#WITMonth, II: Bélem, Blažević, Enríquez, Lebda, Pacheco and Yu (#17 of 20 Books)
Catching up with my Women in Translation month coverage, which concluded (after Part I, here) with five more short novels ranging from historical realism to animal-oriented allegory, plus a travel book.
The Rarest Fruit, or The Life of Edmond Albius by Gaëlle Bélem (2023; 2025)
[Translated from French by Hildegarde Serle]
A fictionalized biography, from infancy to deathbed, of the Black botanist who introduced the world to vanilla – then a rare and expensive flavour – by discovering that the plant can be hand-pollinated in the same way as pumpkins. In 1829, the island colony of Bourbon (now the French overseas department Réunion) has just been devastated by a cyclone when widowed landowner Ferréol Bellier-Beaumont is brought the seven-week-old orphaned son of one of his sister’s enslaved women. Ferréol, who once hunted rare orchids, raises the boy as his ward. From the start, Edmond is most at home in the garden and swears he will follow in his guardian’s footsteps as a botanist. Bélem also traces Ferréol’s history and the origins of vanilla in Mexico. The inclusion of Creole phrases and the various uses of plants, including for traditional healing, chimed with Jason Allen-Paisant’s Jamaica-set The Possibility of Tenderness, and I was reminded somewhat of the historical picaresque style of Slave Old Man (Patrick Chamoiseau) and The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho (Paterson Joseph). The writing is solid but the subject matter so niche that this was a skim for me.
With thanks to Europa Editions, who sent an advanced e-copy for review.
In Late Summer by Magdalena Blažević (2022; 2025)
[Translated from Croatian by Anđelka Raguž]
“My name is Ivana. I lived for fourteen summers, and this is the story of my last.” Blažević’s debut novella presents the before and after of one extended family, and of the Bosnian countryside, in August 1993. In the first half, few-page vignettes convey the seasonality of rural life as Ivana and her friend Dunja run wild. Mother and Grandmother slaughter chickens, wash curtains, and treat the children for lice. Foodstuffs and odours capture memory in that famous Proustian way. I marked out the piece “Camomile Flowers” for its details of the senses: “Sunlight and the scent of soap mingle. … The pantry smells like it did before, of caramel, lemon rind and vanilla sugar. Like the period leading up to Christmas. … My hair dries quickly in the sun. It rustles like the lace, dry snow from the fields.” The peaceful beauty of it all is shattered by the soldiers’ arrival. Ivana issues warnings (“Get ready! We’re running out of time. The silence and summer lethargy will not last long”) and continues narrating after her death. As in Sara Nović’s Girl at War, the child perspective contrasts innocence and enthusiasm with the horror of war. I found the first part lovely but the whole somewhat aimless because of the bitty structure.
With thanks to Linden Editions for the free copy for review.
Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys by Mariana Enríquez (2013; 2025)
[Translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell]
This made it onto my Most Anticipated list for the second half of the year due to my love of graveyards. Because of where Enríquez is from, a lot of the cemeteries she features are in Argentina (six) or other Spanish-speaking countries (another six including Chile, Cuba, Mexico, Peru and Spain). There are 10 more locations besides, and her journeys go back as far as 1997 in Genoa, when she was 25 and had sex with Enzo up against a gravestone. I took the most interest in those I have been to (Edinburgh) or could imagine myself travelling to someday (New Orleans and Savannah; Highgate in London and Montparnasse in Paris), but thought that every chapter got bogged down in research. Enríquez writes horror, so she is keen to visit at night and relay any ghost stories she’s heard. But the pages after pages of history were dull and outweighed the memoir and travel elements for me, so after a few chapters I ended up just skimming. I’ll keep this on my Kindle in case I go to one of her other destinations in the future and can read individual essays on location. (Edelweiss download)
Voracious by Małgorzata Lebda (2016; 2025)
[Translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones]
Like the Blažević, this is an impressionistic, pastoral work that contrasts vitality and decay in short chapters of one to three pages. The narrator is a young woman staying in her grandmother’s house and caring for her while she is dying of cancer; “now is not the time for life. Death – that’s what fills my head. I’m at its service. Grandma is my child. I am my grandmother’s mother. And that’s all right, I think.” The house has just four inhabitants – the narrator, Grandma Róża, Grandpa, and Ann – and seems permeable: to the cold, to nature. Animals play a large role, whether pets, farmed or wild. There’s Danube the hound, the cows delivered to the nearby slaughterhouse, and a local vixen with whom the narrator identifies.
Lebda is primarily known as a poet, and her delight in language is evident. One piece titled “Opioid,” little more than a paragraph long, revels in the power of language: “Grandma brings a beautiful word home … the word not only resonates, but does something else too – it lets light into the veins.” The wind is described as “the conscience of the forest. It’s the circulatory system. It’s the litany. It’s scented. It sings.”
In all three Linden Editions books I’ve read, the translator’s afterword has been particularly illuminating. I thought I was missing something, but Lloyd-Jones reassured me it’s unclear who Ann is: sister? friend? lover? (I was sure I spotted some homoerotic moments.) Lloyd-Jones believes she’s the mirror image of the narrator, leaning toward life while the narrator – who has endured sexual molestation and thyroid problems – tends towards death. The animal imagery reinforces that dichotomy.
The narrator and Ann remark that it feels like Grandma has been ill for a million years, but they also never want this time to end. The novel creates that luminous, eternal present. It was the best of this bunch.
With thanks to Linden Editions for the free copy for review.
Full review forthcoming for Foreword Reviews:
Pandora by Ana Paula Pacheco (2023; 2025)
[Translated from Portuguese by Julia Sanches]
The Brazilian author’s bold novella is a startling allegory about pandemic-era hazards to women’s physical and mental health. Since the death of her partner Alice to Covid-19, Ana has been ‘married’ to a pangolin and a seven-foot-tall bat. At a psychiatrist’s behest, she revisits her childhood and interrogates the meanings of her relationships. The form varies to include numbered sections, the syllabus for Ana’s course “Is Literature a personal investment?”, journal entries, and extended fantasies. Depictions of animals enable commentary on economic inequalities and gendered struggles. Playful, visceral, intriguing.
#17 of my 20 Books of Summer:
Invisible Kitties by Yu Yoyo (2021; 2024)
[Translated from Chinese by Jeremy Tiang]
Yu is the author of four poetry collections; her debut novel blends autofiction and magic realism with its story of a couple adjusting to the ways of a mysterious cat. They have a two-bedroom flat on a high-up floor of a complex, and Cat somehow fills the entire space yet disappears whenever the woman goes looking for him. Yu’s strategy in most of these 60 mini-chapters is to take behaviours that will be familiar to any cat owner and either turn them literal through faux-scientific descriptions, or extend them into the fantasy realm. So a cat can turn into a liquid or gaseous state, a purring cat is boiling an internal kettle, and a cat planted in a flowerbed will produce more cats. Some of the stories are whimsical and sweet, like those imagining Cat playing extreme sports, opening a massage parlour, and being the god of the household. Others are downright gross and silly: Cat’s removed testicles become “Cat-Ball Planets” and the narrator throws up a hairball that becomes Kitten. Mixed feelings, then. (Passed on by Annabel – thank you!)
I’m really pleased with myself for covering a total of 8 books for this challenge, each one translated from a different language!
Which of these would you read?
20 Books of Summer, 8: Au Revoir, Tristesse by Viv Groskop
This is a substitute I picked out as a potential (now belated) #ParisinJuly2025 contribution. There’s been little time for writing over the past week while we’ve been hosting my sister and brother-in-law. Their whirlwind trip was shortened by a day due to a cancelled flight from the States, but we managed to pack in a lot, including a two-night mini-break down in Devon.
Reminiscent of Something to Declare by Julian Barnes and How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton, this is a lighthearted tour through a dozen great works of French literature and the lessons they might offer modern readers on how to live well. Ever since her school days of studying French and spending every family holiday in France, Groskop has been obsessed with the language and culture. In most of the chapters, she undertakes a rereading of a novel she first read as a teenager or Cambridge student, marveling at how much more she gets out of it with greater life experience.
Although her choices are indisputable classics, she acknowledges they can only ever be an incomplete and biased selection, unfortunately all white and largely male, though she opens with Bonjour Tristesse and also includes Colette and Duras novels. I’d only read three of her dozen, in translation: along with the Sagan, Dangerous Liaisons and Madame Bovary (as well as other books by two of the additional authors), but it didn’t make much difference whether I was familiar with a plot or not. So long as one is not allergic to spoilers, it’s possible to enjoy these miniature essays’ witty combination of literary criticism, biographical information, self-help messaging, and a bit of autobiographical context.
The male writers tended to be syphilitic workaholics – Balzac is reputed to have drunk 50 cups of coffee per day to sustain his output – while the women flouted social conventions by drinking, taking much younger (and/or female) lovers and driving recklessly. While the subtitle promises “Lessons in Happiness,” from Hugo to Camus these are in fact pretty miserable narratives in which, as was especially common in the 19th century, protagonists are punished for ambition or transgressions, or never reach contentment because of self-delusion.
In boiling down each plot to one line of advice for a chapter title, Groskop’s tone alternates between earnest (“Our greatest weaknesses conceal our greatest strengths” = Cyrano de Bergerac) and tongue in cheek (“Social climbing rarely pays off, but you’ll probably want to do it anyway” = Le Rouge et le Noir). She describes the works with genuine affection and clearly believes they are still worth reading, yet isn’t afraid to question those aspects that have aged less well. Controversially, she suggests being selective with Proust’s mammoth oeuvre: “skim-read, rereading the passages you fall in love with and discarding the rest.” She also surveys how the stories live on through adaptations. Of the new-to-me, I’m most drawn to Bel-Ami but also fancy La Cousine Bette. This was a delight I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to fellow Francophiles. (New purchase – remainder from Hay Cinema Bookshop) 
May Releases, Part II (Fiction): Le Blevennec, Lynch, Puchner, Stanley, Ullmann, and Wald
A cornucopia of May novels, ranging from novella to doorstopper and from Montana to Tunisia; less of a spread in time: only the 1980s to now. Just a paragraph on each to keep things simple. I’ll catch up soon with May nonfiction and poetry releases I read.
Friends and Lovers by Nolwenn Le Blevennec (2023; 2025)
[Translated from French by Madeleine Rogers]
Armelle, Rim, and Anna are best friends – the first two since childhood. They formed a trio a decade or so ago when they worked on the same magazine. Now in their mid-thirties, partnered and with children, they’re all gripped by a sexual “great awakening” and long to escape Paris and their domestic commitments – “we went through it, this mutiny, like three sisters,” poised to blow up the “perfectly executed choreography of work, relationships, children”. The friends travel to Tunisia together in December 2014, then several years later take a completely different holiday: a disaster-prone stay in a lighthouse-keeper’s cottage on an island off the coast of Brittany. They used to tolerate each other’s foibles and infidelities, but now resentment has sprouted up, especially as Armelle (the narrator) is writing a screenplay about female friendship that’s clearly inspired by Rim and Anna. Armelle is relatably neurotic (a hilarious French blurb for the author’s previous novel is not wrong: “Woody Allen meets Annie Ernaux”) and this is wise about intimacy and duplicity, yet I never felt invested in any of the three women or sufficiently knowledgeable about their lives.
With thanks to Peirene Press for the free copy for review.
A Family Matter by Claire Lynch
“The fluke of being born at a slightly different time, or in a slightly different place, all that might gift you or cost you.” At events for Small, Lynch’s terrific memoir about how she and her wife had children, women would speak up about how different their experience had been. Lesbians born just 10 or 20 years earlier didn’t have the same options. Often, they were in heterosexual marriages because that’s all they knew to do; certainly the only way they thought they could become mothers. In her research into divorce cases in the UK in the 1980s, Lynch learned that 90% of lesbian mothers lost custody of their children. Her aim with this earnest, delicate debut novel, which bounces between 2022 and 1982, is to imagine such a situation through close portraits of Heron, an ageing man with terminal cancer; his daughter, Maggie, who in her early forties bears responsibility for him and her own children; and Dawn, who loved Maggie desperately but felt when she met Hazel that she was “alive at last, at twenty-three.” How heartbreaking that Maggie knew only that her mother abandoned her when she was little; not until she comes across legal documents and newspaper clippings does she understand the circumstances. Lynch made the wise decision to invite sympathy for Heron from the start, so he doesn’t become the easy villain of the piece. Her compassion, and thus ours, is equal for all three characters. This confident, tender story of changing mores and steadfast love is the new Carol for our times. (Such a lovely but low-key novel was liable to make few ripples, so I’m delighted for Lynch that the U.S. release got a Read with Jenna endorsement.)
With thanks to Chatto & Windus (Penguin) for the proof copy for review.
Dream State by Eric Puchner
If it starts and ends with a wedding, it must be a comedy. If much of the in between is marked by heartbreak, betrayal, failure, and loss, it must be a tragedy. If it stretches towards 2050 and imagines a Western USA smothered in smoke from near-constant forest fires, it must be an environmental dystopian. Somehow, this novel is all three. The first 163 pages are pure delight: a glistening romantic comedy about the chaos surrounding Charlie and Cece’s wedding at his family’s Montana lake house in the summer of 2004. First half the wedding party falls ill with norovirus, then Charlie’s best friend, Garrett (who’s also the officiant), falls in love with the bride. Do I sound shallow if I admit this was the section I enjoyed the most? The rest of this Oprah’s Book Club doorstopper examines the fallout of this uneasy love triangle. Charlie is an anaesthesiologist, Cece a bookstore owner, and Garrett a wolverine researcher in Glacier National Park, which is steadily losing its wolverines and its glaciers. The next generation comes of age in a diminished world, turning to acting or addiction. There are still plenty of lighter moments: funny set-pieces, warm family interactions, private jokes and quirky descriptions. But this feels like an appropriately grown-up vision of idealism ceding to a reality we all must face. I struggled with a lack of engagement with the children, but loved Puchner’s writing so much on the sentence level that I will certainly seek out more of his work. Imagine this as a cross between Jonathan Franzen and Maggie Shipstead.
With thanks to Sceptre (Hodder) for the proof copy for review.
Consider Yourself Kissed by Jessica Stanley
Coralie is nearing 30 when her ad agency job transfers her from Australia to London in 2013. Within a few pages, she meets Adam when she rescues his four-year-old, Zora, from a lake. That Adam and Coralie will be together is never really in question. But over the next decade of personal and political events, we wonder whether they have staying power – and whether Coralie, a would-be writer, will lose herself in soul-destroying work and motherhood. Adam’s job as a political journalist and biographer means close coverage of each UK election and referendum. As I’ve thought about some recent Jonathan Coe novels: These events were so depressing to live through, who would want to relive them through fiction? I also found this overlong and drowning in exclamation points. Still, it’s so likable, what with Coralie’s love of literature (the title is from The Group) and adjustment to expat life without her mother; and secondary characters such as Coralie’s brother Daniel and his husband, Adam’s prickly mother and her wife, and the mums Coralie meets through NCT classes. Best of all, though, is her relationship with Zora. This falls solidly between literary fiction and popular/women’s fiction. Given that I was expecting a lighter romance-led read, it surprised me with its depth. It may well be for you if you’re a fan of Meg Mason and David Nicholls.
With thanks to Hutchinson Heinemann for the proof copy for review.
Girl, 1983 by Linn Ullmann (2021; 2025)
[Translated from Norwegian by Martin Aitken]
Ullmann is the daughter of actress Liv Ullmann and film director Ingmar Bergman. That pedigree perhaps accounts for why she got the opportunity to travel to Paris in the winter of 1983 to model for a renowned photographer. She was 16 at the time and spent the whole trip disoriented: cold, hungry, lost. Unable to retrace the way to her hotel and wearing a blue coat and red hat, she went to the only address she knew – that of the photographer, K, who was in his mid-forties. Their sexual relationship is short-lived and unsurprising, at least in these days of #MeToo revelations. Its specifics would barely fill a page, yet the novel loops around and through the affair for more than 250. Ullmann mostly pulls this off thanks to the language of retrospection. She splits herself both psychically and chronologically. There’s a “you” she keeps addressing, a childhood imaginary friend who morphs into a critical voice of conscience and then the self dissociated from trauma. And there’s the 55-year-old writer looking back with empathy yet still suffering the effects. The repetition made this something of a sombre slog, though. It slots into a feminist autofiction tradition but is not among my favourite examples.
With thanks to Hamish Hamilton (Penguin) for the proof copy for review.
The Bayrose Files by Diane Wald
In the 1980s, Boston journalist Violet Maris infiltrates the Provincetown Home for Artists and Writers, intending to write a juicy insider’s exposé of what goes on at this artists’ colony. But to get there she has to commit a deception. Her gay friend Spencer Bayrose has a whole sheaf of unpublished short stories drawing on his Louisiana upbringing, and he offers to let her submit them as her own work to get a place at PHAW. Here Violet finds eccentrics aplenty, and even romance, but when news comes that Spence has AIDS, she has to decide how far she’ll go for a story and what she owes her friend. At barely over 100 pages, this feels more like a long short story, one with a promising setting and a sound plot arc, but not enough time to get to know or particularly care about the characters. I was reminded of books I’ve read by Julia Glass and Sara Maitland. It’s offbeat and good-natured but not top tier.
Published by Regal House Publishing. With thanks to publicist Jackie Karneth of Books Forward for the advanced e-copy for review.
A Family Matter was the best of the bunch for me, followed closely by Dream State.
Which of these do you fancy reading?
Carol Shields Prize Reads: Pale Shadows & All Fours
Later this evening, the Carol Shields Prize will be announced at a ceremony in Chicago. I’ve managed to read two more books from the shortlist: a sweet, delicate story about the women who guarded Emily Dickinson’s poems until their posthumous publication; and a sui generis work of autofiction that has become so much a part of popular culture that it hardly needs an introduction. Different as they are, they have themes of women’s achievements, creativity and desire in common – and so I would be happy to see either as the winner (more so than Liars, the other one I’ve read, even though that addresses similar issues). Both: 
Pale Shadows by Dominique Fortier (2022; 2024)
[Translated from French by Rhonda Mullins]
This is technically a sequel to Paper Houses, which is about Emily Dickinson, but I had no trouble reading this before its predecessor. In an Author’s Note at the end, Fortier explains how, during the first Covid summer, she was stalled on multiple fiction projects and realized that all she wanted was to return to Amherst, Massachusetts – even though her subject was now dead. The poet’s presence and language haunt the novel as the characters (which include the author) wrestle over her words. The central quartet comprises Lavinia, Emily’s sister; Susan, their brother Austin’s wife; Mabel, Austin’s mistress; and Millicent, Mabel’s young daughter. Mabel is to assist with editing the higgledy-piggledy folder of handwritten poems into a volume fit for publication. Thomas Higginson’s clear aim is to tame the poetry through standardized punctuation, assigned titles, and thematic groupings. But the women are determined to let Emily’s unruly genius shine through.
The short novel rotates through perspectives as the four collide and retreat. Susan and Millicent connect over books. Mabel considers this project her own chance at immortality. At age 54, Lavinia discovers that she’s no longer content with baking pies and embarks on a surprising love affair. And Millicent perceives and channels Emily’s ghost. The writing is gorgeous, full of snow metaphors and the sorts of images that turn up in Dickinson’s poetry. It’s a lovely tribute that mingles past and present in a subtle meditation on love and legacy.
Some favourite lines:
“Emily never writes about any one thing or from any one place; she writes from alongside love, from behind death, from inside the bird.”
“Maybe this is how you live a hundred lives without shattering everything; maybe it is by living in a hundred different texts. One life per poem.”
“What Mabel senses and Higginson still refuses to see is that Emily only ever wrote half a poem; the other half belongs to the reader, it is the voice that rises up in each person as a response. And it takes these two voices, the living and the dead, to make the poem whole.”
With thanks to The Carol Shields Prize Foundation for the free e-copy for review.
All Fours by Miranda July (2024)
Miranda July’s The First Bad Man is one of the first books I ever reviewed on this blog back in 2015, after an unsolicited review copy came my way. It was so bizarre that I didn’t plan to ever read anything else by her, but I was drawn in by the hype machine and started this on my Kindle in September, later switching to a library copy when I got stuck at 65%. The narrator sets off on a road trip from Los Angeles to New York to prove to her husband, Harris, that she’s a Driver, not a Parker. But after 20 minutes she pulls off the highway and ends up at a roadside motel. She blows $20,000 on having her motel room decorated in the utmost luxury and falls for Davey, a younger man who works for a local car rental chain – and happens to be married to the decorator. In his free time, he’s a break dancer, so the narrator decides to choreograph a stunning dance to prove her love and capture his attention.
I got bogged down in the ridiculous details of the first two-thirds, as well as in the kinky stuff that goes on (with Davey, because neither of them is willing to technically cheat on a spouse; then with the women partners the narrator has after she and Harris decide on an open marriage). However, all throughout I had been highlighting profound lines; the novel is full to bursting with them (“maybe the road split between: a life spent longing vs. a life that was continually surprising”). I started to appreciate the story more when I thought of it as archetypal processing of women’s life experiences, including birth trauma, motherhood and perimenopause, and as an allegory for attaining an openness of outlook. What looks like an ending (of career, marriage, sexuality, etc.) doesn’t have to be.
Whereas July’s debut felt quirky for the sake of it, showing off with its deadpan raunchiness, I feel that here she is utterly in earnest. And, weird as the book may be, it works. It’s struck a chord with legions, especially middle-aged women. I remember seeing a Guardian headline about women who ditched their lives after reading All Fours. I don’t think I’ll follow suit, but I will recommend you read it and rethink what you want from life. It’s also on this year’s Women’s Prize shortlist. I suspect it’s too divisive to win either, but it certainly would be an edgy choice. (NetGalley/Public library)
(My full thoughts on both longlists are here.) The other two books on the Carol Shields Prize shortlist are River East, River West by Aube Rey Lescure and Code Noir by Canisia Lubrin, about which I know very little. In its first two years, the Prize was awarded to women of South Asian extraction. Somehow, I can’t see the jury choosing one of three white women when it could be a Black woman (Lubrin) instead. However, Liars and All Fours feel particularly zeitgeist-y. I would be disappointed if the former won because of its bitter tone, though Manguso is an undeniable talent. Pale Shadows? Pure literary loveliness, if evanescent. But honouring a translation would make a statement, too. I’ll find out in the morning!
Carol Shields Prize Longlist Reading: The Future and Chrysalis
My first two dedicated reads for our informal Carol Shields Prize shadowing project exhibit one main way in which the prize is different from the Women’s Prize for Fiction: works in translation and short story collections are eligible. I have one of each to review today. Laura and I did a buddy read of an atmospheric dystopian novel translated from the French, and I caught up on a magical, erotic story collection I’d had on my Kindle for a long time. These were both very good, but my minor misgivings are such that I’d rate them the same: 
The Future by Catherine Leroux (2020; 2023)
[Translated from the French by Susan Ouriou]
For such a monolithic title, this has a limited stage: a few derelict districts of the ailing city we know as Detroit, Michigan – but in Leroux’s alternate version, it remained part of French Canada, with lingering Indigenous influence, and so is known as Fort Détroit. No doubt she was inspired by the many vacant properties that characterized Detroit in the 2010s; there’s even a ruins tour bus. In her Fort Détroit, a handful of determined adults cling on in their own homes, but the streets and parks have been abandoned to animals and to a gang of half-feral children who have developed their own nicknames (Adidas, Lego, Wolfpup), social hierarchy and vernacular. Worlds meet when Gloria determines to find her granddaughters Cassandra and Mathilda, who ran away after their addict mother Judith’s suspicious death. At the same time, her neighbour Eunice wants to find out who ran her father down in the street.
