translated fiction

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.16

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Tokyo Express – Seichō Matsumoto (1958 transl. Jesse Kirkwood 2022) 149 pages

Tokyo Express is very much a howdunit and whydunit, as the whodunnit is seemingly fairly obvious from the start. This was my first time reading crime master Seichō Matsumoto and I was hugely impressed.

A young couple are found dead on Kashii beach near a shrine, having drunk cyanide. The local Fukuoka police are quick to decide a double suicide. There is nothing to suggest otherwise, but one of the team, Torigai Jūtarō, a long-standing and rather dishevelled detective, isn’t so sure.

“His overcoat was as battered as the clothes beneath it, his face unshaven, and his tie twisted and worn.”

Reminiscent of Lieutenant Columbo (whom he predates), Torigai is sharp-minded and unegotistical too. He starts trying to unravel how the couple came to be on the beach at that time. The young woman called Toki is dressed in a kimono and was a waitress at a restaurant in Akasaka; the man in Western clothes was Kenichi Sayama, an employee at Ministry X, currently under investigation for corruption. They were witnessed getting on the titular train by two of Toki’s colleagues, and it seems pretty clear that their bearing witness was engineered by a businessman called Tatsuo Yasuda.

Quicky Torigai establishes that a lot rests on that train journey and the timings of what happened when. He’s also baffled by a receipt from the buffet car found on Sayama’s body which recorded a food order for just one person.

“A scene formed in Torigai’s mind: the dark silhouette of a man, silently and briskly leading a woman to the beach, and the woman saying: What a lonely place.”

When Kiichi Mihara turns up from Tokyo, an outwardly very different detective takes over. The case is attracting attention due to the corruption in the Ministry, and Mihara works for the Second Division which investigates white collar crime.

“There was something in his cordial tone that reminded Torigai of an insurance salesman.”

The two investigators agree that the deaths are suspicious, and they also realise Yasuda is likely involved. However, trying to crack his alibi about where he was and when proves extremely difficult.

“Yasuda was always consulting the railway timetable. Did that perhaps mean he knew it secrets? In any case, his familiarity with the train times had to signify something. What if Yasuda’s entire alibi was built on it?”

This is one of the most procedural of police procedurals I’ve ever read. Everything hinges on the tight timing of trains, ferries and planes (a premise that would not remotely work in the UK as it depends on all the transport running to time, which as Magnus Mills pointed in out in my earlier read this month, will never occur). Torigai fades into the background, as Mihara tries to pick it all apart but keeps hitting brick walls.

“That crack in the wall had been nothing but a mirage. Mihara felt crushed. He held his head in his hands and, for a moment, could only stare at the piece of paper in front of him.”

I knew a bit about Tokyo Express before reading it, including that all the timings are based on the actual timetables of the time in the novel, and I wondered if it would be impossible to follow/bogged down in the logistics. But Seichō Matsumoto does a great job of carrying the reader along and there’s even a few surprises in store. The relationship between the two detectives is warm and endearing. I don’t know if they appeared in his subsequent novels, but even if not, I’d be keen to read more by this author.

“Mihara liked to ride the trams of Tokyo. Often, he would board without a specific destination in mind. Odd as it might seem, whenever he was at a loss for ideas, he would simply sit on the tram and allow his thoughts to roam. The tram’s steady trundle, its gentle swaying, induced in him an almost euphoric state of contemplation.”

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.10

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Marzahn, Mon Amour – Katja Oskamp (2019, transl. Jo Heinrich 2022) 141 pages

Marzahn, Mon Amour is a novella I’d been meaning to read for a while and I’m delighted to have finally got to it. Based on the author’s experience of retraining as a chiropodist in her middle-age, it is essentially a series of character sketches of her clients.

Initially her training is a struggle and she’s unsure of her new career:

“We had reached a low point, at people’s feet, and even there we were failing.”

“From writer to chiropodist – what a spectacular come down. I had forgotten how much people, the looks on their faces and their well-meant advice, got on my nerves.”

But on qualifying she gets a job in a salon in the titular area of Berlin, and begins to find her vocation:

“As always, the weather here in Marzahn, once the biggest expense of plattenbau prefab tower blocks in the former East Germany, seems more intense than in the centre. The seasons have more of a smell about them.”

