Tag: Raduan Nassar

20 books of summer (2017)

20 Books of Summer

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20 books logoIn a bid to read more books from my always-growing TBR, I’ve decided to join in this year’s “20 Books of Summer” challenge, which Cathy runs at 746 Books.

The idea is to read 20 books already in your possession between 1 June and 3 September. I’m bending the rules slightly and won’t start until next weekend (I’ve got a couple of other books on the go at the moment that need to be finished first), so plan to finish on or around 11 September.

I’ve had a fun time going through my shelves to select the books I want to read*. They’re all ones I’ve purchased (in other words, they’re not copies sent to me for review) and some have been sitting here for years. They’re all literary fiction and I’ve tried to go for a mix of male and female writers, including some Miles Franklin prize-winners and a couple that feature in Peter Boxall’s 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.

The books I hope to read are as follows and have been arranged in alphabetical order by author’s surname:

  • ‘Mr Bridge’ by Evan S. Connell
  • ‘The Trick is to Keep Breathing’ by Janice Galloway
  • ‘Lilian’s Story’ by Kate Grenville
  • ‘Provocation’ by Charlotte Grimshaw
  • ‘Hangover Square’ by Patrick Hamilton
  • ‘Power Without Glory’ by Frank Hardy
  • ‘The Long Prospect’ by Elizabeth Harrower
  • ‘Our Souls at Night’ by Kent Haruf
  • ‘The Dead Lake’ by Hamid Ismailov
  • ‘Grace and Truth’ by Jennifer Johnston
  • ‘Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
  • The Other Side of the Bridge’ by Mary Lawson
  • ‘If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things’ by Jon McGregor
  • ‘The Glorious Heresies’ by Lisa McInerney
  • ‘Journey to the Stone Country’ by Alex Miller
  • ‘Ancient Tillage’ by Raduan Nassar
  • ‘The Essex Serpent’ by Sarah Perry
  • ‘The Hungry Grass’ by Richard Power
  • ‘Stoner’ by John Williams
  • ‘Shallows’ by Tim Winton

20 books of summer pile

You can find out more about 20 Books of Summer at Cathy’s blog and see who else is participating on this linky page.

Have you read any of the books I’ve chosen? Any suggestions on which one to start with first?

* Note, I reserve the right to swap out any of these books with my existing TBR pile if I find any of these ones don’t work for me or don’t suit my mood at the time.

Author, Book review, Books in translation, Brazil, Fiction, literary fiction, Penguin Modern Classics, Publisher, Raduan Nassar, Setting

‘A Cup of Rage’ by Raduan Nassar

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A Cup of Rage by Raduan Nassar

Fiction – paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 45 pages; 2015. Translated from the Portuguese by Stefan Tobler.

Brazilian writer Raduan Nassar’s A Cup of Rage was first published in 1978, but this is a new translation by Stefan Tobler, whom may be familiar to some of you from the independent publisher & Other Stories, and it tells the tale, in just seven chapters, of a bitter, almost violent, argument between two lovers — an older unnamed man and a younger woman — after a night of heated passion at the man’s remote farm house, and is written in such a breathless manner (each chapter is composed of one long sentence, meaning there are just seven sentences in total across the 45 pages that make up this classic novella) that I came to the end in about an hour but then felt I needed to reread it to pick up on all the things I hadn’t processed first time round, and yet it’s not a complicated story to follow, it’s actually quite simple and goes something like this: the man and the woman meet at his house for an evening of erotic sex (you have been warned) but their raunchy rendezvous comes to an abrupt end the next morning when the man erupts into a rage over what appears to be a minor issue unrelated to the woman whom he then verbally attacks when he sees her chatting to his maid (or is she laughing at him?), so the woman retaliates, which is a natural reaction, and then the full extent of the man’s latent rage is rained down upon her, but she gives as good as she gets because she can’t let anything go (and why should she?), and then, when things reach a climax, the man’s rage morphs into sexual teasing, which excites the woman, who then discovers the man’s motives aren’t as obvious as she first thought, and by the time the story ends you realise this is a misogynistic tale about power, domination, cruelty and desire, one that leaves a slightly bitter taste in the mouth, but which demonstrates that even the most experimental of fiction can be just as compelling and intriguing and as deeply unsettling as the most conventional of psychological dramas, and I would recommend reading it if you are looking for something challenging and different, but don’t expect to like it — I kind of hated it but admired the style and respected Nassar’s bravura enough to want to read more by him.