In the recently concluded Persephone Festival held in April, novelist Rachel Joyce discussed how One Afternoon by Siân James was one of her favourite Persephone books. I’ve yet to listen to the recording (must do so soon!), but can see why she loved this charming, understated novel…
One Afternoon by Siân James is a beautifully written, perceptive tale of love in all its avatars, relationships, making bold choices, and family. At its core is a love story, but Siân James’s intelligent writing ensures that the book never ventures into overtly sentimental territory.
The ‘one afternoon’ of the title refers to that one unexpected encounter that alters our protagonist Anna’s life forever. On that particular afternoon, Anna accidentally bumps into Charlie, a theatre actor who sweeps her off her feet and the two embark on a whirlwind affair. Anna, we soon learn, is a young widow with three daughters living in the countryside in a sumptuously decorated home she has grown to love. She was married to Giles, Director of the very theatre company where Charles works, and was considerably senior to her. We are told of how he died suddenly, but Anna gradually learns to move on. Meanwhile, in the present, her daughters, delightfully, welcome this new man in their mother’s life; Charlie equally gels well with them, participating in the family activities including horse riding et al, adding much mayhem and colour to their hitherto quiet routines.
But Charlie has his career to focus on which entails travelling to London often, and a possibly new opportunity that would involve long stretches of time in the city, away from Anna, soon beckons. This looming absence hangs like a Damocles sword over Anna who despairs at not being able to see Charlie, and niggling uncertainties about their future and a twangs of jealousy begin to creep in.
Intertwined with the present is Anna’s past as she reflects on her marriage to Giles, and their life together. Anna first meets Giles at a party at a young age when she is just a university student, but she is frustrated in her studies and feels adrift. Giles, successful and well-to-do at the time, persuades Anna to give up her education and become his wife instead, to which she agrees. We are told that Anna was happily married to Giles, but there’s a sense that theirs was more of a polite marriage further exacerbated by Giles’ posh upbringing and the age difference between them.
“However, Giles worked until he’d got everything exactly as he wanted it, including all the furniture. By this time I realise what a marvellous job he did; I’ve never wanted to alter a thing, not even a picture or ornament.
When all the work was finished, he completely lost interest in the house. I could tell that he was surprised by this, but with my vast childhood experience of playing house, I wasn’t at all. The joy was always in planning the rooms, arranging the furniture, finding the right boxes for table and chairs, searching out the kettle, the teapot and the ubiquitous jam jars. Once that was done, the game was deadly dull.”
Her sparkling relationship with Charlie makes Anna realise for the first time how spontaneity was sorely missing in her marriage to Giles. Anna is struck by how little she actually knew about Giles, he had his secrets of which she had nary a clue, and as the skeletons in his closet come tumbling out after his death, Anna is at first disconcerted by these revelations forcing her to view Giles and their marriage in a different light. Charlie, meanwhile, sensing Anna’s preoccupied state of mind, and unsure of his standing, decides to end their affair. Anna stoically takes this upheaval in her stride (she never expected anything serious out of it anyway), although she deeply misses Charlie. Then a crucial development occurs, Anna makes a radical (in that period) decision that challenges the conventional mores of her time, but also highlights a noticeable shift in societal attitudes and perceptions based on the various conversations she has with those close to her.
Thrown into this mix are some more characters and mini storylines that add meat to the novel – Anna’s parents and the tragic essence of their marriage, Giles’ mother (Anna’s mother-in-law) with whom she gets along surprisingly well, and last but not the least the stodgy village doctor with a tragic air about him who has taken a fancy to Anna but is despondent on learning that her heart is with Charlie.
One Afternoon, then, is an intelligent, lovely novel about marriage, new relationships, fresh beginnings and big change, finding your feet, and challenging conventional societal mores. More specifically, it is an exploration of love in its various forms whether romantic, marital, casual, maternal, or filial. The contrast between her marriage to Giles and her affair with Charlie compels Anna to ruminate on sex and love and what she missed in her marriage and what she desires in her future relationships. The easy, loving relationship between Anna and her daughters is superbly depicted – their frank conversations and varied personalities and yet how close-knit they are as a family.
To be honest, there’s nothing particularly appealing about any of the men portrayed here, but the highlight of the book for me was the voice – there’s a charming openness to Anna’s personality as she narrates her story with such refreshing candour. We glimpse her journey towards self-discovery and living life on her own terms as she transforms from a tentative, young wife to a confident, mature woman.
