Category: Penguin Modern Classics

1001 Books to read before you die, Author, Book review, Fiction, Giorgio Bassani, Italy, literary fiction, Penguin Modern Classics, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, translated fiction

‘The Garden of the Finzi-Continis’ by Giorgio Bassani (translated by Jamie McKendrick)

kimbofo

Fiction – paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 240 pages; 2017. Translated from the Italian by Jamie McKendrick.

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, first published in 1962, is the third book in Giorgio Bassani’s “Novel of Ferrara” six-part series but can be read as a standalone.

At its most basic level, it is a story of unrequited love between two Italian college students, but it’s so much more than that. It touches on issues related to Italian Fascism, racial discrimination (all the characters are Jewish) and class, and explores memory, loyalty, friendship and family.

The story is told by an unnamed first-person narrator looking back on the events of his life in the northern Italian city of Ferrara some 20 years earlier. We find out right from the start that members of the Finzi-Contini family, with whom he was close, perished in a German death camp during the Second World War.

And then we are plunged into a slow-moving tale of how he befriended brother and sister Alberto and Micòl even though he was from a lower socio-economic class, and how he later fell in love with Micòl, who had

…weightless blond hair, with streaks verging on white, the blue, almost Scandinavian irises, the honeycoloured skin, and on her breastbone, every now and then leaping out from her T-shirt collar, the little gold disc of the shaddai.

Dangerous times

The narrative cleverly weaves in the changing political circumstances of the time to show how decisions by those in power directly affected the lives of ordinary citizens.

The story is set mainly during 1938 and 1939, right up until the eve of the Nazi invasion of Poland. Racial laws have been introduced that restrict where Jewish people in Italy can socialise.

Alberto and Micòl open up their private tennis court, in the walled garden of their grand family home, to friends who have been ousted from the town’s official tennis club, and this is how our narrator grows close to the Finzi-Contini siblings and their slightly older friend, Giampi Malnate, a Christian and socialist with strongly held views that put him at odds with Italy’s Fascist rulers.

The foursome soon becomes three when Micòl heads to Venice to write her thesis. While she’s gone, our narrator, who is working on his own thesis, is expelled from the Public Library, so he is invited to use the personal library of Professor Ermanno Finzi-Contini which contains almost 20,000 books, “a large number of which — he told me — concerned mid-  and late-nineteenth-century literature”.

With an entire, specialized library at my disposal, and besides that, being oddly keen to be there every morning, in the great, warm, silent hall which received light from three big, high windows adorned with pelmets covered in red-striped white silk, and at the centre of which, clad in mouse-coloured felt, stretched the billiards table, I managed to complete my thesis on Panzacchi in the two and half months which followed.

Being let into the inner sanctum of the Finzi-Continis like this also allows our narrator to develop a personal relationship with Micòl’s father, who becomes a mentor, valued for his kindness, intellect and anti-Fascist beliefs.

This warm, nostalgic tone imbues most of the novel, but there is a  dark, almost self-pitying undercurrent because while our narrator is forced to contend with large political issues beyond his control, on the personal front, things aren’t much better. His desire for Micòl comes to a head in a confronting scene towards the end of the book, one that could be construed as a violation (at worst) and sexual harassment (at best).

Later, frustrated by Micòl’s lack of sexual interest in him, he convinces himself that she is seeing someone else, which is why she has not returned his love.

Distant voice

Interestingly, the narrator is the same one who features in Bassani’s The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, and like that book, the narrative takes a while to warm up. At first, the voice is staid, distant and almost bitter, but later opens out to be more thoughtful, introspective and self-aware.

I liked the way it contrasts the narrator’s family upbringing with that of the Finzi-Continis and shows how there are class divisions within the Jewish community. And yet, for all their class and privilege, or maybe because of it, the Finzi-Continis did not survive the Holocaust.

Frankly, this is a sad book, but it is punctuated with moments of joy and quiet scenes of normality that belie the tragedies that will soon unfold — and perhaps that’s what gives The Garden of the Finzi-Continis such astonishing power. We know what’s coming, but the characters at the heart of this story do not.

I read this book for The 1962 Club, hosted by Simon and Karen, which ran between 16-22 October 2023, so am reviewing this a little belatedly. 

‘The Garden of the Finzi-Continis’, by Giorgio Bassani, first published in 1963, is listed in Peter Boxall’s 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, where it is described as a novel of “corrupted innocence and blighted talent and opportunity”, one that is also an “indictment of ordinary citizens too blind to see the threat of creeping authoritarianism and prejudice”.

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)

kimbofo

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”.