Her boss is Tiffy “a grandmother, albeit a non-practising one”; Flocke is the chaotic nail technician. The chapters take the names of her clients, and Oskamp expertly captures a sense of the person in very few words:

Herr Paulke: “whenever I laughed at something that Herr Paulke said in his matter-of-fact way, emotion almost imperceptibly flashed across his face, a mix of incredulity, pride and shame. He was no longer used to anyone paying him any attention.”

The Mon Amour affection the author feels for her clients shines through. Often these are elderly people, disregarded by society, and Oskamp gets to know them over a period of months and even years. The act of caring for their feet is intimate, especially for those who may now be alone and not have much gentleness in their lives.

They all have stories to tell, such as Gerlinde Bonkat, who arrived as a refugee:

“She formulates crystal clear, quotable sentences and speaks an accentless German, with a faintly Nordic hint to its melody.”

Which isn’t to say Oskamp likes all her clients. Herr Pietsch is a former government worker who fails to realise his days of power are over: “All your life you’ve mistaken your position for your personality.” And there’s a disturbing portrait of a mother and daughter who visit where there is a query of elder abuse.

But generally Marzahn, Mon Amour is a gentle read.

“Frau Frenzel is seventy years old. She views the world with a cheerful contempt and won’t let anything or anyone spoil her mood. She reminds me of a hedgehog, with her nose perkily pointing upwards, lively button eyes and grey spiked mullet straight out of the 80s […] Amy, with whom Frau Frenzel shares her life, is a short haired dachshund.”

A lovely read and a wonderful tribute to the writer’s clients.

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.5

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Minna Needs Rehearsal Space – Dorthe Nors (2013, transl. Misha Hoekstra 2014) 89 pages

I really enjoyed Dorthe Nors’ Mirror, Shoulder, Signal as the final novella when I first undertook this month-long challenge back in 2018. Since then I’ve read her short story collection Karate Chop, and was delighted to find Minna Needs Rehearsal Space in my beloved charity bookshop. I think it has been published in editions with Karate Chop, but this Pushkin Press edition was standalone.

This is definitely a novella where the style will alienate some readers. It’s written entirely in a series of short sentences.

“Minna walks around in bare feet.

The flat is full of notes.

Bach stands in the window.

Brahms stands on the coffee table.

The flat’s too small for a piano, but

A woman should have room for a flute.”

At first I wasn’t sure I could read a whole novella like this, but then I suddenly clicked with the rhythm and it seemed a lot less jarring.

Minna is a musician living in Copenhagen, trying to write a “paper sonata” and struggling to find a place to work. She is struggling more widely too: with ambivalence towards potential motherhood; with her tightly-wound sister; with her boyfriend who has just dumped her by text.

This spurs Minna to do some dumping of her own, as she unfriends people on social media.

“Minna eats a cracker.

Karin’s missive awaits.

Karin wants to be nasty.

Karin wants to upset her applecart, but

Minna’s cart has no apples.”

She ends up packing Ingmar Bergman’s Billeder as the director becomes almost a Greek chorus/silent interlocutor, when Minna heads for Bornholm and the sea.

The short sentences act as constant present-tense status updates, a commentary on our online living. Yet by piling on the banal observations, gradually a more subtle picture emerges between the sentences. Minna’s frustrations and vulnerabilities shine through.  It’s a brave approach which for me worked well, but I already knew I liked Nors’ observations, characterisation and humour.

Minna Needs Rehearsal Space is a reminder to look beyond what is immediate to a whole picture; one that is always changing in the present and is much more complex than the surface would have us believe.

“Minna’s broken heart dwells in the breast of an optimist.”

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.4

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Burning Secret – Stefan Zweig (1913, transl. Anthea Bell 2008) 117 pages

Stefan Zweig is such an exquisitely tender writer. His precise, compassionate observations are deep with humane understanding. It makes him a perfect novella writer.

Burning Secret has a very simple structure. Edgar is twelve years old and recuperating from an illness in the spa town of Semmering. He is lonely and disregarded, bored and unnurtured.

“His face was not unattractive, but still unformed; The struggle between man and boy seemed only just about to begin, and his features were not yet kneaded into shape, no distinct lines had emerged, it was merely a face of mingled pallor and uncertainty.”

Unfortunately for Edgar, the Baron, an irredeemable cad and bounder, arrives in Semmering.

