THE TWIN

The Twin, Gerbrand Bakker, Archipelago Books, 2009, 343 pp (originally published by Cossee, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2006; translated from The Dutch by David Colmer.)

The Twin won the 2010 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. I have had it on my shelf of unread Archipelago translated books for eleven years, never suspecting that it is an almost perfect novel. Sometimes books find me at just the right time though.

The eponymous twin is Helmer, a late middle aged man who lost his twin brother at age 18. They were as close as twins often are but their father favored the other boy. Henk had been engaged to be married, he had intended to carry on there at the family farm. Helmer had been at university but was obliged to return home and take over his brother's duties. 

The novel opens as Helmer is moving his aged father to an upstairs bedroom. His mother has been dead for a decade. As Helmer moves through his DIY renovation of the first floor, through his daily routine of farm drudgery, it becomes clear that he has pretty well lost himself through the years he was forced to be Henk. He could have said no, I'm going back to university, but he did not. 

The story of a man looking back on his life has been one I have read in many novels and memoirs. Rarely have I read it done so well. Perhaps that has something to do with the setting, of dikes and rivers and lakes and marshy ground, all rendered with exceptional skill. 

Also, and most wonderful, is how Gerbrand Bakker packed so much life, loss, beauty and wry humor into his pages. By the end I felt I had known Helmer, his family and neighbors, the years as they passed, as well as if I had been there with them. Though the novel is a painting in words about loneliness as a chronic condition, I did not close the book feeling sad, depressed or sorry about anything.

I did want to get on a plane and go to The Netherlands. No other book I have read set in that country has given me that urge.

FICCIONES

Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges, Grove Press, 1962, 174 pp (originally published 1956 by Emcee Editores, Buenos Aires, Argentina, translated from the Spanish by Anthony Kerrigan.)

Sometimes you go on a first date and just nothing happens. I was anticipating a huge, great experience when I first opened the book. So many readers seem to revere this writer. I read the first "story," thinking I'd gotten the hang of enjoying short stories lately. That piece, entitled "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertuis" read like a foreign language to me, even though it was translated into English. I meandered through its 19 pages and arrived...no where. What did I just read?

At the rate of one a day, I pressed on. It was like being in a place where I did not, could not, know or read or understand the language. OK, I thought, as one sometimes does on a first date, who does this guy think he is?

After a few days I realized that these "stories" were more like essays or fictional book reviews about books and authors I did not know. Fine, so that is like being at a party where you are not hip to what everyone else is talking about. You just drink.

Finally I admitted that I was in over my head. I sent messages on Twitter to authors I follow who might be nice to me. They were. They offered some tips. I kept going.

I began to see a glimpse of what authors like William Gibson, John Updike, Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes have raved about. Borges, as some have said, "has read all the books." Books I probably will never read but books that formed a labyrinth in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon wrote a four volume series of novels anchored by what he called the Labyrinth of Books. Labyrinths are a key image with Borges. I finished this collection of 17 stories and found three I especially liked: "The Form of the Sword," "Three Versions of Judas,"  "The South." I felt I had been through an initiation that might or might not have included ingesting certain substances. All I was sure about was that it had been an initiation.

Being a Leo, a feminist, a woman who asserts herself, I don't enjoy being made to feel dumb or inferior. Still, I had to admit I had been in the presence of an intelligence, insouciant for sure, but nobody's fool. Someone I could learn from.

I own another collection by Borges, entitled Labyrinths. It contains all of the stories in Ficciones plus other writings. When I get over myself, I will read that and see what else I can learn.

Because I know one thing for sure: many stories and novels are fairytales, designed to make us feel comfortable in the lives we think we are living. In a way, such literature is as much of a lie as what we get from advertising or politics. I suspect that writers like Borges had something else going on. I am interested in finding out more about that. We will have a second date.

SOLARIS

 Solaris, Stanislaw Lem, Harvest Books, 1970, 204 pp.

[Translation note: Solaris was written in Polish and published in Poland in 1961. The Harvest edition of 1970 was translated from the French by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox. Stanislaw Lem pronounced the French translation "poor." In 2011, Bill Johnston published the first and only translation direct from the Polish to English.]

Solaris is the third of three books I read in February that have a Polish connection. The first was the historical novel Poland by James Michener. The second was Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, set in a 21st century Polish village. Solaris is by a Polish author but is set in space. This little challenge left me giddy.

I read Solaris because it is an iconic sci fi novel published in 1961 just as the space race was taking off. I read the "poor" Kilmartin/Cox translation mentioned above, not knowing until the other day that there was a better one. That may explain some oddities I noticed.

If you are interested here are two links with more about Stanislaw Lem and the two translations.

Even so, it is an amazing tale about a station on Polaris, a planet orbiting two suns and covered mainly by an ocean, possibly a sentient body of something similar to water. This ocean functions as a sort of massive brain with the power to create psychological changes in the Earth scientists who come to study it.

The novel opens with the arrival of Kris Kelvin, a trained psychologist and astronaut, who finds the station in disarray with two of the remaining astronauts acting quite deranged and a third dead. Kris is a strong, no nonsense character, brave and deliberate. Soon enough he too begins to suffer from what may be hallucinations but may be something else.

I did enjoy and admire the story. It dawns on any reader who has read much science fiction that Lem did not write a standard sci fi tale compared to American works. His book is also allegorical, humanistic instead of militaristic, and satirical about the whole space project as it is playing out on Earth. He seems to be making an examination of what may lie beneath man's quest to find life on other planets.

Each character has brought his personal psychological baggage to space. The ocean on Solaris appears to have the purpose of revealing the suppressed emotional darkness of that baggage to the spacemen, causing what appear to be hallucinations of people from each one's past.

So very creepy and disconcerting but also exciting. You wonder who will succumb and who will survive. Kris Kelvin tells this story of how he came to penetrate the purposes of the ocean. Did he? Or did he go insane? The end of the story is a somewhat murky yet somehow satisfying conclusion.

Two movies have been made from this translation. One in 1972 by Andrei Tarkovsky and one in 2002 by Stephen Soderberg, starring George Clooney. I saw one of them, not sure which, several years ago and came away not understanding what I had just watched. I have requested the 1972 movie from Netflix. 

Now tell me of your Solaris encounters, if you have any.

DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD

 Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk, Riverhead Books, 2019, 274 pp (originally published by Wydawnictwo Literackie, Krakow, Poland, 2009; translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.)

When I reviewed Poland  by James Michener, I mentioned two books I planned to read by Polish authors. This is one of them and is the third novel I have read by Olga Tokarczuk. She is my favorite Polish author.

"Drive your plow over the bones of the dead" is a line from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Janina, protagonist of this novel, has many interests, one of which is working with a friend to translate William Blake into Polish.

If all of that sound obscure and scholarly, the novel is anything but. Instead it is a murder mystery, even a thriller. Men in Janina's village are turning up dead. It looks like murder but the police are not doing much to apprehend any suspects. Janina's attempts to provide evidence in the form of letters to the police chief are almost comical, making her appear to be an aging crank who is possibly losing touch with reality.

Her voice as the first person narrator of the story is unmistakable. "I am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by ambulance in the Night." She despises her given name and has "afflictions" that can send her to bed for days. I can relate to that!

She is also an accomplished astrologer and does the charts of everyone she knows by which she predicts what will happen to them. When she is well she has incredible energy and strength. Her escapades in the village bring the sense of a small 21st century Polish town on the Czech border to life.

I won't say more because I would certainly spoil it for future readers. I found it all so entertaining with unique characters, some of whom reminded me of my interactions with New Age friends and my own past as a nonconformist hippy.

This is the third novel I have read by Tokarczuk, winner of the Man Booker International Prize and the Nobel Prize. Her latest novel, The Books of Jacob, historical fiction featuring a Polish Jew who claimed to be the Messiah, is due in English in early 2022. I can hardly wait.

TO MERVAS

 To Mervas, Elizabeth Rynell, Archipelago Books, 2010, 192 pp (originally published as Till Mervas by Albert Bonniers Forlag, Stockholm, Sweden, 2002; translated from the Swedish by Victoria Haggblom)

I have been neglecting my Archipelago Books shelf for too long. I must say that every book I have read from this excellent publishing house of translated literature has provided great reading. To Mervas was no exception.

Marta, a solitary middle-aged Swedish spinster with a troubled past, receives a letter from her lover of over 25 years ago. He writes, "Marta, Mart! I'm in Mervas. It is not possible to get any farther away. And no closer either. Your Kosti."

Though I have never been to Sweden, I have read enough novels set there to have a feel for the country. Never had I heard of Mervas. I learned that it is a region of abandoned mining in the far north.

Marta's journal entries from the November day she receives Kosti's letter, reveal her childhood (brutal), her affair with Kosti (aborted by a huge argument), and her sad life ever since. She struggles with her fear of moving out of her lonely existence and a conviction that going to find Kosti is her last chance to make something meaningful of her life.

The writing is crystal clear, both in the telling of Marta's inner turmoil and in describing the journey she does finally make to Mervas. Elisabeth Rynell is both a poet and and a novelist. To Mervas is her third novel and the first to appear in English. 

It is a story of hope. Even a woman like Marta, who has suffered from terrible trauma and losses, can pull from her suppressed memory the moments when she had strength and so venture again into life.

I loved this novel from its gorgeous cover to its final page.