With a gamut of emotions – exhilaration, sadness, heartbreak, and quiet joy – infused in the narrative, there is much wit, wisdom, and subtlety in Siân James’ writing and storytelling that makes One Afternoon well worth reading.
March and April were hectic months for me – I travelled to Kashmir with family and was also quite busy setting up our new home and getting it ready to shift soon. As a result, my reading and blogging have been a bit patchy – in between bouts of reading consistently, there were days when I didn’t read a single page. But I did read some stellar books during these two months. Of these, two were part of Kim’s #NYRBWomen24 reading project and they were very good, while the rest were a mix of translated literature, short stories, and 20th-century literature written by women.
So, without further ado, here’s a brief look at the nine books…You can read the detailed reviews on the first eight by clicking on the title links, with a review on the Moore to follow soon.
Laden with poetic despair and immersed in a sea of swirling sentences, Augusto Higa Oshiro’s The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu is an elusive, enigmatic, and intense tale of death, madness, isolation, and identity; a brilliant walking novel drenched in dreamlike vibes as it evocatively captures the pulse of Lima, its myriad sights and sounds, making it a deeply haunting reading experience.
We meet Katzuo Nakamatsu on the very first page standing on a pebbled path one August evening mesmerised by the magnificence of the sakura blossoms. If this conveys an aura of peace and tranquility, then it proves short-lived, because Katzuo is immediately gripped by an unnamable anguish, “the weight of consciousness, unseeing affliction.”
The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu is replete with an array of sights, sounds, and rich imagery lending the novel a very tonal and visual quality that only enhances its strange beauty. The lyrical, labyrinthine, looping sentences not only convey the complex pathways of Katzuo’s disturbed mind but also the contours of the city on his walking jaunts – a place of contrasts alternating between sumptuous gardens, hypnotic beaches, quiet affluent neighbourhoods on one side, and the squalid, forbidden corners depicting degradation and filth on the other.
A CRACK IN THE WALL by Claudia Piñeiro (Translated from Spanish by Miranda France)
I love how Claudia Piñeiro employs the framework of crime to explore relationships and social issues, and in this aspect, A Crack in the Wall is no different; it’s another excellent tale of cowardice, ruthless ambition, moral ambiguity, deception, and precarious relationships.
The novel opens with an image of our protagonist Pablo Simó, sitting at his desk “drawing the outline of a building that will never exist.” Pablo works as an architect in the offices of Borla and Associates, a firm engaged in construction and real estate. Borla, a greedy, ambitious man willing to cut corners, is at the helm of things ably helped by his secretary Marta Horvat (with whom he’s having an affair), a beautiful woman Pablo secretly desires. Pablo has worked for Borla for more than a decade but there’s a sense that both Marta and Borla don’t treat him as an equal, and Pablo seems to have resignedly accepted this. The monotony of his days is not lost on Pablo until a stranger walks into their offices one evening deeply disturbing their fragile sense of calm, and evoking deeply hidden memories of a crime committed in the past. In this novel, Piñeiro’s superb storytelling skills are on full display as she artfully combines the finer elements of plot development with astute character portraits that make for an utterly riveting narrative.
Quartet in Autumn was Barbara Pym’s penultimate novel published before her death and in terms of tone and subject matter, it’s a different book because of its haunting, sorrowful quality quite unlike her earlier works which displayed her masterful comic flourishes to full effect. And yet it is a lovely, restrained, poignant novel on the heartaches of growing old, deepening loneliness, the sense of emptiness felt post retirement, and unconventional friendships.
We first meet Edwin, Norman, Letty, and Marcia working in a nondescript London office where they are placed in a common room. The nature of their work seems nebulous, we aren’t exactly sure what they do, maybe they are clerks? But this vagueness is deliberate and gives a flavour of the heightened loneliness of these characters particularly when the spectre of retirement begins to flash before them as they are gripped with a feeling of life passing by and a gnawing sense of emptiness. The comedy we are so used to in earlier Pym novels is muted though not absent, and despite its melancholic mood, the ending can be construed as hopeful. I loved it!
