20 Books of Summer, 17–20: Jaouad, Kim, Merwin, Piñeiro (#WITMonth)
It’s time to draw a line under 20 Books of Summer so I can focus on hosting Short Story September. I’m technically not quite finished with these first two I’m technically not quite finished with these first two [70 pages to go in the Jaouad and 46 in the Kim], but I’ve read enough to form an opinion and will pop back later to add in final thoughts and ratings. My final four are a memoir of cancer in young adulthood; a page-turning courtroom drama about experimental autism treatment gone wrong; gorgeous nature poems; and a novella in translation that comments on disability, motherhood and mental health issues. Skip to the end for my one DNF of the challenge and a look back at some stats plus my most successful reads.
Between Two Kingdoms: What Almost Dying Taught Me about Living by Suleika Jaouad (2021)
{Updated on 7 September} Jaouad wrote a New York Times column about going through leukaemia treatment in her early twenties and what came next. After months of itching and fatigue, she fell properly ill while working her first postgraduate job in Paris and her blood test results were so bad that she flew home to New York. She would be in and out of hospital for the next five years, enduring multiple rounds of chemo and a bone marrow transplant from her brother. It’s a terrific granular account of the physical and emotional rigours of illness, as well as the strain it put on her relationships – being her primary caregiver was too much for her boyfriend, Will. But she also found a community of young cancer patients, many (like Max Ritvo) now dead. After 60% of the book’s length, as the title – its metaphor taken from Susan Sontag – suggests, the new challenge for Jaouad was resuming life. “I’ve spent the past fifteen hundred days working tirelessly toward a single goal—survival. And now that I’ve survived, I’m realizing I don’t know how to live.” She decides to undertake a cross-country road trip punctuated by visits to people who wrote to her through her column: fellow cancer survivors, a mother who lost a son to suicide, a man on death row in Texas. At first I thought this content felt tacked on and should have been a sequel, but ultimately it illustrates why she wouldn’t edit out her illness if she had it all to do again. I hadn’t heard of Jaouad before I stumbled on this book; from Instagram, I learned she’s now (at age 38) weathered cancer three times. (Little Free Library) 
Miracle Creek by Angie Kim (2019)
{Updated on 7 September} After enjoying Happiness Falls so much, I wanted to go back to Kim’s debut, for which she won an Edgar Award. (There’s an autistic boy and discussion of therapies in that second book as well.) The bulk of the novel is set during the four days of an August 2009 trial. It’s been a year since a horrific accident at Pak Yoo’s “Miracle Submarine,” a rural Virginia hyperbaric oxygen chamber where regulars came for twice-daily treatment of autism, cerebral palsy, and infertility. Meanwhile, protesters gathered outside to draw attention to what they believed to be a dangerous and unproven technique, the equivalent of child abuse. Someone with Camel cigarettes and matches from a local 7-11 set a small fire under an oxygen tank; the resulting explosion killed two and seriously injured two more. The mother of one of the autistic boys was arrested for suspected arson and attempted murder, but as the trial goes on suspicion seems to shift to members of the Korean American family who ran the HBOT operation. There’s a lot to sink the teeth into here. Each character has secrets, and little revelations are emerging all the time, such that the prosecutor and defence lawyer are always having to adjust their approach. Like I’ve experienced with Kim before, this was intelligent, thought-provoking, and absorbing. It’s just the sort of crime-adjacent fiction I like. An author Q&A at the end reveals a couple of autobiographical inspirations: working in her immigrant parents’ convenience store near Baltimore as a teenager, and taking one of her sons, who had neurological deafness and chronic illnesses, for HBOT. (Gift from my wish list)
The Vixen by W.S. Merwin (1996)
it seems that the world is made of a single
summer as it always has been (from “Entry”)
I took this off the shelf because Merwin was one of the POV characters in The Daffodil Days, Helen Bain’s excellent novel about Sylvia Plath’s final years. I had no idea what to expect, and it took me a while to get used to his entirely unpunctuated verse. Only by reading aloud or in my head was I able to split the text blocks into meaning-rich phrases. The fox is a revenant flitting through many of these poems as they pinpoint natural rhythms and human traces across the seasons and centuries. A lot reference summer, in particular, so this was a perfect choice for the challenge. There are a few historical portraits but most of the pieces feel timeless, evoking a countryside locale where the speaker returns to find derelict dwellings given over to birds and trees. Mostly it feels like this could be England, but sometimes a dry aridity suggests the Mediterranean. There is a strong sense of temporality, especially of afterness – the close of a day, the tail end of a season, the still-resonant emptiness after life has left or activity has finished. But there is also the hint of an eternal present:
Seen from afterward the time appears to have been
all of a piece which of course it was but how seldom
it seemed that way when it was still happening (from “Completion”)
In a long book (~65 pieces), there were only a few poems that washed over me without making any impression. The run-on pace, alliteration, and close attention to the natural world made this utterly mesmerizing. I’ll be sure to read more by Merwin. (Secondhand – Bridport Old Books) 
Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro (2007; 2021)
[Translated from Spanish by Frances Riddle]
Piñeiro is an Argentinian author known for infusing her detective novels with a political conscience. Elena Knows is a mystery of sorts, in which the title character devotes herself to investigating her daughter’s death (Rita was found hanging in the belfry of a church). But several elements make this atypical for crime fiction: Elena has Parkinson’s disease – “that f—ing whore illness,” she calls it; refuses to accept the police’s conclusion that Rita died by suicide – she would never have gone there in the rain, she insists; and drags her uncooperative body across Buenos Aires to confront an acquaintance she thinks might be able to shed some light. It’s a circadian narrative, divided into sections by Elena’s pill schedule, but expands its timeline through flashbacks to consider the complications of the mother–daughter relationship as Elena became more physically dependent. The eventual encounter with Isabel presents a contrast in the form of a woman who didn’t want to become a mother but had to because of a prohibition on abortion, which was only legalized in Argentina in 2020. While the approach and themes were appealing, I found this repetitive and the long blocks of dialogue in italics were challenging to read. This was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, though I thought it had a better chance in that year’s Barbellion Prize race (returning this year!). (Gift from my wish list) 
And a DNF:
Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates (2000)
Her problem wasn’t she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn’t a blonde and she wasn’t dumb.
Sigh. Between February and July I read about 200 pages, then skimmed another 100 or so, then finally gave up. (My third Oates DNF. I don’t think she and I are meant to be, though I seem to have better luck with her short stories and own another couple of her books to try.) I engaged most with the early pages about her childhood with a vain, neglectful mother who ends up in a mental hospital; and then with her teenage marriage to Bucky Glazer and involvement in the war effort.
She was a sweet kid but so emotional. Wanting love all the time. She was immature and unreliable and I guess so was I; we were too young. If she’d been a better cook and not so emotional, it might’ve worked out.
Except that people were dying and being injured and the world filling up with smoldering rubble, Norma Jeane liked the War. The War was as steady and reliable as hunger or sleep. Always, the War was there.
In the part that I skimmed, she is starting to become known in Hollywood, with a nude photo shoot (for which she only earned $50), bit parts in films, and her famous stage name.
In the introductory Author’s Note, Oates writes, “for all its length, synecdoche is the principle of appropriation.” So, for instance, instead of multiple foster families, we just get one. Always, there was unwanted male attention, including molestation. I was surprised to find that the pick-and-choose, fact–fiction hybrid approach became a problem for me. I wanted to know if she really married a man named Bucky and wrote poetry. Yet I didn’t want to have to be verifying every fact either.
Oates’s kitchen-sink style involves imagined scenes and dialogue plus retrospective commentary and knowing asides; long, looping sentences and short ones; direct and indirect speech; lots of exclamation points. Lots of everything. The repetition will be deliberate, for effect, but I kept longing for a streamlined version that cut, say, three of every five sentences.
Anyway, this was certainly a project worth undertaking for Oates; you can see why it was irresistible to unearth the reality behind a legend. Norma Jeane is intriguing for her simultaneous childlike innocence and cultivated sensuality. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
20 Books Statistics:
14 fiction
4 nonfiction
2 poetry
7 by BIPOC
3 towards WIT Month (for which I reviewed 8 in total, with library reads and Foreword reviews)
3 rereads
I’ve learned this year that it’s important, momentum-wise, to build in a number of shorter books (6 of novella length + 2 poetry collections) and best to avoid doorstoppers. I was wise to pick some addictive, undemanding novels that tread the line between popular and literary fiction (Kim, Mantel, O’Farrell, Reid, Sullivan); anything that feels like hard work (Oates!) is definitely not a summer read.
I only read a risible 4 of the specific books I set out as options in my planning post, plus 1 of my additional ideas. (It’s ironic that I struggled to finish this set of 20 when I could have labelled anything from my shelves part of the challenge – in total, I read 39 of my own books this summer.)
My favourites of the 20 were Strange Weather in Tokyo, Prodigal Summer & The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (both rereads), and The Vixen. But What Belongs to You, Miracle Creek, Mitz, The Employees, Commencement, and Flush were also great reads. To be able to single out half of the books equals a huge success!
I also completed a 4-book diagonal on the Bingo card!
- Summer in the title (PRODIGAL SUMMER)
- A classic you’ve been meaning to (RE-)read (FLUSH)
- Features a family holiday (MITZ)
- Published in summer (ELENA KNOWS – July 2021)
Love Your Library: August 2026
Thanks to Eleanor, Marcie, and Skai for posting about their library borrowing and reading!
This month marks six years that I’ve been volunteering in my local public library. I’m perversely nostalgic for those early days in summer 2020, when we were closed to the public and staff and volunteers socially distanced around an otherwise empty library.
In a normal year, I always forget just how busy the library gets during the school holidays. The children’s shelves, especially, look ransacked and the number of reservation requests shoots up as kids (and some adults) work towards the Summer Reading Challenge. I look forward to things quieting down again.
My library recently acquired the Wainwright Prize shortlists, so I’m taking advantage of the opportunity to read most of the Conservation titles (whereas the Nature writing titles mostly struck me as samey). I’m hoping it will also buy more from the Booker Prize longlist – besides the Harrison and Perry, which I’m waiting for. You can see I’ve also been stocking up on short story collections for Short Story September, which starts tomorrow!
My library use over the last month:
(links are to any book reviews not already featured on the blog)
READ
- Our Spoons Came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns (for Classics book club)
- I Feel Bad about My Neck by Nora Ephron
- One Ukrainian Summer by Viv Groskop
- The Shock of the Light by Lori Inglis Hall
- Kakigori Summer by Emily Itami
- The New Carthaginians by Nick Makoha
- Country People by Daniel Mason
- The Heartstopper Yearbook by Alice Oseman
- Heartstopper: Volume 6 by Alice Oseman
- The Land and Its People by David Sedaris
+
Women in Translation Month reads:
(All originally published in French, though Valckx is Dutch?)
The Years by Annie Ernaux [transl. Alison L. Strayer]: This was a buddy read with Marcie of Buried in Print, though she quickly zoomed ahead! I preferred it to some of Ernaux’s other short memoirs (Happening, I Remain in Darkness, A Woman’s Story) precisely because it is not a memoir but a portrait of her life and times, mostly delivered in the first-person plural with some third person – in the late pages she herself calls it an “impersonal autobiography.” I was most wowed by the opening and closing litanies of the random memories lost whenever any individual ceases to exist. Elsewhere, when not used to depict her actual experiences (via scenes or photographs), the approach does tend toward the generic, yet it gives a good sense of social fads and political trends all the same. Education and consumerism seem like routes out of poverty, whereas novelty and technology offer false promise. Reading something like this would be a good way for younger generations to summon up some sympathy for Boomers.
Favourite lines: “Our parents and the middle-aged were from another time” / “She does not feel any particular age, though certainly feels a young woman’s arrogance vis-a-vis older women, a condescension towards the post-menopausal. It is unlikely she will ever be one of them herself.”