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

This vacuous young man plans on whiling away his time in a meaningless love affair, and his sights soon settle on Edgar’s mother. As she is initially resistant to his charms, he callously decides to leverage Edgar in order to win favour.

“The Baron easily won his confidence. Just half-an-hour, and he had that hot and restless heart in his hands. It is so extraordinarily easy to deceive children, unsuspecting creatures whose affections are so seldom sought.”

Poor Edgar. He falls hook, line and sinker.

“A great, unused capacity for emotion had been lying in wait, and now it raced with outstretched arms towards the first person who seemed to deserve it. Edgar lay in the dark, happy and bewildered, he wanted to laugh and couldn’t help crying.”

For the Baron it is all a game. He has no feelings for Edgar or his mother, the latter only prey with which to amuse himself. He views her ruthlessly, identifying her snobbery and pretentions and knowing how to exploit these by emphasising his nobility. He gives no consideration to her marriage or vulnerabilities as a woman who will be judged much more harshly than he if they have an affair.

What he doesn’t reckon on is Edgar’s dawning, imperfect realisation, and the fury of a hurt child. What follows is a coming-of-age story where the lessons are learned through emotional brutality.

And yet, the resolution is hopeful, and without bitterness. It feels realistic and reflective, not undermining what has gone before but demonstrating human endurance too.

In less subtle hands Burning Secret could be sentimental and mawkish. With Stefan Zweig, it is emotionally devastating.

“He didn’t understand anything at all about life, not now he knew that the words which he thought had reality behind them were just bright bubbles, swelling with air and then bursting, leaving nothing behind.”

“Two English meals a day would have done for me.” (Antal Szerb, The Pendragon Legend)

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This month I started off my reading for Kaggsy and Lizzy’s #ReadIndies event with an author that the event had led me to discover last year: Gertrude Trevelyan. So it seemed apt to end this month’s reading with another author #ReadIndies had introduced me to last year: Antal Szerb. In 2024 reading Love in Bottle in February led to Journey by Moonlight for the 1937 Club in April. This time I’m looking at The Pendragon Legend (1934, transl. Len Rix 2006) which is published by the always reliable Pushkin Press.

The Pendragon Legend is Szerb’s first novel, and utterly bonkers. As I was reading it I remembered why I had enjoyed my previous Szerb reads so much: his wit, fun, intelligence without superiority, gentle ribbing without malice, make him such a joy.

The narrator Janos Bátky is a young scholar who spends his time hanging around the British Library Reading Room. Luckily for him, he has no need for money:

“My nature is to spend years amassing the material for a great work and, when everything is at last ready, I lock it away in a desk drawer and start something new.”

His current interest is Rosicrucians: “Nothing interests me more than the way people relate emotionally to the abstract.”  This ancient secretive organisation’s interests include: “Changing base metals into gold, deliberately prolonging the life of the body, the ability to see things at a distance, and a kabbalistic system for solving all mysteries.”

This leads to him being introduced to the Earl of Gwynedd who invites Janos to stay at Pendragon Castle and make use of his library. Janos heads off to Wales with some acquaintances in tow, unheeding the warnings of a mysterious telephone call… (why do people never heed mysterious telephonic warnings??)

Shortly into his stay there are both earthly concerns when bullets are stolen from his gun and metaphysical concerns where he seems to be haunted:

“Just to be clear on this: not for a moment did I think it could be any sort of ghostly apparition. While it is a fact that English castles are swarming with ghosts, they are visible only to natives – certainly not to anyone from Budapest.”

(This isn’t the only time Janos confuses England and Wales, despite the fact he encounters similar ignorance when people insist he must be German and that Hungary doesn’t exist: “’Come off it. Those places were made up by Shakespeare.’”)

There are femme fatales, reluctant heroes, knowing castle staff… my favourite character was the capable and blunt Lene Kretsch:

“This was how our friendship began: I set myself on fire and she put me out. I’d been sitting by the hearth with The Times. I’ve never been able to handle English newspapers – apparently one has to be born with the knack of folding these productions into the microscopic dimensions achieved by the natives – and, as I flicked a page over, the entire room filled with newsprint.”

And so The Pendragon Legend is a mystery, a thriller, a Gothic ghost story, a fable, and with the arrival of the Earl’s niece Cynthia, a romance, despite Janos’ callowness:

“I can never feel much attraction to a woman whom I consider clever – it feels too much like courting a man.”  