Based on the one Celia Dale novel I’ve read so far (the superb A Helping Hand), I knew that Errol Winston is headed for doom from the opening pages when he lands up one evening on the doorstep of the Didcots, a white, elderly couple. It’s raining cats and dogs, and Errol seems soaked to the skin while also coughing badly. Mrs Didcot, shuffling to the door peers at the paper he thrusts at her, which contains an advertisement for a room on rent. It appears that Errol has made a mistake, and has arrived at the wrong address, there’s certainly no room to let at the Didcots. Errol prepares to leave, but Mrs Didcot takes pity on him, particularly concerned with his hacking cough, and invites him inside to warm himself by the fire, while Mrs Didcot prepares a pot of tea. Deeply exhausted, Errol settles on a chair and falls asleep, and it is during this time that her husband, Arthur Didcot walks in.
In A Dark Corner then, we find ourselves in classic Celia Dale territory, where we are given a glimpse of pure evil that lurks beneath an outward façade of respectability. The overarching premise is pretty similar to A Helping Hand – a couple taking in a lodger in an act of altruism which they believe sets them on high moral ground in the perception of society; how can their kindness be questioned?
Set in 1920s Berlin, Gabriele Tergit’s Käsebier Takes Berlin, is a lively, zesty satire of the excesses of the period highlighting the power of the press, the transitory nature of the latest news and fads, overhyped personalities, consumerism, and the inevitable downfall fuelled by the Great Depression and the rise of fascism. A novel bursting with a slew of characters, it is difficult really to focus on any one, but the essence of the plot is essentially this:
In the newsroom of Berliner Rundschau, on what has been a slow news week, editor-in-chief Georg Miermann pushes one of his key reporters, a sarcastic man, Emil Gohlisch to publish his article on an upcoming folksy singer. Gohlisch initially haws and hums, but eventually gets his story on Käsebier printed as front page news. Soon, another noted journalist but struggling poet Otto Lambeck writes his piece on a Käsebier show and the breadth of his talent in a rival newspaper, Berliner Tageszaitung, and in the blink of an eye, Käsebier becomes a raging sensation.
In a pace that’s intensely frenetic, Tergit captures the pulse of the period brilliantly in her prose – light and airy, comic and satirical, but also dark and profound. The novel particularly becomes absorbing in the second half when the focus narrows down to certain plot points and is not all over the place.
NOT A RIVERby Selva Almada (Translated from Spanish by Annie McDermott)
Set in a rural region of Argentina, Selva Almada’s Not a River is a brilliant, spare novella about male friendship, trauma, encroaching boundaries, unexpressed guilt, grief, and violence. There’s a cinematic feel to the opening pages as we are presented with the image of Enero Rey standing on the boat in the vast river, poised with a gun. He is not alone, accompanying him is his good friend El Negro and a young kid called Tilo.
The three have come to this island on a camping trip, to spend quality time together, for some much-needed male bonding. Tilo’s father, Eusebio, also a good friend of Enero and El Negro died many years ago, drowned in that very river. On this particular fishing expedition, the three are in pursuit of a large, beautiful sting ray; Enero, dazed by the wine and heat, fires more bullets than is necessary to bring it in. Their activities attract the attention of the island inhabitants – first, a coterie of boys to be followed by a mysterious man called Aguirre, who seems offended by the presence of the three and the manner in which they catch the ray. The sense of tension between the men is immediately palpable, glints of latent menace that fill Enero, El Negro, and Tilo with a sense of foreboding.
Written in a spare, lean style, and impressive in the way it manages to pack the weight of its themes into these slim pages, Not a River is another excellent work by Selva Almada, although The Wind That Lays Waste and Dead Girls remain my favourites.
Last Words from Montmartre begins on an ominous note signaling the author’s intention to commit suicide, evident not only from the title but also from this epigraph – “For dead little Bunny and Myself, soon dead.” Deeply confessional and an intense, lyrical book about betrayal, heartbreak, passion, breakdown, and death, the novel is structured as a series of letters and diary entries addressed by the unnamed narrator to various lovers, friends, and family members, offering an intimate glimpse into the protagonist’s inner world. Based on the subject matter alone, it is not always an easy read, but the fierce tone and richness of the writing make it pretty compelling.
