Reviews – findingtimetowrite

Women and/or Witches on the International Booker Longlist

One of the main themes of the International Booker longlist is witchcraft – or the perception that women left to their own devices are dangerous and menacing – especially when they band together. I read three in a row that dealt with this topic and, on the whole, found them more congenial than the other recurring topic on the longlist, namely war. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I think these are the ones that deserve to go on the shortlist – which is being announced at this very minute – but I preferred two of the ones I’m briefly reviewing today to the others I’ve read.

Sharnush Parsipur: Women Without Men, transl. Faridoun Farrokh, Penguin, 2026

This book was published quite a while ago in 1989 and was almost immediately banned in Iran, although it seems fairly innocuous in our present time and society. I suppose in strict Muslim tradition, the very fact that women from all strata of society might choose to live alone, without a male guardian, and move together to the house of one of them, a wealthy widow, is shocking and iconoclastic. This is the second translation of the book (and was originally published in 2011), while the first translation by Talatoff and Sharlat was published in 1998. This makes me question the eligibility criteria for the International Booker.

The novel (or novella, rather, as it is quite short and finishes somewhat abruptly for my taste) is set in 1950s Iran but refers to political events only obliquely.

Farrokhlaqa is the widow who, after feeling stagnant after 32 years of marriage, finally decides to do something as she pleases and acquires a summer villa and garden in Karaj, where she wants to start a literary salon and further her social network and political ambitions. This doesn’t quite work according to plan, but four other women find refuge there temporarily. These include Faizeh and Munis, friends who have completely bought into the patriarchal idea that their virginity is priceless. A complicated unrequited love and domineering, violent brother who tries to kill his sister for dishonouring the family name lead to them fleeing together, but they are assaulted and raped on their way there. Zarrinkolah is a prostitute who has started to see all of her clients as headless men: she comes to Karaj in the hope of being cured. Finally, Mahdokht is a school teacher who is so horrified by the thought of sex that she becomes a tree in their garden. What is significant, however, is that the women (at least the ones that have not been turned into trees or given birth to flowers) have to return to Tehran in the end – their idyllic life as women without men is temporary at best. And even in the villa, they are never entirely without men, since the gardener is a man and ultimately marries Zarrinkolah.

Here is a brief quote from one of the more successful passages in the book (to my mind):

As soon as the gardener left, singing could be heard in the garden. The guests fell silent, transfixed where they were. It was as if they were all encased in a drop of water the size of an ocean. Slowly seeping through the layers of the earth, the drop joined a myriad of elements at the earth’s inner core in a dance, a perpetual, harmonic movement with no beginning or end. It was simultaneously slow and rapid. The guests’ arms lifted and began to swing overhead, hanging like ropes from the sky, moving so quickly they appeared as a shadow… Then a green mist set in, engulfing everything and everyone – one color of the rainbow dominating all other colors. All who were present were dissolved into the mist, and then dripped like dewdrops from the tip of a leaf. At nightfall the tree stopped singing. The guests left the garden noiselessly, wordlessly, entranced by the song they had heard.

I wanted to love this book but it just didn’t work for me. The tree imagery and other magical realist touches are typical of both Persian literature and also art created under a dictatorship, which is forced to convey things very metaphorically. So I could have got on board with that, but the style was simply not as memorable or remarkable as I’d hoped. Possibly revolutionary for its time in Iran, but felt past its prime nowadays.

Marie NDiaye: The Witch, transl. Jordan Stump, MacLehose, 2026

This book took a long time to get translated: it was originally published in French in 1996, but the translator has done a good job of conveying it in very breezy, contemporary language, which made me think of novels set in American suburbia or small towns in Britain. Except the housewife narrating the story, Lucie, is not just lacking in confidence, slightly wary of her teenage daughters and trapped in a mediocre marriage – she is also a witch, coming from a long line of witches. Her abilities are very humdrum, compared to her mother’s (who opted not to use them, however), but she does initiate her twin daughters into the family’s ability to see into the future. Although they don’t take it seriously at first, their abilities soon outpace their mother’s.

I found it fascinating how the book blends the mundane (the opinionated neighbour, for instance, who intimidates Lucie – who finds herself both mocking her and yet craving her good opinion) with the magical. Why does this book succeed while Parsipur’s book doesn’t? I think the translation plays a big part: it sounds modern and fresh, as if the novel had been written just a couple of years ago. There are also moments of wry humour which I enjoyed. Am I being biased because it sounds so familiar, from the countless psychological thrillers I’ve read featuring a similar setting? An upmarket housing development, marital problems, female rivalries, the anxieties of motherhood and feeling the daughters slipping away. I always thought that I didn’t require relatability to appreciate a book, yet here I am saying exactly that: I found this novel and its narrator more relatable.

I closed my eyes and dozed for a few minutes. When I woke up, my daughters were gone… two large birds appeared, their wings brushing the compartment window. They flew off, disappeared from view. Then, in a joyful swoop, they came back to touch their wings to the glass, and I smiled at them in relief. They stared at me with their cold, scheming eyes – who was I to these crows? Who was I, now, to my daughters, who were perhaps fond enough of me, but already such accomplished witches that they couldn’t repress a sort of superior indifference toward their untalented mother?

This story also stands as a metaphor for men fearing or despising women’s skills and powers, while women do their best to diminish themselves for fear of overshadowing their partner. Yet the younger generation don’t seem to fear showing off their powers and Lucie ponders about the difference between her and her daughters.

Every day my talent seemed to fade a bit more – what was it about me, I asked myself, that kept me from being a good witch? Did I lack the will, the intensity, the rage? Most of all, I thought, what I lacked was a taste for power and a disdain for fate.

Unlike the women in the other two novels I’m reviewing today, Lucie does not really find sisterhood or support in other women: her neighbour bullies and uses her, her sister-in-law despises her, her mother-in-law only cares about her own feelings of abandonment. I’d quite like to see this one on the shortlist, I think, but there are four books I haven’t read yet, and some of them are highly regarded by my fellow Shadow Panellists, so…

Olga Ravn: The Wax Child, transl. Martin Aitken, Viking, 2025

This novel is more typical of the witchcraft type novels we’ve been led to expect: it examines in fictional format the true story of a 17th century witch hunt and trial in Northern Jutland in Denmark. It is told from the point of view of a wax figurine, a small child-like figure made out of melted beeswax by noblewoman Christenze, who has suffered one miscarriage after another. Christenze finds comfort in her speechless waxen companion, and soon finds comfort and companionship with other women in Aalborg, first and foremost the charismatic Maren Kneppis. The women meet, spin wool, talk about their troubles with their husbands or communities, and recommend home remedies to deal with health issues – the kind of ‘old wives’ tales’ type of remedies.

We are never quite sure if the women actually attempted any spells or believed in them, given the poetical, elliptical language that Ravn employs, and having things told from the point of view of a wax doll that at times seems omniscient, seeing both the future and the past, but at other times seems naive as a child. But of course the gathering of women who support and encourage each other enrages certain husbands and ‘concerned’ citizens, so they are accused of witchcraft and ultimately burnt alive. ‘Where there are many women, there are many witches’ was the simple conclusion at the time.

