregard of anyone who is inconvenient to conventional society. She does this simply by existing and narrating how people respond to her.

I should warn readers here that the novel does describe cruelty to animals. Because Janina is appalled by it, the scenes are never dwelt on, but they are important to the story. This can make it a tough read but that is precisely the point – to question the horrors of how animals are treated. Drive Your Plow… was adapted into a film called Spoor in 2017 and I was going to end with the trailer, but even then there are some pretty grim scenes so I opted not to.

Drive Your Plow… raises important, complex themes through the voice of a truly memorable narrator. There is a dry humour running through the novel, but it also doesn’t pull its punches. The landscape is beautifully evoked and the characterisation compassionate. It will stay with me for a long time.

“As I gazed at the black and white landscape of the Plateau, I realised that sorrow is an important word for defining the world. It lies at the foundations of everything, it is the fifth element, the quintessence.”

To end, a song about a town community:

“A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike.” (John Steinbeck)

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This is my second post for Women in Translation Month (WITMonth) hosted by Meytal at Biblibio, and I’m hoping its also a sign that my blogging slump is coming to an end – fingers crossed! This week I’ve chosen two books linked by the theme of travel.

Firstly, Flights by Olga Tokarczuk (2007, trans. Jennifer Croft 2017) which won the International Man Booker Prize last year.

Flights is quite a hard book to review, as it’s aptly titled and resists being pinned down in any way. It’s fiction, non-fiction, essay, philosophical musing, travelogue, digression… yet this fragmentary style still holds together and works as a whole. The unity is found through the recurring themes of travel, movement, restless and flight; and also of the human body at its most visceral – the collection of bone, muscle, skin and blood that enables human locomotion.

“A thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence; that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity.”

The fiction sections include a man whose wife and son disappear when they are on holiday in Croatia; the wife of an elderly professor who is taken ill on a cruise; a woman who leaves her young family to live on the streets… all in perpetual motion. There are also historical sections looking at the fate of Chopin’s heart; the first naming of the Achilles tendon; cadaver preservation techniques, among other bodily concerns. The focus on the organic reality of living stops Flights from becoming too flighty, grounding all the fragments in a corporeal existence.

The consistent voice also ties these different pieces together, the sense that we are being told these stories, historical fragments and observations by the same narrator, a female traveller. She sets the focus on travel as she describes the airports, planes, buses and terminals she finds herself waiting in, and her conversations with those who cross her path:

“She says that sedentary peoples, farmers, prefer the pleasures of circular time, in which every object and event must return to its own beginning, curl back up into an embryo and repeat the process of maturation and death. But nomads and merchants, as they set off on journeys, had to think up a different time for themselves, that would better respond to the needs of their travels. That time was linear time.”

Flights is a book you can dip into or read in a linear fashion. I did the latter and I’m glad I did as I could pick up the echoes across the different narratives that give a sense of unity to the book and to the world it evokes. However, it could work just as well by reading a section and focussing closely on it, as Tokarczuk’s writing is so rich. She has described her style as one of constellations, and the reason behind this individual approach is noted in Flights:

“Constellation, not sequencing, carries truth.”

Not a book for when you want a good meaty plot, but I still found it a compulsive read as well as a thought-provoking one.

 

Secondly, The Expedition to the Baobab Tree by Wilma Stockenstrom (1981, trans. JM Coetzee 1983) which is set in South Africa and so forms another stop on my Around the World in 80 Books reading challenge, hosted by Hard Book Habit.

I felt a bit conflicted when I started this: the story of a young slave girl told by a white South African was problematic for me. I looked on Goodreads and no-one else seemed to have this issue. Then I thought that at the time of writing, when black South African voices were so thoroughly suppressed, maybe writing this was a huge political statement.

(I once attended a debate about queer/transgender stories being staged. One side felt only those who identified as queer/trans should tell those stories. The other side felt it was fine for straight/cis artists to tell such stories so long as they did their research and the resulting art was sensitive. The wider issue is something I often come back to and think about, and something I’m still thinking through, as I did with this novella.)

The Expedition to the Baobab Tree is beautifully written and certainly a sensitive portrayal of a woman finding autonomy for the first time as she lives in the hollow of the titular tree on the southern African veld.

“I know the interior of my tree as a blind man knows his home, I know its flat surfaces and grooves and swellings and edges, its smell, its darknesses, its great crack of light […] I can say: this is mine. I can say: this is I. These are my footprints.”

The woman has ended up stranded in the veld as a doomed commercial expedition by her last owner has failed spectacularly. With no-one making demands on her for the first time, the woman is free to think and reflect:

“If I could write, I would take up a porcupine quill and scratch your enormous belly full from top to bottom. I would clamber up as far as your branches and carve notches in your armpits to make you laugh. Big letters. Small letters. In a script full of lobes and curls, in circumambient lines I write round and round you, for I have so much to tell of a trip to a new horizon that became an expedition to a tree.”

Like Flights, The Expedition to the Baobab Tree is not a straight narrative. It moves back and forth in time, with no named places or persons, It has an almost hallucinatory quality – and the narrator may be hallucinating at times, given her exposure and lack of food –  but this never detracts from the horrors she has experienced. There are times she was treated well, but she was also repeatedly assaulted, raped, and had all her children taken as babies. We are the witnesses to her experience, recounted poetically but unflinchingly.

“One time I fled from the tree. I ran aimlessly into the veld, trying to get out of its sight by hiding behind a high round rock, and I opened my mouth and I brought out a sound that must be the sound of a human being because I am a human being and not a wildebeest […] but a human being that talks and I brought out a sound and produced an accusation and hurled it up at the twilight air.”

This is a short, powerful read with a distinctive female narrator who demands to be heard.

To end, a tenuously-linked 80s video as usual 😉 Well, the title offers travel advice! I’ve chosen it especially for Kate as she’s seeing a-ha soon: