translated fiction

“Life was not an art-form, or rather, it was an extremely mixed genre.” (Antal Szerb)

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Back in February, I read a collection of Antal Szerb’s short stories for the #ReadIndies event: Love in a Bottle published by Pushkin Press. I really enjoyed his writing and had his novel Journey by Moonlight (transl. Len Rix 2000) in the TBR too, which I decided to save for this week’s 1937 Club hosted by Kaggsy at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon at Stuck in a Book.

When I think of farce, I tend to think of very broad-strokes comedy. Yet Journey by Moonlight manages to portray farcical circumstances with light humour and characterisation of great subtlety.

It begins with Mihály and Erzsi on honeymoon, having decided to formalise their relationship after an affair behind the back of Erzsi’s husband Zoltan.

“It was not exactly new or surprising to her that Mihály could say and do things she failed to understand. For a time she had successfully concealed her lack of comprehension, wisely asking no questions and acting as if eternally familiar with everything to do with him. She knew that this wordless assumption of authority, which he thought of as her ancestral, intuitive woman’s wisdom, was her strongest means of holding on to him.

[..]

And yet they had married because he had decided they understood each other perfectly, and that, for both, the marriage rested on purely rational foundations and not fleeting passion. For just how long could that fiction be sustained?”

Well, in answer to that question, not very long at all. Mihály loses Erzsi on a train in Italy and makes very little effort to reunite with her. Hardly surprising, given that even when they were physically together she was an abstract concept to him more than an actual living, breathing woman, his wife.

“[Erzsi] had become for him a sort of beautiful memory. He drank heavily to sustain this mood, to make himself believe that he wasn’t with Erzsi but with the memory of Erzsi. With Erzsi as history.”

Mihály is a drifter. To all appearances he has lived a life of bourgeois predictability, but inwardly he has drifted into it. Now he creates an outward life which reflects his inner life.

“At home and abroad he had been schooled in mastery. Not self-mastery, but the mastery of his family, his father, the profession which did not interest him. Then he had taken his place in the firm.

[…]

He had forced himself to become something other than what he was, to live never after his own inclination but as he was expected to. The latest and not least heroic of these exertions had been his marriage.”

The difficulty for Mihály seems to be recognising what his own inclinations are. He hasn’t supressed any great yearning or talent to take the path he has.

His overwhelming preoccupation is with the past. Acknowledging “there’s no cure for nostalgia”, he finds it impossible to live in the now or to take meaningful action in the present. As Erzsi’s ex-husband observes, Mihály is a man “so utterly withdrawn and abstracted that you have no real relationship with anybody or anything”.

At the start of his honeymoon he runs into a childhood friend, conman and thief, János Szepetneki. This sends Mihály into a protracted reverie, thinking about his other friends from that time, the elusive and compelling siblings Éva and Tamás Ulpius, and the religiously-minded Ervin. They will recur throughout the narrative, both absent and present as memories, symbols and occasionally like János, actual people. 

What stops this being completely tedious and self-indulgent is the strong vein of humour running through Journey by Moonlight. It is not overtly comic but it is consistently ironic. Mihály is both serious and faintly ridiculous and his most dramatic moments are consistently undermined.

There are entertaining interludes with the various people he encounters. My favourite occurs when the one decisive act he plans for himself is halted by an almost stranger insisting he become a godfather to a child he has never met. This request for lifelong duty occurs for no apparent reason and is one which Mihály greets with extreme reluctance. And yet, he is drawn in and distracted from his course:

“How distressing that the most sublime moments and stages of our lives can be approached only with the most banal expressions; and that, probably, these are indeed our most banal moments. At such times we are no different from anyone else.”

Yet Szerb doesn’t let the humour undermine the message of Journey by Moonlight. He is exploring how, as human beings, we recognise and live a meaningful, worthwhile life for ourselves. It’s a fine balance which he achieves expertly (the only clunky part for me was a long exposition by an academic friend of Mihály’s on dying as erotic act).