Although the topic does not feel fresh – I seem to have read quite a few books about 17th century witch hunts both in Britain and elsewhere – the book captivated me with its unique style. The wax child eavesdrops on the women’s candid coversations about marriage and sex, often filled with raucous laughter. It accompanies them in the dungeon, and captures their confused voices trying to make sense of things in the dark. And it captures the self-interest of certain of the women, ready to betray their comrades in the hope of saving their own lives.

Although at times the research hangs a little too heavily, and the book does those trendy little things which annoy me in contemporary literary fiction, like no speech marks, I found the prose hypnotic and beautiful. It’s hard to single out a particular passage, because it’s built upon repetition and build-up, like in a classical concert. And it’s much shorter than The Remembered Soldier!

Definitely one for the shortlist and a possible contender for top prize.

So I’ve read nine of the thirteen longlisted books and of those, I’d like to see: Taiwan Travelogue, The Remembered Soldier, The Wax Child, The Witch, The Deserters on the shortlist. (Although I think The Annual Banquet of the Gravedigger’s Guild was a far better book by Enard and it’s such a scandal that it didn’t make the list that year).

P.S. The shortlist was announced just as I finished writing this blog post and I have to say I am REALLY surprised not to find The Remembered Soldier and The Wax Child on the shortlist – two of the strongest contenders to my mind. Two of them that I’ll have to read now: She Who Remains and On Earth As It Is Beneath. I found both The Director and The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran a bit pedestrian, so it might have been political relevance rather than style that won them their place on the shortlist. So far, until I read the remaining two at least, Taiwan Travelogue is my favourite of the official shortlist. However, the Shadow Panel shortlist might be quite different!

Two Recent Reads: from Taiwan and South Korea

I’m continuing the theme of #ReadIndies and the Far East, with two more books from independent publishers and from my favourite part of the world. They couldn’t be more different in style and subject matter, but both are by women authors and deserving of your time.

Qiu Miaojin: Last Words from Montmartre, transl. Ari Larissa Heinrich, NYRB, 2014

This book is one long cry of anguish, a passionate outburst of love declarations but also rancour at the end of a love affair, an acknowledgement of one’s own mistakes but also full of wonder and resentment. A living, breathing contradiction, a love letter and a suicide note (or rather twenty of them, which the author claims can be read in any order). The breathless, feverish quality of this work reminded me of Rilke’s beautiful translation of Letters of a Portuguese Nun, which I read in my early teens. These 16th century love letters (now widely believed to be fictional) were incredibly influential on the epistolary novels that followed and on the Romantic movement.

Perhaps Qiu intended this to be fiction too, and she certainly plays around with different characters and points of view (the letters are not just written by one character nor addressed to just one character), but the fact that the author committed suicide shortly after finishing this novel (which was published posthumously) makes this impossible to read without bearing that in mind.

In the very comprehensive and helpful translator’s afterword, we find out more about Qiu Miaojin, who was considered a bit of a prodigy in Taiwanese literature and a cult figure in queer literature, with her early success Notes of a Crocodile, about life as a lesbian university student and a crocodile who has to hide his/her true nature from society. The author then went to Paris for further studies in clinical psychology and feminism – but also immersed herself in art, literature and films. So it’s not just Montmartre as a location that appears in this work, but also numerous references to French and other Western culture, to Angelopoulos and Tarkovsky, to Western philosophers, and also Japanese authors she revered like Mishima and Dazai Osamu.

I’ll leave you with a few quotes to give you an idea of the style. It is so anguished and painfully raw and honest (ugly with feelings of violence towards the other but also guilty self-flagellation) that I could only read one letter at a time. It was the kind of book that left me giving a huge sigh of relief that I survived it – but in a good way. I dread to think what impact it might have had on a more vulnerable teenage me. And yet there is something so universal and beautiful in the way she describes love and hurt – albeit toxic love. This would have been a better reinterpretation perhaps of Wuthering Heights…

I love her like this not because she is perfect or possesses certain qualities well-suited for me: in other people’s eyes she is possibly just an ordinary girl. I love her like this because my desire matured for her. Yes, this is a milestone in my life that can never be erased.

I suppose my words here are a final attempt to forgive Zu. If this fails, I can’t keep living in a body that hates her so intensely. I’ll have to die, as a final act of reconiciliation for being alive, a reconciliation of my deepest love and hate intertwined. And a reconciliation with her being alive. My death will remind her of the seriousness and sincerity of life itself. There will be nor more problem of forgiveness; a place will remain as the foundation of our love.

I hate my personality, hate that I’m too passionate and ‘active’; and I hate that I long for you and need you too much… I hate that my passion makes me sick and that it becomes so easy for me to injure myself, hate that I suffer so easily, hate that my excessive neediness causes you to worry causes you to suffocate causes you to feel oppressed…

Bora Chung: Your Utopia, transl. Anton Hur, Honford Star, 2024

Three choice of covers here: which do you prefer?

If you have read the previous collection of short stories by Bora Chung, the International Booker shortlisted Cursed Bunny, this collection is rather different: less wild surrealism and horror, instead more science fiction with real-life adjacent scenarios. What remains constant in her work, however, is her social critique and empathy for ‘the little people’ who toil away without much recompense to make a society wealthy and successful. Bora Chung is a committed activist in real life (and she writes about this in the afterword), and I did feel that occasionally the stories veer a little too much into blunt messaging territory. So overall I would say this story collection is less metaphorical and surprising than Cursed Bunny.

Some of the stories start off innocently enough, as if they were set in a world very similar to the one we know. The Center for Immortality Research sounds like any other office environment we know, with job title inflations, endless meetings, shuffling around of papers and changing corporate wording so many times that it loses all meaning. It’s a humorous piece about dysfunctional workplaces, except that it’s a Huis Clos scenario (hope I’m not giving too much away). A Very Ordinary Marriage starts off as a story about a husband who is suspicious about the phone calls his wife makes at odd times at night, but then turns out to be something considerably stranger than an extramarital affair. To Meet Her might be describing a typical fan meeting with a celebrity, albeit one who survived a terrorist attack a few years earlier.

The End of the Voyage appears more straightforwardly sci-fi (and is the one closest to horror, although there is nothing too gory in this book): set on a spaceship that is navigating somewhere far from Earth to try and find a solution or a cure or simply to outstay a deadly Disease that has attacked humans on Earth, turning them into cannibals. Maria, Gratia Plena is set in a hospital, but humans are now capable of scanning the memories of patients in a coma – and do so under the pretext that they might be able to uncover some criminal activities, while the professional scanner is disturbed and ultimately moved by what she sees in the woman’s past, whether real or imagined. Seed is a great little revenge story – or an ecological one, depending how you choose to look at it. But it’s the two stories narrated by machines – a car in Your Utopia and a lift in a residential building in A Song for Sleep – that struck me most. In our world today, when we are starting to fear and resent AI and robots, these stories try to demonstrate that sometimes the machines can develop more empathy than most humans.

