All This I Will Give To You by Dolores Redondo, a Planeta Prize winning novel for Spanish Lit Month and Women In Translation Month

”All this I will give to you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.” ~Matthew 4:9 (NIV)

On World Book Day, Amazon gives free books in translation for one’s kindle. (Mark April 23, 2021 on your calendar should you wish to enjoy such pleasures, for they are worthy titles.) All This I Will Give To You, by Dolores Redondo, has been languishing in my queue for such a time as this: Spanish Lit Month and Women in Translation Month. Not only that, it won the Planeta Prize in 2016.

This thrilling novel is intricately woven and beautifully constructed. It follows the labyrinthine path of Manuel who is suddenly woken in the night with the news that his husband has died in a car crash. And when Manuel drives to Alvaro’s family estate for the funeral, he decides to stay to discover what, exactly, was the cause of his husband’s death. The more he searches, the more intrigue he uncovers, for Alvaro’s family bears many hidden secrets.

The waxy, white petals of a gardenia, discovered tucked away in pockets and drawers…the exuberant innocence of Samuel, a four year old boy…the malicious hatred of the Raven, the matriarch of the family estate which has now been left to Manuel, all combine with the help of a policeman and old friend to reveal the truth.

This was a fascinating novel, one I just completed just last night. I leave you with the trailer from the author’s site, as perhaps it will picque your interest even more.

For Women In Translation Month this August, Ten of My Favorite Authors

 

Hiro Arikawa

Anuradha Roy

Kanae Minato

Sayaka Murata

Margaret Mazzantini

Sylvia Avallone

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels

Olga Tokarczuk

Wioletta Greg

From Japan:

Hiro Arikawa (The Traveling Cat Chronicles)

Yuko Tsushima (The Territory of Light)

Kanae Minato (Confessions and Penance)

Sayaka Murata (The Convenience Store Woman)

From Italy:

Margaret Mazzantini (Don’t Move, Strega Prize winner)

Sylvia Avallone (Swimming to Elba, Strega Prize nomination)

Elena Ferrante (the Neapolitan novels, author not pictured)

From Poland:

Wioletta Greg (Swallowing Mercury, nominated for the Man Booker International Prize, and Accomodations)

Olga Tokarczuk (Flights, Man Booker International Prize winner, and Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of The Dead, Man Booker International Prize nomination)

From India:

Anuradha Roy (Sleeping on Jupiter and All The Lives We Never Lived)

 

Find more information about Women In Translation Month from Meytal Radzinski, the woman behind it at all, at @Read_WIT and/or #WITMonth.

 

 

August Is (Still) Spanish Lit Month; August is Women In Translation Month

Since I don’t have to prepare a classroom in August for the first time in 35 years, I can focus on literature this month. Since Spanish Lit Month and Women In Translation Month align, I can read for both at the same time. And so, we have the books in my kindle and on my shelf:

Umami by Laia Jufresa (translated by Sophie Hughes)

From OneWorld Publications:

Using five voices to tell the singular story of life in an inner city mews, Umami is a quietly devastating novel of missed encounters, missed opportunities, missed people, and those who are left behind. Compassionate, surprising, funny and inventive, it deftly unpicks their stories to offer a darkly comic portrait of contemporary Mexico, as whimsical as it is heart-wrenching.

Fish Soup by Margarita García Robayo (translated by Charlotte Coombe)

From Charco Press:

From internationally acclaimed author Margarita García Robayo comes Fish Soup, a unique collection comprising two novellas plus the book of short stories Worse Things (winner of the prestigious Casa de las Américas Prize)…
Throughout the collection, García Robayo’s signature style blends cynicism and beauty with an undercurrent of dark humour. The prose is at once blunt and poetic as she delves into the lives of her characters, who simultaneously evoke sympathy and revulsion, challenging the reader’s loyalties as they immerse themselves in the unparalleled universe that is Fish Soup.

I am so excited to read these two this month, while hopefully also fitting in Javier Marias’ Fever and Spear.

And you? Do you have plans for Spanish Lit Month? Women in translation?

Penance by Kanae Minato (for the Japanese Literature Challenge 11 and Women in Translation Month)

I didn’t come to Tokyo for the upscale shopping or all the great places to have fun at. What I wanted was to melt into the crowds of people who didn’t know about my past, and vanish.

More precisely, because I’d witnessed a murder, and the person who committed it had not been caught, what I wanted more than anything was to disappear from his
radar forever.

Each chapter of this novel is told from another character’s point of view, all circling around one central theme: the murder of Emily, whose father was an executive with Adachi Manufacturing.

The company had come to their obscure little town because the quality of air was exceptionally clean and pure, a point which is repeatedly brought up, yet in stark contrast to the story each girl has to tell.

As children, they were playing volleyball in the schoolyard after hours when a man appears, dressed in workman’s clothes, telling them he needs to fix the ventilation fans in the school. He chooses Emily to help him, and when she is gone for a long time her friends enter the school to find her dead on the floor of the men’s washroom.