WHITE MASKS

 

White Masks, Elias Khoury, Archipelago Books, 2010, 303 pp; (originally published in Lebanon, 1981, translated from the Arabic by Maia Tabet)

This was the translated book I read in September. Elias Khoury is Lebanese. I have read two other novels of his and loved them both: Gate of the Sun and As Though She Were Sleeping. Like those two books, White Masks takes place in Beirut. Since that country had been in the news, I thought it might be appropriate.

Though the novel was published in the United States in 2010, it was originally published in Lebanon in 1981, making it one of his early novels. It covers a period of months during the Lebanese Civil War which lasted for 15 years, 1975-1990. The war was religious, political, and devastating to the country.

The corpse of Khalil Ahmad Jaber, a civil servant, was found in a mound of garbage. He had been missing for weeks before he was found. A journalist, who narrates the story, sought to piece together what had happened to Jaber. He interviews many people, including the man's widow. Thus the reader gets a sense of life in Beirut during the early part of the war.

I won't tell you this was easy to follow. Each person interviewed has their own particular story to tell about Jaber, about his or her own life and about the violence around them. I got a sense of what it was like for everyday people, for the police and the soldiers. Hard times for all and quite a bit of brutality. Khoury shows the breakdown of society typical of any area where war is being waged.

It was a brilliant way to portray all of that and it was also a mystery. I was interested in the effects of civil war on the psyches and inner lives of men, women and children. The front cover blurb speaks of the resilience of people. I did not get that. I got that such an amount of chaos and uncertainty breaks people. It certainly broke Khalil Ahmad Jaber.

Some American pundits claim we may be heading for civil war in America. I sincerely hope we do not come to that.

FLIGHTS

Flights, Olga Tokarczuk, Riverhead Books, 2018, 403 pp (originally published in Poland, 2007, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft)

 

I read this for my Tiny Book Club. It is an experimental novel made up of fragments, written by Tokarczuk as she traveled around Europe in the first decade of the 21st century. It was a challenging read for me because though there are a few story lines, even those are broken up throughout the book. If you read mainly for story, this might not be the book for you, though it has its own particular pleasures.

 

After I finished the book, I listened to a talk given by Olga Tokarczuk and her translator Jennifer Croft, presented on YouTube by Politics and Prose Books. That was good because it answered questions I had. She actually wrote the book 13 years ago. It was not published in English until 2018, after Jennifer Croft translated it and then fought hard to find a publisher. Once it was published in English, it became a finalist for and then won the Man Booker International Prize, after which Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In the talk she explained that she intentionally wrote in fragments. She called it a "constellation" novel, comparing the way we look at the stars in a vast sky and group them into constellations in an effort to impose some order. Thus the book is a kind of fiction because it contains stories of other people intermingled with the author's reactions to the places she traveled, to what she saw, to certain areas of knowledge she was pursuing and what she learned. She wanted readers to read all of her fragments and involve ourselves in making our own order out of it.

If that sounds like it requires effort by the reader, I can tell you that it does. The pleasures for me were mostly due to being able to read about such continual and free travel during this time of restricted travel due to COVID. And I was reminded how much one can travel within one's own mind, in fact how much we all do that all the time!

A few years ago I read an earlier novel by this author, House of Day, House of Night. It was also a bit challenging but a more enjoyable read for me. I plan to read her most recently translated novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, soon.

Have you read Flights or any of her other books? If you have reviewed any of them leave a link in the comments or just a comment if you prefer.

THE SOCIETY OF RELUCTANT DREAMERS

The Society of Reluctant Dreamers, Eduardo Jose Agualusa, Archipelago Books, 2020, 264 pp (originally published in 2017, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn)

 

This novel was as amazing as it was treacherous. Once I figured out it was set in the African country, Angola, and once I did some research into that country's horrific history and horrendous struggle for independence from European colonizers (mainly Portuguese but also all the major colonizers of the 19th century) then at least it was located for me. I understood why the Angolan author wrote it in Portuguese.

 

The other challenge was the story of Daniel and his dream lover Moira. When the book opens, Daniel has just been divorced by his wife of many years. He is a journalist; she is descended from a family who collaborated with the Portuguese. His daughter has stayed with her conservative mother, but is just as radical as Daniel.

Daniel dreams. He writes down his dreams as though he were reporting the news.

 

"I woke very early. Through the narrow windows, I saw long black birds fly past. I'd dreamed about them. It was as though they had leaped from my dream up into the sky, a damp piece of dark-blue tissue paper, with bitter mold growing in the corners."

 

The above is the opening paragraph of the book. It is a modern novel set in an extremely foreign place. The fight for Angolan independence took at least half a century and the current ruling party as well as its President, though Angolan, are an unstable oligarchy dealing in repression of freedoms.

