thorold is chill from his rippling rest in Q4 2022

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty—

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
—Till elevators drop us from our day ...

Hart Crane, from The bridge: To Brooklyn Bridge

(https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43262/the-bridge-to-brooklyn-bridge)

Welcome to my Q4 thread. I'm taking up the thread from Q3, which was here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/342674#n7942673

Gratuitous seasonal picture:

Q3 Reading stats:

I finished 48 books in Q3 (Q2: 72, Q1: 41).

Author gender: F: 9, M: 39 (81% M) (Q2: 71% M, Q1: 70% M)

Language: EN 28, NL 2, DE 15, FR 3 (58% EN) (Q2 53% EN) (Q1 47% EN)
Translations: 2 each from Russian and Croatian, 1 each from Italian and Polish

4 books were related to the Q3 "Slavic languages" theme

Publication dates from 1810 to 2022; 13 books were published in the last five years.

Formats: library 0, physical books from the TBR 15, physical books from the main shelves (re-reads) 5, audiobooks 6, paid ebooks 2, other free/borrowed 19 — 31% from the TBR (Q2: 42%, Q1: 66% from the TBR)

42 unique first authors (1.14 books/author; Q2 1.07, Q1 1.3)

By gender: M 34, F 8, :81% M (Q2: 70% M; Q1 78% M)
By main country: UK 13, NL 2, FR 2, DE 14, US 3, HR 2, and various singletons

TBR pile evolution:
01/01/2022: 93 books (77389 book-days) (change: 8 read, 12 added)
01/04/2022: 84 books (77762 book-days) (change: 31 read, 22 added)
01/07/2022: 86 books (58460 book-days) (change: 30 read, 32 added)
01/10/2022: 84 books (59801 book-days) (change: 15 read, 13 added)
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I paid less attention to the "old end" of the TBR pile in Q3 after having chopped away at it quite a bit in Q2, so the average age of the books on the pile went up slightly, from 680 days/book to 712. There are still three books from 2016 on the pile.

Overall, there was more travel and less reading in Q3 than Q2. The main reason the TBR pile failed to shrink much was that I was away from home for about half the quarter, reading a lot of books that I found along the way.

Q4 Plans

In Q3 I set out these goals:

— Don Quijote in Spanish — I haven't spent much time on this. During Q3 I advanced from the end of Pt.I, Ch.XXIV to the end of Pt.I, Ch.XL. Still a long way to go.
— RG Theme read (Slavic Languages) — I only read four books for this in the end, but they were all worthwhile.
— More Victorians — I read the two "set books", Lady Anna and Hester. More would have been nice. (I did also read one Georgian book, Crabbe's The Borough)
— More fresh air and travel — yes, I achieved that!

An unplanned bonus at the end of Q3, which gave me a lot of pleasure, was (re-)reading Ronald Firbank's novels back-to-back with Brigid Brophy's Prancing novelist.

Goals for Q4:
— October is going to be a bit fragmented by Real Life stuff, but I'm expecting to get plenty of reading done as we go into the winter months. And maybe some more bookbinding...
— More Victorians: definitely some poetry, maybe the re-read of Middlemarch.
— Keep chipping away at the TBR and Don Quijote
— Fill in a few more gaps in my reading of the Mann Family — partly inspired by the otherwise slightly disappointing The magician, which I read in Q3.
— The RG theme read "prize-winners in their own languages"

...and, leaving all the admin stuff for later, here's the first book I've finished in Q4. It's an audiobook I've been listening to for a couple of weeks now.

Leonhard's book was a huge bestseller when it came out in 1955, but that was slightly before the time when I started reading political memoirs. Fortunately, an enterprising publisher got him to record it as an audiobook to mark the fiftieth anniversary of its original publication, and it popped up in my recommendations, probably because I'd been listening to Eugen Ruge's Metropol.

Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder (1955; 2005; Child of the revolution) by Wolfgang Leonhard (Germany, 1921-2014), audiobook read by the author

  

(Author photo Bundesarchiv via Wikipedia)

Wolfgang Leonhard was the son of the socialist writer and activist Susanne Leonhard, whose high-profile revolutionary past made it inadvisable to stay in Berlin after the Nazis came to power. They went into exile first in Sweden and then in Moscow, where they arrived in 1935, when Wolfgang was in his early teens. In this celebrated memoir, he describes his life from that point up to his move to Yugoslavia in 1949, explaining the process by which someone who had spent his formative years at the heart of the Soviet system was gradually pushed to the point where he felt obliged to break away from Stalinism.

In the Soviet Union, Leonhard initially had a comparatively privileged existence in Moscow's Children's Home No.6 and Karl Liebknecht School, both reserved for the children of German-speaking communist exiles. He went on to study English in Moscow and Karaganda (after Germans were expelled from the Western USSR in 1941), and was assigned to the Comintern's secret political college in the wilds of Bashkiria for an intensive course in Marxist-Leninist administration. Obviously intended for a high-level career in the German party after the war, from 1943 he worked under Walter Ulbricht doing newspaper and radio work for the "Freies Deutschland" committee, a PoW organisation trying to promote opposition to Hitler in Germany. In May 1945 he was one of the ten German comrades led by Ulbricht who went into Berlin with the Red Army to set up new civilian administration, and from there he moved into the Agit-Prop department of the Central Committee in the Soviet Zone and became a lecturer at the SED's party college.

(Fun detail: among the ten people on the plane to Berlin with him in May 1945 were Karl Maron, later to be the DDR's police chief and shortly to become stepfather to future novelist Monika Maron, and Fritz Erpenbeck, writer, DDR arts supremo and grandfather of another novelist, Jenny Erpenbeck. The DDR was an astonishingly small place in some ways...)

Leonhard made friends with Yugoslavian counterparts on a study trip in 1947, and admired the way they were building socialism. He thus had serious "political indigestion" as a result of Stalin's break with Tito in 1948 and the way it was treated in the Soviet Zone. When the SED aligned itself behind Stalin and refused to hear any discussion of the Yugoslav side of the case, Leonhard had irrefutable confirmation that the idea of "a German route to socialism" they had been promoting in the early days after the fall of Germany was an illusion.

Of course, he had had lots of reasons to doubt Stalinism before — the purges of 1936-1938, which resulted in the arrest of his mother (vanished into the Gulag until 1947) and of many other people he knew, for no obvious reason; the sudden switches of foreign policy direction before 1941; the draconian labour laws of 1940; the criticism and self-criticism evenings in the Comintern college, and the dire fate of fellow students who fell foul of them; the difference in living standards between ordinary Russians and party functionaries; Ulbricht's Machiavellian manoeuvres to squash any kind of bottom-up initiatives in the German party, whether from comrades who had stayed in Germany or from social democrats; the SED's absolute refusal to challenge the Soviet occupying power about abuses by Red Army soldiers or the excesses of the "reparations" programme. And much more. But Yugoslavia was the final straw, and in early 1949 he decided that he had no alternative but to leave the Soviet Zone. He escaped to Belgrade in March 1949, and settled down there to work for the German service of Belgrade Radio, but it wasn't long before he decided that he could work more effectively in West Germany.

After writing this memoir, Leonhard worked as a journalist and academic (in Oxford and Yale, amongst other places) specialising in Soviet history and politics. He argues that only someone who has been trained in the mentality of a party functionary could really understand the way the Marxist-Leninist state works.

This is a long book, and it's full of forgotten names and stale political theory, but despite that I found it very engaging. It's always fascinating to get a first-hand view of what it was really like to be on the inside of that kind of system.

>5 thorold: Well that looks like a fascinating book. I will look to see whether it's been translated into English. Also, I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of your 4th quarter reading.

Well, happy Q4 thread. I’ve been catching up, but have taken in too much to say anything other than that I’m enjoying your thread.

>5 thorold: you’ve had me thinking about East Germany a little while now. So I had you in mind while reading where Anniversaries touches on the 1st year of post-ww2 Soviet Germany. It’s a very strange world.

On the very off off off chance that you see this on time AND are interested... I think there are about three hours left to see Kira Muratova's "The Asthenic Syndrome" on Henri:

https://www.cinematheque.fr/henri/film/41148-le-syndrome-asthenique-kira-mourato...

I apologise for the time crunch; but I just realised that it's practically unavailable anywhere. It's a unique look at the disintegrating USSR (1989) and I think may be the single best intro to the recently announced BBC series on the horrible postcommunist period.

>5 thorold:

Very interesting. Times were very hard in Yugoslavia in the late 40s/early 50s, stuck between a hostile West and an equally hostile East. Things started getting better just when Leonhard left.

>8 LolaWalser: Thanks, it looks very interesting. I don’t think I can stay awake to watch it now, but I’ve flagged it on my MUBI watch list in case they get it again. (I’ve just finished watching Die Nibelungen part one).

Leonhard hints at the difficult situation in Yugoslavia after 1948 in his afterword, but he doesn’t really say much about his time there. Most of what he says is about how he found the country so optimistic and different from the Soviet Zone in 1947. Especially the famous railway being built by young people. The only thing he criticises the Yugoslavs for at that time is the way they always deprecate their own achievements by comparing them unfavourably to the Soviet Union: Leonhard of course was in a good position to know that the Soviet Union wasn’t necessarily ahead of them at all.
I think something must have gone wrong when he was living there in 1949-50 that he doesn’t want to talk about (maybe a totally irrelevant personal thing), but he does say he met Tito, who was very friendly (and insisted on speaking Austrian German to him).

A short novel plucked off the TBR shelf for a train journey. This is one I picked up from a little library a year ago, thinking it was a Boekenweek gift: it actually turned to be a reprint of a book from 1975 given out as a free gift by public libraries in October 2008.

Twee vrouwen (1975; Two women) by Harry Mulisch (Netherlands, 1927-2010)

  

There's a scene towards the end of this book where the narrator, exhausted from nervous strain and a long drive, briefly falls unconscious at a café table. When she comes round, the friend who was sitting with her tells her that he saw her suddenly lean forward and fold up "like a ventriloquist's doll".

An image Mulisch chose carefully, of course, because the one fact we never manage to shake out of our minds whilst reading this very intimate first-person story of a tragic love-affair between two women is that it's actually being told by one of the biggest alpha-males of seventies Dutch literature, in a quite extraordinarily bare-faced bit of ventriloquism. To his credit, he doesn't quite turn it into porn (the only explicit sex described in the book is, bizarrely enough, between two men on a theatre stage), but we do get all the other clichés of male-gaze fantasy. Both women are scared stiff of their mothers; the relationship is incomplete by definition, without a man and without children; it can only end unhappily; there can only be a dramatic resolution by bringing a man into the story.

Mulisch is a competent and entertaining story-teller, and he manages to muddy the waters enough by clever image-play and high-cultural references that we almost believe that there's something serious going here. Perhaps not surprising to know that it was one of his most popular books, made into a reasonably high-profile film in 1979. But fifty years on the world has changed: it's hard now to see it as anything more than a rather pointless confidence trick.

And a recent novel by Felicitas Hoppe that caught my eye in the library. I read her Ilf-and-Petrov-revisited road novel Prawda : eine amerikanische Reise a couple of years ago. This one looked as though it was going to be just as complicated and multi-media, and it lived up to that. It took me a while to read it, because of course I also had to devote two full evenings along the way to watching both parts of Fritz Lang's 1924 film.

Die Nibelungen: ein deutscher Stummfilm (2021) by Felicitas Hoppe (Germany, 1960- )

  

The narrator of this novel constantly shifts between being an audience-member and backstage reporter at a 21st-century open-air performance of a play based on the medieval Nibelungenlied and being a witness directly involved in the events of the story. Sometimes she is interviewing actors in the interval, sometimes she is travelling down the Rhine or the Danube in a leaky dinghy.

All this multi-media ambiguity — because Fritz Lang's 1924 silent film is always there in the mix as well — gives Hoppe the chance to toss around complicated thoughts about epic stories and their representations in culture, the way theatre and film work, and how it might feel to be stuck in the rigid logic of such a story.

But she's also looking at the oddities of this particular story and the characters in it. Was the personality of nordic action-maiden Brunhild actually based on Pippi Longstocking? Is everything really Siegfried's fault? How is it that the king of the Huns, Etzel (Atilla), has so little to do in the story? Was Kriemhild beautiful, evil, or both? How did a man from the Worms Rowing Club in a Woolworth's track-suit get mixed up in it all? Was the final showdown in Etzel's hall actually a cake-fight?

