novels in translation

“The story of our lives still isn’t finished, and it never will be.” (Beatriz Bracher, Antonio)

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Trigger warning: mentions mental illness and infant death.

Stu over at WinstonsDad’s blog is hosting Spanish Portuguese Lit Month for the whole of July and so this was the perfect opportunity to get to a novella by Brazilian author Beatriz Bracher which had been languishing in the TBR: Antonio (2007, transl. Adam Morris 2021) published by the wonderful Pushkin Press.

I want to start with the disclaimer that I don’t think I’ve really got to grips with Antonio, so this post is just some initial impressions. Although only 187 pages long it is incredibly densely written and it took me a week to read. Admittedly work has been really demanding lately, but usually it still wouldn’t take me that long to read a book of that length.

Also looking online, there are many effusive reviews praising the socio-political commentary of Antonio, which I’m sure I didn’t fully comprehend. I did pick up some, but I’m certain I need to re-read Antonio at some point.

The novella is told through the alternating viewpoints of three people: Raul, Isabel and Haroldo. Their silent interlocutor is Benjamim, who is awaiting the birth of his first child, the titular Antonio. The imminent arrival of his son has prompted Benjamim to probe into his family history in more depth.

“I’d like to think your mother was also a free person, and maybe you can hold onto that thought, instead of clinging to fear and rage.”

Benjamim knows that his father was Teodoro and that his mother was  Elenir.  Elenir had a son with Benjamim’s grandfather Xavier first, who they also called Benjamim and who died very young. The second Benjamim was raised by his father after his mother died in childbirth.  

Raul is his father’s friend, Isabel is his paternal grandmother, and Haroldo was Benjamim’s grandfather’s friend. They all provide histories of Benjamim’s family that echo and contradict each other, and none seem any more reliable or authoritative than any other. Each has their own truth.

The family is well-off and privileged in São Paulo, but their history is a troubled one. Both Xavier and Teodoro had periods of intense mental illness.

For Xavier, this occurred after the death of Benjamim. As Haroldo recalls:

“[Elenir] looked like a bent piece of wood. She didn’t cry. She received each condolence with correct politeness. Xavier was the total opposite: he was in pieces […] I managed to gain entry to that hell three times. The last time, I brought a team of nurses, to drag my friend out of there and take him to a sanatorium.”

Later, Xavier meets and marries Isabel and they raise a family. They are the generation that came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, idealistic and, in Isabel’s case, driven:

“In a family we’re always a me or and I who’s scattered and complex. It’s only at work, especially work that has to do with ideas, but it’s possible to feel ourselves out and let the contours assume the shape.”

Their youngest son Teo rejects the urban privilege he is born into and goes to live in rural Minas. He throws himself into village life but ultimately becomes rudderless and unwell. Isabel reminds Benjamim of his early childhood:

“You’re from this family, so you are this family. Your father wanted to be rid of all that, and shed himself along with it. The history that he crafted for himself in Minas was a non-history. He went too deep. By the time I brought him back, there was nothing left to hold onto, no handle I could use to hoist him back out: only damaged pieces.”

This is one of central themes of Antonio: how to live an authentic and conscious life, but not be overwhelmed by the search for meaning. How to truly find who you are, alongside the demands of daily life. Isabel believes the answer is hard work, but only Big Work. Haroldo points out:

“She raised a bunch of irresponsible ingrates who are incapable of the most basic displays of solidarity, like visiting their dying mother. Isabel cultivated a true horror of responsibility in them, and at the same time overloaded them with the responsibility to be nothing but the best.”

Isabel recognises that privilege brings responsibility, but she also remains an elitist. When she observes: “I never understood any language that wasn’t well spoken Portuguese.” she is being both literal and metaphorical. The family’s wealth isn’t what it once was and she is unhappy at her children’s middle-class existence.

To me Isabel was the strongest of the three narrators and I got a real sense of her. But Raul, living an ordinary life and baffled by what happened to his childhood friend, and the somewhat reprehensible, colourful Haroldo were also distinct characters if not entirely differing voices, and Bracher balances the three viewpoints well.

I’ve focused on some of the ideas rather than the events of Antonio and that is partly because the novella has some graphic scenes in it – of extensive mental breakdown, one of pig-killing and one of caring for a dead body by someone who doesn’t know what they are doing. None of these are gratuitous but they mean Antonio can be very difficult to read in places.

Bracher avoids conclusions about the causes of Xavier and Teo’s ill health and whether there is a genetic component or whether it is the demands of society on the individual. She vividly, sometimes viscerally, evokes the pressures of family and the search for self in late twentieth-century Brazil.

“To live long and stay well, stay away from your relatives.”

“The cat is, above all things, a dramatist.” (Margaret Benson)

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This is my contribution to Reading the Meow hosted by Mallika at Literary Potpourri, a fantastic week-long celebration of literature inspired by our feline friends!

A Cat, A Man and Two Women by Junichiro Tanizaki (1936, transl. Paul McCarthy 2015) is published by the ever-wonderful Daunt Books and I really liked the simple cover:

There seems to have been a flurry in recent years of slightly whimsical stories about cats and I thought ACAMATW would be one of these, I’m not sure why. The prospect was fine with me, I don’t mind whimsy if I’m in the right mood and I adore cats. But in fact this wasn’t whimsical at all. It was a psychological study – albeit a gentle one – of three people and the catalyst (no pun intended but I’m happy its there 😀 ) of their shared pet.