Just listing the vague content of each story doesn’t give you a feel for things, obviously. Let me add that all this is done in a deceptively cool, detached tone (the polar opposite of Qiu’s impassioned one): the message and the style of delivery seem deliberately at odds with each other, and in this case it works perfectly. It’s a tricky style to pull off, particularly in translation: it can sound too impersonal or cold, or just plain flat, but I think Bora and Anton have created a formidable writer/translator combo. They really seem to ‘get’ each other and be able to play with the readers’ expectations, create something that seems light-hearted or plain at first glimpse, and then hits you with the full impact. Perhaps because Bora is a translator herself and because Anton also writes science-fiction tinged fiction, but it certainly works.

#ReadIndies and #HungarianLitMonth: Metropole

Ferenc Karinthy: Metropole, transl. George Szirtes, Telegram Books, 2007.

The book was originally published in 1970 in Hungary but needed over 35 years to get translated and published by a literary fiction imprint of Saqi Books (thus fitting into the indie publishers reading project). It’s been lurking on my Kindle for quite a while, and I finally took the opportunity to read it to fit with Stu’s Hungarian Lit Month initiative for this February.

Hungarian linguist Budai is on his way to a conference in Helsinki but gets on the wrong plane and ends up in a town and country where he can’t understand a word of the language, nor read the writing. He’s staying in a hotel where no one seems to understand any of the languages he attempts to use. The city is grey and constantly full of commuters, rude people pushing him aside with their elbows. The population is mixed, of all races, so he cannot even guess what continent he is on. He cannot find an airport or railway station, the maps make no sense to him. The only person who seems to show him any compassion is the girl operating the hotel lift, who might be called Epepe or maybe Pepet or Bebe or Tchetchetche… the fact that he can never quite catch or confirm her name is typical of this story of incomprehension. And maybe also a dig at the mentality of certain types of dominant cultures when deciding that a foreign name is too difficult to pronounce.

It’s an odd book: dystopian and disquieting, but also quite funny (and occasionally disturbing). It’s been compared to the nightmarish worlds of Kafka or Jose Saramago, but it also reminded me of the claustrophobic conditions with apparently no escape of On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle. There is a lot of information about linguistics and writing which I personally enjoyed, given my own formation as a linguist, but which I can see might be a bit dull for other readers. I think the author is also making a little fun of the Hungarian language, because the way he describes this strange language sounds an awful lot like Hungarian might sound to people who’ve never heard it before.

It’s also a great metaphor for the culture shock experienced by expats I used to work with, when their attempts at using logic to settle into a new culture failed, because there was nothing familiar to which one might compare things, and none of the usual rules seemed to apply. The only complaint I have is that these scenes do feel a little repetitive – probably a deliberate stylistic choice.

The city itself naturally becomes one of the main characters in the story. It is vast and bewildering, possibly a metaphor for how urban sprawl is causing alienation.

The city spread over a plain into distances further than the eye could see. Whichever way he turned there was no end to it, nothing but houses and apartment blocks, streets, squares, towers, old and new quarters of town, mildewy storm-battered rented barracks and skyscrapers faced with modern marbles… and chimneys, chimneys everywhere he looked, chimneys like so many long-necked dragons stretching towards the sky…

Sounds like the view of Tokyo from a skyscraper (albeit with no chimneys). Gradually, the longer Budai stays in the city, he begins to notice all its shortcomings. This is another typical stage of culture shock – after the curiosity and anticipation of the honeymoon stage, then anger, depression and hostility of the rejection stage. But what he describes will be familiar to anyone living in a big city anywhere in the world.

Filth and mess everywhere – had it been like this from the beginning or had he simply not noticed? When the wind blew, as it was doing now, it lifted and carried the discarded wrappers and other rubbish with it… He noticed how many old people there seemed to be in town: lame, crippled, half and half-paralysed, they stumbled, lurched and staggered on sticks through the crowd… Waves of alien humanity regularly washed over them. Frail old grannies, sickly frightened little sparrow struggled against the overwhelming crowd, dragging their helpless bodies along… constantly being shoved aside, squashed and trodden on in the mêlée… Then there were the crazies, those who wriggled and babbled, who talked and muttered to themselves, the furious who screamed and roamed the streets uttering terrible cries… Then the mumbling beggars thrusting tins in front of passers-by, the moaning, the insane, the paralysed, the skeletal, the subnormal crawling on all fours – all of them full of the desire to live…

Despite Budai’s unlikeable, prickly nature, full of self-pity yet also prone to turn violent when feeling helpless, it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for him when things take a turn and he finds himself kicked out of his hotel. He sleeps rough on the streets, works as a labourer to make a tiny amount of money for food and, above all, for drink. These passages reminiscent of Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London show just how easy it is to reach rock bottom.

Having finished work Budai too took to the bar in the next street… It was part of his current way of life, after all, much more so than a clean shirt. Where was he to wash a shirt? His lack of resources also had him choosing between clean underwear and getting drunk, and it was in perfectly sober mood, after considerable thought, that he opted for the latter. His situation would have been simply intolerable without alcohol.

Having recently read several books about the immigrant experience, and how constant ill-treatment, poverty and poor living conditions make one an angry, selfish and ‘bad’ immigrant (see Drndic’s Canzone di Guerra, for example), I was not surprised to see Budai becoming hostile and aggressive. [Incidentally, last night I watched Enjoy Your Stay, a film about undocumented Filipino workers in a luxury Swiss resort, and that too raised the question of the point at which being a victim of exploitation forces you to lose your own humanity and exploit others in turn.]

Wherever he wandered in town – and now he was deliberately crossing roads against the lights – he strewed rubbish, trod over floral borders and generally sought to break as many rules as he could. He had convinced himself that such rules had nothing to do with him, that he did not belong here, that he was simply a foreigner, an alien. If someone pushed him in the crowd, as often happened, of course, he craftily kicked the person back, or hit him with his fists, or if he lacked the opportunity to do that immediately, kept following the guilty party until he caught up with him and was able to exact full revenge by beating, slapping, punching and tearing at him. When he passed an empty telephone box he would enter, tear off the receiver and crush it under his heel. He would kick over the rubbish bins people had put out in front of their houses and enjoy seeing the rubbish spill out. He would throw stones at windows at night and smash streetlights.

Budai then gets caught up in some kind of workers’ strike or revolution – of course, he has no idea what is going on but simply gets swept along by the crowd, participates in the siege of a building, even gets a gun pressed into his hand and is expected to shoot, and then finally witnesses some revenge scenes and executions, very much in the brutal style of Blindness by Jose Saramago. But the next day, everything seems to have been cleaned up and forgotten. This reminded me of the Tiananmen Square protests (I went to Beijing for the first time just a month or two after the events), but for the author it might have been a reference to the 1956 Hungarian uprising and how the memory of that was instantly suppressed. Those of us used to censorship tend to see elaborate political metaphors everywhere we go. What does emerge from his biography is that for the next 4 years after 1956, he gave up his journalistic activities and dedicated himself predominantly to translation.

