Dancing Mad God

I finished eight books this month, mostly as part of a South American reading month (inspired once again by the Portuguese in Translation book group, which this time did Crooked Plow). Only three in German, mainly because 2666 took up 40 hours of my listening time. I count five of the eight as by women/POC, but the latter group gets tricky to define in e.g. Brazil (I found a timely article on Machado de Assis here: https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/articles/cl7xvyz1eyro ).

• Crooked Plow — Itamar Vieira Junior, tr. Johnny Lorenz
• Budapest — Chico Buarque, tr. Karin von Schweder-Schreiner
• Geschwister des Wassers — Andréa del Fuego, tr. Marianne Gareis
• The Complete Stories — Clarice Lispector, tr. Katrina Dodson
• 2666 — Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer
• Daytripper — Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá
• Epitaph of a Small Winner — Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, tr. William L. Grossman
• Sieben leere Häuser — Samanta Schweblin, tr. Marianne Gareis

Crooked Plow (and the accompanying discussion) was interesting in large part because of the culture in which it is steeped: rural peasants who are (largely — that troublesome classification again) the descendants of black slaves, and who continue to live lives which amount to something very like slavery. The Jaré religion plays a central part in their lives, and in the lives of the protagonists in particular; the connection between spirits, people and land is not just local colour, but central to the characters and their story.

Another Brazilian book, Geschwister des Wassers, is in some ways similar: a realist story of development through the construction of a hydroelectric dam collides with fantastic elements (characters disappearing into coffee filters, the dead transformed into ticks) which are accepted by some characters, but rejected by others. Del Fuego combines this with a laconic, fairy-tale style to make a highly enjoyable read.

Epitaph of a Small Winner also blends whimsy and realism; for an example of the former, enjoy chapter 55:

Narrated by the protagonist after his death, this is a kind of Brazilian Tristam Shandy: ironic, metafictional, but with a strong satirical edge (witness the narrator’s excusal of his brother-in-law’s brutality as being required by his business being the smuggling, rather than the legal trading, of slaves). The original title is Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas), and this happened to be only the first book this month to concern a dead Brás.

The second was Daytripper, this month’s graphic novel. It tells the story of Brás de Oliva Domingos’s life, through a series of episodes at the end of each of which Brás dies. The relationship between the stories — or the Bráses — is left poetically open, while the book builds to a powerful conclusion.

A different side of Brazil is presented in The Complete Stories of Clarice Lispector: while there’s irrationality here, it’s a modern, neurotic irrationality much more familiar to the European reader. There are a lot of stories here, and it was striking how the ones which I appreciated most are also the ones which the introduction focused on when I read it later. Not I think a testimony to my literary judgment so much as to the variation in quality. At her best though, Lispector was excellent:

“stroking his black hair as if stroking the soft, hot fur of a kitten”

“the daughter-in-law … plunked herself down … and fell silent… ‘I came to avoid not coming,’ shed’d said to Zilda”

“To my sudden torment, … he started slowly removing his glasses. And he looked at me with naked eyes that had so many lashes. I had never seen his eyes that, with their innumerable eyelashes, looked like two sweet cockroaches.”

“Any cat, any dog is worth more than literature.”

Budapest is even more literally a story of a Brazilian who seeks to become European, seduced by the challenge of learning Hungarian. It has a lot in common with the other Buarque novel I’ve read (Mein deutscher Bruder) — an unsympathetic narrator/protagonist, the speeded-up passage of time, and obsessions with language and thinly-characterised women.

Speaking of thinly-characterised women, 2666. There was a lot to like in it, especially the first part, which was very M. John Harrisonian in its non sequiturs:

I’m not quite convinced though that there was 40 hours of my life-worth to like in it. Even bracketing out the Part About the Crimes, which by its nature concerns itself with misogyny, the other female characters (Elizabeth Norton, Rosa Amalfitano, Baroness von Zumpe) all feature mainly as sex objects. There is of course a lot to be said about the difference between the author’s attitudes and those of the society which he depicts….

Finally, one re-read: Sieben leere Häuser. I liked this much more on a second reading (and I liked it quite a lot the first time). The relationships and commonalities between the stories struck me much more (the kinds of emptiness, the relationships between parents and children). I’ve been occasionally comparing with Megan McDowell’s English translation, and found myself critiquing McDowell’s version against the “German original” — time to re-learn Spanish!

Next month is Black History Month (UK edition), although how much time Proust will leave me remains to be seen (The Prisoner/The Fugitive seems a substantial instalment).

I finished a modest seven books this month, mainly because it was a Proust month (and Oxen of the Sun in Ulysses took a while). All except Marcel were women for Women in Translation month (two actually in translation, and four in the original German).

• The Stories of Eva Luna — Isabel Allende tr. Margaret Sayers Peden
• Liebe ist gewaltig — Claudia Schumacher
• All the Lovers in the Night — Mieko Kawakami tr. Sam Bett and David Boyd
• Sibir — Sabrina Janesch
• Sodom and Gomorrah — Marcel Proust, tr. John Sturrock
• Madgermanes — Birgit Weyhe
• May Ayim: Radikale Dichterin, sanfte Rebellin — Ika Hügel-Marshall et al.