 

Eventually Daniel's daughter lands in prison for demonstrating against the government. She is only about 18 years old but leads a hunger strike from within the prison! By this time Daniel has met an old soldier from the wars for independence who is half mad from his experiences.

 

The two men spend hours together and share the dreams they have had the night before. Enter Moira, an artist from Mozambique, who stages her dreams in her artwork. All of the dreamers seem to merge into a collective unconscious, while Daniel works to get his daughter out of prison. In that way they seek to unravel the lives they have lived and the political reality of their country.

 

I just had to let go of any preconceived notions I harbor, knowingly or unknowingly, and enter the dream state that constitutes the basis of Jose Eduardo Agualusa's writing. Truthfully, it was not hard to do so. Life in America has become so surreal. What, after all, are happiness, freedom, love, goals? For what do we fight as human beings?

Like Daniel and his daughter, the old soldier and Moira, we yearn for happiness, freedom, love and achievable goals. Sometimes we get those dreams. Sometimes we get nightmares, awake or asleep.

THE TREASURE OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

The Treasure of the Spanish Civil War, Serge Pey, Archipelago Books, 2020, 135 pp (translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith, originally published by Zulma, 2011)

 

This was another wonderful selection from my Archipelago Books subscription. The author, Serge Pey, is a French writer and poet. His parents fled Spain during the Spanish Civil War only to be interned in a concentration camp in France, due to the defeat of the Spanish republicans.

 

His book grew out of the stories told him by his exiled compatriots. The imagery and characterizations demonstrate his poetical skills and his political heart. He is for those who oppose oppression and fight for freedom.

He celebrates human resilience in the acts of resistance found in each of these interrelated stories. Children born and raised in the camp, old soldiers of the Spanish republicans, mothers, healers, and even some animals come to life. 

The magical infuses many of the incidents. Ghosts and spirits and mystical powers work right beside both brave and desperate humans.

It is the nature of concentration camps to practice brutality but Serge Pey balances atrocity with every possible type of life force in the human spirit.

THE HILLS REPLY

The Hills Reply, Tarjei Vesaas, Archipelago Books, 2019, 275 pp (orig published in Norway, 1968, translated from the Norwegian by Elizabeth Rokka in 1971 under the title The Boat in the Evening)

 

 

 Like many people who read books, I have for some years now been on a bit of a tepid quest to read more literature from countries beyond the USA, UK and the major countries of Western Europe. It is a quest fraught with non-comprehension, frequent naps while reading, and the dawning realization that storytelling comes in many forms different than what one becomes accustomed to in the above named locales.

Because I began this quest with the desire to experience life in cultures other than my own, I don't begrudge the difficulties. I am finding what I sought. Choosing what to read involves a mix of lurking on translated lit sites, paying attention to Nobel Prize recipients, and finding small presses dedicated to translating such literature into English.

One of the best of such presses is Archipelago Books, headquartered in Brooklyn, NY. I have read some gems published by this press so this year I opted for a one year membership. For $15 a month I get 12 brand new, beautifully bound paperback books with flapped covers, printed in the US on fine paper.

The Hills Reply was the first selection for 2020. I was thrilled to receive it as I had read a novel I loved by Tarjei Vesaas, The Ice Palace. However, The Hills Reply was Vesaas's last novel and something quite different.

In 16 chapters, the author contemplates various incidents in his life from boyhood to elderly man. Most of these chapters do tell a story but the writing is always like a prose poem. Here are the first lines from the first chapter, As It Stands In Memory:

"There he stands in sifting snow. In my thoughts in sifting snow. A father and his winter-shaggy, brown horse, in snow."

In that chapter the boy is working with his father to clear a logging road of snow. He counteracts the monotony, the cold and his "sharp-tongued father" with imaginings about animals.

Every subsequent chapter follows the boy growing up, going through his life's changes, working through his inner feelings and difficulties and challenges. He is usually walking or engaged in outdoor activities. He seeks answers and understandings through observation of the natural world.

It took me six days to read the book and to figure out at least some idea of what Tarjei Vessas was attempting. The man rarely traveled from his family's farmland but wrote many novels, short stories, poems, and plays. He is quite revered in Norway and has a worldwide readership. 

I spend many hours inside my house these days, reading and writing. When I leave my house, I spend most of my time with other readers. In spring, summer and fall, I work outside tending my big yard, watching it move through the seasons, observing the trees, the shrubs, the flowers, the birds, insects, and small animals with whom I share the property. When I travel it is most often lately with my husband by car to visit National Parks.

After reading The Hills Reply, I became aware that this author had put together for me an understanding of the inner life of my mind and imagination with the ways I solve my problems through my own experiences with life forms other than human. 

I claimed in my post about the books I read in February that this book was my least favorite. That was true while I was reading it but the book haunted me. I now feel it was worth the time spent grasping for comprehension among all its words. Once again I was reminded to spend time in and pay attention to the natural world as a positive healing activity. I will most likely read it again over the coming years.