Author, Book review, Fiction, Giorgio Bassani, Italy, literary fiction, Penguin Modern Classics, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction

‘The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles’ by Giorgio Bassani (translated by Jamie McKendrick)

kimbofo

Fiction – paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 144 pages; 2012. Translated from the Italian by Jamie McKendrick.

The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, by Italian writer Giorgio Bassani (1916-2000), is the story of a platonic friendship between an older gay doctor and the Jewish university student he meets on the train. Both men’s lives become increasingly precarious as fascism takes hold during the 1930s — with heart-rending results.

Originally published in 1958, it is believed to be the first Italian work of fiction to feature “a homosexual figure as protagonist”, according to the translator, poet Jamie McKendrick.

Doctor’s secret life

The story is narrated in the first person by the unnamed student, who employs a staid, almost omnipresent, voice that takes a while to warm up (and which I initially did not like but soon grew to appreciate).

He tells us about Dr Athos Fadigati, an ENT specialist, originally from Venice, who had his own house and clinic in the northern Italian city of Ferrara. He was widely respected and was destined to enjoy a comfortable and uneventful career but — as we are told on the very first page — his life “ended up so badly, poor man, so tragically”.

From this clever bit of foreshadowing, the narrative spools back to cover the doctor’s life from 1919 to the late 1930s, a time synonymous with shifting political tensions in Europe, the rise of fascism in Italy and the outbreak of World War Two.

In Ferrara, in the 1920s, the doctor leads a busy life and is known to be a dapper dresser — he wears the titular gold-rimmed spectacles – and a social butterfly.

After an intense day’s work, he certainly liked to be among the crowd: the noisy, happy undifferentiated crowd. Tall, fat, with his homburg hat, his yellow gloves, or even, if it was winter, with his overcoat lined with opossum fur and with his stick slipped into the right side pocket near the sleeve, between eight and nine o’clock at night he might be seen at any place in the city.

By 1930, when he’s approaching 40, people are beginning to wonder why he hasn’t got married and settled down with children. The notion that he might be gay hasn’t crossed anyone’s mind.

Friendship on a train

Fast forward seven years, to 1937, when our narrator strikes up an acquaintance with him. They are both commuters on the Ferrara-Bologna train, a 45km journey that takes an hour and 20 minutes (when it’s on time), and sit in the same carriage, which is largely occupied by students heading to Bologna University, where our narrator is studying literature and the doctor is taking a university teaching degree.

In short we became friends: however it happened, from that time on, that is, from the end of April 1937, in the two or three carriages in which we used to barricade ourselves – framed by the window the countryside rushed past, already green, cool and luminous – on Tuesday and Friday mornings there was always a place also for Dr Fadigati.

The first to “out” Dr Fadigati is Eraldo Deliliers, a political sciences student with curly blond hair, who travels alongside them. He tells another travelling companion that the doctor is “an old queer” but most of the students have already clocked this — he’d been their family doctor for almost 20 years.

Did he know that we knew? Perhaps not. Perhaps on this question he still deceived himself. In the poised manner, however, in the polite and troubled reserve that he arduously maintained, it was only too easy to read the steady resolve to behave as if nothing about himself had ever been discovered in the city.

Things come to a head in the summer when many residents of Ferrara head to the Adriatic seaside town of Riccione for their annual vacation.

The doctor, almost brazenly, strikes up a “scandalous friendship” with Deliliers, who, it seems, is using him for a free holiday. The pair flit between hotels — “inspiring fierce indignation and endless rumours everywhere” — travelling by car, a brand-new two-seater red Alfa Romeo, and parading themselves without a care in the world.

Of course, it doesn’t end well — Delilier always preferred girls — but our narrator has other things to worry about. He’s Jewish, and there are rumours that racial laws are going to be introduced. His father, a member of the Fascist Party, is beginning to feel uneasy and worries about “the possibility of an outbreak of anti-Semitism in Italy as well, and suffering from it, he would allow the odd bitter word against the Regime to escape him”.

Through this fear of “othering” and persecution, our narrator aligns himself with the doctor, who has been at risk of both his entire life, and the pair’s friendship takes on a deeper meaning.

Politics of the person

Despite the brevity of this story — and the unexpectedly abrupt ending (you have been warned) — there is a lot going on here.

Bassani, who was himself Jewish and later imprisoned for anti-fascist activities, shows us how big political events of the time impacted people’s lives and livelihoods in often deeply personal ways.

By telling his tale through the lens of homosexuality, he shows how a gay man experienced ostracism, exclusion, violence and intimidation on a day-to-day basis, and that this was later mirrored by those Italians who experienced Nazi racism, railed against the Fascist state or took a different political stance to those in power.