Starting with the odd one out, Sodom and Gomorrah is where we find out, amusingly, that everyone except Marcel is gay. Marcel, meanwhile, sleeps his way through fourteen of Balbec’s little band of girls, as you do. Other highlights on my mastodon thread: https://mastodon.green/@slnieckar/110980369394661379

The Stories of Eva Luna were my short stories for the month (plus Lispector, which I’ll hopefully finish in September for my South American month). Interestingly the stock characters which in e.g. Garcia Marquez look like dodgy sexual politics — the macho general, the happy whore, the silent well-brought-up girl — are the same ones she uses. Lispector’s stories, in comparison, are full of neurotically complex characters; I know that she’s considered a very “European” writer, but the question of how much is due to the writer’s approach, and how much to the subjects (the period?) will require more reading.

Liebe ist gewaltig is a brilliantly written story of the narrator coming to terms with childhood in a violent family, where the father’s rages warp his wife’s and children’s characters. Schumacher adjusts the narrative voice to show the movement (not always progress) from smartarse teen to alienated adult (with a terrifying shift from first to third person as the protagonist becomes a Stepford wife).

All the Lovers in the Night reminded me a lot of Breasts and Eggs, both heavily featuring alcoholic women in publishing having inarticulate conversations. This time, the protagonist is an enigmatic (autism spectrum?) proofreader, who tries to find a way through life through her interactions with the other characters. Despite her difficulties connecting with them, the tender portrayal has a powerful effect on the reader.

Despite the name, Sibir actually takes place in Kazakhstan (and in Germany after the characters’ migrations westward). The ex-Soviet Germans are a substantial, but as far as I can tell little talked-about group in this country, so it was a fascinating read. The plot is occasionally creaky, but the focus on children’s worlds in each narrative thread was very effective.

Graphic novel for the month was Madgermanes (explained in the novel as deriving from “made in Germany”). It tells the story of three Mozambicans who worked in the DDR, with each in turn presenting their own perspective and deepening the reader’s understanding. Both in Germany and (for those who return) in Mozambique, they face exploitation and hostility, though the positives are also portrayed. The visual style creatively combines traditional comic and African motifs.

Lastly, May Ayim: Radikale Dichterin, sanfte Rebellin shows another side of Black life in Germany. There is a mixture of recollections of Ayim by her friends and family, unpublished (very dark, late) poems, and some powerful, mostly academic writing of Ayim’s, which together show the prejudice she and other Afro-Deutsch people faced, and her marvellously good-natured ability to deal with it and process it in her work and activism.

As I mentioned, next month is South American month. I might not get through very many, because one of my selected books is the voluminous 2666, but there are a few I’m eyeing up….

Eleven books finished this month, six in German and eight by women/POC — all of those as part of my theme for the month of African writers. I really enjoyed this one, especially because I managed to get books from a good range of countries.

• The Ultimate Tragedy — Abdulai Silá tr. Jethro Soutar
• Der weiße Fleck — Mohamed Amjahid
• So Distant From My Life — Monique Ilboudo tr. Yarri Kamara
• Black Foam — Haji Jabir, tr. Sawad Hussain and Marcia Lynx Qualey
• Solange wir leben — David Safier
• Metro: Kairo Underground — Magdy El-Shafee, tr. Iskander Ahmad Abdalla and Stefan Winkler
• Blutbuch — Kim de l’Horizon
• African Women’s Writing — ed. Charlotte H. Bruner, various translators
• Die sanfte Gleichgültigkeit der Welt — Peter Stamm
• Scarlet Odyssey — C. T. Rwizi
• Die Schiffbrüchige — Ali Zamir tr. Thomas Brovot

The original prompt for the theme was The Ultimate Tragedy (Guinea-Bissau), which was discussed this month by the Portuguese in Translation group (highly recommended). The book’s plot is a fairly standard tale of colonial oppression, but made interesting by being presented from several different points of view. Silá includes several local (Kreol?) words, retained by the translator, which solidifies the sense of place without causing comprehension problems.

Der weiße Fleck (Morocco/Germany) was a great listen, disturbing and humorous, but most of all illuminating regarding the experience of non-whites living in Germany. The German self-satisfaction at having moved beyond racism is of course largely unjustified, while Amjahid manages to give a positive conclusion with a list of ways for white allies — “sweet potatoes” — to make a contribution.

The next two books, So Distant From My Life (Burkina Faso) and Black Foam (Eritrea), deal with a similar main theme: the reasons for migrants to leave their homes and attempt the journey to Europe. The first of these I found less satisfying — the central character remains opaque throughout, and the treatment of homosexuality is disturbing (and not in a good way, even conceding that gay characters donn’t always have to be the heroes). Black Foam manages to present a much more interesting protagonist; even though his extreme unreliability leaves one similarly uncertain about his true character, this becomes one of the focuses of the novel, with plenty of material for thought.