“And again he had the feeling that the really important things were happening elsewhere, where he was not; that he had missed the secret signal. His road led absolutely nowhere and his nostalgia now would gnaw him eternally, remain eternally unquenched, until he too departed.”

Szerb portrays the despair of human beings alongside our ridiculousness, and he does it all with great compassion.

“And sublime and terrible things always happened to him when life was stupid and precious.”

Marina Sofia also reviewed Journey by Moonlight this week, and you can read her wonderful post here.

To end, of the many songs about the moon, I chose this one from björk, because I thought it fitted the tone of Journey by Moonlight well. She takes her art seriously but she’s not afraid to be silly too:

“While there is life there is always the chance that something might happen.” (Antal Szerb)

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This week I’m focussing on Pushkin Press as part of Kaggsy and Lizzy’s #ReadIndies event in order to read four books that have long been in the TBR. For this final post, my read is Love in a Bottle by Antal Szerb (1922-1943, transl. Len Rix 2013)

This was a really interesting collection, because the stories are presented chronologically and there’s a big gap whereby Szerb’s style changes considerably.

The first three stories are from 1922-23. Ajandok’s Betrothal, The White Magus, and The Tyrant all have a fable-like quality. Told in the third person, they are set in a timeless period and within realities that verge on mythical. While they were very well written, and diverting enough, I didn’t find them hugely interesting.

The rest of the stories are from 1932-1943 and these I found much more original and compelling. The first is Cynthia, a fragment which Pushkin Press omitted in a previous edition as Szerb probably didn’t intend it for publication. It begins:

“When they threw me out of Cambridge for my poor taste in neckties and generally immoral conduct, I enrolled at University College London, whose chief claim to fame (though they kept this private) was that its Dean was obliged, as a matter of principle, to see off any clergymen who dared set foot on the premises.”

I immediately felt hopeful that this change in tone and setting would be much more to my liking 😀

The tale itself is told from the point of view of an unpleasant but believable lothario who doesn’t seem to like women very much. This persona recurs through some of the other stories. In A Dog Called Madelon, a man laments that he has never been able to sleep with aristocratic women, despising the shop assistant he is with:

“He had been reflecting on the way his whole life had been frittered away on a procession of frightful little Jennys, when ever since boyhood he had yearned for a Lady Rothesay. History held the sort of erotic charge for him that others found in actresses’ dressing rooms – a truly great passion required three or four centuries historical background at the very least.”

In Musings in the Library, an “anti-Don Juan” who finds “women rarely please me” manages to completely fumble a fledgling love affair.

What stops these characters from being completely alienating to the reader is firstly, the wry humour that runs through the stories, and secondly the deep inadequacy of the protagonists. They are not meant to be heroic in any way, but rather deluded and sad. The stories all end in their failure, often with ironic circumstances.

In the titular tale, Szerb returns to mythology with Sir Lancelot and his love for Guinevere, but this is markedly different to the previous myth-like stories. Love in a Bottle has a more individual, authentic voice to the narration, and the humour of the contemporary-set tales is evident here too.

Szerb seems to view romantic love in these stories with some scepticism, but not disdain. It is the flawed characters which mean love is never fully realised, rather than problems with the idea itself. In fact, there is a feeling of hope towards love in the way Szerb consistently returns to the theme, but it is the humans involved who make it become ridiculous.

His tone is never bitter though, and he doesn’t judge his characters too harshly. To me Szerb seemed to be highlighting foibles while suggesting no-one was above them.

I also enjoyed Fin de Siècle where Szerb seemed to be having a lot of fun satirising writers. Thus Dr Johnson is noted for his “immortal banalities” and a group of writers who gather together include:

“Lionel Johnson, who would deliver his observations about the weather in the manner of a revelation: ‘There was a thick fog in Chelsea this morning.’ he would regularly announce, and glare balefully around the room, his hand clapped on some invisible sword.”

