The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico Garcia Lorca Ascends to Hell - Carlos Rojas (translated by Edith Grossman)

The faithless wife

So I took her to the river
believing she was a maiden,
but she already had a husband.
It was on St. James night
and almost as if I was obliged to.
The lanterns went out
and the crickets lighted up.
In the farthest street corners
I touched her sleeping breasts
and they opened to me suddenly
like spikes of hyacinth.
The starch of her petticoat
sounded in my ears
like a piece of silk
rent by ten knives.
Without silver light on their foliage
the trees had grown larger
and a horizon of dogs
barked very far from the river.

Past the blackberries,
the reeds and the hawthorne
underneath her cluster of hair
I made a hollow in the earth
I took off my tie,
she too off her dress.
I, my belt with the revolver,
She, her four bodices.
Nor nard nor mother-o’-pearl
have skin so fine,
nor does glass with silver
shine with such brilliance.
Her thighs slipped away from me
like startled fish,
half full of fire,
half full of cold.
That night I ran
on the best of roads
mounted on a nacre mare
without bridle stirrups.

As a man, I won’t repeat
the things she said to me.
The light of understanding
has made me more discreet.
Smeared with sand and kisses
I took her away from the river.
The swords of the lilies
battled with the air.

I behaved like what I am,
like a proper gypsy.
I gave her a large sewing basket,
of straw-colored satin,
but I did not fall in love
for although she had a husband
she told me she was a maiden
when I took her to the river. 

Poets.org tells us that Federico Garcia Lorca is one of the most important Spanish poets and dramatists of the twentieth century. Born in 1898 a few miles from Granada he travelled to Madrid in 1919 where he remained for the next fifteen years, writing the scandalous play “El Maleficio de la mariposa” and the collection of poems “libro de poemas” in 1921 based on Spanish folklore, infused with popular themes such as Flamenco and Gypsy culture. Joining the group of artists known as “Generacion del 27” along with Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, he was of course exposed to surrealism. He moved to New York City in 1929 but returned to Spain after the proclamation of the Spanish Republic. Returning to his country home in 1936 at the outbreak of civil war he was arrested by Franquist soldiers and after a few days in jail he was taken to “visit” his brother-in-law, whom the soldiers had murdered, at the cemetery he was executed.

Carlos Rojas’ novel “The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico Garcia Lorca Ascends to Hell” starts with “the Spiral” where we join the poet in hell. He is in a theatre where all his living memories are played out, but he cannot sleep, nor can he participate:

The magic of free will in hell incarnates those memories on stage. Still, the flashes from the past are always painted, not live. If I go up on the boards, so often confused by their apparent veracity, they vanish immediately at my approach. As a fata morgana flees before you tread on it, or vampires turn to ash at dawn. The proscenium and set are empty beneath the arch and raised curtains. The light from the transoms, which recalls amber or alabaster, illuminates only my shadow on stage. The useless shadow of a dead man, alone in eternity with the mirage of his memories.

Each theatre represents a dead person reliving their living past, Lorca can move between theatres in the eternal spiral, some show events to him, others are simply empty. Hell is within us, our own memories. The eternal existentialist angst, the struggle to make sense where there is none:

PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.

I don’t know whether I’m accused of having been born or having been murdered. I sense only that, whoever my judges may be, if I’m acquitted I’ll sleep in forgetfulness and be free of my memories.

PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.

As soon as they appeared, those words on the window faded. They might have been fleeting, but I had no doubt I had seen them. How I would prepare for a trial, alone and not knowing the charges, struck me as grotesque and senseless. The absurdity of the situation filled me with an unexpected hilarity no less irrational than this supposed trial of mine. Twisted over an arm in my orchestra seat, I laughed wildly, like a madman, a mad dead man, my palms at my temples. I stopped laughing when I realized that if life and reason were expectations lost in the firmament, this other universe too, the one of our spiral, could be just as pointless, just as alien to human consciousness. Therefore, once everything had been taken into account, I was still under the same constraints. I was being exhorted to prepare for a trial but not being told what crimes I was charges with. At the same time, by means of a design as obvious as it was inexplicable, I was infused with the certainty that acquittal would represent eternal forgetfulness, the limitless freedom of sleeping with no dreams and no memories.

Characters from the surrealist age come and go at will, we have a character (Rojas himself?) who interviews Lorca’s arrester, there he reveals his dream of Lorca in hell in a spiral of theatres, reliving his life, and the paradox is Lorca is watching this discussion!!! We have a section where a mysterious aged man appears in Lorca’s hell and explains that it can’t be hell as that is on earth. He goes on to divulge that Lorca is only part of his dream, he is Lorca in old age dreaming of the Lorca who caught a train to Granada, being arrested and executed, but of course this is solitude in hell:

The old man was becoming blurred, as if someone were erasing him with a fingertip, taking away volume, outlines, and profile. Eventually he disappeared without leaving a trace or vestige in the theatre or his seat. Alone again, he looked around him. The stage became a dark emptiness, the proscenium open to infinity, like the mouth of a tunnel excavated in the middle of the firmament. He heard or thought he had imagined the sound of footsteps in the vicinity of the corridor and the alabaster lights. Immediately he became aware that he was isolated and abandoned or abandoned and isolated on that spiral, where the dead were blind or invisible to one another. His doubles, the phantoms, having disappeared, the notion of his insignificance oppressed him. Eternity was the greatest of sarcasms, an illogicality more absurd than perishable life. In this untransferable theatre before his trial, he was nothing but a spectator of his past in an endless succession of shades condemned to the same wakefulness. Perhaps the first of them, his most distant ancestor, saw on the stage memories of a recent time he had experienced when still a gorilla or an amphibious fish, with the eyes of a man, in the dark jungles of the beginning of the world.

Our novel itself becomes part of Lorca’s story, four chapters:

He would also have to write down the action and divide it into another four acts whose names were revealed to him, as obvious as his life or his death: THE SPIRAL, THE ARREST, DESTINY, and THE TRIAL.

These are the four chapters of our book, later they become a musical piece (a sonata?) in four movements.

As Lorca is being taken to his execution the construction of the novel changes, there are no sentences, no paragraphs, no punctuation. The style becomes a rush, a blur as he heads to finality. We also learn of the dedication in the front of the novel “For Marina and Sandro Vasari, with gratitude of C.R.” the novel becomes a novel of itself. Yes it is all so surreal…

“my novel, we’ll call it that in order to call it something, represents absolutely nothing.”

Dear Reader - Paul Fournel (translated by David Bellos)

In recent times I’ve reviewed a few books which lament the loss of the written word, writers being forced to modernise or books about writing (Eric Chevillard’s “The Author and Me) but nothing can hold a candle to “Dear Reader” by Paul Fournel.

