Tag: translated fiction

Author, Book review, Cesare Pavese, Fiction, Italy, literary fiction, Penguin, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction

‘The Beautiful Summer’ by Cesare Pavese (translated by W.J. Strachan)

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Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 112 pages; 2018. Translated from the Italian by W.J. Strachan.

The Beautiful Summer by Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) won Italy’s most prestigious literary award, the Strega Prize for fiction, in 1950. (The author sadly died by suicide a couple of months later.)

It’s the story of a teenage girl whose friendship with an older woman draws her into a bohemian artistic community in 1930s Turin, showing her an alternative way of life.

It has been reissued as part of Penguin’s European Writers series.

A girl’s life

Sixteen-year-old Ginia works at a dressmakers and lives with her brother, Severino, a nightshift worker, for whom she cooks and cleans.

To alleviate the mundane nature of her work and home life, she’s keen to go “gadding about”, as she describes it, so when she develops a friendship with 20-year-old Amelia who works as an artists’ model, her social life opens up. They go to dance halls, visit cafes and see films at the local movie house. But there’s always tension between them, because Ginia is cautious, whereas Amelia throws that all to the wind.

In public, Amelia dares to go bare-legged (because she can’t afford to buy stockings), making Ginia anxious and worried about what people might say. Yet this also holds an allure for her, because she’s fascinated by Amelia’s way of being in the world, her freedom and her carefree attitude.

‘Being free in the world in the way I am, makes me mad,’ said Amelia. Ginia would have gladly paid money to hear her hold forth so eagerly on many things which she liked, because real confidence consists in knowing what the other person wants and when someone else is pleased by the same things, you no longer feel in awe of her. (page 14)

Loss of innocence

In her short introduction to the novella, Elizabeth Strout explains that Pavese described it as “the story of a virginity that defends itself”. For most of the book, Ginia acts chastely but she’s fascinated by the adults around her and wages an internal battle to overcome her disgust and shame associated with what she sees and what she wants to experience for herself. She knows she has power over men but is fearful of wielding it.

When Amelia gets a new job posing naked for an artist, Ginia asks to watch, not for any voyeuristic tendencies but to observe the artist at work.

They discussed the question for a short part of the walk and Amelia laughed because, dressed or undressed, a model can only be of interest to men and hardly to another girl. The model merely stands there: what is there to see? Ginia said she wanted to see the artist paint her; she had never seen anyone handling colours and it must be nice to watch. (page 12)

When she gets to watch the proceedings, she finds she’s disgusted by the whole sexual objectification of her friend and her friend’s inability to understand that this is what is happening.

Once more she saw Amelia’s swarthy belly in that semi-darkness, that very ordinary face and those drooping breasts. Surely a woman offered a better subject dressed? If painters wanted to do them in the nude, they must have ulterior motives. Why did they not draw from male models? Even Amelia when disgracing herself in that way became a different person; Gina was almost in tears. (page 23)

Later, Amelia introduces her to two artists, Guido and Rodrigues, who share a studio. Ginia is intrigued by the enigmatic Guido, a soldier who is an artist in his spare time, and a love affair develops — ushering her into a more complex adult world.

Compelling novella

The Beautiful Summer has a simple set-up and follows a predictable outcome. But it’s written in such a rich, lyrical language, with an undercurrent of suspense and danger, it makes for a compelling read.

Strout suggests there are hints of Elena Ferrante in the narrative style, to which I concur. Its depiction of female friendship, including its petty rivalries, quarrels and sharing of confidences, is pitch-perfect, and I loved the melancholia at its heart.

It not only explores themes of youth, desire and loss of innocence, but it also poses questions about the male gaze, sexual objectification and women’s position in Italian society at the time. It demands a reread to properly unpick it, but has certainly made me keen to explore more of Pavase’s work — I read, and loved, The House on the Hill last year.

Author, Book review, crime/thriller, Delphine de Vigan, Europa Editions, Fiction, France, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction, women in translation

‘Kids Run the Show’ by Delphine de Vigan (translated by Alison Anderson)

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Fiction – paperback; Europa Editions; 300 pages; 2023. Translated from the French by Alison Anderson.

Children’s right to privacy in the Internet age is at the heart of Kids Run the Show, a provocative novel — part crime thriller, part social commentary — by French writer Delphine de Vigan.