Qiu Miaojin mysteriously committed suicide after writing Last Words from Montmartre but before its publication fueling discussions about the ‘autobiographical” nature of the novel. This ambiguity is further heightened by these cryptic words at the beginning of the novel – “If this book should be published, readers can begin anywhere. The only connection between the chapters is the time frame in which they were written.” Don’t be fooled by the length – though short, this isn’t a novel that can be breezed through but rather like wine is meant to be sipped slowly and savoured. A book I’m very glad to have read and would recommend!
One afternoon, our protagonist, Anna accidentally bumps into Charlie, a theatre actor who sweeps her off her feet and the two embark on a whirlwind affair. Anna, we soon learn, is a young widow with three daughters married to Giles who was a Director of the very theatre company which employs Charles and was considerably senior to her. Her daughters, delightfully, welcome this new man in their mother’s life, and while Anna is at first enchanted by his company, soon some insecurities and pangs of jealousy begin to filter in. To make matters complicated, Anna will soon learn of secrets in her deceased husband’s past, of which she had nary a clue, but will change her perception of her marriage and the man she married; factors that will also influence how she views her current relationship with Charlie, and another stodgy man with a tragic air about him who has also taken a fancy to her. This is an intelligent, lovely novel about romantic love, marriage, new relationships, fresh beginnings and finding your feet, and challenging conventional social mores, and the easy, loving relationship between Anna and her three daughters is so beautifully conveyed. The highlight of the book for me was the voice – there’s a charming openness to Anna’s personality as she narrates her story with such refreshing candour. Here’s a quote from the book that I posted on social media…
“However, Giles worked until he’d got everything exactly as he wanted it, including all the furniture. By this time I realise what a marvellous job he did; I’ve never wanted to alter a thing, not even a picture or ornament.
When all the work was finished, he completely lost interest in the house. I could tell that he was surprised by this, but with my vast childhood experience of playing house, I wasn’t at all. The joy was always in planning the rooms, arranging the furniture, finding the right boxes for table and chairs, searching out the kettle, the teapot and the ubiquitous jam jars. Once that was done, the game was deadly dull.”
EASTMOUTH AND OTHER STORIES by Alison Moore
I loved these atmospheric, moody, beautifully written stories. Moore has a flair for unsettling her readers like she did in her superb novels Missing and Death and the Seaside. Again, I plan to put up a review of this collection soon, but here’s a quote from one of her stories called “Seabound” that I posted on Instagram…
“’I’ve spent my whole life here,’ said May.’ All my memories are here. All my things are here.’ She felt at home, in that house on the cliff edge against which the sea beat. Daisy phoned every few days to see how she was, and May said she was fine.
Except sometimes she was troubled in the night. All alone in the big bed that had once belonged to her parents, May dreamt she stood in the shallows at the edge of the sea, which sucked the sand from beneath her feet. She went deeper. Vast and cold, the sea climbed her bare legs. It was rough, but she stood her ground. Sometimes, when she woke from these dreams, the sea was so loud it could have been right there in her room.”
That’s it for March and April. In May, I’ve been reading Life with Picasso by Françoise Gilot as part of #NYRBWomen24 which is excellent so far, the combination of art and memoir is too irresistible and compelling. Plus, I’m also enjoying Lars Gustafsson’s A Tiler’s Afternoon which has a haunting, dreamlike quality to it.
Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre is one of those books that had been languishing on my shelves for a long time, and one I wouldn’t have read had it not been selected by Kim for her marvellous “NYRBWomen24” group read. This is a very difficult book to write about given its style and subject matter, but here is an attempt nevertheless…
Last Words from Montmartre begins on an ominous note signaling the author’s intention to commit suicide, evident not only from the title but also from this epigraph – “For dead little Bunny and Myself, soon dead.”
Deeply confessional and an intense, lyrical book about betrayal, heartbreak, passion, breakdown, and death, the novel is structured as a series of letters and diary entries addressed by the unnamed narrator to various lovers, friends, and family members, offering an intimate glimpse into the protagonist’s inner world. Based on the subject matter alone, it is not always an easy read, but the fierce tone and richness of the writing make it pretty compelling.
Qiu Miaojin mysteriously committed suicide after writing Last Words from Montmartre but before its publication fueling discussions about the ‘autobiographical” nature of the novel. This ambiguity is further heightened by these cryptic words at the beginning of the novel…
“If this book should be published, readers can begin anywhere. The only connection between the chapters is the time frame in which they were written.”