Die Schiffbrüchige (Comoros) is also in part a story of migration, this time of a woman from the Comoros to Mayotte. This intra-African migration is neglected by western media, but many of the same features are present (as is apparent from the title). I expected this to be “the best novel I’ve read from the Comoros”, but it’s much more than that: Zamir has a very modern style (the endless sentence), buut there’s tremendous substance too in his portrayal of the central character.

Metro: Kairo Underground (Egypt), my graphic novel for the month, was fun, with energetic artwork and fun sound effects in Arabic script, but ultimately unsatisfying. There’s no real conclusion to the plot, which need not be a problem in itself, but I think it is when the story is as plot-driven as this one.

African Women’s Writing was, as one always says about anthologies, a mixed bag, but on the whole I enjoyed the range of voices, and I have plenty of new leads to chase up. The Story of Jesus, by Violet Dias Lannoy, in particular, was an absolute cracker (a schoolboy writing his understanding of the Gospel narrative in a Kenyan context).

Finally, Scarlet Odyssey (Zimbabwe/Eswatini/South Africa) was something quite different: fantasy/science fiction (and the two are interestingly blended), borderline YA, but complex enough to be enjoyable for adults. Continuing the theme of the month, diversity is paramount: Rwizi creates a world of varied societies, all based in turn on a variety of African cultures. There’s a lot of world-building in this first book of a series, and unsurprisingly there isn’t a real conclusion to the story in this volume, but I will be reading on.

Three (mostly) German-language books to finish: Solange wir leben is intriguing in that it’s a novel telling the story of the author’s parents (the writer himself is a character towards the end, but to Safier’s credit I don’t think that you’d guess this “David” was him if you didn’t already know). There’s a lot to enjoy here, and Safier admirably declines to sugar-coat his portrayal of his father, in particular, but the writing style (especially the addiction to sentence fragments) was not quite my thing.

The last two books for this month form a coincidental Swiss mini-theme, and both are very much my thing. Blutbuch is an exploration of the author’s family history, and its influence on their own life. The writing style varies between the straight-forward and stream-of-conscious poetry, all brilliantly performed in the audiobook by the author. Die sanfte Gleichgültigkeit der Welt is also concerned with the protagonist’s family history, this time as an updating of the classically German Doppelgänger theme. In a very short novel, Stamm manages to explore the ramifications of his conceit so brilliantly that I immediately re-listened to the audiobook, and enjoyed it as much (and understood it much more) the second time. As with Stamm’s other books, Christian Brückner narrates perfectly.

Topic for next month is, of course, Women in Translation. Following the slightly odd rules, that will mean women/non-binary people who don’t write in English; possibly not very many, because there’s also the next volume of Proust to get through….

I finished a modest seven books this month, mainly because of the continuing Proustathon. Three each in German and by women/POC, which isn’t enough, but for the half year that makes 24 and 31 respectively out of 53, so on target. No particular theme this month other than a bit of everything!

• A Flat Place — Noreen Masud
• Aliss at the Fire — Jon Fosse tr. Damion Searls
• Wenn der Hahn kräht: Zwölf hellwache Geschichten aus Brasilien — ed. Wanda Jakob and Luísa Costa Hölzl, tr. various
• Draussen um diese Zeit — Ulrike Ulrich
• Der Augenblick der Liebe — Martin Walser
• The Sandman Vol. 7: Brief Lives — Neil Gaiman
• The Guermantes Way — Marcel Proust, tr. Mark Treharne

A Flat Place was a great start to the month for me: poised somewhere between nature writing and memoir, it explores the relationship between the flatness of the not so obviously attractive landscapes which Masud explores, and the distinctly traumatic experiences of her childhood. Even if I wasn’t convinced by all the links she draws (which might also be a result of listening to the audiobook and not pausing enough at the more abstract parts), I found the honesty of her writing gripping, and her sometimes uncomfortable engagement with the landscapes refreshingly genuine. Bonus points for featuring a black cat called Morvern, which has long been high on my shortlist of potential cat names.

Aliss at the Fire is also heavy on psychological trauma and landscape, somehow packing a multi-generational epic into a novella-length story, despite the typically Fossesqe use of repetition.

I read two short-story collections: Wenn der Hahn kräht gathers stories by various Brazilian women, with an understandable emphasis on the position of women in Brazilian society (not always great). The stories themselves were often rather light, but the title story by Claudia Lage is a banger.

Ulrike Ulrich’s stories are often light on plot, but present intriguing situations; I particularly enjoyed Le Refuge, which follows the mini-society in and around a Paris cafe.

Der Augenblick der Liebe is a very strange book: an elderly man and a young academic have an inexplicable affair, which they intertwine with discussion of an obscure French philosopher. Walser does at least address the improbability and the problematic Altersgeilheit, but with no very convincing result. I listened to this one as an audiobook read by the author, which was energetic, if fatiguing in its one-noteness.

Sandman volume 7 was much more successful: every time I’m impressed by how much Gaiman can pack into a limited space, while allowing room for the reader to develop their own thoughts in response.

Finally, I finished volume 3 of Proust just in time to keep on schedule to finish in 2023: favourite quotes are in a separate thread; most notably for me, the aristocrats (especially the Duchesse) were more interesting than in my memory, but there was still a lot of cringing at their laboured conversations.