As our “Afterword” points out, this is a novel which cannot be changed in any way, the editor can’t change sections, not even the punctuation, the reader can’t reinvent the work with different character names on their new gizmo eReader, the translator? Well they are well and truly stuck, it is impossible to recreate this work in another language (and note I’ve read the translated version)!! Why? Because it has been created to remain exactly as it was written. It contains 36 chapters, the first six all containing exactly 7,500 characters, including spaces, and each ending with the words, read, cream, publisher, mistake, self and evening. The next six chapters contain 6,500 characters (including spaces) ending with the same words, and so on down to the sixth set which consists of 2,500 characters (including spaces). Making the entire composition a “poem of 180,000 signs (including spaces)”. They “serve to narrate the fate of mortal man, they undergo attrition (melting snowball).” As Paul Fournel points out “anyone entering it to change a single letter will destroy the whole project.”

And the tale itself is the destruction of the book as we know it. Our first person narrator, Robert Dubois, is a publisher, who has sold his company to the highest bidder but still works in Dubois Publishing, reading books for a living:

The one under my cheek has a love theme: it’s about a guy who meets a girl but he’s got a wife and she’s got a boyfriend…I’ve read seven pages and I know the rest already. Nothing’s going to give me a surprise any more. For years I’ve not really read anything, because all I do is reread. I spend my time rereading the same brew that gets served up as literary sensations, lead titles, seasonal launches, runaway successes, flops and more flops. Paper for pulping, in trucks that set off at dawn and return at dusk full to the gunwales of obsolete new books.

This is a modern fable, a lamentation on the decline of books and the rise of the eReader (as the publishing house is modernising our narrator gets given one and calls it his “dear reader”), the death of publishing as we know it:

I’ve decided to take my dear reader out for a walk. I want it to see the world.

First comes the pocket test, which it fails miserably. It’s too big for the side pocket of my jacket, it’s too rigid to be stuffed into the slant pocket of my raincoat, and it would be simply futile to try and slide it into the inside pocket of my jacket. Even if it were small enough for that location, it would make me look as if I had Weismuller’s pecs, and its blunt edges would inevitably shred the lining in no time. You can forget about trouser pockets: given the weight of the thing, you’d soon find yourself on the street in flower-patterned underpants with your trousers around your ankles. Unless you also wore broad and sturdy braces…And when you think “braces”, you think “holster”. Might an adapted police model fit the bill? On the other hand, you can’t deny that a reader is somewhat more rectangular in shape than a Colt 45. I shall have to submit this sartorial problem to my tailor, Mr Hollington, who specializes in clothing the edito-architecural clan by providing its members with pipe-pockets, phone-pockets and cigarette-pockets, alongside special places for fold-out rulers, all kinds of pencils and pens, not to mention hip-flasks. For the time being, however, let us concede that the reader is an awkward customer, and that we shall need to raise from his grave some publishing genius who can reinvent the paperback version as well as the wheel.

This book is a hilarious romp through the world of publishing, editing, book fairs, signings and long boozy lunches. We have a writer who produces 20% of the publishing houses’ income, our narrator’s assistant, the new boss (sent in from the takeover parent company) who is hell bent on figures (it’s simple just don’t publish books that will sell less than 15,000 copies), unpaid foppish interns and a local restaurateur who has sold out to the Japanese and sushi.

This is not merely a tale of the decline of paper books, it is also a tale of the decline of a whole age, convenient food, efficient work practices, humanity and culture all sold for the mighty dollar.

Throughout we have smart observations on the everyday mundane:

It’s hard to believe the London Underground isn’t suffering from depression, because it plunges deep into the city’s dark belly and scurries along narrow tubes scarcely big enough for trains to get into. You dip your head instinctively so as not to bump the ceiling. It’s full of mini-skirted girls in high heels and beehive hairdos yapping away under the indifferent eyes of hatted Englishmen and turbaned Sikhs. I’m scanning the Guardian on my tablet and the girl sitting next to me reads along with me, with such a casual air of innocence that it makes me smile. I ask her if she’s finished the page so I can scroll down. She’s offended.

We also have the interns joining forces with the ageing Dubois to create a new internet generation start up to celebrate the written word, a place where instant gratification is the key, short sharp responses delivered to your iPhone, on-line books where you can change the character’s defining qualities, the future of publishing, it will make them rich!

It’s a paradox that I’m reading the translated version of this work, which the author demands that not a single character is altered, so therefore I’ve succumbed to the very decline that our author is lamenting. This is a laugh out loud book for lovers of writing and books made from paper, my edition being from the wonderful Pushkin Press “Collections” editions which are “designed to be as satisfying as possible to hold and enjoy”.

Do me a favour, don’t buy this for your eReader.

Spring Tides - Jacques Poulin - (translated by Sheila Fischman)

Earlier this month I celebrated my birthday and my family knowing me quite well (you’d hope they would!!) delivered a number of gifts that were all neatly wrapped and rectangular in shape. They’d been online shopping choosing a raft of Archipelago Books that weren’t already on my shelf. Jacques Poulin featured with three gifts so straight into his work I delved. No logic with the one I chose first, just the one that happened to be closest to my hand when selecting.

Our protagonist is Teddy, he lives on a deserted island, alone with his work as a translator of comic strips, his only company a battle scarred alley cat called Matousalem.  Once a week his “boss” from the newspaper arrives via helicopter with supplies, more comic strips to translate and then departs with that week’s work. But one week the boss drops off a surprise, a barefoot girl Marie, “from the back she looked like a boy, because her shoulders were a little too broad” as well as her cat Moustache.

Teddy divided his time among translation, keeping an eye on the island and such occupations as building maintenance and repainting the tennis court. He gave priority, obviously, to his main job, and he worked to a very precise schedule.

Now, on some days the words simply didn’t come….He would give up waiting for them; then as he was getting ready for bed, they would appear, like guests who have forgotten the time. They kept him awake a good part of the night.

The words whirled around in his head.

There was a full moon.

This is a novel of simple language and style, reminiscent in a way of Rodrigo Rey Rosa, where more is said with less.

Ever since the girl had been there, the island had seemed smaller. You’re more sensitive to the presence of other people on an island, he mused. Or perhaps other people’s Presence is more intrusive.

The loneliness and the time spent on Teddy musing about his simple existence is wonderfully portrayed through the simple style and to the point prose. We have a detailed chapter of Teddy cooking a pie, it includes the recipe. A stark reminder that the everyday mundane can actually be a celebration of existence if you only take the time to think about it.