Edith: The Girl Who Was 100 Years Old by Catharina Valckx [transl. Antony Shugaar]: Speaking of never growing old… This is a charming middle-grade fantasy about a girl given two blessings by fairies: the ability to animate objects, and the gift of eternal childhood. The former is good fun, allowing her to have a sentient grandfather clock and a pet lemon named Squirt; the latter comes to seem like more of a curse, though. Edith has long outlived her parents and starts to think her condition is “eternal boredom.” She, Squirt and Bolster the dog set out to find the original fairy, now herself an old lady, and see if the spell can be reversed so Edith can experience life in all its stages. Somehow I can’t see this message catching on in the USA! I loved the illustrations and the whimsy but wanted it to go further, Moomins-like, into Edith’s losses and longing.
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi [transl. L’Association / Anjali Singh]: This was one of the first graphic memoirs I ever read (along with Fun Home), a classic of the genre. I wanted to reread it because it has, unfortunately, taken on renewed relevance because of war in Iran and the author’s death earlier this year. Her memoir of growing up in the 1980s and 1990s illuminates what it’s like to live under an authoritarian religious regime in a time of war, and likely planted the seeds for novels such as Martyr! and The Persians.
Satrapi’s parents had secular values but, after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, everyone had to fall in line: she wore the veil whenever she left her house, and though her family made wine they were ready to dump it down the toilet at a minute’s notice. On the one hand, she and her friends were normal Westernized adolescents interested in pop music and trendy clothing; on the other, there were shortages, bombings, and rumours of relatives and neighbours being disappeared for voicing revolutionary ideas. A missile exploded in her neighbourhood, narrowly missing her building but killing their Jewish acquaintances.
Volume 2, “The Story of a Return,” has Satrapi attending school in Austria and encountering a whole new world of drugs and sex. “The harder I tried to assimilate, the more I had the feeling that I was distancing myself from my culture, betraying my parents and my origins”. She returned to Iran four years later to find a country that was still repressive but beginning to be rebuilt after war. Art school (with fully clothed life models) and a brief marriage in her early twenties followed, but she had to leave Iran for good to find a life of creative fulfilment.
Her father’s wise words: “As long as there is oil in the Middle East we will never have peace”; “We Iranians, we’re crushed not only by the government but by the weight of our traditions.”
CURRENTLY READING
- Taking Pictures by Anne Enright
- I Remember Nothing and Other Reflections by Nora Ephron
- The Given World by Melissa Harrison
- Night, Neon and Other Stories of Suspense by Joyce Carol Oates
- Natural Disaster by Lisa Owens
- Hum by Helen Phillips (a buddy read with Marcie of Buried in Print)
- Crossing the Water by Sylvia Plath (from university library)
- The Original by Nell Stevens
- The Queen’s Gambit by Walter S. Tevis
SKIMMED
- Come What May: Life-Changing Lessons for Coping with Crisis by Lucy Easthope
CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ
- Ever Land by Amy Abdelnoor
- Through the Window by Julian Barnes (to reread)
- A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: The Collected Stories by Margaret Drabble
- The Most of Nora Ephron – I’m on an Ephron kick at the moment!
- Hail Mary by Funmi Fetto
- Gentleman’s Relish by Patrick Gale
- From Far Around They Saw Us Burn by Alice Jolly
- The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing (from university library, for Classics book club)
- Everest by Ashani Lewis
- The News from Dublin by Colm Tóibín
ON HOLD, TO BE COLLECTED
- In Meadowlight by Sussie Anie
- The Savage Landscape by Cal Flyn
- The Leveret by Anna Goldreich
- Eat the Planet Well: How to Fix Our Toxic Food System – One Meal at a Time by Dave Goulson
- The End of Everything by M. John Harrison
- When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World by Suzanne Simard
- Fiesta: A Journey through Festivity by Daniel Stables
IN THE RESERVATION QUEUE
- The Strangers by Naomi Alderman
- Stop All the Clocks: Poems of Love and Loss by W.H. Auden
- Dodge City by Patrick deWitt
- Honour & Other People’s Children by Helen Garner
- Every Last Fish by Rose George
- Neurodivergent by Nature by Joe Harkness
- Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold by Daisy Johnson et al.
- How to Be Hopeful by Caitlin Moran
- The Winter Guest by Sarah Moss
- Autumn by Kate Mosse
- Sunrise by Téa Obreht
- May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry
- Green Crime by Julia Shaw
- The Housekeeper by Rose Tremain
RETURNED UNREAD
- Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn – It takes a lot for me to overcome my groundless antipathy to stories about The Troubles.
What have you been reading or reviewing from the library recently?
Share a link to your own post in the comments. Feel free to use the above image. The hashtag is #LoveYourLibrary.
20 Books of Summer, 14–16: Danticat, Ravn (#WITMonth) & Woolf
Today I have a tender Haitian American bereavement memoir, a shocking slice of Danish sci-fi about humans and robot hybrids aboard a spacecraft, and a reread of a delightful and rather overlooked classic. I’ll spend the rest of the weekend scrambling to finish my last few books to review on Monday!
Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat (2007)
But isn’t death, no matter how or when it takes place, always solitary?
I’d read and enjoyed a novel and a short story collection by Danticat, so when I learned there was a bereavement memoir in her back catalogue I knew I had to have it. It opens with, and continues in the vein of, the conjunction of life and death: on the same day in 2004, Danticat found out she was pregnant with her daughter and her father was diagnosed with end-stage pulmonary fibrosis. She spent a year moving between her home in Miami and her parents’ in New York City. At the same time, her uncle, a pastor who raised her and her brothers for eight years back in Haiti after her parents left to set up the family’s new life in America, was in crisis. Gang warfare was rife in his neighbourhood and there had been threats against his church and against him personally. Aged 81, he flew to Miami, confident he would be accepted as a political refugee because his life was in danger. Instead, he was taken to a detention centre and denied his medications; he subsequently fell ill and died in a local hospital. All this happened in a few days. Danticat’s father outlived his brother, but only long enough to meet his granddaughter and namesake, Mira. I got a bit lost in details of family history and military coups, while my interest was piqued in her uncle’s earlier trip to the US for throat cancer treatment (thereafter his Kreol came through an electronic voicebox). This is an understated work that lets the awful facts speak for themselves. Ron Charles says of her new novel, Dèy, which takes on U.S. gun violence, that it exhibits the same “tempered outrage” as much of her work; maybe too mild for me. (Secondhand – gift from my wish list) 
The Employees: a workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn (2018; 2020)
[Translated from Danish by Martin Aitken]
Maybe the humans are that very element of chaos that keeps the world alive.
I knew about this from its International Booker Prize shortlisting. It took me nearly a third of the book to figure out what was going on because I’d avoided reading the blurb, but once I got it I was hooked into something like a sharper, horror-tinged version of Orbital. The novella is structured as a series of 100+ statements, in semi-random order, collected as part of an 18-month workplace tribunal. Each is about a page in length. All are voiced by crew members of the Six-Thousand Ship. Part of Statement 067 reads: “There’s humans, and then there’s humanoids. Those who were born and those who were made. Those who are going to die and those who aren’t.” It’s not always clear who is who. A trove of “objects” (I never quite decided what these are) the spacecraft takes on at a planet stop prompts musings about memory and emotions, loyalty and freedom. The humanoids, grown in a two-year process, are perfect workers from day 1. It’s their “responsibility to make sure the human section of the crew don’t buckle under to nostalgia and become catatonic” – like those who only want to spend time with holograms of their children. The humanoids have had longings implanted in them, to “move in with someone, get married, bake cookies, push a pram, learn to play an instrument, dance a waltz. I think I’ve seen all this in your educational material, is that right? What are cookies?” There’s humour here, but also a growing air of menace. When violence breaks out, it doesn’t just derail the mission, but threatens the whole future. My jaw dropped at the dark turn of events and the bleak but profound phrases it engenders:
I don’t think we as a category are going to survive.
I got the strong feeling that we have failed, and that our time is over.
How can we live with the knowledge that none of these days will be remembered by anyone, not even ourselves?
With the lines so blurred, we’re forced to ask what is essential to humanity. Mysterious and sobering, this is both a meditation on identity and autonomy and an elegy for life on Earth. (Secondhand – Hungerford Bookshop)
Flush: A Biography by Virginia Woolf (1933)
Woolf’s novels are so demanding that it’s good to be reminded she also knew how to have fun. Flush is a cheeky short ‘biography’ of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, spanning the dog’s whole life but even (in a few prologue-like pages) dipping back into prehistory when his ancestors hunted rabbits in Spain. I was tickled to discover that Flush’s first owner was Mary Russell Mitford of Three Mile Cross near Reading – I know of her as a local author and have a copy of her book Our Village. Only because the Mitfords were desperate for money was she willing to sell him to her invalid friend, Miss Barrett. And so in 1842, Flush, used to chasing pheasants in the countryside, has to adjust to life as a city lapdog. He witnesses Miss Barrett’s compulsive letter-writing (“she would lie hour after hour passing her hand over a white page with a black stick”), Robert Browning’s courtship, and their preparations for moving to Italy and welcoming a baby with a mixture of ignorance and alarm. His dignity comes under attack by fleas, and by thieves who hold him to ransom for five days in a London slum – a thrilling central chapter in an otherwise serene narrative. As in Mitz by Sigrid Nunez, which is an homage to Flush, there is dramatic irony between what readers understand and a pet cannot. He mostly experiences the world through the senses, and there are lovely passages where Woolf rhapsodizes about what Flush smells and feels: “He knew Florence in its marmoreal smoothness and in its gritty and cobbled roughness.” Whether you’re a Woolf (or Barrett/Browning) fan, or dog lover, or not, this is an offbeat charmer. (Secondhand – Wonder Book and Video)
My original rating (2013):
My rating now:
20 Books of Summer, 12–13: Strange Weather in Tokyo (#WITMonth) & Mitz
Two terrific novellas I’m belatedly writing up today, one my first selection for Women in Translation month and the other a contribution to Virago’s “Summer of Sigrid.” Both:
Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami (2001; 2012)
[Translated from Japanese by Allison Markin Powell]
Tsukiko is a lonely barfly in her late thirties when she bumps into her secondary school Japanese teacher, Harutsuna Matsumoto, again. She calls him simply “Sensei,” and they start meeting up for low-key adventures: sharing tofu and saké at Satoru’s bar, marking annual holidays, and leaving the city to forage for mushrooms and visit his late wife’s island grave. Sensei quotes poetry and, ever the teacher, gently corrects his former pupil’s language. Tsukiko is an impassive young woman who never seemed to grow up (“I … still might not be considered a proper adult. … I just wasn’t able to ally myself with time”) and is prone to drinking too much, but finally starts to get a grip on her emotions thanks to this new connection.
Each chapter is discrete, building into a linked short story collection. The erratic (non)use of speech marks somehow didn’t bother me as it seems to suit Tsukiko’s slight disorientation. Kawakami infuses the book with attention to the seasons’ changes and everyday sensual pleasures like food. A drunk at the bar speaks for us readers when he asks the main characters, “You two, just what are you?” The nature of their bond is hard to pin down. Tsukiko is also courted by Kojima, a more age-appropriate boyfriend, but she feels nothing for him. Instead, a May–December relationship unfolds like cherry blossom, ever so gradually, from friendship into something deeper. Powell manages to fit some wordplay into her translation, as in this gently erotic passage:
At some point, sitting beside Sensei, I began to notice the heat that radiated from his body. Through his starched shirt, there came a sense of Sensei. A feeling of nostalgia. This sense of Sensei retained the shape of him. It was dignified, yet tender, like Sensei.
From the title and cover image, I might have expected the magic realism so common to Japanese literature, but this is something different: a lovely, subtle romance. It’s a reminder that it doesn’t have to be torrid passion to be true love. “Even a chance meeting is the result of a karmic connection,” as Sensei quotes. Susan (A life in books), whose review is excerpted in my paperback copy, is quite right. Kawakami was a great new discovery and I’ve got my eye on several more of her books: The Nakano Thrift Shop from the library and Record of a Night Too Brief and Far from Everywhere (forthcoming in February) on my e-reader. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury)
Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury by Sigrid Nunez (1998)
What a fun little book from Nunez’s back catalogue! On the one hand, a fictional mini-biography of the Woolfs by way of their pet marmoset might seem like a random choice of topic; on the other hand, you can see the seeds of her future autofiction in which human–animal connection is a starting point for wide-ranging meditations on life and death (a dog in The Friend; a parrot in The Vulnerables; and even, to a lesser extent, the cat in What Are You Going Through).
Mitz is a small monkey who induces strong, conflicting reactions: “You looked at her and thought, How grotesque. And the very next instant, How adorable. And then, How grotesque, again.” She takes a shine to Leonard on a visit the Woolfs pay to their friends the Rothschilds in 1934, and before long they’ve offered to take Mitz home to share their London and Sussex life, along with Pinka and Sally, the spaniels they had in succession. Mitz’s favourite spot thereafter was sat on Leonard’s shoulders, or napping on his feet. She accompanied the couple on their travels, too, so distracting people in Germany that Virginia would write in a letter that “the marmoset saved us from Hitler” (Leonard was Jewish). Visitors were less enamoured, thinking Mitz dirty and bad-tempered.
In any case, the creature was a lucky accessory to genius, and Nunez makes her our eyewitness to the composition of works such as Roger Fry and The Years:
From a distance, then, Mitz observed Virginia. And she saw how this mysterious activity that could bring such a flush to Virginia’s cheek could also have quite the opposite effect: Virginia was as white as her own writing paper. She scribbled and slashed; she muttered and she groaned and she cursed. She jumped up from the chair and wandered in circles about the room.
How much Mitz understands of ageing, death, and conflict, can never be known. These were tumultuous pre-war years, during which Virginia lost a nephew and fascism loomed large. Nunez sets personal cataclysms against international ones, imagining Mitz’s journey from a Brazilian forest, via a hellish ship, to the London junk shop where she was made to sit in a draughty window to drum up business. That she spent her last five years so loved and cosseted was a stroke of good fortune. Her death ends up feeling like a more general omen, as in the book’s final line: “It was Christmas Day, the last year of peace.”
I was reminded of the complications of keeping an exotic pet in My Animals and Other Family by Julia Blackburn, in which she buys Congo the bushbaby from Harrods (and there is also a family spaniel). As part of the backmatter of this reissue, a thank-you letter from Nigel Nicolson to Nunez and a 2019 afterword by Peter Cameron note the undeniable inspiration of Virginia Woolf’s Flush, a playful short biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel (for whom Pinka, a gift from Vita Sackville-West, was a model). I fancied rereading Flush so have picked that up as one of my substitute Books of Summer and am enjoying discovering the connections between it and Mitz. More anon.
With thanks to Virago for the free copy for review, one of several matching reissues they sent me as part of their “Summer of Sigrid.”
#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?
#WITMonth, Part I: Susanna Bissoli, Jente Posthuma and More
I’m starting off my Women in Translation month coverage with two short novels: one Italian and one Dutch; both about women navigating loss, family relationships, physical or mental illness, and the desire to be a writer.
Struck by Susanna Bissoli (2024; 2025)
[Translated from Italian by Georgia Wall]
Vera has been diagnosed a second time with breast cancer – the same disease that felled her mother a decade ago. “I’m fed up with feeling like a problem to be taken care of,” she thinks. Even as her treatment continues, she determines to find routes to a bigger life not defined by her illness. Writing is the solution. When she moves in with her grouchy octogenarian father, Zeno Benin, she discovers he’s secretly written a novel, A Lucky Man. The almost entirely unpunctuated document is handwritten across 51 notebooks Vera undertakes to type up and edit alongside her father as his health declines.
At the same time, she becomes possessed by the legend of local living ‘saint’ Annamaria Bigani, who has been visited multiple times by the Virgin Mary and learned her date of death. Wondering if there is a story here that she needs to tell, Vera interviews Bigani, then escapes to Greece for time and creative space. “Do they save us, stories? Or is it our job to save them? I believe writing that story, day in and day out for years, saved my father’s life. But I’m sorry, I don’t have time to save his story: I need to write my own. The saint, or so I thought.” In the end, we learn, Struck – the very novel we are reading – is Vera’s book.
The title comes from a scientific study conducted on people struck by lightning at a country festival in France. How did they survive, and what were the lasting effects? The same questions apply to Vera, who avoids talking about her cancer but whose relationship with her sister Nora is still affected by choices made while their mother was alive. There are many delightful small conversations and incidents here, often involving Vera’s niece Alice. Vera’s relationship with Franco, a doctor who works with asylum seekers, is a steady part of the background. A translator’s afterword helped me understand the thought that went into how to reproduce Vera and others’ use of dialect (La Bassa Veronese vs. standard Italian) through English vernacular – so Vera and her sister say “Mam” and her father uses colourful idioms.
Though I know nothing of Bissoli’s biography, this second novel has the feeling of autofiction. Despite its wrenching themes of illness and the inevitability of death, it’s a lighthearted family story with free-flowing prose that I can enthusiastically recommend to readers of Elizabeth Berg and Catherine Newman.
This was my introduction to new (est. 2023) independent publisher Linden Editions, which primarily publishes literature in translation. I have two more of their books underway for another WIT Month post later this month. And a nice connection is that I corresponded with translator Georgia Wall when she was the publishing manager for The Emma Press.
With thanks to Linden Editions for the free copy for review.
People with No Charisma by Jente Posthuma (2016; 2025)
[Translated from Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey]
Dutch writer Jente Posthuma’s quirky, bittersweet first novel traces the ripples that grief and mental ill health send through a young woman’s life. The narrator’s mother was an aspiring actress; her father runs a mental hospital. A dozen episodic short chapters present snapshots from a neurotic existence as she grows from a child to a thirtysomething starting a family of her own. Some highlights include her moving to Paris to write a novel, and her father – a terrible driver – taking her on a road trip through France. Despite the deadpan humor, there’s heartfelt emotion here and the prose and incidents are idiosyncratic. (Full review forthcoming for Shelf Awareness)
& Reviewed for Foreword Reviews a couple of years ago:
What I Don’t Want to Talk About by Jente Posthuma (2020; 2023)
[Translated from Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey]
A young woman bereft after her twin brother’s suicide searches for the seeds of his mental illness. The past resurges, alternating with the present in the book’s few-page vignettes. Their father leaving when they were 11 was a significant early trauma. Her brother came out at 16, but she’d intuited his sexuality when they were eight. With no speech marks, conversations blend into cogitation and memories here. A wry tone tempers the bleakness. (Shortlisted for the European Union Prize for Literature and the International Booker Prize.)
Both featured an unnamed narrator and a similar sense of humor. I concluded that Posthuma excels at exploring family dynamics and the aftermath of bereavement.
I got caught out when I reviewed The Appointment, too: Volckmer doesn’t technically count towards this challenge because she writes in English (and lives in London), but as she’s German, I’m adding in a teaser of my review as a bonus. Oddly, this novella did first appear in another language, French, in 2024, under the title Wonderf*ck. [The full title below was given to the UK edition.]
Calls May Be Recorded [for Training and Monitoring Purposes] by Katharina Volckmer (2025)
Volckmer’s outrageous, uproarious second novel features a sex-obsessed call center employee who negotiates body and mommy issues alongside customer complaints. “Thank you for waiting. My name is Jimmie. How can I help you today?” each call opens. The overweight, homosexual former actor still lives with his mother. His customers’ situations are bizarre and his replies wildly inappropriate; it’s only a matter of time until he faces disciplinary action. As in her debut, Volckmer fearlessly probes the psychological origins of gender dysphoria and sexual behavior. Think of it as an X-rated version of The Office. (Full review forthcoming for Shelf Awareness)
#MoominWeek & #WITMonth, II: Moominpappa at Sea by Tove Jansson
My first two reads for Women in Translation month were Catalan and French novellas. With this third one I’m tying in with Moomin Week, hosted by Chris and Mallika in honour of Paula of Book Jotter. Happy nuptials to Paula! Not a blogger I’ve interacted with before, but I welcomed the excuse to finish a book I started a few months ago. I’ve actually reviewed five Moomin books here before: Moominvalley in November, Moominland Midwinter, Tales from Moominvalley, Moominsummer Madness, and Finn Family Moomintroll. (It’s also the third year in a row that I’ve reviewed something by Jansson for WIT Month.)
Appropriate reading at sea (on a ferry to France)
I didn’t grow up with the Moomins, but as an adult I’ve come to love the series for how it lovingly depicts everyday disasters and neuroses and, beneath the whimsical adventures, offers an extra level of thoughtfulness for adult readers. The setting of this one was particularly appropriate. Here’s the opening paragraph:
One afternoon at the end of August, Moominpappa was walking about in his garden feeling at a loss. He had no idea what to do with himself, because it seemed everything there was to be done had already been done or was being done by somebody else.
The sense of being ‘all at sea’ persists for Pappa and the other characters even after they sail to ‘his’ island in the Gulf of Finland, drawn to see in person the lighthouse he has kept as a model on the shelf. They arrive to find the island mysteriously empty and the facilities derelict. Moomintroll goes exploring alone and meets intriguing “sea-horses” that look more equine than marine. Nature is alive and resistant to ‘improvements’ such as Moominmamma trying to tame the wildness with her rose bushes and apple trees. The forest also seems to be retreating from the sea; everything fears it, in fact. The sullen fisherman is no help, and the hulking Groke seems to be a metaphor for depression as well as a literal monster.
There is a sense of everything being awry, and by the close that’s only partially rectified. Pappa ends with conflicting feelings towards the island: proprietary yet timorous. I imagine this is based on Jansson’s own experiences living on a Finnish island (see also The Summer Book). This wasn’t among my favourite Moomin books, but I always appreciate the juxtaposition of the domestic and wild, the cosy and the melancholy. Just two more for me to find now (I’ve read them all in random order): The Moomins and the Great Flood and Moominpappa’s Memoirs.
[Translated from the Swedish by Kingsley Hart] (University library)
#WITMonth, Part I: Novellas by Eva Baltasar and Françoise Sagan
I’m starting off my Women in Translation month coverage with mini responses to two novellas: one Catalan and one French; both about disaffected women trying to work out what they want from life.
Mammoth by Eva Baltasar (2022; 2024)
[Translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches]
I’d been vaguely attracted by descriptions of the Spanish poet’s novels Permafrost and Boulder, which are also about lesbians in odd situations. Mammoth is the third book in a loose trilogy. Its 24-year-old narrator is so desperate for a baby that she’s decided to have unprotected sex with men until a pregnancy results. In the meantime, her sociology project at nursing homes comes to an end and she moves from Barcelona to a remote farm where she develops subsistence skills and forms an interdependent relationship with the gruff shepherd. “I’d been living in a drowning city, and I need this – the restorative silence of a decompression chamber. … my past is meaningless, and yet here, in this place, there is someone else’s past that I can set up and live in awhile.” For me this was a peculiar combination of distinguished writing (“The city pounces on the still-pale light emerging from the deep sea and seizes it with its lucrative forceps”) but absolutely repellent story, with a protagonist whose every decision makes you want to throttle her. An extended scene of exterminating feral cats certainly didn’t help matters. I’d be wary of trying Baltasar again.
With thanks to And Other Stories for the proof copy for review.
Aimez-vous Brahms… by Françoise Sagan (1959; 1960)
[Translated from the French by Peter Wiles]
At age 39, divorced interior decorator Paule is “passionately concerned with her beauty and battling with the transition from young to youngish woman”. (Ouch. But true.) It’s an open secret that her partner Roger is always engaged in a liaison with a young woman; people pity her and scorn Roger for his infidelity. But when Paule has a dalliance with a client’s son, 25-year-old lawyer Simon, a double standard emerges: “they had never shown her the mixture of contempt and envy she was going to arouse this time.” Simon is an idealist, accusing her of “letting love go by, of neglecting your duty to be happy”, but he’s also indolent and too fond of drink. Paule wonders if she’s expected too much from an affair. “Everyone advised a change of air, and she thought sadly that all she was getting was a change of lovers: less bother, more Parisian, so common”.
I was by turns reminded of Chéri by Colette, In a Summer Season by Elizabeth Taylor, and even The Graduate (“Mrs. Robinson,” anyone?). Simon asks the title question to invite Paule to a concert; that she has to ponder it carefully tells her she’s “losing herself, losing track of herself”. But it’s all too easy for the status quo to be reinstated after a brave act. Middle-aged woman makes bid for freedom but ultimately nothing changes: same plot as The Funeral Cryer and any number of other books, but this was so much better. How did Sagan manage such insight at age 24 (and this was her fourth book)?! While not quite as memorable as Bonjour Tristesse, this is another incisive slice of fiction that has aged well apart from using “sodomite” and “Negress” as matter-of-fact terms for bit players. I’d read anything else I can find by Sagan. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury)
#WITMonth, Part II: Wioletta Greg, Dorthe Nors, Almudena Sánchez and More
My next four reads for Women in Translation month (after Part I here) were, again, a varied selection: a mixed volume of family history in verse and fragmentary diary entries, a set of nature/travel essays set mostly in Denmark, a memoir of mental illness, and a preview of a forthcoming novel about Mary Shelley’s inspirations for Frankenstein. One final selection will be coming up as part of my Love Your Library roundup on Monday.
(20 Books of Summer, #13)
Finite Formulae & Theories of Chance by Wioletta Greg (2014)
[Translated from the Polish by Marek Kazmierski]
I loved Greg’s Swallowing Mercury so much that I jumped at the chance to read something else of hers in English translation – plus this was less than half price AND a signed copy. I had no sense of the contents and might have reconsidered had I known a few things: the first two-thirds is family wartime history in verse, the rest is a fragmentary diary from eight years in which Greg lived on the Isle of Wight, and the book is a bilingual edition, with Polish and English on facing pages (for the poems) or one after the other (for the diary entries). I’m not sure what this format adds for English-language readers; I can’t know whether Kazmierski has rendered anything successfully. I’ve always thought it must be next to impossible to translate poetry, and it’s certainly hard to assess these as poems. They are fairly interesting snapshots from her family’s history, e.g., her grandfather’s escape from a stalag, and have quite precise vocabulary for the natural world. There’s also been an attempt to create or reproduce alliteration. I liked the poem the title phrase comes from, “A Fairytale about Death,” and “Readers.” The short diary entries, though, felt entirely superfluous. (New purchase – Waterstones bargain, 2023) 
(20 Books of Summer, #14)
A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast by Dorthe Nors (2021; 2022)
[Translated from the Danish by Caroline Waight]
Nors’s first nonfiction work is a surprise entry on this year’s Wainwright Prize nature writing shortlist. I’d be delighted to see this work in translation win, first because it would send a signal that it is not a provincial award, and secondly because her writing is stunning. Like Patrick Leigh Fermor, Aldo Leopold or Peter Matthiessen, she doesn’t just report what she sees but thinks deeply about what it means and how it connects to memory or identity. I have a soft spot for such philosophizing in nature and travel writing.
You carry the place you come from inside you, but you can never go back to it.
I longed … to live my brief and arbitrary life while I still have it.
This eternal, fertile and dread-laden stream inside us. This fundamental question: do you want to remember or forget?
Nors lives in rural Jutland – where she grew up, before her family home was razed – along the west coast of Denmark, the same coast that reaches down to Germany and the Netherlands. In comparison to Copenhagen and Amsterdam, two other places she’s lived, it’s little visited and largely unknown to foreigners. This can be both good and bad. Tourists feel they’re discovering somewhere new, but the residents are insular – Nors is persona non grata for at least a year and a half simply for joking about locals’ exaggerated fear of wolves.
Local legends and traditions, bird migration, reliance on the sea, wanderlust, maritime history, a visit to church frescoes with Signe Parkins (the book’s illustrator), the year’s longest and shortest days … I started reading this months ago and set it aside for a time, so now find it difficult to remember what some of the essays are actually about. They’re more about the atmosphere, really: the remote seaside, sometimes so bleak as to seem like the ends of the earth. (It’s why I like reading about Scottish islands.) A bit more familiarity with the places Nors writes about would have pushed my rating higher, but her prose is excellent throughout. I also marked the metaphors “A local woman is standing there with a hairstyle like a wolverine” and “The sky looks like dirty mop-water.” 
With thanks to Pushkin Press for the proof copy for review.
Pharmakon by Almudena Sánchez (2021; 2023)
[Translated from the Spanish by Katie Whittemore]
This is a memoir in micro-essays about the author’s experience of mental illness, as she tries to write herself away from suicidal thoughts. She grew up on Mallorca, always feeling like an outsider on an island where she wasn’t a native. Did her depression stem from her childhood, she wonders? She is also a survivor of ovarian cancer, diagnosed when she was 16. As her mind bounces from subject to subject, “trying to analyze a sick brain,” she documents her doctor visits, her medications, her dreams, her retweets, and much more. She takes inspiration from famous fellow depressives such as William Styron and Virginia Woolf. Her household is obsessed with books, she says, and it’s mostly through literature that she understands her life. The writing can be poetic, but few pieces stand out on the whole. My favourite opens: “Living in between anxiety and apathy has driven me to flowerpot decorating.” 
With thanks to Fum d’Estampa Press for the free copy for review.
And a bonus preview:
Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein by Anne Eekhout (2021; 2023)
[Translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson]
Anne Eekhout’s fourth novel and English-language debut is an evocative recreation of two momentous periods in Mary Shelley’s life that led – directly or indirectly – to the composition of her 1818 masterpiece. Drawing parallels between the creative process and motherhood and presenting a credibly queer slant on history, the book is full of eerie encounters and mysterious phenomena that replicate the Gothic science fiction tone of Frankenstein itself. The story lines are set in the famous “Year without a Summer” of 1816 (the storytelling challenge with Lord Byron) and during a period in 1812 that she spent living in Scotland with the Baxter family; Mary falls in love with the 17-year-old daughter, Isabella. 
Coming out on 3 October from HarperVia. My full review for Shelf Awareness is pending.
#WITMonth, Part I: de Beauvoir, Jansson, NDiaye
My first four reads for Women in Translation month were quite a varied selection: a sobering autobiographical essay about the loss of a mother, a characteristically impish children’s novel, a confoundingly elliptical family memoir, and a preview of a forthcoming Mexican novel about women’s friendships and handicraft. Another four coming up later in August.
A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir (1964; 1965)
[Translated from the French by Patrick O’Brian]
“When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.”
I’d read a lot about Simone de Beauvoir but not one of her own works until this reissue came my way. It was right up my street as a miniature bereavement memoir (just 84 pages) that doesn’t shy away from the physical details of decline or the emotional complications of a fraught mother–daughter relationship.
In October 1963, de Beauvoir was in Rome when she got a call informing her that her mother had had an accident. Expecting the worst, she was relieved – if only temporarily – to hear that it was a fall at home, resulting in a broken femur. But when Françoise de Beauvoir got to the hospital, what at first looked like peritonitis was diagnosed as stomach cancer with an intestinal obstruction. Her daughters knew that she was dying, but she had no idea (from what I’ve read, this paternalistic notion that patients must be treated like children and kept ignorant of their prognosis is more common on the Continent, and continues even today).
Over the next month, de Beauvoir and her sister Poupette took turns visiting. Initially alarmed by their mother’s condition, they soon grew used to the deterioration. “I was not worried by her nakedness any more: it was no longer my mother, but a poor tormented body.” They found her in varying states of awareness and discomfort. “In this race between pain and death we most earnestly hoped that death would come first.” Some nurses were better than others. De Beauvoir makes tantalizing references to the standoff between her and her mother about the Catholic faith Simone left behind. (I’ll need to read Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter for more on that.) Even the hope of heaven didn’t fully neutralize self-pity and physical suffering for the dying woman because she feared her daughters wouldn’t be joining her.
The title is what a nurse told the grieving daughters: that their mother’s had been a very easy death in the end (and an upper-class one, de Beauvoir adds). The word used in French for easy, douce, can also be translated as “gentle,” a tie-in to the epigraph from Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Is it better for a loved one to die suddenly, or protractedly? I’ve debated this with myself and a few others since my mother’s death from a stroke in October. Ultimately, it’s pointless to ask; any death is an affront, hard to accept and adjust to no matter how much warning is given. I appreciated how matter-of-factly and concisely de Beauvoir’s essay encapsulates the duties and feelings surrounding a death. Frank and unshowy yet potent, this is a classic of the subgenre.
Published as Fitzcarraldo Editions Classics No. 2 in June. With thanks to the publisher for the free copy for review.
(Books of Summer, #10)
Finn Family Moomintroll by Tove Jansson (1948; 1950)
[Translated from the Swedish by Elizabeth Portch]
My sixth Moomins book, and ninth by Jansson overall. The novella’s gentle peril is set in motion by the discovery of the Hobgoblin’s Hat, which transforms anything placed within it. As spring moves into summer, this causes all kind of mild mischief until Thingumy and Bob, who speak in spoonerisms, show up with a suitcase containing something desired by both the Groke and the Hobgoblin, and make a deal that stops the disruptions.
As always, the creatures and events, conveyed by Jansson’s black-and-white drawings as much as by her words, are inventive and whimsical. There’s a cosy charm to the seasonal rituals, like the end-of-summer pancake party here. But what I value even more is the pointed accounts of the secondary characters’ neuroses. The Moomins are generally on a pretty even keel, though there is mention of Moominpappa’s sense of being hard done by because of childhood bullying and an enduring lack of respect. However, characters like the Muskrat and the Hemulen get a wry smile and shake of the head from me because their predicaments are so familiar: The Muskrat, terrified of mortifying situations, decides the life of a hermit might be preferable; the Hemulen gives up stamp collecting and switches to botanizing because there’s no joy in a finished quest, only in an ongoing search. The Moomins books offer the perfect combination of the familial and routine with the novel and adventurous. Even staid adults should give them a try. (Little Free Library)
Self-Portrait in Green by Marie NDiaye (2005; 2015)
[Translated from the French by Jordan Stump]
I tend to love a memoir that tries something new or experimental with the form (such as Constructing a Nervous System or In the Dream House), but this was a step too far for me; the self referred to in the title is almost wholly absent. NDiaye, a French–Senegalese author, opens in 2003 with the expected flooding of the Garonne in southwest France. Fragments of narrative from 2000–2003 chart her encounters with various women dressed in green, starting with one she thinks she sees under a banana tree (though her four children see nothing). Then there’s Katia Depetiteville, dead 10 years … NDiaye’s stepmother, once her childhood best friend; her friend Jenny’s rival for Ivan’s affection; and her mother, who now has a new family. What is a ‘woman in green’? The author explicitly associates the colour with cruelty, with presumably the usual connotation of jealousy as well. But it still feels arbitrary.
It’s all rather dreamlike, with poetic repetition, rhetorical questions and black-and-white photos that seem marginally relevant. “I’m saying to myself: Is all this really real?” NDiaye writes, and the reader will surely be asking the same. “I’m always interested in stories,” she adds, and while I’d agree, I need to know that they’re being told to build to some greater meaning. It was only in the last fifth of the book, when the author goes to a literary symposium in Ouagadougou and visits her father (a many-times-married former restaurateur and amateur architect now suffering from cataracts) and stepmother that I felt like there was a purpose: a bringing together of past and present for psychological clarity. I was relieved that this was only 112 pages. (Edelweiss) 
The 10th anniversary edition is being reissued by Two Lines Press next month.
And a bonus preview:
Cross-Stitch by Jazmina Barrera (2021; 2023)
[Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney]
In the inventive debut novel by Mexican author Jazmina Barrera, a sudden death provokes an intricate examination of three young women’s years of shifting friendship. Their shared hobby of embroidery occasions a history of women’s handiwork, woven into a relationship study that will remind readers of works by Elena Ferrante and Deborah Levy. Citlali, Dalia, and Mila had been best friends since middle school. Mila, a writer with a young daughter, is blindsided by news that Citlali has drowned off Senegal. While waiting to be reunited with Dalia for Citlali’s memorial service, she browses her journal to revisit key moments from their friendship, especially travels in Europe and to a Mexican village. Cross-stitch becomes its own metaphorical language, passed on by female ancestors and transmitted across social classes. Reminiscent of Still Born and A Ghost in the Throat. (Edelweiss)
Coming out on 7 November from Two Lines Press. My full review for Shelf Awareness is pending.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 