I would just like to pause (paws?) here to let you know that my typing is being severely hampered by my calico cat sitting on my lap, demanding attention – and my tuxedo cat (her brother) has just arrived and there’s a bit of a turf war ensuing…

The titular cat of this novella is Lily, adored companion of Shozo. The story opens with his ex-wife Shinako appealing to his new wife Fukuko to let her have Lily. Her letter emphasises Shozo’s adoration of Lily and Shinako deliberately sets a cat among the pigeons (ha! I’m only a little bit sorry for this 😀 ) of the new marriage,

Even Shozo, feckless in the extreme, notices the change.  

“Could Fukuko be jealous of Lily? He considered this possibility for a moment but then dismissed it as making no sense. After all, Fukuko herself was basically fond of cats. When Shozo was living with his former wife, Shinako, he had sometimes mentioned her occasional jealousy of the cat to Fukuko who had always made rather scornful fun of this silliness.”

Shozo requests his wife cook meals she doesn’t enjoy, so he can share them with Lily. I’m not surprised Fukuko is annoyed:

“Fukuko had been prepared to sacrifice her own taste for her husband’s sake, while in fact it was for the cat that she cooked; she had become a companion to the cat.”

(Update: turf war won by the tuxedo. Calico has stalked off in disgust. Tuxedo determined to rest on my dominant hand and impede my typing.)

The tensions in the marriage centre around Lily, but really have nothing to do with her. She merely highlights Shozo’s lack of drive and inability to engage fully in relationships, except with his cat.

“When he heard people with no knowledge of a cat’s character saying that cats were not as loving as dogs, that they were cold and selfish, he always thought to himself how impossible it was to understand the charm and lovableness of a cat if one had not, like him spent many years living alone with one.”

Shozo isn’t unsympathetic. His mother is manipulative and choosing Lily seems to be one of the rare independent choices Shozo has made. He has had a longer relationship with Lily than either of his wives and his bond with the cat is meaningful to him.

“It was Lily, with whom he’d lived so long, who was more intimately bound up with many memories of his; who formed, in fact, an important part of Shozo’s past.”

Tanizaki does a great job of portraying Lily as a very believable feline, without attributing human motivations or emotions to her. He leaves this to his three human protagonists, who fail to see she is not a strategist in these adult negotiations.

Shinako gets her wish, and the cat she was indifferent to arrives at her sister’s home, where Shinako now has a room. Gradually, she finds herself discovering new emotional territory, thanks to Lily:

“When she thought of the link that bound them together, her anger faded; and she felt, rather, that both of them were to be pitied.”

“Other people had told her so often that she was hard hearted, she had come to believe it herself. But when she considered how much trouble she had put herself to recently for Lily’s sake, she was surprised, wondering where these warm and gentle feelings had been hiding all this time.”

But will Shozo want his cat back? Will Shozo and Fukuko’s marriage survive without Lily to blame for the irritations and lack of understanding?

Tanizaki has a great understanding of cats and of people which makes this novella really shine. The humour is gentle and the psychological observations astute. The ending is left very open which didn’t wholly work for me but this is a minor quibble in regard to this engaging and insightful novella.

ACAMATW was adapted into the film A Cat, Shozo and Two Women in 1956. The summary on Wikipedia makes me think the filmmakers opted for a less open-ended conclusion to the story. From this clip the cat actor looks a lot more tolerant than my two would be 😀

“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” (e. e. cummings)

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The blurb on the cover of my edition of Grown Ups by Marie Aubert (2019 transl. Rosie Hedger 2021) pushes it as ‘the perfect summer read’ and ‘pure escapism’ with which I couldn’t disagree more. Obviously we all have different reactions to books, but for me a novella (154 pages) about a woman coming to terms with her rapidly reducing choices regarding fertility, while at the summer house of her family with all its inherent tensions and rivalries, didn’t feel remotely escapist. Even when it’s darkly humorous and set in a log cabin in Norway 😉

Grown Ups features a very unlikable protagonist in Ida. She behaves really badly by anyone’s standards. But she was also recognisable and (somewhat) sympathetic.

At the start of the novel she is at a Swedish clinic having her eggs frozen:

“One day, I thought as I lay there in the gynaecology chair, one day things have to work out, one day, after a long line of married and otherwise committed and uninterested and uninteresting men, things have to work out, just lying there made me believe both men and child might materialise, just the fact that I was there and actually doing it was a promise that there was more to come, one day.”

I really felt for Ida. As the quote shows, she is feeling a bit desperate regarding the future as she turns forty, but pinning her hopes on a fantasy. As the story develops, the ambivalence she feels about what that future might look like is subtly portrayed. She doesn’t really seem to like children very much, but she doesn’t want that choice taken away from her. If she truly wants a committed relationship, why does she keep seeking out men who are already committed to someone else?

She travels to the family summerhouse in Norway for her mother’s birthday. Her sister Marthe is there with her husband Kristoffer and step-daughter Olea. The sisters relationship is full of long-held petty tensions, but it felt like they could actually be really close if they would just step outside of these entrenched behaviours. It doesn’t help that Marthe has redecorated the cabin without asking or even discussing it with Ida. She is also pregnant.

“‘I’m not as tough as you are,’ Marthe says, sounding a little sarcastic. It’s always the same, every summer, I’m quick to get into the water while Marthe takes her time, and then we each make digs about which approach is best.”

