Diary of a mad old man by Junichirō Tanizaki

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Diary of a Mad Old Man by Junichirō Tanizaki

Japanese fiction

Original title – 瘋癲老人日記 Fūten rōjin nikki

Translator – Howard Hibbert

Source – Personal Copy

Anyone who has been around the blog over the last few years knows the other event in the blogosphere, apart from the Year’s Shadow Jury, is the biannual Year Clubs that Simon and Karn have run for the last decade or so. In fact, I love these so much. It is mainly finding the books for the blog for each year they have chosen. I go with the year the book came out in its original Language. So it means I cover the rest of the world for the years they pick. First, this week we have a man who just missed out on the Nobel Prize. He was on the shortlist of people in the year he died. It will be the fifth book over the years I have covered by Tanizaki a writer I have grown to like over the years and this wry book of old age is a fun book written by a writer in his later life himself.

This afternoon I asked Satsuko to take me out for a drive around the Meiji Shrine. I thought I had escaped, but my nurse saw us leaving and said she’d come along. The whole thing was spoiled. We were home in less than an hour.

July 2

For the last few days I’ve felt that my blood pressure is rising again. This morning it was up to 18.

Pulse 100. At the nurse’s urging, I took two tablets of Serpasil and three of Adalin. The pain and chilling in my hand is acute too. Although it seldom keeps me awake, last night it woke me up and I had Miss Sasaki give me an injection of Nobulon. I find that Nobulon works for me, as far as that goes, but it has unpleasant aftereffects.

“The collar and sliding bed are here. Would you like to try them?”

I’m not very eager, yet the way I feel makes me willing to give them a trial.

A mix of the visit by the daughter in law and his medical state

The book is the diary of a man recovering from a stroke. Utsugoi is in hios late seventies and has lost the use of one hand due to the stroke and this diary follows the few months that follow the stroke it is made up of the actual recovery, but also the visit he has from his daughter-in-law, Satsuko a former dancier with her own daerk past secrets thios forms the other dynamin=c in hte book as she lets the old man kiss her legs and feet as this is all his libido will let himk do this is about power nad desire and what happens when the mind is still active but eh body has given up the ghpost. a look at the dynamics between the father and daughter-in-law, the sort of twisted power trip she lets him lick her body as he buys her gifts and says he wants her feet as part of his gravestone. This is all a mix of sexual tension and black humour of a man on his way out, but still, after fulfilling his fetishes.

August 8

From 1 to z p.m. I had my nap, and then stayed in bed waiting for Dr. Suzuki. Meanwhile I heard a knock on the bathroom door, and Satsuko calling.

“Father, I’m going to lock this!”

“He’s coming, is he?”

“Yes.” She stuck her head out for a moment, but promptly banged the door shut and locked it.

Though I had only a glimpse of her I noticed a cold, sulky look on her face. Evidently she had already taken a shower; water was dripping from her vinyl cap.

More of him in the hospital and Satsuko being around

This is one of those books that makes you think about growing old, but also about desire and what happens when you have it but no way to show it! This is what could happen. It is about a woman willing to make money from a man she is a daughter-in-law to, a man driven by his desires and what they entail. It’s like a weird Japanese take on a Carry On film, a sort of Carry On Old Man in the hospital.  The main character is like a posher version of Sid James with Money, and Satsuko could be any of the female characters from the films, in a way. It is a book around desire and the male libido, with a comic look at growing old and still feeling Horny and what happens when your dancer daughter-in-law takes advantage of that. The book has been made into a couple of films. I can see it makes a good film, just it mixes a black humour and a man not quite ready to die yet. It also has a medical side throughout the book and ends with the reports of the nurse and doctor who treated him. Have you read this book ?

 

Every Day I read by Hwabg Bo-Reum

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Every Day I read by Hwang Bo-Reum

Korean Non-fiction

Original title  -매일 읽겠습니다  Maeil ilgkesseumnida

Translator by Shanna Tan

Source – Personal copy

I think, as a reader and compulsive book buyer, this is one of those books I hadn’t heard of. I heard of the writer’s novel, I think I may have.  brought it, but haven’t found it if I did.  There have been a lot of similar title books, bookshops, etc., in the last few years. But I happened on this collection of essays by her by chance I was looking for the Han Kang Collection of essays that came out earlier this year but couldn’t find it in my local waterstones.  But this caught my eye, and when I saw it was a collection of essays around books and reading, I picked it up. It consists of 53 essays on books and reading.

Last year, my friends and I had a simple year-end gathering.

The most extroverted person among us suggested that we do a gift exchange with a twist. Let’s each bring something from home that we don’t use, but that’s still good to be given as a present.

For an entire week, I mulled over what to bring.

Something in good condition and makes for a meaningful gift? I could only think of one thing: books.

Then came the harder question, which one? Because we planned to do a random draw, I had no idea who would get my present and what the person might enjoy.

Thinking that Id better avoid something overly niche, I ended up picking a 600-page art history book. It’d be interesting, I was sure, but then again, it was 600 pages.

All my friends had busy careers. Would they find the gift ridiculous? Or worse, think that I was ridiculous? Who would have the time for a thick book like that?

From the essay on big boks made me laugh it could been Bottoms dream as the book !

This is one of those books that is a mix of different things, part biography, it follows the writer’s life as a reader and also as a writer over the 53 essays. But it also shows how we, as readers, make a journey from what we do to what we start to read. Well, as she says, in the most part, the Best sellers are those books that most people read, those holiday books, or in a wider sense, I’d say 8-% of the books you see on the internet, most content creators or circle around the most popular books. As I never consider myself a content creator, I can say this. Then how do we read where, when an essay about train reading on her journey home after doing insane Korean working Hours. A book on the train.  Tacking Big books, something I still struggle with over time.  The subjects are all ones, as a reader, we know keeping lists, classics, Bookshops, and difficult books. It follows her Arc as a reader alongside her own life.

The other day, I was talking to a friend who had just finished reading Hermann Hesses Demian.

‘I think authors who come after Hesses time are incred-ible, she said.

‘Oh, why so?’ I asked.

‘After reading this masterpiece, how can anyone think of writing their own book? Demian already tells us everything about life!’

Talk about being a fan. I first read Demian many years ago, but when I turned thirty sometime back, I decided to reread it. I loved it even more, so that I went around urging everyone to read it.

Italo Calvino, in his book Why Read the Classics?,

says this:

The classics are those books about which you usually hear

People saying : “I’m rereading …, never T’m reading…?!”

I think Classics is my one weakness as a reader !!