I hope you are all as well as you can be in these times and that you enjoyed a nice long review from me this week.

FOX

Fox, Dubravka Ugresic, Open Letter Books, 2018, 308 pp (translated from the Croatian by David Williams and Ellen Elias-Bursac)

 

This was my translated literature pick in November. For the third time in one month I found myself reading auto-biographical fiction. The first person narrator in Fox is, I am quite sure, Dubravka Ugresic herself. This is an author I have long wanted to read, who came onto my radar through various literary sites where I lurk as she began to receive acclaim a few years ago due to seven of her works being translated into English.

 

The author has lived in self-imposed exile from Croatia ever since the breakup of Yugoslavia. The result of her criticisms of nationalism there left her branded as a traitor.

Fox is thus biographical, following the life of an author living in exile in the Netherlands and including sections about writing process, attending literary conventions and speaking engagements, and returning for a heartrending episode to her Croatian home town. She uses the mythic figure of the fox as trickster to great effect throughout the novel, making the case for authors who travel across cultures. The through line asks the illusive question, "How do stories come to be written?"

Though I felt somewhat adrift in the long first chapter, A Story about How Stories Come to Be Written, I discovered as I read further that it was a brilliant set up for the rest of the book. I grew accustomed to her sly humor. Most of all, I reveled in the ways she pans the entire international publishing world. She is so bold I worried she might be accused of being a traitor to her own profession!

Currently I am making the progress of a snail through Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, as that author travels through Yugoslavia in 1938. Her travels begin in Croatia and she relates the history and mixture of cultures there: Roman Empire, Slavic, Austro-Hungarian and Turkish. Reading Fox, I felt I had the long and troubled background to Dubravka Ugresic's current concerns. It was one of those delightful events of synchronicity that happen to readers.

STONE UPON STONE

Stone Upon Stone, Wieslaw Mysliwski, Archipelago Books, 2010, 534 pp (originally published in Poland, 1999, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston)

 

"Stone upon stone

On stone a stone

And on that stone

Another stone" 

-from a folk song

This book was my translated novel for the month. It has sat on my shelves for almost a decade and I kept putting off reading it because it is so long. It turned out to be a mixed blessing.

First of all, it took me 10 days to read, during which I got several wonderful naps. The title comes from the folk song quoted above. Polish peasants, people who have farmed grain and raised animals for centuries upon centuries, are now dealing with rapid change after WWII has left their ancient country under communist rule.

The pace of life went at the speed evoked in the song. A peasant son narrates his life story. I don't know if it is a Polish thing but he and everyone else in the book go on and on, so many words. Like a cow chewing cud, they ruminate about their thoughts, tell tales, and give each other advice.

Gradually I became immersed in a world that only moves as fast as a day from sunrise to sunset, a year from planting to harvest to cold long winter to spring planting again. I moved into the head and heart of a man who rebelled and fought against the tyranny of his father, the monotony of peasant life, the oppression of military invasion, but never lost his sense of himself or became beaten down.

The translation is wonderful. It sings, it sounds modern and almost serves as a metaphor for the wrenching changes these people were put through. The underlying wisdom of such simple folk, derived from their intimate connection with the land and its cycles of life, comes rising up out of all those words. 

 

Like the overwhelming majority of reviews I read, I too ended up loving the book, feeling a transcendence as regards the extremes of which human life is composed. I do not regret one second of the time I spent reading what is a masterpiece of an epic. Life is a mixed blessing.

"Stone upon stone

On stone a stone

And on that stone

Another stone"

DEATH IS HARD WORK

Death Is Hard Work, Khalad Khalifa, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2019, 180 pp (originally published in 2016 by Nawfal, Lebanon, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price.)

 

This novel, set in present day Syria, is my translated book for the month. It turned out to be another example of Death Bed Lit. In fact, it could be the Syrian version of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.

 

 

Abdel Latif, an elderly man from a village near Aleppo, lays dying in a Damascus hospital with his son Bolbol standing by. The old man extracts from Bolbol a promise to make sure he is buried in the family plot back in their village, Anabiya.

 

Anabiya is just a few hours drive from Damascus. How hard could it be? Bolbol contacts his older brother Hussein and his sister Fatima, convincing them to make the journey with him. Hussein procures a small van, Fatima gathers provisions. They get the unembalmed body in the vehicle and set out.

Syria at this time is a war zone and the few hours' drive takes three days. Clogged roads, competing militias, checkpoints with long lines every few miles. Due to the high death rate from continuous bombings, they had to take Abdel's body away from the hospital with only a death certificate and it begins to decay in the brutal heat. Every difference, grudge and personality defect between the siblings boils up. 