One of the hardest things to read in the book is Ida’s treatment of Olea. Recognising that Olea and Marthe don’t get on, Ida manipulates the child to increase her opposition to Marthe, just to prove something to Marthe and herself. She seems to have no fondness for Olea, and everything is performative rather than felt or understood.

“I’m the grown up now, I’m good at this. My tone is calm and kind, it feels familiar, like how things ought to be […] See, Marthe, I can do this, I’m the one who’s supposed to be doing this.”

Ida is destructive in her behaviour but only half-recognises this. I felt with Olea she didn’t really see the child as a person so didn’t fully recognise what she was doing. Flirting with Kristoffer on the other hand, she is fully aware of…

I’m making Ida sound more unlikable than she is and not doing justice to Aubert’s subtlety at all! The hurt Ida is experiencing is so clear, she is just seeking entirely flawed ways of managing that pain. Although she mentions friends, they are not named and she comes across as very isolated, particularly when her mother arrives with partner Stein.

“I feel the injustice, rampant and raging, there’s no one there to console me”

There’s also a passage where Ida describes dating and her hopes for more, where my heart just broke for her. It was filled with so much anger and loathing towards herself.

I looked on goodreads and yep, some readers really hated Ida 😀 But for me, while a lot of her behaviour was downright awful, I thought she was realistically portrayed as someone who has grown up thinking love is conditional and now doesn’t know who she is or what she really wants.

Grown Ups is well paced and things aren’t all tied up neatly at the end, which I liked as it didn’t undermine Ida’s situation or her feelings. I did have a sense Ida would carry on but maybe do a bit better. Unlike at the start of the story, there was hope for her grounded in something real.

To end, two sisters who seem to get on better than Ida and Marthe, singing about the struggles of trying to be grown up and a problem Ida has definitely experienced:

“Never despise the translator. He’s the mailman of human civilization.”(Alexander Pushkin)

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This week I thought I’d use Kaggsy and Lizzy’s #ReadIndies event to focus on one indie publisher, and finally get to four books that have long been languishing in the TBR. Pushkin Press “publish some of the twentieth century’s most widely acclaimed and brilliant authors” and they are one of my favourite indies, ever-reliable. Which hasn’t stopped four from their Collection series remaining unread by me for far too long!

Today I’m starting with The Buddha’s Return by Gaito Gazdanov (1949-50, transl. Bryan Karetnyk 2014). Gazdanov was a Russian writer exiled in France and this short novel, described by the publishers as “part detective novel, part philosophical thriller, and part love story” is set in Paris, as much as it is set anywhere – reality is not a consistent concept in this story at all.

The narrator is a student who is experiencing prolonged periods of hallucinations. He tells us from the start that he is an unreliable storyteller:

“Nowhere was there any logical pattern in this, and the shifting chaos clearly failed to present even a remote semblance of any harmonious order. And so, accordingly, at that point in my life, which was marked by the constant attendance of chaos, my inner existence acquired an equally false unwavering character.”

We slide back and forth between a recognisable reality of his poverty-stricken life in Paris and his disturbing, disorienting visions, without always knowing which is which. Early on in the novel he falls to his death from a sheer mountainside, later he is arrested and interrogated by the Central State. The government’s accusations of treason are entirely surreal and illogical, yet this is also what makes them horribly believable.

There is political commentary running through the novel, but the kaleidoscopic nature of the narrative means it is not a sustained satire on any particular country, ruler or party, but rather a wider condemnation:

“The ignorant, villainous tyrants who so often ruled the world, and the inevitable and loathsome apocalyptic devastation apparently inherent in every era of human history.”

Around halfway through, more of a plot emerges as Pavel Alexandrovich, an older man whom the student befriended, is murdered and his golden statuette of Buddha stolen. As the last person to see Alexandrovich alive, the student falls under suspicion. The real-life interrogation by the investigators has shades of the surreal fantasy interrogation by the Central State:

“If we can find the statuette, you’ll be free to return home and continue your research on the Thirty Years War, the notes on which we found in your room. I must say, however, that I completely disagree with your conclusions, and in particular your appraisal of Richelieu.”

As that quote shows, there is humour in The Buddha’s Return and this lightens a tale which has a lot of dark elements: visceral war scenes, squalor, and of course murder.

Apparently, The Buddha’s Return was originally published in instalments and I can see it would work well in this format. I enjoyed it but for me the more plot-driven second half arrived at just the right time, when I’d started to feel it was losing momentum. As it was I enjoyed this consistently surprising tale which still had enough recognisable humanity in it to be involving, and I’d be keen to read more by Gazdanov.

“I have a suspicion that you just dreamt the whole thing up. It’s because you read too much, eat too little and spare hardly any thought for the most important thing at your age: love.”

“All fiction is about people, unless it’s about rabbits pretending to be people.” (Margaret Atwood)

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This is my first contribution to Kaggsy and Lizzy’s wonderful #ReadIndies event, running all month. The Rabbit Factor by Antti Tuomainen (2021, transl. David Hackston 2021) is published in the UK by Orenda Books, who describe themselves on their website as: “a small independent publisher based in South London. We publish literary fiction, with a heavy emphasis on crime/thrillers, and roughly half the list is in translation.”

The Rabbit Factor is the first in a trilogy about actuary Henri Koskinen, which had somehow completely passed me by until I read Annabel’s review of the final part, The Beaver Theory. A little while later I saw The Rabbit Theory in my local charity bookshop and took it as A Sign. (As I have mentioned before, I’ll take pretty much anything as A Sign in that shop, and it always results in me buying more books 😀 )

Henri is a man who likes a well ordered, predictable life: “At the age of forty-two I had only one deep-held wish. I wanted everything to be sensible.”