Despite their fierce independence and acts of protest, the novel’s children still rely on the adult world. Ecosystems are awry and the river is toxic, but Gloria’s friend Solomon, a former jazz pianist, still manages to grow crops. He overlooks the children’s thefts from his greenhouse and eventually offers to help them grow their own food supply, and other adults volunteer to prepare a proper winter shelter to replace their shantytown. Puberty threatens their society, too: we learn that Fiji, the leader, has been binding her breasts to hide her age.
I expected to be reminded strongly of Station Eleven, and while there were elements that were reminiscent of Emily St John Mandel’s work, Leroux’s is a more consciously literary approach. The present-tense omniscient narration occupies many perspectives, including that of a dog, and the descriptions and musings are more lyrical than literal. Where another author would site high drama – sixtysomething Gloria’s night quest, a few children rafting down the river – Leroux moves on swiftly to other character interactions. What did bring Mandel to mind was the importance of art during societal collapse: the children spin nursery rhyme mash-ups and fairytales, Stutt rescues a makeshift library and insists on Huckleberry Finn going along on the river journey, and Solomon plays the piano again after decades.
The opening mysteries of death and disappearance are resolved before the end, but don’t seem to have been the point. The Future is more subtle and slippery than many dystopian novels I’ve read in that there’s not really a warning, or a message here. Instead, there’s an intriguing situation that opens out and alters slightly, but avoids resolution. It’s all about atmosphere and language – I was especially impressed by Ouriou’s rendering of Leroux’s made-up dialect via folksy slang (“She figgers she’s growed-up”). I loved the details and one-on-one moments more than the momentous scenes. On the whole, I found the story elegant but somewhat frustrating. You might be drawn to it if you enjoyed To Paradise or the MaddAddam books. (Read via Edelweiss; published by Biblioasis)
See also Laura’s review.
Chrysalis: Stories by Anuja Varghese (2023)
This debut collection of 15 stories brims with magic and horror, and teems with women of colour and queer people. Indeed, Varghese dedicates the book to “all the girls and women who don’t see themselves in most stories.” Most of the characters are of South Asian extraction. Adoption recurs in a couple of places. Two of the rarer realist stories, “Milk” and “Stories in the Language of the Fist,” have protagonists dealing with schoolgirl bullying and workplace microaggressions. More often, there are unexplained phenomena that position the players between life and death. “In the Bone Fields” focuses on the twin daughters of an Indian immigrant family on a Canadian farm. The house and the bone field behind are active and hungry, and only one twin will survive. (I got mild North Woods vibes.)
In the title story, Radhika visits her mother’s grave and wonders whether her life is here in Montreal with her lover or back in Toronto with her husband. Fangs and wings symbolize her desire for independence. Elsewhere, watery metaphors alternately evoke fear of drowning or sexual fluidity. “Midnight at the Oasis” charts the transformation of a trans woman and “Cherry Blossom Fever,” one of my two favourites, bounces between several POVs. Marjan is in love with Talia, but she’s married to Sunil, who’s also in love with Silas. “People do it — open their relationships and negotiate rules and write themselves into polyamorous fairy tales … Other people. Not brown people,” Talia sighs. They are better off, at least, than they would be back in India, where homophobia can be deadly (“The Vetala’s Song”).
My other favourite was “Bhupati,” about a man who sets up multiple Lakshmi figures in the backyard, hoping devotion will earn him and his wife a better future. The statues keep being burned up by lightning; we learn his wife may be petitioning for different things. “Chitra” is a straightforward Cinderella retelling whose title character lives with two mean stepsisters and works in food service at the mall. A Shoe Chateau BOGO closing sale gives her the chance to get a bargain – and catch the manager’s eye. Despite a striking ending signalled by the story’s subtitle, all I could conclude about this one was “cute.” The three flash horror stories (a murder hotel, ghosts in a basement, werewolves) were much the weakest for me.
There’s a pretty even split of third- and first-person stories (nine versus six) here, and the genre shifts frequently. The quality wasn’t as consistent as I’d hoped, but it was an engaging read. The overall blend of feminism and horror had me thinking of Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, but I’d be most likely to recommend this to fans of Julia Armfield, Violet Kupersmith and Vauhini Vara. (Read via Edelweiss; published by House of Anansi Press)
Both of these are worthwhile books and it’s great that readers outside of Canada can discover them. I wouldn’t personally shortlist either, but the judges may well be dazzled enough to do so. I don’t yet have a sense of where they’d fit for me in the rankings.
Up next:
Cocktail by Lisa Alward (short story collection from Edelweiss)
A Council of Dolls by Mona Susan Power (buddy read with Laura)
Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang (from library)
I’m aiming for one or two more batches of reviews before the shortlist is announced on 9 April.
Three Days in Paris and What I Read
My husband’s belated 40th birthday treat was a short city break in Paris earlier this week. No sooner had I gotten home on Tuesday than I was sealing up my suitcase to fly to the States the following afternoon. It’s been quite the whirlwind week (make that few months), but now that things have quieted down a little, I have a chance to look back on the long weekend’s eating, sightseeing and reading. I’d been to Paris twice before: once just for an overnight en route to Milan in 2019, while my first and only proper trip was in early 2004.
That time I did all the touristy things like the Eiffel Tower, the Musée d’Orsay (though not the Louvre), Notre Dame and the site of the Bastille. A sign of how times have changed: nearly 20 years ago when I was at Père Lachaise cemetery, you could go right up to Oscar Wilde’s grave and add your lip-print to the many kisses on it. (There’s a photo of me and my study abroad friend doing just that; I wish I’d had time to go dig it out of an album.) Today it’s walled off by Perspex with a note explaining that the family pay all the cleaning costs. To think that there are descendants of Wilde’s out there in the world! Still, a tiny letdown when it was such a cute ritual. We also visited Chopin and Balzac and took in the views.
The most touristy things we did this time around were Sainte-Chapelle, a marvel of medieval stained glass, and Shakespeare and Company, the famous English-language haunt of expats over the decades. Notre Dame is still closed for its extensive post-fire restoration (it’s due to reopen next year) but you can read some signboards about the reconstruction outside and sit on the bleachers to soak in the atmosphere. Our other destinations included the Hotel de Ville, lit up at night with a Christmas market to advertise the 2024 Olympics, and the Jardin des Plantes and its museum of paleontology and comparative anatomy – old-fashioned in just the way we like it, with row upon row of skeletons and lots of hand-inked original labels.
We were mostly in the city to eat, and eat we did. Many of our recommendations for boulangeries and patisseries came from American chef David Lebovitz’s blog. Although we did buy traditional baguettes and croissants, we were mostly on the lookout for unusual treats, such as hay-flavoured custard-filled choux buns and a famous maple syrup tart. We had one bistro meal and another at a creperie, this one incorporating Breton-Japanese fusion dishes such as my Breizh rolls, cut from a buckwheat galette filled with artichoke hearts, seaweed, scrambled egg and Comté cheese: a cross between a crêpe and sushi.
We enjoyed riding the Métro and by the time we left felt like pros at it. Speaking French to shopkeepers and waitstaff had also started to become second nature (I even managed to query errors in our order/bill twice at restaurants). The weather was showery and colder than expected, but never enough to spoil our experience, and we stole some good glimpses of the Tower from around the city.
But the highlight of the trip was something we stumbled upon and joined in on a whim. At Shakespeare and Company on our first full day, we spotted a sign for a free event they were hosting the next night: the recording of a podcast by comedian Greg Proops, followed by mince pies, mulled wine and carol singing.