Next month I plan a mainly African month: I’ve already got far more books than I’ll be able to finish on my shortlist, so I’ll be focusing on the less obvious countries as much as possible.

I finished nine books this month, with the usual four in German; only four by women/POC, but I’m planning a people of colour month for May to balance things a bit. All but two were in translation, mainly because of my International Booker theme for the month.

Graue Bienen — Andrej Kurkow tr. Sabine Grebing and Johanna Marx
In einer dunkelblauen Stunde — Peter Stamm
The Discomfort of Evening — Marieke Lucas Rijneveld tr. Michele Hutchison
Nova Hellas: Stories from Future Greece — ed. Francesca T Barbini and Francesco Verso tr. Dimitra Nikolaidou et al.
Ein simpler Eingriff — Yael Inokai
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower — Marcel Proust tr. James Grieve
The World Goes On — László Krasznahorkai tr. John Batki et al.
Breasts and Eggs — Mieko Kawakami tr. Sam Bett and David Boyd
Leonard und Paul — Rónán Hession tr. Andrea O’Brien

Starting with the first of those, Graue Bienen is by Andrej Kurkow (from Ukraine, longlisted this year); it’s set against the background of the Russian invasion and occupation not of 2022, but of 2014 — an important reminder of recent history. Against this background the main character and his story are very gentle, as he first copes with life in the “grey zone” between the opposing armies, then takes his bees on a tour of southern Ukraine in search of safety. The book does go on perhaps a bit longer than necessary, but overall it was very enjoyable.

Peter Stamm (Switzerland) was shortlisted in 2013, and since I discovered him recently he’s become one of my favourite German-language authors. In einer dunkelblauen Stunde explores some of his typical themes — unreliable memories of the past, the lives of artists — this time through the interaction between an ageing author and his prospective biographical film-maker. In a very meta twist, there is apparently a film following Stamm through the process of writing the book, though I haven’t tracked it down yet.

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld (Netherlands) won the prize in 2020 for The Discomfort of Evening. In Jeanette Wintersonian style, it tells the story of a girl growing up in a fairly extreme religious community, this time on a farm in the southern Netherlands. The family transfer their various repressed desires to a range of sexual and violent forms of behaviour towards each other and the animals on the farm, and I found the book as pleasant as that sounds. There are some great bits of writing: the narrator has fluorescent stars above her bed, but, “Dad has already taken away a few, which he does whenever I come home with a bad grade and it’s his turn to tuck me up at night”; these are outnumbered however by the improbably elaborate similes which she favours (“grown-ups are often confusing because their heads work like a Tetris game and they have to arrange all their worries in the right place”).

The World Goes On is by László Krasznahorkai (Hungary, winner 2015); it’s a short story collection of sorts, although with a very broad definition of “story”. The style (seemingly endless sentences) is certainly hard work, and can be infuriating (when used for rambling metaphysics), or extremely powerful when used to actually express the stories and their ideas. I enjoyed it enough to want to explore further, at least.

Breasts and Eggs (Mieko Kawakami, Japan, shortlisted 2022) has an intriguing history: Kawakami wrote a novella with the same title, then reworked it later and added a second part, retitling the whole “Summer Stories” (also a play on the main character’s name, I think). I found it fascinating — it explores the lot of (particularly working class) women in Japan, with a obsessive emphasis on their bodies (most of which are skinny and constantly sweating). Some oddities in the English are presumably normal in Japanese (“When my beer came, Makiko screamed happy birthday to Midoriko”), which is fine and adds interest; others just seem strange (“Despite giving the impression of a person who avoided sweets, she ordered tiramisu with her coffee and really savoured it”). The second part in particular is rather rambling, but both build up to spectacular climactic scenes which are impressively done.

Turning to other translations, Leonard und Paul is also interestingly titled, being “Leonard and Hungry Paul” in English. Omitting the title’s key word in translation is a bold move, and I’m not sure why it was done that way. (I’m also not sure why it’s in the English title, but that’s clearly the point). The descriptions of daily live in Paul’s family do sometimes verge on the Pooterish, but overall it’s a lovely book celebrating a pair of introverted friends, and looking at how they get on in the world.

Nova Hellas: Stories from Future Greece was less successful: there are problems with the translation (“Nah. I myself arranged to draft the reports now”), and some of the stories have the common SF failing of focusing on the ideas rather than the characters or the story (or the writing). The final story (“The Colour that Defines Me”) is probably the strongest, as it does do things with each of those.

Ein simpler Eingriff is a short but excellent book, focusing on a nurse whose professional and personal lives reach parallel crises. She interacts with various other strong-minded women (sister, patient, lover), and it’s these relationships which make the work so powerful.

And with a bit of delay, I finished the second volume of Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower; highlights on mastodon: https://mastodon.green/@slnieckar/110291997758206313 .

I finished eight books this month — seven in German (mostly quite short, hence the vaguely respectable total), and four by women (no POC, which I need to make up for soon). Rough plan for this month was a world tour of German, with books from Austria, France, Argentina, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, and … Prague.