Incidentally, the name of the novel in the original Hungarian is Epepe but I feel that the publishers were wise to use Metropole instead, partly because the city is a main character in the story, while Epepe is initially marginal and later on disappears from the story, and partly because the crowd scenes and huge tower blocks remind one of the Fritz Lang film Metropolis.

Photo from Femina.hu with the occasion of centenary of his birth

Wikipedia has the following rather intriguing entry about Karinthy Ferenc (Hungarian name order is the same as in the Far East – surname first, followed by first name): a Hungarian novelist, playwright, journalist, editor and translator, as well as a water polo champion.

George Szirtes is the translator and I’ve loved his poetry and translations for many years now. I believe he deliberately chose a slightly more old-fashioned vocabulary when translating this book, perhaps in keeping with the time it was written, but also giving it a certain timeless fable-like quality.

#ReadIndies and #JapaneseLiteratureChallenge: An Explosive Book

Murakami Ryu: From the Fatherland, with Love. Transl. Ralph McCarthy, Charles De Wolf, Ginny Tapley Takemori. Pushkin Press, 2013.

I ‘may’ have mentioned before that I used to love the dark, twisted tales of Murakami Ryu, and that I liked him more for his social and political commentary than the shock and gore elements he likes to pile on. So this chunky novel from 2005, which imagines a 2011 Japan in economic and political freefall, was bound to appeal, especially since it is set in Fukuoka, a city I intend to visit as soon as I can. (Murakami is from Kyushu and several of his books describe that tension between Tokyoites and those deemed to be ‘provincial’).

Murakami imagines a Japan where economic stagnation has led to the country becoming insignificant on the world stage. The US dollar has plummeted since the US committed to the War on Terror, and the new administration formed by Democrats is seeking to improve ties with Europe, China and Russia. (All of this sounded plausible back in 2005). So they are withdrawing their troops and increasing the price of grains that they are exporting to Japan – which leads to that country feeling abandoned. North Korea perceives Japan as ‘a dying elephant that lacked the will to heal itself’ and sees this as an opportunity to start a top-secret operation ‘From the Fatherland, with Love’, sending a small elite group of special forces to hold the residents of Fukuoka hostage. The North Korean government will officially call them a ‘rebel army’ faction and disown them… until they send more troops along and occupy Kyushu, making it independent from Japan, and thus trapping South Korea in the middle.

The Japanese central government is just as ineffective as they expected, and the local population is cowed by the terrorists but also angry at their own government for leaving them at their mercies. The only people to show any initiative are a band of frankly quite psychotic, violent young Japanese misfits who’ve found a home of sorts with an aging off-grid rebel. At first they rather admire the ruthless invading forces, but then they decide to fight them through their combined know-how of poisonous insects and reptiles, guns, explosives and boomerangs. But before we get to the final showdown, there are many, many pages of research notes which the author could not bear to throw away and therefore incorporated into the book. When those notes are about politics, I can sort of go along with it, but when there’s lots of detail about explosives or guns or army uniforms or torture methods, I really think that those could have been pruned and been all the more effective when used sparingly.

There is also a huge cast of characters, not all of whom are clearly enough differentiated or even necessary. (There is a glossary at the front of the more important characters, but… even that is so over-filled that it’s hard to keep track of them.) At some points, there were simply long lists of names and job titles of all the politicians who participated in an emergency meeting and I pitied the poor translators who had to possibly research every single name (which could be read in a number of ways in Japanese) to guess which one the author meant.

Yet in spite of these digressions (which I have to admit I frequently skimmed through), I raced through the novel: its blend of suspense, political commentary and sarcasm is exactly my cup of tea, although I no longer have the stomach for Murakami’s descriptions of violence (which in this book includes not just youth crime and fighting, but also North Korean army training methods and torture and an execution squad). As always, he offers an alternative picture of Japan which is so far removed from the currently highly popular theme park vision that most tourists want to see. His descriptions of homeless camps in Japan after a long period of economic downturn are certainly drawn from life (see also Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Park).

…the homeless are the easiest people in the world to kill. Kids are scared of becoming failures themselves in later life, and the media reinforce the fear by depicting the homeless as shameful losers in a winner-take-all society, people who’ll never get back on their feet and will have to scrounge for leftover food, wearing dirty rags, smelling to high heaven and living in cardboard boxes till they day they die. After bank accounts were frozen and inflation had set in, the poor came to be scorned even more openly. Some kids probably reasoned that if it was all right to look down on the destitute, it must be all right to knock them around as well.

Homeless in Japan. Photo credit: Reannon Muth.

Although the book is very much rooted in its (fictionally dystopian) Japanese setting, there are parallels to other countries that are experiencing economic decline and problematic politics that feel all too relevant today.

The mayor and the KEF commander kept repeating the words ‘peace’ and ‘coexistence’. It was to coexist with the citizens of Fukuoka, and to bring true peace and prosperity to the city, that they had come from North Korea. They had not invaded Fukuoka and intended no harm to its citizens, but any individuals or organizations hostile to the project… would be punished. It was a transparently contrived rationale, which Yamagiwa felt he’d heard before. It wasn’t all that different from what the Americans had said after invading Afghanistan and Iraq, and in fact Saddam Hussein had made similar announcements after invading Kuwait. The Japanese military had probably said something of the sort while establishing their rule over Manchuria.

It’s good to see that Murakami’s hippie protest stance has not softened over the years. Most of his social critique is voiced by the rebellious youngsters, although they are considered (and indeed are) criminals, murderers, arsonists and so on. No one’s definition of normal, and yet they rattle off some of the best home truths:

Hino’s teachers, the attendants at the institution, and other adults had always trotted out, like a mantra, the proposition that nothing was more precious than human life. Great numbers of people were being killed every day in the continuing upheavals in the Middle East, and tens of thousands of children were dying of starvation in Sudan and Ethiopia and other African countries. But these authority figures never spoke about the preciousness of those lives – apparently only the lives in their immediate circle counted. What were children supposed to make of people like that telling them how to live?

The darkness of the subject matter is lightened by humour. Two scenes that come to mind are the North Korean soldiers attempting to make small talk or marvelling over the tissue packs being handed out for free by taxi drivers. This book won’t be to everyone’s taste, and it could certainly have done with some serious editing, but I enjoyed its craziness a lot more than I initially expected. Kudo points to Pushkin Press for translating such a mammoth work (as well as several other works by Murakami Ryu) and for the striking cover art.

#JanuaryinJapan: At the Edge of the Wood

Ono Masatsugu: At the Edge of the Wood, transl. Juliet Winters Carpenter, Strangers Press, 2017

In my Keshiki-New Voices from Japan collection from Strangers Press, a lovely selection of chapbooks with short stories or novellas by contemporary Japanese authors, I found one that suited my desire to read one more Japanese book in Japan but also travel lightly to Romania. Ono is a professor of French literature at Waseda University in Tokyo and his key research area is the influence of French literature and thought on the process of (literary and other cultural) modernisation in Japan.

