Favourite Archipelago Books

I have been busy in May setting up and moving into our new home, so haven’t read much, and therefore haven’t blogged much either.  So I have decided to put up another themed post instead, this time on some of my favourite Archipelago books in the last five years (of course, this list will evolve and could even change as I read more from the catalogue). It is also the third “Publisher” themed post on this blog – the first was on Fitzcarraldo Editions called The Best of the Blues, and the second was on my Favourite NYRB Classics.

So without much ado, here is my selection of eight favourite Archipelagos. For detailed reviews on each book, you can click on the title link…

THE ENLIGHTENMENT OF KATZUO NAKAMATSU by Augusto Higa Oshiro (Translated from Spanish by Jennifer Shyue)

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.

EASTBOUND by Maylis de Kerangal (translated from French by Jessica Moore)

Set aboard the Trans-Siberian Express, Eastbound is a stunning, propulsive, and suspenseful novella of fugitives, flight, and freedom. A young conscript Aliocha, barely twenty, is travelling with a slew of men of his ilk to some godforsaken outpost in Siberia. Right till the last moment, Aliocha refuses to believe that he will be forced to sign up for military service even when all his attempts to avoid conscription prove futile. Now he is on the train galloping towards an unknown destination beset by dread, entrapment, and the driving urgency to escape.

And yet, the strange workings of Fate throw him a lifeline. He meets Hélène, an older Frenchwoman in her 40s, who we learn is also a fugitive although Aliocha has no inkling of this at the time. As this fast and furious, adrenaline-charged novella hurtles towards its conclusion, Aliocha and Hélène will encounter some heart-stopping moments that could thwart their uneasy alliance and derail their journey toward freedom. 

Thundering like a juggernaut, and teeming with nerve-wracking tension, Eastbound soars thanks to Kerangal’s gorgeous, haunting prose with its musical cadences and potent energy.

AUTUMN ROUNDS by Jacques Poulin (Translated from French Sheila Fischman)

Autumn Rounds is a subtle, beguiling novel about books and nature, a meditation on forming connections and finding love late in life that has the feel of a travelogue, both charming and melancholy at the same time.

The book opens on the eve of the Driver embarking on his summer tour. He hears faint notes of music drifting into his room, and when he heads out for a walk, he comes across a motley crew of performers – musicians, acrobats, jugglers – putting on a show on the streets for the audience. But then he chances upon Marie, the group’s manager of sorts, with “a beautiful face like Katharine Hepburn’s, a mixture of tenderness and strength”, and the attraction is immediate prompting them to strike up a conversation.

The Driver is entranced by Marie and her troupe, and they, in turn, are enamoured by the idea of a bookmobile, and soon an agreement is reached wherein the troupe will follow the same route taken by the Driver on his summer tour. The Driver arranges for a school bus for Marie and her crew for the purpose of this trip and they are all ready to set off. It’s a bittersweet, quietly powerful novel, a soothing balm for the soul, and there’s something about the goodness and kindness of the people within its pages that touches the heart.

A CHANGE OF TIME by Ida Jessen (Translated from Danish by Martin Aitken)

Set in a rural Danish village in the early 20^th century, A Change of Time is a beautiful, quiet, and reflective novel told through the diary entries of a schoolteacher called Frau Bagge. The novel begins when her husband, Vigand Bagge, a mocking and cruel man, and who is also a respected village doctor, passes away. Subsequently, the novel charts her response to his death and her attempts to build herself a new life, find herself a new place and identity, and discover meaning in life again. An exquisitely written novel.

AN UNTOUCHED HOUSE by Willem Frederik Hermans (Translated from Dutch by David Colmer)

An Untouched House is a spare, taut war thriller sprinkled with doses of absurd comedy that considerably heightens its narrative power. Set during the waning months of the Second World War, when madness still abounds, a weary Dutch partisan chances upon a luxurious, intact estate in an abandoned spa town. Enjoying the comforts of this home while the war outside rages on, the partisan is hell-bent on avoiding the fighting at all costs, until the real owner of the house turns up. At less than 100 pages, An Untouched House pulses and throbs with dramatic tension in which, Hermans, in his unique way, confronts us with the idea of the violent absurdity of war and its terrible consequences for those unwittingly involved.

THE BIRDS by Tarjei Vesaas (Translated from Norwegian by Michael Barnes & Torbjorn Stoverud)

In The Birds, our protagonist is 37-year-old Mattis, who is possibly mentally challenged and lives with his elder sister Hege in a cottage by the lake in a Norwegian village. Since Mattis is not able to hold on to any job, the responsibility of providing falls on Hege’s shoulders, and she is now tired and lonely. Until one day a lumberjack called Jorgen enters their lives and uproots their daily existence. This is a sad but gorgeous novel about the difficulty of communicating with one another and the hurdles that intellectually disabled individuals have to grapple with.