His job as an actuary suits him, using mathematics to predict risk. Unfortunately, what doesn’t suit him is the modern workplace – open plan, noisy and full of corporate-speak about self-actualisation. He is forced into resigning by his boss who hides his bullying behind pseudo-beneficent jargon.

Not long after, Henri is told his brother Juhani has died and he has inherited YouMeFun, an adventure park (not an amusement park) in Vantaa. Unfortunately, before he died his brother inherited their parents’ chaotic approach to life and so Henri finds himself faced with:

“An unbearable lack of organisation, staggering maintenance bills, unproductive use of man hours, economical recklessness, promises nobody could keep, carts that quite literally moved at tortoise speed? I raised my fingers to my throat and checked the position of my tie. It was impeccable.”

Juhani was also in hock to gangsters, two of which – Lizard Man and henchman AK – keep turning up to menace Henri with horrible regularity and conviction. No less threatening, but considerably less violent, is police officer Osmala who similarly seems very interested in YouMeFun and Henri. And so Henri finds himself under enormous pressure and with only his maths skills to fall back on.

“I resigned because I couldn’t stand watching my workplace turn into a playground. Then I inherited one.”

I think maybe this novel passed me by because it can be classified under Nordic-noir, and I don’t read a great deal of that. What I read I enjoy, but I choose carefully because I am a delicate flower and not really in the market for gruesome crimes. Now, there are gruesome deaths in The Rabbit Factor, but I managed these fine. The details aren’t dwelt upon and they are surrounded by such surreal silliness that the focus is more on the ridiculousness of Henri’s situation than violence.

The tone is also not noirish. One of the blurbs in my edition mentions the Coen brothers, and this is a good parallel: while there is darkness to the tale, there is also humour and humanity. Henri’s unlikely colleagues include Esa, the US-marine obsessed security officer; sweet Kristian who is unable to see that his total ineptitude is what prevents him from becoming general manger; Minttu K who seems to know about marketing if she could only stop self-medicating with alcohol; Venla who never arrives for a shift; and quietly efficient Johanna who runs the kitchen and actually seems able to do her job.

There is also Laura Helanto, manager and frustrated artist, who causes feelings to arise in Henri that he doesn’t fully understand. It’s a confusing time for him all round…

“But recent events have taught me that what once seemed likely, as per the laws of probability, is more often than not in the realm of the impossible. And vice versa: what once I would have been able to discount through a simple calculation of probability ratios and risk analysis is now in fact the entirety of my life.”

I really enjoyed The Rabbit Factor. The deadpan narration of Henri is so well-paced that it manages to also be completely engaging. His focus on detail grounds the ridiculousness of his situation so it remains believable, carrying the reader along on Henri’s absurd journey.

“Even as a child I saw mathematics as the key. People betrayed us, numbers did not. I was surrounded by chaos, but numbers represented order.”

The characterisation is equally finely balanced. Henri and his colleagues could so easily be caricatures but instead you end up rooting for these disparate individuals. Tuomainen isn’t remotely sentimental but he is kind to the people he creates. The humour is derived from the situation, never laughing at the people themselves. They change under Henri’s stewardship, and he in return finds himself behaving in ways that surprise him more than anyone:

“I say something I could never have imagined hearing myself say. ‘This doesn’t make any sense. But it has to be done.’”

Last year I decided I would buy one book a month from an independent publisher or bookshop. I think Henri would agree that the probability of my next two purchases in this regard being his adventures in The Moose Paradox and The Beaver Theory are pretty high…

To end, I was so tempted to choose Chas & Dave’s Rabbit, as I absolutely loved that song when I was little (it was released when I was four years old, and I thought they were singing about actual rabbits). But alas, my adult sensibilities prevent me from adding a song about silencing women to the blog 😀 So instead here is a literature-inspired song about drugs rabbits:

“January, month of empty pockets! Let us endure this evil month.” (Colette)

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Happy Colette’s birthday! Regular readers will know how much I love Colette, and today I thought I’d look at two of her novellas which I had languishing in the TBR, La Vagabonde (The Vagabond) and L’Entrave (The Captive). Both follow periods in the life of Renée Néré, based on Colette’s experiences after her marriage to Willy ended.

In The Vagabond (1911, transl. © Martin Secker and Warburg 1954), Colette evokes beautifully her setting of Belle Époque music halls, and expertly weaves in her themes of aging, love and female freedom.

Renée has left her philandering husband Adolphe Taillandy and has no regrets about doing so. However, this has left her with no money, and so she has turned from her beloved writing to earn money on the stage.

“I had savoured the voluptuous pleasure of writing, the patient struggling with the phrase until it becomes supple and finally settles down, curled up like a tamed animal, the motionless lying in wait for a word by which in the end one ensnares it.”

She is in her early thirties, and painfully aware of aging in an industry that depends on appearance and artifice. Renée has a “face which is losing the habit of being looked at in daylight” and which poverty will not help. She enjoys the stage though, and the people in it.

