Tag: books in translation

Butter -Asako Yuzuki (4th Estate 2024)

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My sole experience of Japanese literary fiction is Yoko Ogawa’s “The Memory Police” (2019), admittedly a good one as I rated it five stars and it ended up at #4 in my Top 10 Books Of The Year in 2020.  I thought that might start off a surge of reading Japanese novels in translation but that hasn’t happened until now with this book, which was a best-seller in the author’s homeland when published in 2017 and here available in a translation by Polly Barton.

Rika Machida, a journalist, becomes fascinated by the case of convicted female serial killer Manako Kajii who dispatched three men she had relationships with over a six month period and attempts to befriend her to get her to agree to an interview at the Detention Centre where she is incarcerated.  Kajii is a devotee of fine food and Rika discovers the way to get her talking is to pursue similar experiences of food and report these back to her.  This leads to a cholesterol-drenched, sensual tale which probably wouldn’t win that many fans amongst vegans but which I found really quite appealing.

It really only works within its Japanese framework.  A movie/tv adaptation which relocates this to the US or UK would just seem strange and implausible as alongside all the food and the rights and wrongs of Kajii’s case is the Japanese view towards women and the social pressures for people to ensure that they are not overweight and always making an effort with their appearance.

It is overlong and tends to go over the same points as characters analyse one another’s behaviour and anyone expecting a Japanese “Silence Of The Lambs” will be disappointed but as a tale of society’s expectations, of manipulation and of loneliness it is really very effective.  And the food!  Asako Yuzuki really goes to town with getting the smells and tastes of all this gastronomy across, even when I wasn’t sure what the foods being mentioned, prepared or eaten actually were, my mouth was often watering.  Manako Kajii’s enthusiasm for the best quality butter denied her in prison has an impact on all the other characters, physically, certainly in Rika’s case, but emotionally for all.  There are elements of mystery regarding the conviction and one character does stretch plausibility with her actions but tied up within the Japanese perspectives this doesn’t grate too much.

This was another very good experience of Japanese fiction for me suggesting this is a literary culture I would do well to explore further.

“Butter” is published in the UK on February 29th 2024 by 4th Estate.  Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

The Cook Of Castamar- Fernando J Munez (Head Of Zeus 2024)

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A 633 page entertaining historical novel taking us back to eighteenth century Madrid and the Castamar household headed by the widowed Duke.  At the start of the novel we meet Clara who is about to take up work in the kitchen, having fallen on hard times.  Clara has a fear of open spaces (a fact I seemed to forget regularly when reading this book) but within the intense atmosphere of a busy kitchen she thrives.  That is, if she is allowed to, as the housekeeper Dona Ursula takes a dislike to her.  For the first half of the book Clara feels like the main character but as the plot full of intrigue and manipulation develops others take precedence.

Central to all the skullduggery is an embittered Marquess who has befriended the Duke’s mother in order to wreak havoc and bring about the ruin of the family.  The Duke has an adopted brother, Gabriel, who is black and was brought into the family by the previous Duke appalled by slavery. He fits in with the Castamars but the rest of society is not as accommodating which provides an interesting slant.  There’s a number of other household staff and family friends who have their part to play as well as some low-lifes the Marquess uses to do his dirty work.

Translated from the 2019 Spanish publication by Rahul Bery and Tim Gutteridge this is highly readable.  I felt initially it was going to be bogged down by kitchen preparation and lists of food as the plot is given time to build and when it does it is all rather effective.  It does take a while to work out who is who with the third-person narration seeing things from a number of different characters’ perspectives.  I did really enjoy it and its translation may be prompted by a 2019 twelve part adaptation which is now available on Netflix in the UK.

The Cook Of Castamar is published by Head Of Zeus in the UK on 5th January 2024.  Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

Lie With Me – Philippe Besson (2019)

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This is a short, (148 pages in the paperback edition) nostalgic, yearning French work in which the narrator is startled by the appearance of a man in 2007 which takes him back to a tale of first love from 1984 before a final section set in 2016.  It’s an enigmatic work, seemingly simple, hiding a depth which the French do so well.  The title here holds a double meaning, which actually it doesn’t have in its original language where it is “Arrete Avec Tes Mensonges” (“Stop With Your Lies”).  The English title niftily gives it seduction as well as dishonesty.

I didn’t know how much it is a work of fiction or whether it strays into autobiography.  The puzzle here is created by the author’s dedication to a real life person who has the same name as the love interest.  Maybe it is all true, maybe purely from imagination, it doesn’t really matter.