Another “character” is The Prince, Teddy’s tennis ball machine, which is put to use to relieve Teddy’s stress and keep his body sharp. He has “conversations” with his brother (who isn’t there), the memorising word-for-word large passages of short stories about isolation, a visit at low tide on foot to another island, where they are met by a silent man with a shotgun. But the tranquil idyllic scene is broken when one week the boss leaves his wife “Featherhead” and her Chihuahua, Candy, behind. Given our protagonist is a translator we have definitions of words throughout (for example “happy”), reading the clinical explanation denigrating the true meaning:

She started putting the dictionaries away while he got undressed. As she was closing the big Harrap’s her attention was drawn to the word “ethereal” at the very bottom of the right-hand page: she couldn’t resist looking to see how the word was translated; then she turned the page and read in a low voice: “Au-dessus des choses de ce monde.” Not of this world.

This simple fable muses on what it is to be a French Canadian, not French, not American. As time becomes more blurred we find that during each spring tide, when the moon is full, there is all sorts of rubbish and debris washed onto the shore. During the spring tides is when a whole lot of other characters begin to appear; an author who wants the solitude to write “The Author”, a French professor who is an expert in the history of comic strips “Professor Moccasin”, and later “The Ordinary Man” who is brought in to restore order to a populated island. The list continues but to reveal such would mean a spoiler alert, so you’ll just have to read the book to see how society develops.

As we delve deeper and deeper in what it means to be part of society our fable begins to blur too, the paths on the island are mapped, representing the sinuous flow of life in our veins, one character is reduced to speaking in monkey language from the comic strip Tarzan, time becomes blurred, it is no longer a reality, merely a concept. And of course, having a writer and a translator on the island we have musings on writing as art:

“There’s a man walking on the beach,” she began. “His mind is blank and he has no idea where he’s going. He’s all alone. Suddenly his foot catches against something. He continues on his way, then he feels an urge to go back and see what it was. He retraces his steps. He kicks at the thing, which is almost completely buried in the sand, and it doesn’t move. It doesn’t seem to be a rock or a piece of wood. He gets down on his knees and tries to lift it, but he can’t get a grip on it. SO he puts his nose up to it: it smells strange, an animal smell, it smells of leather….Intrigued now, he sweeps away the sand and stones with his hands and discovers that the object resembles a suitcase laid down flat, with one corner sticking up in the air. He removes some more sand. He uncovers a handle, hinges, straps, another handle, and now he’s getting excited because it’s not a suitcase after all, it’s a real chest, lying on its side, a leather chest with a domed lid and it seems very old because it’s half-rotted by the water. He picks up a pointed rock so he can dig faster. He’s hurrying because the tide is rising, he’s working nervously now and images are starting to glow in his mind: gold coins, diamond rings, old dirks and daggers, diadems, necklaces set with precious stones, old pirate maps, the images are all jumbled up together and he digs more and more feverishly, sometimes with the pointed rock, sometimes with his hands. At last the treasure chest is freed. He grasps one handle and, pulling with all his might, he manages to move it, then to pull it out of the hole; he sets it upright on the beach and drags it over to the trees so it will be safe from the tide. It’s a very old chest: the leather has been eaten away by the water, all the hinges are covered with rust; there’s no padlock, just an old lock that’s all rusty too. So then he starts to look for something to help him force the lock. He looks for an iron rod or a boat nail, anything, perhaps a nail like the ones they use for fastening down railway ties, but all he can find is a fence picket with a piece of wire attached to it. He slips the wire under the clasp and, using the picket as a lever, he taps it. The lock gives way. Kneeling on the ground, he anxiously raises the lid; heart pounding, he looks inside: all he can see at the bottom of the chest is some mildewed cloth, old women’s clothes. Nothing else. And that’s the story about writing.”

Poulin’s world is one I enjoyed very much, a simple place, with simple language but so many hidden meanings, a meandering journey through existence, the meaning and joy of solitude, the insanity of society and the joy of writing. More works by Poulin will be reviewed over the coming weeks.

Twelve Days of Translated Fiction - The Winner - My best read for 2014

When I sat down to compile my list of my favourite translated reads for 2014 I started off by compiling a list of all the books I read and whilst doing so a number jumped out at me that just had to be included on the list. A few I needed to revisit my reviews to remind myself of the merits of certain works and of course there were a few that I just knew were never going to be up there – as an example as a participant in the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Shadow Jury I had already listed my favourites from that list of thirteen longlisted works therefore once I decided “The Mussel Feast”, “The Sorrow of Angels” and “My Struggle Book Two” were on my top twelve reads of the year I knew there were ten others that just didn’t make the cut.

Some books I tossed around for quite some time, whether to include them at the expense of another. Eduoard Levy’s “Suicide” moved me quite dramatically, however I decided that the influence of Levy’s own suicide shortly after delivering this work to the publisher influences the way you read this work and decided that it was just short of my favourites. “The African Shore” by Rodrigo Rey Rosa says so much without saying a lot at all, as the judges of the Best Translated Book Award said “a small, perfectly cut jewel that we can stare into endlessly” but even it didn’t make my shortlist!!! Hrabal’s “Harlequin’s Millions” a visit to his hometown a place where time stood still, Marcelle Sauvageot’s “Commentary” a wonderful example of feminist writing from last century and of course “Don Quixote” (Edith Grossman’s translation) how could I leave out a classic that is recognised as “the greatest monument of literature in Spanish but a pillar of the entire Western literary tradition” (Edith Grossman)? What about Scholastique Mukasonga’s “Our Lady of The Nile” an important and lyrical work about the Tutsi from Rwanda?

Once I had my final twelve there was also a dilemma in ranking them in order, I must admit I stewed for a while over “Ready to Burst” or “Blinding” as two and three, do I put “Satantango” above or below Karl Ove Knausgaard? Why did I prefer “The Mussel Feast to “The Sorrow of Angels”? Which of Yasushi Inoue’s works did I like best? Usual issues when compiling a list I suppose.

However I had no issues whatsoever in choosing my favourite work for the year. It was quite simple, of the seventy books I’ve reviewed this year it was quite simply a standout. It is a work that would make my top books of all time so how could it not be the standout of the year?

The Best Translated Book Award judges were also moved announcing the work as the winner and making Laszlo Krasznahorkai the first back-to-back winner in the history of the award (he won it in 2013 for my fifth favourite read of the year “Satantango”).

As NPR Books says:

“Seiobo There Below places upon us readers the same demands of all great art, and allows us to grasp a vision of painstaking beauty if we can slow ourselves down to savor it.”

A work of art that muses on the beauty of existence, the essence of non-existence and the importance of the present moment. An amazing landscape of humanity attempting to define beauty, our eternal search for ultimate bliss, each and every chapter is a further exploration of the nature of perfection, whether through architecture, painting, music, sculpture or an amazing written contribution to perfection? 

Quite simply “Seiobo There Below” is one of the most rewarding and enlightening books I have ever read.

Here is a copy of my review from early June:

I have to start this review by stating that this was probably the most difficult novel I have ever read. When you are not a genius, how do you review something composed by a genius? Your insignificant thoughts are mere ramblings compared to the broad sweeping vista of Krasznahorkai’s mind.