The story focuses on Mélanie Claux, a young mother of two, who exploits her children online for financial gain.

It is set against a backdrop of calls to regulate the commercial exploitation of children by their parents and to classify the activity as work. In fact, in 2021, France introduced a law to protect “child influencers” on social media because it regards it as a form of child labour, which is already outlawed. The legislation is designed to protect the rights of children who are making money online via online platforms and the Internet.

Mélanie, a failed reality TV star (she got voted off Loft Story, France’s first reality TV show, an adaptation of the Big Brother franchise, early in the first season), is desperate for love and attention. Unable to achieve it for herself, she sets about achieving it vicariously through her children via a YouTube account called “Happy Recess”.

Here she posts cute videos of 8-year-old Sammy and 6-year-old Kimmy, which go viral, attract millions of “likes” and rack up the follower numbers. Happy Recess becomes so successful it generates enough money to support both Mélanie and her husband, Bruno, who live in a beautiful apartment full of beautiful objects, many of which are “freebies” sent to them for review or endorsement purposes.

Kidnapped for ransom

But when Kimmy disappears while playing hide-and-seek with other children in their apartment building early one evening, Mélanie’s carefully curated life begins to fall apart.

At 21:30 Mélanie Claux received a short private message on her Instagram account. The sender, whose name was unknown to her, had no followers of their own. Everything indicated that the account had been created with the sole purpose of sending her the following message: “Kid missing, deal coming,” which confirmed the theory of kidnapping for ransom. (page 33)

The case is referred to the Paris Crime Squad and investigative officer Clara Roussel has the thankless task of trawling through hours and hours of Happy Recess YouTube videos, looking for clues to Kimmy’s disappearance.

The list of suspects is long (possibly anyone who has ever watched a Kimmy video) and Clara’s task is a challenging one. But this isn’t a strict police procedural, rather it’s a thought-provoking examination of how social media has eroded our sense of privacy and created new opportunities to generate lucrative income streams — but at what cost?

The borders between private and public had disappeared long ago. This staging of the self, of one’s everyday life, the pursuit of likes: this was not something Mélanie had made up. It had become a way of life, a way of being in the world. One-third of the children who were born already had a digital life. (page 190)

The last section of the novel fast-forwards to 2031 to look at the long-term impact of the case on each of the main protagonists. It makes for uncomfortable reading.

Kids Run the Show is a clarion call, warning parents about the dangers of turning children into media stars before they are old enough to understand the consequences of their fame.

Guy at His Futile Preoccupations has also reviewed this.

Balsam Karam, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Text, translated fiction, women in translation

‘The Singularity’ by Balsam Karam (translated by Saskia Vogel)

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Text Publishing; 208 pages; 2024. Translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel. Review copy courtesy of the publisher via Netgalley.

The Singularity is a hypnotically powerful novel about the strength of a mother’s love for her missing teenage daughter. But it’s also a compelling story about what it is like to be displaced and to lose your language, country and identity.

The author, Balsam Karam, is of Kurdish ancestry and has lived in Sweden since she was a child.

Unnamed country

The story is set in an unnamed country, somewhere hot, framed between the mountains, “half desert” and the sea, where tourists come to enjoy the food and the weather, but where many locals live in impoverished conditions.

Most of the action occurs on the corniche, a coastal road in a tourist hot spot, home to cafes, restaurants and a bustling food market. There are glistening skyscrapers and shiny new hotels built next to old buildings covered in bullet holes, evidence that the city was once ravished by war.

In the opening pages, an unnamed woman wanders up and down the corniche, pressing a flyer — “Has anyone seen my daughter? 17 years old, missing since dawn on 1 May. Help me find her, help me get justice” — under the windshield wipers of parked cars.

Later, a woman on a business trip, witnesses the desperate mother throw herself off a cliff and into the water below, making orphans out of her three younger children.

The tale of these two women — the mother who dies by suicide and the woman in town on business — are intertwined.  Their personal backstories echo one another. Both are displaced; both have lost children.

Original style and voice

The Singularity is told in a refreshing style, employing different techniques to tell the story of what it is like to be a refugee, to lose loved ones and to endure racism, poverty and violence on an everyday basis.