An interesting mix of the serious and the silly, which, whilst it doesn't attempt to deny that they matter too, goes out of its way to avoid getting bogged down in the most obvious discussion points (injustices of feudalism, blond-hero-cult, negative roles of women, cruelty to dragons and dwarves, the way the Nazis used the story, etc.). We are presumed to be aware of all that sort of thing, I suppose.

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Paul Richter waving his sword around as Siegfried in the Fritz Lang version:


Wikipedia on the Nibelungenlied: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibelungenlied

I've filled in the missing stats (>3 thorold:) and goals (>4 thorold:) posts above.

I hope you keep us apprised of your bookbinding projects. I'm tempted to reread Middlemarch too. I loved it when I read it decades ago.

>13 labfs39: When there's something juicy to show off I'll post more about it. But it won't be for a little while yet, I've just had to move all my supplies down to the basement to make space in the guest-room...

Another recent Edmund White novel I missed. Another male-author-female-narrator novel like >10 thorold:, but it doesn't have the same feeling of male territory-claiming about it. Maybe because White's characters are comic creations obviously not meant to be taken as in any way representative of real women, or maybe just because we know it's written by a gay man?

A saint from Texas (2020) by Edmund White (USA, 1940- )

  

Edmund White is in an unusually jolly mood in this darkly comic satire about a pair of twin sisters from the outskirts of Dallas. It sometimes feels rather like Nancy Mitford's retelling of The Power and the Glory as we follow narrator Yvonne's shameless social climbing from forties Texas suburban nouveau-riche to Parisian gratin against the background of her sister Yvette's equally challenging and oddly parallel quest for humility and saintliness in a Colombian convent (that's "Why-von" and "Why-vet" if you're from Texas, BTW).

The set-up gives White the chance to play around with ideas about the problem of attributing "saintliness" to an actual, complex human being who has lived in the modern world, and to wonder whether the religious life doesn't involve just as much social climbing and backstabbing as more worldly careers. And also about how much rewriting and expurgation inevitably goes into any kind of biography.

But the main raison-d'être of the book is clearly to allow White to make fun of his aristocratic friends in France. It's full of ironic observations of the manners of the French upper classes, and wicked little sketches of people we would obviously recognise if we'd moved in the right circles back in the day. And a certain amount of name-dropping-with-hindsight ("Tell me about this Jacqueline Bouvier." — "She's nobody."). I particularly enjoyed White's send-up of the contemporary music world — Yvonne starts to hold musical salons, inviting the most appalling and deafening avant-garde composers she can find, and of course Paris society can't get enough of it.

Very entertaining.

>14 thorold: Fun review of a fun sounding book.

>11 thorold:

Shiny wields Pointy! Hmm, as I recall Kriemhild was my favourite, so chances are she's evil. (In the epic--I don't have much of a memory of this very looooong movie.)

>14 thorold:

Very glad to see White's still around and kicking.

>16 LolaWalser: He’s not only still kicking, he’s even written another one since then, A previous life, which I read in June. But I enjoyed this one more.

Oh, right, I remember that. What can I say, I've committed public pornography myself, no high ground on my side... :)

Back to the Mann family. This is a re-read of a book I last read in 1995, if the till receipt I found tucked into the final pages (from a supermarket in Klaksvik, Faroe Islands!) is anything to go by. But I actually listened to most of it on audio this time.

Mephisto: Roman einer Karriere (1936) by Klaus Mann (Germany, 1906-1949)

  

Klaus Mann's best-known novel, written in exile in 1936 and attacking the prominent figures in the arts in Germany who had chosen to stay and work with the Nazis despite being aware of how evil the regime actually was.

Although Mann maintained that the novel was about types, not individuals, and that it should not be read as a roman à clef, everyone immediately spotted that the central character, the ambitious actor-manager Hendrik ("with a d") Höfgen, had at least a 90% overlap in background, career and appearance with the author's ex-brother-in-law Gustaf ("with an f") Gründgens. Like the real Gründgens, the fictitious Höfgen was a personal friend of Hermann Göring and his second wife, who appointed him Generalintendant of the Prussian State Theatre; was famous for playing Mephistopheles and Hamlet; a blond Rhinelander; got his start in an army mobile theatre in 1917; worked in the 20s in Hamburg where he cultivated a left-wing image; married the daughter of a prominent intellectual from Bavaria, etc. etc.

Details apart, there's only really one point at which the fictional and real stories diverge: Gründgens was notoriously gay, despite being married successively to Erika Mann and Marianne Hoppe (who were both notoriously bisexual...). Obviously, Klaus Mann couldn't use Gründgens' sexuality to attack him without (a) hypocrisy and (b) exposing himself to reciprocal attacks, so he invents an equally embarrassing sex-life for Höfgen with the black dominatrix Juliette, who eventually becomes such a risk to his career that he has to ask Göring to arrange for her to be deported and paid off.

The borrowing of Gründgens' life-story wasn't a big deal in 1936 — Klaus Mann's books weren't being published in Germany anyway, and the actor was hardly likely to go to court in foreign countries to protest at being represented as a friend of the Nazis — but it completely overshadowed the subsequent life of the novel after 1945, when, contrary to the dark predictions his counterpart Höfgen gets to hear in the final chapter, Gründgens was able to cash in various debts owed to him by other prominent people and resume his theatrical career in the new Germany without much of a stain on his character.

It's been suggested that one of the things that prompted Mann to take his own life in 1949 was the news that a West German publisher was making plans to bring out an edition of Mephisto, which would certainly have led to Mann being involved in some very unpleasant arguments. In the event, Gründgens was able to use his considerable influence to prevent publication in the Federal Republic during his lifetime. After his death in 1963, his life-partner and adopted son, Peter Gorski, fought a legal action to suppress the novel that went all the way to the Federal Constitutional Court, which narrowly decided in his favour in 1971. It was only in 1981 that this bizarre fight between two dead men was put aside and the first West German edition appeared, by which time almost everyone who wanted one had illegally imported a copy of the Austrian or DDR edition.

The result of all this is a rather mixed message: Klaus Mann is using the text of the novel to tell us that you have to pay eventually if you make a pact with the Devil, but the historical context suggests that anyone with the right connections and enough good lawyers has a good chance of wriggling out of a Faustian pact without too much trouble. All the same, Mann's palpable anger and disgust at what is going on in Germany make this a very engaging read, and for us a couple of generations later there's also a lot of interesting period detail about the German theatre between the wars.

>19 thorold: Fascinating review, Mark. What a story (and backstory).

>20 labfs39: Thanks! On reflection, what I could have added that really struck me about the book was the clarity of Mann's insight into where the Nazis were heading: he was absolutely certain that there was going to be a terrible war, and that there was going to be a time in which Germans would have to answer for what they had been doing since 1933. Maybe that didn't require blinding amounts of insight, but it's certainly not what everyone thought in 1936.

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Moving on from nephew to uncle: As far as I can remember, this is only the second of Uncle Heini's books I've read, the first being his most famous novel, Professor Unrat, better known as The Blue Angel from the title of Joseph von Sternberg's film.

This one, written around 1907, draws on the summers the brothers Mann had spent in the Italian town of Palestrina before the turn of the century. Palestrina also features as an important location in Thomas's late masterpiece Doktor Faustus.

Die kleine Stadt (1909; The little town) by Heinrich Mann (Germany, 1871-1950)

  

A small Italian town is thrown into chaos by the arrival of an opera company to perform a new work by a local composer, the first theatrical performance in the town in thirty-eight and three-quarter years. The presence of the singers leads to a flare-up of the smouldering conflict between the liberal faction of professionals and veterans of Garibaldi's campaigns, headed by Advocate Belotti, and the conservative, clerical faction of small traders, headed by the irascible and combative priest Don Taddeo. But it also exposes a bewildering number of personal lusts, greeds, jealousies and revenge-struggles within the community.

Mann explicitly structures the book like an opera, with big opening and closing choruses as the singers arrive on the mail-coach and leave again, a spectacular sustained centre-piece taking us through the chaos both front-of-house and backstage during the tumultuous premiere of The poor Tonietta, and then two more scenes with the entire cast onstage: a Meistersinger-style riot in the main square and the night-time burning-down of Café Progress, which transforms seamlessly to Don Taddeo's big scene during mass in the cathedral. In between there are any number of romantic trysts in gardens and dark alleys, interspersed with jolly café conversation scenes.

There is a ludicrously oversized cast of named characters for a book of this length (around 400 pages), and Mann has fun "burying" characters who will later become important, slipping them in to play insignificant roles in the crowded ensemble scenes. Another very important part of his technique is to present a lot of crucial plot information to us only as gossip, so that we are never entirely sure who is sleeping with whom. But neither are any of the characters in the book, and a lot of actions people take turn out to have been based on false information.

Fun in detail, a lively evocation of Italian small-town life, but maybe a bit frustrating when you try to make something out of it as a complete novel.

This one was prompted by the "prize-winners in their own languages" theme. Dutch author Marga Minco (102 years old in the meantime) has clocked up quite a few prizes in her long career, including the Multatuli-prijs and Vijverbergprijs (now renamed F. Bordewijk-prijs) for Het bittere kruid when it first came out, and more recently the 2019 P.C. Hooft Prize for her whole oeuvre.

This is her most famous book, much translated when it first came out:

Het bittere kruid: een kleine kroniek (1957;Bitter herbs: a little chronicle) by Marga Minco (Netherlands, 1920- )

  

This very sober and pared-down novella tells the story of a young Jewish girl's experiences during the German occupation of the Netherlands, in the simplest possible language and with the least possible explicit emotional input. It's the kind of book that has all its narrative power in the things it doesn't tell us, but which we know are there just under the surface. By not sharing anything about the narrator's fears and griefs, it takes us into them much more strongly than it would if everything had been spelled out.

The story is a lightly fictionalised version of Minco's own experiences — all her family were murdered in the Holocaust, but she was able to escape arrest by a stroke of luck and remained in hiding until the end of the war. She sharpens the focus a bit by making her narrator seem rather younger and more naive than she actually was herself (in reality she was already working as a journalist in May 1940). But it would be unfair to suggest that she was trying to ride in the slipstream of Anne Frank (although her publishers certainly were): this is a very different kind of book, clearly a highly sophisticated piece of literature with a strong message about the gulf that opened up under the ordinary, provincial life the Minco family and their neighbours were living, convinced that "it can't happen here," when it did.

>22 thorold: I went to add this to my wishlist, and found it already there thanks to Monica/justjoey/trifolia. Must get to it!

>22 thorold: you caught my attention with this one, too.

>22 thorold: I was thinking that it will be an interesting companion to Anne Frank and you mentioned it (but then the connection is obvious). I rarely reach towards Holocaust memoirs and novels but this one sounds interesting.

>23 labfs39: >24 dchaikin: >25 AnnieMod: It only takes a couple of hours to read, so you’re not risking much by taking it on (…except emotionally, you’ll keep on thinking about it after it stops).

I was interested by a quote I saw somewhere from Minco talking about her reductive writing technique, which leaves her with carrier bags of discarded drafts by the time she finishes reducing a piece to the length she thinks it should have. It reminded me of Ilse Aichinger, who also lost her family in the Holocaust, and was even more obsessed with reducing texts to their shortest possible form.

>22 thorold: I just checked and saw that I have read four other books by Marga Minco, but not yet this. I should look around for a copy.

This was a book I came across through a suggestion from dianeham in the Questions thread (https://www.librarything.com/topic/344423#7953423).

I don't really know how I managed never to hear Pico Iyer's name: not only was I an avid reader of travel books (and the NYRB) when his work started to appear in the eighties, but we were at the same college, where we only just failed to overlap. Surely I must have seen his name coming up in alumni mailings over the years and never registered it? I suppose it just goes to show how many authors we simply never find out about, however much we read...

A beginner's guide to Japan : observations and provocations (2019) by Pico Iyer (UK, 1957- )

  

Pico Iyer's wife is Japanese, and they've lived in Japan (in Nara) for much of the last thirty years, so he's probably better-qualified than most foreigners to be writing about the country, but he's clearly not entirely joking when he tells us that we should read "Beginner's Guide" as referring to the inexperience of the author, not the reader. Japan is not an easy place to pin down, apparently, especially not if you didn't grow up in a Japanese family and your command of the language is less than perfect.