Maybe Cynthia has more tolerance for him as she comes from a family where: “At most, the Pendragons tolerate women within the limits of marriage, and even then without much enthusiasm.”

Szerb satirises romance along with all the other tropes and genres he employs, but always with affection and never with any disdain. Somehow Janos and assorted friends bumble their way through the mystery, despite the poisonings, blackmail and hauntings which dog their steps.

My one reservation is that it became a bit too esoteric towards the end, but this is a matter of personal taste and feels a bit mean-spirited in the face of such an affectionate and fun tale.

If you fancy a pacy, ridiculous, learned adventure, The Pendragon Legend is for you.

“I was filled with the tenderness I always feel – and which nothing can match – when I encounter so many books together. At moments like these I long to wallow, to bathe in them, to savour their wonderful, dusty, old-book odours, to inhale them through my very pores.”

Blog Tour: Nightingale & Co by Charlotte Printz (2023, transl. Marina Sofia 2024)

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I do enjoy a cosy crime novel, and one with a 1960s Berlin setting ticked so many boxes I jumped at the chance to take part in this blog tour from the ever-wonderful Corylus Books.  I hope they carry on asking me to take part in these tours even though I feel like my posts for their books are getting very formulaic: “I loved it! I want more translations!” Take a guess as to whether this one will be any different… 😉

Nightingale & Co. is the first in a series written by Charlotte Printz and translated by a blogger many of you know, Marina Sofia. Here is the blurb from Corylus Books:

“Berlin, August 1961.

Since the death of her beloved father, Carla has been running the Nightingale & Co detective agency by herself. It’s a far from easy job for a female investigator.

When the chaotic, fun-loving Wallie shows up at the door, claiming to be her half-sister, Carla’s world is turned upside down. Wallie needs Carla – the Berlin Wall has been built overnight, leaving her unable to return to her flat in East Berlin.

Carla certainly doesn’t need Wallie, with her secret double life and unorthodox methods for getting results. Yet the mismatched pair must find a way to work together when one of their clients is accused of murdering her husband.

Nightingale & Co is the first in a cosy historical crime series featuring the sisters of the Nightingale & Co detective agency in 1960s Berlin.”

The story gets off to a fun, engaging start. Carla receives a call from her aunt Lulu telling her she’s waving an airgun on the set of the Billy Wilder film One, Two, Three, seemingly in a deeply flawed attempt to secure a role. As Carla sets off across Berlin at pace, the 1960s city is evoked organically, without seeming like an info-dump.

This trailer for the film includes some external shots:

Yet despite the joy of these opening scenes, we are quickly shown the psychological impact of living in Berlin as the Wall goes up:

“‘They’re building a wall,’ said Lulu. The words were like a punch to her stomach. Carla felt faint. Ulbricht had lied to them. That was why there were so many guards at the Brandenburg Gate yesterday. How naïve of them to believe it was merely for the film set.”

Carla lives with her mother in the same building that houses the agency her father built. The domestic scenes with her bitter, passive-aggressive, baiting parent were so well-realised. Printz really captured the psychological warfare that people can tie themselves into, unable to see an escape route however desperately they want one. Carla is also grieving her father, who died in the crash which left her with enduring head injury symptoms.

When her half-sister Wallie arrives having been cut off from her home in the East by the rapid installation of the Wall, she couldn’t be more different. Physically Carla is compared to Audrey Hepburn, Wallie to Marilyn Monroe. Wallie gives free rein to all her appetites and doesn’t mind dubious means to achieve her ends, while Carla is controlled and keen to remain above reproach. Carla’s mother is entirely charmed by Wallie, although she believes her to be a cousin of her dead husband.

In less skilled hands the contrasting sisters could seem cliched and merely vehicles for dramatic tension. But both Carla and Wallie were entirely believable and well-rounded. The tensions between them arising from Carla not knowing about Wallie’s existence until she turns up on the doorstep, and what this means for her memories of her father, was lightened by their very different attitudes. Their growing but begrudging respect for one another as they find themselves an effective team made them an endearing pair.

The central strand of the story concerns Alma, a beautiful rich woman who asks the agency for help due to her husband’s domestic violence. Carla is sympathetic but realistic about Alma’s options:

“I’m afraid that’s no motive for divorce. A man who beats his wife is regarded by the courts as quick tempered and they usually advise the wife not to annoy him.”