It treads some distressing territory — including self-harm, stillbirth and a litany of girls and young women going missing — but it does so in a matter-of-fact way.

The author uses the mother’s three surviving children as a singular chorus to explain the events leading up to their sister’s disappearance. They are fully aware that it is simply history repeating: years earlier a cousin disappeared who has never been found, a loss that reverberates across the generations.

The grim subject matter is made bearable by the delicacy of the prose and the compelling voices.  It’s a deeply human story set everywhere and nowhere, and because of that it strikes a universal tone: these losses and disappearances play out all across the world, every day, causing immeasurable heartache and trauma.

Admirers of Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail will find much to like here.

This is the author’s first novel to be translated into English; let’s hope her debut novel, Event Horizon, published in 2018, gets translated soon.

The Singularity was nominated for Sweden’s prestigious August Prize and shortlisted for the 2021 European Union Prize for Literature. It has been published in the UK by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

I read this book as part of Reading Independent Publishers Month 4 #ReadIndies, hosted by Lizzy and Kaggsy. This event, which runs throughout February, is designed to showcase the books published by independent publishers across the world.

Text Publishing is an Australian independent press based in Melbourne. It publishes a broad range of fiction and non-fiction. It has been awarded the ABIA Small Publisher of the Year three times and won the Leading Edge Books Small Publisher of the Year in 2018 and 2019. You can find out more about them here.

Author, Book review, Bruno Lloret, Chile, Fiction, Giramondo Publishing, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction

‘Nancy’ by Bruno Lloret (translated by Ellen Jones)

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The cover of X by Bruce Lloret

Fiction – paperback; Giramondo; 144 pages; 2020. Translated from the Spanish by Ellen Jones.

It’s widely acknowledged that the letter X holds a special place in Elon Musk’s heart (assuming he has one). There’s SpaceX, Tesla’s Model X and the social media channel X (formerly known as Twitter). He even has a child named X AE A-XII, known as “X” for short.

The letter X is also popular with Chilean author Bruno Lloret if his debut novel, Nancy, is anything to go by.

First published in Chile in 2015 and translated into English by Ellen Jones in 2020, this striking novella uses X as literary “decoration” and a form of punctuation designed to slow the reader down, to force us to find the words amongst the proliferation of crosses and to contemplate them in a more regarded way.

The blurb on the back of the book, suggests X can be read “as multiplication symbols, scars, locations on a map, or as signs of erasure and the approach of death”.

To show you how the author uses the letter, here’s a relatively extreme example (from page 6) — not all the pages are as heavily marked as this:

Initially, this might seem visually intrusive to the reading experience — it’s certainly unconventional — but if you’re prepared to give it a try, you’re in for a real treat: Nancy is a beautiful and bittersweet novella about a woman looking back on her troubled life, and can easily be read in one sitting.

Looking back

Nancy is a widow who is dying of cancer. As she confronts her mortality, she reflects on her life and relationships, including her marriage to a “gringo”, who died in a tragic industrial accident, and her childhood and difficult adolescence in northern Chile.

Her teenage years were marred by the breakdown of her parents’ marriage and the unexplained disappearance of her beloved older brother, Pato — whom she describes as a “superhero” — outside a nightclub when he was 19 years old.

Basically left to fend for herself, Nancy keeps house for her father and her alcoholic uncle Aarón who moves in with them. She goes to school in the morning and spends her afternoons secretly swimming with friends at Playa Roja under the watchful eyes of a group of creepy old gringos. This is despite her father’s decree that she never leave the house (except to go to school) for fear something might happen to her.

He told me that the bodies of women had been showing up on the beach. Some of them washed in by the waves, others just buried up to their necks in the sand, their heads blue in the open air X Five had shown up that week alone X It’s best if you stay home, Nancy. You’re pretty, and we’ve no idea who’s behind it X (page 34)

Cover image of the Two Lines Press edition
Two Lines Press edition

Courage and determination

Against this background of endemic violence and the threat of being “disappeared”, Nancy’s father discovers religion when two young Morman missionaries come knocking at the door. Eventually, Nancy, who is a non-believer and sexually active (she loses her virginity to a gipsy called Jesulé, whom she adores), is also baptised into the Church of Latter Day Saints — even though her heart is not in it.