“They swagger, tightly buttoned in a full-skirted overcoat of the fashion of two seasons ago; for the essential, the indispensable thing, is the possession not of a clean suit but of a ‘really classy’ overcoat which covers everything: threadbare waistcoat, shapeless jacket, trousers yellowed at the knees; a dashing, flashy overcoat, which makes an impression on the director or the agent, and which in the last resort enables one to throw off that ‘things aren’t shaping well’ in the jaunty tone of a man of means.”

Colette is not sentimental about the poverty or hardships of such a life. Early on she writes of the gradual but inevitable degradation of young chanteuse Jadin, in a way that is clear-sighted but heartbreaking.

Into Renée’s world comes Maxime Dufferein-Chautel, a rich feckless admirer. What follows is a love affair of sorts, one in which Renée never quite resolves her ambivalence.

“He does not want my well-being, this man, he merely wants me.”

“There are days when solitude, for someone of my age, is a heady wine which intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison which makes you beat your head against the wall.”

Maxime is not unpleasant or abusive, but he is pretty dull:

“I forgive him all this ordinariness for the sake of a simplicity which has nothing humble about it, and because he finds nothing to say about himself.”

And Renée is painfully aware that getting into a relationship with him may require more than she is willing to give. As her friend Hamond points out:

“Be frank, Renée, be clear sighted, and tell me whether all your sacrifices [within marriage] haven’t only lost their value in your eyes since you recovered your free will? You assess them at their true worth now that you no longer love.”

Renée is offered a tour and vacillates about whether to go. Ultimately she does and her letters to Maxime form the latter part of the novella, although we never see Maxime’s replies. The Vagabond is determinedly Renée’s story and her voice.

“This evening I should not feel sleepy, and the spell of a book – even a brand new book with that smell of printers ink and paper fresh from the press that makes you think of coal and trains and departures! – even that spell will not be able to distract me from myself.”

Despite The Vagabond’s various urban settings, there is still plenty for fans of Colette’s depictions of the natural world to enjoy, such as this description of early Spring in Paris:  

“Towards the end of the afternoon, a mauve mist veils the avenues so that you do not know where they end, and the unexpected discovery of a wild hyacinth, with its three slender bells of artless blue swaying in the wind, has all the charm of a stolen joy.”

The Vagabond is slightly plotted with very little happening. It is not a slight tale though, but rather a distinctive plea for female independence alongside a consideration of how to reconcile this with romantic love and material necessity.

“Are you not he who, thinking he is giving, takes for himself? You came to share my life. To share, yes: to take your share!”

The Captive (1913, transl. Antonia White 1964) is set three years later. Renée is now financially solvent due to a legacy and whiling away her time in the south of France. She is still living the itinerant hotel-based life, unable to fully adjust to her new circumstances: “when a dog has been kept a long time on a lead, it does not go prancing off the moment you undo the catch of its chain”.

She finds herself with an unlikely trio of friends. There is young May, self-mythologising and fragile:

“Nature has drawn all the features of laughter itself in her round childish face; a Cupid’s bow mouth that tilts up at the corners like her mischievous eyes, a short little nose with quivering nostrils. But gaiety is not a perpetual fidgeting that betrays a lack of security, it is not chatter full of recriminations, nor is it a craving for everything that intoxicates. Gaiety, it seems to me, is something calmer, something healthier, something more serious.”

There is also May’s brutish lover Jean, and their friend, the opium-addicted Masseau.

“Yes, I’ve had enough of those people, it’s true. But, besides beginning to know myself, I’m also beginning to know the advantages and disadvantages of this extraordinary part of the world where mornings are enchanting and the nights, however starry, make one shiver in the discomfort of a double climate. Here cold nights are not invigorating and warm nights throb with fever rather than with passion.”

At the beginning of the novel Renée is determined to remain celibate. However, for reasons that entirely escaped this reader, she is attracted to Jean.

“A kiss, and everything becomes simple and enjoyable and superficial – and also a trifle coarse.”

She leaves Nice for Geneva to try and resist him, but they are eventually reunited. Their affair is wholly unsatisfactory for both of them. Colette explores the experience of a relationship based on sexual attraction without emotional intimacy, when the latter is also desired by both but remains elusive.

“I have insulted this lover, out there alone in the soft spring night, restoring his own identity; I have insulted him by giving him my body and supposing that this was enough. He has returned the insult.”

Like The Vagabond, it is Renée’s thoughts and experiences that the reader is privy to. We know very little about Jean and even less about what he thinks and feels. While he is not likeable, the portrayal of the affair is quite even-handed, as Renée acknowledges how little she is able to give of herself. What she does give may be as much a performance as any she made on the stage:

“You pretend to love me, you do love me. Every minute your love creates a woman better and more beautiful than myself whom you forced me to resemble.”

Somehow I didn’t find The Captive too depressing, although I’m not entirely sure why. There is something resilient about Renée even when she seems to be taking such sad decisions. Although she is adrift at this point in her life, I felt there was some hope she’d start to feel more anchored within herself soon.

“The darkness is ebbing. A faint wind stirs the trees, bringing a green smell of trampled grass. Behind the plane trees, the mound of the fortifications is emerging from the dusk and the sky is taking on the colour of a field of blue flax the subdued, slightly grey, slightly melancholy tint over summer dawn over Paris.”