The 1960s are a time of change but some changes aren’t occurring quickly enough. (I was reminded this week that it wasn’t until 1975 that women in Britain were allowed their own mortgage!)

When Alma’s husband is killed and her subsequent behaviour leads to her arrest, the sisters investigate. The plot is satisfyingly complex without being overly convoluted and frustrating.

The shadows of the war, less than twenty years previous, still loom large and Printz manages to capture how the fallout is interwoven with the modernising present.

 “Hadn’t they learnt anything from the past? It wasn’t enough to just stand there and repeat slogans. Everyone had to contribute.”

It’s hard to judge a translation when you don’t speak both languages, but I was struck by how Marina Sofia managed a sensitive balance in providing an English translation that flowed so well, yet also kept sense of place and contributed to Berlin being evoked so clearly in my mind. The significances of formal/informal address were conveyed without any clunkiness.

What I really enjoyed in Nightingale & Co was the mix of compassion and cynicism displayed by both the sisters in their different ways. It made them, and the story, humane without being sentimental, hopeful in the face of horrors.

“In the end, that was all that anyone wanted: forgiveness. And to be loved. Which made everyone predictable.”

So in summary: I loved it! I want more translations!

Here are the rest of the stops on the tour, do check out how other bloggers found Nightingale & Co:

“I began to understand the world outside the shadows of the family tree.” (Zuheir el-Hetti, The Baghdad Villa)

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I’m hoping to complete my Around the World in 80 Books reading challenge this year. I want each book to be written by someone from that country and so at this stage I need to actively seek the books rather than just see what comes into my path. However, The Baghdad Villa by Zuheir el-Hetti (2016, transl. Samira Kawar 2023) did turn up in my local charity bookshop, helping me to add Iraq to my list.

Set in 2003 after the American invasion and toppling of Saddam Hussein, the narrative is from the point of view of Ghosnelban, a young woman from an aristocratic family who is racketing around the titular building, remembering the glory days of her relatives as life outside the grounds changes beyond all recognition.

“We had been brought up according to strict rules of speech and behaviour. The use of words that breached the limits of politeness and respect was prohibited. We had carefully preserved that strict moral linguistic code, which we shared with our few gradually vanishing acquaintances and relatives, fearing that its demise would signal the loss of our identity.”

Ghosnelban’s only company is her one remaining member of staff, the housekeeper Mamluka, and her brother Silwan, who is very unwell.

“He had been a soldier in an army that had been epically crushed in the battle to free the oil-rich desert. He came back to us, but did not return, because he had left his mind there, on the road between Basra and Nasiriya. He came back filled with horrifying nightmares, leaving behind all that was human. Then he began to endlessly narrate what he had experienced and seen on that accursed road, like an endless black waterfall.”

Ghosnelban knows her situation is unsustainable. At the start of the novel she receives a bullet in the post – a warning to leave her home or be killed. She meditates on seven artworks on the walls, Masters collected by her grandfather, each painting giving its name to a chapter in the book.

Ghosnelban is not likable. She is an elitist who freely admits to othering people who are not like her “Truly, did the lives of such human beings have meaning?” At the same time, clinging onto her elitism in the face of overwhelming destruction of her way of life is an act of defiance and resistance.

“I was, after all, the descendant of a highborn family and had learned to sculpt hatred and to turn it into a lethal weapon that I threw everyone to confront the vulgarity prevailing around me.”

As much as I didn’t like Ghosnelban, her voice was so distinctive and strongly evoked from the start, I was quicky drawn into her story. And as this develops, of course she becomes more complex than the superior, condescending snob the reader is initially introduced to.

She finds freedom in a friendship with sex worker Regina:

“I wanted to escape my own skin into which I had been placed by my family and it’s ancient history. She didn’t know who I was, was completely ignorant of my family’s history… and was totally uninterested in lineage.”

We also learn of Ghosnelban’s experience of love and passion with someone whose position makes the match entirely unsuitable. Perhaps it is this that encourages her to try and find who is when not defined by her family:

“My grandparents seemed supremely elegant, but cheerless. Their gazes expressed a hauteur that seemed natural to them, two people who never allowed colourful emotions to draw close […. ] Tears were an absolutely forbidden weakness. Displays of yearning were cheap. Love was demonstrated through action, not mawkishness; smiling was a feeling, not a meaningless stretching of the lips. We had learned that list by heart, and I remembered it nostalgically.”

