Ten books finished this month, 6 by women/POC and four in German. Romance-language translations and genetic engineering emerged as my themes of the month.
- A Manual for Cleaning Women — Lucia Berlin
- Meine geniale Freundin — Elena Ferrante tr. Karin Krieger
- A Lonely Man — Chris Power
- The Tunnel — Dorothy Richardson
- Die Fremde — Claudia Durastanti tr. Annette Kopetzki
- Mein Onkel der Jaguar — João Guimarães Rosa tr. Curt Meyer-Clason
- Unter Markenmenschen — Birgit Rabisch
- Inversions — Iain M. Banks
- Klara and the Sun — Kazuo Ishiguro
- Treacle Walker — Alan Garner
Prompted by its mention in My Phantoms, this was my second attempt at Meine geniale Freundin — earlier I tried reading the English translation, but couldn’t deal with the comma splices (presumably faithful to the original Italian sentence structure). No problems with that this time, whether because it was in German or because I listened to the audiobook. It’s fantastic — it starts off as an attractive portrait of the narrator’s charismatic friend, then shows a much more complex and interesting relationship developing against the background of an Italy within living memory, but economically and socially more reminiscent of a 19th-century village.
Another translation from Italian, and with similar southern-Italian poverty in the background, Claudia Durastanti’s Die Fremde was also brilliant. In the UK it’s published by Fitzcarraldo, who do a great line in enjoyably devastating reads (making them the first publisher since Picador in the early 90s that I take as a recommendation). This is very much in that vein: an autofictional “novel” which tells the story of Durastanti and her parents through a series of fragments. The introductory family history is full of traumas, each narrated briefly before giving way to the next one, which only heightens the effect. Here’s the narrator’s deaf mother being taught to speak by some nuns:
Wir hatten nie große Küchenmesser im Haus, weil sie meine Mutter an die Schuljahre erinnerten, als die Nonnen der einstigen Klosterschule Suore Maddalena di Ca-nossa ihr ein Messer auf die Zunge legten und sie aufforderten, zu schreien, damit sie lernte, mit ihren Stimmbändern Töne hervorzubringen. Oder sie musste elektrisch geladene Drähte anfassen, und die Nonnen befahlen ihr, noch lauter zu schreien. So hat meine Mutter gelernt, den Klang ihrer Stimme wiederzuerkennen.
One more translation — of sorts — this month was Mein Onkel der Jaguar. This is a very short book by a writer known for a very big book (Grande Sertão), but it features the same wordplay which has led to him being compared to Joyce. This creates obvious problems for the translator, which Meyer-Clason deals with by leaving a substantial proportion of words untranslated — some glossed at the back, others clear from the context. It’s an effective way of handling it (and makes the reader feel clever). The story of a jaguar-hunter in Brazil who becomes — in some sense — one himself is relatively slight, but the use of language creates a great sense of place.
South America also features heavily in A Manual for Cleaning Women. Like the Grace Paley stories I read last year, Berlin’s stories draw heavily on her own life, so a childhood spent in Chilean mining towns, alcoholism and ill-health constantly reappear. Like Paley, she writes with a humour and humanity which lighten the gloom; also like her, there’s not much else of her to read beyond this collection, so finishing it was a pity!
Some Berlin similes:
Her hotel looked blowsy and jaded to her, askew on the hillside. Bougainvillea spilled over its walls like a drunken woman’s shawls.
Mrs. Snowden waited for my grandmother and me to get into her electric car. It looked like any other car except that it was very tall and short, like a car in a cartoon that had run into a wall. A car with its hair standing on end.
Bella Lynn and her friends would slouch in the Court Café under pompadours, blowing smoke from their nostrils like petulant dragons.
Final view of a young couple:
I turned the corner and pulled over to the curb, watched them walk away in the drenching rain, each of them deliberately stomping in puddles, bumping gently into each other.
And cat-lady logic:
I talk to my cat but I feel silly because he is totally deaf.
Most of Dorothy Richardson is also in one book, although fortunately it stretches to 1800 pages and 13 volumes. In The Tunnel, both Richardson and Miriam seem to be really hitting their stride. Miriam is building social and professional relationships which will develop over the next few instalments, while Richardson becomes more experimental in her use of language (noted rather plaintively by the transcriber of the Project Gutenberg edition, which is impressively accurate!).
As usual I amassed a long list of quotes from this volume, covering Richardson’s use of repetition:
people with gentle enlightened faces and keen enlightened faces
“So I thought the best thing to do would be to come and ask you what would be the best thing to do for her.”
And her/Miriam’s sharp opinions:
Shakespeare’s plays are ‘universal’ because they are about the things that everybody knows and hands about, and they do not trouble anybody. They make everyone feel wise. It isn’t what he says it’s the way he says all these things that don’t matter and leave everything out. It’s all a sublime fuss.
On society women:
Refined shrews, turning in circles, like moths on pins; brainless, mindless, heartless, the prey of the professions; priests, doctors and lawyers. These two groups kept each other going. There was something hidden in the fact that these women’s men always entered professions.
On men:
Your reading is a habit, like most men’s reading, not a quest.
On people:
“I always begin by idealising people.”
“Do you indeed?”
“Yes, always; and then they grow smaller and smaller.”
A Lonely Man was great fun. I could identify with Robert’s experiences of living in Germany — “[His family] were becoming Berliners while he moved through the city like a ghost, solitary and largely silent.” — and there’s some lovely writing — “Two tears fell down her cheeks, one fast, the other slow.” The thriller aspect of the story isn’t really my genre, but the ending was beautifully-judged.
Treacle Walker is a wonderfully odd little book: a mash-up of Coraline, folktale, and physics written in language often reminiscent of Riddley Walker:
‘Treacle Walker? Me know that pickthank psychopomp? I know him, so I do. I know him. Him with his pots for rags and his bag and his bone and his doddering nag and nookshotten cart and catchpenny oddments. Treacle Walker? I’d not trust that one’s arse with a fart.’
Inversions was the last book of my Culture re-read — until the next time. Even on a second reading, Banks’s playing with the reader’s expectations works well, and this was a satisfying, if untypically-Culture, end to the sequence.
Lastly, an interesting pair of sci-fi books: Unter Markenmenschen is a short book about a near-future Germany where genetically-engineered designer babies dominate. It’s very much a novel of ideas, where the plot involving the characters is a hook on which to hang the portrait of a society. It’s an interesting portrait though, and the diary format is pleasingly reminiscent of an 18th-century epistolary novel. Klara and the Sun adds to the GE aspect the android of the title, and Ishiguro achieves a natural and subtle integration of characters and world-building. The dialogue in particular is classic Ishiguro, somehow elegant and inarticulate at once.