This chapbook features two linked short stories ‘A Breast’ and ‘The Pastry Shop at the Edge of the Wood’, but I was not aware that they were later Americanised and published together with two more linked stories (also translated by the wonderful Juliet Winters Carpenter) in 2022 by Two Lines Press in the States as ‘At the Edge of the Woods’ (plural). This perhaps explains why the chapbook I read felt somewhat incomplete, almost too enigmatic and opaque, yet the reviewers of the entire novel also seem to struggle to decipher its meaning.

A father and a son are living in a house on the edge of the woods, in a foreign, unnamed country. The wife and mother has gone back to her parents’ home in another country to give birth to the second child. Left to their own devices, the father and son seem to stumble through everyday life, unsettled by the dark forest on their doorstep and the strange sounds that could be coming from there or from the father’s own mind. Mysterious human beings appear in and out of the woods: a half-undressed, confused old woman that his son has brought home and adopted as a grandma; dwarves that could be refugees living in the woods or mischievous imps ready to kidnap children; a pregnant woman lying dead in the woods; a pastry chef and her oversized daughter; another mother and daughter pair that they see in the supermarket car park. The encounters they have with these people are odd, seemingly pointless, half-remembered, like scenes you are unsure whether they were dreams or reality upon awakening.

Two Lines Press marketed this novel as being about climate catastrophe (which is one way to interpret the refugees in the woods). Matt Matros in his excellent review believes it is more about the dizzying contradictions of parenthood. Reading it as I did, when I was recovering from minor sedation (possibly the best way to read this, without worrying too much about trying to make sense), it felt like all the things you start worrying about once you have children: the small things (like getting candles for a birthday cake or whether they are watching too much TV) to complex global issues. Most of the time this fear is diffuse, hard to explain – the minute you try to pin it down and examine it closely, you start rationalising it, you start searching for solutions or signs that it is misplaced or exaggerated. Yet the fear remains: the heart heavy, the reptilian mind in a state of alert, so much remains unknowable. How to keep a child safe and happy under these circumstances?

The language owes something to the simple yet heavily symbolic style espoused by so many French writers since Camus. I loved it for its poetry, for the half-formed images and thoughts it put in my head, and for the ache it left in my heart, even when I wasn’t sure I ‘got’ it. The description of the forest was particularly memorable.

[The trees] pat each other familiarly on the shoulders and back and sometimes wriggle their hips as they hurried ahead… Their whispers spread through the woods like the sound of distant waves. As they traveled, the whispers blotted out not only gaps in consciousness but also the interstices between trees, between branches. Unable to penetrate into the depths of the woods, we would come to a standstill.

But the (imaginary?) sound that so disturbs the narrator is also unforgettable:

The sound that came from the wood, piercing the night, was trying to strange my heart, too. It was echoing in the dreams of my son, asleep in the same bed. […] For an instant, the coughing from the night wood splits the sound of the television, Perhaps I should sneak through that cleft. I look outside. In the smooth windowpane without flaw or distortion, my son, hidden by the sofa, cannot be seen. My reflection in the window, though shaken by the lingering echo of coughing and seemingly on the point of fading away, goes on being there, alone, in the living room.

I always found Juliet Winters Carpenter’s translations supremely elegant and lyrical, and she certainly suits this author perfectly. This is my final review for the Japanese Literature Challenge for this month, although I will no doubt read many, many more Japanese books this year.

#JanuaryinJapan: Underdogs and Warlords

Joining both Tony in his January in Japan venture and Meredith in her Japanese Literature Challenge, because it’s always about Japan with me (and Romania and Germany and Austria and France and… you get the picture, but Japan does have a special place in my heart). Unfortunately, since I’ll be away in Romania for a week without internet access or laptop, I probably won’t get another chance to post something for January in Japan, so here are two in one go.

Ko Kyota: Underdogs of Japanese History: 11 tales of iconic characters who prevailed against the odds… or didn’t, 2023

I came across Kyota (that’s his first name, I’m using the Japanese convention as always, with surname first) on Instagram, where he gives very funny but also useful snippets of information about Japanese history and culture under the name @themetroclassic (I believe he is also on YouTube and perhaps Tiktok). I bought this e-book as an excuse to delve deeper into some of the characters he talks about, and found it really informative as well as witty. Although it can’t quite capture the full charisma of his video performances (I kept hearing his voice as I was reading it), but of course there is considerably more historical detail here.

Most of the eleven underdogs presented here naturally are warriors or warlords or samurai, since there was a LOT of fighting in Japanese history, especially during the Sengoku jidai (Warring States period). But a few women are also represented, although their powers were largely dependent on whom they married, which family they belonged to or whose harem they joined. My old favourite Murasaki Shikibu (author of Genji Monogatari) is also presented, from a social and historical rather than a literary perspective, which made it feel fresh, as someone who used the power of storytelling to ensure a more secure position for herself at court. Some of the interpretations are debatable (for example, that Oda Ujiharu was determined to protect his people rather than merely an incompetent or hot-headed warrior), but with old texts and the notorious Japanese propensity for obliqueness, who’s to say that it isn’t possible?

An enjoyable, painless way to learn more about Japan – far better than the history books I had to read in a rush so I could take over my colleague’s course on Japanese history during her maternity leave – and I was rather pleased to see that Kyota doesn’t like the great unifier Oda Nobunaga much either. (Toyotomi Hideyoshi is my man, especially because he rose from humble beginnings and was less slippery and wily than Tokugawa Ieyasu, but he really shouldn’t have attacked Korea!)

The chapter I was particularly interested in, because I knew very little about it, was the Satsuma Samurai. I only learnt the official summarised and sanitised version about the end of the shogunate and the Meiji Restoration in 1868, but after visiting the Ryozen History Museum in Kyoto, which is dedicated to that period (because it was more than just a year!), I became interested in finding out more about the great turmoil surrounding that transition.

Yokomitsu Riichi: Shanghai, transl. Dennis Washburn, Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, 2001.

This was a really difficult book to read, I kept having to pause it. Not because of the writing, which is often very beautiful and evocative. Nor because of its setting: Shanghai in the 1920s, yet again a period and place I know little about, other than that it was at a confluence of Eastern and Western influences and trade, and that those were troubled times, with a lot of anti-foreign sentiment, strikes and violent clashes which ultimately led to a civil war starting in 1927. This dragged on and on, and the declining economic influence of Japan in China at that time provided of course the pretext for the Japanese invasion of Manchuria a few years later.