Let’s start off by explaining that the chapters are numbered in the Fibonacci sequence (missing 0 and 1) – if you don’t know what the Fibonacci sequence is I suggest you google it and then become even more confused. You’ll find heaps of references to nature, art, Elloitt waves, golden means, you get me? Let’s simply say the chapters are 1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89,144,233,377,610,987,1597 and 2854

These seventeen sections could be easily read as seventeen short stories, as we do not have a common narrator, or character and the sections cover just about the breadth of human existence. The inner sleeve tells me “Seiobo – a Japanese goddess – has a peach tree in her garden that blossoms once every three thousand years; its fruit brings immortality. In “Seiobo There Below”, we see her returning to mortal realms, searching for a glimpse of perfection.“ Now I must have been asleep when I read that section, as my only recollection of Seiobo’s involvement was through a Noh dancer performing as her.

As we know Krasznahorkai creates long winding passages of text, and this work is no different, with single sentences taking up whole chapters and running for thirty–forty pages. Therefore I may well have missed the fact that Seiobo returned to mortal realms, it could well have been squeezed in the middle of a forty page sentence, wall to wall text, no breathing between ramblings, no breaks for the astute reader, just text, text, text and more of the same text, passages that return to their origins and then split off again, for further ramblings.... get what I mean?

What I’m telling you may well lead you away from this amazing work, yes it is difficult, but it is also probably one of the most rewarding and enlightening books I have ever read. An amazing landscape of humanity attempting to define beauty, our eternal search for ultimate bliss, each and every chapter is a further exploration of the nature of perfection, whether through architecture, painting, music, sculpture or an amazing written contribution to perfection? Our welcome is not that open though...

It would be better for you to turn around and go into the thick grasses, there where one of those strange grassy islets in the riverbed will completely cover you, it would be better if you do this for once and for all, because if you come back tomorrow, or after tomorrow, there will be no one at all to understand, no one to look, not even a single one among all your natural enemies that will be able to see who you really are; it would be better for you to go away this very evening when twilight begins to fall, it would be better for you to retreat with the others, if night begins to descend, and you should not come back if tomorrow, or after tomorrow, dawn breaks, because for you it will be much better for there to be no tomorrow and no day after tomorrow; so hide away in the grass, sink down, fall onto your side, let your eyes slowly close, and die, for there is no point in the sublimity that you bear, die at midnight in the grass, sink down and fall, and let it be like that – breathe your last.

Here is a quick summation of the blend which makes up “Seiobo There Below”. We have a heron in a Japanese river who remains perfectly still, an Italian bible crossword telling us that if we solve 54 across we’ll reach a decisive conclusion (“Queen Vashti has done wrong, not only against all the nobles and the peoples of all the provinces of King Xerxes” Esther 1:16), we have references to an Australian skin care website (which if you investigate actually takes you to Arabic articles on liposuction), we have a Persian Queen, Filippo Lippi-Firenze from 1470 an apprentice to Botticelli, Queen Vashti then appears on a wedding chest painted by Lippi (or was it Botticelli).

We have the restoration of a Buddha statue from 1367, recognised for its immortal “one single gaze”, we have a painting of the dead Christ being restored, Christ appears to be wanting to open his eyes. We have a Hungarian tourist visiting the Acropolis totally unprepared, another tourist in Venice who returns to visit a painting of Dead Christ, then an artist who creates “shiro-hannya”, the demon-head mask created for a Japanese Noh play. Flick over to a destitute Romanian who has been tricked into travelling to Spain for work and he stumbles across a mystical gallery where “these angels were real”.

Seiobo is introduced as part of Inoue Kazuyuki’s section, a celebrated Noh dancer who has found the meaning of life:

And he understood everything, and since then he has known that there is no tomorrow; I never think about that – he lowers his voice even more, and with every word that he utters he smiles, as is his custom, then his face closes up again – never, he says, because I only think about today, for me there is no tomorrow, for me there is no future, because every day is the last day, and every day is full and complete, and I could die on any given day, I am ready for it, and then the whole thing will come to an end, and by this he means that – he looks up at a guest sitting across from him on the other side of the room – that one whole will come to an end, and in the distance another shall begin, I am waiting for death, he says with an unvarying smile, I am waiting he says, and death is always close to me, and I shall lose nothing if I die, because for me only the present means everything, this day, this hour, this moment - this moment in which I am dying.

Our novel then moves to Pietro di Vannucci (Il Perugino) and his apprentices, we learn of his struggle to paint anymore. We have the Alhambra in Spain, our journey explains that we don’t know its real name, who built it, when it was built, its main function, but we do know its beauty. Another chapter and another artist who creates sculptures out of earth, by digging in hidden places away from prying eyes. Our protagonist then becomes the guard of the Venus de Milo, there was the Venus de Milo and beyond that there was nothing else at all.

We then have a lecturer giving his thoughts on the analysis of music’s essence, it shatters people’s hearts – this lecture is to a handful of elderly people, given by an ageing architect who has never had a building constructed. Then we have landscape artist Oswald Kienzl standing in line to buy a train ticket, frustrated at the lack of pace in the queue as he recalls his mourning. Back to Japan and a Shinto tree sacrifice ceremony that takes place every twenty years as part the rebuilding of the Ise Shrine, we’re here for edition seventy-one, this section highlighting the clash of European and Japanese cultures.

Onto Se’ami who has been exiled to the island of Sadogashima, he is creating a mask, o-beshimi rain-making mask for use in bagaku. Then we hear of tomb desecrations (known as “excavations”) of the earth below the Shang dynasty in 1600-1100BC.

What a deep exploration of humanity, covering thousands upon thousands of years of human history, the art and the beauty, ceremonies and beliefs contained in each era. As we know these characters are all real and as I read through each section I was enticed to research these characters further, view the artworks on line, understand the struggles through further reading. This is a huge puzzle of a novel, seeking the ultimate answers:

he looks at me, moved, he looks at my dance, but he sees me as well, as I relate to him with earthly movements that there is a Heaven, that high above the clouds there is a Light that then scatters into a thousand colors, that there is, if he casts his gaze up high and becomes deeply immersed in his soul, a boundless space in which there is nothing, but nothing at all, not even a tiny little movement like this one here, which now must slowly come to an end:

All of the puzzles are intertwined, the immortal beauty of Vashti is aligned with the immortal gaze of Buddha, which replicates a crucified Christ wanting to open his eyes......