I read reviews of this book, and I agree with some of the things people say. It is a book for maybe a newer reader, not a person like me, someone soaked in books and reading. But that isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it. I loved it, and I saw a few Korean and other books mentioned that I will be keeping an eye out for. For me, this is the perfect gift for the young reader, probably into Korean fiction, everyone seems to be reading these days. It is a sort of book that would inspire someone that age to discover books. I think the world of books is so much easier to access these days.  There are so many post-reading books from around the world on social media platforms; people seem to read so much faster than I do.  But yes, this is perfect for the 20-something reader or anyone like me who will happily spend an evening devouring a book about books and reading, as it is that sort of book. Once you start, you need to finish in a sitting. Well, I felt that.  Have you read this fun book?

They by Helle Helle

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They by Helle Helle

Danish Fiction

Original title –  de

Tranlstor Maritn Aitken

Source – Review copy

I was kinbdl sent this as I felt for sure it would be on the Boolker longlist as it was on a lot of peoples guess and I had reviewed her earlier books This should be written in the presenrt when it came out in translation in 2015 and I loved that book so it was great to see another book from her being translated all these years later.  Helle Helle has been nominated for the Nordic Council Prize four times, one of the biggest book prizes in the Scandinavian region.  This book won a couple of Book prizes.  She is known for her Merasured, realstic voices and themes her danish wiki page says and i can agree with that.

On the third of April her mother says:

I must have swallowed a stone?

They go for a walk by the playing fields, the anemones are out. Some small boys are playing football, shrieks and shouts, one of them’s crying up against the goalpost. Her mother’s in her winter coat. They’re having beefburgers, hence the walk. She’s wearing an Icelandie sweater herself, it’s still too early yet, the wind cuts through the wool.

‘A stone stone?’ she says, her mother nods.

‘A heavy one. Here.”

She pauses a second and puts a hand to her coat, below the chest. They carry on then towards the pond.

The shrubberies are dotted with crocuses, they don’t care for crocuses.

Early on in the book this capoture the nature of her prose thou

This is a simple book about a mother and daughter in a small Danish backwater town of Rødby. They live in a small flat above the hairdresser’s, a cut above in the town. It follows a few months in their lives, it starts off as just the normal life of a single mother and a teen daughter, and the tensions that can bring. The duagher and her friend Tove are like most girls their age, going to parties, discovering boys, and drinking. Also, the usual teen trauma of ” Am I pretty? “, ” Does he like me? Am I popular?  The usual everyday things we all had at that age. But then what happens when the mother’s throat issues are more serious than she first thought, changing the rhythm and way of their lives as she is given a terminal diagnosis.  How does this change the course of the books from hospital stays to the way the daughter now becomes the mother in a way, looking after an ailing parent? What it does is capture the changing of the roles and how the teen’s life is changed, those moments we all have at this time, caught piece by piece.

Her mother’s head looks very small on the pillow. She props herself up the moment she sees them in the doorway.

“Now there’s a welcome sight, she says with a smile, her cheeks are round and red. A strand of hair hangs down in front of her eye:

Would you look at me,’ she says and blows it away, reaches out to them both, after which she picks up a hairpin from the bedside cabinet.

Palle folds his duffle coat over the footboard. They sit on either side of her, she on the edge of the bed.

Her mother smooths the back of her hand, her hand is warm and dry.

‘Do you want a peppermint?’ she says.

‘No, you keep them, says Palle.

A forceful cough builds and erupts behind a curtain, her mother lifts her eyebrows. In a pause between two phlegmy expulsions her mother puts a finger to her lips and whispers:

“She’s a pain in the neck.’ Then, immediately, in a clearer voice:

‘So, would you like some coffee?

‘Do they have coffee? Palle says, her mother nods:

“They must have?

This line hit me about her m,other head on the pillow it took me back to my pown mother dying in a hospital and me thinking something similar

I bet you now thinking this is a sads book but no it is one of those books that draws you in as a reader and the normality and direct style of Helle Helles writing makes it not soppy more just how it is when caught up in a ilness a terminal diagnossis those little momnets of interaction of how the vbook sees the mother and daughter change over the book is beautiful at times tender not over written as it could be no sparse hard at times I felt there is no punches held back in her prose no iot is all the more realstic for that . That was the main thing I remember from her earlier book: how her writing is perfect in its tone and not over the top, just enough like a master chef, she knows what puts together a great read. Have you read this or her earlier book?

 

The Duke by Matteo Melchiorre

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The Duke by Matteo Melchiorre

Italian fiction

Original title – Il Duca

Translator – Antonella Lettieri

Source – Subscription book

When the Booker longlist came out, I was pleased to see this on it, as I have been a fan of Foundry Press since it first appeared a couple of years ago and have a subscription with them, so I had this book on my TBR.  Matteo Mmelchiorre is a director of the library and museum Cstelfranco Vento, which is where the book is set in Northern Italy.  He studies the Middle Ages. He has also written about the region’s mountains and forests.  It is good to see how this book has been inspired by the world he lives in and the history he is interested in.

There were perhaps ten crows. Clattering. Cawing. Careening. Blind with fury. They were whirling in a frantic fray, striking each other again and again. Then, all of a sudden, they scattered, darting in opposite directions and, in the newly cleared sky, only a knot of wings remained, an entangled tussle which twisted and swirled and eventu-ally, as if struck by shot, plummeted through the air.

But as soon as the tangle hit the ground, right in the courtyard of the house, I discerned a buzzard instead: open beak, frightful eyes, low wings. The buzzard was pinning a young black crow to the ground, trapping it with its talons, and the crow was flapping its wings, and twisting its head, and wriggling, searching for some prospect of salvation.

The opening of the book and the Buzzard and Crow

The book, he said in the Booker interview, had many inspirations, but the fight he saw between a crow and a buzzard was one of them. I have seen a similar thing in the peaks near her birds of prey, where crows have tackled them. Maybe the scene itself is in part of the book, the buzzard, a solitary bird, a regal bird, and the crow live in groups, a common bird scavening its way. The book follows the duke, who is actually a count, a man stuck in his villa like his family has been for centuries.  What happens when he finds the big man from the village is taking his timber?  That is the kernel of the book, like the birds’ two classes coming together, and it is about the duke, an odd man, quirky solo figure, the last of a line of his family, in a way, maybe a sign of years of inbreeding, then the community around him suffers due to him having the land.  Then there are little pieces about the nature and the natural world they are in. This is the old feudal world of the past, and a village wanting to move into the modern world.