When she unwittingly stumbles upon the two young male missionaries locked in an amorous embrace, she films them for potential blackmailing purposes. This is but one example of Nancy’s canny way of holding power in a world that largely denies her this control.

The most striking thing about the story, however, is Nancy’s sexual agency and streetwise view of the world, her unwavering commitment to her father (even though he doesn’t always treat her kindly) and her quiet determination to just get on with things. “Feeling sad won’t change anything,” she claims (page 30)

Nancy is a sensitively told tale of living life in the margins against a backdrop of death and violence. It explores themes of trauma, identity, religion and the search for meaning, yet despite the oppressive nature of the narrator’s life, it feels empowering and optimistic.

Lisa from ANZLitLovers has also reviewed it.

I read this book as part of Reading Independent Publishers Month 4 #ReadIndies, hosted by Lizzy and Kaggsy. This event, which runs throughout February, is designed to showcase the books published by independent publishers across the world.

Giramondo Publishing is fast becoming my favourite indie press. It’s an Australian university-based publisher, which was founded in 1995 “to publish innovative and adventurous literary work that might not otherwise find publication because of its subtle commercial appeal”. You can find out more about them here.

Author, Book review, Daunt Books, Fiction, Italy, literary fiction, Natalia Ginzburg, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction, women in translation

‘Valentino’ by Natalia Ginzburg (translated by Avril Bardoni)

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Fiction – paperback; Daunt Books; 80 pages; 2023. Translated from the Italian by Avril Bardoni.

What is it to be a “man of consequence”? And what happens if you don’t live up to that descriptor?

This is the focus of Natalia Ginzburg’s Valentino, the tale of a much-doted-upon son who fails to live up to his parents’ expectations.

The titular Valentino, the only son of a retired school teacher, is lazy, vain and selfish. But there’s more to his story than meets the eye, and what is left unsaid in this carefully crafted novella, first published in 1957, is almost more important than what is.

A man of consequence

Valentino’s family has made many sacrifices to ensure he can go to medical school and buy all the necessary books and equipment to support his studies. When his father proudly states that this will make his son a “man of consequence”, what he really means is that he is counting on Valentino to lift them out of poverty and boost their social standing.

So it’s somewhat of a shock when Valentino finds a shortcut to riches by announcing he is betrothed to a wealthy older woman called Maddalena. The family are upset because they believe Valentino is getting married for the wrong reasons.

‘That woman is as ugly as sin,’ said my mother quietly. ‘She’s grotesque, Valentino. And since she boasts about being wealthy, everyone will assume that you are marrying her for her money. That’s what we think too, Valentino, because we cannot believe that you are in love with her, you who always used to chase the pretty girls, none of whom was ever pretty enough for you. Nothing like this has ever happened in our family before; not one of us has ever done anything just for money.” (page 11)

His older sister, Clara — who is married with three young children — is so angry about the situation, she calls him a dog under her breath.

But despite his family’s opposition, Valentino can’t see what the problem is — he thinks Maddalena “has lovely black eyes and the bearing of a lady”.

He was bored of all those pretty girls with nothing to talk about, while with Maddalena he could talk about books and a hundred other things. He wasn’t marrying her for her money; he was no pig. (page 12)

He settles into his new married life as if he were born into it and is at ease among Maddalena’s wealthy friends as he is his own family.

A caring daughter-in-law

And while his parents struggle to readjust — his father has a debt hanging over his head because he took out a loan to ensure the family was suitably attired at Valentino’s wedding — Maddalena proves to be a caring and thoughtful daughter-in-law.

When she finds out that Clara’s young son is sick, she arranges costly medical care for him. Later, she offers lodgings to Valentino’s younger sister Catarina, so that she can continue her teacher training studies. And all the while she runs her busy agricultural interests, continues to pay for Valentino’s long-dragged-out (neglected) medical studies, buys him lavish clothes, and bears him three sons.

But she keeps him at arm’s length and soon the quarrels start, where she accuses him of being a “layabout and a failure”.

Sister’s perspective

It is through Catarina’s eyes that we see how events unfold. She’s the put-upon daughter who looks after her parents and gives up any hope of finding a husband of her own. But as much as she’s disappointed by Valentino — she constantly worries that he’s not devoted to his studies and will fail his exams — she still loves him very much.