What I do know, which is a surprise in itself, is that the English translation is by Hollywood A-Lister Molly Ringwald, star of many an 80’s teen comedy from “Breakfast Club” to “Pretty In Pink” to a main character recurring role as Archie’s mum in “Riverdale”.  I can only assume that she must have loved this book so much in French that she wanted to bring it to an international audience.  Her translation certainly feels authentic, full of French introspection, together with the odd cultural reference I had to look up.

As is common with books of this length, the tale is slight, a love story between two teenage boys kept secret before they go their separate ways after their schooldays.  I became more involved once we got into the two later sections, set more recently.  There’s a bit of a leap of faith plausibility-wise required but get beyond that and it becomes a well-handled study on the directions life takes us and I was drawn in by the sensitivity of it all.

I’m not sure whether I’ve ever really been blown away by an adult novel under 200 pages and this hasn’t changed things entirely.  I think that is more my problem than the authors of novellas- perhaps my expectations of what I desire most from a reading experience demands greater length.  I’m still looking for the book to change my mind.  This, however, did have the potential to come close to doing that.

Lie With Me was published in the UK by Penguin Books in 2019.

All The Lies They Did Not Tell- Pablo Trincia (2022)

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Amazon had this as one of their monthly free Prime Reads choices back in July 2022.  Its subtitle “The True Story Of Satanic Panic In An Italian Community” had me interested and remembering my desire to read more true crime I went for it.

This investigative work focuses on what became known as the Devils Of The Bassa Modenese Case which I had not heard of but which caused a huge furore in the late 1990s and led to 16 children being removed from families, convictions and acquittals and a number of deaths of adults associated with the case.

Pablo Trincia’s research into this led to a podcast with investigative journalist Alessia Rafanelli and evolved into this book which has been translated from the Italian by Elettra Pauletto.  Structurally, it does resemble a podcast eschewing a strictly chronological approach to focus on those involved and their stories with the interweaving and retreading of material that this structure involves.  Initially, I found it a little confusing to separate the families but this soon falls into place.

The events are extraordinary.  It is hard to imagine what happened here and the snowballing of such panics but similar things were happening in other countries and can be attributed to the way children were questioned by authorities.  Concerns about a family of vulnerable children led to tales of horrific satanic abuse involving almost everyone these children knew of.  Sexual abuse, torture, rituals, decapitations of cats and children killing other children in buildings and cemeteries horrified authorities who began widescale arrests, family separations and trials.

How much was true and how it came about became the author’s obsession.  He says;

“The story was like a black hole.  The more I looked into it, the more it seemed to bend social and behavioural norms and alter the relationship between cause and effect- things I’d always taken for granted.  It seemed like a parallel universe where everything was deformed.”

The author got lucky as he got hold of much information from a couple of people who had been totally driven by the cases and had lots of documentation and who had both died since the trials and from that he began to piece together what had actually happened.  Was this a case of false memory and how could that have affected so many children or was Satanism thriving in this small part of Catholic Italy in the 1990s?  It’s a sobering, involving account.  It is hard to believe that something like this could ever happen again, it reflects a terrifying moment in the history of abuse investigations where circumstances proved ripe for these life-destroying accusations.

All The Lies They Did Not Tell was published by Amazon Crossing in 2022.

The Broken House- Horst Kruger (Bodley Head 2021)

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This is the first English translation of a German memoir originally published in 1966 as “Das Zerbrochene Haus” and subtitled “Growing Up Under Hitler”.  In the Afterword the author (who died in 1999) reflects that it was a book which was developed backwards, in a way.  As a journalist in 1964 he was invited to attend the Auschwitz trials.  This forms the closing section of the book and is the most powerful and it was his attendance which caused Kruger to look back on his life.  In the 1960s he was stunned by how perpetrators of unthinkable crimes at the concentration camp had assimilated into society before having to answer for their actions at the trials.  I think if this book had been written more recently this central moment would have been the starting point but back in 1966 Kruger chose to employ a chronological approach which leads from his childhood outside Berlin, in Eichkamp, in an apolitical family where his environment would have made the rise of Adolf Hitler seem even more extraordinary.  Alongside this are the family dramas, the suicide of his oldest sister in 1939 and his own dallying with resistance and its repercussions.