To end, I was looking for archive footage from Folies Bergère to reflect Renée’s career, which led me to loads of cabaret footage, which led me to loads of Cabaret footage, which led me to this performance by Liza Minelli. Basically all roads lead to Liza 😀 I’ll never not be astonished by how the chair doesn’t move until she wants it to – the woman must have abs of steel:

“Some things I cannot see until I write about them.” (Yuko Tsushima)

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I wasn’t planning on joining in Japanese Literature challenge 17 hosted by Meredith at Dolce Bellezza other than enjoying other bloggers wonderful posts. However this enthusiastic post by Marina Sofia on Tsushima Yūko’s Territory of Light meant I immediately started rooting through the TBR to find Child of Fortune (1978, transl. Geraldine Harcourt 1983), which I knew I had buried somewhere…

This is the first of her novels I’ve read and on the strength of this I definitely want to read more. Novella length, it tells the story of Kōko, a 36-year-old single mother to eleven-year-old Kayako. Told in the third person from Kōko’s perspective, it is a compelling examination of one woman’s inner world and her barely articulated resistance to the expectations placed on her.

Early in the novel, Kōko suspects she is pregnant. She is ambivalent about Osada, the father, as she is about most things. But gradually she realises that she wants to keep the child:

“Maybe she was reaching an age when it was senseless to want a fatherless child; but, precisely because of her age, she didn’t want to make a choice that she would regret till the day she died. Lately she was more convinced than ever that there was no point in worrying about what people thought. She would soon be thirty-seven. The only person watching Kōko at thirty-seven was Kōko. When this obvious fact finally came home to her it was still a surprise – what a very lonely fact it was!”

Geraldine Harcourt’s informative introduction explains that pregnancy at that age in Japan around this time could still be viewed as shameful even within marriage, so Kōko’s decision is doubly transgressive.

Kōko is an intriguing character, as she lives an unconventional life which places her in opposition to so many, by barely doing anything. Her lack of decision-making is an act of quiet but determined resistance.

Her sister Shoko is much more conventional and doesn’t approve; Kōko’s daughter Kayako much prefers to spend time with her more affluent, conformist aunt. Kōko tries to explain to Shoko:

“No, that’s not it – don’t think I’ve liked using choosing a different world from other people. I know I’ve been stubborn – but not about Kayako alone. All my life, though I often haven’t known which way to turn, I have managed to make choices of my own. I don’t know if they were right or wrong. I don’t think anyone can say that.”

But really she hasn’t made that many choices. She married because of pregnancy; husband Hatanaka organised the divorce years later, unsurprisingly as Kōko didn’t love him, still holding a candle for her lover Doi. She doesn’t enjoy her job teaching piano, but she also takes no steps to do anything else. She doesn’t take great care of herself and she doesn’t have many friends or interests.

Two driving forces in her life are her love for her brother, who died many years earlier, and sexual desire. The latter has led to her current predicament, the former suggests one reason that may be contributing to her lack of attachments.

“A little over a year ago, Kōko had understood something for the first time: the in the end she had let everything slip away from her, that in reality she hadn’t a single resource. It was an alarming discovery.”

Her lack of attachment includes reality – we are taken into Kōko’s dreams and daydreams, woven in seamlessly but disconcertingly.  As we move back and forth in time, learning about Kōko’s childhood, marriage, griefs and pains, Tsushima builds a picture of a woman who may not be completely likable but who is recognisably human and flawed, and muddling through the best way she knows how.

I was really rooting for Kōko to find a more articulate agency, and the penultimate scene was unbearably tense in this regard. Child of Fortune is never didactic yet absolutely achieves a compelling portrait of a woman fighting for her life, against immense societal pressure.   

“Kōko was shaken by the realisation that even now, more than twenty years later, she still lacked any compelling reason to go on living. And by the fact that the will to live was still there.”

To end, Kōko has fond memories of a visit to Karuizawa, which does look lovely:

PS When I was looking for a title quote for this post, I found this great conversation between Tsushima and Annie Ernaux.

“I think of a writer as a river: you reflect what passes before you.” (Natalia Ginzburg)

/ madamebibilophile / 26 Comments

A desperate scrabbling attempt to get a final post written for Women in Translation Month!

Daunt Books are such an interesting publisher and I was keen to read Natalia Ginzburg having heard wonderful things in the blogosphere, so I swooped on All Our Yesterdays (1952, transl. Angus Davidson 1956) when it turned up in my local charity bookshop. I think I’d read somewhere that this wasn’t the best place to start with this author, but I absolutely loved it.

The novel follows two families living in a northern Italian town from the 1930s, through the war years to peacetime. Although the blurb on the French flaps of my edition suggests Anna, the daughter of the poorer family, is the protagonist, really Ginzburg follows them all to a greater or lesser extent, with no overarching plot other than the sequence of years.

Although this approach sounds like a shortcoming, it works so well. It’s not a documentary novel but it gestures towards this with an omniscient neutral(ish) viewpoint and only reported speech. This felt unusual to read, but is so clever in capturing the everyday experiences of those living through extraordinary circumstances.

Anna’s siblings are Concettina, Ippolito, and Giustino. Concettina is popular with boys but struggles to find a purpose in life; Ippolito channels his energies into anti-Fascist activities with his friend from the richer family across the road:

“Emanuele and Ippolito did not even know Italy, they had never seen anything except their own little town, and they imagined the whole of Italy to be like their own little town, an Italy of teachers and accountants with a few workmen thrown in, but even the workmen and the accountants became rather like teachers in their imagination.”

Their lives are equally dictated by world events and by commonplace ones. Anna falls pregnant by her boyfriend and marries an eccentric older man, Cenzo Rena, moving with him to the southern village of Borgo San Costanzo. Her affair with her self-involved, callow boyfriend was no great passion, and while her marriage to Cenzo Rena attracts approbation, he is a warmer, more generous man than the one her own age.