Without wishing to reveal plot spoilers, the story is neatly, and shockingly, upended in quite a profoundly unexpected way.

It’s a delicious treat of a book, written in Ginzburg’s typically understated but direct style. She’s so perceptive about family life, human behaviour and societal expectations, and every page offers up something frank and forthright. And she’s adroit at mixing the bittersweet with the poignant, with a dash of Italian fury thrown in for good measure.

Claire at Word by Word has also just reviewed this.

I have previously reviewed Giznburg’s All Our Yesterdays and The Dry Heart.

I read this book as part of Reading Independent Publishers Month 4 #ReadIndies, hosted by Lizzy and Kaggsy. This event, which runs throughout February, is designed to showcase the books published by independent publishers across the world.

Daunt Books Publishing, which was founded in 2010, grew out of Daunt Books, an independent chain of bookshops in London and the South-East of the UK. You can find out more about them here.

Author, Book review, Europa Editions, Fiction, Japan, literary fiction, Mieko Kawakami, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction, women in translation

‘All the Lovers in the Night’ by Mieko Kawakami (translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd)

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Fiction – hardcover; Europa Editions; 224 pages; 2022. Translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd. Review copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley.

Set in contemporary Tokyo, Mieko Kawakami’s All the Lovers in the Night tells the story of a 30-something woman who isolates herself from the real world because she has difficulty making friends and forming meaningful relationships — both at work and at play.

My name is Fuyuko Irie, a freelance proofreader, thirty-four years old. I’ll be turning thirty-five in the winter. I live alone. I’ve been living in the same apartment forever. I was born in Nagano. Out in the country. One of the valleys. I like to go out on a walk once a year on my birthday, Christmas Eve, in the middle of the night. But I was sure that no one else could comprehend what made this fun, and I had never mentioned it to anyone before. I had no friends to talk to on a regular basis.

Deeply introverted and carrying trauma from her high school years, Fuyuko begins to self-medicate with alcohol, and  “with the aid of just one can of beer, drunk slowly, or a single cup of sake” she develops “the ability to let go of my usual self”.

When she consumes too much sake one morning and accidentally vomits on a stranger she bumps into — an older man called Mitsutsuka — a tentative friendship develops between them.

The paperback edition was published by Picador in 2023

Freelance life

Like Kawakami’s previous novel, Heaven, which looked at social ostracization and bullying in a schoolyard setting, All the Lovers in the Night switches to the adult world of work and looks at what happens to those who struggle to fit in socially.

From a young age, I couldn’t bring myself to contribute to conversations like a normal person, much less socialize or go out with people, and I was never able to acclimate to the particular atmosphere of that little office. At first, my coworkers invited me out for dinner or drinks, but I always declined, offering a string of vague excuses, and at some point they stopped asking. Before I knew it, I’d been left entirely alone.

Fuyuko’s sense of social alienation and isolation worsens when she quits her job to go freelance. Initially, it’s fine because free from the pressure of an office environment, she can focus solely on the work that gives her so much pleasure. She has regular contact with the editor, Hijiri Ishikawa, who keeps her supplied with manuscripts to work on, and the pair sometimes go out for a drink.

But even when socialising with Hijiri, she rarely gives anything away and struggles to make small talk. Hijiri is too self-absorbed to pay this much heed, but later, towards the end of the novel, she becomes increasingly frustrated with Fuyuko’s passivity, accusing her of  “just going through life without asking anything of anyone, or letting anyone ask anything of you”.

Eventually, Fuyoko’s self-imposed isolation gets the better of her and she falls into something that looks like depression but is never stated as such. She lets her fledgling relationship with Mitsutsuka slide, even though she’s convinced herself she’s fallen in love with him.

Human connection

The story explores the meaning of friendship and the need for human companionship and connection. It also looks at what society expects of women, and how those who forgo children and marriage, perhaps in favour of a career, are judged more harshly and the bar for success is raised much higher for them.

I particularly liked the focus on proofreading and the way Fuyoko is so obsessed with “hunting for mistakes” that she stops watching TV because she can’t bear the errors she spots in the subtitles onscreen. (I feel similarly about restaurant menus!)

And she also acknowledges that the proofreader’s work is never done because errors always slip through:

“I mean, even if multiple people go over the same galley multiple times, for days on end, to the point where they can’t read it anymore, no matter how much work everyone puts into it, no book is ever free of errors, right?”