So, by calling me The Duke, the villagers were either implying that I was as eccentric as my grandfather, though inevitably of a quite different sort of eccentricity, or they were mocking the decline of my lineage. A decline which, after all, was most evident, and by virtue of which they could finally enjoy the sight of a Cimamonte with no servants and no tenants and with scratched-up hands and hardened nails.

In any case, I did not care what the village said or thought about me. I was certain that I was already living out the best fate I could possibly desire. Nothing important ever happened during the course my days. Nothing complex ever perplexed my gaze. No exception to my routine. No decision blocking my way. I lived in the best condition to which a man of my nature could aspire – the perfect, ideal condition.

But now, on an afternoon like any other, Nelso Tabióna had come to rap on my windowpane to tell me that, up in the Mountain, in my woods, I had been had.

The duke is actually a count aqqnd the nature is here in the passage I picked

For me, this is a clever book; if it had an NYRB cover, you would be forgiven for thinking it was a rediscovered classic, given the scope and twists of the story. But for me, the one book I thought of a lot was actually Gormenghast. Both books are set in remote settings, and both deal with a crumbling royal family. Both tackle modern subjects, but also set the books in an unknown time frame. Nature is big in both as well. I think I may be the only person who thinks this. There is a mention of ECO in reviews and 19th-century classics. The Foundry, in a recent Instagram post, pointed readers to Trollope and Hardy, whom the writer said inspired him. Of course, The Leopard is another book that has been mentioned as it also deals with a family line crumbling. The writer has also mentioned another Italian book, Deliver us by Luigi Meneghelli, as his bible while writing this book, a book set in a village that explores the writer’s relationship with the land.  This is maybe the most unusual book on the longlist. It is a modern book that reads like a classic novel, with some contemporary ideas about nature and society. It took the translator a while to get the duke’s voice right, she said, as it is very hard to capture the exact Italian nature of his voice. Have you read this book?

 

 

Surgical ward 9 by Peyami Safa

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Surgical Ward 9 by Peyami Safa

Turkish fiction

Original title – Dokuzuncu Hariciye Koğuşu

Translator – Ralph Hubbell

Source review copy

I was sent a number of the first books from the English arm of a Turkish publisher, Thousand Horsemen Press, in this country.  They have published four books, and this slim volume is considered a classic in Turkey.  This book is perhaps one of the fifteen novels Peyami Safa wrote, his most personal and best-known work, as it is a reflection on his own childhood, during which he also had bone tuberculosis in his right arm.  His book has been taught in schools in Turkey and made into films. He had a close working relationship with his fellow writer, Nazim Hikmet . He also translated a number of books from French and had a good knowledge of Arabic. A writer who should be better known in English.  This is the first translation of this book into English.

I too was one of them, and there was no one older than me. I was the only patient there suffering from an idiopathic disease, which I had had since I was eight.

I had spent years waiting outside that examination room, and others just like it. Never once accompanied by a grown-up, I would walk alone through the hospital’s wrought iron gate and make my way towards the ninth

‘surgical ward, envious of the very health of the grounds’ sturdy trees. The strange bright glare of the entrance’s windows would then strike my eyes and churn my stomach with fear, I would enter the passageway and sit off to the side alone, barely stirring, staying quiet, waiting, petrified to the point where I could feel the colour draining from my face.

from a section called troubles of a solitary child

captures the despair of sitting waiting

The book follows our narrator, who is 15 and is stuck in the hospital as he has bone tuberculosis in his right leg. The problem is that the doctors don’t know really what to do; some are nice, others are not. This is a boy stuck with a lot of pain, and the book is told in episodic parts. What happens is he sees a girl, Nüzhet, in the hospital. Seh shines for this boy; she is something different for him.  This girl awakens a dying boy.  This is what happens when you are dying, but then a wonderful light enters your life. The way he describes her, you feel this may have happened to the writer himself. Of course, his narrator in the book has a much worse case than the writer himself did, but there is a sense of time spent in the hospital.  He is well-read for a young man of fifteen. At times, the way he talks with his doctors shows that.  He has few options, will he leave the hospital?

Naturally, a girl wants to be happy.

I keep trying to tell myself this very basic fact. Even in my daydreams, my faltering logic comes to the same con-clusion, but then I begin to reason against it again as if I still need to be convinced.

Suddenly, the unbelievable: I hear something. The sound of someone knocking on the door. I do not believe it at first, but I listen carefully. It’s true.

“Who is it?” I said.

A low voice: “It’s me. Are you asleep? Can I come in?” Nüzhet! Nüzhet in the middle of the night! I could

only mouth the word, “Yes.”

“Can I come in?” she asked again.

Amazed, I sat upright in my bed:

“Yes!” I said.

She opened the door.

She wore a shawl draped over her nightshirt. Her feet,

inside her slippers, were bare.

She walked boldly over to the bed, an act so daring it caused me to feel the intensity of her fright. She looked at me and laughed.

Nuzhet as he views her !

This is a book that can be read in a single evening. I read it in two sittings, as I was so caught up in what was happening to the narrator and in how this girl lit up his world.  She may not be the best person, but there is a sense that this one figure is his hope at this one time. A boy discovering himself . A country struggling in the middle of a war and a sick boy stuck in a hospital jump off the page; you sense this is more auto-fiction, a legacy instead of an arm, some of the options the narrator has to face feel like those the writer may have faced. Did he have a Nuzhet light up his world ? I felt this book salos had a nod towards modernism the way we our in our narrators thoughts called Mrs Dalloway and maybe even something like Hunger by Knut Hamsum it captures a psychological feel to the narrative that the book shares with both the books I have mentioned also he translated french fiction so Proust for the ilness side of the book may have been an inspiration for his writing. It is a gem of a book that has also been made into a film. Maybe the best line is this from his friend Nãzim Hiket “I’ve read Peyami’s latest novel three times, I can read thirty more, I definitely will” High praise!

March 2026 Booker Month 26

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  1. She who remains by Rene Karabash
  2. The Deserters by Mathias Enard 
  3. We are Green and Trembling by Gabriel Cabezón Camára
  4. The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje 
  5. The Nights are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar
  6. The Witch by Marie Ndiaye
  7. The director by Daniel Kehlmann
  8. Erased by Miha Mazzini
  9. Taiwan travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ

It is always the same at this time of year: before the Booker, there was the old IFFP prize. I always start by reading the longlist of prizes. I was very pleased when this year’s longlist came out, as it had books I had planned to read. It was a journey that started in Bulgaria, with a second story I read about the Sworn Virgins. Then to France and an old favourite, Mathias Enard, and a tale about a father, war, and a deserter. Then we are in South America, and a pioneering woman living as a man. Then a man who has lost his memories of post-World War I is claimed by his wife, or is she?  Then, families escape post-Shah Iran, and it follows them in Germany and back to Iran, where a woman is a witch in a small village where her daughters are. Then, a memoir of a director who got caught in Nazi Germany and still made films about making films under the Nazis Regime. Then, a break, and a stunning tale of a woman who lost her identity in a government glitch and struggles to keep her Baby. Then a pair of women, one Japanese, one Taiwanese, travel Taiwan on a year-long tour and eat their way around.