Iyer therefore largely avoids subjective statements of opinion (a very Japanese approach, as he points out) and leans quite heavily on things other people — Japanese and foreign — have said about Japan. Or, occasionally, things people have said about other places that can also be read onto Japan. He arranges them cleverly to expose the many paradoxes in what "we" think we know about the Japanese, and in what the Japanese think they know about themselves, until we find ourselves nudged gently towards the conclusion that, in fact, the Japanese are just like everyone else. Only more so. There are plenty of other places in the world where people eagerly embrace new technologies whilst finding great significance in archaic traditions, or where a a strong desire for outward conformity and avoidance of any kind of individualistic display in public creates masks for people who are wildly eccentric and creative in their inner lives (England was just coming out of that mode when I was growing up, for example). But the Japanese have somehow refined all these things a degree or two beyond the rest of the world.

An enjoyable, thought-provoking book, which will probably become an essential — if useless in practice — reference for anyone visiting Japan for the first time.

>28 thorold: glad you had such a serendipitous experience with Iyer. I can’t remember how I came across him. I think Video Night in Kathmandu was the first of his books I read. I started to read This Could Be Home : Raffles Hotel and the City of Tomorrow but never finished it. I have an online friend in Singapore and wanted to learn more about it. Do you think you’ll read any more by him?

>28 thorold: you've reminded me of a Granta article he wrote on Japanese ritual grieving - that is the sort of pretending/acting out of emotion in a ritual fashion. I remember him writing about how while it's an act, the rituals also provide an opportunity for real grieving. Anyway, great review of A Beginners Guide to Japan.

I am reading 'On Java Road' by Lawrence Osborne and a participant in the story speaks about reading Chinese poetry. This raised a question in my mind about how the ability to read poetry in a foreign language provides a significant advantage to someone like yourself. I can't imagine how a translated poem can provide the same emotional response as the original language.

Is this a valid expectation?

>31 JoeB1934: It’s tricky: there are big debates about this, and many theorists flatly say poetry can’t be translated, but in practice there are also many poets who put time and creative effort into translating, and readers who clearly get a lot out of the translations.

Obviously a translated poem is never going to be the same as the original, because you can’t find 1:1 equivalents for all the ambiguities and cultural references. Sometimes, though, a translation by someone who has spent many hours working on that poem and researching everything going on in it might give you a better impression than a naive first-time reading of the original in a language where you understand the words but don’t have the same cultural frame of reference as the “intended reader”. For example, if I read a poem in Dutch (the language of the culture I live in), I have a much better chance of “getting” it than I do with a poem in Spanish or Italian, which are languages I’ve learnt mostly from books.

Parallel text is a good compromise: that gives you a feel for where the translator has gone away from the literal text and makes you think about why.

>32 thorold: Thanks very much for that expanded explanation.

I am not a poetry reader by nature. If anything, I would be more interested in attending a poetry reading where the reader could provide the appropriate emphasis.

The similarity to my preference for audio books is apparent. Even if the audio reader isn't the same as the author, I obtain more in-depth benefit from an audio book than I do from reading the print.

As part of broadening my reading profile I will be taking a look at some of the books you/others have mentioned here. A good objective for 2023.

Thanks for this chat.

This new novel by Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez caught my eye on the "recent acquisitions" display in the library. It rather nicely picks up the "second-generation communist exiles" theme I started with in >5 thorold: above:

Volver la vista atrás (2021) by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Colombia, 1973- )

  

A biographical novel about the Colombian film director Sergio Cabrera (b. 1950; since appointed as Colombia's ambassador in Beijing) and his father, the actor Fausto Cabrera (1924-2016). The book is in novel form, but closely based on interviews with Sergio and people around him, and takes as its central axis a retrospective of Sergio's films in Barcelona shortly after Fausto's death.

It's a fascinating story, especially the parts dealing with the schooldays of Sergio and his sister in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution — where their parents had parked them whilst they went back to take part in a revolution back home — and their subsequent time as young guerrillas fighting in the Colombian rain-forest. Vásquez looks at the inevitable clash between Maoist idealism and the realities of fighting in an irregular force in difficult conditions, and at the way these extreme experiences leave a mark on later life. A lot of the historical and political ideas that come up in Vásquez's earlier books come into play here too, but this is much more a personal than a political story. Very interesting.

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https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergio_Cabrera

>34 thorold: Making note of that one, Mark. I haven't read any of his works yet, although I own The Informers. Enticing review.

>34 thorold:

Interesting! Only, at that age he'd not only have missed the heyday of Cultural Revolution, it would have taken quite some brilliance for a toddler to dwell on it. This reminds me--that (early 1970s) is exactly when Amélie Nothomb lived in Beijing too... somewhat older, but not by much (I think it's told about in Le sabotage amoureux--one of her few better books, IMO).

If travelogues of Japan are something you're interested in, I highly recommend Alex Kerr's Lost Japan and Nicolas Bouvier's Chronique japonaise, despite their age. (Bouvier may be the best travel writer who ever lived. I realise this is provocative, given the popularity of the genre among the British... :))

>36 LolaWalser: I haven’t read much about China (yet..). I’m sure there are more comprehensive sources for the Cultural Revolution, but I found this particular perspective fascinating. Sergio lived in Beijing from 1960 (when he was ten) to 1969, so he could speak and read Chinese very well by the time things got started, and he was probably less conscious of being an outsider than most adult expats. He lived through most of the excitement as a rather precocious and politically aware high-school student at a Chinese elite school, later in an engineering factory and in military training. Vásquez doesn’t have him pretend to know what was going on across China as a whole, or the detailed politics of it all, but he’s an interesting witness as far as he could see things. Of course it is all filtered by being retold to Vásquez half a century later and written up as a novel with both their hindsight.

I should read more Bouvier: I loved L’usage du monde. I’d hesitate to claim anyone as “best travel writer ever” (how can you compare Ibn Battutah with Bruce Chatwin?). On the limited evidence I have, Bouvier certainly has a claim to be in the running, though.

>37 thorold:

D'oh... somehow I transposed the author's DOB to the subject's, sorry.

how can you compare Ibn Battutah with Bruce Chatwin?

Right, I don't think it's useful to expand the genre artificially to the previous centuries and people who had no specific notion of "travel writer".

Back to the prize-winner's theme, and another Dutch writer I haven't tried before. This book was shortlisted for the Dutch Libris prize in 2008, and Februari won the P.C. Hooft Prize for his whole oeuvre in 2020. (He now uses the masculine forename Maxim, but previously published under gender-neutral and feminine forenames.)

De literaire kring (2008; The Book Club) by Marjolijn Februari {now Maxim Februari} (Netherlands, 1963- )

  

In a dormitory-village in the Dutch countryside, an exclusive book-club is pressured into reading a new novel by a young woman who grew up amongst them. And, naturally, old wounds are reopened, and the members of the club — mostly lawyers and top civil servants — find themselves confronted with the moral consequences of their own actions.

It's a fun idea to shake the book-club out of its normal role as passive consumer of literature, and Februari gets some mileage out of the moral ambiguities of liberal western society in the early 21st century, but this otherwise struck me as an oddly tentative book, that keeps stepping back on the brink of going deeply into any of the main characters. An enjoyable, but slightly odd, mix of moral critique and superficial society novel.

>36 LolaWalser: & >37 thorold: A compelling, firsthand description of living through the Cultural Revolution as a child can be found in Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's recent memoir, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows He spent much of his childhood in exile with his father, the internationally known but officially disgraced poet Ai Qing in far-flung, extremely bleak outposts.

Lots of my Chinese colleagues lived through those times and after. There isn't a one-size-fits-all narrative, particularly when one looks beyond the "dissident" set.

>39 thorold:

Nothing to say, except that I love last name "Februari". Is it common? What about other months?

>42 LolaWalser: Sadly it's a nom-de-plume. I'll look for an old phone-book if I still have one, I'm intrigued by the question as well...

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Another recent prize-winner I spotted in my local library. This won the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française in 2020.

La grande épreuve (2020) by Etienne de Montety (France, 1965- )

  

A brisk, lightly-built novel based on the real events of the terrorist attack on a church in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray in June 2016, when two young men calling themselves Jihadists burst into the church during mass, killing the priest and seriously injuring one of his parishioners.

De Montety moves the action to a small town in South-West France and takes us separately through the "typically French" backgrounds of the various protagonists — the teenage boys (one rugby-playing middle-class, one juvenile-delinquent) who have grown up in non-religious families and been drawn into Islamic radicalism via their perception of their marginalised identity as Rebeus; the septuagenarian Algeria-veteran priest; the nun who has retired from long service in a children's home in Soweto; the policeman of Indochinese descent. He is at his best when he's telling us about the priest and the nun, with Bernanos always hovering in the background, but the touch is so light and the approach so objective and journalistic that it's hard to see where we get to the tipping point when the tragic and wasteful attack becomes inevitable, or how it could have been prevented. Maybe de Montety takes us as close as a white, middle-class reader could get to understanding how a young person with no Islamic background could be drawn into something like that, but it isn't very close.

>42 LolaWalser: I spotted an old surname-directory in the library (Nederlands repertorium van familienamen: ‘s-Gravenhage) and had a quick browse. No direct hits on any standard Dutch month names other than Mei and Augustus, but a few near-misses (Julius and the like). No genuine Februari living in the city at that time, whenever it was.

Thanks. I used to love leafing through phone directories, I read the better part of the New Orleans one, the names were pure poetry. Schexnaydre. (Believe it or not, that was the rendering, presumably "simplified" and "frenchified" of... Schneider.) Lots of magical examples like that; Louisiana had quite a few German imports in the 19th c.

Simenon's Maigret has his Insp. Janvier; that's about it for last names corresponding to months that I can think of.

>45 LolaWalser: Simenon mentions in his memoirs that he collected names from shopfronts, advertisements, news stories and directories wherever he went and kept a note of them. Dickens was another famous collector of interesting names.

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After a couple of (enjoyably!) busy weeks when I barely had time to finish my library books, let alone post about them, a bit of a calm spot to finish something from the TBR pile. This is one that caught my eye in a bookshop a couple of months ago because I'd enjoyed Deen's previous book about the Wadden. And because I always have a soft spot for books about the Rhine...

De grenzeloze rivier: verhalen uit het rijk van de Rijn (2021) by Mathijs Deen (Netherlands, 1962- )

  

Author photo: Writers unlimited

Whilst he was planning to write about the river Rhine, Deen was warned by a passing paleogeographer not to fall into the common trap of thinking of a river in purely linear terms — a source, a bed, and a mouth — but to understand that every river is a drainage system defined chiefly by its catchment area, in which the course of the main bed at any given moment is purely incidental. In the case of the Rhine, that means looking at a big area of north-west Europe: all of Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, large chunks of Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, France and the Netherlands, and even parts of Austria. If you draw it on a map and you have the right kind of imagination, it looks a little bit like a skating bear. Apparently.

Been puts together a collage of interesting vignettes to give us an impression of what this means in physical, cultural, economic, political and spiritual terms — timelapse accounts of the geological formation of the area; journalistic impressions of its scope (the village at the easternmost point of the catchment area, Bischofsgrün, is famous for building a giant snowman each year to celebrate Carnival; at the westernmost point is Ors, where Wilfred Owen was killed a few days before the Armistice in 1918); imaginative reconstructions of incidents in Roman and Carolingian times; the river as a frontier and as a transport artery; the culture of river-bathing and the use of drowning as a means of execution; an eccentric Swiss family that lived on an isolated peninsula in the Upper Rhine Gorge; St Willibrord converting the Frisians; a couple of Swiss entrepreneurs who brought an Irish light-vessel to Basel to make into a concert venue; the Roman general Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo building a canal between the northern and southern mouths of the river. And so on. It sounds like a terrible mish-mash, but it actually works very well: Deen is a lively and versatile writer and he manages to create a unity between the very diverse subjects and moods of these stories.

>46 thorold: Very interesting! To me, crossing the Rhine meant coming home for a long time. I lived in another part of Germany when I grew up, but did not like the area very much and longed to be with the rest of the extended family in the Rhineland area where my mom came from (she moved away to marry my dad). Every time we went there for holidays I was happy to cross the Rhine and sad when we left.
Now I live in the north of Germany and have found yet another home (where the Weser river flows into the sea!), but the Rhine is still special to me, so I read your review with great interest.

>47 MissBrangwen: That’s funny, I spent a lot of childhood summer holidays with my mother’s relatives on the Rhine as well (but in Duisburg, which is not quite the most beautiful part of the river…). And of course I live close to the modern successor of Corbulo’s Canal now.