All the Lovers in the Night is the kind of book you can binge-read in one sitting. I loved the way it explored one woman’s attempt to expand her universe, to find her voice and to overcome loneliness. It’s a deeply melancholic but ultimately rewarding read.

I read this book for the Japanese Literature Challenge 17 run by Meredith at Dolce Bellezza. This annual event has been held every January and February for 17 YEARS, which is an amazing achievement.

Author, Bloomsbury, Book review, Fiction, France, literary fiction, Marguerite Duras, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction, women in translation

‘The Easy Life’ by Marguerite Duras (translated by Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes)

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Fiction – paperback; Bloomsbury; 208 pages; 2023. Translated from the French by Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes.

It took almost 80 years, but it’s wonderful that Marguerite Duras‘ second novel, The Easy Life, has finally been translated into English for the first time.

Originally published in her native France in 1944, this extraordinary novel is about a young woman dealing with the aftermath of two family tragedies in close succession.

It’s essentially a coming-of-age tale (told in the first person) and is divided into three parts.

The first charts 25-year-old Francine Veyrenatte’s life on the family farm, where her boredom is punctuated by two tragic deaths; the second follows her time in a hotel by the sea, where she goes to deal with her grief but unravels psychologically; and the third is what happens when she returns home.

Power and passion

It’s a maudlin, sometimes painful, story, and one that treads a morally ambiguous line — the first death, for instance, is essentially a murder that is covered up when the family closes rank — but it also possesses great power and passion because we feel the enormous personal transformation that Francine goes through and want to cheer her on.

As an account of resilience and stoicism in the face of adversity, it’s a compelling read, but it’s also a beautifully rendered tale highlighting what happens when people living in isolated communities turn on themselves.

Secluded farm

In Les Bugues, where the family grows tobacco crops on a secluded farm surrounded by woods, the atmosphere is claustrophobic and taciturn: Francine’s adored brother, Nicholas, has beaten up their uncle Jérôme — for reasons that have been brewing for years, but mainly involve Jérôme sleeping with Nicholas’s wife, Clémence, who is also the family’s maid.

In a cold, detached and almost cruel voice, Francine details Jérôme’s slow and painful demise (he takes 10 days to die):

In strong, regular jolts, his legs and arms stiffened; his mournful cry burst through the rooms, the garden, the courtyard, crossed the field between the path and the forest and crouched in the bushes filled with birds and sunshine. He was a beast we wanted to restrain but that managed to escape the house and, once outside, became dangerous to us. Jérôme had not yet lost hope that the outside world would rescue him, while knowing that he was alone at Les Bugues with us, who kept him completely out of sight. (p10)

After his passing, the household’s sense of normality does not resume: Clémence flees to the arms of her own family, for instance, leaving her young son behind, and a romance develops between Nicholas and Luce, a beautiful woman from his past whom everyone adores. Francine also acts upon her attraction to Tiène, who runs the farm, and there’s an expectation, from her mother, that the pair will marry.

But then another tragedy strikes (I’ll refrain from explaining it because it spoils the plot), and this is when Francine, desperate to do something exciting for herself while she has the opportunity, catches the train to T., a town on the Atlantic coast, where she will spend the last days of summer alone in a boardinghouse.

Respite by the sea

But with too much time on her hands and unmoored from her usual routines, Francine becomes deeply introspective and dissociates from herself — notice the shift in pronouns in the following paragraph:

Here, in my room, it’s me. It’s as if she no longer knows it’s her. She sees herself in the mirrored armoire; she’s a tall girl with blond hair, yellowed by the sun, a tan face. In the bedroom, she takes up too much space. From the very small open suitcase, she pulls out three blouses to look natural before the girl watching her. Though she avoids seeing herself, she sees what she’s doing in the mirrored armoire. (p94)

Towards the end of her holiday, an incident on the beach shakes her out of her self-imposed stupor and passivity, forcing her to consider who she is and what she wants out of life.

And so, after 15 days away, in which she’s fallen apart and then put herself back together, she heads home determined to pursue an easy life (hence the book’s title), which is the one mapped out for her, rather than one that might be less predictable and more challenging.

Disquieting and distinctive

There’s a lot to like in this deeply disquieting novel written in Duras’ distinctive style, which is introspective, dark and fierce.

Her prose is eloquent and perceptive (especially when referring to matters of the heart and sexual attraction), but it can also cut to the quick. She expertly conveys mood and suspense by the rhythm and repetition of her words and by keeping her sentences short. It’s almost as if she is writing music to be performed staccato.

This edition, which includes a foreword by American novelist, essayist, critic and professor Kate Zamreno, has a terrific translators’ note, which explains some of the challenges associated with translating the prose into English. I’ll let them have the last word:

We channeled Francine’s boredom, her chaos, her youth and inherent old age. We let ourselves feel her fatigue, her containment, and her fragmentation, in turns. That’s how you translate Duras: you become one of her dreamers and degenerates. (p187)

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)

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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”.

Book lists

Captivating tales from around the globe: 12 novellas in translation to add to your TBR

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I love novellas. I love translated fiction. Bring them both together in a single volume and, in my eyes, you have a winning combination.

Given that Novellas in November, an annual reading event (hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck), is just around the corner, I thought it might be helpful to create a handpicked list of translated novellas reviewed on this site.

The list has been arranged in alphabetical order by author’s surname. To see a full review, simply click the book title.

‘Lie With Me’ by Philippe Besson | France | 2019

Bittersweet tale about first love between two teenage boys in rural France in the 1980s.

‘Troubling Love’ by Elena Ferrante | Italy | 1999

A middle-aged comic strip artist goes on a personal quest to discover the circumstances of her mother’s death.

‘The Dry Heart’ by Natalia Ginzburg | Italy | 1947

After just four years of marriage a wife shoots dead her husband, but why?

‘Magma’ by Thora Hjörleifsdóttir | Iceland | 2021

A university student falls in love with a manipulative narcissist who is much older than her.

‘The Last Summer’ by Ricarda Huch | German | 1910

When the governor of St Petersburg retreats to his summer residence, his wife hires a bodyguard to protect them with devastating consequences.

‘The Woman in the Blue Cloak’ by Deon Meyer | Afrikaans | 2018

A South African detective investigates the murder of a foreign woman who had been on the hunt for a rare painting from the Dutch Golden Age.

‘Sundays in August’ by Patrick Modiano | France | 1986

In this noirish crime story, a young woman flees her husband, taking her lover and a hugely valuable diamond with her.

‘The House on the Hill’ by Cesare Pavese | Italy | 1948

A school teacher befriends a group of anti-fascists during the Second World War but can’t quite commit to their cause.

‘Untold Night and Day’ by Bae Suah | South Korea | 2020

An audio theatre employee traverses the city in a single dizzying 24-hour period and meets various intriguing characters.

‘And the Wind Sees All’ by Gudmundur Andri Thorsson | Iceland | 2018

The lives of various residents in a small Icelandic fishing village are told in a series of interconnected stories.

‘Territory of Light’ by Yuko Tsushima | Japan | 1979

After her husband walks out on her, a mother struggles to raise her two-year-old daughter alone.

‘Dry Milk’ by Huo Yan | China | 2019

A disgruntled Chinese immigrant living in Auckland embarks on a dodgy export business selling powdered milk abroad.

For more novella recommendations, please see my list of 17 intriguing novellas you can read in a day. Or just click my novella tag.

Adania Shibli, Author, Book review, Fiction, Fitzcarraldo Editions, Israel, literary fiction, Palestine, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction, women in translation

‘Minor Detail’ by Adania Shibli (translated by Elisabeth Jaquette)

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Fitzcarraldo Editions; 144 pages; 2020. Translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette.

It’s not very often that I am ahead of the curve, but when I extracted Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail from my digital TBR last weekend, little did I know the author would be the focus of worldwide attention in the days to come.

Shibli is a Palestinian author who was due to be awarded the 2023 LiBeraturpreis yesterday (20 October) at an award ceremony at the Frankfurt Book Fair. In the wake of the recent outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas, the Fair’s organisers cancelled the ceremony.

I’m not going to go into the reasons why this is such a controversial decision because there’s been plenty of coverage online already — here (The Guardian), here (The Conversation) and here (Literary Hub), for instance — and I’m mindful of the sensitivities around the current conflict. Instead, I would just like to focus on the book I read given I read it before this all kicked off.

A story of two halves

Minor Detail was written in 2017 (it took more than a decade to write), translated into English in 2020 and longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021.

It’s a novella comprised of two halves set several decades apart and told by two vastly different protagonists, one a soldier in the Israeli Army, the other a young Palestinian woman living and working in Ramallah.

It revolves around a singular incident in August 1949, a year after the Palestine War [1] which forced more than 700,000 people to flee their homeland.

In Part 1, an unnamed Israeli sergeant leads a team of men on a mission to secure the new border with Egypt, comb the “southwest part of the Negev and cleanse it of any remaining Arabs”.

During a daily reconnaissance mission, the soldiers capture a young Arab woman and take her back to their camp, where she is raped and abused, before being executed and buried in the dunes.

In Part 2, a young Palestinian woman reads about the woman’s murder in a newspaper article and is struck by the fact that her death coincided “exactly a quarter of a century later with the morning of my birth”.

It is this coincidence that forms the titular “minor detail” upon which the narrator becomes so obsessed. In a bid to find out more, she hires a car and traverses the occupied territories on a research mission that ends badly.

This minor detail, which others might not give a second thought, will stay with me forever; in spite of myself and how hard I try to forget it, the truth of it will never stop chasing me, given how fragile I am, as weak as the trees out there past the windowpane. There may in fact be nothing more important than this little detail, if one wants to arrive at the complete truth, which, by leaving out the girl’s story, the article does not reveal.

Two different styles

What is most striking about this book is the way Shibli adopts two different prose styles and points of view to tell her story.

The first is told in a distant third-person voice that records, in painstaking detail, the sergeant’s day-to-day activities, which include his ablutions, his constant scouring of his sleeping quarters for bugs and other insects, and the military patrols he carries out.

The second uses a more immediate first-person voice but is similarly focused on the minutiae of the woman’s research trip, from her borrowing of a colleague’s identity card to the names of the various roads she drives down to get close to the scene of the historic crime.

But what ties these two halves together — aside from the incident at the heart of it  — is recurring motifs that act like the echoes of history reverberating across the decades. These motifs include barking dogs, the smell of petrol and the demarcation of borders, both physical and intangible.

Visceral reading experience

For me, reading this story was an almost visceral experience. Shibali’s prose does something inexplicable: it is filled with explanatory detail, to the point of being almost extraneous, while simultaneously evoking the strange worlds her characters inhabit with eloquence and poise. The desert and the soldier’s mission in the first half, for instance, comes alive with dazzling paragraphs like this:

Now the only sound was the muffled weeping of a girl who had curled up inside her black clothes like a beetle, and the rustle of thorn acacia, terebinth leaves and cane grass as the soldiers moved through the spot of green surrounded by endless, barren sand dunes, combing the area for weapons, while he stood there and inspected some manure.

In the second half, we learn of the narrator’s life in the occupied territories, where freedom of movement is seriously curtailed, bombings and military operations are just part of “normal” life and there is the constant threat of being arrested and detained:

We are living under occupation here. Gunshots and military vehicle sirens, and sometimes the sound of helicopters, warplanes and shelling, the subsequent wail of ambulances; not only do these noises precede breaking news reports, but now they have to compete with the dog’s barking, too. And the situation has been like this for such a long time that there aren’t many people alive today who remember little details about what life was like before all this, like the detail about the wilting lettuce in an otherwise closed vegetable market, for example.

Minor Detail doesn’t have a neat resolution, but the ending is heart-wrenching.

The story, as a whole, provides a distressing portrait of what it is like to live in constant fear and anxiety, and it presents a violent and unfamiliar (to me) world in which memory and history do not always dovetail, where life is cheap and oppression is normalised.

This is the kind of multi-layered book that is unsettling and thought-provoking. It has wormed its way under my skin and I’m sure I will be thinking about it a lot in the weeks and months to come.

For another take on this novel, please see Lisa’s review at ANZLitLovers.

Finally, if you live in the UK, the publisher Fitzcarraldo has made this book free to download on Amazon for a short time only.

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[1] In Israel, it is known as the War of Independence and in Arabic as a central component of the Nakba, the destruction of Palestinian society and homeland in 1948, which resulted in the permanent displacement of most Palestinian Arabs.