DIFFICULT LIGHT by Tomás González (Translated from Spanish by Andrea Rosenberg)

A poignant, beautiful book touching upon big themes of family, loss, art, and the critical question of whether death can provide relief from a life filled with chronic pain.  González is compassionate without being overtly sentimental. It’s a deeply moving novel that dwells on the intimacy and humour of a family, of displaying resilience amid pain, and as another author has put it, “manages to say new things about the way we feel.”

LOVE by Hanne Ørstavik (Translated from Norwegian by Martin Aitken)

Love is an unsettling novella set over the course of a single evening and night in a remote village in Norway during winter. Vibeke and her son Jon have just moved into this small village a few months ago. We are told in the opening pages that tomorrow is Jon’s birthday and he will turn 9 years old.

From the outset, it becomes apparent that there is some kind of disconnect between mother and son. Jon is pretty sure that Vibeke is going to bake a cake for his birthday tomorrow and decides to give her all the space she needs to do so. Vibeke, meanwhile, has forgotten her son’s birthday – something that is clear to the reader, but not to Jon. On that particular night, Vibeke and Jon are out of the house, but on their own with no inkling of what the other is up to.

Ørstavik infuses enough tension in her writing so that at the end of the chapters you are left wondering whether it will all turn out well for both mother and son. That the story is set in the depths of winter in a country close to the Arctic, serves as an atmospheric and stark contrast to the protagonists’ search for warmth and a sense of belonging.

A Month of Reading – February 2021

February was a good reading month, a mix of classics and translated literature. While all were very good, my favourites were the Wharton and Mortimer. Here’s a brief round-up of each book. For the links to the detailed reviews, you click on the titles.

AN UNTOUCHED HOUSE – Willem Frederik Hermans (tr. David Colmer)

An Untouched House is a spare, taut war thriller sprinkled with doses of absurd comedy that considerably heightens its narrative power. Set during the waning months of the Second World War, when madness still abounds, a weary Dutch partisan chances upon a luxurious, intact estate in an abandoned spa town. Enjoying the comforts of this home while the war outside rages on, the partisan is hell bent on avoiding the fighting at all cost, until the real owner of the house turns up. At less than 100 pages, An Untouched House pulses and throbs with dramatic tension in which, Hermans, in his unique way, confronts us with the idea of the violent absurdity of war and its terrible consequences for those unwittingly involved.

MINOR DETAIL – Adania Shibli (tr. Elisabeth Jaquette)

Minor Detail is an intense, searing novella of war, violence, memory and erasure at the heart of which lies the conflict between Israel and Palestine. The novella is divided into two sections. The first part focuses on an Israeli patrol and the events leading upto the rape and murder of a Bedouin girl. In the second part, the narration is in the first person, by an unnamed Palestinian woman residing in present, modern-day Ramallah and the perilous journey she embarks on in her quest to find the truth of that atrocity long forgotten.  The novella, then, is a piercing meditation on the tragedy faced by war victims – individuals whose lives are deemed trivial and inconsequential and are lost somewhere in the wider sweep of history.

SATURDAY LUNCH WITH THE BROWNINGS – Penelope Mortimer

Saturday Lunch with the Brownings is a collection of twelve, unsettling, edgy, perfectly pitched tales that disrupt the perceived bliss of marriage and motherhood. It’s also an uncanny depiction of the horrors lurking in the banality of everyday life. A woman and her five year-old son are locked out of a farmhouse in a remote French countryside, a seemingly innocuous family lunch swiftly culminates in a dramatic confrontation, a young woman on the brink of a miscarriage gradually reveals her true intentions. This is a marvelous collection – each piece is like a finely chiseled, perfectly honed miniature whose beauty and horror lingers in the mind long after the pages are turned.

THE HOUSE OF MIRTH – Edith Wharton

The House of Mirth is one of Edith Wharton’s top-tier New York society novels showcasing the social trajectory of its unforgettable heroine, Lily Bart, and the ultimate price she pays for defying convention. Orphaned, but beautiful, sophisticated and witty, Lily Bart craves for money that will enable her to lead the lifestyle of the rich and the one way to do that is to marry a wealthy husband. But her attraction to Lawrence Selden, a lawyer unable to provide her the means, puts her in a quandary of whether to marry for love or money. Meanwhile, Lily commits a series of blunders which begin to accentuate her downfall in the elite set she moves in. Wharton dissects the inner workings of New York society with consummate skill and precision, and her astute observations on its various hypocrisies are spot on especially the point on how women are always at the mercy of the perceptions of others.