We had never heard of Proops but thought we’d take a chance, so made our way back the next evening and got two of the last seats left in the back of the upstairs space. His monologue was funnier than expected, mostly a stringing together of in-jokes about national stereotypes of the English, Americans and French – but as we all know, clichés are amusing precisely because they contain grains of truth. He also had a few long anecdotes about getting eye surgery and running into a famous old film director in Paris. It sounds like this bookshop event is an annual tradition for him.
Best of all, afterwards the shop was technically closed but we were allowed to stay in – lock-in at the bookshop! They don’t normally allow photographs inside, but my husband managed to sneak a few plus some video of the carol singing. The mince pies, gingerbread and mulled wine were all tasty. Professor Lex Paulson at the piano led us in a marathon of 22 songs ranging from ancient traditionals (“O Come O Come Emmanuel” and “The Coventry Carol”) to recent pop (“Last Christmas” and “All I Want for Christmas Is You”); it must be said that there was more general enthusiasm for the latter, while my husband and I were among the few raring for “The Holly and the Ivy” and suchlike. A truly unforgettable evening.
I’d read one memoir of working and living in Shakespeare and Company, Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs by Jeremy Mercer (original title: Time Was Soft There), back in 2017. I don’t remember it being particularly special as bookish memoirs go, but if you want an insider’s look at the bookshop that’s one option. Founder Sylvia Beach herself also wrote a memoir. The best part of any trip is preparing what books to take and read. I had had hardly any time to plan what else to pack, and ended up unprepared for the cold, but I had my shelf of potential reads ready weeks in advance. I took The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery and read the first 88 pages before giving up. This story of several residents of the same apartment building, their families and sadness and thoughts, was reminiscent of Sophie’s World and didn’t grip me. But here’s what I did read, in chronological order (all: 
):
Broderies by Marjane Satrapi (2003)
The fifth-floor Airbnb apartment where we stayed in the suburb of Mairie des Lilas overlooked a school and housed an amazing collection of graphic novels in French. I picked this one up to flick through because I remember enjoying Persepolis, but to my surprise I could understand just about every line bar a very few vocabulary words that I skipped over or grasped in context, so I read the whole thing over a couple of breakfasts and evening glasses of wine.
After a dinner party, Marji helps her grandmother serve tea from a samovar to their female family friends, and the eight Iranian women swap stories about their love lives. These are sometimes funny, but mostly sad and slightly shocking tales about arranged marriages, betrayals, and going to great lengths to entrap or keep a man. They range from a woman who has birthed four children but never seen a penis to a mistress who tried to use mild witchcraft to get a marriage proposal. What is most striking is how standards of beauty and purity have endured in this culture, leading women to despair over their loss of youth and virginity.
I think the title may have some slang meaning relating to the hymen? But in English translation it is Embroideries, referring to the way these women stitch together their life stories and their relationships. All the scenes are in black and white with a readable cursive handwriting for the plentiful text. It was a more talky graphic novel than I tend to prefer, but I learned a lot of good phrases from it, and found it a real joy to read. It must be the first book I have read in French since my university days!
The Sweet Life in Paris by David Lebovitz (2009)
We both read this, keeping two bookmarks in and trading it off on Metro journeys. The short thematic chapters, interspersed with recipes, were perfect for short bursts of reading, and the places and meals he described often presaged what we experienced. His observations on the French, too, rang true for us. Why no shower curtains? Why so much barging and cutting in line? Parisians are notoriously rude and selfish, and France’s bureaucracy is something I’ve read about in multiple places this year, including John Lewis-Stempel’s La Vie.
Lebovitz has happily called the city home for two decades now, and performs culinary feats (testing the recipes for his dessert cookbooks) in a tiny apartment kitchen. There are sections here on fish, cheese, chocolate, and so on, but also on particular shopping areas and typically French incidents, such as everyone being on strike at the same time. One chapter was a hymn to G. Detou (a play on words meaning “I have it all”), a food emporium my husband was especially excited to visit. This was breezy and affectionate, a perfect travel companion.
A Waiter in Paris by Edward Chisholm (2022)
This was consciously based on George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, but more so than an exposé of working-class poverty and abuses of power in the restaurant world, it is a rollicking narrative of living hand to mouth and trying to gain acceptance as a waiter. I enjoyed it in much the same way that I did Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain and Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler: this is a high-stress, macho world I would never want to be a part of myself, but reading about it is intriguing. After Chisholm broke up with his girlfriend, he lived in a bedbug-ridden garret and often did 14-hour shifts as a runner at the “Bistrot de la Seine,” which packed in hundreds of tables and served thousands of meals daily. As “l’Anglais,” with no proper contract or social security, Chisholm was overlooked but determined to become a waiter. Though he felt fraternity with his colleagues, day-to-day life was brutal. He survived on coffee, cigarettes, and stolen rolls, and caught few-hour naps in the toilets of upscale restaurants. The waiters were cut-throat in their competition for tips, and the chefs, mostly Tamil, worked in a basement inferno. His pen portraits of these characters are particularly Orwellian. The account is as vivid and engrossing as a novel.
I forgot to start it while I was there, but did soon afterwards: The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl, forthcoming in early 2024. When Stella’s elegant, aloof mother Celia dies, she leaves her $8,000 – and instructions to go to Paris and not return to New York until she’s spent it all. At 2nd & Charles yesterday, I also picked up a clearance copy of A Paris All Your Own, an autobiographical essay collection edited by Eleanor Brown, to reread. I like to keep the spirit of a vacation alive a little longer, and books are one of the best ways to do that.
Summer Reads, Part II: Cocker, Kroon, Levy & Lewis-Stempel
(Part I was here, ICYMI.) Cooler days here as we say a drawn-out farewell to summer and welcome in early autumn; I’ve been seeing ripe blackberries and Vs of geese for a few weeks now. This batch of books I read from the library truly encapsulated summer: swifts flying overhead, cold lemonade as a reward for sticky outdoor activities, and travels through the confusing cities and inviting countryside of the Continent.
One Midsummer’s Day: Swifts and the Story of Life on Earth by Mark Cocker (2023)
We saw our last swift in Newbury somewhere around 13 August. The three and a half months they were with us passed in what felt like an instant, leaving us bereft until they come back.
Why is it that books seem to bunch together by topic, with several about Henry James or swifts or whatever all being published within the same year or few years? It’s unfortunate for Mark Cocker, a well-respected author on birds and environmental issues in general, that he is two years behind Charles Foster and Sarah Gibson with this work on swifts. I also think he attempts too much, in terms of both literary strategy and subject matter (see the second part of the subtitle), and so loses focus.
The book employs a circadian structure, recording what he sees from his garden from one midsummer evening to the next as he looks up at the sky. Within this framework he delivers a lot of information about the world’s swift species, a fair bit of it familiar to me from those previous books; more novel are his stories of remarkable sightings, like a vagrant white-throated needletail in the Outer Hebrides (it later died in a collision with a wind turbine). But he also tries to set swifts in the context of the grand sweep of evolution. I skipped over these sections, which felt superfluous. With his literary allusions, Cocker is aiming for something like Tim Dee’s exceptional Greenery but falls short.
This could have made a superb concentrated essay, maybe as part of a collection devoting each chapter to a different species, because his passion is clear and his metaphors excellent as he holds up swifts as an emblem of the aerial life, and of hope (“In a social screaming display these weaponised shapes blaze together as a black-swarming meteor in a widening orbit that burns over the houses or between them”). The few-page run-on sentence about how humanity has gotten itself into the climate crisis is pretty great (though Lev Parikian did so much more concisely in Into the Tangled Bank: It’s “f***ing f***ed”). But Foster has written the definitive tribute to swifts, The Screaming Sky, and in just 150 small pages. 
Rhubarb Lemonade by Oskar Kroon (2019; 2023)
[Translated from the Swedish by A. A. Prime]
This was like an update of The Summer Book by Tove Jansson: the delicious innocence of a Scandinavian island summer is threatened by change and, ultimately, death. Vinga is happy to escape her troubles for a simple island life with Grandpa. They eat the same foods day after day, do the same things week after week, and slowly work on refurbishing the wooden sailing boat he gave her. Ruth, the shopkeeper’s granddaughter, couldn’t be more different: she hates the sea, misses the city, and is fully immersed in social media and celebrity culture. Yet Vinga finds her captivating and tingles when she’s near. “Things would be so much easier if we’d never met. Things would be so much more boring if we’d never met.”
Prime won Sweden’s August Prize for this YA novel (spot the reference to The Murderer’s Ape, which won the same prize!). As will be familiar to regular readers of YA, we see Vinga dealing with issues like bullying, loneliness, body image, and family breakdown. She’s called back to the mainland to meet the baby her father has had by the new woman in his life – a trip that coincides with the worst storm the island has seen in ages and a chance for Grandpa to play the sea captain hero. But falling for Ruth, kissing a girl, is not a reason for angst. It’s just the way things are. Kroon makes no grand claim that this will be true love, forever. It’s a teen summer romance, and exaggerated by the cover. Maybe it will last; maybe it won’t. The deeper love is familial, particularly between Vinga and her grandfather. 
August Blue by Deborah Levy (2023)
My third novel from Levy, and a typically confounding one. The facts are simple enough: Elsa M. Anderson is a pianist who has had something of a breakdown. She retreats from giving concerts, dyes her hair blue, and bounces between European capitals in the later days of the pandemic, giving music lessons and caring for her mentor and adoptive father, Arthur, who’s dying on Sardinia. In between there are laughs and lovers, searching and sadness, all muffled by Elsa’s (Levy’s) matter-of-factness. Meanwhile, there’s a touch of the uncanny in the doppelganger Elsa keeps seeing. First, her double buys the carousel horses she had her eye on in Athens. Then Elsa steals her twin’s trilby hat. There’s a confrontation late on but it doesn’t seem to make much difference. The doubling appears to be a way of making literal the adopted Elsa’s divided self. I’m not entirely sure what to say about this one. I enjoyed reading it well enough. Though I never felt compelled to pick it up, when I did I easily got through several chapters at a time. But I’m not convinced it meant much.
La Vie: A Year in Rural France by John Lewis-Stempel (2023)
Lewis-Stempel’s best book in an age; my favourite, certainly, since Meadowland. I’m featuring it in a summer post because, like Peter Mayle’s Provence series, it’s ideal for armchair travelling. Especially with the heat waves that have swept Europe this summer, I’m much happier reading about France or Italy than being there. The author has written much about his Herefordshire haunts, but he’s now relocated permanently to southwest France (La Roche, in the Charente). He proudly calls himself a peasant farmer, growing what he can and bartering for much of the rest. La Vie chronicles a year in his quest to become self-sufficient. It opens one January and continues through the December, an occasional diary with recipes.
The family’s small-scale potager is organic agriculture at its best. He likens it to turning the clock back to the 1970s, or earlier, before England wrecked its countryside with industrial production. (His list of birds in the area is impressive, including some you’d be lucky to come across in the UK – turtledove, nightingale, stone curlew.) In fact, he estimates that his yield per square metre is triple what it was when he participated in that damaging system, for the same amount of work. His lifestyle is also a deliberate resistance to hyper-speed modernity: he scythes his grass, spends days preserving a haul of walnuts, and tries his hand at pressing oil and making spirits. There’s a make-do-and-mend attitude here: when his sheep-shearing equipment goes missing, he buys a beard trimmer at the supermarket and uses that instead.
It’s a peaceful, comforting read that’s attuned to the seasons and the land. There is also gentle mockery of the French with their bureaucracy and obsession with hunting, and self-deprecation of his own struggle to get his point across in a second language. I could never make a living by manual labour, but I like reading about back-to-the-land adventures, especially ones as bucolic as this – two-hour lunches, six-course dinners with homemade wine? Mais oui! 
Winter Reads, Part II: Elisa Shua Dusapin, Howard Norman & Picture Books
As hoped for in my first instalment of winter reads, the weather is warmer now and signs of spring are appearing in the form of cherry blossom, crocuses, daffodils, primroses and snowdrops. So I’m bidding a (perhaps premature) farewell to winter with these two novels featuring very chilly settings. I also borrowed from the library a big ol’ pile of wintry children’s books full of bears, rabbits, snowmen, snowballs and days off school.
Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin (2016; 2020)
[Daunt Books Originals; translated from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins]
Another title doing double duty for #FrenchFebruary and #ReadIndies month. This was Dusapin’s debut and won the Prix Robert Walser and the Prix Régine-Deforges.
Our beaches are still waiting for the end of a war that’s been going on for so long people have stopped believing it’s real. They build hotels, put up neon signs, but it’s all fake, we’re on a knife-edge, it could all give way any moment. We’re living in limbo. In a winter that never ends.
The protagonist is a young mixed-race woman working behind the reception desk at a hotel in Sokcho, a South Korean resort at the northern border. A tourist mecca in high season, during the frigid months this beach town feels down-at-heel, even sinister. The arrival of a new guest is a major event at the guesthouse. And not just any guest but Yan Kerrand, a French graphic novelist. Although she has a boyfriend and the middle-aged Kerrand is probably old enough to be her father – and thus an uncomfortable stand-in for her absent French father – the narrator is drawn to him. She accompanies him on sightseeing excursions but wants to go deeper in his life, rifling through his rubbish for scraps of work in progress.
The underemployed, self-sabotaging young woman is so familiar these days as to be a cliché (and I’d already met a very similar one, also Korean, in Ro from Sea Change by Gina Chung), but there is still something enticing about the atmosphere of this novella. I also enjoyed the narrator’s relationship with her mother, a fishmonger, which sets up for the entirely inconclusive and potentially very disturbing ending. Impossible to say more without spoilers, but I’d be interested to hear what others who have read it think will happen after the last page. (Birthday gift from my wish list) 
The Northern Lights by Howard Norman (1987)
Norman is a really underrated writer and I’m a big fan of The Bird Artist and especially I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place. This is a weird one; it’s his debut and you can see the autobiographical inspiration (per his Introduction) and the sorts of interests that would recur across his oeuvre, such as subarctic Canada and its Indigenous peoples, absent fathers and hotels (not the only reason this reminded me most of early John Irving).
The Canadian settings represent the two poles of isolation and the urban: Quill, Manitoba versus Toronto in 1959–60. The novel opens with the death of teenage Noah’s best friend, Pelly, who fell through a frozen lake while riding his unicycle. Noah’s family dynamic changes quickly, as his cousin Charlotte, orphaned by a factory disaster, comes to live with them and then his cartographer father leaves them to become a hermit in a remote cabin furnished with musical instruments. Noah stays with Pelly’s parents, Sam and Hettie (a Cree woman), to brave a harsh Quill winter –
January and February mornings you would get a crack of icy static in the nostrils when first stepping outside and have to shade your eyes against the harsh glint of snow, if the sun had worked its way through. Certain days neighbors were seen only on their way to their woodsheds. Chimney smoke was our windsocks. Enormous drifts had built up against the houses, sculpted in various shapes. Even brief walks were taken on snowshoes. Winter might be seven months long.
– while his mother, Mina, takes Charlotte to Toronto to run The Northern Lights, the movie theatre where she met her husband as a young woman. The previous alcoholic owner has run it into the ground; “the curtain smelled like a ten-thousand-year-old moose hide.”