The novel begins with a chapter called “Witness” where the unnamed narrator is addressing Yong, one of her earlier lovers, about being betrayed by Xu with whom the narrator was in a passionate relationship. Xu, it seems, abandons the narrator suddenly one day, leaving her with their rabbit Bunny (“the crystallization of our three years of marriage”). Soon thereafter, Bunny dies, and our narrator is now bereft and on the verge of a mental collapse.
“For a month my body and mind were on the verge of total collapse, and Yong was the one who took me in and cared for me. For the first time she opened up to me, lightening the load of my longing and anguish and offering the passion and connection that I desired so desperately. Only then did I suddenly see what had actually happened this past year.”
Possibly as an act of catharsis, our unnamed narrator begins composing a series of letters written specifically to Xu, the love of her life, enumerating in detail and with piercing analysis, the nature of their relationship characterised by an all-consuming passion (“We can only be either wholly together or wholly apart, otherwise you’ll just keep hurting me and, wounded, I will hurt you again. This is the fundamental pattern of the love we share”), the narrator’s mercurial personality and possessiveness, which likely drives Xu away, but also a relationship that lays bare Xu’s passivity and resistance to volatile confrontations. Seen through the narrator’s lens, the character of their relationship is marked not only by deep love and intense passion but also by insults, cheating, heartbreak, misunderstandings, and lack of communication.
“I welcomed the care you showed me but whenever I sensed that deep down you didn’t love me, I lost it. That’s why my “desire for love” could grow even stronger while I also became suspicious of you, lashed out at you, and developed a neurosis and deteriorated. . . . As this happens, the hostile side of you that you’ve kept hidden began to be cruel, selfish, unfaithful, and declared relentlessly that you were leaving me and, most chilling words of all, that you didn’t love me. I turned into a sniper, as we both became so entrenched in our adversarial relationship that the most negative qualities of our personalities were pushed to their extremes. The sad thing is that neither of us could stop the momentum of careening toward the abyss, though ironically we still yearned to treat (or “love”) each other with kindness…”
As the novel progresses, more characters enter the fray, and it quickly becomes clear that all chapters aren’t necessarily letters, some seem to be diary entries…and not all of them are addressed to Xu but a series of people comprising earlier lovers, and friends and family members (an elder sister is mentioned as are the narrator parents Ma and Ba).
But while our narrator seems to be staring into the depths of an abyss, we are given a glimpse of various moments of happiness in her life too, however fleeting. She has her writing to sustain her, finding solace and expression through her art in a novel infused with references to literature, philosophy, creativity, and music. Repeated references are particularly made to the joys of watching movies made by filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos, and to the enchanting quality of Paris. With a circle of friends and an involvement in politics, she isn’t entirely alienated from society, although inwardly her loneliness only deepens. But for the most part, the narrator grapples with feelings of despair, and disillusionment as she mulls on a variety of themes such as trust, definitions of sex and love, cowardice, emotional maturity, or even finding an anchor, always revealing a mind that is gradually unraveling as she toys with the idea of death and relief. In these letters, the narrator is not afraid of exposing the various facets of her personality – sometimes poignant, sometimes horrifying – and even the erotic quality of her desires, the act of writing evolving into a dialogue with herself.
Throughout this enigmatic text, the identity of the narrator remains slippery. The book’s opening pages feel deceptively straightforward – the narrator is a woman in Paris writing letters to her lover Xu who has abandoned her, Xu being probably now in Taipei. But as the book progresses, this allegedly clear picture begins to get hazy. The reader’s assumptions are always questioned – for the most part, it appears that the narrator is female, sometimes it seems that the narrator has a male identity. Then the figure of Zoë makes a presence – Is Zoë male or female? Is Zoë the narrator or another person altogether? More importantly, is this ambiguity around gender deliberate on the author’s part? Does gender really matter when examining the universal themes of sex, love, infidelity, and heartbreak?
If you are looking for linearity in this novel, there isn’t any, as it flits between Paris, Tokyo, and Taipei, the past and the present; plot has no relevance here, it’s a novel with impressionistic vibes, a piece of art to experience; the only consistent factor is the essence of its themes of love, passion, and despair.
“If a couple’s resentments aren’t vocalized, then their love can’t flow. The mutual resentment in our hearts is the main reason our love cannot move forward.”
