It’s been quite a start to the New Year. I experienced the noisiest fireworks in the world (which seemed to go on all night) – Berlin is not the most pet-friendly city on New Year’s Eve. I had guests (my older son and his girlfriend, we had a great time time together), but it is decidedly harder to have guests in a small flat with just one toilet and only sporadic access to my computer, which is in the guest room. But the main problem has been that my phone stopped working a couple of days before Christmas, or rather it was restarting constantly and locking me out. After multiple attempts to repair it, I had to buy a new one… which has not arrived yet, so I’ve been cut off from friends, family and work over the holiday season.
Still, regardless of technological and other woes, and regardless of my previous post complaining of blogging fatigue, I have to take part in my favourite monthly literary meme, namely the #6DegreesofSeparation, as hosted by Kate.
It’s a tricky one this month, since I’m supposed to start with the last book from my December chain, which was Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. So that’s going to be a bit of a headscratcher, since it’s too easy to link it to Boccaccio’s Decameron. I decided to go for a modern adaptation of one of the most famous of the Canterbury Tales, namely the Wife of Bath. I haven’t read the book, but I’m told that The Wife’s Tale by Lori Lansens is a retelling of that story set in modern times, a woman who is shocked out of complacency by the disappearance of her husband on the eve of their silver wedding anniversary.
The second link takes us to disappeared spouses – and other people more generally. In Japan the so-called ‘evaporated’ people (Johatsu) have given rise to a whole industry of ‘organising disappearances’ and ‘acquiring a new identity’. These are people who for reasons of shame or despair have chosen to leave behind their families, friends, jobs and, above all, dangerously high debts. The beautifully produced non-fiction book The Vanished by journalist Léna Mauger and photographer Stéphane Remael uncover the human faces behind the phenomenon.
In other countries such as Argentina, the ‘disappeared’ refers of course to those who did not willingly submit to this, but were kidnapped and killed by the military dictatorship. One of the journalists who wrote extensively and also militated against the authoritarian regime was Rodolfo Walsh, whom I learnt about via the thrilling and very moving fictionalised account of his last few months in Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case by Elsa Drucaroff.
If you’ll allow me to be a little self-indulgent with the next link, I will go by publisher. My very own Corylus Books published Drucaroff’s novel, so I will link to another short novel published by us that is highly political and possibly one of our most underrated titles: Little Rebel by Jerome Leroy is a frighteningly funny dark gem.
The original French title of the book is La petite Gauloise, so my next link is to a classic figure of French literature who is known for smoking… maybe not Gauloise cigarettes, but certainly his pipe. Yes, it’s Simenon‘s Inspector Maigret, and one of my favourite books in the series is Maigret’s Mistake, perhaps because it is so rare to see the good man intimidated by a suspect.
I’ve exhausted all my creativity for my final link, so will stick to ‘mistakes’, this time in the spelling of the title of the book, even though the mistake is deliberate. I’ve always meant to read Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein, because I really appreciate Mary Shelley’s original book. I was not that enthused with the recent film adaptation, so I hope that Winterson’s book is a bit more interesting.
So for our first 6 Degrees of Literary Separation in 2026, we have taken a road trip across the US, gone under the radar in Japan, experienced threats and assassinations in Argentina, spent time in the west of France and in Paris, and finally skipped through time and borders in the search for Frankenstein. Where will your 6 degrees take you?
findingtimetowrite 