Bassani also highlights the differences between sexual and racial persecution: the doctor quietly accepts that he must live his life according to societal norms, while the narrator rages against any idea that he should be singled out because he is Jewish.

It is a heartfelt and occasionally beautiful book. Here’s an example of two simple sentences that paint vivid, striking pictures in the mind’s eye:

The sea was restless and green, the green of vegetation; the sky had the exaggerated translucency of a precious stone.

And:

The signora was embroidering a tablecloth, which draped itself in long folds down from her knees. She looked like a Renaissance Madonna on a throne of clouds.

Finally, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles is part of the author’s series of six interlocking books set in Ferrara — located between Venice and Bologna — which comprises the better-known The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962), Within the Walls (1956), The Heron (1970), Behind the Door (1972) and The Smell of Hay (1972).

These have since been republished (and revised by the author before his death) in one volume known as The Novel of Ferrara, but I read the standalone ebook and have not read any of the others in the set… just yet.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2023), Author, Book review, Decolonise your bookshelves, Fiction, Japan, literary fiction, Penguin Modern Classics, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, translated fiction, women in translation, Yuko Tsushima

‘Territory of Light’ by Yuko Tsushima (translated by Geraldine Harcourt)

kimbofo

Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin Modern Classics; 128 pages; 2018. Translated from the Japanese by Geraldine Harcourt. 

Last month, you may remember that my niece Monet and I wrote a joint review of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel If Beale Street Could Talk, set in Harlem, New York, a book we chose to read because it is listed in This is the Canon: Decolonize Your Bookshelf in 50 Books.

This month, we’re headed to Tokyo, Japan, in a similar era, to see what we make of Yuko Tsushima’s highly regarded novella Territory of Light, published in 1979, which is also listed in This is the Canon.

This slim novella, written in the first person, charts the year in the life of a young (unnamed) mother in the immediate aftermath of her husband walking out on her. She moves into a rented apartment on the fourth floor of an office building, where she raises their two-year-old (unnamed) daughter alone.

Taking time to adjust to her new circumstances, she struggles to juggle childcare with her full-time job in a radio library and often feels as if she’s being subsumed by her daughter and judged by those around her.

Her husband, who claims he’s too poor to pay child support or to seek custody, doesn’t cut ties completely — he keeps hanging around and gets his friends, via phone calls and prearranged catch-ups, to remind his wife that he’s a good person. Yet he fails to show up for the mediation sessions his wife arranges.

This is the Canon describes Territory of Light as an “exquisitely affecting book” that will resonate with “any mother who has ever felt engulfed by child-rearing, estranged from their self-worth and confidence, exhausted and on the edge”. It adds:

Above all, this is a mesmeric and intimate evocation of the secrets that mothers hold close to their hearts and which are so rarely the subject of literature.

My thoughts

👍🏽 For a relatively simple story — what happens to a woman in the 12 months after being abandoned by the man she loves — there’s a lot going on in Territory of Light that, on first inclination, feels light and detached, but the more you read, the more you realise the woman is dealing with all kinds of issues. She’s struggling mentally, but wants to be self-reliant:

My husband would no doubt have helped out if I’d contacted him, but I didn’t want to rely on my husband, even if it meant putting my mother to extra trouble. In fact, I didn’t want him ever to set foot in my new life. I was afraid of any renewed contact, so afraid it left me surprised at myself.

And she’s stressed (by the move, by being a single parent, by having a new boss at work), upset (by the breakdown in her relationship) and feeling a mixture of shame, guilt and despair. She admits that she’s “afraid of my child” and yet she seems emotionally detached from her and offers next to no physical affection — although she’s self-aware enough to wonder why she “never dreams about joyfully hugging my child?”

The creeping sense of unease — and the increasing episodes of violence in the community (there are several references to local suicides and also the death of a young boy who falls from a height) — adds to the compelling nature of the woman’s story. As a reader, I began to worry that something truly tragic was going to happen to her (plot spoiler: it doesn’t).

👍🏽 I loved all the references to light in the story. The title of the book refers to the dazzling amount of light that filters into the woman’s fourth-floor apartment — “The red floor blazed in the setting sun. The long-closed, empty rooms pulsed with light” — but it’s also mentioned in other contexts, and I especially liked this quote:

No one else must know about this place that made me yearn to dissolve until I became a particle of light myself. The way that light cohered in one place was unearthly. I gazed at its stillness without ever going in through the gate.