• Ein Landarzt: Kleine Erzählungen — Franz Kafka
• The Book of Chameleons — José Eduardo Agualusa tr. Daniel Hahn
• Peršmanhof — Evelyn Steinthaler
• Liebes Arschloch — Virginie Despentes tr. Ina Kronenberger and Tatjana Michaelis
• Kalpa Imperial — Angélica Gorodischer tr. Karin Will
• Die Geschichte eines neuen Namens — Elena Ferrante tr. Karin Krieger
• Vermeer — Pieter Roelofs et al. tr. Susanne Karau et al.
• Der Persische Orden und andere Grotesken — Anton Chekhov tr. Alexander Eliasberg

Ein Landarzt was a timely reminder of just how odd Kafka could be, especially in the title story. The longer stories (the title story and Ein Bericht für eine Akademie) were the most rewarding for me; the Chekhov collection, which contains mostly slight, rather fragmentary satires, was in some ways similar, but does include some fantastic illustrations by W. N. Massjutin (in the excellent PG version: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/53731 ):

There were more short stories in Kalpa Imperial (billed as a novel, but with no overall structure that I could see other than the storyteller-narrator and a tendency to get very weird towards the end). There was again a variety of length and weight to the stories, but they were always enjoyable: there are lots of influences which could be found, but I at least enjoyed the similarities to M John Harrison’s Viriconium books, Jeff Vandermeer’s Ambergris books, and Walter Moers.

Then a couple of non-fictions: Peršmanhof is a non-fiction graphic novel (?), briefly telling the story of a massacre committed by German troups in southern Austria in the final days of the war. A helpful afterword gives more background on the preceding and following events (depressingly but predictably, no-one faced legal consequences).

As preparation for the exhibition, I’ve been working my way through the Vermeer exhibition catalogue, which is very well done: hefty in size, but heavily illustrated, with close-ups and related works, supporting essays which point out in accessible terms the themes running through different groups of pictures.

Then three novels: Liebes Arschloch was another book which helped my German vocabulary (this time mainly drugs and alcohol-related), as well as being an impressively fair look at characters affected by the #MeToo movement in France. Covid hits the characters without warning half-way through the book, in very effective fashion.

Die Geschichte eines neuen Namens is the second volume of Ferrante’s Neapolitan series; it’s much longer than the first, and I’m not quite convinced it had to be that long, but it was always enjoyable. As in the first volume, the most interesting aspect is the development of the character of Lila, along with her relationship with the narrator, and Ferrante mostly does a good job of making teenagers’ love lives interesting.

Finally, the only English book this time was The Book of Chameleons, which I read for a book group where José Eduardo Agualusa and Daniel Hahn discussed the novel and its translation. They were both entertaining and informative, and I was pleased to discover a really good novelist from Angola. Oddly, Agualusa turns out to now be living on Mozambique Island, just a few kilometres from Lisa St Aubin de Terán, who was a highlight of last month’s reading.

My plan for April is to have an International Booker month: some of the longlisted books from this year, possibly some other works by the longlisted authors, and some previous winners.

I finished a healthy eleven books in a short month, mainly due to several volumes of short stories; four books in German, and seven of the eleven by women/POC. My main focus this month was reading some of the original “Best of Young British Novelists” from 1983, especially one I hadn’t read previously. No longer young, of course, but it was great to read some new old writers. For German I had a very loose plan of “winners or nominees from the Deutscher Buchpreis”.

• Blood Libels — Clive Sinclair
• Episodes — Christopher Priest
• Banthology — Sarah Cleave et al.
• Das glückliche Geheimnis — Arno Geiger
• Mozambique Mysteries — Lisa St Aubin de Terán
• Die Katze und der General — Nino Haratischwili
• Spiel auf vielen Trommeln: Erzählungen — Olga Tokarczuk tr. Esther Kinsky
• Piranha to Scurfy and Other Stories — Ruth Rendell
• The Complete Maus — Art Spiegelman
• Noonday — Pat Barker
• Kältere Schichten der Luft — Antje Rávik Strubel

Starting with the BYBNs, Christopher Priest was the only one I’d already read. Some of the stories themselves were familiar from another of his collections, but there was an interesting mix of styles from the length of his career. A highlight for me was Palely Loitering, where a meeting between past and future versions of the narrator are used to show their different perceptions, each convinced that he is right:

I could remember how I had seen myself, my older self, that is. I recalled my ‘friend’ from this day as callow and immature, and mannered with a loftiness that did not suit his years. That I (as child) had seen myself (as young man) in this light was condemnation of my then lack of percipience.

Blood Libels was one of the most unpleasant books I’ve ever read — something of a speciality of the time, perhaps, with Ian McEwan and Iain Banks also both in their shocking phases. In this case it seems to be combined with my idea of Philip Roth’s style (another omission of mine until now), so the sexual violence at least had an interesting Jewish flavour.