I’m about halfway through walking the Rheinsteig between Bonn and Wiesbaden, a very lovely walk (albeit one with a lot of unnecessarily steep up and down!). I need to spend another couple of weeks sometime to complete it.

I read another very nice book on the Rhine a few years ago, De Rijn: biografie van een rivier by Martin Hendriksma. Neither seems to be available in any language other than Dutch, though.

It turns out that whoever does the purchasing for the German section of our library follows the winners of the Deutscher Buchpreis. This was the 2020 winner. And, bizarrely, my second verse-novel in German this year! (Der fliegende Berg was the first).

Anne Weber is a German-born translator and writer who lives in France. She has written both in French and in German: this book was one of those she wrote in German first, even though it has a French subject. It won the 2020 Deutscher Buchpreis.

Annette, ein Heldinnenepos (2020) by Anne Weber (Germany, France, 1964- )

  

Weber repurposes the classical form of the verse epic to tell the life-story of a real, modern, female hero, Anne Beaumanoir (1923-2022). As a young woman in France during WWII, Beaumanoir was a courier for the Resistance and helped to save the lives of Jews; subsequently she became a neurologist and carried on in the (clandestine) struggle to protect the rights of oppressed people in the Communist Party and later in the Algerian independence movement, the FLN. She escaped from France and was sentenced in absentia to ten years' imprisonment for "terrorist" activities in 1959, and worked in the Algerian Health Ministry after independence.

The book — which Weber describes as coming out of a friendship that developed from a chance meeting with the 96 year old Beaumanoir at a film festival — is written in rather understated free verse that often seems to shade into prose, but it has enough of a nod towards classical verse-forms that we can see what it is getting at. Weber looks especially at the way the kind of heroic, idealistic behaviour that seems to come naturally to Beaumanoir is constantly bumping up against the realities of political compromise in an unheroic world, where communists spend more time fighting deviation in their own ranks than opposing fascism, and socialist freedom fighters turn into military dictators and Islamists as soon as they get into power. And of course at the way the kind of life Beaumanoir has to lead refuses to fit itself in with the model of life as a wife and mother she has been brought up to expect.

An interesting little book, but probably not quite big enough to contain such a huge personality: it makes you feel you should be reading Beaumanoir's own autobiography instead...

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Beaumanoir

>49 thorold: How come I've never heard of Anne Beaumanoir!?

Makes one wonder how many more examples like that there are. Thousands and millions, probably.

>51 LolaWalser: I’m sure you’re right. She’s one who got quite a bit of publicity in her lifetime in one way and another, including a movie, an autobiography and Wiki pages in several languages, and we still hadn’t heard of her. If you go further away than France and further back in time, there must be endless numbers of women who did extraordinary things that were never recorded.

>52 thorold:

women

Dudes too! *feeling extraordinarily magnanimous* :P

>53 LolaWalser: Dudes too! *feeling extraordinarily magnanimous* :P

Oh dear, I think someone’s hacked Lola’s account :-)

Mellowing with age... :)

I somehow missed that Ransmayr was in verse. HMMMM.

Are you familiar with Vikram Seth's The Golden gate? That's my only reference for a contemporary novel in verse.

The Golden Gate is the first one I can think of too. Plus older things like Amours de voyage, Eugene Onegin and Aurora Leigh, of course. But there seem to be far more out there than we could ever imagine: https://www.librarything.com/tag/novel+in+verse

That tag also picks up things like Autobiography of Red and Omeros that I’ve got on the poetry shelves, though. I suppose it’s just a question of whether I think of the author as primarily a poet or a novelist.

Both the Ransmayr and Annette are in free verse, whilst as far as I can remember, Seth uses a pretty strict rhyme scheme and meter, giving quite a different effect.

Ooo, right--I was blown away by Autobiography of Red. Always mean to go back to Carson for more. Yes, I imagine free vs. rhymed would make a big difference to the "sound".

This is an early Margaret Drabble that I managed to miss the first two or three times round. A battered copy turned up in the little free library, but so many pages fell out when I started to read that I had to give it a "quick and dirty" rebind before I could get anywhere with it. Not a thing of beauty to start with — although I liked the period cover design by Caroline Smith — and I certainly didn't improve it aesthetically, but it was probably good practice before I get going with any real winter bookbinding activities.



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The Garrick year (1964) by Margaret Drabble‬ (UK, 1939- )

  

Emma — clever daughter of a Cambridge don, formerly a successful model, now mother of two young children — has got a promising job as a television announcer lined up for herself in London, but she has to renounce it when her actor husband gets the offer of a season in provincial rep in Hereford with the fashionable director Wyndham Farrar.

A wonderfully ironic look at the inequality of the sexes and the dullness of parenthood and provincial England in the early 1960s, where even the inevitable backstage adultery turns into something very like a tedious social obligation. And full of witty portraits of the kind of people who were creating big egos for themselves in the English theatre of those days. But perhaps slightly undermined by Emma's rather privileged situation and her snooty contempt for anything outside London. There were a lot of young mothers of her generation (my own included) for whom the prospect of an au pair to help with the kids and give them time to go out to first-nights sometimes would have seemed like a remote dream...

Continuing through my library stack with the novel that won the 2017 Deutscher Buchpreis, and another writer I've vaguely heard of but never tried. The novelist and political essayist Robert Menasse is from Vienna, he's the son of a famous Austrian footballer and the half-brother of novelist Eva Menasse.

Die Hauptstadt : Roman (2017; The Capital) by Robert Menasse (Austria, 1954- )

  

When this came out, it was hailed as the first big, literary novel to focus on the inner workings of the EU bureaucracy. Given how many clever, imaginative people there must be sitting around in Brussels offices (or recently retired from them), it seems surprising that there aren't many more such novels: one is almost forced to conclude that the work they do there is so engaging that they don't have any energy left over to satirise it...

Be that as it may, as well as a core group of officials mostly working in the communication department of "DG Culture" of the European Commission, Menasse's cast includes an elderly Auschwitz survivor, an Austrian pig-farmer, an emeritus economics professor, a Brussels police inspector, a professional assassin employed by the Archdiocese of Poznań, and a possibly-imaginary, possibly-symbolic pig wandering through the streets of Brussels. The conventions of narrative tell us that the stories of all these people are going to fit together sooner or later, but Menasse enjoys teasing us by allowing their paths to cross repeatedly without anything happening. It's not for nothing that Kafka's name is dropped repeatedly: Menasse is clearly a fan of the absurd, and we look for logical connections at our peril.

Naturally, this isn't just a book about the peculiarities of living in Brussels, with its constant rain, building sites, demonstrations no-one pays any attention to, inexplicable police blockades, and baffling bilingualism, nor is it merely a detailed study of the sophisticated methods international bureaucracies can deploy to resist dangerous new ideas, although it does both of those things very elegantly. What Menasse really seems to be doing here is arguing that we have lost track of the great European Idea of the 1940s, the notion that if we want a world in which we can say "never again" to Auschwitz we have to get rid of racism and nationalism and move on to a post-national democracy. The institutions of the EU are arranged in such a way that it is almost impossible for anyone to take a decision that goes against the self-interest of any of the member states, and it often seems as though the only truly radical things the EU has ever done have been those needed to serve the prevailing ideology of liberal capitalism and the free market. Obviously there are holes to pick in this: the founders of the predecessor organisations of the EU were arguably more interested in industrial competition with the US than in preserving the postwar peace, and no-one ever seems to have come up with a workable way to create truly democratic European institutions. But I'm sure that Menasse is right in identifying the legacy of Auschwitz as the thing that is at the core of the way large numbers of Europeans — especially of the immediate post-war generations — have looked at the European Idea, and the reason why so many of us view the rise in populist nationalism in the last decades with such horror. But he's clearly also right about the difficulty of communicating that idea to people who've come to see "Europe" negatively.

An interesting and very clever book, in which I recognised a lot of types and professional manoeuvres I'm very familiar with(!), but also a rather sad and frustrating one. He ends with "à suivre", but it's not at all obvious at present where the story should go next, either in fiction or in real life.

...and another short one: the 2012 Goncourt winner, which I picked up mostly on the strength of the intriguing title. Ferrari grew up in Paris, but is from a Corsican family and has spent time teaching philosophy in Corsica.

Le sermon sur la chute de Rome: roman (2012; The sermon on the Fall of Rome) by Jérôme Ferrari (France, 1968- )

  

Matthieu and his best friend Libero drop out of college to run a bar in the Corsican village where Matthieu's parents come from and where Libero has grown up. With plentiful supplies of sunshine, alcohol, music, girls and high-quality charcuterie, what could possibly go wrong? Well, just ask St Augustine...

Ferrari's stylish, compact and philosophically-charged look at the transience of the worlds we build for ourselves almost feels like a parody of everything we expect to find in French literature, which is perhaps what made it such a natural Goncourt winner, but there's an astonishing amount packed into 200 pages: both World Wars, French colonialism, Paris vs. Corsica, rural poverty, violence, and of course the Bishop of Hippo himself, whose church (in modern Algeria) Matthieu's archaeologist sister is busy excavating.

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It's anybody's guess what they were thinking about with the cover image (photo by Josh Wool): the girl in the photo doesn't really suggest either an archaeologist or a Corsican waitress, and there aren't many other female characters in the book.

Authors called Jerome obviously hunt in packs, like buses. Here's another one, an audiobook that I've been too busy to finish until the last couple of days. This won the Belgian Fintro Literatuurprijs in 2017, and was shortlisted for the Libris prize as well.

Wil (2016; Will) by Jeroen Olyslaegers (Belgium, 1967- ) audiobook read by the author

  

Angry old man Wilfried Wils, retired Antwerp policeman and underappreciated poet, rages against old age, the modern world, his family and friends, and — as we soon start to see — more than anything else against himself and the way he acted during the German occupation of the city.

Through the French teacher his father fixed him up with in his teens, he learnt to appreciate Rimbaud, but he has also been drawn into the fringes of the Flemish fascist movement, and — even though he is plainly disgusted by their ideas — he weakly allows himself to take advantage of these connections when the Germans arrive, and is inevitably drawn into more and more damaging compromises.

Olyslaegers cleverly doses Wils's self-contempt against his clear-sighted view of what was going on in the city during the occupation and his passionate love (clearly shared with the author) of Antwerp's cultural and linguistic heritage. Whilst we are clearly meant to disapprove of Wils's entanglement with the SS and SD, Olyslaegers also obviously suspects that no-one could really survive for five years under those conditions without making some kind of compromises somewhere along the line, and that those who proclaimed their ideological purity after the war were either hypocrites or self-deceivers.

The audiobook is a tour-de-force: Olyslaegers plainly loves playing the curmudgeonly old Wils, and he puts a great deal of feeling and humour into it, even if it's occasionally difficult to follow if you don't come from Antwerp...

My latest little binding project, two more French books in their original temporary paper covers that I rebound for a friend — who left them here in January(!) in the hope that I would do something with them. Naturally the project was delayed because I couldn't very well rebind them without reading them, or vice-versa, but I'm on my own again and we've had a string of rainy days lately, so time to get something done. Just very simple black cloth bindings using labels cut from the original covers.

Jacques Prévert was a very popular French poet who lived before the age of autocorrect.

Paroles (1949) by Jacques Prévert (France, 1900-1977)
La pluie et le beau temps (1955) by Jacques Prévert (France, 1900-1977)

  

Paroles is Prévert's best-known collection, containing pieces dating from the early thirties to the end of the war. There are a couple of longer prose pieces, the satire "Tentative de déscription d'un diner de têtes à Paris-France" and the quasi-autobiographical "Souvenirs de Famille ou L'Ange Garde-Chiourme", but otherwise the collection is mostly poems and songs, including a short-story-length "feuilleton" in free verse, "La crosse en l'air".

Lots of political engagement, as you'd expect in the thirties: Prévert knew a thing or two about being hungry and unemployed himself, and he takes up the cause of victims of the economic crisis in many of the pieces here, and there is also plenty of ammunition to spare for Mussolini, Hitler, Franco and the Roman Catholic Church. ("La crosse en l'air", which opens with a bishop drunk in the gutter, covers just about all these satirical bases in one place.) Anti-war poems feature heavily as well, also as you'd expect. Lots of lists, too, Prévert's favourite structural device, lots of wordplay, and quite a few absurd leaps of logic. Altogether good fun, even if he goes a bit too far here and there.