👎🏽 I am not a fan of fiction that overly relies on dreams to move a narrative forward or to act as a kind of metaphor for issues going on in the wider story. It feels like a lazy device to me. Unfortunately, Territory of Light is filled with dreams (and nightmares) and while I will forgive the inclusion of one or two, there are so many in this short book I soon grew weary of them.

Monet’s thoughts

👍🏽 It’s not often that I pick up a book about a woman dealing with mental illness, and this depiction of her husband leaving her, and the guilt and shame she shows throughout was intriguing and definitely one of the only things I found interesting in the novel. I really felt some sympathy for her, and the author did a good job of capturing the narrator’s emotions as a single mother.

👎🏽I don’t tend to enjoy books that don’t have much happening in them, and this one is a great example of this (haha). It felt like an extra slow-paced version of a Sally Rooney novel, but with some quotation marks and without the romance. I was so disinterested in the plot. There was nothing keeping me reading it, besides this review that I knew I was going to write, so I decided to stop reading halfway through. Why was literally nothing happening?

👎🏽Although I said the book captured the single mother’s emotions and mental health well, I didn’t enjoy reading about it because I felt she was a bad mother. In one part, this woman leaves her young daughter in her apartment while she goes out to get drunk with a stranger in a random pub, which I didn’t understand and just made me hate her. At another point, she literally loses her daughter in a park, and I didn’t feel an inch of sorrow for her, I was just really annoyed. Obviously, this was probably intentional by the author but instead of making me more intrigued and playfully hateful towards the character, it just made me want to put the book down. Sorry Yuko Tsushima.

My rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Monet’s rating: ⭐️⭐️

We chose this book to read from ‘This is the Canon: Decolonize Your Bookshelf in 50 Books’, which focuses on fiction produced by writers of African descent, Asian descent and Indigenous Peoples. It’s written by Joan Anim-Addo, Deirdre Osborne and Kadija Sesay George.

This is also my 4th book for #20BooksOfSummer 2023 edition. I purchased it on Kindle last month when Monet and I decided this was the next book we were going to read together.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2023), Author, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, Japan, Penguin Modern Classics, Publisher, Seichō Matsumoto, Setting, translated fiction

‘Tokyo Express’ by Seichō Matsumoto (translated by Jesse Kirkwood)

kimbofo

Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin Modern Classics; 150 pages; 2022. Translated from the Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood.

Seichō Matsumoto, a hugely prolific writer, popularised crime fiction in Japan in the 1960s. Tokyo Express, also known as Points and Lines, was his debut novel, first published in 1958 and only recently translated into English for the first time.

A classic of the detective genre, it charts a painstaking investigation into the apparent double “love suicide” of a man and woman found dead on a beach. The pair have succumbed to potassium cyanide poisoning, but how did they know each other? And why did they decide to die on Kashii Beach, far removed from their Tokyo homes? Where is the suicide note?

Veteran Fukuoka detective Jutaro Torigai is the first to have doubts. The dead man, Kenichi Sayama, 31, worked for Ministry X, which is embroiled in a bribery scandal, and the woman, Toki, 26, a waitress, was not known to have a lover. He begins to suspect that their deaths may be a smokescreen for another crime, but how does he prove it?

This is where Kiichi Mihara, a young inspector with the Second Investigative Division of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, takes up the slack. Mihara begins a slow and meticulous step-by-step analysis of the couple’s last known movements, which includes a trio of witnesses seeing the pair on a train platform in the city a week before their deaths. Where have they been and what have they done since then?

Mihara’s investigation relies on good old-fashioned police grunt work. It’s 1957 so there is no internet, no mobile phones, no easy way to find people without knowing their address beforehand and then knocking on their door. People contact each other by telegram or letter — in fact, Mihara and Torigai strike up a correspondence to keep each other abreast of their enquiries and these letters are included in the narrative.

Most of Mihara’s work involves poring over train timetables and passenger lists, which makes for an incredibly detailed — sometimes laboriously so — plot that is heavily focused on the logistics of travel. The constant reference to (unfamiliar-to-me) Japanese train stations and towns only adds to the complexity.

But the story is well-paced and there’s a nice contrast between Mihara’s urban life —  he does his best thinking while drinking coffee in Tokyo cafes or riding the city’s trams — and the quiet beauty of Hakata Bay, where Torigai resides.

Of course, everything is neatly wrapped up in the end and the solution is a satisfying one. It just felt a little too procedural to get there.

The book was adapted for the screen in 1958 under the name Point and Line. You can watch a trailer for it here.

This is my 1st book for #20BooksOfSummer 2023. I bought it on Kindle on 30 March this year after I discovered it had been published in English for the first time. Admittedly, it was the smart-looking cover that attracted me.

