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.”
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.”
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 Bottlein 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.”
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’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 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:
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!
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:
Death in the Museum of Modern Art is a collection of six stories set during the siege of Sarajevo, although Lazarevska never names the “besieged city” that features in all the tales. Lazarevska is a Bosnian writer and survivor of the siege.
I always find it really hard to write about short story collections, so I’ll just focus on the opening and closing tales. In Dafna Pehfogl Crosses the Bridge between There and Here, the titular character reflects on her long. “unlucky”, “clumsy” life, starting when the maid burned the last coffee listening to her mother’s labour screams. Dafna is something of a scapegoat for her family and remained unmarried as her suitors weren’t smart enough for her family. Now in old age she finds herself alone in the war-torn city. Her family on “the other side” have arranged her passage to safety.
“She stepped boldly and decisively. Freed from other people’s gaze and lengthy sighs. Her feet were light on the deserted bridge between there and here.”
This is the only story in the collection written in the third person, but it didn’t distance Dafna in any way. I really hoped she’d make it to safety…
The final story, Death in the Museum of Modern Art has a dry humour to it. The narrator is answering questions that will form part of an exhibition at MoMA, including “How would you like to die?”
“I would have liked to tell him about that terrible feeling I have of being late… the feeling that I have being overtaken and I’m losing my sense of being present. Neither here, nor there.”
Without heavy judgement, Lazarevska demonstrates how the lived experience of war is being simplified and packaged up for art consumers. The impossibility of the questionnaires even beginning to capture anything meaningful from such a situation.
“But for an American, one ‘easy’ is the same as another. Hence a visitor to the Museum of Modern Art may read that my friend the writer wanted to die easily. He understands that, but the writer does not. That word introduces confusion into the writer’s answer. Can wishes of this kind be expressed in a foreign language, particularly one that does not distinguish one ‘easily’ from another?”
Lazarevska writes in a constrained style, both tonally and structurally. She doesn’t waste a word and has a real command of the short story form – I thought the six stories in this collection were all equally strong.
Lazarevska writes about the siege of Sarajevo in a way that is evocative but not overly emotive, trusting that the circumstances are extraordinary and shocking enough that they don’t need embellishment. Her focus is broadly domestic, looking at how ordinary lives find ways to carry on. The result is a compelling and memorable collection that places the reader alongside the characters as they hold onto their humanity through the most brutal experience.
“The hand I write with his healed. If any new questions should ever arrive, I shall write my answers myself. I’m writing all of this with my own hand.”
For this year’s Women in Translation Month I’m trying to focus on countries I’ve yet to visit on my Around the World in 80 Books reading challenge. This meant I was delighted to find a copy of Bitter Orange Tree by Jokha Alharthi (2016, transl. Marilyn Booth 2022) in my much-frequented local charity bookshop, as I’ve not read a book by an Omani author before.
I had completely missed Celestial Bodies for which Alharthi and Booth won the Man International Booker Prize in 2019. At that time Alharthi was the first Omani woman to be translated into English.
Bitter Orange Tree is a short novel, just 214 pages in my edition with quite large type, which I read entirely during a train journey back from Newcastle. (In fact, everyone around my table was reading a print book – it was like the olden days! For balance, I should say on the journey up I was sat next to someone who spent the whole time scrolling through TikTok and Insta, never watching any of the short content through to the end. I found it exhausting and had to mind my own business in the end 😀 )
The story is told from the point of view of Zuhour, a young woman who has left Oman to study in a nameless, cold, foreign city (most likely Edinburgh). She balances descriptions of her current life where a friend’s sister has fallen in love with a man her family wouldn’t approve of, with memories of Oman and particularly her grandmother-figure, Bint Aamir.
Zuhour harbours guilt regarding not staying with her grandmother, who has now died. A comment to a friend is the starting point for memories and reflections on Bint Aamir’s life:
“She always longed to own some land… just a tiny patch, with date palms growing on it, even if there was only space for five or so. And a few little fruit trees – lemon, papaya, banana, bitter orange. She would even plant those herself. She would water them and take care of them. And eat from them. And rest in their shade.”
Bint Aamir’s life is not easy, expelled along with her brother from her father’s house, she struggles for money. Gradually she finds a role in a relative’s home and while owning nothing, she provides almost everything.
“Bint Aamir’s feet were submerged in the soil that was the ground of our lives. She built the walls that made this household exist and thrive, mud brick by mud brick.”
Zuhour’s past and present conflate frequently, and I thought Alharthi conveyed so effectively the way memories underpin and inform the present. The conflation and the movement back and forwards between different times was seamless and never confusing.
“Tears run from my eyes, from both my eyes, from my two sound eyes. My tears spill over her one eye, which is damaged; over the herbal concoctions that were prescribed by ignorance; over the violence and harshness of childhood; over children orphaned by their mothers deaths and thrown out by their fathers, and over their brothers tragic ends; over a field she did not possess; over a companion she was never fortunate enough to have; over son who is not hers; over the grandchildren of a friend who died before she did.”
There’s also some humour, and I particularly liked this description of Zuhour’s friend Christine:
“Her cup of decaf coffee with soy milk was tall and skinny: it looked just like her. Here at this party, she was an exact scan of the figure I always saw at the university: T-shirt jeans running shoes ponytail nose ring tattoo long skinny cup.”
There were aspects of the story that were less successful for me though. Alongside the friends’ illicit relationship that Zahour has complex, unresolved feelings about, there is also a story of domestic violence involving her sister Sumayya. Both these sub-plots were too shallowly explored, before they petered-out. I felt that either Bitter Orange Tree needed to be longer, or one of these sub-plots needed to be cut and the other further developed.
While I liked the imaginative style, sometimes it became overly sentimental, particularly with regard to Bint Aamir. Although Zahour acknowledges “All her contentment was drawn from the happiness of the people for whom she cared.” she sometimes goes on flights of fancy regarding what her grandmother didn’t have in life, without knowing how her grandmother felt. These seemed clunky to me, although in fairness this may have been deliberate, to emphasise Zahour’s callow inexperience and inability to think beyond cliches at times.
But I only blog about books I like and I did like Bitter Orange Tree. The handling of past and present was so deft, and the style so readable. From looking online I think a lot of people preferred Celestial Bodies so I’d be keen to give that a try. If you’ve read Celestial Bodies I’d love to hear how you found it.
madame bibi lophile recommends 