In a mere 180 pages, Khalifa relates the history of this family and what the war has done to them. It is not all grim because a black humor pervades the tale giving a look into the Syrian soul and temperament. I kept trying to imagine how it would be to travel through such trying conditions.

Khaled Khalifa has an earlier novel set in Syria: No Knives in the Kitchens of This City. Both novels won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature. The author is Syrian born and lives in Damascus, refusing to abandon his country despite the dangers created by its Civil War. For that alone, I figured I could pay him the homage of reading this truly horrifying but finely written tale.

A VERY EASY DEATH

A Very Easy Death, Simone de Beauvoir, G P Putnam's Sons, 1966, 106 pp (originally published in France by Libraire Gallimard, 1964, translated from the French by Patrick O'Brian)

 

Have you ever spent the last days of your mother's life by her side? I have. This memoir of that experience by my much read and much admired Simone de Beauvoir hit me hard but not unpleasantly.

 

In the first volume of de Beauvoir's memoirs, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, written when she was in her forties, covered the first 23 years of her life. Her experiences and insights helped me understand my relationship with my mother. We both fought against our mothers' protective and restraining methods of raising a girl.

Simone's mother fell dangerously ill in 1963 when Simone was 55 years old. Her mother went to hospital, nursing home and finally into hospice care when inoperable cancer was found. Mine had two major strokes from which she could not regain enough strength to care for herself and eventually passed away 10 years ago, also in hospice though not due to cancer. She declined any sort of life support and my sisters and I honored her wishes. I was with her everyday for 3 months, the last 5 weeks of which I was her primary caregiver at her home.

Reading A Very Easy Death was like going through it all again: my mom's bewilderment at being so reduced, watching over her in the hospital and rehab facility where some bad things happened with doctors, nurses and techs, then feeling I had failed to save her when she finally passed. 

However, the other thing I shared with Simone is a coming to peace with who my mother was and understanding her so much more deeply. We were no longer at odds in those final months, a huge gift to both of us. 

Simone de Beauvoir is a brilliant writer. She made the concerns, the exasperations, the humorous moments, the grief and relief, so real. This book captures the details, the essence of that passage in life with complete honesty. I know it is honest because I have been there.

I wish I had had this book with me in 2009.

THE NEVERENDING STORY

The Neverending Story, Michael Ende, Doubleday & Company, 1983, 396 pp (originally published by K Thienemanns Verlag, Stuttgart, 1979; translated from the German by Ralph Manheim)

 

I have been meaning to read this book for years. My blogger friend, Marianne from The Netherlands, mentioned it in a list of Top Ten Books I wish I read as a child and reminded me. I searched it out the next time I was at the library and it became the second children's book I read in June.

 

The story is fantasy truly in the German fairy tale style. Bastian Balthasar Box is a fat little boy of about 10 years. He is motherless, bullied at school, loves to read and has a somewhat distant father. Kids with missing mothers just go with fantasy, don't they?

One rainy morning on the way to school, Bastian darts into a bookshop to escape the boys chasing him. He meets the curmudgeonly owner and ends up stealing a book while the man isn't looking. Hiding away in the attic of his school, he reads the book and finds himself inside the story. Eventually he becomes a hero in the land of Fantastica and learns many lessons from all sorts of creatures.

The copy I read is exquisite. Each chapter starts with a letter of the alphabet set in a detailed illustration. That letter is the first letter of the first word in the chapter. Whenever Bastian is on earth the type is red, when he is in Fantastica it is green.

The emotional impact is strong. If I had read this at 10 years old, I might have seen the sense in what my parents were trying to teach me about life. Like Bastian, I insisted on figuring that out on my own by reading books. I was also a fearful child and may have gotten over my fears earlier and saved myself a lot of mistakes. But the book did not exist when I was 10.

However, reading it at my advanced age I could appreciate all the philosophy the story carries. It was as deep as any of the books I have read by Herman Hesse. I loved The Neverending Story on every page.

DISORIENTAL

Disoriental, Negar Djavadi, Europa Editions, 2018, 338 pp (originally published by Liana Levi, Paris, France; translated from the French by Tina Kover)

 

This was the book I read in May for my Read One Translated Book a Month Challenge. It was so excellent and goes into the running for my Top 25 Books Read this year.

 

Negar Djavadi was born in Iran in 1969 to intellectual parents opposed to the regimes of both the Shah and Khomeni. She arrived in France at the age of eleven, having crossed the mountains of Kurdistan on horseback with her mother and sister.

The novel is loosely based on her experiences. It does require the reader to have some knowledge of Iranian politics in the late 20th century. My knowledge was scanty indeed but now we have the internet and I used it. I also needed to learn more about the geography between Iran and France.