Author, Book review, Decolonise your bookshelves, Fiction, James Baldwin, literary fiction, New York, Penguin Modern Classics, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, USA

‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ by James Baldwin

kimbofo

Fiction – paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 192 pages; 1994.

First published in 1974, James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk is set in Harlem in the 1970s. It is essentially a love story between 19-year-old Tish and 21-year-old Fonny — but there’s a twist: Tish is pregnant and Fonny, a sculptor, is now in jail, falsely accused of raping a “Porto Rican”.

How their respective families deal with the situation — Tish’s family is positive and supportive; Fonny’s is less so — and the ways in which the couple hang onto their love forms the heart of the story.

The book is listed in ‘This is the Canon: Decolonize Your Bookshelf in 50 Books’, which I reviewed earlier in the year. I bought a copy for Monet, my 18-year-old, Melbourne-based niece, because I thought it might be something she would like. I had already spotted If Beale Street Could Talk on her bookshelves when I visited in early March (and she kindly decamped to her sister’s room to let me stay in hers).

Together, we thought it might be fun to read some of the books from This is the Canon and write joint reviews on an ad-hoc basis following a simple format.

This is the Canon describes If Beale Street Could Talk as “one of America’s classic urban love stories”, adding:

The backdrop of institutionalized racism in a pre-Black Lives Matter world, and the mistreatment of Black men by the police and authorities makes their lives bleak; they [Tish and Fonny] often feel beaten before they have barely started living. The fact that a disproportionate number of young Black males in the West are stopped on a daily basis by the police for something as simple as walking along the street, makes this story immediately universal and painfully current.

My thoughts

👍🏽 I really loved this story. It’s quick and easy to read but leaves a lasting impression. And it feels totally modern, even though it was written almost half a century ago! I loved the sparkling and witty dialogue, the frank confessions of Tish as first-person narrator and the wonder with which she sees the world.

👍🏽 It is so joyful in places, not just in the love between the two main characters but in the love that Tish’s immediate family show her when she reveals her pregnancy. Here’s what her mother tells her when she finds out her unwed daughter is going to have a baby:

“Tish,’ she said, ‘when we was first brought here, the white man he didn’t give us no preachers to say words over us before we had our babies. And you and Fonny be together right now, married or not, wasn’t, wasn’t for that same damn white man. So, let me tell you what you got to do. You got to think about that baby. You got to hold on to that baby, don’t care what else happens or don’t happen. You got to do that. Can’t nobody else do that for you. And the rest of us, well, we going to hold on to you. And we going to get Fonny out. Don’t you worry. I know it’s hard – but don’t you worry. And that baby be the best thing that ever happened to Fonny. He needs that baby. It going to give him a whole lot of courage.’

👎🏽 The language is a bit confrontational in places. The ‘n’ word is used a lot (the context has obviously changed in the time since the novel was first published) but there’s also a bit of swearing that might feel jarring if you don’t use this kind of language yourself.

Monet’s thoughts

👍🏽  I really enjoyed how much personality and soul the book had, and how that allowed me as a reader to gain such an attachment to the protagonists Tish and Fonny. The way the book was written and the perspective it offered pushed me to care so much about the characters that I ended up sympathising and feeling their emotions, especially that of Tish.

👍🏽 The writing style was super accessible, especially for a relatively new reader of the classics. The novel dealt with themes of racism, justice and prejudice, which were really eye-opening. They are definitely themes I would like to read about more in the future, whether through Baldwin’s other works or just in general modern classics.

👎🏽 The ending was too open-ended and sort of up for interpretation, leaving the story feeling unfinished. I would’ve loved a bit more clarity to the symbolism and things mentioned towards the end (no spoilers, haha).

My rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Monet’s rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

We chose this book to read from ‘This is the Canon: Decolonize Your Bookshelf in 50 Books’, which focuses on fiction produced by writers of African descent, Asian descent and Indigenous Peoples. It’s written by Joan Anim-Addo, Deirdre Osborne and Kadija Sesay George.

Author, Book review, Fiction, France, literary fiction, Patrick Modiano, Penguin Modern Classics, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction

‘Missing Person’ by Patrick Modiano (translated by Daniel Weissbort)

kimbofo

Fiction – paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 176 pages; 2019. Translated from the French by Daniel Weissbort.

Are we the product of our past? Or is it how we lead our lives now that forms our identity?

These are the questions at the heart of Patrick Modiano’s Missing Person, originally published in French as Rue des Boutiques Obscures (which means “The Street of Dark Shops”) in 1978 and translated into English by Daniel Weissbort in 1980. Modiano, of course, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014; this novel earned him the Prix Goncourt literary prize in the year of publication.