Then, there is a lush feel to Miaojin’s descriptions, particularly palpable in her evocative portrayal of a wintery-spring Paris evening (“Dusk in the Latin Quarter was like a fairy tale or a love poem, like a Klimt mosaic, like glowing, rose-colored clouds reaching toward the heavens . . . a swath of gold ringed in a misty-blue halo, this was the Paris that most entranced me”), or while conveying the essence of Tokyo (“And Tokyo is the cherry blossoms, the sunset at dusk, dawn sunlight through her windows, the cry of the crow, the cityscape of darkened rooms on a rainy evening, the depth of feeling in her eyes”), or even while expressing the simple pleasures of companionship…
“I want to take her on my bike to the woods. I want to make breakfast, lunch, and dinner for her; listen to music with her before bed; read poetry to her, and while I work during the day she can wander away and do whatever she likes until dusk when we’ll walk along the Seine or stroll through the streets…I want to go to the Louvre with her, and at night visit the park in Villette; I want to take her to see Angelopoulos movies and to listen to Argerich’s wild concerts; I want to take pictures of us around the fourth arrondissement as we sweep the dust from the cracks of our everyday lives…If she could stay longer, I would finish my novel and write poetry for her, and make art for her.”
In a nutshell, in Last Words from Montmartre, Qiu Miaojin’s lyrical prose and raw, frank, introspective storytelling captures the emotional intensity of the protagonist’s journey, making it a heartfelt exploration of love and identity. Don’t be fooled by the length – though short, this isn’t a novel that can be breezed through but rather like wine is meant to be sipped slowly and savoured. A book I’m very glad to have read and would recommend!
I’m on a break from blogging for a week starting tomorrow and thought I’d squeeze in one more review. This piece is on Käsebier Takes Berlin by Gabriele Tergit, an “NYRBWomen24” book I began reading in March but spilled over in April…
Set in 1920s Berlin, Gabriele Tergit’s Käsebier Takes Berlin, is a lively, zesty satire of the excesses of the period highlighting the power of the press, the transitory nature of the latest news and fads, overhyped personalities, consumerism, and the inevitable downfall fuelled by the Great Depression and the rise of fascism. A novel bursting with a slew of characters, it is difficult really to focus on any one, but the essence of the plot is essentially this:
In the newsroom of Berliner Rundschau, on what has been a slow news week, editor-in-chief Georg Miermann pushes one of his key reporters, a sarcastic man, Emil Gohlisch to publish his article on an upcoming folksy singer. Gohlisch initially haws and hums, but eventually gets his story on Käsebier printed as front page news. Soon, another noted journalist but struggling poet Otto Lambeck writes his piece on a Käsebier show and the breadth of his talent in a rival newspaper, Berliner Tageszaitung, and in the blink of an eye, Käsebier becomes a raging sensation.
On the face of it, Käsebier is an unremarkable man performing on a cheap stage in a kind of vaudeville, but the series of news articles on him in these leading publications catch the fancy of the upper-class set. Soon he is invited to perform at the prestigious Wintergarten, and the who’s who has begun to sing his praises. Thereafter, follows a champagne party held by wealthy socialite Margot Weissman that becomes a fertile ground for discussing murky business ideas, all centred on the aura of Käsebier.
In the spirit of the happening, buzzing nature of news, the vast stream of characters flit in and out of the novel’s forty chapters, and it is often difficult to keep track of them. But as translator Sophie Duvernoy, in her introduction writes, this book is more about the medium of the press, and taken in that context, it perhaps makes sense that this vast array of characters only adds to the buzz and noise of the novel as Tergit intends them to rather than dwell on deeper character development.
But even then there are some notable characters presented here – the tongue-in-cheek Gohlisch, the lovelorn young Miss Kohler in love with a flighty man with commitment issues, the dubious and opportunistic Frachter who eventually takes over the reins of Berliner R and alters its personality from a newspaper publishing serious political views and essays to one now showcasing the banality of the everyday, the cautious, risk-averse but profit-seeking banker Mr Muschler who gets embroiled in the financing of a construction project of luxury apartments despite not having a nose for business; the beautiful Kate, an independent woman with her own business and numerous lovers, and the intellectual and culturally inclined Miermann, a man of the old school and at the helm of things at Berliner R for a larger chunk of the novel. Ironically, Käsebier despite his name being the talk of the town is barely visible as a character as he is away most of the time on shows; it’s as if the phenomenon has eclipsed the person.
