Trieste

At the centre of this sprawling novel, which covers almost a century in several different countries, is Haya Tedeschi, an Italian Jewish woman born in the 1920s who has been obsessively searching for the son who was snatched away from her in the street in 1944. We first encounter Haya in 2006, alone with her memories and family history and the enduring hope that her son will be found one day, and the narrative goes back into the past, jumping from one time to another to create a non-linear story that uses one family’s history to explore the brutal and tragic history of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on fascism and Nazism.

The Tedeschi family come from an area of Central Europe which has existed as a fluid borderland, a frontier country, for centuries. Haya’s grandmother is a Slovene speaker, her mother and maternal aunts and uncles use mostly German in the refugee camps in which they end up spending the First World War, and her father comes from a middle-class Italian-speaking family in the Italian peninsula. In the early part of the book, which covers the 1910s to the 1930s, Drndić is mostly focused on borders and languages, and how the fascist movements of the 30s came to be in this region of ever-changing regimes and allegiances. Despite their multi-lingual, multi-national background and Jewish heritage, the Tedeschi family are remarkably detached from the political upheavals surrounding them, and we are mostly informed about these developments by the omniscient narrator.

2017 Reading Year in Review

2017 happened, I read some books, and I wrote blog posts about some of them. I also made sure that half of all the books I read were in translation, but I have another upcoming post about that. Below the Read More is the list of books I read (with links to reviews) and some commentary on what I read and some hopes for 2018.

St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

The stories in Karen Russell’s debut collection mostly focus on children and teenagers exploring the world and their place in it. Sometimes this world is bizarre and surreal – weird theme parks appear in several stories – and sometimes it’s outright magical. Below, I’ve reviewed each short story.

The President

In Miguel Ángel Asturias’ phenomenal novel, life under a corrupt and authoritarian regime is revealed through a sweeping narrative consisting of many incidents and subplots which add up to a rich, vivid whole. The country in which this novel takes place is unnamed, but is clearly a Latin American state based on Asturias’ native Guatemala. A large cast of characters encompassing all sections of society interact with each other to form a tapestry of life in harsh and often terrifying conditions. This is not an unrelentingly bleak novel, and there are many moments of humour and tenderness, but the terror of dictatorship is at its core.

The novel starts with a group of homeless beggars who sleep on the Cathedral Porch. In a moment of crazed rage, one of the beggars murders a passer-by, who happens to be a colonel loyal to the President. Events spiral in different directions from this event, which fractures the status quo and has far-reaching implications that continue until the end of the novel. The authorities arrest the beggars and try to force statements from them that the murderer, rather than an angry beggar, was the retired General Eusebio Canales, who is suspected of subversive activities. Meanwhile, the beggar responsible for this death flees into the depths of the city, and is saved by a mysterious Good Samaritan, Miguel Angel Face, who is described here and at many other points to be “as beautiful and as wicked as Satan”.

Matigari

The man known as Matigari ma Njurũũngi, a phrase meaning “the patriots who survived the bullets”, comes down into the village out of the forest one day expecting to find his family and return home. He has spent years fighting the white imperialist Settler Williams and his servant John Boy, an African man who is happy to serve the colonists, so that he can have his home back again. Now that they are both dead, he leaves his weapons in the forest, sure that he does not need them any more. He emerges into a society that has freed itself from direct colonial rule but has not freed itself from oppression. Children throw stones at him, the police are violent and quick to arrest him, and foreign and local companies exploit their workers.

Matigari finds followers in the form of a young boy and a woman who listen to his story about his struggle against Settler Williams and John Boy, who lived off his labour and refused to give him any rights to the house he built with his own hands. When he arrives at this house he finds Williams’ and Boy’s sons barring the way, who refuse to let him enter or take possession of the property. Instead, the police arrest Matigari and throw him in jail. In prison, he shares his story with others who have been unjustly imprisoned, and once he escapes, aided by his two faithful followers, he decides to seek truth and justice in the country.

Short Stories: Where to Start?

“I wish I could read more, but I don’t have time.” I hear this a lot, and I sympathise completely. I gave up on A Song of Ice and Fire in university when I put aside A Feast for Crows during a busy period, didn’t pick it up for four months, and had forgotten the plot of the entire series so far when I picked it back up. What I found great to tide me over – and I still enjoy – was reading short stories. They’re a whole story by themselves! You can read it and not worry about forgetting the plot the next time you go back to it (a.k.a. me with too many murder mysteries)! They don’t have the side-plots and digressions of a novel and get straight to the point! Perfect for the internet age, to be honest.

But the world of the short story can be strange and confusing, and if you were introduced to the form in high-school English it can be hard to shake that initial bias. I love short stories: they exist in every genre, and I think if there is a perfect piece of literature in this world it is probably a short story, or a novella at the longest. What short stories do well is communicate a single idea and focus on and develop it. Because they work on and develop one theme or idea, they can offer a strong and coherent narrative that, if the writer is good, can often deliver a devastating ending.

Memoirs of Hadrian

In historical fiction, there is always tension between preserving the authenticity of the historical setting and writing about it in a way that resonates with your audience. Sometimes authenticity is sacrificed in favour of associations that the audience will better understand, such as Sofia Coppolla’s Marie Antoinette using 80’s music and depicting the young queen wearing Converse under her Rococo gowns, or Baz Luhrmann substituting hip hop for jazz in his adaptation of The Great Gatsby. In Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar invites us to empathise and understand the ancient world she writes about through a more subtle, psychological and philosophical approach.

The conceit is this: while dying from a long illness, the Roman emperor Hadrian decides to write a long letter to his successor, Marcus Aurelius, telling him of his early life and his triumphs and failures as emperor of the vast Roman Empire, in the hope that this will be useful – or at the very least food for thought – for the emperor-to-be. This account of Hadrian’s life is not an apology or the whitewashed official version, but a deeply personal and thoughtful recollection of not only his own life, but how it is to live as a Roman citizen in this huge, strange, violent and brilliant empire.

Down the Rabbit Hole

Juan Pablo Villalobos’ debut novel did not feature the off-the-wall surreality that appears in Quesadillas, which I read first and which made a strong impression. However, while Down the Rabbit Hole adheres to an established genre – the Mexican narcoliterature – in many ways, it’s still unnerving and memorable, and has a distinct voice and anger.

Tochtli is a precocious child obsessed with numbers, hats, and pygmy hippopotamuses. His first-person narrative is charmingly childlike, and in some ways Tochtli could be any young boy trying to figure out where he stands in the world. However, Tochtli’s world is a very small and strange one: he lives in a huge villa with his paranoid father, a Mexican drug lord, and a parade of underlings and servants. Due to the danger – real or perceived – Tochtli never leaves the house, and his only companions are adults. He has an earnest, idealistic tutor who seems strikingly out of place in this world of drugs and violence, several of his father’s associates who drift in and out of the villa that comprises Tochtli’s whole world, and a few servants, who are mostly mute and impassive.

Six Months of 50% Translated Books

In corporate speak, what’s the takeaway from this?

I’ve found myself reading a lot of books that I previously would look at on my shelves and think, “Oh, I’m not in the mood for those.” I’ve also borrowed books from the library that I’ve been thinking about reading for years but, you guessed it, didn’t feel like it. It’s not that I only read light reads, but rather that I fall very easily into ruts where I don’t want to broaden my reading experience. If I’ve been reading lots of historical mysteries or fantasy novels, I’m unlikely to pick up that book about a multi-generational family in Soviet Russia, because it doesn’t “go” with the other books I’ve been reading, and sits on the shelf for another few months.

The Essex Serpent

Essex, both in its modern incarnation as London spillover and in earlier times when it was little more than farmland, has never seemed like a place where extraordinary things happen. But in Sarah Perry’s second novel The Essex Serpent, she manages the impossible, and turns Essex into a strange, eerie land of marshes, rivers, and shingles leading into an unforgiving sea. This frightening, hostile, richly imagined landscape is ripe for supernatural events and home to wild communities, and lies in utter contrast to the orderly, fashionable world of London just miles away.

In the dying years of the nineteenth century, for many people there are signs everywhere of the inexorable march of progress and rationality, delivering the British population ever further from superstition and folk belief. Cora Seaborne, the recently widowed wife of an MP, embraces these rapid changes with enthusiasm. She is an amateur naturalist who collects fossils, keeps up with the latest discoveries, and dreams of discovering a new species, whether currently living or in the fossil record. One of her few friends is Luke Garrett, a surgeon who dreams of new techniques and ways to advance medical procedures, both for his own fame and for the benefit of humanity. When Cora retires to Essex after her husband dies, fleeing the confines of London society, she encounters rumours of something that defies her scientific understanding of the world.