While Ghosnelban seems to retreat into inaction, gazing at her grandfather’s paintings and reflecting, el-Hetti brilliantly builds the sense of impending threat and violence from which she cannot escape. Ghosnelban is not stupid and she knows she has to take a decision or inaction becomes a decision. For such a reflective, interior narrative, The Baghdad Villa becomes unbearably tense.

The Baghdad Villa is a compelling, complex character study which widens to explore the impact on individuals during moments of rapid societal and political change.  It demonstrates how moments of great humanity can exist in the most extreme circumstances; as well as the extremes to which human beings can be driven.

Much to my surprise, it became a real page-turner as I hoped Ghosnelban wouldn’t be destroyed along with her family’s villa. On finishing, I knew I was really going to miss Ghosnelban’s snooty, fierce and vulnerable voice.

“I’ve always looked at myself from above, as pleased as an omniscient narrator.” (Empar Moliner, Beloved)

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Trigger warning: mentions childhood sexual abuse

This is my contribution to the wonderful Novellas in November 2024 hosted by Cathy at 746 Books and Beck at Bookish Beck.

I heard about Beloved by Empar Moliner (transl. Laura McGloughlin 2024) through Stu at Winston’s Dad’s blog. I was immediately tempted and it seemed a good choice for my resolution to buy a book a month from an indie press/bookshop. The lovely 3TimesRebel Press even included a tote bag 😊

The striking cover illustration is by Anna Pont, a Catalan artist. She died from cancer earlier this year and all the proceeds from Beloved are being donated to cancer research.

The paw is courtesy of Fred aka Horatio Velveteen aka Mike Woznicat (as like the comedian Mike Wozniak he has a handsome moustache). Anyway, enough of my blithering about my cat. On with novellas!

Remei is in her early 50s and going through menopause. She is married to a musician ten years younger and at the start of the novella she has a revelation:

“Falling oestrogen, combined with lactose intolerance and loss of near sight, makes me see the world through the light wings of a dragonfly. Because of this I can see, with utter clarity, that my man is going to fall in love with this other woman.”

The novella follows Remei as she works out how she will manage this, as she tries to cope with her bodily changes and memories of a traumatic past at the same time.

She is a witty, forthright, slightly sardonic narrator. I really enjoyed the distinctive voice of this resilient woman.

“I must point out I find modesty overrated: I’m still a good deal. What’s more, until now I’ve performed pre-feminist sexual positions with total dedication and delight.”

Her husband, whom she calls Neptune, is not as clearly drawn. But this is not his story: we are firmly in the first person narration of Remei. She and her husband don’t seem hugely well-suited:

“I like music much more than him and I’m an illustrator. But he likes comics much more than me and he’s a musician.”

“I like everyone, in one way or another. He likes hardly anyone, in one way or another.”

“That’s how we see life too, he and I. Me: everything and right now, so nothing is left over. Him: only what fits, even if what is discarded will rot.”

But she loves him and she loves being a mother to their daughter. Her career is successful, although not quite in the way she planned. However, she is not entirely happy. She self-medicates with alcohol:

“My whole life is a gallop between the pretentious and the epic, depending only on how many drinks I’ve had.”

As she goes for runs with her friends, she reflects on the sexual abuse of her childhood, sanctioned by her family. She is estranged from her brother, after she spoke about what was happening and they were taken into care. Remei seems very much alone, despite all the people that surround her.

She is blisteringly honest about her attitude to her husband and the confusion of feelings as she recognises future events:

“Do I want him to continue to love me as much as ever? Yes. No. I want to float along, no more. I want him to be frozen.”

There is a lot of humour too. Remei never demonises Cris, the young colleague of her husband, but wryly observes her behaviour:

“Punctual, efficient, her ovaries functioning at top speed.”

Beloved shows how control is only sustained through the lightest of ties. Remei is a functional alcoholic who could tip over at any time; she realises her relationship with her daughter is on the brink of change as the latter grows older and more aware; she attempts to control her body with running but aging is relentless; and she takes steps to manoeuvre her husband and Cris in a way that will allow her to cope with the affair, but where will this leave her?

Remei is so flawed, so honest, so tenderly vulnerable and spikily self-sufficient, I was really rooting for her to find a way through all the hurt.