“She was alone with Giuma’s face that gave her a stab of pain in her heart, and every day she would be going back with Giuma amongst the bushes on the river bank, every day she would see again that face with the rumpled forelock and the tightly closed eyelids, that face that had lost all trace both of words and of thoughts of her.”

These are people destined to be on the outskirts of war. Cenzo Rena holds a lot of sway in his local area and does help Jewish people fleeing the Nazi occupation, but on the whole the story of All Our Yesterdays is not one involving soldiers or revolutionaries. It is about ordinary people and for them the conflicts of war are reported facts not lived experience. The latter for them includes a lot of mundanity:

“And the bread in town was rationed and was a kind of soft, grey dough that you couldn’t ever digest, the bread was like the soap and the soap was like the bread, both washing and eating had become very difficult.”

Yet this doesn’t mean the story isn’t affecting, or that the characters avoid tragedy. There are some truly tragic events that are hugely affecting. Ginzburg manages to be even-handed in her treatment of her characters but not detached. Her writing is warm but unsentimental as she demonstrates that flawed people are as worthy of love and mourning as idealised ones.

In case I’ve made it sound unremittingly serious, I should mention that there humour in All Our Yesterdays too. There are romantic entanglements that are treated with a degree of levity, and eccentric housekeepers/family retainers with various foibles. All life is here.

I can’t think of another writer who approaches Ginzburg’s style, and looking back on it I can’t explain how she does what she does. This was a story that snuck up on me, the deceptively simple storytelling drawing me in more than I realised until I was totally immersed. An extraordinary novel.

“Fanfares of trumpets usually announced only small, futile things, it was away fate had of teasing people. You felt a great exultation and heard a loud fanfare of trumpets in the sky. But the serious things of life, on the contrary, took you by surprise, they spurted up all of a sudden like water.”

To end, of course there’s a very famous song I could post on the theme of Yesterday, but instead, to continue the mix of despair alongside levity: have you seen a parrot singing Creep by Radiohead?

“I often think that the night is more alive and more richly coloured than the day.” (Vincent Van Gogh)

/ madamebibilophile / 22 Comments

Life has caused me to fall behind on blog writing, so unusually I’m writing this a few weeks after having read the book. Thankfully I found this one really stayed with me and I can get it in just in time for the last week of Women in Translation Month 😊

Having really enjoyed Mieko Kawakami’s Miss Ice Sandwich (2013) during my novella reading in May, I was delighted to find a copy of All the Lovers in the Night  (2011, transl. Sam Bett and David Boyd 2022) in my local charity bookshop. It’s very different to my previous read of hers, and while I didn’t enjoy it as immediately as Ms Ice Sandwich,  it did grow on me.

Fuyuko Irie is in her thirties and lives alone. She used to work in an office but her alienation from her colleagues means she prefers working at home. Her colleague/friend Hijiri is supportive of her talents and sends her regular work as a freelance proofreader, this work suiting her precise and solitary nature.

But this means that Fuyuko is even more isolated and achingly lonely. Kawakami is so good at capturing that modern urban alienation for people living surrounded by others but unable to connect, the feelings compounded when in the midst of a crowd.

“As I passed below the haloes of green and red traffic signals, I was taken by this strange view of the evening, the city streets full of people – people waiting, the people they were waiting for, people out to eat together, people going somewhere together, people heading home together. I allowed my thoughts to settle on the brightness filling their hearts and lungs, squinting as I walked along and counted all the players of this game that I would never play.”

It looks like things could change for Fuyuko when she meets Mitsutsuka, a physics teacher. Light is important to Fuyuko – every Christmas Eve (her birthday) she walks the streets at night looking at the illuminations. As Mitsutsuka explains the workings of light to her, they begin a tentative friendship, with brief points of connection offering glimmers of hope:

“‘Um, do you think the light you’re thinking about and the light I’m talking about are, um, the same thing?’

‘Of course they are, Mitsutsuka said with a smile. ‘We’re talking about the same light.’”

In a flashback chapter we learn more about Fuyuko’s background, and why she finds herself in the situation she does. There is an event in the past that Fuyuko describes without naming it in the way that I think most readers would, suggesting she doesn’t fully recognize her trauma or why she is making subsequent self-destructive decisions.

Kawakami subtly demonstrates how Fuyuko could change things for herself, but also how wider society makes this extremely difficult for her. She and Hijiri are women who have made very different choices and present themselves very differently to the world, but both struggle under the expectations placed on women and the fact that these are not an easy fit for either of them. A brief meeting with old school friend Noriko suggests traditional choices are not always happy ones either.

“I’d been on my own for ages, and I was convinced that there was no way I could be any more alone, but now I’d finally realised how alone I truly was. Despite the crowds of people, and all the different places, and a limitless supply of sounds and colours packed together, there was nothing here that I could reach out and touch. Nothing that would call my name. There never had been, and there never would be. And that would never change, no matter where I went in the world.”

All the Lovers in the Night is a slow burn novel, despite being only just longer than novella length. As I mentioned at the start, it was a story that grew on me and I found Fuyuko’s voice more compelling the more I read. A few weeks on and she’s really stayed with me.

Despite the sadness and alienation running through All the Lovers in the Night, I thought it ended with a suggestion of hope. That incrementally things can change, and improve. That imperfect people can make poor decisions but might still be moving towards a brighter time while doing so.