Kimia Sadr, the heroine of the novel, came from a large Iranian family with deep roots in the country's history. Her great-grandfather owned vast lands and had 52 wives in his harem! One of his sons had six sons. Darius Sadr was one of them and is Kimia's father. The rest of the sons are her uncles, called by their birth order: Uncle number One, etc. The uncles include an attorney, a secretly gay man who manages the family lands and keeps their history, a notary, a shop keeper and a literature professor. Darius is an intellectual and wrote for various publications until he got himself into deep trouble and had to escape to Paris.

Kimia's mother is Armenian. She loves and supports her husband, being as fiercely revolutionary as he is. The Armenian grandmother helps to raise Kimia and her two older sisters as well as filling them with myths, herbology and her amazing cooking.

Kimia is in full possession of her parents' rebellious spirit and does not fit in with Iranian society. She, her sisters and mother follow Darius to Paris making that journey over the mountains on horseback in winter. Paris has always served as the family's intellectual and cultural Mecca but Kimia has the most trouble adapting. The family trauma has lodged itself in her psyche.

The novel is a story about fear, exile, and adaptation. Though Kimia has no lack of spirit, she struggles with school and Parisian life due to her lesser command of French, compared to the rest of the family. She calls it a "scar." 

"This scar that runs across my vocabulary is my only concession to vanity; the only hint of resistance in my efforts to integrate, lets call them...Because to integrate into a culture, I can tell you that you have to disintegrate first, at least partially, from your own. You have to separate, detach, disassociate. No one who demands that immigrants make 'an effort at integration' would dare look them in the face and ask them to start by making a necessary 'effort at disintegration.' They're asking people to stand atop the mountain without climbing up it first"

I have not ever heard this phenomenon put so well. Hence the title of the book: Disoriental.

 

When the story opens Kimia is waiting for her doctor at a fertility clinic. She is in her 20s and has made great strides with that integration. Then she goes back and forth in time and between cultures telling how she did it. Though that is sometimes disorienting for the reader, her tale always pulses along with plot and mystery and danger and suspense. It covers all the main hot spots of political and personal life in the early 21st century so that though the locations are Iran and France, it could be anywhere. It rewards patient reading and a bit of research into the unfamiliar with a most satisfying and hopeful ending.

 

Negar Djavadi is a screenwriter by profession and Disoriental is her first novel. Perhaps that is why it is so cinematic and so dramatically astute.

SHEPHERDS OF THE NIGHT

Shepherds of the Night, Jorge Amado, Alfred A Knopf, 1966, 360 pp (translated from the Portuguese by Harriet De Onis, orig published by Livraria Martins Editora, Sao Paulo, 1964)

 

 I have been neglecting my 1964 list lately so I put three on my April reading plan. Jorge Amado was a Brazilian author whose novels about social classes, especially the lower ones, are full of rollicking scenes and expose the hypocrisy of the upper classes. He sets these tales in the Brazilian state of Bahai, where he was born and raised. 

 

(As an aside, when I read translated books for My Big Fat Reading Project, I put them on my lists in the year they were first published, usually earlier than the English translation.)

 

The "shepherds of the night" in this collection of three character-related novellas, are a group of men who spend their nights drinking rum and bedding their women, many of whom are prostitutes. From the opening page of the book: "We shepherded the night as though she were a bevy of girls and we guided her to the ports of dawn with our staffs of rum, our unhewn rods of laughter."

In the first novella, one Corporal Martim, looked up to by all of these men, commits the unspeakable act of getting married. In its hilarious and poignant pages, his friends expose the wife for the conniving woman she is, break up the marriage, and rescue their dude.

The second novella concerns the christening of a blue-eyed mixed race baby whose mother died and who was brought to his grandfather Massu to be raised. Massu is a large, very large, Negro with a soft, very soft heart. He is part of the gang. Here we get a look at the cross section of Afro-Brazilian voodoo cults and the Catholic Church brought to Brazil by European colonists. Plenty of magical realism brightens up the tale.

Finally, the third novella deals with clashes between the poor, the government and the press. Oh my, this one could have been set in the present as the families connected with the gang of "shepherds" try squatting on a piece of property owned by one of the major industrialists of Bahai who is also a slum lord.

I was not sure I was going to enjoy the book when I started it. I forgot that I almost always feel this way when I begin an Amado novel. (This is my sixth.) Then I get captured by his storytelling skills and lost in his characters' adventures. I was happy to spend a few days in another culture, all the while seeing that human beings are more similar than they are different all around the globe.

DARK ELDERBERRY BRANCH

Dark Elderberry Branch, Marina Tsvetaeva, Alice James Books, 2012, 52 pp (translated from the Russian by Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine)

 

This was the third translated book I read in March. The others were The Years and The Ravishing of Lol Stein. I came upon all three by different routes and none were on the list of my self created challenge to read one translated book a month. It appears I have opened a door in my reading life and a flood is coming through. How exciting.