Yokomitsu wrote this novel in 1929, having visited Shanghai only briefly in 1928, but he does an excellent job of describing the city in all its beauty, diversity, ugliness and messiness. He was very much influenced by Western literature and art, and attempted to unite the various European currents (realism, surrealism, futurism, expressionism, symbolism) under one flexible, all-encompassing umbrella called New Sensation. He is one of the leading modernist writers in Japan and was hugely influential at the time. For me, his descriptions of the city of Shanghai owe something to journalism and reportage, but are heavily indebted to painting, revealing almost a Pointillist technique: short sentences adding up to a coherent and colourful (not necessarily enticing) picture.

A district of crumbling brick buildings. Some Chinese, wearing long-sleeved black robes that were swollen and stagnant like kelp in the depth of the ocean, crowded together on a narrow street. A beggar groveled on the pebble-covered road. In a shop window above him hung fish bladders and bloody torsos of carp. In the fruit stand next door piles of bananas and mangos spilled out onto the pavement. And next to that a pork butcher. Skinned carcasses, suspended hoof-down, formed a flesh-colored grotto with a vague, dark recess from which the white point of a clock face sparkled like an eye.

What I struggled with in this book are the characters: the Japanese expats Sanki and Koya, who behave like entitled misogynists, and treat the women they come across, Russian, Chinese or Japanese, as objects not as real people (whether they use and discard them, or admire an idealised image of them from a distance). They also express nationalistic sentiments which mirror Yokomitsu’s own at the time. The translator’s afterword examines these controversial beliefs: while it would be fair to say that many in Asia at the time believed they were being subjugated by the great Western powers and deeply resented it, Yokomitsu’s solution to that is Japanese militarism and ascendancy (less obviousl in the novel, but expressed in essays he wrote at the time).

The drifting and nihilistic characters reminded me of several characters in 19th century Russian novels, so that often annoying (and hurtful to others) psychology is present here as well. While I don’t need my fictional characters to be flawless, I found their motivation rather impenetrable or aimless. It’s hard to tell if the racism and misogyny depicted are condoned by the author, but they are certainly reflective of their time. I did enjoy some of the political jabs at the British Empire’s craftiness though, which we seldom see in English language books covering that period. Yet at the same time, this passage stood out to me (and I wonder if that is any longer the case):

…the British have been more successful in Singapore than in other countries because they make use of young men who have been trained thoroughly in the language, customs and capacities of the Chinese. That’s something other foreigners can’t do very well.

Where Yokomitsu succeeds best is at the vivid crowd scenes: if there were nothing else but that, it would still make the book worthwhile in my eyes:

Sanki was forced back into the sunken entrance of a shop and could see only a pivoting transom opened horizontally above his head. The rioting crowd was reflected upside down in the transom glass. It was like being on the floor of an ocean that had lost its watery sky. Countless heads beneath shoulders, shoulders beneath feet. They described a weird, suspended canopy on the verge of falling, swaying like seaweed that drifted out, then drew back and drifted out again.

Two interesting perspectives on Japanese history, one more fun than the other, but both quite educational and eye-opening.

More ‘Happy’ People from the Weimar Era

Hermann Kesten: Glückliche Menschen (Happy People), 1931

I think the Weimar Republic years in Germany seem happy in retrospect only when we compare them with what preceded and followed them. Yes, there was a liberation from oppressive moral restrictions and standards, and prostitution and homosexuality were tolerated in places, although officially still illegal, yes, Berlin felt like the capital of intellectual and artistic effervescence (and captured the imagination of foreign writers such as Isherwood), yes, there was a great deal of partying and decadence that was pursued more openly (and democratically, across all social classes) here than in the London of the Bright Young Things or Prohibition Era New York City.

One of the famous attractions in Berlin: Dance Cafe Moka Efti (not quite as wild a palce as the one of the same name in the Babylon Berlin TV series)

But it was also a city marked by political and social unrest, and the German economy struggled even before the worldwide Great Depression. Crippling war reparations and injured egos led to hyperinflation in 1923, where people saw their lifetime savings wiped out overnight. Incidentally, this was the moment when Kafka chose to move to Berlin at last and had to move flats three times within six months because his rent was becoming too unaffordable. No wonder there was a desperate sense of ‘enjoy the day, for who knows what tomorrow might bring’. It gave birth to a great cynicism that didn’t quite believe in the temporary upsurge of 1926-28. And they were proved right, for the Great Crash in 1929 caused massive unemployment and brought the German economy once more to its knees as investors withdrew their loans.

This chaos is reflected in the literature and theatre of that period: German literature had traditionally eschewed political subjects, but this time it was no longer possible to stand aside. Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper with its bitter refrain ‘Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral’ (First comes grub, then ethics). The unrelenting bleakness of Alfred Döblin’s novel Berlin, Alexanderplatz, Hans Fallada’s Kleiner Mann, was nun? (Little Man, What Now?) or Erich Kästner’s Fabian, in all of which the protagonists struggle with unemployment, poverty and the lure of criminal activities to keep afloat. The women novelists did not avoid political and social commentary either in their novels, as Gabriele Tergit, Irmgard Keun and Vicki Baum demonstrated. And of course the acute observational journalism of Joseph Roth, or the antiwar stance of Erich Maria Remarque were hardly cheery material either.

Reading them in quick succession now, it feels like all of these authors were both describing their times and also warning that this confusion, chaos and desperation could lead to worse. As it most certainly did in Germany just a couple of years later.

So why on earth was I expecting this book by Hermann Kesten to be any different? Did I really fall for that title ‘Happy People’? The blurb was also a bit misleading: ‘Max Blattner and Else Pfleiderer are young and in love, but a lack of material means is preventing them from having a happy future together…’ I suppose I thought that unemployed Max would have some great idea and find a way to make money and prevent Else being married off to a rich businessman who promises to pay off her father’s debts. Perhaps I thought it would be a fluffy bit of escapism like Hans Fallada’s uncharacteristically sweet love story I reviewed last month.

There are indeed some farcical moments: when Else’s father catches the couple in bed, for instance, or the meeting between Max and Krummholz, the businessman her father would like her to marry. But the book starts with a dialogue between the two young people which at first sight seems comically exaggerated, but then ends up colouring the whole atmosphere of the book and foreshadows the outcome. The very first sentence is actually: ” ‘We could just kill ourselves’, she said.’ What follows, however, is the couple’s attempt to find other solutions to their predicament, solutions which involve begging, stealing, blackmail, physical violence, even reluctant attempts at prostitution. A few legal attempts at finding a job too, of course, but needless to say, these are not successful.

Yet the book ends on a supposedly cheerful note: the very last sentence is Max saying ‘We are happy people.’ But the author is cynically toying with us here: he is saying it to someone other than Else – I don’t think this book is likely to be translated into English, so this shouldn’t be too much of a spoiler. Also, the book jumps a few years into the future when he makes this statement, and the author couldn’t have known that by then very few people other than the Nazis and those who believed in them would have described themselves as ‘happy people’ in Germany.