At the time that Noah joins them, he’s never seen a movie before, but as “manager” of the theatre he soon sees The Magnificent Seven 15 times in quick succession. Norman does a peculiar thing here, which is to introduce a key character quite late on in the action. Noah hires Levon, a Cree man, to be the projectionist and he promptly moves his entire family into the building. Had Noah relocated to Toronto earlier, we might have seen more of these characters. Norman’s habit of mimicking broken speech from non-native speakers through overly frequent commas (indicating pauses, I suppose) irked me. There are lots of quirky elements here and I enjoyed the overall atmosphere, but felt the plot left something to be desired. I’d start elsewhere with Norman, but could still recommend this to readers of Robertson Davies and Elizabeth Hay. (Secondhand – 2nd & Charles)
And a DNF:
Snowflake, AZ by Marcus Sedgwick (2019): I wanted to try something else by the late Sedgwick (I’ve only read his nonfiction monograph, Snow) and this seemed ideal. I could have gotten onboard with the desert dystopia, but Ash’s narration was so unconvincing. Sedgwick was attempting a folksy American accent but all the “ain’t”s and “darned”s really don’t work from a teenage character. I only managed about 20 pages. (Public library)
Plus a whole bunch of children’s picture books:
The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen [adapted by Geraldine McCaughrean; illus. Laura Barrett] (2019): The whole is in the shadow painting style shown on the cover, with a black, white and ice blue palette. It’s visually stunning, but I didn’t like the language as much as in the original (or at least older) version I remember from a book I read every Christmas as a child.
A Polar Bear in the Snow by Mac Barnett [art by Shawn Harris] (2020): From a grey-white background, a bear’s face emerges. The remaining pages are made of torn and cut paper that looks more three-dimensional than it really is. The bear passes other Arctic creatures and plays in the sea. Such simple yet intricate spreads. 
Snow Day by Richard Curtis [illus. Rebecca Cobb] (2014): When snow covers London one December, only two people fail to get the message that the school is closed: Danny Higgins and Mr Trapper, his nemesis. So lessons proceed. At first it feels like a prison sentence, but at break time Mr Trapper gives in to the holiday atmosphere. These two lonely souls play as if they were both children, making an army of snowmen and an igloo. And next year, they’ll secretly do it all again. Watch out for the recurring robin in a woolly hat.
The Snowflake by Benji Davies (2020): I didn’t realize this was a Christmas story, but no matter. A snowflake starts her lonely journey down from a cloud; on Earth, Noelle hopes for snow to fall on her little Christmas tree. From motorway to town to little isolated house, Davies has an eye for colour and detail.
Bear and Hare: SNOW! by Emily Gravett (2014): Bear and Hare, wearing natty scarves, indulge in all the fun activities a blizzard brings: snow angels, building snow creatures, having a snowball fight and sledging. Bear seems a little wary, but Hare wins him over. The illustration style reminded me of Axel Scheffler’s work for Julia Donaldson.
Snow Ghost by Tony Mitton [illus. Diana Mayo] (2020): Snow Ghost looks for somewhere she might rest, drifting over cities and through woods until she finds the rural home of a boy and girl who look ready to welcome her. Nice pastel art but twee couplets.
Rabbits in the Snow: A Book of Opposites by Natalie Russell (2012): A suite of different coloured rabbits explore large and small, full and empty, top and bottom, and so on. After building a snowman and sledging, they come inside for some carrot soup.
The Snowbear by Sean Taylor [illus. Claire Alexander] (2017): Iggy and Martina build a snowman that looks more like a bear. Even though their mum has told them not to, they sledge into the woods and encounter danger, but the snow bear briefly comes alive and walks down the hill to save them. Delightful.
Snow (2014) & Lost (2021) by Sam Usher: A cute pair from a set of series about a little ginger boy and his grandfather. The boy is frustrated with how slow and stick-in-the-mud his grandpa seems to be, yet he comes through with magic. In the former, it’s a snow day and the boy feels like he’s missing all the fun until zoo animals come out to frolic. There’s lots of white space to simulate the snow. In the latter, they build a sledge and help search for a lost dog. Once again, ‘wild’ animals come to the rescue. /
The Lights that Dance in the Night by Yuval Zommer (2021): I’ve seen Zommer speak as part of a conference panel on children’s nature writing. The Aurora Borealis unfolds across the sky above the creatures and people of the far north: “We sashayed for an Arctic fox. We swayed above an old musk ox.” I expected more anatomical accuracy (i.e., faces not flattened so that eyes appear to be next to each other on the same side of a face) but I loved how vivid and imaginative it all is.
Any snowy or icy reads (or weather) for you lately?
A Trip to Kyoto with Muriel Barbery and Florentyna Leow (#FrenchFebruary and #ReadIndies)
One of my most recent Book Serendipity incidents was reading these two 139-page books about a foreigner’s wanderings in Kyoto (often touring temples) at the same time. They’re also both from independent publishers, so I’m taking the opportunity to review them together for Read Indies month. The Barbery is also towards Marina Sofia’s casual French February challenge.
A Single Rose by Muriel Barbery (2020; 2021)
[Translated from the French by Alison Anderson]
That Barbery is a Japanophile was clear from her whimsical The Writer’s Cats, which I reviewed for Novellas in November in 2021. Here she takes inspiration from a Japanese aesthetic of minimalist prose, melancholy walks in rainy gardens, and a mixture of legends and stoic Buddhist philosophy. Rose, the half-French, half-Japanese protagonist, is in Kyoto to hear the reading of the will made by her late father, Haru, a contemporary art dealer.
A 40-year-old botanist, Rose is adrift, her father’s death just the latest in a string of losses that have caused her to close off her heart. Her time in Kyoto, while she waits to meet with the lawyer, is a low-key cycle of visits to gardens and Buddhist temples, sake-soused meals, going to bed sad and tipsy, and waking up to rain and preparing to do it all over again. Her minder is Paul, a Belgian who was her father’s assistant. They initially find each other irritating, but are gradually drawn together as two damaged souls.
There are lovely descriptive passages, and the theme of the inescapability of suffering cannot be refuted. The universality of loss comes across in key quotes from Issa and Rainer Maria Rilke, respectively: “in this world / we walk on the roof of hell / gazing at flowers” and “A single rose is every rose.” Still, I somehow found this work both too subtle (the only vaguely relevant chapter-opening snippets of history or legend) and too obvious (“Everybody hurts” is hardly a groundbreaking message). This was my third novella by Barbery. Shall I carry on and read The Elegance of the Hedgehog as well?
With thanks to Gallic Books for the free copy for review.
How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart by Florentyna Leow (2023)
On the face of it, this collection has quite a lot in common with Nina Mingya Powles’s Tiny Moons, from the same publisher: travel- and food-inspired essays that loop through some of the same experiences of loneliness and disorientation. The writers also have a similar background, with Leow a Malaysian Chinese woman living in Japan. She is able to pass for Japanese and so is experienced at code-switching as she moves from temple to jazz bar to teahouse and learns new dialects and accents.
For some years she made a living by leading tours she could never have afforded herself. Much as she loves Kyoto and its sights, she tired of the crowds and of seeing the same temples all the time. It took a stranger observing that she seemed unhappy in her work for her too realize it was time for a change.
This disillusionment and the end of her friendship with her female housemate are the main themes of this short book, especially in the six-part title essay. Interestingly, she describes the end of their relationship in the sort of terms that would generally be used for a romantic break-up, despondently querying what went wrong between them when they had been so happy picking and cooking the fruit from the persimmon tree outside their apartment window. Indeed, later on she cites the concept of a “romantic friendship.”
But I think what she was really mourning was the temporary nature of life. We’re nostalgic for golden times we can never get back. I think of parts of my early twenties like that. I wouldn’t necessarily trade my life now to go back in time (or maybe I would), but those periods will always glow in my memory.
My favourite essays were “Persimmons,” “A Bowl of Tea,” “A Rainy Day in Kyoto” and “Egg Love” – prove you care for someone by learning how they like their eggs. This wasn’t a particularly stand-out read for me, especially in comparison to the Powles, but I’d happily read more by Leow in the future.