Noonday turns out to be the last part of a trilogy, but it stands up well enough on its own. It’s fantastically written, adding a direct, modern feeling to the period (Second World War) atmosphere:

Two glasses of whisky later, Rachel was already slightly slewed. She squinted at Elinor, as if a sea-fret had suddenly blown into the drawing room.

They found the family still in the drawing room, slumped in armchairs with the dazed, disorientated look of the recently bereaved and the totally pissed.

Further along, by the yard door, a man’s head rested on the concrete, severed neatly at the neck, one eye closed. Kenny pushed it to one side with his foot and opened the door into the alley.

As Paul turned the corner, he saw a stick of bombs come tumbling down the beam of a searchlight on to a building fifty yards ahead, an extraordinary sight, like a worm’s-eye view of somebody shitting.

I found the plot thread about the obese medium (reminiscent of Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black, I’m not sure how coincidentally) hard to take for the same reasons as in that case (essentially, it seems that she has real supernatural powers), but the book as a whole was very satisfying.

The biggest surprise was Lisa St Aubin de Terán: I’d always been vaguely aware of her existence, but no more; it turns out that she moved to northern Mozambique almost 20 years ago, and since then has been setting up and running a college of tourism and agriculture. Mozambique Mysteries is not particularly mysterious, and in terms of writing style it’s quite straightforward, so perhaps it wasn’t the best place to start, but it was fascinating to compare her experiences with my own at the other end of the country. There are some disconcerting oddities: she talks about her determination to establish schools in Africa from before she had ever visited, and devises her own herbal remedy against malaria, but generally she shows an awareness that her position in the community is accidental: “Being a writer doesn’t bring much credit in an area where there are no books to speak of.”

these same so-called ‘backward’ villages have a form of democracy that works, that truly represents its people, that gives the chance of equality to all members of the community, and pre-empted the notion of a welfare state by several centuries.

Her right-hand man at the college has the best line in the book, sideswiping whitey while praising their drinking ability:

I always thought that colour was just about your skin and a certain hardness of heart, a lack of compassion, but now I am wondering if it isn’t a lot more than that. Six bottles in just over an hour!

Occasional references to her earlier life show the uniqueness and universality of her experience:

My expectation of how life should be was so rarefied that I managed to squeeze a few lives into the 1970s without really noticing them pass by. During that decade, I was benignly stalked by, and cradle-snatched by, a Venezuelan revolutionary and taken to his inherited lands in the Andes, and I became a farmer and a mother, a writer and then a refugee without realizing that that was my life, rather than the other more elusive dreams I was endlessly chasing.

Graphic novel of the month was The Complete Maus, by Art Spiegelman, and it’s brilliant. The representation of the characters by different animals is very effective, creating enough distance without trivialising the events, and the juxtaposition of the Holocaust narrative with the long-term effects on Spiegelman’s father is extremely moving.

Two English story collections: Banthology contains stories by writers from the countries affected by the Muslim travel ban of the early Trump presidency, while Piranha to Scurfy presents tales of the (mostly) uncanny by Ruth Rendell. Both were mixed bags, as so often, but the two novellas in the Rendell collection were impressively atmospheric.

Spiel auf vielen Trommeln also tends towards the weird, if with more absurdist humour. I particularly liked the opening story, about a writer’s struggles with his doppelgänger. Kältere Schichten der Luft is a fascinating precursor of Strubel’s recent Blaue Frau — a mysterious woman appears (by water!) in a Nordic country, and there’s a tale involving sexual violence, queerness, and memory. In this case there’s less definite resolution than in the later work, so it’s less immediately satisfying, but the atmospheric Swedish summer setting is attractive, and there’s plenty to think about.

Das glückliche Geheimnis was the first of my birthday subscription books, and an excellent start! At first I assumed that it was fictional rather than a memoir; once I realised around half-way through, it was interesting how my mental picture of the situation changed — less cartoon-like, and more realistic in my preconceptions of what could and couldn’t happen in the book.

Finally, Die Katze und der General was certainly long (23 hours in the audiobook); I’m not sure it really had to be, but it was enjoyable to follow Haratischwili wherever she decided to take the story. The performances by several different narrators were excellent. I liked it enough that I’m planning to crack on with Das achte Leben when I have about 40 hours spare.

Next month, a world tour of German, plus volume two of Proust….

I finished nine books in January, five by women/POC, and a below-target three in German (I’ve been listening to the very chunky Die Katze und der General, hopefully to be finished in February). This was a French month (six of the nine), to start off my 2023 read of Proust in suitable style.

• Getting Lost — Annie Ernaux tr. Alison L. Strayer
• Numa Roumestan — Alphonse Daudet tr. Charles de Kay
• Simultan — Ingeborg Bachmann
• In the Kitchen with Alain Passard — Christophe Blain tr. Elizabeth Bell
• The Way by Swann’s — Marcel Proust tr. Lydia Davis
• Tal der Herrlichkeiten — Anne Weber
• Dann schlaf auch du — Leïla Slimani tr. Amelie Thoma
• A Game of Snakes and Ladders — Doris Langley Moore
• Light Rains Sometimes Fall — Lev Parikian

Getting Lost is probably not the best place to start with Ernaux — much of the interest for me was that I’m already invested in her as a character in her other works, so it was fascinating to see the “real” her in her diary. Ernaux herself seems to be determined to make the relationship as dramatic as possible (“I write my love stories, and live my books”), almost as a piece of performance art.