Each tells of the effect this horrific event had in her life: Sae always trembled in fear; Akiko refused to go to school; Yuka became a delinquent, shoplifting at night…

We wonder, as we read, if the murderer will be found before the limit for prosecution has run out. As the translator points out before the novel even begins, “Until 2010, Japan had a fifteen-year statue of limitations on the crime of murder.” And as Emily’s mother admonished the girls who played with her daughter:

“I will never forgive you, unless you find the murderer before the statute of limitations is up. If you can’t do that, then atone for what you’ve done, in a way I’ll accept.   If you don’t do either one, I’m telling you here and now – I will have revenge on each and every one of you.” p. 102

What a thing for an adult to say to children! These girls have been traumatized for the rest of their lives, reliving every moment of this horrendous situation, each wondering what they could have done differently. They are unable to trust, even themselves, let alone the adults around them. Everything in their young lives is called into question.

They arrive at their own ways to “make up” for witnessing this murder, or at least not being able to stop it. One girl says, “A coward’s penance is completed only by stepping up and confessing.”

Another says, “Penance? Never reach for anything beyond your station.”

There is one thing, however, that is not a form of penance: killing a different man in place of the murderer. As each of the girls comes to find out.

The only form of penance which has any positive effect whatsoever, is forgiveness. And, maybe, the person who needs to be forgiven the most is ourselves.

 

I read this book for my own Japanese Literature Challenge 11, and also for Women in Translation Month hosted by Biblibio.

Of Things in August Hoped For

I abandoned The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende today. I had intended to read it for both Spanish Lit Month and the Japanese Literature Challenge 9, but I tired of feeling I was  outside of the book, separated from the characters by a relentless narrative of facts. Normally, Allende’s writing completely engrosses me, particularly with The House of Spirits, and I’m not sure if it’s her or if it’s me to blame for becoming frustrated.

For I am rather excellent at being frustrated these days. The sinus infection from a tooth implant gone awry has lasted my whole entire summer, which I wouldn’t mind so much if it didn’t have an accompanying thump in my upper jaw. And with the arrival of August is the arrival of a new school year, at least in my part of the world; the first day of school for the dear children and I is August 20. Twentieth. Which is still summer as far as I’m concerned.

Lest I continue my bitter complaints, let me point out some positive things about August. There’s Austen in August for which I purchased this gorgeous annotated edition of Emma for $3.00 at our library. (‘Cause if it isn’t Nora Roberts, they don’t keep it on the shelf.)

And, there’s Women in Translation month for which I plan to read the third book of the Neopolitan novels, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante. I hope to get in another Japanese novel as well, quite possibly Asleep by Banana Yoshimoto.

And, I’m folding the most beautiful stars for my classroom. There are many, both big and small, which I will string on invisible thread to cascade down from the ceiling at the back of my room. Because if you’re going to be hot, in an un-air-conditioned upper room at school when you should be at the beach, you should at least have something pretty to look at.

Women In Translation Month: Books I Own, Books You May Want To Try

These are the hard copies of books I own which fit Women in Translation Month this August. I’m sure I have more on my Kindle and Nook, but I will have to go through those carefully to complete the list for next year:

The School of Possibilities by Seita Parkkola (translated from the Finnish by Annira Silver and Marja Gass)

Short listed for the 2006 Finlandia Junior Prize

Who Ate Up All the Shinga? by Park Wan-Suh (translated from the Korean by Yu Young-Nan and Stephen J. Epstein)

Me, Who Dove Into The Heart of the World by Sabina Berman (translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman)

Swimming to Elba by Silvia Avallone (translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar)

The Hunger Angel by Herta Muller (translated from the German by Philip Boehm)

The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly by Sun-Mi Hwang (translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim)

The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles by Katherine Panchol (translated from the French by William Rodarmor and Helen Dickinson)

Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan (translated from the French by Irene Ash)

Out by Natsuo Kirino (translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder)

Asleep by Banana Yoshimoto (translated from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich)

The Restaurant of Love Regained by Ito Ogawa (translated from the Japanese by David Karashima)

The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto (translated from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich)

Short listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize

I would have loved to participate in this challenge hosted by Biblibio, which many of my friends from the IFFP Shadow Jury (Jacqui, Tony M. and Tony) are doing. However, I have set aside August for Haruki Murakami’s latest release, Colorless Tzukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. That novel, and the preparation for a new school year, will occupy my month most fully.

Still, I wanted to see what I own and offer up to you some reading possibilities. I know that Diane of Bibliophile by the Sea loved The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly. And my favorite from the list, though far from all are read, is Swimming to Elba. That novel is actually in my top five favorite adult books ever, the other four being Possession by A. S. Byatt, The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, and Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami.