Time for a change

The allotted space for a free blog, given by WordPress, has now run out after 17 years of blogging. I do not wish to rename my URL yet one more time (dolcebellezza3.wordpress.com?!), and so I am returning to Blogger.

What? I know no one returns to Blogger, and many of you hate trying to leave comments there. (It is easier to use Chrome to do that, rather than anything else.)

But, I will do my best to post more frequently, and comment much more frequently, from here:

Dolcebellezza.blogspot.com

I hope to see you, should you come around. X

Not A River by Selva Almada, translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott (International Booker Prize 2024)

If he looks farther on, to where the road slopes down, he can just about see the river. A glint that makes his eyes water. And again: it’s not a river, it’s this river. He’s spent more time with it than with anyone…

p. 47

Finally! Finally I come to a piece of work which is fraught with tension and power. A story, if you will, within a story. We go back and forth in time, learning of Enero and El Negro who still mourn the loss of their friend, Eusebio. The three bonded at the age of 11, and nothing could separate them but Eusebio’s drowning after a terrible fight. They cling to his son, as if they still have his father with them.

We learn of Lucy and Mariela, sisters who are lovely in form and innocence. They leave home to go to a party after their mother, Siomara, yells at them in anger. She does not know she will never see her daughters alive again.

So much anger, from the islanders, who learn that Enero and El Negro have returned to the river the massive stingray they caught. Anger, perhaps, that comes from more than the return of the sea creature. Anger, which quite possibly stems from poverty and helplessness, from the intrusion of strangers who have more than the islanders ever could.

This is a tragic story, more powerfully told in its 87 pages than any of the others longlisted this year that I have read.

(Thank you to Graywolf Press, who sent me a copy of Not A River to read and review. What a gift you have given me!)

Simpatia by Rodrigo Blanco Calderon, translated by Noel Hernandez Gonzalez and Daniel Hahn (International Booker Prize 2024) “We’re all dogs from the same pack.”

Simpatia is a wonderfully strange ode to dogs, written in a style which, to me, almost resembles Haruki Murakami. Deep and painful issues are handled in a tender way. I would go so far as to say a bizarre way. People come and go, with little explanation as to where, or why, they have left. Suffering occurs in their wake, and it is the presence of a dog which brings comfort.

Three dogs, named after the sons of The Godfather: Sonny, Fredo and Michael…coffee grounds in the bottom of a mug resembling a volcano, or a dog’s head…a table with one leg, lifting to reveal a man standing up from a hole in the floor holding a box of Elizabeth Von Armin’s translated works. These are some of the odd images I’ve come across in the later half of the book. Rather than disturbing me, they brought a joyful quirkiness to this novel.

But, not so much as the dogs bring. The large home, owned by General Martin Ayala, is to be made into the Simpatia por el Perro Foundation, a “foundation dedicated to rescuing abandoned dogs. Ulises was tasked with coordinating…its proper set up and operations in the grounds of the house. Within 120 days after his (Martin’s) death.”

It is around this foundation that the novel revolves. But, it is so much more than a rescue center for dogs. It was the home where children caused great anguish for their parents and continue to carry it out in the present.

Of all the books I have read so far for the International Booker Prize longlist I’m 2024, this is my favorite.

A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare, translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson (International Booker Prize 2024) Pasternak and Stalin, the poet and the tyrant.

Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak, both writers, are also friends, colleagues and rivals. One day, at a chance meeting on the street, Mandelstam reads a poem which is supposedly disrespectful of Stalin. Pasternak, in his own testimony given later, interrupts to say, “Forget you ever read me that…verse. That’s not art, it’s suicide. I’m not getting involved with it.” (p. 135)

You can imagine Pasternak’s consternation, then, when Stalin personally calls him after Mandelstam is arrested. What does Stalin want from this phone call? Will Pasternak also be condemned as Mandelstam was? The meaning of their three minute conversation, on Saturday, June 23, 1934, is the focus of A Dictator Calls.

Why such interest on the part of Kadare, author of this book? “Whether by accident or not, this phone call was so close to me, and I was compelled to analyze each moment of those fatal 200 seconds, when the laws of tragedy had brought the poet and the tyrant together.

It was a grim collision, which should not have taken place, and yet it did, to our fellow artist’s misfortune.” p. 177

What interested me the most, in this novel, is how Ismail Kadare points out the relationship between a writer and a tyrant: “Could the tyrant bring the poet to his knees? Could he overthrow him? The same question might be asked of the poet, confronted with the tyrant.” p. 216

The power of the written word cannot be overestimated, as Kadare so eloquently shows us. One of my greatest fears is that governments can, and have, taken it away.

Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior, translated by Johnny Lorenz (International Booker Prize 2024) “On this land, it’s the strongest who survive.”

Once you get past the ridiculous cover, which looks like a third grader drew it, you find an intriguing book about the poor in Brazil.

It begins with a shocking story of two sisters, who, while unwrapping a hidden knife of their grandmother’s, manage to cut their mouths. They have put the shiny blade up to their lips, to taste the mirrored metal, and in grabbing it from her sister, one of the girl’s tongues is severed. One must speak for the other hereafter.

It is a perfect metaphor for the way that the poor tenants on a landowner’s property have no voice.

Vieira paints a vivid portrait of these people, in their houses built of mud, in the way that women are subject to their husbands, in the poverty the community endures.

But, there is also a magical quality, of the encantadas that are sung, and the food which is shared. The sisters’ father is a healer, able to apply roots and herbs to cure the sick.

What appeared most often at our door were maladies of the divided spirit – people who had somehow lost their stories, lost their memories. People separated from themselves, people you couldn’t distinguish from wild beasts.

p. 31

Although their land was owned by the Peixoto family, and Suterio managed the farm, it was the people who made the land productive. While their father seemed content, to some degree, to keep this arrangement stable, his children fought against it. And in so doing, lives are lost.

Belonisia, the sister who lost her tongue, tells us, “My voice was a crooked plow, deformed, penetrating the soil only to leave it infertile, ravaged, destroyed.” (p. 129)

Had the curiosity that led me to the knife with the ivory handle been directed elsewhere, I’d have discovered the person I might have been. For my mouth has so many stories to tell, stories that could have inspired our community, our children, to cast off their servitude to the owners of the fields and of the city houses where my people work.

p. 176

I am left with a sense of despair, wondering how things will ever change. “…why do we want the things that are unattainable?” (p. 258)

The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky (International Booker Prize 2024)

The Drinkers

Photo credit here.

For a while I felt like a good son, freed from the generations of chains of indentured slavery and conflict. Then, ever so gradually I went back to the pose, kneeling on the floor in the house on Via Gemito.

p. 303

Thus writes Domenico Starnone, son of the Italian painter Federi Starnone, who posed as the boy pouring the water in his father’s famous painting, The Drinkers. He describes the agony of holding the position for hours, unmoving, unable even to go to dinner when his mother calls, for fear of upsetting his father.

To say that Federi Starnone was volatile is to greatly minimize the way his personality dominated the family. He’d scream at his wife and hit her, bruising her face and once even throwing her hair combs into the fire where the scent of their burning haunted Dominic’s memory.

Everyone who disagreed with him was either a shithead or a ball buster; his opinion was the only one which mattered. To him.

He worked for the railroad, even though he wanted to be a full time painter. Never attending university, let alone high school, he was a self taught artist with tremendous skill.

In a particularly memorable scene, Domenico fearfully makes his way through the dark, to fetch his father’s cigarettes in his bedroom. Unexpectedly, he makes out a peacock with all its glorious coloring standing in the room; when his father comes to see what is taking so long, it is apparent that he cannot see it at all.

He would bend it (the peacock) to his needs and after his initial enthusiasm, he’d start to list its flaws…and he’d show the cruelty and jealousy he reserved for his fellow painter to the extent that he’d soon reduce the creature to a measly cockerel.”

p. 138

What a perfect depiction of the way Dominico felt under his father’s gaze: not fully seen, certainly not understood.

It’s interesting to me that I read one autobiographical book after another, the first two of the International Booker Prize longlist I’ve read. They are both deeply personal, and revelatory of a life lived in the shadow of a parent (or great grandparent).

Who we are can’t help being shaped from whom we’ve come.

Undiscovered by Gabriel Wiener, translated by Julia Sanches (International Booker Prize 2024)

Photo credit here.

Undiscovered is the first book I read in the longlist for the International Booker Prize 2024, and I didn’t like it very much. It poses most of the current complaints of our time: “I’m displaced; I’m misunderstood; women are blamed for what men do; racism reigns.” 

And yet, Wiener writes with a powerful pen, giving many passages which gave me pause, which made me get out my commonplace book to record them within its pages. 

Her great-great grandfather, Charles Wiener, was an Austrian archeologist. He brought treasures from Peru which were displayed in Paris, and this is the basis for much of her story. 

I’m leaving the quotes I found most provocative here, as I don’t want to forget them anytime soon:

“Museums are not cemeteries although they look a lot alike.”

“They say the Indians who were taken to Europe didn’t last long. I’ve been here fifteen years and it feels like a miracle.”

“Trolls feed on fear and I am my own personal troll…it’s only logical that the fear of abandonment can paralyze me sometimes.”