Numa Roumestan was quite interesting, though it didn’t fill me with an urgent desire for more Daudet. The differences between northern and southern France are given a broad-brush/prejudiced treatment (“showing that loosened look of the face and revealing in the corners of the eyes and the mouth a character at once weak and violent—all the passions and nothing to resist them. Faces down south are like the Southern landscape.”), but the scheming peasant sister was at least entertaining.

Graphic novel of the month was In the Kitchen with Alain Passard — a graphic novel in some very loose sense, it’s essentially an extended interview with Passard and his staff, in comic form, interspersed with the chef’s recipes. Very odd, but enjoyable, especially the detours to the different farms where he grows vegetables for his restaurant. Most of the recipes (and Passard’s cooking in general) focus on vegetables rather than meat, so some could actually be attempted.

I liked Dann schlaf auch du much more than I’d expected; the story starts at the end, so the interest is not in where we’re going, but how we get there. Along the way, the economic and racial injustices in contemporary France are neatly skewered, sometimes subtly (as in the French-Moroccan mother’s non-reaction to her friends’ racism), other times more broadly.

I’m planning to reread Proust over the course of the year, and loved Lydia Davis’s translation of The Way by Swann’s. Details and particularly good/weird bits in my two Mastodon threads: https://mastodon.green/@slnieckar/109693054146687675 and https://mastodon.green/@slnieckar/109757037221321445 .

One last mostly-French book: Tal der Herrlichkeiten is by the German-French writer Anne Weber, who produces her books in both languages. A mythic story set in contemporary France, the two elements complement each other brilliantly — the sometimes shocking and fantastic elements lend weight, and the realism of the modern setting brings verisimilitude.

Simultan is another one which I hadn’t expected to like so much (I have memories of Malina being a slog). It reminded me of Eva Menasse’s Tiere Für Fortgeschrittene, with mostly longish stories focusing on relationships.

I read A Game of Snakes and Ladders for a reading group which now isn’t happening this month at least, but I’m glad I was spurred to read one I normally wouldn’t. The setting of interwar Egypt is intriguing; the racial attitudes of the characters are obviously suspect (dirty Arabs, covetous Jews etc.), and I’m less than confident about the author’s own position, but that’s something which that discussion might address if the time comes.

Finally, I’ve spent the last year reading Light Rains Sometimes Fall one micro-season at a time. We’ve been exploring our local patch at the same time as reading about his, and it’s been great to compare the two as the year has progressed (“The act of noticing, once undertaken, makes you realise how little of your life you’ve spent looking – really looking”). I’m very jealous of his peregrines and dunnocks. There are good jokes:

You’ll see crows with chips in their beaks; you might also see them dropping molluscs or nuts from a great height to smash them open. You wouldn’t bet against them perpetrating a basic phishing scam against the elderly.

Fun writing:

She is there, on the nest. A minute’s looking and I find the father, up and to the left, alertness birdified.

Even the sight of one swift squiggling around high above the house like an excitable parenthesis has me craning my neck to watch.

Ways to see:

The mind wanders, thinks odd, disturbing, circular thoughts. To keep it on the straight and narrow I set it little tasks, observational homework. Go for a walk and look for square things. Or smooth things. Or green things.

And much to empathise with:

I’m familiar with scattery movements. They’re the bane of my life. Because once you’ve seen one you’re obliged by the laws of nature-watching to see where it takes you, and where it takes you is often peering into a mass of foliage, waiting for it to repeat itself.

Nine books finished this month, five by women/POC and five in German, for a total of 66 for the half-year (124 for the year).

• Kleine Chronik Vier Erzählungen — Stefan Zweig
• Auf See — Theresia Enzensberger
• The Miracle Shed — Philip MacCann
• Landgericht — Ursula Krechel
• March Moonlight — Dorothy M. Richardson
• FLEXEN: Flâneusen schreiben Städte — Özlem Özgül Dündar et al.
• Tiere für Fortgeschrittene — Eva Menasse
• Hummingbird Salamander — Jeff Vandermeer
• Watchmen — Alan Moore

Starting with the short stories, I bought The Miracle Shed some time in the 90s, was blown away by the style when I started reading it, but then found it heavy-going and never finished it. A quarter of a century later, I’m very glad to have read the whole thing: the style perhaps dominates the content, and it’s not always clear what meaning (if any) lies behind it, but the puzzles don’t make it any less interesting or enjoyable.

Tiere für Fortgeschrittene also has some puzzles — each story is prefaced by a short account of a particular animal’s special feature, which in some way relates to the story itself. The relationship is often obscure, to me at least, but it gives the reader something to think about even after the book is closed. I found the length of the stories somewhat unwieldy — they’re generally about the 30 page mark, which requires a certain time commitment, but I appreciated the depth Menasse was able to go into in each one.

Stefan Zweig’s Kleine Chronik Vier Erzählungen was also very enjoyable, combining dark romanticism with the encroaching modernity of the early 20th century. The first and last stories, Die unsichtbare Sammlung and Buchmendel, are each about artistic devotion of different kinds, and were particularly striking for me.

My only non-fiction book this month was Flexen, a collection of texts by a diverse group of writers (mostly women, often POC) on their relationship with the city: we see how their experiences differ from those of the classic middle-class, white male flâneur, and how they deal with it. In India, for example, an activist flâneuse pointedly spends time outdoors:

Bei ihrer ersten Aktion vor vier Jahren legte sich Neha Singh gemeinsam mit einer Freundin mittags in einen Park im bürgerlichen Teil des Vorortes Kandivali, um dort auf der Grasmatte ein Nickerchen zu halten.

While in the Islamic world:

Kann eine verschleierte Frau mit Kind an der Hand eine Flâneuse sein?
Kann ein Mädchen an der Hand seiner Mutter eine Flâneuse sein?

The two German novels this month were both audiobooks: Landgericht reminded me of Anne Weber’s Ein Heldinnenepos in its focus on the post-war life of those who have had extraordinary wartime experiences. In both there is an element of the seemingly unstructured which gives an added sense of realism.

Auf See was in some respects right up my street — near future dystopian sci-fi, set near my part of Germany — and the societies depicted (a dilapidated seastead in the Baltic, reminiscent of the base in Solaris, and a Berlin trying to recover from various calamities) were intriguing. I had several problems with it: we’re frequently told how charismatic one of the main characters is, without any particular evidence; the plot hinges on some rather forced coincidences and parallelisms; and the author was not the ideal choice to read the audiobook. I’m interested enough to read more by her, at least.

Hummingbird Salamander was another audiobook that I had some problems getting into, partly due to the narrator, but partly also my fault (leaving too long between listenings to keep the story in mind). After the halfway point I was much more caught up in it, and I enjoyed spending time with the non-standard protagonist.

Graphic novel for the month was Watchmen, and it’s fantastic. As with Sandman, it’s good to catch up (OK, I’m still 30 years behind) with a whole area of culture I’d previously neglected. Fortunately there’s more Sandman and more Moore to work my way through.

Final instalment of Pilgrimage! March Moonlight is fragmentary, and doesn’t provide nearly as satisfactory an ending as Dimple Hill did. But there are some lovely bits of writing that I wouldn’t be without:

Great bits:

during the dark months, all the doings of the light, half of whose pageant, in the height of summer, must daily be missed, fall well within the waking hours

Hurrying almost the length of the long platform in search of corner seats, finding in every carriage just four men screened by opened newspapers, we meekly took windowless middle places and sat, unnoticed, in hilarious silence

darkness might bring a kind of unity. As does even a deep twilight as it enters, late on a summer’s evening, a roomful of contestants. Host and guest in one, it can be felt at work reconciling differences, transforming each sitter into an almost invisible fellow-traveller within the mystery of space and producing, as it deepens, first a lowering of voices and presently a silence so nearly complete as to impel the arrival of the blindingly brilliant indoor light.

the incident of that winter’s morning when the husband, to prevent her going, with a heavy cold, to early Mass, locked the wardrobe containing all her hats, only to see her, a little later, sailing down the road with her small head supporting his large bowler, draped elegantly with a white veil.

Miriam being Miriam:

Only in silence, in complete self-possession, possession of the inwardness of being, can lovers fully meet. An enthusiastic vocal engagement is a farewell. Marriage usually a separation, life-long?

Glimpses of M’s relationship with her sisters:

Sally knew, had known all her life, Mim’s tiresome insistence on thought and now, at this date, if one were to produce what one had in mind, she would think to herself: ‘That’s the sort of thing that keeps you without a home.’

M realises that Harriett is also a person, but in the next paragraph totally fails to understand her life choices:

And for the first time I realized that my porch was Harriett’s also.

There she was, gazing, in solitude, into her own life, realizing it as it slipped, with the approach of marriage, away into the past, realizing that soon it would be inaccessible.

End of year greatest hits:

• Pilgrimage (13 for one offer)
• Second-hand Time — Svetlana Alexievich tr. Bela Shayevich
• Dunkelblum — Eva Menasse
• The Books of Jacob — Olga Tokarczuk tr. Jennifer Croft
• Die Fremde — Claudia Durastanti tr. Annette Kopetzki
• A Manual for Cleaning Women — Lucia Berlin
• What I Don’t Know About Animals — Jenny Diski
• Der Trost Runder Dinge — Clemens J. Setz
• Der andere Name (Heptalogie I – II) — Jon Fosse tr. Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel
• Wenn es dunkel wird — Peter Stamm
• blues in schwarz weiss | nachtgesang — May Ayim
• Zur See — Dörte Hansen

Plans for the next six months:

• French month, starting a reading of Proust;
• South American month (or possible one Portuguese, one Spanish);
• Japanese month;
• non-fiction month;
• continue with a graphic novel a month;
• at least half women/POC each month;
• at least four a month in German on average;
• read the plays and poetry I neglected this time.