The novel is an evocative portrayal of 1920s Berlin – wining and fine dining, pearls and champagne breakfasts, theatre and dancing, the vibrant café culture, the frivolity and insouciance that envelops the chic and stylish jet set crowd.
The asphalt shimmered. The street lamps cast a haze of light over the spring trees. The longing of the many couples lounging on benches drifted from the Tiergarten. Ladies in fresh pale suits sat in front of cafés, wearing little hats on their little heads, drinking iced coffee and iced chocolate with straws. They were superbly manicured and massaged and creamed and rouged and whitened. Lambeck took in the air scented with freedom, brashness, and benzene.
Berlin is very much a character in the novel, a city that transitions from the excesses of the 1920s to depression and the alarming rise of fascism in the 30s; in one fell swoop we see something of the aura of Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel being felt here in the early pages, and then maybe a wee bit of the somber nature of Lion Feuchtwanger’s The Oppermanns in the final few chapters when the Nazi party begins to gain ground.
Some wonderful set-pieces elevate the novel – the one in which Otto Lambeck indulges in a bit of people-watching sitting at a cafe to get a feel for the spirit of Berlin; another one which singularly focuses on the last-minute frenzy of Gohlisch’s Käsebier article getting published; a later Kafkaesque chapter where one of the minor characters experiences the full force of government bureaucracy as he flits from one room to another asking for some important set of documents, and a slew of chapters that dwell on the discussions between Muschler, and a set of architects and builders as they try to construct a theatre for Käsebier on Muschler’s plot of land, a project characterised by incompetency, cost cutting, bad design, and numerous delays. Meanwhile, throughout the novel, different characters converse on a variety of topics ranging from business and politics to art, culture, and feminism, from declining work ethics to the expensiveness of real estate in Berlin.
“There’s poverty, and otherwise there’s just a big old march to bed. We’ve been let down. No, don’t deny it—we’ve all been let down, all of us who longed for the education, knowledge, and skills of men. We learned how life can open up when the search for truth becomes your guiding star. The next generation is a disappointment. Every day I see it in my office hours. I don’t miss anything, I feel fulfilled, but the generation after us forgot everything. It’s rotten.”
In a classic case of “the emperor’s new clothes”, we see how the viral quality of news catapults mediocrity to unforeseen heights so much so that most people prefer to swim with the tide rather than speak out the truth. The economics of undertaking construction projects is also spot on – corrupt builders, nebulous negotiations, rampant bureaucracy, and cost cutting mean quality work is given the boot. We see the proliferation of excesses and crass consumerism – once Käsebier becomes a sensation, everybody wants to cash in on his name from building theaters, and publishing books to manufacturing cheap merchandise and products. But history often uncannily repeats itself, what rises meteorically must eventually fall, old fads make way for new ones, and the Käsebier aura, unsurprisingly, begins to fade…a cycle that has repeated endlessly throughout the centuries highlighting the prescience of Tergit’s themes, how relevant they are today as they were in the early 20th century.
In a pace that’s intensely frenetic, Tergit captures the pulse of the period brilliantly in her prose – light and airy, comic and satirical, but also dark and profound. The novel particularly becomes absorbing in the second half when the focus narrows down to certain plot points and is not all over the place. Overall, Käsebier Takes Berlin is an excellent novel well worth reading.
I’d read two books by Selva Almada before embarking on Not A River – The Wind That Lays Waste and Dead Girls – both excellent (the latter featured in my Best Books of 2020 list), and both published by Charco Press. Not a River, shortlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize, is the third in a loose trilogy that began with The Wind That Lays Waste, the second being The Brickmakers, which I’ve yet to read.
Set in a rural region of Argentina, Selva Almada’s Not a River is a brilliant, spare novella about male friendship, trauma, encroaching boundaries, unexpressed guilt, grief, and violence.
There’s a cinematic feel to the opening pages as we are presented with the image of Enero Rey standing on the boat in the vast river, poised with a gun. He is not alone, accompanying him is his good friend El Negro and a young kid called Tilo.
Enero Rey, standing firm on the boat, stocky and beardless, swollen-bellied, legs astride, stares hard at the surface of the river and waits, revolver in hand. Tilo, the kid, aboard the same boat, leans back, the rod butt at his hip, turning the reel handle, tugging the line: a glittering thread in the waning sun. El Negro, fifty-something like Enero, alongside the boat, water up to his balls, leans back as well, red-faced from the sun and hard work, rod bent as he winds in and lets out the line. The spool spinning and his breath a kind of wheeze. The river pancake flat.