To end, any excuse for the wonderful Patti Smith:

“There are no ordinary cats.” (Colette)

/ madamebibilophile / 25 Comments

Mallika at Literary Potpourri’s wonderful event  Reading the Meow has been running all week, do check out all the great posts prompted by our feline friends! Here is my post just in time…

I’m grateful to Reading the Meow for finally getting me to pick up The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (finished in 1940, published in 1966) which is part of my Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century Reading Challenge and has been languishing in my TBR for years. Although not ostensibly a book about cats, one does feature prominently as these various edition covers will attest:

The reason it had lain unread for so long was because I’m (aptly) a big scaredy-cat. I was really intimidated by this classic of twentieth-century fiction and I thought it would be far too complex and clever for me to understand. Which as it turned out, was broadly correct. I’m sure I didn’t pick up all the allusions and references, even with the notes in the back of my edition to help me (Alma Classics, trans. Hugh Aplin 2020 – I definitely recommend this edition and translation).  However, I still found it very readable and a lot to enjoy, especially regarding Behemoth, the character that meant I was reading it this week particularly.

The Devil arrives in 1930s Moscow as a Professor Woland, along with his entourage: red headed, bizarrely dressed Korovyev; sinister vampiric Azazello; beautiful Hella; and Behemoth, an enormous cat that walks on his hindlegs, talks, drinks vodka and plays chess.

The proceed to wreak havoc for three days in a series of carnivalesque scenes, using the greed and corruption of people against them.  It’s absolute chaos and carnage, but brilliantly Bulgakov shows that the devil doesn’t have to push very hard for all this to occur.

At the start of the novel, Woland predicts the shocking and absurd death of Berlioz, head of Massolit, a literary organisation. Once people hear of his death, this description of a barrage of statements in order to get Berlioz’s apartment is a good example of how Bulgakov balances social realism, satire, the comic and the desperate throughout:

“In them were included entreaties, threats, slanders, denunciations, promises to carry out refurbishment at people’s own expense, references to unbearably crowded conditions and the impossibility of living in the same apartment as villains. Among other things, there was a description, stunning in its artistic power, of the theft of some ravioli, which had been stuffed directly into a jacket pocket, in apartment No.31, two vows to commit suicide and one confession to a secret pregnancy.”

Meanwhile, Margarita, beautiful and unhappily married, is distressed because her lover, The Master, has committed himself to an institution and renounced his writing.

This is interspersed with the story of Pontius Pilate and Yeshua (Jesus), with the two stories echoing one another, and it emerges that this was the novel The Master was writing.

It is through the titular characters that Bulgakov prevents his satire becoming too bitter and alienating. Their devotion to each other and Margarita’s belief in The Master’s work is truly touching.

I don’t really want to say too much more as The Master and Margarita is such a complex, riotous piece of work that I think the more I try and pin it down the more I’ll tie myself in knots! It tackles the biggest of big themes; religion, state oppression, the role of art, love, faith, good and evil, how to live… It is a deeply serious work that isn’t afraid to be comical too.

But as this post is prompted by Behemoth, here is my favourite scene with him, getting ready for Satan’s Grand Ball on Good Friday and trying to distract from the fact that he is losing at chess:

“Standing on his hind legs and covered in dust, the cat was meanwhile bowing in greeting before Margarita. Around the cat’s neck there was now a white dress tie, done up in a bow, and on his chest a ladies mother-of-pearl opera glass on a strap. In addition, the cat’s whiskers were gilt.

‘Now what’s all this?’ exclaimed Woland. ‘Why have you gilded your whiskers? And why the devil do you need a tie if you’ve got no trousers on?’

‘A cat isn’t meant to wear trousers, Messire,’ replied the cat with great dignity. ‘Perhaps you’ll require me to don boots as well? Only in fairy tales is there a puss in boots, Messire. But have you ever seen anyone at a ball without a tie? I don’t intend to find myself in a comical situation and risk being thrown out on my ear! Everyone adorns himself in whatever way he can. Consider what has been said to apply to the opera glasses too, Messire!’

‘But the whiskers?’

‘I don’t understand why,’ retorted the cat drily, ‘When shaving today Azazello and Korovyev could sprinkle themselves with white powder – and in what way it’s better than the gold? I’ve powdered my whiskers, that’s all!’

[…]

‘Oh, the rogue, the rogue,’ said Woland shaking his head, ‘every time he’s in a hopeless position in the game he starts talking to distract you, like the very worst charlatan on the bridge. Sit down immediately and stop this verbal diarrhoea.’

‘I will sit down,’ replied the cat sitting down, ‘but I must object with regards your final point. My speeches are by no means diarrhoea, and you’re so good as to express yourself in the presence of a lady, but a series of soundly packaged syllogisms which would be appreciated on their merits by such connoisseurs as Sextus Empiricus, Martianus Capella even, who knows, Aristotle himself.’

‘The kings in check,’ said Woland.

‘As you will, as you will,’ responded the cat, and began looking at the board through the opera glass.”

I think overall I probably admire The Master and Margarita more than love it, and I enjoyed Bulgakov’s A Country Doctor’s Notebook more. But there is so much in this extraordinary, unique novel that will stay with me, and I’m sure it will reward repeat readings too.

To end, I tried to get my two moggies to pose with the book. With typical cattitude, they flatly refused 😀  So it’s back to 80s pop videos: