Category: 20 books of summer

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2023)

20 books of summer — 2023 recap

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That’s a wrap!

I’ve completed my #20BooksOfSummer challenge and read 20 books! This is quite an improvement on last year’s efforts, where I only managed 15. 

This is the seventh year I have taken part in this annual event, which is coordinated by Cathy, who blogs at 746 Books. The idea is to read 20 books (or a nominated amount less than this) from your TBR pile between 1 June and 31 August, which is summer in the Northern Hemisphere and winter in the Southern — or, if you live in Western Australia like me, it’s the Nyoongar seasons of Makura (June-July, winter) and the first half of Djilba (August-September, first spring). 

This time around I’ve read a delightful mix of books from mainly European countries, with a particular focus on Ireland (eight books) and Italy (five). I also read two from Japan, two from Australia and one each from France, UK and Norway. 

In total I read 13 literary novels/novellas, two crime fiction books, one short story collection and four non-fiction books. 

It was the non-fiction books — Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli,  Patrick Modiano’s The Search Warrant and Iris Origo’s two-volume Italian war diaries — that really stood out for me, which is surprising given my usual preference for fiction. 

But I also loved Donal Ryan’s heartbreaking novel The Thing About December and Claire Kilroy’s gripping story about first-time motherhood Soldier Sailor. The only book I found disappointing was Naoise Dolan’s The Happy Couple.

Here’s what I read

Click the covers (or tap them if you are reading on a mobile device) to see my review in full.

Cover image of 'The Happy Couple' by Naoise Dolan.

Did you take part in #20BooksOfSummer? How did you do? And regardless if you did or didn’t take part, I’d love to know which book has been your favourite read of the summer (or winter)?

1001 books, 20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2023), Author, Book review, Carlo Levi, Italy, memoir, Non-fiction, Penguin Modern Classics, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, translation

‘Christ stopped at Eboli’ by Carlo Levi (translated by Frances Frenaye)

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Memoir – paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 256 pages; 2000. Translated from the Italian by Frances Frenaye.

Christ Stopped at Eboli, by Carlo Levi (1902-1975), is a beautifully evoked portrait of life in a remote village in Southern Italy in 1935, a place beset by poverty, superstition and ancient beliefs, a place so primitive that sending an educated man to live there was seen as a form of punishment. It was such a bad place, it was said that even Christ would never visit it — hence the title.

A first-hand account of Levi’s experience as a political exile banished from the north of Italy for anti-fascist activities under Mussolini, the book is as much an anthropological study as it is a memoir.

It is full of sublime observations and insights into a traditional way of life — and is probably the best book, and certainly the most interesting, I have read all year.

Banished to the south

Levi was a writer and painter from Turin who had a degree in medicine, but he had never practised as a doctor. He came from a wealthy Jewish family and had been arrested for political activism. (Wikipedia tells me he founded an anti-fascist movement in 1929 and became leader alongside Natalia Ginzburg‘s husband, Leone.)

When he is sent to Aliano (which he calls Gagliano because that is how the locals pronounce it), in what is now known as the region of Basilicata, he is forbidden from contacting the dozen or so other political prisoners living in the same village and must report daily to the fascist mayor.

Knowledge of his medical background precedes him, and soon the local peasants descend on him for treatment because they do not trust the local doctors who are incompetent. The region is plagued by malaria and trachoma (an eye disease that can cause blindness), and the level of illness, starvation and poverty he sees, especially in the children, is distressing.

A dozen women with children in their arms or standing beside them were patiently waiting for me to get up. They wanted to show me their offspring and have me attend to them. The children were pale and thin with big, sad black eyes, waxen faces, and swollen stomachs drawn tight like drums above their thin, crooked legs. Malaria, which spared no one in these parts, had already made its way into their underfed rickety bodies.

Among women

He comes to understand the locals as decent people, but their beliefs are largely superstitious and their customs ancient — most of them shun church. He is immediately warned to stay away from the women — he is a good-looking man — and must never take food or drink prepared by them for “they would be sure to put a philtre or love potion in it”.

The village is dominated by women in what he describes as a “matriarchal society” because most of the men have gone to America in search of work and a better life.

Those [men] who are left in the villages are the discarded, who have no talents, the physically deformed, the inept and the lazy; greed and boredom combine to dispose them to evil. Small parcels of farm land do not assure them a living and, in order to survive, the misfits must dominate the peasants and secure for themselves the well-paid posts of druggist, priest, marshal of the carabinieri, and so on.

A year in the life

Over the course of a year, Levi charts not only his interactions with these people with whom he becomes very fond but also the changing seasons and the beauty he finds in the landscape around him. His painterly eye is apparent in his vivid and ever-eloquent descriptions.

It was September and the heat was giving way to promises of autumn. The wind came from a different direction; it no longer brought with it the burning breath of the desert, but had a vague smell of the sea. The fiery streaks of the sunset lingered for hours over the mountains of Calabria and the air was filled with bats and crows. From my terrace the sky seemed immense, covered with constantly changing clouds; I felt as if I was on the roof of the world or on the deck of a ship anchored in a petrified ocean.

His time in exile is cut short, but when he is told he is free to leave he is reluctant to do so: something about the experience of living among these salt-of-the-earth types has irrevocably changed him and he has learned as much about himself — and the divisions within his own country — as he has of them. So, despite his loss of freedom, the distressing poverty he has seen, the never-ending disease, the “backward” customs he has had to negotiate and the greed and petty corruption of the village “elite”, the village has wormed its way into his soul.

The place and the people wormed their way into mine as well.

Christ Stopped at Eboli is a singularly beautiful memoir; it’s heartfelt without being sentimental, and insightful without being judgemental. It was first published in 1945 and translated into English in 1947.

There’s a film adaptation too. It was critically acclaimed, winning a BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1983, and is available to view on the fee-paying Criterion Channel — I haven’t watched it, but it looks sublime.

If you liked this, you might also like:

‘The Aran Islands’ by J.M. Synge: an anthropological study of the people who lived on these ancient rocky islands in Galway Bay, untouched by modernity at the turn of the 19th century.

This is my 20th book for #20BooksOfSummer 2023. I purchased it from Dymocks online earlier this year when I was looking for books similar to Cesare Pevase’s ‘The House on the Hill’, which I had enjoyed immensely.

‘Christ Stopped at Eboli’ by Carlo Levi, first published in 1945, is listed in Peter Boxall’s 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, where it claims the novel was an “international sensation” and “in a move toward social realism in postwar Italian literature, brought to the attention of the Italian public a long-neglected part of their own country”.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2023), Author, Book review, Fiction, HarperVia, historical fiction, Italy, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction, Viola Ardone, women in translation

‘The Children’s Train’ by Viola Ardone (translated by Clarissa Botsford)

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Fiction – paperback; HarperVia; 312 pages; 2021. Translated from the Italian by Clarissa Botsford.

Viola Ardone’s The Children’s Train is an absorbing novel about a young boy who escapes poverty and disease in war-torn Naples for a short time when he goes to live with a farming family in northern Italy.

Set in 1946, the narrative charts his antics before, during and after his six-month stint living with the kindly Benvenuti family and then fast forwards by almost 40 years to show the long-lasting impact of this experience on his life.

It’s a charming and heartfelt fictionalised account of Italy’s “happiness trains”, an initiative co-ordinated by a group of Communist women, to transport almost 70,000 children from the war-torn south to the north of the country. The “rescue mission” was designed to give those children a temporary reprieve from harsh and unsanitary living conditions following the impact of the Second World War and the families that welcomed them a sense of solidarity.

Maddalena Cerasuolo, an Italian partisan, war hero and Communist Party member, plays a starring role in the novel, helping to organise and register the children for the journey. 

Child narrator

The story is told through the eyes of seven-year-old Amerigo Speranza in the first person, present tense.

Amerigo is a clever, cheeky and talkative child, who lives in a one-room apartment in Naples. An older brother, whom he has never met, died in infancy. He’s never met his father either — he’s supposedly somewhere in America seeking his fortune. His mother, Antonietta, has a lover, who hides black-market coffee under their bed and is later taken away by police and thrown in jail.

To help his mother put food on the table, Amerigo scavenges rags to sell. He has an entrepreneurial spirit and catches rats in the sewers with his best friend Tommasino, painting them brown and white, and removing their tails so the rodents can be passed off as “hamsters” to sell in a local market.

His nickname is Nobel, because he’s clever, especially with numbers, and knows more than most children his age.

When he is sent to northern Italy on one of the first children’s trains to leave Naples, he’s not so sure it’s a good idea. Rumours are rife that Communists eat children and they’ll be cooked in ovens for consumption. There’s also a belief that the trains are a ploy by the Communists to send all the children to Russia, where they will be put to work in Siberia.

Train journey

But despite the fears, the journey is exciting because the children have never been on a train before. They’re issued with new clothes and shoes, fed delicious food and allowed to run amok. When they see snow for the first time through the train window one girl mistakes it for ricotta cheese.

“Amerigo, Ameri… wake up! There’s ricotta all over the ground. On the streets. On the mountains! It’s raining ricotta…”
The night is over and a pale ray of sunlight shines through the window.
“Mariù, it’s not cream or ricotta cheese. It’s snow…”
“Snow?”
“Frozen water.”
“Like the one Don Mimmi sells from his cart?”
“Kind of, but without the black-cherry syrup on top.”

When they arrive in Bologna, the children are collected by their foster families. Amerigo is housed with a young widow, Derna, who is gentle and compassionate, and claims she does not “really understand kids” because she doesn’t have any of her own. She gets her cousin, Rosa Benvenuti, who has three young boys and lives nearby, to look after him during the day (when she’s at work) because “kids need to be with kids”.

The arrangement is fortuitous. Rosa is friendly and maternal; her husband Alcide, a piano teacher, is kind; the three boys — Rivo, Luzio and baby Nario (Rivo-Luzio-Nario!) — are wary at first but soon accept Amerigo as a brother. In their company, Amerigo flourishes, both physically and mentally.

When he expresses an interest in music, in particular the violin, Alcide goes out of his way to secure him an instrument and the lessons to go with it, an opportunity his mother would never be able to provide.

The return back to Naples when the harsh winter is over is predictably a wrench, and Amerigo must readjust to a life in which he must forego basic needs in order to be with his mother, who is emotionally distant and detached.

Tale in four parts

The Children’s Train is comprised of four parts. The first three are set in 1946, covering Amerigo’s time living in Naples, his stint with the Benvenuti family up north, and then his return. The final part, set in 1994, gives us a glimpse of the adult Amerigo, who is coming to terms with decisions he made as a child and which have impacted his life — and his mother’s life — forever.

It’s a really lovely book with glimmers of humour and lashings of nostalgia and wistfulness.

The author, who is a school teacher by trade, has an uncanny ability to see things through a child’s eye. She captures the voice of a young boy perfectly — his youthful enthusiasm, fears and bravado, his sense of wonder and openness to new experiences, his growing awareness of right and wrong, and the class divide are all laid bare for the reader to see. I’m not always partial to child narrators, which can be wearisome and inauthentic, but Amerigo’s narrative is expertly done.

And while I knew exactly how this story was going to end and realised that I was being emotionally manipulated throughout, it’s such an immersive, big-hearted novel that it seems churlish to even point it out. The Children’s Train is an absorbing read, one with all the feels, and easily devoured over the course of a weekend. I adored it.

UPDATE 25 AUGUST: After writing this review, Italian historian Giovanni Rinaldi got in touch about the “happiness trains”. As part of an oral history project, between 2002 and 2020 he interviewed many Italians, now adults, who had been passengers. These have been collected into a book, sadly not available in English translation, called I Was There on That Train Too. A 52-minute documentary has also been made (see here) – with English subtitles — that is available to rent online or purchase. 

This is my 19th book for #20BooksOfSummer 2023. I purchased it earlier this year while browsing in Dymocks Hay Street store, in Perth’s CBD. It chimed well with my then-burgeoning interest in Italy’s involvement in the Second World War. This book also qualifies for #WITMonth, which runs throughout August and encourages people to read books by women writers in translation.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2023), Australia, Author, Book review, David Allan-Petale, Fiction, Focus on WA writers, Fremantle Press, literary fiction, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting

‘Locust Summer’ by David Allan-Petale

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Fiction – paperback; Fremantle Press; 240 pages; 2021.

Having the courage to forge your own path in life, free from parental expectations and obligations, is at the heart of this fine novel by David Allan-Petale.

Set in Septimus, a fictional town in Western Australia’s Wheatbelt, it tells the story of a young city journalist who returns home to the family farm to help bring in the final harvest before the property is sold.

As well as being a bittersweet homage to rural life and farming, it’s also an evocative story about loyalty, resilience, grief and illness.

Harvest calling

It’s 1986 and Rowan Brockman is a poorly paid journalist in Perth working the crime beat under Holt, a gruff but experienced editor. It’s the kind of city job Rowan’s always wanted, although he grew up in the country — “up the Mid West” — on a wheat farm, and there was an expectation he might stay on to run it with his elder brother, Albert.

But Albert is dead, thanks to a horrific mining accident, and the “spare” to the “heir” is not interested in pursuing this kind of life. The result is that there’s an unspoken rift within the family because Rowan’s choice to forgo a life on the land puts the future of the property at risk.

Every year when Rowan’s mum calls and asks him to help with the harvest, there’s always an excuse not to go, but this year is different: Rowan’s dad has dementia and can no longer work. Once the final harvest is finished, the house will be packed up and the land sold to a university for agricultural research purposes. There’s no alternative other than to say “yes” and ask Holt for the time off work to do it.

Mum had a workforce for the fields. Contracts for shipments. Buyers lined up for the grain. Why did I need to come? If she was serious about selling, then movers could pack the house. She already took care of Dad and refused all help.
“Rowan, will you come?”
The sea breathed through the living room curtains. Rising light was bringing the promise of another hot day; hotter inland where desert winds trapped eddies of heat over the paddocks of wheat ready for threshing.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said, and Mum breathed a sigh of relief.

Country life

In Septimus, on the farm, Rowan falls back into the rhythms of country life.

As well as numerous riotous booze-fuelled evenings in the pub and an attempt to rekindle an old romance with Alison, his ex-girlfriend, Rowan gets his soft city hands dirty under the instruction of loyal farmhand Sterlo, who has worked for the family for years. Rowan is the square peg in the round hole, immensely aware he’s not cut out for this kind of work, but doing what he can to fit in. But it’s tough and he makes mistakes.

A lot happens in three short weeks as pressure to get the harvest finished before the weather changes and wheat prices drop continues to mount. There are added complications: day-long harvest bans because of the risk of bushfire; a pair of farm dogs (brilliantly named Bradman and Lillee) are euthanised after they go on a sheep-killing spree; an unplanned drive across a vast salt plain goes disastrously wrong; and Rowan’s father sparks a community-wide search when he disappears one afternoon.

Allan-Petale captures not just the atmosphere of a baking hot summer, the wide open spaces of the Wheatbelt and the time-worn routine of harvest work, but the sense of community spirit — and gossip — which will be familiar to anyone who’s grown up in these kinds of rural locales known the world over.

There’s a lot to admire in this captivating novel. As a story about a man making peace with his decisions, it’s also a touching examination of parental love and the possibility of fresh starts. The mother-son relationship is particularly well done.

Unsurprisingly, the manuscript for Locust Summer was shortlisted for the Australian/Vogel Literary Award in 2017; the book was shortlisted for the WA Premier’s Book Awards in 2021; and it was longlisted for the ALS Gold Medal in 2022.

If you liked this, you might also like:

‘Solace’ by Belinda McKeon: A doctoral student in Dublin struggles to reconcile his city life with the obligation he feels towards helping his father run the family farm.

This is my 18th book for #20BooksOfSummer 2023. I bought it in mid-2021, not long after I read Lisa’s review at ANZLitLovers. Since then, the author has become my colleague: we both work for the same organisation here in Perth and, after a recent restructure, are now sitting on the same team! I’d like to stress this hasn’t affected my opinion of the book; I just wouldn’t have bothered reviewing it if I hadn’t liked it.

This book also qualifies for my #FocusOnWesternAustralianWriters. You can find out more about this reading project, along with a list of Western Australian books already reviewed on the site, here. 

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2023), Author, Book review, Fiction, Harvill Secker, Norway, Per Petterson, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction

‘I Refuse’ by Per Petterson (translated by Don Bartlett)

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Vintage; 288 pages; 2014. Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett.

I hope Norwegian writer Per Petterson is working on a new book because I have now exhausted his entire backlist and I am feeling a bit bereft.

He became one of my favourite authors when I read his award-winning breakthrough novel Out Stealing Horses in 2006 and I’ve been steadily making my way through his work, often translated out of order, ever since.

I Refuse, first published in Norway as Jeg Nekter in 2012, features many of Petterson’s trademark themes: working-class families trying to get by; homes wrecked by domestic violence; and lonely, psychologically damaged men picking up the pieces of their lives.

This story is tinged with Petterson’s usual melancholia and nostalgia but is a brilliant evocation of a friendship forged between two boys in childhood that does not quite stand the test of time.  When the pair are accidentally reacquainted after a 35-year break, it sets in chain a series of events — with mixed results.

Multiple viewpoints

The story is told from multiple viewpoints at various times between the 1960s and early 2000s but unfolds in non-chronological order. I loved its circular narrative style, ending where it begins, and the way in which Petterson conveys the passing of time to highlight how it can feel like it is simultaneously speeding up and slowing down.

Is time like an empty sack you can stuff any number of things into, does it never go just from here to there, but instead in circles, round and round, so that every single time the wheel has turned, you are back where you started.

This device allows the author to build a complex and compelling picture of how Tommy and Jim grew up together before they drifted apart. It also gives the reader a glimpse of how both men, who once had so much in common, have been shaped and altered by their different life experiences.

As well as giving us Tommy and Jim’s backstories in alternate chapters, each one headed with a name and a year to guide the reader, other voices from Tommy’s past are included: his respected foster father, his beloved sister and his estranged mother, who walked out on her four children to escape an abusive marriage, never to be heard from again.

There are several key scenes, described in sparse, yet evocative, prose, that represent significant turning points in the characters’ lives.

The first happens when the men, middle-aged, meet by chance after not having seen each other for more than three decades. It’s a chilly autumnal morning. Jim is on foot, shabbily dressed and returning from his early-morning ritual of fishing from a bridge; Tommy is driving past in a shiny new charcoal grey Mercedes and is wearing an expensive purple coat.

In another, 13-year-old Tommy is viciously beaten by his father, but he gets his own back by smashing his father’s ankle with a rounders bat. Not long later, his father disappears, leaving Tommy to fend for himself with three younger sisters in tow.

In another scene, 19-year-old Jim is standing outside the doors of a psychiatric unit, “the Bunker”, nonchalantly smoking a cigarette while wearing “nothing more over my top than the white hospital smock”. He has been admitted to hospital after trying to hang himself from the rafters of a shed, and for much of the rest of his life, he experiences panic attacks and struggles to hold down a job.

Two lives

By interleaving the divergent courses of Tommy and Jim’s lives, Petterson paints a picture of two different personalities who grow apart in ways that might not have been predicted from their upbringing. Jim, for instance, tends to let things happen to him, while Tommy is more assertive and takes charge of events — the intriguing thing is that both seem to be desperately unhappy, immensely lonely and in need of a friend.

I Refuse asks important questions about male friendship, mental illness, life’s purpose, family ties and whether we can ever truly break free of the past. How did the paths of these two working-class boys from broken families diverge so drastically? Was it simply down to the choices they made? Or did personal circumstances come into play?

Lisa at AnzLitLovers has also reviewed it.

This is my 17th book for #20BooksOfSummer 2023. I bought it on Kindle in March 2022 but I’m sure I have a hardcover kicking around somewhere, too.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2023), A Year With William Trevor, Author, Book review, Fiction, Ireland, literary fiction, Penguin, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, William Trevor

‘Fools of Fortune’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023

Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin; 211 pages; 2015.

As I continue to work my way through William Trevor’s extensive backlist in chronological order (as part of A Year With William Trevor, which I am co-hosting with Cathy from 746 Books), I’ve been waiting to discover the book that would signal a turn in direction. Fools of Fortune is it.

First published in 1983, Fools of Fortune won the Whitbread Prize (precursor to the Costa) in 1983. It is a mid-career novel that moves away from Trevor’s typically English setting to an Irish one. He substitutes black comedy for a more serious and sombre tone. And the third-person voice is eschewed for a more intimate first-person narrative.

The story, which spans the years 1918 to 1982, looks at the long-lasting and far-reaching impact of trauma on the Quinton family, who own a flour mill and live in a Big House, called Kilneagh, in County Cork. They are Anglo-Irish protestants but have Home Rule sympathies —  Irish independence leader Michael Collins, for instance, is a semi-regular visitor, and a defrocked Catholic priest is a live-in tutor for the family’s young son, Willie.

But this is not a political novel. While it’s about murder and revenge during Ireland’s troubled history, it’s really an examination of intergenerational trauma and follows what happens to a small cast of characters caught up in a conflict beyond their control.

A story of two halves

The story is divided into two main sections; the first part is told through the eyes of Willie Quinton; the second is from the perspective of Willie’s English cousin, Marianne, with whom he later falls in love and bears a child.

The crux of the novel almost happens off the page: one of the mill workers is suspected of being an informer, so he is lynched by the Black and Tans, who cut out his tongue and hang him from a tree as a warning. They later set fire to the Quinton’s house, resulting in the death of Willie’s father and his two sisters.

After the devastating arson attack, Willie and his mother move to a smaller house in town. Willie is given succour by a school teacher, Miss Halliwell, who suffocates him with pity and unwelcome affection. It’s only when he is sent to boarding school that he is able to free himself from her overbearing attentiveness and fall in with a group of boys who take pleasure in sending up their professors.

It is in this short part of the novel that Trevor adds a dash of his trademark black comedy — Willie and his friends, for instance, dub the headmaster Mr Scrotum, and there’s an excruciatingly funny scene in which they play a devious prank on a maths teacher that is outrageous in its audacity and crudity. But this humourous take soon gives way to romance — all beautifully evoked — when teenage Willie falls in love with his English cousin during a visit home.

That summer, that last week of July and all of August, three days of September: I have loved that summer all my life. Your dark brown eyes, darker than my mother’s, your oval face, your smile that brought a dimple to one cheek, your long brown hair, soft as mist it seemed. I stole glances at you while we stood near Mrs Haye’s shop and looked down at the city, at the distant green hills that always reminded me of Kilneagh. […] We strolled by the river and railway track […] Further and further from the city we walked, and all the time I wanted to take your hand.

Later, after finishing his education, Willie returns home to begin his career at the mill, still thinking about Marianne and trying to work up the courage to confess his love to her (via letter). But then his mother, who has numbed her pain and grief with alcohol for many years, takes her own life and he has other things to worry about.

Marianne’s tale

When we hear Marianne’s point of view, in the second half of the book, we discover that she feels similarly about Willie. Their romance kicks into gear at the time of Willie’s mother’s funeral, but it’s short-lived: Marianne has to go to finishing school in Switzerland, something that has been prearranged by her parents, for a few months.

While in Montreux, under the care of an English professor and his wife, she not only has to fight off the advances of the lecherous professor, who is in his sixties, she also learns that she is pregnant with Willie’s child. Knowing that this will bring shame on her family — her father is a rector in Dorset — she heads straight to Ireland to tell Willie the news. But Willie is no longer in Ireland and no one will tell her where he has gone or why.

The narrative jumps forward considerably when the story is taken up by Marianne’s school-age daughter, Imelda, who is an inquisitive and imaginative child and is, unknowingly, bearing the burden of her family’s past — in particular, Marianne’s difficult decision to become a single mother at a time when such decisions were condemned.

To compensate for being teased and bullied at school for being “illegitimate”, Imelda constantly daydreams that her father, whom she has never met, will sweep in to rescue her. This fantasy soon becomes an obsession, one that develops into a form of insanity…

Devastating tale

Fools of Fortune is a quietly devasting but hugely mature novel in Trevor’s extensive oeuvre.

The storytelling seems more reigned in, more gentle and nuanced, and less prone to exaggerate human behaviour than his earlier work. Everyone’s just trying to get on with their lives as best they can but their happiness is often thwarted by circumstance, politics and societal conventions rather than the untoward behaviour of psychologically damaged people that often characterise Trevor’s stories.

There are more than 60 years of history crammed into this compact novel, which is tinged with sadness and asks many more questions than it answers. How does Ireland’s story affect the personal, lived histories of its citizens? Who takes responsibility for past actions?  How can we overcome trauma? And how is it passed on?

For other takes on this novel, please see Ali’s review at Heavenali and Lisa’s review at ANZLitLovers.

I read this book as part of A Year With William Trevor, which I am co-hosting with  Cathy from 746 Books. You are invited to join in using the hashtag #WilliamTrevor2023. Please click here to learn more, including our monthly reading schedule.

♥ This month Cathy reviewed ‘Death in Summer’, which I have previously reviewed here.

♥ Next month Cathy plans to review ‘The Story of Lucy Gault’, the first William Trevor novel I read, back in 2003. My (rather inadequate) review is here. I plan to review ‘The Silence in the Garden’.

This is my 16th book for #20BooksOfSummer 2023. I purchased it on Kindle in March 2022.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2023), Australia, Author, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, Garry Disher, Publisher, Setting, Text

‘Day’s End’ by Garry Disher

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Fiction – paperback; Text Publishing; 400 pages; 2022.

What connects a missing Belgian backpacker with a pair of anti-vaxxer Covid deniers who bang on about “sovereign rights”?

Who is the man whose fatally wounded body is found in a diesel-soaked suitcase lying by the roadside?

How does a Facebook scam involving rental properties connect with another scam about hard rubbish collection in a rural town?

And is it a crime to “culturally appropriate” a First Nations symbol, carve it into a hillside and turn it into a tourist attraction?

These are just some of the many questions Constable Paul “Hirsch” Hirschhausen must grapple with in this compelling novel by Australian crime writer Garry Disher.

Day’s End is the fourth book in the Hirsch series of crime novels — Bitter Wash Road (2013), Peace (2019) and Consolation (2020) —  but it can be read as a standalone because Disher expertly sketches in enough detail to make the story “work” regardless of how familiar you are with Hirsch’s back story.

The UK edition is published by Viper

Covid-era conspiracies

Published late last year, Day’s End is set during the pandemic when everyone’s nerves are on edge, the conspiracy theorists have turned aggressive and there are protests about compulsory vaccination impinging on human rights.

Even in his rural outpost — a one-person cop shop three hours north of Adelaide — Hirsch must deal with the outfall of Covid shenanigans on top of his usual quota of rural policing issues. As well as making his twice-weekly road trips to check on remote properties and carry out welfare checks, he is the first point of contact for any dramas in town, from burglaries to drunken brawls.

And for a quiet Wheatbelt town, there is a lot going on.

Disher builds a complex picture of ongoing investigations, including an internal one against Hirsch who is caught on camera calling a guy a “Covid moron” (during an incident at the medical clinic) and another involving the neighbouring town’s police station (where Hersch’s boss is based) after a staffer is caught sharing inappropriate video footage — of a First Nations elder having an epileptic fit, and another of a care worker assaulting an elderly man in a care home.

There’s another narrative thread about cyberbullying against teenager Katie Street, the daughter of Hirsch’s girlfriend, Wendy, which highlights the criminality associated with sending intimidating text messages and faked porn images.

And all the while Hirsch has to try to figure out who killed the man in the suitcase and whether something nefarious has happened to the backpacker.

Complex network of crimes

I think it’s fair to say that Day’s End isn’t a typically plotted police procedural in which there tends to be a single major crime to investigate and solve. There are multiple crimes in this novel, some more serious than others, and not all of them are linked. The fun is trying to work out the connections, if any, and the red herrings.

And while it might seem like Disher is cramming too much into the story — there are cyber crimes, violent on-the-ground crimes, potential homegrown rightwing terrorist crimes, fraud, shootings, arson, murder and more — I never suspended belief. For the most part, the events and the ensuing investigations feel authentic.

The ending is a bit bombastic and not everything is neatly tied up, but that’s okay —  the ride to get there was entertaining and compelling.

And Hirsch, a good-hearted bloke not afraid to show his vulnerability, remains the cop you want on your side when things start to go wrong…

This is my 15th book for #20BooksOfSummer 2023. I rushed out and bought it as soon as it was released last November, took it home and added it to my TBR pile, where it has sat for the past seven months!

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2023), Author, Book review, History, Iris Origo, Italy, memoir, Non-fiction, Publisher, Pushkin Press, Setting

‘A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary, 1939-1940’ and ‘War in Val d’Orcia: An Italian War Diary 1943-1944’ by Iris Origo

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Non-fiction – paperback; Pushkin Press; 186 pages; 2018.

My fascination with Fascist Italy’s participation in the Second World War and the impact the conflict had on ordinary citizens continues with this compelling and highly readable two-volume set of war diaries by Iris Origo (1902-1988).

I had never heard of Iris Origo until I began to see these books pop up in my social media feeds earlier in the year. The diaries were published by both NYRB Classics and Pushkin Press in 2018, so I’m not sure why they have experienced a resurgence now, but I am so glad to have made their acquaintance, if somewhat belatedly.

But first, who was Iris Origo?

Portrait of a writer

The introductions to both these books, along with her Wikipedia entry, explain that she was an English-born biographer and writer who came from wealth and privilege — her father was a rich American diplomat and her mother the daughter of an Irish peer — but she had a peripatetic upbringing in England, Ireland, Italy and America.

After her father’s untimely death when Iris was eight years old, her mother settled in Italy and this is where Iris spent the rest of her childhood.

When she was 22, she married an Italian, Antonio Origo, and together they purchased a 2,800 hectare rundown estate, La Foce, in the Province of Sienna, and set about transforming it. During the Second World War, the couple housed refugee children at the estate as well as sheltering and feeding many escaped Allied prisoners of war and Italian partisans.

A talented writer, Iris became best known for War in Val d’Orcia: An Italian War Diary 1943-1944, which was published in 1947 to great acclaim. That book, reviewed below, recounts her time at La Foce (which is now a UNESCO World Heritage site) during the war, the last years of Fascism and the liberation of Italy.

But an earlier diary, A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary, 1939-1940, was not published during her lifetime. It’s a chilling account of how Italy stumbled into conflict in 1940.

In the afterword to the Pushkin Press edition, Katia Lysy, granddaughter of Iris Origo, writes that the manuscript was found hidden in her papers marked “unpublished”. She believes it was meant to be “a very private record in which Iris could give voice to thoughts and feelings she was usually forced to suppress” because to say such things aloud at the time might have landed her in hot water.

Chilling entries from the past

Published for the first time in 2017, A Chill in the Air is, indeed, chilling. It’s written reportage style without the benefit of hindsight which would allow the writer to contextualise events or to see the bigger picture. Instead, Origo provides a highly personal account of events happening around her, often via her impressive network of well-appointed contacts — her godfather was the American ambassador, for instance — giving us glimpses of multiple voices from political, cultural, religious and social circles.

Her granddaughter summarises it like this:

[…] A Chill in the Air reflects the increasingly oppressive atmosphere of a country on the brink of a war for which it is entirely unprepared. Iris Origo’s account of those years makes compelling reading. She pores over Italian newspapers and reflects poignantly on the changed attitude of her adopted country towards her beloved England, all the while holding our interest with an effortless flow of anecdotes, chilling wartime jokes and insider accounts of diplomatic negotiations doomed to failure.

The thing that strikes me most about reading this diary is that **I** know the outcome of events, but the writer, as she wrote the words, did not. Lines such as “terrible to think of what may lie ahead” (from 28 March 1939) and “the German advance on the Somme continues” (9 June 1939) and “All letters from England are a month old. What is happening? What can be happening?” (17 July 1940) seem alarming because history tells us what occurred.

The penultimate entry, written on 20 July 1940, before the writing of the diary was interrupted by the birth of Iris’s daughter on 1 August, is particularly chilling:

Last night Hitler’s speech. It is received here with almost universal approval: even those people who are not admirers of Naziism consider it a genuine effort towards peace and a last chance for England to save herself from destruction. That this destruction will be inevitable and will be swift, if Hitler does attempt it, no one doubts.

(This speech, in which Hitler offers the British an ultimatum — peace or destruction —  can be read in full online.)

 

Non-fiction – paperback; Pushkin Press; 320 pages; 2017.

War in Val d’Orcia covers the period 30 January 1943 to 5 July 1944 and feels more polished and more personal than the earlier diary. It is definitely more detailed and intricate.

It’s a well-written, first-hand personal account of a difficult time in Italy’s history but Iris Origo always brings a clear-eyed pragmatic view to everything she writes.  In the preface to this Pushkin Press edition, she claims that she tried to “avoid political bias and national prejudice” but acknowledges that she may well have “swallowed propaganda without realising it”.

Complex position

During 1943-1944, Italy’s involvement in the war is complex — and ever-changing. While the earlier diary covered the stage when Fascist leader Mussolini joined forces with Hitler, this diary charts changing circumstances. This includes the Allies landing in Sicily and bombing Rome, the Germans being driven out and Mussolini being arrested, heralding the fall of the Fascist regime.

As well as documenting the conflict — the looting, the bombing, the ever-present danger to Italian Jews and how the Fascist militia works hand in hand with the Nazis — Iris also gives us an insight into her own war efforts. Together with her Italian husband, Antonio Origo, the pair oversee more than 50 farms run by local peasants on their vast estate, producing the food required to sustain the nation. They open up La Foce to 32 refugee children, providing them with food and shelter, educating them and keeping them occupied while the war rages on.

Later, they secretly house escaped Allied prisoners of war (POW) and partisans who have taken up arms against the government. By doing this, both Iris and her husband are risking their lives for to help the enemy is a serious crime, punishable by death.

When the Italian armistice is called in September 1943, it looks like the war is over, but it’s really the beginning of the violence as the Nazis go on a rampage and POWs look to escape to places of safety. The diary does not shy away from describing some of this brutality.

Bombs were dropped in the valley this morning, shaking the house — aimed a the bridge on the Orcia. Then the bomber formation (thirty-six) flew over our heads and bombed Chiusi and the railway line. The explosions were loud even up here, and the children were frightened […] A lorry full of evacuees, all women and children, was hit at the Acquaviva crossing — twenty people wounded and eleven killed. (22 April 1944)

It doesn’t bode well when an airdrop by German planes announces that anyone hiding or helping the enemy will be shot on sight and that any house in which rebels are found will be blown up. Leaflets dropped by Allied planes announce the opposite.

The peasants read these leaflets with bewildered anxiety as to their own fate, and complete indifference (in most cases) to the main issue. Che sarà di noi? (What will become of us?) All that they want is peace — to get back to their land — and to save their sons. (21 May 1944)

Doing the right thing

I found this book not just a compelling and eye-opening read, tinged with sadness, enormous loss and grief, fear and violence, but a ringing endorsement of doing what is right and helping others in whatever way you can. The folly of war plays out against these pages yet Iris Origo, with all her wealth and privilege, does not seek the easy path, which would be to turn a blind eye. Instead, she courageously acts for the greater good.

What drives her to take the less selfless path is hard to know, but it may well have been the death of her son, who died of meningitis at the age of seven in 1933.

Reading A Chill in the Air and War in Val d’Orcia back to back was an intense and unforgettable experience.

For another take on these two diaries, please see Radz’s combined review at Rahika’s Reading Retreat. Jacqui of JacquiWine’s Journal has also reviewed A Chill in the Air and War in Val d’Orcia separately.

These are my 13th and 14th books for #20BooksOfSummer 2023. I bought them earlier in the year after I kept seeing mention of them on Instagram.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2023), Author, Black Swan, Book review, Donal Ryan, Fiction, Ireland, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘The Thing About December’ by Donal Ryan

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Fiction – paperback; Black Swan Ireland; 206 pages; 2014. 

My track record with Irish writer Donal Ryan has been disappointing, so I was delighted that The Thing About December, first published a decade ago, really hit the spot. BUT WHY DID NO ONE WARN ME THAT IT WOULD BREAK MY HEART?

Village life

The story is set in rural Ireland during a single year in which the Irish economy is booming and property speculation is a national obsession.

It’s told from the point of view of Johnsey Cunliffe, a simple, child-like man in his 20s, who lives on the family farm with his widowed mother. The farm is leased to Dermot McDermott, who treats Johnsey with contempt, as if to say “Look at this ape, his father dies and he can’t manage the bit of a farm that’s left behind!”

Johnsey is lonely and has no friends — indeed, he was bullied at school and those same bullies, headed by the nefarious Eugene Penrose, continue to torment him when he has to walk past them on the way home from work. His crime? He has a menial job at the local co-op (hired reluctantly, it has to be said, by Packie Collins, who resents having to pay minimum wage), while they are on the dole, hanging out in the village square because they’ve got nothing better to do with their time.

But there are small mercies. His father was great friends with Mr Unthanks, who owns the local bakery, and the Unthanks family treat him like one of their own. He often visits the bakery for lunch. It’s a place where he feels welcome — and loved.

[…] Himself would give him a lovely roll still warm from his oven and he’d put ham and cheese in it, and give him a Danish pastry for after, or a jam doughnut. The thought of the bakery made the day slow down even more, the warm bread smell and the little tables set out with the red and white tablecloths, the look of the Unthanks, and they smiling at him from behind the long wood counter, the pictures on the wall that hadn’t changed since Johnsey’s childhood and the feeling of gentleness that was always there.

When Johnsey’s mother unexpectedly dies, he seems ill-equipped to cope. His grief, and the shock of his loss, following just a year after his beloved father’s death, is palpable.

For a man to be lonely, Johnsey knew, he did not need to be alone. People often took his hand in the co-op, and stood reminiscing about one or both of his parents while his face burned and his other hand searched mainly for somewhere to put itself. You could be lonely even then, with a person actually standing right there in front of you, clutching your hand, saying things to you.

But the Unthanks step in to provide him with hot meals, and “his aunties and a small army of biddies” make all the funeral arrangements, clean the house and sort out all the accounts so he doesn’t have to worry about anything.

New friends 

Later, when Johnsey lands in the hospital, the result of a brutal beating by Eugene and his mates, he makes two friends who become fixtures in his life, not just in the ward but in the outside world when he is discharged many weeks later.

Mumbly Dave, a fellow patient, is similarly lonely, and Siobhan, the nurse who tends to all his needs (if you get the meaning), visit him regularly. But this pair’s motivations are somewhat murky, and even Johnsey is slightly confused and wary of their attention. Is Siobhan using him to strike up a romantic liaison with Mumbly Dave? Or maybe she’s after Johnsey himself? Is Mumbly Dave just hanging out with him because he’s got nothing better to do?

Other unwanted attention comes in the form of a consortium of local villagers who want to buy the land that Johnsey has now inherited following the death of his parents. While no one approaches him directly, rumour has it he’s been offered 20 million euro and TURNED IT DOWN.

This leads to all kinds of ill will against him. The local newspaper casts him as villain number one, staking out his house and writing vile stories about him.

Johnsey, naïve and inexperienced, seems unable to fathom that the greed at the heart of other men may result in his complete downfall.

The Thing About December is a beautifully told tale, ripe with tension and the unspoken rules of living in a small village where everyone knows everyone else’s business — or thinks they do.

In contrasting the simplicity of one man against a complex, money-hungry world, it asks essential questions about what gives meaning to our lives and the importance of love and connection in sustaining us.

And the ending, right out of left field, comes like an unseen hammer blow: it’s devastating.

For other takes on this novel, please see Lisa’s review at ANZLitLovers and Susan’s at A Life in Books.

This is my 12th book for #20BooksOfSummer 2023. I purchased it secondhand in London so long ago that I can’t even remember the date, but it’s been in my TBR for at least eight years, possibly longer.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2023), Author, Book review, Daunt Books, Fiction, historical fiction, Italy, Natalia Ginzburg, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction, war, women in translation

‘All Our Yesterdays’ by Natalia Ginzburg (translated by Angus Davidson)

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Fiction – paperback; Daunt Books; 418 pages; 2022. Translated from the Italian by Angus Davidson.

First published in 1952, Natalia Ginzburg’s All Our Yesterdays is a big-hearted and rambunctious tale chronicling the ups and downs of two Italian families during the Second World War and the events leading up to it.

It’s not an easy book to like — it’s so richly detailed as to be almost impenetrable, not helped by next to no paragraph breaks – but it is wholly immersive once you commit time to it and let the family dynamics and political dramas work their magic.

There’s no central character to steer you through the complexity of lives being lived, first under Fascist rule, then under German occupation, although the blurb on my edition claims it’s Anna, the quiet, teenage daughter of one of the families.

But it could just as easily be Cenzo Rena, the kindly, sociable, well-travelled man more than 30 years her senior, whom she marries to protect her reputation when she falls pregnant to the self-interested boy across the road. (That boy cruelly fobs her off with a 1,000-lire note to arrange an underground abortion, as if that will solve everything.)

Regardless, the narrative offers enough drama and intrigue to keep the reader turning the pages without a main protagonist.

A novel in two parts

The story is divided into two parts. The first sets the scene and introduces us to a vast cast of characters — two families who live across the street from one another in Northern Italy — and highlights how their secret work to oppose the Fascist regime in the 1930s unites them despite the disparity in their wealth (one family owns a soap factory, the other is headed by a middle-class widower with little disposable income).

They were talking politics in the sitting room, they were once again doing a dangerous, secret thing […] They wanted to overthrow the fascists, to begin a revolution. Her father had always said that the fascists must be overthrown, that he himself would be the first to mount the barricades, on the day of revolution. He used to say it would be the finest day of his life.

The second part focuses more on Anna and Cenzo’s marriage and charts what happens when 16-year-old Anna swaps her familial world for a new life in a new town with a man she barely knows.

Cenzo Rena told her they would get married at once, in a few days’ time, and then they would leave at once for his own village, he pulled out a map of Italy and showed her where his village was, far away where the South began. There the baby would be born and no one would ever know that the father of the baby was not himself, Cenzo Rena.

Later, when the Second World War arrives on their doorstep, Cenzo does his bit to help Jewish internees who are fleeing the North and hiding out in safer nondescript villages in the South. In fact, Cenzo is a rather influential figure in San Costanzo and has the ear of not just the local policeman but many of the contadini (peasants) who live nearby.

The personal and the political

This richly drawn novel manages to successfully show how family dynamics and the minutiae of daily life play out against a broader backdrop of political upheaval and uncertainty.

Ginzburg successfully shows how the Italians, confronted with war and its associated violence and food shortages, continued to live their lives as best they could. References to the German advancement across Europe, the fall of Mussolini and the rumours of Jewish persecution are mentioned almost in passing, but for the reader who has the benefit of hindsight, it’s hard not to feel the chilling hand of history.

All Our Yesterdays offers up a highly personalised view of war and its impact on ordinary people. My edition comes with an introduction by Sally Rooney, who describes it as a novel that does not turn “its face away from evil”:

Like any story of the Second World War, it tells of almost unendurable grief, loss, violence and injustice. But it is also a story about the possibility of what is right, and living by that knowledge, whatever the consequences.

For a far more eloquent review than mine, please see Jacqui’s review at JacquiWine’s Journal. Radz has also reviewed it at Radhika’s Reading Retreat.

This is my 11th book for #20BooksOfSummer 2023. I purchased it in Readings Hawthorn on a sojourn to Melbourne in March of this year. I had previously read Ginzburg’s 1947 novella ‘The Dry Heart’ so was keen to read more of her work.