Book of the month

I will pick this, it is a great gem of a book. I want to avoid pinning a Booker as we are in the middle of our shadow jury debates. This book was written when Miha Mazzini saw a report about the 20,000-plus people removed from Slovenian government records. A tale of a pregnant woman finds she has vanished from government records, and they may take her newborn.

Non-book events

Watching-wise, I am in the middle of a binge of the cosy crime series Shakespeare and Hathaway.With Mark Benton as an ex-police officer, now a PI and his new partner played by jo Joyner. I love the way they play off one another, and Benton has a great world-worn feel about his acting style.Then, at the end of the month, I am trying to add a film or two. I watched a 90s film called The Outpost, a Kafka-esque tale of a woman promoted, or is she sent to a remote outpost in Hungary, in a trip that takes many days to get there. Then I brought a few albums: Black Country New Road, Geese 3D Country, and a collection of Daniel Johnson’s works on vinyl.

Next month

I will review the final two Booker longlist books.  Then it is Karen and Simon’s club 1961. For which I have already bought several books.I am starting them soon.  Then I have a couple of new books, and the EBRD  literature prize shortlist came out today; I hope to read a few from it. before the winner is announced, but it does have the epic Polish novel Ice on it . What are your plans for the next month ?

 

Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāngzi

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Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāngzi

Taiwanese fiction

Original title – 臺灣漫遊錄

Translator – Lin King

Source – Review copy

I finished the last of the Booker International books for this year’s longlist yesterday. This was one of the last three I read. I won’t get them all reviewed till the end of the week. But I was pleased to have finished before the shortlist came out. This was a book that, like a couple of others, had been on a lot of people’s guesses for the longlist. I won the National Book Award for Translated Literature last year. It also won a prize in Taiwan.  The writer was raised in a rural village and identified as Chinese, but after university, she became involved in the Wild Strawberries Movement.  Against the visit of the Chinese politician to Taiwan. She studied Chinese Literature and has since also taken a degree in Taiwanese Literature.. This is her first book

CHAPTER I

Kue-Tsí / Roasted Seeds

“Hold on. What’s going on here?”

I couldn’t help but voice the thought out loud.

For, in that moment, I seemed to have been transported back

into the midst of Shökyokusai Tenkatsu’s Magic Troupe.’

Id crossed paths with Tenkatsu’s troupe long ago, before ra started high school. They had been on tour, and on the day they arrived in Nagasaki, my aunt Kikuko and I happened upon the opening parade.

The procession comprised a majestic formation of rick-shaws, rows and rows of them with no end in sightenough to rival an army regiment. The band rode at the frontmost rick-shaws, performing with remarkable gusto; after them came the women magicians, beaming and waving at the crowd in exquisite maquillage; they were followed by the male magicians in top hats. Other troupe members went on foot, encircling the rickshaws and ushering them along. They held up long poles with brightly colored flags-streaks of crimson, white, violet, and azure that were no less commanding than the band’s spirited music.

My chest thrummed and lifted, as though something had been strung from my navel all the way up into the sky

Each chapter was a dish along the way

The book is a clever little memoir of a Japanese writer in the late 1930s who heads out to Taiwan, then under Japanese rule.  This is the story of the year she spent in the island as we follow Aoyama Chizuko and her translator Chizuro as they go around on her lecture tour f the country she also samples a lot of the local dishes along the way this is a story that sees the two woman at first distant grow closer but also there is a lot about being under rule from anuother country that resentment that can simmer. in the background as they head around the country. The book is framed as her pieces from the year-long tour and presented as a book that has been found. This means we also get a lot of footnotes along the way as we see how different fictional translators dealt with the text.  There are also endnotes from the fictional family of the two women.  Added to that, we also have the food that is almost. Character in itself sets the taste buds racing.

Before that, I broke fast with white rice, pickled vegetables, seaweed, a raw egg, and grilled fish, along with miso soup with tofu and fish—the type of meal I would have had back on the Mainland. This dampened my spirits somewhat, and I did not fill my stomach, which in turn filled my head with thoughts of sweets as lunchtime approached. Fried bread sprinkled with sugar, cream cookies, yokan jelly, red bean buns-those delicacies were appetizing, but all were things that I could have eaten in Nagasaki. Taiwan, with its heat that brought torrents of sweat down my back, called for some more hydrating desserts. Cold o-gio, hún-kué, hún-înn, tshenn-tsháu-à tea, and tropical fruits teeming with juice-how I longed to try them!

More oof the food to mae your mouth water !

I think when the longlist came out, this was maybe the book I knew least about. I wish I had known more about it; it is a little gem of a book with a clever framing device of the memoir as a novel, but it is also a look back at Japan’s colonial rule over Taiwan. But also a nod and warning toward China, threatening to do the same.. It is also about how we view books, how they were altered across various versions, and how different translators tackled the book, showing how translation can be used as a weapon of propaganda in some ways. It is also an ode to Taiwan’s food. It is a book that makes your mouth water. I hope to try a few of the dishes along the way. Others may not have been to my taste. Have you read the book? Did it make your mouth water?

Erased by Miha Mazzini

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Erased by Miha Mazzini

Slovenian fiction

Original title – Izbrisana

Translator – Gregor Timothy Čeh

Source – Review Copy

It is always great after a long time to catch up with a writer whose previous books you have enjoyed; that is the case with Miha Mazzini. I had reviewed two of his earlier books twelve years ago. I loved both of them, so when I was offered his latest book to review, of course, I said yes. This book is a bout a piece of Slovenian history I didn’t know anything about, and that is what happened not long after they became a country in itself, which was when a number of people, 25,671, were erased from the state records, and this is the story of one of them, Zala. Miha heard the story of the erased, he said, and had expected many other writers to write about it, but when they didn’t, he did!