A favourite passage:
REASONS FOR TEA
To celebrate. To thank someone. To enjoy the scent of different incense. To listen to the rain. To view an autumn moon reflected on a pond outside. To watch snow blanket the garden. To hear the texture of that silence. To walk through freshly fallen snow before dawn on the way to the teahouse. To drink tea by candlelight. To remember someone. To bask in the light, the cool of early summer mornings. Because it is spring. Because the leaves are changing colour. Because it is autumn. Because the plum blossoms are out. Because the world is beautiful. Because why not?
How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart will be published on 23 February. With thanks to The Emma Press for the proof copy for review.
Four for #WITMonth: Jansson, Lamarche, Lunde and Vogt
I’ve managed four novels for this year’s Women in Translation month: a nostalgic, bittersweet picture of island summers poised between childhood and old age; a brief, impressionistic account of domestic violence and rape; the third in a series looking at how climate change and species loss reverberate amid family situations; and a visceral meditation on women’s bodies and relationships. Two of these were review copies from the recently launched Héloïse Press, which “champions world-wide female talent”.
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson (1972; 1974)
[Translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal]
It was just the same long summer, always, and everything lived and grew at its own pace.
This was only the second time I’ve read one of Jansson’s books aimed at adults (as opposed to five from the Moomins series). Whereas A Winter Book didn’t stand out to me when I read it in 2012 – though I will try it again this winter, having acquired a free copy from a neighbour – this was a lovely read, so evocative of childhood and of languid summers free from obligation. For two months, Sophia and Grandmother go for mini adventures on their tiny Finnish island. Each chapter is almost like a stand-alone story in a linked collection. They make believe and welcome visitors and weather storms and poke their noses into a new neighbour’s unwanted construction.
Six-year-old Sophia, based on Jansson’s niece of the same name, is precocious and opinionated, liable to change her mind in an instant. In “The Cat,” one of my favourite stand-alone bits, she’s fed up with their half-feral pet who kills lots of birds and swaps him for a friend’s soppy lap cat, but then regrets it. She’s learning that logic and emotion sometimes contradict each other, which becomes clearer as she peppers Grandmother with questions about religion and superstition.
As is common to Jansson’s books, there’s a melancholy undercurrent here.
Everything was fine, and yet everything was overshadowed by a great sadness. It was August, and the weather was sometimes stormy and sometimes nice, but for Grandmother, no matter what happened, it was only time on top of time, since everything is vanity and a chasing after the wind.
Sophia’s mother died, and although her grandmother has the greater presence, Papa is also around, dealing with practicalities in the background. Death stalks around the edges, reminding Grandmother of her mortality through bouts of vertigo that have her grabbing for her heart medication. On just the second page we have this memento mori:
“When are you going to die?” the child asked.
And Grandmother answered, “Soon. But that is not the least concern of yours.”
And so it doesn’t feel like our concern either; the focus is on the now, on these beautiful little moments of connection across the generations – like in “Playing Venice,” when Grandmother stays up all night rebuilding Sophia’s model city that was washed away by the rain. (Public library)
The Memory of the Air by Caroline Lamarche (2014; 2022)
[Winner of an English PEN Award; translated from the French by Katherine Gregor]
In a hypnotic monologue, a woman tells of her time with a violent partner (the man before, or “Manfore”) who thinks her reaction to him is disproportionate and all due to the fact that she has never processed being raped two decades ago. When she goes in for a routine breast scan, she shows the doctor her bruised arm, wanting there to be a definitive record of what she’s gone through. It’s a bracing echo of the moment she walked into a police station to report the sexual assault (and oh but the questions the male inspector asked her are horrible).
The novella opens with an image that returns in dreams but is almost more a future memory of what might have been: “I went down into a ravine and, at the bottom, found a dead woman. She was lying in a shroud, on a carpet of fallen leaves.” I read this in one sitting – er, yoga session – and it has stayed in my mind in intense flashes like that and the flounce of her red dress on the summer day that turned into a nightmare. At an intense 70 pages, this reminded me of Annie Ernaux’s concise autofiction (I’ve reviewed Happening and I Remain in Darkness). An introduction by Dr Dominique Carlini-Versini contextualizes the work by considering the treatment of rape in contemporary French women’s writing.
The Memory of the Air will be published on 26 September. With thanks to Héloïse Press for the proof copy for review.
The Last Wild Horses by Maja Lunde (2019; 2022)
[Translated from the Norwegian by Diane Oatley]
The third in Lunde’s “Climate Quartet,” with its recurring elements of migration, shortages and environmental collapse. Always, though, the overall theme is parent–child relationships and the love that might be the only thing that keeps us going in the face of unspeakable challenges. Here she returns to the tripartite structure of The History of Bees (much my favourite of the three): a historical strand, a near-contemporary one, and a dystopian future story line. The link between the three is Przewalski’s horses (aka takhi).
In the early 1880s, Mikhail Alexandrovich Kovrov, assistant director of St. Petersburg Zoo, is brought the hide and skull of an ancient horse species assumed extinct. Although a timorous man who still lives with his mother, he becomes part of an expedition to Mongolia to bring back live specimens. In 1992, Karin, who has been obsessed with Przewalski’s horses since encountering them as a child in Nazi Germany, spearheads a mission to return the takhi to Mongolia and set up a breeding population. With her is her son Matthias, tentatively sober after years of drug abuse. In 2064 Norway, Eva and her daughter Isa are caretakers of a decaying wildlife park that houses a couple of wild horses. When a climate migrant comes to stay with them and the electricity goes off once and for all, they have to decide what comes next. This future story line engaged me the most.
I appreciated some aspects: queer and middle-aged romances, the return of a character from The End of the Ocean, the consideration across all three plots of what makes a good mother. However, the horses seemed neither here nor there. There are also many, many animal deaths. Perhaps an unsentimental attitude is necessary to reflect past and future values, and the apparent cruelty of natural processes, but it limits the book’s appeal to animal lovers. Maybe the tone fits the Norwegian prose, which the translator describes as lean.
The fourth book of the quartet, publishing in Norway next month, is called something like The Dream of a Tree; a focus on trees would be a draw for me. After the disappointment of Books 2 and 3, I’m unsure whether I want to bother with the final volume, but it makes sense to do so, if only to grasp Lunde’s full vision. (Public library)
What Concerns Us by Laura Vogt (2020; 2022)
[Translated from the German by Caroline Waight]
Vogt’s Swiss-set second novel is about a tight-knit matriarchal family whose threads have started to unravel. For Rahel, motherhood has taken her away from her vocation as a singer. Boris stepped up when she was pregnant with another man’s baby and has been as much of a father to Rico as to Leni, the daughter they had together afterwards. But now Rahel’s postnatal depression is stopping her from bonding with the new baby, and she isn’t sure this quartet is going to make it in the long term.
Meanwhile, Rahel’s sister Fenna knows she’s pregnant but refuses a doctor’s care. When she comes to stay with Rahel, she confides that the encounter with her partner, Luc, that led to conception was odd, rough; maybe not consensual. And all this time, the women’s mother, Verena, has been undergoing treatment for breast cancer. All three characters appear to be matter-of-factly bisexual; Rahel and Fenna’s father has long been out of the picture, replaced in Verena’s affections by Inge.
As I was reading, I kept thinking of the declaration running through A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa: “This is a female text.” Vogt’s vision is all breasts and eggs, genitals actual and metaphorical. I loved the use of food in the novel: growing up, the girls cherished “silly nights” when their mother prepared an egg feast and paired it with a feminist lecture on reproduction. Late on, there’s a wonderful scene when the three main characters gorge on preserved foodstuffs from the cellar and share their secrets. (Their language is so sexually frank; would anyone really talk to their mother and siblings in that way?!) As in the Lunde, the main question is what it means to be a mother, but negotiating their relationships with men stretches the bonds of this feminine trio. One for fans of Rachel Cusk and Sally Rooney.
With thanks to Héloïse Press for the proof copy for review.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 