It was a curious little work, with a head-hopping style giving us insight into several of the characters, a style that is now considered deeply unfashionable, but which reminded me very much of the cynical philosophy of the Dreigroschenoper: ‘Nur wer im Wohlstand lebt, lebt angenehm! – Only the wealthy live comfortably. – Doch die Verhältnisse, sie sind nicht so! – But circumstances do not permit it (for us to be generous and kind, or live in peace and harmony). – Die Welt ist arm, der Mensch ist schlecht. – The world is poor, and man is evil.’

In times of economic, political and social turmoil, art often becomes either completely escapist or political: perhaps this explains the cosy crime revival and cats on covers trend in books, and also films like ‘One Battle After Another’, ‘Bugonia’ and ‘Eddington’. Whether they will outlast the times they reflect remains to be seen.

#GermanLitMonth and #NovNov25: The Wall Jumper

Peter Schneider: Der Mauerspringer (The Wall Jumper), 1982

I am once again doing double duty with this German novella (translated into English by Leigh Harfey) for the two reading challenges this month. Without knowing anything about the book except its title and that it’s set in Berlin, I assumed it might be about the famous wall jumping GDR soldier Conrad Schumann who was captured on camera as he breached the barbed wire of the Wall being built in August 1961, an iconic image which was also the first thing my GDR friend thought of when I told her what I was reading.

However, the book does not focus on one individual and, indeed, it might almost stand for Non-Fiction November as well, since it has the format and often the style of a long-form journalistic reportage, with many nested stories and different voices (reminded me a bit of Svetlana Alexievich’s work). However, it is fiction, perhaps because the author he did not want to presume to generalise about sentiments on either side of the border that ran through Germany until the end of 1989. Instead, he captures the ‘vibe; of the divided city and explores the psychological effects of the Wall upon individuals. He has often been praised since for his prescient statement that the wall in people’s heads will take longer to dismantle than the physical wall, but he starts with a rather poignant depiction of the city from the air, as a plane is coming to land. From above, the city presents a unified image (although there were differences which persisted for a long time, even after reunification, for example, in the city lights), not a place where ‘two political continents crash into each other’.

The narrator lives in West Berlin and is therefore much more easily able to cross over to the East. He was initially surprised at how familiar the other part of the city seemed: the buildings, the rubbish bins, the doorhandles, the lampposts, but he observes ironically that Berlin Mitte (the centre of Berlin) is a place where everything ends up in a dead end street. However, what is harder to articulate, and he spends the entire book trying to do so, are the differences in mentality. He does that through the many stories and descriptions of people he meets. Take his friend Robert, a poet who was no longer allowed to publish in GDR, and therefore moved to the West but now grumbles about everything there except for the ability to play the slot machines (gambling was forbidden in the East).

Despite its short length, I found the book quite dense and read it slowly, over more than a week. I wanted to give each story a bit of time to breathe. Some of the stories are true, some are based on rumours, but they are all fascinating. There are the three boys who lived in a house overlooking the border and would jump across to the West for a few hours every week to watch a film at the cinema on Ku’damm. There is the story of Kabe, a West German, who feels a compulsion to jump over the wall to the east – and does so 15 times, without claiming asylum or anything. The first couple of times, he is arrested, questioned and treated in a psychiatric unit, before being released back to the west, but after that, the GDR start charging the West German state for the ‘babysitting’ services. There is Walter Bolle, who becomes first a spy, and then a double agent after being ‘sold’ to the West, all with the idea of sabotaging the East German regime. Michael Gartenschläger is one of the real people who was at first a political prisoner of the GDR (for writing grafitti on the newly-erected wall) and was later ‘sold’ to the West, where he set up a sort of Underground Railroad to help others to escape from East Germany – and was shot at the border during one of his actions.

Blink and you might miss one of the pointed comparisons that the narrator makes between the East and West (it might help to know that in the 1960s the author was part of the left-leaning student movement, so he is quite critical of the west as well, although not as much as his East German friends).

The first English sentence that Pommerer [his East German friend] learnt was: ‘Ami, go home!’ My first English sentence: ‘Have you chewing-gum?’

Then there is the narrator’s ex-girlfriend Lena, who also escaped to the West, but is struggling to settle there properly:

Her need to set roots was not about a man but about an entire society, and could therefore not be satisfied by a single person. It was a need that made the East Germans in West Germany congregate like the Sicilians in New York. There was an inaudible foreign language uniting Lena and her two friends: three sisters, who’d check out second-hand stores for shirts and jackets, wore shoes with lower heels than the women born here, dressed less provocatively, were louder and more self-assured. said ‘I’ more frequently, wore less make-up and would burst out into a defiant laughter when one of them would suddenly intone the first verse of a Free German Youth song.

I can vouch for this, having seen it with my friend, who grew up in East Berlin, but moved to West Berlin as soon as the Wall collapsed and was young enough to build a whole new life thereafter in the West. Yet she still feels most comfortable with those who’ve grown up in East Germany, and I’m a part of that group of friends, because I too have known life behind the Iron Curtain and we all have similar childhood memories and experiences.

It should be pointed out that this is one of the few books written by a West German about the Wall and about the divided city – while East Germans have written extensively about this trauma. Perhaps, as the author/narrator says quite explicitly in the book, because for West Germans, it was not such a big deal (other than for those who got separated from their immediate family). It was just a bit of political theatre that various MPs in Bonn would regularly mention, but for most of the population, they could barely disguise their yawns when the subject came up.

It’s much more realistic to assume that the Germans on this side of the Elbe have long since resigned themselves to the division. Their pain is like that of a lover who after breaking up with his loved one does not so much miss her, but the feeling he once had when they were together. In Germany, time does not heal the wounds, it merely deadens them.

Perhaps you have to have experience life in the East Bloc or be a thoughtful German citizen to truly find this narrative beguiling, and I can see why some readers might find Schneider’s style a bit dry, but I really enjoyed the layering of story upon story, thus recreating a particular period of time in the troubled history of this city. It is certainly an important piece of writing for future generations, who will not remember a divided city or country. I will end with another image of the wall jumper that I thought this story was about, this time in the form of a monument that has been erected in his honour at the former Bernauer Street crossing.

#GermanLitMonth and #NovNov25: Paulus Hochgatterer

Paulus Hochgatterer: The Day My Grandfather Was a Hero, transl. Jamie Bulloch, MacLehose Press, 2020.

You might be familiar with Austrian author (and psychiatrist) Paulus Hochgatterer from his crime novel The Sweetness of Life, featuring psychiatrist Horn and police detective Kovacs, published in translation by MacLehose Press. It was an unusual crime novel, more of a meditation on the nature of good and evil, and a perfect description of the claustrophobia and narrow-mindedness of a small Austrian town, and I suspect it didn’t sell very well, because only one more was translated from this series The Mattress House, around the same time as the first, but hardly anyone ever heard about it. Nevertheless, some 8-9 years later, MacLehose persevered and published a self-contained novella by the same author, which is of a far more typically literary nature and features – what else, when it comes to what tends to get published from Austria? – the Second World War.