a dark obscurity lay in these eyes, and it seemed unbearable that this dark obscurity was emanating such an endless sadness, and not the sadness of one who suffers but of one who has suffered – but not even that; he got up, and then he leaned back in the chair; it is not a question here of suffering but only of sorrow, a sorrow impossible to grasp in its entirety, and entirely incomprehensible to him, an immeasurable sorrow, he looked into Christ’s eyes and he saw nothing else there, just this pure sorrow, as if it were a sorrow without cause, he froze at the thought of it, SORROW, JUST LIKE THAT, FOR EVERYTHING, for creation, for existence, for beings, for time, for suffering and for passion, for birth and destruction

I could write endless passages here about the meaning of existence and how Krasznahorkai has moved beyond the simple apocalyptic message and into the world of beauty, the essence of non-existence and the importance of the present moment. An amazing work, which requires savouring, a slow read, allow yourself to be immersed in the world of nothing:

the earth with the water, the water with the sky, and into the earth and the water and the sky, into this indescribable Cosmos is woven our fragile existence as well, but merely for just one moment that cannot be traced, then, already, it is no more, it disappears for all eternity, irrevocably...nothing else remains, only and exclusively the landscape;

Twelve Days of Translated Fiction - Day Two - My best reads for 2014

Today my second favourite work of 2014 – surely one that will make the 2015 Best Translated Book Award longlist and one that I believe should be in hot contention for the award (having said that there’s possibly 100 odd works in contention that I haven’t even come across!!!)

In wanting so desperately to speak, I’ve become no more than a screaming mouth. I no longer worry about what I write. I simply write. Because I must. Because I’m suffocating. I write anything. Any way. People can call it what they want: novel, essay, poem, autobiography, testimony, narrative, memory exercise, or nothing at all. I don’t even know, myself. Yet what I write feels perfectly familiar to me. No one can say much more than what he has lived.

And what an amazing “novel, essay, poem, autobiography, testimony, narrative, memory exercise, or nothing at all” this is. I recently saw a comment on Goodreads (I know why on earth was I there?) where it is listed as “Ripe to Burst” and there was a comment about “the consistency” the switch between first person, third person and experience not attached to a character and this was in a four star review!!! A work that is simply written, a world you need to experience to believe, the beauty of pushing the written word boundaries and drawing your reader into an out of control spiral. Haiti under Francios Duvalier (“Papa Doc”). A work where the lines are blurred, where narrative structure we are used to is not the norm, where page upon page is used to describe the weather, where words are investigated in various contexts to increase their impact, and of course where character development is foggy and uncertainty is always to the fore.

Yes this is a novel which switches between the first person and the third person, where sections are written in italics, where different fonts are used to explain various situations and even different shades of ink for dramatic effect.

And of course this is all set in Haiti during troubled times.

Lazy philosophers! Rid yourselves of the bacilli of pure intellect. Explain to me how it is that people all over the world go thirsty. That malnourished peasants feed themselves rock porridge. That children die from fever. That my friend is gone, lost in the American army’s invasion of Vietnam. Explain to me that woman who left and never came back. The Third World bullied, ridiculed, despised. The threat of Imperial Powers. The blindness of people who don’t know how to decipher the graffiti of time’s passing. The illiterate pride of dictators who stomp on the dreams of their people. The shuddering of death. The tremors of life. The sadness of some. The joy of others. The enigma of love. My beating heart. Explain all that to me. I’ll always have the patience to listen and hear – as long as, at the end of it all, there is action.

According to the publishers, Archipelago Books, Franketienne is considered by many to be the father of Haitian letters. He is a prolific poet, novelist, visual artist, playwright, and musician (the cover artwork is one of his works). He has devoted much of his life to fighting political oppression and, in 2009, was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2010, the French Government named him a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. “I am not afraid of chaos,” Franketienne explains, “because chaos is the womb of light and life”.

Our novel follows Raynard who is seeking a better life away from Port-Au-Prince and manages to find a placement on a ship to another island. Of course he is caught and extradited back to Haiti, and whilst on the boat returning “home” a number of other refuges throw themselves overboard to be eaten by the sharks, a more palatable idea than back to Haiti. We also follow Paulin who is writing a Spiralist novel, struggling with words and most definitely a title for his master work.

The novel is a vision of life. And as far as I know, life isn’t a segment. It isn’t a vector. Nor is it a simple curve. It’s a spiral in motion. It opens and closes in irregular helices. It becomes a question of surprising at the right moment a few rings of the spiral. So I’m constructing my novel in a spiral, with diverse situations traversed by the problematic of the human, and held in awkward positions. And the elastic turns of the spiral, embracing beings and things in its elliptical and circular fragments, defining the movements of life. This is what I’m using the neologism Spiralism to describe.

We have Raynard explaining his switch from religion to science based evidence of existence, after he was hit in the eye by a wayward stone. At eight years of age whilst at a funeral he understands his grandmother’s pain as he’s the “only one in the family to keep an inheritance of torments and worries buried deep inside”. Yes a child already with torments and worries buried deep inside.

We have Paulin pitching an income producing scheme to Reynard, to scratch and pick pistachios and sell them to a rich industrialist American for use in soap and oil, an allegory for the might of the USA in Haiti a “mountainous island with its marrow sucked dry by foreign lions.

We also have a theatrical piece where a conversation between Death and a Dying Man takes place:

Death: What have you done with your life, from your birth to this day…pitiful mortal?

Dying Man: I’ve been looking for myself.

I’ve been describing this work in a linear narrative format, which of course doesn’t sit well with the format of the work. This is an amazing revelation, a deep and meaningful read, lyrical, possessed, frightening, honest, shocking and gripping. A celebration of the written word, even a celebration of single words, yes experimental in form but enlightening in structure and style. Although there are sections which describe the imminent death of the novel, it is works like this which make it a joy to discover new translated fiction. One of my favourites of the year (but not quite THE favourite), and I will be hunting down more works by not only Franketienne but also the other Haitian Spiralists. 

Twelve Days of Translated Fiction - Day Three - My best reads for 2014

Yes I’m leaning towards the “language as an art form” for my top reads of 2014. I could have done a listing of the “most readable books” or even the ones I didn’t like (I may still do that before the year is out), but I’ve gone with the books that were the most memorable for me, the ones which challenged my thinking, the ones that still haunt me, the ones where I occasionally bring them up in random conversations, the ones that touched me.

Cartarescu’s “Blinding” did most of those things, but I can tell you one striking thing it did, it gave me a serious appreciation for butterflies.

“Blinding (The Left Wing)” is the first part of a Cartarescu triptych (let’s call it that and not a trilogy as it forms part of a greater picture, the left wing being his mother, the body himself and the right wing his father from what I understand) and this triptych is a massive, intricate butterfly. The references to butterflies are too frequent to mention them all, from the birthmark on Maria’s (his mother’s) hip, an ivory engraved ring made from a mammoth’s tusk, a monstrous frozen butterfly under the surface of the Danube (which is consumed and the wings used for clothing), butterflies that attach themselves to Russian soldiers in a mausoleum and then lay an egg in his brain or even one that mates with a stranded elevator operator after the building is bombed. The metamorphosis is a constant thread along with triangles (structurally, physically, spiritually) and the colour yellow.