There is a sense of detachment throughout which may feasibly be from the translation but I would imagine it is from the original text which does affect the flow and holds the reader at arm’s length.  There is little of Kruger’s own participation in the hostilities, it jumps to the end of his war, and indeed, this is acknowledged by the author in the Afterword which was written in 1975 and reflects back on the work, but this absence of this part of his life does seem a little odd.

In parts, it is magnificent, especially the second half of the book where Kruger feels to be on more certain ground, the actual growing up under Hitler sections in Eichkamp can feel a little tentative but there admittedly would have been so much that the town’s inhabitants would have been unsure about at the time.  It is not quite the masterpiece I had hoped but the author provides many moments that will linger long in my memory.

The English translation of “The Broken House” is by Shaun Whiteside. The book is published on 17th June 2021. The hardback is published by Bodley Head, the e-book by Vintage Digital. Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

Don Quixote- Cervantes (Wordsworth Edition 1993) – A Book To “Read Before You Die”

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It’s time for my second pick from Peter Boxall’s “1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die”.  Last time round, from this chronologically arranged publication I went with “The Golden Ass” dated around 260 AD.  I’m dividing the titles up into groups of five and selecting one to read from these.  The next five choices were:

The Thousand And One Nights

Gargantua and Pantagruel – Rabelais

Euphues: The Anatomy Of Wit – John Lyly

The Unfortunate Traveller – Thomas Nashe

Don Quixote- Cervantes

As with my previous choice I went with the most recent of the bunch but primarily because I had an unread Wordsworth paperback edition on my shelf.  So I set the time machine forward some 355 years from Apuleius for this doorstop of a book which appeared in two parts, the first in 1605, the second 10 years later.

The Wordsworth Edition uses this novel’s third English translation by Peter Motteux which dates from 1712.  Most of us would some idea as to what Don Quixote is about as both he and his squire Sancho Panca have entered our consciousness.  Most would know the “tilting at windmills” episode from early on in the book.  I knew it was a tale of a knight-errant obsessed with tales of chivalry but I had no idea how Cervantes would sustain this for a book of this length, nor did I appreciate just how old this work is, Cervantes was around the same time as Shakespeare, he died just a few days before him and this Spanish classic has proved an intriguing reading experience.

It has taken me a month but I do feel enriched for having read it.  There’s a marked distinction between the two parts, the first was pretty much what I was expecting.  Don Quixote, nothing like the chivalrous heroes of old and suffering from delusions sets out with the verbose Sancho Panca (spelt like this in this edition but the c in his surname is now more commonly a z), Quixote on an old nag he has mentally reinvented into his steed Rozinante and the squire on his beloved donkey Dapple to do deeds of derring do in the name of a peasant woman Quixote has fantasised into his Lady Dulcinea.  They encounter various folk on their way who tend to have fun at their expense with Quixote’s mental wanderings occasionally leading him to make atrocious mistakes.  He believes a dilapidated inn is a castle and is so wrapped up in his image as a chivalrous knight that fact and fiction is blurred.

In the second part this fact vs fiction theme is rounded out nicely.  Cervantes writes as if he is the editor of an Arabic translation of the first part which has become a best seller.  Many of those who meet Quixote from here on in have read about him and his exploits.  A significant part features a Duke and Duchess who have much sport in setting up scenarios for the knight and his squire, bestowing on Sancho Panca a fake governorship of an “island” which was something Quixote has always promised him as a reward for his duties.  Another well rounded dimension is added to the book when Cervantes addresses something which had occurred in the real world when an author stole his characters and published his own “Don Quixote Part 2”.  Cervantes regularly insures his own reputation is intact and employs various methods to attack this author in his text.

All in all this is a very rich, very dense text.  At times it did feel like I was plodding through it but then I would remember the age of the book and the vitality of Cervantes’ tales and it would not be too long before it shifted into a fresh direction.  It’s a comic tale with much more besides and I emerged from my reading of it exhausted but very impressed.

Don Quixote was originally published in two parts in Spanish in 1605 and 1615.  I read the 1712 translation by Peter Motteux.

The Golden Ass – Apuleius (Penguin Classics 1998) – A Book To “Read Before You Die”

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Fancying a bit of a literary challenge the other day I took down my copy of “1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die” by Peter Boxall.  I know this gets updated fairly regularly I have a 2006 edition with “A Clockwork Orange” on the cover.  I thought it might be fun if, occasionally, I worked through some of the titles suggested.  I thought I’d start by seeing what the first five listed books were and discounting any I might have read start by choosing one of this five.  What I’d forgotten is that this book is presented chronologically rather than alphabetically which meant that I was faced with five rather daunting tomes:

Aesop’s Fables

Ovid’s Metamorphosis

Chaireas and Kallirhoe- Chariton

Aithiopika- Heliodorus

The Golden Ass – Apuleius

Not being at all experienced with classic literature I almost gave my plan up at this point but I decided to bite the bullet and downloaded the Penguin Classics edition of “The Golden Ass” which is the only Latin novel to survive in its entirety and was written around 260 AD.  This version is helmed by E J Kenney who provides rather a dry introduction which didn’t really set the work in the context I was looking forward to and gets bogged down in technical details but the actual text is lively and nowhere near as difficult to read as I was expecting.

Lucius is fascinated by witchcraft and his meddling in it leads him to be turned into an ass.  Before he can get to the antidote to the spell (roses) he is abducted by a group of thieves and is passed from owner to owner facing all kinds of ill-treatment on the way but hears many stories most of which feature others whose lives have been transformed by Fate and Fortune.  So, there are a lot of stories within stories, a device familiar to anyone who has read much early literature.  It’s probably best described as a picaresque novel.  Mid-way through you get a longer tale, told by an old woman to placate a young girl who has also been abducted by the thieves and this marks the first appearance in English (or it did when it was first published in the 15th Century) of Cupid and Psyche, a tale of the Gods’ interference in the life of mortals where Cupid, on a task from Venus to disrupt the life of a beautiful girl instead becomes her lover.  Many of the other inserted tales are more knockabout, cuckolded husbands, plots of revenge, some which end well and some which do not with the tale reverting back to the plight of the unfortunate donkey.

Much has been made of the last section and the change of tone as Lucius is restored to human form and becomes a devotee of Isis, the Mother Goddess.  This has proven enigmatic to many scholars.  I do have a thing about reading the notes as I go along which did slow me down considerably here but all in all I enjoyed this far more than I was expecting.  A couple of times I even laughed out loud.  I found myself wanting to know more about the context and background of this work.  Apuleius lived in North Africa and travelled widely in Greece and Italy and used Latin to rework Greek texts. (The bulk of this novel is from an earlier work by Lucian Of Patrae).  It did make a great change from chasing recent and forthcoming publications to discover this oldest surviving novel which has certainly stood the test of time.

I read the 1998 Penguin Classics edition of “The Golden Ass”

Pen In Hand- Tim Parks (Alma Books 2019) – A Books About Books Review

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timparks

Tim Parks’ latest non-fiction work is very much a companion piece to “Where I’m Reading From” which I read and reviewed last year. Subtitled “Reading, re-reading and other mysteries” it is a collection of articles written either for the New York Review Of Books or the New York Times between 2014 and 2017.

 These articles are linked by a Foreword in which Parks encourages us, in a bid to make us more active readers to always have a pen in hand whilst reading and not to be afraid to annotate and highlight the book and note down our thoughts on what we are reading whilst things are still fresh.  Needless to say, my overwhelming desire to finish a book with it looking as pristine as when I started it means that I could not do this with Parks’ work but I certainly can see where he is coming from.  I don’t think I would ever be able to borrow a book from him as he says; “These days, going back to reading the novels and poetry that have been on my shelves since university days, I see three or four layers of comments, perhaps in different coloured pens.”

What he is getting here is a rich resource on his observations upon the work and how  they might have changed over time.  For those of you like me who would find writing on a book difficult,  the E-Book, where markings can be erased and altered so easily may be the answer.  I do often highlight when reading on my Kindle but do not always go back to those highlights and never provide the running commentary on the text which Parks deems so beneficial.

 Elsewhere he covers a lot of fascinating ground on how to read and what it is to be a reader.  He admits that the same sources do tend to come up as examples and that is probably only to be expected – Primo Levi, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Elena Ferrante are amongst those who come under scrutiny and an author I found my interest piqued by – Karl Ove Knausgaard, who has to date passed me by and who in the articles evolves from someone who Parks feels everybody seems to be reading to one who is assumed to be a best-seller by those in the business but whose sales outside his Norwegian homeland do not reflect this.  I found myself considering taking out his “Death In The Family” from the library as a result of Parks’ focus, but then decided to leave it until another time. 

Parks does have a very Euro-centric view having lived much of his adult life in Italy and working as a translator and as in “Where I’m Coming From” I found his views on translated fiction the most fascinating.  In fact, the section on translations which comprises of articles on retranslations of existing translated work, comparing the work of translators on the same text and whether translators should be paid royalties made me wish I had kept up with languages and had been a translator of the written word myself.  A French A-level 30+ years ago would probably not cut it these days- so I think I’ve missed my chance!