The three have come to this island on a camping trip, to spend quality time together, for some much-needed male bonding. Tilo’s father, Eusebio, also a good friend of Enero and El Negro died many years ago, drowned in that very river.
On this particular fishing expedition, the three are in pursuit of a large, beautiful sting ray; Enero, dazed by the wine and heat, fires more bullets than is necessary to bring it in. Their activities attract the attention of the island inhabitants – first, a coterie of boys to be followed by a mysterious man called Aguirre, who seems offended by the presence of the three and the manner in which they catch the ray. The sense of tension between the men is immediately palpable, glints of latent menace that fill Enero, El Negro, and Tilo with a sense of foreboding.
It wasn’t a ray. It was that ray. A beautiful creature stretched out in the mud at the bottom, she’d have shone white like a bride in the lightless depths. Flat on the riverbed or gliding in her tulle, magnolia from the water, searching for food, chasing transparent larvae, skeletal roots. The hooks buried in her sides, the tug-of-war all afternoon till she can’t fight any more. The gunshots.
Alternating with this thread are flashbacks to the past that dwell on the camaraderie between Enero, Eusebio, and El Negro, as boys and then as men. Enero, particularly, is haunted by disturbing dreams of the Drowner, a mythical presence, the harbinger of death on the water. A dream that torments him first in his youth, prompting the trio to take a trip to meet Eusebio’s godfather, a healer, has now returned to disturb his peace of mind in the present on this particular fishing trip.
Intertwined with their storyline, is that of Siomara, Aguirre’s sister, and her two teenage daughters Mariela and Lucy. Siomara’s backstory tells of a woman obsessed with fire and setting things alight, once almost destroying her own home. The bare bones of Siomara’s background reveal a legacy of violence embedded in the relationships between men and women, whether filial or marital. Having been subjected to physical abuse by her father and ditched by her husband, Siomara despairs a similar fate befalling her girls but knows she’s powerless to do anything about it.
Sometimes she thinks the fire talks to her. Not like a person does, not with words. But there’s something in the crackle, the soft sound of the flames, as if she could almost hear the air burning away, yes, something, right there, that speaks to her alone. Even if it doesn’t use human words, Siomara knows it’s calling her. Saying: come on, you know you want to. Just like all the men she fell for, just like the father of her daughters, just like so many others. She answered those calls every time. Why not? Who doesn’t like a bit of attention? And every time, in the end, she’d climbed out of a window as if the building was going up in flames.
Meanwhile, the girls tempt Tilo, Enero, and El Negro at a soda shop one sultry afternoon, inviting them to a dance later in the evening, an event that could be the precursor for something ominous.
The cover of this Charco edition depicts innumerable small tributaries of a river branching out, a representation of the various narrative strands of this tale that flow in across time and space and culminate on that island and river – the spot where Eusebio drowned in the past, where Enero, El Negro, and Tilo feel the pull of an indefinable danger, their fates loosely linked to their fragile encounters with the island locals.
The themes of masculinity, gender violence, guilt, and grief run through this unsettling novella tormenting its characters in the past and present. Enero and El Negro haven’t entirely gotten over Eusebio’s death, the guilt buried deep within; and Siomara’s steadily wasting away body reveals her inability to come to terms with the tragedy that has engulfed her (“One day, the fire inside her will show her the truth. And then all that fire will come out”). There’s a sense of boundaries being encroached, both physical and psychological, and those who have done so in the past have either got their comeuppance with those in the present likely to face a similar fate.
Written in a spare, lean style, Not a River shimmers with mood and atmosphere – the disconcerting silence of the river, the sinister forests surrounding it, the metal-roofed thinly patched houses scorched by the blazing sun, the torpor that descends upon the characters fuelled by heat and fumes of wine. The prose feels skeletal yet poetic with all the linguistic embellishments peeled off, and the dialogues are stripped of speech marks too heightening the novella’s overall effect of economy and mesmerizing starkness. Impressive in the way it manages to pack the weight of its themes into these slim pages, Not a River, then, is another excellent work by Selva Almada, although The Wind That Lays Waste and Dead Girls remain my favourites.
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