To say this is a complex work is an understatement, delving into a tortured mind would always be so, are we talking dreams here, or the everyday machinations of our narrator’s mind?

I felt in my sleep how, in this geyser of light, my own cranium became transparent, how the wrinkled hemispheres of my brain, wrapped in their skin, looked like the meat of walnuts yet unformed. The neurons under the pia mater, like spores bedded under asphalt, swelled here and there, growing hundreds of church spires under the sky of my skull, each one with a bell tolling for a funeral, until the pearly skin broke in hundreds of places and the neuron bells opened like wonders, like sea urchins on the peduncles, rocking and undulating in the solar wind of my Tataie’s halo. I then descended into a delirious Scythia.

How to describe this work? There are chilling stories of people who lose thier shadows,  eight pages of the divine simply exploring the magic of how we can move a single finger and heavy rhetoric:

Maybe, in the heart of this book, there is nothing other than howling, yellow, blinding, apocalyptic howling...

Underneath all of this madness in Cartaresu’s hemispheres is the city of Bucharest meticulously recreated, familiar statues explored in detail and their meanings, allegories for Science, Art, Agriculture and Trade simply part of the narrative. As you wallow inside Cartarescu’s brain you uncover a city, a country, that is part of, is actually passed, a great war. Our writer imagines he can control the city, just like the control he uses to move his finger.

When you are living inside the narrator’s “pia mater” you come across some seriously surreal stuff:

Cripples, dwarfs, cachexics, coxalgics, myelomeningoceliacs, the monstrously obese, cyclopedes, those with cleft lips, eleven fingers and eleven toes, bruised skin from a cardiac deformity, lepers, those scarred by anthrax, by scrofula, by vitiligo...the curved line of giant statues embraced the room with a ring of mutilations, and the funeral train advanced across its endless surface, like a parade of mites.

Special mention here has to go to translator Sean Cotter, who is either a genius by bringing to the English language such deeply obscure words, or he’s just as offbeat as Cartarescu in his thinking. This would not have been an easy work to translate, as you can probably gather by the few simple quotes I have included here, the novel runs to 464 pages!!!

I’m yet to touch on the broader subject of this amazing work, Cartarescu’s mother, because even though we are passengers hitching a ride through our writer’s dark mental caverns this is actually the story of his mother, how she moved to Bucharest, how she met his father, her experiences of war, of meeting a  jazz drummer from New Orleans who has a penchant for masochism,  her sexual awakening and her darkest dreams. A twisted homage to a parent?

I sat on the balcony in my pajamas for half an hour, watching the clouds, whiter than the very white sky, outlined in light, and when I went back into the kitchen, I felt I was entering a sinister cave. In the deep shadow, Mamma seemed like a gypsy woman forgotten on a chair beside the stove, all dark and sweaty, except for the globes of her eyes, which caught the blinding folds of the summer sky. Wasps in yellow plating crawled everywhere. They’d made a nest in the vent and had come through its metal grill. There were wasps as big as my fingers on my mother’s body, as though she were some kind of odd animal trainer. They pulled themselves along with their powerful buccal mechanisms, through her fine, thin, chestnut hair that was untouched by gray, spinning their wings like fans. I told her I was going for a walk. I got dressed and went into the blinding heat outside.

This is not a novel for those who would like to lay poolside and discover whodunit, it is a slow contemplative piece, an amazingly complex construction and a true example of how language can be art. Another classic example of how writers in translation are pushing the boundaries of the written word, pushing their reader’s boundaries to a higher plane:

It was a place to attempt (as I’ve done continuously for the last three months) to go back to where no one has, to remember what no one remembers, to understand what no person can understand: who I am, what I am.

Just as I’m looking forward to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle Part Four, Jon Kalman Stefansson ‘s final part of his trilogy and Elena Ferrante’s final instalment of the Neapolitan Series, I can’t wait for the second part of Cartarescu’s triptych (the body). Busy 2015???

Twelve Days of Translated Fiction - Day Four - My best reads for 2014

Time to get controversial? Why does he have Karl Ove Knausgaard’s second instalment higher than Jon Kalman Stefansson when as a member of the Shadow Jury for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize “The Sorrow of Angels” was announced as the winner. To make matters worse Tony here even put Birgit Vanderbeke’s “The Mussel Feast” higher than the Shadow Jury winner!!!

There is a simple explanation (I think it’s simple), as a 50 something male with children Karl Ove Knausgaard captures and explains all those hidden thoughts, fears, struggles that men have with love, family, responsibility and acceptability in minute detail. Karl Ove’s voice is an echo of my own voice?

“The two of us should go down and see El Clasico. Stay overnight. I can arrange the tickets. No problem. What do you say?”

“Sounds good to me,” I said.

“Sounds good to me,” he snorted. “Let’s go, man.”

Linda looked at me and smiled. “You go, I’d be please for you,” her look said. But there were other looks and moods, I knew, which would appear sooner or later. You go and enjoy yourself while I sit at home alone, they said. You only think about yourself. If you go anywhere it should be with me. All of this was in her eyes. A boundless love and a boundless anxiety. Fighting for domination all the time. Something new had appeared in recent months, it was tied up with the imminent arrival of the baby, and lay inside her, a mutedness. The anxiety was delicate, ethereal, flickering through her consciousness like the northern lights across a winter’s sky or lightening across an August sky, and the darkness that accompanied it was weightless, too, in the sense that it was an absence of light, and absence has no weight. What filled her now was something else, I thought it had something to do with earth, it was earthy, taking root. At the same time I considered it a stupid mythologizing thought.

“My Struggle” is a six book series and after the first instalment (“A Death in the Family”) we actually move from Karl Ove’s struggle with his father’s death and alcoholism to his move from Norway to Sweden and his falling in love and having children. My edition is 573 pages and basically starts and ends with our writer taking his children to a broken down fair ground, but it is the flashbacks to how his children came into being and his reactions to becoming a family man that is the real story here. Or the story of Karl Ove’s struggle to just be a good person is probably more to the point.

His relationship and discussions with his friend Geir give us detail as to how Karl Ove verbalises his struggles. His friend’s jealousy of Karl Ove’s writing ability, for example:

“Technical? Technical” Easy for you to say, that is. You can spend twenty pages describing a trip to the bathroom and hold your readers spellbound. How many people do you think can do that? How many writers would not have done that if only they could? Why do you think people spend their time touching up their modernist poems, with three words on each page? It’s because they have no other option. After all these years surely you must understand that, for Christ’s sake. If they could have, they would have. You can, and you don’t appreciate it. It means nothing to you, and you would rather be clever and write in an essayistic style. But everyone can write essays! It’s the easiest thing in the world.”