The later collection La pluie et le beau temps (1955) opens with a few pieces attacking French colonialism in Indochina and elsewhere, but overall it seems to be more oriented towards social comedy and experiments with form and structure than to directly political subject-matter. There are two or three one-act plays, a couple of ballet scenarios, and quite a few poems about the visual arts as well. And at the end a magnificently wide-ranging dialogue between some washing-up water and a chimney-sweep.

Two of Prévert’s shorter poems:

TANT DE FORÊTS...

Tant de forêts arrachées à la terre
et massacrées
achevées
rotativées
Tant de forêts sacrifiées pour la pâte à papier
des milliards de journaux attirant annuellement l'attention des lecteurs sur les dangers du déboisement des bois et des forêts.

POUR TOI MON AMOUR

Je suis allé au marché aux oiseaux
Et j'ai acheté des oiseaux
Pour toi
mon amour
Je suis allé au marché aux fleurs
Et j'ai acheté des fleurs
Pour toi
mon amour
Je suis allé au marché à la ferraille
Et j'ai acheté des chaînes
De lourdes chaînes
Pour toi
mon amour
Et puis je suis allé au marché aux esclaves
Et je t'ai cherchée
Mais je ne t'ai pas trouvée
mon amour.

Not a great poet, but immensely loveable.

Is it me, or is very little getting translated from Dutch into English?

ETA: forgot to say, nice job with the bindings. I like the air of school cahiers.

>64 LolaWalser: I don’t know about translation — I thought there had been a little revival with The discomfort of evening winning the Booker International. The Olyslaegers book has been translated into various languages including English, but I’m not sure how well it would work, since the Antwerp dialect is such a crucial element.

Yes, I think I had the cahier look in the back of my mind. I didn’t want them too new and jazzy looking. I’m intrigued to see what their owner makes of the bindings (he knew what he was letting himself in for).

>63 thorold: very enjoyable and apt, still

>62 thorold: He also worked writing films I think, Le Jour se Lève from the 30s is beautiful. And looking him up I'm reminded of others he wrote for the director Marcel Carné including Les Enfants du Paradis and more.

I'm impressed by your book binding skill.

Agreed, very nice book binding. Is that something you've learned professionally, or just picked up as an interest?

>66 tonikat: >67 lisapeet: Thanks, both! I posted about the background to my bookbinding in my Q1 thread here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/338153#7728440

I'd forgotten about Le jour se lève — another great film I haven't seen for a long time..!

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Something completely different: one of those books that caught my eye as a result of all the rearrangement they've been doing in the City Library. Since I saw it on a day when I'd been trying to explain to a visitor why the city has a Peace Palace and realised that I knew very little about that, it sounded as though it might be useful:

The Hague : legal capital of the world (2005) edited by Peter J van Krieken and David McKay

 

The Hague hosts an implausible number of international organisations, ranging from giant bureaucracies no-one has ever heard of to tiny secretariats with single-digit numbers of permanent staff that regularly shape world history. When asked why, proud city officials will tell you (as they do in some of the contributions to this collection) that it's all part of the rich Dutch tradition of international law that goes back to Hugo Grotius. Ironic, really, when you think that the most obvious biographical fact we know linking Grotius and The Hague is that he was tricked into attending a meeting here in 1619 to provide an opportunity to arrest him...

Of course, in reality, like attracts like, and a city that already has experience hosting international organisations and ministering to their peculiar needs is always going to be in a good place when it comes to convincing new ones to move here.

If there has to be a single person made responsible for starting the trend, then the most obvious candidate is Tobias Asser (1838-1913), a pioneering professor of international law who founded The Hague Conference on Private International Law in the 1890s, and is thus indirectly responsible for dozens of international agreements on small but vital matters like international recognition of marriages or cross-border motor insurance. Asser's colleague Fyodor Martens was inspired by this to suggest The Hague to Tsar Nicholas II as the site for his 1899 Peace Conference, and Nicholas of course was in a good position to invite himself here, with his teenage niece Queen Wilhelmina eager to profile herself and the Netherlands.

The Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1904 led amongst other things to the setting up of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, and that attracted the attention of Andrew Carnegie, who had a lot of conscience-money to spend in a hurry, and offered to build a Peace Palace to house it. The PCA was soon joined there by the International Court of Justice and various other institutions, including a library of international law, and the city was definitively on the map as an international law hotspot. The PCA and the ICJ got busy sorting out border disputes and matters like the Russian Navy's little indiscretion on the Dogger Bank.

Naturally, there were a few glitches to the idea of judge-imposed peace after the Peace Palace opened (in summer 1913!), but after 1945 the incorporation of the two courts into the United Nations gave them a solid future. Since then all kinds of things have arrived in the city: the Yugoslavia Tribunal, the International Criminal Court, Europol, Eurojust, the Chemical Weapons inspectorate OPCW, and many others.

This book doesn't quite seem to know whether it's a Festschrift for the city to congratulate itself or a reference book for hapless lawyers trying to remind themselves how far the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court extends: some of the essays are very high-level overviews of the role of particular organisations, others go into the fine diplomatic detail. Most are backed up with the text of the founding treaty of the organisation concerned and copious references to other documents and case registries. It's a bit mixed in quality: some of the authors are sharp and to the point, others are floundering about in their second or third language, and there's quite a bit of overlap between essays that the editors could have pruned out without any loss. All the same, there are some fascinating glimpses into important but fairly obscure organisations and what they do for the world. And some fun easter-eggs, like the essay by Gerard Limburg about the Dutch Foreign Ministry's role as depositary organisation of many important treaties: it makes sense that there has to be someone who keeps the master-copy of the treaty and registers all the new signatures, but who knew there are governments that specialise in that job?

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The Peace Palace
 

>68 thorold: Thanks—I had a feeling you'd talked about it before... and I see I even commented on it. What can I say, my memory is short. That's a great project, though, and a nice craft to have learned.

Another Deutscher Buchpreis winner from the library, in this case the 2021 winner, which doesn't seem to have been translated yet:

Blaue Frau : Roman (2021) by Antje Rávik Strubel (Germany, 1974- )

  

There are two alternating stories going on here, both set in Helsinki a few years ago, but without any other very obvious connection until quite a long way into the book: in one, a young woman — Adina/Sala/Nina — who has grown up in a Czech ski resort is holed up on her own in a suburban apartment trying to work out how to take the next step in her life after being raped; in the other, a writer who grew up in East Germany is trying to recalibrate her ideas about East-West relations in the light of the rather different Finnish experience of being caught between two systems, and starts to find the germ of a novel in a series of encounters with the enigmatic Blue Woman.

At the centre of the book is Strubel's exploration of the way we seem to construct artificial competitions between different types of victimhood, where people who suffered under Stalinism can come to feel that they are getting less attention than those in other places who suffered under fascism, or vice-versa; or violence against women somehow gets left out when we are talking about politically or racially motivated violations of human rights. The rapist in the novel is a politician who has built his career on fighting for the rights of minorities; the victim likes to identify herself with the fictional figure of the Last of the Mohicans.

But there's a lot more going on here, especially on the subtleties of "East vs. West" as it plays out in Germany, Finland, Estonia and the Czech mountains. And on all sorts of other forms of exploitation, sexual, economic, or literary. A clever, poetic book, full of subtle touches, but somewhat frustrating to read at first because it takes such a long time to switch from atmosphere-building to actual narrative.

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I was a little bit puzzled by the cover, but it turns out to be a detail of the Sibelius Monument in Helsinki. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibelius_Monument

>70 thorold: After reading your review, I really want to get my hands on this book, but it looks like I'll have to wait for a translation into a language I understand...

Another "how come we haven't heard of her?" book. I had — just about — heard of Etta Palm (she pops up her and there in street names and the like), but I wouldn't have been able to tell you precisely what she was known for, or even which century she lived in.

From the recent acquisitions table at the library:

Etta Palm: van Nederlands eerste feministe tot staatsvijand (2022) by Wil Schackmann (Netherlands, 1951- )

  

Etta Palm (1743-1799) is obviously one of those characters that are too big and colourful for the bare historical record to do them justice: she needs a Balzac novel, not a carefully-considered biography like this one, that refuses to jump to conclusions or take salacious gossip at face value.

Apart from her undeniable big moment in the spotlight, in December 1790, when she gave a speech 'On the injustice of the law in favour of men, at the expense of women', to a revolutionary club in Paris, much of what we know about Etta's life comes from the writings of her political (or family) enemies, or from the statements she made in her own defence later on when she was being accused of treason against the Batavian Republic, so Schackmann has to treat it with considerable suspicion, and we end up with a lot of tantalising gaps. Whether or not we can really call her "the Netherlands' first feminist", she was definitely a fascinating character.

She grew up with her widowed businesswoman mother in Groningen, moved to Paris after a brief marriage to Christiaan Palm (who went off to the Indies and was never mentioned again), and somehow built herself a successful existence near the centre of political and intellectual life there, earning a living (at least) as an informal agent for Willem V's chief minister, Laurens van de Spiegel, and reporting to him on French news as well as on the activities of exiled Dutch Patriots.

When the French Revolution came along, she was close to many of its leading figures, and somehow managed to reconcile her Orangist Dutch political opinions with moderate-revolutionary Girondist French political opinions. She was in touch with Olympe de Gouges and disappointed by the Constitutional Assembly's lack of effort in overcoming inequalities between men and women, hence her controversial intervention in a meeting of the "Amis de la Verité" to present a feminist paper. They were taken aback, and couldn't quite resolve themselves to let her speak in public, but they did allow her paper to be read out by the Secretary, and it led to a lot of discussion and a brief flowering of revolutionary women's clubs, sadly swept away again by subsequent political developments.

Etta returned to the Netherlands in November 1792 on a mission as informal envoy of the revolutionary French government to van de Spiegel, trying to maintain the fragile peace between her "two fatherlands", but soon found herself out on a limb when Louis XVI was executed and war broke out. She somehow managed to navigate the tricky situation until 1795, but then she was arrested by representatives of the new Batavian Republic, who still bore grudges from their time in exile in Paris. After long and inconclusive investigation, she was imprisoned in the castle at Woerden for several years, until another shift in politics led to her release, in December 1798, three months before her death.

A very nice little biography of a fascinating character, that raises at least twice as many questions as it answers. Slightly irritating that it follows the recent trend of having the footnotes on the web and not in the book, but otherwise very worthwhile.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etta_Palm_d%27Aelders (no-one seems to have updated the English page in the light of Schackmann's book yet, but the outline is there).

And yet another Deutscher Buchpreis book from the library, this time the 2016 winner, a 200-page novella as a change from the usual 450-page doorstep. It's from a well-established writer I haven't tried before. Kirchhoff originally comes from the Lake Constance region, and has been writing fiction since the seventies:

Widerfahrnis : eine Novelle (2016) by Bodo Kirchhoff (Germany, 1948- )

  

This feels like a very old-fashioned kind of book, partly from the way the author gives his characters a cigarette to play with whenever he's not sure what they should do next, partly from the echoes of the Ur-German romantic longing for the land where the lemon trees bloom, and also from the plot, which has a lot of echoes of all those lovely British films in which two distinguished elderly actors — let's say Bill Nighy and Dame Judi — go off on an irresponsible adventure together, romance blossoms, and they confront mortality in the last reel.

It's not quite a re-run of that cliché. The spontaneous and tentative relationship that builds up between depressed apartment-complex neighbours Reither (retired small-press publisher) and Leonie (retired hatter) during their impulsive road-trip from Bavaria to the Warm South is more complicated and subtle than that, and the ending, which brings them together with some of the migrants trying to make the same journey in the opposite direction, develops in unexpected ways.

I liked the concept in the end, but I got a bit fed up with all the smoking-business and the endless recycling of holiday detail. I felt it would have worked better as a 100-page novella.

Back to the Victorians after a bit of a lull doing other things. This is one of the Q4 poetry reads (https://www.librarything.com/topic/344996):

Goblin market and other poems (1862) by Christina Rossetti (UK, 1830-1894)

  

Christina was the youngest of the glamorous and talented Rossetti siblings, three-quarter-Italian and brought up in England in the intellectual afterglow of the Byron circle. Apart from being one of the most distinguished women poets of her time (her only real competitor on this side of the Atlantic being Elizabeth Barrett Browning), she's also remembered as the model for many of her big brother's paintings, especially as the Virgin Mary. And, like her brother and the other Pre-Raphaelites, she was heavily involved with the Oxford Movement, a religious revival that aimed to restore some lost medieval piety and glamour to Anglicanism, but ended up sending some of its most prominent followers into the arms of Rome. Partly for religious reasons, Christina never married, although she had at least three offers.