In this languid, dreamlike tale (easily read in one or two sittings), a detective, plagued by amnesia for almost 20 years, tries to establish his own identity when the agency he works for shuts down. Now, with time on his hands, Guy Roland can investigate his past, to work out who he was before he lost his memory.

With just an old photograph to guide him on his way, Guy’s inquiries lead him on a long, winding trail of clues right back to the Second World War. (The book is set in 1965.) Throughout, it’s never clear if his research is reliable or not. He begins to imagine that every new name he unearths in documents or via hearsay or through conversations with “witnesses” may, in fact, be him.

Is it really my life I’m tracking down? Or someone else’s into which I have somehow infiltrated myself?

His quest takes him from Paris to Rome and later ends on the South Pacific Island of Bora Bora. Along the way, he begins to establish a vast array of key figures from his past life, including Russian immigrants, bartenders, a pianist, a jockey, a Hollywood actor and a French model likely to have been his girlfriend.

Clues suggest he may have been a diplomatic minister for the Dominican Republic and that he used this identity to escape the German Occupation of Paris during the war. But maybe he is just imagining it. The lines between what is real and what is not constantly shift and change and blur to the point of being indistinguishable.

The book’s economical prose style and the careful moving forward of the plot largely through dialogue makes this a fast-paced read, part detective thriller, part literary mystery.

The recurring motifs — a billiard table, a black-and-white photograph, a taxi and snatches of tunes – lend the narrative a gentle, hypnotic quality as Guy’s quest inches ever closer to the truth.

Missing Person is an excellent, thought-provoking look at memory, human connections, experience and our search for meaning. It doesn’t provide easy answers — plot spoiler: nothing is neatly tied up at the end — and so it’s up to the reader to figure out what happened and whether the past, lost in a “black hole”, is as important as Guy believes it to be.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2022), Author, autofiction, Book review, Fiction, Italy, literary fiction, Penguin Modern Classics, Publisher, Setting, Sibilla Aleramo, translated fiction, women in translation

‘A Woman’ by Sibilla Aleramo (translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell)

kimbofo

Fiction – paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 240 pages; 2020. Translated from the Italian by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell.

What a “cheery” book this turned out to be. I’m being facetious, of course, because Sibilla Aleramo’s A Woman, first published in 1906, makes for some depressing, albeit important and serious, reading.

Regarded as one of the earliest pieces of Italian feminist literature, it charts the experience of an unnamed Italian woman from girlhood until her mid-twenties at the turn of the 20th century.

During this time she gets married and has a child, but her husband is abusive and the story follows the narrator’s attempts to forge an independent life for herself — but it comes at a high price.

Said to be autofiction and therefore based on the author’s own experiences, it’s a startling and often shocking account of one woman’s determination to reject the life mapped out for her.

A false and petty life

This opening sentence sets the tone and mood for everything that follows:

My childhood was carefree and lively. Trying to resurrect that time now, to rekindle it in my mind, is a hopeless task.

The narrator, looking back on what she describes as a “false and petty” life, reveals how happy she was as a young girl, the oldest child of a middle-class Italian family whose father doted on her.

When the family move from Milan to a rural location so that her father can take up an important job running a factory, she leaves school and begins working for her father as an administrator. She loves the sense of purpose the role gives her, but it’s a false sense of independence because her life as a woman is already mapped out for her: she must marry, have children and be “naturally submissive and servile”.

An unhappy marriage

As a 16-year-old she develops a crush on a factory worker many years her senior. He takes advantage of her youth and brutally rapes her, but she’s naive enough to think he loves her. They marry and have a child. It is not a match made in heaven.

He begins to control every facet of her life and restricts her to one room in the house. Unsurprisingly, she becomes depressed and yearns for something more. The only thing that appears to keep her sane is an undying love for her young son and a passion for writing.

For a while he maintained his prohibitions and I continued not to go out, spending long afternoons shut indoors with a controlled amount of writing paper for correspondence, not allowed to see anyone apart from my relatives, the doctor and the housemaid – all under the pretence of ample freedom, but with such crude surveillance that I would have found it amusing were it not for the fact that at still not twenty-one years old my life had become so irremediably joyless.

It’s not all bad. Eventually, her talent as a writer affords her an opportunity to become a journalist. She makes a name for herself writing about feminist issues and social inequality for a publication based in Rome but she has to tread a fine line between dutiful wife and successful career woman.

Self-indulgent story

The book, which by its very nature is quite self-indulgent, details the narrator’s thoughts and feelings and philosophies on life, her outrage at the divide between the way men and women must live their lives, and the double standards when it comes to love and marriage.

It is confronting in places, especially when she is subject to nightly terrors in the bedroom (it’s not described in detail, but it’s clear her husband rapes her whenever he wants sex) and partly blames her own family for allowing her to be married to a man who treats her so badly.

And how can she become a woman if her relatives hand her over ignorant, weak and immature to a man who does not receive her as an equal; who uses her like an object that he owns, gives her children which he abandons to her sole care while he fulfils his social duties, and while he continues to childishly amuse himself?

When her own mother has a psychological breakdown and is admitted to an asylum, the narrator begins to understand that she may be headed down the same path and that despite her attempts to be her own person she is, effectively, just reenacting her own mother’s life. It’s a depressing realisation.

According to the author blurb, Sibilla Aleramo (1876-1960) was the pseudonym of Marta Felicina Faccio, who was an Italian author and poet best known for producing some of the first feminist writing in Italy and for her autobiographical depictions of life as a woman in late 19th-century Italy. She was a recipient of the prestigious Viareggio Rèpaci award and was active in political and artistic circles throughout her adult life.

This is my 1st book for #20booksofsummer 2022 edition. I bought it on Kindle on 22 June 2020 for the princely sum of 99p. I have no idea what prompted me to buy it because I’ve never read a review of it. Perhaps I just liked the cover?

1001 books, Austria, Author, Book review, Fiction, Penguin Modern Classics, Peter Handke, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, translated fiction

‘The Left-Handed Woman’ by Peter Handke (translated by Ralph Manheim)

kimbofo

Fiction – paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 68 pages; 2020. Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim.

Perhaps because it was written in 1976 when the idea of a woman being independent was more radical than it is now, Peter Handke’s novella The Left-Handed Woman is a relatively odd story.

Written in cool, detached prose, it explores what happens (hint: not very much) when a woman called Marianne decides to leave her husband.

She has a young child, Stefan, but it’s hard to know how old he is other than he goes to school. Her husband, Bruno, runs a porcelain company and is often away on business trips. Perhaps this is why she gets it into her head that one day Bruno will leave her permanently and so she makes the first move: she asks him to move out of the marital home.

There’s no argument, no pleading, no reaction really at all. It’s all very strange.

Bruno smiled and said, “Well, right now I’ll go back to the hotel and get myself a cup of hot coffee. And this afternoon I’ll come and take my things.”
There was no malice in the woman’s answer — only thoughtful concern. “I’m sure you can move in with Franziska for the first few days. Her teacher friend has gone away.”

And so Bruno moves out and into Franziska’s spare room and that’s kind of it. (Of course, we never really hear his side of the story, so perhaps he’s relieved he doesn’t have to deal with his wife any more?)

The woman takes a job as a translator for a publisher, who comes to her house armed with flowers and Champagne. The overtones are slightly creepy. He knows she is alone.

Over the course of the next few days and weeks, Marianne is visited by lots of different people, including her father, Franziska and Bruno, because they are worried about her being alone. “Don’t be alone too much,” her husband warns her, “it could be the death of you”.

And while Marianne does go through a period of adjustment — avoiding people in the supermarket, staring into space a lot, sinking into a kind of malaise and cutting herself off from others — she realises that she can survive perfectly well on her own.

The final scenes of the novella have almost everyone Marianne knows — and those she’s only just met, including an actor, her publisher’s chauffer and a random salesgirl with whom she’s recently interacted — arriving at her house for a spontaneous party. It’s only when they are gone and she is able to relax and put her feet up that a sense of contentment settles upon her. Perhaps having a life of one’s own will be okay after all.

This is a strange novella. The conversations between characters are often vague and dispassionate. People behave in odd ways and say odd things. The overall feeling is one of confusion, discombobulation, frustration and angst.

The main message I came away with is reflected by the afterword, a quote by Goethe from his 1809 novel Elective Affinities, which could well sum up what it has been like living in the grips of a global pandemic:

And so they all, each in his own way, reflectingly or unreflectingly, go on with their daily lives; everything seems to take its accustomed course, for indeed, even in desperate situations where everything hangs in the balance, one goes on living as though nothing were wrong.

Peter Handke won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2019, not without controversy (see this New York Times story and this Guardian opinion piece). I have previously read his 1970 novel The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, which is a cold-eyed account of a once-famous soccer player committing a brutal murder.

‘The Left-Handed Woman’ by Peter Handke, first published in 1976, is listed in Peter Boxall’s 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, where it is described as a fine example of the author’s “rigorous Modernism”, a novel that shows how “personal identity is fragile and difficult to maintain”.

Author, Book review, Fiction, Germany, literary fiction, Penguin Modern Classics, Publisher, Reading Projects, Sabahattin Ali, Setting, TBR2020, translated fiction, Turkey

‘Madonna in a Fur Coat’ by Sabahattin Ali

kimbofo

Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin Modern Classics; 176 pages; 2017. Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe.

If you have ever stopped and stared at a painting and been slightly bewitched by the subject, Sabahattin Ali’s Madonna in a Fur Coat will resonate.

This haunting Turkish novella drips with melancholia and heartache. First published in 1943, it tells the tragic story of a young man from Ankara who travels to Berlin in the 1920s where he falls in love with the portrait of a woman he sees in an art gallery.

Suddenly, near the door to the main room, I stopped. Even now, after all these years, I cannot describe the torrent that swept through me in that moment. I only remember standing, transfixed, before a portrait of a woman wearing a fur coat. Others pushed past me, impatient to see the rest of the exhibition, but I could not move. What was it about that portrait? I know that words alone will not suffice. All I can say is that she wore a strange, formidable, haughty and almost wild expression, one that I had never seen before on a woman. But while that face was utterly new to me, I couldn’t help but feel that I had seen her many times before. Surely I knew this pale face, this dark brown hair, this dark brow, these dark eyes that spoke of eternal anguish and resolve. […] She was a swirling blend of all the women I had ever imagined.

He eventually meets the woman from the painting and the pair strike up an intense friendship. But when he is called back to Turkey, following the death of his father, their romance is cut short. They never see one another again.

A story in two parts

The book has an unusual structure. An unnamed first-person narrator introduces us to a colleague named Raif Efendi, a talented but reclusive translator, whom he befriends. When Raif takes to his bed suffering from an unspecified illness, the narrator visits him at home to discover that his living arrangments are odd and that his family is kept at arm’s length. It is clear that Raif is deeply disturbed by something.

When he collects Raif’s belongings from the office, he discovers a notebook. Raif encourages him to read it. It is this notebook, a reflection on what happened in Berlin 12 years earlier, that forms the rest of the novella. In it, Raif explains his quiet disposition, his incredible shyness and his inability to properly communicate with people, including his immediate family who shun him because they fear he is too feminine.

This lack of typical masculine traits is what brings him close to Maria, the Madonna in the painting, because she recognises that his kindness and quiet, caring nature is far removed from the men she normally meets in the cabaret hall where she dances.

‘Now don’t you dare start thinking like all the other men … I don’t want you reading volumes into everything I say … just know that I am always completely open … like this … like a man … I’m like a man in many other ways, too. Maybe that’s why I’m alone …’ She looked me over, before exclaiming: ‘And you’re a bit like a woman! I can see it now. Maybe that’s why I’ve liked you ever since I first set eyes on you … Yes, indeed. There’s something about you that makes me think of a young girl …’ How surprised I was – and how saddened – to hear a new acquaintance echo my parents’ words!

But Raif’s inability to overcome his low self-esteem and his constant self-flagellation leads to his undoing, for even when he is deeply in love he cannot quite bring himself to fully open up to Maria. He keeps her at an emotional distance, in much the same way that his family keeps him at an emotional distance.

Never in my life had anyone loved me, ever.

Hypnotic, languid prose

I really liked this story with its hypnotic, almost languid prose and its acute psychological insights into one man’s soul.

And while Raif’s passivity annoyed me, there was enough character development to completely understand why a naive 24-year-old man — his first time in the West — might behave in such a way. (Anyone who has ever travelled alone for any length of time will know that there is something about being outside of your comfort zone in a foreign land that can inexplicably lead to a torpor from which you can’t escape. This is especially true if you are an introvert. I recall that Gail Jones writes about this, too, in her novel A Guide to Berlin.)

What is perhaps less understandable is why his siblings, his wife and his children seem to care so little for him, but perhaps that’s because he’s shut them out emotionally. It’s hard to know.

But I digress. As you might have guessed, this is a rather sad tale. It focuses on missed opportunities, thwarted love and the perils of living too much in your own head. If you like reading romantic stories full of tragedy and pathos, then Madonna in a Fur Coat is definitely a must-read. I promise you, it will linger in your thoughts for days, possibly months, afterward.

This is my 3rd book for #TBR2020 in which I plan to read 20 books from my TBR between 1 January and 30 June. I purchased this Kindle edition on 9 January 2019 for £3.99. I have no idea why. Perhaps it is listed in Peter Boxall’s 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die and that’s why I bought it. Unfortunately, I can’t check because my copy is still in London, but if anyone knows maybe you could enlighten me…?