“I am being called into question by a specialist, just like another one of Wiener’s illegitimate discoveries.”

“…we’ve been conditioned to be attracted to people who are slim, white, normative, and to look down on anyone who looks like us.”

“We never stop seeking what we were so that we can start becoming what we dream of. In a movement that distances us from the border, that place between life and death, where a right-wing congressman embraces the police.”

Well, maybe you can get a sense of the hostility, with a side of insecurity, within this book. Thought-provoking, and relevant, it surely holds its place among the longlist contenders. 

The Final Curtain by Keigo Higashino

Keigo Higashino’s work has long fascinated me, and when Arti of Ripple Effects suggested we read it together, I was most eager to begin. As usual, I am looking forward to her thoughts, as she is able to pierce to the quick of any work she analyses. (Try reading The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky with her. Or, Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust! I recommend you look up those posts on her site…)

The thought foremost in my mind, as I read The Final Curtain was how the death of detective Kaga’s mother, in a remote little village of Japan, would tie in with the deaths of a woman and a homeless man in Tokyo…

Those of us who have read of Keigo Higashino’s previous books know him for his work with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. We are aware of his broad shoulders, physical strength, and mental aptitude. In ways similar to many famous detectives in literature (Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, for example) his intellect and insight are incomparable. So, to learn more of his earlier life, particularly of his family, was an appealing angle.

However, once the bodies of a woman who had been strangled, and a homeless man who had been burned in his shelter, were discovered things became quickly complicated. I confess to struggling to remember the characters, as new ones kept turning up, and they all seemed quite similar to my Western mind. Names like Michiko Oshitani, Matsuyo Koshikawa, Yasuyo Miyamito, Yuriko Tajima, and many other characters often had me searching my mind to place them. For me, this is a book which cannot easily be read in conjunction with others, or at a leisurely pace; I would all too quickly be lost in the machinations of the characters.

Yet once I neared the last fourth of the book, I read on at a frenetic pace. For Higashino took us past the plot, into the part I like best about literature: understanding why because we have looked into who the characters are.

We are taken by his expert direction into the lives of children and their parents; in this case we look directly into who Kaga’s mother was, and into another leading character’s father and daughter relationship.

One of the most intriguing aspects of this novel is how Higoshino brought up the idea of comfort in an after life.

Let me tell you something I heard from a friend of mine – she’s a nurse – recently. One of her patients was very close to death. Nonetheless, the thought that she’d be able to watch her children’s lives unfold from beyond the grave filled her with joy. It was a trade-off for which she was quite happy to lose her earthly body. When it’s a matter of their own children, parents are prepared to sacrifice themselves. What do you think?

p. 281

I think that is true, for the most part. But, I also think that many children are prepared to sacrifice themselves for their parents, as The Final Curtain reveals.

(Thanks to Macmillan who sent me an advanced copy of The Final Curtain, although the photograph is one from my local library.)

Find Arti’s review of The Final Curtain here.

Point Zero by Seicho Matsumoto (Japanese Literature Challenge 17)

Was Kenichi fond of her after all? Were the affections he showed her on their honeymoon genuine? She believed so, but then why, right after their wedding, had he disappeared without a trace?

p. 76

Well, that is a distressing thing to come across at the end of the very first chapter. Poor Teiko Itane, just briefly married and never to see her husband again. Why? This is the compelling question to which she seeks an answer throughout the novel.

Her brother-in-law, Sotaro, assures her that Kenichi is still alive. Her husband’s successor, Yoshio Honda, assists her in the search. But, both of them are only so helpful, and it is up to Teiko to find the answer herself.

The setting of this mystery is in the late 1950’s, when the people of Japan are still reeling from the effects of World War II. Especially the women. They had lost wealth, and status, and struggled to survive. Many of them became “pan-pan girls,” women who served the American GIs, in order to live.

When Teiko hears an employee of one of her husband’s best clients speak American with slang added in, she realizes that this woman must have been a consort at one time. And so, the reader is faced with a mystery, as well as parts of Japanese culture and history.

I found Point Zero a fascinating book, beautifully written. It is what I have learned Seicho Matsumoto’s work to be.

Japanese Literature Challenge 17 Review Site

This is the “Review site” wherein we can leave a link to the books we’ve read for the Japanese Literature Challenge 17. I will keep it attached to the top of my blog, for easy accessibility, from now until the end of February.

Please guide us to your thoughts on the books you’ve read, or if you haven’t a blog, leave your thoughts in a comment below. I am looking forward to growing our awareness of Japanese literature in translation together, and adding works to my own ever increasing collection.

ようこそ

(Welcome!)