Goblin Market and other poems was Christina's first properly-published collection. The title-poem — her best-known piece after "In the bleak midwinter" — is an odd kind of fairy-tale ballad about two sisters who get involved with a bunch of dodgy supernatural fruit-and-veg salesmen, naive on the surface, but full of all kinds of troubling sexual and religious undercurrents when you start to look at it closely — perfect exam-syllabus material, especially since it's written with so much verve and assurance that it's always great fun to re-read. And the girls come out on top in the end, which helps!

The rest of the collection is a bit mixed, but there's a lot of good stuff there. Short lyric poems where the poet imagines herself abandoned by her lover, rejecting a suitor, widowed, marrying in the presence of a former lover's ghost, lamenting the transience of life and the seasons, etc. Possibly there is a little more focus on death than we might be entirely comfortable with as modern readers: there is a remarkable number of poems in which the speaker of the poem turns out to be talking to us from beyond the grave. Not surprising to learn that Christina had some struggles with depression during her life. But some of these poems are among the strongest in the collection, like the sonnets "After Death" and "Dead before death". Or "Sweet Death" in the religious section at the end. And just occasionally there's a wry touch of humour, as in "No, thank you, John", a woman's exasperated complaint to a tedious suitor straight out of a three-volume novel, who thinks he just has to go on proposing to her for her to realise that she loves him.

Another notable long poem is "The convent threshold", which seems to be a kind of pendant to her brother's "Blessed Damozel" — the speaker of the poem is a woman who has been involved in a relationship that has gone wrong in some unspecified but spectacular way involving lots of blood. She has repented and is entering a convent, but on the doorstep she pauses to urge her lover to do the same, so that they can be reunited in Paradise later.

You sinned with me a pleasant sin:
Repent with me, for I repent.
Woe's me the lore I must unlearn!
Woe's me that easy way we went,
So rugged when I would return!

It's fun to re-read these poems after a gap without much exposure to Victorian poetry: sometimes what Rossetti has to say about religious and female experience might seem a little trite and obvious in hindsight, but that probably wasn't the case at the time, and it's clear that she meant every word of it. What remains striking above all is the confidence and strength with which she fits her deceptively simple language into a precision-aligned poetic structure.

A series of excellent reviews!
I have not so far followed the Deutscher Buchpreis (or any other prizes!) but it was great to read about some recent-ish winners here. I read my first one this year, Tauben fliegen auf by Melinda Nadj Abonji, who won the prize in 2010. I have also recently bought this year's winner, Blutbuch by Kim de L'Horizon.

I also very much enjoyed reading your review of Christina Rossetti's poems. I am still somewhere in the middle of the book.

>75 MissBrangwen: Thanks! Both of those are sound interesting (I saw your review of Tauben), but they're not among those our library has in German. I'm hoping to get to them soon.

Here's another, on audio this time, the Deutscher Buchpreis winner from 2018. Inger-Maria Mahlke is from Lübeck, and spent a lot of her early life with relatives on Tenerife. She was an academic criminologist before writing her breakthrough novel, Silberfischchen, in 2010 (that won an important prize too):

Archipel (2018) by Inger-Maria Mahlke (Germany, 1977- ) audiobook read by Eva Gosciejewicz

  

(Author photo from Wikipedia)

This novel takes us backwards through the history of Tenerife from 2015 to 1919, following the lives of multiple generations of a group of interconnected families. Mahlke looks at the way the big historical events affect the lives of ordinary people in different socio-economic classes, from modern scandals of Spanish regional politics and EU-subsidy-milking, via the end of fascism and the 23rd of February 1981, the sclerosis of Franco's rule, the fall of José Antonio, the coup and Civil War, the 1920s when the islands were a military base for colonial ventures in North-West Africa, and right back to the early 20th century when Spain had little to say in the islands, which were run as de facto colonies by British shipping and fruit companies.

There are one or two characters who run through almost the whole novel, but, particularly because of the reverse-timebase, it's hard to make connections between the things that happen to them, and it feels as though the real main character is the island itself, with its constant geography and weather offset by ever-changing street-names and émigré populations. Mahlke clearly has a lot of sympathy for the characters at the lower end of the social scale, in particular, but really there is too much going on for us to be able to focus n any of their problems for long. More interesting than satisfying, perhaps.

And, would you believe it, another Deutscher Buchpreis winner set on an island. Lutz Seiler grew up in Gera, in Thuringia, and was a construction worker for a while before going on to study literature (...and do a summer job in a restaurant on Hiddensee). He published several poetry collections and edited a literary magazine before shooting to fame with this debut novel.

There's a 2017 English translation of this novel by Tess Lewis under the same title.

Kruso (2014) by Lutz Seiler (Germany, 1963- )

  

Seiler paradoxically sets his reworking of the Robinson Crusoe story on the popular Baltic holiday island of Hiddensee, to the west of Rügen, crowded in the summer of 1989 with holidaymakers, seasonal hotel and restaurant workers, people hoping to leave the DDR illegally via the tantalisingly short sea-crossing to the Danish island of Møn, and heavily-armed border-guards.

Literature student Ed, his Friday-character, arrives on the island after the death of his girlfriend provokes a kind of nervous breakdown. He finds a job washing-up in the kitchen of the Klausner restaurant in the north of the island (a real place that is still in business; Seiler worked there himself in 1989). And he soon forms a kind of spiritual bond with his colleague Alexander Krusowitsch — "Kruso" — the acknowledged leader of the seasonal workers on the island and organiser of their clandestine assistance to the "shipwrecked mariners", the growing body of people who have come to the island because they have in one way or another been swept overboard from the sinking East German state.

The result is a fascinating and quite unique kind of book, part darkly-realistic behind-the-scenes accounts of restaurant work, part dream-laden allegorical account of liberation and redemption against the background of the collapsing state, part tribute to the many brave people who died or ended up in prison as a result of attempting to leave the DDR. The Robinson Crusoe parallel works much better than you might expect. And I was left with an urge to go and see Hiddensee for myself...

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Another excellent novel I read a few years ago about someone escaping the DDR via the sea-crossing from Hiddensee to Møn: Der Spaziergang von Rostock nach Syrakus by Friedrich Christian Delius.

Just for a change, a recent Goncourt winner, also plucked from the library shelves without looking too closely at what it was about.

L'anomalie (2020; The Anomaly) by Hervé Le Tellier (France, 1957- )

  

This seems to be either a philosophical novel cast as a pastiche of a science-fiction disaster thriller, or a science-fiction disaster thriller that is making fun of the French tendency to turn everything into philosophy. Or possibly both. Something strange happens to an Air France flight from Paris to New York when it passes through a storm cloud in March 2021, and there are repercussions on the individual lives of the passengers and crew, a good dozen of whom are named characters in the novel.

I found the initial exposition of the characters' back-stories quite engaging, and the working out of the consequences for them in the closing chapters a little bit less so, but I got rather fed up with the middle section, where Le Tellier brings in every Hollywood cliché he can think of and then tries to excuse it by making fun of himself (one "top scientist" summoned to discuss the problem can't stop giggling when she realises that she is sitting with a bunch of generals at the famous conference table from Doctor Strangelove; another character is charmed to find himself being debriefed by an FBI psychologist using the actual interview script from Close encounters of the third kind...).

It is all very French: we never find out for sure what the anomaly means or what caused it, and all is not put right at the end; similarly, many of the characters have stories that are resolved in ways that are deliberately messy and unsatisfying. We are supposed to reflect on questions of mortality and identity, the reality of the world and the irreversibility of time, not on heroes and villains. And we are quite likely to wind up asking ourselves whether it was really worth being put through all those red herrings about wormholes and quantum physics and weak jokes about Trump and Macron just for that. Maybe, just maybe, because Le Tellier is a competent and efficient storyteller even when he's trying to deny that there is a story to tell, but I'm not really convinced.

Whatever else, it's also a nice demonstration of the risks of setting a book on a well-defined date in the near future. When he was writing (in 2019?) and when the book came out in August 2020, Le Tellier obviously never thought that Covid-19 would still be the only disaster we would be talking about in early 2021, or that the idea of 240 "normal" people simply getting on a plane from Paris to New York and being allowed to disembark without endless health formalities would itself seem like science-fiction...

>78 thorold: I did not bother to read this book when it got the Goncourt (I am not a good target for the Goncourt books, as I did not really enjoy the few ones who got the Prize recently and that I've read) and your review won't change this, but I really enjoyed reading your take on this book.
First because you describe it in a way that makes it sound more interesting and worth reading than most of the blurbs that I have seen so far.
And second because I enjoyed your analysis. Your description as it is all very French made me ponder on French literature. It's an interesting description (and it might actually explain to a great extend why I am not enclined to read a lot of French contemporary literature...).

>79 raton-liseur: It is all very French — actually, I suspect that there’s not all that much contemporary French literature that is “very French” in that way. But, stereotypes being what they are, we don’t notice the exceptions. The Goncourt is probably weighted towards books where reviewers have scope for talking about abstract philosophical questions, anyway.

I was chatting with a French friend yesterday — by chance he’d been reading this as well, but gave up halfway through when the woman he was trying to impress told him she had hated it too… He did say it reminded him of Perec in places, which makes sense.

Looking at the reviews on LT, it seems that a lot of people reading it in English disliked it because it wasn’t the well-formed thriller they had been expecting from the jacket copy.

>80 thorold: I was wondering what "very French" meant :-D

I was in the audience of Le Tellier's hour-long interview at the Utopiales last month. He talks at length about Oulipo. It made me want to read all his back-catalogue, even though I hadn't even read L'anomalie (but I've got a signed copy now waiting on my desk)...

>80 thorold: I'm not very up-to-date on the French literature of those days, so won't argue with your analysis, but I felt it did describe some of the most prominent recent books I've heard about...

>80 thorold: and >81 Dilara86: The reference to Perec and Oulipo is an interesting point (but again, usually not my cup of tea).

>81 Dilara86: I'll be interested in reading your thoughts on this book as well.

Back to the Victorians for the other of the two suggested Q4 poetry reads (https://www.librarything.com/topic/344996), a poem I haven't looked at since undergraduate Victorian Lit courses. I've got a perfectly good 1899 compact edition of Tennyson's complete poems, but I found a nice scan of the 1900 Bankside Press In memoriam on archive.org and couldn't resist spending a few hours printing it out and binding it. Not the same as the original, of course, and it took longer to make than to read, but it was fun to do, and a lot pleasanter to read than two-column small print:

In memoriam A. H. H. (1850) by Alfred Tennyson (UK, 1809-1892)

  

This is probably the ultimate mid-Victorian poem, everything you need to know about British culture around the time of the Great Exhibition condensed into one novella-length (just under 3000 lines) piece of verse. Reflecting on his reaction to the sudden death of his college friend Arthur Hallam at the age of 22 in 1833, Tennyson analyses the process of grieving and recovery, and examines what death means to him in the context of Christian (Anglican) religious ideas and the way they have been shaken up by recent scientific discoveries. Fossils, descent from apes, age of the planet, Nature "So careful of the type ... So careless of the single life", and all the rest of it. You name it, it's in there somewhere.

The sections of the poem follow a roughly chronological sequence, starting with the poet reacting to news of his friend's death and following in his imagination the progress of the ship bringing his remains back to Britain, and ending years later with the happy marriage of the poet's sister Emilia, who had been engaged to marry Arthur. Along the way he goes back and forward through different ways of dealing with grief and loss, sometimes depressed and desperate, sometimes reconciled to the idea that "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all."

And of course this is a poem full of lines that have entered the language, from "Nature red in tooth and claw" to "Ring out, wild bells". It was a huge hit in its time, and copies flew off the presses, especially after Queen Victoria announced that she had taken great consolation from it after the death of her husband in 1862. Tennyson ended up with the Laureateship and a peerage, with a standing more like that of a former prime minister than a poet.

Reading it 170 years on, of course there's a lot that feels archaic, and the endless pattern of tetrameter quatrains in ABBA rhyme-scheme can seem a bit mechanical, but there's also a lot in his insight into the way we deal with loss and death that still feels relevant and helpful: I don't suppose many people read this without thinking about the way the poet's reflections would map onto a loss in their own lives, and probably feeling better about it as a result.

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And back to prize-winners. This is what the library happened to have by the 2021 Cervantes Prize winner, Cristina Peri Rossi. Many of her books, including the most famous, The ship of fools (1984), have been translated into English, but this one doesn't seem to have been yet:

Por fin solos (2004) by Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay, 1941- )

  

In fifteen short stories and a couple of linking essays, Peri Rossi dissects the stages of falling in love and out of it again, with "alone at last" serving as a key-phrase (in different senses) for both processes. Infatuation, cohabitation, the interference of children and rival lovers, and the frustrated quest for the full-stop at the end of a relationship are all illustrated from ironic and slightly offbeat perspectives. Witty and often perceptive in unexpected ways. I think my favourite was "Ulva lactuca" (Sea lettuce) — a story that turns out to be all about the journey of a spoonful of soup towards the firmly-closed mouth of a reluctant toddler.

>84 thorold: This is probably the ultimate mid-Victorian poem, everything you need to know about British culture around the time of the Great Exhibition condensed into one novella-length (just under 3000 lines) piece of verse.
What a wonderful description! I like the binding too.

And another Goncourt winner by an author new to me that I found in the library: the 2019 winner. There's an English translation of this by Paul Homel, published in March this year.

Tous les hommes n'habitent pas le monde de la même façon (2019; Not everybody lives the same way) by Jean-Paul Dubois (France, 1950- )

  

Paul Hansen, a former apartment-building supervisor, is sharing a cell in a Montreal prison with the notoriously scary Hell's Angels gang-leader Patrick Horton. We're not told the nature of Hansen's offence until the end of the book, but he's clearly quite a different type from his cellmate, and a lot of the interest of the book is in watching the development of a friendship between the two men. Meanwhile, Hansen delves into his memory and looks back at those who mattered to him: his French mother, who ran an independent cinema in Toulouse; his Danish father, protestant pastor and descendant of a long line of Skagen fishermen; his wife Winona, an Irish-Algonquin bush pilot; his friend Kieran Read, an insurance adjuster whose job is to find out bad things about deceased people; and his dog Nouk. All of them existing at different angles to the universe.

There's a lot of information here. We learn a good deal about French cinema of the fifties and sixties, Harley-Davidsons and eccentric European cars, about flying the DHC-2 Beaver, the maintenance of lawns and swimming-pools, prison food, asbestos mining, Skagen sand-dunes, organ music, casinos and race-courses, and much else. And it's not always easy to see what it all adds up to, or how it maps onto the inner lives of the characters. In the end, I think it was a kind of French/Canadian take on Nevil Shute's Trustee from the toolroom, a novel about a man who seems to be fully wrapped up in the mechanical world, but who turns out to have a limit to the amount of senseless destruction of human happiness he can tolerate.

Back to the Deutscher Buchpreis, with the 2022 winner, by gender-fluid Swiss author Kim de l'Horizon, who playfully gives a date of birth in the author bio at the front of the book as "2666" — de l'Horizon has previously worked on stage adaptations of Bolaño — but Wikipedia has the more prosaic date of 1992.

birder4106 and a couple of others have already posted about this book, which turns out to be the third or fourth auto-fiction novel I've read this year by someone who doesn't accept "traditional" models of gender (following on from Dutch authors Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and Tobi Lakmaker).

Blutbuch : Roman (2022) by Kim de l'Horizon (Switzerland, 1992- )

  

Through the lives of the narrator and their mother and grandmother, Kim de l'Horizon explores different kinds of experience of gender, factoring in the peculiarly Swiss experience of existing in a culture where the language of everyday speech is quite different from that of most written discourse.

De l'Horizon has a lot of fun with the way that Bernese-German uses the French-derived Meer/Grossmeer and Peer instead of standard German Mutter/Großmutter and Vater — Meer being a homonym for the standard German word for sea/ocean, so the narrator has grown up speaking die Meersprache, which can be read as both "mother tongue" and "ocean language". And what else would they speak in a landlocked country?

The central image in the first part of the book is the copper beech (Blutbuche, a near-homonym of the "blood-book"/"family tree" of the title) in the garden of Grossmeer's house. The narrator digs into horticultural history to look at the way the fashion for that particular type of beech-tree developed, and how it got mixed up (as most things did) with German nationalist iconography.

The narrator chronicles various adventures with Grindr, and the ups and downs of their relationship with Meer, embarking on a new relationship herself, and Grossmeer, who is showing signs of an imminent decline into dementia. And also discovers a family-history in which Meer has been documenting ancestors in the female line back to medieval times, all of them strong women who refused to conform to gender stereotypes in one way or another — healers, midwives, cross-dressers, lesbians, outlaws, targets of witchcraft accusations, etc.

The book is written in standard German, with frequent intrusions of Bernese-German, but then in the final chapter it suddenly switches to German-accented International English (with an appended machine-translation(!) into German), because the narrator comes to feel that German is inadequate to deal with the things that need to be said about gender and identity, which they have learnt about mostly through American academic and literary writings in English. But then it turns out that the author most cited in that final chapter is Annie Ernaux...

This felt like a very messy book, where it was difficult to pick out what you were really supposed to be focussing on. Overall, what it says about gender is mostly rather familiar territory (but of course everyone has to discover these things in their own way, in their own lives, so maybe it is worth saying them over and over again). It also belongs to that school of autofiction where the narrator keeps popping up to tell you that what was in the last chapter wasn't quite true, and what actually happened was this, which can be frustrating. But there are a lot of very interesting passages, and I enjoyed all the language experimentation, so I'm glad I read it.

And another audiobook. Seethaler seems to be more noted for getting on longlists than actually winning the big prizes, but that's no reason not to read him...

Das Feld (2018; The field) by Robert Seethaler (Austria, 1966- ) audiobook read by the author

  

Robert Seethaler is a hedgehog by Isaiah Berlin's definition, the one thing he does extremely well being to write concise, moving accounts of the lives of "unimportant" people. In A whole life he fills a short novel with the life of one man; here he creates a composite portrait of a small Austrian town by giving voices to a selection of the occupants of its graveyard.

This could be a self-indulgent and sentimental project in other hands, but Seethaler handles it with compassion, wit and a non-judgmental ear that gives the same weight to a centenarian as to a teenager killed in a road accident, or puts the crazed priest who burnt down his own church on the same level as a Middle Eastern greengrocer or a gambling-addicted council workman. Sometimes we hear two conflicting versions of the same events, and have to decide for ourselves whom to believe, at other times there is little or no overlap with the stories of other characters. One character condenses everything she wants to tell the living into a single word, others take all the space they can get.

I don't think you'd want to read several of Seethaler's books in quick succession, but taken every now and then they can be quite rewarding.

Another Goncourt winner, from 2009 this time. Marie NDiaye grew up in France, with a French mother and a Senegalese father. Her brother, Pap Ndiaye, is a prominent academic recently appointed as education minister by President Macron. Marie NDiaye has been writing novels and screenplays since the 1980s. Several of her books, including this one, have been translated to English. Apart from the Goncourt, she's also won the Académie theatre prize, the Prix Femina — for Rosie Carpe — and the Nelly Sachs Prize.

Trois femmes puissantes (2009; Three strong women) by Marie NDiaye (France, 1967- )

  

(I don't know why I bother showing covers for French novels...)

On the face of it, this is a similar sort of deal to Gertrude Stein's Three lives: three novella-length pieces, each involving a strong female character. But it's also a kind of novel, as the three stories intersect in ways that aren't entirely straightforward and logical, and in places verge on the mystical. All three straddle the physical and cultural space between France and Senegal: in the first, Paris lawyer Norah is summoned to Senegal by her estranged father to deal with the aftermath of a family tragedy; in the second, we are in a small French town watching the life of disgraced schoolteacher Rudy unravel as his Senegalese wife Fanta remains enigmatically offstage; in the third, the young widow Khady Demba gets caught up in the horrors of the illegal migration trail across the Sahara to Europe.

NDiaye's women are "strong" not in the conventional sense of being able to exercise power, but in the more particular sense that they have to have the moral strength to deal with more than their fair share of other people's (read: men's) problems without unravelling themselves. It's a book that's packed with anger at the injustices of the world and the selfishness of men and Europeans, and occasionally it seems to lose its direction in all that rage, but most of the time NDiaye's writing is sharp and devastating: it's well worth hanging in there through the woolly patches.

>89 thorold: sort of like Thornton Wilder's play Our Town?

>89 thorold: that reminds me of a fine and private place on of my fav books Will have to looke for this

>89 thorold: Ooh I read that last year - in translation obviously - and enjoyed it very much. I've been meaning to read more Seethaler but haven't so far...

>90 thorold: Marie NDiaye is one of those authors I feel guilty for not liking more. I can't seem to get into her writing. It always feels remote.

>91 kac522: Yes, it’s rather like all those other multiple-voice small-community books — Unterleuten and Vor dem Feste are two other German ones I’ve read recently, but also things like Our town, Winesburg, Ohio and many others.

>92 cindydavid4: I haven’t read A fine and private place (was the Beagle book the one you meant? There seem to have been dozens of books that use that Andrew Marvell line…). The “from beyond death” thing is kept reasonably low-key, the characters only talk about what happened up to their deaths.

>93 Dilara86: Yes, I can see how you might get to “remote” for NDiaye. I certainly had trouble with parts of this book, but I felt in the end that the bits I didn’t like were outweighed by the bits I did like. Interesting to see how much the LT reviews disagree about the book: some people absolutely loved it, but quite a few hated it.

>94 thorold: yes, thats the one. (I did not know where that came from!)

>89 thorold: I read this one a couple of years ago and really liked it. And I like the way you describe the book.

>90 thorold: (I don't know why I bother showing covers for French novels...) It made me giggle!
I've not read anything by Marie NDiaye, but maybe I should, at least to have an opinion on my own about this writter.
This books reminds me Les Impatientes, that won the Goncourt des Lycéens in 2020. It is also the story of 3 women, but this time in a remote village in the Sahel. I did not fully enjoy this book, but the paralell both in themes and structure seems interesting.

>78 thorold: Exactly how I feel about this book, but you phrase it so much better!

>89 thorold: I notice I have this book in my library so something must have intrigued me. Your review convinced met it's time to read it sooner rather than later.

I've been looking at the new "Pages" stats. (https://www.librarything.com/stats/thorold/share/u99e8f9e7.u1b473a3e) Not exactly a surprise to find that my top author by number of pages is P.G. Wodehouse — the two-and-a-half shelves of his books in the Fiction section (about 2m of shelving) are a bit of a giveaway! The other authors in the top twenty are probably also pretty much what anyone who watches my reading might expect. Writers I'm particularly interested in, and also writers who write long crime or historical fiction series. I'm a bit surprised that Peter Carey sneaks into the top twenty as the second Aussie (and Ed White as the only "proper" American, unless you count immigrant P G Wodehouse or emigrant Patricia Highsmith...), but there are probably some quibbles due to missing data.

If the page-counts were complete, I'm sure Thackeray would be in there ahead of PO'B: he takes up a complete shelf of the library, but my old Complete Works probably isn't in Common Knowledge.

Anyway, fun to look at.

>98 thorold: Yes, that is fun! For me Trollope comes out way on top with almost 30,000 pages; my next author is Dickens at around 13,000. Austen is a close third, but that's only because I have several different sets of her works.

You can also just limit by Collection. I track books borrowed from the library by logging them in a separate Collection, and it's interesting to see what authors I borrowed most from the library (Agatha Christie and Alexander McCall Smith) as opposed to what I own.

>98 thorold: Ooh, this is fun to play with. Unfortunately some of the giant fantasy series (Brooks, Goodkind, Lackey) from my younger years skew my data, but I had fun playing with the delimiters.

Something completely different, a re-read of something I haven't looked at in more than forty years...

The "Flower of Gloster" (1911) by E. Temple Thurston (UK, 1879-1933), illustrated by W R Dakin

  

A lovely, lyrical book about the English countryside on the verge of the First World War, from the perspective of a few weeks spent travelling around the canals of the West Midlands on a rented commercial narrow boat. Thurston describes setting out from Oxford in May 1911 on the recently refurbished Flower of Gloster under the care of Eynsham Harry and his horse Fanny, and travelling up to Birmingham, then back down the Stratford Canal to the Avon, down the Avon and Severn to Stroud, and then over the Cotswolds back to the Thames on the Thames and Severn Canal. He enjoys the slow pace of canal travel and the way it takes him to out-of-the-way places, and he clearly appreciates the company of Harry, who not only knows everyone on the canal system, but also has a very keen appreciation for nature, and has studied the habits of birds.