To end, the ever wonderful Tracy Chapman singing about changes in life:

“I have looked for life, but I can’t find it.” (Vicki Baum, Grand Hotel)

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November is the month of sooooo many reading events, and I’m hoping to take part in Margaret Atwood Reading Month and Novellas in November, but I thought I’d start with German Literature Month XIV, hosted by Caroline at Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Lizzy Siddal at Lizzy’s Literary Life.

Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum (1929, transl. Basil Creighton 1930-1 revised by Margot Bettauer Dembo 2016) is a novel I’ve been meaning to get to for some time, republished by the wonderful New York Review of Books Classics.

I find a Weimar Republic setting always so enticing, and this novel was a bestseller in it’s day, originally serialised in a magazine. Sometimes with serials you can really see the joins when they are placed in novel form, but the episodic nature of hotel stays by various guests works well and Grand Hotel felt entirely coherent.

The titular building is opulent and glamorous:

“The music of the jazz band from the Tearoom encountered that of the violins from the Winter Garden, and mingled with the thin murmur of the illuminated fountain as it fell into its imitation Venetian basin, the ring of glasses on tables, the creaking of wicker chairs and, lastly, the soft rustle of the furs and silks in which women were moving to and fro.”

As readers we know that momentum for World War Two is building, but for the guests at this time it is the shadow of World War I which still looms large. Doctor Otternschlag’s face has been severely damaged by a shell. Every day he asks if a letter has arrived for him which it never has. We don’t know what this quiet, traumatised man is waiting for.

“Doctor Otternschlag lived in the utmost loneliness – although the earth is full of people like him…”

Glamour is brought by Grusinskaya, a prima ballerina desperately trying to hang on to physical vigour against the forces of aging. She is somewhat ambivalent, feeling driven to be as she has always been, and exhausted by it all:

“Perhaps the world would have loved her as she really was, as she looked now, for example, sitting in her dressing room – a poor, delicate, tired old woman with worn out eyes, and a small careworn human face.”

The most pathos occurs in the guest who doesn’t fit in: Kringelein, a clerk from Fredersdorf, given a terminal prognosis and determined to squeeze the pips from life before it’s too late. He chooses the Grand Hotel as his boss, Herr Preysing, stays there when in Berlin.

“He felt again, here in the bar of Berlin’s most expensive hotel, the same intoxication, a sense of exuberant plenty as well as of anxiety and alarm, the faint threat haunting the wicked joy of wrongdoing, the excitement of an escapade.”

Kringlein’s difficulty is, he is unsure of how to achieve his somewhat nebulous aim. Doctor Otternschlag tries to help but fails, unsurprising given his jaded, damaged view of the world. More successful is gentleman thief Gaigern, a dashing young nobleman who charms everyone:

“I am quite without character an unspeakably inquisitive. I can’t live an orderly life and I’m good for nothing. At home I learned to ride and play the gentleman. At school, to say my prayers and lie. In the war, to shoot and take cover. And beyond that I can do nothing. I am a gypsy, an outsider, an adventurer.”

He kits out Kringelein in fine clothes and takes him for fast drives in cars and up in a plane, but what are his motives? As Kringelein throws his hard-earned but limited money around, what will Gaigern do?

“Human kindness and warmth was so much a part of his nature that his victims always received their due share of them.”

Baum weaves together these disparate lives expertly, as they bump against each other within the Grand Hotel to a greater or lesser extent. There are overarching plots that draw characters together but Baum demonstrates that while hotels are places where change may occur, they do not lend themselves to resolution so easily. Hotels are by nature transitory and lives must be continued, consequences dealt with, once the guests pass through the revolving doors and back into the world.

“Perhaps there is no such thing as a whole, completed destiny in the world, but only approximations, beginnings that come to no conclusion or conclusions that have no beginnings.“

The tone is so well-balanced, with moments of light humour, almost slapstick, alongside darker elements. I did feel a constant undercurrent of sadness, but this highlighted the resilience of the characters who keep on keeping on during this interwar period, rather than being depressing.

Grand Hotel provides a compelling evocation of the Weimar era too, with glamour, seediness, riches and poverty all bound together in a vibrant, intoxicating, overwhelming Berlin. I’m so pleased to have finally read this novel.