The humour, intelligence and readable style of the stories in Love in a Bottle has made me keen to explore Szerb more. Fortuitously I have Journey by Moonlight lined up for Kaggsy and Simon’s 1937 Club which is running 15-22 April – can’t wait!

“Looking back on the blissful days of my youth, as they begin to slip away from me, I can see now the best of them were those spent in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.”

“My world was small and terrible.” (Isaac Babel)

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This week I’m focussing on Pushkin Press as part of Kaggsy and Lizzy’s #ReadIndies event to finally read four books that have long been in the TBR. For this third post today my read is Odessa Stories by Isaac Babel (1916-1937 transl. Boris Dralyuk 2016).

The Introduction to this volume by translator Boris Dralyuk is really informative and provides some fascinating context to Babel’s writing. Odessa was a booming port when Babel was born in 1894; in 1900 around 140,000 of its 400,000 population was Jewish. Babel was part of a well-to-do family but was drawn to Odessa’s underbelly, writing stories about the legendary gangsters of the city.

Dralyuk also explains about translating the melting-pot language of Odessa, so I highly recommend reading the Introduction before you start on the stories (I often read Introductions at the end). Babel was only 45 when he was killed in Stalin’s purges.

The volume is divided into three parts: Gangsters and Other Old Odessans; Childhood and Youth; and Love Letters and Apocrypha. I always struggle to write about short story collections and generally Babel’s stories are so short that I don’t want to give spoilers. Here I just want to give a flavour and you can see if you might want to seek out these stunning stories for yourself.

The first part is mainly told in the third person and weaves together tales of violence and corruption, with recurring characters including “Benya Krik, gangster and King of the gangsters”. The tales are colourful and carnivalesque, but Babel never allows the broader strokes to obscure the unlawful methods that so many live by:

“At this wedding they served turkey, roast chicken, goose, gefilte fish and fish soup in which lakes of lemon glimmered like mother-of-pearl. Flowers swayed above the dead goose heads like lush plumage. Does the foamy surf of Odessa’s sea wash roast chickens ashore?”

At the same time, he doesn’t position the reader above the gangsters or way of life. Babel suggests that this side of Odessa is as it is because this the logical way to be, and it has emerged as part of the society, laws and political structures that surround it:

“Let’s not throw dust in each other’s eyes. There’s no one else in the world like Benya the King. He cuts through lies and looks for justice, be it justice in quotes or without them. While everyone else, they’re as calm as clams. They can’t be bothered with justice, won’t go looking for it – and that’s worse.”

The second part of the stories in Childhood and Youth becomes more personal, with first-person tales that follow on from one another in some instances. I understand The Story of My Dovecote is the most famous, and rightly so. Within this brilliant collection, it still stands out. (Skip the next two paragraphs if you don’t want to know any details in advance.)

A young boy has spent five of his ten years coveting a dovecote. He manages to find ways around the anti-Semitism at his school to do well academically and get the reward of finally being able to buy his doves. He sets out to the market with his money and gets his beloved birds, tucking them into his jacket. If your heart is sinking at this description, you are absolutely right…

The story is fifteen pages in this edition and completely devastating. I would urge anyone to read it, but it will absolutely stay with you. It will rip your heart out and stamp all over it. The final word of this story is “pogrom”.

There are lighter stories in this section too, such as The Awakening, about a precocious young man:

“Writing was a hereditary occupation in our family. Levi Yitzchak, who went mad in his old age, had spent his whole life composing a tale titled A Man With No Head. I took after him.”

Odessa Stories was my first experience of reading Babel and I was blown away. Babel clearly enjoyed the almost fabulist tales of Benya the King, but somehow never glamorised him. His writing is hugely entertaining but also truthful – the violence towards people and animals suddenly appears in the midst of the stories and jolts the reader to remember the visceral realities of what is being described.

In evoking the worst of human behaviour in Dovecote, Babel is restrained and absolutely drives home the tragedy.