Ljubljana had been thoroughly cleansed by the rain that Sunday morning. The inhabitants had left for their weekend houses and dachas, half towards the coast, half into the mountains. The tourists had not yet arrived; the war was still raging on in the neighbouring states of the former Yugoslavia (translated into only a fingerprint’s distance on the map) and it scared visitors away.

Zala stood by the window and looked out. She missed being active, missed her usual morning walk after the May Day holidays through the empty town, across Tivoli Park to the forest and toward Rožnik Hill. Evidence of the previous night’s traditional celebrations was littered everywhere, empty bottles and patches of drying vomit. At the top of the hill were the remnants of a bonfire, a thick circle of blackened ash; when once she had stuck her fingers into it, she had been burnt. Binmen climbed slowly out of small trucks, stretched themselves and looked despondently at the mess they were called to clear up before the hung-over population began to wake

As she heads to the hopsital

The book opens with Zala having a baby and heading to the hospital to give birth. This is where her troubles start.  As she arrives, there is a problem; they can’t find her on the computer.  By this time, she is deep in labour, they take her and let her have her baby, but what follows is a number of days where she is told that her baby could be taken from her. her because neither of them has papers or is in the computer system. This leads to a Kafkaesque journey through bureaucracy that isn’t helping her, from the Hospital directors to the local authorites don’t have an answer and the doors seem to be closing for her from aproaching the media and other things to highlght her plight and what is going happen to her son will she be able to be a mother to him will she be a slovenian again who will sort this all out?

The Director raised her head calmly and said, “I have been expecting you,” as if the door had not almost fallen off its hinges.

Zala was still holding firmly onto the handle, the grounding of her rage.

“Sit down!”

“What is wrong with my baby?”

“Look…” the woman supported her chin with her hand, “we are not just experts here, each in our own field, but we are also people. We need to make sure that everything will be all right with the child. Do you not agree?”

“But what is wrong?”

“Nothing. My husband is..”

Her lips began to wrinkle, as if juggling a rotten pip and Zala realised that what bonded the Director and the Doctor as a couple was her need to subdue and his childish acceptance.

Nonstop work composed of tiny victories and escapes, life transtormed into continual coexistence, both at home and at work

She is told she isn’t in the system

Miha has a real talent for pacing in his book.  This is like a thriller, a real page turner as we find out how she is trying to firstly get her citizenship back and thus be a mother to her son or lose him and lose herself as she is caught in a lot of red tape and to go back to the old “That’s life title of Jobsworth’s bureaucrats going by the book. It is like a real-life Kaka story, Z caught up in a maze of small officialdom.  What would you do ? It also says in the book that this has happened for a number of people around the world, and there are still people in Slovenia trying to sort their identity out.  I found this article by Miha about the Erased.  is also a screenwriter and has made a film of the book. I hope to watch this at some. If you like Kafka-like thrillers with many twists and turns set over a few days, this is the one for you. What would you do if you were the one erased?

 

The Director by Daniel Kehlmann

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The Director by Daniel Kehlmann

German fiction

Original Title – Lichtspiel

Translator – Ross Benjamin

Source – Personal Copy

There were a number of books on people’s guesses before the Booker International Longlist came out, and this is one I had seen on a number of longlist predictions.  Kehlmann had been on the Booker longlist and the old IFFP before that, and his books have been bestsellers in Germany over the years. So this was a book I had intended to read at some point. I know very little about the director at the heart of the story, other than he was the best-known German-language director in the Weimar Republic and had made films in the US just before World War II broke out.

The first compartment passes by, followed by a second. I suppose I have to step into the third, I’m frightened, it passes by too. Come on, I tell myself, you ve experienced worse. As the fourth compartment rises in front of me, I close my eyes and stagger forward. I make it in-side, but would have fallen down if he hadn’t held me by the shoulder.

It’s a good thing he reacted so quickly.

“Let go of me,” I say sharply.

Getting out is even harder, of course. But he sees it coming, places his hand on my back, and gives me a little push. I stagger out, he holds me steady again, thank God.

“Stop that!” I say.

It smells of plastic; from somewhere comes the hum of large machines. We walk down a corridor with signed photos of grinning people hanging to the left and right. A few of them I recognize: Paul Hörbiger, Maxi Böhm, Johanna Matz, and there’s Peter Alexander, who for some reason has scrawled With great thanks to my dear, dear audience under his signature.

from one of the opening chapters

The book follows the course of Pabst’s life, a man caught up in time. I think, for me, this is a perfect example of Javier Cercas’s Blind Spot.  The book is about Pabst and the Nazis, the blind spot being the truth of what really happened and why. It also has a turning point when his mother falls ill, just as the war in Europe is starting to spread, he is back in Austria and is caught having initially managed to get his family to the US in the early thirties, and now is faced with having to make films.  The book is told from the point of view of his fictional assistant as he struggles with making films and not being seen as a Nazis at the same time.  We see a man walking a tightrope in history; the German title Lichtspiel, light spiel, light game, is maybe more than an old word for cinema, but maybe for walking the line between light and dark. The book finishes after the war and discusses how he was viewed for making a number of films during the war.

She had kept him waiting for forty-five minutes not because she had been busy, but because she treated every visitor that way. The whole time she had stood by the window, watching the colorful birds as they stalked and strutted back and forth. The gardener had once listed the names of all the species for her, but her memory had never been good; usually while filming, someone stood next to the camera holding a card with her lines written in large letters. That was why she had developed a certain restlessly searching gaze, which appeared very mysterious on-screen.

He knew Garbo having cast her before fame

 

As I say, this book is about a blind spot, that place where we question what the truth is, what happened, and what happens when a parental illness leaves Pabst at a turning point in his life.  The man who lived with Louise Brooks and didn’t want to be like Leni Riefenstahl seems like a puppet of the Nazi regime. Art in the time of war is always hard to make, and this shows one man’s struggle to do so. We see a director as almost an actor in his own film of his life.  Our perspective is seeing how he reacts to all that faces him and how that will affect him after the war. I wish I had a better awareness of his films. He was a name I didn’t know a lot about. But I hope to maybe watch a few of his films over time, just to fill in some of the gaps around the man.  How do you make films and not be seen as a nazis wehen making films for the Nazis must have been a hard task, but what else could he have done? That is the question: what would have happened had he said no? Have you read this or any of his books?

 

 

The Witch by Marie Ndiaye

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The Witch by Marie Ndiaye

French fiction

Original title – La Sorcière

Translator  – Jordan Stump

Source – Review copy

I was pleased to see Marie Ndiaye’s name on the longlist when it came out, as I have reviewed three of her other books over the years. She won the Prix Goncourt for her book Three Strong Women in 2009, but it was published 13 years earlier, in 1996.  I’m pleased to see her older books have been coming out. I have a few of hers to catch up on, but this is a book that shows how good a writer she was before the Goncourt win, a book about small-town life with a clever twist.  This is one of two books on the longlist with a witch theme.  This is set in a version of the near past where magic is still alive but hidden.

When we first came to this little city, two years before, I made the mistake of telling Isabelle about my powers, optimistically thinking I might try to initiate her, since after all nothing forbade passing the gift on to women who weren’t my daughters, and because Isabelle seemed a person of some importance who, I thought at the time, 1 wanted on my side. She reigned uncontested over our little sub-division, her authority not founded in any store of objective virtues, for Isabelle was neither pretty nor intelligent, nor hardworking nor thoughtful, nor even subtly and perversely magnetic, but rather (that authority imposed as a historical fact, duly imparted from neighbor to neighbor.

Isabelle and her husband were the first to build here; from that arrival on the still-virgin land at the gates of the city she’d drawn the need to serve in some sense as the memory of us all, we who were appearing from all over the region, and even the country. It was from Isabelle that we learned what had to be known of this or that neighbor’s ways to keep from upsetting the general entente of the neighbor-hood, and should anyone attempt to break off with Isabelle so she wouldn’t come barging in several afternoons a week she made it clear that she would turn the entire subdivision against them with her unscrupulous gift for gossip.

Her powers were small but she told the town gossip

This is a book about family secrets and small towns. It happens that the witch’s nature in the book adds a clever twist. It is about being a mother and a wife in a loveless marriage.  At the heart iof the story is the split between the parents, Lucie and Pierot.  He is very controlling of Lucie. They have twin daughters, Maud and Lise, who are just at the cusp of becoming Teens.  Their mother, Lucie, is from a line of witches, and at this age the girls must discover whether they possess the clairvoyant powers passed down through the family’s female line. Will they bleed tears of blood, a sign you have the power, and will they have it more than their mother, who can only see things in the present moment, not inj the future?  What happens when their powers initially seemed like their mothers’ but over time grow, and the tears come? What happens is a story about secrets, the family’s past, other family members, as their gifts grow over time , and a mother trying to keep it all together. As real life and the surreal world of magic blend into one.

My father opened his big arms wide, and Maud and Lise, delighted by this display, rushed gigglingly toward him. I was surprised to see the gray streaks I knew so well dyed a bluish black that contrasted with his brown hair.

And on top of that he was tanner, thinner, he now had a certain dandyish, youthful elegance, but when, with overplayed enthusiasm, he ordered Maud and Lise to gallop through the rooms—and they launched off with a sound of furious hoofbeatsI saw that he seemed worried and jittery. He grabbed me by the shoulder and, in the tone he probably used to talk business in his Rue de Rivoli of-fice, he beseeched me to return, as quickly as possible, the 120,000 francs hed recently given me on the occasion of his promotion. Then he dropped onto his new couch, red leather, sueded, and added, avoiding my eye:

They Lucie parents as they discover more about the girls powers

I love Ndiaye’s writing style. She has twisty sentences that draw you in as a reader. This is a tale that blends the everyday with the fantastic in a small-town setting. A mother who struggles when her daughters have more power than she does is both a common tale of mothers wanting daughters nearby and a story about daughters having the chance to go further than their mother has because of their powers. It sees what happens when the daughter’s eyes are opened to the full scale of the powers and how it can change their lives, and what about their selfish Father in all this?  I was pleased when this arrived it was the last book I needed when it arrived and the one I most want to read when the short list came out as I am a fan of Ndiaye this is a book from a writer growing not a polished as the other books I have read but they are twenty years older this was her early on in her writing career and great to see a book that mix the everyday and a pinch of magirc realism all that and a tale of a family at a crossroads due to the twins powers and what it means for their mothe Lucie and them themselves!

The Nights are Quiet In Tehran by Shida Bazyar

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The Nights are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar

German fiction

Original title – Nacht ist es leise in Tehran

Translator – Ruth Martin

Source – personal copy

It was odd that there were two novels connected to Iran on the Booker longlist, and all this before the recent war had started there.  Life is often stranger than fiction. And the two books have different takes on the country: one from the perspective of women living in Modern Iran, and the other about what happens when you leave after the 1979 revolution and your family grows up in Exile in Germany. How do your kids deal with returning to Tehran? This book is inspired by her parents’ life in Exile in a small German town. It tackles the parents’ life in Iran firstly, then the life in exile, the daughter returning to Iran years later, and then the son’s perspective on events in Germany in 2009, each event happening a decade apart

The Revolution is a month old, and Dayeh is making stuffed vine leaves. They’re all sitting on the floor, my mother, my sisters, my cousins, my aunts. The wives of my older brothers.

They have laid the sofrehs out on the living-room floor and are sitting around them with bowls full of rice and minced meat, herbs, lentils, and they are folding vine leaves, one after another, and laying them in a pot and talking and laughing and talking and laughing.

There were just as many women when we were little, though they were different women. Our dayeh would send my sisters and me outside; we weren’t supposed to hear the women’s conversation, to interrupt the neighbourhood gossip. You mustn’t bother people while they’re cooking, we were told, or the food will take longer to make, and we went outside, where we played marbles or pretended to shoot down the murderer of the great and oh-so-honourable Imam Hossein.

After the inital coup the world slowly changes post Shah

The book opens in the last days of the Shah’s regime with the hope from the younger people living there, like Behzad a young communist hopeful, as the Shah falls this is a new dawn for the country, but at the opening section moves on the dream he had of a new Iran starts to fade and the religous voice start to run the country.  They are left questioning whether they can stay or go into Exile. So we jump forward, and the next chapter is from the point of view of his lovely wife, Nahid, struggling to settle into life in Germany, trying to be themselves in a new country, and wondering if things will change in Iran. Nahid misses the ebb and flow of the poems, the songs, and the way of life she has left.  This is a tale of the first generation of exiles, those who have come but remain tied to the homeland.  Then, ten years later, the baton passed to the daughter, Laleh (or maybe Shida, really), who goes with her mother to return to a window of relative peace in Tehran.  They head back; the mother finds a place where the ghosts of her past and present don’t match; and the daughter finds it hard to be a German-Iranian in Iran.  Seeing family that stated there are two further chapters, but this is a family tale set over the last forty years of being neither Iranian nor German and growing up a child of exiles.