“The room had taken on that utterly strange and enchanted appearance often encountered in hotel bedrooms.”

Grand Hotel was adapted by Hollywood in 1932, which despite my love of Garbo I’ve never seen. Time to remedy the situation!

Blog Tour: Black Storms – Teresa Solana (2010, transl. Peter Bush 2024)

/ madamebibilophile / 12 Comments

Today I’m taking part in a blog tour for Corylus Books, a lovely indie publisher with a focus on translated crime fiction. For those of us in the northern hemisphere the nights are drawing in, and settling down with a crime novel that opens on All Saints Eve (Hallowe’en) felt like a perfect read for this time of year.

Here is the blurb from Corylus Books:

“Who murders an elderly professor in his university office – and why? Norma Forester of the Barcelona police force is handed the case and word from the top is to resolve it as quickly and as quietly as she can. Set against the backdrop of one of the most vibrant and exciting cities in Europe, Black Storms also highlights the darker side of Barcelona and its past, overshadowed by the bitter Civil War of the 1930s.

The past also touches Norma Forester, the granddaughter of an English International Brigades volunteer who didn’t survive to see his Spanish daughter.

This first novel in Teresa Solana’s is a fast-paced crime story that balances the hunt for a killer with Norma Forester’s colourful and complex personal life. She’s surrounded by her forensic pathologist husband, her hippy mother, and her anarchist squatter daughter whose father is Norma’s husband’s gay brother. Then there are Norma’s police colleagues and superiors – plus an occasional lover she can’t resist meeting.”

Black Storms begins with the murder from the point of view of the murderer. This wasn’t gory or gratuitous. There had also been a brief but effective portrayal of the victim, Professor Francesc Paradella who was an expert on the Spanish Civil War, which definitely evoked my sympathy without being sentimental.

We’re then taken to a birthday dinner at Deputy Inspector Norma Forester’s family home. I really enjoyed the portrait of Norma’s family, full of somewhat eccentric characters without seeming unrealistically colourful.

Her mother Mimí looks like “an old Hollywood actress who’d gone to seed or an eccentric fortune teller.”, in contrast to Isabel, her conservative mother-in-law. Her daughter Violeta briefly returns from living in a squat and also visiting is Aunt Margarida, Mimí’s step-cousin and a nun aka my favourite character:

“she’d been living comfortably isolated from the world and its problems for eight years, reciting ancient prayers behind those impenetrable stone walls. However, occasionally, she did miss the freedom of her secular life and, now and then, invented an excuse to go out and took advantage of her escape to go to bingo sessions, drink cocktails in Boades and hit the town with Mimí.”

I also liked Norma’s husband, principled forensic examiner Octavi, angry that because the Professor was from a powerful family, his death is treated more seriously than others.

“There were class differences even among the dead: upper-class corpses that led to frantic investigations and second-class corpses that were processed routinely.”

The legacy of the Civil War is part of Norma and Octavi’s home, not only through the family history but in their present. Senta, Norma’s grandmother mistakes outside noises for those of conflict and becomes highly distressed. It’s a brief scene but so moving in how it demonstrates the enduring trauma of war.

The reader soon knows who the murder is, someone pathetic and seedy, and very believable. The mystery of Black Storms is not therefore whodunit, but why. The why enables Solana to look at the long shadows cast by the Spanish Civil War and the enduring corruption in society.

My knowledge of the Spanish Civil War is shockingly rudimentary and Solana did a great job of weaving the history throughout the story without ever info-dumping. Past events are evoked through characters; there is an excellent scene between Norma, whose grandfather was killed by state execution, and Gabriel, her second-in-command, whose grandfather was killed by FAI anarchists.

The most severe condemnation is saved for how the legacy has been mishandled: “the circus orchestrated in the corridors of power had succeeded in drowning the transition in a mist of amnesia”.

But the novel is also resolutely contemporary and Barcelona is wonderfully evoked, even the less salubrious sides: “A city for tourists with cirrhotic livers looking for cheap alcohol.” Ouch!

From the start Black Storms had an assured style and Solana is so accomplished in how she weaves together a crime plot, the legacy of the Spanish Civil War, and contemporary social commentary. It never felt remotely laboured and the story pace was never weighed down by the importance of the issues highlighted. I thought Black Storms was a hugely impressive novel. And now I want another in the series to be translated, because I am already missing Aunt Margarida!

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