 Despite this work being formed from articles I found that it did read well as a whole more cohesively than his 2014 collection.  I found many of Tim Parks’ ideas stimulating and some challenging (but still withheld and temptation to scrawl my objections in the margin as he would have wanted me to do).  What I haven’t done yet, and this is with a shimmer of guilt as I mentioned this last time round is to read any of his novels to see how this feelings about the world of fiction and the needs of the reader has been incorporated into his own work. But I will.

fourstars

 

Pen In Hand was published in hardback by Alma Books in May 2019.  I would very much like to thank the publishers for doing their homework and finding out that I had read and enjoyed Tim Parks in the past and sending me a copy of this to review.

Mama Tandoori – Ernest Van Der Kwast (Scribe 2017)

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mamatandoori

Dutch author Ernest Van Der Kwast made his breakthrough with this 2010 Netherlands and Italian best-seller translated now into English by Laura Vroomen.  Publishers Scribe have done a great job in the recent past bringing Dutch authors to wider attention- their 2006 publication of Tommy Wieringa’s “Joe Speedboat” is the current Reviewsrevues Book of The Year and here is another strong title.

“Mama Tandoori” is a study of a family with Dutch and Indian parents.  An autobiographical novel which focuses on Ernest’s mother whose outrageous behaviour verges on the monstrous.  She is a woman determined to get her own way as cheaply as possible.  I was initially quite resilient to Van Der Kwast’s fictional account of his childhood whilst reading of a trip to Lourdes with his disabled brother but the novel really began to draw me in when other adult characters were added to the mix. I found myself fascinated by Uncle Sharma who came from a dirt-poor background and was transported by a visiting outdoor cinema into dreams of becoming a movie star, which came to be realised. From here things all fall into place and I seemed to appreciate more the wider family dynamics.  Mother herself became a more rounded character in my mind when running alongside her competing son on the athletics track and proving to be too nervous to pin on his race number.

There is no doubt that this character can be mean but this meanness does become more appealing in a tragi-comic way.  Her ploy to get a fitted kitchen out of her husband’s dying grandmother is shocking but you cannot help but admire the gall of this character.  The humour is ramped up by the contrast between the narrator’s unemotionally “wooden-hipped” Dutch relatives and the fiery passion and determination of the Indian women.  His mother will both shock you and win you over in laugh-out-loud moments.

Van Der Kwast writes in a likeable, easy style which makes the book feel highly visual and enjoyable.  It has certainly made me keen to read his take on the Italians in his Dolomites-set family saga “The Ice Cream Makers” also published as a Scribe paperback.

fourstars

Mama Tandoori is published on 10th August 2017  by Scribe.  Many thanks to the publishers for the advance review copy.

 

 

The Tobacconist – Robert Seethaler (Picador 2017)

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tobacconist

A novel full of poignant moments and a sense of yearning at a time of great change.  Austrian born Seethaler’s novel is quietly impressive.  It begins in 1937 when 17 year old Franz is sent by his mother from their Austrian Lake District home to Vienna to work in a small tobacconist’s shop.

Here Franz begins to learn about life from the merchandise and the shop’s aromas, from the newspapers he reads each day and from the customers.  These include an aging Sigmund Freud with whom Franz strikes up an unlikely friendship.

But the times are a changing and anti-semitism makes a bond with the Jewish Freud increasingly difficult and the one-legged tobacconist who Franz works for seems a threat to the authorities.  Franz, initially bewildered by the mysteries of love and an obsession for a worldly Bohemian girl finds he has more difficult things to contemplate.

The very likeable Franz is the heart of this novel.  Everything is underplayed, there are few big dramatic scenes yet the drama and turmoil of the times is palpable.  It is clear that for the people in Franz’ circle things can never be the same again.

I like novels where young characters attempt to make sense of the adult world and in Franz’s Vienna there is little that makes sense.  His retreats to analysing his dreams is both as a result of his meetings with Freud and an attempt to fathom out his existence where neither the real nor dream world seem quite right.

Robert Seethaler has written five novels.  His last “The Whole Life” was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.  This, translated by Charlotte Collins, with its quiet tenderness may slip under the awards radar but it is of lasting appeal.

fourstars

The Tobacconist was published by Picador in 2017.