How does an ordinary man, who thinks he has limited writing ability, who believes he is a poor father, son, brother and partner, fall in love and then come to terms with the imposition this places on his writing career?

Then I met Linda and the sun rose.

I can’t find a better way to express it. The sun rose in my life. At first, as dawn breaking on the horizon, almost as if to say, this is where you have to look. Then came the first rays of sunshine, everything became clearer, lighter, more alive, and I became happier and happier, and then it hung in the sky of my life and shone and shone and shone.

Such a struggle, as we turn each page we are drawn into Karl Ove’s need for acceptance, need to define himself, need to write a truly memorable book.

That was where I had to go, to the essence, to the inner core of human existence. If it took forty years, so be it, it took forty years. But I should never lose sight of it, never forget it, that was where I was going.

There, there, there.

These outpourings of the soul, to his partner, friends, and family are all on the pages to see, raw and exposed. To think these people would be reading this (once published) is at times cringe worthy, in some circumstances you’d not blame people for never talking to Karl Ove again.

Of course I have to end on the quote about fiction itself:

Over recent years I had increasingly lost faith in literature. I read and thought this is something someone had made up. Perhaps it was because we were totally inundated with fiction and stories. It had got out of hand. Wherever you turned you saw fiction. All these millions of paperbacks, hardbacks, DVD’s and TV series, they were all about made-up people in a made-up, though realistic, world. And news in the press, TV news and radio news had exactly the same format, documentaries had the same format, they were also stories, and it made no difference whether what they told had actually happened or not. It was a crisis, I felt it in every fibre of my body, something saturating was spreading through my consciousness like lard, not the least because the nucleus of all this fiction, whether true or not, was verisimilitude and the distance it held to reality was constant. In other words, it saw the same. This sameness, which was our world, was being mass-produced. The uniqueness, which they all talked about, was thereby invalidated, it didn’t exist, it was a lie. Living like this, with the certainty that everything could equally well have been different, drove you to despair. I couldn’t write like this, it wouldn’t work, every single sentence was met with the thought: but you’re just making this up. It has no value. Fictional writing has no value, documentary narrative has no value. The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person? Not directed above us, nor beneath us, but at the same height as our own gaze. Art cannot be experienced collectively, nothing can, art is something you are alone with. You meet its gaze alone.

A stunning work, something that has been an absolute revelation, 2015 will see me tackle Book Four of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle”, to be honest I can’t wait.

Twelve Days of Translated Fiction - Day Five - My best reads for 2014

I’m now entering the final five of my favourite reads of 2014. As I explained on “Day Ten” I haven’t restricted my favourites to works published in 2014, nor works shortlisted for 2014 awards, I’ve simply drawn up a list of my favourite translated works that I read within the last twelve months.

Satantango was the winner of the USA based 2013 Best Translated Book Award and was Longlisted for the British based Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in the same year (why it didn’t even make the shortlist is possibly the subject of a blog post in itself – I know of a few well known bloggers who felt Chris Barnard’s “Bundu” was wrongfully included on the shortlist at the expense of this work). From the Hungarian and originally released in his native tongue in 1985, this would have been a serious challenge for George Szirtes to translate.

This is novel is an amazing work, split into two sections of six chapters each – and each chapter is a single paragraph, twelve paragraphs in total (but don’t think you got a quick read on your hands, each paragraph runs for 20 or 30 pages. “The First Part” runs from Chapters I through VI, “The Second Part” From Chapters VI through I, is it circular in structure, or is it ∞?

…and suddenly on the twig of an acacia, as in a vision, the progress of spring, summer, fall and winter, as if the whole of time were a frivolous interlude in the much greater spaces of eternity, a brilliant conjuring trick to produce something apparently orderly out of chaos, to establish a vantage point from which chance might begin to look like necessity…

Order from chaos? Desolation? Resurrection? At the core of the novel is a meeting at the bar of this desolate village’s inhabitants, unemployed farmers, ex-mill workers, mothers of “whores”, ex-headmasters, a cripple and the landlord (the Doctor pays a fleeting visit). And why are they meeting? To await the arrival of Irimias, long thought dead (a resurrection?), as he is the only one who can lead them away from this desolate place.

Is this the meeting of the disciples, after the saviour’s rebirth? But this novel is no salvation story, it is the coming of the apocalypse, a dark, dark, bleak and gloomy tale of poverty, boredom, abuse, lust and premature death. But is that what’s really happening?

“Something might have happened.” But what precisely happened, that could only be determined by a maximum joint effort, by hearing ever newer and newer versions of the story, so that there was never anything to do but wait, wait for the truth to assemble itself, as it might at any moment, at which point further details of the event might become clear, though that entailed a super-human effort of concentration recalling in what order the individual incidents comprising the story actually appeared.

Does the “truth assemble itself” as you’re reading this work? Do “further details of the event” become clear? “Super-human effort of concentration”? This is one work which you could read again and again and still discover hidden gens throughout.

Because what did it mean to say that something represented a cross between primitive insensitivity and chillingly inane emptiness in a bottomless pit of unbridled dark?! What sort of crime against language was this foul nest of mixed metaphors?! Where was even the faintest trace of striving for intellectual clarity and precision so natural – allegedly! – to the human spirit?!

Is this Krasznahorkai having a go at editors, even his own style of writing?! A wonderful character portrait of people on the edge of an abyss, will the resurrection send them straight to the depths of hell? Are their plans beyond their drunken dance a way to erase the past?

That rat-faced bastard has ruined me for good.” He knew that by evening, when he had finished packing – because until then nothing else could go in the van apart from the coffin, not next to it, not behind it, not on the seats, anywhere – once he had carefully locked all the doors and windows and was driving to town in his battered old Warszawa, cursing all the while, he wouldn’t be looking back, wouldn’t turn around once, but would vanish as fast as he could and try to wipe all trace of this miserable building from his memory, hoping it would sink from sight, and be entirely covered up, so that not even stray dogs would stop to piss on it; that he would vanish precisely the way the mob from the estate had vanished, vanish without a last look at those moss-covered tiles, the crooked chimney, and the barred windows because, having turned the bend and passed beneath the old sign indicating the name of the estate, feeling elated by their “brilliant future prospects”, they trusted the new would not only replace the old but utterly erase it.

If you want to challenge yourself to a language feast, a novel that is constructed as a drunken tango, side step, forward step, back step, side step, forward step, back step, start all over again, then I would hunt this one down. This is a world where nature has taken control of these hapless worker’s lives.

                                                                                                                                 

Another amazing European work in translation, which uses language to meld a picture, a creative work of art on the page, paragraphs that decompose in front of your eyes, yet another challenge to our standard planes of thought, how could I not include this in my list of favourite reads for the year? Of course it raised some persona angst as to where on the list I slotted this work. More debate ahead?