Sometimes I imagine 1 am Ulla or Walter, seeing this Behzad for the first time after years of being surrounded by no one but Ullas and Walters. I try to hear him with ears that are used to different television, different radio, used to Helmut Kohls and Helmut Schmidts, ears that understand Nazi speeches, understand Goethe. But I can’t do it. I look at Behzad, stare at him, hear him talking, and try to defamiliarise his words, his whole self. Then I can’t help thinking of him ten years younger — ten years younger, badly shaved and with huge sideburns, thick black hair, and a deep, loud voice.

But then you can be caught between being Iranian and being German

As I said, the two books are so different. This book is made up of the voice of one family over the space of forty years and how the initial dream of the Post Shah years fell apart, and the regime became what it became, and people like Bhzad and Nahid had the choice to stay and change or leave and this shows the story from the perspective of leaving, but when they return, the world they left has gone, and the world they lkeft has m oved on. This is a tale of never fully fitting in place when you become an exile, the limbo of that life, but the effect on the kids’ lives being German Iranians with parents from Iran in modern Germany. It is a family story where the secrets of the past and the decisions one makes come back years later, and where a dream of a new Iran never happens. I think both the books about Iran are very different books, but also deal with firstly the post-Shah years, the change in the country after this, but also the view from inside the country for the five women in the other books, to the women in this book living and growing up outside Iran in the West!  Have you read this book?

 

The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje

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The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje

Dutch Fiction

Original title – De herinnerde soldaat

Translator – David Mckay

Source – Personal Copy

I have long been a fan of Dutch literature; for a small country, it has a unique voice in much of its literature. Cees Nooteboom said this when I asked him about Dutch literature.

The Dutch are a rather special tribe, like the english, but smaller. On the other hand,Holland is not an island. It has taken the world a long time to recognize that there are some interesting writers out there, like Hermans, Mulisch, Claus, Mortier, van Dis, Grunberg, and many others. And of course it does not help that we know much more about English writers

This is a perfect example as it is a book that came out on a small regional publisher and had almost slipped under the radar until an NRC review and further coverage gave the book legs, so to speak, and it won a number of awards in Holland. Then also a number of prizes in the US, including the Republic of Consciousness Prize, which it won this week. Anjet had written a number of novels before this had such success, and her next book has already been lined up for Translation.

On the train he sits opposite her on the hard wooden bench, their knees not quite touching, and the locomotive labors noisily across the quiet green Flemish countryside with a din that drowns out anything they might say to each other and even his thoughts, and he looks outside, it’s a dizzyingly beautiful world, all those colors and spreading waves of grass and floating white cities of cloud, and if this was around him all that time, unfathom-able and infinitely vast, how is it possible there existed a life such as his, imprisoned within the asylum’s cramped walls, as if in one mighty sweep he’s been erased, that’s how he feels, and he tries not to think about it, he must not under any circumstances have another attack like the one on the platform, and he knows she is thinking about the same thing, because from time to time he catches her looking distrustfully in his direction.

that last line as they head home caught me !

The book is really a two-hander story.  It stars Asylum, as they have a man in 1922, a number of years after the war has ended, who still has no memory of who he is, and no one has come forward to claim him. So they put his picture in the newspaper, hoping to find his family.  There are a number of women who come and go who view Noon Merckem as the man, who is called after the time and place he was found. But no one claims him, then Juliennecomes and says he is her husband, Amand, a photographer with kids. She takes him home and this is where the story begins he is in a room in the studio sleeping as they get to know each pother but this room is used as the studio and has a war scene in the room so as he sleeps every night and relives the horror he has seen you do wonder why Julieene is letting this Amand has no memories of there life and as s=they try to connect you do wonder if he is Amand or what happened. He agrees to pose with widows as their lost loves as part of the photograph business ..As they grow close, is this the real Amand that Julienne is painting to him or a new version of the man? The two of them try to find Amand again and, over time, grow closer, but is it all it seems?

And he sits down and lights the gaslight, and the world leaps back into place, chillingly real, as if it had been lurking by the wayside, and his panic does not die down, he no longer dares to go back to sleep and lies waiting in silence until first light, in the distance he hears a train pass, another, another, and a faraway church bell strikes five, the first cart in the street, hooves on the paving blocks, and then more carts and footsteps and voices, and the half-light of early morning creeps comfortingly across the backyard and into the studio. And when the church bell strikes half past five he gets dressed, but the house is still deep in sleep, and six o’clock, and still no one is up, and at quarter past six the church bells ring in the distance for early Mass, a familiar sound, and she, the children, Felice, everyone sleeps on, not until seven does he hear the steps creak and a door open, and then the toilet flushing, and when he recognizes her voice and Rose’s he goes upstairs, and on the stairs he runs into Gus coming down with the coal scuttle, and Amand says good morning and offers to carry the coal for him, but Gus squeezes past without a word.

At home with the family amd the Studio

I was so pleased when this made the Booker longlist. It had been a personal Christmas gift I had brought with Money I was given at Christmas, and it was high on my list to get this year. It is a book a bout war, which I always enjoy. The aftermath of World War I has been covered by other writers like Pat Barker and Rebecca West, both of whom deal with the Trauma and mental aftermath of War. None deal directly with anaemia, though, and this was inspired in part by actual events.  There were people photographed in the papers and claimed by people, particularly the case of the Frenchman, Anthelme Mangin, who had two people fighting over him. This story inspired two novels. For me, the way the family was photographed was interesting as images can be altered and changed, and is this story a life being retouched or a life being altered? Is he Amand, is he the Amand he was, or the one his wife has invented? The book makes you wonder what is real, what is made up, and how far people will go.

What type are reader are we all ?

