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.