 

Dark Elderberry Branch is a book of poetry that also includes an afterword about the poet's life by one of the translators. It was the March selection of my Tiny Book Club, suggested by the member who is a poet. We are having a Russian moment, having read Keith Gessen's A Terrible Country prior to this.

The poems in this collection got under my skin, delighted me, and gave me chills. I fell in love with Marina Tsvetaeva as have many others. The book comes with a CD of the poems being read in Russian. Though I do not speak or read Russian, hearing these poems in their original language while reading them in English was completely surreal.

Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) grew up in the last years of Tsarist Russia, lived through the Revolution of 1917 and the early years of the USSR. Those years are also covered in an amazing novel I read about a year and a half ago: The Revolution of Marina M by Janet Fitch. Early in the story the heroine, also named Marina, is about to turn 16 and plans to be a poet. It was in this book that I first read the names of Marina Tsvetaeva and her compatriot Anna Akhmatova. Marina M would to out to the coffeehouses to catch a glimpse of them and hopefully hear their poems. The two wrote poems for each other.

All part of the magic of reading.

THE RAVISHING OF LOL STEIN

The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Marguerite Duras, Grove Press, 1966, 181 pp (originally published in France by Editions Gallimard, 1964; translated from the French by Richard Seaver)

 

I have long wanted to read Marguerite Duras. Now I have and it was difficult but I will read more. Something about her way of looking at and writing about how love, desire, and passion can send a female mind into utter breakdown is intriguing; both the fact of the breakdown and the description of it.

 

Lol Stein at 19 years old was jilted by her fiance for another woman during summer vacation. It happened at a ball, the biggest one of the season, just a couple months before the wedding date. She fell into a deep mental illness assumed by her family to be caused by the incident. Some years later Lol married another man, moved with him to a different town, had two children and appeared to be the perfect mother and wife, keeping a perfect home.

For some reason, they moved back to her childhood home and she began to recreate her tragedy by spying on her old best friend Tatiana from that summer when they were 19. She stalks Tatiana and one of her lovers in the guise of a voyeur but proceeds to draw that lover's attention to herself. At least that is what I managed to figure out with some help from an analysis of the novel I found on-line.

Reading this book was not unlike reading Clarice Lispector, it was similar to some novels I have read by William Faulkner in writing style, even reminded me a bit of Patricia Highsmith. I don't, I can't recommend this type of writing to anyone particularly. One does not read such writing necessarily for enjoyment.

I am writing this review on the eighth day of having a horrible bout of the flu. I was not sick when I read Lol Stein but while I have been sick I have felt something like she seemed to feel in the story. Divorced from my usual fairly competent self, unable to carry out the demands of daily life, but knowing that the "real me" is still there or will be back when I am better. 

Marguerite Duras was born of French parents in Indochina (now Vietnam) in 1914. She was one of the most important literary figures of the 20th century in France, wrote 22 novels, as well as stories, plays and screenplays, essays and memoir during her 82 years of life.

If it is true that we read to know we are not alone (it is true for me), then Duras has proved herself to me as someone who can put into words how it is when a woman feels alone, can gather her in and say she is not. It is possible to carry what are socially unacceptable thoughts, emotions, and desires while still living the charade we call life. That fine line.

THE YEARS

The Years, Annie Ernaux, Seven Stories Press, 2017, 231 pp (originally published by Editions Gallimard, Paris, France, 2008; translated from the French by Allison L Strayer.)

 

I read this because it is a memoir. I read memoirs and autobiographies as aids to the book I am writing, either a memoir or an autobiography depending on which day you ask. When I first heard about The Years, I learned that this acclaimed French writer covers her life against a background of social and political French life, comparing and relating her passages to those events. I am attempting a similar feat.

Unlike myself, Annie Ernaux is exemplary in her brevity. She manages to compress 1941 to 2006 into just a bit over 200 pages. Reading the book was like watching a newsreel, barreling through her upbringing, her schooling and her adult life, complete with the major news, the literature, music, movies and changing styles and mores.

At times she is remembering her world by looking outside herself, other times by recalling her emotions and observations. Since I have never lived in France, many of the cultural bits were outside my experience. That problem was eased by the fact that we have both been through these changes simply by living in the world during almost the same decades.

She often mentions Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, and other French authors I have read, making me feel more at home. I have read from those authors about the German occupation during WWII, the resistance, the Algerian War, the involvement of French intellectuals and youth with socialism and communism. New to me though was what has happened in France from the 1970s on.

The book was a great boost to my own writing project. Unless other readers are interested in mid 20th century French life, it might be less interesting. If you have visited France over the years though, it is an inside look into changes you may have noticed.

Just as I was reading it, The Years was included on the long list for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, another bonus for book nerds.