Babel’s writing is intensely human, marrying together humour, violence, pathos and beauty seamlessly. I will definitely seek out more by him on the strength of Odessa Stories. Sadly, there isn’t much as his life was cut short. However, Pushkin Press publish Red Cavalry, another short story collection.

“For the first time I saw my surroundings as they actually were – hushed and unspeakably beautiful.”

“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.

“Compared to memory, every possession can only ever seem disappointing” (Giorgio Bassani)

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This is my final post for the 1962 Club, hosted by Simon and Kaggsy, which has been running all week. It’s been a great event as always, and I’m really pleased it prompted me to pick the three I’ve read off the TBR pile at long last!

(Please note, despite the subject matter I’ve made a deliberate choice not to draw contemporary parallels. I think Lisa explained this decision really well in her blog post here.)

I adored Giorgio Bassani’s The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles (1958) when I read it last year, so I had high expectations when I approached The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (transl. Jamie McKendrick, 2007), the third book in his Romanzo di Ferrara cycle. It fully lived up to those expectations.

The unnamed narrator tells us in the Prologue that he is looking back from 1957 to a time before World War II. However the tone is more elegiac than nostalgic, as he also tells us that those he recalls perished in concentration camps.

Before the war the Finzi-Continis were a prosperous family, but the conflict destroyed them and all they owned. The large house is now squatted in, and the titular space:

“All the broad-canopied trees, limes, elms, beeches, poplars, plane trees, horse chestnuts, pines, firs, larches, cedars of Lebanon, cypresses, oaks, holm oaks, and even the palm trees and eucalyptuses planted in their hundreds by Josette Artom during the last two years of the first world war, were cut down for firewood, and for some time the land had returned to the state it was in when Moisè Finzi-Contini acquired it”

So it is with this knowledge that we then meet the younger, somewhat callow narrator, and follow his developing friendship with the younger Finzi-Contini’s, Alberto and Micòl, son and daughter of Professor Ermanno and Signor Olga.

Racial laws are coming into effect in Italy in the late 1930s, and this sees the narrator invited into the walled estate, as Jewish people are banned from places such as the local tennis club.

“They entirely left aside the existence of a far greater intimacy, a secret one, to be valued only by those who shared it, which derived from the fact that our two families, not by choice, but by virtue of a tradition more ancient than any possible memory, belonged to the same religious observance, or more accurately to the same ’School’”

Despite the growing pressures of the outside world, within the Finzi-Continis walls the narrator remembers a time where:

“The weather remained perfect, held in that state of magical suspension, of glassy, luminous, soft immobility which is the special gift of some of our autumns. In the garden it was hot, just slightly less than if it was summer.”

In this enchanted space the narrator falls for Micòl, but their relationship never develops, characterised by misunderstandings and ambiguity that they are too young to resolve. Being too young for what life throws at you is also shown through the political conversations with Giampi Malnate, an older Christian friend of Alberto, as well as an experience of terminal illness.

What I thought was so subtle and clever from Bassani is that nothing overly dramatic happens. Rather, things fade out. The huge events that we know are looming take place outside of the novel, and instead we are shown how we can take for granted the moments that seemingly have no wider ramifications. Except of course, they do. This is a formative time for the narrator.  

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is not a plot-driven novel. It is a beautifully written evocation of a time before unimagined horrors. It is reflective and elegiac in tone without ever letting sentimentality lessen the portrait of a family obliterated by the Holocaust. It’s a truly devastating read.

The novel was adapted into a film in 1970, which won the Best Foreign Language Oscar that year. Has anyone seen it? It looks pretty faithful to the book so I’m interested to watch it:

Murder at the Residence – Stella Blómkvist (transl. Quentin Bates) Blog Tour

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Today I’m taking part in a blog tour for Corylus Books, a lovely indie publisher with a focus on translated crime fiction. The novel Murder at the Residence offers an enduring mystery aside from the story: Stella Blómkvist is the name of the protagonist, not the author. Apparently there’s lots of speculation but it’s never been confirmed who writes this popular series. Murder at the Residence was published in 2012, the first of a second wave of Stella books, after a break since 2006.

Here is the blurb from Corylus Books:

“It’s New Year and Iceland is still reeling from the effects of the financial crash when a notorious financier is found beaten to death after a high-profile reception at the President’s residence. The police are certain they have the killer – or do they? Determined to get to the truth, maverick lawyer Stella Blómkvist isn’t so sure.

A stripper disappears from one of the city’s seediest nightspots, and nobody but Stella seems interested in finding her. A drug mule cooling his heels in a prison cell refuses to speak to anyone but Stella – although she has never heard of him. An old man makes a deathbed confession and request for Stella to find the family he lost long ago.

With a sharp tongue and a moral compass all of her own, Stella Blómkvist has a talent for attracting trouble and she’s as at home in the corridors of power as in the dark corners of Reykjavík’s underworld.

Stella Blómkvist delivers an explosive mix of murder, intrigue and surprise, and is one of Iceland’s best-loved crime series.”

The start of the novel sees Stella cruising for a New Year hook up. Her voice throughout is direct and no nonsense, and this includes articulating her sexual needs clearly. Sadly for Stella she doesn’t find a hottie to see the year in with, but she does meet Dagnija and Ilona, two Latvian women brought to Iceland on empty promises and finding themselves dragged into sex work. When Ilona disappears, Dagnija asks for Stella’s help.

Stella’s pretty busy, what with a dying man asking her to find his adopted daughter, a drug courier to defend, a young injured activist to support, and a family christening ending with the discovery of a dead body:

“The murder in the church at Bessastaðir was naturally the lead news item on both TV channels. Understandable, as it’s been a few centuries since there was last a murder at Bessastaðir. That’s as far as we know. And the President was in residence that weekend.

The body is that of a well-known financier.”

The financier Benedikt Björgúlfsson seems no great loss, but the story is bound up in the political situation in Iceland at the time:

“There were anonymous claims online that Benedikt must have been murdered by someone who had been with him at the President’s reception on Friday. The conclusion is that the guilty party has to be among society’s most powerful individuals. Others argue that this murder is the man on the street fighting back, that this is a foretaste of what other wealthy banksters can expect if the courts don’t get round to locking them up.”

As the various strands of Stella’s work start to come together, Murder at the Residence brilliantly portrays how political machinations and police corruption should concern everybody, because they affect everything. And while the story evokes its Iceland setting beautifully, it is sadly universal.

“Presumably you know the Icelandic politicians never, ever, resign due to poor judgement in their work. Taking responsibility for their own mistakes is something that simply missing from their genetic makeup.”

“Are wealthy playboys with reputations in ruins still Iceland’s heroes?”

Living in the UK means I’m not sure there was really a need to specify Iceland(ic) in those sentences….

Anyway, while Stella is (rightly) cynical regarding those in power, she’s not embittered like me 😀 So her voice remains clear-sighted and resolute but never alienating.

“It’s the familiar old song about bad foreigners making every effort to destroy Iceland’s innocence. But it’s on the overblown side this time. Our own homegrown criminals have long been perfectly capable of shovelling illegal drugs into the country. Not that they haven’t formed a few alliances along the way with European mafiosi.”

She has a softer side too – there is a budding romance, and also her young daughter Sóley Árdís to provide some work/life balance.

Murder at the Residence is expertly plotted and I just about kept up! If you’re the sort of reader who keeps notes and makes character lists when they read, those habits would serve you very well here.

The personal and political, plot and characterisation were all finely balanced. The story was also clear about the violence and corruption in the world Stella was investigating, but never gratuitous. I really enjoyed Stella’s distinctive voice and I’d love to spend more time with her. Fingers crossed more translations will follow.

Here are the stops from the rest of the tour, so do check out how other bloggers got on with Murder at the Residence:

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

/ madamebibilophile / 24 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?