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I have been racing through the Booker International longlist this year. I think the fact I like most of the books on the list is that they are ones I would read at some point. I think we all, as readers, have this list of books. If I see if I find, if I have time, the last being the main problem, too many books, too little time. I think of the years I have never quite got what motivates my reading, but this year it has changed, and the change is coming because I have decided that one of the things I need to do this year is fill the gaps. I always read a number of Japanese books in January as there are events then.  We go to March, and it’s the Booker International longlist.  Then we have the bi-annual Year clubs Simon and Karen run, which are maybe my favourite online blog event all year.  Then there are things I have dived in an out of in recent year the EBRD prize which i think has a great selection of literature every year but it is so near the booker I end up burnt out on the prize list and then I have like the Wainwright prize for nature writing but maybe need to just focus on either the shortlist or the books that jump out on me. So the idea this year is to have more of these little projects, read a new book from a new country every month, is one such idea, and I have gone and brought a lot of books for that project for this year.  Then I had looked at Mookse doing the NYRB books and Muriel Spark, but I am not a joiner in person; I like to either have an idea for myself or a couple of people on board. So what other project has he up his sleeve? Well, I had thought of Spark and liked Beryl Bainbridge to read their books in order. But then I remember Kim doing a number of Iris Murdoch last year, and I had read The Sea, The Sea a long time ago, and her back catalogue is huge; she had multiple Booker nominations over the years.  include a win for The Sea, The Sea. So, as I always say, I fell under read. I know in a lot of ways I am not, but I feel I need to read a few more English writers, and this is the start. I will be reading all her novels in publication order, hopefully. This is the first of two writers I am thinking of; I’m thinking of flipping between them, but at the moment, I’m not quite decided who. I think C P Snow, maybe, or Anthony Powell; I have circled both their multiple-novel collections and have nearly all of them on TBR. But I haven’t yet decicded as I may pick an older writer say Dicken or Trollope or maybe some one else the idea is ovber time to cross of names so I read the complete ouvre of a female and male writer and this to be a constantly rolling idea with Murdoch having twenty plus novel that is a few years reading so the Male may have less books. I will let you know who I pick in a few weeks. Then in the summer, I will do my book-a-day idea with Novellas. I can’t do a month, but I will try for one month to read as many as I can, with my shifts being 12-hour days. I lose a few days each week to this, so I struggle to blog on those days. But I like the idea of summer days and short books outside in coffee shops, etc. I will be doing Hungarian lit month, and at some point Spanish and Portuguese lit month and of course some reading on the run up to the Nobel, with a lot of recent deaths of people that have been near the top of thebetting lists in recent years, there is maybe a name or two out there to come to the surface. I am trying to be a lot more proactive in my reading, so those periods of not having a little or large project are less, and thus, meaning I always have rabbit holes to find books, learn about the writers and countries, and what books are available and waiting to be read. I love my sail boat idea of reading but now I  am mor eof a cruise and trying to have a little newsletter of upcoming event like you do on a cruise ship (not that I have ever been on a cruise ) I love watch you tube videos of cruises and love the idea of a daily news letter I am so 20th century with my list of books piles of books and just liking the printed word. How do you plan your reading? Are you ad hoc, like plans, like ideas, book clubs, etc., or a solo traveller in the world of books?

We are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

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We are Geen and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

Argentinian fiction

Original title – Las niñas del naranjal

Translator – Robin Myers

Source – Personal copy

I have read the two other books to have come out in English from this writer, and I was.  A fan of Slum Virgins, which was her Debut book.  But this had been on my radar, not least because both the UK and US editions of the book have very eye-catching cover art, so I would have got to see that she is part of this wonderful crop of strong female voices from Latin America.  I often say that, over the 16-plus years I have been around the blogosphere, the nature of Latin American fiction has shifted from very Male-heavy to fairly even these days.  Gabriella is a creative writing teacher, so she will no doubt be setting forth the next generation of great Argentine writers for us all to read.  This book, like the other book, features a woman in a male world, this time living as a man in the New World.  Antonio is writing back to her home and the priory where her aunt, the Prioress of the Basque Priory, lives.

…that is a story I will tell you in time, dear aunt. Let me tell you now about the fragrances of the forest, which are strong as the spirits soldiers drink, as village rotgut, and about the other flowers, mammoth and fleshy and carnivorous, nearly beasts, for bere in the jungle the animals bloom and the plants bite, and I believe I have even seen them walking, I swear this to you, and leaping, for vines do leap; all things seethe bere, whereas the forest rustles, as well you know; I remember your attention to the presence of the fox, with its faint rustle of leaves in your forest, and to the bear, with its beavy rustle of trunks and branches; the forest rustles, but not the jungle, the jungle seethes, full of eyes; life surges inside it as lava surges in volcanoes, as if the lava were trees and birds and musbrooms and monkeys and coatis and coconuts and snakes and ferns and caimans and tigers and trumpet trees and fish and vipers and palms and rivers and fronds, and all other things within it were amalgams of these primary ones.

Writing to the Aunt about the world she is in the New World

The book is a mix of these letters home.  Narrative it tells the tale of Antonio in her adventures in the New World or Cayalina as she was known has seen it all the violence of the old world hanging death of native culture as the conquestordors move opn the the country as they are trying to conquer the New world and this is how He Antoino has ended up with a ragtag bunch around him two Two Gurani girls he saved from a life of slavery a couple of monkeys hand horse in this Jugle where the world becomes a mix of dreams and nightmares as she recounts the vents she had seen to get where she had been with her jounrey to the new world from singing on a ship to the various other jobs he had along the way ad s the book goes on the Jungle itself is almost a character as the bunch try to escape can the find a place this is a book that has a lot of layers for such a short book.

He hears the rattle. A snake. He’s lucky to have his sword within reach. A bit blunted but better than nothing. He stands, armed, and stamps the earth with his feet. He listens. Silence, save the growls of the dog slowly calming. The horses wander back. He wants to keep writing. He needs to leave the girls somewhere safe. The tree. He wraps them in his cape. Michi is so weak that he supports her head by pulling the cloth taut.

He puts the monkeys in, too, binding them to his back, and climbs. He lays them down in a nest-like gathering of boughs and ties the cape to the strongest branch. He sits with them.

An African once told him tales of enormous serpents. One had swallowed an elephant. It looked like a hat, said the man. His troops wouldn’t need an enormous one to devour them. Any old serpent could gobble the girls and the monkeys for breakfast.

In the jungle it is alive at times

I think this is a book that maybe could have done with being a little longer.  There are a lot of ideas, the church, religion, the new world, woman in a man’s world, so many, it is like it has been stuffed into a box and is fit to burst.  I feel that maybe means the book suffers at times; it is a great book.  I still like SLum virgin best of her books, but that may just be me being a reader who finds books set near my own time much easier to connect with.  The main character is based on a real figure from the time, a woman who lived as a man in the New World.  I kept going back to the Filmsof Werner Herzog set in the New World and imagining if Klaus Kinski’s character Aguiree had been had been a trans character in the Jungle, it would be like this book a man tinged by the violence of the world they are in another film that cmae to mind around the two girls was Apocalypto the shere violence that is seen at times.  I believe the writer herself has highlighted Studio Ghibli as an influence on her writing.  I just felt it would have been a better five-hundred-page book than the 200 it is, and I rarely think that it is a book jam-packed with ideas and history, and a character at the heart of the book that should have been better known as a trailblazer for their time.  Have you read this or any of her other books ?