It is set in March 1945 in a rural community in Niederösterreich, just as the war is about to end, but of course the people living through its last gasps are not aware of that. All that they know is that they’re mightily sick of all the fighting, lack of food and heating. It also speculates on the fate of a missing artwork, The Tower of the Blue Horses by Franz Marc, an example of ‘decadent art’ that the Nazis supposedly despised but often wanted to keep for themselves.

The title might be perceived as slightly ironic, since the entire book shows how unheroic most people are during times of war and dictatorship, how they just passively go along with whatever seems to be the easiest option, believing that if they keep their head down and mind their own business, things will pass eventually. and it speculates on the fate of a missing artwork. Furthermore, the ‘grandfather’ in question is not really the grandfather of the narrator, thirteen-year-old Nelli, who is thought to be the sole survivor of a blast at the Nibelungen factory that killed her entire family, and the family of farmers in Lower Austria have taken her in. But is she really that person? No one is quite sure and she appears to have lost her memory. After all, she does inform us quite early on in the novella:

There are some things I’m certain of. I’ve been here for one hundred and forty-six days. I have a plan. Sometimes I lie.

The family has five daughters and a son who has gone missing on the front. They also have a relative living with them, Laurenz, who was injured during the war and also studied to be a priest. And then a young man shows up on their doorstep, an escaped Russian POW who speaks German, and he carries with him a rolled-up canvas with a strange painting. But it’s the last desperate weeks of war and soon the Wehrmacht turns up too, on the retreat from Allied forces, and demands to be fed… and to know who everyone on the farm is.

Although the summary makes this sound like an exciting story, it is actually not about the plot. We see everything filtered through Nelli’s eyes and we know she’s an unreliable, probably heavily traumatised narrator. She loves stories about the martyrdom of saints, which she recounts in excruciating bloodthirsty detail. She sometimes provides hugely plausible details to the Wehrmacht officers about her background and that of the young Russian man, but at other times her different accounts of the same situation makes the reader wonder what actually happened. Yet there is a charming kind of poetry in the writing as Nelli observes all the natural and unnatural details around her: the fields, the arrival of the swallows, the planes droning overhead, whether the flour has a smell or not.

In a way, I suppose Nelli is a metaphor for Austria itself, its convenient amnesia and how it was lying to itself and others about its level of guilt during WW2. There is a numbness and claustrophobia to the way everyone on that farm behaves that reminded me a lot of the recent German film In die Sonne schauen (Sound of Falling), which also explores intergenerational trauma in a rural community. Its handling of tacit complicity with fascism also fits in well with the book I am currently reading, the sixth in the Gereon Rath series (aka Babylon Berlin) by Volker Kutscher.

This is once more a way of combining two November reading challenges: German Literature Month, as hosted by Caroline and Tony, and Novella November hosted by Bookish Beck and Cathy.

#GermanLitMonth and #NovNov25: Two Charming, Gentle Reads

In the spirit of efficiency, I am once more combining two of my favourite reading challenges, namely German Literature Month, as hosted by Caroline and Tony this year, and Novella November hosted by Bookish Beck and Cathy. The joys of being based in Germany now, of course, is that I can find lesser-known (and untranslated) books at the library that fit both of these criteria, without committing to yet more book-buying (since the shelving situation is increasingly desperate).

Hans Fallada: Zwei zarte Lämmchen, weiß wie Schnee (Two tender lambs, white as snow) – this is not the Fallada of social critique and tough themes that we know. It’s a sweet and funny love story, a bit tongue-in-cheek, about two very shy workers at a clothing store. It has something of the slapstick feel and misunderstandings of the 1930s film comedies, and I can’t help wondering if Fallada was planning to use it as a possible film script.

Gerhard Grote is a bit of a loser, a small, puny man lacking in self-confidence, who wouldn’t dare to say boo to a goose. He works in the accounting department in a ladies’ clothes department store and has fallen for Rosa, who works in the warehouse of the same store. But he is too shy to make a move and he is running out of excuses to keep on going up to the third floor to see his paramour, especially when Rosa’s boss tells him and Rosa off for not working hard enough. In an attempt to stop Rosa being bullied by her boss, he has a sudden brainwave and claims that they are engaged, much to the bafflement of their co-workers, who consider them both innocent lambs.

Of course there is a happy ending, but first the young couple have to overcome the embarrassment of constant teasing by their co-workers, the clash with Rosa’s father who believes that herbal teas can cure anything, and of course, their mutual shyness. Although we are given to understand that Rosa is considerably less shy than Grote, as she often gives him the chance to speak up… yet he fails to grab (or even notice) the opportunities she is giving him.

Current reviewers say that this kind of story would not be possible nowadays, but I feel that beneath the bravado and quick resorts to memes and slogans, some of us are struggling just as much to communicate, especially when we start to truly care about somebody. Or perhaps the difference is that nowadays we don’t admit even to ourselves that we care about somebody? While it may feel a little old-fashioned, it is also an amusing, fluffy little story, a nice respite from more gruelling reads.

Arno Camenisch: Goldene Jahre (Golden Years) – this book by a Swiss author came out in 2020 and was longlisted for the German Book Prize that year – and in some ways it is the perfect read for that pandemic year. It reminded me a lot in its gentle, compassionate humour and strong, witty narrative voice of Leonard and Hungry Paul. The title also reminds me of the David Bowie song ‘Golden Years’ and of the fabulously sarcastic and mischievous Golden Girls. The humour in this novella, however, is of a far less raunchy nature.

Margrit and Rosa-Maria are two ladies in their late sixties who have been running a ‘kiosk’ (I suppose the correct term would be service station, since they also have a petrol pump) just outside a mountain village in the Swiss Alps since 1969. Every morning they switch on the bright yellow neon sign that they installed in 1969 and, since they no longer have a lot of customers since the appearance of a motorway further down the mountain, they spend most of the day reminiscing.

Their memories are a jumble of the historical and the personal (mostly village gossip and life, we find out very little about their private lives, they both seem to still be single, although we get hints that they did have men who admired them). They also talk about the moon landings, the Chernobyl disaster, the occasional politician or celebrity and even the Tour de Suisse cycle race that once passed by there. Through their amusing chatter and unfiltered take on events (sometimes contradicting each other slightly, sometimes in full agreement as they make fun of things), we get a potted version of fifty years (or fifty-one, as they keep reminding the reader) of running the shop. There is a bittersweet reminder that, where once upon a time, they were the recipients of all the village secrets and a key part of the community, there is now next to no footfall. Yet the ladies have no time for self-pity, they soldier on and encourage each other and make us laugh. It felt very much as if I were back in my childhood, eavesdropping on my aunt with her friends.

Very much a voice-driven narrative, where even the repetitions serve a purpose, and which does not outstay its welcome with just 95 pages. More deliberately knowing than Fallada’s novella, and therefore perhaps more suitable for contemporary readers.

Camenisch writes in both German and Romansh by the way, and this book is full of local dialect – or possibly Romansh expressions (but not in an annoying way). A couple of his earlier novels have been translated from German by Donal McLaughlin and published by Dalkey Archive.