RAMIFICATIONS – Daniel Saldaña Paris (tr. Christina MacSweeney)

Set in Mexico, Ramifications is a moving portrait of arrested development, a tale of a boy growing up in a broken family and trying to survive in an environment where machismo and secrecy rule the roost. When our unnamed narrator’s mother abandons the family to participate in the Zapatista uprising of 1994, the family is forced to fend for itself. Living with an emotionally distant father and an uncaring elder sister, the narrator at the age of ten is left to his own devices and beset with aching loneliness. Ramifications, then, is a beautiful evocation of a child’s attempts to interpret events beyond his understanding. Saldaña París’ writing is simple and elegant and there’s almost a fairy tale like quality to the prose as we are taken inside the tormented psyche of a child.

That’s it for February. I have started March with a recently published novella – The Faces by Tove Ditlevsen. I was blown away by Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy a couple of years ago, so this was a novella I was really looking forward to. And I also just finished another lovely novella – Twelve Nights by Urs Faes.

An Untouched House – Willem Frederik Hermans (tr. David Colmer)

I have been having a good run with Archipelago Books lately, having read and loved Cockroaches by Scholastique Mukasonga and Difficult Light by Tomás Gonzélez. It only made sense to read more of their books for #ReadIndies month and An Untouched House by Willem Frederik Hermans fit the bill perfectly. This is my second book by Hermans, I was previously quite impressed by Beyond Sleep. Hermans does have a flair for farce as was evident in both these books.

An Untouched House is a spare, taut war thriller sprinkled with doses of absurd comedy that considerably heightens its narrative power.

The novella is set during the waning months of the Second World War, where the intermittent fighting between the Nazis and the Soviets is still going strong.

Our unnamed narrator is a Dutchman who hasn’t seen his homeland for the past four years. Having escaped the German camps quite a few times, our narrator is now a part of a group of partisan soldiers led by the Soviets.

These partisans come from an assortment of countries – the group comprises Spaniards, Bulgarians, Romanians et al. The only common thread that binds them together is their fight against the Germans. Otherwise, these partisans are as different as chalk and cheese. Language being a big barrier, most of them do not understand each other and often orders given are misunderstood.

Our unnamed narrator is confronted with a similar predicament. Not understanding the orders of his sergeant, our narrator forges ahead and finds himself in an abandoned spa resort town. The exact location of this town is not revealed to the reader, and it doesn’t really matter. Moving on further, he comes across a massive house that appears empty.

I realised that this would be the first time in a very long while that I had entered a real house, a genuine home.

For our weary and disgruntled narrator, worn down by years of continuous fighting punctuated with periods of imprisonment, the cleanliness and warmth of the house is a miracle. Its cocoon-like environment is in stark contrast to the war outside and the noise, death and destruction it implies.

Some doctors explain love at first sight as arising not from what you see but from what you smell. Humans are so sure they can’t trust others that things that are said or shown never convince. Smell – the weakest over a distance, able to be suppressed by perfume but never defeated – cannot dissemble because it is constantly being produced. Stench is everywhere, unavoidable. Only stench tells the truth.

For the first time in many years, our narrator is offered a glimpse of a world before the war, and he is now zealous about seeking refuge here.

He discards his dirty soldier clothes and immerses himself in the luxuriousness of a bath and clean towels, while all around him the war rages on with its barrage of bombs and fires.

When the Germans re-capture the spa town, they install themselves in the house, when our narrator introduces himself as the owner of the house. Having donned on the clothes of the actual owner, the Germans have no way of ascertaining our narrator’s true identity and the side he is fighting for.

And yet, our narrator knows his position is precarious. First things first, he needs to thoroughly explore and familiarise himself with the house to douse any suspicions.

A library full of books on fish and a locked room – features beyond the grasp of our narrator, only deepens the aura of mystery surrounding the house.

All the books were about fish. That meant the owner was a fish fancier! I knew something, but I didn’t want to know anything, not his name, not what he looked like, nothing! He had never existed, that was the truth! He had been the intruder, not me. He would be dead at the end of the war; I would stay here forever.

And then the real owner of the house turns up…

An Untouched House, then, is a study of the horrific impact of war and the primal response that it induces – survival. Despite the rampant confusion, our narrator’s faculties of observation continue to work with icy precision, and that the house where he takes shelter becomes the story’s second main character.

For the narrator, the empty house is akin to an oasis in a desert and he is ready to go to any lengths to preserve this, including adapting to any role that will ensure his survival. The novella also succeeds in imparting a core message – the folly, chaos and pointlessness of war. The notion that war is a highly organised affair seems inherently bizarre as this novella progresses, especially since murder and mayhem takes centrestage.

At less than 100 pages, An Untouched House pulses and throbs with dramatic tension. In a writing style that is forensic yet mesmerizing, Hermans, in his unique way, confronts us with the idea of the violent absurdity of war and its terrible consequences for those unwittingly involved.