Temple Thurston was a moderately successful Edwardian novelist and playwright, born in Suffolk but spending much of his early life in Ireland. At the time of writing this, he had just been divorced from his first wife, the bestselling Irish novelist Katherine Cecil Thurston (she was to die in slightly mysterious circumstances later in 1911).

The "Flower of Gloster" is really one of those books that only became known because of someone else who read it quite a bit later, in this case the campaigner and industrial historian L T C Rolt, whose 1944 book Narrow boat launched the craze for recreational canal cruising in Britain. Writing about his time living on a converted canal barge in the thirties, Rolt credits Thurston with being the first person to notice the canals as something other than a rather outdated system for transporting cargo very slowly around the country. Compared to Rolt, Thurston's interest in the canals themselves and the people who live and work on them is fairly superficial: he's more interested in the way they act as a back door to rural England. He turns back in horror on the approach to Birmingham, where Rolt goes into lyrical ecstasies about the industrial heritage of the region and its importance to Britain's development.

Inevitably, expert canal historians have taken Thurston's book apart and concluded that he couldn't have made the journey described there in one go, and that the book is most likely a composite of several separate canal trips. But it is very interesting, especially the part about the Golden Valley and the Thames and Severn Canal, because that closed to navigation shortly after the First World War. (There are projects to restore it, and some parts have recently been reopened.)

The other association the book has in many people's minds is the 1967 ITV children's drama serial called The "Flower of Gloster", which actually had almost nothing in common with Thurston's book except that the plot centred around a journey in a horse-drawn narrow boat. I remember enjoying it, but I'm sure I didn't see it the first time it was broadcast, because that was before we got a TV...

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(I read this in a reprint of the US edition: the cover above is the DJ of the original UK edition.)

>101 thorold: Those were the kind of books that sparked the imagination, making you think you could go off and do that trip yourself, whether as a child or an adult. I wonder how many more of them are out there waiting to be "discovered".

Lovely cover, which goes with that sense time and place.

I have a book by Katherine Cecil Thurston, which I thought I'd read, but apparently not. The two don't really sound like they would have connected.

>102 SassyLassy: Yes, Dakin's illustrations are very Edwardian-atmospheric. Apparently they were mostly done from Thurston's photographs — when I first read the book I had a romantic idea that Thurston had been sitting down to do watercolours and sketches himself along the way. And yes, I probably have to admit to having impracticable fantasies about running away to sea in a horse-drawn narrow boat when I was about twelve...

Back to the TBR pile:

Mothers, fathers, and others : new essays (2022) by Siri Hustvedt (USA, 1955- )

  

A collection of Hustvedt's shorter writings from the last five years or so, written against the background of Trump, Covid, and the deaths of her parents. There are several essays about her parents and grandparents that fill in some extra pieces around the people she wrote about in her novel The sorrows of an American; there are analytical pieces about Jane Austen, Emily Brontë and Louise Bourgeois; a playful reworking of Sinbad's voyages and a two-hour stare at a Bellini painting in the Frick Collection; and there are reflections on death-practices, on mentoring, on misogyny, and on the absence of representations of childbirth in Western art.

As you would expect, it's all calm, clear and devastatingly logical, with more than a hint of a twinkle in the author's eye as she points out the inanities of what earlier writers have said about a given subject. She especially castigates critics who apply the teachings of Freud uncritically in inappropriate places, notably in her essay on Louise Bourgeois, where she clearly feels that people have taken the artist's own statements far too literally, as though a woman artist wasn't capable of using irony or leading critics up the garden path. Calling Hustvedt "a twenty-first century Virginia Woolf", as one of the blurbers on the back cover does, is maybe a bit overblown, but that's certainly the kind of space she's operating in.

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Cover artwork by LB herself, of course.

>102 SassyLassy:

They were married. I read The Gambler by Katherine Cecil Thurston, and gave it four stars.

>104 edwinbcn: Yes, we knew that — they'd recently been divorced when he wrote his canal book, he seems to have been a bit of a Boris Johnson on a small scale, forever getting the wrong woman pregnant; his second marriage didn't last long either. I think SassyLassy was talking about how different they seem to have been as writers.

Another from the TBR pile: Anna Enquist is a Dutch writer I've been coming back to quite a bit over the past few years, and now her 2002 Boekenweek novella turned up in one of our local Little Libraries...

De ijsdragers (2002) by Anna Enquist (Netherlands, 1945- )

  

A dark little story about a middle-class couple living a comfortable life in a coastal town in North Holland, but with a catastrophic gap in their lives where their nineteen-year-old daughter ought to be. Loes is a classics teacher, focussing on the order and structure of Tacitus when she isn't trying to impose order on her sandy garden; her husband Nico is the kind of psychiatrist who believes that the job of his profession is to re-equip people with acute mental illness for ordinary life in the community as quickly and efficiently as possible, and is keen to sweep all the psychoanalysts and long-term clients out of his hospital.

Naturally, poetic justice takes a hand, and he realises that he and Loes are like the ice-carriers they heard about on a holiday in France twenty years ago, men who used to bring slowly melting loads of fresh ice down on their backs from Pyrenean glaciers to the towns.

It's difficult to read this without remembering that Enquist is a psychoanalyst in her day job, and that she must have written this around the time that she lost her own grown-up daughter in a road accident. There's a lot of very dark anger here, and not much daylight glimmering through. But the "office politics" of the psychiatric hospital comes over very convincingly.

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It's tempting to make connections between Hustvedt (>103 thorold:) and Enquist — both novelists with one foot in psychoanalysis (Enquist as a practitioner, Hustvedt as a philosopher), both strongly associated with another art-form (Enquist music, Hustvedt painting), both Scandinavian-at-one-remove (Enquist through a Swedish husband and a Swedish pen-name; Hustvedt with a Norwegian mother and a third-generation Minnesota Norwegian father)...

>103 thorold: can you recommend what I should read by Siri Hustvedt?

>107 dianeham: Any of her recent novels is a safe place to start, and should give you a feel fairly quickly for whether that’s the sort of thing you like. The blazing world and What I loved are good if you have an interest in visual arts, whilst Memories of the future and The summer without men are more about being a writer. And The sorrows of an American is a very approachable novel about her father and the whole Minnesota Norwegian thing.

Mothers, fathers and others is the only one of her essay collections I’ve read so far.

More random TBR-clearing work. This is a book that the Rarely-Mentioned-Better-Half finished on the plane and abandoned here — I was intrigued as it's a subject I knew almost nothing about.

The quest for life in amber (1994) by George O Poinar (USA, 1936- ) and Roberta Poinar (USA)

  

George Poinar had the good fortune to find a way to combine his professional activity as an entomologist with his collector's interest in amber, and even turned it into an expanding family research team involving his wife Roberta — an electron microscopist — and his son Hendrik — a biochemist working on DNA amplification. In this little book he takes us quickly through the cultural history of amber as one of the earliest-known trade commodities, through the main places in the world where amber is found, and through his experiences studying organisms trapped in resin millions of years ago and extracting preserved tissue from them, which accidentally led to Michael Crichton getting the idea for Jurassic Park. Poinar is quick to reassure us that Crichton's fantasy is a long way from being realised: he doesn't think it likely that anyone will ever find a complete, undamaged piece of dinosaur DNA in a blood-sucking insect preserved in amber, and, even if they did, we'd have a hard time establishing what it really was, and an even harder one somehow simulating the environment of a dinosaur egg and persuading the blood-cell DNA to develop into a complete organism.

All the same, it's very interesting to see how much Poinar and his colleagues had learnt from organisms trapped in amber by the time this book was written (according to Wikipedia, he didn't stop there, either). Just a shame that he isn't the most gifted of writers. His thrilling or comic travellers' tales of fieldwork in rainforests and coalmines mostly fall rather flat, with a punchline that's either visible miles away or completely fails to materialise. And there's the odd way that Roberta is credited as co-author but the book is all in the first person singular, where "I"=George. Apart from a lot of very 1970s photographs of scientists standing next to rocks or trees, the book is illustrated with a section of fabulous colour images of organisms trapped in Dominican amber from around 40 million years ago, which are worth getting even if you don't bother about the text. There are no footnotes, but there is a general bibliography for each chapter in case you want to follow up the original scientific papers.

>98 thorold: I spent half an hour jumping on and off the kick-stool to enter page-counts for Thackeray: he now comes out at 15 029, which is 600 pages ahead of Wodehouse. Thinner paper and considerably fewer books than PGW, but more pages per book, as you'd expect from a Victorian novelist (and I have quite a few Thackeray books in two different editions).

ETA: No, perhaps not: I just checked, and there are at least thirty Wodehouse titles in my library that don’t have page-counts entered. That probably means Wodehouse is well over 20 000 pages…

>110 thorold: Oh don't get me started! I spend enough time updating common knowledge. If I started fixing page numbers, I would never have time to read. Lol.

>109 thorold: Too bad the book fell flat. I love amber and find it an amazing process.
Perhaps Roberta was clever enough to demand a credit on the title so that she would have a publication for her CV (difficult to know what stage in her academic career she was in at the time)

I see the Poinars followed this up with What Bugged the Dinosaurs? Analyzing exotic insects fossilized in Cretaceous amber at three major deposits in Lebanon, Burma, and Canada, they reconstruct the complex ecology of a hostile prehistoric world inhabited by voracious swarms of insects. says the publisher Princeton University Press (2008).

>111 labfs39: Updating common knowledge - I spend the odd afternoon working through the "dead or alive" list of authors. It seems many current authors no longer reveal their date of birth, a privacy matter I can relate to completely, but that list will never be cleared at this rate!

>112 SassyLassy: “Fell flat” is perhaps a bit strong — the Poinars are much better on amber and insects than on “droll incidents in the life of a scientist”. Or on distinguishing between “pedal” and “peddle”. It might well still be worth getting out of the library if you’re interested in amber. Unless you live in Boston and it’s been banned, of course (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forever_Amber_(novel)).

I’m guessing that it was most likely a real collaboration (maybe one of them did the technical parts and the other the “human interest”?). If it was a case of acknowledging everyone who contributed to the scientific work or of CV-padding, they would surely have included Hendrik in the list of authors, since he must have been at a more crucial stage in his career than they were. Roberta can’t have been very much younger than George, and he was around sixty by that time. But I don’t know the situation either, of course.

The book Septology by the Norwegian author Jon Fosse sounds very interesting to me and I am wondering if you have read any other books by the author.

>114 JoeB1934: I read Trilogy a few years ago — I certainly found that interesting, but it was quite heavy going too. Very biblical, very intense, stylistically eccentric, rather detached from time and space, the sort of book where you are forced to engage quite seriously if you don’t want to lose track of where you are. But certainly rewarding, it left me feeling I should come back and read more, but perhaps not right away. Septology sounds as though it must be quite similar in feel.

Another one from the TBR. Read mostly on the train journey to England…

Wie der Soldat das Grammophon repariert (2006; How the soldier repairs the gramophone ) by Saša Stanišić (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Germany, 1978- )

This was Saša Stanišić’s first novel, focusing mainly on his early life in Višegrad and his childhood experience of the Bosnian war. In a patchwork of stories, pastiche school essays, and even a novel within a novel, the narrator Aleksandar tells us about his family connections, Serbian and Muslim, his rural grandparents, his neighbours in the town of Višegrad and the river he fishes in and talks to. Ivo Andrić is always there in the background, as is the famous bridge, of course. But the main theme, of course, is the puzzling and distressing experience of finding yourself caught up in a bloody conflict between groups you barely had any reason to identify as distinguishable groups before.

Clever and sophisticated writing: it’s no surprise that Herkunft turned out to be such a tour-de-force.

>98 thorold:

I'm surprised Simenon is that low, relatively. Also didn't notice before you were a Pratchettian.

My data is too incomplete to bother with, assuming I could even get the page to load.

>116 thorold:

He's good, glad you liked it.

Mark thanks for the rec for the field just got it and started it. Looks like its another keeper (hopefully)

>118 cindydavid4: Great! I’m sure you will enjoy it.

It’s the last day of the year, and I’m halfway through a long book, so I’m not likely to be posting any more reviews here.

My 2023 Q1 thread is up and ready to go (when I finish this book…): you can find it here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/346921

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to the discussion here during 2022, and “Guten Rutsch!”