If you are yet to discover the artistic merits of Krasznahorkai and you are up for a challenge this is one to add to your Festive Season reading lists. Don’t think it is a simple sit by the side of a swimming pool and knock it over style read though. Surely a future Nobel Prize winner, just don’t say I didn’t tell you.

Twelve Days of Translated Fiction - Day Six - My best reads for 2014

This year I did read quite a few shorter works as well as a very large number of independently published books. From the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Shortlist came Birgit Vanderbeke’s “The Mussel Feast” (translated by Jamie Bullock). A work that “won the most prestigious German-language literature award, the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize”, that was first published in 1990 and “has not been out of print since” and one that has “been translated into all major European languages”. It took 23 years before somebody picked it up, translated it into English and released it in Britain. A worthy inclusion on the Prize shortlist and one I personally rank slightly higher than the seventh book on my favourite list, “The Sorrow of Angels”.

This is a very short work (105 pages) and contains only thirteen paragraphs, it is one that you can sit down and read from start to finish without even having to make yourself another coffee.

Our story starts with our young (teenage?) narrator, via a monologue, explaining the process of cleaning mussels, because they’re having a feast, a celebration for their father as he’s about to return from a business trip. “We would always have mussels to celebrate a special occasion” but her and her mother don’t “care for them much”. On the surface a simple feast preparation for a normal family (there is a brother) about to celebrate the father’s potential promotion and his home-coming. Just like a mussel, strong, solid, shiny on the outside, resilient.

But soon our monologue reveals the true darkness of the family, the mussels begin to open. We are slowly led into the bleak world of a “normal family” that has moved from the East and settled in West Berlin. Even the pot that contains the mussel feast has a tale. As our night unfolds, and the ritual hour of the home-coming passes and hours tick away we slowly peel back the layers of this “proper family”:

We no longer liked being a proper family, as he called it. In truth we didn’t see ourselves as a proper family. Everything in our lives revolved around us having to behave as if we were a proper family, as my father pictured a family to be because he hadn’t had one himself and so didn’t know what a proper family was, although he’d developed the most detailed notions of what one was like; and while he sat in his office we played at being this, even though we’d far rather have let our hair down than be a proper family.

As the monologue continues we are drawn further into the horrors of this family unit, the omnipotent father has still not arrived but their uncomfortableness of him being all knowing, all seeing restricts their openness. As the hours tick by the special Spatlese starts to take effect and the revelations speed up, the honesty also opens up and the horrors become more revealing. Time seems to speed up too. The fully open mussels are now there for all to see, in all their resplendent colour, but because of the time, they’re ruined.

My father talked to my mother about his week at the office, whereas my mother didn’t talk to my father about her week at school, because the office was important and worth more than school;

This is a moving and bleak tale of emotional and domestic violence, of manipulation and creation, a story where I had to double take and think…“have I ever said anything like that”? Dad’s come home from a long hard day, he just needs a bit of a rest…..

My father talked to my mother about his week at the office, whereas my mother didn’t talk to my father about her week at school, because the office was important and worth more than school.

The impressions that parents behaviour, actions and words makes on young children is all to the fore here, simple acts like discussing the next holiday are shown to be power struggles and with a domineering father in charge there is only going to be one outcome.

A book written just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, it shows the relentless ambition of the Eastern bloc settlers, their shame of their past, their need to create a “proper family”, what it means to keep up appearances at all costs, the relentless pursuit of promotion and the emotional and physical neglect that comes as baggage. A very moving book indeed.

Twelve Days of Translated Fiction - Day Seven - My best reads for 2014

Of what other use is poetry unless it has to power to change fate? There are books that entertain you but don’t stir your deepest thoughts. Then there are others that cause you to question, that give you hope, broaden the world and possibly introduce you to precipices. Some books are essential, others diversions.

What better way to introduce my seventh favourite translated work of 2014? As I read that quote I feel it should possibly be higher up on my list, but I’ve made my decisions and I’m going to stick to them. The placement of the works in order was an arduous task in fact, taking into account numerous criteria and listing this book at number seven is surely going to raise a few eyebrows. I’m sure some of my fellow Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Shadow Jury members will wonder why so low on the list!!

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Shadow Jury announced this work as their winner a few days before the actual Jury announced Hassan Blasim as the winner for his short story collection “The Iraqi Christ” (translated by Jonathan Wright). In fact, Jon Kalman Stefansson’s work “The Sorrow of Angels” didn’t even make the shortlist. You’ll have to stick around and read my posts for the next few weeks to see if personally I rated Blasim’s work higher than the Stefansson one.

“The Sorrow of Angels” (translated by Philip Roughton), is the angel’s tears which manifest as snow. And our novel contains quite a lot of snow, blizzards, snow storms, treacherous ravines, glaciers, iced tracks, icy seas – the snow being another character to accompany the two main characters, the boy and the postman. “The Sorrow of Angels” is Jon Kalman Stefansson’s second work in a trilogy, following on from “Heaven and Hell” and is a simple tale of “the boy” following Jens the postman on a journey to deliver the mail, they are “on their way to a place that constantly seems to be retreating.” Jens “flourishes nowhere but far from human habitation; far from life, in fact”, a man who broods and prefers silence. “The boy” lives in the world of words, poetry and the power of speech, "a person who holds a pen and paper has the possibility to change the world".

As I said in my original review this is a beautiful book, as delicate as a snowflake but also as treacherous, it contains the mysteries of humankind.

There’s little that we can count on in this world; the gods have the tendency to let us down and men do so many times over, but the Earth never betrays; you can shut your eyes confidently and put your foot forward, it will receive you; I’ll take care of you, it says, and that’s why we call it “mother”. Thus it is hardly possible to comprehend the desperation that grips someone if he or she expects the earth to vanish at the next step, the snow to give way, to be replaced by air, a precipice, a fall, The boy plods along behind the mare and man, it’s so obvious that the heath cares nothing for them. Jonas was right, it cares little for company at the moment. The snow falls thickly, the wind blows it into drifts and although it’s freezing and the snowcover hardens the higher they tramp, the snow doesn’t harden quickly enough to hold up men and horse; and they sink constantly, sometimes just several centimetres, which is difficult enough and frustrating, while sometimes their legs simply vanish entirely and the men just sit there stuck, forced to use all their strength to tear themselves free, first one leg, then the other. Yet the men have little excuse; they have only two legs, and a vertical shape, as if their bodies are part of an eternal tug-of-war between Heaven and Hell;

Which leads me to my take on this second instalment of Stefansson’s trilogy, it is in fact an Icelandic version of Dante’s Puragtory.

A stunning novel, a revelation and one I’m glad the IFFP judges brought to my attention, pity those same judges demeaned a great work by saying it wasn’t in the top six translated works of the year!!!